Adrian Veidt: Beat Poet.

I’d like to respond to Marc’s comment on Garret’s ‘Who owns the Watchmen’: there, Marc notes that rather than nodes of

 intelligibility, the welter of cultural signifiers in V for Vendetta makes the central character unintelligible. V “is an overflowing conduit of signification organized around the same traumatic senselessness,” Marc writes. “It is here where the work of resignification runs into the unconscious and the abyss of the other's desire: there is simply something about V which consistently escapes our understanding, something we cannot fathom.”

We can extend Marc’s idea that the heteroglossia (in Garrett’s term) makes V unintelligible with Veidt’s viewing of multiple television screens in Chapter XI. This reflects a Burroughsian abstraction of disparate materials that results in a premonitory truth because it suppresses rational thought: “[William S. Burroughs] suggested re-arranging words & images to evade rational analysis, allowing subliminal hints of the future to leak through ... An impending world of exotica, glimpsed only peripherally.” “...Meanings coalesce from semiotic chaos before reverting to incoherence.” We sense this is beginning to describe not only Veidt’s careful watching of a bank of TVs, but also the Watchmen itself. Veidt begins to describe a form of cognitive mapping of a totality unavailable to any one perspective: “These reference points established, an emergent worldview becomes gradually discernible amidst the media’s white noise.” This is Veidt’s idiosyncratic position as watchman, but the truly disturbing aspect is not its investment in non-rational ‘analysis,’ but its perfect analogy with early religious interpretation: “The method has an earlier precursor than Burroughs in the shamanistic tradition of divining randomly scattered goat innards...”. Watchmen generates radical undecidability in the best surrealist tradition since we can see Adrian Veidt as both sensitive cultural analyst, divining hidden significance with ingenious clarity, and psychotic modern-day shaman, seeing just what he desires in a pile of strewn intestines. 

Sympathy for the Devil

I want to look at V and the law in relation to drive compulsions and their regulation by the pleasure principle.

Through-out Vendetta, V represents himself as demonic. In the above example, he quotes the Rolling Stones' 'Sympathy for the Devil' as an introduction. Previous scenes indicate a similar comparison of V to demons and devils. For instance, he tells Evey that he is 'the king of the twentieth century... the bogeyman... the villain... the black sheep of the family' (13.8) and when Evey wants to 'make a deal' with him, V quotes Faust and, putting himself in the position of Mephistopheles, observes, 'He made a deal, too' (44.1-3).

In one of the happy coincidences of academic life, Freud refers to drive compulsions, in their disregard for the pleasure principle (the agency that attempts to keep excitation in the psychic apparatus at a minimal level) as having a 'daemonic character'. Using this coincidence as a starting point, I want to bring together some of my previous ideas on V as both bio-political and violent excess of the state and suggest that he embodies what Freud called the 'death drive'. Contrary to popular usage, this does not mean he is 'suicidal' so much as it connects him to the notion of traumatic repetition and points to how his imperatives do not coincide with those of the state which, governed by the pleasure principle, does not acknowledge how its own drives motivate it. V represents the death drive disrupting the appearance of the smooth functioning of order, a functioning that is meant to keep excitation to a minimum.

Running parallel, the law of the state seems to function as a screen for its libidinal investments and the indulgence of its own impulses. The fact that the government is dominated by 'drives' is indicated nicely by the division of its various agencies into body parts (nose, finger, eye, ear etc.), each of which appears somewhat at odds with one another instead of in unified agreement. Nonetheless, as I have observed with the leader Adam Susan, the indulgence of drive impulses are actively disavowed as a necessity of maintaining order and the dominance of the 'pleasure principle' that V endeavors to destroy. Disrupting the passive jouissance of the populace, immobilized by the idiotic entertainments to which it has become accustomed, V attempts to reveal the hidden impulses indulged by state power and hidden beneath the semblance of homeostasis and take vengeance on its agents.

The fact that law is little more than the cover for the indulgence of sexual impulses is illustrated through the story of the pedophiliac priest. Although this priest represents the state, presenting its propaganda as if supported in biblical teaching, his nightly activities of seducing very young girls is not only the common knowledge of the state but is completely tolerated. The law serves as a cover for these 'impulses' rather than a protection against them.


