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Passive pleasures

Audron ukauskait

The condition of late capitalism is characterized by permissiveness, the lack of a clearly defined symbolic authority and the absence of a set of moral laws. The main question today is how to get satisfaction if there is nothing to transgress? How can desire be channeled without the coordinates of the Symbolic, in the silent absence of the Other which is no longer concerned with our demands? In this context we can reconsider several moral stances: the retrograde one of insisting to return to the universal maxims of moral behavior (an impossible quasi-Kantian position); the popular claim that everyone has the right to his/her difference, so that the only universal thing is our particularity or pathology (the position of Lacanian psychoanalysis); the idea that the absence of external prohibitions reveals the inherent obstacle to desire which freezes the subject in paralytic passivity (Slavoj ieks position).

All these moral stances are reconsidering the relation between desire and the Law, or, more precisely, between the Law and its transgression. The first thinker who introduced the notion of transgression into the field of philosophy was George Bataille. In his famous formulation transgression does not deny the taboo, but transcends and completes it 1 he asserted the interdependence between transgression and the Law. As Lacan pointed out, without a transgression there is no access to jouissance, and to return to Saint Paul, that that is precisely the function of the Law. Transgression in the direction of jouissance only takes place if it is supported by the oppositional principle, by the forms of the Law.2 That means that instead

1 2

George Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, San Francisco: City Light Books, 1986, p. 63. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Tavistock: Routledge, 1992, p. 177.

of creating a prohibition or a limit, the Law actually generates transgressive desire. Bataille, of course, is a perfect example of this dialectic between the Law and its transgression, which expresses itself as excess, e.g. a singular act, supporting the Symbolic order . In this sense transgression is a negative affirmation of the Symbolic order. iek, discussing the Bataillian notion of transgression, concludes that Bataille is strictly premodern: he remains stuck in this dialectic of the Law and its transgression, of the prohibitive Law as generating the transgressive desire, which forces him to the debilitating perverse conclusion that one has to install prohibitions in order to be able to enjoy their violation a clearly unworkable paradox.3

Its an unworkable paradox because its impossible to imagine the authority, firstly, capable to install any prohibition, and secondly, being able to reach consensus about the content of such a prohibition. Since the moment when Lacanian psychoanalysis appropriated the sphere of the moral Law its impossible to define what the content of this moral Law is and to whom it should be addressed. Its not a coincidence that Lacan and iek are preoccupied mainly with two figures of modernity: Kant and de Sade. 4 Kant is important for psychoanalysis as a philosopher who asserted that universal moral truths (the Good) should have a form of universal moral Law; speaking generally, Kant formalized the sphere of morality defining moral behavior not in respect to its content (compassion, love, etc.) but only in respect to the formal rules.

It is precisely this formal character of the moral Law that makes the comparison between Kant and de Sade possible. As iek pointed out, What Sade accomplishes is thus a very
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Slavoj iek. The Parallax View, Cambridge, London: The MIT Press, 2006, p. 95. For Lacans reading of Kant with de Sade see: Jacques Lacan. Kant avec Sade. In: crits, Paris, ditions du Seuil, 1966, p. 765-90; for ieks account of the similarity between Kant and de Sade see: Slavoj iek. Kant with (or against) Sade. In: The iek Reader, eds. Elisabeth Wright and Edmund Wright Oxford, UK and Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1999, pp. 285-301.

precise operation of breaking up the link between two elements which, in Kants eyes, are synonymous and overlapping: the assertion of an unconditional ethical injunction and the moral universality of this injunction. Sade keeps the structure of an unconditional injunction, positing as its content the utmost pathological singularity. 5 In this respect both Kant and de Sade reveal two sides of the same tendency of modernity, e.g. the absolutely formal character of a moral Law. As Gille Deleuze points out, Kant gave a rigorous formulation of a radically new conception, in which the law is no longer regarded as dependent on the Good, but, on the contrary, the Good itself is made to depend on the law. // Clearly THE LAW, as defined by its pure form, without substance or object or any determination whatsoever, is such that no one knows nor can know what it is. It operates without making itself known. It defines a realm of transgression where one is already guilty, and where one oversteps the bounds without knowing what they are, as in the case of Oedipus.6

