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HELIOS Volume 31
Spring–Fall 2004
Numbers 1 & 2
BEFORE SUBJECTIVITY? LACAN AND THE CLASSICS James I. Porter and Mark Buchan, Guest Editors
Introduction James I. Porter and Mark Buchan
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Looking to the Feet: The Riddles of the Scylla Mark Buchan
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From Antigone to Joan of Arc Slavoj Ziz˚ek
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In Parmenidem Parvi Commentarii Mladen Dolar
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Cato the Elder and the Destruction of Carthage Ellen O’Gorman
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Vergil’s Voids James I. Porter
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Seeing and Saying: A Psychoanalytic Account of Ekphrasis Jaså Elsner
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The Vanishing Point, or Speculative Mathemes Sara Ahbel-Rappe
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Auto-Iconicity and Its Vicissitudes: Bentham and Plato Miran Bozovic
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Afterword Duncan F. Kennedy
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H E L I O S , vol. 31 no. 1–2, 2004
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Introduction ja m e s i . p o rt e r a n d m a r k b u c h a n
The dissemination of the thought and works of Jacques Lacan continues, as his Seminars are edited, published, and translated. This has not only opened up psychoanalytic theory to a wider intellectual audience in the United States, but also popularized his provocative readings of an array of classical texts, including, but not limited to, Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus, Plato’s Symposium, and Aristotle’s Physics and Poetics. One consequence is that cultural theorists in general, and psychoanalytic theorists in particular, have been forced to revisit these canonical ancient works. A second consequence is that many classicists have been confronted with psychoanalytic theory through the power of such interpretations. Finally, and possibly most compellingly, it is slowly dawning on the public that psychoanalysis cannot be detached from its classical roots—indeed, that it may owe its modern definition precisely to the ancient. The wellknown hope of Freud—for a research program that would link the clinical research projects of psychoanalysis to broader cultural and humanistic inquiry, where classical studies would have a prominent place—is perhaps as alive as ever. Even so, this recent turn of events—the growing sophistication of Lacanian analysis and its diffusion across academic fields—has generated problems. On the one hand, Greco-Roman antiquity has come to mean, for too many, little more than a series of well-known readings of these canonical texts. On the other, though it is rare to find any classics conference here or abroad without an animated discussion of Lacan’s successes and failures, or a theoretical paper without some passing reference to him in either text or footnotes, such discussions tend to remain marginalized, betraying both a great interest in his importance and yet a certain disciplinary anxiety. This volume of papers in one sense tries to bridge the gap between two intellectual communities: Lacanians, with an interest in antiquity
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that has come from Lacan, and classicists, who have found that Lacanian ideas have opened up or complicated their ideas about antiquity. We began with a simple idea: to invite respected Lacanian scholars to make use of Lacan to reflect on aspects of antiquity largely ignored by Lacan, and to invite professional classicists to make use of Lacanian theory as part of their inquiries into the culture of the ancient world.1 This volume is the fruit of such an encounter, but in another sense it argues for the transparency of interests across these two worlds: to understand Lacan is to be able, as it were, to read Greek and Latin—Lacan often thinks in Greek and Latin. There are problems to face in this communication across times and cultures, to be sure, but the pervasive references in psychoanalysis from Freud onwards cannot be merely effaced. We should emphasize that the essays collected here are not Lacanian readings of ancient texts; rather, they address problems that are of equal relevance to both Lacan and the classics—forms of subjectivity, constitution of philosophical objects, readings of literary and philosophical texts. Without summarizing the essays to come, it is worth providing a brief sketch of what a Lacanian-classical research program might offer to Lacanians and classicists alike. A simple answer is that such a program puts a theory of the subject back on our agenda, and it is the overlap between ancient theories of the subject and Lacanian theories that will be central in much of what follows. Thus, a few brief remarks on, first, how Lacanian theory might allow us to reimagine antiquity and, then, how the complexities of ancient thinking about the subject might allow us to complicate Lacan.
I. Classical Antiquity with Lacan The Freudian world isn’t a world of things, it isn’t a world of being, it is a world of desire as such. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 2
One way of approaching Lacan is to see him as the most sustained critic of any humanist or essentialist thinking. Throughout his work, there is a persistent questioning of any exaltation of the human. It is not the truth of the claims humans make about themselves that matters, but rather what is psychically at stake in making these claims. Following Freud, Lacan views the human subject as victim of its own
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illusions, and something quite other than the images or stories it tries to construct about itself. Riven by desire, victim to the network of signifiers that make up a language that both precedes and controls it (what Lacan calls the Other), the subject is also haunted by the incompleteness of that symbolic world that it itself is lacking, unable to provide answers to the fundamental questions of the subject’s being (what Lacan calls the Other as desire, or the barred Other). The Lacanian challenge, then, is to rethink the world less in terms of what the subject has, or claims to have, and instead in terms of what it lacks, that is, desire. There is an analogy to the project of Descartes here. Part of the point of Descartes’s analysis of the cogito was not simply to explain human consciousness, but to find a foundational point from which a search for scientific knowledge could begin, and this was discovered in the certainty of self-conscious thought itself. For Lacan, the alternate project is to rethink the world, but without any such fixed anchoring point for the subject. It is less a worldview than a theory of why worldviews can never entirely cohere, and thus be an effort at analyzing the different kinds of illusions that the human subject has constructed for itself—a decentering of the human, but in a particularly radical way. The point is not simply the “Copernican” revolution of refusing to see man at the center of the world, in control of his destiny and able to take control of it, but to critique the illusions inherent in believing there to be a center at all. If the subject truly has no anchoring point, then there is not only something suspicious about the kind of thinking about the self that takes refuge in such fantasies (the possibility of a complementary sexual relationship, where man and woman would somehow complete each other, is perhaps the most enduring); it is that all sorts of our thinking can easily be infected with just this kind of fantasy. Here, for example, belongs Lacan’s critique of Aristotle’s hylomorphism, where the possibility that matter and form somehow complement each other is seen as hiding a lurking gender essentialism of “male” and “female” principles, and thus polluted by a quite typical kind of sexual fantasy.2 Accordingly, all the Lacanian/Freudian clinical categories are simply names for the differing relations of subjects to the problem of desire: from the psychotic, whose refusal of language entails an absence of desire, to the ingenious strategies of neurotics to domesticate desire by the desire for an impossible or unsatisfied desire. Indeed, much of our everyday mode of desiring, or the fantasies that
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shape our desire, can be understood as attempts to domesticate the problem of desire as such. Of course, there is a major difficulty here, as Lacan himself recognizes. On the one hand, it is impossible to speak of desire without to some extent elaborating the content of what is desired: I desire X, where X must be something. Yet desire’s paradox is that it cannot be reduced to a neverending list of its objects, for the human being, when incorporated into a symbolic universe, lacks any object to satisfy it. Hence desire becomes something of a process or strategy designed to defer or come to terms with its own impasses, from which also arises Lacan’s numerous formulations that try to show desire in action, such as, “Just because people ask you for something doesn’t mean that’s what they really want.” Thus, the Freudian-Lacanian world is not one of being, because any subject’s belief in an enduring, stable point of its own being is an alienating fiction, an identity imposed upon it by the external, autonomously functioning world of symbols. It is not a world of objects, because there is no “right object” that would satisfy desire and, therefore, it is independent of desire’s reach. But a critique immediately seems to present itself. Is this not just another doomed version of a false universalism, an attempt to impose a specific theoretical model (a theory of desire, of the psychic consequences that ensue from it) onto the array of different cultures that must resist any such model? Yes, and no. Lacan, steeped in the hermeneutic tradition, has no difficulty in recognizing the importance of context for the understanding of any culture. Indeed, the kind of pseudotheorizing in which the strangeness and seemingly nonsensical nature of an idea or social practice is immediately domesticated by being clumsily fitted into a preexisting theory is one of the modes of understanding that Lacan is so intent on analyzing and deflating. But to speak out against a universalizing humanism in the name of historical and cultural specificity harbors certain kinds of assumptions. To speak of different cultural contexts of the human is to presume some sort of common element that allows us to link them together, and this creates a paradox endemic to language itself. To say anything specific about the human is to say something that has a cultural and historical context, and so its universalizing pretensions are immediately undermined. But we are, nevertheless, left with a human self that is nothing in particular, and it is precisely this ciphered self, this nothing that exists beyond its cultural manifestations, that is so important to
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Lacan—not just the subject of language, but the leftover of the human self on, so to speak, the other side of language. Different cultures will have different desires, to be sure. But perhaps the more fruitful, theoretical question is, Why is this so? What is the effect of this paradox— that the words we use are somehow always insufficient even as they are suffused with universalizing expectations—upon each of us? To exemplify this problematic, Lacan turned to Oedipus—not the Oedipus of the Oedipus Tyrannus, but the Oedipus at the end of his life at Colonus, the Oedipus whose race is run, whose symbolic life, determined by the assorted discourses of the oracle, has come and gone, and yet who still remains, a kind of useless, embarrassing leftover.3 What is at stake here is not the content of his object-choice (the unwitting killing of his father, sex with his mother), but something quite different. First, there is the encounter with an alienating language—oracles—that completely determines his life, but also the figure of Oedipus after his life has run his course—the asocial, vicious figure at Colonus (wantonly bringing destruction on his sons) utterly at odds with the world around him. The value of Lacan’s own remarks on antiquity—sometimes in the form of entire seminars, as in his seminar on Plato’s Symposium, sometimes in the form of incidental, off-the-cuff remarks—is that he not only shows us well-known texts in a new light, but that he undermines our own investments in certain idealizations of antiquity. Consider only a couple of Lacan’s own interventions. Lacan views the achievement of Socrates in the elenchus as opening up a yawning gap between knowledge and virtue. This, of course, is not in Socrates’ famous thesis that virtue is knowledge, but rather in what he does. His philosophical life underpins the illusions of those around him who, as they practically live their lives, act as if no such gap exists. Knowledge is given its due, but becomes curiously impotent for the subject, having nothing to do with its happiness. Or take Lacan’s brilliant, counterintuitive reading of the “Ode to Man” in Sophocles’ Antigone. The man who is pantoporos (full of every resource) goes into the future “lacking in no resources” (aporos), or, as Lacan glosses it, what a creature is the human. What a person has no resources to deal with, he ignores! Rather than an attempt to come to terms with the impasses of his existence, the human not only ignores them, but constructs a battery of monuments to his own resourcefulness as a way of ignoring them.4
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To bring Lacan to antiquity, then, should be an invitation to rethink some of our most basic assumptions. Of course, to explore any other culture should always offer a glimpse into the contingency of our own cultural practices. But there is more to it than that. Consider human sexuality, the center of so much recent scholarship on antiquity. It is a banal and longstanding truth—as a glance at almost any page of Herodotus reveals—that different cultures organize their modes of sexuality in different ways. But though it is certainly interesting to find certain internal logics or coherences in practices that at first seem foreign, there is a more fundamental question: What is it about human sexuality, what impasse does it occasion, that somehow invites or requires this kind of cultural elaboration? Lacan takes a stand against arid sociologizing in the name of the continuing enigma of sex itself, that moment that links the death of the individual to the ongoing life of its species. Or consider our relationship to our bodies. There are, to be sure, differing cultural conceptions of such a relationship, but what is it about the body that requires such illusions about it, such tall stories about its beauty and integrity? An alternate psychoanalytic starting point is its utter vulnerability, linked to an analysis of the particular parts of the body that seem so often to indicate that vulnerability—the “partial objects” of the body, the voice, gaze, anus, breasts, where the body seems to disintegrate at the very moment it is drawn out of itself into the world of others.
II. When a Subject Is: Historicizing the Subject in Antiquity And anyway, can you get me his silhouette? Nietzsche, à propos of Homer, 1869
Is it anachronistic to read the Lacanian subject of desire into and out of literary and other representations from Greco-Roman antiquity? Even assuming it is, how can we account for the suggestiveness with which Lacan’s own readings seem to illuminate aspects of classical problems in new and often revealing ways? Or, to put the question that will be of particular concern in the essays that follow, how can we account for the fact that thinkers and writers from one end of antiquity to the other seem to have acknowledged something like an empty subject or a subject as void? Anyone wishing to prove or disprove the Lacanian thesis must reckon with this problem. And
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although one of the central problems around which this collection of papers is organized—that of the ancient subject as void—will necessarily have a bearing on the historical tension in Lacan’s theory of the subject, the aim here is not to confirm or disconfirm Lacan’s theses about the nature of subjectivity or about the historical frameworks in which subjectivity as we know it today arises; rather, the contributors to this volume are interested in exploring some of the dilemmas of subjectivity as these can be shown to have been featured in classical antiquity and, in so doing, in putting them in a stranger light. At issue is less the validity of a contemporary theory of the subject than what we perceive as a need to stretch beyond their current and accepted limits some of the inherited assumptions, both among readers of antiquity generally and among readers of Lacan, about how to regard the many and varied subjects of antiquity. And so if contributors here draw on Lacanian psychoanalysis, they do so not in the name of adopting as a timeless and restricted set of truths a recent view about the nature of subjectivity. Their aim is rather to change or modify interpretive paradigms currently reigning in the study of antiquity, as well as to show the extraordinary relevance of the ancient problems to those problems that engage our attention today. The history of classical culture is typically presented as a history of the subject’s self-discovery. The model assumed is one of maturation: from a naïve childhood, one progresses through lyric, with its discovery of the lyric “I,” to a full-blown, if prosaic, subjective self-consciousness (often signaled by the entry of Socrates into world literature, which occasions the first developed use of the reflexive pronoun for the self, emautos),5 and finally to the fully developed, if overripe, expression of self-awareness that is found in postclassical Hellenistic literature and scholarship. This story is a modern myth. Shaped by the tradition of neoclassicism during the age of Winckelmann, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller, and Goethe, it plainly carries Hegelian overtones as well. The number of permutations of this idea, which has acted as a kind of tyrannical grand récit over the past few centuries in classical studies, is astonishing. The effects can be felt in the evolutionary hypotheses about oral and written culture, shame and guilt culture, transitions from mythos to logos, genre development and adaptations, the rise of the sciences (including philology itself) and of visual expression (from aniconism to naturalism to Baroque expressionism to the later repeti-
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tion of classical forms), organic models of the rise and fall of the classical era, characterizations of linear developments of mentalités within this overarching parabola (typically passing from a primitive naïveté to an intense self-consciousness and “secondariness” in later eras). The list is endless, touching virtually every aspect of intellectual life in antiquity. The self-serving nature of this modern story about antiquity is too obvious for comment. A closer look at scenes from classical texts upsets this kind of narrative progression. Take Homer, a question fraught with problems of subjectivity if ever there was one. It has been a commonplace of modern readers, at least since the late eighteenth century, that Homer represents subjects who are rudimentary versions of the modern self. This thesis has taken various forms, but the principle has been unvarying: Homeric subjects are simpler and more naïve than we are; they lack integrated personalities, or else they express them in strange ways. They are driven in part by gods rather than exclusively by internal motivations (whence the theory of their “double motivation”). They are subject to the public pressures of shame and honor rather than the inward pressures of guilt, conscience, or will. They lack a single word for a unified self and so (philology dictates) they must have no corresponding sense of being unified selves (a composite whole made of body and soul); instead, their identity is distributed among their scattered somatic parts, each relatively autonomous of the other. Indeed, one has to wait for Plato to encounter a full-fledged conception of the self as a totality. Until then, the argument goes, the Greeks struggled, much like children, with the names for their uncoordinated faculties of doing and thinking, groping towards a unified image and concept of the self or person that might take responsibility for its own actions. Visual art of the period confirms this in graphic form, whereby figures from the Geometric Age appear to divide the body into geometric shapes rather than presenting it as a formal whole. The extreme version of this picture is that of Bruno Snell (1946; English trans. 1953) who, in his argument about “the discovery of the mind,” views Homeric subjects as fragmented puppets badly joined together. A counterargument is available, namely that Homer’s characters do, after all, make decisions, do act for reasons, do hold beliefs, desires, and purposes, all of which is recognizable to us because it is all basically similar to our own mental acts: Homer’s Greeks are “just
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like us.” The refutation, recently made most forcefully by Bernard Williams, depends on showing how the Snellian view—the primitivist and evolutionary paradigm in its most caricatured form—fails to see what is self-evidently (“obviously”) at work in Homeric characters, the unity of the person that underlies all of its doings, their “implied psychology”: “Once again, [Snell] does not acknowledge the obvious unity, the one that is in front of his eyes” (Williams 26). Ignoring what is there, Snell’s logic mistakenly looks for something that the poems do not, and probably should not, contain: a Kantian or Christian concept of the will that is tied to a notion of relative or autonomous moral duty. While it is fair enough to show that behind Snell’s view lurks a modern assumption of what constitutes a fully formed person, the critique of Snell on these terms disappoints. One kind of self-evidence, a narrowly philological one, is traded for a narrowly philosophical one: the unity of the person decried as missing on one theory is reassuringly discovered, “after all,” on the other theory (despite differences in opinion as to how a unified person should be described in terms of moral agency). Both theories, moreover, fall prey to a similar fallacy, that of taking literary representations as surety for psychological realities. The most that can be deduced from a poem like the Iliad, one should think, is something about the conceivability of human action and subjective identity within a certain genre or tradition of narrative (epic), one that evolved over centuries and became textually fixed at some unknown point in time. But in view of all the gaps in our evidence, the absolute lack of comparanda, and our lack of access to other forms of self-representation, it is hazarding a lot to stake a wide generalization on the evidence of a mere two poems, each of uncertain date (eighth century, seventh century, or later?) and uncertain authorship, and both founded upon conventions that, due to the absence of contrasting background information, we may in fact be unable to read.6 The virtue of this debate lies in the weaknesses that it exposes on all sides of the question. A normative conception is in each case disguised as a fact, which leaves unqueried the very categories of body, self, and identity that ought, one should think, to be at stake in any discussion of them. That these entities just named are not simple facts or givens, or even desirable in and of themselves, has been pointed out repeatedly since Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, and Foucault. Snell’s view at least
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has the merit of putting into question the problem of the emergence of these categories, although he treats this as a genetic, historical problem, and thus seems to know where he wants to go even if he is unsure where things began. Further sacrificed on this refutation is Snell’s insight into the fragmentary exposition of human psychology in Homer, which likewise ought to be noticed as something “in front of everyone’s eyes” and in need of some attention, if not explanation. Lyric poets may seem to grope for an expressive “I,” but it needs to be shown that this kind of subjectivity is stable and originary, not divided or fundamentally barred from the very beginning. Nor is Plato a satisfactory endpoint in the historical succession of ancient selves. Plato’s psychology not only points up a fragile unity of parts in contention (Rep., passim; Leg. 626d–27c, 644c–45c), but it explicitly invokes the Homeric model, as in the following: “‘He struck his breast and spoke sternly to his heart’ [Od. 20.17]. Clearly, Homer here has one distinct part rebuking another distinct part—the part which has thought rationally about what is better and worse rebuking the part whose passion is irrationally becoming aroused” (Rep. 441b–c; trans. Waterfield). Homer here is being invoked to justify an earlier observation about how “it’s possible for anger to be at odds with the desires, as if they were different things” (Rep. 440a). While we can say that Plato has a more overtly refined psychology than Homer, what we cannot claim is that Plato has decisively progressed over Homer in his understanding of the mind’s inner workings. Their models bear more than a passing resemblance to each other, far more so than either the progressivist argument (held by Snell and others) or its critique would wish to acknowledge.7 This begins to suggest one crucial way in which the debate over parts and wholes misses the point. If the scattered parts of the person point to an implied, unified, and recognizable whole, the relevant question, surely, is not whether that whole existed in the minds of Homer’s Greeks, but whether Greek psychology had access to an illusion (or phantasm) of a unified body and self, and then whether those illusions are identical to their counterpart, or counterparts, today.8 Could it be that the Homeric poems, as it were, repress the mention of the whole person in order to express the interplay, and even the tensions, between the partial identities of the self and its illusory synthesis? In other words, can it be imagined that Homeric poetry is willing to stare down, and even to deconstruct, what modern inter-
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preters of Homer seem to cherish most of all (whether they find it in him or not), namely, the fantasy of the unified subject? The jury is still out on the question, as it can only be; the question has not been so much as posed.9 Nor is it obvious that subjectivity marches forward in the direction of unity. The resemblances between Freud’s and Plato’s psychology, which have frequently been noticed, suggest that contemporary norms are anything but obvious and agreed upon. Is the salient feature of modern subjects their unified psyches or their lack of any such unity? This is where a Lacanian perspective can prove fruitful. Suppose the Homeric poems describe, not the fantasy of a totalized self, but the dilemmas of selfhood—the fact that selves are radically divided within, multiply determined, and as much a matter of external as internal causes and reasons. Leaving fragmentation aside for the moment, let us consider the alleged hallmark of Homeric subjectivity, which is also the hallmark of archaic subjectivity down to the age of Socrates and Plato: its “results-oriented” nature, whereby validation comes from without rather than from within, and from visible deeds rather than abstract and rational principles, whether in the form of directives from the gods, thoughts about how others will view one’s acts, or in the externalized representation of interiority (the heart “barking” at some other internal yet [strangely] unaddressed and unnamed instance). One of Lacan’s lessons is that the outward-looking nature of subjectivity is one of its most surprising features even today: even our inmost private thoughts are exposed to the view and desires of an Other, and indeed they are a response to that imaginary or symbolic agency, in the form of a question that we put to it or assume it asks of us: “What do you want of me?,” “What does the Other want of me?” The point of Lacanian analysis is that such questions are fundamentally unanswerable. The demands of the Other— roughly, of language, culture, and society—are disturbingly unfulfillable, and they lack any intrinsic reason or rationale. Such is the imperatival logic of the authoritative instance of the Other, whose ultimate reply is a nonsensical one: either blank silence, or the admonition “Because you must.” Lacanian subjectivity is radically external and Other-oriented. It is also results-oriented, a kind of performance that makes tangible the demands of being a subject and in virtue of which tangibility a subject is. Thus, far from marking a departure from the Lacanian model,
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the psychology of the Homeric poems appears to be, rather, its instantiation. The Homeric poems put on display what Lacan calls extimacy (extimité), the radically external and public constitution of subjectivity.10 The very shared language of the poems, their famously “formulaic” nature, is living proof of how subjects do not own the language that, in this one sense, founds them. In Homer, language “swamps” individuals: it overwhelms and eclipses them, reducing them to permutations of a symbolic code that, arbitrary and repetitive, forever remains extrinsic to them and in relation to which alone their acts and utterances find meaning. When Achilles strikes out against this prison house of language, when he questions the epic purpose by asking questions that cannot be answered in the Homeric idiom, what we need to see in this futile and even tragic situation is not just a heroic effort by an individual struggling against the limits of social expression, but a comment on the senseless traumatic kernel that resides at the core of social language.11 Rather than read the tragedy of Achilles as an idiosyncratic frustration with a world that is homogeneously (formulaically) constructed, one can view it against the background of a world whose meaning is radically extrinsic to all the individual agents in that world and is never self-consistent. One can take this line a step further and argue that what the poems turn on is not the tragedy of the individual but the dispensability of the very concept of the individual. This is not, of course, the only conclusion to be drawn from this state of affairs. In fact, it can be argued that the Iliad and the Odyssey present contrasting yet complementary views about social meaning, drawn as they are from opposing perspectives—martial and domestic, historical and fairy-tale-like, death-driven or life-driven. But it could also be shown that each epic with its attendant perspectives presupposes the other, and not infrequently falls into the other’s paradigms of selfhood, society, and meaning (or nonmeaning). What about the fragmentary condition of the epic self? Lacan again offers one way of construing the problem. The Homeric hero is a “subject” in the Lacanian sense, qua barred $ (void), only if he or she emerges “at the point of nonrecognition.”12 What constitutes subjects for Lacan is not merely their lack of integration, their existing in, as it were, a Snellian fragmentation of the self with no executive center, but the integration of a self that is organized around a basic lack, a nonsensical kernel. That lack, in Lacanese, is the subject
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of the unconscious, correlative to the lack or void in the Other, which is the object-cause of vital desire and of an often direr jouissance (enjoyment). It is not enough to demonstrate, as on a structuralist approach, the fragmentary nature of the Homeric self (viewed as parts that can be broken down into further parts, endlessly). Lacan distinguishes between the self that is imaginary and whole, and the (Freudian) subject, which designates the formal and actual conditions under which subjectivity operates. Nor is it enough to identity the “self” that some find to be missing in Homeric society, for to do that is to fail to identify the subject that logically subtends the self. Between the Homeric self—which is manifold and disjoint in its appearances, can be polytropic, and so on—and its manifestations (its expressions and appearances), there lies a gap. One can try to fill in that gap with the positive entity of the self. But this is precisely the function of the expressions just named: they exist in order to fill in the gap between the posited self and its appearances. This particular gap has no positive existence; rather, it is a theoretical or virtual entity that is performatively (unconsciously) traced in the acts of a self that names itself—and, consequently, misnames itself—in all of its doings. Odysseus is both Nobody (Outis) and every imaginary way in which he appears: he is both empty and full. But above all he is this dilemma of (t)his identity. And the same holds, mutatis mutandis, for Achilles, who is both the exemplification of the heroic code (of the symbolic regime that gives coherence to the epic world) and its breach (its refusal, that is to say, an index of that regime’s basic lack of sense, its formal and internal inconsistency). Thus, Achilles’ pitiful complaint “Why should I fight?” has, as its nonsensical answer, “Because you must.” The other Homeric characters follow suit. Indeed, it is in virtue of the dilemmas of the Homeric individuals, which are insoluble, that we find them (to the extent we do at all) to be recognizably like ourselves. Because the subject for Lacan is constituted in its formal tension with the fictions of selfhood, indeed as their simultaneous nullification and realization, the purported “absence” of the subject down to the Platonic or Socratic self is uniquely fitted to Lacanian analysis. For Lacan, a subject is to the extent that it never fully is, is never fully constituted as such—or else is positively constituted around a fundamental lack. The very idea that a subject is fully present to itself and adequate to its self-representations is a fantasy that exists to fill in the
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fundamental gap that makes a subject into a being forever caught in a web of failed recognitions (méconnaissances), a web that is constituted by the triad of language, sociality, and sexuality. Lacan’s theory of the subject is thus not least of all a critique of the plenary subject of Western culture. On this point, Lacan is unwavering. For this reason alone, Lacan is good to think with whenever we are dealing with Greek and Roman antiquity. Doing so helps us to account for our instinctive sense that subjectivity in the West has been accompanied by a subtle, and often not so subtle, critique (not to say anxiety) from the very beginning. Should we be worried that by taking a view like Lacan’s we run the risk of making the ancients seem too modern, possibly even too postmodern? Hardly. The problem is rather that we have not even begun to learn how to read the ancient notions of self and subject. Nor should we worry that Lacanian language is the only way available to us for describing those notions. Lacan in one sense merely points us to phenomena that we might otherwise overlook. But there is nothing intrinsically Lacanian in the idea of a self that is constructed out of its acts without preexisting them, or in calling the illusion of a preexisting subjectivity “empty.” Supposing, however, that we do get this far in an attempt to locate ancient subjectivities, there is no reason to fear that the resulting picture—that of a self drawn, as it were, in silhouette—will resemble the postmodern self, except in the most superficial of ways. Subjects, even (and especially) for Lacan, are highly contingent historical affairs: in one sense empty, in another they are richly significant phenomena that can only have appeared in the form they do when they do. Certain gestures may repeat themselves, or may seem to do so, over long stretches of time (disavowals, self-deceptions, self-aggrandizements, etc.), but in themselves they are empty and meaningless. It is only in their immediate context, or in the contexts into which they later get placed (for example, in the course of our historical analyses of them), that they take on any meaning at all. Subjectivity is inherently context-bound. Paradoxically, Lacan directs our focus onto the category of the subject only in the end to direct our attention elsewhere (this is another way of stating the well-known “de-centering of the subject”). To imagine that the dividing lines between premodernity, modernity, and postmodernity rest entirely upon the way in which the concept of subjectivity comes to be conceived is to attrib-
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ute to that concept a far too extraordinary power of determination. Don’t look for the subject, Lacan tells us; look for the Other. What is more (or the same thing), not all empty spaces look alike, any more than all wholes (plenary substances) do. Emptiness, we might say, is a relational property, not an intrinsic one: it is palpable only in contrastive relation to something else, just as totalities vary by virtue of being founded on different exceptions and exclusions. But the spatial analogy goes only so far, for the subject (Lacan would say) is “filled” with a lack. And yet it is not the case that any object can occupy the place of that lack, because the lack is not an empty space but is rather the tangible impasse around which a subject takes form and in relation to which the subject exists—indeed, the subject just is this relation.13 Plainly, the range of factors that impinge on a subject, indeed on its very formation, depends entirely on conditions that lie outside the control of any subject: they are given by circumstances alone.14 Lacan’s theory of the subject reminds us of this contingency, even as historically changing ways of “filling out” the subject tend to make us forget it again. Viewed in this light, a Lacanian perspective offers productive ways of historicizing the problem of subjectivity, not of dehistoricizing it. If we have dwelt at such length on Homer, it is for the obvious reason that Homer was foundational to Greco-Roman culture: he set the paradigm for virtually all of classical literature to follow. But also, just by virtue of their authority, their monumental character, and their canonical status, the Homeric epics established the rules by which questions of identity continued to be worked out in the centuries following. (It is no small irony that Homer’s personal identity was itself, and still is, one of the least known and most heavily disputed phantasms from antiquity.) The advent of the Socratic selves was in many ways shaped as a response to the inherited images of the Homeric self (not only in the Apology, where Socrates recalls Achilles, but more generally as the dialectical hero of the Platonic dialogues who likewise dies “a beautiful death”). These images, it needs to be underscored, were never static but were constantly being reinterpreted with each new generation and in every new genre of representation. The Socratic self is an evolved self, perhaps. But is it any less fragmentary a self, any less vulnerable to the impossible ideals of consistency that it demands of itself and of others, any less dislocated in the
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way it weaves in and out of engagement with others in a public arena—which is, after all, how it constitutes itself (is this not Socrates’ defining praxis?)? Or is the Socratic self any less vulnerable to the charge of presenting the elusive image of a rarest interiority, the phantasm of endless riches within (what Alcibiades calls Socrates’ agalma)? Is Plato’s conception of a self divided by its desires any more or less fragmentary than the Homeric entity that some deign to call a self, or the modern self that others cheerfully deem whole and unitary (in the teeth of Freud’s dismantling of that pretense)? It should be clear that readers who follow the lines of approach suggested above will be less eager to speak about the “foundations” of classical literature than to be on the lookout for those extraordinary complications that riddle classical culture: the lack of sure foundations and the power of insight into the phantasmatic shapes that identity assumes. No doubt an investigation into the visual and material record of antiquity will bring out a richer picture still,15 and the analysis could be extended to historical arenas not covered in this volume: questions of Greekness or Latinity, antiquity’s sense of its own pasts, problems in reception and Nachleben, to name just these newly rediscovered topics in contemporary scholarship. Our evidence could have as easily been drawn from ancient analytical conceptions of music or science, or from theories of poetics, or from various expressions of historical self-awareness. These are surely areas ripe for consideration by others in the future. Our aim in this volume has been of a more limited scope. The wager has been to see to what extent some of the results of Lacan’s theory of the subject can be shown to have equivalents in a range of materials from classical and late antiquity and also how these might in turn bear on modern notions of the subject. Problems to do with selectivity aside, we have not undertaken to solve the general problem of anachronism that Lacan creates for himself on his theory. It is not our intention to settle the question, which would mean determining whether the historical picture is essential to Lacan’s postulation of desire and drive, or whether the evidence of antiquity can be accommodated within a flexible theory of the emergence of the subject. After all, on Lacan’s view the subject has never really emerged. Why should it be a contradiction to point to its nonemergence in antiquity? To attempt to “apply” Lacan to classical studies or to worry about the anachronism of doing so gets hold of things from the
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wrong end, for it is just as likely that Lacan’s categories have been determined in no small part by the classical heritage that saturates his writings. And that, in the end, is of greater potential interest than the questionable assumption about the originality either of Lacan’s thesis or of the subject that it implies.
Works Cited Coward, R. and J. Ellis. 1977. Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject. London. Dolar, M. 1988. “Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious.” In S. Ziz˚ek and R. Salecl, eds., Cogito and the Unconscious. Durham, NC. 11–40. Goldhill, S. 1984. Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia. Cambridge. Gunderson, Erik. 2003. Declamation, Paternity, and Roman Identity: Authority and the Rhetorical Self. Cambridge and New York. Havelock, E. 1972. “The Socratic Self As It Is Parodied in Aristophanes’ Clouds.” YCS 22: 1–18. Henderson, J. 1999. “Smashing Bodies: The Corinthian Tydeus and Ismene Amphora (Louvre E640).” In J. I. Porter, ed., Constructions of the Classical Body. Ann Arbor. 19–49. Janan, M. 2001. The Politics of Desire: Propertius IV. Berkeley. Kay, S. 2001. Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century. Stanford. Lacan, J. 1982. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École freudienne. Ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jaqueline Rose. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. New York ———. 1991. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 2: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–55. New York. ———. 1992. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Trans., with notes, Dennis Porter. New York. Loraux, N. 1991. “Antigone sans theater.” In N. Avtonomova et al., Lacan avec les philosophes. Paris. 42–49. Lynn-George, M. 1988. Epos: Word, Narrative, and the Iliad. Basingstoke. Mauss, M. 1987. “A Category of the Human Mind.” In M. Carrithers, S. Collinas, and S. Luke, eds., The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge. 1–25. Miller, J.-A. 1988. “Extimité.” Prose Studies 11.3: 121–31. Miller, Paul Allen. 2004. Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real. Princeton. Nussbaum, M. C. 1972. “Psucheµ in Heraclitus.” Phronesis 17: 1–16. Parry, A. 1956. “The Language of Achilles.” TAPA 87: 1–7. Salecl, R. 1988. (Per)Versions of Love and Hate. London. Segal, Ch. 1986. Language and Desire in Seneca’s Phaedra. Princeton. Stewart, A. 1997. Art, Desire and the Body. Cambridge. Williams, B. 1993. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley. Wohl, V. 2002. Love among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens. Princeton. Zupanc˚ic˚, A. 2000. “Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis.” In A. Zupanc˚ic˚, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London. 170–248.
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Notes 1
Of course, the contributors to this volume can in no way represent or stand in for the complexity and range of work already done by Lacanians on antiquity, or by classicists who work with Lacan. Nor are we attempting some kind of overview of work already completed, whether the growing length of book-length studies on antiquity by classicists working within the Lacanian idiom (e.g., Gunderson, Janan, Loraux, Miller, Wohl), or the more general influence of Lacan on theoretically sophisticated critics (e.g., Goldhill, Lynn-George, Segal). Analyses of ancient sources by Lacanians include Zupanc˚ic˚ and Salecl. See also Kay on the tradition of courtly love as explored in Lacan’s seminar on ethics. 2 Lacan 1982: 153ff. 3 Lacan 1991: 229–33. 4 For remarks on Socrates, see Lacan 1991: 5; on Antigone, 1992: 274ff. 5 See Havelock. 6 The Homeric language is a Kunstsprache (artificial idiom), but this point gets easily forgotten. How likely is it that the Homeric audience had to worry about their various internal organs “barking” at them or addressing them? Just as unlikely, one suspects, as anyone going around telling others, “I got up at rosy-fingered Dawn today.” 7 The passage from Plato is quoted in Williams 38, where it evokes an idea that is missing from Williams’s general account of Greek psychology: that Greek psychology is fundamentally strange to our own. In his belief in the existence of the soul, Plato is similarly strange to us, as Williams admits (26). 8 It is worth observing that Williams’s critique is addressed to the same entity as is aimed at in contemporary critiques of ideology; but in contrast to these, Williams affirms the notion of the person that survives his critique. Cf. Coward and Ellis 76: “The subject in ideology has a consistency which rests on an imaginary identification of self. . . . The consistent subject is the place to which the representations of ideology are directed: Duty, Morality, and Law all depend on this category of subject for their functioning.” See further (and earlier) Mauss, who also holds about languages across the world that “[the concept of] the ‘self’ is omnipresent, and yet it is not expressed by [the word] ‘self’ or even by ‘I.’” He further distinguishes between “the sense of the ‘self,’” which is found historically and cross-culturally, and its “notion,” which is a modern European product. Mauss significantly anticipates Williams’s critique of Snell, but also points in a different direction (see previous note). 9 See Nussbaum, for whom we see in Homer that “a man speaks of his life in terms of separate faculties, but fails to notice their unity until this unity is destroyed” (4). This might seem to save Williams’s argument, but it is prey to the same assumption. Why not say, rather, that the illusion of this unity appears only retrospectively once an agent has died? At stake is a failure, not to notice something, but to include “failing to notice” in the definition of what a subject essentially is. Subjectivity is epitaphic, forever arriving “too late” to be grasped from within. 10 Miller. 11 Contrast Parry. 12 Dolar 14. 13 See Zupanc˚ic˚ 240–42. 14 This is not to say that the subject is for Lacan some sort of deterministic product. On the contrary, the subject alone is responsible for her acts, and above all for any enjoyment she derives from them. 15 See Stewart; Henderson.
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Looking to the Feet: The Riddles of the Scylla mark buchan
KR. H J poikilw/do;~ Sfi;gx to; pro;~ posi; skopei`n meqevnta~ hJma`~ tajfanh` proshvgeto. CR: The riddling Sphinx encouraged us to look to what is at our feet, Paying no attention to the invisible . . . —Sophocles, Oedipus the King
The story of Oedipus is explicitly acknowledged only once in the Odyssey, when Odysseus sees Oedipus’s wife in the Underworld. The underlying dynamics of the “specimen story of psychoanalysis,” however—killing the father, sleeping with the mother—lurk threateningly in the background. Consider the moment when Telemachus is about to string the bow in Book 21 and thus about to win the prize of the contest—the hand in marriage of his mother, Penelope—until a timely look from Odysseus stops him. Or consider Odysseus’s delayed entrance to Eumaeus’s hut in Book 14. In order for Odysseus to be allowed access to the hut of Eumaeus, the swineherd first must prevent the household dogs from mauling, and nearly killing, Odysseus. This event, important enough in itself, becomes retroactively even more significant when the same dogs fawn over the returning Telemachus as he approaches Eumaeus’s hut, as he himself is fresh back from his own mini-odyssey to the homes of Menelaus and Nestor. “At this time / the clamorous dogs came fawning around Telemachus, nor did they bark at him as he came, / and great Odysseus noticed that the dogs were fawning . . .” (Od. 16.4–6).1 Here, the Odyssey offers a preemptive clue to the solution of the greatest Sherlock Holmes mystery, “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” In that story Holmes solves the case at the moment that he realizes that an absence matters, for the lack of a bark when the criminal entered the house signified that a man known to the dogs—that is,
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the master of the house—had entered. The silence itself, rather than any idiotic fascination with material evidence, is the key to the solution of the crime. Odysseus, too, is careful to notice what the dogs do (fawn), but more importantly what they do not do (they do not bark or maul Telemachus, as they tried to do to him). Thus, Odysseus retroactively discovers that the dogs he encounters in Eumaeus’s hut are, in some sense, Telemachus’s dogs, while we see that the Odyssey has, quite fortuitously, escaped an unwitting patricide by way of these dogs. The Oedipus story, though formally excluded, defines the Odyssey through this exclusion: if the Odyssey does not explicitly remember the Oedipus story, the Oedipus story remembers it, functioning as a kind of abyss that the narrative hovers around without quite falling into. We thus preserve the (fragile) possibility of a return to a “normal” oikos or household. If it is true that the characters of the Odyssey will not do that, nevertheless at key moments the Odyssey— quite behind the back of its characters—seems to blunder toward this prohibited narrative. The Odyssey necessarily cannot be the story of Oedipus, and yet, at crucial moments, we see that it could be. On this reading, the integrity of the story certainly would not depend on any presumed conscious will of its characters (say, Odysseus’s desire to return home, or Telemachus’s desire to recognize his father and displace the suitors), still less on any conscious control of those characters set in place by the decisions of a poet. We might be closer if we see this failed deadly encounter between Odysseus and his son, via the marauding dogs, as one way in which the logic of the narrative signals its own inherent lack of logic, its basic insufficiency; the dogs do not kill Odysseus, but for no good reason—at least, no other reason than the thoroughly tautological reason that the Odyssey cannot be the story of Oedipus. The story itself is turned over, for a moment, to the arbitrary will of these dogs that will kill, or not kill, the father. Here we might risk a comparison to the actions of the poet of the Iliad, who dramatically parades his own inability to tell the events of epic (“Tell me now, you Muses who have your homes on Olympos. / For you, who are goddesses, are there, and you know all things, / and we have heard only the rumor of it, and know nothing . . .” [Il. 2.484–86]), and instead turns his story over to the agency of an imagined big Other (the Muses, the representatives of poetic tradition, the guarantors of the medium of poetry itself). The dogs are correlative,
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in the Odyssey’s narrative, to this failure of the poet, and the entire existence of the story is handed over to the agency of the dogs. As we might be tempted to compose a Book 16 proem, “Tell me, dogs who guard the household, who protect its boundaries while we humans are too weak, and are far too impotent to do so, the story of whether the house deserves to be saved; we humans, who know nothing, have heard that you have this knowledge. . . .”2 But we should go a step further here and show how what is apparently contingent—the acts of the dogs—reveals a hitherto concealed desire. That is, is not the murderous activity of the dogs evidence for Telemachus that he is receiving from the Other (here, represented by the dogs) his own true message in inverted form? The aggressive action of the dogs allows us to reconsider the effect of his lifelong efforts to tame them, efforts that coincide with Odysseus’s physical absence. Telemachus makes the household dogs his, and therefore no longer his father’s. The elaborate care of the dogs was never innocent, for lurking beneath Telemachus’s efforts to construct the safe space of an oikos for himself, in Eumaeus’s hut and via his dogs, is the symbolic destruction of the oikos that went before, the oikos of his father. The mauling dogs clarify, had we but cared to notice, that aggressive impulses had been present all along, killing Odysseus softly, lurking not so much behind Telemachus’s acts as in the form of his opposite intentions, the loving care of the animals who protect the threshold of the oikos.3 This gives added point to the first moment of the father-son reunion. Prior to any attempt by Odysseus to prove that he is Telemachus’s father, he is forced to confront a scene that Laius never had to witness. If, at least in Sophocles’ version, the Oedipus narrative centers on the son’s belated discovery of the patricidal act, in the Odyssey we see these events from the perspective of the father, Odysseus, and via the symbolic mediation of the dogs, not the ciphered messages of the oracles. As Odysseus might have said in response to the dogs’ lack of bark, “Oh my god, the patricidal dogs were his dogs, and he did not even know about his own patricidal desire. . . .” The point of this lengthy preamble is not to reduce the Odyssey story to the well-worn dynamics of the tale of Oedipus, but rather to beg for some license to read the two stories against each other in an effort to open up the significance of both. More specifically, I wish to examine a single part of the Oedipus myth—Oedipus’s solution of the
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riddle of the Sphinx—and use my reading of that riddle as a kind of makeshift interpretative key to puzzle through the significance of Odysseus’s encounters with the monsters of Book 12, in particular the journey between Scylla and Charybdis.4 The riddle focuses on a problem that is showcased throughout both stories: the relationship of body parts—hands and feet and voice—to the human creature as a whole. There are, then, two parts to what follows, as I trace the links between Oedipus and Odysseus, these two exemplary mythic men who define themselves through their encounters with monsters: first, a brief attempt to complicate the riddle of the Sphinx, and then an attempt to put this reading to work in creating (because the riddling status of these encounters is less well known) some monster riddles in the Odyssey.
I. Membra Disjecta: The Riddle of the Sphinx Let me begin with the riddle of the Sphinx. If there is one moral we might draw from the Oedipus tale, it is “beware of solving riddles,” or, at least, beware of any overly easy solution to riddles. Thus, we should hesitate before presuming that Oedipus correctly solves the Sphinx’s riddle; at the very least, we can look back to the riddle for a clue to the disasters that follow its solution, retroactively seeing how the solution implicates the solver. A doubt concerning Oedipus’s solution has already been suggested, in Lacanian circles, by Stuart Schneiderman, for whom Oedipus makes a significant error.5 For Schneiderman, Oedipus is beguiled by a humanist jubilation in man, and his exultation causes him to forget not so much his individual self as his name—swollen-footed Oedipus—a name that itself defines him in terms of feet. Oedipus misses that he is not simply a single example of the genus man who grows up and grows old, but is rather a decentered being, a subject-of-the-signifier thrust into the world of language. This is nicely highlighted by the tension between his ability to provide a linear solution of progress to the riddle and his marked lack of ability to understand himself as a being that has a name, Oedipus. Indeed, the generic answer “man” blinds him to his status as a named, nongeneric being, “Oedipus.”6 With this as a promising beginning, let us push the problem of the riddle further. Here is the best-known, and most provocative, version of it, as recounted in Athenaeus’s Deipnosophists:
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e[sti divpoun ejpi; gh`~ kai; tetravpon, ou| miva fwnhv, kai; trivpon, ajllavssei de; fuvs in movnon o{ss j ejpi; gai`an eJrpeta; givnontai kai; ajn j aijqevra kai; kata; povnton: ajll j oJpovtan pleivstoisin ejreidovmenon posi; baivnh/, e[nqa tavco~ guivoisin ajfaurovtaton pevlei aujtou`. (10.456b) There is on the earth a two-footed and four-footed—who has one voice— And three-footed thing, and it alone changes its nature, of all the things That come into being on earth and in the air and on the sea. But whenever it goes forth leaning on the most feet, Then is the swiftness in its limbs the weakest.
Oedipus, of course, provides a unifying solution. But let us linger over the questioning structure that frames the riddle, and its mode of division of this strange multiped being who is soon to become, via Oedipus’s nomination, the human. One way of doing this is to focus on the two moments of transition in human nature: first, the moment when two legs become three (at old age), and earlier, when four legs become two in the transition to adulthood. Oedipus’s solution heals these moments of rupture by drawing them together via a linear narrative of human progress. But rather than identifying with this narrative solution, itself dependent on the word man that stitches it together, we might instead focus on the strange, fragmentary creature that is defined only in relationship to the appearances and disappearances of his limbs. At the moment of old age, from Oedipus’s solution, we know that the third leg is the walking stick. With this solution in place, we can retroactively see that the three legs are made up of our two natural legs, and the third is a manufactured one, the walking stick we use in old age. But what if we take the riddle at face value? After the addition of the third leg, we do not have, in principle, two natural legs supplanted by a third conventional one, but simply three legs, quite indistinguishable from each other. Humans become, in age, the kind of species that manufacture their own body parts, parts that completely replace these “natural” parts; a symptom of that manufacture is the separation of ourselves from all those body parts, the natural and crafted parts alike. Does not the addition of the walking stick turn our own supposedly “natural” legs themselves into a kind of walking stick? Can we unproblematically talk about “our” legs any more after the addition of the third leg, which has the function of making of our own legs a kind of makeshift prosthetic object?
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The anatomy of man, as Marx once put it in one of his riddles, is the key to the anatomy of the ape. In this riddle, rather than seeing the moment of old age as a decline from the moment of adulthood, can we not, if we follow the temporal logic of the rise and fall of man through the generations highlighted in the riddle, also say that the anatomy of the old is the key to the anatomy of the adult? The truth of old age—the creation of the first prosthetic limb—helps us understand that we have always had a problematical relationship to the body, even if it is easier, when we are in (what we think of as) health, to ignore this. Indeed, it clarifies how the time of the adult human, rather than being the controlling apex of the creature’s existence, is instead the moment when the human is the greatest victim of a set of illusions about his body (its unity, its ability to function automatically). In age, by way of contrast, we become aware of the way our limbs have always been an embarrassing addition to ourselves, things that we can do things with and do things to, even as they do things back to us quite behind our backs. To borrow a phrase from Philip Larkin, “our flesh surrounds us with its own decisions.” What the riddle does—using the body/limbs to provide a message—might then be more significant than what the spoken solution seems to offer us, for the riddle is an attempt to show us that our flesh/limbs can signify something to us—that is, the way our body parts can be the location of symptoms—but only if, following Freud, we try to read them.7 If the riddle’s solution suggests that it is about the unity of the human species—and Adorno saw, in Oedipus’s solution, the birth of a dangerously exultant humanism—rereading it after Oedipus’s solution allows us to pick apart this unity, to dismember the body. And of course the two are correlative: until the riddle’s answer, there was no “human,” just the kind of chaos associated by Lacan with the corps morcelé prior to the jubilant exultation of the self in its image at the mirror stage. Oedipus’s failure was a failure to remember the question, to lose himself in his unifying solution. But what was lost—the dismembered, fragmented self—will return in the peculiar perversion of the self that becomes Oedipus, the swollen-footed incestuous monster who undermines any hierarchical, ordered pattern of generational continuity. The importance of the third foot can perhaps also help us see what is at stake during the second moment of the riddle, the move from childhood to adulthood. This additional prosthetic limb—an artifi-
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cial, cultural addition—is in no way innocent. Rather, the riddle clarifies the way in which by adding something it clarifies that something was always missing from us, an unproblematic relationship to our bodies that are cut off from us by the workings of language itself. Thus, if we add something at the moment when an adult ages and loses his ability to stand on his own two feet, the earlier transitional moment of the riddle puts on display a disappearing trick, giving us a glimpse of what has been lost. From four legged-creatures we become two-legged creatures; we make two of our limbs disappear, insofar as they are legs. We change our limbs, their use and purpose, in accordance with our changing desires, and, of course, the normative story of progression from childhood is itself symptomatic of one such frozen desire, a desire for order, for a hierarchy organizing the human species. But if we take the disappearance of the legs seriously, we also destroy two of our body parts in that moment of change into adulthood. This confusion of hands/feet, and the truth about our relationship to the body that it reveals, stand in tension with any normative story of any ordered progress of the human creature through its life. Thus, what seems interesting about the riddle is the way in which a story of natural progress—four feet, two feet/two hands, three feet, all linked to the birth and decay of the human organism—is linked to an imaginative (from the perspective of the Sphinx’s riddle itself) dismemberment of a bodily unity normally taken for granted in our post-Oedipal worlds. In terms of the riddle of the Sphinx, the encounter between these two views of the progress of man—natural progression, and fragmentation of body clarified by the addition of the extra limb representing culture—is not equal. The story of progress can be subsumed under the aegis of this prosthetic cultural limb (it is just a story, among other stories about human progression), but not vice versa. Any attempt to replace the lost limbs can only ever be a cultural, prosthetic one. It is not just that the cure forever doubles the wound, but that it creates the wound, gouges out a hole even as it covers it up in the same gesture. (We will see below how the Odyssey seems to examine this.) In terms of the encounter with the Sphinx, Oedipus is surely not the philosopher, but rather the antiphilosopher: his solution returns us to the prephilosophical “natural” status of the being man, the single body that moves through life, destroying man as a question, whereas the riddle of the Sphinx is bound up in dismember-
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ing this unity through thought. We might see, then, the suicide of the Sphinx as the suicide of a frustrated philosophy teacher, irritated at the utter stupidity of her latest student who produces the naïve answer “man” to her provocations, and as she jumps off her rock, she leaves him to his fate of a violent imposition of unity onto himself and his family relationships. A doubly naïve student, because he not only answers “man” but is unaware that the unity he imposes is his unity, he is held together by his additional act of interpretative violence. Thus, as we might put it, “the unity that Oedipus as subject endeavors to impose on the sensuous multitude via his synthetic activity is always erratic, eccentric, unbalanced, ‘unsound,’ something that is externally and violently imposed on to the multitude, never a simple impassive act of discerning the inherent subterranean connections between the membra disjecta.”8 To remain unaware of this is Oedipus’s error. All this will be crucial below to the story of the Scylla, where the status of her hands and feet, as we will see, are a significant problem. But this moment of disappearance of limbs, as the body—momentarily, at least within the logic of the riddle—becomes a kind of limbless torso, might make us think more readily of an earlier Odyssean monster-tale in Book 12, his encounter with the Sirens. In this tale, does not Odysseus also get rid of his limbs, at least temporarily? The crew binds him hand and foot, turning him into an immobile human torso that does nothing but listen: One after another, I stopped the ears of all my companions And they then bound me hand and foot in the fast ship, standing Upright against the mast with the ropes’ end lashed around it . . . (12.177–79)
The sailors are all but ears, while he is simply all ears.9 He has no use of his hands and feet, while they are entirely hands and feet. They do not listen, for wax is in their ears. They do not think: they obey the orders of Odysseus, which preprogram them to ignore the evidence of their eyes, and Odysseus’s visual requests to untie him. Instead, they get rerouted from what they see back to the earlier order, which demands that they tie him all the more securely the more he talks. So, if it is true that Odysseus, in addition to his ears, still has the use of his voice, it is a paradoxical voice that is no longer really his, neutralized in advance by his earlier order. His order, in other words,
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deprives him not only of his limbs, but of the ability of his own voice to function as a provider of sensible discourse. From the moment he gives it, he can try to replace the effect of his earlier order with new forms of signs, but only on the condition that no one hears them. And what do we see as Odysseus’s orders take hold? A kind of composite, identikit human-machine, with a whole bunch of arms and legs (the crew) and a brain function that is externally drafted onto it via the voice of Odysseus. This monstrous creature has a voice that is not its own, but is an active, commanding foreign presence that causes its activities but is grafted onto it from without. We should also note the time gap: the crew’s limbs are worked upon by a prior message of Odysseus, which makes them oblivious to all further messages. The companions, at the moment they carry out the orders, are deprived of any possible further words that might help explain them. It is a senseless message. In short, does not the crew become “agents of the letter”? It is usual to think of this episode as a defeat, by Odyssean cunning, of a certain kind of monstrous Siren song. But there is a second Siren song, the words of command that Odysseus gives to his troops, words that turn them into the kind of entranced automatons that is the usual fate of the prey of the Sirens. We are, I think, too often beguiled by the monsters of the Odyssey, as we focus on their strangeness. What we miss, in so doing, is the way that Odysseus solves the problems they present only by constructing— though it is far from clear he knows what he is doing—a machinelike human monster to replace them: polla; ta; deina; koujde;n ajnqrwvpou deinovteron pevlei, as Sophocles once put it. As we might translate, “there are many monstrous things, but nothing more of a monster than man.” In Odyssey 12, the “monstrous” power of the Sirens does not disappear, but rather is transferred into the voice of the man who unwittingly changes human nature, turning himself and his men into a monster-rowing machine.
II. Fwnh; d j a[rrhkto~: If I Had an Unbreakable Voice Back to the riddle of the Sphinx for one last look. In the encounter with the Sirens, Odysseus, a speaking being who is not heard, seems to lose his voice at the moment it becomes split off from him and reflected back to him in the rowing of the troops. He confronts his own voice, but deprived of the sense that normally veils its truth, for
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the commands issued from that voice—the orders to the troops—are deprived of the structural context that would give them sense. The monster, then, has limbs (oars), a torso, even a single voice; though it is not its own, it is that of Odysseus, but in its disavowed truth, in the form of the enjoyment lurking behind his commands.10 In the Sphinx’s riddle, the creature that changes its nature also seems to have a single voice. But where does this voice come from? In order for Oedipus’s solution to work, we need to view the human species as the simple object referred to by the riddle: “human” is the creature with one voice and changing limbs. But until the solution, we just have a set of changing body parts, even though the voice itself remains the one thing that stays the same. A prehuman existence, and certainly one where the voice itself is part of the object referred to in the riddle, is on show in the fragmentary object soon to be named humanity. But, on the other hand, it is a voice that necessarily remains silent, deliberately unwilling to help the efforts of the solvers who die because of their own failures of speech. It takes Oedipus’s voice to make the riddle speak, to actualize this voice of the riddling creature that had remained silent until his solution; that is, with the hindsight of Oedipus’s solution we can read the riddle proleptically, for it anticipates the “one voice” that will solve it. The one voice will be the additional voice of Oedipus who says the one thing that will solve the riddle or, at least, destroy the riddler: the one creature is the generic single blueprint of a single representative human. But this proleptic reading complicates its solution, for if the riddle spoke of one voice, we add a second voice to the voice of the human object in order to make the riddle work out. The only thing that gives unity to these body parts is indeed a “single voice,” but it becomes the voice of the person who solves the riddle by saying “man.” The answer to the riddle, given by a Euripidean scholiast, seems to show some sort of awareness of this problem by emphasizing Oedipus’s voice: klu`qi kai; oujk ejqevlousa, kakovptere Mou`sa qanovntwn, fwnh`~ hJmetevrh~, so;n tevlo~ ajmplakivh~: a[nqrwpon katevlexa~, o{~, hJnivka gai`an ejfevrpei, prw`ton e[fu tetravpou~ nhvpio~ ejk lagovnwn, ghralevo~ de; pevlwn trivtaton povda bavktron ejreivdei aujcevna fortivzwn ghvrai> kamptovmeno~.
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Hearken, even if you don’t want to, evil-winged Muse of the dead, To our voice, your end of erring. You have spoken of man, who, when he comes upon the earth First is four-footed by nature, speechless from the womb, And being old he leans on a staff, a third foot, Burdening his neck, bent over with age.
Listen to our voice, he says—your end; he thus banishes the voice of the Sphinx, but also duplicates the voice of the object he tries to define. But the important point here is that Oedipus can only believe he has solved the riddle—the creature with a distinct, single voice—if he fails to notice his own voice, for it becomes an embarrassing addition as soon as we stop thinking of it as a sign of subjectivity and see it instead as an additional object. He speaks, but he cannot hear himself speak without confusing the number of voices in the riddle. So the riddle of the Sphinx works perfectly as a riddle, but only as long as a voice does not solve it. The split here is between the inert, harmless vision of the fragmented human in the riddle, and the voice that brings it to life as the “human” in the person of Oedipus, who begins to pull its strings. He puts an end to one voice, but the problem of monstrosity simply metamorphosizes into the solver, the aspects of himself he needs to remain blind to as a condition of the riddle’s solution. To transfer into Lacanian terms, Oedipus’s answer to the riddle chooses sense over enjoyment, an enjoyment that is not alien to him but rather a disavowed part of himself lurking in what Barthes calls the grain of his own voice, which he cannot hear. So too with Odysseus, who is confronted, as he sees the senseless rowing of the men, with the enjoyment bound up in his own command that they obey. This reading might also make us pause as we think of what games are being played with the notion of bodily unity in the riddle. Unity, if we take this riddle at face value, is not intrinsic to our conceptions of our own body, but grafted on from outside by an external voice that disturbs the unity in the very gesture of creating it. Humans are not intrinsically whole, but only insofar as they are constructed as whole through an alien voice that is added to, and duplicates, the supposedly singular voice of the object defined. For when does this creature become a single unified “man,” and not a series of body parts? Only as long as there is someone around to say “man” and does not hear himself say it.
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III. The Anatomy of a Monster-Murder Let us now turn to examine in detail the encounter between Odysseus and the Scylla, and try to create some riddles from the puzzling things that Circe says to Odysseus in Book 12 in preparation for his meeting with the mythical monsters to come. The encounter between Circe and Odysseus has all the ingredients of a competitive encounter, as she spells out not only the monsters he will meet on his journey home, but also what he must do to avoid them. She thus deprives him in advance of any chance he has to use his crucial attribute—his cunning—to avoid them. Alive to this problem, Odysseus tries to seek ways of avoiding the outcomes she claims are necessary. This is most obvious when he asks if there is any way to avoid the loss of men when he travels between Scylla and Charybdis. But he also tries, as we will see, to make sense of the riddling things she does say. In short, Circe’s words do more than merely help us anticipate the acts to come, and they do so in coded, enigmatic ways. First, Circe’s description of the Scylla: e[nqa d jejni; Skuvllh naivei deino;n lelakui`a. th`~ h\ toi fwnh; me;n o{sh skuvlako~ neogillh`~ givnetai, aujth; d j au\te pevlwr kakovn: oujdev kev tiv~ min ghqhvseien ijdwvn, oujd j eij qeo;~ ajntiavseie. th`~ h\ toi povde~ eijs i; duwvdeka pavnte~ a[wroi, e}x dev tev oiJ deirai; perimhvkee~, ejn de; eJkavsth/ smerdalevh kefalhv, ejn de; trivstoicoi ojdovnte~, puknoi; kai; qameve~, plei`oi mevlano~ qanavtoio. mevssh mevn te kata; speivou~ koivloio devduken, e[xw d jejxivscei kefala;~ deinoi`o berevqrou: aujtou` d j ijcquava/, skovpelon perimaimwvwsa, delfi`nav~ te kuvna~ te kai; ei[ poqi mei`zon e{lh/s i kh`to~, a} muriva bovskei ajgavstono~ ajmfitrivth. (12.85–97) In that cavern Scylla lives, whose howling is terror. Her voice indeed is only as loud as a new-born puppy Could make, but she herself is an evil monster. No one, Not even a god encountering her, could be glad at that sight. She has twelve feet, and all of them wave in the air. She has six Necks upon her, grown to great length, and upon each neck There is a horrible head, with teeth in it, set in three rows Close together and stiff, full of black death. Her body From the waist down is holed up inside the hollow cavern, But she holds her heads poked out and away from the terrible hollow, And there she fishes, peering all over the cliffside, looking
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For dolphins or dogfish to catch or anything bigger, Some sea monster, of whom Amphtrite keeps so many. . . .
The first problem to which the riddle of the Sphinx might alert us is a problem of the relationship of the Scylla to her body, in particular to her feet. The Scylla is clearly described as having twelve feet. But how can we ever know this, if she is buried in her cave up to the middle? We might presume that the narrative takes for granted her accepted mythic status as a twelve-footed, six-headed being, and that accordingly we can safely believe that twelve of her feet lie behind her in the cave. But this already takes too much for granted, not least the presumptuous notion of what the bodies of monsters are supposed to look like. We assume too readily that monsters are creatures with legs below their middle, as with humans or other animals, even though the very notion of the monstrous should make us willing to suspend such judgments, leaving room for at least momentary wonder. It is also true that the description is specifically intended as a preview of a coming attraction for Odysseus. How could he recognize these feet? Thus, rather than filling in any narrative blanks with mythical/mythic background information, let us resist the temptation to identify with an all-knowing Other (the realm of some assumed communal knowledge of myth on the part of the listener). Instead, let us consider the image the text provides from the perspective of a thoroughly unknowing audience. This can comprise the Homeric audience— Odysseus and us, stripped of our mythic scholarly pretensions. Odysseus is to see a thing with twelve feet and six heads, and there are three rows of teeth embedded in those heads, but one half of this being’s defining features, her feet, are actually invisible, hidden by the cave. Another problem: how can you recognize something that may (or may not) even be there for you to see? There is a further puzzle: the Scylla has a strange voice, which is characterized by her bizarre screaming: deino;n lelakui`a. Yet despite her status as a monster, her metaphorical “bark” is a puppy dog bark. Note also the etymologizing play on her name here: the Scylla’s very identity (Skuvllh) is linked to her puppy voice (fwnh; skuvlako~). But how can a big monster have such a strange, puppy dog voice? 11 We might also note the general relevance of these problems to the issues explored in the riddle of the Sphinx. We have the problem of the number of limbs of the Scylla, and also the strangeness of her voice.
