Chapter II: How Perverse Is Ruby?—
Lack in the Other? No, Thanks!
This chapter aims to examine how the founders and rulers of Ruby, namely, the New Fathers, in claiming the unification and consistence of the big Other—which is embodied both by the Ruby community and its patriarchy—come to make the world they live penetrated with perversion.1 The task of investigating the mental structure at work in Ruby bears two elemental purposes: first, to comprehend and problematize the “will to community” pervading the fathers and citizens of Ruby; then, to find a way to deal with the problematic mentality and preclude the recurrence of horrifying events. By the term “the will to community,” I mean the psychical apparatus that operates behind these people’s invention of and investment (Besetzung) in their residence.2 The cathexis of Ruby results in the narcissistic adherence to the community, including the demand for the communal integration, the logic of exclusionism, and the widespread xenophobia as is perceived in Ruby. Ultimately, the investment in the community leads to the heinous and scandalous gang violence imposed by the New Fathers.
Indeed, Ruby is preoccupied with the demand for the integrity and isolation of the community and a conspicuous aversion to strangers (the interracial or the intraracial ones). As the conversation between Richard Misner, the Reverend at the Cavalry church, and Patricia Best, the schoolteacher in the community, reflects, Ruby “used to be [as] tight as was” and “[i]t still is”
(207). Also, as Morrison describes, “neither the founders of Haven nor their descendants could tolerate anybody but themselves”; outsiders are as “unwelcome [as possible] on each grain of soil” of Ruby (13). The intolerance of those “strangers to Ruby people themselves” in the end
1 The big Other in Ruby can be understood to refer both to the community and—since it is the fathers who lead and initiate the construction and maintenance of the community, the patriarchy. Also, the Ruby community and patriarchy are the reincarnation the Haven community and patriarchy. Thus, when I refer to the big Other, it generally denotes the community and patriarchy that date back to Haven and is taken over by Ruby.
2 In SE, Strachey renders Besetzung as “cathexis,” which is a word derived from Greek and coined by himself. Yet, as Laplanche and Pontalis points out, Besetzung is no more than an everyday word in German, which corresponds to Freud’s intention in using this word (65). “Investment” is usually another way of translating this word and whenever it appears in the thesis, it should be understood to refer to cathexis/Besetzung.
contributes to the nine male Rubians’ prosecution of the Convent women.3 While these episodes explicitly manifest the unrelenting obsession with the integration of the community and the associated hostility to outsiders, the communal logics of exclusionism and essentialism still call for a meticulous analysis to understand their causation. The prevalent resistance to the communal disintegration and the abhorrence at both the interracial and intraracial strangers, I argue, stem from the perversion that saturates the big Other in Ruby. Thus, a better discernment of the cause for the segregation and xenophobia is grounded upon approaching the mentality of Rubians in light of perversion.
The exploration of the Ruby perversion carries a more consequential intention: to traverse the perverse fantasy and suspend the related jouissance and therefore to find the way out of the exclusionist and essentialist logic. As Laura Mulvey maintains, “analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it” (597). That is, a clarification of the structure of enjoyment, as Žižek once puts, serves to “lay bare its underlying libidinal economy” and hence helps to put into bracket the involved fantasy and jouissance (The Plague of Fantasies 46). Along Mulvey’s and Žižek’s lines of argument, it is reasonable to assert that an exposure of the perverse condition and acts observed in Ruby does not reify the structure of perversion and reinforce the associated enjoyment in the community. Rather, it paves the way for the traversing of the perverse fantasy and suspension of the enjoyed jouissance, the possibility of which I will discourse upon in Chapter IV. More importantly, an examination of the psychical structure predominant in Ruby intends not so much to blindly plead guilty its fathers and residents as to seek the medium of negotiation with perversion. As I have mentioned in the previous chapter, the accessibility of the
“second chance” given to Ruby pivots upon the traversing of the perverse fantasy. Whether this analytic work can be successful in turn hinges upon a proper reconstruction of fantasy. In consequence, an exposure of the perverse structure and fantasy prevailing in Ruby is required so as to prepare for the forthcoming task of traversing of fantasy.
3 The phrase “strangers to Ruby people themselves” is a modification of the title of one of Julia Kristeva’s masterpieces, Strangers to Ourselves. For a more detailed expansion on the way Rubians should deal with and negotiate with these “strangers to themselves,” please refer to Chapter IV.
In this chapter, I will exhibit how perverse Ruby can be by broaching its will to community.
How the New Fathers and Ruby people in consolidating and claiming the communal unity make the community a world of perversion. In order to clarify the correlation between perversion and the will to community, I will first begin with a recapitulation of how perversion is demarcated in Lacanian psychoanalysis, by Lacan and his disciples including Evans, Fink, Miller, and Žižek.
Then, extending from the Lacanian conceptualizations of perversion, I will disclose to what extent the mechanism of perversion structures the Ruby patriarchy and community.
The Fundamental Concepts of Perversion: Law and the Other’s Jouissance
In the psychoanalytic theory that precedes Lacan, perversion is conventionally defined along the normality of sexuality.4 As Dylan Evans notes, in Freudian psychoanalysis, this clinical category is composed of a variety of the deviations from the “‘normal’ sexual act,” or, more specifically, from “the norm of heterosexual genital intercourse” (Laplanche and Pontalis 306; Evans, An Introductory Dictionary 138). However, Lacanian psychoanalysis brings the understanding of perversion to an innovative and groundbreaking path. In the 1950s seminars, Lacan puts forward the slogan of “return to Freud” in psychoanalytic discourse and at the same time re-articulates Freudian theory according to the logic of structuralism. In the meantime, Lacan takes on the task of exploring the mystery of perversion by means of leading its discussion to a structural turn: instead of, as it used to be, being treated as an umbrella term covering all types of sexual abnormality, perversion is now thought of as a unique type of “clinical structure”
(Evans, An Introductory Dictionary 138).5 As Lacan himself specifies, perversion is “not simply an aberration in relation to social criteria, an anomaly contrary to good morals, although this register is not absent, nor is it an atypicality according to natural criteria, namely that it more or
4 For an overview of the definition of perversion by Freud, his predecessors, and contemporaries, please consult Laplanche and Pontalis 306-09.
