Next Year at Marienbad: On The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias

One of the most emblematic images of our present may be the geopolitical tensions converging around the Arctic Circle. Faced with melting polar ice—an ecological emergency that should demand a radical rethinking of our modes of production—the great powers have instead entered a low-intensity war over the routes and resources made accessible by the retreating ice. Capital seems incapable of questioning the conditions leading us toward ecological catastrophe, yet perfectly capable of turning their consequences into new opportunities for profit.

It is here, inside a Norwegian military base in the Arctic Circle, that Slavoj Žižek opens The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias, Sophie Fiennes’s new film that recently premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and the concluding installment of a twenty-year-long trilogy that began with The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) and continued with The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012). The model remains the same: a journey through films that become figures for thinking through the contradictions and symptoms that have always characterized Žižek’s work. The setting immediately establishes the film’s place of enunciation: a historical present where climate emergency and geopolitical tensions converge under the specter of world war. It is no surprise, then, that The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias begins by announcing itself as a film about the end of the world. Utopia and the end of the world, Žižek argues, are now inextricably mixed: Perhaps they must be thought together, just as capital contains both the possibility of its own overcoming and that of catastrophe. Judgment Day, however, is not simply something that may happen in the future. It is a future that already exists in our present. The problem is how to see it.

But if the apocalypse is already walking among us, empirical reality alone will not allow us to see it. This is one of the film’s most Lacanian premises: Reality is never immediately given, since it is already structured by the symbolic and ideological forms through which we perceive it. The fetishistic denial of catastrophe (je sais bien, mais quand même …) belongs to the logic of capital, which registers its crises only in terms of the accumulation of value while remaining blind to their consequences at the level of use values. Paradoxically, to see things as they are, we must close our eyes to empirical reality and look at films. It is there that unconscious desire, which empirical reality tends to foreclose, can emerge. As Lacan taught us, reality should not be interrogated through what it says about itself, but through the symptoms it would rather repress: through truth, not knowledge. After all, apocalypse means not only the destruction of the world but also its revelation: the moment when the truth of what we already are is exposed. This is how Žižek reads Apocalypse Now. Kurtz is not madness escaping the control of power but its most consistent realization: not simply the dark underside of Western rationality, but its rigorous ethical distillation, just as for Lacan, Sade carries Kantian ethics to its ultimate consequences. Catastrophe, then, must be thought not primarily in terms of time, but of space. Benjamin puts it succinctly in The Arcades Project: “That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given … Hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now.”1 Apocalypse is not the interruption of normality: Normality itself is already apocalyptic.

Yet recognizing catastrophe does not simply mean spotting it in the faces of our enemies. Žižek illustrates this through Freud’s visit to the Škocjan Caves in Slovenia: At the deepest point of the abyss, Freud recognizes the terrifying face of Karl Lueger, Vienna’s anti-Semitic mayor who paved the way to Hitler’s success. But Lueger’s name also echoes the German Lüge, “lie.” What we encounter when we descend into our ultimate depth may not be some substantial truth stripped of appearances, but a lie. The enemy is never absolutely external: Something in his face belongs to the desire through which we constitute him as an enemy.

This is a problem Žižek has never stopped posing: How can rebellion against power avoid becoming a figure of power itself? V for Vendetta stages precisely this paradox. Žižek interprets the film almost against itself, focusing on a minor scene when in a televised comedy sketch, the face behind V’s mask turns out to be that of the villain Sutler, a condensation of the speculative identity between power and rebellion against it. If power generates its own internal excess, how can we be sure our rebellion is not already part of its fantasy? Hence Lacan’s provocation to the students of May ’68: “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.”2

At this point, the problem of apocalypse becomes the problem of the act. Not every gesture of rupture constitutes an act in the psychoanalytic sense. A passage à l’acte may instead testify to the inability to transform the symbolic coordinates of a situation: an apparently radical gesture that leaves the field intact. This is how Žižek reads both the January 6 assault on the Capitol and Trump’s pseudo-activism, the paradoxical figure of an “authoritarianism without authority”: forms of transgression that ultimately reaffirm the coordinates of power. But the alternative cannot be the obsessive neurotic’s endless hesitation, accumulating enough knowledge to ensure that acting will involve no risk. The analytic act implies something radically different. It is not an action performed by an already constituted subject intervening in the world while seeking to preserve itself. An act transforms the symbolic coordinates of a situation, and the subject that emerges from it cannot be the same as the one that initiated it. The act does not express an already given subjectivity: It creates the conditions for a subject that did not exist before it.

Yet in this strange end time, the modern form of subjectivity itself has entered into crisis. The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias approaches this problem through the two Blade Runner films. In Ridley Scott’s film, the traumatic discovery is that even what seems most intimate—our memories, our thoughts, our imagination—may have been artificially produced. Blade Runner 2049 goes one step further: Another generation of replicants appear who know perfectly well that their memories are artificial. Yet rather than making them more conflictual, this knowledge makes them even more malleable. Here the fetishistic structure returns. Žižek invokes Julian Assange, whose scandal lies not simply in revealing what power wanted to keep hidden, but in demonstrating how little revelation itself is now capable of producing consequences. We can know perfectly well that we are being manipulated and continue to act as if we were not. Demystification alone does not emancipate.

