Jelica Sumic-Riha 
A Matter Of Resistance 
One of the great problems we face today is what we propose to call, by 
paraphrasing Lacan, the growing impasses of the way out, or, more generally, 
the problem of resistance. This problem is all the more acute in the present 
constellation characterised by the worldwide victory of the alliance of 
capitalism and liberal democracy, insofar as this alliance seems to discredit 
the very idea of a "way out" as being ideological, Utopian and, ultimately, 
irrational. In a remarkable way, a major shift that has been taking place in 
contemporary thought over the past two decades - namely, a drift away from 
an understanding of the way out as emancipation towards an account of the 
way out in terms of resistance - signals that contemporary theorising about 
the way out has reached an impasse. 
To understand how the shift towards resistance has come to permeate 
the very activity of thought itself, and how this in turn bears upon our sense 
of the present deadlock of the way out, it may be helpful to turn to Lacan. 
His succinct remark gives us a penetrating insight into the problem: 
"In relating this misery /caused by capitalism/ to the discourse of the 
capitalist, I denounce the latter. Only here, I point out in all seriousness that 
I cannot do this, because in denouncing it, I reinforce it - by normalising it, 
that is, improving it."1 
This cryptic remark can be read in two ways. At first sight, it seems to 
convey Lacan's principled pessimism with regard to possible resistance. 
Understood in this way, Lacan's remark would seem to gesture towards the 
well-known postmodernist or poststructuralist critique of Marxism, a series 
of which appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s.2 According to this 
1 See Jacques Lacan, Television, New York: W.W: Nortin & Co., 1990, pp. 13-14. Translated 
by Jeffrey Mehlman. This point has been further elaborated in Jacques-Alain Miller's 
excellent comment on Television: "A Reading of Some Details in Television in Dialogue 
with the Audience", Newsletter of the Freudian field, Spring/Fall 1990, Vol. 4, No. 1-2, pp. 
4-30. 
2 Lyotard's "libidinal" writings in particular provide a good example of such a critique. 
See, for instance, his Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud, Economie libidinale and Des dispositifs 
pulsionnels. For a penetrat ing account of Lyotard's early writings, see Bill Readings, 
Introducing Lyotard. Art and Politics, London and New York: Routledge, 1991. 
Filozofski vestnik, XVIII (2/1997), pp. 127-152. 127 
Jelica Šumič-Riha 
critique, the fault of Marxism lies in its blind faith in the inexorable laws of 
development which will, eventually, bring about the collapse of capitalism. 
Lyotard, for instance, convincingly shows how Marxism, by trying to find 
capitalism's weak link, the final stage of its development, in short, by waiting 
for capitalism to approach "a limit which it cannot overcome", develops a 
critique that negates capitalism by merely inverting it, thus, paradoxically, 
remaining within the same framework as capitalism.3 The lesson to be drawn 
from this account could be phrased as follows: all critique of capitalism, far 
from surpassing capitalism, consolidates it. Thus, if capitalism refuses to 
collapse, to come up against the limit of its own growth and expansion, this 
is due to its structural "greediness",4 as Lacan puts it, as capitalism is nothing 
but the drive for growth: the growth of indifference as well as the indifference 
of growth. 
What we have here, then, is the reversal of the usual "progressist" 
interpretation of Marx's dictum, according to which "the limit of capital is 
capital itself, i.e. the capitalist mode of production." As is well known, this 
definition of capitalism in terms of its inherent limitation is usually read as 
an announcement of its inevitable collapse: once the capitalist relations of 
production become an obstacle to the development of the productive forces, 
capitalism will come up against a limit it cannot overcome and therefore 
face its own ruin. For Lacan's as well as for Lyotard's account of capitalism, 
this structural deadlock, this growing impasse of capitalism, is considered 
as a stimulus rather than as an impediment to its fur ther development. 
According to this account then, capitalism itself is nothing but the impasse 
of growth. By misrecognising how every objection, every obstacle to this pure 
drive for growth immediately simply provides more fuel for it, how such an 
attempt at impeding growth, instead of constituting a "way out" of capitalism, 
comes to be its condition of possibility, all critique of capitalism, be it as 
radical as Marxism, signals its surrendering, unbeknown, of course, to the 
impasses of growth. 
The preceding remarks seem to be pointing to the following conclusion: 
all resistance to capitalism is vain, since capitalism is capable of overcoming 
not only its inherent deadlock but also any attempt at resistance or protest. 
What then, would a way out of capitalist domination be if all solution seems 
to become entangled in the growing impasses of the capitalist's drive for 
growth? Instead of a critique which is, by structural necessity, caught in the 
vicious circle of the drive for growth, Lacan proposes the following solution: 
3 See Jean-François Lyotard, Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud, pp. 12-13. 
4 See Jacques Lacan, Télévision, p. 28. 
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A Matter Of Resistance 
"The more saints, the more laughter; that's my principle, to wit, the way out 
of capitalist discourse - which will not constitute progress, if it happens only 
for some."5 
How is the position of the saint to be understood in terms of resistance? 
As evidence that all resistance is illusory? This reading appears to be 
corroborated by Lacan's rejection of both a critical and an "ethical" "way 
out": the Marxist approach as well as the currently widespread practice of 
self-accusation that tends to burden thought itself with crimes it has not 
committed (Nazism, Stalinism, etc.), an idea that has been shared, as is well 
known, by the later Adorno and the majority of the leading postmodernist 
a n d / o r poststructuralist thinkers (from Lyotard and Deleuze to Nancy and 
Lacoue-Labarthe). In response to those who would be taking "all the burdens 
of the world's misery on to their shoulders", Lacan states emphatically: "One 
thing is certain: to take the misery on to one's shoulders ... is to enter into a 
discourse that determines it, even if only in protest." What Lacan proposes 
instead is the following advice: those who are "busying themselves at / t h e / 
supposed burdening, oughtn' t to be protesting, but collaborating. Whether 
they know it or not, that's what they're doing."6 
Does it mean that Lacan preaches the "heroism" of renunciation and 
collaboration? Indeed, if we are justified in using this term in connection 
with resistance, this is only on condition of its radical recasting, which implies 
the rejection of both classical positions: that of standing up against some 
immense power, on the one hand, and that of resignation, on the other. 
Though it may seem that there is no option left, Lacan puts forward a solution 
which consists, ultimately, in identification with what is left over, with the trash. 
This heroism, which could be called "the heroism of the trash" and by means 
of which Lacan designates the position of the saint since, for Lacan, to act as 
trash means "to embody what the structure entails, namely allowing the 
subject, the subject of the unconscious, to take him as the cause of the subject's 
own desire. In fact, it is through the abjection of this cause that the subject 
in question has a chance to be aware of his position, at least within the 
structure."7 
What, then, characterises the resistance of the saint-trash, in particular, 
since for the saint, says Lacan, this is not amusing? According to Lacan, the 
saint plays the doub le role of a r e m i n d e r / r e m a i n d e r : as "a cog in a 
machine", the saint, no doubt, "collaborates" in producing an effect of 
5 Ibid., p. 16. 
6 Ibid., op. cit., p. 13. 
7 Ibid., p. 15. 
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Jelica Šumič-Riha 
enjoyment, more precisely, the enjoyed-sense /joui-sens/, as Lacan calls it, 
on condition that the saint herself/himself does not and cannot participate 
in this enjoyment. On the contrary, her /h i s role is to remain a mute witness 
to this enjoyment; indeed, s /he is that instance which resists enjoyment or, 
with Lacan, s /he is "the refuse of jouissance".8 
Lacan's observations are important for our concerns here because by 
designating the saint as the site of resistance he clearly indicates that a 
resistance to capitalism, defined as a drive for growth that knows no limits, 
no beyond, can only be theorised in terms of some resistant instance which 
is, strictly speaking, neither exterior nor interior, but rather is situated at 
the point of exteriority in the very intimacy of interiority, the point at which 
the most intimate encounters the outmost. As is well known, the Lacanian 
name for this paradoxical intimate exteriority is "the extimacy". Conceived 
in terms of extimacy rather than in terms of a pure alterity, resistance 
therefore consists in the derivation, from within capitalism, of an indigestible 
kernel, of an otherness which has the potential to disrupt the circuit of the 
drive for growth. 
