Clark Buckner Apropos of Nothing Deconstruction Psychoanalysis and The Coen Brothers

Apropos of Nothing
SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature

—————
Charles Shepherdson, editor
Apropos of Nothing
Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis,
and the Coen Brothers
CLARK BUCKNER
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Buckner, Clark, 1968–

Apropos of nothing : deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and the Coen Brothers / Clark
Buckner.
pages cm. — (SUNY series, insinuations: philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5255-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
E-ISBN 978-1-4384-5256-2 (ebook)
1. Coen, Joel—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Coen, Ethan—Criticism and
interpretation. I. Title.
PN1998.3.C6635B833 2014
791.4302'330922—dc23 2013033745
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To
Jules and Elias
“Look upon me, I’ll show you the life of the mind!”
—Charlie Meadows, aka Karl “Madman” Mundt
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Apropos of Nothing: Or, What Does It Mean

to Be “Blood Simple”? 1
1 All-American Nihilism 31
2 The Symbolic Object and the Subject of Fantasy 63
3 Jouissance, the Real 105
4 Superego Overdrive 155
5 Ex Nihilo 201
Notes 241
Bibliography 245
Index 251
ix
Acknowledgments
Among its many challenges and satisfactions, writing this book largely was
a solitary process, in which I engaged people almost exclusively through
their articles, books, and movies. At the same time, however, I depended
upon a handful of others whose patient support and critical acumen were
instrumental in bringing the book to fruition. First among them, Kalliopi
Nikolopoulou and Jason Winfree gave me the opportunity to begin the
project as a paper on the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo for their panel on
“Deserts” at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature
Association. Here and elsewhere, my work has benefited significantly from
their consistent support and thoughtful criticism. The other books in this
series set a high standard for my own writing, and I am grateful to the
series editor, Charles Shepherdson, for his generous encouragement of my
efforts. The readers who reviewed my manuscript for State University of
New York Press provided insightful feedback on the project, and my subse-
quent exchanges with Todd McGowan were particularly helpful to its further
refinement. Also at State University of New York Press, I am grateful to
Andrew Kenyon and Jenn Bennett, who patiently endured my meticulous
revisions as they oversaw the book’s publication. Among philosophers, Gregg
Horowitz, David Hoy, and David Wood have long mentored my intellectual
development, and this project bears the marks of their continuing impact
on my thinking. Exchanges with the psychoanalysts Raoul Moncayo and
Dany Nobus stimulated my writing. Anton Malko offered helpful feedback
on my prose. And, over countless dinners, my good buddy Sebastian Lurie
provided a sounding board for my ideas, despite the fact that he disagrees
with me almost categorically. Above all, I am grateful to my wife and dear
friend Jennifer Perfilio, who makes a home in her grace for the intolerable
cruelty of my love. This book is dedicated to our sons.
xi
Introduction
Apropos of Nothing
Or, What Does It Mean to Be “Blood Simple”?
Blood Simplicity
A blank, white screen opens the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo, slowly to reveal
a landscape as a car emerges from the distance, first only as an obscure
interruption of this oversaturated image, and crosses the screen on a wind-
and snow-blown road. This bleak expanse of the film’s location—Fargo, as the
middle of nowhere—helps to articulate the absence that permeates the film
and ties together several of its key elements. Oblivious to the consequences
of his actions, the villain Jerry Lundergaard (William Macey) arranges to
have his own wife kidnapped. To him, it seems, the kidnapping is merely
a business strategy: a clever scheme to pilfer money from his father-in-law.
He has no apparent appreciation of the traumatic violence entailed in the
kidnapping, not only for his beloved but also for their son. “It’s real sound,”
he promises the kidnappers, “it’s all worked out.” While his crime undoubt-
edly is eccentric, the Pollyanna reassurance with which he disavows it is
altogether consistent with the empty prattle that pervades his social milieu.
The characters in the film speak with absurdly bright, Midwestern accents,
using corny upbeat clichés with vapid, homespun enthusiasm: Aw, geez. You
betcha! Don’t cha know? When it erupts, the film’s violence too is brutally
meaningless. With Jerry’s wife face down dead in the snow beside him, her
kidnapper and killer stands silently beside a frozen lake, wearing his long
johns, boots, and a goofy-looking hat, feeding his partner’s body parts into
a wood-chipper. There’s no lesson to be learned, no catharsis. It’s not even
tragic: it’s pathetic, ridiculous even.
1
2 Apropos of Nothing
In this regard, Fargo is emblematic of the Coens’ work. Absence is so

central to their films that, one might say, they are about nothing. The Big
Lebowski features a Dude (Jeff Bridges) who does nothing. It revolves around
a kidnapping that has not in fact taken place, and the ransom is paid to a
spastic gang of nihilists with the ringer for a ringer. Norville Barnes (Tim
Robbins), the protagonist in The Hudsucker Proxy, is an innocent—an idiot
really—who’s installed as the president of a major corporation in order to
depreciate the value of the company’s stock. Throughout the film, he draws
empty circles, zeros, and enthusiastically proclaims, “You know, for the kids!”
In The Man Who Wasn’t There, the eponymous protagonist, Ed Crane (Billy
Bob Thornton) is the shadow of a man, a “ghost,” as he describes himself,
who remains virtually silent throughout most of the story. Burn After Read-
ing features a conspiracy surrounding an utterly worthless computer disc.
Intolerable Cruelty hinges on divorce proceedings that leave one spouse with
absolutely nothing. In No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee
Jones) bemoans the loss of collective values in the modern world, while the
psychopathic assassin Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) uses a slaughterhouse
bolt gun to blow holes in his victims’ skulls. And Barton Fink is a film that
revolves around the absence of a film, or more specifically, the absence of
a screenplay.
The figures of absence that permeate the Coens’ films are correlates of
the irrationality that drives their characters, sustains their plots, and gives the
slip in the slapstick of their black comedy. As New Yorker film critic David
Denby notes, with specific regard to their 1985 breakthrough film, Blood
Simple, “What interests the Coens is how foolishly people behave, and how
little they understand of what they are doing” (Denby, 2008; 74). In Blood
Simple, they capture this sense of the irrational—and establish its continuing
importance for the subsequent development of their oeuvre—in the central
image from the film’s final sequence.1 Abby (Frances McDormand), the wife
of a jealous man, and the private detective (M. Emmett Walsh) hired first to
tail and then to kill her, shoot at each other through walls. The bullets punch
holes in the Sheetrock, projecting haphazard beams of light into otherwise
dark rooms. They are firing blindly with little or no sense of where they
are aiming—or, in Abby’s case, at whom she is trying to shoot. When she
finally succeeds in hitting the private detective, Abby declares, “I’m not afraid
of you, Marty,” referring to her husband, whom the private detective has
good reason to assume dead, and registering her distorted notion of what’s
happening. As his blood drains from the hole in his gut, the private detective
erupts in a sinister laugh, not only ridiculing her but also acknowledging
his own confusion about what he thought Abby was plotting: his imminent
Introduction 3
death, he realizes, will be the result of a stupid misunderstanding. “If I see

him” (presumably in Hell), he declares, “I’ll give him the message.”
Critic Hal Hinson traces the film’s title to its roots in Dashiell Ham-
mett’s novel Red Harvest, arguing that, after killing someone, you go soft in
the head—“blood simple.”2 He writes, “The sight of blood on [the char-
acters’ hands] causes the world to warp and distort just as Hammett said it
would, like the nightmare reflection in a fun-house mirror” (Hinson, 2006; 3).
However, the misunderstandings and misguided acts depicted in the Coens’
film precede any killing: they are its condition rather than its consequence.
Despite deriving from Hammett’s novel, the Coens’ concept of what it means
to be “blood simple” is thus perhaps better understood as inverting the title
of Flannery O’Connor’s Southern gothic novel Wise Blood.3 Rather than a
distorting effect, brought about by the fear and guilt of murdering, in the
Coens’ films, simplicity seems to be in our blood: a mindlessness that plagues
the human condition, derailing our self-conscious motivations and distorting
our understandings of one another and the world.
In this vein, the Coens’ characters consistently fail to act in their own
self-interest. Their motivations lack clear objectives and frequently prove to
be self-destructive. They misunderstand one another and the implications of
what even they themselves are doing. They do what they do for no good rea-
son: for nothing. In Fargo, for instance, Jerry attempts to rook his father-in-law
in order to pay off his debts. He has been embezzling funds through the car
dealership where he works, by taking out loans on nonexistent automobiles,
and he owes a lending agency more than a quarter of a million dollars, for
which he can’t even properly account. A quarter of a million dollars, one
might protest, that’s hardly nothing! Indeed, critics frequently assume that
Jerry’s plans are driven by greed. However, Jerry’s debt on nonexistent cars
only reinforces the central importance of absence to the film, and the Coens
take pains to establish the perversity of his designs. When first arranging the
kidnapping, the thugs Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud
(Peter Stormare) question Jerry’s plan. “It’s like robbing Peter to pay Paul,”
Carl declares, “it doesn’t make any sense.” Jerry attempts to explain, “Okay,
see, it’s not me payin’ the ransom. The thing is, my wife, she’s wealthy. Her
dad, he’s real well-off.” Carl pushes further, “So, why don’t you just ask him
for the money?” And even the otherwise mute Gaear chimes in, “Or your
fucking wife, you know?” Jerry rebuts, “It’s all part of this . . .” he stops
himself. “They don’t know I need it. See, okay so there’s that. And, even if
they did, I wouldn’t get it. So there’s that on top then. See these are personal
matters.” Carl presses him, “personal matters?” Jerry defends, “Yeah, personal
matters that needn’t . . .” He breaks off, provoking Carl’s reply, “Okay, Jerry,
you’re tasking us to perform this mission, but you won’t, you won’t . . .” He
lets it go, “Aw, fuck it.” And the story begins. As registered by the killers’
skepticism, the question remains: why can’t Jerry ask his wife and father-in-
law for the money? How does he know he won’t get it? And why does it
seem more palatable, even necessary, to put his wife at the mercy of these
two criminals. Furthermore, why did Jerry originally pilfer the loans? Along
with promising to provide for Jerry’s family, his father-in-law, Wade (Harve
Presnell), owns the car dealership where Jerry works. His job is secure, no
matter how well he performs. He does not need the money and never reveals
any rapacious plan, so typical in thrillers, to run away with another woman
and live out his days in luxury. So why does he do it?
Similarly, in Barton Fink, the Hollywood executives repeatedly tell the
eponymous playwright exactly what to write. So why does he sit paralyzed
in front of the typewriter, complaining that he doesn’t know what they want?
In The Man Who Wasn’t There, Ed is dismissed when he confesses to killing
his wife’s lover and executed for a murder that he didn’t commit. Why is
he so consistently misunderstood, and why does his modest plan for self-
improvement result rather in his own demise and the destruction of everyone
close to him? In The Big Lebowski, why does the Dude get embroiled in
the kidnapping, when he has good reason from the outset to believe that it
never took place? And what does he mean when he demands compensation
for his dirty, old, pissed-on rug, because “it really held the room together?”
The Deadlock in the Coens’ Critical Reception
In their critical reception, the Coens’ champions and detractors alike have
registered the importance of absence in their films when framing them
as postmodernists. The modernist films of the late 1960s and 1970s Hol-
lywood Renaissance featured alienated protagonists, who leveled at least
implicit critiques of dominant social conventions. By contrast, the films of
the 1980s—when the Coens’ emerged—were largely marked by a backlash,
paradigmatically embodied not only by the hypermasculine heroes played by
Sylvester Stallone in Rocky and First Blood but also by the kitsch rehashing
of classic Hollywood film genres, as represented most vividly by the revivals
of the outer space and wartime serial adventure in George Lucas’s Star Wars
and Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. In their films, the Coens, too,
quote explicitly from established Hollywood genres. Along with Lawrence
Kasdan’s Body Heat and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Blood Simple is a leading
representative of 1980s neo-noir; and, throughout their oeuvre, the Coens
play inventively with the conventions of both literary and film noir. The
Introduction 5
Man Who Wasn’t There draws heavily upon the noir classics, based on James
M. Cain novels Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Miller’s
Crossing adopts elements from Dashiell Hammett’s novels The Glass Key and
Red Harvest. And despite all appearances to the contrary, The Big Lebowski is
largely based on Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Along with noir, the
Coens revive and playfully exploit the conventions of screwball comedy, for
instance, in The Hudsucker Proxy and Intolerable Cruelty. And, most importantly
to their critical reception, the Coens relentlessly juxtapose stylistic tropes
from genres that typically are taken to be incommensurable.
In his review of Blood Simple, Hinson writes, “Made up of equal parts
film noir and Texas gothic, but with a hyperbolic B-movie veneer, it’s a
grab-bag of movie styles and references, an eclectic mixture of Hitchcock
and Bertolucci, or splatter flicks and Fritz Lang and Orson Welles” (Hinson,
2006; 4). Billed as a thriller, Fargo has the soundtrack and setting of a western,
the moral struggle between two families conventional to that genre, and its
own eccentric brand of ethnic humor. Barton Fink is a surreal horror film
and buddy flick that consistently quotes the Old Testament, draws heavily
upon the historical experience of modernist American writers and invents
its own classic B-film genre—which really should be one—the “wrestling
picture.” If The Big Lebowski is based on Chandler’s The Big Sleep, the opening
image of a “tumbling tumbleweed,” accompanied by The Sons of the Pio-
neers’ performance of that song, establishes it, too, as a western, even before
the entrance of The Stranger (Sam Elliot), the cowboy narrator drawn from
the “Wild West” of Hollywood’s stages. The character of the Dude owes an
obvious debt to the stoned, Gordita Beach private investigator in Thomas
Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice. And the Dude’s tour of 1990 Los Angeles in
pursuit of his stolen rug also evokes Vittorio De Sica’s classic film Bicycle
Thieves. In The Big Lebowski, the Coens even cite their own earlier movies,
putting the private detective Da Fino (Jon Polito), for instance, in the same
VW Beetle as the private detective in Blood Simple.
Accordingly, critics frequently have dismissed the Coens’ films as the
blank parody of postmodern pastiche that Marxist cultural critic Fredric
Jameson famously denounces for systematically short-circuiting the “social
and historical interpretation, which it perpetually holds out and withdraws”
(Jameson, 1991; 23). In her review of Blood Simple, for instance, film critic
Pauline Kael writes,
Blood Simple has no sense of what we normally think of as “real-

ity,” and it has no connections with “experience.” It’s not a great
exercise in style, either. It derives from pop sources—from movies
such as Diabolique and grubby B pictures and hardboiled steamy
fiction such as that of James M. Cain. It’s so derivative that it

isn’t a thriller—it’s a crude, ghoulish comedy on thriller themes.
(Kael, 1985; 81)
While Kael does not explicitly evoke postmodernism, her critical dismissal
of Blood Simple rests upon the same knowing self-consciousness that Jameson
denounces. She dismisses it as “over-calculated—pulpy yet art-conscious,”
and contends that “it has the look of film noir, but it lacks the hypnotic
feel.” Scathingly, she slams the film’s manifold citations as characteristic of
the self-consciousness of film students; and she argues that in his directorial
strategies, Joel plays to the audience’s enjoyment of being in-the-know—as
relieving them from the responsibility “to take things seriously” (Kael, 1985;
81). On this basis, she goes on to challenge the Coens’ status as representa-
tive figures of the resurgent Independent filmmaking of the early 1980s,
pressing the very reasonable question, “What’s the glory of making films
outside the industry if they’re Hollywood films at heart, or, worse than
that—Hollywood by-product?” (Kael, 1985; 81). With language that further
reinforces the centrality of absence in the reception of the Coens’ films,
she concludes (with specific reference to the money they raised to make
the film), “Blood Simple comes on as self-mocking, but it has no self to
mock. Nobody in the moviemaking team or in the audience is committed
to anything; nothing is being risked except the million and a half ” (Kael,
1985; 81—my emphasis).
Despite their many subsequent successes, similar criticism has followed
the Coens throughout their career. In his review of The Man Who Wasn’t
There, Philip Kerr echoes Kael’s critique of the “knowingness” of the Coens’
films and extends it to explain their popularity. “It’s axiomatic,” he writes,
“that Coen-heads—the people who get off on ‘getting it’—will like The Man
Who Wasn’t There. Coen-heads get off on the mechanics of filmmaking: the
flashy stylistics, the look of the picture, the production design, the score, stuff
like that. For them, style is all . . . and content nothing” (Kerr, 2001; 46).
Terrence Rafferty denounces Barton Fink as “densely packed with allusions,
clever dialogue, ingenious visual jokes, startling plot twists and imaginative
atmospheric effects, yet it feels thin. It’s an empty tour-de-force and what’s
dismaying about the picture is that the filmmakers . . . seem inordinately
pleased with its hermetic meaninglessness” (Rafferty, 1991; par. 1—quoted
in Landrum, 2009; 204). Peter Rainer discerns a similar detachment in his
review of The Hudsucker Proxy, denouncing the Coens as “perfect postmod-
ernists for a race of androids” (Rainer, 1994; 9, quoted in Sickels, 2008; 115).
Jonathan Rosenbaum dismisses Miller’s Crossing as “self-conscious and show-
Introduction 7
offy, with more portent than soul” (Rosenbaum, 1990; par. 1). And Patrick
McGavin, argues that O Brother, Where Art Thou? lacks “essential shape” or
“essential emotional register,” ultimately dismissing it as “postmodern prank-
sterism” (quoted in Seeley, 2008; 2).
As if anticipating such dismissive criticism, in Blood Simple, the Coens
make no bones about the clichéd tropes they employ. Instead they celebrate
them, among other ways, in the movie’s soundtrack. As the film’s setting is
first being established, Meurice (Samm-Art Williams), the black bartender
in Marty’s otherwise all-white, Texas honky-tonk, seizes the opportunity of
a band break to saunter over to the juke box in his high-top sneakers. He
drops his quarter in the machine, punches in his selection, and the speakers
erupt—to the explicit annoyance of the honky-tonk’s country-music fans—
with the Four Tops’ 1964 Motown hit, “It’s the Same Old Song.” The song
recurs later in the film—presumably it’s Meurice’s current favorite—and it
accompanies the closing credits, as a final echo of the film’s rehashing of
other works. The Coens don’t just play self-consciously with genre tropes;
they self-consciously call attention to their very self-consciousness.
Critics who champion the Coens’ films similarly don’t deny that they
indulge in postmodern pastiche; instead, they defend their work from dismiss-
als like Kael’s by asserting the critical force of such strategies. Paradigmatically,
in his book on the Coen Brothers, literary and film critic R. Barton Palmer
argues that postmodernism marks not an end to socially subversive film-
making but rather a novel form of it, which he contends, “is characterized
by a wholesale ‘nudging’ commitment to doubleness or duplicity” (Palmer,
2004; 102). Rather than relishing in nostalgia or preempting serious criti-
cism, Palmer argues that the Coen Brothers’ reiteration of genre conventions
plays self-consciously with their contrivance to subvert the integrity of the
original forms, mining them for creative possibilities and challenging the
audience’s sense of self-possession by showing the contingent artifice in the
constitution of both cinema and experience. When defending the subversive
force of the Coens’ self-conscious citations, Palmer thus contests the very
paradigm of critical praxis as founded on substantive grounds. Instead, in
answer to Denby’s formulation of the Coens’ concern with “how foolishly
people act and how little they understand of what they are doing,” he elevates
the underdetermination of experience to a point of principle, arguing that
their films consistently hinge on, what he calls, “the twin impossibilities of
human experience: coming to any meaningful understanding of others and
mastering the brute reality ruled by the principle of seemingly diabolical
mischance” (Palmer, 2004; 53). Indeed, in the monologue that begins Blood
Simple, the private detective portends, “Now I don’t care if you’re the Pope
in Rome, President of the United States, or man of the year, something can
always go wrong.”
The Supplement at the Origin
The critical strategies that Palmer discerns in the Coen Brothers’ films find
their most rigorous theoretical articulation in the work of Jacques Derrida,
who levels a sustained critique of Western thought and culture, as qualified
throughout by a consistent, prejudicial reduction of difference to identity,
which he denounces as the “metaphysics of presence.” Derrida emerges on
the French intellectual scene in the early 1960s, at a time when Europe
still reeled from the horror and devastation of the Second World War while
also facing anticolonial struggles abroad—including, specifically, in Vietnam
and Algeria—as well as tumultuous social changes at home. While both the
victory over fascism and these emancipatory struggles evoked Enlighten-
ment principles of rational self-determination, the crises they presented also
implicated, and in doing so, called into question, the value and integrity of
modern, scientific self-consciousness. Rather than merely an aberrant depar-
ture from the rationality of modern life, the rise of fascism appeared to be
symptomatic of it, the deviant excess of its own self-transparent objectivity,
and, in different ways, all parties were implicated in the atrocities of the
war. The principles and practices of modern science contributed directly to
the exploitations of colonialism and served to justify and sustain domestic
social hierarchies. As anticipated already by many leading critical theorists
of the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, Derrida’s philosophy
thus registers and works to redress the crisis of legitimation engendered by
this dialectic of enlightenment, revealing the inconsistencies and exclusions
integral to the project of remaking the world in the light of reason, and
elaborating new strategies to orient and sustain critical reflection.
In popular discourse, Derrida’s critical methodology, “deconstruction,”
has come to be used frequently, and somewhat revealingly, to mean simply
“critical analysis.” Strictly speaking, however, to deconstruct is to subvert
the logic of a system by revealing its organizing principles to presuppose
the phenomena that they purportedly justify and explain—what Derrida
calls finding “the supplement at the origin” (Derrida, 1976; 313). Contrary
to the conventions of formal logic, however, Derrida does not merely dis-
miss his objects of study as fallacious. Instead, he reveals how their seeming
coherence is predicated upon a differential underdetermination, which both
disturbs and makes possible their proper functioning. When deconstructing
Introduction 9
a philosophical system, literary text, or social organization, Derrida thus

indeed suspends the authority of its governing principles—but from within,
on the basis of their own immanent contradictions and without thereby
simply leaving them behind. Instead, through his interventions, he discloses
possibilities intrinsic to the phenomena they organize by showing them to
have been always already otherwise; and, through his broader philosophical
project, he works to cultivate a general attunement to experience, which is
open to phenomena in the singularity of their alterity.
As paradigmatic of such a deconstructive reversal, Derrida famously
argues that “writing precedes speech.” In the essay “Signature Event Context,”
he formulates this postulate in response to the eighteenth-century French
philosopher Étienne Condillac, whose work he holds up as exemplary of
representational theories. According to Condillac, writing serves as a practi-
cal means to extend the field of speech, in the absence of the person with
whom one wants to converse. Implicitly, Condillac thus conceives linguistic
exchange as predicated upon a homogeneous, ideal medium, which subtends
communication, in all of its variations, and ultimately is grounded in the
self-presence of the conscious subject. Derrida writes, “Thought as repre-
sentation, precedes and governs communication, which transports the ‘idea,’
the signified content.” It is possible because “men are already in a state that
allows them to communicate their thoughts to themselves” (Derrida, 1988;
4). In Condillac’s philosophy, writing thus serves to supplement speech, which
itself supplements thought, as the representation of a representation; and
the absence that distinguishes writing is conceived as a derivative form of
presence: both descriptively, insofar as it extends the context of the spoken
exchange, and normatively, as a lesser form of it, on account of its apparently
greater propensity for misunderstanding.
Against Condillac’s concept of writing as a supplementary extension
of the subject’s self-presence, however, Derrida argues that the absence that
informs its use must be conceived rather as radical. In order for a “written
communication” to retain its function as writing, he contends, “it must be
repeatable—iterable—in the absolute absence of any empirically determinable
collectivity of receivers”; and he argues that this categorical absence applies
equally to the author. Writing must be readable, even if the author “no longer
answers for what he has written” whether “because of a temporary absence,
because he is dead,” or, more generally, because he has not invested it” fully
with “the desire to say what he means.” The author’s relationship to his own
writing is thus closer to that of the reader than commonly understood; and
the written mark is qualified by an “essential drift,” which compromises its
integrity, as a paradoxical condition of its functioning properly (Derrida, 1988;
9). Derrida writes, “By virtue of its essential iterability, a written syntagma can
always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given without
causing it to lose all possibility of functioning, if not all possibility of ‘com-
municating,’ precisely. One can perhaps come to recognize other possibilities
in it by inscribing it or grafting it onto other chains” (Derrida, 1988; 9). As
Derrida conceives it, this iterability entails both difference and repetition, as a
potential for substitution that conditions the written mark in its originality
and so divides it from itself, in the very constitution of its identity. Writing
has been always already grafted from another context, as a paradoxical con-
dition of its original use, and so means something more and different than
one intends, as a condition of its possibly meaning anything at all.
Radicalizing these claims, and reinforcing the implications that he draws
from them, Derrida then argues that the same categorical absence condi-
tions the possibility of speech. In order for the spoken word to signify, he
contends, it, too, must be recognizable and repeatable beyond the limits of
its immediately expressed intention. Rather than rooted in experience, or the
understanding of the self-conscious subject, speech registers a division from
the world and the subject’s ideas, which enables its characteristic abstraction
from experience and exchange between different people. Derrida conceives
this division as fundamental: as an iterability that precedes and conditions
its possible use, rendering the spoken word too inherently inconsistent and
qualifying its significance similarly as always already otherwise. In fact, he
conceives speech as a form of writing—what he calls “a grapheme in gen-
eral,” defining it specifically as “the nonpresent remainder of a differential
mark cut off from its putative ‘production’ or origin” (Derrida, 1988; 10).
Whereas Condillac implicitly presupposes a homogeneous ideal presence,
which subtends communication in its various forms, Derrida thus discerns
the absence, conventionally attributed to writing, already at work in the
apparent immediacy of speech; and he extends this negativity finally to the
self-presence of the subject, which provides the ultimate source and guarantee
of meaning in Condillac’s representational hierarchy.
Derrida’s strategic reversal of speech and writing, in “Signature Event
Context,” closely approximates the distinction, drawn by seminal Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure, between speech (la parole) and language (la langue).
Working in the late nineteenth century, Saussure contributes to the develop-
ment of his field, first and foremost, by conceiving it as the scientific study
of signs, a semiotics, rather than the philological study of language’s historical
development. Distilling the sign into its component parts—as signifier (the
linguistic mark), signified (its meaning), and referent (the object on which it
Introduction 11
is brought to bear)—Saussure argues that the words we use have no natural

relationship to the things they present. Instead, their meaning results from
their relationship to other words within the broader context of a signifying
chain. “In language,” he famously asserts, “there are only differences with-
out positive terms” (Saussure, 1966; 120). The distinction that Saussure draws
between speech and language follows from this fundamental understanding.
Rather than being grounded in the self-understanding of the intentional
subject, the meaning of the subject’s speech depends upon the differential
system of language, which conditions its possibility. As integral to his broader
desubstantialization of linguistic meaning, Saussure’s semiotics thus displaces
the self-conscious subject, central to the humanist tradition; and, indeed, his
theory contributes directly to the development of the modern social sciences,
most notably through the work of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
In the early formulation of his philosophy, Derrida draws heavily
upon the accomplishments of structuralism, which he celebrates, in the essay
“Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” as a
“rupture” in the history of Western thought. While the concept of structure
is as old as the tradition itself, Derrida contends that it thus far has been
conceived as giving order to experience as a system of relations, organized
around a fundamental orienting principle. While decisive to the structure’s
organization, this orienting principle occupied a distinct position in it, as
ultimately independent from the internal dynamics of the structure itself. As
both integral to the structure and yet beyond the qualification of its internal
dynamics, Derrida formalizes the role of this orienting principle as, what
he calls, the “transcendental signified.” Drawing upon Martin Heidegger’s
critique of the philosophical reduction of Being, as a dynamic process of
coming to be and passing away, to the stasis of an immediately given being,
Derrida explains the history of Western thought and culture as a history of
the structure, defined by the shifting concepts of this transcendental signi-
fied. He writes,
The entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture

of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of sub-
stitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations
of the center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center
receives different forms of names. The history of metaphysics,
like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors
and metonymies. Its matrix . . . is the determination of Being as
presence. (Derrida, 1978; 279)
Further clarifying the scope and orienting concerns of his philosophical proj-
ect, Derrida expounds these paradigmatic names, “eidos, arche, telos, energeia,
ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), aletheia, consciousness, God, man,
and so forth” (Derrida, 1978; 279–280).
According to Derrida, structuralism’s break from this history of the
structure lies not only in its renunciation of such transcendental signifieds but
also in its critical interrogation of the limiting conditions of their institution,
or, what he calls, “the structurality of the structure” (Derrida, 1978; 280).
And he takes it to be paradigmatic of what has come to be known as the
“linguistic turn” in twentieth-century philosophy. For Derrida, however, this
appeal to language means something both more specific and more general
than commonly understood. He writes, “This was the moment, when lan-
guage invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of
a center or origin, everything became discourse—provided we can agree on
this word—that is to say a system in which the central signified, the original,
or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of
difference” (Derrida, 1978; 280). By raising the question of “the structural-
ity of the structure” and addressing its concerns in terms of the differential
dynamics of “discourse,” Derrida argues that structuralism “de-centers” the
Western philosophical tradition, conceiving its first principles as inherently
contradictory, surrogate placeholders, which substitute for something that
never, in fact, existed. Rather than a “present-being” with a fixed, “natural
site,” the center comes to be understood as a “function, a sort of nonlocus
in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play” (Derrida,
1978; 280).
When celebrating the structuralist break from “the history of the struc-
ture,” Derrida thus explains it in terms that are consistent with his own
assertion of the primacy of writing before speech. Indeed, the argument put
forth in “Signature Event Context” essentially brings the structuralist critique
of the humanist tradition to bear specifically on Condillac’s representational
theory of language. However, Derrida also criticizes structuralism, not for
being insufficiently radical in its critique of metaphysics—as one might sup-
pose, in light of his skepticism—but rather, paradoxically, for being too radical
in its claim to scientific novelty. With specific regard to Lévi-Strauss’s The
Raw and the Cooked, Derrida argues that, insofar as he proposes to surmount
the classical philosophical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible,
by undertaking his analysis exclusively in terms of structuralism’s scientifically
rigorous concept of the sign, he effaces the very conditions of the concept to
which he appeals and so remains implicitly inscribed within the tradition he
purports to leave behind. The concept of the sign, Derrida writes, “has been
Introduction 13
determined by this opposition throughout the totality of its history,” and it

bears the associations of this inheritance, even if put forth on radically new
grounds. In fact, he argues that, precisely at the point where Lévi-Strauss
supposes to have shed this history, it ultimately overdetermines his analysis.
Generalizing the point, Derrida writes, “If one erases the radical difference
between signifier and signified, it is the word ‘signifier’ itself which must be
abandoned as a metaphysical concept” (Derrida, 1978; 281).
When arguing that writing precedes speech, Derrida does not there-
fore simply add rhetorical flourish to an otherwise essentially structuralist
argument. Instead, he redoubles the critical negativity of the structuralist
“rupture” by both criticizing the “transcendental signifieds” of the philo-
sophical tradition and refusing the simple subversion of established hier-
archies. While purportedly self-present phenomena are conditioned by a
differential underdetermination, Derrida contends that, nevertheless, it is
impossible to conceive difference altogether independently from its reifi-
cation in a fixed presence. As exemplary of this two-fold movement, and
another central concept in his philosophy, Derrida accordingly conceives
difference in terms of what he calls différance. In French, the “a” in Derrida’s
neologism is phonetically indistinguishable from the e in the commonplace
difference. The distinction between the two terms “remains purely graphic”
(Derrida, 1982a; 4). Phonetically, it registers only as an elision, requiring an
appeal to the written distinction for clarification. At the same time, how-
ever, the graphic distinction between the two terms already anticipates its
phonetic expression, insofar as it can only be properly appreciated through
its failure to be heard. Beyond merely reversing the conventional privilege
of speech over writing, Derrida’s coinage thus presents the two as mutually
implicated, so that neither can be understood independently of the other,
and yet the tension between them cannot be resolved on the basis of a
mediating third term. To the contrary, Derrida argues that the paradox of
this mutual inclusion of speech and writing complicates the further distinc-
tion between the sensible and the intelligible, which would seem to provide
this resolution. The failure of either speech or writing to exhaust the dis-
tinction between différence and différance suggests that the decisive point of
their opposition lies rather in thought. Indeed, the difference between the
two thus betrays an irreducible intellectual dimension. However, concepts
never entirely outstrip the sensible conditions of their articulation. Derrida
makes the point through a playful, etymological appeal to the Greek word
for “theory” and a French word for “understanding,” which literally refer to
“seeing” and “hearing.” Sublating the tension between writing and speech
in the realm of ideas thus compels an implicit reversion to the realm of the
sensible, again forcing a confrontation with the impasse between the aural
and the visual, speech and writing.
Accordingly, Derrida’s concept of différance presents the reader with a
paradox. In fact, it even problematizes its own status as a concept, provoking
a state of wonder, but one in which the aporia at issue does not lie primar-
ily in the mind. Instead, even when thought, the locus of its complexity
remains bound up with the uncanny physical presence of the letter “a” as a
written mark. And, in his contention that writing precedes speech, Derrida
similarly formulates a paradox that he both conceives as radically undecidable
and puts forth as a defining condition of experience. In the closing passages
of “Signature Event Context,” he accordingly reflects on his persistent usage
of what he calls “the old name,” writing, by explaining deconstruction as, “a
double gesture, a double science, a double writing,” which effects both “a
reversal of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system”
(Derrida, 1988; 21). By preserving the “old name,” Derrida refuses the simple
subversion of speech and writing in representational theories of language. If
speech entails the same constitutive absence that justifies the conventional
denigration of writing as merely supplementary, nevertheless writing can-
not be conceived altogether independently from this hierarchical order and
the self-presence of the conscious subject on which it is founded. While
Derrida’s philosophy thus involves an unavoidably conservative moment, it
is this “double gesture” that he conceives as displacing the whole economy
of speech and writing, presence and absence, in representational theories of
language, spurning further reflection, and paradoxically holding open the
possibility of the altogether different.
Screen/Play
In their book Screen/Play, Peter Brunette and David Wills bring deconstruc-
tion to bear on film theory. Against the apparent immediacy of film images,
they argue that film ought to be understood rather in Derridean terms as
supplementary, an artificial construct that only derivatively gives rise to the
appearance of the original as such. They write,
The visual occupies a position of primacy with respect to the

verbal similar to that which speech occupies with respect to
the written. Yet by simply requiring an “apparatus,” no matter
how rudimentary or sophisticated, cinema fulfills the definition
Introduction 15
of writing as easily as does the word. Whether that apparatus be

the camera itself, or at the other end of the spectrum, the system
by which the spectator puts desire into effect, the same structural
result is achieved. In its offering of a certain appearance of full-
ness of vision, however, cinematography wants to forget that it
is always written. (Brunette and Wills, 1989; 62)
Beyond disagreeing about the different potential implications of a film, or

even analyzing the ways in which it produces a contrived sense of coherence,
Brunette and Wills argue, one ought to read a film “as a graft, a series of
omissions, an accident” (Brunette and Wills, 1989; 62). Doing so not only
subverts the film’s apparent natural universality but also opens it up to novel,
generative readings, which exploit the intrinsic propensity to dissemination
within film and explore the potential meanings produced by the overlapping
between a film and other “texts.” They continue, “From a deconstructive
standpoint, analysis would no longer seek the supposed center of meaning
but instead turn its attention to the margins, where the supports of meaning
are disclosed, to reading in and out of the text, examining the other texts
onto which it opens itself out or from which it closes itself off ” (Brunette
and Wills, 1989; 62).
In his study of Barton Fink, Michael Dunne accordingly takes issue with
any attempt to formulate a coherent reading of the film, instead advocating
an exploration of its interweaving of otherwise incongruous texts. He writes,
Barton Fink may very well be a satire of the Hollywood system,

but it is also (and simultaneously) a satire of mindless leftist poli-
tics, an allegory about creativity, and a rich, intertextual pastiche
of Hollywood genres, highly varied modes of representation and
much else besides. For the critic—or amateur viewer—to reduce
the film finally to a single interpretation (or even two or three)
may achieve hermeneutical neatness, but the same interpretive act
betrays our ongoing viewing experience of actively attending to
many contending voices throughout the film. (Dunne, 2000; 310)
Against such “monological” readings, Dunne instead emphasizes the Coens’

self-conscious acknowledgment of the film as an artificial construct. He
catalogues the diverse historical, cinematic, and literary references they cite;
and he contends that reading Barton Fink in this way enters into a com-
plex “intertextual dialogue” with Hollywood and American culture more
g enerally, which “helps us think more productively about this film, its rela-
tion to the medium of film more generally, and our relations as viewers to
all of these entities” (Dunne, 2000; 304).
Beyond critically and creatively dismembering movies, Brunette and
Wills similarly contend that the deconstruction of film problematizes estab-
lished notions of representation, provoking newfound skepticism about what
we take to be “reality.” They write,
One is often tempted, in speaking of cinema, to refer to the

real that it represents. And one usually feels constrained to place
that reality within quotation marks, conscious of the mediation
that the “real” has inevitably undergone. The strength of Der-
rida’s argument is that the slight qualification that these quota-
tion marks signal is enough to undo the whole coherence of
the representational process. Those marks, traces of an other than
simple duplication, as any duplication must by definition be, open
a spacing that is sufficient to allow a medium as pure as a silent
mime imitating nothing with an assignable origin. (Brunette and
Wills, 1989; 93—my emphasis).
Whereas critics like Kael dismiss the pastiche of genre conventions as cyni-
cally vacuous, deconstructionists like Brunette and Wills thus celebrate this
“imitation of nothing” as a subversive condition of critical practice. Indeed,
according to Palmer, herein lies the critical thrust of the Coens’ filmmak-
ing. By rendering questionable the validity of their film’s representations,
they cast doubt on what we otherwise take to be true. Fargo, for instance,
is shot in a flatly realist style with muted colors, limited camera movement,
and mundane sets; but, Palmer contends, the story and characters are so
darkly outrageous that they test the limits of the audience’s credulity. At the
outset of the film, the Coens’ press the point by solemnly declaring, “This
is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in
1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out
of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.” But
could these clowns, these monsters, and these terrible events be real? The
film closes with a disclaimer the contrary, “no similarity to actual persons
living or dead is intended or should be inferred,” and, in light of this glar-
ing contradiction, Palmer concludes in an explicitly Derridean vein, “The
truth status of Fargo is established as uncertain, if not undecidable” (Palmer,
2004; 97).
Introduction 17
A Sign!
In the narrative content of their films, too, the Coens thematize the gaps
and inconsistencies engendered by the symbolic mediation of experience. In
Blood Simple’s opening scene, Abby flees her jealous husband, Marty (Dan
Hedaya), in a car driven by one of the bartenders who works in his honky-
tonk. Suddenly, she yells out, “Stop the car, Ray!” The car comes screeching
to a halt, and the private detective on their tail almost rear-ends them. Ray
(John Getz) supposes that Abby suspected they were being followed, but she
asks instead, “What was that back there?”
“What?” Ray responds in kind.
She clarifies, “A sign.”
While the sign in question proves to be familiar enough, advertising
a roadside motel to which the two shortly retreat, before and beyond the
drama of their tryst, as correlative to their formal play with genre conven-
tions, it establishes the importance for the film—and ultimately for the Coens’
oeuvre as a whole—of signifying systems.
In Blood Simple, the Coens further develop this theme through the
formal device of the telephone and the gap it institutes between seeing
and hearing. The next morning in the motel, the ringing of the telephone
wakes Abby and Ray. A voice on the end of the line asks menacingly, “Are
you having fun?” When Ray responds, “Who is this?” the voice retorts, “I
don’t know, who is this?” In this case, despite their unanimous assertions of
ignorance, everyone knows exactly who’s who and what’s going on. After
Ray hangs up, Abby asks, “Who was it?” Ray answers, “Your husband.” Later,
however, precisely this presupposition of mutual recognition unravels. The
next day, when Ray returns from talking to Marty, who insists that Abby is
using Ray and will betray him too, she is on the telephone. The audience
knows that Marty is on the other end of the line, but he says nothing. When
Ray walks into the room, he asks accusingly, “Who was it?” Startled, Abby
turns around, “What?” He continues, “On the phone.”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it for you?”
“I don’t know,” she explains, “He didn’t say anything.”
“How’d ya know it was a he?”
Abby answers, “You gotta girl? Am I screwing something up?”
“No,” Ray accuses, “Am I?”
While nothing transpired on the telephone, by the end of the exchange,
the two are at odds. Ray is defensive; and, despite the fact that he and Abby
just recently became lovers, they now are deciding, who—at least initially—
will sleep on the couch.
The telephone interjects an absence into the exchanges between Abby
and Ray. Not only is there silence at the other end of the line, leaving Abby
ignorant of who might be there, but also Ray can’t hear what she is or,
in fact, isn’t hearing. In Derrida’s terms, the technological mediation of the
telephone, and the gap it institutes between seeing and hearing, constitutes
the phoneme, spoken into the receiver, as a grapheme, a written mark character-
ized by a second-order of absence: the representation of a representation, as
captured by the etymology of “tele” as “far,” which renders it irreducible to
the context of its articulation; and this same negativity infects the reliability
of their spoken exchange.
In the crime scene at the center of the film, the Coens present this
same “supplementary” absence in the texture of immediately given experi-
ence. In fulfillment of Marty’s contract to murder Abby and Ray, the private
detective provides him with doctored photographs of the two in bed, riddled
with bullet holes. He takes Marty’s money and then shoots him with Abby’s
gun. The double-cross depends upon Marty’s misunderstanding of the photo-
graphs, and subsequently this crime scene in Marty’s office becomes the locus
of the misrecognitions that drive the remainder of the film, as a collection
of evidence: the gun on the floor, the broken glass, the fish on the desk,
the hammer on the safe. In the film—in fact, in any crime scene—these
details function not merely as facts but rather signifiers, which promise to
explain what transpired. Contrasting Blood Simple with Cain’s novels, Stanley
Orr accordingly writes,
If Cain’s protagonists doom themselves through compulsive, trans-

gressive action, the Coens’ spend most of their time trying either
to read “signs” that provide a basis for action or producing texts
that misdirect the actions of others. The narrative emerges from
such misreadings and is therefore impeded by interpretive paraly-
sis. Each character, not exempting the viewer, succumbs to a
textualized world in which the distinction between meaning and
meaninglessness becomes hopelessly blurred. (Orr, 2008)
Following his murder, the details of Marty’s office constitute a field of sig-
nifying evidence. How one understands them depends upon determining
the hermeneutical framework that would establish their relationship to one
another, give them a narrative context, and define their significance. However,
insofar as the evidence itself does not provide this framework, any under-
Introduction 19
standing of the scene remains at best auxiliary, riddled with confusion and
subject, always again, to revision.
Raw Intelligence
In Burn After Reading, the Coens similarly thematize the differential underde-
termination of signifying systems. At the center of the film’s plot is a computer
disc, which accidentally is misplaced in the locker room at a “Hardbodies”
gym. The information on the disc belongs to Osborne “Ozzie” Cox (John
Malkovich), a pretentious but presumably low-level researcher for the CIA,
who quits his job at the outset of the film rather than accept a demotion,
apparently because he has a drinking problem. At a loss for how to proceed
with his career, he resolves to write a memoir while trying to drum up work
as a consultant. The Coens satirize Ozzie as grandiose in his self-importance.
He waxes into a tape recorder, “We were young and committed, and there was
nothing we could not do . . .” but his reflections go nowhere and—establish-
ing the fact that he’s written very little—soon he’s watching game shows on
television and waiting until five o’clock to fix himself his first cocktail. The
disc includes Ozzie’s first attempts at writing along with the figures from his
bank accounts. Unbeknownst to him, the files from his computer have been
copied onto the disc by his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton)—who is so cold
and stuck up that she’s perhaps best addressed by her professional title as Dr.
Cox. She plans to divorce Ozzie and copied his financial information off
his computer to share with her lawyer, only accidentally adding the sketchy
notes for his memoir. Her lawyer’s assistant mislaid the disc at Hardbodies.
As Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), one of the trainers at the gym, reads
through the data, the language of the CIA reflexively calls attention to the
information as information, “It’s these files, man . . . Talking about SIGNT
and signals and shit and . . . ‘Signals’ means ‘code,’ you know. Talking here
about department heads and their names and shit.” It’s code for code. He
continues, “And then there’s these other files that are just, like, numbers.
Arrayed. Numbers and dates and numbers and numbers, . . . and dates. And
numbers and . . .” Listing these numbers and dates Chad further distills the
information on the disc to the pure function of the signifier, discerning the
deepest meaning in it precisely at the point where it has become utterly
meaningless. Pointing at the computer screen, he concludes, “I think that’s
the shit, Man. The raw intelligence.”
Despite the absurdity of Chad’s melodrama, his recognition of the
meaningless numbers and dates as the essence of the information indeed
corroborates Derrida’s concept of iterability as a fundamental nonsense that

conditions the possibility of sense; and the conspiracy surrounding the disc
results in large measure from the dissemination of its displacement. When
Chad and his coworker, Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), call Ozzie,
offering to return his disc and hoping perhaps thereby to earn a reward,
Chad whispers into the telephone with a stilted cloak-and-dagger voice. He
introduces himself as a “good Samaritan,” which sounds almost like a code
name, despite the fact that it’s also perfectly true, and he explains, again
honestly but in a way that sounds almost menacing, “I thought you might
be worried about the security of your shit.” Ozzie, of course, doesn’t know
about the computer disc at all and can’t imagine what Chad might be talk-
ing about. But when Chad reads to him from his notes, his contemptuous
irritation grows into unrestrained fury and adds to the confusion. In response
to the suggestion of a reward, Ozzie concludes that Chad and Linda are
extortionists. Despite the fact that, originally, they offered to return Ozzie’s
disc, only hoping that they might be rewarded accordingly, by the end of
the exchange, they are indeed demanding money for the disc, at odds with
Ozzie, and involved in, what they take to be, a political conspiracy.
The Criminal and the Commonplace
In Fargo, the breakdown in communication similarly plays a central role in

the dramatic unfolding of the film’s absurd disasters. When first introducing
himself to Carl and Gear, Jerry cites the ex-con mechanic (Steven Reevis)
who referred him to them, “Shep Proudfoot said . . .”
Carl interrupts, “Shep said you’d be here at 7:30. What gives, man?”
Jerry protests, “Shep said 8:30.”
But Carl insists, as if offering proof to the contrary, “We’ve been sitting
here an hour. He’s peed three times already.”
“I’m sure sorry,” Jerry concedes. “Shep told me 8:30. It was a mix-up,
I guess.”
If Blood Simple begins with the private detective’s ominous proclama-
tion that, down here, “something always can go wrong,” in Fargo, something
has gone wrong even before the film begins: “a mix-up” about what “Shep
said.” And, in various ways, the disasters that ensue reverberate from the gap
in this initial misunderstanding.
Moreover, beyond such conspicuous attention to the underdetermina-
tion of the signifier, Palmer contends that, in Fargo, the Coens deconstruct
the binary moral oppositions that frame the story, between the villainous
and the virtuous, the criminal and the commonplace, and, what he calls, the
Introduction 21
everyday and the exotic. If Jerry is oblivious to the violence he unleashes,

Palmer argues, so is Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), the pregnant
police chief who pursues the wreckage of his disastrous plot. Despite the
horror she uncovers, Marge remains all but unmoved. She reflexively turns
away from it, steadfastly committed to her sense of the ordinary without any
inkling of disillusionment. In their utter banality, Palmer argues, the upstand-
ing citizens who populate the film thus exhibit the sense of self-possession
that subtends Jerry’s crimes—a point that one might press still further by
connecting the “mix-up” about what “Shep said” to the empty chatter of
the broader social milieu. Palmer writes, “The everyday envelops the exotic,
expressing and yet suppressing its strangeness.” And here, he contends, is the
film’s political point: “contemporary American culture, even in its most mild-
mannered mid-continental version, manifests a Hobbesian underside that can
erupt at any time into homicidal fury” (Palmer, 2004; 100).4
While the critics who champion the Coens as postmodernists thus see
the absence in their films as provoking questions concerning commonplace
epistemological and ethical assumptions, as evidenced already in Kael’s cri-
tique of Blood Simple, critics of postmodernist filmmaking are not, however,
unaware of its capacity to establish an ironic distance from its subject matter.
To the contrary, they argue that such satire ultimately establishes too much
distance, providing the viewer no point of entry into the film and ultimately
degenerating into hollow self-righteousness, which implicitly does more to
sustain than to subvert the object of its critique. In this vein, Christo-
pher Sharrett writes about Fargo, “[The film’s] satire is built on the conflict
between the apparent plenitude and comfort of bourgeois life and the actu-
ality of its bankruptcy and barrenness. Yet the Coens’ satire and parody run
very close to pastiche because the film’s humor underscores the emptiness
in its characters and situations without focus to its critical project” (Sharrett,
2004; 62). While Palmer contends that the emptiness of the Coens’ films
undermines any vantage “outside the text,” and so subverts the certainty of
everyday experience, Sharrett argues that it provides the audience a safe dis-
tance from the disasters they depict, and so serves to sustain the culture that
contributes to them. And don’t we know better, at least in light of Palmer’s
own analysis, than to imagine ourselves as infallible?
The Eruption of the Real
To be sure, the Coens’ champions and detractors do not share the same con-
cept of the absence in their films. For their detractors, it amounts to a lack
of focus or substantive grounds that so broadly nullifies actual concerns that it
situates their critical vantage “above it all” and renders their movies cynically
hollow. To the contrary, the Coens’ champions conceive the absence in their
films as a differential underdetermination, which precedes and conditions any
apparently determinate self-presence: negativity, yes, but the negativity that
plays a generative role in the disclosure of the world and so conditions the
possibility of critical reflection. Despite these distinct notions, however, the
Coens’ critics and champions concur in conceiving the absence in the Coens’
films privatively, as a void or withdrawal, an emptiness or underdetermina-
tion. But is the absence in the Coens’ films, indeed, primarily privative? If
their anti-naturalism undoubtedly contests the apparently objective givenness
of experience and precludes any sentimental overidentification with their
characters, is the critical negativity in their movies therefore defined—for
better or worse—essentially as a lack?
To the contrary, despite its meaningless brutality, the violence in Fargo
imposes itself with an overwhelming visceral proximity. However contemptible
or pathetic Jerry’s wife Jean (Kristin Rudrüd) may appear as she sits idioti-
cally on the couch, knitting and laughing at the television, the moment the
kidnappers storm her house is horrifying. When they grab her, she writhes
and screams in desperation, her body flailing and then crashing to the ground
before she momentarily escapes to the second floor of her home. Upstairs in
the bathroom, she shakes with her mouth agape and snot running down her
contorted face as her attackers beat down the door with a crowbar. Suddenly,
she makes a break for it, blindly attempting to flee the kidnappers while
smothered by a shower curtain. As one of them looks on, bewildered, she
runs wildly, trips over her own feet, falls heavily down a flight of stairs, and
collapses onto the floor, unconscious and perhaps dead. The interruption of
such sudden explosions of overwhelming violence amid satirical inanity is a
recurrent technique of the Coens. The effect of these explosions is intensi-
fied by the pleasurable lull that the Coens’ satires set up, leaving the viewer
shocked and apprehensive. Any distance from their films suddenly is precluded,
and their humor takes on a decidedly menacing tone. Does Fargo’s force
therefore rest upon a sympathetic identification with the suffering of Jerry’s
victims—implicitly filling the void in the film with a substantial concept of
humanity? To the contrary, in their setup of the scene of Jean’s abduction, the
Coens cast her in a thoroughly unsympathetic light—practically abusing her
themselves in their depiction of her banality. Nevertheless, they don’t allow
the viewer any refuge from the violence that ensues. The scene is horrible
not because we sympathize with Jean’s humanity but rather because any sem-
blance of humanity—and with it any possible identification—breaks down as
an interruption of, what Jacques Lacan calls, the Real.
Introduction 23
While Lacan’s teaching first and foremost concerns the practice and
transmission of psychoanalysis, in a manner consistent with Derrida’s decon-
struction, he draws upon the accomplishments of structuralism to reformulate
Freud’s concept of Oedipal conflict in terms of the subject’s originary sunder-
ing by the signifier. Specifically, in his work of the 1950s, Lacan conceives
neurotic suffering as the legacy of an infantile over-identification with the
father, as literally embodying the object of the mother’s desire, and so, both
rivaling the child for her affections and, in this same capacity, providing
a template for its burgeoning ego. In his theory of the three registers of
experience, Lacan conceives such seemingly self-present identities as imagi-
nary, and he argues that they come to be constituted within a context of
symbolic relations whose differential underdetermination they simultaneously
occlude. According to Lacan, the infant’s over-identification with its father
thus obfuscates his primarily symbolic function, as representative of the dif-
ferential negativity that informs the (m)Other’s relationship to the broader
social order and constitutes her desire, on the basis of an originary absence,
as primordially wanting.
As Lacan conceives it in the 1950s, the psychoanalytic “talking cure”
resolves neurotic suffering by dissolving the imaginary fixations on which the
ego is based, within the field of symbolic relations from which they emerge.
Rather than tracing neurotic conflicts to the actual events that purportedly
provoked them, the interpretation of symptoms takes up and engages the
symbolic underdetermination of the objects and experiences, which inform
the analysand’s sense of self. Apparently given actualities prove to be sustained
through the meaning that they hold for the analysand, and these meanings
themselves are shown to be conditioned, and so qualified, by the fundamental
meaninglessness of the symbolic. While compelling a troubling destitution of
the ego, psychoanalysis thus dispels the fixations that impede the analysand’s
relationships to others and the world, opening up the possibility of more
fully realizing his or her desire by assuming the constitutive lack, which
Lacan calls symbolic castration.
In this way, Lacan conceives Freud himself as a structuralist avant la let-
ter, famously arguing that the unconscious is structured like a language, and
explaining the ego, first and foremost, as the reified occlusion of an originary
difference. However, in keeping with Derrida’s critique of the structuralist
“rupture,” Lacan comes to see his own early concept of the symbolic as too
pure in its differential negativity. When revising his theory, he argues that the
imaginary reification of identity and the differential underdetermination of the
symbolic are mutually implicated, and he conceives the dialectic between them
as qualified by a radical excess, which precludes their ultimate reconciliation.
In his work of the 1960s, the conceptual logic of Lacan’s critical theory thus
strictly parallels Derrida’s concept of the aporetic undecidability of différance.
However, the motivations for Lacan’s revision of his theory are different from
those behind Derrida’s redoubling of the critical negativity in structuralism.
Despite having exhausted their interpretation, Lacan’s patients too often
remained enthralled to their symptoms. Contrary to his earlier conclusions,
their unconscious conflicts could not therefore be explained as merely mis-
construing the primordial absence of the symbolic as an imaginary demand
for something actual. Instead, they betrayed the excess of a further conflicted
satisfaction, prompting Lacan to see the constitutive lack of desire as itself
rent by a paradoxically unbearable ecstasy, which he calls jouissance. As Lacan
came to conceive it, the infant first suffers the expectations through which
its sense of self develops as the gratification of a visceral excitation that both
precedes and ultimately exceeds its capacity to symbolically articulate the
boundaries of experience. Indeed, according to Lacan, this affective excess
renders the symbolic inherently incoherent, and so requires the supplemen-
tary support of the imaginary that simultaneously contravenes its constitutive
underdetermination. And, while Lacan argues that this imposing affect exists
only as the absence of a disturbance—as the excess in desire that contradicts
the aspirations of desire—he nevertheless conceives the material recalcitrance
of the impasse that it presents as Real.
Accordingly, Lacan revises his theory of unconscious conflict as defined
not by the opposition between the imaginary and the symbolic, as concepts
of presence and absence respectively, but rather by the opposition between
the lack of desire and this Real jouissance as distinct concepts of absence. While
the Real of jouissance, again, exists only as the absence of a disturbance, it
is not reducible to the formal underdetermination of this lacuna, but rather
imposes itself with an overwhelming visceral proximity. Indeed, the absence of
jouissance is characteristic of this excessive proximity, which renders it impos-
sible to delimit as either near or far, complicates the borders between inside
and out, and ultimately threatens to dissolve the boundaries of experience
altogether in the self-reflexive collapse of its ecstatic frenzy. To the contrary,
only the institution of the symbolic first introduces the differential negativity
that constitutes the absence in experience as a privation, and it never sum-
marily sublates this disturbance in the Real. While originally he conceives
neurotic suffering as symptomatic of the imaginary obfuscation of the lack
of symbolic castration, Lacan thus comes to conceive it rather as symptom-
atic of the struggle to maintain the symbolic lack necessary to sustain one’s
desire, in light of the imposing proximity of the Real. And rather than more
fully assuming the lack of symbolic castration, he comes to see the end of
Introduction 25
analysis as a matter of assuming responsibility for the jouissance that informs

one’s commitment to sustaining the organizing principles of the symbolic,
and so holds one in the throes of its concomitant conflicts.
Beyond the complimentary privative concepts of absence in their criti-
cal reception as postmodernists, the blood simplicity in the Coen Brothers’
films thus proves to be the idiotic ecstasy of an obscene enjoyment, which
renders their characters’ desires self-contradictory; while the absurd disasters,
in which their movies so often result, retroactively bring to light these
conflicts as correlative to the strife in the structure of their broader social
settings. In Blood Simple, the murderous love triangle results not merely from
the differential underdetermination of the evidence that informs the charac-
ters’ misunderstandings of one another and the world. As most conspicuous
in Marty’s seething jealously, it furthermore betrays the affective excess that
the characters suffer in this absence, and the paranoid fantasies with which
they make sense of the evidence in their respective attempts to delimit each
other’s desire. In Fargo, Jerry pilfers from his father-in-law precisely because
he wants for nothing, suffering this plenitude as a coercive imposition, cor-
relative to the excessive affirmation in his social milieu. And, while Barton
Fink complains that he doesn’t know what the Hollywood executives want
from him, to the contrary, he knows all too well. Not only has he been told
repeatedly, but he is repulsed by their expectations. Accordingly, he suffers
his writer’s block as an unconscious protest, tacitly refusing to indulge their
enjoyment, while he struggles to position himself—and so to articulate what
he wants—in light of the changes in the cultural landscape, brought about
by his move to Los Angeles from New York.
While indeed irreducible to either empirical facts or the subject’s self-
understanding, the critical focus of Coen Brothers’ films does not therefore
remain abstractly indeterminate, but rather consistently concerns crises in the
authority of the symbolic, as attributed specifically to the function of the
father, bringing to light its inherent contradictions as not merely undecidable
but furthermore as informed by the jouissance that compels and compromises
its institution. Most obviously, Raising Arizona tells the story of a petty thief,
whose police officer wife proves to be barren, compelling him to com-
mit the worst crime of his career in his attempt to satisfy her desire for a
wholesome family. In No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell’s despair concerns
his inability to uphold the authority bequeathed to him by his forbearers,
when he proves unable to protect a young couple and the promised future
they present. And, in The Hudsucker Proxy, Norville’s refrain, “You know, for
the kids,” similarly associates the film’s study of creative invention with the
promise of paternity.
As correlates to their characters’ troubles, the Coens’ films also typically

take place against the background of crises in American history, implicitly
addressing their defining contradictions, again, as characteristic of the mate-
rial, affective compulsions that inform the organizing principles of their
social contexts. While nonetheless meaningless in its ultimate absurdity, the
conspiracy in Burn After Reading concerns the confluence of narcissism and
paranoia in the age of hypermodern communication technologies. Set at
the outset of the First Gulf War, The Big Lebowski implicitly addresses the
fallout from the social turmoil of the 1960s, and the lingering trauma of
the Vietnam conflict, as evidenced specifically by the “Powell Doctrine” of
unqualified force against Iraq. And The Man Who Wasn’t There registers the
social anxiety provoked by the advent of the Cold War, when the self-
defeating threat of “mutual assured destruction” proved necessary to guarantee
the state’s authority.
While cutting and pasting from a wide array of seemingly incommen-
surable sources, in the formal strategies of the their filmmaking, the Coens
similarly thematize not only the tenuous underdetermination of cinematic
depictions, but also the affective excess that both renders them inconsistent
and accounts for their necessity. As correlates to the fantasies that orga-
nize and undermine their characters’ understanding of the world, the Coens
indeed call attention to the role of illusion in the constitution of reality, but
without thereby distancing their audience from their movies. Instead, they
ensnare the audience in the absurd melodramas of their films, soliciting their
desire through the very underdetermination of their stories, and paradoxically
inviting sympathetic identifications with their characters in the very artifice
of their exaggerations. At the same time, the Coens thus lay grounds for
staging the breakdown of their films’ fantasy frames, indeed revealing the
tenuousness of experience, but without thereby devolving into cynicism or
even necessarily provoking critical reflection. To the contrary, as anticipated
already by the explosive violence in the scene of Jean’s abduction in Fargo,
the excruciating visceral force of these breakdowns at least momentarily
refuses the critical distance necessary to formulate a question.
Beyond the Metaphysics of Presence and Absence
While Lacan’s critical theory provides an avenue for traversing the impasse in
the Coens’ critical reception, the anti-naturalism of the Coen Brothers’ films
thus contributes to distinguishing the Real of jouissance from both Derrida’s
concept of the undecidability of différance and the substantive self-identity he
Introduction 27
contests, revealing the critique of the metaphysics of presence itself to be a

false problem and dispelling the force of its hold on critical theory by tra-
versing the sterile impasse of its defining oppositions. While Lacan has been
widely recognized as a leading figure in twentieth-century European thought,
the force of his work has yet to be fully registered. Among other sources
of this lapse, Lacan presents distinct challenges to scholars. Throughout his
career, Lacan’s critical theory consistently develops and changes. As partially
traced through the course of this study, these shifts in Lacan’s thinking can
be roughly demarcated into distinct periods. However, because they unfold
only gradually, Lacan’s teaching frequently suffers from anachronisms and
inconsistencies, which only can be properly parsed in hindsight of his whole
development. Furthermore, because Lacan’s principal intellectual production
consists in transcripts of his seminars, the text of his teaching is sprawling,
and, despite the rigor of his thinking, lacks the refinement that comes with
the editorial revision of a written book. Meanwhile, as a result of the politi-
cal struggles surrounding Lacan’s personal legacy, many of his seminars have
not yet been published in French, and only a handful have been officially
translated and published in English. A complete English edition of Lacan’s
essay collection, Écrits, was only first published in 2006, and it only charts
Lacan’s teaching up to the early 1960s, when he begins to address the Real
of jouissance. Throughout most of the history of his reception, Lacan’s criti-
cal theory has thus been understood, both positively and negatively, almost
entirely on the basis of his teaching in the 1950s, in which he originally
appeals to structuralism to reformulate the fundamental principles of Freud’s
critical praxis.
Finally, in the decades since the end of the Cold War, Lacan’s later
thinking has been taken up and elaborated, above all, in the work of Slavoj
Žižek and the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis, prompting a return to
Lacan, focused specifically on the implications of his concept of the Real.
Nevertheless, the implications of Lacan’s critical theory continue to be
obscured, among other ways, through its newfound embrace by post-phe-
nomenological philosophers. Among English-speaking scholars, in particular,
the renewed interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis has thus inspired compara-
tive studies, which emphasize the isomorphic conceptual logic in Lacan’s
later theory and Derrida’s deconstruction, defending Lacan’s work essentially
as another approach to the same critical project.5 Other scholars conflate
Lacan’s concept of the ethics of psychoanalysis with the deferential ethics of
alterity that Derrida elaborates on the basis of both Martin Heidegger’s and
Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophies.6 And, in political philosophy, the theory of
Radical Democracy, first formulated by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau,
suffers from a still inadequately clarified confusion of Derrida’s concept of

the impossible and Lacan’s concept of the Real.7 Indeed, the proprieties
of post-phenomenological philosophy are so influential among Continental
philosophers that even the most astute philosophical expositions of Lacan’s
critical theory take such pains to clarify his accommodation of Derrida’s
critique of the metaphysics of presence that they risk obscuring the decisive
points of Lacan’s critical departure from deconstruction.
In light of the chronic misconception of the unconscious within the
field of psychoanalysis, the isomorphism between Lacan’s and Derrida’s theo-
ries serves well to preempt its reduction either to a quasi-empirical theory
of instinct or to a propensity for misunderstanding in the hermeneutics
of intersubjective relationships. Indeed, Derrida’s concept of the aporetic
underdetermination of experience is unrivaled in the single-minded preci-
sion of its logic, and deconstruction is perhaps best understood as providing
the formal criteria for any rigorous theory of the conflicts that inherently
plague the conscious subject. The commentators who insist upon the iso-
morphism between Derrida’s and Lacan’s theories are not therefore mistaken.
However, precisely through this emphasis upon the form of their conceptual
logics, they obscure the materialist negativity that distinguishes Lacan’s critical
theory from deconstruction. Despite rhetorically evoking the anxious trem-
bling caused by his critical interventions, insofar as Derrida conceives the
absence in constitution of experience only as symptomatic of the irreduc-
ible mutual inclusion of identity and difference he disavows the content that
Lacan discerns in the lacuna of this formal underdetermination. In so doing,
Derrida effectively denies the problem of the irrational that he purports to
radicalize by distilling it into the merely arational, as a radical withdrawal that
conditions both the play of presence and absence in the coming to be and
passing away of experience, and the correlative complication of meaning and
meaninglessness in the unfolding of thought. Derrida neutralizes the affective
excitation that renders desire inherently conflicted, conceiving the force of
the drive that compels the subject to contravene its own orienting aspirations
as symptomatic only of the formal, phenomenological underdetermination
that qualifies experience as metaphysically contingent and epistemologically
uncertain. And he abstracts the material recalcitrance of these conflicts instead
as merely undecidable and so as cause for wonder. While Derrida does not
fall prey to the same valorization of self-identity, insofar as he abstracts and
neutralizes the strife of unconscious conflict, his philosophy thus proves to
be equally repressive as those that he criticizes. In fact, insofar as Derrida
conceives the altogether different as an elusive, but nonetheless orienting
value, while disavowing the imposing affective excitation that defines the
Introduction 29
difficulty in the subject’s constitutive alterity, Derrida’s philosophy proves

to be downright coercive, implicitly exploiting this affective excess in the
gratuitous insistence on the normative responsibility to remain open to this
otherwise sterilized Other.
Everything You Always Wanted to Know
While undertaking a thematic study of the figures of absence in the Coen

Brothers’ films, this book accordingly levels a psychoanalytic critique of
deconstruction by juxtaposing Derrida’s and Lacan’s respective debts to and
departures from Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. In fact, given
the central importance of these conceptual concerns, the book might have
been better entitled Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Lacanian
Critique of Deconstruction, But Were Afraid to Ask Joel and Ethan Coen. Despite
the orienting problem of the impasse in the Coen Brothers’ critical recep-
tion, this study strategically avoids the mistake of “applied theory,” which
brings preconceived notions to bear on cultural artifacts as if they were
immediately given as self-sufficient objects rather than informed by the inter-
pretations they solicit. At the same time, however, the Coens’ films are not
therefore treated simply as unrefined articulations of philosophical concepts.
As already anticipated by the absurd humor and explosive violence cited in
this introduction, they furthermore function here as aesthetic objects, whose
force lies equally in their affect. In fact, despite their obvious affinities, even
philosophy and psychoanalysis are not simply reducible to one another but
instead have distinct objects and aims. Without reducing philosophy to cul-
tural criticism, abstracting psychoanalysis as if it were philosophy, or treating
the Coens’ films as merely exemplifying theoretical concepts, the result is
thus an interdisciplinary study, which draws upon the Coen Brothers’ mov-
ies, Heidegger’s and Derrida’s philosophies, and Freud’s and Lacan’s critical
theories to think absence as a conflicted satisfaction, informed by the mate-
rial recalcitrance of an unbearable enjoyment, which imposes itself with an
overwhelming proximity.
As a result, the book is bound to frustrate all the relevant parties.
The claims of philosophy are held up to the utterly arbitrary standard of
the Coen Brothers’ movies; psychoanalysis remains almost—but importantly
not—entirely removed from the context of its clinical practice; and the enjoy-
ment of the Coens’ films continually gets interrupted by polemical reflec-
tions on theoretical distinctions. While thus guaranteed to provoke the ire of
readers, and perhaps even violating the standards of the separate disciplines
it includes, the study nevertheless entails an internal necessity, which ideally,

in retrospect, will appear to have been unavoidable all along. That is, not
only does psychoanalytic critical theory provide an avenue to traverse the
impasse in the Coen Brothers’ critical reception as postmodernists; but, still
more fundamentally, to understand why psychoanalysis provides a necessary
corrective to deconstruction’s idealism, one has to consider the Coen Broth-
ers’ anti-naturalism. Apropos of nothing . . .
1
All-American Nihilism
The Ballad of Sheriff Bell
In the opening lines of the Coen Brothers’ 2007 adaptation of Cormac

McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Tom Bell reflects, in his
thick West Texas drawl, “I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five
years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman. Father too. Me and
him was sheriffs at the same time, him up in Plano and me out here. I think
he was pretty proud of that. I know I was.” As sheriff, Bell embodies the
law, not only as a broad social institution but also as a paternal inheritance
transferred across generations of his family. He continues,
Some of the old-time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lot

of folks find that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough never car-
ried one. That’s the younger Jim. Gaston Boykins wouldn’t wear
one, up in Comanche County. I always liked to hear about the
old-timers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can’t help but
compare yourself against the old-timers. Can’t help but wonder
how they’d have operated these times.
When Bell enters the action of the film, he, too, refrains from carrying a
gun or, at least, feels little need to do so. After he and his deputy, Wen-
dell (Garret Dillahunt), pursue the assassin Anton Chigurh to the trailer of
everyman, Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), Bell instructs the deputy to proceed
with his “gun out and up.” However, Bell himself does not draw. Instead,
when the deputy prods him to follow suit, he humorously quips, “I’m hid-
ing behind you.” Bell’s refusal to brandish a pistol distances him from the
31
physical violence sometimes associated with the figure of the Texas lawman,
evidencing the specifically symbolic nature of his authority. What defines
him as a representative of the law—what Bell inherited from his father, his
grandfather, and the others who came before him—is the authority of the
badge alone. Appealing to brute violence to enforce it, to the contrary, would
compromise the law and, one surmises, his sense of what it is to be a man—
exhibiting a disrespectful lack of the trust that he registers in his laughter.
When wondering how the old-timers would have “operated these
times,” however, the sheriff betrays a crisis in this confidence in his author-
ity. After recounting the depravity of a killer, whom he helped to capture,
try, and execute, Bell reflects,
The crime you see now. It’s hard to even take its measure. It’s
not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing
to die to even do this job. But I don’t want to push my chips
forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand.
A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say,
“Okay, I’ll be part of this world.”
The film is set in a small West Texas town, during the early 1980s, just
as the violence of the cross-border drug trade exploded. Ostensibly, it’s a
chase film. While pursuing an antelope he’s wounded on a hunting expedi-
tion, Moss stumbles upon the carnage of a failed drug deal, tracks down the
“last man standing,” and succeeds in procuring a briefcase of two million
dollars cash. The corporate American firm involved in the disastrous deal
hires Chigurh to recoup its money, and Bell trails Chigurh, who murders
a police officer and an oblivious passerby even before he embarks on his
pursuit of the stolen briefcase. However, the chase does not play out along
conventional lines. Despite indeed facing off against one another, Moss’s
flight from Chigurh does not culminate in a decisive, final confrontation that
resolves the struggle between pursuer and pursued. Instead, he’s killed—off
camera—by a Mexican drug cartel whom the American firm also has put on
his trail. And, in stark contrast to the Hollywood cliché of the salt-of-the-
earth lawman, who alone has the moral fiber sufficient to bring some novel
villainy to justice, Bell despairs his inability to address the violence erupting
in his town: repeatedly refusing appeals from the DEA to revisit the scene
of the drug deal gone awry, altogether declining to survey the scene of a
subsequent shootout, and pursuing Chigurh no more than remotely tracing
the wreckage left in his wake. As an echo of his opening reference to his
own father and grandfather, however, Bell does his best to defend Moss,
All-American Nihilism 33
whom he implicitly treats as a son. Specifically, he travels to meet Moss’s

wife Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald) in order to offer him protection. And,
when Moss gets killed, Bell’s despair overtakes him, provoking him to quit
the police force—as if Moss’s death attested to his ultimate inability to hold
open the promise of the future embodied by the young couple.
As much as a personal failure, for Bell, the law itself proves inadequate
to address the criminality he confronts, and he sees evidence of its decline
everywhere. Looking up from the paper he’s reading, in a passing scene, the
sheriff remarks to his deputy,
My God, Wendell, it’s all-out war. I can’t think of any other

word for it. Who are these people? Here, last week they found
this couple out in California. They rent out rooms to old people,
kill ’em, bury ’em in the yard, cash their Social Security checks.
Oh, they’d torture ’em first. I don’t know why. Maybe their
television set was broke.
Beyond the brutality of the couple’s crime or even their perverse sadism,
what most outrages Bell is the apparent lack of common decency, evidenced
by their neighbors’ failure to recognize that something was wrong. He reads,
“Neighbors were alerted when a man ran from the premises wearing only
a dog collar,” adding, “. . . that’s what it took, you notice, to get somebody’s
attention. Digging graves in the backyard didn’t bring any.” While bemoaning
his own sense of inadequacy, Bell’s melancholy more fundamentally concerns
the breakdown in morality suggested, among other ways, by this apathy. And,
as much as a sense of personal failure, Bell implicitly complains that the law
itself has proven inadequate to sustain him and his sense of the world. Despite
idealizing his elders, in fact, Bell’s complaint indirectly implicates them for
not having made good on their promises. And, in his personal despair, the
sheriff gives voice to a deeper and more far-reaching sense of nihilism.
The Film That Wasn’t There
Given the absence that riddles their oeuvre, the Coens’ films consistently
evoke the problem of nihilism, portraying it as a perennial feature of the
American landscape. Among other movies, in The Man Who Wasn’t There, the
protagonist Ed Crane betrays an alienated sense that his life holds little or no
value. The opening voice-over begins, “Yeah, I worked in a barbershop, but
I never considered myself a barber. I stumbled into it, well, married into it
more precisely. It wasn’t my establishment. Like the fella says, ‘I only work
here.’ ” Ed plays a prescribed role—the barber—without ever fully assuming
responsibility for it or anything else in his life. His work consists of mere
routines, which he compares to those of a barman or a soda jerk, a series
of standard haircuts, distinguished by only minor variations: the butch, the
flattop, the ivy, the crew, among others. At best, he’s a functionary who goes
through the motions required by his job: passing his life as little more than
an automaton.
The film is set in 1949 Santa Rosa, California; and Ed’s home has all
the conveniences of the postwar American suburbs. However, he seems to
derive little pleasure from it; in fact, he seems hardly to feel at home at all.
He describes it, “The place was okay, I guess. It had an electric icebox, a gas
hearth. It had a garbage grinder built into the sink. You might say I had it
made. Oh yeah, there was one other thing . . . Doris . . .” As an addendum
to his list, Ed introduces his wife almost as an afterthought and literally as
“one other thing.” Consistent with the matter-of-fact instrumentality of the
rest of his life, she’s an accountant who works at Nirdlingers, a local depart-
ment store: she likes to know where things stand and seems to derive much
of her enjoyment in life from the luxury goods she buys with her ten percent
employee discount. While Doris (Frances McDormand) does not share Ed’s
despondence, nevertheless she reinforces it. “Doris and I went to church
once a week,” he explains, “usually Tuesday night.” It’s a gag line. Panning
down the figure of Christ on the cross, the camera reveals a priest reading
off numbers for a game of bingo. Ed continues, “Doris wasn’t big on divine
worship, and I doubt if she believed in life everlasting. She’d most likely tell
you that our reward is on earth, and bingo is probably the extent of it.”
Most emphatically, the Coens present Ed’s alienation through his silence.
In the narrative unfolding of the film, he says almost nothing. Despite playing
the leading role in the movie, in most scenes, he passively listens to other
characters, smoking cigarettes while sitting squarely on the couch or stand-
ing at his barber station. As if the film primarily were a formal exercise, the
Coens pursue Ed’s silence with a rigorous insistence: maintaining an almost
categorical division between his interior monologue and his outward appear-
ance. What Ed thinks and does remains almost entirely incommensurate
with how other people conceive his thoughts and actions. This structural
division reaches its apex at the story’s turning point. Ed resolves to try to
leave behind his role as a barber and pursue a business opportunity. To raise
the necessary capital, he blackmails Doris’s boss, “Big” Dave Brewster (James
Gandolfini), with whom she is having an affair, by threatening to tell Dave’s
wife about the lovers. At first the scheme succeeds and Ed gets the money,
but eventually Dave learns that Ed is the blackmailer and confronts him.
That night, distraught by the blackmailing scheme, Doris is so drunk she’s
passed out. Laying her down in their bed, Ed begins a story.
I met Doris blind on a double-date with a loudmouth buddy of

mine, who was seeing a friend of hers from work. We went to a
movie. Doris had a flask. Boy, she could put it away. At the end
of the night, she said she liked that I didn’t talk much. It was
only a-couple-a-weeks later, she suggested we get married . . .
The phone rings and Ed interrupts the story; it’s Dave asking him to come
down to his office. Ed complies. After first confronting him verbally, Dave
physically attacks him. In his defense, Ed reflexively grabs a penknife on
Dave’s desk and stabs him in the jugular. After watching Dave bleed to death
on the floor, Ed lets himself out of the store, drives home, returns to Doris’s
bedside, and resumes his story.
. . . It was only a-couple-a-weeks later, she suggested we get

married. I said, “Don’t you want to get to know me more?” She
said, “Why? Does it get better?” She looked at me like I was
a dope, which I never really minded from her; and she had a
point I guess. We knew each other as well then as now. Anyway,
well enough.
The sequence lasts seven minutes, and Ed has murdered a man, but it’s like
he never went anywhere and nothing transpired.
The remainder of the film falls out from this gap between Ed’s experi-
ence and how his thoughts and actions are registered by others. Because she
conspired with Dave to cook the books at Nirdlingers, in order to help him
cover the blackmailer’s ransom, Doris is accused of Dave’s murder instead
of Ed. Later, however, Ed is accused of killing his proposed business partner,
Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito), whom Dave has pummeled to death in his
effort to unmask the blackmailer. When Ed openly confesses to Dave’s mur-
der, he is ignored as if he is only proposing a strategy to disorient the jury
at Doris’s trial. And, at the end of the film, Ed is put to death for Tolliver’s
murder, despite his innocence in the case. Indeed, as announced by the
movie’s title, it’s as if he never were there.
The irony of Ed’s remark about his relationship with Doris, of course,
is that they knew each other as well when they first met as they ever did,
because subsequently they never got to know each other any better. Despite
sharing a home and making a life together, they never really knew each other
at all. However, this sense of estrangement might equally be extended to all
the major characters in the film. If Ed suffers his alienation in antipathetic
isolation, nevertheless the other characters in the film share it with him.
They all are playing roles that keep them at a remove not only from one
another but even from themselves. As Ed would have it, they’re all phonies.
Beyond the instrumentality of her work and the objectivism of her consumer
enjoyments, Doris is dead set on running Nirdlingers: she’s a careerist who
overidentifies with her job as an accountant and, like so many characters in
the Coens’ oeuvre, pays credence to the modern fetish of success. Along with
betraying her husband, when the blackmailing scheme threatens her impend-
ing promotion, she proves willing not only to compromise her professional
integrity but also to break the law. Like Ed, she’s arrested for a murder she
didn’t commit; and, when she finds out Dave isn’t who she thought he was
and realizes that she’s pregnant with his child, she hangs herself in jail. It’s
almost as if she, too, never was there.
“Big” Dave, in turn, boasts incessantly about his military record. He
recounts stories about facing the Japanese in the Pacific and belittles Ed for
having been passed over in the draft. However, in the run-up to Doris’s
trial, her lawyer learns that he never went to war. Similarly, he makes a big
deal of his job running Nirdlingers, but like Ed, Jerry Lundegaard, the “Big”
Jeff Lebowski, and many of the male characters from the Coen Brothers’
films—he only enjoys his position at the indulgence of his wife, who is the
heiress to the department store chain. As he declares to Ed in a moment of
distress, “I serve at the indulgence of god-damned ownership.” Like Doris,
he betrays his spouse. He’s never accused of the murder he commits; and the
wrong person is held responsible for his killing. Was he ever there?
This same sense of artifice and self-deception extends even to the minor
characters in the film. Ed’s brother-in-law Frank (Michael Badalucco), the
first chair at the barbershop, is an infantile blowhard who yammers on like an
authority on everything. Introducing him, Ed quips, “Maybe if you’re eleven
or twelve years old, Frank’s got an interesting point of view; but sometimes
he got on my nerves.” Freddy Riedenschneider (Tony Shalhoub), the high-
priced lawyer from Sacramento whom Ed hires first to defend Doris and
later him, is a self-important sophist. He makes his cases by throwing sand
in the jury’s eyes, undermining their confidence in the authority of their
judgment, and insisting that, in the matter before them, there is no truth
to be discerned. And Ed’s prospective business partner, Creighton Tolliver
(Jon Polito), is a vain con artist who bilks Ed out of ten grand and ends
up beaten to death for a blackmailing scheme that he didn’t commit. His
killer is never even accused of his murder; and, contradicting any standard
of justice, Ed, the victim of his con, pays for the crime.
In the end, everything in the film goes down the drain. When Doris is
arrested, Frank mortgages the barbershop that their father had worked thirty
years to own “free and clear” in order to pay Riedenschneider, who imme-
diately starts spending away their capital on indulgent “incidental” expenses.
After Doris hangs herself in jail, Frank falls apart, begins drinking, stops com-
ing to work, and allows his father’s business to go to pot, presumably losing
it eventually to the bank. And, when Ed is arrested for Tolliver’s murder, he
signs over his house to Riedenschneider to cover the expense of his defense.
A disruption in the courtroom leads to a mistrial, but, as Ed explains, “The
well ran dry. There was nothing left to mortgage. Riedenschneider went
home. And the court-appointed lawyer . . . threw me on the mercy of the
court. It was my only chance, he said. I guess I really never had a chance.”
In the end, it’s all washed away—the people, the places, the scenario—as if
nothing had happened.
Given the sense of alienation that pervades it, critics consistently read
The Man Who Wasn’t There existentially, as a portrait of the nihilism of the
modern world, whose empty objectivism confronts Ed with the nullity of
existence, compelling him, for the first time, to assume responsibility for his
life in the resolution to pursue a business opportunity. (Apocryphally, when
Joel first pitched the part to Billy Bob Thornton, he explained, “It’s about a
barber who wants to be in the dry-cleaning business,” and Thornton replied,
“I’ll take it!” [Robson, 2003; 255].) Citing the private detective’s opening
monologue in Blood Simple, Richard Gaughran describes that the Coens’
universe as a world “without value, devoid of meaning, absurd,” adding, “we’re
not always specifically in Texas, but we are ‘down here,’ and we are indeed
on our own” (Gaughran, 2009; 227). According to Gaughran, Ed confronts
an existential dilemma. “In a world without value,” he writes, “humans are
nothing, are ‘not there,’ until they create themselves. And, Crane, not self-
created, just ‘the barber,’ is a wisp of a man, invisible to others” (Gaughran,
2009; 237). Similarly Palmer describes Ed as suffering “an inchoate, Sartrean
disgust” (Palmer, 2009; 280). And, with specific regard to Søren Kierkegaard’s
Sickness Unto Death, philosopher Karen D. Hoffmann reads The Man Who
Wasn’t There as a sustained meditation on existential despair. She quotes
Kierkegaard, “Surrounded by hordes of men, absorbed in all sorts of secular
matters, more and more shrewd about the ways of the world—such a per-
son forgets himself . . . finds it too hazardous to be himself and far easier
and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, a mass man”
(Hoffmann, 2009; 245).
The Question of the Meaning of Being
As a philosophical concern, the problem of nihilism is first formulated in

Friedrich Jacobi’s 1799 “Letter to Fichte.” The immediate background for his
argument is the transcendental turn in philosophy, accomplished by Immanuel
Kant, who argued that a critically rigorous philosophy ought not to make
metaphysical claims concerning the essence of things or the foundations of
the self but rather should limit itself to expositing the conditions of the
possibility of experience as we know it, as defined by the categories of
reason. Jacobi denounces Fichte’s elaboration of this critical turn in phi-
losophy as nihilistic, insofar as it denies access to anything beyond the ken
of subjectivity.1 He writes, “If the highest upon which I can reflect, what I
can contemplate is my empty, pure, naked and mere ego, with its autonomy
and freedom: then rational self-contemplation, then rationality is for me a
curse—I deplore my existence” (quoted in Critchley, 1997; 4). In keeping
with the common reaction against existentialism in the twentieth century,
what Jacobi denounces as nihilistic in Fichte’s reworking of Kant might better
be understood as precisely what Kant was working to address in the impasse
between rationalism and empiricism. While the empiricist repudiation of
metaphysical speculation couldn’t be refuted, it also paradoxically denied the
ultimate validity of reason’s claim to knowledge and reduced ethics to merely
pragmatic prescriptions and, what eventually would be conceived as, the
hedonistic calculus of quantifiable goods. Rather than formulating a nihilistic
philosophy, Kant, and the German Idealists who followed in his wake, thus
worked to address the specter of nihilism that haunted the rise of modern
science by integrating the failure of speculative metaphysics into their concept
of philosophy and trying to accommodate the inherent tendency in reason
to undermine its own judgment, which Kant addresses in terms of “the
antinomies of reason.” However one understands this philosophical history,
the roots of the problem of nihilism thus can be traced to the advent of
modernity. While the development of a scientific self-consciousness held out
the promise of potentially grounding knowledge and morality on rigorously
objective grounds, simultaneously it threatened to undermine altogether the
projects of epistemology and ethics: not only by displacing the Aristotelian
worldview of the Scholastics, which previously had provided the framework
for their formulations, but more radically by revealing reason to be rent by
contradictions.
As anticipated by philosophical responses to the French Revolution, in
the subsequent development of German Idealism and its Marxist aftermath,
these problems concerning the theoretical foundations of science and moral-
ity, furthermore, came to be embroiled with the social turmoil of the early
modern world and the crises engendered by the rise of industrial capitalism,
which not only undermined the agrarian forms of life that had sustained
people for centuries but also subjected the modern populous to unprec-
edented exploitation. While it would be a mistake therefore to collapse the
diverse theoretical and social problems of the age into a single, overarching
philosophical concern, the problem of nihilism thus recurs throughout the
intellectual, cultural, and social history of the nineteenth century, reaching an
apex in the catastrophe of the First World War, which marks its end. How
would society be restored and sustained? The problem registered in the artis-
tic, philosophical, and political modernism of the early twentieth century was
not abstract but rather integral to the project of literally rebuilding the world.
At this juncture in philosophy, the problem of nihilism finds one of its
most systematic and enduring formulations in the work of Martin Heidegger,
who registers and responds to it as a matter of what he calls the forgetting
of the question of the meaning of Being. In his 1935 lecture course, Introduction
to Metaphysics, he writes,
But where is authentic nihilism at work? There, where they cling

to familiar beings and believe that is enough, as heretofore, to take
beings as beings, since that is after all what they are. But with this
they reject the question of Being and treat Being like a nothing
(nihil), which in a certain way it “is” insofar as it essences (west).
To cultivate only beings in the forgetfulness of Being—that is
nihilism. (Heidegger, 1959; 203)
Heidegger first formulates this problem of the forgetting of the question of

the meaning of Being in his early magnum opus, Being and Time. While the
ontological question was seminal to Western philosophy in its ancient Greek
origins, Heidegger argues that it was obscured almost as soon as it appeared,
insofar as it was formulated—and so ostensibly answered in advance—with
reference to an ontic being. The Greek concept of essence (ousia) already
has a twofold significance: referring at times to the Being of an entity and
at other times to the entity itself. As a result, as early as Parmenides, Being
was understood both in a dynamic sense—anticipating Heidegger’s under-
standing—as “a pure ‘making-present’ of something”; while, at other times, it
was equated with the static immediacy of the objectively present (Heidegger,
1962; 26/48). The Scholastic translation of the Greek concept of essence
(ousia) as substance (substantia) further reinforced this tendency to conflate the
ontological concept of Being with an ontic being by connoting a stratum
underlying the changing appearances of things. And Heidegger traces the

sedimentation of this substantialization, up through the origins of modern
philosophy in Descartes’s critical turn to the subject, arguing that despite
the radicality of his assertion of the cogito sum, he failed to interrogate “the
meaning of the Being of the ‘sum’ ” (Heidegger, 1962; 24/46).
When addressing the problem of nihilism in terms of this collapse of
“the ontological difference” between Being and beings, Heidegger elaborates
upon the critique of objectivism that his mentor Edmund Husserl first for-
mulates in response to the rise of psychologism. As characteristic of nine-
teenth-century, ideological positivism—which, of course, still persists in both
popular and professional guises—psychologism argues that, because science
and logic belong to consciousness, their principles ought to be amenable to
empirical explanation as elements of psychology. As an echo of Kant’s critique
of empiricism, Husserl first argues that psychologism entails a category mis-
take, which fails to do justice specifically to the objects of logic and math-
ematics. However, in light of its more far reaching implications concerning
the nature of consciousness, Husserl ultimately contends that the problem of
psychologism reveals the need for a broader suspension of theoretical presup-
positions, which he develops as a methodological “epoché.” And he calls for
a renewed investigation of experience, in light of this cultivated naïveté, as
registered by his famous call “to the things themselves.” Specifically, Husserl
insists upon suspending the presupposition of “third-person” objectivity as
the standard of knowledge. Instead, he proposes analyzing experience from
a first-person, phenomenological perspective, which he insists is not merely
relative in its subjectivity but rather defined by consistent structures and
dynamics. According to Husserl, consciousness is always consciousness about
something and, in this dynamic relating plays a role in constituting its object.
Against the objectivist reification of both subject and object in psychologism,
Husserl thus conceives knowledge as a process, which he works to clarify
with particular attention to this conscious intentionality.
In Being and Time, Heidegger adopts Husserl’s phenomenological meth-
od as his own. At the same time, however, he criticizes Husserl’s continued
emphasis upon disinterested knowledge (Dreyfus, 1991; 46). Accordingly,
when working out the methodological approach to his problem, Heidegger
proposes addressing the question to “Dasein,” as the being for whom “in its
very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Heidegger, 1962; 32). Dasein is
a vernacular German expression that means “existence” and translates liter-
ally as “being” (sein) “there” (da). Heidegger appeals to the term, not only
to bracket the associations evoked by the classical concept of the subject
but also to ground his analysis in lived experience. Rather than an esoteric
philosophical concern, it is a question raised by everyone, as part and parcel

of being alive. Only as such, in fact, might it provide a proper foundation
for science as a human pursuit. However, Heidegger’s concept of Dasein’s
“pre-ontological understanding” of Being goes further: Dasein reflects on
who it is, and what it is doing, as an integral part of doing what it does.
Rather than simply given, the determination of Dasein and its surroundings
depends upon a tacit answer to this question of the meaning of being, which
is integral to its pursuits. As a further distinction from Husserl, Heidegger
thus qualifies his phenomenology as hermeneutical—a term originally pertain-
ing to the reception of religious texts—and he formulates his analysis, as a
radicalization of the interpretive understanding integral to Dasein’s everyday
being-in-the-world.2
Being-in-the-World
Against the commonplace concepts of the world as an aggregate of empirical

objects, or a substantial geometrical foundation—like Descartes’s res extensa
(extended thing)—Heidegger argues that the world is grounded in Dasein’s
being-in-the-world as the Da, the “there,” of its being-there. While one might
presume that things exist in the world, out there, as factual objects, only
secondarily to be taken up within the framework of human pursuits and
so attributed significances, Heidegger argues the contrary: things appear first
and fundamentally as the things they are, within the framework of their use.
The hammer is what it is in nailing—in the solidity of its handle, the weight
of its head, the force of its impact. Rather than merely given as an object,
it exists in, what Heidegger calls, its “readiness-to-hand.” Only secondarily
and derivatively is it a mere thing, a brute fact. When its use is somehow
interrupted, when it goes missing or breaks, when it is left idle on the floor
and gets tripped over: then it appears in the stasis of its presence-at-hand.
However, even then, its mere presence remains rooted in its readiness-to-
hand, insofar as it is first and foremost unusable.
According to Heidegger, the world thus amounts to a referential con-
text; the hammer exists as such only in relationship to nails, to tool-belts, to
two-by-fours. Outside of this network of relationships, these things cease to
be what they are. Expositing Heidegger’s example, Charles Spinosa explains,
“[The craftsman] understands nothing, not even himself, independently of
everything else in the shop that has some role in pursuing his occupa-
tion, his involved activity” (Spinosa; 2005, 486). However, the world is not
thereby exhausted by the network of ready-to-hand things of which it is
comprised, any more than it consists of an aggregate of empirical, present-

at-hand objects. As a referential context, the world is held together by Das-
ein’s projects, which implicitly define the relationships between things, in
the pursuit of a common end. Beyond the network of tools that comprise
it, the worldhood of the world thus lies ultimately in Dasein, insofar as the
interpretive understanding integral to its pursuits reveals things for the first
time as the things that they are, in the light of its being-there.
While Heidegger’s analysis of the worldhood of the world concerns
the “there” of Dasein’s being-there, he addresses “who” Dasein is, in its
everyday involvements, as, what he calls, das Man. In common usage, the
German expression das Man functions most often as an impersonal pronoun,
connoting an anonymous generality, as in, “one does, one says . . .” Hubert
Dreyfus commends this translation of the term for its normative implica-
tions, as if to say, “this is how things are done” (Dreyfus, 1991; 143). By
contrast, in their English version of Being and Time, John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson translate das Man as “the They,” which Dreyfus contests as
implying that, in Dasein’s everydayness, “I” am different from “them.” As a
further aspect of his departure from the Cartesian concept of subjectivity as
an interiority withdrawn from the world, Heidegger argues that Dasein does
not exist as an atomized individual who fundamentally stands apart from
things and people and only secondarily develops relationships with them.
Instead Dasein takes up projects that have long been pursued by others and
adopts their ways of doing things. As a result Dasein first understands both
itself and the world through this collectivity, as a generic, even anonymous
subject. By translating das Man as “one,” Dreyfus emphasizes Dasein’s fun-
damentally social-historical character. At the same time, however, he risks
effacing the fact that, for Heidegger, das Man nevertheless is alienating: the
inauthentic state of Dasein’s existence, predicated upon a blind acceptance
of generic conventions. Macquarrie and Robinson’s admittedly awkward
translation of das Man as “the They” thus has its own virtue. Translating the
term as “one” takes it in the direction of the first-person plural, as if to
connote “this is how we do things.”3 However, Heidegger does not conceive
the collectivity of das Man in the first person: as a self-determining social
body. Instead, as a form of subjectivity, das Man is objectified. In the first
person of its self-understanding Dasein originally identifies with the third-
person plural: the They.
Arguing that Dasein’s everyday existence as das Man is objectified, of
course, is not to argue that Dasein is simply reduced to the brute facticity
of a thing. Instead the objectivism of das Man is subjective: the alienation of
subjectivity into the third-person plural of the cliché, which assumes the form
of an immediate given, and, as such, inhibits Dasein’s dynamic engagement

with the world, in the stasis of a movement that goes nowhere. In language,
this takes the form of, what Heidegger calls, “idle talk.” While language, in
principle, brings things to light—articulating their qualities and sharing them
with others—most of the time making oneself understood requires appealing
to an “average intelligibility,” whose readily available meanings occlude the
critical reflection that gives language its clarity and precision (Heidegger,
1962; 168/212). Similarly Heidegger describes das Man’s understanding as “a
kind of knowing . . . just in order to have known,” and he argues that this
“curiosity” privileges the immediacy of sight, insofar as it sanctions moving
on to the next thing, and the next, ad infinitum (Heidegger, 1962; 172/217).
Das Man is not indifferent but wants to know if only to be “in the know.”
However, precisely through this busy activity, curiosity sustains the subject
in a state of distraction, which paradoxically holds the world at bay. Through
this curiosity and its intersection with idle talk, Heidegger accordingly con-
cludes that das Man is held in a state of suspended indecision, which he
calls “ambiguity.” He writes, “When in our everyday being-with-one-another,
we encounter the sort of thing which is accessible to everyone, and about
which anyone can say anything, it soon becomes impossible to decide what
is disclosed in a genuine manner and what is not” (Heidegger, 1962; 217).
In the ambiguity of das Man, Dasein’s circumspective interpretation of the
world—and, by extension the world itself—remains formless, indecisive in its
very determination, as qualified by, what Heidegger calls, “a non-committal
just-surmising-with-someone-else” (Heidegger, 1962; 218).
mr.loser.com
As “the barber,” Ed has thoroughly objectified his subjectivity, reducing his

thoughts and actions to a series of routine functions. He has rendered his
subjectivity generic, assuming a role that veils him from the world, others,
and, perhaps most importantly, from himself. He’s anonymous and at least in
this one sense isn’t “there.” During Ed’s trial, Riedenschneider inadvertently
makes the point in one of his characteristic attempts to undermine the jury’s
confidence in their authority to judge. Ed recounts, “He told them that I
was modern man. And if they decided to convict me, well, they’d be practi-
cally cinching the noose around their own necks.” For all of its perversity,
the argument attests to the scope of the Coens’ portrait. In Ed, they are
addressing the modern condition as such. His alienation isn’t eccentric but
rather characteristic of modern society as a whole. At the same time, the
argument attests to the nature of Ed’s alienation. In his ordinariness, he is

indeed just like them. In fact, precisely in their anonymous collectivity, he
is “them”: a mass-subject, the “They,” das Man.
In another earlier scene, following Doris’s suicide, the Coens make the
point visually. As he walks home from work, Ed imagines that the other
people on the street are trying not to look at him. He remarks, “It was
like I was ghost.” Most immediately, Ed thinks they aren’t looking at him
because they don’t want to acknowledge Doris’s death, and his growing
sense of isolation is characteristic of the deepening despair that might be
understood as setting him apart from the crowd. Visually, however, the Coens
present Ed not as isolated but rather as surrounded by other people, also on
their way home from work, similarly dressed and similarly cast in the grays
and whites of the film. They, too, are utterly anonymous, not “there,” ghosts
to one another. Ed doesn’t disappear from the crowd; he disappears into
the crowd.
In Burn After Reading, the Coen Brothers update this critique of the
nihilism of the modern world through a scathing satire of American culture
at the turn of the millennium, with particular emphasis on the narcissism
of health clubs, plastic surgery, fucking-machines, and anonymous sex. The
film begins with a satellite image of the United States, which captures the
rationalization of modern life, as subjected to exhaustive scientific scrutiny
from a vantage ostensibly “outside” the world. Beyond reinforcing the critique
of objectivism leveled by Heidegger in Being and Time, Burn After Reading
thus anticipates Heidegger’s later account of modernity as the age of the
world picture. Whereas in Being and Time Heidegger argues that Descartes’s
concept of the cogito falls prey to objectivism as a sedimented holdover from
Scholasticism resulting from his failure to interrogate the ontology of the
subject as substance, in his later work, Heidegger conceives modernity as
radicalizing the objectivism integral to the tradition. He writes, “the world
picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but
rather the fact that the world becomes a picture at all is what distinguishes
the essence of the modern age” (Heidegger, 1977a; 130). The world appears
as a picture from the vantage of the subject withdrawn from it, like the
satellite hovering over the earth in Burn After Reading. The “world picture”
is characteristic of the reduction of truth to representation, which Heidegger
describes as “making-stand-over-against, an objectifying that goes forward
and masters” (Heidegger, 1977a; 150). Whether understood as scientifically
objective or pluralistically relative, the concept of experience as comprised
of worldviews thus complements Heidegger’s theory of “technology” as the
metaphysical essence of modernity, which he characterizes as constituting all
life as “standing reserve”—as if, in the end, it amounted to nothing more

than stockpiled resources ready for exploitation (Heidegger, 1977b; 117).
In keeping with the macrocosmic depiction of this instrumentalization,
in Burn After Reading’s opening shot, the introduction of Linda Litzke to
the film brings the same phenomenon to bear upon the microcosm of the
individual’s body. Linda plans to “reinvent” herself through a battery of plas-
tic surgery operations, marrying the objectivism of modern science and the
mass media: a combination perhaps more common than typically imagined.
Linda complains to Ted (Richard Jenkins), her manager at Hardbodies gym,
about the refusal of their insurance plan to cover the cost of the elective
procedures. Ted is soft on Linda and, in response to her desperation, he reas-
suringly compliments her, “You’re a beautiful, woman.” Linda protests, “I’ve
gone just about as far as I can go with this body.” Modestly, he insists, “I
think it’s a . . . it’s not a phony-baloney, Hollywood body.” But that’s exactly
what Linda wants. She scoffs, “That’s right Ted, I would be laughed out of
Hollywood. I have very limited breasts, a ginormous ass, and I’ve got this
gut that swings back and forth in front of me like a bent wheel.”4 Linda’s
aspirations are those of the modern subject, not as an anonymous face in
the urban crowd but rather as a consumer in the age of the Internet, when
computer dating first emerged as a prevalent—if not the predominant—form
of romance.
Along with resolving to make herself over with plastic surgery, in
an attempt to invigorate her love life Linda has begun to date through
the website BeWithMeDC.com, whose name almost literally parodies Hei-
degger’s concept of das Man, as Dasein’s everyday being-with (Mitsein). As
characteristic of das Man’s “idle talk,” the social networks of the Internet have
rendered commonplace the “personals” that, before its invention, were tucked
away in the classified ads at the back newspapers and largely considered the
terrain only of desperately lonely people and perverts. In this vein, jealously
questioning Linda about Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a guy she later
meets through BewithmeDC.com, Ted remarks, “What do you really know
about this guy? . . . I mean he could be one of these guys who cruises the
Internet.” Linda lights up enthusiastically, “Yeah, so am I!” By rendering the
personals mainstream, the Internet has established their objectifying categories
as a commonplace vocabulary for evaluating one’s self and others. Correlative
to the breadth of their distribution, as an “open call” for romantic intimacy,
the personals required one to identify oneself with easily recognizable cli-
chés, in a limited number of characters, extending the abstract taxonomies
of the bureaucratic form to personal life. “Professional SWM, 37, seeks SF,
20–40, likes Chinese noodles and long walks on the beach.” Describing her
Internet profile to Chad, Linda captures the contemporary version of this

phenomenon: “What turns me on. What turns me off. I’m really looking
for a guy with a sense of humor.”
In a marginal scene, the Coens’ further depict this objectification of
subjectivity in the reduction of language to, what Heidegger calls, “idle talk.”
Trying to secure her insurance company’s approval for her plastic surgery,
Linda is on the telephone, speaking with a machine. The robot prompts her,
“If you’re an English speaker, please say ‘yes,’ or ‘English.’ ”
“Yes,” she enters.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand what you said. If you’re an English
speaker . . .”
Linda interrupts, “English.”
“Would you like to speak to the billing department or an agent?”
Again the robot fails to comprehend her entry, “I’m sorry, I didn’t
understand what you said.”
“Agent. A-Gent.” The machine’s prompt, “if you are an English speaker,”
reflexively calls attention to the language of the exchange. While Linda
indeed speaks English, the machine doesn’t understand her. Not only is
her speech limited to responding to mechanical prompts, her pronunciation
must conform to the machine’s parameters. In the end, she sounds as much
or more like a robot than the robot itself, a point brought home not only
by the mechanical repetition of Linda’s final response but also by evoking
subjectivity with the word itself: “Agent. A-Gent.”
Finally, the objectivism of the Internet is captured in the standard with
which Linda and Chad evaluate potential suitors. As she scrolls through
candidates on the computer screen, she dismisses them in short succession,
“Loser . . . loser . . . loser. They should call this ‘mr.loser.com.’ ” All consid-
erations of character are reduced to a uniform standard, in terms of which
Linda also clearly evaluates herself. As evidenced in Chad’s dismissive laughter
at the men’s pictures, eccentricity is precluded as aberrant. And the singular
dynamics of intersubjective relationships, which one might argue are essential
to their value, are altogether denied. When Linda later goes to meet with a
man who—despite his stupid-looking glasses—Chad suggests “might not be
a loser” because he’s wearing “a Brioni suit,” the alienation of the Internet
is echoed in her experience of the public. All life now seems to be medi-
ated directly or indirectly by the zeros and ones of the computer. As she
walks through the park, she spies numerous men sitting alone on benches.
Each of them looks like a potential suitor, waiting for a stranger to take to
a movie, dinner, and bed. Linda’s date has precisely this routine sense about
it: she and her suitor sit in silence at the cinema, don’t talk over dinner,
but nevertheless go to bed together and screw without any evidence of

pleasure or passion—he keeps on his stupid-looking glasses—simply because
its perfunctory.5
Yo’ Ass!
In Intolerable Cruelty, the Coens explore this instrumentalization of sex and

social life with particular regard to one of the modern institutions in which
one otherwise might hope to find refuge from such exploitation: marriage.
The film begins with the image of a rich television producer driving home
in his convertible to catch his wife in flagrante with the pool boy—and they
don’t have a pool! A fight erupts in which he draws a gun from the bedside
table and his wife stabs him in the rear end with his Daytime Television
Lifetime Achievement Award before both she and the pool boy flee the
scene. As the TV producer stands on the balcony outside their bedroom,
screaming after them and firing his gun, he also takes Polaroid pictures of
the incident—the pool boy’s van, his wife driving away in his Jaguar, and
the stab wounds on his backside—proclaiming, “Explain this away darling!”
Miles Massey (George Clooney), a divorce lawyer, and Marylin Rexroth
(Catherine Zeta-Jones), a gold-digging divorcée, are the film’s protagonists,
and, in it, the Coens approach marriage through the institution of divorce. In this
light, they reductively present marital relations as sustained, not by love, but
rather by sex (for men) and money (for women). After he has been caught
literally with his pants down, Marylin’s husband, Rex Rexroth (Edward Her-
rmann) explains to Miles, his lawyer, “When I first met Marylin, we were
crazy about each other. Not emotionally, of course. Just, we couldn’t keep
our hands off each other.” But if sex is the lure that initially leads men into
marriages, in Intolerable Cruelty, it also inevitably leads them astray. Miles com-
pletes the thought, “But then . . . Time marches on. Ardor cools.” And the
women in the film not only anticipate but even hope for the philandering
that follows, as the key to a generous divorce settlement. One of Marylin’s
friends remarks, “I’ve been trying to nail George’s ass for years, but he’s so
careful.” Women in the film marry for money, not so they can enjoy it with
their husbands but rather so they can enjoy it after they leave them. While
utterly farcical, Intolerable Cruelty thus entertains a critical hypothesis that in
modern America might very well carry sociological validity: divorce is the
dominant paradigm of romantic, familial relationships. As a messenger from
his wife’s law firm tells Harry, in Burn After Reading, when he’s distraught
about the fact that she’s leaving him, “Grow up, man. It happens to everybody.”
Divorce does not serve to dissolve failed marriages; marriage temporarily

postpones all-but inevitable divorces. And marital relationships are accordingly
characterized by mutually exploitative antagonism.
In Intolerable Cruelty this antagonism is captured in a slogan: “I’m gonna
nail your ass!” Gus Petch (Cedric the Entertainer), a private detective and self-
described “Ass Nailer” who works both sides of the war between the sexes,
introduces the expression and repeats it most incessantly. Chasing Marylin’s
husband and his date half-naked around their motel room with his video
camera, Gus barks at them, “Yeah, I’m gonna nail your ass! I’m gonna nail
your ass! Oh, I’m gonna nail your ass!! Yo’ ass! I’m gonna nail your ass!”
After he shows the video to Marylin, and she explains what she intends
to do with it, he remarks, “Sounds to me like you’re gonna nail his ass.”
The expression thus first positions women in the Coens’ depiction of the
antagonism of modern marriage, for whom it primarily means to catch one’s
spouse transgressing so that one can sue for divorce with the dominant hand.
But an exchange between Miles and Marylin reveals that this expression also
explains the position of men in their relationships to women. Over an early
dinner (which Miles has arranged to distract Marylin so that Gus can raid
her house while she’s out), Marylin remarks, “I’ve invested five good years
in my marriage to Rex, and I’ve nailed his ass fair and square. Now I’m
going to have it stuffed and mounted . . . and have my lady friends come
over and throw darts at it.” When she subsequently asks, “What are you
after Miles?” He explains, “Well, I’m a lot like you. Just looking for an ass
to mount.” Marylin replies, “Well, don’t look at mine.” If, for the women,
“I’m gonna nail your ass!” means to take their husband’s assets, for the men
the meaning is explicitly sexual. In Intolerable Cruelty, despite the difference
in the respective positions of men and women within it, marriage is thus
presented as an institution forged by mutual ass-nailing.
This nihilistic depiction of romantic relationships is presented as char-
acteristic of a culture defined by vanity and consumption. As emblematic
of his narcissism and ruthless aggression, Miles chronically checks his teeth
in the mirror. While comparing their schedules to make plans, Marylin’s
friends are all too preoccupied with their body wraps, Botox, and butt fat
to make time for one another. The film is set amid the opulence of Bev-
erly Hills: fine restaurants, high fashion, sports cars, and swimming pools. At
stake in the divorce proceedings are mansions, summer homes, and whole
companies; and, if the women size up the men in terms of their possessions,
the sex pursued by the men is itself presented, in familiar terms, as another
consumable: nameless blond bimbos bouncing on a bed. While the social
critique in Intolerable Cruelty might be dismissed as superficial in its caricature

of consumer culture, what is at stake for Marylin in all this opulence and
objectification is a defining modern value: autonomy. She explains to Gus,
“This is going to be my passport to wealth, independence, and freedom.”
But independence itself is presented as having a dark side: lonely, antisocial,
isolation. Marylin’s best friend, Sarah Sorkin (Julia Duffy), has achieved what
Marylin herself wants, “Three fine settlements. More money than she could
ever hope to spend . . . Her vaunted independence . . .” But the result is
contrary than expected. When she complains about pain from an ulcer (she
can’t take her medicine before elective surgery), Marylin expresses concern,
“You shouldn’t be living here alone, Sarah.”
She replies, “My goddamn husbands gave me the ulcer.”
“But a bottle of Bromo can’t love you back.” Beyond the vain con-
sumerism of contemporary culture, in the Coens’ film, atomization and the
instrumentalization of social relations are thus presented as the truth of liberal
democratic autonomy. (What political philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously
defines as “negative freedom.”) When one stands as a rational calculating
subject over and against the world as an objective field, subject to one’s
instrumental manipulation, one stands alone, at odds with others in a world
devoid of value.
Anxiety Has No Object
What wrenches Dasein from this fallenness into the everyday objectivism
of das Man is, according to Heidegger, anxiety. Whereas fear pertains to
something potentially detrimental, Heidegger argues that anxiety has no object.
What provokes anxiety is indeterminate. It’s hard to pin down, seemingly
emanating from everywhere and nowhere in particular. Anecdotally, Hei-
degger recounts, in the wake of an anxiety attack, “we are accustomed to
say, ‘it was really nothing’ ” (Heidegger, 1962; 187/231). Still further, Hei-
degger contends, anxiety renders things in the world and even other people
momentarily inconsequential. Any gesture or object offered as a palliative is
dismissed. Nothing suffices to calm one’s nerves.
While initially formulated privatively, Heidegger affirms this lack
of any definitive object as a positive, existential determination of anxiety.
“What oppresses us,” he writes, “is not this or that . . . it is the world itself ”
(Heidegger, 1962; 187/231). Asserting this, of course, Heidegger does not
contend that anxiety brings Dasein face-to-face with the world as a brute,
physical fact. After all, for Heidegger, the world is not at thing but rather
a potentiality integral to Dasein. Accordingly, he contends that the void
revealed in the nothing and nowhere of anxiety is the defining horizon of
this potentiality: the nullity that circumscribes the world in Dasein’s projec-
tive understanding. And he concludes that, by disclosing the world as world,
anxiety throws the subject back upon itself. Heidegger writes,
In anxiety, what is environmentally ready-at-hand sinks away and

so, in general, do entities within the world. The “world” can offer
nothing more, and neither can the Dasein-with of others. Anxiety
thus takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself
as it falls, in terms of the world and the way things have been
publicly interpreted. (Heidegger, 1962; 188/232)
Interrupted in its everyday immersion in the world, Heidegger contends

that Dasein experiences the uncanniness of its existence: the unfathomable
groundlessness of its being at all. The German word unheimlich translates
into English literally as “not at home.” And, for Heidegger, this, too, is a
further, positive determination of anxiety’s indeterminacy as an experience
of nothing, nowhere. Anxiety renders Dasein “not-at-home,” by interrupting
its everyday existence, bringing it face to face with itself in its potentiality as
being-in-the-world, and so opening up the possibility of assuming respon-
sibility for its existence authentically.
In The Man Who Wasn’t There, Ed generally suffers not from anxiety but
rather from a malaise, in which the nullity of existence is manifested in the
meaninglessness of his listless indifference. However, Ed’s experience also is
punctuated by attacks of anxiety. Standing at his station in the barbershop, Ed
stares at the back of a child client’s head, suddenly dumbfounded. He mutters
to Frank, “This hair, you ever wonder about it, how it keeps on coming? It
just keeps growing . . . It’s part of us and we cut it off and throw it away.”
Baffled by Ed’s remarks, Frank chides him, “Come on, Ed, you’re gonna scare
the kid.” All at once, Ed’s role as the barber no longer fits him comfortably.
The hair he works on every day appears foreign, disturbing his very sense
of the commonplace. He continues, “I’m gonna to take this hair and throw
it out in the dirt . . . I’m gonna mingle it with common house dirt.”
In Intolerable Cruelty, Miles similarly suffers from a general sense of
despondence, which gives way to a paralyzing fit of anxiety. Like the melan-
choly of Marylin’s friend Sarah Sorkin, Miles’s despair paradoxically culminates
in the accomplishment of what he imagines he wants: victory, which, in one
exchange with Marylin, he identifies directly with her sense of independence.

He’s at the top of his game, and yet his success leaves him empty. Attempt-
ing to fathom the source of his despair, Miles speculates that it lies in the
concessions that his work requires him to make; and he articulates a theory
of nihilism reminiscent of Nietzsche’s. He explains to his colleague, Wrigley,
“The problem is everyone is willing to compromise. That’s the problem with
the institution of marriage. It’s based on compromise. Even through its dis-
solution . . .” Wrigley counsels, “That’s life. Life is compromise.” But Miles
retorts, “That’s not life. That’s death. Struggle and challenge and ultimate
destruction of your opponent—that’s life! . . . Let me ask you something,
Attila the Hun, Ivan the Terrible, Henry the Eighth, what did they have in
common?” . . . They didn’t just win. They . . . they . . . They destroyed . . .”
In some respects, Nietzsche is the consummate philosopher of nihil-
ism; and Heidegger develops his understanding of the problem, through the
lecture courses he gave during the late 1930s and early 1940s on Nietzsche’s
work. For Nietzsche, the Western philosophical tradition as a whole is moti-
vated and ultimately amounts to a resentful denial of life’s value. Informed
primarily by the confluence of Platonism and Christianity, he contends,
philosophy asserts the existence of metaphysical substrates—including God,
the good, heaven, the subject, the true, the soul, and so on—champion-
ing them as the essence of the world of “mere” appearances. In so doing,
philosophy denigrates lived experience by evaluating it only in relationship
to the timeless eternals of metaphysics and so denying its worth in both
principle and practice. Against this tendency, Nietzsche advocates a transvalu-
ation of values, which would invert this metaphysical gesture, shattering the
purported timelessness of philosophy’s universals and reaffirming appearances
and the generative force of the will to power in the transience of becoming.
Nietzsche anticipates Heidegger’s own response to the problem of nihil-
ism, insofar as he too opposes the reduction of Being as existence to the
static, self-presence of beings. However, Heidegger sees Nietzsche’s critique of
metaphysics as too immediate in its inversion of Platonism. While Nietzsche
repudiates Descartes’s cogito as yet another philosophical essence, he argues
that his concepts of value and will to power are equivalent to point-of-
view and so remain characteristic of “the age of the world picture.” Despite
critiquing the objectivism of metaphysics, he contends, Nietzsche sees the
world as defined by the subject’s evaluation. As a result, he falls prey to the
contrary objectivism of pure perspectivalism. However, because Nietzsche
renounces the philosophical appeal to universal principles, the objectification
and instrumentalization of his philosophy remains unchecked. Accordingly,
for Heidegger, Nietzsche doesn’t just continue the tradition’s nihilistic ten-
dency but rather marks its culmination as, what Heidegger calls, “the last
metaphysician” (Heidegger, 1977c; 104).
In Intolerable Cruelty, Marylin’s divorce from Rex Rexroth provides Miles
with the occasion to test his Nietzschean hypothesis, and the results confirm
Heidegger’s critique of the will to power. Rexroth’s assets are tied up in a
real estate deal; so, despite his explicit transgression, he proposes that Marylin
should have to settle for leaving the marriage with nothing. This challenge
presents Miles with the opportunity to refuse to compromise, to destroy the
other side, and achieve the total victory that the justice system typically denies
him; and indeed, despite the strong evidence against Rexroth, Miles succeeds
in leaving Marylin with nothing by proving that she only married Rexroth
in the first place because he was rich and foolish and would be easy to bilk.
However, rather than overcoming his sense of nihilism, total victory deepens
Miles’s despair. By annihilating his opponent, he finds himself bereft.
In the wake of his victory, Miles’s general sense of malaise accordingly
gives way to a paralyzing fit of anxiety. The senior partner in his law firm,
Herb Meyerson (Tom Aldredge), calls him down to his office to congratulate
him on his success. From the moment he’s summoned by his secretary, Miles
panics. Meyerson is a monstrous, gothic character. In stark contrast to Miles’s
high-rise office, with its wall-sized windows looking out over Los Angeles,
Meyerson’s office is a dark cavern without visible windows, which lies at
the end of a long hall in the deep recesses of the firm. Amid the shadows
of heavy, wooden, Victorian furniture, shelves of books, and medical equip-
ment, he sits behind his desk wheezing. He has wrinkled skin, yellow teeth,
and bulging eyes, which combine to give him a sickly aura. A respirator
attached to his nostrils pumps air into his lungs, while a thick yellow tube
feeds him through his chest. As Miles approaches Meyerson’s desk, he shakes
with overwhelming fear and trembling. When Wrigley later questions his
persistent melancholy, Miles responds by evoking Meyerson, “Okay, I won.
What then? How many cases has Herb Meyerson won?” Wrigley reflects,
“The old man? More than anybody. He’s a legend.” Miles continues, “And
look at him. He’s eighty-seven years old; he’s the first one into the office
in the morning. No home life.” Wrigley cheerfully quips, “Who needs a
home when you’ve got a colostomy bag?” For Miles, it seems, Meyerson
embodies the nihilism of his own objectivism and instrumentalization. Having
succeeded in every possible professional capacity, Miles insists his life lacks
meaningful relationships with other people, as if in Meyerson’s monstrous
visage, he found himself confronted with the lonely emptiness of his own
inevitable death.
The Grim Reaper in West Texas Denim
Insofar as it entails a projective understanding of itself and the world, Hei-

degger’s preliminary exposition of Dasein presents something of a contradic-
tion. In its constitution as a totality, Dasein anticipates the yet to come. It
exists as always ahead of itself in its potentiality, and so as always outstanding,
comprised of an inherent lack. To address the issue, Heidegger turns his atten-
tion to the existential determination of death as definitive of Dasein’s being
at an end. In different ways, throughout our lives, we experience the death
of others. However, the existential significance of death precludes reduction
to such an objective concern. To the contrary, Heidegger contends, “death
is in every case mine” (Heidegger, 1962; 284). In any role that one might
adopt in life, another person might just as well take one’s place. In death,
however, no one can take my place. Correlative to this radical singularity, in
its existential significance, Heidegger furthermore contends that death must
be understood, not objectively as a matter of fact but rather in the dynamism
of a relation—as “something that stands before us—something impending”—
which he captures in his concept of Dasein’s totality as being-towards-death
(Heidegger, 1962; 250/294). Dasein anticipates death as a possibility. At the
same time, however, death is not merely one possibility among others, as a
series of underdetermined actualities that might or might not transpire. Death
gives Dasein “nothing to be actualized; nothing, which Dasein as actual could
itself be.” Instead, death is “the measureless impossibility of existence. . . . It
is the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself
towards anything, or every way of existing” (Heidegger, 1962; 307). As a
possibility, the impossibility of death thus provides the limiting condition of
Dasein’s being-in-the-world—as, what Heidegger calls, “Dasein’s ownmost
possibility”—qualifying the whole field of the possible and the actual and
constituting Dasein’s potentiality-for-being, as the being for which its Being
is an issue (Heidegger, 1962; 307).
As a correlate to Bell’s melancholy denunciation of the nihilism of the
modern world, in No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh might be seen as
a figure of death’s impossible possibility, insofar so qualifies, the sheriff ’s sense
of self-possession in the radical negativity of his violence. As Bell finishes his
opening monologue and the action of the film begins, a police deputy helps
Chigurh, handcuffed, into the back of his patrol car. Back at the station, the
deputy describes the prisoner to his superior on the telephone, expressing
perplexity about his strange contraption but finally closing, “Yes, sir, I got
it under control.” However, the moment he hangs up, Chigurh proves the
contrary, strangling the deputy with his handcuffs and leaving him dead on
the floor. As the epitome of the violence and moral depravity that he sees
growing around him, Chigurh overwhelms Bell. Unable to “take [his] mea-
sure, he fundamentally challenges Bell’s sense of justice, of what it means to
be human, and ultimately his sense of the world.
Accordingly, the sheriff does not confront Chigurh directly but rather
as an elusive shadow that registers a gap in the constitution of his experi-
ence. When they first track Chigurh to Moss’s trailer, Bell recognizes that the
milk bottle on the coffee table is still cold. Wendell erupts excitedly, “Oh,
sheriff! We just missed him [Chigurh]! We gotta circulate this on radio.”
Bell concedes, “Alright. What do we circulate?” Pouring himself a glass, he
speculates, “Looking for a man who has recently drunk milk?” After Moss
has been gunned down, Bell again registers the sublimity of Chigurh’s crimi-
nality in response to the El Paso sheriff ’s description of him as “a goddamn
homicidal lunatic.” Bell protests, “I’m not sure he’s a lunatic.” Taken aback,
the sheriff presses him, “Well, what would you call him?” Bell answers,
“Well, sometimes I think he’s pretty much a ghost.” When Bell subsequently
revisits the motel room where Moss was gunned down, the Coens visually
stage Bell’s experience of Chigurh as an apparition. The lock on the door
has been blown out, betraying the fact that Chigurh indeed has been there.
As Bell stares trepidatiously at the hole in the doorknob, considering the
fate that lies before him and contemplating whether to proceed, the film
cuts to Chigurh peering out of the shadows with his rifle in his hands and
light streaming through a hole, presumably on the other side of the door.
However, when Bell finally draws his pistol and opens the door, the room
is empty, and he is confronted only with the image of his own shadow cast
against the far wall. At the first motel where he stayed, Moss took two dif-
ferent rooms and stashed the money in the adjoining air duct. At the scene
of his murder, Bell again finds the vent on the air duct removed; and one
surmises Chigurh was never behind the door he opened but rather in the
neighboring room. However, the Coens never confirm the fact—for instance,
by showing Chigurh fleeing from the scene—or explain why the anticipated
confrontation never transpires. Instead, the viewer, too, suffers a lacuna in the
film’s continuity, sharing Bell’s point of view precisely at the point where
he remains unable to get a hold on experience, seeing Chigurh not only in
the shadows but as a shadow.
In light of this lacuna in his sense of justice, Bell’s despondence appears
to be symptomatic of his refusal to concede the negativity of death as inte-
gral to the unfolding of experience in its coming-to-be and passing away.
At the outset of the film, as Moss takes aim at the antelope that sets him
off on his ultimately ruinous adventure, he mutters to himself, “hold still,”
before pulling the trigger. Immediately thereafter, as Chigurh commandeers

a passing car, he raises his bolt-gun to the driver’s forehead and calmly asks
him to “hold still” before blowing a hole in his skull. And, in his nostalgic
recollection of the past, Bell similarly attempts to make it hold still, effec-
tively insisting not only that the world as he knew it should have been more
dependable but that it should have been unchanging. At the end of the movie,
the sheriff drives out to the squalid home of his grandfather’s aged, former
deputy, Ellis (Barry Corbin), who was shot and crippled in the line of duty,
and asks him what he would have done to the gunman if he had lived out
his prison sentence. “Nothing,” Ellis answers, “All the time you spend try-
ing to get back what’s been took from you, more is going out the door.
After a while, you have to try to get a tourniquet on it.” To the contrary,
in response to Bell’s complaint of feeling “overmatched,” Ellis diagnoses the
source of his melancholy in his overidentification with a heroic image of
his predecessors, and he counters it by telling Bell the story of his great-
uncle’s demise, “shot down on his own front porch,” in the first decades
of the twentieth century. Ellis concludes, “What you got ain’t nothin’ new.
This country’s hard on people.” As he sees it, the violence Bell confronts is
not altogether different from the past, and his predecessors, too, suffered its
ravages. Insisting otherwise, Ellis contends, Bell betrays a narcissistic refusal
to concede his limits, adding, “You can’t stop what’s comin’. It don’t all rest
on you. That’s vanity.”
Resoluteness
As anticipated by Uncle Ellis’s council, when explaining being-towards-death

as the ultimate horizon of Dasein’s potentiality, Heidegger simultaneously
establishes the conditions of its possibly comporting itself in the authenticity
of, what he calls, resoluteness (Entschlossenheit). Heidegger conceives Dasein’s
resoluteness as the responsibility of a decision born of the confrontation
with the singular, groundlessness of one’s existence in the anxiety of being-
towards-death. Emphasizing the underdetermination of resoluteness, Charles
Scott writes, “authenticity means the disclosure of human being-in-question
without the possibility of resolving the question” (Scott, 1993; 77). In the
everydayness of das Man, Dasein remains blind to the groundlessness of its
existence, denying death not by assuming itself to be assured of life eternal
but rather by taking the certainty of death to be an actuality and so failing
to discern its immanence as a possibility, integral to the constitution of the
present. As an actuality, the certainty of death always has yet to transpire
and so is “deferred to ‘sometime later.’ ” What thus gets effaced is the exis-
tential dynamism of death, which qualifies all actuality as contingent (in the
immanence of its imminence). Heidegger continues, “Thus the ‘they’ covers
up what is peculiar in death’s certainty—that it is possible at any moment.
Along with the certainty of death goes the indefiniteness of its ‘when’ ” (Hei-
degger, 1962; 302). Correlative to his concept of its possible impossibility, as
conditioning the field of both the possible and the actual, Heidegger thus
conceives the “indefinite certainty” of death as the limiting conditioning of
both the certain and uncertain in the groundless contingency of existence.
Through this analysis of being-towards-death, Heidegger thus explains
the paralyzing effect of anxiety, which he first described as confronting Dasein
with the uncanniness of existence. “In this state of mind, he writes, “Dasein
finds itself face to face with the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of its
existence. Anxiety is anxious about the potentiality-for-Being of the entity so
destined [des so bestimmten Seieden], and in this way it discloses the uttermost
possibility.” At the heart of this confrontation, he contends, “Dasein opens
itself to a constant threat arising out of its own ‘there.’ ” And, further com-
mending Scott’s paradoxical equation of resoluteness with an unresolvable
question, Heidegger describes the encounter with this threat as not only the
precipitating condition of Dasein’s authentic resoluteness but also as integral
to its pursuit. He continues, “In this very threat Being-towards-the-end must
maintain itself. So little can it tone this down that it must rather cultivate
the indefiniteness of the certainty” (Heidegger, 1962; 310).
At the same time, however, Scott’s equation of Dasein’s resoluteness
with an unresolved question is potentially misleading. While the groundless
indeterminacy of death’s impossibility indeed defines the horizon of reso-
luteness, precisely as such, it compels Dasein to assume responsibility for
its existence and so discloses the world in the concrete determination of a
decision, an answer. Heidegger writes, “The resolution is precisely the disclosive
projection and determination of what is factically possible at the time” (Heidegger,
1963; 299/345). As opposed specifically to the suspended indecision of das
Man’s “ambiguity,” resoluteness reveals the world with the clarity and preci-
sion born of a decisive judgment. Correlative to restoring the question of the
meaning of Being, in the face of Dasein’s being-towards-death, resoluteness
entails assuming the burden of existence as the concrete determination of
oneself, the world, and the others with whom one engages in relationship to
one’s committed projects. Heidegger continues, “The ‘world’ which is ready-
to-hand does not become another one ‘in its content,’ nor does the circle
of Others get exchanged for a new one; but both one’s Being towards the
ready-to-hand understandingly and concernfully, and one’s solicitous Being
with Others, are now given a definite character in terms of their ownmost
potentiality-for-Being-their-Selves” (Heidegger, 1963; 298/344).
True Love and True Crime
Despite apparently evoking existentialism’s critique of the nihilism of the

modern world, Burn After Reading never arrives at such a decisive ethical
juncture. However, in The Man Who Wasn’t There, when a customer, Creigh-
ton Tolliver, proposes opening a chain of dry cleaners—“only the biggest
business opportunity since Henry Ford”—Ed takes interest in the prospect.
He reflects, “Dry cleaning. Was I crazy to be thinking about it? Was he a
huckster or the real McCoy? My first instinct was, ‘Na, Na. The whole idea
was nuts; but maybe that was the instinct that kept me locked up in the
barbershop, nose against the exit and afraid to try turning the knob.” Decid-
ing to pursue the opportunity, Ed apparently assumes responsibility for his
existence, for the first time in his life, shedding his role as “the barber” and
redefining the contours of his experience. Palmer writes,
The Man Who Wasn’t There, surprisingly enough, is about the

hope for spiritual growth, the leap of faith made possible by
the embrace of meaninglessness. The film thus finds its closest
analogues not in the pulp novels and genre films of the period,
but in the serious writings favored by intellectuals in the early
1950s, from Camus’ The Stranger and The Rebel to Saul Bellow’s
The Dangling Man to Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, and Jean-Paul
Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. (Palmer, 2004; 66)
Ed’s reflections on the way to the electric chair provide further support
for this existentialist reading. He remarks, “At first I didn’t know how I
got here . . . step by step, but I couldn’t see any pattern . . . But now all
the disconnected things seem to hook up . . . That’s the funny thing about
going away, knowing the date you’re going to die . . . It’s like pulling away
from the maze . . . You get some distance on it; and all those twists and
turns, they’re the shape of your life. It’s hard to explain; but seeing it whole
gives you some peace.” Richard Gaughran seizes on these remarks to argue
that, at the end of the film, Ed honestly confronts the human condition and
assumes responsibility for his actions. He writes, “Facing his death, Crane
says, ‘I don’t regret anything. Not a thing I used to. I used to regret being
the barber.’ He could have said, like Meursault (from Camus’ novel, The
Stranger), ‘I opened myself to the gentle indifference to the world.’ ” In the

“impending absence” of his execution, he continues, Ed “at last experiences
‘complete presence.’ . . . He is thus no longer ‘the man who wasn’t there.’ ”
Quoting existentialist theologian Paul Tillich, Palmer adds, “The embrace of
meaninglessness is a meaningful act” (Palmer, 2004; 78).
In Intolerable Cruelty, the confrontation with finitude integral to existen-
tial resolve is addressed in terms of the vulnerability of love, as an antidote to
the objectivism and instrumentality that informs Miles’s despair. Expounding
upon the manifestations of the void in experience, along with anxiety, and
“profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence
like a muffling fog,” Heidegger includes love. He writes, “Another possibility
of such manifestation is concealed in our joy in the presence of Dasein—and
not simply of the person—of a human being we love. Such being attuned,
in which we ‘are’ one way or another and which determines us through
and through, lets us find ourselves among beings as a whole” (Heidegger,
1998a; 87). Immediately following upon Miles’s confrontation with Herb,
Marylin arrives in his office with a new fiancé, Howard D. Doyle (Billy
Bob Thornton), the rambling billionaire scion of a Texan oil dynasty, to
sign a “Massey” prenuptial agreement. The Massey prenup is a legal docu-
ment of Miles’s own design, which is fabled to be impenetrable. After their
meeting, Miles corners Marylin in the hallway and kisses her. The visit, the
signing of the prenuptial agreement, and the seduction are the first steps
in Marylin’s con to exact retribution from Miles for his role in her earlier
divorce. But Marylin’s scheme depends upon Miles’s desire for her, which
in the immediate wake of his exchange with Meyerson appears to be an
expression of resolve. And, in the subsequent unfolding of Marylin’s plot,
the film’s treatment of the problem of nihilism is addressed in terms of the
possibility of love in the modern world, with particular emphasis on the
issues of vulnerability and trust presented by the Massey prenup.
By signing an ironclad prenup, Marylin apparently has elevated her
love for Howard above the material exploitation that, in the world of the
film, is otherwise the staple of marriage. As Wrigley explains, “Only love is
in mind if the Massey is signed.” However, rather than an expression of her
true love for Howard, Marylin’s commitment to the Massey prenup turns
out to be the key move in her vengeful deception of Miles. During the
wedding celebration, as an expression of his trust and devotion, Howard
tears up the prenuptial agreement and eats it with barbeque sauce. Having
relinquished any protection of his wealth by this “the leap of faith,” Marylin
thus secures an unqualified claim to half. Indeed, six months later, Marylin is
divorced from Howard and purportedly “richer than Croesus.” When she and
Miles meet again in Las Vegas, where he’s been invited to give the keynote
address at a meeting of NOMAN (National Organization of Marital Attor-
neys Nationwide)—as in, “let NOMAN put asunder”—Marylin successfully
seduces Miles into marriage—by expressing her empathetic understanding
of his lonely despair. Then she repeats Howard’s gesture: as they recline on
their wedding bed to consummate the marriage, she complains, “No, this is
all wrong . . . Do you love me? . . . Can I trust you?” When Miles com-
mits his trust, she tears up the prenup, and he proclaims, “Darling, you’re
exposed!” To which she replies seductively, “A sitting duck,” and the two
passionately embrace.
The next morning, Miles wakes up a changed man. Standing before
a bewildered auditorium of divorce lawyers, he tears up his speech (titled
“Nailing Your Spouse’s Assets”) and instead delivers an impromptu encomium
to love. He describes himself as “naked, vulnerable, and in love.” He counsels
that “Love need cause us no fear, love need cause us no shame . . . love is
good”; and he argues that “the cynicism that we think protects us, destroys:
destroys love, destroys our clients, and destroys ourselves.” Before conclud-
ing, he resigns from NOMAN and promises to devote himself to “pro-bono
work in East L.A. or one of those other . . .” Here, despite their obvious
ironic detachment from Miles’s speech, the Coens provide us with the first
“Hollywood ending” of the film. As Miles strolls out of the auditorium, the
initially confused and suspicious audience begins to clap and ultimately erupts
in a standing ovation. The scene is pure “Jerry McGuire.” But it quickly col-
lapses into the contrary, as Miles discovers he’s been duped. When he and
Wrigley retreat to the hotel bar to celebrate the beginning of Miles’s new
life, they see Howard on the television, playing the role of a surgeon in a
soap opera, and they recognize Marylin’s con: her marriage to Howard was
entirely staged, and the object of her deception wasn’t him but Miles.
In the conclusion of the film, the antagonism in Miles’s and Marylin’s
relationship becomes conspicuously violent, albeit still utterly farcical. At
Meyerson’s prompting, Miles and Wrigley hire a goon, Wheezy Joe (Irwin
Keyes) to kill Marylin. When they learn that Marylin’s first husband, Rexroth,
has died without revising his will, they then try to call off their plan. (As
Wrigley remarks, “Why kill the only woman you’ve ever loved, when she’s
the richer party?”) However, Marylin has already turned the tables on them
and convinced Wheezy Joe to murder Miles instead. The slapstick that ensues
leaves Wheezy Joe dead—after he confuses his gun for his inhaler and shoots
himself in the mouth—and Miles and Marylin return to the negotiating table,
where they first met, to work out the terms of their marriage’s dissolution.
Here, in the second “Hollywood ending” to the film, the shredding of the
prenup is repeated. Despite all that has transpired, Miles is still enthralled
to Marylin, and he pleads with her to give their marriage another chance.
When Marylin questions his fidelity, he takes out a new Massey prenup,
signs it, and hands it over to Marylin, who tears it up, and the two embrace.
If the opposition between the nihilistic objectivism of the Massey pre-
nup and the confrontation with finitude in the vulnerability of love would
seem to confirm Intolerable Cruelty’s existentialist message, the oscillation
between the cynicism in the film and its sanguine ending renders it deeply
problematic. Despite the film’s scathing critique of the instrumentalization
of social life and the mutually exploitative dynamics in modern marriage,
it seems love triumphs in the end. In her brief response to the film, Cath-
leen Falsani indeed draws this moral from the story. “Marriage is sacred,”
she writes, “and love, even deeply imperfect love, is good” (Falsani, 2009;
157). While more critical of the movie, Eddie Robson sees it in a similar
light, arguing that it ultimately affirms the couple’s love but without the
requisite abandon to make the movie successful. He writes, “As filmmakers,
[the Coens] are unwilling or unable to engage in the shameless emotional
manipulation which makes a really good rom-com work” (Robson, 2003;
282). However, if one takes seriously the film’s social critique, the problem
is the opposite: the harmonious reconciliation between Miles and Marylin
disavows the truths articulated in the movie’s send-up of modern romance.
In its sanguine ending, the film is all too emotionally manipulative, serving
only as an apology for the social dynamics that it satirizes.
In fact, Intolerable Cruelty provides grounds for both cynicism and
romanticism. If the film ends with a celebration of Miles and Marylin’s
romance, the Coens have already parodied the overvalorization of love in
Miles’s speech to N.O.M.A.N. As a confirmation of Robson’s complaint,
the Coens not only fail to provide the emotional lift that one expects
from a romantic comedy, they actively refuse it. However, the film does not
therefore conclude cynically but rather ends on a decidedly happy note.
In this way, Intolerable Cruelty makes clear how cynicism and romanticism
can function not merely as contradictory but rather as complementary. Not
only does the romanticism of the film’s ending deny the cynicism of its
premise, the cynicism is what makes the romanticism possible. In their very
pretense to “knowing better,” the Coens adopt sufficient distance from the
film’s romanticism to sanction its indulgence. Rather than existentialist, in
the indeterminacy of this dialectic, Intolerable Cruelty would thus seem to
confirm Sharrett’s critique of, what he takes to be, the blank parody of the
Coens’ postmodernism. Despite adopting a critical vantage on the nihilism
of modern marriage, the Coens maintain too much distance from the object
of their concern, situating their audience at a safe remove from the problem
they depict and so sustaining its perpetuation.
The apparently existentialist lesson of The Man Who Wasn’t There simi-
larly proves to be problematic, if not altogether untenable. If the film promises
a study of spiritual growth, it ultimately goes nowhere. Despite framing the
movie in Kierkegaardian terms, Hoffmann thus concludes that Ed does not
in fact make the “movement of faith” intimated by his purported resolve.
At best, she contends, he moves from an immediate, unreflective despair into
another more self-conscious variety. Despite his more celebratory embrace
of the film as a story of existential redemption, Palmer, too, disavows the
lessons that he draws as merely ironic. He writes,
[T]he Coens do not take Ed’s musings on spiritual transcendence

au grand serieux. His hopes for such a transformation, in fact,
take shape somewhat as a cartoonish fantasy. The anticipated last
moments of Ed’s life “play” out in an execution chamber whose
abstract, minimalist design comes right from a German expres-
sionism as Walt Disney might re-imagine it. Ed’s hope, in other
words, is thoroughly ironized as unrealizable. (Palmer, 2004; 79)
As the ultimate repudiation of the film’s apparent existentialism, in its

final sequence, the Coens reveal Ed’s voice-over narration of the story to be
the text of an article, written from his prison cell for a men’s magazine. Trashy
rags are scattered across his desk. The true crime depicted in the film suddenly
appears in scare quotes, as “true crime,” a thoroughly ironic genre play that
leaves no room for existential authenticity. In this light, earlier, inexplicable
aspects of the movie suddenly read differently. Specifically, after his murder,
Big Dave’s freaked-out wife, Anne Nirdlinger (Katherine Borowitz), tells Ed
that, years earlier, aliens abducted Dave, when they were on a camping trip,
and she believes that he was killed to cover up what he knew. The image
of a flying saucer recurs later in the film, as a hubcap comes sailing off a
crashing car. And, before he’s put to death, Ed dreams of being beamed
aboard a spaceship. Elsewhere in the film, Ed flips through a magazine at
the barbershop with articles in it about Roswell and dry cleaning. One has
to wonder is he just piecing this story together with scissors and tape? Are
the Coens? Contrary to its apparent existentialism, The Man Who Wasn’t There
turns out to be an explicitly cut-and-paste pastiche of pop-culture clichés,
taunting any viewer who takes it too seriously. While purportedly awaiting
his execution, Ed apologizes, “They’re paying me five cents a word, so you’ll

pardon me if sometimes I’ve told you more than you wanted to know.” As
their dismissive critics contend, in this closing of the film, the Coens thus
indeed demonstrate a knowing self-consciousness, and, regardless of whatever
force their critique of modern life initially carried, in the end, it appears to
be dismissed as a pretentious red herring.
2
The Symbolic Object

and the Subject of Fantasy
Assuming the Worst
A s Blood Simple’s central premise, Marty is convinced that his wife is

unfaithful. However, despite the fact that Abby retreats to a motel room
with Ray almost as soon as the film begins, nothing else intimates that she
has been untrue. Her affair with Ray seems to be more of a consequence
of Marty’s overbearing jealousy than its justifying cause. When she proposes
to Ray that they go to bed, she does so not wantonly or even passionately
but rather in a detached manner, as if because—fleeing Marty—she doesn’t
know what else to do. In fact, Abby’s appeal to Ray provides evidence against
Marty’s suspicion that she is having an affair by establishing the fact that Abby
has nowhere else to turn. Marty’s jealously is his own, a misunderstanding
of his wife and whatever evidence he might suppose to have against her. As
argued at the outset of this study, Blood Simple thus indeed thematizes the
intrinsic propensity for misunderstanding, engendered by the symbolic media-
tion of experience. However, Derrida’s concept of the constitutive iterability of
the signifier does not suffice to account for Marty’s irrationality—his being
“blood simple”—and his ensuing self-destruction. Faced with the evidence
before him, he doesn’t simply misunderstand what’s going on, stumbling into
trouble as a merely accidental matter predicated upon the limited situation of
human understanding amid heteronomous signifying systems. Instead, Marty
conceives Abby’s infidelity in very specific and unrelenting ways, informed
by his jealous fantasies.
Paradoxically, this fundamental importance of Marty’s fantasies in the
distortion of his experience is established at precisely the moment when he
63
receives proof of his wife’s betrayal. After the private detective provides Marty
with photos of Abby and Ray in bed together, their conversation devolves
into a fight. Marty threateningly reminds the detective of how the ancient
Greeks beheaded bearers of bad news. The private detective retorts, consoling
him with bitter irony, “It ain’t such bad news. I mean, you thought he was
colored. You’re always assuming the worst.” While Abby’s night with Ray
would seem to provide empirical confirmation of Marty’s suspicion, to the
contrary, it reveals its essentially excessive, irrational nature. As captured by
the private detective’s remark, he has worked out an entire scenario of his
wife’s infidelity, which shapes any evidence for or against it. Indeed he is
always assuming the “worst.” So that, even after the matter of Abby’s fidel-
ity would seem to be settled—she is having an affair with Ray, he’s got the
pictures—his jealousy still isn’t satisfied. When Ray later tries to get his back
pay from him, Marty refuses but offers him a deal. “She’s an expensive piece
of ass,” he snarls, “But you get a refund if you tell me who else she’s been
sluicing.” He’s still jealous: there must be more, another.
The Subject of Fantasy
The concept of fantasy speaks well to the Coen Brothers’ interest in how
foolishly people act and how little they understand what they are doing.
Fantasies are inherently irrational. For both good and ill, they inspire aspira-
tions beyond the scope of what is reasonable. They mask past failings and
impending obstacles, exaggerate the images we have of ourselves and others,
and warp experience in accordance with our urges. The absence that riddles
the Coens’ films might therefore be explained as the distorting effect of the
fantasies that pervert their central characters’ motivations and obscure their
relationships to one another and the world, providing a potential avenue for
traversing the impasse in their critical reception as postmodernists. How-
ever, appealing to fantasy also risks denigrating, even ultimately denying, the
absence that it serves to address: explaining it away as the consequence of
an aberration in the understanding of a fundamentally self-interested subject,
and so providing fodder for the wholesale dismissal of the Coens’ work.
Indeed, as deviations from the ultimately objective standard of self-interest,
the inanities and frequently catastrophic fuck-ups depicted in their films
could not but come off as cynical satires. The formal contrivances of their
filmmaking and concomitant lack of natural emotion in their movies could
not but appear empty, detached, and knowingly self-conscious. Rather than
traversing the impasse in the Coens’ critical reception, would not the concept
The Symbolic Object and the Subject of Fantasy 65
of fantasy therefore provide grounds for their repudiation? Psychoanalytically

