H
ieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights(ca. 1504, central panel, Figure 8.1) presents a vision of Hell—a place where the psyche suffers—characterized by excesses of bodily addictions, jouissance, and the drives.
Metaphorically, it already distances us from the “horrors and delights” of the vir- tual Real, a place where the division of human beings and nature has yet to be formed, D+G’s immanent plane of flows and intensities; nonstratified, unformed intense matter, where both the animate and inanimate, the artificial and the nat- ural come together. This unformed and fluid plane of nature (or BwO) is simply a function of varying its speed and slowness, movement and rest, and intensities within a single physical system. Both the Imaginary and Symbolic psychic orders, as “abstract machines of stratification” (to continue to use D+G’s language), pro- tect us from its worst manifestations. As Bosch’s paradoxical title suggests, the delights and horrors that emerge from it, seemingly through autopoietic processes, are intimately enfolded within one another: Heaven and Hell are not dichotomies; rather, they are braided together in complicitous and complex ways, like demand and desire, as intertwining toruses (doughnuts). Bosch’s painting seems to be a perfect metaphor for the “Hellmouth,” the portal through which the demonic forces gain entry to Buffy’s Sunnydale.
In 1958, a Harvard art historian, Clive Bell, wrote an important thesis, by now long forgotten, explaining why pagan gargoyles—strategically placed on Gothic cathedrals to remind the faithful that the Church was to protect them from such horrors—began to disappear as the Enlightenment proceeded from its natural theological beginnings to secular forms of rationalism. More recently, Robert Romanyshyn, in his interesting book Technology as Symptom and Dream(1989), makes the same claim. Such irrational forces seemed to visually vanish as ration- ality eventually became an internalized ideology as modernism progressed. Goya’s famous etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1797–98), subtitled Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters, and Foucault’s (1965) important study Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age
of Reasonare two further historical markers that indicate how our hellish “mon- sters and demons” have been locked away from sight so that the road to rational secularization could continue. The basement, underground, or cellar—all the metaphorical names Freud and his followers provided for the unconscious strug- gles with the drives—have yet again come out in the open, working themselves out in music, computer games, television, cinema, and other art forms in various ways. Documenta 11 (8.6–15.9, 2002), the renown postwar art exhibition, held in Kassel, Germany every five years for one hundred days, made this abundantly clear, as many artists presented paranoid states of existence concerning the post- colonial condition and the failures of democracy.
It was Lacan who tried to show that such “monsters” were not repressed in some gothic basement, but could be seen functioning in everyday life through his structural attempts at explaining neurosis (hysteria, obsession, phobia), psychosis, and perversion. These are not states of “madness” as much as they are attempts at Figure 8.1 Hieronymus Bosch,The Garden of Earthly Delights, central panel
living with the contradictions between unconscious and conscious life shaped by the relationship ofjouissanceto the Law of the Symbolic Order.Buffy’s narrative is one brilliant form by which to display these contradictions between impossi- ble masculine and feminine relationships that youth grapple with in a post- Oedipalized world. Episode 6017 (“Normal Again”) is conscious Heaven rather than the unconscious suffering of Hell. The world of magic, as littered through- out the video game landscape, television, and films, manifests an unconscious search to rethink a new transcendent myth to live by, which would transform the postmodern malaise, where both melancholia and mourning are entwined as algiaandnostros. Rudolf and Margot Wittkowers’ study Born under Saturn(1963) pointed to the same malaise that prevailed as the Copernican Revolution swept through the intelligentsia. Some artists and writers were unable to make the tran- sition to the new ontology.Buffyis definitely on the side ofalgiain its attempts to deal with the Real of postmodern transition.
There have been few filmic narrative structures that have opened a porthole into the unconscious as effectively as Buffydoes to explore ethical implications of the Real. The most brilliant of these have been time-image films like Taylor Hackford’s Devil’s Advocate(1997) that stage the journey into the unconscious through Lacan’s mirror stage as a misrecognition between one’s ideal ego [i(o)], how you want to be seen, and the Ego Ideal [I(O)]—how the social order sees you.
