big Other, Real and superego That is to say, why is Wagner not yet properly modern? To put it in dogmatic Lacanian terms: because for him, the big Other still exists -- as we already pointed out, in her Liebestod, Isolde still refers to this Other in the guise of the ideal Witness supposed to REGISTER what is going on (Cant you see that he /Tristan/ is smiling?). It is not even Schoenberg who fully abandons this reference: the true break occurs between Schoenberg and Webern. While Schoenberg, although already totally resigned that there is no actual public which can directly respond to his work, still counted on the symbolic fiction of the One purely hypothetical, imagined, listener, needed for his composition to function properly, Webern renounced even this purely hypothetical supposition and fully accepted that there is no big Other, no ideal Listener at all for his compositions. … That is to say, in his classic If This Is a Man, Primo Levi recalls how he discovered with amazement that most of the inmates at Auschwitz shared the same dream: after miraculously surviving the camp, they are at home, telling about their horrible experiences to their friends and family, when, all of a sudden, they notice that the listeners are completely indifferent, bored, that they speak among themselves as if the survivor is not there, or simply leave the table -- does this ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story(Levi 1987, p. 60) not render the fact that the big Other doesnt exist, that there is no ideal Witness ready to register our experience? -- It is interesting to note that, in the very last paragraph of The Truce, Levi reports of a dream which haunted him long after the war and which, while it starts with the same scene as the Auschwitz dream (sitting at home, telling about his horrible experiences to friends and family), follows a different twist: what disturbs this scene of reconciliation is not the indifference of the listeners, but the emergence of a dream within a dream: all of a sudden, everything starts to collapse and disintegrate around him, he is alone in the centre of a grey and turbid nothing -- in the Lager once more, aware that the family scene was a mere deception, a dream, anxiously awaiting the well-known voice of the Kapo pronouncing the feared foreign word: Wstawach!, Get up! (Levi 1987, p. 379-380). This is what Lacan meant when he claimed that, within a dream, the real appears in the guise of the dream within a dream. The link between the two denouements is easy to discern, they ultimately amount to the two versions of the same outcome: the obscene superego voice is precisely the foreign intruder which causes the disintegration of the big Other. Such a heroic acceptance of the non-existence of the big Other is, perhaps, the only thoroughly radical ethical stance today, in art as well as in real life. Not only Wagner, but Nietzsche himself, his most bitter critic, was not able to persevere in this stance -- witness Nietzsches final madness, which is structurally strictly homologous to the suicidal passage à lacte: in both cases, the subject offers himself as the object to fill in, in the Real, the constitutive gap of the symbolic order, i.e. the lack of the big Other. That is to say, the key enigma of Nietzsches final madness is: why did Nietzsche have to take recourse to what cannot but appear to us as ridiculous self-aggrandizing (Why I am so brilliant?, etc.)? This is an inherent PHILOSOPHICAL deadlock, which has nothing whatsoever to do with any private pathology: his inability to accept the non-existence of the big Other. (Within these coordinates, suicide occurs when the subject perceives that the megalomaniac solution doesnt work.) Slavoj Zizek and Mladen Dolar, Operas Second Death, Routledge, 2001.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 03:34:13 +0000
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