human nature, they are an axiom posited by our decision.) The occurrence of the term “science” in the very name of some of the fundamentalist sects (Christian Science, Scientology) is not just an obscene joke, but signals this reduction of belief to positive knowledge. The case of the Turin shroud is here symptomal: its authenticity would be awful for every true believer (the first thing to do then would be to analyze the DNA of the blood stains and thus solve empirically the question of who Jesus’ father was . . .), while a true fundamentalist would rejoice in this opportunity.
We find the same phenomenon in some forms of contemporary Islam: hundreds of books by scientists “demonstrate” how the latest scientific advances confirm the insights and injunctions of the Koran—the divine prohibition of incest is confirmed by recent genetic knowledge about the defective children born of incestuous copulation, and so on and so forth. (Some even go so far as to claim that what the Koran offers as an article of faith to be accepted because of its divine origin is not finally demonstrated as scientific truth, thereby reducing the Koran itself to an inferior mythic version of what has acquired its appropriate formulation in contemporary science.)27 The same goes also for Buddhism, where many scientists vary the motif of the “Tao of modern physics,” that is, of how the contemporary scientific vision of reality as a desubstantialized flux of oscillating events finally confirmed the old Buddhist ontology . . .28 One is thus compelled to draw the paradoxical conclusion: in the opposition between traditional secular humanists and religious fundamentalists, it is the humanists who stand for belief, while fundamentalists stand for knowledge—in short, the true danger of fundamentalism does not reside in the fact that it poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in the fact that it poses a threat to authentic belief itself.
What we should bear in mind here is how the opposition of knowledge and faith echoes the one between the constative and the performative: faith (or, rather, trust) is the basic ingredient of speech as the medium of social bond, of the subject’s engaged participation in this bond, while science—exemplarily in its formalization—reduces language to neutral registration. Let us not forget that science has, for Lacan, the status of the “knowledge in the real”: the language of science is not the language of subjective engagement, but the language deprived of its performative dimension, desubjectivized language. The predominance of scientific discourse thus entails the retreat, the potential suspension, of the very symbolic function as the metaphor constitutive of human subjectivity. Paternal authority is irreducibly based on faith, on trust as to the identity of the father: we have fathers (as symbolic functions, as the Name-of-the-Father, the paternal metaphor), because we do not directly know who our father is, we have to take him at his word and trust him. To put it pointedly, the moment I know with scientific certainty who my father is, fatherhood ceases to be the function which grounds social-symbolic Trust. In the scientific universe, there is no need for such faith, truth can be established through DNA analysis . . . The hegemony of the scientific discourse thus potentially suspends the entire network of symbolic tradition that sustains the subject’s identifications. Politically, the shift is from Power grounded in the traditional symbolic authority to biopolitics.
The “worldless” character of capitalism is linked to this hegemonic role of scientific discourse in modernity, a feature clearly identified already by Hegel who wrote that, for us moderns, art and religion no longer obey absolute respect: we can admire them, but we no longer kneel down in front of them, our heart is not really with them—today, only science (conceptual knowledge) deserves this respect. “Postmodernity” as the “end of grand narratives” is one of the names for this predicament in which the multitude of local fictions thrives against the background of scientific discourse as the only remaining universality deprived of sense. Which is why the politics advocated by many a leftist today, that of countering the devastating world-dissolving effect of capitalist modernization by inventing new fictions, imagining “new worlds” (like the Porto Alegre slogan “Another world is possible!”), is inadequate or, at least, profoundly ambiguous: it all depends on how these fictions relate to the underlying Real of capitalism—do they just supplement it with the imaginary multitude, as the postmodern “local narratives” do, or do they disturb its functioning? In other words, the task is to produce a symbolic fiction (a truth) that intervenes into the Real, that causes a change within it.29
It is only psychoanalysis that can disclose the full contours of the shattering impact of modernity (in its two aspects: the hegemony of scientific discourse and capitalism) on the way our identity is performatively grounded in symbolic identifications, on the manner in which the symbolic order is counted on to provide the horizon that allows us to locate every experience in a meaningful totality. The necessary obverse of modernity is the “crisis of meaning,” the disintegration of the link—identity even—between Truth and Meaning. Since, in Europe, modernization was spread over centuries, we had the time to accommodate to this break, to soften its shattering impact, through Kulturarbeit, through the formation of new social narratives and myths, while some other societies—exemplarily the Muslim ones—were exposed to this impact directly, without a protective screen or temporal delay, so their symbolic universe was perturbed much more brutally, they lost their (symbolic) ground with no time left to establish a new (symbolic) balance. No wonder, then, that the only way for some of these societies to avoid total breakdown was to erect in panic the shield of “fundamentalism,” the psychotic-delirious-incestuous reassertion of religion as direct insight into the divine Real, with all the terrifying consequences that such a reassertion entails, up to the return with a vengeance of the obscene superego divinity demanding sacrifices. The rise of the superego is another feature that postmodern permissiveness and the new fundamentalism share; what distinguishes them is the site of the enjoyment demanded: our own in permissiveness, God’s own in fundamentalism.
From all sides, Right and Left, complaints abound today about how, in our postmodern societies composed of hedonistic solipsists, social bonds are progressively disintegrating: we are increasingly reduced to social atoms, as exemplified by the lone individual hooked on the computer screen, preferring virtual exchanges to contacts with other flesh-and-blood persons, preferring cyber sex to bodily contact, and so forth. However, this very example renders visible what is wrong with the diagnosis on suspended social ties: in order for an individual to immerse herself in the virtual space, the big Other has to be there, more powerful than ever in the guise of cyberspace itself, this directly universalized form of sociality which enables us to be connected with the entire world while sitting alone in front of a screen.
It may seem that Lacan’s doxa “there is no big Other” has today lost its subversive edge and turned into a globally acknowledged common-place—everybody seems to know that there is no “big Other” in the sense of a substantial shared set of customs and values, that what Hegel called “objective Spirit” (the social substance of mores) is disintegrating into particular “worlds” (or life styles) whose coordination is regulated by purely formal rules. This is why not only communitarians but even liberal leftists advocate the need to establish new ties of solidarity and other shared values. However, the example of cyberspace clearly demonstrates how the big Other is present more than ever: social atomism can only function when it is regulated by some (apparently) neutral mechanism—digital solipsists need a very complex global machinery to be able to persevere in their splendid isolation.
Was not Richard Rorty the paradigmatic philosopher of such an Other without a privileged link to others? His big Other is the set of neutral public rules which enable each of the individuals to “tell her own story” of dreams and suffering. These rules guarantee that the “private” space of personal idiosyncrasies, imperfections, violent fantasies, and so on, will not spill over into a direct domination of others. Recall one of the latest upshots of sexual liberation: the “masturbate-a-thon,” a collective event in which hundreds of men and women pleasure themselves for charity, raising money for sexual- and reproductive-health agencies, and—as the organizers put it—raising awareness and dispelling the shame and taboos that persist around this most commonplace, natural, and safe form of sexual activity. The ideological stance underlying the notion of the masturbathon is marked by a conflict between its form and content: it
