truthful lie by which is initiated that which participates in desire.”11
If we go back to the idea of a territory that has been lost, that which constitutes identity (which has become abstract) is always lost to an Other. The subject who is in search for confirmation of self-identity sees a threat in any other human being, because any other human being is potentially the initial thief of the territory that has given rise to the need for possessing the territory. So either the Other is made part of the territory to be retrieved, or the territory has to be defended from this Other, because the conflict is formative. But this is what can be overcome through a realization of the illusory nature of territoriality. Awareness, of course, is not enough, given that social practices that bring comfort are most of the time preferred to those that require effort. However, social change cannot be brought about without awareness of deeply embedded problems arising from the abstraction of territory.
We need to remain open to the possibility of becoming at least in part detached from the effects of speech on ourselves by recognizing that the people surrounding us have not stolen our identity, and cannot steal it, since we always are who we are, not entities that were only retrospectively whole. This way, we can find a new kind of openness toward an Other that would not be primordially an enemy. Since, for social beings, there is no outside of language (or of their sociality), at least we can stop making identity such a bitter stake. This book points to some approaches to the Other (borrowing a few points from Emmanuel Levinas), in order to overcome, possibly, the essential misconceptions that propel us, through desire, toward death.
The First Fall: Mythical Identity
Approaching innocence in conjunction with the system of language (be it defined as mythical—after the fact—or religious, political, historical, and so on) allows us to understand why communities that prescribe the way to righteousness to their subjects make wholeness an enormous stake and see themselves as justified in eliminating anything less than ideal (and all subjects must be understood as less than ideal). These threats are perceived as standing in the way of achieving purity, or of retrieving the state of unfallenness.
Approaching “innocence” at the beginning of this study is therefore necessary because of the importance we tend to attribute to collective definitions of the lost real as far as nations, religions, social organizations, and historical frictions are concerned, especially in the Western cultures. Hitler notoriously sold his sinister plans to the German people by promising a retrieval of the lost integrity of the German identity. For the good of their collective identity, Germans were expected to embrace Nazism because it offered a self-definition to the nation as a unit. The Catholic Church, as another example, prompts believers to identify with Christianity because it offers an identity, “under Christ,” to all those who have faith.
Two possibilities exist. A subject either acknowledges fallenness and strives to overcome it, or else he/she is unwelcome in the social order and is denied identity. It is very important to explain why everything that a social system rejects is rejected in the name of innocence, an innocence that nobody has and nobody will ever have.
Nonetheless, this innocence gives tremendous momentum to the functioning of the social fabric, because it is what connects the social space to the lost territory. Let me attempt to explain how innocence survives as a stake after ages of violence in its name, because it is always deferred, so it always remains possible. For its violence to cease, the stakes need to be altogether abandoned, which, as I will show, cannot be done simply by shifting to another mode of perceiving the fall.
In my definition, innocence is an imaginary construct that forms the social subject through its loss, and which is imposed primarily on (and attributed to) those in the first stages of life (children). Given this analogy, the concept of game—as arbitrary or not essential practice of a community, based on an accepted set of rules—becomes relevant in relating innocence to the social world. I will show that the game draws individuals into language, and against the Other as opponent, through obligation derived from legitimation and from the promise of the possible (i.e. wholeness). The game, which has claims to knowledge about the lost territory, works through the opposition between centrality (institutionalization) and those who are excluded, the corruption that is presupposed in the notion of purity. On this topic, Derrida’s Dissemination will be useful in explaining the processes of inclusion and exclusion, which dictate the death of the individual for the sake of the social system.
If innocence means being harmless (etymologically)12 and is also what has been lost, and if the whole of the social space has lost that innocence, it follows that a social system whose identity is at stake must work continuously toward not being harmful to itself. For the system to be finally whole, it would mean that all of its individuals would work so harmoniously to sustain it that no alteration would further be needed within it. This is assumed to have been the starting point of any given system within language, before it has been corrupted by individuality, by foreign elements occupying the territory. Yes, it is true! Any individual ultimately corrupts any territory. Of course, the moment before this corruption is misrecognized as innocent and it is a mythical construct. Contrary to the traditional association between innocence and childhood, for the purposes of the social space, the child’s desire is a social desire, and the child is born into fallenness. Even though childhood is commonly essentialized qua innocence,13 it is only in retrospect that it appears as such, and in connection to a mythical territory. In order to see how the concepts of fallenness and innocence are violent, the child needs to be seen as already in language as soon as the child acquires a position in the social space (which happens as soon as the child enters the mirror stage).
The child does not exist outside relationality. The fantasy of totality misrecognized in the mirror stage is a spatial metaphor used to demonstrate that the social system is already inscribed on the (imaginary) body of the baby, to “mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development,” explains Lacan.14 The imago, which is situated in the symbolic space of the Other, “inaugurates … the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations.”15 As the baby now sees itself as whole, this is an already socially defined baby, with a place in the social space that is already expecting him or her even before birth. In actuality, innocence cannot be traced back to the space of childhood, because childhood is part of the territory.
Innocence is then a symbolic and not a “real” concept. It is not something that a child possesses, but what a child is expected to possess and to lose in the process of becoming an adult. With maturity, the subject attaches desire, in the unconscious, to the loss with which it has already identified. It is important to acknowledge that this misrecognition already takes place at the foundation of individuality, and is not something that the subject comes across along the way.
The most convenient definition of the fall from innocence is encountered in the Judeo-Christian conception of the fall, or that generally given by Western orthodox theologians. The notion of sin is not related to a voluntary transgression from something otherwise ideal, but to a corruption in which all participate by being born into the very system that defines corruption. This is why there are no degrees to sin, because anything less than whole is enormously distanced from that wholeness (here, God).
In order to exist at all, the system (mythical, religious, social, political) must always be right. This does not mean that the system is a space of wholeness. It is only the space where identity (as whole) exists as a possibility, but nobody will reach wholeness within the social space. Even though it is rather strange to say that neither the system is whole, nor anybody in it, we can say that, as no territory is the initial territory, no social system reaches the level of sacredness that the ideal, lost realm of wholeness is supposed to possess. The sacred is characterized by wholeness. Religion, as other social orders, strives to structure the
