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Faith

Dr Edmond Wright


It was said by Kant long ago that

To one man, for instance, a certain word suggests one thing, to another some other thing; the unity of consciousness in that which is empirical is not, as regards what is given, necessarily and universally valid. (Critique of Pure Reason, B140)

This uncontentious statement, that it is not possible for two persons' understandings to match exactly, has not been given by philosophers the attention it deserves. Fortunately, a psycholinguist with a special interest in communication, Ragnar Rommetveit, has concerned himself with this very matter; he has empirically established the fact that it is possible for two persons to arrive at practical co-ordination in speech and action without either being aware that they each have marked differences of perception and understanding.[1] These differences would, indeed, only become salient to one or both in some entirely new context unforeseen by either, in which some hidden criterion on which one had been unconsciously relying became relevant to his or her current purposes. A logician, Harry S. Leonard, has commented on this universal feature of communication, an ever-present but concealed 'misapprehension':

Two people engaged in this same process of trying to reach a common understanding may well find two sets of criteria which remarkably well isolate the same extension. But do they understand the word in the same way?[2]

Notice the radical implication here which goes beyond this remark and that of Kant's: the two might not even be using criteria that pick out strictly the same extension, the same 'thing'. For one of them, his 'entity' might not be considered to last as long as the other's 'entity', or cease to be 'the same thing' when it changes in some quality (say, in colour, weight or taste). As Aristotle commented, what are six apples for the seller do not necessarily count as six apples for the buyer.

But Leonard's remark can take us further: it does not matter (in the sense of how the participants in language judge their intentions and how they direct their separate attentions) whether their attempts at co-ordination do coincide fully, that is, each might have their own 'entity', their own selection from the individual experiences they are having, as long as the 'failure' of overlap between these selections does not immediately interfere with their judgements of success in the action concerned. The implication is a startling one: there is actually no single entity in front of them at all - 'its' 'singularity' is something supposed for the convenience of communication. That convenience is established by each behaving as if their two selections from experience actually did coincide. Obviously, if they did not make this necessary but strictly false assumption that there was only 'one' entity in front of them, they could never bring their separate judgements into any sort of harness.

To make this plainer, the structure involved is of a similar character to that of two persons talking over the phone about something they both happen to be watching on television. There may be distinct differences in the quality of the pictures on the screen (e.g. in the colour settings or the size of the screen), but both persons refer to the 'same object' that they pick out (even though that quality difference might, unknown to them both, be significant for what they are talking about - say, in a programme about art, a painting). A word may be, as V. N. Volosinov put it, 'a territory shared by addresser and addressee',[3] but it is not quite the same territory for them both.

This assumption of there being a single entity, furthermore, is sustained by judgements of how far current intentions are being fulfilled, and intentions themselves are notoriously open to indefinite exploration. The sociologist Harold Garfinkel speaks of the 'Et Cetera' principle,[4] which states that all communication makes use of the assumption that, though not everything has been strictly defined for some present statement, there is a vague region of relevance which supposed to be the same for each participant - when it patently is not. Linguists such as Sir Alan Gardiner,[5] and philosophers of science such as Michael Polanyi[6] have stressed that intention has depths beyond the conceptualizing of the agent. Even analytic philosophers have drawn attention to this characteristic of intention, one calling it 'The Accordion Effect'[7] because the intentional description of an act can be widened without limit. Why did you have that cup of tea in that café? - not merely because you were thirsty, not merely because you wanted a rest, not merely because you were waiting for someone, etc., etc.

A sociologist, Alfred Schutz, reached the same conclusion as Rommetveit, arguing that, in order for two persons to engage in the co-operative act that is communication, they have to perform something that is not actually the case, namely, to behave as if, were they able to exchange their perspectives on the world - stand in the other's shoes, so to speak, thus seeing the world as their partner in dialogue does - then the object or whatever in front of them would appear exactly the same. He called it 'the Idealization of Reciprocity', the assumption of 'an interchangeability of standpoints'.[8] This is precisely what the very first two philosophers to glimpse this key structure noted. They were both American, Roy Wood Sellars and Clarence Irving Lewis: 'No two individuals can possibly have numerically the same thing-experiences, even though it works ordinarily to make that assumption';[9] 'the possibility of agreement' in our acting together in the world must be 'antecedently presumed'.[10]

