Preface Walter Benjamin commended as a theoretically productive and subversive procedure the by reading of the highest spiritual products of a culture alongside its common, prosaic, worldly products. What he had in mind specifically was a reading of the sublime ideal of the love couple represented in Mozart’s Magic Flute together with the definition of marriage found in Immanuel Kant (Mozart’s contemporary), a definition that caused much indignation within moralistic circles. Marriage, Kant wrote, is “a contract between two adult persons of the opposite sex on the mutual use of their sexual organs.” It is something of the same order that has been put to work in this book: a reading of the most sublime theoretical motifs of Jacques Lacan together with and through exemplary cases of contemporary mass culture: not only Alfred Hitchcock, about whom there is now general agreement that he was, after all, a “serious artist,” but also film noir, science fiction, detective novels, sentimental kitsch, and up—or down—to Stephen King. We thus apply to Lacan himself his own famous formula “Kant with Sade,” i.e., his reading of Kantian ethics through the eyes of Sadian perversion. What the reader will find in this book is a whole series of “Lacan with . . . “: Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith, Colleen McCullough, Stephen King, etc. (If, now and then, the book also mentions ‘‘great” names like Shakespeare and Kafka, the reader need not be uneasy: they are read strictly as kitsch authors, on the same level as McCullough and King.) The intention of such an enterprise is twofold. On the one hand, the book is conceived as a kind of introduction to Lacanian “dogmatics” (in the theological sense of the term). It mercilessly exploits popular culture, using it as convenient material to explain not only the vague outlines of the Lacanian theoretical edifice but sometimes also the finer details missed by the predominantly academic reception of Lacan: the breaks in his teaching, the gap separating him from the field of poststructuralist “deconstructionism,” and so on. This way of “looking awry” at Lacan makes it possible to discern features that usually escape a “straightforward” academic look. On the other hand, it is clear that Lacanian theory serves as an excuse for indulging in the idiotic enjoyment of popular culture. Lacan himself is used to legitimize the delirious race from Hitchcock’s Vertigo to King’s Pet Sematary, from McCullough’s An Indecent Obsession to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The solidarity of these two movements could be exemplified by a double paraphrase of De Quincey’s famous propositions concerning the art of murder, propositions that served as a regular point of reference to both Lacan and Hitchcock:
If a person renounces Lacan, soon psychoanalysis itself will appear to him dubious, and from here it is just a step to a disdain for Hitchcock’s films and to a snobbish refusal of horror fiction. How many people have entered the way of perdition with some fleeting cynical remark on Lacan, which at the time was of no great importance to them, and ended by treating Stephen King as absolute literary trash!
If a person renounces Stephen King, soon Hitchcock himself will appear to him dubious, and from here it is just a step to a disdain for psychoanalysis and to a snobbish refusal of Lacan. How many people have entered the way of perdition with some fleeting cynical remark on Stephen King, which at the time was of no great importance to them, and ended by treating Lacan as a phallocentric obscurantist!
It is for the reader to decide which of the two versions he or she would choose.
A word or two concerning the general outline of the book’s theoretical argument. Lacan’s “return to Freud” is usually associated with his motto “the unconscious is structured like a language,” i.e., with an effort to unmask imaginary fascination and reveal the symbolic law that governs it. In the last years of Lacan’s teaching, however, the accent was shifted from the split between the imaginary and the symbolic to the barrier separating the real from (symbolically structured) reality. So, the first part of the book—“How Real Is Reality?”—attempts to develop the dimension of the Lacanian real, first by describing how what we call “reality’’ implies the surplus of a fantasy space filling out the “black hole” of the real; then by articulating the different modalities of the real (the real returns, it answers, it can be rendered via the symbolic form itself, and there is knowledge in the real); and finally by confronting the reader with two ways of avoiding the encounter with the real. This last will be exemplified by the two main figurations of the detective in crime novels: the classic “logic and deduction” detective and the hard-boiled detective. Although it might seem that all has already been said in the endless list of literature on Alfred Hitchcock, the second part of this book—“One Can Never Know Too Much about Hitchcock”—takes the risk of proposing three new approaches: first an articulation of the dialectic of deception at work in Hitchcock’s films, a dialectic in which those who really err are the non-duped; then a conception of the famous Hitchcockian tracking shot as a formal procedure whose aim is to produce a “blot,” a point from which the image itself looks at the spectator, the point of the “gaze of the Other”; and, finally, a proposal that would enable us to grasp the succession of the main stages in Hitchcock’s development, from the Oedipal journey of the 1930s to the “pathological narcissism,’’ dominated by a maternal superego, of the 1960s.
