My very first film, The Orchid Gardener, opened with a caption stating that the film was dedicated to a girl who had died of leukaemia, giving the dates of her birth and death. That was entirely fabricated! And manipulative and cynical, because I realized that if you started a film like that, then the audience would take it a lot more seriously.3
There is much more than manipulation at work here: in his feminine trilogy (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville), von Trier provokes us in our innermost being, stirring up automatic sympathy with the ultimate archetypal image of the victimized woman who, with her heart of gold, suffers pain. Through his “manipulation,” he displays the lie of this sympathy, the obscene pleasure we gain from seeing the victim suffer, and thereby disturbs our self-satisfaction. Does this mean, however, that my “truth” is simply in my symbolic identity obfuscated by my imaginary “inner life” (as a simplistic reading of Lacan seems to indicate, opposing the subject of the signifier to the imaginary ego)?
Let us take a man who, deep down, cultivates sadistic fantasies while in public life he is polite, follows rules, and so forth; when he goes online to express those fantasies in a chat room, say, he is showing his truth in the guise of a fiction. But is it not the case, on the contrary, that the polite persona is the truth here and the sadistic fantasies serve as a kind of defense? As in a new version of the old Jewish joke: “You are polite, so why do you act as if you were polite?” Is not, then, the internet, where we supposedly express on screen our deepest truths, really a site for the playing out of defensive fantasies that protect us from the banal normality that is our truth?4
Two cases are to be distinguished here. When I am a brutal executive who, deep within myself, feel that this is just a public mask and that my true Self discloses itself in my spiritual meditations (and imagine my friends telling people: “His brutal business efficiency shouldn’t deceive you—he is really a very refined and gentle person . . .”), this is not the same as when I am, in real interactions with others, a polite person who, on the internet, gives way to violent fantasies. The site of subjective identification shifts: in the internet case, I think that I really am a polite person, and that I am just playing with violent fantasies, while, as a New Age businessman, I think that I am just playing a public role in my business dealings, while my true identity is my inner Self enlightened through meditation. In other words: in both cases, truth is a fiction, but this fiction is differently located. In the internet case, it is imaginable that, at some point, I will “take off the mask” and explode, that is, carry out my violent fantasies in real life—this explosion will effectively enact “the truth of my Self.” In the case of the New Age businessman, my truth is my public persona, and, here, “taking off the mask,” enacting my New Age self in reality, namely, really abandoning my businessman traits, would involve a real shift in my subjective position. In the two cases, “taking off the mask” thus works differently. In the internet case, this gesture is what Hitler did with actual anti-Semitic measures (realizing anti-Semitic fantasies), a false act, while in the New Age businessman case, would be a true act.
In order to resolve the apparent contradiction, one should reformulate the two cases in the terms of Lacan’s triad Imaginary—Symbolic—Real: we are not dealing with two, but with three elements. The dirty fantasies I am playing with on the net do not have the same status as my “true Self” disclosed in my meditations: the first belong to the Real, the second to the Imaginary. The triad is then I—S—R. Or, more precisely, in the internet case, my polite public persona is Imaginary—Symbolic versus the Real of my fantasies, while, in the New Age executive case, my public persona is Symbolic—Real versus my Imaginary “true Self.”5 (And, to take a crucial further theoretical step, in order for this triad to function, one has to add a fourth term, none other than the empty core of subjectivity: the Lacanian “barred subject” (
It is this complex “knot” that accounts for a well-known tragic figure from the Cold War era: those Western leftists who heroically defied anti-Communist hysteria in their own countries with utmost sincerity. They were ready even to go to prison for their Communist convictions and their defense of the Soviet Union. Is it not the very illusory nature of their belief that makes their subjective stance so tragically sublime? The miserable reality of the Stalinist Soviet Union renders the fragile beauty of their inner conviction all the more majestic. This leads us to a radical and unexpected conclusion: it is not enough to say that we are dealing here with a tragically misplaced ethical conviction, with a blind trust that avoids confronting the miserable, terrifying reality of its ethical point of reference. What if, on the contrary, such a blindness, such a violent gesture of refusing-to-see, such a disavowal-of-reality, such a fetishistic attitude of “I know very well that things are horrible in the Soviet Union, but I nonetheless believe in Soviet socialism,” is the innermost constituent part of every ethical stance? Kant was already well aware of this paradox when he deployed his notion of enthusiasm for the French Revolution in his Conflict of Faculties (1795). The Revolution’s true significance did not reside in what actually went on in Paris—much of which was terrifying and included outbursts of murderous passion—but in the enthusiastic response that the events in Paris generated in the eyes of sympathetic observers all around Europe:
The recent Revolution of a people which is rich in spirit, may well either fail or succeed, accumulate misery and atrocity, it nevertheless arouses in the heart of all spectators (who are not themselves caught up in it) a taking of sides according to desires [eine Teilnehmung dem Wunsche nach] which borders on enthusiasm and which, since its very expression was not without danger, can only have been caused by a moral disposition within the human race.6
The real Event, the dimension of the Real, was not in the immediate reality of the violent events in Paris, but in how this reality appeared to observers and in the hopes thus awakened in them. The reality of what went on in Paris belongs to the temporal dimension of empirical history; the sublime image that generated enthusiasm belongs to Eternity . . . And, mutatis mutandis, the same applies for the Western admirers of the Soviet Union. The Soviet experience of “building socialism in one country” certainly did “accumulate misery and atrocity,” but it nevertheless aroused enthusiasm in the heart of the spectators (who were not themselves caught up in it).
The question here is: does every ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal? Is even the most universal ethics not obliged to draw a line and ignore some sort of suffering? What about animals slaughtered for our consumption? Who would be able to continue eating pork chops after visiting an industrial farm in which pigs are half blind and cannot even properly walk, but are just fattened to be killed? And what about, say, the torture and suffering of millions about which we know but choose to ignore? Imagine the effect on one of us if we were forced to watch one single snuff movie of what goes on thousands of times a day around the earth—brutal torture (plucking out of eyes, crushing of testicles, for example)? Would we continue to go on living as usual? Yes—if we were able to somehow forget (suspend the symbolic efficiency) of what we had witnessed.
So, again, does not every ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal?7 Yes, every ethics—with the exception of the ethics of psychoanalysis which is a kind of anti-ethics: it focuses precisely on what the standard ethical enthusiasm excludes, on the traumatic Thing that our Judeo-Christian tradition calls the “Neighbor.” Freud had good reasons for his reluctance to endorse the injunction “Love thy neighbor!”—the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the Neighbor. This is what Emmanuel Levinas did with his notion of the Neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility