in America, your father is your model for God.
And if you never know your father, if your father bails out
or dies or is never at home,
what do you believe about God?"
"What you end up doing," the mechanic says,
"is you spend your life searching for a father and God."
"What you have to consider
is the possibility that God doesn't like you. Could be, God hates us.
This is not the worst thing that can happen."
- Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk. Capítulo 18.
En los propios términos de Derridá "escoger su herencia" -nuestra herencia, la herencia- consiste en: ni aceptarlo, ni barrer con todo. Ser heredero es reafirmarse, pero siempre de manera responsable y amorosa. Se excede dentro de territorios conocidos, porque la misma tradición lo permite y fomenta. Los caminos que recorre el heredero son peligrosos, deben ser temidos por otros, solamente así será sometido a prueba. El exterminio no está en los planes del héroe, heredero, historiador, hijo. La deconstrucción, a final de cuentas, busca el reencuentro con el padre, disculpándolo amorosamente por sus errores y arrebatos, pero viéndolo de manera distinta, con otros ojos, con una mirada orgullosa.
Reconozco que mis temas, mis obsesiones, son, en su mayoría, diatribas generacionales. Mi declarada profesión de fe a Slavoj Zizek, a Douglas Coupland, a Chuck Palahniuk, J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, Radiohead, Sigur Ros (y muchos más etcéteras) indica un compromiso por hablar en otro tono, pero dentro un mismo código, con mis tribus, con mis coetáneos, con todos los locos ambulantes que juegan a ser normales dentro de una sociedad que no los incluyó. Mi oratoria es para los X, siempre, aunque termine hablando con los Y, trabajando para la generación Baby Boom y viviendo día a día el equívoco que nos mantiene fértiles, acumulando, segundo a segundo, malos entendidos.
"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time." - Tyler Durden.
Parte del compromiso generacional que me anuncia es, precisamente, el conflicto que mantengo con Fight Club, con el discurso pronunciado, y traicionado por la combinación Palahniuk-Fincher, que dejó heridas abiertas, muchos símbolos sepultados y caminos por recorrer. Hay una reflexión inconclusa, en la obra, que nadie se atreve a mencionar, sin embargo la hipótesis central del libro ha provocado que en la red social más importante en la actualidad -Facebook- existan 383, 360 fans para una sola aplicación, al mismo tiempo que se han detectado, desde hace ya casi 10 años, cientos de grupos y foros en los que jóvenes y adultos, en todo tipo de condiciones, se organizan para enfrentarse en una pelea a la vez, sin camisa, sin zapatos, dos rivales por pelea. Cada vez que me entero que un nuevo fanático de Fight Club profesa su radicalidad y su misoginia siento una obligación que me antecede e impone a decir la verdad, lo que nadie dice. Es una responsabilidad cruel, dolorosa y, bajo cierta luz y óptica, fratricida. Sin embargo es una responsabilidad de heredero, donde el acto heroico es implacable, es indispensable para construir los cimientos de una evolución simbólica.
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Joshua Delpech-Ramey entrevista a Slavoj Zizek para el Diario de Filosofía y Escritura, la conversación se titula "On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love". A continuación el extracto referente a Fight Club en el que el filósofo eslovenio ilustra, de manera muy clara, la intención deconstructiva del protagonista para alcanzar la libertad. Tangencialmente Zizek habla sobre la importancia de una herencia que incite al cambio y a la apertura
JPS: A cut within ourselves?
SZ: Yeah, yes! This is why again, in a totally different way (you put it wonderfully) this too, is in a movie that I like, Fight Club, where at first, you hit yourself. This is the most difficult part. The change is a change in you. Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School, so sadly forgotten today, put it in a very nice way in his essay on liberation, "freedom is the condition of liberation." In order to liberate yourself you must be free.
We see this today, with feminists, that the first step in liberation is that you perceive that your situation is unjust. This already is the inner freedom. The problem is not, at first, that the situation for women was bad, but [rather] that they just accepted it as a fact. Even in revolution it goes like this. If you look at the French Revolution, the shift was purely ideological. They overthrew the king when they started to perceive that position as unjustified. Look at it in an objective way. The ancienne regime was, in the second part of the 18th century, much more liberal and open than before. It's just that the implicit ethical standards changed. My big obsession with Christianity is that there is something extremely precious in this legacy that is being lost today.
