2: The Indomitable Gaze of the Other

Radical Theology 

A suitable location had to be found for the construction of an esoteric vagina that would center the cartel’s ritual intentions on the enigma of feminine enjoyment, which at this point they formulated as something like enjoying without satisfaction, but they couldn't decide if that was penetration without completion or completion without penetration. There were copious options for the erection of a giant vaginal diorama since the dark, inner spaces of unusedhouses were abundant, but there were two key considerations for the location of this state-of-the-art worship facility: one, it had to be spacious so that the massive vagina’s girth could accommodate the entire body of each of the initiates (one at time) literally crawling through its entrance into the symbolic underworld, including Michael, who was six, six and a little over three hundred pounds. And two, it had to be out of the line of sight of some of the less liberated inhabitants of the zone.  

Someone had been clandestinely planting the flag of the Vatican where the cartel gathered for their sex magic, which kind of ruined the vibes, but not in the way you think. The flag must have been the gesture of some secret reserve of pietistic sanctimony within the zone of which the cartel had previously been unaware. Whoever had done it, the cartel must have properly scandalized them for the prudes to try to spook them with the Catholic standard. The cartel was scandalized as well, but there was also a conscious sense of extra delight from an unconscious enjoyment of scandalizing others. A certain sharpness to their lasciviousness had been missing since any sort of reactionary authority had left the area. Perhaps, the Church had returned for a great battle between good and evil, which at first had given their debauchery the brighter intensities of purposivity. The Church would lose because the cartel’s phallus-like faith was stiff and inflexible. But then it dawned on Ishmael, that it might be the Church’s imprimatur, and once he told the others, a pall of impotency was cast upon the penises of the members who had them. 

The thought of the Church’s approval of their indecency enfeebled them. It was typical of those pious voyeurs to enjoy the enjoyment that belonged to others, but a certain, reactive shift in thinking about enjoyment was effectuated in the cartel through this perversion of their perversions. The Church's enjoyment was that of the spectator, who steals the pleasure of others by both being outside the scene but implicating themselves within it nonetheless, which is the general structure of any “objective,” third-person observation. The pervert savors because he denies his involvement in the event of his libidinal enjoyment. He may even add to his enjoyment by condemning whatever he pretends is of the Other because he playacts as if Other’s enjoyment is not the pervert’s own dissimulation. This is the necessary obfuscation that constitutes both his desire and its satisfaction because the pervert’s optic nerveobscures how his eye’s enjoyment relies on the obstacle of its own blind spot for its satisfaction. Having the Other’s desire without otherness isn’t satisfying, so the pervert’s scotoma must hide the Other behind his fantasy projection of otherness like a Freudian “screen memory.” The pervert's desire is projected into others, so that it is neither from them nor in them, but rather, it is the pervert’s phallic protuberance disguised as the Other’s. 

This is what Lacan, and therefore the cartel, called the subterfuge of “Phallic Enjoyment.” But the cartel wanted to move the phallus from penises to vaginas because they had come to believe that the enjoyment that Lacan called “Feminine Jouissance” was a phallus without the phallic enjoyment of the pervert. Lacan had pointed out that even those with penises were “symbolically castrated” and therefore without the phallus, which was a point that the cartel was still trying to figure out. They had found some of Lacan’s major seminars translated into English in the library, but it was difficult going since none of them had much of a background in Freudian psychoanalysis nor many of the philosophical points that Lacan was addressing in his seminars. But the enigmatic way that Lacan had of thinking about things intrigued them in the way that any obstacle causes a desire for whatever it is that it seems to bar. They were surprised to find out that Lacan himself had intended his work to be a stumbling block so that the work that one had to put into it would invest one into it in such a way as to appreciate its value. Lacan had presented himself as a repetition of Freud, but he disagreed with Freud on a few matters, including how Freud had made his work too easily accessible, so that those who read it thought that they understood concepts, especially “Death Drive,” that they didn’t.And also, Lacan was an asshole and enjoyed being obscure. 

