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
In considering their respective politics, I find it interesting that there is a certain coincidence between V and Rorscach in terms of such 'voids of desire'. V represents a radical anarchist politics and Rorscach is portrayed as a sort of right-wing nut-job. We have here two irreconcilable political positions that nonetheless seem to structurally overlap.
ReplyDeleteI think that perhaps what we encounter is two formulations of how to deal with the uncertainty of 'what does the other want from me?' (Che vuoi?). In the case of V, we witness the Lacanian discourse of the 'analyst' in which the subject renounces fantasies which fill in the lack in the Other (the state, the law, etc.) and thus refuses identification with it. In contrast, Rorshcach fully identifies with and acts as the instrument of the Other, filling in the indeicpherability of the Other with Right-Wing fantasies of law and order (the Lacanian discourse of the pervert).
Both of these are of course written as the same discourse (a-$ / S2-S1). Their difference rests in the ambiguity of the objet petit a, which can either stand for the irritating lack disrupting smooth communication (discourse of the analyst who refuses to mirror the desire of the other) or the excessive jouissance inherent to a particular communicative link (discourse of the pervert who enjoys doing their duty for the other). The coincidence between V and R. is the coincidence between lack and excess in the objet a.
In light of this comparison, the lack in V seems to function much differently than in Rorschach. For V, lack represents the stubborn refusal of identification with law. He essentially has no symbolic identity and is just as assemblage of cultural 'texts' and 'ideas' with no content of his own. His desire is the true mystery. For Rorschach, his own ink-blot mask might be seen as a figure for the ambiguous desire of the state and its law-- what does it really want from me?
This idea probably deserves better articulation and more development than I have given it here, but it seems worthwhile drawing the comparison nonetheless.