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'.

On Love (and Shit)

In my previous post I discussed the transfiguration of Evey. It entails a double movement in which she renounces fear of opposing the law and embraces a revolutionary love.

Yet, what defines this 'love' that compels Evey into action?

As I hope has become apparent thus far, we are not meant to equate it with either sexual desire or the notion of happiness, as doing so would contradict the very impetus behind Evey's imprisonment, which is to strip her of the desires that enable her to conceal from herself and so accept the state of fascist law which has cost her and others so much. The definition must come from elsewhere.

The theme of love first appears in the episode of 'Valerie', woven into the sequence of Evey's imprisonment. Evey, reaching her breaking point under the pressure of her torturers, finds a letter scrawled on a piece of toilet paper that relates the story of Valerie, a former inmate of the same cell. She writes how she had lived happily with her female partner (she is a lesbian) until one day they were both taken away and imprisoned, tortured and eventually, we must presume, killed.

Evey obviously draws inspiration from Valerie's story as it convinces her not to sacrifice V's location to her interrogators, even though she knows for certain that it means she will be executed. What is the purpose of this episode? What is it about Valerie and her story that moves Evey to accept even her own death?


The answer seems to be 'love' and that 'last inch' that Valerie says she will not give away. The end of her story is worth quoting at some length:

'I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish... except one. An inch. It's small and it's fragile and it's the only thing in the world that's worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. I don't know who you are, or whether you're a man or a woman. I may never see you. I will never hug you or cry with you of get drunk with you. But I love you. I hope that you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better and that one day people have roses again. I wish I could kiss you. Valerie.' (159.6-160.5)

To give this argument a Zizekean twist, why is Valerie's story written on toilet paper if not to convey the notion that her life, under the gaze of the law, has no value, is abject filth, has become shit? What Valerie's love seems to entail is nothing connected to the existing qualities of whoever she is addressing, who, as she points out, she will never, hug, cry with or get drunk with. She even asserts how it doesn't really matter if the reader is male or female. The only point of connection is that she knows if someone is reading her story, they are facing the same circumstances she is facing as she writes it. Valerie's invocation of love is tied to the recognition of a common vulnerability, one inherent in the fundamentally political relations between the self and the other as exposed bodies. One alternative to fear of the law is love of the other in their common vulnerability to that law, a sublime love that cannot be destroyed.

What is this 'last inch' that Valerie refuses to give away? Her speech suggests it is something that cannot be reduced to her physical or material conditions. The image of her hand moving over that of her partner in which she claims that this inch is the 'only thing worth having' (160.1) suggests that the capacity to love the other in all of his or her filth and finitude which constitutes the one thing on which one must not give way under any circumstances.

In the end, Evey chooses her fidelity to this ideal over her own life. She no longer has fear of death or fear of what the law can do to her. She instead values that thing in her more than herself which connects her to everyone else. Even if everyone is shit, so too are they potentially sublime and indestructible.

As we are not quite there yet, next time I will try to finish my thought regarding what a revolutionary love entails, particularly regarding how this love paradoxically convinces Evey of the necessity for violence.

Lose Your Illusions

I'd like to pick up the thread I started last time and discuss V for Vendetta in two additional ways: (1) how it critiques the notion of 'happiness' as an ideological supplement to an unfair rule of law (2) how it argues that only through the realization of shared human vulnerability to exclusion from the protection of the law does one potentially join a revolutionary collective.

Perhaps the most well known sequence in V for Vendetta relates how V, under the disguise of the totalitarian state, kidnaps and tortures Evey Hammond. After having been abandoned by V in a city street, Evey finds refuge with a man named Gordon with whom she imagines having a contented relationship. When agents of the state kill Gordon and Evey conspires to take revenge, V, unknown to her as well as the reader, conspires to play a trick of his own.

Recreating the conditions of his own incarceration, V tortures Evey. He shaves her head bald, drowns her, beats her and leave her alone in a dark rat infested room. All the while, impersonating agents of the state, V inquires as to the whereabouts of the 'codename V', offering Evey her freedom in exchange for the information. The alternative is to be taken behind the chemical sheds and shot.

In this sequence, Evey is reduced to the lowest possible level of human existence. She is deprived of even the most basic anchor points for her identity, a fact indicated by her head being shaved and her clothes exchanged for rags. When she refuses to provide the information asked of her, even at the expense of her own life, she is released only to discover that it had been V who tortured her all along.