5 In his re-reading of Freud, Lacan actually comes to differentiate three major categories of clinical structures, i.e., psychosis, perversion, and neurosis. The delineation of each category is based on its extraordinary way of encountering the castration complex: psychosis is characterized with foreclosure of castration, perversion disavowal of castration, and neurosis negation of castration.
less derogates from the reproductive finality of sexual union. It is something else in its very structure” (S1 221; emphases added).6
In this ingenious light shed by Lacan, the spotlight on perversion now shifts from its deflection from sexual normality onto its structural specifics. As Evans describes, the clinical structure of perversion has at least two primary and distinctive features: the disavowal (Verleugnung) of castration and the pervert subject’s assumption of him-/herself as the
“object-instrument of the Other’s jouissance” (An Introductory Dictionary 138-39; Žižek, The Plague 34).7 In the first analysis, in psychoanalytic discourse, disavowal refers to a specific way of refusing castration and contributes to perversion: the subject falls within the domain of perversion and becomes a pervert when (s)he cannot not completely admit and accept the trauma and the possibility of castration. Yet, in taking recourse to disavowal as a defense mechanism, the pervert subject does not completely renounce castration (which is known as foreclosure and will only give rise to psychosis). In fact, perversion is symptomatic of a certain “splitting of the ego”8: the pervert subject simultaneously admits and disavows the occurrence and aftermath of castration, or, in Lacan’s words, the “threat of or nostalgia of not-having [manque à avoir]” the phallus ( “The Signification of Phallus” 582). The interrelation between perversion and castration
6 Lacan’s groundbreaking interpretation of perversion through its clinical structure, as Evans brilliantly observes, also contributes to the distinction and “inter-independence” of act and structure: while a perverse subject may not necessarily enact perverse acts, perverse acts may be committed by non-perverse subjects (An Introductory Dictionary 138).
7 The original German applied by Freud to describe the pervert’s reaction to castration is Verleugnung, which is alternatively translated as “denial” and “disavowal” in the Anglophone world. Yet, as Donald Nicholson-Smith, translator of Laplanche and Pontalis’s The Language of Psycho-analysis, suggests, “disavowal” might serve as a better term in that the translators and editors of Standard Edition use this term as a consistent rendering of Freud’s Verleugnung and “denial” may be confused with another term “verneinen,” which means “to negate,” and hence with a neurotic response to castration (120). Thus, in the following discussion, I will use “disavowal” as the specific term referring to Verleugnung.
8 Following Freud’s premise of the “splitting of ego […] in perversion, not in neurosis,” Fink relates: “In neurosis, contradictory thoughts are situated at differently […] agencies,” split between the ego and the id […] In perversion […] the ego itself splits, and contradictory ideas—a woman both does and does not have a penis—are maintained side by side in the same agency [of conscious]” (A Clinical Introduction 171). As Freud maintains, in defending against the threat and fear of castration, the child “disavowed reality” so that “he […] saved his own penis” by means of “a displacement of [the] value” of the penis “to another part of the body” (“Splitting of the Ego in Defence” 277). With the substitute (known as fetish), the child “continued with his masturbation as though it implied no danger; but at the same time, […] with the creation of his fetish, he developed an intense fear of his father punishing him” (277). Thus, it is understandable that splitting of the ego consists in the ambivalence of the work of the substitute fetish in the ego: it demonstrates a simultaneity of appeasing and arousing the castration anxiety.
can thus be best understood as a neither-nor and a both-and. The pervert neither completely accept nor purely reject castration; (s)he just both admits and disavows this traumatic experience.
And it is this ambivalent mechanism of disavowal, this very synchronous acknowledgement and denial of castration that constitutes the clinical structure of perversion.
The reason why the perverse subject disavows castration has to be understood in light of the jouissance of the Other. In addressing the relation between perversion and the Other’s jouissance, Lacan formulates the matheme (a ◊ $), whereby he explicates the structure of the pervert’s fantasy.9 As I have made clear in Chapter I, the “a” refers to the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire, and $ means the barred, the castrated subject—though here it does not indicate the pervert subject but instead the Other “as another subject” (Evans, An Introductory Dictionary 133). With this formula, Lacan postulates that the pervert subject intends to fill up the lack in the Other by treating “himself as [the] object” that fulfills the Other’s jouissance “in his encounter with the division of subjectivity [of the Other]” (S11 185).10 As Evans clarifies, the pervert subject
“assumes the position of the object-instrument of the ‘will-to-enjoy,’ which is not his own will but that of the big Other,” and intends to “pursue his activity [not] for his own pleasure, but for the enjoyment of the big Other” (An Introductory Dictionary 139).11 In other words, in disavowing castration and failing to totally settle down within the purview of the Symbolic, the pervert subject is in fact trying to make open the access to jouissance in the service of the big Other.
Yet, the matheme on how the pervert subject fantasizes about the interrelation between him-/herself and the Other’s jouissance brings to mind another key aspect in Lacanian
9 In his “Kant avec Sade,” Lacan explains that the lozenge symbol ◊ should “be read as ‘desire for.’” (653). In this logic, (a ◊ $) reads that the self-instrumentalized subject desires for “having his [the pervert] division as a subject entirely reflected in the Other” (653). In fact, the formula suggests at least two distinct ways of interpretation: first, the pervert needs the Other to be split ($, the barred subject of “practical reason”) so as to complete the Other’s jouissance (S, “the brute subject of jouissance”) (654). Also, through its jouissance-fulfilling activity perversion arouses the anxiety in the Other (S10; qtd. in Fink, A Clinical Introduction 187).
10 Or, to be more specific, the pervert subject acts for the Other’s jouissance “in his encounter with the division of subjectivity [of the Other subject]”: as Lacan holds, perversion is “sustained by the intersubjective relation” (S1 214).
11 For a discussion of the translation of Lacan’s jouissance, see Chapter I, note 16.
psychoanalysis: the lack in the Other. As I have noted in the previous chapter, Lacan elaborates the dialectic between jouissance and castration with the thesis that “[c]astration means that jouissance has to be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire.” Or, Lacan puts elsewhere: “Transgression in the direction of jouissance only takes place if it is supported by the oppositional principle, by the forms of the Law” (S7 177). Put differently, jouissance does not precede and thus demand castration; the former in fact results from the latter.
Here the Lacanian theses on the dialectical relationship between castration and jouissance originally aims to explain that the (neurotic) subject’s jouissance lies in what (s)he has sacrificed to enter the Symbolic register, i.e., the Thing (das Ding). Yet, it also illuminates that lack, which results from castration, denotes the very locus of jouissance.12 In other words, castration creates both lack and jouissance; the site of lack is the very locus of jouissance.13
Now, with the interconnection of jouissance and lack in mind, it is reasonable to argue that when the pervert subject claims to act for the Other’s jouissance, (s)he is actually perspiring for the stuffing of the lack in the Other. As Evans elucidates, “disavowal is the failure to accept that lack [in the Other] causes desire, the belief that desire caused by a presence” (An Introductory Dictionary 44). Since the lack in the Other tantalizingly suggests the gap, the hole, and not-wholeness of the Symbolic, the pervert’s task of serving as the “object-instrument” of the
12 The term “the Thing”/das Ding (la Chose in French), which derives from Kant’s Thing-in-itself, belongs to the Real and stands outside the Symbolic. Yet, in its relation to “the world of wishes and expectations,” i.e., to desire, das Ding is “the absolute Other of the subject” and the lost object “that is supposed to be found [but] cannot be found again,” that [o]ne doesn’t find it, but only its pleasurable associations” (S7 52). This way, das Ding initiates the (metonymic) movement of desire, its consummation lies in the acquirement of the Thing and the production of jouissance.