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Let us look at these problems in sequence, beginning with the riddle of her feet. The strangeness of the incongruity between the number of the feet and the way she is buried up to her waist is accentuated by the difficulty in finding a meaning for the only word used to describe these feet, a[wroi. Unlike contemporary commentators, who for the most part despair of finding a meaning for the word, the scholiasts were their usual loquacious selves, offering two major strands of thought: either the word is related to ajeivrw (raise up), or it should be read as some version of the alpha privative plus w{ra. The meanings could then verge from “dangling” if read from “raise” (hence, Lattimore’s translation), or “out of season, bizarre, untimely.” Now, rather than making the philological presumption that there is a single clear meaning to the word—the kind of presumption that is too often a kind of foundation myth for positivist philological inquiry—we might do better to take the word as selfconsciously strange. Indeed, it might be intended to evoke exactly the kind of scholarly exegesis that it has provoked. So let us keep the status of a[wroi as signifier in mind, allowing open at least both sets of meanings put in motion by the scholiasts. In fact, both possibilities can be read as providing keys to the entire episode, for time and again body parts in Odyssey 12 will not remain in their customary place, challenging our commonsense (imaginary) worldviews. Further, their failure to stay in place means that they dangle between earth and sky, disrupting any easy associations we have between animal life and locale: birds in the sky, fish in the sea, four-footed animals on land. At any rate, after hearing this bizarre description from Circe, and the strange word a[wroi, Odysseus certainly is on the lookout for the Scylla, peering about himself in all directions, consciously hoping to maximize the time available to him to do battle with her before she eats his men. Then he finally sees her. Of course he sees her too late, that is, at the moment she begins to eat up his men—as he puts it, the most piteous sight he has ever seen: oujdev ph/ ajqrh`sai dunavmhn: e[kamon dev moi o[sse pavnth/ paptaivnonti pro;~ hjeroeideva pevtrhn. hJmei`~ me;n steinwpo;n ajneplevomen goovwnte~: e[nqen ga;r Skuvllh, eJtevrwqi de; di`a Cavrubdi~ deino;n ajnerruvbdhse qalavssh~ ajlmuro;n u{dwr. h\ toi o{t j ejxemevseie, levbh~ w}~ ejn puri; pollw`/ pa`s j ajnamormuvreske kukwmevnh: uJyovse d j a[cnh
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a[kroisi skopevloisin ejp j ajmfotevroisin e[pipten. ajll j o{t j ajnabrovxeie qalavssh~ aJlmuro;n u{dwr, pa`s j e[ntosqe favneske kukwmevnh, ajmfi; de; pevtrh deino;n bebruvcei, uJpevnerqe de; gai`a favneske yavmmw/ kuanevh: tou;~ de; clwro;n devo~ h{/rei. hJmei`~ me;n pro;~ th;n i[domen deivsante~ o[leqron: tovfra dev moi Skuvllh glafurh`~ ejk nho;~ eJtaivrou~ e{x e{leq j, oi} cersivn te bihvfiv te fevrtatoi h\san. skeyavmeno~ d j ej~ nh`a qoh;n a{ma kai; meq j eJtaivrou~ h[dh tw`n ejnovhsa povda~ kai; cei`ra~ u{perqen uJyovs j ajeiromevnwn: ejme; de; fqevggonto kaleu`nte~ ejxonomaklhvdhn, tovte g j u{staton, ajcnuvmenoi kh`r. wJ~ d j o{t j ejpi; probovlw/ aJlieu;~ perimhvkei> rJavbdw/ ijcquvs i toi`~ ojlivgoisi dovlon kata; ei[data bavllwn ej~ povnton proi?hsi boo;~ kevra~ ajgrauvloio, ajspaivronta d j e[peita labw;n e[rriye quvraze, w}~ oi{ g j ajspaivronte~ ajeivronto proti; pevtra~. aujtou` d j eijni; quvrh/s i kathvsqie keklhvgonta~, cei`ra~ ejmoi; ojrevgonta~ ejn aijnh`/ dhi>oth`ti. oi[ktiston dh; kei`no ejmoi`s j i[don ojfqalmoi`s i pavntwn, o{ss j ejmovghsa povrou~ aJlo;~ ejxereeivnwn. (12.232–59) I could not make her out anywhere, and my eyes grew weary From looking everywhere on the misty face of the sea rock. So we sailed up the narrow strait lamenting. On one side Was Scylla, and on the other side was shining Charybdis, Who made her terrible ebb and flow of the sea’s water. When she vomited it up, like a caldron over a strong fire, The whole sea would boil up in turbulence, and the foam flying Spattered the pinnacles of the rocks in either direction; But when in turn again she sucked down the sea’s salt water, The turbulence showed all the inner sea, and the rock around it Groaned terribly, and the ground showed at the sea’s bottom, Black with sand; and green fear seized upon my companions. We in fear of destruction kept our eyes on Charybdis, But meanwhile Scylla out of the hollow vessels snatched six Of my companions, the best of them for strength and hands’ work, And when I turned to look at the ship, with my other companions, I saw their feet and hands from below, already lifted High above me, and they cried out to me and called me By name, the last time they ever did it, in heart’s sorrow. And as a fisherman with a very long rod, on a jutting Rock, will cast his treacherous bait for the little fishes, And sinks the horn of a field-ranging ox into the water, Then hauls them up and throws them on the dry land, gasping And struggling, so they gasped and struggled as they were hoisted
35
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Up the cliff. Right in her doorway she ate them up. They were screaming And reaching out their hands to me in this horrid encounter. That was the most pitiful scene that these eyes have looked on In my sufferings as I explored the routes over the water.
Odysseus’s reaction is, I think, another puzzle. Why on earth is this the most piteous sight he has ever seen? He has certainly seen more of his men die in his previous encounters, and he has also seen his men eaten before in the cave of the Cyclops. Why, in short, is Odysseus so upset? In solving this problem, let us take the advice of the Sphinx to heart—at least the advice as reported to us by the Thebans in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus—that they should “look to what is at their feet, and pay no attention to what is invisible.” This should force us to pay attention to the way Odysseus looks for feet, those invisible objects that are emphasized and yet seem to be buried in the cave. He peers around, looking for a being with a waist in a cave and with twelve feet. At the moment his men get captured, distracted by the horror of the voided Charybdis, empty of water, he looks up, and sees what? At this moment, do not twelve feet come out of the Scylla’s mouth? And is not this the moment that he understands Circe’s riddle? The twelve feet of the Scylla are not her own feet. They are not permanently attached to her body. Rather, “her” feet are those of her spoil (this is one possible translation of Scylla’s Greek name, “the despoiler”). If the sight is piteous for Odysseus, it is because he realizes, retroactively, his own failure to understand Circe’s riddle. The Scylla’s feet were never her own, but always the feet of her victims. The irony, then, is that Odysseus misses what is immediately in front of him (to; pro;~ posiv [at his feet]), by looking for twelve feet that, he presumes, are not afoot, but rather buried in the cave. We can also now understand another of Circe’s ominous remarks. It turns out to be true that “no one, not even a god encountering her, could be glad at that sight,” but not because of any innate ugliness. It is because what she is—in Aristotelian terms, her material cause—is the severed body parts of those who drive by her and who must thus witness their own dismemberment at the very time they see her. This motif of recognizing a riddle or a prophecy but only when it is too late is quite common in the Odyssey; normally, however, it
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happens to the victims of Odysseus, not to Odysseus himself. Consider the case of the Cyclops. After Odysseus has blinded him and is about to make his escape, he tells the Cyclops his name. Only then does the Cyclops remember the prophecy of Telemus: ‘w] povpoi, h\ mavla dhv me palaivfata qevsfaq j iJkavnei. e[ske ti~ ejnqavde mavnti~ ajnh;r hju?~ te mevga~ te, Thvlemo~ Eujrumivdh~, o}~ mantosuvnh/ ejkevkasto kai; manteuovmeno~ kateghvra Kuklwvpessin: o{~ moi e[fh tavde pavnta teleuthvsesqai ojpivssw, ceirw`n ejx jOdush`o~ aJmarthvsesqai ojpwph`~. ejnqavd j ejleuvsesqai, megavlhn ejpieimevnon ajlkhvn: nu`n dev m j ejw;n ojlivgo~ te kai; oujtidano;~ kai; a[kiku~ ojfqalmou` ajlavwsen, ejpeiv m j ejdamavssato oi[nw/.’ (9.507–15) “Ah now, a prophecy spoken of old is come to completion. There used to be a man here, great and strong, and a prophet, Telemos, Eurymos’ son, who for prophecy was pre-eminent And grew old as a prophet among the Cyclopes. This man told me How all this that has happened now must someday be accomplished, And how I must lose the sight of my eye at the hands of Odysseus. But always I was on the look-out for a man handsome And tall, with great endowment of strength on him, to come here; But now the end of it is that a little man, niddering, feeble, Has taken away the sight of my eye, first making me helpless with wine.”
The Cyclops had misrecognized the prophecy of Telemus, who foretold his blinding, because he expected a big guy, not a pathetic nobody. One could use this episode to point out the obvious: what one sees is never neutral, but always framed by one’s expectations about it. These are expectations that one can never be fully aware of, a dilemma clearly on show in Lacan’s analysis of the “The Purloined Letter,” where the idiotic police force look in the depths of an apartment for a letter, but they miss that it is left lying on the surface. The police miss the surface, because they construe a “search” as the search for something hidden in the depths. The Cyclops falsely universalizes his own worldview of “bigness” and so misses the “nobody” Odysseus. But what is at stake in Odysseus’s misrecognition of the body of the Scylla? In addition to the problem of transference (his belief in a secret of the Scylla, itself a function of his belief in some hidden meaning to Circe’s words), his error also has something to tell us about his prejudices about the body: Odysseus gets the rid-
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dle wrong because he looks for a unified body, where feet are naturally attached to the body, and forgets that bodies can be split apart, rearranged, just as the riddle of the Sphinx emphasized. Ultimately, is not part of the lesson that we learn from the Scylla the extent to which we cling to certain fantasies of what a body consists of, and is not part of the horror the way we are forced to witness this elementary deconstruction of those fantasies? Let me take a moment here for a brief foray into the world of Homeric scholarship. It was once fashionable to think that there was no concept of the “entire body” or “person” in Homer, that there was only the conception of the self as fragmented, a collection of body parts. This led Bruno Snell to believe that the ancients had a defective concept of agency and the self, as they patiently waited for the day when Kantian conceptions of the self could emerge to show them what they lacked. Bernard Williams recently has forcibly argued against this view, suggesting instead that there was a simple, but coherent, theory of agency already present in Homer.12 But is not this tale a kind of preemptive commentary on the debate? Homer, at least as we look through the eyes of Odysseus, certainly had a belief in a unified body. But what the tale of the Scylla does is to show that this is precisely a prejudice, and a dangerous one at that, which can be preyed upon like any other prejudice. In Lacanian terms, we can also see that Odysseus’s prejudices can be linked to the exultation of the image of the body at the mirror stage (insofar as Odysseus can imagine no other kind of body), a more vulnerable or fragmentary body, for example. If Odysseus had a theory of the body that was less beset by specific assumptions of what a body looks like, he could have understood the riddle and not have been tricked by Circe. If Oedipus puts together a whole from riddling parts, Odysseus sees only a whole where he needs to see—and eventually does see, but too late—parts. In short, we have another classic Oedipal error. But before we get too enthused by this reading, it is worth hesitating. When, if we take Circe’s description literally, does the Scylla become the Scylla? If she is the monster with twelve feet, it is only momentarily that she achieves her identity as a twelve-footed monster, and never for herself but only ever for us. We see her with her twelve feet; she never sees herself, too intent, at least as the narrative describes her, in looking out for possible sources of prey:
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aujtou` d j ijcquava/, skovpelon perimaimwvwsa, delfi`nav~ te kuvna~ te kai; ei[ poqi mei`zon e{lh/s i kh`to~, a} muriva bovskei ajgavstono~ ajmfitrivth. (12.95–97) And there she fishes, peering all over the cliffside, looking For dolphins or dogfish to catch or anything bigger, Some sea monster, of whom Amphtrite keeps so many. . . .
Scylla is a being who becomes herself for us, as riddle seekers, only as she fills out the symbolic role she places in the narrative of the Odyssey; in fact, her body, uniting to herself the limbs of those she eats, corresponds to the little we know about her from the building blocks of the story. The Scylla is indeed the creature who is on the lookout for prey and who “has” limbs, even if the limbs of the men are not what she seeks. Rather, she desires to see dolphins, sea-dogs, or a “greater monster.” The men, then, are simply collateral damage, and the logic of the Scylla’s desire seems quite alien to that of Odysseus. But we can now at least diagnose Odysseus’s error even more accurately. He falsely sees a gap between the mythic description of the Scylla given by Circe, and the being of the Scylla—because of certain normative presumptions, Odysseus sees Circe’s words as a riddle, as signaling the presence of something more than what she says—where no such gap exists. The Scylla is nothing more than Circe’s words, a perpetual seeker of prey, who happens to gobble up the feet of his men as they go by; that is, Odysseus projects into the void of the cave (under the Scylla’s body) a second set of feet, where only one such set of feet exists. It is only from the perspective of such presumptions about her feet that the riddle exists as a riddle at all. The riddle is nothing more than Odysseus’s desire for a riddle, a desire that we appropriate if we identify with Odysseus. From the perspective of Circe, is she not simply telling the story “straight,” as it is? The Scylla just is the utterly nonsensical creature, made up out of the limbs she gobbles up, hanging over a cliff, looking for prey, forever mythically tied to the limbs of a certain crew she preys upon. It is when Odysseus starts trying to make sense of her that disaster ensues. Just as Oedipus’s flight was necessary to bring about the prophecy of Apollo, so too the puzzlement of Odysseus at the Scylla creates the monster we know as the Scylla. Thus far the identity of the Scylla has been what we have made of it, as we linked the problems of her description and her name to the
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sights that we saw through the eyes of Odysseus. Given that our numbering skills are in the spotlight here, let us pause for a recount: if it is true that the troops show twelve feet, it is just as true that they show 24 dangling limbs, for we can add the twelve hands of the crew. But at this point in their existence, can we really be so sure of our designation of the crew’s legs as legs, and hands as hands? As Odysseus sees them, they are dangling, removed from the earth. If we stop to think about what this might look like, are they not more like little quadrupeds rather than bipeds, babies rather than adult humans? When both their hands and legs are removed from the ground, they lose their link to the adult, human functions that define them as hands and legs. The legs prop up nothing, they have no anchoring point in the ground. The episode stages—to return once more to the riddle of the Sphinx—a kind of generational regression of the companions. They become four-footed, childlike beings. And what does all this mean for our efforts at conceptualizing the identity of the Scylla, this Scylla-for-us? As the Scylla eats the men, and half their legs disappear into the cave, is she then the Scylla? It is worth remarking that in order for this reading of the riddle to work correctly, it is only because we cling to a certain normative notion of what the human adult is. We rule out the “four-footed” crawling being from childhood, and the three-footed, cane-carrying being from late in life, and focus instead on the adult being who walks upright. In short, we add the very thing—the “answer” from the riddle of the Sphinx, the normative concept of man progressing through the years—that the riddle puts into question. Here, the Scylla, just at the moment her riddle is solved, seems to fight back, suggesting that no reading of it can be neutral. Instead, whatever amount of limbs we count will always be already determined by whatever conception of the human we bring to the table in an attempt to solve it, as the riddle returns us to our own subjective impasses, our own status as subjects of the signifier. And any such conception will have to deal with our quite unnatural and problematic relationship with our limbs.
IV. The Silence of the Scylla Let us now turn to the problem of the Scylla’s voice. Rather than take our cue from the Sphinx’s riddle, we can perhaps return to the beginning of the Iliad, where it is the impossible fantasy of an unbroken
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voice that leads the poet to seek the help of the Muses: “Not if I had a voice never to be broken . . .” (2.490). Here, too, we have a broken voice, for the monster is split from the voice we would expect, and instead barks strangely with the voice of a puppy.13 But why a puppy? Puppies had made an appearance, in a brief simile, three books earlier in the Odyssey, in Book 9, in the tale that functions as a cannibalizing doublet of the Scylla episode: the man-eating exploits of the Cyclops. The Cyclops picks up three of Odysseus’s companions and slaps them to the ground “as if they were puppies” before eating them (9.289).14 If we push the identification between these two sets of eaten men and read both sets of men as puppylike—or, in terms of the narrative, if we read the puppy simile as an important piece of narrative information for the later story of men-eating—we get an answer to the our second riddle. The weird “voice” of the “barking” Scylla is, quite simply, the piteous crying of Odysseus’s puppylike men as they cry out to him and name him just before they disappear into the Scylla forever. Within the narrative, this makes perfect sense: the only time a sound comes from the Scylla during the episode is when the companions speak. Otherwise, she is silent, she never screams. In short, Circe’s riddling description of the Scylla’s voice looks back (to the simile of puppies in Book 9) and forward (to the eating of the men by the Scylla, and their voice). We might also notice the significance of what the men say. As the men linger in the six mouths of the Scylla, they name Odysseus and thus belatedly do what was prohibited by the logic of the narrative in Odyssey 9; then, as they were eaten, they were already part of the trick of Odysseus’s trick of “no one,” and if they had called out his name the “no one” trick would have failed, blowing Odysseus’s cover as “no one.” The two episodes read each other, as the piteous plight of the second group of men, who call out Odysseus’s name, allows us to see the depths of the first set of men’s (self-destructive) fidelity to Odysseus.15 As for the second set, it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that Odysseus never told his men about the encounter with the Scylla: he was afraid, so he claimed, that this foreknowledge would hinder their ability to row, that is, to be good machines, caught up in his cunning. Can we not read their plaintive name-calling as suggesting some sort of awareness of betrayal? We also have a neat reversal of the arrogant self-naming Odysseus performed at the end of the encounter with the Cyclops: there, he boasted of his trick in blinding the Cyclops
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through the “no one” trick by telling the Cyclops his actual name. Here, at a moment of utter impotence, he is forced to listen to his own name called out through the mouth of the Scylla, via his companions’ mouths. We might also see the picture of these four-footed beings as a reworking of Oedipus’s solution to the Sphinx riddle, which depended on the assumption that the four-footed human child was wordless (tetravpou~ nhvpio~ ejk lagovnwn), not a creature of the word (epos). Here, the puppy dog companions utter the signifier that is the cause of their destruction. At the very least, we can agree with Circe that this sound is a strange kind of barking indeed.16
V. A Thing of Nothing With these riddles in mind, we should perhaps return to the Scylla and her material causes. For what is left of her? Even though the narrative seems to have spirited away her limbs and her voice, there is at least the frame for her body parts—the long necks and head that do hang out over the cliff face, and the strange triple rows of deadly teeth as context for the voice: e}x dev tev oiJ deirai; perimhvkee~, ejn de; eJkavsth/ smerdalevh kefalhv, ejn de; trivstoicoi ojdovnte~, puknoi; kai; qameve~, plei`oi mevlano~ qanavtoio. mevssh mevn te kata; speivou~ koivloio devduken, e[xw d j ejxivscei kefala;~ deinoi`o berevqrou: aujtou` d j ijcquava/, skovpelon perimaimwvwsa, delfi`nav~ te kuva~ te kai; ei[ poqi mei`zon e{lh/s i kh`to~, a} muriva bovskei ajgavstono~ ajmfitrivth. (12.90–97) She has six Necks upon her, grown to great length, and upon each neck There is a horrible head, with teeth in it, set in three rows Close together and stiff, full of black death. Her body From the waist down is holed up inside the hollow cavern, But she holds her heads poked out and away from the terrible hollow, And there she fishes, peering all over the cliffside, looking For dolphins or dogfish to catch or anything bigger, Some sea monster, of whom Amphtrite keeps so many . . .
The problem here is that even this framework is described in such a way as to allow us to continue to chip away at the Scylla. The long necks and the three rows of teeth might be the physical attributes of a
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monster, but they also seem close to the kind of implement, a trident (triovdou~), which is most often used for killing a sea-monster.17 The long necks of the Scylla, the head with its three rows, are easily assimilated to the neck of a trident, with its three prongs “full of black death.” The correspondence is strengthened if we pay attention to the details of the later simile, as Odysseus’s men get eaten: wJ~ d j o{t j ejpi; probovlw/ aJlieu;~ perimhvkei> rJavbdw/ ijcquvs i toi`~ ojlivgoisi dovlon kata; ei[data bavllwn ej~ povnton proi?hsi boo;~ kevra~ ajgrauvloio . . . (12.251–53) And as a fisherman with a very long rod, on a jutting Rock, will cast his treacherous bait for the little fishes, And sinks the horn of a field-ranging ox into the water . . .
The “very long rod” (perimhvkei> rJavbdw/) corresponds to the “very long necks” (deirai; perimhvkee~) of the Scylla. One might also note that a further piece of mythic monstrosity lurks in the everyday actions of this fisherman, for the tiny fish victims (correlative within the simile to the men of Odysseus who die) are lured to their death by the top part of an ox, his “horns,” which are severed from the rest of the ox’s body. But it is not simply that beneath the Homeric description of the Scylla, a “rationalizing” nonmonstrous alternative lurks, say, real fishermen who stuck tridents out to spear whatever sailed through the straits. Rather, we are forced to confront what is monstrous in the everyday, the way that the seemingly miraculous aspects of nature are at work in the details of human attempts to fulfill their desires. If, however, at the level of the material the Scylla seems to consist of nothing, there remains something that we cannot wish away, and this is the “wish” of the Scylla herself, for she “fishes, peering all over the cliff, looking for dolphins or dogfish to catch or anything bigger, some sea monster.” Thus, the Scylla, if not herself a monster, is at least made up of a desire for a monster. It might seem as if this desire is left unsatisfied. After all, we normally think of Odysseus and his crew as her human victims. But because of the difficulties we have experienced in locating the monstrous, it is worth turning to the last time we meet the Scylla. After Odysseus’s men have all died, Odysseus makes the return trip between Scylla and Charybdis, alone, and he haphazardly seems to do the impossible: he succeeds in navi-
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gating between the Scylla and Charybdis without loss, an impossible task, at least according to Circe: pannuvcio~ ferovmhn, a{ma d j hjelivw/ ajniovnti h\lqon ejpi; Skuvllh~ skovpelon deinhvn te Cavrubdin. hJ me;n ajnerruvbdhse qalavssh~ aJlmuro;n u{dwr: aujta;r ejgw; poti; makro;n ejrineo;n uJyovs j ajerqeiv~, tw`/ prosfu;~ ejcovmhn wJ~ nukteriv~: oujdev ph/ ei\con ou[te sthrivxai posi;n e[mpedon ou[t j ejpibh`nai: rJivzai ga;r eJka;~ ei\con, ajphvwroi d j e[san o[zoi makroiv te megavloi te, kateskivaon de; Cavrubdin. nwlemevw~ d j ejcovmhn, o[fr j ejxemevseien ojpivssw iJsto;n kai; trovpin au\ti~: ejeldomevnw/ dev moi h\lqon, o[y j: h\mo~ d j ejpi; dovrpon ajnh;r ajgorh`qen ajnevsth krivnwn neivkea polla; dikazomevnwn aijzhw`n, th`mo~ dh; tav ge dou`ra Caruvbdio~ ejxefaavnqh. h|ka d j ejgw; kaquvperqe povda~ kai; cei`re fevresqai, mevssw/ d j ejndouvphsa pare;x perimhvkea dou`ra, eJzovmeno~ d j ejpi; toi`s i dihvresa cersi;n ejmh`/s i. Skuvllhn d j oujkevt j e[ase path;r ajndrw`n te qew`n te eijs idevein: ouj gavr ken uJpevkfugon aijpu;n o[leqron. (12.441–58) All that night I was carried along, and with the sun rising I came to the sea rock of Skylla, and dreaded Charybdis. At this time Charybdis sucked down the sea’s salt water, But I reached high in the air above me, to where the tall fig tree Grew, and caught hold of it and clung like a bat; there was no Place where I could firmly brace my feet, or climb up it, For the roots of it were far from me, and the branches hung out Far, big and long branches that overshadowed Charybdis. Inexorably I hung on, waiting for her to vomit The keel and mast back up again. I longed for them, and they came Late; at the time when a man leaves the law court, for dinner, After judging the many disputes brought him by litigious young men; That was the time it took the timbers to appear from Charybdis. Then I let go my hold with hands and feet, and dropped off, And came crashing down between and missing the two long timbers, But I mounted these, and with both hands I paddled my way out. But the father of gods and men did not let Skylla see me Again, or I could not have escaped from sheer destruction.
We could see this ending as quietly pointing toward the symbolic demise of the mythic problem of the Scylla and Charybdis. Odysseus has managed to escape their clutches without loss. He has, therefore, solved them as a riddle, and the Scylla withdraws, just as the Sphinx
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jumps off her rock in response to Odysseus’s answer. But there is more to it than this, for her disappearance coincides with an order from the “father of gods and men,” an order that functions as a kind of non-du-père that prohibits her from seeking out what she desires. But as he turns the Scylla’s gaze away from Odysseus, this also suggests that, up until that moment, she had been looking at him, frozen stonelike to the sight before her eyes. So what, exactly, had she seen? The Scylla, let us remember, though she looked out for dolphins and dogs, also hoped to catch a monster: ei[ poqi mei`zon e{lh/s i / kh`to~. Here, within the context of the riddles of the Sphinx and the Scylla, it is striking that Odysseus’s escape is dependent on the use and abuse of his limbs. Thus, the Scylla first sees Odysseus clinging to the tree by his limbs, rendering his legs useless. The simile used to describe Odysseus, “like a bat,” also seems to open up our usual questions. If he looks as if he is upside down, what function is being played by his hands, what function by his feet? In this topsy-turvy world, at least in the eyes of the Scylla, Odysseus seems to turn the human species upside down, switching the use of hands and feet. Afterwards, he hurls himself into the water up to his waist, causing his legs to disappear entirely as he paddles away; as he does this, he makes his arms into tools, turning them into oars. We might also note that the planks of the boat (perimhvkea dou`ra) recall the Scylla’s necks (oiJ deirai; perimhvkee~). It is not merely that she sees a monstrous creature, for this monster renders its own legs redundant, severing them from any natural use, causing them first to dangle, then to disappear underneath the water. Does not Odysseus, in these moments of metamorphosis, provide a picture of a monster to the Scylla? “She looked for dolphins, sea-dogs, or a monster” (delfi`nav~ te kuvna~ te kai; ei[ poqi mei`zon e{lh/s i / kh`to~) But perhaps this description of her strange desire suggests an escalation of strangeness. If dolphins have the appearance of fish, they spend much of their time in the air, and look as if they fly. The “dogs” that are in the sea are already a conflation of sea and land, where the function of hands and feet are radically different. But it is only with this strange monster, Odysseus-man, that she finally sees a creature who slides from one world to the other, having his home nowhere.18 Indeed, this monster-Odysseus is of a similar kind to the monster that Odysseus and his men had fantasized about from the description of Circe, and so if the episode seems to end with a benevolent act
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from Zeus—protecting Odysseus from the monstrous Scylla—it is perhaps because we have once again looked for the monster in the wrong place. What if it is the Scylla who is being protected from this terrifying, resourceful creature, “man”? But Zeus is also shielding her from something even more frightening. Her desire for a monster is, as we have seen, the only thing that constitutes her. By shielding this picture of Odysseus from her, therefore, Zeus, and the narrative, might be keeping the Scylla’s desire alive by refusing to let her get what she wants, and thus extinguishing her desire. The “no” of this father keeps this mythic being alive.19
Works Cited Goldhill, Simon. 1991. The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature. Cambridge. Henderson, J. 1997. “The Name of the Tree: Recounting Odyssey 24 340–2.” JHS 92: 87–116. Lear, Jonathan. 1998. Open-Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Cambridge, MA. Salecl, Renata. 2000. (Per)versions of Love and Hate. London. Scheiderman, Stuart. 1983. Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero. Cambridge, MA. Segal, Charles. 2001. Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge. New York. Snell, Bruno. 1953. The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought. Oxford. (Originally published as Die Entdeckung des Geistes; Studien zur Entstehung des europäischen Denkens bei den Griechen [Hamburg 1946]) Williams, Bernard. 1993. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley. Ziz˚ek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London and New York. Zupanc˚ic˚, Alenka. 2000. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London and New York.
Notes 1
For the Odyssey, I use Monro-Allen’s OCT text (Oxford 1963), and the translation of Richard Lattimore (New York 1967). 2 If this seems an absurdity, it might be worth remembering that this magical ability of dogs as subjects-supposed-to-know is the foundation of another political absurdity—the fantasy world of Plato’s Republic, for the search for a Republic begins with a recognition of the need to protect it by use of guardians, and the very possibility of guardians is premised on the nature of dogs: “You have surely observed in noble dogs that their natural disposition is to be most gentle to their friends and those whom they recognize, but the opposite to those whom they do not know . . .” (Rep. 375e). 3 On paternity and its problems in the poem, see Henderson, passim. 4 The earliest extant evidence for the riddle can be dated to the mid-sixth century, though there is reason to think it is older. See Segal 32ff. for a useful discussion.
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5 Scheiderman 82ff. Scheiderman’s analysis looks back to Lacan’s reading of monster-riddles in Seminar XVII. See also the remarks of Zupanc˚ic˚ 200ff. 6 This lesson is quite different from Jonathan Lear’s reading of the play (chap. 3), despite superficial similarities. For Lear, Oedipus exhibits an inability to talk about his self, and is thus guilty of a “reflexive breakdown”—as if Oedipus could talk about himself and maintain some kind of formal coherence. Accordingly, for Lear, the problem of the play is that Oedipus does not understand the meaning of his name—as if reading Oedipus as “swollen-foot” would have solved all his problems. For Scheiderman, Oedipus fails to confront the alienness of his very self, caught up/constituted by the workings of the signifier. This is superior for the simple reason that it understands “Oedipus” as a signifier, rather than a signified, for to reduce Oedipus to one signified (in Lear’s case, swollen foot) is to run into the problem of the notorious polysemy of his name. 7 That is, is the word “man” enough to close the problem of the questions our bodies pose? In Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, it is as if the hasty foreclosure of this problem of limb-counting returns in the opening scenes of the play, where a parade of diseased, disjointed human body parts, in the form of the plague victims of Thebes, begs him to explain the logic of their dissolution. 8 Here I rework the words of Ziz˚ek 33. 9 This episode, if any in the poem, surely activates one of the possible puns lurking in Odysseus’s adoption of the name “no one,” or ou-tis, which can also mean “big ears.” Odysseus as all ears becomes a body part elevated fetishistically to the status of whole. On this pun, and its history, see Goldhill 32 n. 61. 10 If the encounter with the Sirens is Odysseus’s encounter with feminine enjoyment (see Salecl, chap. 3), is not his encounter with the endless rowing of his troops an encounter with his own disavowed masculine enjoyment, organized around the signifier? 11 If lelakui`a is most often translated/understood as “bark”—and lavskw can be used of dogs, though it is also used of screaming humans—it is because of the way the simile, “as if of a puppy dog,” imposes its meaning on the narrative. I take the details of the simile and presume that the monster herself is a kind of dog. Already, then, commentators indulge in the process of reducing the monster’s real monstrosity to something knowable, recognizable, and as they do so, they metaphorize the monster into a new monster. It is worth emphasizing that there is nothing explicit in the narrative that justifies this equation of the Scylla with a dog other than the play of language itself as noted by the commentators—from the overriding of the separation between monster and dog in the simile (like a puppy) to the metonymic connection at the level of the signifier between Scylla and skulax. 12 Snell, chap. 1; Williams, esp. chap. 1. 13 Again, our “surprise” at a monster having a puppy dog voice would be because we make the same error as Polyphemus did regarding Telemus. We expect a monster to have a loud voice, just as he expected a giant to defeat him. 14 su;n de; duvw mavrya~ w{~ te skuvlaka~ poti; gaivh/ / kovpt j. 15 Although, as Helen C. King has pointed out to me in personal communication, the narrative of Odyssey 9 does not give them even the opportunity to signal any awareness of betrayal, since the Cyclops dashes their heads to the ground before they have the chance to speak. That is, the naming of Odysseus in Odyssey 12 lets us see what cannot be allowed to happen in Odyssey 9—as if the Cyclops, as he smashes the men immediately to the ground, might be an unwitting accomplice in his own destruction, silencing the men.
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16 Note also that the companions presume that the voice of the Scylla belongs to her alone. But her voice is terrifying because it is their voice too. We have returned to the problem of the voice in the riddle of the Sphinx, and the problem of failing to take one’s own voice into account. 17 Cf. Plato, Soph. 220c, and the division of categories of hunting there. 18 Thanks to Emily Gowers for pointing much of this out. 19 This paper originated in a laser-sharp question from an undergraduate in a mythology class at the University of Washington: “How many legs does the Scylla have?” It turned out to require a rather long answer, and this paper is perhaps at least a start. Accordingly, I dedicate this to that student, Leila Barr. Thanks also go to audiences at the University of Washington, University of California at Los Angeles, Northwestern University, and Princeton University for assorted acute observations and criticisms, and to Jim Porter and Ellen O’Gorman for their response to an earlier written version.
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From Antigone to Joan of Arc s l avo j z ˚ i z˚ e k
In the universe of the Greek tragedy, a woman has two ways to break out of the private domain and penetrate the public space otherwise reserved for men. The first is unconditional self-sacrifice for her husband or father. Iphigenia and Polyxena, to cite two examples, both insist on freely assuming the sacrificial slaughter that is imposed on them by the male warrior community. In this purely formal act of freely willing, of assuming, as the result of one’s free decision, what is in any case brutally imposed on the individual as an inevitable necessity, resides the elementary gesture of subjectivization. In each situation, the woman accomplishes it for the gaze of the great Other: she readily sacrifices the pleasures of her young life for her posthumous fame, that is, for the awareness that she will survive in the memory of Greece. The counterpoint to these two sacrificed virgins is Alcestis, who sacrifices herself for her husband Admestus. Her act is effectively a free choice: she assumes his place and dies (goes to Hades) instead of him. Prior to her act, she extorts from her husband the promise that he will not remarry but will indulge in eternal mourning for her. Admestus accepts this condition, even telling her that he will keep a stone statue of her in his bed, so as to remind him of her loss and make it easier to endure (an ambiguous gesture, since this fetishistic substitute in a way makes it easier for him to survive her loss). The story then turns to comedy: Heracles brings Alcestis back from Hades, veiled as an unknown woman, and offers her to Admestus as a guest’s gift. Because of his fidelity to his wife’s memory, Admestus resists the guest’s gift, although the woman uncannily reminds him of his dead wife. Finally, after accepting the gift, he is glad to discover that the unknown woman is none other than his beloved Alcestis. Along the lines of the Marx brothers’ joke, no wonder she looks like Alcestis, since she is Alcestis. We enter here into the domain of the uncanny, of the undead and the double: the paradox is that the only
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way for Admestus to get his beloved wife back is to betray her memory and to break his pledge to her. The other series, opposite to this line of self-sacrificing women, is that of excessively destructive women—e.g., Hecabe, Medea, Phaedra—who engage in a horrifying act of revenge. At first they are portrayed with sympathy and compassion, since their predicament is terrible. Thus, Hecabe sees her entire family destroyed and herself reduced to a slave; Medea, who sacrificed all—even her country—for the love of Jason, a Greek foreigner, is informed by him that due to dynastic reasons he will marry another young princess; and Phaedra is unable to resist her all-consuming passion for Hippolytus, her stepson. But the terrible acts of revenge that these women concoct and execute (killing their enemies or their own children, etc.) are considered pathologically excessive and thus turn them into repulsive monsters. In both series, we begin with the portrayal of a normal, sympathetic woman, caught in a difficult predicament and bemoaning her sad fate (for example, Iphigenia, who begins with professing her love of life). The transformation that befalls them, however, is thoroughly different: the women of the first series find themselves “interpellated into subjects,” that is, they abandon their love of life and freely assume their death, thus fully identifying with the paternal Law that demands this sacrifice. The women of the second series, on the other hand, turn into inhuman, avenging monsters undermining the very foundations of the paternal Law. In short, they transcend the status of normal mortal suffering women, prone to human pleasures and weaknesses, and turn into something no-longer-human. In one series, however, we have the heroic free acceptance of one’s own death in the service of community; in the other, the excessive evil of monstrous revenge.1 Two significant exceptions are Antigone and Electra. Antigone clearly belongs to the series of women who accept their sacrifice on behalf of their fidelity to the Law; however, the nature of her act is such that it does not fit the existing public Law-and-Order scheme, and so her no-longer-human insistence does not change her into a hero to be worshipped in public memory. For her part, Electra is a destructive avenger, compelling her brother Orestes to kill their mother and her new husband; however, she does this on behalf of her fidelity to her betrayed father’s memory. The destructive fury here is in the service of the very paternal Law, while in the case of Antigone,
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the self-sacrificing sublime gesture is accomplished in resistance to the law of the city. We have, then, an uncanny confusion that disturbs the clear division: a repulsive avenger for the right cause, and a sublime self-sacrificial agent for the wrong cause. Of further interest is the “psychological” opposition between Antigone’s inner certainty and calm, and Electra’s obvious hysterical theater. Electra indulges in exaggerated theatrical self-pity, thereby confirming that this indulgence is her one luxury in life, the deepest source of her libidinal satisfaction. She displays here inner pain with neurotic affectation, offering herself as a public spectacle. After incessant complaints about Orestes’ delay in returning and avenging their father’s death, she is late in recognizing him when he does return, obviously fearing that his arrival will deprive her of the satisfaction of her grievance. Furthermore, after forcing Orestes to perform the avenging act, she breaks down and is unable to assist him. In the case of Antigone and Medea, the “radical” act of the heroine is opposed to a feminine partner who “compromises her desire” and remains caught in the “ethics of the good.” Antigone is contrasted to gentle Ismene, a creature of human compassion unable to follow her sister in her course of action (as Antigone herself puts it in her answer to Ismene, “Life was your choice, when mine was death”), while Medea is contrasted to Jason’s young new bride (or even herself in the role of a mother). In the case of Iphigenia, her calm dignity, her willing acceptance of the forced choice of self-sacrifice on behalf of her father’s desire, is contrasted to the furious outbursts of her sister Electra, who hysterically calls for revenge yet fully enjoys her grief as her symptom, fearing its end. Why, in this triad of the “radical” heroines (Iphigenia, Antigone, Medea), do we tend to prefer Antigone, elevating her to the sublime status of the ultimate ethical hero(ine)? Is it because she opposes the public law, not in the gesture of a simple criminal transgression, but on behalf of another Law? Therein resides the gist of Judith Butler’s reading of Antigone: The limit for which she stands, a limit for which no standing, no translatable representation is possible, is . . . the trace of an alternate legality that haunts the conscious, public sphere as its scandalous future.2
Antigone formulates her claim on behalf of all those who, like the sans-papiers in today’s France, are without a full and definite socioontological status. As Butler emphasizes through a passing reference
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to Giorgio Agamben,3 in our era of self-proclaimed globalization they, the nonidentified, stand for the true universality. This is why one should pin down neither the position, from which (on behalf of which) Antigone is speaking, nor the object of her claim. In spite of her emphasis on the unique position of the brother, this object is not as unambiguous as it may appear (is Oedipus himself also not her [half-]brother?). Antigone’s position is not simply feminine, because she enters the male domain of public affairs; in addressing Creon, the head of state, she speaks like him, appropriating his authority in a perverse/displaced way. Nor does she speak on behalf of kinship, as Hegel claims, since her very family stands for the ultimate (incestuous) corruption of the proper order of kinship. Her claim thus displaces the fundamental contours of the Law, what the Law excludes and includes. Butler develops her reading in contrast not only to Hegel, but also to Lacan. In Hegel, the conflict is conceived as internal to the sociosymbolic order, as the tragic split of the ethical substance: Creon and Antigone stand for its two components—state and family, day and night, the human legal order and the divine subterranean order. Lacan, on the contrary, emphasizes how Antigone, far from standing for kinship, assumes the limit-position of the very instituting gesture of the symbolic order, of the impossible zero level of symbolization, which is why she stands for the death drive: while still alive, she is already dead with respect to the symbolic order, excluded from the sociosymbolic coordinates. In what one is almost tempted to call a dialectical synthesis, Butler rejects both extremes: Hegel’s location of the conflict within the sociosymbolic order, and Lacan’s notion of Antigone as standing for the going-to-the-limit, for reaching the outside of this order. For Butler, Antigone undermines the existing symbolic order not simply from its radical outside, but from a utopian standpoint of aiming at its radical rearticulation. Antigone is a “living dead,” not in the sense (which Butler attributes to Lacan) of entering the mysterious domain of ate, of going to the limit of the Law, but in the sense of publicly assuming an uninhabitable position, a position for which there is no place in the public space—not a priori, but with regard to how this space is structured now, in historically contingent and specific conditions. This is Butler’s central point against Lacan: Lacan’s very radicality, the notion that Antigone locates herself in the suicidal outside of the
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symbolic order, reasserts this order, the order of the established kinship relations, silently assuming that the ultimate alternative is the one between the symbolic Law of (fixed patriarchal) kinship relations and its suicidal ecstatic transgression. But what of the third option, that of rearticulating these kinship relations themselves, that is, of reconsidering the symbolic Law as the set of contingent social arrangements open to change? Does not the same hold also for Wagner, that is, is not the obliteration of the Law of the Day in Tristan the obverse of the inability to envision its radical rearticulation? Is Lacan, then, in his celebration of Antigone’s suicidal choice of ecstatic death, the ultimate Wagnerian, the “last Wagnerite,” if not the perfect one, as G. B. Shaw would have put it? It is here that we encounter the crucial dilemma: can what Lacan calls ate really be historicized, as the shadowy spectral space of those to whom the contingent public discourse denies the right to full public speech? Or is it the other way ’round, so that we can rearticulate the symbolic space precisely insofar as we can, in an authentic act, take the risk of passing through this liminal zone of ate, which only allows us to acquire the minimum of distance towards the symbolic order? Another way to formulate this dilemma is with regard to the question of purity. According to Butler, Antigone speaks for all the subversive “pathological” claims that crave to be admitted into the public space, while for Lacan, Antigone is precisely the pure one in the Kantian sense, free of any “pathological” motivations; it is only by entering the domain of ate that we can attend the pure desire. This is why Antigone is, for Lacan, the very antipode of Hegel’s notorious notion of womankind as “the everlasting irony of the community,” who “changes by intrigue the universal end of the government into a private end, transforms its universal activity into a work of some particular individual, and perverts the universal property of the state into a possession and ornament for the family.”4 These lines seem to make the point that Wagner states in an even clearer way apropos of the figure of Ortrud in his Lohengrin: there is nothing more horrible and disgusting than a woman who intervenes in the political life while driven by the desire for power. In contrast to the male’s ambition, a woman wants power in order to promote her own narrow family interests or, even worse, her personal caprice, incapable as she is of perceiving the universal dimension of state politics. How are we not to recall here Schelling’s claim that a power that, when it is kept at its proper place,
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can be benign and pacifying can turn into its radical opposite, into the most destructive fury, the moment it intervenes at a higher level, the level that is not its own? The same femininity that, within the close circle of family life, is the very power of protective love turns into obscene frenzy when displayed at the level of public and state affairs. In short, it is acceptable for a woman to protest the public state power on behalf of the rights of family and kinship; but woe to a society in which women endeavor directly to influence decisions concerning the affairs of state, as they manipulate their weak male partners, effectively emasculating them (as Ortrud does in Lohengrin). Butler is correct to emphasize the strange passage from the (unique) individual to the universal which takes place at this point of Hegel’s Phenomenology.5 Hegel, after celebrating the sublime beauty of Antigone, her unique “naïve” identification with the ethical substance—the way her ethical stance is part of her spontaneous nature itself, not something won through the hard struggle against the egotistic and other evil propensities (as is the case with the Kantian moral subject)—all of a sudden passes into general considerations about the role of “womankind” in society and history, and, with this passage, the pendulum swings into the opposite extreme: woman stands for the pathological—even criminal—perversion of the public Law. We can see how, far from bearing witness to an inconsistency in Hegel’s argumentation, this reversal obeys an inexorable logic: the very fact that a woman is formally excluded from the public affairs allows her to embody the family ethic as opposed to the domain of public affairs, that is, to serve as a reminder of the inherent limitation of the domain of “public affairs.”6 Is this, however, the ultimate scope of the feminine political intervention? It is here that one should consider the break that separates modernity from antiquity. Already in late medieval times, with Joan of Arc, a new figure of the feminine political intervention appeared that Hegel does not take into account: by her very universal exclusion from the domain of politics, a woman can, exceptionally, assume the role of the direct embodiment of the political as such. Precisely as woman, Joan stands for the political gesture at its purest, for the community (universal nation) as such against the particular interests of the varying factions. Joan’s male attire, her assumption of male authority, is not to be misread as the sign of unstable sexual identity: it is crucial that she does it as a woman. Only as such, as a woman, can Joan stand for the political cause in its pure universality. In the
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very gesture of renouncing the determinate attributes of femininity (being a virgin with no children, etc.), she stands for woman as such. This, however, is simultaneously the reason she had to be betrayed and only then be canonized: such a pure position, standing directly for the national interest as such, cannot translate its universal request into a determinate social order. It is crucial not to confound this Joan’s feminine excess (a woman who, by way of renouncing feminine attributes, directly stands for the universal political mission) with the reactionary figure of “Mother Nation” or “Mother Earth,” the patient and suffering mother who stands for the substance of her community and who, far from renouncing feminine attributes, gives body to the worst male ideological fantasy of the noble woman.7 The charge against Joan at her trial can be summed up as follows. In order to regain mercy and be readmitted into the Catholic community, she was to (1) disavow the authenticity of her voices, (2) renounce her male dress, and (3) fully submit herself to the authority of the church (as the actual terrestrial institution). These three directives, of course, are interconnected: Joan did not submit to the authority of the church, because she gave priority to the divine voices through which God directly addressed her, bypassing the church as institution, while her exceptional status as the warrior directly obeying God, bypassing the customs of ordinary people, was signaled by her crossdressing. Do we not encounter here, yet again, the Lacanian triad of the Real-Imaginary-Symbolic: the Real of the hallucinated voices, the Imaginary of the dress, and the Symbolic of the ecclesiastic institution?8 Therein resides the core of Joan’s subversion, ultimately intolerable for the church and state alike: although she firmly stood for hierarchy and order, she claimed for herself the right to decide who should be the legitimate bearer of this order, her direct contact with the divine voices allowing her to bypass the mediation of the social institution. In short, her very position of enunciation was that of an exception to the order, contradicting her message of order. This exceptional position grounded the massive effect of transference, which Joan was fully aware of and deftly manipulated: when, in Orleans, a delegation of citizens told Joan that they wanted to fight— although the captain (official commander of the French army) was opposed to it—and formally requested her to lead them, Joan answered: “In God’s name, I will do it, and he who loves me will follow me.”9 The main insignia of this exceptional position was Joan’s insistence on wearing male clothing. The judges at Rouen black-
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mailed Joan, who desperately wanted to make a confession and attend a mass: she would be allowed to do this only if she changed her man’s attire for the woman’s dress appropriate to a Christian lady. Joan rejected this condition, however, persisting in her choice to the very end. This very persistence in crossdressing was also what triggered her downfall: her “relapse into heresy,” after the brief abjuration and admission of guilt, was signaled by her changing back into man’s dress. The very fact of Joan’s short-lived abjuration, however, demonstrates that Joan “had none of the masochism which has often marked the temperament of martyrs. She never embraced suffering for its own sake, and she seems, indeed, to have had unusual sensitivity to physical pain.”10 This abjuration, when she publicly signed the document proposed to her and thus got her excommunication lifted and her death sentence exchanged for perpetual imprisonment, was accomplished in a peculiar way: she spoke her words while laughing. One can interpret this eerie laughter either as a case of fou rire—as the sign of her incoming psychic breakdown after such prolonged suffering—or as a sign that she had not really committed herself, that is, that from her standpoint her signature was void, “performatively invalid,” as we would have put it today. What is even more interesting is the almost Pascalean/Althusserian nature of her “relapse” that followed a few days later. According to our most reliable sources, male clothing was initially forced upon her by her guards (they stripped her naked and then left only men’s clothing near the bed to which she was chained, thus compelling her to use them in order to avoid the sexually embarrassing situation of being exposed to the guards, who taunted her all the time with obscene remarks and threats of rape); this was doubtlessly done at the behest of the English authorities, who wanted her to relapse so as to justify her public burning. However, as the next day’s interrogation suggests, the male clothing was soon “internalized,” turned into a matter of her deliberate choice. Joan’s own account of this choice is ambiguous: on the one hand, it coincides with the return of her voices and her belief in her mission; on the other, knowing that this meant her certain death, she opted for it to put an end as soon as possible to her miserable situation: “She said that she preferred to do her penitence once and for all, that is to say by dying, than to endure longer her pain in prison.”11 What was first imposed from without, as an enforced
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social custom, thus paradoxically enabled Joan to regain the fortitude of her “inner” conviction. As to the status of this conviction, one should reject as impertinent the boring psychiatric questioning of the nature of Joan’s voices. Of course they were not “real,” of course she was not “really” mandated by Christ; however, her “mission,” although self-posited—that is, authorized in no external authority but only in her own act of declaration—was no less authentic. (One is tempted to repeat here Lacan’s formula of the analyst: Joan ne s’autoriserait que d’elle-meme.) So, was Joan a psychotic (hearing voices), a pervert (perceiving herself as the instrument of a divine mission)? What about hysteria (recalling Lacan’s formula of the hysteric’s desire in answer to Freud’s notorious Was will das Weib?: the woman wants a master, but a master whom she can dominate)? Was not Joan’s troubled relationship with the proverbially irresolute Charles VII one towards a master whom she effectively wanted to dominate? It is this reference to hysteria that perfectly accounts for the curious ritual that Joan succeeded in imposing upon the king, the ritual that cannot but appear as unworthy of the royal dignity: One day, the Maid asked the king for a present. The prayer was granted. She then asked for the kingdom of France itself. The king, astonished, gave it to her after some hesitation, and the young girl accepted. She even asked that the act be solemnly drawn up and read by the king’s four secretaries. The charter having been written and recited, the king remained somewhat astonished when the girl said, showing him to those who were by: “Here you see the poorest knight in his kingdom.” And a little later, in the presence of the same notaries, acting as mistress of the kingdom of France, she put it into the hands of all-powerful God. Then, at the end of some moments more, acting in the name of God, she invested King Charles with the kingdom of France; and she wished a solemn act to be drawn up in writing of all this.12
This is hysteria at its purest: I [Joan] take it [the symbolic authority] from you only to give it back to you immediately, thus asserting myself as the one who rules over you, the very ruler. This hysterical knot forms the very core of Joan’s fantasy, to which she held to the end. Asked to swear to tell the truth, she replied to her judges: “I do not know about what you wish to interrogate me, and perhaps you will ask me things that I will not tell you.” The following dialogue then ensued:
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“Swear to tell the truth concerning whatever will be asked you had to do with the Catholic faith and with anything else that you know.” “About my father and mother, and everything that I have done since I took the road to come to France, I shall willingly swear; but never have I said or revealed anything about the revelations made to me by God except to Charles, my king. And even if you wish to cut my head off, I will not reveal them, because I know from my visions that I must keep them secret.”13
Joan finally consented to take a limited oath: she would tell the truth and the entire truth about reality (her military-political activity, etc.) as well as matters concerning religious belief, but she maintained her silence about the messages she claimed to receive from God, especially the secret message that she revealed to the king. This is the true fidelity: not to the facts, but to one’s innermost phantasmatic kernel that the subject refuses to share. One should recall here that for Lacan truth is non-all: one cannot “say it all,” not because we cannot ever know it all, or only approach it indefinitely, but because the field of truth is in itself non-all, inconsistent. It is precisely these gaps of inconsistency that are filled in by phantasy. Thus, the point of Joan is not simply “I will not tell you everything I know,” but “I will tell you all I know, I will not keep from you any truth known to me. I just refuse to share with you what I don’t know, the way I try to come to terms with the abyss of what I don’t know. . . .”
Works Cited Brecht, Bertolt. 1980. Die Mutter. Frankfurt. Butler, Judith. 2000. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death. New York. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford. (Originally published as Phänomenologie des Geistes. 6 Aufl. [Hamburg 1952]) Lucie-Smith, Edward. 2000. Joan of Arc. Harmondsworth. Marin, Louis. 1987. Le portrait du roi. Paris. Pernaud, Regine and Marie-Veronique Clin. 2000. Joan of Arc: Her Story. London. Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin. 1993. Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic of Women. Ithaca and London.
Notes 1
As to these two series, see Rabinowitz. 2 Butler 40. 3 Butler 81. 4 Hegel 288.
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Butler 38. Today, when we are fully aware of how the very frontier that separates the public from the private hinges on political rapport of forces, one can easily perceive women as the privileged agents of the repoliticization of “private” domains, not only of discerning and articulating the traces of political relations of domination in what appears to be an “apolitical” domain, but also of denouncing the very “depoliticization” of this domain—its exclusion from the political—as a political gesture par excellence. 7 Even here, however, one should bear in mind that there are mothers, and there are mothers. The continuing reference to the figure of mother in Brecht’s work—from the “learning plays” to The Caucasian Chalk-Circle, the epic play about the antagonism between the biological mother and the actual emotional mother—is as a rule passed over in silence by the commentators. In Jasager, the first in the series of learning plays, it is on behalf of the mother, to bring medicine to her, that the small boy joins the expedition over the mountains, in the course of which trek he loses his life. The reference to mother disappears in The Measure Taken, the key learning play, only to return even more directly in Mother, based on Maxim Gorky’s classic revolutionary novel, the ultimate learning play and at the same time the first epic drama. This figure of the mother is not the standard Oedipal mother who keeps her child in the closed incestuous link, but the “revolutionary” mother who is educated by her son and, at the end, supports and takes over the son’s social engagement. This mother is to be opposed to a series of other mother figures: the passive-aggressive mother of silent self-sacrifice for her family and children, the conservative mother standing for the stability of home, and even the “postmodern” feminist mother who raises her children in a tolerant spirit, while pursuing her career, and the deep ecologist “Earth Mother.” Crucial in Brecht’s Mother is the song “In Praise of the Third Thing” (Lob der dritten Sache: Brecht 60): the mother keeps (or rather, regains) her son in the very act of losing him “through the third thing,” even as they are close to each other by their closeness to the third thing (in this case, their common struggle for Communism). This paradox of maintaining proximity in the loss itself is, of course, that of symbolic castration, and so it is the mother herself who is here the bearer of castration, that is, of the replacement of herself as Thing (das Ding) with the common symbolic Cause (die Sache). 8 The parallel here is clear between the triple accusation against Joan and the three dimensions of the royal authority mentioned by Marin in his outstanding Le portrait du roi: the Real (the question of blood: is he the “true” king, the true descendant of his parents, and not a false pretender?), the Imaginary (the splendor of the king’s public appearances, designed to mesmerize his subjects), and the Symbolic (the official titles with which the king is endowed). 9 Lucie-Smith 116. With regard to the eminent status of this phrase in the French national memory, did not Lacan implicitly refer to it when, in 1979, after dissolving l’Ecole freudienne de Paris, he addressed his call for the new organization with “A tous ceux qui m’aiment”? In both cases, the transference is directly mobilized. This love is not psychological in the usual sense, not an affair of emotions, but “objective,” inscribed into the very texture of sociosymbolic relations: the leader is by definition, irrespective of his/her actual properties, “beloved.” 10 Lucie-Smith 278. 11 Lucie-Smith 275. 12 Lucie-Smith 67. 13 Pernaud and Clin 109. 6
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In Parmenidem Parvi Comentarii mladen dolar
“Surely the greatest artistic achievement [Kunstwerk] of the ancient dialectics.” This is how Hegel, in a famous passage at the end of his “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Spirit, describes Plato’s Parmenides. “A curious vanguard” of psychoanalysis is how Lacan describes the same dialogue. What in this arid-looking, bizarre, and proverbially difficult text can give support for such judgments? For our present purpose, why can this “work of art” be seen as relevant, and even crucial, for psychoanalytic theory? And can psychoanalysis shed any new light on this text, which has been heavily commented on for 2,500 years, giving occasion to a proverbial delirium of interpretations, hardly matched by any other? Lacan, in his seminar “ . . . ou pire” of 1971–72, spent much time embroidering on the axiom “There is One” (Y a de l’Un). In the brief summary (first published in Scilicet in 1975), he says: Anyway, I was not occupied by the thought of One [pensée de l’Un], but, taking the dictum that ‘there is One’ as the starting point, I pursued it according to the terms of its usage in order to make psychoanalysis with it. This is already present in Parmenides, i.e. Plato’s dialogue, by a curious vanguard [par une curieuse avant-garde]. I proposed this reading to my audience, but have they read it? (Lacan 2001: 547)1
The Parmenides, which dates to 370–367 b.c.e., is part of Plato’s Middle Period (if we are to follow the standard periodization), together with Theaetetus, Sophist, and Republic. According to Plato’s own textual hints,2 the dialogue is the first in this series, and the others would have to be seen as its follow-ups (a point I will come back to). The Parmenides’ notoriety springs from two sharply opposite reactions to it. On the one hand, it was extensively used by the Neoplatonics, who treated it as a mythical sacred text, as it were, as a paragon of philosophical and theological depth and perfection, the
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disclosure of divine essence by a series of subsequent emanations— what Hegel calls “this misunderstood ecstasy” (44), and Lacan “the Neoplatonic confusion” (547). On the other hand, the text is so odd and bizarre that it has frequently produced the very opposite effect— not the mythical ecstasy, but an unease, a consternation, a disbelief, which occasionally takes the form of a serious doubt as to its authenticity. Ueberweg, the great German nineteenth-century authority on the history of philosophy (his history was widely used as a textbook for almost a century) thought that this curiosity (monstrosity?) could not possibly have come from Plato’s own hand, and many followed his opinion. (The dialogue’s authenticity is now universally accepted.) Others speculated, less radically, that the two parts of the dialogue could not have been written together, or that there must be a missing third part that could put things in order and make sense of the whole. Such philological speculations have been driven by something like an anxiety in face of the dialogue’s aberrant nature. There are two principal sources of this perplexity, distributed between the two parts of the dialogue: 1. How could Plato, in the first part of the Parmenides, have written what seems like a radical criticism of his own theory of ideas, and thus have anticipated the bulk of Aristotle’s later objections? Plato would seem to have been a better critic of himself than all his subsequent critics, since he was able to beat them to it, to outwit them in advance, to outrun them. What sense can be assigned to this self-criticism, if this is what it is?3 2. And why does Plato, in the second part, engage in a logical exercise that, apparently, lacks the point, or does not provide anything remotely resembling a satisfactory answer? Furthermore, this part does not really furnish an answer to the harsh criticism of the first part, nor does it deliver a clue, or a clear solution, to what appear to be insurmountable difficulties (or does it?). And how are we to understand the conclusion, which is almost unlike anything in the history of philosophy— the hardly ever matched point of paradox, or nonsense?
“Let us then say this [if one is not, then nothing is]—and also that, as it seems, whether one is or is not, it and the others both are and are not,
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and both appear and do not appear all things in all ways, both in relation to themselves and in relation to each other.” “Very true.” (Prm. 166c)4
Is this a conclusion? The ending of one of Plato’s dialogues? Is Plato pulling our leg? Can one continue from here? Is the conclusion to be taken seriously, as a declaration of philosophical faith? Does this not rather sound very much like a paramount example of sophist extravagance, as the very epitome of the kind of philosophy that Plato spent his whole lifetime fighting? To sum up, Plato would thus appear to be both a greater Aristotelian than Aristotle, and a greater sophist than the Sophists. *** The beginning, as always with Plato, is a very strange place to start. The dialogue opens with an intricate web of displacements: Cephalus brings his friends, philosophers from Clazomenae, to Athens, where they run into Adeimantus and Glaucon (Plato’s brothers). Through Adeimantus they try to get to Antiphon, his maternal half-brother, who is a great friend of Pythodorus, who in turn was the witness, in his youth, of the great discussion between Socrates, Zeno, and Parmenides, and who committed this exchange fully to his memory. Antiphon, to whom Pythodorus related the whole story, likewise memorized it, and now Cephalus and his friends would like to hear it from him. Thus, in the beginning there is hearsay. The discourse had to traverse the distance of time and space, the web of mediations and transmissions, from mouth to mouth, from memory to memory, from generation to generation, in order to wind up with Plato, who is merely the transcriber, the man who keeps the minutes. The initial great event becomes initial, great, and event by the retroactive web of transmission that produces it as the source and the treasure. Plato is but the last link in this chain, merely the faithful chronicler, the addressee to whom the long-sent letter has finally arrived and who is but remailing it for us. Plato is the bearer who is not writing in his own name but has taken the risk to break the spell, to translate the ideality of the inscription into memory, and the circulation by the word of mouth, into the materiality of the letter (and thus to destroy it?)—a step that Socrates never risked or was brave enough to avoid. The letter is sustained by the previous history of voice and memory, and would lose its substance and consistency without this prehistory.