There have been several attempts to theorise resistance in terms of the 
indigestible kernel within capitalism itself, that is, in terms of the real. A 
solution put forward by Lyotard consists in revealing "another libidinal 
apparatus, still unclear, difficult to identify.... in a non-dialectical, non-critical 
relation, incommensurable with that of kapital."9 In a typically deconstructive 
move, Lyotard exhibits what we may call the "complicity" of the two 
apparatuses. This is evident in the capacity of capitalism to maintain itself 
by drawing on the intensity of the unconscious drives. On the other hand, 
capitalism can never entirely subjugate the unconscious drives because their 
polymorphous perversity (i.e. their inheren t unruliness) precludes any 
attempt to bring this heterogeneous multiplicity under the rule of one 
principle, to subsume it under the law of the One. On this reading, then, 
the unconscious drives, while constituting a source upon which capitalism 
draws, an apparatus that capitalism is fully capable of "exploiting", remain 
an insurmountable obstacle for the rule of capital, an instance capable of 
subverting it; or, in Derridian terms, the libidinal apparatus represents for 
capitalism its condition of possibility and impossibility. 
Basically, what is problematic about this "libidinal" deconstruction of 
capitalism is precisely Lyotard's valorisation of the libidinal apparatus for 
its disruptive, destabilising capacity. As Bill Readings rightly points out, the 
8 Ibid., p. 17. 
9 Ibid. 
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A Matter Of Resistance 
libidinal apparatus, in Lyotard's reading, "produces a transgression for its 
own sake which is entirely indifferent to the structure it opposes."10 The price 
to be paid for this valorisation of the libidinal intensities, is, ultimately, a 
fall back into a pure alterity between the rule of capitalism and the unruliness 
of the drives: thus, the libidinal apparatus, instead of being theorised in terms 
of a relation which subverts the inside/outside opposition, comes to be 
situated wholly "outside". 
Though Lyotard's account is not without its merits, the role that the 
drives play within the rule of capital, as we shall see, is far more complex 
and ambiguous than Lyotard wants us to believe. By showing how capitalism, 
in order to preserve itself, must draw on libidinal intensities, Lyotard presents 
one side of their complicity with capitalism. What remains completely 
unworked on in his account is the way in which the drives "parasitise" the 
appara tus of capitalism; or, pu t differently, Lyotard fails to show how 
capitalism itself constitutes the condition of possibility for the functioning of 
the unconscious drives. 
This brings us back to Lacan's somewhat enigmatic expression "the 
growing impasses of civilisation" by which he, in opposition to Lyotard, who 
insists on the structural incompatibility between the commensurable law of 
capital and the incommensurable logic of the drives, tries to expose the 
structural homology between the logic of capital and the logic of drives. 
WTiile Lyotard theorises the relationship between the two apparatuses in 
terms of the repression of the drives and resistance to this repression, Lacan, 
on the other hand, does it by demonstrating how a satisfaction of the drives 
is paradoxically procured by repression, exhibiting a perfect agreement 
between the two apparatuses. 
In Lacan's reading, the structural homology and, as a consequence, 
the complicity between capitalism and the libidinal apparatus is therefore 
grounded in the fact that all obstacles - more precisely, the renunciation of 
enjoyment, the blocking of satisfaction - instead of impeding the unconscious 
drive in its blind search for satisfaction or the capitalist drive for growth, 
const i tu te that secret "cause" that sets in motion the search for the 
"satisfaction" of bo th drives: the capitalist drive for growth and the 
unconscious drive. In both cases we are dealing with some surplus, surplus-
enjoyment in the case of the unconscious drives, surplus-value in the case of 
capitalist production, intimately tied to the lack or, rather, to the impossibility 
of satisfaction. WTiat has been designated by Lacan as the growing impasses 
of civilisation or the greediness of the superego, is precisely this satisfaction 
1 0 See Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard. Art and Politics, p. 91. 
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in discontent, in dissatisfaction - that is, in the impossibility to satisfy.11 The 
growing impasses of civilisation therefore mark a point where the greediness 
of the superego and capitalist greed converge; more precisely, they mark 
the conversion of the growing impasses into the impasses of growth. In the 
light of this convergence it could be said that capitalism is simply another 
name for the superego. 
Once it is accepted that it is through the intervention of an instance that 
demands a renunciation that the drives, the capitalist drive for growth 
included, attain their satisfaction, it becomes clear that Lyotard's solution 
ultimately consists in proposing, as a means of the way out of capitalism, an 
apparatus which is caught in the vicious circle of growth, entangled in its 
impasses, or, put another way, an apparatus that is entirely dominated by the 
paradoxical dialectics of the renunciation of enjoyment and the production 
of surplus enjoyment. 
In the language of Lacan, it could be said that by assimilating resistance 
to the drive for growth with what Lacan calls the imperative of enjoyment, 
Lyotard conflates two modes of resistance: on the one hand, that which could 
be called the resistance of the superego to being integrated in the subject's 
symbolic universe, since the superego's imperative, Enjoy! or Produce! Be 
useful! is experienced by the subject as nonsensical, "mad"; and, on the other 
hand, the resistance that the subject offers to the superego, this being a 
resistance that has been elaborated by Lacan in terms of the saint-trash. And 
it is precisely this confusion of the two modes of resistance, a resistance of the 
superego with a resistance to the superego, which compelled Lyotard in his 
later writings to theorise resistance in terms of the Law and the call of justice 
rather than in terms of the Multiple. Before we move on to a consideration of 
this shift, we must examine another aspect of resistance: the way it relates to 
thought. 
A Sublime, Sentimental Mute 
An intriguing account of the transformation of the relationship between 
thought and resistance as a direct consequence of the ruin of politics can be 
found in Jean-Claude Milner's recent book, Constat.12 According to Milner, 
politics maintains its pre-eminence so long as it is grounded in the conjunction 
of thought and resistance. What is meant by politics, in this reading, is the 
1 1 See Jacques Lacan, Television, p. 28. 
1 2 SeeJean-Claude Milner, Constat. Paris: Verdier, 1992. 
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A Matter Of Resistance 
capacity of thought to produce material effects in the social domain, the 
privileged figure of these effects being the insurrection of the social body. Seen 
from this perspective, the defeat or retreat of emancipationist politics (in this 
reading, identified with politics tout court) that we have been witnessing for 
the past two decades signals the incapacity of contemporary thought to translate 
its effects into resistance. 
What is striking about Milner's account is the judiciousness with which 
the negative implications of the process of dis-union, of the drifting apart of 
thought and rebellion that we are witness to today, are brought to the fore: 
thought ceases to be politically subversive; indeed, thought is worth its name 
only by being conservative, hostile to all forms of rebellion, while rebellion, 
on the other hand, is true to its nature only by being "brute", unruly. Put 
another way, thought marks the dissociation from rebellion by its growing 
powerlessness to produce material effects in the political and the social field, 
whereas rebellion records its break with thought by turning into a resistance 
against thought. 
The present antinomic relationship between thought and resistance can 
thus be accounted for in terms of a forced choice between "I am (not)" and 
"I am (not) thinking".13 Confronted with the disjunction, according to which 
I am there where I am not thinking and vice versa, rebellion clearly opts for 
the "I am" and therefore for the "I am not thinking", suggesting that what is 
lost in this forced choice in any case is precisely thought of resistance - that is, 
thought which is appropriate to resistance. This is evident in postmodernist 
a n d / o r poststructuralist theorising about resistance, insofar as that which is, 
strictly speaking, a problem (namely, the antinomy between thought and 
resistance), is proposed as a solution. It should be noted, however, that this 
idea, according to which resistance is identified by rebellion against thought, 
is one that has already been announced by Adorno and later picked up and 
further developed by the contemporary partisans of resistance. Yet this shift 
of resistance towards unthought is paradoxically accompanied by an almost 
obsessive concern about the "honour of thinking".14 In what does this saving 
1 3 For further elaborations on the forced choice, see Jacques Lacan, Logique du phantasme, 
unpublished seminar (1966-67). 
