The Sublime Object of Ideology

ideological figure of the Jew (schemer, wire-puller, exploiting our brave men and so on) and the common everyday experience of his good neighbour, Mr Stern? His answer would be to turn this gap, this discrepancy itself, into an argument for anti-Semitism: 'You see how dangerous they really are? It is difficult to recognize their real nature. They hide it behind the mask of everyday appearance – and it is exactly this hiding of one's real nature, this duplicity, that is a basic feature of the Jewish nature.' An ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as arguments in its favour.

Surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment

Herein lies the difference from Marxism: in the predominant Marxist perspective the ideological gaze is a partial gaze overlooking the totality of social relations, whereas in the Lacanian perspective ideology rather designates a totality set on effacing the traces of its own impossibility. This difference corresponds to the one which distinguishes the Freudian from the Marxian notion of fetishism: in Marxism a fetish conceals the positive network of social relations, whereas in Freud a fetish conceals the lack ('castration') around which the symbolic network is articulated.

In so far as we conceive the Real as that which 'always returns to the same place', we can deduce another, no less crucial difference. From the Marxist point of view, the ideological procedure par excellence is that of 'false' eternalization and/or universalization: a state which depends on a concrete historical conjunction appears as an eternal, universal feature of the human condition; the interest of a particular class disguises itself as universal human interest . . . and the aim of the 'criticism of ideology' is to denounce this false universality, to detect behind man in general the bourgeois individual; behind the universal rights of man the form which renders possible capitalist exploitation; behind the 'nuclear family' as a trans-historical constant the historically specified and limited form of kinship relations, and so on.

In the Lacanian perspective, we should change the terms and designate as the most 'cunning' ideological procedure the very opposite of externalization: an over-rapid historicization. Let us take one of the common-places of the Marxist-feminist criticism of psychoanalysis, the idea that its insistence on the crucial role of the Oedipus complex and the nuclear-family triangle transforms a historically conditioned form of patriarchal family into a feature of the universal human condition: is not this effort to historicize the family triangle precisely an attempt to elude the 'hard kernel' which announces itself through the 'patriarchal family' – the Real of the Law, the rock of castration? In other words, if over-rapid universalization produces a quasi-universal Image whose function is to make us blind to its historical, socio-symbolic determination, over-rapid historicization makes us blind to the real kernel which returns as the same through diverse historicizations/symbolizations.

It is the same with a phenomenon that designates most accurately the 'perverse' obverse of twentieth-century civilization: concentration camps. All the different attempts to attach this phenomenon to a concrete image ('Holocaust', 'Gulag' …), to reduce it to a product of a concrete social order (Fascism, Stalinism …) – what are they if not so many attempts to elude the fact that we are dealing here with the 'real' of our civilization which returns as the same traumatic kernel in all social systems? (We should not forget that concentration camps were an invention of 'liberal' England, dating from the Boer War; that they were also used in the U.S to isolate the Japanese population, and so on.)

Marxism, then, did not succeed in taking into account, coming to terms with, the surplus-object, the leftover of the Real eluding symbolization – a fact all the more surprising if we recall that Lacan modelled his notion of surplus-enjoyment on the Marxian notion of surplus-value. The proof that Marxian surplus-value announces effectively the logic of the Lacanian object petit a as the embodiment of surplus-enjoyment is already provided by the decisive formula used by Marx, in the third volume of Capital, to designate the logical-historical limit of capitalism: 'the limit of capital is capital itself, that is the capitalist mode of production'.

This formula can be read in two ways. The first, usual historicist-evolutionist reading conceives it, in accordance with the unfortunate paradigm of the dialectics of productive forces and relations of production, as that of 'content' and 'form'. This paradigm follows roughly the metaphor of the serpent which, from time to time, sheds its skin, which has grown too tight: one posits as the last impetus of social development – as its (so to speak) 'natural', 'spontaneous' constant – the incessant growth of the productive forces (as a rule reduced to technical development); this 'spontaneous' growth is then followed, with a greater or lesser degree of delay, by the inert, dependent moment, the relationship of production. We have thus epochs in which the relations of production are in accordance with the productive forces, then those forces develop and outgrow their 'social clothes', the frame of relationships; this frame becomes an obstacle to their further development, until social revolution again co-ordinates forces and relations by replacing the old relations with new ones which correspond to the new state of forces.

If we conceive the formula of capital as its own limit from this point of view, it means simply that the capitalist relation of production which at first made possible the fast development of productive forces became at a certain point an obstacle to their further development: that these forces have outgrown their frame and demand a new form of social relations.

Marx himself is of course far from such a simplistic evolutionary idea. If we need convincing of this, we have only to look at the passages in Capital where he deals with the relation between formal and real subsumption of the process of production under Capital: the formal subsumption precedes the real one; that is, Capital first subsumes the process of production as it found it (artisans, and so on), and only subsequently does it change the productive forces step by step, shaping them in such a way as to create correspondence. Contrary to the above-mentioned simplistic idea, it is then the form of the relation of production which drives the development of productive forces – that is, of its 'content'.

All we have to do to render impossible the simplistic evolutionary reading of the formula 'the limit of capital is capital itself' is to ask a very simple and obvious question: how do we define, exactly, the moment albeit only an ideal one — at which the capitalist relation of production become an obstacle to the further development of the productive forces? Or the obverse of the same question: when can we speak of an accordance between productive forces and relation of production in the capitalist mode of production? Strict analysis leads to only one possible answer: never.

This is exactly how capitalism differs from other, previous modes of production: in the latter, we can speak of periods of 'accordance' when the process of social production and reproduction goes on as a quiet, circular movement, and of periods of convulsion when the contradiction between forces and relations aggravates itself; whereas in capitalism this contradiction, the discord forces/relations, is contained in its very concept (in the form of the contradiction between the social mode of production and the individual, private mode of appropriation). It is this internal contradiction which compels capitalism to permanent extended reproduction – to the incessant development of its own conditions of production, in contrast to previous modes of production where, at least in their 'normal' state, (re)production goes on as a circular movement.

If this is so, then the evolutionist reading of the formula of capital as its own limit is inadequate: the point is not that, at a certain moment of its development, the frame of the relation of production starts to constrict further development of the productive forces; the point is that it is this very immanent limit, this 'internal contradiction', which drives capitalism into permanent development. The 'normal' state of capitalism is the permanent revolutionizing of its own conditions of existence: from the very beginning capitalism 'putrefies', it is branded by a crippling contradiction, discord, by an immanent want of balance: this is exactly why it changes, develops incessantly – incessant development is the only way for it to resolve again and again, come to terms with, its own fundamental, constitutive imbalance, 'contradiction'. Far from constricting, its limit is thus the very impetus of its development. Herein lies the paradox proper to capitalism, its last resort: capitalism is capable of transforming its limit, its very impotence, in the source of its power – the more it 'putrefies', the more its immanent contradiction is aggravated, the more it must revolutionize itself to survive.

It is this paradox which defines surplus-enjoyment: it is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some 'normal', fundamental enjoyment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus, because it is constitutively an 'excess'. If we subtract the surplus we lose enjoyment itself, just as capitalism, which can survive only by incessantly revolutionizing its own material conditions, ceases to exist if it 'stays the same', if it achieves an internal balance. This, then, is the homology between surplus-value – the 'cause' which sets in motion the capitalist process of production – and surplus-enjoyment, the object-cause of desire. Is not the paradoxical topology of the movement of capital, the fundamental blockage which resolves and reproduces itself through frenetic activity, excessive power as the very form of appearance of a fundamental impotence – this immediate passage, this coincidence of limit and excess, of lack and surplus – precisely that of the Lacanian objet petit a, of the leftover which embodies the fundamental, constitutive lack?

All this, of course, Marx 'knows very well … and yet': and yet, in the crucial formulation in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, he proceeds as if he does not know it, by describing the very passage from capitalism to socialism in terms of the above-mentioned vulgar evolutionist dialectics of productive forces and the relations of production: when the forces surpass a certain degree, capitalist relations become an obstacle to their further development: this discord brings about the need for socialist revolution, the function of which is to co-ordinate again forces and relations; that is, to establish relations of production rendering possible the intensified development of the productive forces as the end-in-itself of the historical process.

How can we not detect in this formulation the fact that Marx failed to cope with the paradoxes of surplus-enjoyment? And the ironic vengeance of history for this failure is that today there exists a society which seems to correspond perfectly to this vulgar evolutionary dialectics of forces and relations: 'real socialism', a society which legitimizes itself by reference to Marx. Is it not already a commonplace to assert that 'real socialism' rendered possible rapid industrialization, but that as soon as the productive forces reached a certain level of development (usually designated by the vague term 'post-industrial society'), 'real socialist' social relationships began to constrict their further growth?

