ABSTRACT

On a side street in downtown Sao Paulo, there is a woman of about thirty, not unattractive, seated on some flattened cardboard boxes against a doorway. She has a baby, a large doll. You see her when you go out of your hotel, she is there when you go out in the morning, in the evening, when you come back in the night. She never looks at you or holds open a hand to you. A few times you have seen her wash in the fountain in the adjacent square. You have noticed the waiter from a cafeteria at the corner bring her a plate of food after mealtimes. She does not cling to the doll, rock it and coo over it, like a little girl does; often it is left to her side as she contemplates the passing scene. Like a real baby, it often seems to tire her, or bore her. It is always warm in Silo Paulo; a fixed awning overhead shelters her from the rain. She has a pile of extra clothes. She sees you, occasionally your looks cross. She seems to have all she needs. She never begs. She is not a little girl. There is nothing she needs that she does not have. There is nothing she wants. Except someone, something to love. Haggard, unrelenting, aching, craving to love.

You eat, sometimes, in the adjacent cafeteria. The waiter is young, vigorous, his face has a certain charm. He is certainly ill paid. In another country, he would be a student, or apprenticed to a trade. He certainly does not live around here; he must take a long bus ride here each morning from the far-flung favelas that extend the city. After the meal hour, he takes her a plate of food, handing it to her, not looking at her, not speaking to her. He understands it is not the craving to be loved that is in her.

She must have learned as an infant. She must have learned, playing with a stray puppy, that her frail body is full of pleasures to give. Holding that puppy but not too tight, her baby hand learned tenderness. She must have learned that her hands are organs to give pleasure. She must have learned, in contact with the puppy mouthing and licking her legs and fingers and face, that her lips are organs that give, give the pleasures of being kissed. Ordered to watch a baby sister while her mother went off to labor all day, she must have learned, that her hands, her thighs, her belly are organs that give pleasure. In a slum childhood, abandoned to the streets, she learned how little she needed or wanted. Picked up, fucked, left by a fifteen-year-old, and by how many men since, she learned how little she needed or wanted. How much all that tenderness, all that pleasure, she learned she has to give aches in her now!

One day she was gone. You blamed the police. This is the center of the city; was there some business conference for foreign investors in town, so that the police were ordered to clean up the streets, chase away the riff-raff? Was there some national commemoration to be made--some historical event to be celebrated, some statue to be unveiled?

But a few days later, you saw here again. Seated at the same doorway. With the same doll.

One day you left Sao Paulo. You saw her as you left the hotel with your bags. She is still there. You still see her.

In his book Looking Awry, An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, Slavoj Zizek (1999) writes:

Avoid as much as possible any violation of the fantasy space of the other, i.e., respect as much as possible the other's "particular absolute," the way he organizes his universe of meaning in a way absolutely particular to him... Such an ethic is neither imaginary (the point is not to love our neighbor as ourselves, insofar as he resembles ourselves, i.e., insofar as we see in him an image of ourselves) nor symbolic (the point is also not to respect the other on account of the dignity bestowed on him by his symbolic identification, by the fact that he belongs to the same symbolic community as ourselves, even if we conceive this community in the widest possible sense and maintain respect for him "as a human being"). What confers on the other the dignity of a "person" is not any universal-symbolic feature but precisely what is "absolutely particular" about him, his fantasy, that part of him that we can be sure we can never share. To use Kant's terms: we do not respect the other on account of the universal moral law inhabiting every one of us, but on account of his utmost "pathological" kernel, on account of the absolutely particular way every one of us "dreams his world," organizes his enjoyment. ...

Fantasy as a "make-believe" masking a flaw, an inconsistency in the symbolic order, is always particular--its particularity is absolute; it resists "mediation," it cannot be made part of a larger, universal, symbolic medium. For this reason, we can acquire a sense of the dignity of another's fantasy only by assuming a kind of distance toward our own, by experiencing the ultimate contingency of fantasy as such, by apprehending it as the way everyone, in a manner proper to each, conceals the impasse of his desire. The dignity of a fantasy consists in its very "illusionary," fragile, helpless character. (pp. 156-157)

PRIVATE MYTH

What Zizek here calls the "fantasy space" is not simply a floating mass of images, but "the way a person organizes his universe of meaning in a way absolutely particular to him."

