Perversion the Social Relation

The Masochist Social Link 119ized as the exemplary small bourgeois procedure, that of distinguishingin every phenomenon a "good" and a "bad" aspect, and then affirmingthe good and getting rid of the bad—in our case, struggling to keepthe "good" aspect (awareness of oppression) and discard the "bad" one(finding pleasure in oppression).The reason this "untying of the knot" doesn't work is that the onlytrue awareness of our subjection is the awareness of the obscene excessivepleasure (surplus enjoyment) we get from it. This is why the first gestureof liberation is not to get rid of this excessive pleasure, but to assumeit actively—exactly what the hero of Fight Club does. If, followingFanon, we define political violence not as opposed to work, but, precisely,as the ultimate political version of the "work of the negative," ofthe Hegelian process of Bildung, of the educational self-formation, thenviolence should primarily be conceived as self-violence, as a violent reformationof the very substance of subject's being—therein resides thelesson of Fight Club.In his autobiography, Bertrand Russell reports how he was trying tohelp T. S. Eliot and his wife Vivien in their marital troubles, "until I discoveredthat their troubles were what they enjoyed" 7 —in short, until hediscovered that they enjoyed their symptom. How, then, are we to drawa clear line of separation between this redeeming violence and the brutalacting out that just confirms one's entrapment? In an outstandingreading of Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History,"Eric Santner elaborates Walter Benjamin's notion that a present revolutionaryintervention repeats/redeems the past failed attempts. 8 The"symptoms"—past traces that are retroactively redeemed through the"miracle" of the revolutionary intervention—are "not so much forgottendeeds, but rather forgotten failures to act, failures to suspend the forceof social bond inhibiting acts of solidarity with society's 'others' ":Symptoms register not only past failed revolutionary attempts but,more modestly, past failures to respond to calls for action or even forempathy on behalf of those whose suffering in some sense belongsto the form of life of which one is a part. They hold the place ofsomething that is there, that insists in our life, though it has neverachieved full ontological consistency. Symptoms are thus in somesense the virtual archives of voids—or, perhaps, better, defensesagainst voids—that persist in historical experience of "normal" so-