Moving the phallus from penises to vaginas did something to the phallus that the cartel couldn’t quite figure out, but they had started combining Lacan’s later seminars for any mentions of “feminine jouissance.” Whatever Lacanwas talking about when he had talked about feminine enjoyment, it seemed to be exemplified by the celibate yet highly desirous female mystics of the Middle Ages. Their enjoyment had famously taken place in a sort of liminal space halfway between the inside and the outside of the Church. They used the Church’s own language to sneak in their super sexy love affair with God. Their love was much more intimate than the Church’s, so they really had figured out how to enjoy without the limitations of the Church’s phallus.  

They cartel’s problems with discovering the secret teachings of feminine jouissance seemed to center around those members with penises. The penis havers could not grasp that they didn’t have the phallus because they looked down and saw that they did, but as they had all become impotent in the revelation of the Church’s witness, they could now see that the biological penis and the imaginary phallus were noncoincidental. But, how do you get the phallus out of the line of sight of the Christian perverts, so that it, like the feminine jouissance of the mystics, could hide within the plain sight of the Church? It had occurred to Julien that, perhaps, you hid it where they would never think to look for it, within the labial folds of female genitalia. The clitoris was not too far in biological form from the penis, but it had been ignored by the Church, and it was the beyond of masculine enjoyment because it was irrelevant to the penis’s penetration of the feminine mystery that the penis, when in the male position, only wished to possess rather than to release. The Clitoris might be a model for how to enjoy without possession because it remains invisible even as it is disclosed. 

The body cannot be remapped without physical practice. Although it may seem that the clitoris and the penis share certain anatomic affinities, for the cartel, it turned out to be quite difficult to move the phallus there, and then to retroactively move the clitoral phallus back to the penis, so that the penis could enjoy according to the principles of feminine enjoyment. Some of them started to wonder if feminine jouissance shouldn’t be located in a bodily organ at all. Maybe, it didn’t need physical deployment but rather an intellectual one. Philosophy had been established to think without the taint of the body. And this decoupling had accomplished many things, particularly the ultimate disembodiment of the third-person, view-from-nowhere, which was the “objectivity” that science claimed for its gaze, the gaze that reduced the invisible to the visible.  

“Religion” had been the “re-binding” of praxis before it had become the profession of intellectual propositions. Faith had been a performance of the body and not the recitation of creeds. The cartel read about secret and anathematized orders who had tried to bring vital “liturgy,” which translated from the Greek was “the work of the people,” back into religious observance, but it now appeared to Julien that the mistake of each had been the phallic structure of their praxis, which penetrated their inner sanctums with penis-like intentions. The holy of holies wasn’t an intentional presence, but the unintentional presence of the absent phallus, which in Ancient Near-Eastern temples was represented as an empty throne or altar, or the bull without a rider (unjustly mocked in the golden calf incident at Mount Sinai), or the giant footprints found leading to the doorways of Canaanite temple ruins. Each represented the divine’s presence as an absence. 

That morning when the cartel set out, three of the biological structures that the Big Other called “vaginas” and four of what it called “penises” were present, and all of them thought that they were seeking the “feminine position,”but it was still as of yet ill-defined amongst the persons of the cartel, except that they all agreed that it meant something like inhabiting a position within the symbolic discourse of the Big Other, but able to interrogate its discourse from outside in one instance, not an ultimate outside, like a view from nowhere, or God forbid, a “metalanguage,” but an intimate outside like a mismatch between intuition and the language to say what externality had been internalized.Lacan taught that this from within but nonetheless without an identity was the “Non-all” position because from this interposition, one could see both knowing and its failure, which means seeing the outside, or the limit, from within, which is what Lacan called the “Real.”  

This is the Non-all position that Lacan loving named the “hysteric’s discourse.” The “hysteric’s discourse” was the position from which one could see the failure of the “All” of the masculine position, which held that the phalluspenetrated, or disclosed, it all. The hysteric asked the question, “Why am I what you say that I am,” which is a rejection of the phallic authority of the Big Other enable by its failure to reveal the totality of our being. The hysteric saw that the Big Other could not say it all about what it claimed to identify completely according to its intention to have it all because there was always an irreducible remainer of ambiguity outside its reach.  A particular male may realize this impotency but consider this failure to be only his personal castration because in his Imaginary there was always at least one who was exempt from the impuissant at the heart of the Symbolic.  

