and voice love objects Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek, editors sic A DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham and London 1996 © 1996 Duke University Press AH rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ® Typeset in Sabon by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Introduction i PART I GAZE, VOICE i Mladen Dolar, The Object Voice 7 2 Alenka Zupancic, Philosophers' Blind Man's Buff 32 3 Elisabeth Bronfen, Killing Gazes, Killing in the Gaze: On Michael Powell's Peeping Tom 59 4 Slavoj 2izek, "I Hear You with My Eyes"; or, The Invisible Master 90 PART II LOVE OBJECTS 5 Mladen Dolar, At First Sight 129 6 Fredric Jameson, On the Sexual Production of Western Subjectivity; or, Saint Augustine as a Social Democrat 154 7 Renata Salecl, I Can't Love You Unless I Give You Up 179 8 Slavoj 2izek, "There Is No Sexual Relationship" 208 Notes on Contributors 251 Index 253 Renata Salecl/Slavoj 2izek In the psychoanalytic community, we often encounter a nostalgic long• ing for the good old heroic days when patients were naive and ignorant of psychoanalytic theory—this ignorance allegedly enabled them to pro• duce "purer" symptoms, that is, symptoms in which their unconscious was not too much distorted by their rational knowledge. In those days, there were still patients who told their analyst, "Last night, I had a dream about killing a dragon and then advancing through a thick forest to a castle ...," whereupon the analyst triumphantly answered, "Ele• mentary, my dear patient! The dragon is your father, and the dream ex• presses your desire to kill him in order to return to the safe haven of the maternal castle. ." Jacques Lacan wagers exactly the opposite: the subject of psychoanalysis (the person analyzed) is the modern subject of science, which means—among other things—that his symptoms are not now and have never been by definition "innocent," they are always addressed to the analyst qua subject who is supposed to know (their meaning) and thus as it were imply, point toward, their interpretation. For that reason, one is quite justified in saying that we have symptoms that are Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian, and so on, that is, whose reality involves implicit reference to some psychoanalytic theory. Today, the "free associations" of a typical educated patient (analysand) consist for the most part of attempts to provide a psychoanalytic explanation of his or her disturbances.... What is effectively at stake in this ongoing battle between the two ver• sions of psychoanalysis is not only the destiny of psychoanalysis but the 2 Salecl and £izek destiny of modernity as such: are we to persist in reflective knowledge, or are we to return to some kind of intuitive wisdom? This battle, the continuation of the old bataille des lumieres, is nowhere fought so fero• ciously as in the terrain of the relationship between the sexes. A good hundred years ago, the sudden emergence of the figure of the hysteri• cal woman (in the works of Richard Wagner, August Strindberg, Otto Weininger, Franz Kafka, Edvard Munch, and others) announced a crisis of sexual relationship in whose shadow we continue to live. From the charmingly naive assertion of harmony in the couple in Mozart's Magic Flute, the pendulum swung to the other extreme, bearing witness to a radically antagonistic relationship between the sexes: man and woman are in no way complementary, there is no preestablished harmony here, each of the two sexes poses a threat to the other's identity. There are two ways to approach this crisis. According to the first, obscurant• ist one, this imbalance results from the fact that modern subject has lost its roots in the organic unity of tradition, which is why a return to some kind of premodern wisdom (in the guise of the new "holistic para• digm" destined to replace the old "mechanistic," "Cartesian" paradigm, for example) will also abolish the antagonism between the sexes and re• establish their lost harmony. The second approach asserts that the late-nineteenth-century percep• tion of the hysterical woman as a threat to male identity rendered visible a universal feature that was here all the time, only in the mode of "in- itself," that is, it was not yet "posited," not yet "for-itself." So there is no incompatibility between the precise historical context (the great crisis of the relationship between the sexes one hundred years ago, which also gave birth to psychoanalysis) in which "There is no sexual relationship" (Lacan) became a commonplace and Lacan's claim that this statement is universally valid: in a proper dialectical analysis, universality and his- toricization are strictly correlative. Freudian psychoanalysis is, as the standard judgment goes, a product of the late nineteenth century; how• ever, its