2 From Symptom to Sinthome

Back to the future

The Dialectics of the Symptom

The only reference to the domain of science fiction in Lacan's work concerns the time paradox: in his first seminar, Lacan uses Norbert Wiener's metaphor of the inverted direction of time to explain the symptom as a 'return of the repressed':

Wiener posits two beings each of whose temporal dimensions moves in the opposite direction from the other. To be sure, that means nothing, and that is how things which mean nothing all of a sudden signify something, but in a quite different domain. If one of them sends a message to the other, for example a square, the being going in the opposite direction will first of all see the square vanishing, before seeing the square. That is what we see as well. The symptom initially appears to us as a trace, which will only ever be a trace, one which will continue not to be understood until the analysis has got quite a long way, and until we have realized its meaning.

The analysis is thus conceived as a symbolization, a symbolic integration of meaningless imaginary traces; this conception implies a fundamentally imaginary character of the unconscious: it is made of 'imaginary fixations which could not have been assimilated to the symbolic development' of the subject's history; consequently, it is 'something which will be realized in the Symbolic, or, more precisely, something which, thanks to the symbolic progress which takes place in the analysis, will have been'.

The Lacanian answer to the question 'From where does the repressed return?' is therefore, paradoxically, 'From the future.' Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the past, but constructed retroactively – the analysis produces the truth; that is, the signifying frame which gives the symptoms their symbolic place and meaning. As soon as we enter the symbolic order, the past is always present in the form of historical tradition and the meaning of these traces is not given; it changes continually with the transformations of the signifier's network. Every historical rupture, every advent of a new master-signifier, changes retroactively the meaning of all tradition, restructures the narration of the past, makes it readable in another, new way.

Thus, 'things which mean nothing all of a sudden signify something, but in a quite different domain'. What is a 'journey into the future' if not this 'overtaking' by means of which we suppose in advance the presence in the other of a certain knowledge – knowledge about the meaning of our symptoms – what is it, then, if not the transference itself? This knowledge is an illusion, it does not really exist in the other, the other does not really possess it, it is constituted afterwards, through our – the subject's – signifier's working; but it is at the same time a necessary illusion, because we can paradoxically elaborate this knowledge only by means of the illusion that the other already possesses it and that we are only discovering it.

If – as Lacan points out – in the symptom, the repressed content is returning from the future and not from the past, then the transference – the actualization of the reality of the unconscious – must transpose us into the future, not into the past. And what is the 'journey into the past' if not this retroactive working-through, elaboration, of the signifier itself? — a kind of hallucinatory mise-en-scène of the fact that in the field of the signifier and only in this field, we can change, we can bring about the past?

The past exists as it is included, as it enters (into) the synchronous net of the signifier – that is, as it is symbolized in the texture of the historical memory – and that is why we are all the time 'rewriting history', retroactively giving the elements their symbolic weight by including them in new textures – it is this elaboration which decides retroactively what they 'will have been'. The Oxford philosopher Michael Dummett has written two very interesting articles included in his collection of essays Truth and Other Enigmas: 'Can an Effect Precede its Cause?' and 'Bringing About the Past': the Lacanian answer to these two enigmas would be: yes, because the symptom as a 'return of the repressed' is precisely such an effect which precedes its cause (its hidden kernel, its meaning), and in working through the symptom we are precisely 'bringing about the past' – we are producing the symbolic reality of past, long-forgotten traumatic events.

One is therefore tempted to see in the 'time paradox' of science-fiction novels a kind of hallucinatory 'apparition in the Real' of the elementary structure of the symbolic process, the so-called internal, internally inverted eight: a circular movement, a kind of snare where we can progress only in such a manner that we 'overtake' ourselves in the transference, to find ourselves later at a point at which we have already been. The paradox consists in the fact that this superfluous detour, this supplementary snare of overtaking ourselves ('voyage into the future') and then reversing the time direction. ('voyage into the past') is not just a subjective illusion/perception of an objective process taking place in so-called reality independently of these illusions. That supplementary snare is, rather, an internal condition, an internal constituent of the so-called 'objective' process itself: only through this additional detour does the past itself, the 'objective' state of things, become retroactively what it always was.

Transference is, then, an illusion, but the point is that we cannot bypass it and reach directly for the Truth: the Truth itself is constituted through the illusion proper to the transference — 'the Truth arises from misrecognition' (Lacan). If this paradoxical structure is not yet clear, let us take another science-fiction example, William Tenn's well-known story 'The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway'. A distinguished art historian takes a journey in a time machine from the twenty-fifth century to our day to visit and study in vivo the immortal Morniel Mathaway, a painter not appreciated in our time but later discovered to have been the greatest painter of the era. When he encounters him, the art historian finds no trace of a genius, just an imposter, a megalomaniac, even a swindler who steals his time machine from him and escapes into the future, so that the poor art historian stays tied to our time. The only action open to him is to assume the identity of the escaped Mathaway and to paint under his name all his masterpieces that he remembers from the future — it is he himself who is really the misrecognized genius he was looking for!

