NTU Studies in Language and Literature 39

Number 31 (June 2014), 39-63

DOI: 10.6153/NTUSLL.2014.31.02

* “The Wound Is Healed Only by the Spear

That Smote You”:1
The Undead, Biopolitics and Psychoanalysis

Han-yu Huang
Professor, Department of English
National Taiwan Normal University

Abstract
This paper takes the undead as the fundamental condition of biopolitics. The first
part offers a critical survey on the undead in the context of modern political theology
and the body politic and contemporary biopolitics. Then, I will examine the avatars of
the undead in psychoanalysis, such as the superego, the Neighbor, and the death drive,
and how life conceptualized through them always already receives wounds and,
therefore, is densely biopolitical. Then, in light of Žižek’s elucidation, I will apply
Lacan’s “University discourse” to disentangle the complication of bureaucratic
knowledge, surplus-enjoyment and contemporary uncertain, risky, anxiety-provoking
capitalist biopolitical conditions. The last part of this paper proposes some ways to
look at the undead as a potential, albeit ambiguous and indeterminate, site of radical
possibilities. What I aim at is not so much any survival kit for contemporary

* This paper is a partial fulfillment of my NSC research project “The Undead, the Limit of Expe-
rience and the Politics of Redemption” (NSC 100-2410-H-003-143-MY2). Special thanks go to the
anonymous reviewers’ invaluable critical suggestions for revising this paper.
1
In Wagner’s Parsifal, Parsifal’s “the wound is healed only by the spear that smote you” addresses
Amfortas, the King of the Grail who is hurt by his own Holy Spear and suffers a wound as well as
shame that does not heal. The miraculous moment of healing happens at the short circuit of the ab-
andonment of all hope and God’s grace, a moment that is equal to, put in biopolitical lexicons, the
state of exception of sovereign jouissance. Žižek takes this statement to be the emergence of per-
verse subjectivity, which is already implicit in Kant: the perverse subject emerges when he wil-
lingly assumes the role of the instrument to accomplish “the crime which paves the way for the
Good” (Tarrying 195). In his “The Politics of Redemption,” Žižek relegates it to the paradox of the
revolutionary process, in which the existing violence can only be overcome by violence. My take
on this allusion is slightly different from, albeit not diametrically opposed to, Žižek’s in that I see
the wound of shame as a moment of ontological dislocation that shares the same form with messia-
nic suspension.
40 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

biopolitics as some psychoanalytic views on radical politics that is grounded in insur-

rectional, revolutionary subjectivity and community.

Keywords: bare life, biopolitics, death drive, jouissance, undead, University dis-
course, wounds
 “The Wound Is Healed Only by the Spear That Smote You” 41

「唯有傷你之矛可療癒」：
不死、生命政治與精神分析

黃涵榆
國立臺灣師範大學英語學系教授

摘 要
本論文視「不死」為生命政治之根本情境。論文第一部分針對現代政治神
學與政體、以及當代生命政治的脈絡裡的「不死」進行批判性考究。接著檢視
精神分析裡各種不死的化身，例如「超我」
、「鄰人」與「死亡驅力」
，以及透過
這些概念所理解的生命必然早已負傷，不脫生命政治掌控。接著將援引拉岡的
「學院陣式」
，試圖拆解官僚知識體系、剩餘快感與當代不斷引發風險、不確定
性與焦慮的生命政治情境之間的糾葛。論文最後一部分將提出不死如何之為基
進政治場域的可能視角。本論文企圖形塑的不是當代生命政治的存活策略，而
是根植於精神分析理論觀點的騷動或革命主體與共群。

關鍵詞：裸命、生命政治、死亡驅力、極爽、不死、學院陣式、傷口
42 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

“The Wound Is Healed Only by the Spear

That Smote You”:
The Undead, Biopolitics and Psychoanalysis

Han-yu Huang

“We have nothing left to lose. We are already dead.”

─Marcos, Subcomandante
of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation

The Undead in Contexts

With his signature stroke, Kafka ends The Trial with what remains vi-
brating beyond its textual boundary: “‘Like a dog!’ he said. It was as if the
shame would outlive him” (Kafka, The Trial 177). Joseph K’s execution
brings into a sharper focus a kind of sovereign state of exception where law
and non-law lose their distinction, while shame survives death or acquires
another form of life. The cut is not simply symbolic but, as a matter of fact,
real in a Lacanian-psychoanalytic sense that it exposes K’s very kernel of be-
ing to the gaze of the Other. Shame understood in this context is equal to the
posthumous (and posthuman?) undead remnant as such in surplus over sym-
bolic and biopolitical mortification; it is a life substance that is most intimate
to us but too much to be claimed as our own. The ending of The Trial thus
understood brings to bear on the boy’s wound in Kafka’s “A Country Doctor”:
the wound qua a palpitating undead life substance that shames the doctor and
confronts him with the crisis of his symbolic mandates (224). K and the doc-
tor in their own way are caught in a state of exception or sovereign jouissance
without any measure. As a matter of fact, psychoanalysis does not lack in-
stances of such wounds or undead life substances, undead in the sense that it
is “somatically sublime and sublimely somatic” in excess of mere animal or
biological life, “the very thing that both enables and troubles human flourish-
ing” (Santner, Royal 73). Accordingly, life from psychoanalytic perspectives
is out of joint and biopolitical in essence.
The undead life substance at issue, as the focus of the current study,
never ceases to preoccupy political theology. This can be best observed in the
discursive formations opened up by Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s seminal The
 “The Wound Is Healed Only by the Spear That Smote You” 43

