PARADOX OR DIALECTIC?

Slavoj iek
EDITED BY

John Milbank
CRESTON DAVIS

d i a l e c t i c a l c l ar i t y v e r s us t he m i s t y concei t of p aradox

repressing this symptom. . . . Religion is made to do this, to cure people, that is to say, to make it sure that they do not note what doesnt go smoothly.8

Within the eld of psychoanalysis itself, the hermeneutic reaction strikes in the guise of Jungian depth psychology. One can formulate this dierence between Lacan and Jung as the one between God is unconscious and God is the unconscious: between the materialist thesis on our beliefs which, although we are unaware of it, persist in our material practices, where we act as if we believe, and the spiritualist-obscurantist notion of the divine dimension that dwells deep in our unconscious. With regard to materialism itself, we are today witnessing a paradoxical reversal. In the standard precritical metaphysics, nitude was associated with materialist empiricism (only material nite objects really exist), while innity was the domain of idealist spiritualism. In an unexpected paradoxical reversal, today, the main argument for spiritualism, against radical materialism, relies on the irreducibility of human nitude as the unsurpassable horizon of our existence, while it is todays forms of radical scientic materialism which keep the spirit of innity alive. The standard line of argumentation is: we should not forget that the technological dream of total mastery over nature and our lives is a dream, that we, humans, remain forever grounded in our nite life-world with its unfathomable backgroundit is this nitude, this very limitation of our horizon, which opens up the space for proper spirituality. All todays predominant forms of spirituality thus paradoxically emphasize that we, humans, are not free-oating spirits but irreducibly embodied in a material life-world; they all preach respect for this limitation and warn against the idealist hubris of radical materialismhere the case of ecology is a good example. In contrast to this spiritualist attitude of limitation, the radical scientic attitude which reduces man to a biological mechanism sustains the promise of full technological control over human life, its articial re-creation, its biogenetic and biochemical regulation, ultimately its immortality in the guise of the reduction of our inner Self to a software program that can be copied from one hardware to another. It is as if, with this shift, Spinozas old materialist insight according to which terms like God are false terms with no positive meanings, just terms which provide a deceptive positive form for the domain of what we do not know, gets its nal conrmation: the religious dimension is explicitly linked to the limitation of our comprehension, i.e., this dimension is not the intimation of a higher knowledge, but the inverted assertion of its limitation. This is why religious thinkers are so fond of (what appears as) the limits of our knowledge: dont try to understand the biogenetic foundations of our mind, the result may be the loss of soul; dont try to reach beyond the Big Bang, this is

the point where God directly intervened in material reality. . . . It was Kant who said that he limited the space of knowledge to create the space for faith. These two sides of the same coin are clearly discernible in the work of Andrei Tarkovsky: what pervades Tarkovskys lms is the heavy gravity of Earth, which seems to exert its pressure on time itself, generating an eect of temporal anamorphosis, extending the dragging of time well beyond what we perceive as justied by the requirements of narrative movement (I should confer here on the term Earth all the resonance it acquired in late Heidegger)perhaps, Tarkovsky is the clearest example of what Deleuze called the time-image replacing the movement-image. This time of the Real is neither the symbolic time of the diegetic space nor the time of the reality of our (spectators) viewing the lm, but an intermediate domain whose visual equivalents are perhaps the protracted stains which are the yellow sky in late Van Gogh or the water or grass in Munch: this uncanny massiveness pertains neither to the direct materiality of the color stains nor to the materiality of the depicted objects it dwells in a kind of intermediate spectral domain of what Schelling called geistige Koerperlichkeit, spiritual corporeality. In our standard ideological tradition, the approach to Spirit is perceived as Elevation, as getting rid of the burden of weight, of the gravitating force which binds us to earth, as cutting links with material inertia and starting to oat freely; in contrast to this, in Tarkovskys universe, we enter the spiritual dimension only via intense direct physical contact with the humid heaviness of earth (or stale water)the ultimate Tarkovskian spiritual experience takes place when a subject is lying stretched on the earths surface, half submerged in stale water; Tarkovskys heroes do not pray on their knees, head turned upward, toward heaven, but while intensely listening to the silent palpitation of the humid earth. . . . We can see, now, why Stanisaw Lems novel Solaris had to exert such an attraction on Tarkovsky: the planet Solaris seems to provide the ultimate embodiment of the Tarkovskian notion of a heavy humid stu (earth) which, far from functioning as the opposite of spirituality, serves as its very medium; this gigantic material Thing which thinks literally gives body to the direct coincidence of Matter and Spirit. A logical materialism has to break with both these features: to get rid of Spirit, it gladly sacrices Matter itself in its inert density. The fundamental premise of todays advocates of the nitude of our existence is thus: we are thrown into a world which preexists us, which we did not create, and so can never fully grasp, control, or dominate; whatever we do, even in our most radically autonomous act, we have to rely on the opaque background of inherited traditions and the socio-symbolic texture which predetermine the scope of our acts. Hans-Georg Gadamer made this point in very vivid terms: the time has come to turn around Hegels famous formula on the becoming-subject of Substance, of the subjective-reexive appropriation of all

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