Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 362-366

Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman. Ethics and sublimation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002; 261 pp.; ISBN: 0262032996 (hbk); LC call no.: BJ1012.C68; $20.97

In her introduction to this very engaging study, Copjec reminds us of Lacan's critique of Kant by way of a line from Ubu Roi, "Long live Poland, for without Poland there would be no Poles!" and considers the political and ethical burden of subjectivity, of one's "Polishness" being indebted to "Poland" as a transcendental category of orientation. Of course, readers of the first volume of Witold Gombrowicz's Diary would have noticed that the anxious relationship to Poland is a constant theme of this text of exile, and, in some ways, its argument anticipates Lacan's "Kant avec Sade" by almost ten years. Gombrowicz criticizes those Poles who "do not know how to act toward Poland" (6) precisely because they lose themselves in the very act of slavishly exalting the Polish state; in other words, the only proper Pole is a Pole without a Poland. Although Copjec doesn't refer to Gombrowicz, she elaborates both Lacan's and Jacques-Alain Miller's reading of Jarry's line by arguing suggestively that we should instead, and here, I think Gombrowicz would agree, "Imagine there's no Poland!" This imperative frees the Pole from the grinding fantasy of her performing a "whole of being." But we can extrapolate this insight more widely, Copjec insists, by turning our attention to Lacan's theorization of the feminine in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and Encore. Woman's symptomatic relation to Man makes her the "guardian of the not-all of being"; that is to say, because she is the sex which is not One, the realm of the ethical — of one's relation to the Other — is perforce feminine. Copjec is quick to reassure us that she is not falling into a kind of essentialism that would contend that "Man is unethical; Woman is ethical." Instead, we should modify the command "Imagine there's no Poland" to, as you have already guessed, "Imagine there's no Woman!"

What would this mean? Copjec attempts to answer this question by repairing to several texts. In her reading of Antigone, she moves through a short summary of the tragedy's reception and adaptation in Modernity, but restricts most of her remarks to Hegel and Lacan. An important distinction that drives her analysis is Hegel's misreading of Antigone and Creon's respective, equally shared "stubbornness." As Lacan contends, Antigone's insistence upon the burial of Polynices is not merely stubborn; it is a kind of haftbarkeit — the perseverance borne of responsibility or commitment — that must be distinguished from Creon's fixation with the law.

What distinguishes Antigone from Creon is the vel of alienation, the forced choice, famously exemplified in Lacan's "Your money or your life!" [end page 362] She chooses death because it opens up the opportunity for an act that is, in relative terms, more free than choosing to give up "the money," as it were; in choosing death, she eschews what Hegel has called "the freedom of the slave."

Here, at the intersection of death and freedom, we do not encounter mere biological death; we encounter in the act the death of the subject — in the death drive.