V conspires to extend his vendetta to the priest -- who had been present at the Larkhill facility -- by sending Evey to him dressed as a little girl so that she may open the window and gain V entrance into the apartments. In order to do so, Evey must make up an excuse about her finding open windows 'exciting'. The priest then begins to explain the necessity of not ignoring 'primal impulses': 'A wild and primal impulse. We should never ignore our primal impulses...' (50.5)

What makes this sequence particularly interesting is how his speech is layered over images of V approaching the church. Over illustrations of V crossing the courtyard on his way to kill the priest his future victim speaks the following lines: 'Don't you agree? Those rich and mysterious forces that stir in the shadowy depths of the human soul... Those inexpressible longings... When their moment is come they shall not be denied' (50.6-8). The parallel between words and pictures in this sequence suggests a connection between the priest and V in terms of such 'impulses'.

Perhaps then it would not be going too far to suggest that the priest realizes his own drive compulsions, which are disavowed by the state, the law and society according to the pleasure principle, as to acknowledge them would bring displeasure; V represents the return of the drives in the sense of negating that principle. He is the repetition of the excess that the law denies in itself, its 'demonic' underside.

The Legal Meets the Lewd (Part 2)

In my last posting, I concentrated on the figure of Adam Susan and how his relationship to the fate computer reveals something about the libidinal investment that sustains the alienating automaton of law. Now I'd like to shift attention to the role of women as it pertains to the 'legal' and the 'lewd'.

In the first scene at the Kitty-Kat Keller nightclub, a hang-out for both government officials and local criminals, a singer enters on to the stage and begin to sing a song that connects the law directly to sexual desire. Here's an excerpt:

'I'm not politically ticklish and theory makes me weary... and affairs of state aren't my kind of affairs. And I'd never bed, nor much less wed the wag whose flag is deepest red. My tastes run more to London derryairs... But at rallies in the night with all the torches burning bright I feel a stirring in me I cannot neglect... And I'll grasp with mad abandon any lad with an armband on whose cute salute is manly and erect! I like the boots (dada dada dada da) I like the at-ti-tude, I like the point at which the legal meets the lewd. I like the thrill (dada dada dada da) of the triumphant will... I like the marching and the music and the mood!' (125)

The song, much the way V does in his own performances, brings forward a dimension of enjoyment relegated to the background of the enforcement of law. The 'point at which the legal meets the lewd' marks where the written rules encounter their libidinal support. Nowhere is this point better revealed than in the abuse of women underwritten by the privileged position of men within the legal order.

In the above example, the performance of femininity is intrinsically bound to the tropes of fascist spectacle, a reading supported by the performer's Nazi-style walk across the stage as she describes her erotic fascination with lads whose 'cute salute is manly and erect'. In order to please her audience, the performer must present her desire in a way that flatters the patrons, who represent the legal and extra-legal elite of the state. These 'unwritten rules' regulate the desire of women in this society.

The sub-plot of Rosemary Almond best epitomizes the importance of these unwritten rules. When her husband is killed by V, she is left without state support and without experience cannot find for herself a well-paying job. Desperate, she is driven to date a man she despises (Roger Dascombe) and to dance in a burlesque show in order to support herself. In both cases she must submit herself to male desire in order to survive a rule of law that affords her no other legal or economic protection. She is both physically and metaphorically exposed to the excesses of law, at the mercy of male desire (see 205).

One possible parallel comes in V's torture of Evey Hammond. It is not difficult to see the structure of sado-masochistic reversal in how V stages the very scenario of his incarceration, except he has changed from the object of violence into the subject who inflicts it. Of course as Freud teaches us, this perversion includes three positions in so far as in punishing Evey, V also punishes himself through her.

Nevertheless, V's first defense of his actions is to say he does it out of 'love' for her. I have argued elsewhere that V's torture of Evey reflects the necessity of a revolutionary facing his or her own abjection within the law. So, here I'd like to offer the variation that the torture also stages V's fantasy of sado-masochistic violence against women. Yet, in so far as I have also argued that V holds up a 'fun-house mirror' to the state, this violence might be read as a version of extra-legal state punishment. V's static expression, once again, makes his actual investment in this procedure ambiguous. But his perpetual smile also betrays the hidden truth of libidinal investment in the enforcement of the law.

