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Irina Boca: The Double-Structured Antithesis of Reality
The triple structure weakens
the polemical punch of the double-structured antithesis. Therefore, soon after a period of order, exhaustion and attempts
at restoration, when the battle began again, the simple double-structured antithesis prevailed again.
C. Schmitt [1]
I
read in the newspapers of the tragic situation of two European infants who are Siamese twins. The doctors say that, since
the twins have one heart and one lung, they can only be separated in such a way that one twin lives and the other dies. The doctors also say that if they do not separate the twins,
both will die within months.
I. Wallerstein [2]
In less than a century, B. Constant’s
impulse sauvage and calcul civilize, which denominated the succession of two diametrically opposed historical periods (war and
peaceful exchange), came to denominate two simultaneous orders opposing one other, two adverse perspectives waging a permanent
war against each other. C. Schmitt found the Marxist antithesis between the proletariat and the bourgeois the most prominent
and most effective historically because it concentrated all the energy on the final battle between two irreconcilable orders.
By contrast, G. Dumezil found the antithesis between the god of night (Varuna) and the god of day (Mitra) expressive of the
collaborative nature between natural and supernatural orders; he turned their historical succession into their simultaneous
coexistence, into the sovereign couple that binds and exchanges, wills and knows, acts and decides, and, most importantly,
forms a perfect double with the Roman couple (Romulus and Numa), with the “terrible and the Ordered, the Violent and
the Correct, the Magician and the Jurist…”. [3]
Succession and simultaneity no longer separate into two diametrically opposed orders,
for each has become the mirror image of the other, functioning as a double articulation of conflict and collaboration, war
and peace, bonds and exchanges. Two successive orders (i.e., Rome under Romulus and Numa) are simultaneous with the presence
of the divine couple (Jupiter Stator and Fides), they “borrow” the collaborative quality of the divine couple,
becoming the sovereign (simultaneous) heads of the human order. They become the “twins” living on the same set
of organs (same order) for an indefinite period of time. [4] The Hegelian antithesis between master and slave passes through
the successive stages of the family, of civil society and the state, bringing them together in the final synthesis. The successive
orders fold back upon one another (Foucault’s accordion structure) becoming one indivisible order in which the master-slave
antithesis is simultaneously dissolved and (re)composed in ever new configurations (family versus civil society; civil society
versus the state, etc.).
J. Habermas traces the tensions between these simultaneous, yet successive, materializations
of the master-slave antithesis inside the bourgeois family, civil society and the state, emphasizing that all successive transformations
of the public sphere were possible by dint of its absorption into the two antithetical orders - the bourgeois family and the
state. In the triple structure (family-society-state) the middle term is always absorbed by the other two, forming a new couple,
[5] a new reality (or order). The ever changing antithetical couples, backed by the triple structure of their successive transformations,
lead to the isolation and absorption of the third element of the structure - it is a closed system in which each element goes
from isolation (oneness) to coupling, to tripling, and back, without ever changing its place, but only its function. This
is the structural response to the ontological question of being, the middle term between philosophy and science, which is
(as all such terms are) both successiveness and simultaneous coexistence of two opposing theses - the middle term is as much
a hybrid of the two alternatives as it is the “novelty” directing the process of their simultaneous homogenization.