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One cannot simply start with the letter, for it has to rely on the mythical trace of the voice as its inner part, a trace that endows the letter with authority and roots it in an impossible presence.5 Plato’s diegetical hints lead us to believe that the dialogue supposedly took place c. 450 b.c.e., that is, some eighty years before being written down; however, all interpreters for once unanimously agree that the encounter is fictitious (indeed Plato’s strange device of the triple framing of his narration may well be read as a hint that he is presenting us with a fiction). The cast appears to be a rather fantastic condensation of the ancient Greek philosophy, its dream team: not only do the Presocratics (Parmenides and Zeno) meet Socrates, not yet knowing that they are Presocratic and that this will be their historic fate, but we also have an Aristotle, a young lad who acts as the sparring partner in the logical exercise with Parmenides and who is being chosen for that role on the basis of his youth and inexperience.6 The story goes that Aristotle (the “real” one) was so offended by the use of his name in this dialogue that he never mentioned this dialogue in his entire corpus (though one can find some textual parallels, as Diès has shown, to say nothing about the extensive use of Plato’s own arguments against the theory of ideas). But this mythical text has always been surrounded by a host of legends. As if the labyrinth of displacements of an absent origin is not enough, the dialogue itself starts off with an absent text, a non-lieu, as it were. Zeno has just finished reading his paper on multitude, and we can only surmise its content on the basis of Socrates’ objections. Zeno argued, roughly, that multitude does not exist, despite the appearance to the contrary, for if it existed, it would be contradictory, at one and the same time identical and nonidentical to itself, etc. Zeno seems to have argued for the fundamental Eleatic thesis about the existence of One, and he did so a contrario, that is, by demonstrating the absurdity of the hypothesis to the contrary. If the thesis about Oneness is often reproached as being contradictory, then the opposite hypothesis is even more so. Socrates’ objection to this argument outlines and condenses the basic problem: the doubling of the order of ideas and the multiplicity of things. Socrates suggests that contradictions can supposedly disappear with a compromise; for example, he is in certain respects multiple, since one can discern his multiple qualities, while at the same time he is numerically one (otherwise the audience would be a com-
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pany not of seven but of six). The contradiction between Oneness and multitude may thus be taken care of: there is nothing strange in the fact that things are in certain respect one, insofar as they participate in Oneness, and in other respects multiple, insofar as they participate in multitude. Each thing participates in many ideas; but what has to be excluded as unthinkable is the possible contradiction in the very realm of ideas: “If he could show that kinds and forms themselves have in themselves these opposite properties, that would call for astonishment. But if someone should demonstrate that I am one thing and many, what’s astonishing about that?” (Prm. 129c)
Thus, each thing can be shown to be one and many at the same time without contradiction; but it does not follow that the one in itself includes multitude, or vice versa. Oneness and multitude can be clearly discerned in things, precisely because their forms are clearly discerned and noncontradictory. But everything would fall apart, and great havoc would follow, if it turned out that there can be a contradiction in the order of forms themselves. Contradictory attributes can be ascribed to things, but not to ideas, whose very status depends on univocal predication. The problem, then, seems to be elegantly solved by the strict distinction of two orders, but it is now displaced by the question of how multiple and changing things participate in the noncontradictory and unchangeable realm of ideas. Socrates offers a strategy to eliminate the paradox. Where Zeno took the extreme stance that there is no multitude, no movement, and no changing (a stance that can be underpinned only by a firm footing in the signifier against the massive evidence of the senses), Socrates takes the position of a compromise, the ecumenical position that everything can be sorted out if one establishes the division of labor between two spheres; he repeats three times that there is nothing to be astonished about. This position may well sound Platonic, but it will quickly turn out that it is full of tricks and traps, and the entire second part of the dialogue will ultimately demonstrate precisely what Socrates tries to avoid at all costs at the beginning: that there are paradoxes and contradictions in the very midst of the realm of ideas. Thus, Platonism (par excellence?) only starts at the point where it can sustain a paradox far greater than the one proposed by Zeno. After the short initial dialogue, Zeno mysteriously keeps silent.
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Has his cause been utterly defeated? Maybe one of Plato’s intentions was to humiliate and then dispose of Zeno so as to promote Parmenides, who now takes over Zeno’s cause, as an ally of the theory of ideas. The strategy—to make alliance with the master, to get rid of the cumbersome disciples—seems common enough. In the ensuing dialogue between Parmenides and Socrates, we witness a most extraordinary scene where Socrates—who later so magisterially and artfully twists his sparring partners with the ability to outwit anybody—is here in the position of an ignorant pupil, a beginner, clumsy in his thinking, easily confused and constantly contradicting himself, unable to think through the consequences of his own thought. The very idea of participation, one of the cornerstones of the Platonic position, seems to crumble in front of his eyes, with himself entirely powerless, the cornerstone being revealed as shaky, corroded, porous, and unusable. The first part is a slow but sure way to Socrates’ defeat. Parmenides’ objections to the theory of participation quickly put Socrates at an impasse. If ideas exist separate from things, then Socrates has no problem in admitting this status first to the mathematical and logical entities; then to the ideas of one, multitude, identity, difference; further to the ideas of the good, the beautiful, the right; and finally, with some misgivings, to the ideas of man, fire, water, etc. The question already emerges whether these latter ideas are on the same rung as the former, but the real trouble arises at the end of this progression, or rather this descent. If every genus has to have its eidos, is there a form for “things that might seem absurd, like hair and mud and dirt, or anything else totally undignified and worthless?” (Prm. 130c). Is there an eidos of shit? Of garbage? Of refuse? Of scum? It would be strange if those things had a form that can simply be put alongside the above-mentioned elevated notions, that can be part of the same series; but then again, are they not covered by eidos? Socrates, faced with this dilemma, is seized with panic: “When I get bogged down in that, I hurry away, afraid that I may fall into some pit of nonsense and come to harm; but when I arrive back in the vicinity of the things we agreed a moment ago have forms, I linger there and occupy myself with them.” “That’s because you are still young, Socrates,” said Parmenides, “and philosophy has not yet gripped you as, in my opinion, it will in the future, once you begin to consider none of the cases beneath your notice.” (Prm. 130d-e)
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If I had to choose but one quote from Plato, this passage would be it. Indeed, it should be placed on the frontispiece of Plato’s works, or perhaps as the inscription on the gate of the philosophical edifice (if such a thing existed). Socrates escapes. Faced with the object “in the form of” refuse, that is, without a form, he is terrified by the menacing pit of nonsense; after all, if the doxa is to be trusted, it is so much more comfortable and pleasant to consider the elevated and sublime notions that are deemed to be the proper business of philosophy. Thus, at the margin of the theory of forms and at the very beginning of its scrutiny, there suddenly arises the phantom of an object not covered by eidos, the formless object, the castoff—or, if we give it a little push in the Lacanian direction, an object not covered by the signifier, a being not represented by a signifier. Parmenides, as opposed to the young Socrates, is prepared to follow the thought to the extremes: the dignity of philosophy ultimately consists in being able to consider the object without dignity, and it takes a far greater courage to consider the refuse rather than the good and the beautiful. This is where psychoanalysis should pay attention. Indeed, when Lacan tried to establish the theory of the objet a, he found no better foundation to pin it down to than Plato. In his seminar on transference (the eighth in a row, from the school year 1960–61 and published in 1991), Lacan took recourse to the Symposium, in order to single out there the object as agalma (cf. Symp. 215a–b), the infinite treasure supposedly detained by Socrates (in another incredible scene where Socrates is treated as an object of erotic seduction, but this is another story). The object as agalma was then taken as the pivotal point, the clue to transference (cf. Lacan 1991: 163ff.)—specifically the object as sublime, as the supposed hidden treasure, the object to which, ultimately, love is addressed (or rather, love is addressed to the supposed holder of that unfathomable object). It was the object qua agalma that presented the phantom of knowledge, as well as that of the good and the beautiful, the specter that appeared to detain their secrets. But here we have the object— the very same object?—in a dramatically different, indeed the opposite, outlook: the object as refuse, deprived of any sublimity, the object provoking horror and anguish, the object that cannot be the proper object of knowledge (let alone the object of love), the refuse of the episteme itself, its garbage. Yet, perhaps we have here the neces-
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sary counterpart, the Platonian missing half, as it were, for a theory of the object a. There are two very different, sharply opposed views of the object in Plato, agalma and junk; these views should ultimately be made to converge in the concept of object a, and the theory of the object has to account for them both from the same pivot. Admittedly, the present passing remark, insightful as it may be, may seem rather meager to base great theories on, but let us not make haste, for the continuation of our dialogue provides a most remarkable and strict foundation for a theory of the object a. All this is but a prelude to the first part of the dialogue, where Parmenides, with a sort of sadistic clarity, exposes the weaknesses of the theory of participation, that is, of what is ultimately the cornerstone of Plato’s theory. This part would require much more detailed reflection, but since this is not my aim here, a few very brief summarizing strokes are all that are in order. The objections are roughly these: 1. How can a multitude of things participate in a form without the form itself becoming multiple and divided? If the form is whole in things, then it is outside itself; but if only part of it is in things, then it is divided and not one, or else its part should be the same as the whole. 2. It does not help if we conceive of the form as the principle underlying multiple things, the form that they would all have in common and that would thus form their unity. Big things would thus be big by participating in the form of magnitude as their common trait, and so forth. But this approach would demand another idea of magnitude that would encompass both the big things and their form, for the form and the things do not have a common measure; they can find their tertium comparationis only on a metalevel that would cover both things and forms and thus secure their unity and participation. This is, of course, the notorious argument that gained fame under the name of “the third man.”7 But once we introduce a third, there is no way to stop the amassing of metalevels: the new entity will need an entity of a superior order in order to insure the unity of inferior levels. The metalevels will expand, in what seems like the nutshell of Russell’s paradox, into infinity. 3. We fare no better if we try to conceive of the idea as a thought present only in the soul; we would thus preserve its unity, in a
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stance that looks like a brand of nominalism. But if the form is a thought, then it should be the thought of something that is common and identical in the multitude of things. Forms can only be thoughts inherent in things, or else one would have to give up the whole idea of participation. Thus, either everything is a thought, or things are thoughts that do not think. 4. We could try to disentangle ourselves by positing forms as models (paradigms), and things as their copies. But here again, the third man lurks behind the corner (like Orson Welles in Carol Reed’s great film of that name, suddenly springing up in a deserted square): how can copies resemble the supposed models without presupposing a third form that would encompass both and thus enable resemblance in the first place? And so forth into infinity. 5. At the core of all these failed strategies, there may be the biggest impasse of them all: if forms are what they are supposed to be, if they constitute an order of their own and are kept well apart from things, then they should be inaccessible to knowledge. The absolute entity should not be in us and for us, if it is to be absolute. The ontological status of forms is separate and they can be adequately grasped only at their own level, just as the things can only be considered in relation to other things that are of the same rank. Thus, the ideas would, in principle, be inaccessible and there would be an unbridgeable gap between the forms and things.8 This argument also works in reverse: since the divine mind possesses the absolute knowledge, our world is beyond its reach; divinity cannot understand the finite human world any more than we can understand the absolute. There is an unsurpassable precipice. But here we have reached a point where the argument cannot be sustained any longer. If Parmenides is trying to display the contradictions of the theory of participation, his aim is not to undermine the very reality of forms altogether. Participation may have grave problems, but the extreme position that seemed to be the result, or the source, of the objections turns out itself to be untenable. The radical unknowability of ideas entails the impossibility of thought itself, of language, the annihilation of discourse, for only forms enable any nomination and predication, and should they be withdrawn, we
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would find ourselves in a universe of chaos, of the undistinguishable, or in a void. Even though the contradictions of participation may seem insurmountable, the forms are the only support for our thought. We may not be able to get to them, but we cannot do without them. So how to wriggle out of this loop? Parmenides, on the face of it, does not offer any clear advice or handy solution. What he does offer seems rather bizarre: a dialectical exercise whose aim is not simply to look for an answer, but rather to test all the logical possibilities, investigate all the conceivable hypotheses, and fearlessly draw from them all the consequences, however extreme and far-fetched they may appear. And even more: “. . . you must not only hypothesize, if each thing is, and examine the consequences of that hypothesis; you must also hypothesize, if that same thing is not” (Prm. 135e–36a). The dialectical exercise must be able to sustain the nonbeing of each entity, and probe it on the same level with its being. Each entity must be investigated against the backdrop of its possible absence, the presence and the absence taken at the same level, and the consequences drawn from each in cold blood, regardless of habits of thinking and the evidence of perception. Only such an exercise, if rigorously pushed to the end, can perhaps show the way out of the predicament of the initial discussion. Socrates requests a demonstration, and after some persuasion Parmenides is finally willing to undertake it, but not without tremor and anxiety. Just like the old poet Ibycus, who, before engaging in the game of love, compared himself to an old horse, a past champion who has to race again in his old age, trembling with advance excitement and past memories, so Parmenides engages in the exercise, thrilled as the horse before the race, or an old man before the act of love. Anxiety, desire, trembling, expectation, rapture, shudder, dread, hope—those are the proper attributes of the subjective stance corresponding to this exercise that may seem as the most tedious and the dullest of drills with no place for subjectivity. But the stakes are high, the highest possible, and Plato has given us a notice, however strange, that the stakes involve the very topology of the subject. The philosopher’s trembling is not a psychological trait, not a description of a particular feeling or something to depict the atmosphere; it is a precise subjective—that is, nonpsychological—counterpart to the seemingly arid deduction of hypotheses. The logical exercise proposed by Parmenides deals with the problem of one, the central problem of Eleatic philosophy. It does not lead
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to some clear-cut conclusion, but to the bizarre ending quoted above, which, at least on the face of it, seems to make the initial predicament even worse, and we might well ask what we have gained (if anything). Indeed, we are rather faced with a maze where all the possible tracks will be carefully examined, and all the consequences deduced from all the stances that we can possibly take, only to find out that each of them leads to an impasse, that each of them must be rejected because they all lead to absurdities.9 The one, the axis of the entire discussion, will give rise to an articulate totality, a paradoxical structure; but it is precisely by the paradoxes, the impasses it entails, that the one pertains to the Real. It may well be, as Diès says (xvi), that Plato, in the last instance, endeavors to find “the intellectual intuition of a unity which would generate multitude without splitting itself.” This is a noble and impossible endeavor, but the One displayed in front of our eyes is overwhelmingly a split one, the one inherently broken on the rocks of multitude and alterity, and which will never be whole again, whatever the Neoplatonics may try to say on its behalf. This is no doubt the scandal of this dialogue, and we cannot but admire Plato’s immense heroism.10
First Hypothesis As the dialectical exercise must scrutinize the being as well as the nonbeing of its entities, the nine hypotheses are from the outset distributed roughly into two groups: the first five follow from the being of one, the second four from its nonbeing. But the being of one, the starting point of the first group, becomes rather dramatically convoluted already in the very first hypothesis, which will lead to the bizarre conclusion that “the one in no way partakes of being” and “as it seems, the one neither is one nor is” (Prm. 141e–42a). The first hypothesis, “if one is one,” investigates what can be ascribed to one. If one is one, what follows? On closer inspection, it seems that the first hypothesis calls for caution since it does not claim that one is, but rather merely analytically dismembers the one and examines its possible predicates. And since the one is taken “in itself,” in isolation, as it were, the predication fails. It keeps failing. One, taken in itself, cannot be many, cannot have parts, and therefore cannot be a whole either, since being whole means having all the parts, and hence being divisible. Having no parts, it cannot have a beginning or an end or a middle or a limit; it is, therefore, limitless
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and formless. It cannot be in another, since it would then be contained by this other and thus have a border with it; this would already presuppose the division into a middle and a periphery. But it cannot be in itself either, since that would entail an inner division into the containing and the contained. It can be neither active nor passive, nor can it move, for all of that would entail some form of division. But it cannot stand still either, since it could only stand still in relation to something that would contain it. It cannot be identical to something else, since it would thus cease to be one; but it cannot differ from it either, since it would thus turn into something differed, marked by the difference. Furthermore, and more dramatically, one cannot be identical to itself, since identity “always already” presupposes difference, some minimal and purely formal form of duality that identity then “identifies,” that is, evens out, equalizes, or tries to abolish and annul, but too late, too late. If it were not so, identity would coincide with oneness, but to be one is not the same as to be the same. The argument, which will become notorious in Hegel’s majestic and magisterial strokes, is already here in a nutshell: “If the one is to be the same as itself, it won’t be one with itself; and thus it will be one and not one. But this surely is impossible. Therefore the one can’t be either different from another or the same as itself” (Prm. 139e). One will thus not be similar to another, since that would entail a common measure, and it will not be similar to itself, since similarity too entails inner division. It will be neither like nor unlike itself, neither equal nor unequal to itself; it is excluded from any comparison. It cannot be older or younger than anything else, which further means the exclusion from any form of temporality. Time can basically be understood as becoming unequal to oneself, and so one is thus also excluded from becoming and passing. Being outside time it is also outside being, since being can only be conceived in relation to a past, a present, a future. To be is to be in time: “Therefore, if the one partakes of no time at all, it is not the case that it has at one time come to be, was coming to be, or was; or has now come to be, comes to be, or is; or will hereafter come to be, will be coming to be, or will be. . . . Therefore the one in no way is.” (Prm. 141e)
It follows from this radical exclusion that “one neither is one nor is” (142a) and consequently cannot be the object of speech (logos), of knowledge (episteµmeµ), of opinion (doxa) or of perception (aistheµsis).
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In one sentence, in a most remarkable metaphorical condensation, we have all the key philosophical entities of classical antiquity: the one escapes logos as well as sensory perception, it escapes the stringency of epistemic science as well as the nonbinding opinion. It shuns both truthful and untruthful speech; it pushes us against the limit of the speakable. The one, which should be the basis of the possibility of speech and the minimal foundation of the theory of forms, the inner principle of eidos as such, when taken in itself, is in this first hypothesis revealed as void, an entity to which one cannot ascribe anything at all. In place of one, we suddenly have the precipice of a lack.
Second Hypothesis If the first hypothesis, which considers the one in itself, produced a disjunction between the one and being (the one is not), then the second hypothesis starts from their conjunction. It proposes that “one is”; there is, as it were, an existential judgment. And where the first hypothesis proceeded analytically, merely unfolding the consequences of the “one in itself,” or rather the impossibility of its consequences, here the second proceeds “synthetically” (to borrow the largely inappropriate Kantian diction of Jean Wahl’s commentary on this). It ascribes something to one that is not inherently contained in its concept, namely, being. Lacan’s famous dictum “Y a de l’Un” can be read as a paraphrase of this second hypothesis. Translating it simply by “There is One,” we lose the paradox of the French formulation, where the partitive article de treats the one as an indefinite quantity (as in Il y a de l’eau [“There is water”], that is, an indefinite quantity of it), implying, first, that there can be an immeasurable quantity of one, of what is itself the basis of any measuring, and second, that if the quantity is indefinite, then it is divisible (like water). But into what, if one is the minimal unity? This peculiar (mis)use of Plato’s wording is perhaps not so far from Plato’s point, as we shall see. If one is, it participates in being and is therefore something different from being, for otherwise it would make no sense to assert that one is. One and being are distinct, so that “the one that is” is necessarily innerly split by their difference. “The one that is” falls apart into one and being, but in such a way that each part includes the other as its part. This inner division, once it has started, cannot be stopped: the moment we have two parts, we have infinitely many of
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them, for each new one, and each new being, fall apart in its turn into being and one: “So again, each of the two parts possesses oneness and being; and the part, in its turn, is composed of at least two parts; and in this way always, for the same reason, whatever part turns up always possesses these two parts, since oneness always possesses being and being always possesses oneness. So, since it always proves to be two, it must never be one. . . . So, in this way, wouldn’t the one that is be unlimited in multitude?” (Prm. 142e–43a)
The difference between one and being cleaves both from inside, turning them into something split and divided (“chopped up”). The couple of one and being makes already three, for difference and alterity have sneaked in between them, and once one has started counting, there is no way to stop it. “The one that is” is difference and multitude, by the very fact of being: “Therefore, the one itself, chopped up by being, is many and unlimited in multitude. . . . So not only is it the case that the one being is many, but also the one itself, completely distributed by being, must be many.” (Prm. 144e)
The equation of one and being does not add up, and if the entire Eleatic philosophy, with Parmenides as its founding father, came into history under the auspices of this equation,11 then it is extraordinary to hear Parmenides saying here that the equation cannot possibly work—though we must also bear in mind that this is but a provisional stage of an uncertain whole, a step in a progression. It is already here that we can see Plato’s dealings with the Presocratic problem par excellence, the problem of “the count of being.” Can being be counted, be seized by a number? How many beings are there? The most economical evocation of this problem is the quote by Isocrates: “For some there is an infinite number of beings, for Empedocles there are four, for Ion just three, for Alkmaion two, for Parmenides and Melissos one, and for Gorgias none at all” (quoted in Diès 11). In order for logos to be possible, being must be divided and counted; it has to be calculable and calculated. But Plato here draws the line under this problem, and especially under the Eleatic equation of being and one: it seems that this equation made being one and allencompassing, a whole (hen kai pan). Yet Plato here demonstrates the
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very contrary, that the equation cleaves them—both cleaves them apart and cleaves each of them from the inside. The one that is will never be one, and its being will disintegrate into infinity. A number of paradoxical consequences subsequently follow that are directly opposed to what we encountered in the first hypothesis. One is now, at one and the same time, the whole and the part, and so into infinity; it is both limited and unlimited, it moves and stands still, both identical and different, like and unlike itself and others, both equal and unequal to itself and to others, etc. Insofar as it participates in being, one is in time; it becomes older and younger than other things, and is subject to becoming, to “now,” “before,” and “after.” The conclusion of this deduction, which I cannot follow into detail here, is that we may well have “one that is,” but only at the price that it can now be ascribed all the contradictory attributes—just as in the first hypothesis it was not possible to ascribe any to it at all. It seems that we have avoided one kind of catastrophe only to fall into its opposite: “And indeed there would be knowledge and opinion and perception of it, if in fact even now we are engaging in all those activities concerning it. . . . And a name and an account belong to it, and it is named and spoken of. And all such things as pertain to the others also pertain to the one.” (Prm. 155d–e)
We have gained the one that is—the one that can be known, spoken about, perceived, defined, etc.—but on the way we have lost its oneness. The basic preoccupation, roughly designated above by the problem of “counting the being,” offers the basis to propose a “didactical scheme,” a device to help us conceptualize all the different wonders that Parmenides proffers in the nine hypotheses, and to help us to consider together the different strategies displayed here. Let us use the intersection of two circles, so familiar from Lacan’s various demonstrations, a simple device that Lacan was so fond of and used for a variety of purposes. This time, if we recast it in such a way that one of the circles designates “one” and the other “being,” it suddenly appears that the hypotheses quite naturally take their places in the slots waiting for them: if the first hypothesis takes the place of “one without being,” then the second has to be located at the very intersection of being and one, in the areas where the two circles overlap.
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figure 1
Lacan’s scheme of intersection of two circles was designed (Lacan 1986: 210ff.) to demonstrate the mechanism of forced choice, that is, a choice that in spite of the seeming freedom has been decided in advance, a choice that entailed a loss.12 We can see that the scheme here is of a different nature: it confronts us with an even more difficult situation where all the possibilities have to be taken, while, at the same time mutually exclusive, they all turn out to run into an absurd. We are free, or rather we are forced, to adopt them all, in good time, but each choice comes with a vengeance. The forced choice here means not only that there is no free choice, but also that there is no “right choice,” that what we are forced to choose is the logic of concatenation—where every impossible choice leads to another impossible choice—which traces a pattern of impossibilities but is perhaps the only way to pursue the real.
Third Hypothesis The third hypothesis, a consequence of both the first and the second hypotheses, radicalizes their impasse.13 If the one can be ascribed contradictory predicates, this ultimately also applies to the existential predicate itself: one, therefore, is and is not, and can be ascribed being as well as nonbeing. This consequence, after all, follows from the fact that one, insofar as it is, is situated in time (subject to “being and time,” as it were), and if it is in time, it becomes and it passes;
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there is a time when it is and a time when it is not, and it passes back and forth from being into nonbeing, and vice versa. This is also true of all the other contradictory predicates: the becoming of one is the passing of multitude and vice versa, a splitting and a coupling, a permanent passage from movement to standstill and vice versa, etc. It is as if Plato were suddenly speaking with the tongue of Heraclitus. But the point of this hypothesis is elsewhere: how can one grasp the very moment of passage? Is it thinkable at all? Insofar as something is in time, it can either move or stand still, but it cannot be somewhere in between. If time is a continuum, it seems impossible to comprehend the passage from one state to another. When, at what point in time, does the passage take place? “Yet there is no time in which something can, simultaneously, be neither in motion nor at rest. . . . Yet surely it also doesn’t change without changing. . . . So when does it change? For it does not change while it is at rest or in motion, or while it is in time.” (Prm. 156c–d)
The moment of passage and change is a “suddenness,” something that cannot be located in time. It does not fit into time, and time cannot accommodate it. It is an impossible instant when an entity does not rest nor is it set in motion, an evasive and intangible instant that does not occupy any point in time. It is the time of “not yet” and “not any more,” a passage that can never be something present—as if, suddenly, we are in the company of not only Heraclitus, but also Hegel. Hegel, however, uses the paradox of retroactivity to deal with the evasiveness of passage: one has “always already” become the other; in the very process of progressing it turns out that the passage has already taken place, that it is not somewhere ahead but somewhere behind, so that one can only progress to where one has already been. It follows that the place, where one “always already” was, is not some primordial identity but otherness from the outset. The passage as a “now” is structurally lacking, and this is what pushes forward Hegelian dialectics. But Plato tries to resolve the problem in a very different manner, by opposing the instant—the suddenness—and time. The instant does not belong to time, not to the time seen as a series of “nows.” It has no place in the present, in any presence; it is excluded from being, and yet not simply falling into nonbeing. It is the very limit between the being and the nonbeing. The problem of the instant may well
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arise with all passages, but its emphatic touchstone case is no doubt the passage from being into nonbeing and the other way around. The instant is the moment of suspension when something is not yet, and not any more, and thus the instant cannot be situated in the seemingly exhaustive division between being and nonbeing; it is on neither side of the seemingly sharp limit, the sharpest of them all. It embodies the very boundary between being and nonbeing: “But in changing, it changes at an instant, and when it changes, it would be in no time at all, and just then it would be neither in motion nor at rest. . . . Whenever the one changes from being to ceasing-to-be, or from not-being to coming-to-be, isn’t it then between certain states of motion and rest? And then it neither is nor is not, and neither comes to be nor ceases to be?” (Prm. 156e–57a)
This is, Plato says, a physis atopos (atopical entity), a creature without a place, an unplaceable location, a point outside time and space, where the law of noncontradiction and the law of the excluded middle do not apply—the proper object of the third hypothesis. In our scheme, its place will be precisely the limit, the boundary between one and being, the place where one neither is nor is not.
Fourth Hypothesis The following hypothesis places the one into a relationship to the other, or rather to a plurality of others, the multiplicity of entities other than one (and by not being one, they are necessarily multiple). Otherness appears here in a rather rough and abstract manner as the non-one. No doubt, on the one hand, the otherness has to be considered on the level of forms themselves, that is, as the eidos other than one, and not simply on the level of material things of the senses. Yet on the other hand, Plato envisages a certain limit: what makes others others is something that cannot simply be subsumed under the eidos. Are we going too far if we say that the otherness here is located in a paradoxical verge where it touches upon something irreducible to eidos and yet not simply coinciding with material things? Others are by definition not one, but this does not mean that they are without one or outside one: by virtue of being other, they can participate in one. Others have parts, insofar as they are not one; but having parts means that they are parts of a whole, and “the whole of
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which the parts are to be parts must be one thing composed of many” (Prm. 157c). Multitude is in a necessary relationship with one that unifies it and thus makes it a multitude. Others, insofar as divided, participate in one and in the whole, and participation presupposes difference, since others must differ from one in order to participate in it. Without participation they are just an infinite multitude that cannot be related to one, and even the smallest part of this infinite multitude would still be infinite. Thus, “one” can be seen precisely as a limit to this limitless multitude; it is only by virtue of one that others can become parts and wholes and be limited against one another. The others, then, show two faces—the limitless face of ungraspable infinity, and the face of participation in one that enables any distinction. The others are thus placed precisely on the limit between one and alterity: “[I]nsofar as they are both limited and unlimited, they have these properties, which are opposite to each other. . . . And opposite properties are as unlike as possible. . . . So in respect of either property they would be like themselves and each other, but in respect of both properties they would be utterly opposite and unlike both themselves and each other. . . . Thus the others would be both like and unlike themselves and each other. . . . Things other than the one are both the same as and different from each other, both in motion and at rest, and have all the opposite properties . . .” (Prm. 158e–59a)
This hypothesis can easily be seen as standing in symmetrical terms to the previous hypothesis: both of them are placed in a limit, or they embody a limit, but while with the third hypothesis it is the limit between being and nonbeing, with the fourth we have the limit between the one and the others beyond the one. The third hypothesis is ruled by the logic of “neither-nor,” but the fourth by “one as well as the other.” The former leads to the exclusion of the instant, while the latter leads to the inclusiveness of all properties of the others. The others are placed on the borderline between form and the amorphous, but in such a way that both sides pertain to them; the others live in both worlds.
Fifth Hypothesis The fifth hypothesis continues the examination of the consequences of one for the others, but this time the others are considered with
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respect to their nonparticipation in one, which entails their exclusion from the realm of one. “So the one could not be in the others as a whole, nor could parts of it be in them, if it is separate from the others and doesn’t have parts” (Prm. 159c). Thus, in the others one cannot distinguish parts, nor can one speak of them as wholes. If they are not one, they cannot be many either, “for each of them would be one part of a whole, if they were many” (159e). Multitude is only thinkable in relation to one, as its counterpart and its consequence; there is no multitude without counting, and there is no counting without one. Others are then uncountable, and therefore neither like nor unlike the one, nor can they be like or unlike themselves. If they were to be that, we would have to compare one part of them with another and so produce their division, which cannot be done without one. Thus, they are neither identical nor different, neither bigger nor smaller; they neither move nor stand still, neither do they come to be nor do they pass. No predicate can be assigned to them. In the end, after the trajectory of five hypotheses, we get stuck in the impossibility of discourse with which we started in the first hypothesis. The fifth hypothesis mirrors the first: just as it was impossible to say anything about one, taken in itself, so it is equally impossible, at the opposite end, to say anything about things (other than one) that are taken in isolation from one. At the opposing extremities we face the precipice of the impossibility of predication. We can now see the exact symmetry of the first and fifth hypotheses, as well as the analogous symmetry of the third and fourth hypotheses, so that the pivot of this matrix appears to be the second hypothesis, which asserts the being of one and which I placed in the intersection of the two circles. The possibility of discourse stuck to this intersection and to its boundaries, although even there this possibility turned out to be highly paradoxical and problematic. It seemed that it contained too much or too little, that it did not have the air of the firm ground we were looking for. But discourse pertains to being precisely through those paradoxes, not in spite of them; if we want to isolate the one as the basis of the possibility of discourse, the pure signifier in itself, or if we want to isolate being for itself and outside the realm of the signifier, then in both these opposite directions we wind up with the impossibility of speech, the abyss of the unspeakable. I have already proposed that the five hypotheses can be most economically disposed with the little help of our didactical diagram, the
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intersection of two circles. If the left circle, arbitrarily, covers “one,” and the right circle “being,” this obviously entails a simplification and a condensation. To be sure, the provisional massive opposition between one and being actually condenses two different oppositions: that between the one and the others (things other than one), and that between nonbeing and being. As we have seen with the first hypothesis, one taken in itself is excluded from being and falls into the nonbeing. In the symmetrical fifth hypothesis, the exact opposite takes place: things other than one, despite the impossibility of predication, do not fall into nonbeing, but rather coincide with pure being without any attributes. We are confronted, then, with being without one, with that dimension of being that escapes oneness, which is heterogeneous to one and hence “inexpressible.” This symmetry allows for our makeshift condensation from which some clarification may be gained. This diagram makes immediately clear why Lacan sees in Plato’s Parmenides the forerunner of psychoanalysis and how he could read it as a deduction of the basic concepts of his own theory. Obviously, in the intersection of the second hypothesis we are faced with the “unary signifier,” with “Y a de l’Un” or “There is one,” as the basis of all signifying logic, its minimal presupposition, the root of any possibility of distinction. The function of the signifier occurs precisely through the emergence of a “unary trait,”14 which, in Lacan’s alge-
figure 2
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bra, is pinned down by the symbol S1, the “first” signifier, the signifier of pure oneness, the signifier without a signified. And since it is without a signified, all attributes can be assigned to it, that is, any and all of S2 can be attached to it. S2, the second signifier, thus condenses the entire signifying chain that can always be prolonged into infinity. In our condensed scheme, the one of the second hypothesis stands at the intersection of one and being (as the one that is), and hence at the intersection of one and the others (since being introduces difference into it, and hence alterity). On the left side of our scheme, the space of the first hypothesis, there is the empty space of one in its pure form, the void of the pure difference that is not the difference of any positive entities, the void that is invisible the moment we deal with positively-given signifiers, but that enables their differences and glides along their chain, shifting from one link to another, although it can never be apprehended as such and for itself. The moment we have the unary signifier (one), we also have the void that pertains to it, not as something external or added to it, but as the embodiment of the very evasiveness of its existence. To put it in another way, this void represents the very place of the inscription of the signifier, insofar as this empty space is different from it, so that its own lack is, as it were, part of the one. The lack forms a single part, the signifier another. The circle of one, the left circle, is quite demonstratively split into the unary trait and the lack: signifier is the paradoxical entity split into itself and into its own absence as its own part.15 This empty space is precisely the location of the entity that, in Lacanian algebra, is designated by $ (the barred S), and this is where Lacan spots the subject, the place where subjectivity enters speech. The place of the subject is the place of this lack, this void, which, however, cannot be present as such in itself. This is why it has always to be represented, that is, represented by a signifier for other signifiers. This structural place can be isolated in Parmenides in its explicit and pure form, yet one should not be quick to draw from it too many conclusions. Plato produces it as a part of his deduction, but the idea never crosses his mind that this could be a place of subjectivity. The structure that he produces is not a structure with a subject; we will have to wait for Hegel for this.16 There remains the last slot in the matrix, the space of the fifth hypothesis, reserved for pure alterity, the place of pure being outside of the realm of one, the being not covered by forms. It is the other-
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ness that is stubbornly recalcitrant to any seizure by one but, in spite of this, does not simply coincide with materiality, sensuality, and objectivity. What else can that be but precisely what Lacan calls the objet a? Can a better designation of this paradoxical object be given? The specter of mud, hair, junk, etc., which for a moment haunted Socrates in the first part, here finds a proper logical site. The symmetry of the first and fifth hypotheses also reveals affinity between $ and a, the Lacanian concepts of subject and object. What they have in common is that they cannot be simply pinned down by a signifier. They are recalcitrant to being fixed by a signifier and therefore are recalcitrant to meaning. They are both “inexpressible” in and by themselves, although they constantly and necessarily stick to any speech, the two strange creatures pertaining to any discursivity: on the one hand as the pure lack produced by the incidence of the signifier ($), and on the other hand as the pure heterogeneity that the signifier cannot seize, capture, and appropriate, yet not as something preexistent that would evade its grasp, but something that emerged through its very incidence. What it cannot seize is its own product, not the illusory infinite wealth that preceded it. Thus we arrive at the following simple scheme: This matrix, which follows directly from Plato’s sequence and arrangement of the minimal elements in the first five hypotheses,
figure 3
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offers perhaps the best clue to the matrix of Lacanian concepts. In a single elegant move, all the basic entities are brought together, inserted in their proper slots, clearly delineated, and their mechanism displayed. Lacan himself uses this didactical device in a somewhat different way and for other purposes; most notoriously he tries to explain with their help the mechanisms of alienation and separation (cf. Lacan 1986: 210ff.). But the matrix that we have uncovered here is perhaps even more elementary than those developed there; it may well be the matrix at the bottom of those, which can then be seen as its further elaborations.
Sixth Hypothesis We now turn to the last part of the dialogue, the second half of the logical exercise, and to the four hypotheses that start from the supposition opposite to that which served as the basis of the previous five hypotheses. We are to suppose now that “one is not” and see what follows from there. This part, as we have seen, has the same necessity and the same dignity as the part that started from “one that is.” The same rigor must preside over our examination; and the same matrix has to be submitted to equally strict scrutiny, but with the great difference that now we have a void at its very core: the place of the intersection, the space of overlapping of being and one—the slot occupied by the second hypothesis—must now be left empty. “There is one,” the coinciding of being and one, has to be left out, and so there remain only four hypotheses that now encircle the central void. Can they have any consistency without this anchoring? The sixth hypothesis begins with the paradoxes that emerge if one speaks of nonbeing. If we assert that something is not, we yet name in the same breath this nonexistent entity; we define it, conceive of it, distinguish it from other entities. The nonbeing is the object of speech, and speech endows it with a kind of existence, however much one tries to assert the contrary. It is an existence recalcitrant to negation. If we speak of one that is not, we still know what we are talking about; we can delineate it and acquire certain knowledge about it. However much one does not “really” exist, it has an existence in the symbolic all the same; even more, it appears that the symbolic existence is completely indifferent to its being or nonbeing:
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“Then we must state from the beginning as follows what must be the case, if one is not. First, as it seems, this must be so for it, that there is knowledge of it; otherwise we don’t even know what is meant when someone says, ‘if one is not.’ . . . Furthermore, the one that is not partakes of that and of something, this, to this, these, and so on; for the one could not be mentioned, nor could things be different from the one, nor could anything belong to it or be of it, nor could it be said to be anything, unless it had a share of something and the rest.” (Prm. 160d–e)
The one that is not, despite its nonexistence, is thus in a necessary relationship with others and participates in others. It can be said to be like or unlike others. Its nonbeing is not a nonrelationship; it is caught in the web of differences with existent entities, and it is from that web that it acquires a meaning. Even more, it has to partake of a certain part of being if it is to be spoken about at all. It has to participate both in nonbeing and in being, so that the boundary between the two again seems to be put into question: being must include a part of “existent nonbeing,” while nonbeing must comprise some part of “nonexistent being,” as it were: “So if it [sc. One] is not to be, it must have being a not-being as a bond in regard to its not-being, just as, in like manner, what is must have not-being what is not, in order that it, in its turn, may completely be.” (Prm. 162a)
Once again we are witnessing a strange scene of Plato’s fictional Parmenides in opposition to the historical Parmenides and his thesis of the clean cut between being and nonbeing, Plato thus circumventing the prohibition that should prevent nonbeing from surreptitiously acquiring a being of some sort. Throughout Parmenides this boundary will be put to the test and into question, but Plato’s criticism will achieve its full swing in the Sophist, which, precisely on this precarious edge, will demand nothing less than the murder of the father, the parricide, the symbolic murder of the father Parmenides: Stranger: “That you will not think that I am turning into a sort of parricide.” Theaetetus: “In what way?” Stranger: “We shall find it necessary in self-defense to put to the question that pronouncement of father Parmenides, and establish by main force that what is not, in some respect has being, and conversely that what is, in a way is not.” (Soph. 241d)
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If this dividing line—the mother of all dividing lines—is put into question, it follows that what is not participates in being as well as in nonbeing. And if it participates in both, it is also subject to changing, to the becoming and the passing, that is, to the acquisition and the loss of being. The nonexistent one moves, but on the other hand its movement is well impossible, since it is deprived of being and consequently cannot move and change in relation to some being. It cannot occupy a place in the midst of being, which would enable a comparison, and so it has to stand still. If one is not, it cannot be somewhere and cannot move either. The final consequence of this is that this one, which is not, has to be assigned contradictory predicates: being and nonbeing, movement and rest, becoming and passing, etc.: “Therefore also the one, if it is not, comes to be and ceases to be, if it is altered, and does not come to be or cease to be, if it is not altered. And thus the one, if it is not, both comes to be and ceases to be, and doesn’t come to be or cease to be.” (Prm. 163b)
The sixth hypothesis is thus located on the same boundary between being and nonbeing as the third hypothesis, which is its counterpart. But this time its value is inverted: the third hypothesis yielded “neither being nor nonbeing,” but here we have “being as well as nonbeing.” The corresponding entity in the third hypothesis was the evasive instant, “the suddenness,” whereas in the sixth, the counterpart in the realm of one that is not is the evasive symbolic existence of nonbeing.
Seventh Hypothesis The one that is not must now be considered from the perspective of its nonparticipation in being. The nonbeing of one has to be taken as excluded from being, not as its paradoxical subspecies. If nonbeing does not in any way partake of being, then one cannot assign any qualifications to it. The one that is not can neither come to be nor cease to be nor change; it can neither acquire nor lose being, if it is devoid of it. It cannot move or stand still, since there is no correlative place in relation to which it could do either. It can be neither like nor unlike other, neither different nor the same. It cannot be the subject of knowledge, opinion, perception, definition, or name. “Thus one, since it is not, is not in any state at all” (Prm. 164b).
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The seventh hypothesis thus arrives at the same conclusions as the first: whether one is or is not, in both cases nothing can be said about it, if it is taken in itself. The same consequences follow if we depart from examining “if one is” or the contrary supposition “if one is not.”
Eighth Hypothesis Now we have to explore what follows from “one that is not” for the others; to do this, we must revisit the terrain previously covered by the fourth and fifth hypotheses. But in this new constellation, what makes the others others? On what basis can they be ascribed an alterity? For they cannot be others in relation to one, since we are now in the realm of the supposition that one is not. Thus, they can be others only in relation to others; there can be otherness only in their mutual relationship, as it were—there can only be an otherness that sustains itself as otherness. Others without one can only be indefinite quantities, and so an indefinite quantity of others can be other in relation to another indefinite quantity. We cannot compare the others one by one, since they are deprived of one, and hence uncountable and indivisible. There is no counting, no dividing into parts. Every infinitesimal part will dissolve in our hands into another infinity, “just as in a dream” (Prm. 164d). All we have, then, are masses, unlimited multitudes, which are mutually heterogeneous and incommensurable, with no common ground. With these masses every identity, counting, equality, likeness, etc., can only be appearance and illusion. It will only seem that some unity pertains to them, but it really does not. It will only seem that they are equal, like, different, comparable. They will appear to have a beginning, a middle, and a boundary in relation to others, but “in fact,” every beginning will be preceded by another beginning and every end followed by another end. Therefore, we find ourselves in a universe of a multitude without a hold which consists only of appearance. If anything is to be pinned down by thought, we would need to use one, and without one we are stuck with masses without any unity or footing: “So every being that you grasp in thought must, I take it, be chopped up and dispersed, because surely, without oneness, it would always be grasped as a mass. . . . So must not such a thing appear one to a person dimly observing from far off; but to a person considering it keenly from up close, must not each one appear unlimited in multitude, if in
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fact it is deprived of the one, if it is not? . . . Just as, to someone standing at a distance, all things in a painting, appearing one, appear to have a property the same and to be like. . . . But when the person comes closer, they appear many and different and, by the appearance of the different, different in kind and unlike themselves.” (Prm. 165c–d)
To those masses that can be differentiated only in appearance and from afar, we can ascribe all the contradictory predicates and at the same time none of them. This structure can perhaps best be summed up by “seemingly the one as well as the other, but in fact neither the one nor the other.” The eighth hypothesis mirrors the fourth; it must be placed on the edge between the one and the others, but now one is lacking, so that it can no longer serve to limit the limitless (as in the fourth hypothesis). There is also an affinity with the third hypothesis as well, but the counterpart of the atopical and unplaceable instant is here the infinitely stretchy and pliable appearance that dissipates the moment we try to grasp it.17 The eighth hypothesis creates a space that is “absolutely relative,” as it were, a universe ruled by the “logic of appearance.” Each qualification of this universe is but apparent, yet we cannot state the truth behind this appearance, for in order to do so we would have to rely on oneness. This universe is enfolded in itself and cannot be totalized, since it has no boundary. The one, which in the fourth hypothesis could provide a boundary, is missing here. Strangely, in this “curious vanguard” of psychoanalysis, on the edge between the nonexistent one and the others, Plato anticipates the Lacanian logic of the nonwhole. This, of course, calls for some caution. We must remember at once that the Lacanian nonwhole includes one, but a kind of one that is not in the position of an exception and is deprived of all privilege. A way to produce the nonwhole is precisely the inclusion: each “one” is included in the series, and for that very reason the series cannot be totalized; one cannot grasp it as a totality, since nothing is left outside as an exception. Totality becomes impossible by virtue of inclusiveness, and so we find ourselves in a sort of vicious circle without support and foundation. This is precisely what Lacan is getting at: he takes “Y a de l’Un” as a starting point (through pointed reference to Parmenides), but the “one” that is at stake here is not the one of totalization. It is not the one that builds totality or can be correlative to any totality; it is not the one of exception or a privileged position (cf. the long tradition of ens est unum, verum, bonum, etc.). Totaliza-
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tion requires delimitation, a boundary, which is strictly correlative to the exception of “at least one” (au moins un).18 We have seen how the second hypothesis introduces the “unary signifier” as the pivotal point of the entire matrix, and in our Lacanian reading it can easily be converted into S1, that is, into the signifier that is located precisely in the place of exception, the one that stands apart from the rest of the series (the rest is abbreviated by the symbol S2). This exceptional status is attested by unary signifier’s qualifications: “the signifier without the signified,” “the master signifier,” etc. It is by virtue of this exceptional status that it can serve as the starting point for analyzing a vast variety of effects: the master signifier is the clue to the analysis of domination, the ideological “quilting point,” a logical function, a poetical effect. Since this signifier is empty in itself (it is the positivation of the pure difference), it can serve as an ideal support for the supposedly highest and the most elevated, the ineffability of meaning, the point from which the sense itself emanates. The combination of the first two hypotheses has perfectly well revealed its nature—the correlation of one and the void—and also indicated the correlation of the highest meaning with the absence of meaning. But in this second part of the dialogue, the privileged signifier is, by the initial supposition, lacking; the pivotal point is missing, and what necessarily follows is the logic of the nonwhole—a consequence that Plato has fully envisaged and deduced by a purely logical way. Lacan’s corollary would be that the privileged signifier can be evacuated simply by getting rid of its privileged status, by including it in the series of all other signifiers. What follows is a universe without a boundary or a hold.
Ninth Hypothesis The investigation of the consequences of the nonparticipation of others in the nonexistence of one remains. Others are here seen in a complete incommensurability with the one that is not, and so we can assign to them neither oneness nor multitude (as in the fifth hypothesis), neither sameness nor difference, neither knowledge nor opinion nor perception, not even appearance. Others without one have no reality and no appearance. “Then if we say, to sum up, ‘if one is not, nothing is,’ wouldn’t we speak correctly?” “Absolutely” (Prm. 166c). The ninth hypothesis brings us to the familiar situation of the fifth
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hypothesis, and here we finally have the entire matrix of the second set of the last four hypotheses:
figure 2
The seventh and the ninth hypotheses lead us into the realm of the impossibility of discourse, just as the first and the fifth hypotheses do. In the first five hypotheses, the possibility of speech pertain to the intersection of being and one, and to its boundaries, whereas the external circles (the first and the fifth hypotheses) trail off into the unspeakable. In the second set of hypotheses (sixth through ninth), based on the presupposition of the one that is not, we see again that the possibility of discourse sticks to the limits of the missing one, the boundaries of the intersection. There is a tentative possibility of discourse only on the borders of this absence, and so the sixth hypothesis dealt with the capacity of speech to evoke absence, to bring the nonbeing into being and endow it with a symbolic reality, so that in speech presence and absence are on a par and so that the very lack of one is an effect of speech (and can thus be treated at all). The eighth hypothesis confronts us with a “universality of appearance,” that is, the impossibility of a universality; since universality always relies on one, it has to take support in “the one underneath the many” (sub pluribus unum). The appearance is the consequence of speech that
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lacks the firm footing in one; thus, the eighth hypothesis perhaps does not run out into the impossibility of speech, but rather a speech that without one will only produce appearances (cf. the Sophist). The absence of one affects being; it produces a contrived and counterfeit being of appearance, and the absence of the symbolic one is compensated by the imaginary that lacks the capacity of distinction. The sixth and eighth hypotheses, which encircle the central void, the hole of the missing one, can therefore also be read in opposition, as the opposition between the symbolic “absent presence, present absence,” and the imaginary appearance that comes to inhabit the lack of one. The former is based on the symbolic distinction (the absent is distinguishable in the same manner as the present; hence, the distinction of presence and absence is just another symbolic distinction, the symbolic distinction par excellence), and the latter on the “indistinction,” the indistinct character of the imaginary, its (un)likeness. The succinct ending of the ninth hypothesis (“if one is not, nothing is”) is followed by the general ending of the exercise, the exit line, the parting shot. If I began this paper by quoting this passage, the best way to conclude is perhaps to quote it again: “Let us then say this—and also that, as it seems, whether one is or is not, it and the others both are and are not, and both appear and do not appear all things in all ways, both in relation to themselves and in relation to each other.” “Very true.” (Prm. 166c)
The conclusion seems to bring this exercise to a complete impasse, with the mien of a cold-blooded serenity. It is as if in the middle of the stormy ocean Plato, without flinching an eyelid, suddenly decrees, Here is the harbor. If the point of Plato’s method is reductio ad absurdum, then he succeeds very well indeed; he manages to lead us into an absurdity of a proper grandeur. But if the point of this method is to dispute certain claims by displaying its absurd consequences, what is the claim being disputed? That there is one, that one is not? That whether one is or is not, either is equally absurd? That one is both necessary and untenable, that we cannot do without it and neither can we do with it? Mary Louise Gill proposes a useful way of putting it: The key issue in the second part of the Parmenides is Socrates’ assumption in Part I that the one cannot be both one and many. This is the false assumption that ultimately leads to the [final] conclusion . . . and
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that conclusion is Parmenides’ final response to Socrates’ original challenge in Part I. Socrates’ assumption is false, and it must be false because there is a world to be explained. (107)
In this reading, therefore, the disputed assumption, which led to absurdity, is that one cannot be both one and many; although it may well look the other way around, the claim that one is both one and many is absurd enough to disclaim the assumption that led to it. In order to avoid the absurdity of the conclusion, we are forced to espouse a claim that is hardly less absurd. This dilemma causes much of the great unease that Parmenides provokes among interpreters. It offers only a matrix that, with the minimal elements, delineates all the possible positions and their logical permutations, without clear “instructions for use,” without pointing out what follows and which, if any, of the proposed possibilities would be the right one—or rather, all these possibilities seem to be wrong and equally untenable, their point being only in the way they are articulated (“the medium is the message,” one is tempted to say), in the logic of their connection, and we have seen that each of the positions brings forth some essential trait of the “logic of the signifier.” What is displayed on the way is indeed the message that one is at the same time one and many, that it implies a structure and carries with it alterity. If the dialogue runs into a complete deadlock and gets stuck in a radical impossibility, what thread could one attach to this ending in order to continue? We have to wait for the Sophist for Plato’s answer, and ultimately for Hegel and for Lacan. In this impossible exit, Hegel and Lacan both see the best of entries, and both turn the deadlock into the most formidable starting point.
Works Cited Brisson, Luc. 1994. “Introduction.” In Luc Brisson, ed. and trans., Platon: Parménide. Paris. 9–73. Diès, Auguste. 1956. “Notice générale” and “Notice.” In Auguste Diès, ed. and trans., Platon: Parménide, Théétète, Le Sophiste. Paris. v–xix and 3–52. Dolar, Mladen. 1996. “The Object Voice.” In Renata Salecl and Slavoj Ziz˚ek, eds., Gaze and Voice as Love Objects. Durham and London. 7–31. ———. 1998. “Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious.” In Slavoj Ziz˚ek, ed., Cogito and the Unconscious. Durham and London. 11–40. Freud, Sigmund. 1985. The Pelican Freud Library. 15 vols. Harmondsworth. Gill, Mary Louise. 1996. “Introduction.” In Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan, eds. and
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trans., Plato: Parmenides. Indianapolis and Cambridge. 1–116. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford. (Originally published as Phänomenologie des Geistes [Bamberg and Würzburg 1807]) Lacan, Jacques. 1966. Écrits. Paris. ———. 1986. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. J.-A. Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London. (Originally published as Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de psychanalyse [Paris 1973]) ———. 1991. Le transfert. Ed. J.-A. Miller. Paris. ———. 2001. Autres écrits. Paris. Miller, Jacques-Alain. 1975. “Matrice.” Ornicar? 4: 3–8. ———. 1986–87. Ce qui fait insigne. Unpublished seminar. Regnault, François. 1968. “Dialectique d’épistémologies.” Cahiers pour l’Analyse 9: 45–73. Ziz˚ek, Slavoj. 1991. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London and New York.
Notes 1
Just for the record, there is already a somewhat enigmatic reference to “the admirable dialogue with Parmenides” in one of the early pieces in Écrits (“Propos sur la causalité psychique,” written in 1946 and first published in 1950): see Lacan 1966: 193. This dialogue there appears in a series of names—along with Socrates, Descartes, Hegel, Marx, and Freud as the authors who cannot be “surpassed”—against the backdrop of the vogue to “surpass” philosophy. 2 Cf. Socrates’ remarks in Theaetetus: “Parmenides himself is in my eyes, as Homer says, a ‘reverend and awful’ figure. I met him when I was quite young and he quite elderly, and I thought there was a sort of depth in him that was altogether noble” (183e). And in the Sophist: “[T]o use the method of asking questions, as Parmenides himself did on one occasion in developing some magnificent arguments in my presence when I was young and he quite an elderly man . . .” (217c). 3 Various hypotheses have been offered to explain this apparent oddity. Just to list a few: Plato actually never championed a theory that is the object of criticism; what Plato criticizes here was his early and naïve theory of ideas, as it can be found in, e.g., Republic; the theory under attack can be ascribed to Socrates, and Plato actually settles his accounts with Socrates through the mouth of Parmenides; Plato criticizes a caricature of his own theory such as it was simplified and watered down by his disciples; etc. See Diès; Brisson. We can see that what Freud calls the kettle argument (cf. Freud 4: 197; 6: 100) is alive and well in classical philology. 4 For purposes of translation of this dialogue, I use the new translation provided by Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan (1966). 5 This is part of a much larger problem that I cannot go into here; I reference only Dolar 1996, where the question of the differences with Derrida—the most obvious reference here—is also taken up and discussed at some length. 6 The use of this name is certainly a bizarre coincidence. Aristotle, at the time of the composition of this dialogue, hardly left Macedonia to try his luck in the Academy, and it really would have been too much if he walked straight into a dialogue of Plato. The name Aristotle was very familiar at the time—Diogenes Laertes lists no less than eight different Aristotles—and this particular young lad is probably the one who later became one of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens after the Peloponnesian War. Being a spar-
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ring partner, he could quite literally be spared: F. M. Cornford, in his English translation of the Parmenides, simply omits Aristotle’s rejoinders (except, most significantly, for the last one). Since this Aristotle’s rejoinders are minimal and he never really expresses any opinion, nothing seems to be missing—except for the structural function of the interlocutor, who is after all the subject of the entire exercise. As it has already been argued, the function of the interlocutor, giving the minimal support to the “feature speaker,” is a close and paradoxical kin to the function of the analyst, whose rejoinders are equally minimal, never express opinions, and are there purely to fulfil the function of a strawman, as it were. 7 The designation stems from Alexander’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (though its origin is attributed to the sophist Polyxenes): “If what is affirmed about several things simultaneously is distinct from those things and exists by itself, there will be, if man is affirmed both in regard to individuals and to the Form, a third man distinct from both the individuals and the Form. In the same way there will be a fourth, then a fifth and so on into infinity” (Alexander, Comm. in Met. 990b15, quoted in Diès 63; cf. also Diès 21–22). The gist of the argument can already be found in Republic 597c. I cannot here go into the long, passionate, and most interesting discussion about the third-man argument that was triggered by Gregory Vlastos in 1954. 8 In the inappropriate Kantian diction, one might say that our knowledge would thus be limited to the phenomenal world, whereas the ideas in themselves would be in principle inaccessible to us as finite beings. 9 Cf. Brisson 45: “By a reductio ad absurdum we are led in all cases to reject the hypothesis, whether affirmed or negated, by seeing that it implies notoriously false consequences.” 10 The first Lacanian reading of Parmenides was given by François Regnault (1968). One should well note the moment of its publication, namely, in the midst of the revolutionary events of 1968. What could possibly be more dearly needed in revolutionary times than a dissertation on oneness and being? I am very fond of the idea of reading Parmenides as a revolutionary manifesto. Regnault’s account has many weaknesses, despite its grand style. What follows is largely indebted to a different line of Lacanian approach, one proposed by J.-A. Miller in his seminar in 1986–87. 11 It has to be noted in passing that the historical Parmenides himself was strangely reticent on this subject, so that the weight of this notorious equation can be pinned down to a single explicit quotation. 12 One necessarily loses the intersection, to cut the long story short; this is indeed the point where one is always cut short, and this is what the notorious example of “Your money or your life” tries to demonstrate. 13 Many interpreters do not count this third hypothesis as an entity on its own (as the ancient tradition has always done), but classify it as an appendix to the first two (cf., e.g., Gill 55, 85–86; Brisson 47), as an attempt to resolve their contradiction. Gill 85: “The Appendix attempts to reconcile the conclusions of Deductions 1 and 2 by supposing that the one is in those states at different times. There is no contradiction if an object is F at one time and not-F at another.” Yet I think there is no doubt that there is a separate deduction, that Plato introduces it as such (“Let’s speak of it yet a third time” [Prm. 155e]), and that it leads to paradoxes of its own. 14 The French trait unaire is Lacan’s rendition of Freud’s einziger Zug (a single trait) from his Group Psychology; see Freud 12: 136. 15 Let me quote here Ziz˚ek’s now classic formulation of this paradox: “This paradox is founded in the differential character of the signifier’s set: as soon as one is dealing with a differential set, one has to comprise in the network of differences the difference between an element and its own absence. In other words, one has to con-
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sider as a part of the signifier its own absence—one has to posit the existence of a signifier which positivizes, ‘represents’, ‘gives body to’ the very lack of the signifier—that is to say, coincides with the place of inscription of the signifier. This difference is in a way ‘self-reflective’: the paradoxical, ‘impossible’ yet necessary point at which the signifier differs not only from another (positive) signifier but from itself as signifier” (43). For an even more classical formulation, cf. Miller. 16 Or at least Descartes, for paradoxically Lacan will read cogito on the basis of the same scheme, as a certain interpretation of the intersection of one and being. Cf. Dolar 1998. 17 I can just remind here that the question of appearance will loom large and will play the pivotal role in the Sophist, since Plato will try to conceive and pin down the sophist precisely as the producer of appearance. 18 Cf. Ziz˚ek 44: “This, then, is the basic paradox of the Lacanian logic of ‘non-all’ [pas-tout]: in order to transform a collection of particular elements into a consistent totality, one has to add (or to subtract, which amounts to the same thing: to posit as an exception) a paradoxical element which, in its very particularity, embodies the universality of the genus in the form of its opposite.” And 111: “A totality without exception serving as its boundary remains an inconsistent, flawed set which ‘doesn’t hold together’, a ‘non-all’ [pas-tout] set.”
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Cato the Elder and the Destruction of Carthage ellen o’gorman
The last of his political actions is supposed to have been the destruction of Carthage; while the younger Scipio brought about the fulfilment of the act, it was by the design and especially the judgement (gnomeµ) of Cato that the Romans undertook the war. Plutarch, Life of Cato the Elder Must we . . . give up any hope of finding a reason for this sudden Roman fury against an enemy who was powerless? Cato was a hard man and lacked breadth of vision, but he was neither stupid nor easily excitable, and was therefore unlikely to undertake a difficult war for purely emotional reasons. Gilbert Charles-Picard, The Life and Death of Carthage . . . in the real of our desire, we are all murderers. Slavoj Ziz˚ek, Looking Awry
Among Cato the Elder’s writings there should have been a monograph entitled How to Do Things with Words, since his famous soundbite or gnomeµ on Carthage is not only his best-known work, but also one of the most resonant soundbites from antiquity (possibly even more notorious than veni, vidi, vici).1 The reason for its resonance possibly is that Cato appears as that miraculous figure whose words do not represent actions in the past but create a future within which actions seem inevitable. The representations of Cato collude with this apparition by conflating the sententia with “its” outcome, noticeably bypassing the Senate’s first response to the debate, their decision not to destroy Carthage but to relocate it (a response to which I will return). Instead, many texts work to minimize the gap between word and deed. Pliny the Elder, who will reappear later in this paper, may serve here as the representative example:
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[W]hen he was declaiming in every meeting of Senate that Carthage must be destroyed [Carthaginem delendam] . . . and at once they embarked on the third Punic war, in which Carthage was destroyed [Carthago deleta est]. (HN 15.74–75)
What Cato creates as a potentiality, he represents as necessity— Carthage must be destroyed—and what he represents as necessity, we and (most of) the writers of antiquity now available to us see forever under the shadow of its fulfillment by Scipio. Pliny’s way of rendering this is to see Cato’s demand, Carthago delenda est, met with (the aftermath of) its fulfillment, Carthago deleta est, while on the far side of the perfect participle those of us born after the destruction of the city are left to contemplate the marvel of this figure whose words translate so clearly into deeds. Another way to put this is that we, Plutarch, and Pliny see the destruction of Carthage as completed, and retroject into the second century b.c.e. the necessity of this destruction. Cato becomes, from this perspective, a spokesman not for his present but for ours. And this makes him more, not less potent. Why does antiquity create this monster, and why do we perpetuate it? Cato is a monster not because his words consign the people of Carthage to the flames, but because his awareness renders him opaque to historical understanding. Charles-Picard’s perplexity in the epigraph to this paper arises in part out of this opacity. Because Cato’s insistence on the historical necessity of destruction (a necessity that arises out of subsequent recognition) is a voice from the future, his words cannot be understood historically, that is, cannot be understood within the context of their own time. In other words, the statement Carthago delenda est, and its speaker, can only make sense from the perspective of Carthago deleta est. Note here that Carthage in these statements always is—Carthago est—but its existence oscillates between a dependence upon the future (delenda) and a dependence upon the past (deleta).2 Thus, before continuing with a reading of Plutarch’s and Pliny’s Catos, it is necessary to formulate the status of Carthage, or rather of Carthage, the undead city. The year 146 b.c.e. saw the destruction by Rome of both Carthage and Corinth. What makes these two events significantly different?3 One simple answer4 would be that the destruction of Corinth was didactically conceived within the process of the education of the Greeks. Perhaps more importantly, the destruction of Carthage constituted the destruction of a rival towards which the Romans had
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already constructed a relationship of identification. One of the most perceptive readers of Mediterranean culture, Scipio Africanus the Younger, sums up this relationship at the fall of the city, when he confesses that he fears the same fate for Rome. The destruction of Carthage, therefore, and the retrospective construction of Carthage as a place that must be destroyed, mark an important place in the Roman social imaginary. Carthage becomes the place that cannot be assimilated within the Roman system of empire and, moreover, irreducible to a Roman totality of knowledge. Yet the destruction of this place is precisely what liberates it to represent the irreducible in abstraction; around the idea of Carthage Roman obsessions about empire and death come to accrue. It is no accident that Lucretius, writing to dispel humanity’s fear of death, turns to the memories of the Punic wars as a means of imagining annihilation or nonbeing: Therefore death is nothing to us and matters not one bit, since the nature of the mind is considered to be mortal. And just as we felt no distress with regard to past time, when the Carthaginians were coming to battle from all sides, when everything was shaken by the terrifying tumult of war, and, shivering, trembled under the high vaults of the heavens, and was in doubt under whose domination all humankind on land and sea must eventually fall; so, when we are no more [ubi non erimus], when body and soul, from which we are made one, are split, then surely nothing can affect us, who are no more [qui non erimus], nor can anything cause us sensation, even if the earth mingles with the sea and the sea with the sky. (3.830–42)
Lucretius’s reference to the great wars of the past is taken to be sardonic:5 just as his contemporaries can feel no distress about a crisis that gripped the world before they were born, so they should not fear what will happen after they die. At the same time, the trembling ancestors are facing the possibility of their own annihilation. The dominion of the world will pass either to Rome or to Carthage; there is no symbolic place in that world for the loser of the struggle. In that sense the loss of world rule would be, for the Romans, a symbolic death. Lucretius, therefore, presents his readers not just with an example of how the past cannot inspire fear in the present, but with an example from the past of the fear of death experienced nationally rather than individually. In so doing, he perhaps undercuts his own argument, since the concept of Rome’s destruction, although safely confined to the past, is not necessarily something that Lucretius’s
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readers could contemplate without emotion. The argument is predicated upon an assumption that history has no potency in the present—a dangerously confident assumption to make about Roman culture, even if you were a Roman. More importantly, for the purpose of this paper, this exemplum demonstrates the association between the struggle for empire (in dubioque fuere utrorum ad regna cadendum) and the struggle against death and annihilation. Lucretius’s insistence on the future nonexistence of himself and his readers (ubi non erimus . . . qui non erimus tum . . . ) creates the association of Carthage with death, in that both Carthage and death are defined as “not-us,” as an absence of Rome, but an absence precisely conceptualized from within Rome. “Fear of death,” which Lucretius attempts to rationalize away, becomes synonymous with “meaningful existence” for the Roman citizen; even when the source of fear has been physically removed, it remains necessary for it to be invoked in discourse. Lacan’s positioning of das Ding as both central and (therefore) excluded is suggestive here because of his use of topography, as well as temporality, to convey the paradox: Simply by writing it on the board and putting das Ding at the center, with the subjective world of the unconscious organized in a series of signifying relations around it, you can see the difficulty of topographical representation. The reason is that das Ding is at the center only in the sense that it is excluded. That is to say, in reality das Ding has to be posited as exterior, as the prehistoric Other that it is impossible to forget—the Other whose primacy of position Freud affirms in the form of something entfremdet, something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me, something that on the level of the unconscious only a representation can represent. (1992: 71)6
In terms of both space and temporality, Carthage occupies the ideal position from which to serve as such a representation. It is at the heart of the Roman imperialist drive insofar as its colonization is unthinkable. It preexists Rome as the enemy of Rome. It is impossible to forget (as Lucretius and most other Roman writers remind us) because its destruction is not accompanied by the loss of Roman desire for its destruction. Note how Pliny moves from delenda to deleta, from desire to aftermath of fulfillment of desire; the achievement of the Roman desire is precisely the least interesting feature of Carthage for the Romans. What survives as the aftermath, what I
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have referred to as Carthage and glossed as “the undead city,”7 appears as the objet petit a, or surplus-enjoyment. This apparition, moreover, comes about by means of the symbolization of Carthage within the Roman worldviews. In that respect this irreducible element, which resists Roman symbolization but is required to frame and structure the Roman world, does not escape but rather is a product of that process of symbolization: ‘[T]he remainder’ (what [Lacan] calls the objet petit a) is not simply the remainder of the Thing, but the remainder of the signifier itself which retroactively establishes the dimension of the Thing; it is not the remainder of some ‘matter’ that the signifier was incapable of ‘transforming’ into the symbolic, it is the remainder, the outcast, the ‘spittle’ of the self-referential dynamics of signifiers. (Zupanc˚ic˚ 190–91; original emphases)
So the Romans have their Thing. But before moving on to Cato, I want to return briefly to the est, the present tense embedded in the irretrievable pastness of Carthago deleta est, and to place it next to my own easy assumption of the present tense in the paragraphs above (an assumption I share with many others working in the discipline of classical studies). There are many effects achieved by the use of the present tense (the construction of a continuum from here to antiquity, for example), but one effect is the consistent denial—at the semantic level and therefore at the heart of the matter—to see the Romans as dead. Our own relationship with Rome, in other words, is another matter that needs at some point to be explored; here I have space only for general questions about the place of Carthage in the imaginary of the classicist (or of moderns more generally). If Romans think about Carthage as a way to think, or to avoid thinking, about symbolic death, what is the fascination of Carthago delenda for modernity?8 Does Carthage present us with the specter of our world without a Roman past, a specter in other words of our own impossibility, while we construct, through the figure of Cato, the historical necessity of our own existence?
