POBLACIÓN E INDICES DE BIENESTAR DE LA REGIÓN

the illusion that there is some suprasensible noumenal Entity is shown precisely to be an "illusion", a fleeting apparition. And, again, what this means is that we can never comprehend the "whole" of the reality we encounter: if we are to be able to endure our encounter with reality, some part of it has to be "de-realized", experienced as a spectral apparition.

The Act

So, to recapitulate: what is the Hegelian "identity of the opposites"?

In the conflicting opinions about the royal family which followed the death of Princess Diana, some conservative commentators emphasized how the essence of royalty lies ⁱⁿ its mystical charisma, which ^is why the royal family must not display ordinary human emotions - it must remain somehow remote, elevated above ordi­

nary human concerns, floating gendy in the nostalgic dignity of its ethereal misty world; if one gets too close to members of this family, and focuses on the details of their everyday lives, they become just people like any others, and their misty charisma dissipates. . . . This is true, but what these commentators overlook is the way this very remote aloofness, the perception that the royals are "something special", sustains the ever-present need to hear gossip about the spicy details of their personal lives. If we learn that our lower-middle-class neighbour is a drunk, or that he sucks raw eggs, or that he drinks only water, this is not even the common stuff of small talk; if _we learn this about a member of the royal family, it makes news.

This dialectical reversal is crucial to our perception of the royals:

precisely in so far as they are branded with charisma, they are the people whose very "ordinariness" makes the stuff of (our) dreams­

they do not have to prove themselves by their creative acts; they are a kind of non-alienated species which is of interest to us not because of their qualities, but simply because of what they are. For that reason, the public demand (created by the media) that the Queen should show some public emotion after Diana's death was not simply the demand that even the dignified royals should prove that they are warm human beings like the rest of us: the point of this demand was, rather, that they should do it

for us,

as our stand-in; that it is

their duty to symbolize and express, via a public act, the grief of us all .... The remoteness of their mystical charisma thus involves a

"speculative identity" with its opposite: with the thirst for as many sordid humdrum details of their lives as possible - the lowest yellow­

press trash secretly sustains its opposite, charismatic dignity. The more details of their private life we get to know, the stronger the background they provide for the royal charisma, as with a great artist or scientist about whom we are delighted to learn that he also has some human weakness - far from reducing him to our scale, such details render all the more tangible the gap that divides Him from ^· us, common mortals.36

There is in fact a kind of speculative identity of opposites between

"totalitarian" and "liberal" subjective positions: the two are comple­

mentary. When Adorno claims, in Minima Moralia, that "to say 'we' and to mean 'I' is one of the persistent diseases",37 he thereby provides a succinct formula of the "totalitarian" position of present­

ing one's contingent subjective opinion as the impersonal objective/

collective truth - that is, of designating oneself as a direct instrument of the big Other ("historical Necessity"). However, the exact opposite - "to say 'I' and to mean 'we' " - also holds: that of presenting the impersonal commonplace as your intense personal experience. The problem with the liberal notion of "expressing one's true Self'' is that it confers the form of the authentic Self on what is a mere imitation of public cliches.

Remember also the unique figure of James Jesus Angleton, the ultimate cold warrior:38 for two decades - from 1953 to 1973 - he was chief of the counter-intelligence section of the CIA, his task being to unearth "moles" within it. Angleton, a charismatic, highly idiosyncratic figure with a literary education (he was a personal friend ofT.S. Eliot, and even resembled him physically), was prone to paranoia. Th� premiss behind his work was an absolute belief in the so-called "Monster Plot": a gigantic deception co-ordinated by a secret KGB "organization-within-the-organization", whose aim was to penetrate and totally dominate the Western intelligence network, and thus bring about the defeat of the West.

Not only was Angleton convinced that there were innumerable

"moles" at the very heart of the CIA, not to mention the Western European intelligence establishment (he thought that Henry Kissin­

ger, Harold Wilson and Olaf Palme, among others, were KGB agents); he also dismissed all the signs of disunity in the Socialist

"camp" (the autonomous path ofYugoslavia; the split between the USSR and China; "Eurocommunism" in the 1970s and early 1980s) as an orchestrated deception destined to establish in the West a false notion of the East's weakness. On top of all this - and most catastrophically for the Western intelligence community - Angleton dismissed practically all KGB defectors offering invaluable infor­

mation as fake, sometimes even sending them back to the USSR (where, of course, they were inunediately put on trial and shot, since they were in fact true defectors!).

The ultimate outcome of Angleton's reign was total stasis -crucially, in his time, not a single true "mole" was discovered and apprehended. No wonder Clare Petty, one of the top officials in Angleton's section, brought the Angleton paranoia to its logical self­

negating climax by concluding, after a long and exhaustive investi­

gation, that Golitsyn (the Russian defector with whom Angleton was engaged in a true folie a deux) was a fake, and Angleton himself the big mole who was successfully paralysing anti-Soviet intelligence activity. And, in fact, we are tempted to raise a question: what if Angleton was a mole justifying his activity by the search for a mole (for himself, in the final real-life version of the Big Clock/No Way Out plot)? What if the true KGB "Monster Plot" was the very project to put the idea of a "Monster Plot" into circulation, and thus immobilize the CIA and neutralize future KGB defectors in advance?