In Devil’s Advocate,Lomax, a lawyer who has never lost a case, faces his first pos- sible defeat. During a pause in the trial, he walks into the men’s washroom and stares at himself in the mirror. The camera lens voyeuristically penetrates the darkness of one of his pupils through a telescopic zoomed close-up, and we are immediately propelled back to the courtroom as the trial resumes. Cinematically, there has been no cut in the action. It is only much later that we find out that the ethical decision that Lomax must make in the court trial has been suspended as he struggles “within” his unconscious Real with the Devil—John Milton—as to what action he should take. Toward the end of the narrative, the camera zooms back from his pupil, and Lomax is once more facing himself in the mirror, ready to enact his decision (jagodzinski 2001). The port(w)hole to the unconscious is also humorously developed in Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999) as a crawl space that exists on a nonexistent half-floor of a building. There is also Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come, which charts Chris Nielson’s journey in an imaginary heaven to find his two children, and then into hell to “awaken” his wife, Sciorra, who has committed suicide, bereaved of her family: her two children killed in a car accident, followed a few years later by Chris who dies in a car acci- dent as well.
Assuming that the Buffyverse is an exploration of the unconscious—its horrors as delights and delights as its horrors—what gives Buffy her power if authority has been suspended? What saves Buffy’s schizophrenic, psychotic narrative from sim- ply being the pathology of a narcissistic, grandiose, paranoid ideation? Buffy is egomaniacally positioned at the center of conspiracies and intrigues of a colossal magnitude, like Freud’s Judge Daniel Paul Schreber. Her stories of vampires and demons are simply delusions on the grandest of scales. What saves Buffy’s psy- chosis is an “Ethics of the Real” (Zupanc
ic
2000; Jaaus 1997), for within such an
ethics lies the heart of self-refleXive thought. As the ONE, in her singularity, undecidability, and urgency, as Jacques Derrida1puts it regarding the difficulty of justice, she practices a form of “responsible anarchy,” if it can be put this way.
Not only do the episodes deal with a host of youth dilemmas,A Garden of Earthly Delightswith its Sadeian traps, but it is also the way she deals with them that is so powerful.
Buffy is suspended in a space between her call of Nature and the Law, the Sophoclean story where woman defies the law of man (patriarchy) and submits to Divine Justice. She is wedged between the Council of Watchers (Symbolic Order), who have a Scriptural Divine Law as represented by Giles’s library, and a realm of Nature that is always “beyond” them, existing in a dimension that is out of reach of rules and the imagination. I would go further and maintain that Nature here is not transcendental in its reach for utopian possibilities. Rather, as Nature, she brings the issues back to Earth. This “fall” is in the direction of Spinoza, Schlegel, and the Stoic tradition, all Deleuzian influences, where divine Nature becomes an immanent god. Pushed further, material Nature becomes a force moving itself, an intelligence in matter, but that does not allow an escape from judgment. We find ourselves on a plane “between Heaven and Earth,” a place where jouissanceflows freely between them, bringing us painful pleasures and pleasurable pains—the joys as well as the sorrows. Buffy has to mediate these two forces through her actions. But, ultimately, the decision rests on her shoulders as a “free,” ethical act.
Her entitlement to Nature; that is to say her chthonic powers of the Earth’s energy as sacred “natural life” (zoë) is inexplicable and out of the reach of the Symbolic Order (institutions, rules, science, Law). She must work out an ethics of the Real, which is always beyond the Law’s reach, mediated by the entwine- ment of Eros and Thanatos. Justice is always beyond rules, and ethics is the nego- tiation of this “beyond” of the rules. This is precisely why the Triebeexist in the enfolded space/time between biological Nature and symbolic Culture. Ethics is always a preontological question. Its questions are always open-ended; its value structures always come after the fact, after the decision has been made. Lacan’s discussion ofAntigone(S VII,Ethics) is the exemplar here. Antigone becomes a numinous object by being sublimated and raised to the dignity ofdas Dingfor the deed that she does. That is to say, some ordinary object or deed has been ele- vated to an unconditional position that is valued as life (zoë) itself. Her splendor and grace come from an ethical stance against the laws of Creon. Her “madness”
(até)to obey a higher Law of Nature (zoë) meant burying her brother Polyneices despite his offenses against the state. Creon wanted his soul to perpetually suffer in anguish. His burial would raise questions about the weakness of his own rule.
But Antigone’s sacrifice as an “act” meant her own death. But, through this “act,”
the very foundation of morals as to what was dichotomously Good and Evil came to be questioned. In the end, Creon is devastated and alone. All his loved ones have committed suicide because of his fixation (Freud’s Fixierarbeit), his obses- sion with and on the rules.