Lacan called that illusory, fully-unified one, “the Big Other,” and any particular one who appeared to embody its at-oneness, a “little other,” which included not only those little others who physically embodied the Big Other’s authority but also the voices that  spoke ceaselessly in one’s head as the disembodied presences of the little others within. But there was an absolute Other to any of these vociferous others who caused all their incessant banter to warp and finally cease. This Other was the ultimate outside of both language and intention and in as much as language and intention comprise our subjective interiority, it was the outside other that was more in us than ourselves, which was what Lacan called the “Real,” not because it was real but because it was the outside of reality that made reality fail from within, but this failure was both the limit and the horizon of what relates everything that is to what isn’t. The Real was the castration of all imaginary pretentions that the phallus promised to possess. The ultimate outside wasn’t a Big Other, or a metalanguage, or an omniscient intention, but a failure to be, which Heidegger had called “nonbeing,”and nonbeing was the failure internal to being that would not be denied its final victory against language, intention, and being itself.  

This expedition to locate the sacred site of the vaginal phallus took place in the middle of what was a swelteringly hot summer. They had spent most of it hidden in the shade discussing the new theology, but this morning, it was cool and overcast and delightfully ominous. They came to call the new project, “Project Kenosis” because it was to be the incarnation of emptiness. Soon after their debilitating realization of the Church’s go-ahead, Julian had serendipitously stumbled upon “Radical Theology” in the stacks of the library, and the title was obviously ineluctable to her. After she emerged from one of her well-known periods of intense study, she brought the group a boon. Sheexplained to the rapt gathered, each of whom were in love with her, that Thomas Altizer’s Radical Theology outlined the self-emptying, or “Kenosis,” of God vacating Himself. The divine presence had rejected the position of both distant “sky god” and omniscience know-it-all in an act of extreme self-limitation called the “incarnation,” which including but was not limited to taking on human fallibility as well as their bodily functions, teaching them about something thatnobody could understand, including himself since he had become just as stupid as they were, and, most famously, absolute destitution on an ignominious cross.  

The term “Kenosis” was the Ancient Greek word for “self-emptying” that St. Paul had used in his letter to the Philippian's to describe how God had abdicated the “Throne of Power” to come in weakness in the “form of a servant.”Altizer had seen that Christ’s death on the cross was the actual death of God. In this masterful move, Altizer had hidden his atheism within the plain sight of both the atheists and the “Christians” by believing more deeply than they did.For Altizer God was dead because that’s what the Bible said, and his bodily resurrection was as the body of the Holy Spirit present wherever two or three bodies were gather in the name of the dead God.  

Julien made the brilliant connection between the “Omni-God’s” abandonment of the Throne of Power and the flaccid penises within the cartel ever since the Vatican’s planting of their perverse flag. The Messiah’s coming in weakness rather than power transformed the notion of what a messiah was, but most of his “followers” couldn’t abide a weak messiah, and so, like Peter, they deny Jesus in their constant grasping after the phallus in one form or the other. But Jesus’s juxtaposition of power and weakness, could be emulated by switching the location of the phallus from the penis to the vagina. The impotency of the flaccid penis was a negated presence, but the twice negated presence of the vagina presented an excessive absence, which was the “incontinence of the void,” as Samuel Becket had put it, and which was why the vagina was the true phallus. This sort of presence had been articulated before Jesus by Lao Tsu as the power of water’s weakness, which was the absence of rigidity in water’s essence as a flow. The vagina was the true phallus because its dialectic “contained” the absence of the pensis’s rigidity.  

Nobody was really following her logic, but they followed her that morning throughout the neighborhood because she was beautiful, and they couldn’t let her leave their sight. They ogled her but they weren’t projecting dominance as the cinematic male-gaze had, but rather they were staring at whatever it was in her that controlled them. They walked down the middle of the cracked, cement streets because the overgrowth from the neglected lawns sprawled well beyond their proprietary borders. There was a green wall of sprouting grass, wildflowers, scrubs, and unkempt trees rioting on each side of them as they trailed behind her. This overcast, summer morning the air had the slightly metallic smell of ozone before it rained. The cool, breezy air soothed the oppression of the previous, heat-soaked weeks, and new spirits filled them with calm affects, but they were soon lost to the burning intensities of their obsession with Julien’s hold over them. Although their faces had become expansive as they no longer had to squint when they weren’t in the shade, their longing closed their chests in tight waves of craving. 