What is the status of women within/without the law in our other texts?

The Legal Meets the Lewd (Part 1)

As with the Comedian, who enjoys the excessive character of his extra-legal violence, V for Vendetta suggests how the law is sustained by a libidinal investment that it actively disavows but nonetheless returns. In order to demonstrate this, perhaps it is worthwhile returning to the section of the novel titled 'Versions' on which I have already made some comments below ('Law and Violence').

In this section, the leader of the totalitarian government, Adam Susan, and the terrorist, V, each explain their 'version' of law. In the case of Adam Susan, the law is identified with the 'fate' computer that helps the leader monitor the populace through the myriad of video cameras planted in public and private spaces throughout the city. He refers to this computer as if it were a courtly lover, the impossibly removed lady who denies him her affection. Nonetheless, he asserts, 'My love, I would stay with you forever, would spend my life within you. I would wait upon your every utterance and never ask the merest splinter of affection, Fate... Fate... I love you' (39.1-3).


Susan's elevation of his cold, distant, technological 'lady', who punishes him by denying him her affections, enacts a disavowal of his own sexual desire. Since the fate-computer stands in for the law, his personal relationship to it speaks larger questions of how those in power relate to it.

If one approaches this issue from a psychoanalytic perspective one discovers how the idealization of the law as an untouchable 'courtly lady' does not speak to some purified, spiritual love for it, as Susan's monologue appears to suggest, but instead reflects the structure of masochism: the more ideal she becomes, the more the one courting her suffers unrequited love.

As Zizek writes in his article 'From Courtly Love to the Crying Game', the idealized lady 'functions as an inhuman partner in the precise sense of a radical Otherness which is wholly incommensurable with our needs and desires; as such, she is simultaneously a kind of automaton, a machine which randomly utters meaningless demands' (96). There is neither a relationship of empathy possible with such an entity nor through such an entity. The idealization of the law in this way evades the traumatic, alienating character of the sort of law 'Norsefire' has imposed on Vendetta's near-future Britain.

As I mentioned, this idealization also represents a disavowal of sexual desire (or libidinal investment of any sort). As Susan admits, he has 'never known the peace that lies between the thighs of a woman' yet he finds comfort in the fact that he is 'respected' and 'feared' (38.3) and has a 'love that is far deeper than the empty gasps and convulsions of brutish coupling' (38.4). For Susan, his love of the 'law' is opposed to the consumation of sexual desire. His self-punishing pleasure (jouissance) comes from the perpetual deferment of his desire.

In contrast, as I have pointed out below, V uses a directly sexual language to address the law, accusing justice of being a 'whore' who has 'bedded another'. Whereas Susan disavows sexual desire as a motive force animating his love of the law, V, as is often the case in Vendetta, brings this repressed material back into the open. V shows how for Susan, doing his duty is not an act of supreme self sacrifice (as he frames it), but instead testifies to a plesure-pain animating the maintenence of law.

When V takes control of the fate computer -- indeed he has been monitoring it from the beginning -- he sends back to Susan his message in an inverted form. Appearing on the screen in front of the leader are the words 'I love you' (


What should we make of this detail? Why does this unexpected message consume Susan for the rest of the novel? Is this another case of 'the abyss gazes also'?

Is Moore advocating a 'universal love'? If so, how might it relate to the 'love' Evey feels for Valerie following her impriosnment, for instance? What are the problems that this raises? Do any of Moore's other texts advocate this sort of solution? Doe she complicate it at all?

Fun-house Mirrors

Jason's 'V for Violence' post below has gotten me thinking about V as the mirror of the agents of the law who derive pleasure in doing what 'must be done' to maintain order. So far I have been approaching V as the model for a revolutionary excess to the law who cannot be assimilated into it and draws his strength from this exclusion. But it occurs to me that V also serves as a sort of fun-house mirror to the state, reflecting the enjoyment of its own extra legal excess, an excess that the law must actively disavow in order to function. Moreover, his 'vendetta', which gives title to the novel, does not seem to be without a certain pleasure on his part.