Rommetveit, independently of Schutz, puts it this way: 'we must, naively and unreflectively, take the possibility of perfect intersubjectivity for granted in order to achieve partial intersubjectivity in real-life discourse with our fellow-men.'[11] And in case anyone should think that the phrase 'take for granted' means actually be convinced of, one only has to analyse the phrase: 'take for' means to accept an partial confirmation for a full one or to accept an appearance for reality, as in the sentence 'It was so foggy I took him for his brother'; and 'to grant' means to assent, to allow, to permit to be realized, which clearly implies a matter concerning our will, decision, desire, fear. So 'take for granted' means to accept for the time being that something not fully confirmed will be treated as such according to our judgement of our current purposes.

Next step. A difference relevant for one person A and not for the other B that has not surfaced into mutual acknowledgement lies in a peculiar region of awareness. It may be something sensed which has not even been commonly attended to by anyone other than A; indeed, it may not even have been named in the public language. As Wilhelm von Humboldt put it:

All understanding is simultaneously a noncomprehension; all agreement in ideas and emotions is at the same time a divergence.[12]

What is implicit for each cannot all be explicit for both. Of two persons A and B, A herself is certainly not aware of this difference in her experience from that of B. Though it may be also sensed by B, it has not been brought to his attention, and therefore, while he is sensing perfectly well, he does not know what it is he is sensing that has the significance A is attributing to it. He has no idea that she is making any such attribution because there is nothing in the current discussion to make it salient. As C. I. Lewis put it: '

It is, thus, quite possible that we may understand each other perfectly when we should disagree about the definition of our terms, because only some restricted meaning, covered in both our definitions, is required by our discussion.[13]

Sensing and knowing, therefore, come apart in a division that is not recognized in the public language. Person A is using a word with that criterion as part of her application of it, but no one else is so doing. Tomorrow it may turn out, because of some mismatch in behaviour, that the difference comes to public recognition, and clearly it is possible that that difference may emerge as beneficial to all (it may even be person B who discovers that A is using the word differently from everyone else, so it would be A's insight but B's discovery!).

But now we can see a more radical conclusion still: since no one's sensing is the same as any one else's (a fact undisputed by neurophysiologists), and since no one attends to precisely the same sensory features of the world as anyone else, it is empirically impossible for the common word to capture all that is being experienced by those who are engaging in communication. As the philosopher of rhetoric Hans-Georg Gadamer has put it, there is always 'the infinity of the unsaid'.[14] We project the illusion of finitude upon the infinite. Of course, one can say that, strictly speaking, we do not know whether the Real consists of discrete elements or is a continuum or is a mixture of both (consider the physicists' continuing debate about 'wave' or 'particle'), but what is obvious is that in order to inform someone of something we have to behave as if the world consisted of finite, discrete 'dry-goods', to use J. L. Austin's phrase.

Communication thus turns out to require a 'naïve and unreflective' projection of agreement on supposedly discrete portions selected from individually separate fields of experience, an agreement that can never reach a logically perfect coincidence of understanding. Although Speaker and Hearer must, as Rommetveit and Schutz insist, assume a perfect agreement over 'whatever they refer to', this is only a useful, unconscious method of obtaining such co-ordination as they can manage. To quote Gadamer again, 'this dialectic of reciprocity that governs all "I-Thou" relationships is inevitably hidden from the mind of the individual.'[15] Once this is established in any ongoing statement that is being made in the real world, then an adjustment of that agreement can be made and the Hearer's concept be updated, that is, the initially agreed finite boundaries are moved about on the in-finite. As was said above, unless we acted as if we made perfect reference to 'single objects and persons', we could never maintain the partial overlap that is necessary if we are to do any updating at all, which is, after all, the purpose of speech. To use Saussurean terms, we have to perform the synchronic perfection of language is order to allow the diachronic correction to go through.

