Caché
The Hole
In the Mood for LoveDo you know what people did in the old days, when people still had secrets?
– 2046
A secret always makes you tremble.
– J. Derrida
The Hole, In the Mood for Love, and Caché are cinematic examples of the limits of postmodern styles of representation and anticipations of what lies between, or beyond, the limits of postmodernity. This between or beyond, what I can only name as the post-human, is a coming to terms with the absolute negativity of the human condition by acknowledging the fundamental lack that structures both our existence and being as creatures of paradox. That the human condition is absolutely negative may not necessarily appear evident — but let us assume that it is; to say that these films acknowledge the fundamental lack that structures our existential and ontological situation as a situation of creaturely paradox may seem even less evident than our first proposition, but let us also assume that it is so. By allowing these propositions to constitute truth in our analysis of these films I hope it will reveal that — far from not achieving any kind of “logic” or “conclusion” or “closure” — the films offer us the paradigm of the postmodern structure of desire and each of the films traces new structures of desire.
The three films will be linked together on the level of desire and the notion the of “the hole.” The analysis will be arranged in this order: desire-hole / hole-desire, to examine each film’s approach to desire and the hole, and the logic that each film reaches as its conclusion regarding the approach. At the level of outcome (i.e. love or hate) the films’ truths diverge. In this divergence what emerges, we wager, being is opened up to the procedure to truth. In the comparison between the three films, the structure of post-human desire becomes visible.
Since we live in a universe “without secrets” (Baudrillard) we have to imitate, invent, or simulate them in order to “make sense” of the silence of the Body’s arousal[1] and the fact that violence is mute.[2] It is in fact this silence, this absence that is infinite: silence is the gap, or hole, or lack, or space, or stain that allows discourse to approach infinity and thus set a limit to the Real, a limit for desire to approach and be turned away from / towards its Object,[3] or for drive to exceed the limit.[4]
Post-human desire uses the postmodern axiom “there is no meaning / truth” as its ground; a true posthuman paradigm has yet to be articulated as its structures are only now becoming visible,[5] whereas postmodern desire recognizes that desire is fundamentally structured around the impossible impossibility of an absence (e.g. “there’s no such thing as No”). Furthermore, postmodernism recognizes the “hole” (or “stain” in the case of Caché) created by absence is caused by a trauma in experience. However, postmodernism recognizes this only through negation, by not trying to cover up the hole, by leaving the stain and doing nothing about it.[6]
The trauma that is the cause of absence is a rupture in the Symbolic Order, a breakdown of the exchanges supposed to be “guaranteed” by the Big Other and the failure of fantasy (i.e. symbolic-fiction) to constitute a relationship between the Imaginary (i.e. Object/s) and the Real (i.e. Thing/s). When the totality of one’s Being-in-the-world is skewered by an Event, postmodernism recognizes this as the limit; in fact, it might be said that post-modernism is obsessed with these limits only in order to continuously (re)create a limit and surpass or “transgress” it — widening the holes, adding more blemish to stain.
Postmodernism holds onto the cynical belief of its own confidence in being able to discern its own desire as apart (as operating apart) from the socially operative system of drives in which the postmodern subject is immersed and subject to; it denies the limitation of itself as an implied tautology: “there is no truth” is itself a truth that negates itself, etc. Even postmodern modes of irony end up resembling this cynicism because instead of the subject’s desire being authentic (i.e. not symbolic fiction) all desires become symbolic fiction, structured by Force-Relations (which are socio-historically determined, or determine what constitutes socio-historicity, or both, or neither depending on the “flavour of the month”).[7] The fundamental truth post-modernism asserts is that “the best mask for a thing is the thing itself”[8] and this is the aspect of postmodernity that most often is overlooked, which has also, if obliquely, inaugurated the post-human.
The post-human mode of desire does away with all of post-modernity’s questions of whether the hole that desire is structured around is symbolic fiction, or not; whether the subject of desire is an object of ideology, or not; whether or not subjects determine force-relations – or force-relations determine subjects. Post-humanity does not care for such questions. In either case, the result is the same: the codification of the elements / Objects of the Symbolic Order, approved (or disapproved) by the Big Other. Another way to articulate this codification might be: the determination of necessity; “necessity” being always-already a dumb contingency, while also being always already socio-historically determined, which means that certain Objects in different socio-historical time-periods, across different geo-political boundaries will appear as “necessities” — more “necessary” than others – while the pursuit for Things is the driving force behind the desire for necessity. The post-human is primarily concerned with desire, not only as it dis / appears but as it is registered as desire as such. Whereas post-modernity is concerned with “transgressing the boundaries” (with the always mysterious “beyond” of any limit) — post-humanity concerns itself with the limit itself and all that it contains, or with establishing a limit,[9] in order to examine, but not go beyond the limit once it is established.[10]
The (post-human) subject being discussed is caught in a symbolic network, or several symbolic networks that pre-exist him. For example: language, history, anatomy, etc. — or the Real of raw, non-filtered experience — all determine the subject, but they do not completely determine him … all the time, at least. This is to say, in some cases the subject’s determination by the Real is inconsistent, cannot come to either coherence or completion because the discourse around any area of the Real is structured around an absence.[11] At the heart of every set is Zero or Void, but this does not mean that all sets are “equal:” the concept of “transfinite numbers” means that there are some infinities which are greater than others because they contain a higher order of “Zero-Void Elements,” or properties that traverse every other set — yet only leave traces of themselves, appear as subtractions (from the situation). Postmodernism recognizes Zero as the only transfinite element, allowing for the processes of equalization and simulation to take place; the post-human cares only for the form Zero takes as value — even the minimal value approaching Zero or the maximal value approaching Infinity or some value between the two.[12]
I agree with Andrew Gibson, in Towards A Postmodern Theory of Narrative, when he says that “narratives [are] sets of signifying practices” (69, my italics) — if the word “sets” is understood in terms of (Lacanian) “set theory.” I believe that Caché (Haneke), The Hole (Tsai), and In the Mood for Love (Wai) comprise a set, a certain ordering of elements with certain properties in common. Each (film) is an element with its own properties — and so are subsets of the larger set, whose name is “Trauma.”[13] The structure of trauma is the structure of “Being”[14] and “Event,”[15] in which the “Subject” experiences a “rupture” in the discourse he forms around the elements that order his reality (i.e. his approach to / defense from the Real) — the order that provides the elements, organizes and constitutes his Imaginary defenses (symbolically formulated as fantasy) against the necessary and excessive but concentrated remainder of the Real of Jouissance.
