“To let yourself matter is to acknowledge not merely how it is with you, and hence to acknowledge that you want the other to care, at least care to know. It is equally to acknowledge that your expressions in fact express you, that they are yours, that you are in them. This means allowing yourself to be comprehended, something you can always deny. Not to deny it is, I would like to say, to acknowledge your body, and the body of your expressions, to be yours, you on earth, all there will ever be of you.”
— Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy
*
Although far from what is called a Lacanian, I find myself enjoying the company of Helen Rollins’ Psychocinema (Polity, 2024) as the spectacle of newborn Trumpism unfurls. What follows is simply an excerpt from the section titled “The Tics and Grimaces of the Universe” in Rollins’ book, which focuses on the 90’s dark comedy, The Last Supper.
Section titled "The Tics and Grimaces of the Universe - The Last Supper" by Helen Rollins
The Last Supper (directed by Stacy Title, 1995) depicts a group of righteous graduate students who invite right-wing guests for dinner. They intend to murder these guests, serving them poisoned wine from a blue decanter—rather than a clear one, which contains the normal drink—unless they come to recant their political beliefs over the course of the meal. After several successful killings, the students invite a famous conservative pundit to dinner. The pundit confuses the group with a range of moderate opinions that they have difficulty refuting. He even admits that the views he presents on television are for ratings and do not represent his true political positions. Over the course of the dinner, the pundit pieces together clues that murders have taken place in this house. The students retreat to the kitchen to decide the pundit's fate, agreeing that his centrist views mean he should be spared. During this time, the pundit has swapped the poisoned wine from the blue decanter to the clear one and serves it to the students, raising a toast. As the film ends, the liberal students collapse on the floor and the conservative pundit speculates about a possible populist presidential bid.
[Here, though the students profess liberal views, they are—as in the Master-Slave dialectic—conservative, acting in accordance with the Master's Discourse. They are unwilling to recognize the dialectical subjectivity of the Other, preferring to retain a frame of logic that sustains the status quo. This logic is unstable and contains within it the beginnings of their own demise. Not only would an embrace of the contradictory subjectivity of the Other allow for the possibility of change that may transform the collective in surprising and emancipatory ways, but also to foreground the Lack that generates this universal contradiction is to challenge the logic of capitalist closure itself, whose symptoms at the level of culture the students might consciously condemn.
The students nullify the possibility of contingency within the Other by casting them as transcendentally belonging to a category of belief, unable to change and not marked by universal Lack. Like the contemporaneous "culture warrior" declaring their opponent to embody a "crypto-fascist" or "crypto-communist position, the students engage in abstraction, claiming an a priori knowledge as to the destination of the chain of signifiers and the possible replication of the signifier "A" in another context. This utopian approach to language and logic necessitates an enemy whose presence explains away its impossibility. It resides within a paranoid-schizoid position, in Kleinian terms, demanding the destruction of the subjectivity of the Other and denying their possible conversion, undermining any opening toward the surprise and novelty of emancipatory politics altogether. It is a position contradicted in the film by the pundit's vacillating position. His adoption of political ideas as a televisual performance demonstrates his discernment or not-at-oneness with himself, a symptom of his marking by Lack and something that could be transformed in the right material and philosophical context.
The Irish comedian Dylan Moran suggests that war isn't conflict; it's the inability to do conflict. If politics is the very act of engaging with the inevitably conflictual desires of the collective, then "culture war" is the end of politics. It pits groups' interests against each other for the benefit of a capitalist class that resists change, even at the cost of the world's inexistence.
To be unrecognized in one's subjectivity is to experience a negation of one's humanity that is experienced as violent. The intransigence of the liberal students and their unwillingness to recognize the Other may be the very reason those they disparage have taken up their reactionary positions in the first place – in their subjective anxiety and material precariousness. The conservative nature of their politics affirms their subjective investment in the logic of capital, which alienates and exploits the collective and casts blame upon them for their suffering in the face of the impossible material conditions it creates.
The final scene of the film, in which the pundit sees himself leading a populist uprising, expresses the way in which this kind of revolt can be motivated by a libidinal ressentiment against the liberal Beautiful Soul, an action that is disastrous for the universal politics that would undermine the cultural phenomena that—consciously at least—the conservative students claim so fervently to stand against, as well as the political economy that generates the material conditions that foment reactive anger in the first place.
Certainly, there is more, which I leave here in PDF form for those who would like to read it—-while also encouraging you to pay $10 cost that would support Polity’s publications as well as Rollins.
