The Opposite of Existence is NOT Nonexistence, but Insistence...

In his unpublished seminar on anxiety (1962-63), Lacan specifies that the true aim of the masochist is not to generate jouissance in the Other, but to provide its anxiety. That is to say; although the masochist submits himself to the Other's torture, although he wants to serve the Other, he himself defines the rules of his servitude; consequently, while he seems to offer himself as the instrument of the Other's jouissance, he effectively discloses his own desire to the Other and thus gives rise to anxiety in the Other - for Lacan, the true object of anxiety is precisely the (over)proximity of the Other's desire. That is the libidinal economy of the moment in "The Piano Teacher" when the heroine presents to her seducer a detailed masochistic scenario of how he should mistreat her: what repulses him is this total disclosure of her desire. (And is this not also perfectly illustrated by the painful scene from David Fincher's "Fight Club" of Ed Norton beating himself up in front of his boss? Instead of making the boss enjoy it, this spectacle obviously provokes his anxiety.) For this reason, the true choice apropos of historical traumas is not the one between remembering or forgetting them: traumas we are not ready or able to remember haunt us all the more forcefully. We should therefore accept the paradox that, in order really to forget an event, we must first summon up the strength to remember it properly. In order to account for this paradox, we should bear in mind that the opposite of existence is not non-existence, but insistence: that which does not exist, continues to insist, striving towards existence (the first to articulate this opposition was, of course, Schelling, when, in his "Treatise on Human Freedom" he introduced the distinction between Existence and the Ground of Existence). When I miss a crucial ethical opportunity, and fail to make a move that would 'change everything', the very nonexistence of what I should have done will haunt me forever: although what I did not do does not exist, its spectre continues to insist. In an outstanding reading of Walter Benjamin's "Thesis on the Philosophy of History, Eric Santner elaborates Benjamin's notion that a present revolutionary intervention repeats/ redeems past failed attempts: the 'symptoms' - past traces which are retroactively redeemed through the 'miracle' of the revolutionary intervention - are 'not so much forgotten deeds, but rather forgotten failures to act, failures to suspend the force of social bond inhibiting acts of solidarity with society's "others"':

symptoms register not only past failed revolutionary attempts but, more modestly, past failures to respond to calls for action or even for empathy on behalf of those whose suffering in some sense belongs to the form of life of which one is a part. They hold the place of something that is there, that insists in our life, though it has never achieved full ontological consistency. Symptoms are thus in some sense the virual archives of voids - or, perhaps, better, defenses against voids - that persist in historical experience.

Santner specifies how these symptoms can also take the form of disruptions of 'normal' social life, like participation in the obscene rituals of the reigning ideology. Was not the infamous Kristallnacht in 1938 - that half organized, half-spontaneous outburst of violent attacks on Jewish homes, synagogues, businesses, and people themselves - a Bakhtinian 'carnival' if ever there was one? We should read thist Kristallnacht precisely as a 'symptom': the furious rage of such an outburst of violence makes it a symptom - the defense-formation covering up the void of the failure to intervene effectively in the social crisis. In other words, the very rage of the anti-Semitic pogroms is a proof a contrario of the possibility of the authentic proletarian revolution: its excessive energy can be read only as a reaction to the ('unconscious') awareness of the missed revolutionary opportunity. And is not the ultimate cause of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the Communist past) among many intellectuals (and even 'ordinary people') of the defunct German Democratic Republic also a longing - not so much for the Communist past, for what actually went on under Communism, but, rather, for what might have happened there, for the missed opportunity of another Germany? Consequently, are not post-Communist outbursts of neo-Nazi violence also a negative-proof of the presence of these emancipatory chances, a symptomatic outburst of rage displaying an awareness of missed opportunities? We should not be afraid to draw a parallel with individual psychic life: just as the awareness of a missed 'private' opportunity (say, the opportunity of engaging in a fulfilling love relationship) often leaves its traces in the guise of 'irrational' anxieties, headaches, and fits of rage, the void of the missed revolutionary chance can explode in 'irrational' fits of destructive rage...

- Slavoj Zizek, "Welcome to the Desert of the Real"