The Fall of Literary Theory. Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen
moments in time bring changes to the perception of identity and the fall, but the changes are never final. People’s lives do change, and many times revolutions bring monumental improvements in the way people live. Otherwise we would not be speaking of the end of feudalism, the end of slavery, or the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. However, there are essentialist ways of perceiving social identity and self-identity that have not changed. For instance, violence against racial others continued even after the bondage of slavery was abolished.
Historic changes only shift the emphasis on how identity is constructed, due to variations in the stakes that language raises. If we accept the definition of the individual as a subject of language, we should also accept that this subjection is what drives the subject to believe that language has robbed it of something essential, which is the real. In the real, the subject imagines the ideal, or whole selfhood exists (i.e., one that is not lacking). This is why the real, overtaken by the imaginary and the symbolic, is precisely this lost territory I began to explain. It is this abstract territory and its signifiers that individuals and communities become attached to, and to which they turn when they become convinced they can retrieve their lost identity.
Lacan also emphasizes the perspective of the past in the formation of the subject: “the subject is there to rediscover where it was—I anticipate—the real .... Where it was, the Ich—the subject, not psychology—the subject, must come into existence. And there is only one method of knowing that one is there, namely, to map the network .... One goes back and forth over one’s ground, one crosses one’s path.”2 Obviously, Lacan also associates a notion of territoriality to the formation of the subject, and he is not the only one to do so (see Michel Foucault3 or Spanos4). Lacan’s notion of the subject formed within the lack of the real can explain the notion of the fall itself, as what is unnecessarily but stubbornly insisted on in relation to identity.
The reason why I find Lacan more useful than others (though I draw ideas from Derrida as well, and to some extent Nietzsche, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and others), is that Lacan unequivocally claims that the subject is founded on a misrecognition. This is to say, what the subject desires as an identity is what the subject assumes to have lost (hence recognizes). In actuality, this recognition leads to an illusion of self-identity (hence misrecognized) that drives human beings to identify with an image/symbol all throughout their lives. Critics of Lacan claim that he dooms and restricts subjects to being deluded.5 The point is, however, that Lacan offers an explanation that is tremendously useful in trying to disengage human thought from the idealism of linguistic identity. If we agree with Lacan’s logic, our efforts should be directed toward how we can change (even to an infinitesimal extent) this perception of ourselves, rather than hide behind a judgment that reinforces our misconception that we are in need of retrieving something lost. Is it even possible, one would ask, to conceive of a way in which we can function and see ourselves as other than such fallen subjects? Although that is close to impossible, we can certainly acknowledge that “recognizing” ourselves is what drives us toward violence, because we will never stop on our way to reaching that elusive object of desire, which is the self. This is what places us in an irreconcilable position toward others; the more we define ourselves, the more tension we create with others.
Lacan best explains this conflict by placing truth, speech, and self in the Other, against which the subject is defined. He arrives at this now overly-used and re-used concept of the “capital Other”6 from a basic critique of Rene Descartes,7 and further exploration of ideas developed by Hegel7 and Alexandre Kojeve.9 Lacan’s contribution is to claim that the Other organizes the unconscious, which becomes “the discourse of the Other”:10 “You will then see that it is in the Other that the subject is constituted as ideal, that he has to regulate the completion of what comes as ego, or ideal ego … that is to say, to constitute himself in his imaginary reality …. This is also the point from which he speaks, since in so far as he speaks, it is in the locus of the Other that he begins to constitute that truthful lie by which is initiated that which participates in desire.”11
If we go back to the idea of a territory that has been lost, that which constitutes identity (which has become abstract) is always lost to an Other. The subject who is in search for confirmation of self-identity sees a threat in any other human being, because any other human being is potentially the initial thief of the territory that has given rise to the need for possessing the territory. So either the Other is made part of the territory to be retrieved, or the territory has to be defended from this Other, because the conflict is formative. But this is what can be overcome through a realization of the illusory nature of territoriality. Awareness, of course, is not enough, given that social practices that bring comfort are most of the time preferred to those that require effort. However, social change cannot be brought about without awareness of deeply embedded problems arising from the abstraction of territory.
We need to remain open to the possibility of becoming at least in part detached from the effects of speech on ourselves by recognizing that the people surrounding us have not stolen our identity, and cannot steal it, since we always are who we are, not entities that were only retrospectively whole. This way, we can find a new kind of openness toward an Other that would not be primordially an enemy. Since, for social beings, there is no outside of language (or of their sociality), at least we can stop making identity such a bitter stake. This book points to some approaches to the Other (borrowing a few points from Emmanuel Levinas), in order to overcome, possibly, the essential misconceptions that propel us, through desire, toward death.
The First Fall: Mythical Identity
Approaching innocence in conjunction with the system of language (be it defined as mythical—after the fact—or religious, political, historical, and so on) allows us to understand why communities that prescribe the way to righteousness to their subjects make wholeness an enormous stake and see themselves as justified in eliminating anything less than ideal (and all subjects must be understood as less than ideal). These threats are perceived as standing in the way of achieving purity, or of retrieving the state of unfallenness.
Approaching “innocence” at the beginning of this study is therefore necessary because of the importance we tend to attribute to collective definitions of the lost real as far as nations, religions, social organizations, and historical frictions are concerned, especially in the Western cultures. Hitler notoriously sold his sinister plans to the German people by promising a retrieval of the lost integrity of the German identity. For the good of their collective identity, Germans were expected to embrace Nazism because it offered a self-definition to the nation as a unit. The Catholic Church, as another example, prompts believers to identify with Christianity because it offers an identity, “under Christ,” to all those who have faith.
Two possibilities exist. A subject either acknowledges fallenness and strives to overcome it, or else he/she is unwelcome in the social order and is denied identity. It is very important to explain why everything that a social system rejects is rejected in the name of innocence, an innocence that nobody has and nobody will ever have.
Nonetheless, this innocence gives tremendous momentum to the functioning of the social fabric, because it is what connects the social space to the lost territory. Let me attempt to explain how innocence survives as a stake after ages of violence in its name, because it is always deferred, so it always remains possible. For its violence to cease, the stakes need to be altogether abandoned, which, as I will show, cannot be done simply by shifting to another mode of perceiving the fall.
In my definition, innocence is an imaginary construct that forms the social subject through its loss, and which is imposed primarily on (and attributed to) those in the first stages of life (children). Given this analogy, the concept of game—as arbitrary or not essential practice of a community, based on an accepted set of rules—becomes relevant