speaking, no: the concept of fantasy does not entail any such psychological
naturalism. In fact, it challenges it, precisely by complicating the opposition
between illusion and reality, which the concept of fantasy otherwise might
seem to imply. The German word Phantasie means “imagination” and refers
both to the creative inventions of, what commonly is known as, “the world
of the imagination” and to the synthesis of experience in intuition that Kant
famously analyzes as the work of “the transcendental imagination.” In his
work, Freud addresses both forms of fantasy, explores their intersection, and
draws upon each to elucidate the other.
As an empirical, psychological phenomenon, fantasy belongs to the
characteristically eccentric objects of concern in psychoanalysis, along with
hysterical symptoms, slips of the tongue, psychotic delusions, sexual perver-
sions, obsessive rituals, jokes, and, of course, dreams. The fantasy is akin to
the dream. It is the daydream that Freud correlates with children’s play and
the work of artists. Both the contemporary and childhood fantasies of his
patients play a crucial role in his interpretation of their symptoms. And
fantasy informs the distortion in the structure and dynamics of the analytic
exchange, which Freud refers to as “transference.” As commonly understood,
this familiar form of fantasy indeed hinges on the naturalistic opposition
between illusion and reality; and Freud’s writings lend themselves at times
to such an interpretation. In “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental
Functioning,” for instance, Freud juxtaposes the psychical gratifications of
wish-fulfilling illusions to the estimations of conscious perception under the
governance of the reality principle; and, at the apex of his initial invention
of psychoanalysis, Freud recognizes that, what he previously took to be trau-
matic sexual seductions in his patients’ childhoods are in fact fantasies—or,
as J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis put it, “no more than ‘psychical reality’ ”
(Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973; 314). However, rather than affirming the
naturalistic opposition between illusion and reality, this decisive turning point
in Freud’s early thought instead makes clear precisely where his concept of
fantasy not only departs from but fundamentally complicates the terms on
which it rests. For Freud’s recognition of the fantastical nature of his patients’
reports of childhood seductions does not provide the basis for his dismissal
of them as unreal: mere illusions, existing only in the “internal world” of
their minds, and so distorting the reality of what actually happened. Instead,
it provides the basis for his recognition of psychical reality as the cornerstone
of psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Beyond the familiar, empirical experience of fantasy as daydreaming
Freud discerns that his patients’ symptoms are informed by unconscious fantasies
that play a founding role in the constitution of their characters. He con-

ceives of fantasy as “the mise-èn-scene” of desire, which not only expresses
his analysands’ frustrated longings but fundamentally contributes to defining
what they want and, as such, marks every aspect of their experience. Work-
ing in Freud’s wake, Laplanche and Pontalis write,
The psychoanalyst must endeavor in the course of the treatment

to unearth the phantasies that lie behind such products of the
unconscious as dreams, symptoms, acting out, repetitive behav-
ior, etc. As the investigation progresses, even aspects of behaviors
that are far removed from imaginative activity, and which appear
at first glance to be governed solely by the demands of reality,
emerge as emanations, as “derivatives” of unconscious phantasy.
In the light of this evidence, it is the subject’s life as a whole
which is to be seen as shaped and ordered by what might be
called, in order to stress this structuring action, “a phantasmatic”
(une fantasmatique). (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973; 317)
As correlative to the central importance of dream analysis in the develop-

ment of his critical praxis, Freud furthermore discerns that his analysands’
everyday fantasies often hold the key to understanding their conflicts. Their
daydreams evidence the impasses in their relationship to the world: the dis-
satisfied, sticking points that Freud affirms as the essence of their desires. For
Freud, that is, everyday daydreams implicitly attest to the fantasies that play a
more fundamental “transcendental” role in shaping experience. Rather than
departing from reality as a naturalistic given, in psychoanalysis, Freud thus
conceives fantasy as more real than mere actuality. For, despite life’s chang-
ing circumstances, the conflicts in one’s desire persist in their constitutive
distortion of experience, and these conflicts, which are not otherwise readily
evident, make themselves apparent in daydreams.
Along with speaking directly to the Coens’ interest in the irrational, the
psychoanalytic concept of fantasy thus indeed presents an avenue for travers-
ing the impasse in their critical reception as postmodernists. For if fantasy
presents a psychoanalytic precursor to Derrida’s concept of the supplement
at the origin as an aberrant excess that both contributes to and compromises
the coherence of experience, it simultaneously requires rethinking subjectivity
as the locus of unconscious conflict, implicated in subverting the conscious
sense of self-possession. Complicating the opposing positions in the deadlock
of the Coens’ critical reception, in his critical theory, Lacan furthermore
conceives the fantasy in the organization of experience as engendered by the
heteronomous sundering of a symbolic negativity, while his rethinking of the

subject also contributes to accounting for the contrary propensity to reify
this originary absence. At the same time, however, Derrida’s now-classical
critique of Lacan identifies undeniable shortcomings in his early thinking,
which thus mark a decisive limit to the initial psychoanalytic approach to
the Coen Brothers’ films undertaken in this chapter. But precisely in this
way, this preliminary dilemma also sets the stage for considering Lacan’s own
critical revision of his thinking, which not only accommodates Derrida’s
critique of the metaphysics of presence, but also redefines the terms of their
opposition, precisely pinpointing the avenue for traversing the deadlock in the
Coens’ critical reception and providing the basis for an alternative critique
of Derrida’s own philosophy.
The Divided Self-Image
While Lacan does not explicitly elaborate his formula of fantasy until the
late 1950s, from the outset, the concept is integral to his project of explain-
ing subjectivity as engendered by a primordial symbolic division. Broadly
speaking, the orienting concerns of Lacan’s critical theory depart from the
basic conceptual framework of object-relations psychoanalysis, which chal-
lenges the tendency in ego psychology to reify the subject as an atomized
individual motivated by quasi-biological instincts. Instead, object-relations
theorists explain subjectivity as emerging through a series of identifications
with what they call “partial objects,” associated with distinct developmental
stages, including specifically the breast, feces, and the phallus. Rather than
treating subjectivity as empirically given, they thus explain it as dynamic,
engaged, and informed by its interactions with the world. However, in so
doing, they fall prey to a contrary tendency. Instinct not only assumes a
secondary role in their critical theory, it comes to be largely supplanted
by the idea of “relationship.” Contrary to Freud’s division between the aim
and object of the drives, which renders the occasion of their satisfaction
highly variable, object-relations theorists tend to define relational modes
according to their corresponding objects. By extension, they implicitly posit
an appropriate object choice and ideally harmonious relationship in the
accomplishment of genital sexuality. And, while fantasy plays a central role
in the thinking of many leading object-relations theorists—which may help
explain why Lacan does not explicitly formulate his own concept of fan-
tasy until he has sufficiently defined his position in contradistinction from
theirs—the emphasis on the object-relation tends towards treating p sychical
life primarily in terms of relationships between actual people. While depart-

ing decisively with ego psychology’s objectivist objectification of the sub-
ject, object-relations theory thus entails a contrary form of normalization:
reducing psychoanalysis to a pedagogical acculturation, predicated upon an
idealistic ethics of intersubjectivity.
In the original formulation of his critical theory, Lacan thus maintains
the conceptual framework of object-relations psychoanalysis, explaining the
development of the subject through its introjection of a lost object, which
provides both the basis of its identification and the orienting object cause of
its desire; however, rather than actual—as breast, feces, phallus—he conceives
the lost object as fundamentally symbolic.1 As a programmatic assertion of this
insight, in his celebrated 1953 essay “The Function and Field of Speech and
Language in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan contends, “Freud’s discovery was that of
the field effects, in man’s nature, of his relation to the symbolic order and the
fact that their meaning goes all the way back to the most radical instances
of symbolization in being. To ignore the symbolic order is to condemn
Freud’s discovery to forgetting and analytic experience to ruin” (Lacan, 2006,
227/275). However, even prior to his explicit turn to language—and his
appeal, in particular, to structural linguistics—Lacan’s project of conceiving
subjectivity as engendered by the introjection of a symbolic object already
can be discerned in his earliest theory of the mirror stage.
In the organization of his Écrits, Lacan presents a challenge to this
account of his earliest work by not only relegating his theory of the mirror
stage, and concomitant concept of narcissistic aggression, to what he called
his “antecedents” but furthermore by dismissing them as merely “imaginary”
(Lacan, 2006; 51/65, 55/70). In the theory of the three registers, which he
develops in his later work, Lacan’s concept of the “imaginary” pertains first
and foremost to the objectivist sense of identity, defined by the correspon-
dence between particulars in a dyadic, one-to-one relationship, whereas the
“symbolic” concerns the differential distinction that conditions any such
identification. In keeping with Heidegger’s account of the privilege of sight
in the curiosity of das Man, in Lacan’s thinking, the association between the
visual and the imaginary thus derives from this sense of correspondence, as
that which appears to be self-identical in its immediacy, while the symbolic
is associated with language insofar as it explicitly evidences the constitutive
lack of a radical division, which Lacan understands still more specifically in
terms of metaphor, the law, and the function of the father.
When organizing his Écrits, Lacan thus dismisses his early theory of the
mirror stage as imaginary insofar as its explanation of the subject’s genesis rests
upon a dyadic relationship between self and other, and so ultimately fails to
account for the division that first situates these particulars in relationship to
one another. Rhetorically, he asks, “Can any step in the imaginary go beyond
the imaginary’s limits if it does not stem from another order” (Lacan, 2006;
55/70)? However, Lacan’s self-criticism pertains to the mirror stage as his
initial attempt to articulate this primordial symbolic division. That is, insofar
as the mirror-stage serves as, what he calls, “the symbolic matrix in which
the I is precipitated in a primordial form” (Lacan, 2006; 76/94). Rather than
merely imaginary, Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage should therefore be
understood as an initial, albeit still too imaginary, account of the originary
sundering of the subject by the mirror image as symbol.
According to Lacan, the self-conscious subject’s sense of enduring
consistency derives from the image of completeness and coherence that
appears in the mirror reflection. As such, the apparent self-identity of the
Cartesian cogito comes to be constituted in relationship to an alien other,
which institutes a radical division at its core and fundamentally distorts
its desire. As distinct from other animals that demonstrate a high degree
of self-sufficiency immediately following birth, the human infant suffers
a “primordial Discord,” in its relationship to nature, as evidenced by the
anatomical incompleteness and early lack of motor coordination, which
Lacan describes as an essential “prematurity” (Lacan, 2006, 78/96). To these
biological facts, he conjoins the observations of research psychologists who
documented the expression of jubilant self-recognition in young children
before the mirror. As distinct from chimpanzees of the same age, which
exhibit a higher degree of instrumental intelligence and quickly lose inter-
est in the mirror, the human child plays with the reflected image. In this
playful experience, Lacan argues, the infant takes pleasure in the gestalt of
its reflection, because it compensates for its corporeal fragmentation and
lack of coordination, providing a paradigm of cohesive completeness that
the child internalizes as an “ideal ego.”
In keeping with the basic tenets of object-relations theory, Lacan thus
argues that the subject is not constituted as an empirical given but rather
develops through an identification with an alien object. However, against the
normalizing tendency in object-relations psychoanalysis, he argues that the
object in question never exists as an actual thing in the world but rather
is categorically lost: the secondary representative of a nonexistent original,
closer in this regard to Derrida’s concept of the supplement at the origin.
In the genesis of subjectivity, the sundering of the object-relation is radi-
cal and the loss it entails never can be wholly recuperated in what might
simply be postulated as maturity. Instead, the subject remains categorically
divided—in fact, it is nothing but this division—conceiving itself on the
basis of an idealized image that constitutively eludes its efforts to actualize

and so presents a chronic source of strife.
Correlative to this originary sundering, Lacan’s theory of the mirror
stage accordingly provides the basis for his early concept of drive conflict
as engendered by its ambivalent combination of love and hate. In conjunc-
tion with his initial recognition of the problem of narcissism, following the
First World War, Freud confronted clinical phenomena that his concept of
the pleasure principle proved inadequate to address. By elevating psycho-
analysis to a cosmology, founded on libido as a universal principle of love,
Carl Jung’s deviation from Freudian doctrine furthermore made clear that
the reality principle might simply be distilled to the pleasure principle. The
opposition between the two was not therefore sufficient to account for
the conflicts manifested in psychical suffering. While tenuous in its initial
formulation, Freud thus posited a primordial death drive beyond the sexual
and self-preserving instincts, which he now grouped together as “life drives.”
Despite the exigencies that motivated its original assertion, however, the
subsequent generation of psychoanalysts—with the exception of Melanie
Klein alone—renounced Freud’s theory of the death drive. And, in his 1948
essay “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan accordingly works to restore,
what he calls, the “hiatus” of Freud’s concept of the death drive to psy-
choanalytic theory (Lacan, 2006; 82/101). “To evade the death instinct in
[Freud’s] doctrine,” Lacan later writes, “is not to know his doctrine at all”
(Lacan, 2006; 679/803).
In psychoanalysis, Lacan cautions, the aggression confronted in the
problem of the “negative transference” is a subjective phenomenon, mani-
fested within the framework of a meaningful exchange. That is, despite the
biological terminology that recurs throughout Freud’s work, it ought not to
be confused with animal aggression as a matter of natural instinct. Instead
Lacan contends that aggression in analysis is intentional. Despite this evocation
of phenomenology, however, Lacan does not therefore simply posit aggression
as a given, albeit alternative, form of transcendental self-consciousness. Instead,
as characteristic of his structuralism, before and beyond his later appeals to lin-
guistics and anthropology, Lacan explains the aggression confronted in analysis
as engendered by the mirror’s originary sundering of the subject. “Images,”
he contends, “constitute . . . the instincts themselves” (Lacan, 2006; 85/104).
Because the ego first coalesces through its identification with an idealized
mirror image, Lacan argues that the self-conscious subject paradoxically has
been supplanted as an a priori condition of its coming to be. Correlative to
its originary sundering, the subject’s desire thus develops through a primor-
dial animosity, born of its narcissistic self-love. For, if the ego overvalorizes
its own image, simultaneously it suffers a sense of inadequacy in relationship

to its ideal. The narcissism that gives desire its focus thus divides it between
love and hate, and the subject is constituted as rivalrous before and beyond
its engagement with others.2
As the symbolic object that institutes the unconscious as a radical self-
division, and marks the subject’s desire with the perversity of a fundamental
ambivalence, the mirror image thus accounts for the primordial aberration
in the structure and dynamics of experience that Lacan later calls, “the fun-
damental fantasy.” He writes,
The mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes pre-

cipitously from insufficiency to anticipation—and, for the subject
caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies
that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I
will call an “orthopedic” form of its totality—and to the finally
donned armor of an alienated identity that will mark his entire
development with its rigid structure. Thus the shattering of the
Innenwelt to Umwelt circle gives rise to an inexhaustible squaring
of the ego’s audits. (Lacan, 1966; 78/97)
Insofar as the ego is constructed on the basis of an image that it both takes
to be its own and suffers as an impossible ideal, Lacan argues that subjectiv-
ity is defined by an intractable sense of inadequacy, which plagues it with
fantasies of impossible self-mastery and monstrous disintegration. At the same
time, however, Lacan conceives this conflict and the fantasies it engenders as
central to the processes of maturation and socialization.
In keeping with the work of Melanie Klein, who researched conflicts
in the relationship between mother and child, prior to the intervention of
the father, the mirror stage provides the conditions for, what Lacan calls,
the secondary identification of the Oedipus complex. As a cornerstone in
the formation of the psyche, Lacan contends that the development of com-
petition with a rival can only compellingly be conceived on the basis of a
prior internal conflict, which his theory of the mirror stage explains as a
struggle between the ego and its own idealized image. Introducing a con-
cept that later will grow in importance for his thinking, he writes, “This
form [of the mirror image] crystallizes in the subject’s inner conflictual
tension, which leads to the awakening of his desire for the object of the other’s
desire: here the primordial confluence precipitates into aggressive competi-
tion from which develops the triad of other people, ego, object” (Lacan,
2006; 92/113—my emphasis). The idealized unity of the imaginary gestalt
is attributed to the rival, who thus seems to enjoy a satisfaction—originally

registered in the “Aha-Erlebnis” of the mirror stage—that, in the persistent,
underlying discontinuity of experience, the subject takes itself still to be
deprived. Extending the subject’s narcissistic investment in its ego to things
in the world, the object of the other’s satisfaction thus becomes the object of
the subject’s own desire. And, along with serving as its template, the aggressive
love/hate relationship between the ego and alter ego is transformed through
the emergence of this Oedipal conflict.
As Freud originally contends, Oedipal conflict marks a fault line in the
constitution of the psyche insofar as it also plays a decisive role in socializa-
tion. When organized and elaborated in relationship to other people and
objects, Lacan argues that the defining tensions of the mirror stage undergo
dialectical mediation. Rivalrous identification with the father, as alter ego,
provides the basis for adopting the values of the social order, while the
emergence and dissolution of the Oedipus complex transform the violence
and self-loathing of the mirror stage into moral conscience and the sense
of guilt. Shared ideals substitute for and develop upon the subject’s original,
ambivalent, narcissistic self-image, while the antagonism of the subject’s pri-
mary identification is transfigured in the scorn and self-discipline of moral
commitment and put to work in the cultivation of its character and context.
While persisting as an impasse in the structure and dynamics of experi-
ence, as well as an immanent obstacle in social institutions themselves, the
aggressiveness of the mirror stage thus founds the subject’s entrance into
society, thereby providing the subject with a secondary, symbolic prosthetic
to compensate for its biological maladaptation to nature.
Why So Uptight, Osborne Cox?
When Linda Litzke first enters Burn After Reading, she’s literally presented
through the reflection in a mirror and her melancholy preoccupation with
her body image provides obvious support for Lacan’s early theory. However,
Ozzie’s rage still more immediately captures the narcissistic paranoia engen-
dered by the mirror stage. Contrary to the deconstructionist emphasis on
indeterminacy, in their initial exchange, Ozzie doesn’t simply misunderstand
Linda and Chad. Instead, he seizes upon the opportunity of their call to
throw a tantrum. While Chad’s silly, spy-caper lingo suggests that something
sinister is afoot, Ozzie’s angry response is no more appropriate to espio-
nage than it is to the goodwill of strangers. And, despite his absurd, stilted
speech, Chad explicitly offers to return Ozzie’s “sensitive shit” at a time of
his choosing. So why does Ozzie flip out? What does he mean when he
insists that Linda and Chad are in way over their heads? Have they in fact
stumbled upon coveted secrets and embroiled themselves in a spy caper?
From any angle—even Ozzie’s, given how little he’s actually written—the
information on the disc is worthless. And Chad is right to ask, “Why so
uptight, Osborne Cox?”
The film’s opening scene sets the stage for this subsequent conflict.
Ozzie is called into the office of his superior, Homer Palmer (David Rasche),
and told that he’s being demoted. His boss hedges, “Look, um, Oz. This
doesn’t have to be unpleasant.” Rubbing his temples with growing rec-
ognition of what’s happening, Ozzie interrupts him and turns on another
colleague in the office, “Homer, with all due respect, what the fuck are
you talking about? And why is Olson here?” When a third colleague, Peck
(Hamilton Clancy), interjects, “You have a drinking problem,” Palmer trepida-
tiously repeats, “This doesn’t have to be unpleasant . . . ah . . . Um . . . We
found something for you over in State. It’s a . . . ah . . . um . . . Well, it
is a lower clearance level, yes, but it’s not . . . We’re not terminating you.”
Ozzie explodes, “This is an assault. I have a drinking problem? Fuck you,
Peck, you’re a Mormon. Next to you, we all have a drinking problem. What
the fuck is this? Who’s ass didn’t I kiss? Let’s be honest. I mean, let us be
fucking honest.” He stands up in his three-piece suit and pretentious bowtie,
throwing out his arms like Christ on the cross, “This is a crucifixion! This
is political; and don’t tell me it’s not!” Long before Linda and Chad contact
him about the computer disc, Ozzie already imagines himself to be embroiled
in a conspiracy. The source of his persecution remains undetermined, but he
is unswayable in the conviction that he’s under attack.
Ozzie thinks very highly of himself. However, in his work, his mar-
riage, and his everyday interactions with others, he suffers frustrations that
challenge his inflated self-image. The rage that he unleashes on others is born
of this tension between his ideal ego and its chronic crumbling. And Linda
and Chad appear to be only incidental victims of the narcissistic aggression
that emanates from his fragile ego. However, Linda and Chad don’t frustrate
Ozzie at all; to the contrary, they oblige him at every turn. Rather than the
effect of a breakdown, his anger and paranoia thus prove to be fundamental
to his sense of himself. (In opposition specifically to ego psychology, Lacan
accordingly writes, “The ego, whose strength our theorists now define by its
capacity to bear frustration, is frustration in its very essence” [Lacan, 2006;
208/250].) Ozzie’s impotent rage fills him with an overt sense of power
and authority, and he elevates himself by putting other people down with
his signature insult: “Moron!” Despite his insistence that they are menacing
him, when Chad and Linda call him with the offer to return the computer
disc, they thus provide him with exactly what he’s always looking for again:
imaginary rivals who fuel his tenuous and strife-laden sense of self-impor-
tance by suffering his narcissistic aggression.
Evidencing the pleasure he takes in Linda and Chad’s attention, when
Ozzie hangs up the phone after their initial exchange, he explains to his wife,
“Some clown, two clowns, have gotten ahold of my memoirs.” Repeatedly,
she asks, “Your what?” When he explains, “My memoirs, the book that I’m
writing,” she quips, dumbfounded, “Well, why in God’s name would anyone
think that’s worth anything?” While he’s been screaming into the telephone,
railing against Chad and Linda for purportedly attempting to exploit him,
his account of the exchange betrays his relish of their intrusion. In contrast
to his demotion at work and his wife’s scathing disdain, Chad and Linda
deem his writing sufficiently valuable to anticipate a reward for its return.
Despite denouncing them as clowns, he thus simultaneously elevates them
when casting them in the role of extortionists, effectively generating the
conspiracy as one in which he holds highly coveted secrets.
When they subsequently meet, Ozzie further embellishes the value
of his work. At Linda’s urging, Chad rides his bicycle to meet Ozzie at
the appointed location. The two personal trainers have now fully embraced
the role of extortionists and are asking Ozzie for fifty thousand dollars in
exchange for the disc. As they sit together in his car, Ozzie chastises Chad
for threatening to make his memoirs public: “What you’re engaged in is
blackmail. That is a felony. That’s for starters.” Despite having raised the
stakes, Chad tries to backpedal, again explaining the modesty of the situ-
ation, “Appearances can be deceptive. I am a mere good Samaritan, who
happens . . .” But Ozzie persists, raising his voice as he continues, “Secondly,
the unauthorized dissemination of classified material is a federal crime. If
you ever carried out your proposed threat, you would experience such a
shit storm of consequences, my friend, that your empty little head would
be spinning faster than the wheels of your Schwinn bicycle back there.”
Attempting to regain the upper hand, Chad knowingly scoffs, “You think
that’s a Schwinn.” While Chad clearly has no idea what he’s doing, Ozzie
is the one whose threats are idle. Were Chad and Linda to make the infor-
mation public, in fact, nothing would happen—putting the lie to Ozzie’s
own sense of self-importance. In this regard, Chad is right when repeatedly
insisting, “Appearances can be deceptive.” Ozzie is the one who is deluded
and misleading them, so that, by the end of the episode, along with the
fifty thousand dollar price tag that they have attached to the disc, Linda and
Chad now deem it a matter of national security, which they plan to betray
to the Russians, and Ozzie has succeed in staging his narcissistic fantasy as a
full-fledged spy thriller, complete with a car chase and international intrigue.
Narcissistic Aggression and Existential Negativity
Insofar as the development and resolution of the Oedipus complex pro-

vides the structural paradigm for the subject’s self-realization, Lacan conceives
it as a theory of being as becoming. He writes, “In all of an individual’s genetic
phases and at every degree of a person’s human accomplishments, we find
this narcissistic moment in the subject in a before in which he must come
to terms with a libidinal frustration and in an after in which he transcends
himself in a normative sublimation” (Lacan, 2006; 97/119). Beyond a merely
empirical psychological account of common problems in early childhood
development, Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex explains the dynamics
of experience and the potential in it for transformation as structured by the
conflicts integral to the subject’s formation and the manner in which they
have‑or haven’t‑been resolved. As the locus of strife in his early theory of
the mirror stage, Lacan accordingly conceives subjectivity as a radical negativity,
consistent with Heidegger’s concept of Dasein. “Aggressiveness,” he writes,
is “a tension correlated with narcissistic structure in the subject’s becoming”
(Lacan, 2006; 95/117). Affirming this affinity between his and Heidegger’s
theories, Lacan explicitly equates his concept of narcissistic aggression with
“existential negativity” (Lacan, 2006; 79/99). And he defines the subject—
specifically in the figure of modern man arriving at the office of his ana-
lyst—as a “being of nothingness” (Lacan, 2006; 101/124). However, Lacan also
levels a pointed attack against existential phenomenology. “Unfortunately,”
he writes, “this philosophy grasps that negativity only within the limits of a
self-sufficiency of consciousness” (Lacan, 2006; 80/99).
When leveling this critique of existentialism, Lacan elaborates upon his
broader criticism of philosophy. As a foil for the psychoanalytic response to
neurotic suffering, Lacan juxtaposes its “talking cure” to philosophical dianoia.
He writes, “Dialogue in itself seems to involve the renunciation of aggressive-
ness; from Socrates onwards, philosophy has placed its hope in dialogue to make
reason triumph. And yet ever since Thrasymachus made his mad outburst at the
beginning of the great dialogue, The Republic, verbal dialectic has all too often
proven a failure” (Lacan, 2006; 86/106). Whereas psychoanalysis conceives the
subject as the locus of unconscious conflict, in Lacan’s estimation, philosophy
equates subjectivity with rational self-determination. As a result, philosophy
precludes any engagement with the problems that psychoanalysis takes to be
decisive for meaningful change, in fact provoking outright dismissal in response
to its inherent obfuscation of the subject’s constitutive conflicts.
While Lacan’s depiction of philosophy as rationalistic might be chal-
lenged on numerous fronts, the pertinent question here concerns whether he
justifiably extends this critique to Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. To

the contrary, one might protest, Heidegger vehemently contests the theoreti-
cal overvalorization of rational self-possession. As the basis for comparing his
thinking with Freud’s, Heidegger rather conceives Dasein as fundamentally
divided, and he explains the value in existence as conditioned by its tenuous
underdetermination. Indeed, Heidegger’s philosophy is not naïvely rational-
istic, and Lacan would be mistaken to conflate it facilely with the tradition
that Heidegger so insightfully criticizes. Nevertheless, Lacan’s critique of
Heidegger’s existentialism proves warranted insofar as he conceives Dasein’s
constitutive diremption merely in terms of the formal, phenomenological
groundlessness of existence.
Decisive in this regard is the distinction that Freud draws between
the preconscious and the unconscious. Like the unconscious, preconscious phe-
nomena are not immediately present to conscious attention, including, for
example, memories and the apperception of the body in space. As one goes
about one’s day, by and large, they remain outside the scope of one’s aware-
ness. However, with the shift of attention, such preconscious phenomena
can be called forth to consciousness. A song on the radio brings to mind
a friend or a moment from the past. Tripping on the curb, suddenly one
becomes aware of one’s gait and composure. While not immediately present
to conscious attention, preconscious phenomena thus lie at the margins of
experience. They are readily available to consciousness, even as they typi-
cally remain beyond the purview of one’s interest or concern. By contrast,
unconscious phenomena are not readily available to consciousness. While
similarly marginal to experience, they are held apart from conscious attention
by the affective force of repression, justifying Freud’s specific nomination, the
“dynamic unconscious.” Beyond being merely absent from conscious atten-
tion, unconscious phenomena are refused access to consciousness, bearing
the weight of the affective conflicts that, according to Freud, render desire
constitutively conflicted and riddle experience with the gaps and inconsis-
tencies of its irrational excesses.
While Heidegger does conceive Dasein as rent by an originary nega-
tivity, to the contrary, he explains this division merely as the formal, phe-
nomenological play of presence and absence in the unfolding of existence,
devoid of the affective dynamism that defines the Freudian unconscious.
Hence, in Heidegger’s analysis of the worldhood of the world, the oscillation
between readiness-at-hand and presence-at-hand takes place solely through
a shift in seeing aspect. Despite the crisis that interrupts Dasein’s practical
involvements and dissolves the context of its pursuits, no resistance need be
overcome in order to reveal the world otherwise. The change takes place
through a change only in the hermeneutic orientation of Dasein’s engage-

ments. Despite the affect rhetorically evoked by Heidegger’s concepts of
anxiety and the uncanny, even the normative transition between Dasein’s
authenticity and inauthenticity entails no force of resistance. While Heidegger
indeed describes Dasein’s immersion in the everydayness of das Man as a
flight from the totality of itself, implicitly treating being-towards-death as if
it were a locus of resistance, he never accounts for Dasein’s apparent aver-
sion to its finitude, which he takes pains, to the contrary, to distinguish from
biological self-preservation. If the uncertain certainty of Dasein’s coming to
an end indeed subverts the egotistical sense of self-possession, Heidegger
does not account for the desire for mastery that this might seem to imply,
instead conceiving the objectivism of das Man as a propensity intrinsic to
the constitutive underdetermination of Dasein’s existence. And with explicit
reference to Plato’s dialogues, Heidegger contends that the problem of the
meaning of Being might be restored solely through questioning.
While Heidegger is not naïvely rationalistic, despite the formal affinities
between his philosophy and psychoanalysis, he thus abstracts and neutralizes
the affective strife in the Freudian unconscious. And Lacan, in his critique
of existentialism, distinguishes psychoanalysis from any pedagogy that appeals
only to critical reflection on the defining conditions of experience, whether
they are understood in terms of the timeless eternals of Platonic Ideas or the
groundless singularity of human finitude. Rather, in terms adopted from the
painter Salvador Dalí, Lacan explains psychoanalysis as a “guided paranoia” that
takes up and engages the narcissistic aggression in the constitution of subjectiv-
ity as “the inaugural knot of the analytic drama” (Lacan, 2006; 87/107). Instead
of an argumentative dialogue or even primarily an exercise in interpretive
understanding, psychoanalysis thus hinges on negotiating the affective conflicts
that inform the distortions of the transference in the structure and dynamics
of the analytic exchange. By assuming a position of anonymous “impassability,”
Lacan contends that the analyst draws out the analysand’s narcissistic aggres-
sion, neither to indulge nor merely to refuse his or her demands, but rather
to enable the analysand more fully to realize the dynamic potential in this
strife as definitive of his or her desire (Lacan, 2006; 87/106).
By contrast, in the penultimate scene of Burn After Reading, Ozzie pro-
vides a satirical example of the consequences of failing to address this affec-
tive strife in the structure of dialogue. After breaking into his own home to
retrieve from his wife what he supposes to be rightfully his, Ozzie discovers
Ted rifling through his basement office. Because Chad has disappeared with
the computer disc, Linda has convinced Ted to break into Ozzie’s house and
download the information from his computer onto another disc. After first
supposing that Ted is his wife’s lover, Ozzie realizes that he recognizes him. “I
know you,” he says, “you’re the guy from the gym.” With his characteristically
bland prudence, Ted replies, “I’m not here representing Hardbodies.” In his
attempt to clarify for Ozzie who he “represents,” Ted effectively interprets
the transference that overdetermines their encounter, without thereby accom-
modating its force as true to Ozzie’s experience and the dynamics of their
exchange. While trying to disabuse Ozzie of his confusion, Ted accordingly
only fuels his anger. Ozzie replies, “Oh yes, I know very well what you
represent. You represent the idiocy of today.” Connecting Ted back to Linda,
he continues, “You’re in league with that moronic woman. You’re part of a
league of morons . . . You’re one of the morons that I’ve been fighting my
whole life, my whole fucking life. And guess what? Today, I win.” Ozzie
shoots Ted in the shoulder, chases him out of the house, yelling “intruder”
to justify his violence, and, in the middle of the street, uses an axe to bash
in his skull.
The Instance of the Letter
While Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage provides a preliminary account

of the symbolic object loss in the genesis and structure of subjectivity, as
anticipated by his own self-critical remarks in Écrits, Lacan’s early theory
indeed remains too imaginary in the immediacy of its appeal to the one-
to-one relationship with the mirror and correlative reduction of drive con-
flict to rivalrous aggression. Accordingly, in the1950s, Lacan rethinks this
originary object loss instead as a paradoxically retroactive consequence of
the subject’s founding inscription into the normative orders of language
and society. Drawing specifically upon structural linguistics and anthropol-
ogy, Lacan’s thinking thus develops a more systematic rigor. He establishes a
clear distinction between the imaginary identification with the alter ego and
the symbolic division on which it is predicated, and he sheds the residual
empiricism and correlative psychologism of his concept of narcissistic aggres-
sion. In the process, Lacan also purges his social theory of its potentially
authoritarian implications, and he better explains the intersection between
analytic praxis and the affective dynamism of unconscious conflict, which
his early theory risks treating as ultimately independent from the dialogue
of the analytic exchange. At the same time, however, Lacan brings his think-
ing still closer to Heidegger’s existential phenomenology and, through his
marriage of psychoanalysis, structuralism, and existentialism, falls prey to the
same idealism that he originally criticizes in his philosophy. Along with also
establishing the terms for the complementary critiques that Derrida levels
against both of their theories, Lacan thus sets the stage for his own further
critical revision of his concept of unconscious conflict on decidedly different
grounds, as not only imaginary and symbolic, but also Real.
In his 1957 essay “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,”
Lacan specifically explains the originary object loss in the genesis of sub-
jectivity in terms of the algorithm drawn from Saussure’s Course on General
Linguistics, “S/s,” which he translates as “signifier over signified” (Lacan, 2006;
415/497). As rehearsed earlier, when introducing the sources of Derrida’s
deconstruction, Saussure explains the meaning in linguistic signs, not as the
correspondence between signifiers and either things (referents) or concepts
(signifieds) but rather as an effect of the differential relationship between
signifiers and other signifiers. In his appropriation of this thesis, Lacan empha-
sizes the bar that Saussure draws between the signifier and the signified as
a line of “resistance” (Lacan, 2006; 415). While positioning the signifier above
the signified, as if the two were related in a one-to-one correspondence,
Saussure’s algorithm articulates the opposite: the orders of the signifier and
signified are categorically distinguished and so, despite continuously over-
lapping, never inherently correspond. Instead, the signified incessantly slides
beneath the signifier. Lacan writes, “In the chain of the signifier, meaning
insists, but . . . none of the chain’s elements consists in the signification it can
provide at that very moment” (Lacan, 2006; 419/502).
This constitutive division of the signifier is what Lacan refers to in
the title of the essay as the instance of the letter. In terms reminiscent of
Derrida’s concept of writing, he compares its automatism to the displaceable
and material mechanics of “moveable type” (Lacan, 2006; 418/501). Whereas
Derrida appeals to the differential underdetermination of the signifier only
to rebuff the egotistical sense of self-possession, however, Lacan furthermore
draws upon Saussure’s linguistics to revise his concept of subjectivity as
the locus of unconscious conflict. According to Lacan, the line that divides
signifier and signified similarly sunders the subject. To make the point, he
reiterates his critique of Descartes’s famous foundational thesis: cogito ergo sum.
Lacan asks, “Is the place I occupy as subject of the signifier, concentric or
eccentric to the place I occupy as subject of the signified?” (Lacan, 2006;
430/517). When I speak of myself, am I the same as the self of whom I
speak? Insofar as thought depends upon symbolic systems that precede and
condition any self-understanding, Lacan contends that, in thinking, the sub-
ject is fundamentally alienated from its being. Whereas Descartes’s radical
skepticism leads him to conclude, “I think, therefore I am,” Lacan argues
that the thinking subject’s origins, in the heteronomy of language, sunder
it from its ontological identity; and, on this basis, he concludes, “I think

where I am not; therefore, where I am, I am not thinking” (Lacan, 2006;
430/518). According to Lacan, the subject’s inscription in language institutes
the division between being and knowing, drawn most emphatically in Kant’s
celebrated transcendental turn, and founds an absence in the subject’s core.
He writes, “[T]he S and s of the Saussurean algorithm are not in the same
place, and man was deluding himself in believing he was situated in their
common axis, which is nowhere” (Lacan, 2006; 431/518).
As a further distinction from Descartes’s substantialization of this pure
vanishing, Lacan conceives this negativity as dynamic, arguing that the divi-
sion between being and knowing institutes and sustains the subject as a
“want-to-be” (Lacan, 2006; 493/589). He writes, “Desire is a relation of
being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn’t the
lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists” (Lacan,
1991; 223). Revising his earlier theory of the “existential negativity” of
narcissistic aggression, Lacan accordingly argues that the subject’s alienation
from its ontological essence simultaneously constitutes its being as a form of
becoming. He explains,
The signifying game of metonymy and metaphor—up to and

including its active tip [pointe] that “cotter-pins” my desire to a
refusal of the signifier or to a lack of being and links my fate to
the question of my destiny—this game is played out in its inexo-
rable subtlety, until the match is over, where I am not, because
I cannot situate myself there. (Lacan, 2006; 430)
The division between being and knowing that founds the subject of the
unconscious simultaneously inaugurates the unfolding of existence as a search
for its categorically elusive essence. And, bringing his thinking closer to
Heidegger’s existential analytic, Lacan accordingly explains the metonymy
of desire, engendered by this originary lack, as the pursuit of a question.
“Whether phobic, hysterical, or obsessive,” he contends, “neurosis is a ques-
tion that being raises for the subject ‘from where he was before the subject
came into the world’ ” (Lacan, 2006; 432/250).
What makes this questioning “neurotic” is its inevitable fixation in the
short-circuit of an answer provided by—or rather in the form of—the ego.
Whereas originally he conflates the twofold dynamics of identification and
differentiation in the ambivalent introjection of the mirror image, in his work
of the 1950s, Lacan revises his concept of the fantasy in the genesis and
structure of subjectivity as a nexus of concurrent identifications in which the
imaginary alter ego emerges through the void instituted by the sundering
of the symbolic, for which Lacan specifically reserves the term, the Other.
Rather than inflecting it secondarily, the figure in the mirror thus first takes
on the significance that it has for the infant as an effect of what is said by the
caretaker as (m)Other, who holds the child up to the glass. The discourse of
the (m)Other establishes the mirror as a locus of identification by addressing
the infant to what appears there, and the caretaker’s remarks both directly
and indirectly inform the idealization of the image as a gestalt. “Aren’t you
cure? Let me see your smile!” Through such orienting tilts of the mirror’s
surface, the (m)Other articulates the contours and consistencies of the alter
ego, effectively conjuring the idealized image that the infant mistakes as its
own, and so both enjoys and suffers as an impossible ideal.
Accordingly, Lacan now conceives the fantasy in the genesis and struc-
ture of the subject as essentially literary. Anticipating the possible “cultural-
ist” misreading of his theory—to which, of course, it nonetheless has been
subjected—Lacan explains that he appeals to the primacy of the signifier in
order to account for “the laws that govern the other scene, which Freud, on
the subject of dreams, designates as the scene of the unconscious” (Lacan,
2006; 578/689). The staging of this andere Schauplatz is the fantasy that
informs the organization of experience, and Lacan explains it by juxtapos-
ing the sadistic fantasies that inform obsessional rituals with literary works,
which he doesn’t name but can’t but be associated with the writings of the
Divine Marquis. The affinity between the two, Lacan contends, lies not in
the fact that novelistic accounts of erotic cruelty are imaginary expressions
of primitive instincts, but rather that obsessionals fantasies are themselves
literary scenarios in which the imaginary paradigm of the ego appears‑as
protagonist‑from the symbolic vantage of the author’s voice.3 And, through
this twofold identification in the structure of fantasy, Lacan contends that
the subject does not merely entertain unfulfilled or far-flung desires but first
and foremost brings itself into play.
The Dialectics of Demand
Developmentally, Lacan explains the laws that govern this “other scene,” in
terms of the dialectics of need, demand, desire. While Lacan frequently cites
the infant’s place in its parents’ discourse prior to its birth, often even as
a condition of its conception, the symbolic sundering of the subject does
not take place merely through an act of nomination, but rather through the
articulation of needs as demands.4 Even before the infant’s inchoate cries are
given explicit verbal expression in its caretaker’s replies, “Oh, you’re hun-
gry . . . you need to be changed, etc.,” Lacan contends that the infant, its
needs, and the objects that satisfy those needs, undergo symbolization through
the periodic presence and absence of this attentive Other. The cornerstone
of this process is the originary experience of frustration that, Lacan contends,
institutes the (m)Other as the primary symbolic identification in the infant’s
psyche. Whereas prehistorically, one might suppose, the satisfaction of needs
is, for the infant, as inchoate as their nagging—either as directly correla-
tive to them in the symbiosis of the uterus or as altogether arbitrary in
the anarchic formlessness of the earliest experience—the periodicity of the
(m)Other’s coming and going institutes her as an authoritative agency in
the structure of the infant’s burgeoning experience and establishes the terms
through which its needs first come to be articulated.
As an important implication of Lacan’s assertion of the primacy of the
signifier, strictly speaking, this exchange between (m)Other and child is not
intersubjective. She does not occupy the position of another ego, subjectivity,
or proto-subjectivity, however one might qualify it, in a primitive second-
person relationship. Instead, her absence first introduces the infant to society
as such in a relationship—later echoed in the facelessness of the analytic
exchange—between the subject as first-person singular and the Other as
third-person plural. The (m)Other’s agency is not that of one among other
subjects in the framework of a broader situation but rather defines the param-
eters of the infant’s experience and exercises a normative authority over its
involvement with everyone and everything. While distinct in his appeal to the
heteronomous, almost mechanical, structures of language, Lacan thus accounts
for the development of the world as a referential context, which Heidegger
explains as “the worldhood of the world.” Through their exchange within
the symbolic order instituted by the authority of the (m)Other, objects take
on determinate contours as objects, for the first time, as objects of demand.
Their qualities as objects are effects of their symbolic articulation as gifts in
this exchange. Do they merit love or hate? Or, in Freud’s original terms,
are they pleasurable or repulsive? These defining judgments are provided by
the (m)Other’s expressions and the differential relationships that, through her
words and actions, come to be established between objects.
Insofar as objects are thus first determined in their concrete particu-
larity and granted a place in the world through their inclusion within the
framework of this symbolic exchange, paradoxically, they are simultaneously
subjected to systematic nullification. “Demand,” writes Lacan, “annuls (auf-
hebt) the particularity of everything that can be granted, by transmuting
it into a proof of love” (Lacan, 2006; 581/691). While the articulation of
need as demand might be misunderstood as representing objects that sat-
isfy the infant’s physical dependencies (as signified) in the semiotics of its
mother tongue (as signifying system), Lacan’s theory is the opposite: through
the articulation of the infant’s needs as demands, the objects that satisfy its
physical dependencies come to stand in (as signifiers) for its mother’s love
(as signified). However, the (m)Other’s love is not itself an object that she
has available to bestow upon her child. Lacan writes, “The Other’s privilege
here [. . .] outlines the radical form of the gift of what the Other does not
have—namely, what is known as its love” (Lacan, 2006; 580/690). Rather than
an object, the (m)Other’s love is only a wanting, an absence, registered for
the child in the experience of primordial frustration. It can’t be articulated
within the exchange between mother and child, because it institutes and
sustains their relationship. As a result, not only do need and demand fail to
correspond adequately to one another, they stand in an inverse relationship.
The more the need articulated in demand is satisfied, the further effaced is
the love that it is meant to express. And the primordial frustration through
which the child’s needs first come to be articulated thus qualifies its bur-
geoning desire for its (m)Other’s love as inherently conflicted.
While explaining desire as the pursuit of a question brings Lacan’s
critical theory closer to Heidegger’s philosophy, he accordingly conceives
this existential reflection as not only heteronomously engendered but also
as formulated in relationship to this originary alterity. “Who am I for the
Other? What does the Other want from me?” In light of the frustration that
provokes these questions, Lacan also distinguishes them from the detached
reflection that they might seem to imply, conceiving them rather as directed
toward the Other in a belligerent demand for the proof of love (Lacan, 2006;
693/818). In this way, Lacan further clarifies his qualification of the sub-
ject’s existential pursuit of its elusive essence as “neurotic” by explaining it
as predicated upon the assumption, inherent to the very formulation of the
question, that the Other indeed wants something. The reification in the origin
of the strife-laden ego thus proves to be twofold, both obfuscating the void
of subjectivity in the purported self-identity of the alter ego’s gestalt and mis-
construing the primordial frustration of the (m)Other’s love as a demand for
that which would render her complete. The ideal of love, engendered through
the give-and-take of these two, is strictly inverse to the infant’s primordial
frustration as the satisfaction of an undifferentiated whole that—in a manner
reminiscent of Lacan’s early theory of the narcissistic aggression—entails a
correlative resentment if not out-and-out hate.
Although it already is comprised of both symbolic and imaginary
dimensions, the whole economy of demand is thus qualified as imaginary in
the immediacy of the one-to-one relationship between (m)Other and child,
accounting for, what Freud calls, the primary processes of the unconscious.
In the infant’s burgeoning experience, the reification of the (m)Other’s desire

constitutes her symbolic authority as the whimsy of an omnipotent tyrant
who refuses to relieve the strife in its world, once and for all, while met-
ing out her affection and disapproval with seemingly haphazard indifference.
Accordingly, the subject’s symbolic inscription depends upon the further,
secondary repression, predicated upon the intervention of the father, whose
castrating “no” effects the exchange between (m)Other and child as a whole,
triangulating the deadlock of their give-and-take in relationship to the sym-
bolic phallus and introducing the infant, for the first time, to the register of
desire.
Taken at face value, Lacan’s concept of symbolic castration evokes
loss. However, castration is first and foremost empowering as an authorizing
nomination that secures the child a place in the social order. And, in Lacan’s
thinking, the phallus, too, is firstly a symbol that only secondarily maps onto
the body. He writes, “The phallus is the privileged signifier [marking the
subject’s relationship to the symbolic order] in which the role of Logos is
wedded to the advent of desire” (Lacan, 2006; 581/692). While the child suf-
fers its (m)Other’s authority, in the contingent immediacy of its experience,
as tyrannically fickles, as an implicit condition of its demand for love, the play
of presence and absence—and, above all, her refusal of the infant’s aspiration
to be the object of her demand—are points of principle, definitive of not only
her commitment to the child’s father but, as such, and more fundamentally,
her own constitutive inscription within the broader social order. As Lacan
understands it, castration is thus strictly correlative to the infant’s primordial
frustration insofar as it is originally symbolic. Correlative to regulating the
(m)Other’s coming and going, castration marks the disjunction between
nature and culture, which distinguishes desire from the gratification of
instinct as the subject’s originary point of entry into history. Rather than
symptomatic of a loss, the lack of castration is thus characteristic of the
authority that it grants when establishing a place for the child in society, and
it also accounts for the primarily symbolic nature of the phallus. Like the
monarch’s scepter, the seal of the president, a diploma, or a title, the phallus
functions normatively as the limiting condition of the infant’s engagement
with the world, not by supplanting the (m)Other’s absence with a substantial
self-presence but rather by originally defining the terms of its articulation,
localizing it, and giving it a minimal consistency. The defining feature of
the phallus is thus its emptiness as the metaphorical division that institutes
and sustains the metonymic play of signifiers and social relationships, and
its meaning accordingly comes to be established only indirectly through
the shifting network that it organizes. At the same time, the symbolic lack
of castration informs the propensity to reify its originary negativity in the

imaginary register of demand, on the one hand, by instituting the division
from the immediacy of the natural world that inflects the satisfaction of the
infant’s needs with the significance of an appeal for something qualitatively
distinct, while, on the other hand, it thus establishes the objects of need
as inevitable surrogates for this categorically outstanding remainder. While
thus presenting an inherent limitation in the emergence and expression of
desire, however, this reification of the lack of castration simultaneously plays
a central role in establishing the subject’s symbolic authority through the
rivalry of Oedipal conflict.
As the basis for assuming its symbolic castration, the infant first identi-
fies with the father as an alter ego in the economy of its demand for the
(m)Other’s love. The give and take of the struggle to be the object of her
desire comes to be complicated by competition with the father over who
has what it takes to be loved. Here the symbolic phallus indeed gets mapped
onto the body of not only the father but the whole parental couple, as the
mediating term of their relationship and, specifically, the enjoyment of their
intimacy. At this juncture, the threat of castration also takes on its significance
as an experience of loss. Through rivalry with the father, the imaginary object
of the (m)Other’s love takes on determinate features, strictly correlative to
the infant’s sense of inadequacy. That is, the child does not fear that it might
lose the imaginary phallus through the competition of its Oedipal rivalry.
Through this struggle, the imaginary phallus first comes to be defined as
what the child takes itself to be lacking. However, as a redoubling of the
division in the demand for love, this competition with the father also intro-
duces the basis for its own overcoming, assuming the lack of castration as
an empowering, albeit inevitably conditional, emancipation from the whole
economy of demand in light of the originary absence of the (m)Other’s
desire. Through this dissolution of the Oedipus complex, the child’s relation-
ship to the father thus undergoes a shift in aspect, in which the rivalrous
identification with the imaginary of his ego comes to be subsumed within
a symbolic identification with his aspirations in the institution of the ego
ideal, adopting the law, embodied by the father, as its own.
Seducing Surveillance
In light of Lacan’s work of the 1950s, Stanley Orr’s argument about Cain’s
and the Coens’ distinct approaches to noir accordingly appears to rest on
a false dichotomy. The Coens’ emphasis on the hermeneutics of signifying
systems does not contradict Cain’s attention to the transgressive compulsions

that motivate people to act against their own self-interest. Instead the signify-
ing systems in the Coen Brothers’ films contribute to accounting for their
characters’ conflicted motivations. As argued at the outset of this study, in Burn
After Reading, the Coens thus indeed thematize the gaps and inconsistencies
engendered by the symbolic mediation of experience. However, as already
argued in regard to Ozzie’s rage, the absurd conspiracy at the center of the
film does not result merely from the iterability of the displaced computer
disc, but furthermore depends upon the conflicts in the characters’ motiva-
tions, which circumscribe the disc within the network of the their otherwise
haphazard relationships. Are these accounts of the film therefore mutually
exclusive? While Lacan already conceives the mirror image as a symbolic
object, the reflexive immediacy of its one-to-one encounter nevertheless
precedes the burgeoning subject’s engagement with the social world. In this
light, Ozzie’s narcissistic paranoia indeed appears to be a prior condition of
the conspiracy, essentially external to the confusion that he contributes to
creating. However, Lacan subsequently conceives unconscious conflict as an
effect of the subject’s originary inscription within the symbolic orders of
language and society. The film’s thematic attention to signifying systems and
the conflicts in the characters’ motivations are not therefore contradictory
but rather coextensive. And, rather than a deconstructionist send-up of the
misunderstandings engendered by the iterability of the signifier or an exis-
tentialist critique of the nihilism of the modern world, Burn After Reading
proves to be a study of the confluence of narcissism and paranoia in the age
of hypermodern communication technologies.
As a corrective complement to the previous reflections on his char-
acter, a brief early scene accordingly presents Ozzie’s narcissistic aggression
as symptomatic of a reified sticking point in the structure of his originary
socialization. Sailing on the Chesapeake Bay, Ozzie walks onto the deck of
the boat, where his comatose father stares out over the water. Sitting down
beside him, Ozzie reflects,
Dad, I left my job at the agency. I’m sorry Dad. Government

service is not the same as when you were in State. Things are
different now. I don’t know, maybe it’s the Cold War ending.
Now it seems like it’s all bureaucracy and no mission. I’m writ-
ing a memoir [which he pronounces with a pretentious French
accent]. I think it could be pretty explosive, but I don’t think
you would disapprove. Katie [Dr. Cox] has had trouble accepting
it. But sometimes there’s a higher patriotism, Dad.
Beyond the immediacy of the confrontation with the mirror, the exchange
situates Ozzie’s sense of himself in the eyes of his father, whose symbolic
authority he conflates with the nation, in whose service Ozzie follows his
father’s example. While the old man’s silence might seem appropriate to his
function as a father, he simultaneously appears to be pathetically powerless
in the brute physical presence of his comatose state, as if to suggest that
he has failed to hold open a place for his son in the symbolic. In Ozzie’s
complaint that, in the wake of the Cold War, his work has become “all
bureaucracy and no mission,” he registers a similar experience. Without the
symbolic principle of a properly political aim, Ozzie intimates, the organiza-
tion has been reduced to pragmatic administration and the infighting that, in
the opening scene, rightly or wrongly, he attributes to his colleagues. And,
in this regard, Ozzie’s anger and paranoia evidence a structural impasse in
his relation to others and the world, one which keeps him embroiled in the
rivalries of Oedipal conflict as he implicitly works to redress, what he suffers
as, the failure of his father’s symbolic authority, puffing himself up with his
impotent rage in a desperate attempt to maintain his “higher patriotism.”
Among other characters, Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) embodies the
confluence of narcissism and paranoia in the film, through the continuity
between his serial seduction of women and his panicked sense that he’s under
surveillance. Harry’s having an affair with Dr. Cox, hooks up with Linda
through an Internet dating site, and rendezvous with another anonymous
woman in a fleeting encounter, which would seem to be introduced only to
establish that he does it constantly and with utter disregard for the identity
of his partner. Harry is sexually fixated. After he introduces himself as a U.S.
marshal to some of Ozzie’s friends, Ozzie quips, “If you want, he’ll show you
his great big gun.” Harry defers, “The gun’s no big deal. In twenty years of
marshal service, I’ve never discharged my weapon.” In response, Ozzie makes
the psychological significance of Harry’s weapon explicit: “That sounds like
something you should be telling your psychiatrist.” In fact, Harry can’t but
show off his “gun” as if compulsively trying to prove that he’s got what
the Other wants. Before departing on a book tour to the West Coast, his
wife Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel) remarks about Seattle, “Lots of independent
bookstores, it rains all the time, what else are people going to do?” Harry
replies suggestively, “I can think of a couple things.” But she corrects him,
“You can think of one thing.”
As testimony to the narcissism in his sex, after each of his romantic
interludes, Harry jogs. His refrain, “Maybe I can get a run in?” is so insistent
that the Coens use it to register sex scenes without having to show them.
And by connecting his sex life to his preoccupation with his body image, the
routine suggests that, in his serial seduction of women, Harry takes pleasure
not primarily in his partners but rather in their confirmation of his prow-
ess—as an answer to his implicit demand for proof that he’s loved. When he’s
struck by a bout of melancholy, after learning that his wife plans to divorce
him, Harry confirms the importance of his body image to his sense of well-
being. “I’ve just got to exercise,” he complains to Linda. “I haven’t gone for
a run in three days, butt-crunches anything.” And the next day, when Linda
remarks that he seems refreshed, he reconnects this narcissistic preoccupation
with his body to his sex life, lasciviously remarking, “Yeah, well I snuck in
a little gym time this morning . . . and our exercise last night didn’t hurt.”
Among other examples of the narcissism in his sex, when Harry goes
to stay with Dr. Cox, he brings with him an awkwardly large, square pillow
wedge, presumably to prop her up in positions that, he imagines, will allow
him to give her exactly what she wants. And Harry literally incarnates the
reified phallus that informs his fantasies when building a fucking machine
as a present for his wife. Initially, the Coens veil Harry’s designs. Secretively,
he hauls materials down into the basement of his home and works with a
blowtorch to craft mechanical joints. Eventually, however, he discloses the
contraption to Linda. “You like surprises?” he asks her. She responds, “I’m
always open to new experiences.” Pulling back a blue tarp, he reveals a black
vinyl chair, mounted to a wood and steel frame, with a handle out in front
of it and a gap cut into the seat. The gizmo looks remotely like a rowing
machine or a primitive device for training astronauts. With eyes agape, Linda
asks, “What is it?” As the soundtrack builds to a suspenseful crescendo, Harry
repeats with a smile, “What is it? You sit down there, make yourself comfort-
able, put your feet in the stirrups, and . . .” He rocks the chair horizontally
along the frame as the music cuts out. With a pathetic squeak, a polyurethane
dildo bobs up and down in the gap cut into the seat of the chair. “Oh my
God,” Linda enthusiastically gasps, “That’s fantastic!”
While Harry’s serial seductions serve to demonstrate his prowess, at
the same time, they paradoxically disavow his dependence on the Other to
whom he makes his demonstration, in this way also denying his symbolic
castration by asserting himself as whole in the indifference of his purported
autonomy. Accordingly, Harry uses his jogging routine to hold his lovers at
bay, preempting the potential intimacy of their sexual encounters by imme-
diately bolting after they’re done. At the same time, however, the narcissism
of Harry’s sex life is predicated upon a reification of the Other’s desire as
the basis for assuming that there is indeed something that the Other wants.
Lacan writes, “The refusal of castration, if there is any such thing, is, first
and foremost, a refusal of the Other’s castration” (Lacan, 2006; 528/632).
Despite denying any debt of allegiance to his lovers, in the compulsive force
of his serial seductions, Harry thus betrays his devotion to the Other, in the
imaginary register of demand, as a fickle tyrant, to whom he offers himself
in service as an instrumental extension. Accordingly, Harry’s jogging routine
also betrays the insecurity of this helpless subservience as a flight from his
lovers’ judgmental scrutiny and inevitable disappointment in his exaggerated
sense of his virility. Indeed, following directly upon the passion of these
encounters, the physical exertion of Harry’s jogging registers the force of
a remainder, as if there still were something to be worked out; and, in this
same way, it also suggests that Harry already is training for his next liaison.
In fact, while apparently following after his hookups, Harry’s refrain, “Maybe
I can get a run in,” is thus perhaps better understood as not only giving
voice to the anxiety in their precipitating motivation but also as literally
preceding his romantic rendezvous.
Still more forcefully, the conflicted nature of Harry’s narcissism mani-
fests itself in his growing sense that he’s under surveillance, bringing to light
Harry’s situation in the fantasy that organizes his experience, as surrounded
by shadowy figures of his Oedipal rivals under the scrutiny of a seemingly
all-knowing Other. In fact, Harry’s wife is having him tailed by a private
investigator. But Harry’s paranoia exceeds these circumstances. When finally
he catches the investigator stalking him, Harry smashes into his car, chases
him down the street, wrestles him to the ground, and interrogates him, “Who
do you work for? CIA? NSC?” Later, Harry evidences this paranoia still
more violently by murdering Chad in a fit of panic. Linda has convinced
Chad to break into Ozzie’s home to gather more “intelligence” from his
computer. Harry is living there temporarily, sleeping with Dr. Cox, while
his wife is out of town. When he stumbles upon Chad hiding in a closet,
Harry shoots him point-blank in the head, “reflexively, without thinking,” as
he explains his training earlier in the film. With his pistol still drawn, Harry
trepidatiously approaches his corpse, “Oh, my God! What the fuck? Oh my
fuck, I killed a fucking spook. What the fuck are you doing here, fucker?” In
the violent panic of his paranoia, Harry finally reveals the full force of the
conflicts that compel his narcissistic sex life. Despite the utter contingency
of their encounter, Chad literally occupies the position of the other man,
hiding in the closet of his lover’s bedroom, and realizing the fear that Harry
suffers in the very enjoyment of his serial seductions. In the film’s final scenes,
when Linda inadvertently betrays that the man he’s murdered is her friend
Chad, Harry again flips out, interrogating her, too, “Who are you? The CIA?
NSA? Military? Who do you work for?” He sees spies everywhere: tailing
him in the park, watching him from their cars, taking his picture, reporting
his movements on their radios. And, despite the fact that no one actually is
pursuing him, the last we hear of Harry, he’s fleeing to Venezuela to avoid
extradition to the United States.
When Linda Litzke first appears in Burn After Reading, she’s presented
through an obscenely close-up shot of fatty, pink flesh, reflected in a circular
mirror, while the voice of her doctor (Jeffrey DeMunn) narrates, “We take
all the chicken fat off your buttocks, here.” Folding up her sagging biceps
and pinching her distended belly, he proposes pruning off her excess blubber.
With a black marker, he draws dashes across the creases of soft tissue on her
body, continuing, “Now we do breast augmentation, with a tiny incision,
here and here.” Linda giggles, “Ow, that marker tickles.” Linda does not
formulate her desire to transform herself through introspective, existential
reflection or standing alone in front of the mirror. Instead, she directs the
question of who she wants, or even ought, to be to her doctor, constructing
the ideal of her new persona through an appeal to what he thinks would be
best. As a cosmetic surgeon who performs elective procedures, her doctor’s
expertise extends beyond medical science to popular culture. Linda solicits
his advice not to treat an illness but rather to make her more attractive. In
this regard, his office resembles the health club where Linda works, which
similarly provides resources primarily to craft one’s appearance. However, this
emphasis on cosmetics does not contradict Hardbodies’ claim to promote
healthiness, as such; instead, it characterizes the health that it proffers: as a
general sense of well-being, based upon a positive self-image that involves
not only looking and feeling good but also being more popular, productive,
and sexually satisfied. And Linda accordingly imagines the proposed medi-
cal procedures to be the key to a happier life, providing her the means to
realize the sense of fulfillment that she also gleans from the ideals proffered
by Hollywood and on the Internet.
As argued previously, in her overidentification with these popular ide-
als, Linda indeed evidences the objectivism of das Man. However, she does
so in relationship to the symbolic systems that organize her world, and, in
this reflexivity, registers a desire for acceptance that invests her melancholy
with narcissism and self-loathing. Along with departing from phenomenol-
ogy’s presupposition of the intentional subject, Linda’s identification with
the ideals espoused by this discursive archipelago of medical science, health
clubs, Hollywood films, and the Internet, thus also provides a helpful cor-
rective to the widespread synthesis of nominalism and historicism, which
conceives the subject simply as a product of society’s networks of power
and knowledge.5 As Joan Copjec explains, in such theories, “the subject is
assumed to be already virtually there in the social and to come into being
by actually wanting what social laws want it to want” (Copjec, 1996; 41).
While Lacan similarly explains subjectivity as an effect of the symbolic,
he conceives it as a surplus product of language and society, engendered
by the remainder, which appears to have been “cut off ” in the process of
socialization. “It is this missing part—this additional nothing—that causes
the subject; the subject is created ex nihilo” (Copjec, 1996; 53). Although
the Lacanian aphorism “desire is the desire of the Other” might easily be
misconstrued as arguing that the subject fashions itself in the image of the
Other’s desire, as if it were given as a determinate content, Lacan argues
that the Other’s desire is never given as such. Instead, it remains indeter-
minate, defined precisely by the symbolic negativity that marks society’s
distinction from the immediacy of the natural world. And it is this very
lack that founds the subject’s desire. “It is first of all unsatisfied desire that
initiates our own, one that is not filled up with meaning, or has no signi-
fied” (Copjec, 1996; 55). Accordingly, rather than an automatic effect of
her social indoctrination, what sustains Linda’s enthrallment to pop-culture
clichés is the underdetermination of her social inscription and the correlative
conflicts that compel her demand for proof that she’s loved—or rather, as
she poses it to her doctor, for what would make her loveable.
Indeed, Linda’s doctor betrays the fact that he does not like her. As
their conversation turns to considerations of “genetic factors,” Linda explains,
“The Litzkes have always been big.” The doctor consoles her, “Well, every-
one’s got . . .” But she interrupts, “My mother had an ass that could pull a
bus.” At a loss for words, the doctor feigns interest, “Wow! Well that’s a . . .”
Interrupting again, she continues, “Father’s side, too. I mean, although Dad
tended to carry his weight out in front more, in the gut area. Derrière, not
so much.” The doctor nods his head, trying to bring her storytelling to an
end, “O-kay.” Despite his compliments, Linda’s doctor clearly is not charmed
by her banter. To the contrary, she repulses him. However, the dissonance in
Linda’s relationship to her doctor does not therefore compromise his author-
ity to ply her with promises of a more fulfilling life, but rather compels her
to further solicit his advice. Along with liposuction, breast augmentation,
rhinoplasty, and a facial tuck, the doctor proposes removing Linda’s vaccine
scar. Anxiously, she asks, “I want to talk about this vaccine thing. I mean, can
you counsel me on this? I mean, is it really that unsightly? I see . . . I mean,
a bunch of people have them.” Implicitly reinforcing Linda’s doubts, the doc-
tor reassures her, “Absolutely. Some women don’t mind it. It’s personal taste.”
At the same time, however, Linda is not merely a passive instrument of her
doctor’s will. To the contrary, insofar as he does not exercise a direct influ-
ence over her desire, Linda plays an active role in instituting and sustaining
her doctor’s authority over her. Indeed, in her literal request for an answer
to the question of what would make her loveable, Linda reveals the exercise
of power to be predicated upon a seduction, which paradoxically solicits the
authority to which it submits, in an effort to determine what the Other
wants. When she giggles in response to the feel of her doctor’s marker on
her breast and asks him what can be done about “the higher inner thigh
area,” in fact, Linda’s deference to his authority is downright flirtatious.
Similarly, Linda’s investment in the conspiracy surrounding the com-
puter disc does not result merely from the instrumental promise of paying
for her plastic surgery with the imagined reward, but rather from the strife
in the telephone exchange with Ozzie that first invests the reward itself with
a complementary mystique. While Chad instantly attributes high value to the
disc, and Ted takes the bait, defensively repeating, “I’m not comfortable with
this . . . I want this out of Hardbodies,” initially Linda is indifferent to the
discovery of the disc. Poking her head into the gym office, where Chad is
surveying its contents on a computer, she asks, “Is that my date list?” Her
mind is on other things; and, while she’s visibly struck by Chad’s excitement,
the discovery of the disc does not particularly pique her interest. Even later,
when Chad comes over to her apartment to call Ozzie, Linda doesn’t par-
ticularly appreciate, or even fully understand, what he is doing. Only at this
juncture, does Chad first float the possibility of, what he humorously calls,
a “Good Samaritan tax,” which ties the discovery of the disc to the plan to
reinvent herself and indeed excites her curiosity. However, Linda’s passionate
contribution to fabricating the conspiracy develops through the course of
the phone exchange, in response specifically to Ozzie’s angry insults. As the
conversation between the two men degenerates into an argument, Linda first
interjects generously, “Tell him we’re gonna give it back. We just thought that
he would like to maybe know . . . and tell him about that Good Samaritan
tax thing . . .” Ozzie, of course responds combatively, “Listen to me you two
clowns, you have no idea what you’re doing, and I warn you . . .” Only
then does Linda’s investment in the fictitious reward take hold. “You warn
us?” she replies, “Let me tell you something, Mr. Intelligence. . . . We warn
you! . . . We will call you back with our demands!” While Linda indeed
comes to see the reward as absolutely essential to securing her plastic sur-
geries, she first really imagines it as valuable at this juncture in the fight,
as something that Ozzie, in his cruel contempt, is withholding from her.
Linda’s conviction that there is in fact a reward to be earned thus corre-
sponds to Ozzie’s own elevation of the importance of his writing. But, still
more fundamentally, Ozzie’s refusal underlies the connection that Linda draws
between the supposed reward and her surgeries, insofar as they too promise
to provide her with something that she takes herself to have been deprived.
Rather than being related as means and end, in the fantasy that structures
her experience, what Linda tries to extort from Ozzie and what she tries
to solicit from her doctor thus amount to essentially the same thing: as the
key, missing piece to resolving the strife in her experience and realizing the
sense of well-being she desires, if only it weren’t being withheld!
The Dude Supposed to Know
In The Big Lebowski, a conspiracy similarly develops around a series of utterly

worthless objects: a dirty, old, pissed-on rug; a kidnapping that never took
place; a missing toe; an empty suitcase. As distinct from Linda, however, the
Dude does not primarily demand these objects from others but rather suffers
other people’s demands for them, and so finds himself situated in the position
that Lacan attributes to the psychoanalyst, as “the subject supposed to know”
(Lacan, 1998; 230—243). When revising his concept of the transference in
light of the primacy of the signifier, Lacan argues that the analysand positions
the analyst as the symbolic authority in the fantasy that organizes his or
her suffering. While of course recognizing the analyst as another individual
and confronting the analyst accordingly as an imaginary object of rivalry
and affection, as anticipated by Linda’s appeal to her doctor, Lacan argues
that the analysand’s appeal for help implicitly addresses the analyst as the
one who possesses the key to his or her happiness, and so not only knows
what the Other wants but instantiates the Other in the analytic encounter.
Through the process of their exchange, the analyst thus comes to be directly
implicated in the structure and dynamics of the analysand’s suffering, as an
incarnation of the symbolic authority that justifies and sustains the inevitably
“neurotic” answer to the question concerning his or her lack of being, tacitly
supporting the imaginary ideals that inform the analysand’s strife-laden ego,
and participating in his or her conflicted satisfactions.
Accordingly, in The Big Lebowski, the Dude plays a decisive role in
orchestrating the absurd conspiracy surrounding the kidnapping and missing
ransom, propping up the other characters’ inflated egos and giving meaning
to their groundless motivations by assuming responsibility for their manifold
demands. At the outset of the movie, thugs attack the Dude in his apartment,
shoving his head in the toilet and demanding money to pay off his wife’s
debts. As one of them pisses on his rug, the other threatens him, “See what
happens, Lebowski? See what happens?” The Dude corrects him, “Nobody
calls me Lebowski. You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m the Dude, man.” Later, at
the bowling alley, the Dude complains that the now-soiled rug “really held the
room together.” However, his bowling buddy Walter Sobchak (John Goodman)
first spawns the plan to seek compensation for the rug by demanding that
the other “Big” Lebowski (David Huddleston) ought to cover the expense.
With his typical belligerence, he yells, “There’s no fucking reason why his
wife should go out and owe money all over town, and then they come and
they pee on your fucking rug. Am I wrong?” When the Dude hesitates,
“Yeah, but . . .” Walter insists, “That rug really tied the room together, did it
not?” Inflecting the Dude’s own words with his sense of entitlement, Walter
provokes the Dude to ape him in turn, “His wife goes out and owes money
all over town, and they pee on my rug.” The two continue with their call
and response, without thereby adding anything significant to the conversation,
until the Dude not only has taken up Walter’s call for justice, he also indirectly
has adopted the thugs’ original cause and now himself wants money from the
senior Lebowski to cover his wife’s debt (i.e., for the rug).
When the Dude appeals to the purported millionaire, the older Leb-
owski justifiably refuses any responsibility for what happened to his rug,
but he also seizes on the opportunity to denounce the Dude as a bum in
search of a handout, and to extol his own sense of accomplishment. But the
plot thickens when the “Big” Lebowski too makes demands on the Dude,
asking for his help specifically to ransom his wife, Bunny (Tara Reid), from
kidnappers. Explaining the assignment to Walter, the Dude dismisses it as a
cakewalk, “You know, it’s all pretty harmless. She probably kidnapped herself.”
But, when Walter subsequently jeopardizes the payoff—by swapping a ringer
for the ransom and scaring away the supposed kidnappers—the Dude apes
Lebowski’s words, conveying his responsibility, “Her life was in our hands,
man.” Subsequently, Lebowski’s daughter Maude (Julianne Moore) consoles
the Dude by seconding his hypothesis that the kidnapping is a fraud; but
she also makes her own demands upon him. The money used to pay off the
ransom, she explains, was taken from the family charity, and she wants the
Dude to get it back. Registering the demand, when Lebowski later confronts
the Dude for failing to make the payoff, he falteringly apes Maude in turn,
“Shit, man. She kidnapped herself. Sure man, look at it, a young trophy wife,
in the parlance of our times, you know.”
While assuming responsibility for this network of demands, however,
the Dude begins to imagine that he indeed holds the key to their resolution.
Already, when answering to Lebowski for his failure to pay off the kidnap-
pers, the Dude lays claim to privileged knowledge in the matter at hand,
and he reiterates this same claim to the others embroiled in the growing
conspiracy. Specifically, the Dude tells Maude, “This is a very complicated
case . . . You know, a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what have yous. A lot
of strands to keep in my head, man. A lot of strands in old Duder’s head.”
He makes the same claim again, when Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara), the
pornographer whose thugs first confused the Dude with the senior Lebowski,
calls upon him (intentionally this time) to locate Bunny and retrieve the
money he’s owed. The Dude explains, “Yeah, right man, there are a lot of
facets to this. A lot of interested parties.” And, in confirmation of the Dude’s
purported expertise, Da Fino, the private detective hired by Bunny’s parents
to bring her home to Minnesota, applauds the Dude’s strategy: “Let me tell
you something. I dig your work, playing one side against the other, in bed
with everyone. Fabulous stuff!”
While the Dude’s pretense to this privileged knowledge reinforces
his position in the film as the subject supposed to know, he does not, of
course, possess any such secret understanding. Indeed, as Lacan conceives
the transference, the analysand’s overestimation of the analyst is predicated
upon a fundamental misconception of the Other’s desire as a demand for
something actual. There is, in fact, nothing to be known! As strictly cor-
relative to exaggerating his or her authority, the analysand thus sets up the
analyst to fail, investing the analytic exchange with the strife in his or her
fragile ego and paradoxically sustaining the imaginary ideals on which it is
based by denouncing the analyst for providing them with inadequate sup-
port. Accordingly, in The Big Lebowski, the Dude suffers abuse from the same
people whose demands he struggles to satisfy. In fact, their demands and their
abuse essentially amount to the same thing. Along with the thugs’ shoving
his head in the toilet, and the senior Lebowski’s insulting disdain, Maude’s
bodyguards knock out the Dude and reclaim the rug that he pilfered from
her father. The nihilists pretending to have kidnapped Bunny confront the
Dude in his home, throw their ferret into the tub where he’s bathing, and
threaten to “cut off [his] Johnson.” Jackie Treehorn only arranges to meet
with the Dude to give his goons a chance to ransack his apartment. After
spiking the Dude’s drink, he throws him out onto the streets of Malibu,
where local police pick him up and submit him to both verbal and physi-
cal violence. The police chief threatens the Dude, “Keep your ugly, fucking,
goldbricking ass out of my beach community!” And, as a more obliquely
figurative but nonetheless further aspect of this abuse, through the course
of the Dude’s involvement in the caper, his car also gets progressively more
beaten up, until finally, in the parking lot outside his regular bowling alley,
the nihilists have lit the whole thing on fire.
Along with positioning the analyst as the symbolic support for the anal-
ysand’s strife-laden ego, however, Lacan argues that the analysand’s ambivalent
demands also serve to sustain his or her desire, by paradoxically articulating