To commit an act in Lacan’s sense is to change the very orientation of the Symbolic Order, seemingly an impossible task. It is a metaethical act. We have only to think of the founders of (patriarchal) world religions of the “Axial Age”
(Achsenzeit) (ca. 800–200 BCE), as Karl Jaspers (1953) called it—Socrates, Confucius, Zoroaster, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, as the founders of Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—to see what’s at stake (sorry, couldn’t be helped!). The Buffyverse revisits the transition of matrilineal to patrilineal family structures. She is the “Numinous Slayer with a Thousand Faces,” to echo Joseph Campbell. Buffy goes all the way back to the first slayer—Sineya (4022, “Restless”) as the primor- dialdas Ding, the Mother, the ONE, in Hegelian terms: the paradox of the genus that contains its opposite—man,2where Zero is counted as ONE, the womb as Nothing which already has Something. Creation demands an imbalance of the sit- uation from the start.
The Doubled Road of Ethics
There are two ways in which the seemingly innocuous and frivolous Buffyverse addresses self-refleXivity as an ethics of the virtual Real. The first I would call a Deleuzian solution, where the difference inside us, what is strange within us, is addressed as becoming-animal3in D+G’s terms, a return to nature where the per- spective on life shifts from seeing oneself as an ego (moi) to seeing oneself as a flow (flux), “a set of flows in relation with other flows, outside oneself and within oneself ” (Deleuze 1997, 51). Such flow extends to the life of flux and nonorganic life as orientated to the soul (l’âme). Such an ethics means decentering the egoic self, coming to terms with its misrecognitions in Lacan’s terms, and extending oneself to the nonhuman and inhuman alike, the “beasts” that dwell throughout the Buffyverse, as animal-machines that every living creature is, subject to DNA reinsciption leading to genetic miscalculations and code errors.4“What is indi- vidual is the relation; it is the soul and not the ego. The ego has a tendency to iden- tify itself with the world, but it is already dead, whereas the soul extends the thread of its living sympathiesandantipathies(51, added emphasis). The soul is directly tied to the virtual Real. “The soul as the life of flows is the will to live, struggle and combat” (52). I take Deleuze’s notion of the soul as a key to an ethics of difference that the Buffyverse demonstrates, as I hope to show. It is a combat with difference that is at stake (I’m letting the pun stand). Deleuze compares combat to war; war being a general annihilation that requires the participation of the ego, whereas combat rejects war. It is the conquest of the soul. “The inalienable part of the soul appears when one has ceased to be an ego; it is this eminently flowing, vibrating, struggling part that has to be conquered” (52).
The second is Lacan’s ethical “act” as staged by Buffy, which, as was true in the case of Antigone, has consequences for the Symbolic Order. In Alenka Zupanc
ic
’s (2000, 249–59) formulation, the ethics of the Real is an “abyssal realization of desire.” To break with the premodernist Master/Slave dialectic, where Honor (as Cause) cannot be surrendered, requires rethinking the drive toward Liberty (as Cause). The former is an “ethics of the Master” where the code “better death than dishonor” makes honor the one exception that one is willing to sacrifice one’s life for—or anything else for that matter—in order to save face. Heroically, the slave
tries to elevate him/herself as a Master. It is an either/or proposition—death or honor. The modernist version, “liberty or death,” leads to the paradox where you die, but you have achieved your freedom, with the possibility that the Symbolic Order has changed as well, as during political revolutions. Choice, however, can be dictated by a different logic—neither/nor. “Liberty or death” can be inverted to
“neither liberty nor death.” The Slave reframes the context of opposition to the Master. This presents the option of sacrificing the Cause itself—be it liberty, honor, or anything else. Death, in this case, may be symbolic in the sense that there is no place in the symbolic order for the Slave. However, freedom is retained and death is avoided! This is an antiheroic position. It seems the act that seals Antigone’s fate embodies both possibilities.
In order to explore these two possibilities, we begin with the “mythological,”
neopagan soteriology presented by Giles:
This world is older than any of you know, and contrary to popular mythology, it did not begin as a paradise. For untold eons, demons walked the Earth, made it their home, their Hell. In time, they lost their purchase of this reality, and the way was made for mortal animals. For Man. What remains of the Old Ones are vestiges: cer- tain magicks [sic], certain creatures . . . The books tell that the last demon to leave this reality fed off a human, mixed their blood. He was a human form possessed—
infected by the demon’s soul. He bit another and another . . . and so they walk the Earth, feeding. Killing some, mixing their blood with others to make more of their kind. Waiting for the animals to die and the Old Ones to return (1002, “Harvest”;
Golden and Holder 1998, 126).