When she confronts him with taking her happiness from her, V argues that 'happiness' is a prison which blinds her to the suffering visited on those closest to her: 'You're in a prison, Evey. You were born in a prison. You've been in a prison so long, you no longer believe there's a world outside' (170.4).

Paradoxically, he argues, only by renouncing the imaginary support of 'happiness' can she face the real of her trauma and the true contingency that actual freedom entails. Here V assumes the position of the 'analyst'. He draws Evey's own suffering out from her and forces her to face it. He does not try to reinforce her ego but rather strips it away and traces the contours of something as yet unrealized in her: 'Good. You're almost there. Go closer. Feel the shape of it... Your mother died. They took your father away. There's a little girl Evey, and she's screaming...' (170.8). Evey's cry in the following panel, in an extreme close-up, emphasizes the pain in her expression, the release of long ago repressed emotions.

With her cry, Evey realizes what her apparent happiness concealed. In doing so, she enters the world without illusions and as I will touch on next time, with a renewed sense of revolutionary purpose.

V proceeds to take Evey on to the rooftop naked in the rain, an acknowledgment of common human vulnerability and an embrace of her own contingency. With nothing left to lose she has undergone a complete subjective destitution, renouncing all of the illusions which had kept her attached to the law. She finds this empowering, raising her arms in victory (a white stain against a black background).

The parallel between this scene and V's emergence from the flames engulfing Larkhill is not accidental. Both experiences are a sort of transfiguration where an excremental excess reverses into a revolutionary one: the revolutionary derives his or her power from the complete loss of the self, of her personal fulfilment, in the name of all who suffer like she has.

Next time I want to pick up on the question of 'love' as the alternative to fear through Evey's encounter with the story of Valerie as well as the final realization of her revolutionary desire.

(Su)staining the Law

As I have been developing thus far, V resists attempts to look 'behind his mask'. This characterization of V rejects the impulse towards humanization and rather reflects V's reduction to 'non-human' within the discourse of the law. It is how V mobilizes his own monstrosness as the point of exception to that legal discourse which transforms him from a victim to a revolutionary agent. The following post will present the Vendetta version of the Watchmen's 'the abyss gazes also'.

V never tells us his own story. Our only access to it comes in the form of the journals left by Dr. Delia Surridge detailing her time conducting research and experiments on living subjects at the Larkhill concentration camp facility. Her attitude towards these human guinea pigs clearly indicates their status as bio-political excess, bodies who are classified as non-human under the law in order to justify violence visited upon them: 'They're so weak and pathetic you find yourself hating them. They don't fight or struggle against death. They just stare at you with weak eyes. They make me want to be sick, physically. They're hardly human' (80.5). Here, the status of her subjects as 'non-human' dictated by the law is inverted into the assumption it is because they are hardly human that the law classifies them as such.

V is of course amongst these prisoners who are reduced to nothing but 'bare life' under the medical gaze. We do not gain any insight into him as a 'rich human being', but we do discover, however, that he takes his name from his cell (roman numeral "V"). This detail indicates how V derives his identity as a revolutionary from his treatment in the facility. Unlike the other victims who look at the doctor with their 'weak eyes', V turns his condition as biopolitical excess into a source of power.

This transformation is indicated by his reversal of the medical gaze. Once V has set his plan into motion, torching the facility with his home-made explosives and napalm, the doctor relates how he, to her horror, emerges out of the flames: 'And in the yard, I saw him. He had the flames behind him. He was naked... He looked at me. As if I were an insect. Oh God. As if I were something mounted on a slide. He looked at me' (83.7-9). Whereas the victims in the facility were once subjects of experiments that killed them one by one while the doctors watched them as if they were insects 'mounted on slides', the doctor feels horrified that V looks at her just as she had once looked on him. In this sense, he returns the gaze of the law in its inverted form. Once excluded as an excremental excess, he turns that status as excessive against the law that does not have a place for him. His emergence functions as the 'stain' on the legal order, an irritating rem(a)inder of the exceptions and contradictions which define it.