insights are "universally valid" not in spite of the historical con• text of their discovery but because of it. Lacan's "There is no sexual relationship" provides a simple answer to the eternal question, Why is there love in the world? Love is a lure, a mirage, whose function is to obfuscate the irreducible, constitutive "out- of-joint" of the relationship between the sexes. The famous Freudian "partial objects"—leftovers of a prephallic jouissance, that is, of a jouis- Introduction 3 sance not yet "sublated" in, mediated by, the paternal metaphor—give body to the elusive obstacle that prevents the fulfillment of sexual rela• tionship. Lacan added to Freud's list of partial objects (breasts, faeces, phallus) two other objects, voice and gaze. It is therefore by no means accidental that gaze and voice are love objects par excellence—not in the sense that we fall in love with a voice or a gaze, but rather in the sense that they are a medium, a catalyst that sets off love. Three conclusions are to be drawn from these premises. First, love cannot be reduced to a mere illusion or imaginary phenomenon: beyond its fascination with the image of its object, true love aims at the kernel of the real, at what is in the object more than the object itself, in short, at what Lacan called Vobjet petit a. Love—as well as hate—is supported by what remains of the object when it is stripped of all its imaginary and symbolic features. Secondly, love is therefore an inherently historical phenomenon: its concrete configurations are so many (ultimately failed) attempts to gentrify, tame, symbolize, the "unhistorical" traumatic ker• nel of jouissance that makes the object unbearable. Thirdly, love is never "just love" but always the screen, the field, on which the battles for power and domination are fought. Is voice, as a catalyst of love, not the medium of hypnotic power par excellence, the medium of disarming the other's protective shield, of gaining direct control over him or her and submitting him or her to our will? Is gaze not the medium of control (in the guise of the inspecting gaze) as well as of the fascination that entices the other into submission (in the guise of the subject's gaze bewitched by the spectacle of power)? More than sixty years ago, in the wake of the Fascist threat, Walter Benjamin proposed to counter the Fascist aestheticization of the political with the leftist politicization of the aes• thetic. In a homologous way, today, more than ever, one should counter the sexualization of the political (from the overtly reactionary New Right "grounding" of the political hierarchy in the "natural" familial hierarchy of the sexes, through the New Age endeavor to reestablish the balance of feminine and masculine cosmic principles, to the pseudo-Freudian re• duction of political struggles to an expression of libidinal deadlocks— rebellion as the acting out of an unresolved Oedipal complex, etc.) with the politicization of sexuality (by analyzing the political overdetermina- tion of the way sexual difference is perceived in an actual society), Each of the two parts of the present volume opens up with an elabora• tion of basic concepts (voice and gaze; love), to which are then attached 4 Salecl and 2izek three concrete historical analyses. Part i—Gaze, Voice—opens up with Mladen Dolar who, unlike the Derridean deconstructers of phonocen- trism, works out the consequences of the Lacanian theory of voice and gaze as the two objectal remainders of an excessive presymbolic jouis- sance. The essay that follows Dolar's, by Alenka Zupancic, focuses on the paradoxical role of blindness in the Enlightenment tradition from Descartes to Kant: the paradigmatic case of the subject delivered from false prejudices and deceptive illusions is a blind person. Next, Elisa• beth Bronfen's close reading of Michael Powell's cult film, Peeping Tom, deploys the Hitchcockian motif of the murderous gaze. Finally, Slavoj 2izek provides the passage to part 2. First, he articulates the difference between gaze and voice as "partial objects"; then, he tackles the way gaze and voice are involved in politico-ideological struggles, by way of focusing on the enigmatic relationship of the racist and/or sexist subject to the object of his hate. What is the target of the outbursts of racist or sexist violence? What are we aiming at, what do we endeavor to annihi• late when we exterminate Jews or beat up foreigners in our cities? The answer is double: violence aims at the symbolic fiction that sustains the Other's identity and, beyond it, at the phantasmatic "kernel of the real" of the Other's identity. In part 2—"Love Objects"—it is again Mladen Dolar who, via an analysis of the Freudian notion of the Uncanny [das Unheimliche], articulates the meanders of Vobjet petit a as the cause of transferential love.