King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. To a great extent,

the question of the King’s two bodies─namely, the supernatural, mystical or
sublime flesh in surplus over the natural, mortal body as well as the laws of
men and perishable nature─persists through the history of the body politic to
today’s biopolitics. As Agamben explicates in his The Kingdom and the Glory,
the linkage between “legitimacy” and “duration” stands as the central ques-
tion of every political formation, to which the king’s two bodies serve as the
solution (34). To survive its mortal limitations and ensure its consistency, the
secular state strives for ecclesiastical glorification and constantly exchanges
properties with the Church (37). “The King is Dead! Long live the King!”
Nothing other than this exclamation better manifests the corpus mysticum on
which Kantonowicz’s study is centered. The King’s mortal body even after its
termination undergoes a metamorphosis into an undead life substance which
is incorporated into and cuts through the whole social fabric as an antidote
against the latter’s disintegration and degeneration. The life substance at issue
does not exclusively pertain to the medieval monarchical body politic; it has
its modern manifestation in, for example, the totalitarian regime where the
Leader’s will penetrates all aspects of everyday life however private and cap-
tures subjects and the whole social fabric in a state of supra-stasis (Arendt
456). With all these in view, we will not fail to see, in Eugene Thacker’s
terms, the “necrological” nature of the body politic: “Every attempt to formu-
late the constitution of the body politic must also confront its dissolution. . . .
The body politic is constituted on its dissolution, the shaping of a collective,
living body that always exists in relation to the corpse (nekros)” (151). Never
getting rid of its necrological double, the body politic or human society is
undeadened from its root, where life and death enter into a zone of indistinc-
tion; it is already dead but kept alive.
The undead formulated in this paper does not simply pertain to the con-
stitution of the body politic; the modern biopolitical and technological society
has already been populated by a plethora of liminal, undead beings. Arendt’s
“stateless person” and all the avatars of homo sacer in Agamben─for exam-
ple, the refugee, the undocumented immigrant, the human guinea pig, the
overcomatose person─now stand as representative figures of modern biopo-
litics. On the other hand, any extension of human cognitive and sensory func-
tion by the media, technological innovation necessarily breeds a new phan-
tasmal, spectral existence that crosses or profanes the boundaries between
material and immaterial, embodiment and disembodiment, immanence and
transcendence, here and there, real and unreal, for example. It is no exaggera-
44 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

tion to characterize contemporary technoculture with “a drive to the undead,”

which is most obvious in cyberspace technology. For example, the experi-
mental projects on Artificial Life and Hans Moravec’s and Marvin Minsky’s
dream of digital immortality─that is, uploading human consciousness unto
the computer─also envision the undead existence in question. And when the
users of the Internet get wired, they are hooked onto or devoured by the
communication network or a sea of data. As I write in “Vampirism Wired: A
Žižekian Critique of Contemporary Technoculture,” “[T]he fantasy of cyber-
space involves not merely a virtualization of spatiality and reality; more sig-
nificantly, it begets spectral, undead, oceanic existence” (416). We thus wit-
ness a shift from Katonowicz’s motif of the king’s two bodies to the digital or
Internet subject’s two bodies. In a slightly different but relevant context, con-
tagions, epidemics, or various kinds of risk support but, at the same time, res-
ist being subsumed by risk calculus or immunitary defense: in other words,
they work as both the undead, underside supplement to and the life substance
in surplus of biopolitical domination.
What are sketchily rendered above are yet to be critiqued, and that is the
task the current study has in view: namely, to tackle how psychoanalysis may
contribute to our critiquing and rethinking of contemporary “undead” biopo-
litical conditions. In what follows, first of all, I will examine the avatars of the
undead in psychoanalysis─the superego, death drive and objet a, for example
─and life conceptualized through them is densely biopolitical: that is, the
subject emerges exactly in the cut wielded by the law or in the question of
“Che vuoi,” namely, the encounter with the Other’s enigmatic desire, while
the Real is never grasped as any self-sufficient whole or thing in-itself. Then,
in light of Žižek’s elucidation, I will apply Lacan’s “University discourse” to
disentangle the complication of bureaucratic knowledge, surplus-enjoyment
and contemporary uncertain, risky, anxiety-provoking capitalist biopolitical
conditions. The last part of this paper offers some reflections on how the un-
dead can be taken as the zero degree of liberation from biopolitical domina-
tion or a potential site of radical possibilities. What I aim at is not so much
any survival kit for contemporary biopolitics as some psychoanalytic views
on radical politics.

Undeadening Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics

We may take up the myth of the primal father on which Freud specu-
lates in Totem and Taboo (162-70) as an archetype of the formation of the
 “The Wound Is Healed Only by the Spear That Smote You” 45

superego, guilt, and the undead in psychoanalysis. The savage father who is
entitled to all women in the tribe is murdered by his sons and, hence, primor-
dially repressed, but he leaves his residue and remains undead in the law that
prohibits incest and provokes sense of guilt. Roughly at the same time does
the conception of a self-observing, self-censoring, self-judging, and self-
critical psychical force come into being. The evolution of this undead pater-
nal figure moves into the stage of the ego ideal, the social norms, expectations
and recognitions that evoke shame and guilt. It is not until “The Ego and the
Id” (1923) that Freud formally applies the term superego and gradually disso-
ciates it from the ego ideal. This shift is decisive in the sense that the death
drive becomes a fundamental concept in the theory of the superego, as is now
characterized with insatiable severity and takes ego as its object (Freud, “The
Ego and the Id” 30-31). The primordial tension between id and ego now takes
on a new face: the superego draws forces from the id against the ego. The
superego remains prohibitive but, paradoxically, blames the ego for postpon-
ing the satisfaction of aggressive instincts; more instinctual renunciations or
inhibitions of aggressivity only redound to more aggressivity. It is Lacan,
however, who gives such a split nature of the superego more sophisticated
formulations. The law that says “No!” relies on its underside support of the
superego that knows jouissance and commands the subject to enjoy more than
it can bear: hence, Lacan’s motto “the more one sacrifices to [the superego],
the more it demands” (Seminar VII 302). The subject’s homeostasis is thus
disturbed and disrupted; the enigma of “Che vuoi?” gives place to the supe-
regoic voice that haunts, and confronts the subject with a life substance that is
anxiety-provoking and can never be claimed as its own.
As pointed out above, Freud’s theory of the superego signals his turn to
darker views on individual psychical systems and civilization and his preoc-
cupation with the problem of aggressivity, as well as his encounter with the
conceptual impasses of the pleasure principle. However, the conflict between
temporal development and atemporal conservation, malleability and regres-
sion persists to the end of Freud’s career even beyond his awareness. The later
Freud characterizes the death drive with the compulsion to repeat and to re-
turn to a primal state of things that has been disturbed since the emergence of
life, namely, a state of inertia in organic life2; in so doing, Freud also widens
the gap between Eros and Trodestrib, as the latter gets an upper hand over the
former as well as the pleasure principle. As Adrian Johnston comments, we

