Table Of ContentTHE VIRTUAL POINT OF FREEDOM
Series Editors
Slavoj Žižek
Adrian Johnston
Todd McGowan
diaeresis
T H E V I R T U A L P O I N T
O F F R E E D O M
Essays on Politics, Aesthetics,
and Religion
Lorenzo Chiesa
Northwestern University Press
Evanston, Illinois
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
Copyright © 2016 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2016. All rights
reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Chiesa, Lorenzo, author.
Title: The virtual point of freedom : essays on politics, aesthetics, and religion /
Lorenzo Chiesa.
Other titles: Diaeresis.
Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2016. | Series:
Diaeresis
Identifiers: LCCN 2016014077| ISBN 9780810133730 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN
9780810133747 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810133754 (e-b ook)
Subjects: LCSH: Liberty. | Political science— Philosophy. | Philosophy, Modern.
Classification: LCC JC585 .C47 2016 | DDC 323.44— dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016014077
Contents
Preface vii
1 Topology of Fear 3
2 Pasolini and the Ugliness of Bodies 17
3 Wounds of Testimony and Martyrs of the Unconscious:
Lacan and Pasolini contra the Discourse of Freedom 30
4 A Theater of Subtractive Extinction: Bene without Deleuze 55
5 Giorgio Agamben’s Franciscan Ontology 72
6 Christianity or Communism? Žižek’s Marxian Hegelianism
and Hegelian Marxism 82
7 The Body of Structural Dialectic: Badiou, Lacan,
and the “Human Animal” 100
Notes 115
Index 145
Preface
The essays included in this volume were written between the winter of
2005 and the spring of 2010, and are here presented in chronological
order. They originally appeared in slightly different form in journals
and edited collections of often limited circulation focusing on academic
disciplines as apparently incompatible as continental philosophy, social
psychology, Italian culture, and theater studies. Nonetheless, they re-
ceived sufficient attention for most of them to be translated into other
languages.
Preliminarily, I wish to make two important specifications. First, I
certainly do not regard these articles as intellectual B-s ides in desper-
ate need to be reclaimed through some variation of the vague category
of “minor writing.” They rather faithfully witness to what has been the
at times tortuous theoretical trajectory I have developed following the
completion of my monograph on Lacan, Subjectivity and Otherness,1 and
the facing of the practical obstacles posed by the many challenges of
present-day professional life for academics. Second, although these essays
were not initially intended to be released together as a book, they exhibit
in retrospect, as I hope the reader will be able to confirm for himself, a
surprising degree of consistency with regard to both the issues treated
and the perspective from which they are approached.
The principal motif that runs throughout the collection is undeni-
ably a virulent confrontation with the discourse of freedom, or, more
specifically, the falsely transgressive ideal of a total emancipation that
would know no constraints. This is first and foremost a book about the
productivity of constraints. As Pier Paolo Pasolini— one of the authors I
dialogue with recurrently— suggests, insofar as “every conquest of free-
dom generates its own servitude,” what really matters is the emergence
of the evanescent moment or point of liberation, and thus, the indefati-
gable practice of freedom that obtains radical change only at the price
of reestrangement.2
Far from delineating a supposed “subject of freedom” that would
allegedly overcome alienation once and for all, the seven essays con-
vii
viii
PREFACE
tained in the present volume seek to unfold an innovative reading of the
dialectical coincidence between dis- alienation and re- alienation in poli-
tics, aesthetics, and religion, using psychoanalysis as a privileged critical
tool. Topics and authors being covered to this end include Little Hans’s
urban phobia and Mike Davis’s “ecology of fear” currently determining
the space of our cities as both generated by a crippled ideology of repres-
sive tolerance; Pasolini’s attack on the visual and biological degeneration
of bodies brought about by pleasure- seeking “liberal” consumerism; De-
leuze’s grossly mistaken reading of Carmelo Bene’s theater of extinction
as a “creative” and plastic theater of explosive life without boundaries;
Agamben’s and Žižek’s conflicting negotiation with the Christian tradi-
tion of “poverty” and “inappropriateness” as potential redemption;
and Badiou’s inability to develop, in contrast to Lacan, a scientifically
informed philosophical anthropology capable of paving the way for a
novel type of Marxist inhuman humanism that could sustain a coherent
politics of emancipation.