To put the human situation of language in another way; both participants have their own selection in front of them which they call 'the entity', but it is not the same portion of the Real for each of them. That is both entities are real - in the sense that they exist as separate individual selections from existence - but they are not numerically the same selection for A and B. Indeed, if they (impossibly) were identical, there would be no point in speaking, which is to adjust our references upon the world. So see how easy it is to slip into being convinced that the objective is real, for one's own selection is from the Real - what we forget is that, however objective we may think it to be, it is not the same bit of the Real that the other is selecting. Thus the conclusion is that, objectivity, that would-be safe agreement about entities in the world (including persons and selves), is not to be identified with existence. Existence remains uncaptured by language even when all parties profess themselves satisfied: objectivity is but an aspect of the needful Idealization of Reciprocity, our 'faith' in which is sustained by all the testing we have done with that entity to date. Sensing is never perceiving, which implies that our unconscious 'faith' in 'perfect objectivity' is never without risk. All entities therefore, constructed from the Real though they are, have a virtual quality, remaining forever provisional. In Rommetveit's words,

we cannot attain closure and assess propositional content without prejudging a multifaceted, only partially known and opaque 'reality'.[16]

This opacity is that of the Real. In addition, we need the co-operation of all members of the speaking group to produce the best possible outcome, for the 'truth' can clearly be in the possession of the least 'authoritative' member, to whom authority should pass like a baton in a race. Nearly two thousand years ago Sextus Empiricus warned us that 'truth is a rare thing and on this account it is possible for one man to be wiser than the majority.'[17] To give a current statement of the same view, as Alain Badiou puts it, 'truth can appear as boring a hole in the encyclopaedia [of knowledges].'[18]

There may still be readers who protest, declaring, 'Surely there is no doubt that we see things and people in front of us!' It needs to be repeated, in the face of this massive prejudice that the confidence here springs from two aspects of the situation:

Many an analytical philosopher has protested against such conclusions. To take an up-to date example out of innumerable cases, in a new book on the philosophy of perception Michael Tye refines on a theory he has earlier proposed called 'representationalism'. What is noteworthy is that in defining it he confidently begins with the commonsense experience of having familiar objects in front of him; he believes we start with 'how things look to you';[19] my italics). He nowhere inquires into how that identification was achieved or intersubjectively maintained and never questions the possibility that there actually could be no logically single entities to be seen, that our sensory experience could be no more than bare evidence. He also believes that a sensory experience is 'publicly accessible' in an identical way to everyone.[20] But sensory experience is bare in the sense of needing the drive of pleasure and pain to deem it significant at all. Imagine a mutation in some advanced animal, say, a monkey, born with perfect seeing, hearing, smelling, etc., but no feelings of pleasure and pain. It is obvious that the monkey could gain no knowledge whatsoever. Or imagine the reverse, it born with feelings of pleasure and pain but no other senses (this would be jouissance at its most blind): equally there could be no knowledge. In both cases, there would be evidence but no possibility of making use of it. Our experience does not 'represent the world': it merely gives us evidence that we may or not take advantage of.

That experience, both the sensory and that of pleasure and pain, is part of the Real, just as bare, even 'brute' or 'raw' as philosophers say, as what causes it, other parts of the Real. Consider this analogy: a piece of rock falls from a cliff, bounces into some clay, and flies off to land yards away. It leaves behind a near-perfect imprint of one side of itself in the clay. Is this a 'representation' of the rock? No, of course not; it is just a freak occurrence as contingent as anything else. Similarly with what happens when a distribution of light-rays arrive at your retinas; things happen automatically in the evolved brain and an 'imprint' of sorts becomes your experience of that whole distribution. But the significance of the variations within that distribution have to be, as we say, 'painfully' learned. And we can go on learning more and more. Inspector Morse on seeing the evidence of a footprint might at first say that 'someone has been here'; then, 'a man has been here'; then 'a man with a limp has been here'; then, 'an exceptionally tall man has been here', etc., etc. The Real is infinite, remaining outside the Symbolic even when we are experiencing it. So we have to say 'We the sense the Real, but know only those precarious and tentative selections we have made from it with the help of our motivation system, and - since we are human and can communicate with each other - with the help of what we have learned from the Symbolic, held in place by our mutual trust (and our luck with the Real so far).' Existence is what we sense, and it is always there, known or unknown; the so-called 'real world' of objects and persons and named properties is actually only a possible world, for any of these guesses might fail us at any time. Logicians believe that they can imagine 'possible worlds' when the fact is we really live in one. So when Terry Eagleton amusingly writes[21] that Jacques Lacan, for example, sees the objective world as 'just a low-grade place of fantasy in which we shelter from the terrors of the Real', he is not far from the truth. Dr. Samuel Johnson kicked a stone thinking to disprove Berkeley's idealism thereby, but he only demonstrated the existence of 'what' he felt with his foot, for what he kicked might not have been 'a stone' at all, but a projection of some rock, or a brick, or some partly buried iron, etc., etc. If everyone there were agreed that 'it' was a stone, that would have been a confirmation of the idealized reciprocity of he and his fellows in the dialogue of the ongoing Symbolic Order. When Berkeley said that all objects remained the same because they are 'seen by God', he was ironically correct, for the singularity of 'the stone' is projected by the naïve mutual 'faith' - which we can call 'God' if we like.