The presentation of him as cloaked in silhouette as he walks towards the picture plane emphasizes his status as such an opaque 'stain' on the law. In a motion similar to a cinematic jump cut the narrative perspective shifts from a more neutral observational stand-point (we see the scene from the perspective of no one in particular at first, 83.7) to the subjective stand-point of the doctor (we see it through her eyes, 83.8-9), the novel isolates this stain; V's gaze falls on the doctor and on us as the supporters of any law that could justify its actions by classifying him or anyone else as non-human filth.

His anonymous appearance also contains another hidden truth: under such exceptions to the law, anyone is potentially non-human. As I hope is coming through here, this has two implications: (1) anyone could potentially be placed outside the law and (2) since this is every one's potential position, the realization of it can serve as revolutionary motivation. In my next post I want to develop, through a reading of the torture of Evey Hammond and V's critique of 'happiness', how this theme in the novel actually argues against the impulse towards humanization: we are not all 'rich human beings', we are, in the end, excrement in the eyes of the dominant state and ideological apparatuses and so we must realize ourselves as such.

Spatial Inversions

Just a quick post to open up another topic of discussion: How does Moore use notions of space to achieve targeted effects in his texts? Here I am not thinking of the spaces between panels - unique to the comic book medium - that Scott McCloud describes as "gutters", where "in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and tranforms them into a single idea" (66 Understanding Comics). Although this is an integral part of Moore's work (e.g. Dr. Manhattan existing in a space/time continuum), I am thinking in particular of the way Moore inverts foreign physical presences in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in order to unsettle commonplace imaginative conceptions of 19th C. London.

Perhaps the most powerful character that Moore mobilizes in this respect is the enigmatic Captain Nemo, taken from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Nemo's name itself reveals his chief attribute: rootlessness. Translated into Latin, Nemo is "no man", or "no-body". An individual with elusive motivations, aside from an interest in generating scientific knowlegdge and the nebulous desire to deliver some form of comeuppance to civilized society, Nemo's primary defining trait is his freedom from governmental control. Thus, Moore's decision to include him as one of his titular League members is quite telling. By working under the auspices of the British secret service, Moore's Nemo is a frank inversion of the character that Verne gave the world. Rather than exisiting in the interstitial space of the ocean, Nemo - the nomadic, autonomous rogue of empire - becomes a force for the maintainance of British authority and power. It is for this reason that I think the Nemo of League strikes such a self-loathing posture. He practically seethes at having to pretend to be a coolie during one scene in Vol. I. I read Moore's Nemo as a representation of the coercionary force of the law. Eventually even the "no man" can be brought to heel and subordinated to the law. By bringing the "other" into the realm of the British secret service, clear and precise notions of 'Britishness' itself are problematized. It calls to mind the famous FDR quote about the leader of Nicaragua: "He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch". Such naked real politik would certainly interest an author like Moore who would see in the figure of Nemo a brilliant opening to recode him as a potent "node of intelligibility" for his readership.

In contradistinction to Nemo, I take the character of Allan Quartermain as another of Moore's spatial inversions. The hero of imperial Britain is initially found in a foreign opium den, a mere vestige of the literary figure's former glory. This, it seems to me, is another potent example of the manner in which Moore destabilizes notions of imperial space: if Nemo has been brought into the fold, Quartermain has to rehabilitated and re-inserted into the quasi-legal frame of the League. Rather than Quartermain operating as a cautionary tale, I see his presence in the series as a comment on the fulfillment of imperial desire. His is the figure of the glutton, the imperial hero who has satiated himself on the spoils of ill-gotten wealth to the point of human wreckage. Quartermain's vice - opium - has a redolent and almost overburdened associative connection to Britain's part in the opium trade of the 19th C. One can almost sense the way in which a contemporary crooked DEA figure lurks beneath his Victorian patina. With Quartermain the self has become the other. Not only does he occupy a physical space far beyond the bounds of Britain, but his drug-addled desires are those that were thought properly to exist beyond Britain's shores, the exclusive purview of the hedonistic East. It is, instead, the figure of Nemo who exercises restraint and to whom we look for strength of character.

What are some of the other ways that Moore uses space in his texts? How do notions of spatiality allow him to achieve a critical stance on the subject of the law? Are there any other examples you can think of where he effects a self/other inversion along the contours that I have described above? I will elaborate on these themes in later posts, as I am also interested in the Limehouse section of Vol.I, where the Chinese threat is found to be lurking in a subterranean (subconscious?) section of London.

