only for her to die soon afterwards due to an illness contracted in the camp. The patient fell into total despair, and all Frankl’s attempts to drag him out of depression failed, till, one day, he told the patient: “Imagine that God gave me the power to create a woman who would have all the features of your dead wife, so that she would be indistinguishable from her—would you ask me to create her?” The patient was silent for a short time, then stood up, said “No, thanks, doctor!” and, shaking his hand, left to set out on a new and normal life.31 The patient in this case did what Scottie, who did indeed try to recreate the same woman, was not able to do: he became aware that, while one may be able to find the same woman with regard to all positive features, one cannot recreate the unfathomable objet a in her.
There is a science-fiction story, set a couple of hundred years in the future, when time travel is assumed to be possible, about an art critic who becomes so fascinated by the works of a New York painter from our era that he travels back in time to meet him. The painter, however, turns out to be a worthless drunk who steals the time machine from him and escapes into the future; alone in the world of today, the art critic paints all the paintings that fascinated him in the future and had made him travel into the past. Surprisingly, none other than Henry James had already used the same plot: The Sense of the Past, an unfinished manuscript found among James’s papers and published posthumously in 1917, tells a similar story which also uncannily resembles Vertigo, and stimulated penetrating interpretations by both Stephen Spender and Borges. (Dupuy notes that James was a friend of H. G. Wells—The Sense of the Past is his version of Wells’s Time Machine.32) After James’s death, the novel was adapted as a very successful play, Berkeley Square, which was made into a movie in 1933 with Leslie Howard as Ralph Pendrel, a young New Yorker who, upon inheriting an eighteenth-century house in London, finds in it a portrait of a remote ancestor, also named Ralph Pendrel. Fascinated by the portrait, he steps across a mysterious threshold and finds himself back in the eighteenth century. Among the people he meets there is a painter who was the author of the portrait that had captivated him—it is, of course, a self-portrait. In his commentary, Borges provided a succinct formulation of the paradox: “The cause is posterior to the effect, the motif of the voyage is one of the consequences of this voyage.”33 James added a love aspect to the trip into the past: back in the eighteenth century, Ralph falls in love with Nan, a sister of his (eighteenth-century) fiancée Molly. Nan eventually realizes that Ralph is a time-traveler from the future, and she sacrifices her own happiness to help him return to his own time and to Aurora Coyne, a woman who had previously rejected Ralph but would now accept him.
James’s story thus psychotically (in the real) mystifies the circle of the symbolic economy, in which effect precedes cause, i.e., retroactively creates it—and exactly the same holds for the legal status of the rebellion against a (legal) power in Kant: the proposition “what the rebels are doing is a crime which deserves to be punished” is true if pronounced while the rebellion is taking place; however, once the rebellion has succeeded and a new legal order is established, this statement concerning the legal status of the same past act no longer holds. Here is Kant’s answer to the question “Is rebellion a legitimate means for a people to employ in throwing off the yoke of an alleged tyrant?”:
The rights of the people are injured; no injustice befalls the tyrant when he is deposed. There can be no doubt on this point. Nevertheless, it is in the highest degree illegitimate for the subjects to seek their rights in this way. If they fail in the struggle and are then subjected to severest punishment, they cannot complain about injustice any more than the tyrant could if they had succeeded . . . If the revolt of the people succeeds, what has been said is still quite compatible with the fact that the chief, on retiring to the status of a subject, cannot begin a revolt for his restoration but need not fear being made to account for his earlier administration of the state.34
Does Kant not offer here his own version of what Bernard Williams has called “moral luck” (or, better, “legal luck”)? The (not ethical, but legal) status of rebellion is decided retroactively: if a rebellion succeeds and establishes a new legal order, then it brings about its own circulus vitiosus, i.e., it pushes its own illegal origins into the ontological void, it enacts the paradox of retroactively grounding itself. Kant states this paradox even more clearly a couple of pages earlier:
If a violent revolution, engendered by a bad constitution, introduces by illegal means a more legal constitution, to lead the people back to the earlier constitution would not be permitted; but, while the revolution lasted, each person who openly or covertly shared in it would have justly incurred the punishment due to those who rebel.35
He could not have been clearer: the legal status of the same act changes with time. What is, while the rebellion goes on, a punishable crime, becomes, after the new legal order is established, the opposite—more precisely, it simply disappears, as a vanishing mediator which retroactively cancels/erases itself in its result. The same holds for the very beginning, for the emergence of the legal order out of the violent “state of nature”—Kant is fully aware that there is no historical moment of the “social contract”: the unity and law of a civil society is imposed onto the people by an act of violence whose agent is not motivated by any moral considerations:
since a uniting cause must supervene upon the variety of particular volitions in order to produce a common will from them, establishing this whole is something no one individual in the group can perform; hence in the practical execution of this idea we can count on nothing but force to establish the juridical condition, on the compulsion of which public law will later be established. We can scarcely hope to find in the legislator a moral intention sufficient to induce him to commit to the general will the establishment of a legal constitution after he has formed the nation from a horde of savages.36
What Kant is struggling with here is nothing other than the paradoxical nature of the political act. Recall, from the history of Marxism, how Lenin saved his most acerbic irony for those who engage in the endless search for some kind of “guarantee” for the revolution. This guarantee assumes two main forms: either the reified notion of social necessity (one should not risk the revolution too early; one has to wait for the right moment, when the situation is “mature” with regard to the laws of historical development: “it is too early for the Socialist revolution, the working class is not yet mature”), or the conception of normative (“democratic”) legitimacy (“the majority of the population is not on our side, so the revolution would not really be democratic”)—as a Lacanian Lenin might have put it, it is as if, before a revolutionary agent risks the seizure of power, it should obtain permission from some figure of the big Other—by, say, organizing a referendum to ascertain whether the majority does in fact support the revolution.37 With Lenin, as with Lacan, the point is that a revolution ne s’autorise que d’elle-même: one should take responsibility for the revolutionary act not covered by the big Other. The fear of taking power “prematurely,” the search for the guarantee, is the fear of the abyss of the act and is nicely rendered in the anecdote about the exchange between Lenin and Trotsky just prior to the October Revolution: Lenin is said to have asked: “What will happen to us if we fail?” To which Trotsky supposedly replied: “And what will happen if we succeed?” Se non e vero e ben trovato . . . What is unimaginable within the positivist vision of history as an “objective” process which determines in advance the possible coordinates of political interventions is precisely a radical political intervention which changes these very “objective” coordinates and thus, in a way, creates the conditions for its own success. An act proper is not just a strategic intervention into a situation, bound by its conditions—it retroactively creates its conditions.
We can see where Kant’s weakness resides: there is no need to evoke “radical Evil” in the guise of some dark primordial crime—all these obscure fantasies have to be evoked to obfuscate the act itself. The paradox is clear: Kant himself, who put such an accent on the ethical act as autonomous, non-pathological, irreducible to its conditions, is unable to recognize it where it happens, misreading it as its opposite, as unthinkable