This, therefore, is the basic paradox we are aiming at: the subject is confronted with a scene from the past that he wants to change, to meddle with, to intervene in; he takes a journey into the past, intervenes in the scene, and it is not that he 'cannot change anything' – quite the contrary, only through his intervention does the scene from the past become what it always was: his intervention was from the beginning comprised, included. The initial 'illusion' of the subject consists in simply forgetting to include in the scene his own act – that is, to overlook how 'it counts, it is counted, and the one who counts is already included in the account'. This introduces a relationship between truth and misrecognition/misapprehension by which the Truth, literally, arises from misrecognition, as in the well-known story about the 'appointment in Samarra' (from Somerset Maugham's play Sheppey):

Death: There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place, I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

We find the same structure in the myth of Oedipus: it is predicted to Oedipus's father that his son will kill him and marry his mother, and the prophecy realizes itself, 'becomes true', through the father's attempt to evade it (he exposes his little son in the forest, and so Oedipus, not recognizing him when he encounters him twenty years later, kills him ...). In other words, the prophecy becomes true by means of its being communicated to the persons it affects and by means of his or her attempt to elude it: one knows in advance one's destiny, one tries to evade it, and it is by means of this very attempt that the predicted destiny realizes itself. Without the prophecy, the little Oedipus would live happily with his parents and there would be no 'Oedipus complex'...

1 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 159.

Repetition in History

The time structure with which we are concerned here is such that it is mediated through subjectivity: the subjective 'mistake', 'fault', 'error', misrecognition, arrives paradoxically before the truth in relation to which we are designating it as 'error', because this 'truth' itself becomes true only through — or, to use a Hegelian term, by mediation of — the error. This is the logic of the unconscious 'cunning', the way the unconscious deceives us: the unconscious is not a kind of transcendent, unattainable thing of which we are unable to take cognizance, it is rather – to follow Lacan's wordplay-translation of Unbewusste – une bévue, an overlooking: we overlook the way our act is already part of the state of things we are looking at, the way our error is part of the Truth itself. This paradoxical structure in which the Truth arises from misrecognition also gives us the answer to the question: why is the transference necessary, why must the analysis go through it? The transference is an essential illusion by means of which the final Truth (the meaning of a symptom) is produced.

We find the same logic of the error as an internal condition of truth with Rosa Luxembourg, with her description of the dialectics of the revolutionary process. We are alluding here to her argument against Eduard Bernstein, against his revisionist fear of seizing power 'too soon', 'prematurely', before the so-called 'objective conditions' had ripened – this was, as is well known, Bernstein's main reproach to the revolutionary wing of social democracy: they are too impatient, they want to hasten, to outrun the objective logic of historical development. Rosa Luxembourg's answer is that the first seizures of power are necessarily 'premature': the only way for the working class to reach its 'maturity', to await the arrival of the 'appropriate moment' for the seizure of power, is to form itself, to educate itself for this act of seizure, and the only possible way of achieving this education is precisely the 'premature' attempts … If we merely wait for the 'appropriate moment' we will never live to see it, because this 'appropriate moment' cannot arrive without the subjective conditions of the maturity of the revolutionary force (subject) being fulfilled – that is, it can arrive only after a series of 'premature', failed attempts. The opposition to the 'premature' seizure of power is thus revealed as opposition to the seizure of power as such, in general: to repeat Robespierre's famous phrase, the revisionists want a 'revolution without revolution'.

If we look at this closely, we perceive that what is at stake in Rosa Luxembourg's argument is precisely the impossibility of metalanguage in the revolutionary process: the revolutionary subject does not 'conduct', 'direct' this process from an objective distance, he is constituted through this process, and because of this – because the temporality of the revolution passes through subjectivity – we cannot 'make the revolution at the right moment' without the previous 'premature', failed attempts. Here, in the opposition between Bernstein and Luxembourg, we have the opposition between the obsessional (man) and the hysterical (woman): the obsessional is delaying, putting off the act, waiting for the right moment, while the hysteric (so to speak) overtakes herself in her act and thus unmasks the falsity of the obsessional's position. This is also what is at stake in Hegel's theory of the role of repetition in history: 'a political revolution is generally sanctioned by the opinion of the people only when it is renewed' – that is, it can succeed only as a repetition of a first failed attempt. Why this need for repetition?