This trace takes the form of a subtraction (absence or hole: The Hole, IMFL) or an unbearable “addition” (stain: Caché). All of the films are about the approach to the hole / stain that the Real leaves in / on the subject. The former two articulate object-causes of Love – whereas Caché spells out, letter by letter, the erotics of Hate.
Desire is the transformation of drive for the Real of satisfaction into drive for the desire of the Real of Jouissance. Jouissance satisfies needs beyond need: Desire as the approach to jouissance is what the three films are reflections of. Bataille remarks that “the desire for ecstasy can’t exclude method” (Bataille, 1998, 29) and I would say that each film presents a certain order of desire, an “inaugural” (Gibson, 87) order, to be sure, that uses (similarly to Potter’s “camera lyric”) “a realism of particulars … giving primacy to the visible” (ibid, 81). However — I would even go so far as to say that each film, in its own way is in opposition to Gibson’s claim that
No description of the world has a privileged [‘mirroring’] relation to reality … That description [‘classic realist text’] cannot finally escape a Baudrillardian indictment as implying a ‘theory of truth and secrecy’ to which ‘the notion of ideology still belongs’ (75-6).
The basis for my disagreement with Gibson has to do with the fact of closure: that things can be counted as one and objects can link different things together into an order called a set. Now, if this is true, we see that sets can reflect one another if they are of the same Symbolic Order: a closed, yet indeterminate constellation of Signifiers. They may contain identical “transfinite numbers.” Transfinite numbers may be understood as signifiers that are always registered as having some value regardless of the set they are in; this is not to say that the value of the transfinite element(s) will have the same value from one set to another but that these elements are registered as value, in the form of value as such, which allows for the possibility of an operation to take place (e.g. 1+1=2; or a comparison between works’; or a translation from one language to another).
It is this absence, this hole, this secret, this stain that creates value for discourse. Discourse tries to fill in or wash away that which makes it valuable – what photographs try to capture — what philosophy tries to systemize in order to form patterns of recognition — what only fiction can represent: the arousal of the phallus-signifier that penetrates being with an excess and vanishes with a trace only to be recorded as an event in retrospect (i.e. advent and event). In a sense the event is predictable in many ways and can actually precede the advent of itself, as prophecy or Utopian fantasy; however, and this is where Truth becomes a factor, the forcing of a pre-fabricated, simulated, directly asserted (truth-)Event onto the “advent-ousness” of Being can only end in disaster, i.e. Caché; Majid’s suicide is an extreme gesture that accomplishes very little, if not nothing at all. The reverse of this is not believing in the Truth of an event that offers a procedure to Truth: The Hole, which leads to failure – death as the Final Fantasy of desire. Or, a kind of “syntheses” of the two where neither disaster nor failure is produced but a kind of partial success is achieved: In the Mood for Love’s character’s “genitals cannot be imagined (and, therefore, cannot be Real)!”
The notion of limit can be addressed through The Hole: just as every man’s penis can go this far but no further — infinity (dis)appears just beyond this. When the man puts his leg through the hole in the floor — this is the most pregnant scene in the film. It is pure parody but dead serious in its psychoanalytic implication: the moment he registers pain in the Real, he encounters the limit of his desire. He is willing to go this far (i.e. to the experience of the sensation of physical pain — more specifically being stuck) in order to be a part of the lady downstairs’ apartment (her Symbolic Order). New elements make new parts, A-part: to be her phallus-signifier (objet a), the event that ruptures her being, the discourse that fills her hole (read: not some silly napkin talking to Nobody on the phone), the thing that dances with her that’s not a fire extinguisher, the one he embraces (or wants to embrace) that’s not also a fire extinguisher (one may here ask: what is the point of all the fire extinguishers because it’s always raining? even in the fantasy scene!? Answer: insistence of the Big Other), the one for the other being the thing that falls on them that isn’t the rain (or garbage), the cat he feeds that never hides, the plumber she can call to fix her leak.
