Enfoques centrados en el individuo

What sort of “Father” then rules over the new landscape of postmodernist designer capitalism? We left the story during Greco-Roman times, with the myths that inspired Freud. The obscene Father’s rule eventually established an Oedipal Father of patriarchy. In Moses and Monotheism (SE XXIII, 1939) Freud’s last work, the question of authority of the Father is revisited. Moses the Lawgiver of the Torah, who imposes monotheism and does away with pagan polytheism, is also killed by his sons only to return as the psychic structure of Jehovah (Yahweh, YHWH), a vengeful, jealous, and irrational superegoic figure—a two-sided God of love and hate and of capricious pre-destination. The guilt for this patricide, Freud says, is the reason Christians understand Jesus’s death as sacrificial. “The ‘redeemer’ could be none other than the most guilty person, the ringleader of the company of brothers who had overpowered their father” (87). “Judaism had been a religion of the father;

Christianity became a religion of the son” (88). Zizek’s (1999b, 318–319) reads Moses as a Father figure of will and prohibition who enforces prohibi-tion but remains ignorant of jouissance. As for Christ’s crucifixion, he argues (2001a,b, 68–84; 2001c, 45–60) that this not a sacrificial act of redemption but an exemplary revolutionary “ethical act” of freedom, an act as “feminine renunciation” again raising the ethical ambiguity of the death drive as men-tioned earlier.

Zizek (1999b) links modernist authority with the stage set by Judeo-Christian religion. The rise of monotheism over polytheism set the direction for rise of the modern subject. Moses’s God prohibitions dissolved the old sexualized Wisdom [of matriarchal societies] clearing the space for a nonsex-ualized understanding of abstract knowledge. Objective scientific knowl-edge, we would say, did not become fully secularized until God recedes from the scene of prohibition. As a number of historians of science have traced, the concept of an authoritative God still first appears “outside the system”

during the late Gothic early Renaissance period. God’s authority is then rationalized as being “within” the system through the various forms of humanism (notably Aquinas) that arise with the recovery of Greco-Roman knowledge by literati. Finally God “withdraws” from interfering with the system, becomes a “hidden God” in Lucien Goldmann’s (1964) terms with the rise of the Deists and the paradigmatic notion of science based on hypo-deductive methods. The founding of the nation-states and liberal democracy is based on such noninterference between Church and State. Both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, for instance, were Deists. With such a

noninterfering God, science becomes discovering Nature’s laws, for a certain period of time these are still considered God’s laws. Eventually, Nietzsche will famously pronounce that “god is dead” as the secularization of author-ity is complete at the turn of the twentieth century. Effectively, this pro-nouncement was also the “death toll” of the Oedipal Father as well who drew his moral authority from Judeo-Christian roots. God, after all, had defeated the Devil, the obscene Father of Enjoyment. As Verhaeghe’s (1999b) study of Freud’s cases indicate where fathers appear, all of them were weak figures. Lacan notes that the authority of the Oedipal Father was already waning at the turn of the twentieth century. From the sovereign authority of King and Pope to their leveling as elected presidents, and first prime minis-ters, to the judges that are representatives of the Law, the Symbolic Order rests on the fantasy that the interests of the nation’s citizen’s are being looked after. What emerges from such a scenario is the paradox of the Superego Freud had identified when the Father of prohibition is weakened, then the temptations to transgress the Law arise. As Zizek (2001a) humor-ously puts it, “the more Coke you drink, the thirstier you are; the more profit you make, the more you want; the more you obey the superego com-mand, the guiltier you are—in all three cases, the logic of balanced exchange is disturbed in favor of an excessive logic” (23–24). This excessive logic of designer capitalism emerges when the Father of Prohibition retreats and a permissive society emerges where the expectation to fulfill one’s passions is wedded to the machinery of productive capitalist desire of consumerist fan-tasies. Culture consists of the mythically sanctioned circulation of goods and the economy of social and sexual exchange, whereas religion (spirituality) pro-vides the very limit of such exchanges. Against Althusser’s thesis that the econ-omy is the “last instance” determiner of consciousness, it is more the case that the enframing determinations of religion as the spiritual force of the Symbolic Order is more at issue. The demands “it” makes on human sacrifice, like the horrors of clitoridectomy, the excesses of potlatch ceremonies, circumcision, mock crucifixions, and so on. With this religious limit lifted through the sep-aration of Church and State (at least constitutionally), the contradictory split in the Superego widens. On the one hand the message is to obey the secular Law while on the other hand there is the pressure always to transgress it. This contradiction is embodied in the ideology of designer capitalism itself.