and defending the lack that they obfuscate. In this regard, the Dude also
provides support for Lacan’s further contention that the locus of resistance
in psychoanalysis lies not with the analysand, as one might expect, but rather
with the analyst. “Desire,” Lacan contends, “is the force-element, the inertia,
that lies behind what is formulated at first, in the discourse of the patient, as
demand, namely the transference” (Lacan, 1998; 235). While the analysand’s
appeal to the analyst implicitly denies the constitutive lack of desire by insist-
ing that the Other must want something, at the same time, it thus registers
the force of this lack as the source of the conflict that it seeks to assuage.
By this same token, the analysand’s aggression also registers the analysand’s
rightful refusal to be satisfied by the solutions that the analyst offers to his
or her suffering. Along with authorizing the analyst to articulate what the
Other wants, the analysand’s appeal for help thus situates the analyst at the
paradoxically fortuitous locus of, what Lacan calls, “an absolute point of
no knowledge” (Lacan, 1998; 253). While presented with the temptation
to answer the analysand’s demands, as the symbolic authority in the fantasy
that organizes his or her suffering, the analyst simultaneously embodies the
lack of castration that institutes and sustains the metonymy of the analysand’s
desire in the pursuit of the question concerning his or her want-to-be. With
his rethinking of the transference, Lacan accordingly conceives psychoanalysis
as a process in which the analysand articulates the symbolic presuppositions
that inform the imaginary ideals in his or her strife-laden ego, renewing the
metonymy of desire and more fully assuming the constitutive lack of castra-
tion. As the locus of symbolic negativity in the analytic exchange, it thus
falls to the analyst to hold open this lack in the analysand’s demand. And,
while the analyst might be inclined to scorn the analysand for the moral
cowardice inherent in denying the limiting conditions of his or her experi-
ence, Lacan argues that insofar as the analysand’s desire already is operative
in the appeal for the analyst’s help, any resistance to its further elaboration
must be understood, to the contrary, as symptomatic of the analyst’s own
sympathetic identification with the analysand’s suffering in the pretense to
being able provide an answer to what the Other wants.
Accordingly, when assuming responsibility for the intersecting demands
placed upon him, the Dude does more to sustain than to solve the con-
spiracy surrounding the kidnapping and the missing ransom. And he suc-
ceeds in finally resolving the case, by contrast, when he acknowledges his
mistake in imagining that these demands could be answered at all. After
Maude seduces him, the Dude gets up to fix himself a white Russian, and
reassures her, “I’m very fucking close to your father’s money.” But Maude
corrects him, “I keep telling you, it’s the foundation’s money. Father doesn’t
have any.” Surprised, the Dude questions her, “What are you talking about?
He’s fucking loaded.” She explains, “No, no, the wealth was all mother’s.”
But the Dude protests, “Well, he runs stuff.” She continues, “We did let him
run one of the companies, but he didn’t do very well at it . . . No, he helps
administer the charities now; and I give him a reasonable allowance. He
has no money of his own. I know how he likes to present himself. Father’s
weakness is vanity. Hence the slut.” Mixing his cocktail, the Dude reflects,
“So, your father. Oh yeah, I get it. Yeah, yeah, my thinking about this case
had become very uptight. Your father.” As he later explains to Walter, “The
briefcase was fucking empty, man. The asshole was hoping they would kill
her. You threw out a ringer for a ringer.”
Despite the fact that Maude already had told him that the money was
taken from their family charity, the Dude never imagined that the briefcase
was empty or doubted Lebowski’s correlative pretense to accomplishment.
As the basis for his pivotal contribution to the whole caper, the Dude thus
betrays a tacit sympathetic identification with the senior Jeffrey Lebowski,
from whom he otherwise consistently dissociates himself. As an echo of his
exchange with Jackie Treehorn’s goons at the outset of the film, when the
older man refers to him as Mr. Lebowski, the Dude protests, “I am not Mr.
Lebowski. You are Mr. Lebowski. I’m the Dude, so that’s what you call me,
you know? That, or uh, his Dudeness, or Duder, or El Duderino, if you’re
not into the whole brevity thing.” When Lebowski proceeds to point out
that one doesn’t go looking for a job, dressed like he is, on a weekday, the
Dude replies with stoned sarcasm, “Is this a . . . what day is this?” While the
Dude sets himself off against Lebowski, precisely in this way, he evidences
an implicit identification with the older man, as the point of opposition to
his contrary, countercultural stance. And, when assuming responsibility to
recover the missing ransom, the Dude reveals that, in his very calculated
indifference, he pays more credence to the senior Lebowski’s reified sense
of responsibility than he admits. Of course, the Dude and his buddy failed
to make the payoff and then let Lebowski’s briefcase get stolen by some
kid who took the Dude’s car for a joy ride (an utterly stupid mistake that
might, in fact, better be understood as a classic Freudian slip). But, insofar as
there never was any money to lose, they didn’t actually do anything wrong.
All too consistently with Lebowski’s disdainful insults, however, the Dude
concludes that there must be money in the briefcase, since he’s sure that he
lost it, and he claims to have privileged insight into the case not because he
actually knows anything, but rather because, in his desire to redress his own
sense of failure, he believes that he should.
By recognizing his overestimation of the senior Lebowski and coming

to terms with his own conflicted sense of responsibility, the Dude succeeds
in resolving the caper, not by finally retrieving the missing treasure and so
realizing the expertise that he had claimed but rather by relinquishing his
assumption that there is any treasure to be found, solving the case by dissolv-
ing it: untangling the various strands in “old Duder’s head” by addressing the
conviction that had compelled him to hold them together. Discerning the
emptiness of the whole escapade is not, however, without its effects. Walter
and the Dude drive to the “Big” Lebowski’s house. Of course, given their
anti-naturalism, the Coens do not present the revelation of his self-deception
as a psychological drama of personal transformation. True to form, however,
they hyperbolically stage the destitution of Lebowski’s ego as correlative to
the Dude’s fall from his position as the subject supposed to know. As the
Dude confronts Lebowski with his lies, Walter becomes convinced that the
con artist is faking his handicap, pulls him up out of his wheelchair, and
leaves him crying on the ground. Despite his phony pretenses, the old man
isn’t faking his lack.
The Vacuous Truth
In Derrida’s most sustained engagement with Lacan’s thinking, he takes issue

with the reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter,”
which Lacan formulated in the first years of his public seminar and later
included, in transcript form, as the opening essay in his Écrits. In his analysis
of the story, Lacan counters the reduction of psychoanalytic literary criti-
cism to the semantic interpretation of texts on the basis of their authors’ life
experiences. Instead, he reads Poe’s tale syntactically, in terms of the characters
rotating positions in relationship to the eponymous “letter.” While analyz-
ing Poe’s story, Lacan thus works simultaneously to elaborate his concepts
of subjectivity and psychoanalysis as themselves irreducible to biographical
narratives and rather best understood structurally in light of the primacy of
the signifier.
As one might anticipate, Derrida is not unsympathetic to Lacan’s proj-
ect. Resisting the reduction of significance to semantics and reading texts
rather in terms of the formal play of signifiers is also integral to his philo-
sophical project. However, in keeping with his criticism of structuralism
generally, Derrida contends that Lacan conceives the story’s symbolic network
as an autonomous system, which neutralizes the signifier’s undecidability and
collapses into a paradoxical, second-order semantics of the symbol. He writes,
“Missing here [is] an elaboration of the problem of the frame, the signature,
and the parergon. This lack permits the scene of the signifier to be recon-
structed into a signified (a process always inevitable in the logic of the sign),
permits writing to be reconstructed into the written, the text into discourse,
and more precisely into an ‘inter-subjective’ dialogue”6 (Derrida, 1987; 432).
Insofar as Lacan purports to explain the significance of Poe’s story strictly
in terms of the syntax of the letter, Derrida contends that he effaces the
opposition between form and content in the constitution of meaning. While
signification refuses reduction to the semantics of biographical narrative, the
structure of texts cannot be understood altogether independently from their
genetic development. While signifiers are not grounded on signified inten-
tions, they nevertheless presuppose them in their constitution as linguistic
marks. And, insofar as Lacan fails to register this further complication in the
constitution of meaning, Derrida contends that he conceives the symbolic
network in Poe’s story as a closed system, which paradoxically contains its
own signified, as a study in “the truth of truth” (Derrida, 1987; 426). Der-
rida writes, “Formalism and hermeneutic semanticism always support one
another: question of the frame” (Derrida, 1987; 432).
Abstracting from his reading of Poe, Derrida’s argument might be
distilled to a critique of Lacan’s concept of the symbolic phallus. Rather
than naïvely dismissing it for asserting paternal authority as a metaphysical
principle, Derrida affirms Lacan’s notion of the phallus as the signifier of a
lack, which institutes and sustains symbolic exchange as irreducible to any
such substance. Precisely in this way, however, Derrida argues that Lacan’s
concept of the symbolic phallus functions as a “transcendental signifier,”
which grounds and authorizes meaning, in its very differential underde-
termination of experience (Derrida, 1987; 465). He quotes Lacan on the
materiality of the signifier,
For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature

symbol only of an absence. Which is why we cannot say of the
purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be in
a particular place but that unlike them it will be and not be
where it is, wherever it goes. . . . For it can literally be said that
something is missing from its place only of what can change it:
the symbolic. (Quoted in Derrida, 1987; 424–425)
According to Derrida, Lacan paradoxically regulates the signifier’s dissemina-

tion, precisely by explaining the phallus solely as the symbol of a lack. In the
very purity of its negativity, he argues, the differential underdetermination
of the symbolic stands too categorically opposed to the imaginary reduc-

tion of difference to identity and so itself collapses into the self-presence of
a closed circuit. Derrida writes, “The contour of this hole is determinable,
and it magnetizes the entire itinerary of the detour which leads from hole
to hole, from the hole to itself, and which therefore has a circular form”
(Derrida, 1987; 437).
When inaugurating the subject’s desire, the absence confronted as the
Other’s demand sets the subject on a course for which it simultaneously
serves as the end. The assumption of castration is the arrival at this telos, which
sublates the desire of the (m)Other in the symbolic phallus. As manifested
in dreams, of course, the subject never entirely assumes responsibility for
its castration, instead remaining divided between demand and desire, having
assumed a debt (for something it didn’t do) that must be paid (with some-
thing it doesn’t have). Nevertheless, Derrida contends, the phallic circum-
scription of lack provides a balance for this psychical accounting. He writes,
On cannot define the “hermeneutical circle,” along with all the

conceptual parts of its system, more rigorously or more faithfully.
It includes all the circles that we are pointing out here, in their
Platonic, Hegelian, and Heideggerian tradition, and in the most
philosophical sense of responsibility: to acquit oneself adequately
of that which one owes. (Derrida, 1987; 474)
While repudiating the purported self-identity of the imaginary ego, accord-

ing to Derrida, Lacan thus preserves and restores the subject’s self-presence
in the propriety of symbolic castration—as the true and proper relationship
to the signifier’s differential underdetermination—and in the closed circuit of
the trajectory that it circumscribes. And he discerns a similar circularity in
the relationship between the scientific novelty of his structuralism and the
philosophical tradition from which he purportedly departs, subverting the
metaphysical concept of the subject as substance, only to refind it, indirectly,
in the closure of the symbolic order.
Insofar as Lacan’s work of the 1950s finds support in the Coen Brothers’
films, it thus opens them up to a new line of criticism. Again, the Coens’
evidence a cynical detachment from their characters and the dramas they stage.
However, in stark contrast to both the arguments typically leveled by the
Coens’ detractors and the conclusions drawn at the end of the preceding
chapter, the Coens’ cynicism appears to be symptomatic of the determinacy
rather than the indeterminacy of the critical negativity in their films, constitut-
ing their narratives as closed hermeneutical circles and situating the audience
at a safe remove from their motivating conflicts. In The Big Lebowski, this
hermeneutical closure is obvious. The Dude’s involvement in the kidnapping
caper hinges explicitly on a misunderstanding concerning his surname, Leb-
owski, as the Name of the Father. While the Dude roams aimlessly through
Los Angeles, the teleology in his motivating conflicts is thus well defined. In
fact, the solution to the caper lies with him the whole time. Although it is
not therefore inevitable that he will arrive at the appointed destination, the
Dude’s brief romantic encounter with Maude opens up the possibility of
his doing so. After they make love, Maude tells the Dude that she hopes to
have a child. He responds aghast, spitting out his cocktail. But Maude relieves
the Dude’s panic, by explaining that she doesn’t want the child’s father to
be involved in its upbringing. That is, she wants the Dude to be a father
in name alone. And, in light of Maude’s reassurance, the Dude recognizes his
misconception of her father and resolves the caper, by assuming the lack that
informs his own, pivotal role in holding it together.
Although the conspiracy in Burn After Reading is even more wildly
haphazard, the Coens similarly close the circuit of its symbolic network by
decisively delimiting its groundless underdetermination. When Linda and
Chad take Ozzie’s files to the Russian embassy, the CIA mole there reports
back to Ozzie’s former superior, Palmer, who relays the ever more “compli-
cated” situation to his own boss (J. K. Simmons). From the outset, the chief
is dumbfounded by the story. “The Russians?” he initially queries; and, when
Palmer spells out the network of intersecting players, he goes on to reflect, “So
we don’t really know what anyone is after?” The comment speaks directly to
the audience, remarking on the drama of the film and situating the chief in
the position of the spectator. At the end of their meeting, he literally directs
Palmer (and us) to “keep an eye on everyone and see what they do,” adding
“and report back to me, when . . .” he pauses, “when, um, it makes sense.”
In the film’s final scene, Palmer provides his report. While Ozzie was
murdering Ted, he explains, the CIA agent assigned to trail him felt obliged to
step in and shoot Ozzie. Eager to cover any traces of the whole “cluster-fuck,”
the chief responds, “Good. Great. Is he dead?” Unfortunately, Palmer explains,
Ozzie is only in a coma; but the doctors are sure that he has no higher
brain function. With Ted dead, Chad’s body disposed of, Harry on his way to
Venezuela, and Ozzie in a coma, it seems that all the loose ends have been
tied up. But Palmer adds, “Well, sir, there is . . . uh . . . there is, the wom-
an . . . the gym woman, Linda Litzke.” The chief curses, prompting Palmer
to explain that “[s]he’s willing to play ball, if we pay for . . . um . . . some,
I know this sounds odd, some surgeries that she wants . . . cosmetic surgery.
She says she’ll sit on everything.” The chief commands, “Pay it!”
With the case resolved, the chief takes a deep breath and reflects,
“Jesus fucking Christ. What did we learn here, Palmer?” The question again
is directed at the audience, remarking on the senseless absurdity of the film.
Grasping at clichés, the chief answers himself, “I guess we learned not to do
it again,” admittedly adding, “although I’d be fucked to know what we did.”
He closes the case file on his desk, again declaring, “Jesus fucking Christ,”
and the camera pans straight up from the surface of the desk, through the
ceiling, above the roof, and through the atmosphere, up to the vantage of
the spy satellite with which the film began.
The chief ’s ridiculous attempt to draw lessons from the episode empha-
sizes its irrationality, and, of course, he right! However, when calling attention
to the conspiracy’s meaninglessness, the chief also attests to its implicit truth.
Although none of the film’s central characters ever discerns the constitutive
lack in their own conflicted motivations, and so realizes its inherent potential
for transformation, their narcissism and paranoia nevertheless make it evident.
And from the vantage of his “absolute point of no knowledge” at least calls
it to the attention of the audience. In light of the lessons proffered more
or less explicitly in these movies, the force of the Coen Brothers’ films thus
appears to be roughly consistent with the postmodernist defense of their
critical normativity, as an ethics of finitude that commends assuming responsi-
bility for the limiting conditions of one’s place in the world, while satirically
acknowledging the correlative propensity to deny this underdetermination
and set oneself up for disappointment, if not disaster. In the closing of The
Big Lebowski, the Stranger accordingly celebrates the Dude as almost mes-
sianic. “The Dude abides,” he reflects, “I don’t know about you, but I take
comfort in that. It’s good knowing that he’s out there, the Dude, takin’ her
easy for all us sinners.”
As the basis for drawing this lesson, however, the critical negativity
in these films appears to be not radically aporetic but rather determinately
defined by the lack of symbolic castration, potentially providing a comple-
mentary corrective to the postmodernist defense of the Coens’ oeuvre. But
this very determinate negativity instead provides novel confirmation of the
contrary accusation of cynical detachment. If Burn After Reading offers a clear
moral lesson, the central characters are nevertheless treated solely as objects
of ridicule, and, in The Big Lebowski, the Dude’s cool, if nonetheless addled,
attitude is sustained through its opposition to the pretentious self-importance
of all the other characters. Insofar as the critical horizon of this ethics of
finitude is clearly delimited, it seems, the audience’s point of entry into the
characters’ problems simultaneously provides a vantage for holding them at a
distance as objects of moral disdain. While the existentialist themes explored
in the preceding chapter devolved into the critical indeterminacy that typi-
cally informs the accusation of cynical detachment leveled against the Coens,
in light of Lacan’s work of the 1950s, the Coens’ cynicism appears to be
symptomatic of the all too determinate delimitation of their critical negativity,
instead calling for a Derridean corrective to sustain the audience’s implica-
tion in their dramas, by complicating the boundaries between presence and
absence, right and wrong, inside and out, right and wrong.
3
Jouissance, the Real
Dirty Little Secrets
I n The Man Who Wasn’t There, Ed’s melancholy alienation casts those around
him as pretentious phonies living lives devoid of meaning or genuine
satisfaction. Accordingly, when viewed from his self-conscious vantage, the
film appears to proffer the ultimately untenable existentialist lesson explored
previously. However, closer scrutiny to the texture of the movie and the
dynamics of Ed’s despair reveal the absences that riddle his world to be not
merely empty but rather rife with enjoyment. In the film’s opening sequence,
Ed’s brother-in-law Frank stands at his station in the barbershop cutting a
young boy’s hair and chattering into his ear, “But this is my point, my point
is, that these traders and trappers would come to this country and get their
pelts and gold ingots . . .” However fatuous his pretense to expertise may be,
as he spouts on to a child about early American history, Frank relishes his
prattle. Correlative to the pleasure derived by the Coens themselves when
crafting the language of their dialogue, the very of words of Frank’s blather
are marked by an almost poetic delectation: the alliteration of “traders and
trappers,” the colorful specificity of “pelts and gold ingots.” His satisfaction
does not depend upon the substance of his pronouncements. It is reflexive,
an almost autistic self-indulgence in which he takes pleasure simply in hear-
ing himself speak.
Frank himself is an overgrown child—a big baby of a man with chub-
by cheeks, pudgy fingers, and a roly-poly physique, whose posturing isn’t
merely pretentious but almost playful—albeit nonetheless obnoxious—in its
indulgent excess. At a family wedding on the outskirts of town, a child—
resembling a miniature version of Frank—comes rushing up to Ed, shouting,
105
“He’s riding Garibaldi! Uncle Frankie’s riding Garibaldi!” Surrounded by a

swarm of screaming children, Frank rounds the farmyard on the back of a
galloping, oversized pig, while swigging from a jug and swatting the swine’s
hind, until finally collapsing into the dirt. Later the children drag him by
the hands to a pie-eating contest as he feigns to protest, “Come on, kids, I
just ate lunch. I couldn’t eat another thing.” With the contestants lined up
behind a long picnic table, including Frank and six boys, a judge announces,
“Ok, kids, ready” (my emphasis) and fires off the starting gun: Frank buries
his face in a pie, snorting as he eats like a pig at a trough. On the way
home, he lies prone in the back of Ed’s car with his eyes closed and the
winning trophy clutched in his hands, mumbling deliriously to himself, “I
never want to see another blueberry pie. I never even want to hear those
words. Don’t say those words, Ed! Don’t say those words!” The pie and the
words have become indistinguishable; and, in his continued rambling, Frank
is drunk—to the point of making himself sick—on the excess of their
intoxicating enjoyment.
Similarly, if the lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider is indifferent to the
truth in the cases he takes to trial, nevertheless his sophistry isn’t merely
empty—its ecstatic! While his rhetoric might be relegated to the tools of his
trade, like Frank, he revels in his use of language. After a private detective
recounts the facts of Big Dave’s military record, Ed asks, “So?” Riedenschnei-
der retorts, “So? This could be your Dolly’s ticket out of the death house,
so!” The words pop in the vivid precision of their colloquial derision. If
persuading juries provides Reidenschneider the occasion to indulge his mag-
niloquence, the gratification he derives from it exceeds the aim of winning
cases. In both his arguments and his exchanges with Doris and Ed, he holds
forth like an actor, savoring the recitation of his lines.1 “It stinks . . . I don’t
care if it’s true or it’s not true, it stinks. You say he was being blackmailed.
By who? You don’t know. For having an affair. With who? You don’t know.
Did anyone else know? Probably not. You don’t know.” In the process, he
overtly inflates his sense of his self-importance, referring to himself in the
third person, “Freddy Riedenschneider is good, but he’s not a magician.” In
keeping with Frank, Riedenschneider’s delight in his sophistry is characteristic
of a more general self-indulgence, which the Coens initially establish again
in connection to the pleasure of eating. As Ed enters the restaurant where
they first meet, Riedenschneider’s already ordering, “Not fried, poached.
Three of ’em, two minutes. Strip steak, medium rare. Flapjacks, potatoes,
tomato juice, and plenty of hot coffee. Do you have any oysters? Bring me
a fruit cocktail while I wait.” The order is exorbitant and directly associated
with Riedenschneider’s solipsistic enjoyment of his own voice. “Look,” he
Jouissance, the Real 107
insists, “I don’t want to waste your time, so I’ll eat while we talk. Do you
mind? You don’t mind.”
If the ecstasies enjoyed by these characters are most evident in the
emptiness of their twaddle, the con artist Creighton Tolliver manifests his
in the connection between the duplicity of his con and the duplicity of
his sex. When inquiring about the prospect of investing in his venture, Ed
approaches him in his hotel room. After the two arrive at an informal agree-
ment, Tolliver pours them each a cocktail, raises a toast to Ed—whose name
at first he can’t recall—and reclines on his hotel room bed with his legs
parted wide. He downs his drink, straightens his hair, loosens his tie, and casts
a suggestive glance at Ed. Breaking the silence, Ed confronts him, “Was that
a pass?” Tolliver confirms Ed’s suspicion with a lascivious, “Maybe.” But Ed
forcefully declines the solicitation, “Boy, you’re out of line, mister.” Tolliver
sits up, “Not a problem.” Ed repeats, “Way out of line.” Tolliver reassures
him, “Right, strictly business.” The exchange is fleeting and never mentioned
again. In fact, it seems almost out of place, provoking consideration of why
it is included in the film at all. As such, it is characteristic of what critics
frequently characterize as the “quirkiness” of the Coens’ films, as an eccen-
tric, minor detail that inflects the movie as a whole with a distorting excess.
However, it also has more immediate implications for the Coens’ depiction
of Tolliver by investing the duplicity of his con with an erotic significance.
Beyond this isolated exchange, there is an obscene air about Tolliver.
When he first enters the film as a customer at the barbershop, he muscles
his way into an appointment after closing time, despite Frank’s protests to
the contrary. Ed goes to work on his hair, but Tolliver stops him, “Not so
fast brother,” reaching up to unloosen his toupee from his scalp, boasting,
“Pretty good, eh, fools even the experts. One hundred percent human hair,
handcrafted by Jacques of San Francisco.” In contrast to the proposed dry
cleaning business at the center of his con, Tolliver is greasy, even lewd, in
the excesses of his physical presence. He continues, “Yeah, it’s a nice rug.
I’m paying it down on the installment plan.” Correlative to the obnoxious
corporeality of his toupee, he speaks too openly about money, and his sub-
sequent remarks articulate the connection in his psyche between the body,
money, and sex that appears again when he attempts to seal his business deal
with Ed by making a pass. “A lot of people live with the pink exposed,” he
explains. “They say the dames think it’s sexy. But for my money, it’s just not
good grooming; and grooming, my friend, is probably the most important
thing in business . . . after personality, of course.” After his attempt to seduce
Ed fails, Tolliver reassures him that henceforth their dealings will be limited to
“strictly business.” However, the exchange establishes the contrary. In keeping
with his initial confusion of their proposed business partnership with a pro-
posed sexual partnership, not only will their dealings not be limited to “strictly
business”—since there is nothing straightforward about his con—given the
complication of erotic and financial commerce in his character, even if they
never touch, it won’t be limited either to “strictly business.”
When revealing the duplicity of Big Dave’s military machismo, Rie-
denschneider similarly describes it as a “dirty little secret.” Contrary to the
existentialist critique of das Man, in their dissemblance, the characters in the
film aren’t simply playing roles; they’re getting off on one another. Insofar as
it indeed might be thought of as a “dirty little secret,” however, the erotic
qualification Tolliver’s double-dealing isn’t therefore hidden as a truth that lies
behind appearances. His sleaziness is overt. He literally wears it not on his
sleeve, but worse, atop his bald head. While his pass at Ed perhaps comes as
a surprise, everyone in the film knows that he’s homosexual: his being “in-
the-closet” does not mean that people are unaware that he’s gay. He disavows
it, for instance, when reflecting on whether “dames” find bald men sexy; and
it leaves him vulnerable to violence and derision, as registered in his repeated
defamation as “the pansy.” However, Tolliver’s homosexuality is not therefore
veiled from appearance; to the contrary, it’s plain to see, an open secret.
While, according to Riedenschneider, Big Dave’s “dirty little secret”
concerns the fact that he spent the war sitting behind a desk in San Diego,
his stories similarly exhibit an obvious excess that would have to be consid-
ered at least hyperbolic even if he had gone to battle. As Riedenschneider
explains it to Ed, “Look chum, this is a guy, from what I understand, told
everybody he was a war hero, right—island hopping, practically liberated
the Pacific all by himself, with a knife in one hand, a gun in the other and
twenty yards of ‘Jap guts’ between his teeth.” Whether he was stationed in
San Diego or Iwo Jima, the hyperbole of Big Dave’s rhetoric is deceptive.
Beyond the facts of the matter, he lies to sustain the enjoyment of his own
narcissistic self-image. And his “dirty little secret,” too, must be understood
accordingly as an open secret, concerning not the facts of his history but
rather the excessive pleasure that he derives from his personal mythology.
At a dinner party at Ed and Doris’s home, Dave regales the party guests
with a war story, while forcefully cutting into his dinner with knife and fork
in hand and speaking with a mouth full of meat, “So the Japs had us pinned
down on Buna for something like six weeks. I gotta tell you, I thought we
had it bad, but we had supplies. The Japs were eating bugs and grubs and
thistles.” Enraptured by the story, Doris winces at the thought. “Anyhow,” he
continues, “one day . . . we find Arnie Bragg, this kid missing on recon—the
Japs had eaten the son-of-a-bitch, if you’ll pardon the . . .” Apologetically, Big
Dave defers to his wife, Anne, but then turns back to Doris, “Just a scrawny,
pimply kid, nothing to write home about; I mean, I never would have, you
know . . .” Doris laughs so hard, she can hardly keep herself from spitting
out her cocktail. Big Dave needles Anne, “So what do I say, honey. What
do I say, when I don’t like dinner? Come on, what do I say?” Anne cracks
a grimace on her otherwise frozen face, “I say, Arnie Bragg . . . again?” In
keeping with their portraits of Frank and Riedenschneider, the Coens again
emphasize the self-indulgence of Dave’s boastful speech by associating it to the
enjoyment of eating. However, the obscenity of his story gives the connection
here a particularly macabre twist. The “Jap guts” evoked in Riedenschneider’s
rhetoric return in Big Dave’s reference to cannibalism, complicating the dinner
that they are eating first with insects and brambles and then with the flesh
of dead soldiers on the battlefields of the Pacific.
Along with Big Dave’s enjoyment of his macho persona, the scene
reveals the pleasure that he derives from his affair with Doris. Given his
flirtatious attention to Doris, this talk of soldiers eating one another takes
on a sexual tenor. Doris indeed has some meat on her bones and might
be thought of as “something to write home about”—a peculiar expression
given the reference. If, in Arnie’s case, Dave “never would have . . . ,” one
surmises, in Doris’s he very well might. Although Doris and Dave are run-
ning around behind the backs of their spouses, in their inauthenticity they
aren’t therefore living merely empty lives. To the contrary, they are having
a blast. When introducing her at the outset of the film, Ed reduces Doris’s
pleasure in life to mere objectivism and instrumentalization, depicting her
as an accountant who likes to know where things stand and a consumer
suckered by the lure of her ten percent employee discount at the department
store. However, Doris exudes a sensuality that Ed seems unable to acknowl-
edge. As he describes her in these reductive terms, Doris preens in front of
her bedroom mirror, accentuating the curves of her figure in only a tight,
white slip. She pulls the hem of the slip down over her ass, sits on the bed
with her long legs crossed, and adjusts her bra. After opening a box, wrapped
with a ribbon and filled with tissue paper, she pulls a fine stocking over her
delicate foot, adorns herself with makeup and earrings, and spays perfume
onto her neck. Despite Ed’s despondent insistence on the banality of her
existence, Doris appears to be full of sensual anticipation, as if dressing for a
date—perhaps ultimately with Big Dave. And, in the closing of the sequence,
when they’re shown at church on a Tuesday night, there’s something ecstatic,
even orgasmic—albeit no less ridiculous—about the shuttering excitement
that overtakes Doris when she stands up from the table and shouts at the top
of her lungs, “Bingo!” Doris is drunk with enjoyment; in fact, she’s drunk
throughout most of the film, from the opening dinner party with Big Dave
and Anne to the bender at the wedding on the outskirts of town, which
leaves her unconscious during Big Dave’s murder. If, as argued earlier, Doris
is absent from her own life, in this instance, literally, she’s intoxicated to the
point of having passed out.
The Sublime Ass of Impossible Enjoyment
The voids depicted in Intolerable Cruelty similarly resonate with an excessive

enjoyment. Setting the stage for the film’s romantic comedy, in an early scene,
Miles represents a husband in divorce proceedings. His wife is on the stand,
being questioned by her lawyer (George Ives—who’s always hilarious!). “Now
Mrs. Gutman,” he prompts her, “you testified that you were your husband’s
sexual slave for thirty-six years of marriage.” Mrs. Gutman (Judith Drake) is
a plump, older woman, with big, round glasses, a broad face, graying hair,
and an anxious demeanor. While her lawyer’s rhetoric evokes the existential-
ist critique of objectivism, by depicting marriage as inherently exploitative,
he’s literally referring to sadomasochistic sexual rituals, incongruous with her
conservative, matronly appearance. He continues, “How would you describe
your husband’s sexual proclivities?”
“Well,” she explains, “at first he was a very gentle and tender lover.
But then he became more and more fixated . . .” As the scene proceeds, the
details of their sex life become progressively more graphic. “These encounters
were videotaped. Sometimes there would be a gizmo.” With absurdly formal
restraint, her lawyer prods her further, “A gizmo?” She explains, “He had a
device he called the Intruder. It was something he had the engineers at the
factory design. And then he had a prototype built out of parts from our
vacuum cleaner.” In response to her lawyer’s acknowledgment, “I see,” Mrs.
Gutman complains, “So the vacuum cleaner wasn’t available to me for several
months.” Sympathetically, her lawyer affirms, “Several months without the
appliance.” The scene points beyond the film’s apparent critique of modern
marriage as an institution based upon the reciprocal instrumentalization of
men and women to satisfy their natural needs for material support and sexual
gratification. The Gutmans’ marriage provided a framework for their enjoy-
ment in all of its transgressive excess. With the dissolution of their union,
those ecstasies are suffered in the courtroom instead in their mutual anxiety
and embarrassment.
As Miles complains to his assistant Wrigley that life has lost meaning
for him, Mr. Gutman sits between them with a distressed look on his round,
boyish face, wincing as he helplessly listens to his wife’s testimony. Beyond

threatening to deprive him of financial assets, she’s making public the indul-
gences of his fantasy life. He hides his face in his hands, furrows his brow,
and wipes the sweat off his fat neck. His wife’s recollection of scenarios
that previously racked his body with pleasure now causes him a contrary,
but not altogether unrelated, physical discomfort, and the desperation of his
countenance indirectly evokes the intensity of his earlier enjoyment as simi-
larly visceral, overwhelming, and ultimately absurd. At one point, he turns to
Miles, as if entreating him to protect him for her testimony, in hopes perhaps
ultimately that the legal proceedings will relieve his anxiety, by relegating
his enjoyment of those scenarios again to their place within the marriage,
if only in the past. When Miles gets the opportunity to cross-examine Mrs.
Gutman, in turn, he begins, “Do you know a man named David Gonzalez?”
She confirms, “Well, he’s the tennis pro at the club.” Miles reflects, “ ‘The
tennis pro’? Then why are your letters addressed to him, ‘Dear David and
Goliath?’ ” With the dissolution of the Gutmans’ marriage, it seems, even
the indiscretion of her desire for another man has been cut loose from
its moorings, plaguing her now as it floats freely in its unbounded excess.
And, despite their opposition to one another in the calculative, cool, and
indifferently formal proceedings, Mr. and Mrs. Gutman look as though they
might seek comfort from the reciprocal disclosure of their enjoyment in the
familiarity of each other’s embrace.
Of course, reading the absence in Intolerable Cruelty as rife with enjoy-
ment risks confounding this line of argument with simply affirming the
consumerism it depicts. However, only moralistic piety could lead one to
dismiss the opulence in the film as merely banal: a vain, memento mori in
the classical Christian tradition. The Southern California setting overflows
with luxury goods; and, while the mansions, sports cars, and high fashion,
fought over by the feuding couples, indeed embody the emptiness of their
objectivism, nevertheless, along with the charming good looks of Catherine
Zeta-Jones and George Clooney, they are integral to the film’s visual pleasure.
Accommodating this apparent contradiction thus requires recognizing that
the enjoyment provided by the depictions of opulent wealth in the film lies
not in their immediate gratification as objects of consumption but rather
in the excess that also invests them with humor: as never enough and so
implicitly deficient in their very extravagance.
In the moment of his death, for instance, Marylin’s first husband, Rex
Rexroth, who is sexually fixated on trains, bounces on a big bed with six
nubile, young women wearing matching white teddies, garter belts, and engi-
neer’s caps. While films of steam engines project onto a screen behind them
from the headlamp of a full-scale replica of a locomotive on the opposite wall,

Rexroth leads them in a call-and-response rendition of “I’ve Been Work-
ing on the Railroad,” as he, too, bounces on the mattress, wearing only his
underwear and a conductor’s hat. After he seizes up with a heart attack, the
women continue to jump and shout, “toot-toot!” until finally they come to
a halt, leaning over him in their lacey undergarments as he lies dead on the
bed. One of them asks, with the high-pitched squeak of Betty Boop, “What’s
the matter, Rexie?” If the pleasure of the scene appears all to immediate in
its objectification of the women’s bodies, its enjoyment is marked by the
absurd excess of Rexroth’s staging of his fantasy. If one of these women alone
won’t satisfy his desire, neither will six, seven, eight, nine. No matter how
big he builds his imaginary locomotive, it won’t do justice to his excitement.
As registered precisely in the exorbitance of his obscenely literal orchestra-
tion of his reverie, the object of his fantasy remains elusive—an impossible
object, irreducible to any merely instrumental gratification. Confirming this
excessive character of his enjoyment, the stimulation of the scenario does
not in fact provide Rexroth with the pleasure of satisfaction, which implies
homeostatic regulation; instead, it overwhelms him in the paroxysms of a
seizure that, in its obvious, absurd, and ultimately disappointing resemblance
to an orgasm, leads to more than just his “little death.”
As they sit beside the pool of their country club, Marylin’s “lady
friends” exhibit a similar tendency. Along with the luxuries they list when
attempting to schedule another get-together, in their discussion of men and
marital relationships, they express a seemingly insatiable appetite for material
acquisition. When Marylin identifies Miles as her husband’s divorce attorney,
belittling him as Rexroth’s “schnauzer,” her friends protest, “Miles Massey of
Massey Meyerson . . . he’s no schnauzer. He got Phyllis Rumsey that cute
little island of George’s.” Beyond weekend getaways and injections of butt
fat, these ladies traffic in small landmasses. Their appetites are sublime in their
extravagance. However, when Marylin’s friends subsequently push her to date
a thrice divorced, wealthy Scandinavian, whom they describe as “tuna,” she
declines the opportunity, insisting that she’s not going to begin seeing anyone
else until she’s done “nailing Rex’s ass.” In response specifically to her best
friend, Sarah Sorkin, she protests, “Sarah, one husband at a time.” If Marylin’s
restraint might thus seem antithetical to the excesses of her husband, who
explicitly enjoys multiple women at once, to the contrary, it attests only to
the fact that her indulgence has a different temporal structure. These women
are serial divorcées. Sarah’s full name is Sarah Battista-O’Flanagan-Sorkin. If
they take their husbands one at a time, their enjoyment of them is no less
excessive than Rexroth’s train engine orgy. As a fundamental condition of
their very relationship to the institution of marriage, they are dissatisfied:

always needing more, another, again.
Anxiety Is Not without an Object
The enjoyment radiating from the absences in the Coens’ films calls for
reconsideration of their depictions of anxiety, as what Heidegger explains as
coming from nowhere and concerning nothing. In his work of the 1950s,
Lacan follows Heidegger in conceiving anxiety as distinguished from fear by
its lack of an object. However, in his 1962–1963 Seminar X: Anxiety, Lacan
scathingly repudiates his earlier position. He writes,
Anxiety, we have always been taught, is a fear without an object.

A chant in which, we could say here, another discourse already
announces itself, a chant which however scientific it may be is
close to that of the child who reassures himself. For the truth
that I am enunciating for you, I formulate in the following way:
“[Anxiety] is not without an object.” (Lacan, Sem. X; 30.1.63)
What does Lacan mean in the peculiar use of this double-negative, “not
without an object?” How does he accordingly rethink the absence in anxiety?
And how does Lacan’s revision of his critical theory redefine the opposition
between psychoanalysis and deconstruction?
In contradistinction to his original theory of the narcissistic aggres-
sion of the mirror stage, Lacan’s reformulation of the concept of Oedipal
conflict in terms of the symbolic sundering of the subject gives his critical
theory a newfound coherence and enables him to account specifically for
the efficacy of the analytic exchange as a “talking cure.” Clinically, however,
Lacan confronted a problem that required him to reconsider the limits of his
linguisticism. Despite the seemingly exhaustive interpretation of his patients’
symptoms, his analysands too often remained enthralled to their suffering.
As an immediate implication of this problem, Lacan thus revised his con-
cept of the symbolic phallus as too purely negative in its determination of
unconscious conflict. The narcissistic identification at the heart of his patients’
symptoms could no longer be conceived merely as misconstruing the con-
stitutive lack in the Other’s desire, as an imaginary appeal for something
actual. To the contrary, Lacan came to see the symbolic and the imaginary
as irreducibly complicated, and he conceived this complication as evidence
of the symbolic order’s fundamental incoherence.
When critically revising his theory, Lacan’s thinking thus develops along
lines consistent with the arguments that Derrida levels against him in “The
Facteur of Truth”; and he brings the conceptual logic of his theory into line
with Derrida’s critique of the “metaphysics of presence.” However, the irre-
ducible mutual inclusion of the symbolic and the imaginary does not itself
account for the persistent suffering of Lacan’s patients. As the precipitate for
revising the logic of his concepts, Lacan rather discerns that what sustains the
narcissistic attachment in neurotic symptoms is a conflicted satisfaction for which
his original theory of need, demand, and desire fails to account. Accordingly,
as the basis for rethinking the delimitation of absence in his earlier theory,
Lacan first takes issue with its formal negativity and what, in his early essay
on Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, he had identified in existential phenom-
enology as the problem of idealism. And, rather than merely radicalizing his
critique of the objectivist reduction of difference to identity, Lacan reasserts
the material recalcitrance of the Freudian lost object, insisting, in answer
to the suggestion that, for psychoanalysis, life is but a dream: “No praxis is
more oriented towards that which, at the heart of experience, is the kernel
of the Real” (Lacan, 1998; 53).
Unbearable Enjoyment
In English, the French word jouissance translates simply as “enjoyment,”

and, in common parlance, it has associations with orgasm, which Lacan does
not altogether disavow (although he conceives “cumming” as more anxious
than commonly understood). However, contrary to the implications of these
standard correlates, jouissance exceeds the opposition between pleasure and
displeasure that Freud originally conceives as regulating psychical life. Indeed,
Lacan postulates it as “beyond the pleasure-principle” in order to account for,
what Freud, too, comes to see as, the disturbing excitation that both exceeds
and requires its homeostatic regulation. At the same time, however, jouissance
never manifests itself directly. In fact, it only exists as this aberration in the
economy of pleasure and displeasure, necessary to account for the conflicted
satisfaction in neurotic suffering. The classic paradigm of jouissance is thus the
distorted grimace that appears on the face of Freud’s analysand, the “Rat
Man,” when he describes his fear that, if he does not perform his obses-
sional rituals, his dead father and his betrothed will be subjected to a torture
that he has heard rumors about, in which rats are driven up the victim’s
anus. As a gratification in repulsive horror, or rather, a horrified repulsion in
gratification, jouissance thus amounts to a paradoxical pleasure-in-displeasure;
and, in this way, it also accounts for what Freud posits as the self-destructive
tendency in this “beyond.” In fact, it is perhaps best understood as a hypo-
thetical frenzy in which the subject succumbs to the unbearable ecstasy of an
overwhelming enjoyment. As destructive, it entails neither simple aggression
nor the existential anticipation of being-towards-death but rather the excess
in desire that contravenes the very aspirations of desire.
In his seminar on Anxiety, Lacan first registers the force of this jouis-
sance in his own thought, indirectly, through a critique of Lévi-Strauss, to
whom he owes at least an equal debt, as he does to Saussure, in his original
appropriation of structuralism. In terms reminiscent of Derrida’s position in
“Structure, Sign, and Play,” Lacan contends that Lévi-Strauss’s theory con-
cerning the essential continuity of magic and science effectively restores the
philosophical unity of the cosmos on the basis of modern social science.
While such an account of the unity of human knowledge might seem to
promise a sense of security, by effectively purging the magical of its distinctly
compelling force, Lacan insists Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology rather provokes
resistance. Rhetorically, he asks, why are people not content to see totemism
emptied of emotional content? Why are people dissatisfied by the notion
that, since the dawning of human society in the Neolithic era, the world
has been “ordered in such a way that everything is only an insignificant
little wave on the surface of that order?” He adds, “in other words, why do
we want so much to preserve the dimension of anxiety?” (Lacan, Sem. X;
28.11.62—my emphasis).
According to Lacan, what provokes resistance to Lévi-Strauss’s anthro-
pology is the consistency and coherence of his concept of the symbolic, as
demarcating the fundamental division between nature and society. Distilling
the issue to its most basic terms, he asserts, initially the world exists as a
material given, upon which secondarily the social world develops as the
“stage of history.” The question thus arises as to what “the world is in the
Real . . . once we have referred to the stage?” (Lacan, Sem. X; 28.11.62).
Are the world and its history exhausted by what transpires upon the stage?
To the contrary, Lacan contends that the anxiety registered in opposition to
effacing the distinction between magic and science presses the issue of the
remainder left in the wake of this transition, as the source of the tension
that sustains their opposition.
While Lacan directs his critical reflections outward in relationship to
Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, he thus implicitly undertakes a revi-
sion of his own theoretical tenets. In his work of the mid-1950s, Lacan
explicitly conceives the symbolic order as, what Derrida calls, a “restricted
economy.” Emblematic of this understanding, Lacan originally explains the
symbolic phallus as a correlate of, what he calls, the Name-of-the-Father.

When first introducing the concept—in fact, in the context of a discussion
of Lévi-Strauss—Lacan writes, “It is the name of the father that we must
recognize as the basis of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of
historical time, has identified his person with the figure of the law” (Lacan,
2006; 230/278). Of course, in this appeal to the timeless universality of the
Name-of-the-Father, Lacan does not posit a substantial, philosophical first-
principle: a divine, unmoved mover, whose agency and authority govern the
world. Instead, Lacan’s concept of the Name-of-the-Father designates the
radical break with nature that institutes the social order on the basis of a
fundamental absence and so precludes any such reconciliation of man and
nature. Lacan appeals to the “name,” as distinct from the person, precisely
to emphasize the fundamentally symbolic status of the father as a meta-
phorical function whose authority rests upon its correlation with “the place
first symbolized by the operation of the mother’s absence” (Lacan, 2006;
465/557). In coining the term, Lacan furthermore plays with the homonym
in French between “Le Nom de Pere” and “Le Non de Pere.” The father
symbolizes the absence of the (m)Other in the law’s prohibition: “No.”
When more rigorously formulating the concept in his early theory of psy-
chosis, Lacan thus writes, “The attribution of procreation to the father can
only be the effect of a pure signifier, of a recognition, not of the real father,
but of what religion has taught us to invoke as the Name-of-the-Father”
(Lacan, 2006; 464/556—my emphasis). However, precisely as a concept of
radical negativity, the Name-of-the-Father indeed functions as, what Der-
rida calls, a “transcendental signifier,” defining the boundary between the
symbolic and the natural worlds, theoretically distinguishing the differential
determinations of the symbolic from the imaginary identities with which it
becomes contingently complicated, and ultimately guaranteeing the proper
functioning of the symbolic order.
Attesting to this status of the Name-of-the-Father as a “transcendental
signifier,” between his 1954–1955 Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and
the Technique of Psychoanalysis and his 1957–1958 Seminar V: The Formations
of the Unconscious, Lacan consistently maintains, “There is an Other of the
Other.” However, the following year, in his 1958–1959 Seminar VI: Desire
and Its Interpretation, Lacan argues to the contrary, “There is No Other of
the Other.” Of course, Lacan does not renounce his concept of the sym-
bolic as instituting a fundamental division in the genesis and structure of
the subject. Instead, he reconceives this division as implicated in and so
complicated by the distinctions that it simultaneously sustains. In the absence
of the Name-of-the-Father as a conceptual guarantee, the phallus is not

categorically distinguished from the other signifiers in the symbolic order.
The determination of the social order is therefore radically contingent: the
principles that, in each case, found it are fundamentally marked by their
historical specificity; and the order they institute remains conditional, a frag-
ile and ultimately fleeting organization of social relationships. Furthermore,
insofar as it originates from the order it founds, the symbolic phallus bears
the imaginary qualifications of the context from which it emerges. And the
delimitation of the symbolic order is riddled with gaps and inconsistencies,
which register the intrusion of what Lacan previously had categorically
distinguished from it as Real.
Enter the Real
According to Lacan, the reality of everyday experience—or, what we might

call, actuality—comes to be through the mediation of the symbolic and
imaginary. He writes, “The world of words creates the world of things—
things which at first run together in the hic et nunc of the all in the process
of becoming—by giving its concrete being to their essence, and its ubiquity
to what has always been” (Lacan, 2006; 228–229). Along with this sense of
the Real as actual, in his work of the 1950s, Lacan elaborates a concept of,
what he calls, Wirklichkeit. Adopted from Freud, the German word translates
into English as “reality” but also carries the significance of “efficacy.” Lacan
appeals to it in order to distinguish the “effects” of the unconscious from
immediately given empirical reality. As the reality of hysterical symptoms,
obsessional rituals, psychotic delusions, and sexual fixations, among other
things, Wirklichkeit thus designates psychical reality—the reality of fantasy—as
more real than the actual, which Lacan, at this juncture, also calls the real-
of-the-symbolic. Along with these two senses of reality, in the 1950s, Lacan
also defines the Real as the hypothetical “primordial stoff” that exists as a
noumenal substrate before and beyond the mediation of the symbolic. At
times, he complicates this account by qualifying this hypothetical substrate
of experience as material and equating it with the brute physicality of the
body, without thereby distinguishing his categories from those of biology.
However, Lacan more often emphasizes the distance of this primordial stoff
from experience, precisely to maintain the gap instituted in experience by the
sundering of the signifier and to refuse the reduction of desire to instinctual
nature. When he first formulates his theory of the three registers, Lacan
accordingly defines the Real essentially as that which “resists symbolization”

(Lacan, 1988; 66). And, insofar as he treats it at all, he does so indirectly in
opposition to his accounts of the imaginary and symbolic.
Beginning in his 1959–1960 Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, however,
Lacan contends that the subject has an originary relationship to the Real,
which manifests itself as a disruptive excess within the symbolic mediation
of experience. He writes,
[The subject] finds itself in the beginning led toward a first out-
side—an outside which, Freud tells us, has nothing to do with
that reality in which the subject will subsequently have to locate
the Qualitätzeichen, signs that tell him that he is on the right track
in his search for satisfaction. That is, something which, even prior
to the test of this search, sets up its end, goal, and aim. (Lacan,
1992; 52)
From the outset of his teaching, Lacan describes the infant as confronted
by an alien Other, which founds it as a subject and defines the fundamental
parameters of its relationship to the world. Whereas initially he conceives
this Other on the basis of the imaginary confrontation with the mirror, and
subsequently explains it in terms of the subject’s inscription in language, now,
however, he understands it first as Real, in terms of what he calls das Ding:
the Thing. “The whole progress of the subject,” he continues, “is . . . ori-
ented around the Ding as Fremde, strange, even hostile on occasion, or in
any case the first outside” (Lacan, 1992; 52).
Lacan discerns an echo of this original encounter in the horrified gasp,
“You!” Rhetorically, he asks,
What does the emission, the articulation, the sudden emergence

from out of our voice of that “You!” (Toi!) mean? A “You” that
may appear on our lips at a moment of utter helplessness, distress
or surprise in the presence of something that I will not right
off call death, but that is certainly for us an especially privileged
other—one around which our principle concerns gravitate, and
which for all that still manages to embarrass us. (Lacan, 1992; 56)
Even prior to the existential reflection, registered in the hysteric protest

“What do you want from me?” this “You!” registers the subject’s encounter
with the Other as terrifying in the sublimity of its expectations. Reflecting
on the answer given, in deference to this Other, Lacan continues,
What is this “Me!,” this “Me!” all by itself, if not a “Me!” of

apology, a “Me!” of refusal, a “Me!” that’s simply not for me?
Thus from the beginning the “I” as thrust forth in an antagonistic
movement, the “I” as defense, the “I” as primarily and above all
an “I” that refuses and denounces rather than announces, the “I”
in the isolated experience of its sudden emergence—which is
also perhaps to be considered as its original decline—this “I” is
articulated here. (Lacan, 1992; 56)
Without thereby reverting to the imaginary rivalry of the mirror stage, Lacan
thus reformulates his concept of the symbolic sundering of the subject as
riddled with a strife that is irreducible to the critical reflection engendered
by the constitutive absence of the signifier.
Doing so, Lacan does not, however, renounce his concept of language’s
role in the genesis and structure of subjectivity. While he postulates the sub-
ject’s relationship to the Real in the Other as “there from the beginning,” as
evident in the approach he takes to it through this astonished “You!” Lacan
nevertheless argues that the Real only ever appears as a disturbance in the
symbolic order. “The Thing,” he writes, “only presents itself to the extent
that it becomes word” (Lacan, 1992; 55). However, it does so paradigmati-
cally in the lacuna of a silence. While Freud contends that the infant cries
when first confronted with the Other, Lacan accordingly emphasizes the
extralinguistic dimension of this cry by arguing that “the things in question
are things insofar as they are dumb” (Lacan, 1992; 55). As exemplary of
this silence of the Thing, Lacan appeals specifically to the menacingly mute
Harpo Marx. He writes,
Is there anything that poses a question which is more present,

more pressing, more absorbing, more disruptive, more nauseating,
more calculated to thrust everything that takes place before us
into the abyss or void than the face of this Marx, that face with
its smile leaves us unclear as to whether it signifies the most
extreme perversity or complete simplicity. (Lacan, 1992; 55)
While Harpo’s silence depends on the word, insofar as it only appears as a

disturbance in the field held open by linguistic exchange, it interrupts the
symbolic from a point in language that is irreducible to language, as an idi-
ocy that betrays the ecstasy of his jouissance.
According to Lacan, the Thing does not therefore exist as immedi-
ately given, either in actuality or as a primordial stoff beyond the limits of
experience. To the contrary, he contends, “the Thing is not nothing, but

literally is not. It is characterized by its absence, its strangeness” (Lacan, 1992;
63). Alienation from the Real is a condition of the actual, which must be
posited in order to account for the jouissance in neurotic suffering and the
divisions it reveals in (or rather, as) the subject: the Real only appears—in
fact, it only exists—in the interruption of an absence. Its reality lies only in
the material recalcitrance of its disturbing effects. Žižek writes, “For Lacan,
the Real at its most radical has to be totally de-substantialized. It is not an
external thing that resists being caught in the symbolic network, but the
fissure within the symbolic network itself ” (Žižek, 2006; 72).
In his exposition of the decisive changes in Lacan’s thinking dur-
ing the late 1950s and early 1960s, Lorenzo Chiesa accordingly argues that
Lacan’s concept of the Thing marks something of an intermediary position
in his renunciation of the transcendental horizon previously guaranteed by
the Name-of-the-Father (Chiesa, 2007; 104–140). Having relinquished this
transcendental signifier, Lacan now conceives the symbolic economy of the
unconscious as corrupted by the Real that previously he supposed to lie
outside its boundaries. However, insofar as the concept of the Thing implies
the existence of a noumenal substrate, beyond the limits of the symbolic,
Chiesa argues that it betrays the persistence of the transcendentalist distinc-
tion between inside and out in Lacan’s conceptual logic. Accordingly, Chiesa
contends that Lacan’s subsequent relinquishing of the concept of the Thing
marks an advance in his thinking, through which he comes to conceive the
Real instead as an aspect of the object (a), which exists as “the remainder of
the loss of an always already lost unity . . . of something which ultimately
never existed” (Chiesa, 2007; 122).
When first conceiving the object (a) as Real, Lacan takes pains to
distinguish it from both the imaginary object of desire and correlative lack
of castration with which it intersects. With reference to both object-relations
theory and phenomenology, Lacan defines the object of desire as the object
of subjective intentionality, what Husserl calls the “noema,” which knowledge
is always necessarily about. Whereas the object of intentionality lies “out in
front” of the subject, Lacan contends that the Real object (a) lies “behind
desire” (Lacan, Sem. X; 16.1.63). Rather than the referent of the subject’s
intention, the exteriority of the object (a) precedes and conditions the very
distinction between inside and outside, integral to the subject’s emergence.
Accordingly, Lacan defines it as the object cause of desire. He writes, “What
has to be introduced here to resolve this impasse, this riddle, is the notion
of an outside before a certain interiorisation, of the outside which is situated
here, (a), before the subject at the locus of the Other, grasps himself . . . in
this specular form, which introduces for him the distinction between me
and not-me” (Lacan, Sem. X; 16.1.63).
While Lacan ultimately explains it as an algebraic matheme without
analogy in experience, the letter “a” in his concept of the object (a) derives
originally from the French word autre. Lacan first uses it as a formulaic term
when schematizing his fourfold theory of the unconscious as another scene,
specifically to denote the particular, imaginary other identified with the ego,
in the intersubjective context established by a prior identification with an
intrasubjective symbolic Other (A). In its specifically specular manifestation,
which he subsequently distinguishes as i(a), the “a” thus formalizes the gestalt
of the mirror image as situated in the absence engendered by the sunder-
ing of the signifier. However, now, in keeping with his critique of, what he
called, “the stage of history” in Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Lacan
conceives this staging of the unconscious in fantasy as interrupted by the
Real, from which it simultaneously alienates the subject. To do so, he returns
to the scene of the infant held before the mirror in the arms of its (m)Other.
In the context of a conversation of the experience of depersonalization in
psychosis, he argues that the “non-recognition of the specular image” attests
to the fact that “what is seen in the mirror is [so] anxiety-provoking [it]
cannot be proposed to the recognition of the Other.” He continues,
The infant is not able to turn his head, in accordance with this
movement which I described to you as familiar toward this Other,
this witness, this adult who is there behind him, to communicate
his smile to her, the manifestation of his jubilation about some-
thing which makes him communicate with the specular image,
that another relationship is established of which he is too captive
for this movement to be possible; here the purely dual relationship
dispossesses . . . the subject of this relationship to the big Other.
(Lacan, Sem. X; 23.1.63)
Having previously subordinated the imaginary confrontation with the mirror

to the subject’s symbolic inscription, Lacan thus asserts the primacy of the
Real in this encounter as irreducible to—even an impasse in—the subject’s
relationship to the symbolic.
While the Real object (a) only exists as a remainder in the symbolic,
contrary to the all-too-common assumption, it is not therefore a remain-
der of the symbolic. To make the point, Lacan postulates a cut in the Real
that is logically prior to and different from the cut of symbolic castration.
Emphasizing the distinction, he contrasts this cut to the infant’s subsequent
separation from its mother in weaning, by comparing it instead to separation

from the enveloping placenta that sustained it in utero. “The cut involved,”
he contends, “is not that between the child and the mother” (Lacan, Sem.
X; 23.1.63). This later division registers the intervention of the father inso-
far as he qualifies the mother’s coming and going as originarily symbolic.
However, when separating from the placenta, the infant undergoes a division
from itself, or rather from its immersion in the formlessness of organic life,
which precedes and conditions this symbolic sundering. Lacan writes, “In
order to have a complete notion of this pre-specular totality which is [the
object (a)], you have to consider these envelopes as elements of the body”
(Lacan, Sem. X; 23.1.63). While the placenta is conjoined to the mother, Lacan
emphasizes its intermediary status as a parasite that does not in fact belong
to her body. The Oedipal conflicts in the subject’s symbolic inscription are
thus mapped onto the infantile organism, as already marked by this logically
prior division, and, insofar as they intersect with the organism at the breast
rather than the placenta, they do not therefore directly sublate the cut in
the Real. Instead, the sundering of the symbolic remains eccentric to this
logically prior separation, powerless to redeem the loss it institutes, and so
subject to its relentless disturbance. As a result, the object lost in the genesis
of subjectivity is not only categorically lost, it also is never entirely lost, stuck
to one’s heel with the nagging insistence of a compulsion.
Lack of Lack
Registering the force of this insistence, Lacan contends, “anxiety is not the
signal of a lack but of . . . the absence of this support of the lack” (Lacan,
Sem. X; 05.12.62). Whereas previously he explained anxiety in terms of the
subject’s confrontation with the lack of symbolic castration, Lacan now con-
ceives it as symptomatic of the excessive proximity of this remainder in the
Real, as the object of the Other’s expectations, suffered as the gratification
of a visceral excitation, before and beyond the institution of the symbolic.
While Lacan does not therefore explain anxiety on the basis of an immedi-
ately given actuality, he no longer conceives unconscious conflict as resulting
merely from an imaginary misrecognition of the Other’s constitutive lack.
As explained by his postulate of a cut in the Real, prior to the sundering
of the symbolic, the Other indeed wants something. No longer is it delimited
by the pure lack of a differential principle, whose formal negativity sustains
the metonymy of desire, holding open the, always outstanding, promise of
the possible. As a qualifying condition of its organizing principles, the Other
instead exploits the subject for its own enjoyment, reaching into its “skin”
at the very moment of its genesis as a parasite that it never will be able to
purge. Accordingly, Lacan contends,
[Anxiety is the signal of] a demand which does not concern any
need, which does not concern anything other than my very being,
namely which puts me in question—let us say that it cancels it
out: in principle it is not addressed to me as present—which is
addressed to me, if you wish, as expected which is addressed to
me much more again as lost and which in or that the Other
should be able to locate himself requests my loss. (Lacan, Sem.
X; 27.02.63)
According to Lacan, what causes anxiety is not the phenomenological under-

determination of experience, as “having no object,” but rather the imposing
presence of the Other’s jouissance, which, in the very fabric of the subject’s
constitution, threatens to engulf it as an object of enjoyment. To the con-
trary, Lacan contends, “[the] possibility of absence is what gives presence its
security” (Lacan, Sem. X; 05.12.62).
In Intolerable Cruelty, Miles’s melancholy complaint that his life has
lost all significance casts his senior partner, Herb Meyerson, as embodying
the emptiness of his own reified existence. However, Meyerson’s objectiv-
ism is by no means merely empty; instead it evidences an obscene satisfac-
tion, whose object is above all Miles. As he trepidatiously advances down
the corridor leading to his office, Meyerson bellows, “Fourteen summary
judgments sought. Thirteen granted.” He wheezes. “Eighteen movements
to void for respondent’s prejudice. Eighteen granted. Twelve court days on
the Rexroth case alone.” Phlegm in his throat makes him gurgle. “Three
hundred and twenty billable hours for paralegal services.” Registering his
growing excitement, his voice becomes more elevated. “Six hundred and
eighty billable . . . at full attorney rate.” He puts a hand to his forehead
as if overwhelmed with pleasure, cracking a smile that reveals his pointed
yellow teeth. “Eighty-five lunches charged.” He relishes the thought with
a laugh that devolves into a sputtering cough and, with his throat clicking,
pulls himself up out of his chair. Reaching forward to take Miles’s hand, he
grabs it suddenly, applauding the horrified junior partner, “Counselor, you
are the engine that drives this firm.”
Contrary to the existentialist implication, Meyerson’s office isn’t a crypt
but a corporeal cavity that lies literally in the bowels of the firm. Before the
meeting, sitting nervously in Meyerson’s outer office, Miles sifts through the
publications on the coffee table, discovering beneath several legal journals a

lifestyle magazine with a picture on the cover of an older couple, happily
sharing champagne beside a swimming pool, and the title, Living Without
Intestines! Meyerson isn’t morbid, he’s scatological. In classical Freudian terms,
his annal is anal: beyond reducing Miles’s existence to the banality of an
objectified function, he revels in the ecstasy of acquisition, cataloging the
wealth that Miles has accrued for the firm. If Miles’s existence has been
instrumentalized, his anxiety does not therefore stem from the emptiness of
his role as a functionary but rather from his having become the object of
Meyerson’s jouissance.
Similarly, in The Man Who Wasn’t There, Ed’s endless griping about the
self-indulgence of those around him betrays his experience of their ramblings
specifically as exploiting his patience. Predictably, given the time they spend
working alongside one another, his brother-in-law Frank most relentlessly
abuses Ed in this manner, directly or indirectly compelling him to assume
the position of the young boy in the barber chair, while he relishes his
pretentious posturing as an authority. Anxiously awaiting their appointment
to mortgage the barbershop, Frank condescends to Ed,
[These bankers are] just people like you and me, Ed. Remember
that, just people. They’ve got to put up a big front so that people
will trust them with their money. This is why the big lobby. But
they put their pants on one leg at a time, just like you and me.
They, too, use the toilet, Ed, in spite of appearances.
By contrast, Riedenschneider’s exploitation of Ed is not nearly so inno-

cent. If the enjoyment he derives from it transcends the aim of winning
cases, nevertheless, it cannot be divorced from the satisfaction he derives
from belittling others, manipulating juries, and fleecing his clients. Contrary
to Ed’s account, at the end of the film, the proverbial well has not simply
run dry, Riedenschneider has drained it, having swindled Ed and his in-laws
for all they are worth—as he all but admits up front is his intention. When
he and Ed first meet, Riedenschneider itemizes the cost of his services,
which include an empty room at a local hotel. He’s staying there now, but
because he’ll be traveling back and forth from Sacramento, he’s having the
hotel hold it for him in his absence. He continues, “So in addition to my
retainer, you’re paying hotel, living expenses, secretarial, private eye if we
need to make any inquiries, head-shrinker should we decide to go that way.
We’ll talk about appeals if and when.” Correlative to the extravagance of his
lunch order, the litany of expenses obviously exceeds Ed’s resources. Even
with Frank’s having mortgaged the barbershop, there is no way that they
will be able to cover the expense of having Riedenschneider pursue the case
to its end—and it seems clear that, for all intents and purposes, he has no
plan to do so. Furthermore, as attested by the inclusion of the empty room,
the list exceeds the resources necessary to defend Doris. He’s spending their
money just to spend it—for the sake of his enjoyment.
As a con artist, the exploitative nature of Tolliver’s treatment of Ed
hardly needs explanation. Before inviting Ed into his hotel room, Tolliver
snaps, “Got the dough?” In spite of the emphasis he places on the purported
importance in business of “personality,” Tolliver’s characteristic indiscretion
makes clear that he’s only interested in what he can get out of Ed. And,
later, when sealing the deal with an exchange of cash and a contract signed
on Tolliver’s bedspread, he all but announces his plan to pilfer Ed’s capital. In
his only moment of hesitation, Ed confronts him, “Say, Creighton, you’re not
gonna screw me on this?” Tolliver responds melodramatically, as if outraged
by the accusation, “Screw you? Jesus.” Of course, as evidenced by his failed
seduction of Ed, one way or another, that’s exactly what he has planned.
Most importantly, Ed suffers the enjoyment of Big Dave and Doris’s
affair as, not only incidentally but integrally, at his expense. Smoking alone
on the front porch of his home, after the dinner party with Big Dave and
Anne, Ed reflects, “Yeah, I guess Doris liked all that he-man stuff. Sometimes
I had the feeling that she and Dave were a lot closer than they let on. The
signs were all there, plain enough. Not that I was going to prance about
it, mind you.” As characteristic of his alienated disaffection, Ed apparently
suffers the affair at worst as an annoyance on par with Frank’s pretentious
prattle. After Dave comes crying to Ed about the blackmailing scheme,
unaware that he’s its perpetrator, Ed more frankly admits his hurt but still
downplays the pain the affair causes him. “In a way, I felt bad for Big Dave.
I knew that ten grand was going to pinch him where it hurt. But Doris was
two-timing me, and, I guess somewhere that pinched a little, too.” However,
the scene at the dinner party makes clear that Ed’s resentment runs far
deeper. Along with flirting suggestively with Doris, with his reference to
cannibalism among combatants, Dave seems almost to eat Ed alive. As Doris
continues to laugh uncontrollably at his joke, Dave turns to Ed, “Were you
in the service, Ed?” Given the familiarity between the two couples, he must
already know the answer, and his question seems strategically pointed. Ed
simply answers, “No, Dave, I wasn’t.” But Doris, still convulsing with hys-
terics, adds, “Ed was 4F, on account of his fallen arches.” Glaring across the
table at his wife, Ed’s rancor is conspicuous. As she continues to laugh, it’s
now unclear whether she’s laughing at Big Dave’s joke—indirectly insulting
Ed in the conspicuous excess of her adoration—or if she’s simply laughing

at Ed for his failure even to qualify physically for military service. And, in
this light, Ed suffers the affair as if he were the principal object of Doris
and Dave’s enjoyment.
As captured by the imposing jouissance in Ed’s and Miles’s anxiety, when
revising his critical theory, Lacan no longer takes the two poles of need and
desire—as presence and absence—to frame the dialectics of demand. Instead, he
conceives these dialectics in terms of the opposition between jouissance and
desire, as distinct forms of absence. Given its corporeal excess, jouissance precludes
determinate localization. While it appears only in the gaps and inconsistencies
in experience—including, paradigmatically, the self-defeating failure in Freud-
ian slips, the groundless compulsion in obsessional rituals, and the hyperbolic
exaggerations of hysteria—its absence is suffered as the insistence of an over-
whelming presence, which ultimately threatens to dissolve the boundaries of
experience. By contrast, the absence of desire is a lack, defined as such in
relationship to the symbolic phallus. While determining the absence of desire
in relationship to the presence of a symbol might seem to compromise its
distance, to the contrary, Lacan argues that the phallus first institutes and
sustains it, precisely by circumscribing its boundaries. In contradistinction to
the imposing excess of jouissance, the symbolic phallus thus makes possible
the homeostatic regulation that constitutes satisfaction and disappointment as
pleasurable and unpleasurable: not by grounding it on a self-present principle,
but rather by opening the space necessary for the wax and wane of desire.
Beyond the Undecidability Principle
Accounting for the double negative of his assertion that “anxiety is not
without an object,” Lacan’s concept of the Real of jouissance thus explains
his dismissal of Heidegger’s contrary contention as a “childish consolation.”
Insofar as he conceives anxiety as confronting Dasein only with the phenom-
enological underdetermination of experience, Heidegger dispels its visceral,
affective excitation, abstracting its dissolution of the world’s boundaries as
evidence merely of the formal negativity, which conditions any positive
determination of the actual, and denying its imposing over-proximity by
explaining it rather as symptomatic of the radically groundless withdrawal
of Dasein’s being-towards-death. At the same time, Heidegger denies the
material recalcitrance of the Real by abstracting the intractable obstacle of its
“impossibility” as evidence only of the contingency of existence, and elevat-
ing its disturbance of the actual to a guarantee of Dasein’s potentiality. Finally,
by explaining the confrontation with this phenomenological underdetermina-

tion as existentially challenging, Heidegger celebrates as ethically courageous
the assumption of lack that Lacan conceives as a reassuring source of stability.
In this regard, Heidegger presupposes the accomplishment of the fan-
tasy frame that Lacan contends mitigates the Real of jouissance, instituting
the symbolic division necessary to give order to experience and holding
open the possibility of desire. Specifically, in his theory of Dasein’s being-
towards-death, Heidegger stages the subject’s symbolic castration, nullifying
the imaginary reification of the ego in order to affirm the lack of desire
as if it were fundamental in the comforting security of Being’s differential
negativity. But how then does Lacan’s revision of his theory inform his
relationship to Derrida’s deconstruction? Is his self-criticism consistent with
the arguments that Derrida levels against him? Or does Lacan’s critique of
the contention that “anxiety has no object” extend to Derrida’s concept of
the aporetic undecidability of différance?
Somewhat surprisingly, in his existentialist reading of The Man Who
Wasn’t There, Palmer finds support for his postmodernist defense of the Coens’
oeuvre.2 Whereas the characters in the films that the Coens draw upon, like
Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, find themselves trapped
by limited economic horizons and oppressive social institutions, Palmer con-
tends that those in The Man Who Wasn’t There suffer from a “vaguer but
perhaps deadlier malaise,” the problem of nihilism, which he explains as “the
deep feeling of the age that . . . ‘like life itself, values seemed to come and
go, without pattern or reason’ ” (Palmer, 2004; 64). Drawing upon William
Graebner’s history of the 1940s as “the age of doubt,” he continues, “[t]hey
are thus typical of an era when one could ignore only with difficulty the
absolute contingency of existence” (Palmer, 2004; 65). Indeed, in the first
lines spoken after Ed’s opening voice-over, Doris’s brother Frank reflects on
the day’s headlines, “Says here that the Russians exploded an A-bomb and
there’s not a damned thing we can do about it . . . How do you like them
apples?” As paradigmatic of the catastrophes of the twentieth century, Palmer
sees the A-bomb as epitomizing the radical uncertainty in his reading of the
Coens’ movies. Describing the disasters that follow Ed’s resolve to pursue
the dry cleaning venture, he argues that his plan sets “a chain of events in
motion that he has not foreseen and cannot control. Like all of the Coens’
would-be-schemers, he finds himself unable to solve the mysteries of other
people or to contest successfully the most general rule of human experi-
ence—that something always goes wrong” (Palmer, 2004; 74).
In his analysis of the Coens’ films, Palmer thus implicitly equates Hei-
degger’s existentialism and Derrida’s deconstruction. In fact, he finds the
strongest articulation of the critical negativity for his postmodernist defense

of the Coens in his existentialist reading of The Man Who Wasn’t There. As
both a central strategy in his defense of Doris and as a way to introduce
the fact that he’s discovered that Big Dave’s military record isn’t all he pro-
claimed, Riedenschneider holds forth,
In Germany, they’ve got this guy, Fritz something or other, or

maybe it’s Werner. Anyway, he’s got this theory: you want to test
something, you know, scientifically—how the planets go around
the sun, what sun spots are made of, why the water comes out
of the tap—well, you got to look at it. But sometimes when
you look at, your looking changes it. You can’t know the reality
of what happened, or what would have happened if you hadn’t
stuck in your own god-damned schnoz. Looking at something
changes it. They call it the Uncertainty Principle. I’m sure it
sounds screwy, but even Einstein says he’s on to something. Sci-
ence. Perception. Reality. Doubt. Reasonable doubt. I’m saying,
sometimes the more you look, the less you really know. It’s a fact,
a proved fact. In a way, it’s the only fact there is.
Whereas typically Riedenschneider’s soliloquy would be dismissed as the

sophistry of a self-interested lawyer, Palmer contends that, in light of cultural
conditions of the 1940s, he articulates a truth about the modern world and,
still more fundamentally, our existential condition. He writes, “For it no
longer seems the case that lawyers like Riedenschneider are simply being
cynical when they ignore getting at the ‘truth’ of the case as they search for
an explanation that will work rhetorically, as it were, to convince jurors that
they in fact do not know what happened” (Palmer 2004; 69).
When upholding this “uncertainty principle” as the critical negativity
in his postmodernist defense of the Coen Brothers’ films, Palmer implicitly
draws an equation specifically between the aporetic undecidability of différance
in Derrida’s deconstruction and the uncertain certainty of being-towards-
death in Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. Is this connection justified?
If so, then how might it be reconciled with the apparent opposition between
the two in what Palmer also takes to be the postmodern subversion of the
film’s existential lesson?
While Derrida draws upon diverse and, at time, contradictory sources,
he is most indebted to Heidegger, who first inaugurates the project of decon-
structing the philosophical tradition in Being and Time as an integral part of
his restoration of the question of the meaning of Being. Derrida began his
career as a Husserl scholar, and his critique of the metaphysics of presence

develops out of Husserl’s critique of objectivism, and its reformulation in
Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. Beyond exhibiting strong affinities in
their respective approaches to the constitutive underdetermination of expe-
rience, Derrida’s and Heidegger’s philosophies furthermore overlap. While,
in his early work, Heidegger reasserts the ontological difference between
Being and beings through a phenomenological analysis of the structures and
dynamics of Dasein, in anticipation of Derrida’s emphasis on the differen-
tial negativity of the signifier Heidegger conceives the worldhood of the
world as a referential context and explains existence itself as hermeneutical.
On the other hand, while Derrida’s work first focuses on the differential
underdetermination of language, he attends to the constitutive absence of
writing in order to address broader considerations of the phenomenological
circumscription of context, and he conceives the aporetic undecidability of
différance as a quasi-transcendental condition of experience.
Earlier analyses of the Coens’ films already anticipate these connections
by addressing their considerations of the uncanny groundlessness of existence
and the absence engendered by the symbolic mediation of experience. How-
ever, these comparisons only confirm that the Coens’ films lend themselves
to similar readings in light of either one, or in a blend of their distinct
points of emphasis like the synthesis of existentialism and structuralism in
Lacan’s work of the 1950s. However, the problem presented by The Man
Who Wasn’t There is different. Rather than simply evoking either of the two
theories, in that film, the Coens apparently solicit the existentialist critique
of the nihilism of the modern world, only then to reveal the whole story
to have been cut and paste from pop-culture clichés. While this closing
deconstruction of the film’s form indeed might be conceived as continuous
with the film’s treatment of existential uncertainty, it simultaneously under-
mines the force of its own, original formulation. Rather than lending its support
to either deconstruction or existential phenomenology, The Man Who Wasn’t
There would thus seem to require affirming both and neither. The question
thus remains: Is this subversion of existentialism justifiable as consistent with
its own critical negativity?
Despite his debt to Heidegger’s philosophy, Derrida furthermore
expresses a pronounced ambivalence specifically about the concept of anxi-
ety, which provides the normative fulcrum in his existential phenomenol-
ogy. At times, Derrida appeals to it to convey the subversive force of his
own philosophy, while, at other times, he criticizes it as integrally bound
up with the humanist subject’s self-presence. In “Structure, Sign, and Play,”
when explaining the structuralist critique of the “history of the structure,”
Derrida accordingly writes, “The concept of centered structure is in fact the

concept of play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the
basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is
beyond the reach of play. And on the basis of this certitude, anxiety can be
mastered” (Derrida, 1978; 279). Similarly, when asserting the repetition that
precedes and conditions the purported self-presence of signification, Derrida
writes, “From the very first moment, the body of [a] statement . . . becomes
plural. At least it trembles in an unstable multiplicity as long as there is no
context to stop us” (Derrida, 1993; 9—my emphasis). However, when criti-
cizing earlier attempts to surmount the humanist valorization of the subject,
Derrida explicitly distinguishes this “trembling” of différance from the concept
of anxiety, arguing, that, in opposition to the self-referential negativity of
being-towards-death, “A radical trembling can only come from the out-
side.  .  .  . This trembling is played out in the violent relationship of the whole
of the West to its other” (Derrida, 1982a; 134). Given this ambivalence, is
it therefore justifiable for Palmer implicitly to equate the critical negativity
of deconstruction’s undecidability with the uncertain certainty of death in
Heidegger’s existentialism?
The Plural Logic of the Aporia
Although Derrida’s philosophy essentially derives from the project initiated

in Heidegger’s early existential phenomenology, precisely as testimony to
this debt, Derrida brings the force of Heidegger’s thinking to bear on his
own work: both by criticizing his continuing direct overvalorization of self-
presence, and by critically redoubling the negativity in his concept of the
differential underdetermination of identity. In the critiques of Heidegger to
which he returns throughout his career, at different junctures, Derrida thus
takes contrary tacks. In his 1968 paper “The Ends of Man,” for instance,
Derrida argues that despite the force of his critique of the purportedly self-
transparent subject of modern philosophy, Heidegger continues to presuppose
the fundamental unity of man in the privilege he grants to self presence in
Dasein’s reflexivity as the being for whom its being is a question. Derrida
thus brings Heidegger’s own critique of objectivism to bear on Being and
Time, pressing it further “in the same direction” by arguing that Heidegger
does not sufficiently realize his own stated project. In the essay “Ousia and
Gramme,” however, Derrida critiques Being and Time “in the contrary direc-
tion,” by arguing that the possibility of articulating the ontological difference
remains irrevocably qualified by the objectivism that it aims to subvert. He
writes, “What if there was no other concept of time than the one that
Heidegger calls ‘vulgar’? What if, consequently, opposing another concept
to the vulgar concept were itself impracticable, nonviable, and impossible?”
(Derrida, 1982b; 14).
In his 1993 book, Aporias, Derrida brings both these strategies to bear
specifically upon the question concerning the fate of anxiety in deconstruc-
tion, through a sustained meditation on the intersection of death and lan-
guage, which not only affirms Heidegger’s concept of being-towards-death,
despite subverting its decisive determination, but, still more fundamentally,
radicalizes Heidegger’s concept of the impossible possibility of death in his
own concept of the aporia of the impossible. Orienting his reflections, Der-
rida asks, “Is my death possible? Can we understand this question? Can I
myself pose it? Am I allowed talk about my death? What does the syntagm
‘my death’ mean? And why this expression, ‘the syntagm “my death”’?” (Der-
rida, 1993; 21–22).
Addressing these questions, Derrida first juxtaposes Heidegger’s exis-
tential analytic and the histories of death written by Philippe Ariès and
Michel Vovelle, arguing that these discourses entail “an irreducible double
inclusion,” in which each both presupposes and entails the other (Derrida,
1993; 80). Studying the diversity in cultural practices related to death and
dying depends upon a definition of death that is beyond the scope of the
historian’s discipline. Indeed, how would one define death as a subject of
social, historical investigation? On the one hand, death is elusive: the limit
of experience, never manifested directly in experience. On the other hand,
death is so fundamental to the human condition that it leaves no field
unmarked. If death is the explicit concern of medicine or religion, for
instance, is it not also integral to law, to love, to art, to engineering, to war,
to education? Death is nowhere and everywhere. Where would one begin,
end? Insofar as each of these subjects pertains to death, it is simultaneously
rendered problematic when considered directly in relationship to its obscure
but nevertheless decisive limit.
In light of his inability to define the terms of his study, even to his
own satisfaction, Ariès ultimately defers addressing these considerations as
“metaphysical,” leaving them aside as “accessible to common sense or uni-
versal experience” (Derrida, 1993; 50). In so doing, Ariès essentially corrobo-
rates Heidegger’s assertion, at the outset of Being and Time, of the ontic and
ontological priority of the existential analytic. The two discourses are neither
opposed nor contradictory but rather recognize and affirm their respective
roles in relationship to one another within a familiar disciplinary hierar-
chy. Simultaneously, however, Ariès’s appeal to “metaphysics” inadvertently
p roblematizes this disciplinary order by calling attention to the need within