13 As Early as in the 1956-57 seminar, which is entitled Object Relations, Lacan has deliberated upon the relation of lack and castration and subcategorized castration into three different kinds, each of which corresponds to one of the three separated times of the Oedipus complex and three distinctive types of lack. The three castrations are frustration, privation, and the castration proper (though from time to time Lacan still calls the first two “castration”). What predominates in the first time of the Oedipus complex is frustration, which denotes the imaginary lack of a real object (the breast) by the symbolic mother and the time when the mother fails to meet the child’s unconditional demand for love; the second time of the Oedipus complex is associated with privation, which specifies the real lack/castration of a symbolic object (the symbolic phallus) by the imaginary father, the time when the father deprives the mother’s possession of phallus; and in the third time of the Oedipus complex comes the castration proper, which indicates the symbolic lack/castration of the imaginary object (the imaginary phallus) by the real father, the time the father deprives the child of the possibility of identifying with the imaginary phallus (Evans, An Introductory Dictionary 22). In the following discussion, I will abide by Lacan’s categorization and the term castration will only denote the castration proper.
Other’s jouissance is centered upon how to “fill the void” in the Other (Fink, A Clinical Introduction 175). Driven by the will to the Other’s jouissance, the pervert subject then takes full attention to the hole and (non-)wholeness of the Other. In order to fulfill the jouissance of the big Other, the pervert shoulders the mission of pursuing and defending the completeness of the Symbolic register. Thus, in perversion still permeates the mechanism of disavowal, but in the sense of disavowing the castration of the big Other. Intending to reject the lack in the Other and maintain the possibility of the Other’s access to jouissance, the pervert would make efforts to prevent the castration of the castrating agent and the collapse of the Symbolic domain. If the totality and unity of the Other is ever in danger or even sabotaged, the pervert will strive to avert any possible threat to the wholeness of the Other or to stitch up the hole in the Other. That is, perversion is symptomatic of an endeavor in all manners to jam-pack the lack in the Other and an attempt to keep intact and secure the functioning of the Symbolic register.14
More importantly, when the pervert takes heed of the (in-)completeness of the Other, (s)he is in fact working for the unity and integrity of the Other qua the Law (of desire), which is also known as the paternal function.15 As Lacan playfully reads and interprets, perversion bears the overtone of “père-version,” which is a combination of “père” (“father” in French) and “version.”
As Miller explains, perversion is characterized with “a turning to the father, a call to the father”
and is hence “in no sense a subversion” (“On Perversion” 308). That is, in no way suggesting the
14 The pervert subject’s dedication to the unity of the Other may put into question the boundary between neurosis and perversion if the Lacanian premise that the neurotic fantasy also functions to mend the lack in the Other is taken into account (yet, the neurotic also cares about the lack in the self; the pervert does not). The basic differentiation lies in the fact that while the neurotic in his/her fantasy structure, known as ($ ◊ a), looks for the object a that fills the gap in the Other, the pervert, whose fantasy structure is the reversal of the neurotic—(a ◊ $), takes him-/herself as this very object-instrument that provides the jouissance of the Other. In addition, as Evans has reminded, the act does not necessary correspond to the clinical structure; a neurotic subject can commit a perverse act and still remains in the field of neurosis (An Introductory Dictionary 138). After all, as Ragland indicates, “[f]antasy is […]
fundamentally perverse”; or, as Fink, following Lacan, specifies, “object a has something inherently fetishistic [and hence perverse] about it” (Ragland 22; Fink, A Clinical Introduction 166).
15 The Law of desire can be synonymously grasped as the paternal function for a variety of reasons: first, it is the father who enacts and imposes the incest prohibition on the subject and the paternal function serves as “the name for this prohibitive and legislative role”; also, the Law of desire is exerted through the Name-of-the-Father (Le Nom-du- Père), which names the desire of the mother (le désir de la mère) and thus makes possible the subject’s desire; last but not least, the Law of desire is also “born out [and reinforced] of the murder of the [primal] father” as is discussed in Freud’s Totem and Taboo and is elaborated in Lacan’s Seminar VII (Evans, An Introductory Dictionary 99).
derailment from the normalcy of sexual behavior, this clinical category should not be thought of merely as the transgression of the boundary of normality. Perversion aims at not so much the subversion to and transgression of the father’s Law as at the subservience to the potency and even omnipotence of the father and the paternal function. As a result, in their discussions on the relation between perversion and the Other qua the paternal function Miller and Fink brilliantly conclude: “there is no negation of the Other in perversion” and “the pervert needs the Other to exist”; “disavowal concerns the father: the father’s desire, the father’s name, and the father’s law” (“On Perversion” 317; A Clinical Introduction 170).
Fink’s exploration of perversion in fact makes more transparent the complicit relation between the pervert subject and the paternal function. Training in Miller’s mid-1980s seminars on Lacanian psychoanalysis and inheriting Lacan’s playful reading of perversion, Fink portrays the pervert as someone who “calls upon or appeals to the father, hoping to make the father fulfill the paternal function”: “while [perversion] sometimes presents itself as a no-holds-barred, jouissance-seeking activity, its less apparent aim is to bring the law into being,” to “mak[e] the Other exist—not the mOther, but the symbolic, law-giving Other” (A Clinical Introduction 181, 180, 184; emphases added). That is, perversion, unlike neurosis and psychosis, is neither an attempt at the dissolution of the Symbolic register (as in psychosis) nor a complacent intention of stealing and winning back some jouissance from the big Other (as in neurosis). On the contrary, the pervert seemingly parasites on the calling for the operation of big Other qua paternal law and the Symbolic register. Thus, the psychical category is structured around the rigorous demand for the potent exertion and presence of “the symbolic, law-giving Other.”
The ruthless and unrelenting command for the existence of the Law as seen in perversion also results from the specific way in which the pervert engages with the paternal function and which is mediated by a third term, Über-Ich, the superego. In The Ego and the Id, Freud expounds that the superego is “the heir of the Oedipus complex” and “arises […] from identification with the father taken as a model” (36, 54). As Fink elaborates, “the superego […]
originates in parental voices, most typically in the voice of the father [and] is experienced as an
expression of the Other’s desire” (A Clinical Introduction 189).16 That is, in the process of identification with the father, the pervert subject introjectes the rigor and brutality with which the father’s Law is voiced and proclaimed. As Lacan reveals, the formation of the superego is accompanied by an identification “only with what is most devastating, most fascinating, in the primitive experiences of the subject. It ends up being identified with what I call the ferocious figure, with the figures which we can link to primitive traumas the child has suffered […]” (S1 102; emphases original). Here “the ferocious figure” certainly refers to the father as the castrating agent; the configuration of the superego out of the identification with the father is coextensive with the internalization of the authority and oppression implicit in castration. This way, the formed superego comes to bear the trace and taint of the ferocity that characterizes the announcement and enactment of the Law.
On the other hand, insomuch as identification is a way of (dis-)possessing or “not without having” the forbidden or lost love-object, the superego arising from the introjection of the father and his Law serves to retain the presence and operation of the paternal function. However, the pervert can only do so by (mis-)interpreting the desire and demand of the big Other, confusing the former with the latter.17 As Lacan maintains, the superego is no more than “a failure to recognize the [L]aw” and “at one and the same time the [L]aw and its destruction […] its commandment of [L]aw” (S1 102). As Žižek elucidates, the superego is “the obscene ‘nightly’
law that necessarily redoubles and accompanies, as its shadow, the ‘public’ Law” and, in the course of translating the paternal function, (mis-)reading it” (The Metastases of Enjoyment 54).
