Heft - Institut für Theorie ith

Alenka
Zupančič
97
The Double
and Its
Relationship
to the Real
in which we let ourselves be completely dazzled or
“blinded” by an abstract dimension of the loved
object, so that we no longer see, or cannot bear to
see, its concrete existence (and its always somewhat
ridiculous, banal aspect). This kind of “sublime
love” indeed necessitates and generates a
radical inaccessibility of the other (which usually
takes the form of eternal preliminaries, of inaccessible
object of choice, or else the form of intermittent
relationship that enables us to reintroduce
the distance that suits the inaccessible, and thereby
to “resublime” the object after each “use”). But,
neither is real love simply something that takes its
object “such as it is,” in the sense of homogeneity
and (uninterrupted) continuity of its presence as
real. The true miracle of love consists in preserving
the transcendence in the very accessibility of
the other. Or, to use Gilles Deleuze’s terms, it consists
in creating a “circuit laughter-emotion,
where the former refers to the little di≠erence and
the latter to the great distance, without e≠acing or
diminishing one another.” 8 The miracle of love is
not that of transforming some banal object into a
sublime object, inaccessible in its being – this is
the miracle of desire. The miracle of love consists
in the coincidence of the two objects (the loved
and the existing object), which remains precisely
this: a rather strange coincidence, rare in its
occurrence, in relation to which one never stops
wondering – that “you really are you.” Real, concrete
love always includes and presupposes this
kind of minimal di≠erence. To illustrate this
notion of “minimal di≠erence (of the same)” I like
to use a rather famous punch line from one of the
Marx Brothers’ movies: “Look at this guy, he looks
like an idiot, he behaves like an idiot – but do not
let yourself be deceived, he is an idiot!” Or, an
even better and less exploited example, also from
the Marx Brothers (A Night at the Opera): After
sitting with another woman for quite a while,
Groucho Marx (Driftwood) comes to Mrs. Claypool’s
table (she was waiting for him all that time),
and the following dialogue ensues:
Driftwood (Groucho): That woman? Do you know why
I sat with her?
Mrs. Claypool (Margaret Dumont): No –;
Driftwood: Because she reminded me of you.
Mrs. Claypool: Really?
Driftwood: Of course! That’s why I’m sitting here
with you. Because you remind me of you. Your
eyes, your throat, your lips, everything about
you reminds me of you, except you. How do you
account for that?
Indeed, this is not a bad answer to the impossible
question: “Why do you love me?” – “Because you
remind me of yourself.”
So, to repeat again my objection to Rosset:
in order for a surprising coincidence to occur (as
a singular real), there needs to be a minimal
di≠erence already at work in the same. One could
assume that Rosset was aware of this problem, and
that this is why he slightly changed his fundamental
conceptualization of the real in his subsequent
work. Yet he changed it in a rather unfortunate direction,
which brought him in a paradoxical position where, because
of his very insistence upon the singularity of the real, his philosophy
moved more and more in the direction of a dualism
in which we have, on the one side, the real as a kind of primary
substance, unattainable in itself, and, on the other
side, the mode in which this real manifests, presents and
represents itself.
Rosset first introduced the real as something that
imposes itself as immediate and obvious, whereas the duplication
strives to cover and de-realize it, by putting something
else in its place. Duplication (or “another version”)
thus presents itself as the only true real, reducing the immediate
real to a mere appearance (this is also what Rosset
defines as metaphysical procedure par excellence). In L’objet
singulier (published 3 years after Le réel et son double), in
the chapter entitled “Return to the question of the double,”
Rosset makes a step further and reverses this conceptual
edifice by – to put it simply – turning the question of the
double into the question of representation. We now read
that not only the real has no double. It is itself strictly speaking
invisible. Along these lines Rosset writes that the invisibility
of the real, to which the suggesting of the double leads,
is a constitutive quality of the real, and that the real object is
in fact invisible, so far as it is singular. 9 This clearly indicates
that Rosset now understands visibility as such already as a
duplication, that is as a secondary representation of what
manifests itself in it. The real is no longer the immediate
evidence which we tend to put aside installing something
else in its place, something supposedly more real than the
real. The real is now the original, yet invisible and extremely
precarious reality, with no face of its own. From the thesis
that the real has no double it now follows – sic! – that
“by suggesting an obvious and radical transformation of its object,
which it is supposed to imitate, the double is […] the shortest
detour by which it can happen to the real to become ‘visible,’ that
is apprehended as close as possible to its reality, for it appears in
the very obviousness of its invisibility.” 10
And as if the reference to Jean-François Lyotard and his
philosophical preference for the Kantian dialectics of the
sublime were not yet explicate enough, Rosset goes on and
directly uses Lyotard’s terminology in saying that the double
thus manages “to present the real as non-representable.”
Although Rosset suggests yet another way of accessing the
real, namely through tautology (which is much more interesting
and actually presupposes the notion of a “minimal
di≠erence”), the real rests fixated in this perspective as inaccessible
in its singularity and simplicity. Moreover, even
though he briefly entertains the idea that the contradiction
which accompanies the real could be inscribed into the
things themselves (i. e. into the real as such), Rosset rather
concludes that the shadow cast upon the real by the disappointment
of its double “does not a≠ect so much the reality
itself as the possibility of its being an object of thought.” 11
This way we get dangerously close to a somehow obscurantist
concept of the real as fundamentally inaccessible to
thought, or accessible only in a negative way, in a more or less
extreme and lethal experience of the impossibility / failure of
its double.
Rosset proceeds by simply presupposing an equivalence
not only between visibility and the double, but also
between the figure of the double and the figure of representation.
Nothing whatsoever justifies this equivalence, except