To the memory of our dear colleague and friend, ,

TOSHlKATSU MURAYAMA (1967 -2006),

whose almost daily writings on Lacan and culture made him one of the
most beloved and inspiring theorists of his generation in Japan.
 U M B R (a)
A JOURNAL OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 2007

ISSN 1087-0830 ISBN 0-9799539-0-1

EDITORS:
Peter DeGabriele
Shane Herron
Sol Pelaez
MANAGING EDITOR: UMBR( n) is published with the help of grants from the
Andrew Skomra following organizations and individuals at the
State University of New York at Buffalo:
EDITORIAL COMMITIEE:
KevinArnold The Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
Andrew Ascher! The ~raduate Student Association'
J.C. Cloutier The Group for the Discussion of the Freudian Field
Peter DeGabriele The English Department
Stephen Elin The David Gray Chair (Steve McCaffery)
Ron Estes, Jr.
The J'JIles H. McNulty Chair (Dennis Tedlock)
Meghan Faragher
Richard Gamer The Melodia E. Jones Chair (Gerard Bucher)
Nathan Gorelick
Moriah Hampton
Ryan Hatch
Shane Herron
"The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the GSA.
Crystal Hickerson
Lydia Kerr
Minna Niemi
Address for Editorial and Subscription Enquiries:
Russel Pascatore
Sol Pelaez U¥BR(a) .
Andrew Skomra Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
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408 Clemens' Hall
Hiraki Yoshikuni
Buffalo, NY 14260-4610
FACULTY ADVISORS: http://wings.buffalo.edu/student-life/graduate/gsajlacan/lacan.html
Joan Copjec
. Special thanks to Editions de L'Heme for granting permission to publish an excerpt
Tim Dean
from: Henry Corbin, Le Paradoxe du Monotheism © Editions de L'Herne, 1981
Steven Miller
Special thanks to Editions Galilee for granting permission to publish a translation of
Catherine Malabou, "Pierre aime les horranges: Levinas-Sartre-Nancy-eune approche
ART DIRECTION:
du fantastique en philosophic," in Sens en tous sens: autour des trauaux de Jean-Luc
Andrew Skomra
Nancy © Editions Galilee, 2005
Lonely Cosmonaut
V')
I-
z
I.IJ 6 EDITORIAL: SEMBLANCE WITHOUT ILLUSIONS
peter degabriele, shane herron & sol pelaez
I- 11
Z ON THE PATH OF THE SEMBLANT
jelica sumic

0 37 INTIMATE EXTORTED, INTIMATE EXPOSED

U gerard wajcman

59 APOPHATIC THEOLOGY AS ANTIDOTE TO NIHILISM.

henry corbln"
,
85 SEMBLANCE: PUTTING PHILOSOPHIZING TO THE TEST
bernard baas

99 PIERRE LOVES HORRANGES

LEvINAS-SARTRE-NANCY: AN APPROACH TO THE FANTASTIC IN PHILOSOPHY
catherine malabou

115 ON CHANGING APPEARANCES IN LACAN AND BADIOU

oliver feltham

131 SEMBLANT, PHALLUS, AND OBJECT IN LACAN'S TEACHING

russell grigg

139 WORLD INTERCOURSE: A TRANSCRITICAL READING OF KANT AND FREUD

kojin karatani

168 REVIEWS
 The political culture of modemtty begins
with a far-reaching attempt to denude the
master. The modern political subject-dis-
satisfied with the cunning mask of the mag-
istrate-first declares itself through its desire
to peer behind thetta~ade, to locate the true
motivations of the powerful, and to discover
the secret of the political that had hith-
erto been obscured. This war on semblance
quickly develops into a sophisticated and far
ranging ideology critique that compulsively
searches for the real and the material that
lurks behind the fake and the ideological.
Having registered its protest, the subject
believes that it is announcing an authentic
commitment to the eradication of appear-
ance and the transparency of authority. This
tenacious subject imagines that this quest
must lead to liberation from the master and
his discourse. But the act of announcing this
irrepressible suspicion of the ruler's duplicity
is not without consequences: authority soon
takes the demand for exposure to heart and
begins its project of rendering the subject
totally visible, of depriving the subject of all
its hiding places, of further and further nar-
rowing the space reserved for enjoyment.

UMBR(a) 6
 In the same way, modernity declares sci-
ence and reason to be the pall-bearers of
myth and the heralds of a new transparency
for knowledge and politics. Undeterred by
this widespread demand that all knowledge
authorize itself through its transparency,
psychoanalysis founds its mandate on the
unsightly remainder of semblance that lies
at the foundation of both governance and
knowledge. Instead of multiplying the du-
plicity of the master with calls to unmask,
the specificity of the intervention of psycho-
analysis locates the master's semblance in his
very fashioning of the "ultrareduced myth
of being identical with his own signifier," In
other words, transparency is simply taken
as the very first semblance. Recognizing
the imprint of the superego in the calls for
the master to disrobe, psychoanalysis asks
whether there may not be some mystification
at work in the rational claim to have dis-
solved the semblances. Yet, psychoanalysis
does not only aim to demystify the myth of
the end of all myths. The crucial wager is
that this process of demystification creates
a residue for which there is no accounting,
that which continues to divide transparency
from itself: semblance.
Refusing to oppose truth and semblance,
psychoanalysis models its utterances on
their alliance. If Freud creates a number
of "scientific" myths that continue to elicit
derisive laughter from modern psycholo-
gists-Oedipus, the primal father-it is for
no other reason than that psychoanalysis
emerges at the point where this repressed
myth must return in the guise of rationalism
itself in order to combat the fierce dialectic
of obscurantism and rational atheism. The
Future of an Illusion is not merely an at-
tempt to convince us of the fraudulence of
religious claims. On the contrary, Freud as-
sumes that people will discover this falseness
and replace the religious worldview with a
more secular and scientific one. Unlike some
atheists, he understands how well-worn this
debate is, stands humbled before the many
luminaries who have fought battles on one
side or the other, and has no interest in pro-
ducing the semblance of a plea to "really
convince" the naive, For Freud, whether
in the hands of fundamentalist believers or
literalist atheists, a simple-minded exposure
of religion's fraudulence inexorably produces
a philistine recalcitrance that clumsily tram-
ples the salvable core of the religious: the
semblance that hits upon the real of jouis-
sance. Hisdeepest fear, therefore, is that we
will dispose of religion without recognizing
the level on which it tells the truth, and even
occasionally bests rationalist mythology. It is
not semblance or illusion per se that Freud
distrusts-he knows full-well that the former
cannot be eradicated-it is illusion devoid of
semblance, the destructive effect of unmask-
ing an illusion and destroying its semblance
in the process.
In this fashion, rather than unmasking the
deception of the master signifier, psychoanal-
ysis produces this deception in its emptiness,
indirectly revealing its semblance and sepa-
rating off its illusory mystifications without
 sacrificing the singular jouissance it marks.
The master signifier, here, is characterized by
its undecidability, by the absence of any signs
or markers which would provide the means
for assessing its authenticity, which might
tell us if it merely veils a devious Machiavel-
lian scheme (a cunning plan) or an object
of sincere belief. As a signifier which has no
other signifier, no referents, to verify it and
to allow us to definitively know whether it
is or is not authentic, the master signifier's
semblance, as the undecidable of analysis,
can only be the site of a decision. Placing
the subject in the position where the Other
00 was initially posited, psychoanalysis forces
us to recognize that the work of the subject
alone produces the master in his semblance.
The decision to apprehend one's jouissance
in that place will have all the hallmarks of
·a risk or gamble. Decisively separated from
its support in the master's knowledge, it will
always be an act of faith. Apart from war, it is
our only option when faced with semblance,
~d the only one that allows us to decide on
it. Far from distancing itself from semblance,
by making it into an everyday object against
which one can do battle, psychoanalysis
should maintain the possibility that this sem-
blance of being might be our only chance to
decide, to intervene politically.
1. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar o] Jacques Lacan,
Book XVII: The Otherside of Psychoanalysis, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New
York: Norton, 2007), 90.
I- °eu
z ::J
III
-<C ItI
....J :=
U
The real is what does not depend on my idea of it.
~

:E -Jacques Lacon'

I.LJ HEADING FOR THE REAL

V')
What is the peculiar evocative force of the notion of the real? In the "pas-
I.LJ sion for the real" which, according to Badiou, animated all the subversive
inventions of the 20th century-from psychoanalysis to revolutionary
:::L politics-is there a mystification at work that merits our critical scrutiny
l- before we so quickly subscribe to its seductive appeal?'
Rather than succumbing to the temptation of forcing appearance in
u, order to accede to the real supposed to be lurking behind it-an endeav-.
,
o our which can only engender devastating consequences, as Badiou nevi!t'
tires of repeating"-for Lacanian psychoanalysis, the path of access to the
:::L real is none other than that of the semblant. Indeed, for psychoanaly-
sis, the question of the real is inseparable from the interrogation of the
semblant. This is why, although the semblant is relevant to numerous
~ contemporary discourses, it is only in psychoanalysis that this term was
c..: elevated to the level of concept.
The semblant is a term forged by Lacan in the last period of his teaching
I.LJ in order to rework the relation between the symbolic and the real. The
:::L introduction of this notion charts a momentous shift in Lacan's teaching
from the symbolic to the real as a focal point of psychoanalysis. Thus, to
I- a certain extent, the semblant is a problem specific to psychoanalysis.

z Omnipresent, unsettling, yet unresolved, the problem of the semblant

comes to the fore at critical moments in the history of psychoanalysis,
o thereby marking turning points at which the orientation of psycho-
analysis is at stake. Freud himself already tried to circumscribe the
problem of the semblant by claiming that "there are no indications of
reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between the
truth and fiction cathected with affect. ""Stumbling across what could be
termed a primordial deceitfulness at the level of the unconscious, Freud
nevertheless refused to consider the distinction between truth and fiction
as an operational conceptual opposition in psychoanalysis. He thereby
indicates that another dimension, that of the libido and the satisfaction
of the drives, is to be taken as a compass for orienting oneself in an un-
conscious swarming with lures and deceptions.

UMBR(a) 11
 Lacan, likewise, encounters the problem of the semblant at a crucial moment of his teaching,
in particular in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, in which he sets out to forge new
conceptual tools to treat the real at stake in the analytic experience. More particularly, Lacan
broaches the question of semblants at a point in his teaching at which he seemsto be turning
away from the problematic of truth, that is to say, from that which previously constituted the
focal point of psychoanalysis and its specificity in relation to the discourse of science. Indeed,
it is under the guise of fiction, a concept borrowed from Bentham, that Lacan first tackles the
question of the semblant. What Lacan emphasises here is a conceptual knotting between the
Benthamite fictions and his notion of the symbolic. Crucially, he insists that what he means by
fiction is not to be confused with its commonly accepted sense: illusion. "Fictitious is not," he
claims, "in effect, in its essence that which deceives, but is precisely what I call the symbolic."
Moreover, the very fact that Lacan situates fiction in the symbolic order involves the displacement
of the notion of truth: it is not enough to state with Freud that the opposition between fiction
and truth is untenable since truth itself has the structure of fiction. 6
One might say that, from the outset, the semblant is conceived by Lacan as a paradox of the
relation between the symbolic and the real. In this respect, it is interesting to note that although
both French terms, "semblant" ("semblance") and "semblable" ("similar"), have the same root,
the Latin word similes, Lacan's category of semblance is not a new name for the imaginary. On
the contrary, semblance, as conceived by Lacan, is intended to designate that which, coming
from the symbolic, is directed towards the real. This is precisely what characterizes Bentham's
fictions. Indeed, as a fact oflanguage, made of nothing but the signifier, Bentham's legal fictions
are nonetheless capable of distributing and modifying pleasures and pains, thereby affecting the
body. What held Lacan's attention in reading Bentham's Theory of Fictions was precisely that
something which is ultimately an apparatus of language- Bentham defines fictions as owing
their existence to language alone-is capable of inflicting pain or provoking satisfaction that can
only be experienced in the body. It appears as if with Bentham's fictions Lacan found at last a
missing link, a quilting point between the signifier and jouissance. This is why in Seminar XX,
in a period of his teaching in which the notion of the semblant is well established, he can still
remark, in referring expressly to the Benthamite fictions, that the whole purpose of using "old
words" is their ability to capture jouissance.'
There is yet another aspectto the Benthamite fiction that Lacan broughtto light, although rather
late in the day, in his seminar D'unAutre a Tautre. In Lacan's reading, what sets apart Bentham's
approach to fictions from the usual understanding of this term is that, with remarkable lucidity,
Bentham reveals how all human institutions have as their ultimate aim jouissance. Hence by
openly stating that fictions are nothing but an artificial device, "a contrivance," to use Bentham's
proper term, designed to provoke either pain or pleasure, Bentham brings into question all human
 institutions insofar as they are an apparatus destined to regulate the modes of jouissance by
dressing them up in the virtues of the useful and the good. 8 Bentham's concept of fictions can be
seen as an effective manner of denouncing the moral and social ideals of the epoch, of exposing
them as being nothing but a semblance, a make-believe, precisely to the extent that the human
institutions are nothing but semblants, that is, the means and the modes ofjouissance. This hardly
concealed cynicism, reminding us of the primacy of jouissance, is precisely what is scandalous
about the Benthamite conception of fictions; and it is from this perspective of the cynicism of
jouissance that a crucial feature of semblants can be brought to light: the constitutive role of
belief. Destined to cover up the economy of jouissance, semblants can only succeed in their task
inasmuch as we believe in them, that is to say, take their make-believe at face value.
With Bentham's fictions, by contrast, we are dealing with a semblance which openly declares that
it is nothing but make-believe. Indeed, in order to be operational, Bentham's fictions, unlike the 'OJ; ,
rest of human institutions, can do without the masquerade or, more precisely, without the belief
in moral or cultural ideals. Bentham's fiction-in itself a fallacy, a make-believe, a semblance, yet
a semblance which presents itself as semblance, a reflexive semblance, as it were-thus presents
us with the paradox of lying truly. As semblant hostile to semblants, the fiction contributes to
the unmasking of moral virtues as semblants in the service ofjouissance, while still touching the
real. The lesson to be drawn from Bentham's cynical use of fictions is therefore the following: it
is possible to use fictions in order to attain the real without believing in them. It is precisely in
view of this double capacity of the Benthamite fiction-as a means both of denouncing, exposing
semblants and of attaining the real-that the question of the semblant is posed to Lacan above
all as the question of how to put semblants to good use.
The question of know-how with fictions is, indeed, of paramount importance to Lacan once it
is admitted that fictions can be considered as a symbolic apparatus destined to intervene in the
real of the body. Hence, from the moment fictions are conceived by Lacan as the very means with
which to modify the subject's relation to jouissance, his whole elaboration of the analytic practice
changes. But this emphasis put on jouissance also demands a radical reorientation of psycho-
analysis in which the role of the structuring principle is attributed to the opposition between the
real and semblants. In fact, it is Lacan's redeployment of Bentham's concept of fiction that made
it possible for the real at issue in psychoanalysis, the real of jouissance, tl\emerge as such.
In view of this shift in Lacan's teaching, which defines psychoanalysis not in its relation to truth
but in its relation to the real, it may appear odd that the notion of the semblant did not find what
might be called its proper place until the seventies. There is one further consideration about the
Lacanian concept of the semblant that should be mentioned. The fact that this notion, which
could truly serve us as a key to Lacan's later teaching, did not receive the attention it deserves
until recently, can be attributed in large part to the fact that the seminar which was specifically
intended to address the issue of the semblant, D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant (Of a
Discourse Which Would Not Be of the Semblant), occupies a transitional place between Seminar
XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX, Encore. Unlike these two landmark
seminars which, becanse they discuss two issues of general interest-power and sexual differ-
ence-have taken up a prominent place in contemporary debate across an impressive range of
disciplines, Seminar XVIII and, consequently, its key concept have passed largely unnoticed.
It should be noted that although "semblant" as a term may well have been a late entry into
Lacan's vocabulary,' that which appears to be essential in the question ofthe semblant-the
articulation between two radically heterogeneous if not antinomic registers, the symbolic and
the real-is, on the contrary, a persistent problem throughout his teaching. As a matter of fact,
Lacan never stopped inventing new terms destined to hold together that which does not hold
together: jouissance and the signifier. In the course of his teaching, he explored the different ways
of capturing jouissance via the signifier. Starting with the phallus, also designated as the signi-
fier of jouissance, Lacan inaugurates an extraordinary series of terms that replace one another
as the anchoring point, the nodal linkage between the symbolic and the real: the phallus, the
Name-of-the- Father, the master signifier and, finally, the object a. Each of these terms will come,
in the course of Lacan's teaching, to fulfil the quilting function, provided that it responds to the
structurally necessary demand of building a bridge between two antinomic registers: langnage
and the real. But how exactly, one might wish to ask, do these operators of quilting respond to
the notion of the semblant?
One could risk the following thesis in order to link the semblant to the quilting function of
these terms. As a matter of fact, each of these terms can be considered a "detached piece," to
borrow Jacques-Alain Miller's formulation," an element of the real which, through the operation
of significantization, is elevated to the dignity of the signifier, acts as a signifier, in order to stitch
together that which does not hold together. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that the
operation of significantization makes an element of the real ex-sist as a signifier. Not of course as
an ordinary signifier but precisely as a signifier that is at odds with all the others, since it is only
as such an exception among signifiers, a signifier that marks an exception, that it can assume the
function for which it was designed: to be the place-holder of the real within the symbolic. However,
it is important to properly situate this place-holder of the real in relation to the real itself. Strictly
speaking, what we are dealing with here is a paradoxical movement that goes from the real to
the real via the symbolic. Indeed, it is only insofar as these "detached pieces" are converted into
signifiers that they can be operational. Thus one could say that Lacan remains within Bentham's
paradigm as long as he can conceive ofthe real solely in terms of the symbolic.
However, the very fact that Lacan invented a new category, that of the semblant, and introduced
it into psychoanalysis, along with his major categories of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary,
testifies to the fact that all these various attempts at solviug the problem of the disharmonic re-
lation between the real aud the symbolic-iu the final aualysis, the relation of the subject of the
signifier and the real ofjouissance-proved to be unsatisfactory. They are unsatisfactory precisely
to the extent that the only real with which Lacan was preoccupied before Seminar XVIII is the
symbolic real or, more precisely, the symbolic as the real.
Yet it is precisely in the context of Lacan's preoccupation with the question of the proper use
of some artful devices as a means for handling the real in the analytic experience that, in the
seventies, the question of the semblant as the opposite of the real posed itself so acutely. This is
also why one finds only then a shift in Lacan's theory of the semblant and a break with the Ben-
thamite paradigm. While one of our aims is to briefly outline the development of the Lacanain
concept of the semblant and to draw attention to some difficulties that highlight the ambignous
status that the semblant has in psychoanalysis, we also wish to emphasize the relation between
the real and the semblant as being the crux of Lacan's later teaching.
It should be noted that, for Lacan, these two terms, semblant and real, constitute a couple-an
odd couple to be sure, since, in order to make it possible for the real to appear in the analytic
experience, it is necessary to vacillate the semblant. The very expression, "vacillation of sem-
blants," such as it was elaborated in Lacan's last teaching, is clearly governed by a dichotomy
between the real and the semblant.
But does this not amount to saying that, by advancing the orientation towards the real, an
orientation that implies both the traversal of the imaginary and the vacillation of semblants,
Lacan simply translates, for the proper ends of psychoanalysis, the classic Platonic opposition
between appearances and reality? In accordance with this thesis Freud, in one of his last texts,
"Analysis Terminable and Interminable," marked out the aim of the psychoanalytic treatment
exactly from the perspective of this opposition. Defined in terms of a pursuit of truth, psycho-
analysis is from the outset situated beyond the zone of the "Schein und 7'rug," appearance and
deception, which are precisely Freud's names for semblants. That is to say, the analyst must
U

follow the trace of the real in the unconscious, although the latter is swarming with semblants,
i.e., delusions, lures, etc., which are but ersatz 'Satisfactions according to Freugl, thus making it
difficult if not impossible to attain the real. Lacan seems to be subscribing to this program because,
in his unpublished seminar, D'un discourse qui ne serait pas du semblant, he recommends the
rejection of "all sham (faux-semblant) and deception.':"
Without being entirely unfounded, this alliance between philosophy and psychoanalysis is nev-
ertheless misleading. Here it will suffice to say that, far from being unanimous, the condemnation
of appearances has from the outset caused great controversies in philosophy itself-from Plato's
adversaries, the sophists, to Nietzsche, who never tired of exposing the real that is operative in
philosophical discourse, thus showing the fictional status of truth. There have constantly been
attempts to rehabilitate appearance. Lacan's subversion, on the other hand, goes beyond the
simple binary of appearance and reality. Just as the real, according to Lacan, is irreducible to the
true, the semblant is not to be confused with the false. Furthermore, the traditional philosophical
hierarchy is radically displaced by Lacan, since two terms that at first glance seemed to constitute
a radical opposition in fact present a continuity. To cite a few typical Lacanian inversions and
paradoxes: "the fantasy is the principle of reality," "truth is a semblance," and last but not least,
jouissance, which may well be situated in the register of the real, "is questioned, evoked, tracked,
and elaborated only on the basis of a semblance.t'"
Oddly enough, these paradoxes are in accordance with the structure of the Freudian libido
insofar as the drive's satisfaction itself depends on lures and deceptions. The precious indica-
tions ofthe intimate relation between the mode of jouissance and the semblants ofthe social
Other can thus be found in Freud's article, '''Civilised' Sexual Morality," in which he brings to
light a zone that is beyond the obvious antagonism between the "demands of civilization" and
the real of the drive.
Freud was indeed the first to situate the symptomatic dimension of the modes of enjoyment
as a mark of civilization's malaise. While criticizing the ruthlessness of the cultural demand,
which involves a repression of drive-jouissance, Freud points out that the growing difficulties of
the sexual relation resulting from "the domination of a civilised sexual morality" can lead only
to a promotion of "other modalities" of sexual practice. AI; a matter of fact, according to Freud,
"it is not difficult to suppose that under the domination of a civilised sexual morality the health
and efficiency of single individuals may be liable to impairment and that ultimately this injury
to them, caused by the sacrifices imposed on them, may reach such a point that, by this indirect
path, the cultural aim in view will be endangered as well:''''
Hence it is possible to say that the relation between semblants and psychoanalysis was from
the outset marked by a profound ambiguity. The advent of psychoanalysis, by revealing behind
moral and social ideals the presence of the libido-thus showing that the moral of castration is
in itself a mode of jouissance, since the drive attains its satisfaction not despite its renunciation
but because ofit- provoked a tremendous shake up ofthe moral and social ideals of the epoch.
Lacan in his later teaching qualified these ideals precisely as semblants in order to highlight
their fictitious character in relation to what really matters to the subject: the real of jouissance
and its grappling with it.
Lacan continues in this vein, taking up Freud's idea of the social dimension of the symptom
since, in Chapter V of his Encore seminar, "Aristotle and Freud: the other satisfaction," he insists
that "reality is approached with apparatuses of jouissance" since "there's no other apparatus
-

than language"; indeed, it is in this way, Lacan continues, that "language is fitted out in speaking
beings." In saying that, for a speaking being, language is an apparatus of jouissance through
which reality is approached, Lacan clearly rejects as utterly erroneous the idea of a jouissance
that would be prior to reality. How then, is this enigmatic thesis, according to which language
itself is identified with the apparatus of jouissance, to be understood?
Miller provides us with the following interpretation based on the notion of the apparatus, which
puts emphasis on the instrumental use of language: "When one says that reality is approached
by apparatuses, this means that there is an instrumental aspect to it. On the one hand, in the ap-
proach to reality through apparatuses ofjouissance there is the idea of the construction of a fiction,
and on the other hand the idea that this fiction is operational, that this fiction is an instrument
which is used. What is it used for? Well, I think that it serves to constitute the fantasy." That
is to say, if the reality of the speaking being is ultimately fantasmatic, this is because language
as such is an apparatus of jouissance. There is no other access to reality but through language
which is in itself instrumentalized, finalized in view of a special goal: to serve jouissance. In other
words, the perspective oflanguage as an apparatus is precisely the perspective of the "semblant
making" of the symbolic. It is from the perspective of the apparatus of jouissance that the status
of language-indeed, the symbolic as such-is radically modified: situated within the category
of the apparatus, language, instead of being perceived as a means to secure access to the real, is
envisaged instead in terms of the semblant slaving in the service of jouissance.
However, for Freud, as well as for Lacan, there are two apparently contradictory faces of the
semblant that are nonetheless bound together. That is what Lacan in particular insists on: as
an artful device the semblant can be considered both as a path to accede to the real, as well as
a defence against the real. Not surprisingly, this duplicity of the semblant fends itself to two
opposing interpretations. According to the first, the semblant is primarily an artifice useful for
triggering a misrecognition or for erecting a barrier against the real of jouissance; according to
the second, however, the semblant is nothing but a suppletory device, be it imaginary or subli-
matory, destined to support the drive's satisfaction.
Taking its cue from these two contradictory readings of the semblant, Lacanian psychoanalysis
seeks to rethink the real proper to the analytic experience. This would seem to require a new
concept of the real which would allow it to come up with a more precise definition of that which is
both the proper target and the main tool in psychoanalysis: the symptom. What is called the symp-
tom in psychoanalysis is namely the way the subject invents its relation to the real ofjouissance.
Hence, there is no subject without a symptom since everyone has his or her own symptomatic
way of complying with the demands of civilization, that is, through the impossible.
 THE REAL, PLAGUED BY SEMBLANTS
The re-examination of the concept of the real is urgent for a psychoanalysis that is oriented to-
wards it yet proposes to approach it from the perspective of the semblant. It is urgent in terms of
creating the concepts it cannot do without in order to situate and circumscribe the real such as
it is encountered in the analytic experience but also in redefining the aims of psychoanalysis.
Following Freud, Lacan takes up his idea of the role of psychoanalysis in guiding the subject
through the evolution of the semblants of civilization since the mutation of the Other of civiliza-
tion leads to a modification of the form and usages of jouissance: "Psychoanalysis has played
a role in the guidance of modern subjectivity, and it would not know how to support it without
organising it in accordance with the movement in science that elucidates it. "17
Clearly, what justifies this guiding role assigned to psychoanalysis is nothing other than the
aspiration, shared by Freud and Lacan, that psychoanalysis, just like science, would be a dis-
course which is not founded on the semblant but on the real. There is, however, a price to pay

.. for this special alliance between science and psychoanalysis. It is in the name of the real that
psychoanalysis made it its business to shake the social Other. But once the Other is degraded,
downgraded to a mere semblant, the real itself becomes a question to which only uncertain,
contradictory, and inconsistent answers can be given. As we can witness today, the inexistence of
the Other implies that everything is IIsemblant, thus entailing a loss of fundamental references
and, moreover, the refusal of the real itself."
In his seminar purposively entitled L'Autre qui n'existe pas et ses comites d'ethique (The Other
Which does not Exist and its Ethical Committees), Miller characterizes our world as a world of
semblants in which the meaning of the real itself has become a problem. The contemporary subject
is immersed in the world of semblants produced by none other than the discourse destined to fix
the real for us: the discourse of science. With the concept of the inexistent Other, Miller throws
precisely the crisis of the real into relief; in other words, he draws the real with which science is
concerned ever closer to the status of the semblant. Ironically, the progress of science has "sue-
ceded" in plaguing the real with its semblants, blurring in this way the distinction between the
real and the semblant and, ultimately, shattering the real itself as the fixed reference. '9 Suffice it
to recall all the gadgets which seem to have taken control of our lives and which are, in effect, a
materialization of science's hallucinations. There are two strnctural consequences to be drawn
from this generalized "semblantization" which results from the progress of science: by increasing
the possibility of limitless semblant-making, contemporary science has destroyed the fixation
of the real. But the discourse of science is equally responsible for the decline of the social Other:
insofar as science is, by structural necessity as it were, limitless, it cannot but erode the previous
limitations and obstacles set in its way by the ideals of civilization.
--
In bringing to light tbe necessary correlation of tbe inexistence oftbe Other and tbe problema-
tization of tbe real, Miller also points out tbat tbe question of tbe use of semblants appears to
have no raison d'etre and is actually in vain, inoperative, once tbe real vacillates. This is precisely
tbe reason why Lacan, iu his later teaching, strives to show tbat, at least from tbe perspective of
psychoanalysis, tbe inexistence oftbe Otber and of tbe real are not mutually exclusive but, on tbe
contrary, correlative. Given tbe importance of tbis re-elaboration of tbe concept of tbe real for
tbe very existence of psychoanalysis, it becomes imperative for Lacan to break witb tbe scientific
paradigm and its concept of the real. The very logic of Lacan's gesture-to tie psychoanalysis to
tbe real as its point of reference, as its compass-requires tbat he make a sacrifice of tbat concept
of tbe real which has inspired him tbroughout all of his teaching: tbe real as tbat which always
returns to tbe same place, reliable, law-like, law-abiding, as it were. Yet tbere still remains tbe
problem of elaborating a new conception of tbe real proper to psychoanalysis, a radical, unheard
of conception, insofar as tbe real is now considered to be tbat which ignores all tbe rules of tbe
game, an utterly erratic, deceiving, "lawless real," in short, a caprice incarnate."
It is in view of tbis final elaboration of tbe real tbat we propose to reread the precious indi-
cations given by Lacan in Television regarding the question of jouissance in tbe context of tbe
absence of tbe Other. Here we witness tbe emergence of a central distinction, on tbe basis of
jouissance, between the object a and tbe Ideal: thus, whereas Ideals always have sometbing of
a delusion about them, tbe object a brings out tbe real of jouissance, its irresolvable impasse.
Here Lacan puts tbe accent on tbe fact tbat, witb tbe decline of tbe Other, tbere is notbing to
prevent "our jouissance going off track," as he puts it. "The Otber does not exist" implies, as
Lacan underlines it, tbat "our mode of jouissance" takes "from now on [...J its bearings from
tbe 'surplus-iouissancc." " This shows not only a pluralization of modes of jouissance but also
tbat tbere is no defence against tbe real here as there is no Otber to lead tbe subject tbrough tbe
maze of jouissance.
However, by linking tbe contemporary impasse of jouissance to tbe inexistence of tbe Otber,
Lacan also casts a new light on what is meant by a role tbat he previously attributed to psycho-
analysis, namely, to be "the guidance of modern subjectivity." Indeed, what place falls to psy-
choanalysis when the social Otber itself strives to inscribe modes of jouissance-which Freud
already considered to be symptoms of civilization-while assuring tbem a wholly new legitimacy
and promoting tbe rules instituting tbe norms oftbeir integration?
To inscribe contemporary modes ofjouissance in tbe current context of tbe social bond, tbat is
to say in an epoch in which tbe figure of the Other and its Ideals are declining, it is necessary to
account for tbe substitution tbat has occurred at tbe level of that which situates jouissance witbin
tbe social bond. There are two ways in which jouissance can be situated: first, by setting up tbe
agent of castration; second, on tbe contrary, through tbe investment of tbe remainder, the plug
of castration, what Lacan termed surplus-jouissance, plus-de-jouir. It is precisely at this level
that Lacan's remark that "our jouissance [...] takes its bearings from the 'surplus-jouissance'""
takes on its full value. What Lacan calls "our jouissance" is exactly the contemporary mode of
jouissance in an epoch in which the Other does not exist, ajouissance which cannot therefore be
situated by means ofthe Ideal. Jouissance today is not situated by means of the master signifier;
it is not located on the side of the annulment of jouissance, but rather is situated on the side of
surplus-jouissance as a stopper of castration.
What is new is thattoday, instead of being forbidden by the Ideal, jouissance is on the contrary
commanded. What has changed is the way in which mass production, through its imperative
"Consume!" proposes jouissance as a semblance for everybody. This phenomenon, which Miller
describes as "haunting the surplus-jouissance," creates the illusion that through the good use of
the object a, surplus-jouissance, we could achieve complete drive-satisfaction. We can thus talk
today of the primacy of the object a over the Ideal which, in turn, is denounced as a mere sern-
blant. The epoch of the inexistent Other is at the same time the epoch of the limitless production
of semblants. Thus, it could be argued that the primacy of surplus-jouissance goes hand-in-hand
with the generalized "semblantification" where there is nothing to keep jouissance in check.
Hence, new practices of perversion, in Freud's time considered to be scandalous, are today
considered to be an opportunity for the innovation of new semblants in order to inscribe all
these various new modes of jouissance. Indeed, it is these new modes of jouissance that pres-
ent themselves today as a condition for inventing new modes of the social bond, new fictions in
Bentham's sense of the word, destined to secure the individual's right to his or her particular
mode of jouissance.
Paradoxically enough, psychoanalysis is not without responsibility for this disorientation of
the contemporary subject in relation to jouissance since psychoanalysis has itself contributed
to the undermining of ideals. Freud, like Bentham, detected behind the ideals of civilisation the
presence of the libido, that is, the modes and the forms of jouissance since, for him, the superego
testifies to a paradoxical satisfaction of the drive disguised as renouncement of satisfaction.
Yet something has radically changed insofar as today psychoanalysis seems to be oddly inca-
pable of effecting a cut in the dominant discourse and of thereby undermining contemporary
moral and social semblants. On the contrary, it seems to be a prolongation of this discourse; and
it is precisely today, when psychoanalysis seems to be unable to disturb contemporary semblants
and to fracture the dominant ideological discourse, that the antinomic relation between the
semblant and the real is the decisive issue for psychoanalysis.
This is why, despite the fact that nothing appears to stop the expansion of the empire of
semblants, psychoanalysis has to maintain the real as its compass. But in order to succeed,
--
psychoanalysis has to rediscover once more as its proper place the interval between the real
and the semblant. Thus, the present interrogation of the semblant stems from the urgency of
advancing a new, i.e., "realist" orientation for psychoanalysis in an era in which the Other does
not exist. Indeed, in an epoch in which the figure of the Other and its Ideals are declining, the
question of the nature and the use of semblants in psychoanalysis looms larger than ever in the
history of psychoanalysis.
At the beginning of the 21" century, when practices in which speech is used as a tool for absorb-
ing the traumatism of the real have invaded contemporary utilitarian civilization, psychoanalysis
is expected to radically distinguish itself from these practices. Whereas various psychotherapeu-
tic practices set as their goal the patient's well-being, psychoanalysis, on the contrary, aims at
a radical subjective mutation which involves the subject's separation from its identifications in
order to become a response to the real.
Certainly, this orientation to the real is an extreme position. This is why taking the real seriously
as a compass for psychoanalysis entails at the same time pushing psychoanalysis to its limits: not
only beyond the Name-of-the-Father, that semblant which, according to-Freud, represents the c
~
unsurpassable horizon for psychoanalysis, but even further: beyond the Freudian unconscious
itself. One is almost tempted to say that the price to be paid for the orientation of psychoanalysis
'"
'"
E
toward the real is the downgrading of the concept of the unconscious.
However, if Lacan is driven so far as to break, at least at certain points, with the Freudian
tradition, this is precisely in order to define psychoanalysis according to its proper logic, that is,
beyond semblants. This break with Freud concerns first and foremost the status of the real in
psychoanalysis. If the Name-of-the-Father, for Freud, is not a mere semblant, this is because it
is but another name for the prohibition of jouissance. Like Freud, Lacan also draws the geneal-
ogy of the father from jouissance, but unlike Freud, he considers the prohibition as being but a
retroactive rationalization of the sexual non-rapport. Hence, for Lacan, the father is not the name
of the obstacle in the way of jouissance, but rather a semblance masking an irreducible gap in
the very structure ofjouissance. Indeed, today the Name-of-the-Fatherproves to be incapable of
mastering, dominating the real at stake: the real of jouissance. This is because, as Lacan's later
teaching is destined to show, the fact that the interdiction ofjouissance is today replaced by its
permission has no bearing on the inherent impasse of jouissance.
But the price to be paid for the radical orientation toward the real also implies, as has been
underlined by Jacques-Alain Miller, a downgrading of the unconscious to the extent that "the un-
conscious itself appears as a response made to the real, at the level of the semblant, a response to
the hole in the real [ dueto the fact that there is no sexual relation], a response which has to do with
the vain effort to make the absence of sexual programming siguify at the level of the real."'3
 One of the unexpected, indeed, paradoxical consequences of such a radical position was that
this reference to the real appears as a problematic as well as a problematizing reference in Lacan.
At the end of his teaching, Lacan even suggests that the status ofthe real is that of the symptom,
a deduction made from the unconscious: that is to say, the notion of the real, in the last analysis,
is nothing more than his invention.
However, if the question of the real poses itself to Lacan so persistently in the final period of
his teaching, this is precisely because the real proper to the analytic experience is now considered
to be resisting signifierization, i.e., conversion into the symbolic. In view of such a radicalized
conception of the real, both the imaginary and the symbolic appear as mere make-believe. Yet it
is precisely this question of the real as being both outside the imaginary and the symbolic that
prompts Lacan to entertain the hope of a psychoanalysis which would not be founded on the
semblant. By naming his seminar consecrated to the question of the semblant, "Of a Discourse
Which Would Not Be of the Semblant," Lacan seems to be nourishing and encouraging the
mere hope of the possible elaboration of a discourse that would not be reducible, unlike the rest
of them, to a mere semblant but would rather be a discourse of the real. To the extent that the
....
.... symbolic is now seen to be downgraded to the order of the semblant this seminar, which evokes
the possibility of a discourse which would take its departure point from the real, thus signals a
turning point and a perspective shift in Lacan's teaching insofar as, at the outset, Lacan proposed
to ground psychoanalysis as a discourse on the symbolic. It is at this point in Lacan's later teach-
ing, when psychoanalysis is ordered by the relations of the semblant and the real, that a large
part of Lacan's theorization, which had been deployed in the register of the symbolic, appears
to be reduced to the mere status of semblance: sicut palea.
The opposition of the real and semblance is therefore a crucial step in the development of
Lacan's teaching: it is a radicalization of the opposition, introduced in his seminar on The Ethics
of Psychoanalysis, between the real on one hand and the symbolic, and the imaginary on the
other. It could be said that, from the point of view of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary
appear to be equivalent. Yet this opposition between the real and the semblant became a struc-
turing opposition only when Lacan had constructed the four discourses.
In a sense, it is only from the perspective of the semblant that one can realize that what creates
an impasse here is that, actually, the cleavage between the signifier andjouissance was surrepti-
tiously created by Lacan's proper definition of the subject. Conceived in terms of the signifier-the
subject is what one signifier represents for another signifier-the Lacanian subject is essentially
empty, dead, devoid of "enjoying substance," severed from jouissance. The outcome of this ir-
reducible disjunction between the subject of the signifier and the real of jouissance entails the
coupling of the empty subject With the remainder of jouissance: the object a. With the object a
as an answer to the lack of the signifier, Lacan inscribed in what he caned the four discourses a
real that is Within the reach ofthe subject of the signifier.
-
A DISCOURSE WHICH WOULD NOT BE OF THE SEMBLANT
Psychoanalysis is based on the assumption that the treatment of the real, more specifically the
real ofjouissance, by the signifier is only possible within the framework of discourse-not just any
discourse, of course, but that which is able, like Freud's, to be "maintained as close as possible
to what is related to jouissance""-one whose pivotal point is the relation between the signifier
andjouissance. Indeed, from the perspective of the relation between the signifier andjouissance,
the task of the analyst's discourse is to expose the surreptitious alliance between the signifier and
jouissance as constitutive of any social bond. Lacan's definition of discourse as a social bond can
thus be understood also in the sense that it is a bond between the signifier and jouissance.
The elaboration of the four discourses is for Lacan an opportunity to revisit his initial departure
point, the disjunction between the signifier and jouissance, in such a way that, behind the overt
antithesis between signifier and jouissance, their clandestine solidarity is revealed. Before the
signifier could be situated in the order of the semblant, it was therefore necessary for Lacan to
txpose the duplicity of the signifier: the signifier which was initially defined by Lacan through
the exclusion of jouissance, as a barrier against jouissance, is revealed to be an apparatus of
jouissance. '5 Indeed, there is a dialectic oflack and supplement at work in the relation between
the signifier and jouissance. On the one hand, the signifier involves the loss of jouissance, its
annulment; on the other, this very loss, as an effect of the signifier, responds to the supplement
of jouissance termed by Lacan the object a, surplus-jouissance. Thus it could be said that the
loss of jouissance produced through the signifier is the condition of possibility for repetition,
encore, once more, again and again, and it is precisely through this repetition that a surplus is
produced. Hence, the lesson to be drawn from the seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis is
that the loss ofjouissance and surplus-jouissance,plus-de-jouir, are both produced through the
functioning of the signifier; and it is in view of this dialectic ofloss and surplus that the signifier
appears as a semblance, that is to say, as a defensive device masking the real of the drive while
at the same time supporting the jouissance of castration.
However, if the signifier is downgraded to the status of the semblant, then the question arises
of whetlter psychoanalysis can have any bearing on the real of jouissance. Indeed, how can it
touch on drive-satisfaction if it deals with drives only to the extent that they are present in words?
Taking on board the impossibility of an immediate relation to the real, Lacan goes a step further.
He claims that the experience of analysis proves that "there is something in the signifier that
resonates," that "the drives are the echo in the body of the fact that there is saying,"" and that
"for this saying to resonate, to be consonant, the body has to be sensitive to it. "'7
In psychoanalysis, the real ofjouissance is broached from the mark of saying, from the effect
produced on the body by saying, a mark which is invisible yet which proves to be legible. This is
precisely what the master's discourse reveals: in the master's discourse, the dominant or com-
manding position is filled by S" also called the master signifier. As such, it embodies the alienating
 function of the signifier to which the speaking being is subject. If the analyst's discourse is the
other side, the inverse of the master's discourse, this is because the discourse ofthe unconscious,
just like the discourse of the master, is governed by a master signifier. In the master's discourse,
the subject finds its identification within the Other. There is always a master signifier there that
hooks him up.
Thus, the matrix of the discourse which borrows its name from the place of the agent or the
master signifier, S" discloses how this mark of saying dominates the subject. As has been pointed
out by Miller, this mark of saying, S" is able to "confiscate the representation of the subject"'s
to the extent that it seems to absorb the subject. As a result, the subject appears to be indistin-
guishable from the mark.
In the analyst's discourse, the place in the upper left-hand corner of Lacan's quadripartite
structure, the place of the agent, is attributed to the psychoanalyst in so far as s/he assumes
the function of the object a, that is, the place of the plus-de-jouir, surplus-jouissance. This
particular property of the analyst's discourse singles out the place of the agent as equivalent to
the semblant. Indeed, semblant is the name by which Lacan designates this place of the agent
....
N or "dominant" place, as he calls it, in all four discourses. On this point, the foUowing quotation
from his seminar Encore is decisive:
Before the semblance, on which, in effect, everything is based and springs back in fantasy, a strict dis-
tinction must be made between the imaginary and the real. It must not be thought that we ourselves
in any way serve as a basis for the semblance. We are not even semblance. We are, on occasion, that
which can occupy that place, and allow what to reign there? Object a. Indeed, the analyst, of all [those
whose] orders of discourse are sustained currently [ ...] is the one who, by putting object a in the place of
semblance, is in the best position to do what should rightfully be done, namely to investigate the status
of truth as knowledge. [... ] Analysis came to announce to us that there is knowledge that is not known,
knowledge that is based on the signifier as such. [ ...] The status of knowledge implies as such that there
already is knowledge, that it is in the Other, and that it is to be acquired. [... ] the subject results from
the fact that this knowledgemust be learned, and even have a price put on it [...] Knowledgeis worth
just as much as it costs [...] and that is difficult. Difficult to what? Less to acquire it than to enjoy it.
In enjoying, the conquest of this knowledge is renewed every time it is exercised, the power it yields
29
always being directed towards itsjouissance.
In using its proper apparatus of semblants, that is to say, in showing that the analyst, by posi-
tioning himself or herself as object a in the place of the agent, occupies the place
0
of semblance, the
analyst's discourse kills two birds with one stone. As "a specialist in the S,,"3 to borrow Miller's
formula which captures very well the gist of the matter, the analyst makes it possible for the sub-
ject to "cough up" this mark that has absorbed it until now. It is from the position of the object a
that the analyst sets the subject at work and thus makes it possible for a transmutation-of the
invisible yet legible mark that dominates the subject into a new master signifier-to occur.
-

What is at stake in psychoanalysis is to make the identifying signifier, the master signifier,
vacillate and to displace it. But what can make the identifying semblants vacillate if not another '
master signifier, an S" produced by the analyst's discourse itself? In the matheme of the analyst's
discourse, the S" produced in the very analytic experience, is situated in the place of the real,
in the place of the product. Although this new S, occupies the place of the real, it is but a false
real. As a matter of fact, what the analyst's discourse brings to light at the end of the analysis is
precisely that the real cannot be situated in any of the places provided by the structure of the
discourse. It is in this sense that one can say that discourse as such, even the analyst's discourse,
is an app~ratus of the semblant specially designed to avoid the real.
At the same time, by situating the analyst in the place of the agent, the analyst's discourse thus
shows its true character as semblant. Far from being the master of discourse, the term occupying
the place of the agent, as its appointed "functionary," suffers truth effects rather than provoking
them. This place seems only to be one of an acting subject; indeed, it is but a semblance brought
in by the discourse structure as such.
It is for that reason that, according to Lacan, the discourse that brings the other three to light
is the analyst's discourse. That is to say, by exposing as a semblant, as a deceitful fiction, that
term which, by occupying the dominant place, commands all the relations between the terms
of any discourse structure, the analyst's discourse is for that reason able to subvert the make-
believe of the social bond that is present in the other three discourses. From such a perspective,
the analytic discourse can then be seen as a specific apparatus which, by being situated at a
paradoxical Archimedean position of extimacy in relation to any discourse, brings to light the
functioning of the semblant in all other discourses.
While strictly speaking, the analyst's discourse can not be considered to be a discourse that
is not of the semblant, its privilege consists nevertheless in its ability to perceive the semblant
for what it is: precisely a semblant. The very fact that in the analyst's discourse the analyst is
situated in the place of the agent permits it, by using the very mechanism of the production of
the social bond-that is, this peculiar mode of mimicking the structure of the social bond which
is sustained only by virtue of the make-believe situated in the place of the agent-to reveal the
semblant itself.
It is from such a perspective that Lacan himself underlined the fictional foundation of psycho-
analysis: paradoxically one should pay respect to the psychoanalysis of our time, he said, insofar
as it "is a discipline which produces itself only through the semblant. The latter is denuded to the
point that it unsettles the semblants which support religion, magic, piety, all that which conceals
the economy ofjouissance."" This remark assumes its full value on the condition that one treats
the semblant through the psychoanalytic discourse. a
 •