The Hole can only be understood as a “narrative” in the most rudimentary sense: it represents exactly how the conditions of post-modern ideology, as constructed by post-modern discourse, provide the ground for structures of post-human desire to emerge. The title is too naïve and too obvious to really be effective as irony: it is, I would say, the Zero level of post-modernity. This is to say, and this will be returned to later, it is not actually a Value of Zero, but the minimal Value that approaches Zero. The Hole is about a hole — quite simply — but also about what fills this 
Hole: namely, Fantasy. Fantasy is a symbolic structure whose referent is an object-cause (of desire). Grace Chang’s songs, and Tsai’s filming of them, represent not just what the characters desire but how they are supposed to desire:[16] they are the impossible Objects of the character’s symbolically constituted desire, yet subjectively determined in terms of “choice.” The rest of the movie represents the elements of the (deteriorating) Symbolic Order — no longer guaranteed by any Other: Things, in terms of causes of desire are, certainly, determined by the BO but, in The Hole’s representation, the BO’s objective indifference and non-involvement in those causes actually, in some ways at least, prevents and obstructs the characters from their desire for each other (each being the cause of the other’s desire for the other, who has a connection or resemblance to the One, that is, the Object).
The man puking down the hole and the woman spraying bug spray up into the man’s apartment indicate that we are witnessing a “closed” symbolic order: an order outside the Big Other’s gaze, an order in which it is the other’s gaze that determines and guarantees a lawful (or unlawful) exchange between subjects of signifiers (i.e. the Man, the Woman, the Hole). The masturbation scene with the woman, the man embracing the fire extinguisher, the woman’s (hopeless) determination to “fix” the hole, the man’s friendship with “me-me the cat,” are all examples of either characters cause(s) of desire. In the woman’s case, the paper towel represents a piece of the Order that arouses her desire for another; her determination to “fix” the hole is her approach to that other.
For the man, puking down the hole is an involuntary ejaculation — the pure spontaneous (premature!?) excess of joy (from a night of drinking!) and the remainder it produces (that goes down the hole): this marks and is a parody of the “remainder” like quality of sexual contact without the intermediary of desire-fantasy.[17] His friend, the cat, represents the effect of the wound that The Hole of post-modernity opens up. This effect being a kind of tenderness[18] around the blood-stained inconsistencies and forced closures of (post)modern modes of hyper-communication: where the representation of the Real passes beyond — transgresses — representation and duplicates all the signs of the code of the Real itself. It goes so far beyond what is necessary that it supersedes the Real of the Subject – deepening the already wide and asymmetrical split (between I and Other) that constitutes subjectivity proper. The man is thoroughly exposed to us in the scenes when he is calling to the cat — feeding it when it comes; the scene where the cat does not appear is the breakdown of his precious, because closed, symbolic order with his friend the cat. His hammering the hole when the woman succumbs to the disease is the breakdown of that relationship: the breakdown of their already dysfunctional (defunct, postmodern) symbolic order.
What happens to the woman — even if the disease is a purely functional literary device — is symptomatic of what happens to those without any real wounds, to those living at the Zero level of post-modernity. One crawls underneath all the layers of “tissue paper” — into the emptiness of one’s “Egyptomania”[19] in despair of ever communicating all the elements of one’s desire and the order one arranges them in; this elemental order being what leads one to that particular hole (e.g. old man’s bean sauce).
These characters are reacting to the situation of post-modernity in a strictly post-human fashion. They really take no notice of the Voice’s warnings of the disease contained within the water that is nearly indestructible: once the hole is opened up, it creates a (de)centre of gravity of which the Man and the Woman are satellites. Their reaction is neither banal nor extra-ordinary – it simply never manifests on the level of the material or symbolic: it stays imaginary and the image of the two plays itself out as it is. The first fantasy, Calypso, has the woman dancing in the elevator in a bright sequined dress; we slowly pan in, past the broken mailboxes — and there she is. It is important to note that although the scene is highly stylized it does not eliminate the remainder of the Real — it simply focuses in on the Objective surplus of Calypso. The woman dancing in the elevator is representative of the phallus not as penis, possession of man or of the father but her thing — the MOther’s thing: the phallus as the square root of negative One.[20] This is the case if the elevator represents the (artificial in)vagina(tion),[21] if the woman dancing represents the phallus (that is, the presence of an aroused desire) — which she does because the desire she arouses, especially after just the first fifteen minutes of The Hole, is our, the Spectator’s desire. In the Real the Phallus is always, as Badiou formulates the formulation of Being and the retrospective structuring of the Event, “the-One-that-is-Not.” The “phallus” is first “the one,” the limit point of an encounter in a situation with the Real-of-Jouissance, with the Jouissance-of-the-Real. In this way, and in this way alone does it resemble the obscenity of the erect male organ insofar as it ineluctably-inevitably becomes what it always already was: the-one-that-is-Not (meaning: the phallus is not inexhaustible, even if infinite; the penis does, after all, have an aperture of its own). This is why the phallic parodies within The Hole — as suggested by the “Final Fantasy” of the movie — point to the absurdity of so-called “Real” sex.