Julien’s colorfully beaded locks swung and clacked as she gracefully strode into the bowels of the neighborhood. Julien wore a yellow sundress, orange socks, brown, hiking boots, and nothing else. Her fulsome hips and ample rear became the barely veiled objects of the group’s adoration as they followed behind her in rapt silence. And when her elegant, sable face turned to them to consider the pros and cons of a particular location, they acquiesced to whatever she said because they weren’t really listening.  

Julien paid attention to the insects and often used them as examples for the theological points that she was making. Those that had remained in the zone had learned how to keep bug bites at a minimum even though chemical sprays were of little overall effect to their general population, the industrial concoctions detoured or killed the bugs of immediate concern, especially those that had parasitically attached themselves to one’s body. The eerie thing was that the overall population of insects never seemed to be lessened by any of the chemical measures. However, those commercial sprays soon ran low without any new influx of them into the zone after the others had left, but the cartel had learned to make their own “organic” mixtures to keep the swarming intruders off their skin. 

The insects were so constant that they had become mostly an indifferent background noise. But for Julien, her deep study of books was only matched by her perusal of the obscene wonders of the lives of insects. She didn’t glean quite the same transcendental principles as Henry David Thoreau had in his famous insect observations at Walden, but something close. She saw that whatever intention she related to their many doings, there was always some irreducible remainer of interpretability. She, like Thoreau, admired their undivided intention, which Thoreau had thought of as their indifferent industriousness. However, she also noticed that whatever was gained by their single-minded attention to their duties, there was something unnamable that had been lost, which meant that something unnamable had been gained. Was it merely purity? Or was their also menace? Or both? She called this always withdrawingaspect of their phenomenal presentation, their “irreducible ambiguity” because it was what she had read that Emmanuel Levinas and Giles Deleuze had called it, and they had both thought of it as desirable. Irreducible ambiguity was what remained after any attempt to comprehend the arthropods and arachnids failed, which is what Immanual Kant had called “the things-in-themselves" of the noumenal realm.  

The former voices of those who said that things just, “are what they are” remained in her head, but there was a new voice that said that simple being wasn’t as simple as it seemed because “raw” facts pointed beyond themselves, but to what, Julien didn’t know. Whatever it was, it was something indicated by the seeming symbolic nature of being, but it failed to appear, or rather it appeared, but it didn’t indicate anything that Julien could discern. Nevertheless, it enthralled her. It was the sound of the “Deep calling to the Deep” that God had referred to when he showed up as a whirlwind to upbraid Job, and which Ishmael had overheard speaking amongst itself increasingly now that the zone had grown quieter. Julien had come to enjoy what exceeded symbolization capacity to encode, which was not only an excess but also the lack inherent to representation itself, so that the Symbolics' warped and broken signifiers pointed to whatever it was that was beyond representation, beyond what could be grasp because it was Nietzsche's void, which stared back at those who investigated it for too long. She enjoyed the invisible terror that looked back at her because it resisted the intention of her gaze absolutely. 

The insects within the zone were no different than any, anywhere else, except that no matter how many of them were killed, by whatever method, they always returned to their previous populations’ levels within 24 hours or so. They weren’t resurrected or anything obviously magical like that. Their dead bodies remained where they had fallen, until they were either cleaned up or consumed by the other hungry lives that relied on their dead bodies for sustenance.Life is constructed and sustained by death.  

However, the uncanniness of their constant return had been found to be unacceptable to the former residence of the zone, and so they had left en masse. The return was like an undead drive that unnerved them to their coresbecause it lacked any definitive explanation. Those that had remained lived with this uncanny lack of determination as the unconscious background of their lives. They had learned how to mostly keep the bugs from their direct awareness by reducing how often they were bitten by them. The various lemon eucalyptus and peppermint mixtures that those who remained smeared all over their bodies and worked deep into their hair throughout the day sufficed. Everyone had a punchy citrus-mint scent when they first came into each other’s presence, and both the bugs and the bouquet of “organic” repellents mostly faded into the background noise of their lives in the zone. 

