The Politics of Trauma #1: The Sovereign Fetish (beginning)

What I am posting below is the beginning of a new chapter to what I hope eventually to make a book on trauma and philosophy.  This chapter is on the politics of trauma, and I have given it the working title “Trauma and the Remnants of Politics.”  Today I am posting the beginning of the first section of the chapter, a section I am calling “The Sovereign Fetish.”

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Trauma and the Remnants of Politics

What is the politics of trauma?

That is, for one thing, in what ways and within what limits can politics be played with trauma, as the Bush administration played politics with the trauma to so many Americans of “9/11,” to countenance the American invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, and the curtailing of civil liberties through the Patriot Act and other means?  What can politics do with trauma?

But also, what politics does trauma itself elicit?  What would a politics grounded in trauma itself—in the acknowledgment of it, in letting the trauma traumatize, rather than avoiding and denying it—be like?  What does trauma do to politics?

I will begin this chapter on the politics of trauma with some further reflections on the topic of the preceding chapter, the topic of sovereignty and its relations to trauma.

The Sovereign Fetish

The sovereign is a fetish.

That, at least, is what Slavoj Žižek’s way of handling the concept of fetish suggests.  In his recent book In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek differentiates between a fetish and a symptom.  As he presents it, the fetish, like the symptom, involves (page 282) “a gesture of transference (onto the fetish object).”  However, in the case of the fetish this transference “functions as an exact inversion of the standard formula of transference (with the subject supposed to know),” which applies to the symptom.   By Žižek’s account,  “a symptom embodies a repressed knowledge, the truth about the subject that the subject is not ready to accept.”  In contrast, “what the fetish gives body to is precisely my disavowal of knowledge, my refusal to subjectively assume what I know.”  The fetish is defined by such “refusal-to-know,” he says.

A few pages later (page 296) Žižek elaborates a bit on his treatment of the distinction between symptom and fetish, in applying it to the analysis of “ideology” and arguing in favor of “opposing the fetishistic mode of ideology, which predominates in our supposedly ‘post-ideological’ era, to its traditional symptomal mode, in which the ideological lie which structures our perception of reality is threatened by symptoms qua ‘returns of the repressed,’ cracks in the fabric of the ideological lie.”  He then continues:

The fetish is effectively a kind of envers of the symptom.  That is to say, the symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of false appearance, the point at which the repressed Other Scene erupts, while the fetish is the embodiment of the lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth.  Let us take the case of the death of a beloved person:  in the case of the symptom, I “repress” this death, I try not to think about it, but the repressed trauma returns in the symptom; in the case of a fetish, on the contrary, I “rationally” fully accept this death, and yet I cling to the fetish, to some feature that embodies for me the disavowal of this death.  In this sense, a fetish can play a very constructive role by allowing us to cope with the harsh reality.  Fetishists are not dreamers lost in their private worlds, they are thoroughly “realist,” able to accept the way things effectively are—since they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full impact of reality.

Ironically, however, by the rest of what he says about the fetish as opposed to the symptom, the way in which the fetish allows us to “cope” with whatever “harsh reality” is at issue is precisely by refusing to cope with it at all:  the way the fetish makes us “able to accept the way things effectively are” is by the very  “refusal-to-know” anything at all about how things are.  We might put the point by saying that the only way that the fetish let’s us accept the way things effectively are is by altogether denying how things affectively are.  But, after all, such a traumatic blow as “the death of a beloved person” is a traumatic blow in the first place only insofar as one is affected by the loss of that person; if I really don’t “feel” anything when the other person dies, then that death is no more than the death of an acquaintance with whom I had no special bond, and not the death of a beloved person at all.  As Žižek writes two pages yet further on (page 298):

This is a fetish at its purest:  a tiny stupid object to which I cling and which allows me to endure all the dirty compromises of my life.  Do we not all have, in one or another form, such fetishes?  They can be our inner spiritual experiences (which tell us that our social reality is mere appearance which does not really matter), our children (for whose good we do all the humiliating things in our jobs), and so on and so forth.

Another distinction Žižek draws in some of his earlier works is of use here, with regard to clarifying the current distinction between fetish and symptom. That is the distinction Žižek adopts from Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s Pour un catrophisme éclairé (Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 2002) between knowledge and belief.  In The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA:  The MIT Press, 2003, pages 159-160) Žižek uses Depuy’s distinction to explicate a passage from Henri Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion, a passage in which Bergson describes his own subjective experience at the onset of World War I in August, 1914.  I will use my own earlier discussion of the issues involved, from my article “9/11 Never Happened, President Bush Wouldn’t Let It:  Bob Dylan Replies to Henri Bergson” (published in the Electronic Book Review).