[6]
More to the point, the bourgeois-proletarian antithesis gives raise to the war machine
(in Deleuze and Guattari); it gives raise to the police (in P. Virilio); or to the public sphere (in Habermas), at the same
time at which the war machine, the police, the public sphere, threaten to become the sovereign elements in the system, while
simultaneously being reabsorbed by both the bourgeois and the proletarian states. The structural response, while intellectually
challenging, falls pray to H. Arendt’s observation that only buildings have structures, that no matter how much we calculate
and how many predictions we produce there will always be a human element that remains outside the reach of certainty. The
war-machine, the police, the public sphere, are a blend of impulse sauvage and calcul civilize, they are hybrid-machineries
acting inside and outside the state, outside society, or outside the family - they are the new machines that have no boundaries
and no souls, acting, as S. Zizek tells us “within the space of the death drive.” [7]
They no longer operate locally as sovereignty does, but go beyond the borders of the
state apparatus, into the open space of empire. Through them, war no longer plays the supportive role it formerly had, but
rather betrays and limits the operations of the state: “just as Hobbes saw
clearly that the State was against war, so war is against the State, and makes
it impossible.” [8] Even though state and war seem mutually exclusive, they turn into reciprocal formations evolving simultaneously
throughout history, limiting and challenging one another. The warrior type, which is an in between type (half military leader,
half war-machine) is “at once eccentric and condemned.” [9] He falls in love and betrays by falling in love (e.g.,
Achilles), he loves and sacrifices himself for love. He is the third element in the structure, the “sacrificial”
element, or as Bataille suggests, “the thing - only the thing.” [10]
Far from “weakening the polemical punch of the double-structured antithesis”,
the third element is always sacrificed, or at least appears to be so since the entire structure could collapse without it
and no double-structured antithesis could work indefinitely, without being threatened from within. The passage from the three-dimensionality
of power to the double-structured opposition, or to the one-dimensional relation of self to self, is at once threatened and
preserved, sacrificed and saved. Because of its “sacrificial” status, the third element tends to become neutral.
Some examples are: R. Barthes’ space of the alibi, the neutral zone of the “neither-nor” choices; H. Arendt’s
emptiness placed inside the onion-like structure; Foucault’s notion of a human self caught between the strata of the
archive; Deleuze’s and Guattari’s smooth war-machine; and so on.
What catches our attention is that the third element (each element becomes the “third”)
plays both the role of a betrayal and a cathartic sacrifice capable of purging the whole structure of tensions and conflicts.
In the last analysis, it is not simply the element that occupies the third dimension that is threatened, but the war within,
the “threat” brought about by it in the first place. The third dimension is the dimension of war, the dimension
of depth which is given through some tension or conflict and is maintained as such in relation to the other two dimensions
- the Mitra-Varuna couple, the complementary, antithetical (and here antithetical means collaborative) couple that maintains
itself by “sacrificing” conflict, that is, by turning it into a “thing” to be sacrificed.
The double-structured antithesis which had always been a conflicting duality, turns
against its own nature as it were, dissolving it into a final battle against one last enemy: itself. This is the extreme alternative,
the nihilistic version that remains outside the reach of science precisely because science is an indirect form of nihilism
– i.e., it attempts to prove the real by disproving it. The weapon, or nihilism in pure form, enters the domain of science
in order to protect it (i.e., from itself); its relation to science is one of mutual collaboration - it cannot destroy the
source and scope of its creation, but also it cannot stand its threatening nature. Differently put, the weapon is both the
embodiment of conflict and its resolve. It is the neutral space of the alibi, the shell covering up the emptiness inside,
but also the exterior materialization of this emptiness, its being projected outside of itself, in the concreteness of a destructive
function. The warrior is the bearer of the weapon, at once maneuvering and strategizing its uses even though he is twice removed
from real conflict. On the one hand, conflict is equivalent to the use of weapons, on the other, the weapon ceases to be (if
it ever was) the embodiment of conflict and becomes its resolve.
The warrior is no longer the classical hero throwing spears and cannonballs (the critic
of modern society) at the enemy, but the modern technocrat of arsenals and mobility, acceleration and speed. He is no longer
the architect of the battlefield but the engineer of the army camp, for whom the victory on the battlefield is only a matter
of routine. Classical war, as has been stressed so many times, is at an end. In its place we are dealing with the advent of
the “machine”, with its equipment and capabilities, with its range and speed, with every single quality and property
that sets it closer to victory, closer to its own end. The war of today is a fabrication of victory, the very process by which
the victors lose their ability to engage in a battle otherwise than by manufacturing the source of conflict, the landscape,
the enemies and their weapons. Victory itself is nothing more than this process of manufacturing and managing dissenting landscapes
and peoples, the very guarantee that any war is a winning war, that, indeed, war and victory are synonymous terms referring
to the same process by which man produces and spoils his freedom.
