Well burrowed, old mole!

Courage

Who among us has the courage to utter the unspeakable? This type of courage is what is most necessary in free human beings.  The person who possesses this type of courage is the only human being who can claim to be honest.  Knowing what any group defines as the unspeakable is a major key to that group’s motives and nature.  We should always ask ourselves, what is it not possible to articulate within their way of speaking?

It is often regarded as cruelty to perform the act of speaking the unspeakable.  However this is one case where cruelty should have  positive connotations because cruelty contains an element of fearlessness which is foregrounded in this act.  Thus, there is the English expression regarding the cruelty of some truths.  The articulation of the unspeakable is often the result of a pitiless evaluation, a ruthless evaluation, an evaluation that does not judge in terms of good and evil.  This should be contrasted with the Kantian critique, the critique that justifies its object,  whose axiom is that one should begin by believing  in that which one criticizes. 

Consider a person who walks into a shopping mall and says, “the necessity of work is a myth that is used to enslave us” or the scene in I Heart Hukabees where the fireman character states that Jesus can in fact be mad at someone who believes in him, that faith is not enough.  Another example would be the case of Dr. Wilhelm Reich, and the persecution that he endured for bringing out the connections between politics and sexuality.  What do all of these people have in common? They all have the courage to articulate that which a certain situation is configured to hide. As Hegel put it, “The courage of truth…is the first condition of philosophising.”

In many cases the unspeakable has to be spoken before it becomes unspeakable.  It will begin as the merely unspoken, it is spoken and then it is suppressed.  The unspeakability of the unspeakable is a prohibitive tautology like the “it is what it is because I said it is what it is” that Zizek finds at the foundation of all rule systems.  However, as Bataille notes, since the death of god, the validity of the tautology has dissolved, the copula has lost its binding power without divine sanction.  The impotence of the copula changes things somewhat and allows for all sorts of strange effects.  One of these is the fact that we can speak the unspeakable, we can say that something is what it is, and is not what it is.

The Copula

The copula is at the center of a certain type of thinking.  If the copula is now impotent, if it relied for its power of binding on the presumed existence of a transcendent  guarantor, and that guarantor has flown, we must face a new situation utterly without precedent in human history.   The ‘is’ just does not stick anymore because nothing has the authority to enforce that relation.  All assertions now have at least the  form, “I desire that it should be…” there is no longer pure predication, but desire and valuation in every assertion.  The general failure of the copula has many other consequences, all of which I will not get into here and now.  It is not that predication is impossible now, but rather that it shows itself in a new light.  There are authorities which try to underwrite the copula, but a certain innocence has been lost.  As John Berger said, “never again will a single story be told as if it was the only one.”  Each attempt to take up this role fails to transcend the immanence of the field of power, none is pure, each comes burdened with interests as one among a set of equally qualified candidates. 

As Derrida said, history is a succession of substitutions of one central concept for another.  The uniqueness of the period that we live in is the rapidity with which such substitutions take place, and the fact that we have ready access to other conceptual systems that are radically different from the ones that we were inducted into as children.  What is at the center of the center, if we can see the constant overturning of these “central” concepts,  if we can  take a ten hour flight and be in a different semiotic universe?  What is it that moves people to suspend their disbelief in these concepts? It becomes easier and easier to see the sheer force of the tautological command, it becomes easier and easier to see the unspeakable at the center, the naked prohibition, the terror at the heart of meaning.  Behind the concept of God is the priest and his accusations of witchcraft,  behind Reason the psychiatrist and the policeman with their  straightjacket, behind the free market the army with its missiles and machine guns.   The unspeakable is indispensible to the suspension of disbelief that is the staying power of any central concept.  For some time now disbelief has been affirming itself, has been stretching groggily, awakening from the long nightmare of history. 

Bakunin once said that, “”if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.” What is Bakunin doing here? He is employing irony in two senses; first, he inverts Voltaire’s famous aphorism, and second, he is employing an ironic equivocation which shows the gap between the God of tradition and the “God” of Voltaire.  The real God could never be abolished by human beings, but the God of Voltaire can.  However, he is also showing us the equivalence between these two, if a god can be abolished, if God can be the object of an abolition he could not have ever been anything but the God of Voltaire.  In a larger sense, what Bakunin is doing is speaking the unspeakable of the Christian speech community.  He is speaking on the same plane as the people who invented “God” in the first place, he is their shadow, that being that their act made possible, but whose existence they had always to suppress.  This is a bypassing of the limits of the Christian belief system from the very center of the same.

This type of irony is the result of a critique of a set of values in terms of its highest points, a critique which deals head on with them at their strongest, which does not settle for attacks on failures to realize the value but which attacks the value itself in its full realization.  The person performing such a critique does not begin by declaring belief in that which he criticizes; he or she would not seek to dethrone a false god or a false image of god in favor of the true one.  This critic merely asks, “if God exists what does that justify?” “if God does not exist then what is terribly unjustified?”

This seems to draw on the following conclusions:

1. No symbol can exist without a system
2. No symbol system can exist without a population
3. All symbol systems depend on forces exterior to them for their creation
4. These forces come from human beings in groups
5. The meaning of the symbol system is a function of the power relations within the group and between the group and other groups
6. Meaning can only be achieved in systematic closure
7. Such closure is always political