The opposition between the real and the semblant therefore remains essential for Lacan's
elaboration of the four discourses. Even so, there remains the problem of knowing not only
how the relation between the real and the semblant is located within each discourse but, more
importantly, whether among the four discourses there is one which is also of the real and not
only of the semblant.
In this seminar Lacan argues that discourse, namely, is a structure which is able to subsist
without words due to certain fundamental relations that would not be able to be maintained
without language." The distinction between discourse and speech, the latter being always more
or less occasional, is crucial here insofar as it translates, at the level oflanguage, the distinction
between invariable and variable. Indeed, by opposing discourse and speech, Lacan clearly aims
at situating discourse on the side of that which remains invariable, that which remains the same,
untouched by what is meant or said of it. One is almost tempted to say that discourse, to the
extent that it is defined as a structure, is an instance of the real in language.
Indeed, Lacan's theory of the four discourses is grounded in an idea which traverses the whole
..,
N
of his teaching, namely, that for psychoanalysis, as for science, there should be some symbolic
in the real. If psychoanalytic theory has for its object the unconscious, then it has as its charge
the task of demonstrating that this peculiar kind of knowledge which cannot be assigned to an
"I" keeps returning to the same place, that is, situated in the real. Clearly, mathematical writing
provides a model in this regard insofar as Lacan indicates that there is discourse in the real, that
there are formulas which the subject obeys without knowing it.
The very promotion of the social bond implies for Lacan the radicalization of the antinomic
relation between the real and the semblant. Indeed, the point of departure of the Lacanian con-
cept of discourse is the steady erosion of the Other and its Ideals. If the question of the real was
so acute in Seminar XVII it is because from the perspective of the inexistence of the Other, from
a perspective in which the Other with its Ideals is downgraded to the status of the semblant, the
real itself seems to vacillate. Indeed, what remains of the real if the Other is not real, if it has
the structure of a fiction?
Actually, the very idea of the four discourses, four mathemes, four discursive structures, is
inspired by the knowledge in the real that the discourse of science transcribes in mathematical
formulas. In a way, the four discourses are Lacan's desperate attempt at restoring the Other-un-
der the guise of discourse structures. Just as for science there is knowledge in the real, there are
discourse structures in the real for psychoanalysis. Lacan's concept of discourse could then be
considered a new edition of the Other as a structure in the real.
Of course, the Other in this new edition is not to be confused with the master signifier. The
Other may well be concentrated in the place of the master signifier, but it could also be situated
in the place of knowledge, of product; in short, it would be more appropriate to situate knowledge
--
at the level of discourse as such. It is the structure of discourse which can now be identified
with the Other. Only in this sense can Lacan maiutain in his seminar Encore that "the notion
of discourse should be taken as a social link, founded on language.t" In other words the Other,
from the perspective of the four discourses, cannot be isolated; rather, it is the very knot of all
four discourses. It is an attempt at maintaining the function of the quilting point without it be-
ing assigned to a particular discourse. In this sense, the four discourses as a figure of the Other
already a'll'0unce the Borromean knot insofar as it is a solution proposed by Lacan to show how
three heterogeneous orders-the imaginary order of meaning, the symbolic order of knowledge
and the real order of jouissance-hold together.
The four discourses can then be perceived as the last desperate attempt to elevate psychoanalysis
to the level of science. The idea according to which the structures of discourse are inscribed in
the real is an ingenious invention which permits psychoanalysis to determine the specificity of . .".i. •
the real that is at the core of its experience and at the same time to avoid the snares of contem-
porary nominalism according to which everything is a semblant. The construction of the four
discourses is an operation comparable to Galileo and Newton's founding gesture of science, a
gesture which consists in the strict separation of the real from the semblant. In other words,
the four discourses are Lacan's attempt at circumscribing the place of the real in psychoanalysis
while limiting the imperialism of semblants; and just like the discourse of science that not only
"reads," determines, deciphers the knowledge in the real, but writes it down in mathematical '"....
formulae in order to transform it, psychoanalysis also presumes to be able to determine the real
it deals with and to find a way to transform it.
Thus, considered in retrospect, it is perhaps no accident that Lacan raised the thorny ques-
tion of the semblant in the wake of his seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Contrary to
what one might believe according solely to the title, which is rather equivocal since it evokes the
possibility of a discourse that would not be a semblant, the central issue in the seminar D'un
discours qui ne serait pos du semblant is not the elaboration of a disconrse that would not be a
semblant, with the surreptitious implication that psychoanalysis might be, together with science,
this discourse. On the contrary, from the beginning of this seminar, Lacan states in no uncertain
terms that insofar as the signifier itself is the semblant, all that belongs to the discursive order
necessarily falls under the rubric of the semblant." In other words, the semblant is a category
inherent to discourse as such.
Having established that in discourse the semblant is irreducible and that, consequently, there
is no discourse that is not of the semblant-the discourse of psychoanalysis being no excep-
tion- Lacan moves on to broach the question which is undoubtedly the crucial issue around
which the major part of Seminar XVIII revolves: once the constitutive lack of the discourse of
the real is admitted, how to solve the problem of holding together the symbolic and the real, two
heterogeneous registers, while maintaining their irredncible heterogeneity? This constitutive lack
 ,

of the discourse of the real is what leads Lacan to deploy a new category and to pose the question
of knowing what is the real from a new perspective.
In Seminar XVIII Lacan started to bring into question the union of the symbolic and the real
and, by so doing, he proposed at the same time to reconsider psychoanalysis and its practice
from a different perspective: from the disjunction of the symbolic and the real, from the rapport
of the exteriority between the two and, ultimately, from their non-rapport.
From this perspective of non-rapport, Lacan's seminar D'un discourse qui ne serait pas du sem-
blant marks a crucial turning point in which the future orientation of psychoanalysis is at stake.
Hence, despite Lacan's usual style of self-assurance and confidence, in this seminar he neverthe-
less hesitates as regards the possible ways of overcoming the impasse implied in the non-rapport
between the signifier and jouissance. In fact, the question of a new departure point involving a
radical inversion of perspectives plays across the whole surface of this seminar. Throughout this
seminar, the deployment of the notion of the semblant allows itto gather its consistency, while at
the same time providing the points of vacillation and resistance necessary for it to establish the
...
N
themes that Lacan pursues in the final period of his teaching. Lacan tentatively proposes various
solutions to the problem posed by the articulation of absolutely heterogeneous registers, while
at the same time avoiding the previously privileged device: the quilting point.
Lacan's theory of the semblant clearly follows a certain dynamic, a logic of its own. In Seminar
XVIII, we can witness the displacement of this concept in relation to the quilting point. With his
elaboration of the notion of the semblant, Lacan throws precisely the quilting function of the
signifier into relief. And it is by redefining what is at stake in this function that Lacan comes to
effect, by replacing the term "fiction" with that of "sembI ant," a singular devaluation, the down-
grading of the term whose role is precisely to pin the real to the symbolic.
Lacan initially introduced the notion of the semblant into pyschoanalysis, under the guise of
the fiction, in order to situate the real in the symbolic (which is to say, to make the real obey the
rules of the signifier). In his later teaching, the same terms that were previously considered to
secure access to the real (the phallus, the master signifier, the Name-of-the-Father, the Other,
the object a) and were as such valorised, now, under a new light, appeared to be the very obstacle
on the path to the real and were consequently downgraded to the status of semblance. In fact,
as has been pointed out, the substitution of the term "fiction" by "semblant," to the extent that
it implies a certain downgrading of the terms designated as semblant, involves at the same time
a paradigm shift.
In this regard, it is perhaps not without reason that Lacan, starting with Seminar XVIII,
preferred the term "semblant" to that of "fiction." However, this fioal choice cannot be justified
by saying that the semblant, as a concept, is broader and can include fiction; nor is it enough to
insist on a distinction between discursive and non-discursive semblants, semblants in nature,
--
since Lacan is primarily interested in discursive semblants. On the contrary, what justifies the
substitution is Lacan's re-examination of the nature of the semblant and the function attributed
to it. Thus one could say that it is the inversion of perspective that makes Lacan downgrade
the semblant. More particularly, a term is denounced as semblant insofar as it responds to the
function of the quilting point. What downgrades the semblant is precisely its function. From
this inverted p'1!Jipective, which takes as its departure point the non-rapport of the symbolic
and the real, all these instances of the quilting point are seen now as being but a mere make-
believe, a cover-up.
Indeed, the semblant is essentially make-believe: by pinning down the imaginary, the quilting
signifier makes us believe that it is the thing itself. In other words, the semblant is a symbolic
construct which, by quilting, makes us believe that it is the other of the symbolic, namely, the
real. This is why, for Lacan, the father is by definition a semblance. The father only exists in the
form of the signifier and he exists as long as this signifier, the Name-of-the-Father, produces
certain effects. The phallus, from this point of view, is also seen as a semblant since, strictly
speaking, it is but a supporting piece of evidence for the semblance of the father. And there is
yet another, third fignre of the semblant, more delicate than the other two, the object a, invented
by Lacan to designate the remainder of jouissance which is not converted into the signifier and
which remains outside the signifier's quilting function. If the object a, from this perspective,
is yet another name for the semblant alongside the father and the phallus, this is because it is ....
..,
strategically positioned at a place where, instead of the expectedjouissance, one only encounters
its loss. The object a is the semblant which effects the conversion of the loss of jouissance into a
surplus, one which curiously is notto be found on the side of the realjouissance but on the side
of the symbolic. Hence the equivalence, established by Lacan, between jouissance under the
guise of plus-de-jouir, and sens-joui [enjoy-meant]-the only jouissance that a speaking being
can attain is precisely sens-joui.
In fact, we might say that with the quilting point thus exposed, the affinity of the semblant
to the hole, the void, is also brought to light. From such a perspective, all these various names
of the quilting point have something in common: their only function is to veil, to cover up with
their flimsy materiality, a hole, a void in the structure. Indeed, we would argue that there is a
structural, constitutive relation between the semblant and the hole. The question of the semblant
is essentially the question of the relation between void and veil. By following Miller, we could
propose the following succinct definition of the semblant: the semblant is a mask of nothing."
As a matter of fact, the semblant is only encountered where something is expected but one only
encounters a hole, a void, an emptiness, an absence. The function of the semblant is solely to
cover up, by its very presence, the empty place of a term which is constitutively lacking; but in
so doing, the semblant at the same time reveals that this term ex-sists only through this empty
place.
 ,

In this regard, psychoanalysis seems to be inverting Leibniz's famous question: instead of

asking why there is something rather than nothing, the question with which psychoanalysis is
preoccupied is rather: why is only a void, an absence, an emptiness encountered where something
is expected? All semblants deployed by Lacan (from the phallus to the Other and Woman) are as
many deceitful answers to this question. Semblants, in the final period of Lacan's teaching, are
therefore all designed to veil, to mask the nothing: the phallus covers up castration, the Name-
of-the-Father is a mask concealing the hole in the Other of language and, finally, Woman is
nothing but a veil which disguises that there is no such thing as a sexual relation. The semblant
can then be understood as an envelope of nothing, one which conceals precisely that, behind the
semblant, there is nothing but the void.
Indeed, it is precisely in throwing into relief the dialectics of void and veil that the concept of
the quilting point comes undone. This conveys a profound switch in the line of Lacan's elabora-
tion of the relation between the symbolic and the real, one which implies a renouncement of any
kind of quilting point. In fact, this question of the articulation between the symbolic and the real,
while giving up the quilting of these two orders, offers a guiding thread through Lacan's seminar
o D'un discourse qui ne serait pas du semb/ant. Indeed, we would argue that he poses this ques-
M

tion precisely in order to overcome the impasse left over at the end of his seminar on the four
discourses, in which the revolving circle of the four discourses leads to a somewhat unexpected
and certainly unwanted conclusion: if there is no discourse which is not of the semblant, this
only means that any attempt at converting the real into the signifier brings about the emergence
of the semblant. By paraphrasing Miller, one could thus say: what is siguifierized is by the same
token "semblantified."
This is why Lacan in "Lituraterre," the published part of Seminar XVIII, proposes as a pos-
sible solution for holding together that which does not hold together a new concept, that of the
letter insofar as it is itself identified with the litoral: "Is the letter not [...] more properly littorale
[coast-line], figuring that one domain in its entirety makes for the other a frontier, because of
their being foreign to each other, to the extent of not falling into a reciprocal relation. Is the
edge of the hole in knowledge not what it traces?"" To propose the littoral as a solution consists
in nothing other than to propose the void itself as the mediator, the "void-median," as Lacan
calls it. The operation involving the littoral is the inverse of the quilting operation since, with
the littoral, the void holds together by keeping the heterogeneous instances apart: "between
knowledge and jouissance, there is a littoral that only turns towards the literal on condition
that this turn may be taken likewise at any instance." Littoral, by activating the void itself as a
mediator, is certainly a way of relating to jouissance, which can do without the semblant. On the
other hand, when Lacan posed a rhetorical question-"Is it possible for the littoral to constitute
such a discourse that is characterised by not being issued from the semblant?"39-his answer is
clearly no. The littoral can only testify to the fracture of that which it is itself an effect. But it is
unable to effect the cut. Only a discourse can produce a cut. One can see in what sense the theory
of semblants constitutes a clearing gesture: indeed, it is only after bringing into question any
instance of quilting that something like a littoral can be established, an empty plane in which
something new can be inscribed. In the seminar D'un discourse qui ne serait pas du semblant,
Lacan seems still to be harboring the hope of writing the formula of the sexual relation, a hope
quelled with the seminar Encore. But just as the formula "there is no sexual relation" does not
abolish the contingency of the encounter, the littoral proposes itself as a virgin canvas on which
new combinations of knotting the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic can be inscribed.
By taking np the question of the semblant in its relation to the real, Lacan's Seminar XVIII
is therefore, from the beginning, quite radically a question of defining a new type of articula-
tion separatingjouissance and the signifying articulation. In the context of Lacan's project thus
outlined, the theory of semblants, insofar as it breaks with his previous assertion of the primacy
of the symbolic, can be perceived as a "vanishing mediator," a necessary step on the path to
the final solution: the Borromean knot, this being exactly the perspective in which all three
registers-the symbolic, the imaginary and the real-are considered to be independent and au-
tonomous registers, absolutely equivalent at the level of the knot. Lacan's project thus becomes
that of separating the three orders, while at the same time exploring the many different ways in
which it is possible to produce a new kind of knotting at the level of jouissance. The issue here
is of course that of jouissance and the different ways in which it is elaborated at the level of the
knot. In fact, we would argue that it is above all in order to explore this transformative aspect
of knotting that Lacan explores jouissance as an enigma that drills a hole in sense. It is obvious
that such a project has many consequences for the way in which psychoanalysis tries to situate
the real from the perspective of the outside-sense. But it is also from this perspective that the
notion of the semblant assumes its full value.
 ,

from Lacan's vocabulary. One reason why he finally gives up

1. Jacques Lacan, Les non-dupes errent (1973-1974), unpub-
the notion of the fiction is no doubt that the concept of the
lished seminar, 23 April '974.
fiction is too restrictive: whereas the fiction is strictlyspeak-
2. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Malden: ing language dependent, the semblant, insofar as it exists in
nature, does not owe its existence to language. Actually, all
Polity, 2007), 48-58.
the examples used by Lacan to illustrate the notion of the
3. Badiou, Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, semblant in his seminar D'un discours qui ne serait pas du
trans. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2001) semblant, are exactly non-discursive semblants, semblants
69-71. in nature, such as rainbow, thunder, and meteors. This very
fact indicates that the concept of the semblant, while partly
4. Sigmund Freud, "Letter to Fliess #69, 21 September 1897," overlapping with that of the fiction, is nonetheless irreduc-
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ible to it. There is yet another aspect of this substitution that
ojSigmundFreud (hereafter S.E.) ed. and trans. James Stra- should be noted here. In fact, this replacement coincides
chey et aI. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), 1: 260. with the change in value of the term concerned: while the
status of the Benthamite fiction was undoubtedlyvalorised,
5. Lacan, The Seminar oj Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Eth-
that of the semblant was on the contrary downgraded .
ics a/Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter (London: W.W.
....
.., Norton, 1992), 12 . 10. Consider the title of one of Miller's recent courses: Pieces

6. "'Fictitious' means 'fictive' but, as I have already explained detachees (2004-2005), unpublished seminar.
to you, in the sense that every truth has the structure of
11. See Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," S.E.
fiction." Ibid.
23: 216-253.
7. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacon. Book XX: Encore,
12. Lacan, D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant (1970-
trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 58.
71), unpublished seminar.
8. Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XVI: D'unAu"tre d ['autre (Paris:
Seuil, 2006), '90. 13. Lacan, Encore, 92.

9. The genesis of Lacan's notion of the semblant has been 14. Freud, "Civilised' Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous
outlined by Pierre-Gilles Gueguen in the 17 December 1997 Illness" (1908), S.£. 9: 181.
session of Jacques-Alain Miller's course "Le partenaire-
symptdme," 1997-98. He also pointed out that, at the be- 15. Lacan, Encore, p. 55·
ginning, Lacan used both terms, "semblant" and "fiction,"
16. Jacques-Alain Miller, Lafuite du sens (1995-1996), unpub-
practically as synonymous. To account for this equivalence
of both terms, Gueguen proposes the following hypothesis: lished, 31 January 1996.
if "semblant" and "fiction" are in Lacan's view interchange-
17. Lacan, "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in
able, this is because both concepts were perfectly capable
Psychoanalysis," tcrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan
of effecting the knot between the symbolic and the real and
(London: Routledge, 1977), 72•
therefore of accounting for the manner in which a mere sig-
nifying device is able to distributejouissance. Nevertheless, 18. Paradoxically, the collapse of the Other, in particular that of
in the seventies, the term "fiction" practically disappears
-- ..
its emblem, the Name-of-the-Father, has made it possible
for an unlikely alliance such as that between deconstruction
and utilitarianism. Indeed, what deconstruction and utili-
tarianism have in common is the consideration of the social
bond, and the sexual relationship with it, simply in terms of
semblants. To the extent that, from such a perspective, the
subject is ultimately S, an empty set condemned to an ever
changing series of ideatifications, all identity, sexnal identity
included, can only be a provisory stopper of a process of
identification that knows no limit. Consequently, all identity
is a semblant destined to be deconstructed. Characteristic in
this respect is Judith Butler's radical critique of any politics
of identity. See Butler, "Competing Universalities," Contin-
gency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues
on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), '36-'83. Indeed, for
her, the path opening new political possibilities is that of a
radical critique of the category of identity as such, insofar
as no name, no identity, man or woman notwithstanding, is
capable of adequately capturing the particn!ar experience
jouissance. However, such a position, which may appear at
first sight to be a radical one, is only possible on the basis of
the identification of the subject with a radical nothingness
since it is only as such a nothingness that the subject can
experience the giddy freedom in relation to all identities and
to all modes of enjoyment that characterizes the Butlerian
subject. This is a subject that is, in the last analysis, noth-
ing but an endless process of identifications. Butler insists
that, inasmuch as it is not possible to designate the proper
place of the subject fromjouissance, the mode of enjoyment
being always singular, the subject is nothing other than an
incessant process of rejections of the proposed identities.
The Butlerian subject is thus tom between its ever-changing
particular jouissance on the one hand, and the endless proc-
ess of identification desperately trying to keep pace with the
breathtaking pluralization of the practices ofjouissance on
the other. Indeed, with Butler, we are dealing with a process
in which only imaginary identity and symbolic identifica-
tion, automaton, are involved, while the driving force of this
dialectic between identity and identification-the impasse of
jouissance itself as the category of the real-is evacuated. As
a consequence, identity and identification remain polarized
according to the opposition between imaginary construction
and symbolic deconstruction. What is problematic here is
that such a project of politicizing jouissance is, ultimately,
grounded in the rejection of the real. In other words, what
is lacking in such a project is precisely the third instance,
that which would tie the subject to its mode of jouissance:
the inexistence of the sexual relation as a hole in the real.
Thus, instead of reproaching psychoanalysis for maintain-
ing the Name-of-the-Father as a norm according to which
sexual identities are distributed-indeed, as a guarantor
of the consistency of the social Other-it would be more
appropriate to consider it, from a Lacanian perspective, as
a term that marks a radical limit, an impossibility: that of
-a
•
the sexual relation. Indeed, it is only from such a perspec-
tive that takes into account the impossible that any attempt
at invention, at creation, can even be envisaged; it is only c:
~
against the background of such a hole in the real that an
of '"
'"
attempt can be made of writing the impossible, that is, an E
attempt at "possibilizing" the impossible.
w
w
19· Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent, "The Other Who
Does Not Exist and His Ethical Committees," trans. Michele
Julien, Richard Klein, Kevin Polley, Mischa Twitchin, and
Veronique Voruz,Almanac of Psychoanalysis 1(1998): '9.
20. IfLacan defines the real as that which is impossible, this is,
as he emphasizes himself, because "the real-well, [believe,
if this is my symptom, tell me-the real is [ ...] without law.
The true real implies the absence of the law. The real has
no order. " Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XXIII: Le sinthome
(Paris: Seuil, 2005), '37-'38.
21. Lacan, Television. A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Es-
tablishment, trans. Dennis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and
Annette Michelson (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 32.
22. Ibid.
23. Miller, L'exprerience du reel dans la cureanalytique (1998),
unpublished seminar, 25 November 1998.
24. Ibid., 81.

25. See Miller, "Equivalence Between the Other and the Symp-
tom," psychoanalytical Notebooks 12 (2004): 9-31.

26. Lacan, Le sinthome, 17·

27. Ibid.

28. Miller, "TheSinthome, a Mixture of Symptom and Fantasy,"

psychoanalytical Notebooks 5 (2001): 10.

29. Lacan, Encore, 95-97·

go. Miller, Pieces detachees, 26 January 2005·

31. Lacan, "Discours a l'Ecole Freudienne de Paris," Autres

ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 280-1.

32. Lacan, "L'Etourdit, ..Autres ecrits, 449-495·

33. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XVII: The

Other Side of psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton,
2006).

34. Lacan, Encore, 17·

35. Lacan, D'trn discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 13

January 1971.
36. Miller, "Of Sembl ants in the Relation Between Sexes," Psy-
choanalytical Notebooks 3 (1999);.10.

37. Lacan, "Lituraterre/' Autres ecrits, 14·

38. Ibid., 16.

39. Ibid., 18.

,-
•

....
,-
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ta
CLJ u E
en ......
0 ta~
C. "0
><
L&J e
L.

It is justifiable to say that Freud revolutionized the inner feeling [sens

'CIJ
OJ)
intime]. This is why, in a book on windows, I attempted to define the
CLJ conditions of possibility of this subjective kernel that we call the intimate.'
-1-01 I began with the hypothesis that the intimate is neither a transparent
ta notion nor a given, but that it has a distinctive structure and a history: in

E other words, there hasn't always been an intimate, nor will it necessarily

--
-1-01
always exist. By treating the fundamental psychological concept of our
innermost selves as a topological problem, I finished by circumscribing
c: the intimate as a site, in essence both architectural and scopic: that is,

- ~
as the part of space where the subject can feel shielded from the gaze of
the Other.
On the one hand, this is not a positive definition of what constitutes
•

"'C the intimate nature of the intimate. Instead, it tries to define its condition
CLJ of possibility and necessity. The intimate is a space qua internal exclu-
-1-01 sion, an island, where the subject escapes from even the supposition of
L- being watched. This is what we at times call the "at-home." This space
0 can be interior and subjective, just as it can take the form of a physical
-1-01 site. Moreover, the existence of the one ensures the existence of the
><
L&J
other. Thus the architecture of a given period appears, as it were, as the
decipherable symptom of the state of the intimate in this period. This,
for example, is how the modern usage of glass in architecture should be
CLJ interpreted. While it is in essence architectural, the site of the intimate
does not necessarily take an architectural form. Everyone knows that one
-1-01
ta can feel at home in different ways-in a crowd (why not?), in a hotel, in
the middle of nature. The fact that it goes without saying that one can
E
--
-1-01
feel at home in the home of the Other shows that we need to nuance our
understanding of the nature of the intimate.

c: On the other hand, I am making the gaze of the Other-that is, an

- exterior gaze-the very heart of the question of the intimate. This sup-
poses, in the Other, an implacable and limitless desire to see. We must
start from this point: that the Other is animated by an absolute will to
see everything; that prior to everything, there is the presence of an ir-
reducible and insatiable gaze. Ifthe preexistence of a gaze is a given, the
fundamental question-the only one really-vis henceforth to know ifthere

UMBR(a) 37
exists for the subject a space where he can avoid the panoptic eye of the Other, this Gorgon eye
which never sleeps or blinks. At one time this gaze was that of God. Formerly transcendent, He
has become immanent, has entered into the world, and the modern subject is subjected to the
incessant and excessive desire for visibility that animates every power and saturates our societ-
ies. We want to see and know everything.
This brings us to consider that, beyond political, economic, or other questions raised by the
idea of mondialisation, of globalization, there exists an aspect, a profound consequence that, it
seems to me, we have failed to take entirely into account. Globalization also means that, from
now on, not a single square inch of the planet can escape the gaze of the master.
The question of the intimate must be seen against this background. From this perspective, the
political stakes and topicality of the intimate take shape. If what matters is to pose the question
of a politics ofthe subject, it can be framed like this: in a world dedicated to global visibility, the
intimate is, for each subject, the possibility of concealment [la possibilite du cache].
The intimate, this possibility of concealment, must be defended.
It could be that, for one reason or another, there is no place for the subject to conceal himself
or feel himself concealed, no place to escape from the supposition or conviction that he is being
watched. Beyond the realm of politics, one can hear in this contemporary global concern its clini-
cal echo. We live in paranoid times and should not be surprised if certain subjects claim-as did
a certain patient cited by Lacan-io sono sempre vista, I am always being watched. In truth, the
impossibility of concealment furnishes us with a certain idea of hell: a place where the subject
would be incessantly seen. This is the direction in which the hypermodern world is moving.

1
I have thus formulated the hypothesis of a historical birth of the intimate. The intimate, in the
modern sense of a psychological interiority, was born in the Renaissance. By situating the inti-
mate historically, I have tried to highlight the fact that it took shape in an unexpected place-not
within the domain of the law (where the idea of the 'private" was in part elaborated), nor in
philosophy, but in art. While architecture played a key role, it was not the first place the intimate
was conceived of and thought out. Rather, it was painting. Painting, "the flower of all art," as
Alberti called it, became a model for all other arts-architecture included-in particular with the
invention of geometrical perspective. In a single stroke: the intimate was born with the advent
of the modern painting, defined by Alberti as an "open window." Expanding the dimensions of
this idea, I contend that modern painting, in the same gesture, gave birth to the Cartesian no-
tion that henceforth man had the right to gaze upon the world. It also defined the intimate as
the one site in the world where man could hold himself apart from the world; where, from his
-
window and in secret, he could contemplate it and where, shielded from every gaze, he could
turn his gaze upon himself.
To gaze upon oneself, shielded from every gaze: this is the double-heart of the invention of
the intimate. On the one hand, the intimate entails being able to steal away from the gaze of the
Other who would reduce man to the state of an object-"this man," as Anaelle Lebovits writes,
"that one would like to rivet to oneself, who would be disclosed, partes extra partes, under the
extra-lucid gaze of an other. ", On the other hand (and while subtracting oneself from the gaze
of the Other), it also entails being able to see oneself as manifest in the intimate that cannot be
reduced to the subject's intimacy. To put it in Heideggerian terms, "it is only by means of this
complex gesture, by this self-regard into the very remoteness of self, that something like a self
can be constituted." The subject thus demonstrates that he is not riveted to himself, that he is
not reducible to an object that would only be perceptible under the gaze of the Other, and also
that the intimate is not reduced to being the site where the subject, concealed, would free himself
from himself. The intimate is thus the site where the subject makes himself an enigma, where he
demonstrates that he is not transparent to himself. The intimate is not a site of pure freedom; it c:
is instead the site where the subject appears in its division. Gazing upon itself there, the intimate, ~
the site of shadows and secrets, can thus also be a place of modesty. The intimate is the site of '"
'"
:E
the subject, that is, of its division.
If it is what I say it is-at once a source of power for the man who appropriates the world by
his gaze and the cradle, the inner territory where what we name interiority, that is, this intimate
division of the subject, unfolds -then one will grant that I am at least somewhat right to claim
that the birth of the Albertian painting was an upheaval that inaugurated a new era.
This era is still our own. But for how much longer?
In order to satisfy ourselves with our treatment of the intimate, we must bring to light its tragic
and crucial stakes; this is where its topicality resides. The possibility of concealment must not
simply be thought of in terms of gain or conquest, of more or less: it is an absolute condition of
the subject. It must therefore be said that there is no subject unless that subject cannot not be
seen. We understand by this the modern subject-who thinks, and therefore, is; in other words,
the subject who, under the gaze, does not think. Thus, in the modern era, the intimate-the secret
territory of the shadow or of the opaque-is the very site of the subject.
To speak of the intimate in terms of territory is to inevitably raise the question of borders, a
question posed today. But if it is truly worth pondering, it is not in order to refine a topology of
the intimate in the manner of Lacan's extime; rather, it is because of the urgency-of a threat that,
bearing on the intimate, today bears down on each subject.
There is a politics of the intimate. The intimate can be threatened. It must be defended.
 By invoking the right to concealment, we give the intimate a definition beyond the architec-
tural and scopic; beyond, too, the domains of psychology and anthropology: the intimate takes
on a political dimension, one fonnded on force. The definition of the intimate that I've given-a
site free from every gaze-implies a relation of power, a relation to power, or more exactly, a
separationfrom it. In trnth, what matters is to hold a territory apart from the always totalitarian
presence of the Other. This constitutes the real condition of the intimate, which we can associate
with the right to secrecy. The intimate mnst be seen against the background of the Benthamite
Other, the importunate gaze-intrnsive or invasive-that wants to see and know all, all the time.
The important thing is to reveal that which could limit this limitless desire. One could invoke the
law, but the law preserves the private; or rather, the private is that part which can be protected
by the law. The intimate exceeds; it cannot proceed from the law; it proceeds only from the real
possibility of a subject to conceal himself and to remain silent. Its guarantee is material; that
is, the right to secrecy can only be maintained by the subject himself, by his force alone, and
not by the Other, by the law. It is an act of the snbject that keeps the subject free. This political
dimension is consubstantial with the notion of the intimate, which does not merely refer to the
innermost part of us (the Latin intimus is the superlative of interior), but that comprises the
idea of secrecy in its very definition.

i
::>
Thus we perceive that the intimate, secrecy and freedom are intimately linked.
Here again we must remember that we're speaking of real freedom, of material freedom. As
Jean-dande Milner insists, the real question of freedom is to reveal how to obtain the conditions
in which the weakest can be truly free in the face of the strongest. If juridical and institutional
guarantees are precious, they nonetheless remain rather illusory. In other words, like the inti-
mate, the doctrine of freedoms is not founded on the law, but on force. In truth, Milner says, we
are all convinced of one thing: apart from fairy tales where the weak become strong (that is, the
revolutionary dream), there is but a single guarantee of actual freedoms, and that is the right to
secrecy, the single material limit to the power of the Other that we name "the State," "institu-
tions," or "society."
That said, I will now make six remarks, with the goal of delineating the current state of the
intimate.

2
The first concerns what I would call the interest of psychoanalysis. We should emphasize that,
during the Romantic period, the notion of the intimate took on a hue that would go on to thor-
oughly color Freud's invention. psychoanalysis sets apart anything having to do with sexuality
as that which is the most personal and the most concealed. Sexuality is designated as the opaque
kernel of the intimate. This hue will always more or less color the intimate.
 But this interest is more radical still, because the intimate does not only demarcate the most
subjective site of the subject. It is, as I have said, its very condition. There can be no subject with-
out a secret, that is, there can be no entirely transparent subject. Every dream of transparency
removes, with the dissolution of every opacity, the opacity of the subject itself.
Democracy is, of course, animated by an ideal of transparency, but on principle it concerns
itself only with power and the powerful, not with subjects. Not only does democracy set the opac-
ity of the subject against the transparency of the Other, the State; it is supposed to defend this
opacity against any intrusion, which also means defending the subject's freedom. This is where
the problem lies today. We could cite Walter Benjamin: "Mankind, which in Homer's time was
an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has
reached such a degree it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first
order.'> Only, the problem today is not that we have taken ourselves as an object of contempla-
tion, it's that our democratic world is dividing itself unequally into those who gaze and those who
are gazed at. In reality, our democracy seems to be animated by a perfectly contradictory will: on
the one hand, the Other tends to become more and more opaque, while on the other hand the
subject is rendered increasingly transparent. As a result, even though these days every gesture
made by every politician is subjected to media scrutiny, we still know less and less about the
machinery of power. Meanwhile-to judge by all sorts of various indexes-power knows more
and more about each one of us.
We live in a time when everything can be known; there are no longer any secrets. Confidenti-
ality is dead. We have entered an era when secrecy has had its day. I was very struck by Sidney
Pollack's 1975 film The Three Days of the Condor, in which Robert Redford plays a failed writer,
recruited by the CIA, who works in a "reading unit" where agents spend all day going through
spy novels with a fine-toothed comb in order to find possible leaks, or to learn new methods of
"work. "The thesis of Joseph Turner, the hero of this reading unit, is that there is no concealment,
that no secret is concealed. All that is necessary is to read and to reconstruct. Every secret, even
the most confidential secrets of the State, like those concerning the atomic bomb, are perfectly
visible in texts that have absolutely nothing at all to do with the military or with espionage ser-
vices. The truth is perfectly legible, but cut up, fragmented, scattered. The truth is an encrypted
puzzle; all one would have to do is to assemble the pieces, and in order to do that, one must see
them. That is, one must find the right point of view from which one can discern these elements
of truth; these elements that, observed from another point, slip away and remain, not concealed,
butinvisible. In short, what we have here is a modern version of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Purloined
Letter." This is an extremely interesting thesis. It must be emphasized that, as in Poe's story, the
secrets in question are secrets of the State; the secrets to be extorted are secrets of the powerful.
The question is whether or not the thesis of the film-that there are no more secrets-is no longer
put into practice by the powerful for the powerful, but ramer by the powerful for the subject. It
is no longer necessary to uncover secrets of the State, in any case not only those secrets; what
matters today are the secrets of the alcove, the intimate of the subject.
In this encrypted visibility of the secret, Edgar Allen Poe joins, in a sense, Leo Strauss, who
highlighted the role of persecution in the art of writing, persecution that obliged the writer to
practice a writing of dissimulation, an "art of writing between the lines." The psychoanalyst is the
one who reads what is written between the lines. However, there are two barriers that keep him
from being an extortionist ofthe intimate. The first barrier is ethical: the psychoanalyst uncovers
the intimate only to the subject that demands it of him. The second barrier proceeds from the
real, that is, from the impossible: it is impossible to say everything, thus the psychoanalyst can-
not extort the truth from the subject. Lacan, who once claimed that he told the truth but not-all
[pas-toute] of it, said all there was to say on this subject.
We live in a time of a widespread uncovering [devoilement], of which the Internet is both the
symptom and the instrument. We note, moreover, that The Three Days of the Condor is inscribed
in an earlier time in that it pursues the secret of the Others, the bad guys; there is also the fact
that the instrument of truth in the film is the book. Today we live in the age of the Internet, of
webcams, of widespread imaging. In the age of the Internet, the idea that there are no more
secrets has for its counterpart the idea that there is no more possible mastery of information.
Everything can be known, and everyone can know it all of the time. Thus we must have special
procedures so that power can escape being uncovered. There is a need to render power opaque.
Transparency is thus the modem watchword, but it works in only one direction.
All of this relates directly to our freedom. Wheu we read Benjamin Constant's On the Liberty of
the Moderns, which dates from the 1820'S, we grasp a thesis that concerns our modernity, namely,
that if the Ancients defined freedom as active and constant participation in public affairs, our
freedom (we other Moderns) is comprised of the peaceful jouissance of private independence.
psychoanalysis was born into this modernity and has to situate itself according to it. What is
strange is that psychoanalysis, which aims at elucidation, is aligned on the side of the obscure,
on the side of the defense of secrecy. It is the obscure side of weakness, which is that ofthe sub-
ject in the face of power. This can be easily deduced from the preceding: to wit, anything that
threatens the right to secrecy threatens not only intimacy and freedom, it threatens the subject
in its very existence. Without the right to secrecy, without concealment, there is no subject that
thinks, hence no subject that is. Thus, we understand that it is not only a question of the inter-
est of psychoanalysis, but that the defense of the intimate and of secrecy is properly a cause of

psychoanalysis.
 It is here that we can sketch out the political dimension of psychoanalysis. It corresponds not to
a new form of "application"-psychoanalysis's intervention in the political field, armed with its
concepts-but to the highlighting of an internal political dimension, one proper to psychoanalysis,
simply because the possibility of the intimate is, in the end, the possibility of psychoanalysis.
Whether it is a question of video surveillance and medical dossiers, or of procedures which
seek to evaluate the risks a child might pose in the future, every measure that puts the intimate
and the right to secrecy in peril constitutes a threat to psychoanalysis-which, moreover, is itself
directly threatened. Hence the need for political vigilance, and even, today, a state of alert.
3
My second remark touches on the nature of threats at the borders of the intimate.
The right to concealment is a barrier; it constitutes the border of the intimate. If there is reason
to speak of borders in the plural, it is not because this border is diverse or variable, or that it is a
question of more or less secrecy, of degrees of the intimate. The rightto secrecy and to the intimate
are absolutes-either this right exists or it does not. On the other hand, like any border, it demar-
cates two spaces: the intimate-the site of the subject-and the field of the Other. The border can
thus be seen from two sides. This opens up three possible states for the border: either it remains
hermetically sealed and preserves the intimate from any intrusion (this is what defines a certain
state of real democracy), or there is a crossing over [franchissement]. But there are two ways of
thinking about this crossing over: either there is invasion ofthe intimate, or there is renunciation
of it.The first is the case of the Other, of power; the second is the case of the subject.
Let us consider first of all the act of power. Suppose that the Other has poked his nose into our
intimate space or pried into our private life. This is an increasingly common occurrence, due to the
fact that we live in an age of video surveillance. Whether police, urban, or military, this surveillance
is at present more than just widespread: it is planetary. From this day forward there will be eyes
revolving day and night around the Earth-as one can easily see by logging on to Google Earth. We
have entered a paranoid age. But the presence of cameras on every street corner poses a serious
question; it is not simply a matter of a technical innovation that permits power to extend itself
and to invade the public space. Rather, with this technical progress, a reversal has taken place
without our being aware of it. When, formerly, techniques of police surveillance were developed,
they were developed with the aim of flushing out the secrets of criminals. Nowadays the latest
techniques are used in the service of absolutely opposing aims: cameras are there to keep watch
over the innocent and to control their secrets. The society of control that Deleuze spoke of is a
society where the innocents are controlled. This is what engenders the diffuse feeling of society's
criminalization, where we are all watched as if we are would-be or unaware culprits.
 •

As for this rampant and widespread criminalization of society, we can shed some light on certain
procedures employed today in the service of policies that allegedly aim to prevent criminality.
Prevention has become the watchword of the day, to the point that, in place of Foucault's "Sur-
veiller et punir," we have now substituted "Supervise and Prevent." The novelty stems from the
fact that the latest procedures of delinquency prevention, for the sake of maximum effectiveness,
tend to be more and more preemptive. That is, these procedures no longer simply attempt to
influence so-called "environmental" factors in the emergence of criminality, but aim at the very
being of subjects. In other words, well beyond social, educational, juridical or police measures,
preventative procedures will henceforth be a matter for medical science and will be devised by
mental health specialists. This is supposed to render them beyond suspicion, since science, as
we all know, can only work for our good.
This brings to mind a particular project, one very controversial in France, which has mobi-
lized many people and is still politically relevant today: namely, a report of "collective expertise"
published in 2005 by the Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale (INSERM)
on the prevention of delinquency, entitled "Conduct Disorders in the Child and the Adoles-
cent." Delinquency, a sociologico-juridico-police notion, is treated in this report as a "conduct
disorder," a psychiatric notion taken from the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders). Its "predictive" signs are organized into four categories: aggressive conduct
that causes or threatens physical harm to other people or animals, non-aggressive conduct that
causes property loss or damage, deceitfulness or theft, and serious violations of rules. I will cut
to the chase: the report alerts us to the stunning precocity of the signs of this disorder: "aggres-
siveness, intractability and inadequate emotional control during childhood have been described
as predictive of conduct disorder in adolescence."4 It is specified that these behaviors must be
differentiated from what is termed "normal conduct." This comparison should be emphasized,
as it highlights a certain mode of thinking about the individual, i.e., thatthe behavior of a subject
is linked directly to the normality of the group. Thus we see the field of psychology occupied by
a mode of thinking that reasons not in terms of people but of "population." This is the threat
Foucault pointed to-a threat which gives rise to a new Leviathan, a flood of statistics (the DSM,
a worldwide psychiatric reference, is itself a statistical treatise of "disorders"). psychiatrists and
psychologists-these experts-do not think of singular and individual people in terms of cases;
they think of them in terms of statistical beings in which the subject as singularity is reabsorbed,
abolished-in Lacanian terms, foreclosed. We now knowthatthese experts resolve the question
of abnormality by retaining the criterion of age. It is claimed that behaviors such as physical
aggression, lying or the theft of objects, that is, behaviors relatively frequent in small children,
only become "abnormal" if they occur very frequently and last beyond the age of four years. As a
consequence, our group of experts recommends a systematic medical screening for every child at
 36 months, since "at this age, one can first locate the signs of a difficult temperament, of hype rae-
tivity, and the first symptoms of a conduct disorder." This in turn leads to the recommendation
that every health professional learn to recognize the criteria defining conduct disorders, a task
that concerns, first of all, intervention specialists in maternal and infantile protection agencies
and in medico-psycho-pedagogical centers, as well as National Education medical personnel.
We scarcely dare add that our INSERM experts have identified certain risk factors in the course
of the prenatal and perinatal periods: for example, a very young mother, the consumption of
psychoactive substances during pregnancy, a low birth weight or complications arising during
delivery. As a consequence, our experts recommend a testing offamiIies presenting these risk
factors over the course of the medical supervision ofthe pregnancy. These principles, and the
"scientific" measures that result from them, are today defended by experts from the police services,
who are advised by the minister of the interior, who is a candidate in the French presidential
elections, and who has included these measures in his program of public security. We can thus
consider this report, prepared by experts in medical research, as the ultimate illustration and
justification of Michel Foucault's thesis of biopower, that is, the notion that life and the body
have henceforth become objects of power.
This system of child evaluation and administrative record-keeping, recommended by the experts
of a national institute of medical research, bears witness to the fact that we have entered an age in ....
which the gaze of the master-the intrusive gaze, relying on science and technical knowledge-is '"
without limits. The subject who, in the past, submitted to the gaze of a God who peered into
his soul today finds his body scrutinized by experts who probe the most secret recesses of his
spirit-if not the very womb of his mother, perhaps even farther. The intimate, which used to
be defined as a window open to the subject and closed to the Other, is now incessantly probed
and extorted.
From now on, an immense machine lays siege to the borders of the intimate.

4
We must at present displace or reverse our point of view in order to discover a new perspective.
There is another way to cross the border of the intimate: by going in the opposite direction [dans
l'autre sens]. This would be the case of those who, unconstrained by any external force, open up
their intimacy, confess it or expose it. This has nothing to do with stolen or extorted images or
data, but rather with those that are deliberately exhibited. We should stress that this would not
be a case ofthe subject renouncing his right to secrecy; on the contrary, it would be a free act,
a certain exercise of this right. The right to remain silent, which one hears ritually invoked in
American police films at each arrest, does not oblige one to be quiet. This would be totalitarianism,
 ,

according to Lacan: everything not prohibited is obligatory. We might note in passing that this
right to silence embodies the spirit of America (a nation founded by those fleeing persecution)
whose citizens, as Jacques Alain-Miller points out, gave themselves a totally new constitntion,
one whose principle was not prohibition but permissiveness. This does not prevent the existence
of censorship; however, we must grant that censorship does not derive from the Constitntion.
"The intimate exposed": this irresistibly invokes the age of what we today call reality TV. Al-
though this phenomenon is massive and warrants our interest, I only want to mention it here in
order to highlight a strange featnre of our era. Namely, that on the one hand, the desire to see
everything no longer only animates power ("Big Brother is Watching You'"), it is now a wide-
spread desire on the part of the subject, one that demands gratification. On the other hand, and
at the same time, it is in this society-where each person wants to know what's happening in the
life of the other-that this obscene taste for exhibition develops. Each one wants to see and each
one wants to be seen, all at once.
Be that as it may, I would like for us to pay attention here to what is taking place in art and
literatnre, which have become eminent sites in the exercise of this freedom to flaunt the intimate.
A veritable art of exhibiting the intimate is developing today in literatnre and in museums. For-
merly, in art, intimacy was startling; images of the intimate were stolen and gave the spectator
the delicious feeling that he was violating a prohibition, that he was an intruder who saw what he
was not supposed to see. Today the intimate is not stolen, it is displayed openly, without shame
and without giving afrisson of pleasure. This can take all sorts of forms: pornography, exhibi-
tion, confession, book review, admission; The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet,
the films of Larry Clark, the photographs of Araki, or the work of Nan Goldin.
Of course, one could object that the intimate was being exposed long before these works came
along, but we must remind ourselves that in the eighteenth century, for example, when Jean-
Jacques Rousseau published his Confessions, it wasn't considered an intimate work in the strict
sense. What was then referred to as ejournal intime was precisely that: a journal that remained
secret and was by necessity not published. By contrast, what characterizes our age is that, in
addition to revealing ourselves [se dire] in the secrecy of the analyst's office, the intimate today
is published, is displayed on screens and exposed on the walls of museums. And, we must add,
without shame. We have entered the age of uncovering, which is also an age of the dissolution
of shame. Of course, psychoanalysts should rejoice in this, since this tendency bears witness to
a certain victory for Freud, in that the prohibition on sexuality no longer weighs on us; in any
case, it no longer weighs on us the way it did in Freud's day.
This dissolution of shame does not signal the total absence of modesty that would lead to
provocation without limit, but rather the simple fact of a certain reduction of the feeling of guilt
in the subject. In contrast to Sartre's voyeur, who blushed when he thought he was seen by the
 Other, today's subject no longer blushes when he is seen viewing images of his fantasy. This is
what, in certain respects, distinguishes the exhibition in museums of what used to be referred
to as "shameful images"; namely, that now they are exposed without shame. Shameful images
have a hard time shaming us: times are hard for pornographers. That is, the border crossing I am
talking about in art can today no longer be thought of in terms of subversion, scandal, provoca-
tion, outrage, or profanation. Along with the dissolution of shame there is a certain dissolution
of the sacred. The collapse of prohibitions does not call for sacrilege or blasphemy, at least not
on a day-to-day basis. Scandal is so affordable these days that it is within the reach of the most
common advertisement. This is why contemporary works of art that try to be provocative must
play the game of escalation, a tiring game in an already-inflated market; these works end up being
somewhat derisory, grotesque or pitiful. Fortunately, there are still a few irritable puritans here
and there, obsessive censors that confer a whiff of sulfur on certain works that, without these
calls for prohibition or even destruction, would not generate much of an audience.
.....
The sole remaining prohibition, the one sacred value in our society that seems to remain, is
to do with children. It is forbidden to touch a hair on their little blond heads, as if children had
rediscovered that angelic purity on which Freud managed to cast some doubt. And it is undoubt-
edly the diabolical figure of Freud that we condemn today, seeing him as the one who, by uncov-
ering the relationship of childhood to sexuality, quite simply depraved OUrvirginal childhoods.
In an age when sexuality is exhibited on every street corner, the image of the innocent child has,
strangely, returned with a vengeance. ...
....
We have to admit, today, that we have seen everything. So how does one go about causing
a scandal? The inquisitional ardor of a certain "moral minority"' is nothing but the sign of the
collapse of all prohibitions; likewise, the desire for the restoration of values is at bottom an indi-
cation that the times have changed, that shameful images hardly shame us anymore, that their
power of Provocation has become blunted. This should give us pause.
In order to contrast it with certain historical precedents, we should like to return for a mo-
ment to the idea that shameful images without shame are a novelty. For example, after having
read Daniel Arasse, one might be somewhat correct in considering Titian's Venus of Urbina as
the paradigm of the "shameful image." This recumbent nude woman, who caresses herself while
smiling at us, is in certain respects a shameful image without shame-except that this intimate
image was destined only for the intimacy of a single gaze, that of GUidobaldo della Rovere, who
ordered this "pin up"? from Titian for his exclusive nse. This poses a real museographical problem,
not as to the contemporary exhibition of such a painting in a mnseum (in the Uffizi in Florence),
but as to its meaning-effect [eifet de sens] on visitors. During the Renaissance, the intimate
was destined for an intimate space. Today it goes directly to the museum; that is, it is no longer
destined for the secrecy of a studio or the gaze of a lover, but for the bright lights and greedy
 eyes of culture. The museum is that great site of the democracy of the gaze; indeed, it rests on
a principle that, in a way, derives from the Enlightenment: every visible work must be able to
be seen by all. Let us admit, however, that such a democratic principle, which is as such beyond
discussion, nevertheless has the effect of obscuring the meaning of certain works by delivering
them over to gazes for which they were not destined. Hence we can draw the conclusion that
the history of art is inconceivable without the construction of a history ofthe gaze. We can also
perhaps understand if, in Europe (and perhaps especiaUy in France), curators of public muse-
ums- the defenders of the democratic gaze-feel a certain hostility toward types like Guidobaldo
deUa Rovere and private coUectors in general, who, they claim, organize the privatization and
the deprivation of the jouissance of a work that could be the property of all.
So there we have it: a charming picture of our current state of affairs. This leads us to make a
double-remark. On the one hand, in our era, which advances under the standard of the Rights of
Man, the material right to secrecy is materially threatened from all sides. One the other hand, one
would be in part correct to try to prevent that right from becoming humankind's most important
right. Secondly and conjointly, we remark today a widespread, excessive display of the intimate .
ee For my part, I suggest we consider the question by confronting these two sides, one against the
....
other: that of the widespread threat against the intimate, and the widespread extension of im-
ages of the intimate. There are two sides: the intimate exposed, and the intimate extorted. The
question I am raising deals with the possible relation of one to the other.

