Real and subject If one were to rewrite Antigone as a modern tragedy, one would have to change the story so as to deprive Antigone’s suicidal gesture of its sublime dignity and turn it into a case of ridiculously stubborn perseverance which is utterly out of place, and is, in all probability, masterminded by the very state power it pretends to call in question. Lacan’s precise formulation of this key point fits like a glove the position of the accused in the Stalinist monster trials. In the modern tragedy, the subject ‘is asked to assume with enjoyment the very injustice of which they are horrified [‘il est demandé d’assumer comme une jouissance l’injustice même qui lui fait horreur’]’. Is this not a perfect qualification of the impasse of a Stalinist subject? Not only are they forced to sacrifice everything that really matters to them – tradition, loyalty to their friends, etc. – to the Party, what’s more, they are requested to do it with enthusiastic allegiance. One is, therefore, tempted to risk the hypothesis that the Stalinist monster trials with their absolute (self-relating) humiliation of the accused (who is compelled to ask for the death penalty for themselves, etc.) provide the clearest actualization in social reality itself of the fundamental structure of the modern tragedy articulated by Lacan apropos of Claudel. Insofar as the subject runs out on the kernel of his being, they, as it were, cut off the possibility of a dignified retreat into tragic authenticity. What, then, remains for them but a ‘No!’, a gesture of denial which, in Claudel, appears in the guise of the dying Sygne’s convulsive twitches. Such a grimace, a tic that disfigures the harmony of a beautiful feminine face, registers the dimension of the Real, of the subject qua ‘answer of the Real’. This tiny, barely perceptible tic – ‘a refusal, a NO, a non, this tic, this grimace, in short, this flexion of the body, this psychosomatics’ – incomparably more horrifying than the Cyclopean vortex of the Real celebrated by Schelling, is the elementary gesture of hysteria. By means of her symptoms, the hysterical woman says ‘No’ to the demands of the (social) big Other to ‘assume with enjoyment the very injustice of which she is horrified’ – say, to pretend to find personal fulfilment and satisfaction in carrying out her ‘calling’ the way it is defined by the ruling patriarchal order. Slavoj Žižek, INTERROGATING THE REAL, (Editorial material, selection and translation, Rex Butler and Scott Stephens), (Originally published as ‘Prolegomena to a Future Answer to Dr. Butler’, Agenda: Australian Contemporary Art 44, 1995, pp. 45-67. This article was written in response to a series of questions that Rex Butler posed to Žižek following a series of public lectures delivered at the Eighth Annual Conference of the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis in the Freudian Field, Melbourne, 13 August 1994 [Žižek’s second lecture is reprinted in Chapter 4 of this volume, ‘Connections of the Freudian Field to Philosophy and Popular Culture’]. These questions appeared in Agenda 44, pp. 68-70), Continuum, 2005, pp.222-3
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 22:41:11 +0000