V's frozen smile serves as a quick short-hand for his enjoyment--he is a figure who enjoys all the time, who can do nothing but enjoy. Other signals in the novel support this conclusion. V is identified with popular culture, songs, art and otherwise banned works. He houses those cultural treasures he is able to recover in his underground 'shadow-gallery', a strange sort of fun-house that speaks to undercurrents on libidinal investment in his mission (perhaps I'll write more on the gallery in a later post). In every instance, V identifies with significations of forbidden excess, even as he seems to embody a structural void or lack that sets in motion Evey's desire.

One of the tropes he draws on most frequently is that of performance, a tendency which in the 'Vaudeville' section (31-36) has some bearing on his 'fun-house' mirroring of the state and V's own enjoyment of his excessive position. In this sequence, V has kidnapped Commander Prospero, the voice of 'Fate' and a former guard at the Larkhill detention facility. Taking him back to the shadow gallery, V, dressed in his vaudeville 'punch and judy' costume, terrorizes Prospero by leading him through a stage mock-up of the facility. V ends this farce by incinerating Propspero's antique dolls collection in an oven (returning to the fire motif). V's 'distortion' of the facility actually reflects its disavowed truth.

Since this section is ambiguous, let's break it down into the two readings that it condenses.

In the first reading, V, in recreating the conditions of his imprisonment, holds up the mirror to the law, confronting it with its obscene excesses. V points out the pleasure Prospero used to take in his obscene position: 'I remember you used to call out to us sometimes. Little jokes. You had a special name for the medical block. You used to call it the funny farm' (34.5). The joke is however a sick one, as V demonstrates through the destruction of the dolls in the oven. Prospero, who vehemently protests, values plastic and porcelain over flesh and blood. The hidden truth of this sequence is that in operating the ovens at Larkhill, Prospero had reduced living humans to his playthings, something trivial and disposable. V thus confronts him with his own perverse enjoyment.

In the second reading, it is difficult to deny that V's expression suggests that he is enjoying his psychological torture of Prospero. He dresses up as a grotesque figure with a frozen smile whose goal is to torment Propspero and to remind him of V's suffering in the 'medical compound'. He stages an elaborate show simply to punish a man who once punished him. Undoubtedly, his vendetta, which focuses largely on those who worked at Larkhill, speaks to a personal enjoyment of revenge, which is as much a motivating factor as his concern for society as a whole.

Yet, herein rests the wisdom of V's portrayal as an inscrutable void: the ambiguity of his position cannot really be resolved. Does he work for the good of society, or does he work for his own good? Does he hold up the mirror to power, or does he mirror his own desire? What does Moore intend to say by the overlap of these excesses in both state power and revolutionary power?

V for Violence

The explosive, fiery destruction visited by both V and the Comedian, two of Moore’s perpetually grinning protagonists who are above (or outside) the law, represents blistering Lacanian jouissance.  The excess that marks them as ur-violent, as revolutionary/founding agents, is represented/visualized in the irruptive flame they both associate with. 

In chapter II, The Comedian (whose preferred weapon in Vietnam is the flamethrower,) sets fire to the map of “new social evils” the “Crimebusters” have been convened to fight. He says these evils “don’t matter squat because inside thirty years the nukes are gonna be flyin’ like maybugs...” (ch.II,pg11). The Comedian doesn’t offer any way to address this larger problem, which he feels negates particular social ills, but seems to enjoy the threat of annihilation. “Once you figure out what a joke everything is, being the Comedian’s the only thing makes sense” (ch.II,pg13). This flippant discussion of nuclear catastrophe is perhaps the grandest economy of jouissance on display until the overweening power of Adrian Veidt is revealed.

The Comedian registers jouissance each time he goes too far: happily tear-gassing protestors, or, more gruesomely, shooting his pregnant mistress. Each time, jouissance is something that can’t be contained; an excess or extra thing breaking free of any restraint.

Dr. Manhattan psychoanalyzes him: “Blake is interesting. I have never met anyone so deliberately amoral. He suits the climate here: the madness, the pointless butchery.... As I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition, I also realize that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding. Blake’s different. He understands perfectly ... and he doesn’t care.”

The Comedian presents the pure jouissance of enjoying absolute destruction, accepting its negativity for what it truly is. Overflowing the bounds... is this the state’s violent desire or the anarchist subject’s excessive joy? We are caught in an oscillation of these terms as one comes to resemble the other.