5
My hypothesis is that the excessive display of images of the intimate that we find today in art
arises not from the modern exercise of a freedom, but constitutes, paradoxicaUy, a response to
the threat against the intimate. Of course one could imagine, as a response to the hypermodern
threat of a limitless gaze into the intimate, extending the use of the veil. (This is, moreover, what
we are witnessing with the rise of Muslim rigor.) But in art, on the contrary, we are also witness-
ing a movement of uncovering, one that might appear, after all, to be simply in keeping with the
desire for omniscience of the modern master. And yet it seems to me that images of art, certain
ones at least, can stage an interruption ofthis desire. We must, then, specify how and why.
All of this means that in order to understand what one would today call "shameful images," we
need no longer look at the prohibition, but on the contrary, at this machine- for-seeing -everything,
this machine for extorting the intimate that is today the power in the hands of the hypermodern
master. To this we must add the fact that the visible has become a commodity; there is a privatiza-
tion of the visible, with the result that, henceforth, the image of every single thing can be converted
into money. Nothing and no one can escape from the system of exchange, which is global. The
 market is the contemporary form of the universal. There is no domain of human affairs shielded
from its law, including that of the sacred and the tragic. We no longer live in a world of masters
and slaves, capitalists and proletarians, or citizens, but in a world of consumers, either real or
virtual. Lacan prophesied this-"the rise of the object to the social zenith." The domination
of prohibitions and of the father gives way neatly to the domination of the object. The current
tendency is not toward the prohibition but toward the admission, in the sense that the body and
the genitals (the most intimate of the intimate) are also seized upon by the market. Everything
is free and must free itself in this sense. As a result, without prohibitions, we see the possibilities
of provocation disappear. There is no longer a "hell." Everything is more or less permitted. There
are some things that still make us tremble, but one gets the feeling that it is no longer possible
to go very far in transgression unless one is to make a work out of crime. This is one possibility.
Childhood is the only thing today that can stage an interruption, as we saw in the case of the
CAPC of Bordeaux.' By the end of the twentieth century, we had seen it all. But if the sacred has
lost its glory and its power today, how do we go about being subversive? It is going to happen
vis-a-vis the world of the market; Jeff Koons speaks of this. By using icons, by erecting new and
ridiculous golden calves, Koons allows us to take a certain distance. By elevating always-perish- c:
~
able objects to the dignity of the work, always imperishable, he uncovers a certain truth; he lays '"
'"
bare the illusory prestige of the fetish. La Cicciolina is, in a sense, one of these works: she is a E
statue oflove and of sex seized in the marketplace.w The topicality of "shameful images" would
be in this sense the topicality of threats against the intimate. If one function of art is to show what
one cannot see, we must nevertheless not limit ourselves to thinking that what we cannot see is
what is prohibited, that poor taste would be the proper response to the conservative attitudes of
a "moral majority'?' who would force us to conceal what we cannot see. Not because the intimate
would be any less threatened by a prohibition than by an obligatory admission-Foucault warned
us against this-but because it is purely and simply threatened with dissolution.
Let us simply ask ourselves this question: what could be the possible meaning and value of
exposing pornographic images in a world where we are seen everywhere, all the time and from
every angle, and sounded to the innermost depths of our bodies and our souls?
I have already mentioned that a new figure haunts our era, a phantom or a fantasy: that of the
transparent subject. It is the correlate to what I call the limitless gaze of the master. The inven-
tion of the X-ray at the end of the nineteenth century gave birth to the scientific dream of the
transparency of the body-to the point of inspiring the belief that, thanks to Rontgen, our most
secret thoughts would no longer be safe from the practiced eye of the physician. It is clear that
today the forces of technical expansion seem to want to extend the power of the machine-for-
seeing to the point of creating a man without a shadow, a totally transparent subject, in body
and soul. Between the explosion of medical imaging, the perpetual innovation in the field of
 police surveillance and espionage technology, the triumph of legal medicine and of anatomic
pathology, or the strange displacement of psychiatric expertise towards what we henceforth
will call "psychological autopsy," it seems that power is today centered on the gaze, and that the
exercise of power consists first of all in increasing the powers of surveillance of the subject and
the investigation of bodies. We are thus led to think that what formerly was considered a divine
attribute-the omniscience of God, his power to see everything without being seen-has today
become an attribute of a secular power, armed by both science and technology.
This is why it is of the utmost importance to be able to watch what is watching us; to reveal to
everyone that which, without our seeing it, turns us into subjects-under-control, that is, observed
objects.
It would hardly be forcing things to superimpose this fantasy of science onto what would
be, for the police, an ideal situation. Photography has obviously played a historic role in doing
this. By virtue of showing that this process of recuperation is today on its way to completion, I
would direct your attention to the recent batch of police TV shows like CST, in which we see the
o progressive substitution of the character of the cop, private eye, or detective by the figures of
on
the scientific expert and the forensic scientist. The police, whose object is to defend the living,
now strive above all to develop investigative techniques that deal with cadavers, objects, matter.
Likewise, when doctors speak of developing the "psychological autopsy" as an area of expertise,
one should worry that this means, from now on, that the subject as such will be thought of a
priori as a cadaver, and that one might penetrate into its innermost recesses to root out the truth.
Sustained by the scientific fantasy of transparency, power's rightto the gaze, which is set against
the subject's right to secrecy, becomes a major and acute political problem.
It is also a problem for any reflection on art today. Not that the question poses itself specifically
for art; rather, following the idea of art I am putting forth, I believe that today, art is a site where
the fantasy of science is posed and exposed as problematic in the sense that one uncovers it, that
it is demonstrated and dismantled as such. Art is the site where the fantasy of science and of the
modern master are perhaps most profoundly thought through, and where there is a response to
the threat such a fantasy entails.
I will give an example: when the great Belgian artist Wim Delvoye produces radiographic im-
ages of a kiss or of sexual acts, or when Bernard Venet runs a self-portrait through a scanner,
these artists are not merely aesthetically appropriating the latest scientific technologies, as has
been done in art for a long time. As far as the use of radiography goes, it seems that Moret Op-
penheim was the first (in 1964) to make X-ray portraits: self-portraits, to be exact. By exposing
the scientific hyper-intimacy of the body, these artists' images are truly a critical response to the
scientific fantasy of the transparent subject; that is, one which is fully knowable. These scientific
images alert us to the desires of science and its pretensions to an entirely calculable, assessable,
 and as a result fully predictable subject. In truth, what these images of transparency show us,
what these artists show us by showing us scientific images of the body's transparency, is that,
along with the fantasy of science, there also exists a certain irreducible opacity.
Science does have a stumbling block. I will say which later.
To linger for a moment with the idea of a critical art or of an art of resistance, I cannot help
referencing a work by Bruce Nauman. I have to admit that I think of Bruce Nauman as a sort
of universal thinker; he is to my mind the Swiss army knife of our era, the great revealer of the
latest malaise of our civilization. I have, moreover, come up with a law that I call the Law of
TAA. W.O.BNAT.T.S: There's-A1ways-A-Work_Of_Bruce-Nauman's-Adapted_ To-The-Situation.
For now I'll speak of the audio piece exhibited in Paris and more recently at the Tate Modern in
London. One enters freely into a small padded room, dark and empty, and as one approaches the
walls one hears-vaguely at first, and then, as one nears the partition, more distinctly-a voice,
whispering firmly, "get out of my mind, get out of this room.r» It is the voice of Bruce Nauman
.....
himself. Thus one goes to a museum, one walks calmly into a space with the aim of seeing, as is
fair; and once inside, one discovers first of all that there is nothing to see, and then that one is
"inside the mind of Bruce Nauman" and would do well to get out of there, and fast. A work that
kicks you to the curb: all in all, not bad for a museum piece. In fact, if I had to award a Grand
Prize in Art against the "psychological autopsy" -to pick a work that most acutely denounces the
desire of experts to probe our souls, a work of public safety announcing that the assessors are
already in Our heads, in short, a work that most savagely defends the intimate-I WOUld,without
hesitation, nominate this piece by Bruce Nauman.

Now, in order to conclude, and to respond at the same time to certain questions still in suspen-
sion, we must face a paradox.

To refer to psychoanalysis, as I have been doing, is to defend a discourse that, one might claim,
is also responsible for extorting the intimate. Michel Foucault may have thought so. Saying-ev-
erything [Ie tout-dire] leads straight to the confessional-the Church and communism have both
been guilty of this. Now, as far as suspecting that psychoanalysis is on the side of the inquisitive
gaze, I give YOu-as fodder for suspicious minds-another bad sign, the fact that Freud conceived
of the material device of psychoanalysis, the relation of armchair to couch, by invoking the power
it offered him to "see without being seen." He thus invoked (without knowing it, I believe) what
used to be considered an attribute of God, the only being capable of seeing without being seen. '3
By placing himself in his armchair, the psychoanalyst is supposed to be sitting on the throne of
an omniscient god.
 The entire problem can be limited to two questions, which in turn imply two barriers. The
first is ethical: if tbe analyst does indeed have a certain omniscience at his disposal, tbe value of
tbis omniscience lies in the analyst's not making use of it. Whetber he does or not rests on an
etbical choice alone, one from which analysis is suspended: in his role as listener, tbe analyst
is non-seeing (which is what perhaps gives him tbe power, like Tiresias, to see into tbe future).
The second barrier is real: does it necessarily follow that, from the power to see everything, ev-
erything can be seen? In trutb, tbe problem is played out here, since tbis begs tbe question of a
limit to tbe gaze-one founded not on a prohibition, on a choice, or on any contingency, but on
an impossible, on tbe real.
All of tbis only makes sense if we put psychoanalysis into historical perspective. Jacques-
Alain Miller tried his hand at this on a radio show some montbs ago. We must indeed admit
tbat tbe primary effect of psychoanalysis in our world has been to modify common sense by
loudly touting its claim: by saying, "everything is good for you." At any rate, tbis is how society
has interpreted it. These days, tbe idea tbat saying everything is beneficial has become com-
mon sense. Formerly, there were tbings tbat one did not say, lest tbe sacred be offended. We
...
N
must realize that, as a result of tbis possibility, tbe act of saying had great value. As a result, the
authority of censorship has played an important role throughout history. Nor did Freud fail to
recognize its importance, giving, as he did tbe notion of censorship a place in his theory. Writ-
ers, too, have been aware of tbe problem, from tbe time when tbe act of saying still counted for
something. Censorship was the writer's partner. Again, it was Leo Strauss who highlighted tbe
role of persecution in tbe art of writing, which required a writing of dissimulation, an "art of
writing between tbe lines" whereby every piece of writing was supposed to be an encoded mes-
sage. Even Rousseau (to whom I have also already alluded), who professed a frankness without
limits, admitted to employing a certain art of writing so as not to reveal to certain malicious
people what he was reallytbinking. Nevertheless, today we must observe tbat saying-everything
has triumphed. We live in the age of the Internet that, to judge by tbe evidence, is heading in
tbe direction of saying-everything.
And tbis is tbe point. That is, we have to conclude tbat we no longer live in tbe era of Freud.
Freud lived in anotber time, tbe Victorian age, which pivoted on tbe suppression of speech, witb
its cohort of censorship and repression. In a sense, he borrowed tbese notions from his time. In
tbat world of censorship and repression, psychoanalysis thus obviously marked tbe appearance
of a certain freeing-up of speech. As Jacques-Alain Miller emphasizes, Dada and Surrealism will
later be parts of tbis current.
This freeing-up of speech has led to a mutation in deptb in tbe twentietb century correlative to a
weakening of tbe sacred. The psychoanalyst, it is said, must plead guilty in tbis respect, for he has
indeed contributed to tbe dissolution oftbe sacred. Thus, during its first century, psychoanalysis
 has been contemporaneous with an art caught up in a Bataillean dialectic between the sacred,
prohibition, and transgression. Bypitting itself against censorship and repression, psychoanalysis
thus works together with the provocative exhibition of shameful images.
But our present age, the age of the triumph of Freud and the Internet, of the triumph of the
say-everything, opens up the obviously more melancholy horizon of twenty-first century psy-
choanalysis. What is left for us to hope for if the say-everything has already triumphed? Obvi-
ously, there are still moral panics and censors; there are stillliberatory battles to fight. But to
conclude here would make for a dull ending -a false one, to be honest. The latest result ofthe
social say-everything is that it dissolves the field oflanguage. In other words, Freud's triumph
is also a defeat.

However, against the background of this dull ending, another question appears: can one truly
say everything? To say everything is supposed to resolve everything. But although one can try to
say everything, this attempt is futile, for there is, fortunately for psychoanalysis, something that
remains unresolved, something never resolved, something that, we can safely predict, will never
be resolved. Something having to do with sexuality. Something in the sexuality of the human spe-
cies will never be resolved. So we must reconcile ourselves to that which will never be resolved.
This opens up new possibilities for psychoanalysis in our hypermodern age. That which is not
resolved is exactly what Lacan called "the impossible sexual relation." Obviously, this does not
mean (and we should know this by now- Lacan started the whole business in the 70'S) that there
is no sexual relationship, but rather that there is, for the human species, no such thing as a fixed, '"
w

defined body of knowledge concerning the relation between the sexes. Pink flamingoes know
this, as do guinea pigs, but men do not, nor do women. This is, by the way, why humankind has
invented all sorts of organized bodies of knowledge, such as marriage and the Kama Sutra-in
an attempt to compensate for this lack.

In other words, there seems to be a beyond [au-deld] of prohibition. Prohibition used to be a

barrier that called for transgression. Art was at one time a site of freedom against prohibition.
Today we are discovering that prohibition is not the ultimate barrier, but that, fundamentally,
it is a means of giving a human face-by means of the law, the symbolic, language-to the real
of an impossible. Following the logic of Cocteau's remark in The Wedding on the Eijfel Tower,
"since these mysteries are beyond us, let's pretend we're organizing them. "'4 Prohibition takes
over for the impossible.

Which brings me to my last remark. I would contend that today, art resides on the side of this
real-that shameful images come to be inscribed precisely where there is something unresolved
 in sexuality, something that cannot be exhausted, either by saying or by seeing. Aspace is opening
up in art today: not of sexuality, but of malaise in sexuality, of malaise in jouissance.
This is also an opening for an art of the post-Freudian age. We are under the impression today
that it is good to admit to every jouissance, but there exists something before which speech fails,
whatever we might do. When we read Catherine Millet's novel, it tells us of a certain silence of
jouissance. Nan Goldin is a great artist of civilization's malaise, in other words, of the malaise of
jouissance, of the great disorder oflove. She, too, is an artist of a psychoanalysis-of-the-present,
of the ultimate truth of psychoanalysis, which is that of the impossible. Her images of beaten-up
transvestites at four o'clock in the morning, with their mascara running and their pretty dresses
all askew: these are images of the unveiling of the truth of sex. And of the phallus: all worn out
and flaccid, not turned-on and erect. We live in the age of the weary phallus. Goldin's is the
punk art of sex, the "no future'< of sex. The image has lost all capacity to shock. This is not to
say that her images themselves are flaccid, deliberately. Nor are they ugly, provocative, disgust-
ing-nothing of the kind; they are simply true. These images can be moving, striking, troubling,
.... whatever you like; there is no reason whatsoever that the truth has to be ugly and unpleasant .
., What these images show is that there is something behind the shocking, behind the image, behind
all things: the great incurable disorder of love. For his part, Larry Clark's filming of American
adolescents demonstrates a liberated sexuality, albeit one dating from the era of the triumph
of psychoanalysis: a sexuality that has finished expressing itself, that is, a sexuality that is worn
out. These children are, in a way, still the children of Freud and Coca-Cola.
I would thus situate things in this way: certain images are capable of showing malaise in
jouissance, of showing that which remains unresolved in the domain of sexuality. There again I
find the Lacano-Wittgensteinian machine that leads me to the question of the image, following
the proposition of the Tractatus that states that there is something inexpressible, that there are
things one cannot say, and that that which one cannot say shows itself. From this I simply draw
the conclusion that today, shameful images are no longer to be considered subversive or eman-
cipatory, that they no longer stand up against prohibition, but that they confront the impossible:
the sexual relation that does not exist.
To conclude, we might evoke two radiographic images by Wim Delvoye.' These X-ray images
possess the power of extreme truth. But not where one would think, nor where one would look.
Displaying a kiss or an act of fellatio, they are there to be seen, of course,like every image. But, on
the one hand, these images show what one cannot see with the naked eye, the interior of bodies
in action. We are no longer in the era of the pornographic movie. The value of the appearance
of the pornographic movie, if there is one, was that it showed something, a part of the anatomy
that cinema had never shown before: sexual organs in action. X-ray images go one step further
by going beyond anatomy, beyond the sexual organs under our skin. Thus the images of Wim
Delvoye tend to show something that no one had ever seen before: how the sexual organs work.
 Perhaps it would be better to say that these images show that one does not see it. Or, better yet,
they show that it is normal for one not to see it.

One can photograph the intimate functioning of the sexual organs using science and the most
sophisticated techniques. Yet this inno way risks divulging the secret of sex, of how human desire"
works, or of the astonishing machine of the sexes for which there are no blueprints-as opposed to
the poop-machine that (as ifby chance) Wim Delvoye himself built, and with complete success."
The Cloaca- Turbo (which also allows one to see a mechanism inside the body) and the X-ray im-
age of a sexual act would be inverse copies of each other: on the one hand, the image of a machine
that works, and on the other, the image of a machine that doesn't. To be more exact, I would say
that these X-ray images (which resemble Leonardo's famous anatomical drawing representing
an act of coitus in cutaway) demonstrate above all that there is something one cannot see: how
love works, the secret of sexuality. This is their critical dimension. They are addressed as much
to physicians as to everyone else, with the message that the search for bodily transparency is a
fantasy because there is something that we will never be able to see, know, or master: the sexual
relation. You can X-ray the body, autopsy the body, render the body as transparent as you like,
but you will never learn the secret of the sexual relation. This is what, after all, definitively resists
the will of the master, who insists that things "work." Medical imaging brought up short by the
sexual relation: this could be the title for this series of images by Wim Delvoye.
As a result, it is rather amusing to point out that the first X-ray image, made by Rontgen, who
invented radiography in 1895 (the same year psychoanalysis and the cinema were born) was
'"
'"
that of the hand of his wife, and that what we first notice when we see it is the dark shadow of
her wedding ring. Thus the first image of the interior of a woman's body reveals the presence of
a man, specifically, a husband-a scientist husband from whom she could keep no secrets. No
doubt that explains this image. One wonders what Rontgen had in mind when he decided to
produce, as his first image, an X-ray of his wife's body. We might say that Wim Delvoye shows
us what Rontgen had in mind.

The hypermodern world is subjected to the order of transparency. This watchword seeks to tri-
umph thus: "all of the real is visible, and what is not visible is not real." In this world, art seems
to join with psychoanalysis in the same cause: to dispel the illusion of transparency. This cause
is, moreover, that of the defense of the shadow. It is a cause of truth.
Art and psychoanalysis: two discourses of the other side of transparency.
From this we conclude that, in this hypermodern world, art and psychoanalysis are
necessary.

Translated by Ron Estes, Jr.

 ,

1. Gerard Wajcman, Fenetre, chroniques du regard et de l'in- 8. Jacques Lacan, "Radiophonie," Scilicet 2/3. (Paris: Seuil,
time (Paris; Verdier, 2004). 1970),66.

2. Anaelle Lebovits, "The Veils of Modesty" ("Les Voiles de la 9. In 2000, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Bordeaux
pudeur"), uupublished paper given at the Ecole de la Cause (CAPC) organized an exhibit around the theme of child-
freudienne, Paris, May 2006. hood, "Presumed Innocent" (Presumes Innocents). The
exhibit brought together 200 works from 80 celebrated
3. Walter Benjamin, flluminations, trans. Harry Zohn(New international artists. Six years later, in 2006, a complaint
York: Schocken, 1968), 242. was lodged by an extreme right -wing organization, charging
that the works were "pornographic." The former director of
4. All translations of this report are my own. [Trans.]
the museum and two curators were placed under investiga-
tion; they now risk sentencing and punishment. The affair
5. In English in the original. [Trans.]
provoked a scandal, with the majority of the French public
6. In English in the original. [Trans.] siding with the accused. A number of politicians have also
become involved and have lent their support. The matter is
7. In English in the original. [Trans.] still ongoing. [Trans.]
10. In 1991 the American sculptor Jeff Koons married Anna
Ilona Staller (also known by her stage name, Cicciolina),
an Italian-Hungarian porn star turned politician, and the
first hardcore performer in the world to be elected to a
democratic parliament. [Trans.]
11. In English in the original. [Trans.]
12. In English in the original. [Trans.]
'3. I refer here to two texts: Sigmund Freud, "On Beginning the
Treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of
Psychoanalysis I)," The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter S.E.) ed.
and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press,
1953-1974),12: 121-45. and "An Autobiographical Study,"
S.E., 20: 3-71.
14· Jean Cocteau, The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, trans. Mi-
chael Benedikt. Modern French Theatre: theAvant-Garde,
Dada and Surrealism. eds. Michael Benedikt and George
E. Wellwarth (New York: Dutton, 1966), 94. [Translation
modified]
'5· In English in the original. [Trans.]
16. To find reproductions ofWim Delvoye's X-Ray works online,
see <http://www.touchyourself.org/blog/2005/12/del-
voyes-x-ray-sex.html.» [Editor's note]
'7· In English in the original. [Trans.] ....
18. To find reproductions ofWim Delvoye's Cloaca online, see
<http://www.cloaca.be/machines.htm.> [Editor's note] c
if;
:E
....
'"
 c
.-
.c
L..
o
u
~ I. WHERE, HOW AND WHEN IS THERE A DIALOGUE?
c
Q) We must first clarify how my proposed topic relates to that of our col-
s: loquium by posing the question whether the global impact of Western
thought can make a "real" dialogue between civilizations possible. This
preliminary explanation proposes a triple approach: Where, how and
when is there a dialogue?
1. The first question that emerges is the following: Were there prec-
edents to a dialogue between civilizations? The term "civilization" is,
in fact, an abstraction. "Civilizations" as such (as "universals") cannot
enter into a dialogue. Only their representatives can be real partners in
a dialogue. This is how I understand the adjective "real" attached to the
word "dialogue" in the announcement of the topic of our colloquium.
In this regard, we have to recall as precedents the great enterprises of'"
translation undertaken throughout the centuries. In chronological order,
we shall recall in particular the following: a.) translations from Sanskrit
to Chinese (in the second century, two Arsacid princes translated the
fundamental text of the Buddhism of the Pure Land, the Sukhauatii;
b.) translations from Greek to Pahlavi at the end of the Sassanid period
in Iran; c.) translations from Arabic into Latin, with the interference
of Hebrew and Arabic philosophical texts, during the first centuries of
Islam; d.) Shah Akbar's liberal reforms that stimulated translations from
Sanskrit to Persian during the sixteenth century.
From the same perspective, we could also find a reason for optimism
in the increasing number of translations done in our days. But to what
extent would it be legitimate to profess this optimism? Let us first under-
line with force the passionate interest that the West has shown ever since
the nineteenth century in archeological explorations, the resurrection of
dead cities, the discovery of manuscript collections hiding the secrets of
philosophical and religious systems. Western consciousness has obeyed
a research imperative that appears to be the exact opposite of an obstacle
to a dialogue and reveals a completely different set of preoccupations
from the materialism a bit too summarily imputed to it. This research
implies an ability to question received knowledge upon contact with
newly discovered thoughts. But to what degree was there reciprocity?
Did the East display a similar interest in the great spiritual traditions of
the West? I dare not respond in the affirmative, and this is why, without
a "real" dialogue, we have remained in a monologue.

UMBR(a) 59
 Of course, the responsibilities are shared. But since a dialogue takes place between "persons,"
in order to have a dialogue, it is necessary that the positions of the persons in the dialogue have
something in common. A dialogue takes place between "you" and "me." It is necessary that "you"
and "J" should be invested with the same responsibility of a personal destiny. By posing the
question of the person in this way, we have already made a big step toward the understanding
of my proposed topic.
2. In order to have a "real" dialogue, everything depends in fact on the situation of the partners
involved. The underlying concern behind the announcement of the topic of our colloquium is the
accomplished fact of the disappearance of so-called "traditional civilizations" due to the impact
of what is in general called nihilism. In essence, we are dealing here with a metaphysical nihilism
proceeding from radical agnosticism, from the refusal to "recognize" a reality transcending the
empirical horizon and rational certitudes. Is it, then, possible to have a "real" dialogue between
partners if one of them succumbed to this nihilism while the other resisted it effectively?
Nowadays, the meetings of experts on technology and technological conferences are certainly
frequent. So the question immediately emerges: Can technology fulfill the concept of civilization?
Does this concept imply a secret, invisible force (that we should call a spiritual force), determining
its content and finality, which transcends as such the premises posed by technology? If it does
not imply such a thing, we can reconcile ourselves to the leveling or even the absence of persons.
Ultimately, highly developed information machines would be sufficient. But if the concept implies
something else, it is the status of the partners' persons which is in question-that is, precisely
thatfor which and to which only a human person can answer in his or her inalienable spiritual
individuality. In the absence of the latter, in the absence of what renders its primacy possible,
we find ourselves face to face with agnostic nihilism: there is no longer any person.
3· It is precisely at this point that my topic can be introduced. In fact, I am not the first one to
observe that the socio-political systems that spread out from the contemporary West across the
whole planet are the secularizations of earlier theological systems. But this amounts to implicitly
acknowledging that the plenary concept of the West cannot be fully and simply identified with
secularization. It also means acknowledging that the phenomenon is not particular to the West,
since the Oriental world today has itself fallen prey to what we call "Westernization." This is why,
more than ever, the contrast between "East" and "West" can only be meaningful on a metaphysical
level, precisely where Iranian philosophers since Avicenna and Sohravardi have situated it.
On this level, the contrast is no longer of the ethnic, geographical, historical, or juridical or-
der. The essential contrast appears between sacralization and secularization. We understand
here by "sacralization" the announcement, recognized by intimate sentiments, of a sacrosanct
transcendental world Calam al-qods) within the phenomena and appearances of this world.
Let us, then, be careful: the secularization that we are speaking about aims at the destruction
of the metaphysical dimension. Therefore, its opposite is not the sacralization of social and
political institutions, since a sacralization of these institutions can precisely consist of the very
profanation of the sacred (its materialization). Reciprocally, as a result of a fatal confusion, the
secularization of these institutions can easily turn into the pseudo-sacralization of these very
same institutions. I hope that our young Eastern colleagues remain always perfectly conscious
of this paradox. There was, for example, the characteristic phenomenon of the religious history
of the West: the phenomenon of the Church. The separation of the State and the Church, where
it did take place, certainly accomplished the desacralization and the secularization of public life.
But, to the degree that this desacralization comes from the negation of the whole metaphysical
perspective, the whole "rear-world" ["arriere-monde"], these secularized human institutions can
be reinvested with a pseudo-sacred value. The phenomenon of the Church is simply succeeded
by the totalitarian State.
The reason for this is that the phenomena of sacralization and secularization do not primarily
take place or have their place in the world of external forms but first in the internal world of the
human soul. The human being projects outside the modalities of his internal being in order to
constitute the phenomenon of the world, the phenomena of his world, in which he makes deci-
sions about his freedom or servitude. Nihilism arises when the human being loses consciousness
of his responsibility for this link and proclaims, with desperation or cynicism, that the gates that
he himself had shut are closed.
The passage from the theological to the sociological is accomplished when the social takes
the place of theos. Horrified that it might be considered the servant of theology, philosophy
rather makes itself the eager servant of sociology. Unfortunately, sociology can no longer offer
philosophy the way out that was reserved for it by the double modality of theology: apophatic or
negative theology (tanzlh in Arabic and Persian) and affirmative or cataphatic theology (these
two concepts will be explained in further detail). The significance of the nihil of nihilism depends
on how we decide to construe the relation between the two sides of this modality (with regard to
the precedence of one over the other), and on whether we accept the absence of one or the other.
Cultural nihilism is merely the socialized aspect of an unfortunate or unsuccessful outcome of
this dialectic. I would say it is the outcome which abolishes the primacy of apophatic theology in
such a manner that the dogmas posed by positive or affirmative theology as absolutes vacillate
as if they had been deprived of their foundations and justifications.
This outcome entails the fate of the person, the fate of what the real existence of the human
person postulates, and thereby also the fate of the persons who are potential partners in a dia-
logue which is not unreal but true. It is for this reason that my topic proposes "negative theology
as antidote to nihilism."
 With this, I believe, we have reached the heart of the question as I see it. In order to unravel it,
we must first confront the notions of "personalism" and "nihilism." I will do so on the margins
of a recent article by one of our eminent French philosopher colleagues, an expert on Indian
philosophy, who denounces Western personalism for being the cause of nihilism.
I am afraid that this is a total misunderstanding. Quite to the contrary, we consider imper-
sonalism-the failure, the annulment or the alienation of the person-to be simultaneously the
cause and the outcome of nihilism. The case is so much the more serious since it implicates a
fundamental concept of the family of the three Abrahamic religions.
Therefore, we have to examine: 1. Which concept of the person is being professed when it is
denounced for being the cause of nihilism? To put it differently, how do we stand with personal-
ism and nihilism? 2. The reason behind this accusation of personalism appears to be the fact that
what the Abrahamic tradition in its entirety (and not just its Western version) has conceived of
as negative or apophatic theology has been lost from sight. 3. To put it differently, how do we
stand with apophatic theology and personalism? By sketching out this confrontation, we will be
able to discern where nihilism truly lies. 4. As a result, we will be able to oppose a rival reality
principle to the scientific conception complicit with nihilism. At the same time, we will have to
listen to the voices of our traditional Iranian philosophers, foremost among them that of Mella
Sadra Shirazi (1050/1640).

II. PERSONALISM AND NIHILISM

The article that we have referred to-well thought out and thought provoking even and especially
if we regret being in disaccord with its diaguosis-was authored by our colleague and friend, the
eminent comparatist philosopher, Professor Georges Vallin. Ifit should appear to him that I have
not fully met his intentions, it will be easy for us to dissolve all misunderstandings in a friendly
manner. The title of the article is "The Tragic and the West in Light of Asian Non-Dualism."
The paradox is the following: while for us metaphysical and moral nihilism is concomitant
with the dissolution of the person, for our colleague, as it turns out, the source of nihilism is, to
the contrary, the very notion ofthe person, which is essentially that of the spiritual individuality.
Our colleague's inquiry proceeds from anthropology to reach the level of theology, connecting
the idea of the personal self with the idea of the personal God in order to denounce them both for
the rise of nihilism. As we have just said a moment ago, the seriousness of this thesis consists of
the fact that it indicts the anthropology and the theology of the three grand Abrahamic religions,
and with them the spiritual worlds of the Greeks and the Iranians as well, the two strongholds
of the personality of God and men. The contrast between the East and the West is mostly left
behind, but the fate of the "persons" who become partners in a dialogue remains posed with so
much more urgency. Thus, we propose the following analysis.
 1. Anthropology. The leitmotif of the article in question, which is also announced in its title,
is a thesis formulated in a book by J.-M. Domenach, published a decade ago, Le Retour du
tragique (The Return of the Tragic). We find there the following: "It is significant that the tragic,
this essential category of human existence, marks no other culture beside that of Europe." The
author of the article attempts to justify this proposition by showing that where the fundamental
presuppositions of Western culture are missing, the appearance of the tragic is "strictly speak-
ing inconceivable." For us, however, this amounts to saying that we have no right to speak of the
tragic as an "essential category of human existence." At the same time, we also learn that the idea
of the tragic is the proper mark of our Western philosophy because it belongs to the essence of
this philosophy to postulate the individual. I will cite here the passages that are simultaneously
the densest and the most striking: "What appears to constitute," according to G. Vallin, "the
permanent ideology of Western man is the belief in the reality of the individual or the identi-
fication of reality with individuality, in opposition to the fundamental ideology of traditional •
Asia as it transpires in the doctrines of the non-dualist Vedanta of Taoism or of the Buddhism
of the Grand Vehicle.'"
We are invited here to consider the idea that for Oriental man the real is identical with the
Universal or the Supraformal. But we have to ask ourselves: How could human thought express
itself aboutthe Supraformal in any other way than by negative terms? We are offered the famous
formula, tat tuam asi, meaning that you (the ego) are also the suprapersonal Absolute, which
leaves the question intact whether this ego named here is still an ego when it is equated with
the Suprapersonal. In other words, how does this "I" have the power to say that "1am identical
with the suprapersonal Absolute," when the idea of the real human being is being opposed to
the idea ofthe ego? Is it the real human being or the illusory ego that declares that "I am that."
Is it enough to say "I am that" in order for the ego to cease to be illusory?
Our colleagne indeed explains that here the negativity implied by the ego in its usual exoteric
definition is not originary but derived in the sense that this negativity has for its origin the belief
in the reality of this ego, a belief which is the very "obscuring" of the "essential identity of the I
and the supra-personal Absolute." In fact, it is the Self who is responsible for it. We read the fol-
lowing in the text: "The individual is in a sense responsible for its own individuation, since the
permanent possibility of rediscovering the 'universal' or 'infinite' dimension of Being, from which
it has never been separated in reality, is inscribed into the heart of its being."" In other words,
the individual is gnilty of existence or gnilty for its own existence. A truly and extremely disturb-
ing proposition anticipating the moment when the individual will be imposed upon to rid itself
of this gnilt but no longer in order to recover its "universal or infinite" dimension. The tearing
apart of all existence, culminating in the destruction of death, would only be experienced as such
if we identified the real human being with the ego. In Buddhist terms, "the existence of the ego
is identical with suffering, and the being of the ego is identical with the void." But a Westerner,
without necessarily being a philosopher or a goostic, could ask himself: But what if it is the other
way around? What if the origin of suffering is the mutilation of spiritual individuality and this
mutilation is the only justification to consider the ego as an illusion? In that case, would not the
great problem be the restoration of the ego to its originary plenitude? To put it differently, we
would not at all respond to the tragedy of the mutilation of the person by the acceptance of the
void, but by the war between the sons of light against the powers of darkness-that is, in short,
by the whole Zoroastrian ethics of ancient Iran.
From now on, we can see that the issue at hand concerns what was traditionally called in
philosophy the "principle of individuation." I cite once again: "We know that the dominant
ontologies and the anthropologies of Western man are precisely centered around the invincible
affirmation of the reality of the ego (in all its forms) and of the reality of indioidual forms in
general. This belief appears to us to be a correlative of the mutilation of being" because its ori-
gins and essence are to be found in "the negativity or the principle of individuation identical
with the reality principle." Once again, this position appears to be extremely serious. It appears
to us to be marked and tarnished by the confusion denounced by our Iranian metaphysicians
of the Avicennian tradition: the confusion between the transcendental unity of Being (wahdat
al-wojiid) and the impossible, contradictory, illusory unity of beings (mawjiid, which is the
Latin ens).5 They categorically renounced this confusion committed by a certain Sufism which
confirmed the position defined by Geroges Vallin as that of Eastern man. At the same time,
however, our Iranian philosophers are in agreement here with the great neo- Platonist Proclus's
metaphysics of being: the relation between the Henad of Henads and the unified Henads of the
multiple Ones (that the Henads pose in the act of being by turning them each into one single
being, since Being can only be being in the multiplicity of individual beings). The affirmation
of the reality of individual forms, therefore, is not at all a mutilation of Being but, contrarily, its
revelation and full expression. The confusion of the order of Being and the order of beings is
fatal. The principle of individuation is the positing of a being. If we only see in it negativity, we
are on our way toward metaphysical catastrophe.
Furthermore, we do not believe that we could simply say that this principle of individuation
dominates the totality of Western thought from Aristotle to Sartre," since this principle itself was
interpreted in two opposing ways so different from each other that they involve irreducible con-
sequences. Formulated in terms ofhylemorphism, the question is the following: Is the principle
of individuation matter or form? If it is matter, spiritual individuality (as the form and the idea
of a being) might be only illusory. If it is form, then it is this imperishable and inalienable spiri-
tual individuality itself. It is called Fravarti (Persianforfihar) in Avesta, Neshama in the Jewish
Kabala, 'ayn thdbita (eternal hecceity) by Ibn Arabi, and Perfect Nature (al-tibO.'al-tdmm) by
Suhravardi and the hermetic tradition of Islamic theosophy, and so on.
--

Therefore, when our colleague writes that for him nihilism "appears to originate in the inau-
guration of the principle of individuation or the metaphysical sanctification of the ego" and that
"the properly tragic destiny of the West appears to us to consist of the progressive discovery of
the consequences of this sanctification that coincides with the fundamental Prometheanism of
Western man; Western man is essentially tragic, since with him negativity is originary and not
derived," we must admit that what comes spontaneously to our mind is a radically antithetical
position. The tragic is not particular to Western man, because the tragic and tragedy are the human
being itself. There is a Promethean tragic but there is also an Ohrmazdean tragic (the invasion
of Ahriman), both completely different in their nature and signs." The tragic does not consist of
an individuation professed to be initial and the very law of every being (of the spiritual as well as
the material world), but of the failure or the catastrophe that involves with its dramatic conse-
quences the spiritual individualities that pre-exist this world. This is described by the dramatic
cosmogonies that are common to all the Abrahamic as well as the Iranian gnoses (Zoroastrism,
Manichaeism) as well as the "Platonic mysteries."
Individuation, therefore, is not a secondary derivation here but something truly initial, which
arises with the ontogenesis of being. It is not the principle of individuation that is tragic. The
tragic is what mutilates, paralyzes, betrays, caricatures it. To such an extent that if it is the
principle of individuation that differentiates Western man from Asian traditional man, we must
admit once again that we do not comprehend how our colleague Georges Vallin can denounce '"
'"
the contemporary Far East as hence participating in the cultural domain of Western civilization
that has become global. As far as we know, quite to the contrary, the cultural domain of the
contemporary Far East does not particularly distinguish itself by the recognition of the rights of
the individual ego.' Or perhaps this recognition is not the characteristic mark of Western man,
nor that of Western culture whose impact has become global. Ifthe global influence ofthe West
is accompanied by the deterioration of the rights of the individual, how could we characterize
the West by a "sanctification ofthe individual"? Either we are dealing with something other and
more than Western influence, or Western thought is not what we are told it is. We find ourselves,
therefore, at the heart of the topic of our colloquium, since how could we conceive of a dialogue
without an agreement concerning its fundamental premises? There could be only confrontation
or a dialogue of the deaf. But I am trying to lead us toward the conditions of a dialogue between
partners who are partners in a dialogue because they are partners of the same destiny.
The principle of individuation is so essential that, supposing that it constitutes the tragic it-
self, the latter would not only mark the West but all spiritual universes whose fiery-eyed gnoses
attempted to penetrate the mystery that preceded the "descent" of man into this world. In fact,
the principle of individuation is so significant that our philosopher colleague, still following the
impetus that led him to denounce the identification of the real with the individual as the source
 of nihilism, will also denounce, this time passing from anthropology to theology, the Judeo-
Christian concept of the individual God as responsible for the theological nihilism proclaiming
the "death of God." Once again, just as previously the denunciation of the principle of individu-
ation appeared to lose sight of what the narrative gnoseological cosmogonies described, here
it is what is called negative or apophatic (tanzih) theology in the Abrahamic set of gnoses and
theosophies that appears to be deliberately silenced. But it would be extremely serious to lose
sight of such a thing.
2. Theology. We can in fact discover here the tacit presupposition that allows us to affirm an
essential link between the idea of a personal God and the negativity of the self conceived of as
originary, as inherent in the very idea of the self which would be the "extreme form of the activity
of negation" and, as such, the primordial source of a primordial nihilism (a kind of Urnihilismus).
We, on the other hand, believe that, as far as we are concerned, this negativity is not originary
at all and it is not inherent in the self. Furthermore, the tragic has to be related to an incidental
negativity, which is the present condition of the ego, the condition ofits existence in this present
world and the result of a catastrophe. This is discussed in all the narrative gnoseological anthro-
pogonies and psychogonies. It is not the ego that is the tragedy but its mutilation compensated
for by a pathological inflation, in short, its "descent" into this world. The sentiment of "exile"
(so vital in Jewish and Islamic theosophy) expresses the same thing: there is something "incom-
mensurate" between what the soul (the ego) is in the present and what the soul (the ego) feels
itselfto be called upon to be by virtue of a pre-existential origin that it can sense. The mystic
epics translate this incommensurate protestation much better than philosophical systems. (For,
there is no common measure between its actual state and what it is called upon to be.) The mystic
epics and theosophies always recounted the same tragedy. But this adventure, this tragedy of the
soul that takes place in the world of the Soul, would be inconceivable if it were not also a divine
or rather an intra-divine adventure that takes place and finds its place within the divine itself.
This is precisely the problem that apophatic theology aims at and outlines, as well as the reason
why the personal God still has a regard for us, that is, still concerns us now and forever.
This is to say that the divine person, the personal form of the personal God, is not itself the
originary absolute. Rather, it is the eternal result of an eternal process within the divine. Eter-
nally resulting from an eternal process, however, it is simultaneously derived and originary. If we
contemplate this secret, we can understand that personalism is not at all the source of nihilism.
Inversely, it is the loss of this personalism, the failure and abortion of the person that nihilates
its ontogenesis. Eo ipso, the transpersonal cannot be conceived by human thought as ontologi-
cally superior to the personal form of the divinity and the human self.
Hence, when dealing with the origins of Evil, it will immediately appear insufficient to reduce
the problem to an alternative: either the tendency of the myth of Greek tragedy to conceive of
man as innocent; or the tendency of Judeo-Christian monotheism to conceive of God as inno-
cent-in the sense that "alone the will of free man, created by God, would be the origin ofEvil."w
Perhaps this is how things present themselves in a purely exoteric monotheism. But apophatic
theology in particular, as it develops into a theosophy, surpasses and displaces the problem
posed in such exoteric terms. Unfortnnately, everything happens as if the spokesperson of the
traditional Asian man did not conceive of any other position than that of an exoteric affirmative
theology, which, deprived of the safeguards of negative or apophatic theology, is thereby inca-
pable of sensing the fundamental idea that renders the personal God and his believer partners
in the same combat. These heroes confront together the same tragedy whose origins and stakes
are not that their respective persons are a negativity that needs to be absorbed but, contrarily,
a positivity to be conquered.
It appears, then, that to the thesis of the culpability of the ego as such that we have already
invoked here previously-which poses that "the ego is 'guilty' of existence" and that individuation
appears as a "mistake" to the degree that we are redirected to the suprapersonal dimension of the
Self whose ego ultimately could only be distinct in an illusory mode-for our part, we can only
oppose a double antithesis: culpability is not in the existence of the ego; it is in the failure that
mutilates and paralyzes it. Thus, it is in reality the loss of the ego, which most often translates
H

as an inflation into emptiness and monstrosity. The illusion is not the "illusory" differentiation
of the ego from the transpersonal absolute, but its cancellation through its equation with the
Absolute. So, in opposition to the thesis which holds that "the tragic is only possible for the man
who remains faithful to the famous Greek 'measure,' to the vision of man enclosed in his finitude,
and who identifies with the constitutive limits of his humanity and with his ego,"" we have to
argue that, quite to the contrary, in the Gnostic epics it is the transgression of this limit that
triggers the earlier catastrophe that determines the existence of this world. It is this catastrophe
that produces the limits of a self mutilated and paralyzed in and by its existence in this world.
These limits are those of his captivity and exile and not the limits that eternally determine his
very being, the unity of his monad. Fall and liberation are the grand acts ofthis tragedy. The
liberation of the individual being restores its complete and authentic individuality and monadic-
ity. It restores its truth rather than denounces it as illusory.
We are now oriented in an altogether different direction from that which, envisaging the person
and personalism from the point of view of an "Asian non-dualism," denounces them as entailing
a certain nihilism. To the contrary, we propose that it is the task of the concept of the person to
"counter" nihilism, so that the partners of a dialogue can be real persons and not shadows of a
suprapersonal Self whose individuality would be a mere illusion.
The little that we have just said puts us on the way to have a more profound conception of
apophatic theology, by refusing from now on the thesis that would turn Abrahamic (that is to
 say, J udeo-Christian- Islamic) monotheism into another form of the tragic inherent in the culture
ofthe West which "sanctifies" the ego and the individual. We have reversed these nihilating
theses prolonged by another thesis which holds that the basis of this tragedy is the institution of
a personal Absolute in the place of a suprapersonal Absolute. Apophatic theology has precisely
the virtue of protecting us from any confusion between the Absolute and the personal God, be-
tween the indeterminacy of the former and the necessity of the latter. Consequently, when our
eminent colleague, appointing himself the spokesperson of an "Asian non-dualism," denounces
the living and personal God of Judeo-Christian- Islamic monotheism as "the first stage of the
death of God,"" we have to reverse the meaning of nihilitude and restore its correct sense. This
"first death of God," as we are told, had been brought about by the confusion and equation of
the Absolute and the personal God. We concede that it can in fact appear to be the work of the
affirmative and dogmatic theology of a completely exoteric Church deprived or depriving itself of
the safeguard of apophatic theology. Perhaps this is precisely that aspect of the "official" theology
that our friend Georges Vallin envisages. In that case, we are in agreement with him. But how do
we stand with regard to the theosophical theology based on an apophatic theology which precisely
differentiates the Absolute from the personal God? In fact, as our philosopher colleague puts it
very nicely, explicitly referring to Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Karl Barth, it is a theology deprived
of theosophy, which contemplates an "absent God" as "the object of a certain impotent nostalgia
for the unhappy consciousness."> But we would have liked him to consider-and it appears to
us impossible that he did not at least secretly do so-what we have in mind here which would
have allowed him to refer just like we do to Johannes Scotus Erigena, Jacob Boehme, Ibn Arabi,
Isaac Lauria, and so on.
In fact, the absolute is not that first and primordial aspect that we usually designate with that
word. It is a passive participle that supposes a nomen agentis, the so-called absolvens which ab-
solves it by turning it into absolutum. Ifthe absolvens absolves the absolute of all determination,
the absolute still needs to be absolved of this very indetermination. This remark could help us
avoid quite a few misunderstandings. Contrary to the thesis according to which the arrival of the
personal God of the "religions of the Book" in the three Abrahamic groups constitutes the "first
death of God," we have to argue that the act of exorcizing this" death of God" does not consist of
the effacement of the personal God in front of the suprapersonal Absolute. Rather it consists of
the understanding that the autogeneration of the personal God engendering the Absolute, ab-
solving itself of the indetermination of this Absolute, is not the "death" but the eternal birth of
God. This, certainly, amounts to a reversal of the phenomenological analysis. For Georges Vallin,
"modernity" would be the "second death of God" or, at least, "the event following the second death
of God." It would consist of the human ego, forever losing sight of its fundamental negativity,
entering "into an active process of totalization" which leads to "the hegemony ofthe principle of
individuation." Therefore, he says, "history is sacralized while man is collectivized."
 We are certain that our friend Georges Vallin won't hold it against us if we confess that we
found it somewhat difficult to follow his analysis all the way. It appears to us that, to the contrary,
in order for humanity to be collectivized, the rampart of the person, of the individual monad,
needs to collapse on all levels. It is precisely at the point where the ego as such is denounced
as an illusion that we can no longer clearly see how it could resist collectivization, even if we
define this illusion in relation to a suprapersonal Self. At the same time, in order for history to
be "sacralized," the agents and the events of this history must be perceived from a unique one-
dimensional perspective by way of a nihilism which rejects the transcendental dimension of
the person (and as snch of every respective person), because it perceives in this dimension the
manifestation of a rival reality principle.
So, in what sense is the theology called apophatic as such (the safeguard of the person against
nihilism) simultaneously the safeguard of the divine and the human person? Furthermore, how ..,i
does it turn the safeguarded person into the very safeguard against nihilism? And, from now
on, what is the difference between the epiphany of the person eternally being born from the
Urqrund and the dogmatic affirmation of the divine person that has not suffered the trial of
apophatic experience?