The “failure to recognize” and “(mis-)reading of the Law” derive from the identification of the
16 It is worthwhile to take into consideration Lacan’s postulation of voice as the objet petit a, and, in the case of perversion, as the object whose existence and validity in fulfilling the Other’s jouissance has to be ensured (“The Subversion of Subject” 693).
17 In identifying with the love-object, the ego comes to unconsciously preserve the object within himself/herself.
This identification-as-possession is a vestige of the cannibalistic devouring as perceived in the child at the oral stage and the primitive people who consume the animal objects so as to earn their power or to be identical with these animals. However, identification does not in reality possess the object; it is no more than a way of having it by not having and thus can be understood as “not without having the object.”
Other’s desire (which is the Law of desire per se) with the Other’s demand.18 Thus, Fink relates that the pervert subject reduces “[t]he Other’s desire” to the Other’s demand and abides by the latter “instead of the [Law], in place of the [Law], in the absence of the [Law]” (A Clinical Introduction 189). In other words, the superego at work in perversion clearly dramatizes its fantasy structure in relation with the Other: in every pronouncement of the function of the Other qua Law, the pervert simply misrecognizes the meaning of the Other’s desire and treats it to the Other’s demand, which is vocalized through the superego and asks for the completion (rather than postponement) of the Other’s desire.
Morever, the need to enact and reinforce the paternal function in perversion stems from the failure of castration and the weakness of the castrating agent, the Symbolic father. As Fink illuminates, it is the “inadequacy of the paternal function” that gives birth to the pervert subject:
the possibility of disavowal of castration originates from the impotence of the father and the consequent failure of castration (A Clinical Introduction 174).19 To the pervert, the “inadequacy of the paternal function” is tantamount to the castration of the paternal agency. As a result, Miller states that “perversion may be spoken of as fear of castration, [as] fear of the Other’s castration essentially” (“On Perversion” 317). If the father himself has “never worked out his own problems with authority” and is hence unable to decree castration and make his law pronounced, which implies the castration of the Symbolic register—the castrating agency as such—, then the pervert will come to defend and exert the castrating and desire-creating Law in the father’s stead (A Clinical Introduction 180). The failure of the paternal function as the necessary condition for perversion perhaps best explains the determinedness and severity seen in perversion. The cruelty
18 As Lacan maintains, “the neurotic, whether hysteric, obsessive, or, more radically, phobic, is the one who identifies the Other’s lack [i.e., the locus of the object of the Other’s desire] with the Other’s demand, Φ with D”
and “his fantasy […] is reduced to the drive: ($ ◊ D)” (“The Subversion of Subject” 698). Since fantasy is inherently perverse, Lacan’s account of the correlation between neurosis and fantasy can be borrowed to explicate how fantasy operates in perversion: it is embodied in the superego’s misconception of the Law.
19 Here the “paternal function” in fact designates the register of the Symbolic, the Other qua Law. Lacan uses the term this way in that the subject’s entrance into the Symbolic domain depends upon whether the Symbolic father can name the desire of the mother (la désir de la mère) with the Name of the Father (le Nom du Père). In addition, since the process of naming acts as a metaphor, the paternal function is also referred to as the “paternal metaphor” in Lacanian psychoanalysis. For the discussion on how the father’s naming helps to lead the individual into the Symbolic and to become a desiring subject, please consult Fink, The Lacanian Subject 57-58.
and mercilessness typical of the pervert in enunciating the father’s law (exemplified, as Miller indicates, by “the judge, the priest, and the professor,” who are considered by him to be “[t]he true perverts”) exactly tell of the father’s impotence with respect to the constitution and enactment of the Law (“On Perversion” 318).
The recognition of the “perversion” as “père-version” and of the associated anxiety over the castration of the Other qua Law in Symbolic sheds a much transparent light on the pervert subject’s self-assumed role of fulfilling the Other’s jouissance. When the pervert asks for the enunciation and reinforcement of the paternal function and castration, (s)he is in actuality trying to be the “object-instrument” of the jouissance of the Other. Precisely, in perversion castration does not mean that “jouissance has to be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire”; on the contrary, castration is what makes jouissance accessible to the Other.
As Fink observes, “[i]t is the […] staging of castration that brings […] a kind of jouissance” (A Clinical Introduction 192). Yet, Fink immediately adds that in the process of imposing castration, the pervert also “derives [for himself] satisfaction from the enactment of the very operation which demands that he separate from the source of his satisfaction” (A Clinical Introduction 192-93). Or, as Žižek describes: “A pervert fully acknowledges the obscene-jouissant underside of the Law, since he gains satisfaction from the very obscenity of the gesture of installing the rule of Law—that is, of ‘castration’” (The Plague 35). That is, under the pervert’s “apparent altruism”
and his/her “conscious fantasies” for “unending jouissance” may hide “something in [the pervert’s fantasy] for [himself]” (Fink, A Clinical Introduction 180-81). However, it is important to bear in mind that what stands side by side with the pervert’s autoerotic enjoyment of castration is something “in pervert more than pervert himself/herself,” namely, the objet petit a incarnated in perversion’s altruistic service for the jouissance of the Other. If the pervert subject’s enactment of castration can strengthen and consolidate the paternal function and hence bring jouissance, it is mainly for the jouissance of the Other that the pervert sweats. In other words, whereas in perversion the exertion of castration can produce autoerotic effects, the pervert would still use it to pave the way for the Other’s access to jouissance. No matter how much autoerotic enjoyment
the staging of the Law can yield in perversion, the actualization of the paternal function undoubtedly spoonfeeds the big Other with jouissance.
Against the clinical structure of perversion as is developed in Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is now possible to perceive conspicuously how perversion structures Ruby and its ruling patriarchy.
Similar to the Lacanian thesis that perversion should not be treated as the generic term for the natural deviations from normality, neither is Ruby born to be a perverse society: it in fact becomes a place of perversion. As I have mentioned at the inception of the chapter, a mapping of the process in which both the patriarchal and communal Other get permeated with perversion is necessary before the analytic treatment can claim its validity. The success of the traversing of the perverse fantasy and the suspending of the Other’s jouissance pivots upon a thorough revelation and reconstruction of the locus in which the perverse fantasy is at work. Thus, in what follows, based on the Lacanian definition of perversion’s relation with the Law and the Other’s jouissance, I will uncover where and how perversion underlies Rubians’ will to community.
Lack in the Other? No, Thanks!
