Perversion the Social Relation
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Perversion the Social Relation

Perversion the Social Relation Perversion the Social Relation

ideiaeideologia.com
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Slavoj ÈizekIn Gasparone, a silly German musical from 1937, the young MarikaRoekk, when reproached by her father for treating unkindly her richand powerful fiancé, promptly answers: "I love him, so I have the rightto treat him in any way I want!" There is a truth in this statement: farfrom obliging me to be respectful and considerate (all signals of colddistance), love in a way allows me to dispense with these considerations.Does this mean that love gives me a kind of carte blanche, justifyingevery brutality? No, and therein resides the miracle of love: love sets itsown standards, so that, within a love relationship, it is immediately clearwhen we are dealing with love and when we are not (the same as withpolitically incorrect terms, which can also be used as proof that I am areal friend of the concerned person). As we already learned from Christianity,true love and violence are never simply external to each other—sometimes, violence is the only proof of love. David Fincher's Fight Club(1999), an extraordinary achievement for Hollywood, directly tacklesthis knot of love and violence.The Perverse Organ without a BodyJack, the film's insomniac hero and narrator (superbly played by EdwardNorton), follows his doctor's advice and, in order to discover what truesuffering is, starts visiting the support group of victims of testicular cancer.However, he soon discovers how such practice of the love for one's

The Masochist Social Link 113neighbors relies on a false subjective position (of voyeurist compassion),and soon gets involved in a much more radical exercise. On a flight, hemeets Tyler (Brad Pitt), a charismatic young man who explains to himthe fruitlessness of his life filled with failure and empty consumer culture,and offers him a solution: Why don't they fight, beating each otherto pulp? Gradually, a whole movement develops out of this idea: secretafter-hours boxing matches are held in the basements of bars all aroundthe country. The movement quickly gets politicized, organizing terroristattacks against big corporations. In the middle of the film, there isan almost unbearably painful scene, worthy of the most weird DavidLynch moments, which serves as a kind of clue for the film's final surprisingtwist: in order to blackmail his boss into paying him for notworking, the narrator throws himself around the man's office, beatinghimself bloody before building security arrives; in front of his embarrassedboss, the narrator thus enacts on himself the boss's aggressivitytoward him. The only similar case of self-beating is found in Me, Myself& Irene, in which Officer Charlie Baileygates (Jim Carrey) beats himselfup—here, of course, in a comic (although painfully exaggerated) way,as one part of a split personality pounding the other part. 1 In both films,the self-beating begins with the hero's hand acquiring a life of its own,escaping the hero's control—in short, turning into a partial object, or,to put it with Deleuze, into an organ without a body (the obverse of thebody without an organ). This provides the key to the figureof the doublewith whom, in both films, the hero is fighting: the double, the hero'sIdeal Ego, a spectral/invisible hallucinatory entity, is not simply externalto the hero—its efficiency is inscribed within the hero's body itselfas the autonomization of one of its organs (the hand). The hand actingon its own is the drive ignoring the dialectic of the subject's desire: driveis fundamentally the insistence of an undead "organ without a body,"standing, like Lacan's lamella, for that which the subject had to lose inorder to subjectivize itself in the symbolic space of the sexual difference.What, exactly, is the status of this "organ without a body"? At thebeginning of Monteverdi's Orfeo, the goddess of music introduces herselfwith the words "Io sono la musica." Is this not something whichsoon afterward, when "psychological" subjects had invaded the stage,became unthinkable, or, rather, irrepresentable? One had to wait untilthe 1930s for such strange creatures to reappear on the stage—in Bertolt

Slavoj ÈizekIn Gasparone, a silly German musical from 1937, <strong>the</strong> young MarikaRoekk, when reproached by her fa<strong>the</strong>r for treating unkindly her richand powerful fiancé, promptly answers: "I love him, so I have <strong>the</strong> rightto treat him in any way I want!" There is a truth in this statement: farfrom obliging me to be respectful and considerate (all signals of colddistance), love in a way allows me to dispense with <strong>the</strong>se considerations.Does this mean that love gives me a kind of carte blanche, justifyingevery brutality? No, and <strong>the</strong>rein resides <strong>the</strong> miracle of love: love sets itsown standards, so that, within a love relationship, it is immediately clearwhen we are dealing with love and when we are not (<strong>the</strong> same as withpolitically incorrect terms, which can also be used as proof that I am areal friend of <strong>the</strong> concerned person). As we already learned from Christianity,true love and violence are never simply external to each o<strong>the</strong>r—sometimes, violence is <strong>the</strong> only proof of love. David Fincher's Fight Club(1999), an extraordinary achievement for Hollywood, directly tacklesthis knot of love and violence.The Perverse Organ without a BodyJack, <strong>the</strong> film's insomniac hero and narrator (superbly played by EdwardNorton), follows his doctor's advice and, in order to discover what truesuffering is, starts visiting <strong>the</strong> support group of victims of testicular cancer.However, he soon discovers how such practice of <strong>the</strong> love for one's

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