1 4 The most concise definition of the "saving of thought's honour" we owe, of course, to 
Lyotard. According to Lyotard, this is one of the central stakes of contemporary thought. 
Consider the following presentation of the problem: "Given 1) the impossibility of avoiding 
conflicts (the impossibility of indifference) and 2) the absence of a universal genre of 
discourse to regulate them (or, if you prefer, the inevitable partiality of the judge) : to find, 
if not what can legitimate judgement (the "good" linkage), then at least how to save the 
honour of thinking." See Jean-François Lyotard, TheDifferend. Phrases in Dispute, Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press 1988, p. xii. Translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele. 
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of thought's honour consist? And how does the saving of honour connect with 
what it means to think and to resist? 
Adorno 's answer, which will serve as a mode l for c o n t e m p o r a r y 
postmodernists a n d / o r poststructuralist thinkers, consists in assigning to 
thought the task of bearing witness to that which resists. On the one hand, this 
task poses an almost insurmountable obstacle for thought, as it is in the nature 
of thought, says Adorno, to do violence to that which is other than thought -
that is, in Adorno's case, to things. On the other hand, Adorno maintains that 
thought is neither insensitive nor blind to the wrong done to its other: "While 
doing violence to the objects of its syntheses," says Adorno, "our thinking heeds 
a potential that waits in the object, and it unconsciously obeys the idea of making 
amends for what it has done."15 
In this reading, the capacity of thought to bear witness to "a potential 
that waits in the object" would reside in the very splitting of thought between 
the victimising instance, on the one hand, and the instance which testifies to 
the inflicted wrong, on the other. What Adorno seems to suggest here is the 
idea that thought is unable to make "amends for what it has done" to that 
which tries forever to evade it- the unthought, the ungraspable - unless thought 
turns against itself; or with Adorno, the resistant thought is, ultimately, "thought 
thinking against itself."16. Only then can thought assume the task assigned to 
it: to bear witness to resistance already operating in the world, and, at the 
same time, to augment this resistance with a resistance of its own. For Adorno, 
this resistance proper to thought consists essentially in its refusal to give in; in 
making it impossible for "a desperate consciousness to deposit despair as 
absolute,"17 in a positive manner, the resistance of thought is identified with 
"the resistance of the eye that does not want the colours of the world to fade."18 
This means that thought must not only turn against itself, to reject its temptation 
to surrender; it must also "objectivise" itself. Adorno's metaphor of the 
"lingering eye" provides a particularly good example of what is meant here 
by the objectivisation of thought: "If the thought really yielded to the object, 
if its attention were on the object and not on its category, the very objects would 
start talking under the lingering eye".19 
1 5 See T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, New York: Continuum Publishing, 1973, p. 19. 
Translated by E.B. Ashton. For an inspiring account of Adorno's conception of 
resistance, see David Toole, 'Of Lingering Eyes and Talking Things. Adorno and 
Deleuze on Philosophy since Auschwitz', Philosophy Today, Fall 1993, Vol. 37, No. 3 /4 . 
16 Negative Dialectics, p. 141. 
11 Ibid., p. 404. 
18 Ibid., p. 405. 
19 Ibid., p. 28. 
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A Matter Of Resistance 
What strikes us first about Adorno's remark is the very wording used to 
designate the way in which thought perceives the resistance of things: instead 
of seeing, the eye is supposed to hear things, since Adorno states explicitly: 
"things would start talking under the lingering eye". Instead of showing to the 
eye or talking to the ear, as one would normally expect, we have "talking" to 
the eye. 
Adorno's enigmatic remark thus seems to suggest that the "objects do 
not go into their concepts without remainder,"20 signalling in this way that 
there is an insurmountable gap between the objects and their conceptual 
"envelopes" or, to put it in Lacanian terms, between the real and the symbolic. 
Essential here, as Adorno himself convincingly argues, is that this "something 
more" in the object which forever tries to evade all conceptualisation is not 
accessible as such; rather, it is only through the cracks in the conceptual 
envelope of things that we get a glimpse of the "talking things". It is at this 
point that the lingering eye intervenes: for this eye is considered as being 
endowed with a power to separate or, in Deleuze's terms, with "a 'dissociative 
force' which would introduce a... 'hole in appearances'... a fissure, a crack."21 
Put bluntly, the cracks are not simply there, waiting to be discovered; rather, 
they testify to the intervention of the eye. Only then can we say that by focusing 
on these cracks and fissures, the lingering eye not only exhibits the gap between 
things and concepts, as that which ultimately belies the subjugating identity 
imposed by the concept, but also allows us to see the thing in its "becoming", 
as Adorno puts it. To use Deleuze's no less fitting definition, it exhibits a thing 
"in its excess of horror or beauty, in its radical or unjustified character."22 
Instead of staging some fantasy scene of the primal becoming of things 
in their substantial fullness - a scene in which things expose themselves to our 
gaze as they "really" are - we will insist that Adorno's theorisation of resistance 
can only be productive if the idea of such a fullness is discarded. It is true that 
it is only through cracks espied by the lingering eye in the conceptual envelope 
of things that we get a glimpse of the "abundance", the reserve of possibilities 
of what things could have become. Yet these possibilities, as Adorno 
convincingly points out, are always-already missed opportunities. Thus, to see 
a thing in its becoming is to glimpse what Adorno calls "the possibility of which 
their reality has cheated objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one."23 
20 Ibid., p. 5. 
2 1 See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 
1989, p. 167. 
22 Ibid., p. 20. 
23 Negative Dialectics, p. 52. 
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Jelica Šumič-Riha 
This becoming of things that is, strictly speaking, given only in retrospect, 
through cracks and fissures in their symbolic envelope, is no doubt a fantasy, 
a utopia, says Adorno. Nonetheless, this utopia yields hope. This yielding 
of hope is all the more paradoxical since it is grounded in a fantasy, staging 
not what a thing could have become but rather what it has failed to become; 
in short, it is grounded in the thing's failure to become the thing, i.e. in the 
failed thing. 
The evoked failure of the thing as exposed by the lingering eye indicates 
that the link between the excess of the thing and the dissociative power of 
the lingering eye is more complicated than may appear at first glance. In 
Adorno's account, this relationship is represented, enacted, by way of an 
impossible encounter between the eye and the "talking" things. How are we 
to account for this "impossible" encounter, an encounter which, because of 
the incommensurability between the organ of perception and the object of 
perception, is doomed to failure from the start, and in what way does it relate 
to resistance? 
It is stunning how Adorno's account about thought's bearing witness to 
the resistance of things seems to anticipate what Lacan theorised in terms of 
a chasm between the eye and the gaze. As is well known, Lacan, in his efforts 
to theorise the status of the subject in the scopic field, starts with the 
assumption that there is a pre-existence of a given-to-be-seen to the seen. In 
a similar way, by introducing the lingering eye into the picture, Adorno also 
draws our attention to the fact that, in the scopic field, we are not only the 
seers who perceive things with our eyes, that is to say, who focus on the concept 
instead of the thing since, even before the things are looked at by us, they 
are gazing at us; or, to put it in Lacan's terms, they are showing. Yet we are 
unaware of this chasm because, normally, we perceive, instead of the things, 
their "clichés", to borrow Deleuze's term, or, with Adorno, we see them as 
subjugated, mediated by language, enveloped in the conceptual schemata. 
Put another way, what we see is how they look; what we do not see is that 
they also show. 