See Fig 1 Cato corresponds to the Hegelian image of the “world-historical individual . . . whose aims embody a universal concept.”9 Cato creates a
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set of conditions that seem to be only his interest, doing so with a single-mindedness that cannot be mistaken for narrow-mindedness, as Charles-Picard’s assertion at the start of this paper attests. The opacity of Cato to historical understanding, however, arises from the apparent absence of any individual satisfaction to be gained from his actions: Up till that time, Cato had not been particularly fanatical in his antiPunic views. He must therefore have seen something in Africa which led him to take up a radical and unyielding position. What was it? (Charles-Picard 289)
If we try to understand Cato’s actions only according to criteria of “rationality” and “emotion,” we may well remain perplexed,10 just as we will never understand what he saw in Africa if we imagine that what Cato did see corresponded to a lived Carthaginian reality. But if we start from the supposition that Cato is both thinking within and transforming an ideological fantasy within which Carthage occupies a certain relationship to Rome, we can regain the capacity to analyze the logic, and the passion, of his responses. What did Cato see in Africa? The rest of Charles-Picard’s paragraph is taken up with a rather odd refutation: He must therefore have seen something in Africa which led him to take up a radical and unyielding position. What was it? He had admired the fertility of the estates, but this cannot have been a revelation to him: he was a disciple of that agricultural expert, Mago, and knew better than any how competent the Carthaginians were in this field. There does not seem to be any reason why the fear of competition from Carthaginian speculative agriculture should suddenly lead Cato to adopt such extremist views. (289)
Why does Charles-Picard bother to discount something that no historian would surely advance as a prime cause for Cato’s hostility? Perhaps because the fertility and beauty of Carthage tend to appear in the ancient sources in the context of Cato’s visit to the city—to the extent that in Appian’s history (to which I will turn later) the envoys return to Rome anxiously protesting that it is fear, not jealousy, which motivates their strategic advice.11 Plutarch’s account of Cato’s visit to Carthage focuses on these signs of prosperity, and suggests that Carthage is feared not merely as a military threat, but as a site of outrageous pleasure:
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But he found the city not, as the Romans supposed, in a distressed and poorly state, but abounding with many men in their prime, filled with great wealth, full of weapons of all types and warlike preparations and because of these not at all in low spirits. He thought that the Romans should not be taking care of the administration and arbitration of the affairs of Massinissa and the Numidians, but that if they did not repress this city which had been hostile and sullen towards them for all time and had increased in size beyond belief [or, suspiciously], they would be back in the same dangers as before. (Cat. Mai. 53.3)
The emphasis on how full Carthage is of all warlike paraphernalia represents it primarily as a military threat, but the conclusion—the dangerous pleasure that Carthage itself seems to take in its own plenitude—appears to strike Cato with particular force. And in a sense this notion of Carthage as a site of enjoyment informs Cato’s choice of visual example, by which he attempts to convince the Romans of the need to destroy their rival. In a gesture as famous as his words, he produces figs from Carthage in the Roman Senate: Besides this, they say, Cato purposely dropped some Libyan figs in the Senate as he threw his toga over his shoulder, then when the senators wondered at their great size and beauty, he said that the land which had borne these was only three days’ sail from Rome. But the next thing he did was more violent, namely, his practice when declaring his opinion on any subject at any time of saying in addition this: “And it seems to me that Carthage should not exist.” (Cat. Mai. 54.1–2)
While the primary point of the figs is to convey the dangerous proximity of Carthage to Rome—that is, they operate as synecdoche— their first effect seems to be to symbolize the luxuriant growth of that city, that is, they operate as metaphor.12 Like Carthage, the figs have grown to an incredible extent, so that their size and beauty affect the senators with admiration and wonder, perhaps too with pleasure. The extent to which the figs then symbolize not Carthage’s proximity but its condition continues to resonate in Cato’s famous gnomeµ, so that he seems to be saying that Carthage should not exist because such pleasures should not exist. Indeed, the choice of figs in this regard may reinforce the sense that Carthage represents excessive pleasure, since the fig, among ancient Romans, was associated with the female breast. The ficus Ruminalis, site of the suckling of Romulus and Remus, is perhaps the best-known instance of this juxtaposition,13 but Cato’s choice of a fig
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to stand for the incredible growth of Carthage seems to evoke similar resonances, especially when he brings about his disclosure of the figs by shaking them out of the folds of his toga. I will return later to the question of where the figs come from, but here their emergence from the bosom of Cato suggests that they represent a fetishized body part, one whose beauty and size are a source of wonder, but whose pleasure in its own existence is a cause for anxiety. Lacan’s remarks on envy, in the context of the famous Augustine quotation, serves as a commentary on this passage as well: Such is true envy—the envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself, before the idea that the petit a, the separated a from which he is hanging, may be for another the possession that gives satisfaction, Befriedigung. (1977a: 116)
So does the fig “establish the dimension” of the Thing? That is to say, does it here embody enjoyment? We can approach this by returning to the senators’ reaction to the figs. The Senate is thaumasantoµn (struck with wonder), yet this reaction can be seen to approximate a fascinated horror, for what Cato shows them is presented in two stages and in two different states. Plutarch does not have Cato simply hold the figs up for the Senate to see; rather, Cato drops the ripe figs on the floor, simultaneously displaying the excessively perfect fruit and the mess of flesh smeared on the floor of the Curia.14 Or, more precisely, the extent to which the figs stand for enjoyment deforms them in the eyes of the senators; even as they wonder at the size and beauty of the fruit, it is transformed into a disgusting substance that stains the surface of the Curia.
A Fold in History It is important to emphasize that whatever this fig may mean for the Carthaginians, for Cato it is not food; rather, it embodies an enjoyment in which Cato cannot (apparently) participate, and which seems to lie at the heart of his aggression towards Carthage. Lacan, when discussing this type of reaction, comments on it as “strange” and “odd” (indeed, as only communicable in German): [T]his register of a jouissance as that which is only accessible to the other is the only dimension in which we can locate the strange malaise
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that, if I’m not mistaken, only the German language has managed to point to . . . with the word Lebensneid. Lebensneid is not an ordinary jealousy, it is the jealousy born in a subject in his relation to an other, insofar as this other is held to enjoy a certain form of jouissance or superabundant vitality that the subject perceives as something he cannot apprehend by means of even the most elementary of affective movements. Isn’t it strange, very odd, that a being admits to being jealous of something in the other to the point of hatred and the need to destroy, jealous of something that he is incapable of apprehending in any way, by any intuitive path? The identification of this other virtually in the form of a concept may in itself suffice to provoke the movement of malaise concerned. . . . (1992: 237)
To explore how this oddity becomes articulated in the case of Cato, I want to look further into the folds of his toga from which the figs emerge. The gesture is normalized by one commentator, David Sansone, who assimilates them to the trouser pockets of modernity;15 but the story remains fascinating, for the folds of classical drapery have an aesthetic resonance for us that trouser pockets do not. To discover that these elegant curves habitually bore the residue of everyday life is to mess up the clean narrative sweep of the classical past. That the folds of Cato’s toga extrude something as beautiful and as horrifying as the Libyan fig (and its consequences) should cause us to turn back to the fold itself. Specifically, the link between the fig and the act of aggression towards the Carthaginians seems to gain further resonances by concentrating thus on where the fig comes from. The fold in the text, to use Derrida’s formulation, partakes of both inside and outside; the fold in the toga creates a space within which both time and space seem to escape their usual regulation, and one sign of this is perhaps the emergence from the fold of enjoyment and its accompanying hatred. Folds appear to multiply. The fold in Cato’s toga at the “start” of the Third Punic War is doubled by the fold in a Roman envoy’s toga at the start of the Second. This earlier fold played a role in the declaration of that war, which occurred in a peculiar (and unremarked on) fashion: Then the Roman, having made a fold in his toga, said: “In here I carry to you war and peace: take whichever you please.” In reply to this speech there was a universal shout, no less fierce, that he should give whichever he wished. And when he, after shaking out the fold again,
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said that he gave them war, they all replied that they accepted it and that they would fight it in the same spirit in which they had accepted. (Livy 21.18.13–14)
Within the fold resides, for a moment, two irreconcilables: war and peace. This is the true either/or situation, for once the fold has gone, only one option will remain. But while the fold remains, the historical agents are suspended in a situation of expanded possibilities.16 Yet when this opposition is presented to the Carthaginians, it appears as an instance of the “forced choice” and will be echoed by the later choice offered to them by the Roman Senate before the Third Punic War. Moreover, the creation of this fold by the unnamed Roman envoy indicates a self-consciousness about the process of history within which he acts; the Roman comments on the historical process of choosing between war and peace while remaining part of that process. The envoy, then, is “inside” the story, presenting the choice to the Carthaginians, and “outside” the story, presenting this choice as a momentary fold in the historical process. If this seems to be an excessively textual reading of the fold in the envoy’s toga, it is worth looking at Livy’s source for this story—the Histories of Polybius—where the fold in the toga, holding peace and war, is replaced by an explicitly textual fold: I interrupted my narrative to enter on this digression at the point where the Roman ambassadors were at Carthage. After listening to the Carthaginians’ statement of their case, they made no other reply but the following. The oldest member of the embassy, pointing to the bosom of his toga, told the Senate that it held both war and peace for them: therefore he would let fall from it and leave with them whichever of the two they bade him. The Carthaginian Suffete bade him let fall whichever the Romans chose, and when the envoy said he would let fall war, many of the senators cried out at once, “We accept it.” The ambassadors and the Senate parted on these terms. (Polybius 3.33.1–4)
The reader might well ask where Livy got his fold in the toga, since Polybius refers merely to the envoy pointing to the bosom of his garment. Now, one could argue that the bosom of any toga must necessarily be made up of folds, but Livy emphatically gives us not merely the fold, but the action of folding (sinu ex toga facto). I think that Livy here is being a very clever reader of his very clever predecessor. Polybius presents us with two incompatible accounts of the
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envoys’ exchange with the Carthaginian Senate, of which this is the second. The first begins thus at 3.20.6: “The Romans . . . at once appointed ambassadors and sent them posthaste to Carthage, giving the Carthaginians the option of two alternatives, the one of which, if they accepted it, entailed disgrace and damage, while the other would give rise to extreme trouble and peril”; the passage continues with an extended account of the arguments on both sides. These two accounts, however, do not require reconciliation by the narrator because they exist on opposite sides of a digression that thus functions, like the fold, by encompassing incompatibles. Digressions are, of course, places where narrator and reader frequently display a heightened awareness of the interplay of externality and internality in texts. What Polybius does here is to turn that awareness into an analogy between the narrator and the historical agent about whom he narrates. Livy, in turn, conflates narrator and agent by having his envoy self-consciously make a fold, alluding to Polybius’s digression, and then shake it out, thereby reentering the historical process. What the logic of the fold has to tell us is that the precisions of historical understanding—based on temporal structures, homological proof, and a chain of cause and effect—cannot fully account for the representation of war at the limit of its declaration. The earlier fold, then, appears as a place created for incompatibles, but one from which an act of aggression emerges. Indeed, between the folds such distinctions as “later” and “earlier” are suspended. When Cato makes a fold in his toga, a number of temporal differences are elided: what lies between the Second and Third Punic Wars, between Cato’s actions and the first response of the Senate, between Cato’s words and their actualization by Scipio Africanus. This last conflation is in part effected by the first: Cato, by making a fold and mimicking the envoy at Carthage, acts as if he were declaring war, uttering words that will be fulfilled in acts.17 What is strange and odd at the end of this exploration is that Cato’s gesture is regarded by Plutarch as less violent than his words.
Show and Tell What can Cato say that is “more violent” or “more forceful” than what he has already done? While the gesture of the fold allows for many interpretations, the strongest of which marks out Carthage as a
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place of perverse enjoyment, the soundbite asserts the absolute necessity of Carthage’s nonexistence.18 In another way, however, the soundbite is less explicit than the gesture; that is, if we see in the fig the remainder of the Thing, the bit of Real that constitutes the perverse enjoyment of Carthage, Cato’s soundbite does not explicate the Thing but rather interposes in front of it the desire of destroying Carthage. As I argued above, this circuit of desire into which the Romans become locked survives (finds its “fulfillment” in) the destruction of Carthage. It is this desire that retrospectively establishes Carthage as das Ding. From this perspective, our question about Cato’s words might be not “Why are they are more violent?” but “Towards whom are they more violent?” This perspective can also illuminate Plutarch’s elaboration of the debate between Cato and Scipio Nasica. The exchange barely earns the title of debate, for every time Cato’s gnomeµ is given voice, it is echoed in reverse by Scipio Nasica. Existing in a weird temporality, Scipio is said by Plutarch to have “always made a habit of” doing this, as if he has abandoned his individual self to become a negative image of Cato himself. The two figures, endlessly repeating the same gnomai, have a cartoon quality of nightmarish repetition to them: But the next thing [Cato] did was more violent, namely, his practice when declaring his opinion on any subject at any time of saying in addition this: “And it seems to me that Carthage should not exist.” In opposition to this Publius Scipio Nasica always made a habit of declaring his position by saying: “It seems to me that Carthage should exist.” (Cat. Mai. 54.1–2)
Perhaps the violence of Cato’s practice consists in his reduction of himself and his opponent to automata, always and endlessly repeating their refrain. Yet Nasica is elaborated by Plutarch and other writers not as a mere echo of Cato but as the one who “got it right,” the one whose fears for the fate of a successful Rome were spot on. Plutarch puts it thus: For, it seems, since he saw that the people were transgressing badly at this point because of arrogance [hubris], and because of their prosperity and insolence they were difficult for the Senate to control, and through their power [dunamis] they were dragging the whole city along with them wherever their passions led, he wanted that fear at least placed on them like a bridle, as a corrective to the audacity of the mob, thinking
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that the Carthaginians were not strong enough to prevail over the Romans but were too strong to be despised. (Cat. Mai. 54.3)
This is a well-known historical commonplace, where the fear of an external enemy inspires the Romans to virtue, its best-known occurrence in Sallust’s history. This topos is projected onto Scipio Nasica almost every time he is mentioned. Just like Cato he appears as a transhistorical figure; Cato’s words translate into actions and Nasica’s operate as commentaries in advance of the consequences of those actions. Yet it would be too simple just to say “Nasica got it right,” since this overlooks the weirdness of his new habit, of always saying the same thing, and since it also overlooks the continued extent of his dependence upon Cato’s initial statement in order to formulate his position—that is, Cato has started Nasica thinking about the nonexistence of Carthage.19 But it is in Nasica’s repetition of Cato that we are alerted to the main oddity of the soundbite.20 Both speakers not only reorganize their rhetorical practice, but in one sense abandon rhetorical practice altogether. The soundbite does not vary in accordance to the context of, say, any senatorial response, or indeed of the specific speeches to which the soundbite is appended. Plutarch emphasizes this when he says that Cato “declaring his opinion on any subject at any time [peri pantos ou deµpote pragmatos]” would add these unchanging words. We may for a moment compare this reported practice with another famous obsessive repetition in Roman politics: Cicero’s repeated assertion that Catiline must die. Within the context of the four Catilinarian orations, we see this repetition elaborated, inverted, modified in the light of objections, and reframed in the context of whether Cicero is speaking in the Senate or before the popular assembly. In other words, the varied repetition conjures up for us the picture of a rich historical context, the development of arguments, the effect of changing circumstances, the requirements of different audiences. Cato’s soundbite gives us nothing of this: it barely works as oratory,21 either in the time in which it is given or for the historicist reader of the present. This too is what renders it disturbingly transhistorical. Two points can be made in consequence of the above. The first is that the intransigence of the soundbite to the demands of context derives from its rendering of desire, the desire to destroy that the soundbite interposes between the senators and the real of enjoyment.
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The second point requires that we (perversely, in the light of what I have just stated) contextualize the soundbite as a stage in Cato’s rhetorical career, at least as it is charted in Plutarch. The importance of speech for Cato is stressed early in the biography: He acquired and honed his technique in speaking [ton de logon], as a second body [deuteron soµma] and an instrument of good things, absolutely necessary to a man intending to lead a life which is neither lowly nor ineffectual. (Cat. Mai. 28.5)
I wish to emphasize here the formulation of public oratory as a second body. Within this formulation the intransigent soundbite, appended to but not incorporated within the speech, stands forth as a detachable, excessive extra body part, analogous to the fig that emerges from Cato’s toga, like a female breast, an unnecessary addition to the male orator’s body. But the removal or detachment of the soundbite from the speech, or of the “breast” from the body, also works perversely, since it is this surplus that remains while the speech/body disappears. We have now two obsessives who have reorganized their rhetorical practices to include this repeated exchange as a habit. I use the term obsessive because behind each man or his actions there appears an anxiety that if they do not repeat the formula over and over again, something unspeakable might not happen.22 Plutarch, in a sense, reassures them by skipping the attempted relocation of the city of Carthage (which was the first action to arise out of this debate); instead, he moves straight to the war and Scipio’s fulfillment of Cato’s words. But here let us take time out from Plutarch and look at the logic of the relocation.
Either/Or—Both/And Cato says, “Carthage must not exist”; Nasica, “Carthage must exist.” The Senate’s response to this in other sources might initially seem ridiculously inept, like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss who, presented with an incompatible either/or question, enthusiastically responds, “Let’s do both!” Yet in another sense the Senate’s decision to relocate Carthage shows an awareness of the further resonances of the Cato-Nasica debate. “Carthage must be allowed to exist,” that is,
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the Carthaginian people should not be annihilated in the interests of world rule. The important point to make explicit here is that both sides of the Cato-Nasica debate are concerned with Rome’s interests, Rome’s desire. The most extensive discussion over relocating Carthage takes place in Appian’s history of these wars, and the relation of Carthage to the desire of Rome is highlighted there in a passage all the more chilling for the fact that it is focalized through the Carthaginians: The Senate, who had long ago decided to make war and who were looking for a pretext, made this judgment: that the Carthaginians had not satisfactorily defended themselves in the eyes of the Romans. Once more, then, much distressed, the Carthaginians asked if they appeared to have made some error [hamartein], what they must undergo to redeem themselves from this accusation. The Senate replied thus in a phrase: “Do what is satisfactory [hikanon] for the Romans.” . . . Since the Carthaginians were at a loss, once more they sent to Rome and demanded to know precisely what was “satisfactory” for the Romans. And the answer was that the Carthaginians knew very well, and having answered thus they sent the Carthaginians away. (Pun. 74)
This repeated demand for satisfaction from the Romans articulates in abbreviated form their relation to the Carthaginians as the possessor of something they cannot apprehend. It is not that Rome expects Carthage to satisfy its demand—quite the opposite, for it expects Carthage to be never quite enough for them. This is their expression of how they do not apprehend Carthage’s enjoyment. What is interesting about this staging of the incident is the strong sense of Carthaginian perplexity (a disturbing glimpse into the life of one forced to play the other). The key moment here is when the Carthaginians ask what error they have made, what hamartia has been committed. The question innocently puts the Romans on the spot by asking “according to which symbolic system do you judge us?” To which the answer has already been given as Rhoµmaiois (to the Romans). (The key word in the response is not hikanon but Rhoµmaiois.) That the Carthaginians are presumed to know this is entirely congruent with their status in the Roman imaginary. The refusal of the Senate to state more clearly what would be “satisfactory” relates back to the dual demands with which this section began: Carthage must/must not be allowed to exist. Relocation answers that demand, and the consul Censorinus, in
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Appian’s account, defends the relocation to the Punic envoys with the words, “We considered you, not the ground, to be Carthage” (Appian, Pun. 89). At the same time, however, the Senate acknowledges Cato’s demand, “Carthage must not be allowed to exist,” that is, Carthage qua “Carthage,” the horrific site of uncontainable enjoyment. Again, Censorinus’s rationalization in Appian’s account suggests that Carthage’s relocation makes sense when viewed as Roman control of excessive pleasure, since he enjoins the Carthaginians to give up the delights of maritime life for the safer gains of agriculture. Given the primacy of Carthage in innovating agricultural methods at the time, we can find some ironies in this sermonizing: “Life inland, O Carthaginians, is more reliable, given over to agriculture and calm: perhaps the profits of agriculture are smaller than those of trade, but they are more certain and much less dangerous. On the whole it seems to me that a city based on the sea is more like a ship than like ground, having much unsteady tossing and overturning of its affairs, while a city inland reaps the fruits of safety on solid ground.” (Pun. 87)
Censorinus is here recycling a passage from Plato’s Laws, which emphasizes the moral necessity of a city being a reasonable distance from the sea. This use of Platonic philosophy adds moral and rational to physical force, and suggests, as Charles-Picard perceptively puts it, that the relocation “was intended to re-integrate [Carthage] into that order of things which conformed to the plans of Providence and to the laws of wisdom which Rome felt she had been called upon to establish.”23 For Carthage to be integrated into the Roman symbolic network, however, is for it to cease to be “Carthage,” the irreducible alien. “Carthage,” in that sense then, will no longer exist. The choice thus is “be destroyed or . . . be destroyed,” a “forced choice” more nakedly aggressive than that of the envoys before the Second Punic War who merely presented the choice of war and peace. One final point about Censorinus’s use of Plato is worth remarking. Censorinus emphasizes the distance that Carthage must move from the sea in order to survive (as Carthage) and to be destroyed (as “Carthage”): eighty stades. This is repeated at the end of the speech, just before his definition of what Carthage is, as quoted above: “We considered you, not the ground, to be Carthage” (Appian, Pun. 89). Censorinus then reminds the envoys that Rome itself is further than
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eighty stades from the sea. The comparison is made in order to point out how reasonable the Romans are being, how the new Carthaginians will not be so far from the sea after all. But if this claim too is mapped onto the Platonic paradigm from which it is derived, we are reminded that in Plato the ideal city must be further than eighty stades from the sea: As things are, however, there is consolation in the fact of those eighty stades. Still, it lies unduly near the sea, and the more so because, as you say, its harbors are good; that however, we must make the best of. (Leg. 704e)
Even the relocation of Carthage, then, will not redeem it from its mercantile decadence, since according to the Platonic model it just fails to make it to the finishing line, while Rome remains serenely within the boundary of the ideal city. The choice offered to the Carthaginians at this point had always seemed to be no choice: relocate or be destroyed. Now we see that even in the arguments for relocation the Carthaginians are bound to lose: relocate and escape your current decadent situation, placed too close to the sea; relocate instead to a new position, already prepared in advance for you as decadent, still just too close to the sea. The Romans retain the optout clause of being able to describe Carthage again as a site of excessive pleasure, and they turn the screw once more in their presentation of the choice as a choice. Cicero’s reworking of this passage of the Laws in his De republica makes explicit the aggressivity of the analogy. He has Scipio, speaking after the destruction of Carthage, using both Carthage and Corinth as examples of the decadent maritime city: There is, however, a sort of corruption and transformation of morals to be found in maritime cities; for they are intermingled with new languages and practices, and it is not just the trade of foreigners that gets imported, but their morals too, so that nothing of ancestral institutions can remain uninfluenced. Those who inhabit such cities do not stay settled but are taken far from home by speculation and unstable hopes, and even when they remain at home in body, still in spirit they are exiles and wanderers. Indeed, nothing was so influential in the downfall of Carthage and Corinth, both of which had been tottering for some time, than this instability and weakening of the civic body, because in their desire for trade and sailing they abandoned agriculture and warfare. [Again we can see the ironies of this.] To be sure, there
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are many temptations to luxury, very dangerous for city-states, which are supplied from the sea, and taken up or imported; and even the very pleasant location itself has its many allurements of extravagant or indolent desires. (Rep. 2.5–8)
Here again we see the dynamic to which I referred at the start of this paper, where from the post eventum perspective the city of Carthage is viewed as already holding the potential for its own destruction. The statement in particular—that the instability and decadence of the Carthaginians and Corinthians themselves caused the downfall of those cities—occludes not only the Roman acts of destruction but also the Roman construction of the cities as pleasure-grounds. We also see the relocation of Carthage from target audience of the philosophical argument in Appian to exemplum within the argument in Cicero. The final twist to Cicero’s treatment of the topic is in Scipio’s explicit citation of sources. While Cicero is working with a Platonic source, Scipio announces at the start of De republica 2 that he is working here from the example of his teacher and mentor, the elder Cato.
See Fig 2 Plutarch (50–120 c.e.) finds an astute reader in the elder Pliny (23–79 c.e.), who inserts the story of the Libyan figs into his disquisition on figs in general. In Pliny’s account, Cato’s use of fig itself effects the relocation of Carthage: But the fig called “Africana” by Cato at that time reminds me of an exceptional demonstration in which he made use of this fruit. When he was inflamed with a deadly hatred of Carthage and was worried about the safety of his descendants, and so was declaiming in every meeting of the Senate that Carthage must be destroyed, one particular day he brought into the Senate house a very ripe fig from that province, and displaying it to the senators he said: “Now, I ask you, when do you think this fruit was plucked from the tree?” When they all agreed that it was freshly plucked [recens], he said: “Actually you should know that it was picked the day before yesterday at Carthage: so close is the enemy to our walls!” At once they embarked on the Third Punic War, in which Carthage was destroyed, although Cato had died in the year after the war began. What should we marvel at first in this story, the foresight of this talented man or the use of chance opportunity, the swiftness of the outcome, or the forcefulness of the man himself? Above all else, what I think is the most marvellous, that so great a city,
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the one rival of Rome in the whole world for 120 years, was ruined by the evidence of one piece of fruit, which not Trebia, not Trasimene, not Cannae with its entombing of the Roman name could effect, nor the Punic camp set up at the third milestone from Rome and Hannibal himself riding up to the Colline gate: so much closer did Cato bring Carthage by means of this fruit. (HN 15.74–76)
It is not merely the portability of the fig but also its use for enargeia that bring Carthage, so to speak, home to the Romans. Here the beauty and the pleasurability of the fig are implicit in its ripeness, which, however, conveys a message of more urgency to the senators: just as a ripe fig requires immediate consumption, so too Carthage must be destroyed before it “spoils.” And here in the Pliny passage we see the immediacy of the move from Carthago delenda to Carthago deleta. In one sense, Pliny does not have to include the story of the attempted relocation, not only because it would undermine his point about enargeia, but also because Cato has, as I have suggested, already relocated Carthage by producing the fig in Rome; and that is the point of Pliny’s conclusion. But it also suggests that the ripe fig here does not stand so much for the pleasures of Carthage (as it seems to do in the Plutarch passage) as for the pleasures of consuming Carthage and its pleasures. The beauty of the fig, here embodied in its ripeness, does not appear so much self-contained as directed outwards: the fig here as a commodity produced for the pleasure of others. Now at first this may seem to tighten the stranglehold that the Roman ideological fantasy has upon the (now limited) lived reality of the Carthaginians. Just as Censorinus’s use of the Platonic model circumscribes the Carthaginians within a definition of decadence wherever they may choose to live, so this gesture of the ripe fig encapsulates Carthage as “that which must be destroyed,” whether it is decadent or not. Nevertheless, the flourishing here of the fig in the Senate, and the implicit injunction to consume, represent the pleasures of Carthage in the form of an importable commodity. The dubious pleasures of the maritime city are being brought home to Rome in every sense. Indeed, if it were not for the context of Cato’s repeated warnings, his gesture here could be read as an encouragement to the Romans to make use of this ready supply of fresh fruit, a mere three days’ sail from the city. The fig, moreover, can be grafted onto an Italian tree, and so even the more sober pleasures of agricul-
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ture, the art most cultivated by Cato himself, are prey to Punic infection. The context of Pliny’s story, we remember, is the description of different strains of fig, and it is clear from this that the Africana has now become a native of Italy. The use of the fig, therefore, rebounds upon Cato, as he brings Carthage up to the walls of Rome, not merely as a threat to be eradicated, but as a symbol of moral degeneration and dangerous pleasure which has already taken root. If, however, we follow the hypothesis of F. J. Meijer who argues that Cato’s figs came from his own estates, we can see them as Italian produce standing (in) for Carthaginian.24 What Cato is holding up, then, symbolizes Carthage as an integral kernel of his ideology, which at the same time resists being entirely absorbed into the Roman social imaginary. Hence the paradoxical “recentness” of the fig: the senators of Cato’s day remark that this particular fig is recens, while Pliny earlier in his disquisition states that the African variety is a recent introduction to Italy (nuperrime transierit, HN 15.69). The inconsistency conveys the position of the irreducible Carthaginian, embedded in the Roman imaginary, as always already recent: semper ex Africa aliquid novi.
Africanus One final detail of the Pliny passage demands comment. The naming of the fig as Africana is ascribed also to Cato: a Catone appellata iam tum Africana. (Note that we are told that the fig is named by Cato before we are told what it is named.) This appellation is another place where the irreducibility of the fig is situated; it may flourish in Italy for centuries, but by its name it will always be marked as alien (and recently introduced). It also creates a curious congruence between the fig of Carthage and the eradicator of Carthage—the younger Scipio Africanus—whose actions, as the Plutarch quotation with which I started makes clear, stand as a fulfillment of Cato’s words. Indeed, Cicero’s Scipio at the start of De republica 2, which I mentioned earlier, acknowledges his debt to Cato as the educator of his youth: just as Cato raises African figs from Italian trees, so too he nurtures the mind of Scipio Africanus. But while the African name in the former instance denotes an ineradicable place of origin (no matter how long the figs are in Italy, they will always be Africanae), the name in the latter instance notoriously stands for an object destroyed
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by the one who then bears its name. And, more disturbingly, the distinction between these two uses of the name is nowhere to be seen in the form of the name itself. Both Africana and Africanus, moreover, are used by Cato as tools to destroy the city. Scipio’s actions in destroying Carthage are subordinated to Cato’s will so that he is denied full agency in his own history. We are reminded of this towards the end of Plutarch’s biography, when he recapitulates Scipio’s role as fulfiller of Cato’s words and links it with Scipio’s character: So in this way Cato is said to have accomplished the third and last war against the Carthaginians, although he died before the war began,25 having uttered an oracular statement about the man fated to fulfill the end of the war, who was at that time a young man, but as military tribune on campaign had displayed evidence of both his wisdom and his daring in battle. They say that Cato, hearing the accounts of him brought back to Rome, said: “Only he is wise, the others glide about as shades.” And Scipio soon after confirmed this judgment. (Cat. Mai. 54.5–7)
I argued at the start of this paper that the temporality of Carthago delenda makes of Cato’s speech an address to the future; here his words are explicitly taken as prophecy, and once more receive their fulfillment in Scipio. Ironically, Cato prophesies about Scipio by likening him to the prophet Teiresias, but I think his choice of quotation has a further resonance not only for Scipio but also for the other Romans.26 The shades of the Odyssey are deprived of the capacity to speak until they have drunk the blood offered them by Odysseus. Cato appears to be consigning his fellow Romans to a shadow world where their only capacity to speak meaningfully is contingent upon a sacrifice. It is tempting to see the blood of the Carthaginians as the fuel of the Roman symbolic order, not only for Cato’s time but in subsequent generations. Indeed, this brief and allusive commentary on the Romans by Cato could be read in conjunction with the Lucretius passage with which I began, in order to suggest other ways in which Rome might conceptualize its own symbolic death. There are other points to make about the force of the quotation within Plutarch’s biography as a whole. Nels Forde comments first on the irony of Cato’s return to Homer, and then on how these final words replace the traditional deathbed utterance so beloved of Roman biographical subjects:
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Strange indeed that the last known statement from this famous old man, in the absence of any known details about his death, was a quotation from a Greek author in praise of an adopted Scipio—symbols he had fought all his life. (261)27
Cato, of course, can be seen here as fighting back by means of aggressive appropriation,28 but I am more interested in Forde’s suggestion that we read this in place of the final utterance with which a historical character is meant to sum up his life. I think this is interesting for two reasons. First, unlike the deathbed utterance, this statement does not sum up Cato’s life; instead, it sums up Scipio’s, but does so in advance, as a prophecy that Scipio soon after fulfils, as Plutarch tells us. (More on this in a moment.) The second reason is that it effectively consigns Cato’s death to some other place. This is an important point for Pliny as well as for Plutarch, neither of whom narrates Cato’s death. In both narratives the fact of Cato’s death appears in a concessive clause, asserting his agency in the outbreak of war, although he died the year after the war began (as Pliny says) or although he died before the war began (as Plutarch says). The detail of when he died becomes less important than the fact that his death is irrelevant to the events his words have set in motion. The prevalence of speech over death returns us to the place of the Underworld, which plays a particular role in framing Plutarch’s view of Cato as a biographical character. At the beginning of Cato’s “life,” Plutarch recounts (Cat. Mai. 28.4) an epigram so as to illustrate Cato’s pigmentary disposition; the epigram precisely denies to Cato any access to the Underworld: Red-headed, biting every hand, grey-eyed, not even when he’s dead Does Persephone receive Porcius in Hades.
There is a paradoxical humor to “not even when dead,” death being the main qualification for entry to the Underworld. But the main sting of the epigram, as Sansone notes (204), is in the assimilation of Cato to an animal, an assimilation that might be expected not in hell but at the gates of hell. But this “snapping at every hand” seems also to relate to Cato’s caustic use of soundbites, which is exemplified throughout Plutarch’s biography; as the biographer comments, words are more indicative of character than action. In this respect Cato’s speech, as I argued at the beginning, sets him free from time and mor-
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tality, and it is perhaps as a reflection of this that both the anonymous epigram and the Homeric quotation hint at visits to the Underworld performed by still living beings. Yet for both Scipio and Cato, to be set free from time and mortality is precisely to be liberated also from the symbolic relation to Carthage, a relation that, as I have suggested throughout this paper, they are pivotal in forming. In particular Cato’s soundbite, endlessly and unchangingly snapping at the Carthaginians, sets up a time-free space of implacable hostility; it is the problematic insertion of this hostility into the frame of the historical that confronts us with these provocative oddities.29
Works Cited Bellen, Heinz. 1985. Metus Gallicus—Metus Punicus: Zum Furchtmotif in der römischen Republik. Mainz. Burian, Jan. 1978. “Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.” Klio 60: 169–75. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination. Trans. David Ames Curtis. Stanford. (Originally published as Le monde morcelé [Paris 1990]) Charles-Picard, Gilbert and Colette Charles-Picard. 1968. The Life and Death of Carthage: A Survey of Punic History and Culture from its Birth to the Final Tragedy. Trans. Dominique Collon. London. (Originally published as La vie quotidienne à Carthage au temps d’Hannibal IIIe siècle avant Jésus-Christ [Paris 1958]) Dubuisson, Michel. 1989. “Delenda est Carthago: Remise en question d’un stereotype.” In H. Devijver and E. Lipinåski, eds., Studia Phoenicia X: Punic Wars. Leuven. 279–87. Forde, Nels W. 1975. Cato the Censor. Boston. Forrester, John. 1990. The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida. Cambridge. Gruen, Erich. 1993. Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome. London. Harris, William V. 1979. War and Imperialism in Republican Rome 327–70 B.C. Oxford. Hegel, G. W. F. 1988. Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Trans. Leo Rauch. Indianapolis. (Originally published as Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte [Hamburg 1900]) Jameson, Frederic. 1988. “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan.” In Frederic Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971–1986. 2 vols. London. Kenney, E. J. 1971. Lucretius: De rerum natura Book III. Cambridge. Lacan, Jacques. 1977a. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London. (Originally published as Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de psychanalyse [Paris 1973]) ———. 1977b. Écrits. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London. ———. 1992. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Trans. Dennis Porter. London. Lancel, Serge. 1995. Carthage: A History. Trans. Antonia Nevill. Oxford. (Originally published as Carthage [Paris 1992])
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Linderski, Jerzy. 1984. “Si vis pacem, para bellum: Concepts of Defensive Imperialism.” In W. V. Harris, ed., The Imperialism of Mid-Republican Rome. Papers and Monographs of the American Academy in Rome, 29. 133–64. Meijer, F. J. 1984. “Cato’s African Figs.” Mnemosyne 37: 117–24. Ogilvie, R. M. 1965. A Commentary on Livy, Books 1–5. Oxford. Purcell, Nicolas. 1995. “On the Sacking of Carthage and Corinth.” In Dorren Innes, Harry Hines, and Christopher Pelling, eds., Ethics and Rhetoric: Classical Essays for Donald Russell on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday. Oxford. 133–48. Sansone, David. 1989. Plutarch: The Lives of Aristeides and Cato. Warminster. Smith, R. E. 1940. “The Cato Censorius of Plutarch.” CQ 34: 105–12. Thürlemann, Silvia. 1974. “‘Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.’” Gymnasium 81: 465–75. Till, Rudolph. 1953. “Zu Plutarchs Biographe des älteren Cato.” Hermes 81: 436–46. Welwie, Karl-Wilhelm. 1989. “Zum Metus Punicus in Rome um 150 v. chr.” Hermes 117: 314–20. Zetzel, James. 1995. Cicero, De re publica: Selections. Cambridge. Ziz˚ek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York. ———. 1991. “Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears.” October 58: 45–68. ———. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, NC. ———. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London and New York. Zupanc˚ic˚, Alenka. 2000. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London and London.
Notes 1
On the history, or fictionality, of Cato’s phrase as it is best known, see Thürlemann. See also the opening remarks of Dubuisson. 2 This point was made to me by Robin Osborne. 3 Purcell 131 argues that the destruction of these two cities together formed “a carefully considered statement.” My analysis takes a different tack. I will explore the relationship between Carthage and Corinth further in my projected book on Roman fantasies of Carthage. 4 Space permits here only a most generalized sketch of the complex relationships of Greeks, Romans, and Carthaginians during this period. 5 Kenney 193. 6 Slavoj Ziz˚ek, talking about national identification in more general terms, puts it thus: “The element which holds together a given community cannot be reduced to the point of symbolic identification: the bond linking together its members always implies a shared relationship toward a Thing, toward Enjoyment incarnated. This relationship toward the Thing, structured by means of fantasies, is what is at stake when we speak of the menace to our ‘way of life’ presented by the Other . . .” (1993: 201). 7 By conjuring up the image of the vampire here, I intend also to evoke the place of the vampire in the contemporary world, as articulated by Ziz˚ek 1991: 47: “The place of the ‘living dead’ is not somewhere between the dead and the living; it is precisely as the dead that they are ‘more alive than life itself,’ having access to the life-substance prior to its symbolic mortification.” 8 Although it should be added that, apart from perpetuating the notoriety of the soundbite that I am about to examine, our discipline tends to assume that the study of
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Carthage entails another resurrection of a city “as it was,” external to its symbolization. Both Charles-Picard’s and Lancel’s books on Carthage, for example, construct a continuous narrative of the city from pre-Roman existence to its destruction. In so doing they miss another point, that Carthage qua Carthage exists only within Roman symbolization, where it appears of course as excluded and therefore central. 9 Hegel 32. 10 Just as Burian misses the point in his search for “sober” and “realistic” views of the Roman policy in Africa. 11 Appian, Pun. 69. On “das Furchtmotif” in Roman policy, see Bellen; Welwie; and the insightful essay of Linderski. 12 We could perhaps see in this the interpretative move from “Furchtmotif” to “Fruchtmotif” (with thanks to Synnøva O’Gorman). 13 Ogilvie 49 cites the various sources for religious associations of fig trees more generally with procreation. 14 My thanks to Bob Fowler for teasing out the latent oddness of Cato’s gesture in this passage. 15 Sansone 233. 16 What we seem to have here is a collapse into one of the later opposition between Cato and Scipio Nasica—“Carthage must not exist/war” versus “Carthage must exist/peace”—which I will discuss in a moment. 17 If the fig is the enjoyment of Carthage, we might allow that war is, in our eyes, the enjoyment of Rome. Cf. the fascinating analysis of Harris 53: “Roman imperialism was in large part the result of quite rational behavior on the part of the Romans, but it also had dark and irrational roots. One of the most striking features of Roman warfare is its regularity—almost every year the legions went out and did massive violence to someone—and this regularity gives the phenomenon a pathological character.” 18 I may mention in passing that what both the Greek and the Latin versions of this soundbite have in common is a coy refusal to name the agent of Carthage’s destruction/nonexistence. This point came up during discussion of an oral version of this paper at Oxford. 19 Another point we could make about the Cato-Nasica exchange is that it represents perhaps the most obviously self-sufficient short circuit of the message returned to the sender in its true, inverted form. That is, if we choose to read Cato’s words as an expression of fear (“I fear that Carthage will continue to exist”), we can then see Nasica’s response as “You fear that Carthage will not continue to exist”; cf. Lacan 1992: 64. But this formulation of the exchange sets up the relationship between the two senators rather differently. 20 The following paragraphs arose out of discussion with Bob Fowler. 21 This will be clearest if we compare the sort of repetition we are looking at here with some of the rhetorical figures that explicitly make use of partial repetition, e.g., the combination of antistrophe and epanaphora (conversio et repetitio) which appears in a phrase of Cato’s quoted in the Rhetorica ad Herennium: “Who are they who have so often broken treaties? The Carthaginians. Who are they who have waged war most savagely? The Carthaginians. Who are they who have disfigured Italy? The Carthaginians. Who are they who ask for forgiveness? The Carthaginians. See then how satisfactory it is that they get what they ask for” (Rhet. Her. 4.20). As the rhetor comments, this is not a result of verbal poverty; indeed, the repetition aims for an accumulation of Carthaginian crimes that make their pardon all the more unsatisfactory. My point here is that this sort of repetition is not at all what we are dealing with in the case of Cato’s gnomeµ under discussion here.
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22 Lacan 1977a: 54: “[I]n obsessional neurosis, the object with relation to which the fundamental experience, the experience of pleasure, is organized, is an object which literally gives too much pleasure. . . . What in its various advances and many byways the behavior of the obsessional reveals and signifies is that he regulates his behavior so as to avoid what the subject often sees quite clearly as the goal and end of his desire.” 23 Charles-Picard 292. 24 The quintessentially Catonian pursuit of agriculture, we may recall, was in part learnt from the writings of Mago, which were subsequently translated from Punic into Latin. 25 The fact that Cato died before the destruction of Carthage is highly suggestive of a similarity between the Cato-Scipio relationship, as it appears in explanations of the Third Punic War, and the relationship between Hannibal and his father Hamilcar, which occupies an analogous position in explanations of the Second War. This clause in particular echoes Polybius’s statement on Hamilcar (3.10.7), which I have discussed in detail elsewhere. 26 The one other Homeric quotation ascribed to Cato is in the context of his teasing of Polybius, Scipio’s pet historian (Plutarch, Cat. Mai. 36.3). 27 The ironies of Cato’s “adoption” of Scipio here relate not only to his feud with the elder Scipio Africanus but also to his shadowboxing with Scipio Nasica, as detailed earlier. One question we might ask here is which Scipio is the “true” adopted son of Cato. 28 Gruen, chap. 2, has provided a significant revision of the image of Cato as antiHellenist. 29 My thanks go first to Mark Buchan and Jim Porter for their invitation to write this paper and for their subsequent encouragement. I delivered versions of parts of this paper at the Oxford Philological Society in 2000 and at the Bristol Research Seminar in 2001. My thanks to all who participated in those debates.
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Vergil’s Voids ja m e s i . p o rt e r
Scilicet et tempus veniet, cum finibus illis agricola, incuruo terram molitus aratro, exesa inveniet scabra robigine pila aut gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanis grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris. And know that a time will come, when in those fields A farmer, working the land with his curved plough, Will find javelins eaten with rusty mold, Or will strike empty helmets with his heavy hoe And marvel at gigantic bones in the unearthed graves. Vergil, Georgics At contra nusquam apparent Acherusia temple nec tellus obstat quin omnia dispiciantur, sub pedibus quaecumque infra per inane geruntur. his ibi me rebus quaedam divina voluptas percipit atque horror, quod sic natura tua vi tam manifesta patens ex omni parte retecta est.
But, on the other hand, the quarters of Acheron are nowhere to be seen, nor yet is earth a barrier to prevent all things being descried, which are carried on underneath through the void below our feet. At these things, as it were, some godlike pleasure and a thrill of awe [or: horror] seizes on me, to think that thus by thy power nature is made so clear and manifest, laid bare to sight on every side. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things Vacuums are nothings. We only mention them to let them know we know they’re there. Anonymous fifth or sixth grader
Something about Nothing This paper has its background in a few related projects. First, and most generally, it belongs to an overarching obsession in progress on conceptions of emptiness in classical literature. More immediately
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related are the remarks, from the Introduction to this volume, on the subject as void in classical antiquity. The aim of those remarks was to consider to what extent contemporary perspectives on the empty subject in psychoanalysis in a Lacanian vein are an inheritance of ancient views—thus reversing the worry about anachronism in psychoanalytic readings of ancient texts, a view that attributes far too much originality to the psychoanalytic framework and far too little complexity to the ancients. (Which is not to say that it eliminates the worry: the worry persists, if only in a new, displaced, and doubtless heightened form.) This paper is also connected to an essay of mine on Lucretius and the role played by horror vacui in his poem, both as a thematic and structuring device.1 The term void in my title, therefore, has resonances in each of these areas. Void refers generally to notions of the empty (vacuity) in Greek and Roman poets. It also refers to one aspect of this emptiness, whereby subjects in poetic settings—let us call them somethings—become thinglike or phantasmatic and finally voided of substance—let us call them nothings. Among the many examples of this are Agamemnon eclipsed by death in Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy; Helen in Stesichorus and in Gorgias; and Europa in Moschus, as she dissolves without remainder into her fantasy. And finally, void refers to the atomistic conception of void as found in Lucretius.2 Vergil, as an inheritor of the literary tradition, also inherits these three senses of void, and so, while it is tempting, when dwelling on the appearance of voids in Vergil, to read him from the start against his Roman Epicurean context, my topic will be straining somewhat against this narrow contextualization of Vergil’s poetry. The hunt for specifically Lucretian echoes in Vergil, while valuable in itself, can do an injustice to the wealth of associations and allusions in Vergilian poetry. The Epicureans have no monopoly on the conception of void in antiquity, nor should we imagine that their conceptualizations are generally immune to prior poetic influence.3 Moreover, broadening the search criteria for, say, Vergilian echoings of Lucretius or of Epicurus will have the advantage of shifting the focus away in part from an overly narrow understanding of Epicurean thinking. The result, I hope, will be a richer picture of Vergil’s negotiation of this tradition in his works, as well as a richer picture of this tradition itself. That Vergil has an intimate familiarity with Epicureanism has been observed at least since Servius wrote his commentary on the Aeneid.4 On the question as to how Vergil uses this tradition, in particular the
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Lucretian material, consensus has been harder to reach. To take just two recent examples: where Philip Hardie sees an anti-Lucretian turn in Vergil—a “remythologization” of Lucretius’s demystified physical reductions (for instance, an affirmation of religion, piety, and order [cosmos], all in the name of imperium)—Viviane Mellinghoff-Bourgerie sees skepticism, uncertainty, and the vanity of human undertakings (“l’inanité”), all of this in line with Servius’s arguments in a similar vein.5 Hardie’s focus is on meteorological and cosmological motifs, and on the aesthetics of the outsized (gigantomachy), the hyperbolic, the baroque, and the full (“Vergil’s infinity is one of plenitude, not of emptiness”),6 a fullness that borders on “claustrophobia.”7 For Mellinghoff-Bourgerie, the poem’s reality is psychological, not cosmic; hence her view of Aeneas as “un héros de la vie intérieure,” despite her recognition that his personality etiolates, or fades (“sa personalité devienne de moins en moins active”), in what she calls “l’épanouissement de l’individu dans le bonheur parfait.”8 Yet for all their divergences, these two scholars concur in seeing in Aeneas an incarnation of Epicurean virtue, a subject who is in complete rational self-control, withstanding the shocks of a painful world, ascendant like Epicurus himself in De rerum natura, and destined for a life among the stars, extra flammantia moenia mundi.9 There are problems, which we cannot examine here, with this last reading of personal identity from an Epicurean perspective. There are problems, too, with the readings that these two critics give to the two moments they see as exemplarily culminating the poem, the end of Book 12 and the end of Book 6, respectively. I find it hard to see in the final slaughter of Turnus much that reflects an Epicurean ideal of selfhood, a quiet, recessive passivity on the part of Aeneas, let alone “a journey to the heavens or the stars.”10 And yet there are elements of both interpretations that one might want to preserve and adapt (with qualifications). A fresh start is needed—but also a detour, back to the Georgics and then further back to the epic tradition into which Vergil inserts his poem.
The Death of the Subject and the Epic Unconscious: “Between the Two Deaths” Consider the leading epigraph to this paper, which is taken from the Georgics. What is remarkable about this passage is the pathos with
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which it underscores the vanity of warfare, the contrasts that it develops in order to create this pathos (the peaceful, productive activity of tilling the soil, the corroded weapons that are forgotten until they are unearthed, the skulls suggested in silhouette by the helmets that once contained them and now are “empty”), and then, finally, the dangerously naïve fascination exerted by this appearance, or rather apparition: the dead are made into giants, outsized and contrasting with the limited horizon of the farmer’s vision (finibus illis). One could conceivably read the whole of the Aeneid through this single passage from the Georgics: all the paradoxes of the epic seem to be contained in these five lines. To ask whether this moment, a tragic epyllion in miniature, is a Lucretian one or not (and parallels have been noted11) seems beside the point. The disparities at work in this brief moment are a constant of the epic tradition that never ceased to stand back and look upon itself with a bemused reflexivity. Epic is always also counter-epic: it knows the futility of warfare, even as it knows that this futility is the source of the undying attractions, as it were, of war. Is this not the meaning of a “beautiful death”?12 The beauty lies not in the accomplishment of any act but in the emptiness of the gesture, its utter uselessness; it is the sheer expenditure of life in its fullest flowering that draws us to epic heroes. They are, as we shall see in a moment, famous only when they no longer are. Epic brings these two timeframes—of contemporaneity and posterity—together in a single glimpse, in a shock of time that produces a beauty that may be less beautiful than it is sublime and, for the same reason, tinged with hollowness. This is why the recent quarrel that Bernard Williams has with Bruno Snell over the integrity of the Homeric self goes somewhat astray.13 The problem in Homer is not whether the self is whole or fragmented (a false problem in any case, because what ought to be in question here is whether Homeric Greeks had access to the fantasy that they were unified wholes, and the issue is ultimately one not of empirical psychology but of literary aesthetics and stylization); rather, the real problem has to do with the redundancy of the self in Homer, its disappearance as such. The Homeric poems are saturated with a sense of this redundancy. What they depict is not the tragedy of the individual but his dispensability. We might say that in this respect the Homeric poems are already Lucretian avant la lettre. Consider Lucretius’s meditation on death from Book 3, in which Nature,
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addressing a frail old man “smitten in years,” rudely reminds humans of their negligibility in the greater scheme of things: “Away hence with tears, thou rascal, set a bridle on thy laments. Thou hast enjoyed all the prizes of life and now dost waste away”; step aside from the banquet of life, your time is up, and so on. To this Lucretius adds: The old ever gives place, thrust out by new things, and one thing must be restored at the expense of others: nor is any one sent down to the pit and to black Tartarus. There must needs be substance that the generations to come may grow . . . and life is granted to none for freehold, to all on lease. Look back again to see how the past ages of everlasting time, before we are born, have been as naught to us. These then nature holds up to us as a mirror of the time that is come, when we are dead and gone. Is there ought that looks terrible [horribile] in this, ought that seems gloomy? Is it not a calmer rest than any sleep? (3.955–77)
The passage is a tapestry of allusions and quotations, among which must surely figure the famous speech from Iliad 6 by the Trojan warrior Glaucus, who at first refuses to provide his genealogy in response to a request from the Greek hero Diomedes (“Who among mortal men are you, good friend . . . if you are one of those mortals who eat what the soil yields?”): “High-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask of my generation? As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber Burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning. So one generation of men will grow while another Dies. (6.145–50)
In Homer, heroes are to the extent that they are no more, are remembered, have a name (won by exploits and above all by a “beautiful death”). But here Glaucus is casting that logic, so to speak, to the wind: memory is no defense against meaninglessness, and what is the use of genealogy in the face of the nullity of generations (made null by sheer repetition) and the absurdity of death? What is shown here is the illogic of the epic illusion: Glaucus’s gesture is as defiant, and even as nihilistic, as Achilles’ refusal to obey the logic of the epic code: “Yet why must the Argives fight with the Trojans?” (9.337).14 Additionally, this refusal of memory by Glaucus touches the very medium in which the poems were recorded and recited (by way of
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oral composition), which is to say the very condition of Homeric memory itself. The Homeric heroes of the Iliad not only fight in the shadow of death, they also live in a condition “between the two deaths.” Shortly after the scene from Book 6 just quoted, Hector echoes Glaucus’s words (which he cannot have heard but nonetheless knows very well) in a speech to Andromache: “For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it: There will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish, And Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear.” (6.447–49)
This is a moment we might call “Vergilian,” thinking back on the quotation from the Georgics. But there is more. Predicting the outcome of the war, Hector imagines himself dead (6.459). Hector proceeds to battle, Andromache retires to her chambers, and together with her handmaidens sounds a dirge, like a benediction over a corpse: “So they mourned in his house over Hector while he was living still . . .” (6.500). Hector is effectively dead, as much for those around him as he necessarily is for the audience. The only exception, the one person who does not quite realize this fact about Hector (who knows it but refuses to acknowledge it), is Hector himself.15 Hector’s real death will coincide with the moment when he makes this realization and concedes its force; at that moment he will bow to the consciousness of the epic itself. Until then, he goes on existing in the realm between two deaths, suspended in a state of disavowed consciousness that is best summed up by the formula, “I know very well that I am supposed to be dead, but nevertheless I will go on acting as though I am not.”16 The lessons of Hector can be extended to all of the actors of the Iliad: effectively dead, they go on acting as if they were alive. Is that not the real tragedy of epic?17 At the extreme, wherever this greater knowing catches up with the characters’ normal, operative state of unknowing, epic reality shades off into unreality. Agents find themselves acting “as in a dream,” as Hector does in the fruitless attempt to elude Achilles’ pursuit around the walls of Troy (Il. 22.199). Or, they find themselves in a counterfactual existence, as does Helen in the Teichoscopia, in her address to Priam: I wish bitter death had been what I wanted, when I came hither Following your son, forsaking my chamber, my kinsmen . . .
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It did not happen that way: and now I am worn with weeping. . . . Did this ever happen? (Il. 3.173–80)
The last tag, which casts doubt on the whole of the epic—not only on the reality that leads up to the present moment but also including the present moment—is more teasingly phrased in the Greek original: ei[ pot j e[hn ge, literally, “if indeed these things ever were,” or, more poignantly, if remotely, “if indeed I ever existed.”18 The confession is alarming, not least of all because if Helen does not now exist, was never married to Agamemnon, was never abducted by Paris to Troy, then the Trojan war is pointless indeed, being fought over a phantom object. And what could be more meaningless than that? Later poetic tradition, beginning with the lyric poet Stesichorus and then carried on by Euripides (in his play Helen) and arguably by Gorgias, draws this very conclusion. Far from proposing an alternative to the epic tradition, as though developing a narrative possibility unexplored by Homer, this later tradition in fact constitutes a powerful counterfactual reading of the Homeric poem and offers an express commentary on it. More precisely, it makes into its exclusive theme a thread that was already in place in Homer, and one that unravels all that the Homeric epics purport to establish.19 In this later continuation (rather than revision) of the Homeric tradition, Helen at Troy is called an eidoµlon, or phantom image of herself, representing a confection of projected desire: “That story [known from Homer] is not true, and you did not go on the well-benched ships and you did not reach the citadel of Troy” (Plato, Phdr. 243a). Now, the term eidoµlon, before it gets taken over by the Greek atomists to designate simulacral reality (secondary appearances given off by configurations of real atoms and void), is Homeric in its origins. Used in the Odyssey to signify shades of the departed or images appearing in dreams, its earliest appearance in Greek is in Iliad 5, where Apollo saves Aeneas from the onslaught of Diomedes by whisking him off the battlefield to the safety of his own temple in Pergamus. Meanwhile, Apollo fashions a decoy, an eidoµlon “in the likeness of Aineias himself and in armour like him, and all about this image brilliant Achaians and Trojans hewed at each other”: But he of the silver bow, Apollo, fashioned an image [eidoµlon] In the likeness of Aineias himself and in armour like him, And all about this image brilliant Achaians and Trojans Hewed at each other, and at the ox-hide shields strong circled
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Guarding men’s chests, and at the fluttering straps of the guard-skins.20 (Il. 6.450–54)
The vanity of battle and the nihilism of epic are here condensed into but five lines: so much fury over a mere nothing! It is clear (although I am unaware of anyone who has said so) that Stesichorus must have taken his cue from these very verses, from this Homeric potentiality, and put them at the center of his poem. Compare Plato, Rep. 586c: “Just as Helen’s phantom [eidoµlon], according to Stesichorus, was fought over by the warriors at Troy in ignorance of the truth. . . .” We shall see how Vergil remembers this moment from Homer, but in his own way. At any rate, in Stesichorus we cannot even clearly say that Helen at Troy is a simulacrum of herself, because there is no evidence that he takes her to be anything beyond this phantasm, this fiction of a literary identity, whereas in Homer she represents no more or less than the veiled threat of her own impossibility.21 My point is simply that agents in the Homeric tradition down to the fifth century b.c.e. can stare deeply into the abyss of meaning and into their own phantasmatic existence. It is this sense of the self as image or phantasm, a something that is nothing, that gets preserved in the later tradition too.
Aeneas Inanis: The Aesthetics of Irreality Qui sommes-nous? Nous voyons en nous quelque chose de compact avec des qualités et des défauts, des traits de caractère qui forment un personnalité, et que nous regardons du dehors, que nous trouvons généralement aimable et agréable. Tandis que si nous nous plaçons au niveau où je me place . . . il n’y a pas d’identité. Nathalie Sarraute (quoted in Simone Benmussa, Entretiens avec Nathalie Saurraute) tu vero dubitabis et indignabere obire? mortua cui vita est prope iam vivo atque videnti. Wilt thou then hesitate and chafe to meet thy doom? thou, whose life is well nigh dead while thou still livest and lookest on the light. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
Vergil wrote a generation after Lucretius, but the presence of the Lucretian worldview looms large in his works, most visibly in his Georgics, but no less significantly in the Aeneid, the poem of concern
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in this section. A few comments on this worldview are in order, which is nothing if not contested. What kind of vision is represented by a passage like the following? And yet a pool of water not deeper than a single finger-breadth, which lies between the stones on the paved street, affords us a view beneath the earth to a depth as vast as the high gaping mouth [hiatus] of heaven stretches above the earth; so that you seem to look down on the clouds and the heaven and bodies hidden in the sky beneath the earth—all in magic wise [mirande]. (Lucretius 4.414–19)
A pool of water, no deeper than your finger, catches the image of “a depth as vast as the high gaping mouth of heaven stretches above the earth.” To put the question in a way that P. T. Wiseman once attempted in his biographical inquiry, “The Two Worlds of Lucretius,” what qualifications does it take to see depths in a surface? Quite simply, one has to be a bit of an Epicurean and all too human to have this kind of vision. It is available to each and every one of us. Lucretius’s example appears in a list of optical illusions, but surely the greatest optical illusion is that presented by the world as we perceive it on a day-to-day basis.22 Our senses continually read off the surface phenomenonappearances that reflection and science can serve to correct. But equally to the point, Lucretius’s comment on perceptual fallacy here is deflationary in the extreme: not only do phenomena conceal greater (if terrifying) depths beyond, but those regions beyond—charged with indefinite aesthetic, psychological, and even metaphysical significance—are in these verses themselves of an illusory cast, a mere image. Grandeur, sublime heights and depths, and vast expanses of heaven and earth, conjuring up beauties and horrors and reverential awe (horror ac voluptas), are all vitiated here by a puddle. Which has more truth to it, the image or its source? Lucretius here graphically makes a point that he elsewhere makes explicitly: “A little thing can give a picture of great things and afford traces of a concept” (2.123–24). His point, on the surface a pretty picture, is in fact a deeply conceptual one; but above all, it is a deeply unsettling one. Our minds tend to read into phenomena what is not really there.23 This is why, when we are faced with passages like the following, we have to be on our guard: Unless perchance, when you see your legions swarming over the spaces of the Campus and provoking a mimic war [belli simulacra cientis],
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when you draw them up equipped with arms, all alike eager for the fray, strengthened with hosts in reserve and forces of cavalry, when you see the army wandering far and wide in busy haste, then alarmed by all this the scruples of religion fly in panic from your mind, and the dread of death then leaves your heart empty and free from care. (Lucretius 2.40–45; cf. 2.324)
The temptation is to take belli simulacra (a contested bit of text mainly because it is so boldly vague) in one of two ways: either as referring to legionary exercises (“mimic war,” so Bailey), or as referring to “real war” (so Wiseman, who is puzzled by the phrase and then leaves it behind, satisfied to have located the reality of war despite Lucretius’s language).24 The question to ask here is, In what sense is real warfare simulacral? In exactly the same sense, I would suggest, as a puddle’s illusory reflection. A better question to ask might be, In what sense is simulated war real? Lucretius’s language suggests a painting, not a reality: it makes reality into a canvas (it is unclear why belli simulacra cannot carry this sense here25), in exactly the same way that all of perception presents itself as an aesthetic object to Lucretius, whether as an object of beauty or of horror—two responses we have, as it were, on loan, given that neither is a properly scientific response to the way things are.26 We need only think back to the beginning of Book 2 (“Sweet is it . . . to behold great contests of war in full array over the plains, when you have no part in the danger”); or to the lesson drawn soon after that: “Ah! miserable minds of men, blind hearts! in what darkness of life, in what great dangers ye spend this little span of years!,” feeding the vanity of greed, possession, and power; or to the image, likewise from the same book (2.115–22), of particles of dust in the light, warring furiously and vainly like atoms in the void; or back to Book 1, where we learn that time is not real (tempus per se non est), but is only a feeling (sensus) derived from things, and consequently “‘the rape of Tyndarus’s daughter’ or ‘the vanquishing of the Trojan tribes in war’” are not real either but only “said to be” (cum dicunt esse, 2.464–65).27 Lucretius’s last point about res gestae is general in scope: doings and events, in themselves, are nothing at all. His philosophical vision evacuates the reality that we think we intuitively know and understand, even as that vision seeks to anchor this reality in the reassuring bedrock of physics (atoms and void). The Epicurean vision, inherited from Democritus, enacts what might be called a “derealization” of reality.