In both cases, the ultimate deception assumed the guise of trnth itself:

there was a "Monster Plot" (the very idea of the "Monster Plot");

there was a mole in the heart of the CIA (Angleton himself).

That is the truth of the paranoiac stance: it is itself the threat, the destructive plot, against which it is fighting. The neat aspect of this solution- and the ultimate condemnation of Angleton's paranoia­

is that it doesn't matter if Angleton was merely sincerely duped by the idea of a "Monster Plot", or if he was in fact the mole: in both cases, the result is exactly the same. What, then, constituted the deception? Our failure to include in the list of suspects the very idea of (globalized) suspicion, that is, to put the very idea of suspicion under suspicion ^- and this "short circuit", this coincidence of opposites, is the point of Hegelian self-relating negativity.

This logic of self-relating negativity, in which the genus encoun­

ters itself in one of its own species, also explains why it is so difficult to overcome the Original Sin of the capitalist libidinal economy -in short, to convert a miser. With other s-ins of excess, conversion

comes relatively easily - one simply has to moderate the sin in question, transforming it into a virtue, that is, conferring on it the form of a virtue (you overcome gluttony by eating moderately, etc.);

the problem with avarice, however, in contrast to other sins, is that it already takes the form cif a virtue (does not thrift demand from the subject an attitude of renunciation, discipline and hard work?). The difference between avarice and (the virtue of) prudence is that, in Kantian terms, prudence is good in so far as it remains "pathologi­

cal", serving our well-being; while, paradoxically, it turns into a sin the moment it is elevated to the properly ethical level, the moment it assumes the form of an end-in-itself to be pursued independendy of all pathological considerations. 39 This paradox of elevating a vice into a virtue, of conferring on it the form of a virtue, provides the elementary formula of capitalism's incredible self-propelling dynamic, in which opposites coincide: not only is the vice of thrift (accumulation) the highest virtue; consumption itself is turned into the mode of appearance of its opposite, thrifi:.40 How, then, are we to break out of this vicious cycle? There is no return to the previous innocence - no easy way out by means of generosity, by returning to the premodern podatch logic ala Bataille, or, on the contrary, by returning to some kind of balanced "limited economy".

Here, however, Lacan's statements on psychoanalysis and money, and on the anticapitalist nature of psychoanalysis, are to be taken seriously.41 Consider Jacques-Alain Miller's joke about how, in psychoanalytic treatment, exploitation works even better than it does in capitalism: in capitalism, the capitalist pays the worker who works for him, and thus produces profit; while in psychoanalysis, the patient pays the analyst in order to be able to work himsel£ ...

In psychoanalysis, therefore, we have an intersubjective money relationship in which all parameters of exchange break down. The key point is: why does the patient pay the analyst? The standard answer (so that the analyst stays outside the libidinal circuit, uninvol­

ved in the imbroglio of passions) is correct, but insufficient. We should definitely exclude "goodness": if the psychoanalyst is per­

ceived as good, as doing the patient a favour, everything is bound to go wrong. We should, however, tackle a further question: how does the patient subjectivize his paying? This is where the logic of exchange breaks down: if we remain within the parameters of "tit for tat" (so much for an interpretation of a dream, so much for the dissolution of a symptom), we get nowhere. "Paying the price for services

rendered" contains the analysis within the limits of avarice (it is easy to imagine a further acceleration of this logic: pay for two interpre­

tations, and get a third one free ... ). What is bound to happen sooner or later is that the analysis gets caught in the paradigmatic obsessional economy in which the patient is paying the analyst so that

nothing will happen

^-so that the analyst will tolerate the patient's babbling without any subjective consequences. On the other hand, there is nothing more catastrophic than a psychoanalyst acting out of charity ("goodness") to help the patient; if anything, this is the most effective way of turning a "normal" neurotic into a paranoiac psychotic.

Is the answer to be found, then, in the shift from having to being, along the lines of Lacan's definition of love as an act in which one gives not what one has, but what one doesn't have -that is to say, what one

is?

The gesture of giving one's being can also be a false (megalomaniac or suicidal) one - witness Nietzsche's final megalomaniac madness, whose structure is stricdy homologous to the suicidal

passage

a

l'acte:

in both cases, the subject

<?ffers himself (his being) as the object that fills, in the Real, the constitutive gap of the symbolic order-

that is, the lack of the big Other. That is to say, the key enigma of Nietzsche's final madness is: why did Nietzsche have to resort to what cannot fail to appear to us as ridiculous self­

aggrandizing (recall the chapters tides in his

Ecce homo:

"Why I am

so wise", "Why I am so bright", up to "Why I am a destiny")?

