Monday, May 03, 2010
Slovenia Uber Argies...
A logical paradox
Zizek writes at Lacan.com:
How is this circle of changing the past possible without recourse to travel back in time? The solution was already proposed by Henri Bergson: of course one cannot change the past reality/actuality, but what one can change is the virtual dimension of the past – when something radically New emerges, this New retroactively creates its own possibility, its own causes/conditions. [2] A potentiality can be inserted into (or withdrawn from) past reality. Falling in love changes the past: it is as if I always-already loved you, our love was destined, “answer of the real.” My present love causes the past which gave birth to it. The same goes for legal power: here also, synchrony precedes diachrony. In the same way that, once I contingently fall in love, this love was my necessary Fate, once a legal order is here, its contingent origins are erased. Once it IS here, it was always-already here, every story of its origins is a myth, like the Swift story of the origin of language in Gulliver’s Travels: the result is already presupposed.
In Vertigo, it is the opposite that occurs: the past is changed so that it loses objet a. What Scottie first experiences in Vertigo is the loss of Madeleine, his fatal love; when he recreates Madeleine in Judy and then discovers that the Madeleine he knew already was Judy pretending to be Madeleine, what he discovers is not simply that Judy is a fake (he knew that she is not the true Madeleine, since he recreated a copy of Madeleine out of her), but that, because she is NOT a fake – she IS Madeleine -, Madeleine herself was already a fake – objet a disintegrates, the very loss is lost, we get a “negation of negation.” His discovery changes the past, deprives the lost object of objet a.
Are, then, today’s ethico-legal neoconservatives not a little bit like Scottie in Hitchcock’s Vertigo: in wanting to recreate the lost order, to make a new distinguished Madeleine out of today’s promiscuous and vulgar Judy, they will be sooner or later forced to admit not that it is impossible to restore to life Madeleine (the old traditional mores), but that Madeleine WAS already Judy: the corruption they are fighting in modern permissive, secular, egotist, etc. society was there from the beginning. It is like with Zen Buddhism: those who criticize the Westernized New Age image and practice of Zen, its reduction to a “relaxation technique,” as the betrayal of the authentic Japanese Zen, obliterate the fact that the features they deplore in the Westernized Zen were already there in Japanese “true” Zen: after WWII, Japanese Zen Buddhists immediately started to organize Zen courses for business managers, during the WWII their majority supported Japanese militarism, etc.
In true love, after discovering the truth, Scottie would have accepted Judy as “more Madeleine than Madeleine herself” (he DOES that just before the rise of the mother superior…): here Dupuy should be corrected. Dupuy’s formula is that Scottie should left Madeleine to her past – true, but what should he have done upon discovering that Judy IS Madeleine? Past Madeleine was an imaginary lure, pretending to be what she was not (Judy played Madeleine). What Judy is doing now in playing Madeleine is TRUE LOVE. In Vertigo, Scottie does NOT love Madeleine – the proof is that he tries to recreate her in Judy, changing Judy’s properties to make her resemble Madeleine. This is why the idea to clone a child to parents who lost him (or her) is an abomination: if the parents are satisfied, their love was not true love – love is not love for the properties of the object, but for the abyssal X, the je ne sais quoi, in the object.
Zizek writes at Lacan.com:
How is this circle of changing the past possible without recourse to travel back in time? The solution was already proposed by Henri Bergson: of course one cannot change the past reality/actuality, but what one can change is the virtual dimension of the past – when something radically New emerges, this New retroactively creates its own possibility, its own causes/conditions. [2] A potentiality can be inserted into (or withdrawn from) past reality. Falling in love changes the past: it is as if I always-already loved you, our love was destined, “answer of the real.” My present love causes the past which gave birth to it. The same goes for legal power: here also, synchrony precedes diachrony. In the same way that, once I contingently fall in love, this love was my necessary Fate, once a legal order is here, its contingent origins are erased. Once it IS here, it was always-already here, every story of its origins is a myth, like the Swift story of the origin of language in Gulliver’s Travels: the result is already presupposed.
In Vertigo, it is the opposite that occurs: the past is changed so that it loses objet a. What Scottie first experiences in Vertigo is the loss of Madeleine, his fatal love; when he recreates Madeleine in Judy and then discovers that the Madeleine he knew already was Judy pretending to be Madeleine, what he discovers is not simply that Judy is a fake (he knew that she is not the true Madeleine, since he recreated a copy of Madeleine out of her), but that, because she is NOT a fake – she IS Madeleine -, Madeleine herself was already a fake – objet a disintegrates, the very loss is lost, we get a “negation of negation.” His discovery changes the past, deprives the lost object of objet a.
Are, then, today’s ethico-legal neoconservatives not a little bit like Scottie in Hitchcock’s Vertigo: in wanting to recreate the lost order, to make a new distinguished Madeleine out of today’s promiscuous and vulgar Judy, they will be sooner or later forced to admit not that it is impossible to restore to life Madeleine (the old traditional mores), but that Madeleine WAS already Judy: the corruption they are fighting in modern permissive, secular, egotist, etc. society was there from the beginning. It is like with Zen Buddhism: those who criticize the Westernized New Age image and practice of Zen, its reduction to a “relaxation technique,” as the betrayal of the authentic Japanese Zen, obliterate the fact that the features they deplore in the Westernized Zen were already there in Japanese “true” Zen: after WWII, Japanese Zen Buddhists immediately started to organize Zen courses for business managers, during the WWII their majority supported Japanese militarism, etc.
In true love, after discovering the truth, Scottie would have accepted Judy as “more Madeleine than Madeleine herself” (he DOES that just before the rise of the mother superior…): here Dupuy should be corrected. Dupuy’s formula is that Scottie should left Madeleine to her past – true, but what should he have done upon discovering that Judy IS Madeleine? Past Madeleine was an imaginary lure, pretending to be what she was not (Judy played Madeleine). What Judy is doing now in playing Madeleine is TRUE LOVE. In Vertigo, Scottie does NOT love Madeleine – the proof is that he tries to recreate her in Judy, changing Judy’s properties to make her resemble Madeleine. This is why the idea to clone a child to parents who lost him (or her) is an abomination: if the parents are satisfied, their love was not true love – love is not love for the properties of the object, but for the abyssal X, the je ne sais quoi, in the object.
# posted by Lamb Mouton @ 8:53 AM 