III. APOPHATIC THEOLOGY AND PERSONALISM

By affirmative or cataphatic theology, we mean a theology that, reflecting on the concept of
God, affirms all its attributes of essence, operation, and perfection that appear to conform to
the concept of divinity. Ultimately, every human attribute is sublimated. This is what we call via
eminentiae. At the same time, this "way" sublimates the creaturely attributes only to confer them
on the divinity. Monotheism is in danger of succumbing to the very idolatry that it otherwise re-
nounces. Negative or apophatic theology, in order to radically avoid the peril of this assimilation
(tashbib) of the divinity to the creature, denies all attributes to the divinity and only speaks in
this regard in negative terms: such is the tanzih, the via negationis. This is the way par excellence
chosen by Shiite Islam, Ismailis as well as Twelve-Imam Shiites.» I am thinking of the sermon
delivered in Merv by the EightImam, 'Ali-Reza, admirably commented on by Qazi Sa'id Qommi;
I am thinking of the school of Rajab 'Ali Tabrizi, the sheik school of Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa't, etc. ,6
In our Western tradition, it is Jacob Boehme who appears to be the most representative. I will
therefore refer essentially to him in order to simplify the explication at hand.
Every metaphysical doctrine that attempts a total explication of the universe finds itself facing
the necessity to make something come from nothing, or rather to make everything come from
nothing, since the initial principle from which the world emerges and which has to explain it
cannot be anything contained within this world. '7 At the same time, this initial principle must
possess everything necessary to explain simultaneously the being and the essence of the world and
what it contains. Therefore, this principle cannot itself be either Being or a part of Being, since it
is Being that it needs to account for. In this respect, it is the negation of Being. In relation to the
things of this world and to thought, it is absolutely undetermined. This absolute is nothingness.
On the other hand, however, it must possess a relation with the things that follow from it. It must
possess a certain similarity with the things whose source it is. This initial principle, therefore,
as the late Alexandre Koyre excellently analyzed it, must be at the same time "everything" and
"nothing." This is the starting point of the constitution of the two theologies: negative (apophatic)
and affirmative (cataphatic), the via negationis and the via eminentiae.
We have, then, initially a double nothingness, a double nihil, and therefore two forms of nihil-
ism: one is in a certain way positive; the other is pure negativity. There is a nihil a quo omnia
fiunt, a nothingness from which everything comes. This is the Nothingness of the divine Absolute
superior to being and thought. And there is a nihil a quo nihilfit, a nothingness from which noth-
ing comes forth and into which everything tends to fall and sink back, a nothingness inferior to
being and thought. I am afraid that when people speak of nihilism, they often lose sight of the
difference between two nihils.
The Neo-Platonist tradition, by the Greeks as well as its three Abrahamic branches, tended to
prioritize the apophatic over the affirmative (cataphatic) way, since Being finds itself subordinated
to the Absolute. We already alluded to this a moment ago. Without the priority of the apophatic
(of this nihil from which everything proceeds), we can merely pile creaturely attributes on the
divinity (the nihil from which nothing proceeds). Thus, monotheism perishes in its triumph as it
degenerates into the kind of idolatry it ferociously tried to avoid. Such was the fate of affirmative
theologies, when they cut themselves off and isolated themselves from the strong fort of apophatic
theology. And it was their fate that appeared to us to be the just target of Geroges Vallin's criticism.
Negative theology, however, does not constitute an Absolute to which everything must return to
be all swallowed up (that is nihilism). Rather, everything must come from this Absolute which
maintains in being everything that it makes exist. In short, exoteric monotheism understands the
constitutive nature of unique Being as if it were the unity of beings. We have already explained
this fatal confusion. But the relation of Being to beings, of the undetermined Absolute to the
personal God, is not to be conceived in the sense of a nothingness that must be reabsorbed within
the Absolute (a multiplicity of beings which must be confused with the unity of Being), but in
the sense of a positivity whose principle and source is the Absolute." It is in this sense that the
esoteric theosophies of Islam, most notably that of Ibn 'Arabi, understood the famous hadith: "I
was a hidden Treasure. I wanted to be known. I created the world to become known." The nihil-
ism that degrades the positive value of the personal God amounts to forbidding to the hidden
Treasure (to the undetermined Absolute) that it manifest itself by determining itself, that Being
exist as being in the plurality of beings.
 I have just cited Ihn 'Arabi whose mystical theosophy centers on this differentiation between
the undetermined and unknowable Absolute (the Absconditum) and the Rabb (the personal
lord, the Deus reve/atus, the only one man can speak of because it is its correlative term).
We find the same thing in Ismaili theosophy for which the name Al-ldh in fact corresponds
to the First Intelligence ofthe pleroma. We could think here ofthe relation between En-S6f
and the ten Sepiroth, of Metatron and the Cherubim on the throne in Jewish gnosis, as well
as all the great protestant mystics: Sebastian Franck and Valentin Weigel, etc., since for all
of them it is only in relation to us, creatures, that the deity can appear as a force, power, will,
action, etc.'?
The absolutely undetermined can only become the determined Deus revelatus required by via
positionis in relation to the creature in as much as the latter is created by this Deus reuelatus.
It is, therefore, necessary for the Absolute to step outside its absoluteness and posit a personal
creature whose personal God it is in such a way that the personal God is not at all the originary
negativity that we have seen renounced earlier as "the first death of God." On the contrary, it is
the birth of the divine that occurs in this passage of the Absolute to the person. If one were to c:
ask why this stepping outside itself, why this correlation of the Creator with the created being is ~
necessary, the best answer would still be found in the exemplary works of our Jacob Boehme: his '"
'"
E
immense oeuvre, which hides the secret of his Quest, is the personal response to this question
and here no other answer is possible but the personal.
In fact, Boehme's whole theology is "an analysis of the conditions of possibility of the absolute
person" that is absolved of the indetermination of the original Absolute, the Absconditum. (As
we have said above, the Absolute being absolved of all determination still remains to be absolved
of this indetermination). Koyre's merit was having been one of the very few who grasped this
aspect that differentiates Boehme from so many of his predecessors whose pitfalls he saved us
from-an important point, because his exemplary case helps us perceive what brings into ques-
tion the topic that I proposed and, through this topic, the conditions of a dialogue.
"What Boehme believes before all doctrine, what he is searching for, what all his doctrine is
destined to justify, is that God is a personal Being and, even more, that he is a person, a living
and active person conscious of itself, a perfect person. "'0 Let us mark these words well: "what he
is searching for." The personal God is not given in a primitive fashion. He is encountered at the
end of a Quest (much like the Holy Grail). Thus, there is no confusion between the Absolute and
the personal God supposedly caused by Western personalism and denounced, as we have seen,
for being the source of the nihilism responsible for the "death of God." This Quest contrasts with
two symmetrical nihilisms: one of affirmative (cataphatic) theology immediately establishing its
dogma as absolute beyond which there is nothing to be found; and that of a negative (apophatic)
theology that only aspires to the indeterminacy of the Absolute and loses sight of the fact that it
 is the nihil a quo omnia procedunt (the hidden Treasure of hadith cited above). In both cases,
we have a theology without theophany.
From this moment on, we can discern two permanent attitudes persisting throughout the
centuries until our very days that are typified, respectively, by the mystical doctrine of Meister
Eckhart (14"' century) and by the mystical theosophy of Jacob Boehme (1575-1624)." Byobserv-
ing these two exemplary cases, we can start to avoid the traps of nihilism.
In both of them, we certainly encounter the same profound sentiment of the mystical Divin-
ity as undetermined Absolute, immobile and unchangeable in his eternity. From this point on,
however, the two masters diverge. For Meister Eckhart, the Deitas (Gottheit) transcends the
personal God, and the latter must be transcended because it is the correlative of the human soul,
the world, and the creature. The personal God, therefore, is only one step on the way of the mystic
because this personal God is affected by limitation and negativity, by non-being and becoming:
"He becomes and un-becomes" (Er wird und entwird)." The "Eckhartian soul" strives to free
itself of it in order to escape from the limits of being, from the nihil of finitude and everything
that could fixate it. Therefore, it must escape from itself in order to dive into the abyss of divin-
....
N

ity, into an Abgrund whose bottom (Grund) it can never reach. Jacob Boehme's conception and
attitude are completely different. He is searching for liberation in the affirmation of the self, in
the realization of the true self, ofits eternal "idea" (which is what the very concept of 'ayn thdbita
means by Ibn 'Arabi and all those he inspired in Islamic theosophy).
Therefore, everything is reversed: it is not the personal God which is a step toward the Deitas,
the undetermined Absolute. To the contrary, this Absolute is a step toward the generation, the
eternal birth of the personal God. Jacob Boehme also admits that "Er wird und entwird," but
this does not mean for him the nihilating nihil annihilating the personal God. On the contrary, it
designates the nihil of the Absolute differentiating itself in its aspiration to reveal itself, to deter-
mine itself (the hidden Treasure!) in a single Nunc aetemitatis (ewiges Nu). We find here, then,
an intradivine history, which is not History in the ordinary sense of the word, but an atemporal
History, eternally achieved and eternally beginning, simultaneously and eternally complete (simul
total in all the forms and stages of its auto-generation as personal God. The latter "contains in
itself every difference [...] He is in the movement and the movement is in him." The determination
that the person carries, therefore, is not "originary" here. It is no longer marked by nothingness.
It is the conquest over and by the nihil of the originary indetermination.
This is precisely the point we can all profit from. By describing the conditions that render pos-
sible the absolute person as the triumph and conquest of the primordial nihil (the conditions
that form the whole structure of the divine organism), Boehme describes eo ipso "the route by
which God has passed and is eternally passing in order to be able to engender and constitute
himself, the eternally successive since eternally simultaneous phases of divine life: the stages of
his internal development.vs This internal intra-divine History of the eternal generation of the
personal God is the archetype that the human soul exemplifies in order to accede to the dignity
of the person. The personal form of being is "the highest because it realizes the revelation of the
self. Being can only realize or manifest itself by determining and manifesting itself."" These are
the same relations that the vocabulary of our Iranian philosophers expresses with terms such
as zohiir (manifestation), tajall1 eldhi (theophany), mazhar (theophanic form), tashakhkhos
(individuation). With these terms, we announce a whole program for comparative philosophy.
From this moment, we also possess the necessary strategy to confront the nihil a quo nihilfit
(nihilism as such), which presents itself today in a laicized form as agnosticism or totalitarian
collectivism. Personalism is not only the vocation of the West. It is not only the Greek world. It
is also the Iranian world and the whole spiritual universe of the "religions of the Book." It is the
rampart against all the negative and annihilating forces. Researching the origins and the causes
of the failures and derelictions ofthis personalism has taken us quite far.
In short, I have cited the case of Jacob Boehme as exemplary ofthose for whom the supreme
goal of man's Quest in this world is not the Ens nullo modo determinatum (even if one presents c
~
this "being entirely undetermined" as the ideal of traditional Asia). To the contrary, it is the '"
Ens determinatum omni modo (the entirely determined being) which is the goal of the Quest. '"
E
Beyond this, "there is no longer any person." The dialogue would take place between "shadows." ....
w
This is precisely the meaning that I give to the topic I proposed, negative theology as antidote
to nihilism, because this negative theology authenticates the eternal birth of the person. It is,
therefore, not by annihilating itself through fusion with the divinity or the collective which is
its illusory laicization; it is not by abandoning what defines it as a person and posits it in being;
contrarily, it is by realizing that which is more personal and profound in him that man fulfills
his essential function which is the theopanic function: to express God, to be the theophore, the
God-bearer.
This contrast which confronts us with a choice can announce itself in two Latin formulas that
we owe to the genius of Franz von Baader, the great interpreter of Boehme: "To the thesis Omnis
determinatio est negatio ('every determination is negation,' the thesis which sees personalism
as the source of nihilism), Boehme implicitly opposed the belief: Omnis determinatio est positio
(every determination is positing)."" The contrast between these two theses recapitulates every-
thing we tried to show here. So, whether we take charge of the past or the future, we can now
confront the question: Where is nihilism?

IV. WHERE IS NIHILISM?

We can answer to this question that nihilism is not in the principle of individuation, which was
denounced as such. This principle is, contrarily, the rampart against nihilism, provided that it
aims at the integral ego and not the ego that onr harmful habits qualify as normal. To put it dif-
ferently, nihilism appears to us in the alienation of the principle of individuation. The reason for
this is that, far from being a negativity, determination is positive. The personal form of Being is
its supreme determination and its supreme revelation. Therefore, everything that tends toward
abolishing it constitutes either a menace or a symptom of nihilism. And this menace can veil itself
behind fundamentally identical forms that appear to be different. I want to say that the person
called by Dostoyevsky the "Grand Inquisitor" has a wide choice of uniforms. At the same time,
for example, we find a warning formulated in the few lines of a psychologist opportunely quoted
by Theodore Roszak, which tell us that mental integrity or true sanity "implies in one way or
another the dissolution of the normal ego, of this false I cleverly adopted to our alienated social
reality; the emergence of 'internal' archetypes that mediate divine power, while the outcome of
this death is the rebirth and re-creation of a new function of the ego, wherein the I no longer
betrays the divine but serves it. ",6
Let us consider carefully every word of these dense lines. They are like instructions for an
initiation inviting us first to the death of an ego mutilated by an alienated social reality, then
leading us to the new birth of a regenerated self invested with divine function that, henceforth, it
has the force to support and fulfill. Based on this, we can now ask the capital question: "What is
a person?" This is the question implicitly posed today by a good deal of research which appears
to be disorganized because it is desperate, but which is in fact organized by the sense that the
decisive secret (that is, the hidden value of personal conscience) cannot be found, for example,
in some kind of class consciousness but rather in a consciousness of the consciousness revealing
the secret of this class consciousness.
I had the privilege of participating last May in a conference held at the Philosophical Institute
of the University of Tours whose theme was "Man and Angel." The mere announcement of such a
topic might sound today like a challenge to common and received evidences. In fact, it is because
it is a challenge that such a topic contains precisely the secret way that leads to the answer to the
question we pose here: "What is a person?" In this way, I will appeal to onr Iranian philosophers
(to whom I have owed so much for so long) to show us the answer to this question as well as,
finally, the message of Iranian philosophy for onr colloquium.
I find this answer by reference to a fundamental concept of the anthropology of pre-Islamic
Zoroastrian Iran, Fravarti (which is the correct pronunciation of what is written as "fravashi" or
in Persian frouhar). In Zoroastrianism, the word designates the celestial archetype of every being
oflight, its superior Self, its guardian Angel, in as much as the latterforms part of its very being
because it is its celestial counterpart. This concept is so fundamental to Zoroastrian personalism,
as the very law of being, that Ohrmazd himself, his archangels (Amahraspandi'm) and all the
God-Angels (Izad, see also the Dii-Angeli by Proclus) have their own respective fravarti." It is
this fravarti that gives its true dimension to the person. A human person is only a person due to
this celestial, archetypal, angelic dimension, the celestial pole without which the terrestrial pole
of its human dimension is completely depolarized, condemned to wondering and perdition. The
drama would be the loss of this pole, of this celestial dimension, because the whole fate of the
person is engaged in this drama.
And it is precisely here, where the theme of our colloquium is situated, that we have to seek
today the drama of the West that includes vast regions of the East.
We must, therefore, congregate around this ancient concept of Zoroastrian Iran, since under
different names we find its equivalents almost everywhere in the Abrahamic as well as the Greek
world. I can only give here simple indicative reminders." We can find its functional equivalent in
the hermetic notion of Perfect Nature (al-tiba' al-tdmm), so essential in Suhravardi's philosophy
and admirably explicated by Abii'l- Barakat Baghadi. This is also the notion of the "Witness in the
Sky,"the "Shayk al-ghayb," the secret personal guide, by Najmoddin Kobra, Semnani, 'Aziz Nasafi. ....
It is the form oflight which, at the time of its initiation, joins itself to the faithful in Ismailism, a
precise Manichean reminiscence (see also the Paraclete or Angel of the prophet Mani). Its idea
can also be represented by the image of the subtle body, the ethereal spiritual body, or by the im- c:
~
age of a celestial garment (the "the song of the Pearl" in Thomas's Acts), or by that of the Tselem '"
'"
(form) in Judaic Kabala which recapitulates the others. It is the celestial Self that is implied in E
the formula "to see oneself," "to know oneself." Because this form is the primordial Form of the ....
human being, the archetypal supreme Image according to which man was created, it is the mirror '"
in which God or rather his Angel, the "Angel of the Face," appears to the visionaries. '9 Although
the prophet ofIslam received the answer: "You won't see me," Ian tariini (Koran 7/139), we still
have his testimony: "I have seen my Lord (ra'ito rabbi; in the most beautiful form. "30
The integral Ego, the integral person, is precisely this unus-ambo, this "dualness" [dualitudeJ,
The monadological conception of the human being as mundus concentratus presupposes the
dual polarity of the "Angel of Man," since in order to be integral, it must contain the pole of the
celestial world as well as the pole of the terrestrial world. This is what the Iranian philosophers
of the Avicennian tradition designate with the term 'alam 'aqli, which was translated into Latin
as saeeulum intelligible: spiritual individuality at its peak is a completely "spiritual world," an
Aion, as the Avicennian term resuscitates in a significant way the Gnostic designation of Eons
(Aions), the spiritual entities of the gnosis,» Thus, the integral Ego progressively tends toward
being an Ens omni modo determinatum, radically reversing the process that would try to identify
it with the undetermined Absolute. This simple recapitulation of Boehme's position mentioned
earlier suffices to indicate where the menace of nihilism emerges.
This menace arises exactly at the point where the spiritual, transcendental, angelic dimension
ofthe person disappears. In short, it appears when the Fravarti that gives it (without institu-
tional mediation) its dimension beyond this world disappears. The invasion of nihilism begins
when this dimension, which is the supreme principle of individuation, disappears. We do not
have to discuss its whole history here. It started a long time ago. It is the history of "man without
fravarti." No doubt-since the Zoroastrians were the ones who had the strength to look the hor-
rible Ahriman, the principle of active nihilitude, in the face-it is precisely this menace that they
sensed by contemplating the invasion of the Ohrmazdian creation oflight by Ahriman's negativ-
ity. Ohrmazd has summoned to his help all the fravartis. Without their help, he could not have
defended the ramparts of the sky. It is a significant feature of the thought of the old Zoroastrian
Iran: the menace is so terrifying that the God of Light needs the help of all of his kind. So a pact
of chivalrous solidarity is established between the Lord of Wisdom (Mazda) and all his celestial
knighthood. They are partners in the same battle. The idea of the chivalric pact can be found in
the mystical solidarity of Rabb and marbiib (master and servant) by Ibn 'Arabi and everywhere
where the idea of thefotovvat, in Persianjavdnmardl (spiritual chivalry) appears.
But what happens when the celestial dimension of the person, which constitutes the very being
of the person as its supreme individuation, disappears?
What happens is the rupture of the pact of reciprocal engagement. AB a result, the whole rela-
tion of God and man is altered. They are no longer in solidarity, responding to each other, in the
same combat. They face each other as master and slave. One of the two must disappear. While
Prometheanism has stolen the sacred Fire by violence, for Mazdaism humans were the guard-
ians of this sacred Fire that the celestial powers entrusted them with. This Prometheanisrn, in
order to reach its goal, has assumed all the possible forms of the Grand Inquisitor. To think by
oneself, to personally create by one's own initiative, to freely risk the Promethean adventure are
tasks many humans would rather spare themselves. Therefore, the Grand Inquisitor assumes
this task instead of them, on the condition that they renounce being themselves. To this end,
it is denied to human individuality to contain in it something inborn. Everything that it is, it
will have received from its environment, from the omnipotent pedagogy that takes charge of
it." How to be oneself, when the self is annihilatedy» It is at this point that nothingness surges
forth into a desacralized world. How could man, in the absence of its own person, from now on
annihilated, still encounter a God that appears to him in a personal form? The only thing left to
him is to pray to this God to exist.
The triumph of nihilism will always be marked by the forms of imperious agnosticism and
the agnostic imperative: the reality of being limited to the unique empirical world, the truth of
consciousness limited to sensible perceptions and abstract laws of understanding. In short, it is
everything that governs the concept of the world we call scientific and objective, as the reality
of events is limited to empirical History in such a way that it is no longer possible to escape the
dilemma "myth or history," since we are no longer capable of sensing that there are "events in the
Sky." We have just said that all our ruling ideologies are laicized versions of theological systems
having perished in their triumph. We mean with this that the divine Incarnation has transformed
itself into social or socio-political Incarnation. From now on, it is the very idea of this Incarnation
that manifests the gravity of it consequences. It was impossible for official dogma to stabilize
the paradoxical equilibrium between human and divine nature. It was necessary that either the
human element abolishes the divine or that the divine volatilizes the human. This latter case was
the fact of monophysism, and we could say that the phenomena of socialization and totalitarian-
ism that it entails are merely monophysisms in reverse.s-
These are the consequences of the failure or disappearance of personalism-of this personalism
that we have seen denounced as the source of nihilism. But, for us, the opposite is true. Therefore,
we need to construct or reconstruct-which is to say, reactivate-a reality principle rivaling this
nihilating reality and, thus, rivaling nihilism as such.
..J.- ,

V. FOR A REALITY PRINCIPLE RIVALING NIHILISM

We will find this principle precisely by starting with the dialogue, simultaneously presupposed
and instituted by the double dimension of the integral person, between its celestial and terres-
trial poles, or as we have put it in Iranian terms, between Favarti (or Angel) and Soul. Since it
is the rupture of this bipolarity that renders possible the offensive return of the nothinguess of ....
nihil, we must establish or restore a reality principle that makes the fatal inversion impossible,
....
in which the personal God is confused with the undetermined Absolute and secularized on the
level of a social Incarnation.
The "mystery of mysteries" (in Ismailism as well as in Islamic guosis the ghayb al-ghoyub) is
manifestativum sui. Byits very essence, as we have seen by Boehme and Ibn 'Arabi, ittends toward
manifesting itself. The idea of this manifestation presupposes eo ipso the second term: the one
to whom it manifests itself. There is, therefore, eo ipso a correlation between this auto-genera-
tion that leads the divine Absolute to manifest itself as a personal God, between this intradivine
History and the History of the soul extracting itself from external pressures and oppressions so
that finally its eternal "Idea" (which is the very secret of its unique person) can appear. There is a
correlation between the divine birth and the birth of the soul for which this divine birth produces
itself. This correlation, thus, establishes between the two terms an interdependence, a reciprocal
solidarity, such that the one cannot continue to exist without the other. If one of the two were to
disappear, the other would become the prey of nihil. There is a correlation between the "death
of God" and the death of man. We have spoken of a pact of chivalric solidarity whose idea first
appeared in the celestial chivalry of ancient Zoroastrian Iran. But, then, which order of truth and
which order of reality, that is to say, which form of consciousness presupposes the perception of
this bipolarity, and in which region of the world of Being does it take place and find its place?
 The propositions formulated by a cataphatic theology which did not pass the test of apophatic
theology, as well as the propositions formulated by sociology which substituted itselffor theology
(philosophy remaining the servant of sociology after having passed for being that of theology),
have the form of what we call dogmas, that is, demonstrated propositions established once and
for all and, consequently, imposing their authority uniformly on everyone. The dogmatists do
not allow a true dialogue, only confrontation.
On the other hand, however, the truths perceived to be constitutive of this each time unique
relation between the God manifesting itself as a person (in Biblical terms, the Angel of the Face)
and the person that he elevates to the dignity of a person by revealing itself to him constitute an
essentially existential relation which is not at all dogmatic. It cannot express itself as a dogma
only as a dokema. The two terms derive from the same Greek word, dokeo, which simultane-
ously means "to appear," "to show itself as," "believe," "think," "admit." The dokema marks the
link of interdependence between the form of what manifests itself and that to which it manifests

..
....
itself. It is precisely this correlation that dokesis names. Unfortunately, the routine accumulated
by the centuries of the history of West em dogmas has taken this term docetism as the synonym
of "phantasmatic," "unreal," and "appearance." We must, therefore, reactivate the first mean-
ing: what we call docetism is in fact the theological or rather theosophical critique of religious
consciousness. A critique which examines what is visible for the believer but invisible for the
non-believer also examines the nature and causes ofthis visibility. This nature and cause depend
on the event that takes place and consists of the correlation we are discussing and does not have
its place either in the world of sensible perception orin the abstract world of understanding. We
need, therefore, another world which assures ontologically the full right of this relation which
is not a logical, conceptual, or dogmatic, but a theophanic relation constitutive of a visionary
realism in which appearance becomes apparition.
It is this inter-world that has preoccupied so many of our Iranian philosophers over the cen-
turies (since Sohravardi [d. 1191]until Molla Sadra Shirazi [d. 1640]) and in our present (Sayyed
.Ialaloddin Ashtiyiini). It is the intermediary world between the world of 'Aql (the world of pure
Intelligences) and the world of sensible perception, which is called 'tilam al-mithdl, the "world of
the Image," but not of the sensible but of the metaphysical image. This is why I have translated
it in my books, following the Latin mundus imaginalis, with the term imaginal world, in order
to better differentiate it from the imaginary which is identified with the unreal. Otherwise, we
would fall back into the abyss of agnosticism from which the imaginal world, to the contrary,
must protect us. This world, "in which bodies spiritualize themselves and Spirits obtain bodies,"
is according to its essence the world of subtle bodies, the world of an ethereal spiritual matter
liberated from the laws of the corruptible matter of our world but not from extension (of math-
ematical substances) eminently possessing all the qualitative richness of the sensible world but
in an incorruptible state. This inter-world is the place of visionary events, of visions of prophets
and mystics, of eschatological events. Withouttlris inter-world, these events would no longer have
a place. Thus, this mundus imaginalis is the way by which we can liberate onrselves from the
literalism that has always been a temptation for the "religions of the Book." It is the ontological
level on which the spiritual meaning of revelations becomes the literal meaning, because it is on
this level that we attain a sacramental perception or a sacramental consciousness of beings and
tlrings, which is to say of their theophanic function, because they protect us from confusing an
icon (which is precisely a metaphysical image) with an idol. In the absence of this inter-world,
we remain caught in an incarceration in the unidimensional History of empirical events. The
"events in the Sky" (for example, divine birth and the birth ofthe soul) no longer concern us,
because we no longer concern ourselves with them.
Thus, I discover the most obvious symptom of the nihilism, whose preys we these days are, in
all those regions of thought and consciousness that have succumbed to the Cartesian dualism (op-
posing the world of thought to the world of extension) that they cannot escape. It is a stronghold
which renders it so difficult, if not impossible, for us to conceive of a spiritual body, a spiritual
matter, that the timid attempts once made by William James and later more vigorously by Berg-
son provoked considerable uproar in their times." Although ethnologists spoke of such ideas
as "primitive" conceptions, we are not dealing with a "primitive" conception in the ethnological
sense but with something ontologically primordial. I believe that things have changed since that
time. In addition to the increasing research done witlrin this frontier field we call the psy domain,
philosophy has also multiplied its attempts to escape the dilemma of Cartesianism.
The hour has come when we can join together, rather than merely compare, the convergent
efforts of Jacob Boehme and Mella Sadra Shirazi, by establishing a metaphysics of the active
Imagination as the organ of the inter-world of subtle bodies and spiritual matter, the quarta
dimensio. The intensification of the act of existence, as it is professed by Sadra Shirazi's meta-
physics, raises the status of the body to the level of a spiritual body, that is, the divine body (iism
ildhi). The organ of this transmutation, of this generation of the spiritual body, is for Boehme
as well as for Molla Sadra the imaginative [imaginamce] power which is the magic faculty par
excellence (Imago-Magia), because it is the soul itself, "animated" by its "Perfect Nature," its
celestial role. If one of the destructive aspects of nihilism appears to us in the "disenchantment"
(Entzauberung) of a world reduced to a utilitarian positivity, without a finality in the beyond,
we can see where the rampart against nihilism could be erected.
I have spoken in so much detail in my books about this metaphysics of the imaginal and of
the inter-world (which appears to me as an essential element of the actual message of Iranian
philosophy) that I cannot say more ofit here." It would take me another conference. Thus, I am
not going to recapitulate my whole argument, and I would like to end it with this reminder.
 The theme of our colloquium interrogates the impact of the West on the possibility of a dia-
logue with the civilizations we call "traditional." My analysis attempted to disengage the primary
phenomenon which allows us to transfer the culpability that is imputed to the West in charging
it with the responsibility of a "materialism" to which the "spiritualism" of the East could oppose
itself. I wanted to suggest that this culpability does not follow from what the West supposedly is
in its essence, but precisely from a betrayal of what constitutes this essence. At this moment, the
opposition between East and West, in the geographical or ethnic sense of these words, is already
surpassed, since neither what is called "spiritualism" nor what is called "materialism" are inalien-
able monopolies. Otherwise, how would the phenomenon that we call today the "Westernization"
of the East be possible? Is the West definitely responsible for this "Westernization"? Isn't it rather
the East itself? In fact, Easterners and Westerners confront together the same problems. Hence
the words "East" and "West" have to take on a completely different meaning from their geographi-
cal, political, or ethnic meanings. For if a pamphleteer of our day could write that "Rome is no
longer in Rome," it might also be true that the East is no longer in the East. We take the "East"
..
o in the metaphysical sense of the word; the "East" as it is understood by the Iranian philosophers
of the tradition of Avicenna and Suhravardi, Their "East" is the spiritual world ('Mam qodsi), the
celestial pole upon which, as we have seen, the integrality of the human person depends. Those
who lose this pole are the vagabonds of a West which is the opposite of the metaphysical "East"
and it is irrelevant whether they are geographically Easterners or Westerners.
The question of the possibility of dialogue is implied therein: Do we want to go together to
rediscover this celestial pole which gives the human being its integral dimension? A dialogue in
the true sense is only possible between persons having the same aspirations to the same spiri-
tual dimension (which is a completely different thing from belonging to the same generation
for example). This integral dimension of the human person was shown to us by such teachings
as those of Jacob Boehme. We speak of the "same aspirations" since this integral dimension of
the human person does not yet exist. It can only achieve itself at the end of a process which, far
from leading it back to an illusory identification with a supra-personal Absolute (Absconditum),
is itself engendered as divine Person. The Absolute has no Face. Only the Person has a Face
making a face to face relation possible, and it is in this "face to face" that the pact of chivalric
solidarity is sealed.
 It is an aberration to involve what we call the Absolute in the vicissitudes of human destiny. On
the contrary, the personal God and his believer appeared to us as partners of the same destiny.
This personal God, then, which can only die by the betrayal of his respondent, gives its true mean-
ing to the human adventure. And this is the profound truth of the issue current in that group of
intrepid spiritualism known in the West under the name of the Mormons: "What you are, God
has been. What God is, you shall be." Thus, we shall not be merely partners of a dialogue. We
shall be this dialogue itself.

Translated by Roland Wgso

7
 This paper was presented in Teheran in October 1977 at an
International Colloquium organized by the Iranian Centre
for the Study of Civilizations on the theme, "The Impact of
Western Thought. Does It Allow Real Dialogue between Civi-
lizations?" The paper was published along with "Le paradoxe
du monotheism" and "Necessite de l'angelologie," in Henry
Corbin, Le Paradoxe du Monotheism (Paris: L'Herne, 1981).
We thank L'Herne for permission to translate and publish this
essay here.
1. Georges Vallin's article appeared in the Revue philosophique
(July-September 1975): 275-288. See also his more recent
article, "Pourquoi le non dualisme asiatique? (Elements
pour une theorie de la philosophie comparee)," Revue
philosophique 2 (1978): '57-'75.
...
N 2. Jean Marie Domenach, le Retour du tragique (Paris: Edi-
tions du Seuil, 1967), 292, cited in Georges Vallain, "The
Tragic and The West Considered in Light of Asian Non-
Dualism," 275.
3· Ibid., 276. [Emphasis in original.]
4. Ibid., 278.
5. Notably Sayyed Ahmad 'Alavi Ispahani and Hosayn Tonks-
bani. See also, Sayyed Jalaloddin Ashtiyanl and Henry
Corbin, Anthologie des philosophes iranienne depuis Ie
XYlIe siecle jusqu'a nosjours, Vol. II (Teheran-Paris: Bib-
liotheque Iranienne, 1975), 7-3', 77-90.
6. Vallin, 280.
7. Ibid.
8. The myth of Prometheus is considered to be a wild perver-
sion of reality by the believer who profoundly lives the Ira-
nian conception of Light. See also our essay, "TheRealism
and Symbolism of Colours in Shiite Cosmology," in Temple
and Contemplation, trans. Philip Sherrard (London: KPI,
1986). See also Jean Brun, "Sisyphe, enfant de Prornethee,"
in Eranos-Jahrbuch, 46-1977.
9· See Vallin, 28o, n. 3.
10. Ibid, 282.
11. Ibid, 284.
12. Ibid, 284.
'3. Ibid., 285.
'4. Ibid., 285.
15· See, in particular, the Persian treatise of Abu Ya'qflb
Sejestani, an Ismaili text of the fourth century Hegira,
Kashf al-Mahjilb [The Unveiling of Hidden Things], ed.
Henry Corbin (Teheran-Paris: Bibliotheque Iranienne, vol.
1, 1959). The author pursues a rigorous dialectic of double
negation: non-being and not non-being. God is not-in-time
and not not-in-time; not-in-space and not not-in-space,
and so on. See also by the same author IeLivre des Sources
(Kitab al YanllblJ, the Arabic text edited and translated
in our Trilogie Isrnaelienne (Teheran-Paris: Bibliotheque
Iranienne, vol.o, 1961).
16. See Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien: aspects spirituals
et philosophiques, tome IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1971-1972),
which has a general index on tawhid. See also the chapters
devoted to On QiiziSa'id Qommi and the Shayk School in the
same volume. On Rajab'AliTabrizi, see ourAnthologie des
philosophes iraniens, tomeI, (Teheran: Iranian Academy of
Philosophy, 1977), 98-116 of the French section, as well as
our Philosophie iranienne et philosophie compare (Paris:
Buchet/Chastel, 1977).
'7· See Alexandre Koyre, la Philosophie de Jacob Boehme
(Paris: J. Vrin, 1929),303-3°5. Koyre's monumental study
has retained all its value and actuality. We closely follow its
argument here.
18. See our study on the "Paradoxe du monotheisrne," whose
argument is developed in further detail in "Necessite de
l'angelologie," 97.
19. Koyre, 307. 32. Haven't some people gone as far as saying that chromosomes
are a "fascist" invention?
20. Ibid., 315.
33. See Alexander Zinoviev, Les hauteurs beantes (Lausanne:
21. The late Koyre has clearly marked the contrast in a brief L'Age d'homme, 1977).
analysis, 316 (n. 2).
34. See above, in our Necessite de l'anqeloloqie the whole chap-
22. According to Koyre's fitting translation. ter on Christos Angelos.

23. Koyre, 318. 35· Koyre reminds us of this, See Ibid., 113n. 3.

36. See En Islam iranien ... tome 4. L'Archange empourpre, a

24. Ibid., 319.
collection of fifteen mystical treatises and stories of Suhra-
25. We owe this opportune insertion ofBadder's Latin formulas vardi translated from Persian and Arabic and commented by oJ

that recapitulate the whole question to Koyre, See Ibid., Henry Corbin (Paris: Fayard, 1976). See the index as well as
the index of our work on Ibn 'Arabi (see above note 30).
319·

26. Theodore Roszak, Vers une contre-culture. trad. Claude

Elsen, (Paris: 1970), 68.

27. See our two articles cited in note 18. ..

...
28. See the indexes of our works: Avicenna and the Visionary
Recital, trans. Willard Trask (Irving: Spring Publications,
1980); Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, trans. Nancy
Pearson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); En
Islam iranien; L'Archange empourpre, and so on. See also
Gershom Scholem, Von der mystischen Gestalt der Gottheit
(Frankfurt: 1973), 249·

29. For the" Angel of the Face," see above the final part of onr
essay "Necessite de l'angelologie."

30. See our work, Alone with theAlone: Creative Imagination in

the Sufism of Ibn il.rabl, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1969), especially the whole last
chapter (with the texts translated in the footnotes) on the
"Form of God" (sDrat al-Haqq).

31. See our work, Philosophie iranienne et philosophie com-

paree (see note 16). See 'dlam 'aql1.in the index.
..~ ...
_.
__l
 D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant (Of a Discourse Which
Would Not Be a Semblant): from the very first session of the Seminar that
bears this formula as its title, Lacan specifies that above all else we must
not understand this "semblance" as a "semblance of discourse," in the
sense that it might be opposed to some true discourse.' But it is perhaps
a little precipitous to conclude from this remark that what Lacan here
names "semblance" would have no relation with the usual, philosophical,
notion of 'semblance,' as appearance ("it seems that") or as simulation
("to pretend").' Granted, the Lacanian opposition of "semblance" (which,
since it proceeds from signifying articulation, is in essence linked to the
order of discourse) and the real (as that which is outside signification
[hors significant] and thus exceeds the discursive order) has nothing in
common with the classical philosophical opposition between 'semblance"
(as appearance or simulacra) and the real (as truth). Lacan's reappropia-
tion of signifiers proper to philosophical discourse is not itself "insig-
nificant." But, if Lacan's intention is to show that all discourse proceeds
from "semblance" through its inscription into the signifying order and
thus takes up a problematic relation to truth and jouissance, it is also,
at least implicitly, to get his bearings in relation to the philosophical
problem of 'truth-seeming." For, if the discourse of truth, which has been
appropriated by the philosophical as such, has always been opposed to
all forms of simulation, therefore to discourses of "false-semblance" (the
first among these being the sophistical), it also had to make sure that it
would not merely be truth-seeming itself. Thus it had to expose itself to
the question of knowing whether even philosophical discursivity (logical,
conceptual, dialectical) was not also a form of 'semblance' that acts as an
obstacle to the transparency of truth. This is the question that has always
haunted metaphysics: how can the contemplation of truth cross over the
obstacle of discourse that still inscribes it within the realm of 'semblance'
and thus of the sole "truth-likely" or "truth-seeming"? Through this we
can see that, even if this isn't its chief end, the Lacanian problematic
of "semblance" can also come to bear on the question of the status of
philosophical discourse.
So if "semblance is the signifier itself,4-or, inversely, if the signifier
is "semblance par excellence"'-there could be no discourse that would
not be "semblance." We might as well say that there is no discourse of
the real-if this formula still has a meaning; there is only "the division

UMBR(a) 85

-s _
 without remedy ofjouissance and semblance." But the formula "all discourse is semblance" can
also be understood according to the logic articulated in the mathemes of sexuation: the affirmative
universal proposition "all X verifies the functionf(x)" implies-contrary to strict mathematical
logic-the exception that makes the rule and that, in a certain way, founds it: "there exists at least
one x that does not verify the functionf(x)." In fact, just as the universal law of castration being
concerned with sexuation demands, for the masculine subject, that there be at least one who
is not castrated (the father as "hommoinzun") precisely because his status is to apply the law,
then likewise, being concerned with discourse, the universal law that states that "all discourse is
semblance" demands, for that discourse, that there exist at least one discourse that would not be
"semblance," because such a discourse is precisely that which forbids all discourse from escaping
this law. This is why, at the end of this Seminar, Lacan will specify: "Of a Discourse Which Would
Not Be a Semblant: this hypothesis-for this title is presented to you in the conditional-is the
one through which all discourse justifies itself."
All discourse, in other words all philosophical discourse as well. It is doubtless not by chance
if, in this first lesson of this Seminar, Lacan evokes the Hegelian figure of philosophical discourse
'"
ee
as the discourse of the master in order to recall that the koowledge engaged in this discourse
has always supposed a relation to jouissance," Nevertheless, it is not simply this more or less
general qualification of philosophical discourse that we are interested in here. We would rather
be concerned with the relation that the philosophical-metaphysical-discourse establishes
between 'semblance' understood as appearance or simulation and "semblance" in the Lacanian
sense that we have just made explicit. More precisely: we would like to show, starting from two
different cases, that it is precisely by virtue of a certain relation to 'semblance,' as appearance or
simulation, that the philosophical discourse confirms that it does not escape the universal rule
("all discourse is semblance") at the very moment it seeks to elevate itself to the level of the ex-
ception that founds it ("the discourse that would not be semblance"). The two cases correspond
to the two possibilities of relating to semblance: in the first case, the philosophical discourse
founds itself on a radical condemnation of all forms of semblance in order to insure its access to
truth-Plato is its very exemplification"; in the second case, the philosophical discourse refers to,
or at the very least explicitly plays with, semblance in order to ground its relation to truth-its
figure is Descartes.

PLATO
The platonic critique of appearance is well koown: what presents itself to sensible perception is
nothing but truth-likeness, that is, at best a deformed image of the real. The task, for those who
consider it, is notto be content with truth-likeness and so to give oneself the means of accessing
 knowledge of the true suprasensible reality in which it participates. These means are those of
discourse, for discourse proceeds from the intellect, not from the sensible: to go from appearance
to reality thus requires one to go from aesthesis to noesis, which is deployed essentially in the
order of discourse. The problem is that discourse itself is likely to play appearances and therefore
to be nothing but 'semblance' of discourse. That's why we could not hold as true discourse (that
is, discourse of the true, discourse that says the true) all the forms of discourse that produce
nothing but appearances of truth and that are thus nothing but imitations of the true discourse:
they are the discourses of sophists, of rhetors, and of poets. The philosophical discourse must
therefore stand in opposition to all these 'semblances' of discourse. And this opposition always
offers itself, in Plato, as the opposition of presence to representation, which is also to say of life
to death. If representation is always marked by the distance between the representative and the
represented-a distance whose length varies depending on whether it concerns the learned mi-
mesis of artisans or the ignorant mimesis of painters and poets, or again depending on whether
it concerns the doxomimeticity of sophists or the mimesis of words such as those the nomothetic
would have instituted-then presence, in turn, is or would be the cancellation of this distance. That
is the horizon of the philosophical course, its ultimate goal: presence without distance from the
true in the theoretical contemplation of suprasensible realities. We can say of this presence that
it would be the jouissance of the soul: suprasensible jouissance (since it can only occur beyond
sensible phenomenality) and jouissance of the suprasensible (since its object is pure ideality).
But this opposition of presence to representation also concerns discursive modality: if thought
..
....
is the living act by which the soul lends itself to the contemplation of ideas, the philosophical
discourse must extend to the presence of thinking as act and keep away from all forms of repre-
sentation (of semblance) that deliver only that which has been thought, not the thinking as act.
This requirement can be delineated in three steps:"
1. The requirement implies, first of all, that the true discourse adopts the dialogic form, the liv-
ing form of dialogue and forbids itself the fixed, in some way coagulated, form of the monologue.
The monologue, in fact, however apparent its agitation may be, is an immobilization of thought:
the movement of thought is here stuck on a treadmill. Monologue is nothing but the stating of
a thesis that has been thought and that now repeats itself, as a finished product, and can only
repeat itself again, since it considers itself complete enough to be self-sufficient: in monologue,
the movement of thought (the living thinking as act) has deserted discourse. Dialogue, in turn,
is the movement of thinking. Its vitality does not depend so much on the number of interlocu-
tors as it does on the diversity of the propositions that are here stated and examined. On this
condition, it is possible to converse all by oneself, without this being a monologue for all that.
For dialogue is, above all, that which defines the proper discourse of thinking (to dianoesthaz)
as "a discourse (logos) which the soul holds with herself in considering of anything [...J; the soul
 when thinking appears to me to be just talking (dialegesthazi-asking questions of herself and
answering them, affirming and denying. "" But if the movement of thinking in dialogic form can
be said to be living, it is essentially because this movement is one of generation. Exposing itself
to alterity and to contradiction, thought never ceases to engender new propositions that it then
questions in turn, with a view to elevate itself to ideas that can no longer be undermined in any
way whatsoever. This means that the dialogic form is none other than the dialectical movement
itself. But dialectic is not only the name ofthe method or the procedure of philosophical thought,
it is also the name of philosophical knowledge itself, that is, the knowledge of ideas; it is the
name of the learned knowledge of the suprasensible realities. That this learned knowledge (the
contemplation of ideas) names itself dialectic attests that the dialogic form is the only one able to
respond to the requirement of a discourse that, in order to be true discourse and not semblance
of discourse, is in itself the presence of thinking as act.
2. But the fact that the true discourse requires, for its very truth itself, the adoption ofthe dia-
logic form does not mean that all dialogue would satisfy the requirement of such a discourse. We
must thus redouble the division and oppose the true dialogue to the semblances of dialogue. The
'"'" latter are in part theatrical dialogue, in part sophistic dialogue. Through the fables from which
it makes its substance and through all of the artifices it employs (imitative speech, declamation
and the performance of actors, song and musical accompaniment), the former attests that it seeks
no other end than to stir emotions and to cajole the passions. If the theater is, granted, a place
of contemplation (theathron comes from theaomai meaning "to contemplate"), it nevertheless
offers nothing to contemplation but shadows of reality: it is always the theater of the cave, where
the voices heard are nothing but the echoes of unknown speech. The more 'truth-seeming' it
gives itself, the more does theatrical dialogue reveal itself to be more concerned with semblance
than with the true. As for sophistic dialogue, be it by rhetorical artifices or eristic maneuvers,
it has no other end but domination; truth is here a concern only by virtue of semblance, in or-
der to better persuade. We should thus not confound these two semblances of dialogue, where
representations are played up to cajole or dominate, with the true dialogue, the dialogue whose
concern is truth, whose concern is to elevate itself to the immediate presence without distance
from the true (even when we aren't sure whether we can make it, even when, finally, we crash
head first into aporia). Only the concern for truth insures, for the dialogic form of discourse, the
presence of thinking as act.
3. But this requirement of the presence of thinking as act, this requirement to never yield to
the representation that threatens thought to distance itself and thus to abscond from what it
thinks-this requirement, thus, also implies that thought is not to be compromised with writ-
ing. For writing is itself representation. Unable to answer the questions that are posed to it,
 also unable to defend itself, the written discourse is petrifaction of thought: it is the corpse of a
thought that was once alive, but that is no longer there to enliven it. We must thus oppose "the
living and animated discourse (zonta kai empsychon)" to the written discourse of which it is
only its "simulacra (eidolon);"" we must oppose the living word to the dead letter. The discourse
of the presence of thinking as act can therefore be nothing but the oral dialogue concerned with
truth. It remains that Plato, unlike Socrates, himself writes-contrary to Socrates-and he thus
compromises thinking with representation, the true discourse with its simulacra. Yet this is pre-
cisely what explains the choice of the dialogic form. Granted, in writing, Plato does not escape the
law of representation. But to write the dialogue that had been (or would have been) the Socratic
oral dialogue, is not to represent what has been thought-the thought as finished product thus
as already dead (which would be the case if it was a treatise, a monologue). It is to represent the
very presence of thinking as act, the presence of the act of thinking elevating itself to the level of
the suprasensible in order to take pleasure in the contemplation of ideas. That is why Plato had
to fictionalize what would have been the only effective presence of thinking as act: the Socratic
dialogue. Socrates is the mythic name of this pure presence of thinking, that is, at once of the
living presence of the act of thinking in and by the oral dialogic form and of the presence without
distance from the true in the theoretical contemplation of suprasensible realities. But, in all fair-
ness, this presence is that which cannot be written. The compromise is thus inevitable: we will
consent to write, granted, but we will write that living dialogical speech. In other words: we will DO

do right by representation, but only to represent presence, as if this represented presence eased '"
somewhat the flaw of representation. Through this, perhaps the status of the Platonic text can
be more easily understood: the dialogic form must here be taken-rigorously, that is, etymologi-
cally-not as a literary genre among other possible ones, but as the only true "literary genre":
the only discourse that, through the written letter (literary), (re)presents-or re(presents)-the
engendering of thought (genus, the "genre," comes from gena meaning "to engender").
But it is still a discourse. Try as it will to reject all forms of semblance, the Platonic discourse
nevertheless remains a discourse that is 'semblance.' In doing so, it verifies that the universal
law that states that "all discourse is semblance" requires, as condition for the possibility of this
discourse, that there exists at least one discourse that would not be "semblance." For Plato, this
"at least one discourse" was the Socratic dialogue. But there is the myth of Plato, in the sense of
the Lacanian definition of myth: "the attempt to give an epic form to what is operative through
the structure."" For this discourse that would have been the presence of thinking and thus the
theoretic jouissance as act is precisely that which cannot be written, and even more precisely: that
which does not stop not being written. All that can be written-and, at the same time, must be
written-is the impossibility of inscribing presence in the written letter. The writings of Plato are
 the trace of an impossible presence, thus of an impossible jouissance, through which it is revealed
that the letter here functions as "littoral" between knowledge andjouissance. The written dialogue
is, in fact, the discourse which, in the profusion of the knowledge it lugs around, gives itself as
passing on the limit-on the edge, on the littoral-of the effective presence of thinking as act
and thus also at the limit of the presence of the suprasensible reality. But it is also, through this,
the discourse that tells-even if Plato does not explicitly acknowledge it, and with reason-of the
impossibility of this presence and thus of the impossibility of a suprasensible jouissance (or of a
jouissance of the suprasensible). And, when dealing with the latter formulations, we must again
specify that the genitive must be heard in its double meaning: the suprasensible as the object of
the jouissance of the thinker (objective genitive), and the suprasensible as that very thing that
enjoys (subjective genitive). This is saying that the jouissance from which the desire of the thinker
proceeds would be the suprasensible taking pleasure [of] itself, the thinker-subject abolishing
himself as such through this fusion with the suprasensible. That is why the discourse that is writ-
ten dialogue is also the discourse that tells of the erasure of the subject in the jouissance to which
he tends. The discourse that would not be "semblance" -this discourse that "mythically" figures
o
the Socratic oral dialogue-would be the discourse of the suprasensible itself that would tell of
'" its own jouissance, which is structurally the impossible. This is also saying that the suprasensible
is the name of the "real" as that which cannot be missed. All that remains then is the discourse
that is dialogic writing-the platonic discourse-and which, as such, does not escape its status as
"semblance" in the end. But, since this discourse is necessarily written, the discourse that would
not be "semblance" is that which, in this platonic discourse, does not stop writing itself, namely
the unthinkable itself.
We can still add this subsidiary remark on the logical structure of this platonic discourse: the
thinker-subject that is Plato ($) here takes the place of the agent; he supports himself with a truth
that is nothing but a remainder of the jouissance that is lost because impossible (a), in order
to address himself to the signifying-master that is Socrates (S,), thus producing philosophical
knowledge (S,). AB we recognize, this is the very structure of the discourse of hysteria:
!~ S,
a S,

It is not a matter of extracting from this remark some kind of "clinical" lesson. At best it allows
us to confirm the status of the platonic discourse as written discourse. In fact, that this discourse
is, for reasons we have seen, necessarily written also attests, in a certain way, that "the letter has
a feminizing effect.?"
But the principal lesson of this first course mostly concerns the correlation between the critique
of 'semblance,' in the philosophical sense of appearance and simulacra, and the expropriation of
"semblance" in the Lacanian sense. If the platonic discourse never ceases to support itself with
its opposition to all semblance of discourse, to which it opposes the true discourse as discourse
of the true, nevertheless, as discourse, it remains the "semblance" of the jouissance from which
it proceeds. As written dialogue, the platonic discourse represents presence in its very impos-
sibility: it is the impossibility of the jouissance it pretends to reach but that it can only miss.