What are such philosophers as Tye actually doing when they insist on the objectivity of things and properties (e.g. believing that a scent is 'publicly accessible' in an identical way for all)? To answer this, a kind of argumentum ad hominem is for once justifiable. To be convinced that there exist observable discrete entities (and definable properties) in the Real as an axiom of one's philosophical argument is to remain inside the Idealization of Reciprocity without being aware that one is. So therefore to insist, as for example, with David Wiggins, that 'the object is there anyway',[22] is no more than to encourage us to apply the Idealization of Reciprocity, to join with him in the unreflective 'faith' that sustains language. And who could complain about that - at the level of ordinary speech? So he is not speaking as a philosopher , one who should be examining the basis of dialogic communication: he is still at the level of the ordinary speaker without knowing it. It is just the same mistake when he says that all our separate vaguenesses about an object 'match exactly',[23] for what is hidden from mutual understanding is undoubtedly different for each participant, but we have to behave as if it is not, and this last is really what he is telling us to do, to engage in the 'naïve and unreflective' faith. He does not see that to say that one person's vagueness is the same as another's is equivalent to saying we must neglect all that we separately consider negligible, and this is plainly an exhortation to take the supposed 'singularity' of 'the entity' for granted. But there is no doubt that we cannot know that what is 'negligible' for you is 'negligible' for me; tomorrow we may find it was not. This is what all stories are about. This ambiguity is betrayed in the common phrase 'to all intents and purposes': when we say 'we shall treat something as something else to all intents and purposes', we know it actually means the opposite of that, that there is a certain doubt about the equivalence, but it will do for the time being. And this is precisely what we do for any entity - the human co-ordination of a pair of guesses (that actually produces 'it' by treating the two as a single certainty) will work for the time being. It is like using money and knowing how to bargain (and thus alter its value), instead of, like a miser, fetishizing it.

So this error such philosophers are making can become a very dangerous because it ignores three things: first, the hypothetical nature of the Idealization; second, the fact that it depends on what has the structure of a trust between two persons; and third, it not only ignores the risk involved but tries to turn the trust into a superstitious conviction that words do in fact fit the world. This complacent assertion - when the world is plainly rife with unpleasant surprises - turns the Idealization, which is only after all a method (that enables us together to hold a portion of the Real roughly in place) into an occult dogma. At its worst turns into an insistence on one's own preferred interpretation of some identity or other, an attitude basically narcissistic and authoritarian, whether one is tyrannically at the centre of the social order or anarchistically at the periphery of it. This is what Zizek repeatedly warns against, the turning of the Law into an obsessional fixity, the perverse obedience one finds in ascesis, for example, or the comic example of Hasek's 'Good Soldier Schweik', who threw the Austrian army into confusion by following his orders with absolute precision.[24] Zizek borrows Kant's fantasy[25] in which a man is allowed a vision of the Divine Order, the result being that he is turned into a lifeless puppet.[26] We can now perhaps see a way as to why, to use Terry Eagleton's phrase, 'language is not all there is.'

To keep to theological terminology, such philosophers are not being 'religious' in Kierkegaard's sense; that is, they are behaving as if the language is in perfect order as it is and requires no adjustment from individual subjects. The whole point of a religious faith, if we are to accept Zizek's interpretation of St. Paul, is to view the existing Law, both legal and moral, as something to be reshaped, not in the sense of a disobedient reaction, but as a transformation of both subject and law[27] This is the Kierkegaardian faith that 'cannot even be externalized into the universal medium of language',[28] and why not? - because the whole point of speaking is to change the language. This is the real message of the Cretan Liar story, in that we are all strictly 'liars' as soon as we have something new to say, for to utter any informative statement does change the language, albeit perhaps only infinitesimally. The linguist Sir Alan Gardiner, in opposition to Saussure's 'superstitious' over-reliance on the negations of the Symbolic structure, points out that the living ox before two French observers does make its own new, positive, if infinitesimal, contribution to the signifié of the word boeuf.[29] It is where the Symbolic Order of language gains by accretion from the Real.