Hegel developed his theory of repetition apropos of the case of Julius Caesar's death: when Caesar consolidated his personal power and strengthened it to imperial proportions, he acted 'objectively' (in itself) in accordance with historical truth, historical necessity – the Republican form was losing its validity, the only form of government which could save the unity of the Roman state was monarchy, a state based upon the will of a single individual; but it was still the Republic which prevailed formally (for itself, in the opinion of the people) – the Republic was still alive only because she forgot that she was already dead', to paraphrase the famous Freudian dream of the father who did not know he was already dead: 'His father was alive once more and was talking to him in his usual way, but the remarkable thing was tha he had really died, only he did not know it.

To the 'opinion' which still believed in the Republic, Caesar's amassing of personal power – which was, of course, contrary to the spirit of the Republic – appeared an arbitrary act, an expression of contingent individual self-will: the conclusion was that if this individual (Caesar) were to be removed, the Republic would regain its full splendour. But it was precisely the conspirators against Caesar (Brutus, Cassius, and the others) who – following the logic of the 'cunning of reason' – attested the Truth (that is, the historical necessity) of Caesar: the final result, the outcome of Caesar's murder, was the reign of Augustus, the first caesar. The Truth thus arose from failure itself: in failing, in missing its express goal, the murder of Caesar fulfilled the task which was, in a Machiavellian way, assigned to it by history: to exhibit the historical necessity by denouncing its own non-truth – its own arbitrary, contingent character.

The whole problem of repetition is here: in this passage from Caesar (the name of an individual) to caesar (title of the Roman emperor). The murder of Caesar – historical personality – provoked, as its final result, the installation of caesarism: Caesar-person repeats itself as caesar-title. What is the reason, the driving force, of this repetition? At first sight the answer seems to be clear: the delay of the consciousness as to the 'objective' historical necessity. A certain act through which breaks historical necessity is perceived by the consciousness (the 'opinion of the people') as arbitrary, as something which also could not have happened; because of this perception people try to do away with its consequences, to restore the old state of things, but when this act repeats itself it is finally perceived as an expression of the underlying historical necessity. In other words, repetition is the way historical necessity asserts itself in the eyes of 'opinion'.

But such an idea of repetition rests upon the epistemologically naive presupposition of an objective historical necessity, persisting independently of consciousness (of the 'opinion of the people') and asserting itself finally through repetition. What is lost in this notion is the way so-called historical necessity itself is constituted through misrecognition, through the initial failure of 'opinion' to recognize its true character – that is, the way truth itself arises from misrecognition. The crucial point here is the changed symbolic status of an event: when it erupts for the first time it is experienced as a contingent trauma, as an intrusion of a certain nonsymbolized Real; only through repetition is this event recognized in its symbolic necessity – it finds its place in the symbolic network; it is realized in the symbolic order. But as with Moses in Freud's analysis, this recognition-through-repetition presupposes necessarily the crime, the act of murder: to realize himself in his symbolic necessity – as a power-title – Caesar has to die as an empirical, flesh-and-blood personality, precisely because the 'necessity' in question is a symbolic one.

It is not only that in its first form of appearance, the event (for example, Caesar's amassing of individual power) was too traumatic for the people to grasp its real signification – the misrecognition of its first advent is immediately 'internal' to its symbolic necessity, it is an immediate constituent of its final recognition. The first murder (the parricide of Caesar) opened up the guilt, and it was this guilt, this debt, which was the real driving force of the repetition. The event did not repeat itself because of some objective necessity, independent of our subjective inclination and thus irresistible, but because its repetition was a repayment of our symbolic debt.

In other words, the repetition announces the advent of the Law, of the Name-of-the-Father in place of the dead, assassinated father: the event which repeats itself receives its law retroactively, through repetition. That is why we can grasp Hegelian repetition as a passage from a lawless series to a lawlike series, as the inclusion of a lawless series – as a gesture of interpretation par excellence, as a symbolic appropriation of a traumatic, non-symbolized event (according to Lacan, interpretation always proceeds under the sign of the Name-of-the-Father). Hegel was thus probably the first to articulate the delay which is constitutive of the act of interpretation: the interpretational always sets in too late, with some delay, when the event which is to be interpreted repeats itself; the event cannot already be lawlike in its first advent. This same delay is also formulated in the Preface to Hegel's Philosophy of the Law, in the famous passage about the owl of Minerva (that is, the philosophical comprehension of a certain epoch), which takes flight only in the evening after this epoch has already come to its end.

The fact that the 'opinion of the people' saw in Caesar's action an individual contingency and not an expression of historical necessity is therefore not a simple case of 'delay of the consciousness in relation to the effectivity': the point is that this necessity itself – which was misrecognized by opinion in its first manifestation; that is, mistaken for a contingent self-will – constitutes itself, realizes itself, through this misrecognition.

