Psychoanalysis k – Sam Franz – rks seniors Cover Letter

Terrorism

13.The aim of the war on terror – the attempt to eradicate terrorism – fails insofar as it attempts to eliminate the subject of the terrorist itself. Enjoyment, like the terrorist subject, can never be eliminated.

While most contemporary subjects don't smash rocks over the heads of those who provoke anxiety in them, the conclusion of Short Cuts is nonetheless revelatory. Much (physical and psychic) violence today occurs in response to the anxiety of the encounter with the enjoying other. Both the violence of the fundamentalist suicide bomber and the violence of the War on Terror have their origins in the experience of anxiety. Suicide bombers target sites of decadent Western enjoyment — bars, clubs, discos, the World Trade Center, and so on — in order to create a world where this enjoyment would return to the shadows and thereby cease to provoke anxiety. The true fundamentalist dreams about being able to desire once again with some respite from the proximate object and the anxiety it creates. But the actions of the suicide bomber, for their part, produce anxiety in the Western subject that leads directly to the phenomenon of the War on Terror.

Both the suicide bomber and the perpetuators of the War on Terror make the same mistake that jerry does in Short Cuts when he watches his spouse work as a phone sex operator. They see an enjoying other where there is nothing but the image of enjoyment. The suicide bomber sees Western women in revealing clothes and believes that the bare skin promises an opening to enjoyment, but this represents a failure to understand that enjoyment operates through limitations and barriers rather than through revelations and transgressions. One can never go far enough in the direction of transgression to reach real enjoyment. It is the veil, not the miniskirt, that is the true garment of enjoyment.” The enjoying Western other is the enjoying other of the suicide bombers themselves, not the enjoying other in itself. No number of successful attacks will dissipate this enjoyment because they can never hit its real source within the attacking subject itself.

Belief constitutes the source of their danger and their enjoyment. But the act of blowing oneself up for a cause in no way testifies to the completeness of one’s belief. As Pascal sees, acting as if one believes functions as a way of securing the belief of one who is not certain. The dramatic act is almost inevitably an attempt to prove to oneself that one believes rather than evidence for that belief. The subjects who have to sacrifice themselves for the cause most often have to do so in order to avoid losing faith in the cause. In short, the danger lies not in the true believer — the authentically enjoying other— but in the one who wants to believe but cannot. The violence of the War on Terror strikes out at the wrong target insofar as it aims at the true believer. The suicide bomber is not so different from the typical Western subject: both experience enjoyment assaulting them from the outside in the form of the enjoying other, and both seek ways of eradicating this enjoyment with violence before it becomes overwhelming.

The series revolves around the mysterious death of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), who is at once a prom queen, volunteer for Meals on Wheels, drug user, and prostitute. Laura's contradictory identity leads all the other characters in the show to see her as a cipher for their own ideas about enjoyment. She acts as the embodiment of the enjoying other. Inhabited by what seems to be a supernatural force, her father, Leland, kills her before the series begins. But Lynch (and cocreator Mark Frost) shows Laura's enjoyment returning in the figure of her cousin, Madeleine Ferguson (also played by Sheryl Lee). By having the same actor play both Laura and her cousin, Madeleine, Lynch stresses the continuity of the enjoyment that they convey. Leland must murder his niece in the same manner as his daughter, and the series gives no indication that this cycle of violence would ever end without his capture by the police. In fact, Lynch depicts Leland being inhabited by a supernatural force precisely in order to stress the insatiable nature of this type of violence.

The violence that targets the enjoying other is insatiable not just because the other's enjoyment cannot be destroyed but because the real goal of the violence is not eliminating this enjoyment but sustaining it. Suicide bombers attacking sites of decadent Western enjoyment do not want to eliminate that enjoyment any more than the perpetuators of the War on Terror want to put an end to the obscene enjoyment of Islamic fundamentalism. In each case, the violence has the effect of producing more outbursts of the enjoyment it professes to want to curtail. George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq made that country into a hotbed of Islamic terrorism, just as the September 11 attack aroused Western displays of violent enjoyment. If Bush and the fundamentalists were acting as enemy agents, they could not have been more effective at realizing the opposite of their stated goals. But these are not simply unwanted side effects of the violence. Violence directed at the enjoying other succeeds by failing: its failures to wipe out the enjoying other stimulate the other and thus produce even greater images of enjoyment.