Law and Violence

In his use of extra-legal violence to exact his vendetta, V seems to operate 'outside the law'. Yet, making this claim would necessarily occur against the assumed background of an otherwise peaceful socio-juridical order, which the novel makes abundantly clear does not accurately describe the regime in this near-future Britain, where violence, control, torture and intimidation are routine parts of daily life.

How then are we to perceive V's connection to the law?

Slavoj Zizek's distinction between 'subjective' and 'objective' violence could prove instructive in refining this question. According to Zizek, 'subjective violence' describes seemingly irrational outbursts perceived 'against the background of a non-violent zero-level' or, in other words, the 'normal' and 'peaceful' functioning of things (Violence 2). In contrast, 'objective violence' describes the violence which sustains 'the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent' (2). I think it is precisely this split between viewing V's actions as 'subjectively' violent (irrational outbursts against society without cause) and seeing his violence as a response to an 'objective' violence (the disavowed violence that sustains the totalitarian state) that constitutes the ideological parallax for the readers of V for Vendetta: Will they see V as a terrorist who lashes out irrationally against a peaceful order, or will they perceive the repressed background of violence that compels V to act?

V for Vendetta certainly does not approach this question from a 'neutral' standpoint: it clearly favors the later interpretation over the former. Before I develop this further however, I think it is important to note the 'political unconscious' of the text. Moore does not so much 'invent' some exotic near-future out of nothing as extrapolate his scenario from the conditions of 1980s Britain. During this period, running parallel to the American 'Reagan Revolution', Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative party gained power in England. Along with this political shift came the ideological tenets of neo-liberal ideology, which essentially claimed that 'free-market' economics lead to the prosperity, freedom and 'personal responsibility' of citizens. Yet Moore seems to draw out the repressed underside of this revolution, pointing to its implicit xenophobia as well as its disavowed militaristic bent (in the U.S. one might point to the arms race, the history of imperialism, racism of the 'war on terror' etc.). This historical shift forms the 'unconscious' of Moore's text and thus the critique of the novel should always keep in mind the historical situation as its 'absent cause' .

Returning then to the issue of law, one can see from V for Vendetta how it relies on an irrational excess that it must actively disavow in order to function. Walter Benjamin makes precisely this point in his 'Critique of Violence', in which he argues that violence is an inherent component of the law, both in terms of its 'law founding' and 'law preserving' functions. From this perspective, law is itself based in irrational excess in so far as it must transgress its own boundaries in order to maintain its monopoly on the legit mate use of violence against those individuals who might threaten it. The main point here is that violence is not that which functions outside of the law, but instead is an irrationality that although splitting law from within also sustains it.

For now I will only develop one example to support this observation. In the sequence titled 'Versions' (37-41) the fascist leader of the state (Adam Susan) rejects the notions of freedom and liberty, calling them luxuries that his country can no longer afford. Instead, he believes in the 'unity' brought about by the imposition of fascism. His language shifts into an eroticized description of his relationship to 'fate', whom he claims to love unconditionally, even if that love in completely unrequited (38-39.3). Susan's obsession with 'fate' demonstrates how fascism positions itself against the conditions of anarchy and any disunified conception of society. In place of these conditions it establishes the inevitability (or 'fate') of an authoritarian leader rising to power who will re-establish order and posits the necessity of sacrificing freedom to this imperative.

In contrast, the other 'version' comes from V, who in the following sequence also uses eroticized language to describe his relationship to 'justice', represented as a statue. Whereas he admits that he had once worshipped what the statue represents, V quickly accuses her of turning into a whore for men in 'jack boots' and 'arm bands'. He then blows the statue up. So rejecting justice, he claims that 'anarchy' is his new mistress (41.2).

The juxtaposition of these 'versions' of law brings to the surface the differing function of violence in the state and in V.

The state must disavow the violence that sustains its power and instead ground its authority in something outside of the law such as 'fate'. The use of this term cannot help but strike the reader as remarkably similar to the neo-liberal 'end of history' utopia in which it is only a matter of time before all countries submit to free-market and liberal democratic reforms. (Margaret Thatcher summarized it well with her infamous 'there is no alternative' statement.) Sliding under this utopian unity is a systematic 'objective' violence necessary to sustain it: the coercion that imposes reforms, extracts resources, exploits cheap labor, marginalizes minorities and transfers wealth to those in power. It is this 'unconscious' level that we often fail to perceive in neo-liberalism and Vendetta brings to the surface.

