Return of the Undead

An earlier couple of posts on the Uncanny & the Inhuman are perhaps partly glossed by this paragraph from Zizek:

‘The paradox of moving statues, of dead objects coming alive and/or of petrified living objects, is possible only within the space of the death drive which, according to Lacan, is the space between two deaths, symbolic and real. For a human being to be ‘dead while alive’ is to be colonised by the ‘dead’ symbolic order; to be ‘alive while dead’ is to give body to the remainder of the Life-substance which has escaped the symbolic colonization (‘lamella’). What we are dealing with here is thus the split between A and J, between the ‘dead’ symbolic order which mortifies the body and the non-symbolic Life-substance of jouissance. '

Firstly, in what sense is the Symbolic order ‘dead’? The symbolic order of language pre-dates us and survives us; it is coldly indifferent to the span of our biological life. The Symbolic order has something obviously machine-like about it- its rules and structures are used by us, but are external to us and not dependent on us. Paradoxically, then, The Symbolic is ‘dead’ because is has a ‘life of its own’, and this is foreign to our own.

This is Bruce Fink:

‘The body is subdued; “the letter kills” the body. The living being (le vivant) – our animal nature – dies, language coming to life in its place and living us.”

Fink also cites Bergson’s phrase about language being ‘Encrusted on the living’ (a phrase with obvious relevance to his theory of comedy as those moments when the living body is rendered mechanical). This ‘encrusted’, ‘foreign’ and autonomous order stands opposed to our life-substance, it is the robust machine operating within us, so deeply intricated with our being that it is ‘inoperable’.

When James Joyce’s Stephen speaks of his relation to the English language, he also encapsulated this ‘extimacy’ of the language machine:

'His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language'.

(is the frequent uncanniness of the voice not to do with the fact that it’s never quite the invisible envelope of the Symbolic order, that it ‘holds it at bay’?)

We are thus dealing with two things here: the ‘dead symbolic order’ and that which ‘holds it at bay’, the living remainder. Are not each of these, in turn, uncanny (or is it inhuman)?

Would we not say that someone who perfectly embodied a particular Symbolic order – spoke in a smooth and pauseless grammatical fashion, someone who acted unflinchingly in accordance with the letter of some Law – was ‘robotic’, or, in a word, uncanny. This relates back, in some ways, to the previous post about ideology. Would not someone who, with poker-faced efficiency, carried out the corporate ethos or was completely keyed into the ruling letter of an organisation, strike us as a kind of replicant – as comic but scary. As uncanny?

Equally, when someone has died symbolically – their accounts have been settled, the story of their life seems to have arrived at some fitting terminus – but remains alive, like Oedipus after the catastrophe, is such a person not also uncanny. That which is ‘inappropriately alive’, that refuses to die, that ‘should’ be dead according to all Symbolic rights and prescriptions. ? In its ‘pure state’ the Life-substance, in all its blind repetitive action, is just as uncanny as the ‘pure’ Symbolic.

So according to Slav., what has been ‘opened up’ - or made visible - in both cases is the split between A and J; or perhaps, what has been shattered is the proper ‘equilibrium’ between these two. The dignity of the noble subject dissolves into its components, like the often quoted example of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil where the meal dissolves into an image on the one hand and undifferentiated matter on the other. The 'magic trick' of the living subject breaks up into its two 'dead' constituents.

[add on, 1/4:


On the ‘dead’ symbolic order, I should perhaps have remarked more on the repeated rhetoric of the Symbolic ‘murdering’ the Real: it enters its ‘undifferentiated’ fabric and irreparably divides, quarters it. I remembered also this from Z.:

‘The word is a death, a murder of the thing: as soon as the reality is symbolized, caught in a symbolic network, the thing itself is more present in a word, in its concept, than in its immediate physical reality.’

But in killing or silencing the Real, the Symbolic introduces various zones and pockets of jouissance; the body is now shot through with and irradiates significance. The ‘letter’ of the Symbolic thus seems to at once ‘kill’ and create – the erasure of the Real means that our bodies are now radioactive with a new and significant life. The Symbolic as a foreign body therefore acts like a creative irritant, around which the Life-substance crystallises by way of resistance/response.

Henceforth, is there not a new ‘artificial’ life: the foreign iron (of the Symbolic) is now in our soul, lives in symbiosis with it: we are part Life-substance, part dead thing