Another way to make the same point would be to emphasize how, in today’s
art, the gap that separates the sacred space of sublime beauty from the
excremental space of trash (leftover) is gradually narrowing, up to the
paradoxical identity of opposites: are not modern art objects more and more
excremental objects, trash (often in a quite literal sense: faeces, rotting
corpses … ) displayed in – made to occupy, to fill in – the sacred place
of the Thing? And is not this identity in a way the hidden ‘truth’ of the
entire movement? Is not every element that claims the right to occupy the
sacred place of the Thing by definition an excremental object, a piece of
trash that can never be ‘up to its task’? This identity of opposite
determinations (the elusive sublime object and/or excremental trash) – with
the ever-present threat that the one will shift into the other, that the
sublime Grail will reveal itself to be nothing but a piece of shit – is
inscribed in the very kernel of the Lacanian objet petit a.
In its most radical dimension, this impasse is the impasse that affects the
process of sublimation – not in the common sense that art production today
is no longer able to generate properly ‘sublime’ objects, but in a much
more radical sense: the very fundamental matrix of sublimation, that of the
central Void, the empty (‘sacred’) place of the Thing exempted from the
circuit of everyday economy, which is then filled in by a positive object
that is thereby ‘elevated to the dignity of the Thing’ (Lacan’s definition
of sublimation), seems to be increasingly under threat; what is threatened is
the very gap between the empty Place and the (positive) element filling it
in. If, then, the problem of traditional (premodern) art was how to fill in
the sublime Void of the Thing (the pure Place) with an adequately beautiful
object – how to succeed in elevating an ordinary object to the dignity of a
Thing – the problem of modern art is, in a way, the opposite (and much more
desperate) one: one can no longer count on the Void of the (Sacred) Place
being there, offering itself to be occupied by human artefacts, so the task
is to sustain the Place as such, to make sure that this Place itself will ‘
take place’ – in other words, the problem is no longer that of horror
vacui, of filling in the Void, but, rather, that of creating the Void in the
first place. Thus the co-dependence between an empty, unoccupied place and a
rapidly moving, elusive object, an occupant without a place, is crucial.
The point is not that there is simply the surplus of an element over the
places available in the structure, or the surplus of a place that has no
element to fill it out – an empty place in the structure would still sustain
the fantasy of an element that will emerge and fill out this place; an
excessive element lacking its place would still sustain the fantasy of an as
yet unknown place waiting for it. The point is, rather, that the empty place
in the structure is in itself correlative to the errant element lacking its
place: they are not two different entities, but the obverse and reverse of
one and the same entity – that is, one and the same entity inscribed into
the two surfaces of a Moebius strip. In other words, the paradox is that only
an element which is thoroughly ‘out of place’ (an excremental object, a
piece of ‘trash’ or leftover) can sustain the void of an empty place, that
is, the Mallarméan situation in which rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu (‘
nothing but the place will have taken place’) – the moment this excessive
element ‘finds its proper place’, there is no longer any pure Place
distinguished from the elements which fill it out.
For Lacan, creative sublimation and the death drive are strictly correlative:
the death drive empties the (sacred) Place, creates the Clearing, the Void,
the Frame, which is then filled in by the object ‘elevated to the dignity of
the Thing’. Here we encounter the third kind of suicide: the ‘suicide’
that defines the death drive, symbolic suicide – not in the sense of ‘not
dying really, just symbolically’, but in the more precise sense of the
erasure of the symbolic network that defines the subject’s identity, of
cutting off all the links that anchor the subject in its symbolic substance.
Here, the subject finds itself totally deprived of its symbolic identity,
thrown into the ‘night of the world’ in which its only correlative is the
minimum of an excremental leftover, a piece of trash, a mote of dust in the
eye, an almost-nothing that sustains the pure Place–Frame–Void, so that
here, finally, ‘nothing but the place takes place’. So the logic of
displaying an excremental object in the sublime Place is similar to the way
the Hegelian infinite judgement ‘The spirit is a bone’ functions: our first
reaction to Hegel’s ‘The spirit is a bone’ is ‘But this is senseless –
spirit, its absolute, self-relating negativity, is the very opposite of the
inertia of a skull, this dead object!’ – however, this very awareness of
the thorough incongruity between ‘spirit’ and ‘bone’ is the ‘Spirit’,
its radical negativity … Along the same lines, the first reaction to seeing
faeces in the sublime Place is to ask indignantly: ‘Is this art?’ – but it
is precisely this negative reaction, this experience of the radical
incongruity between the object and the Place it occupies, that makes us aware
of the specificity of this Place.
In other words, the point of the claim that even if I were to possess all
knowledge, without love I would be nothing, is not simply that with love, I
am ‘something’ – in love, I am also nothing but, as it were, a Nothing
humbly aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically made rich through the very
awareness of its lack. Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love:
the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way
higher than completion. On the one hand, only an imperfect, lacking being
loves: we love because we do not know all. On the other hand, even if we were
to know everything, love would inexplicably still be higher than completed
knowledge. Perhaps the true achievement of Christianity is to elevate a
loving (imperfect) Being to the place of God – that is, of ultimate
perfection.