And we should not be surprised to find the same logic of repetition in the history of the psychoanalytic movement: it was necessary for Lacan to repeat his split with the International Psycho-Analytical Association. The first split (in 1953) was still experienced as a traumatic contingency –

Lacanians were still trying to patch things up with the I.P.A, to regain admission – but in 1964 it also became clear to their 'opinion' that there was a necessity in this split, so they cut their links with the I.P.A and Lacan constituted his own School.

5 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Frankfurt: Surkhamp Verlag, 1969, pp. 111–13.

Hegel with Austen

Austen, not Austin: it is Jane Austen who is perhaps the only counterpart to Hegel in literature: Pride and Prejudice is the literary Phenomenology of Spirit; Mansfield Park the Science of Logic and Emma the Encyclopaedia... No wonder, then, that we find in Pride and Prejudice the perfect case of this dialectic of truth arising from misrecognition. Although they belong to different social classes – he is from an extremely rich aristocratic family, she from the impoverished middle classes – Elizabeth and Darcy feel a strong mutual attraction. Because of his pride, his love appears to Darcy as something unworthy; when he asks for Elizabeth's hand he confesses openly his contempt for the world to which she belongs and expects her to accept his proposition as an unheard-of honour. But because of her prejudice, Elizabeth sees him as ostentatious, arrogant and vain: his condescending proposal humiliates her, and she refuses him.

This double failure, this mutual misrecognition, possesses a structure of a double movement of communication where each subject receives from the other its own message in the inverse form: Elizabeth wants to present herself to Darcy as a young cultivated woman, full of wit, and she gets from him the message 'you are nothing but a poor empty-minded creature. full of false finesse'; Darcy wants to present himself to her as a proud gentleman, and he gets from her the message 'your pride is nothing but contemptible arrogance'. After the break in their relationship each discovers, through a series of accidents, the true nature of the other – she the sensitive and tender nature of Darcy, he her real dignity and wit – and the novel ends as it should, with their marriage.

The theoretical interest of this story lies in the fact that the failure of their first encounter, the double misrecognition concerning the real nature of the other, functions as a positive condition of the final outcome: we cannot go directly for the truth, we cannot say, 'If, from the very beginning, she had recognized his real nature and he hers, their story could have ended at once with their marriage.' Let us take as a comical hypothesis that the first encounter of the future lovers was a success – that Elizabeth had accepted Darcy's first proposal. What would happen? Instead of being bound together in true love they would become a vulgar everyday couple, a liaison of an arrogant, rich man and a pretentious, empty-minded young girl. If we want to spare ourselves the painful roundabout route through the misrecognition, we miss the Truth itself: only the 'working-through' of the misrecognition allows us to accede to the true nature of the other and at the same time to overcome our own deficiency – for Darcy, to free himself of his false pride; for Elizabeth, to get rid of her prejudices.

These two movements are interconnected because Elizabeth encounters, in Darcy's pride, the inverse image of her own prejudices; and Darcy, in Elizabeth's vanity, the inverse image of his own false pride. In other words, Darcy's pride is not a simple, positive state of things existing independently of his relationship with Elizabeth, an immediate property of his nature; it takes place, it appears, only from the perspective of her prejudices, vice versa, Elizabeth is a pretentious empty-minded girl only in Darcy's arrogant view. To articulate things in Hegelian terms: in the perceived deficiency of the other, each perceives – without knowing it – the falsity of his/her own subjective position; the deficiency of the other is simply an objectification of the distortion of our own point of view.

Two Hegelian jokes

There is a well-known, very Hegelian joke that illustrates perfectly the way truth arises from misrecognition – the way our path towards truth coincides with the truth itself. At the beginning of this century, a Pole and a Jew were sitting in a train, facing each other. The Pole was shifting nervously, watching the Jew all the time; something was irritating him; finally, unable to restrain himself any longer, he exploded: 'Tell me, how do you Jews succeed in extracting from people the last small coin and in this way accumulate all your wealth?' The Jew replied: 'ok, I will tell you, but not for nothing; first, you give me five zloty Polish money.' After receiving the required amount, the Jew began: 'First, you take a dead fish; you cut off her head and put her entrails in a glass of water. Then, around midnight, when the moon is full, you must bury this glass in a churchyard ...' 'And,' the Pole interrupted him greedily, 'if I do all this, will I also become rich?' 'Not too quickly,' replied the Jew; 'This is not all you must do; but if you want to hear the rest, you must pay me another five zloty!' After receiving the money again, the Jew continued his story; soon afterwards, he again demanded more money, and so on, until finally the Pole exploded in fury: 'You dirty rascal, do you really think I did not notice what you were aiming at? There is no secret at all, you simply want to extract the last small coin from me!' The Jew answered him calmly and with resignation: 'Well, now you see how we, the Jews...'