DESCARTES
So much for the philosophical discourse that intends to abstain from any concession to 'sem-
blance.' But what happens to this discourse when it commits itself to the path of 'semblance'
and explicitly finds its pleasure in playing it up? For this second course, Descartes will serve as
our guide.
We know the famous formula by which Descartes announced his entrance upon the "stage"
of the "theater of the world": "laruatus prodeo" (masked, I go forth). Incidentally, in Descartes'
discourse there is a recourse to 'semblance' (to pretence or to fiction) that is constitutive of the
very founding of his philosophy, that is, constitutive of the cogito itself. Granted, the preliminar-
ies of the Cartesian discourse oppose the true and the seemingly-true in order to critique the
position-tantamount to that of the sophists-of the scholastic philosophers that take pleasure
in "speak[ing] with an appearance of truth [vraisemblablement] about all things to make [them-
selves] more admired by the less learned'" and who use their speculations to flatter their "van-
ity" forcing them to "use that much more wit and artifice in the attempt to make them plausible
[vraisemblable].','6 In this Scholastic philosophy, where "each is much more occupied in making
the best of mere likelihood, than in weighing the reasons, ,," we only worry about knowledge in
order to appear erudite, which is more easily accomplished "by remaining satisfied with the ap-
pearance of truth [...] than by seeking the truth itself."" Thus the critique does indeed proceed
from the classic distinction of the true and the truth-seeming, that is, of the simulacra of true
knowledge. And this is why the initial Cartesian decision is to "reckon as well-nigh false all that
was only probable." But-as we shall see, and even if this seems paradoxical at first-it is at
this point in the Cartesian decision that a recourse to 'semblance,' in view of assuring truth, is
already in play.
To make allowance between the true and truth-seeming representations-Descartes says
"thoughts" -we must take into consideration that the plausible gives itself first as truth-seeming.
Now this 'semblance' of truth is the property of fictions. These are, of course, the fictions ofpoets
and painters, who busy themselves with much artifice to "represent sirens and satyrs," so that
their work represents for us something "purely fictitious and absolutely false.'?" After all, these

,
fictitious objects can also be representations in the mind-such as we see in dreams-so that it
is possible to maintain that "sirens, hippogryphs, and the like, are inventions of my own mind.?"
But fiction does not only concern the perceived or represented object that the mind deems false; it
can also affect the act of the mind whenever it positions itself to fictionalize its judgment, that is,
feign its own judgment, thus to pretend [faire semb/ant] in the very act ofjudging. In other words:
it is no longer simply at the level of what is objectively judged, but at the level of the subjective
position itself, that fiction, thus 'semblance,' occurs. Such is the dubious Cartesian position: to
doubt is to pretend that what appears to my mind is truth-seeming, therefore fictitious, therefore
false. The Cartesian experience of doubt is a fictitious experience; or, rather, the experience of a
fiction; Of, again, experience as semblance, an experience of semblance.
Before paying attention to the status of this semblance that comes to support the Cartesian
thesis, we can briefly summarize things: all that my senses represent to me, "body, figure, ex-
tension, motion, and place are merely fictions of my mind,"" in the same way as all that my
mind represents to me in and by itself, the innate ideas, which, even though they appear clear
and distinct to me, could be the work of some "great deceiver," so that I would be prudent to
"become my own deceiver, by feigning, for a time, that all those thoughts are entirely false and
imaginary.'?" And even, when it comes to God, itis possible for me, in "feigning ignorance of the
author of my being;" to "feign that such a being does not exist. ,," Such is indeed the Cartesian
decision, its resolution: "I resigned myself to pretend that all the things that had ever entered
into my mind when awake, had in them no more than the illusions of my dreams." Yet, how-
ever resolute it might be, this fiction finds its limit: for "I could pretend that I had no body, and
that there was no world nor any place in which I might be [...] but I could not therefore pretend
that I was not. "'7 I am thus that which feigns, which pretends [fait semb/ant], but which cannot
feign not to be. Fiction here reaches its limit, which is also its zenith, its hyperbole; as Jean-Luc
Nancy says: "The very height of pretence is that I am pretending. ,,'8 Butthis certainty of myself
is also the lever (the famous "Archimedean point") from which the truths lost by doubt, that is,
by the experience of fiction, must be regained. First, we will demonstrate the existence of God,
"of which one cannotfeign [...] that one's idea represents nothing real" and which therefore "is
not even a pure production or fiction of my mind""; then we will demonstrate the truth of the
innate ideas, "the knowledge of which is so natural to our minds that we cannot even pretend
to ignore [them];":" and finally the reality of bodies, whose ideas "cannot be said to have been
feigned by me."
Such is then, grossly summarized, this entire course dominated by the trial of fiction, the trial
of 'semblance,' and whose key moment is, of course, this kind of exhaustion of fiction: I cannot
feign that I am not. But it is precisely the relation between the experience of fiction and its limit
that we should now examine more closely. This relation can be expressed thus: the proposition
"there is no thought that isn't false" (that is, all thoughts are false) implies that "there is at least
one true thought"; this thought is: "I am." We can reformulate this thusly: the proposition "there
 is no thought which J cannot pretend to regard as being false" (that is, I can pretend that all
of my thoughts are false) implies that "there is at least one thought which J cannot pretend to
regard as being false": and that is this "I am" (that is, I cannot pretend that I am not). But this
is saying, precisely, that "J am" is nothing but a thought. This is what authorizes Lacan's critique,
a critique that is sufficiently well-known" to limit ourselves here to a reminder of its essential
argument: thinking and being do not overlap each other, so that we must maintain the disjunc-
tion of the subject's statement and the statement's subject, while reestablishing the Cartesian
formula in the writing of its punctuated syntax: "I think: 'therefore I am'." The "1" of the "I am"
(the subject's statement) could never be the same as the "1" of the "I think" (the statement's
subject). The statement's subject is actually that which does not let itself be thought, that which
does not let itself be objectified as thought and which is therefore, as such, the unthinkable: "the
'therefore I am' is nothing but a thought, [which is enough] to show that it is the unthinkable
that thinks."" This unthinkable is the "real," that which the "subject in so far as he thinks [...]
does not meet.'?' Strictly speaking, the limit-point of the experience of doubt could be nothing
but "a mere point of fading. "'5 Granted, by affirming that "this proposition 'I am, I exist' is neces-
sarily true every time I pronounce it or conceive of it in my mind," Descartes would indeed wish
to make sure that "I am not a wind, or flame, or vapor, or breath, or any of all the things I can
feign. ",6 But this ''1" that thus utters itself, even if in the silence of the mind, is perhaps nothing
more than a wind from beyond the sense that its own discourse articulates: flatus vocis. It is ...
'"
an "1" without consistency or substantiality, which is nothing but all that can be written of the
trace of the hole of the real. This outside-siguified [hors-signifie] is an absence of sense in the
discourse that veils it or surrounds it: the ''blank sense [sens blanc]."" The quivering jubilation
that the Cartesian text undergoes in this moment of discovering the cogito, this jouissance of the
pure presence, without distance, from self to self, is but a semblance of jouissance, a parody of
jouissance, because it is jouissance of "semblance," jouissance of the "blank sense."
From the point of view ofthis Cartesian strategy (or rather of the stratagem of the experience
of doubt as fiction, or 'semblance'), everything will have thus see-sawed over to the extreme point
of doubt, to the point of Archimedes: "ego sum." This thought-for it is a thought and nothing but
a thought-is for the Cartesian subject the at least one true thought. And it is from this thought
which I cannot pretend to regard as false that it has been possible to regain the lost certainty,
that is, to show which other thoughts are not simply truth-seeming ("fictions of my mind"), but
are indeed truths. It remains that in terms of the experience of doubt, I could only conceive of
myself as thinking, and from a thought that consisted in nothing but doubting, therefore pretend-
ing. At this limit point of doubt, "ego sum" signifies: "I am doubting," "I am pretending." But,
as such, this subject could not be self-sufficient enough to get out of pretence, or 'semblance.'
This is why D'tfcartes needs recourse to God, that is, to the true God, to the God whose verac-
ity is the guarantee of the truth of the innate ideas and of the reality of bodies. In other words:
 "ego sum" is, for the subject, inasmuch as he has only to do with himself, the at least one true
thought; but, to insure the true discourse, that is, the discourse of science, the subject must have
recourse to the divine guarantee: he defers to God for the truth. For God is no deceiver, God
does not pretend [fait pas semblant]. In a certain way, the divine discourse-that is, the divine
creation, or in a word, nature, this nature of which Descartes could have said, like Galileo, that
it is "the great book written in mathematical language" -is, for the Cartesian subject of science,
the at least one discourse that is not 'semblance.' And it is not only the discourse of science that
is thus guaranteed by God; moreover, as Descartes shows, the discourse that unfolded the expe-
rience of doubt already reveals itself, after the event, to have been implicitly supported by God:
"for how could I know that I doubt, desire, or that something is wanting to me, and that I am
not wholly perfect, if I possessed no idea of a being more perfect than myself, by comparison of
which I knew the deficiencies of my nature?"" The whole discourse of the Cartesian subject thus
supports itself with the reference-implicit or explicit-to God, to the divine discourse, that is,
to the at-least-one discourse that would not be 'semblance,' so that the discourse of the subject
is nothing but the mask of the divine discourse: "Iarvatus prodeo"; it would be more exact to
....
'" have: larvatus pro Deo, masked, I go forth in God's place, I am the semblance of God, I am the
mask that God adopts to tell the truth.
But if natural science wants to approach this "real," which has to be situated in God, if science
is God's asymptote-a-symptote meaning that "which does not encounter," and "that which is
never encountered" is the very definition of the real-then this science can only be written: it is
within algebraic writing that geometric forms and mechanical forces can be solved. Which, here
again-but in a more radical and thus more decisive way-confirms that the letter functions as
"littoral" between knowledge andjouissance. For in this literality of algebraic writing, the subject
itself is erased (the writing of algebraic calculation does not infuse any letter with its operative
subject) and sense is abolished (the combination of the written symbols authorizing itself only on
its own authority, excluding all reference to sense,just as it is done in formalized axiomatics). We
have here, assuredly, that which alone allows an approach to the real, if it is true that "the very
idea of the real includes the exclusion of all sense;" and, Lacan specifies that "it is only inasmuch
as the real is emptied of all sense that we can apprehend it a little."? And the only way to empty
it of all sense is algebraic writing. With Descartes this new literal status of science was inaugu-
rated: the writing of "semblance" as "blank sense," which does not prevent it from being God's
masquerade. And it is only in this masquerade that something can be articulated as truth.

Translated by Jean-Christophe Cloutier

1. Jacques Lacan, D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant 11. Plato, Theaetetus, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B.Jowett
(1970-71), unpublished seminar. Lacan says ofthetitle of his (London: Oxford 1964), 18ge.
seminar, "OfaDiscourse Which WouldNotBea Semblant:
in order for this phrase to be stated. this 'semblance' must in 12. Plato, Phaedrus, in The Dialogues of Plato, 276a. [Transla-
no way be followed by a reference to 'discourse'." 13 January tion modified.]
1971.
13. Lacan, Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Es-
2. The French termfaire semblant, here translated as "to pre- tablishment, ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind
tend" literally means "to make semblance," but can mean "to Krauss, and Annette Michelson (New York: Norton, 1990),
fake;' or "feign." Most uses of "pretend " or "pretence" in this 30.
text are translations of "faire semblant," unless otherwise
indicated. [Trans.] 14· Lacan, D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 19 May
1971.
3· The French term "vraisemblance" is a formulation that
15. Rene Descartes, Le Discours de la Methode in Oeuvres Phi-
....
combines "semblance"with "vrai," that is, truth. This word
usually means "likelihood," "probability" or "verisimilitude." losophique: Tome I (Paris: Editions Garnier-Preres, 1963),
Where possible I chose the compound word "truth-seem- I. 573. [Alltranslations of Descartes are made directly from
the French.] c
ing" rather than the other possibilities in order to retain the J:
emphasis on semblance. [Trans.] '"
'"
16. Ibid., 577. E
4· Lacan, D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 13
17· Descartes, Discours, VI, 641.
..,
January 1971. '"
5· Ibid., 12 May 1971. See also Lacan, "Lituratterre," inAutres 18. Ibid., 643.
Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 17.
19. Descartes, Discours, 1,576.
6. Lacan, D'un discours qui ne seraitpas du semblant, 9 June
20. Descartes, Meditations, Oeuvres Philosophique: Tome II
1971.
(Paris: Editions Garnier-Freres, 1963), I, 407.
7· Ibid., 16 June 1971.
21. Descartes, Meditations, III. 435.
8. Ibid.
22. Descartes, Meditations, II, 415. [Emphasis added.]
9. We could also think of Rousseau, in whom, however, the
status of discourse is more skewed. See Jean Starobinski, 23. Descartes, Meditations, I, 411. [Emphasis added.]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Transparency and Obstruction,
24. Descartes, Meditations, VI, 487. [Emphasis added.]
trans. Authur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988). 25. Descartes, Meditations, III, 446. [Emphasis added.]
10. In order not to make the following account too heavy (which 26. Descartes. Discours, IV, 603.
only recalls. by summarizing them, well-known theses), we
have abstained from-except for citations-referring each 27. Descartes. Discours II, 415. [French translation modi-
time to the texts from which they originate. fied.]
28. Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego Sum (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 115·
This book is a precious reference for everything that con-
cerns fiction and fable in the Cartesian text.
29. Descartes, Meditations, III, 446, 453. [Emphasis added.]
32. See especially Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lecen, Book
XI~ The Four Fundamental Concepts oj Psychoanalysis,
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Norton, 1981), 29-64. See also, Bernard Baas and Armand
Zaloszyc, Descartes et les fondements de la psychanalyse
(Paris: Navarin & Osiris, 1988).

33. Lacan, ... Ou pire (1971-1972), unpublished seminar, 9

30. Descartes, Discours, V, 615.
March 1972. I have added "which is enough" to the typed
transcription since it seems incomplete as is, and thus in-
31. Descartes, Meditations, V, 470. [Emphasis added.] comprehensible.

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34· Lacan,TheFour Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 38. Descartes, Meditations, III, 446.
49-
39· Lacan, L'insu que sait de l'unebevue s'aile a mourre (1976-
35· Ibid.,224. 1977), unpublished seminar, 8 March 1977.

36. Descartes, Meditations, II, 419.

37- See Lacan,RSI (1974-1975), unpublished seminar, 11March

1975- The play on words in French here between "semb/anf'
and "sens blanc" is phonic, as both would sound alike if
spoken in French. [Trans.]

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U In this essay, I will try to situate the question of the fantastic in philosophy .
Upon this road, there are three great predecessors, three decisive ap-
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l: with a discussion of what the fantastic in philosophy is not or cannot be
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name the real of ontological difference. Indeed, the fantastic designates a
certain modality of the real-a real that, we will see, exceeds the real and-
outstrips it; like every self-respecting version of the fantastic, the fantastic
,jJ
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u to the real, in the real. Accordingly, this in-excess-of-the-real must lead back
L&J tI:I to the ontological problematic from which it arises and to the phenomenon
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What is fantastic is this appearance; what is fantastic is the reality of the
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nas, Sartre and Nancy call existence - and this is precisely what authorizes
their strange grouping.
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between Being and beings. The "definition" -if it is one-is now complete.
And since our conference is oriented by "sense," the question of sense, you
l:
tI:I will have understood that I intend, in my own way, to question the sense of
Z existence or, at least, of that existence.
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(I) I turn back to my "definition": the fantastic is existence conceived as
L- the reality of the difference between Being and beings. Two aspects of this
,jJ
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tI:I contained in the etymology of the word "fantastic" -fantasma,fantastiki!.
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III
Second, it entails a reference to Heidegger. The reference may be oblique or
tI:I contorted, but this torsion precisely situates the distance and the proximity
.->
l: of Levinas, Sartre, and Nancy from Heideggerian philosophy. In my defini-
tion of the fantastic, the reference to Heidegger is indirect in more than one
.(1) manner. On the one hand, Heidegger never spoke of a reality of ontological
...J difference. He perhaps never spoke of reality at all-since, as we know, the

UMBR(a) 99
 two concepts of Realitiit and Wirklichkeit were deconstructed in Being and Time. Accordingly,
on the other hand, Heidegger never thought that existence could continue to designate, as it is
does within the metaphysical tradition, something like "reality." Finally, even though he was
intent upon elucidating the status of the image and imagination, Heidegger never confused the
image, das Bild, with the simple "phantasm," nor imagination, die Einbildung, with fantasiz-
ing (Phantasie). But, one will object, Levinas, Sartre and Nancy did not either! Nevertheless,
a sustained reading of their works will show that they displaced the Heideggerian thinking of
the image and the imagination; that, at the same time, they displaced the sense of ontological
difference; and that they thereby displaced the sense of existence toward another imagination,
another difference, another existence.
The fantastic, conceived as the reality of the difference between Being and beings, thus names
a certain Heideggerian inheritance that displaces what it inherits. Levinas, Sartre, Nancy, as
faithful and unfaithful inheritors, seek to bring to light, that is also to produce, the effect of
Heidegger's thought in the real; the way in which ontological difference now constitutes the
s real of philosophy, what there is to think. The fantastic thus characterizes the effect in the real
of deconstruction (Destrucktion, Abbau)-the deconstruction of the image, of the real. Further,
this effect, the effect of Heideggerian thought in the real, is existence, the emergence of a new
signification of existence, which is no longer stricto sensu Heideggerian and no longer simply des-
ignates Dasein's mode of being, but rather the irruption of ontological difference in the real and
as the real. Existence should here be understood as the concretion or concreteness of difference.
Levinas, Sartre and Nancy all speak of the materiality of difference. Existence is what returns,
materially, after Heidegger's disappearance: the fantastically real inheritance of Heidegger.'
Everything begins with a contrasense: Sartre translates Dasein by "human reality" and thus
transforms the ontological difference, which Heidegger explicitly presented as the difference
between Being and beings, into the difference between existence and the existent. What Heideg-
gerian did not decry the scandal! This or these "constrasenses," among otherthings, meantthat
Sartre would be purely and simply excluded from the circle of "true" philosophers. However, it
is ever more apparent to me that this or these "contrasenses" are not in fact contrasensical, at
least not entirely; and that Sartre's "translations" are pregnant-even their author knows noth-
ing about it-with a truth whose sense could only appear later, much later-today, when what
there is to think is precisely existence as the reality of ontological difference, the fantastic return
of existence after Heidegger, after Heidegger's existence. Reading a passage from Being and
Nothingness will confirm that, when it came to the matter of the fantastic, Sartre knew what he
was talking about.
To engage or reengage the truth of Sartre's "contrasenses," I have decided to let Levinas speak
first; for, starting with his earliest texts, Levinas also turns the difference between Being and
beings into the difference between" existing" and "existents." In Time and the Other, for example,
he declares: "We return again to Heidegger. One cannot ignore his distinction ... between Sein
and Seiendes, Being and beings, but which, for reasons of euphony, I prefer to render as existing
and existent, without ascribing a specifically existentialist meaning to these terms. ",
The question of the fantastic, for Levinas, is linked to the difference between "existing" and
"existents." The fantastic, for him, is the mode of being of what does not exist ... and thus of
existing itself. "I would gladly say," the author continues in Time and the Other, "that existing
does not exist." This declaration is easy to understand to the extent that "existing" characterizes
the mode of being of something 'that is not a being, the mode of being of Being itself, or of the
being-Dasein-which has an understanding of its own Being.
Even as the Levinasian concept of existence presents itself, at first, as the translation of Hei-
degger's concept, it will very quickly be distinguished from that concept. As Levinas comments
on Heidegger in Time and the Other, he insists upon the fact that it is not possible to think Being
and beings without one another; that their difference unites them; and that Being is always the
being of a being. "Existing," he says, "is always grasped in the existent." There is no existence
or existing "without existents."
Accordingly, it is at the moment when he elucidates the meaning of Geworfenheitthat Levinas
bifurcates, as it were; it is at this moment that he parts company with Heidegger and displaces
difference for reasons other than "euphony." He begins by recalling that "Geuiorfenheit should
be translated as 'the-fact-of-being-thrown-in' ... existence." Therefore, there is no existing without
existents. Nonetheless, he adds:
It is as if the existent appeared in an existence that precedes it, as though existence were independent
of the existent, and the existent that finds itself thrown there could never become master of existence.
It is precisely because of this that there is desertion and abandonment. Thus dawns the idea of an
existing that occurs without us, without subject, an existing without existents."

The fantastic enters into play at the precise point of this paradoxical dissociation between exist-
ing and existents, between Being and beings-a dissociation that does not appear in Heidegger.
There where existing cannot exist without existents, it still cuts itself away from them and it is
this cut that is fantastic. Levinas thus seeks to show how difference is susceptible to becoming
ontological separation and then ontological indifference.
When existing shows that it is separated from existents, the frightful and the horrible make
their appearance. The philosopher asks: "How can we approach this existing without existents?"
And his response is, for my argument, extremely interesting: "by an act of the imagination."
Let us imagine all things, beings and persons, returning to nothingness, What remains after
this imaginary destruction of everything is not something, but the fact that there is. The absence
 of everything returns as a presence, as the place where the bottom has dropped out of every-
thing, an atmospheric density, a plenitude of the void, the murmur of silence. There is, after this
destrnction of things and beings, the impersonal 'field of forces' of existing. There is something
that is neither subject nor substantive. The fact of existing imposes itself when there is no longer
anything. And it is anonymous: there is neither anyone nor anything that takes this existence
upon itself. It is impersonal like 'it is raining' or 'it is hot.' Existing returns no matter with what
negation one dismisses it. There is, as the irremissibility of pure existing.'
"Let us imagine all things returning to nothingness." But what imagination is capable of this
feat? Such an imagination must be capable of nothing less than imagining being, imagining
existing, which does not exist. One thinks immediately of the Heideggerian interpretation of
productive imagination in Kant. Imagination, Heidegger says, is not creative within the ontic
order, but rather within the ontological." Has one ever reflected on the vertigo opened up by
the idea of a creative imagination within the ontological order-an imagination that no longer
operates within the register of beings or non-beings, but rather of Being, and that even gives the
N
o expression 'that does not exist' a sense entirely other than the ontic sense?
~
For Heidegger, as we know, the imagination's ontological power of "creation" is the schematism,
still called originary temporalization. The schemas are pure images-that is, determinations of
time. Being's manner of being is time. But Levinas, who recognizes that the anonymity of existing
reveals time as such, the "soldering" that holds the temporal exstases together (as he says in the
same text), insists at the same time upon the hallucinatory effect produced by the very possibility
of an image of Being. What Levinas seeks to describe here is the reverberation of the schema in the
real, the fantastic image that appears like an atmosphere, a hypervigilance, an insomnia without
limit, an incessant murmur-other names, the author says, for the "basis of beings." Everything
happens as if the schema itself was right there. Radicalizing and profoundly transforming the
Heideggerian analysis of anxiety, and thus displacing its problematic, Levinas devotes himself
to describing the shockwave provoked by what he calls "the return of absence within presence,"
the ontic mirage of the ontological image, which is, in a sense, one being's response to the an-
nihilating solicitation of its own image. It is the phenomenon of this response that is "fantastic."
The ontological image becomes real-like a profound night or darkness, something that becomes
possible to describe. In Existence and Existents, Levinas says: "Nocturnal space delivers us to
Being." And, he continues, it is from darkness that things "acquire their fantastic character."
Darkness does not only modify their contours for vision; it reduces them to undetermined, anonymous
being, which they exude.
One can also speak of different forms of night that occur right in daytime. Illuminated objects can
appear to us as though in twilight shapes. Like the unreal, inverted city we find after an exhausting
 trip, things and beings strike us as though they no longer composed a world, and were swimming in
the chaos of their existence. Such is also the case with the 'fantastic,' 'hallucinatory' reality in poets
like Rimbaud, even when they name the most familiar things and the most accustomed beings. The
misunderstood art of certain realistic and naturalistic novelists, their prefaces and professions of faith
notwithstanding, produces the same effect: beings and things that collapse into their 'materiality,' are
terrifyingly present in their destiny, weight and shape. Certain passages of Huysmans or Zola, the calm
and smiling horror of de Maupassant's tales do not only give, as is sometimes thought, a representation
'faithful to' or exceeding reality, but penetrate behind the form which light reveals into the material-
ity which, far from responding to the philosophical materialism of the authors, constitutes the dark
background of existence. It makes things appear to us in a night, like the monotonous presence that
hears down on us in insomnia.

The rustling of the there is ... is horror."

The unreal, the hallucinatory, horror: such are the ontic responses to the paradoxical appeal
of ontological indifference.
Ontological indifference, in Levinas, primarily designates the mode of being of Being, of ex-
isting without beings or without existents. It is the indifference of Being with regard to beings,
which find themselves abandoned. But ontological indifference also characterizes the mode of
Being of the beings or of the existents thereby deserted; it characterizes the existent itself insofar
as it has become an intruder in relation to its own existence. This effect of mutual foreignness ~
o
w
produced between Being and beings thereby opens another dimension of indifference, that of
indistinction or non-difference. Even as the difference between existing and existents is stretched
to the limit, to the point of separation, existing and existents become paradoxically confused with
one another; they become impossible to distinguish. Existing and existents become foreign to
one another; and they curiously allow the community of this very foreignness to appear in one
flesh, one matter, one basis, one real image, one schema. This matter, other than matter, ontico-
ontological matter, is the very consistency of difference: "this materiality that ... constitutes the
obscure basis of existence."
On the one hand, the fantastic inheres in the hallucinatory dimension of apprehending such a
materiality-neither ontic nor ontological, but both at the same time; and this hallucinatory di-
mension becomes the necessary dimension of philosophical thought. On the other hand, it inheres
in the mode of being of this materiality or reality, whose stuff, this strange flesh, Heidegger never
thought. This reality thus appears at once as a materialization of Being insofar as it is different
from beings and as the effect ofthe suspension of the beingness of beings or existents, which
thereby become unreal or really unreal. The fantastic (whence its name) can thus appear as an
image supplement-or a phantasm, if one likes-whereby the ontological image is embodied;
whereby the schema and time make their non-existence exist.
 In the same movement, beings vanish and being is embodied-which is to say, along with
Sartre, that it is "qualified."
With this analysis in mind, one should read the magnificent chapter from Being and Nothing-
ness entitled "Of quality as a revelation of being." One should also reread Nausea and, this time
around, accuse Levinas of a contrasense when he declares: "Nausea,' as a feeling for existence,
is not yet a depersonalization; but horror turns the subjectivity of the subject, its particularity
qua entity, inside out.'?" Because nausea is only the way in which the there is ever rises into the
mouth.
The chapter, "Of quality as a revelation of being," begins-once again, and this point is par-
ticularly interesting for my argument-with an analysis of the imagination that emerges from a
critique of "Bachelard's material imagination." According to Sartre, this imagination, material as
it may be, remains a property of the psyche; it remains subjective and thus lacks the "ontological
reality" to which any true "psychoanalysis of things" must return. What is this psychoanalysis?
Psychoanalysis makes it possible, Sartre says, "to establish the way in which each thing is the
objective symbol of being and of the relation of human reality to this being.'?'
"Each thing is the objective symbol of being. "This phrase, without playing on words, is fantas-
tic. It transforms the meaning of the symbol. If all things are symbols, then it is not because they
are sensible representations, metaphors, the images of states of the soul, or an intelligible reality
that would transcend them. Referring to being, these symbol-things do not refer to anything,
to anything other than themselves. Insofar as they exist, things let what does not exist, being or
existence, appear in them, materially and objectively. This strange appearance is once again a
sort of real image, existence brushing up against what is there. This is to say that things are not
symbols, if one understands a symbol-according to the traditional definition of the term-to be
an image detached from the thing of which it is the image; an image that one can grasp in itself,
in the psyche, which can do without its body. Insofar as it is objective, however, forming a single
body with what it symbolizes-in some sense, with itself-the symbol is no longer a symbol, but
the real-if one understands the real, following Lacan's elaboration of it during the same period,
as something that resists symbolization or idealization. According to what only seems to be a
paradox, the "objective symbol," in Sartre, designates the incoercible resistance of the real, and
thus of existence, to the symbol. It is precisely this resistance of existence to the symbol that
Same calls "the existential symbolism of things," thereby affirming that the symbol exists-which
is to say that it is not a symbol. Or that the symbol is what is."
The task of the "psychoanalysis of things" is thus to "establish the manner in which each
thing is the objective symbol of being and of the relation of human reality to this being." This
psychoanalysis must take the psyche into account-whence its name; but it must do so in a very
particular manner. Sartre immediately gives an example: "take ... the particular quality which we
 call viscous."'-' "The viscous," he will say later, "does not symbolize a psychic attitude a priori; it
manifests a certain relation of being with itself and this relation has an originally psychic quality
[et cette relation est originellement psychisee]."" In fact, Sartre is in the process of redefining
the schema: "this relation has an originally psychic quality" signifies that the viscous is a schema
originarily given to the mind, inscribed within it a priori as a pure image: "I am enriched," Sartre
writes, "by a valid ontological schema ... which will interpret the meaning of being of all the exis-
tents of a certain category.?" that is, all viscous existents. But, much as in Levinas, this schema
enters into presence within what it schematizes; that is, the viscous, as schema, is itself viscous,
and it is in this sense that it shows itself as the relation of being to itself-this phenomenon go-
ing beyond imagination properly speaking: "a phenomenon of constant hysteresis in relation to
itself." The being of the viscous and the viscous entity thus exist in a relation that resembles the
relation between the honey in my spoon and the honey in the pot upon which I pour it:
The honey which slides off my spoon on to the honey contained in the jar first sculptures the surface
by fastening itself on it in relief, and its fusion with the whole is presented as a gradual sinking, a col-
lapse which appears at once as a deflation (think, for example, of children's pleasure in playing with a
toy which whistles when inflated and groans monrnfully when deflated) and a spreading out-like the
flattening of the full breasts of a woman who is lying on her back."

Honey upon honey: as in Levinas, this image translates ontological indifference; it comes on
o
stage as the very reality ofthe commonality of being and beings, existing and existents. What ....
meets up in this indifferent sugared difference, in this ontological difference at once annulled
and revealed by the honey, is, Sartre tells us, the "there is" and "the facticity of being-thrown."
Things thus literally take part in finitude. And I remain persuaded, contrasense or not, that the
genius of Sartre's writing and its fantastic power consist in the way in which it makes ontological
difference exist; that is, the way in which it invites things to bear witness to the question of Being.
Only then, for example, could there be a "metaphysical coefficient of lemon."
In each apprehension of quality, there is in this sense a metaphysical effort to escape from our condi-
tion so as to pierce through the shell of nothingness about the 'there is' and to penetrate to the pure
in-itself. But obviously we can apprehend quality only as a symbol of a being that totally escapes us, even
though it is totally there before us; in short, we can only make revealed being function as a symbol of
being-in-itself. This means that a new structure of the 'there is' is constituted which is the meaningful
level although this level is revealed in the absolute unity of one and the same fundamental project. This
structure we shall call the metaphysical purport of all intuitive revelation ofbeing: and this is precisely
what we ought to achieve and disclose by psychoanalysis. What is the metaphysical purport of yellow,
of red, of polished, or wrinkled? And after these elementary questions, what is the metaphysical coef-
ficient of lemon, of water, of oil, etc.? Psychoanalysis must resolve all of these problems if it wants to
understand someday why Pierre loves oranges and has a horror of water, why he gladly eats tomatoes
and refuses to eat beans, why he vomits ifhe is forced to swallow oysters or raw eggs,"

b
 In this text, a language is sought that would attain this very particular level of ontico-ontological
reality, the level on which philosophical analysis has neither to do with beings or with being, but
with both at the same time, different-indifferent, soldered together in the matter of existence.
This text resonates as an echo of the famous scene in Nausea when the root of the chestnut tree,
flesh of Being and beings, fantastically appears in a public park, much like the unreal cities that
Levinas speaks of:
And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existencehad suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost
the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things; this root was kneaded into
existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the
diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted,
Is
leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder-naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.
One must be attentive here to the motif of unveiling: "existence was suddenly unveiled." Sartre's
novel envisages the effects in the real of the Heideggerian unveiling of existence; aletheia comes
on stage, the effective unveiling that calls ontological difference to come into appearance, to enter
into existence. It is as if the real underscores its own deconstruction, modifies itself in service of
this deconstruction; as if it were ready to bend to its new philosophical and phenomenological
destiny, taking ontico-ontoloqical form, giving itself to be differently seen, letting existing dif-
ference be seen as the very matter of this form, at once existence become "paste" and nothing.
For this reason, existence, for Sartre, as for Levinas, does not ultimately have much to do-de-
spite what they both affirm-with the existence ofDasein. It is something other than what comes
into play when the two authors retranslate the couple Being-beings into "existing-existents."
Existence appears in their work as the real effect of ontological difference and not simply as
the mode of being of an entity that is not a thing. And it is paradoxically this real effect that is
fantastic, to the extent that this real exceeds the real, as it is generally understood. At stake is the
incursion of existence into things, the incursion of difference into the night or the sadness of a
garden, surreality or hypermateriality of being after Heidegger: a post-Heideggerian real.
The academic character of my exposition so far-firstly Levinas, secondly Sartre, thirdly Nancy
(I could not find a better method for what I intended to present here)-masks the fact that it was
through reflection on the work of Nancy that I came to see a unity-an unsettled and perhaps
contestable unity, he will say to me-between the thought of these three authors. I am currently
in the process of writing on Heidegger and I have had to confront, like so many others before
me, the unavoidable question of the changes in his work after Being and Time, and to reflect
upon the fact that the category of existence very quickly loses the central role that it obviously
played at the heart of the analytic that bears its name. Accordingly, it has always struck me that
existence remains, in the thought of Nancy who is a great reader of Heidegger, a major concept,
and that it continues to insist, to exist after its ontological disinheritance, after the failure of
existentialism, and finally, after the work of Derrida-within whose work, to my knowledge ex-
istence is not a fundamental philosopheme. I thus began with this question: why does existence
resist and what is existence for Nancy? While I was rereading his texts, I noticed a certain "family
resemblance" between his analyses and those of Levinas and Sartre. Ifthe context of his analyses
is very different, something, within existence conceived as an ontological effect, remains deeply
identical-which raises, once again, the question of the fantastic.
Existence is not thinkable, for Nancy, outside of a double structure, that of the "right on" (d
meme)-"an" in German-and that of the "being-caught-within." To exist is being-right-on, like
Same's honey is right on the honey when its ecstasy takes it from the spoon to the pot. "The be-
ing of existence takes place right on existence," Nancy declares in "The Decision of Existence,"
one of the articles that make up Une pensee finie. He continues: 'There is no existentiale that is
not immediately and as such caught in the existentiell. "'9
"The Decision of Existence" presents itself as a reading of Being and Time that attempts to
understand how Dasein passes from improper existence-everydayness, the "One"-to proper
or authentic existence. It is this passage itself that is the "decision of existence." However, once
again, this reading of Heidegger displaces Heidegger; and existence acquires, as it were, a new
existence.
Nancy thus insists upon the fact that the decision of existence takes place right on existence.
o
This signifies, and paragraph 38 of Being and Time affirms, that "existence in its ownness is not ....
something which floats above falling everydayness; existentially, it is only a modified grasp (ein
modiftziertes Ergreifen) in which such everydayness is seized upon. »ao In other words, decision,
the passage from the improper to the proper takes place as a kind of slippage-"without changing
ground," Nancy says; it is very much existence that modifies itself, right on itself. Nancy thus
asks how there can be decision, a pure cut-Entscheidung-where there is precisely nothing to
cut, since existence remains caught in itself, flows from itself toward itself, as it were, without
rupture. Nancy's insistence upon this existential paste and this existential vice grip deports the
Heideggerian definition of existence toward something other than itself, toward another future.
How can there be a decision, therefore, if decision always implies the cutting edge of an opening?
How to open and what is opening when one is caught? To cut, Nancy responds, can only signify
this: to open existence upon its incision. "The essence of the decision [of existence]. .. is itself cut,
exposed, opened-on its very incision, so to speak.?" What begins to appear here is, indeed, the
slice of existence-that is, a thickness that lets itself be sliced, or cut, to the quick. A reality, here
again, of ontico-ontological being: "nothing that is-but only of Being-delivered-over to beings,
which is existence."" The "modified grasp" of existence by itself-which, Nancy mentions, Hei-
degger tells us "nothing more" abont-implies a mutability, and thus a certain malleability, and
thus a certain materiality, or plasticity, of existence. The double structure of existence's relation
to itself, the structure of the "right on" and that of "being-caught-in," marks the upsurge of an
understanding of existence as the reality of difference. Difference starts to exist.
This existence of existence is not night, nor is it the viscous or the root of a chestnut tree; it is
all that at the same time; it is the body. The body is the existence of existence; it is the existence
of the body. "The body," Nancy writes in Corpus, "is the being of existence.?" With this word,
"the body," so simple and so old, Nancy gives a name to tbe simplest apparatus of ontico-onto-
logical materiality. This body is indeed the "ontological body," the body of ontico-ontological
difference.
Does that mean that it is the incarnation of ontico-ontological difference? No. Nancy says that
the ontological or ontico-ontological body is not the "incarnation" of difference, but its "carna-
tion," or rather its "local color."
.._another name for local color is carnation [...J Not incarnation, where the body is filled with the
breath of Spirit, but simple carnation, like the scansion, color, frequency and nuance, of a place, of the
event of existence. 24
"Incarnation" and "carnation" are analyzed as two "versions of coming to presence." The one
is metaphysical, traditional; the other is the apparition, real and recent, of difference. But how
would this carnation, this ontological body, be apprehended if not as fantastic phenomena? The
singular body can be seen, as in Levinas, at once detached and attached, delivered and redeemed,
inseparable and separated from the ontological body that is the basis of existence, this "com-
pact thickness," this "continuity of sense": the body "does not inhabit either the 'spirit' or the
'body.' They take place at the limit [upon the cutting edge], as the limit itself: limit-outer edge,
fracture and intersection of the foreign within the continuity of sense, within the continuity of
matter. Opening, discretion. "'5 The being of existence and existence itself are at once united and
separated, soldered together, right on one another, both caught up in one another and strangers,
each an intruderfor the other. There again, the community of this foreignness takes place, bod-
ies forth, makes space, time, and matter, and produces vertigo. Nancy does not speak literally of
horror, or of the fantastic, but he does have his own word, a very beautiful word: areality. The
ontico-ontological real is "areal."
"Areality" is also the title of one of the slices of Corpus:
"Areality"is an oldwordthat signifiesthe propertyofhavingan air (area). Byaccident,the wordcan also
suggest a lack of reality, or rather a tenuous, light, or suspended reality: that of the distance that localizes
a body, or within a body. The paucity of reality, indeed, which is at the "basis" of substance, matter or the
subject. But this paucity of reality makes up the entire areal real in which the archi-tectonic of the body
(as it has been called) articulates itself and plays itself out. In this sense, areality is the ens realissimum,
the maximal potentiality of existing, within total extension of its horizon. Simply put, the real as areal
26
unites the infinite of the maximum of existence ... to the absolute finitude of the areal horizon.
Areality- this beautiful word speaks of space, space as reality. At the same time, it speaks of this
reality as the "paucity of reality," as non-thing (the a beiug understood as a privative prefix);
a-real as the contrary of the real, but still appearing right on the level of things. Areality is also
a form of the schematism. An "air" renders bodies homogeneous with the concept. There is uo
apprehension of bodies without the mediation of an air. At the same time, the schema itself
comes on stage, assumes a body itself, and thus provokes the effect of a real, a surreality, the
maximum of the real-a fantastic image. "Comes the world of bodies," Nancy writes. But what
comes with this world?
First of all, it is perhaps nothing other, nothing more than this: what comes is what images show us.
OUf billions of images show us billions of bodies-as bodies have never been shown. Crowds, masses,
melees, packages, files, troupes, swarms, armies, gangs, disbanded particles, panics, tiers, processions,
collisions, massacres, mass graves, communions, dispersions, full to the brim, overflowing with bodies
always both in compact masses and pulverizing divagations, always collected (in streets, ensembles,
megalopolises, banlieues, centers of transit, surveillance, care, or forgetting) and always abandoned to
a stochastic mixture of these same places, to an agitation that structures them, an incessant generalized
departure. This is the world of worldwide departure: the spacing of partes extra partes, with nothing
that overarches it or upholds it, without Subject of its destiny, taking place only as a prodigious press
of bodies. 27

The world overflows right on itself, one body against another; difference compacts, compresses
itself. And the hallucinatory reality that surges up from this congregation or this agglomeration
given in images calls thought to open itself to this (surreal, a-real, areal) effusion, to think the
real of another age, the real of ontico-ontological difference, to make itself available to the pos-
sibility of apprehending a fantastic reality, existence that exists, existence that does not exist:
the effect of the real of Heidegger's legacy.
While rereading Heidegger, I understood that the destiny of ontological difference was indeed
"carnation," the name given to what should become an effect of a real-of another real, of course,
but still a real-beings and Being together, which does not limit itself to the existence of Dasein,
but enters into presence everywhere, always, there, like the root of the chestnut tree, viscous paste,
night without sleep, body in departure, areola. And Nancy taught me much; for, he never sought
to ontologize the body or to affirm it as an ontico-ontological bastard child. This body does not
give itself "in flesh and blood;" it arealizes itself. And, in a film about Sartre, I found something
that he says very profound: "It is not a matter of being an idealist or a materialist, but rather a
realist." Ontological realism thus appears as the future of a certain phenomenology.
Forging a real alliance between the work of three thinkers, whose differences I have decided
not to exhibit, I have insisted upon the fantastic dimension of this objectivity, this materiality, or
this reality, which confronts philosophy with a new challenge and obliges thought to economize
otherwise the distinction between existent and non-existent, between "this exists" and "this
does not exist." Heidegger made possible this fantastic dimension of the real; and this opening
of philosophical thought to strange phenomena of Being; but he did not undertake their analy-
sis-which thus becomes our task.
I have elsewhere elaborated how what I call "plasticity" could designate this place of an always
already "psychicized" being, as Sartre says, where philosophy encounters itself; where metaphysics
and an other thought cross and organize the modalities of their exchanges; where, for example,
the trace of ontological difference forms itself, materializes itself in forms: forms of the real, but
also artistic forms, heretofore unknown forms of philosophical writing-a writing evidenced in
texts such as Nausea, certain passages from Being and Nothingness, Existence and Existents,
or Corpus, the first examples of a fantastic philosophy.
How could one not think, finally, of Nancy's L'Intrus, where the fantastic is born from the
impossibility of distinguishing between "the organic, the symbolic, and the imaginary"?
From the moment that I was told that I must have a heart transplant, every sign could have vacillated,
every marker changed: without reflection, of course, and even without identifying the slightest action
or permutation. There is simply the physical sensation of a void already open [dEij'douvert] in my chest,
along with a kind of apnea wherein nothing, strictly nothing, even today, would allow me to disentangle
the organic, the symbolic, and the imaginary, or the continuous from the interrupted-the sensation
was something like one breath, now pushed across a cavern, already imperceptibly half-open and
strange; and, as though within a single representation, the sensation of passing over a bridge, while
still remaining on it.28

And later:
I become like an android from science-fiction, or rather one of the living dead, as my youngest son
said to me one day."

To conclude, I turn to Roger Caillois, a great thinker of the fantastic, who has silently accompa-
nied me throughout this exposition and whom I admire very much. In Coherences aventureuses,
Caillois excludes from the category of the fantastic all pictural or poetic works that deliberately
intend to produce the fantastic: "The first rule that I give myself is to exclude what I call the
fantastic that tries too hard: those works of art purposely created in order to surprise'?": the
marvels offairy tales, legends and mythology, the painting of Hieronymus Bosch, "delusions of
the demented mind, indulgent fancies, the masks of Tibetan demons, the avatars of Vishnu."?'
skeletons, hells, sorcerers. "I let myself entertain," he pursues, "the dream (unreasonable, I am
afraid) of a permanent and universal fantastic."
 What Caillois calls the "permanent and universal fantastic" closely resembles what I have here
tried to approach under the name of the philosophical fantastic. This fantastic, Caillois says, is
a "coherent and unavoidable" fantastic that is always born from the intrusion of a foreign ele-
ment at the heart of the familiar-this element not coming from outside, but from within being.
"The fantastic in my sense does not come from an element outside the human world: composite
monsters, infernal fauna, the irruption of demonic, grotesque or sinister creatures. It emerges
from a contradiction that bears upon the very nature of life and that obtains nothing less than
the appearance of momentarily abolishing, by means of its vain but troubling prestige, the border
that separates life from death.f"

Translated by Steven Miller

tr
The essay translated here originally appeared as "Pierre aime
les horranges: lkvinas-Sartre-Nancy-une approche du fantas-
tique en philosophie," in Sens en tous sens: autour des travaux
de Jean-Luc Nancy, eds. Francs Guibal and Jean-Clet Martin
(Paris: Galilee, 2004), 39-57·
1. One could also say it in this way: existence, that is the fan-
tastic, is what returns even when the category of "existence"
has disappeared from Heidegger's thought-which happeus
very quickly, right after Being and Time.
2. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A.
Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987),44·
3. Ibid,46.
4. Ibid,45.
5· Ibid,45.
6. Ibid, 45-6.
7. Ibid,46-7.
8. See in particular, Phenomenological Interpretation of
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Parvis Emad and
Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1997), 283: "Now we see that, if the productive power of
the imagination plays a leading role in the structure of
human finite knowledge, nay, if the power of imagination
is the very unifying root of intuition and thinking, then in
finite knowledge too there is something original in the sense
originarium. But this original faculty does not concern
beings themselves, as does intuitus originarius, which is
ontically creative and brings things as such into extantness.
By contrast the exhibito originaria of the productive syn-
thesis of the power of imagination is merely ontologically
creative, in that it freely 'figures' the universal horizon of
time as the horizon of a priori resistance, i.e., of objectness"
[Translation slightly modified].
9. Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988),54-5·
10. Ibid, 56.
11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E.
Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 768.
12. Ibid, 769·
13. Ibid, 770 [Translation slightly modified]. 24. Ibid.