A myth is the particular way a particular community organizes the environment into a meaningful pattern. Shamans and healers work to integrate individuals into the understanding of the community and into the community by dramatically reenacting the great mythic conflicts and victories in the bodies of their clients.

It happens that two societies, and two myths, enter into contact-the Islam of the Arab invaders and the old Zoroastrianism of the Persians; the white mythology of priests and missionaries and the old African mythologies of enslaved peoples in Mississippi, in Brazil, in Haiti. Two political systems, two economies, and also two mythologies pull in opposite directions in the activities and also in the understanding of people. There results not only mental confusion but physical inability to function in this field of contradictions.

It is in this in-between zone, where the two cultures and mythical systems imperfectly overlap, that marginal leaders--medicine men, faith healers, Voodoo serviteurs, cargo cult messiahs--work. They interpret the enslavement and deportation from Africa to Brazil, Haiti, and Mississippi in terms of the deportation and enslavement of the Jews in Egypt; they identify the triumphant white-skinned saints set up in the altars of Catholicism, St George and St James, with Ogun and Olodum, African gods of thunder and bloodshed. But their work is not simply to construct coherence between the universal categories of divergent myths; it is to construct coherence between the universal categories of myths and the concrete experience of individual people. They have to enable individuals to make sense of their ametropic lives.

They work piecemeal, rather like jurisprudence works. The healers and serviteurs work by "bricolage," by tinkering with the system, using parts of the Christian mythology and parts of the Aztec or Yoruba mythology to make sense of what is happening in this individual. They have to fill in the gaps; they invent, they work by inspiration. They improvise rituals and sacraments. And shamans really do, in many cases, succeed in making individuals functional again, healers really do heal.

Field anthropologists found that typically shamans and healers had undergone some severe crisis in their own lives. They had fallen into deep depressions, had fallen prey to strange sicknesses, had suffered physical and nervous collapse. Now they help other dysfunctional individuals by individualizing myths to explain their sicknesses and diagram their cure. Are shamans and healers in fact neurotics and psychotics, improvising religions which Freud called collective neuroses? Or should we say that neurotics and psychotics have shamans, witch doctors, Voodoo serviteurs inside them--or that they are shamans, witch doctors, Voodoo serviteurs occupied only with themselves? Jacques Lacan called the fantasy systems of neurotics and psychotics private myths.

But do not each of us elaborate such private myths? The common language of physical dynamics and electromagnetism, and of physiology, neurology, psychology, and pragmatic reason--the meaning-system of our culture--has to be applied to our own environment and our own bodies in order to enable us to make sense of how our bodies function or do not function in the situations in which we find ourselves. In seeking to do so, we may find the symbolic system has internal flaws, or else that it does not adequately fit our own environment. Moreover, the meaning system, the categories, are general, while we are individuals in particular situations. There is a gap; each one has to fill in, with meaningful terms, this gap. The symbols each one devises to cover over the gap, Zizek says, will be "always particular."

THE IMPASSES OF DESIRE

It is especially with regard to what we find gives us pleasure, what elicits and stimulates our desires, what gives us a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment, that the meaning-system of the culture is wanting. It is especially with regard to our own bodily cravings and carnal desires that we elaborate our fantasy, our private myth. Fantasy, Zizek says, is intrinsically bound to the sensual impulses of one's own body. Fantasy is the particular way each of us "dreams his world," "organizes his enjoyment."

There are positive forces in our body: the instinctual forces, limited and periodic, which integrate our body and make it functional, able to act to discharge the excess energies it produces. There is also in our body an insistent drive for excessive and monstrous paroxysms of pleasure in pain. This drive seizes hold of some organ of the body, and pushes it to endlessly repeat the same failed gesture. This drive dismembers and disintegrates the organism; it is a drive toward the death of the organism, a death drive, but the drive itself knows no death and knows no time; it is a repetition compulsion. The drive is held in abeyance, not by the natural integration of body parts, but from the outside, by prohibition, by law.