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I want to suggest that Vergil’s Aeneid follows Lucretius in this very way. The reality it depicts is consistently derealized for the agents in the poem and consequently for the readers who stand in an analogous position to those agents, witnesses twice removed: as the poem’s agents, bodies, and places are made to seem irreal, we ourselves are distantiated, are rendered strangers to what we look upon, mere spectators of a canvass whose properties as a canvass have more presence, palpability, and reality to them than the figures painted on it. To Hardie’s (strangely Hellenistic) aesthetics of the baroque and hyperbolic, and to Mellinghoff-Bourgerie’s tentative aesthetics of the uncertain and the skeptical, I want to oppose a different aesthetic as I see it in Vergil’s epic: a resolute aesthetics of irreality, which may be located in the dissociative consciousness that pervades the poem. In Lucretius, this ambivalent attitude to what is, gains cogency from the fact that atomic reality is not only in some vital sense more real than appearances, but also more realistically drawn, more animated than life itself.28 In Vergil, this attitude transpires behind the shelter of epic fiction, but it also taps into the derealizing aesthetic tendencies of the epic genre (as I suggested earlier). Thus, when in Book 2 Venus reveals to Aeneas the divine machinery of warfare in operation at Troy (where, as Lucretius would say, “nature is made so clear and manifest, laid bare to sight on every side”29), it is a mistake to see, with Hardie, a remythologization of Lucretius: “Aeneas . . . sees behind [the scrim of appearances] to the reality of the destroying gods.”30 The accent needs to be done exactly the other way around. The picture presented of gods controlling human affairs works to render unreal the wars being waged and the achievements of human agency. But just how “real” are the underlying causes here? This brings us back to Lucretius’s belli simulacra again, but also to wars waged in the name of a simulacrum like Helen. (Aeneas is, at the moment of revelation in the scene just mentioned, prepared, in fact, to kill Helen. But Venus, luminous, intervenes with her blindingly clear view of things, in a language that recalls Lucretius’s rendering of Epicurean enargeia, as if to prevent him from trifling over a phantom.) Yet we are also, I suggest, put in mind of Iliad 5 and Aeneas’s first appearance in Greek literature, which we saw also coincides with the first occurrence of the term eidoµlon in the Greek language. 31 There, at the near fatal conclusion of his first aristeia, or heroic display, poised literally between the two deaths (“now in this place Lord
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Aineas might have perished had not Venus . . .” 5.311–12), Aeneas (dis)appears, precisely, as a simulacrum: “Aineias himself and . . . armour like him” (aujtw`/ t j Aijneiva/ i[kelon kai; teuvcesi, the phrase “him and his armor” being a hapax in Homer). Vergil begins his poem here: arma virumque.32 And this brings us to the much-debated issue of Aeneas’s characterization. The question has been frequently asked: Is Aeneas a hero or only the “shadow” of one?33 Frail and human, afflicted with anxieties rather than being bold and larger than life, Aeneas seems more of a hysteric than a hero. And yet Pound’s quip (“Ach, a hero, him a hero? Bigob, I t’ought he waz a priest”34) captures one of the most disquieting features of Aeneas: his complete subservience to a divine mission— the founding of Rome and its terrible imperium—in the guise of pious devotion. Does not this behavior fit to a T the Lacanian definition of the pervert? An agent of the universal, Aeneas realizes his life-project in becoming the instrument of the jouissance of the Other, and that is the source of his “piety,” even if only in the mode of disavowed awareness: “‘I do not head for Italy of my own free will, spontaneously [non sponte].’ . . . But pious Aeneas . . . nonetheless acted out the commands of the gods” (4.360, 393–96).35 Where the hysteric, trapped in the dialectical economy of desire, continually asks, “What does the Other want of me?,” or else doubts his qualifications either as a leader (“Am I really up to the task of being the master for my people?”) or as an agent of destiny (“Why me?”), the pervert’s mistake lies in a short-circuiting of desire, in his assuming that he knows what the desire of the Other is (despite its being an illusion): he consequently identifies his own enjoyment with that of the Other.36 Here Lacan draws some interesting ideological conclusions that bear upon Vergil’s poem. If the hysteric is a politically subversive agent, forever putting questions of legitimacy in doubt (however much psychic consolation he derives from this game), by contrast the pervert is politically retrograde.37 Not merely the blind tool of power and a model of unquestioning obedience, unlike the forever doubting and ideologically subversive figure of the hysteric, the pervert actually believes in his devotion. Worse still, in stripping himself of all traces of pathological motivation, the pervert approximates to the agent of pure moral duty, pursuing its categorical imperatives with an impersonality that is beyond reproach, and terrifyingly so. Book 12 of the Aeneid, in which Aeneas enacts his final revenge upon Turnus and fatefully establishes the imperium of Rome, can be read in this light.
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From a Lacanian perspective, what is (or rather, ought to be) so disturbing about this form of subjectivity is that the subject who so completely assumes his symbolic mandate in this “interpassive” way, without reinvesting it with pathological traits (whence his purely formal resolve), becomes a star example of the subject in its most abstract and purest form: rather than pursuing an object of desire, the subject here coincides, unconsciously, with the itinerary of drive itself.38 This resemblance between Lacan’s version of the Freudian subject and the Kantian moral subject takes us momentarily aback.39 But then again, it would be wrong to assume that being a subject ($) is an admirable condition, one that we should aim at attaining (even if it is a choice we are ultimately not free to make40)—although on this point Lacan again seems to vacillate. When it comes to contrasting the ethics of drive with the ethics of desire, Lacan often prefers the former (Antigone’s sublimation of her identity, her creation ex nihilo of herself, is a case in point), even though elsewhere he seems to acknowledge that subject formation occurs in no other way than through medium of $, the bar of subjectivity, for, as he says, subjects just are a creation ex nihilo, a construction out of a void—they retroactively cause themselves.41 This uncertainty aside, far from being an admirable quality, the voiding of the subject, its radical destitution, is quite to the contrary a necessary condition of subjecthood, one that no one can help but instantiate, whether in the very attempt to flee it (Oedipus) or else in the attempt to approach it, assuming it is a condition one can will. (Antigone wills an act, and in doing so commits “symbolic suicide”; but the act is ethical only insofar as what she wills is not her self-voiding but the voiding of the symbolic order represented by Creon’s laws.) To put this in a different way: in its pure form the subject as void is a necessary, and necessarily unintentional, byproduct as well as coefficient of subjectivity: subjects come about in no other way. (Thus, one cannot will one’s self-voiding, but only indirectly cause it.) Aeneas, in his particularly Roman empty contours, is therefore also exemplary. Expressions of selfhood—subjective styles or pathologies (identities)—automatically follow in the wake of this voiding of the subject, which is either fleetingly attained (in the rarest moments of symbolic breakdown) or permanently recessed (“repressed”) in the structure of the subject. That they do so is a symptom of subjective identity itself. If $ (the barred subject) indicates the ways in which subjects come to be formed, it further points to the ideological kernel of a given
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social formation. Locating the position of the barred subject in a given symbolic formation is the way psychoanalysis most effectively discovers the underpinnings of ideology—its mechanisms and its forms of “passionate” attachment (whatever it is that makes a subject cling to a social signifying formation), just as a subject’s return, or rather approach, to the condition of $ inevitably throws up the conditions of ideology in a violent display. Confronting subjects with (in Lacan’s language) the “real” of their identities in all of its perversity can be ideologically destabilizing, but nothing guarantees that it will be this, or rather nothing guarantees what forms this destabilization will take or the lasting nature of their effects. Perhaps that is why Vergil’s poem has just as often been read as a critique of Roman imperium as it has been taken to be a celebration of Rome’s cause(s). This variety of responses to the poem has a structural cause that lies not in the nature of poetic language or in some fundamental political ambivalence in Vergil, but in the structure of subjectivity itself in its contingent historical conditions: to be a subject is to be caught up in the dilemmas of ideology; to be a Roman subject is to be rent by Roman ideologies. These divergences of reading and interpretation are due, in other words, to the necessarily traumatic character of the ideological (or “pre-ideological”) kernel at the core of (here) Roman rule, which is permanently on display in the poem. Insofar as it is “about” anything at all, the Aeneid is, quite simply, about the construction of an ideological edifice. But it is also about Aeneas, who occupies an impossible set of positions with respect to this edifice. He is, on the one hand, the exemplary “hailed” subject, interpellated into a symbolic role (his “mandate”) within a system of social and political relations (not all of them yet fully realized), an interpellation that is ritually repeated daily by all Romans in the historical present of the poem’s telling and by their ancestors in the historical present of the poem. On the other hand, in the erection of this regime Aeneas occupies the place of its “vanishing mediator” (mythical founding father) who must pass into the abstract conditions of political possibility (must be eliminated), if “Rome” is to exist with any degree of consistency. Aeneas cannot consistently fulfill both of these expectations at once, and his subjectivity is therefore located at the point of failure in this crossing of symbolic and imaginary mandates. Aeneas, the exemplary barred and voided subject—that is, the failed intersection of these two mandates—coin-
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cides with his passing from view and into the Real of Rome, that which in Rome is more real than anything Rome can propose to itself in its various self-expressions. And this Real-ization is the source of his derealization. Facing the traumatic Real of ideology is no simple matter: it is as easy to shun the spectacle and avert one’s gaze from it as it is to revel in its fascination (which is just another form of aversion, namely, a fetishization). So how does Vergil’s poem get us to confront or experience the Real of Rome? Paradoxically, through the failure to do so. Just as Rome’s Real exists in a reader’s failed encounter with it, so too does Aeneas embody this failure in his “person.” Look as we might for the Real of Rome in Aeneas, we will not find it: Aeneas’s character, I would suggest, does not contain any such Real, and if anything the multiple forms in which Aeneas comes to be figured in the poem and then interpreted by its readers (typically, either as a hysteric or a pervert) are illustrative of the ways in which that Real comes to be eluded rather than encountered in all of its bruising immediacy. The Real, such as it is, is to be found on another level of experience (rather than on a level of reading) in a series of missed encounters. The first of these is to do with Aeneas’s character—or rather his lack of one. The rest are to do with the loss of reality that accompanies the poem as it unfolds. We may consider these in turn. Who, or what, is Aeneas? Presented as an (admittedly small) bundle of attributes and ascribed character traits—features that he has, not in virtue of his possessing them so much as he is represented as having them—Aeneas is altogether lacking in any essential qualities we might call his own. Superficially, he is a kind of polytropic Outis (Nobody). This is his most “Odyssean” side, even if it also entails that he can take on, depending on one’s perspective, the features of a “second Achilles” (6.89) or a “second Paris” (4.215; 7.321). Elsewhere he appears as a Hector, an Apollo, a Danaan (Greek), and in other identities as well, although never explicitly as an Odysseus— and in this respect he is more Odyssean than Odysseus himself. It is not so much that “Vergil’s hero . . . keeps much hidden from us; and even what he reveals does not always add up,” as Mark Griffith writes in an article that addresses the shrewd question, “What Does Aeneas Look Like?”42 It is rather that Aeneas (or Vergil) has nothing to hide. His identity is no secret, if it counts for anything at all, and it is best summed up in his own Odyssean tautology from Book
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1: “The man you seek is here” (1.595). Except, he is not “here” at all. Ludwig Wittgenstein once was troubled by this dilemma of identity: Imagine a language in which, instead of saying “I found nobody in the room,” one said “I found Mr. Nobody in the room.” Imagine the philosophical problems which would arise out of such a convention. Some philosophers brought up in this language would probably feel that they didn’t like the similarity of the expressions “Mr. Nobody” and “Mr. Smith.” (69)
Aeneas is very like Mr. Nobody. The reference to “Aeneas” is not empty; it points unerringly to the emptiness that surrounds and envelops Aeneas. The first and natural response to this dilemma of characterization is to assume that Aeneas is nothing but a fictional construct, an artifact of art and a highly wrought emblem born of the self-conscious aesthetic of Roman neotericism. The “fabrication” of his appearance in Book 1 by Venus (his mythological mother, and here the literal Aeneadum genetrix) is a typical moment in this line of reasoning, but one that strictly speaking is de rigueur in the epic tradition, at least since the Odyssey. At most, then, we might want to affirm Aeneas’s generic, that is to say epic, identity. But there is more to the problem than that. Aeneas, we have to say, is not a mere passive receptacle of subjectivation; he is not simply “made” or made up. On the contrary, he is the retroactive product of his own reflection in a fictional medium—a baffling experience for himself, to be sure—and he develops a sense of purpose and an identity in response to his own image as it comes to him from without. The key moments are not the scenes of Aeneas’s fabrication of the kind just noted, but in his encounters with his own alter ego, for instance earlier in the same book where he discovers (himself in or as) another work of art, this time the frieze of Dido’s palace and its depictions of the Trojan War: He sees the wars of Troy set out in order: The battles famous now through all the world. . . . He halted. As he wept, he cried: “Achates [his companion] . . . Forget your fears; This fame will bring you some deliverance.” He speaks. With many tears and sighs he feeds His soul on what is nothing but a picture. (1.456–65)
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Not many lines later, Aeneas, scanning the same monument, not only relives the trauma of the recent past but discovers himself: “He also recognized himself [se quoque . . . agnouit] in combat with [permixtum; more literally, because it helps to objectify him even further, ‘mixed in amongst’] / the Achaean chiefs” (1.464–87). The trouble is that Aeneas cannot truly be said to recognize himself here because, as we have already been reminded, he is feeding his soul on what is but an “empty picture”: sic ait atque animum pictura pascit inani (464). In what sense can Aeneas be said to recognize himself? All depends on where we place the se that he recognizes and identifies, that is, whether we locate it in himself or in the picture. The identification must in any case be dialectical: seeing himself in the picture, he recognizes from the picture who he is. And yet there is something hollow, even unreal, about this act of recognition, and indeed about the entire scene. The picture is “empty,” after all—very like, shall we add, the fame that, Aeneas assures his companion Achates, will issue from their undertaking? (Certainly their fame can be no more substantial than that proclaimed by the image of Troy: the image just is what fame is.) Indeed, at this moment Troy is being reduced to an image, its reality effectively annulled (with clear Lucretian echoes):43 Vergil is framing and bracketing the epic tradition, and founding his own epic upon this self-conscious relation to earlier artifice—a gesture that does not, however, make the Aeneid more “full.” And Aeneas is drawn into the same circle. Aeneas claims to see himself. Would anyone else recognize him? “Mixed in amongst the Achaeans” suggests the possibility that he is pictured in disguise as an Achaean (2.389), a stratagem that, likewise described on the frieze, had cost Aeneas dearly (he calls it an error [2.413], because of the lives that were lost) and that ultimately failed: the Achaeans eventually learned to unmask the disguised Trojans (agnoscunt, 2.423). Quandaries of identity in the poem are thus mirrored in the image—assuming these two levels of representation can be distinguished. The narrative voice and the narrated voice are crucially elided here, which allows us to ask whether Aeneas sees himself as full or as empty (inanis). Is that the source of the scene’s pathos (and Aeneas’s tears: multa gemens . . . sunt lacrima rerum)? Is Aeneas even depicted on the frieze?44 Whether or not he is (how could we tell?), he effectively is, and that is all that matters. Either way he is present in effigy only; and since he cannot perceive himself qua the
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effigy that he is—a recognition that is barred (it is too traumatic for him, especially in his strong desire to see himself in the frieze)—he misreads himself in Carthage as being present, as do others around him. Aeneas is absent even in his presence, yet unrecognizably so to himself and to others (which is a crueler, and more accurately Lacanian, truth than the habitual argument about something being “present in its absence”). Thus, it is the object that seems to see and identify the subject, the way a mirror sees the one looking upon it, and the way a gaze locates a subject’s desire.45 A further complication: the image is seductive, and it is this picture of Aeneas that will inflame the heart of Dido, more so than the reality of Aeneas (4.1–5). Does Dido “choose” Aeneas precisely because he is nothing but this absence (or its representative), a thing of nothing? If so, then he answers to the truth of her desire perfectly. Her desire is in any case staged as if it stood in relation to a picture, and more specifically as a relationship between two absences: illum absens absentem auditque videtque (“Absent, she hears and sees him, the absent one,” 4.83). Is Aeneas, with his soul feeding on nothing, in any sense fuller than the picture of himself, whether the one he sees or the one Dido sees? In one sense he obviously is not fuller than his image: he is himself but a picture, and it is the reader who is feeding her mind on an empty representation. In another, Aeneas gains identity only in relation to an image that he must put on and, as it were, wear (like armor). Vergil never allows the reader to evade the consequences of this insight, and in fact he seems to take every opportunity to remind her of it. The effects, presented here in Book 1 as identificatory and as a key moment of recognition, are alienating indeed. An obvious objection here would be to say that all we are being pointed to is something very common after all, namely, the literary fabrication of Aeneas. What is so unique about that? Are not all literary characters equally fictional, insubstantial, mere products of a figuration, easily reducible to their simulacral status? No doubt they are, but the way in which they are made to assume their figurative status within their fictional worlds varies greatly from fiction to fiction (possibly also from genre to genre). While it is true that readers have the discretionary power to reduce characters to a fiction, this tells us nothing about how the characters of fiction are presented, either as perceiving their own status or as perceived from within the works in which they appear: the reducibility of a character to an
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empty fiction is a difference in perspective that may or may not be enforced from within a literary work.46 The far greater objection, however, ought to be the obverse situation to the purely formal, poetic consideration: Is not the fact that subjects can be so easily depsychologized, emptied of their subjective fullness and reduced to the flat screen of their fantasies, on the contrary an all too common feature of “real” subjects? If the decentering of the subject is the very definition of the Freudian subject, the subject’s destitution, its voiding, constitutes the very foundation of the Lacanian subject. And so it would also seem that the decision by a reader to reduce characters to a fiction, which is in itself merely tautological, is all the easier to make inasmuch as it reassures readers of their own nonfictional status, and defends them against the far more troubling possibility, namely, that fictions can be, in this precise sense, truer than reality. The problem, in other words, is not that Aeneas, in his exposure as a creature who is “less than himself,” becomes too much of a fiction but, on the contrary, that he becomes all too familiarly real, too little a fiction and too much of a (barred) subject, too exemplary a reminder of the ordinary constitution of actual subjectivity. And that, perhaps, is the clue to his strangeness. He is too uncannily familiar to be reabsorbed back into the world of fiction from which he emerged: he “sticks out” of that world as a disturbing excess of fiction, but also from our own “normalized” world of reality. Aeneas is thus in different ways very like the psychotic who, cured of his delusion that he is a grain of corn and asked by his analyst whether he finally feels cured, replies in a terrified voice, “Yes, I feel fine and am definitely cured. But does the hen know that I am not a grain of corn?” Cured of his psychosis, he has become a (saner) neurotic who no longer doubts who he is because his identity is henceforth staked on the uncertain knowledge of what he is for the Other. The only question remaining for him is this: Does the Other know what I am? The joke is relevant here, if for the hen we substitute not only the characters around Aeneas from the poem (Dido, Anchises, Ascanius, and so on) but also the reader of the poem herself.47 Now to the loss of reality. Saturated with literary memory, the world of Aeneas is heavily symbolic. It is freighted with supernatural signs, with ghosts, apparitions, and hauntings, with false mental images and effigies, like a brain on fire, caught up in a nightmare that is more real than reality—or else in a distinctively Lucretian night-
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mare, in which simulacra are more real, more tangible, and more substantial, than reality itself, copies that, as it were, have displaced their originals.48 Nor can Aeneas be fully dissociated from these images himself, struggle as he might to do so. When he appears a mere image to others, as he often does, Aeneas will assert, his voice “broken” and nearly “failing” him, his mouth “agape”: “Do not doubt—I am real” (et raris turbatus vocibus hisco: / ‘ne dubita, nam vera vides,’ 3.315–16). Surely the most astonishing moment in this series of simulacra, which includes the effigy of Aeneas that is mounted on a pyre by Dido in Book 4 (and that eerily recapitulates the opening verse of the poem: arma viri . . . [4.495–508]), comes in the conclusion to Book 6, the symbolic midpoint of the poem, where Aeneas, himself a virtual shade, emerges from the Underworld through the gates of Sleep. There are two gates, one of horn given to true shades to exit from, the other of polished ivory, through which “the Spirits send false dreams into the world above.” Oddly enough, it is the latter exit through which Anchises sends his son (along with the Sibyl) back to the shoals of light (6.893–99).49 The choice between the two gates has long been a source of embarrassment to scholarship. Some commentators hold that the choice is forced: Aeneas is not a true shade; the way marked by horn is therefore barred to him, and so he goes the way of . . . false dreams.50 But even odder is the fact that the choice is posed at all. We think back to the initial, reassuring contrast in the encounter with Charon earlier in the same book, to the solid body of Aeneas and the empty shades he displaces. Yet even this contrast is delusive. Does it not involve us in the inane calculation of just how many shades Aeneas’s body weight equals?51 Nor is this the last time that Aeneas appears as a rare, empty image. And in other contexts a virtual echo effect is created between his name, Aeneas, and the word for vacuity, inanis.52 In Book 10, Juno fashions a phantom-Aeneas—a shade (umbra) and image (imago) of him out of a cloud of air—in order to delude Turnus and to lead him away from Aeneas and from a certain death. The moment is a re-creation of Iliad 5 (see above), as Juno earlier reminds Jupiter and the reader (10.79–82),53 a re-creation that strangely puts Aeneas into a new relation with Helen: Then out of insubstantial mist [nube cave] the goddess Fashions a phantom [lit., “shade”: umbram], thin and powerless [sine viribus],
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That has Aeneas’ [Aeneae] shape (astounding sight) And wears the Dardan’s arms [telis]: she imitates The shield and helmet of his godly head And gives it empty words [inania] and sound that has No meaning [sine mente], and she counterfeits his gait; Like forms that—it is said—hover when death Has passed, or dreams that cheat the sleeping senses. (10.636–42)54
Arma virumque, or sine armis viribusque? It makes no difference, for Turnus takes the bait and chases the cloud image. He believes that Aeneas has lost heart in flight: “His mind [animo], / bewildered, he drinks in empty [inanem] hope: / ‘Where are you off to, Aeneas [Aenea]?’” (647–49).55 The three-way echoes between inanis, animus, and Aeneas are reinforced elsewhere in the poem. The effigy of Aeneas set aflame by Dido in Book 4 eerily recapitulates the opening verse of the poem (arma viri . . . , 4.495),56 which likewise notably fails to name Aeneas (arma virumque cano), whose existence must be inferred either from the conjunction of “arms” and “man” or (arguably) from their disjunction. It is worth comparing arma procul currusque virum miratur inanis (6.651), where Aeneas is gaping at the phantom arms and chariots of the Underworld dead, and which recalls the epigraph from the Georgics.57 We have already seen how Aeneas’s animus fed on empty images in Book 2. And the poem ends on an identical note, in a nightmarish scene that involves the two protagonists, Turnus and Aeneas, in a terrible and mutual loss of reality. In their final, fateful encounter, Turnus tears up an immense and ancient (antiquus) boundary stone lying in the plain, formerly held by peaceable farmers (a symbolic act that likewise puts us in mind of the Georgics passage), and hurls it at his opponent. Utterly dazed, Turnus has all but lost consciousness, as if it he was the one who was struck by the stone he has just hurled: “He does not know if it is he / himself [neque se . . . cognoscit] who runs or goes or lifts or throws / that massive rock.”58 As for the stone, “it itself whirls through / the empty void [vacuum per inane volutus] but”—redoubling its ineffectuality, like the twice-emptied air through which it flies, and like the arrow in Zeno’s paradox (or the projectile from a parallel Lucretian scenario)59—“does not cross all of the space [spatium] between” (12.896–907). Turnus feels and acts as if he were in a dream, as when we are no longer in control of our limbs or tongue, overcome by
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weakness and immobility. I say “we,” because Vergil, strikingly (and in a breach of his usual practice), shifts into the first-person plural in his dream simile (videmur . . . succidimus) before lapsing into the objectifying third person to describe limbs and tongue that are removed from the command center of the self (non lingua valet, non corpore notae / sufficiunt vires, etc.). The effect is jarring for the reader, who is at once brought into the picture, and so seemingly made aware of her own reality, and then, or simultaneously, de-realized again, in a way similar to the process described just above.60 Aeneas, for his part, steps into an irreality of his own. That is to say, he becomes unreal to himself, for as he rains down his final crushing blow upon Turnus, in the culminating gesture of the poem, he disclaims all responsibility for the act: “It is Pallas who strikes you” (12.948–50). No longer himself, Aeneas is somebody else, and precisely when he ought most of all to have come into his own. Or, perhaps, he has finally become what he is, has incorporated the truth of his position in the truth of his desire, which is that of an Other. Aeneas is inanis. He has, in Lacanian terms, finally become an incorporation of the Real. The ending of the Aeneid is ghastly in its ghostliness.61 Aeneas, as a pathological subject, is as dispensable here as he always was, a point that Venus cruelly concedes in Book 10, thus reversing her role of Aeneas’s savior from Iliad 5: “Let me send away Ascanius, unharmed, from battle: let My grandson live. Aeneas may be cast, Just as you will, on unknown waves and follow Whatever pathway fortune finds for him; But let me shield Ascanius and take him Far from this dreadful war.” (10.47–51)
And yet, as an empty subject, Aeneas is nonetheless indispensable to the symbolic functioning (ideology) of Rome. As part of its Triebschicksal, he represents the ethics of Roman drive, its fate and fatality—he is its future in the past, retrojected from the present. And that future is nothing less than the future of an illusion—one that is deeply ingrained in the literary and philosophical memory that Vergil inherited and then passed on to us.62
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Works Cited Bailey, Cyrus. 1947. Titi Lucreti Cari, De rerum natura libri sex. 3 vols. Oxford. Benmussa, Simone 1999. Entretiens avec Nathalie Saurraute. Tournai. Bowie. 1998. “Exuvias Effigiemque: Dido, Aeneas and the Body as Sign.” In Dominic Monteserrat, ed., Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human Body in Antiquity. London. 57–79. Cavafy, C. P. 1992. Collected Poems. Trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Ed. George Savidis. Rev. ed. Princeton. Conington, John and Henry Nettleship. 1872–76. P. Vergili Maronis Opera: The Works of Vergil. 3 vols. 3d ed. London. Easterling, P. E., E. J. Kenney, B. M. W. Knox, and W. V. Clausen, eds. 1982–85. The Cambridge History of Classical Literature. Vol. 2, Latin Literature, ed. E. J. Kenney. Cambridge. (Cited as CHCL) Freud, Sigmund. 1905. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. Vol. 8 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. 24 vols. London 1953–74. ———. 1933. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. 24 vols. London 1953–74. 22: 3–182. Gale, Monica R. 2000. Vergil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition. Cambridge. Griffith, Mark. 1985. “What Does Aeneas Look Like?” CP 80.4: 309–19. Hardie, Philip R. 1986. Vergil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium. Oxford. Kirk, G. S. 1985. The Iliad: A Commentary. Vol. 1. Cambridge. Lacan, Jacques. 1971. Écrits. 2 vols. Paris. ———. 1977. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York. ———. 1978. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre II: Le Moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse. 1954–55. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris. Lattimore, Richard. 1951. The Iliad of Homer. Chicago. ———. 1967. The Odyssey of Homer. New York. Long, A. A. 1997. “Lucretius on Nature and the Epicurean Self.” In P. H. Schrijvers, M. H. Koenen, and K. A. Algra, eds., Lucretius and His Intellectual Background. Amsterdam. 125–39. Lukács, György. 1971 [1920]. Die Theorie des Romans: Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik. Neuwied. Mandelbaum, Alan, trans. 1971. The Aeneid of Vergil. Berkeley. Mannoni, Octave. 1969. Clefs pour l’imaginaire, ou l’autre scène. Paris. Mellinghoff-Bourgerie, Viviane. 1990. Les incertitudes de Vergile: contributions épicuriennes à la théologie de l’Énéide. Brussels. Merrill, W. A. 1918. “Parallels and Coincidences in Lucretius and Vergil.” PCCP 3: 135–247. Parry, Adam. 1956. “The Language of Achilles.” TAPA 87: 1–7. Porter, James I. 1990. “Patterns of Perception in Aeschylus.” In Mark Griffith and Donald J. Mastronarde, eds., The Cabinet of the Muses: Essays on Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer. Atlanta. 31–56. ———. 1993. “The Seductions of Gorgias.” CA 12.2: 267–99. ———. 2003. “Lucretius and the Poetics of Void.” In Annick Monet and Philippe Rousseau, eds., Le jardin romain: Épicurisme et poésie à Rome. Mélanges offerts à Mayotte Bollack. Villeneuve d’Ascq. 197–226.
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Pound, Ezra. 1960 [1934]. ABC of Reading. New York. Pucci, Pietro. 1996. “Between Narrative and Catalogue: Life and Death of the Poem.” Métis: Revue d’anthropologie du mond grec ancien. Philologie-HistoireArchéologie 11: 5–24. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. 1991. “A ‘Beautiful Death’ and the Disfigured Corpse in Homeric Epic.” In Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays. Ed. Froma I. Zeitlin. Princeton. 50–74. Williams, B. 1993. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley. Williams, R. D. 1972. The Aeneid of Vergil, Books 1–6. London and Glasgow. Wiseman, P. T. 1974. “The Two Worlds of Lucretius.” In P. T. Wiseman, Cinna the Poet and Other Roman Essays. Leicester. 11–43. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford. Ziz˚ek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York. ———. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London and New York. ———, ed. 1998. Cogito and the Unconscious. Durham, NC. ———. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London. ———. 2000a. The Fragile Absolute, Or Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London and New York. ———. 2000b. “Melancholy and the Act.” Critical Inquiry 26: 657–81. Zupanc˚ic˚, Alenka. 1998. “The Subject of the Law.” In Ziz˚ek 1998, 41–73. ———. 2000. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. London.
Notes 1
Porter 2003. A note on the translations in this paper: for Homer, I use Lattimore 1951 and 1967; for Lucretius, Bailey; for the Aeneid, Mandelbaum. 2 On Agamemnon, see Porter 1990; on Helen in Gorgias, see Porter 1993. 3 Which is not quite the same thing as saying that Lucretius, for example, draws heavily on earlier literary tradition, a point that is commonly enough made. 4 E.g., Servius, Ad Aen. 2.536, 6.272, etc.; Servius, Ad Ecl. 6.13; further, [Vergil], Catalepton 5 and 8; Donatus, Vita Verg. 79 Diehl. See Conington-Nettleship; Merrill; Mellinghoff-Bourgerie. For the Georgics, see most recently Gale. 5 Hardie; Mellinghoff-Bourgerie, e.g., 102: “Vergil semble souligner à plaisir l’inanité des maux endurés par le héros.” See Servius, Ad Aen. 6.893: vult [sc. Vergilius] intellegi falsa esse omnia quae dixit, essentially voiding the contents of Book 6 (cited by Mellinghoff-Bourgerie 214). Mellinghoff-Bourgerie is something of an apologist for this line of interpretation, though she shrinks back from its most radical implications. 6 Hardie 199. 7 Hardie 200: “For all its cosmic spaciousness the Aeneid can also induce a feeling of claustrophobia.” 8 Mellinghoff-Bourgerie 207, a view that is reinforced by the selectiveness of the approach (her treatment ends with the end of Book 6, on which, see below), and 229. 9 Hardie 194–209; Mellinghoff-Bourgerie 229–30, claiming the Epicurean ideal for that “de l’auteur lui-même.” 10 Lucretius 1.79, cited by Hardie 196 and compared by him to Vergil, Aen. 6.781–72: illa incluta Roma / imperium terris, animos aequabit Olympo. 11 See Budet ad loc., referencing Lucretius 2.1150–52. 12 See Vernant on the concept of the kalos thanatos. 13 See the introduction to this volume, 00–00. 14 See Parry, and the introduction to this volume, 00–00.
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15 See Freud 1975: 3: 24. See too the last stanza of Cavafy’s poem “Trojans”: “Yet we’re sure to fail. Up there, / high on the walls, the dirge has already begun. / They’re mourning the memory, the aurora of our days. / Priam and Hecuba mourn for us bitterly” (Cavafy 22). 16 Much like Alexander the Great, reprimanded by Philip in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead 12.6: “Aren’t you ashamed, Alexander? Won’t you learn to forget your pride, and know yourself, and realize that you’re now dead?” (trans. M. D. Macleod, Loeb Classical Library). The joke in Lucian is that all the characters are not dead but are only imaginary figures (cultural signs, ideologemes as it were) who act as if they were real and refuse to realize that they never really were (real) to begin with. On the logic of the formula, which is that of fetishistic disavowal, see the essay “Je sais bien, mais quand-même . . .” in Mannoni, and, e.g., Freud 1933: 101: “It is quite possible, and highly probable indeed, that the dreamer does know what his dream means; only he does not know that he knows it and for that reason thinks he does not know it.” 17 For interesting byplays on the two deaths in the Odyssey, see now Pucci. 18 The verb form of this formula, which appears five times in the two epics in this form and once in a related form (Il. 11.761), is morphologically ambiguous between third and first persons. See Kirk 290 ad loc., and his paraphrase of the verse: “‘If that relationship ever existed,’ i.e., if ever I lived in Lakedaimon and was married to Menelaos—it all seems so far off now.” Kirk adds: “There is a bare possibility that eh[n refers to Helen herself.” But the upshot is identical in either case. 19 Porter 1993, esp. 278–80. 20 Aujta;r o} ei[dwlon teu`x j ajrgurovtoxo~ ajpovllwn / aujtw`/ t j Aijneiva/ i[kelon kai; teuvcesi toi`on, / ajmfi; d j a[r j eijdwvlw/ Trw`e~ kai; di`oi jAcaioi; / dhv/oun ajllhvlwn ajmfi; sthvqessi boeiva~ / ajspivda~ eujkuvklou~ laishvi>av te pteroventa. 21 The “you” addressed in his so-called Palinode (“you never were”) is a literary phantom. See Porter 1993: 278. 22 Book 6 of De rerum natura will detail the illusions of what the puddle in Book 4 purports to reflect as a reality; see Porter 2003. Of course, Epicurus (in contrast to Democritus) claims that appearances are real—every bit as real as the underlying atomic structures that cause them. But they remain appearances, distinct from their causes, and they also frequently stand in an illusory relation to those causes. Is it not our everyday belief that external objects are “solid”? And is it not the aim of atomism to prove to us the falsity of this intuition, to make plain to us our frequent “madness” (as with Orestes’ hallucination of the Furies)? Is it not also the aim of atomism to unsettle the apparent naturalness of our sense impressions? Hence the “ruthless determination [on the part of Lucretius] to make his readers face the facts of nature as they really are” (Long 135)—a bitter pill indeed. 23 The maiestas of nature in Lucretius (maiestas rerum; see the prologue to Book 5) is the sheer exhilaration that a glimpse of scientific truth affords, but it is a complex kind of exhilaration: nature is first reduced to a res, and then that Thing is magnified into a maiestas; it is thus a sublime presque rien. 24 “Real war is what Lucretius had in mind” (13); see also 13 n. 9, reporting West’s suggestion that “‘mimic war’ may be a mistranslation anyway, since simulacra are not normally ‘imitations’ in Lucretian usage.” What Vergil had in mind in his seeming quotations of Lucretius at Aen. 5.585 and 5.674 is another question altogether. 25 Cf. simulacra divum in this sense at 5.75. 26 Cf. horribile in 3.976, quoted above. Another way to put this is to ask whether belli simulacra is “translated” by Vergil into the frieze images of warfare in Book 2 or in the mimed battle maneuvers of Book 5. Interestingly, the latter turn real; and to
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prove their mimic status, Ascanius hurls down his “empty helmet” before the Dardanian (Trojan) women who have mistaken his maneuvers for the real thing. 27 In technical terms, these last are “accidents” (symptomata). In Lucretius’s Latin, they are eventa; they lack the status of existence that bodies and places have (“so that you may see clearly that all events from first to last do not exist,” 2.478–79), and are less substantial and existent than even void itself (nec ratione cluere eadem qua constet inane, 2.480). 28 I am not denying that Epicureanism attributes reality or truth to appearances. See above, note 22, and Long 135: “Natura is objective reality, but . . . it is not real in the way that atoms, void and atomic compounds are real.” By natura Long means “scientific reality,” “reality as the object of rational understanding.” I am not sure if this is right, but the distinction is intriguing. Rerum natura, if it is meaningful at all, has to include the reality of atoms and void, while science gives us the de. A parallel claim can, however, be made for the experience of reality. 29 And this moreover in Lucretian language: avulsaque saxa. 30 See Hardie 213 n. 143. 31 His bare name occurs in a catalogue/genealogy at Il. 2.822. 32 Plutarch brings out this association of simulacra and Aeneas’s eidoµlon in his attack on Epicureanism in the treatise That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible (Mor. 1105f). As John Henderson points out to me in personal correspondence, the program of the Eclogues is similarly announced in the mode of an annulling and devastating privation: carmina nulla canam (“I shall sing no songs,” Ecl. 1.77), and is followed up immediately by the studium inane of Corydon’s song in the second Eclogue (2.5). 33 “Compared with Achilles, Aeneas is but the shadow of a man”: Denys Page, cited in CHCL 2: 346–48. 34 Pound 44. 35 Significantly, this interpretation reflects Aeneas’s own reading of the situation. Contrast Juno at 10.65–66, the truth of whose statement is belied in the end by its own rhetorical perversion: “Did any god or man compel Aeneas / to take the way of war, to let himself / be used [subegit . . . se inferre] as enemy of King Latinus?” 36 Lacan, “Kant avec Sade,” in Lacan 1971: 2:119–48. 37 See Ziz˚ek 1999: 247–49. 38 On the Kantian subject of the Law and its complications, see Ziz˚ek 1998. For the notion of “interpassive,” see Ziz˚ek 1999. 39 I use the term Kantian here advisedly, mainly because of the tension that seems to exist in Lacan’s references to Kant in the occasional mismatch between Kant’s transcendental ego and the selfless object of the categorical imperative, the duty-bound subject of Kant’s ethics. See further Ziz˚ek 1997: 222–23; and now Zupanc˚ic˚ 2000 (for a more positive reading of Kant’s categorical self). 40 See Zupanc˚ic˚ 2000: 31–32 for an acute analysis of this kind of choice. 41 E.g., “The Subversion of the subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Lacan 1977; cf. Ziz˚ek 1999: 303. Ziz˚ek’s own exemplary critique of postmodern models of self-fashioning clashes with the Lacanian model of ethical selfdetermination. 42 Griffith 319 (though see 318), an article that has not received due notice. 43 The Lucretian echoes are threefold: (1) inanis is rigidly formulaic in Lucretius, half of the time appearing in final position, as here; (2) pascere is a Lucretian touch, used of sight at 2.419 (oculos qui pascere possunt); and (3) Lucretius’s own treatment of the Trojan War comes close to negating it in the course of qualifying its existence: it
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is technically an “accident” (eventum) of places that still are, hence it is not a per se existent (2.465), hovering uncertainly between the polarities of body (a per se existent) and void (per se the opposite of what is) (2.479–81). But my point about Vergil’s devastating gesture stands irrespective of the possible connection to Lucretius’s argument and my (perhaps unorthodox) reading of it. 44 Mark Buchan in personal communication prompted the following reflection on this last possibility: “What if this picture is already of Iliad 5, and thus of a missing Aeneas? Aeneas would then be obsessed with his out-of-place status, his absence from even the earlier epic itself. This could be his answer to the nostalgia for a heroic death in book 1: he was never even a part of that. So he cries.” 45 See Jaså Elsner’s article in this volume. 46 Agamemnon in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, for example, at the moment of death arguably has no perceptual insight of any kind, while his presentation at that very moment is calculated to demonstrate why this lack of insight is precisely required of him and “true to character,” while Agamemnon in the Iliad, by contrast, has blunted, almost idiotic perceptions (an inability to decipher divine signs, raging and blustering to the point of wordlessness) that are equally true to his character there. See Porter 1990: 44 on Aeschylus. 47 See Ziz˚ek 1989: 35, where the joke is used to illustrate “the objective status of belief.” Are not the truths of literary interpretation—which is (as every one knows) highly arbitrary and subjective, vulnerable to change with each new school of reading, and never verifiable in themselves—grounded on this very presupposition, namely, that of the objective nature of subjective belief? The interpreter’s truths are not ever objective but are rather “subjectively objective,” founded ultimately not in the interpreter’s particular subjectivity but in the objectivity of the Other, which is the only guarantee of truth in reading there can be but is also the source of interminable doubt: what does the Other objectively believe? This is not to be confused with the opposite category of the “objectively subjective,” which applies to another range of phenomena (“the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don’t seem that way to you”; see Ziz˚ek 2000: 83): the unconscious quality of fantasy in psychoanalytic terms, or the primary qualities of atoms, such as density, tangibility, and weight, in Epicurean terms, or (say) the inverted truth of Aeneas’s perception of his empty simulacrum on the frieze (namely, that he is in the end correctly identified by it, being no more than a simulacrum). The ambiguity of me (corresponding to either the subject of the enunciation or its object, which is the subject of the statement) embodies this double movement syntactically. 48 The Lucretian color to this register of the Aeneid’s vocabulary, the language of simulacra, has been noted before, most recently by Bowie 61–62, 67, who concentrates, however, and despite his appeal to Lacan (58–59), on the body as image (“sign”), as mirroring the subject, and not as Real, that is to say, as both radically Other and as radically (and unreachably) interior to the subject. 49 But perhaps Aeneas is merely exemplifying a general condition of other Vergilian heroes, all of whom, according to Lukács 40, live out a Schattendasein (shadowy existence). 50 Williams ad loc. 51 Long after writing this, I came across the following “nonsensical” joke told by Freud (1905: 8: 57) and its commentary in Lacan 1978: 273: “‘Never to be born would be the best thing for mortal men.’ ‘But,’ adds the philosophical comment in Fliegende Blätter [a comic weekly], ‘this happens to scarcely one person in a hundred thousand.’” “Pourquoi est-ce de l’esprit? . . . Mieux vaudrait ne pas être né. Bien sûr! .
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. . [Mais] ce qui est ridicule est de le dire, et d’entrer dans l’ordre du calcul des probabilités.” 52 The tradition of punning on Aeneas’s name is old. Cf. Hymn. Hom. Ven. 198–201, where the wordplay is metalinguistic, because it gives an etiology of his name (Aeneas [Aineias]/awful grief [ainos], with subsidiary echoes): tw`/ de; kai; Aijneiva~ o[nom j e[ssetai ou{nekav m j aijno;n / e[scen a[co~ e{neka brotou` ajnevro~ e[mpeson eujnh`/: / ajgcivqeoi de; mavlista kataqnhtw`n ajnqrwvpwn / aijei; ajf j uJmetevrh~ geneh`~ ei\dov~ te fuhvn te (“His name shall be Aeneas, because I felt awful grief in that I laid me in the bed of a mortal man: yet are those of your race always the most like to gods of all mortal men in beauty and in stature” [trans. Evelyn-White]). 53 “You have the power to pluck Aeneas from / the hands of the Achaeans, giving them / the mist and empty winds instead of him [et ventos obtendere inanis] / to change Troy’s ships into as many nymphs.” She adds in the next verse: “‘Aeneas is away and does not know’ [Aeneas ignarus abest] / —indeed, let him be away and not know!” This recalls again the thematic link between Aeneas’s absence and his emptiness. 54 In faciem Aeneae (uisu mirabile monstrum) / Dardaniis ornat telis, clipeumque iubasque diuini adsimulat capitis, dat inania uerba, / dat sine mente sonum gressusque effingit euntis . . . 55 Tum uero Aenean auersum ut cedere Turnus / credidit atque animo spem turbidus hausit inanem: / ‘quo fugis, Aenea? . . .’ 56 Et arma viri thalamo quae fixa reliquit / . . . super exuuias ensemque relictum / effigiemque toro locat haud ignara futuri (4.495–508). 57 Cf. 6.490: ut videre virum fulgentiaque arma per umbras. The cipher “arms and the man” (in fact, a kind of griphos or riddle) gains reality as the poem moves on: the most famous line of the poem, its opening phrase, offers an idealized imaginary reflection, which then becomes progressively freighted, fragmented, and real, with irreality being merely the culmination of this Real. A gruesome variation on the theme is at 11.635: “But in the third encounter all the troops / are tangled up with each another, man to man [virum vir]; / and then indeed the groans of dying ones, / of wounded horses, butchered men [semianimes] rise up; the bodies, weapons mingle in deep blood [armaque corporaque et permixti caede uirorum]; / the fight is brutal.” Here, the words “arms and man” signify their own confusion, which is now that of life and death itself: Vergil brings us to the epic territory of the living dead. It may be accidental that permixta caeda is Lucretian. At Lucretius 5.1313, however, this phrase is used in the most horrifying and vain battle scene in his poem, a vanity that is all the more poignant given that at the end of his account he throws the reality of this entire story into doubt: “If indeed they ever acted thus [si fuit ut facerent]. But scarce can I be brought to believe that . . .” (5.1341–43). Commentators scratch their heads in disbelief here; some wonder if Lucretius was not in fact mad when he set down these last verses (see Bailey ad loc.). But this desperation is unwarranted: Lucretius has abundantly shown how he regards vain contests and struggles as bordering on the unreal. And his gesture is in fact in the tradition of epic poetry at its purest (as with Helen, above)—as are the parallels in Vergil. 58 Cf. Lucretius 3.172–74 on the sequelae of a near-fatal shock of war injury, the “faintness [that] follows, and a pleasant swooning to the ground, and a turmoil of mind . . .” 59 Cf. Lucretius 1.968–83 (in a discussion of the infinity of space in the universe): “Moreover, suppose now that all space were created finite, if one were to run on to the end, to its farthest coasts, and throw a flying dart, would you have it that that dart, hurled with might and main, goes on whither it is sped and flies afar, or do you think
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that something checks and bars its way? . . . For whether there is something to check it and bring it about that it arrives not whither it was sped, nor plants itself in the goal, or whether it fares forward, it set not forth from the end. In this way I will press on, and wherever you shall set the farthest coasts, I shall ask what then becomes of the dart. It will come to pass that nowhere can a bound be set, and room for flight ever prolongs the chance of flight.” 60 Thanks to Eric Downing for pointing out this correspondence to me. 61 See Ziz˚ek 2000b: 669: “‘It is not I, the subject, who is speaking, it is the big Other, the symbolic order itself, that speaks through me, so that I am spoken by it,’ and other similar babble.” Cf. Zupanc˚ic˚ 2000: 40–41. Aeneas fails to make the final move and to acknowledge that he is the effect of a lack of cause in the Other. 62 Thanks go to Mark Buchan, Eric Downing, John Henderson, Sara Rappe, and members of the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Bristol for helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay.
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Seeing and Saying: A Psychoanalytic Account of Ekphrasis jas e l s n e r Ekphrasis, by which I mean the description of works of art,1 has many forms in antiquity. It would be too simple to bracket the kind of ekphrastic display oratory that survives from the pens of Lucian, Philostratus, and Libanius with the poetic descriptions of art that appear within long poems (most famously in the Iliad and Aeneid but also in Catullus 64, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Silius Italicus), or as the principal subjects of short poems and epigrams (from Theocritus and Posidippus to Ausonius), or as vivid visual insets or proems within prose novels. Rather, my specific focus here, in trying to theorize some of the psychodynamics of ekphrasis, will be on its rhetorical forms, as prescribed in the so-called progymnasmata (trainee-orators’ handbooks), and as exemplified above all in the Imagines of Philostratus the Elder.2 Ekphrasis, I submit, works simultaneously along two axes: the visual axis of a viewer, an object, and the speech generated (which is a kind of record of a view); and the verbal axis of a speaker, an audience, and the speech that communicates between them. The speech— the ekphrasis itself—thus fulfils two roles at once: it mediates the spectator’s view of the object in verbal terms and enacts a dialogue between the speaker and the listener. The speech is a twofold attempt to establish a relationship: on the one hand between viewer and object, on the other between speaker and hearer. In each case, the object and the hearer are Other from the viewpoint of the speaker/spectator’s subjectivity; the speech is the means—whether controlled, paranoid, alienated, or self-deluding—to create a bridge over the gap between self and Other. But since the two processes are always simultaneous and often in conflict, the resulting speech is frequently an occlusion of one of these Others, even when it may most explicitly profess to expose or celebrate that Other in its verbal performance.
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The ancient rhetorical handbooks, each of which effectively rewrites and largely repeats its predecessors,3 make two crucial points about ekphrasis. First, it is a descriptive account (the Greek is perihghmatikov~, which literally means “guiding the listener around the subject”). Second, its key feature is enargeia, the quality of bringing what is described vividly before the eyes of the listener.4 In the words of Hermogenes, “The virtues of ekphrasis are clarity [safhvneia] and visibility [ejnavrgeia]; for the style must through hearing operate to bring about seeing” (Prog. 49). For my purposes here, it is worth remarking that this emphasis lends a certain psychoanalytical resonance to the practice of ancient ekphrasis, for it deals with the deliberate manipulation of both the speaker’s and the listeners’ imagination and desire. Ekphrasis always operates in the realm of the imaginary, the realm where sublimation and transference are most forcefully located.
A Freudian Model for Ekphrasis In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,5 Sigmund Freud proposes a brilliant structural model for the way tendentious jokes, that is, jokes that serve an aim beyond simply raising a laugh (132), work both in terms of their speaker’s intention and as a social process. Freud argues (140–46) that obscene jokes (or smut) function according to a triangular pattern in which the speaker (archetypically male) directs smutty talk about a second person (female) to a third person (again male): Generally speaking, a tendentious joke calls for three people: in addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled. (143) In Freud’s model, the joker has a libidinal impulse towards the woman who is the object of his joke. Her resistance to his advances occasions a hostility that emerges as a joke directed towards the third person, the listener, whom he summons as an ally. As a result, “Through the first person’s smutty speech, the woman is exposed before the third, who, as listener, has not been bribed by the effortless satisfaction of his own libido” (143–44). Yet the exposure of the woman is simultaneously her occlusion; she is the object of a conversation between two men but never an active subject in her own right.
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At the same time, although she does not speak, Freud’s construction is dependent on the woman having an effect on the men—an agency that might be said to be complicit in the words spoken about and inspired by her: “The woman who is thought of as having been present in the initial situation is afterwards retained as though she were still present, or in her absence her influence still has an intimidating effect on the men” (145). Like the ekphrastic object—absent as material form from the rhetorical discourse, but present both as “influence” and as “intimidating effect”—the woman inspires words that seem symptomatic of unease and alienation as much as they are attempts to control the other. Whatever the merits of this analysis for the subject of Freud’s discussion, it is directly pertinent to the psychodynamics of rhetorical ekphrasis.6 Here—as in Lucian’s De domo (second half of the second century c.e.) or the Imagines of Philostratus (first third of the third century c.e.)—the ekphrasist is a speaker (Freud’s first person) who directs his virtuoso verbal display to an audience. Admittedly, the ancient texts already complicate the model, since the audience is both one implied in the text (a set of listeners to an oral performance) and the person reading the text (or hearing it declaimed as the record of a previous performance). Yet all these listeners, with different nuances, correspond to Freud’s third person. Instead of the second person—the woman in the Freudian model—we have in ekphrasis a work of art. Like the woman in Freud, ekphrasis is silent and rapidly absent, replaced in the texts that survive by the flowing cascades of rhetorical discourse that simultaneously expose and elide the real object beneath a flood of verbal appropriations designed to bring speaker and listener together. The feminizing of the object of ekphrasis was never more brilliantly caught than in Lucian’s Imagines (c. 170 c.e.).7 There, the first speaker, Lycinus, after seeing a sublimely beautiful woman, professes himself almost turned to stone, that is, to becoming himself a work of art (Imag. 1). Unable to name or adequately describe this gorgeous creature, he offers the listener (Polystratus in the text, but also Lucian’s reader) a spectacular account of her by presenting his own ekphrases of selected portions of the most famous statues of women by the most famous artists of old. His aim is explicitly to use these descriptions “to model a statue of the woman” (Imag. 3). The result is both her exposure and a double effacement. First, the woman
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described fails to figure as herself; instead, she can only manifest as a patchwork of canonical sculptures (the head of Praxiteles’ Cnidian Aphrodite, the cheeks and forehead from Alcamenes’ Athenian Aphrodite in the Gardens, the nose from Phidias’s Lemnian Athena, and so forth). Second, the objects—chosen to perform the ekphrastic role of expressing the oxymoron of a perfect canonical beauty and yet at the same time an individuality—are themselves dismembered. As part-objects, like the gaze itself in Jacques Lacan’s celebrated analysis (which is described as a stain, or blur, or blind spot in the visual field8), these dismembered references to bits of famous statues are points at which vision both coheres (in the new image of the woman constructed from fragments) and falls apart (in the old sculptures rhetorically broken up to create Lucian’s description).9 Of course, the joke is that Polystratus recognizes the real person from this orgy of idealization (Imag. 10) as the emperor’s mistress Panthea, and then proceeds to turn the tables on Lycinus by becoming himself the speaker and Lycinus the listener in an account of the wonderful qualities of Panthea’s soul beyond those of her body (Imag. 11f.). This description is also conducted as an effacement of the actual woman, this time buried beneath a pile of mythical exempla.10 One might argue that Lucian’s use of these processes of fictive effacement is itself a way of getting at the real woman by way of illusions: truth here is structured as fiction.11 Alternatively, to take a highly Lacanian reading of Woman, one might argue that truth is inaccessible here: the only existence (or nonexistence) of Panthea lies in an endless realm of the symbolic.12 What complicates further the structural dynamic so well analyzed by Freud is the fact that behind both speakers stands an author of uncertain relation with either (in the shape of Lucian) and with extratextual listeners (in the shape of all Lucian’s readers from antiquity to the present day). Moreover, what is supremely “tendentious” (in Freud’s terminology) about this speech is that it is designed in part to flatter Panthea with its ekphrastic form serving a panegyrical purpose. The effaced woman whose identity can only be expressed through idealizing artistic and mythical clichés has no choice but to be flattered by all this verbalization of the visual. One might say that although she may be no more than the construct of all this rhetoric, Panthea is always conceived as its witness. Whereas for Freud it is the third person or interlocutor who acts as witness (though the absent woman nonetheless exercises an intimi-
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dating effect on the relations of speaker and listener), in Lucian the woman described in the text’s debate between Lycinus and Polystratus is envisaged as its extratextual witness, flattered by Lucian’s elegant report of the discussion. The problem of occlusion and exposure—central not only to Freud’s psychodynamic model, but also to the relations of ekphrasis with the art it proposes (or purports) to describe—is key to Lucian’s De domo.13 Here two unnamed speakers compete, shifting roles not only between Freud’s first and third persons but also, as third persons, between the personas of enemy and ally. The contest turns in part on the issue of whether the beauty of the hall (the actual object about which the rivalry of ekphrastic performances will focus) is a benefit or a liability for ekphrasis (Dom. 14–15). The first speaker is stirred to eloquence by the hall (Dom. 1–4): To me, at least, it seems that a splendid hall excites the speaker’s fancy and stirs it to speak, as if he were somehow prompted by what he sees. No doubt something of beauty flows through the eyes into the soul, and then fashions into the likeness of itself the words that it sends out. (Dom. 4)
Of course, in this presentation of the speaker’s passivity, it is the object itself that seems to produce, and thus to signal the failure of, the subject’s words, in that they are not his but have been fashioned by the hall. The issue of effacement seems here to revert from the object described to the subjectivity of the speaker describing it. “Who would not want to outdo himself in speaking about beautiful things,” cries the first speaker, “aware that it is highly disgraceful not to be a match for what one sees?” (Dom. 10). He also expresses the hope that the listener too, “committing to memory all that one says,” will be “an appreciative hearer,” not only “applauding the speaker but gratefully repeating his phrases” (3). For the first speaker, then, ekphrasis is a case of exposing the hall, or, to use his own feminizing vocabulary, of adorning the already beautiful woman with the jewels of his words (7–8). The second speaker makes the opposite case: a beautiful object “dazzles and frightens him, disturbs his thought” (17): “Is not then a hall so beautiful and admirable a dangerous adversary to a speaker?” (21). His words not only fall short of a beautiful work of art like the hall, but they are simply irrelevant, even a detriment before the sight of beauty (as jewelry is a detriment
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to the good looks of a truly beautiful woman [15–16]). Ultimately, we are told, the only way to respond to what the speaker calls “word-painting” (21) is to reject the object—“to close your eyes and listen to what he says” (32). This very occlusion is presented at the dialogue’s climax in the Freudian terms of constructing an alliance between speaker and audience. The second speaker’s peroration is an urge to the audience to support, rather than dislike, his opponent and to abandon their role as judges or jury in order to become participants (sunagwnistai`~) in the competition to do the hall justice in words (31). In terms of Freud’s analysis, the enactment of friendship or hostility towards the object of ekphrasis (that is, between the speaker and the second person) is an inevitable result of the libidinal drive that leads the speaker to make his speech. Insofar as the object is resistant (as all objects inevitably are), it will act always on some level as adversary to the speaker’s attempt to frame it verbally. Of course, here the Freudian model is at best partial: the very competitive frame in which rhetorical displays were conducted in antiquity, and in which both these dialogues of Lucian are cast, is itself an incitement to see contestation everywhere, even in the inanimate objects that an orator might wish to describe.14 The cleverness of the ending of De domo is that it reverses the model of contestation that was suddenly and surprisingly introduced into the piece (along with the second speaker at Dom. 14) when the audience was characterized as jury (14, 15, 21, 32) or judge (32) and witnesses summoned (20). Only at the end do the two speakers and the audience turn out to be collaborators in the great project of letting the hall (always the silent second person) do the talking. What I hope this brief account has established is that Freud’s structure of triangulation—a speaker, a listener, and an object—in which the speech that passes between speaker and listener purports to expose the object but contrives nonetheless to repress it, is an excellent model for ekphrasis. In this model, ekphrasis is “tendentious,” that is, it serves as an excuse for something else. The range of possible functions to which it may be put is vast. As we have seen, Lucian’s Imagines offers a panegyric intent or purpose,15 while the De domo gives an agonistic aim as well as turning out to be about the ultimate collaboration of opponents in the exercise of ekphrastic praise. Philostratus’s Imagines at least explicitly proclaims a pedagogic function:
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We propose to describe examples of paintings in the form of addresses which we have composed for the young, that by this means they may learn to interpret paintings and to appreciate what is esteemed in them. (Imag. 1.praef.4) In all these examples, however, what matters is that the actual objects are replaced by their descriptions (as Freud’s second person is replaced by the tendentious joke or smutty speech that objectifies her). Moreover, the speech itself (like Freud’s jokes) has a function quite other than being simply an elegant or satisfying example of the topos being attempted. Rather, it is designed to bring together (ally in Freud’s terms) the speaker and listener (the first and third persons) in a structure of relationship defined by their mutual exclusion of the object described (the second person). The work of art that was (apparently) their initial joint (or even competing) object of desire is blanked out by the words that replace it, and those very words are themselves relevant only as a means of unifying two subjectivities (speaker and listener) at the expense of the third element in this triangulation, the feminized object.16 The Freudian model beautifully encapsulates the structural dynamics of listener and speaker, emphasizing their collusion in the object’s verbal erasure. It describes well (is a long ekphrasis for, one might say) the attempt of two subjectivities to find a common world in which to inhabit. For Freud, this “alliance” plugs into his key theme, namely, the ways jokes may reveal something of the unconscious and hence open possibilities in communication. In Philostratus, there is a constant appeal to a shared commonsense world, which is usually defined by the first-person plural, that is, a world shared between you and me:17 “The hand itself . . . is relaxed and limp, as is usual at the beginning of slumber, when sleep gently invites us and the mind passes over into forgetfulness of its thoughts” (Imag. 1.2.2). So, for example, in this excerpt from the description of “Comus,” a motif integral to painting’s world is transferred into a common experience, recognized, and shared not only by Philostratus and his internal audience but also by external readers of the text. The crucial moves in this case are the allusion to what is usual (that is, beyond the specific construct of the painting) and then to the first-person plural, so that a discrete visual motif, particular and perhaps unique to a specific painting, becomes verbally generalized to a normal and unremarkable situation that we have all experienced.