2
See Standard Edition (SE) 18: 36; SE 19: 40, 173; SE 23: 148
46 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

may thus find that “the demonic, deathly side of Trieb . . . demands satisfac-
tion often at odds with the physical, psychological, and/or social wellbeing of
the individual” (165). It remains debatable whether the later Freud reduces
the concept of the death drive to atemporal regression to the primal state of
being and, therefore, makes it difficult, if not impossible, to understand tem-
porality in his metapsychology. I deem it fruitful not to see the Freudian no-
tion of the death drive as unified in itself; rather, we see it is as characterized
with an inner split and never settled on any single substance. It is undead in
the sense that it is neither thoroughly somatic nor thoroughly psychical and
breaks with any linear, causal or teleological logic; it is the nonhuman in the
human, or something in the human more than human.
As a matter of fact, this undead life of excess or surplus receives its
more sophisticated formulations by Lacan. For example, in his seminar on the
ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan ties the death drive to jouissance, both of
which, albeit always organized in relation to the symbolic Other, confront the
subject with “an uncanny monstrousness beyond its symbolic and imaginary
mandates” (Ruti 21). And the Neighbor in truly Lacanian terms stands as the
perfect embodiment of such a monstrous, inhuman and undead partner to the
subject, one that the subject can never identify with but is so close as to be
anxiety-provoking to the subject. This Neighbor animates the subject’s desire:
I want what is in my neighbor or imagine his suffering in my own image
(Lacan, Seminar VII 184-87). Nevertheless, the subject can live together with
its neighbor only when the latter is deprived of his annoying, excessive and
malignant jouissance, which breathes life substance into the subject, always
sticks out and contorts its life, and resists being integrated. Similarly, Lacan’s
supposition of lamella in Seminar XI (197-98), as an updated version of
Freud’s libido, also points to a kind of enjoying life substance that always
undergoes “death and rebirth in the field of the Other” (Santner, Royal 67)
and guarantees a minimal degree of consistency to the subject.
As pointed out above, biopolitics concerns not only life on the mortal,
biological level but also undead life substance, as is a modern version of the
Kings’ two bodies. It is from this point that we may explore how psychoana-
lysis contributes to our thinking and critique of biopolitics. Taken together,
the above Freudian and Lacanian metapsychological formulations of the
death drive, which pulsates, detours, flies off and overflows in excess of the
distinction between soma and psyche, life and death, mortality and immortal-
ity, human and nonhuman, lead us to a fundamental lesson of psychoanalysis,
as Žižek puts: “[H]uman life is never ‘just life’: humans are not simply alive,
 “The Wound Is Healed Only by the Spear That Smote You” 47

they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately
attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things”
(Parallax 62). We must bear in mind, however, that such a life substance is
always disciplined and linked to the desire of the Other. The subject, in other
words, can enjoy only when it takes on symbolic mandates or, back to the
figure used at the very beginning of this paper, only after it receives wounds.
“Enjoying” life substance, more accurately put, is more like an anamorphotic
stain that parasitizes but remains in surplus over the Symbolic and the Imagi-
nary.
Credits for popularizing the notion of the undead or the living dead in
psychoanalytic terms, undoubtedly, should be given to Žižek. Early in his
1992’s Enjoy Your Symptom, Žižek dwells on the homologous representation
of various bodily distortions and deformations, namely, all those wounds that
stick out palpitatingly, in high art and mass culture: the nose and the voice in
Munch’s Scream, the eyes in Hitchcock’s The Birds, the face in David
Lynch’s The Elephant Man, to name only a few. All these figures threaten to
degenerate into formless slime and are taken by Žižek as the forbidden zone
of pre-ontological or pre-symbolic life substance. In his own words, “The
place of the ‘living dead’ is not somewhere between the dead and the living:
precisely as dead, they are in a way ‘more alive than life itself,’ having access
to the life substance prior to its symbolic mortification” (Enjoy 116, emphasis
original). This “prior to,” of course, does not designate anything temporally
factual and given; it pertains to what lies beyond conceptual distinctions and
recognizably human markers or what persists in surplus or symbolic cuts:
hence, the grimace of the real. Later in Tarrying with the Negative (1993), the
undead is more formally conceptualized in relation to Kant’s indefinite judg-
ment or “the affirmation of non-predicate,” in distinction with the downright
negative judgment that negates the predicates of life but retains same human-
ity. The undead like vampires, however, retain all the characteristics of living
persons without being ones (Tarrying 113). Those undead beings belong to
the borderline phenomena between life and death, the monstrous life sub-
stance in the Real in excess of the Symbolic that wounds the body, castrates
the subject and gives proper meanings to death (Plague 89).
Žižek’s formulations of the undead as sketched above continue to sup-
port his later musing on a group of strange beings like Melville’s Bartleby,
Kafka’s Odradek and the Muselman, namely, those representative figures of
the Neighbor-Thing who embody the inhuman excess of humanity and do not
resemble anything human (“Neighbors” 166). The relevance of such undead
48 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

