HUPOMNEMATA

Here it is , I saw The Matrix Reloaded. So as I should, I am going to write about it. But as some of you haven’t seen it yet, I will go by steps.
Let’s begin with this choice “Freedom or death”. If everything is written like a program is written, if we are part , or within a system, with its loops in time, its bugs, its failures. Let me tell you what I was reading the day before I saw the movie and how weirdly enough it was a key of reading the movie. I don’t think that the directors have found any inspiration in Lacan or Hegel, I am just talking about coincidences…but is there coincidence?
If you don’t want to know, don’t go on reading , it is your own choice.

So in the train between Rotterdam and Brussels, reading this book by Joan Copjec, ‘Imagine there’s no woman’, p. 18
“Now, it would seem that the revolutionary slogan, ‘Freedom or death’ offers a choice with the same alienating structure. If you choose freedom and thereby invalidate the threat of death, you have no way of demonstrating your independence of the life situation, as Hegel argued in his essay on “Natural Law”; that is, you have no way of demonstrating that your choice is free. So in this case the only real choice is death, since it alone proves that your choice has been freely made. Yet once this decision is taken, you lose all freedom but the freedom to die. This is what Hegel called “the freedom of the slave”. (…)
In (this) example,(…), by choosing one does not automatically lose what is not chosen, but wins some of it. Lacan attributes the difference between the 2 examples (Your money or your life and Freedom or death) to the appereance of death in the second. It is through the introduction of the ‘lethal factor’,as he puts it, that the revolutionnary choice opens the possibility of an act about which it is imporper to say it sacrifices freedom, that it loses it to the structure of alienation. The choice of death gains freedom. This point is utterly incomprehensible unless one assumes the death one opts for in the second example (freedom or death) is not the same one that is avoided in the first (your life or your money). That is, at the point at which death intersects freedom-which is to say,at the point at which it intersects the subject-it ceases to be conceivable in literal or biological terms. The authority for this observation is, again, Freud, who argued that death is for the subject only “an abstract concept, with a negative content”. For this reason it does not enter psychoanalysisi as such, but only in the form of the death drive. We must assume, then, if we are speaking of the embodied rather than tha abstract subject, that what is at issue in the intersection of freedom and death is not biological death, but the death drive. It is to the latter that we owe the possibility of an ethical act does not alienate freedom or incur additional guilt. More specifically, it is to sublimation, which is strickly aligned with the drive (…) that we owe this possibility.
My argument, in sum, is that Lacan attacks Hegel’s argument by 1. sexualizing work or better, the act and 2. debiologizing death in an effort, in both cases, to corporealize the ethical subject. I understand that this appears to give rise to a contradiction: to declare ethical action, as such, a sublimation would seem to purify action of all reference to the body and pleasure. But this apparent contradiction arises from a common yet faulty definition of sublimation. If one were successfully to show that “sublimation is not in fact, what the foolish crowd thinks…(it) doesn’t make the sexual object disappear-far from it”, then the contradiction would be dissolved.”
–to be continued

Posted by laurence on Monday, May 19th, 2003 in: science/fiction. Both comments and pings are currently closed.