Heidegger’s study itself for further grounding, which it cannot but presup-
pose. While Ariès effectively equates “metaphysics” with philosophy, for Hei-
degger, “metaphysics” belongs alongside the history of death as itself another
discourse, dependent upon the prior elucidation of Being and Time. Questions
belonging to, what Heidegger calls, the “metaphysics of death” (Metaphysiks
des Todes) entail considerations of what lies beyond life and death, including
specifically, questions of survival and immortality. While Heidegger does not
outright dismiss these questions, he contends that their proper formulation
depends upon a prior exposition of the limiting conditions of experience—
qualifying them specifically as undecidable prior to the accomplishment of the
existential analytic.
Despite deferring these questions as contingent upon completing his
study, Derrida argues that Heidegger’s existential analytic presupposes such
a metaphysical decision, insofar as it rests upon the axiom that “one can
only start from here” (Derrida, 1993; 53). That is, Heidegger falls prey to
metaphysics precisely at the point where he supposes to have bracketed all
considerations of metaphysics. When resolving to begin “here,” Heidegger
exercises philosophical modesty by refraining from speculatively positing first
principles beyond the limits of experience and instead beginning in a char-
acteristically phenomenological manner with “the things themselves.” Never-
theless, Derrida contends that Heidegger’s determination of his starting point
implicitly depends upon the speculation from which he purportedly refrains.
Beginning “here” requires distinguishing the “here” from the “beyond.” While
maintaining the deferential position on “this side” of the divide, the concept
of finitude is no less metaphysical than eternity. Accordingly, Derrida con-
tends, Heidegger makes a decision at the outset of his analysis that, by his
own admission, depends upon the clarification that it promises to provide.
Given this contradiction, Derrida argues that Heidegger’s analysis reveals
itself to be implicated in not only “the metaphysics of death” but any and
all of the variously ontic discourses that it serves to ground. Specifically,
Derrida contends that Heidegger’s concept of the “here” bears the marks of
all the anthropologies rooted in “Judeo-Christian theology” (Derrida, 1993;
55). And, on this basis, he argues that Heidegger’s existential analytic and
the histories of death exhibit “an irreducible double inclusion,” in which
each both presupposes and entails the other (Derrida, 1993; 80). While cul-
tural studies of death, like Ariès’s, depend upon “the powerful and universal
delimitation,” of the existential analytic, Being and Time can be read “as a
small, late document” in “the huge archive where the memory of death in
Christian Europe is being accumulated.” Derrida concludes, “Each of these
two discourses is much more comprehensive than the other, bigger and
smaller than what it tends to include or exclude, more and less originary,
more and less ancient, young or old” (Derrida, 1993; 80–81).
The second deconstruction that Derrida undertakes, in Aporias, departs
from Diderot’s reflections on the limits of truth and the brevity of life in the
work of Seneca. In their work, he discerns “a rhetoric of borders,” which
he captures in the phrase “il y va d’un certain pas” (Derrida, 1993; 6). On
account primarily of the polyvalence of the French word pas, which connotes
both “not” and “step,” the sentence has multiple meanings, which qualify it
as distinctly French: 1) it involves a certain not; 2) it involves a certain step;
3) he walks with a distinct gait. Any translation of the phrase into another
language would fail to grasp the alternative connotations, which inflect the
expression even if they don’t pertain directly to the given context. Transla-
tions are inevitably incomplete, leaving residual remainders in the form of
possible alternative meanings, which require the standard but still inadequate
footnotes in scholarly texts and make translation a generative practice. In
Derrida’s terms, translation is supplementary—a derivative second-order form
of representation, which is constitutively marked by its distance from the
significance of the original that it attempts to convey. But does this opposi-
tion between the translation and the original, in fact, hold?
In keeping with his paradigmatic reversal of writing and speech, Der-
rida asks, is not some such translation—or better yet, some such constitutive
translatability—integral to the original? In French, just as in its translation
into English, any one of the several distinct uses of the sentence “Il va d’un
certain pas” entails the marginalization, if not out and out exclusion, of its
other potential meanings. Like a translation, the original French expression
remains incomplete, generating residual remainders, which tacitly evoke other
possible meanings that no one formulation could properly capture. Derrida
writes, “The border of translation does not pass among various languages.
It separates translation from itself, it separates translatability within one and
the same language.” That is, the original always already suffers from what’s
lost in translation. The impossibility of exhausting its own connotations is
a condition of its meaning. He continues, “Babelization does not wait for
the multiplicity of languages. The identity of language can only affirm itself
as identity to itself by opening itself to the hospitality of a difference from
itself or of a difference with itself ” (Derrida, 1993; 10).
Problematizing the point further, Derrida juxtaposes what it means for
an expression to belong to language with what it means to be included “in
the space of citizenship or nationality; natural, historical, or political borders;
geography or geo-politics; soil, blood, or social class” (Derrida, 1993; 7). If the
expression “Il y va d’un certain pas” belongs essentially to the French language,
evoking Heidegger’s concept of the uncanny singularity of existence revealed
in the anxiety of being-towards-death, Derrida argues that this belonging
is simultaneously a form of nonbelonging. Belonging to language entails
a fundamental expropriation—a division of the signifier, which renders it
nonidentical with itself, always already alien in its very belonging. What Der-
rida explains as the constitutive untranslatability of language is not therefore
reducible to the multiplicity of possible translations, because the borders
delimiting these distinct signifying contexts are themselves already informed
by this nonbelonging. In fact, he argues, it conditions their possibility.
Abstracting from these distinct analyses, Derrida formalizes the inde-
terminate dialectic internal to each and in their relationship to one another,
as what he calls “the plural logic of the aporia.” The impasse of aporia, he
contends, assumes three distinct forms, impermeability, indeterminacy, and
impossibility. The first is defined by the impassability of the fixed obstacle:
Heidegger’s being-towards-death and the impossible condition of Dasein’s
possibility. The second is defined by an indeterminate plurality too limit-
less to locate: the postulate of a rhetoric of borders as an impasse that can’t
be crossed, because it can’t be specified. The third aporia articulates the
indeterminate dialectic of the other two’s mutual implication and redoubles
their negativity. In it, the impasse is not confronted either as a fixed barrier
or as an indefinite slippage that loses all specificity. Instead, the impasse is
altogether occluded. Explaining this aporia of the impossible, Derrida writes,
The coming of the future advent of the event would have no

relation to the passage of what happens or comes to pass. In this
case there would be an aporia because there is not even any space
for an aporia determined as experience of the step or of the edge,
crossing or not of some line, relation to some spatial figure of the
limit. No more movement or trajectory, no more trans- (transport,
transposition, transgression, translation, and even transcendence).
There would not even be any space for the aporia because of
a lack of topographical conditions, or more radically, because of
a lack of the topographical condition itself. (Derrida, 1993; 21)
In this aporia of the impossible, Derrida argues, “there is no longer any

problem” (Derrida, 1993; 12). Not because solutions have been found but
rather because, in a state that he nevertheless describes as paralyzing, “we
are exposed, absolutely without protection, without problem, and without
prosthesis, without possible substitution, singularly exposed in our absolute

and absolutely naked uniqueness, that is to say, disarmed, delivered to the
other, incapable even of sheltering ourselves behind what could still protect
the interiority of a secret” (Derrida, 1993; 12).
Reassuring Aporia
In light of Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s concept of being-towards-

death, the connection that Palmer implicitly draws between their philosophies
not only proves to be justified but also serves well to defend the Coens’
purported postmodernism, at least, from facile dismissal as distancing. Rather
than merely a glib play with rhetorical conventions, Derrida’s deconstruction
develops and extends the project of Heidegger’s existential phenomenology,
challenging the reduction of experience to the merely actual, in order to hold
open the promise of the possible. While indeed opposing the philosophical
valorization of presence, Derrida does not simply champion absence—and
hence distance—as its antithesis but rather conceives the two, presence and
absence, distance and proximity, as irreducibly complicated. And, rather than
cynical, Derrida argues that the displacement of self-consciousness, effected
by this radical underdetermination of experience, sustains the wonder that
compels critical reflection in light of its uncanny groundlessness.
Clarifying this connection between Derrida’s deconstruction and Hei-
degger’s existential phenomenology does not, however, resolve the paradox of
Palmer’s affirmation of both the validity and the absurdity of the existential
lessons in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Instead, it establishes the grounds for
affirming the paradox as a paradox within the terms that it complicates.
Despite enriching the figures of absence in the Coen Brothers’ films, these
arguments do not therefore succeed in defending them from dismissal as
cynically detached. To the contrary, when elaborated this way, Palmer’s defense
of the Coens’ films proves to necessarily concede the accusation of cynical
detachment leveled against them, as an integral component of the undecid-
ability that he celebrates as its critical force. So, no matter how subtly devel-
oped, Palmer’s argument categorically does nothing to advance the debate. In
light of Lacan’s critical revision of Heidegger’s concept of anxiety, however,
the source of the non-sequitur in the Coens’ critical reception becomes
clear, revealing the opposition between the objectivist overvalorization of
self-presence and the differential underdetermination of identity, in Derrida’s
critique of the metaphysics of presence, to be predicated upon an abstraction
and neutralization of the conflicted satisfaction in the gaps that riddle expe-
rience. The accusation of detached distance leveled against deconstruction
thus indeed proves to be justified, albeit not on the same grounds as typi-
cally understood. And, what critics typically take to be evidence of Derrida’s
cynicism proves rather to be symptomatic of his idealism.
In each of their critical revisions of Heidegger’s concept of anxiety,
Derrida and Lacan both retain his account of its formal phenomenology as
a “sinking away,” which dissolves the boundaries of the world, revealing the
groundless ground of existence (Heidegger, 1962; 232). Furthermore, Derrida
and Lacan both redouble the critical negativity in Heidegger’s philosophy
by conceiving the differential underdetermination of identity as irreducibly
complicated by the objectivist reduction of absence to presence. Indeed, the
conceptual logics in Derrida’s and Lacan’s respective theories are isomorphic:
as juxtapositions of the synchronic division of metaphor, and the diachronic
deferral of metonymy, Lacan’s concept of the irreducible mutual inclusion of
the symbolic and the imaginary formally corresponds to Derrida’s deconstruc-
tion of the decisive impermeability of being-towards-death and the indefinite
plurality of the rhetoric of borders. And, as theories of the radical alterity that
inform this irreducible mutual inclusion, Lacan’s concept of jouissance as Real
corresponds to Derrida’s concept of the aporia of the impossible.
As the point of his opposition to Heidegger, however, Lacan conceives
the sinking away of the world in anxiety as symptomatic of an affective,
visceral excitation, whose unbearable enjoyment threatens to overwhelm the
subject in the vertiginous insistence of its imposing proximity. By contrast, in
his revision of Heidegger’s concept of anxiety, Derrida criticizes the delimi-
tation of negativity in his philosophy, but he does not take issue with the
idealism of his concept of absence or otherwise address the content that Lacan
discerns in the formal underdetermination of experience. Instead, Derrida’s
critique of Heidegger remains squarely within the phenomenological critique
of objectivism, further complicating the opposition between the apparent self-
presence of immediately given objects and the dynamic underdetermination
that conditions and so qualifies their purported self-identity. Indeed, Derrida
explains the aporia of the impossible as a strictly “formal negativity” (Der-
rida, 1993; 19). So that, despite the isomorphism of their theories, Derrida’s
account of the constitutive conflicts in experience remains predicated upon
a abstraction and neutralization of the irrationality that informs Lacan’s self-
criticism. And, Derrida’s deconstruction proves to be equally repressive as the
philosophical overvalorization of self-presence that he opposes.
Although he celebrates the critical force of différance as a cause to
tremble, Derrida specifically dispels the affective excitation of jouissance when
conceiving the force of its disturbance as symptomatic merely of the unde-

cidability that qualifies experience as metaphysically contingent and episte-
mologically uncertain. He abstracts the material recalcitrance of the conflicts
engendered by this affective excitation as Real, by explaining their disrup-
tion of the static immediacy of the actual as ultimately sustaining, rather
than subverting, the ever-elusive promise of the possible. And he elevates
to an ethical challenge the assumption of lack that, for Lacan, is a source
of consolation. Because Lacan contends that the symbolic phallus institutes
this reassuring lack of desire as “having no object,” one might protest that,
like Derrida, Lacan’s critique of Heidegger primarily concerns the persis-
tent, albeit indirect privileging of presence in his philosophy. Indeed, Lacan
argues that, as Real, jouissance precludes the reduction of experience to a
self-present principle. However, the force of its disturbance is not equivalent
to this phenomenological underdetermination but rather lies in the affective
excitation that informs it as the locus of a conflicted satisfaction. In this
regard, Lacan’s concept stands equally opposed to any merely formal concept
of absence such as Derrida’s, even if it radically subverts both the direct and
indirect valorization of presence. On the other hand, one might protest that,
insofar as Derrida redoubles the critical negativity in Heidegger’s existential
phenomenology, the aporia of the impossible, too, is “not without an object.”
The “a” in Derrida’s différance thus would be equivalent to Lacan’s object
(a), as the embodiment not only of the differential condition of identity in
the primacy of writing before speech, but also the dependency of this dif-
ferential condition on the self-presence of the speaking subject to register its
phonetic elision. However, in Lacan’s terms, this ineluctable hypostatization
of difference is only imaginary; and while Lacan, too, repudiates the simple
disjunction between the imaginary and the symbolic, as anticipated by his
appeal to Harpo Marx, he furthermore conceives the silence of the object
(a) as an idiotic ecstasy and argues that the material recalcitrance of the
impasse it presents is Real. So that, despite his insistence on the unavoidable
objectification of difference, insofar as Derrida explains this complication as
merely undecidable, his concept of the aporia still “has no object.”
When one goes beyond the isomorphism of Lacan’s and Derrida’s
theories and instead attends to the concrete terms of their critical revisions
of Heidegger’s concept of anxiety, this disjunction immediately becomes clear.
Whereas Lacan critically revises Heidegger’s contention that “anxiety has no
object” by preserving the concept of anxiety and restoring its recalcitrant, affec-
tive insistence as “not without an object,” to the contrary, Derrida relinquishes
the concept of anxiety, while retaining Heidegger’s notion of the impossible
possibility of experience as “having no object.” Despite their common critique
of any simple disjunction between inside and out, near and far, presence and
absence, Lacan thus conceives the Real of jouissance as an ontological closure
suffered by the subject as a material condition of its constitutive inscription
in the symbolic, while Derrida conceives the aporia of the impossible as a
ontological openness, whose radical underdetermination doubles back on itself
and so admits only of deconstruction’s paradoxical formulations. That is,
Lacan conceives the radical alterity that conditions and qualifies experience as
an impasse more objective than the mere actuality and he articulates it accordingly
with grammatical substantives: anxiety, jouissance, the Real; whereas, Derrida,
to the contrary, conceives this alterity as the unfathomable void, born of the
paradoxes it engenders, and he articulates it accordingly using only grammati-
cal privatives: un-decidability, a-poria, im-possibility. To reiterate, in the aporia
of the impossible, Derrida writes, “there would not even be any space for
the aporia because of a lack of topographical conditions or, more radically
because of a lack of the topographical condition itself ” (Derrida, 1993; 21).
As argued previously about Heidegger, Derrida too thus presupposes
the accomplishment of the fantasy frame that, according to Lacan, both miti-
gates the strife of jouissance and registers its affective excess in its constitutive
inconsistencies. Indeed, despite his insistence on its subversive force, from a
Lacanian vantage, Derrida’s concept of the aporetic undecidability of différance
implicitly assumes and defends the fundamental coherence of the symbolic,
by abstracting the impasse of the Real in the symbolic as if it were symp-
tomatic only of the aporetic underdetermination of the symbolic. Leveling
this argument, of course, does not merely turn the tables on Derrida and so
essentially extend his own philosophical project. While Derrida conceives the
ideological guarantee of the symbolic as reducing its differential underdeter-
mination to the self-presence of an imaginary identity, Lacan argues that the
ideological guarantee of the symbolic lies rather in the idealist abstraction
of the Real strife of jouissance as the lack of a merely formal, phenomeno-
logical withdrawal. So that, in his very insistence on the radically aporetic
underdetermination of the symbolic, Derrida implicitly denies the Real’s
interruption of its scope and function as if it were merely cause for wonder.
At the same time, in the fantasy frame that informs his philosophy, Derrida
implicitly presupposes and preserves the position of the desiring subject, even
as he exploits its neurotic conflicts. Of course, as distinct from Lacan, Der-
rida repudiates any appeal to the subject as reducing the differential under-
determination of experience to the full presence of self-consciousness. The
question accordingly arises: From what vantage then does Derrida level his
deconstruction? According to Derrida, deconstruction always develops from
within the texts that it takes as its objects. However, insofar as the aporetic
undecidability that orients his critical praxis is characterized by the lack of

the symbolic, Derrida implicitly articulates his analysis from the vantage of
the desiring subject, sustaining critical reflection in the face of this fathomless
void. Indeed, Derrida explicitly equates the differential underdetermination in
deconstruction with Husserl’s concept of the “epoché” (Derrida, 1992; 20).
While he exploits the subject’s neurotic suffering in the obsessional insistence
of his questioning, Derrida simultaneously disavows the psychotic kernel of
jouissance that compels these conflicts precisely by abstracting them as cause
for further questioning. And, in this way, Derrida not only contradicts the
premises of his own philosophy, he obscures the more problematic subject
of the unconscious as strictly correlative to the material recalcitrance of the
affective excess that renders the symbolic incoherent.
In this regard, Lacan’s critique of Heidegger’s concept of anxiety as a
childish consolation not only extends equally to Derrida’s concept of the
aporia of the impossible, it furthermore suggests that, for Derrida, Heidegger’s
philosophy is not reassuring enough. If, as argued earlier, Heidegger’s concept
of being-towards-death effectively stages the subject’s symbolic castration—
implicitly negating the imaginary self-presence of the ego and so renewing
the subject’s desire in the differential underdetermination of existence—when
revising his critical theory, Lacan recognizes the persistent objectivism in this
schema as evidence of the idealism of his concept of absence, rethinking
desire as not fundamentally given but rather predicated upon the institu-
tion of the fantasy frame that mitigates the affective strife engendered by
the imposing proximity of the Real. However, in his critical revision of
Heidegger’s concept of anxiety, Derrida does not address the idealism of
his concept of absence but rather takes it up as his own. While implicitly
registering the Real of jouissance in his critique of Heidegger’s persistent
objectivism, Derrida’s redoubling of his critical negativity thus only serves to
reinforce the fantasy frame of Heidegger’s philosophy, routing out the residual
valorization of presence as the occasion—in his work and elsewhere—as the
occasion again to insist upon its differential underdetermination, as if this
still more rigorous and aporetically complex staging of what nevertheless
amounts ultimately to symbolic castration were ethically courageous rather
than a source of security.
Hell Is the Other’s Jouissance
Whereas Derrida conceives the aporia of the impossible as a radical uncer-

tainty, as a further point in their disjunction, Lacan describes the jouissance
in anxiety as an “appalling certainty.” Of course, Lacan does not therefore

conceive anxiety as empirically determinate. Its certainty is not the mas-
tery of self-conscious understanding. Instead, anxiety’s certainty registers the
over-proximity of the Real as (logically) prior to the lack of the symbolic,
which makes possible the shuck and jive of both deception and doubt. He
continues, “Anxiety is not doubt; anxiety is the cause of doubt” (Lacan, Sem.
X; 19.12.62). In this light, Riedenschneider’s soliloquy, in The Man Who
Wasn’t There, calls for reconsideration. If Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
indeed attests to the phenomenological underdetermination of experience, it
is nonetheless objective, real, even certain. As Riedenschneider remarks, “the
Heine even wrote it out in numbers.” While Heisenberg’s physics is, meth-
odologically, no more consistent with Lacan’s psychoanalysis than Derrida’s
deconstruction, it would be a mistake therefore to take Riedenschneider’s
obscurantism at face value, or even to conclude that the doubt that riddled
the era, depicted in the film, is itself symptomatic of a radical underde-
termination. While the threat of nuclear annihilation, evoked by Frank’s
opening lines, indeed renders everyday experience profoundly uncertain, the
problem it presents is not itself uncertain. Although it cannot be reduced
to an actual danger, since it jeopardizes the very fabric of life, the threat
of nuclear destruction presents an impasse that is more recalcitrant than
empirical objectivity. It imposes itself with a proximity that can neither be
localized nor outstripped. And the doubts that it causes serve only to mitigate
its immanent catastrophe.
The setting of Blood Simple is similarly characterized by a claustropho-
bic closure, anticipated by the reference, in the private detective’s opening
monologue, to the situation “down here.” While potentially understood as
an evocation of finitude, the unfolding of the film suggests something worse.
Indeed, a hell. However, one that also must be distinguished from Sartre’s
famous depiction of the godforsaken modern condition, as defined by the
self-conscious subject’s dependence on other’s for recognition. Instead, this
claustrophobia imposes itself with a visceral immediacy, captured by the Texas
summer heat. As the private detective relays his dark portrait of humanity,
the screen displays images of the American Southwest. Despite their bright
light and open vistas, the landscapes are oppressive. The sun is too bright,
and the air ripples with heat. When the film’s narrative begins, Abby and
Ray are driving through a summer rainstorm so dense that it engulfs their
car. And the entire movie is drenched in sweat.
In this regard, the irrationality in Blood Simple is conditioned not only
by the phenomenological underdetermination of the sign but also by the
imposing jouissance that the characters suffer in the gaps and inconsisten-
cies that plague their relationships with one another and the world. While
indeed rendering the symbolic incoherent, the imposing proximity of this
affective excess furthermore compels the fantasies that distort the characters’
experience, not by obscuring the radical groundlessness of existence but
rather in their paranoid attempts to maintain a minimal distance from each
other by delimiting its imposing proximity. When delivering the pictures of
Abby and Ray in bed together, the private detective accordingly registers the
ecstatic suffering in Marty’s jealousy by taunting him, “I know where you
can get those framed.” Marty replies, “Why’d you take these?” The private
detective explains, “What d’ya mean? Just doin’ my job.” Marty continues,
“You called me. I knew they were there. Why’d you take ’em?” The private
detective lights up a cigarette, “I don’t know. Call it a fringe benefit.” While
Marty reacts defensively to the private detective’s abrasive lack of decorum,
as the private detective intimates, he betrays an enjoyment in his humili-
ation. Despite threatening to silence him, Marty accordingly prompts the
private detective to continue, “How long did you watch them?” And the
two proceed to discuss the details of Abby’s sex with Ray.
As evidenced by this masochism in his jealous fantasies, Marty does
not deny the radical lack of desire but rather works to delimit Abby’s enjoy-
ment, effectively constituting her as lacking in the field of his experience, by
proving that he does not have what she wants. And he finds evidence of his
impotence everywhere. After receiving the detective’s photos of Abby and
Ray in bed together, Marty walks out of his office into the bar and hits on
a woman who clearly is interested in the bartender, Meurice. His advance
is inappropriate, unwelcome, and immediately shot down. Later, when Marty
attacks Abby and, threatening to rape her, carries her outside of Ray’s house,
she breaks his finger and kicks him in the ribs, causing him to collapse to
his knees and puke on the lawn. When Ray comes out of the door, wear-
ing no shirt and virilely buttoning his pants, Marty pathetically slinks away
and takes off in his car the wrong way down the cul-de-sac. Comforting
Abby, Ray smirks, “I’d like to have seen his face when he found the dead
end.” The next scene begins with a close-up shot of Marty’s finger wrapped
in an absurd looking cast. The camera pulls back to reveal teenagers in the
background, hanging out, drinking beer, who mock Marty as he passes: “Hey
Mister, how’d you break your pussy-finger?” One of them, a young woman,
is talking to the private detective when Marty walks up to meet him. The
detective explains, “She saw me rolling a cigarette and thought it was mari-
juana.” Gesturing to the back of his car, he adds, “Thought I was a swinger.”
It’s as if even this nasty man can make time that Marty can’t. And, when he
notices Marty’s finger, the private detective snickers, “Stick your finger up
the wrong person’s ass?” Accordingly, when Marty ends up shooting blanks
from his own grave, it retroactively appears to have been inevitable: the final,
pathetic defeat and ultimate consequence of his murderously self-destructive
jealousy—as if it were what he’d been looking for all along.
In his affair with Abby, Ray, too, manifests a perverse enjoyment in his
ultimately self-defeating attempt to determine what she wants. As they first
drive out of town, Abby anxiously reflects on Marty’s menacing irrationality,
“Sometimes I think maybe there’s something wrong with him, like maybe
he’s sick, mentally. Or is it maybe me, do you think?” Ray responds hesitantly,
“Listen I . . . I’m not a marriage counselor.” Later, he reiterates the expres-
sion. After Abby suddenly insists that he stop the car, and suggestively calls
his attention to the motel sign they just passed, she asks, “Remember what
you was saying before? Were you just being a gentleman?” Ray defers, “Abby,
I like you. But it’s no point in starting anything now.” She concedes, “Yeah.”
But he continues, “I mean, I’m not a marriage counselor.” And, again, later
in the film, when Ray asks for his back pay, Marty refuses. Ray insists, “I
want that money. You got something to tell me, fine.” Marty retorts, “What
are you, a fucking marriage counselor?” As typical of the syntax of denial,
Ray’s refusal to be “a marriage counselor” precipitates his assumption of the
role and sets the stage for his involvement in all that ensues.
Revealing what it means for him to be “a marriage counselor,” Ray
first becomes Abby’s lover: fucking her at the motel and helping her not only
to escape but also to betray her husband. However, attempting to relieve the
strife in Abby’s marriage simultaneously saddles Ray with a nagging sense
of inadequacy, and the very next night he acts like a jilted lover, accusing
her of loving another man. As a further component of the “counseling” he
provides, Ray takes responsibility for cleaning up Abby’s mess: he uses his
shirt to wipe up the blood that he believes she spilled in Marty’s office, and
he finishes the job of murdering Marty, whom he believes she shot. Again,
however, even this radical attempt to satisfy Abby—which compels Ray, for
the first time, to declare his love for her—results in a sense of failure. The
morning after burying Marty alive, the phone ringing in Abby’s apartment
wakes Ray up. It’s the private detective, tracking their whereabouts, but they
know nothing about him. Ray insists, “Pick it up.” Again there’s dead air,
the click of a phone hanging up, and a dial tone. Abby explains, “Well, it’s
him.” Ray asks, “Who?” When she answers, “Marty,” unaware that he’s dead,
Ray laughs with a desperate, twisted look on his face, which registers the
enjoyment in his conflicted devotion to Abby, like the Rat Man’s distorted
grimace. “All right,” he concedes, “call him back, whoever he was. I’ll get
out of your way.” The exchange again uses the telephone to thematize the
gaps in the symbolic mediation of experience. However, the undecidability

of this “grapheme” alone does not suffice to account for Ray’s misconstrual
of Abby’s intentions. To the contrary, the exchange attests to the gratifica-
tion that sustains his fantasies, regardless of the evidence he confronts. And,
before the film ends, Ray dies without ever realizing that, as the marriage
counselor, he indeed played an integral role in staging the drama between
Marty and Abby.
In a reworking of the classic femme fatale, Abby’s seemingly naïve
innocence provokes both Marty’s and Ray’s anxiety, providing the screen on
which they play out their respective fantasies. Her own motivations remain
less conspicuously developed. Nevertheless, in her sense of persecution, Abby,
too, exhibits a paranoid attempt to delimit the enjoyment in the expectations
of others. When reflecting that maybe Marty’s “sick, mentally,” Abby’s caveat,
“or, is it maybe me,” appears to be a rhetorical trope that is clearly contra-
dicted by Marty’s compulsive jealousy. However, in her seduction of Ray,
Abby indeed betrays the distortion of her own paranoid fantasy, implicitly
attempting to delimit Marty’s imposing enjoyment by giving him what she
supposes he craves. Establishing the tryst as a performance for Marty, Abby
would appear to know that she and Ray have been followed. As paradoxi-
cal evidence of her own paranoia, Abby later expresses the same fear that
Ray, too, may be “sick, mentally.” Indeed, after killing Marty, Ray acts very
strangely, and, from the outset of their relationship, he accuses Abby of betray-
ing him. But Abby finds Ray threatening, even when he’s acting on, what
he takes to be, her behalf. Despite the underdetermination of the evidence
at the crime scene, she specifically imagines that Ray broke in to steal his
back pay from the safe, and, when Ray got caught by Marty, he killed him
in a brawl. Attesting to the distinctly subjective nature of this scenario, in her
dreams, Marty tells her that Ray plans to kill her, too. And in the end, as a
dialectical reversal of her apparent passivity, Abby’s paranoia has contributed
to the murders of the movie’s three principal male characters.
(Divorce) Courtly Love
In technical terms, Lacan explains the distinct dynamics of this identification

with the object of the Other’s jouissance as “acting out” and “passing to the
act.” As a defense against this anamorphic excess, acting out reinforces the
constitutive lack of a symbolic authority by asserting an imaginary object in
the place of the Real object (a) of jouissance, thereby maintaining sufficient
distance from it to take pleasure in it as an object of desire. Roberto Harari
explains, “By delivering this pound of flesh, by separating himself from the
object, the [subject] saves himself from identifying with it. He maintains
distance from it by staging it” (Harari, 2001; 80). In acting out, the subject
thus performs the staging of fantasy that structures the unconscious. When elabo-
rating the concept, Lacan appeals to the case of a young lesbian who came
to Freud for analysis after throwing herself into a ditch in a failed suicide
attempt. Before trying to kill herself, the young woman made a dramatic
public display of courting a woman of ill repute in an effort to circumscribe
her anxiety in relationship to her father’s symbolic authority. When describ-
ing the aim of this melodrama, Lacan compares it to the ritual of courtly
love. To do what, he asks,
[To] make of her castration as a woman what the knight does

with respect to his lady, to whom precisely he offers the sacrifice
of his virile prerogative to make of her the support of what is
linked in the relationship by an inversion to this sacrifice itself,
namely the putting in place of the lack, precisely what is lacking
to the field of the other, namely the desire of the father, that one
is sure of it, that there is a law of the father, an absolute phallus.
(Lacan, Sem. X; 16.01.63)
In the staging of this scene, Lacan argues that the young woman implicitly
identifies with all the central characters. Heuristically adopting her voice,
Lacan explains, “She is my lady, and since I cannot be your submission,
[father], and I your object, I am the one who sustains, who creates, the
idealized relationship to what is inadequate in myself, what was repulsed”
(Lacan, Sem. X; 16.01.63).
In Intolerable Cruelty, Miles’s melancholy itself presents a form of acting
out, in which he struggles to sustain the lack of his desire, by distancing
himself from the object of the Other’s enjoyment. As he stands at the net
of a tennis court, lifelessly volleying balls shot from a machine, Wrigley
congratulates him on his recent victory. Indifferent to the compliment, Miles
asks, “What was that?” Wrigley replies astonished, “What was that? Uh, Rex
Rexroth? He kept everything? You win? No compromises? Isn’t that what
you wanted?” Miles only sighs. In his boredom, Miles responds to both
Wrigley’s and Meyerson’s congratulations as a killjoy by insisting not only
that he is frustrated with his life but also—despite his overt rapture—that
the same must be true for the senior partner. As announced inadvertently
in Wrigley’s reproach, Miles’s problem lies precisely in the fact that he does
not want at all. As a result, his life indeed has lost interest for him; how-
ever, not because it is merely banal or otherwise empty. To the contrary, as

revealed at the height of his anxiety, he has so identified with the object
of the Other’s enjoyment, he is unable to maintain his own desire. What
is most anxiety-provoking, Lacan contends, is “the demand which cannot
fail” (Lacan, Sem. X; 05.12.62). Rather than articulating the emptiness of
his objectivism, Miles’s disaffection thus serves as a protest, which insists
on this failure to gratify the Other’s demand in order to preserve the lack
of his longing.
As anticipated by the chronic dissatisfaction of the serial divorcées,
Miles’s consumption of luxury goods still more vividly presents his melan-
choly as a form of acting out. Amid the Gutmans’ divorce proceedings, he
complains to Wrigley, “You don’t just decide to become bored. It just hap-
pens.” Wrigley advises him, “It’s a mid-life crisis. Look, get yourself a new
car.” Miles retorts, “I have a new car. I have two new cars and a tab at the
Mercedes dealership. Torn the house down twice, rebuilt the cabin in Vail,
got three of those, uh . . . yard people . . . gardeners. I’ve got a man who
waxes my jet.” As indeed intended in Wrigley’s advice, Miles appeals to these
luxuries in order to sustain his desire. However, insofar as they are asserted in
the immediacy of demand, as objects of gratification, they lack the symbolic
consistency, that is, the lack, to fulfill this function except in the melancholic
insistence of their disappointment and compulsive repetition in always more,
another. Accordingly, Miles succeeds in sustaining his wanting only insofar
as he remains dissatisfied with each successive indulgence—not as a matter
of holding out for an ultimately satisfying object but rather holding at bay
the exhaustion of his desire.
In The Man Who Wasn’t There, Ed’s silence and overidentification with
his role as the barber similarly serve to limit the claims that others make
on him, by disdainfully diminishing their enjoyments. In anticipation of
their dinner party with Big Dave and Anne, Ed explains, “As Doris said, we
were ‘entertaining.’ Me, I don’t like entertaining.” As integral to his sense of
alienation, Ed is misanthropic. While Ed’s identification as the barber might
appear to be self-deprecating, his insistence on his own diminished role serves
to counteract other people’s inflation of their own sense of self-importance.
Contrary to his comportment towards others, Ed furthermore isn’t a quiet
person. In the voiceover that runs throughout the film, he proves to be
downright loquacious. And Ed’s silence must be understood, accordingly, as
an active refusal to engage others: to be entertaining.
At the same time, of course, Ed’s silence sustains his enthrallment to the
jouissance that he suffers as imposed on him by others. Frank only can talk
his ear off, because Ed never interrupts his banter, challenging his pretenses
to expertise or, better yet, telling him to shut up. During their initial meet-
ing, as he stuffs his face at Ed’s expense, Riedenschneider adds, “One more
thing, you keep your mouth shut. I get the lay of the land. I tell you what
to say. No talking out of school. What’s out of school? Everything’s out of
school. I do the talking. You keep your trap shut. I’m an attorney. You’re a
barber. You don’t know anything. Do you want anything?” Similarly, Tolliver
gets away with his con, because Ed never even bothers to consult a lawyer
when signing away his ten grand. And, most importantly, Doris and Big
Dave can carry on unencumbered, because—despite being aware of their
affair—Ed never says anything.
Along with serving to sustain his desire, Ed’s silence must therefore be
understood as providing him with an implicit, albeit conflicted, gratification,
which holds him enthralled to the jouissance of his miserable circumstances.
Beyond practically enabling others to exploit him, in his silence Ed shares
in their indulgence, masochistically seething with resentment and scornfully
belittling their pleasures. And isn’t the same true of Miles’s melancholy?
Along with mitigating the indulgent excesses that pervade his world, Miles’s
boredom satisfies his sadistic cruelty. His disaffection is also an expression of
his disdain, and his melancholy is altogether consistent with the aggression
that he also exhibits in his shiny sharp teeth, his aggressive legal maneuvers,
and his lust for “total victory.”
In each of these films, the characters’ malaise gives way to a more
active form of acting out when a disturbance in the tenuous compromise
of their conflicted satisfactions too fully realizes the jouissance in their strife-
laden circumstances and so threatens to altogether foreclose their desires. In
Intolerable Cruelty, even prior to his anxious encounter with Herb Meyerson,
Miles’s more dynamic acting out is precipitated by the accomplishment of his
aspiration for “total victory.” In the exchange that first introduces the pos-
sibility of realizing Miles’s aspiration, Marylin’s first husband, Rex Rexroth,
explains to Miles that she has him “between a rock and a hard place.” While
she has videotaped evidence of his philandering, he has nothing to hold
against her and no prenuptial agreement to protect his assets. Working to
establish the terms for an inevitable compromise, Miles asks him, “What kind
of settlement do you seek? What are, for you, the parameters of the possible?”
Rexroth explains that his finances are tied up in a real estate venture, and
he’s run up extensive mortgage debts. Should he have to relinquish any of
his assets to Marylin, the project would be compromised and he would lose
big. The request piques Miles’s interest. He asks, “nothing?” and then, solicit-
ing confirmation, continues, “So you propose that, in spite of demonstrable
infidelity on your part, your unoffending wife should be tossed out on her
ear?” Rexroth lights up with a grin, “Well, is that possible?” Miles affirms,
“It’s a challenge.” The injustice of Rexroth’s position makes clear that Miles’s
aspiration for “total victory” is symptomatic not merely of the instrumental-
ization of others and the world, which Heidegger denounces in Nietzsche’s
philosophy, but rather the satisfaction of a sadistic cruelty. The case’s distinct
promise lies in the extravagance of leaving Marylin with nothing. Beyond
the gratification of any further instrumental end, the void of this nothing
is tinged with jouissance. At the same time, the injustice of Rexroth’s posi-
tion also presents the contrary possibility of establishing a categorical limit
to the enjoyment that Miles suffers as imposed on him, as an experimental
transgression aimed at establishing the law’s incontrovertible justice. And the
fulfillment of Miles’s aspiration reinforces his despair because, in realizing the
sadistic excess in his own aggressive cruelty, Miles proves the lack of any
such limit and so paradoxically renders himself an unqualified instrument of
the Other’s enjoyment—occasioning Meyerson’s congratulations.
Support for this reading can be found in the specific dynamics of
Miles’s fascination with Marylin. In light of the movie’s existentialist impli-
cations, Miles’s ardor appears to be an expression of his openness to the
groundless underdetermination of experience, revealed in love. Rather than
openness, however, Miles’s relationship to Marylin is defined by inaccessibility.
When Miles first takes Maylin out to dinner, she queries him, “Miles, you
didn’t ask me here to pick me up? I could have you disbarred for that.” He
replies, “Maybe, I’m reckless.” As his client’s adversary, Marylin is officially
off-limits. Similarly, when Marylin later appears in Miles’s office after her
devastating divorce from Rexroth, she is accompanied by her wealthy new
fiancé, Howard D. Doyle. Miles assumes that Marylin is only out for his
money and cautions her against signing an iron-clad “Massey” prenup. But
Marylin repeatedly rejects Miles’s warning, provoking him finally to kiss
her. In response, Marylin again asserts the legal barrier between them, “I
could have you disbarred for that.” Romantically, he replies, “It was worth
it.” Rather than accepting the groundlessness of existence, Miles’s infatua-
tion with Marylin thus attests to his need for a limit to sustain the lack of
his desire. He finds her attractive precisely because she isn’t merely another
consumable, but rather elusive in her committed love for Howard. And, as
Marylin walks away, Miles registers his longing for the first time in the
movie, by declaring, “You fascinate me!”
In The Man Who Wasn’t There, what disturbs the equilibrium of Ed’s
misanthropic alienation is the impending opening of Big Dave’s Annex,
which threatens all too fully to realize the perverse enjoyment in his unhappy
circumstances. “Boom-times in retail” present the opportunity and incentive
to expand the business of Nirdlingers Department Store. Along with giving

credence to Dave’s pretenses to success, the name of the new store, Big Dave’s
Annex, suggests that, for the first time, he will own at least a partial stake
in the business. In the event of a divorce, it seems reasonable to imagine
that Big Dave’s annex would go to Big Dave, introducing the possibility that
Dave and Doris might enjoy a future together independently from Ed’s tacit
approval. And, after Doris hangs herself, the coroner tells Ed that she was
pregnant, retroactively presenting the promised child as further evidence of
Doris and Dave’s potential future together—also meriting the nomination
“Big Dave’s Annex.”
As paradoxical as it may seem, insofar as it depends on his silence, Doris
and Dave’s romance is an expression of Ed’s desire. Following the opening of
the annex, however, Ed effectively will have been silenced. Independently of
actual divorce proceedings, he will have been cut out of any consideration
in Doris and Dave’s affair. Betraying their secret no longer will end their
romance. Instead, it will liberate the couple to pursue a future together, all
too fully realizing the jouissance in Ed’s masochistic seething, and foreclosing
the lack of his desire. The prospect of going into the dry cleaning business
with Tolliver does not therefore appeal to Ed as a chance for financial gain
or personal improvement, but rather as a way to thwart the opening of Big
Dave’s Annex. When they initially meet at the barbershop, Tolliver indirectly
betrays the fact that he first proposed the investment opportunity to Big
Dave, who declined because “all of his capital is tied up in expansion plans
of his own.” Tolliver thus establishes that the opening of the annex depends
upon the ten thousand dollars and provides Ed with the conscious pretext
for taking it from Dave. Ed’s utterly cavalier attitude towards the business
venture confirms this reading of his scheme. After procuring the money from
Dave, Ed effectively throws it away: handing it over to Tolliver after signing
a contract that he does not submit to a lawyer’s scrutiny, have witnessed by
a notary, or even read. Regardless of its nominal value, Ed treats the ten
grand as worthless. Or rather, the money only has value for Ed insofar as it
goes missing from Dave’s plans.
Razing Big Dave’s Annex
In light of its catastrophic consequences, however, Ed’s blackmailing scheme

ultimately proves rather to be an instance of, what Lacan calls, “passing to
the act.” Whereas acting out sustains the subject’s desire by distancing its
ego from the object of the Other’s enjoyment, in passing to the act the
subject overidentifies with the Other’s enjoyment, dispelling the force of

its imposition by altogether collapsing the fantasy organizing experience in,
what amounts to, an “exit” from the fantasy stage. In Lacan’s example of the
young lesbian woman, she passes to the act when she throws herself into
the ravine. When she and her beloved encounter her father on the street,
the object of her affections becomes self-conscious about her psychologi-
cal games and tries to wrestle free from her embrace. As the staging of her
fantasy begins to crumble, the young woman meets a scornful look in her
father’s eyes that precipitates her suicide attempt. At this moment, Lacan
argues she totally identifies with the jouissance in his disdain, taking herself
to be the abject, discarded remainder in the institution of the symbolic, and
accordingly throws herself out.
When distinguishing himself from the object of the other characters’
enjoyment, Ed implicitly makes it his own, and the distance maintained
by his acting out collapses into the self-defeating closure of passing to the
act when he all to fully realizes this jouissance in his own conflicted desire,
rendering himself its ideal instrument and so paradoxically overidentifying
with its abject object. From advertisements in magazines and mounted to
walls, to the vanity of Doris and Big Dave’s self-aggrandizing ambitions, the
ideology of self-improvement permeates The Man Who Wasn’t There, and, in
pursuing Tolliver’s business proposal, Ed makes its normative injunction his
own—Be a Better Man!—both generally and specifically in relationship to
what the other characters’ abuse suggests that they want him to be. When
blackmailing Dave, Ed accordingly takes up the challenge in his taunting,
engaging him in “commercial” competition. In a reversal of Dave’s ridicule,
he challenges Dave’s sense of self-importance by reducing him to a blub-
bering weakling who admits his dependence upon his wife’s family for his
fancy job. And, making little, or no, effort to veil his scheme, Ed provokes
Dave to physically attack him, calling the bluff on his macho militarism and
indeed defeating him in “battle” by stabbing him in the jugular.
When brokering the deal with Tolliver, Ed similarly doesn’t only fail
to exercise caution, but instead actively and aggressively capitulates to Toll-
iver’s desire to stick it to him. After Ed asks him whether he plans to screw
him out of the money he’s just given him, Tolliver holds out the contract
to Ed, hysterically proclaiming, “Take it to a lawyer. I insist! I insist! This
is dry cleaning. This is not some fly by night thing.” Wiping the sweat
from his face, he goes on, “I’ll tell you. I have been thirteen years as an
entrepreneur, and I have never . . . No one has even questioned me like
that.” Ed backs away, “It’s okay.” As quickly as he exploded, Tolliver calms
back down. His protest is all bluster. Of course, in any previous business
dealing, his prospective partners would have taken pains to make sure they
wouldn’t get ripped off. And Ed’s deference might be seen accordingly as a
misguided symptom of his apathetic passivity. To the contrary, however, Ed’s
meager note of caution solicits Tolliver’s reassurance that he plans to rip him
off—which Tolliver’s melodramatic protest indeed confirms. Not only is Ed
indifferent to the money, it’s a trap: Tolliver should be checking up on him!
By “letting” Tolliver get over on him, Ed plants on him the ten grand that
Big Dave knew he wanted, setting him up to suffer the tough guy’s abuse
and ultimately to be bludgeoned to death.
In Doris’s case, Ed’s passing to the act hinges on his silence. As attested
in the story of their early romance, “she liked the fact that [he] didn’t
talk much,” and this sentiment is reaffirmed at several points throughout
the film. After her death, Ed recalls sitting together on their living room
couch. He turns to talk to her; but she raises a hand and shakes her head,
signaling him to keep quiet, and goes back to drinking her cocktail. As
most evident in her affair with Big Dave, Doris’s enjoyment is predicated
upon Ed’s silence. Not only does he not call her on what she’s doing, Ed
tacitly sanctions the unqualified intoxication of her jouissance. When Doris
is accused of Big Dave’s murder, Ed accordingly carries his silence to its
absurd extreme. When they first all meet to discuss Doris’s defense, Rie-
denschneider struggles to formulate a plausible argument. In the absence
of any compelling strategy, Ed uncharacteristically pipes up, “I killed him.”
The proposal piques Riedenschneider’s interest, and he presses Ed to test
the story’s plausibility, “Okay, you killed him . . . How come?” Ed admits,
“He and Doris, um, were having an affair.” Riedenschneider persists, “Okay,
how did you know?” Looking Doris in the eyes, Ed continues, “I just knew,
a husband knows.” Riedenschneider continues to pursue the story, “Will
anyone else say they knew? And don’t say your wife.” But, when Ed proves
unable to provide support for his account, Riedenschneider ultimately gets
exasperated, “Will anyone corroborate any goddamned part of your story at
all? Come on, people, you can’t help each other like that. Let’s be realistic
now  .  .  .” As well as being true to the facts, Ed’s confession is the only frank
exchange between the couple in the film and might seem to contradict
the thesis that Ed contributes to Doris’s undoing by overidentifying with
her demand for his silence. However, Ed’s admission is implicitly boastful,
not a modest confession that his wife made him a fool but rather a quietly
belligerent declaration that he spitefully vanquished her lover. And, when
Riedenschneider dismisses the story as unrealistic, Ed refrains from pressing
the case further, allowing her to take the fall for the killing. Indeed, as the
ultimate evidence of his participation in her demise, Ed even provides his
wife with the noose to hang herself. He explains, “I’d brought her a dress
to wear to court. And she’d used the belt.”
Somewhat surprisingly, The Man Who Wasn’t There thus turns out to be
a love story that addresses the conflicted nature of desire and the close prox-
imity, if not intrinsic identity, between love and evil in light of the jouissance
that informs their intersecting passions. When Ed introduces Doris as “one
other thing,” at the outset of the film, he does not therefore present her as
a matter of fact object, but rather as the locus of a residual, erotic excess,
which precludes reducing experience to such banal objectivity. Accordingly,
Doris’s affair with Dave provides Ed with the means to hold this excess at
bay. However perverse it may seem—as Lacan argues about courtly love—Ed
does not merely tolerate the affair; being cuckolded by Doris keeps her at
a remove and so enables him to sustain his desire for her. It is how he loves
her! Other moments in the film further evidence Ed’s love for Doris: his
gentle admission that he “never really minded” when she called him a dope;
the sexual charge when he shaves her legs in the bathtub; the quiet intimacy
they share, in Ed’s memory, as they sit together silently (and nonetheless
alienated) on the couch. However, Ed most explicitly manifests his love for
Doris in the devastation that his passing to the act brings down upon his
world—including her. As he’s strapped into the electric chair, Ed reflects,
I don’t know where I’m being taken. I don’t know what I’ll find
beyond the earth and sky. But I’m not afraid to go. Maybe the
things I don’t understand will be clearer there, like when a fog
blows away. Maybe Doris will be there, and maybe there I can
tell her all those things they don’t have words for here.
While Ed’s destruction of his world is radical, through it, he paradoxically

succeeds in restoring the tenuous equilibrium of his conflicted desire, reaf-
firming the principle of his commitment to Doris in the nullifying collapse
of his passing to the act. And, although Ed’s contribution to Doris’s death
undoubtedly is cruel, in and through it, he succeeds not only in distancing
her sufficiently to sustain his longing but furthermore manifests the jouis-
sance of his love.
The Patter of Little Lawyer’s Feet
Watching Intolerable Cruelty in relationship to Lacan’s concept of anxiety as

“not without an object” similarly recasts the closing confluence of cynicism
and romanticism in light of the dialectical implication of the Real and the
symbolic. As Miles and Marylin kiss across the negotiating table after tear-
ing up their prenuptial agreement and affirming their love in the movie’s
final scene, Miles pauses for a moment to ask, “Do you hear something?”
Marylin lovingly replies, “Only the patter of little lawyers’ feet.” While the
image romantically evokes the promise of children, as lawyers, the chil-
dren simultaneously attest to the couple’s persistent antagonism. Accordingly,
Marylin’s remarks might be understood as again evidencing the oscillation
between cynicism and romanticism that undermines the existentialist reading
of the movie, and apparently confirms the critique of the Coens’ purported
postmodern detachment. At the same time, however, Marylin’s remarks point
beyond this empty oscillation by presenting the strife in loving relationships
as true to their passion, and depicting the law as holding open, rather than
foreclosing, the lack of desire.
Indeed, the film’s cynical depiction of modern marriage, as forged by
mutual ass-nailing, finds clear support in Lacan’s concept of the Real object
(a) of jouissance, which renders love unavoidably qualified by the imaginary
demand to be what the Other wants. Contrary to the movie’s existential
implications, in fact, Lacan conceives the antagonism in loving relationships
as not merely a matter of instrumental objectivism, but worse, as symptomatic
of an affective excess that compels lovers to make demands that never could
be satisfied, disturbing the whole economy of instrumental gratification and
qualifying love as implicitly cruel. The absurd gluttony and chronic dissatis-
faction of the feuding couples in the movie attests to this erotic excess. And,
rather than denying the vulnerability of loving relationships, the Massey pre-
nup codifies the narcissistic paranoia that is true to them, albeit in a manner
that effectively guarantees the divorces against whose repercussions it guards.
At the same time, however, Lacan argues that the Real of jouissance
also compels the overvalorization of love, and the film’s celebratory roman-
ticism similarly finds support in his critical theory. Contrary to the movie’s
existential implications, however, Lacan does not conceive love as the open-
ness of a radical vulnerability, compromised by the delimitation of the law,
but rather argues that the value in love is concomitant with the excess that
renders it strife laden. Along with requiring the law to mitigate the demands
that lovers make on one another, the very perversity of this erotic excess
informs the idealization that elevates the beloved to an object of devotion,
and so precludes reducing romance to the narcissistic paranoia of the Massey
prenup. While marital relationships never outstrip the strife that qualifies
them as cruel, the symbolic articulation of this strife as law furthermore
serves to sustain the longing that holds open the promise of the future. And,
this dialectical implication of jouissance and the law explains the tension
that makes love compelling, in light of the excess that renders it conflicted.
Despite opposing one another in divorce proceedings, the Gutmans’ testi-
mony accordingly attests to the truth of marriage as a framework for working
out one’s kinks—both in and out of the bedroom. And, in this regard, intol-
erable cruelty provides grounds not only for divorce but also for marriage.
4
Superego Overdrive
Mattie’s Law
A s distinct among their films, in True Grit, the Coens address the problems
of paternity and the symbolic authority of the law through the eyes
of a child. Based on a 1968 novel by Charles Portis, and set on Arkansas’s
western frontier, shortly after the American Civil War, the film presents the
autobiographical recollections of Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld / Elizabeth
Marvel), a pious middle-aged spinster, whose father was murdered by one
of his own hired hands, when she was only fourteen. When Mattie’s mother
sends her to retrieve her father’s corpse from Fort Smith, Mattie takes it
upon herself to bring his killer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), to justice. In a
letter home, she writes, “You know that Papa would want me to be firm
in the right, as he always was.” Mattie is precocious in her sense of justice.
Her resolute commitment to the rightness of the law both drives the film’s
plot and provides the principal source of its humor. However, as rendered
still more explicitly in Portis’s original novel, Mattie’s sense of justice is
not, therefore, unqualified. Instead, in the wake of her father’s death, her
righteousness betrays a defensive denial of the fact that the law has failed
her. Despite her high estimation of his virtue, her father effectively allowed
a drunken imbecile to gun him down in the street. Is there no justice?
Or is the law, embodied by her virtuous father, perhaps more complicated
with mean criminality than Mattie willingly admits? While the Coens risk
obscuring the force of these questions in their emphasis on the clownish
buffoonery of the two lawmen that emerge as Mattie’s surrogate fathers, the
film reads best when they are seen as motivating her adventure. That is, what
drives Mattie’s pursuit of her father’s killer is not the strength of her sense
155
of right but rather the crisis in her convictions provoked by the trauma of
his failure; and her expedition into the lawless territory, beyond the borders
of the western frontier, presents a genealogy of her own morality, which
reveals the contradictions in her sense of justice, as correlative to redressing
the crisis to which they have given rise.
When she first arrives in Port Smith, Mattie witnesses a hanging of
three men, which announces the importance of these considerations of the
law, and its contradictions, to the film. Addressing the crowd with his final
words, the first convict (Nicholas Sadler) bawls pathetically, “Ladies and
Gentlemen, beware and train up your children in the way that they should
go. You see what has become of me because of drink. I killed a man in a
trifling quarrel over a pocketknife. If I had have received good instruction
as a child . . . I would be with my wife and children today.” At face value,
the convict’s contrition attests to the justice of the legal process. Beyond
acknowledging the error of his ways, he recognizes the roots of his vice in his
early education and offers himself as an example to the public. Paradoxically,
however, the very appropriateness of the convict’s apology to the administra-
tion of the law renders it hollow. Particularly in his sociological account of
his own criminality and moralistic condemnation of “drink,” he provides the
court with the explanation of his crime that it not only expects from him
but also cites in justification of its own authority. Despite his effusive tears,
the plea is formulaic and, as such, rings hollow. Registering this insincerity,
a voice from the crowd calls out, “Stop whimpering, boy!” By contrast, the
second convict (Scott Sowers) is unrepentant, instead, protesting the unac-
knowledged political forces implicit in the law brought against him, “Well, I
killed the wrong man is the which-of-why I’m here. Had I killed the man
I meant to, I don’t believe I’d have been convicted. I see men out there in
the crowd is worse than me.” The convict does not plead his innocence,
instead admitting his own murderous intentions. However, he contests that
the law concerns the injustice of murder at all, insisting rather that it only
serves to protect some men from others. Supporting this contention, the third
convict (Jonathan Joss) is hooded and executed before he can address the
crowd at all. He’s an Indian; and one must suppose that his voice similarly
was silenced through the course of his trial.1
In his original novel, Portis further pursues this criminal violence in
the law through the figure of Isaac C. Parker, the border judge respon-
sible for sentencing these men to death. While initially he ruled without
oversight from any other authority besides the office of the U.S. president,
Portis explains that, when the Supreme Court began to review his decisions,
many were reversed, and the severity of his judgment earned his court the
Superego Overdrive 157
nickname “the Parker Slaughterhouse” (Portis, 2010; 42). In response to the

accusation, Parker insists that the Washington magistrates “don’t understand
the bloody conditions in the Territory”; and Mattie sympathetically seconds
the judge’s rejoinder, noting, “I don’t know who was right. I know sixty-
five of [Parker’s] marshals got killed. They had some mighty tough folks to
deal with” (Portis, 2010; 42). However, as she also explains, Parker had his
own self-doubts and, on his deathbed, converted to his wife’s Catholicism.
Mattie remarks, “If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death,
and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you
would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could
make” (Portis, 2010; 42).
Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), the marshal that Mattie hires to track
down her father’s killer, works for Parker’s court and provides the princi-
pal focus in the story for these considerations of the law’s contradictions.
Surveying the roster of the court’s marshals, the local sheriff (Leon Rus-
som) distinguishes Cogburn from both the best tracker and the most just
as the meanest, “a pitiless man, double tough,” who doesn’t let fear “enter
into his thinking.” When first approaching the marshal, Mattie echoes this
endorsement by remarking, “They tell me you’re a man of true grit”; and
the ensuing plot hinges largely on whether Cogburn, who acts as Mattie’s
unacknowledged father/protector, will in fact rectify the law, compromised
by her father’s murder, by proving his grit—which Portis associates specifi-
cally with virility. After initially resisting her appeal for help, attempting to
leave her behind in Fort Smith, and then getting so drunk and despondent
on the trail that he relinquishes any responsibility for Mattie or her cause,
Cogburn ultimately stands down Chaney’s criminal gang and rides all night
to save Mattie’s life. Looking back on the adventure, a quarter of a century
later, in Mattie’s imagination, Cogburn thus indeed succeeds in proving the
strength of his character and restores her sense of justice, not only as a father
figure to the little girl she was but also, ultimately, as an unspoken husband
to the spinster she becomes.
The principal weakness in the Coens’ adaptation of Portis’s story lies in
their treatment of Cogburn primarily as a buffoon. Indeed, he’s an aging, fat,
one-eyed drunk, whose life amounts to little more than a string of failures,
and, in his novel, Portis undoubtedly conveys this buffoonery, among other
ways, by depicting Cogburn in an absurd shootout with a rat. However, the
Coens’ emphasis upon the marshal’s foolishness obscures the darker, criminal
dimensions of his character, which give greater weight to Mattie’s adventure.
With Jeff Bridges cast in the role, it’s difficult not to associate Cogburn’s
failings with the Dude’s benign incompetence in The Big Lebowski; and,
when first introducing him, the Coens add a ridiculous scene to the story,
in which Mattie tries to solicit the marshal’s assistance through the closed
door of an outhouse. (When he answers her knock, by calling out, “The
jakes is occupied,” Mattie explains, “I know it is occupied, Mr. Cogburn. As
I said, I have business with you.” The marshal replies, “I have prior business.”
Mattie complains insistently, “You have been at it for quite some time, Mr.
Cogburn.” But the marshal protests, “There is no clock on my business!”)
More indirectly, the Coens also exaggerate Cogburn’s buffoonery
through the elevated importance they give to the character of LaBoeuf (Matt
Damon)—which he pronounces “LaBeef ”—a Texas Ranger who also hopes
to bring Chaney to trial for the murder of a senator and joins Mattie and
the marshal in their pursuit. While ultimately benign in contrast to Cogburn,
LaBoeuf, too, is absurd. Like the boyish caricature of a Wild West hero, he
wears big spurs and a starched cowlick in his hair, he smokes a flamboyant
pipe, and he rides a shaggy cow pony. When they first meet, La Boeuf tells
Mattie that he has just come from her home in Yell County. She replies,
“We have no rodeo clowns in Yell County.” In their adaptation of Portis’s
novel, the Coens place greater emphasis on the importance of LaBoeuf ’s
role in story, nearly to the point of shifting its focus to the struggle between
the two lawmen for Mattie’s admiration. And, in this way, they also further
exaggerate Cogburn’s foolishness, as if, most importantly, he were the other
“rodeo clown.”
Despite this trivialization of his flaws, however, the moral ambivalence
of Cogburn’s character proves unavoidable, and the problem of the crimi-
nality in the law nevertheless remains central to the film. When first prop-
erly introduced to the movie, the marshal is testifying in the trial of Odus
Wharton, who, with his brother, C.C., robbed and murdered a farmer and
his wife. The crime is unqualified in its calculated brutality. However, upon
cross-examination, Wharton’s lawyer (Joe Stevens) casts doubt on the legal-
ity of Cogburn’s own actions. When he and his fellow marshal tracked the
brothers to the home, a gun battle ensued, which left C.C. and his father,
Aaron, dead. Odus was only injured in the shootout; and, in his defense, the
lawyer depicts Cogburn as a ruthless killer with a particular bent against the
Whartons. During his four years as a U.S. marshal, the lawyer forces Cogburn
to admit, he has killed twenty-three people, including the Whartons’ cousin,
Dub, who threatened him only with the kingbolt from a wagon. Return-
ing to the shootout with C.C. and Odus, the lawyer furthermore compels
Cogburn to acknowledge that their father similarly was armed only with an
axe. While hardly competition for the marshal’s drawn and cocked revolvers,
Cogburn insists that Aaron nevertheless advanced upon him in a threatening
manner, leaving him no choice but to shoot. However, the lawyer explains
that Aaron’s body was discovered immediately beside the cooking pot in the
fireplace; and, before the scene is over, the lawyer has succeeded, at least, in
suggesting that, rather than shooting in self-defense, Cogburn stormed the
house and gunned down the Wharton family as they prepared their dinner.
While nonetheless true in his pursuit of wrongdoers, through the
course of his adventure with Mattie, Cogburn indeed provides support for
the lawyer’s accusations. As they set an ambush for Chaney, and the train-
robbing gang with whom he has joined forces, the marshal explains the plan
to Mattie, “What we want is to get them all in the dugout. I’ll kill the last
one that goes in, then we’ll have them in a barrel.” Surprised, Mattie asks,
“You will shoot him in the back?” While undoubtedly strategic—Cogburn
explains, “It’ll give them to know our intentions are serious”—the plan
hardly seems just; and it’s easy to imagine that Cogburn felt similarly justi-
fied to descend upon the Wharton family, firing. In Portis’s original story,
but unfortunately omitted from the Coens’ film, the ensuing fight at the
dugout furthermore results in the death of a young boy, who never before
had been in any trouble and only contributed to the gang’s train robbery
by fearfully guarding the horses. In his youthful innocence, he’s an obvious
counterpart to Mattie herself; and his killing at Cogburn’s hands renders the
justice of the otherwise opposed parties unavoidably complicated. Otherwise,
Cogburn reveals the moral ambivalence of his character through the rambling
recollection of his past. As they lope through the countryside, the marshal
tells Mattie about his divorces. Upon leaving him, his first wife remarked,
“Good bye, Reuben. The love of decency does not abide in you.” Particularly
relevant to his relationship with Mattie, he admits also to his failure as a
father, explaining, “She took my boy with her, too. He never cared for me
anyway.” Before being appointed as a marshal, Cogburn admits to a brief
career as an outlaw bank robber himself; and he explains this criminality
as a holdover from his participation in the, more fundamentally troubling,
history of the American Civil War.
As an enduring symptom of the social rift revealed by the war, Cog-
burn previously fought against the state, whose authority he represents in
the film. However, as a member of the notorious band “Quantrill’s Raiders,”
the marshal’s military record bears the marks of a still darker history. While
eventually recognized by the Confederacy, Quantrill’s troops were never fully
integrated into its army and never entirely fell under its control. Instead, they
acted primarily as a guerilla force in the conflict along the Kansas-Missouri
border, directing much of their efforts toward driving out the civilian popu-
lations of pro-union towns. Citing this history, in their ongoing verbal feud,
LaBoeuf denounces Cogburn, “This man is a notorious thumper. He rode

by the light of the moon with Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson  .  .  . They
murdered women and children in Lawrence, Kansas.” Principal members of
the James-Younger Gang also fought under Quantrill; and this military his-
tory provides some context for Cogburn’s postwar career as a bank robber.
Still more fundamentally, however, it reinforces the aspersion cast upon his
character by the lawyer in the Whartons’ trial, by suggesting that, despite his
current legitimacy, the marshal’s methods have not fundamentally changed.
Indeed, in Portis’s novel, Mattie explains that, only weeks after their adventure,
the same basic techniques cost the marshal his badge. After Odus Wharton
had escaped from prison, Cogburn shot him down in a gun battle, along with
two other men who were not wanted by the law. While Mattie insists that
they must have been guilty by virtue of their association with the “thug,”
the killing could not in fact be justified (Portis, 2010; 219). And, among his
other exploits, Cogburn later worked terrorizing “nesters and grangers” in
the land grab that has come to be known as Wyoming’s “Johnson County
War” (Portis, 2010; 219–220).
The film’s study in the law’s contradictions comes to a head when
Mattie stumbles onto Chaney wading in a river. When their respective parties
rush to their aid, the lawmen and the criminals are cast in strict opposition
along the river’s banks, paradoxically emphasizing the dialectical determina-
tion of their respective positions and the possibility of their being recon-
figured. Cogburn, it seems, knows the bank robbers’ leader, Lucky Ned
Pepper (Barry Pepper), on a first-name basis, as if perhaps previously they
had been allied. And, when the criminal gang takes Mattie hostage, she
appeals to Pepper to recognize the justice of her cause against Chaney, offers
the bank robber the aid of her lawyer, and plays the criminals off against
one another in rough approximation of her manipulation of Cogburn and
LaBoeuf. Without, of course, compromising her principles, Mattie’s sense of
justice thus appears to transcend the opposition between the legal authority
and criminal transgression, represented by the two groups. Indeed, Mattie’s
attempt to recruit Pepper’s support for her cause echoes her initial appeal
to Cogburn as a reminder that, while sanctioned by the court, her whole
adventure exceeds the boundaries of the law, both by taking her beyond
the western frontier and by working to redress the law’s failure to uphold
her sense of right.
Eventually, LaBoeuf comes to rescue Mattie from Chaney, while Cog-
burn courageously stands down Lucky Ned’s gang. However, before their
confrontation comes to an end, Chaney succeeds in knocking out LaBoeuf,
and, when Mattie shoots her father’s killer, the rifle’s recoil sends her fall-
ing backwards into a deep hole, where she gets trapped alongside a cadaver
with a nest of poisonous snakes housed in its rib cage. As the pinnacle of
her adventure, the corpse in the pit evokes the figure of her father, lying
in his grave, and presents the ultimate distillation of the negativity that the
trauma of his death revealed in her sense of justice. The decisive question,
presented by the film, thus concerns how to conceive this void. Is it simply
a tomb, confronting Mattie with the finitude of, what Heidegger explains
as the groundless ground of being-towards-death? Is it the still more radical,
aporetic undecidability, which, according to Derrida, qualifies the integrity
of any purportedly self-same principle, including paradigmatically, the law?
Or is it rather the monstrous excess of the jouissance that compels her will-
ful insistence?
Beyond the Hermeneutics of Desire
While originally Lacan explains Freud’s concept of the death drive in terms
of the narcissistic aggression of the mirror stage, as exposited in the second
chapter of this study, he subsequently rethinks the conflicts in the constitution
of desire as a consequence of the subject’s originary symbolic inscription.
Accordingly, Lacan reformulates his concept of the death drive in terms of
the negativity of the symbolic phallus and the relentless insistence of the
signifying chain, which defines the unconscious as the discourse of the Other.
Reflecting on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in “The Direction of the
Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” Lacan thus affirms Freud’s famous
distillation of his grandson’s game to the verbal opposition Fort! Da! (Away!
There!). He argues, “This is the point of insemination for a symbolic order
that preexists the infantile subject and in accordance with which he has to
structure himself ” (Lacan, 1996; 497/594). At the same time, insofar as this
originary sundering defines the lack of symbolic castration, Lacan equates
the death drive with the anticipation of Dasein’s being-towards-death. While
praising Freud, in the same essay, he accordingly remarks, “Who, as fearlessly
as this clinician, so firmly rooted in the everydayness of human suffering, has
questioned life as to its meaning—not to say that it has none, which is a
convenient way of washing one’s hands of the matter, but to say that it has
only one, that in which desire is borne by death?” (Lacan, 1996; 536/642).2
By appealing to the primacy of the signifier, Lacan accounts for the
radical variability that Freud discerned as distinguishing human sexuality
from mere animal instinct, by asserting the distortions of culture as not
secondary but rather fundamental to its constitution. He accounts for the
paradigmatic erogenous zones, which psychoanalysts typically associate with