The book could be seen as roughly divided into two parts, with the four
initial essays or chapters focusing on political liberation from the angle
of aesthetics (the writings on cinema, acting, painting, and the built en-
vironment of, respectively, Pasolini, Bene, Lacan, and Davis) and the sub-
sequent three chapters opting for an increasingly cautious dialogue with
theology that attempts to unmask the latter’s most insidious ramifications
into materialist thought. In this sense, the sketching out of the figure of
the partisan— a subject who makes it possible to conceive of an intersec-
tion between provisional morality and radical politics— in the conclusion
of the final chapter seems to exhaust both previous trends. On the one
hand, via a sort of anti-a esthetic desublimation, it evidences the threshold
of indistinction between the human animal’s dysfunctional animality and
its potential subjectivization as the very source of egalitarian universalism.
On the other hand, it rejects in parallel the possibility of any “purely logi-
cal grace” (Badiou) that in the end invariably issues into the eternity of
Life as logos (Agamben).
In relation to this speculative itinerary, the present collection may
also no doubt be read as an all- round testing ground for the field and
function of psychoanalytic theory, especially with regard to philosophy.
The first, second, and third chapters still abundantly rely on Lacan’s no-
tion of the subject as discussed in my Subjectivity and Otherness. They do
so in order to shed light on, in turn but without solution of continuity,
the phobic impasses caused by the decline of traditional authority; the
neurotic aggressivity— if not erotomania— induced by a hedonistic ide-
ix
PREFACE
ology; and the psychotic delusion that, when everything becomes trans-
gression, power can be dissolved through an act of terroristic martyrdom.
After such a psychopathological survey of late capitalism, psychoanalysis
leaves the front stage in the fourth and fifth chapters. Here, however, its
anti-p hilosophical lesson— aimed at “a patient inventory of the imbe-
cilities”3 that characterize the history of ideas including, first and fore-
most, the badly disguised desire for totalization evident even in its alleg-
edly most subversive representatives— is played against the thought of
Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben. Unsurprisingly, at this juncture,
it is Bene’s self-e ffacing figure of the slave, the one whose knowledge,
according to Lacan, has been stolen by the philosopher in the name of
mastery, who alerts us to the metaphysical implications inherent to the
pseudo- political vitalism of both homo sacer and so- called “deterritorializa-
tion.” If, on the one hand, in the fifth and sixth chapters, Alain Badiou’s
own philosophical familiarity with anti- philosophy is called to the rescue
of materialist thinking in face of a mounting theological threat (which
Žižek addresses but also provocatively flirts with), the final chapter finds
it indispensable, in this view, to resort again to Lacan.
In a properly dialectical fashion, the volume thus traces an open
circle that starts off from the unquestioned, and perhaps naive, assump-
tion that it is licit to apply psychoanalytic theory to other more established
domains of knowledge; moves on to problematizing this very premise by
putting into practice anti- philosophy independently; touches on the ten-
uousness of the line dividing a philosophy that is aware of anti- philosophy
from anti- philosophy; and ultimately comes back to psychoanalysis in a
way which, I must confess, is possibly in Lacan more than Lacan himself.
In other words, and very briefly, this shift from psychoanalysis as critique
to a more affirmative psychoanalytically informed metacritique opens
up the space, in Lacan’s steps but also beyond him, for my current and
as yet tentative attempt at delineating a new realist and para- ontological
domain of twenty- first- century philosophy.4
As I feel uncomfortable concluding what is an unquestionably retroac-
tive and nonsystematic collection on such a grandiose, if not prescriptive
note, let me hint at a couple of lateral standpoints from which the reader
may wish to unpack or even challenge these writings.
Three and a half chapters (on Pasolini, Bene, and Agamben) were
initially meant to be included in a book on Italian biopolitics, which in
all likelihood will never be completed. In all honesty, I have probably felt
that the complex obscenity of today’s Realpolitik, within and outside my
country of origin, made me lack the synthetic resources necessary to ar-
