fast as they are made,Forgot as soon
As done. Perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright. To have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mock’ry. [. . .]
O, let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all To envious and calumniating time.
(III, 3)
Ulysses’ strategy here is profoundly ambiguous. In a first approach, he merely restates his argumentation about the necessity of “degrees” (ordered social hierarchy), and portrays time as the corrosive force which undermines old true values—an arch-conservative motif. However, on a closer reading, it becomes clear that Ulysses gives to his argumentation a singular cynical twist: how are we to fight against time, to keep old values alive? Not by directly sticking to them, but by supplementing them with the obscene realpolitik of cruel manipulation, of cheating, of playing one hero against the other. It is only this dirty underside, this hidden disharmony, that can sustain harmony (Ulysses plays with Achilles’ envy, he refers to emulation—the very attitudes that work to destabilize the hierarchical order, since they signal that one is not satisfied by one’s subordinate place within the social body). Secret manipulation of envy—that is, the violation of the very rules and values Ulysses celebrates in his first speech—is needed to counteract the effects of time and sustain the hierarchical order of “degrees.” This would be Ulysses’ version of Hamlet’s famous “The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!”—the only way to “set it right” is to counteract the transgression of Old Order with its inherent transgression, with crime secretly committed to serve the Order. The price we pay for this is that the Order which thus survives is a mockery of itself, a blasphemous imitation of Order.
This is why ideology is not simply an operation of closure, drawing the line between what is included and what is excluded/prohibited, but the ongoing regulation of non-closure. In the case of marriage, ideology not only prohibits extramarital affairs; its crucial operation is to regulate such inevitable transgressions (say, the proverbial Catholic priest’s advice to a promiscuous husband: if you really have needs that your wife cannot satisfy, visit a prostitute discreetly, fornicate and then repent, as long as you do not divorce). In this way, an ideology always admits the failure of closure, and then goes on to regulate the permeability of the exchange with its outside.
Today, however, in our “postmodern” world, this dialectic of the Law and its inherent transgression is given an additional twist: transgression is more and more directly enjoined by the Law itself.
The atonal world
Why does potlatch appear so mysterious or meaningless to us? The basic feature of our “postmodern” world is that it tries to dispense with the agency of the Master-Signifier: the “complexity” of the world should be asserted unconditionally, every Master-Signifier meant to impose some order on it should be “deconstructed,” dispersed, “disseminated”: “The modern apology for the ‘complexity’ of the world [. . .] is really nothing but a generalized desire for atonality.”23 Badiou’s perspicuous example of such an “atonal” world is the politically correct vision of sexuality, as promoted by gender studies, with its obsessive rejection of “binary logic”: this world is a nuanced, ramified world of multiple sexual practices which tolerates no decision, no instance of the Two, no evaluation (in the strong Nietzschean sense). This suspension of the Master-Signifier leaves as the only agency of ideological interpellation the “unnameable” abyss of jouissance: the ultimate injunction that regulates our lives in “postmodernity” is “Enjoy!”—realize your potential, enjoy in all manner of ways, from intense sexual pleasures through social success to spiritual self-fulfilment.
However, far from liberating us from the pressure of guilt, such dispensing with the Master-Signifier comes at a price, the price signaled by Lacan’s qualification of the superego command: “Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance—Enjoy!”24 In short, the decline of the Master-Signifier exposes the subject to all the traps and double-talk of the superego: the very injunction to enjoy, in other words, the (often imperceptible) shift from the permission to enjoy to the injunction (obligation) to enjoy sabotages enjoyment, so that, paradoxically, the more one obeys the superego command, the more one feels guilty. This same ambiguity affects the very basis of a “permissive” and “tolerant” society: “we see from day to day how this tolerance is nothing else than a fanaticism, since it tolerates only its own vacuity.”25 And, effectively, every decision, every determinate engagement, is potentially “intolerant” towards all others.
In his Logiques des mondes, Badiou develops the notion of “atonal” worlds (monde atone),26 worlds lacking a “point,” in Lacanese: the “quilting point” (point de capiton), the intervention of a Master-Signifier that imposes a principle of “ordering” into the world, the point of a simple decision (“yes or no”) in which the confused multiplicity is violently reduced to a “minimal difference.” None other than John F. Kennedy provided a concise description of this point: “The essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer—often, indeed, to the decider himself.” This gesture which can never be fully grounded in reasons, is that of a Master—or, as G.K. Chesterton put it in his inimitable manner: “The purpose of an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it upon something solid.”
If the fight against a world proceeds by way of undermining its “point,” the feature that sutures it into a stable totality, how are we to proceed when (as is the case today) we dwell in an atonal world, a world of multiplicities lacking a determinate tonality? The answer is: one has to oppose it in such a way that one compels it to “tonalize” itself, to openly admit the secret tone that sustains its atonality. For example, when one confronts a world which presents itself as tolerant and pluralist, disseminated, with no center, one has to attack the underlying structuring principle which sustains this atonality—say, the secret qualifications of “tolerance” which excludes as “intolerant” certain critical questions, or the secret qualifications which exclude as a “threat to freedom” questions about the limits of the existing freedoms.
The paradox, the sign of hidden complicity between today’s religious fundamentalisms and the “postmodern” universe they reject so ferociously, is that fundamentalism also belongs to the “atonal world”—which is why a fundamentalist does not believe, he knows directly. To put it in another way, both liberal-skeptical cynicism and fundamentalism thus share a basic underlying feature: the loss of the ability to believe in the proper sense of the term. For both of them, religious statements are quasi-empirical statements of direct knowledge: fundamentalists accept them as such, while skeptical cynics mock them. What is unthinkable for them is the “absurd” act of a decision which establishes every authentic belief, a decision which cannot be grounded in the chain of “reasons,” in positive knowledge: the “sincere hypocrisy” of somebody like Anne Frank who, in the face of the terrifying depravity of the Nazis, in a true act of credo qua absurdum asserted her belief in the fundamental goodness of all humans. No wonder then that religious fundamentalists are among the most passionate digital hackers, and always prone to combine their religion with the latest findings of science: for them, religious statements and scientific statements belong to the same modality of positive knowledge. (In this sense,
