as does that other choice, also from The Phenomenology of Spirit, between the two readings of “the Spirit is a bone” which Hegel illustrates by way of the phallic metaphor (the phallus as organ of insemination or as the organ of urination). Hegel’s point is not that, in contrast to the vulgar empiricist mind which sees only urination, the proper speculative attitude has to choose insemination. The paradox is that making the direct choice of insemination is the infallible way to miss the point: it is not possible directly to choose the “true meaning,” for one has to begin by making the “wrong” choice (of urination)—the true speculative meaning emerges only through the repeated reading, as the after-effect (or by-product) of the first, “wrong,” reading. And the same goes for social life in which the direct choice of the “concrete universality” of a particular ethical lifeworld can end only in a regression to a pre-modern organic society that denies the infinite right of subjectivity as the fundamental feature of modernity. Since the subject-citizen of a modern state can no longer accept immersion in some particular social role that would confer on him a determinate place within the organic social Whole, the construction of the rational totality of the modern state leads to Revolutionary Terror: one should ruthlessly tear up the constraints of the pre-modern organic “concrete universality,” and fully assert the infinite right of subjectivity in its abstract negativity. In other words, the point of Hegel’s analysis of the Revolutionary Terror is not the rather obvious insight into how the revolutionary project involved the unilateral and direct assertion of abstract universal reason, and as such was doomed to perish in self-destructive fury since it was unable to channel the transposition of its revolutionary energy into a concrete, stable and differentiated social order; Hegel’s point turns rather on the enigma of why, in spite of the fact that the Revolutionary Terror was a historical deadlock, we have to pass through it in order to arrive at the modern rational state.28
This is why Hegelian dialectics is not a vulgar evolutionism claiming that while a phenomenon may be justified in its own time, it deserves to disappear when its time passes: the “eternity” of dialectics means that the de-legitimization is always retroactive, what disappears “in itself” always deserves to disappear. Recall also the paradox of the process of apologizing: if I hurt someone with a rude remark, the proper thing for me to do is to offer a sincere apology, and the proper thing for the other party to do is to say something like “Thanks, I appreciate it, but I wasn’t offended, I knew you didn’t mean it, so you really owe me no apology!” The point is, of course, that although the final result is that no apology is needed, one has to go through the elaborate process of offering it—“you owe me no apology” can only be said once I have actually offered an apology, so that, although formally “nothing happens,” and the offer of apology is proclaimed unnecessary, there is still a gain at the end of the process (perhaps, even, the friendship is saved).29
Is it not that, here also, one has to do something (offer an apology, choose terror) in order to see how superfluous it is? This paradox is sustained by the distinction between the “constative” and the “performative,” between the “subject of the enunciated” and the “subject of the enunciation”: at the level of the enunciated content, the whole operation is meaningless (why do it—offer an apology, choose terror—when it is superfluous?); but what this commonsensical insight overlooks is that it was only the “wrong” superfluous gesture which created the subjective conditions that made it possible for the subject to really see why this gesture was indeed superfluous. The dialectical process is thus more refined than it may appear; the standard notion is that one can only arrive at the final truth at the end of a series of errors, so that these errors are not simply discarded, but are “sublated” in the final truth, preserved therein as moments within it. What this standard notion misses, however, is how the previous moments are preserved precisely as superfluous.
This is why the obvious response “But is this idea of retroactively canceling the contingent historical conditions, of transforming contingency into Fate, not ideology at its formally purest, the very form of ideology?” misses the point, namely that this retroactivity is inscribed into reality itself: what is truly “ideological” is the idea that, freed from “ideological illusions,” one can pass from moment A to moment B directly, without retroactivity—as if, for instance, in an ideal and authentic society, I could apologize and the other party could respond “I was hurt, an apology was required, and I accept it” without breaking any implicit rules. Or as if we could reach the modern rational state without having to pass through the “superfluous” detour of the Terror.
How is this circle of changing the past possible without recourse to time travel? The solution was already proposed by Henri Bergson: of course one cannot change the past reality/actuality, but what one can change is the virtual dimension of the past—when something radically New emerges it retroactively creates its own possibility, its own causes or conditions.30 A potentiality can be inserted into (or withdrawn from) past reality. Falling in love changes the past: it is as if I always already loved you, our love was destined to be, is the “answer of the real.” My present love causes the past which gave birth to it. The same goes for legal power: here too, synchrony precedes diachrony. In the same way that, once I contingently fall in love, this love becomes my necessary Fate, once a legal order is installed, its contingent origins are erased. Once it is here, it was always already here, every story about its origin is now a myth, just like Swift’s story of the origins of language in Gulliver’s Travels: the result is already presupposed.
In Vertigo, it is the opposite that occurs: the past is changed so that it loses the objet a. What Scottie first experiences in Vertigo is the loss of Madeleine, his fatal love; when he recreates Madeleine in Judy and then discovers that the Madeleine he knew was actually Judy already pretending to be Madeleine, what he discovers is not simply that Judy was a fake (he knew that she was not the true Madeleine, since he had used her to recreate a copy of Madeleine), but that, because she was not a fake—she is Madeleine—Madeleine herself was already a fake—the objet a disintegrates, the very loss is lost, and we have a “negation of negation.” His discovery changes the past, deprives the lost object of the objet a.
Are, then, today’s ethico-legal neoconservatives not a little bit like Scottie in Hitchcock’s Vertigo? In wanting to recreate the lost order, to make a new distinguished Madeleine out of today’s promiscuous and vulgar Judy, they will sooner or later be forced to admit not that it is impossible to restore Madeleine (the old traditional mores) to life, but that Madeleine was already Judy: the corruption they are fighting in the modern permissive, secular, egotistic, etc., society was present from the very beginning. One can compare this with Zen Buddhism: those who criticize the Westernized New Age image and practice of Zen—its reduction to a “relaxation technique”—as a betrayal of authentic Japanese Zen, forget the fact that the features they deplore in Westernized Zen were already there in “true” Japanese Zen: after World War II, Japanese Zen Buddhists immediately started to organize Zen courses for business managers, whilst during the war the majority supported Japanese militarism, and so on.
In the case of true love, after discovering the truth, Scottie would have accepted Judy as “more Madeleine than Madeleine herself” (he does in fact do that just before the rise of the mother superior . . .): here Dupuy should be corrected. Dupuy’s perspective is that Scottie should have left Madeleine to her past—true, but what should he have done upon discovering that Judy was in fact Madeleine? The Madeleine of the past was an imaginary lure, pretending to be what she was not (Judy was playing Madeleine). What Judy was doing in playing Madeleine was true love. In Vertigo, Scottie does not love Madeleine—the proof is that he tries to recreate her in Judy, changing Judy’s properties to make her resemble Madeleine. Similarly, the idea of cloning a dead child for bereaved parents is an abomination: if the parents are satisfied by this, it is proof that their love was not genuine—love is not love for the properties of the object, but for the abyssal X, the je ne sais quoi, in the object.
In his Wissen und Gewissen, Viktor Frankl reports