We can easily recognize, that this discourse of guilt, is, of course, the discourse of psychoanalysis, and the unknown Law which operates without making itself known, is nothing other than the unconscious: What we have here is, for the first time in the history of philosophy, the assertion of the Law as unconscious.7 Here we can see to what extent psychoanalysis is dependent on the rational discourse of modernity: morality based on rational calculation is in direct correlation with the unconscious as ruled by unknown laws; the moral duty is in direct correlation with the discourse of guilt. Everyone having an unconscious (and no one can prove the otherwise) is transgressing some unknown Laws and is always already guilty: in this sense transgression is not a singular and enthusiastic excess
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Slavoj iek. Kant with (or against) Sade. In: The iek Reader, eds. Elisabeth Wright and Edmund Wright Oxford, UK and Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1999, p. 291. 6 Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, New York, Zone Books, 1991, p. 82-84. (Italics mine A. .) 7 Slavoj iek. The Unconscious Law: Towards an Ethics Beyond the Good. In: Slavoj iek, The Plaque of Fantasies, New York, Verso, 1997, p. 226.

(Bataille), but a universal condition. Can psychoanalysis then be generally defined as a theory asserting that everyone has the right to his/her difference and that the only universal thing is our own particularity or pathology?

Although psychoanalysis is often regarded as a theory of sexuality, its content is absolutely opposite: its a theory of desublimation and guilt. As iek pointed out, Sade announces the moment when, with the emergence of bourgeois Enlightenment, pleasure itself loses its sacred/transgressive character and is reduced to a rationalized instrumental activity. // The Sadian hero is fundamentally apathetic, reducing sexuality to a mechanical, planned procedure deprived of the last vestiges of spontaneous pleasure and sentimentality. 8 In this apathetic universe everything is permitted, but nothing is pleasurable. In this respect psychoanalysis can be regarded as a theory that gives us a rationalized explanation of why we cant get direct access to pleasures (e.g. in terms of lack and desire, the reality/pleasure principle, death drive, etc.)

Michel Foucault in his text A Preface to Transgression points out that after the death of God was announced, modern sexuality was not emancipated, but, on the contrary, denatured and acquired a form of universal prohibition. As Lacan emphasizes in his Seminar II, the famous proposition of Dostoevsky should be turned around: if God does not exist, everything is forbidden.9 Foucault points out that from the moment that Sade delivered its first words // the language of sexuality has lifted us into the night where God is absent, and where all of our actions are addressed to this absence in a profanation which at once identifies it, dissipates it, exhausts itself in it, and restores it to the empty purity of its

Slavoj iek. Kant with (or against) Sade. In: The iek Reader, eds. Elisabeth Wright and Edmund Wright Oxford, UK and Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1999, p. 287. 9 Jacques Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan II: The Ego in Freuds Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, New York and London, W. W. Norton, 1988, p. 128.

transgression.10 In contrast to Bataille, Foucaults definition of transgression is absolutely positive. Foucault insists that transgression must be liberated from the scandalous or subversive, that is, from anything aroused by negative associations. // Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the first time.11

Interpreted in this way, transgression contains nothing negative; on the contrary, it acquires the status of a universal condition. With Lacanian psychoanalysis transgression loses its excessive character and acquires the form of a proper ethical act. iek defines transgression not as a violation of a norm (as Bataille did) but as an invention of a new norm: the ethical act proper is a transgression of the legal norm // that, in contrast to a simple criminal violation, does not simply violate the legal norm, but redefines what is a legal norm. The moral law doesnt follow the good - it generates a new shape of what counts as good. 12 So if we simply follow the moral rules, we behave automatically without making any moral decision. The favourite Lacanian example of transgression as a proper moral act is Antigone by transgressing the (Creons) prohibition she invents a new moral law. The notion of transgression gets complicated when iek tries to adapt this notion in the political realm and starts advocating such psychotic passage lacte like the October revolution.

Of course we have to ask what happens if transgression becomes a universal condition. How can we cope with this experience of voluntarism and limitlessness, even if it looks so promising? How can we frame our desires and achieve pleasure if there is nothing left to transgress? The answer is rather simple: by inventing a new limit, which is not external
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Michel Foucault. A Preface to Transgression. In: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: selected essays and interviews by M. Foucault. Ed. D. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 30-31. 11 Op. cit., p. 35. 12 Slavoj iek . Melancholy and the Act. In: Critical Inquiry, 26, 2000, p. 672.

(symbolic authority, morality), but internal. iek points out that the absence of explicit limitation confronts us with the Limit as such, the inherent obstacle to satisfaction; the true function of the explicit limitation is thus to sustain the illusion that, through transgressing it, we can attain the limitless.13 Desire is achieved not by reinventing the external moral prohibitions, but by revealing the inner limits, the inherent obstacles in the way to satisfaction. Here we enter the realm of intimate transgression, which posits the limit in the desire itself: pleasures are not forbidden, but not possible either.

