SUBSIDIOS Y SUBVENCIONES

I have suggested that the cultural project of Enlightenment as Hegel sees it is to institute a set of universal cultural forms in which all subjects may recognize themselves and one another within a single, positive and coher- ent totality. Hegel consistently emphasizes the impossibility of conceptu- alizing the universal culture without taking into consideration the role of language. Indeed, prefiguring Lacan’s development of the consequences of the speaking subject’s subjection to a symbolic order, Hegel underlines that the radical and deathlike “renunciation of existence” (507) the En- lightenment subject suffers in order to accede to culture parallels the drama of this subject’s externalization in properly linguistic forms. Through this externalization the existential self—the self in its immanent, in-itself mode—is lost only to be recovered in a different form. Crucially, this form into which the self is alienated features a split between what Hegel refers to as a general and a specific component:

This alienation [of the subject] takes place solely in language, which here appears in its characteristic significance. . . . [Lan- guage] is the power of speech, as that which performs what has to be performed. For it is the real existence of the pure self as self; in speech, self-consciousness, qua independent separate

individuality, comes as such into existence, so that it exists for others. . . . Language . . . contains [the self] in its purity, it alone expresses the “I,” the “I” itself. This real existence of the “I” is,

qua real existence, an objectivity which has in it the true nature of the “I.” The “I” is this particular “I”—but equally the univer-

sal “I”; its manifesting is also at once the externalization and vanishing of this particular “I,” and as a result the “I” remains in its universality. . . . [I]ts real existence is just this: that as a self-conscious Now, as a real existence, it is not a real existence, and through this vanishing it is a real existence. (508)

No doubt on the more concrete, historical level of his analysis Hegel has in mind in this section of the Phenomenology the passage from a feudal, properly military form of self-consciousness, which required the risk of literal death on the battlefield to accede to the substance of nobility, to a more cultural monarchical one, in which battles for distinc- tion took the form of displays of sophistication and wit, of linguistic dexterity, in the salon milieu. Still, language acquires in these passages a more conceptual function, becoming a moment of the dialectic of Spirit

in general, and the notion of the “I” comes to summarize the effects of the mediating function that language performs. Émile Benveniste of- fers a view of the role of this personal pronoun—a so-called “shifter”— which is strikingly similar to Hegel’s. Just as, for Hegel, the “I” denotes the paradoxical coincidence within a single signifier of an objective, general form of self-consciousness and the traces of an independent, but vanishing, particularity, for Benveniste it “refer[s] indifferently to any individual whatsoever and . . . at the same time identif[ies] him in his individuality.”17

For his part, Hegel chooses to express this duality in terms of a distinction between the particular I and the universal I: The subject makes use of this pronoun to differentiate its desires from other sub- jects, but it quickly discovers that the same function, denoted by the same signifier, is available to ever yone else. Hegel identifies in the pronoun “I” a function we might qualify as generically particular: It provides the subject with a form of self-consciousness which makes it visible to other subjects, yet it pays the price by witnessing the vanish- ing of its particularity. Thus, though the subject has no choice but to suffer the death of its immediate, natural self-presence in order to gain a self-consciousness recognizable to others, it never fully recuperates itself within the forms of language in which self-consciousness be- comes real. This vanishing of the subject of the I bears witness to a self-splitting between an objectively recognizable or communicable form and a mysterious absence—a “real existence”—which for Hegel at once exists and does not, which persists precisely through its disappear- ance. The subject’s vanishing “is thus itself at once its abiding,” Hegel says; by passing away into the universal form it retains an empty, generic excess over itself left over as a paradoxical negative remainder of the process of externalization (508).