When, then, do things start to show, to provoke our gaze? Only when 
that which is normally excluded f rom the picture, i.e. the gaze, is re-
introduced into it. This is precisely the function of the lingering eye: the 
presence of the lingering eye makes it possible for us to take our distance 
from "normal" perception, to see things in a different light, or, with Adorno, 
to see them "talking". Thus, strictly speaking, it cannot be said that the things 
are showing off for the lingering eye; rather, it is the presence of the lingering 
eye which exposes the showing of things. What Adorno urges us to trace, to 
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A Matter Of Resistance 
follow, to track is precisely the presence of the gaze in the picture, that which, 
under normal circumstances, passes unobserved. 24 
But this is only possible if we consider the lingering eye, instead, as an 
organ of perception, capable of seeing things as they "really" are, as a snare 
which provokes our gaze. The lingering eye is not there to look for the cracks 
in the conceptual envelope; rather, it is the cracks themselves, an anomaly 
in the picture "which is there to be looked at, in order to catch," says Lacan, 
"to catch in its trap, the observer, that is to say, us."25 The lingering eye is 
therefore the imagined gaze of the things themselves, yet a gaze endowed 
with the power to "call us in the picture", to photograph us. And conversely, 
insofar as the lingering eye is identified with the "resistance of the eye that 
does not want the colours of the world to fade", as Adorno puts it, we could 
say that the lingering eye is nothing other than our gaze represented as 
caught, turned into a picture. 
In what sense can it be said that the lingering eye is concerned with 
resistance if, as we have seen, the subject in the scopic field is defined as 
being under the gaze, as being photographed, in short, paralysed? To answer 
this question we must return to the relationship between the excess of the 
things and the lingering eye. The excess of the thing exposed by the lingering 
eye appears to be ambiguous to the extent that it evokes the cracks, the "hole 
in appearances", in short, the void, as it is only through such fissures in the 
conceptual envelope of things that this excess shows; yet at the same time, 
its blazing presence, "its excess of horror or beauty", seems to cover up, to 
dissimulate this void. This indecidability of the excess, or ra ther this 
convergence of the lack and the excess, has implications for our con-
ceptualisation of the way out and of the task of thought. 
Rather than reducing it to bearing witness to the excess of the thing, to 
its resistance, the task of thought consists in exhibiting the thing as a place-
holder of the void, since it is only in this way that thought is capable, not 
only of rendering the installation of things by the "law" of a situation, its 
particular mode of symbolisation, radically contingent or, to use Deleuze's 
term, unjustified, but also of exploring a given situation from the point of 
view of its i n h e r e n t void, thus uncovering new, unti l now unknown, 
possibilities. This means that while Adorno models the way out on the 
2 4 "In our relation to things, insofar as this relation is constituted byway of vision and 
ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted, from 
stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it-that is what we call the gaze." 
See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, London: Penguin, 
1979, p. 73. Translated by Alan Sheridan. 
25 Ibid., op. 92. 
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Jelica Šumič-Riha 
resistance of the inexhaustible thing, we propose to conceive of it in terms 
of a double exposure, the exposure of exposure, since it is not enough to 
uncover in the conceptual envelope of things cracks and fissures through 
which things in their "excess of horror or beauty" emanate , as Adorno 
pretends to claim. What is needed in addition is "one more effort", which 
consists in exhibiting the void behind this fearful a n d / o r sublime mask of 
the thing. 
Put another way, inasmuch as the way out implies the creation of a 
new situation, it depends upon a traversing, a shift f rom the bl inding 
blaze e m a n a t i n g f r o m the t h i n g towards t he void t h a t has b e e n 
dissimulated by this fearful or sublime mask of the thing. Yet it is precisely 
this second step that Adorno, as well as the contemporary postmodernists 
a n d / o r poststructural is ts , fail to accompl ish : b l i n d e d by the blaze 
emanating from the thing, they can only powerlessly testify to that which 
has shocked them. Illuminating in this context is the way in which Deleuze 
draws parallels between the position of thought and that of "a seer who 
finds himself struck by something intolerable in the world, and confronted 
by s o m e t h i n g u n t h i n k a b l e in t h o u g h t . Between the two, t h o u g h t 
undergoes a strangle fossilisation which is, as it were, its powerlessness 
to function, to be, its dispossession of itself and the world."26 
The task that Deleuze assigns to thought consists essentially in its 
passively bearing witness to the intolerable world. However, this passivity, 
this powerlessness of thought, according to Deleuze, is no t to be seen as 
a sign of inferiority, since this would still po in t towards al l-powerful 
thought as a lost paradise. Rather, it should become our way of thinking, 
insists Deleuze, and therefore a means to restore the belief, not in a better 
or a t ruer world, as a Marxist cr i t ique would have it, b u t "in a l ink 
between man and the world,"27 or, in Adorno 's terms, a link between 
though t and things. What is ques t ionable abou t this c o n c e p t i o n of 
resistance is not so much the fact that the saving of thought ' s h o n o u r 
converts thought into a passive witness to suffering, as in the convergence 
of impotence and enjoyment: evidence of such a secret, illicit enjoyment 
that t hough t draws on its impotence can paradoxical ly be f o u n d in 
Lyotard 's e labora t ions on the d i f f e r e n d , p e r h a p s o n e of the mos t 
accomplished theories of resistance. 
It is well known that Lyotard is also c o n c e r n e d with r ema in ing 
faithful to the rupture, the cleft, though he proposes to call it the differend. 
26 Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 272. 
27 Ibid., p. 170. 
138 
A Matter Of Resistance 
It is defined as "a case of conflict between (at least) two parties that cannot 
be equitably resolved for the lack of a rule of judgement applicable to 
both arguments."2 8 As a result, no tribunal can resolve the case, either 
way, wi thout victimising one side or the other, thus render ing them 
"mute". In so far as the victim's (in)capacity to prove a wrong inflicted 
upon h i m / h e r is constitutive of a differend, it could be said that a victim 
is, indeed, a double victim: s / h e has suffered a wrong, yet is unable to 
prove it, as it is in the na tu r e of the wrong done to h i m / h e r to be 
"accompanied by the loss of the means to prove the damage."29 
Crucial to our conce rn here is Lyotard's thesis that that which, 
ultimately, testifies to the differend, to the dis-unity, is a feeling, rather 
than a concept or a phrase.30 Such feeling, which Lyotard, following Kant, 
calls the feeling of the sublime, arises when thought finds itself affected 
by some overwhelming event without being able to seize upon it. Essential 
here is that such an encounte r which shocks thought 's power to grasp is 
a n n o u n c e d by a p a r a d o x i c a l c o m b i n a t i o n of p l ea su re a n d pa in , 
exh i la ra t ion and f rus t ra t ion . The co-presence of these violent and 
ambivalent affects in itself evokes enjoyment, a paradoxical pleasure 
produced by displeasure. What concerns us here is this enjoyment: more 
specifically, it is the way in which thought secretly feeds on its impotence 
as manifested in the posture of a passive spectator overwhelmed by the 
spectacle displayed before his eyes. 
In what follows we will enquire into the implications of thought's illicit 
enjoyment as it manifests itself at the level of the constitution of the subject. 
What is important here is that the subject that concerns Lyotard is not simply 
given in advance; rather, the subject, as Lyotard is right in pointing out, can 
only emerge in the process of phrasing the wrong done to a victim or, more 
generally, in the process in which thought attempts to account for that which 
has shocked it. And it is precisely at this level that Lyotard's valuation of the 
feeling proves to be highly questionable: on the one hand, a differend is 
28 The Differend, RD: Title. 
29 Ibid., p. 5. 
3 9 The most persuasive illustration of what it might mean to testify to the wrong done to 
the victims and to their incapacity to prove it comes in Lyotard's remarks on Auschwitz. 
