of the West and its “War on Terror” relies: the opposition between liberal-democratic individual rights and religious fundamentalism embodied primarily in “Islamo-fascism”? Therein resides the symptomatic inconsistency of the US neoconservatives: while, in domestic politics, they privilege the fight against liberal secularism (abortion, gay marriages, and so on), that is, their struggle is the so-called “culture of life” against the “culture of death,” in foreign affairs, they privilege the very opposite values of the liberal “culture of death.” One way to resolve this dilemma is the hardline Christian fundamentalist solution, articulated in the works of Tim LaHaye et consortes: to unambiguously subordinate the second opposition to the first one. The title of one of LaHaye’s latest novels points in this direction: The Europa Conspiracy. In this account, the true enemy of the US is not Muslim terrorism, the latter is merely a puppet secretly manipulated by European secularists, who are the true forces of the Antichrist intent on weakening the US and establishing the New World Order under the domination of the United Nations. Opposed to this minority view is the predominant liberal-democratic view which sees the principal enemy in all kinds of fundamentalisms, and perceives US Christian fundamentalism as a deplorable homegrown version of “Islamo-fascism.”
The reactive nature of religious fundamentalism is discernible in its hidden reflexive position. Let us take a look at this reflexivity at its (artistic) highest, in the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky himself, and not only the heroes of his (late) films, stands for the regained immediacy of authentic belief, as opposed to the Western intellectual’s doubt and self-destructive distance. But what if the constellation is more complex? The ultimate figure of this direct belief is Stalker—to quote Tarkovsky himself:
I am often asked what this Zone stands for. There is only one possible answer: the Zone doesn’t exist. Stalker himself invented his Zone. He created it, so that he was able to bring there some very unhappy persons and impose on them the idea of hope. The room of desires is equally Stalker’s creation, yet another provocation in the face of the material world. This provocation, formed in Stalker’s mind, corresponds to an act of faith.36
What, however, if we take the claim that Stalker invented the Zone literally? What if Stalker, far from directly believing, manipulates, feigns belief, in order to fascinate the intellectuals he brings to the Zone, arousing in them the prospect of belief? What if, far from being a direct believer, he assumes the role of a subject supposed to believe for the eyes of the decadent intellectual observers? What if the truly naive position is that of the intellectual spectator, of his fascination with Stalker’s naive belief? And what if the same goes for Tarkovsky himself, who—far from being the authentic Orthodox believer in contrast to Western skepticism—acts out this role in order to fascinate the Western intellectual public?37 John Gray is therefore right to say that “Religious fundamentalists see themselves as having remedies for the maladies of the modern world. In reality they are symptoms of the disease they pretend to cure.”38
To put it in Nietzsche’s terms: they are the ultimate nihilists, since the very form of their activity (spectacular mediatic mobilization, and so forth) undermines their message. One of the first exponents of early literary modernism, Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), followed his provocative Chants of Maldoror with Poésies, a weird reassertion of traditional morality. At the very beginning of artistic modernity, he thus stages its final paradoxical reversal: when all sources of transgression are exhausted, the only way to break out of the suffocating weariness of the Last Men is to propose traditional attitudes themselves as the ultimate transgression. And the same goes for our popular culture:
What will happen when we run out of new vices? How will satiety and idleness be staved off when designer sex, drugs and violence no longer sell? At that point, we may be sure, morality will come back into fashion. We may not be far from a time when “morality” is marketed as a new brand of transgression.39
One should be very precise here: this reversal is not the same as the one, described by Chesterton, in which morality itself appears as the greatest transgression, or law-and-order as the greatest (universalized) crime. Here, in contrast to Chesterton’s model, the encompassing unity is not that of crime, but that of the law: it is not morality which is the greatest transgression, it is transgression which is the fundamental “moral” injunction of contemporary society. The true reversal should thus occur within this speculative identity of opposites, of morality and its transgression: all one has to do is to shift the encompassing unity of these two terms from morality to transgression. And, since this encompassing unity has to appear as its opposite, we thus have to accomplish a shift from a society in which the Law rules—in the guise of a permanent transgression—to a society in which transgression rules—in the guise of a new Law.40
Happy to torture?
This elevation of transgression itself into a moral injunction has a precise name: happiness as the supreme duty. No wonder that, over the last decade, the study of happiness emerged as a scientific discipline of its own: there are now “professors of happiness” at universities, “quality of life” institutes attached to them, and numerous research papers; there is even the Journal of Happiness Studies. Ruut Veenhoven, its editor-in-chief, wrote:
We can now show which behaviors are risky as far as happiness goes, in the same way medical research has shown us what is bad for our health. We should eventually be able to show what kind of lifestyle suits what kind of person.41
This new discipline has two branches. On the one hand, there is a more sociological approach, based on data gathered from hundreds of surveys measuring happiness across different cultures, professions, religions, social and economic groups. One cannot reproach these researches for cultural bias: they are well aware of how the notion of what constitutes happiness depends on the cultural context (it is only in individualistic Western countries that happiness is seen as a reflection of personal achievement). One also cannot deny that the data collected are often interesting: happiness is not the same thing as satisfaction with one’s life (several nations that report low or average life satisfaction at the same time report high percentages of very happy people); the happiest nations—mostly Western and individualistic ones—tend to have the highest levels of suicide; and, of course, the key role of envy—what counts is not what you have so much as what others have (the middle classes are far less satisfied than the poor, for they take as their reference point the very wealthy, whose income and status they will be hard-pushed to match; the poor, meanwhile, take as their reference point the middle earners, who are more within their reach).
On the other hand, there is a more psychological (or, rather, brain-sciences) approach, combining cognitivist scientific research with occasional incursions into New Age meditation wisdom: the exact measuring of brain processes that accompany feelings of happiness and satisfaction, etc. The combination of cognitive science and Buddhism (which is not new—its last great proponent was Francisco Varela) is here given an ethical twist: what is offered in the guise of scientific research is a new morality that one is tempted to call biomorality—the true counterpart to today’s biopolitics. And indeed, was it not the Dalai Lama himself who wrote: “The purpose of life is to be happy”42—this is not true for psychoanalysis, one should add. In Kant’s description, ethical duty functions like a foreign traumatic intruder that from the outside disturbs the subject’s homeostatic balance, its unbearable pressure forcing the subject to act “beyond the pleasure principle,” ignoring the pursuit of pleasures. For Lacan, exactly the same description holds for desire, which is why enjoyment is not something that comes naturally to the subject, as a realization of her inner potential, but is the content of a traumatic superego injunction.43
Consequently, if one sticks to the end to the “pleasure principle,” it is difficult to abandon a radical conclusion. The artificial-intelligence philosopher Thomas Metzinger considers artificial subjectivity
