Perversion the Social Relation

ii4Slavoj ÈizekBrecht's "learning plays," an actor enters the stage and addresses thepublic: "I am a capitalist. I'll now approach a worker and try to deceivehim with my talk of the equity of capitalism." The charm of this procedureresides in the psychologically "impossible" combination in oneand the same actor of two distinct roles, as if a person from the play'sdiegetic reality can also, from time to time, step outside himself andutter "objective" comments about his acts and attitudes. This secondrole is the descendant of Prologue, a unique figure that often appears inShakespeare but that later disappears, with the advent of psychologicalrealisttheater: an actor who, at the beginning, between the scenes, orat the end, addresses the public directly with explanatory comments,didactic or ironic points about the play, and so on. Prologue thus effectivelyfunctions as the Freudian Vorstellungsrepràsentanz (representativeof representing): an element which, on stage, within its diegetic realityof representation, holds the place of the mechanism of representing assuch, thereby introducing the moment of distance, interpretation, ironiccomment—and for that reason, it had to disappear with the victory ofpsychological realism. Things are here even more complex than in anaive version of Brecht: the uncanny effect of Prologue does not hingeon the fact that he "disturbs the stage illusion" but, on the contrary, onthe fact that he does not disturb it—notwithstanding his comments andtheir effect of extraneity, we, the spectators, are still able to participatein the stage illusion.And this is how one should also locate Lacan's "C'est moi, la vérité,qui parle" from his La Chose freudienne: as the same shocking emergenceof a word where one would not expect it. In his extraordinaryphilosophical novel Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748), Denis Diderot claimsthat a woman speaks with two voices. 2 The first one, that of her soul(mind and heart), is constitutively lying, deceiving, covering up her promiscuity;it is only the second voice, that of her bijou (the jewel, which, ofcourse, is the vagina itself), that by definition always speaks the truth—a boring, repetitive, automatic, mechanical truth, but truth nonetheless,the truth about her unconstrained voluptuousness. This notion of the"talking vagina" is not meant as a metaphor, but quite literally: Diderotprovides the anatomic description of the vagina as instrument à cordeet à vent capable of emitting sounds. (He even reports on a medical experiment:after excising the entire vagina from a corpse, doctors tried to