Designer capitalism is driven by an insatiable thirst of transgression. Its very ideology is to continually overcome crisis that mark its productive limit, so as to continue economic growth, always searching for new markets to take under its wing through various forms of postcolonial benevolent interven-tions where cultural difference is embraced and eventually assimilated under its logic. The creation of fantasies to ensure that the motor of its logic con-tinues to run is absolutely crucial, while the “fetishism of the new” through commodity production and consumption ensures its survival (see Snyder 1988). The subject of desire as defined by the void of lack emerges full blown with consumerist postmodernity as an ideology “for all” (pour tous); its nas-cent beginnings, (en-soi) start with the creation of childhood in Enlightened

Romanticism with the emergence of liberal capitalism and nation-states; this subject of desire is given for-itself status (pour-soi) through a series of Reform Laws in England and universal suffrage approximately at the turn of the cen-tury with the advent of advertising and the creation of fantasy as surplus value developed by the economic monopoly capitalism, and finds its full expression in contemporary society. We are “plagued by fantasies” to echo Zizek. This movement was brilliantly traced by Baudrillard (1981) through his innovative rewriting of Marx’s political economy along symbolic lines.

He detailed the eventual decentering of the sign system of nascent mod-ernism that categorically and hierarchically held subjects in their “proper”

social positions. This gave rise to greater social mobility by the turn of the twentieth century, a trajectory that continues to the simulacra of contem-porary bodies of designer capitalism and poststructuralist thought. What Zizek’s appropriation of Lacan adds to this is the structural equivalence between the subject of fantasy and the fantasy of capitalism.

We can theorize the question of creativity that the fantasy of “youth” pro-vides from this context. What we have in mind is a sort of reverse generational scenario of Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973). Set in the year 2022 the narrative projects an overpopulated world suffering from the Green House effect where the population is fed different color-coded pellets of food pro-duced by the Soylent Corporation. Soylent Green, the most nutritious of the products, is made from the euthanized bodies of willing old and poor people in exchange to ensure an inheritance for their loved ones. As it turns out, younger not so willing bodies are also processed to make the green substance for human consumption. In this light, the figure of Kronos Devouring his Children takes on a contemporary meaning if Kronos is designer capitalism consuming the raw energy of youth for its own gains. To come to such (what some will think) a bizarre analogy is to revisit a well-known figure, Antigone.

A great deal already has been written on Antigone by contemporary scholars to justify her as an exemplary figure for the (post)modern ethical question of judgement and decision, to claim her as a representative for a particular Cause since Lacan immortalized her in S VII, Ethics as a beautiful object raised to the dignity of the Thing. Zizek (re)confirms her action as an ethical act after Lacan, Butler (2000) forwards the confusion of the kinship relations to ward off, yet again, heteronormativity, and opens up a space for other kinship struc-tures, while Irigaray (1985, 219–220 esp.) sees her as a figure of sexual differ-ence, caught by a primary masochism that women suffer in patriarchy. Copjec (1999) takes a turn by arguing succinctly the ethical problematic Antigone encounters when the intersection of freedom and death come together in a death drive. Clarifying Lacan’s notion of the ethical act, Antigone presents a sublimation of Creon’s demand as an ethical act of “perseverance,” Freud’s Haftbarkeit, which has intonations of legal responsibility (258, 260). Her position comes closest to our own. All trounce Hegel’s dialectical reading of the conflict between two equally rational ethical claims to Sittlichkeit as the progress of Geist: the conflict between the Law that forbids the burial of state enemies and Antigone’s familial claim of conscience. Yet, Hegel was in search

of the civic space that could be opened up to consciousness to sublate the matrilineal/patrilineal conflict, between state and kinship. Perhaps that was why he was so fascinated by Antigone? Not any different than contemporary times, which is why Antigone still fascinates the scholarly community.

