El papel de los países del Golfo

Grant me, for the moment, the anodyne assumption that film noir is, among other things, a compendium of base human emotions, and you will be less sur-prised by my beginning this discussion of the religious and ethnic tensions that perturb relations in cities such as Jerusalem with a scene from one of the classics of the noir genre. My focus will be on one base emotion and the fundamental way in which it challenges liberal theories of community and justice, raising signifi-cant questions about the politics of civility and the “rights to the city.” I have in mind the 1944 film, Laura, particularly that scene in which the voice-over narra-tor, Waldo Lydecker, discovers that Laura, the woman whom he has calculatedly transformed into his most admiring devotee, has begun spending her evenings with another man. As he peers up from the street at the drawn shade of her second-story window, Lydecker catches a glimpse of two silhouettes—not the lonely one he would have preferred to see. From this moment on he will not rest until he has utterly demolished the career of the man who casts the second silhou-ette, a painter named Jacoby.

The question before us is this: why does Lydecker set himself on this path of destruction, which will lead him to annihilate not only Jacoby, but also Laura, whom he will later shoot in the face with a shotgun at close range (or so he thinks)? The answer most ready to hand is that he longs for the sort of sexual in-volvement with Laura that is missing from his relation to her, but which Jacoby apparently enjoys. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. That Ly-decker feels only disgust for such sexual liaisons is unmistakable both from his own comportment toward Laura and from his frequent contemptuous remarks about the earthiness and obvious corporeality of her other suitors. We must take these expressions of disgust at face value, for Lydecker is definitely not jealous of Jacoby, he is envious of him. The next question is, of course: what’s the differ-ence? Crabb’s English Synonyms offers this answer: “Jealousy fears to lose what it has;

envy is pained at seeing another have that which it wants for itself.”¹Descriptively

chapter 6•sour justice, or liberalist envy

considered, this distinction isn’t bad. Opposing “what it has” to “what it wants,” the definition accurately grasps the fact that jealousy is grounded in the possession of a certain pleasure, whereas envy stems precisely from a lack of it. Yet one would be wrong to assume that envy’s lack can be filled by the possession of that pleasure it is pained to see the other enjoying. As the dictionary entry goes on to remark, “All endeavors . . . to satisfy an envious man are fruitless.” Why? Because what he wants and what he perceives as the other’s enjoyment are not at all the same thing.

And since the envious man does not want for himself what the other has, the at-tainment of that other, altogether foreign pleasure will never appease his desire.

It is no coincidence that the “two silhouettes on a shade,” the object of Lydecker’s perception, is a cliché. You will miss its meaning, however, if you as-cribe this cliché to the film rather than to the character who beholds it; that is to say, it is Lydecker who is responsible for the hackneyed form his discovery takes.

If this perception is neither immediate nor fresh, but filtered through a stock im-age, this is because Lydecker’s envious look is not inspired by desire. And yet the window he regards from a cold, dark below is lit with a bright glow, as if a glint of the real shown from the imaginary scene, the sign no doubt of his certainty that the scene displays the image of a complete, closed-off contentment. The pleasure he observes taking place at a distance remains alien to him, turned in on itself.

The look with which he beholds this—to him—complete, absolute, and yet in-comprehensible pleasure has thus a malevolent potency; it is bitter.

As has been documented, “virtually all languages, ancient and modern,”

have a term for the “evil eye” that accompanies envy.²The feature that justifies this look’s being given a distinct designation is its apparent intent to poison or pollute.

While every other “mean and hungry look” —of anger, greed, or jealousy—remains focused on harm, concentrated on robbing the other of some coveted object, only the evil eye of envy seeks to steal enjoyment itself. In seeking to leave the other bereft of that which brings him pleasure, those other malicious looks would nev-ertheless leave the other’s capacity for pleasure intact. Not so envy, which wants nothing so much as to spoil the very capacity for enjoyment. “The envious man sickens at the sight of enjoyment. He is easy only in the misery of others.”³

In the famous judgment of Solomon, it is his discernment of the pres-ence of an evil eye that allows the wise leader to unmask the “false mother.” Hav-ing just lost her own precious, irreplaceable child, she is still far too bereaved to desire another. What she wants, then, as Solomon sees, is decidedly not the real mother’s little “bundle of joy” (that this foul-smelling, puking little package could

be the source of someone else’s joy must, in actual fact, seem unfathomable to her), but the extinction of the other’s maternal satisfaction. For this reason, split-ting the child in two is not a compromise she is willing to accept, but the sort of ruination for which she longs.

It is well acknowledged that pleasure is a private matter: “to each his own,”

we say. But the incomprehensibility with which we encounter another’s pleasure is not in itself the cause of our hostility. What must be added to this state of affairs for envy to arise is an obstacle that prevents the envious person from relishing his own pleasure. Some deficit of pleasure must be felt that spoils the pleasure that remains to him, makes it distasteful. When this happens, the deficit can never be made good, never be filled by anything in this world, and the envious person thus begins to regard with malevolence the idiotic passions of others. I have noted that it is the inconsolable loss of her child that initiates the bereaved mother’s envy.