figures to our rethinking of radical politics beyond the horizon of contempo-

rary biopolitics will be explored in more detail later in this paper. As a matter
of fact, that life substance in psychoanalysis is thoroughly biopolitical finds
its more explicit supports from sources other than above. We may have little
difficulty perceiving a similarity between the country doctor’s examination of
the body’s wound in Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” as interpreted above and
Freud’s gaze at Irma’s mouth in a dream, where he is shocked to find “exten-
sive grayish-white scabs adhering to curiously curled formations” (Interpreta-
tion 75) and confront a crisis of his symbolic mandate as the country doctor’s.
Freud’s conference with his colleagues in the second part of this typical an-
xiety dream represents a compromise formation against the undead life sub-
stance, the lamella in excess of Irma’s hysterical body. To a great extent,
Freud’s retroactive, self-reflexive interpretation of the dream expose of the
lack of psychoanalysis itself and its inability to capture the undead life sub-
stance in question.
From Lacan’s critique of the University discourse in Seminar XVII, we
witness the more intriguing destiny of the life substance in question. Under
the dominance of S2, namely, totalized, formalized and all-knowing bureau-
cratic knowledge, surplus jouissance taken as the object, in Lacan’s own
words, “became calculable, could be counted, totalized. This is where what is
called the accumulation of capital begins” (Lacan, Seminar XVII 177). The
excess of jouissance qua an undead life substance is integrated into the logic
of capital; new methods are working to extract surplus-jouissance and turn it
into surplus value. When surplus-jouissance is allowed, encouraged and
widely circulated as commodity for mass consumption, it necessarily inverts
into an imperative (Žižek, Parallax 310) and, thus, becomes anything but
transgressive. It acquires full visibility and is well administered. No wonder
Lacan takes up the topic of shame─strictly speaking, shamelessness─in the
last session of his seminar. Such shamelessness amounts to displaying as well
as enjoying one’s wounds openly. All these does not only pertain to contem-
porary permissive society of the spectacle or reality shows,3 where personal

3
Žižek points to “the tragicomic reversal of the Benthamite-Orwellian notion of the panopticon
society”: “[T]oday, anxiety seems to arise from the prospect of not being exposed to the Other’s
gaze all the time, so that the subject needs the camera’s gaze as a kind of ontological guarantee of
his or her existence” (Did Somebody 249-50). Such overdosed reliance on the Other’s gaze, of
course, works as a fantasmatic defense against what radically horrifies the subject, namely, the
Other qua the Real that cannot be reduced to imaginary semblance of any human counterpart and
lies beyond intersubjective or symbolic identification: in Žižekian lexicons, the monstrous Neigh-
bor-Thing. The ultimate of allegory of the reversal in question may be found films like The Truman
 “The Wound Is Healed Only by the Spear That Smote You” 49

life styles or fantasies however perverse can be publicly staged, but also to
post-political liberal democracy, in which each opinion, choice, voice and
identity are counted and well served on condition that the fundamental choice
─for example, class struggle or any alternative to liberal democracy or global
market capitalism─and radical structural transformations have been excluded.
All kinds of choice do not guarantee more freedom but, instead, make choos-
ing and desiring more difficult. At this point, one is unlikely to miss the
Agambenian thesis of “the inner solidarity between democracy and totalita-
rianism” (Homo Sacer 10). In the last analysis, surplus-jouissance is extracted
and exploited as the instrument for the total domination of life.
As pointed out above, the King’s two bodies have migrated into
People’s two bodies─that is, the mortal, biologic-anatomical body and the
sublime, collective body of population─in modern biopolitics; this migration
runs parallel to the ascendancy of so-called “life experts” to the center of
biopolitics. However, we should not mistake this new modality of biomedical
power for the demise of the state’s domination over its subjects. Rather, as
now representatives of the University discourse as well as avatars of new
forms of pastoral power, these experts turn health into a blending of know-
ledge and ethical duties; rather than wielding blatant coercive power, these
life-experts take hold of─in the terms of this paper, undeaden─the subject
by superegoic intimation or informed coercion. They thus relay the long-
distance administration of life for the sovereign power to the most meticulous,
molecular level. Such molecular biopolitics, in Nicholas Rose’s terms, ex-
pands the realm of biomedicine to such luminal entities as sperm, oval, em-
bryos, DNA fragments, and stem cells. From the perspective of the current
study, these entities are undead in the sense that they bring into view life in
surplus or excess testing the limits and borders of the language of information
and simulation technologies. As Rose argues, “[M]olecular biopolitics now
concerns all the ways in which [the] molecular elements of life may be mobi-
lized, controlled, and accorded properties and combined into processes that
previously did not exist” (15). The objectives of such molecularization are not
to cure diseases but to make survive and to administer, reshape, optimize and
undeaden the vital processes.
Bureaucratic expert knowledge or the University discourse does not
work to channel the subject’s desiring and coordinate its sense of reality (as
the subject is notated as “objet a” in the formula of the University discourse

Show (1998) and TV reality shows like Queer Eye and America’s Next Top Model.
50 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

and remains in surplus over systems of knowledge or the Symbolic). We are

thus justified in using “undead biopolitics” in parallel to such terms as “risk
society,” “culture of fear,” “catastrophe bond,” and so on. Risks come from
investment, unemployment, immigration, terrorism, environmental pollutions,
epidemics, foods, traffic accidents, aging, sexual contact . . . : in one word,
everywhere and everything. More relevant to the context of this paper, know-
ledge is characterized with intense self-reflexivity and aims to calculate the
incalculable; knowledge takes its uncertainty or failure into account in ad-
vance and, hence, becomes the source of risks. It is all-knowing in the way
that it no longer takes non-knowledge as its dialectical opposite; rather, as
Ulrich Beck argues, “Non-knowing permeates and transforms human condi-
tions of life and suffering expert and control systems, the notions of sove-
reignty and state authority, of law and human dignity” (115). No longer
erecting any semblance of the Master Signifier, today’s expert knowledge
openly displays its wounds, but its grip on the subject does not loosen.

The Politics of the Undead, the Community to Come?