In the passage from the Two Sources, Bergson depicts how he reacted on the occasion of the actual outbreak of declared hostilities between France and Germany, on August 4, 1914.  By his own account, he experienced the pending war as “simultaneously probable and impossible.”  Then, in the following passage, which Žižek also cites, Bergson goes on to elucidate such a “complex and contradictory notion” (as Bergson himself calls it), hearkening back to something he already articulated in his earlier work, pertaining to the notions of possibility and actuality, and on how unforeseeable events retroactively project their own possibility behind them, as it were.  In the Two Sources Bergson is concerned to clarify his position, and to distinguish it from the idea—one that, as Žižek will later observe, belongs in the domain of science fiction—that current events could somehow change how the past itself “really was.”  Bergson writes:

I never pretended that one can insert reality into the past and thus work backwards in time.  However, one can without any doubt insert there the possible, or, rather, at every moment the possible insert[s] itself there.  Insofar as unpredictable and new reality creates itself, its image reflects itself behind itself—in the indefinite past:  this new reality finds itself all the time having been possible; but it is only at the precise moment of its actual emergence that it begins to always have been [possible], and this is why I say its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once this reality emerges.

In a remark parts of which have already been noted above, Bersgson writes that, before the actual declaration of war between his country and Germany, war appeared to him as “simultaneously possible and impossible:  a complex and contradictory notion that persisted to the end,” that is, till war actually broke out in the declaration of hostilities on August 4.  Using Depuy’s analysis of the global ecological catastrophe pending today, almost a centrury after Bergson and the First World War, Žižek writes that such events as either global ecological catastrophe today at the beginning of the 21^st century, or global war early in the 20^th century, are “always missed,” the bypassing or missing of such events taking one of two basic forms, in accordance with which “either it [the event] is experienced as impossible but not real (the prospect of a forthcoming catastrophe that, however probable we know it is, we do not believe will really happen, and thus dismiss it as impossible), or as real but no longer impossible (once the catastrophe happens, it is ‘renormalized,’ perceived as part of the normal run of things, as always-already having been possible).”  He then goes on to call explicit attention back to Dupuy’s distinction by remarking that “as Dupuy makes clear, the gap that makes these paradoxes possible is the gap between knowledge and belief:  we know the catastrophe is possible, even probable, yet we do not believe it will really happen.”

Thus, to stick with the example of Bergson at the outbreak of World War I, Bergson did indeed know that war was not merely possible, but even probable, as he says himself.  Yet, as he also says, he continued to relate to that same war as im-possible.  That is, at the level of his everyday life, in common with most of his countrymen and, indeed, most of the populations in the other European countries about to be drawn into the carnage of the “Great War,” Bergson’s conduct, thought, and emotions bore no evidence of that very knowledge that war was coming.  If by belief we mean precisely that which underlies and expresses itself in our conduct—and there is certainly ample ground and precedent for such usage –then it is exact to say that Bergson and all the others of that time did not believe what they perfectly well knew.

To return to the concept of the fetish, as Žižek later articulates it in In Defense of Lost Causes (and where he also cites again, after his discussion of the fetish, the same passage from Bergson), a fetish is something by fixating on which I can block what I know from having any effect on what I believe.  It is a bar to the door through which any restructuring of my belief might come from events that exceed my capacity to accommodate or understand them, a sticking to my already entrenched patterns of going about my days.  The symptom, in the psychoanalytic sense, marks the spot where I am affected by an event that cannot be processed by my old set of beliefs—the spot where the lightning has struck.  In contrast, the fetish tries to efface the mark and block the affect, keeping everything in the dark. Žižek points in this direction himself in Lost Causes when he writes (page 300—just before repeating nearly verbatim what he wrote comparing transference in the fetish and the symptom back on page 282, cited above):

Fetishism does not operate at the level of “mystification” and “distorted knowledge”:  what is literally “displaced” in the fetish, transferred onto it, is not knowing but illusion itself, the belief threatened by knowledge.  Far from obfuscating “realistic” knowledge of how things are, the fetish is, on the contrary, the means that enables the subject to accept this knowledge without paying the full price for it [that is, precisely, without letting it change one’s “belief”—without letting it affect one!]:  “I know very well [how things really stand {in brackets in original}], and I am able to endure this bitter truth because of a fetish (a hamster, a button . . .) in which the illusion to which I stick is embodied.”  [So I “endure” the truth only by making quite sure I will have to endure none of its impact upon me affectively!]

The two strategies, in effect, that Žižek mentions in The Puppet and the Dwarf for warding off any chance that new knowledge might strike changes at the level of genuine belief—the two ways that, according to him, epoch-changing events are “always missed”—are the two sides of one and the same fetishizing mechanism.  Fixation on the fetish is, on one side, the denial of “reality” to the event at the fully affective, experiential level, the level of “belief” as contrasted with “knowledge.  In short, the event is denied any event-ful-ness.  That denial is coupled, on the other side, with the reduction of the event to the status of “nothing really new” after all, but just the actualization of a possibility that was already inscribed in the conditions that preceded the event, and that are now asserted to have caused or produced it.   In that reduced form, the event, denied reality as an event, which is to say at the affective level of belief, can nevertheless be granted reality at the merely notional or informational level of “knowledge.”

So fetishized, the event both did and did not occur, and the unacknowledged slippage between the two very different senses of occurrence at issue is what allows one to go on acting “as if nothing had happened” after even the most shattering trauma.

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