The third part—“Fantasy, Bureaucracy, Democracy”—draws some conclusions from Lacan’s late theory, concerning the field of ideology and politics. First, it delineates the contours of the ideological sinthome (a superegoic voice, for example) as a core of enjoyment at work in the midst of every ideological edifice and thus sustaining our “sense of reality.” Then it proposes a new way of conceptualizing the break between modernism and postmodernism, centered on the obscenity of the bureaucratic apparatus as rendered in Kafka’s work. The book concludes with an analysis of the inherent paradoxes that pertain to the very notion of democracy: the source of these paradoxes is the ultimate incommensurability between the symbolic domain of equality, duties, rights, etc., and the “absolute particularity” of the fantasy space, i.e., of the specific ways individuals and communities organize their enjoyment.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Preliminary versions of some of the material have appeared in “Hitchcock,” October, no. 38 (Fall 1986); “Looking Awry,” October, no. 50 (Fall 1989); “Undergrowth of Enjoyment,” New Formations, no. 9 (1989); and “The Real and Its Vicissitudes,’’ Newsletter of the Freudian Field, no. 5 (1990). Since it is needless to add that Joan Copjec was present from the very conception of this book, encouraging the author to write it, that her work served as a theoretical point of reference, or that she spent considerable time improving the manuscript, we will not do so!
1— From Reality to the Real The Paradoxes of Objet Petit a Looking Awry at Zeno’s Paradoxes
What is at stake in the endeavor to “look awry” at theoretical motifs is not just a kind of contrived attempt to “illustrate” high theory, to make it “easily accessible,’’ and thus to spare us the effort of effective thinking. The point is rather that such an exemplification, such a mise-en-scène of theoretical motifs renders visible aspects that would otherwise remain unnoticed. Such a procedure already has a respectable line of philosophical predecessors, from late Wittgenstein to Hegel. Is not the basic strategy of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to undermine a given theoretical position by “staging” it as an existential subjective attitude (that of asceticism, that of the “beautiful soul,” etc.) and thus to reveal its otherwise hidden inconsistencies, that is, to exhibit the way its very subjective position of enunciation undermines its “enunciated,” its positive contents? To demonstrate the fecundity of such an approach, let us turn to the first proper philosopher, Parmenides, who asserted the sole existence of Being as One. What are of interest are the famous paradoxes by means of which Zeno, his disciple, tried to prove his master’s thesis a contrario, by disclosing the nonsensical, contradictory consequences that follow from the hypothesis of the existence of multitude and movement. At first sight— which is, of course, that sight which pertains to the traditional historian of philosophy— these paradoxes appear as exemplary cases of pure, hollow, artificial logomachy, contrived logical trifling attempting to prove an obvious absurdity, something that goes against our most elementary experience. But in his brilliant essay “The literary technique of Zeno’s paradoxes,”1 Jean-Claude Milner effectuates a kind of “staging” of them: he gives sufficient reasons to allow us to conclude that all four of the paradoxes by means of which Zeno tried to prove the impossibility of movement originally referred to literary commonplaces. The final form in which these paradoxes became part of our tradition results moreover from a typical carnevalesque-burlesque procedure of confronting a tragic, noble topic with its vulgar, common counterpart, in a manner recalling later Rabelais. Let us take the best known of Zeno’s paradoxes, the one about Achilles and the tortoise. Its first point of reference is, of course, the Iliad, book XXII, lines 199–200, where Achilles tries in vain to catch up with Hector. This noble reference was then crossed with its popular counterpart, Aesop’s fable about the hare and the tortoise. The version universally known today, the one about “Achilles and the tortoise,” is thus a later condensation of two literary models. The interest of Milner’s argument lies not solely in the fact that it proves that Zeno’s paradoxes, far from being purely a game of logical reasoning, belong to a precisely defined literary genre; that is, that they use the established literary technique of subverting a noble model by confronting it with its banal, comical counterpart. What is of crucial importance from our—Lacanian—perspective is the very contents of Zeno’s literary points of reference. Let us return to the first, most famous paradox mentioned; as already noted, its original literary reference is the following lines from the Iliad: “As in a dream, the pursuer never succeeds in catching up with the fugitive whom he is after, and the fugitive likewise cannot ever clearly escape his pursuer; so Achilles that day did not succeed in attaining Hector, and Hector was not able to escape him definitely.” What we have here is thus the relation of the subject to the object experienced by every one of us in a dream: the subject, faster than the object, gets closer and closer to it and yet can never attain it—the dream paradox of a continuous approach to an object that nevertheless preserves a constant distance. The crucial feature of this inaccessibility of the object was nicely indicated by Lacan when he stressed that the point is not that Achilles could not overtake Hector (or the tortoise)—since he is faster than Hector, he can easily leave him behind—but rather that he cannot attain him: Hector is