In Paradise, perversion finds its expression in the ways the New Fathers—who are basically the founders and rulers of Ruby— and in particular Deacon and Steward Morgan, fantasize about and engage with the lack in big Other, namely, in Ruby and its patriarchy. In fact, the Ruby fathers demonstrate a severe demand for the integration and consistence of the community and for the potency and omnipotence of the paternal function. Specifically, the New Fathers manage to make their community and patriarchy bear no lack and remain uncastrated and thus make sure the possession of the phallus by the Other, even though they seemingly have always already admitted the lack and castration of the Symbolic register. With the devotion to the non-hole-ness and wholeness of the community and patriarchy, the Ruby Fathers come to disavow the rift in the Symbolic universe and the failure of the paternal function and hence lay claim to the fulfillment of the jouissance of the Other. In the end, these male Rubians make themselves perverts and their
“Paradise” a world of perversion.
The strategies by which the New Fathers come to have the big Other with phallus and without lack are manifold. In fact, the approaches to the wholeness of the Symbolic have to be unquestionably various. As Lacan asserts, “[a]s soon as [the pervert subject] realizes [the jouissance of the Other], at the very moment when [(s)he] catches up with it, [(s)he] loses its object” (S1 222). In this regard, perversion requires innumerable ways of attaining and sustaining the Other’s jouissance. One of the most essential and handy measures is merely to disavow the existence of the lack in the Other. In the first analysis, Morrison’s characterization of the Morgan twin brothers has metaphorized the disavowal of lack in Ruby. Taking the place of the patriarchy in Ruby, Deacon and Steward would equate the inter-split between themselves with the intra-split of the Other. Thus, although born to be two distinctive individuals, they have to behave and think as if they were one: “the brothers not only agreed on almost everything […].
Each knew the other’s thoughts as well as he knew his face and only once in a while needed the confirmation of a glance” (Paradise 116). The condition of being “never not one” certainly evidences the access to jouissance since it makes the twin “fee[l] more complete” and “more like…superior.” (116). In addition, as Deacon himself admits, “[e]xcept for a crack here, a chink there everything in Ruby was intact” (Paradise 112). Echoing the mechanism of disavowal as is characterized with the simultaneous admission and refusal of castration and lack in the Other, Deacon’s recognition of the “crack” and “chink” in Ruby and ensuing denial of this recognition through the confirmation of the “intactness” of the community apparently reveals the work of disavowal and the trace of the perverse mentality.
What can be learned of the episode of Deacon’s disavowal of the lack in Ruby is the mechanism of fetishism—one of the main subcategories of perversion—at work in the New Fathers. No sooner has the Ruby fathers taken notice of the lack in the Other than they resort to some substitute, i.e., fetish, that veils the breach in the Symbolic universe.20 Whenever there appears any threat to the completeness and wholeness of the community and patriarchy, the New
20 In other words, the double reaction to castration in disavowal seemingly has a certain time lag: the cognizance of the lack precedes its denial, and the simultaneity of admission and disavowal of castration only comes later.
Fathers will strive, no matter what measure has to be taken, to (re-)consolidate and (re-)claim the unity and integrity of the big Other. Indeed, the anxiety over the hole in the Other has been constantly prevailing in the Ruby mentality. As Patricia, in contemplating and recording the history of the Ruby families and residents, notes, “[t]he scattering would have frightened [Zechariah Morgan]. The breakup of the group or tribe or consortium of families, or in his case, the splitting up of a contingent of families who had lived with or near each other since before Bunker Hill” (192). When Zechariah repeatedly tells the story of the glorious and proud history of exodus and home-building at the Oven, both Deacon and Steward “listened to, imagined and remembered every single thing because each detail as a jolt of pleasure, erotic as a dream, out-thrilling and more purposeful than even the war they had fought in” (16). This way, Big Papa’s anxiety over the scattering of the Haven residents and the disintegration of the community, along with the traumatic experiences recounted in the epic of Haveneid and the fright of the ever present force that “lay Out There” and could cause the demise of the community and its residents, is fixated into the psyche of the twin brothers, eventually turning into part of Ruby people’s cultural heritage. This way, in Ruby the psychical reality does not meet with the physical reality:
Rubians are always ready to disavow the Symbolic cut.
The perverse fantasy that works to veil the lack in the Other stimulates the New Fathers to
“consolidat[e] 8-rock blood” and internalize into Ruby the “blood rule” that “no body admitted existed” and has been “established when the Mississippi flock [i.e., the one hundred and fifty-eight freedmen led by the Old Fathers] noticed and remembered […] that Disallowing”
(Paradise 194, 195). Here the “[u]nadulterated and unadulteried 8-rock blood [which] held its magic as long as it resided in Ruby” understood as “[t]he sign of racial purity” functions to be the fetish that is appropriated to cover the discord among the 8-rock families and maintain the unity, identity, and even immortality of the community (217, 194). In fact, throughout Paradise and the history of Ruby, disagreement among the New Fathers, which is tantamount to the scattering and demise of the community, takes place from time to time. To begin with, animus takes place between the Morgans and the Fleetwoods when Arnette Fleetwood, the daughter of
Arnold Fleetwood and the sister of Jeff Fleetwood, is known to be pregnant in her affair with K.D., the nephew of Deacon and Steward and son of their dead sister Ruby. The way the two families adopt and is supported by other Rubians to deal with Arnette’s pregnancy and with “the maybe-baby [Arnette] had not acknowledged, announced or delivered” (144). In this case, endogamy, which means marriage with those also from the 8-rock families, serves to cover up and mend the lack in the bond between the Morgan fathers/family and the Fleetwood ones: with the marriage of K.D. and Arnette, Ruby people “were looking forward to the union of the two families and an end to the animus that had soaked the members and friends of those families for four years” (144).
By contrast, when Roger Best, one of the New Fathers and also Pat’s father, marries Delia, who is “a wife with no last name, a wife without people, a wife of sunlight skin, a wife of racial tampering” and hence regarded as “a cracker and was bound a have cracker-looking children,” he becomes “the first to violate the blood rule” and is thus, though in a furtive way, expelled out of the core of the 8-rock families (197, 196). Here the refusal of the blood-mixing exogamy suggests something more than a black-and-white differentiation of the self and the other. On the contrary, blood purity is a fetish that ascertains and (re-)claims the integrity and even immortality of the community. On the one hand, signaling the sameness of the leading families in Ruby and the firmness of the communal connection, “[t]he sign of racial purity” stands for the unification of the Ruby community. This way, exogamy, which means marriage with those who are not from the 8-rock families, certainly connotes the attenuation of the blood purity and splitting of Rubians. As a result, the repudiation of exogamy helps to reconsolidate the 8-rock blood and in a sense re-confirm the sense of identity among these families. On the other hand, underlying the surface of the interracial hatred of outsiders and the connected aversion to exogamy is the intraracial hostility, namely, the New Fathers’ abhorrence at Roger Best, especially at his mortuary business. Intimating and recalling the possibility of mortality of Ruby people, among which the death of Ruby is the first and the last one before one of the broken babies of Jeff Fleetwood and Sweetie, Save-Marie, passes away, Best’s mortuary business thus goes against the
claim of the blood rule to the survival and immortality of the Ruby community and its people.
Yet, the rebuttal of the exogamy between Roger Best and Delia covers up a deeper and more ingrained split among the New Fathers: insofar as the Bests are not the “original nine” in the eight-rock blood, they are always-already excluded from the core of the Ruby.