If The Hole suggests that “Real” sex, and its phallic-symbol simulations are absurd — In the Mood for Love suggests “Real” sex is impossible without the absurdity of the simulations supposedly based on “it.” In the Mood for Love is excessively baroque in its representation of post-modern desire: it is constantly showing the signs of the Things one desires (e.g. all the shots of people’s midsections, especially the woman’s posterior) and pretending that there is an Object behind them (e.g. “fusion”). There is an excess of limits. In fact, the film promises nothing except what the title suggests; these characters are certainly-constantly in the mood for love, forever in a state of desire because the Thing that would cause desire is restrained not just by the Big Other in the form of gossip but their own constitution as ethical subjects. There are only exceptions and no (real) rules. That the Big Other in this film is really indifferent to “transgressions” of the “sacred law” of marriage is obvious (e.g. the woman’s boss, the man’s sleazy friend); however, the characters adherence to this code of values allows their relationship to achieve the level of transgression on the purely symbolic level: they fuse when he publishes their first story. She is not credited with authorship, which adds to the secrecy of their transgression and furthers our point that the phallus is Woman’s possession insofar as she authorizes its status as “the-One” and remains, carries on even after it becomes “the-one-that-is-Not” – her desire for More(!) after the One has been exhausted. By Recognizing the Limit they Enter a Path unto Infinity — a path which they neither follow to its “end” nor really even attempt to go beyond.
The position each character takes is post-human in the sense that they, not without sorrow nor joy, submit to “laws” that Nobody cares about: this is not just a “passion for rules” (Baudrillard) but a sacrifice and response to the system that is indifferent to its own rules — the two operate without any aim, or goal; their affinity for each other cannot be located in the register of instinct (necessity, pathology) or of drive (morality, sociality) alone.
The woman’s position in the office, inside her boss’s private office, gives her a perspective on adultery from an interior male perspective (she is “trans-gendered” in a weird way) — yet she is also confronted with another perspective on married life: “couples should spend time together” says her elderly neighbour. This points to the point already made about the BO’s indifference to its own laws and the rules that emerge in order to “aestheticize” transgressions and desublimate desire for (Impossible-Logical) Objects into drive for (Attainable-Substitutional-Causal) Things — or part-objects.[22] This relates to the social boundaries in place and the surplus necessity of secrets in a world without them. This is the postmodern codification of transgression — the terminal point of “God is dead” where nothing is permissible because not prohibited and therefore diminished in terms of the Thing’s ability to summon forth the phallus in the presence of desire’s Object.
The man, whispering his secret to the hole in the tree, shows his fidelity to idealism, to resisting certain temptations — he does after all admit, “I’m so bad!” Secrets establish closed symbolic orders within the overarching “Other’s discourse.” Just like being wounded by the Other (as in The Hole: the hole kind of “just appears,” or like the way an erection can “just suddenly dis / appear”), is something that is impossible to completely articulate to the other who has the exact same wound as us – but inverted. The point is made: for the man, the hole appears in the floor; for the woman the ceiling. The inverted wound is also the difference between the sexes and the various ways in which they form discourse around the Real trauma of sexual differentiation.
That one necessarily needs an other — is the fundamental axiom of desire: even if that other is a screen, this is all it takes, whether it be the digital screen of pornography that hides (the) Sex(ual relationship) or the screen of the female that hides Woman. If one were to be in direct contact with Woman, or the Other, this connection would — theoretically — be the end of human desire as we know it. It would function as a meta-language with internal consistency and internal completeness and would completely bypass the need for mediation (the phallus-signifier) as such because there would be no “hole” — it would already be “whole” in and of itself. But, then, this would not be the phallus as constituted by desire and fantasy but a phallic symbol that does not desire because it is always erect, which cannot be aroused or afflated because it cannot be deflated.[23]
Their “rehearsals” and the writing of their story are astoundingly Gestalt. The transference that passes between the two is uncanny. Uncanny in the sense of a virtual doubling (“I don’t know what your husband / wife would order … he / she has the exact same purse / tie”) that results in the barred image of desire’s object. Or, to be more precise: the logical conclusion of desire’s reason. The film embraces the possibility that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship. Ring images in the film … but bound to what? Certainly not tradition, or their spouses: bound to the absence of the other-husband / wife, and of the sexual relationship. Instead we have the symbolic relationship as the Two establish a closed system that is under the gaze of an indifferent BO. In order to have a symbolic relationship, a connection between two objects, between two sets of properties: the Real All Beyond Representation must be excluded from the signifying exchanges, except in the form of speechlessness.
When she cries after their “rehearsals” this is an example of the Symbolic’s power (i.e. of language, representation, substitution) to have effects (to cause, and produce affects) in the register of the Real: when and where language turns into incoherent sounds the body makes.[24] Just because language posits “the-One” — though it always turns out to be “the-one-that-is-Not” — this sometimes does not prevent it from appearing to be, and producing all the effects of the Real in the Real via the symbolic: this is to say, to paraphrase Anne Carson, that “in love, to the lover, the signs of truth in the gestures of the beloved become truth itself.”[25]
“When did it start?” Here may be inscribed the difference between logic and reason. Logic aims at a conclusion or cause: the beginning or end, despite being posited as such, does not actually exist. Every logical beginning or end that attempts to assert finality or initiation is essentially an empty set. Reason aims at consistency: the indefinite extension of sensible elements … the paradox is that “consistency” cannot be obtained from an infinite set — at some point indefiniteness must be suspended so that the elements within can be arranged one by one. Logic and reason aim at, and always miss, one another.[26] I disagree with the statement there is no desire in the film In the Mood for Love. Instances where Eros appears, and appears naked, are when she is at the Neighbours’ door just looking for a chat; when they are first talking about their liking of martial arts serials; when he is eating his dumpling alone: desire satisfied because substituted and desire deferred because only partially attained. Here we see desire in its poverty, lack, and want — but also in abundance: a reaching out that grasps … something(?).
