Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek

persona, and learns that his marriage failed because he was distracted by the pursuit of his career and material possessions, the very things in life that others made him believe were important. Depressed, he returns to the Company and asks them to provide him with yet another identity; the Company agrees on condition that he directs to them some rich past acquaintances who might like to be “reborn.” While awaiting his reassignment, Wilson encounters Evans, who was also “reborn” but could not accept his new identity. At the film’s ominous end, doctors drag Wilson to an operating room, where, strapped to the table, he learns the truth: those who, like him, fail to adjust to their new identity, are not, as promised, provided with a new one, but become cadavers used to fake new clients’ deaths.

      All the philosophico-ideological topics we have been dealing with reverberate in Seconds: the reduction of the subject to a tabula rasa, the emptying of all its substantial content, and its rebirth, its recreation from a zero-point. The motif of rebirth is here given a clear critico-ideological twist: transforming himself into Wilson, Hamilton realizes what he always dreamt of; but things go terribly wrong when he becomes aware that those transgressive dreams were part of the same oppressive reality from which he had tried to escape. In other words, Hamilton-Evans pays the bitter price for the fact that his negation of the past was not radical enough: his revolution failed to revolutionize its own presuppositions. Hegel had a presentiment of this necessity when he wrote: “It is a modern folly to alter a corrupt ethical system, its constitution and legislation, without changing the religion, to have a revolution without a reformation.”²¹ In a radical revolution, people not only “realize their old (emancipatory, etc.) dreams”; they have also to reinvent their very modes of dreaming. Is this not the exact formula of the link between the death drive and sublimation? Therein resides the necessity of the Cultural Revolution, as clearly grasped by Mao: as Herbert Marcuse put, it in another wonderfully circular formula from the same epoch, freedom (from ideological constraints, from the predominant mode of dreaming) is the condition of liberation, in other words, if we change reality only in order to realize our dreams, without changing these dreams themselves, then sooner or later we will regress to the former reality. There is a Hegelian “positing of presuppositions” at work here: the hard work of liberation retroactively forms its own presupposition.

      In Seconds, Wilson pays the price for his “revolution without reformation”: when he rejects his old life as a banker trapped in a loveless marriage, he thinks he has escaped an oppressive social reality in which others (or, rather, the ideological “big Other”) define his dreams, telling him what he desires. What he discovers after his rebirth is that this very fantasmatic core of his being—his innermost dream of an authentic life which he felt was being claustrophobically oppressed—was no less determined by the existing order. Nowhere is this trap of “inherent transgression” more obvious than in the bacchic orgy scene with its wink to the hippy lifestyle (recall that the film is from 1966), a scene which was censored on the film’s first release, when full frontal nudity was not yet permitted. The scene drags on painfully, its depressive inertia clearly refuting the notion of a liberating explosion of spontaneous joie de vivre.

      The film’s conclusion, in which Wilson is sacrificed as a stand-in body so that another subject can be reborn, restates the Hegelian-Christian lesson: the price of my rebirth is another’s annihilated body, like Christ’s.

      1 We all know of Alan Turing’s famous “imitation game,” designed to test whether a machine can think: we communicate with two computer interfaces, asking them any imaginable question; behind one of the interfaces, there is a human person typing the answers, while behind the other, there is a machine. If, based on the answers we get, we cannot tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human, then, according to Turing, our failure proves that machines can think. What is less known is that, in its first formulation, the test was not to distinguish the human from the machine, but man from woman. Why this strange displacement from sexual difference to the difference between human and machine? Was it a result of Turing’s simple eccentricity due to his homosexuality? According to some interpreters, the point is to oppose the two experiments: the successful imitation of a woman’s responses by a man (or vice versa) would not prove anything, because gender identity does not depend on sequences of symbols, while the successful imitation of a human by a machine would prove that this machine can think, because “thinking” is ultimately the proper way of sequencing symbols. What if, however, the solution to this enigma is much more simple and radical? What if sexual difference is not simply a biological fact, but the Real of an antagonism that defines humanity, so that once sexual difference is abolished, a human being effectively becomes indistinguishable from a machine?

      2 In the same way, apropos the ongoing healthcare debate in the US, one should distinguish between the “constituted” level of empirical falsifications (like the absurd charge that Obama’s health-care reform will lead to the establishment of “death committees”), and the “constitutive” level of the threat to freedom of choice which informs the entire field of the attacks on Obama. Not to mention the Benjaminian distinction between constituted violence (empirical acts of violence within society) and constitutive violence (the violence inscribed into the very institutional frame of a society).

      3 Silvia Aloisi, “Israeli film relives Lebanon war from inside tank,” Reuters, September 8, 2009.

      4 I rely here on Andrej Nikolaidis’s outstanding “Odresujoca laz,” Ljubljanski dnevnik, August 28, 2008 (in Slovene). Nikolaidis, a younger generation Montenegrin writer, was sued by Emir Kusturica and scandalously condemned for writing a text in which he denounced Kusturica’s complicity with aggressive Serb nationalism.

      5 Let us recall a similar story about Lacan: those who got to know him personally, to observe how he behaved in private, when he was not maintaining his public image, were surprised to learn that he conducted himself in exactly the same way as in public, with all his ridiculously affected mannerisms.

      6 I owe this idea to Bernard Keenan.

      7 There is, effectively, an early Soviet film (Vladimir Gardin’s A Spectre Haunts Europe, from 1922) which directly stages the October Revolution in the terms of Poe’s story.

      8 In order to encourage peace and tolerance between Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo, the UN forces controlling its independence distributed posters with a photo of a dog and a cat sitting side by side in a friendly manner, accompanied by the message: “If they can live peacefully together, you can too!” If ever there was an example of multicultural racism, this is it: as we all know, in reality, dogs and cats do not tolerate each other, with the exception of circuses and other places where they are trained to do so—hence Albanians and Serbs are implicitly being treated as two different wild (animal) species who have to be properly trained to tolerate each other’s proximity.

      9 To add insult to injury, two further details spoil the film’s last moments. When a member of Wade’s gang shoots Evans to death and then throws Wade his gun, Wade takes a quick glance at the gun’s handle, notices a metal relief of Christ on the cross and then changes sides, coldly and quickly killing his entire gang, as if divine intervention pushed him to betray his rescuers. Then, in the very last seconds, when the train is leaving for Yuma with Wade on board, he whistles to his horse outside the train on the station, which then starts to run after the train—a clear hint that Wade has already planned his escape, and everything will end well for him.

      10 Perhaps one should link this asexual character of the Panda to the gradual abandonment of the “production of the couple” in mainstream Hollywood (Quantum of Solace as the first James Bond film in which there is no sexual act between Bond and the Bond-girl; the absence of sex in the last two Dan Brown novels [Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol] as well as in the film version of Angels and Demons).

      11 Sir Richard Francis Burton, The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, New York: Random House 2001, p. 441.

      12 See Fethi Benslama, La Psychanalyse à l’épreuve de l’Islam, Paris: Aubier 2002.

      13 See Jean-Joseph Goux, Œdipe philosophe, Paris: Aubier 1990.

      14 Benslama,