Beck’s diagnosis that risk society is marked by the decline of faith in
transcendental, utopian or redemptive power (4) may be rewound to Lyotard’s
“incredulity towards metanarratives” (xxiv), that is, the postmodern legitima-
tion crisis, and applies to contemporary postpolitical, liberal-democratic biopo-
litics as critically sketched above. However, risk society theory is never any
solution to but part of the symptom: the deadlock of desiring and making
choice and the hyper-reflexive narcissistic subjectivity which always expe-
riences itself as constantly demanded and wounded from all sides. Those
management, calculus, preventions and measures work to displace fundamental
social antagonisms and, consequently, keep intact the existing structure of
biopolitical domination. Put in Žižekian terms, they act out the symptom of
interpassivity.4
From psychoanalytic-ethical perspectives, undead figures like Antigone,
who lives between two deaths and does not cede her desire, and Bartleby,
who always would “prefer not to,” have been embraced as heroic figures of

4
The Žižekian logic of interpassivity, simply put, involves having the Other to know, enjoy and
believe in my place so that I may displace my fundamental passivity to the Other, remain active
and avoid encountering the anxiety-provoking enigma of the Other’s desire. For Žižek’s original
formulations, see The Plague of Fantasies 111-17, The Žižek Reader 104-23, and “The Interpassive
Subject.”
 “The Wound Is Healed Only by the Spear That Smote You” 51

radical ethics and politics. How the undead may be invoked for rethinking the
political in response to the deadlocks of contemporary biopolitics as depicted
above, however, remains to be articulated. Such a task does not uncondition-
ally or indiscriminately embrace social anomaly but aims at the singularity of
being and collective projects based on a true understanding of the subject’s
wounds, unassumable excess of life─namely, shame─and ontological dislo-
cation. Rational calculus and management of jouissance or any call for “re-
turning to the basics” will be nothing but the defensive fantasy and, hence, the
problem mistaken for the solution. “The wound is healed only by the spear
that smote you”─the first fantasy to break with is exactly that of any way out.
Only when we do not shun away from those palpating wounds or life in its
horrible, inhuman and undead excess, or the impossibility of any unified,
self-identical identity and society, can we take the first step to radical trans-
formation and glimpse any messianic light.
The undead die an improper death; they are already dead but are kept
alive, and their survival unsettles the traditionally sanctified ontological op-
position between life and death, mortal, immortal, animate and inanimate,
human and nonhuman, proper and improper, sacred and profane. As can be
grasped from my discussion of the notion of the death drive, life according to
psychoanalysis is always conflicting between development and regression,
expansion and regression, temporal and atemporal, and our unmasterable past
or unassumable life substance in excess keeps intruding into the present and,
therefore, disrupts our defensive fantasy of linear temporality and causality, as
well as all those dominant biopolitical-economic values like “efficiency,”
“management,” “sustainability,” and measures line “risk calculus” and “pre-
vention,” all of which keep the system running and the structure of domina-
tion intact. We will be thus driven to encounter what lies beyond social nor-
mativity, our sense of reality and its fantasmatic support. This does not imply
any escape to alternative, utopian reality and the destruction of the law; nor
does this anticipate a solipsistic closure. Rather, this is similar to what Santner
calls “unplugging” based on Rosenzweig’s Judaic mystic philosophy and
psychoanalysis. As Santner elaborates, “Unplugging . . . need not signify a
radical break with social reality, with the rule of a community’s law or even
from historical agency; it signifies, above all, a suspension of the haunting,
‘undead’ supplement of the law” (Psychotheology 64). These notions illu-
strate Santner’s contribution to bringing psychoanalysis closer to messianic
cession, as can be found in Rosenzweig as well as in Benjamin and Agamben,
and, hence, to broader theological-philosophical contexts. To envision a radi-
52 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

cal politics of the undead which necessarily brings to bear on collective proj-
ects, however, more work on conceptualizations is yet to be done.
The relevance of psychoanalysis to reinventing the political lies in the
challenge it poses to the subject of certainty and agency. If any radical agency
or freedom is possible in psychoanalysis, it is always on the side of the Real
or being driven. Doing away with linear, progressivist notion of temporality
and causality as pointed out above, psychoanalysis tears apart the semblance
of activity or, in Žižekian terms, interpassivity and confronts the subject with
the dirty water it has poured on others. What is to be done at the point cor-
responds to Lacanian subjective destitution according to Žižek’s formulation:

The disavowed fundamental passivity of my being is structured in

the fundamental fantasy which . . . regulates the way I relate to
jouissance. For that precise reason, it is impossible for the subject
to assume his fundamental fantasy without undergoing the radical
experience of “subjective destitution”: in assuming my fundamental
fantasy, I take upon myself the passive kernel of my being─the
kernel the distance towards which sustains my subjective activity.
(Plague 116)

To take upon itself such a passive kernel, the subject has to confront the un-
dead enjoying substance in excess, which is more excessive than the subject
can assume, and, hence, the wounds at the very kernel of its being. This is
also the moment of shame, since we only feel ashamed of the real content of
our desire that is disavowed by the fantasy but is now exposed: that is, shame
for the recognition of how we passively submit to the Law or enjoy being
enslaved by the Other more than we would admit. Accordingly, assuming
such an unassumable undead kernel of being in question means a subtraction
from the fantasmatic supports of our reality and from human individuality or
personality (“Introduction” xv): hence, the subject at its purest, the inhuman
excess of humanity, with which no empathetic, symbolic, or intersubjective
relationship is possible.
The politics of the undead that I am tackling in the current study does
not stop at the mere gesture of subtraction or withdrawal on the level of sub-
jective singularity. We should avoid over-glorifying undead figures like Anti-
gone and Bartleby as idiosyncratic, whimsical individuals. What is more ur-
gently and decisively needed is to politicize undead singularity of being and
the collective of the undead, as composed of many Bartlebies and Antigones,
 “The Wound Is Healed Only by the Spear That Smote You” 53