As viewers of Caché we cannot deny our involvement in Georges’ predicament — as Georges does with Majid: this is the whole point of Haneke withholding the answer to the question of “who is sending the tapes?” It is implied on another, subtler level when Pierrot returns home by his own volition after admitting that he had also disappeared by his own volition (a little like the boy who cried “wolf!”). Not that we know whom, or that we are sending Georges the tapes (which is as unlikely as Georges sending himself those tapes) — but that we are not uninvolved in their production. The influence and presence of History in Caché is stronger than in either of the other two films, and plays itself out on the “micro-level” insofar as Georges represents one of the “deux frères” — except he is Cain wearing the mask of Abel. This seems to go against what I have already said, but perhaps not: Is Majid, then, wearing the mask of Cain while being Abel? Or is there always already no difference between “Noble” and “Savage?” To Majid, Georges appears as what he is — to others outside that system, others who happen to catch glimpses of the “real” Georges: its appearance is denied (we shall return to this later).
His position within the symbolic order allows him to effectively be one while appearing as the other. This explains, somewhat, Georges’ inability to acknowledge Majid’s death as an event — to dismiss it as simulation — because acknowledging this would effectively destroy the discourse that Georges has erected in order to defend himself against the scene of Majid being taken away as a boy; the advent of which he undoubtedly caused (although not entirely because his parents also colluded with Georges by believing his lies, his simulations, to be true, to be of the order of the Real).
By refusing to acknowledge Majid’s suicide — which is Majid trying to offer Georges the gift of death (Derrida) by sacrificing his own life, Majid carving a hole in his own throat for Georges to descend and whisper his secret into — Georges refuses to complete this exchange by not changing his own position. Majid’s act goes from one of heroism (if Georges only would say openly and honestly why he doesn’t trust his wife, why he is so angry — what’s on his mind) to one of absurdity. Majid essentially commits “philosophical suicide”[27] in order to prove, to Georges, that he is not sending the tapes — Georges turns the truth of Majid’s act into a convoluted and complex sophistry that can only exacerbate the situation.[28] “Exacerbate” here does not mean, necessarily, a subtraction — in fact, if Georges were to subtract certain elements of his excessive and unnecessary defenses,[29] which are imposed by the symbolic order but also freely chosen by him, he might be able to change. Instead of going “beyond the limit” Georges stays within it.
In Caché the “hole” opened up comes from a moment (but also a history) of intense violence — resulting in death / orgasm: in the sense of orgasm, Caché‘s “hole” appears as a stain that must be erased with discourse.[30] Georges refuses to acknowledge the Real of the event (of his lies / of Majid’s suicide) – and prefers to stay in simulation. Even after Majid KILLS HIMSELF, Georges still thinks it’s a game – that “this is just what HE wants.” Georges is the one who “plays games” in the sense that he has been seduced by the surface abyss of his own simulation: he still cannot escape — even after Majid’s suicide — the simulation of his own paranoid fantasy turned outwards, “He Hates Me!”
Georges is in the Master’s position — he is the protagonist. Everybody is so interested in him — his mother: “what’s wrong?”; his wife: “why won’t you tell me!?”; Majid’s son: “why are you so angry?”; and, finally, Majid: “why do you act like we are strangers?” The secret and the hole are Baudrillardian “artificial invaginations.” The person sending the tapes is never revealed: this absence signifies George’s attitude of non-involvement with the events of which HE IS A PART and his non-inclusion of information.[31]
Georges, the Master (in terms of class as well) does not know his desire — he sees it “performed” for him. All the lower class characters treat Georges with a respect he does not return. For example Majid’s suicide, his encounter with the bicycling black man, and when Pierrot is returned, the Woman who returns him is obviously from a lower class: her entire performance is to satisfy the master by politely refusing to enter the house of the master as she shows deference to Anne (also like the black man bicycling). Georges is the Absolute master in both of these senses and in the sense that it is his desire that prompts Majid’s suicide — although Georges himself would probably deny that this was his desire. It is his desire insofar as the master only knows his desire in terms of the slave’s performance; the performance that the slave performs based on the signs of the master’s enjoyment. Thus Majid’s suicide presents Georges with das Ding.
The whole film (Caché) moves towards the moment of the stain: the film up to this point anticipates the blood spatter on the wall — the film after that point is trying to escape but only ends up returning to the originary moment (the exact nature of which is left ambiguous on purpose). The moment it returns us to, however, is not Majid cutting his throat but the final moments of the film, which recalls the Deux frères poster above Georges as he exits the theatre after witnessing Majid’s suicide: when Pierrot and Majid’s son are talking. The question is: will these two resolve their fathers’ enmity (thus bringing the cycle of hatred and violence to a bloody conclusion)? Or will they carry on their cultural and paternal antagonism and let the sequence of (surplus) repression continue to inaugurate episodes of “repressive desublimation”[32] (e.g. Majid’s suicide)?