The question of transgression directly relates to the question of the big Other. Transgression in Bataillian style is a passionate interpellation to the big Other, the desperate attempt to prove that the big Other (God) still exists. Bataillian excess is only a detour at the end of which one should rediscover the lost sacred experience. The psychoanalytical discourse emptied the place of the big Other (according to Foucault, God has never existed) and this is why the empty place of the Other can be replaced by anyone else (psychoanalyst, the Master, etc.) Recent (post-Lacanian?) discourse has to admit this absence and assume that what // one needs is a demand no longer addressed to the Other. The task, therefore, is to assume the non-existence of the Other even and also of the dead Other.14

Of course, we should ask how can desire be channeled without the coordinates of the Symbolic, in the absence of the Other which is no longer concerned with our demands? Does the place of the Other remain empty or does it open space to the infinite play of substitutions? As Lacan has put it, God always intervenes between the subject and its other creating some sort of philosophical mnage--trois.15 In this way Lacan indirectly suggests
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Slavoj iek, The Parallax View, Cambridge, London: The MIT Press, 2006, pp. 295-296. Ibid. 15 Jacques Lacan. On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge. Book XX, Encore 1972-1973, New York, London: Norton, 1998, p. 70.

that the place of the Other is never empty and in specific situations can be replaced by the Other as other sex. As Lacan formulated it, The good old God exists. The way in which he exists will not necessarily please everyone, especially not the theologians, /.../ because I deal with the Other. This Other - assuming there is but one all alone - must have some relationship with what appears of the other sex.16 A bit later Lacan develops his idea asking: Why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as based on feminine jouissance?17

Such suggestion can bring us very close to some strange conclusions similar to these following from feminist theology or such blockbusters as Da Vinci Code. Instead of going into this direction I would like to examine two filmic examples, - Talk to Her by Pedro Almodvar (2002) and Breaking the Waves by Lars von Trier (1996) - which are structured around the deadlock of intimate transgression and in an ironic way reveal the play of substitutions where the empty place of the Other is replaced by the Other as other sex. Another important thing about these two films is that they both represent passive subjects (paralysed or lying in coma), which are nevertheless passive in an active way, being involved in uncanny sexual relationships.

I would like to start with Almodvar who makes transgression the constant theme of his films. His earlier films like The Law of Desire (1987) or Matador (1986) follow the logic of sexual desire from the realm of pleasure to the realm of the death drive. A film such as All About My Mother (1999) visualises the transgression of binary gender codes and reveals the performative character of gender identity. The film Talk to Her proceeds in a different direction depicting the transgression of the taboo concerning the (almost) dead and in this way reveals the ambivalent nature of every sexual relationship. Both female protagonists of
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Op. cit., pp. 68-69. Op. cit., p. 77.

the film are in a deep coma. The male character Benigno who is nursing Alicia describes this situation as a perfect love relationship. The idyllic atmosphere of the film leads us to a conclusion that maybe nothing would change if all women would take this position of a Sleeping Beauty. Unfortunately the idyllic atmosphere of the film is interrupted when Benigno, after being condemned for rape, is jailed and commits suicide. At the end of the film Alicia miraculously wakes up from a coma after giving birth and continues to live as an active person.

What is important to stress in interpreting the film Talk to Her is the suspension of the big Other: the imperative Talk to her creates an illusion of direct contact, of an immediate and intimate relationship, which is not censored by the big Other. Another important thing is that the suspension of the big Other, I think, is directly connected with the religious iconography of the film. For example, the way in which Alicias body is represented (and gazed at) in the film has direct allusions to Christian iconography (Christs Shroud or Crucifixion). These two moments lead to a conclusion that Almodvars film is an interpellation to this (missing) Other as to the feminine Other. As far as this feminine Other acquires certain features of religious iconography, we can say that in this film transgressive sexual relationship in some sense replaces the (missing) religious relationship. This reminds me of ieks claim, when he, interpreting Lacan, says: Since Woman is one of the names of God, would it not be logical to conclude that, in the same way that there is no sexual rapport, there is also no religious rapport? Perhaps, the uncanny fact of Christs Crucifixion stands for the silent admission of this fact.18

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Slavoj iek, lacanian ink 18. http://www.lacan.com/frameXVIII6.htm