distinct developmental “stages”—the oral, anal, and phallic—by explaining
them as sites of the signifier’s cut, registered in the phenomenology of the
body. And he accounts for the dualism of unconscious conflict by conceiving
desire as intrinsically divided between the sundering of the symbolic and
the imaginary reification of identity. However, as the crux of what he later
criticizes as the idealism of his work of the 1950s, Lacan’s reformulation of
Freud’s drive theory in terms of the primacy of the signifier suffers from,
what Jacques-Alain Miller diagnoses as, a “confusion between the drive and
desire” (Miller, 1996b; 422).
In his exposition of this “confusion,” Miller takes issue with Lacan’s
exhaustive integration of “the drive into the schema of communication.”
Echoing the central thesis of Lacan’s “structuralist period,” he protests, “the
drive is completely constructed like an unconscious message” (Miller, 1997;
26). Attributing the negativity of the death drive to the sundering of the
symbolic, Lacan equates it with the lack of desire, while he explains drive
conflict (in fact, drive itself) as an effect of the derivative reduction of desire
to demand. Correlative to his dissolution of the objectivity of the lost object
in the formal negativity of the signifier, Lacan thus dispels the force of
the drive, as a compulsive excitation, which chronically disturbs the subject’s
self-possessed intentions. “Need, demand, desire,” Miller asks, “Where is the
drive?” (Miller, 1997; 26). While desire emerges, “between the demand of
need and the demand of love,” he adds, “there is a third: the demand of
jouissance,” which refuses assimilation to the differential negativity of discourse
alone (Miller, 1997; 26). While justifiably refusing the objectivist reduction of
Freud’s concept to a quasi-biological theory of need, defined by the causal
necessity of mechanical determinism, Lacan falls prey to the contrary error
of idealistically “elevating” it to a purely symbolic theory of want and so—
despite the heteronomous dialectic of its constitution—conceiving it essen-
tially as a form of intentionality or, even, freedom.
In more classical psychoanalytic terms, Lacan mistakenly assimilates the
disturbing force of the death drive’s negativity to the pleasure principle’s
homeostatic regulation of the psyche. Accordingly, when revising his critical
theory, Lacan revisits the polemical confrontation with Jung that, among
other things, compelled Freud to postulate the death drive as the pleasure
principle’s “beyond.” Setting the stage for his argument, he reflects on the
rise of modern science, as marked by the historical transition from astrol-
ogy to astronomy. “The primitive science,” he contends, “is a sort of sexual
technique” (Lacan, 1998; 150). Despite drawing significant conclusions about
the stars, traditional astrology lacks the objectivity of astronomy, insofar as it
conceives the universe as invested with meaning. Rather than merely fac-
tual, it thus understands the stars “erotically” as organized in terms of—and,
in fact, actively reflecting—the relational dynamism of social relationships.
The question, Lacan asks, is “whether we must regard the unconscious as
a remanence of that archaic junction between thought and sexual reality?”
(Lacan, 1998; 152). Despite the diametrical opposition between Jung’s and
Lévi-Strauss’s theories, the question echoes Lacan’s critique of the anthro-
pologist’s explanation of the unity of science and magic, on the basis of the
symbolic division that differentiates all cultures from nature. In his elevation
of psychoanalytic concepts to universal “archetypes,” Jung similarly restores
the unity of astrology and astronomy, albeit not on the basis of the scientific
rigor of his theory of the symbol but rather by recuperating “the level at
which man’s thought follows those aspects of the sexual experience that
have been reduced by the invasion of science” (Lacan, 1998; 153). That
is, he conceives psychoanalysis as recuperating the repressed, “astrological”
concept of the universe as a meaningful totality, in which empirical science
finds its proper place.
While an empiricist might protest Jung’s eroticization of nature, in
keeping with his “anxious” reaction to Lévi-Strauss, Lacan’s contention first
concerns the implications of his theory for the psychoanalytic concept of
drive conflict. Jungianism, he argues, “is necessarily accompanied by a repu-
diation of the term libido, by the neutralization of this function by recourse
to a notion of psychical energy, a much more generalized notion of interest”
(Lacan, 1998; 153). While Freud implicitly repudiates the scientistic ideology
of nineteenth-century positivism, by indeed recognizing an “archaic junction
between thought and sexual reality,” in a decidedly modernist—even prop-
erly scientific—vein, he recognizes this junction as the locus of a conflict in
each, and in their relationship to one another. By contrast, Jung’s restoration
of the unity of thought and desire not only overextends reason’s reach but
also dispels from desire the disturbing excess that qualifies it as sexual. Jung’s
eroticization of nature, that is, depends upon purging from the libido that
which makes it erotic.
The Drive’s Circuit
Against this implication of his own earlier work, in his 1964 Seminar, Lacan
accordingly insists that “the reality of the unconscious is sexual reality”;
and he explains the force of the drive as an effect of the subject’s origi-
nary relationship to neither the lack of desire nor its derivative reduction
to demand but rather to the Real of the lost object (a), registered in jou-
issance (Lacan, 1998; 150). Prior to its articulation into the three voices,
“active, passive, and reflexive,” Lacan argues that the drive is defined by a
“movement outwards and back,” which he elaborates through the fourfold
distinction that Freud draws in his Three Essays on Sexuality, by first locating
its source in the body. Contrary to his earlier, exhaustive reduction of the
unconscious to the “treasure-trove” of signifiers, Lacan thus conceives the
subject as essentially corporeal. However, he does not therefore reduce the
drive to a quasi-naturalistic theory of instinct. As distinct from the rhythmic
gratification of instinctual needs, the pressure of the drive is constant: the
chronic disturbance of a relentless excitation. In keeping with the earlier
account of the object (a), as the remainder of a cut in the Real, (logically)
prior to the sundering of the signifier, the force of the drive registers the
subject’s division from the immediately given, natural world, at the level of
its natural physiology. While not yet delimited by the symbolic prohibition,
which constitutes desire, nevertheless the drives exceed the closed circuit of
the instincts and the innate rhythm of their satisfaction. They are, as Žižek
contends, “already ‘derailed nature’ ” (Žižek, 2005; 192).
In this regard, when locating the drive’s source in the body, Lacan
implicitly conceives the body itself as neither merely biological nor merely
phenomenological (i.e., symbolic) but rather somewhere between the two—
in fact, one might hypothesize, at the impasse marked by their irreducible
mutual implication—as constituted in its ultimate (in)coherence by the Real
in the “extimate” lost object (a). As distinct from the internal organs, which
regulate the exigencies of the instincts, the organs of the drive thus lie on
the body’s surface, at the “vanishing points where the inside meets the out-
side” (Jaanus, 1995; 120). Rhetorically, Lacan asks, “Why are the so-called
erogenous zones recognized only in those points that are differentiated for
us by their rim-like structure?” (Lacan, 1998; 169). Beyond the satisfaction
of the organism’s natural needs, and yet prior to their symbolic mediation,
the rims of the body’s orifices delimit the subject’s physical relationship to
the world, as points of division, invested with the force of a craving, whose
unqualified gratification would be the subject’s corporeal dissolution. At a
strictly physical level, the force of the drive is thus most immediately evident
in those excitations that run contrary to the body’s needs: insomnia, addiction,
the masochistic self-flagellation of the workaholic.
While locating the source of the drive in the body, Lacan thus simul-
taneously distinguishes the object of the drive from the object of instinctual
need. Whereas instincts entail a determinate relationship to their object, Lacan
argues that the drive has no objective correlative. Citing Freud, he contends,
“Look what he says, ‘As far as the object of the drive is concerned, let it
be clear that it is, strictly speaking, of no importance. It is a matter of total
indifference’ ” (Lacan, 1998; 168). The object of the drive is, according to
Lacan, the Real of the lost object. Despite the force of its claim on the
subject’s body, strictly speaking, it thus amounts only to “a hollow, a void,”
for which objects of instinctual gratification (among others) only secondarily
serve as surrogates (Lacan, 1998; 180). Lacan contends, “No food will ever
satisfy the oral drive, except by circumventing the eternally lacking object”
(Lacan, 1998; 180).
Bringing together the “void” of the drive’s object with the “rim” of its
source, Lacan depicts the force of the drive in a vivid image. “Even when
you stuff the mouth—the mouth that opens in the register of the drive—,”
he contends, “it is not the food that satisfies it, it is, as one says, the plea-
sure of the mouth” (Lacan, 1998; 167–168). As conspicuous, for instance, in
the clinical and cultural phenomenon of overeating, the drive is not sated
by the objects on which it is brought to bear but rather always demands
more, another. At the point where overeating meets anorexia, the object of
the drive lies rather in the absence of the remainder: its satisfaction is cor-
relative with its dissatisfaction, as the enjoyment of the craving. Accordingly,
Lacan explains the aim of the drive as the circumnavigation of the object.
The drive, he puns, “fait la tour” (Lacan, 1998; 168). The expression literally
means “to go around,” but it is also used idiomatically to mean “to trick.”
While brought to bear upon objects of instinctual gratification (among oth-
ers), the drive does not find satisfaction in consumption, or even, strictly
speaking, consummation. As further explaining the constancy of its pressure,
it instead “tricks” the object into serving as a stand-in for the lost object
(a) and finds its satisfaction only in the dissatisfaction of repeating the out
and back of its circuit.
While repudiating his earlier assertion of the primacy of the signifier’s
lack, Lacan thus conceives the drive itself as the efficacy of an originary
negativity. Rooted in the rims of the body’s orifices, the drive relentlessly
circumnavigates a categorically lost object, accomplishing nothing. Contrary
to his earlier theory, however, Lacan does not conceive the absence of the
drive privatively but rather as the imposing presence of a visceral excitation
whose “lack of lack” renders it impossible to directly determine. In opposi-
tion to the idealistic, formal negativity of the signifier, Lacan thus depicts
the drive as a monstrous corporeality in his myth of the “lamella.”
Lacan’s myth echoes Aristophanes’s speech, in Plato’s Symposium, con-
cerning the origin of love. In the beginning, the comedian contends, human
beings were round creatures, with four arms, four legs, two faces, and two
sets of genitals. Some were wholly male, some wholly female, and others
both male and female. They were powerful, ambitious creatures, who rebelled
against the gods; and so, to limit their strength, Zeus resolved to divide them
in half, healing the wound of this cut “at the center of the stomach . . . now
called the navel” (Plato, 1989; 26/190E). Separated in two, each longed for its
own other half, and this, Aristophanes contends, “is the source of our desire
to love each other.” Born into every human, love “tries to make one out
of two and heal the wound of human nature” (Plato, 1989; 27/191D). In
his myth, Lacan similarly postulates an originary corporeal sundering in the
genesis of human desire. Whereas Aristophanes depicts this cut as separating
two complete people, and so constituting love as an essentially intersubjective
relationship, however, Lacan conceives it rather as a cut in the alterity of the
Real that conditions the genesis and structure of the subject. Rather than
intersubjective, the drive thus registers the force of a corporeal disturbance
in the subject’s intrasubjective relationship to the world as a whole, which not
only precludes the possibility that it might constitute itself as complete but
furthermore saddles the subject with a tireless excess. Beyond even Aristo-
phanes’s strange speech, which still has an aura of humanism, Lacan’s myth
thus more closely approximates the classic horror B film Basket Case, in
which a boy attempts to abandon his deformed, conjoined twin in New
York’s Grand Central Station, only then to find himself terrorized by the
angry monster. Indeed, as a further elaboration of Freud’s concept of the lost
object, the persistence of the Real in the drive is essentially undead. With an
air of gothic horror, Lacan accordingly explains,
The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba.

It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And
as it is . . . related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is,
like the amoeba in relation to the sexed being, immortal—because
it survives any division, any scissiparous intervention. And it can
run around. Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes
and envelopes your face while you are asleep. (Lacan, 1998; 199)
In keeping with his comparison of the object (a) with the discarded
placenta, when here conceiving the cut in the Real as the origin of the
drive, he again distinguishes it from the father’s symbolic “no,” by situat-
ing it rather at the level of the egg, as what he compares to a primordial
“scrambling” of the subject. “If you want to stress its jokey side,” he says,
“you can call it ‘l’hommelette” (Lacan, 1998; 197).
The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse

The Coens’ films are rife with characters, who embody the negativity in
their plots, with the hyperbole of Lacan’s lamella. In Blood Simple, the private
detective who derails Marty’s plans anticipates this recurrent character, with
his sardonic laugh, obscene humor, and repulsive physical presence; and, in the
last moments of his life, Marty himself finally fully embodies the masochistic
jouissance that drives his obsessive jealousy, dragging his bullet-ridden body
across the asphalt with an insistence that suggests he isn’t merely struggling
for his life but rather returning from the dead. However, the Coens’ second,
1987 film, Raising Arizona, first captures the monstrosity of the drive in its
thoroughly cartoonish excess. As another treatment of the problem of pater-
nal authority, the movie tells the story of H.I. “Hi” McDunnough (Nicolas
Cage), a petty thief “partial to convenience stores,” who falls in love with
Edwina “Ed” (Holly Hunter), the admitting officer at “the county lock-up
in Tempe, Arizona.” Despite the early “salad days” of their marriage, however,
the promise of their future hits a snag when Ed proves to be unable to
bear children. “The doctor,” H.I. recalls, “said that her insides were a rocky
place, where my seed could find no purchase.” H.I.’s criminal record pre-
vents the couple from adopting, and they despair that they may never have
a family, until Florence Arizona (Lynne Kitel), the wife of Nathan Arizona
(Trey Wilson)—“the owner of the largest chain of a unpainted furniture
and bathroom fixture outlets throughout the Southwest”—gives birth to
quintuplets! Convincing herself that the Arizonas “have more than they can
handle,” Ed hatches a plan. At her insistence, H.I. breaks into their home
and, after struggling to wrangle the infants in the nursery, kidnaps one of
the boys—“Nathan Jr.,” they speculate, although even their father cannot
clearly differentiate the brood.
Bringing him back to their trailer, the couple welcomes the boy to
his new home, celebrates their new family, and brace themselves for their
new responsibilities. Retiring into this restored domestic bliss, however, H.I.
is visited by a terrifying vision. He recounts,
That night I had a dream. I drifted off, thinking about happi-

ness, birth, and new life. But now I was haunted by a vision
of . . . He was horrible. The lone biker of the Apocalypse. A
man with all the powers of hell at his command. He could turn
day into night. And laid to waste everything in his path. He was
especially hard on the little things, the helpless and the gentle
creatures. He left a scorched earth in his wake, befouling even

the sweet desert breeze as it whipped across his brow. I didn’t
know where he came from or why. I didn’t know if he was a
dream or vision; but I feared that I myself had unleashed him.
For he was the fury that would be as soon as Florence Arizona
found her little Nathan gone.
With two sawed-off shotguns strapped across his back, and hand-grenades
hanging from his chest, the biker emerges from burning flames. Caked with
dirt, he wears all black leather, shoulder pads, and fur-covered boots. As
he races through the desert, he blows up bunny rabbits and, in a gesture
repeated more solemnly by Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, shoots
critters by the roadside. As H.I. concludes the recollection of his dream, a
screaming woman’s voice starts to crescendo on the soundtrack. Continu-
ing the biker’s trajectory, the camera races up the driveway of the Arizonas’
home at the speed of his motorcycle. It jumps over the hood of a parked
Cadillac, cuts across the desert lawn, climbs the ladder that H.I. left behind,
enters through the open window, and descends into the vortex of Florence
Arizona’s gaping mouth.
As H.I. contends, the biker embodies the rage of the mother, whose
child has been taken from her—which is, of course, every mother. In Lacanian
terms, he embodies the mother’s demand, and, as such, corresponds not only
to Florence’s anger at having her child taken but also to Ed’s frustrated desire,
as the motivating force behind the kidnapping. When H.I. wakes up from the
dream, the soundtrack cuts from Florence’s scream to the gentle sound of Ed’s
voice, singing Nathan Jr. a lullaby. The two are literally continuous. At the
same time, in essentially the same capacity, the biker doubles for Nathan Jr.,
as the child, taken from his mother—which is, of course, every child. And he
still bears the scars of this separation, as a furious grown man. As he speeds
through the desert, the Coens reveal a pair of bronzed baby shoes dangling
from the biker’s belt. A skull tattooed on his arm reads “Mama didn’t love
me.” When he enters the film’s narrative, he introduces himself to Nathan
as a “Man-hunter,” who “hunt[s] babies on occasion,” and menacingly offers
his services to recover Nathan Jr. When Nathan reminds him of the reward
he’s already posted for his son’s return, the biker tells him that the offer is
below the market rate, adding, “why, as a pup, I myself fetched $30,000 on
the black market,” and threatening to sell the recovered boy to the highest
bidder. Finally, as a figure of the abducted child, the biker also doubles for
H.I. himself. In the struggle of their final confrontation, H.I. tears open the
biker’s shirt, revealing the same tattoo that H.I., at the outset of the film,
had flashed to Ed. If, as H.I. contends, the biker embodies Florence’s fury,
the association of this monster with H.I. himself brings the drive’s circuit full
circle, by presenting his desire to provide Ed with a child, as the persistent
force of an infantile wish to rectify his own constitutive diremption.
In Fargo, the kidnappers, Carl and Gaear, similarly embody the exces-
sive jouissance of the drive in Jerry’s plan to kidnap his wife, with a vividly
grotesque hyperbole. While superficially more human than the “lone biker
of the Apocalypse,” in their duality, the kidnappers almost literally parody
Freud’s later theory of drive conflict, as based upon the opposition between
Eros and Thanatos. When they first rendezvous at the roadside honky-tonk,
Gaear sits collapsed in his chair, as if passed out drunk, with his head hanging
back and a cigarette dangling precariously from his open mouth. Despite his
sheer size and hulking strength, Gaear looks dead: his pale skin and bleached
blonde hair giving him the air of a zombie; but he embodies Freud’s death
drive still more fundamentally in the withdrawal of his reticence. Because he
postulates the death drive only to account for the conflict in erotic desire,
manifested in his analysand’s symptoms, Freud argues that, in its pure form,
it “escapes detection,” operating silently, unless “alloyed with Eros” (Freud,
1957; 21: 121); and, indeed, it’s hard to imagine how Gaear could manage
without his loquacious partner, Carl. While Jerry was first referred to Gaear,
at the meeting, Carl does all the talking, and later, when Gaear dismisses
Carl’s attempt to solicit conversation, “You ever been to Minneapolis?” with
a characteristically curt, “Nope,” Carl calls further attention to his silence by
berating him, “Would it kill you to say something?”
Indifferently, Gaear protests, “I did.”
“ ‘No.’ That’s the first thing you’ve said in the last four hours.” Sar-
castically, Carl continues, “That’s a fountain of conversation, man. That’s a
geyser. I mean whoa, daddy, stand back, man. Shit. I’m sitting here driving.
I’m doing all the driving, whole fucking way from Brainerd. Just tryin’ to
chat. You know, keep our spirits up, fight the boredom of the road and you
can’t say one fucking thing just in the way of conversation?” The Coens
push the point, until it degenerates into a gag. “Fuck it,” Carl continues, “I
don’t have to talk either, man. See how you like it.” He pauses. “Just total
fucking silence. Two can play at that game, smart guy. We’ll just see how
you like it.” He pauses again. “Total silence.”
When Gaear does speak, the monotony of his demands renders them
nevertheless deadening. Wrapped in a cloud of cigarette smoke, he insists,
“Where is pancakes house? We stop at pancakes house.” Carl complains,
“What are you nuts? We had pancakes for breakfast. Gotta go to a place,
where I can get a shot and a beer, and steak, maybe, not more pancakes.”
While Gaear protests Carl’s proposal to wait to eat, until later outside of
Brainerd—at a place he knows, where they can get laid—by insisting that
he’s “hungry now,” the ultimate force of his demand lies, not in need to
gratify his hunger but rather its idiotic redundancy: more, the same, again,
“pancakes house.”
If Gaear thus embodies the conservative redundancy of the death drive,
which disturbs the homeostatic regulation of the pleasure principle, through
the radical negativity of its self-reflexive collapse, Carl caricatures Freud’s
concept of Eros with his endless prattle and fucking. Along with talking
Gaear’s ear off, and indeed hiring hookers at a truck stop outside of Brainerd,
on a later trip into Minneapolis to steal license plates for the car, Carl takes
a prostitute out to dinner. When she asks if he lives in the city, he replies,
“Just in town for business. Just in and out . . . Just a little of the old in-and-
out.” Beyond the immediate obscenity of his personality, Carl furthermore
betrays his erotic excess, by subverting his own designs through the constant
attention that he draws to himself. In an effort to retrieve his four dollars,
he provokes a fight with the attendant at the airport parking lot, where he
steals new license plates for his car. As if intentionally announcing his sus-
picious activity, he explains that he just pulled in, “but, you know, decided
not to take a trip, as it turns out.” And, as the clue that leads Marge to his
hideout, Carl complains to a local bartender that he’s “going crazy out there
at the lake,” looking for some “woman action”; then, when the bartender
rebuffs his solicitation, he tells him that he killed the last guy who treated
him like a jerk.
In light of No Country for Old Men’s existentialist implications, Anton
Chigurh appears to be a figure of the impossible possibility of Dasein’s being-
toward-death. However, in his initial reflections, Bell specifically associates
Chigurh with a moral hazard that exceeds the threat of getting killed, and,
in his relentless insistence, Chigurh indeed refuses any such finite delimita-
tion, as a figure rather of the drive. In the film’s final scene, after he’s mur-
dered Carla Jean, Chigurh drives calmly through her quiet suburb, trailed
by boys on bicycles. Suddenly, as he crosses through the green light of an
intersection, a station wagon barrels full speed into the side of his car. When
the two cars finally come to a stop, they sit deathly still. Glass litters the
pavement, and their engines smoke, but no one moves. Given the force of
the impact, it’s easy to imagine that no one survived; and one might see
the scene, accordingly, as reinforcing the film’s apparent ethics of finitude,
by presenting the ultimate check on the attempts by the central characters
to make things “hold still.” To the contrary, however, the scene altogether
undermines the simple dichotomy between egotistical self-presence and dif-
ferential underdetermination that frames this moral. Breaking the still silence
of the crash scene, Chigurh haltingly pushes open the driver’s side door and
limps to the curb. The boys ride up on their bikes, as Chigurh rolls up his
shirtsleeve. Dumbstruck, one of the boys remarks, “Mister, you got a bone
sticking out of your arm.” Despite conspicuously struggling, Chigurh main-
tains his composure, reassuring them that he only needs to sit for a minute.
And, when the boys let him know that an ambulance has been called, he
offers to buy one of their shirts, makes himself a sling, and, after echoing
Sheriff Bell by remarking, “You didn’t see me,” he walks away. Not only
does Chigurh remain undaunted by the contingent interruption of the car
crash, the force of his persistence is not reducible to the egotistical pretense
to authoritative self-control. Instead, as he leaves the scene with his body
battered, Chigurh embodies the relentless excess of the drive, insofar as it
not only outstrips the will’s delimitation, as Bell complains, but still more
disturbingly causes it to fail.
As if by Chance
Despite the hermeneutical dimension of his critical praxis, announced by the

title of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud worked to explain the cause of his
patients’ suffering, in a manner consistent with the positivism of his education
and training. When the objectivism of his medical science proved inadequate
to the task, Freud did not therefore give it up in favor of a humanistic
understanding of subjective experience, which effectively would have limited
the development of his work to Breuer’s original “cathartic method.” Instead,
he persisted in his efforts to formulate a causal explanation of neurotic suf-
fering, precisely at this impasse between positivism and humanism. Similarly,
in his appeal to structuralism, Lacan evidences his commitment to explain-
ing psychical suffering causally. Despite his debt to Heidegger’s existential
phenomenology, in his work of the 1950s Lacan thus conceives unconscious
conflict as an effect of the symbolic’s formal structure. And, when revising
his critical theory, he renews this project by asking how the “gap between
the Real and the symbolic affects the symbolic order itself ”: as its “inherent
limitation” (Žižek, 1994; 30).
In so doing, Lacan distinguishes the causality of the Real from the
determination of the law, both in the Newtonian mechanics of empirical
science and in his own earlier concept of the “automaton” of the signify-
ing chain (Lacan, 1998; 53–54). In fact, Lacan conceives the Real’s causality
and the law’s determination in a dynamic opposition. “There is cause,” he
contends, “only in something that doesn’t work” (Lacan, 1998; 22). Contrary
to the determination of the law, the causality of the Real does not bring to
fruition a precipitating sequence of events. As such, the Real’s effects appear
“as if by chance,” the disturbance of an accident, whose cause only can be
inferred retroactively, in light of the effects it generates. The Real, Lacan
contends, presents itself in the form of that which is unassimilable—“in
the form of the trauma, determining all that follows, and imposing on it
an apparently accidental origin” (Lacan, 1998; 55). In keeping with Chiesa’s
account of the object (a) as the remainder of something that never existed,
the causality of the Real should not therefore be conceived as preexisting its
effects but rather as coextensive with them. The diachronic unfolding of the
contingent missed encounter, always again for the first time, brings to light
the synchronic encounter with the Real qua encounter forever missed, while
this structural impasse in the subject’s experience itself requires postulating
the trauma of a diachronic missed encounter as the prehistory accounting for
its genetic development. Žižek explains, “The paradox of trauma qua cause
that does not pre-exist its effects but is itself retroactively ‘posited’ by them
involves a kind of temporal loop: it is through its ‘repetition’ through its
echoes within the signifying structure, that the cause retroactively becomes
what it already was” (Žižek, 1994; 32).
In his reflections on the structures and dynamics of différance, Derrida
elaborates a similar concept of the paradoxical coincidence of cause and
effect. Strictly correlative to Lacan’s rethinking of his original postulate of
the primacy of the signifier, Derrida formulates his concept as a critical
response to Saussure’s theory of the differential conditions of signification.
While Saussure rightfully refuses the reduction of meaning to a transcen-
dental cause by conceiving significance instead as a formal effect of the dif-
ferential play of signifiers, Derrida argues that Saussure implicitly recuperates
the metaphysical origin that he repudiates in, what he fails to acknowledge
as, the paradoxical impossibility of this structural field of effects without a
genetic cause. “In a system of language,” Derrida writes, “there are only
differences . . . [and] these differences play: in language, in speech too, and
in the exchange between speech and language.” At the same time, however,
“these differences are themselves effects. They have not fallen from the sky
fully formed” (Derrida, 1982a; 11).
In his concept of différance, Derrida accordingly redoubles Saussure’s
critique of causal origins by postulating a genetic basis for the linguis-
tic structure in Saussure’s theory, which paradoxically cannot be conceived
except on the basis of the synchronic system of primordial differences that
it institutes. Derrida writes,
What is written as différance, then, will be the playing movement

that “produces”—by means of something that is not simply an
activity—these differences, these effects of difference. This does
not mean that the différance that produces differences is somehow
before them, in a simple unmodified—in-different—present. Dif-
férance is the nonfull, nonsimple, structured and differentiating
origin of differences. Thus the name “origin” no longer suits it.
(Derrida, 1982a; 11)
While irreducible either to a metaphysical theory of causal origins or to

a contrary structuralist concept of purely differential effects, Derrida con-
ceives the efficacy of différance as the aporetic mutual inclusion of their two
contrary movements in the phenomenological unfolding of experience. He
writes, “Différance is no more static than it is genetic, no more structural than
historical. Or is no less so” (Derrida, 1982a; 12). Along with the opposi-
tions between presence and absence, speech and writing, the intelligible
and the sensible, in his concept of différance, Derrida thus deconstructs the
dichotomy between cause and effect, evoking, what Peggy Kamuf calls, the
“nontransitivity” of “a middle voice between the active and passive voices,”
as “an operation that is not that of a subject on an object,” and so, strictly
speaking, “not an operation at all” (Kamuf, 1991; 59).
Accordingly, in Lacan’s concept of the drive’s causality, his critical the-
ory again proves to be strictly isomorphic with Derrida’s philosophy. For
although the force of the drive is registered in the orifices of the subject’s
body, Lacan argues that its efficacy resides in the Real of the object as, what
he calls, the object cause of desire. While compelling the subject to act, the
drive is thus first suffered passively, in a manner that indeed complicates
the distinction between subject and object and so similarly distinguishes the
agency of the drive from an operation. Like Derrida’s concept of différance,
Lacan furthermore conceives the force of the drive as the efficacy of an
originary aberration. And both Lacan and Derrida formulate their theories
through critiques of structuralism’s differential systems, which render the
opposition between cause and effect aporetic. Despite the strict isomorphism
between their concepts, however, Derrida’s philosophy again proves to be
predicated upon an abstraction and neutralization of, what Lacan discerns as,
the content in this formal underdetermination. In contradistinction to Der-
rida’s concept of différance, Lacan does not therefore conceive the force of
the drive as exhausted by the aporetic mutual inclusion of cause and effect
in its phenomenological unfolding. As an implication of his concept of the
jouissance revealed in the nothing and nowhere of anxiety, Lacan furthermore
explains the drive as a visceral excitation whose negativity resides specifically

in the constitution of the sexed body, even as it too complicates the bound-
aries between inside and outside, agent and object. Before and beyond the
problem of defining it limits, Lacan accordingly conceives the trauma that
compels the drive as an effect of this imposing enjoyment, which the sub-
ject suffers with a vertiginous ambivalence. And, rather than the efficacy of
an ontological openness, whose subversion of the dichotomy between cause
and effect is symptomatic of the radical contingency of experience, Lacan
conceives the force of the drive as a compulsive insistence more necessary
than empirical causality.
As a correlate to the necessity of this strife, Lacan furthermore conceives
the “middle voice” of the drive’s deconstruction of cause and effect as not
only subverting the conscious subject’s sense of self-possession, but also as
constituting the subject as the unconscious agent of impulses that are both
heteronomously engendered and contradictory to its own desire. Accordingly,
Lacan might seem to conceive the drive as a form of intentionality, albeit
displaced from self-consciousness, providing an implicit basis for mastering
the inconsistency in experience as characteristic of the subject’s unconscious
desire. In the declaration “That’s me!” one would thus retroactively assume
responsibility for apparently objective obstacles as instead symptomatic of
one’s hermeneutical comportment toward the world. However, along with
having its object behind the subject of desire, the drive does not seek and
so does not misconstrue an ever-elusive satisfaction. To the contrary, as symp-
tomatic of its suspension of both the empirical laws of biology and the
symbolic regulation of the pleasure principle, the drive categorically refuses
satisfaction. Or rather, its satisfaction lies in the pleasure-in-displeasure of
jouissance, which it has always already found. When tricking objects of need the
drive does not therefore fill the emptiness of a void, but rather expresses the
excitation of this excess-in-satisfaction as the source of a chronic disturbance.
As Freud originally observed in the nightmares of soldiers traumatized
by the First World War, the drive orients and sustains the subject in relation-
ship to the impasses that catalyze its compulsive insistence, reiterating their
recalcitrant impossibility without thereby ameliorating their effects. Instead of
assuming subjective responsibility for seemingly objective matters of fact, the
drive thus requires one to identify objectively with the structural impasses
that compel one’s subjective jouissance. Avowing the drive does not take the
form, “That’s me!” reducing the alterity of the incoherence in experience
to the self-determination of the intentional subject, but rather “I’m that!”
both shattering the egotistical sense of self-possession against the rocks of the
Real and assuming responsibility for the agency of the unconscious as the
enjoyment in the strife of this monstrous alterity. And, in this regard, Der-
rida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence proves to be predicated upon a
false opposition between the mastery of autonomous self-determination and
the heteronomous undecidability, which not only fails to account for, but
furthermore serves to obscure, the more troubling implications of the drive’s
causality as the perversity of a fundamentally self-defeating agency.3
Glen Jr., Gale Jr.
As an embodiment of the jouissance that permeates the drive in Ed and H.I.’s

desire to have children, the lone biker of the Apocalypse accordingly also
presents the ultimate obstacle to realizing their wish by both offering his
services to retrieve Nathan Jr. from them and threatening to kidnap the baby
himself. However, even before Ed and H.I. ultimately confront the biker,
the Coens reveal the failure of their plan to be correlative to the excessive
passion in its motivating cause, through the intervention of other characters,
who similarly mirror their desires.
Attempting to provide, what she takes to be, a “decent” home for their
son, Ed arranges a lunch date with the family of Dot (Frances McDormand)
and Glen (Sam McMurray), the foreman at the sheet metal plant where
H.I. has found a job. The couple have a brood of their own, which hastily
runs roughshod over the McDunnoughs’ home, hitting their car with sticks,
writing “potty-talk” on their walls, breaking windows, throwing food at H.I.’s
head, and wetting H.I.’s pants with a water gun. Meanwhile, Dot barrages
Ed with an anxiously overdetermined list of what she and H.I. are expected,
as new parents, to provide their son: shots, pediatricians, life insurance, bank
accounts “for his orthodontia and university.” Between Dot’s expectations, and
the children’s abuse, H.I. gets overwhelmed and, walking through the desert
with Glen, complains of feeling suffocated by his newfound responsibilities.
Glen sympathizes and offers a solution, “That’s a disease, but you got a cure.”
Turns out the couple are swingers; and when Glen proposes swapping wives,
H.I. punches him in the face and chases him into a tree.
The next day, Glen returns to tell H.I. not only that he’s fired but
also that he and Dot want Nathan Jr. for themselves. When first introducing
them to the boy, H.I. and Ed stumbled over their story, and, after reading
about the kidnapping in the paper, their friends pierced the veil of their
deception. Glen explains, “I was just gonna turn you in for the reward, but
Dot wants something to cuddle.” Despite their already overwhelming number
of children, at the lunch date, Glen explained that Dot wants more, which
he is unable to provide, on account of there being “something wrong with

[his] semen.” While Ed decries the failure of the two families to identify, it
thus turns out, to the contrary, that they are too much alike. Dot and Glen
suffer the same excess in their desire for family, both in their already team-
ing progeny and in their persistent demand for more. And now they plan
to do to the McDunnoughs what the McDunnoughs did to the Arizonas.
The second couple to derail Ed and H.I.’s plans are the Snoats brothers,
Gale (John Goodman) and Evelle (William Forsythe), prison buddies of H.I.,
who break out of jail at precisely the same moment that he and Ed kidnap
Nathan Jr. Correlative to the association drawn, by way of the biker, between
H.I. and the abducted child, the Coens depict their escape as a birth. As
rain pours down onto the ground outside the prison walls, Gale’s screaming
head, pierces through the mud. Twisting and writhing, he pulls his shoulders
and arms up through the tight tunnel and spills out onto the wet ground,
covered in goo. Still screaming, Gale reaches back into the earth and pulls
out his brother, Evelle, by the boot. He’s breeched. Reinforcing the metaphor,
when they arrive that night at the McDunnoughs’ trailer, Ed complains of
the smell. Gale explains, “When we were tunneling out, we happened to hit
the main sewer line, dumb luck that.” Despite her initial protests, Ed agrees
to let them stay, and, the next morning, the escaped convicts ogle Ed, feed-
ing the baby, as they eat their “cereal flakes.” Lasciviously, Gale asks, “Why
ain’t you breast-feeding? You appear to be capable.” Citing their mandatory
prison counseling, Evelle explains, “Ma’am, you don’t breast-feed him, he’ll
hate you for it later. That’s why we wound up in prison. At least that’s what
Doc Schwarz tells us.”
When Glen confronts H.I. with the truth about Nathan Jr., the Snoats
brothers overhear him and decide to kidnap the baby themselves. While Glen
and Dot first reiterate the excess in the McDunnoughs’ desire for family,
as doubles for H.I., Gale and Evelle thus first mirror the means by which
they attempt to realize their dreams. But the two intersect, as the “decent
couple” is driven to kidnapping and the kidnapping criminals find unex-
pected fulfillment in parenting. While Evelle expresses affection for the boy
from the beginning, the bond of their “family” is sealed when the brothers
pull away from a gas station, after accidentally leaving Nathan Jr. on top of
their stolen station wagon. When they realize what they’ve done, the Snoats
turn their station wagon around and race back to retrieve the baby, again
screaming the whole way. Finding the boy unharmed, Evelle picks him up
in his arms, declaring, “Promise we ain’t never gonna leave him, Gale.” His
brother reassures him, “We ain’t never gonna give him up again, Evelle. He’s
our little Gale Jr. now.” The process echoes the McDunnoughs’ original
adoption of Nathan Jr. When first driving him home, H.I. remarks, “It’s like
when I was robbing convenience stores.” Despite being driven by a desire for
family, and already expressing pride in his newfound progeny, the abduction
reminds H.I. of stealing cash and sundry goods. When the Snoats kidnap
the baby for themselves, they implicitly draw the same connection, albeit
in the contrary direction. Having taken the child, like any other valuable,
only to trade him for the promised reward, they find themselves overcome
by parental love, as if a child—and the family it provides—were what they
were after all along. Maybe Doc Schwarz was right?
Finally, the McDunnoughs indeed must confront “the lone biker of
the Apocalypse,” as the ultimate obstacle to realizing their dreams. After the
Snoats again leave Nathan Jr. at the scene of a bank they’ve robbed, Ed
and H.I. race to his rescue, only to find that the monstrous biker already
has scooped him up. In the ensuing battle, H.I. suffers the full force of the
biker’s wrath but, in the end, manages to blow him up with one of his own
grenades. However, the victory does not liberate Ed and H.I. to enjoy their
new family. To the contrary, insofar as the obstacles to their happiness seemed
to come from without, they were able to sustain the struggle to fulfill their
aspirations. But once the biker has been defeated, they find themselves faced
with the fact—brought to light through the course of their adventure—that,
the source of their frustration lies rather in the excess of their own desires.
And, at least initially, they plan to break up.
Smooth Smooth
As figures of the drive, in Fargo, Carl and Gaear similarly evidence the ret-
roactive necessity of the disasters in which Jerry’s plans result. As they drive
to their hideout with Jean bound and gagged in the backseat of their car,
a police car pulls up behind them with its sirens wailing. Carl failed to put
temporary tags on the new car that Jerry gave to them for the job: a stupid
mistake that undoubtedly qualifies the whole episode as contingent. But
the accidental nature of Carl’s oversight does not suffice to account for the
ensuing murders. As the state trooper steps to the window, asking to see his
license and registration, Carl reassures Gaear, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of
this.” He pulls a fifty-dollar bill partially out of his wallet and proposes that
they settle the matter right then and there; but the trooper rebuffs the offer
and, raising the stakes in the arrest, asks Carl to step out of the car. When
Jean begins to whimper in the backseat, the trooper gets curious, and Gaear
settles the matter, on his own terms, by pulling his revolver from the glove
compartment and blowing a hole in the policeman’s skull. Blood spurts onto
Carl’s lap and face as he gasps, “Oh Jesus.”
The failure of Carl’s attempt to cajole the trooper into letting him
go again might be conceived as resulting from the indeterminacy that both
conditions the possibility of their exchange and subverts Carl’s self-conscious
intentions. While Carl supposes that the fifty-dollar bill “represents” a deal
between them, the trooper understands it rather as a criminal transgression.
However, even on its own terms, this reading is thin, since both Carl and
the trooper know what the money is supposed to mean; and, beyond mere
indeterminacy, Carl’s bribe attempt is weighted with an erotic excess, which
constitutes it, specifically, as a failed seduction. With his fifty-dollar bill, Carl
attempts to lure the trooper into an unspoken agreement—given its secrecy,
one might even call it an intimacy—and the trooper thwarts Carl’s advance,
for the very same reason, as a repulsive attempt at illicit social commerce. The
deal goes wrong, not on account of unanticipated contingencies but rather—
in keeping with Carl’s, more general, self-defeating chatter—on account of
the distorting excess in his own desire. Settling back into his comatose reserve,
Gaear makes the point, when chiding him, “You’ll take care of it. You’re a
smooth smooth, you know.”
The failed communication between Carl and the trooper echoes the
gaps and inconsistencies in Jerry’s initial exchange with the kidnappers, bring-
ing to light the task that he tacitly assigns them, through his very anxious
inability to explain his plan. After Gaear kills the trooper, he sends Carl
to clear his body off the road, when a couple drives by and witnesses the
grizzly scene. Gaear chases down their car, runs them off the road, and
shoots them dead in the snow. In light of the three murders, Carl later calls
Jerry to demand more money for the job. “Things have changed,” he yells
into the phone, stuttering incoherently, “Circumstances, beyond the acts of
God. Force majeure.” Appealing to forces beyond his control, of course, Carl
denies his own contribution to the disaster. However, Jerry’s response reveals
him to be the one, still more fundamentally, deluded. “How’s Jean?” he asks.
Bewildered, Carl responds, “Who’s Jean?” Again, the confusion might be
explained merely as a “mix-up,” as if, when hiring Carl and Gaear to kidnap
Jean, Jerry supposed that they would look after her safety, while of course
to them, she’s nobody. However, this at least obscures the fact that, despite
his disavowal, Jerry arranges for Jean to suffer terrifying, physical violence as
an immediate implication of her abduction. And in light of the anxiety that
informs the elisions in Jerry’s speech, it seems rather that Carl understands
him all too well, so that, in Carl’s obliviousness—as Lacan argues about the
psychoanalyst—Jerry receives the truth of his own message in reverse. As
one of the film’s defining images, Jean’s momentary escape from her captors
reinforces this reading of Carl and Jerry’s exchange. When the kidnappers
first arrive at their hideout, Jean springs from the car, with her hands tied
behind her back and a hood over her head. Running blindly, and going
nowhere, she struggles to find her way through the snow-covered woods, as
Gaear stares dumbfounded and Carl laughs. As a concise distillation of the
film’s study in “blood simplicity,” the image directly connects Jean’s suffering
to the irrationality in Jerry’s scheme. And when Jerry asks about Jean’s well-
being after Carl explains that the plan has gone awry, he again draws the
same connection. For beyond the immediate, instrumental violence of her
abduction, in the interval that Carl originally discerns as the zero-sum gain
between “robbing Peter” and “paying Paul,” Jerry at least implicitly opens
the possibility, if he doesn’t tacitly express the hope, that the kidnappers will
assign Jean to oblivion.
Call It, Friendo
In No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh literally presents the necessity
of the force that he embodies as the efficacy of the objective conflicts in
the structural conditions of other people’s subjective attitudes. After killing
the police deputy and another innocent man whose car he steals in his first
appearances in the film, Chigurh stops to get gas. The semi-retired station
attendant (Gene Jones) strikes up a conversation, “Y’all getting any rain up
your way?” The question catches Chigurh’s attention, “What way would
that be?” When the old man explains that he noticed his Dallas license
plates, Chigurh continues more aggressively, “What business is it of yours
where I’m from  .  .  .  friendo?” The station attendant tries to back away, “Well,
I didn’t mean nothing by it.” But Chigurh refuses to accept his apology,
instead provocatively affirming his colloquial double-negative, “You didn’t
mean nothing?” Finally, Chigurh flips a coin and insists that the attendant
call it, by explaining, “I can’t call it for you. Or it wouldn’t be fair.” When
the old man again attempts to extricate himself from the situation, insisting,
“I didn’t put nothing up,” Chigurh retorts, “Yes, you did. You’ve been put-
ting it up your whole life. You just didn’t know it.”
While the coin toss might be confused as an appeal to chance, instead,
it elevates the outcome of the situation to a determination of fate, as if
to acknowledge larger forces at work beyond the ken of these two men.
Indeed, Chigurh repeatedly insists that the gas station attendant does not
know what he’s talking about; and, when the old man tries to avoid m aking
the call, Chigurh insists, “You know what date is on this coin? 1958. It’s
been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here. And it’s
either heads or tails.” In his appeal to the coin toss, Chigurh thus apparently
asserts a reductive determinism, which explains the situation solely on the
basis its defining facts and the corresponding mechanical laws of nature. As
a paradoxical correlate to liberating humanity from its subservience to the
divine, the rise of modern science has rendered the role of human agency
in shaping experience theoretically more problematic in light of its concept
of empirical necessity; and Chigurh’s determinism might be seen, accordingly,
as parodying the psychotic implications of those philosophies that, either
explicitly or implicitly, misconstrue the laws of nature as metaphysical prin-
ciples. Consistent with this apparent objectivism, Chigurh indeed evidences
a lack of the subjective sympathy, which often is understood as necessary for
moral judgment. As the principal source of the strife in their conversation,
Chigurh thus takes the gas station attendant too literally, as if he’s unable to
appreciate the subjective connotations integral to speech. As he grows ever
more uncomfortable, the old man asks, “Is something wrong?”
Chigurh rebuts, “With what?”
“With anything.”
The killer smirks, “Is that what you’re asking me? Is there something
wrong with anything?” And, when the gas station attendant laughs off one
of his remarks, with the qualification “If that’s the way you want to put it,”
Chigurh overtly dismisses any subjective implication of his comments by
insisting, “Well, I don’t have some way to put it. That’s the way it is.”
Chigurh does not, however, lack moral principles. To the contrary, he
exhibits an explicit, even excessive, ethical resoluteness. When another hired
gun, Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), tracks Moss to a Mexican hospital
and asks him to relinquish the money he found, the injured everyman pro-
tests that he could just as well cut a deal with Chigurh. But Wells clarifies,
“No no, you don’t understand. You can’t make a deal with him . . . He’s a
peculiar man. Might even say he has his principles, principles that transcend
money or drugs or anything like that. Not like you. Yeah. He’s not even
like me.” Indeed, when Chigurh corners Wells in his hotel room, the assas-
sin himself attempts to broker a deal, offering him money and telling him
that he knows where Moss hid the pilfered briefcase. As Wells anticipated,
Chigurh refuses, adding that he knows something better, that is, where the
briefcase is going be. Despite Chigurh’s claim to this certainty, the story does
not explicitly play out as he describes, and he might be dismissed for the
apparently metaphysical exaggeration of his contention. However, the con-
tinuing exchange reinforces Wells’s original description of his conviction as
ethical. Chigurh remarks, “And you know what’s gonna happen now, Carson?
[The killers are on a first name basis with one another.] You should admit
your situation, there would be more dignity in it.” When Wells snubs him,
Chigurh continues, “All right. Let me ask you something. If the rule you
followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
In this vein, when insisting that the gas station attendant has been
putting up his bet his whole life, Chigurh does not therefore appeal to the
natural laws that lead him to that moment but rather the ethical rule implicit
in his actions. Specifically, Chigurh holds the old man accountable for the
nosy banter, which he discounts as merely “passing the time,” as if to say:
“Really, you want to get to know me better?” While ethical, however, the
principle to which Chigurh appeals is not therefore merely subjective, as if
to challenge the man’s beliefs or conscious decisions. In his roadside conge-
niality, the gas station attendant demands an excessive familiarity, which he
simultaneously disavows. By holding him to his word, Chigurh accordingly
brings this excess to light and, with his coin toss, requires the old man to
take responsibility for its motivating conflicts. In a manner consistent with
Lacan’s concept of the causality of the drive, that is, Chigurh compels the
gas station attendant to identify with the objective contradictions in the
structure of his experience, which inform the excess in his subjective attitude.
The Unconscious Sense of Guilt
Insofar as he inflects his brutality with a normative value, Chigurh fur-

thermore contributes to clarifying what Freud, in his later work, discerns
as the close connection between the force of the drive and the cruelty of
the superego. While Freud initially equates the superego simply with the
moral conscience installed in the psyche with the dissolution of the Oedipus
complex, in Civilization and its Discontents he argues that the superego is
distinguished from the moral law by the unrelenting insistence that renders
it self-contradictory. Whereas the law’s mediation of ethical conflicts serves
a pacifying function, as Freud explains it, conceding the superego’s demands
only fuels their stricter prosecution. Despite the normative content of its
injunctions, the superego exerts an unjustifiably cruel fury that paradoxically
compromises the integrity of its principles and so qualifies it as essentially
transgressive. As a correlate to revising his theory of drive conflict, Freud’s
concept of the superego thus contributes to accounting for, what Melanie
Klein and others address as, the strife in the unconscious before and beyond
the Oedipal conflicts engendered by the father’s symbolic “no.” And, in his
reflections on the discontent in civilization, Freud appeals to this self-con-

tradictory normative agency to account for the dialectic of enlightenment,
which he addresses in terms not only of the melancholy disaffection that
pervades modern life, but also the propensity in civilization to devolve into
unprecedented forms of barbarism.
Well before the emergence of the feminist movement, the critique of
patriarchy dates back to the advent of modernity and the decline of social
institutions modeled on family relationships. Accordingly, in the opening of
his 1690 Second Treatise of Government, John Locke argues that “Adam had
not, either by natural right of fatherhood, or by positive donation from
God, any such authority over his children, or dominion over the world, as
is pretended” (Locke, 1980; 7). While Locke’s argument pertains specifically
to claims concerning the divine right of kings, it also registers a broader
refusal to justify the law on the basis of the Sovereign Good traditionally
attributed to the father, whether it is understood as the harmony of the
natural order (as in Ancient Greek philosophy), a theological principle (as in
medieval Christianity), or the collective substance of common practices (as
in folk communities). Instead, Locke argues that the law must be justified
by rigorous criticism in a manner consistent with modern science, which
he attempts to provide in his political philosophy.
While liberating society from the strictures of tradition, this repudia-
tion of the Sovereign Good paradoxically brought to light the inherently
contradictory nature of law. As distilled most rigorously, a century later, in
Kant’s moral philosophy, the law’s justification appeared to be strictly self-
referential, as if to say, “The law is the law!” While Kant conceives this
self-reference as the essence of the subject’s moral autonomy, in the absence
of metaphysical basis the authority of law betrays an insistence that cannot be
justified on strictly rational grounds. And, in diverse ways, subsequent thinkers
both register this contradiction and attempt to account for its motivating
force. In his critique of political institutions organized on the basis of Kant’s
deontological ethics, Karl Marx argues that the law’s groundless formalism
disavows the class-conflict that informs its institution. Nietzsche explains the
excessive, strife-laden force in law as symptomatic of a resentment informed
by, what he calls, the will-to-power. And Freud conceives it as the compul-
sion of drive-conflict, which sustains the ideology of the Sovereign Good in
the paternal imagos of the unconscious (Santner, 1996; 9–16).
In this regard, Freud’s famous account of religion as “the universal
obsessional neurosis of humanity” is perhaps better understood in reverse
(Freud, 1957; 21: 43). While the thrust of Freud’s assertion undoubtedly lies in
his critique of religious practice as the collective sublimation of unconscious
conflict, Freud simultaneously situates the emergence of neurotic suffering

in relationship to the breakdown of traditional social institutions and the
secularization of the modern world. So understood, the accomplishment of
enlightenment self-consciousness has been coupled with the unconscious
persistence of the paternal figures that informed traditional religious and
social institutions, while simultaneously intensifying the affective conflicts that
sustained them in light of the ultimate groundlessness of publicly sanctioned
authorities. As the converse of Freud’s critique of religion as a collective
neurosis, that is, obsessional neurotics perform symbolic rituals, which redress
the strife in their experience through their “own private” religious passions.
Accordingly, the crisis that existentialist philosophers address as the
problem “nihilism” reveals itself to Freud in his patients’ symptoms, well
before he explicitly turns his attention to the discontent in civilization,
and Lacan explicitly elaborates on this connection. However, Lacan also
contests the existentialist formulation of the problem it presents, at least in
the Nietzschean proclamation of God’s death. In his 1964 Seminar, Lacan
argues, “The true formula of atheism is not God is dead,” but rather, “God
is unconscious” (Lacan, 1998; 59). And as early as his 1954–1955 Seminar,
Lacan contests Dostoyevsky’s postulate—put forth by a panicked priest in The
Brothers Karamazov—that, if God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted.
“Quite evidently a naïve notion,” Lacan retorts, “for we analysts know full
well that if God doesn’t exist, then nothing at all is permitted any longer.
Neurotics prove that to us every day” (Lacan, 1991; 128). While Dostoyevsky’s
priest supposes that God’s death leaves a void, sanctioning anarchic deprav-
ity, neurotic suffering reveals that the sense of guilt is not merely a result
of the authoritarianism of religious institutions, but rather symptomatic of
the affective conflicts in subjectivity and social life that first informed their
establishment. Despite his virulent atheism, in Civilization and Its Discontents
Freud accordingly applauds traditional religious institutions for at least having
provided means to mitigate these conflicts, and he argues that the paradoxical
price of civilization’s advance is “a loss of happiness through the heightening
of the sense of guilt” (Freud, 1957; 21: 134). Žižek explains,
The fact that there is no longer a Destiny preordaining the con-

tours of my guilt in no way allows me to enjoy the innocence
of the autonomous subject delivered from any externally imposed
standard of guilt. This absence of Destiny rather makes me abso-
lutely guilty: I feel guilty without knowing what I am effectively
guilty of, and this ignorance makes me, even more, guilty. (Žižek,
2005; 207)
Instead of relieving the sense of guilt, the repudiation of God’s transcendence

rendered it amorphous as an inchoate anxiety that lacks solid grounds, or
even determinate limits, and so pervades experience. Rather than permitting
everything, the death of God accordingly seizes the modern subject in a
psychical paralysis, which the unconscious persistence of religious illusions
both manifests and serves to mitigate. And, as strictly correlative to these
unconscious conflicts, the heightened sense of guilt also accounts for the
distinct propensity in modernity to devolve into barbarism, as an expression
of and an antidote to the unrelenting insistence of the superego’s cruelty.
Mark It Zero, Dude!
In his initial elaboration of the normative implications of the drive as the

coercive force of the Real in the superego’s support for and subversion of
the law, Lacan famously addresses it through an uncanny equation of Kant
with Sade. Along with seconding Locke’s repudiation of the Sovereign Good,
in the formulation of his ethics Kant furthermore discounts the moral value
of utilitarian considerations of personal advantage and the collective welfare.
Instead, Kant approaches the problem of ethics through an analysis of the
transcendental conditions of the sense of duty, and he formulates his moral
philosophy, in strictly formal terms, by arguing that moral acts are those
performed out of respect for the law. For Kant, morality thus concerns the
integrity of intentions and the exercise of autonomy: giving the rule to
practical life, independently from such heteronomous motives.
As the fulcrum of his moral philosophy, Kant distills the integrity of
the will’s autonomy into an ethical principle in the formulation of his cel-
ebrated concept of the categorical imperative. He writes, “Act only accord-
ing to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should
become a universal law” (Kant, 1993; 30). At first glance, Kant’s appeal to
the universal might seem to compel the subordination of personal interests
to considerations of the common good. To the contrary, however, Kant
argues that such considerations do not account sufficiently, or even necessar-
ily, for the distinctly moral sense of obligation, as transcendent of time and
place. In fact, their pursuit might just as well be motivated by sentimental
overidentification, vain self-gratification, or any number of other amoral, or
even immoral, reasons. By contrast, the thrust of Kant’s concept lies in the
standard of internal consistency that it provides, precisely by purging one’s
motives of all heteronomous inclination, whether individual or collective. By
formulating the maxim of one’s action as a universal law, one dispels from
it the particularities that constitute one as an empirical subject—suspending

considerations of both personal advantage and historical context—as a radical
expression of the rational capacity for principled action.
In this disregard for the subject’s well-being, Lacan recognizes that
Kant’s concept of the moral law contravenes the homeostatic regulation of the
pleasure principle, evidencing an implicit cruelty, which is not compensated
by the conciliatory promise of a greater good but rather affirmed as an end
in itself. In fact, despite his refusal of any sensuous basis for moral judgments,
Kant effectively admits this sadistic dimension of his ethics. He writes, “Con-
sequently, we can see a priori that the moral law as the determining principle
of will, by reason of the fact that it sets itself against our inclinations, must
produce a feeling that one could call pain” (quoted in Lacan, 1992; 80). At
the same time, Lacan reads Sade paradoxically as a moralist, not only because,
in his life and literature, he pursues his libertinism as a point of principle,
but also because the torturers, whom he depicts—the hangmen and execu-
tioners—exert their cruelty as a “duty” in the service of a master, without
regard for—or even, at times, explicitly contrary to—their own satisfaction.
Lacan’s identification of Kant with Sade is not therefore ironic—as if to
reveal the hypocritical hedonism of the stern ethicist, while celebrating the
indulgent libertine as a paradigm of virtue. Despite the unavoidable humor
of his insight, Lacan equates the two sincerely, on the basis of their common
articulation of the jouissance—as pleasure-in-pain—that qualifies the moral
law, precisely in its formal abstraction.
In The Big Lebowski, the Dude’s bowling buddy, Walter, depicts this
sadistic excess in the moral law through his exaggerated sense of duty. Despite
their divorce, Walter remains devoted to his ex-wife, taking care of her
Pomeranian while she travels with her new lover, and persisting in the prac-
tice of Judaism, to which he converted for their marriage. When the Dude
ridicules him for his “sick, Cynthia-thing,” insisting, “you’re not even Jewish,
you’re Polish-Catholic,” Walter retorts, “So, what are you saying, when you
get divorced, you turn in your library card, you get a new license, you stop
being Jewish. I’m as Jewish as fucking Tevya.” In fact, Walter is devout in
his religious observances. When their team’s bowling match is scheduled on
a Saturday, Walter protests, “Saturday, Donny, is Shabbos, the Jewish day of
rest. That means that I don’t work, I don’t drive a car, I don’t fucking ride
in a car, I don’t handle money, I don’t turn on the oven, and I sure as shit
don’t fucking roll.” Above all, Walter exhibits a profound sense of loyalty in
the almost constant remembrance of his fellow soldiers, killed in the Vietnam
War. When the waitress at a local diner ask him to keep his voice down,
Walter turns on her, citing the Supreme Court’s rejection of “prior restraint”
and yelling, “Lady, I had buddies who died face down in the muck so that
you and I could enjoy this family restaurant.”
As evidenced in these exchanges, Walter manifests the sadistic enjoy-
ment in his sense of duty, through the belligerence of his insistence on
points of principle. In a scene with particular relevance to Lacan’s concept
of the symbolic authority of the law, as the representation of a lack, Walter
accuses a competing bowler, Smokey (Jimmy Dale Gilmore), of overstepping
the foul line. When Smokey protests, Walter draws a pistol from his bowl-
ing bag, threatening, “Smokey, my friend, you’re entering a world of pain.”
The other players try to talk him down, but Walter’s anger only escalates.
He stands up, screaming, “Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only
one here who gives a shit about the rules? Mark it, zero.” Pointing the gun
in Smokey’s face and cocking it, Walter continues to yell, “You think I’m
fucking around here? Mark it, zero.” The zero of Smokey’s score emphasizes
the formal emptiness of moral duty, as defined by the integrity of one’s com-
mitments independently from considerations of consequences, while Walter’s
belligerence betrays the content in this form: not, to be sure, as a hypocritical
reversion to pathological considerations of the common good, but rather as
the jouissance in the repudiation of such considerations. At the same time, of
course, this violence in Walter’s enforcement of the rules also violates the
principle it serves to support. So that, despite declaring himself the only
one who cares about the rules, when Smokey reports the incident to the
bowling league, Walter is the one whose team is disqualified.
The Conspiracy of Car Dealers
As a second variation on his concept of the superego, Lacan argues that the
inconsistency in the symbolic “no” of the law manifests itself in “extralegal”
social codes that both contravene its explicit authority and provide a neces-
sary supplement to sustain the cohesion of the social body. In Fargo, Jerry
manifests this extralegal condition of otherwise explicitly sanctioned social
commerce, when rooking customers at the car dealership. Sitting in his office,
the husband (Gary Houston) in a middle-aged, married couple berates Jerry,
“We sat right here in this room and went over this and over this.” Contrary
to their express wishes, Jerry has arranged for the couple’s new car to be
covered in a sealant and charged them for it, presumably for a kickback from
the company. The husband is irate. Jerry steps out of the office, promising to
discuss the issue with his boss, but instead watches hockey on the TV over
a coworker’s shoulder (Kurt Schweickhardt). “You goin’ to the Gophers on
Sunday?” Jerry asks. “You betcha.” Upon returning to his office, Jerry dons
a big smile and explains that his boss has offered to knock “a hundred dol-
lars off ” the cost of the sealant. On the verge of tears, the husband breaks
down and writes the check, denouncing Jerry as “a bald-face liar, a fucking
liar.” Despite Jerry’s fallen expression, one surmises that these sorts of scams
are a routine part of his business practice. They’re perhaps even taught and
encouraged. And, while he’s just killing time in the back room, Jerry’s brief
exchange with his colleague suggests it’s something they do together: the
conspiracy of car dealers.
At the same time, however, Jerry suffers the exploitation of such unspo-
ken conditions of social commerce. When Wade’s assistant, Stan Grossman
(Larry Brandenburg), recognizes the value in a business proposal that he has
submitted for their consideration, they call him into their office. However,
there’s been a misunderstanding. Wade and Stan assume that Jerry is bring-
ing the business to them, for a fee, while Jerry hopes they’ll help him to
finance the project as his own. Stan chides him, “We’re not a bank, Jerry.”
The scene is complicated. From a business standpoint, Wade and his associ-
ate are perfectly justified in their refusal of Jerry’s application. Furthermore,
Jerry isn’t being honest: he wants the money to pay off his loans on the
nonexistent cars. Nevertheless, the exchange is decidedly dismissive. As his
hopes crumble before him, Jerry pleads in desperation, “I guarantee you your
money back.” But Wade disdains the offer, “I’m not talkin’ about your damn
word, Jerry.” Despite recognizing the fundamental soundness of the pro-
posal, the only guarantee that Wade will accept is the capital backing of the
FDIC. His dismissal of Jerry’s personal integrity, and any traditional sense of
filial responsibility, thus rests on an objectivist instrumentalization of social
relationships. But there’s more. Wade and Stan exhibit an unspoken sense
of camaraderie, from which Jerry, by contrast, is excluded. Despite setting
him up in a job, and providing for his family, Wade refuses to include Jerry
in his dealings. To the contrary, he treats him as a patsy. “Look,” Wade ends
the meeting, “I don’t want to cut you out of the loop, but this here’s a
good deal. I assume if you’re not interested, you won’t mind if we move
on it . . . independently.”
While attempting to rip off Wade, Jerry thus simultaneously identifies
with the normative injunction, implicit in his own business practices. When
a loan officer calls, asking for the serial numbers on the cars that he’s bor-
rowed against, Jerry reassures him, “It’s okay. The loans are in place. I already
got the money.” But the loan officer persists, “We have an audit here. I have
to know these vehicles you’re financing exist.” Jerry laughs, “Yeah, well, they
exist all right.” While clearly intended to deflect the agent’s questions, Jerry’s
friendly familiarity also parodies the unspoken solidarity that he takes to be

an integral part of doing business, as if a nod and a wink should suffice to
account for the loans, at least until the money comes due. And when his
son, Scotty, expresses worry about his mother’s fate, Jerry not only flatly lies
to him—reassuring him that “these men only want money,” when of course,
“these men” include him—he furthermore tells Scotty to lie to his mother’s
friends about her whereabouts, thereby implicating him in the crime.
Ozzie and Harriet
In this same vein, while Ed, the police officer, aspires to have a “decent
family,” she depends upon H.I.’s criminality to bring it to fruition. Despite
decrying his past, insisting that henceforth they’ll do “everything right and
good and decent,” H.I. thus commits the most serious crime of his career,
at her urging. Along with mirroring the conflicted excess in Ed and H.I.’s
desire for a family, the two couples that derail their plans accordingly depict
this extralegal condition of the law. The decent folk turn out to be swing-
ers, while the criminal brothers prove to be loving parents. And these same
dialectics play themselves out in the drama of Ed and H.I.’s marriage. When
H.I. loses his job after punching out Glen, Ed chastises him, “Where does
that leave the three of us? Where does that leave our entire family unit?”
Proudly refraining from explaining Glen’s indiscretion, H.I. defends himself,
“With a man for a husband.” But, for Ed, that’s not enough. She protests,
“That ain’t no answer.” In response, H.I. reverts to his old ways. While his
impending unemployment effectively leaves him without money to cover
the expense, the baby needs diapers. He turns into the parking lot of a con-
venience store and, while Ed reads stories to the baby in the car, proceeds
to rob the joint. Pulling a gun on the cashier, he threatens, “I’ll be taking
these Huggies, and whatever cash you got.” As sirens start wailing in the
distance, Ed figures out what H.I.’s doing and starts cussing his name. H.I.
tells the cashier, “You’d better hurry it up. I’m in dutch with the wife.” But
by the time he gets outside, she’s jumped into the driver’s seat and driven
away, abandoning him at the crime scene. H.I. protests, “Honey!” The ensuing
chase plays out the film’s treatment of the contradictions in paternal author-
ity with absurd slapstick humor. As police fire at him from their prowlers,
H.I. runs through the streets, stores, and homes of a suburban neighborhood
with a nylon stocking over his head, a pack of dogs trailing behind him, and
a package of Huggies under his arm. After hearing the gunshots, Ed turns
her car around and picks up H.I., complaining “I’m not gonna live this way,
H.I. It just ain’t family life!” As H.I. opens the passenger side door of the
car to pick up the Huggies that he left lying in the road, H.I. seconds the
sentiment, “Well, it ain’t Ozzie and Harriet.”
As the Coens depict it, of course, it is: at the heart of the modern
American family lies an obscene kernel that exceeds its own explicit sense
of propriety. In this regard, like the decent folk and the thieves, the McDun-
noughs and the Arizonas, too, prove to be dialectical complements. Before
even learning that she’s barren, never mind hatching the plan to kidnap
Nathan Jr., Ed thus betrays the excessive jouissance of her desire to have chil-
dren even in its most innocent expression. As they sit on their lawn chairs,
watching the sun go down over the desert, in his voice-over, H.I. explains
that Ed, “said there was too much love and beauty in the world . . .” There’s
nothing missing from Ed’s life. She does not want to have children to fill
a void, but rather suffers from a surfeit of love that exceeds the boundar-
ies of her relationship with H.I. At the same time, Nathan Sr. admits this
same excess in the origins of his own family. After he catches H.I. and Ed
in the act of returning Nathan Jr. to his crib, the couple explains that they
kidnapped the baby because they can’t have one of their own. “Well, look,”
he consoles them, “if you can’t have kids, you just got to keep trying, hope
medical science catches up to you, like Florence and me.” Glancing around
the nursery with a slightly pained grimace on his face, he adds, “Caught
up with a vengeance.” As Nathan explains it, in the genesis of their family,
the Arizonas, too, suffered an impulse beyond their capacity to gratify. Fur-
thermore, when medical science “caught up” with them, it did not simply
satisfying this impulse. Instead, in an aberration of their reproductive capacities
reminiscent of Lacan’s concept of the drive, it rather realized its inherent
excess.
Swedish Meatballs
As the final variation on his concept of the superego, Lacan explains it

simply as the mandate to “enjoy!” Most conspicuously, the coercive force of
enjoyment lies in its refusal of the dissatisfaction that accompanies the law’s
restrictions. The imperative to enjoy might therefore be heard as reinforcing
the law’s authority, by censoring any of the residual dissent that it inevitably
engenders.4 However, Lacan’s contention is stronger still. The imperative to
enjoy itself entails a social coercion, which the law serves to mitigate: it is
the demand to be the object of the Other’s satisfaction, which threatens to
overwhelm the subject in the vertigo of its solicitation. In Fargo, this c oercive
insistence is most evident in the clichés that define the social milieu as the
most distinguishing feature of the film and its eccentric brand of ethnic
humor. If they are vacuous, the emptiness of these tropes is decidedly upbeat,
“Minnesota nice,” demanding the satisfaction of a common social assent in
their dogged cheerfulness. As Jerry pays the check at a local diner, the cashier
(Petra Boden) asks him, “How was everything?” Her smile is exaggerated to
the point of distorting her face. With her pale skin, bright blond hair, and
crudely colorful make-up, she looks clownish. In fact, she looks like Harpo
Marx! Jerry responds in kind, “Yeah, real good.” He smiles. She smiles.
Among other ways, in Fargo, the Coens also capture this obscene excess
by pushing the satisfactions of Marge and Norm’s homespun domesticity
to the point of rendering them stifling in their repulsive excess. The police
chief first enters the film when an early morning phone call wakes her up
with the news of the triple homicide on the outskirts of town. As she pulls
her tired, pregnant body out of bed, Norm stirs from his sleep and offers to
make her breakfast. She declines, “It’s okay, hun. I gotta run.” But he insists,
“You gotta eat a breakfast, Marge. I’ll fix you some eggs.” In stark contrast
to the violence that befalls the Lundegaards—and the blackness of the Coens’
comedy more generally—the food shared by the Gundersens is emblem-
atic of the cozy creature comforts that they enjoy together. Already in the
next scene, however, this wholesome nourishment gets compromised. After
inspecting the dead body in the car overturned by the roadside, Marge sud-
denly doubles over, resting her elbows on her knees. Her deputy, Lou (Bruce
Bohne), calls out, “You see something down there, Chief?” She explains,
“No, I just think I’m gonna barf.” Given the carnage that surrounds her,
Marge’s nausea initially suggests that she’s revolted by the violence of the
crime; but it turns out to be morning sickness: the innocent malady of an
expectant mother. However, the two are now associated. With a squeamish
look on her face, Marge pauses momentarily to swallow, “Well, that passed.
Now, I’m hungry again.”
Upon returning to her office, indeed, Marge finds Norm waiting
behind her desk. He’s brought her fast food for lunch, and she’s brought
him nightcrawlers for ice fishing. Both come in identical white paper bags.
Norm peers in at the worms, writhing in the dirt, as Marge remarks, “Aw
ya, looks pretty good,” only subsequently to be shown peaking at the meat
beneath the roll of her sandwich. While the two affectionately dote on one
another over lunch, the Coens have visually confused the contents of their
respective satchels, effectively depicting the couple as dining on dirt and
slimy bugs. So, despite its sweet sentimentality, there’s something repugnant
when Marge coyly responds to a kiss on the cheek from Norm, “Eh, you
got Arby’s all over me.” And, again later, the Gundersens eat at a restaurant
cafeteria. With muzak playing in the background, the camera pans across trays
full of hot food in heavy sauces: chicken fricassee, fried dumplings, Swed-
ish meatballs. As already their third meal in the still only early day, Marge
and Norm pile the pabulum onto their plates, waddle over to their table
with cafeteria trays in hand, and begin stuffing their faces. If eating together
initially evoked the innocence of the Gundersen’s domesticity, by this point
in the movie, it appears nauseating in its gluttony. And, rather than counter
point, the very excess in Marge and Norm’s creature comforts betrays a
continuity with the strife in the Lundegaard family, as if repressively stifling
an unacknowledged tension or even, in terms more strictly consistent with
Lacan’s concept of the superego, exerting its own inherent coercion.
Force of Law
In the formulation of his philosophy, Derrida too registers the contradictions

