La Clemenza di Kamala

Mozart - adapted

loyalty born of fear?

fear at the heart of love?

better to be feared than loved?

is love a force to be feared?

love is stronger than fear?

You can't make someone love you

You can make someone fear you.

Love of Power

Merciful power/Fearful power

terror of merciless power

desire for immortal possession of the beautiful and good

desire for eternal birth and rebirth in beauty

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On the arrival of the Fake Master 

The Jewish commandment which prohibits images of God is the obverse of the statement that relating to one’s neighbor is the ONLY terrain of religious practice, where the divine dimension is present in our lives – ‘‘no images of God’’ does not point towards a gnostic experience of the divine beyond our reality, a divine which is beyond any image; on the contrary, it designates a kind of ethical hic Rhodus, hic salta: you want to be religious? OK, prove it HERE, in the ‘‘works of love,’’ in the way you relate to your neighbors… We have here a nice case of the Hegelian reversal of reflexive determination into determi­nate reflection: instead of saying ‘‘God is love,’’ we should say ‘‘love is divine’’ (and, of course, the point is not to conceive of this reversal as the standard humanist platitude). It is for this precise reason that Christianity, far from standing for a regression towards an image of God, only draws the conse­quence from Jewish iconoclasm by asserting the identity of God and man. 

If, then, the modern topic of human rights is ultimately grounded in this Jewish notion of the Neighbor as the abyss of Otherness, how did we reach the weird contemporary negative link between the Decalogue (the traumatically imposed divine Commandments) and human rights? That is to say, within our post-political liberal-permissive society, human rights are ulti­mately, in their innermost, simply rights to violate the ten Commandments. ‘‘The right to privacy’’ – the right to adultery, done in secret, when no one sees me or has the right to probe into my life. ‘‘The right to pursue happiness and to possess private property’’ – the right to steal (to exploit others). ‘‘Freedom of the press and the expression of opinion’’ – the right to lie. ‘‘The right of free citizens to possess weapons’’ – the right to kill. And, ultimately, ‘‘freedom of religious belief” – the right to celebrate false gods.1 Of course, human rights do not directly condone the violation of the Commandments – the point is just that they keep open a marginal ‘grey zone’ which should remain out of reach of (religious or secular) power: in this shady zone, I can violate the commandments, and if power probes into it, catching me with my pants down and trying to prevent my violations, I can cry ‘‘Assault on my basic human rights!’’ The point is thus that it is structurally impossible, for Power, to draw a clear line of separation and prevent only the ‘misuse’, while not infringing upon the proper use of Rights, i.e., the use that does NOT violate the Commandments… The first step in this direction was accomplished by the Christian notion of grace. In Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, just before the final pardon, Tito himself exasperates at the proliferation of treasons which oblige him to proliferate acts of clemency:

The very moment that I absolve one criminal, I discover another. /…/ I believe the stars conspire to oblige me, in spite of myself, to become cruel. No: they shall not have this satisfaction. My virtue has already pledged itself to continue the contest. Let us see, which is more constant, the treachery of others or my mercy. /…/ Let it be known to Rome that I am the same and that I know all, absolve everyone, and forget everything.

One can almost hear Tito complaining: ‘‘Uno per volta, per carita!’’ – ‘‘Please, not so fast, one after the other, in the line for mercy!’’ Living up to his task Tito forgets everyone, but those whom he pardons are condemned to remember forever:

SEXTUS: It is true, you pardon me, Emperor; but my heart will not absolve me; it will lament the error until it no longer has memory.

TITUS: The true repentance of which you are capable is worth more than constant fidelity.

This couplet from the finale blurts out the obscene secret of clemenza: the pardon does not really abolish the debt, it rather makes it infinite – we are FOREVER indebted to the person who pardoned us. No wonder Tito prefers repentance to fidelity: in fidelity to the Master, I follow him out of respect, while in repentance, what attached me to the Master is the infinite indelible guilt. In this, Tito is a thoroughly Christian master, the practician of a logic which culminates today in the new capitalist ethics, where the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is, today, part of the game as a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploita­tion. In a superego-blackmail of gigantic proportions, the developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ the undeveloped (with aid, credits, etc.), thereby avoiding the key issue, namely, their COMPLICITY in and co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the undeveloped. Which discursive shift underlies this new form of domination?

Lacan provides the answer in L’envers de la psychanalyse, Seminar XVII (1969-1970) on the four discourses, his response to the events of 1968. The guiding premise is best captured as Lacan’s reversal of the well-known anti-structuralist graffiti from the Paris walls of 1968 ‘‘Structures do not walk on the streets!’’ – if anything, this Seminar endeavors to demonstrate how structures DO walk on the streets, i.e., how structural shifts CAN account for the social outbursts like that of 1968. Instead of the one symbolic Order with its set of a priori rules which guarantee social cohesion, we get the matrix of passages from one discourse to another: Lacan’s interest is focused on the passage from the discourse of the Master to the discourse of university as the hegemonic discourse in contemporary society. No wonder that the revolt was located in the universities: as such, it merely signaled the shift to the new forms of domination in which scientific discourse legitimizes relations of domination. Lacan’s underlying premise is skeptical-conserva­tive – Lacan’s diagnosis is best captured by his famous retort to the student revolutionaries: ‘‘As hysterics, you demand a new master. You will get it!’’ This passage can also be conceived in more general terms, as the passage from the pre-revolutionary ancien regime to the post-revolutionary new Master who does not want to admit that he is one, but proposes himself as a mere ‘servant’ of the People – in Nietzsche’s terms, it is simply the passage from the Master’s ethics to slave morality, and this fact, perhaps, provides a new approach to Nietzsche: when Nietzsche scornfully dismisses ‘slave morality’ he is not attacking lower classes as such but rather the new masters who are no longer ready to assume the title of the Master – ‘slave’ is Nietzsche’s term for a fake master.

-Slavoj Zizek, "The Structure of Domination Today: A Lacanian View"