The film returns us to this question and gives no answers. Georges tells his wife about Majid’s suicide he says “it’s no joke.” Later on, after elaborating exactly what lies he told his parents about Majid when they were children, he says of Majid’s suicide: “What kind of sick joke is that? I’ll be accused of murder. Then he would have gotten what he wanted.” Even after Georges has witnessed Majid commit suicide — he still thinks it’s a “game.” The tape of Georges threatening Majid that was sent to Georges boss signifies: “look at what the exterior of this gentleman hides” — here is the complete contradiction of Rousseau’s “noble-savage.”[33] George’s civilized, dignified exterior masks a pathological monstrosity: he fears everything and doesn’t trust anyone – not even his own wife, when he doesn’t share his “hunch” with her. The hunch which, in the final analysis – I believe to be proven wrong, but not proven “who”
We may say that George’s case is the exact opposite of either of the situations in The Hole or IMFL, insofar as he refuses to acknowledge his own participation in the advent of Majid’s suicide: he knows the discourse of the event but refuses to acknowledge its importance — refuses to allow it to come to the surface and penetrate his being. Instead he keeps secrets from everyone who trusts him, and this also reflects a kind of fascist hatred of women that Georges transfers onto the other (i.e. Majid and his son; the black guy on the bike), which Georges shows signs of.[34] Georges wears two masks: the Noble and the Savage. When his boss sees the tape of him threatening Majid and Georges aggression is visible — it is the boss who destroys it: this implies that Georges aggression is not merely pathological but symptomatic. Which is to say that Georges does not simply (not) act for purely subjective (‘pathological’) motives but, also, for motives which have been symbolically inscribed by the Big Other – implied by the fact that it is the ‘boss’ who covers up Georges irrational threats, the ‘boss’ who erases the stain.
The Hole embraces the event in fantasy, but the part when he is smoking and she is on the balcony — both are pretending not to see the other when the other is looking — is the impossibility of the fantasy ever becoming Real; the end of the film is anticipated in the third fantasy sequence when she dances with the fire extinguisher and is kicked out of the room. It is the woman’s death that is represented in her ejaculation from the room. In the Mood for Love’s characters start with the simulation and slowly build to a symbolic fusion (i.e. writing stories together) that never makes it to the Real. These two films show that Love’s power is on the symbolic level — Caché, on the other hand, shows us the disturbing and post-human truth of fundamentalism: that it is only the Erotics of Hate, in terms of extreme acts (like Majid’s suicide) that can immediately affect the Real — that such acts are still always already a wager that can either become an event for truth, or a simulation leading to betrayal thus leading to disaster.
Whereas post-modernity represents desire on the level of “subjective destitution”[35] the post-human uses that position to articulate possible structures that desire may take in such situations; The Hole follows the Imaginary trajectory of desire, which constitutes the image of fusion between inverted images of the traumatic hole-in-being that is the event; IMFL directly confronts the necessity of simulated secrets in the absence of any Real secrets;[36] and, finally, Caché indicts us to place ourselves in the Master’s position,[37] whose desire is continuously played out yet never allowed to come to completion because unacknowledged as the site of a potential event for the procedure to truth.[38]
Another formulation I would like to add which is not unrelated to the idea of the post-human is between the masculine and feminine gaze. Caché and IMFL exemplify the difference between the two. In Caché — it is Georges who has the masculine gaze and it is every other character (especially his wife), who is seeking to penetrate his “depth,” that has the feminine. George sticks to surfaces; the others are looking for depth. Much differently, the difference between the masculine and feminine gaze appears in IMFL most starkly in 2046: the flashback to IMFL when they are riding home in the car together, he is leaning on her shoulder, sleeping while she looks tiredly ahead. The male gaze is at rest here: he is asleep; the female gaze — her gaze — is wide open and so is ours insofar as we read this scene for some type of “deeper” meaning.
The Hole, unfortunately, cannot really be fit into this formulation as it is more about diverting the gaze from the real into fantasy; however, I think that Sally Potter’s YES illustrates this point —especially when the husband and wife are fighting at the dinner table: the husband just wants the same surface to re-appear, the wife wants their relationship to have the depth it used to have. She is more postmodern as she goes “beyond the limits” and has an affair with a man from a very different Symbolic Order (the man cheats but with a familiar element, his wife’s friend) … Finally, the difference between IMFL and 2046 is on the level of the difference between postmodern and post-human: 2046 breaks all the rules IMFL sets up and sticks to. Or between the “masculine” / “feminine” gaze: 2046 throws all the surfaces that IMFL restrains in our face – how postmodern!
The three films show us three sites – it is up to us to inscribe the event onto the being of our experience of this media; the post-modern desire for “beyond the limit” is being replaced by the post-human desire for a “beyond within the limit” (e.g. the coast-line of Britain) – a beyond-that-is-Not. The three films “plead guilty”[39] to being pathological, to being socio-historically determined, and for not being able to transcend the limitations of unlimited universes of simulation: it is this plea that opens up a path away from post-modernity’s aporias’ — that is not a return to a Lost Object (e.g. Medievalism, Romanticism, etc.) or simply the pursuit of an impossible Utopian Fantasy (e.g. Fascism, Totalitarianism, etc.). These films are attempts to inaugurate, or, in the case of Caché, merely articulate a few of the patterns that the desire of the post-human will take: for love or for hate. The Gift of Death will be given whether the world wills it or no.[40]
The question, now, is: After postmodernism, after everything has been fused — Heaven and Hell, Noble and Savage, etc. — and transgressed (e.g. quantum mechanics is the smallest level of “anything goes” according to the postmodern New Age Obscurantist), what remains? What is left? What is right? It is not easy — it may well prove impossible — to accept this gift. And there is also no way to refuse. Welcome to the Real of Post-Humanity.