The only kind of languages that are not provisional are those of pure logic and pure mathematics, for in them we have decided for the nonce to treat them as if they will never refer to the Real, that is, nothing can ever alter the meaning of the signs we use within them. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that, as soon as we try to refer while still believing ourselves in the realm of the non-referring, paradoxes result. Zeno's paradoxes, for example, all depend on the impossible reference to something so small that no mutual agreement about that portion as a part of the Real could ever be reached (this point was made in 1836 by Alexander Bryan Johnson[30]). The paradox in Gödel's Proof of the Inconsistency of Mathematics arises because it contains an illicit attempt to refer, namely, in making numbers refer to other numbers. Treating numbers as never referring makes them of course the most fictive of all uses of language: ordinary words may only refer by virtue of our mutual idealization, but at least they retain a current tenuous hold on the Real. In pure mathematics the logos becomes pure mythos.

The question of the 'faith' of the Idealization of Reciprocity requires a closer look. If the 'faith' is 'naïve and unreflective', a product of evolution, then it does not in itself partake of any moral worth. After all, one can talk with an enemy - even though it creates an odd irony that two enemies must to that minimal level agree together. But what obviously does happen that a genuine faith can be consciously built on the naive foundation, one that openly acknowledges the risk that is attendant upon it. This in turn implies that those one loves can never be wholly as one believes; they are irredeemably alien, a part of the opaque Real - indeed, it can be said that they are therefore to an unknown degree one's 'enemies', whom one has, nevertheless, to love. But - and this is Slavoj Zizek's repeated insistence - the self just as much contains an alien core or 'kernel' that, though it constitutes the Real inside one, remains ever detached from the mutual definitions within which we have created our very subjecthood (through what Althusser named its 'interpellations', the 'calls' that elicited the self from the undivided Real, which, being a part of the Symbolic, cannot just work one way; for a discussion of Althusser's notion, again see Moriarty).

To imagine that the Symbolic Order of language guarantees one's own interpretations of it is to be narcissistically lost, whether one is speaking from the standpoint of the 'authorities' (like Kierkegaard's 'ethical' stage where a formal code is taken as guide) or from that of the anarchic rebel (like his 'aesthetic' one, where a supposed 'inner' light is the source of action). To be positivist about entities is thus to be superstitious, even bigoted, and Zizek would say that the motivation is that of the 'obscene superego', the investing of the Law with uncontrolled jouissance. Instead of the entrance to the Symbolic being a faith that allows for the endless risk of semantic correction, that is, admitting the likelihood of a sacrifice of jouissance, it is taken as a boundless reassurance and permission. What should be, 'a shared ignorance', as Zizek calls it[31] - which, incidentally, is a good description of one aspect of the Idealization of Reciprocity - is colonized as an absolute knowledge. In contrast to this, there is the example of Antigone that Lacan examined. Her case is especially interesting because it shows an attempt to assert an 'absolute freedom', but, as Russell Grigg argues, though 'every act is a crime' set against the perfection of the Law, no one can be free of having to restructure the Symbolic, to move what Lacan called the points de capiton, the upholstery buttons that roughly hold the Symbolic to the Real.[32] From the point of view of a perfect Symbolic, however, any such attempt would be, as Eagleton notes, 'Original Sin', but, since one can privilege neither Symbolic nor Real, the Symbolic is just as much of an original sin against the subject. It is the Cretan Liar structure showing itself again: one hopes to move within the language to change the language. My own comment here has been to note that this implies that both comedy and tragedy are actual possibilities as life-structures for both subject and society, which makes the hopeful acceptance of risk in the public faith all the more fraught.[33] If this should be the case, then it is not 'an obscene vision of humanity', as Eagleton puts it,[34] that Zizek is presenting: it is rather that we should adopt Thomas Hardy's warning - 'if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst' ('In tenebris, II', line 14).