This is an inherent philosophical deadlock, which has nothing whatsoever to do with any private pathology: his inability to accept the nonexistence of the big Other. Within these co-ordinates, sui­

cide occurs when the subject perceives that the megalomaniac solu­

tion does not work. 42

As Lacan emphasized, one cannot analyse the rich, for whom paying does not matter. So there has to be payment, a price paid -it must hurt.43 What, however, does one get for -it? The analysis proper begins when one accepts the payment as a purely arbitrary expenditure. By paying for nothing, by engaging in pure expendi­

ture, the patient gets back that for which there is no price- the

objet petit a,

the cause of desire, that which can emerge only as a pure excess of Grace. The vicious circle of thrift is thus doubly broken:

the patient does something totally meaningless within the horizon of the capitalist logic of consumption/accumulation, and receives in exchange the pure surplus itself.

The Lacanian name for this gesture of breaking the vicious cycle of the superego is act, and the lack of a clear elaboration of the notion of act in its relation to fantasy is perhaps the key failing of The Sublime Object. Perhaps we find the most perspicuous formula­

tion of this relation in Shakespeare, when, in Act ^II Scene ^1, of julius Caesar, Brutus voices his doubts about acting against Caesar:

Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.

Fantasy fills the gap between the abstract intention to do something and its actualization: it is the stuff of which debilitating hesitations -dread, imagining what might happen if ^I do it, what might happen if ^I don't do it - are made, and the act itself dispels the mist of these hesitations which haunt us in this interspace.

What, then, is an act, grounded in the abyss of a free decision?

Recall C.S. Lewis's description of his religious choice from his Surprised by Joy- what makes it so irresistibly delicious ^is the author's matter-of-fact sceptical "English" style, far from the usual pathetic narratives of mystical rapture. Lewis's description of the act thus deftly avoids any ecstatic pathos in the usual Saint Teresa style, any multiple-orgasmic penetrations by angels or God: it is not that, in the divine mystical experience, we step out (in ex-stasis) of our normal experience of reality: it is this "normal" experience which is

"ex-static"(Heidegger), in which we are thrown outside ourselves into the external reality of entities, and the mystical experience indicates withdrawal from this ecstasy. Lewis thus refers to the experience as the "odd thing"; he mentions its common location­

"I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus"; he makes qualifications like "in a sense", "what now appears", "or, if you like", "you could argue that . . . but ^I am more inclined to think ... ", "perhaps", ^"I rather disliked the feeling":

The odd thing was that before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. In a sense. I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus. Without words and (I think) almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow pre­

sented to me. I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armour, as if I were a lobster. I

felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armour or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corset meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. I say, "I chose," yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives. You could argue that I was not a free agent, but I am more inclined to think this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done.

Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, "I am what I do." Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back - drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling. 44

In a way, everything is here: the decision is purely formal, ultimately a decision to decide, without a clear awareness of what the subject is deciding about; it is a non-psychological act, unemotional, with no motives, desires or fears; it is incalculable, not the outcome of strategic argumentation; it is a totally free act, although he could not do otherwise. Only afterwards is this pure act "subjectivized", translated into a (rather unpleasant) psychological experience.45 There is only one aspect which is potentially problematic in Lewis's formulation: the act as conceived by Lacan has nothing to do with the mystical suspension of ties which bind us to ordinary reality, with attaining the bliss of radical indifference in which life or death, and other worldly distinctions, no longer matter; in which subject and object, thought and act, fully coincide. To put it in mystical terms: the Lacanian act is, rather, the exact opposite of this "return to innocence": the Original Sin itself, the abyssal Disturbance of the primeval Peace, the primordial "pathological" Choice of the uncon­

ditional attachment to a specific object (like falling in love with a specific person who thereafter matters to us more than anyone or anything else).46

In Buddhist terms, an act is thus the exact structural obverse of Enlightenment, of attaining nirvana: the very gesture by means of which the Void is disturbed, and Difference (and, with it, false appearance and suffering) emerges in the world. The act is thus close

to the gesture of a Bodhisattva who, having reached nirvana, out of compassion - that is, for the sake of the common Good - goes back to phenomenal reality in order to help all other living beings achieve nirvana. The difference between this and psychoanalysis lies in the fact that, from the latter's standpoint, the Bodhisattva's sacrificial gesture is false: in order to achieve the act proper, one should erase any reference to the Good, and

peifonn the act just for the sake of it.

(This reference to the Bodhisattva also enables us to answer the "big question": if, now, we have to strive to break out of the vicious cycle of craving and into the blissful peace of nirvana, how, in the

(This reference to the Bodhisattva also enables us to answer the "big question": if, now, we have to strive to break out of the vicious cycle of craving and into the blissful peace of nirvana, how, in the

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