Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek

passage from Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs, which deals precisely with the invisible excremental space and what one might discover by way of probing into it—the event described took place when he was the Chilean consul in Sri Lanka (Ceylon):

      My solitary bungalow was far from any urban development. When I rented it, I tried to find out where the toilet was; I couldn’t see it anywhere. Actually, it was nowhere near the shower, it was at the back of the house. I inspected it with curiosity. It was a wooden box with a hole in the middle, very much like the artifact I had known as a child in the Chilean countryside. But our toilets were set over a deep well or over running water. Here the receptacle was a simple metal pail under the round hole.

      The pail was clean every morning, but I had no idea how its contents disappeared. One morning I rose earlier than usual, and I was amazed when I saw what had been happening.

      Into the back of the house, walking like a dusky statue, came the most beautiful woman I had yet seen in Ceylon, a Tamil of the pariah caste. She was wearing a red-and-gold sari of the cheapest kind of cloth. She had heavy bangles on her bare ankles. Two tiny red dots glittered on either side of her nose. They must have been ordinary glass, but on her they were rubies.

      She walked solemnly toward the latrine, without so much as a side glance at me, not bothering to acknowledge my existence, and vanished with the disgusting receptacle on her head, moving away with the steps of a goddess.

      She was so lovely that, regardless of her humble job, I couldn’t get her off my mind. Like a shy jungle animal she belonged to another kind of existence, a different world. I called to her, but it was no use. After that, I sometimes put a gift in her path, a piece of silk or some fruit. She would go past without hearing or looking. The ignoble routine had been transformed by her dark beauty into the dutiful ceremony of an indifferent queen.

      One morning, I decided to go all the way. I got a strong grip on her wrist and stared into her eyes. There was no language I could talk with her. Unsmiling, she let herself be led away, and was soon naked in my bed. Her waist, so very slim, her full hips, the brimming cups of her breasts made her like one of the thousand-year-old sculptures from the south of India. It was the coming together of a man and a statue. She kept her eyes wide open all the while, completely unresponsive. She was right to despise me. The experience was never repeated.²⁶

      Neruda then simply passes to other things. This passage is remarkable not only for obvious reasons: a shameless story of a rape, with the dirty details discreetly passed over (“she let herself be led away, and was soon naked in my bed”—how did she come to be naked? Obviously, she didn’t do it herself), the mystification of the victim’s passivity into a divine indifference, the lack of elementary decency and shame on the part of the narrator (if he was attracted to the girl, wasn’t he embarrassed by the awareness that she was smelling, seeing, and dealing with his shit every morning?). Its most remarkable feature is the divinization of the excrement: a sublime goddess appears at the very site where excrements are hidden. One should take this equation very seriously: elevating the exotic Other into an indifferent divinity is strictly equal to treating it like shit.

       Legal Luck, or, the Loop of the Act

      What, then, is the dimension of the law that the law cannot admit to publicly? The best way to discern it is through a logical paradox deployed by Jean-Pierre Dupuy in his admirable text on Hitchcock’s Vertigo:

      An object possesses a property x until the time t; after t, it is not only that the object no longer has the property x; it is that it is not true that it possessed x at any time. The truth-value of the proposition “the object O has the property x at the moment t” therefore depends on the moment when this proposition is enunciated.²⁷

      One should note here the precise formulation: it is not that the truth-value of the proposition “the object O has the property x” depends on the time to which this proposition refers—even when this time is specified, the truth-value depends on the time at which the proposition itself is enounced. Or, to quote the title of Dupuy’s text, “When I Die, Nothing of Our Love Will Ever Have Existed.” Think about marriage and divorce: the most intelligent argument for the right to divorce (proposed, among others, by none other than the young Marx) does not refer to commonplaces such as “like all things, love affairs are not eternal, they change over the course of time,” and so on; rather it concedes that indissolvability is inherent in the very notion of marriage. The conclusion is that divorce always has a retroactive scope: it does not mean only that a marriage is now annulled, but something much more radical—a marriage should be annulled because it never was a true marriage. And the same holds for Soviet Communism: it is clearly insufficient to say that, during the years of the Brezhnev “stagnation,” it “exhausted its potential,” it “was no longer adapted to new times”; what its miserable end demonstrates is that it was caught in a historical deadlock from the very beginning.

      Perhaps this paradox provides a clue to the twists and turns of the Hegelian dialectical process. Let us take Hegel’s critique of the Jacobin Revolutionary Terror as an exercise in the abstract negativity of absolute freedom which cannot stabilize itself in a concrete social order of freedom and thus has to end in the fury of self-destruction. One should bear in mind, however, that, insofar as we are dealing here with a historical choice (between the “French” way of remaining within Catholicism and thus being obliged to engage in self-destructive Revolutionary Terror, and the “German” path of the Reformation), it involves exactly the same elementary dialectical paradox as does that other choice, also from The Phenomenology of Spirit, between the two readings of “the Spirit is a bone” which Hegel illustrates by way of the phallic metaphor (the phallus as organ of insemination or as the organ of urination). Hegel’s point is not that, in contrast to the vulgar empiricist mind which sees only urination, the proper speculative attitude has to choose insemination. The paradox is that making the direct choice of insemination is the infallible way to miss the point: it is not possible directly to choose the “true meaning,” for one has to begin by making the “wrong” choice (of urination)—the true speculative meaning emerges only through the repeated reading, as the after-effect (or by-product) of the first, “wrong,” reading. And the same goes for social life in which the direct choice of the “concrete universality” of a particular ethical lifeworld can end only in a regression to a pre-modern organic society that denies the infinite right of subjectivity as the fundamental feature of modernity. Since the subject-citizen of a modern state can no longer accept immersion in some particular social role that would confer on him a determinate place within the organic social Whole, the construction of the rational totality of the modern state leads to Revolutionary Terror: one should ruthlessly tear up the constraints of the pre-modern organic “concrete universality,” and fully assert the infinite right of subjectivity in its abstract negativity. In other words, the point of Hegel’s analysis of the Revolutionary Terror is not the rather obvious insight into how the revolutionary project involved the unilateral and direct assertion of abstract universal reason, and as such was doomed to perish in self-destructive fury since it was unable to channel the transposition of its revolutionary energy into a concrete, stable and differentiated social order; Hegel’s point turns rather on the enigma of why, in spite of the fact that the Revolutionary Terror was a historical deadlock, we have to pass through it in order to arrive at the modern rational state.²⁸

      This is why Hegelian dialectics is not a vulgar evolutionism claiming that while a phenomenon may be justified in its own time, it deserves to disappear when its time passes: the “eternity” of dialectics means that the de-legitimization is always retroactive, what disappears “in itself” always deserves to disappear. Recall also the paradox of the process of apologizing: if I hurt someone with a rude remark, the proper thing for me to do is to offer a sincere apology, and the proper thing for the other party to do is to say something like “Thanks, I appreciate it, but I wasn’t offended, I knew you didn’t mean it, so you really owe me no apology!” The point is, of course, that although the final result is that no apology is needed, one has to go through the elaborate process of offering it—“you owe me no apology” can only be said once I have