"Auschwitz" is presented as "a non-negatable negative", an "indigestible remainder" 
which, paraphrasing Lacan, "remains stuck in the gullet" of speculative logic. As a 
consequence, "it is not a concept that results from "Auschwitz", but a feeling, an 
impossible phrase, one that would link the SS phrase on to the deportee's phrase, or 
viceversa" (D, §104). Feeling thus signals that the very capacity to phrase - this being 
the capacity to speak and to be silent - has been suspended. 
139 
Jelica Šumič-Riha 
designated as a state in which "something 'asks' to be put into phrases, 
and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases r ight 
away,"31 thus indicating that the proper way of dealing with differends is 
to find the appropriate phrase for expressing the wrong inflicted u p o n 
the victim. According to Lyotard, the responsibility of thought lies in 
"detecting differends and in finding the (impossible) idiom for phrasing 
them."32 On the other hand, by designating "Auschwitz" as a case of a 
wrong beyond repair , a d i f f e r e n d which , by d e f i n i t i o n , c a n n o t be 
converted into a litigation (that is, into a repairable damage) , Lyotard 
erects an insurmountable obstacle to the injunct ion that "every wrong 
ought to be put into phrases". To make this point clear it suffices to ask 
this naive question: which phrase is capable of expressing the d i f ferend 
disclosed by the feeling without betraying it or smothering it in litigation? 
The only possible answer, of course, is none , as no phrase is capable of 
t ransla t ing the wrong done to the victim wi thou t d i s tor t ion . Thus , 
Lyotard's ambiguous comment that the feeling is, in itself, the impossible 
phrase should be read in both senses: as a place-holder of such a phrase 
and, at the same time, as that instance whose role is precisely to prevent 
such a phrase from "happening". 
It is precisely at this point that the question of the subject of the wrong 
arises. For Lyotard, as we have seen, the feeling bears witness to the fact 
that "an 'excess' has ' touched' the mind, more than it is able to handle."3 3 
In addi t ion , the re la t ionship be tween t h o u g h t a n d tha t which has 
"shocked" it, as Lyotard posits it, is an antinomic one: "When the sublime 
is ' there ' (where?), the mind is not there. As long as the mind is there, 
there is no sublime."34 This "e i the r /o r" alternative clearly marks the 
splitting of the subject: between the affected entity - namely, that which 
receives the "blow" - and another entity which testifies to the effects of 
this "blow". Indeed, this separation is already evoked in Lyotard's own 
enigmatic question: "What is a feeling that is not felt by anyone?... if there 
is no witness?"35 To whom should we assign feeling, then? And what, on 
closer examination, is the subject of the differend? 
31 Ibid,., p. 13. 
32 Ibid., p. 142. 
3 3 See Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and "the jews", Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press, 1990, p. 32. Translated by Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts. 
34 Ibid., p. 32. 
3 5 See Jean-François Lyotard, 'Heidegger and "the jews'": A conference in Vienna and 
Freiburg," in Political Writings, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 
Translated by Bill Reading and Kevin Geiman. 
140 
A Matter Of Resistance 
If t h e f e e l i n g "does n o t arise f r o m an expe r i ence fe l t by the 
subject,"3 6 as Lyotard maintains, then we might ask where the demand 
for phrasing comes f rom. While Lyotard is right in linking this demand 
for phrasing to the emergence of the subject, thus suggesting that the 
subject is where there is an at tempt to phrase the wrong, he appears to 
be unable to account for their simultaneity. Basically, the solution put 
forward by Lyotard can be presented in terms of an irresolvable dilemma: 
to save the singularity of the differend or the universality of the injunction. 
The first option, which insists on the idiosyncrasy of the differend, seems 
necessarily to c o n d e m n a victim to mutism, as the only appropr ia te 
expression of the wrong inflicted upon h im/her is incommunicable feeling. 
The problem with this solution resides in the fact that Lyotard, by taking 
the feeling, the affect, as a criterion of veracity (or, to put it in Lacanian 
terms, as "that which does not deceive"), Lyotard establishes the body, the 
suffering matter, as a guarantor of truth, as the Other of the Other. Once 
the feeling is posited as index sui37, the injunction that all differends should 
be phrased is revealed to be an empty one, one which is impossible to satisfy. 
It is impossible to satisfy, to the extent that a passage through "the defiles of 
the signifier" necessarily distorts the feeling. If, however, there is no phrasing 
without the misrepresentation, the "betrayal" of the feeling, this means that 
a desperate search for the proper phrase is thus revealed to be a barely 
dissimulated refusal of all attempts at phrasing. 
Lyotard's fear that the feeling of the wrong might be "translated" into 
an i napprop r i a t e phrase ( therefore smothered, distorted - in short, 
betrayed) has radical consequences for the status of the subject: by refusing 
to assume the distortion that the affect/feeling necessarily endures in the 
process of phrasing, by refusing to envelope the pain into a phrase, thus 
making it "speak" in the field of the Other, accessible to others, this pain 
remains intimate to the victim. And conversely, insofar as Lyotard seems to 
be unwilling to accept the wrong's alienation, the fact that it can only emerge 
in the field of the Other as represented by the signifier, the victim remains 
forever chained to he r /h i s pain. As a result, the only subject "appropriate" 
to the differend turns out to be a sentimental, sublime mute, condemned to 
the role of a "plaything" of the wrong inflicted upon her /h im. 
36 The Differend, § 93. 
3 7 "The feeling is, at the same time, this state and the signalling of this state. The sensus 
is index sui. " See Jean-François Lyotard, 'Sensus communis' in Judging Lyotard, ed. 
Andrew Benjamin, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 13. Translated by 
Marian Hobson and Geoff Bennington. 
141 
Jelica Šumič-Riha 
The second solut ion p roposed by Lyotard seems to be no less 
problematic. The injunction according to which all differends should be 
phrased, and which is destined precisely to prevent the psychotic, solipsistic 
solution evoked in the first answer, is valid only on condition that the feeling 
testifying to it is conceived as universal, transcendental. But this is only possible 
if there is some transcendental support capable of receiving the "blow", to 
use Lyotard's more general term which later replaced that of the wrong; 
that is to say, as something ready to be affected. That is to say, the subject 
must, in a certain sense, already be there, if only as a material, corporeal 
support: a suffering matter. Lyotard's conception of the affect thus implies 
that before there is a subject of the cogito ("I think") there is a pure capacity 
of being affected: a "pre-subject", a "subject in statu nascendi"38 as Lyotard 
describes it. 
The problem with this, unquestionably victimising conception of the 
subject, is that by presupposing an original capacity of being affected, that 
is, by presupposing an instance of a guarantee that the wrong will be received, 
the subject of the wrong, which emerges in the process of its phrasing, 
remains ultimately indiscernible, confla ted with the suffer ing matter. 
Consequently, both options opened up by Lyotard's dilemma prove to be 
problematic: though the first option preserves the wrong in its radically 
unrecognised nature, this is only possible on condit ion that the wrong 
inflicted upon the victim remains "unverifiable", intimate to the victim; the 
supposition of a universal, transcendental receptivity, on the other hand, 
annuls the "blow" and /o r wrong as a pure effect of surprise. 
From this it follows that there is no universal injunction demanding 
that a wrong should be "treated ", and consequently there is also no original 
receptivity destined to be affected by the "blow". Thus, contrary to Lyotard, 
who attempts to theorise the subject as divided between a pure receptivity 
destined to receive the blow and the equally passive witness who registers 
the effects of the blow, we will maintain that the the emergence of the subject 
coincides with the phrasing of the wrong. Seen from this perspective, there 
is a simultaneous "birth" of both - the subject and the wrong. This co-birth 
remains radically contingent and precarious, as no preceding demand 
universally imposes the task of handling the wrong. This simultaneity can 
only be explained if we bear in mind that the crucial feature of the wrong is 
its non-recognition or misrecognition. In order to be recognised, a wrong 
must be brought to light. However, this can only happen retroactively, with 
the emergence of an entity which not only designates itself a victim of a wrong, 
38 Ibid., p. 21. 
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A Matter Of Resistance 
but is also capable of giving voice to it; or, in Lyotard's language, an entity 
which is capable of inventing the "impossible" phrase to express the wrong. 
