itself as ethics itself.
The Price of Survival
Here, then, is our conclusion. Common sense tells us that the actual lives of people, of real individuals with their wealth of experience and practice, cannot be reduced to a “spontaneous” impersonation of ideology. But it is precisely this recourse to the non-ideological lifeworld that one should abandon. This is why Elfriede Jelinek’s advice to theater writers is not only aesthetically correct, but has a deep ethical justification:
Characters on stage should be flat, like clothes in a fashion show: what you get should be no more than what you see. Psychological realism is repulsive, because it allows us to escape unpalatable reality by taking shelter in the “luxuriousness” of personality, losing ourselves in the depth of individual character. The writer’s task is to block this manoeuvre, to chase us off to a point from which we can view the horror with a dispassionate eye.18
In other words, we should resist the urge to fill in the void with the rich texture of what makes us a person.19 Two half-forgotten classic films stage such an emptying of the wealth of “personality” at its most radical, rendering a subject who survives as a shell deprived of substance. First, there is Lina Wertmüller’s Pasqualino Settebellezze (itself a true counterpoint to Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella. All one has to do to see what is wrong with Benigni’s film is to carry out a simple thought experiment: imagine the same film with one change—the father fails in his “noble lie,” and his son dies. Or another alternative: at the end, the father learns that his son knew all the time where he was, namely in a concentration camp, and that he was pretending to believe his father’s story in order to make life easier for his father.) Pasqualino Settebellezze is the ultimate film on survivalism. Its climax involves a unique sex scene which, apart from the one in Handke’s The Piano Teacher, is perhaps the most painful in the history of cinema. Its perverse twist cannot but recall the weirdest moments in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. In order to survive the concentration camp, the hero (played superbly by Giancarlo Giannini) decides to seduce the kapo, a cold, ugly, and fat German “bitch.” The horror of the act lies in making love to the maternal Thing and/or Lady in a scene of courtly love, to the absolutely capricious Mistress on whose whims one’s life depends: during the act, she remains cold, unsmiling, and expresses not a moan or groan of pleasure, just yawning once—a true “netrebko.”20 After Pasqualino arouses himself through fantasizing, she sees through him, realizing that the seduction is merely an expression of this “Mediterranean worm’s” pure will to survive, and contrasts this survivalist attitude to the German ethic of risking life for honor. (The nice irony is that, in the figure of Pasqualino himself, the reality of this survivalism is opposed to the pathetic and operatic Neapolitan sense of honor, which belongs to the lineage of Italian opera from Rossini through to the films of Sergio Leone with their excess of life.) After the act, she nominates him kapo of his barrack, and immediately gives him the task of selecting six prisoners to be executed—should he fail, they will all be executed. Then, he has personally to shoot his best friend. Such is the price of his survival: he survives alone. In the film’s last scene, after the war, he returns home and proposes marriage to a young prostitute, just to have as many children as possible as a guarantee of survival. When his mother exclaims with joy: “But you are alive!”, he replies after a long silence: “Yes, I am alive!”—the last words of the film. Is he truly alive? Would not a true act of life have been, in the last scene in the camp, for him to shoot the kapo and other guards, before being shot himself? The standard idealist question “Is there (eternal) life after death?” should be countered by the materialist question: “Is there life before death?” This is the question Wolf Biermann asked in one of his songs—what bothers a materialist is: am I really alive here and now, or am I just vegetating, as a mere human animal bent on survival? When am I really alive? Precisely when I enact the “undead” drive in me, the “too-much-ness” of life (Eric Santner). And I reach this point when I no longer act directly, but when “it [es]”—which the Christians name the Holy Spirit—acts through me: at this point, I reach the Absolute.
The other film is John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), a neglected companion-piece to his cult masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate, shot in pure noir style. There is no space here to dwell on the film’s many outstanding features, beginning with one of Saul Bass’s best title sequences (on a par with his titles for Hitchcock’s great trilogy Vertigo, North-by-Northwest, and Psycho), composed of anamorphically distorted fragments of a face in a disfiguring mirror. Seconds tells the story of Arthur Hamilton, a middle-aged man whose life has lost its purpose: he is bored by his job as a banker, and the love between him and his wife has waned. Through an unexpected phone call from Evans, a friend whom he thought had died years earlier, Hamilton is approached by a secret organization, known simply as the “Company,” which offers wealthy people a second chance at life. After he signs the contract, the Company makes Hamilton appear as if he has died by faking an accident with a corpse disguised as him. Through extensive plastic surgery and psychoanalysis, Hamilton is transformed into Tony Wilson (played by Rock Hudson), with a fancy new Malibu home, a new identity as an established artist, new friends and a devoted manservant. (The details of his new existence suggest that there was indeed once a real Tony Wilson, but what became of him is a mystery.) He soon commences a relationship with Nora, a young woman whom he meets on the beach. They visit a nearby wine festival which develops into a full-scale drunken sexual orgy, and he reluctantly relaxes enough to participate in it. For a time he is happy, but soon he becomes troubled by the emotional confusion of his new identity, and by the exuberance of renewing his youth. At a dinner party he hosts for his neighbors, he drinks himself into a stupor and begins to babble about his former life as Hamilton.
It turns out that his neighbors are “reborns” like himself, sent to keep an eye on his adjustment to his new life. Nora is actually an agent of the Company, and her attention to Wilson is designed merely to ensure his cooperation. Escaping his Malibu home, Wilson visits his former wife in his new persona, and learns that his marriage failed because he was distracted by the pursuit of his career and material possessions, the very things in life that others made him believe were important. Depressed, he returns to the Company and asks them to provide him with yet another identity; the Company agrees on condition that he directs to them some rich past acquaintances who might like to be “reborn.” While awaiting his reassignment, Wilson encounters Evans, who was also “reborn” but could not accept his new identity. At the film’s ominous end, doctors drag Wilson to an operating room, where, strapped to the table, he learns the truth: those who, like him, fail to adjust to their new identity, are not, as promised, provided with a new one, but become cadavers used to fake new clients’ deaths.
All the philosophico-ideological topics we have been dealing with reverberate in Seconds: the reduction of the subject to a tabula rasa, the emptying of all its substantial content, and its rebirth, its recreation from a zero-point. The motif of rebirth is here given a clear critico-ideological twist: transforming himself into Wilson, Hamilton realizes what he always dreamt of; but things go terribly wrong when he becomes aware that those transgressive dreams were part of the same oppressive reality from which he had tried to escape. In other words, Hamilton-Evans pays the bitter price for the fact that his negation of the past was not radical enough: his revolution failed to revolutionize its own presuppositions. Hegel had a presentiment of this necessity when he wrote: “It is a modern folly to alter a corrupt ethical system, its constitution and legislation, without changing the religion, to have a revolution without a reformation.”21 In a radical revolution, people not only “realize their old (emancipatory, etc.) dreams”; they have also to reinvent their very modes of dreaming. Is this not the exact formula of the link between the death drive and sublimation? Therein resides the necessity of the Cultural Revolution, as clearly grasped by Mao: as Herbert Marcuse put, it in another wonderfully circular formula from the same epoch, freedom (from ideological constraints, from the predominant mode of dreaming) is the condition of liberation, in other words,