Everything in this small story is susceptible to interpretation, starting with the curious, inquisitive way the Pole looks at the Jew – it means that from the very beginning the Pole is caught in a relationship of transference: that the Jew embodies for him the 'subject presumed to know' – to know the secret of extracting money from people. The point of the story is of course that the Jew has not deceived the Pole: he kept his promise and taught him how to extract money from people. What is crucial here is the double movement of the outcome – the distance between the moment when the Pole breaks out in fury and the Jew's final answer. When the Pole blurts out 'There is no secret at all, you simply want to extract the last small coin from me!', he is already telling the truth without knowing it – that is to say, he sees, in the Jew's manipulation, a simple deception. What he misses is that through this very deception the Jew kept his word, delivered him what he was paid for (the secret of how the Jews ...). The Pole's error is simply his perspective: he looks forward to the 'secret' being revealed somewhere at the end; he situates the Jew's narration as a path to the final revelation of the 'secret'; but the real 'secret' is already in the narration itself: in the way the Jew, through his narration, captures the Pole's desire; in the way the Pole is absorbed in this narration and prepared to pay for it.

The Jew's 'secret' lies, then, in our own (the Pole's) desire: in the fact that the Jew knows how to take our desire into account. That is why we can say that the final turn of the story, with its double twist, corresponds to the final moment of the psychoanalytic cure, the dissolution of transference and 'going through the fantasy': when the Pole breaks out in fury he has already stepped out of transference, but he has yet to traverse his fantasy – this is achieved only by realizing how, through his deception, the Jew has kept his word. The fascinating 'secret' which drives us to follow the Jew's narration carefully is precisely the Lacanian objet petit a, the chimerical object of fantasy, the object causing our desire and at the same time – this is its paradox – posed retroactively by this desire; in 'going through the fantasy' we experience how this fantasy-object (the 'secret') only materializes the void of our desire.

Another well-known joke possesses exactly the same structure, but this is usually overlooked – we are referring, of course, to the joke about the Door of the Law from the ninth chapter of Kafka's Trial, to its final turnaround when the dying man from the country asks the door-keeper:

'Everyone strives to attain the law, how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?' The door-keeper perceives that the man is at the end of his strength and his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: 'No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since the door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it."

This final twist is perfectly homologous to the one at the end of the story about the Pole and the Jew: the subject experiences how he (his desire) was part of the game from the very beginning, how the entrance was meant only for him, how the stake of the narration was only to capture his desire. We could even invent another ending for Kafka's story to bring it nearer to the joke about the Pole and the Jew: after the long wait, the man from the country breaks out in fury and begins to cry at the doorkeeper: 'You dirty rascal, why do you pretend to guard the entrance to some enormous secret, when you know very well that there is no secret beyond the door, that this door is intended only for me, to capture my desire!' and the door-keeper (if he were an analyst) would answer him calmly: 'You see, now you've discovered the real secret: beyond the door is only what your desire introduces there ...'

In both cases, the nature of the final twist follows the Hegelian logic of surmounting, of abolishing the 'bad infinity'. That is to say, in both cases the starting point is the same: the subject is confronted with some substantial Truth, a secret from which he is excluded, which evades him ad infinitum – the inaccessible heart of the Law beyond the infinite series of doors; the unattainable last answer, the last secret of how the Jews extract money from us, awaiting us at the end of the Jew's narration (which could go on ad infinitum). And the solution is the same in both cases: the subject has to grasp how, from the very start of the game, the door concealing the secret was meant only for him, how the real secret at the end of the Jew's narration is his own desire – in short, how his external position vis-à-vis the Other (the fact that he experiences himself as excluded from the secret of the Other) is internal to the Other itself. Here we encounter a kind of 'reflexivity' which cannot be reduced to philosophical reflection: the very feature which seems to exclude the subject from the Other (his desire to penetrate the secret of the Other — the secret of the Law, the secret of how the Jews … ) is already a 'reflexive determination' of the Other; precisely as excluded from the Other, we are already part of its game.

A time trap

The positivity proper to the misrecognition – the fact that the misrecognition functions as a 'productive' instance – is to be conceived in an even more radical way: not only is the misrecognition an immanent condition of the final advent of the truth, but it already possesses in itself, so to speak, a positive ontological dimension: it founds, it renders possible a certain positive entity. To exemplify this let us refer again to science fiction, to one of the classic science-fiction novels, The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein.