always too fast or too slow. There is a clear parallel here with the well-known paradox from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera: do not run after luck too arduously, because it might happen that you will overrun it and that luck will thus stay behind. The libidinal economy of the case of Achilles and the tortoise is here made clear: the paradox stages the relation of the subject to the object-cause of its desire, which can never be attained. The object-cause is always missed; all we can do is encircle it. In short, the topology of this paradox of Zeno is the paradoxical topology of the object of desire that eludes our grasp no matter what we do to attain it. The same may be said of the other paradoxes. Let us go on to the next: the one about the arrow that cannot move because at any given moment, it occupies a definite point in space. According to Milner, its model is a scene from the Odyssey, book XI, lines 606– 607, in which Heracles is continually shooting an arrow from his bow. He completes the act again and again, but in spite of this incessant activity on his part, the arrow remains motionless. Again, it is almost superfluous to recall how this resembles the well-known dream experience of “moving immobility”: in spite of all our frenetic activity, we are stuck in the same place. As Milner points out, the crucial characteristic of this scene with Heracles is its location—the infernal world in which Odysseus encounters a series of suffering figures—among them Tantalus and Sisyphus—condemned to repeat the same act indefinitely. The libidinal economy of Tantalus’s torments is notable: they clearly exemplify the Lacanian distinction between need, demand, and desire, i.e., the way an everyday object destined to satisfy some of our needs undergoes a kind of transubstantiation as soon as it is caught in the dialectic of demand and ends up producing desire. When we demand an object from somebody, its “use value” (the fact that it serves to satisfy some of our needs) eo ipso becomes a form of expression of its “exchange value”; the object in question functions as an index of a network of intersubjective relations. If the other complies with our wish, he thereby bears witness to a certain attitude toward us. The final purpose of our demand for an object is thus not the satisfaction of a need attached to it but confirmation of the other’s attitude toward us. When, for example, a mother gives milk to her child, milk becomes a token of her love. The poor Tantalus thus pays for his greed (his striving after “exchange value”) when every object he obtains loses its ‘‘use value” and changes into a pure, useless embodiment of “exchange value”: the moment he bites into food, it changes to gold. It is Sisyphus, however, who bears on our interest here. His continuous pushing of the stone up the hill only to have it roll down again served, according to Milner, as the literary model for the third of Zeno’s paradoxes: we never can cover a given distance X, because, to do so, we must first cover half this distance, and to cover half, we must first cover a quarter of it, and so on, ad infinitum. A goal, once reached, always retreats anew. Can we not recognize in this paradox the very nature of the psychoanalytical notion of drive, or more properly the Lacanian distinction between its aim and its goal? The goal is the final destination, while the aim is what we intend to do, i.e., the way itself. Lacan’s point is that the real purpose of the drive is not its goal (full satisfaction) but its aim: the drive’s ultimate aim is simply to reproduce itself as drive, to return to its circular path, to continue its path to and from the goal. The real source of enjoyment is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit.2 Therein consists the paradox of Sisyphus: once he reaches his goal, he experiences the fact that the real aim of his activity is the way itself, the alternation of ascent and descent. Where do we detect the libidinal economy of the last of Zeno’s paradoxes according to which it follows, from the movement of two equal masses in opposite directions, that half of a certain amount of time equals its double amount? Where do we encounter the same paradoxical experience of an increase in the libidinal impact of an object whenever attempts are made to diminish and destroy it? Consider the way the figure of the Jews functioned in Nazi discourse: the more they were exterminated, eliminated, the fewer their numbers, the more dangerous their remainder became, as if their threat grew in proportion to their diminution in reality. This is again an exemplary case of the subject’s relation to the horrifying object that embodies its surplus enjoyment: the more we fight against it, the more its power over us grows. The general conclusion to be drawn from all this is that there is a certain domain in which Zeno’s paradoxes are fully valid: the domain of the subject’s impossible relation to the object-cause of its desire, the domain of the drive that circulates endlessly around it. This is, however, the very domain Zeno is obliged to exclude as “impossible” in order that the reign of the philosophical One can establish itself. That is, the exclusion of the real of the drive and the object around which it circulates is constitutive of philosophy as such, which is why Zeno’s paradoxes, by means of which he tries to prove the impossibility and consequently the nonexistence of movement and multitude, are the reverse of the assertion of One, the immovable Being, in Parmenides, the first proper philosopher.3 Perhaps we can now understand what Lacan meant when he said that the object small a “is what philosophical reflection lacks in order to be able to locate itself, i.e., to ascertain its nullity.”4