Turning again to the film Laura, we find at its heart a loss that is similarly abysmal.

According to the ordinary view, the film depicts a struggle between Lydecker, whose contentments are said to be purely intellectual, and MacPherson (one of Jacoby’s successors), whose passions are more corporeal. But if the film were merely about a battle between two positive passions, Laura, the source of the other’s enjoyment, would not have been the direct object of a shotgun blast. It is therefore necessary to suppose that although Lydecker does derive the only plea-sure he allows himself from intellectual pursuits, this pleaplea-sure is never felt by him to be adequate to fill the loss that deracinates all his endeavors. This supposition is confirmed by the film itself, especially the final sequence.

At the outset I identified Lydecker as the voice-over narrator of the film.

A question related to this role hangs suspended throughout the film: from where—from what point in the narrative—does he narrate the story that unfolds?

The final sequence reopens the question as preparation, finally, to answering it.

In this sequence, the location of the point of enunciation becomes a question with narrative consequences. As Laura in her bedroom listens to Lydecker’s weekly radio address, she assumes he is in the radio studio and that she is thus at least temporarily safe from his aggressions. We, the audience, can see, however, what she will soon learn: through prerecording his voice has been separated from his body. While his voice is being transmitted from the studio, he is in the next room preparing to murder her. This revelation cues our attention to the critical sepa-ration of voice and body that will conclude the film. Shot by the police, Lydecker falls to the floor and with his dying breath utters a simple “Good-bye, Laura.”

chapter 6•sour justice, or liberalist envy

These are his last living words. But they are not his last words in the film. As the camera lingers on a sprung clock, we once again hear his voice, this time off-screen, speak the film’s final line: “Good-bye, my love.”

From where do these words come? Not from Lydecker, clearly, as he lies now dead on the floor. The final living words issued from the diegetic space of Laura’s apartment and from the visibly wounded body of Lydecker, but these words emerge from elsewhere. The difference between the two spaces is audible in the lack of room tone in the second “good-bye.” This suggests that the final line was, like Lydecker’s radio address, recorded in a sound studio, not on the film set and thus not from the diegetic space the film creates. In narrative terms, we would locate the place of their enunciation on the other side of death, some-where beyond the grave. In other words, the film does not close in the dream that is to us life on earth—I am recalling the words Lydecker recites on the radio,

“They are not long, the days of wine and roses. Out of a misty dream our path emerges for awhile, then closes in a dream”—but on the far side of it.⁴

Laura is no horror film, and it would be unwise to try to make it into one by mistaking the import of its ultimate positioning of Lydecker’s voice-over narration outside time (the sprung clock), outside the narrative space, beyond earthly life. By locating his enunciation beyond the grave, the film gives us insight not into the ontological character of its world, but into the psychological charac-ter of Lydecker. It is he who places himself—or, that which is most precious to him, what he most deeply wants—beyond earthly life and all the pleasures it can offer. He speaks and perceives the world as one who is dissatisfied with it, precisely because, by definition, it lacks and therefore cannot give him what he desires. Life for him is as insubstantial as a dream; what he wants is something more profound.

What about Laura? Does he want her? The answer is a complex “no.” She is, for him, an idealization, which is to say, she represents not so much what he wants as its unavailability. She is a stand-in for that which is missing from the world and which he therefore cannot touch; she embodies not a positive good, a partic-ular pleasure, but the distance that separates every good that is in reach from the absent one he longs to possess. This is manifest in the very opening line of the film, spoken by Lydecker, “I’ll never forget the day Laura died.” As the film reveals, however, Laura did not die on the day he so vividly recalls for us as the moment of her death. This premature expression of mourning betrays Lydecker’s melancholic atti-tude toward Laura, as toward life in general. The melancholic mourns the struc-turally lost object by allowing it to cast a shadow on the living, which suffers

therefore an untimely death. Here we touch on the structural truth of envy: it is al-ways closely tied to the idealizations it both feeds on and feeds. For, envy’s unhap-piness is the very stuff from which idealizations are contrived. We might even venture the interpretation that the baffling opening sequence—which offers an im-age of MacPherson examining objects on display in Lydecker’s apartment, while Lydecker sits, so far unseen, writing in his bathtub, his voice-over narrating the film—demonstrates that MacPherson himself and the other suitors before him are the literary creation of Lydecker, who invents a series of robust, athletic-looking enemies from a feeling of his own emaciated impotence. That is, Lydecker not only destroys his enemies with his pen, but invents them in order to destroy them.

Earlier, I justified my excursive reference to Laura by commenting that film noir is known above all for its dilation on the baseness of human emotions.

These films formed part of a broader speculation on the urban topologies of ad-jacencies and the dark personal entanglements in which they increasingly issued.

Noir films are about the city and the myriad ways in which life in it turns toxic.