More importantly, the mending of the “first visible glitch,” of Roger Best’s violation of the blood purity, is only designed to cover up “an invisible one that had nothing to do with skin color” (196). As Patricia observes, in Ruby the 8-rock families’ demand for the racial purity with the recourse to endogamy in fact only leads to an incestuous relation among these people, which surely provide them with jouissance (196-97). The resistance to the exogamy as the “visible glitch” then bears the function of being a fetish, a cover-up that diverts Rubians from the awareness of the “invisible glitch,” the enjoyment acquired by Ruby community and 8-rock families in the suspension of the incest prohibition. In this regard, both the recourse to endogamy and the dismissal of exogamy reflect a more fundamental disavowal, a disavowal of disavowal:
what secretively buttresses these marital regulations as the access to the integration of the core families in Ruby is the obscene and unacknowledged enjoyment by the communal Other and hence the disavowal of the disavowal of castration. The renunciation of the “visible glitch” of exogamy truly veils the “invisible glitch” of incestuous relation. Precisely, the fetishistic rule of racial purity props up the disavowal of the rift in Ruby’s unity and of the Other’s enjoyment:
after all, as Patricia comments, the 8-rock blood “was their recipe […] and their deal. For immortality,” and, undeniably, for disavowal and for jouissance (Paradise 217).
Like Fathers, Like Sons
While the unavowed and clandestine rule of blood purity manipulated through the mechanisms of endogamy/exogamy provides jouissance for the communal Other, one of the other essential measures the New Fathers take so as to have the Other remain uncastrated the possession of phallus by the Other is to make Ruby a copy of Haven. As Morrison portrays, the Morgan brothers “and the others, veterans all, had a different idea. Loving what Haven had
been—the idea [Vorstellung] of it and its reach—they carried that devotion, gentling and nursing it from Battan to Guam, from Iwo Jima to Stuttgard, and they made up their minds to do it again”
(6).21 Here the “to do it again,” to build a new Haven for “the idea of it and its reach” can be interpreted as a task of the fulfillment of the jouissance both for the Haven and Ruby communities and patriarchies. On the one hand, the preservation of the traces of Haven in Ruby pronounces the immortality of the former and perpetuates the glory and heroism of the Old Fathers. Insofar as death suggests castration, the reincarnation of Haven in Ruby is a repetition without difference that denies the mortality of Haven and the Old Fathers and thus keeps them uncastrated. Also, successfully helping its residents to see through the material and psychological predicament, the Haven community represents a world with phallus; everything witnessing and connected to the long-standing and long-enduring Haven thus metonymically becomes the phallic symbol as well.22 The resemblance to Haven therefore promises the accessibility of, if not phallus, at least its fetishistic substitute and jouissance to the newly-formed community and patriarchy. This way, the Ruby fathers show the compulsion to repeat and memorize everything related to Haven. The aforementioned inheritance and reenactment of the 8-rock blood rule, besides its functioning as a manipulative fetish, is just the first exemplification of the modeling of Haven by Ruby.
In addition to the introduction of the demand for racial purity, the New Fathers, especially Deacon and Steward, also treat the Oven as a fetish and therefore move it into Ruby. As a place where the Haven residents used to gather together and exchange necessities, the Oven “both nourished [the Haven people]” and enhance the sense of identity and belonging among these people (Paradise 99). Also, the Oven defends the Haven residents against the violence and danger without, no matter in terms of starvation or the rape of its women by whites when they
21 The word Vorstellung does not appear in Morrison’s text. I add this word to emphasis its connection with representation (of Haven and the Oven) as is addressed later in this section. In fact, Vorstellung plays an important role in Freudian psychoanalysis and simultaneously bears the denotations of “idea,” “presentation,” and
“representation.”
22 For a specific discussion concerning how the establishment of Haven and the Oven is related to the “material and psychological predicament,” please refer to Chapter III 87-90.
work in the white kitchens. In addition, constructed simultaneously with Haven and persevering even after the downfall of the community, this gathering place bears witness to the success and glory of Haven and “monumentalized what they [and especially the Old Fathers] had done” (99).
That is, helping the Haven people survive the material and psychical threats to living and creating the sense of community among them, the Oven comes to crystallize the potency of Haven and the omnipotence of the Old Fathers, becoming the phallic substitute that is applied to defend the lack in the community. This way, it is no wonder that to Deacon and Steward the Oven appears to be “huge [and] flawlessly designed” and “[r]ound as a head, deep as desire”
and they even question “whether [the Oven] needed its original soil as foundation for the respect and wholesome utility that was its due” when they have taken every part of the Oven into Ruby (6, 112; emphases added). The image of being “huge [and] flawlessly designed” and “[r]ound as a head, deep as desire” clearly reflects its phallic status in the mind of the Morgan twin brothers.
With its provision of nourishment and corroboration of integration, the Oven is aggrandized and idealized. Moving and rebuilding the phallicized Oven in Ruby is equal to the duplication and possession of the phallus in the newly-built community, both in terms of the preservation of what the Old Fathers have heroically accomplished and of the seizure of the phallic recourse with which the New Fathers can appeal to the community of Ruby.
Another way to make Ruby the mirror image of Haven is the cathexis, specifically, the remembrance and representation (Vorstellung), remembrance through and as representation, of all the things past as if they are still alive. If the security of the spatio-temporal presence pivots upon the separation and, in a sense, castration of the past from present time, the treatment of the past as an immediacy of the present then somewhat disavows and jams the temporal and spatial gap between the past and the present.23 Such an in-difference between the past and the present in
23 It is undeniable that the past is a ghost that ex-sists and repeatedly haunts the present; the engagement with the past is hence “a question of repetition; a specter is always revenant [re-coming]” (Derrida, Specters of Marx 11).
However, the “hauntology” or “spectrology” of negotiation with the past as the comprehended and incomprehensible ghost is a also a question of dealing with the temporal Other and can be grasped along the nosology of psychoanalysis: psychosis is an indistinction of the past, the present, and the future in reality; neurosis is a will to settle the time blocs into the past, the present, and the future; perversion involves a knowledge of the
Ruby is illustrated by Deacon and Steward. As Morrison relates, “[t]he twins have powerful memories. Between them they remembered the details of everything that ever happened—things they witnessed and things they have not. The exact temperature of the weather when the cars circled the girls as well as the bushel yield of every farm in the country. And they have never forgotten the message or the specifics of any story” (13; emphases added). Here the “between them” can be both understood as the temporal-historical gap and discontinuity between the past (Haven) and the present (Ruby) and the existential-spatial split between the twins. With the
“remembrance of all the things past,” Deacon and Steward simultaneously fill in the temporal and spatial hole of the big Other with “the details of everything that ever happened.” This way, no lack is supposed to exist and ex-sist between the past and the present and between the twin brothers.
Coexistent with the assumption of the past as the present in the confusion of the present and past is the chiasmatic formula of reification of the present as the past. As Žižek illuminates,
“hysteria displays the linear narrative of origins (the neurotic’s ‘family myth’), while in perversion the narrative remains stuck in the same place and repeats itself indefinitely—that is to say, the perverse narrative is unable to ‘progress’ properly” (The Plague 40; emphases added).