This mythological tale identifies what Immanuel Kant, a pious Protestant, was unable to adequately explain—namely radical evil, which is repressed so that he may define a universal notion of the Good based on a dutiful vigilance to a
“categorical imperative” that rationally universalized good behavior. The question of “diabolical or radical Evil” (the Old Ones) eluded him (Z∨iz∨ek 1993, 83–84).
Subjectivity in the Buffyverse myth is already tainted with Evil, but in an ambigu- ous sense. The usual understanding of Evil as being in opposition to the Good is deconstructed. “Feeding off a human mixed their blood” (the vampire) has several resonances. The first is a matter of survival, while the second is the sense of usher- ing in the Good in the form of what is distinctly “human.” While a third is the com- ing together of difference itself—as nonhuman with human, a becoming-animal.
From the Deleuzian perspective, death and becoming have a particular rela- tionship to the BwO. It is very close to Lacan’s reinterpretation of Freud’s death- drive5that Slavoj Z∨iz∨ek (2004d) follows—as that which is “beyond” life and death.
It is “the terrifying insistence of an undead object.” Something is “dead,” but it still manages to go on. In other words, we are dealing with a kind of life force that is oddly named, for it has nothing to do with the usual misinterpretation as only being destructive. Willow’s magic out of control in season six was her death drive, but this is still an intensity animated by life. This is precisely D+G’s formulation as well when they write, “Catatonic schizophrenia [. . .] gives its model to death.
Zero intensity” (329). In other words, the catatonic patient will attempt to mobi- lize and reanimate other parts of the body where possible. As they say, “The body
without organs is the model of death” (329). Authors of horror stories know this.
We have only to think of all those zombie films as examples of such “living death.”
They continue to move as best they can, although they are “dead.” So it seems absurd to place Thanatos (death) in opposition to Eros (life), the death drive in opposition to the life drive. Their solution, as it is Lacan’s as well, is to theorize the death drive as animating life. Deleuze enfolds Thanatos (death drive) within Eros (life drive) to make the “experience of death” that which structures the psyche; as in Lacan, it becomes a “driving” force (hence, the need for a forgetting to allow for change, thought of as the physicality of dying brain cells). As D+G put it, “The experience of death is the most common of occurrences in the unconscious, pre- cisely because it occurs in life and for life, in every passage or becoming, in every intensity as passage or becoming” (330). “Experiencing death” is precisely becom- ing. It opens up transformative potentialities.
The death drive in this formulation oddly enough becomes a form of Eros, but with significant questions surrounding its occurrence. As the positive orientating principle of repetition, it is also demonic. There is something compelling as well as horrifying about the way it can derail us, take us over, and here we are again in the realm ofjouissanceand the Buffyverse. As Z∨iz∨ek (1993) puts it, “Evil is another name for the ‘death-drive,’ for the fixation on some Thing which derails our cus- tomary life-circuit. By way of Evil, man [sic] wrests himself from animal instinc- tual rhythm, i.e., Evil introduces the radical reversal of the ‘natural’ relationship”
(96). This is rather a startling reversal of our usual way of thinking of Evil. What is that “natural relationship”? From a Kantian humanist perspective, Evil is a ques- tion of conscious subjective (ego) choice. Through “reason” one can subordinate one’s own “pathological” nature, or “original sin,” and follow one’s moral duty.
Here, something more radical is being proposed: “Survival” itself becomes ambiguous. An act of radical Evil may result in suicide that may be indistinguish- able ethically from the Good. Young Palestinian men and women in their teens and early twenties acting as suicide bombers embody such a deadlock position where Evil suspends the Law of the Good. Evil/Good become reversible terms depending on which side of the Israeli/Palestinian wall you are on. Such activity is “pathological” when taken in the Kantian sense. This is an act that runs counter to egotistical interests, and believes in a Cause that does not yet even exist. Each martyr believes he or she will change the symbolic order through his or her act, and make a qualifiable difference.
It seems an imbalance is required to jump-start things. The primary choice is not between Good and Evil; rather, it is either yielding to one’s “pathological”
leanings or choosing radical Evil as a mode of becoming. Paradoxically, in this view Evil ushers in the Good. Evil is put in the service of facing “subjective desti- tution,” a metaphorical “death” of one’s ego; to allow the fantasy frame that holds it to shatter so as to inwardly face the “pathology” inside when confronted by the
“face” of the Other (cf. Emmanuel Levinas6). But, how far can this be taken? An ethical act must respond to the alterity in the Other; that is, one has to respond to what is absolutely unknown in the Other as well as to the alterity within one’s self.
It means to invent a new rule out of the singularity of the situation. Put another way, we are all capable of being vampires. An ethics of the Real analyzes the