In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek
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musicians and philosophers. In one or two of his plays, notably in Troilus and Cressida, we are almost painfully conscious of this suppression; we feel an intense intellectual activity, but at the same time a certain coldness and hardness, as though some power in his soul, at once the highest and the sweetest, were for a time in abeyance. In other plays, notably in The Tempest, we are constantly aware of the presence of this power.21
There is truth in this perception: it is as if, in Troilus, there is no place for the redemptive quality of metaphysical pathos and bliss which somehow cancels the horrible and ridiculous events that took place. The first difficulty is how to categorize Troilus: although arguably the bleakest of Shakespeare’s plays, it is often listed as a comedy—correctly, since it lacks dignified tragic pathos.22 In other words, if Troilus is a comedy, then it is for the same reason that all good films about the Holocaust also are comedies: it is a blasphemy to claim that the predicament of prisoners in a concentration camp was tragic—their predicament was so terrifying that they were deprived of the very possibility of displaying tragic grandeur. Troilus plays the same structural role in Shakespeare’s opus as Cosί fan tutte among Mozart’s operas: its despair is so thoroughgoing that the only way to overcome it is through the retreat into fairy-tale magic (The Tempest and other late Shakespeare plays; Mozart’s Magic Flute).
Many of Shakespeare’s plays retell an already well-known great story (of Julius Caesar, of English kings); what makes Troilus the exception is that, in retelling the well-known story, it shifts the accent to what were in the original minor and marginal characters: Troilus is not primarily about Achilles and Hector, Priam and Agamemnon; its love couple is not Helen and Paris, but Cressida and Troilus. In this sense, Troilus can be said to prefigure one of the paradigmatic postmodern procedures, that of retelling a well-known classical story from the standpoint of a marginal character. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencranz and Gildenstern Are Dead does it with Hamlet, while here, Shakespeare himself carries out the move. This displacement also undermines Shakespeare’s standard procedure, from his royal chronicles, of supplementing the “big” royal scenes staged in a dignified way with scenes figuring common people who introduce a comic common-sense perspective. In the royal chronicles, these comic interludes strengthen the noble scenes through their contrast to them; in Troilus, everybody, even the noblest of warriors, is “contaminated” by the ridiculing perspective which makes us see them either as blind and stupidly pathetic or as involved in ruthless intrigues. The “operator” of this undoing of the tragic dimension, the single agent whose interventions systematically undermine tragic pathos, is Ulysses—this may sound surprising in view of Ulysses’ first intervention, at the Greek war council in Act I where the Greek (or “Grecian,” as Shakespeare put it, in what now may be called “Bush mode”) generals try to account for their failure to occupy and destroy Troy after eight years of fighting. Ulysses intervenes from a traditional “old values” position, locating the true cause of the Greeks’ failure in their neglect of the centralized hierarchical order where every individual is in his proper place:
The specialty of rule hath been neglected.
And look how many Grecian tents do stand
Hollow upon this plain: so many hollow factions.
[. . .] O when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
Then enterprise is sick. How could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenity and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows. Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead.
Force should be right—or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power [. . .]
(I, 3)
What, then, causes this disintegration which ends up in the democratic horror of everyone participating in power? Later in the play, when Ulysses wants to convince Achilles to rejoin the battle, he mobilizes the metaphor of time as the destructive force that gradually undermines the natural hierarchical order: in the course of time, your old heroic deeds will soon be forgotten, your glory will be eclipsed by the new heroes—so if you want to continue shining in your warrior glory, rejoin the battle:
Time hath, my lord,
A wallet at his back,
wherein he puts
Alms for oblivion,
a great-sized monster
Of ingratitudes.
Those scraps are good deeds past,
Which are devoured
as fast as they are made,
Forgot as soon
As done. Perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright. To have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mock’ry. [. . .]
O, let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all To envious and calumniating time.
(III, 3)
Ulysses’ strategy here is profoundly ambiguous. In a first approach, he merely restates his argumentation about the necessity of “degrees” (ordered social hierarchy), and portrays time as the corrosive force which undermines old true values—an arch-conservative motif. However, on a closer reading, it becomes clear that Ulysses gives to his argumentation a singular cynical twist: how are we to fight against time, to keep old values alive? Not by directly sticking to them, but by supplementing them with the obscene realpolitik of cruel manipulation, of cheating, of playing one hero against the other. It is only this dirty underside, this hidden disharmony, that can sustain harmony (Ulysses plays with Achilles’ envy, he refers to emulation—the very attitudes that work to destabilize the hierarchical order, since they signal that one is not satisfied by one’s subordinate place within the social body). Secret manipulation of envy—that is, the violation of the very rules and values Ulysses celebrates in his first speech—is needed to counteract the effects of time and sustain the hierarchical order of “degrees.” This would be Ulysses’ version of Hamlet’s famous “The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!”—the only way to “set it right” is to counteract the transgression of Old Order with its inherent transgression, with crime secretly committed to serve the Order. The price we pay for this is that the Order which thus survives is a mockery of itself, a blasphemous imitation of Order.
This is why ideology is not simply an operation of closure, drawing the line between what is included and what is excluded/prohibited, but the ongoing regulation of non-closure. In the case of marriage, ideology not only prohibits extramarital affairs; its crucial operation is to regulate such inevitable transgressions (say, the proverbial Catholic priest’s advice to a promiscuous husband: if you really have needs that your wife cannot satisfy, visit a prostitute discreetly, fornicate and then repent, as long as you do not divorce). In this way, an ideology always admits the failure of closure, and