Now Lacan made of the vanishing to which Hegel points a key feature of his own formulation of the subject of desire. For Lacan, the subject’s alienation in the structures of language is punctuated by the “moment of a ‘fading’ or eclipse . . . that is closely bound up with the

Spaltung or splitting that [the subject] suffers from its subordination to the signifier.”18 _{The innovation of Lacan’s thesis with respect to the}

semiological tradition in which it intervened was to locate the subject not in the “signifying chain” where it finds what Hegel would call its “substance,” but rather in the very moment of this fading itself, in other words at the place in the chain where a signifier lacks. The subject must then compensate for this lack through the development of a properly unconscious fantasy, that is to say one which may be neither signified nor subjectivized and which therefore refuses to appear within the sig-

nifying chain. The Lacanian concept of a subject of the unconscious and Hegel’s notion of the I’s vanishing specificity therefore share the same generically particular status: generic because necessarily at play in any speech act, because a necessary effect of speech as such; yet particular because indicative of an essential but indeterminate subjective nucleus which remains inaccessible to language’s forms.

Hegel appears to have anticipated Lacan’s decision to define the subject as this unknowable but necessary, indeed objective, absence when he qualifies this vanishing of the subject in and from language as the I’s “true nature” (508). The paradoxical location of the subject at the point where its content disappears is thus what ultimately defines self- consciousness for Hegel; the vanishing of the particular I, in other words, is self-consciousness as such. To return to Hegel’s analysis of Diderot, then, it becomes apparent that it is precisely this empty, disappearing form representing the self-identity of self-consciousness—this mediating “middle term,” as he calls it (509)—which makes apparent the mutual interimplication of the competing noble and ignoble judgments in Hegel’s dialectic. This essence of the I functions as the medium for the dialec- tical transformation of subjective content into its opposite, and this con- tinual transformation is the Verkehrung or perversion which constitutes for Hegel the underlying radical negativity of Enlightenment culture. Indeed, in a passage which clearly seeks to evoke the Nephew’s dis- course, Hegel claims that the negativity of what he calls “true Spirit” “exists in the universal talk and destructive judgement which strips of their significance all those moments which are supposed to count as the true being.” The truth of Spirit, Hegel continues, “is equally this nihil- istic game which it plays with itself” (521). By mercilessly destroying each of the moral certainties and grounded views to which the philoso- pher clings, the Nephew’s discourse articulates the very essence of the Enlightenment world of culture.

As I have intimated, however, this nihilistic game the Nephew plays features a worrisome ambivalence, for his steadfast negation of the philosopher’s faith in virtue assumes the form of Hegel’s “infinite judg- ment”—an unlimited affirmation, that is to say, of all judgments which could possibly be uttered, an affirmation whose ambition is to leave nothing unsaid. We have already acquainted ourselves with the properly perverse, absolute Other to which the infinite judgment is enslaved: The subject is free to react to the relativist-nominalist vertigo which Enlight- enment culture finally produces through the restoration of a certainty bestowed by this Other whose enjoyment corresponds with its law. I have shown how the Nephew’s discourse contains indications of this logic. Hegel, however, clearly sees redeeming qualities in the radical

negativity of Enlightenment culture, a negativity which unsettlingly brings to the fore the splitting of the I. We are now in a position to explore how the Nephew’s symptoms contain within themselves the seeds of a differ- ent, nonperverse outcome, one which refuses the strategy of disavowal of the Other’s self-difference the pervert enthusiastically puts into effect.

These symptoms appear most memorably in the dialogue in associa- tion with the Nephew’s talent for what the philosopher calls “panto- mime.” The term refers to the moments in the dialogue when the Nephew, transported by his musical passions, mimics in a fit of unconscious spontaneity an entire repertoire of performances from comic operas of the day. From a psychoanalytic perspective these performances may be read as manifestations of the absences, or losses of consciousness, which confronted Freud at the early stages of his work with his hysterical analysands. As such, they bear witness to a traumatic vacillation in the Other, a vacillation which reveals a gap or absence in response to which the Nephew produces his symptom. In other words, the symptom emerges as a result of the impending failure of the full, “unbarred” Other whose command the Nephew’s perversion would have him obey and whose imperfection must be covered up by the performance itself. As the Nephew himself describes it, the art of the bohemian enter- tainer in the prerevolutionary bourgeois salons of Paris consists in an- ticipating what is desired of him, of doing whatever is required to satisfy the audience’s perceived demand. But because this demand is in actu- ality never coherent or unambiguous, the Nephew is forced to engage in a frantic attempt to conform in advance to all demands; to act out, more specifically, the full repertoire of all possible musical performances in a doomed effort to satisfy all parties present. The Nephew expresses as follows his thoughts on how the salon jester-musician should handle the difficulty of trying to satisfy an audience’s multiple musical tastes:

You must know how to prepare and where to bring in these peremptory tones in the major key, how to seize the occasion and the moment, for example when opinion is divided and the argument has worked itself up to the highest pitch of violence, when everybody is talking at once and you can’t hear what they are saying. Then you must take up your position some way off in the corner of the room farthest removed from the battlefield, having prepared your explosion by a long silence, and you sud- denly drop like a bomb in the middle of the contestants. No- body has ever touched me in this art. . . . I have some soft notes which I accompany with a smile and an infinite variety of ap- proving faces, with nose, mouth, eyes and brow all brought into

play. I have a certain agility with my hips, a way of twisting my spine, raising or lowering my shoulders, stretching my fingers, bowing my head, shutting my eyes and being struck dumb as though I had heard an angelic, divine voice come down from heaven. (73-4)

We discern in the Nephew’s “infinite variety of approving faces” a per- verse reflection of the Hegelian infinite judgment which, in its limitless expansion of subjectivity, admits of no negation or lack. In effect, the Nephew’s corporeal contortions and nonsignifying noises allow him to offer himself as the object which reconciles the audience with itself. His aim, in other words, is to reduce the audience’s multiple and contradic- tory expectations into a single, uniform taste, which then manifests itself to the Nephew in the form of the otherworldly voice he imagines he hears (and which he acknowledges does not objectively exist). At work in the pantomime is once again the Nephew’s desire to incarnate an expressive totality which leaves nothing unarticulated. It becomes apparent as well how his effort, were it to succeed, would place the Nephew in a position of utter dependency with respect to his performance’s addressee.

Yet Diderot makes clear that the pantomime does not properly come off, for the Nephew begins to suffer anxiety at the prospect of the im- possibility of conforming to a multitude of aesthetic opinions. Indeed, it is this dimension of anxiety which most distinguishes the Nephew’s discourse from the clinical picture of perversion psychoanalysis offers. At a very early stage of the dialogue, the narrator is struck by this emergence of suffering in a performance designed to entertain both performer and audience. “Is it not a painful thing,” he asks, “to see torment in somebody who is supposed to be giving a representation of pleasure?” (53). It becomes clear that the Nephew advances his panto- mime as a response to the enigma of the Other’s desire, to its frustrating inability to tell us clearly what it wants. While theoretically his perfor- mance constitutes for the Nephew an ideal compromise formation which makes use of sound and gesture as a way of attempting to circumvent the strictures and limitations imposed by language, its underlying impo- tence becomes plainly apparent to Diderot’s philosopher, who looks upon his interlocutor’s strange performances as a fascinating but ultimately pathetic form of acting-out.

The musician clearly suffers in a worryingly immediate way from the lack of certainty he begins to discover in his Other. Indeed, it be- comes apparent that the prospect of failing to satisfy his audience is so traumatic for the Nephew that he effectively loses consciousness during his performance, retaining no memory of it when he comes to. Though