14· Ibid, 779 [Translation slightly modified]. 25. Ibid, 18.

15. Ibid.
26. Ibid, 39.
16. Ibid, 775.
27· Ibid, 37.
17. Ibid, 770.
28. Nancy, L'Intrus, trans. Susan Hanson, CR: The New Centen-
18. Same, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New nial Review 2.3 (Fall 2002): 3.
Directions, 1964), 127.
29· Ibid, 3.
19. Jean-LncNancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes
et. al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 30. Roger Caillois, Coherences aventureuses {Esthetique ge-
99 [Translation slightly modfied]. neralisee; Au creur dufantastique; La Dissumetrie) (Paris:
Gallimard, 1962, 1965, 1973), 72.
20. Heidegger quoted by Nancy, ibid, 99.

21. Ibid, 85 [Translation slightly modified]. 31. Ibid,74.

22. Ibid, 91. 32. Ibid, 74.

23· Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Metailie, 2000), 17. 33. Ibid, 173·
THE GREEK MATRIX OF APPEARANCE
Why would one distinguish, in philosophy, between appearing and being?
For what reason? In high school literature essays, it is always a question
of appearance versus reality, as though there were a contest and a win-
ner to be named. In philosophy, however, the contrast seems to be with
being, an altogether more solitary and enigmatic affair.
In Plato's Republic, the term "appearance" emerges in two places: firSt"" •
in the allegory of the cave, and second when Socrates justifies his early
exclusion of the poets from the city. In each passage, appearance is not
contrasted to being, butto the Idea, of which it is a copy. In both passages,
the term "appearance" intervenes to resolve difficulties in the argument.
In the cave, which is an allegory for the philosopher's education, what is
at stake is the differentiation of the philosopher's koowledge from that
of any other claimant for political power (via its orientation towards the
Good). The politicians of established cities are fascinated by appear-
ances. Donald Rumsfeld, for example, spent his years in power chained
to a muddy bench in a dank cave gazing slack-jawed at the shadow of
efficiency. The philosopher, on the other hand, rejects and passes beyond
appearances. This parting of ways of the philosopher and the politician
marks the threshold of philosophy as an ascetic practice of questioning,
a practice that is not only orientated by the Good, but if we take Socrates
at his word in the Apology, it also constitutes the good life itself.
When Socrates returns in Book X to the expulsion of the poets, he di-
vides appearances into two classes (phenomena and simulacra) according
to their genealogy (are they related to the Ideas or not?). This genealogy
generates a scale of being wherein the Ideas are most "in being" as they
are the most self-identical, and the simulacra-the painters' and poets'
copies of copies, unhinged from themselves and duplicitous-are least
"in being." The particular appearances which are at stake at this moment
of the argument are the appearances of practices in both senses of the
genitive. First, there is the appearance of a practice in terms of its place

UMBR(a) 115
within the functioning of the city: one can imagine the guardians conducting a survey of the city's
production for tax purposes-such is the production offarmers, such is that of the carpenters, the
masons are behind this year, etc. Second, these practices also generate appearances: the carpen-
ter produces an appearance of the Idea "bed." The appearances of the practices of painting and
poetry pose a problem for Socrates in both senses. The problem is that, due to their degraded
relation to the Ideas, the appearances of painting and poetry have no place within the order of
professions and functions that constitutes the city. Not only that, but poets claim, via imitation
(mimesis), to possess multiple places by taking the places of the legitimate professions. That is,
both painters and poets trick their audiences into believing that they as artists actually possess
the technical knowledge-of charioteering, of government-that they represent in their works.
The root of the problem is thus their usurpation of the function of education, which in Socrates'
construction is exclusively the domain of the guardians. Thus Socrates' ultimate concern at this
point is to guard the consistency of the city during the moment of its presentation to its own
population, that is, during the moment of its reflexivity: the moment of education. In short,
the threat of poetic mimesis is that it will unhinge the identity and structure of the city, which
is held together both by an order of technical knowledge and by that order's presentation and
transmission in education.
To complete this short primer in appearance in Greek philosophy, we must turn to the work of
the Stagirite. It is my contention that the problem of appearances, although it is not as explicit
as in Plato, does occur for Aristotle, and precisely at a point where he can least afford to have
problems: the foundation of his ontology in the Metaphysics. It is the moment when he carries
out his investigation of being-already decided via the pros hen doctrine as ousia or substance-by
examining the technical or artificial production of new substances. In his attempt to determine
the nature of substance, he distinguishes four causes of production: the material, the efficient,
the formal, and the final. An individual substance-a being-is defined as a union of form and
matter. The process of production which changes a pile of bricks into a house shows that mat-
ter and form are separable, and that the same matter can take on different forms. This is where
Aristotle's headaches begin, and Lacan knew these headaches in detail.' Ifsubstance is understood
as hypokeimenon (substrate) the material cause (bricks or clay) can be identified as substance
inasmuch as it can take on different forms. However, in itself matter is not unified, it has an
infinity of accidental properties-this brick is chipped, this brick bulges. Form is what bestows
unity on matter, and for Aristotle being-substance-has to be unified. But if one argues that
substance is form, even actualized form, and unity is saved, then the concrete individuals-the
very cause of knowledge for Aristotle-are left outside the domain of ontology itself which is
now incapable of speaking of being.' Aristotle's prior philosophy runs aground on the relation
between form and matter: form is the changeable appearance of concrete matter, and matter
is the non-unified multiple with its infinite accidents.
 In Plato's thonght there is thus no simple opposition between appearance and being, but a
distinction between the being of the Idea and the being of two different types of appearances:
phenomena (copies ofIdeas) and simulacra (copies of copies). The role of these distinctions is to
ground the disqualification of all other pretendants, such as poets or politicians, to the posts of
governor and educator ofthe city, thus paving the way for the exclusive election of the philosopher.
In Aristotle, appearance in the shape of the definable form of a concrete substance provides one
solution to ontology's task of speaking of being. However, it does so at the price of losing being
in the shape of what underlies and remains the same through change. The task of this paper is
to show that these two Greek dispositions of appearance can be understood as partially condi-
tioning the conceptualization of appearance in the philosophy of Alain Badiou: they constitute
a matrix for his thought. However, this is the case only insofar as that matrix was transformed
by its passage through a praxis of subjectivity peculiar to the twentieth century: psychoanalysis.
This passage was marked in particular by Lacan's repeated interrogations and qualifications of
.....
both the figure of Socrates and the logic and metaphysics of Aristotle.

LACAN: SEMBLANCE AND THE LETTER

Lacan introduces the term semb/ant in a seminar whose title-which could be translated as
"of a discourse that does not originate in or belong to semblance" -already indicates a Socratic
orientation or promise within his project.> It is in this seminar that Lacan begins to elaborate
the formulae of sexuation made famous in Seminar XX. Hence the term semb/ant is introduced
within the problem of sexual difference and specifically the various dysfunctions of the relations
between the sexes. Lacan's solution to this problem is radical. He declares that there is no sexual
intercourse, and that all sexual identification, for both men and women, is a matter of sheer
pretense, of discourses constituted by signifiers of sexual identity; that is, discourses which do
belong to the order of the semblant." In this seminar, the semb/ant is another term Lacan uses
to think the S,-S, articulation according to which the master signifier unifies a set of secondary
signifiers, specifically in the field of sexual differentiation. Semblance is not coupled with being in
Lacan's thought, but rather with the real andjouissance. One of the clearer ways of understanding
Lacan's three orders-symbolic, imaginary, and real-in his late teaching is that they are neither
domains, nor regions of being, nor types of presentation but modalities of presentation, and the
modality of the real is that of impossibility and contingency. When Lacan first articulates the
formula "not all jouissance is phallic," he also claims that this non-phallic jouissance-qualified
as infinite, or as pure repetition beyond the pleasure principle, or as unsymbolized-falls into
the modality of the real, and as such it can be opposed to the order of semblance. 5 Phallic jouis-
sance on the other hand, in the form of the object a of the fantasy or the phallic signifier, is not
opposed to semblance insofar as it makes up part of the latter's order: phallic jouissance is always
a semblance of jouissance for Lacan .
 In Seminar XVII, Lacan claims that all discourses are constituted as organizations of jouis-
sance. In Seminar XVIII, he declares that all discourses are of the order of semblance." We can
thus state that all discourses generate a semblance of jouissance. However, the very title of the
seminar raises the possibility of a discourse which would not belong to the order of semblance.
We can suppose that one characteristic of such a discourse would be that it would neither avoid
nor fill in the absence of a sexual relation. The few indications Lacan gives as to the nature of such
a discourse concern the letter. He says, and I quote: "It is only via the effects of the articulation
of the semblant-via little letters-that we can designate what is real; what is real is what makes
a hole in the semblant" (28). And later: "The letter which erases thus distinguishes itself from
semblance by being a break or rupture of the latter; it dissolves all form, phenomenon, meteors.
This is the operation that science performs ...on perceivable forms" (122).
Lacan makes two moves here. First, he distances his discourse from philosophy, specifically
from its concern to identify forms and phenomena and then anchor them in being. Second, he
aligns his discourse with modern science inasmuch as it proceeds not by grounding its proposi-
tions in the representation, in perception of stable phenomena, but by writing mathematical
formulae in algebraic letters to capture the real. What this alignment produces within Lacan's
work is the doctrine of the matherne, and it is this doctrine which provides the first key to situat-
ing Badiou's work.
From the very beginning of his work in the late 1960s, Badiou took the doctrine of the matheme
as his guide: the letter, organized in a matherne, performs a rupture with the order of semblance.'
It is my contention that the consequences of this doctrine have not yet been fully understood in
the interpretation of Badiou's work, especially with regard to empiricist anxieties about the rela-
tion between Badiou's "abstract" set theory ontology and supposed "real" or "concrete" situations.
Not only that, but it is in Lacan's Seminar XVIII itself that we immediately find the epistemo-
logical consequences set out with regard to truth and appearances. One of Lacan's concerns in
this seminar is to criticize logical empiricism, in particular the doctrine of verificationism. This
doctrine claims that a sentence is meaningful if the existence of the objects it refers to can be
verified. Lacan claims that this doctrine is untenable from a psychoanalytic point of view. He
says that interpretation, like the Greek oracle, is only true via its consequences: "Interpretation
is not tested by a truth that would decide by yes or no, it unleashes truth as such. It is only true
inasmuch as it is truly followed" (13). At the end of the seminar he speaks of what can be said
from the perspective of this truth which is followed: "There is discourse solely on the basis of
semblance ....Semblance can only be stated or declared on the basis of truth ....As truth, it can
only say what is semblance with regard to jouissance, and it is with regard to sexual jouissance
that it wins every time" (144).
 Thus, within the psychoanalytic orientation which Lacan contrasts to Carnap's epistemolo
one does not start out by verifying the existence of a set of concrete objects and checking their
relationship to a theoretical statement. It is only from the perspective of a truth that has already
been unleashed by an interpretation, and then followed in its consequences that one can isolate
and situate semblances. This orientation of thought with regard to appearances goes a long way
towards explaining the status of Badiou's new logical phenomenology and the extreme tension
between its mathematical apparatus and the architectural and political illustrations.
But to situate Lacan and Badiou with regard to appearance, it is not enough to sketch a genealogy
which hesitates between masters, assigning precedence and foresight to Lacan and mathemati-
cal sophistication to Badiou. Rather, it is through multiplying relations-to Althusser, to Hegel,
to the stakes of the discourse of the university and its own mania for placement-that the two
Parisians will finally be positioned in regard to the situation of appearance and semblance. And
one of these relations to be multiplied is to the Greeks, a relation that the Parisians are quick to
exploit in orientating their own enterprises: Badiou explicitly situates himself as Platonic and
Lacan as Socratic; Lacan claims that Socrates was the first hysteric; Jacques- Alain Miller in his
commentary claims that Socrates, like the psychoanalyst, distrusts the order of semblance, sowing
doubt and launching the passage beyond appearances by asking "so you believe that?!" to each of
the powerful men he interrogates." Lacan situates himself as anti -Aristotelian by derailing and
appropriating Aristotle's logical categories. He does this by engaging in a parodic examination
of ontology, naming it an inaugural discourse of the master, by calling, as if to compensate for
its arrogance, for an hontoloqie, a shame-ology.' The only "substance" psychoanalysis recog-
nizes, for Lacan, is jouissance. And in Encore he claims that being can only appear [par-est] in
the interstices and impossible points of a discourse." Thus it is within the impasses of a formal
discourse that being-jouissance-may be presented in a manner that would not be yet another
semblance of jouissance. It is here that our triangulation via the Greeks begins to bear fruit for
at this point Badiou detaches himself from Lacan. Badiou claims that being is presented not in
the impasses but in the formulae, in all of the writings, of set theory. This fundamental thesis is
what allows him to restore the Greek discourse of ontology without any particular privileges for
categories such as jouissance and shame that belong to a particular being, the subject. This is not
to say that Badiou is Aristotelian rather than Platonic. Far from it, the point of this triangulation
is that Badiou is more Socratic than Platonic.

BAD IOU: BREAKING OPEN A SPACE OF APPEARANCES

Badiou's first published articles appear in the Cahiers pour l'ana/yse, a journal edited by the
Cercle d'epistemologie which consisted of a number of students of the philosophy department at
 the Ecole Normale Superieure iucludingJacques-Alain Miller and Jean-Claude Milner. Badiou's
first book, Le concept de modele, originally took the form of an intervention in Althusser's 1967-
68 course later published as Philosophie et philosophie spontanee des savants." The course was
consecrated to identifying the emergence of ideology within scientific practice. Althusser was
concerned not so much with the specific results of a hypothesis and a set of experiments, but
with what happened to scientific discourse when scientists attempted to relate their results to the
wider context of scientific progress and society. Note that Althusser's project is strictly Socratic:
the aim is to interrogate claims to authoritative knowledge or wisdom on the part of powerful
men-such as Jacques Monod, the biologist occupying the chair at the College de France-and
to track down their claims to know things beyond the limits of the technical knowledge gener-
ated by their activity.
Badiou's intervention in Althusser's course focuses on the ideological usage made of one
particular scientific concept, the mathematical concept of model. His targets are cybernetics,
structuralism and logical empiricism insofar as they each claim that a theory constructs a model
o to account for particular behavior on the part of empirical phenomena within a delimited field.
N

This model is then adjusted to account for any discrepancies between predictions made on its
basis and actual phenomena. However, compared to the original mathematical concept, this
epistemological account is topsy-turvy. In mathematics one starts with a set oflogical axioms,
and then one constructs a "model" of them by fleshing them out and assigning a certain set of
values to the variables of the axioms, showing that the axioms and theorems remain valid when
they are "interpreted" by a particular set of variables. In Badiou's argument, the correct use of the
mathematical concept of model leads to an alternative epistemology, one that rejects Carnap's
distinction between the formal and the empirical, and in doing so recognizes that when think-
ing science "one establishes oneself within science from the outset. One does not reconstitute it
starting from nothing. One does not found it.""
But Badiou's concern at this stage of his work is not to have done with empiricism, nor to
elaborate an alternative epistemology; both are steps on the way to a larger project that is al-
ready in view. From a cursory reading of his three early articles- "La subversion infinitesimale,"
"Marque et manque," and "Le (re)commencement du materialisme dialectique" -it is evident
that his fundamental concern is to theorize the limit of a space of appearances, his question be-
ing where such a space opens or breaks up." In other words-and this formnlation marks the
constancy of Badiou's thought-how can a space of appearances change? At this point in his
work he disposes of a ready-made name for such change as it occurs within the domain of sci-
ence: an epistemological break. He approves of Althusser's use of this Bachelardian concept to
separate out a properly scientific part of Marxism: the result of this separation is that philosophy
becomes dialectical materialism, the theory of the historical production of knowledge by science,
focusing in particular on marking the distinction between science and ideology. '4 In his article
"La subversion infinitesimale,' Badiou puts the Althusserian model of philosophical practice to
work by isolating and critiquing the subsistence of ideology within a particular field of science,
mathematics, inasmuch as it occurs as an epistemological obstacle to the investigation of the
infinitesimal numbers of calculus. However, Badiou's object was not the science-ideology distinc-
tion but the occurrence of change.
In order to theorize the change of a space of appearances, one has to be able to distinguish
between one space of appearances and another. That is, to signal a transformation one must be
able to differentiate two states from each other and institute an order between them such that the
change is not without orientation. Thus one would have an "initial state" and an "end state." In
"La subversion infinitesimale," Badiou's strategy is to delimit a domain of finite marks and then
to isolate a trace of heterogeneity within that domain whilst maintaining its consistency. At this
point he imports Lacan's category of the real into the Bachelardian-Althusserian problematic.
Like anyone involved in the import-export business, Badiou wants efficient reliable delivery and
a product which is the same every time, so he disregards the complexity and clinical ramifications
of Lacan's meditations on the real and seizes on one definition: the real is a point ofimpossibility
in formalization." This allows him to justify his other import into the Althusserian problematic:
mathematical formalization. In the commentary on Badiou, one finds a disagreement between
Peter Hallward who speaks of a mathematical turn in Badiou's oeuvre and Bruno Bosteels who
counters with an argument for continuity of dialectical thought. What needs to be recognized,
however, is that Badiou in fact starts out in mathematics: this is his unique contribution to the
Althusserian epistemological question. The conception of dialectics on the other hand, which is
definitely present at the beginning, remains purely Althusserian. The importation of mathematics
is not only a biographical accident (Badiou's father being a professor of mathematics). Rather,
there is a philosophical choice involved. For Badiou mathematics is none other than a discourse
which would not belong to the order of semblance: the use of the Lacanian hypothesis could
not be more evident. Indeed, at one point in his article "Marque et manque," he claims that the
domain of ideology is that of the signifier and the domain of science that of the letter. ,6
But what is this virtue of the letter? How exactly does it escape the domain of ideology? For
Badiou the first virtue is that a letter-a variable-can mark a place of impossibility without filling
it with a constant.v For instance, one can write 4 - x = x and x> 4, or z" + 1 = o. Thus in Badiou's
inversion of Lacan on the matheme and the real, not only can being be written in formal language,
but the real qua impossible can also be written using algebraic letters. Moreover, and this is where
the theory of change starts to find some focus, mathematics historically splits and remakes itself
by creating constants that occupy these impossible places: ~ is baptized an imaginary number
which is then used in a new space of calculations. The axiom of infinity in Zermelo-Fraenkel set
theory states that an infinite cardinal exists; this anchors Cantor's technique for distinguishing
different infinities, thus opening up a whole new realm of infinite cardinals. For Badiou, what
these transformations reveal is that the point in which they originate-the point of the real-is
in fact what singularized the initial domain of marks. The variable which marked the impossible
place differentiates this domain from other domains, most evidently from the successive domain,
which is another stratum of marks, with its own points of impossibility. I claimed above that one
of the desiderata for a theory of change is a distinction between two states, an initial and an end
state of the change. Here we find that it is not the positive characteristics of a domain, or state of
affairs, that differentiates it, but its immanent point of impossibility. ,8 The second fundamental
virtue of the letter for Badiou-and this is clear in the early articles-is that it is not referential.
A letter neither signifies nor does it refer to a substantial object. A letter-a free variable-opens
a place of substitution; any value whatsoever from the admitted domain of values can take the
position offix) = y. Hegel in The Science of Logic already says that a greater logic is not "about"
some ready-made world: for the early and the late Badiou, mathematics has no object.

LOGIQUES DES MONDES

In March 2006 Badiou published his third major work, Logiques des mondes, billed as the com-
panion volume to Being and Event. His problem is still that of thinking the change of a space of
appearances. His terminology is not the same, however, and he is no longer concerned with the
AIthusserian project of tracking down instances of ideology in science, nor is he concerned with
theorizing the difference between science and ideology. His major task is to construct a logic
which will demonstrate the consistency of appearances without recourse to a transcendental
subject or a unifying agent of any kind, such as Kant's transcendental subject of apperception of
NikIas Luhmann's autopoeitic systems. Badiou sets out to show how appearances-not just the
appearances of a set of mathematical marks this time but any phenomena whatsoever-can be
written using the resources of category theory as objectively cohering into worlds via a small set
of mathematical operations: the minimum, the conjunction, the envelope, and the inverse.
Where does this odd mathematical phenomenology begin? True to his Socratic orientation,
Badiou starts with what he claims is the doxa of our times. In the preface to Logiques des mondes,
rather than situating his work within a philosophical context, as he does in Being and Event, he
situates it in a far wider context. His opponent is not Robert Brandom or John Searle but the
hegemonic ideology of our epoch: democratic materialism, an ideology which boils down to one
sordid existential axiom-there are solely bodies and languages. This is our, nay even Badiou's,
"natural belief' if we don't watch ourselves. The stage is set, the battle may begin. Unfortunately
one cannot continue with the military metaphors, which are amusing, because the task for Badiou
is no longer one of exiting from the cave-or even destroying it (which was the case in his Maoist
period)-but rather that of supplementing it with an exception. This is a far more complex task
for thought, one sign of which is the increasing length of his major works."
The existential thesis that Badiou opposes to democratic materialism is "there are only bodies
and languages except that there are truths." This thesis lies at the basis of what Badiou terms
an ideology, a kind of counter-ideology called "materialist dialectics." How can this new use of
the term "ideology" be understood? Evidently Logiques des mondes does not rehabilitate the
Althusserian distinction between the Marxist science of historical materialism and bourgeois
ideology. Badiou still uses mathematics-and the permanence of the inverted Lacanian doctrine
on the real and the matheme is evident-but his philosophical project as a whole is now termed
"not an ideology."
What this appellation immediately makes clear is what Badiou is not trying to do. One could
argue that he spends 300 pages importing category theory into philosophy to construct a logic
of the solidity of appearances because he needs to explain why revolutionary change does not
happen all the time. This is the Frankfurt School's problem: why don't the masses rise up in
revolt given that it is in their best interest to do so? What stops the people from overthrowing
their oppressors? However, there is no problem more foreign to Badiou's approach: he has no
theoretical account of power and no account of what a human is before it is subjectivized by a
truth procedure. His is a far more affirmative and less melancholic philosophy: his premise is ...
N

that events and truths do occur. The problem is what to do with them and how to maintain them,
not why there aren't more of them. There are more than enough. We have not even worked out
how to design a school in a manner faithful to the principles of the French revolution: equality,
fraternity and liberty, and we have had 200 years.
The trickiest thing about Logiques des mondes is that it starts off distinguishing itself from an
ideology that is easily recognized and then ends up in extremely abstract accounts of structures of
appearance, such as ,,(x) = p. These mathematical writings are said to schematize the appearances
of a world such as-and these are Badiou's examples-a painting, a city, or a battle. In Being and
Event Badiou claims that certain sets schematize the structure of being of particular non-onto-
logical situations, like the situation of France today. It is all very well for Badiou to justify his use
of mathematics via the Lacanian doctrine of the signifier belonging to the order of the semb/ant
and mathematical formalization being the sole hope of isolating the real, but if in mathematics
the letter does not refer to an object, once it is imported into philosophy it does seem to refer
to something nonetheless. Inasmuch as a set or this category theory formula refers to the be-
ing and appearing of a particular situation, reference remains operative. Badiou's exposition in
Logiques des mondes is absolutely littered with examples, and his readings are quite convincing.
The problem for many commentators is that there is no clear method for assigning one figure
in the painting to a mathematically marked degree of existence, just as there was no method for
assigning a situation to a set. There is a certain gnlfbetween tbe examples and tbe matbematical
writings. This problem has led some to worrytbat Badiou is ''building a castle in tbe air." Deleuze
himself accused Badiou of analogical tbinking, and Justin Clemens accuses Badiou of illustrating
his philosophy.w Obviously it is here tbat semblance makes its return: Badiou's philosophy risks
becoming yet anotber discourse which does belong to tbe order of semblance.
How can Badiou be rescued from tbis terrible fate?" One must return to Hegel, a Hegel that
lies somewhere behind Deleuze's horror, Derrida's demonization and Zizek's adulation. For
Hegel tbe absolute is not tbe totality of everything but tbe exposition of tbe tbing-in-itself in
its independent existence. The absolute is not separate from all determining relationships witb
otber entities but contains all of tbose relationships. The exposition of tbe thing-in-itself in all of
its complexity is tbe result of a practical process, of tbe unfolding and self-examination of con-
sciousness tbrough the experience of particular historical ordeals." Althusser appropriates this
conception of the absolute when he states tbat tbe concrete is tbe result of analysis. During tbe
1970S, in his most explicitly Maoist period, Badiou turns against Altbusser, calling him revision-
ist for his idealist conception of ideology. He never cites Altbusser again in his major works. But
in Badiou's epistemological orientation, in his embrace of this alternative to empiricism-and
tbe anxiety about relating tbe concrete to tbe abstract in Logiques des mondes is an empiricist's
anxiety-in all tbis, Badiou is still tboroughly Altbusserian.
The effect of philosophical analysis, according to Altbusser, is tbat it produces distinctions and
divisions: it "traces lines of demarcation," to cite Lenin, between matter and form, science and
opinion." For Althusser, science-and Badiou imports this into his conception of philosophy
as early as his article "Le (re)commencement"-is tbe regulated production of a new object es-
sentially distinct from tbe given object, whilst ideology articulates lived experience and a false
way people have of relating to their conditions of existence. '" Consequently, if a philosophical
analysis reproduces recognizable objects from one's lived experience, for Altbusser and Badiou,
given tbat one always-as Socrates says-begins amidst the doxa, tben such philosophy is indis-
tingnishable from ideology. True philosophical analysis is a practice of division which produces a
new, unrecognizable but concrete object. It so happens that tbis epistemological orientation was
amply anticipated by Lacan when he declared that trutb is unleashed by an interpretation, and
followed in its consequences. Moreover, Lacan set out tbis very position in reaction to empiricist
attacks on his own usage of lingnistics as "metaphorical.'?" If Badiou, as I argne, is working in
this Hegelian-Altbusserian-Lacanian lineage, tben tbere is no possible "application of Badiou's
system to examples." His logics of appearance cannot be illustrated. Altbusser is very clear on this
point. He says, "Philosophy cannot be illustrated or applied. It is exercised. It can be learned only
by being practiced, for it exists only in its practice.?" What is Badiou's concept for philosophical
practice? It is conditioning. Conditioning means that one's philosophical thought must be born
and motivated by a practically grounded and organized ideological struggle, in Badiou's 1970S
Maoist terminology, and by a truth procedure in his Being and Event terminology.
This conception of philosophical practice in Logiques des mondes can be immediately situ-
ated with regard to the Greeks: the changing of appearances in a process of production-Ar-
istotle-can only be mapped in their consistency by a dialectical thinking which proceeds by
division-Socrates-thus subjectivizing the human being in her or his emergence from the cave
of doxa- Plato. How is this conception situated with regard to psychoanalytic praxis? As the
master-signifiers emerge during the work of analysis via a process of division, the analysand maps
and articulates her or his identifications and thus comes to have some distance, some liberty
from them. What, however, do we do with the problem of reference and semblances creeping
back in? Do sets schematize situations? I think this is an unfortunate formulation on Badiou's ....
part, and I wish I had deleted it from my translation of Being and Event. It is misleading. A more
appropriate formulation of the orientation of thought in Badiou would be: from within the philo-
sophical conceptualization of a particular truth procedure and its traversal of the limits of state
representation in its situation, the philosopher must write and present the emerging situation
without the security of a method. Badiou is very clear: ontology is not the (formal) representation
of (empirical) presentation. Ontology is the "presentation of presentation," an enterprise that is
more constructivist in its orientation than representational.
In the final analysis, the stakes of this epistemological orientation are institutional. When Lacan
in Seminar XVIII responds to the empiricist attack on his lack of an epistemology he talks about
the status of hypotheses in science:
The hypothesis-as Newton used it-never concerns the foundation ofthings, but participates in logic.
A conditional implies a consequent, the verification of the latter does not prove the former because a
true consequent can be drawn from a false premise in logic. The truth of a hypothesis in science resides
in the order that it gives to the entire field such as it has its status. Its status can only be defined by the
consent of all those who are authorized in this field: thus the status of the scientific field is academic.
(42-3)"

The status of a hypothesis in science thus depends on the discourse of the university and so is
conditioned by a question of power. The exercise of institutional power takes place through a polic-
ing of an order of places-much like in Plato's Republic-the places provided for the teaching and
researching of certain topics, for the funding of certain laboratories, and for both the disciplines
and for industry. Given this situation-one Lacan baptizes the order of semblances-it can only be
a virtue that Badiou's logic of appearances, of being-there, can be used to concretely and construc-
tively re-situate things and practices in worlds as part of its own praxis of changing appearances.
 1. Lacan characterizes Aristotle's dilemma as one of a trade-
off between essentiality and singularity: "Where is the
principle? Yes, it's the genre but ifit's the genre he becomes
enraged because it is not clear whether it is the general genre
or the more specific genre. It's obvious that the more general
genre is more essential, hut at the same time it is the most
specific which determines what is unique in each." ... Ou Pire
(1971-72), unpublished seminar, 15 December 1971, 21. See
also, "Aristotle leaves place for mysticism by saying that the
individual, the real, is what is unsayable." D'un discours qui
ne serait pas du semblant (1970-71), unpublished seminar,
20 January 1971, 27.
2. Aristotle appears to settle with this option in Books VII and
VIII: "For the substance constitutes form, that is, such as
is indwelling, from which and from matter the entire sub-
stance is denominated ..." in The Metaphysics, trans. John
'"
N
H. McMahon (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books,
1991), '54·
.,
~
3· When it comes to the translation of this term, one should
'"
::>
note that faire semblant is the only phrase in standard
French in which one hears this term, and that this phrase
can be translated by "to pretend." Consequently "pretense"
would be the preferred translation of semblant. How-
ever, despite the interesting relation this opens up to John
Austin's essay "Pretending," the English word does suggest
that some substantial reality lies behind the pretense, a
reality that could be presented in turn. This is not the case
in Lacan's conception, and so I have chosen to use the term
semblance.
4· There are numerous competing translations of Lacan's
famous maxim"il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel." In a conver-
sation with the author in Spring 2004, Badiou claimed that
his translation was "there is no sexual connection." I said
then, and I still think that this sounds more like the title of
a melancholic disco-funk hit than a philosophical thesis.
The best translation is that suggested by Barbara Formis:
"there is no sexual intercourse."
S· Lacan, D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 85.
108.
6. See, "Everything which is discourse can solely be given as
semblance, and nothing is edified within it which isn't, at the
base of something called the signifier." Lacan, D'un discours
qui ne serait pas du semblant, 14. All further references to
this seminar will appear parenthetically within the text.
7· At the end of Being and Event Badiou claims that there is a
return of the real of ontology-the chance of the event and
the act of the subject, both of which are excluded from its
discourse-within the actual discourse of ontology. This
return occurs at the point of impossibility contained in
the statement of the undecidability of the cardinality of
an infinite set's powerset: the statement which writes the
impasse of being, the unmeasurable excess of represen-
tation over presentation. For details see my "And Being
and Event and ..." in Polygraph 17 (2005): 27-40. There
is a strict genealogy to be drawn from Seminar XVII to
Seminar XX between this argument and Lacan's doctrine
of the letter with regard to the opposition between science
and ontology. Witness passages such as the following from
Seminar XVIII: "It is only via the effects of the articulation
of semblance-via little letters-that we can designate what
is real; what is real is what makes a hole in semblance ....Sci-
entific discourse progresses with no concern as to whether it
belongs to semblance or not; it's only a matter of its lattice
showing holes in the right places ....There is no reference
save to the impossible, that to which its deductions lead,
and that impossible is the real" (27); "The letter which acts
as an eraser thus distinguishes itself by being a rupture of
semblance, which dissolves everything which built a form,
phenomenon, meteor; this is....science's inaugural opera-
tion ....on perceptible forms" (122).
8. Jacques-Alain Miller, "Quand les semblants vacillent ...", La
Cause Freudienne: Les semblants et Ie reel 47 (2001),12.
9· See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, BookXVII: The
 Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969-1970, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2006).
10. At the level of the signifier Lacan's portmanteau word is a
homonym ofparait- "appear" -whilst at the level of the sig-
nified it would best be rendered by "be by" or "be beside."
11. See Louis Althusser, "Philosophy and the Spontaneous
Philosophy of the Scientists" in Philosophy and the Spon-
taneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays,
ed. Gregory Elliott, trans. Ben Brewster, et al. (London:
Verso, 1990), 69-165. Zachary Fraser has completed a
first draft of his translation of Le concept de modele. He
has kindly made it available online for collective feedback
at <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/badiou-list/files/
conceptssaoofxaomodel.pdf»
12. Alain Badiou, Le concept de modele (Paris: Maspero, 1970)
42.
13. See Badiou, "La subversion infinitesimale," Cahiers pour
l'analyse 9 (1968): 118-37: "Marque et manque: a propos
du zero," Cahiers pour l'analyse 10 (1969): 150-73; "Le
(re)commencement de la dialectique materialists" Critique
240 (May 1967): 438-467.
14· Badiou, "Le (re)commencement...," 448.
15· Badiou, "La subversion infinitesimale," 122.
16. Badiou, "Marque et manque," 162, 164.
17· Badiou, "La subversion infinitesimale," 122.
18. The entire difficulty for Badiou in his theory of change is
whether or not this immanent impossibility is present before
the occurrence of change or is revealed through that change.
Hence the hesitations over the definition of the evental-site
in Being and Event: on the one hand there is a structural
definition, it is an absolutely singular multiple, and on the
other hand there is a contingent definition, a site is only
7
truly evental once an event occurs. Hence the redefinition
of the event and the site in Logiques des mondes whereby
the objective existence of sites is secured through the
theory of the inexistent. On the question of Badiou's order
of argument with regard to the theorization of change in
Logiques des mondes, see the video of my presentation at
the November 24-25, 2006 "Colloquium on Logiques des
mondes" on the Ecole Nonnale Superieure website "Dif-
fusion des saviors": <http://www.diffusions.ens.fr/index.
php?res~conf&idoonf~1568#>
19· Le concept de modele is around 90 pages; Theone du sujet
makes up 350 or 400; L'etTe et l'evenementwas 547 exactly;
and Logiques des mondes is near the 700 mark. I ask the
sympathetic reader to spare a thought for Alberto Toscano
who has taken on the gargantuan task of translating the
latter.
20. SeeJustin Clemens, "Had We ButWorlds Enough, and Time,
This Absolute, Philosopher ..." in Cosmos and History: The
Praxis of Alain Badiou, 2006. <http.z'/www.cosmoandhis-
tory.orgjindex.phpjjournaljarticlejviewj122j69>
-
....
N
21. Ray Brassier-in a fabulous nihilistic reading of Badiou
to appear in his new book if a publisher dares to publish
it-rescues Badiou by submerging him in mathematics: he
argues that insofar as philosophy attempts to make sense of
the world it is equivalent to ideology; the most radical ten-
dency in modern philosophy is to abandon sense; Badiou's
set theory ontology makes no sense of the world, and this
is its virtue; therefore, we must abandon his metaontology
and all this talk of truth procedures and art and politics
and take up the position of the working mathematician.
The price one pays, however, is that one can't stop making
sense inasmuch as our premise, unlike that of the normal
working mathematician, is that maths is ontology, and yet
we lose any chance of communicating with people working
in other truth procedures.
22. See Georg W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans.
 AV. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 21.
See also, Frederick Beiser, Hegel (New York: Routledge,
2005),59,171-2.

23. Althusser, "Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of

the Scientists," 75.

24. See "Le (re)commencement," 449.

25. Badiou's own position with regard to empiricist attacks

on his use of mathematics is set out in the Introduction to
Being and Event.

26. Althusser, "Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of

the Scientists," 84.

27. In this session-ere February 1971-Lacan speaks of an

~ article written against his use of linguistics accusing him.
along with Barthes and Levi-Strauss of employing a "meta-
-;- phorical use oflinguistics." Lacan responds by saying "je sais
i<
CD a quaim'en tenir," that is, the place of the psychoanalyst.
::e
:::J He adds that the very discourse of science itself repudi-
ates the question "where are we?": there is no mapping to
tell us where we are in terms of how we use concepts. He
argues further that the article's injunction for thinkers like
him and Barthes to stick to their proper domains is a sign
of the link between the discourse of the university and the
historical existence of other social entities such as the army
and the navy; he states that the discourse of the university
can only be articulated-insofar as the master-signifier is its
truth-on the basis of the discourse of the master. Finally,
he points out that none of the four discourses allows one
to actually know what one says: this is the consequence of
the discovery of the unconscious.
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This paper is an attempt to understand the concept of the semblant in

Lacan's teaching. The attempt will follow two main courses of critique
while illustrating the relation of the semblant to the fetish object. This will
involve a critique of the common idea that the semblant and the phallus
are akin, and a criticism of the extremely broad use of the semblant in
Lacan's later teaching.

THE SEMBLANT IN LACAN .....

•
The importance of the concept of the semblant is indicated by Lacan's
description of object a as a semblant that fills the void left by the loss of
the primary object. If we can explore the nature of this semblant, we shall
be able to come to a better understanding of some aspects of object a.
For Lacan, a semblant is an object of enjoyment that is both seductive
and deceptive. The subject both believes and does not believe in semblants
but, in any case, opts for them over the real thing because, paradoxically,
they are a better source of satisfaction than the real thing that one avoids
encountering at all cost. More accurately, because the semblant fills a
lack, we should say that the semblant comes to the place where something
should be but is not, and where its lack produces anxiety. It is not just
anxiety, though, since this lack is also capable of producing a range of
related affects including dread, awe, foreboding, fear, and so on.
The term "sernblant" itself needs some clarification before we go any
further. The not-sa-common English word "semblant" means being like
or resembling; seeming rather than being real; being (merely) apparent.
In French, the same word with the same spelling is both in common
usage and richer in connotation. While it carries a similar connotation
of appearance to its English counterpart, it also has the related but
supplementary meaning of outer appearance, pretence, even imitation.
What is most interesting about the French usage for our purposes is that
"un semblant" can carry the connotation of something man-made and
of not being an appearance that one is taken in by but one that one is
happy to make do with. The semblant resembles what it imitates. This

UMBR(a) 131
notion of something that is not authentic but is also in some way non-deceptive is well captured
by Jankelevitch who refers to "un semblant" as a transparent appearance.
This accident of French, where a range of phenomena are expressed by one word for which
in English we would have to use a circumlocution, makes it easier to isolate two prominent, but
upon reflection, quite peculiar features of the semblant:
1. Its strange ersatz quality is such that we are capable of finding greater satisfaction in it

than in the real thing.

2. It has the quality of pretence, where we are happy to make believe (''faire semblant," as
the French say) and pretend it is what it is not, even as we know it is not that thing.
It strikes me that these two features of the semblant are what makes it a distinctive term with
such rich connotations-connotations that Villiers de L'Isle-Adam is drawing on when he writes,
"Have not the semblants oflove become, for nearly everybody, preferable to love itself?" Lacan,
then, draws upon rather than creates these connotations in his own use of the term.
The aspect of pretence and make-believe combines with the surplus satisfaction that can
be derived from a semblant to explain why a semblant is not an appearance. The moon on the
horizon gives the appearance of being larger than it is, but it is nevertheless not a semblant. This
no doubt also explains why the concept of the semblant is not common currency in either English
or French philosophy, at least not in metaphysics or epistemology. It seems never to have been
used to designate anything like appearance in its familiar contrast with reality.
Consider Lacan's response in Seminar XI to Merleau-Ponty's posthumously published The
Visible and the Invisible, and to what Lacan describes as "the emergence [from the field of the
visible] of something like the search for an unnamed substance from which I, the seer, extract
myself.'" While such a remark could clearly herald a critique of Merleau- Ponty as offering a kind
of crypto-Heideggerian analysis of being, Lacan finds something quite different in The Visible
and the Invisible. His final assessment of Merleau-Ponty's work associates him with Artemis,
the goddess of the hunt and the wilderness, because Lacan finds something wild and frenzied in
Merleau- Ponty's work accompanied by an interest, cut short by Merleau-Ponty's early death, in
new ways of thinking about the subject opened up by psychoanalysis.
Lacan's interpretation ofMerleau-Ponty is instructive because it emphasizes a split or fracture
within being itself (between semblant and reality), instead of pursuing the old philosophical prob-
lem of representation and the opposition between appearance and reality. The former opposition,
the semblant-reality split, has a clinical basis but is also detectable, Lacan believes, in the purely
natural world. Alongside the account of Merleau -Ponty we therefore find Lacan discussing Roger
Caillois' work on the three functions of mimicry in the natural world; disguise, camouflage, and
intimidation.' Caillois' thesis is that the phenomenon of mimicry displays something inexplicable
in merely functional or instrumental terms and gives the lie to the view that everything in nature
can be explained in terms of an instinct for snrvival. Rather, mimicry supports the conclusion
that autonomous forces, which he rather boldly calls "aesthetic," exist in nature.
Caillois presents an ingenious argument to substantiate this claim. He first points out that
humans find astonishing and bewitching beauty in surprising places in nature. The perfect geo-
metrical proportions of a Nautilus shell, the incredibly delicate and regular ribbing found in
Radiolaria, or even the shell of a humble sea-urchin-all of these seem to indicate a spontane-
ous geometrical beauty arising from out of the forces of nature itself. However, he continues,
the beauty is purely accidental since the regular, and pleasing, geometrical shapes are a result
of the governing principle of maximum strength from a minimum of material. This principle
is utilitarian and it seems a reasonable assumption to think that it has strong survival value. In
marveling at the beauty of nature in this way we are therefore anthropomorphizing a principle
of economy and seeing in it a drive to create a beautiful form.
.....
Caillois further claims, however, that this cannot be extended to everything in the natural
world without exception. Consider butterfly wings. Marshalling evidence of various kinds, Caillois
reasons that the beauty of the shapes and colors on butterfly wings cannot be explained entirely
on instrumental grounds, and this leads him to conclude that there must exist an autonomous
aesthetic force in nature. It is a very interesting and well-argued thesis; however, based as it is
on a single example from the natural world, the conclusion seems too hasty and the argument
requires more support.
A second aspect of Caillois's work dealing with the function of semblants in the natural world
and the corresponding split between semblant and reality is particularly relevant to psycho-
analysis. What Caillois emphasizes is the mediating role that disguise and masquerade play in
the presentation of masculinity and femininity in animals' sexual behaviour. However, it is not
possible to move seamlesslyfrom the animal to the human world; on the contrary, the differences
go to the heart of Lacan's concept of the semblant.
In the animal world, semblance is mere appearance because it lacks the element of make-believe
that makes semblance such a strange function in humans. This is the point of the discussion of
object a in the field of the visible in Seminar XI; object a is located just at the point at which the
fact of being taken in, of being duped, is recognized by the subject. In the field of the visible, at
least, object a emerges at the point at which a representation appears as something other than it
had previously seemed. This is the implication of taking the example of the trompe l'oeil which
fascinates because it both successfully represents something other than what it is and declares
the fact that it is doing so. This is in contrast with animals which are apt to be deceived by a
simulacrum that need not look all that much like the object it stands for, but can simply be a
sign or act to trigger some response in the other. If we continue along this line of thought, we
 can see how this suggests that humans appreciate verisimilitude not because one mistakes the
representation for the thing itself but because one appreciates the likeness qua likeness. To take
an example, while scarecrows scare crows because they flap and shake in the wind, scarecrows
scare humans because the collapse of their success at imitating a human reveals, in a sometimes
abrupt and startling manner, indications that they are a simulacrum of a human.
Owing to the resemblance with the uncanny in what I have just described, a parenthetical
comment is relevant here. Freud persuasively argues for two features ofthe uncanny. It is pro-
duced where the literary or fictional device creates a realistic representation of reality and then
exploits this backdrop of realistic portrayal to depict something unrealistic. This explains both
why fantasy, by definition unrealistic, is never uncanny and why cinema, with its natural facility
for realism, has the necessary conditions for creating something uncanny. The second feature is
the special nature ofits relation to the appendages of the human body, in particular to the phal-
lus, in so far as it bears upon what is present in the maternal body but should be missing from
it. What these two features share is the characteristic of being an intrusion of the real into the
field of the visible, or into the field of representation more generally.
The semblant, then, lies at the opposite pole to the uncanny because in the game of make-believe
characteristic of semblants the subject knows that a semblant both is and is not the object that
i
:::>
causes his desire. This makes the semblant closer to Freud's fetish object than to the uncanny,
as it both stands in for the missing object and signifies and memorializes it at the same time.
We can understand why an object a acts as more than a substitutefaute de mieux, where the
original object-the uncastrated maternal phallus-is unattainable and the subject is drawn to
seek a diminished and impoverished substitute for the horror of castration. If the substitute
was entirely diminished and impoverished, then this would completely fail to explain the most
significant and striking feature of fetishism, which is that the fetishist is generally more than
pleased with the ingenious solution he has found and has no desire to abandon it. His troubles,
if troubles he has, revolve around the delicate issue of getting the other party to accept his clever
solution, and not around his own conflicts over his choice of object; and this is fundamentally
different from the neurotic, who agonizes over his object choice.
An object a produces its effects around the fact that it captures this moment of deception,
which leads Lacan to say, first, that the most intense encounter between the masculine and
feminine occurs when, their encounter is mediated by masks, in which the function of seductive
lure is prominent; and, second, that people can play with this mask knowing that the "gaze" lies
beyond them.
The concept has similarities with the fetish, and also with Freud's use of the term "illusion."
Freud distinguishes illusion from error: an illusion is not always an error and an error is not
invariably an illusion. Illusions have their basis in a desire for a belief to be the case, to the point
where, even if the belief is true, interest in its truth is irrelevant. As for the fetish, a semblant
functions to avoid the horror or anxiety produced by an encounter with the real.
Thus, for Lacan, "semblant" carries the connotation of being seductive and therefore deceptive.
We believe in semblants, or rather we opt for a semblant over the real, because semblants are a
means of satisfaction or a way of avoiding unpleasure. When a semblant collapses anxiety emerges.
It fills a lack by coming to the place where something should be but is not, and where its lack
produces a negative affect of some sort, usually anxiety. Semblants are a form of substitution
of something that provides a source of satisfaction for another object that would cause anxiety.
The general formula for this is:_l

SEMBLANT AS PHALLUS?
A second way to look at semblants is taken up by Jacques-Alain Miller when he says that the
function of semblants is to "veil nothing" and to convert this nothing into something.' Again, the
double aspect of semblants appears in this definition which emphasizes the functions of veiling
and of drawing our attention to this very veiling. Miller goes on to say that it is because of this
double aspect of semblants that, as a semblant, the veil phallicizes the body.
Note, however, that a semblant is not the phallus. What are the grounds for saying this? First, I
do not think Lacan held this view. I take Lacan to be holding to this distinction between semblant
and phallus when in "Positions of the Unconscious" he remarks, "In restoring ...the function of the
'partial' object [by introducing the concept of object a] .. .I have not been able to extend it to ...the
object (-~) as 'cause' of the castration complex." I think Richard Klein is mistaken to quote this
passage to the effect that this object (-~) will later become the object a.' On my reading, it is rather
the case that Lacan insists on treating the object a and the phallus as different.
I also think the two concepts are different enough from one another and mark a significant
enough difference between the phenomena to make it worth retaining the distinction. The sem-
blant, which I am urging should be understood as a substitute that has the two characteristics
of being a source of satisfaction while also being recognized as a substitute for an object that
does not exist, is itself also the object of satisfaction. In the case of the phallus as -<j>, which veils
nothing but converts this nothing into something, the object causing the desired object is the
object created ex nihilo beyond the veil. The semblant is on the side of the fetish object, while
the phallus is on the side of masquerade.
The difference is important in the sexual field. In female homosexuality, where the supreme
interest is invariably in the fundamental issue of femininity, the relationship is dominated by
the object as cause of desire. As a result there is a natural ease with which such women invoke
their masculinity. Compare this with male transsexualism, on the other hand, where the phal-
lic masquerade leads to the adoption of a parodic, exaggerated and at times delusional style of
femininity.'