And here we have come round to the theme of Zizek's most recent books, The Ticklish Subject and The Fragile Absolute, for they deal above all with how the relation of the Symbolic to the Real underlies our major present political and moral concerns. If 'sharing a language' is only a co-ordinating of unsure overlaps, then Zizek's paradoxes begin to make sense. To take the one with which we began, that 'the subject can only recognize itself through acknowledging what it cannot recognize.'[35] If what is at the core of our bodily being is a kernel of the Real - as 'bare evidence' - that forever escapes the publicly 'shared' language by which we seek to understand it, then to acknowledge that alien experience, 'to recognize' it, is inevitably to realize that we cannot wholly capture it in words, that is, 'not to recognize it'. This is easy to understand if we accept that we can sense what we cannot ultimately know. As Roy Wood Sellars used to insist, 'being is one thing and knowledge is another',[36] which, in Lacanese, is 'The Real is one thing and the Symbolic Is another.' Zizek himself says something, another paradox, which can now be seen to be the equivalent of this:

This dialectical procedure of how an entity can become X only on so far as it has to renounce being X is precisely what Lacan calls "symbolic castration", the gap between the symbolic place and the element which fills it, the gap on account of which an element can fill its place only in so far as it is not directly this place.'[37]

The 'symbolic place' is the mutually idealized identity of our separate selections from the Real, and the Real provides 'the element' that 'fills' it, for each of us differently. Slavoj Zizek's discussion of the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski,[38] can be said to centre on the problem of the subject's encounter with the Real, both in itself as 'object' and with the other. He sees the films as presenting versions of a 'not-yet-constituted universe', where rival fantasies strive in conflict, those fantasies to which subjects depend for their very subjecthood, which are endeavours to hide the failure of the Symbolic to define them, that failure Lacan terms the 'Void' or the 'Lack'. The failure to accept that 'shared ignorance' extends to the sexual relationship, for which Lacan used the hyperbole of 'the impossibility of the sexual relationship', as 'impossible' as any other identification. Kieslowski's play of doubles in film after film takes that impossibility as its very topic.

The functioning of Symbolic faith, according to Zizek, is at the core of today's political and international troubles. Global capitalism is parasitic upon the culture of individual nations and social groups, both in the sense of colonizing their values and aesthetic character and yet in the process inevitably erasing those very differences. What is being erased is the level of genuine symbolic faith, one that not only tolerated risk but expected and coped with it. There has been a consequent increase in the level of superstition, the turning to creeds, political and religious, that promise full control, the absence of risk. Fear-driven, and thus cowardly, they insidiously direct jouissance under the guise of obedience. As Zizek asserts in a recent book, on totalitarianism,[39] the fascist or Stalinist leader obtains the apparent loyalty of his subjects by presenting rape and violence, not as transgressions, but as things commanded by the law, even, as was the case with the Nazis, presented as sacrifices of 'normal decency' for the greater cause. Instead of the Symbolic Order, the 'big Other', being socially created as a focus of an essentially unrealizable hope, it is misrecognized as having a foundation in the Real. Hence the paranoid distortions such as New-Age cults, extreme fundamentalisms, suicidal sects, UFO societies and their like, all of which are seeking an 'Other of the Other', a supposedly Real support in the face of the felt loss of a genuine trust.

Within the philosophy presented here, it is a matter of recognizing that the Symbolic already depends on its 'naïve and unreflecting' faith. This, though not of itself a support for hope, can nevertheless give us ground for optimism in that we can regain the trust that blindly sustained the best communities in the past by consciously performing what they did unthinkingly and which everyone who speaks is still doing.