to universalize singularity so as to disrupt, suspend the working of the biopo-

litical machine. If anything, the undead qua political subjects embody a kernel
of excess that resists all social negotiations and taxonomies as well as biopo-
litical calculus and dispositif. They are divested of symbolic and imaginary
supports; they herald “a non-relational excess which is out-of-joint with re-
spect to . . . any form of teleological absorption by larger purpose” (Santner,
“Miracles” 96).
So, human waste or the inhuman excess of human comes to take the
center stage of politics. But Lacanian psychoanalysis never opts for modera-
tion, compromise or healing. The later Lacan even calls for identifying with
the excremental remainder as a means to step outside the capitalist politi-
cal-economic production of surplus-jouissance, the inherent transgression that
supports the system (Lacan, Seminar XVII 189-90; Ruti 62; Vighi 88, 92;
Žižek, “Structure” 394 ).5 This “excremental identification” also pertains to
the analyst’s discourse, in which objet a occupies the position of the agent for
a new social link. In the psychoanalytic process thus formulated, the analyst
identifies himself with objet a and does not provide any all-knowing, imper-
sonal knowledge as in the University discourse but the knowledge concerning
the lack of being in the Other and in the split subject itself. The analyst poses
himself as a vanishing mediator that leads to the breakdown of the fantasy
of the subject supposed to know and confronts the analysand/subject with the
lack qua the principle of desiring: the Other does not have it! How does a
radical new collective arise out of this discourse? How can the analyst’s de-
sire and this “identification with excremental remainders” work to ignite rad-
ical political subjectivities and movements? Who are the excremental re-
mainders today to identify with: rioters, the homeless, migrant workers do-
cumented or undocumented, those who are struggling with the myth of min-
imum wage, or all those who are becoming proletarian?

5
This gesture of excremental identification is radical, from the perspective of the current study, in
the sense that it is equal to identifying with the impossible or aporetic nature of political subjectiv-
ity and communities and, accordingly, biopolitical capture of the singularity of life. The radicality
in question is illustrated and elaborated later through organizing without organization, those un-
counted or miscounted 99%, and other more concrete instances in Conclusion. What I aim at
through all these is the political that irrupts in concrete biopolitical conditions but resists being
subsumed into any party politics or social movements in the name of “citizenship,” which always
presupposes a system of counting or differentiation of, for example, inside and outside, proper and
improper, non-violence and violence, and so on. Special thanks go to one of the reviewers of this
paper for urging me to clarify my argument on this issue.
54 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

The last questions sound embarrassing or opaque to political philosophy

and may be thus rejected as outmoded or irrelevant. Placing stakes on un-
ivocal answers to them, however, will disturb the domestic and global biopo-
litical immunitary defense, risk calculus and prevention, and cognitive map-
ping. Žižek reads into the analyst’s discourse a social link that is structured
around the analyst’s desire and “stands for the emergence of revolutio-
nary-emancipatory subjectivity” (“Objet a” 110). Such a radical politics of
excremental remainders will be equal to a collective of revolutionary subjects
who do not struggle for recognition and distributive justice; without being
grounded in any predetermined ideology and teleology, this politics does not
aim at proper counting but threatens to collapse the rules of counting. To en-
vision the politics of the undead at issue here, we may need to place our
stakes on violence. As always uncompromisingly opposing to postmodernist,
multiculturalist politics, Žižek carries Lacanian excremental identification to
a more radical, insurrectional degree. As he reiterates emphatically, for an
authentic political act or event to take place, we have to directly identify with
violence, for true universal singularity, as is embodied by those human ex-
crements, non-parts or homo sacers, or all thoese strange beings like Mel-
ville’s Bartleby, Kafka’s Odradek and the Muselman as mentioned above,
namely, those representative figures of the Neighbor-Thing always irrupts in
the guise of excessive, irrational violence (Parallax 282, Ticklish 204).6 Such

6
Grouping all these undead beings together, I may run the risk of an intentional misreading of
Agamben in psychoanalytic terms. As one of the reviewers of this paper rightly reminds, Žižek’s
take on the messianic is different from Agamben’s, and the political act and the plea for or stake on
violence at issue here work to diametrically distinguish them. Though not the objective of this pa-
per, a comparativel reading of Agamben and Žižek, particularly when positioned in the context of
the theological turn in contemporary theory, is an undeniably worthwhile endeavor to complete yet.
From the perspective of the current study, the difference at work, however, does not occlude the
undeadness qua excess or remainder in Agamben’s weak messianism. First of all, the figure of the
Musselmann, namely, undead homo sacer par excellence, stands as life substance in its inhuman or
nonhuman excess which deactivates whatever human communitarian attributes, categories, distinc-
tions, not to mention emphatic identification. Nevertheless, Agamben sees the Muselmann as the
human (non)subject at its purest or, in Agamben’s own words, “the guard on the threshold of a new
ethics of a form of life where dignity ends” (Remnants 69). Earlier in his Homo Sacer, Agamben, in
a similar vein, takes the Muselmann to be a figure that moves in a zone in excess of all distinctions
and “a silent form of resistance” that might attack the guard and threaten to deoperationalize the
law of the camp all of a sudden (Homo Sacer 185). Thus said, we are unlikely to remain blind to a
similar structure in Agamben’s messianic time. As developed from a close exegesis of Pauline texts,
messianic time for Agamben works as a singular interruption of both secular-chronological time
and eternal time; it is a time out of joint with, in excess of time itself, a time that realizes “as not”
(hōs mē) (Time 68). More crucial to my argument in this paper, this messianic time dislocates and
deontologizes the subject, which transforms into a remnant, a remainder in excess of and out of
 “The Wound Is Healed Only by the Spear That Smote You” 55

violence slits open the semblance of social health, order and common goods,
and exposes the wounds which are already there but never really heal so as to
confront us with the disavowed fundamental social antagonisms and shame
we normal citizen-subjects.7 This also pertains to the divine violence that
preoccupies Žižek in his recent works.8 In order not to fall prey to obscurant-
ist mystification and divert our attention to an other-worldly unknowable ori-
gin, as Žižek provokes, we should have the courage to identify the eruption of
divine violence with the really happening historical events when “those out-
side the structured social field strike ‘blindly,’ demanding and enacting imme-
diate justice/vengeance” (“Introduction” x). The event of divine violence that
happens fundamentally disrupts the status quo. It is in such a moment that the
subject—properly speaking, the undead, revolutionary subject—confronts its