LACAN'S EXTENSION OF THE TERM

There is an extended use of the term in Lacan's later work in which he broadens its meaning
and speaks of semblance merely as a stand-in or substitute. Because the deceptive and satisfying
aspect of the concept is lost, an important feature of the concept disappears.
It is not difficult to see why Miller claimed that the Lacanian epoch of psychoanalysis came
into its own with the recognition that the Other does not exist and that only its semblance does.
The significance of this moment arises from the fact that it produced the subsequent recognition
that the Name-of-the-Father is a lure, whereas it had originally been designed to guarantee the
Other's existence-the foreclosure of the Name-of-the- Father in psychosis producing serious
disturbances at the level of the Other. This leads to the thesis that there is no Other, only its
semblance. As Miller explains, "one can only make do without the Name-of-the-Father qua real
on condition that one makes use of it as semblant/"
This is an important point, the implications of which will unfold through a series of seminars
such as Seminar XVII in which Lacan criticizes the Freudian Oedipus complex as being useless
and one of Freud's dreams.
However, "semblant" had assumed so much importance for Lacan by the end of his teaching
that it had come to include just about everything that had been previously distinguished, and this
is a problem. Language, the Other, the Name-of-the-Father, the phallus, all come to be regarded
as semblants. Both the growing importance Lacan progressively assigns to the concept and the
not-so-gradual growth in its extension are in indirect proportion to the continued usefulness of
the concept. Whatever the significance of a new orientation in Lacan's late teaching, and whatever
the new clinical and theoretical orientations it opens out onto, the value of this new orientation is
not assured by merely extending the meaning of the concept, but rather by upholding its clinical
and theoretical specificity.
1. Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Cruel Tales, trans. Robert Baldick 5· Lacan, "Positions of the Unconscious," in Ecrits, trans.
(London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 223. [Translation Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 721, n. 4.
modified.]

2. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI:
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Norton, '98'), 82.
3· See Roger Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, trans. George
Ordish (London: Gollenoz, 1964).
4· Jacques-Alain Miller, "On Semblances in the Relation
Between the Sexes," in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl, trans.
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 14. [Translation
modified.]
6. See Richard Klein, "Gaze and Representation" in The Later
Lacan, eds. Veronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf (New York:
SUNY Press, 2007), 181.
7. Lacan, Baits, 619.
8. Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent, "The Other Who
Does Not Exist and His Ethical Committees," trans. Michele
Julien, Richard Klein, Kevin Polley, Mischa Twitchin, and
Vercnique Voruz, in Almanac o/Psychoanalysis 1 (1998):
'9·

w
....
.-
'-'
o In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant's critique was seemingly directed
~
at an antiquated theological metaphysics. However, although Kant
remarked in the preface that metaphysics, which had been the "queen of
all sciences," had declined and become the scoff of the world, he main-
tained that, the various metaphysical tasks imposed on reason had not
disappeared, and argued that we should aim at their solution practically,
that is, morally. Therefore, we should say that what Kant criticized was
not ancient metaphysics but rather its derision by the Enlightenment.
Enlightenment is the liberation from illusions. If the illusions are errors
caused by the senses, as the philosophers of the Enlightenment assumed,
it is easy to rectify them by reason. Yet, there is one kind of illusion that
cannot be abolished and which, even if abolished forcibly, is always
reproduced in another form. Kant calls this transcendental illusion.
Transcendental illusion is that which is produced not by the senses but
by the claims of reason itself. Kant writes: "Human reason has the pecu-
liar fate in one of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which
it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature
of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend
every capacity of human reason." The "questions" which afflict reason
are, after all, rooted in the finitude of human beings and in their wish to
transcend it. The Enlightenment dismissed religion as a mere illusion.
When one is liberated from religion, however, it does not follow that
he or she is liberated from the afflictions caused by finitude. Religion is
merely replaced by another illusion, like that of the nation.
Transcendental illusion is never limited to antiquated theological
metaphysics. It is also found in the thoughts of romantic philosophers
such as Herder and Fichte, who succeeded Kant's critique. The point
is that the idea of nation still embraces theological and metaphysical
questions. In this regard, Benedict Anderson's remarks on the nation are
suggestive. Among his reflections on "imagined communities," the most
important is his insight that what secures an individual's immortality is
situated in the core of the nation. According to Anderson, this attribute
of the nation was caused by the decline of the religious mode of thought
in eighteenth century Western Europe, which was dominated by the
world-views of the Enlightenment and rationalism. It is nationalism,

UMBR(a) 139
Anderson argues, that provided the "imaginative response" in the place of religion: the nation
provides each individual with eternity, and his or her existence with meaning. Here, however, I'd
like to point out that what Anderson calls the "religious mode of thought," which was dissolved
by the Enlightenment and rational secularism, is not religion per se, so much as a communal
mode of thought . Universal religions such as Christianity or Buddhism were formed in opposition
to established communities or religions, but when they took root within specific communities,
they still had to meet their demands. Therefore, as those communities declined, religion could
recover its universal nature. In fact, religion developed, rather than declined, in individualistic
forms (such as Protestantism) after the fall of the community. Accordingly, we should say that
what nations achieved in place of religion is the imaginary recovery of the lost community.
The collapse of the community is brought on by the loss of generational temporality, which
had ensured the continuity of the community and the eternity of individuals. In the agrarian
community, reciprocity is assumed not only between its existing members, but also between
the dead (ancestors) and the unborn (descendants). For instance, the living act in consideration
of their descendauts and also, as descendants themselves, thank their ancestors who acted in
consideration of them. As the agrarian community declines, the sense of eternity, which could
be obtained by locating oneself between the past and future generation, perishes. The universal
religions may be able to provide an individual soul with eternity, but can never recover the
generational continuity of the community. The nation can, however, for it contains not only the
living but also the dead and the unborn.
It is worth noting that Kant lived precisely in the age mentioned by Anderson. On the one hand,
Kant had to be a thinker of the Enlightenment, since the old religious order continued to reign in
Germany. On the other hand, however, he encountered the prevalence of the imaginary recovery
of the community which had been destroyed by the Enlightenment in Romantic nationalism,
epitomized by Herder's notion of the Volk who share German language and culture. The fact
that Kant acutely contested this current of nationalism in his later years has been neglected.
Kant's harsh critique of Herder and Fichte, no doubt, has been attracting sufficient interest,
but it has never been read as a critique of their nationalism, despite the fact that Kant gradually
clarified his position as a cosmopolitan. Although it is possible to say that Kant's later works can
be integrated into his idea of "perpetual peace," this does not mean that he shifted his interest
from metaphysical questions to actual questions of politics. Rather, it means that he found a
new theological metaphysics in questions that were seemingly actual and political. To the extent
that Kant's later works aimed at nations as transcendental illusions, they' can be considered as
sequels to the three Critiques. That nations are transcendental illusions implies that they are
illusions based upon reason rather than sense-perception, and therefore cannot be overcome
by intellectual enlightenment.
 Nations are an imaginary recovery of reciprocal relations, which are distinct from the power
relations of the state or the competitive relations of the market. In other words, the Romantics tried
to solve the actual problems caused by the state and capital with such imaginary products (that
is, illusions) as the nation. In this case, it is no use criticizing the nations as an illusion, because
there is a reality which compels human beings to need such illusions. Just as Marx claimed in his
critique of religion, if you want to criticize an illusion, you must criticize the reality which compels
human beings to need it in order to show how to dissolve it practically. The Kantian moral law
is a problem which is actual and economic, and to be realized in history. The society in which
this law is realized is called "the kingdom of the end." Kant's project for perpetual peace is not a
question of mere international politics. He regarded human history as a process of achieving the
kingdom of the end or the "world republic." Hence, it can be said that Kant's world republic entails
a situation in which the trinity of Capital-Nation-State is superseded. Reading only Kant's works,
however, does not clarify how his philosophy proceeds to the world republic. In Transcritique,
I tried to elucidate Kant's works through those of Marx, who was rather ungenerous with Kant.
Conversely, this also meant that I tried to reread Marx's works as a continuation of the Kantian
critique. Still, I must admit that there are some important aspects missing from the transcritical
reading of Kant and Marx: violence and aggressivity. Through a transcritical reading of Kant and
Freud, I believe, these points can be brought to light.
Hegel regarded Kant's project for perpetual peace as an abstract one that relied upon human
understanding or benevolence. Based upon the Hobbesian notion of the state, Hegel deemed a
state which transcends other states to be impossible. Such an institution as what Kant called a
"League of Nations" would be powerless since it could not apply military sanctions against states
that violate the international treaty. Ultimately, there must be a hegemonic state with sufficient
power. Hegel saw world history as a stage on which states were contesting each other; the winner
was called the "world-historical state." Basically thoughts similar to this Hegelianism have been
dominant ever since the nineteenth century; their ideologues like the neo-conservatives in
twenty-first century America have continuously derided the Kantian project. Yet, Kant was not
as naive a thinker as Hegel assumed he was. Indeed, Kant insisted that it was possible for states
to transcend the state of nature mutually and to attain the world republic, and that this process
was programmed in human history by nature. At first glance, this appears to be an extremely
optimistic view, but what is at stake for Kant becomes clearer in the following passage:
The means that nature uses to bring about the development of all of man's capacities is the antago-
nism among them in society, as far as in the end this antagonism is the cause oflaw-governed order in
society. In this context, I understand antagonism to mean men's unsocial sociability, i.e., their tendency
to enter into society, combined, however, with a thoroughgoing resistance that constantly threatens to
sunder this society. This capacity for social existence is clearly embedded in human nature."
 Rather than benevolence or understanding, "unsocial sociability" as humanity (or human
nature), as well as the wars or disasters it causes, lead to the League of Nations and ultimately
the "world republic." Our experiences in the twentieth century endorse Kant's thinking. After
the First World War the League of Nations was formed, and after the Second World War the
United Nations. It is not human benevolence or understanding but the World Wars, which were
manifestations of "unsocial sociability," that actualized those institutions. All it were, nature
actualized them. This Kantian view is called the "cunning of nature" in contrast to what Hegel
called the "cunning of reason," for Kant, indeed, treats nature as a subject. This is not mere
rhetoric. Kant's words here suggest that there is a kind of subjectivity in history distinct from
the conscious subject. It is impossible to overcome Hobbesian mutual hostility with only human
will and understanding. Rather, according to Kant, only something derived from hostility itself
could overcome hostility. He called this something nature instead of reason.
Alllong as we remain within the frame of Kant's argument, however, it would be difficult to
grasp the concrete significance of his thinking on nature, which is at the core of the possibility of
perpetual peace. In order to fathom its depth, we need to refer to Freud, who was also ungenerous
with Kant. I am certain that this reference will cast a new light on Kant's treatises upon perpetual
peace and world history. This does not mean that I am proposing a psychoanalytic reading of
Kant. On the contrary, reading Freud's theory of culture from a Kantian viewpoint could also cast
a new light on Freud. In my former work I have called reading Kant through Marx and reading
Marx through Kant "transcritique." In that sense, this essay can also be called a transcritical
reading of Kant and Freud.

DEATH DRIVE
Freud propounded the notion of the superego in 1923 in The Ego and the Id. At first glance, the
superego seems to paraphrase what he earlier referred to as the "censor of dreams" in his The
Interpretation of Dreams. It seems possible to say that the superego is the "father," or the social
norm, which is internalized as a result of the Oedipus complex. It should be noted, however, that
it was not until he introduced the notion of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in
1920 that he posited the idea of the superego. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud observed
symptoms in which unpleasurable and unwished for actions were repeated: cases in which patients
of traumatic neurosis repeatedly dreamed abominable scenes of disasters, and a child repeated,
in forms of play, unpleasurable scenes of being left behind by his mother. Freud speculated that
this repetition compulsion stemmed from something primary and fundamental, which exceeded
the pleasure principle. He called this excess the death drive. The death drive becomes aggres-
sive when it is turned outward. By turning this aggressive drive inward, according to Freud, the
superego is formed. The "censor" comes from without insofar as it is the internalization of the
norms of parents or society. For its part, the superego arises from within. While the censor is
heteronomous, the superego is autonomous.
Generally speaking, however, even after the introduction of the death drive, the superego
has been considered as an internalization of social norms. In Negative Dialectics, for example,
Adorno attempted to use Freud to criticize Kant's "practical reason." He claimed that Kant
neglected the process by which the moral law was founded and instead treated it as noumenal.
Adorno writes:
No Kant interpretation that would object to his formalism and undertake to have the substance dem-
onstrate the empirical moral relativity which Kant eliminated with the help of that formalism-no
such interpretation would reach far enough. The law, even in its most abstract form, has come to be;
its painful abstractness is sedimented substance, dominion reduced to its normal form of identity.
Psychology has now concretely caught up with something which in Kant's day was not known as yet,
and to which he therefore did not need to pay specific attention; with the empirical genesis of what,
unanalyzed, was glorified by him as timelessly intelligible. The Freudian school in its heroic period,
agreeing on this point with the other Kant, the Kant of the Enlightenment, used to call for a ruthless
criticism of the super-ego as something truly heteronomous and alien to the ego. The super-ego was
recognized, then, as blindly, unconsciously internalized social coercion."
Adorno, then, conceived of Freud's notion of the superego as an internalization of social norms.
Consequently the critique of Kant based upon Freud is directly followed by critique of Freud
himself. "As soon as it puts the brakes of social conformism on the critique of the super-ego
-......
launched by itself, psychoanalysis comes close to that repression which to this day has marred all
teachings of freedom [...]. A critique of the super-ego would have to turn into one of the society
that produces the super-ego."
However, Freud put forward the notion of the superego precisely because within it there was
a new thinking that was completely distinct from his previous theories. If, as Adorno held, the
superego was merely iuternalization of the father or social norms, the "censor" would have been
more appropriate. In the superego, Freud found more positive functions than in the censor. This
new thinking is indicated in his 1927 essay on humor. Although Freud had treated it in Jokes
and their Relation to the Unconscious, humor had only been mentioned in a small section of
the last chapter in the book. There, he makes only a simple distinction between jokes, the comic,
and humor: "the pleasure in jokes has seemed to us to arise from an economy in expenditure
upon inhibition, the pleasure in the comic from an economy in expenditure upon ideation (upon
cathexis) and the pleasure in humour from an economy in expenditure upon feeling." In the
short essay entitled "Humour," however, Freud sought a more fundamental difference between
humor and jokes. Concerning humor, Freud refers to an example of the "criminal ...being led
out to the gallows on a Monday," who remarks "Well, this week's beginning nicely." This might
simply sound like the criminal refusing to accept reality, but those who hear his words, which
in humor are sincere, are provided with a kind of pleasure which could not be found in a simple
repudiation. "Humour possesses a dignity which is wholly lacking, for instance, in jokes, for
jokes either serve simply to obtain a yield of pleasure or place the yield of pleasure that has been
obtained in the service of aggression."
Ajoke is thus the contributionmade to the comic by the unconscious. In just the same way, humour
would be the contribution made to the comic through the agency of the super-ego. In other connec-
tions we knew the super-ego as a severe master. It will be said that it accords ill with such a character
that the super-ego should condescend to enabling the ego to obtain a small yield of pleasure. It is true
that humorous pleasure never reaches the intensity of the pleasure in the comic or in jokes, that it
never finds vent in hearty laughter. It is also true that, in bringing about the humorous attitude, the
super-ego is actually repudiating reality aud serviug an illusiou. But (without rightly knowiug why)
we regard this less intense pleasure as having a character of very high value; we feel it to be especially
liberating and elevating."
We obtain a dynamic explanation of the humorous attitude, therefore, if we assume that it consists
in the humorist's having withdrawn the psychical accent from his ego and having transposed it on to
his super-ego. To the super-ego, thus inflated, the ego can appear tiny and all its interest trivial; and,
with this new distribution of energy, it may become an easy matter for the super-ego to suppress the
ego's possibilities of reacting."
Here Freud sees the superego not as the agency of repression and censorship but as that which,
"in humour, speaks such kindly words of comfort to the intimidated ego."? This new notion of
the superego cannot be found in Jokes. Needless to say, the change occurred through Beyond
the Pleasure Principle. The superego derives not from the outside by way of the father or social
norms, but from the inside; it was discovered as that which brought about effects which could be
regarded as autonomous. Rather, the death drive was discovered to be that which brings about
the superego.
Although Freud's discovery of the active function of the superego, compared to the negativity of
the "censor," seems to be a critical turn, it can be said that this turn is a further radicalization of
the other turn with which psychoanalysis was established as such. The first turn took place when
Freud, who had argned in Studies on Hysteria that the cause of hysteria was sexual traumas, that
is, seductions by adults, denied his own argnment in the very next year. According to his new
view, the memory oftraumatic experiences that the patient retains is a fiction he or she retro-
spectively invents. What is concealed by this memory is the childhood past in which the patient
actively tried to realize his or her desire. It goes without saying that it is at this time that Freud
proposed the concept of the Oedipus complex. At the same time he also proposed the concept
of the libido. This does not mean that human beings are subject to the libido. On the contrary,
Freud introduced the concept in order to stress that a child was active as a subject of desire, even
though the child was not a subject of consciousness. That is to say, what is at stake in Freud's
concept of the libido is his project to locate active subjectivity in the dimension where there is no
subject of consciousness. At this point, psychoanalysis was established. On the same ground, the
notion of the death drive was introduced; in this sense it is a development of Freud's early theory,
rather than a turn from it. Indeed, Freud began to refer to libido as life instincts when he started
using the notion of the death drive. In short, the notion of the drive was proposed as that which
could bear witness to active subjectivity on a level that was not consciousness. The superego in
humor, for example, functions with spontaneity and activeness, but not with consciousness. If
it functioned consciously, it would not be humor but irony and simple repudiation.
The following is clear: the superego was not conceived as a consequence of the notion of the
death drive. On the contrary, Freud postulated the death drive precisely in order to demonstrate
the autonomous superego, through which the drive could inhibit itself. Taking the superego into
consideration, aggressivity can be seen as a part of the death drive. It is an inward aggressivity
that can inhibit externalized aggressivity. If so, it follows that we are provided with a new per-
spective in which it is not impossible to control aggressivity.

FREUD AND WAR

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud addresses the theory of the death drive as a cultural
theory. Repudiating the German tradition which distinguished between civilization and culture, ....
J>,

he basically regarded culture as the superego, defining it in various ways. Culture, however, is
not internalized social norms. It comes, as it were, from the inside. Instead of the traditional
Romantic view that culture (or the superego) repressed the id (or the pleasure principle), on the
basis of the reality principle, Freud held that culture was derived from the death drive. Generally
speaking, Freud's cultural theory is deemed to be an application of psychoanalysis. Indeed, even
before Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud had applied psychoanalysis to cultural problems.
However, it is impossible to see Civilization and Its Discontents as an application of the theory
of the death drive. We can speak of the death drive only in terms of cultural theories. Civiliza-
tion and Its Discontents is not a psychoanalytic explanation of a historical situation, but, on the
contrary, a statement of the fact that psychoanalysis is situated in history. When Freud insists
that it is only the superego as the inwardly aggressive drive, only the sense of guilt, which can
inhibit the aggressive drive, his words should be read in the context of the particular historical
situation of postwar Germany.
Nevertheless, we must argue that the death drive is a concept that is produced from within
psychoanalytic experience. Freud denies that the death drive originates in an historical event
such as the First World War. In fact, by referring to the cases of children and traumatic neu-
rosis, he dehistoricizes it. The death drive is a theoretical development from his experience in
psychoanalytic treatment. Certainly this is true, for his thinking on the death drive cannot be
anticipated from reading his essay on war and death written during the war. In 1915Freud wrote
the following:
We cannot hut feel that no event has ever destroyed so much that is precious in the common possession
of humanity, confused so many of the clearest intelligences, or so thoroughly debased what is highest.
Science herself has lost her passionless impartiality; her deeply embittered servants seek for weapons
from her with which to contribute towards the struggle with the enemy. Anthropologists feel driven
to declare him inferior and degenerate, psychiatrists issue a diagnosis of his disease of mind or spirit.
Probably, however, our sense of these immediate evil is disproportionately strong, and we are not
entitled to compare them with the evils of other times which we have not experienced."

While Freud admits the fact that the First World War brought disillusionment to Europeans, he
is distinctly unsympathetic with their plight. He argues that they are disillusioned because they
have an illusion which they should not have had in the first place. The morality and civilization
that modern Europeans believe to be superior to those of other races are mere illusions. Freud
writes: "in the last resort it may be assumed that every internal compulsion which makes itself
felt in the development of human beings was originally-that is, in the history of mankind-only
an external one" (282). The moral conscience of an individual is social anxiety and nothing else.
In war the external compulsion is removed. "[War] strips us of the later accretions of civilization,
and lays bare the primal man in each of us. It compels us once more to be heroes who cannot
believe in their own death; it stamps strangers as enemies, whose death is to be brought about or
desired" (299). In short, if we know that there is no siguificant difference between the civilized
and the primitive, we would not have to be disillusioned.
Having in this way once more come to understand our fellow citizens who are now alienated from us,
we shall much more easily endure the disappointment which the nations, the collective individuals of
mankind, have caused us, for the demands we make upon these should be far more modest. Perhaps
they are recapitulating the course of individual development, and to-day still represent very primi-
tive phases in organization and in the formation of higher unities. It is in agreement with this that
the educative factor of an external compulsion towards morality, which we found was so effective in
individuals,is as yet barely discernible in them. (287-288)
This view, however, is not original to Freud. He writes the following: "students of human nature
and philosophers have long taught us that we are mistaken in regarding our intelligence as an
independent force and in overlooking its dependence on emotional life. Our intellect, they teach
us, can function reliably only when it is removed from the influence of strong emotional impulses;
otherwise it behaves merely as an instrument of the will and delivers the inference which the will
requires ....Psycho-analytic experience has, if possible, further confirmed this statement." That
is to say, according to Freud's thinking in this period, war reveals the emotional life which is
ordinarily repressed by the state. "[Tjhe logical bedazzlement which this war has conjured up in
our fellow-citizens, many of them the best of their kind, is therefore a secondary phenomenon, a
consequence of emotional excitement, and is bound, we may hope, to disappear with it" (287).
In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud was antagonistic to the dominant current of thought,
which, denying cnlture, argued for a return to nature, a return to "life." In "Thoughts for the time
on War and Death," however, he is more or less in consonance with the contemporary philosophy
oflife. For example, he argues that, although we accept death as unavoidable, "our unconscious
... does not believe its own death." Thus he concludes:
[WJar cannot be abolished; so long as the conditions of existence among nations are so different and
their mutual repulsion so violent. There are bound to be wars. The question then arises: Is it not we
who should give in, who should adapt ourselves to war? Should we not confess that in our civilized
attitude towards death we are once again living psychologically beyond our means, and should we not
rather turn back and recognize the truth? Would it not be better to give death the place in reality and
in our thoughts which is its due, and to give a little more prominence to the unconscious attitude to-
wards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed? This hardly seems an advance to higher
achievement, but rather in some respects a backward step-a regression; but it has the advantage of
taking the truth more into account, and of making life more tolerable for us once again. To tolerate life
remains, after all, the first duty of all living beings. lllusion becomes valueless if it makes this harder
for us. We recall the old saying: Sivis pacem.perc bellum. Ifyou want to preserve peace, arm for war.
It would be in keeping with the times to alter it: Si vis vitam, para mortem. If you want to endure life,
prepare yourselffor death. (296, 299-300)
What Freud says here is ambiguous. Although he considers war as folly, he also affirms, albeit
halfheartedly, our adaptation to it. We can act in war without fear of death because we assume
the unconscious attitude towards death, and thus believe in our own immortality. Rather than
clinging to various civilized devices, which have been produced in order to avoid confronting death,
Freud suggests, it might be better for us to abandon them and return to the unconscious attitude.
In other words, although human beings recognize death as an inevitable fact, this recognition
is itself a refuge from death. War sends human beings back to the state of existence prior to the
introduction of civilized or intellectual devices, to which we must return. This view appears to
be shared by Heidegger, who grasps the authenticity of human beings in "Being-towards-death."
That is to say, in opposition to the then prevalent neo Kantian philosophy of "intellect," Freud
had an affinity with the philosophy of life. He pointed to the limit of intellect in the Enlighten-
ment and retained the position of Romanticism.
The romanticism of psychoanalysis can be inferred from Freud's relationship with Jung. A
number of Freud's disciples, including Jung, deserted him because of their repulsion for his theory
of the sexual drive. Without the theory of the sexual drive, however, psychoanalysis would simply
be a form of Romantic thought. In fact, J ung seeks the origin of psychoanalysis in the thinkers
and poets of Romanticism. In short, this is a dualism of consciousness and the unconscious,
or reason and feeling. The unconscious is the drive that is repressed by reason and comes out
through reason's censorship. It is true that the notion of the unconscious has been used since
Romanticism; without using the term, similar theoretical apparatuses are repeated today in the
form of cultural anthropology or semiotics.
Romanticism is often regarded as having an adolescent, subjective, and rebellious attitude, but,
as is shown in the later Wordsworth (The Prelude) or Hegel (The Phenomenology of Mindy; it
does include criticism ofitself. In Freud's terms, it is the whole process of "maturation" in which
the pleasure principle is inhibited and the reality principle is admitted. According to Hegel, it is
sickness that stunts mind's development and which persists in its lower phases. Basically Freud's
early thinking is close to this Romanticism; his Romanticism is directly indicated by his words
during the war quoted above: "[the collective individuals of mankind] represent very primitive
phases in organization and in the formation of higher unities." Without the infant's sexual drive,
therefore, Freud's thinking would not be able to avoid being reduced to Romanticism. It can be
said that only by persisting with the sexual libido did Freud diverge from Romanticism. This
does not mean that Freud adopted a mechanistic, biological viewpoint. On the contrary, as I
stated above, when he introduced the concept ofthe libido, Freud saw it as a source that could
demonstrate an active subjectivity different from the conscious subject.
In 1914 Jung aired his differences with Freud and resigned as president of the International
Psychoanalytic Association. The damage to Freud caused by Jung's desertion has been pointed
to. The non-Jewish Jung had been the bulwark against the prejudice which the movement of
psychoanalysis could have encountered because it had been fostered mainly by Jews. Jung's
secession, however, is related to Freud's thoughts on the eve of the First World War. In the war,
for example, most of the socialists, who belonged to the Second International, which was opposed
to war, supported the war in their countries. Romantic nationalism had thus overwhelmed the
reason of the Enlightenment. J ung stood in this current.
On the eve of the World War, Jung broke away from Freud. Still, it is not that Freud broke
away from Jung. Freud himself, while viewing war as regression into savagery, simultaneously
acknowledged its significance as a liberation of "life" and an existential awakening of individuals.
Hence we must avow that Freud, up to this period, was a Romantic in the broadest sense. It is
only when he renounced Romanticism, in the postwar Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that Freud
truly broke away from Jung. Freud describes the process leading to it as follows. At first he had
reflected on psychoneurosis in terms of dualistic conflict between the ego-drive and the sexual
drive. When it was revealed that the ego-drive itself had a libidinal nature, however, it became
impossible for him to uphold this traditional dualism. Then, like Jung, he would have had to
subscribe to the opinion which does not limit the libido to the sexual but grasps it monistically.
Concerning this problem, Freud states the following:
 But we now find ourselves suddenly faced by another question. If the self-preservative instincts too are
of a libidinal nature, are there perhaps no other instincts whatever but the libidinal ones? At all events
there are none other visible. But in that case we shall after all be driven to agree with the critics who
suspected from the first that psycho-analysis explains everything by sexuality, or with innovators like
Jung who, making a hasty judgement, have used the word 'libido' to mean instinctual force in general.
Must not this be so? It was not our intention at all events to produce such a result. Our argument had as
its point of departure a sharp distinction between ego-instincts, which we equated with death instincts,
and sexual instincts, which we equated with life instincts. (We were prepared at one stage to include
the so-called self-preservative instincts of the ego among the death instincts; but we subsequently
corrected ourselves on this point and withdrew it.) Our views have from the very first been dualistic,
and to-day they are even more definitely dualistic than before-now that we describe the opposition
as being, not between ego-instincts and sexual instincts but between life instincts and death instincts.
Jung's libido theory is on the contrary monistic; the fact that he has called his one instinctual force
'libido' is bound to cause confusion, but need not affect us otherwise. II

It is the apparatus of the Romantic dualism between the reality principle and the pleasure principle
that Freud broke away from. It goes without saying, though, that his views became "even more
definitely dualistic than before" as a result of this break. Whence, however, did Freud obtain the
concept of the death drive? It does not come from within psychoanalytic theory, nor does it come
from the experience of the war. He obtained it from patients suffering from war neurosis who
he encountered in the practice of psychoanalysis. Despite the speculations of analysts, patients
themselves introduced the historical situation. It is as a response to war neurotics' dreams of the
"compulsion to repeat" that Freud developed the death drive. He had attempted to treat them
as a problem of traumatic neurosis in general and to contain the historical situation of the First
World War within psychoanalysis. Freud "admits" that he has had doubts about his own theory
of dreams since the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams.
This would seem to be the place, then, at which to admit for the first time an exception to the proposition
that dreams are fulfilments of wishes. Anxiety dreams. as I have shown repeatedly and in detail, offer
not such exception. Nor do 'punishment dreams', for they merely replace the forbidden wish-fulfilment
by the appropriate punishment for it; that is to say, they fulfil the wish of the sense of guilt which is the
reaction to the repudiated impulse. But it is impossible to classify as wish-fulfilments the dreams we
have been discussing which occur in traumatic neuroses. or the dreams during psycho-analyses which
bring to memory the psychical traumas of childhood. They arise. rather, in obedience to the compulsion
to repeat, though it is true that in analysis that compulsion is supported by the wish (which is encour-
aged by 'suggestion') to conjure up what has been forgotten and repressed."

Yet, his admission simultaneously conceals another problem: why did Freud recall his doubt at
this period? Considering his attitude as a scientist, having no scruples about changing his opinion,
it is still strange, that especially at this period, he made a decisive and sudden tum in his opinion.
Freud must have seen numerous cases of the repetition compulsion in dreams. While he had
 dismissed them as exceptions for a long time, why couldn't he do the same in 1920? In a word,
Freud faced the modem "war" for the first time in the dreams of war neurotics. In "Thoughts for
the Times on War and Death" he wrote as a non-combatant and for non-combatants.
The individual who is not himself a combatant-and so a cog in the gigantic machine of war-feels
bewildered in his orientation, and inhibited in his powers and activities. I believe that he will welcome
any indication, however slight, which will make it easier for him to find his bearings within himself at
least. I propose to pick out two among the factors which are responsible for the mental distress felt by
non-combatants, against which it is such a heavy task to struggle, and to treat of them here[.] (275)

Needless to say, I would not assert that only those who go to battlefields experience war. Freud
held that, once war was over, most soldiers would return to everyday life and recover their
intellect in place of the emotional excitement. However, the First World War was qualitatively
different from any previous war: it produced a huge amount of neurotics who could not return
to everyday life. Hence we might be able to say that the specificity of the war is revealed in their
dreams. For example, war is absent in literature written during wartime. On the other hand,
o "postwar literature," of the First or Second World War or the Vietnam War, is in the broad sense
on
~ a literature of war neurosis. Even afterits end, war is repeated in the nightmares of war neurot-
ics. It is not the war as an observed fact, but the invisible war repeated in dreams that changed
the framework of Freud's psychoanalysis.
Freud saw the aggressive drive which caused the repetition compulsion in the nightmares
of war neurotics. The aggressive drive, however, is distinct from the aggressivity which we can
observe in experience. The First World War was filled with such aggressivity. Freud himself,
for instance, writes during the war: "the instinct which is said to restrain other animals from
killing and devouring their species need not be attributed to [primeval man]" (292). This view
anticipates what Konrad Lorenz, an ethologist, later endeavored to discover. However, the
Romantic opposition between animal and human, or between the primitive and the civilized-
although its hierarchy is inverted-does not attend to the specific character of modern wars.
Freud, witnessing the behavior of (civilized) Europeans in the First World War, commented
that war "strips us of the later accretions of civilization, and lays bare the primal man in each
of us," but this is perhaps unjust to primitive man, just as it is unjust to beasts to call those
men who commit cruelties beastly. In all ages professional warriors or soldiers neither fight a
war without promise of victory nor press the defeated too hard unnecessarily: the aggressivity
in human beings is also inhibited sufficiently. Consequently, the uninhibited carnage is never
due to the "primitive mind" but to something specific to the First World War. It is the first war
waged as an all-out war. Distinguished from previous wars, which involved only battles of arms,
all-out war is violent, severe, and lengthy. The states not only fight battles of arms but also
motivate all their cultural, political, economic, ideological and military forces. This war has a
decisive significance for the economy and for the people's political and ideological solidarity.
That is to say, in this national war, in which all forces are concentrated, it does not make sense
to distinguish between soldier and civilian, between military and economic affairs, or perhaps
between war and peace.
In the midst of the war, Freud expected that the people's emotional excitement would eventu-
ally be calmed down. This is a viewpoint that sees war in its classical sense. And yet he could not
avoid reading in war neurotics that this war was different from previous ones. To be sure, he
never objectified the difference of the war. Nevertheless, Freud, who had theretofore assumed an
ahistorical stance, confronted the historicity of the First World War in war neurotics. We must,
therefore, read the death drive as an historical concept.
In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud points out the prevalence of the "hostility to civi-
lization." This is a social tendency which could be found before the First World War, and was .....
occasionally called the "philosophy of life," but was basically an anti-intellectual and Romantic
tendency. In opposition to the force of cultural order, for example, Georges Sorel, affirmed
violence as an affirmation of "life," which countered its power. When the war broke out, social-
ists who valued an intellectual and abstract cosmopolitanism decided to enter the war at once.
It is impossible to see this phenomenon only in terms of national interest. Neither the socialists
themselves, nor the peoples, could resist the attraction of war's aggressivity. Freud himself was
attracted to it to a certain degree.
In postwar Germany, however, the "hostility to civilization" had another meaning: it was
nothing but the hostility to the Treaty of Versailles and the regime ofthe Weimar Constitution.
From the viewpoint of the Nazis the regime was a humiliating order vindictively imposed upon
the German people by the victorious nations; from the viewpoint of the communist party it was a
fraudulent order hampering the true proletarian revolution. In other words, the postwar Weimar
regime was a culture imposed from the outside and a state of neurosis caused by repression. As
a result the Weimar regime collapsed under attacks from both the right and left. When Freud
wrote Civilization and Its Discontents, the Weimar regime was on the verge of collapse. What
Freud implicitly maintains in this book is that the postwar order should be regarded not as an
internalization of a compulsion from the outside but as a displacement of the German people's
aggressive drive onto themselves. He argues that "the community, too, evolves a super-ego. ,,'"
The Weimar regime is precisely the superego, which we equate with culture. The people thought
that the Weimar regime was a repressive system inflicted upon a defeated Germany by the vic-
torious nations. It is from this viewpoint that the Nazi's propaganda that the German race was
castrated by the Allies, behind whom lurked the Jews, worked effectively. From the viewpoint
of the early Freud, it would be impossible to contest this propaganda, for culture was certainly
repression .
 However, Freud, after Beyond the Pleasure Principle, albeit uncomfortably, attempted to
reinforce culture, or the superego. It is not external control, but the aggressive drive itself that
can inhibit the aggressive drive. By this thinking, he insisted on the necessity of maintaining the
Weimar regime. It should be noted, however, that it was not the war itself but the patients who
repeated the war every night that compelled Freud to take a drastic turn that changed the mean-
ing of the superego and culture. Freud speculated that individuals should be cured of neurosis,
but that states did not have to be cured of neurosis, namely culture.

KANT'S SUBLIME AND FREUD'S SUPEREGO

A parallel can be found between Freud and Kant in the shifts that occur between their early and
later works, especially those concerning humor and the sublime. As stated above, although Freud
did not pay enough attention to humorin 1905 when he wrote Jokes, in 1928 he considered humor
as fundamentally different from jokes. This turn was caused by the notions of the death drive
and the superego. To repeat, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud observed the fact of the
repetition of essentially unpleasurable acts which should have been avoided: the case of a child
who overcame the unpleasurable situation of his mother's absence by repeating it in play. Here
Freud saw the "beyond" of the pleasure principle. We can say, however, that what he saw here is
the autonomous (that is, self-legislative) function of the superego, which consoles the poor ego.
For this reason, the concepts of the death drive and the superego are inseparable.
Yet, it is Kant in Critique of Judgment who investigated the conversion of unpleasure into a
kind of pleasure for the firsttime. There, he distinguishes between the beautiful and the sublime.
Before the Critiques, he had dealt with them in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and
Sublime, in which he merely described his observations of the types of taste formed in this era.
The sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peak rises above the clouds, the description of a raging
storm, or Milton's portrayal of the infernal kingdom, arouse enjoyment but with horror; on the other
hand, the sight of flower-strewn meadows, valleys with winding brooks and covered with grazing
flocks, the description of Elysium, of Homer's portrayal of the girdle of Venus, also occasion a pleasant
sensation but one that is joyous and smiling. In order that the former impression could occur to us in
due strength, we must have a feeling of the sublime. and, in order to enjoy the latter will, a feeling of
the beautiful. Tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime; flower beds, low hedges and
tree trimmed in figures are beautiful. Night is sublime, day is beautiful."
The difference between the beautiful and the sublime, here, is only that of objects, or feelings.
Kant certainly points out that the sublime is possible only through unpleasure, but such a notion
had already been put forward by Edmund Burke. The emotion of the sublime is "not pleasure,
but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror.?" At this stage, Kant's
aesthetics assumed a position that explained the beautiful and sublime, in Freud's words, in
terms of the "pleasure principle."
 This is convincing proof that, even under the dominance of the pleasure principle, there are ways and
means enough of making what is in itself unpleasurable into a subject to be recollected and worked
over in the mind. The consideration of these cases and situations, which have a yield of pleasure as
their final outcome, should be undertaken by some system of aesthetics with an economic approach
to its subject-matter. They are of no uses for our purpose, since they presuppose the existence and
dominance of the pleasure principle; they give no evidence of the operation of tendencies beyond the
pleasure principle, that is, of tendencies more primitive than it and independent of it."
Freud's critique here is directed toward his own early theories, which saw dreams as wish-fulfill-
ments and forcibly explained away even unpleasurable dreams as such. In Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, he endeavors to explain dreams of the repetition compulsion in terms of an inclina-
tion different from the pleasure principle. His move parallels that of Kant, who at first saw the
sublime from the viewpoint of the aesthetics of the pleasure principle, but later held it to be in
principle different from the beautiful.
According to Kant, judgment of the beantiful is caused by finding the form of "pnrposive-
ness without purpose" in a natural object. In this case, the beautiful has its ground in the
external object and imagination works together with understanding. On the other hand, the
sublime emerges when we cannot find such purposiveness but still try to find another kind of
purposiveness: judgment of the sublime is caused by the imagination working together with
reason. When, for instance, we are confronted with nature, which absolutely overwhelms us
'"
w
in its magnitude or its intensity, when in spite of our powerlessness the "supersensible faculty
in ourselves" is aroused, the feeling of the sublime emerges. In short, while the beautiful has
an external ground, the sublime's ground is internal and projected onto external objects. As
Freud differentiated a kind of pleasure in humor from that of jokes and indicated the superego's
involvement in humor, Kant also pointed out that reason was involved with the pleasure of the
sublime. Kant says:
The quality of the feeling of the sublime is that it is a feeling of displeasure concerning the aesthetic
faculty of judging an object that is yet at the same time represented as purposive, which is possible
because the subject's own incapacity reveals the consciousness of an unlimited capacity of the very
same subject, and the mind can aesthetically judge the latter only through the former .17

Kant's thinking here is analogous to Freud's on humor: the revelation of a self with unlimited
capacity encourages the powerless self. Freud's example of the child, who converts the pain of
being left behind by his mother into pleasure by play that repeatedly represents the pain, shows,
in Kant's words, that "an unlimited capacity" of the subject can be "aesthetically" judged only
through the same "subject's own incapacity."
Can we then insist that the sublime is derived not from external objects but from the inside?
Without an external object, however, with such an overwhelmingly formidable power as to
make us feel powerless, there would be no sublime. Without reason, which overcomes the
powerlessness, no doubt, tbere would be no sublime; otherwise it would be religious fear and
far from yielding pleasure. The sublime, however, is not a mere subjective feeling. The sublime
is impossible witbout the existence of tbe overwhelming external object. The same logic can be
applied to Freud's concept oftbe superego. I stressed thattbe superego is derived from tbe inside,
but my proposition does not deny tbat tbe superego is derived from tbe outside. Freud argued tbat
conscience is formed not by tbe severe and superior (tbat is, external) otber, but by a renunciation
of one's own aggressivity, of which psychic energy passes into tbe superego and is wielded on tbe
ego. Simultaneously, he insisted that tbis view was compatible witb his former view.
Which of these two views is correct? The earlier one, which genetically seemed so unassailable, or the
newer one, which rounds off the theory in such a welcome fashion? Clearly, and by the evidence, too,
of direct observations, both are justified. They do not contradict each other, and they even coincide
at one point, for the child's revengeful aggressiveness will be in part determined by the amount of
punitive aggression which he expects from his father. Experience shows, however, that the severity of
the super-ego which a child develops in no way corresponds to the severity of treatment which he has
himself met with. The severity of the former seems to be independent of that of the latter. A child who
has been very leniently brought up can acquire a very strict conscience. But it would also be wrong to
exaggerate this independence; it is not difficult to convince oneself that severity of upbringing does
also exert a strong influence on the formation ofthe child's super-ego."
For Freud the superego is ambiguous. What is new after Beyond the Pleasure Principle, how-
ever, is his attempt to explicate the autonomy of tbe superego through tbe concept of tbe deatb
drive. Despite his attempts to explain it in biological metaphors, needless to say, he could not be
satisfied with tbem. At the same time, he could not help being perplexed to find that, avoiding
biology, his argument had become speculative and metaphysical. The concept of tbe deatb drive,
in fact, has been repudiated by nearly all psychoanalysts, an exception being Melanie Klein, who
read it as a biological entity.
It maybe askedwhether and how far I am myselfconvincedofthe truth ofthe hypotheses [ofthe death
drive] that have been set out in these pages. My answer would be that I am not convinced myself and
that I do not seek to persuade other people to believe in them. Or, more precisely, that I do not know
how far I believe in them. There is no reason, as it seems to me, why the emotional factor of conviction
should enter into this question at all. It is surely possible to throw oneself into a line of thought and to
follow it wherever it leads out of simple scientific curiosity, or, if the reader prefers, as an advocatus
diaboli, who is not on that accounthimself soldto the devil.I do not dispute the factthat the third step
in the theory of the instincts, which I have taken here, cannot lay claim to the same degree of certainty as
the two earlier ones-the extension of the concept of sexuality and the hypothesis of narcissism. These
two innovations were a direct translation of observation into theory and were no more open to sources
of error than is inevitable in all such cases. It is true that my assertion of the regressive character of
instincts also rests upon observed material-namely on the facts of the compulsion to repeat. It may
be, however, that I have overestimated their significance."
 Neither primary masochism nor the death drive, are ever empirical concepts. While aggressiv-
ity is a notion which can be readily obtained from the observation of war, the aggressive drive is
a postulate which can be obtained solely from the nightmares of war neurosis. Still, to postulate
the aggressive drive, and its derivative the death drive, is not a re-introduction of metaphysics.
While he tenaciously adhered to the physical, Freud encountered in it the inevitability of the
metaphysical as drive. Nevertheless, it is not that the metaphysical exists independently of the
physical. For example, he states the following:
[T]he most interesting methods of averting suffering are those which seek to influence our own organ-
ism. In the last analysis, all suffering is nothing else than sensation; it only exists in so far as we feel it,
and we only feel it in consequence of certain ways in which our organism is regulated.
The crudest, but also the most effective among these methods of influence is the chemical one-intoxi-
cation. I do not think that anyone completely understands its mechanism, but it is a fact that there are
foreign substances which, when present in the blood or tissues, directly cause us pleasurable sensations;
and they also so alter the conditions governing our sensibility that we become incapable of receiving
unpleasurable impulses. The two effects not only occur simultaneously, but seem to be intimately
bound up with each other. But there must be substances in the chemistry of our own bodies which
have similar effects, for we know at least one pathological state, mania, in which a condition similar to
intoxication arises without the administration of any intoxicating drug."
From this description it is evident that Freud anticipated the discovery of endorphins. Brain physi-
010gy today has been developing in the direction Freud foresaw. Why can pleasure be obtained
through unpleasure? It is because endorphins are secreted when ordinary pleasure is frustrated.
Arunner's high, for instance, occurs after the state of suffering. Since antiquity, religious ascetics
have known this art of conversion, these techniques of the body. Certainly they have regarded
those techniques as metaphysical "ecstasy," but, even if they soar into heaven, there is no "mys-
tery" in mysticism without the chemical ground. Religious mysticism is different from narcotics,
in that, while the former causes the secretion of endorphins by intentional sufferings, the latter
adds them from the outside. Marx said that "religion is the opium of the people," but for Freud it
was not a metaphor. He argues that "the effect of religious consolation may be likened to that of
a narcotic.'?" Incidentally, there are two main types of narcotic. One type, such as amphetamines
or cocaine, directly supplies dopamine. The other type, such as opium or heroin, functions in the
same way as the endorphins: they affect the receptor which inhibits the activity of the nervous
system and consequently yields pleasure. Therefore, while the former compels people to act, often
aggressively, the latter causes the calm pleasure of nirvana, and puts people into, as it were, an
"inorganic" state. We can also find these two types in religious mysticism.
This view provides us with a physical ground for the conversion of unpleasure into pleasure.
Probably Freud would not repudiate it. Kant, too, would not repudiate it, for, as is shown by the
"third antinomy," the proposition that everything has a cause in nature is compatible with the
fact of freedom. Kant repudiated not only eudaemonism but also the inclination to seek suffering,
because erotic elements often appeared in actively seeking the pleasure brought about by the
pain offollowing the moral law. Religious enthusiasm and ecstasy, Marianism, and masochistic
asceticism, in which the devotees willingly suffer martyrdom, are apt examples. Freud calls this
"moral masochism." "[T]hrough moral masochism morality becomes sexualized once more,
the Oedipus complex is revived and the way is opened for a regression from morality to the
Oedipus complex. This is to the advantage neither of morality nor of the person concerned. An
individual may, it is true, have preserved the whole or some measure of ethical sense alongside
of his masochism; but, alternatively, a large part of his conscience may have vanished into his
masochism.?" Similarly Kant not only repudiated empirical eudaemonism but also "mysticism,"
which he saw as the pursuit of the suffering/pleasure which paradoxically results from the
repudiation of the eudaemonism.
However, Freud saw Kant's ethics in terms of the Oedipus complex. As he said, "Kant's
Categorical Imperative is thus the direct heir of the Oedipus complex." This view does not
greatly differ from that of Emile Durkheim and the sociological thought of his followers, which,
by regarding Kant's "categoricalimperative" as the norms of the community, assumed that Kant's
subjective ethics could be translated into a "social fact." In a sense Freud's earlier view is analogous
to theirs. The later Freud, however, made a significant tum from this view, and if he had read
Kant from his new viewpoint, a totally different Kant could have been revealed to him. Just as
Adorno was satisfied with a stereotypical reading of Freud, however, so Freud was satisfied with
a stereotypical reading of Kant. Hence we must read Kant against Freud. It is not until we see it
from the viewpoint of the later Freud thatthe puzzle in Kant's moral theory can be solved.
Kant indeed located morality in our obedience to an imperative, but he deemed it freedom
because the imperative is constituted by ourselves, that is, autonomously. How is this possible?
How can we understand it? There is an excellent example of what Kant calls autonomy, or
following what one constitutes as the law: Freud's case ofthe child, who overcomes the suffering
of his mother's absence by repeating a game. Autonomy is possible through a doubling of the ego
between the ego and the superego. This doubling is as different to the doubling of the empirical
self and the transcendental self as chalk is from cheese. The latter yielded "Romantic irony,"
exemplified by Schlegel, which dwells in transcendental subjectivity and denies the limitation of
the ego in its empirical existence. It is a continual effort to negate the ego's powerlessness at the
level of experience. As a result, irony emerges as an attitude in which being serious is playful and
being playful is serious. It is, however, merely an excessive self-consciousness. Hegel criticized
Romantic irony because it stopped at the stage of subjectivity; human beings mature only by
limiting themselves. Hegel thus seems to have overcome Romanticism. Yet, as we have already
seen, his overcoming is also a form of Romanticism. On the contrary, Freud says thatthe superego
is an unconscious agency from which humor is yielded. Freud insists: "not everyone is capable
of the humorous attitude. It is a rare and precious gift, and many people are even without the
capacity to enjoy humorous pleasure that is presented to them.:" Humor is not produced by
self-consciousness. Moreover, Freud asserts the following.
We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual
life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The
voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless
succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about
the future of mankind, hut it is in itself a point of no small importance. And from it one can derive yet
other hopes. The primacy of the intellect lies, it is true, in a distant, distant future, but probably not
in an infinitely distant one."

