Shofar

 

Slavoj Žižek, "Shofar: The Founding Gesture That Made the Law Following Erbaba's Murder" (Goole Tranlated from Turkish)

In his classic essay written in the 1920s, Theodor Reik drew attention to the 'shofar' that howls bitterly in endless tones. The shofar is a wind instrument made of ram's horn, used in the evening ritual of the Yom Kippur contemplative day. Reik connects his shofar voice to the problematic of the murder of ancient Erbaba (Urvater, described in Totem and Taboo): The shofar, which awakens an uncanny mixture of pain and pleasure in the audience he startles with his rambling of the bullet, is, according to Reik's interpretation, the last trace left of Erbaba's life-substance; it is the endless cry of the moaning-dying-helpless-humiliated father. In other words, the shofar is the mark of 'preliminary', it is almost a loud monument of the substance of arbitrariness that is killed before the symbols come: the father whose cry of death echoes in the sound of the shofar is the 'emasculate' Keyfi-Baba (Erbaba). Reik also cites another primitive instrument similar to a geyser: The bullroarer is an instrument that imitates the blackberry of a bull slaughtered in the arena: in each bullfight, Erbaba's slaughter is staged once again.

On the other hand, according to Jewish tradition, the sound of shofar is the echo of the thunder that flashes in the heavens at the solemn moment when God hands over the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written to Moses; that is, the shofar represents the Jewish people's gesture of making the Law in the sense of their Covenant with their God. The sound of the shofar is the 'lost intermediary' between the direct vocal expression of the legendary pre-iconic life-substance and the expressive word; it represents the gesture of the soul-substance withdrawing, erasing itself, opening up space for the symbolic Law. In the case of the Shofar as becoming the 'vanishing tool', we again encounter the Grundoperation, which operates in the deep thoughts of Schelling and Hegel: this strange sound, which represents the essence of the seda that transcends itself by transforming into the snobbish words, is similar in Schelling to the unconscious action that differentiates the Logos field from the vortex of unconscious impulses. This is how psychoanalysis enables us to get out of the vicious circle that oscillates between the 'disciplinary' Word and the 'chewer'/consumer Seda: by focusing on a transcendent voice that serves as the founding gesture of the expressive word itself.

The Shofar reminds us of the impossibility of going directly from the immediate pre-symbolic life-life to the expressive word: the 'lost intermediary' between the two is the sound of dying, like the animal shouting as it dies:

As every animal dies in terror, it makes a sound, expressing the transcendence of its Self. (The singing of birds is absent from other animals because birds belong to the element of air—they belong to an expressive sound, a more scattered self.)

Seda translates meaning into itself; seda is the negative self, the desire. It is deficiency, it is the namelessness of the substance in itself...

(Hegel, Jenaer Realphilosophie)

Schelling considered the difference between the two modes of spirit: on the one hand, there is the pure ideal Spirit, which is the medium of self-clarity of rational thought; on the other side there is the manifestation of ghost, there is the resurrecting soul. Even though the shofar sound or death song has been torn away from its owner and its ghost has attained autonomy, it has not yet become a clear environment of spiritual meaning: the paradox/hairiness in the 'spiritual body' (Schelling) that this voice confronts us blurs the distinction between bodily density and spiritual clarity, just as in the case of living dead or vampires. In this sense, the Spirit/ghost difference coincides with the difference between the two Freudian fathers: on the one hand, Oedipal the symbolic agent who rules by prohibition, the dead father, and on the other hand, the shameful Erbaba. The ghost of the dying shameful Erbaba makes its voice heard, so that the Shofar may rule by the name of the Father and become the symbolic perpetrator.

In the context of the shofar, the voice left over from the murder of the father, Lacan dealt with one of his unique feats, asking a simple question: To whom does the uncanny voice of the shofar appeal? The standard answer is, of course, that the voice of the shofar is addressed to believing Jews, to remind them of the divine Law that they must obey by virtue of their covenant with God. But Lacan turns things around: the main addressee of the shofar is not the faithful community, but God Himself. What do believing Jews remind them of when they play the shofar? He is dead. Of course, at this point the horror turns into divine ridiculousness, that is, we enter the logic of the famous Freudian dream of a father who 'does not know that he is dead' (from the Interpretation of Dreams). God-Father does not know that he is dead, so he continues to deal with us in the guise of the ghost of the Master, who pretends to be alive; therefore, you need to remind him that he is dead, and as soon as he realizes that he is walking in the void in the cartoons, he will collapse like a cat that crashes to the ground. Accordingly, the function of the shofar is actually its passive sword: its startling roar is actually to make God's 'pagan' Overhead dimension passive and neutral, that is, to secure His unblemished Name to act in the name of the symbolic Covenant. In terms of the human-God covenant, the shofar voice serves to remind God of his symbolic covenant obligation and to prevent him from disturbing us with traumatic bursts of bouncer arbitrariness. In other words, the concentration of two features in the voice of shofar (the belly of the deceased Erbaba and the declaration of the Ten Commandments) draws attention to the fact that God can only exercise a legitimate reign if he is dead.