That is, hysterics, echoing Lukács-Jameson’s postulation on the formation of the bourgeois identity based on a linear model, “project [their] own vision of [their] past and [their] future and to articulate [their] […] project in a temporal narrative distinct in form from those of earlier
‘subjects of history,’” whereas the pervert does not so much fantasize about the sequence—the beginning, climax, and denouement—of events and make a chronology in narrative as circle around a certain time and episode in the narration (Jameson 283; emphases added). In imagining the history of their own community, these pervert residents in Ruby fabricate a narrative that indeed “remains stuck in the same place and repeats itself indefinitely” and “unable to ‘progress’
properly.” As Misner observes in his conversation with Patria during the time the annual
distinction but keeps disavows the temporal lack in the present through the refusal of a distancing of the different times.
Christmas play is staged, “most of the folks here [do not] read newspapers and different kinds of books” and never “keep up” (Paradise 208). Rejecting knowledge on anything new (“newspapers”) and different (“different kinds book”), these Rubians obviously hyper-invest their psychical energy in the historical past of Haven. In addition, “[i]n staging the […]
Christmas play” every year, which puts on stage the trauma of the Disallowing and at the end of the play dramatizes the collapse of the aggressors who have done the disallowing, the Ruby community demonstrates its fixation to the pain and hatred associated with the traumatic past and to the beginning of Haven/Ruby history; this way, Rubians “remai[n] stuck in the same place and repeats itself indefinitely” (185; emphases added). Also, Misner even illumines:
Over and over and with the least provocation, they pulled from their stock of stories tales about the old folks, their grands and great-grands; their fathers and mothers. Dangerous confrontations, clever maneuvers. Testimonies to endurance, wit, skill and strength. Tales of luck and courage. But why were there no stories to tell of themselves? About their own lives they shut up. Had nothing to say, pass on. As though past heroism was enough of a future to live by. As though, rather than children, they wanted duplicates. (161; emphases added)
Having “no stories to tell themselves” and staying silent “[a]bout their own lives,” Ruby people explicitly manifest the reluctance and resistance “to ‘progress’ properly.” The reticence about themselves and isolation from the outside world exhibit the perverse temporality in Ruby: the community lives the present as if it “is” the past and the past as if it “is” the present. The subjunctive tone related to the “as if” does not fit the Ruby mentality: its past is its present and vice versa. With the disavowal of the distinction between the past and the present and the inability to go beyond the traumatic past, Rubians are no more than “duplicates” of “their grands and great-grands” and “their fathers and mothers.”24
More importantly, Richard’s comment on Ruby also specifies that via remembrance as and
24 In the Morgan families, what is ironical, or, fits the wish for duplication is that since both Deacon and Steward have no children (Soane, Deacon’s wife gives to none, and Steward and Dovey’s sons, Easter and Scout die of the Vietnam War), “the Morgans had arrived at the end of the line”; this way, they do not have to worry about change in the future (Paradise 113).
through representation, the Ruby residents live “[a]s though past heroism was enough of a future to live by.” In other words, as long as the past of Haven has not really become the past, its phallic value can hold sway in Ruby and, since Ruby is a replica of Haven, in Haven. In fact, the maintenance of the phallic equivalence through remembrance of things past hinges upon the identification of the lack in Haven with that in Ruby. Growing up in Haven the twin brothers certainly perceive and experience in person and as one person the prosperity and downfall of Haven. Besides, they “heard for twenty years what the previous forty had been like. They listened to, imagined and remembered every single thing because each detail as a jolt of pleasure, erotic as a dream, out-thrilling and more purposeful than even the war they had fought in” and
“had no trouble imagining the shame for [themselves]” (16, 95; emphases added). That is, in listening again and again to the stories told by the Big Papa about the exodus and home-building, Deacon and Steward beyond doubt internalize both the glory and humiliation involved in the history of Haven as if they lived and are living them. “Hav[ing] no trouble imagining,” i.e., having no difficulty in identifying with the shame and the lack in Haven and the Old Fathers, the twins regard the lack of Haven as that of Ruby. As a result, the exact remembrance/representation of the past at the same time fulfills the wholeness and jouissance of Haven and Ruby, of the two communities and the two patriarchies.
The exact repetition and representation concern the cover-up of another lack in the Other:
the split between the descendents of the Haven community. Indeed, not all the progenies of the Old Fathers move to or settle down in Ruby. As regards the Morgans, besides the lines of the twin brothers, “there were Elder’s children—a flock of them roosting everywhere except at home, some of whom visited Ruby for a week only to cut it short, so eager were they to get away from the peace the found dull, the industry they found tedious and the heat they found insulting” (113;
emphases added). Reacting to the scattering of the Morgan family, which actualizes the Big Papa’s anxiety and hence suggests the failure of the paternal function, Deacon and Steward manage to make Ruby the copy of Haven so that they are certified to be the “true heirs, proof of which was Ruby itself. Who, other than the rightful heirs, would have repeated exactly what
Zechariah and Rector had done?” (113; emphases added). In claiming themselves the “true” and
“rightful heirs,” the twin brothers are actually disavowing the hole in the integration of the line of the Morgans. If they are the true heirs, the Morgan family is unified and integral. Plus, the marked and recognized cleavage between legitimacy and illegitimacy covers a deeper, more serious hole in the Other: the credibility about the heirdom of Ruby and the New Fathers. That is, behind the rhetorical question “Who, other than the rightful heirs, would have repeated exactly what Zechariah and Rector had done?” lies the true question: “Who, even though repeating exactly what Zechariah and Rector had done, could be the true heirs?.” The self-identification as the true blood and the rightful heirs by treating the non-Rubians as the false counterparts is therefore the disavowal of a deeper lack, the anxiety over the legitimacy of Ruby and the New Fathers, and functions to justify the raison d’etre of Ruby as the reincarnate of Haven and the inheritor of its phallic equivalent.
The Law and Its Double, the Superego
The most distinguished and efficient way of copying Haven and retaining its possession of phallus is to duplicate the Law encoded by Zechariah. The reproduction of the Law has two primary functions: to resume the efficacy of the paternal function and, in subjecting the residents of the newly-formed community to the Law, to enhance the unity of community. In consequence, in building Ruby, the New Fathers also “recemented” the words that are inscribed in “the Oven’s lip”—“Beware the Furrow of His Brow”—and have “its worn letters polished for all to see”
(Paradise 6). However, in the course of reproducing the public, written Law, things turn sour: the (re-)construction of the messages by Big Papa coincides with the generation of its double, its vocal counterpart and jouissance-enjoying underside—the superego.
