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.
I think you are right about the Comedian's excessive enjoyment of his duty. He strikes me as an analogy to Rorschach who maintains a similarly perverted relationship to the law. In a way, I think all three of the texts we are covering here deal with this spectacle of the dirty obscene underside attached to the maintenance of power. In Watchmen we have the Comedian as the obscene underside of American geopolitics and global 'policing'; in Gentlemen we get the obscene underside of British empire; and of course in Vendetta we see the obscene underside of neo-liberal conservatism.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that obscene enjoyment forms the nexus of Watchmen and its comment on the law is best congealed into the 'have-a-nice-day' button with the blood streak. The opening panels isolate this element and it connects the former members of the team to one another. You'll notice that through-out the beginning of the novel, this little button circulates between the heroes until it finally ends up in the grave of the Comedian. It is a device Moore uses to link them all together, to show how all of their paths converge in a disgusting enjoyment of their outsider status.
All of them occupy some sort of excessive place outside of the law which serves as their extra kick for fighting to maintain it (exception: Dr. Manhattan, who seems to have few emotions at all). For instance, fighting crime as a vigilante enables Night-owl to achieve sexual satisfaction, Rorschach derives pleasure from doing what the law recoils from, Veidt revels in the autonomy he gets from his wealth and fame, and the Comedian enjoys the meaningless destruction that he causes. All of these characters hold a fun-house mirror up to American domestic and foreign policy and reveal their hidden truth.
The button as 'nodal-point' (point de capiton, if you'd like) is duplicated in V's frozen smile, but as I emphasized in the case of Rorscach, V seems to occupy a different structural position in so far as his goal is the inverted one of the Watchmen characters. He wants to destroy the law rather than work as the obscene supplement needed to maintain it. Once again, I think this is the result of the ambiguity of the objet petit a. I'll develop this more in another post.