When not turned against itself (which is always perceived as an “end’’), the antithetical structure
seems to work in the name of history, peace, freedom, justice, all concepts which no longer have any other real referent except
the assembly lines where history and peace, freedom and justice, are produced so that in the end one prevails upon the other
- perhaps in the same way in which the proletariat prevailed over the bourgeois state (i.e., by accelerating the process of
industrialization). Whether that victory had been won or not is not the subject of the present project, but it does relate
to it in a manner much more profound than a simple ironical statement. The present de-acceleration of industrialization plays
back the same process by which the proletariat was erected in the first place. It is precisely the folding of the event of
proletarianization understood as a class struggle against the bourgeois state, which is not a promise, least of all a manifesto
- it is the same victory that troubled us earlier playing itself backwards as if it were nothing more than a conscious production
of conflict and neutrality, victory and failure, betrayal and love.
It is even more than that, for the consciousness of failure is also the consciousness
of victory, of another kind of victory than the simple production of its spectacle. In any case, the failure of the bipartite
system is not only the failure of the Cold War, though in some respects it is identical with the failure of the proletariat
to grasp the importance of wealth, or of wealth as the raison d’être of the state, but also the failure to maintain
two equally suited competitors in an ambush very similar to the American rush for gold. The only conclusion to be drawn from
the former bipolarity of the world is that the former communist states have gained their right to live at the very limit of
subsistence: it is possible to make them poorer, yes, to fabricate their revolutions and coups d’état, or even
to propel them into some undesired coalitions, but one can no longer get rid of them, for to get rid of them is to exterminate
the very source of wealth. As a matter of fact (or of irony), one seems better off by being a communist rather than a liberal
or a conservative - one enjoys the privilege of politics by default, that is, he is moved by the promise of a will to power
and not by the will to power as such.
What does it mean to be political, then? It means absolutely everything, or at least
this is what some of the most important thinkers of the 20th century seem to have suggested. It is not just the
polls, the electoral campaign, the seat in the parliament, but the gas price, the ozone layer, the fashion show; they are
all connected in a way that is essentially political, essentially will(ing) to power. One does not become political by getting
accustomed to the world around him, it is his will to power that moves him from the closed world of the animal to the political
condition of being a voter, a member of parliament, or a gas-station owner. Of course, none of this is true - or at least
not entirely. Could one leave the animal condition and become a voter by simply willing power? Could he occupy his seat in
the parliament by sheer will? Schopenhauer would have said yes; he would have convinced us that everything human is a matter
of will and representation, that there is nothing more essential and more desirable than the will: “the will determines
itself, and therewith its action and its world also; for beside it there is nothing, and these are the will itself.”
[11]
But the will is no longer pure and simple willing, it is essentially political, essentially
will to power, for to will the world or to act according to one’s will is already power. Power is the world, it inscribes itself as the genesis and raison d’être of everything human, intelligible,
forceful. In its realm, conflicting alternatives compose the human horizon by separating it into light and sound layers of
the will, into the language and articulation of a powerful self. Such is the power of the present as the most familiar and
most abstract formulation of the will. On the one hand, the world as representation, on the other, the world as power, or
the power of the world: two mirror images of the same willingness to will. The world as representation exhibits the potential
for resistance, but it lacks the potential for a greater will to power, of a will to power decanted through the archival layers
of the present - it lacks the in-itself of power, the historical consciousness of being something other than human
truth. Conversely, the world as power exhibits the potential for representation, but it lacks the potential for a greater
will to represent; it lacks the for-itself of representation, the historical consciousness of being something other
than human power. The world as will and representation is the world of power, the completed circle of willing and representing
the will or, what amounts to the same thing, of representing and empowering representation.
The willing world of subjects as opposed to the representation of their will in the
objects, the world of the savage as opposed to the quiet world of the civilized man, two antithetical orders founding the
empire of the will, the ephemeral empire of willing and representing power as the omnipotent relation between one’s
will and his representation of it. The couple is always a willing couple, an antithesis driven by the will to power, which
is to say that each party must will and represent its power in opposition to (or collaboration with) the other. The will does
not exist without being first represented (which is difference; negation; transfiguration), just as representation cannot
take place without an object of representation. The world is both represented and willed, powerful and weak; it is, for the
first time, more than pure negation or pure differentiation, for it is the representation of the will that turns it into a
texture of power relations between willing and represented subjects - a relation between two forces unsettled by their will
to empower and represent themselves.