1 Jean-Claude Milner, DéDections fictives, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1985, pp. 45–71.
2 "When you entrust someone with a mission, the aim is not what he brings back, but the itinerary he must take. The aim is the way taken. . . . If the drive may be satisfied without attaining what, from the point-ofview of a biological totalization of function, would be the satisfaction of its end of reproduction, it is because it is a partial drive, and its aim is simply this return into circuit." (Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, London, Hogarth Press, 1977, p. 179.)
3 In other words, we could pin down the ultimate paradox of Zeno's paradoxes by means of the Hegelian distinction between what the subject "intends to say" and what he "effectively says" (the distinction that, incidentally, coincides with the Lacanian distinction between signification and signifiance). What Zeno "wants to say," his intention, is to exclude the paradoxical nature of our relationship to object small a by proving its nonexistence; what he effectively does (more properly: says) is to articulate the very paradoxes that define the status of this object as impossible-real.
4 Jacques Lacan, "Résponses à des étudiants en philosophie," in Cahiers pour l'analyse 3, Paris, Graphe, 1967, p. 7.
Goal and Aim in Fantasy In other words, what Zeno excludes is the very dimension of fantasy, insofar as, in Lacanian theory, fantasy designates the subject’s “impossible” relation to a, to the objectcause of its desire. Fantasy is usually conceived as a scenario that realizes the subject’s desire. This elementary definition is quite adequate, on condition that we take it literally: what the fantasy stages is not a scene in which our desire is fulfulled, fully satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realizes, stages, the desire as such. The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed—and it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the coordinates of the subject’s desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the subject assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as de siring: through fantasy, we learn how to desire.5 To exemplify this crucial theoretical point, let us take a famous science fiction short story, Robert Scheckley’s “Store of the Worlds.” Mr. Wayne, the story’s hero, visits the old and mysterious Tompkins, who lives alone in a shack, ruined and tilled with decaying waste, in an abandoned part of town. Rumor has it that, by means of a special kind of drug, Tompkins is capable of transposing people into a parallel dimension where all their desires are fulfilled. To pay for this service, one was required to hand over to Tompkins one’s most valuable material goods. After finding Tompkins, Wayne engages him in conversation; the former maintains that most of his clients return from their experience well satisfied; they do not, afterward, feel deceived. Wayne, however, hesitates, and Tompkins advises him to take his time and think things over before making up his mind. All the way home, Wayne thinks about it; but at home, his wife and son are waiting for him, and soon he is caught up in the joys and small troubles of family life. Almost daily, he promises himself that he will visit old Tompkins again and afford himself the experience of the fulfillment of his desires, but there is always something to be done, some family matter that distracts him and causes him to put off his visit. First, he has to accompany his wife to an anniversary party; then his son has problems in school; in summer, there are vacations and he has promised to go sailing with his son; fall brings its own new preoccupations. The whole year goes by in this way, with Wayne having no time to take the decision, although in the back of his mind, he is constantly aware that sooner or later he will definitely visit Tompkins. Time passes thus until . . . he awakens suddenly in the shack beside Tompkins, who asks him kindly: “So, how do you feel now? Are you satisfied?” Embarrassed and perplexed, Wayne mumbles “Yes, yes, of course,” gives him all his worldly possessions (a rusty knife, an old can, and a few other small articles), and leaves quickly, hurrying between the decaying ruins so that he will not be too late for his evening ration of potatoes. He arrives at his underground shelter before darkness, when flocks of rats come out from their holes and reign over the devastation of nuclear war. This story belongs, of course, to postcatastrophe science fiction, which describes everyday life after nuclear war—or some similar event—has caused the disintegration of our civilization. The aspect that interests us here, however, is the trap into which the reader of the story necessarily falls, the trap upon which the whole effectiveness of the story is based and in which the very paradox of desire consists: we mistake for postponement of the “thing itself” what is already the “thing itself,” we mistake for the searching and indecision proper to desire what is, in fact, the