Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek
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is still a gain at the end of the process (perhaps, even, the friendship is saved).29
Is it not that, here also, one has to do something (offer an apology, choose terror) in order to see how superfluous it is? This paradox is sustained by the distinction between the “constative” and the “performative,” between the “subject of the enunciated” and the “subject of the enunciation”: at the level of the enunciated content, the whole operation is meaningless (why do it—offer an apology, choose terror—when it is superfluous?); but what this commonsensical insight overlooks is that it was only the “wrong” superfluous gesture which created the subjective conditions that made it possible for the subject to really see why this gesture was indeed superfluous. The dialectical process is thus more refined than it may appear; the standard notion is that one can only arrive at the final truth at the end of a series of errors, so that these errors are not simply discarded, but are “sublated” in the final truth, preserved therein as moments within it. What this standard notion misses, however, is how the previous moments are preserved precisely as superfluous.
This is why the obvious response “But is this idea of retroactively canceling the contingent historical conditions, of transforming contingency into Fate, not ideology at its formally purest, the very form of ideology?” misses the point, namely that this retroactivity is inscribed into reality itself: what is truly “ideological” is the idea that, freed from “ideological illusions,” one can pass from moment A to moment B directly, without retroactivity—as if, for instance, in an ideal and authentic society, I could apologize and the other party could respond “I was hurt, an apology was required, and I accept it” without breaking any implicit rules. Or as if we could reach the modern rational state without having to pass through the “superfluous” detour of the Terror.
How is this circle of changing the past possible without recourse to time travel? The solution was already proposed by Henri Bergson: of course one cannot change the past reality/actuality, but what one can change is the virtual dimension of the past—when something radically New emerges it retroactively creates its own possibility, its own causes or conditions.30 A potentiality can be inserted into (or withdrawn from) past reality. Falling in love changes the past: it is as if I always already loved you, our love was destined to be, is the “answer of the real.” My present love causes the past which gave birth to it. The same goes for legal power: here too, synchrony precedes diachrony. In the same way that, once I contingently fall in love, this love becomes my necessary Fate, once a legal order is installed, its contingent origins are erased. Once it is here, it was always already here, every story about its origin is now a myth, just like Swift’s story of the origins of language in Gulliver’s Travels: the result is already presupposed.
In Vertigo, it is the opposite that occurs: the past is changed so that it loses the objet a. What Scottie first experiences in Vertigo is the loss of Madeleine, his fatal love; when he recreates Madeleine in Judy and then discovers that the Madeleine he knew was actually Judy already pretending to be Madeleine, what he discovers is not simply that Judy was a fake (he knew that she was not the true Madeleine, since he had used her to recreate a copy of Madeleine), but that, because she was not a fake—she is Madeleine—Madeleine herself was already a fake—the objet a disintegrates, the very loss is lost, and we have a “negation of negation.” His discovery changes the past, deprives the lost object of the objet a.
Are, then, today’s ethico-legal neoconservatives not a little bit like Scottie in Hitchcock’s Vertigo? In wanting to recreate the lost order, to make a new distinguished Madeleine out of today’s promiscuous and vulgar Judy, they will sooner or later be forced to admit not that it is impossible to restore Madeleine (the old traditional mores) to life, but that Madeleine was already Judy: the corruption they are fighting in the modern permissive, secular, egotistic, etc., society was present from the very beginning. One can compare this with Zen Buddhism: those who criticize the Westernized New Age image and practice of Zen—its reduction to a “relaxation technique”—as a betrayal of authentic Japanese Zen, forget the fact that the features they deplore in Westernized Zen were already there in “true” Japanese Zen: after World War II, Japanese Zen Buddhists immediately started to organize Zen courses for business managers, whilst during the war the majority supported Japanese militarism, and so on.
In the case of true love, after discovering the truth, Scottie would have accepted Judy as “more Madeleine than Madeleine herself” (he does in fact do that just before the rise of the mother superior . . .): here Dupuy should be corrected. Dupuy’s perspective is that Scottie should have left Madeleine to her past—true, but what should he have done upon discovering that Judy was in fact Madeleine? The Madeleine of the past was an imaginary lure, pretending to be what she was not (Judy was playing Madeleine). What Judy was doing in playing Madeleine was true love. In Vertigo, Scottie does not love Madeleine—the proof is that he tries to recreate her in Judy, changing Judy’s properties to make her resemble Madeleine. Similarly, the idea of cloning a dead child for bereaved parents is an abomination: if the parents are satisfied by this, it is proof that their love was not genuine—love is not love for the properties of the object, but for the abyssal X, the je ne sais quoi, in the object.
In his Wissen und Gewissen, Viktor Frankl reports on one of his post-World War II patients, a concentration camp survivor who had been reunited with his wife after the war, only for her to die soon afterwards due to an illness contracted in the camp. The patient fell into total despair, and all Frankl’s attempts to drag him out of depression failed, till, one day, he told the patient: “Imagine that God gave me the power to create a woman who would have all the features of your dead wife, so that she would be indistinguishable from her—would you ask me to create her?” The patient was silent for a short time, then stood up, said “No, thanks, doctor!” and, shaking his hand, left to set out on a new and normal life.31 The patient in this case did what Scottie, who did indeed try to recreate the same woman, was not able to do: he became aware that, while one may be able to find the same woman with regard to all positive features, one cannot recreate the unfathomable objet a in her.
There is a science-fiction story, set a couple of hundred years in the future, when time travel is assumed to be possible, about an art critic who becomes so fascinated by the works of a New York painter from our era that he travels back in time to meet him. The painter, however, turns out to be a worthless drunk who steals the time machine from him and escapes into the future; alone in the world of today, the art critic paints all the paintings that fascinated him in the future and had made him travel into the past. Surprisingly, none other than Henry James had already used the same plot: The Sense of the Past, an unfinished manuscript found among James’s papers and published posthumously in 1917, tells a similar story which also uncannily resembles Vertigo, and stimulated penetrating interpretations by both Stephen Spender and Borges. (Dupuy notes that James was a friend of H. G. Wells—The Sense of the Past is his version of Wells’s Time Machine.32) After James’s death, the novel was adapted as a very successful play, Berkeley Square, which was made into a movie in 1933 with Leslie Howard as Ralph Pendrel, a young New Yorker who, upon inheriting an eighteenth-century house in London, finds in it a portrait of a remote ancestor, also named Ralph Pendrel. Fascinated by the portrait, he steps across a mysterious threshold and finds himself back in the eighteenth century. Among the people he meets there is a painter who was the author of the portrait that had captivated him—it is, of course, a self-portrait. In his commentary, Borges provided a succinct formulation of the paradox: “The cause is posterior to the effect, the motif of the voyage is one of the consequences of this voyage.”33 James added a love aspect to the trip into the past: back in the eighteenth century, Ralph falls in love with Nan, a sister of his (eighteenth-century) fiancée Molly. Nan eventually realizes that Ralph is a time-traveler from the future, and she sacrifices her own happiness to help him return to his own time and to Aurora Coyne, a woman who had previously rejected Ralph but would now accept him.
James’s story thus psychotically (in the real) mystifies the circle of the symbolic economy, in which effect precedes cause, i.e., retroactively creates it—and exactly the same holds for the