Against this vision we have V who refuses to ground his actions in the notion of 'law', here represented as its ideological supplement, 'justice'. Instead he takes responsibility for his acts of violence with no goal of founding a new law. He does not actively disavow violence. Instead he mobilizes it against ideas such as 'justice' which have been used to conceal a deeper more systematic violence.

From the perspective of the neo-liberal state, V's violence appears as purely 'subjective': he is some kind of mad-man who acts purely out of his own disturbed psychological state. However, Vendetta enacts a shift in perspective which forces the reader to perceive his violence against the background of a systemic 'objective' violence that produced him (he had been tortured in a concentration camp). It is precisely in this shift that I think we should locate the novel's political comment on the historical background of law in general and neo-liberalism in particular. Although the state sustains itself by framing V's violence as an 'irrational' excess that only it can eliminate, will that same state confront the violence at its own core?

Who Owns The Watchmen?

This post will go in a bit of a different direction, although a later missive will take up the issue of lack and desire in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The impetus for this post is a comment made by Moore in a recent interview conducted by Wired Magazine where he had the following to say regarding the ownership of his intellectual property: "When I returned to work for - well, I didn't return. I was kind of press-ganged. I had DC buying the company I had just signed contracts with, which is very flattering in one way and very creepy in another. It's like being stalked by a very rich demented girlfriend who can just buy your entire street in order to be close to you." While this quote is vintage Moore - overtly metaphoric and layered with sarcasm and resentment for the publishing industry - what interests me about it is the way that his own work often utilizes works found in the public domain as a pivot for his critiques. In his comments on League, Moore has often said that he mainly dealt with characters drawn from the literature of the era "because characters from literature were all that were around until roughly the end of the 19th century" (Wired). This is certainly a plausible enough justification for the methodology he employs in League, but I am more pointedly interested in squaring it with his desire - seemingly closely aligned with a Cultural Studies perspective - to effect a "unified field theory of culture that actually links up all these various works, whether they're high culture or low culture, or no culture" (Wired). Moore's choice of words here could not be more apt; in using the descriptor "links" he encapsulates the hypertextual nature of his literary output in a single phrase.

I think Moore's desire to "flatten out" culture is part and parcel of his desire to resist the loaded epithet of creative genius that is often directed at him. Moore's resistance to DC's "overtures", I think, has little to do with an apparent tension in his utilization of public domain materials (and here I mean not just in League but in Watchmen and V as well) coupled with his aversion to losing control over his own characters. I think Moore is acutely aware of how the creative figure in the digital era has become what Mark Poster has called "a rallying point for ideological jockying". But what kind of jockying? Precisely the sort that commodifies the creative genius as the unnassaible locus of intellectual property rights. Much like how the late 18th century bore witness to copyright wars launched in the name of author's rights, the unsettling and destabilization of the cultural field initiated by digitization has sparked a similar response from vested commercial interests. Call it the Metallica Syndrome.

If we grant the possibility that Moore is indeed actively and energetically resisting the label of artistic genius in order to thwart the commercialization, not of his works, but of him; how might his adoption of the role of shaman be a strategic choice rather than a personal one? In several interviews, including the extended ones conducted for the film The Mindscape of Alan Moore, the author relishes his position as shaman. It seems a convenient category for him to adopt for a number of reasons. In Mindscape Moore says the following about the role of the artist (which he has previously harmonized with his definition of the shaman): "It is not the job of the artist to give audiences what they want. It is the job of the artist to give audiences what they need...[art should] overwhelm the sensibilities of the audience [and attempt to] direct their consciousness." Here we have Moore arguing for precisely the same role as an artistic genius, although he has divested himself of the troubling label and its associated connotations with publishing. By borrowing the cloak of a shaman Moore is able to problematize the relationship between authorial genius and intellectual propertyright cases waged in their name. The rhetorical ellusiveness of his gesture is also quintessentially Moore, achieving as it does a tenous hold on a liminal space free from stringent control, creative limitation, and predetermined authorial expectations.