realization of desire. That is to say, the realization of desire does not consist in its being “fulfilled,’’ “fully satisfied,” it coincides rather with the reproduction of desire as such, with its circular movement. Wayne “realized his desire” precisely by transposing himself, in a hallucination, into a state that enabled him to postpone indefinitely his desire’s full satisfaction, i.e., into a state that reproduced the lack constitutive of desire. We can in this way also grasp the specificity of the Lacanian notion of anxiety: anxiety occurs not when the object-cause of desire is lacking; it is not the lack of the object that gives rise to anxiety but, on the contrary, the danger of our getting too close to the object and thus losing the lack itself. Anxiety is brought on by the disappearance of desire. Where exactly, in this futile circular movement, is the objet a? The hero of Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade, narrates the story of his being hired to find a man who had suddenly left his settled job and family and vanished. Spade is unable to track him down, but a few years later the man is spotted in another city, where he lives under an assumed name and leads a life remarkably similar to the one he had fled when a beam from a construction site fell and narrowly missed hitting him on the head. In Lacanian terms this beam became for him the mark of the world’s inconsistency: s(). In spite of the fact that his “new” life so closely resembles the old, he is firmly convinced that his beginning again was not in vain, i.e., that it was well worth the trouble to cut his ties and begin a new life. Here we see the function of the objet petit a at its purest. From the point of view of “wisdom,” the break is not worth the trouble; ultimately, we always find ourselves in the same position from which we have tried to escape, which is why, instead of running after the impossible, we must learn to consent to our common lot and to find pleasure in the trivia of our everyday life. Where do we find the objet petit a? The objet a is precisely that surplus, that elusive make-believe that drove the man to change his existence. In “reality,” it is nothing at all, just an empty surface (his life after the break is the same as before), but because of it the break is nonetheless well worth the trouble.
5 For an articulation of such a notion of fantasy in regard to cinema, see Elizabeth Cowie, Sexual Difference and Representation in the Cinema, London, Macmillan, 1990.
A Black Hole in Reality How Nothing Can Beget Something
Patricia Highsmith’s story “Black House” perfectly exemplifies the way fantasy space functions as an empty surface, as a kind of screen for the projection of desires: the fascinating presence of its positive contents does nothing but fill out a certain emptiness. The action takes place in a small American town where men gather in the evenings in the local saloon and revive nostalgic memories, local myths—usually their youthful adventures—that are always somehow associated with a desolate old building on a hill near the town. A certain malediction hangs over this mysterious “black house”; there is a tacit agreement among the men that one is not allowed to approach it. Entering it is supposed to involve mortal danger (it is rumored that the house is haunted, that it is inhabited by a lonely lunatic who kills all intruders, etc.) but, at the same time, the “black house” is a place that links all their adolescent memories, the place of their first “transgressions,” above all those related to sexual experience (the men endlessly retell stories of how, years ago, they had their first sexual encounter in the house with the prettiest girl in the town, how they had their first cigarette in it). The hero of the story is a young engineer who has just moved into town. After listening to all the myths about the “black house,” he announces to the company his intention of exploring this mysterious house the next evening. The men present react to this announcement with silent but nonetheless intense disapproval. The next evening, the young engineer visits the house, expecting something terrible or at least something unexpected to happen to him. With tense anticipation, he approaches the dark, old ruin, climbs the creaking staircase, examines all the rooms, but finds nothing except a few decaying mats on the floor. He immediately returns to the saloon and triumphantly declares to the gathered men that their “black house” is just an old, filthy ruin, that there is nothing mysterious or fascinating about it. The men are horrified and when the engineer begins to leave, one of them wildly attacks him. The engineer unfortunately falls to the ground and soon afterward dies. Why were the men so horrified by the action of the newcomer? We can grasp their resentment by remarking the difference between reality and the ‘‘other scene” of the fantasy space: the “black house” was forbidden to the men because it functioned as an empty space wherein they could project their nostalgic desires, their distorted memories; by publicly stating that the “black house” was nothing but an old ruin, the young intruder reduced their fantasy space to everyday, common reality. He annulled the difference between reality and fantasy space, depriving the men of the place in which they were able to articulate their desires.6