joint with itself too (Time 41, 52-53). All these conceptions have significant implications on the
messianic community and radical-political agency, as can be testified by my references to Rancière
and Benjamin in what follows. Then, I argue, the insurrectional or revolutionary style of Agam-
ben’s thinking can be tentatively tackled, if not fully explored, and brought closer to Žižek’s project
of ethical violence and radical politics.
7
When dwelling on these ideas, I find congenial Jacques Rancière’s argument in his Disagreement
(particularly Chapter 2). Politics in the West is founded on the policing of the fundamental blabe-
ron (damage, harm or wrong) that interrupts the distribution or partition of common goods in a
community body. And the political emerges when the people or the proletariat declare the wrongs
done to them and their status of no-parts or, in the lexicons of the current study, excremental re-
mainders, a singular part of non-parts that represent the whole and universality.
8
Walter Benjamin’s echo is undoubtedly sonorous here. The radical potentiality of Benjamin’s “Cri-
tique of Violence” lies in its musing on the messianic suspension of the state of exception that legi-
timates the law, the vicious circle of the law-instituting violence and the law-preserving violence,
or the progressive, teleological “victor’s history” as he conceptualizes in his “Theses on the Con-
cept of History.” Accordingly, revolutionary pure violence has to be redeemed, a very unique kind
of violence that is no longer repressed and forgotten. Put slightly different, Benjaminian pure vi-
olence, as an undead excess, resists being reduced to any instrumental equation between means and
ends; nor does it justify any system of biopolitical domination to cast out any homo sacer. Though
Benjamin does not explicitly conceptualize pure violence, we may speculate on it in relation to di-
vine violence. In contrast to the mystic violence that passes punishments and takes revenge, divine
violence destroys the given legal and moral distinctions and wields absolutions. Divine violence
strikes without displaying its force or any warning signals in advance (Benjamin, “Critique”
249-50); it manifests “pure power over all life for the sake of the living” (250) or affirms pure life
beyond legal violence, a potential life-to-come. From this point, we understand that the revolutio-
nary potential of the proletarian strike: it does not lie in workers’ suspension of their relation to
mechanical production and administration through non-violent means, nor does it concern any
economic benefits. What is truly radical about the proletarian strike is the absence of any calcula-
tion of means and ends as well as of rights and responsibility. The new justice demanded by the si-
lenced, nameless oppressed people attests to weak messianism and disrupts the given legal and po-
litical structure and class distinctions and redeems the memories of injustice and suffering (Fritsch
105, Sinnerbrink 491). All these ideas are congenial to my musing on the politics of the undead in
this paper.
56 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

inhuman madness, its life as a kind of undead, excremental remainder ex-

cluded from the world of living and deprived of all social, communitarian,
and symbolic markers. This is also the moment of emancipatory terror beyond
the immunitary fear of biopolitics. The subject assumes “the solitude of a so-
vereign decision . . . not covered by the big Other” (“Introduction” xi). Put in
more emphatic way, ethical violence subtracts the subject from the hegemonic
ideological field and destroys its positive content; they are driven to the trau-
matic realization that there is no way back and what it is afraid to lose—social
harmony, life world, the substance of community or, in one word, the Oth-
er—has already been lost (Defense 434).

Conclusion, or Becoming Excremental and Insurrectional?

Recent controversies in Taiwan over U.S.-imported beef, Da-pu, and
Chung-chiu Hung’s death, crises of rabies and food safety, and, more recently,
the Nuclear Power Plant No. 4 and the Free Trade Pact with China, make
clear that governmental agencies now are working by the principle of disabil-
ity or have normalized the state of exception. Meanwhile, Taiwan society is
witnessing a kind of political rhetoric in reaction to various social movements:
“you are entitled to stage demonstrations against nuclear power on condition
that you propose policies of replacement energy” or “you are entitled to stage
demonstrations as long as they do not deviate from decency in the name of
citizenship,” so on and so forth. Such reactionary rhetoric, as standard reac-
tions to Occupy movements like Occupy Wall Street and Occupy the London
Stock Exchange that they lack concrete legislative proposals and programs,
from Žižek’s perspective, simply reinforces “the democratic illusion, the ac-
ceptance of democratic procedures as the sole framework for any possible
change, that blocks any radical transformation of capitalist relations” (Year
87), the sanctified democratic dogma of the majority’s rule, the utilitarian
calculus of means and ends, or whatever that sustains the smooth running of
the liberal-capitalist biopolitical machine. We are justified to question that
such a bipolitical machine appears to include, count and account for every
vote, voice and interest but does not depart from the logic of exclusion. As
that reactionary rhetoric may have it, those alleged two hundred and fifty
thousand citizens that participate in the 1985 Citizen Movement and the al-
leged half of a million in the March 30th demonstration against the Free
Trade Pact with China remain a minority based on the intriguing rule, if not
trick, of counting. On the other hand, recent social movements in Taiwan
 “The Wound Is Healed Only by the Spear That Smote You” 57