Lars von Triers Breaking the Waves could be considered as another example of how a (missing) religious relationship is replaced by transgressive sexual relationship. The film depicts Bess, a religious girl, and her love relationship with Jan, which is mediated by Bess direct relationship with God. One day Bess begs God to return Jan to her; as an answer to her prayers, Jan returns home, but after an accident he is paralysed from the neck down. From this moment Bess interprets reality in terms of a contract with God. Confined to bed, Jan starts manipulating Bess, asking her to make love with other men and then to describe her experiences to him. When his condition deteriorates, Bess starts a chain of sacrifices, and finally condemns herself to death. After Bess dies Jan miraculously wakes up from a coma, and even regains his ability to walk. The final shot of the film shows the church bells miraculously ringing in the sky, and, as if that was not enough, these bells are shown from above that means, from Gods perspective

How can we read such direct stories about miracles today, in our postmodern post-secular universe? The miraculous logic of the film together with enormous doses of sentimentality and romantic kitsch leaves us, spectators, in absolute perplexity. In both films we are confronted with a situation where the Other (the public opinion, the moral law) is suspended and replaced by the Other as other sex. As a result of this displacement we find ourselves in a transgressive universe, which raises the question of religiosity in the universe without God and, paradoxically, depicts sexuality without sex. This strange logic of substitutions (transgressive sexual relationships in the place of (missing) religious relationships) evolves into the experience of profanation, which finds expression in kitschy and sentimental aesthetical forms. Foucault was the first to recognize this proximity between profanation and

transgression: Profanation in a world which no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred is this not more or less what we call transgression?19

Another thing characteristic to both films is that the main protagonists represent a kind of passive subjectivity. Here I refer not only to the physical circumstances depicted in these films, such as paralysis or coma, but to a more general phenomenon of interpassivity as a constant condition, essential to contemporary postmodern subjectivity. iek suggests that the notion of intersubjectivity should be replaced by the more relevant notion of interpassivity: Far from being an excessive phenomenon which occurs only in extreme pathological situations, interpassivity, () is thus the feature which defines the most elementary level, the necessary minimum, of subjectivity.20 That means that situations, which we tend to interpret as pathological, start to represent postmodern subjectivity as such. Here we can briefly refer to such trivial phenomena of active passivity as screen persona in computer games or chat rooms, or, by contrast, phenomena of passive activity such as cyber twins which acts as a deputy when the real person is not online. In philosophical context we can refer to the Levinasian ethics of suspension and passivity; the Derridian impossibility to decide; Blanchots idea of unworking, and ieks idea of suspension and sabotage as a politics proper. All these examples raise the same question: What if the original subjective gesture, the gesture constitutive of subjectivity, is not that of autonomously doing something, but, rather, that of the primordial substitution, of withdrawing and letting another do it for me, in my place?21

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Michel Foucault. A Preface to Transgression. In: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: selected essays and interviews by M. Foucault. Ed. D. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 28. 20 Slavoj iek, The Plaque of Fantasies, London, New York: Verso, 1997, p. 116. 21 Op. cit., pp. 118-119.

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Speaking about the films we just discussed we can notice that the extent of passivity differs when we speak about different genders: the male character in Breaking the Waves, though being passive is still active through the other, while Alicia in Talk to Her is turned into absolute object of care. Here I want to stress that the position into which female characters are being put (the position of the big Other) has nothing to do with emancipation. What we encounter here could be entitled as a kind of postmodern misogyny: for example, iek is not ashamed to say that women in fact are passive, apathetic objects, but this is characteristic of any postmodern subject - this is why women, according to iek, are postmodern subjects par excellence. (As we know, apathy is the favourite mood of the Sadian universe.) Though we tend to think that gender differences should disappear in this level of postmodern subjectivity, we can conclude that still, there is passivity and passivity.

Now I would like to come back to the definition of intimate transgression: it is intimate not only in a sense that it takes place in intimate situations, but in a sense that it invents inner obstacles to itself that compromises desire. Another important thing is that intimate transgression does not foresee any form of Law we cant define the Law that it tends to transgress. If in a Kantian universe we have a universal content (the Good) in a universal form, in a Bataillian universe a universal content in a particular form (an excess which supports the Symbolic), in a Sadian universe a particular (pathological) content in a universal form, here we encounter a particular (pathological) content in a particular (excessive) form. Each position or stance produces its own pleasures: if Kantian pleasure is duty, Bataillian pleasure is excess, and Sadian pleasure is apathy, here we encounter pleasure as/in passivity. Intimate transgression, on the one hand, compromises desire, and on the other hand, it regains it in the mode of passive pleasure.

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