[1] Arousal only appears in response to desire in the form of the phallus.
[2] Violence, whether “natural,” as in natural disaster, or intentional, as in de-liberate or re-strained never speaks for itself.
[3] I.e. the Thing being the Limit behind which the Object dis / appears upon being found.
[4] Drive, while reaching its goal, misses its aim: exacerbation.
[5] For another glimpse of the post-human, Michel Houellebecq’s novels, Whatever, The Elementary Particles, Platform, and Possibility of an Island are paragon examples of the post-human in the form of literature; I am thinking particularly of Platform, after the main character’s love-object-cause (i.e. Valerie) has been killed by Islamic terrorists: his slow descent into ennui. The destruction of her life means that he still longs for a lost object.
[6] This is an example of transgression at its purest and most postmodern sense: not necessarily Evil but not recognizable as Good either (similar to Bartleby’s mastery of the master, which inaugurates something else altogether). This kind of transgression is useful and subversive – but not evil in the sense that Georges (Caché) is evil. One is also here reminded of Yeats’ notions of “radical innocence,” “the best lacking all conviction,” and “the worst being full of passionate intensity” as examples of (inaugurating) the structures of postmodern desire.
[7] This is a variation of a part of Zizek’s essay, Quantum Physics with Lacan.
[8] Zizek, Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT, 2006. He says that a South American leader escaped death in a riot by wearing an “uncanny” disguise; his disguise was a mask of himself – which all the rioters were wearing at the time (28).
[9] Even if this “limit” is “cynical” or “imitated” or “ironic” or “mediated” or “parodic” or “represented” or “satirical” or “simulated,” etc., ad infinitum.
[10] An example of this style of desire is evident in OULIPO’s methods of composition according to arbitrarily established, yet rigorously undertaken, axioms.
[11] Here it is the reverse of Potter’s “there’s no such thing as no” becomes operative, in the sense: If only there were such a thing as no.” Meaning, among other things: If only there were the phallus as square root of negative one.
[12] Zero: City of God, The Hole, and Rosetta represent the Real of urban life). Infinity: Caché and Yes represent the Simulations of high society. Somewhere between Zero-Infinity: C.R.A.Z.Y., In the Mood for Love, and Short Cuts represent the urban Real that is only desirable through Simulation; in the case of C.R.A.Z..Y. the simulation is in sexual difference and preference, whereas in Short Cuts the Real-zero of sex, at least between Chris Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh, is desired through the simulation-infinite of phone sex fantasies!).
[13] Comay, Rebecca. “Introduction.” Lost in the Archives. Ed. Rebecca Comay. Toronto: Alphabet City, 2002. Comay writes that “the archive…confounds every beginning and every rule.… This is traumatic. Traumatic not in some vague, trendy way (a whiff of melancholy here, some blurry photos there) but in a technical Freudian sense – trauma defined essentially as the slippage or non-synchronicity of experience” (14). Postmodern trauma is vague and trendy; post-human trauma is sustained, e.g. The Hole: man banging on the floor with his hammer; IMFL: woman at the door, looking for a chat or the man eating his dumpling alone; Caché: the ending scene of Pierrot and Majid’s son.
[14] Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2005.”What has to be declared is that the one, which is not, solely exists as operation. In other words: there is no one, only the count as one” (24, italics Badiou’s).
[15] Ibid. ” … only an interpretive intervention can declare that an event is presented in a situation; as the arrival in being of non-being, the arrival amidst the visible of the invisible … an event is not (does not coincide with) an evental site. It ‘mobilizes’ the elements of its site, but it adds its own presentation to the mix” (181-2, italics Badiou’s).
[16] Zizek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.
[17] Or, another formulation that focuses on the transgressive nature of the non-mediation of drive: pure-drive forever drifts towards evermore, indeterminable satisfactions – never finding a limit that cannot be transgressed.
[18] “Tenderness” in three senses: 1) as in “love me tender …” 2) as in the area around a wound indicates a vulnerability and “tenderness” to the touch and 3) as in “legal tender.” Here I conjecture that postmodernism uses the aesthetics of gentleness, the ethics of the artificial invagination, whereas post-human aesthetics are of tenderness, which involves actual wounds caused by Real trauma. City of God, C.R.A.Z.Y., Short Cuts, and Yes are postmodern; the other films discussed in this essay, aside from Kill Bill, are post-human.
[19] Santner, E. Psychotheology of Everyday Life. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2001. “ … even the ancient Egyptians suffered a form of “Egyptomania”” (7).
[20] Lacan, Jacques. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire.” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink with Heloise Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 2002. See page 694.