What is especially indicative in Field of Dreams is the content of the apparitions: the film culminates in the apparition of the ghost of the hero’s father (the hero remembers him only from his later years, as a figure broken by the shameful end of his baseball career)—now he sees him young and full of ardor, ignorant of the future that awaits him. In other words, he sees his father in a state where the father doesn’t know that he is already dead (to repeat the well-known formula of a Freudian dream) and the hero greets his arrival with The gaze of the men in the saloon, capable of discerning the fascinating contours of the object of desire where a normal view sees nothing but a trivial everyday object, is literally a gaze capable of seeing nothingness, i.e., of seeing an object “begot by nothing,” as Shakespeare formulated it in a short scene in Richard II, one of his most interesting plays. Richard II proves beyond any doubt that Shakespeare ha d read Lacan, for the basic problem of the drama is that of the hystericization of a king, a process whereby the king loses the second, sublime body that makes him a king, is confronted with the void of his subjectivity outside the symbolic mandate-title “king,” and is thus forced into a series of theatrical, hysterical outbursts, from self-pity to sarcastic and clownish madness.7 Our interest is limited, however, to a short dialogue between the Queen and Bushy, the King’s servant, at the beginning of act II, scene II. The King has left on an expedition of war, and the Queen is filled with presentiments of evil, with a sorrow whose cause she cannot discern. Bushy attempts to console her by pointing out the illusory, phantomlike nature of her grief:
Bushy: Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows, Which show like grief itself, but are not so. For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears, Divides one thing entire to many objects; Like perspectives, which rightly gaz’d upon Show nothing but confusion; ey’d awry Distinguish form: so your sweet majesty, Looking awry upon your lord’s departure, Finds shapes of grief more than himself to wail; Which, look’d on as it is, is nought but shadows Of what is not. Then, thrice-gracious queen, More than your lord’s departure weep not: more’s not seen; Or if it be, ‘tis with false sorrow’s eye, Which for things true weeps things imaginary.
Queen: It may be so; but yet my inward soul Persuades me it is otherwise: howe’er it be, I cannot but be sad, so heavy sad, As, though in thinking on no thought I think, Makes me with heavy nothing faint and shrink.
Bushy: ‘Tis nothing but conceit, my gracious lady.
Queen: ‘Tis nothing less: conceit is still deriv’d From some forefather grief; mine is not so, For nothing hath begot my something grief; Or something hath the nothing that I grieve: ‘Tis in reversion that I do possess; But what it is, that is not yet known; what I cannot name; ‘tis nameless woe, I wot.
By means of the metaphor of anamorphosis, Bushy tries to convince the Queen that her sorrow has no foundation, that its reasons are null. But the crucial point is the way his metaphor splits, redoubles itself, that is, the way Bushy entangles himself in contradiction. First (“sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears, / Divides one thing entire to many objects”), he refers to the simple, commonsense opposition between a thing as it is “in itself,” in reality, and its “shadows,” reflections in our eyes, subjective impressions multiplied by our anxieties and sorrows. When we are worried, a small difficulty assumes giant proportions, the thing appears to us far worse than it really is. The metaphor at work here is that of a glass surface sharpened, cut in a way that causes it to reflect a multitude of images. Instead of the tiny substance, we see its “twenty shadows.’’ In the following lines, however, things get complicated. At first sight, it seems that Shakespeare only illustrates the fact that “sorrow’s eye . . . divides one thing entire to many objects” with a metaphor from the domain of painting (“like perspectives which rightly gaz’d upon show nothing but confusion; ey’d awry distinguish form”), but what he really accomplishes is a radical change of terrain—from the metaphor of a sharpened glass surface, he passes to the metaphor of anamorphosis, the logic of which is quite different: a detail of a picture that “gaz’d rightly,” i.e., straightforwardly, appears as a blurred spot, assumes clear, distinguished shapes once we look at it “awry,” at an angle. The lines that apply this metaphor back to the Queen’s anxiety and sorrow are thus profoundly ambivalent: “so your sweet majesty, looking awry upon your lord’s departure, finds shapes of grief more than