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A Lacanian Model for Viewing Lacan’s Seminar XI, given in 1964 and only published in 1973,18 is a response not only to Freud (especially his Interpretation of Dreams) but also (within the French intellectual tradition) to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.19 Here Lacan is interested in how the creation of independent subjectivity is located in a world where one not only looks out, but is also constantly looked at. In this sense the gaze is a condition of existence, a way of being that preexists whoever happens to be looking and imagining that s/he owns what s/he looks at: “We are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world. That which makes us consciousness institutes us by the same token as speculum mundi” (72). However, the gazes of the individual (looking out at the world) and of the world (looking in onto him or her) are not the same: “I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides” (72). This dynamic has numerous repercussions. First, Lacan argues that while we may appear to own the object of our gaze (“according to the bipolar reflexive relation by which, as soon as I perceive, my representations belong to me” [81]), in fact, “In the scopic relation, the object on which depends the phantasy from which the subject is suspended is an essential vacillation of the gaze” (83). That is, the gaze itself comes to construct both the objectivity of the object and the subjectivity of the subject, both of which exist as poles at either end of the gazing process. The gaze itself, however, becomes an object, something encountered by the viewer in the world outside but in part the result of his or her own transference:20 “The gaze I encounter . . . is not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other” (84). This autonomy of the gaze, with its own field of desire (85, 115, 182–83), leads in the rhetorical structure of Lacan’s account to the famous and disturbing story of the sardine can:21 It’s a true story. I was in my early twenties or thereabouts—and at that time, of course, being a young intellectual, I wanted desperately to get away, see something different, throw myself into something practical, something physical, in the country say, or at the sea. One day, I was on a small boat, with a few people from a family of fishermen in a small port. At that time, Britanny was not industrialized as it is now. There were no trawlers. The fisherman went out in his frail craft at his own risk. It was this risk, this danger, that I loved to share. But it wasn’t all
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danger and excitement—there were also fine days. One day, then, as we were waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, an individual known as Petit-Jean, that’s what we called him . . . pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry which we in fact were supposed to supply. It glittered in the sun. And Petit-Jean said to me—You see that can? Do you see it? Well it doesn’t see you! (95)22
While Petit-Jean finds the incident amusing, Lacan is deeply disturbed. “If what Petit-Jean had said to me, namely that the can did not see me, had any meaning, it was because in a sense it was looking at me all the same. It was looking at me at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated” (95). For Lacan, “that which is light looks at me, and by means of that light, in the depths of my eye, something is painted” (96). Not only is the subject’s sense of control effaced as he is objectified by being the object of the light’s gaze and his action in seeing only facilitated by means of that light, but the whole process “with all its variability and ambiguity, is in no way mastered by me” (96). This loss of control or autonomy over (what one may falsely imagine to be) one’s own gaze may be phrased differently: “No doubt, in the depths of my eye, the picture is painted. The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I am not in the picture” (96). But the key point is that the subject is radically disempowered even on the most fundamental field of asserting his or her own identity—that of the gaze of one’s eyes as one confronts the world. The result is that “in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture” (106). And this has fundamental ramifications for identity: “What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze outside. It is through the gaze that I enter into light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects” (106). Subjectivity thus lives as “a fracture, a partition, a splitting of the being to which the being accommodates itself, even in the natural world” (106). In the specific context of the relation of viewer and object (which is my focus here), this tremendous (dare one say “paranoid”?23) complexity of viewer, object, and gaze opens up a fundamental gap between subject and object: From the outset we see, in the dialectic of the eye and the gaze, that there is no coincidence, but, on the contrary, a lure. When, in love, I
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solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that—you never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see. (102; original emphases)
The process of the gaze is thus one of desire,24 of the phantasized object (the object in the viewer’s mind) always eliding the real object (the one out there the viewer thought he was attempting to see), and of desire endlessly failing as the two objects—the imagined that is never commensurate with the Real, is never accessible—fail to coincide (115, 182–83). As Lacan reiterates, “What one looks at is what cannot be seen” (182). These reflections are highly pertinent to the dynamics of rhetorical ekphrasis. First, the orator is himself always on a stage, under the gaze of an audience. However much he presents himself as in control of his discourse, he also is always objectified as the focus of multiple gazes to which his speech responds.25 This leads to minute instructions on the orator’s deportment in such rhetorical manuals as Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, where the subject takes up most of 11.3.1–184. The more a published speech pretends to function in the absence of such an audience, the more it serves to construct the orator as feminized object—his satisfaction being (to quote Lacan) “the satisfaction of a woman who knows that she is being looked at, on condition that one does not show her that one knows she knows . . .” (72). Of course, the nature of ekphrasis as always a spoken or written record of a viewing means that it can never be a “pure” demonstration of the Lacanian gaze. The very process of rhetorizing adds a “tendentious” dimension of the sort examined by Freud and complicates the speaker/viewer’s relations with the viewed object in that there is also an indirect object of his speech (a listener). So in reading ekphrases, it is necessary to be aware of both the Freudian axis of a speech about an object directed at an Other, and the Lacanian axis of a gaze directed by a subject towards an object. As we have seen, it is axiomatic of the genre of rhetorical ekphrasis that the viewing/speaking subject is himself the object of multiple gazes. But as the sophist speaks, so the object of his ekphrasis (that is, also of his gaze) has a tendency to change in the flow of the sophist’s discourse.26 The closer the speaker comes to bringing what he sees to the mind’s eye of his listeners, the further he may be from the object he looks at (which Lacan’s analysis denies he can ever “see”).
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The picture of the “Bosphorus,” for instance, in Philostratus the Elder’s Imagines 1.12–13—already complex since it is an ekphrasis of a landscape (itself a traditional descriptive theme) masquerading as a painting—develops through various narratives, including one of a woman in a lookout tower gazing over the sea as her lovers approach in boats (1.12.4), and apparently ends with a temple (at 1.12.5). At this point the boy interrupts: “Why don’t you go on to another painting? This one of the Bosphorus has been studied enough for me” (1.13.6). Instead of moving on, Philostratus resumes, taking in further stories of fish and fishermen, as if the painting’s subject is always changing. At 1.13.9, the speaker urges: Now gaze [blevpe] at the painting and you will see [katovyei] just this going on. The lookout [skopiwrov~] gazes [blevpei] at the sea and turns his eyes in one direction and another to get the number; and in the bright gleam of the sea the colors [crwvmata] of the fish vary, those near the surface seem to be black, those lower still begin to elude the sense of sight [th;n o[y in], then they seem shadowy, and finally they look just like the water; for as the vision [hJ o[y i~] penetrates deeper and deeper into the water, its power of discerning objects is blunted.
As the description finds itself unable to discover a clear and single subject to the picture—that is to say, as the picture defies a single interpretative viewing—so the gaze, desirous to look out and penetrate the image, becomes itself the subject of the description.27 As the viewer must gaze, so the lookout gazes (just as the woman surrounded by lovers gazed earlier); and as the speaker’s gaze fails to catch his subject, so the lookout’s gaze fails to penetrate the water. The more one looks, the less one seems to see. The reference to “colors” and their changing hints brilliantly at the double complexity here: our gaze is blunted not just by the resistance of the visual but by its very rhetorical reframing as ekphrasis (“colors” being a technical term of rhetoric). The account ends by spectacularly reversing the thematics of the defeated gaze: A shout rises from the fishermen now that the fish are already in the net. Some they have caught, some they are catching. And at a loss [ajmhcanou`nte~] what to do with so many they even open the net and let some of the fish swim away and escape; so proud are they of their catch. (Imag. 1.13.10)
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Instead of defeat and the failure to grasp what one is trying to see, we have a formulation that turns them into success. There is so much to see, to catch, that the fishermen may be proud of the process; and the feeling of being “at a loss” is presented as the inability to cope with overwhelming plenitude. The fish that the lookout failed to see become those that got away by the fishermen’s willingness and generosity. This rhetorical tour de force in reversing failure may work as pictorial description; but can it succeed in conning the viewer (and Philostratus’s restless listener who already announced his keenness to move on from this image) that the defeated gaze of the lookout (whose looking is defined by the same word, blevpein, as our gazing) is not a figure for the gaze of the orator and his audience? Are the fish that escape the catch not those that the viewers’ gaze failed to penetrate and Philostratus failed to find words for in the Lacanian gap between the image out there and the one imagined in his fertile mind? In so many ekphrases in the Philostrati, the gaze itself appears to become the subject of the description, taking on its Lacanian form as an object (or, more correctly, a part-object) in its own right. One thinks, for instance, of Olympus and Narcissus, both looking at themselves in pools at 1.21 and 1.23, or of Pasiphaë gazing in helpless desire at the bull while it gazes at a cow at 1.16.4.28 Or take, for example, an ekphrasis by Philostratus the Younger, who professes himself the grandson of his elder namesake.29 In his “Heracles in Swaddling Clothes” (Imag. 5), he opens with a direct address to the depicted hero: You are playing, Heracles, playing, and already laughing at your labor, though you are still in swaddling clothes; and taking the serpents sent by Hera one in each hand you pay no heed to your mother, who stands near by crazed with fear . . . (5.1)
The orator’s address to the picture30—of course a cover for his actual address to an implied listener31—sets up the scene, shifting between “objective” description of the image’s content (the infant Heracles strangling the serpents) and highly interpretative “reading in” (the mother “crazed with fear”). The death of the snakes is then described at some length with the specific comment that “their eyes have no vision in them” (5.1). Shifting to the mother, Philostratus writes: Alcmene, if one looks carefully [ajnaskopou`nti] at her face, seems to be recovering from her first fright, but she now distrusts what she really
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sees [ajpistei` de; nu`n oi|~ h[dh oJra`/], and her fright has not permitted her to remain in bed even though she has lately given birth to a child. For doubtless you see [oJra`/~] how leaping from her bed, unsandaled and only in her shift, with disordered hair, and throwing out her arms she utters a shout . . . (5.2)
Here we have a complex of gazes. After the dying gaze of the serpents, the careful, analytic gaze of the extrapictorial observer betrays how Alcmene cannot trust her gaze. This is further complicated by the arrival of Amphitryon, sword drawn and ready to defend his family: His hand is still ready to act, but the thoughtfulness revealed by his eyes [hJ tw`n ojfqalmw`n e[nnoia] sets a curb to his hand, since he finds no danger to ward off, and he sees [oJrw`nto~] that the situation before him needs the insight of an oracle to interpret it. (5.3)
That oracle arrives in the shape of the blind Teiresias “divinely inspired and breathing out prophecies” (5.4). The gazes in the picture—the serpents’ dying gaze, Alcmene’s emotional gaze of distrust (where she disbelieves the good news she sees), Amphitryon’s gaze of common sense but also his (visual) appeal to oracular proof, Teiresias’s lack of gaze but demonstration of insight— reverberate against the gazes outside it, the viewer’s twice-evoked gaze of spectatorship (the careful examination of Alcmene’s face, the visual noting that she is distraught). Are we to emulate Alcmene (and not believe what we see) or Amphitryon? Are we to decide the picture is as we see it, that is, as it has been described (what I have called Amphitryon’s “common sense”), or should we turn to the emotional drama of maternal panic, or do we need to appeal to a higher power (the oracular insight)? Just as the picture shifts between triumphant and tragic, depending on one’s point of view, so we who stand outside are challenged with uncertainty about the position to adopt. As the objectivity of the object under the ekphrastic gaze refracts into a range of possible interpretations, so the subjectivity of the subject (the implied viewer, addressed as “you,” as Heracles is addressed) is itself potentially undermined. Heracles himself, the hero of the painting, is its only named character effectively without a gaze, casting the central figure into a kind of occlusion in a description whose entire dynamic revolves around the problems of seeing. The gaze itself is not the object of this description nor of the paint-
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ing purportedly described; rather, it is the theme that constantly intrudes, what in Lacanian terminology is a spot or stain in the visual field. It is around the gaze that the subjectivity of the picture’s viewer and the subject of the picture’s visual narrative and material substance come to cohere and yet to fall apart. The gaze in this description (and elsewhere in the Philostrati) is the point of resistance against which sense gets made and unmade, against which the picture (at least in its descriptive form) offers a mirror to, and an image of, the viewer’s (construction of) subjectivity itself.32 It is worth noting that all this is cast in someone else’s discourse. The younger Philostratus not only is explicitly dependent on his grandfather (Imag. Praef.2), but he quotes him explicitly several times.33 The Heraclean theme is itself a reworking with variations of the Heraclean subject matter of the elder Philostratus’s Imagines 2.20–25, where snakes and madness are among the subjects. Even the description’s final image—“Night, the time in which these events take place, represented in human form” (5.5)—appears to be a deliberate variation from the elder Philostratus’s Imagines 1.2.1 (“The time is supposed to be at night. Yet night is not represented as a person, but rather it is suggested by what is going on . . .”). It is as if the orator’s anxiety of influence is translated as a Lacanian paranoia about the gaze of his grandfather—descending upon him, determining his choices and omissions, defining him as being watched even as he devises a listener who does not exist except as the figment of his own phantasy. Unlike the elder Philostratus, the younger presents himself not as a real speaker before a real audience but as a follower in his grandfather’s footsteps (Imag. Praef.2), whose interlocutor is an imaginary audience: “Let it be assumed that there is a person present to whom the details are to be described, that thus the discussion itself may have its proper form” (Imag. Praef.7). Yet this attempt to control the audience collapses in the way that the younger Philostratus is not only controlled by the model of his grandfather’s texts, but also draws attention to that ancestral manipulation. Both the notion of an assumed audience and the ritualized nature of performance as an ekphrastic genre point to the placing of the gaze, and the subjectivity it implies, in the realm of ideology.34 The loss of authorial (or viewing) autonomy is paramount in the implicit threat that the viewer may himself be subject to the gazes of the picture. Since the “you” that addresses “Heracles” is no different
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grammatically or discursively from the “you” that addresses the imaginary interlocutor, one might ask whether the “crazed fear” and the visual distrust are not really in the speaker’s mind. Once the picture’s internal world is as much a matter of competing gazes as is the imaginary world constructed by the writer for turning his text into a speech directed at a (nonexistent) listener, we may wonder where the limits of the gaze (real, imagined, sublimated, or the product of transference) may legitimately lie. Again, this plays with a theme deep in the work of the elder Philostratus, and never better articulated than in his “Narcissus” (1.23) where we can never be sure whether the painting’s subject matter—a boy entranced with his own image—is not in fact a picture of us as viewers.35 Philostratus’s “Narcissus,” even more than his grandson’s “Heracles,” not only raises the worrying Lacanian possibility that “I am a picture” (Lacan 106) but even more worryingly threatens to deny Lacan’s assertion that “I am not in the picture” (96). Inevitably, ekphrastic viewing, by addressing the painting and finding that the painting has ways of looking out at us, may find its interpreters lost in the imaginary world they describe and unable to legislate for the boundaries between the visual field of art and the safeties of “reality.”
Between Freud and Lacan: The Workings of Ekphrasis In the brilliant “Hunters” description from Book 1 of the elder Philostratus (Imag. 1.28), the sophist begins by describing a boar hunt, only to perceive that the apparent pursuit is a sublimation for “hunting the beauty of yonder youth” (1.28.1).36 His strategy at the opening is, like his grandson’s in the “Heracles,” to address the picture’s characters directly: “Do not rush past us, you hunters, nor urge on your steeds till we can track down what your purpose is and what the game is you are hunting” (1.28.1). The line between pictured world and viewers’ “reality” is broken down not only by the second-person plural dialogue with the painting, but also by the game (not least a verbal pun) of the viewer tracking down the hunters’ real quarry. Yet even as the elaborate psychology of this painting as metaphor for sexuality expands into an analysis of desire, the speaker jumps back, as it were, from the picture plane: How I have been deceived! I was deluded by the painting into thinking that the figures were not painted but were real beings, moving and lov-
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ing—at any rate I shout at them as though they could hear and I imagine that I hear some response—and you did not utter a single word to turn me back from my mistake, being as much overcome as I was. . . . (1.28.2)
Having established “it really is a painting before which we stand” (1.28.2), and having implicated his audience (also addressed in the second person, but this time in the singular form for the boy to whom Philostratus generally speaks) in “the deception and stupefaction” by which we identify with the depicted figures and phantasize about their lives as if they were like ours (1.28.2), he returns to the double narrative of the two hunts, the pursuit of boar and boy (1.28.3–7). The renewed description, after this firm assertion that paint is just paint, is no less psychological than its predecessor, with the beloved lad constantly spotlit in the midst of his hunting companions/sexual pursuers.37 This time, however, the orator stands back just enough not to address the picture itself, but to describe it in the third person. The erotics of the chase is itself a cover for the erotics of Philostratus’s own performance, which not only spotlights an addressee (“the son of my host, quite a young boy, about ten years old”) within a broader audience of “young men” (1.praef.4–5), but then uses this structure repeatedly within individual descriptions.38 On the level of viewing, the moves in such a complex ekphrasis play knowingly with the kinds of dynamic expressed much more theoretically by Lacan. The elements of the picture, which Philostratus differentiates, are several. There is the painted picture surface, with its pigments explicitly described: “These pigments, it is said, the barbarians living by Oceanus compound of red-hot bronze, and they combine, and grow hard, and preserve what is painted with them” (1.28.3). There is the content of the picture: a boar hunt, whose necessarily static form as art is here transformed (and this is typical of ekphrasis39) into a narrative of action where the boar is tearing up fig trees and apple trees at 1.28.1, is overcome by missiles and wounded in the thigh, and finally killed “just where the shoulder blade joins the neck” before the dogs drag it to the ground (all this at 1.28.7). There is, finally, the interpretative narrative of homosexual desire, interwoven into the story of the hunt, which may be within the picture, may be a matter of the sophist’s own collusive imaginings with his audience, and may be the speaker’s own patter of seduction to win the boy he is “educating.”
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By the time Philostratus has viewed the picture and turned it into a bravura speech, none of these elements have remained as they “really” were. The pigments (and the word crwvmata again has a double meaning as representing also the “colors” of rhetoric) are given a mythic context (a narrative of their own), combined with barbarian color. This exotic geography of color continues through the description with scarlet defined as “Median” and purple as “Phoenician” (1.28.4)—a leitmotif that merges into the ethnic epithets of the hunting dogs as “Locrian, Laconian, Indian, and Cretan” (at 1.28.5). The story of the hunt—whatever was actually depicted in the real picture (if ever there was one!)—moves not only diachronically toward the boar-killing, but pauses with a hymn to Artemis and a prayer at her temple (1.28.6) and is interspliced, like a film, with the parallel narrative of chasing the boy and ogling his beauty. In the swiftness of this action, we cannot tell what is objectively there in the picture and what is purely in the orator’s imagination. Indeed, the gush of phantasy seems designed to elide the gap between the subject looking out and the visual object of which he must make some sense. In the wonderful moment of self-consciousness, when the speaker finds the picture surface denying his phantasy of a narrative that could control its action, these various levels clearly fail to interact. What the sophist looks at, on the level of pigment, is not what he wishes to see, on the level of desire. Yet, even though he knows that all the responses that he hears from within the painting are ones he imagines (1.28.2), nonetheless the speaker continues his speech, pursuing his phantasy of a transference that sees the commonsense world, which we all know and acknowledge, played out in the lad’s shame of exposure, his winsome smile (“conscious of the fact that he is beloved,” 1.28.4), and the lovers’ rivalries in shouting (1.28.7). This collapsing (after 1.28.3) of the different elements of picture surface, content, and interpretation (which had previously been explicitly separated at 1.28.2) finds a spectacular culmination in the closing image of the boy as if he were a picture. This image is more than just an attempt to resist the Lacanian denial of seeing the object being looked at. It is a conscious wish-fulfillment phantasy whereby ekphrastic narrative includes in its own content an image of what it is itself trying to do. Where the discourse had attempted (and failed, yet at the same time partly succeeded) to dismantle the pictorial reality of a painting into its underlying psychological meanings, so it ends up
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by translating the desires it has analyzed as governing the painting’s structure into the image of a picture being viewed. The painting ceases to be anything like it might “really” have been, as the verbal flow inserts into it not only a progressive narrative of hunting and killing but also a heroic account of the beloved as boar-slayer and an intensifying process of suppressed sexual passion where the excitement of the lovers causes them to shout and at least one of them to fall off his horse (1.28.7). They end up surrounding their beloved “as though he were a picture,”40 just as the audience of Philostratus surround the painting he is describing (in which all this is happening) and as we who read (or hear) this ekphrasis may be said to surround its speaker. On the level of ekphrasis (that is, as a speech directed by a speaker to a listener), the description is certainly “tendentious” in Freud’s terms. Whether its aim is to educate the young to interpret paintings (as claimed by Philostratus, Imag. 1.praef.3) or to create the conditions for pederastic seduction (as brilliantly portrayed by Petronius41), the speech certainly tends beyond itself. Whatever the purported painting looked like, it has undoubtedly been as much occluded as exposed, as much suppressed as made explicit, in a dialogue that has more to do with the speaker’s dramatizations of his own failure and success to penetrate the painted surface than it has to do with giving the picture a descriptive space. As we have seen, the picture’s dynamic of pretty boy and hunters forms a homology for the frame of the Imagines as a whole, with its dynamic of a boy amidst the youths. Both these groups—the depicted one and the one represented in discourse as being the recipient of discourse—are in fact actively addressed by Philostratus in the first two sections of the description. In Freudian terms, one might argue that the painting has been entirely occluded so as to turn into a cipher for the speaker’s relations with his audience. The purpose of this cipher, of the picture as ekphrasis, is presumably revealed in the erotic subject matter of the painting. Like Eumolpus’s tale of the Pergamene boy in the Satyricon of Petronius, the aim is to seduce. A homology is enacted in other descriptions; for example, that of Aesop (1.3). Aesop himself performs the role of Philostratus (as sovfo~, 1.3.2) and his fables surround him with the fox as “leader of the chorus” (1.3.2) in the roles of the youths and the boy.42 Here the purpose is explicitly pedagogic:
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through the fables, “children may learn the business of life” (1.3.1). But as Eumolpus proves with wicked distinction, the pedagogue is always a potential cover for the pederast.43 But this dynamic also has significant Lacanian resonances. If we regard the real object viewed by Philostratus as the boy he is addressing amidst his circle of young men (and not the paintings he is discussing), then ekphrasis itself, as it generates desire by means of the pictures described in the Imagines, has the function of the object that causes desire, what Lacan terms the objet petit a.44 This “algebraic” term in his system is hardly easy to grasp, but it is conceived in several terms that place it close to some aspects of ekphrasis, at least as performed by the sophists of the second and early third centuries c.e. Lacan argues that language is itself driven by an excess of jouissance (enjoyment), and that the drive for this pleasure revolves around the objet a.45 The excess of Philostratean ekphrasis, reveling in a rhetoric that numerous critics have dismissed as purely rhetorical and irrelevant to the pictures actually described,46 is certainly not gratuitous. On the contrary, the ekphrases follow the form they take precisely to allow the subjects within their frame (speaker, listeners, and readers) to derive pleasure (jouissance).47 The objet petit a is for Lacan not the object of desire (which in Philostratus would be the boy and the youths to whom he speaks, or the works of art themselves in an estheticist and antierotic reading) but the object-causing-desire. That is, the objet a appears as the very ekphrases that both generate the audience’s desire to keep listening and the orator’s desire to keep speaking, as well as his deeper pederastic/pedagogic designs.48 Moreover, the objet petit a is the object of the Other’s desire;49 that is, for the speaker in ekphrasis, his speech is an attempt to service and fulfill the listeners’ desire for knowing the painting.50 The ekphrases keep the dynamic of desire flowing and yet, simultaneously, demonstrate its failure and its lack. The more the speaker performs his speeches, the less can they be said to have succeeded in their aim: he has not seduced the boy in his act of constant seducing; as long as education proceeds, the boy cannot be said to have been educated. There is indeed a certain pleasure in the very failure: whenever the gaze (or its rhetorization) fails, Philostratus finds a way (as we have seen) to keep the fires of desire burning. Effectively, his ekphrases not only cause desire but cover over the void created by this desire’s persistent lack of fulfillment. In needing to cover that
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void (what Lacan sometimes calls the gap or the lack), the ekphrastic impulse constantly reveals it. Not only does the speaker never get the boy, but we (as readers) never get closer to the images described than the excessive verbiage of their description.51 Just as the descriptions whet the appetite—communicating an innuendo or an education to the boy (in the tendentious Freudian reading) and arousing the desire to see the real painting (in their more directly object-related reading)—so they bar that desire, standing as words in the way of the pictures and as fictions in the way of the pedagogic/pederastic narrative they evoke. Ultimately, the dynamic of desire in Philostratean ekphrasis can never be separated from the repeated demonstration of its failure. Indeed, the thematized failure may itself be seen as a cover for the success, or at least the pleasurableness, of the process! One way of describing the objet petit a is as the chaperone (or pander) between a suitor and the beloved—never the object of desire herself, yet always the object causing desire, the procurer of pleasure and yet the bar to that pleasure since she stands in the way of the suitor and the beloved.52 On this reading, the ekphrasis takes that role both in relation to the viewer and the object, and in relation to the speaker and his audience. But one of the most typical (if complex) literary patterns for the use of ekphrases in ancient fiction extends the role of the objet petit a beyond the spoken description to the speaking voice of the orator himself in his function as exegete. This is the trope where a viewer is confronted by an image and fails to interpret it to his or her satisfaction. In the face of failure, an exegete arrives usually in the pedagogic/pederastic form of an older man, who proceeds to explain the picture. We find this pattern explicitly in the Satyricon of Petronius (83, 88), in the Tabula of Cebes (1–3), in Lucian’s Heracles (1–6), in the prologue of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, and in Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon 5.3–4.53 Indeed, the entire text of both the Tabula and Daphnis and Chloe purports to be the interpretative description of the painting that serves as an ekphrastic frontispiece. Effectively, the Imagines of both Philostrati also fulfill this pattern, although here we must assume a dumbfounded viewer, since the authorial voice in these texts is not that of the spectator but of the interpreting exegete. All these interpreters stand between the spectator and the object, arousing the spectator’s desire and through their own production of ekphrasis allowing the process of desire to flow from viewer to pic-
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ture. Both ekphrasis and speaker’s action in producing his description appear as objet petit a, facilitating the gaze of desire—exposing but also occluding the object described—not only for the imagined listeners within the text, but also for the external reader. The fact that the speaker may himself have desires (most explicitly expressed in the pederasty of Petronius’s Eumolpus, but strongly implied also in Philostratus’s, Longus’s, and Achilles Tatius’s more subtle arrays of erotic suggestions and in the regional politics of Lucian’s Celtic interpreter in the Heracles) is part of what makes ekphrasis so complex. It also provokes a parallelism between ekphrasis and its speaker, on the one hand, and the Lacanian conception of the analyst, on the other. Whereas for Freud the analyst occupies the place of the desired object, of desire as an object, for Lacan the analyst takes the place of the object that causes desire, the objet petit a.54 In Lacanian terms it is crucial that the process of psychoanalysis lead to failure: what has to fail is the maintenance of the analyst (occupying the role of objectcausing-desire, of drive for desire, of the void or gap or lack over which desire papers) in the position of an ideal. It is precisely this process that is so scintillatingly performed by the elder Philostratus. One might say that the education offered as a result of and through reading his ekphrases is both a model demonstration of how to do it oneself and a kind of freedom from idealizing the sophistic analyst in order that one might abandon him and go on to do it for oneself. This is presumably parallel to the attempt to end analysis by moving away from identification.55 Whether the array of desires thrown up in the ekphrases belong ultimately to the speaker or are the product of his listeners’ and readers’ various transferences, is much less significant than the fact that through their literary performance they are made explicit and labeled consciously as the desires and phantasies that arise in the triangular cases (of speaker, object, and listener or of viewer, gaze, and object) that we have been exploring.
Coda To those who doubt the validity of trying to superimpose upon ekphrasis some models from psychoanalysis (or of inflicting upon the living activity of psychoanalysis a few corpses from the long-deceased ancient past), I have this reply. If you listen to sport on the radio—in England, especially, live commentary on soccer or cricket matches—
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you can hear the genre of ekphrasis alive and well. The seen object is missing (this is radio and not television), but the fan’s desire—and you are always a fan through the very structure of listening, even if you do not care at all about the result—is all the more passionately aroused for the unattainable object (the actual match and its all-important result) by the flow of ekphrasis—by its enargeia as evoked through words, tone of voice, the emotional drama of the passions narrated. Never is description more clearly the object-causing-desire, papering over the void of desire’s lack of fulfillment, than in such radio commentary. But the difference of this kind of ekphrasis from those of Philostratus lies in the radical lack of self-reflection in sports radio beside the spectacular rhetorical offering of antiquity that makes not just the description of art its subject but also the process of gazing and the process of speaking. It is the second-order self-awareness of ancient rhetorical ekphrasis (and the Imagines of the elder Philostratus in particular) that elevates it to a philosophical—dare one say psychoanalytical?—commentary on the process it performs in ways parallel to those by which Freud’s and Lacan’s writings serve both to create, and to comment upon, the psychoanalytic experience.56
Works Cited Anderson, G. 1986. Philostratus: Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third Century AD. London. Bann, S. 1989. The True Vine: On Representation and Western Tradition. Cambridge. Barton, T. 1994. Power and Knowledge: Astrology, Physiognomics, and Medicine under the Roman Empire. Ann Arbor. Bartsch, S. 1989. Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius. Princeton. Beall, S. 1993. “Word-Painting in the ‘Imagines’ of the Elder Philostratus.” Hermes 121: 350–63. Bettini, M. 1999. Portrait of the Lover. Trans. Laura Gibbs. Berkeley. (Originally published as Il ritratto dell’amante [Torino 1992]) Boeder, M. 1996. Visa est vox: Sprache und Bild in der spätantiken Literature. Frankfurt. Bryson, N. 1988. “The Gaze in the Expanded Field.” In H. Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality. Seattle. 87–114. Camaggio, M. 1930. “Le ‘immagini’ filostratee e la pittura pompeiana: Il quadro di Dedalo e Pasifae.” Historia: Studi storici per l’antichità classica 4: 481–506. Conan, M. 1987. “The Imagines of Philostratus.” Word and Image 3: 162–71. Cuenca, L. A. de and M. A. Elvira, 1993. Imagénes: Filóstrato el Viejo, Filóstrato el Joven, Calístrato. Madrid. Dubel, S. 1997. “Ekphrasis et enargeia: La description antique comme parcours.” In Lévy and Pernot, 249–64.
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Dunand, A. 1995. “The End of Analysis (1).” In Feldstein, Fink, and Jaanus, 243–49. Elsner, J. “Seductions of Art: Encolpius and Eumolpus in a Neronian Picture Gallery.” PCPhS 39: 30–47. ———. 1995. Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity. Cambridge. ———. 1996. “Naturalism and the Erotics of the Gaze: Intimations of Narcissus.” In N. B. Kampen, ed., Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Italy. Cambridge. 247–61. ———. 2000a. “Caught in the Ocular: Visualising Narcissus in the Roman World.” In L. Spaas, ed., Echoes of Narcissus. Oxford. 89–110. ———. 2000b. “Making Myth Visual: The Horae of Philostratus and the Dance of the Text.” Röm. Mitt. 207: 253–76. Feldstein, R., B. Fink, and M. Jaanus, eds. 1995. Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Albany. Fink, B. 1995. The Lacanian Subject: Between Desire and Jouissance. Princeton. Fowler, D. P. 1991. “Narrate and Describe: The Problem of Ekphrasis.” JRS 81: 25–35. Freud, S. 1991. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Harmondsworth. (Originally published as Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Umbewussten [Vienna 1905]) Frontisi-Ducroux, F. and J-P. Vernant. 1997. Dans l’œil du miroir. Paris. Gandelman, C. 1991. Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts. Bloomington. Goldhill, S. 2001. “The Erotic Eye: Visual Stimulation and Cultural Conflict.” In S. Goldhill, ed., Being Greek Under Rome. Cambridge. 154–94. Gunderson, R. 1998. “Discovering the Body in Roman Oratory.” In M. Wyke, ed., Parchments of Gender: Deciphering the Body in Antiquity. Oxford. 169–89. Harris, H. A. 1961. “Philostratus, Imagines 1.24.2.” CR 11: 3–5. Heffernan, J. A. W. 1999. “Speaking for Pictures: The Rhetoric of Art Criticism.” Word and Image 15: 19–33. Holly, M. A. 1996. Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image. Ithaca and London. Jay, M. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley. ———and T. Brennan, eds. 1996. Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives of Sight. London. Kalinka, E. and O. Schönberger. 1968. Philostratos: Die Bilder. Munich. Krauss, R. 1993. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, MA. Krips, H. 1999. Fetish: An Erotics of Culture. Ithaca and London. Lacan, J. 1979. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. A. Sheridan. Harmondsworth. (Originally published as Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de psychanalyse [Paris 1973]) C. Lévy and L. Pernot, eds. 1997. Dire l’évidence (philosophie et rhétorique antiques). Paris. Maffei, S. 1986. “Le Imagines di Luciano: Un ‘Patchwork’ capolavori antichi. Il problema di un metodo combinatorio.” Studi Classici e Orientali 36: 147–64. ———. 1994. “Introduzione” to Luciano di Samosata, Descrizioni di opere d’arte. Turin. Melville, S. 1996. “Division of the Gaze, or, Remarks on the Color and Tenor of Contemporary Theory.” In Jay and Brennan, 101–16. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London. (Originally published as Phénoménologie de la perception [Paris 1945])
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———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston. (Originally published as Le visible et l’invisible; suivi de notes du travail [Paris 1964]) Michel, C. 1974. “Die ‘Weisheit’ der Maler und Dichter in den Bildern des älteren Philostrat.” Hermes 102: 457–66. Newby, Z. 2002. “Testing the Boundaries of Ekphrasis: Lucian’s On the Hall.” Ramus 31: xx-xx. Onians, J. 1980. “Abstraction and Imagination in Late Antiquity.” Art History 3: 1–24. Percy, W. A. 1996. Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece. Urbana and Chicago. Quinet, A. 1995. “The Gaze as an Object.” In Feldstein, Fink, and Jaanus, 139–47. Ragland, E. 1995. “The Relation between the Voice and the Gaze.” In Feldstein, Fink, and Jaanus, 187–203. Reardon, B. P. 1971. Courants littéraires grecs des IIe et IIIe siècles après J.C. Paris. Romm, J. 1990. “Wax, Stone and Promethian Clay: Lucian as a Plastic Artist.” CA 9: 74–98. Rose, J. 1986. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London. Salecl, R. and S. Ziz˚ek, eds. 1996. Gaze and Voice as Love Objects. Durham and London. Sartre, J.-P. 1950. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York. (Originally published as L’être et le néant, essai d’ontologie phénoménologique [Paris 1943]) Schissel von Fleschenberg, O. 1913. “Die Technik des Bildeinsatzes.” Philologus 72: 83–114. Silverman, K. 1992. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. London. ———. 1996. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York. Tatum, J. 1989. Xenophon’s Imperial Fiction. Princeton. Thomas, E. 1994. “The Monumentality of Roman Architecture AD 98–180.” Ph.D. diss., Oxford. Too, Y. L. 2000. The Pedagogical Contract: The Economies of Teaching and Learning in the Ancient World. Ann Arbor. Webb, R. 1997a. “Mémoire et imagination: Les limites de l’enargeia dans la théorie rhétorique grecque.” In Lévy and Pernot, 229–48. ———. 1997b. “Imagination and the Arousal of Emotion in Greco-Roman Rhetoric.” In S. M. Braund and C. Gill, eds., The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature. Cambridge. 112–27. ———. 1999. “Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre.” Word and Image 15: 7–18. Ziz˚ek, S. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London.
Notes 1
The subjects of ekphrasis according to the ancient rhetorical handbooks (progymnasmata) include “persons, actions, times, places, seasons, and many other things” (to quote Hermogenes, Prog. 47 Rabe). In this sense, art is one of the “many other things.” However, the example given by Aphthonius (Prog. 47 Rabe) is of the Temple of Serapis and the acropolis in Alexandria—effectively an architectural paradigm. On the differences between ancient and modern assumptions about ekphrasis, see Webb 1999. 2 In my account of Philostratus, I use the edition of Kalinka and Schönberger (1968) with the Loeb translation by A. Fairbanks (sometimes adapted).
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3 The earliest surviving handbook is by Aelius Theon, dating from the end of the first century c.e. For our purposes here, his text (Progymnasmata 118–20 Patillon) is virtually identical with that of (pseudo?) Hermogenes, perhaps from the early third century, and Aphthonius, from the fourth or fifth century. 4 For recent discussion of enargeia and ekphrasis, see Dubel; Webb 1997a and 1997b. 5 I use James Strachey’s translation (Standard Edition, vol. 8) in the Penguin Freud Library edition, vol. 6 (see Freud 1991 in Works Cited). For a brief discussion, see Krips 155–56. 6 One might, for instance, object to Freud’s gendering of what is ultimately an analysis of power relations. While Freud himself may have believed this gendering to be universal (men as subjects, women as objects)—and clearly his model is dominant in regards to both early twentieth-century Europe and antiquity—nonetheless there is in principle no reason why the genders should not be reversed (with females as speakers and listeners, and an exposed/occluded male object), or, in the context of, e.g., ancient homoeroticism, why the genders should not be single throughout (with all three persons male or female). 7 See also Lucian, Dom. 7 and 15 for the hall (as object of ekphrasis) compared to a woman. On Lucian’s Imagines, see Maffei 1986 and 1994: xlvi–lv; Romm 87–90; Goldhill 184–93. 8 See Lacan 74–75; Silverman 196. 9 In one of his “Love Letters,” Philostratus subjects Lucian’s scheme here to some elegant ironizing, by performing the role of a lover unable to decide which of the bits that make up the lady is the best: “I know not what part of you to praise the most. Your head? But oh your eyes! Your eyes? But oh your cheeks! Your cheeks? But your lips entice me and with a wondrous passion they consume me . . .” (34). Having got to the point of imagining the lady disrobing to reveal a “radiance as of lightning,” Philostratus leaps to “O Phidias and Lysippus and Polyclitus, how much too soon you ceased to be! Surely you would not have made any other statue in preference to hers.” Here the vision of the artist in making a whole statue is implicitly holistic (by contrast with the dismemberment of Lucian’s works of art) against the lover’s fragmentation of his beloved into segments among which he cannot even decide his preference: the letter ends with the writer attempting to distribute prizes to the best bits, if only he is allowed to touch them. Whether this figurement of the beloved as a series of ever better part-objects has to do with the inadequacy of the gaze beside touch and sexual fulfillment in the dialectic of desire (as implied by the text’s moves towards disrobing and touch), or with the hopelessness of language in articulating the desired (“I know not in what terms to describe it”) is, typically, not made clear. 10 In Imag. 2.9, Philostratus conducts another piece of brilliant and high-octane intertextuality on this dialogue by reversing this construction where the body is presented through art and the soul through texts. Lucian in fact never mentions Panthea by name, but refers instead to the fact that she shares her name with the wife of Abradates in Xenophon, Cyr. 5.1.2ff.; 6.1.31ff.; 6.4.2ff.; 7.3.2ff. (see too Lucian’s Imag. 10 and 20). Philostratus, explicitly describing Xenophon’s Panthea, tells us that though Xenephon (the writer) described her character (h\qo~), it was the painter—“a man not good at writing but very clever at painting” [ajnh;r xuggrafein me;n oujc iJkanov~, gravfein de; iJkanwvtato~—a wicked piece of Greek since the terms for “writing” and “painting” are interchangeable!]—who contrived to paint her soul (yuchv): Imag. 2.9.1. The final Philostratean irony is that the soul, as this text defines it, is what painting can depict and what Xenophon failed to describe, namely, “what her hair was like, the breadth of her brow, her glance, and the expression of her mouth” (that is, the very kinds of phys-
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ical qualities that Lucian used works of art to define in his account of Panthea’s body!). Ultimately, the soul turns out to be in the eyes (2.9.6). On Philostratus’s reworking of Xenophon, see Tatum 21–22. 11 Cf. Lacan vii: “There is no truth that, in passing through awareness, does not lie”; 133, 136–48. 12 Cf. Rose 49–81; Ziz˚ek 112. 13 My thinking on De domo is indebted to two outstanding but as yet unpublished studies by Newby (forthcoming) and Thomas 162–82, as well as to Goldhill 160–67. See also Maffei 1994: xxxviii–xl; Boeder 117–37. 14 On the agonistic culture of the Second Sophistic, see the discussion by Barton 13–14, 147–50. 15 Freud’s word is, in fact, Tendenz; see Freud 132. 16 Of course, while there is only ever one speaker at any one time, there may be multiple listeners in ekphrasis. Often (as when De domo’s second speaker addresses the “jury” and the silent first speaker, or when Philostratus turns specifically to his boy listener amidst a larger audience of young men) the Freudian third person is both singular and plural at the same time. The listener’s subjectivity is therefore a collective one (and I cannot think of a case where audiences are presented as producing multiple and conflicting responses, though they may collectively stone the speaker, rather than applaud him, as in Petronius, Sat. 90). 17 See Elsner 1995: 32. 18 I use Alan Sheridan’s translation in Lacan 1979. The gaze is covered in chaps. 6–9 (67–119). Useful accounts include Silverman 125–56 and Jay 329–80, who places Lacan’s approach within its intellectual context of Francophone discussions of vision. For some creative and thought-provoking extrapolations of Lacan’s theory of the gaze, see the essays in Salecl and Ziz˚ek, and in Jay and Brennan. 19 For the debt to Merleau-Ponty 1962 and 1968, see, e.g., Lacan 71–72, 74–75, 79, 81–82, 93, 97, 107, 110, 114, with Melville 108–09. For the debt to Sartre, see Lacan 84–85, with discussions by Bryson 88–94, Silverman 1996: 163–70, and Melville 104–05. 20 See, e.g., Krauss 87–88; Quinet 139–47. 21 This story is the subject of much commentary. See, e.g., Rose 190–94; Bryson 91–94; Holly 75–78, 88–89; Melville 105–07; Krips 101–05. 22 Despite the assurance of truth, this is a carefully written account, building up to its apparently unremarkable climax (the surprise will lie in Lacan’s commentary) through several evocations of desire. The name of Petit-Jean—evoking Lacan’s “algebraic” term objet petit a (or “little a” rather than “big A,” with the a standing for autre or “other”)—also seems hardly accidental. 23 This is Bryson’s term (104–06). 24 On the sexuality of Lacan’s concept of the gaze (perhaps overstating this), see Gandelman 157–60. 25 See esp. Gunderson. 26 A particularly interesting instance of this is Cebes’ Tabula, perhaps a first-century c.e. text, where the very form of the picture appears to change under philosophicalekphrastic scrutiny: see Elsner 1995: 45. 27 For the centrality of sea-creatures and fishermen to some classic ekphrases, see (at the very inception of the tradition of describing art) [Hesiod], Sc. 207–15 and (at the foundations of Hellenistic ekphrasis) Theocritus 1.40–44. Is it beyond the bounds of credibility that the lookout, peering into the depths of the sea, might be gazing into the ancestral past of ekphrastic self-fashioning? Particularly relevant is Hesiod’s “fisherman watching” (ajnh;r aJlieu;~ dedokhmevno~, [Sc.] 214).
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28 On Pasiphaë, see Camaggio 489–506; Michel 459–60; Beall 359–60. For a complex of missed gazes, paralleling Apollo’s missed throw, see the description of Hyacinthus (1.24.2) with Harris. There discus throwing is defined by a posture described in terms of sight words (katovpin, meaning “behind” but carrying an etymological connection with “sight,” and uJpoblevyai), while Apollo’s gaze fails to lift from the ground (kata; gh`~ blevpei, 1.24.3) and the viewer sees (oJra`/~) Zephyrus taunting the god from his lookout (periwphvn) at 1.24.4. 29 If the elder Philostratus has been found rhetorically excessive, his younger namesake has generally fared worse. See, e.g., Cuenca and Elvira 26. 30 The strategy of directly addressing a picture is relatively frequent in ekphrasis, but it is not the most common form of framing a description. It occurs again in the younger Philostratus’s “Sophocles” (Imag. 13.1) and in several examples from the elder Philostratus, including “Olympus” (Imag. 1.21.1), “Narcissus” (1.23.3), “Hunters” (1.28.1), and “Hippolytus” (2.4.3). 31 Interestingly, while the elder Philostratus and Lucian present their ekphrases as if they were “live” speeches to a real audience, the younger Philostratus presents his as if they were exercises. His proem ends: “Let it be assumed that there is a person present to whom the details are to be described, that thus the discussion itself may have its proper form” (Imag. Praef.7). While this may be said to make his descriptions rhetorically less complex, it also strips them of one aspect of Freudian “tendentiousness” and thus makes them more directly a rhetorizing of the gaze. Nonetheless, the implied listener is a complicated category (not always necessarily identical with any actual reader) and open to plenty of the kinds of nuanced rhetorical play typical of ekphrasis. 32 Cf. Lacan 97: “If I am anything in the picture, it is always in the form of the screen, which I earlier called the stain, the spot.” See also Bryson 92. 33 So for some examples:
. . . gumnw`/ tw`/ xivfei e{toimo~ . . . Younger Philostratus, Imag. 5.3
. . . gumnw`/ tw`/ xivfei kai; eJtoivmw/ . . . Elder Philostratus, Heroicus 33
. . . tw`n ojfqalmw`n e[nnoia . . . Younger Philostratus, Imag. 5.3
. . . th;n tw`n ojfqalmw`n e[nnoian . . . Elder Philostratus, Imag. 2.31.2
. . . hJ Nu;x ejn ei[dei . . . (Night as a personification) Younger Philostratus, Imag. 5.5
. . . oJ {Umno~ ejn ei[dei . . . (Sleep as a personification) Elder Philostratus, Imag. 2.22.2
34
Cf. Ziz˚ek 105–07. On “Narcissus,” see Bann 108–13; Elsner 1996: 252–54 and 2000a: 102–03; Frontisi-Ducroux and Vernant 225–30; Heffernan 22–23. 36 On “Hunters,” see Onians 4–7; Conan 163; Elsner 1995: 33–37. 37 “About the lad are gathered beautiful youths, who engage in beautiful pursuits”; 1.28.7: “The rest follow it [the boar] to the edge of the marsh, but the youth keeps on after the creature . . .”; 1.28.7: “The lad is still in the pool, still in the attitude in which he hurled his javelin, while the youths stand in astonishment and gaze at him as though he were a picture.” For a parallel vignette of the ephebic youth (here an athlete stripped naked) as an object of awestruck erotic contemplation, see Dio Chrysostom, Or. 28.6. For the origins of the trope, see Plato, Chrm. 153d-54c, where the boy figures as object of the eroticized gaze “like a statue.” 38 On the rhetorical structure of the proem’s audience and that of the ekphrases themselves, see Anderson 265–66; Elsner 1995: 37–39. 39 See, e.g., Fowler. 35
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40 Here the description subscribes to another triangular pattern in the ancient texts about art, recently highlighted by Bettini who examines what he calls his fundamental story of two lovers and a portrait of one of them. In Imag. 1.28.8, the boy spotlit as a picture serves as a Bettini “portrait” of the boy-listener whom the speaker “loves,” with the boy-beloveds—within the picture and outside it—both surrounded by groups of (admiring) older youths. While Bettini occasionally mentions Freud, his book makes no use of Lacan. But one might extend Bettini’s analysis on Lacanian lines to say that his “portraits” are always in the function of the objet petit a; since they are the product of an excess of jouissance, they function as a constant stimulus to desire the beloved they represent, and simultaneously they occlude that beloved by being mere imitations of him or her, never the real thing. In naturalistic art, all portraits fulfill that function (although in his famous discussion of Holben’s double-portrait called The Ambassadors, Lacan never in fact makes this point; see Lacan 85–89). 41 See Petronius 83–90, with Elsner 1993. 42 See Elsner 2000b: 259–61. 43 On pedagogy and pederasty, see Percy 189–92 for the Roman imperial period; also Too 28–29, 96–97, and esp. 47: “The historically privileged pedagogical relationship is in fact a pederastic one. . . .” Key Second Sophistic texts include [Plutarch], De liberis educandis 11e-12d; Plutarch, Amat. 751f-752b; [Lucian], Amores. 44 On the objet a, see Fink 59–63, 83–97; Krips 18–28. 45 On the objet petit a and excess, see Ragland 187–88; Ziz˚ek 50, 82, 95, 158; Krips 9. 46 For dismissal of Philostratus’s rhetoric, see, e.g., Reardon 191. 47 Pleasure is explicitly given as a cause of art in the proem of the younger Philostratus (Imag. Praef.4). 48 On the objet petit a and desire, see Ragland 188–90, 197–200; Ziz˚ek 65, 163, 180. 49 On the objet petit a and the other’s desire, see Fink 59–61. 50 Inevitably, of course, in view of its role in facilitating desire, the objet a becomes desired in its own right—as facilitator, as symbol of the subject’s lack, and as the potential filler of that void. See Silverman 1992: 20. 51 On the object petit a as a “stopper to the void of loss at the centre of all being and knowing,” see Ragland 197, 200–01; Ziz˚ek 53; Silverman 1996: 75–77. 52 I borrow the description of Krips 9 and 28–29. 53 The classic paper identifying this pattern is Schissel von Fleschenberg; see also Bartsch 3–39. There are numerous slight variations on the pattern, e.g., the opening of Achilles Tatius’s novel (1.1–2), where the young (not old) interlocutor of the picture’s viewer (who may or may not be synonymous with the author) produces a narrative (the novel itself), inspired by rather than directly describing the painting. 54 See Dunand 244–45, Fink 61–63. 55 See Dunand 247. 56 These reflections, and the turn to psychoanalytic theory to help explain ekphrasis, owe a great deal to discussions (years ago as well as more recently) with John Henderson, Jenny Preston, and Froma Zeitlin. If anyone is responsible for constantly reminding me of the continuing value of psychoanalysis, it is Silvia Frenk. I am grateful to the audience of the Passmore-Edwards Symposium on Ekphrasis, held at Corpus Christi College, Oxford in September of 2002, for allowing me to air these thoughts and for roughing them up! My special thanks are due to Jim Porter and Mark Buchan, not only for giving me the opportunity to put my thoughts down on paper, but also for their thorough, incisive, and sympathetically critical discussions on an earlier draft.
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The Vanishing Point, or Speculative Mathemes Sa r a A h b e l - R a p p e
A little piece of string walks into a bar and hops up on the counter, saying “Give me a double.” But the bartender says, “Sorry, we don’t serve string in here.” So the string goes out into the alley, dishevels its hair, and ties itself up and walks back into the bar. “Say, aren’t you that piece of string that just came in here?” “No,” came the reply; “I’m a frayed knot.” Joke on National Public Radio For the sake of clarity, often the argument wishes to lead to a conception of the multiplicity which has come to be, by positing many lines from one center. Plotinus, Enneads
Introduction: The Vanishing Point André Green opens his essay, “Objects and Subject,” by calling attention to the misalignment between the analytic situation and psychoanalytic writing: “We do not know this realm very well [sc. the unconscious].”1 For Green, the enunciative position of the analytic writer seems undermined by the very fact that her subject, the unconscious, necessarily resists discursive representations. Although Lacan has made it possible to speak of a philosophy of psychoanalysis,2 Lacan himself in positing the rotational substitutability of the four discourses (analytic, university, master, and hysteric) reveals that psychoanalytic discourse must be heard in a radically different way than academic or speculative discourse, since different subjects enunciate them:3 Psychoanalytic Discourse a —— S2
$ —— S1
Academic Discourse S2 —— S1
a —— $
These formulae within Lacanian algebra imply that analytic discourse subtends academic discourse. Knowledge (S2 in Lacan’s symbolism)
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occupies the role of the agent/subject of discourse in the second schema, whereas the objet petit autre, in some sense the unconscious, is the subject of psychoanalytic discourse in the first. In the first schema, again, the analyst speaks up for the surplus of meaning, articulating her position as situated within the determinations, or biases, of desire, whereas knowledge is supposed to be objective or neutral. Psychoanalysis employs, in the words of Jacques-Alain Miller, a nonreferential language, one that does not purport to describe a state of the world.4 In analytic discourse, the agent, the analyst, is paradoxically passive and, in allowing herself to be spoken by the analysand, reflects back the latter’s (mis)apprehensions of the world. Therefore, if the analyst speaks, she does not do so in the indicative mood. Nor does she speak as the grammatical subject, “I,” who unifies the content of the linguistic predicate. By occupying the position of the object, the Other, she stands in for what is outside the reach of sentential logic, or exposes the incoherence of a grammatical structure that somehow equates the subject and predicate via essentialist semantics. In contrast, by knowledge we commonly mean knowledge that something is the case. There is, therefore, an intentionality, or directedness to the world, a facticity of knowledge that is interrupted in the language of psychoanalysis, which thereby constitutes a different kind of speech act, one that is fundamentally nonreferential.5 That psychoanalytic language is founded in the praxis of the analytic situation, as opposed to the praxis of academic manufacture, suggests that these two modalities of language will misunderstand each other. It is in this sense that I use the phrase “vanishing point” in my title. The very point of psychoanalysis vanishes if it is turned into capital for the production of speculative philosophy, or if it becomes a product of the academic enterprise, and yet Lacan notoriously reinscribes the cogito, along with speculative metaphysics, within the analytic situation by claiming that the unconscious is structured like a language—that is, that it includes meaning or is constituted by signifiers. Does he thereby invite or dismiss a philosophical alliance with his theory of the subject? In this paper, I discuss Lacanian theory insofar as it can be situated in the history of Western metaphysics, specifically in the Platonist tradition.6 This affinity to Platonism is manifested not only in the two world-metaphysics that form the skeleton of Lacanian theory—the Real and the Imaginary, or being and its signifiers—but also in a
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more allusive form in terms of the myths Lacan invokes. Actually, Lacan is perhaps more of a nouveau Platonist than a Platonist, for he joins the distinguished company of Festugière, Bergson, Bréhier, Hadot, and Foucault in appropriating the tropes of Neoplatonism.7 For example, such Neoplatonic conceptions as intuition, askeµsis, selfattention, and the pratiques de soi (the practices of the self), so popularized by Foucault and Hadot, reveal how often this ancient tradition creeps into French intellectual culture. Lacan’s fondness for ancient esoteric lore is obvious not just in his citations of the Symposium8 or in his references to Orphism, but also in an interwoven thread of Upanishadic texts. The foundational sayings of the Upanishads (mahavakyas) show up in unlikely places in the Séminaires,9 alongside fleeting remarks about Dhvani (the Sanskrit word for “metaphor”) or lengthier quotations from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Altogether, these citations have the effect, not of turning Lacan into a philologist, but into the Rsi (seer), heir to the ancient wisdom tradition, who stretches back, paradoxically, to . . . Freud!10 Lacan operates as a mythmaker in the realm of discourse, since he posits a critique of ontology that relies on a narrative moment, namely, the departure of the self from the Real. The subject, who cannot know herself in truth precisely because self-apprehension involves a departure from the original state, is known as that which cannot be apprehended. As Lacan says in the Écrits, the experience of psychoanalysis leads him “to oppose any philosophy issuing directly from the Cogito” (1977a: 1). Or again, he alludes to the méconnaisance of self-awareness when he writes about “consciousness, in its illusion of seeing itself seeing itself” (1977b: 82). This failure of the subject to know himself materializes as the ability to arrive at self-perception. But it is in the act of self-perception that the subject turns into something that cannot be apprehended, that is, into nothing: “From the moment that this gaze appears, the subject tries to adapt himself to it, he becomes that punctiform object, that point of vanishing being with which the subject confuses his own failure” (1977b: 83). This failure simply to be—or fundamental ontological absence—is paradoxically the condition sine qua non for the subject’s existence: The real lack is what the living being loses, that part of himself qua living being in reproducing himself through the way of sex. This lack is real because it relates to something real, namely, that the living being,
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by being subject to sex, has fallen under the blow of individual death. (1977b: 205)
This passage purports to describe what actually happens to subjects, but since it captures a moment that is outside of the realm of experience, the story can never be an empirical account nor ever be a philosophical theory. Since the Real is by definition what falls outside the scope of the subject, it cannot enter into an account of the subject. Similarly, Lacan’s theory of the subject cannot be a philosophical theory without being tainted by a serious self-contradiction: a theory that posits a Real beyond apprehension cannot itself under its own terms be a true theory. Perhaps, then, Lacan’s theory of the subject is more like a gesture of frustration, a shrug of the shoulders or a shaking of the head. This theory indicates an attitude of misapprehension, rather than hypothesizing an actual misapprehension of the Real, which in terms of this theory is beyond verification. Lacan endorses the statement that disavows itself. In this paper, I compare Lacan’s narrative of departure from the Real with the central metaphysical narrative deployed in Neoplatonism—the doctrine of emanation—according to which the embodied soul departs from the unity of the One. Both Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Neoplatonic metaphysics instruct their disciples that the individual, or “I,” is at best a construction that operates primarily in the realm of discourse. A reversal of language is needed in order to “see” the truth of what is purportedly enacted in the myth. In fact, psychoanalytic theory relies notoriously on mythologies in order to convey its primary insights. Just as Oedipus allows Freud to solve the riddle of the Sphinx and equate the child with the man,11 so Lacan resorts to the (Orphic) myth of unity/androgyny to collapse male and female, mother and child, through the postulate of the preinfantile.12 Therefore, Lacan is asking about the moment before the birth of the subject, much as the Zen koan, “Show me your original face before you were born,” asks the student to do something that language itself contravenes.13 Like this koan, which demands that the student account for herself in terms that eschew a life history, Lacan suggests that psychoanalysis, as a historytaking or history-constructing venture, is trapped by that very method. Lacan wishes to subvert language that attempts to describe the way things are or to reconstruct the way things were. In this respect, he shares a great deal with other critics of the discursive realm. Since Neo-
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platonism perhaps offers the West one of the more cogent attacks on discursivity, there are some strategies that show up in both Neoplatonic metaphysics and Lacanian theory. Lacan and Neoplatonism also construct distinctive notions of transmissible wisdom.14 Lacan’s “writings” (e.g., the Écrits) are in fact oral teachings. The texts we read, (apparently) authored by these teachers who lived in different millennia, are just the surface indications of what went on in psychoanalytic sessions, in supervision, in the seminar itself, or in the face-to-face teaching between master and disciple. In its more exotic forms, Neoplatonism developed a whole rule of ritual, askeµsis, and contemplative exercise; there is a discipleship in the art of contemplation that hardly surfaces in the scholastic aporias of Neoplatonic texts. Likewise, Lacan often appears as the scholarly counterpoint to Freud, correcting his master with a healthy dose of Saussure, Hegel, and Heidegger, but exhorting his students to return to the master’s words with renewed fervor.15 Nevertheless, his enterprise is with his patients and above all with his trainees. And unlike Freud, who transcribed his sessions with Dora, Rat-Man, or Ann O., Lacan keeps his laboratory largely hidden from view, though we glimpse it in the question-and-answer period transcribed after some of the seminars. Lacan works with an eye/ear trained to language. Language is the medium of psychoanalysis, to the extent that at times Lacan appears to want to displace consciousness with language. Perhaps Lacan’s definition of the signifier, “a signifier is that which represents the subject for another signifier” (1977a: 316), motivates this demotion of consciousness. In the analytic session the subject cannot see himself, but can very much hear himself.16 Self-reflection or self-transparency follows a linguistic turn for Lacan, who writes in Seminar XX: Wasn’t it charitable of Freud to have allowed the misery of speaking beings to say to itself that there is—since there is the unconscious— something transcendent, truly transcendent, which is but what the species inhabits, namely, language? Wasn’t there, yes, charity, in the fact of announcing the news that his everyday life has, in language, a more reasonable basis than it seemed before, and that there is already some wisdom there? (1998: 96)
Since Lacanian psychoanalysis inaugurates a discussion of the limits of knowledge through this device of comparing the unconscious to
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language, it also insists that auditory knowledge, or hearsay, is privileged above immediate vision. Because a conversation about reality offers creative possibilities for speaking beings, that is, because such beings can hear the unconscious speak (Lacan’s affirmation is “ça parle”), wisdom does become available within the analytic situation. This kind of wisdom, however, cannot compete with the certainty offered by the philosophic model of the inner knower, possessing as she does a fleshless eye that renders both transparent and lucid everything within. Instead of trying to see within, analysis asks us to listen intensely, for this listening is exactly the foundation of the analytic situation, which consequently does not function as a productive, specular discourse. For the Neoplatonists as well, the limitations of metaphysical theory form the basis of their philosophic activity. Hence, both Lacan and the Neoplatonists make their cases by using mathemes, or antilinguistic devices that conduct a conversation about language, as it were, by situating it in another medium. The reason for this symbolism, the mathemes of self-reference, is to subvert the linguistic structure of self-apprehension. As Bruce Fink interprets Lacanian symbolism, To Lacan’s mind the unconscious consists in chains of quasi-mathematical inscriptions, and—borrowing a notion from Bertrand Russell, who in speaking of mathematicians said that the symbols they work with don’t mean anything—there is thus no point talking about the meaning of unconscious formations or productions. . . . The kind of truth unveiled by psychoanalytic work can thus be understood to have nothing whatsoever to do with meaning. Language in the unconscious, and as the unconscious, ciphers. . . . Analysis thus entails significant deciphering processes that result in truth, not meaning. (21)
To put this paradox another way, we could say that for both traditions what ordinarily goes under the description of self-apprehension or self-knowledge is self-enunciation, self-speaking. According to Lacan, in self-knowledge it is not as if one sees into oneself; it is rather that one speaks oneself.17 But by speaking oneself, one both loses and creates oneself as lost. And yet Lacan is not a nihilist, nor is the consequent void of the subject any kind of ultimate reality. The Real cannot be exactly apprehended along the lines of traditional self-reflexive knowledge, as an item of specular discourse. And though the Real may be posited within the terms of such an academic theory, its mean-
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ing, nevertheless, will not yield itself. For all that, Ziz˚ek’s encomium of Lacan as belonging “to the great tradition of modern thinkers who have been exploring what it means to be a subject” commits Lacan to a viable theory; in fact, according to Lacan’s own strictures (a metalanguage cannot be spoken), no such theory obtains.