The relationship between the wrong and the subject can thus be articulated 
as follows: while the emergence of the subject definitly presupposes the 
existence of the wrong, this can be recognised, established as such, only once 
the subject that designates itself as the subject of the wrong emerges.39 
What is lacking in Lyotard's account is precisely the subject which would 
emerge in the process of handling the wrong. But this subject remains 
unthought to the extent that Lyotard appears to be reluctant to accept such 
a solution, as it would put into question both his injunction that all wrongs 
should be phrased, as well as the victimising conception of the subject and, 
consequently, the division between a mute suffering "human animal," to 
borrow Alain Badiou's term40, and the compassionate gaze. 
This fascinat ion with victimisation, with suffering, indicates the 
complicity between the muteness of the suffering victim and the passivity of 
the witnessing gaze. This brings us back to "the saving of the honour of 
thinking". The "saving of the honour of thinking" evokes a division of the 
subject, but also a paradoxical division which renders the emergence of the 
subject impossible, as the subject is divided between two objectified instances: 
seen from the perspective of the "blow", the subject is reduced to its material 
support, to nothing but a reminder of the mute, animal suffering; seen from 
the perspective of the injunction of the phrasing of the differends, however, 
the subject is reduced to a pure gaze witnessing the inflicted wrong. As a 
consequence, there can be, strictly speaking, no "it happens" for the subject; 
on the contrary, the subject remains forever a subject to come, a subject "in 
abeyance", whose emergence is forever differed. 
What, we might ask, motivates the saving of the honour of thinking? As 
already indicated by Adorno, it is the sense of guilt, insofar as the "smallest 
trace of senseless suffering in the empirical world" produces a sense of guilt 
(that is, reminds thought of the wrong done to things). On the one hand, 
thought seems to be guilty in advance, as it is in its nature to ignore, 
misconceive or misrepresent the wrong done to the victims; on the other 
hand, the feeling of guilt yields hope, since it testifies to the fact that thought 
3 9 It is along these lines that we propose to read Rancière's thesis, according to which 
political subjectivisation is "the enactment of equality - or the handling of a wrong." 
See Jacques Rancière, 'Politics, Identification, and Subjectivisation' in The Identity in 
Question, ed. John Rajchman, London and New York: Routledge 1995, p. 67. 
4 0 For a penetrating (though biting) critique of the victimising conception of the subject, 
see Alain Badiou, L'éthique. Essai sur la conscience du Mal, Paris: Hatier, 1993. 
143 
Jelica Šumič-Riha 
is aware of suffering, as guilt and "nothing else," says Adorno, "is what 
compels us to philosophise."41 
What is concealed in this ambiguous account, which simultaneously 
blames thought for its crimes and praises its feeling of guilt, is the way in 
which thought depends on suffering, since it is this shock which gives birth 
to the feeling of guilt and, consequently, to thought itself. From what has 
been said above, it follows that it is not the case that thought can only testify 
to the victimisation, to the wrong done to the victim, by converting itself into 
a passive spectator; rather, it is the "impotent", powerless thought which, by 
impotently gazing at the suffering, turns the subject into a mute remainder, 
a human animal that can only express its suffering by feeling, a sentimental 
mute - more precisely, it is reduced to nothing but a reminder of the wrong 
inflicted upon it. The victimisation of the subject hence appears to be a direct 
consequence of the "saving of the honour of thinking". 
Adorno and Lyotard could then be b lamed for d is regarding the 
complicity of the powerlessness of thought with victimisation. Put another 
way, if the theorists of resistance seem to be all too ready to incriminate 
thought for crimes it did not commit, this is only to exculpate it for the crime 
it did commit. In its modesty, which, in fact, is immodest, contemporary 
thought burdens itself with all sorts of horrible, unspeakable crimes, only 
to conceal the real one: its unwillingness to abandon its posture of a powerless 
gazer, which, paradoxically, proves to be yet another disguise of mastery, 
another figure of mastery. This might seem to be surprising, since it is the 
position of all-powerful thought, as evidenced by Deleuze's remark, that has 
been categorically rejected by contemporary thought precisely because of 
its pretensions to mastery. Where, then, does the mastery of thought lie? 
Insofar as testifying to the victim's misery is considered to be thought's raison 
d'être, it could be said that thought not only reduces the subject to a victim; 
in addition, by fixing the subject in the role of the eternal victim, thought 
also prevents the victim from overcoming this state, thus preventing h e r / 
him precisely from becoming the subject. 
This implies that thought's guilt lies not where Adorno or Lyotard locate 
it; rather, it lies in the very position that the thinkers of resistance propose 
as the "saving of the honour of thinking". While thought, in its urge to 
humiliate itself, is ready to sacrifice all its privileges, it is unwilling to sacrifice 
this position as the mute, compassionate witness of suffering. The problem 
with this position lies in the way in which thought, by adopting the passive 
role, comes to constitute and to sustain the victimisation. Put another way, 
41 Negative Dialectics, p. 364. 
144 
A Matter Of Resistance 
fascinated by the horrors of victimisation, thought misconceives its own role 
in victimisation, and therefore its responsibility for that situation. And 
conversely, it is only by renouncing such a position of a passive witness, which 
would, no doubt, strike a fatal blow to the "saving of the honour of thinking", 
that thought could engage in a practice of resistance whose goal is not to 
testify to the suffering but, on the contrary, to put an end to it. 
The first attempt to account for the shift from emancipation to resistance 
can thus be conceived in terms of a double defeat: defeated politics is in 
retreat, while thought, on the other hand, is reduced to being a paralysed 
witness to victimisation a n d / o r the resistance of the unthought. At this point 
we might raise a naive, yet obvious question: does the present dissociation 
preclude all subversiveness of thought, its efficacy in the domain of politics? 
Could thought still be considered subversive once the site of resistance is 
located in the unthought? From what has been said so far, it follows that an 
answer to these questions requires a rethinking of the relationship between 
thought and resistance, while taking into account the actual state of their 
dis-unity. Put this way, it appears that both solutions - modernist emancipation 
and postmodernis t resistance - must be discarded f rom the start. The 
modernist solution must be rejected because, by insisting on a fidelity to 
politics, conceived in terms of the conjunction of thought and resistance, 
politics seems to be converted into a precious treasure, an agalma\ it 
ultimately suggests that, in the final analysis, "nothing has happened". As a 
result of this denial of the breakdown of the link between thought and 
resistance, the actual "defeat" of politics is left unthought, unthematised. The 
postmodernist idolisation of resistance, on the other hand, seems to be no 
less debatable: though it marks the dissolution of thought and resistance, in 
the end it simply turns resistance against thought and, as a result, values the 
moment of the real for its intrinsic capacity for resistance, irrespective of 
the context in which it operates. 
What, then, would count as a solution to the problem once both 
alternatives are rejected? Does this not leave us in an uncomfortable position 
of the one "going against the flow"? To this end, i.e. towards the goal of 
sketching our solution, we shall begin with a brief examination of the last 
figure of resistance, namely that of the remainder that has no proper place. 
145 
Jelica Šumič-Riha 
"The Jews" and/or "The Saints": Reminder - Remainder 
One of the paradoxes of the ascetic ethics in which the "saving of 
thought's honour" is supposed to be grounded lies in the fact that such an 
ethics is far from immune to enjoyment ; rather, the contrary is t rue. 
Enjoyment, or more precisely surplus-enjoyment, is paradoxically produced 
by the programmed failure of the phrasing of the wrong. In what follows, 
we propose to tie this extraction of surplus-enjoyment to Lyotard's radical 
misconception of the affect. This requires a closer look at the knot which 
links the subject, the Other and the affect, since it is precisely along these 
lines that Lyotard tries to account for the relationship between "the jews", 
as he puts it, and the Law. 
