Прогрессивный журнал Генезис
a magical object endowed with special powers». In other words, we can imagine a bourgeois subject visiting a course of Marxism where he is taught about commodity fetishism; however, after the finished course, he comes back to his teacher, complaining that he is still the victim of commodity fetishism. The teacher tells him «But you know now how things stand, that commodities are only expressions of social relations, that there is nothing magic about them!», to what the pupil replies: «Of course I know all that, but the commodities I am dealing with seem not to know it!» This situation is literally evoked by Marx in his famous fiction of commodities that start to speak to each other: «If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects.What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values» 5 . So, again, the true task is not to convince the subject, but the chicken- commodities: not to change the way we speak about commodities, but to change the way commodities speak among themselves… Alenka Zupancic goes here to the end and imagines a brilliant example that refers to God himself: «In the enlightened society of, say, revolutionary terror, a man is put in prison because he believes in God. With different measures, but above by means of an enlightened explanation, he is brought to the knowledge that God does not exist. When dismissed, the man comes running back, and explains how scared he is of being punished by God. Of course he knows that God does not exist, but does God also know that?» 6 . It is in this precise sense that today’s era is perhaps less atheist than any prior one: we are all ready to indulge in utter scepticism, cynical distance, exploitation of others «without any illusions», violations of all ethical constraints, extreme sexual practices, etc.etc. — protected by the silent awareness that the big Other is ignorant about it. Exactly the same holds also for God who, for Lacan, does not possess actual existence but counterfactual ex-sistence—l’inexistence divine, as QuentinMeillassoux put it: god qua real is like the impossible jouissance: it never was here AND we cannot get rid of it, or, in the case of god, there is not god AND it continues to haunt us in its very inexistence. Jean-Pierre Dupuy often mentions the ancient story of the twelfth camel: anArab merchant dies and leaves to his three sons 11 camels,with the precise instructions on how to distribute them: the first son gets half of the camels, the second one third and the third one sixts. So how to do it when 11 is not divisible with 2, 3 or 6? A wise judge proposes the solution: he will add just to the sum a camel of his own. Now we have 12 camels and the first son gets six the second three and the third two, together eleven; the judge then takes back the camel he added, so that he is not at a loss… (Niklas Luhmann has written a book on this.) The key feature is here that one can also merely imagine the twelfth camel — it needn’t to exist in reality. And is god not something like the twelfth camel, is the twelfth camel not one of the names for god, a lie (a non-existing entity) which makes things clear? So does god exist or not? It does not exist as a fact, but it inexists counterfactually,which does not meant that it is simply an illusion: it is the paradox of an illusion which is immanent to reality itself,a counterfactual immanent to factuals, to our symbolic universe: «It is really fabulous that the function of t he other, of the other as locus of the truth, and in a word of the only place, even though an irreducible one, that we can give to the term of Divine Being, of God to call him by his name. God is properly the locus where, if you will allow me the term, there is produced the dieu, the dieur, the dire, for a trifle, dire gives us Dieu. As long as something is said, the God hypothesis will be there. And it is precisely as trying to say something that there is Alenka Zupancic, „’Concrete Universal’ and What Comedy Can Tell Us About It“ (manuscript). 6 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, p. 176-7. 5 9
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