I. The Mirror of Dionysus Lacan’s myth of a primordial, disincarnate being who becomes subject to embodiment, mortality, and (consequently) sexuality is, as was suggested above, structurally similar to the Orphic cosmology that one finds recounted in a number of late antique texts.18 The ancient myth cycle, as we discover from the Neoplatonic sources, itself contains a “mirror stage” in one element of the narrative. As in the Orphic myth, which narrates the fall of our ancestors into embodiment, mortality, and individuation—all precipitated through the deceitful use of a mirror—so in Lacan’s myth cycle the mirror stage functions as the fulcrum of the subject’s incarnation. The central Orphic myth narrates a cosmogony in which an androgynous being named Phanes (the Revealer) springs from a cosmic egg and gives birth to the world after mating with itself, whereupon Zeus promptly swallows the creation. Another sequence has the Titans consuming Zeus’s infant son Dionysus (later repaired by Apollo) and then paying dearly for their crime with a blast of Zeus’s thunderbolt. Their blood falls to the earth and spawns the human race. In later Neoplatonism, the mirror is actually a murder weapon. Dionysus falls prey to the ravenous Titans, who lure the boy with his own mirror image and then rend and consume him. Thus the Titans, demons afflicted by cannibalistic hunger and waging a perpetual war against Zeus (the superego), get hold of the subject in the mirror stage. While the mirror stage is, for Lacan and the Neoplatonists, a creative matrix that allows the ego or individual self to cohere as a ground of identification, it also serves as the origins of falsehood. The mirror offers a reflexive presentation of reality and so mediates the separation of the self from the Real. The Neoplatonists use the myth of Dionysus to illustrate the fall from unity of consciousness and the consequent fragmentation of the world into subject and object, with discursive thought providing a channel of approach and discrimination between the knower and the known. The rending of Dionysus
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also symbolizes the beginning of human thought, of individuated consciousness or individual soul (as distinct from the universal hypostasis or soul).19 For Lacan, the mirror stage has an almost Aristotelian significance because it defines what is distinctively or essentially human in subjectivity. At a very basic level, the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror functions as the distinguishing mark of human beings from other animals. Moreover, in recognizing herself in the mirror, the infant comes into possession of an ego ideal and so glimpses the potentiality for her yet-to-be-realized adult self. Though the human infant at the age of 6–18 months is developmentally behind his simian cousin, he is able, unlike the chimp, to recognize his image in a mirror.20 Thus, humans are born prematurely: they lack primary motor functions and only slowly gain control of their own bodies21 precisely through language, which articulates the body parts; this identification with the image in the mirror forebodes a realm of freedom, presages autonomy. Lacan celebrates the feat of the child’s recognition of his image in the mirror as the origin of meaning and truth, the birth of the signifier, because the image comes to mean the self, or signifies the me. In the Four Fundamental Principles of Psychoanalysis, Lacan transforms the Orphic symbol of the cosmic egg into an hommelette, or Lamella, which is the first offspring of the preincarnate human being, before sexualization occurs. The Lamella is an inchoate germ of life, consciousness itself, which begins to be self-reflexive and mediates its self-apprehension through the phallic marker. Herein lies the origin of the mirror stage, since for Lacan it is precisely the recognition of self that precipitates desire. Both self-recognition and desire are predicated on lack; they involve the same absence or subordination of the signified to the signifier. The Lamella is unsexed; the androgynous pair consisting of maternal being and phallic signifier is fused in the cosmic hommelette, the plastic, mobile organ by which the subject connects to, touches, takes up residence in the world. Speaking of Plato’s Symposium, Lacan writes: Aristophanes’ myth pictures the pursuit of the complement for us in a moving, and misleading, way, by articulating that it is the other, one’s sexual other half, that the living being seeks in love . . . To this mythical representation of the mystery of love, analytic experience substitutes the search by the subject, not of the sexual complement, but of the part of himself, lost forever, that is constituted by the fact that he is only a sexed living being, and that he is no longer immortal.
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Thus defying, perhaps for the first time in history, a myth that has acquired so much prestige, and which last time I placed under the same heading as Plato places that of Aristophanes, I substituted the myth intended to embody the missing part, which I called the myth of the lamella. (1977b: 205)
Thus, the myth of original unity is deferred by the myth of the body. The acquisition of the body, or fall into the body, is a sudden event that comes about through what is literally a reversal of consciousness. This reversal can be thought of as the mirroring or self-grasping aspect of consciousness. In other words, the mirror stage is the locus of the “I,” whereas the “I” sense inevitably invests itself in the location of the body. From a contemporary perspective, it might seem odd to inquire how or when the self acquires a body, since it seems rather obvious that self implies body and body implies self, as the popular neurologist Damasio writes: You might wish to consider an amusing piece of evidence, at this point. For every person that you know, there is a body. You may never have given any thought to this simple relationship but there it is: one person, one body; one mind, one body—a first principle. You have never met a person without a body. Nor have you met a person with two bodies or with multiple bodies, note even Siamese twins . . . You may have met, or heard about, bodies occasionally inhabited by more than one person, a pathological condition known as multiple personality disorder. Even then, however, the principle is not quite violated since at each given time only one among the multiple identities can use the body to think and behave, only one at a time gains enough control to be a person. (142)
Aristotle, in the De anima, perhaps summarizes this fact more succinctly when he defines the mind as “the first actuality of a body that has life potentially.” But Lacan’s mirror stage does not carry the unproblematic correlation between body and self that Aristotle assumes at the outset of his psychology. Instead, Lacan sees the relationship between body and self as accreted, acquired, adventitious, and questionable. With the recognition of self in the mirror as the body, body becomes the surface of the imaginary, its horizon of contraction, the first available locus for the conflict/communication between what is outside myself and what is inside myself. The body is the ground for a projection of selfhood, the locus for a fantasy of unity, cohesion, and thinghood, all of which form the basis of ego ideation. But only as the imago, when it assumes the unity of self-
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hood, can the body function in this idealized manner. Very un-Aristotelian (since Aristotle explains body and soul as just two sides of one hylomorphic compound) is Lacan’s anthropology: if the body forms the boundaries of self, the moi-peau or skin ego, it does so only as the mirror image, that is, as a projection of the mind. Nevertheless, this projection is crucial, since without the body image, there can be no self at all. This paradox is hard to grasp since it reverses our ordinary way of thinking about the relationship between mind and body. Both are equally unreal, two sides of one hylomorphic fiction.
Exhibit 1: Enneads 1.1, The Mirror Stage “Pleasures and sadnesses, fears and assurances, desires and aversion and pain—whose are they? They either belong to the soul or the soul using a body or a third thing composed of both.” This is how Porphyry chooses to begin his edition of Plotinus’s great meditation on the nature of human becoming, which Porphyry entitles the Enneads. The very first statement in Plotinus’s treatise asks the question that Lacanian psychoanalysis asks: Who is the subject? Plotinus’s answer—a third thing, a compound of body and mind, a thing not like body and not like mind—points to the skin bag, the body/mind complex that forms the basis of our identity. The first essay in the Enneads helps us come to understand our nature as the body/mind compound, and thus to understand the Neoplatonic conception of subjectivity as involving this event of coming to inhabit the body. It may seem all too obvious that the body is the locus of desire: The body will be improved by sharing in life, the soul made worse by sharing in death and unreason. So too, it will be the body that desires—for it is the body which is going to enjoy the objects of desire—and is afraid for itself—for it is going to miss its pleasures and be destroyed. (Enn. 1.1.4.10)
Plotinus and Lacan succeed in problematizing the pleasure made available through bodily enjoyment. The subject can be alienated from the source of this enjoyment: The real lack is what the living being loses, that part of himself qua living being, in reproducing himself through the way of sex. This lack is real because it relates to something real, namely that the living being,
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by being subject to sex, has fallen under the blow of individual death. (Lacan 1977b: 205)
Neoplatonists might think that this quote is from Plotinus—in fact the language is almost frighteningly Plotinian, for Lacan uses the phrase “living being,” which could be an exact translation of Plotinus’s phrase to zoµon in Enneads 1.1. As in Plotinus, Lacan complains that the living being, qua living being, is always mixed up with the body, but that this condition of embodiment is inherently disorienting. The body is a wound, like an infected wound (Plotinus says like a plant with an infestation of vermin), something that solicits our care, suggests partiality, incompleteness, and, above all, limitation: The very delimitation of the ‘erogenous zone’ that the drive isolates from the metabolism of the function . . . is the result of a cut expressed in the anatomical mark of a margin or border—lips ‘the enclosure of the teeth,’ the rim of the anus, the tip of the penis, the vagina, the slit formed by the eyelids, even the horn-shaped aperture of the ear. (Lacan 1977a: 315)
These openings into the field of the Other form a kind of lining; they loosely contain the self in a semipermeable skin bag. As I write this paper, Dr. Lori Andrews has finished a new book that describes a Frankensteinian twentieth-first-century commerce in body parts, The Body Bazaar. This volume traces what happens to human tissue once it has been removed from the living person, offering a kind of neoFreudian fantasy in which the infantile overvaluation or economy of bodily waste is strangely mimicked in the postmodern marketplace. Although a physician does have to secure his patient’s permission to invade his body for the purpose of removing fluid or tissue, nevertheless once these tissues, organs, fluids, genes, or cells are separated from the owner of the body, it is in dispute as to whether he legally owns them. In 1990, the California Supreme Court ruled that a man whose physician had taken blood, bone, and sperm samples from him over a number of years and had patented his patient’s cells as U.S. Patent 4,438,032 had no legal right to collect royalties. Some people claim from the Internal Revenue Service depreciation on their bodies, much as they would for expensive cars. Andrews describes a blood donor whose primary income came from the sale of her rare type AB negative blood. She marketed it an average of twice a week, paying taxes on her earnings. She even suc-
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cessfully claimed tax deductions for the high protein foods and vitamin supplements she ingested and for her commuting expenses to the clinic. A company, Biomedical Industries, gave [another woman] stock, payments up to $1,600 per bleed, a Lincoln Continental, and a signing bonus when she agreed to donate her blood to them. (39)
What is it to be the body? Is it a collection of parts over which “one” exercises property rights or ownership? Is the owner the “person” who originally generated these tissues, or the agent who sells, markets, patents, or otherwise commodifies these parts? And if the person is embodied, what meaning attaches to the separation of the body from this person? Postmodern industrialized bodies are now undergoing a refragmentation under the new lens of the bio marketplace. For Lacan, the notion of the body as a unified self is precisely an illusion created through the specular idealization of the mirror stage: This fragmented body—which term I have also introduced into our system of theoretical references—usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement of analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual. It then appears in the form of disjointed limbs, or of those organs represented in exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions. (1977a: 4)
To be the skin bag, to be the skin ego, is the root condition from which the philosophy of Lacan and Plotinus begin to work out a metaphysics of enlightenment. In traversing the wider spaces of Neoplatonic inquiry into self-nature, a point of commonality emerges. One starts with the body as the surface of limitation, of castration, of anxiety, of contraction. From there and only from there is it possible to talk about the metaphysics of ascent. When Lacan ends his essay, “The Mirror Stage,” with an allusion to the Upanishadic mahavakya, Tat tvam asi (“That thou art!”), we can only guess his intentions. But as he tells us, this is no longer the journey of psychoanalysis proper: In a fundamental paper on symbolism, Dr. Jones points out, somewhere around page 15, that although there are thousands of symbols in the sense that the term is understood in analysis, all of them refer to one’s own body, to kinship relations, to birth, to life, and to death. (1977a: 82) In this essay, Lacan asks, How does the subject arise? The essay can easily be compared to Enneads 4.8, “On the Entry of Souls into
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the Body.” How does the self acquire a body? It happens at a moment that forms the crisis of Lacanian Neoplatonism or Neoplatonic psychoanalysis. In this respect, Lacan wants to revert to the moment before Freud, who receives the subject as already born, as if Freud is his parent, and Lacan asks, But where does my parent come from? Lacan places Freud in the wisdom tradition in order to see past embodiment. In Plotinus’s account, the origin of the ego lies in its desire to be separate, a kind of originary rebellion (tolma or self-will) against the Real, which gives rise to an imaginary demarcation between self and reality. This desire to be self-originating is what causes the leap into birth and death; it occasions the fall into the body/mind complex, or couplement, which for Plotinus forms the basis of the empirical self: What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and though members of the divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It? The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the net into the sphere of process, and in the primal differentiation with the desire for self-ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this freedom and largely indulged in their own motion. (Enn. 5.1.1–5)
Thus Plotinus and Lacan both recognize a mirror stage, the ground of the ego as body/mind complex, a cut in the Real from which the ego is separated, as Plotinus says, “by nothing but otherness.” But more than the individual, the entire life of the world is, in fact, a projection that the soul then enters and finds is only an inversion of being. Body, therefore, is not just something that happens to an individual; it is a fulcrum of transformation, the containing place of the imaginary. Below I have juxtaposed passages from Plotinus with Lacanian texts in order to invent a kind of dialogue between these theorists: Plotinus: When I hear about the Lacanian mirror stage, I think of the Orphic myth: The souls of men see their images as if in the mirror of Dionysus and come to be on that level with a leap from above. But they experienced a deeper descent because their middle part was compelled to care for that to which they had gone on, which needed their care. (Enn. 4.3.12.2) Lacan: Yes. This mirror stage is exactly responsible for the reflection of being, and so reminds me of the Platonic original/image ontology:
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It is to this object that cannot be grasped in the mirror that the specular image lends its clothes. A substance caught in the net of the shadow, and which, robbed of its shadow-swelling volume, holds out once again the tired lure of the shadow as if it were substance. (1977a: 316) Plotinus: What you say about the net could almost have been inspired by my Enneads: It is as if a net immersed in the waters was alive, but unable to make its own that in which it is . . . the sea is already spread out and the net spreads with it, as far as it can; for no one of its parts can be anywhere less than where it lies. (Enn. 4.3.9.38–40) Lacan: Speaking of nets reminded me just now of entrapment, of becoming ensnared. But in order for this to occur, there must be a lure. This is the function that is found at the heart of the institution of the subject in the visible. What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form I am photographed. “The lure plays an essential function therefore.” (1977b: 107) Plotinus: A lure, or even enchantment, something like hypnotism: Just as the steersmen of ships in a storm concentrate more and more on the care of their ships and are unaware that that they are forgetting themselves, that they are in danger of being dragged down with the wreck of the ships, these souls incline downwards more with what is theirs . . . they are held fettered with bonds of magic. (Enn. 4.3.17.27) Lacan: Self-forgetting. That is what we have been talking about: It is through this separated form of himself that the being comes into play in his effects of life and death, and it might be said that is with the help of this doubling of the other, or of oneself, that is realized the conjunction from which proceeds the renewal of beings in reproduction.
How does this lure operate? In the Orphic narrative, the Titans offer a mirror as a plaything to Dionysus, who is thus distracted by his own image. But this absorption in the image becomes the occasion for the dismemberment of his body, though of course his essence remains. There is an ancestral echo of Dionysus in the traces of Zeus that are transmitted to the human offspring of the Titans. In Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium, the lure reappears as the erotic object, the image of the self or other half that would exactly complete the fragment. But this structure of fragmentation and lure now gives rise to another kind of entrapment, the entrapment in the imaginary. Like the experience of Alice who in Wonderland enters into the look-
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ing glass, the world is now essentially an image, so that there can be no original, no source, no subject other than the absence of a subject. For most late Neoplatonists, the dismemberment of Dionysus signifies both a stage in the history of the cosmos, when the soul is divided or distributed into the world of space, as well as an anthropology, setting the stage for the soul’s ultimate liberation from matter. The later tradition reads back into the Platonic text this same anthropology. For Olympiodorus, the prohibition of suicide in the Phaedo is related to the episode. Human beings arise from the soot of the Titans’ ashes after they have consumed the god; the human body belongs to Dionysus, originating from his flesh (Olympiodorus, Comm. in Ph. 1.3). According to Olympiodorus, this is the esoteric reason behind Socrates’ strictures against suicide: Again, the “reign of Dionysus” is also a symbol for the human soul in its embodied condition. This is the life of division, signified by the “chewing” of the Titans: “Dionysus is the patron of this world, where extreme division prevails because of ‘mine’ and ‘thine.’” (Comm. in Ph. 1.5) In these examples and most famously in Enneads 4.3, the Dionysus episode reveals the fragmentation of human consciousness.22 For Plotinus and for Lacan, therefore, desire and separation arise together as the ground of the ego. Lacan agrees with the Neoplatonic assessment of the ego as inherently not healthy, as a cutting off of the Real, and as a concrete realization of narcissism whose correlate is aggression. In the Olympiodorus passage above, the narcissism of the mirror image is the counterpoint of the Titan’s cannibalism. In a similar vein, Lacan writes in “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis”: It is clear that the promotion of the ego today culminates, in conformity with the utilitarian conception of man that reinforces it, in an ever more advanced realization of man as individual, that is to say, in an isolation of the soul ever more akin to its original dereliction. (1977a: 27)
Only as the place where reality is not, do I arise. Hence Lacan’s famous comparison of the subject to the mugger’s dictum, “Your money or your life!” By becoming yourself, you cease to be. Separation introduces the problematic of falsehood into the arena of being. Plotinus refers to this false being as the eidoµlon, the image-being— a gift, ironically, from the universal soul, which the individual then appropriates and comes to inhabit:
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The first image is the faculty of sensation in the joint entity, and after this is everything else which is called a form of soul, each in its turn proceeding from the other; the series ends in the power of generation and growth. (Enn. 1.1.8)
The image of the real, the eidoµlon, the barred subject ($), takes up residence in the body or what Plotinus calls “the joint entity,” the mind/body compound. For Lacan, again, the technical name for the living being as individual, embodied self, is the perception-consciousness system. Accompanying this cosmic dispensation—the self-mirroring of the universal soul in the mind-body complexes of countless sentient beings—is the neusis, the inclination or downward pull of the imaged. Plotinus distinguishes between illumination and shadow cast, between illuminator and illuminated: Often I have woken up out of the body to my self and have entered into myself, going out from all other things. Then after that rest in the divine, when I have come down from Intellect to discursive reasoning, I am puzzled how I ever came down, and how my soul has come to be in the body when it is what it has shown itself to be by itself, even when it is in the body. (Enn. 4.8.1.1, 8–12)
The neusis or outward pull of the objective order, the sheer gravity of the state of embodiment, is another manifestation of the Other as source of entrapment. Both Plotinus and Lacan dwell at some length on the lure of the Other: It is as if someone, wishing to remove the images that arise from a dream should cause the dreaming mind to wake up, and should then say that the mind caused the passions, meaning that whatever the soul saw [in its dream] was only apparently external. (Enn. 3.6.5.10)
Plotinus concludes that one should just “leave the soul alone” and not allow it “to gaze at another.” Elsewhere, he suggests that anytime the mind simply looks at another thing, it is necessarily enthralled by that object, or subject to it.23 This dream of Otherness, the fall into the sexually marked body, is captured in the mirror of Dionysus, or mirror stage. Both Lacan and the Neoplatonists refer to the original disembodied condition in the terms of the Orphic myth cycle, the androgynous cosmic egg or hommelette: The relation to the Other is precisely that which for us brings out what is represented by the lamella—not sexed polarity, the relation between
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masculine and feminine, but the relation between the living subject and that which he loses by having to pass, for his reproduction, through the sexual cycle. (Lacan 1977b: 199)
II. The Disappearance of Being For Plotinus and for Lacan, however, this body can only be inhabited by the subject who is not identical with the body—not identical with the sexed body, since both sexes are equally modes of failing to be a subject; nor identical with the maternal body, since when the subject coincides with the maternal body, there is no subject; nor identical with the body as phallus, since the phallus is precisely the substitution of the Real for the symbolic order. Moreover, there are different coarsenesses of body: maternal body as pure being, infant body as imaginary reflection, and, perhaps the most subtle body, the body of language. In what seems to be an almost Stoic move, Lacan insists on language as a body. But this subtle body means that for Lacan there is no pure consciousness, but that what calls itself pure consciousness is language operating as the deferral of the signified: If the subject is what I say it is, namely the subject determined by language and speech, it follows that the subject, in initio, begins in the locus of the Other, in so far as it is there that the first signifier emerges. Now, what is a signifier? I have been drumming it into you long enough not to have to articulate it once again here. A signifier is that which represents a subject . . . for whom, not for another subject, but for another signifier. (1977b: 198)
Here we turn to the genealogy of the subject as unavailable fulcrum for experience, as the vanishing point, the center of a world that can never include it as one of its contents. To some extent, as even devoted Lacanians will admit, Lacan’s theory of the subject was born out of structuralism and inherits the grammatical psychology of Benveniste, for whom “I” as the subject of statements is an empty placeholder that relies entirely on the predicates attached for its meanings. Let us turn now to Neoplatonism, whose members belonged to a loosely defined revived Platonic academy, one that actually was closed down in 529 c.e., or almost one thousand years after the death of Socrates. They considered themselves Platonists in part because the school revolved around the exegesis of Plato’s dialogues, according to
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the rather abstruse metaphysics of Plotinus (fl. c. 320) and Proclus (fl. c. 480). The elements of this metaphysics are simple: the One, the Nous, and Soul are all positions or stages of a kind of cosmic pulse, according to which all things flow out of the One, remain in the One, and flow back into the One. These three moments—cosmic emanation, remaining, and reversion—are at the center of Neoplatonic philosophy. Its teleological psychology posits that the human soul can revert to the One, or become one with the One, by tracing its own origins back from its descent into the body. And so Neoplatonists disputed the definition of soul with Aristotle, who defined soul as the first actuality of a body endowed with life potentially. For the Neoplatonists, soul is actually the outermost expression of the One, or rather the point of entry into the universal life of the cosmos. But one of the most important principles for the Neoplatonists is the ultimate desire to reconcile Plato and Aristotle.24 Thus, the Neoplatonist commentators on Aristotle seized on Aristotle’s definition of the soul and tried to incorporate it into their philosophy of emanation. One avenue they took for this appropriation involves the topic of self-awareness, or self-transparency. Broadly speaking, the Neoplatonists assume that as the mind experiences an object, it flows outward to the object. But then, as the object is known by the mind, the mind takes that object in, making it a part of the intelligible world, and so the mind returns to its own center. Perception is a kind of mimesis, an enactment of the whole cosmic drama that consists in soul’s return to the One. Accordingly, the Neoplatonists argue that perceptual awareness implies the return of the soul to itself, and hence indicates its membership in the intelligible order. In the philosophy of the ancient Neoplatonic commentators, selfperception becomes an increasingly important topic within the larger project of interpreting Aristotle’s De anima. At the beginning of De anima 3.2, Aristotle tries to show that the faculty of perception must itself be responsible for the perception of perception.25 Several Neoplatonic authors came to interpret this passage of the De anima as a reference to self-awareness. Self-perception, the awareness that one is undergoing perceptual states, becomes a higher form of perception, rather than the simple perceptual awareness that Aristotle quite clearly had in mind. Certain later commentators on the De anima recognized a sixth sense, beyond the five senses that each have their proper sense objects, which either does or does not coincide with an
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Aristotelian common sense. The name for this additional mental faculty is prosektikon, from the verb prosekhein (to pay attention to, to be aware of). In his commentary on Plato’s Phaedo, the sixth-century philosopher Damascius describes the prosektikon as witness of the soul, as a self-awareness that simply records the presence of any experience the subject undergoes. Simplicius held that when the soul perceives something in the external world, it simultaneously perceives that object as bearing a predicate, as good or bad, for example; thus, in perceiving the object, the soul also knows itself. Perception contains a component of self-knowledge, insofar as perception is not merely passive, but the human perceiver at least is doing something in addition to passively receiving the form. The promotion of empirical self-awareness to a philosophically significant issue allowed the Neoplatonic tradition to formulate the concept of a transcendent faculty of awareness. Although the Neoplatonists stopped short of the strong Cartesian sense of the res cogitans, no doubt because they did not attribute indubitability to this new faculty, they greatly assisted in the construction of the res cogitans. The mind is simply that which reports on states of mind. This linguistic basis of subjectivity, the reification of the witness or reporter self, is an integral part of the Western philosophical tradition, with roots deeply buried in the world of late antiquity. The incipient nihilism of this construction is underscored in the Lacanian analysis, according to which self-transparency entails the loss of selfhood. Lacan also notices that the entire dilemma, the necessary choice between cogito and sum, is founded on an essentially skeptical philosophical project, as the self assumes an evidentiary status whose very testimony then belies its credibility. The Neoplatonists recognized the consequences of this skeptical self-configuration, and several members of the school attempted to reject the project of selfknowledge on the basis of inference. Plotinus, for instance, in considering the possibilities that introspection functions as a guarantor of self-existence, asks: Self-division is impossible. How will [the self] divide itself? It cannot do so randomly. In fact who is it that does the dividing? Is it the person identifying with the subject of vision or the person identifying with the object? Then again how will the subject recognize himself as the object if he identifies himself as the subject? (Enn. 5.3.3)
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Here we see that self-knowledge cannot be equated with perception, since the self is not, according to Plotinus, an object of knowledge. Plotinus’s intellect is not directed toward any intentional states and has no intentional object: “The being of intellect consists in an activity that is not directed toward anything” (Enn. 5.3.7.19). Moreover, it is neither the subject nor the predicate within any ordinary grammatical structure:26 when it affirms, “I am this,” if the word “this” refers to something other than the self, it will be saying what is false. If subjectivity pretends to demonstrate the presence of a subject, this very condition paradoxically voids the subject. Going through this kind of demonstration is like running one side of a Möbius strip. It is in this sense that the conditions for self-knowledge are smothering conditions. Now, the problem with this way of formulating selfreflection is that it posits the self that knows as itself an object of self-consciousness. Thus, the self itself becomes an object for the self. But the subjectively apprehending self cannot be an object of perception in the way that objects of perception are. Where are we to search for this lost self? We have seen that the self seems most evident as specular witness of its own states, as though all that it sees provides testimony for its own existence. The very desire to close the representational gap between self and subject instantiates that gap, since the self cannot be represented. This is the point at which Lacan inscribes the distinction between subject and ego—and so gestures toward the subject that cannot be an intentional object— with the matheme $. At Enneads 5.3.7, in the course of explaining what the activity of intellect is like, Plotinus gives us a gloss on the meaning of the word energeia (activity), since the function of intellect is pure energeia: For those for whom the essence is not potential, but actual, there is a unique and appropriate activity that consists in a resting from other things. Therefore, the essence of such things is activity, and yet it is an activity directed toward nothing.
Let us now turn to the critical discourse of Neoplatonism. Not only is this self constructed in language that is a central part of our philosophical heritage, but it has also produced critics along with its certainties. One might say that indubitability invites doubt, and thus these two sides of a philosophical program—dogmatism and skepticism—reinforce each other in a way that ultimately stabilizes and
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lends credence to both positions. Looking at the history of Platonism as a precursor to Lacanian antispecular philosophy, we will not be surprised to find a critical discourse, one that attacks the specular subject every bit as sincerely as its constructors propound it. Damascius (c. 462–538) was scholarch when the Christian emperor Justinian officially shut down the Platonic Academy in 529 and issued a decree that banned all pagans from teaching in Athens. Damascius’s title, Diadochus, marks him as last in the ancient lineage of Platonic Successors. His Problems and Solutions concerning First Principles is of significance both because it is one of the few original metaphysical treatises to have survived from late Athenian Neoplatonism, and because it presents a compendium of pagan philosophical and religious traditions as they existed at the close of an epoch. The following passage is taken from the central books of his critical work, Doubts and Solutions concerning First Principles. Here Damascius criticizes one of the central tenets of the Neoplatonic school, the doctrine of noeµsis or the theory of pure, incorrigible intuition, which posits the unity of subject and object in the moment of knowing: Knowledge accords with this object of knowledge but it is not the object of knowledge. Question: What then is the experience of the knower when it does not yet know? Answer: It seeks out the object of knowledge. Therefore knowledge is the attainment of the object of knowledge qua object of knowledge. For if in fact it attains Being, this is [only] insofar as Being is an object of knowledge. Question: So then intellect does not know Being, but [only] the manifestation of Being? Answer: [It knows] Being insofar as it is manifest, and it is manifest in accordance with the object of knowledge. And even if intellect could know Being, in exactly the way that it knows that which is capable of being known, nevertheless all that is capable of being known would be entirely [present] as an object of knowledge. The result is that intellect does know Being, but necessarily, as we say, according to the manifestation [of Being]. (2: 148, 20–25 Ruelle)
Here Damascius subjects the theory of reversion or self-reflection to a critique, according to which the act of self-recovery can never be completed: only as object can the self be apprehended, that is, “knowledge is the attainment of the object of knowledge qua object of knowledge.” The Lacanian dilemma, the Vel between cogito and sum, between subject as knower and object as known, establishes
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itself on one of the tropes of skepticism, namely, the splitting of consciousness. The mind must be either subject or object; it must be conditioned by its own subjectivity, and its productions can never return to the unity of consciousness once they arise. The Neoplatonists saw the connection between epistemology and desire: “But it is Being that Intellect desires.” Knowing is erotic. One branch of Neoplatonism in particular placed emphasis on the erotic compulsions expressed in the primary relationship between self and Other. In the ritual practice of theurgy, the participant invokes a deity by projecting that divinity into the symbolon (literally, token). This site of projection has a significant name, since symbolon denotes a fragment that requires its complement in order to signify. Theurgy employs this site of loss, of the split between subject and object, or fragmentation of the real, for its operations. Damascius refines the Platonic meaning of eroµs, or the drive toward reality.27 For Damascius, desire cannot be oriented toward being, but points backward toward the subject, and hence to nonbeing: Objection: But it is Being that intellect desires. Answer: It may desire Being, but it attains Being as an object of knowledge. Perhaps we should say that its desire is also of Being insofar as it is known since desires naturally correspond to the capacity to attain the objects of desire, and it follows that, for the knower, to attain Being is to attain it insofar as it is known. (2: 150, 19–23 Ruelle)
In stark contrast to the Neoplatonic identity thesis, for Damascius knowing and being known consist in alterity: Question: What does it mean to say, “capable of being known,” and how does this differ from Being? Answer: Something is an object of knowledge insofar as it exists in relation to another, whereas it is Being by virtue of what it is in itself. (2: 149, 25–150, 1 Ruelle)
Being is not something that can be attained; hence no desire for Being can be satisfied, and so here one can no longer speak of intellect knowing Being. When Damascius limits intellect’s knowledge to the appearance of Being, he suggests that Being still falls short of the goal that eroµs implies but that intellect can never discover. Knowledge implies desire, and desire is correlated to absence. The separation between knower and known remains the fulcrum of Neoplatonic
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worship and fuels the metaphysical enterprise. But this separation cannot itself become absolutized.
The One So far we have encountered Lacan and the Neoplatonists according to the Neoplatonic hierarchy of Being: the animate principle, the individual soul or discursive consciousness, and the intellect. If anything, the One has been posited as a placeholder that signifies the irrecoverable origins alluded to in the Orphic myth, or in Lacan’s myth of the prehistory of Being. Now we turn to consider the One, not as a moment in a narrative sequence, but as it is in itself. Since the One is not a thing, its more proper name is ‘nothing.’ In fact, Damascius disputes the fundamental metaphysical structures of the entire prior tradition, inasmuch as he refuses to designate his first principle “the One,” and instead prefers the name to arreton (Ineffable). The point here is that the Ineffable cannot be the subject of a metaphysical argument or the basis of a metaphysical system at all. It cannot be incorporated within, or accounted for outside of, the causal system that forms the structure of Neoplatonic metaphysics. From the point of view of the Ineffable, no such system exists. From the point of view of metaphysical discourse, the Ineffable is a term that can occupy no fixed place within the system: It is not above or below; it belongs neither to the category of first or ultimate, for there is no procession [from it]. It is not replete with all things nor yet does it contain all things; it is not within the realm of that which can be spoken, nor is it the One itself. (Damascius 1: 24.7–10 Westerink)
Consequently, all arguments for the Ineffable are ineffectual, if not self-refuting. The Ineffable at once bears comparison to and contrast with Lacan’s subject as void, as the enjoyer of an endlessly deferred jouissance, as the turning point of causality and the collapse of all agency. Primarily the contrast lies in the covert metaphysics of Lacanian theory. Lacan relies on a theory of the Real, which infuses his psychology with ontological commitments: Thinking always begins from our position within the symbolic order; in other words, we cannot but consider the supposed “time before the
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word” from within our symbolic order, using the categories and filters it provides. We may try to think ourselves back to a time before words, to some sort of presymbolic or prelinguistic element in the development of homo sapiens, or in our own individual development, but as long as we are thinking, language remains essential. In order to conceive of that time, we give it a name: the real. Lacan’s real is without zones, subdivisions, localized highs and lows, or gaps and plenitiudes. The real is a sort of unrent, undifferentiated fabric woven in such a way as to be full everywhere, there being no space between the threads that are its stuff. (Fink 24)
But where do we find this Real? In point of fact, psychoanalysis is the process of symbolizing the Real, of transforming, reducing, or converting that which has not yet been symbolized into the Symbolic order. Hence Lacan expresses the relationship between the Real and the Symbolic order through the following ratio: Symbolic/Real. This ratio expresses the idea that the Real can only ever be a postulate, a relative concept—meaning perhaps the beginning of a psychoanalytic session, memory before it is remembered, the body before it is named according to anatomical nomenclature. But this Real is, then, just an effect of the discursive realm. Even if the Symbolic functions to cut, sever, or mutilate the uncarved face of the Real, the wound abrades as much of the Real as could surface in consciousness. Neoplatonists, on the other hand, begin their radical praxis as the undoing of the effects of the Symbolic. Damascius refers to his practice as a giving birth to ignorance, as suffering the birth pangs of not knowing, as the labor of emptiness. This drive to fold back the individual self into the maternal ground before consciousness arises is the explicit goal of Neoplatonic askeµsis. In the following passage, Damascius quotes from the Chaldean Oracles, a pseudo-Babylonian wisdom book that was written in archaizing hexameters sometime around the second century c.e.: There is something intelligible, which you should know in the flower of the Intellect. If you turn your own intellect toward it and know it as an object, then you will not know it. . . . I ask you to know this without strain; turn back the sacred eye of your soul and bring the empty mind into that intelligible, until you comprehend it, since it is outside the intellect. (1: 105, 3–5 and 9–13 Westerink = Orph. Chal., Frag 1)
Does Lacanian theory admit this backward step away from the objective portion of consciousness? We have seen that Lacan decries con-
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sciousness of consciousness as a shell game, as the monstrous habitation of a Cyclopean eye, or as tenancy in the head alone. To lose one’s head, not to cling to the subject as a space of refuge, seems to be one of the few bits of philosophical advice Lacan is willing to offer. Damascius too speaks of losing one’s grounding in self-consciousness, a kind of losing one’s eye. Again using metaphorical language, Damascius describes the experience in which intellect disappears: When first we try to see the sun we see it from afar. But as we get closer to it, we actually see it less: finally we don’t see it or anything else, since we have ourselves become the light. There is no more eye of enlightenment. (1: 84 Westerink)
Many of Lacan’s claims seem compatible with Neoplatonism. Both would suspect that the ordinary perceptual apparatus and the accompanying ego-consciousness—the everyday mind of a person who has not yet digested, converted, the Real—amount to a mechanistic form of awareness. Lacan directly connects ego-consciousness to the threat of mechanistic self-annihilation when he writes: “We are engaged in a technical enterprise at the species scale: the problem is knowing whether the Master/Slave conflict will find its resolution in the service of the machine” (1977a: 27). In the anecdote of the can shining in the water (1977b: 95), Lacan demonstrates how the world is invested with a consciousness that it does not truly, in its status as an object, have a right to claim: “Do you see that can? Well it doesn’t see you!” The only thing shining in the case of the tin can is the eye that perceives it. If Lacan asks his interlocutors to retrace the radiance of perception, to steal away the gaze from the lure of the mirror, then so far the Neoplatonists concur with his recommendations. Much of this work cannot be captured in language, since it involves going behind the scenes of the world facade and recapturing the central polarities of seer and seen, eye and world, knower and known. Perhaps this need to subvert the structure of language is what inspires Lacan’s reliance on diagrams. At certain points, Lacan seems to think that the structure of subjectivity is inherently geometric or spatial, that the appreciation of subjectivity involves kaleidoscopic vision. The ego formation is a spatializing projection. Neoplatonists also revive their ancestral origins in number theory, ancient Pythagorean symbolism, Plato’s numerological puns, and the esoteric interpretation of Euclidian geometry. The basic diagram that Plotinus
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employs is the simple model of a point surrounded by one or more concentric circles, with radii projecting from the center to the circumference of these circles. The geometric figures representing the hypostases are often described by means of mathematical images: like numbers, they are conceived of as generating, multiplying, being added, and subtracted. In this system of imagery the basic Plotinian conception of deriving all things from unity takes on a literal character as a process of metaphysical subtraction and addition:28 Therefore this multiple intellect, when it wishes to intelligize that which is beyond, wishes to intelligize that itself as one, but wishing to apprehend it in its simplicity emerges continually grasping something else multiplied in itself. (Enn. 5.3.11.1–4) Before the Dyad is the One, and the Dyad is second and from the One, that has it as something indefinite, but this is indefinite of itself. It is otherness, movement, desire, and life. (Enn. 5.1.5.6)
Taking up the narrative before Freud, who seemingly greets the subject as already caught up in the binary system of self and Other, a configuration that Freud references by means of the Fort-Da game, Lacan asks about the moment when this binary arises. Lacanian anthropology also begins in numerology. Lacan’s chapter in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, “Of the Subject Who is Supposed to Know, of the First Dyad, and of the Good,” reads as a sendup of obscure Pythagorean numerology. And yet in this essay Lacan intimates an almost Neoplatonic interest in transcendence. It is the dyad, the inexplicable onset of duality, the fall that consists, for subjects, of coming under the determinations of the binary signifier, which functions like the Neoplatonic cosmic pulse.29 Perhaps there is a kind of philosophy of emanation at work in Lacan, in which the moment of procession and remaining form the stages of one Möbius strip, where the inwardness of the Real receives expression/obfuscation in the extimacy of the subject who speaks. In a strange comparison, perhaps Damascius too is asking this question about the subject of the Real when he starts his work, Doubts and Solutions concerning First Principles, with the following query:30 Is the so-called One Principle of all things beyond all things or is it one among all things, the as it were apex of everything that proceeds from it? And are we to say that “All Things” are with the [first principle], or after it and [that they proceed] from it?31
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If someone were to assert this last hypothesis, . . . how could [it] be something outside of all things? . . . For “all things” means, strictu sensu, “that from which nothing whatsoever is absent.” But in this case, the [first] principle is missing. Therefore what comes after the first principle would not be properly speaking “all things,” but rather all things up to the point of [parav] the first principle. (1.1–10)
Like the Neoplatonists, Lacan posits an originary condition that can be described as nothing at all, a condition that precedes, in some sense, the lapse into meaning and being which inaugurates ontology. The contrast between the helpless infant body and his lack of speech—with the powerful, free, and purely symbolic function of recognizing the self in the mirror—entails for Lacan precisely the divergence between the subject’s original being and its discursive constitution. Could we say that for Neoplatonists and Lacanians the subject is punctiform or dyadic—punctiform because it can never be discovered among the objects that occupy the field of its awareness, dyadic because of this very alienation. If Lacan is willing to use the science of optics as part of his psychoanalytic program, perhaps it is because he wants to call attention to the very fact of seeing as such. Lacan might well think of his own activity as belonging to the tradition of seers, as if his texts were interspersed with the untranslatable glyphs of a forgotten language, the knots, interlocking circles, and incommensurate surfaces of perception, desire, and memory which turn his writings into Hermetic treatises. If the Plotinian spider web or radiant vortex of emanation equates with Lacan’s punctual subject caught up in the web of language, of the Symbolic, of desire and its substitutes, this equation suggests something that may be concealed by Lacan’s manifest dualism. Although Lacan considers the valorization of self-consciousness a huge distraction—the seeing oneself seeing oneself as a step back from life as it actually unfolds—he does not spend as much time dwelling on the inverse picture. Like the prisoners in Plato’s cavern, we cannot turn around and see the originals reflected in the mirror. The eye cannot see itself. In order to see, we must see objects. Thus, we do not find that our world includes the original; the subject is excluded. The subject, for us, is a void. But what is the nature of that void? Does it represent the limits of consciousness and the saturation of being, or does it suggest to us that our world is, as a mat-
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ter of fact, mind only? Why should we inhabit this world as if it merely eclipses the Real, wounds the Real? Do we inhabit the world in this way merely because it turns out, as a matter of fact, to be unsatisfactory? Could there be another way to inhabit this world, one that does not crucially rely on jouissance as the only known antidote to suffering, since that one antidote is also unavailable? This is where psychoanalysis and Neoplatonism as praxes and not theories once more intersect and diverge. Damascius insists that the only cure for what ails—not knowing—will be persistence in not knowing. He perhaps would argue that most of the time we know all too much or that we have not yet succeeded in not knowing. Fundamentally, all knowing is predicated on the split between subject and object, and being and its signifiers, which become the crux of Lacanian psychoanalysis. But Damascius and Lacan part company over the chasm of this divide. Lacanian analysis bids its adherents to abide in speech, to be speaking beings, to speak themselves. To switch cultural references, this Lacanian divinization of speech reminds us more of the Vedas than of Platonism. At one point in his essay “Function and Field of Speech and Language,” Lacan actually closes the essay with a reference to an Upanishadic hymn to speech. Quoting the Brhadanranyaka Upanishad, Lacan enjoins: “The sacred text mean[s] that the powers below resound to the invocation of speech.”32 Lacan actually suggests that reality consists in speech alone: “At last it is in the gift of speech that all the reality of its effects resides; for it is by way of this gift that all reality has come to man.” By contrast, for Damascius reality is not exhausted by speech. If Lacan and Damascius share a common name, “The Void,” for their first principle, Damascius is aware that negative attributes when applied to the Ineffable do not attribute anything to it nor determine its nature. Instead, by using negative language we succeed only in delimiting our own discursive practices: Nor do we affirm that [the Ineffable] is unknowable in the sense that the unknowable has a determinate nature, being something other, nor do we call it “being,” nor “one,” nor “all,” nor “principle of the all” nor “beyond all things.” We deny that it is possible to make any statement about it at all. . . . But this again is not its nature, viz., the expressions “not a thing,” “beyond all,” “causeless cause,” and “unrelated to anything,” nor do these attributes constitute its nature. . . . Rather, they serve simply to remove anything that arises after the Ineffable. (1: 11, 15–25 Ruelle)
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How to effect that removal is the entire burden of Neoplatonic praxis. Lacan leaves us where he found us—in the field of speech, whose center is a subject that can never be articulated—and yet to describe this subject as a void is to engage in ontology, as Lacan readily admits. For Lacan, this subject is void because it has become unavailable. Like the Real, whose effects are both felt in and eclipsed by language, the subject does not emerge in the empirical realm. The subject ($) is a placeholder within the system of the Symbolic, an order from which there is no egress or, at least, from which the praxis of Lacanian psychoanalysis leaves no egress. Lacan’s theory of the subject is a discourse that does not purport to be referential, as we saw at the beginning of this essay. But if so, can it genuinely function as a theory of the subject?
Works Cited Abram, J., ed. 2000. André Green at the Squiggle Foundation. London. Andrews, L. and D. Nelkin. 2001. Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age. New York. Brisson, Luc. 1995. Orphée et l’Orphisme dans l’antiquité gréco-romaine. Brookfield, VT. Bull, Malcolm. 2001. “Hate Is the New Love.” London Review of Books 23: 2 (25 January 2001). Damascius. Dubitationes et solutiones de primis principiis. Ed. Ch. Ruelle. 2 vols. Paris 1899. ———. Traite des premiers principes. Ed. L. G. Westerink. Trans. J. Combes. 3 vols. Paris 1986–91. Damasio, A. 2001. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York. Dennett, M. 1978. Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Philosophy. Montgomery, VT. Dolar, M. 1998. “Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious.” In Ziz˚ek 1998a, 11–40. Fink, B. 1995. The Lacanian Subject. Princeton. Guthrie, W. K. C. 1952. Orpheus and Greek Religion. Princeton. Irigaray, L. 1985. “Plato’s Hysteria.” In L. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. G. C. Gill. Ithaca. 243–364. (Originally published in Speculum de l’autre femme [Paris 1974]) Kenny, A. 1989. The Metaphysics of Mind. New York. Lacan, J. 1977a. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York. ———. 1977b. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. J.-A. Miller. Trans. A. Sheridan. London. (Originally published as Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de psychanalyse [Paris 1973]) ———. 1982. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. Eds. J. Mitchell and J. Rose. New York. ———. 1998. Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX. Ed. J.-A. Miller. New York.
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Miller, J.-A. 1991. “Language: Much Ado about What?” In Ragland-Sullivan 1991, 21–35. Olympiodorus. Prolegomenes à la philosophie de Platon. Ed. L. G. Westerink. Trans. J. Trouillard. Paris 1990. Plotinus. Plotini Opera. Eds. P. Henry and H.-R. Schwyzer. Editio minor. 3 vols. Oxford 1964–82. Ragland-Sullivan, E., 1986. Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Urbana. ———, ed. 1991. Lacan and the Subject of Language. New York. Simplicius. In Aristotelis Categorias commentarium. Ed. K. Kalbfleisch. Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, 8. London 1907. Sorabji, R., ed. 1990. Aristotle Transformed: The Ancient Commentators and Their Influence. London. Waterfield, R., trans. 1988. The Theology of Arithmetic: On the Mystical, Mathematical and Cosmological Symbolism of the First Ten Numbers, Attributed to Iamblichus. Grand Rapids, MI. West, M. L. 1983. The Orphic Poems. Oxford. Zintzen, C., ed. 1967. Vitae Isidori reliquiae. Hildesheim. Ziz˚ek, S., 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham. ———, ed. 1998a. Cogito and the Unconscious. Durham and London. ———. 1998b. “Four Discourse, Four Subjects.” In Ziz˚ek 1998a, 74–113. ———. 1998c. “The Cartesian Subject versus the Cartesian Theater.” In Ziz˚ek 1998a, 247–74.
Notes 1
Abram 17. 2 I am thinking of a number of works that either treat Lacanian theory as a kind of metaphysics or replacement for metaphysics (e.g., Miller’s essay in Ragland-Sullivan 1991), or place Lacan in the Western metaphysical and especially Hegelian tradition (e.g., Ziz˚ek 1993 and 1998a). Dolar, for example, sees psychoanalysis as attacking philosophy through the Freudian rejection of the cogito, that is, through Freud’s refutation of subjective transparency via his theory of the unconscious. 3 Fink 130–07. 4 Miller 32. 5 Lacan 1977b: 138–39. 6 See Irigaray. This discussion is hardly original, as any student of Irigaray knows. Irigaray, of course, employs Lacanian thought as the unspoken frame of her Speculum of the Other Woman. In this book, Iragaray more or less equates the Lacanian model of sexual differentiation, which posits the Symbolic order as that which excludes the feminine, with the self-apprehension of the Platonic subject, described as a moment of epistrophe in Plato’s allegory of the cave. For Irigary, both Lacan and Plato attempt to exclude by fiat a region of experience that resists their metaphysics of self-apprehension. 7 Cf. Bull. The parallels between Plotinus and Lacan are probably more than fortuitous. Lacan developed his theory in the early 1930s through the synthesis of his teacher Henri Wallon’s “mirror test” with some of the ideas he was picking up from his informal philosophical studies. At the time, Neoplatonism was also undergoing a revival in France under the leadership of Emile Berthier at the Sorbonne, while the
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belief that there are affinities between the philosophies of Plotinus and Bergson brought Neoplatonism into wider philosophical discussion. Lacan’s attention would have been drawn to the myth of Dionysus Zagreus (and its Neoplatonic interpreters) by a book he said all psychoanalysts should read at least once—Erwin Rohde’s Psyche, which had been translated into French in 1928. The general fascination with Neoplatonism had waned by the years of Lacan’s fame, but the scattering of references to Plotinus in the Seminars testifies to an enduring interest. 8 Cf. Lacan 1977b: 196–97, 231–32, 234. 9 Lacan 1977a: 7. 10 Lacan 1977b: 232: “Now it is quite certain, as everyone knows, that no psychoanalyst can claim to represent, in however slight a way, a corpus of absolute knowledge. That is why, in a sense, it can be said that if there is someone to whom one can apply there can be only one such person. This one was Freud, while he was alive. He was not only the subject who was supposed to know. He did know, and he gave us this knowledge in terms that may be said to be indestructible, in as much as, since they were first communicated, they support an interrogation which, up to the present day, has never been exhausted.” 11 Lacan himself identifies Freud as a mythmaker. 12 I will return to this myth shortly, but here I should indicate that I am referring to the myth of the Lamella or hommelette outlined in 1977b, a myth that Lacan derives from his reading of Aristophanes’ tale in the Symposium. But this tale itself is, as will become clear, a version of an Orphic cosmogony. Cf. Lacan 1977b: 197. 13 Lacan also compares his techniques to those of Zen Buddhism. 14 Lacan is very interested in the transmission of psychoanalytic “truth,” and invents a new form of certification that permits the truth of a given analysis to be passed down to those outside the original analysis itself. 15 As, for example, in “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” where Lacan sets out from a Hegelian master-slave logic that depends on the desire to dominate the Other but ends in the Freudian castration complex; he concludes that in the last, desire can only be of the Other. 16 The notion that there is something irreducibly third-personesque about the subject, about the “I”—that the subject has completely entered into language—is, it turns out, unsurprisingly traditional. The question for us as readers of this classical metaphysical tradition (here, through the mirror of psychoanalytic discourse) is, Do we complain or do we concur? And do we read psychoanalytic discourse as complying with, or as breaking with, this fundamentally linguistic representation of subjectivity? 17 Lacan 1977b: 83: “For us, consciousness matters only in its relation to what, for propaedeutic reasons, I have tried to show you in the fiction of the incomplete text— on the basis of which it is a question of recentering the subject as speaking in the very lacunae of that in which as first sight, it presents itself as speaking.” Again, in his work on the Vel of alienation, Lacan writes: “Let us illustrate this with what we are dealing with here, namely the being of the subject, that which is there beneath the meaning. If we choose being, the subject disappears, it eludes us, and it falls into nonmeaning. In other words, it is of the nature of this meaning, as it emerges in the field of the other to be in large part of its field eclipsed by the disappearance of being, induced by the very function of the signifier. The subject manages, fortunately, to symbolize his own vanishing and punctiform bar in the illusion of the consciousness of seeing oneself see oneself” (1977b: 83). 18 For a summary of texts alluding to the Orphic cosmogony, see West. Before the discovery of the Derveni papyrus, three versions of the Orphic myth were distinguished. The first is the Rhapsodic Theogony, preserved by Damascius and Christian
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apologists, in which Chronus produces a Cosmic egg, which then hatches into Phanes, the bisexual being who creates the world that is eventually swallowed and regurgitated by Zeus. The second version, the Eudemian and the most ancient, is mainly attested in Aristophanes, Av. 693–703, but also was supposedly known by the Peripatetic Eudemus; here Night creates the Cosmic egg. There was also a third version, that of the enigmatic Hieronymous, attested to solely in the writings of Damascius. The quotation that Damascius makes from the version of Eudemus gives us information about the Orphic poems circulating during the Classical period, which can be used together with Aristophanes’ Birds, Plato’s Symposium, and the Derveni Papyrus, in order to comprehend which episodes belonged in the earliest version of the Orphic drama. 19 The Neoplatonists recognized both a universal nous or intellect (the faculty of intuitive, prediscursive awareness) and an individual mind, the ability of each individual to attain to intuitive knowledge of reality. Similarly, the Neoplatonists recognized various levels of soul: the universal hypostasis (Soul), which constitutes one aspect or moment of Neoplatonic metaphysics; the world soul; and individual souls subject to birth and to death, and to enlightenment or ignorance. 20 Lacan 1977a: 1: “Some of you may recall that this conception [sc. the mirror stage] originated in a feature of human behaviour illuminated by a fact of comparative psychology. The child, at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recognize as such his own image in a mirror.” 21 Lacan 1977a: 308 refers to “that danger of the generic prematuration of birth, which I see as the dynamic origin of specular capture.” 22 Cf. also Proclus, Comm. in Crat. 133: “The intellect in us is Dionysian and thus truly a shrine to Dionysus. Whoever wrongs it and scatters its undivided nature through much divided falsehood sins against Dionysus.” 23 The lure also has a therapeutic function in the Platonic tradition. Often it triggers the response that makes self-transformation available to the subject. In the early Socratic dialogues, for example, we often see Socrates luring his interlocutor with promises of assisting him in his enterprise, thus luring him into a philosophical interview. Socrates lures Charmides with a promise to cure his headache, if only Charmides will let Socrates examine his soul. 24 Cf. the collection of essays in Sorabji. The commentator tradition constructs a new Aristotle by reading Aristotelian texts in the light of Platonist doctrines. Among the most important commentators are Alexander of Aphrodisias, Simplicius, and Philoponus. 25 [Epei; d j aijsqanovmeqa o{t i oJrw`men kai; ajkouvomen, ajnavgkh h] th`/ o[yei aijsqavnesqai o{ti oJra`/, h] eJtevra/. ajll j hJ aujth; e[stai th`~ o[yew~ kai; tou` uJpokeimevnou crwvmato~. w{ste h[ duvo tou` aujtou` e[sonati h[ aujth; auJth`~. e[ti d j eij kai; eJtevra ei[h hJ th`~ o[yew~ ai[sqesi~, h] eij~ a[peiron ei\s in h] aujthv ti~ e[stai auJth`~, w{st j ejpi; th`~ prwvth~ poihvteon. (De an. 3.2) Since we perceive that we see and hear, it must either be by sight that one perceives that he sees or by some other sense. But then the same sense will be both of sight and of color which is the object sight, so that either there will be two senses of the same or some sense will be of itself. Furthermore, if the sense which is of sight indeed be different, either there will be an infinite regress, or again some sense will be of itself. So this ought to be done with regard to the first. This involves some difficulty, for it to perceive by sight is to see and if it is color or what has color which one sees, if that which sees is itself seen, then that which first sees will have color. 26 On the Cartesian subject as a grammatical placeholder see Kenny and Ziz˚ek. 27 Cf. Plotinus, Enn. 3.6.9. 28 Cf. also Plotinus, Enn. 5.8.9.11; 6.2.4.13; 6.5.12.18.
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29 It is interesting that Lacan’s interest in the dyad as the origin of subjective alienation resembles the Neoplatonic cosmic interpretation of the Dyad. Plotinus and the Neoplatonists describe a metaphysical system with the mathemes of the One, Indefinite Dyad, and Multiplicity, or with the mathemes of point, line, circle, and sphere. The Indefinite Dyad enjoys a notorious reputation among the Neopythagoreans and later Platonists: one of its names is “daring, audacity,” that is, ego: “Among the virtues, they liken it [sc. the Dyad] to courage: for it has already advanced into action. Hence too they used to call it ‘daring’ and ‘impulse’” (Zintzen 41). 30 Damascius begins his discussion by raising an aporia concerning the status of the first principle. Tensions between a transcendent One, utterly unrelated to any form of Being, and an originary One, source and support of all reality, broke out in the doctrinal disputes of Plotinus’s successors, with Porphyry elevating the causal aspect of the One at the risk of collapsing the second hypostasis into the first. Responding to this solution, Iamblichus proposed that there are two first principles before the level of Being: the first One, not associated with causality, and second One, which is. 31 This opening question is directed at the debate between Iamblichus and Porphyry concerning the status and number of principles before the first noetic triad. Damascius examines the issue more fully at 1: 86–94 Westerink, and tends to approve the position of Iamblichus as against Porphyry, without committing himself entirely to the Iamblichean solution. 32 Lacan 1977a: 107.
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Auto-Iconicity and Its Vicissitudes: Bentham and Plato m i r a n b o z ov i c
Auto-Thanatography Jeremy Bentham’s last wish was that after his death his body be publicly dissected and then preserved and exhibited. The ideas behind this somewhat extraordinary wish are elaborated in his work entitled Auto-Icon; Or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living.1 While other philosophers who reflect on death are mostly concerned with the destiny of the soul after the death of the body, Bentham, in his AutoIcon, is concerned exclusively with the destiny of the dead body, that is, the body that the soul has left. Accordingly, whereas other philosophers’ reflections on death most often take the form of meditations on the immortality of the soul and completely disregard the postmortem fate of the body, Bentham’s reflections on death take the form of meditations on the body—first and foremost on his own dead body—and disregard the destiny of the soul. As a treatise on the author’s own dead body, Bentham’s Auto-Icon is perhaps the only work of its kind, thus constituting its own genre, for which Bentham coined a new term: for the description of one’s own death and the subsequent fate of the body, he proposed the term auto-thanatography as a natural sequel to one’s autobiography.2 While people generally find the very thought of death or dead bodies revolting, by contrast in Bentham’s eyes it is the dead bodies— bodies of animals and humans, preserved after death “in the torrid regions of Africa,” “in the ice of the poles,” “in the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii,” “in rocks,” and in “bogs, impregnated with tannine matter”—which provide “valuable materials for thought” (1). While others, as a rule, rarely talk about death, particularly not their own, Bentham said of his own death, and of the fate of his body after death, that “for many a year the subject has been a favourite one at my table” (2).
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A good example of the way people generally try at all costs to ward off the idea of their own death can be found in Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. There, not only do all the friends of the recently deceased Ivan Ilyich behave “as though death were a chance experience that could happen only to Ivan Ilyich”3 and not to themselves, but Ivan Ilyich himself dies believing that death is an experience that happens only to others and not to himself: Ivan Ilyich saw that he was dying, and he was in a constant state of despair. In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he unaccustomed to such an idea, he simply could not grasp it, could not grasp it at all. The syllogism he had learned from Kiesewetter’s logic—“Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal”—had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but by no means to himself. That man Caius represented man in the abstract, and so the reasoning was perfectly sound; but he was not Caius, not an abstract man; he had always been a creature quite, quite distinct from all the others. . . . Caius really was mortal, and it was only right that he should die, but for him, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all his thoughts and feelings, it was something else again. And it simply was not possible that he should have to die. That would be too terrible.4
Although Ivan Ilyich is terminally ill, he still thinks that it will be Caius, that is, “man in the abstract,” who will die, not he himself. Although Bentham wrote his Auto-Icon shortly before his death and referred to it as his “last work,”5 he betrays in the treatise no fear of death; instead, he reflects on his own death just as objectively as he reflects upon everything else, that is, from the viewpoint of its possible utility. Although his writing was usually cold and dull, this utilitarian sage, when writing his auto-thanatography, becomes lively for the first time and does not even try to hide his enthusiasm in contemplating the postmortem fate of his body. As a utilitarian, he was exclusively interested in how he could be of use to his fellow humans even after death, that is, in what way even his dead body could contribute to the happiness of the living. As he wrote already in 1769, he wished “that mankind may reap some small benefit in and by my decease, having hitherto had small opportunities to contribute thereto while living.”6 Other philosophers, such as Nicolas Malebranche or George
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Berkeley, similarly display no fear of death, but Bentham’s lack of fear stems from different causes. It is, perhaps, not hard to face death if we share Berkeley’s belief that the soul is “naturally immortal”7 and that “the Resurrection follows the next moment to death.”8 The latter idea constitutes one of the “several paradoxes” that follow from Berkeley’s radical theory of time. If, as a mind, I exist only as long as I perceive, then, of course, the moment I cease to perceive, that is, the moment I fall into a totally dreamless sleep or lose consciousness, I should cease to exist. Subsequently, in order to avoid this conclusion, Berkeley introduces his theory of time. According to Berkeley, what constitutes the time of each individual mind—and each individual mind has its own wholly subjective time, for there is no absolute time—is “the succession of ideas”9 in the mind. It follows that the moment there is no succession of ideas, there is no time either. But if, when there is no longer any succession of ideas, there is also no time, then between death (the moment when I lose consciousness) and the resurrection (the moment when I regain consciousness) there is no time for me not to exist.10 Thus, what Berkeley claims is not that I myself do not exist in the interval separating my death from the resurrection, but rather the interval itself does not exist. Since Berkeley believed that the “intervals of Death or Annihilation” are “nothing,”11 is it any wonder that he got a friend to assist him in hanging himself because he was curious to know “what were the pains and symptoms . . . felt upon such an occasion”?12 It might be even less difficult to face death, if we were to share Malebranche’s belief that “at death we do not lose anything.”13 According to Malebranche, in addition to the material body, which is inaccessible and inefficacious, we possess yet another “ideal” or “intelligible body”; and it is only the latter body that is capable of acting on us. It is not simply that the ideal body begins acting on us after death, when we have lost the material body; rather, the ideal body acts on us all along. Thus, for example, although we believe that it is our material body that causes pain in us when we are injured, it is in fact the ideal body that is causing the pain. Since, according to Malebranche, the soul can be united only to that which can act upon it, it follows that the soul is not, and cannot be, united to the material body, but only to the ideal one. The ideal body is “more real” than the material body; moreover, unlike the material body that no longer exists after death, our ideal body is “incorruptible,”14 and we there-
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fore possess it even after we have lost the material one. Since death cannot separate us from the ideal body, to which we are really united, but only from the material body, which even while still alive was incapable of acting on us and was thus actually dead even before death, it is clear that “at death we do not lose anything”: “therefore death which separates the soul . . . from this insensible body . . . is not to be feared at all.”15 Furthermore, since the body that acts upon us even while the material body is still alive is precisely the body that also acts upon us after the material body’s death, it follows that in Malebranche the resurrection precedes death itself. Incidentally, there is an apocryphal story—quoted by Thomas De Quincey in his brilliant essay On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts—which states that Berkeley supposedly caused Malebranche’s death. When Berkeley called on the famous philosopher in Paris, he found him in his cell cooking. A dispute arose about the latter’s doctrine of occasional causes. Berkeley urged Malebranche to retract his system, while the latter stubbornly stood his ground. “Culinary and metaphysical irritations united to derange his liver: he took to his bed, and died.”16 Berkeley thus came to be considered as “the occasional cause of Malebranche’s death.”17 If, on the other hand, we share Bentham’s uncertainty about the ontological status of the soul after the death of the body, that is, if the “soul, existing in a state of separation from the body,” cannot even be said to be a “real entity,”18 and if our entire postmortem fate is that of “a senseless carcass” (7), then clearly there is not much we can hope for in the afterlife. While Malebranche’s postmortem fate is not dependent upon the fate of the dead material body, Bentham’s is not dependent upon the fate of the soul. While Malebranche, in Entretiens sur la mort, views his own postmortem fate as the fate of the immortal soul, which, even after the death of the material body, remains united to the ideal body, Bentham in Auto-Icon, by contrast, sees his postmortem fate solely in terms of his dead body. Although this body will remain soulless even after the resurrection, it will nevertheless be precisely this body that Bentham will claim as “his own self.”