As the aforesaid references to Lacan and Fink have indicated, the formation of the superego derives from the enunciation of the Law by the parents, in particular by the father, and the (mis-)interpretation of meaning of the Other’s desire transmitted in the Law. Meanwhile, the parental/paternal voice carries a compelling quality, leading the subject to treat the Other’s desire
as the Other’s demand. In other words, the superego is an internalization of the objet petit a (the Other’s desire) in the guise of an imperative (the Other’s demand) that commands the subject to fulfill the Other’s desire/demand. Considering the New Fathers’ replication of Zechariah’s messages in Ruby, some distinctive features of the superego should be specified here. The pathogenic moral agency is both the vocal double and the transgressive (mis-)representation of the paternal function. In either case, the superego functions to recall and retain the operation of the Law. As Miller maintains in his “A Discussion of Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade,’” the superego is
“something […] left as a remainder [and a reminder],” i.e., the objet petit a, in relation to the Law (230).25 Ultimately, the moral agency overshadows the paternal function and even takes its place as a vocalized pseudo-law.
In order to understand this thesis, it is necessary to return to Lacan’s “Kant with Sade.” In this essay, which serves as the preface to Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, Lacan reformulates his matheme of the perverse fantasy and differentiate the fantasy structures of sadism and masochism. In order to do so, to the original formula (a ◊ $) Lacan adds two new elements, S and V. While a still refers to the objet petit a, the object-instrument that fulfills the Other’s jouissance and $ the barred subject, S signifies the complete subject, “the brute subject of pleasure (the ‘pathological’ subject)” and V “a will [volonté] to jouissance” (653).26 In the newly-constructed algebra, what concerns most the work of the superego is the symbol V. As Miller interprets, V, besides designating the “volonté” in the “will to jouissance,” also stands for a voice (“voix” in French), namely “the voice of conscience” (“Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’” 236).27
25 Two cases exemplify Lacan’s objet petit a as a “remainder” (and also a reminder). First, as Fink designates, the objet a is a “remainder produced when that hypothetical unity [between the mOther and the child] breaks down, as a last race of that unity, a last reminder thereof” (The Lacanian Subject 59). The same logic characterizes the reference function of a signifier, in which the objet petit a once plays the role of the “remainder/reminder.” While it a signifier intends to signify something, the aimed signified immediately disappears in the process of signification.
Yet, it is mistaken the signifier then refers to nothing; instead, it signifies the objet petit a, which is now the remainder/reminder of the signified.
26 For the complete graphs portraying the fantasy structure of sadism and masochism, please consult “Kant with Sade” 653 and 657.
27 Thus, as Evans reminds, Lacan’s “sado-masochist drive” mentioned in Seminar XI is an “invocatory drive” (An Introductory Dictionary 200). That is, the fantasy structure of sado-masochism is motivated by a certain voice—as mentioned, the voice of conscience.
In addition, this “voice of conscience,” as Miller mentions earlier, can be understood as “the voice of the drives” and “the voice of the [sado-masochist] superego” (222). In a synthetic reading, in the fantasy of sadism and masochism, the “will to jouissance” takes the form of the
“voice of conscience,” which thereby foregrounds the vocal quality of the superego.
It is worthwhile to notice that the “voice of conscience” is not equal to the parental/paternal voice when the Law is proclaimed. Instead, as Miller elucidates, the superegoic voice is “an auto-affection of the subject,” an impersonal voice heard in the mind of the subject (“Lacan’s
‘Kant with Sade’” 230). It is known that the rise of the superego is attributable to the articulation of the Law. Upon hearing its pronouncement by the parents or the father, the subject not only internalizes the question regarding the Other’s desire/demand but also introjects its vocal quality.
Later, when the enunciator of the Law is not around and even disappears, the voice in which it is articulated remains in the listerning subject. This vocal residue is what is known as the superego.
That is, the articulated order of moral agency is in fact a command addressed by the subject to him-/herself. Thus, as Miller specifies, “the voice of the conscience appears to be nobody’s voice or the subject’s own voice, to recall what Slavoj [Žižek] said—that is, the subject hears his own voice as the voice of conscience” (“Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’ 222). This auto-affected voice replaces the paternal function and serves as its vocal double, reminding the subject of its work.
However, the superego is at the same time a transgressive (mis-)interpretation of the Law.
The articulated Law which encompasses the Other’s desire is in itself an indecipherable question;
therefore, the subject’s answer always fails to hit the mark and is inevitably a misinterpretation.
Thus, as Fink puts, “[s]ince [the subject] cannot obtain the [S]ymbolic law as such, [(s)he] seeks that which [(s)he] somehow understands to be associated with it” (A Clinical Introduction 189).
This “that which [the subject] somehow understands to be associated with it,” namely, the agency by which (s)he fantasizes about the Other’s desire is the superego. As such, the action with which the subject responds to the Other’s desire is mediated by the superego. Since this moral agency is no more than a misunderstanding of the Law, the subject does not act according to the Law. Rather, it fulfills the superego’s command, for the Other’s jouissance. Hence, Žižek
describes that the Law is “articulated in the public discourse,” while the superego is a
“clandestine ‘unwritten code,’” “the obscene, ‘nightly’ Law,” and “[the] shadow [of]” the written Law (Metastases 54-55). The very obscenity of the superego consists in its work for the Other’s jouissance.28
To clarify the correlation of the superego and the reproduction of the Law in Ruby, one last thing has to be pointed out: since the community is structured around with perversion, the superego at work therein can be understood as a “perverse superego.”29 What, indeed, is a
“perverse superego”? My earlier discussion has made clear that in perversion the subject sweats for the Other’s jouissance; the superego is a mediation of the Law and an immediate vocalized misinterpretation/transgression of the paternal function. The juxtaposition of the two terms then promise a semantic combination: the perverse superego designates the vocal and obscene double that works for the jouissance of the Other qua Law. Also, the Other’s jouissance hinges upon the solution to the question of the Other’s desire, the subject under the command of the perverse superego will claim to know the final answer to ensure the Other’s access to enjoyment. Last but not least, as my previous quotation of Fink has shown, the superego is “accepted […] instead of the [L]aw, in place of the [L]aw, in the absence of the [L]aw.” This way, the perverse superego as the double and residue of the Law will overshadow the paternal function and even take its place, in the end reifying the approach to the Other’s jouissance.
The birth of the superego in Ruby can be traced back to the time of Haven. When toiling for the construction of Haven and the Oven, the Big Papa at the same time “forged [some words] for the Oven”: as Patria recollects, these inscribes letters are “More than a rule. A conundrum:
28 Interestingly, as Žižek emphasizes, the relation between the Law and the superego is quite ambivalent and even reciprocal. While the superego transcends the Law and thus creates jouissance, the latter also needs its obscene underside to exist: whereas castration decides jouissance, jouissance also ensures the existence of castration (The Plague 77).
29 However, my usage of the term “perverse superego” does not suggest that the superego comes into being only in perversion. Instead, as Žižek also reminds, “there is no Law without superego—the superego is the obscene stain which is structurally unavoidable” (The Plague 241). In other words, the configuration of the superego is a structural corollary of the necessary lack in the Other qua Law. Thus, while the superego as such, in demanding the subjects to enjoy and follow the Law, may behave like a sadistic pervert, it is more important to differentiate its work in different clinical structures, namely, in neurosis, perversion, and n psychosis.