It is not the desire of another desire that
makes man leave the animal world by setting himself in conflict with it, which is a relation impossible to represent, but
the desire of representation, of making that desire known by giving a form to it, by placing it in relation to other things
and other desires, by confronting them and giving form and meaning to their confrontation. Now, to represent desire is one
thing, and to desire the representation of the same desire is another: their conflict arises from the fact that desire and
representation have been, for a very long time, equivalent. If man desires something, he represents it, and if he represents
something, it means he desires it. This parallelism (or equivalence) of desire and representation, so characteristic of the
classical age, is now turned around: man represents what he does not desire and he desires what he does not or cannot represent
- both desire and representation belong to him indirectly, by being the negatives of one another.
This negative coupling (representation of a non-desire and desire of a non-representation)
hides its own positivity, its own beginning as it were - its being a representation of representation and a desire of desire,
that is, a simple relation of desire and representation (the real and the imaginary). It hides from it, no doubt, in search
for something better than the unsettling vacillation between reality and imagination, desire and the thing. Violence is not
desire/desired, it is simply unsettling, simply unrepresented - man does not desire another man’s desire, but the object
of that desire, which he cannot appropriate without a fight. Fighting promises the violent appropriation of the object of
desire - it directs its forces against everything that separates man from the object of his desire. The end of violence is
also the coincidence between man and the object (desire and representation; reality and imagination), the victory of science
over the world of objects, its complete takeover as the last act in the mythological encounter with and representation of
the other.
One could no longer speak of any excess, nor of any parallelism between desire and
object, but only of victory, coincidence, and speed, each modifying the cardinality of power, its relation to the (in)different
productivity of knowledge. From now on, the only relation that power entertains with knowledge is a relation of production,
an irreversible process of knowing how to produce and make use of an entire world of objects. To acquire power is no longer
an art, nor an ingenious folding of force, but a mere knowledge of production, a knowledge of the object – a technology.
It is in this respect that one could no longer speak of excess, for technology is incapable of dealing with the incalculable
and the uncertain. It must deal with the limited, the finite and the measurable - anything other than this is already a self-consciousness,
already something other than technology.
The relation between power and science, or power and technology, is implicit in this
“lack” of consciousness, or rather it is based on it to such an extent that it produces its own knowledge and
its own world around it. This is the sterile world described by G. Dumezil, the world-object oriented towards infinite growth
and destruction - the violent sovereignty operating locally, in the closing space of empire. Without a doubt, its authority
is challenged by its “wise’’ counterpart, or at least by the impressive simulation of some kind of wisdom
- a ritual by which power is tempered through the remembrance of what it needs to know. This intermittent challenge is never
poignant, never capable of rejuvenating culture, the economy, or even power. It is a simulation and nothing more, a reemergence
of the powerful during the processes of work, production, or violent creativity. Its essence is characterized by sterility,
though it is always invested with the power of truth, with the energy and expectations of real life events.
In this case, there is only sterile expectation - the energy to resist, to expect,
to dream, but also the excess of not resisting, not expecting, not dreaming. The inequality between the two is the source
of even more knowledge, more uninhabitable spaces, more excesses. Without ever growing into a full relation, excess arbitrarily
signals prosperity and decadence, politics and the apolitical, knowledge and ignorance. Excess appears as a sign rather than
as an entire semiotic environment, as a symptom rather than a diagnosis, but it could never appear so without also becoming
the opposite, without shifting and metamorphosing from one phase to the other, without making both sign and semiotics, symptom
and diagnosis, disappear in the arbitrariness of excess(ing).