The prohibition, this law, is imbedded in the whole myth and all the sciences of the community. A myth, we said, is the particular way a particular community organizes the environment into a meaningful pattern, as is our language of physical dynamics and electromagnetism, and of physiology, neurology, psychology, and pragmatic reason. This symbolic system or these systems fix terms for us each of which is a relay to further terms in the context, which opens indefinitely before our advance. The symbolic system that maps the environment for us makes action--mobilized, integrated, focused, oriented action, and action with others--possible. To channel our energies into actions is to renounce immediate gratification, to renounce the drive for excessive and monstrous paroxysms of pleasure in pain. It is to pursue the limited objectives articulated in the symbolic system, each of which is a relay toward further objectives. In pursuing those objectives one pursues the lost object of drive. Then the paroxysms of pleasure in pain appear to be concentrated outside, at the far end of the objectives articulated in the symbolic system.

Fantasy reenacts the drama of the original prohibition, the original castration. It depicts the lost object of drive as something that was taken from us by another, and must be found in the other. This other is the symbolic system, but it is also the one who utters the prohibition and subjected us to the unending pursuit of symbolized objects, symbolic objectives.

Fantasies then do not depict me in a state of immediate gratification, or in excessive and monstrous paroxysms of pleasure in pain. Instead, they depict what would make me worthy of the other's devotion, they visualize what others want of me. My fantasies visualize me as being outfitted and arrayed with objects-objectives of the symbolic system.

But this fantasy is, Zizek says, illusionary, fragile, and helpless. It is fragile and helpless because the objects-objectives of the symbolic system interminably relay our desire from one object to another. The subject of desires which are structured, channeled by these fantasized possessions is empty and melancholy. The desire that is constituted in fantasies is under the illusion that the other who would come to be fascinated, mesmerized, devoted to oneself, thus arrayed with symbolic objects-objectives would or could supply, from the outside, the lost excessive and monstrous paroxysms of pleasure in pain.

Kant (1914) argued that we have no real concept of happiness. We can give this abstract idea of it, but no thinker has been able to give the working formula. None of us who pursue happiness really knows, really can say, what this happiness is. In Lacan's, and Zizek's terminology, jouissance, the excessive and monstrous paroxysms of pleasure in pain, is the objective intrinsically absent from the objects of desire. It is also absent from its concept, absent from our understanding, unrepresentable.

Desire is desire for satisfaction; it can exist only as a desire that believes it will be, or can be, satisfied. Desire persists under the illusion that, in its fantasy space, it knows what it seeks and that what it seeks is obtainable. Our fundamental fantasy, then, is the way each of us conceals the irremediable absence of the object of drive. Daniel Paul Schreber's fundamental fantasy of being a slut irresistible to God projects his desire for beatitude or jouissance and covers over its impossibility (Schreber, 1955).

But it is the illusionary, fragile, and helpless character of the fantasy space in the core of an individual, Zizek says, that gives an individual dignity. It is what makes an individual not be content with the simple satisfaction of his needs and wants, not be content with contentment.

For Kant, dignity is an end that is not at the same time a means for something further. For Zizek, dignity resides in that fantasy space which makes any state of the individual not be the end, be a means for a further end. It is what makes life not be simply the satisfaction of needs. This dignity, then, Zizek, like Kant, defines only negatively.

RESPECT

But the fantasy space in another commands our respect. Respect is attention to, considerateness for, deference to another. It is to avoid violating the otherness of the other. This otherness, "that part of him that we can be sure we can never share," is not an abstract separate identity, but the particular fantasy that organizes his enjoyment and thus his desires and his behaviors. It is the very illusionary, fragile, and helpless character of that fantasy that requires our respect.

This conception Zizek turns into a very radical critique of psychoanalytic practice:

But is not the very aim of the psychoanalytic process to shake the foundations of the analysand's fundamental fantasy, i.e., to bring about the "subjective destitution" by which the subject acquires a sort of distance toward his fundamental fantasy as the last support of his (symbolic) reality? Is not the psychoanalytic process itself, then, a refined and therefore all the more cruel method of humiliation, of removing the very ground beneath the subject's feet, of forcing him to experience the utter nullity of those "divine details" around which all his enjoyment is crystallized? (Zizek, 1992, p. 156)

Psychoanalysis works to expose Schreber's conviction that he was becoming a woman with an ass irresistible to God as a mere fantasy with no basis in reality. It works to make this one face the fact that he is in reality not a beloved child of God, that he is really the child of this father and this mother and is not a poor lost orphan, that he is a shell-shocked soldier and not a bird. Psychoanalysis is disrespect itself, the most far-reaching, deepest and most cruel humiliation.