But Julien taught that bringing the background forward was how to enter the near-far. When inspecting each house, she carefully surveyed the resident bug populations within and surrounding it. The warm climate insects had mostly disappeared from the zone, possibly because the homes were no longer heated consistently in the winter. However, it was strange to assign a cause to any of the “facts” of the insect populations of the zone because causes seemed to have an eerily selective efficacy for them. The fact that those insects that had long ago come from far-away, tropical places had not maintained their populations, no longer necessarily corresponded to the other fact thatthere was no longer mechanized, indoor heating, but it did seem to suggest that it was the manufactured chemicals that those that always returned had somehow learned to resist. The tropical guests survived in the few places where there was consistent heat, and sprays also did not deter them. It seemed to be the freezing winters that rid the zone of them. The invisibility of causes, as David Hume had famously pointed out, meant that they could not be directly observed. Whatever invisible force causes once held was loosening. The fact was that the cartel now observed plenty of mosquitoes, ticks, flies, bees, moths, butterflies, spiders, and beetles, but had not found any cockroaches or bedbugs since the advent of the exodus. As had been the case even before the exodus, observation could not always determine causal relations, but what appeared sometimes appeared without necessary and sufficient reasons, not because these reasons were hidden and hypothetically could be to be uncovered by systematic inquiry, but rather because of the incomplete determination of being itself. 

The cartel was careful before embarking on their pilgrimage that morning to check to see if they could spy any hidden representatives of the Vatican lurking in the bushes. And once they had embarked, whenever they could manage to look away from Julien’s quivering backside, they scanned the wild terrain for religious perverts. Julien was too focused on finding a hallowed spot to care too much about either their attention to her or to care too much about the attention of the Roman authorities. There was a certain floor plan that featured large family dens sunken behind the front parlors that Julien thought would be good because they couldn’t be seen, or heard, from the street. And because there were stairs from the front room going down into this backroom area. Julien had been imagining that initiates would solemnly descend into the labial realm by descending stairs. She had mentioned before that although it was assumed that mystics were taken up, or that they ascended to meet the divine, just as many descended into their experiences of the Holy of Holies.  

But most importantly, in Radical Theology, Kenosis was a self-emptying into the body from the heights of transcendence to the depths of imminence, so that the lower was elevated as lower without lifting it up, which for Altizerwould have been the mistake of reoccupying the heavenly throne but with another tyrant. Making immanence transcendent is how the divine sanctifies the body through incarnation rather than through purification. The near-far was not high but low, not universal but particular, and not transcendent but immanent. Or rather, the near was the far, the low was the high, the particular was the universal, and the immanent was the transcendent. 

Julien stopped at a house that looked like those that had the right sort for the sunken den. This one looked so well-preserved that they didn’t know if it was actually unoccupied. They knew most of the people in the zone and where they lived, but they were always discovering clandestine folks who had hidden themselves from view for one reason or the other. The front lawn erupted wildflowers, rogue trees, reprobate bushes and unbroken weeds like the other yards, but the deep green paint on the front porch wasn’t peeled, and the maroon front door seemed as though it hadn’t been opened since the exodus. This was always a risky situation since many of those who had remained kept gunsand would shoot anyone approaching what they had claimed as theirs. 

But Julien saw a sign. There were massive ant colonies around the left side of the house, and she interpreted the streams of ants as “fellow journeyers on the left-hand path.” This was the symbolic world that the cartel had both wanted and feared to various degrees. Ishmael caught himself second guessing the ant logic as too bold a rejection of reason but then admired Julien’s willingness to publicly announce her unapologetic descent into the esoteric world of visions and synchronicities. Why should magical thinking be thought of as crazy any longer when psychosis was the only reasonable response to the increasing madness of their lives. But what was to protect them from the certainty of psychosis? Sure, psychosis posited hidden reasons that enchanted their thinking, but wasn’t this the exact sort of thinking that reduced the given ambiguity of being to the sort of totalitarian determinations that they were trying to escape?