Ossification DA. Attempts at lawmaking rely on symbolic notions of conformity that reproduce anti-Black and Queer violence as well as an ossification of the world.

[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education

Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 3, Duke University Press]//owen

What does this absence of “formal limits” on the violence of “forcing” mean if not that truth-procedures invariably rely on the agency of the death drive even while those made subjects through (catachrestic) namings of the event attempt to socialize its rupture, to rebind its unbound energy, to contain the queerness of its eruption? As a first step in clarifying this relation between the death drive, the event, and its naming as a truth, we might note how often Badiou identifies repetition as such with death, perhaps most clearly in his work on Saint Paul when he discusses the apostle’s meditation on sin and the law in the Epistle to the Romans. While explaining how “the law” in that epistle becomes “one of the names of death in a subjective constitution,” Badiou writes, “The law, and only the law, endows desire with an autonomy sufficient for the subject of desire . . . to come to occupy the place of the dead. The law is what gives life to desire. But in doing so, it constrains the subject so that he wants to follow only the path of death.”49 If the law here incites and vivifies desire, it does so by endowing desire with a seeming autonomy from the law, thus enacting a logic that echoes Michel Foucault’s account of the law as producing, not repressing, desire.50 But why should this flourishing of desire propel the subject down the “path of death”? Badiou answers this question directly through his definition of sin: “What is sin, exactly? It is not desire as such, for if it were one would not understand its link to the law and death. Sin is the life of desire as autonomy, as autonomism. The law is required in order to unleash the automatic life of desire, the automatism of repetition. For only the law fixes the object of desire, binding desire to it regardless of the subject’s ‘will.’ It is this objectal automatism of desire, inconceivable without the law, that assigns the subject to the carnal path of death.”51 Leaving aside its binding to an object, desire’s attributes, in this description, correlate more closely with the drive: repetition compulsion, automatism, subordination of the subject’s will. Badiou might well be troping on Lacan’s engagement, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, with this very passage from Paul’s epistle. For Lacan, the relation between desire and law, where the latter refers to “the law of speech” (83) that governs the Symbolic, gives rise to the death drive in the form of sin, which Lacan construes as the “Thing”: “The dialectical relationship between desire and the Law causes our sin to flare up only in relation to the Law, through which it becomes a desire for death” (83–84). Crucially, though, Lacan asserts that the Thing (das Ding) “is the very correlative of the law of speech in its most primitive point of origin, and . . . that this Ding was there from the very beginning, . . . it was the first thing that separated itself from everything the subject began to name and articulate” (83). To the extent that it refers to the originary loss that inheres in the primal division produced by naming as articulation, the Thing, entwined as it is with the Law, denotes the constitutive exclusion that every linguistic act repeats. Badiou—like Hamlet, Freud, and Lacan—concedes that the repetition compulsion determines the order of survival. But he holds out the prospect of escaping repetition, the stasis of the law’s survival, through a break with the order of law itself: The law . . . delivers desire to its repetitive autonomy. . . . The law’s prohibition is that through which the desire of the object can realize itself involuntarily, “unconsciously,” . . . which is to say, as a life of sin. As a result of which, the subject, de-centered from this desire, crosses over to the side of death. . . . If the subject is to swing over to another disposition, one wherein he would be on the side of life, and sin—that is to say, the automatism of repetition—would occupy the place of the dead, it is necessary to break with the law.52 In a world where “sin” alone has vitality and where the death drive organizes life, the event, for Badiou, as uncontrollable eruption of the Real (and so, of the contentless queerness of ab-sens), enables a break with the law as survival and with the “automatism of repetition” that makes survival a kind of death. That this break calls forth a living subject different from the “human animal” constrained to mortifying repetition might seem to confirm as absolute Badiou’s privileging of life over death. Such a belief prompts Žižek to draw a sharp line between Lacan’s position and Badiou’s. After remarking that Lacan rejects the positivity of what Badiou denotes by the truth-event and so “implicitly changes the balance between Death and Resurrection in favour of Death,” Žižek adds that, in doing so, Lacan “parts company with St. Paul and Badiou: God not only is but always-already was dead—that is to say, after Freud, one cannot directly have faith in the truth-event; every such Event ultimately remains a semblance obfuscating a preceding Void whose Freudian name is death drive.”53 This criticism, though trenchant in its theoretical framing, presupposes that the truth-event must be construed as positivized by Badiou and affirmed, therefore, as the site of a content other than the pressure of “a preceding Void whose Freudian name is death drive.” But does Badiou’s event, as Žižek asserts, simply obfuscate that void, or might it also, if less explicitly, attest to its insistence? Is the event exhausted by the truth it inspires, or does it extend to the form of the event itself, to the radical interruption of the law’s repetition—the interruption of its formulated truth—by the encounter with the Real? In the latter case the law’s repetition would identify the Real within it, the place where inner and outer converge, and the event would announce the “a-cosmic and illegal” ground of every order. Far from an alternative to the repetition subtending the law, the event, instead, would repeat it by marking the advent of a new truth. To that extent the event as form would desublimate the truth its disciples name by insisting on the queerness of the evental drive inaccessible to nomination. Not the event, then, but rather the naming of the event, the catachresis that bends it to the law of speech, would obfuscate the death drive; the event itself would manifest the ex nihilo of the drive, thus making it, like theater in Badiou’s formulation, a “repeatable event.”54 Like the event of theater, the event as such is never once and for all; it never signals truth’s completion or our capacity to comprehend it but always insists on the not-all of its given articulations—a not-all obscured by every name we bestow in a truth-procedure. Each event, therefore, repeats the interruption of repetition by opening onto