Crucial in this respect is his reinterpretation of the Law. In contrast to 
his earlier writings - where the instance of the Law is conceived as a restriction 
which limits the free-floating libidinal intensities, the One which strives to 
subjugate to itself the Multiple - from Just Gaming onwards, Lyotard theorises 
the Law as the place-holder of the Other, i.e. the Law that imposes an 
obligation which is identified with the call of justice. According to Lyotard, 
this Law is always already there, yet we do not know what it says, not even 
from where it comes to us. Yet in spite of that the Law plays the role of the 
Other that has to be always presupposed a n d / o r invented by our doing and 
saying. In these terms, one is always in a position of an addressee, of being 
obliged. One is obliged to act in accordance with the Law, even though the 
Law does not state what or what not to do. Ultimately, it is up to the subject 
to decide what the Law demands. The paradox of this enigmatic Law, as 
Lyotard convincingly argues, resides in the fact that the place of the sender, 
of the subject of the enunciation of the Law, is left vacant.42 Where, then, 
does this obligation come from? 
Using Freud's idea of Nachträglichkeit, Lyotard offers an account of how 
this obligation before the Law may have struck us originally with excessive, 
overwhelming power, and how it continues to have a hold over us. This 
implies that the obligation must be considered as a fact, suggesting that the 
source of this obligation calls to us from a "past" that has never been present. 
In short, the source of obligation remains unconscious. This original 
encounter with the Law is unique among events in that it can never be known 
4 2 "Only if / t h e position of the sender / is neutralised will one become sensitive, not to 
what is, not even to the reason why it says what it says, not even to what it says, but to 
the fact that it prescribes or obliges." See Jean-François Lyotard, Just Gaming, 
Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 71. (Translated by Wald 
Godzich.) 
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A Matter Of Resistance 
directly; we only know it from its effects-affects. It is a traumatic experience, 
of which the subject shattered by it has no memory. Although the original 
encounter with the Law remains forgotten, the feeling of being obliged points 
to it nevertheless.43 As a result, Lyotard urges us to mark repeatedly the 
memory of that which cannot be remembered, to incessantly record the 
traces of this traumatic encounter with the Law. This testifying to that which 
cannot be integrated into our memory, i.e. this preservation of the traumatic 
experience in its very "impossibility", is only possible by converting the 
subject herself/himself into a living monument of the Forgotten. According 
to Lyotard, this is precisely the destiny of the "chosen" people, "the jews". 
The tradition of Western thought continually tried to deny this obligation 
before the Law, to forget the Forgotten. This is done by trying to convert, 
expel, integrate and finally exterminate those to whom that obligation is due. 
These others are "thejews", the forgotten, marginalised people of the world. 
"They are what cannot be domesticated in the procession to dominate, in 
the compulsion to control domain, in the passion for empire."44 
That is to say, "Thejews", as elaborated by Lyotard, play the role of 
the Vorstellungsreprasentanz, the representative of the lacking, "originally 
repressed" representation of "the Law". By filling out the empty place of 
the missing representation, the signifier ("thejews") evokes this void and, 
at the same time, points beyond it to that which is supposed to fill it out and 
which Lyotard calls the "Unforgotten". It is precisely this double role of the 
evocation of the void and its concealment that converts "thejews" into a 
remainder which does not find its place within a given community and its 
symbolic universe. Strictly speaking, their role is to bear witness to the original 
shock, a traumatic experience of the encounter with the Law. In this sense, 
"thejews" are that instance which embodies the void of reference of this 
traumatic experience. They are the reminder of the "first blow" and, at the 
same time, the place-holder of the lacking representation of this blow. As 
such, "thejews" occupy the place of an instance whose very instance produces 
disruptive effects in a given community. "Thejews" could then be called the 
impossible community within a community - more precisely, the real of the 
community or, quite simply, the real community. 
Lyotard is right in trying to tie the quantum of the affect which results 
from the first, "forgotten" blow to some instance whose role is to embody, 
4 3 Thus, "the Forgotten is not to be remembered for what it has been and what it is, 
because it has not been anything and is nothing, but must be remembered as something 
that never ceases to be forgotten." Heideggerand "thejews", p. 3. 
44 Heidegger and "thejews", p. 22. 
147 
Jelica Šumič-Riha 
to positivate, the vacuousness of reference of the affect. What Lyotard fails 
to see is the fact that "the jews" are not disturbing in themselves, for they 
are a structural effect of specific, singular constellation. Thus, it could be 
said that "the jews" become "the jews" in Lyotard s sense because they occupy 
the place of a remainder that disturbs the coherence of a given situational 
regime. For Lyotard, on the contrary, "the jews" seem to play this role 
irrespective of the situation, since that which constitutes their identity of a 
reminder-remainder is their specific relationship with the Law: to be the 
reminder of the call of justice, the keeper of the most precious treasure, the 
agalma. Thus, in the same way in which Lyotard chains the subject-victim to 
the wrong done to him/her, he also rivets "the jews" to the Law: as a living 
monument, "the jews" are compelled to testify to the shattering encounter 
with the Law. With respect to the unforgotten Forgotten, they play the same 
role as the affects with respet to the wrong. 
It is at this po in t that we can show a d i s t inc t ion be tween the 
psychoanalytical elaboration of the affect and that provided by the theory 
of resistance. Lacan as well as Lyotard are interested in affects only to the 
extent that they "touch the real".45 The point of departure of both approaches 
is the supposition in which the subject is affected by something indefinite, 
unanalysable, in short, by something that does not work. However, in 
opposition to the theories of resistance for whom the affect constitutes the 
beginning and the end of the process, thus ending up in passage to act, in 
the conversion of the subject herself/himself in the reminder of that which 
has affected her /h im, Lacan requires that the passage of the affect to the 
saying, in short, to the signifier. Rather than taking the affect as a criterion 
of veracity, as we have seen with Lyotard, psychoanalysis puts it into question. 
That is to say, we are dealing here with what we may call the "imperative of 
saying", the injunction to grasp that which, by definition, eludes it, i.e. the 
traumatic experience of the the "blow" (traumatic in the sense that it radically 
affects, shatters the subject, thus making it possible for the emergence of a 
new subject). Yet Lacan's imperative of "well-saying", in opposition to the 
contemporary theorists of resistance who strive to preserve the unsayable, 
the unpresentable, at all costs, invites the subject to seize on and say that 
which cannot be said. 
This "well-saying" dclinitly cannot be conceived in terms of a speculative 
dialectics, a procedure which "digests" everything that comes its way. What 
4 5 Exemplary in this sense is Lyotard's elaboration of the feeling of the sublime, since it 
evokes the failure of the power of thought. What is at stake here is the failure, the 
impasse, to the extent that it evokes the real, that it points to that which forever 
eludes thought, as Lyotard says, or the symbolic, in Lacan's terms. 
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A Matter Of Resistance 
is at stake here is not all-powerful thought; rather, it is thought that passes 
from impotence and powerlessness to the impossible. And it is precisely by 
this impossibility that thought "touches the real", since the real is that mode 
which manifests itself only through impasse and failures. How, then, are we 
to account for a "reconciliation" of the real and the symbolic, enjoyment 
and the signifier? Only by opening space for the real within the symbolic 
itself. This means that the relationship between the symbolic and the real 
can only be conceived in terms of extimacy: the real (enjoyment for Lacan) 
is not wholly "outside"; rather, it is the exterior situated in the very interiority 
of the symbolic. Thus, instead of saying, as Lyotard does, that the impossibility 
of representation points to the unpresentable or, which amounts to the same, 
that the phrasing of the wrong is structurally impossible, Lacan incites us to 
say the unsayable, even though the Other of the Other, the guarantor of such 
a phrasing, does not exist. On the contrary, according to Lacan, the "well-
saying" is possible precisely because the Other does not exist, since to express 
the unsayable involves an invention, a creation of a new idiom which does 
not exist in the field of the Other. Two conditions must be satisfied in order 
to invent a new idiom: to evacuate, to empty the substance of the suffering, 
of the pain; and second, to assume the inexistence of the Other. 