We can understand Antigone’s defense of her brother Polyneices from Creon’s injunction not to be buried in yet another way. We are not aware of a reading that takes Agamben’s (1998) thesis of the homo sacer as an archaic figure in Roman Law to heart and applies it to Polyneices.⁴ Could Antigone’s “claim” to the ancient “divine laws” be referring to that realm which the Greek polity shuts out—“bare life” or zoë. Agamben’s decisive argument claims that Greco-Roman polity is founded on the split between

“natural or biological life” (zoë) and life as bios which is politically qualified as being virtuous and good. Isn’t this another distinction between drive and desire? The exceptional figure of the homo sacer arises to mediate these two different conflicted notions of life, a figure whose essential simple dignity of vulnerable life (as zoë) was both recognized and denied at the same time since the sovereign had complete power to proclaim a death sentence. This peculiar inclusion into the polity through exclusion produced a sacred body that could be killed, but not sacrificed. It would seem that Polyneices fits the archaic figure of the homo sacer rather well. He is a sacred body (Creon’s son, of royal blood) who was killed but not allowed to be sacrificed in accordance with ritual practices of being buried “properly.”

Antigone’s insistence on the ancient “divine laws” that require a sister to bury her brother that override the new “human laws” Creon is mandating, at first sight, seems to be “simply” an ethical issue over the dignity of human life—of zoë. The stakes, however, are high read from Agamben’s perspective and Lacan’s construction of an ethical act by which she stands up to Creon’s demand by honoring the unrepresentable singularity of her family’s atè, which her brother represents. The two readings can come together if the misfortune, as well as madness of the Labdacidean family that she identifies with—the familial atè—is interpreted as belonging to the immortal life of zoë, a realm that escapes the bios of the state’s clutches and refuses its demand. Her brother’s bodily “life” (zoë) identifies the family’s immortality as well as its fate. Agamben’s perspective would suggest that Creon’s Law is founded on the exception to create the rule. The contradictory figure of Polyneices as homo sacer is a Master signifier that holds the Symbolic Order’s ethical accountability together. Such a figure exists in an “extimate space,” both inside and outside the system at once. Homo sacer confirms the sacredness of life by denying it, doubling the suffering, so to speak, through such an abjection. As homo sacer, Polyneices stands outside both judicial (human/Creon) as well as outside religious (divine/Antigone) spheres. The killing of such a figure by a sovereign is considered unpunishable on the grounds of protecting the State. By spreading dust over her brother’s body, Antigone’s action answers to this contradiction. It does honor to both family and the vulnerability of bare immortal life, an act of reverence and not idealization.

Read most radically, life as zoë belongs to the private sphere—the inner essence that refuses to be entirely processed into the biosubstance of Solyent Green. It exists outside the control of the Law and out of the clutches of the State, although it is also intimately tied to it in various forms of transgres-sion. Its force as a transgressivity “to and beyond the Law” can be equated with the desublimated forces of the death drive (id, Triebe, jouissance) since there is a denial of castration, and hence an uncivilized “bestial” sphere emerges that is technically “outside” the Law by not being recognized by it.

The issue, therefore, is how bare life is to be interpreted? Whether it is merely the “finitude of man” as interpreted by nineteenth-century biological sciences, or the very place of human freedom. If we choose the latter, is this freedom tied to Romantic views of zoë as a “fountain of youth” that is divine and sacred, or should this realm be secularized, atheistically formal-ized as in the philosophy of Alain Badiou? (See Hallward 2003.) He stands diametrically opposed to Jungian and Aquarian New Ageism, which would preserve this divinity?⁵We follow Copjec (1999) in our own way in support of a psychoanalytic body that is conceived not “as the seat of death [of biological sciences], but as the seat of sex” (248, original emphasis).

“[C]ontrary to Foucault’s claim, the sexualization of the body by psycho-analysis does not participate in the regime of biopolitics, it opposes it”

(ibid., added emphasis).

Zoë, we would say, is a metaphysical reproductive creative force of the drive.