The Violence of Decision

I hope that the following remarks will help to tie up a few threads I have been drawing out thus far pertaining to V's inscrutable desire, the status of violence and excess and the transformation of Evey into a revolutionary agent. In my view, the best way to do this will be to focus on Evey's decision to take V's place following his death.

In the relevant scene, V collapses dead in front of Evey and she turns over in her mind what she will do next. The government has begun announcing that the 'terrorist' has been shot dead and that the insurrection is over. Without V to guide her, Evey is stuck with the weight of decision--what did V want from her? 'Oh Christ,' she laments, 'what happens next? You never said. You never said what you were educating me for. You never told me what I'm supposed to do' (249.2).

Considering her confusion about what V really wants from her, perhaps her impulse to remove his mask and see his 'true face' is a natural one. Yet, every time she removes his mask in her imagination, she only sees some other victim of the government that she has known: her mother (249.5), Gordon (249.8), her father (250.3) and finally herself (250.8). After this final revelation, Evey realizes who V must be. On the following page she looks at herself in the mirror and an extreme close-up shows her own mouth twisted into V's frozen smile (251.8). She later puts on his costume and appears before the masses to prove that the insurrection is far from over.

Here is perhaps the key moment in the entire text, the one to which all else has been leading. Evey, who has been looking to V as a sort of guarantor of her decisions, as the 'subject supposed to know' what she must do, finally assumes this responsibility for herself. In seeing all those she has lost behind his mask she fully embraces the necessity of revolutionary violence. Evey takes her final step towards becoming V, towards transforming a personal tragedy into a collective vendetta.

Her decision has negative resonances today in light of the 'war on terror' and thus V for Vendetta proves particularly unsettling in its advocacy of violence, especially in the name of, as I am arguing, a sort of love. I have tried as much as I can not to project the contemporary situation into the text, but such comparisons are unavoidable and they are partially what account for its current importance.

Does Moore's text advocate terror? If so then can we take anything positive from it?

I think the unsettling nature of these questions speaks to the deadlocks of the current moment in which 'objective' (government sponsored) violence comes up against seemingly irrational 'subjective violence' (for more on this see my post on 'Law and Violence' below) in a self-perpetuating loop from which no one benefits. Yet, it also reflects an extremely narrow view of what 'violence' might mean in this case.

I recall here the distinction that Walter Benjamin makes between 'mythical violence' and 'divine violence'. He writes,

'If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the later is lethal without spilling blood... Mythical violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake, divine violence pure power over all life for the sake of the living' ('Critique of Violence', Reflections 297).

Benjamin's distinction between the mythical and divine sorts of violence maps well on to current concerns. Whereas one should openly condemn the bloody violence that keeps both terrorists and the governments they strike against trapped in a perpetual loop of 'mythical violence', entailing both 'guilt' and 'retribution', the later sort of 'divine violence' does not necessarily seek to engage in more such bloody violence. What of course constitutes a divine violence is left unclear, but Benjamin quite directly indicates that he does not intend his definition to include terrorist violence exclusively--it is sometimes 'lethal without spilling blood' and always for the 'sake of the living'. Benjamin appears to advocate a strategic sort of violence that is more of a position against the law in all its functions than anything filled out with any positive content. To do so would necessarily fall into a mindless sort of resistance and ignore the particulars of the situation.

If read more as a parable for a particular position in relation to the law rather than a revolutionary program, V for Vendetta actually opens up more options than it closes off. Nowhere does it say violence is the only modality of this position as an impossible object disrupting the smooth functioning of things. Rather, like the character of V, the novel as a whole refuses to tell anyone what must be done in their situation. That becomes a decision that each person must take in their particular place yet cannot be taken either with certainty or with guarantees. Ultimately, that seems to be the 'freedom' that V gives to Evey: the freedom over her own decision.

To do 'violence' to the law can mean a great number of things: protests, sit-ins, damage to property, strikes etc. Although containing numerous truths to reflect on for today, Moore's vision is admittedly exaggerated and the sort of violence necessary in that situation would differ greatly from in others. Nonetheless, perhaps Evey boils it down to the zero level. Her final act of violence is to look at the law which has destroyed her life and the lives of so many and to defiantly say 'no'.