During the historical period of the genre’s development, racial and ethnic ten-sions were just barely perceptible behind the smog, as one of its causes. The hard-boiled detective, the main protagonist of many of these films, might, for example, be forced to venture into a black neighborhood or jazz club, areas generally skirted by whites, in order to track down some lead. But these parts of town still formed the background; in the foreground of the detective’s seedy but still so-cially acceptable office, the denizens of discounted, unimaginable neighbor-hoods would stream through one by one, quirky, in some way deformed, but never clearly racialized. It was as if they had been required, by some artistic rule, to doff such tell-tale traits at the detective’s door as the price of entering. That this is exactly what was going on is also the surmise of later films of the period and of more recent revivals—think of Kiss Me Deadly, which is populated by aural grotesques, or Blade Runner, with its visual grotesques—in which the formerly doffed traits are returned to these characters. The gallery of rogues is exposed as a gallery of racial types. Identitarian references began to pile up as quickly as dead bodies.

ENVY AND JUSTICE: RAWLS

But if noir adumbrated envy as the fathomless and bitter source of social rivalries, social and political theorists did not pick up on the clue; they have given no seri-ous consideration to this vice and its injuriseri-ous contributions to social relations—

except for John Rawls, whose benchmark book, A Theory of Justice, does indeed pause

chapter 6•sour justice, or liberalist envy

to examine the place of envy in social life.⁵Because the aim of Rawls’s book is to propose, as the title indicates, a theory of the possibility of justice, envy—which stands in justice’s way—is set aside at the beginning. A neo-Kantian, Rawls wants to locate the conditions of the possibility of justice in human reason and thus brackets those motives of self-interest—such as envy—that cause reason to swerve away from its proper destiny, which is by definition disinterested, rather than selfish. But he can avoid the topic of envy for only so long, since he cannot pre-tend to be unaware of a significant challenge to the legitimacy of his assumption that envy is a mere obstacle to justice. According to this challenge, articulated most forcefully by Freud, envy is not simply an impediment, but the very condi-tion of our nocondi-tion of justice.

Freud argues in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego that the intensity of envy’s hostility is so noxious that it threatens to harm even the one who envies, who thus calls for a truce in the form of a demand for justice and equality for all.

That is, envy defends itself against its own invidiousness by transforming itself into group feeling. The esprit de corps cementing group relations is guaranteed by the following pledge: “No one must want to put himself forward, every one must be the same and have the same.”⁶From this Freud draws the radical conclu-sion that “Social justice means that we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well, or, what is the same thing, may not be able to ask for them. This demand for equality is the root of social conscience and the sense of duty.”⁷

Freud’s conclusion blasts at the foundations of the theory of justice Rawls lays out; he must, therefore, deal with it head on. How does he do so? First, he argues that the notion of equality Freud targets is different from the one he, Rawls, proposes: an equality that is “bound in the end to make everyone includ-ing the less advantaged worse off ” (538) may be one kind of equality—specifically, the one implied by strict egalitarianism’s insistence that all goods be equally dis-tributed—but it cannot be accepted as a definition of equality, as such. Rawls be-lieves he is protected from the charge that his theory of justice aspires to equality in Freud’s sense because his theory respects “the plurality of distinct persons with separate systems of ends” (29), that is, he rejects utilitarianism’s false notion that we all desire the same things and argues instead that individuals have—and have a right to have—different desires. As we will see presently, however, Rawls does fi-nally allow one common desire to sneak back into his theory, and even to assume a primary place there.

Rawls begins by focusing, as Freud did, on the emergence of envy among siblings, in the nursery. He speculates that Freud may have inaccurately described what goes on in this ur-scene of envy; rather than the nonmoral feeling of envy, sibling rivalries may actually exemplify legitimate moral resentment about being unfairly denied one’s due share of parental attention and affection. The siblings may vie with each other, not out of a feeling of impotence or a lack of self-confidence—the roots of envy, in Rawls’s view—but out of a confident conviction that their claims to their parents’ affection are equally valid, that is, out of feel-ings of fairness and self-worth. By redescribing the nursery scenario in this way, Rawls intends to distinguish Freud’s notion of equality from the one at stake in his theory of justice and thus to reclaim the scenario for his theory. His re-description implies that the siblings do not have the same desire, but instead want

Rawls begins by focusing, as Freud did, on the emergence of envy among siblings, in the nursery. He speculates that Freud may have inaccurately described what goes on in this ur-scene of envy; rather than the nonmoral feeling of envy, sibling rivalries may actually exemplify legitimate moral resentment about being unfairly denied one’s due share of parental attention and affection. The siblings may vie with each other, not out of a feeling of impotence or a lack of self-confidence—the roots of envy, in Rawls’s view—but out of a confident conviction that their claims to their parents’ affection are equally valid, that is, out of feel-ings of fairness and self-worth. By redescribing the nursery scenario in this way, Rawls intends to distinguish Freud’s notion of equality from the one at stake in his theory of justice and thus to reclaim the scenario for his theory. His re-description implies that the siblings do not have the same desire, but instead want