Yet it is precisely this inexistence of the Other that Lyotard's conception 
of the affect precludes from the very start. At the root of Lyotard's error lies 
his conception of the affect as that which does not deceive thus signalling 
towards the Other. For Lyotard's subject is wholly dependent on the Other 
which, although unnameable and enigmatic, is present nevertheless. Thus, 
it cannot be said that the subject confronts the lack of the Other, for an 
enigma is not the lack of the Other. In the final analysis, no "well-saying" is 
possible, for in order to be possible the Other must be suspended, hollowed 
out. Though Lyotard starts with an unnameable, enigmatic, almost empty 
Other, he ends up by giving this Other a body, a substance, by riveting the 
subject to her /h is pain, by turning it into a living reminder of the obligation 
to the call of justice, a living monument of the traumatic encounter with the 
Law of the Other. This means that, for Lyotard as well as for Levinas, the 
subject, insofar as s / h e assumes the role of the reminder-reminder, of the 
witness, remains forever a hostage of the Other. 
In what sense can it be said that Lacan, contrary to Lyotard who assigned 
to "the jews" the role of guardians of the agalma, is not duped by the 
paradoxical functioning of the "objet a"? What makes the saint into that 
object which is stuck in the "gullet" of the rule of capital, the drive for growth, 
of incessant production? What makes it possible for the saint to evade the 
deranged machine of production? It is only the fact that s /he occupies the 
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position of "useless" trash, a remainder. What this means is that the subject 
is invited to occupy the position of the object, a position where neither the 
dialectics of the recognition nor the feeling of compassion with a victim 
operate or apply, for both of these logics presuppose the existence of the 
Other, whereas the position of the saint is possible, on condition that the 
existence of the Other is put into question. By occupying the position of the 
remainder, of the trash, the subject makes it impossible for the two logics -
that of the symbolic and that of the real or, to borrow terms from Ranciere's 
political theory, that of the police and that of the presupposition of equality 
- coincide. But the price to be paid for occupying the position of the excessive 
leftover of that which does not count and which, for that reason, finds no 
place in the given order, is her /his subjective destitution. Thus, it could be 
said that the subjectivisation of a given structure or a situation is "paid for" 
by the conversion of the subject into an object. 
Although it might seem that Lyotard also urges "the jews" to assume 
the position of the remainder and therefore of "subjective destitution", this 
is only to remind all the others, not of the inexistence of the Other but of 
the call of justice, as has been imposed on the subject by the Other. What is 
at stake in Lyotard's endeavour is the re-establishment of the reign of the 
Other, i.e. the Law, rather than its annulment. As a result, "the jews" can 
never recognise themselves in the "objet a". That is, no "jew" can identify 
with the remainder that would evoke both the inexistence of the Other and 
the vacuous reference of the subject's desire. Insofar as "the jews" are the 
guardians of the agalma, although the "grave is empty", there can be no 
occasion when the "jew", in opposition to the saint, would say of herself / 
himself: "Thus, I am that", namely, useless trash. 
How, then, are we to account for the possibility of a way out in the 
present constellation, characterised by the reign of the dominat ion of 
capitalist discourse and its drive for growth? Although it is tempting to assign 
to psychoanalysis the task of opening up the space for resistance, we are 
reluctant to espouse this solution, especially since Lacan himself predicted 
the surrender of psychoanalysis to the growing impasses of civilisation. The 
saint, on which Lacan models the analyst's refusal to be useful, to surrender 
to the demands of capitalism, is a singular structural apparatus/effect of the 
structure rather than a vocation. 
Though it might seem that there is a structural homology between the 
contemporary saint, i.e. the analyst who resists by "doing nothing", by refusing 
to satisfy the demand of capitalist discourse to produce and be useful, and 
the hysterics who resist the existing symbolic order by refusing to assume 
the role assigned to them by this order, we believe that it would be a serious 
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A Matter Of Resistance 
error to conflate the resistance offered by the saint with the hysterical "No!" 
The problem with such a solution, which is premised on hysterical refusal, 
lies in the very treasuring of refusal for its own sake. What is misconceived 
by this approach, and this has been clearly pointed out by Lacan, is the fact 
that the refusal, instead of impeding the drive for growth, sets it in motion. 
That is to say, the mere refusal of the given order, of the roles and places 
that have been distributed and fixed by the "police", to use Ranciere's term, 
in itself does not bring about a change in the situation. On the contrary, 
such an answer may well be expected, if not "orchestrated", by the "police" 
itself. 
No less contestable is the path of anamnesis, i.e. the approach which 
strives to keep alive the memory of the intractable, of the Forgotten, be it 
the Law or Revolution, by converting the subject into a remainder-reminder 
of the traumatic "blow", a mute, sublime witness to that which has shattered 
h im/he r . Not only is the path of anamnesis illusory, as the cause of the 
traumatic shattering is, by structural necessity, irretrievable, it also has serious 
consequences for the subject: the appointed "treasurer", the keeper of the 
lost treasure, the subject, remains forever chained to the enigmatic Other, 
desperately trying to guess what the Other wants from her /h im. 
Insofar as the two above-mentioned solutions seem to be two sides of 
the same problem (i.e. the imperative of the continuation of resistance at 
all costs), we might ask, then, what the "proper" solution would be to the 
problem of the way out. Since no instance, not even that of the analyst, is 
predestined to play the role of the privileged site of resistance, the emergence 
of resistance wholly depends on an incalculable, hazardous, chancy, 
precarious encounter, on the intervention of some incalculable supplement 
which Badiou calls the event. It is only in terms of such an unheard-of event 
that the working-out of a situation in terms of a way out is conceivable. This 
has radical implications for our understanding of resistance: neither a destiny 
nor a duty, neither a task nor a right, resistance is "what happens", i.e. that 
which is entirely at the mercy, as it were, of the precarious, wholly chancy 
encoun te r with the real, or, to use another term, is dependent on the 
emergence of the event. It could happen, but nothing indicates that it would 
or should happen, for instance, to this particular subject, or in this particular 
situation. 
Second, this also has consequences for the position of the subject. 
Insofar as the "blow, the encounter, precedes the subject, and insofar as the 
subject is no t there before the "blow" strikes, it could not be said that 
resistance is something which "happens" to the subject, since there is no 
transcendental support, no matter of resistance, to be moulded by the "blow". 
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Jelica Šumič-Riha 
Rather, far from being identified with a "treasurer" of the agalma, a keeper 
of the secret forever chained to the Other, the subject is nothing but the 
moment in which a given situation is seen in a different light, i.e. f rom the 
point of view of the contaminating supplement, a surplus which does not 
count but which turns everything into a miscount, thus rendering a given 
situation inconsistent, untotalisable. 
At the level of the subject, the only way out should, then, be accounted 
for in terms of a paradoxical combinat ion of resistance and fidelity, a 
combination which also calls for a "new" alliance between thought and 
rebellion. The fidelity at stake here is not to be confused with a fidelity to 
"the intractable", to borrow Lyotard's term, as a place-holder of the agalma. 
Rather, the imperative of the fidelity, which might be spelled out in terms of 
the ethics of desire ("Do not give in!") or in terms of the ethics of truth, 
such as has been elaborated by Badiou and whose fundamental maxim is 
"Continue!", aims at that which embodies "nothingness", the remainder, the 
place-holder of that which finds no place within a given situation. Although 
the imperative which demands continuation at all costs is "eternal" and 
universal, it can only be enacted once the event "happens", which as such 
cannot be calculated or prescribed. Hence, it could be said that resistance, 
insofar as it is combined with fidelity, requires patience. 
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