As a potentially dangerous sphere to the state, the contradictory figure of the homo sacer is a way to negotiate this potential threat to sovereign (and national) identity. Pirates, concentration and refugee camp victims, those on life-support systems, persons who undergo euthanasia, at one time those who were HIV positive, and the many American Iraqi citizens held for inves-tigation in jails throughout the United States would all be forms of homo sacer for Agamben. They are a potential threat or problem to the State. As is well known, Foucault argued that modernism politicized “life” in order to

“free and liberate” it through the nation-state, resulting in biopolitical forms of power and control. “Life” as the private sphere (health, housing, welfare, and living conditions of the population) began to be micro managed indi-rectly through state discourses. In the second half of the eighteenth century there was “the entry of phenomena peculiar to life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the spheres of political techniques”

(1980, 141–142). Power, in his view, became decentralized, more insidious, and difficult to directly identify.

This incorporation of “immortal life,” unending youth, occurs precisely when the fantasy of the “innocent or divine child” of Romanticism came to paradigmatic fruition with figures such as Schiller,⁶Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Creativity and genius were linked to childhood, a sacred sphere.

This was also the height of the castrati phenomenon—their transcendental voices scraping the gates of heaven in their purity. The most famous and leg-endary castrato of all, Carlo Broschi (a.k.a. Farinelli) lived during the second half of the eighteenth century (1705–1782).⁷With the rise of liberalism and

the sovereign individual that preserves a private space, along with basic freedoms, the contradiction between individual and the state is a structural constraint of liberal democracy. Locked within capitalist machinery, there is a the continual uneasy balance between encroachment on civil liberties by the state and unbridled competitive individualism. The contribution that Agamben makes is to supplement or complete Foucault’s thesis by showing that life as zoë can be traced to at least Greco-Roman times, reestablishing a direct link to sovereign state power which Foucault dismissed.⁸Law and life are directly related and not so ambiguously decentered, a criticism echoed by Hardt and Negri (2000) in their praise for Foucault and criticism of his structuralism, which failed to identify the productive dimension of biopower. As they put it,

“power is the production and reproduction of life itself ” (24). “Biopower becomes an agent of production when the entire context of reproduction is subsumed under capitalist rule, that is, when reproduction and the vital rela-tionships that constitute it themselves become directly productive (364). . . . Life is no longer produced in the cycles of reproduction that are subordi-nated to the working day; on the contrary, life is what infuses and dominates all production” (365).

While “bare life” as zoë is constantly being processed into bios, like Soylent Green, by the capitalist technological machinery (for example, DNA is decoded as the sequences of A, G, C, T, that stand for the chemical bases of purines and prymidines, while the genome is said to be composed of the color-coded sequences of over three billion letters) something always escapes which is why our insistence that zoë is yet another name for jouissance, the

“lamella” of life as Lacan put it, yet another name for the missing elixir of libidinal “life” that would complete a person, make them stay “forever young.” It is this impossible kernel of human existence—la nuda vita—the Real that refuses to be entirely colonized. As private life is continually invaded by public life, zoë as bodily jouissance is constantly erupting through aggressivity and violence as the faith (social capital) in the Symbolic Order diminishes in designer capitalist economies that push for consumerism. The neighbor, immigrant, refugee become a threat.⁹ Given that neurosis for Freud was the human condition—the self is chronically out-of-joint, infan-tile narcissism remains as an existential surd that refuses total capture.

Lyotard (1992a) refers to this surd as “infantai,” as “that which resists, after all. But something will never be defeated, at least as long as humans will be born infants, infantes. Infantia is the guarantee that there remains an enigma in us, a not easily communicable opacity—that something is left that remains, and that we must bear witness to it” (416). It is this “miserable and admirable indetermination” of infancy, Lyotard (1992b) thinks, which can resist the Enlightenment ideal of “emancipation,” the “inhuman” of system-atization and complexification disguised as “development.” The goal of emancipation is to “secure full possession of knowledge, will and feeling; so

Lyotard (1992a) refers to this surd as “infantai,” as “that which resists, after all. But something will never be defeated, at least as long as humans will be born infants, infantes. Infantia is the guarantee that there remains an enigma in us, a not easily communicable opacity—that something is left that remains, and that we must bear witness to it” (416). It is this “miserable and admirable indetermination” of infancy, Lyotard (1992b) thinks, which can resist the Enlightenment ideal of “emancipation,” the “inhuman” of system-atization and complexification disguised as “development.” The goal of emancipation is to “secure full possession of knowledge, will and feeling; so