For us to respect the fantasy space of another, we must recognize that the meaning we ourselves find in the world derives not simply from the common language of physical dynamics and electromagnetism, physiology, psychology, and pragmatic reason, but also from our own fantasy; that the meaning we find in our bodies and in our predicament is a private myth. To do so is to recognize that this myth functions to conceal from us the impossibility of what we desire. By acquiring some distance from our own fundamental fantasy, Zizek says, we recognize the contingency of the manner in which we organize our universe of meaning, and its impotence to really incorporate the other into it.

Then, paradoxically, in order for the psychoanalyst, and each of us, to respect the other, we must shake the foundations of the our own fundamental fantasy, force ourselves to experience the utter nullity of those "divine details" around which all our own enjoyment is crystallized. Then is not the means of respecting the other a refined and cruel method of humiliation exercised on ourselves? If it is the illusionary, fragile, and helpless character of the fantasy space in the core of an individual that gives an individual dignity, this dignity is no longer the dignity Kant distinguished from value, that is, from the susceptibility of implements; to change places and effect results, the exchangeability of means for ends, of goods for other goods. For Kant dignity designates a being that is a good unto itself. But for Zizek fantasy instead depicts the individual as equipped and arrayed with the goods designated by the symbolic system, in order to appear worthy of the desire of another. The fantasy visualizes what others want of me. They do not depict me as having dignity unto myself; instead they depict what would make me worthy of another's desire. "The original question of desire is not directly 'What do I want?', but 'What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I to others?" The subject that fantasizes is fundamentally a hysteric: ceaselessly questioning his or her existence, refusing to fully identify with that object others see in him or her, wondering "Am I really that?" (Zizek, 1997, 49).

Would not respect for the fantasy space of another then be respect for the response the other makes to the demands of the others who speak as spokespersons of the symbolic system, of prohibition and Law? Would it not be respect for the empty subject in his melancholy pursuit of the will-o'-the-wisps of ever only symbolic objects of desires?

One might think that respect, in psychotherapy, which is spoken of as one of the caring professions, would require care for the one who applies to the therapist for help, that is, some movement of love. Is it not in the name of our caring for the person whose head is a fantasy space that we criticize the psychoanalyst who sets out to remove the very ground beneath the subject's feet, of forcing him to experience the utter nullity of those "divine details" around which all his enjoyment is crystallized? Is not that care the divination that there are more things in heaven and earth, in that body and that personality of the one who comes to him, than the psychotherapist dreams of?

But for Zizek, it is not in actual contact with a body and personality that one loves someone, and it is not in actual contact with a body and personality that you and I and the psychotherapist comes to care for someone. To the contrary, any contact with a real flesh-and-blood other, any sexual pleasure that we find in touching another human being is inherently traumatic. Instead, it is one's own fantasy of a lover that one is captivated with.

For animals, the most elementary form, the "zero form," of sexuality is copulation; whereas for humans, the "zero form" is masturbation with fantasizing (in this sense, for Lacan, phallic jouissance is masturbatory and idiotic); any contact with a "real," flesh-and-blood other, any sexual pleasure that we find in touching another human being, is not something evident but inherently traumatic, and can be sustained only insofar as this other enters the subject's fantasy-frame. Even at the moment of the most intense bodily contact with each other, lovers are not alone, they need a minimum of phantasmic narrative as a symbolic support--they can never simply "let themselves go" and immerse themselves in "that" ... (Zizek, 1997, p. 65)

Falling in love--what Zizek called the mechanism, the automatism of love--would have to serve as the model for what could subsist as respect for the dignity of another. One has first a fantasy of the other that would give one everything, make one's existence complete. To attract that other, one depicts oneself in fantasy as worthy of a lover's total devotion; one depicts oneself equipped and arrayed with the goods depicted in the symbolic system of the culture--one identifies onself with one of the lotharios of Hollywood romances. Then abruptly someone--someone contingent, ultimately indifferent: it could be just anyone--is taken to fit that fantasy-frame, to materialize Mr. Right or Miss. Right. To love in practice involves respect for that person who is Mr. Right or Miss. Right for me--that is, respect for the fantasy Mr. Right. I am peculiarly for him or her.

VISION AND FANTASY

In ordinary usage and in our epistemology, the notion of fantasy--the visualization of what is not there--contrasts with perception--the visual materialization of what is there. But I shall argue that fantasy as a "make-believe" masking a flaw, an inconsistency in the symbolic order contrasts with visions--the visions of visionaries and seers. I argue that what Zizek analyzes as fantasy is a misfire of vision, and could only be recognized in a subject where visions are possible.