Romanticism claims that intellect cannot defeat feeling or the drive. What Freud calls "intellect"
here, however, is nothing like the intellect of the Enlightenment. It is a "soft" voice persistently
muttered in the unconscious: the superego. The superego is an agency that actively and autono-
mously inhibits desire and the drive. Such is also what Kant calls "reason."

THE CUNNING OF NATURE

Freud and Kant are similar in that both of them, in their later years, devoted themselves to the
problem of "perpetual peace." Nonetheless, sufficient attention has hardly been paid to this fact.
Rather, it has been considered a peripheral and insignificant matter compared to their main work.
Kant's theory of peace, indeed, did not become an issue in the nineteenth century, and yet, there
is no doubt that, after the First World War, the following words became more persuasive.
[T]hrough wars, through excessive and never remitting preparation for war, through the resultant
distress that every nation must, even during times of peace, feel within itself, they are driven to make
some initial, imperfect attempts; finally, after much devastation, upheaval, and even complete exhaustion
of their inner powers, they are driven to take the step that reason could have suggested, even without
so much sad experience, namely. to leave the lawless state of savagery and enter into a federation of
peoples [Volkerbund]. In such a league, every nation, even the smallest, can expect to have security
and rights, not by virtue of its own might or its own declarations regarding what is right, but from this
great federation of peoples (Foedus Amphictyonum) alone, from a united might. and from decisions
made by the united will in accord with laws.26

The League ofN ations, established after the First World War, was powerless. From this experience
the United Nations was founded, but it is also powerless and is consistently criticized as merely
a measure by which the powerful nations achieve their own ends. It has to rely on the powerful
nations with arms since its resolution cannot take sanctions against violations. Critiques of the
United Nations always result in critiques of Kant: it is nothing but "Kantian idealism" to imagine
 a resolution of an international conflict by the United Nations. This kind of argument is actually
anticipated by Hegel, who criticized Kant's "To Perpetual Peace."
There is no Praetor to judge between states; at best there may be an arbitrator or a mediator, and even
he exercises his functions contingently only, i.e., in dependence on the particular wills of the disputants.
Kant had an idea for securing 'perpetual peace' by a League of Nations [Staatenbund] to adjust every
dispute. It was to be a power recognized by each individual state, and was to arbitrate in all cases of
dissension in order to make it impossible for disputants to resort to war in order to settle them. This
idea presupposes an accord between states; this would rest on moral or religious or other grounds and
considerations, but in any case would always depend ultimately on a particular sovereign will and for
that reason would remain infected with contingency."

Concretely, the "League of Nations" is impossible without powerful nations which can use
force in their sanctions against violations. According to Hegel, the hegemonic "world-histori-
cal nation" is necessary. This is, indeed, the logic which brought about the two world wars and
Cold War, in the twentieth century. Against this Hegelianism, needless to say, Kant's theory of
.."'
~
perpetual peace is powerless and may seem to be only a dream. Still, even if Kant was a dreamer,
what he dreamed is not at all limited to such a league. For Kant's ideal of the world republic,
the "League of Nations" is only a "negative surrogate." Kant, rather, proposed it as a realistic
compromise.
Reason can provide related nations with no other means for emerging from the state of lawlessness,
which consists solely of war, than that they give up their savage (lawless) freedom, just as individual
persons do, and, by accommodating themselves to the constraints of common law, establish a nation
of peoples (civitas gentium) that (continually growing) will finally include all the people of the earth.
But they do not will to do this because it does not conform to their idea of the right of nations, and
consequently they discard in hypothesis what is true in thesis. So (if everything is not to be lost) in place
of the positive idea of a world republic put only the negative surrogate of an enduring, ever expanding
federation that prevents war and curbs the tendency of that hostile inclination to defy the law, though
there will always be constant danger of their breaking loose."

This indicates that Kant's concept of the League of Nations is far from his ideal. The Kantian
world republic entails the renunciation of the sovereignty of nations, namely the sublation of
nations. Kant's theory of peace cannot be reduced to the problematics of international laws or
politics. "To Perpetual peace" is situated at the root of Kant's philosophy of history, for, in "Idea
for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent", the formation of the world republic is re-
ferred to as the ideal to be achieved in the history of human species. "One can regard the history
of the human species, in the large, as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about an
internally, andfor this purpose, also an externally perfect national constitution, as the sole state
in which all of humanity's natural capacities can be developed." Consequently, "A philosophical
attempt to work out a universal history of the world in accord with a plan of nature that aims
at a perfect civic union of the human species must be regarded as possible and even as helpful
to this objective of nature's. "'9 This "hidden plan of nature," however, is fraught with a material
paradox: world peace, or, the world republic, according to Kant, is made possible not by human
reason or the moral will but by "unsocial sociability," or the "antagonism" that is innate in hu-
man beings. The phrase, "a hidden plan of nature," is no more than rhetoric, but it is important
to note that Kant calls it nature instead of reason or mind. I suggest that nature is a structure
which we can and should analyze. It is from Freud's insight about the relation between the death
drive and reason, I believe, that we can gain the key to the structure.
The moral law, for Kant, is the categorical imperative. These words entice us to assume that
the law is derived from the outside, whether it be from God or from parents. Consequently, many
people read it as an internalization of external (or social) norms. Yet, according to Kant, the moral
law is inside the soul. However, one cannot be ethical a priori. The moral law must be derived
from the outside, but at the same time it must have its own root in the inside. Considering the
example presented by Freud, it is not difficult to solve this antinomy. Although moral behavior
is implanted from the outside by command or force, if everything is determined by the outside,
it would remain merely heteronomous morality and, without external enforcement, would be
abolished. In order for morals to be autonomous, they must come from the repetition compul-
sion: they must be derived, in one way or another, from the inside. The antinomy can thus be
solved by considering what Kant refers to as the "antagonism" of innate human nature in terms
of Freud's concept of the aggressive drive.
This problem would be vacuous, however, if it is solely considered within the realm of indi-
vidual psychology. Freud's concept of the death drive emerged in a particular stage of history,
in the situation of the First World War. The same can be said of Kant: he thought the problem
of "practical reason" not within the framework of morality in a narrow sense, but on the level of
history, economy, and politics." At the base of his argument about peace, there is the "world" or
"human species" in which the global economy of capitalism was actualized in reality.
[T]he effect that any national upheaval has on all the other nations of our continent, where they are
all so closely linked by trade, is so noticeable that these other nations feel compelled, thongh withont
legal authority to do so, to offer themselves as arbiters, and thus they indirectly prepare the way for the
great body politic [Staatskorper] ofthe future, a body politic for which antiquity provides no example.
Although this body politic presently exists only in very rough outline, a feeling seems nonetheless to
be already stirring among all its members who have an interest in the preservation of the whole, and
this gives rise to the hope that, finally, after many revolutions of reform, nature's supreme objective-a
universal cosmopolitan state, the womb in which all of the human species' original capacities will be
developed-will at last come to be realized."
Kant points out that cosmopolitanism, or the tendency toward the "great body politic," can-
not be found in "antiquity" and was caused by nations' being "so closely linked by trade." Kant,
who had been a geographer all his life, did not define the hnman species by a specific difference,
such as reasoning, but saw it in the unity of peoples and races, and also in the permeation of the
monetary economy. It is precisely the exchange enabled by the renunciation of violence, that is,
the commodity economy, that concretely unites the human species. AB Marx argued, the com-
modity economy appears between communities and is internalized in each community. Yet, what
Kant did not see is the fact that the commodity economy proceeds only as capital's movement of
its own accumulation. Contrary to Kant's hope, therefore, the capitalist economy makes mutual
conflicts global. After pointing out that the human species is established in "world intercourse,"
and that it is not until then that "world history" is established, Marx states the following.
[O]nly with this universal development of productive force is a universal intercourse between men
established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the "propertyless" mass
(universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally
has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (I)
communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have
developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions
surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism.
Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples "all at once" and simulta-
neously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse
bound up with communism."
This passage, written in 1848, reads as if it were written in 1989. It is due to the similarity
between what was happening under the overwhelming dominance of the British liberalism in
the 1840S and under the American neo-liberalism of the 1990S: the economies of nations, which
theretofore had maintained their relative independence by national interventions, were forced
into reformation of the division oflabor and class in the global market economy. I quoted this
passage, however, not in order to demonstrate how keen and pioneering Marx's insight was, but
because I would like to remark that, notwithstanding the exactitude of his perception, his vision
was too hasty." From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, in fact, it is ridiculous to
speak of world intercourse and world-historical individuals, who are enabled by the former, in
1848. Yet, we assume at each age that "the universal development of productive forces and world
intercourse" has reached the final stage. For example, there were two so-called "World Wars" in
the twentieth century, but the First World War was, after all, that of Europe, and neither did the
Second extend all overthe world. The same can be said ofthe present. The situations after 1990
cannot yet be the final stage. In the future we will face situations which will make what is now
taken seriously seem like a beginning in terms of "world history"; we might be forced to realize that
something like the development of human society is a sheer illusion. Even so, looking back over
the two hundred years since Kant's death, I cannot help agreeing with Kant's following words:
 I will thus permit myself to assume that since the human race's natural end is to make steady cultural
progress, its moral end is to be conceived as progressing toward the better. And this progress may well
be occasionally interrupted, but it will never be broken off. It is not necessary for me to prove this as-
sumption; the burden of proof is on its opponents. [ ...]
One can also offer evidence showing that the cry over the irresistible growth in human depravity is due
to the fact that, when man attains a higher stage of morality, one can see further still and can make
more rigorous judgments regarding what man is in comparison with what he ought to be; consequently,
our self-censure will always be the more rigorous the more stages of morality have been ascended in
the known course of the world."

CULTURE AND THE SENSE OF SHAME

From the perspective of Kant and Frend, the way to world peace can be fonnd in cnlture, that
is to say, in reinforcing the internalization of the aggressive drive. For Romanticism, however,
culture is sickness as such. The problematic emerges in its most radical form in the defeated na-
tions ofthe Second World War: Germany and Japan. Germany and Japan were not only forcibly
democratized but also thoroughly demilitarized by the Allies. If war is a nation's sovereignty,
then renunciation of war also means the renunciation of sovereignty. This regime is forced and
imposed by the victorious nations. It is not surprising, therefore, to hear the claim that the Ger-
man or the Japanese people were castrated and deprived of their historical identity. In Germany,
however, such revisionism is prohibited as unconstitutional discourse. It is prohibited neither
because the atrocities by Nazi Germany were beyond any comparison nor because the criticisms
from the outside are irritating. Rather, it is prohibited precisely because such revisionism was
vehemently asserted in the postwar Weimar regime, and was a factor in the rise of Nazism and
the Second World War. Instead of healing the disease caused by the First World War, that claim
simply intensified its symptoms.
We should re-read Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents from this point of view. Accord-
ing to Adorno, Freud ceased his "ruthless criticism of the super-ego" after Civilization and Its
Discontents. It was not from a desire to conform to the national system, though, that he stopped
his criticism. Adorno, for instance, thus states:
Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may
have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong
to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living -especially whether
one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere
survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could
have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will
 be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944
and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed
twenty years earlier."
Adorno's words correspond to what Karl Jaspers called "metaphysical guilt," which he added to
criminal, political, and moral guilt when he investigated the phenomenon of war-guilt soon after
the Second World War.36 Besides this correspondence, however, Adorno's words are reminiscent
of the war neurotics' nightmares ofthe repetition compulsion. We can ask Adorno the following
questions: if it is the superego that forces the sense of guilt upon us, should we fight against it?
If the nightmare is a compulsive repetition, can we simply be cured of it?
In Germany such a cure, that is, revisionism, is impossible. In Japan, on the contrary, it is
always being claimed that the history written by the winners must be revised. What is mysteri-
ous, however, is the fact that such a claim has never become the dominant force in debate about
Japanese national identity. It is evident that the constitution of postwar Japan, especially its
ninth article, which declares the renunciation of war, was imposed by the occupying army. If
this is true, why has the article never been amended? First of all, America itself, who imposed
the Constitution, demanded the remilitarization of Japan during the revolution in China and
the Korean War. The Japanese government, however, refused to acquiesce. The refusal is not
due to the excellent strategy of Shigeru Yoshida, the prime minister at the time, which aimed
primarily at Japan's reconstruction of its economy, while entrusting its security to America. The
Japanese government refused America's demand for remilitarization because it was apparent
that an overwhelming majority of the people would reject the amendment of the ninth article.
As a result, the Japanese government formed the Self-Defense Forces (under the pretext that the
Forces would be limited to defense), and defacto revised the interpretation of the Constitution
gradually. However, the government still cannot insist on constitutional revisions at elections,
for it is apparent that it would face vehement opposition. On the other hand, it is said that the
pacifist Constitution has been preserved due to leftist propaganda. This is also beside the point.
It is unlikely that Marxists would support the policy of renouncing arms. The Communist Party,
for example, considered postwar Japan to be obeying America as its colony, and insisted on the
military struggle for national independence. Generally speaking, the postwar leftists opposed
the military of bourgeois states, but affirmed the people's army. The majority of the New Leftists
retained this inclination. In general, the postwar leftists attempted to exploit the ninth article
rather than maintain it, for by doing so they could counter the conservatives to a certain degree, if
only by mentioning its maintenance at elections. Accordingly, it is not because ofthe dominance
ofleftist ideology that the ninth article has survived. On the contrary, the Japanese leftists, too,
have been ruled by something that upholds the ninth article.
This something, needless to say, inhabits the people, or the nation. It cannot be said, however,
that it is situated in consciousness: it is not driven by rational persuasion or reflection. It is the
superego as the unconscious. For example, Jun Eto, a literary critic, deemed that views such as
those that claim the postwar Japanese Constitution was imposed by the American occupation
army cannot explain why the Constitution so strongly determined the mind of the Japanese
people. He then attempted to find the secret of the Constitution's power in the meticulous and
hidden "radical censorship" of the occupying army.
Moreover, the reality of this censorship was nothing but the extremely meticulous and hidden censor-
ship which was practiced with the ban on the "reference to the censorship system." Metaphorically
speaking, it seems as if Japanese are, concerning the Constitution, enclosed by this censorship system
in a room all covered with mirrors. Looking from this side, this mirror is just a mirror and reflects
nothing except our own faces, but, looking from the other side, namely from the side of the occupation
authorities and the United Sates government, it is in fact clear glass-a device through which the inside
of the room is tangibly exposed to detail."
This censorship is precisely the same as what early Freud described concerning the "censor of
the dream." In other words, here Eto unwittingly follows the same logic as the early Freud. It is
no wonder that he holds the Romantic view that the Japanese can be cured of the sickness when
they are liberated from the repression. And yet, contrary to Eto's contention, it was well-known
even at that time that the occupying army was practicing the censorship. For example, every
one knew that the information on the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was extremely
limited. Furthermore, the cases of censorship mentioned by Eto merely indicate the censors'
folly and whim, and can never be called "meticulous and hidden" censorship.
Bymeans of this kind of political manipulation, it is impossible to cause compulsive repetition
in the Japanese people. The superego produced in the Japanese people seemed to be derived
from the outside, from America, but it was not. The superego was produced from the inside: it
was produced as a result of the aggressive drive which the people exerted to their hearts' content
in the all-out war. Let us refer to Freud's words:
What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which oppose it, to make
it harmless, to get rid of it, perhaps? ... This we can study in the history of the development of the
individual. What happens in him to render his desire for aggression innocuous? Something very remark-
able, which we should never have guessed and which is nevertheless quite obvious. His aggressiveness
is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from-that is, it is directed
towards his own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the
rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of 'conscience', is ready to put into action
against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other,
extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it,
is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore,
obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it
and by setting up a court [Instanz] within him to watch over it, like an occupying army [Besatzung]
8
in a conquered city. 3
 In this passage Freud seems as ifhe is speaking of the Japanese situation: an occupying army,
(disarming, watching over) and a court (the Tokyo Tribunal). For Freud, however, the "occupying
army" would not be that of America but precisely the aggressive drive of the Japanese people,
who fought under the general mobilization. If the Japanese people have a "sense of guilt," it is
not occasioned by the ruse of America or criticisms from the Asian peoples who were victim-
ized by the Japanese aggressions. To be sure, the "sense of guilt" comes from the outside, but
it cannot be maintained without that which comes from the inside, the repetition compulsion.
Furthermore, the latter is more important. For example, it is difficult for the postwar generation
to feel the sense of guilt. They reject any attempts to make them feel this guilt. The postwar gen-
eration, nevertheless, has supported the war-renouncing ninth article, not because of the sense
of guilt, but because they sense that it is shameful not to be capable of inhibiting aggressivity by
themselves. The superego is located in this sense of shame.
There are normal states or peoples without superegos. The United States, for example, tempo-
rarily possessed the sense of guilt after the Vietnam War, but was cured of the sickness by the Gulf
.... War in 1991. Can we say, however, that the American people recovered their health? They merely
'" obey another repetition compulsion, which is forced upon them by capitalism and nationalism.
There will come a time when they will have to be thoroughly ashamed of this cure. The normal
age, in which nations could, or believed that they could, wield their sovereignty, is already over.
The power to inhibit the "state of nature" between nations is stronger than ever before. It is not
that a certain ideal caused this situation; rather, it is the result of aggressivity being revealed on
an unprecedented scale in the two world wars and the Cold War.
For Freud, culture or civilization is a social apparatus that autonomously inhibits aggressivity.
In this regard, the investigations of Norbert Elias, who was influenced by Freud and studied the
civilizing process from a sociological viewpoint, are suggestive. In The Civilizing Process, writ-
ten in 1939, he closely examined the "civilizing process" in Western Europe from various angles.
According to Elias, for instance, up until around the fifteenth or sixteenth century, people were
brutal, belligerent, fought and very often killed each other, but gradually they abandoned their
aggressive attitudes. This inhibition of aggressivity was not only caused by the prohibition by
the absolute monarchy, which monopolized violence, but also because the ruling class regarded
the self-inhibition of aggressivity as a noble quality. Civilization consists not only in restraining
aggressivity, but also in it being self-inhibiting.
Returning to Freud, it becomes evident that his thinking about the superego is concerned with
the problematics of the civilizing process: how is it possible to spontaneously inhibit aggressiv-
ity? Parents can discipline children by using violence so that they can inhibit the aggressivity
by themselves, but this discipline often results in raising violent persons. Conversely, as Freud
pointed out, it is occasionally the case that children brought up by lenient parents have a strong
 ethical sense, that is, a superego. He explained this phenomenon in terms of the death drive, but it can be
explained from another viewpoint. Even though they did not explicitly use force on their children, it is still
possible to think that lenient parents produced the superego in them by showing by their own example that
it is shameful to be incapable of self-inhibition. In this respect, it is important to note that Freud revised his
earlier theory and insisted that a child's superego was not the parent himself, but formed upon the model
of the parent's superego. The parent's superego, which inhibits aggressivity, can be communicated to the
child. Moreover, the revised theory of the superego makes it possible to assume that not only individuals
but also groups can possess a superego.
Responding to Einstein's question of how to abolish war, Freud wrote that it was not enough only to
form a league of nations which would limit the sovereignty of each nation, but that the civilizing process
in which people develop a revulsion for warfare was also essential.
[To rebel against war] is not merely an intellectual and emotional repudiation; we pacifists have a constitutional ..... ,
intolerance of war, an idiosyncrasy magnified. as it were. to the highest degree. It seems, indeed, as though the
lowering of aesthetic standards in war plays a scarcely smaller part in our revolt [Aujlehnung] than do its cruel-
ties."
Obviously many people insist that war is cruel and sinful. Repeated too often, however, their words result
in provoking reactions from those who avow that war is pleasurable and heroic. What is necessary to re-
pudiate war is the sense of revulsion to being involved in such a vulgar and brutal thing. It is not the sense
of guilt but that of shame. Moreover, asserting that by this growth of civilization it is possible to attain the
society in which war would be abolished, Freud concludes the correspondence with the following words:
"By what paths or by what side-tracks this will come about we cannot guess. But one thing we can say:
whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.'?"

Translated by Hiroki Yoshikuni

p
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer
and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999),
99·
2. Kant, "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan
Intent," in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted
Humphrey (Indiauapolis: Hackett, 1983), 3'-2.
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton
(New York: Contiuuum, 1973), 272.
4. Ibid., 273-74·
5. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Uncon-
scious, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychologi-
cal Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter S.E.), ed. and trans.
James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974),
8: 236.
6. Freud, "Humour," S.E. 21: 161, 163.
7. Ibid., 165-6.
8. Ibid., 164.
9. Ibid., 166.
10. Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," S.B.
14: 275. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically
within the text.
11. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, S.E. 18: 52-3·
12. Jbid., 32.
13. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, S.E. 21: 141.
'4. Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sub-
lime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: U. of California
Press, 1960), 47·
'5. Edmund Burke,A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Routledge
& Kegau Paul, 1958), 136.
16. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, S.E. 18: '7·
'7. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, traus. Paul Guyer
and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000),
142.
18. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, S.E. 21: 130.
19. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, S.E. 18: 59·
20. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, S.E. 21: 78.
21. Freud, The Future of an fllusion, S.E. 21: 49·
22. Freud, "The Economic Problem in Masochism," S.B. 19:
169·
23. Ibid., 167.
24. Freud, "Humour," S.E. 21: 166.
25. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, S.B. 21: 53·
26. Kant, "Universal History," 34-5·
27. Georg W.F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M.
Knox (London: Oxford UP), 213-4.
28. Kant, "To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch," in
Perpetual Peace, 117-8.
29. Kant, "Universal History," 36, 38. [Fonts reversed.]
30. It was in 1795, shortly before Napoleon's rise in the process
of the French Revolution, that Kant wrote To Perpetual
Peace. He seemed to anticipate the war between the na-
tion-states, which emerged with the French Revolution. In
that sense To Perpetual Peace is a critique of the French
Revolution.
31. Kant, "Universal History," 37-8.
32. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Gei-man Ideology,
trans. Chris Arthur (New York: International, 1970), 56.
 33· Hegel, in his Philosophy of Right, stressed that a state's
sovereignty was directed toward the outside, that is, toward
other states. This point is neglected by Marx in his critique
of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Reflecting on the state only
in its relation to civil society (or the welfare state), that is,
only within the boundary of one state, he neglected the fact
that a state exists insofar as it is related to other states. Ac-
cordingly, Marxists in general tend to emphasize struggles
against a state and capital within the state and to scorn
Kant's attempts to limit the sovereignty between states. Still,
even if it is possible within a state to abolish the political state
and establish a welfare state or a commune, as was the case
with the Paris Commune, it cannot avoid collapse due to the
intervention of other states, otherwise that state would have
to become powerful itself. The movement to abolish a state
engenders one with more power. Marx did not consider this
paradox because, for him, a revolution limited to one state
was impossible. He always presupposed the simultaneous
world revolution. It is an unrealistic presupposition, how-
ever. In the Russian Revolution, for example, presupposing
the start of revolutions in Europe, Lenin and Trotsky pressed
for the seizure of power, but the revolutions never broke
out. Hence what Stalin called "socialism in one state" was
born. In the event, this form of socialism abandoned Lenin's
anarchistic ideal of the "withering away of the states." This
problem is still relevant. When the simultaneous "world
revolution" is impossible, how is it possible to supercede
the states? Not only a revolution within each state but also
the process in which, in the relationship between the states,
their sovereignty is gradually limited is essential. This is
what Kant's theory of perpetual peace suggests.
34· Kant, "On the Proverb: That May be True in Theory, Bnt Is
of No Practical Use," in Perpetual Peace, 86-7.
35. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362-3.
36. In a lecture shortly after the war, Karl Jaspers, criticizing
the political natnre of the Niimberg trials by the victor na-
tions, aimed at recovery of the pride of the German race by
voluntarily accepting the guilt of Nazism. He divides the
responsibilities of war into four kinds: criminal, political,
moral, and metaphysical responsibility. Basically it can
be said that the policies of postwar Germany are based
upon the philosophical arrangement by Jaspers. Yet, is it
possible to distinguish between moral and metaphysical
responsibilities? "Metaphysical guilt is the lack of absolnte
solidarity with the human being such as-an indelible claim
beyond morallymeaningfnl duty. This solidarity is violated
by my presence at a wrong or a crime. It is not enough that
I cautiously risk my life to prevent it; if it happens, and
if I was there, and if I survive where the other is killed, I
know from a voice within myself: I am guilty of being still
a1ive"(The Question of German Guilt, trans. KB. Ashton
[New York: Capricorn, 1961], 71) .. What Freud refers to
.... •
as "conscience," namely the super-ego, is concerned with
"metaphysical guilt." Freud says: "[after the institution
of the super-ego] the difference between an aggression
intended and an aggression carried out lost its force. Hence
forward a sense of guilt could be produced not only by an
act of violence that is actnally carried ont (as all the world
knows), but also by one that is merely intended (as psycho-
analysis has discovered)"(Civilization and Its Discontents,
S.E. 21: 137). With the institntion of the snper-ego, an act
of violence which we never intended, that is, which in fact
we are never involved in can also produce the sense of guilt.
The super-ego can never be external. If"metaphysical guilt"
in this sense disappears, the whole "sense of guilt" could not
but disappear. We can say that Adorno tries to evoke the
sense again in the passage quoted above.
37. Jun Eto, Senkyuhyakuyonjuroku-nen Kenpo-Sono Kosoku
[The 1946 Constitution-Its Restriction] (Tokyo: Bnngei
Shnnju, 1980),95.
38. Frend, Civilization and Its Discontents, S.K 21: 123-4.
[Italics added, Translation modified.]
39· Sigmnnd Freud, "Why War?" S.E. 22: 215 [Translation
modified.]
40. Ibid., 215.
THE ACT OF BEING: THE PHILOSOPHY
OF REVELATION IN MULL}; SADRA
Christian Jamhet
trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2006),
497PP·
While an investigation of the epiphanic phi-
losophy of Mulla Sadra Shirazi (1571-1640)
may seem to be an exceedingly particular
introduction to Islamic thought for an uniniti-
ated western readership, Christian J ambet's The
Act of Being persuasively renders the crucial
value Mulla Sadra's metaphysics holds for the
trajectory of Islamic philosophy after Aver-
roes as well as for western philosophy's own
inquiries into the status of freedom, necessity
and being. Highlighting Sadra's insistence on
the imperative, creative act that reveals the
singular identity of God and being, Jambet
puts forth a compelling argument for no less
than a fundamental "relation between Islamic
philosophy and the prophetic revelation of the
truth of the real" (20).
Jambet introduces his study of the thought
of Mulla Sadra by proclaiming the presumptu-
ousness of any attempt "to explain the truth of
a religion'Tro). This is an interesting statement
considering that throughout the entirety of The
Act of Being it is the ontology of a non-par-
ticularized Islam that is assumed as the book's
primary subject. Jambet's prefatory admonish-
ment is immediately followed, however, by his
claim that it is not any particular "truth" that is
at stake in the qnestion of religion, but rather
that it is "the true" that forms the content of
religions faith, that there exists an "originary
relation to the essence of truth" in the prophetic
revelation of monotheism (ibid). For Islam, this
revelation concerns the identity of the One and
the God of revelation who grounds all being in
a creative act, an identity encapsulated in the
Surah Ikblas ofthe Qur'an: "Say:He, God, One."
In TheAct of Being , J ambet seeks to understand
the central concepts of Sadra's philosophy and
how these concepts treat the revealed iden-
tity of being and God. Following the work of
Henry Corbin, J ambet posits this revelation as
the very center of Islamic philosophy, and his
book sets out to investigate the ways in which
Sadra's ontology constitutes a hermeneutics
of such revelation. For Jambet (as well as for
Corbin), Islamic philosophy is prophetology-a
prophetic philosophy that communicates the
divine messages of God as they are revealed.
These divine messages state "what being is."
That is, as Jambet claims, "This philosophy is
the ontology of Islam" (21). An exegesis of this
ontology (defined as the doctrine of the very
reality of the real) thus forms the basis for this
sustained discussion of Sadra's thought in rela-
tion to the truth of being.
The first part of The Act of Being, on "The
Metaphysical Revolution," establishes the cen-
trality of metaphysics to Sadra's understanding
ofIslamic philosophy. God is the witness of the
real, and he defines reality through this witness-
ing. It is in this sense that God as the "act of
being" effectuates the reality of all things and
is thns "the most real" of all things. According
to J ambet, being [al-wujudJ is for Sadra always
an act in the imperative sense. Being does not
actualize a potentiality but rather "the actualiza-
tion of this act, which always bears within it the
mark of the divine imperative" (75-76). Such an
imperative is the direct revelation of God. Sadri-
an metaphysics therefore must account for this
·witnessing of the real by God as well as become a
bermenentics of the content it reveals. As such,
it is a metaphysics that cannot bnt come to terms
with the divine. God is the witness of all that
exists, and as the pure act of being is existence
itself, which "precedes all reflection, all predica-
tion; it is pure presence, brilliance oflight" (78).
On Jambet's reading, this metaphorics of light
allows Sadrii to define entities according to the
intensity of the existence which confers being
upon them and not (as in Avicenna's scheme)
by their quiddity. The act of being as God in his
self-revelation is the prime instantiator of the
effusive light of all effectuation witbout which
"the darkness of its limit" qua quiddity could not
exist. It is in this sense that the act of being is
"the foundation of the existence of quiddity" and
not a copulative "term that unites with another
term" (104). Positing the priority of existence
(the act ofbeing) over essence (quiddity) allows
Sadra to construct a hierarchy of intensity of
being in and through which "the origin will be
located at the maximum intensity of the diving
being, and the lowest degree will border on the
nonbeing of first matter" (153).
The second part of Jambet's book deals with
"The Existential Revolution" in which Sadra's
conception of being is considered. The hierarchy
ofthe intensity of being consists of elements that
always remain in motion, and this is the only
constancy the hierarchy of being can be said to
elicit. The soul is shown to bear within its unity
multiple tendencies of movement among which
is the compulsion to return to its origin in the
One from which it emerged. The destination of
the soul is the "immanent infinity of intensity
that animates it," an infinity that forms the gen-
erative center of each existing thing and is "the
true name of its freedom" (281). Constituted
by the imagination, the destiny of the soul is
the site of a negotiated struggle for salvation in
the One wherein the essential motion of that
trajectory is itself the very act of existing. As a
consequence, Jambet's presentation of Sadra's
reflections on the vagaries of the soul culminates
in a discussion of the absolute necessity of the
act of existing which coincides with absolute
freedom.
Thus in the final section of TheAct of Being,
"Salvation," Jambet puts forth an argument
about the psychological motivation of the
"psychic man" ("the man of soul" who "is the
mediation between the sensible man and the
intelligible man" [349]) to perfect and "purify"
himself througb demonstrating "his desire to
care for himselfby knowing his own soul" (358).
This movement of purification (which is essen-
tiallya Platonic philosophical practice) leads to
the world of the imperative-the world of the
esoteric in which human freedom is generated,
precisely as imperativejreedom. This impera-
tive corresponds to the notion of servitude and
obedience embodied in the theophauic form of
the "Perfect Man." In Sadra's conception of it,
religion is an "internal movement" of "obedi-
ence and assent to God" that is not to be con-
fused with adherence to the juridical prescrip-
tions set forth in the world of the apparent, the
external world ofthe polity (420). Rather, for
Sadra, "Religion is the submission of the eso-
teric dimension of man ...fully affirmative and a
concomitant of gnosis and of certitude" (421).
This is a religion without compulsion emanat-
ing from the apparent world. True (interior)
obedience is pure, unbridled spontaneity that
is authentic, imperative freedom.
 This opposition between free will and the
imperative freedom inberent in the act of being
that Jambet draws our attention to in Mulla
Sadra's doctrine constitutes a potential point
of entry for the reader who is not a specialist
in Islamic philosophy. That is to say, outside
the particular fields of religious scholarship
or the history of Islamic philosophy, it may be
difficult for those of us in the West with a more
general philosophical interest - in questions
of ontology, subjectivity, and sovereignty, for
example - to understand the motivation behind
such a study as the one J ambet has undertaken.
Indeed, Jambet explicitly states his interest
here as that of interrogating and understanding
the ontology ofIslam on its own terms: "in the
thought of the authors of Islam, in their texts"
(13). But more precisely, what seems to be most
at stake in Jambet's work is an investigatiou of
an ontology in which God is the transhistorical
generative matrix of intelligibility, the name of
the absolute subject and absolute creativity that
is not limited by being but rather sustains itself
from a position "beyond being." Being (God, the
One), conceived as such, is the real which sus-
tains and founds being itself, thereby allowing
for the possibility of absolute freedom. In such
an ontology, "the foundation of being is itself
without foundation. Radical liberation includes
liberation from being itself." We may therefore
find in this rather specialized study of Islamic
ontology a fruitful basis for understanding how
the philosophy ofIslam, in its "living power ...is
connected to and even interlinked with our own
metaphysical destiny" (15)·
- Andrew Ascherl
1. Peter Hallward, "The One or the Other: French
PhilosophyToday,"Angelaki 8.2 (2003): 13·
The Century
Alain Badiou
trans. Alberto Toscano (Malden: Polity,
2007), 233 pp.
Badiou makes no mention of Marina Abramovic
in The Century. Nevertheless, the following
brief fragments from this Serbian performance
artist's bizarre and varied career will underscore
what is, for Alain Badiou, most singular and
significant about the last century.
As one part of the seven-part Seven Easy
Pieces (2005), Abramovic re-enacted Vito
Acconci's infamous Seedbed. In Seedbed,
Acconci lay hidden from view beneath a ramp,
masturbating for several hours at a time every
day for nine days. During the performance, he
fantasized aloud and into a microphone about
the gallery visitors; his voice was projected
through loudspeakers in the gallery. In an in-
terview Abramovic was asked, "How on earth
did you-as a woman-perform that piece?"
In response, Abramovic admitted, "having or-
gasms publicly ...it's really not easy, I tell you!
I've never concentrated so hard in my life. My
friend gave me some sexy magazines, but I
really didn't use them. I concentrated ...on the
idea that I had to have orgasms, as proof of my
work. And so I did. I don'tfake it-I never fake
anything."' Abramovic then added-perhaps in
case we still harbored doubt about her commit-
ment-that by the time she was finished with
her performance, she had had no less than nine
orgasms. Of course, those among us who are
even vagnely familiar with Abramovic's career
have little reason to doubt her commitment to
keeping it real. More than three decades prior
to her re-creation of Seedbed, she staged a per-
fonnance that placed her at the extreme limit of
what is possible in the domain of art, where-to
borrow from Badion-she essentially "declared
that it is better to sacrifice art"-and, in her case,
the artist along with it- "than to give np on the
real" (131). For Rhythm 0 (1974), Ahramovic
stood silently next to a table. On the table were
72 varied objects and a sign that read, "There
are 72 objects on the table that one can use
on me as desired." Among these objects was a
knife, a pair of scissors, a whip, and a loaded
gun. For exactly six hours, she stood silently
and passively as her audience wrote on her face,
cut away her clothes, implanted thorns in her
stomach. One participant forced Abramovic
(who was by this time naked) to hold the pistol
and insert the harrel into her mouth. And while
she was not then instructed to shoot herself,
neither did this near brush with death cause
her to end her performance early.'
A refusal to fake anything, an artistic ges-
ture that finds its only limit in the violent and
total disappearance of the artist: from the list
of radical artistic personalities of the twen-
tieth century (a long list, to be sure), Marina
Abramovic clearly deserves our attention. This
is primarily because her life and works (between
which it is difficult to draw a distinction) are
more dramatically driven by what Alain Badiou
names "the passion for the real" than those of
any other contemporary artist. Throughout
the thirteen provocative lessons that comprise
The Century, Badiou insists it is precisely this
militant passion for the real that coustitutes the
twentieth century's singularity, fueling each of
its truly original productions in the domains of
politics, science, love, and art.
Badiou begins his series of lessons (which
derive from the seminar that he gave at the
College International de Philosophie between
1998 and 2001) with a simple question: What
is the twentieth century? Note that he does not
ask after what it was; rather, he asks after what
remains constitutive of its singnlarity. If it is a
question as daunting and provocative as it is
simple, this is simply because, at every turn,
Badiou refuses the lure of a brute historicism
that would eqnate "the century" with "what
happened from 1900 to 2000." In his analysis,
"the century" does not name a historical unit;
the onlynnit that interests him is "a philosophi-
cal object, exposed to that singular will which
is the will to speculation" (1). Consequently,
Badiou's central task throughout the book is
to extract the universal thought unique to the
last century from the multiplicity and particu-
larity of its "what happened." More precisely,
the question demands that he find a generic
formula for the varied events, movements, and
works that belong genuinely to the twentieth
century-those that were not merely produced
during the twentieth century, but that are also
truly of it.
By way of a rigorously immanent method
that shares much with Foucault's archaeological
writings, Badiou aims "to subjectivate the cen-
tury as a living composition" in order to discover
how the century thought its own thought (13).
Just as Freud's elaboration of psychoanalysis
took the discourse of the analysand as its one
true source, so too does Badiou look only to
"the century's productions, some documents
or traces indicative of how the century thought
itself" in order to flesh out the constitution and
consequences of its passion for the real (3).
Through close readings of Man deIst am, Malev-
ich, Brecht, Breton, Pessoa, Celan, and Mao-to
name only a few- Badiou discovers that the
twentieth century desires to think itself as the
time to make real, here and now, the radically
new. In contradistinction to the utopian prom-
ises and ideologies that shape the nineteenth
century, the last century defines itself as that
time during which what had been promised
will be produced in its actuality. "It is the cen-
tury of the act, ofthe effective, of the absolute
present, and not the century of portent, of the
future" (58). It thereby defines itself against
the preceding century insofar as it is radically
skeptical of the dialectical unfolding of His-
tory-to the point of being the anti-dialectical
century. Having given up on the romantic idea
that the ultimate sense and essence of History
will inevitably emerge in its movement toward
an "internal overcoming of contradiction," the
twentieth century posits itself as "a figure of the
non-dialectical juxtaposition of the Two and
the One"-as structurally antagonistic (59)· It
isolates the first part of Hegel's dialectics- "one
divides into two" -as the sole formula for its
condition.
Hence, the militant subject of the twentieth
century finds that the question of his subjectiv-
ity emerges at the irreconcilable gap between
opposing forces-life and will, history and
the new, complete destruction and genuine
creation, semblance and the real. Because, in
each of the century's disjunctive syntheses,
"everything points to the suppression of one
of the two terms," Badiou asserts that war
is the generic paradigmatic means by which
the twentieth century thought itself (59). The
violence, cruelty, and destruction that pervade
the twentieth century (in politics and art alike)
have to be read as strictly correlative to its anti-
dialectical desire to purify itself of semblance
in order to make actual the real. Yet he insists
that the destructive purification that pervades
the century is not a necessary condition of its
passion for the real-there is another, creative
way of maintaining fidelity to this passion. Be-
yond the destructive orientation, which treats
the real as a substantial identity that needs to
be isolated, there emerges what Badiou calls the
subtractive orientation. This orientation treats
the real as a categorically irreducible gap ("a
minimal, albeit absolute, difference ...between
place and taking-place," [56]). Because it can
neither be fixed nor filled in, it is opposed to
the imperative of purifying destruction. Badiou
evokes Malevich's White on White, a painting
that bodies forth and supports this irreducible
and infinitesimal difference as the "difference
between white and white," as the epitome of
the subtractive gesture in art (55). While his
discussion of White on White is as subtle as it
is brief, one nevertheless finds in it a descrip-
tion of what, for Badiou, figures as the century's
most novel and revolutionary approach to the
real.
What is perhaps most unique about this vast
speculation on the century's relation to the
singularity of its own thought is its categori-
cal refusal to pass judgment on the century.
Badiou neither begins nor concludes by taking
measurements of its "value" from the "objec-
tive" position of the retrospective twenty-first
 century philosopher. Still, Badiou's lessons
are clearly subtended by two fundamental
claims-claims that are his, notthe century's-
regarding the phenomena he examines within
them. These are what invest The Century with
its polemical force.
The first claim is descriptive: Nothing that
belongs to the twentieth century is of the order
of the unthinkable. Insofar as this claim is a
necessary precondition of Badiou's method, it
might go without saying. However, it is worth
noting here mainly because it allows us to
identify Badiou's philosophical euemies, the
"intellectual hegemony" against which The Cen-
tury demands to be read (4). This hegemonic
position is, of course, the one that insists the
violence and cruelty that undoubtedly color the
last century can only be understood as "Evil," as
un-thought-and thus unthinkable-manifesta-
tions of barbarism. Against such de-politicizing
advertisements for the democratic-humanitar-
ian status quo as the sine qua non of political ra-
tionality-which take the Nazis' extermination
of the European Jews as privileged proof of the
century's irrational criminality- Badiou argues
that even Nazism must be understood as "both
a politics and a thought" (4). Those who refuse
to do so simply aim to "conceal the deep and
secret bond between the political real ofN azism
and what they proclaim to be the innocence of
democracy"; in so doing, they encourage the
repetition of the horror of Nazism (5).
The second claim, which follows from the
first, is prescriptive: We must not give up on
the twentieth century,for to cede its passion
for the real to an acceptance of reality will be
to trade the potentialfor new thoughtfor the
sterile repetition of a sham happiness. The
critical urgency of Badiou's lessons largely de-
rives from the fact that this trade off appears to
be a fait accompli. That is, the dual "triumph" of
liberal democracy and capitalism is sustained
by an injunction to give up on the real and to
resign oneself to the reality principle of profits
and opinions. Thus the apparent victory of
this injunction effectively signals the end of
Badiou's twentieth century and the dawn of
"the second Restoration" roughly twenty years
before the historical twentieth century comes
to a close (26). It announces that insofar as
the real-though!'s "obligatory correlate"-is
c:
"always liable to give rise to ...Terror ...it is ~
always preferable to have no relation to it '"
'"
E
whatsoever" (26). Better to do without thought
than to live with the possibility of terror: these
are the familiar words of wisdom against which
Badiou writes The Century. Ultimately, this
study compels us to resist the imperative of
the Restoration-which asserts that the only
"subjective" unit worth protecting is the in-
dividual-and to maintain our fidelity to the
possibility of realizing a new emancipatory
social link, a "disparate 'we' of togetherness"
that would reintroduce us to the revolutionary
potential of thought itself (97).
-Ryan Hatch
1. Karen Rosenberg, "Provocateur: Marina
Abramovic." New York Magazine, December
12, 2005. <http.Z/nymag.com/nymetro/arts/
art/15228> (July, 2007) [My emphasis]
2. Michael Archer, Art Since 1960 (London:
Thames and Hudsou, 1997), 108.
 BERNARD BAAS holds a doctorate in philosophy and is a Professeur agrege. He teaches at
the Lycee Fustel de Coulanges in Strasbourg (in the preparatory class for the Ecole Normale
Superieure), His many publications include Descartes et les Fondements de la psychanalyse
(Navarin-Osiris, 1988), Le Desir pur (Peeters, 1992), L'Adoration des berqers (Peeters, 1994),
De la chose d l'objet (Vrin, 1998), and Le rire inextinguible des dieux (Vrin, 2003)·

HENRY CORBIN (1903-1978) was a philosopher who specialized in comparative religion, Is-
lamic mysticism, and Heidegger. For more than 20 years he taught in Paris, at the Ecole Pratique
des Hautes Etudes, as well as the Department d' Iranologie at Teheran University and in Ascona,
Switzerland. He was a prolific translator of Iranian philosophy. His translations include works
by Shihsbuddin Yahya al-Suhrawardi, Mulla Sadra Shirazi and Ibn'Arabi. Some of his most
important works are En Islam Iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques (4 vols.) (Gallimard,
1971-3), Alone with the Alone (Princeton University Press, 1998), The Man of Light in Iranian
Sufism (Omega publications, 1994), L'Homme et Son Ange: Initiation et Chevalerie Spirituelle
(Fayard, 1983) and Le Paradoxe du Monotheisme (l'Herne, 1981).
........
RUSSELL GRIGG is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Melbourne and teaches philosophy
and psychoanalytic studies at Deakin University. He is a member of theEcole de la Cause freud-
ienne, the New Lacanian School and the Lacan Circle of Melbourne. His Lacan, Language and
Philosophy is forthcoming from SUNY Press.

OLIVER FELTHAM teaches philosophy at the American University of Paris. His research
interests include psychoanalysis, Marxism, critical theory and the history of metaphysics. He is
the translator of Alain Badiou's Being and Event (Continuum, 2006), and has recently edited
and contributed to an anthology of essays on Badiou's work, Ecrits autour de la pensee d'Alain
Badiou (Harmattan, 2007). He is currently working on an introduction to Badiou's philosophy,
forthcoming from Continuum.

KOJIN KARATANIhas taught at Hosei University, Yale University, Columbia University, and
Kinki University. He is the author of numerous articles and books on literature and philosophy
with a constant focus on Marx. His books translated into English are Origins of Modern Japanese
Literature (Duke University Press, 1993), Architecture as Metaphor (The M.LT. Press, 1995),
and Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (The M.LT. Press, 2003). Currently he is working on a
forthcoming volume entitled Revolution and Repetition.
CATHERINE MALABOU is Maitre de conferences at the University of Paris X-Nanterre. Her
publications in English include The Future of Hegel (Routledge, 2004), Counterpath (with Jacques
Derrida [Stanford University Press, 2004]), What Should We Do With Our Brains (forthcoming in
2008 from Fordham University Press), and Plasticity at the Eve of Writing (forthcoming in 2008
from Columbia University Press).

JELICASUMIC is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nova Gorica and Senior Research
Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Centre for Scientific Research of the Slovenian Academy
of Sciences and Arts. She has published a number of philosophical works, including Politik der
Wahrheit (with Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere and Rado Riha [Turia + Kant, 1997]), Unioer-
sel, sinqulier, sujet (with Alain Badiou, et. al [Kim", 2000]), and Mutations of Ethics (Zal. ZRC,
2002).

GERARD WAJCMAN is a French psychoanalyst and writer and teaches at the University of
Paris VIII. His publications include L'objet du siecle (Verdier, 1998) and Fenetre: chronique du
regard et e l'intimie (Verdier, 2004).

....
'"
 UTOPIA
V) co Utopian thinking determines the structuring coordinates of a certain political ho-

0:::0 rizon (subject, object, obstacle, demand, and social link) in an anticipatory gesture
that, paradoxically, advances a simultaneously imaginable and "wholly other" future

IJJO as that which will retroactively invest political struggle with its sense. "Utopia"
works to animate praxis through the promise of a time and space wherein the gap
Q..N between desire and its "satisfaction" will be bridged-a time and space beyond the
vicissitudes of lack.

~m
0:::'-"
The many devastating impasses of the contemporary political scene, coupled with
our pervasive refusal to recognize them as impasses, bear witness to the allure,
endurance, and costs of the utopian promise, which has occupied the center of
political thinking at least since Marx. Even the regime of power that today seeks
to forcibly implement a global order based on the "final" collapse of real socialism,
00::: the "irrevocable" triumph of liberal democracy, and the "unassailable" growth of
the global market is not without its own perverse notion of utopia.
LL.:Q Why does the specter of utopia, that ever-receding not-place, die so very hard?

....I~ Psychoanalysis, we will argue, is more than prepared to address the question of its
haunting insistence. We seek to address the status and destiny of utopian think-
....I~ ing and praxis. Insofar as the utopian demand for the elimination of lack obtains
its force only because it is, strictly speaking, impossible (it can only insist as long

<C as it fails to exist), is it not akin the impossible-real object of what Freud named
Wunsch? Does psychoanalytic thinking afford us the opportunity to unmask the

u operation of utopian thinking where we would not otherwise detect it? Do the
conceptual resources of psychoanalysis allow us to rethink politics beyond the im-
mobilizing deadlocks of both utopian futurism and "anti" -utopian cynicism? Most
to the point, perhaps, can psychoanalysis expose the precise ties between the lure
of utopia and the explosive violence it so often authorizes, so that we might discover
how to untie such a knot?

UMBR(a): A Journal of the Unconscious is currently seeking articles that address

such issues. Submissions should be 1,500-6,000 words in length, must be submitted
on disk (MSWord) and in hard copy, and must be received no later than December
1, 2007. Please send all submissions to:

UMBR(a)
c/o Ryan Hatch
Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
408 Clemens Hall
Buffalo, New York '426u-461O

UMBR(a) 176