Perversion the Social Relation

124 Slavoj Èizekseries: when, in October, the victorious revolutionaries penetrate thewine cellars of the Winter Palace, they indulge there in the ecstatic orgyof smashing thousands of the expensive wine bottles; in Bezhin Meadow,after the village Pioneers discover the body of the young Pavlik, brutallymurdered by his own father, they force their way into the localchurch and desecrate it, robbing it of its relics, squabbling over an icon,sacrilegiously trying on vestments, heretically laughing at the statuary.In this suspension of the goal-oriented instrumental activity, we effectivelyget a kind of Bataillean "unrestrained expenditure"—the piousdesire to deprive the revolution of this excess is simply the desire to havea revolution without revolution. It is against this background that oneshould approach the delicate issue of revolutionary violence which is anauthentic act of liberation, not just a blind passage à l'acte. 14Notesi There is, however, a scene in Don SiegePs Dirty Harry that somehow augurs the selfbeatingin Fight Club: the serial killer, in order to denounce Dirty Harry (InspectorCallahan, played by Clint Eastwood) for police brutality, hires a thug to beat his faceinto a pulp—even when his face is already soaked in blood, he continues to instructhim: "Hit me harder!"2 Denis Diderot, Les Bijoux indiscrets, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Hermann,1978). I rely here on Miran Bozovic, "Diderot and Pâme-machine," Filozofski vestnik(Ljubljana) 3 (2001).3 There is, of course, a long literary and art tradition of talking vagina—from the 1975French cult film Le sexe qui parle (Pussy Talk; Frederic Lansac and Francis Leroi) toEve Ensler's recent, notorious monodrama The Vagina Monologues. However, whathappens here is precisely the wrong step: the vagina is subjectivized, transformed intothe site of woman's true subjectivity. In Ensler, sometimes ironic, sometimes desperate... it is the woman who speaks through her vagina, not vagina-truth itself thatspeaks.4 See Gilles Deleuze, Masochism and Coldness (New York: Zone Books, 1993).5 Quoted in Claire Brennan, The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2000),22.6 I borrowed this term from Elisabeth Bronfen's study of hysteria, The Knotted Subject(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).7 Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge, 2000),295.8 Eric Santner, "Miracles Happen: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, and the Limits of the Enlightenment"(unpublished paper, 2001).