[21] Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans: Sheila Faria Glaser. Michigan: Michigan UP, 1994. “Each mark, each trace, each scar left on the body is like an artificial invagination … the few natural orifices to which one usually attaches sex and sexual activities are nothing next to all the possible wounds … to which a body can open itself, no longer through nature, but through artifice, through the simulacrum, through the accident … nothing next to the exchange of all the signs and wounds of which the body is capable. The savages knew how to use the whole body to this end, in tattooing, torture, initiation – sexuality was only one of the possible metaphors of symbolic exchange, neither the most significant, nor the most prestigious, as it has become for us in its obsessional and realistic reference, thanks to its organic and functional character (including in orgasm)” (114-115).
[22] This point is more evident in Caché, Majid’s suicide being an example of desublimation proper; however, in IMFL the woman desublimates her desire by having a child while the man goes onto other substitute objects, i.e. whispering secrets into tree-holes on mountains.
[23] Beckett, Proust. Trans: Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove, 1931. “The man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget” (17). “Re-membering” as in “making-whole” out of what has been “dis-membered,” or cut off, or subtracted from the Whole (i.e. The Hole and IMFL) or what has been forcibly added (even if in the form of negation or simulation) to the Hole (i.e. Caché). See also Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History” in his Theses on the Philosophy of History; and also O-ren Ishi (Lucy Lu) from Kill Bill when she says: “swords never get tired.”
[24] The pun also resembles this kind of encounter with the Real; there is really no relation to what is being said or meant, there really is nothing funny about them: yet they can still produce laughter by playing on different registers of experience, blurring the line between Being and Meaning.
[25] Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1986. “… a sensation of serious truth accompanies the lover’s vision of himself. There is something uniquely convincing about the perceptions that occur to you when you are in love. They seem truer than other perceptions, and more truly your own, won from reality at personal cost. Greatest certainty is felt about the beloved as necessary complement to you” (36, italics Carson’s).
[26] Creation myths typify this statement. At the end of a chain of reason, the logic used to arrive there is absent; or there is no cause for a causal object. If one begins with a logical object, the series of reasons (theoretically) extends to infinity. One way to resolve the Yin-Yang (Logic) and Genesis (Reason) accounts of the universe is as follows: Yin-Yang is the prime and ultimate state that Genesis gives body to. If one is subtracted from the other, the result is bodiless (fusion without bodies) or without end (bodies without fusion). IMFL shows us desire, its Logic and its Reasons.
[27] Camus, A. Myth of Sisyphus. Trans: Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage, 1955. If “life is not worth living” Camus recommends “philosophical suicide.” This is a gutsy, risky wager, which in the case of Caché – does not pay off.
[28] E.g. Georges taking sleeping pills, which are also neatly within a folded box and hidden.
[29] Sebald, W. G., Austerlitz. Trans. Bell, Anthea.Toronto: Vintage, 2002. On the discourse of defence, this novel is instructive: “the whole insanity of fortification and siegecraft was clearly revealed in the taking of Antwerp, said Austerlitz, the only conclusion anyone drew from it, incredibly, was that the defences surrounding the city must be rebuilt even more strongly than before, and moved further out” (17). Georges retreat from the real can be seen as this kind of “insanity.”
[30] You may have seen “anti-racist” posters around the campus that have the image of a black boot against a pink background, with the caption: “Racism We’re Going to Stomp You Out” – an incredibly fascist iconography.
[31] Which is an allegory for the French massacre of Arabs in the sixties; the film “Deux Frerès” that Georges sees and is unaffected by proves that fantasies cannot co-exist.
[32] Marcuse, H. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud. Toronto: Saunders, 1966.
“ … the release of sexuality within the dominion of these institutions [governed by the performance principle] …[this process] explodes suppressed sexuality; the libido continues to bear the mark of suppression and manifests itself in the hideous forms so well known in the history of civilization; in the sadistic and masochistic orgies of desperate masses, of “society elites,” of starved bands of mercenaries, of prison and concentration-camp guards. Such release of sexuality provides a periodically necessary outlet for unbearable frustration; it strengthens rather that weakens the roots of instinctual constraint; consequently, it has been used time and again as a prop for suppressive regimes” (202).
[33] I might even go farther and say that the jouissance of the noble-savage is guilty-pleasure: pleasure derived from the feeling of guilt, guilt from pleasure.
[34] Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies Vol. 1. Trans: Stephen Conway. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987. I do not actually intend to cite this work but there is a connection between Georges mistrust of his wife, his attachment to surfaces, and Fascist Germany’s “aestheticized politics.”
[35] Lacan. Four Fundamental Concepts and Feminine Sexuality. I am at a loss for a page reference at the moment. Also known as the “analyst’s position.” However, I actually think that Rosetta is a much better example of the destitute subject who is in a position to, if given the opportunity, cause an event.
[36] That is, when the BO no longer cares about deviations of individuals in the Symbolic Order.
[37] Georges and his family are economically superior – that is, superior in the Real – to either of the other two couples.
[38] Majid’s suicide could be a captioning point in the procedure to truth, like the hole in The Hole, or the story in, In the Mood for Love.
[39] Bataille, G. Literature and Evil. Trans. Alastair Hamilton. London: Calder & Boyars, 1973.
[40] Blake, William. “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Newly Revised Ed. Ed. David V. Erdman. Comm: Harold Bloom. New York: Anchor, 1988. Blake’s work actually reads: “I have also: the Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no.”
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