in the law, revealed by the repudiation of the Sovereign Good in patriarchal
social institutions. In his early essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” when arguing that
the condemnation of writing’s constitutive underdetermination is the found-
ing gesture of philosophy, Derrida accordingly explains the privilege granted
to speech as a consequence of its proximity to the paternal authority of
the self-conscious subject and the correlative guardianship of reason by the
idea of the Good. He writes, “Logos is a son, then, a son that would be
destroyed in his very presence without the present attendance of his father. His
father who answers. His father who speaks for him and answers for him.
Without his father, he would be nothing, but, in fact, writing” (Derrida,
1981; 77). Insofar as Derrida denies the possibility of simply subverting such
self-present principles without indirectly sustaining their authority, he too
might be understood, like Lacan, as refusing the unqualified declaration of
God’s death, conceiving Him rather as enduring unconsciously (or, at least,
preconsciously) in the persistent privileging of self-presence that he critiques
in the classical theories of originary difference. And, as the basis for this
play of presence and absence, God and His death, patriarchy and modernity,
Derrida furthermore argues that the contradictions in the law reveal it to
be qualified by the force of a radically heteronomous disturbance.
In his 1989 conference presentation, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foun-
dations of Authority,” Derrida addresses these extralegal qualifications of the
law, revealed with the rise of modernity, in terms of the problem of justice. As
a defining topic in political philosophy, the law requires enforcement through
an exercise of violence that must be distinguished from the violence that it

outlaws. Classically, this problem has been addressed by competing theories
of justice; and, indeed, this is Derrida’s concern. However, rather than assert-
ing a social ideal to authorize the legitimate exercise of violence, Derrida
further problematizes the law’s justification, by juxtaposing the (diachronic)
opposition between the legitimate and illegitimate exercise of force under
the law with the (synchronic) opposition between the justice of the law and
the violence that must be understood, both genetically and structurally, as
an a prior condition of its institution. He writes,
Since the origin of authority, the foundation or ground, the posi-

tion of the law can’t by definition rest on anything but themselves,
they are themselves a violence without ground. Which is not to say
that they are in themselves unjust, in the sense of “illegal.” They are
neither legal nor illegal in their founding moment. They exceed the
opposition between founded and unfounded, or between founda-
tionalism and anti-foundationalism. (Derrida, 1992; 14)
While the violence in the law’s institution is not illegal, Derrida contends that
it qualifies its authority with an excess that altogether transgresses its regulation.
In its very structure, the law’s integrity is therefore compromised, constituting
it as indeed always already complicated with the criminality that it outlaws,
providing the basis for, what Derrida asserts as, the law’s deconstruction.
Although Derrida’s concept of the law’s authorization as “a violence
without ground” evokes brutal, physical aggression, he accordingly first con-
ceives this force privatively, as characteristic of the groundless underdeter-
mination that renders the law constitutively inconsistent and so inevitably
unjust. He writes,
For me, it is always a question of differential force, of difference

as difference of force, of force as différance (différance as différrée-
differante), of the relation between force and form, between force
and signification, performative force, illocutionary or perlocution-
ary force, of persuasive and rhetorical force, of affirmation by
signature, but also and especially of all those paradoxical situations
in which the greatest force and the greatest weakness strangely
enough exchange places. (Derrida, 1992; 7)
As an integral part of his critical practice, Derrida argues that this differential
underdetermination accounts for the violence not only in the law but also
in the organizing principles of literary texts, social institutions, philosophical
systems, and the other objects of his concern, qualifying their purported
universality with the prejudicial distortion of particular, conflicting inter-
ests, or, conversely, nullifying the eccentricity of discrete particulars in their
generic universality.
At the same time, however, Derrida contends that this force provides
a check against the tyranny of such organizing principles, precisely by precluding
the possibility of their justice, and so revealing them to be always already
contradictory. Specifically, Derrida argues that the différance in the structure
of law refuses the reduction of responsibility to instrumental calculation,
preempting the apathy of good conscience and compelling attention to the
singularity of each case. He writes,
Each case is other, each decision is different and requires an

absolutely unique interpretation, which no existing, coded rule
can or ought to guarantee absolutely. At least, if the rule guar-
antees it in no uncertain terms, so that the judge is a calculating
machine, which happens, and we will not say that he is just, free
and responsible. But we also won’t say it if he doesn’t take any
rule for granted beyond his own interpretation, he suspends his
decision, stops short before the undecidable or if he improvises
and leaves aside all rules, all principles. It follows from this paradox
that there is never a moment that we can say in the present that
a decision is just (that is, free and responsible) or that someone
is a just man—even less, “I am just.” (Derrida, 1992; 23)
While initially Derrida’s assertion of the extralegal force in the law’s institu-
tion might appear to be cynical, to the contrary, he thus conceives it as call-
ing for constant renewal of the pursuit of justice. Rather than undermining
social responsibility, the differential underdetermination of the law requires
rigorous reflection in light of the impossibility of either alienating one’s
duty in the law’s generic objectivity or elevating one’s subjective whims to
the authority of a principle. To the contrary, each case must be addressed
in the singularity of its undecidability, and ultimately one must assume the
full weight of one’s responsibility by exercising one’s judgment, in the face
of this void, as a leap of faith.
Accordingly, Derrida conceives the aporetic underdetermination of law
as not only privatively qualifying the possibility of its justice, but also as
normatively orienting and sustaining his critical praxis. He writes,
The fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news. We may even
see in this a stroke of luck for politics, for all historical progress.
But the paradox that I’d like to submit for discussion is the fol-
lowing: it is this deconstructible structure of the law (droit), or if
you prefer of justice as droit, that also insures the possibility of
deconstruction. Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or
beyond law, is not deconstructible. No more than deconstruction
itself, if such a thing exists. Deconstruction is justice. (Derrida,
1992; 14–15)
Arguing that justice cannot be deconstructed, of course, Derrida does not

postulate a metaphysical principle that transcends the exigencies of experi-
ence. Instead, he conceives the promise of justice as strictly correlative to the
impossibility of reducing it to a principle, as law, which thus perpetuates the
practice of deconstruction by holding open the possibility of this categorically
elusive ideal. He writes, “Justice remains, is yet, to come, à venir, it has an, it is
à-venir, the very dimension of events irreducibly to come (Derrida, 1992; 27).
In this context again, Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence
thus remains squarely within the framework defined by the phenomeno-
logical critique of objectivism, and the juxtaposition between Derrida’s and
Lacan’s critical revisions of Heidegger’s concept of anxiety provides precise
terms also to clarify the normative disjunction in the psychoanalytic critique
of deconstruction. In Being and Time, of course, Heidegger seconds Freud’s
concept of anxiety as an amorphous sense of guilt and, insofar as Lacan
initially understands the absence of its nothing and nowhere as confronting
the reified ego with the symbolic lack that both conditions and qualifies its
sense of self-possession, he understands the normativity in Heidegger’s and
Freud’s critical responses to the modern condition as essentially equivalent.
However, in light of Lacan’s subsequent revision of his concept of uncon-
scious conflict, Heidegger’s very formulation of the dialectic of enlightenment
in terms of the problem of nihilism appears to presuppose the integrity and
coherence of the (symbolic) moral law, whose inconsistency Freud discerns
as a further, indirect implication of the demise of the (imaginary) concept
of the Sovereign Good, disavowing the (Real) spite and self-loathing in this
melancholy complaint by taking it at face value as problem concerning the
meaning of Being. On the basis of this neutralization of the problem that it
presents, Heidegger accordingly finds grounds in this impasse to preserve and
defend the values that it would seem to compromise, specifically affirming
the guilt in anxiety, which Lacan contends stifles the subject’s desire through
its unrelenting insistence, as instead wrenching Dasein from the objectivism
of das Man and restoring its intentionality in the authenticity of resoluteness.
When criticizing Heidegger in Aporias, Derrida argues that his concept
of Dasein’s finitude remains inscribed within the Christian metaphysics of
death that Heidegger contends his existential phenomenology provides a

necessary corrective and a priori grounding. In this regard, Derrida essentially
seconds Lacan’s declaration that God is unconscious, conceiving Heidegger’s
repudiation of such substantive first principles as itself qualified by their
residual persistence. However, Derrida’s critique of Heidegger redoubles the
critical negativity in his own philosophy without therefore discerning the
affective excitation of the drive in this formal phenomenological under-
determination. As the basis for his reformulation of the problem of the
unconscious sense of guilt in terms of the threat of good conscience, Derrida
accordingly radicalizes Heidegger’s concept of anxiety as a check against the
objectivism of das Man, when explaining the normativity of the aporia in
terms of, what he calls, the ethics of the arrivant. Whereas being-towards-death
entails a minimal delimitation as the ultimate horizon of Dasein’s projective
understanding, he contends that, in anticipation of the arrivant, one awaits
for an unknown other, at an unspecifiable location, at the inevitably wrong
time. In keeping with his deconstruction of law, Derrida contends that the
undecidability of the arrivant thus compels tireless reflection on the nature
and limits of one’s obligations. It requires assuming full responsibility for the
ethics of one’s actions in the groundlessness of a leap of faith. And it sustains
the values of ethics and politics in light of the paradoxical impossibility of
articulating their definitions. Indeed, in the anticipation of the arrivant, Der-
rida goes so far as to equate the normativity of the aporia with “negative
theology” (Derrida, 1993; 19).
Celebrating the normative impasse in the dialectic of the enlightenment
as paradoxically preserving the promise of the divine under the aspect of
its impossibility, Derrida’s idealistic concept of absence thus proves to justify
the accusation of irrationalism often leveled against deconstruction. From
a psychoanalytic vantage, however, this criticism means something different
from the way that it usually is used. Typically, critics argue that, insofar as
the undecidability of différance contravenes the principles of formal logic,
Derrida’s thinking lacks critical objectivity as a pretentious posturing to
philosophical wisdom that amounts rather to sophistry. From a psychoanalytic
vantage, however, deconstruction’s irrationalism lies in Derrida’s abstraction
and neutralization of the irrational; and, in this light, deconstruction appears
to be all too philosophical, dispelling the strife in unconscious conflict as if
it were merely a formal condition of the possibility of experience and, on
this basis, preserving the integrity of moral judgment, in terms essentially
consistent with Kant, under the aspect of this limiting impossibility. Despite
the altogether contrary concepts of ethics, in fact, Derrida specifically follows
Kant in conceiving the ethical subject as divided between the noumenal
groundlessness of moral responsibility and the phenomenal determination of
other ends. And, because he disavows the jouissance of the drive in the extra-
legal conditions of the law, Derrida’s concept of deconstruction’s normativity
evidences the same sadistic coercion. For if one takes seriously the affective
excitation that Derrida rhetorically evokes, his insistence on the virtue of
deferentially acquiescing to the Other presents another variation on the
injunction: enjoy! Of course, Derrida assumes this provocative disturbance
only to spawn critical reflection and ethical striving, albeit in a form that
amounts only to obsessive worrying and acting out. However, if one indeed
takes seriously the affective rhetoric in Derrida’s ethics of hospitality, his phi-
losophy courts the more radically violent and frequently catastrophic reaction,
which he implicitly purports to prevent, in the psychotic passage to the act.
Jerry’s Jouissance
As traced through this chapter, however, the Coen Brothers’ studies in the
law’s contradictions do not hinge on the phenomenological underdetermina-
tion of experience, which undermines their characters’ sense of self-possession
and so complicates the criminal and the commonplace. Instead, their char-
acters’ transgressions bring to light the coercive excess in the organizing
principles of their broader social contexts through the self-defeating excess
in their own desires. In the preceding exposition of Raising Arizona, this dia-
lectic already is explicit. The criminality that compels Hi to kidnap Nathan
Jr. is strictly correlative to the excess in Ed’s desire for a wholesome family,
and it is this superabundance in Ed and Hi’s motivations that ultimately
precludes the realization of their designs: exposing them to the intrusion of
the other, criminal and upstanding, couples, and ultimately confronting them
with the impossible extravagance of their own demands in the figure of the
lone biker of the Apocalypse.
In Fargo, the criminality of Jerry’s scheme similarly evidences the self-
defeating excess in his own motivations as correlative to the coercive affir-
mation that sustains the solidarity of his social milieu. As anticipated by his
excessive affirmation in his neighbors’ “Minnesota Nice” and the stifling
obscenity in Marge and Norm’s domesticity, Jerry doesn’t pilfer from his
father-in-law, despite the fact that he wants for nothing, but rather because
he does. As the price for having his every need met, Wade makes Jerry
out to be a chump, undermining his authority as a father to his family by
providing for them himself and, above all, setting up Jerry as the unworthy
benefactor of his largess. Through the very luxuries he’s afforded, that is,
Jerry becomes the object of Wade’s enjoyment, unable to sustain the lack of
his desire. And, along with his petty rivalries and cheap cons, Jerry’s cruel
kidnapping of his own wife both manifests and mitigates the overwhelming
proximity of this jouissance.
Indirectly, the minor character, Mike Yanagita (Steve Park), provides
further evidence of this dynamic in Jerry’s motivations. He’s a former high
school classmate (and perhaps an old boyfriend) of Marge. When she meets
him for dinner in the Twin Cities, where she is pursuing the case, Mike
immediately embraces her too forcefully and for too long. Later, he moves to
sit next to her, putting his arm around her, in a forced and hasty pass, which
seems particularly inappropriate in light of her pregnancy. Mike’s apologies
are pathetic and excessive; and, when he tells her about his life and work,
including the fact that his wife—another fellow classmate—died of leukemia,
he breaks down in tears, insisting, “I always liked you . . . I always liked
you so much . . . You’re such a super lady.” Later, however, Marge learns
that Mike never was married to their classmate, who in fact is still living.
Instead, Mike was stalking her. He has had “psychiatric problems” and still
lives with his parents. In light of this brief exchange, the pervasive affability
in the film betrays a pathological excess, as if it isn’t to be trusted and, any
moment, might altogether break down.
In Jerry’s case, this pathological disturbance manifests itself as a form
of acting out, through which he both evidences the jouissance in his own
conflicted desire and works to dispel its imposing excess. As anticipated pre-
viously, when pilfering the auto-loans, Jerry thus tacitly identifies with the
extra-legal exploitation that he endures from Wade and Stan as the unac-
knowledged basis for their conspiratorial camaraderie and standing in the
community. At the same time, he distinguishes himself from the object of
their enjoyment by locating it rather in the missing money. In the process,
Jerry symbolically deprives Wade of the resources that sustain his hold over
him, reasserting the lack of his desire in the void of its absence. In the drama
surrounding the kidnapping, these Oedipal dynamics become more explicit.
In contrast to Jerry’s pathetic dependence when appealing for the loan, the
kidnapping puts Jerry in the driver seat. Along with being another way to
steal from Wade, the kidnapping is Jerry’s project. Accordingly, when initially
arguing about whether to contact the police, Wade dismisses Jerry, “You don’t
know. You’re just whistling Dixie.” But, for the first time, Jerry stands up for
himself, insisting, “this is my deal here Wade. Jean is my wife.” Ultimately,
however, Wade does not grant Jerry authority over Jean’s fate or, even, the
ransom money, which he repeatedly suggests he values more. But this only
further confirms the importance of this power struggle in Jerry’s motivations.
When Wade demands to deliver the ransom instead of him, Jerry protests,
“No, Wade they were real clear . . . they only deal with me. You feel this
nervousness on the phone there . . . these guys are dangerous.” But Wade
puts Jerry back in his place, by retorting, “all the more reason. I don’t want
you . . . All due respect Jerry, I don’t want you muckin’ this up . . . Look
Jerry, you’re not selling me a damn car. It’s my show. That’s that.”
By arranging to have Jean kidnapped, Jerry furthermore silences her as
a principal source of the insistent affirmation that threatens to foreclose his
desire. He implicitly avenges himself against her for his diminished role in
their family. And he again allays the jouissance in his own conflicted desire by
making Jean its object and rendering her missing. Indeed, Jerry paradoxically
reaffirms his desire for her. So that, however absurdly contradictory it may
be, when Jerry asks Carl about Jean’s well-being, his concern nevertheless
must be heard as genuine. At the same time, however, Jerry’s abuse of Jean
reinforces his identification with the jouissance in the extra-legal conditions of
social commerce, laying grounds for the dissolution of the fantasy frame that
ultimately reveals his cruel scheme to have been a self-destructive passage to
the act. In Jerry’s final appearance in the film, the police knock on the door
of the motel room where he’s hiding. Wade is dead. Jean is dead. And Scotty
has been orphaned. After Jerry repeatedly tries to cajole the cops with the
genial reassurance “Just a sec,” they enter his room and grab him as he tries
to escape out the bathroom window. The struggle echoes Jean’s abduction,
again connecting her suffering to the irrationality in Jerry’s motivations, but
now in the contrary direction. While rendering Jean the object of enjoyment
in his conflicted desire, it turns out that Jerry has only confirmed his own
place in that role, implicitly overidentifying with his sense of abjection all
along. As the cops wrestle him onto the bed and handcuff his wrists behind
his back, Jerry wails into the bed sheets with a grotesquely infantile cry,
giving voice to the ecstatic horror of the jouissance that motivated his crime.
In No Country for Old Men, the criminal violence embodied by Chigurh
similarly brings to light the conflicts in Moss’s and Sheriff Bell’s motivations
as correlates to the contradictions in their social context. At the end of
the film, after Carla Jean arrives home from her mother’s funeral, she finds
Chigurh sitting in a dark corner of her room. In response to his obviously
threatening presence, she insists, “You got no cause to hurt me.” Chigurh
concedes, “No. But I gave my word.” While the two men were still involved
in their chase, Chigurh had told Moss, in a brief telephone exchange, that
if Moss gave him the stolen drug money, he would spare Carla Jean’s life.
When Chigurh accordingly tells Carla Jean that Moss “used [her] to save
himself,” she protests, “Not like that. Not like you say.” In the end, Chigurh
leaves Carla Jean’s fate to the determination of a coin toss, and his logic here
is consistent with his confrontation with the gas station attendant. Indeed,
Carla Jean is right to protest the reductively instrumental implication of
Chigurh’s claim. Nevertheless, Chigurh’s insistence on Moss’s responsibility
for her death rings true in light of the self-defeating excess in his decision
first to take the briefcase of drug money. After they first connect Moss to
the drug deal gone awry, Bell’s deputy remarks, “Think this boy Moss has
got any notion of the sorts of sons-of-bitches that are hunting him?” Bell
replies, “I don’t know. He ought to. He’s seen the same things I’ve seen and
it certainly made an impression on me.” As Bell explains it, the dead bodies
strewn about the desert should make it sufficiently clear to Moss that by
taking the briefcase he is courting disaster. And insofar as Moss also puts
Carla Jean in harm’s way, Chigurh is altogether justified to insist that her
husband sacrificed her for his own perverse reasons.
Bell’s implication in Chigurh’s violence is more oblique, but also more
directly connected to the contradictions in the film’s social context. The drug
crime invading Bell’s town does not come into America from elsewhere. Justi-
fying the sheriff ’s cynicism, the purportedly innocent communities victimized
by the violence of the drug trade are tacitly responsible for fueling its illicit
economy, while the effort to curb its violence only contributes to its perpetu-
ation. And, in his melancholy, Bell registers a similar dialectic in the structure
of the law. Decisive, in this regard, is the sheriff ’s opening monologue. As a
prelude to initially explaining his sense of being outmatched, Bell describes
a “boy” that he helped to send to the electric chair. After murdering a
fourteen-year old girl, the killer showed no remorse, admitting that he’d been
planning to murder someone for as long as he could remember and insisting
that, given the chance, he would do it again. The sheriff reflects, “I don’t
know what to make of that. I sure don’t.” Despite being unable to fathom
the killer’s criminality, however, Bell played a central role in his execution,
thereby implicating himself in the killer’s own sadism. Insofar as the killer
undermines Bell’s own sense of right and wrong, executing him calls into
question the justice of the law that he embodies, making the violence in its
enforcement only the mirror reflection of the violence that it nullifies. Has
Bell’s enforcement of the law been corrupted by the boy’s criminality, or
does the sublimity of his evil bring to light a sadistic excess already inherent
in the law? Does the killer present an aberrant departure from the justice of
the law, or is his criminality symptomatic of the coercive violence in the law
under which he was raised? Uncle Ellis inadvertently casts further light on
the source of Bell’s dismay. In his story about the death of Bell’s Great-Uncle,
the men who shoot him are identified only as Indians, who were “wanting
this, wanting that.” Even if they were purported criminals, one would have
to wonder about the justice of the law that Bell’s predecessor was responsible
for enforcing on them. Contrary to his intentions, Ellis’s story thus suggests
that the institution and enforcement of the law always has depended upon a
sadistic cruelty that outstrips its own justice. And it is the recurrent trauma
of this excess that forecloses the promise of the future as a horizon of pure
possibility. For Bell, that is, the future hasn’t failed to live up to the past, but
rather the strife of the Real in this ultimately prehistorical past has proven
to be an inescapable condition of the future. And it is this unbearable excess
that Bell’s melancholy both registers and refuses.
Returning finally to Mattie’s confrontation with the corpse at the end
of True Grit, this same cruel enjoyment answers the question concerning
the force of the negativity in her sense of justice. While clearly evoking the
finitude of being-towards-death, the cadaver’s horror lies in the “undead”
insistence of the snakes that emerge from its hollow chest cavity. As Mattie
struggles to climb up out of the hole, she awakens the snakes. They slither
from the corpse, wrap themselves around her legs, and infect her with their
poison before Cogburn and LaBoeuf can pull her to the surface. Rather
than either the coming to be and passing away of existence or the aporetic
underdetermination of purportedly self-determining principles, in this cul-
mination of her pursuit, Mattie accordingly suffers the intoxicating excess
in her own willful sense of justice. Indeed, Mattie was thrown into the hole
by the recoil of the rifle shot that killed her father’s killer. When rectifying
the justice in the law by enforcing it on Chaney, she falls prey to the same
violence that she wields against him, and not only as another instance of the
dialectical complication of opposites in the film, but rather as an immediate
repercussion of the excess in the force that she exerts. At the same time,
in the closing of the film, Cogburn indeed proves his grit, by riding all
night to get Mattie to a doctor in time to save her life. As another figure
of Mattie’s own self-destructive will, Cogburn drives Mattie’s horse Blackie,
until it finally collapses in exhaustion and has to be put down. And, in the
process, Cogburn himself presents the affective excess in the law’s authority
as a form of love—not, to be sure, in the sweet sentimentality of self-interest
or even altruistic consideration of others, but rather in the normative excess
of its jouissance.
5
Ex Nihilo
Reinventing the Wheel
A fter a newspaper reporter publishes a scathing cover story, denouncing

him as an idiot, Norville Barnes, the recently appointed president of
Hudsucker Industries, responds to the accusation by dictating a letter to his
secretary, Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh), from behind his magisterial art
deco desk. But his confidence falters. When the letter is done, he appeals
to her for support. “You know me, Amy, better than this dame,” he asks,
“Do you think I’m an imbecile?” In fact, Amy and the dame are one and
the same. She’s taken the job of Norville’s secretary under false pretenses in
order to get the inside scoop on this unknown. She hesitates to respond,
“Well, I’m sure I . . .” He presses her, “Tell the truth. I trust you. I put a
lot of stock in your opinion.” However, before she can answer, he interrupts
her again. His question is rhetorical. Rather than hearing her reply, he wants
to convince her to the contrary. “Let me ask you a question,” he continues,
“Would an imbecile come up with this?” He spins around a sketchpad on
his desk. On it, there’s the drawing of an empty circle, a zero. He explains,
“You know, for the kids.”
Set at the turn of the New Year in 1958, the Coen Brothers’ 1994
screwball comedy The Hudsucker Proxy is a send-up of corporate culture that
hinges largely on this invention of Norville’s and so presents a sustained study
of creation ex nihilo. Norville is a naïve young man, a sap really, who only
earlier the same week arrived to New York on a bus from Muncie, Indiana.
Despite having no prior work experience, he managed to land a job in the
mailroom of Hudsucker Industries and rapidly was promoted to president of
the firm as the pawn in a scheme by the company’s board of directors. At
201
the very moment Norville first entered the Hudsucker building, the com-
pany’s founder Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning) casually stepped onto
the long boardroom table and, in the midst of a meeting, ran down its full
length, launched himself out the window, and fell to his death on the street
below. Because he apparently left no will and had no family, the company
bylaws required that, by the year’s end thirty days later, his holdings in the
firm would be converted into common stock and made available to the
general public. A board member, Sidney Mussburger (Paul Newman), explains
the implications: for the first time in the company’s history, “any slob in a
smelly T-shirt” would be able to buy Hudsucker stock, and the board of
directors would lose control of the firm. Accordingly, Mussburger devised a
plan: by instilling panic in the shareholders, the board would drive down the
company’s share price low enough that the board could afford to purchase
a majority of stock, retaining control of the firm and enriching themselves
through their manipulation of the company’s value. As central to the plan,
they needed “a grade ‘A’ ding-dong” to replace the former president—and
Norville is their patsy.
Key to Norville’s selection as the dupe in the board’s scheme is his
empty circle design. When a “blue letter” from Waring Hudsucker arrives
in the mailroom, it falls to him to deliver it to Mussburger’s office. “Blue
letters” are important communications between the most powerful men in
the company and, as such, render their couriers vulnerable to severe penalties
should anything go awry in their transmission. Because he’s new to the job,
Norville doesn’t know enough to avoid the task. However, once he’s up in
Mussburger’s office, he seizes the opportunity to pitch his idea. Mussburger
is on the phone, working with a colleague to determine “the biggest moron
in the company” to serve as its new president, when Norville approaches his
desk. Neglecting his responsibility to deliver the letter, he asks for a minute
of Mussburger’s time to show him something that, he explains, he’s “been
working on for the past two or three years,” and pulls a folded piece of paper
from his sock to present him with the empty circle. “You know,” he explains,
“for the kids.” The titan of industry is dumbfounded by the gumption of
this schmuck from the mailroom; but, as Norville deferentially explains that,
despite the obvious brilliance of his design, “he’s no great genius,” it dawns
on Mussburger: he’s found his man.
While Norville’s invention is thus the key to his selection as Muss-
burger’s sucker, paradoxically, it also subverts Mussburger’s scheme. The plan
is working. Norville’s appointment is justified as an attempt to bring fresh
blood to the company. But, as intended, the shareholders are wary: the value
of the stock is plummeting and, when he’s denounced in the newspaper
Ex Nihilo 203
as an imbecile, they begin to turn aggressively against him. In the mean-

time, however, Norville has not relented in his ambition, and he pitches his
design to the board. Turns out, it’s a hula hoop. “You know, for the kids.”
Of course, Mussburger thinks it is ridiculous and imagines that producing it,
as Hudsucker Industry’s first release under the direction of its new leader-
ship, will attest publically to Norville’s incompetence and contribute further
to undermining the value of the company’s stock. However, to the great
surprise and disappointment of the board—who, in the meantime, sold all
their depreciating stock—it’s a hit! Norville saves Hudsucker Industries and
is publically celebrated as the company’s “idea man.”
While Norville qualifies his creative process by explaining, “Inspiration
is ninety-nine percent perspiration and, in my case, probably double that,”
the Coens ultimately locate the source of his ideas in the void of his design.
Whereas Mussburger hardly can imagine anything more worthless, as the
essence of his inventiveness Norville sees his zero as rich with potential. For
all intents and purposes, he reinvents the wheel. However, there is nothing
conservative or tediously redundant in his invention. To the contrary, Nor-
ville’s invention is thoroughly modern: precisely a novelty, rich with possibili-
ties as an object of pleasure and play. His wheel doesn’t support the labor
of a pushcart or provide the transportation of a carriage; instead, it revolves
around your hips—good for nothing—as sheer entertainment.
The Coens depict the initial moment of insight in Norville’s creative
process indirectly at the culmination of the extended montage featuring the
industrial production of his design. With its combination of music, machines,
and pantomime, the sequence is the highpoint of the movie, as the creation
of a great American myth: the invention of the hula hoop. At the end of it,
when the colorful hoops finally arrive at the local five and dime in prover-
bial, small-town America, they don’t sell at all. Presumably, no one knows
what to do with them. Why would you need such a thing? What are they
for? The storeowner progressively discounts their price until, as Mussburger
anticipated, he, too, deems Norville’s invention to be utterly worthless and
throws out his stack of hula hoops in the alley behind his store. The colorful
circles role down the sidewalk successively falling onto the pavement, one
after another, until finally a lone last hoop—fire-engine red—falls at the feet
of a dark-haired little boy. After hesitating for a moment, he picks it up, pulls
it over his head and around his waist, and starts rocking back and forth to
spin it: the hula hoop is born.
At the opening of the sequence, Norville already spins a prototype of
the hula hoop on his hips. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to assume
that the kid on the street simply “gets” the use that Norville intended for
the plastic circle. Instead, the kid invents it again for the first time as another
figure of creative genius, directly associated with Norville himself. When
school lets out, a swarm of children spill out into the town square. Together
they run down the street and around the corner, where they confront the
hula hooping boy. They are awestruck, standing before him with their eyes
wide and their mouths agape. In the meantime, the boy has reinvented the
toy twice again: first spinning it around his neck and head and then, using
it like a jump rope, by turning the hoop around the ankle of one leg and
hopping over it with the other. Like any really good toy, the hula hoop’s
use and enjoyment are undetermined, marked by an absence that holds it
open to transformation. In fact, it is nothing but the embodiment of a void.
At the opening of the film, this confrontation with the void is anticipat-
ed by Hudsucker’s suicide. Like the bowling alley’s lanes in The Big Lebowski,
the lines of the boardroom table extend to the abyss on the horizon out
the window. And the Coens depict denying the groundless underdetermina-
tion of experience, by contrast, as an obstacle to creativity. Paradigmatically,
Mussburger’s grandiose sense of self-importance leads him to misconstrue
the genius in Norville’s naivety as mere stupidity. Similarly, in the wake of
his success, Norville’s sense of accomplishment stifles his ingenuity.1 While
the press awaits his next big invention,Norville can think of nothing but
modifications of his original hula hoop design. He’s paralyzed, clinging to
the invention that he believes constitutes his greatness, and thereby denying
himself access to the very ignorance that was the seat of his original inspira-
tion. At the apex of this impasse, Norville fails to appreciate the inventiveness
of a design presented to him by Buzz (Jim True), the company’s wisecracking
elevator operator. As Norville sleeps facedown on his desk, Buzz approaches
him with his idea. Like Norville before him, he reaches into his pocket and
pulls out a folded piece of paper with the drawing of an empty circle. He
explains, “You know, for drinks.” Buzz has invented the straw; but Norville
haughtily pooh-poohs the design, “It lacks the creative spark, the unalloyed
genius that made something like the hula hoop such a success.” Affronted
by Buzz’s inventiveness, Norville finally fires him, provoking the elevator
operator to break down in tears, groveling to get back his job, and ultimately
crawling on all fours out of Norville’s office.
Meanwhile, Mussburger has discovered that Norville’s secretary Amy is
the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who denounced Norville in the news-
paper. Because she threatens to blow the lid off his machinations, Mussburger
takes advantage of Buzz’s anger about having been fired—as a second pawn
in his scheming and hence again a proxy for Norville—and convinces him
that Norville stole the original idea for the hula hoop from him. Publicly
Ex Nihilo 205
denounced as a sham, Norville is bereft and ends up—in the scene with
which the film begins—standing on the ledge outside his office on the
forty-fourth floor, contemplating suicide. Suddenly Norville slips and falls. As
he plummets to the street below, Moses, the apparently mystical mechanic,
who maintains the big clock on the face of the office building, jams a
broomstick into its gears, fantastically stopping time and suspending Nor-
ville in midair, only yards above the pavement. As he hangs there, Waring
Hudsucker floats down to speak to Norville, wearing angel wings, playing a
ukulele and singing “She’ll be Coming Around the Mountain.” Hudsucker
chides Norville for having failed to deliver his blue letter and prompts him
to take the letter out of the jacket pocket where Norville still has it lodged.
The letter is addressed to Mussburger and, after the standard protocol of a
resignation letter, explains why Hudsucker took his life. Although Hudsucker
enjoyed great successes in business, he allowed his sense of accomplishment
to get the better of him, playing “the great man” and watching his life thus
become “more and more empty.” Specifically, Hudsucker regrets his failure
to appreciate the woman who instead married Mussburger. And, on account
of the errors in his life, Hudsucker proposes changing the company’s bylaws
to guarantee that the company’s next president has the freedom to take the
risks and suffer the disappointments that make life worthwhile, retroactively
bequeathing to Norville all his holdings in the company and so granting
him a second chance.
The Hudsucker Proxy reaffirms the central importance of absence in the
Coens’ films and brings it to bear specifically on creative practice, potentially
providing a way to understand their own concept of film form. However,
the film’s resolution is so contrived that it risks altogether undermining its
value. As Norville recites the film’s ponderous message, the Coens maintain an
explicitly ironic distance from the lesson they proffer. Not only is the revela-
tion that Hudsucker loved Mussburger’s wife trivial, it is absurd. Earlier in the
film, she’s briefly introduced and presented as decidedly unattractive. When
Norville politely compliments Mussburger, “Charming wife,” he gripes, “So
they tell me.” Further accenting this detachment, Hudsucker bawls into his
handkerchief at the revelation of his lost love, only then to return abruptly
to his matter-of-fact tone. Despite this irony, however, the blue letter’s lesson
is nonetheless true to the movie. Intersecting with the lines of the board-
room table, and the related thematics of the void, The Hudsucker Proxy is
full of circles. Along with the images of the hula hoop, the straw, the large
revolving clock on the face of the company building, the film is organized
by opposing pairs that circle one another in contrary, dialectical motions,
complementing the drama of Norville’s creativity. His idiocy is his genius,
and his genius is his idiocy. His failure is his success, and his success is his
failure. A similar dialectic is evident in Amy’s relationship to Norville. She
cynically deceives him by posing as an innocent girl from Muncie, in order
to reveal him to the world as a sham. Through her subterfuge, however, she
discovers Norville’s naïveté to be a much longed-for antidote to her own
jaded worldliness, falls in love with him, and ultimately attempts to protect
him from the public’s scorn.
In a passing remark, Norville explains the revolutions of this dialectic
as a metaphysical principle. Standing on the balcony outside an elegant party,
Amy almost blows her cover and distracts Norville by turning his attention
to the city scene. Gesturing to the street below, she remarks, “the people
look like ants.” Romantically appealing to her imagination, Norville seizes
on the observation, “Well, the Hindus say  .  .  .  and the Beatniks also  .  .  .  that,
in our next lives, some of us will come back as ants. Some will be elephants
or creatures of the sea.” After conjuring a naïvely sweet scenario of the two
of them as frolicking antelopes, he cracks a joke before continuing, “Seri-
ously Amy, it’s what your Beatnik friends call KAR-ma.” She corrects him,
“Karma.” Norville continues, “The great circle of life, death, and rebirth.”
Regretfully, Amy confirms, “Yes, I think I’ve heard of that, what goes around,
comes around.” He persists, “Yes, a great wheel that gives us all what we
deserve.”
In this regard, The Hudsucker Proxy presents a reductive parody of
Lacan’s famous claim, in his early reading of Poe, that “a letter always arrives
at its destination” (Lacan, 1996; 30). As anticipated by the earlier exposition
of Derrida’s critique of Lacan, the blue letter decisively delimits the absence
in the film’s story and so circumscribes the trajectory of Norville’s fate.
While perhaps unbeknownst to him, Norville’s redemption is guaranteed
as a condition of his symbolic nomination as the president of Hudsucker
Industries. While he misconstrues his authority, when overidentifying with
his role as the company’s idea man, the blue letter specifically anticipates this
error as paradoxically inherent to the authority that it grants. And, despite
affirming its importance to life and love, the letter rules out in advance the
possibility of any real failure.
As a study in creative practice, The Hudsucker Proxy accordingly justi-
fies the accusation of cold, android detachment often leveled against the
Coen Brothers, however not on the basis of their purported postmodern
pastiche but rather the hermeneutical closure with which they circumscribe
the absence in the movie. As argued previously, in both Burn After Read-
ing and The Big Lebowski, among other movies, the Coens explicitly adopt
a transcendental vantage on the foolishness of their respective conspiracies,
Ex Nihilo 207
positioning the audience all too securely in relationship to the films’ symbolic
networks. However, the Coens’ self-conscious attitude towards their subject
matter does not always do justice to the absurdity of their characters, the
irrationality in their dramas, or the formal strengths of their filmmaking.
And the question remains as to how then to better understand the Coens’
creative practice—a question that might be addressed through Lacan’s critical
theory in terms of the place of the gaze in the constitution of the visual
field and, what he calls, the ethics of psychoanalysis.
Anamorphosis
While Lacan’s critical theory has played a central role in the history of film
and media studies since the 1970s, as a particularly vivid example of the
staggered delay in the reception of his teaching, Lacan’s concept of the gaze
consistently has been equated wrongly with the spectator’s look, as a locus of
mastery, or even, sadistic domination.2 Indeed, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre
first introduces the concept to philosophy as exemplary of his existentialist
appropriation of Hegel’s early intersubjective dialectics of recognition. As
Sartre stages it, the voyeur lasciviously peers through a keyhole, only to find
himself surprised by a witness to his shameful prurience. While not merely
authoritarian, Sartre thus does equate the gaze with looking, as evidence of
the capacity for subjects either to objectify or to acknowledge one another.
However, Lacan’s theory departs rather from the work of Merleau-Ponty,
who conceives the gaze instead as conditioning the possibility of such inter-
subjective exchanges, as a blind spot whose opacity holds open the field of
visual experience.
The incomplete manuscript for Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the
Invisible was posthumously published immediately prior to the start of Lacan’s
1964 Seminar; and Lacan reads it as extending the theory of “the regulatory
function of form,” elaborated in his earlier book The Phenomenology of Per-
ception (Lacan, 1998; 71). In that study, Merleau-Ponty challenges the idealist
reduction of seeing to the interiority of self-consciousness, and addresses the
concomitant problem of explaining how then to bridge the divide between
seeing and the seen, by conceiving sight as rooted in the subject’s embodied
engagement with the world. Lacan summarizes, “La Phénoménologie brings
us back then to the regulation of form, which is governed, not only by the
subject’s eye, but by his expectations, his movement, his grip, his muscular
visceral emotion—in short, his constitutive presence, directed in what is called
his total intentionality” (Lacan, 1998; 71).
At the same time, however, Lacan understands The Visible and the Invis-
ible as critically revising the central argument in The Phenomenology of Percep-
tion. Whereas originally Merleau-Ponty directly identifies the field of visual
experience with the structures and dynamics of intentionality, in his later
manuscript, he argues that seeing depends upon “the pre-existence of,” what
Lacan calls, “the given-to-be-seen” (Lacan, 1998; 74). Of course, Merleau-
Ponty does not therefore revert to the empiricist assertion of the priority, in
sight, of immediately given things, which his earlier theory also contests, as
essentially correlative to the idealist privileging of self-consciousness. Instead,
he recognizes the phenomenology of seeing as marked by an elision, which
reveals a still further horizon in the constitution of visual experience. In a
phrase, Lacan summarizes, “I see from one point, but in my existence I am
looked at from all sides” (Lacan, 1998; 72). When seeing, one carries one-
self through a visual field whose continuity exceeds the dynamics of one’s
engagement with it; and, while one might conceive this broader field as
evidence of the essentially social-historical nature of subjectivity, Merleau-
Ponty argues that the elision of this all seeing vantage qualifies even such
social-historical notions. The gap between sight and the disclosure of the
world is, according to Merleau-Ponty, fundamental: a structural opacity that
conditions the revelation of the visible. “In the so-called waking state,” Lacan
contends, “there is an elision of the gaze, and an elision of the fact that not
only does it look, it also shows” (Lacan, 1998; 75).
In the formulation of his concept of the gaze, Lacan thus takes up
Merleau-Ponty’s theory at the point where he corroborates his own critical
understanding of self-consciousness, as predicated upon an imaginary mis-
recognition, which occludes the qualification of identity by the constitutive
negativity of an intrasubjective Other. At the same time, however, Lacan
argues that his theory requires further elaboration in light of Freud’s concept
of experience as a field of conflicted desire; and, in his 1964 Seminar, Lacan
formulates his own concept of the gaze through an analysis of Hans Hol-
bein’s celebrated 1553 painting, The Ambassadors, which does not therefore
apply psychoanalysis to art criticism but rather conceives visual experience itself
as a primitive form of picturing. In Holbein’s painting, two French diplomats
proudly pose amid artifacts of their wealth and learning that attest not only
to their personal accomplishments but also to the accomplishments of their
age. In the forefront of the picture, however, the floor beneath their feet
bears the mark of a formless blotch, which, when viewed from a skewed
vantage proves to be a skull. While the image invites manifold interpretations,
most obviously, it presents a memento mori, reminding the spectator of the
inevitability of death, which renders all worldly accomplishments worthless
Ex Nihilo 209
in contrast to the promise of salvation; and Lacan elaborates upon this read-
ing of the image, as still more fundamentally embodying, what he explains
as, the “annihilation” of the viewer beneath the scrutiny of the gaze (Lacan,
1998; 81). Along with depicting the world objectively, in the development
of Renaissance art and science, the techniques of naturalist perspective pre-
sented a way to construct images that, when viewed head-on, appear to be
nothing, the stain of an anamorphic distortion, but, when viewed from a
skewed vantage, reveal themselves to be legible. For Lacan, this anamorphosis
presents neither merely a perversion of naturalist perspective nor an auxiliary
capacity that it makes possible but rather an excess, integral to the newfound
science. In anamorphosis, the picture looks back at the spectator, contravening
its own apparently neutral objectivity, by situating the conscious subject at a
concrete point in its visual field; and, while typically pictures do not explic-
itly thematize this dynamic, in his appeal to Holbein’s painting, Lacan argues
that such distorting elisions are integral to their constitution. While, in the
optics of seeing, the spectator apparently lies at the margins of experience,
representing the world to its self from a transcendent vantage, anamorphosis
betrays the fact that pictures always look back at the viewer; reconstructing
not only the look but also the gaze, and so situating the spectator within
their depictions of the world, from the vantage point at which they dissolve
into unintelligible distortions.
In his analysis of Holbein’s painting, Lacan emphasizes the symbolic
and imaginary dimensions of this anamorphosis in picturing, comparing the
shift between the legibility and illegibility of the image, to the contrasting
states of a flaccid and engorged erection. He writes, “The gaze is presented
to us only in the form of a strange contingency, symbolic of what we find
on the horizon, as the thrust of our experience, namely, the lack that consti-
tutes castration anxiety” (Lacan, 1998; 72–73). In light of the critical revision
of his theory, however, Lacan furthermore conceives the gaze as the Real
of the object (a) in the visual field. As the ultimate point of his disjunc-
tion from Merleau-Ponty, Lacan thus explains it as not merely an originary
phenomenological elision in the field of visual experience but rather the
locus of an affective excess, which registers the subject’s enthrallment to
the Other, in the force of the scopic drive. From the opacity of the gaze,
that is, one isn’t merely shown but furthermore compelled to bear witness
to the world. As an example of this force of the Real in the gaze, Lacan
cites the recurrent nightmare at the center of Freud’s famous case study The
Wolfman, which begins with the sudden opening of a window. Outside, the
branches of a large tree are lined with wolves, which seize Freud’s patient
in a state of stupefying terror. Through its inclusion of the window within
the apparition it presents, Lacan argues that the Wolfman’s dream presents
the “pure schematic form of the fantasy,” a meta-critical reflection on the
very nature of dreaming (Lacan, Sem. X; 66.12.62). Simply put, it is a fantasy
about fantasy, in which the Real in the gaze presents itself with an almost
psychotic literalism, evidencing a breakdown of the symbolic in the structure
of the Wolfman’s experience.
By contrast, Lacan explains picturing as the process, whereby the jou-
issance of the gaze comes to be neutralized through the institution of the
fantasy frame. He explains it, in surprisingly conventional terms, as a form
of mimesis. However, Lacan does not therefore conceive mimicry as the
second-order imitation of a given reality but rather as integral to experience,
comparing picturing to the processes of travesty, camouflage, and intimidation,
whereby animals integrate themselves within their environments. He writes,
“The effect of mimicry is camouflage, in the strictly technical sense. It is
not a question of harmonizing with the background but, against a mottled
background, of becoming mottled—exactly in the technique of camouflage
practiced in human warfare” (Lacan, 1998; 99). For animals, of course, this
process is the automatic expression of an instinct. However, insofar as the
subject is constituted by a sundering, which alienates it from the immediate
reflexivity of the natural world, Lacan conceives the camouflage of picturing
as a creative practice, whereby one maps oneself into the world, isolating
“the function of the screen” and playing with it. He writes, “Man, in effect,
knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze”
(Lacan, 1998; 107). So, what then is the critical normativity of this play
with the screen?
The Dignity of the Thing
While too easily overlooked, particularly in their purportedly empirical, med-

ical, and cognitive-behavioral formulations, the problems of modern psychol-
ogy are inherently ethical. One appeals to the analyst, the psychotherapist,
the psychiatrist—or, another of the many modern gurus who now hawk
their counsel in the name of self-help, success, or new age mysticism—in
the hope of restoring one’s sense of well-being. What’s wrong with me?
Why can’t I find happiness? What should I do with my life? Although rarely
acknowledged as such, these commonplace complaints implicitly concern
the classical, philosophical problem of the Good: evoking an ideal of human
excellence, registering a sense of duty, and evidencing a search for terms on
which to resolve the strife in one’s relationships with others.
Ex Nihilo 211
In his early work, however, Lacan does not explicitly address the moral
dimensions of psychoanalysis. In fact, he consistently criticizes ethical conven-
tions, and their influence in analysis, as predicated upon the postulate of an
imaginary ideal that only reinforces the suffering of neurotics. Nevertheless,
Lacan does not therefore neglect considerations of the normative ends of
analysis, which rather are integral to his reflections on psychoanalytic praxis.
In fact, he puts forth his teaching essentially as an antidote to such moralizing.
The apparent neglect of ethical questions in Lacan’s early work is thus better
understood as evidence, to the contrary, of his presuppostion of the norma-
tive value of analysis: as a meta-ethics and amoral morality (as Nietzsche
describes his genealogy of morals), which critically challenges ethical norms,
in both theory and practice, in light of the problem of unconscious conflict.
As announced by the title of his seventh Seminar, however, when con-
fronting the limitations of his initial postulate of the signifier’s primacy,
Lacan indeed thematizes The Ethics of Psychoanalysis—among other ways,
by reiterating his contempt for the moralizing tendencies in other schools
of thought. “Psychoanalysis,” he contends, “might seem at first to be of an
ethical order. It might seem to be the search for a natural ethics—and, my
goodness, a certain siren song might well promote a misunderstanding of
that kind” (Lacan, 1992; 88). At face value, the target of Lacan’s critique is
object-relations theory, whose postulate of an ideal “genital relation” he goes
on to denounce as a “pastoral” promise to “restore a normative balance with
the world” (Lacan, 1992; 88). But what is the assumption of symbolic castra-
tion if not the maturity of genital sexuality, conceived on the more rigorous
basis of structural linguistics and anthropology? Is not the problem presented
by the purity of Lacan’s concept of absence, and its indirect circumscription
of the unconscious as a hermeneutical enclosure, precisely its inadvertent
assertion of an imaginary ideal of paternal authority? And doesn’t Lacan’s
own critical theory thus betray elements of both object-relations’ harmoni-
ous intersubjectivity and ego psychology’s strong ego, which is as much its
complement as its contrary? Indeed, Lacan implicitly recognizes this moral-
izing tendency as his own, reflecting on the normative implications of his
theory in light of the impasse in his critical praxis. If the Name-of-the-Father
ought not to be presupposed as the ultimate horizon of unconscious conflict,
what then is the orienting principle of analysis? Does its end still hinge on
assuming the lack of symbolic castration, and, if so, what then becomes of
the remainder in the Real?
In Lacan’s 1959–1960 Seminar, his responses to these questions hinge
largely on the concept of sublimation to which Freud returns repeatedly
throughout his career. Although Freud never systematically formulates a
theory of sublimation, he consistently describes it as a process though which

an infantile erotic wish is dispelled of its explicitly sexual dimension and
directed towards socially acceptable ends; and, in the formulation of his own
concept, Lacan first takes issue with the quasi-empirical and potentially con-
formist implications of Freud’s theory (Laplanche and Pontalis, 431–434). On
the one hand, in so conceiving sublimation, Freud risks reifying the drives
as if they were natural instincts originally independent from the influence
of society; while, on the other hand, he risks hypostatizing cultural norms as
if they were unqualified standards with which one inevitably must comply.
To the contrary, Lacan contends that Freud’s theory of sublimation ought to
be understood as accounting for the inherent complication of these appar-
ently opposed terms: drive and civilization. Reiterating his insistence on
the plasticity of the drives, Lacan accordingly argues that the structure of
the drive “commits (the libido) to slipping into the play of words, to being
subjugated by the . . . world of signs” (Lacan1992; 91). However, Lacan
places newfound emphasis on the recalcitrance of the Real as a limiting
condition of this symbolic plasticity. “The most archaic aspirations of the
child,” he contends, “are both a point of departure and a nucleus that is
never completely resolved under some primacy of genitality or a pure and
simple Vorstellung of man in human form by androgynous fusion, however
total one may imagine it” (Lacan, 1992; 93). As Lacan understands it, the
subject still remains fundamentally oriented by the object lost in the origi-
nary sundering of the signifier. However, he now conceives this lost object
as not only symbolic but also Real. Desire’s metonymic slippage from one
signifier to the next is thus informed not only by the lack of the paternal
metaphor but also by this nagging remainder, and he understands Freud’s
concept of sublimation as accounting for the structure and dynamics of
this tension.
As a “general formula,” Lacan contends, sublimation “raises an
object . . . to the dignity of the Thing” (Lacan, 1992; 112). According to
Lacan, the remainder in the Real invests the constitutive negativity of the
symbolic with the jouissance of an impossible promise of complete satisfaction.
While still explaining neurotic suffering as misconstruing the Other’s lack
as an imaginary demand for something actual, he accordingly contends that
sustaining the constitutive negativity of desire depends upon the contrary
process of elevating an imaginary particular to a symbolic embodiment of
the Real. Articulating the Real of the lost object in an imaginary figure
ameliorates its motivating tension and postpones its inevitably premature satis-
faction. Rather than a static given, Lacan thus conceives the lack of desire as
Ex Nihilo 213
requiring active cultivation. Along with dissolving imaginary fixations into its
differential underdetermination, he understands the talking cure as redefining
the organizing principles of the symbolic. And he conceives Freud’s concept
of sublimation, as diverting sexual wishes to socially acceptable ends, in fun-
damentally transformative terms by explaining it as the creation of “socially
recognized values” (Lacan, 1992; 107). De Kesel summarizes,
As a “creation ex nihilo,” sublimation . . . repeats the primary cut

of the signifier in the Real. Again, a signifier brings a differ-
ence, a lack, an emptiness into the indifferent Real, onto which
a new autonomously operating system can graft itself. However,
the system is incapable of filling the lack it has introduced into
the Real, and is therefore, in its turn, plagued by that Real as if
with an irreconcilable lack. The term for that Real lack is the
“Thing” and the sublimated object is “raised to the dignity of
the thing.” (De Kesel, 2009; 180)
Whereas previously he assumed the Name-of-the-Father to be a transcen-

dental given, in light of Lacan’s initial revision of his critical theory, he thus
conceives the symbolic law as a tenuous, historically contingent principle,
which requires perpetual renewal. And Lacan explains the ethics of psycho-
analysis accordingly as oriented and sustained by the committed cultivation
of the law’s symbolic lack. He writes, “From an analytic point of view, the
only thing of which one can be guilty is having given ground relative to
one’s desire” (Lacan, 1992; 319).
A Man Chasing His Hat
In their 1990 release, Miller’s Crossing, the Coen Brothers address the struc-
ture and dynamics of ethics in terms that help to clarify Lacan’s concept
of sublimation. The film’s opening lines announce its contrarian approach
to moral questions. In a meeting with the town’s Irish political boss, Leo
(Albert Finney), the sweaty-faced Italian gangster Johnny Casper (Jon Polito)
implores, “I’m talkin’ about friendship. I’m talkin’ about character. I’m talkin’
about—Hell, Leo, I ain’t embarrassed to use the word. I’m talkin’ about
ethics.” The ethics in question concern the reliability of a fixed fight. When
Casper pays a favorite to throw a match and then places his bets with the
bookie Bernie Bernbaum (Jon Turturro), word gets out: the odds even up,
or worse, turn the other way. Bernie, he insists, is selling information about
the fixes, and Casper wants permission to snuff the grifter. “If you can’t
trust a fix,” he pleads, “what can you trust? For a good return you gotta
go bettin’ on chance, and then you’re back with anarchy. Right back in the
jungle. That’s why ethics is important—what separates us from the animals,
the beasts of burden, the beasts of prey. Ethics.” Along with rectifying the
wrong committed against him, Casper aims to preserve the moral order their
social enclave. He is, by his own assertion, a highly principled man. But the
principles that Casper defends are those of the criminal underworld, and he
depicts the fair play of a game left to chance, by contrast, as utterly depraved.
In response to his complaint, Leo first questions Casper’s conviction that
Bernie is the one selling him out. Indeed, numerous others also are privy
to his dealings—including Casper’s right-hand man, Eddie Dane (J. E. Free-
man), and the Dane’s lover, Mink (Steve Buscemi)—and they might instead
be, directly or indirectly, responsible for the leak. Casper concedes the point
but nevertheless insists on the justice of his grievance. “Sure other people
know,” he explains, “That’s why we gotta go to this question of character
to determine just who, exactly, is chiselin’ in on my fix. And that’s how we
know that it’s Bernie Bernbaum, the shmatte kid—’cause ethically, he’s kinda
shaky.” Casper’s logic is circular. He derides Bernie’s character, by accusing
him of leaking the fixes, and then justifies his accusation on the basis of
Bernie’s depravity. When Bernie is introduced to the film, he indeed proves
to be thoroughly unscrupulous, and he admits to exploiting insider infor-
mation about the fights. However, Leo’s speculations also prove to be true.
Mink also is in on the grift, and the Coens never clarify who exactly did
what. Instead, the movie’s motivating concerns again remain fundamentally
underdetermined: an absence, which drives the story.
Despite this underdetermination, however, Casper is not wrong to
complain that something is amiss in their underworld. While Leo justifies
his refusal of Casper’s request, by arguing that Bernie pays for protection
and that Casper’s own contributions to the cartel don’t give him the right
to kill bookies, his insistence upon the integrity of the moral order is
self-contradictory. Leo’s lover is Bernie’s sister, Verna (Marcia Gay Harden).
He defends the bookie’s life, not out of respect for the mob’s organizing
principles, but rather for reasons of the heart. When Leo later justifies his
escalating aggression against Casper by insisting that he didn’t start the
trouble, his captain Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) accordingly protests, “You
did start it. You and Verna . . . And Casper hasn’t broken the rules, Bernie
has, and you, too, by helping him.” Although perhaps initially unbeknownst
to him, Casper’s complaint thus presents a direct attack on the legitima-
Ex Nihilo 215
cy of Leo’s authority, by bringing to light the contradictions in his own

commitments.
While Leo thus compromises the integrity of his principles out of love
for Verna, she, on the other hand, compromises the integrity of her love
out of a principled devotion to her brother. When Tom accuses Verna of
leading Leo astray, she protests, “What do you want, Tom? You want me to
pretend I don’t care what happens to Bernie? Well, I do? He’s my brother.
I don’t want to see him get hurt. If Leo wants to help out, I’ll step out
with him and show him a good time in return. There’s no harm in that.”
Tom scathingly replies, “There’s a name for that kind of business arrange-
ment.” Despite his apparent contempt, however, Tom himself takes advantage
of Verna’s willingness to proffer sexual favors in her brother’s defense. She’s
sleeping with him too, in a thinly veiled effort to quell his demand that Leo
give up Bernie to Casper. And, as the most perverse expression of her filial
piety, Bernie alleges that Verna once tried to seduce him in a misguided
attempt to discourage his homosexuality.
Along with these two, Bernie also occupies a morally contradictory
position in the film. Given his circular reasoning, Casper’s denunciation of
the bookie is conspicuously prejudicial: an unjustified attack, likely motivated
by anti-Semitism or homophobia. (Indeed, when taking up his complaint,
the police chief remarks, “Let Casper have Bernie. What’s one more Hebrew
more or less?”) Nevertheless, as Casper contends, Bernie is “ethically shaky.”
In addition to selling Verna out to Tom, Bernie exploits and eventually mur-
ders Mink, who’s sleeping with him despite his relationship with the Dane.
Bernie does indeed double-cross Casper. And, when Tom spares his life, he
uses Tom’s mercy as leverage against him. The Dane, in turn, vouches for
Mink, despite the fact that he, too, is taking advantage of Casper—thus cast-
ing aspersion not only on his but also on the Dane’s integrity. And, finally,
as a dialectical complement to Casper’s insistence upon the ethics of the
underworld, the mayor and the police chief are in the pockets of the mob.
In light of these ubiquitous contradictions, the question arises as to
how the social order sustains even the semblance of cohesion. As Leo’s position at
the head of the mob begins to falter, Tom chastises him, “You don’t hold
elected office in this town. You run it, because people think you run it.
Once they stop thinking it, you stop running it.” Indeed, the inconsistency
in Leo’s exercise of his authority undermines confidence in his leadership,
giving rise to an all-out war between the two gangsters in which Casper
gets the upper hand. Despite the changing circumstances, Tom continues to
urge Leo to hand Bernie over to Casper, hoping immediately to placate his
rage and then to later exact their revenge. But Leo refuses, provoking Tom
to tell Leo about his affair with Verna. Leo beats up Tom, kicks him out of
the gang, and dumps Verna, setting the stage for Tom to undertake a series of
machinations in which he double-crosses Casper and ultimately restores Leo’s
position at the head of the mob. Through these reversals in Leo’s fortune,
the moral contradictions in Miller’s Crossing’s underworld undergo a series of
dialectical inversions reminiscent of the rise and fall of Norville’s creativity
in The Hudsucker Proxy. Initially Tom stands at Leo’s side in his professional
position, while Verna’s pulls Leo’s heart strings and undermines the basis for
Tom’s loyalty to his boss. In the end, however, Verna is bound to Leo in a
marriage of convenience, while Tom undermines the original basis for their
relationship through his professional scheming. Tom’s double-cross earns him
Leo’s gratitude, while the Dane’s loyalty to Casper gets him murdered. And,
while Leo’s weak will compels Tom to buttress his authority and ultimately
sustains his position at the head of the mob, Casper’s principled conviction
makes him susceptible to distrusting the Dane and ultimately leads to his
downfall. Contrary to The Hudsucker Proxy, however, the principle that medi-
ates this dialectical play does not occupy the same fixed position outside the
film’s narrative structure but rather depends upon Tom’s committed engage-
ment. And, in Miller’s Crossing, the Coens accordingly address the tenuous
underdetermination of social institutions in terms specifically of the dynamic
conflicts in the relationship between love and the law.
When Leo first refuses Casper permission to snuff Bernie, the Italian
explodes in an angry tirade, repeatedly protesting, “I’m sick of you giving
me the high hat!” For Casper, it’s a touchy point, but, in this case, he isn’t
being unduly sensitive. When declining Casper’s request, Leo insults him by
failing to respect his due rights. Similarly, for Tom, the breakdown in Leo’s
authority compromises his own sense of moral self-worth, and he too asso-
ciates it with the pride of his “hat.” Unable to say no to Verna or even, by
extension, her grifter brother, Leo turns out to be as base as them or worse,
a self-interested opportunist willing to exploit his office to indulge his petty
satisfactions, and so incapable of upholding the principles that justify Tom’s
fealty. Despite Tom’s insistence that “There is nothing more foolish than a
man chasing his hat,” through the course of the movie, that is exactly what
he therefore finds himself compelled to do, ultimately rectifying Leo’s author-
ity in order to restore his own sense of integrity. Of course, in the irony of
Casper’s opening monologue, the idea of an ethical gangster is presented as
ridiculous, and the criminal nature of Tom’s pursuits might similarly seem to
qualify the seriousness of his dilemma. As conventional to film noir, however,
addressing ethical questions in the context of a criminal underworld enables
the Coens to take up the distinct problematics of modern morality, address-
Ex Nihilo 217
ing ethics solely in terms of the integrity of intentions and thematizing the
contradictions revealed in light of the groundless self-determination of the
moral law.
Indeed, as a correlate to the double-crossing in the film’s drama, the
characters in Miller’s Crossing consistently prove unable to recognize one
another’s intentions. When Casper rebuts Tom’s insinuations about his captain,
by insisting that he knows the Dane, Tom summarizes the point, “Nobody
knows anybody, not really.” In the unfolding of his scheming, in fact, Tom’s
own motivations appear to be largely unclear to him. After Leo dumps Verna,
because Tom told him about their affair, she complains to Tom, “You could
have just asked for what you wanted.” He responds, “Oh yeah, what did I
want?” Did Tom tell Leo about their affair, as Verna supposes, in order to
secure her love for himself? Did he do it, as seems more likely, in hopes of
freeing Leo to reaffirm the integrity of his authority? While Kant takes the
sense of duty to be a transcendental given independent of the contingen-
cies of experience, in their depiction of Tom’s dilemma the Coens present
the sense of obligation to be unavoidably complicated with the concrete
conditions of its articulation. To stand by Leo’s side, Tom would have to
compromise the very principle on which his responsibility is based. Yet his
duty to his boss has no significance outside the context of their underworld.
To run away with Verna, Tom similarly would have to concede the corrupt
nature of their love. Yet his devotion to her can’t be divorced from the filial
piety that first motivated their affair. When expressing uncertainty about
his motivations, Tom does not therefore express a vague lack of resolve but
rather the inconsistency in his obligations. He doesn’t know what he wants,
because the orienting principle of his desire has proven to be contradictory.
At the same time, however, Tom sustains his sense of integrity on the
basis of this same underdetermination of the moral law, revealed by the
inconsistencies in his sense of duty. In light of the ultimate outcome of
his efforts, Tom retroactively proves his commitment to Leo’s authority by
restoring his position at the head of the underworld, and he does justice to
Verna’s love by rectifying her relationship with Leo. But Tom achieves these
ends through a project whose aim remains instrumentally undefined and
objectively contradictory. Most importantly, through his machinations, Tom
does not merely serve Leo’s and Verna’s interests. To the contrary, as evident
already in the disclosure of his affair with Verna, Tom contravenes both Leo’s
and her wishes in his struggle to defend his sense of integrity; and, while
making good on his responsibilities to Leo and Verna, Tom puts an end their
personal relationships. While Tom’s defense of his sense of integrity can’t be
divorced from his attachments to Leo and Verna, it depends upon sustaining
the metonymy of his desire through the underdetermination that that refuses
its reduction to their ends. And it is this same groundlessness of the law that
provides the basis for Tom’s restoration of the social order.
Revealing in this regard is Tom’s decision to spare Bernie’s life at the
moral juncture presented by the woods at Miller’s Crossing. When Tom first
offers his services to Casper, the Italian demands that he demonstrate his
allegiance by putting a bullet in Bernie’s brain. After leading the bookie into
the forest, Tom forces him to beg for his life, and then lets him go, telling
him to disappear without a trace. Why? In his pleading, Bernie insists, “Tom,
you can’t do this,” adding in a reference to Casper’s goons, “You’re not like
those animals back there.” Indeed, despite his hard exterior, Tom does not
seem capable of cold-blooded murder. But Tom has been advocating for
Bernie’s killing since the opening of the film. Does the prospect of doing
it himself really make it unpalatable? Whereas previously he had insisted
that Leo let Casper kill Bernie, Tom now takes up Leo’s cause and comes
to Bernie’s defense. Does he, too, do it for Verna? Indeed, faking Bernie’s
death would be the perfect way to protect him from Casper. Perhaps Tom
was not conning Verna, after all, when he convinced her to share Bernie’s
whereabouts, so that he could tell him “to skip.” Finally, the distinction
that Bernie draws between Tom and Casper’s henchmen, as animals, echoes
Casper’s own original account of ethics as marking the distinction between
men and beasts. As he falls apart, Bernie pleads, “I can’t die . . . out here
in the woods like a dumb animal. Like a dumb animal!” In his stark con-
frontation with Bernie’s desperation, does Tom meet the irreducible core
of ethical life? Bernie begs him, “Look in your heart! I’m praying to you!
Look in your heart!”
In the further unfolding of his machinations, Tom’s decision to spare
Bernie’s life proves to have been prescient. As the key to undermining
Casper’s authority, Tom cultivates his suspicion of the Dane by convincing
him that the Dane and his lover Mink were in on Bernie’s scam. When
Bernie continues to place debts despite the fact that he’s supposed to be
dead, he thus provides Tom with helpful evidence to press his case against the
Dane. And, when the Dane challenges Tom’s allegiance to Casper by insisting
that he never really killed Bernie, the bookie’s double crossing saves Tom’s
life. Returning to Miller’s Crossing with the Dane, Tom literally retraces the
steps that he took with Bernie. But, this time, it’s Tom who stands to lose
his life, and, although he’s decidedly more reticent than Bernie, he, too, loses
his cool: buckling over and vomiting in what the Dane rightfully takes to
be confirmation of his deception. Just at that moment, however, Casper’s
Ex Nihilo 219
henchmen indeed find the body of a dead man, lying in the woods with his
face blown off. While recognizing that sticking around potentially would put
Tom in jeopardy, Bernie saw that this gave him leverage over the man who
saved his life, and he decided to take advantage of the situation. However,
Bernie also realized that covering Tom’s story about killing him would be
essential to his exploitation. And, when Mink got spooked by Bernie’s return
from the dead, the grifter feared that he might betray him to the Dane.
So he safeguarded Tom’s story by murdering Mink and leaving his defaced
corpse at Miller’s Crossing.
In this light then, Tom’s decision to spare Bernie appears to have been
strategic, a calculated judgment that indeed proves instrumental to his designs.
As evident in his panicked nausea, however, Tom could not anticipate the
outcome of his decision. As a strategic decision, sparing Bernie serves at best
to sustain the contingency of Tom’s situation amid the warring gangs. While
sanctioning Bernie’s killing originally promised to restore the integrity of
Leo’s authority, in light of Casper’s rise to power, snuffing the bookie would
all too decisively institutionalize the new order. Bernie is the wildcard. As
the apogee of the corruption in the underworld’s moral contradictions, Ber-
nie also is the link connecting Leo’s love for Verna to Casper’s assertion of
his rights. Accordingly, keeping Bernie in play is also essential to sustaining
Tom’s defense of his sense of integrity, by maintaining the underdetermina-
tion that conditions his machinations. And it is this same uncertainty that
paradoxically accounts for Bernie’s instrumental value to Tom’s scheming,
not necessarily by continuing to place bets, but by introducing ambivalence
into Casper’s relationship with the Dane through the connection that he
establishes between the Dane’s love for Mink and Casper’s anxiety about the
legitimacy of his authority.
In the unfolding of Tom’s scheming, finally, this shift in the dynamics
of his relationship with Bernie also accounts for the dialectical reversal in
its end results. Whereas initially Bernie’s lack of scruples brings to light the
inconsistency in Leo’s authority, Tom’s subsequent cultivation of this same
moral corruption leads to Casper’s downfall and restores Leo to his original
position. In the process, the conflicts in Leo’s authority are not resolved but
brought to light and institutionalized in his engagement to Verna. Verna’s
love for Leo, too, has been publically sanctioned and secured. And, in the
final scene of the movie, Tom reinforces the groundless underdetermination
of his sense of responsibility, by refusing Leo’s appeal to come back to work,
and instead bidding farewell to Leo and Verna with a longing look and a
tip of his hat.
Sublimation, Superego
In its distinction from the hermeneutical closure of The Hudsucker Proxy, the
dynamism of Tom’s defense of his integrity supports explaining the critical
normativity in the Coens’ creative practice as a form of sublimation. Indeed,
Žižek explains Lacan’s concept of sublimation as strictly correlative to the
anamorphosis of the gaze in the picturing of the visual field. If the stain of
the gaze becomes visible as such, the coherence of the visual field collapses.
So something must be displaced from the network of imaginary particulars,
which make up the world, and put in position of this gap, around which
it is organized. Žižek writes, “The object is the ‘sublime object [of ideol-
ogy],’ the object ‘elevated to the dignity of the Thing,’ and simultaneously
the anamorphic object (in order to perceive its sublime quality, we have to
look at it ‘awry,’ askew—viewed directly, it looks like just another object
in a series)” (Žižek, 2001; 149). However, as a paradoxical symptom of his
extraordinary command of Lacan’s critical theory, Žižek often plays fast and
loose with his concepts and, despite their obviously complementary dynamics,
simply equating sublimation, as a form of picturing, with the anamorphosis
of the gaze is at least questionable. Still more importantly, Lacan’s concept of
sublimation suffers from fundamental theoretical problems which compromise
its critical value and cast the Coens’ creative practice in a different light.
As characteristic of the persistent transcendentalism in Lacan’s thinking
at this distinctly transitional juncture, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Lacan
defines the Thing as “that which in the Real suffers from the signifier”
(Lacan, 1992; 118). While providing a preliminary corrective to the ideal-
ism of his earlier concept of absence, Lacan thus still conceives the Real as
the object of desire, which lies out in front of the subject as an elusive lost
wholeness and so exerts the force of its jouissance as the magnetism of an
impossible promise of complete satisfaction. While remedying the static fixity
of his theory by conceiving the symbolic as thus requiring renewal through
the mediation of imaginary particulars, he nevertheless conceives this whole
process as circumscribed by the originary sundering of the signifier. And
despite the newfound materialism in his concept of absence, Lacan continues
to conceive the normativity in psychoanalysis accordingly as an ethics of lack,
defined by the opposition between desire and demand.
Accordingly, when first addressing the sadistic cruelty in the institution
and enforcement of the law, Lacan conceives the superego as investing the
symbolic authority of the imaginary, Oedipal father with the jouissance in
the Real that, he here contends, resists symbolic circumscription. At issue,
according to Lacan, is the moment when the child “quite simply perceives
Ex Nihilo 221
that his father is an idiot or a thief  .  .  .  a weakling or routinely, an old fogey.”

