Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek
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he explains, because people believe them to be special. Realizing that precisely this is the very point of the Dragon Scroll, Po rushes off to challenge Tai Lung. Despite Po’s skill, Tai Lung temporarily stuns him and takes the Dragon Scroll, but is unable to understand its symbolism. Po counter-attacks and defeats him in an explosion of light that ripples through the valley. The villagers, including Po’s father, hail Po as a hero. In the very last scene, Po rests on the floor with Shifu; after a few seconds, Po suggests that they get something to eat and Shifu agrees.
The first thing that strikes one about the film is a linguistic detail: the abundance of ironically tautological statements, from the trailer’s claim that the film is about “the legend of a legendary warrior,” to the father’s reference to the “special ingredient of my soup with special ingredient.” In the Lacanian “logic of the signifier,” tautology stands for the point at which, as Lacan put it, the signifier falls into its signified. Recall the old Polish anti-Communist joke: “Socialism is the synthesis of the highest achievements of all previous historical epochs: from tribal society, it took barbarism; from antiquity, it took slavery; from feudalism, it took relations of domination; from capitalism, it took exploitation; and from socialism, it took the name. . ..” Does the same not hold for the anti-Semitic image of the Jew? From the rich bankers, it took financial speculation; from capitalists, it took exploitation; from lawyers, it took legal trickery; from corrupted journalists, it took media manipulation; from the poor, it took indifference towards personal hygiene; from sexual libertines it took promiscuity; and from the Jews it took the name . . . Or take the shark in Spielberg’s Jaws: from the immigrants, it took their threat to small-town daily life; from natural catastrophes, it took their blind destructive rage; from big capital, it took the ravaging effects of an unknown cause on the daily lives of ordinary people; and from the shark it took its image . . . In all these cases, the “signifier falls into the signified” in the precise sense that the name is included in the object it designates.
What this means is that, to be a true anti-Semite, it is not enough to say that Jews are dirty, exploitative, manipulative, and so on: one has to add that they are dirty, exploiting, manipulative, etc., because they are Jews. What accounts for these visible positive properties is the mysterious je ne sais quoi which makes them Jews—this mysterious ingredient, “what is in a Jew more than a Jew” (or, in Kung Fu Panda, “what is in the soup more than the soup itself, more than its usual ingredients”), is what Lacan called the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire. Here, we encounter the first paradox of the objet a: the X beyond words is a pure effect of words. This object which is, by definition, ineffable—the je ne sais quoi which cannot be adequately translated into any explicit positive determinations, whose transcendence only shines through the flow of speech—is, with regard to its genesis, totally immanent to language, the product of a signifying reversal or self-relation. It emerges at the point where “the signifier falls into the signified,” in other words, its transcendence is the inverted mode of appearance of its immanence. This is why its presence is indicated by tautology: the two terms in a tautology are not at the same level: the first occurrence of the term is as a signifier, and the second as a signifier within the signified. In the statement “A Jew is a Jew,” one expects, after the first occurrence (“A Jew is . . .”), an explication of its signified, a definition of the term, an answer to the question “What is a Jew?”; but, when one gets the same term repeated, this signifying repetition generates the specter of an ineffable X beyond words. The paradox is thus that language reaches “beyond itself,” to the reality of objects and processes in the world, when it designates these objects and proceeds by means of clear denotative/discursive meanings; but when it refers to an ineffable transcendent X “beyond words,” it is caught in itself. The specter of radical Otherness is the mode of appearance of pure immanence, or, to put it in Hegelese, the truth of the relation to transcendent Otherness is self-relating.
Should we then read Kung Fu Panda as a somewhat naïve, but nonetheless basically accurate illustration of an important aspect of Lacanian theory? When Po opens the Dragon Scroll and sees nothing, only the empty surface, does he not thereby confirm Lacan’s thesis that the objet a is a lure, a stand-in for the void at the very heart of the symbolic order, that it has no positive ontological consistency? When Lacan proposes as the formula of fantasy $-a, does he not thereby indicate that the objet a is ultimately the fantasmatic object? The elementary feature of fantasy is the belief in the actual positive existence of the objet a, of the “special ingredient,” the quintessence, the sublime “fifth element” over and above the ordinary four (earth, fire, water, air); so when Po realizes that “there is no special ingredient. It’s only you. To make something special you just have to believe it’s special,” does he not thereby accomplish a kind of wild traversée du fantasme, breaking its spell?
There are indeed some surprisingly complex moments in Kung Fu Panda. When Po enters the forbidden hall in which the Dragon Scroll is kept, he sees a precious sacred painting and exclaims with awe: “I’ve only seen paintings of this painting”—an authentically Platonic moment, with its reference to the distinction between the copy and the copy of a copy. Furthermore, there is an interesting moment of psychological (and narrative) vacillation in the great confrontation between Shifu and Tai Lung: aware of his responsibility for Tai Lung’s failure to become a Master, Shifu apologizes to him, confessing how, due to his love for Tai Lung, he blinded himself to the dangerous path Tai Lung was taking and thus contributed to his downfall. At this moment, Tai Lung’s expression changes: taken aback, he looks at Shifu with a perplexed gaze mixed with sympathy, and we (the viewers) are led to believe that a moment of authentic existential contact has taken place, well beyond the simplistic confrontation of good and evil characters. However, the moment passes quickly and Tai Lung explodes in rage, once again ferociously attacking the paternal figure of Shifu. It is as if, at the level of the narrative logic, the offer Shifu makes to Tai Lung is: “Let us change the rules and move from this stupid cartoon confrontation to authentic drama!”, an offer which is rejected by his opponent.
So, again—is the film’s insight into the illusory nature of the object-cause of desire, into the primacy of the void over every object that occupies the place of the void, effectively proto-Lacanian? It is—but only if we misread Lacan’s notion of “traversing the fantasy” as a new version of traditional wisdom. That is to say, what is wisdom at its most elementary? In the film, it is embodied in the old tortoise Oogway, whose ultimate wisdom is that there is no objet a, no quintessence, every object of our desire is a lure, and we have to accept the vanity of all reality. But what about the obvious opposite of wisdom, the sarcastic denunciation and unmasking of all pretense to sublimity which abounds in the film? Kung Fu Panda continuously oscillates between these two extremes: serene wisdom and its cynical undermining by commonsense, with reference to common needs and fears. Such undermining becomes almost a running gag throughout the film—for example, when Shifu runs to Oogway to tell him he has some bad news, Oogway replies with the standard wisdom “There is no good or bad news, there is just news.” But when Shifu informs him that Tai Lung has escaped, Oogway says: “Well, this is bad news . . .” Or when, as mentioned, in the final scene of the film, Shifu and Po are laying on their backs meditating in silence, and Po, becoming agitated, says: “What about getting something to eat?”, to which Shifu agrees. But are these two levels (wisdom and everyday commonsense) really opposed? Are they not the two sides of one and the same attitude of wisdom? What unites them is their rejection of the objet a, of the sublime object of passionate attachment—in the universe of Kung Fu Panda, there are only everyday objects and needs, and the void beneath, all the rest is illusion. This, incidentally, is why the universe of the film is asexual: there is no sex or sexual attraction in the film; its economy is the pre-Oedipal oral-anal one (incidentally, the very name of the hero, Po, is a common term for “ass” in German). Po is fat, clumsy, common, and a kung fu hero, the new Master—the excluded third in this coincidence of opposites is sexuality.10
In what, then, does the ideology of the film reside? Let us return to the key formula: “There is no special ingredient. It’s only you. To make something special you just have to believe it is special.” This formula renders the fetishistic disavowal (split) at its purest—its message is: “I know very