The Auto-Icon Art According to Bentham, the conventional disposal of the body after death goes against not only utilitarian wisdom but also common
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sense: it is a “source of evil” for the living—“undertaker, lawyer, priest—all join in the depredation” (1)—and it also deprives them of the good they might otherwise have obtained from the dead. But what is the good that can be extracted from the dead? In what way can the dead, through their bodies, contribute “to the common stock of human happiness” (2)? After death, human bodies can serve two purposes: one that is “transitory,” and the other, “permanent.” The transitory purpose is “anatomical, or dissectional,” and the permanent is “conservative, or statuary” (2). “The mass of matter which death has created” should not simply be disposed of, but should be used “with a view to the felicity of mankind.” Bearing in mind his “greatest-happiness principle,” Bentham argues that the dead body can be put to the best use if “the soft and corruptible parts” are employed “for the purpose of anatomical instructions,” and “the comparatively incorruptible part” converted into “an Auto-Icon” (2). Let us look first at the “transitory,” that is, “anatomical, or dissectional” purpose of dead human bodies. It might seem unnecessary for the utilitarians to have to persuade anyone about the utility of the dead in teaching anatomy, for by now most of us will admit that by dissecting and studying the bodies of “the insensible dead,” the “susceptible living” may be spared numerous severe pains. Yet in Bentham’s time, this position was not widely shared. As Ruth Richardson observes, in Great Britain during this period the only legal bodies for medical dissection were those of hanged murderers. The dissection, performed by a surgeon-anatomist, was considered part of the punishment, an extension of the hangman’s task.19 Consequently, anatomists acquired a particularly low reputation in public opinion and the act of dissection itself was viewed with suspicion. The dissection of murderers was made compulsory by the 1752 Murder Act, in which dissection is described as a “further Terror and peculiar Mark of Infamy.”20 But since the bodies from this source clearly were in scarce supply, in order to satisfy the ever increasing demand of the anatomy schools, the so-called body snatchers (or “the resurrectionists,” as they were also known) emerged and began digging corpses up from their graves and selling them to anatomy schools. Body snatching was not technically a crime of theft—dead bodies were not thought to belong to anyone by law and consequently “could be neither owned or stolen”—but was considered merely as an offense
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against public morality.21 However, William Burke and William Hare from Edinburgh, the most notorious of the body snatchers and mentioned by Bentham in his Auto-Icon, did not simply dig up dead bodies, but actually murdered their subjects with the intention of selling their bodies to anatomists. It is in this historical context that Bentham’s extraordinary last will must be understood. Bentham left his dead body to his friend and disciple, Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith; it thus became Smith’s property and could not be stolen from him with impunity. He was to dissect it and use it as the means of illustrating a series of lectures to which scientific & literary men are to be invited. . . . These lectures are to expound the situation structure & functions of the different organs. . . . The object of these lectures being two fold first to communicate curious interesting & highly important knowledge & secondly to show that the primitive horror at dissection originates in ignorance . . . 22
Bentham left his own body to an anatomist for dissection in a period when, as I said above, there was a growing demand for corpses in the medical schools, but only a scant supply, since only convicted criminals could be dissected. Indeed, corpses were so much in demand and so scarce in supply that murder began to pay. According to Bentham, it was “the pecuniary value attached” to the corpses that “created murderers in the shape of Burkes and Hares” (7). Rather than an empty gesture of a capricious philosopher who had lost his mind in old age, Bentham’s donation of his body was an “exemplary bequest,”23 intended to inspire others to bequeath their bodies for dissection after death and thus ultimately to make murder unprofitable. Southwood Smith executed Bentham’s last will faithfully, and dissected his friend’s body in front of his disciples and medical students. Before the dissection, he gave a long oration, entitled A Lecture Delivered over the Remains of Jeremy Bentham, over the corpse. The idea that dissected human bodies, having once served their “transitory” purpose, should be preserved, that is, put to their “permanent” or “conservative, or statuary” purpose, is urged by Bentham as follows: What resemblance, what painting, what statue of a human being can be so like him, as, in the character of an Auto-Icon, he or she will be to himself or herself? Is not identity preferable to similitude? (3)
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Since nothing resembles an individual as well as that individual resembles himself, the bodies of the dead need to be preserved as their own most adequate representations. While one is usually represented after death by various icons—“resemblances,” “paintings,” and “statues”—the preservation of the body makes it possible for anyone to become his own icon, that is, an “auto-icon.” The term auto-icon, invented by Bentham, is, as he says, “self-explanatory”; it means “a man who is his own image” (2). Converted into an auto-icon, every man could, even after death, continue to represent himself, to be “his own image.” Since each man would be “his own statue,”24 auto-iconism would, of course, “supersede the necessity of sculpture” (4); that is, since each man would be “his own monument” (4), “there would no longer be needed monuments of stone or marble” (3). The art of auto-iconism, in short, would provide “likenesses more perfect than painting or sculpture could furnish” (5). Bentham thus was interested in the dead body in the same way that De Quincey was interested in murder—as an objet d’art, that is, as the object of “one of the fine arts.” Bentham set a personal example not only for the “transitory” (i.e., “anatomical”) purpose, but also for the “permanent” (i.e., “statuary”) purpose of dead human bodies: in his will, he directed Southwood Smith, after he had performed the dissection and anatomical demonstrations, to reassemble his bones into a skeleton, place on it the head (which was to have been processed separately), and then clothe the skeleton “in one of the suits of black usually worn by me” and seat it “in a Chair usually occupied by me when living.” Thus clad, the skeleton was to be equipped with “the staff in my later years borne by me” and put in “an appropriate box or case. . . .”25 As a result, Bentham may still be seen today exemplifying the “permanent” purpose of dead human bodies: he sits as “his own statue” in a glass and mahogany case in a corridor of the University College, London, still representing himself more than a century and a half after his death.26 While the conservative preparation of the trunk and extremities amounted to no more than ordinary taxidermy—the skeleton is tied together at the joints by copper wires and wrapped in straw, hay, tow, cotton wool, wood wool, and so on27—the auto-iconization of the head required a special treatment. That special attention would need to be paid to the head is clear, for Bentham instructs, “The head of
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each individual is peculiar to him and, when properly preserved, is better than a statue” (2). Accordingly, Bentham advised that the head be treated like the heads of indigenous New Zealanders, that is, by exsiccation. In striving to contribute to human happiness, then, a civilized man is not to scorn the “savage ingenuity” of “the barbarous New Zealanders,” who have “preceded the most cultivated nations in the Auto-Icon art” (2). The eyes, one of the “soft and corruptible parts” of the body, need not present a problem, since artificial eyes could be made out of glass and would not be “distinguishable from those which nature makes” (2).28 A curious irony had it that the auto-iconization of Bentham’s body failed precisely at the head. Although Southwood Smith faithfully followed Bentham’s instructions, the desiccated head was markedly dissimilar to the head of the living Bentham, and the anatomist therefore had a wax replica made to replace it. Although “identical” to the head of the living Bentham, the original head of the auto-icon was no longer “similar” to it, and Bentham, converted into an auto-icon, no longer resembled himself. It was, then, the wax replica that turned out to be more “like” Bentham than Bentham in the character of an auto-icon was “like himself.” However, since, according to Bentham, the head is what is “peculiar” to each individual, Bentham’s autoicon, with its wax head, turned out to be no “better than a statue.” The irony of this lies not only in the fact that it was the example of Bentham himself that proved that an individual is not necessarily his or her own most adequate representation after death, but also in the fact that in considering how to preserve his own head after death, Bentham was led to toy with the idea of experimenting in “the AutoIcon art” of the New Zealanders: he planned to obtain a human head from an anatomist and dry it out in a stove in his house.29 It is not clear if the experiment was ever actually carried out, although Bentham, in his Auto-Icon, does somewhat cryptically refer to experiments in “the slow exhaustion of the moisture from the human head” which have been going on “in this country” and “which promise complete success” (2).
The Corporeal Immortality In Bentham’s scheme, how exactly are the auto-iconized dead supposed to “contribute to the happiness of the living”? Besides their
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numerous other uses—moral, political, economical, genealogical, architectural, phrenological,30 and so on—the auto-icons are also supposed to benefit the living through their “theatrical, or dramatic use” (12). Auto-iconism would make possible an entirely new kind of theater, one in which the auto-icons themselves would perform as actors. On the stage, the auto-icons would speak and gesticulate; they would be animated either from within (moved by “a boy stationed within and hidden by the robe”) or from without (“by means of strings or wires,” operated by “persons under the stage”). By special contrivances, it would seem as if the auto-icons breathed and as if their voices, lent by actors, issued from their own mouths; since the skin on their faces “would be rendered of a more or less brownish hue,” as a result of “the process of exsiccation,” they would need to wear stage makeup.31 Thus, for the ultimate good to be extracted from them, the dead would have to be, as it were, brought back to life. The only roles the dead would play would be themselves. Thus, for instance, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, staged according to Bentham’s principles of auto-iconism, would feature Julius Caesar himself, that is, his auto-icon, in the title role. “What actor can play Julius Caesar better than Julius Caesar in the character of an autoicon can play himself?” is how the first sentence of Bentham’s manifesto of the auto-iconic theater would no doubt read. Moreover, the auto-iconic theater would make it possible for the characters that actually lived centuries and continents apart to meet on stage face to face. It is in this spirit that Bentham briefly sketches some dialogues that could be staged in the auto-iconic theater. The dialogues are categorized according to different disciplines, such as ethics, mathematics, and politics.32 Each of the performers discusses his own work and achievements. Performers include thinkers as ancient as Confucius, Aristotle, and Euclid and as recent as John Locke, Isaac Newton, and D’Alembert. In all the draft dialogues, there is one name that persistently pops up, that of Bentham himself. Bentham would thus appear in all these dialogues and, of course, play himself. He reserves for himself absolutely pivotal roles in which he would compare his various achievements to the leading authorities in each particular field. Bentham also worked out the choreography of the corpses on the stage, down to the smallest details: after all the representatives of a particular discipline are gathered on the stage, Bentham enters and is
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greeted in the name of all the performers by one of the interlocutors who then introduces Bentham to each of the others and briefly sketches the principal achievements of each in his respective discipline.33 The following exchange on ethics is a good example of the typical course of these dialogues. “The sage of the 1830th year after the Christian era,” that is, Bentham himself, says to “the sage of three centuries and a half before the same,” that is, Aristotle: In your work on morals, at the very outset of it, you bring forward the observation, that good in some shape or other, is the end in view of all men. Two thousand years have passed, and in all that time, nothing has been done on the subject by anybody else. Nobody has given a precise and clear import to the word corresponding to good, by translating the language of good and evil into the language of pleasure and pain. . . .(14)
Nobody but Bentham himself, of course, who considered the method of paraphrasis—namely, replacing words referring to abstract and obscure entities, the reality of which is merely “verbal,” with words referring to perceptible, actually existing entities, such as pleasure and pain—to be one of his most important achievements. More or less the same story is repeated in Bentham’s dialogues on mathematics with Euclid and Newton,34 on politics with John Locke, and so forth.35 Dialogues between these dead clearly could not have been staged auto-iconically, since, with the exception of Bentham himself, none of them could play themselves any longer. While Bentham might well have hesitated as to the exact ontological status of their souls existing in a state of separation from their bodies—are they “real” or “fictitious entities”?36—he had no doubt as to their bodies: there were no “perceptible real entities” in the external world corresponding to the names of his interlocutors after their death. Nowadays, more than a century and a half after Bentham’s death, such a performance should, in principle, be possible, although the selection of Bentham’s coactors and interlocutors would be rather limited. Apart from Bentham, the only eminent sages that could play themselves after their death would be, for instance, Lenin,37 Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, and a few others. Like Bentham, these men were all “auto-iconized”; even after death, they all continue to represent themselves. In one significant respect, they can even be said to represent themselves more
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adequately than Bentham does: unlike Bentham’s auto-icon, their embalmed bodies are indubitably “better than a statue.” Yet, even though they are all unquestionably “their own statues” or “their own monuments,” nevertheless they are nothing more than just that, that is, monuments to themselves. What Bentham would probably have found objectionable about all these auto-iconized thinkers is that they all, as a rule, represent themselves as dead, that is, as corpses: even though they look exactly the same as they did when they were still alive, they nevertheless lie like dead people with their eyes closed, whereas Bentham himself is sitting upright in a chair, his (glass) eyes open, his hat on his head and his walking stick in his hands, as if he had just sat down, or as if he were just about to rise from his chair and leave for his daily “antejentacular circumgyration”—in a word, as if he were alive. While Bentham’s auto-icon is flexible at the joints (if necessary, it can even be dismantled38), the rigid, embalmed corpses would be impossible to animate or to bring back to life even on the stage. Thus, in the auto-iconic theater, in which the dead are brought back to life by the staging of dialogues between them, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, or Kim Il Sung could only play themselves at the moment of their deaths. It is perhaps because they only represent themselves as dead that their embalmed bodies have not superseded “the necessity of sculpture,” but, on the contrary, have inspired innumerable likenesses that represent them as living, even though, according to Bentham, their bodies are without question “better than a statue.” Although these others may “contribute to the happiness of the living,” not all the good has been “extracted” from them. They offer “anatomico-moral instruction” (7), but do not serve any “theatrical, or dramatic” purpose. It is therefore questionable whether the “extracted” good in fact outweighs “the evil done” (1), the expenses. For example, until a short time ago, Lenin’s mausoleum laboratory in Moscow employed a staff of almost a hundred scientists—histologists, anatomists, biochemists, physical chemists, and opticians—who maintained the embalmed corpse around the clock, treating it with special chemicals and by means of equipment worth several million dollars.39 In contrast, Bentham’s auto-icon has been restored only twice since 1832: on both occasions, the moth-eaten clothes were simply cleaned and patched up, the stuffing replaced, and a bag of naphthalene and a bunch of lavender added for good measure.40 Let us briefly recall some typical difficulties concerning the dead
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human body in medieval philosophy. If the rational soul is the only substantial form of the human body, then after death, that is, after the separation of body from soul, Christ’s body can no longer be called his. If, however, the dead body on the cross cannot be said to be identical with Christ’s body, then it cannot be a fit object of worship.41 For the utilitarian sage, however, this dilemma would present no difficulty; as Bentham tersely puts it, “A man’s Auto-Icon is his own self” (10). Converted into an auto-icon, the “comparatively incorruptible part” of the matter created by death is identical with the living body and, therefore, is a fit object of worship (or scorn), to the extent that people, while still alive, will take into account the judgment they will receive after death in the eyes of their fellow human beings when deciding upon any course of action: “What will be said of my Auto-Icon hereafter?” (7). Public opinion, then, will assign the auto-icons their place in “the temple of honour” or in “the temple of dishonour” (6); but since it is not always possible to assign this place unequivocally, Bentham supplements his secular version of heaven and hell with “the Auto-Icon purgatory” (7), that is, a temple in which the auto-icons await the definite judgment of public opinion. Bentham believes that although the utilitarian eschatology cannot threaten with suffering or entice with pleasure after death—auto-icons are merely “senseless” carcasses—nevertheless it can, by exposing the auto-icons to the public eye, introduce “into the field of thought and action . . . motives both moral and political” (7). Furthermore, Bentham predicts that his auto-icon will become sacred. It is true that he designates his auto-icon merely as “quasi sacred” (15; original emphasis), but this was only because he thought that the term “sacred” had become “so open to abuse, as well as already so much abused” (15), not because he considered its use in this case exaggerated in any way. How was this anticipated beatification supposed to come about? Once the principles of auto-iconism had been generally accepted and people, following Bentham’s example, had begun to auto-iconize their dead, the auto-icons would, by themselves, arouse in people a “virtuous curiosity” (7). This, in turn, would trigger pilgrimages to “the Auto-Icons of the virtuous,” of the “benefactors of the human race,” to the auto-icons of those who, while living, had acted in accordance with Bentham’s principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” These auto-icons “in their silence would be eloquent preachers,” and the lesson they would preach to
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the pilgrims would be “Go thou and do likewise” (7). Therefore, what would be propagated in this way would be virtuous behavior, that is, action in accordance with Bentham’s greatest happiness principle. While pilgrimages to the auto-icons of the benefactors would be undertaken by masses, the pilgrimages to “the old philosopher preserved in some safe repository” would be made only by the “votaries of the greatest-happiness principle” (15). Bentham’s own auto-icon would thus be worshipped by only those few who understood that the good that made the auto-icons of the benefactors worthy of worship in the eyes of the masses was the direct result of their acting in accordance with Bentham’s greatest-happiness principle; that is, his auto-icon would be worshipped by those who realized that the one who had first introduced this principle was, for that very reason, himself the greatest benefactor of the human race. In short, Bentham’s auto-icon would be worshipped by the converts to utilitarianism. It would be the auto-icon of Bentham himself that would, in the eyes of the converts, make all other auto-icons worthy of worship. Thus, although like all the other auto-icons of the illustrious dead Bentham’s would be nothing other than “a senseless carcass of the biped” (7), in the eyes of the converts it would be the only one deserving of the elevated status of a “quasi sacred Auto-Icon” precisely because it would be the only one that would be worthy of worship on account of the person whom it represents, that is, it would be the sole icon worthy of worship in its own right. In his will, Bentham directed his disciples, whenever they met in order to commemorate “the Founder of the greatest happiness system of morals and legislation,” to bring the case box containing his autoicon into the room with them.42 Thus, while in other sects leaders as a rule succeed the founder after his or her death, in contrast Bentham as an auto-icon would continue to “preside bodily” (5) over the sect of his followers even after his death: But when Bentham has ceased to live, (in memory will he never cease to live!) whom shall the Bentham Club have for its chairman? Whom but Bentham himself? On him will all eyes be turned,—to him will all speeches be addressed. (5)
What we encounter in Bentham’s Auto-Icon is the obverse of Spinoza’s project outlined in the second half of the fifth part of his Ethics. Here Spinoza considered “the mind’s duration without relation to the
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body” (E5p20s),43 not, as Bentham did, the body’s duration without relation to the mind. While Spinoza’s attention is focused on the part of the human mind that is eternal, Bentham is concerned with the part of the human body that is eternal. Spinoza believed that “the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but [that] something of it remains which is eternal” (E5p23),44 whereas Bentham no doubt believed that after death something of the human body remains that is “imperishable” (12), namely, its “comparatively incorruptible part” converted into an auto-icon. Thus, if Spinoza’s project in the Ethics can be termed an “alternative, secular salvation”45 of the mind, Bentham’s may be termed an alternative, secular resurrection of the body.
The Cratylus, or the Case of the Forged Auto-Icon In Homer, psucheµ (soul) is the image (eidoµlon) of the dead body. One does not have a psucheµ; rather, it is after death that one becomes a psucheµ, an image of the body that no longer exists. The psucheµ of Patroclus that Achilles sees while falling asleep perfectly resembles the dead hero; it is, as it were, his exact double. At the same time, it is totally insubstantial. When Achilles reaches out to grasp the figure, it evaporates, melts away. It is, in short, a phantom or ghostly double of the dead body (Il. 23.65–108).46 We find a different picture in Plato, according to whom it is the dead body that is the image of the deceased: the corpses are “images [eidoµla] of the dead” (Leg. 959b2–3).47 Nevertheless, one’s preserved dead body would not have been characterized by Plato as one’s selfimage. Let us suppose that Socrates’ dead body had been preserved.48 This “auto-iconized” body would have been regarded by Plato only as an image or icon of Socrates, not as Socrates’ auto-icon. Since what constitutes one’s real being, one’s self, is according to Plato “nothing other than the soul” (Leg. 959b ), Socrates’ dead body is his image not insofar as it is its own image, but insofar as it is the image of his soul. The dead body, in short, is the image of one’s self, but it is not one’s self-image. Thus, for Plato, the auto-iconic aspect of the dead body would have been less significant than its iconic aspect. Although the Benthamite auto-iconic theater would have most likely appealed to Plato—Bentham’s dialogues of the dead are clearly nothing other than that kind of “poetry” that Plato would have been will-
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ing to admit in his city besides the “hymns to the gods,” namely, “eulogies of virtuous men” (Rep. 607a)—the staging of one of his dialogues featuring Socrates’ “auto-iconized” dead body would doubtlessly have left him less enthusiastic than Bentham. In Plato, the representational relation between body and soul is inverted: it is the dead body that is the image of the soul. While the immortal soul is what constitutes our real being, the dead body is its illusory, transient image, its “ghostly reflection.”49 In Platonic ontology, it is the body that is desubstantialized. It is not only after death that the body is deprived of reality; even while still alive, it was no more than an insubstantial “semblance” accompanying the soul (Leg. 959b1). For Bentham, on the other hand, it is neither the soul that is the image of the dead body nor is it the dead body that is the image of the soul: the dead body is its own image and, as such, one’s selfimage. In Bentham’s eyes, it is as a body that a man is “his own image” after death. This is because it is not the soul that has detached itself from the body, but the dead body itself that constitutes a man’s self after death. Or, in Bentham’s words, “A man’s Auto-Icon is his own self” (10). Extraordinary though it may seem, this idea can nevertheless be understood against the background of Bentham’s ontology. In Bentham’s classification of entities, the soul after the death of the body, that is, the soul separated from the body, cannot even be said to be a “real entity”—it may well turn out to be only a “fictitious entity.” “Of a human soul, existing in a state of separation from the body,” writes Bentham, “no man living will, it is believed, be found ready to aver himself to have had perception of any individual example.”50 At best the soul is therefore an “inferential real entity,” an entity the reality of which “not being, in any instance, attested by perception, cannot therefore be considered any otherwise than as a matter of inference.”51 Bentham is quick to add in a footnote, however: “Should there be any person in whose view the soul of man, considered in a state of separation from the body, should present itself as not capable of being, with propriety, aggregated to the class of real entities, to every such person, the class to which it belongs would naturally be that of fictitious entities.”52 The body, on the other hand, is a real entity par excellence, a “perceptible real entity,” that is, an “entity the existence of which is made known to human beings by the immediate testimony of their senses, without reasoning.”53 Whether it is categorized as a “fictitious entity” or as an
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“inferential real entity,” in Bentham’s eyes the ontological status of the soul after death is more precarious than even the ontological status of the dead body, that is, the body that the soul has left behind: if properly preserved, the dead body is clearly still a “perceptible real entity.” It is his ontology, then, that makes Bentham claim the “senseless carcass,” rather than the soul, as “his own self” after death. While Bentham is arguing that each thing is its own most adequate representation, Plato, in the famous passage of the Cratylus characterized by Alexander Nehamas as “the metaphysical version of the myth of Pygmalion,”54 argues that a thing itself can never be its own image or icon. Not only must an image numerically differ from the thing of which it is an image; it must, in resemblance, fall short of the thing it represents, “if it is to be an image.” For if an image were to reproduce all the qualities of the thing it represents, that is, if it were to resemble its object in all respects, “everything would be duplicated” and one could no longer tell which is the image and which the real thing. If we were to add to an image all the qualities of the thing of which it is an image, it would cease to be an image of that thing and would become its exact double, a duplicate, a new real thing. Thus, if, besides the color and shape it already has, “some god” were to add to the image (eikoµn) of Cratylus all of Cratylus’s internal properties, so argues Socrates, we would no longer have an image of Cratylus on the one hand and Cratylus on the other but, simply, “two Cratyluses” (Cra. 432a–d).55 The idea that an image, if it is to be an image, must fall short in resemblance of the thing it represents can also be found in Descartes, who in his Optics observes: [I]n no case does an image have to resemble the object it represents in all respects, for otherwise there would be no distinction between the object and its image. It is enough that the image resembles its object in a few respects. Indeed the perfection of an image often depends on its not resembling its object as it might. . . . Thus it often happens that in order to be more perfect as an image and to represent an object better, an engraving ought not to resemble it.56
What in Plato’s eyes constitutes the key feature of icons or images, what in Descartes’ eyes accounts for their “perfection”—their not resembling the objects they represent in all respects—is, in Bentham’s eyes, the reason for their inadequacy: all icons or images—distinct
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from the thing itself, that is, “resemblances,” “paintings,” and “statues” of that thing—are dismissed by Bentham as inadequate precisely because they never resemble that thing as closely as it resembles itself, because in resemblance they necessarily fall short of the thing they represent. What would a situation in which “everything would be duplicated” mean to Bentham? Why would the creation of the second Cratylus make his hair stand on end? In Plato’s view, by turning a representation of Cratylus into his exact double we lose an icon or image and gain a new real thing; instead of Cratylus and his image we now have “two Cratyluses.” In Bentham’s eyes, on the other hand, we gain a new icon as well, an icon that could be called a “forged auto-icon.” A Benthamite forged auto-icon is a paradoxical entity: it is a forgery precisely insofar as it is qualitatively entirely indistinguishable from the thing it imitates; if it fell short in resemblance of the thing it imitates, it would no longer be its “forged autoicon,” but merely one of the imperfect likenesses or icons that more or less inadequately represent the things of which they are icons. The second Cratylus is not only his own icon but also an icon of the first Cratylus. Resembling the first Cratylus as closely as the first Cratylus resembles himself, the second Cratylus represents the first Cratylus as adequately as the latter represents himself. Since he is an icon of the first Cratylus to the same extent as the first Cratylus is his own icon, the second Cratylus is a “forged auto-icon” of the first. And because a qualitatively indistinguishable, yet numerically distinct thing would represent Cratylus no less adequately than Cratylus represents himself, Bentham is led to conclude that “Auto-Icons . . . cannot be forged” (5). In representation, therefore, Bentham clearly strives for the highest degree of iconicity, that is, identity. “Isn’t identity preferable to similitude?” he asks (3) in Auto-Icon. Each particular thing can most adequately be represented only by itself, each thing is its own best icon; in short, each object is a sign of itself. Thus, Bentham’s auto-icon is a paradoxical sign that is identical with its denotatum, a sign that is itself its own denotatum. Bentham’s central principle of auto-iconism—since nothing can resemble a thing as closely as itself, a particular thing can most adequately be represented therefore only by itself—ultimately derives from Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles. According to
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Leibniz, no two things in nature can be exactly alike. If two things perfectly resemble each other, they are also numerically identical, that is, one and the same thing; two things that are indiscernible from one another are in reality nothing other than “the same thing under two names.”57 From a Lacanian perspective, however, it is rather the reverse that holds true. “The anti-Leibnizean lesson of the Lacanian logic of the signifier,” writes Ziz˚ek, “is that since a thing does not ‘look like itself’, resemblance is, on the contrary, the guarantor of non-identity.”58 Thus, what we encounter here is not the Leibnizean principle of the identity of indiscernibles, but its obverse, namely, a principle that could, perhaps, be termed a principle of “the dissimilarity of the identical.” A borderline case of this principle is embodied in the elusive character of Rameau’s nephew, described by Diderot in the novel of the same name with the following words: “Rien ne dissemble plus de lui que lui-même.”59 While according to Bentham nothing resembles an individual more than that individual resembles himself, according to Diderot nothing resembles Rameau’s nephew less than himself. Thus, contrary to Bentham’s principle of auto-iconism whereby an individual is his own icon, “his own image,” that is, he resembles himself, Rameau’s nephew does not look like or resemble himself—he is Rameau’s nephew. It is in accordance with this principle that in the film Lady Eve a character (played by Henry Fonda) sees the same woman for the second time (a woman who still looks exactly the same but is now pretending to be somebody different) and exclaims: “They look too much alike to be the same!”60 What distinguishes the two women for him is precisely the fact that they are indistinguishable: they simply resemble one another too much to be identical. Thus, the striking resemblance between the two women leaves Fonda entirely indifferent. While, as a rule, it is the resemblance between two persons that attracts our attention and arouses our suspicion that they might in fact be one and the same person (and the greater the resemblance, the more it attracts our attention and the greater our suspicion), Fonda, by contrast, would begin to suspect that the two women might in fact be one and the same person only if the woman before his eyes “didn’t look so exactly like the other girl.”61 It is the resemblance, then, that in his eyes guarantees nonidentity.
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This very same logic governs Groucho Marx’s speculation about Emmanuel Ravelli’s identity in the film Animal Crackers. Upon learning that someone who looks “exactly like” Emmanuel Ravelli is in fact Emmanuel Ravelli, Groucho nevertheless protests: “But I still insist there is a resemblance.”62 It is because Emmanuel Ravelli resembles himself exactly that Groucho finds it hard to believe that he is indeed Emmanuel Ravelli: how could he possibly be Emmanuel Ravelli when he looks “exactly like” him? Emmanuel Ravelli, then, simply looks too much like himself to be identified as Emmanuel Ravelli. It seems then that an individual, according to this logic, can only remind us of himself or be recognized unequivocally if, despite the fact that everything about him reminds us of him, he himself does not remind us of him. In the same way, Margaret Dumont, in the opening scene from A Night at the Opera, reminds Groucho Marx of herself; he declares: “Your eyes, your throat, your lips—everything about you reminds me of you. Except you.” Or, in Ziz˚ek’s inimitable rendition of Hegelese: “The ‘oneness’ of a thing is grounded not in its properties, but in the negative synthesis of a pure ‘One’ which excludes (relates negatively to) all positive properties: this ‘one’ which guarantees the identity of a thing does not reside in its properties, since it is ultimately its signifier.”63
Works Cited Barson, Michael, ed. 1988. Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel: The Marx Brothers’ Lost Radio Show. New York. Bentham, Jeremy. 1838–1843. The Works of Jeremy Bentham. 11 vols. Ed. John Bowring. Edinburgh. ———. n.d. Auto-Icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living. A Fragment. From the MSS. of Jeremy Bentham. Berkeley, George. 1992. Philosophical Works. Ed. M. R. Ayers. London. ———. 1998. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Ed. Jonathan Dancy. Oxford. Berman, David. 1994. George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man. Oxford. ———. 1997. Berkeley: Experimental Philosophy. London. Bradbury, Malcolm. 2000. To the Hermitage. London. De Quincey, Thomas. 2000–03. The Works of Thomas De Quincey. 21 vols. Ed. Grevel Lindop. London. Descartes, René. 1985–91. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. 3 vols. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Cambridge. Diderot, Denis. 1972. Le Neveu de Rameau. Ed. Jean Varloot. Paris. Eckhart, Master. 1974. Did the Forms of the Elements Remain in the Body of Christ
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While Dying on the Cross? In Master Eckhart, Parisian Questions and Prologues. Trans. Armand A. Maurer. Toronto. Furlong, E. J. 1982. “On Being ‘Embrangled’ by Time.” In Colin M. Turbayne, ed., Berkeley: Critical and Interpretative Essays. Minneapolis. 148–55. Grayling, A. C. 1986. Berkeley: The Central Arguments. London. Hemingway, Ernest. 1996. A Moveable Feast. New York. Henderson, Brian, ed. 1986. Five Screenplays by Preston Sturges. Berkeley. Kenny, Anthony. 1980. Aquinas. Oxford. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von. 1973. Philosophical Writings. Trans. Mary Morris and G. H. R. Parkinson. London. Luce, A. A. 1967. Berkeley and Malebranche: A Study in the Origins of Berkeley’s Thought. Oxford. Malebranche, Nicolas. 1972–84. Œuvres complètes de Malebranche. 20 vols. Ed. André Robinet. Paris. Marmoy, C. F. A. 1958. “The ‘Auto-Icon’ of Jeremy Bentham at University College, London.” Medical History 2: 77–86. Nehamas, Alexander. 1999. Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates. Princeton. Pitcher, George. 1977. Berkeley. London. Richardson, Ruth. 1987. Death, Dissection and the Destitute. London. ——— and Brian Hurwitz. 1987. “Jeremy Bentham’s Self Image: An Exemplary Bequest for Dissection.” British Medical Journal 295: 195–98. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1959–95. Œuvres complètes. 5 vols. Ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris. Southwood Smith, Thomas. 1832. A Lecture Delivered over the Remains of Jeremy Bentham. London. Spinoza, Baruch. 1988. The Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol. 1. Trans. Edwin Curley. Princeton. Tarn Steiner, Deborah. 2001. Images in Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought. Princeton. Tipton, Ian C. 1974. Berkeley: The Philosophy of Immaterialism. London. Tolstoy, Leo. 1981. The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Trans. Lynn Solotaroff. New York. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. 1978. Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs. 2 vols. Paris. ———. 1991. Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays. Ed. Froma I. Zeitlin. Princeton. Yovel, Yirmiyahu. 1989. Spinoza and Other Heretics. Princeton. Zbarsky, Ilya and Samuel Hutchinson. 1998. Lenin’s Embalmers. Trans. Barbara Bray. London. Ziz˚ek, Slavoj. 2000. The Fragile Absolute. London.
Notes 1
Bentham n.d.: 8. This privately printed volume, comprising 21 pages, is extremely rare; there is no date and no name of editor or publisher given on the title page. I consulted the copy in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Quotations from this text will be referenced in the body of the article. 2 Bentham n.d.: 8: 2. 3 Tolstoy 44; see also 37. 4 Tolstoy 93–94. 5 Bentham n.d.: 1, “Note by the editor.” 6 Quoted in Smith 4.
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Berkeley 1998: 156. Berkeley 1992: 354. 9 Berkeley 1998: 138. 10 For a fuller account of Berkeley’s theory of time, see Tipton 271–96; Pitcher 206–11; Grayling 174–83; Berman 1994: 61–70; Furlong 148–55. 11 Berkeley 1992: 308. 12 See “Some Original Memoirs of the Late Famous Bishop of Cloyne,” in Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 5 vols., ed. A. Friedman (Oxford 1966) 3: 35; quoted in Berman 1997: 38. 13 Malebranche 12–13: 410. 14 Malebranche 12–13: 405. 15 Malebranche 12–13: 409–10. 16 De Quincey 6: 123–24. In this essay, De Quincey toys with the idea that “every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries”—that is, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Leibniz, and Kant, in addition to Malebranche—“has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him” (118). Thus, De Quincey considers it “an unanswerable objection (if we need any)” against Locke’s philosophy that, “although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it” (118). On the other hand, Leibniz, generally recognized as a philosopher superior to Malebranche, must have felt deeply “insulted by the security in which he passed his days.” His ambition that there would at least be an attempt on his life—which would bring ultimate recognition of his philosophy—was so great that in his old age he amassed a large sum of gold and kept it in his house in order to attract a potential murderer, but without success; in the end, he died “partly of the fear that he should be murdered, and partly of vexation that he was not” (124). The only reason Kant was not murdered was that his prospective murderer “was an amateur, who felt how little would be gained to the cause of good taste by murdering an old, arid, and adust metaphysician; there was no room for display, as the man could not possibly look more like a mummy when dead, than he had done alive” (125). 17 For more on this point, see Luce 208–10. 18 See Bentham 1838–43: 8: 196n. 19 Richardson 34. 20 Quoted in Richardson 37. 21 Richardson 58–59. 22 Bentham MSS Box 155, UC Library; quoted in Marmoy 80. 23 Richardson and Hurwitz 195. 24 Literary examples of “auto-iconization” (one’s turning into one’s own statue or one’s own monument at the moment of death) of course abound. See, e.g., Malcolm Bradbury’s description of Voltaire immediately before his death: “He’s become his own statue, transfigured himself into his own waxwork, grown into his own bust” (Bradbury 478); and Ernest Hemingway’s description of the seemingly dying F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Back in the room Scott was still lying as though on his tomb, sculpted as a monument to himself . . .” (Hemingway 166). 25 Bentham MSS Box 155, UC Library; quoted in Marmoy 80. 26 When Burke was caught, he was sentenced to be hanged and publicly dissected; that is, the one who had engaged in murder to serve utilitarian ends was himself, in his turn, murdered and his own body put to its “farther use to the living.” In fact, Burke’s body was used not only for “transitory,” but also for “permanent” purpose: the presiding judge decreed that after the execution and subsequent dissection of his body, 8
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Burke’s skeleton should be reassembled and preserved in memory of his atrocious crimes (see Richardson 143; see also his 340 n. 52). Thus, Burke can still be seen today. Displayed in the Edinburgh University Museum, even today he continues to represent himself, even today he continues to be “his own image,” his own icon. 27 Marmoy 85. 28 Artificial eyes were the only concession Bentham was prepared to make within his strict principles of auto-iconism: that is to say, the only part of his body that he did not insist on preserving as auto-iconic after death were his eyes. Instead, Bentham had a pair of glass eyes, later to adorn his desiccated head, made in his own color twenty years before his death, which he used to carry around in his pockets and show to his friends. See Marmoy 84n. 29 Bowring, Autobiographical Recollections (London 1877) 343; quoted in Marmoy 78. 30 Bentham n.d.: 3. 31 Bentham n.d.: 13. 32 Bentham n.d.: 14–15. 33 Bentham n.d.: 13. 34 Bentham 1838–43: 8: 15. 35 Bentham n.d.: 14–15. 36 See Bentham 1838–43: 8: 196n. 37 One can easily imagine a dialogue between Bentham and Lenin, let us say, on ontology, in which the two interlocutors would jointly mock Berkeley and his belief in the nonexistence of matter, with Bentham probably quoting from his Fragment on Ontology, and Lenin from his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. 38 Richardson and Hurwitz 197. 39 Zbarsky 181. 40 Richardson and Hurwitz 196. 41 For an account of the controversy, see Kenny 47. For an ingenious solution, see Eckhart 71–75. 42 For the text of Bentham’s last will, see Marmoy 80. 43 Spinoza 1: 606. 44 Spinoza 1: 607. 45 Yovel 154. 46 I draw here on Vernant 1991: 186–92. See also “Figuration de l’invisible et catégorie psychologique du double: le colossos,” in Vernant 1978: 2: 65–78. 47 Although Plato, in contrast to Bentham, does not expect the dead to be of any “farther use to the living,” his attitude toward dead bodies nevertheless resembles Bentham’s own, in that the expenses the living have disposing of them should be as low as possible. For example, according to Plato, “one ought never to squander one’s substance, in the belief that this lump of flesh being buried especially belongs to one”; one should only spend “a measured amount” on the disposal of the dead, that is, “not more than five minas” should be “spent on the whole funeral by a man of the highest class, three minas by a man of the second, two by a man of the third, and a mina by a man of the fourth” (Leg. 959d1–6). “Graves . . . are not to be located on any land that is cultivable, . . . but only where the nature of the land is suitable for this alone: to receive and hide, in a way that is the most painless to the living, the bodies of those who have died” (958e1–4). And the stone markers must not be made any “larger than are required to contain at most four heroic lines of encomia on the life of the deceased” (959d4). 48 The fact that it was not is deplored by Bentham in Auto-Icon: “Take the case of Socrates,—suppose him Auto-Iconized, and the Auto-Icon deposited in the British
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Museum, would the Auto-Icon justify Xenophon’s character of him and the portrait drawn in his ‘Memorabilia’?” (8). 49 Vernant 1991: 190. 50 Bentham 1838–43: 8: 196. 51 Bentham 1838–43: 8: 196 (Bentham’s emphases). 52 Bentham 1838–43: 8: 196n. See also 196: “Considered as existing and visiting any part of our earth in a state of separation from the body, a human soul would be a ghost: and, at this time of day, custom scarcely does, fashion certainly does not command us to believe in ghosts” (Bentham’s emphases). In this case, however, the soul could not even be categorized as a fictitious entity but rather as an imaginary nonentity. 53 Bentham 1838–43: 8: 195. 54 Nehamas 285; see also 263. 55 For an excellent detailed discussion of the passage, see Steiner 69–74. 56 Descartes 1:165–66 (emphasis added). 57 Leibniz 216. 58 Ziz˚ek 51. 59 Diderot 32. See also Rousseau’s description of himself: “Rien n’est si dissemblable à moi que moi-même” (1: 1108). 60 Henderson 467. 61 Henderson 467. 62 Cf. Barson 5. 63 Ziz˚ek 51–52.
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Afterword du n c a n f. k e n n e dy
This collection stages an engagement of theory and history that raises issues of wider interest than simply the interaction of Lacan and texts from Greco-Roman antiquity. “Is it anachronistic to read the Lacanian subject of desire in and out of literary and other representations from classical antiquity?” ask Porter and Buchan in their Introduction (00). This is a question that could be posed to any Lacanian engagement with history, not simply with classical antiquity. More broadly, it is a question relevant to the historical application of any notion or category held to have emerged at any specific historical moment. The usefulness and interest of Lacan’s categories are taken as given in this collection; their relationship to history, though, remains an issue treated with considerable caution, manifested especially in the term anachronism, but more generally in the tentative quality of the assertions of affinity between Lacanian and classical texts (emphases in the quotations that follow are mine). Thus for Sara Rappe, Lacan’s essay “The Mirror Stage” can “easily be compared to Enneads 4.8, ‘On the Entry of Souls into the Body’” (00), and, more generally, “many of Lacan’s claims seem compatible with Neoplatonism” (00). Similarly, Jaså Elsner suggests: “It is the secondorder self-awareness of ancient rhetorical ekphrasis . . . that elevates it to a philosophical—dare one say psychoanalytical?—commentary on the process it performs in ways parallel to those by which Freud’s and Lacan’s writings serve both to create, and to comment upon, the psychoanalytical experience” (00). Porter and Buchan themselves speak, in the Introduction, of “problems that are of equal relevance to both Lacan and the classics—forms of subjectivity, constitution of philosophical objects, readings of philosophical texts” (00), and of “the overlap between ancient theories of the subject and Lacanian theories that will be central in much of what follows” (00). Dolar negotiates this issue by offering an explicitly striking temporal config-
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uration: “Strangely, in this ‘curious vanguard’ of psychoanalysis, on the edge between the nonexistent one and the others, Plato anticipates the Lacanian logic of the nonwhole” (00). An understandable circumspection characterizes the language of Lacan’s commentators here, and is related to the claims to knowledge that are being made on behalf of Lacanian theory, for a key way in which theory (any theory) projects itself as knowledge1 is through its configuration of history. This will be my major concern in much of what follows. To focus this issue, let us bracket Lacan for a moment, and look at two accounts of “the subject” I have tendentiously configured so as to emphasize the divergent modes of historicization involved and the sorts of knowledge deemed to be available. From the strongly universalizing anthropological perspective of Marcel Mauss, “there has never been a human being, who has not been aware not only of his body, but also at the same time of his individuality, both spiritual and physical.”2 According to Mauss, the basic form of the self found among indigenous peoples in locations as widely separated as Australia and North America, is the persona, role, or mask—a concept related to its possessor’s social function. Mauss suggests that this primitive form evolved in ancient Rome into the self as a bearer of legal rights and obligations, was then supplemented first by the Stoics with a consciousness of good and evil and then by the early Christians with a metaphysical aspect, until finally in the eighteenth century it achieved its current form as a self-knowing psychological being. Mauss unashamedly presents a ubiquitous phenomenon, a perennial “thing” (here described as “individuality, both spiritual and physical”), within a progressivist account culminating in the present. For Mauss, history charts the gradual discovery of a “natural” attribute (one that characterizes “the human being”), always “there,” if differently salient in different contexts, but manifesting itself in its most sophisticated (and “final”?) form here and now. There is a strongly teleological cast to this configuration of history, which serves to privilege the knowledge associated with the “present”—always an elastic term, but here meaning “from the eighteenth century until now.” The further the “present” is assumed to stretch into the future, the stronger the epistemological claim that is being made; forever, and the claim to knowledge is as definitive, true. Within Mauss’s approach, attributing the characteristics of the modern self-knowing psychological being to the indigenous peoples of
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Australia would instantly be felt as an anachronism, but this hardly arises as an issue, since both are assumed to be manifestations of the atemporal master term, individuality. Contrast Foucault’s distinction between two categories, the “self” and the “subject,” peculiar to their epochs—classical antiquity and modernity, respectively—and each at the center of their own power/knowledge nexus. For Foucault, the two are effectively incommensurable: the former fundamentally ethical and aesthetic in nature, capable of generating its “knowledge” only if well cared-for by its owner; the latter, the invention of Descartes, obtaining its “knowledge” by seeing what was evident. That this Cartesian “subject” may have made possible, for example, an enterprise as prestigious as modern science does not make it for Foucault a transcendent category; it is possible to envisage—if indeed for Foucault it is not already a fait accompli—the “death of the subject.”3 Foucault’s narrative seeks to eschew progression or convergence towards finality or the truth in favor of a succession of “epistemes,” each developing its own characteristic styles of reasoning, and categories that are incommensurable: the Foucauldian “subject” cannot simply be substituted for the Foucauldian “self” (this would be felt to be intolerably anachronistic), and reference to an atemporal master category is eschewed. In the Foucauldian scheme, “present” knowledge is explicitly provisional; it is for the foreseeable future only, and subject to revision, a fresh backwards glance that will require a reconfiguration of history. Were the categories to be wholly incommensurable, however, there would be an absolute rupture between present and past, the past would be inaccessible to the present, and history would be impossible. Some degree of translatability must be admitted (negotiated by seeing both the self and the subject as epistemic categories), but, of course, with that will come a genealogy. If for Mauss we have the gradual discovery of a natural kind, for Foucault the subject is an artifact, an invention. Put otherwise, Mauss’s narrative seeks to emphasize continuities over time and has a trajectory; Foucault’s seeks to emphasize discontinuities and undirected succession without origins or goals. Where might psychoanalysis fit into all this? Psychoanalysis, perhaps thanks to Freud’s scientistic, universalizing claims to knowledge, is somewhat in thrall to a narrative of itself in terms of a triumphant emergence in 1900, a heroic epiphany that consigned other modes of exploring “the human condition” definitively to the past, and, under
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the influence of that narrative, continues to consign them; the latest casualty, courtesy of Ziz˚ek and Dolar (2001), is opera. It is worth juxtaposing psychoanalysis with the rhetoric of science in this regard. It is a common assumption that currently accepted explanations in physics, chemistry, or biology can be transported unproblematically to periods before their “discovery.” This latter term articulates the realist view that the “thing” in question, say gravity, has always been “there” and operative, albeit hidden from view or misunderstood until the moment of its revelation. Histories of science that involve such realist assumptions are troped as heroic epiphanies: “God said: ‘Let Newton be.’” Bruno Latour’s work on the history of science has sought to denaturalize such narratives.4 Taking, for example, the medical examination by French scientists of the mummified body of Rameses II, and their conclusion that the pharaoh died of “tuberculosis,” Latour ponders the anachronism involved in asserting that Rameses died of a disease whose etiology was first described in 1819 and whose agent was isolated only in 1882. “The attribution of tuberculosis and Koch’s bacillus to Rameses II,” he says, “should strike us as an anachronism of the same caliber as if we had diagnosed his death as having been caused by a Marxist upheaval, or a machine gun, or a Wall Street Crash.”5 With something we can readily configure as an artifact—an item of technology like a machine gun or, with a little more thought, a stock market collapse—such a translation to the past seems preposterous, yet the extension of “tuberculosis” to the past is usually accepted without demur. The alternatives for history seem stark: a radically antiwhiggish view that would forbid us ever to use the expression “Rameses II died of tuberculosis” (and so sever the present irretrievably from the past), and the whiggish view that accepts Koch’s bacillus as the long-awaited and final revelation of what has been at work all along in history, and that rudely dismisses as curiosities, mistakes, or nonsense anything the actors of the time might have had to say about Rameses’ demise. Viewed through the lens of history, a thoroughgoing absolute realism emerges as no less problematical than its antirealist counterpart. For Latour, just as a description (of the etiology and agency of tuberculosis, say, constructed with considerable effort and at great cost) gains in explanatory authority, so the perception of it as a description is effaced, giving way to a realist assumption of unproblematic reference to “something out there.” From being “invented” (the favored
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trope of construction and antirealism), it becomes “discovered” (the favored trope of realism) and applicable to the past. In this way, the mode of historical narrativization is related to the issue of explanatory authority.6 The realist view, with its whiggish configuration of its associated historical narratives, requires of us that we elide the representational work that goes into the construction (and maintenance) of a term like “tuberculosis” to foster the belief that we are in unmediated contact with a thing in itself, beyond the discourses that configure it. Contrariwise, if we emphasize the representational work, realism becomes a problem: the relationship between signifier and signified, rather than being straightforwardly transparent, becomes itself an issue of central concern. So it is with the “subject,” and here we can link up with Lacan once more. Lacan’s work is often represented as a “linguistic turn” on the more realist/scientistic/universalizing views of Freud, most clearly in his statement that the unconscious is structured like a language.7 If the subject exists by virtue of language—rather than vice versa—then the Real is always going to lie beyond final capture. This poses a conundrum for Lacan’s theory of the subject. In terms of the Lacanian triad of Real-Imaginary-Symbolic, Lacan’s theory and its constituent categories must be part of his Imaginary. This inclines Rappe to a pessimistic view: “Lacan’s theory of the subject cannot be a philosophical theory without being tainted by a serious self-contradiction: a theory that posits a Real beyond apprehension cannot itself under its own terms be a true theory. Perhaps, then, Lacan’s theory of the subject is more like a gesture of frustration, a shrug of the shoulders or a shaking of the head” (00; my emphasis). Perhaps this charge of “self-contradiction” in turn involves too much of a concession to an absolutist realism, encoded here, I think, in the adjective philosophical, which carries so powerful a universalizing charge. For Rappe herself, “Lacan wishes to subvert language that attempts to describe the way things are or to reconstruct the way things were” (00). For Porter and Buchan, “[o]ne way of approaching Lacan is to see him as the most sustained critic of any humanist or essentialist thinking” (00). But given that Lacan tropes one of his key categories—that which eludes any attempt to capture it discursively—as the Real, his theory of the subject might rather be thought of as one strand in an ongoing critique of realism, a critique in which final truth is not so much excluded as deferred (perhaps endlessly).8
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The stumbling block may be as much the word theory as true. When the claims of a “theory” are located in time and in history, the seduction of teleology is hard to resist, as when for Lacan Plato’s Parmenides is the “curious vanguard” of psychoanalysis.9 The adjective curious reads as an acknowledgment of, or even apology for, an instance of whiggish history, transplanting into the past as it does the hidden or potential existence of a future that we are familiar with, though the less fortunate inhabitants of a relatively unenlightened past are not. Such a directionality targeted on the present has epistemological implications—that the present has somehow “got it right” (or at least “more right”)—that confer on the ideas concerned a claim to transcendent truth and, therefore, an unquestioned applicability to the past. Conversely, to describe Lacan’s views on the subject as a “theory” is to locate them outside history in that comfortably atemporal zone we call the “present” and to grant the “present” not simply some correlation with the past but explanatory power in relation to it. In this regard, it is noteworthy how a number of the articles in this volume invoke a model of retrojection and recognition (a FortDa structure?) which reproduces this teleological structure and the epistemological claims it gestures towards. Thus, in Mark Buchan’s article, characters within the Odyssey recognize (retroactively constitute) a riddle or prophecy (as such), though only post eventum, while the essay itself could be thought retrospectively to “create”10 some “riddles” (problems) that must “await” a Lacanian analysis for their “solution” now. For Buchan, the characters in the Odyssey experience what Alenka Zupanc˚ic˚ calls the “effect of truth” (202)—what might in another theoretical framework11 be described as a moment of realization (“that’s how it was”); a similar effect, in my account (an account that works retroactively to constitute his article as riddles and their solution), awaits Buchan and his readers. Distinctively from a Lacanian perspective, of course, such a moment of recognition (retroactive understanding), however pleasurable, always remains a moment of misrecognition. The riddle is a key concept in Lacanian epistemology, as Zupanc˚ic˚ makes clear (esp. 200–03). It articulates the distinction between knowledge as the knowledge that knows itself—“the knowledge behind a statement supported by an anticipated guarantee (at the level of enunciation), in the sense that the Other is always-already there, ready to offer a guarantee for the subject’s statement”—and knowledge as truth—“a word, a statement for
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which the subject alone holds the guarantee in an act of anticipation, of ‘precipitate identification.’” As Zupanc˚ic˚ explains, The subject who solves riddles with the help of a dictionary of riddles in fact knows many things, but this knowledge has nothing to do with truth. For in order for the effect of truth to occur, the subject must throw in his word like a wager, as Oedipus did. (202)
Porter and Buchan use this trope in the Introduction to figure this collection as knowledge as truth: “The wager of this volume has been to see to what extent some of the results of Lacan’s theory of the subject can be shown to have equivalents in a range of materials from classical and late antiquity and also how these might in turn bear on modern notions of the subject” (00). The distinction is one that is open to deconstruction, and the line the critic treads is a fine one: insofar as she “uses” Lacanian ideas—reifies them, makes them into “things”—they are always-already the Other, and the consolation Lacanian “theory” offers is that of the Imaginary. A thoroughgoing realism “discovers” (with the “discovery” often represented as a moment of revelation or epiphany) the “nature” of “things,” and not only of things, but also of people, their “innate character” or “essence.” For a discourse skeptical of the claims of realism, people do not have such an inner nature or essence but are the point of intersection for various discursive features.12 “Who, or what, is Aeneas?” Porter asks (00). He responds to this realist question in antirealizing mode (my emphases): “Presented as an (admittedly small) bundle of attributes and ascribed character traits—features he has not in virtue of possessing them so much as he is represented as having them—Aeneas is altogether lacking in any essential qualities we might call his own.” When Aeneas scans the pictures on the temple of Juno at Carthage, he “not only relives the trauma of the recent past but discovers himself” (00; se quoque . . . agnovit, Aen. 1.488). What for Aeneas is experienced as a heartening moment of self-recognition, even self-realization, is for Porter one of pathos and misrecognition on the part of a Lacanian barred subject, voided of any such essence—the polar opposite of a realist view. From a realist perspective, texts too are things with a nature, which, though perhaps not readily apparent, can be “discovered” to be “there” all along. The antirealist retort to this is that the text may indubitably exist in front of your eyes, but what’s “in” it? What is
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“there”?13 When Aeneas gazes at the frieze on the temple of Juno, he sees pictures, he even describes what is “in” them for him; but Porter reminds us that he is “feeding his soul on what is but an ‘empty picture’” (00; pictura . . . inani, Aen. 1.464). An “empty” picture; but how “empty”? Again, a critique of realism works to empty a text not of meaning (the pictures on the temple are overflowing with meaning for Aeneas; the Aeneid is replete with meaning for Porter), but of innate significance, definitely out there, irrespective of the drives and desires that motivate any interpretative activity, whether that be Aeneas’s or Porter’s. Mutatis mutandis, Elsner’s discussion of ekphrasis reflects upon the reading/description of written texts. “As the objectivity of the object under the ekphrastic gaze refracts into a range of possible interpretations,” he remarks (00), “so the subjectivity of the subject . . . is itself potentially undermined.” As texts cease to be objects, they get to look a lot more like subjects, with all that that can imply, not least from a Lacanian perspective.14 As one moves away from a realist view, texts cease to have a definitive nature, and the privilege that is assumed for a one-to-one correspondence with things out there. When texts are brought together under these circumstances, the hierarchy of authority, which would allow one text (say Lacan) to be used as the template by which to read the other (say Homer or Vergil), becomes problematic, and processes of negotiation and translation (needs must) take place—the very processes of constructing affinities, equivalences, etc., that I highlighted in my opening paragraph. Notionally, Lacan is not used to read Plato or Vergil or Plotinus, or vice versa. The process is heuristic and two-way, and no metalanguage can explain (away) or offer mastery over a text: Vergil might as well offer a way of thinking about the text of Lacan as vice versa.15 Whereas for classic realism the correspondence theory of truth consists in a one-to-one relationship of word and world, truth lies for the qualified realism of which I have been speaking in the correspondence of text and text, when the two texts are configured as equivalent (“of equal strength”) so as to reflect the “same” concerns (as when for Porter, Lacan and the Aeneid are aligned around a common theme). That is a satisfying symmetry; but is the symmetry always already broken? As for Aeneas viewing the pictures on the temple, texts become a locus of desire and fantasy, and of (possibly misplaced) self-realization; willy-nilly, in our readings we precipitate certain “things” as “real,” of ourselves and of
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the world. And that just might be, amongst other “things,” the Lacanian theory of the subject. Press the antirealist case hard enough, and you will come full circle: having drained the Real (/the subject) completely, void (/the barred subject) takes its place as a “thing.” As Sara Rappe cautions (00), “nor is the consequent void of the subject any kind of ultimate reality.”16 From a strictly Lacanian perspective, as subjects in language the past is not simply there, as realists would have it. We reconstruct our past, as Micaela Janan argues: The past’s fictive and retrospective status flows logically from Lacan’s model of the desiring subject . . . a subject aboriginally divided by language and thus made to desire the “wholeness” that alignment with various cultural signifiers appears to offer. The fissure Lacan traces in the subject’s self-conception also generates an unconscious narrative— a reconstructed history—to rationalize that desire. The “split” the subject putatively sustains as a subject-in-language returns as a narrative of a lost whole, arranged in a temporal relationship of origin and succession . . . out of the division and lack that imbue the present moment emerge (lost) unity and plenitude.17
Anyone even mildly suspicious of realism’s claim that the definitive past is out there, awaiting our discovery, will feel some affinity with this formulation. It provides a generously blank canvas on which can be inscribed ad libitum genealogies (not least genealogies of Lacanian theory), which will be differently organized around different nodes of heuristic concern (the scholarly manifestation of desire) in the present, and none of which, within this framework, can lay a claim to final truth. Ziz˚ek’s alignment of Lacan in a metaphysical tradition stretching back through Hegel and Kant is currently perhaps the most powerful of such narrative expressions,18 but Sara Rappe in this collection offers a way of relating Neoplatonism and Lacan, and others readily come to mind. One might construct a no less intriguing alignment of Lacan with a physical tradition in such a way as to shake out issues that could be seen to be of common concern. Just as Lacan and the Classics has led us to interrogate the notion of a unified subject and problematize the issue of its “emergence,” so such a juxtaposition with the physical tradition could provide the opportunity to explore further the emergence of “things”19 (Latin res, deeply implicated in the notion of the Real), the relationship of the Epicurean
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solid atom (“indivisible”) to the notion of the self-sufficient “individual,” and of “void” and the barred subject,20 and the “body” (in turn, one of the most common tropes for the Epicurean atom) as a symbol of unity and wholeness.
Works Cited Carrithers, Michael, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes, eds. 1985. The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge. Daston, Lorraine, ed. 2000. Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress.” In Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader. New York and London. 340–72. Janan, Micaela. 2001. The Politics of Desire: Propertius IV. Berkeley. Kennedy, Duncan F. 2002. Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature. Ann Arbor. Latour, Bruno. 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law. Cambridge, MA and London. (Originally published as Les microbes: guerre et paix; suivi de, Irréductions [Paris 1984]) ———. 2000. “On the Partial Existence of Existing and Nonexisting Objects.” In Daston, 247–69. Mann, Wolfgang-Rainer. 2000. The Discovery of Things: Aristotle’s Categories and Their Context. Princeton. Mauss, Marcel. 1985. “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of the Person; The Notion of the Self.” In Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes, 1–25. Ziz˚ek, Slavoj. 1993. Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham. ———and Mladen Dolar. 2002. Opera’s Second Death. New York.
Notes 1
Though in the case of Lacanian theory we should perhaps write knowledge. I shall return to this below. 2 Mauss 3. 3 See, conveniently, Foucault. 4 See esp. his study of Pasteur and “microbes”: Latour 1988. 5 Latour 2000: 248. 6 Latour is therefore prepared to entertain a realism, albeit a qualified realism, which, even in the case of scientific objects subject to highly elaborated and replicable procedures of verification, is only provisional, contingent upon the maintenance of the network of actors and institutions that have developed those procedures. Constructions of descriptions involve work and cost, but so does their maintenance, even when they have been rendered “transparent.” 7 Cf., e.g., Rappe’s emphasis on psychoanalysis as a representational practice: “Language is the medium of psychoanalysis, to the extent that at times Lacan appears to want to displace consciousness with language” (00; my emphasis). 8 Cf. Porter and Buchan 00: “After all, on Lacan’s view, the subject has never really [sic] emerged.”
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9 The phrase is highlighted by Dolar 00. For a similar configuration of temporality cf. Dolar’s concluding paragraph (00): “We have to wait for the Sophist for Plato’s answer, and ultimately for Hegel and for Lacan.” 10 Cf. Buchan 00: “Let us now turn to examine in detail the encounter between Odysseus and the Scylla, and try to create some riddles from the puzzling things that Circe says to Odysseus in Book 12. . . .” 11 Cf., e.g., “the reality effect” of Roland Barthes. It is a characteristic of antirealist discourses to start with the effect and track to/construct a cause (effect > cause). Realism characteristically reverses this order (cause > effect); cf. Kennedy 34–36. An antirealist approach to a riddle starts with the answer (“man”) and from there constructs the question (“What walks on four legs . . .”), though, of course, a “real” riddle starts with the question. For the shift in temporality and perspective cf. Buchan 00: “It takes Oedipus’s voice to make the riddle speak, to actualize this voice of the riddling creature that had remained silent until his solution; that is, with the hindsight of Oedipus’s solution, we can read the riddle proleptically” (my emphases). 12 Cf. Porter and Buchan 00: “Lacan’s theory of the subject is thus not least of all a critique of the plenary subject of Western culture. On this point, Lacan is unwavering.” 13 Cf. Elsner’s discussion of ekphrasis, esp. 00: “We cannot tell what is objectively there in the picture and what is purely in the orator’s imagination. Indeed, the gush of phantasy seems designed to elide the gap between the subject looking out and the visual object of which he must make some sense.” 14 Cf. Elsner 00: “The loss of authorial (or viewing) autonomy is paramount in the implicit threat that the viewer may himself be subject to the gazes of the picture.” 15 Cf . Kennedy 115–16. 16 Cf. Bruno Latour in another context (1998: 71): “A little bit of constructivism takes you far from realism; a complete constructivism brings you back to it.” 17 Janan 17. 18 See Ziz˚ek 1993. 19 Cf. Mann. 20 A study of this is promised by James Porter.
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Notes on Contributors
Miran Bozovic is professor of philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of Der grosse Andere: Gotteskonzepte in der Philosophie der Neuzeit (Vienna 1993), An Utterly Dark Spot: Gaze and Body in Early Modern Philosophy (Ann Arbor 2000), and the editor of Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings (London 1995). Mark Buchan is assistant professor of classics at Princeton University. He works and teaches mainly in Greek literature of the archaic and classical periods, with broader interests in literary theory, especially Marxist and psychoanalytic theory. His book, The Limits of Heroism: Homer and the Ethics of Reading, will be published in the summer of 2004. He is currently working on a theoretical introduction to Homer’s Iliad, as well as on a series of essays on Greek tragedy. Mladen Dolar held the position of professor in the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, for twenty years up to 2002. Since then he has worked as a researcher and editor for the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Ljubljana. His publications in Slovene include The Structure of Fascist Domination (1982), Hegel and the Object (with Slavoj Ziz˚ek, 1985), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (2 vols, 1990 and 1992), On Avarice (2002), and On Voice (2003). In English he has published Opera’s Second Death (with Slavoj Ziz˚ek, New York and London 2002); His Master’s Voice is to be published by Verso in 2005. Jaså Elsner is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and visiting professor of art history at the University of Chicago. He is author of Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge 1995) and Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire AD 100-450 (Oxford 1998), as well as the editor of a number of volumes directly concerned with issues of word and image and ekphrasis, including Art and Text in Roman Culture (Cambridge 1996) and the recent special issue of Ramus 31 (2002) dedicated to ekphrasis in antiquity. He has also authored various papers on the interrelation of literature and art in antiquity. His current work includes editing books on pilgrimage in Greece and Rome for Oxford University Press (with Ian Rutherford), and on Philostratus for Cambridge University Press (with Ewen Bowie).
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HELIOS
Duncan F. Kennedy is professor of Latin literature and the theory of criticism at the University of Bristol. He is author of the Arts of Love (Cambridge 1992) and Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature (Ann Arbor 2002); he is currently working on issues of time and criticism for a projected book. Ellen O’Gorman is a lecturer at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Irony and Misreading in the Annals of Tacitus (Cambridge 2000) and is currently writing a book on Roman fantasies of Carthage. James I. Porter is professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of Michigan and author of Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (2000) and The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on The Birth of Tragedy (2000), as well as editor of Constructions of the Classical Body (1999) and of Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome (forthcoming 2005). His current projects include The Material Sublime in Greek & Roman Aesthetics and Homer: The Very Idea. Sara Ahbel-Rappe is associate professor of classics at the University of Michigan. Her research interests center on classical and Hellenistic philosophy, Neoplatonism, and the philosophy of languages. Her publications include Reading Neoplatonism: Translation of Damascius’ Doubts and Solutions Concerning First Principles (forthcoming); co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to Socrates (forthcoming); and articles and book chapters on Socrates, Neoplatonism, the Cynics, and late antique religion. Slavoj Ziz˚ek, who is a trained psychoanalyst and dialectical-materialist philosopher, is senior researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author or editor of over forty books. His latest publications are Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (New York 2004), Organs without Bodies (New York and London 2004), and The Puppet and the Dwarf (Cambridge, MA 2003).