himself to wail; which, look’d on as it is, is nought but shadows of what is not.” That is to say, if we take the comparison of the Queen’s gaze with the anamorphotic gaze literally, we are obliged to state that precisely by “looking awry,” i.e., at an angle, she sees the thing in its clear and distinct form, in opposition to the “straightforward” view that sees only an indistinct confusion (and, incidentally, the further development of the drama fully justifies the Queen’s most sinister presentiments). But, of course, Bushy does not “want to say” this, his intention was to say quite the opposite: by means of an imperceptible subreption, he returns to the first metaphor (that of a sharpened glass) and “intends to say” that, because her gaze is distorted by sorrow and anxiety, the Queen sees cause for alarm, whereas a closer, matter-of-fact view attests to the fact that there is nothing to her fear. What we have here are thus two realities, two “substances.” On the level of the first metaphor, we have commonsense reality seen as “substance with twenty shadows,” as a thing split into twenty reflections by our subjective view, in short, as a substantial “reality” distorted by our subjective perspective. If we look at a thing straight on, matterof-factly, we see it “as it really is,” while the gaze puzzled by our desires and anxieties (“looking awry”) gives us a distorted, blurred image. On the level of the second metaphor, however, the relation is exactly the opposite: if we look at a thing straight on, i.e., matter-of-factly, disinterestedly, objectively, we see nothing but a formless spot; the object assumes clear and distinctive features only if we look at it “at an angle,” i.e., with an “interested” view, supported, permeated, and ‘‘distorted” by desire. This describes perfectly the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire: an object that is, in a way, posited by desire itself. The paradox of desire is that it posits retroactively its own cause, i.e., the object a is an object that can be perceived only by a gaze “distorted” by desire, an object that does not exist for an “objective” gaze. In other words, the object a is always, by definition, perceived in a distorted way, because outside this distortion, “in itself,” it does not exist, since it is nothing but the embodiment, the materialization of this very distortion, of this surplus of confusion and perturbation introduced by desire into socalled “objective reality.” The object a is “objectively” nothing, though, viewed from a certain perspective, it assumes the shape of “something.” It is, as is formulated in an extremely precise manner by the Queen in her response to Bushy, her “something grief” begot by “nothing.” Desire “takes off” when “something” (its object-cause) embodies, gives positive existence to its “nothing,” to its void. This “something” is the anamorphotic object, a pure semblance that we can perceive clearly only by “looking awry.” It is precisely (and only) the logic of desire that belies the notorious wisdom that “nothing comes from nothing”: in the movement of desire, “something comes from nothing.” Although it is true that the object-cause of desire is a pure semblance, this does not prevent it from triggering a whole chain of consequences that regulate our “material,” “effective” life and deeds.
5 For an articulation of such a notion of fantasy in regard to cinema, see Elizabeth Cowie, Sexual Difference and Representation in the Cinema, London, Macmillan, 1990.
6 In this respect, the role of the cleared cornfield, transformed into a baseball diamond in Phil Robinson's Field of Drearms is exactly homologous to the "black house": it is a clearance opening the space where the fantasy figures can appear. What we must not overlook apropos of Field of Dreams is the purely formal aspect: all we have to do is to cut out a square in the field and enclose it with a fence, and already phantoms start to appear in it, and the ordinary corn behind it is miraculously transformed into the mythical thicket giving birth to the phantoms and guarding their secret—in short, an ordinary field becomes a "field of dreams." In this it is similar to Saki's famous short story "The Window": a guest arrives at a country house and looks through the spacious French window at the field behind the house; the daughter of the family, the only one to receive him upon his arrival, tells him that all other members of the family had died recently in an accident; soon afterward, when the guest looks through the window again, he sees them approaching slowly across the field, returning from the hunt. Convinced that what he sees are ghosts of the deceased, he runs away in horror . . . (The daughter is of course a clever pathological liar. For her family, she quickly concocts another story to explain why the guest left the house in a panic.) So, a few words encircling the window with a new frame of reference suffice to transform it miraculously into a fantasy frame and to transubstantiate the muddy tenants into frightful ghostly apparitions.