The hypothesis of this novel (written in 1957) is that in 1970 hibernation has become an ordinary procedure, managed by numerous agencies. The hero, a young engineer by the name of Daniel Boone Davis, hibernates himself as a professional deception for thirty years. After his awakening in December 2000, he encounters – among other adventures – the old Dr Twitchell, a kind of 'mad genius' who has constructed a time machine; Davis persuades Dr Twitchell to use this machine on him and to transpose him back into the year 1970. There our hero arranges his affairs (by investing his money in a company that he knows, from his voyage to 2000, will be a great success in thirty years' time, and even by arranging for his own wedding in 2000: he organizes also the hibernation of his future bride) and then hibernates himself again for thirty years; the date of his second awakening is 27 April 2001.

This way, all ends well — there is just one small detail annoying the hero: in the year 2000, the newspapers publish, beside 'Births', 'Deaths' and 'Marriages', also the column 'Awakenings', listing the names of all persons roused from hibernation. His first stay in the years 2000 and 2001 lasted from December 2000 until June 2001; this means that Doc Twitchell has transposed him back to the past after the date of his second awakening in April 2001. In The Times for Saturday 28 April 2001, there was of course his name in the list of those awakened on Friday 27 April: 'D. B. Davis'. Why did he, during his first stay in 2001, miss his own name among the 'Awakenings', although he was all the time a very attentive reader of this column? Was this an accidental oversight?

But what would I have done if I had seen it? Gone there, met myself—and gone stark mad? No, for if I had seen it, I would not have done the things I did afterward—'afterward' for me—which led up to it. Therefore it could never have happened that way. The control is a negative feedback type, with a built-in 'fail safe', because the very existence of that line of print depended on my not seeing it; the apparent possibility that I might have seen it is one of the excluded 'not possibles' on the basic circuit design. 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.' Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true?

Here we have the literal definition of the 'agency of the letter in the unconscious': the line 'the very existence of which depended on my not seeing it'. If, during his first stay in 2001, the subject had perceived his own name in the newspaper – if he had perceived during his first stay the trace of his second stay in 2001 – he would have acted thereupon in a different manner (he would not have travelled back into the past, and so on): that is, he would have acted in a way that would have prevented his name from appearing in the newspaper. The oversight itself therefore has, so to speak, a negative ontological dimension: it is the 'condition of the possibility' of the letter that it must be overlooked, that we must not take notice of it – its very existence depends on its not being seen by the subject. Here we have a kind of inversion of the traditional esse – percipi: it is the non-percipii which is the condition of esse. This is perhaps the right way to conceive the 'pre-ontological' status of the unconscious (evoked by Lacan in his Seminar 11): the unconscious is a paradoxical letter which insists only in so far as it does not exist ontologically.

In a homologous way, we could also determine the status of knowledge in psychoanalysis. The knowledge at work here is knowledge concerning the most intimate, traumatic being of the subject, knowledge about the particular logic of his enjoyment. In his everyday attitude, the subject refers to the objects of his Umwelt, of the world that surrounds him, as to some given positivity; psychoanalysis brings about a dizzy experience of how this given positivity exists and retains its consistency only in so far as somewhere else (on another scene, an einem anderen Schauplatz) some fundamental non-knowledge insists – it brings about the terrifying experience that if we come to know too much, we may lose our very being.

Let us take, for example, the Lacanian notion of the imaginary self: this self exists only on the basis of the misrecognition of its own conditions; it is the effect of this misrecognition. So Lacan's emphasis is not on the supposed incapacity of the self to reflect, to grasp its own conditions – on its being the plaything of inaccessible unconscious forces: his point is that the subject can pay for such a reflection with the loss of his very ontological consistency. It is in this sense that the knowledge which we approach through psychoanalysis is impossible-real: we are on dangerous ground; in getting too close to it we observe suddenly how our consistency, our positivity, is dissolving itself.

In psychoanalysis, knowledge is marked by a lethal dimension: the subject must pay the approach to it with his own being. In other words, to abolish the misrecognition means at the same time to abolish, to dissolve, the 'substance' which was supposed to hide itself behind the form-illusion of misrecognition. This 'substance' – the only one recognized in psychoanalysis – is, according to Lacan, enjoyment jouissance: access to knowledge is then paid with the loss of enjoyment – enjoyment, in its stupidity, is possible only on the basis of certain non-knowledge, ignorance. No wonder, then, that the reaction of the analysand to the analyst is often paranoid: by driving him towards knowledge about his desire, the analyst wants effectively to steal from him his most intimate treasure, the kernel of his enjoyment.