Heft - Institut für Theorie ith

Alenka
Zupančič
95
The Double
and Its
Relationship
to the Real
modalities is not as uniform as Rosset pretends,
but involves in fact two di≠erent notions. One
implies a real that roughly corresponds to reality
with all its di∞culties and inconveniences, and in
relationship to which we have the habit of practicing
a whole lot of “illusions” – to borrow Rosset’s
own term. This notion of illusion is very specific,
and it refers neither to an erroneous perception,
nor to denial. It rather corresponds to the following
configuration: we (correctly) perceive a thing
and do not deny this perception, yet we refuse the
consequences that should normally follow from it.
Rosset’s funniest example here is a comic play by
George Courteline Boubouroche (1893). In this
play Boubouroche learns at some point (a hint
from a friendly neighbor) that his lover Adèle is
regularly cheating on him with a young lover, in
the very apartment he put her in. So he shows up
there by surprise and finds the lover in the closet.
But Adèle manages to convince him very quickly
that in spite of what he sees, she is guilty of nothing,
that it is Boubouroche himself who is guilty of
unspeakable vulgarity for busting on her like this,
and that he is the one who has to apologize and
ask for forgiveness. Which is what he does, furious
with the neighbor who “misinformed” him.
According to Rosset, Boubouroche’s reasoning
can be summed up as follows: “There is a lover in
Adèle’s closet (he never denies seeing this) – therefore
Adèle is innocent and I am not a cuckold.” At
stake in this notion of illusion is thus the following
configuration: It is not that I do not want to see,
and I do not deny the real that I see. But this is as
far as I am prepared to go. I saw, I admitted, but
do not ask any more from me. In all the rest I
maintain my previous position. I go on as before,
as if I saw nothing. One should point out that Rosset’s
description here corresponds point by point
to what psychoanalysis conceptualized with the
notion of “(fetishist) disavowal” (“Verleugnung”),
and which has precisely the structure of “I know
very well (that this is how things stand), but nevertheless
(I continue to behave as if it was not
so).” 2 And, everything considered, the concept of
disavowal might come closer to the mark of this
configuration than the notion of redoubling.
There is yet another notion of the real and
its redoubling at work in a series of Rosset’s central
examples, which, in my view, cannot be utterly
reduced to this same logic of illusionist duplication
/ disavowal. They have an even more farreaching
and interesting structure, and they
deserve separate attention. These are examples of
the oracular, prophetic literature, and this is Rosset’s
crucial and masterful observation in respect
to them:
“Oracles have a general and at the same time paradoxical
characteristic that they come true and that
they surprise with this very coming true. The oracle
does us the favor of announcing the event in advance:
so that the one for whom this event is destined
has the leisure to prepare for it, and eventually to try
to ward it o≠. The event is fulfilled such as it had been
predicted (or announced by a dream, or some other
sort of premonitory manifestation), and yet this fulfillment has a
curious fortune of disappointing the expectation at the very
moment when the latter would have to see itself as utterly fulfilled.
A is announced, A happens, and we are lost, at least to some
extent. Between the event such as it has been announced, and the
event such as it was fulfilled, there is a kind of subtle di≠erence
that su∞ces to baffle the very person who has been expecting precisely
that what he is witnessing. He recognizes it all right, but he
no longer recognizes himself in it. Yet nothing happened but the
announced event. But the latter is inexplicably other.” 3
Rosset supports this observation with numerous examples.
There is, for instance, an old Arab tale that has seen many
di≠erent versions, among which Somerset Maugham’s The
Appointment in Samarra. But the most famous of these stories
is of course Oedipus the King. And if we think of it, it is
indeed very true that although what eventually takes place in
this tragedy corresponds exactly to what has been predicted
(that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother),
we – together with Oedipus – cannot help but to be very
much at a loss when it happens, or rather, when this turns
out to be what actually happened. Rosset places this “subtle
di≠erence that su∞ces to baffle the very person who has
been expecting precisely that what he is witnessing” at the
core of what he recognizes as splitting or duplication of the
real at work – in a quasi-general way – in our attitude toward
the world; or simply toward the real: we cannot put up with
the real in its idiotic simplicity and univocity, we simply cannot
stand it that the real is only what it is, and has no other
meaning or dimension.
The example of a fulfilled prophecy elucidates this general
propensity to duplication by presenting its other side: it
confronts us with an unwelcome (and surprising) coincidence
at a point where our “normal” existence would be
more than satisfied with a split or non-coincidence between
two versions (or two meanings) of the real. We thus tend to
put the real aside and to install a double in its place – a double
that has the advantage of suiting us better. However –
here I am still following Rosset –, as it is clear from the stories
that treat the theme of the double (oracular stories or,
even more directly, stories about doubles), there is no possible
double of the real, the latter always wins in its singularity,
eliminating the other person or version of the events. Any
kind of a double of the real is impossible, since the real is by
definition the same, and singular. What happens with the
fulfillment of a prophecy (and Rosset suggests that, in this
respect, all reality is structured like a prophecy) is that the
expected event coincides with itself, and this is the very
source of our surprise – for we have been expecting something
di≠erent, albeit akin to it, the same thing, but not
exactly like this.
This is why, according to Rosset, the sentiment of being
somehow deceived, which always accompanies the realization
of prophecy, is itself the peak of illusion. There is a
deception involved in this all right, but not where we see it:
we are deceived by the very impression that we have been
deceived (that something else should have happened). The
only illusion here is the illusion that we have been cheated,
and that the realized event took the place of “something
else.” (Here we come across the logic exposed by Lec’s aphorism
again: “Who knows what Columbus might have discovered
had America not blocked his way!”)
We could say that, for Rosset, the real is out there as
singular and unproblematic in itself, indistinguishable from
its meaning. The other meaning (which can remain unspecified)
is the result of the subjective will to illusion that