One of Moore's signature moves is undoubtedly his effective deployment of cultural "nodes of intelligibility"; that is, the utilization of widely recognizable culture products in a manner that recodes their associations and allows them to function as part of a loosely coherent critique of modernity. I am thinking here of how Moore takes a character like Alan Quartermain and renders him an ineffectual opiate addict, at the same time that Captain Nemo - formerly the "scourge of the empire" - becomes a far more palatable character. While League is the most obvious example of Moore's heteroglossia, I am curious to hear what other types of resonance you think he achieves in the usage of public domain material in V and Watchmen? What do you think, is it possible that Moore is not as contradictory as he appears due to his aversion to the label of genius? Is this part of the Lacanian distancing that Jason perceives in the character of Rorshach? More to come...

The Void in Rorshach --

Marc asks: “Are there other examples of characters as embodiments of 'lack' in Moore's texts? Do they function in the same way?” I’d like to answer this by exploring the obscure desire of Rorschach in Watchmen.

Walter Kovacs, when acting as the vigilante Rorschach, is carefully disguised with a latex mask which spontaneously generates symmetrical patterns: ink blots. We should read this mask as the evolution of V’s impenetrable grin: where V presents a frozen smile, Rorschach’s gaze presents an engine of ambiguous associative imagery. This imagery, while technically contentless, is filled in by the ‘patient’ who beholds it: effectively activating a psychological evaluation in the intersubjective gap.

In this gap appears the essential Lacanian question, “che vuoi?”, along with its paradoxical effects. The unlucky souls who encounter Rorschach immediately ask him this: when Moloch find R in his apartment in Chapter V: “Oh god ... Look, please what do you want with me?” The abductor-murderer cries: “Oh, god, please... what do you want?”(ch6.24) But Lacan explains that this question isn’t literal, in a sense: man’s desire is the other’s desire, so the question impinges most radically on the self. “'Che vuoi?', 'What do you want?' is the question that best leads the subject to the path of his own desire” (Ecrits). This aligns perfectly with the frightening ink-blot mask which is given positive content by the subject terrorized by Rorschach. The abductor-murderer thus immediately (and correctly) guesses what Rorschach ‘wants’: Look, I know what you think ... You think I’m something to do with that little girl. Well, well, I’m not, okay? okay?”(ch6.24)

Chapter six, which imparts the traumatic childhood of Kovacs/Rorschach, is entitled “The Abyss Gazes Also,” an excerpt of Nietzsche which is quoted more fully at the chapter’s conclusion: “...if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” This is an effective schematic of the intersubjective situation in which the abyss of the other’s desire elicits the question ‘che vuoi?’

So Rorschach becomes the abyss par excellence, his mask (which he refers to as his “face”) an effective psychological weapon which exploits the topology of subjective desire, which Zizek explains as follows: “the subject desires only insofar as it experiences the Other itself as... the site of an unfathomable desire. [...] The other not only addresses me with an enigmatic desire, it also confronts me with the fact that I myself do not know what I really desire, with the enigma of my own desire” (How to Read Lacan). We should thus ask what Rorschach wants.

Rorschach is a true abyss in one sense: he is void of sexual desire. Sexually, he desires nothing, having been traumatized by his mother’s excessive sexuality. In a wolf-man scenario, Kovacs is shown walking in on his mother (a prostitute) engaged with a john. We sense that he is never able to decipher or resolve this confusing scene, and thus he is forever bewildered and disgusted by signifiers of intimacy.

This flashback also explains the one desire that Rorschach does clearly manifest: his compulsive desire for justice is a sublimation of his sex drive.

There is another void ‘beneath’ the indecipherable desire of the other, here represented by the surface of the amorphous blot itself. Dr. Malcolm Long, Rorschach’s psychiatrist, confronts this deeper level as he considers an ink blot: “It looked more like a dead cat I once found... But even that is avoiding the real horror. The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else.”(ch6.28) This more radical alienation speaks of a monadic isolation of each subject: “we are [each] alone,” and there are no others. There is only our desire reflected back at us by the meaningless blots we encounter.

In my next posting, I’ll discuss the void(s) inherent in Dr. Manhattan. While Rorschach and Dr. M are very different heroes, they present similarly impenetrable personas which impel fear and activate guilt in anyone who encounters them. In that posting I will argue via Lacan/Zizek that these indeterminacies are generally another name for the law.

link: Slavoj Zizek, from How to Read Lacan: http://www.lacan.com/zizkubrick.htm#_ftn2