This voice, which is the monument/relic of the dying father, is certainly not something that will be erased by the Legislature: it will be constantly needed as the indestructible support of the Law. Therefore, the echo of that voice was heard when Moses was receiving the Commandments from God, that is, at the moment of the establishment of the (symbolic) decree of the Law (in that voice, Moses could hear the expression of the Commandments, while the crowd waiting at the foot of Mount Sinai could hear the endlessness of the expressionless shofar sound): The sound of the shofar (written) is the irreducible addendum of the Law. Only that voice can bestow a performative dimension on the Law, but that voice can enact the Law: without the support of this meaningless voice (the object of seda), the Law would be a piece of paper that does not bind anyone. Through the voice of the shofar, the Law attains its utterance, becomes 'subjective' and thus becomes an effective perpetrator who obliges others. In other words, the element that transforms the chain of spelling into the act of creation is the intervention of a sound.

The crucial issue is the relevance of the traumatic, shocking moment at which the Act was laid down and the sound of the shofar: the 'origin' of the Act is absolutely unthinkable as long as we remain within the law; The provision of the law presupposes that its ('illegal') origins have been 'erased from the ledger'; The performative effect of the law depends on us considering it as always-given. That is why those impossible 'origins' can only be found within the sphere of the Law in the guise of a vacuum, in the guise of a constitutive namesake; The role of fantasy is to fill that void with an imaginary origin story. (Written) The law requires that fanciful addition; If that add-on does not exist, the gap in the middle of the legal structure becomes apparent and renders the Law inoperable. The relation of sound to the (written) Law is like the relation of fantasy to synchronic symbolism: sound/fantasy replaces the unimaginable 'origin' of that structure, fills (and replaces) its lack of a founder.

Presentness and absence, thus become intricate in the shofar. This sound is the 'little piece of truth' left over from the pre-icon-Key-Father; It represents the presence of the traumatic origin of the law. But the voice of the shofar also bears witness to the authenticity of the origin of the Law; that monotonous voice is precisely the object of fantasy: it is the pure face, the object whose fascinating presence blinds the subject to the radical inconsistency of the symbolic order, the object that replaces the absence of the ultimate signifier, which is supposed to assure that the symbolic order (the 'great Other') is consistent and competent. Therein lies the ultimate paradox/argument for the shofar sound: Symbolic authority is, by definition, the authority of the dead father, the authority of the Father's-Name; but if the effect is to be seen, this authority must be based on the (fantastical) remnant of the living father, leaning on an ancient fragment that survived the murder of Erbaba.

We can now see the structural position of the strange voice of the Shofar: the Shofar sound embodies the remnant of the traumatic constituent gesture of the Word, thus freeing us from oscillating between being disciplined with the Word and being consumed by the self-pleasure of the Sedan. The lesson from the shofar seems at first glance to this: If the logos, the worded word that carries the symbolic authority, is to master the arbitrariness-narrative (enjoy-meant: jouis-sens: the sound of arbitrariness), if it is to transcend it, it must call upon another voice more traumatic than it; If the Logos is to prevail in its battle of flooding arbitrariness, both sides fighting must be voices. But then the matter remains unresolved: In what ways are these sounds relevant, which voice takes precedence? The sound of the shofar, that is, the bellow of the deceased father, cannot be considered another kind of self-consuming arbitrariness in the feminine fashion: the 'identical' of these two can only be Hegelian speculative identity. There are two modes of leftover: remainder and excess. Both of these are on the 'same side', on the side of arbitrariness against the Logos. The remainder points to his own reminder.

In algebra, the term 'remainder' refers to the amount left when one number cannot be fully divided by another; such as what happens when the substance of arbitrariness cannot be fully divided by the web of the spelling (when it cannot be done, when it cannot be expressed, when it cannot be counted). Similarly, the sound of the shofar is the object remnant-monument of the dying Arbitrary-Father: it is what remains of the constitutive gesture that makes laws, the indivisible remainder of that gesture. The relationship between the logos and the self-consuming feminine arbitrariness, on the contrary, is the relationship between the pre-established symbolic Order and its transgression: the feminine voice is exuberant according to the Law. In other words: If you move from the flood-consuming Voice to the echo of the shofar, you are shifting the tension that arises between the Law and its transgression to the internal division of the field of the Law itself: the external relationship between the Law and its transgression becomes internalized in the relationship between the Law and its own traumatic organizational gesture. As we said above, the echo of the shofar serves as a veil of fantasies that points to the mystery of the 'impossible' origins of the Law.

From Indivisible Kalan

Turkish: Işık Barış Fidaner

Notes:

See "Shofar" (Wikipedia), "The legend of Oedipe and the legend of Erbaba" Slavoj Žižek, Echo (special page), "Feminine exuberance" Slavoj Žižek, "To be named is the shadow of mourning" Jacques Derrida, "The Minimum Structure of Language", "The dead father's dream and to get along with desire" Jacques Lacan

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