the void whose queerness ruptures the world’s coherence. But that rupture gives rise to another name that another event must displace. How, after all, can the zero escape transformation into a one without destroying the conceptual frame in which the zero “appears” catachrestically? Those seized by an event and faithful to its nomination through a truth-procedure must force it by way of naming it, but the truth they declare will inevitably dissimulate the drive from which it springs: the void, the “castration,” that “truth hides.” The event thus confronts the subject of the law with its counterpart in another dimension: the headless or acephalic subject with which it can never be one. Lacan approaches this difference in dimension when he poses the following question: “Is the place that I occupy as subject of the signifier concentric or eccentric in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified?”55 The answer, as Lacan goes on to suggest, hinges on the fact that “the S and the s of the Saussurian algorithm are not in the same plane, and man was deluding himself in believing he was situated in their common axis, which is nowhere.”56 The difference of order, the ontological gap that prevents these planes from meeting on a “common axis,” gives rise, Lacan argues, to the death drive and the eruption of the Real. It precludes the comprehension of those planes within any totalizing framework by assuring that every unified system will carry that gap within. As the obtrusion of the void internal to any particular situation, but perceptible only through a pressure or “force” exerted from outside it, such a gap pertains to another dimension and invokes the beyond that inhabits the “known” in the form of what “is” not. It registers the persistence within the signifying order of the bar in the Saussurian algorithm—the bar excluded from the signification that it alone makes possible by dividing the signifier from the signified while establishing a (non)relation between them. It attests, thereby, to the primal repression of the senseless machinery of division (sex as designated by ab-sens) that produces the Symbolic order (as the topology of sens-absexe). The repetition compulsion intrinsic to order emerges from that primal repression, that absenting of ab-sens. What repression first bars from signification is the Saussurian bar itself. It precludes our thinking what conditions thought: pure difference in the absence of positive terms, the primal cut of division from which the Symbolic subject is born and which, as negative relationality, as what Lacan denotes by the phallus (which is also to say, by castration), eludes the positivizations through which the Symbolic tries to contain it. From this “primitive point of origin” of the Symbolic’s law of speech, das Ding, as we have already seen, “was the first thing that separated itself from everything the subject began to name and articulate.” The primal cut of articulation is itself the cutting off of what will have been lost thereby as das Ding, the cut that Lacan defines as the truth that generates the unconscious: “It is from it [the truth], from a cut, that a knowledge other than propositional knowledge arises, namely, unconscious knowledge.” The primal repression of the Saussurian bar allows for the advent of meaning, which is absent in the bar itself, and it consigns to the realm of unthinkability the originary split or mitosis by which “nothing” divides into “nothing” and “something” (the zero and the one). Both the event and radical evil repeat that primal creation ex nihilo, that fracturing of what is by the radically detotalizing insistence of the nihil as such; but they both get contained by the Symbolic compulsion to speak, to name their truth. Such a forcing of truth through its naming intends to ward off the (Real) disaster by which the event, in its queerness, voids the Symbolic law of nameability, thus undoing the world much as theory undoes cognition for de Man: by “prevent[ing] all entities, including linguistic entities, from coming into discourse as such.” Since the unnameable, the zero, can never be named, even in the act of forcing it, the (Real) disaster lies not in trying to name it in a truth-procedure (notwithstanding the real historical disasters that such forcing repeatedly occasions) but rather in its evental annihilation of the order of naming itself. The naming of the event, from this perspective, is the sublimation of the death drive that animates it, the death drive philosophy refuses to raise to the dignity of a truth. The convergence of theory’s challenge to teaching (by troubling the logic of reference) with the event’s repetitive break from the naming that negates the “nothing” of the cut is brought into focus in the complex dynamics of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997). This deliberately sadistic and assaultive film, remade by Haneke ten years later in an English-language version intended to attract (in order the better to condemn) a mass audience of slasher-film fans, thinks aesthetic education with radical evil (and each, obliquely, with the event) in order to explore the undoing of the world whose givenness we assume. Funny Games shatters epistemological security (including the security of knowing the genre to which the film itself belongs) much as the home invaders within it destroy the world of the Family they terrorize. At once a tragedy and a comedy, a thriller and a science fiction film, an exemplar of so-called torture porn and an indictment of that genre, Funny Games scorns the categorical coherence (or the claim to categorical coherence) that orients interpretation. But Haneke’s investment in education, an investment elaborated both within the film and in his commentaries on it, seeks to restore the “ethical and aesthetic values” that Funny Games seems to attack. It aims to restore them through a sublimation, as in the Kantian dynamic sublime, that allows the mind to rise above terror by seeing natural concerns as small and looking beyond them to the superior power that the mind itself possesses. As Kant puts it in characterizing a liking for the sublime as “only negative,” “It is a feeling that the imagination by its own action is depriving itself of its freedom, in being determined purposively according to a law different from that of its empirical use. The imagination thereby acquires an expansion and a might that surpasses the one it sacrifices. . . . For the imagination . . . acting in accordance with principles of the schematism of judgment (and hence, to that extent, in subordination to freedom), is an instrument of reason and its ideas.”57 For Haneke as for Kant, the mind’s triumph depends on sacrificing our attachment to the Imaginary—or depends, at any rate, on the representation, the imagination, of such a sacrifice. Funny Games offers an allegory of that Imaginary sacrifice, depicting it as performed terroristically, which is also to say, perversely, by “queer” figures of radical evil engaged, like de Man’s “The Resistance to Theory,” in fulfilling “a didactic and an educational function” for the Family and the audience alike.58