Despite bearing the mantle of symbolic castration, “the little man” provides
“paltry support for the signifier,” rather appearing to be deprived of it him-
self (Lacan, 1992; 308). Along with realizing the child’s patricidal fantasies,
and so compromising the loving identification that simultaneously provides
the basis for its burgeoning ego, the father’s failure attests to his inability
to satisfy the jouissance in the (m)Other’s expectations. Accordingly, Lacan
contends that the child’s disappointment compels the further exaggeration of
its father’s imaginary potency. So understood, the superego’s terrifying power
reflects the child’s sense of its father’s weakness. Along with buttressing his
pathetic embodiment of the symbolic law, the superego’s severe reproaches
echo those unconsciously leveled against the father by the disappointed child.
And, despite mitigating the lure of its temptation, the superego sustains the
child’s enthrallment to the jouissance in its (m)Other’s demands.
Along with thus accounting for the ontogenetic development of neu-
rotic suffering, Lacan’s theory furthermore concerns the phylogenetic moral
crisis in the origins of the modern world. While Kant reinforces modernity’s
repudiation of the Sovereign Good by reducing the ethical value of an act
to the integrity of its motivating intentions, Lacan contends that he implic-
itly preserves the substantial grounds that he refuses in the objectivism of
his transcendental concept of the moral law (Lacan; 1992; 77). The sadistic
cruelty in Kant’s concept of moral duty thus proves to be characteristic of
the melancholic introjection of the Sovereign Good’s disappointing demise in
the genesis and structure of modern morality. While distinguishing the law’s
noumenal groundlessness from other phenomenal concerns, Lacan contends
that Kant’s basis for drawing this distinction already evidences its collapse;
and it is this implicit reduction of the law’s constitutive negativity to the
objectivity of an empirical principle that Lacan discerns in Kant’s description
of the experience of moral commitment as painful (Lacan, 1992; 80). As further
evidence of his reification of the law, Lacan argues that Kant’s concept of
moral self-determination paradoxically requires reducing oneself to the passive
instrument of a machine. Parodying Kant’s categorical imperative, he writes,
“Never act except in such a way that your action may be programmed”
(Lacan, 1992; 77). And, Lacan argues that the sense of duty serves as an
“alibi,” whereby one submits to the authority of a thoroughly formal, albeit
nonetheless imaginary, demand rather than concede the constitutive lack of
the symbolic. “Psychoanalysis,” he writes, “teaches that, in the end, it is easier
to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration” (Lacan, 1992; 307).
While addressing it as a perennial problem, Lacan thus treats the norma-
tive double-bind in the dialectic of enlightenment as an aberrant propensity
in the proper institution and enforcement of the moral law, and he conceives
psychoanalysis as extending modernity’s emancipating project by working
through the chronic recurrence of this self-contradictory tendency in subjec-
tivity and society. Despite criticizing the objectivism in Kant’s ethics, in his
theory of sublimation Lacan accordingly radicalizes Kant’s own concept of the
formal underdetermination of the moral law, by arguing that the organizing
principles of the symbolic are unavoidably complicated with the concrete
conditions of their articulation. In this regard, Lacan’s critical response to Kant
violates the strict opposition between the noumenal groundlessness of the
law and the phenomenal determination of empirical interests that frames his
moral philosophy; but it does so in order to redress Kant’s own transgression
of this opposition in the objectivism and concomitant cruelty of his concept
moral duty. When criticizing Kant’s ethics, that is, Lacan brings Kant’s own
criteria to bear on his philosophy; and, in his concept of sublimation, Lacan
takes up and defends Kant’s concept of the law’s integrity by conceiving its
noumenal underdetermination as a tenuous, existential contingency, which
requires perpetual renewal through historical change.
Accordingly, at this juncture, Lacan’s concept of the ethics of psycho-
analysis indeed justifies comparison with Derrida’s defense of deconstruction’s
normativity. While Lacan conceives the Real as a distinctly material remain-
der, which exerts an affective force on the subject, in keeping with Derrida’s
argument in “The Force of Law,” he here explains the superego’s coercion,
above all, as symptomatic of the imaginary reduction of the symbolic to
the static immediacy of an objective principle; and, despite his emphasis
on the value of elevating an imaginary particular to a symbolic principle,
Lacan’s concept of sublimation lends itself to elaboration in terms of the
post-phenomenological ethics of alterity. Simon Critchley draws this equation
with specific reference to Emmanuel Levinas, whose work strongly informs
the ethics of the arrivant in Derrida’s deconstruction. In critical distinction to
Heidegger’s emphasis on the philosophical priority of the question of Being,
Levinas argues that ethics is first philosophy and, in opposition to the absence
of the subject’s own being-towards-death, he conceives this pre-ontological
normativity as an effect of the constitutive role of the Other in defining the
subject’s sense of its self and its place in the world. Critchley summarizes,
What distinguishes an ethical relation from other relations (to

oneself or to objects) is, Levinas claims, that it is a relation with
that which cannot be comprehended or subsumed under the
categories of the understanding. In Stanley Cavell’s terms, it is the
very unknowability of the other, the irrefutability of skepticism
Ex Nihilo 223
that initiates a relation to the other based on acknowledgment and

respect. The other person stands in a relation to me that exceeds
my cognitive powers, placing me in question and calling me to
justify myself. (Critchley, 1999; 97)
Insofar as they both conceive the subject as rent by an originary responsibility

to the Other, Critchley contends that “there is a common formal structure to
ethical experience in Lacan and Levinas” (Critchley, 1999; 199). In his exposition
of Lacan’s concept of sublimation, Critchley reinforces this isomorphism by
emphasizing that it articulates an originary absence. Since there is no Sov-
ereign Good, he explains, the only chance for happiness lies in sublimation’s
deflection of the drive from its aim. He writes, “Sublimation is the realiza-
tion of one’s desire, where one realizes that one’s desire will not be realized,
where one realizes the lack of being that one is” (Critchley, 1999; 202). As
the articulation of a lack, Critchley furthermore contends that sublimation
implies a confrontation with death—indeed, the marriage of being-towards-
death and symbolic castration, integral to Lacan’s work of the 1950s—and it
is this, he argues, that brings to the fore its aesthetic dimension. While death
remains beyond the ken of human understanding, sublimation provides the
means to make it manifest, not, to be sure, by defining the truth of finitude
but rather, indirectly, insofar as it exceeds the boundaries of its presentation.
In this regard, Critchley argues that Lacan’s critical theory does not
strictly correspond to but rather offers a complementary corrective to Levi-
nas’s ethics. In keeping with the arguments that Derrida brings to bear
on Heidegger’s concept of being-towards-death, Critchley asks how Levinas
gains access to the traumatic encounter with the Other and whether it is
reasonable to suppose that the force of this trauma, at the core of his eth-
ics, can be sustained? While Levinas formulates his concept of the Other’s
alterity through a phenomenological analysis of the intentional structures of
experience, Critchley argues that his access to it implicitly depends upon the
sublimation of his writing. He writes, “the entire effort of Levinas’ strangely
hyperbolic rhetoric is to intimate or testify to a dimension of the unthema-
tizable Saying within the thematics of the Said. . . . There is no pure Saying,
there is nothing prior to the mediation of the Said.” And, in this regard,
he concludes, “Levinas’ writing might be seen as an anti-aesthetic aesthetic”
(Critchley, 1999; 205). While contrary to Levinas’s self-understanding, Critch-
ley thus conceives Lacan’s concept of sublimation as clarifying an implica-
tion of his own theory, and he goes on to argue that Lacan’s critical theory
similarly provides support for the normativity of Levinas’s philosophy. Insofar
as Levinas explains the subject’s encounter with the Other as traumatic, it
remains unclear how its normative force can be endured, and commenta-
tors have criticized his theory accordingly for its ethical extremism. How-
ever, Critchley finds implicit support in Levinas’s own text for countering
this apparently exclusive emphasis on the traumatic encounter and conceiv-
ing his ethics, rather, in terms closer to Lacan’s concept of sublimation, as
characterized by a twofold movement “between separation and reparation,
between the tear and repair, between the traumatic wound and the healing
sublimation. . . . In this sense,” he concludes, “ethics would not simply be
a one-way street from the Same to the Other, but would also, in a second
move, consist in a return to the Same, but a Same that had been altered in
itself (Critchley, 1999; 206)
As anticipated by the initial qualification of these reflections, one
might contest Critchley’s assimilation of Lacan’s critical theory to the post-
phenomenological ethics of alterity as predicated upon an abstraction and
neutralization of the material strife that Lacan discerns in the groundless
underdetermination of experience. Indeed, despite Critchley’s concern with
its excessively traumatic quality, the affect in Levinas’s concept of the Other
has to be purged of the jouissance in the coercive insistence of the drive
in order to justify Critchley’s concept of ethics as an “infinite responsibil-
ity of unconditional hospitality.” And, as the ultimate object of this gratu-
itous generosity, Critchley has to treat the Real as an unattainable goodness,
rather than the recalcitrance of an menacing proximity (Critchley, 1999;
275). At this particular juncture, however, Critchley’s post-phenomenological
appropriation of Lacan’s critical theory is fundamentally justified, insofar as
Lacan conceives the normativity in psychoanalysis as an ethics of lack. If the
nascent materialism in Lacan’s thinking indeed provides grounds already to
insist upon Lacan’s departure from post-phenomenological philosophy, level-
ing these arguments only serves to fuel their confusion. And the project of
asserting the opposition between psychoanalysis and post-phenomenological
philosophy is better served by altogether conceding Critchley’s nevertheless
hasty equation.
As exposited previously, however, Lacan subsequently posits a cut in
the Real that precedes the sundering of the signifier and, on this basis, he
explains the object (a) as a remainder in the symbolic, which is not there-
fore a remainder of the symbolic. Rather than a lost wholeness that lies out
beyond the subject’s grasp, Lacan thus conceives the Real as an imposing
proximity that lies behind the subject and so never can be shaken loose.
The affective force of its claim on the subject does not therefore take the
form of an elusive magnetism, promising an impossibly complete satisfaction,
but rather relentlessly imposes an unbearable satisfaction-in-dissatisfaction.
Ex Nihilo 225
And, beyond inconsistency, it renders desire inherently self-defeating. Only

at this juncture does the materialism in Lacan’s critical theory do justice to
the normative impasse in the dialectic of enlightenment, and so account for
the opposition between psychoanalysis and post-phenomenological philoso-
phy. Specifically, in light of this further revision of his critical theory, Lacan
renounces his reduction of the superego’s cruelty to an aberrant reification
of the symbolic’s constitutive lack, and he no longer asserts the sublimation
of desire as an antidote to its coercion. To the contrary, Lacan comes to see
the two as coextensive. In his 1972–1973 Seminar, he writes,
The superego, which I qualified as based upon the imperative

“Enjoy!” is a correlate of castration, the latter being the sign with
which an avowal dresses itself up (se pare), the avowal that jouis-
sance of the Other, of the body of the Other, is promoted only
on the basis of infinity (de l’infinitude). I will say which infin-
ity—that, no more and no less, based on Zeno’s paradox. (Lacan,
1990; 7–8—my emphasis)
If the lack of symbolic castration provides the subject with a minimal dis-
tance from the Real of the Other’s jouissance, insofar as it remains not merely
open to but rent by this same Real, it institutes and sustains its coercion.
The deferral of desire, which Lacan equates here with the infinity of Zeno’s
paradox, does not therefore provide an alternative to the jouissance in the
superego’s coercion but rather remains predicated upon, even characteristic of,
its tireless circuit of prohibition and transgression.3 As Joan Copjec explains
it, “The more we define ourselves as mere becoming, the more we place our-
selves in the service of a cruel and punishing law of sacrifice, or, as Lacan
says, a ‘dark God’ ” (Copjec, 2004; 151).
Are You in Pictures?
In this regard, Miller’s Crossing requires reconsideration. While Leo’s senti-

mentality indeed betrays the inconsistency in his principles, it does so as a
symptom of the erotic excess in moral authority, which requires naturalizing
its inherent contradictions as if they were an effect only of the finite individu-
als and institutions assigned to uphold the law’s justice. As announced by the
humor in his opening monologue, the crisis in the underworld results rather
from Casper’s anxious, albeit nonetheless justified, concern with Leo’s respect
for his rights. By compelling Leo to defend his love for Verna on principle,
Casper brings to light the erotic excess integral to his position at the head
of the mob. The crisis in Tom’s sense of integrity makes this clear. Contrary
to Verna’s assumption, Tom does not disclose the affair out of jealousy of
Leo; and he also doesn’t do it, in defiance of Verna’s wishes, to free Leo to
reassert his authority. Instead, Tom’s revelation of the affair is motivated by his
jealousy of Verna! Before Tom admits to sleeping with Verna, Leo tells him
that he plans to marry her, adding in response to Tom’s accusations against
her, “I trust Verna as much as I trust you.” Along with revealing the extent
of Leo’s commitment to defending Bernie, the assertion piques Tom’s pride,
bringing to light the passionate investment in his principled commitment to
Leo’s authority. Tom responds, “Trust me or to hell with you.” And, when
Leo refuses to give way, Tom confesses the affair like a spiteful lover.
Understanding the crisis in the underworld this way, Tom’s machina-
tions still depend upon Bernie’s unscrupulousness to sustain the metonymy of
his desire, and ultimately to establish the connection between Casper’s anxiety
about his authority and the Dane’s love for Mink. As already implicit in the
earlier account of the film, however, Bernie’s lack of scruples is not itself
uncertain. While Tom cannot anticipate the effects of his decision to spare
Bernie’s life, he can rest assured that Bernie will sustain the contingency of
his situation, derailing Casper’s efforts to institute his authority precisely by
defying Tom’s instructions. And, in this way, Bernie’s immorality does not
merely deviate from the underworld’s organizing principles, it all too fully
realizes their intrinsic excess. In an early exchange with Tom, Bernie offers
to cover his debts if they can be friends, adding, “My motto is ‘A guy can’t
have too many [friends].” As a longstanding concern in political philosophy,
the gangsters in Miller’s Crossing appeal to friendship when evoking their
reciprocal rights and responsibilities in the underworld; and, in his appeal to
the principle, Bernie does not merely pervert its proper usage, but attests to
its inherent excess. As Bernie presents it, one always expects too much from
friends and so inevitably has too many. In his double-crossing of Casper,
Tom does not therefore exploit the uncertainty that Bernie introduces into
his relationship with the Dane, but rather the unbearably certain, conflicted
excess that informs the ambivalence in their relationship, by connecting
Casper’s anxiety about his authority specifically to the homosexual love affair
between Dane and the Mink. As Tom remarks, “There’s always that wild card
when love is involved.” In the culmination of Tom’s scheming, Casper makes
the jealous excess in his sense of principle conspicuous, exploding in a fit
of rage as he denounces the Dane as a double-crosser, and, finally, in the
film’s most literal incarnation of the superego’s cruelty, betraying a sadistic
enjoyment on his bloody face, as he counsels Tom, “Always put one in the
Ex Nihilo 227
brain!” Accordingly, when restoring order to the underworld, Tom does not
merely take up and affirm the groundless underdetermination of the law, but
institutionalizes this excess in the cruel violence of its organizing principles.
Specifically, after Casper already has been killed and Leo’s restoration has
been guaranteed, Tom murders Bernie in cold blood. Because the assassination
serves no clear instrumental end, its sadistic cruelty is conspicuous. However,
Tom’s violence isn’t arbitrary but rather true to the moral authority whose
groundless underdetermination he defends. Along with revealing its force
in his own motivations, Tom’s murder of Bernie thus serves to repress this
conflicted excess in the institution of the law, rendering Bernie responsible
for the superego’s sadistic jouissance, precisely at the point where he suffers
its unmitigated enforcement.
Strictly speaking, to argue that “there is no Other of the Other” is
equivalent to insisting that “there is no Other.”4 In the absence of a tran-
scendental signifier, the symbolic ultimately lacks coherence, instead coalesc-
ing in tenuous configurations that are sustained by historically contingent
master signifiers. When drawing this conclusion, of course, Lacan does not
thereby deny the heteronomous qualification of subjectivity or the integral
role of the symbolic in its genesis and structure. However, he conceives
the subject and the symbolic as more dialectically interdependent, placing a
newfound emphasis on the “circularity of the relationship of the subject to
the Other” (Lacan, 1998; 213). As a complement to his original concept of
the alienation of the subject in the symbolic, Lacan accordingly postulates a
contrary separation. If the subject loses the Real of its imaginary being through
the sundering that marks its entrance into language, separation sustains the
continuity of existence by redressing the contrary disturbance of the Real
in the symbolic.5 Making sense of the Other’s address requires reflexively
locating the vantage from which it is articulated. Rhetorically, Lacan asks, “He
is saying this to me, but what does he want?” (Lacan, 1998; 214). As a further
elaboration of Lacan’s concept of the transference, separation answers this
question by delimiting the Other’s jouissance in the form of the fantasy frame.
Along with further displacing the subject in relationship to the Other, when
conceiving the symbolic as rent by the Real Lacan thus makes the subject
more responsible for the contours of its experience, as the source of the
supplement that ultimately guarantees the Other’s authority and coherence.
In this twofold movement of alienation and separation, Lacan’s critical
theory again reveals its isomorphism with Derrida’s deconstruction. How-
ever, contrary to Derrida and the conventions of post-phenomenological
philosophy, Lacan conceives the incoherence in the symbolic as symptomatic
of the ecstatic jouissance, which holds the subject enthralled to the Other,
before and beyond the differential underdetermination of its absence. While

Derrida explains the inconsistency in the symbolic as symptomatic of a radi-
cal ontological openness, which renders its differential underdetermination
unavoidably contravened by the reification of identity, Lacan conceives this
inconsistency as the disturbance of an ontological closure, which requires
the institution of the symbolic to hold open the field of experience. Žižek
makes the point rhetorically,
According to the doxa, fantasy stands for the moment of closure:

fantasy is the screen by means of which the subject avoids the
radical opening of the enigma of the Other’s desire. . . . What,
however, if things are exactly inverted? What if it is fantasy itself which,
in so far as it fills the void of the Other’ s desire sustains the (false)
opening—the notion that there is some radical Otherness which makes
our universe incomplete? (Žižek, 1997; 31)
While Freud’s theory of dreams as “wish-fulfillments” apparently emphasizes

the imagined gratification of a frustrated desire, in the revision of his critical
theory Lacan reverses the order of these terms. The imaginary gratification
in the wish-fulfillment mitigates the Real in the Other’s demands, localizing
its imposing jouissance and so establishing the distance necessary to articulate
it as an object of desire, that is, to wish. Rather than misconstruing the
constitutive lack of the symbolic, the fantasy institutes the authority of the
law whose contravention it stages. And, the object does not therefore medi-
ate the subject’s relationship to the symbolic. Instead, the symbolic mediates
between the subject and the Real.
In the unfolding of their films, the Coens stage this confrontation
through the crises in their characters’ personal lives, and, in Barton Fink,
they also explain it as characteristic of the form of their filmmaking. The
title character is a New York playwright, lured to Hollywood in the early
1940s to write screenplays. In the move, the terms that organize his artwork
lose their moorings, resulting in a crippling bout of writer’s block. Barton
is a modernist, social-realist playwright, who aspires to “make a difference”
through what he calls not merely “New Theater” but “Real Theater.” He
explains,
There are a few people in New York, hopefully our numbers

are growing, who feel we have an opportunity now to forge
something real out of everyday experience, create a theater for
the masses based on a few simple truths, not on some shopworn
Ex Nihilo 229
abstractions about drama that don’t hold true today if they ever
did . . . The hopes and dreams of the common man are as noble
as those of any king. The stuff of life—why shouldn’t it be the
stuff of theater?
When presented with the opportunity to work in Hollywood, Barton is

concerned that he will have to compromise his artistic integrity; but the
crisis that he suffers results not from the ways that Hollywood’s crass demands
depart from his artistic aspirations but rather from the ways that they all
too well coincide.
At the outset of the film, after the opening of one of his plays, Barton
meets his producer and patrons for dinner. They lavish him with compli-
ments and read aloud a critic’s celebratory review. He responds, “I can’t
start listening to the critics; and I can’t start kidding myself about my own
work. A writer writes from his gut; his gut tells him what’s good and what’s
merely . . . adequate.” When his agent, Garland Stanford (David Warrilow),
calls him away to the restaurant bar to tell him about the offer from Hol-
lywood, Barton complains, “Jesus, Garland, you left me alone with those
people,” and he insists that leaving New York would separate him “from
the well-spring of the common man.” Garland replies, “The common man
will be here when you get back. Who knows, there may even be one of
two of them out in Hollywood.” Despite his express disdain for his New
York patrons, when transplanted to California, it becomes clear that Barton
enjoys a symbiotic relationship with them both financially and fantastically:
they expect him to play the role of the romantic bohemian, committed
to his artistic values, while he depends on their haughtiness to sustain the
oppositional force of his artistic principles. In Hollywood, however, Barton
indeed discovers “one or two” common men, and the terms of this whole
economy of law and desire dissolve.
To Barton, Hollywood represents empty artifice and crass commercial-
ism. When he first meets with Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner), the producer
at Capitol Pictures, where he’s been contracted, Barton explains that he
sought out a hotel that was less “Hollywood,” as if it were a dirty word;
and, when Lipnick asks what kind of pictures he likes, Barton explains that
he doesn’t go to the movies, making it clear that, as far as he’s concerned,
they’re beneath him. In this light, Barton’s inability to write appears to result
from an unwillingness to compromise his artistic principles. However, Barton
expresses more confusion than principled opposition to his assignment, and,
if it were simply a matter of defending his commitment to “higher truths,”
Barton might preserve his sense of honor, by turning up his nose at the
movies while nevertheless writing screenplays for them. The great novelist
turned Hollywood screenwriter W. P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), based loosely
on William Faulkner, provides a vivid example of this distancing strategy. In
the note in a book that he gives to Barton, Mayhew writes, “May this little
entertainment direct you in your sojourn among the Philistines.” But Bar-
ton’s “higher values” are based upon a figure of the common man—of the
Philistines—whose voice, he insists, has been silenced by established artistic
conventions. His modernism presents a subversive challenge to the pretenses
of high art; but, in Hollywood, the culture is all too low, all too common.
Characteristically, when the producer, Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub), learns
that he’s been assigned to oversee Barton’s film, he yells, “What am I the
goddamned janitor around here?”
The Coens’ Hollywood is rife with obscenities. Both Lipnick and
Geisler are brash, oversized characters that swear, readily betray confidences,
openly insult other people, and almost constantly yell. When they first meet,
Lipnick tells Barton, “I’m bigger and meaner and louder than any kike in
this town . . . and I don’t mean my dick is bigger than yours, it’s not a
sexual thing, although you’re the writer, you know more about that. Coffee?”
When Geisler calls Lipnick’s assistant, Lou Breeze (John Polito), he begins
the conversation, “Lou, how’s Lipnick’s ass smell this morning?” By contrast,
Mayhew maintains the veneer of Southern gentility and refinement; but
his grace serves only as an apology for his otherwise overt depravity. When
Barton first meets him, he’s just vomited loudly into a restaurant toilet. While
subsequently washing his hands, he turns to Barton, introduces and excuses
himself, “Sorry about the odor.” Rather than representing the repressed voice
of authentic experience, in this context, Barton proves to be a downright
prude. His face winces with repulsion. He wears a heavy wool, three-piece
suit and carries his body with a hunched reserve that conveys his anxious
hesitation and disgust. And, while liquor flows freely throughout much of
the movie, at least when first in Los Angeles, Barton is a restrained teetotaler.
While Barton struggles to situate himself in relationship to his boss’s
overbearing expectations, his anxieties focus, still more centrally, on the com-
mon man, Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), who’s staying in the next room
at his hotel. They first meet when Barton hears Charlie crying or laugh-
ing—in pain or ecstasy it’s decidedly unclear—through the wall separating
their rooms. When Barton calls down to the front desk to complain, Charlie
comes to his door to confront him but then apologizes and, much to Barton’s
annoyance, invites himself in. The two strike up a conversation in which the
dynamics of Barton’s relationship to Hollywood, his New York patrons, and
to the common man prove to be different than they initially seemed. Whereas
Ex Nihilo 231
Barton heretofore had expressed nothing but contempt for the film industry,
when Charlie asks him what kind of writing he does, he brags, “I’m writ-
ing for the pictures now,” and, directly contradicting his earlier disdain for
his critics and patrons, he goes on to boast, “I was well established in New
York, some renown there. . . . [My last play] got a hell of a write up in the
Herald.” When Charlie asks him what he writes about, Barton explains, “that’s
a good question . . . Strange as it may seem, Charlie, I guess I write about
people like you, the average working stiff, the common man,” and he lapses
into his idealistic polemic about the promise of a social-realist theater. Whereas
previously Barton’s rhetoric had seemed revolutionary, now, face-to-face with
Charlie, it seems pretentious. Barton momentarily pauses in his speech to note
condescendingly, “I guess that this doesn’t mean much to you.” When Charlie,
to the contrary, seconds his ideas about the truth in everyday experience,
“Hell, yeah, I could tell you some stories,” Barton interrupts him, “That’s the
point, we all have stories,” and continues with his speech. Rather than giving
voice to repressed truths of working-class experience, Barton’s social realism
now seems rather to be repressive: silencing the common man by speaking
for him and obscuring the realities of “his” experience by romanticizing them
in his art. Barton presents his theater as an antidote to empty formalism, but
his exchange with Charlie makes explicit the abstraction and emptiness of his
own realism. The scene ends with Charlie offering, “If there’s anything I can
do to help.” Barton condescendingly replies, “Sure Charlie you can help by
just being yourself.” And, with a smile on his face, Charlie reiterates, “Well I
could tell you some stories.”
In contrast to Barton’s heroically idealized, and implicitly sanitized, con-
cept of the common man, Charlie is obscene. He’s a big, sweaty man, with
an unreserved laugh and a flush face. He’s excessively friendly and naïvely
enthusiastic. He has a chronic infection that causes puss to ooze from his ear;
and he wears a novelty tie with a pin-up on the backside, which he flashes
to Barton, “Ouch!” Specifically, for Barton, there’s something unpleasantly
erotic about Charlie. When he offers to explain to Barton the basic moves
of wrestling, as potential inspiration for his writing, Charlie gets down on
all fours, tells Barton to join him on the floor and to put his arms around
him, raising an eyebrow and beckoning over his shoulder, “Come on, champ.
You can do it.” After quickly and brutally pinning him to the floor, Charlie
adds in suggestive language, “Well, that’s all wrestling is, except usually there’s
more grunting and squirming before the pin.” Later Barton confirms the
sexual tenor of this episode. After the body of Mayhew’s assistant and her
lover, Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis), has been found decapitated, the police
coming looking for Charlie. They tell Barton that his real name is Karl
“Madman” Mundt, and they accuse Barton of conspiring with him. “Did
you two have some sick sex thing?” they ask. Barton responds, “Sex? He’s
a man. We wrestled.”
Another exchange between Barton and Charlie suggests that this sex-
ual enjoyment is specifically what Barton avoids in Charlie’s stories.6 When
Charlie asks him, “Got a sweetheart?” Barton explains his own innocence,
talking into the desk with his back to Charlie and the camera, “No. I guess
it’s something about my work. I get so worked up over it. I don’t know,
I don’t have a lot of attention left over, so it would be a little . . . unfair.”
By contrast, Charlie boasts, that, in his line of work, he gets “opportunities
galore.” But, as he sets out to recount one of his sexual escapades, Barton
again interrupts, “You know in a way I envy you Charlie. You know what’s
expected of you. You know the drill.” To the contrary, Barton insists that
his job requires him to “plumb the depths” of the psyche. “The life of the
mind,” he complains, “there’s not a roadmap for that territory. And explor-
ing it can be painful. I have pain most people don’t know anything about.”
Another decisive aspect of Charlie’s obscenity, and the problem it pres-
ents to Barton’s writing, is the fact that Charlie likes movies. Everyone else
in the film at least tacitly acknowledges the baseness of Hollywood and,
in particular, the B movie that Barton has been assigned to write. How-
ever, when Barton qualifies one of his speeches, by remarking “. . . probably
sounds a little grand for someone writing a wrestling picture for Wallace
Beery,” Charlie lights up, “Beery? You got no beef there. He’s good—a hell
of an actor. Though, for my money, you can’t beat Jack Oakie. Funny stuff.”
If Barton aspires to “a theater for the masses based on a few simple truths,”
Hollywood would seem have beaten him to the punch. By contrast, in fact,
his own social realism appears to be a pseudo-populist entertainment for
middle-class cognoscenti “based,” in his own terms, “on shopworn abstrac-
tions . . . that don’t hold true today, if they ever did.” Charlie’s enthusiasm,
combined with his preference for Oakie over Beery, leaves Barton perplexed.
He doesn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. Should he appeal for
Charlie’s affirmation or turn up his nose at Charlie’s bad taste?
The solution to Barton’s dilemma develops through the love triangle in
his relationship with Mayhew and Audrey. When picnicking with the couple,
Barton complains that the writer’s drinking is spoiling his gift. Mayhew gets
up in protest, slaps Audrey, and wanders off in a stupor. Barton rushes to
Audrey’s defense, denouncing Mayhew, “That son of a bitch!” Barton takes
an interest in Audrey as soon as they meet, inviting her out to dinner as
she stands in the door of Mayhew’s bungalow and excuses him. At the pic-
nic, Barton’s principled commitment to his art piques her interest and he
Ex Nihilo 233
further expounds upon his ideas as a quiet challenge to Mayhew’s cynicism.

But Barton’s rivalrous desire comes to a head in the crisis surrounding his
writer’s block. When faced with the prospect of having to present his prog-
ress to Lipnick in the morning, Barton panics and calls Audrey for help in
the middle of the night. When she comes over, Audrey explains that she’s
done the same thing many times before for Mayhew, up to and including
having written his last few novels. Barton explodes in a fit of self-righteous
fury, “What a goddamned phony! W. P. Mayhew—William goddamn Phony
Mayhew!” But then Barton proceeds to ask Audrey to do the same for him.
Instead, she seduces Barton.
In what follows, the film breaks with any remaining vestiges of natu-
ralism. As Barton and Audrey recline on his bed, kissing, the camera pans
down to show them kick off their shoes, tracks across the room into the
bathroom, and descends into the drain of the sink. As the camera moves
into the darkness of the drain, Audrey’s moaning blends with screaming and
other guttural sounds to produce a nightmarish cacophony of pleasure and
pain. The screen comes to light again on Barton’s sleeping face, as if we have
been privy to the torments of his dreaming mind. And, when he wakes up,
he finds Audrey lying next to him in bed—dead. The trope of the sexual
encounter followed by murderous carnage is conventional to slasher films, and
the culminating scenes in Barton Fink draw deeply from the image vocabulary
of melodramatic horror. When the police later come to interrogate Barton
again about the murder of both Audrey and Mayhew, whose body also has
been found decapitated in a ravine, Barton’s room becomes unbearably hot.
The elevator bell rings, and, when the police step out into the hallway to
check it out, they discover the hotel is on fire. As flames rise up through
the elevator shaft, Charlie steps out of the elevator, holding a “policy case,”
from which he draws a shotgun, and he shoots one of the detectives in the
chest. Setting off running down the hallway, Charlie echoes Barton’s preten-
tious musings on his art as he repeatedly screams, “Look upon me! I’ll show
you the life of the mind.” Finally he catches up to the second police officer,
who has fallen to the ground. Charlie lowers the shotgun to his forehead
and shoots him in the face, calmly proclaiming, “Heil Hitler.”
If Barton’s night with Audrey initiates the film’s final break with psy-
chological naturalism, it also marks the turning point in Barton’s creative
process. When Barton discovers Audrey dead in his bed, he appeals for help
from Charlie, who disposes her body. When he later returns to Barton’s
room, Charlie asks Barton to hold a parcel for him while he travels to New
York with the unacknowledged implication that he’s going there to kill Bar-
ton’s parents. Charlie tells Barton that the package contains all his worldly
possessions. “Maybe it’ll bring you good luck,” he suggests, “Help you fin-
ish your script. You’ll think about me. Make me your wrestler. Then you’ll
lick that story.” Sure enough, after the police first interrogate him about the
murder, Barton returns to his room, places the parcel on the desk before him
and, for the first time in the film, writes productively. In fact, he rapturously
loses himself in his writing, emerging from it only momentarily to call his
agent back in New York and ecstatically proclaim, “This may be the most
important work I’ve ever done.” What’s in the box remains a mystery. Later,
as the hotel burns down around them, Charlie tells Barton, “By the way, that
package I gave you, I lied, it isn’t mine,” implying that instead it’s Barton’s.
Does it perhaps contain Audrey’s head? Or, in truly surreal terms, Barton’s
own head? Whatever the case, it emerges as a direct consequence of Barton’s
night with Audrey and provides the fulcrum for reorganizing Barton’s fantasy
life. Specifically, in Lacan’s terms, Charlie’s box enables Barton to distinguish
himself from the object of enjoyment in Hollywood’s demands, by distancing
it as an elusive object of desire in light of his guilt before the law. As a resto-
ration of the oppositional dynamic that, in New York, defined his relationship
with his patrons, Barton accordingly can resume his writing as a struggle for
self-determination, which reclaims this lost object from the forces of repres-
sion. And the final lines of his screenplay, hammered out on his typewriter,
directly echo the closing lines of his play at the outset of the movie.
While overcoming his writer’s block, however, Barton’s success para-
doxically proves to be his defeat. In keeping with the hell that Charlie lit-
erally rains down on Barton’s hotel, when he turns his screenplay into the
studio, Barton finds himself condemned to a writer’s hell. After his assistant,
Lou, reads the script, Lipnick denounces it as a “fruity movie about suffer-
ing.” However, he doesn’t fire the writer. “That would be too easy.” Instead,
Lipnick keeps Barton under contract, so that anything he writes belongs to
Capitol Pictures, but Capitol Pictures won’t produce anything he writes. In
this way, Barton Fink inverts the dialectic of success and failure in The Hud-
sucker Proxy. While Barton’s inability to write buffers the studio’s expectations,
completing his screenplay institutionalizes his enthrallment to the studio in his
very opposition to their expectations. Accordingly, Barton Fink also exhibits a
circular structure. As an echo of his original play, the closing lines of Barton’s
screenplay bring the film full circle and, in light of its anti-naturalism, raise
the question: Is Barton a New York playwright displaced in Hollywood, or
a Hollywood screenwriter who sustains his practice by imagining that he
really is a New York playwright? As a correlate to this geographical shift,
the principal locus of Barton’s breakdown is his seedy hotel, complicating
Ex Nihilo 235
the boundaries between the interiority of the writer’s psychology and the
exteriority of the hotel’s architecture in a manner reminiscent of Roman
Polanski’s films The Tenant and Rosemary’s Baby. And, in light of his mythical
proportions, Charlie’s status in the film similarly complicates the boundaries
between inside and out. Is Charlie a living, breathing salesman and mass-
murderer or does he embody the monstrous excess in Barton’s conflicted
desire? If the police have good grounds to blame Charlie for Audrey’s murder,
they are right to accuse Barton of conspiring in the killing. And it is this
shared criminality, which provokes the institution of the law necessary to
restore Barton’s creativity. Along with attacking Barton’s pretentious claim
to plumb the depths of the psyche, Charlie’s hyperbolic portrayal of the
“life of the mind” is true to Barton’s writing process. Charlie is indeed his
“wrestler,” and, while the Coens depict Barton as a fool, they take his writ-
ing seriously enough to make it the centerpiece of their own reflections on
creative practice.
Throughout the film, as Barton sits at his desk, unable to write, he
leans back in his chair, daydreaming, while he meditates on a postcard image
hanging on the wall. In it, a brown-haired woman in an old-fashioned bikini
sits with her back to the frame and her hand help up to her brow, look-
ing out at the ocean. In the film’s final sequence, after Lipnick denounces
his screenplay, Barton wanders down a Southern California beach. As he
sits in the sand with his box, the woman from the postcard comes and sits
down in front of him. “It’s a beautiful day . . .” she remarks, “What’s in the
box?” Barton answers, “I don’t know.” She continues, “Isn’t it yours?” Barton
repeats, “I don’t know.” He compliments her, “You’re very beautiful. Are you
in pictures?” She replies, “Don’t be silly,” turns towards the ocean, and raises
her hand to her brow, recreating the image in Barton’s room. Through this
complication between the interiority of the picture image and the exterior
vantage from which it is viewed, the Coens distill the film’s study in creative
practice as a process whereby the artist mimetically inscribes himself within
the field of experience. Following the breakdown of the fantasy frame that
organizes his work, Barton suffers the excessive proximity of an obscene
enjoyment whose coercive imposition he struggles to hold at a distance.
Through the Oedipal conflict in his relationship with Bill and Audrey, Barton
does not compromise the originary lack of desire, but rather restores the
minimal distance necessary to return to his writing. But, because the jouis-
sance in Barton’s anxiety exceeds the constitutive absence of the symbolic,
the distance provided by his evocation of the law simultaneously institutes
and sustains its coercive insistence in his relationship to the studio.
Traversing the Fantasy
Whereas sublimation sustains the symbolic dissolution of imaginary fixations,

this Real in the law furthermore marks a limit to interpretation, requiring
a critical confrontation with the jouissance in the symbolic, independently
from the meaning or meaninglessness of symptoms. Along with revising his
theory of sublimation, Lacan accordingly rethinks the critical normativity in
psychoanalysis as an ethics of the drive, in terms of, what he calls, traversing
the fantasy. In the closing session of his 1964 Seminar, Lacan asks, “How
can a subject who has traversed the radical fantasy experience the drive?”
(Lacan, 1998; 273). While he only uses the phrase this once, the concept of
traversing the fantasy has gained widespread usage as a general term for the
diverse approaches that Lacan develops, in his later thinking, when address-
ing the ends of psychoanalysis in relationship to the jouissance of the drive.
Among other ways, in his exposition of Lacan’s concept, Žižek appeals to
Freud’s distinction between the interpretation of symptoms and the construc-
tion of the fantasy. In light of his original appeal to structural linguistics,
Lacan conceives fantasy as misconstruing the symbolic lack of desire in the
demand for something actual and, on this basis, assumes the interpretation
of symptoms to hold the promise of the fantasy’s dissolution in the assump-
tion of castration. In his theory of sublimation, Lacan contends that the
mediation of imaginary particulars plays a generative role in articulating the
organizing principles of the symbolic, but he still explains the two, symptom
and fantasy, as essentially coextensive in their symbolic delimitation. In light
of Lacan’s postulate of a cut in the Real before and beyond the sundering
of the symbolic, however, he conceives the institution of the fantasy frame
as prior to and independent from the lack of its organizing principles. Of
course, interpreting symptoms still plays an important role in clinical practice,
restoring the dialectical flexibility in the analysand’s desire by lessening its
fixations and decreasing their motivating anxiety. However, addressing the
analysand’s conflicts ultimately requires the analyst to speculatively reconstruct
the fantasy that institutes and sustains the subject’s relationship to the Other.
While symptoms presuppose the symbolic order that retroactively ren-
ders them meaningful, the fundamental fantasy stages the gratification that
institutes and sustains the authority of the Other in the Real that renders
it incoherent. Whereas desire is “on the side of the Other,” Lacan contends,
“Jouissance is on the side of the Thing” (Lacan, 2006; 853/724). Accordingly,
the interpretation of symptoms and the construction of the fantasy are not
only independent of one another but entail contrary affective dynamics.
While symptoms disturbingly subvert one’s sense of self-possession, their
Ex Nihilo 237
interpretation tends to be pleasurable as an intersubjective articulation of

unconscious desire. By contrast, the private reveries of fantasy are terrifically
pleasurable. However, their disclosure tends to cause discomfort and shame
(Žižek, 1989; 74). Strictly understood, in fact, traversing the fantasy necessarily
entails this disturbing affect. As a critical practice, its force lies in refusing the
distance that enables the subject to disavow the gratification in its symbolic
articulation of experience. Contrary to Derrida’s insistence on the undecid-
able, Lacan conceives skeptical reflection as essential to upholding rather than
subverting the symbolic. What causes the symbolic to collapse is rather the
all too immediate realization of the gratification that institutes and sustains
its organizing principles. Accordingly, traversing the fantasy compels this con-
frontation, bringing the subject to the point where the fantasy frame proves
impossible to sustain in light of the unbearable proximity of its enjoyment.
As complementary to the structure and dynamics of picturing, pre-
sented in Barton Fink, the Coens stage this traversal of the fantasy most
vividly in the explosive violence that interrupts their films. In these instances,
the audience’s investment in the movie’s visual field suddenly breaks down,
all too fully realizing the jouissance in the gaze, as strictly correlative to the
excess in their characters’ conflicted motivations. Rendering the film almost
unbearable to watch, the Coens momentarily collapse the fantasy frame that
organizes its images, confronting the viewer with the affective excess that
sustains his or her investment in the story. At the same time, however, it
would be a mistake therefore to conceive traversing the fantasy as a cata-
strophic rupture, essentially equivalent to the self-destructive passage to the
act. While indeed harboring the potential for radical change, traversing the
fantasy requires assuming responsibility for the jouissance in one’s enthrallment
to the symbolic order, by taking it up as the basis of one’s relationships to
others and the world. And isn’t this true to the Coens’ creative practice? In
their cutting and pasting of stylistic tropes, the Coens don’t play primarily
with their potential to generate meanings, but hold them together with
grotesque enthusiasm.
Pastiche, Surrealism, Realism
As a final reflection on their formal strategies, if not the blank parody of

postmodern pastiche, how then are the Coens’ films best categorized? When
discussing the structures and dynamics of the drive, Lacan contends, “If we
bring together the paradoxes that we just defined at the level of Drang, at
that of the object, at that of the aim of the drive, I think that resulting image
would show the working of a dynamo connected to a gas-tap, a peacock’s

feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman, who is just lying
there looking beautiful” (Lacan, 1998; 169). Insofar as psychoanalysis con-
ceives experience as a field of compulsive excitations, riddled with the gaps
and inconsistencies of unconscious conflicts, it is surrealist critical theory.
When so describing the force of the drive, Lacan does not therefore evoke
dream life or the delusions of psychosis, except insofar as they reveal other-
wise unacknowledged aspects of actuality. The jouissance of the gaze consti-
tutes the topology of everyday life as a fundamentally inconsistent narrative
scenario, in which one finds oneself captured by always at least minimally
monstrous symbolic authorities, engaged in paranoid love-hate relationships
with others, and desperately trying to shake the nagging insistence of other-
wise irrevocably lost objects. “If there is anything resembling a drive,” Lacan
contends, “it is a montage in a surrealist collage” (Lacan, 1998; 169).
Accordingly, the Coens’ films, too, might be understood as surrealist.
Along with their cut-and-paste juxtaposition of incommensurable genre con-
ventions, the Coens oversaturate their movies’ color and style. They emphasize
their characters’ distinguishing traits with a single-minded repetition that
renders their eccentricity disturbing. And, in the groundless underdetermi-
nation of their dramatic narratives, they bring to light the self-destructive
excess in people’s motivations as strictly correlative to the conflicts and
inconsistencies in their broader social contexts. However, the Coens’ films
are perhaps better understood simply as Realist. Although guaranteed not to
catch fire as a neologism, the concept is consistent with Lacan’s emphasis
on the objectivity of the lost object and his central concern with the sci-
entific rigor of psychoanalysis. Any critical concept that sets itself apart from
Realism risks deferring the concept of reality to empirical objectivity and
the ideological justification of the status quo. While post-phenomenological
philosophers equate realism with the reification of self-presence, is it not
in fact more “subversive” to conceive the irrational as the way things really
are? And aren’t they?
In the final scenes of Barton Fink, America has joined the fight against
the Axis powers in World War II. As an expression of his enthusiastic support
for the cause, the producer, Lipnick, has enlisted in the reserves. Sitting at
his desk with the California sunshine streaming in through French doors
behind him, he trashes Barton’s script while wearing the uniform of an army
colonel. As he admits to Barton, Lipnick’s enlistment has yet to be officially
approved, so he had the uniform put together by the studio’s wardrobe
department—complete with a chest full of medals! When discussing the stu-
dio producers who inspired Lipnick’s character, Joel explains, “Michael Lerner
Ex Nihilo 239
resembles him a little, but Lipnick is more of a composite. The incident with
the uniform, for instance, came from the life of Jack Warner, who enrolled
in the army and asked his wardrobe department to make up a uniform.”
Undoubtedly Ethan is justified to add that it is “ironical” that the “colonel
uniform, which is one of the most surreal elements in the movie, is at the
same time one of the few to have been drawn directly from Hollywood
lore.” However, irony implies a detached critical reflection on commonplace
assumptions that does not, in fact, do justice to the absurdity of the Hol-
lywood producer’s cartoonish costume. As true for the film and the Coens’
oeuvre as a whole, the costume’s absurdity is better registered by insisting that,
if it is fantastical, nevertheless it isn’t ironic at all. To the contrary, it’s Real.
Notes
Introduction: Apropos of Nothing;

Or, What Does It Mean to Be “Blood Simple”?
1. In a 1987 interview for Postif, Joel describes the scene as built around this
image. “The image,” he says, determined the situation there, which was then elabo-
rated to integrate into the context of the story” (Ciment and Niogret, 2006; 33).
2. Following Hinson in this reading of Hammett’s title helps to orient the
central concerns in this study. However, in the context of Red Harvest’s gang wars,
Hammett originally uses the expression to mean something more like “killing with-
out restraint.” The thematic connection between the Coens’ film and Hammett’s
original story, if any, would seem to lie rather in the private detective’s surreptitious
intervention, which provokes the gangs to turn on one another.
3. With a wonderful perversity, O’Connor herself categorizes the novel as
“Christian realism.”
4. As characteristic of what Sharrett criticizes as the lack of a focused criti-
cal project, what Palmer’s postmodernist reading fails to explain is what makes this
underside of American culture specifically “Hobbesian”?
5. See Hurst, 2008; Lewis, 2008; Ruti, 2012
6. See Critchley, 1999.
7. See Stavrakakis, 1999.
Chapter 1. All-American Nihilism

1. Of course, in contradistinction to the Enlightenment philosophes, Kant fre-
quently has been understood rather as a romantic, precisely because his critical
articulation of the limits of reason holds open a place for religious faith.
2. David Hoy explains, “Heidegger conceives of Dasein and world as forming
a circle, and he thus extends the traditional hermeneutic circle between a text and
its reading down to the most primordial level of human existence” (Hoy, 1993; 179).
3. Dreyfus explicitly entertains this translation and only rejects it because he
deems it to insufficiently convey the normativity of das Man (Dreyfus, 1991; 152).
241
242 Notes to Chapter 3
4. Of course, insofar as Frances McDormand is an Academy Award–nominated

actress married to Joel Coen, the line takes on an additional irony.
5. The sex scene is noteworthy given the fact that, with the exception of Blood
Simple, the Coens typically refrain from showing any explicit sex in their films. In
this case, it seems, what sanctioned doing so was precisely the utter absence in it
of any enjoyment.
Chapter 2. The Symbolic Object and the Subject of Fantasy

1. See De Kesel, 2009.
2. In the same vein, Lacan argues that consciousness is essentially paranoid.
3. Lacan’s argument thus supports Freud’s assertion in “Creative Writing and
Daydreaming” that literature heroicizes the ego, by reversing its terms: the ego is
originally a literary hero.
4. Arguing in this fashion, to be sure, Lacan does not thereby posit the existence
of the subject as the seat of natural instincts prior to its inscription by language. As
any parent or caretaker knows, in the exasperation of trying to quell a crying child,
the needs of an infant are inchoate. Fed, burped, changed, wrapped in a warm blanket,
and rocked, a child often will continue to scream as if still in dire need, while its
caretaker throws up her arms, proclaiming, “What else could you possibly want?” In
this vein, as evidenced by the manifold modern manuals on child-rearing and the
diversity of their methodologies, the responsibility of parents is not so much to satisfy
their infants’ needs as it is to structure them: defining them, instituting patterns for
their gratification, and providing terms for their expression. If there is undoubtedly
an irreducible biological dimension to the infant’s needs, it never manifests itself
altogether independently from this structuring to which even medical science now
also contributes. And, it might be best therefore to conceive Lacan’s speculations as
retroactively positing the genetic source of what only can be understood in light of
its subsequent development, as if to say: there will have been subjectivity.
5. See Copjec, 1996; 1–14.
6. Parergon is Derrida’s coinage. Combining the Greek terms for “beyond”
and “work,” the term pertains to the limits of the artwork as text and finds its
fullest elaboration in relationship to Kant’s aesthetic theory in an essay for which
it provides the title.
Chapter 3. Jouissance, the Real

1. Whereas an actor speaks lines written by someone else, however, Rieden-
schneider’s arguments are his own; and, like any true sophist, the pleasure he takes
in his language is bound up with the enjoyment of his own cleverness.
2. Along with the blank parody of knowingly “yoking together of disparate,
irreconcilable elements,” the return to classical film styles has also taken the form
Notes to Chapter 5 243
of, what has come to be called, “new sincerity”: returning to the original in order
to emphasize as its truth aspects of it that originally were marginalized or otherwise
obscured (Palmer, 2004; 62–63). Rather than contradicting his central argument,
Palmer’s existentialist reading of The Man Who Wasn’t There might therefore be under-
stood simply as introducing a distinct aspect of their filmmaking. However, Palmer
does not in fact separate these two aspects of his argument. Instead, he conjoins
them by arguing that the new sincerity of The Man Who Wasn’t There articulates the
truth of the postmodern condition evidenced by the blank parody of their playful
citations.
Chapter 4. Superego Overdrive

1. Portis’s treatment of this character presents the ambivalence of the law as
more subtle and compelling. The convict proclaims, “I am ready. I have repented
my sins and soon I will be in heaven with Christ my savior. Now I must die like
a man.” If again his apology rings “too true,” in this case, it does not therefore
sound hollow but rather attests to the paradoxical concept of the law (and grace) in
Christianity. Mattie responds, “If you are like me you probably think that Indians are
heathens. But I will ask you to recall the thief on the cross. He was never baptized
and never even heard of a catechism and yet Christ himself promised him a place
in heaven” (Portis, 2010; 22).
2. Explaining Lacan’s appropriation of Heidegger’s concept, Charles Shepherd-
son argues that death “involves a peculiar link between the symbolic and the Real,
presenting us with a sort of hole or void in the structure of meaning—a void that
is not a deficiency, but virtually the opposite, an absolute condition of meaning”
(Shepherdson, 2008; 3).
3. Of course, for Freud, postulating this radical negation is necessary to account
for the highest accomplishments of civilization, including science, art, and religion, as
well as the distortions of neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, among other everyday
psychopathologies.
4. As captured by a slogan, common among parents and educators, “You get
what you get, and you don’t get upset,” beyond respecting the law, children now
are told that they must like it.
Chapter 5. Ex Nihilo
1. By connecting the naïveté of Norville’s creative spark to the “slobs in smelly
T-shirts,” whom Mussburger similarly denounces, The Hudsucker Proxy conveys an
obvious democratic message.
2. See Saper, 1991; McGowan, 2007; Žižek, 2009.
3. Rather than relieving its burden, the imaginary sacrifices required by the
symbolic law thus fuel the Real excitation that compels its transgression. In fact,
244 Notes to Chapter 5
one might discern the superego injunction “Enjoy!” in the very purported purity
of the symbolic’s constitutive lack.
4. Indeed, as anticipated by Lacan’s depiction of the infant’s inability to turn
away from the mirror to address its caregiver, Miller explains, “at the level of jouis-
sance  . . . the Other doesn’t exist” (Miller, 1997; 16).
5. As Ed Pluth explains, separation thus accounts for how the impasse of “the
Real’s presence in the symbolic achieves symbolization” (Pluth, 2007; 91).
6. The caesura in Barton’s speech, quoted earlier, already suggested something
similar in his relationship to the common man. He says, many writers “do anything
in their power to insulate themselves from the common man, from where they live,
from where they trade and fight and love and converse and . . .” Presumably, he
means to add, “where they fuck.”
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Index
A-bomb, 127 anxiety, 26, 49–50, 52, 55–56, 58, 77,

see also nuclear annihilation 89, 110–111, 113, 115, 121–124,
absence, 1–4, 6, 9–10, 12, 14, 18, 126–127, 130–131, 134–140, 143–
21–26, 28–29, 33, 58, 64, 67, 76, 145, 151, 173, 178, 184, 194–195,
80, 82–85, 99–100, 103, 105, 111, 199, 209, 219, 226, 235–236
113–114, 116, 119–124, 126, 129, aporia, 14, 24, 28, 102, 127–131,
135–139, 150, 165, 173, 182–183, 133–139, 161, 173, 193–195,
191, 194–195, 197, 204–206, 211, 200
214, 220, 222–223, 227–228, 235 Aristophanes, 165–166
acting out, 66, 143–146, 148–149, astrology, 162–163
196–197 autonomy, 38, 49, 88, 175, 182–184
aggression, 48, 68, 70, 73–75, 77–78, see also freedom
80, 83, 86, 96, 115, 146, 161, 192,
214 barbarism, 182, 184
alienation, 34, 36–37, 42–44, 46, 80, Barton Fink. See under Coen Brothers
105, 120, 145, 147, 227 Basket Case, 166
alter ego. See ego: and ideal ego Being: as becoming, 75
alterity, 83, 136, 138, 166, 174–175 the differential negativity of, 127
see also ethics: of alterity the question of the meaning of,
America, 5, 15, 21, 26, 32–34, 44, 47, 38–41, 56, 77, 80, 128–130, 194,
105, 140, 155, 159, 189, 199, 203, 222
238 Berlin, Isaiah, 49
American Indians, 156, 199 Big Lebowski, The. See under Coen
analysand, 23, 66, 77, 93, 95–96, Brothers
113–114, 169, 236 Blood Simple. See under Coen Brothers
analyst, 66, 70, 77, 162, 178, 183, 210, Brunette, Peter, 14–16
236 Burn After Reading. See under Coen
see also symbolic, the: authority of Brothers
the analyst
anamorphosis, 143, 207, 209, 220 Cain, James M., 5–6, 18, 85–86
see also gaze, the Capitalism, 39
251
252 Index
castration, 23–24, 84–85, 88, 96, 100, culturalism, 81

102, 120, 122, 127, 139, 144, 161, see also historicism
209, 211, 221, 223, 225, 236
causality, 171–175, 181 Dasein, 40–43, 45, 49–50, 53, 56, 58,
Chandler, Raymond, 5 75–77, 126–127, 129–130, 134,
Chiesa, Lorenzo, 120, 172 161, 170, 194–195
Christianity, 3 n. 3, 51, 111, 132, 156 n. death, 3, 33, 35–37, 44, 51–52, 54,
1, 182, 194 57, 61, 106, 111–112, 115, 118,
Coen Brothers, passim 150–151, 155–157, 159, 161, 194,
Barton Fink, 2, 4–6, 15–16, 25, 199, 202, 206, 208, 218
228–239 being-towards-death 53, 55–56, 77,
Big Lebowski, The, 2, 4–5, 26, 93–98, 115, 126, 130–131, 134, 136, 139,
101–102, 157, 184–186 161, 195, 200, 222–223
Blood Simple, 2–8, 17–19, 47 n. 5, death drive, 70, 162, 169–170, see also
63–64, 139–143 drives, the
Burn After Reading, 2, 19–20, 26, God’s, 183–184, 190, see also nihilism
43–47, 57, 72–74, 77–78, 85–93, deconstruction, 8–9, 14–16, 20, 27–30,
101–103, 206 72, 79, 86, 113, 127–130, 133,
Fargo, xi, 1–5, 16, 20–22, 25, 36, 135–136, 138–139–140, 173–174,
59, 169–170, 177–179, 186–188, 192–196, 222, 227
189–191, 196–198 see also Derrida, Jacques
Hudsucker Proxy, The, 2, 5–6, 25, De Kesel, Marc, 68 n. 1, 213
201–207, 216, 220 democracy, 204 n. 1
Intolerable Cruelty, 2, 5, 47–52, 58–61, liberal, 49
110–113, 123–124, 126, 143–147, Radical Democracy, 27
151–153 Denby, David, 2, 7
Man Who Wasn’t There, The, 2, 4–6, Derrida, Jacques, 8–14, 16, 18, 20,
26, 33–37, 43–44, 50, 57–58, 23–24, 26–29, 63, 66–67, 69, 79,
61–62, 105–110, 124–129, 135, 98–100, 103, 114–116, 127–140,
145–151 161, 172–173, 191–196, 206 ,
Miller’s Crossing, 5–6, 213–220, 222–223, 227–228, 237
225–227 Descartes, René, 40–41, 44, 51, 79–80
No Country for Old Men, 2, 25, desire, 15, 23–26, 28, 58, 66, 68–72,
31–33, 53–55, 168, 170–171, 76–77, 80–81, 83–85, 88, 90–91,
179–181, 198–200 93, 95–97, 100–114, 116–117,
Raising Arizona, 25, 167–169, 175– 120, 122, 126–127, 137, 139, 141,
177, 188–189 143–149, 151–152, 161–164, 166,
True Grit, 155–161, 200 168–169, 173–178, 188–189, 194,
comedy, 2, 5–6, 60, 110, 190, 201 196–198, 208, 212–213, 217–218,
Condillac, Étienne, 9–10, 12 220, 223, 225–226, 228–229,
Copjec, Joan, 90–91, 225 233–237
creativity, 7, 16, 25, 65, 81 n. 3, 203– De Sica, Vittorio, 5
207, 210, 220, 233, 235, 237 différance, 13–14, 24, 26, 127–130,
Critchley, Simon, 27 n. 6, 38, 222–224 136–138, 172–173, 192–193, 195
Index 253
divorce. See marriage explanation. See causality

Dreyfus, Hubert, 40, 42
drives, the, 28, 67, 70, 78, 161–171, Falsani, Cathleen, 60
173–177, 181–182, 184–185, 189, fantasy, 26, 63–67, 71, 74, 80–81,
195–196, 209, 212, 223–224, 89, 93, 96, 111–112, 117, 121,
236–238 138–139, 143–144, 149, 198, 210,
Dunne, Michael, 15–16 227–228, 234–237
Fargo. See under Coen Brothers
ego, 23, 38, 93, 95–96, 98, 100, 116, father, 23, 25, 31–32, 37, 68, 71–72,
121, 127, 139, 148, 194, 221 84–87, 95–97, 101, 114, 116,
and ego ideal, 80–85 120, 122, 144, 149, 155, 157–161,
and ideal ego 69–70, 72, 78 166–167, 181–182, 191, 196, 200,
in ego psychology, 67, 73, 211 211, 213, 220–221
see also superego see also paternity
enjoyment, 6, 25, 29, 34, 36, 87, 89, Four Tops, The, 7
105–106, 108–115, 123–126, 136, freedom, 38, 49, 162, 205
141–145, 147–150, 165, 174, 175, Freud, Sigmund, 23, 27, 29, 65–68, 70,
189, 196–200, 204, 226, 232, 72, 75–77, 81–83, 97, 114–119,
234–235, 237 124, 126, 144, 161–164, 166,
see also jouissance 169–171, 174, 175 n. 3, 181–183,
Enlightenment, the, 8, 38 n. 1 194, 208–209, 212–213, 228, 236
enlightenment: the dialectic of, 8, 182, friendship, 213, 226
183, 194, 221, 225
epoché, 40, 139 Gaughran, Richard, 37, 57–58
ethics, 27, 38, 68, 72, 214–215, German Idealism, 38
217–218, 220 gaze, the, 207–210, 220, 237–238
of alterity, 9, 27, 29, 222–224 God, 12, 51, 178, see also death: God’s
of the arrivant, 195–196 is unconscious, 182–184, 191, 195,
of finitude, 102, 170 see also enlightenment: the dialectic
Kant’s deontological concept of, 182, of
184–185 superego as a dark, 225
the problem of good conscience, gothic, the: as a genre, 3, 5
193–195
the problem of unconscious guilt, Hammett, Dashiell, 3–5
181–184 Harari, Roberto, 143–144
of psychoanalysis, 118, 207, 211, 213, Heidegger, Martin, 27, 29, 39–46,
236 49–53, 55–58, 68, 75–78, 80,
and the repudiation of the Sovereign 82–83, 113, 126–139, 147, 161,
Good, 182, 184, 191, 194, 221 171, 194–195, 222–223
existentialism, 29, 37–38, 49, 53, 57–58, hermeneutics, 15, 18, 28, 41, 77, 85,
60–61, 75–80, 83, 90, 102, 105, 99–101, 129, 161, 171, 174, 206,
108, 110, 114–115, 118, 123, 211, 220
127–132, 137, 147, 152, 170–171, see also interpretation
183, 194, 207, 222 Hinson, Hal, 3, 5
254 Index
historicism, 90 Judeo-Christian Theology, 132, see also

see also culturalism Christianity
Hobbes, Thomas, 3 Jung, Carl, 70, 162–163
Hoffmann, Karen D., 37, 61 justice, 32, 37, 52, 54, 94, 147, 155–
Hollywood, 5–6, 15, 25, 32, 45, 59, 90, 157, 159–161, 191, 193–194,
228–230, 232, 234, 239 199–200, 214
Renaissance, 4 see also law
Hoy, David, 41 n. 2
homosexuality, 107–108, 215, 226, 231 Kael, Pauline, 6–7, 16, 21
Hurst, Andrea, 27 n. 5 Kamuf, Peggy, 173
Husserl, Edmund, 40–41, 120, 129, 139 Kant, Immanuel, 38, 40, 65, 80, 99 n. 6,
182, 184–185, 195, 217, 221–222
identification, 22–23, 26, 36, 42, 55, Kasdan, Lawrence, 4
67–72, 78, 80–82, 85, 90, 96–97, Kerr, Philip, 6
113, 121, 143–145, 149–150, 174, Klein, Melanie, 70–71, 181
176, 181, 184–185, 187, 197–198,
206, 221 Lacan, Jacques, 22–29, 66–73, 75–86,
imaginary, the, 23–24, 68–69, 71, 74, 88, 91, 93, 95–96, 98–100, 103,
76, 79, 81, 83, 85, 89, 93, 95–96, 113–123, 126–127, 129, 135–140,
100, 113–114, 116–122, 127, 136, 143–145 , 148–149, 151–152,
139, 143, 152, 194, 208–209, 161–168, 171–174, 178, 181, 183–
211–213, 220–222, 228, 236 186, 189, 191, 194–195, 206–213,
instrumentalization, 34, 36, 45, 47, 220–225, 227–228, 234, 236–238
49–50, 52, 58, 60, 69, 92, 109–110, lack, 22–24, 27, 53, 68–69, 80, 84–85,
112, 124, 147, 152, 179, 187, 193, 91, 93, 96, 98–100, 102, 113, 120,
199, 217, 219, 227 122, 126–127, 134, 137–141, 143–
see also objectivism 145, 147–149, 152, 161–163, 165,
intentionality, 11, 40, 70, 90, 120, 162, 186, 194, 196–197, 209, 211–213,
174, 194, 207–208, 223 220–221, 223–225, 228, 235–236
Internet, the 45–46, 87, 90 Laclau, Ernesto, 27
interpretation, 5, 15, 23–24, 43, 65, 98, lamella: Lacan’s myth of the, 165–167
113, 116, 172, 193, 208, 236–237 see also drives, the
irrationality, 2, 28, 63–64, 66, 76, 102, Laplanche, J., 65–66, 212
136, 140, 142, 179, 195, 199, 207, law, 31–33, 36, 47, 52, 68, 81, 85,
238 91, 116, 131, 144, 147, 151–153,
iterability, 9–10, 20, 63, 86 155–161, 171–172, 174, 180–182,
184–186, 188–190, 192–196,
Jameson, Fredrick, 5–6 199–200, 213, 216–218, 220–222,
jouissance, 24–27, 105, 114, 119–120, 225, 227, 229, 234–236
123–124, 126–127, 136–140, 143, Levinas, Emmanuel, 27
145–153, 161–162, 167, 169, 173– Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 11–13, 115–116,
175, 185–186, 196–198, 200, 210, 121
212, 220–221, 224–225, 227–228, Lewis, Michael, 27 n. 5
236–238, see also enjoyment Locke, John, 182, 184
Index 255
lost object, 68–69, 78–79, 84, 114, 162, necessity. See cause
164–166, 212, 234, 238 neurosis, 23–24, 75, 80, 83, 93, 114,
see also object (a) 120, 138–139, 171, 175 n. 3,
love, 25, 45, 47, 49, 57–60, 70–72, 182–183, 211–212
82–85, 88–89, 91–92, 110, 131, new sincerity, 127 n. 2
142–144, 147, 151–153, 162, 165– Nietzsche, Friedrich, 51–52, 147,
167, 189, 200, 205–206, 215–217, 182–183, 211
219, 225–226, 232, 238 nihilism, 33, 37–39, 44, 51–53, 57–58,
Lucas, George, 4 60, 86, 127, 129, 183, 194
see also God: is unconscious
das Man, 42–47, 49, 55–56, 68, 77, 90, noir: film and roman, 4–6, 85, 216
108, 194–195 nuclear annihilation, 140
marriage, 2, 19, 47–48, 51–52, 58–61, see also A-bomb
88, 110–113, 124, 142–143, 145,
147–148, 152–153, 167, 185, 188, object (a), 120–122, 137, 143, 164, 166,
216, 223 172, 209, 224
masochism, 110, 141, 146, 148, 164, 167 see also lost object
maternity. See mother objectivism, 36–37, 40, 42, 44–46,
Marx, Harpo, 119, 137, 190 49, 51–52, 58, 60, 67–68, 77, 90.
Marxism, 5, 38, 182 109–111, 114, 129–130, 135–136,
McGowan, Todd, 207 n. 2 139, 145, 152, 162, 171, 180, 187,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 207–209 194–195, 221–222
Miller, Jacques-Alain, 162, 227, 244 object-relations theory, 67–69, 120, 211
mirror-stage, the, 68–72, 75, 78, 80–81, O’Connor, Flannery, 3
86–87, 90, 113, 118–119, 121, 161, Oedipal conflict, 23, 71–72, 75, 85, 87,
227 n. 4 89, 113, 122, 181, 197, 220, 235
modernity, 2, 8, 36–39, 43–45, 47–49, ontological difference. See Being
53, 57–58, 60–62, 75, 110, 128– Orr, Stanley, 18, 85
129, 162, 180–184, 191, 194, 210, Other, the, 29, 87–89, 91–93 , 95–96,
216, 221–222 100, 113, 118–119, 121–123, 130,
as hell, 139–140, 234 139, 143–145, 147–149, 152, 161,
as the age of the world picture, 44–45 189, 193, 195–196, 208–209, 212,
hypermodern communication tech- 222–225, 227–228, 236, Ch5,n6, as
nologies, 26, 86 alter ego, 68–69, 72
modernism, 4–5, 39, 163, 203, 228, 230 as (m)Other, 23, 81–85, 100, 116,
see also enlightenment: the dialectic of 221
mother, 71, 91, 97, 122, 155, 168, 188, see also alterity
190, 198
see also Other: as (m)Other Palmer, R. Barton, 7–8, 16, 20–21, 37,
Mouffe, Chantal, 27 57–58, 61, 127–128, 130, 135
paranoia, 25, 26, 70 n. 2, 72–73, 86–87,
narcissism, 26, 44, 48, 55, 68, 70, 72–75, 89, 102, 141, 143, 152, 238
77–78, 80, 83, 86–90, 102, 108, partial object, 87
113–114, 152, 181 see also lost object
256 Index
passing to the act, 143, 148–151, 181, Pynchon, Thomas, 5

196, 198, 237
paternity, 25, 31, 99, 155, 182–183, 188, Rafferty, Terrence, 6
191, 211, 212 Rat Man (case study), 114
see also father Real, the, 21–22, 24, 26–28, 35, 79,
phallus, 67–68, 84–85, 88, 99–100, 113, 105, 114–115, 117–122, 126–127,
116–117, 126, 137, 144, 161 136–140, 143, 152, 164–166, 171–
phenomenology, 29, 40–41, 70, 75–76, 174, 184, 194, 200, 209–213, 220,
78, 120, 123, 127–130, 132, 222, 224, 225, 227–228, 236–239
135–137, 140, 162, 164, 171, 173, representation
194–196, 207–209 resoluteness, 55–56, 194
post-phenomenological philosophy, Robson, Eddie, 60
27–28, 222–225, 227, 238 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 6
Plato, 51, 77, 100, 165–166, 191 Ruti, Mari, 27 n. 5
pleasure principle, 70, 112, 114, 143,
161–162, 170, 174, 185 Sade, Marquis de, 81, 184–185
Pluth, Ed, 227 n. 5 sadism, 33, 81, 110, 146–147, 185–186,
Poe, Edgar Allen, 98–99, 206 196, 199–200, 207, 220–221,
Polanski, Roman, 235 226–227
Pontalis, J.B., 65–66, 212 Saper, Craig, 207 n. 2
Portis, Charles, 155–160 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 37, 57, 140, 207
positivism, 40, 163, 171 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 10–11, 79–80,
postmodernism, 4–7, 21, 25, 30, 60, 64, 115, 172
66, 102, 127–128, 135, 152, 206, 237 science, 8, 11, 14, 38, 40–41, 45, 72, 81
presence, 22, 24, 51, 58, 82, 84, 87, n. 4, 90, 115, 162–163, 171, 175 n.
107, 118, 123, 126, 165, 167, 170, 3, 180–102, 190, 209
198, 207 Scott, Charles, 55–56
metaphysics of 8–14, 26–28, 67, 100, Scott, Ridley, 4
103, 114, 129–130, 135–139, 173, separation: the Lacanian concept of, 227
175, 191, 194, 238 sex, 44, 47–48, 65, 67, 70, 87–90, 107–
presence-at-hand, 41, 76 111, 117, 141, 151, 161–164, 166,
privation, 22, 24–25, 49, 138, 165, 174, 211–213, 215, 226, 230–233
192–193 Sharrett, Christopher, 21, 60,
see also lack Shepherdson, Charles, 161 n. 2
psychoanalysis, 23, 27–30, 65–70, 75, slasher films, 233
77–78, 93, 96, 98, 113–114, 116– Spielberg, Steven, 4
118, 140, 162–163, 178, 194–195, Spinosa, Charles, 41
207–208, 211, 220–222, 224–225, Stallone, Sylvester, 4
236, 238 Stavrakakis, Yannis, 27 n. 7
psychologism, 40, 78 structuralism 11–13, 23, 27, 68, 70–72,
psychosis. See passing to the act 75, 78, 82, 98–100, 115, 121,
proximity: overwhelming, 22, 24, 29, 129–130, 162, 171–174, 179, 211,
122, 126, 136, 139–141, 197, 224, 236
235, 237 subjectivity, passim
Index 257
sublime object, 110, 112, 220 undead, the, 166, 200, see also drives,
see also object (a) the
sublimation, 75, 182, 212–213, 220, undecidability, 14, 16, 24–26, 28, 98,
222–225, 236 126–129, 132, 135, 137–139, 143,
success, 36, 51–52, 148, 204–206, 210, 161, 175, 193, 195, 237
234 underdetermination, 7–8 , 13, 22–26,
superego, 155, 181, 184, 186, 189, 191, 28, 55, 76–77, 79, 99–101, 126,
221–222, 225–227 129–130, 135–140, 143, 147,
supplement: at the origin, 8–9, 14, 18, 171, 173, 191–193, 200, 213–214,
66, 69, 133, 186, 227 216–219, 222, 224, 227–228
surrealism, 5, 234, 237–239
surveillance, 85, 87, 89 violence, 1, 21–22, 26, 29, 32, 53–55,
symbolic, the, 17, 23–25, 32, 63, 78–79, 72, 78, 95, 108, 156, 178–179, 186,
81–88, 90–91, 126–127, 129, 136– 190, 192, 198–200, 227, 237
141, 143–145, 149, 152, 161–164,
166, 171, 174, 206–207, 209–213, Wills, David, 14–16
222–225, 227–228, 235–238 western, the: as a genre, 5
authority of the analyst, 93, 95–96 war, 4, 33, 36, 210, 215, 219
decline of, 155, 181, 183, 186, 194 Algerian War of Independence, 8
Derrida’s critique of Lacan’s concept, American Civil War, 155, 159–160
98–102 between the sexes, 48
incoherence of, 114–122 Cold War, 26–27, 86–87
the mirror-image as 67–69, 71–72 First World War, 39, 70, 174
transference, 65, 70, 77–78, 93, 95–96, First Gulf War, 26
227 Second World War, 8, 108, 238
Thing, the, 118–120, 210, 212–213, Vietnam War, 8, 185
220, 236 Wolfman (case study), 209–210
worldhood of the world, 42, 76, 82,
uncanny, the, 14, 76, 129, 133, 135, 184 129
uncertainty principle: Heisenberg’s 128, writing: precedes speech, 9–10, 12–15,
140 79, 99, 129, 133, 137, 173, 191
unconscious, the 23–25, 28, 65–66, 71,
75–81, 86, 113, 116–177, 120–122, Zeno’s paradox, 225
139, 144, 161–164, 171, 174, 181– Žižek, Slavoj, 27, 120, 164, 171–172,
184, 191, 195, 211, 221, 237–238 183, 207 n. 2, 220, 228, 236–237

Clark Buckner Apropos of Nothing Deconstruction Psychoanalysis and The Coen Brothers

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Clark Buckner Apropos of Nothing Deconstruction Psychoanalysis and The Coen Brothers

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Apropos of Nothing

SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature

© 2014 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

Production by Jenn Bennett

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buckner, Clark, 1968–

Introduction: Apropos of Nothing: Or, What Does It Mean

2 The Symbolic Object and the Subject of Fantasy 63

3 Jouissance, the Real 105

4 Superego Overdrive 155

In this regard, Fargo is emblematic of the Coens’ work. Absence is so

death, he realizes, will be the result of a stupid misunderstanding. “If I see

The Deadlock in the Coens’ Critical Reception

Blood Simple has no sense of what we normally think of as “real-

fiction such as that of James M. Cain. It’s so derivative that it

The Supplement at the Origin

a philosophical system, literary text, or social organization, Derrida thus

is brought to bear)—Saussure argues that the words we use have no natural

The entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture

determined by this opposition throughout the totality of its history,” and it

The visual occupies a position of primacy with respect to the

of writing as easily as does the word. Whether that apparatus be

Beyond disagreeing about the different potential implications of a film, or

Barton Fink may very well be a satire of the Hollywood system,

Against such “monological” readings, Dunne instead emphasizes the Coens’

One is often tempted, in speaking of cinema, to refer to the

If Cain’s protagonists doom themselves through compulsive, trans-

corroborates Derrida’s concept of iterability as a fundamental nonsense that

The Criminal and the Commonplace

In Fargo, the breakdown in communication similarly plays a central role in

everyday and the exotic. If Jerry is oblivious to the violence he unleashes,

The Eruption of the Real

analysis as a matter of assuming responsibility for the jouissance that informs

As correlates to their characters’ troubles, the Coens’ films also typically

Beyond the Metaphysics of Presence and Absence

contests, revealing the critique of the metaphysics of presence itself to be a

suffers from a still inadequately clarified confusion of Derrida’s concept of

difficulty in the subject’s constitutive alterity, Derrida’s philosophy proves

Everything You Always Wanted to Know

While undertaking a thematic study of the figures of absence in the Coen

it includes, the study nevertheless entails an internal necessity, which ideally,

The Ballad of Sheriff Bell

In the opening lines of the Coen Brothers’ 2007 adaptation of Cormac

Some of the old-time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lot

whom he implicitly treats as a son. Specifically, he travels to meet Moss’s

My God, Wendell, it’s all-out war. I can’t think of any other

The Film That Wasn’t There

I met Doris blind on a double-date with a loudmouth buddy of

. . . It was only a-couple-a-weeks later, she suggested we get

The Question of the Meaning of Being

As a philosophical concern, the problem of nihilism is first formulated in

But where is authentic nihilism at work? There, where they cling

Heidegger first formulates this problem of the forgetting of the question of

underlying the changing appearances of things. And Heidegger traces the

philosophical concern, it is a question raised by everyone, as part and parcel

Against the commonplace concepts of the world as an aggregate of empirical

comprised, any more than it consists of an aggregate of empirical, present-

of an immediate given, and, as such, inhibits Dasein’s dynamic engagement

As “the barber,” Ed has thoroughly objectified his subjectivity, reducing his

. . . It was only a-couple-a-weeks later, she suggested we get