The question posed by Blade Runner, then, is whether something like modern subjectivity can still exist, and what distinguishes a subject from an artificially produced entity. Žižek plays on the resonance between Deckard, Harrison Ford’s character, and Descartes. But the Cartesian reference shifts the question altogether. We need not identify some positive content that distinguishes human from replicant, as if authentic subjectivity could be defined by a checklist of properties. The Cartesian subject emerges, on the contrary, precisely when all such contents are suspended.

Here I am reminded of something I once heard a psychoanalyst say. We can change our name, country, beliefs, body, sex, physical features; contemporary technology only makes this plasticity more evident. We can radically transform the content of our identity. Yet there is something we will never be able to change: our symptom. Not because it harbors some secret, substantial truth about who we really are, but for the opposite reason: The symptom is the point at which what we are becomes a question for us. It is this interrogative dimension of the symptom that perhaps allows us to grasp the link between the subject of the unconscious and the Cartesian subject. Under transference, the symptom does not provide us with a more authentic content with which to replace our previous identifications; rather, it opens an unbridgeable distance from them. This is why, in Seminar XV, Lacan links the analytic act to transference: the condition under which the symptom can become the site of a question capable of bringing another form of subjectivity into play.

The question posed by the replicants, then, is not whether they are truly human. The human being itself is not defined by any positive content, whether biological or cultural. What matters is the properly Cartesian form in which every content of subjectivity can be suspended, allowing an evanescent and unsubstantial point of disidentification to emerge: the possibility of taking a distance from the determinations through which we know who we are. The content of our personality may be entirely alienated, even artificially produced, but the subject emerges in the possibility of putting all this into question. Here we touch on one of the film’s central claims: The core of modern subjectivity is fundamentally alien to knowledge. The Lacanian-Cartesian subject cannot be reduced to a body of knowledge that, through progressive accumulation, would finally tell us who we are and what we should do. This is also how we should understand the importance Žižek has always attributed to faith: not as a positive content opposed to knowledge, but as a point of rupture with knowledge’s claim to constitute itself as complete.

This becomes clear in Žižek’s commentary on the now almost forgotten masterpiece The Rapture. The film pushes the question of faith to the paradoxical point where it would seem capable of being fully translated into knowledge. The apocalypse has taken place, God has unequivocally manifested his existence, and the protagonist is offered entry into paradise. There is nothing left to believe in the ordinary sense: now she knows. And yet it is precisely here that faith separates itself from knowledge. She can still say no to God. Even in the face of absolute evidence, there remains a gesture that no evidence can perform in her place. The core of subjectivity thus appears as something necessarily mad from the standpoint of any possible totalization of knowledge.

This is why, in the film’s final section—probably its most beautiful, and certainly the most surprising—utopia becomes first and foremost a problem of language. Not because utopia is merely a symbolic construction, a nonexistent world we can describe in words. On the contrary, utopia concerns language because language itself “digs a hole” in reality, preventing it from constituting itself as a closed totality.3 This is the Lacanian dimension of the not-all: not the idea that reality is missing a piece that might one day complete it, but the structural impossibility of reality ever constituting itself as a Whole. It is precisely within this non-totalizability, in the hole opened by language, in a reality separated from itself, that something of the order of utopia can emerge.

Brilliantly, and surprisingly, the postapocalyptic film par excellence with which Žižek concludes his journey is Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad. A film where there is no longer any catastrophe, not even the memory of one. It is postapocalyptic because it depicts a world from which both temporality and subjectivity seem to have disappeared. Language has lost its capacity to produce difference, becoming a blah blah blah that endlessly circles back upon itself. Last Year at Marienbad could just as well be called Next Year at Marienbad: Past and future become indistinguishable in an eternity where everything repeats itself. Nothing can happen anymore, because there is no longer any space for separation to emerge.

The counterpoint to Marienbad is Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, which Žižek subjects to an unorthodox and convincing reading. Jeanne, too, initially seems to inhabit a world from which every discontinuity has been erased. After her husband’s death, her existence is entirely organized around repetition: the house, her son, preparing meals, meeting clients (given that she works as a prostitute); every gesture occupies its place within a minutely regulated temporality. Something breaks when sexual enjoyment suddenly erupts. Sexuality introduces a cut into Jeanne’s perfectly ordered universe, bringing to the surface what the compulsive repetition of her gestures had served to keep at bay. Žižek does not dwell on the detail, but it is difficult not to notice that the murder is committed with a pair of scissors: Jeanne responds to the cut introduced by sexuality with another cut, this time in the Real of the body. Why, then, does Jeanne pass to the act? For Žižek, not because the pleasure is insufficient, but because it is too much: It threatens to bring down the entire structure through which Jeanne has organized her identity. Murder becomes a desperate attempt to restore the equilibrium this experience has shattered. The real alternative would be to accept the disintegration of her identity, even though this means losing the identity through which Jeanne has lived her oppression, and from which she inevitably derived a certain masochistic enjoyment. It would mean passing through what Žižek calls the “point zero” of a madness that is nothing other than the evanescent point from which a subject can emerge.

Perhaps this point zero is what remains of modern subjectivity even at the end of the world: not an identity to defend or some substantial human content to preserve, but a point of noncoincidence that prevents reality and the subject from collapsing into one another, keeping the distance between them open.