seem to address the public with their decent, reasonable and self-regulating
images: in one word, images of good citizens. We are justified as well to
question that this maneuver might knowingly or unknowingly appeal to the
response and recognition of the system, the Other that hears, responds to our
pleas and count us in. The title of the theme song of the 1985 Citizen Move-
ment “Do You Hear Our Voice?” uncannily echoes my argument here. We are
tempted to posit that such movements amount to nothing but obedient dis-
obedience, depoliticized politics or, in Žižekian signature terms, decaffeinated
coffee. If any project of justice can be thus completed, it would be one that is
counted by the calculus machine and does not change the fundamental rules
of counting; as running through a feedback loop, its outcome returns to and is
subsumed by the system.
So, what is to be done? At the ending of the Chinese edition of his
Amateur Revolt,9 a book committed to everyday, micro-political sabotages,
protests and resistance, the author Hajime Matsumoto wholeheartedly re-
sponds to Occupy Wall Street’s slogan “We are the 99%!” and urges a soli-
darity among the poor and all the other human excrements, all those “who
have submitted to the rich’s manipulation and have been living between life
and death” (231). This political forefront consists of not so much any defi-
nitely, exclusively defined class as a more inclusive, opaque collective which
can be named, for the convenience of my argument here, as nonclass or, in
Badiou’s terms, “the inexistent of the world” (56): Africans, the mass of or-
dinary workers, slum dwellers, squatters, or all those permanently or tempo-
rarily, potentially or actually unemployed or disprivileged, in one word, all
those disposable human excrements. For a radical political praxis based on
excremental identification from psychoanalytic perspectives to take place, we
may need to summon our courage to identify in all these a power of self-
organizing without “concrete proposals and programs,” centralized authority
and organization, power that may have the opportunity to be like, as formu-
lated above, the divine violence that causes glitches to the system and makes
it inoperative. Perhaps, it is worth placing our stakes on urorganized immi-
grants’ demonstrations in, for example, Los Angeles and Chicago in the
spring of 2006 (Harvey 188) or any other metropolitan cities against the leg-
islation that aims to criminalize the undocumented migrant workers. Or,
should we take one step further to even do away with the marker “immi-

9
《貧乏人の逆襲！タダで生きる方法》2008. This paper cites its Chinese edition that bears the
title《素人之亂》
。
58 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

grants” and, as The Coming Insurrection provokes, unconditionally identify

with the cause of becoming excremental and anonymous and reverse the hu-
miliating condition of being socially nothing, the “tragic lack of recognition”
into a politics with “[n]o leader, no demands, no organization, but words,
gestures, complicities” (113)?10
“The wound is healed only by the spear that smote you”─its relevance
to the central argument of this paper is multiple, if not ambiguous. Any re-
thinking or reinvention of radical politics needs to take its ground in a her-
meneutic of contemporary undead biopolitical conditions. Accordingly, we

10
When first released in 2007 France under the name of the publishing house, Éditions la Fabrique,
the book bears no author’s name and only the signature of “Invisible Committee” appears on the
book cover. But the widely circulated opinion holds that the culprit might be Julien Coupat, a
freelance rebel who has ever been steeped in Foucault, Debord and Agamben. According to Andy
Merrifield, Agamben ever taught Coupat in Paris’s École des hautes etudes, the two collaborated in
the the latter’s radical journal Tiqquin (56). How Agamben’s political thinking impacts Coupat or
the book is a matter to explore or surmise. The flee from visibility, the politics with no qualities, the
inessential commune and so on─all these are surely susceptible to an Agambenian reading and
congenial to my argument for a politics of the undead from the psychoanalytic perspectives formu-
lated above. As Merrifield rightly elaborates,
For the survival of any autonomous self-organizing community, relentless effort and ac-
tivity, relentless determination, is necessary. Self-organization will always be in con-
stant need of expansion, in need of a practice that can both occupy, and be a territory,
that can establish solid and durable life-form. Any commune will need to increase the
density of its fellow-traveler communes, and its means of circulation and modes of so-
lidarity with them. The ideal scenario is one where a commune’s own territorial demar-
cation becomes unreadable, is “opaque to all authority.” (70-71)
The “insurrectional style” at issue here is different from a mere passive gesture of withdrawal in
the way that it, with its densely geological-spatial figuration, engenders porosity in political carto-
graphy and undermines the latter’s grasp from the ground up; the collectives or communes thus
formed occupy, inhabit and expand but do not belong to any specific territory or fall into any hie-
rarchical, stratified organization and concrete programs and, more important, remain opaque to the
establishments. Therefore, the congeniality of my argument here to David Harvey’s endorsement of
the revolutionary potential of Occupy Wall Street in reclaiming the “right to the city” and “con-
vert[ing] public space into a political commons” (161) stops at the point he argues that “[a]ll this
has to be democratically assembled into a coherent opposition, which must also freely contemplate
the future outlines of an alternative city, an alternative political system, and, ultimately, an alterna-
tive way of organizing production, distribution, and consumption for the benefit of the people”
(162-63). Similar to Harvey’s agenda, Badiou’s embracing assessment of the transition of an im-
mediate riot as is characterized with limited locales, participants and means for expansion to a his-
torical riot which heralds a rebirth of history and emancipation is hinged on the reformulation of an
“ideological proposal, a powerful Idea, a pivotal hypothesis, so that the energy [historical riots] re-
lease and the individuals they engage can give rise, in and beyond the mass movement and the
reawakening of History it signals, to a new figure of organization and hence of politics” (42). All in
all, how the politics of the undead from a psychoanalytic perspective, the organizing power without
organization, and the Agambenian inessential commune may be grafted to a new Marxist project of
emancipation or subversive politics remains debatable.
 “The Wound Is Healed Only by the Spear That Smote You” 59

come to recognize how we are ontologically wounded or dislocated and,

hence, how our life, more human than (in)human, palpates in excess of those
wounds, the law, the sovereign and biopolitical domination. Besides, we are
not to take Zizek’s plea for ethical, divine violence literally to be foolhardy
militantism or irresponsible acting-out of brute biolence. Instead, what we
have taken for granted as making our society and our life impossible to be
complete in themselves are exactly the necessary zero degree of radical
transformation. The recognition that “we have nothing to lose; we are already
dead,” of course, does not guarantee any final victory. It only clears the
ground for the new to happen. But how, by repeating the past failures to fail
better? On what ground can the commentators in the West justifiably con-
clude that the uprisings in the Arab countries these three years, as following
same historical tragic necessity, only lead to abortive democracies, more so-
cial chaos, and, then, ceaseless coups, if not a narcissistic gaze of the West?
Psychoanalysis does not take the healing of wounds as its ultimate end, nor
does it sprinkle salt on them. At its most radical, psychoanalysis brings us to
see how we are enslaved by the compromises we make.
60 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

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[Received 19 July 2013;

accepted 16 May 2014]
64 NTU Studies in Language and Literature