Yet this notion raises the problem of immortality. On the one hand, we cheerfully acknowledge that we are mortal, but we continue to harbour the fantasy, secretly, absurdly, that we are not. This fantasy manifests itself in the desire to support and endorse a "sense of posterity" in the act of work that, in other ages, would have been viewed as blasphemous or, at the very least, impractical. Copjec, in following Hans Blumenberg, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Claude Lefort on this point, seems to characterize this fantasy not only as a product of Modernity, but also as a negation of history that posits "a spatial beyond where the future is waiting to bestow itself on the individual" (21). It is the danger of this fantasy that prompts Feuerbach to insist upon an acknowledgment of death's finality and LeFort to critique the singularity that prompts us unconsciously to imagine ourselves immortal. But the egoism of singularity, however overweening, must make some bridge to the social. Another way of putting this problem, Copjec asks, is to ask how can one be simultaneously immortal, with the multitude of abundance that it implies, and yet be individual? This question directs her toward biopolitics, and the ways the individual body is "immortalized" by the State, through the intervention of the life sciences. The production of a new biological category, the faux vivants, who persist in a liminal zone that blurs the distinction between one's life as a political subject and as a biological entity, is, as Agamben shows us, the result of a sinister collusion of the metaphysical and the biopolitical. In working to break the conceptual and political deadlock of Agamben's position, Copjec argues that the body need not be mapped as the site of suspended death; instead, we should turn to psychoanalysis — and imagine the body "as the seat of sex" (29). This assertion is elaborated through Copjec's clarification of a persistent misunderstanding of the death drive; its aim is death, but more specifically, it is a retrospective fantasy. In Freud's words, it is "the restoration to an earlier state of things" (33). What constantly interferes with the fulfillment of this fantasy are the asymptotic nature of the death drive, and its incoherence as a "complete" drive toward destruction. The asymptotic nature of the drive is shaped by the subject's relation to das Ding or the objets a, which prevent the drive from reaching its goal. Crucially, the erotic fascination with and apprehension of the object of desire is, for Lacan, the basis of the ethical. It is the process of sublimation that becomes the means by which one can [end page 363] apprehend, as Lacan phrases it, "the good that das Ding brings with it" (36). Antigone's unexplained relationship to Polynice's corpse, then, is to its singularity and the tautology it raises: "I love him because I love him." This love is necessarily ethical because it perseveres despite its personal and political cost. This is always the risk in any ethical dilemma: do I fixate on the social as a means of perpetuating a particular version of myself, a version that is secured by the approving gaze of the big Other, or do I persevere in maintaining a version of myself that I know will produce rage, punishment, ostracism, or even death? In Creon's case, Copjec offers a compelling reason why he acts as he does. His fixation with the law is an identification not with the Other, but with the superego. This identification is not with pleasure, not with love, but with its inhibition. If Antigone is in love with her brother, Creon is also in love — with his own aggressive, overwhelming dissatisfaction which masquerades as a concern for order and justice.

I have dwelled on this chapter at length because the text then moves to a series of different examples to explore the implications of the insights yielded by her sustained reading of Sophocles, Lacan, and Freud. The second chapter, "Narcissism, Approached Obliquely," considers the partial object's role in the relation between narcissism and sublimation. Narcissism is not the state of being ensnared by the imaginary; it is located in the "problematic of the drive" (63) and the difficulties inherent to an uncannily impersonal encounter between drive and the partial object. In a critique of Badiou's "What is Love?," Copjec rejects the notion that in terms of gender relations, Woman is placed in a "too classical" (that is, "objective") position with respect to Man. How? Narcissism and sublimation are called upon to mediate this question by revealing that the narcissist's jouissance is not located in the object, but in the shattering experience of loving another. The apparent passivity of the narcissist, then, is very much active — since it is already fueled by the drive to love. In this way, Woman is "the subject par excellence" and it is the subject who moves obliquely among love objects, as Copjec's discussion of Cindy Sherman's work demonstrates. Chapter three concludes that Kara Walker's disturbing and controversial silhouettes of African American history are not simply the re-presentation of racial stereotypes: they are instead the staging of their dissolution, as the bodies in the images work to free themselves from the lures of their antebellum past. This hysterical resistance to history informs the next chapter, which looks at the disjuncture between the hysteric and the world in the film Stella Dallas. The famous "missed encounter" that ends the film (Stella stands in the rain outside a window, watching her daughter's marriage) is not, as many critics have suggested, yet another example of the sacrifice the heroine must make in melodrama. As Copjec argues, it is the reverse; it is the [end page 364] renunciation of sacrifice by sacrificing the demands of the maternal position. In other words, Stella experiences the jouissance of subjectivity, of claiming her identity as Stella, and not as Laurel's mother. Thus, her daughter's marriage is the pledge and seal of her freedom.