VISION

A myth is not simply the particular way a particular community organizes the environment into a meaningful pattern. It is not simply a map of the environment using more concrete symbols than those used in modern economics, sociology, political science, history, biology, physics, and astronomy. Myths are also visions, visions of visionaries and seers. Visions are not just overarching conceptual frameworks; they are visualizations. The visions of Dante, William Blake, and James Joyce, the visions of the great myths, Gilgamesh and the Mahabharata, the Odyssey and the Ring of the Niebelungen present visions of a transfigured and glorified world, or the glowing ashes of an incinerated world. The visionaries and seers do not simply represent and consecrate the established economy and politics of a community; they present another world. Neither the visions of Isaiah nor Homer, Milton, or William Blake, nor those of Simon Bolivar, Che Guevara, Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela simply make the existing environment intelligible.

The shamans and healers do not simply effect the castration that destines the troubled one to the pursuit of the objects that the symbolic system of the community designates; they consecrate his alienation from the community, they make his voice heard to the community. How could they be the agents designated by the community to integrate the one stricken with idiosyncratic notions and physical unfitness into the reason and work of the community, when the shaman is himself a heresiarch and a malingerer, when his visions improvise and his practices may be black magic? The visions of visionaries and seers call upon, call up powers that ordinary life in society does not awaken, that the symbolic system of the society does not elicit.

It is the one who has no use for visions and visionaries that undergoes the castration that subjects him to the symbolic system of his society. "He was soon to be head clerk; it was time to settle down," Flaubert writes. "So he gave up his flute, exalted sentiments, and poetry; for every bourgeois in the flush of his youth, were it but for a day, a moment, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of lofty enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet" (Flaubert, 1948, p. 308). But then there is a visionary in every strong and healthy person, in the youth, that is, the insolence, impetuousness, brashness, and bravado of that person. For in youth there is there is festivity, license, and puerile pleasure. There is an element of lubricity, of wickedness in the innocence of youth.

"Every bourgeois in the flush of his youth, were it but for a day, a moment, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of lofty enterprises." There is a visionary in youth; one's youth fixes a vision in the core of oneself: "I am a dancer!" "I am a man of the sea." "I am an explorer of all open roads." "I am a soldier of America, a revolutionary."

"'Not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form of ideology, of its 'practical efficiency,' Zizek declares. "It is only the reference to such a trans-ideological kernel which makes an ideology workable". Will he argue that to say that not all is the mediocre fantasies of the libertine--that there was indeed a poet in what has become a notary, there was a youth in what has become a bourgeois is the very form of fantasy? Will he argue that to say that not all is myth, that is, Hollywood fantasy fabricated for the masses, that there are also the visions of the Bhagavad Gita, of William Blake, of Che Guevara, Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela--is the very form of ideology?

INTENSIFICATION

Zizek here depicts fantasies as a bricolage of symbols which are fitted into flaws and inconsistencies of the symbolic system of the culture in which one finds oneself. This is to envision symbols statically, as pieces of a system. In The Plague of Fantasies, he says that fantasies provide desire with its coordinates, and thus structure, channel, our desires. But visions--the visions of visionaries and seers, and the visions of youth, and even of the bourgeois in his youth have to be envisioned dynamically in their activity of formulating, shaping, and intensifying one's insights and one's feelings.

Nietzsche envisioned value terms in a new way, not as designations of properties of things nor as terms that function to compare and rank things, but as confirmations and intensifications of surges of inner feeling (Lingis, 1994). It is in exclamations: How good I feel! How healthy I am! How real I feel! How beautiful I am! that these terms receive their sense. One says "How healthy I am!" because one feels it, and in saying it one feels still more healthy. To feel healthy is not to have the essentially negative notion of no-debility, no-sickness that we shape from the doctor's, or our own amateur-doctor's, examination of ourselves, but to feel exultant energies to burn. The exclamation "How happy I am" catches up an upsurge within, intensifies it, and makes it flare outward.