it is clearly quite tempting to qualify his pantomime as an instance of the putatively subversive deterritorialization of language Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari attribute to the “minor” literature of Kafka, it becomes clear that whatever liberation the Nephew achieves during his perfor- mances not only comes at a formidable psychical cost, but also, in its properly unconscious manifestation, fails to meet the criteria for even the most modest conception of agency. The narrator describes as fol- lows the aftermath of the most intense of the Nephew’s strange perfor- mances: “By now he was quite beside himself. Knocked up with fatigue, like a man coming out of a deep sleep or long trance, he stood there motionless, dazed, astonished, looking about him and trying to recog- nize his surroundings. Waiting for his strength and memory to come back, he mechanically wiped his face. Like a person waking up to see a large number of people gathered round his bed and totally oblivious or profoundly ignorant of what he had been doing, his first impulse was to cry out “Well, gentlemen, what’s up? What are you laughing at? Why are you so surprised?” ’ (104).

It is indeed not at all surprising that the Nephew’s rebellion against the formal strictures of language has lent itself to comparison with Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis on so-called minor literature: The Nephew’s praise of what he calls the “animal cry of passion” evokes precisely the unimpeded, fully embodied, affect-laden expressionism through which the French critics mount their rebellion against the logic of the signifier (105). During his pantomimic absence the Nephew no doubt experi- ences the temporary fusion of the “subject of the enunciation” and the “subject of the statement”—what Hegel referred to as the “universal” and the “particular” I—which Deleuze and Guattari want to valorize in the nonsemiotic expressivity they claim to find in Kafka’s story “The Investigations of a Dog,” for example. In this story they identify “lan- guage tonalities lacking in signification” extremely similar in their mani- festation to the products of the Nephew’s own protest against a properly symbolic castration.19 _{But the ver y lack of continuity between the}

Nephew’s performance and the moment of coming to indexes the pres- ence of the traumatic negativity in the Other which the more properly perverse tendency of his discourse seeks to disavow. The fact that the Nephew cannot subjectivize his performance, cannot integrate it into his sociosymbolic universe, points toward the conclusion that the utopian expressive unity Deleuze and Guattari think they find in Kafka is impos- sible. The properly unconscious quality of the Nephew’s pantomime reveals that the splitting of the subject between its statement and its enunciation, the very splitting the schizoanalyst seeks to overcome, is constitutive: The Nephew will never successfully remember his perfor-

mance; it will remain, like the navel of the Freudian dream-text, untrans- latable into the terms of conscious speech.

It is interesting to note that Diderot provides a precociously psycho- analytic clue concerning the aetiology of the Nephew’s performances. Diderot in fact directly associates the Nephew’s reluctance to submit to the subjective self-estrangement that language imposes to his massive investment in the cultural prestige and authority of his celebrated uncle. The Nephew reveals that it is his fear of failing to measure up to the stature of the great Rameau which causes him to refuse the risk of a perceived sacrifice of enjoyment which a serious engagement with the music world would entail. Indeed, the patronym “Rameau” begins to function as a veritable Lacanian Name-of-the-father in the dialogue, such that the entire economy of the Nephew’s reluctance to submit to sym- bolic castration revolves around this proper name. Lacan used the term “Name-of-the-father” in association with the separation the subject un- dergoes upon entry into the order of signifiers; it is “the support of the symbolic function,”20 _{the signifier which holds the place of the lack in}

the socio-symbolic network, simultaneously constituting it as a closed totality and designating the limit or absence which haunts it.

Diderot explicitly indicates that one of the sources of the Nephew’s hysterico-perverse symptoms lies is his inability to assume the name of which he is the involuntary inheritor. It is indeed difficult not to notice while reading the dialogue that the Nephew demonstrates through its entirety a tortured relation to the uncle who, it should not take a Freud- ian to discern, figures paternally within his psychical economy. Though at the text’s conclusion we are not at all certain what will become of the Nephew, there is little doubt that he will fail to attain the renown of the great Rameau. When the philosopher, in a moment of facile optimism, suggests to the Nephew that a retired life of reflective introspection, combined with the sublimation of his cynical ideas in the writing of a book, might help alleviate his torment, the Nephew responds defen- sively: “[B]ut I haven’t the courage—and then having to sacrifice one’s