The latter portion of the text, entitled "Evil and the Eye of the Beholder," turns to ancient concepts like evil, grace, envy, embodied vision, and the gaze. Following Kant, Copjec contends that evil is not connected absolutely to human weakness or finitude, but is instead linked to human freedom. In this theorization, evil is then the product of freedom, of our failure to claim responsibility for our desire. Grace, to follow this logic, is not the claim of being the exception to the rule, or to the rule of history. The gift of grace is, in Simone Weil's words, the recognition that "I am other than what I imagine myself to be" (Gravity and Grace, 9). Like Bhabha's concept of the "time-lag," grace opens up a space in which history is not yet decided, in which the disjunction between fantasy as a structure of reality is painfully, uncannily revealed. Chapter six, which meditates on the 1944 Otto Preminger film Laura, figures Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) as an instance of envy masquerading as justice. The thrust of Copjec's argument is that envy is predicated not on the theft of a coveted object, but on the other's enjoyment. The other's enjoyment is troped as "excessive" in the sense that it must be justifiably destroyed by the envious subject, since it has no deserved place in the other's desire. The discussion then moves to a larger question of envy's place in the liberal notion of justice. Envy is (and here Copjec uses Freud to criticize Rawls's theory of justice) a condition of this version of the just. We could say, aphoristically, that envy is the elevation of one's dissatisfaction into a democratic principle. Her turn to Elaine Scarry's deeply problematic On Beauty and Being Just, though peppered with just challenges to the fantasy that beauty is both pacific and agitational to the will (the former quality strangely unaccounted for, and the latter uncomfortably close to a quietist submission to the scales of justice), faintly praises her return to Kant's "beauty symbolizes our morality" (172). First of all, this is precisely the stumbling block that Copjec goes on to theorize. Beauty is the "nothing," the mere appearance, that does not "symbolize our morality." Second, beauty is our symptomatic relation to pleasure. The question, then, is not how to contain pleasure, or how to mete it out, but how to make pleasure, not dissatisfaction, desirable for oneself and the other.

I will now turn to the final chapter, "What Zapruder Saw." Obviously the most notorious home movie ever made, the 8mm film of the Kennedy assassination is read through the lens of Pasolini's disparaging remarks about the event. An important feature of Pasolini's critique of the film is that it is a long take: there are no cuts. An ethical problem then surfaces [end page 365] around the issue of the cut, of montage. In her discussion, which takes a thoughtful detour through Kaja Silverman's reading of Sartre's version of the gaze. Though Copjec firms up Sartre's contention that the "Other exists. Probably" by wittily arguing that this is his acknowledgment of the distinction between the gaze and the look, his use of it in his plays and novels often suggests the very conflation of the two for which he has so often been criticized. Compared with the long take, montage implies an acknowledgment of the subject's relation to the law. If the long take suggests an objectification of the filming subject, as if he were standing in the place of the law, helplessly fulfilling its demands, then montage is a recognition of the gaze, of the mystery of the other's desire. In this (political) economy of looking, the "author" of this kind of long take is figured as a kind of sadism, the perverse embodiment of a law that claims no desire of his own because he is simply following the letter of the law. But what is this letter which kills? It is the imposition of the choice to stop resisting the pain of torture, to accept the reverence of the sadist whose supplication manifests itself as torture. This is the logic that informs such statements as "One day you=ll thank me for this." Copjec ends the text with a relatively contemporary example — The Starr Report. His perverse pursuit of Clinton's pleasure is likened to the trauma produced by the Zapruder film in that both render the collapse of the law's representative in the name of the law. In this regard, one could say that, Ken Starr and Bill Clinton embody the distinction Lacan makes between a knave and a fool. The knave "constitutes part of the ideology of the right-wing intellectual" who gathers fools and crooks together for public spectacle - a task which "inevitably leads to a collective foolery" (Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 183). It is this kind of knavish foolery, the fantasy of "purifying the law" of desire, that Copjec's book admirably exposes in turn. In conclusion, if we began imagining there's no Poland, let's end by imagining there's no America!

Allan Pero

University of Western Ontario