Lux Lindner - [excerpt]

Josefina Ayerza

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Who is M. Rabour talking to? His look certainly not directed toward the Célestine owner-of-the-leg, but to “whom” he holds in between the teeth, Célestine says—it is as if it were yours.
Célestine’s part-foot detaching, he finds the image of what he desires in the body of who he does not love. Yet the part that gets detached is not just any part. What gets detached, already an image, is the phallus - an image substitute of the image of the penis. Still a signifier, a lack, with Jacques Lacan, the organ actually invested with this signifying function takes on the value of a fetish.

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Love and desire foregoing, the emergence of jouissance will spell. Woman the symptom of man is a hole. Let woman lend her foot for the man to enjoy it, she will all along not be herself, only the very intrinsic attributes - foot, toe, bootee - she comes to embody. A perverse bias to the symptom, the fact won’t prevent it from being distinguished throughout the particular lucubration - not in that it stands for an exception - it comes from anyone.
When man jouit, it’s the jouissance of his organ. However the phallus, an image of the sexual organ, moreover a representation of the certain image, is forever a lack—of the organ itself. It’s to the signifier to bring up the erotic, and in this sense it precedes male’s extrinsic jouissance, off the body... And phallic jouissance will as well determine woman, her ex-sistence: the jouissance of this Other is off language, off the symbolic.

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Far from being a mere metaphor, this notion of the cadre’s special body is grounded in the logic of “objective meaning” shared by Lenin and Stalin: while ordinary individuals are caught in historical events which surpass them, blinded for their true meaning, so that their consciousness is false, a revolutionary cadre has the access to the true objective meaning of events—his consciousness is the direct self-consciousness of historical Necessity itself. It is this special position that allows him to criticize others in the well-known style of “your intentions may be good and your desire to help people sincere, but, nonetheless, objectively, what you claim means, in this precise moment of the struggle, a support for the reactionary forces...” What this position overlooks is how this objective meaning is already subjectively mediated. It is, for example, when the Party decides to change its politics that the same politics can radically change its objective meaning: till the Pact Hitler-Stalin in 1939, Fascism was the principal enemy, while if, after the pact, one continued to focus on the anti-Fascist struggle, one objectively served the imperialist reaction. And the cadre’s sublime body is the ethereal support of this direct self-consciousness of the historical absolute Subject.

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