The coexistence of diametrically opposed alternatives freezes the moment of choice
while also turning everything into an object of choice, into an indifferent object, an indifferent choice. There are innumerable
examples: Sartre’s indecision between the Germans and the Americans; Lyotard’s indifference vis-a-vis all possible
couples; the indifference of a choice regarding Russia and America, in Bataille. Such “separate/separating” examples
make up the body of choice, they map out and modify its constitutions and destitutions, its becoming other than just a body,
other than just a corporeal constitution of decision-making. The body itself is nothing but the mirror image of the head –
a map perpetually folding back upon itself, folding the real and the unreal, the sign and the signified, the will and its
representation - folding folds as it were, folding the body within the mind and the mind within the body, the image within
the mirror and the mirror within the image.
The double is always the mirroring image of the singular, the different, the distinctive.
It follows it everywhere, like a shadow on the ground, mutating and silencing everything in its way. In this sense, the platonic
world of shadows is no longer mere visibility, it has never been perhaps, but all the same - it is a mere shadow. It follows something other than itself within the order of the visible, it follows it silently,
almost indistinctly, perusing the surfaces of things in an indefinite and indifferent display of movement. There is only performance,
surface, spectacle, each emerging out of symbols and realities, scenes and portals, sacrifices and newness, each becoming
thing and ghost - a distinct phenomenon: the doubling.
To go back, to travel backwards towards the split, means to unearth the symbols, to
modify reality to such an extent that existence becomes an impossibility (by virtue of being the only possibility). The real
[12] is no longer out there, it has been inherited by all the words and nuances, and images, and portraits, by all the things
(a piece of advertisement; a love scene; a poem) capable of conveying and annulling their own messages and realities. We encounter
a world of fragments, a world of indistinctive things and shadows - an arbitrary spectacle of the double in which nothing
happens except the split, the clearing, the death of the real. Death becomes “the symbolic order itself, the structure
which, as a parasite, colonizes the living entity.” [13]
Or, “there is no meaning without some dark spot,” [14] no
possibility for the impossible semblances and betrayals of the real, of life, of love. There is only the indifference of choice,
the indifference of wonder, behind which there lies dormant our longing for (an)other. In this longing, there is a negligible
difference between the “small Jewish barber and the great dictator (in the Great Dictator),” [15] a difference,
or negligence, which results in “two situations as infinitely remote, as far opposed as those of victim and executioner.”
[16] The same difference situates and plays itself off in Zizek’s interpretation of Lafayette’s Princess of
Cleves: “if she renounces marrying the Duke, she will at least gain and retain him “in eternity” (Kierkegaard)
as her only and true love; if she marries him, she will sooner or later lose both, his bodily proximity as well as his eternal
passionate attachment to her.” [17]
Perhaps between the two negligences, or differences, one
could insert J.L. Nancy’s vision of sovereignty: “by condemning herself, Cleopatra liberates herself.” [18]
What happens is that “art becomes the sovereign neither of the world nor of souls but the very enigma of sovereignty.…”
[19] Imperial sovereignty, far from becoming the “place of a cult of stelae and statues erected as divine presences,”
[20] becomes a “celebration of the groundless space opened by a canvas without a depth.…” [21]
In this surface without depth, where previously had reigned “the sacrality of a lineage, its majesty and its
idols,” [22] now reigns “ the striking brilliance of its eclipse – but it thus reigns in all its splendor,
as the splendor of this eclipse itself.” [23] Out of this abyss come all the possibilities, “all the radiant appearances
and all the illuminations of an arrival in the world, of a coming into body and flesh, of an incarnation and a birth by which
the mystery of potency would have to be clarified – that is, not the mystery of force, but the very different mystery
of birth itself, of being-in-the-world and of being-a-world.” [24]
Notes
3. G. Dumezil, Mitra-Varuna, New York: Zone Books, 1988, p. 64.
4. I. Wallerstein’s simile refers explicitly to the European situation, to the present dilemma
of European politics.
5. Also see R. Barthes, ’’The Two Semiological Chains,” Mythologies, New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
6. J.F. Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984.
8. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine, New York: Semiotext(e), 1986, p.11.
9. Ibid., p. 7.
10. G. Bataille, Theory of Religion, New
York: Zone Books, 1992, p. 43. “The thing - only the thing, that is what
sacrifice means to destroy in the victim.”
11. A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,
New York: Dover Publications, 1969, p. 272.
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