The worst aspects of religion and nationalism in the past, the massacres of so-called 'intolerance', were the result of the scapegoating Reinhard identifies. But, as Zizek is arguing is his latest books, some kind of return to symbolic faith is required if we are to escape a repetition of such history. At worst, religion has been relegated to the schools, where it may hold a sentimental Santa Claus status or has vanished into a multicultural history of religions. Patriotism has been given a bad name by Hitler. Liberal politicians often say that they are patriotic, but patriotism does not make its appearance in their serious pronouncements of policy; on the contrary, they are visibly embarrassed by mention of it, believing, for those in England, that it is going to undermine their wanting to join the Euro and their wishing to keep England somehow in its ghost position as still imperial within the United Kingdom (witness New Labour's fear of a separate parliament for England with a federal parliament for England, Scotland and Wales). We need a recognition of a national polity that does not require the hatred of asylum-seekers, homosexuals, Pakistanis, black people, or Jews to maintain it, but, on the contrary, draws them into the common faith. What is required is the open acknowledgement of there having to be a common hope, maintained by poetic creation and renewal of a culture that celebrates the place and all who live in it. Some theorists of nationalism persist in being suspicious of the 'invention' of national culture: they can only see it as a kind of 'noble lie' in Plato's sense, in which an elite cynically encourage a religion in which they do not believe and the plebs as cynically reject it with what Peter Sloterdijk calls 'kynicism' [Sloterdijk, 1988). But what is required is a lie that is really noble because everyone takes a part in it knowing it not to be true. Where Pascal thought that all you had to do to be religious was to go through the motions and belief would follow, the proper approach is to go through the motions with everyone knowing that belief will never follow. This is why Zizek need not be so suspicious of irony and laughter,[40] because one must encourage everyone to play seriously in the social language, well aware of the risk. This was V. N. Volosinov's/Michael Bakhtin's counsel: discourse must maintain 'a double focus'.[41] There have been minds still under the Enlightenment's influence who are unable to play. Ernst Cassirer rejected the idea of such a religion: 'without belief in the reality of its object, myth would lose its ground';[42] but to make that very utterance he had to hold to the Idealization of Reciprocity, which is precisely to perform a myth of their being 'objects'. Jean Baudrillard has noted that when the Iconoclasts broke the idols (and recall the Talibans' recent destruction of the Buddha statues) what they really could not stand was the truth that God was no more than his image.[43] Consider also the protests within the Church of England at the 'heretical' theology of Don Cupitt, who recommends behaving as if there is a God while knowing full well that there is not.[44] This is surely Zizek's 'shared mode of disidentification', in which the community has to maintain 'a proper distance towards the object'.[45]

Such an argument is traceable back to its roots in the Lacanian view of the subject's construction in language, to the originary failure of the Symbolic to capture the Real within and without. When Lacan says that the satisfactory end of an analysis is a 'subjective destitution', he means that the analysand has come to recognise that his identity cannot be encompassed by the Symbolic, in Zizek's words, that one 'freely assumes one's non-existence', a hyperbole that in the relevant sense is hardly a hyperbole at all, since the mundane 'reality' of one's subjecthood is precisely what has to be put in question. To reach the end of an analysis one has 'to traverse the fantasy', that is, one has to regain something of the fundamental act of the imagination that brought the subject into existence in the first place. That originary moment in which the 'pre-linguistic imagination' produced the fundamental fantasy that grounded the subject as a subject cannot of itself be relived, but its effects can be brought within the reach of some control. Language draws a subject into existence by projecting a promise of final fulfilment at the impossible conclusion of its naming of the world, and each subject creates a fantasy, drawn from some chance encounter in infancy, Freud's 'unary trait', that acts to conceal that impossibility. This is the 'sublime object', the objet petit a, as Lacan terms it, that at once hides and betrays the failure of language to deliver the Real as named and defined. It is like the promise on a banknote to pay the bearer 'the pound': language will work as money does, that is, as long as no one takes the promise seriously (as the American cult the 'Promise-Keepers' seem to believe[46]) - or becomes a cynic about it (as during hyperinflation). Just as with money it is the judgement of separate subjects that takes its value up and down as long as they join in the semblance of a common value, so too the negotiation of our desires in communication depends on our judgement of the meaning of the words we use. Though we cannot help trying to making our desire that of the Other, the Real in each of us will produce a change, infinitesimal or momentous, in the meanings of the words we use to express it. As Zizek puts it, the Lacanian avoids in language the Scylla of cynical distance and the Charybdis of unquestioning belief by 'counting on the efficiency of the big Other without trusting it',[47] which is as much as to say that there should be a faith in its deliverances that turns into neither the nihilism of the former nor the superstition of the latter. This is why Zizek calls psychoanalysis a 'vanishing mediator', a catalyst, between logos and mythos, between the logical perfection of the Symbolic Order with its Parmenidean world ordered by the public Word, and the fantasy of the private bliss of consummatory jouissance in a Plotinian One. The racist behaves as if these opposites can be fused. To be emancipated is to keep them in dialectical play.

