what the system as such excludes—and as such, the Untouchables stand for universality. Or, as Ambedkar put it with his ingenious wordplay: “There will be outcasts as long as there are castes.” As long as there are castes, there will be an excessive excremental zero-value element which, while formally part of the system, has no proper place within it. Gandhi obfuscates this paradox, as if a harmonious caste structure were possible. The paradox of the Untouchables is that they are doubly marked by the excremental logic: they not only deal with impure excrements, their own formal status within the social body is that of excrement.
This is why the properly dialectical paradox is that, if one is to break out of the caste system, it is not enough to reverse the status of the Untouchables, elevating them into the “children of god”—the first step should rather be exactly the opposite one: to universalize their excremental status to the whole of humanity. Martin Luther directly proposed just such an excremental identity for man: man is like a divine shit, he fell out of God’s anus—and, effectively, it is only within this Protestant logic of man’s excremental identity that the true meaning of Incarnation can be formulated. In Orthodoxy, Christ ultimately loses his exceptional status: his very idealization, elevation to a noble model, reduces him to an ideal image, a figure to be imitated (all men should strive to become God)—imitatio Christi is more an Orthodox than a Catholic formula. In Catholicism, the predominant logic is that of a symbolic exchange: Catholic theologians enjoy pondering over scholastic juridical arguments about how Christ paid the price for our sins, etc. No wonder Luther reacted badly to the lowest outcome of this logic: the reduction of redemption to something that can be bought from the Church. Protestantism, finally, posits the relationship as real, conceiving Christ as a God who, in His act of Incarnation, freely identified Himself with His own shit, with the excremental real that is man—and it is only at this level that the properly Christian notion of divine love can be apprehended, as the love for the miserable excremental entity called “man.” We are dealing here with what can be ironically referred to as the cosmic-theological proletarian position, whose “infinite judgment” is the identity of excess and universality: the shit of the earth is the universal subject. (This excremental status of man is signaled already by the role of sacrifice in the original Veda: by way of substituting the sacrificial victim for humans, the sacrifice bears witness to the eccentric, exceptional, role of man in the great chain of food—to paraphrase Lacan, the sacrificial object represents man for other “ordinary” members of the food chain.) Here is a quite surprising, if not outright shocking, passage from Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs, which deals precisely with the invisible excremental space and what one might discover by way of probing into it—the event described took place when he was the Chilean consul in Sri Lanka (Ceylon):
My solitary bungalow was far from any urban development. When I rented it, I tried to find out where the toilet was; I couldn’t see it anywhere. Actually, it was nowhere near the shower, it was at the back of the house. I inspected it with curiosity. It was a wooden box with a hole in the middle, very much like the artifact I had known as a child in the Chilean countryside. But our toilets were set over a deep well or over running water. Here the receptacle was a simple metal pail under the round hole.
The pail was clean every morning, but I had no idea how its contents disappeared. One morning I rose earlier than usual, and I was amazed when I saw what had been happening.
Into the back of the house, walking like a dusky statue, came the most beautiful woman I had yet seen in Ceylon, a Tamil of the pariah caste. She was wearing a red-and-gold sari of the cheapest kind of cloth. She had heavy bangles on her bare ankles. Two tiny red dots glittered on either side of her nose. They must have been ordinary glass, but on her they were rubies.
She walked solemnly toward the latrine, without so much as a side glance at me, not bothering to acknowledge my existence, and vanished with the disgusting receptacle on her head, moving away with the steps of a goddess.
She was so lovely that, regardless of her humble job, I couldn’t get her off my mind. Like a shy jungle animal she belonged to another kind of existence, a different world. I called to her, but it was no use. After that, I sometimes put a gift in her path, a piece of silk or some fruit. She would go past without hearing or looking. The ignoble routine had been transformed by her dark beauty into the dutiful ceremony of an indifferent queen.
One morning, I decided to go all the way. I got a strong grip on her wrist and stared into her eyes. There was no language I could talk with her. Unsmiling, she let herself be led away, and was soon naked in my bed. Her waist, so very slim, her full hips, the brimming cups of her breasts made her like one of the thousand-year-old sculptures from the south of India. It was the coming together of a man and a statue. She kept her eyes wide open all the while, completely unresponsive. She was right to despise me. The experience was never repeated.26
Neruda then simply passes to other things. This passage is remarkable not only for obvious reasons: a shameless story of a rape, with the dirty details discreetly passed over (“she let herself be led away, and was soon naked in my bed”—how did she come to be naked? Obviously, she didn’t do it herself), the mystification of the victim’s passivity into a divine indifference, the lack of elementary decency and shame on the part of the narrator (if he was attracted to the girl, wasn’t he embarrassed by the awareness that she was smelling, seeing, and dealing with his shit every morning?). Its most remarkable feature is the divinization of the excrement: a sublime goddess appears at the very site where excrements are hidden. One should take this equation very seriously: elevating the exotic Other into an indifferent divinity is strictly equal to treating it like shit.
Legal Luck, or, the Loop of the Act
What, then, is the dimension of the law that the law cannot admit to publicly? The best way to discern it is through a logical paradox deployed by Jean-Pierre Dupuy in his admirable text on Hitchcock’s Vertigo:
An object possesses a property x until the time t; after t, it is not only that the object no longer has the property x; it is that it is not true that it possessed x at any time. The truth-value of the proposition “the object O has the property x at the moment t” therefore depends on the moment when this proposition is enunciated.27
One should note here the precise formulation: it is not that the truth-value of the proposition “the object O has the property x” depends on the time to which this proposition refers—even when this time is specified, the truth-value depends on the time at which the proposition itself is enounced. Or, to quote the title of Dupuy’s text, “When I Die, Nothing of Our Love Will Ever Have Existed.” Think about marriage and divorce: the most intelligent argument for the right to divorce (proposed, among others, by none other than the young Marx) does not refer to commonplaces such as “like all things, love affairs are not eternal, they change over the course of time,” and so on; rather it concedes that indissolvability is inherent in the very notion of marriage. The conclusion is that divorce always has a retroactive scope: it does not mean only that a marriage is now annulled, but something much more radical—a marriage should be annulled because it never was a true marriage. And the same holds for Soviet Communism: it is clearly insufficient to say that, during the years of the Brezhnev “stagnation,” it “exhausted its potential,” it “was no longer adapted to new times”; what its miserable end demonstrates is that it was caught in a historical deadlock from the very beginning.
Perhaps this paradox provides a clue to the twists and turns of the Hegelian dialectical process. Let us take Hegel’s critique of the Jacobin Revolutionary Terror as an exercise in the abstract negativity of absolute freedom which cannot stabilize itself in a concrete social order of freedom and thus has to end in the fury of self-destruction. One should bear in mind, however, that, insofar as we are dealing here with a historical choice (between the “French” way of remaining within Catholicism and thus being