Do not the images and scripts of many of our fantasies function in the same way--not only and not always to concoct the missing pieces that would make the symbolic system of our culture meaningful for ourselves, but to confirm, consecrate, and intensify the surges of our strong and ecstatic feelings? Daniel Paul Schreber, in naming his ass a solar anus glorifies his sense of its radiant seductiveness. George Bataille's (1985) obsessive image of a third eye, opening on top of his head to look directly into the sun, intensifies his boldest and most extravagent impulses. These are not terms and images that get their sense from the context, but images that intensify our gratuitous forces, and form incendiary points that blaze new paths and new contexts about them.

MIS-IDENTIFIED GOAL AND BY-PRODUCT

Zizek assumes that the forces mobilized by drive, which takes hold of an organ and compulsively makes it repeat the same failed gesture, aim at the excessive and monstrous paroxysm of pleasure in pain, which is jouissance. He assumes that the forces mobilized by fantasy pant after the other who prohibits and therefore detains the forces of jouissance. Fantasy is illusionary, frail, and helpless, he thinks, because it has been detoured, and detoured without end, from drive. Should we not rather object that jouissance can never appear as something possible in the organism, not because it would be a death drive for a finite and temporal organism, but because it is a by-product and not a goal?

The forces mobilized by a vision in an individual as in a people, call upon powers that are not oriented toward pleasure, or the excessive and monstrous excesses of pleasure-in-pain; they aim at a work or an artwork or a revolution.

THE STRONG IMPULSES

The visionary vision that in the insolence, impetuousness, and bravado of his youth an individual finds and fixes in himself marshals the excesses, the youth, of his powers. These powers are not what Zizek identifies as the instinctual powers of an organism, those limited and periodic forces that consolidate the parts and organs into an integrated organism. Nor are they the forces of what Zizek calls drive, the repetition compulsion for excessive and monstrous paroxysms of pleasure in pain. Nor are they the forces that fantasy elicits and channels--the hysterical and melancholy forces of desire which slides from object to object. Instead the vision in oneself--I am a dancer! I am a doctor! I am a revolutionary!--calls forth and intensifies and consecrates the productive and sacrificial powers in oneself, the flesh-and-blood powers that generate energies in excess of what the organism needs or wants to satisfy its needs or wants.

But our strongest sensual impulses issue from the strengths in life. These impulses do not seek to terminate in a happiness indefinitely deferred. Weak impulses seek contentment; our strongest impulses discharge excesses of energies; they are ecstatic. The strengths in life actively seek out the surprising, the bungling, the nonfunctional, and the absurdity of a system where everything works, and bless them with peals of laughter. They seek out the corpse of the fallen hero, of the hummingbird fallen from poisoned skies, to hallow them with one's grief and tears. Laughter and tears, blessings and cursings are the strong emotions that drive us to discharge the excesses of energies in our healthy organisms upon a world full of sound and fury signifying nothing, a world of the free forces of nature, the sparkling of flowering fields and dunes of ice crystals, the shimmering of the winds and the wrath of storms.

NOT LACK: EXCESSES

The action then that the vision unleashes is borne by an inner conviction that one has energies to burn, that one is young--young still like Che Guevara at forty, young still like Nelson Mandela at eighty. This action is heedless of self, does not seek return or recompense, does not calculate profits and losses. The vision channels an ecstatic release of excess energies. One has the inner conviction that one has in one's flesh and blood kisses and caresses to squander on someone, that one has a tenderness and an excitement to give someone such as no lover has ever yet given anyone. One has the inner conviction felt in the upsurge of excess energies, felt in exhilaration--of having the strength and the spirit ahead to train and to inspire one's body to dance as no one has ever before danced, having the strength and the spirit ahead to endure all the risks, disasters, failures, and savageries of the revolution.

RESPECT: BEYOND RESPECT

What imposes respect is the sense of the other as a being affirming himself in his laughter and tears, his blessings and cursing. This respect is first the consideration that catches sight of the space in which the emotions of another extend. The jeers of strikers before the threats of the factory owner, the grief of a widow it is bravery and strength that grieves the affection of a child for a puppy, command our respect. The misery of the trapped jaguar, the exultation of the young eagle taking to flight, the playfulness of the wolf cubs command our respect.

When one respects the fantasy space of another, is it not because one does not know, from the distance respect maintains, whether what is in that fantasy space is not rather the vision of youth--the debris of a poet in the notary? But when one approaches, gets closer, one is exposed to the forces of his laughter and tears, his blessings and curses.