JPS: This is a question about idolatry, one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest theme of monotheistic religion, and of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptures. You claim provocatively in The Puppet and the Dwarf that "the ultimate idolatry is not the idolizing of the mask, the image, but the belief that there is some hidden, positive content beyond the mask" (138). What do you mean, exactly, by this phrase?
SZ: The key point for me is that Hegelian statement which I make all the time, which is that what dies on the cross is not a finite representative of God, but the God beyond himself. So that "Holy Spirit" means precisely, we are on our own, in a way. This terrible opening, this freedom, which, and here I am quite dogmatic: what we really mean by freedom was opened only through Judeo-Christian space. Freedom in this radical sense only is or appears as a correlate of what Lacan would have called desire of the Other qua Other. Without the abyss of the other, without perceiving the other in an abyss, without not knowing what the other wants, you are not free. If you know what they other one wants, and you are the object of his desire . . . Here it can be said also why Christianity is the religion of love. It's a positive ontological constituent of love: you only love someone who is an abyss, whom you don't know. Love always means this. . . In order to love someone, it should be an abyss . . . it should be a lacking in perfect being, but at the same time a being with an impenetrable excess. There is no love without this. You have all that mystical stuff where you say yes to the universe, but that's not what is uniquely Christian love.
And here I think, again, as for the essence of Christianity Kierkegaard got it first. When he emphasized that it is totally wrong to read Christ as a metaphor in the sense that first the truth appears just as a person but then with the Holy Spirit we know that it's not a person but just a universal notion of love, or whatever. The greatness of Kierkegaard is to show that our only access to eternity is through temporality. Not in this fake Hegelian sense that eternity is just the totality of the movement of the temporal, but this crazy paradox that in a specific historical moment something happened. Only through that passage do you get eternity. That is to say, if you go directly to eternity, you get nothing, you miss eternity itself. So if I were to pick out one writer here who got it, it would have been technically Kierkegaard. It's also clear that the Kierkegaardian triad aesthetic-ethical-religious is so clearly the Lacanian imaginary-symbolic-real. It fits so perfectly.
Also, what interests me in some of my works is to explain this relation between sexuality and love. Not in some cheap New Age religious sense where the ultimate religious experience is to have good sex, because you get the yin-yang balance and so on . . . what I think is that something is missing for me, in Kierkegaard. I develop this, I think, in my Wagner book. It's that you have a.) the aesthetic mode of sexuality which is, basically—I know it's more complex than this—seduction, Don Giovanni, blah blah. Then you have the ethical mode which is marriage. Then where is the religious mode? I think it is courtly love, this absolute logic, and so on. But something is missing there. And the whole trick of it, and Kierkegaard was approaching it, is how (we should never forget it) with Kierkegaard, it's either/or: the three are not at the same level, you always have to make a choice between the two. Which is why (and in some of his most radical formulations Kierkegaard did get a presentiment of it), paradoxically, once you make the fundamental choice and you opt for the ethical, from within the ethical the only step toward the religious is, often in its appearance, a regression towards the aesthetic.
Which is why I refer, in the last pages of my On Belief , to that weird English catholic novel by Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited, where you have exactly this. For the heroine, it would be ethical to marry the guy, now [at the end], because she is divorced. But she says no. Her only way to maintain fidelity to God is to go on changing lovers like crazy. Ethical would be, as Kierkegaard puts it (in a wonderful way apropos Abraham) the ethical is sheer interpretation itself. To act ethically, as opposed to religiously . . . from a religious perspective ethics is not something you should stick to against temptation. The ethical, as such, is the temptation. Which is why, again, this crazy leap of faith into the religious, can well appear, to external observers, to those not within the event, as merely aesthetic, as some kind of aesthetic regression. And again I think that to return to a diagnosis of where we are today, I think that precisely what I find horrible in these new forms of spirituality is that we are simply losing our sense for these kinds of paradoxes, which are the very core of Christianity.