[1] Ragnar Rommetveit, On Message Structure: A Framework for the Study of Language and Communication (London, John Wiley and Sons, 1974).

[2] Harry S. Leonard, Principles of Reasoning: An Introduction to Logic, Methodology and the Theory of Signs (New York, Dover Publications, 1967), p. 266.

[3] V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Metejka and I. R. Titunik (New York, Seminar Press, 1973), p. 86.

[4] Harold Garfinkel, 'Studies in the Routine Ground of Everyday Activities'. Social Problems, 11 (1964), 220-50 (pp. 247-8).

[5] Sir Alan Gardiner, The Theory of Speech and Language (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1932).

[6] Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being, ed. Marjorie Greene (London, Routledge, 1969).

[7] Joel Feinberg, 'Action and Responsibility' in Philosophy in America, ed. Max Black (London, Allen and Unwin, 1964), pp. 134-60.

[8] Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), pp. 3-47.

[9] Roy Wood Sellars, Critical Realism: A Study of the Nature and Conditions of Knowledge (Chicago and New York, Rand McNally, 1916).

[10] Clarence Irving Lewis, Mind and the World-Order (London, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929), p. 21.

[11] Ragnar Rommetveit, 'On Negative Rationalism in Scholarly Studies of Verbal Communication and Dynamic Residuals in the Construction of Human Intersubjectivity', in The Social Contexts of Method, eds. Michael Brenner, P. Marsh and Marilyn Brenner (London, Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 16-32 (p. 31).

[12] Wilhelm von Humboldt, Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development, trans. George C. Buck and Frithjof Raven (Coral Gables, Florida, University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 43.

[13] Lewis, Mind and the World-Order, p. 85.

[14] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, eds. and trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (London, Sheed and Ward, 1975; orig. pub. J. C. B. Mohr, Tübingen, 1960), p. 416.

[15] Ibid., p. 323.

[16] Rommetveit, 1974, 119.

[17] Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (London, Heinemann, 1955 [c.150]), p. 179.

[18] Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London, Verso, 2001), p. 136.

[19] Michael Tye, Consciousness, Color and Content (Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press), p. 48 (my italics).

[20] Ibid.,p. 49.

[21] Terry Eagleton, 'Enjoy!', Paragraph, 24:2 (July, 2001), 40-52 (see p. 41)

[22] David Wiggins, 'On Singling out an Object Determinately', in Subject, Thought and Context, eds. Philip Pettit and John MacDowell )Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 169-80.

[23] Ibid., p. 175.

[24] Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London, Verso, 1999), pp. 104-7; The Fragile Absolute, pp. 148 (see note 1).

[25] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (New York, Macmillan 1956 [1788]), pp. 152-3.

[26] Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 25.

[27] Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, p. 145.

[28] Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 211.

[29] Sir Alan Gardiner, 'De Saussure's Analysis of the signe linguistique', Acta Linguistica, 4 (1944), 104-110 (p. 109).

[30] Alexander Bryan Johnson, A Treatise on Language, ed. David Rynin (New York, Dover Publications, 1968), p. 100.

[31] Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, p. 115.

[32] Russel Grigg, 'Absolute Freedom and Major Structural Change'. Paragraph, 24:2 (July, 2001), 111-124.

[33] Edmond Wright, 'Sociology and the Irony Model', Sociology, 12:5 (1978), 523-43 pp. 528-40).

[34] Eagleton, p. 49.

[35] Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, p. 28.

[36] Roy Wood Sellars, 'The Epistemology of Evolutionary Naturalism', Mind, 28:112 (1919), 407-26 (p. 407).

[37] Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 272.

[38] Slavoj Zizek, 'Chance and Repetition in Kieslowski's Films', Paragraph, 24:2 (July, 2001), 23-39.

[39] Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London, Verso, 2001), p. 28.

[40] Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, Verso, 1989), pp. 27-8.

[41] Volosinov, p. 176 (see note 4).

[42] Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1944), p. 83.

[43] Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1988), p. 169.

[44] Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (London, SCM Press, 1980).

[45] Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 267.

[46] Ibid., p. 342-3.

[47] Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 36-49 (see note 36).


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