And for us to defer to another, to subordinate our behavior to some extent to him, is to expose ourselves to him expose ourselves to being violated, outraged, wounded by him. To approach another with respect is to expose our seriousness of purpose to the flash-fires of his laughter, to expose our cheerfulness to the darkness of his grief, let him put his blessing on our discomfiture and suffering, expose ourselves to the shock waves of his curses. For us to approach the woman seated on some flattened cardboard boxes against a doorway with a doll in Silo Paulo is to trouble, lacerate, bruise, wound her and to be wounded by her. It is through our wounds that we communicate.

This happened a long time ago. I think about twenty five years ago. A lifetime ago. It was a late November day, overcast and cold. I was coming from out West, with a younger friend, driving toward Pittsburgh. I began to speak of Pittsburgh, a city where I had taught for six years, and began to remember where I had lived, behind the bluff overlooking the city called Mount Washington, in a little house next to a huge wooded ravine. The house had two rooms, an attic loft, a basement for the furnace, toilet, and kitchen. I had rented it for thirty-five dollars a month. It was in fact left over from a miner's town that had been perched over the ravine. I had pulled up the linoleum and sanded the floors, glued burlap on the walls, built a worktable, opened again the old fireplace, planted spring bulbs in the tiny yard. Describing my old house awakened in me a desire to see it again and show it to my friend. We detoured into the city. When we arrived at the site, the house was vacant. We walked around to the back, and found the door bashed in. The neighborhood kids had in fact broken the windows, bashed at the walls, even tore up the stairs and floorboards. I stepped through the rooms, on the rafters and piles of fallen plaster, telling my friend what the rooms looked like when I lived there, filled with melancholy at the realization that this was the last time I would see this house, now in ruins, it would be torn down under orders of the city. My friend noticed some torn papers and began collecting them: they were letters torn once through the page, top to bottom. I took some pages to the window and tried to read them in the fading light. My friend kept searching for more pages in the debris, but he kept bringing me only the right or the left half of a torn page. Many pages must have been blown out of the broken windows, into the ravine below. I read these fragments out loud at the window as it got colder and darker. They were letters to a woman from a young man in prison. He recounted the news--for even in the utterly routinized days of a prison, there are occasional events: new inmates, fights. He also spoke of preparing for when he would be released: he was cutting down on cigarettes every day, doing more and more pushups in the cell, writing songs he would play when he had a guitar again. But mostly he wrote of her, invoking every part and organ of her body, recalling in graphic detail the things they did to one another's bodies in the woods, in the creek, in the truck, in an elevator, next to her mother's bedroom.

I was getting more and more troubled reading these letter fragments. I was eavesdropping on a torrid love. In the cold and dark, in the ruins of my house, reading these torn pages of a ruined love, I was overcome by a foreboding that this ended tragically. For how could she have torn up these letters? Once in your life you receive a letter, a succession of letters like that. Most people never receive letters of passion. Most people never know what it is to be loved like that. She must have worried about these letters, not known what to do with them. She had taken everything out of the house when she left. I imagined her taking the mattress, the chairs, armsful of dresses, bags of kitchen utensils into the car. The letters she had taken out of some box, left on the mantlepiece. Now she had everything, it was time to go. She turned to the letters, burning like acid on the mantelpiece. Abruptly, with violence, she snatched them up, tore them once down the middle, dropped them, and fled the house. I was sure that that was what happened.

It was now quite dark in the house, my friend brought me two more half-pages; these matched two of the pages I had laid out on the window sill. He had written: Red came to see me on Saturday and brought me news of you, and why you had stopped coming or writing to me. With firm hand he had written: No one will ever love you as I love you.

REFERENCES

Bataille, G. (1985). Visions of excess. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Flaubert, G. (1948). Madame Bovary. New York: Pocket Books.

Kant, I. (1914). Die metaphysik der sitten, I. Metaphysische anfangsgrunde der rechtslehre, Kant's gesammelte schriften, Koniglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissebschafien, Bd. VI. Berlin: G. Reimer. Translation: Ladd, J. (1965) The metaphysical elements of Justice. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

Lingis, A. (1994). The community of those who have nothing in common. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Schreber, D. P. (1955). Memeories of my nervous illness. London: W. Dawson.

Zizek, S. (1992). Looking Awry, An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Zizek, S. (1997). The plague of fantasasies. New York: Verso Books.

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By Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University

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