Przypisy
This has been discussed by, e.g., Mariusz M. Leś in Stanisław Lem wobec utopii [Stanisław Lem in the face of utopia] (Białystok: 1998). He has argued that Lem’s output is the best ‘example of one’s sense of responsibility for words, for thoughts, all harnessed to fulfil the arduous job of exploring the mysteries of the world. Any delusions, any escapism from real problems were unacceptable for Lem. His writings have been an expression of an active stance towards reality’, (M. Leś, Stanisław Lem wobec utopii, pp. 33-34). Mariusz Leś (clearly contrary to Małgorzata Szpakowska) has also been a proponent of alternative readings of Lem’s discursive and literary works as the former enable only a partial interpretation of the writer’s novels and short stories, creating only seemingly and actually a superficial interpretative key (ibid., p. 52).
That, naturally, refers to an alignment that is not mediated by discursive reflection.
Świat na krawędzi. Ze Stanisławem Lemem rozmawia Tomasz Fiałkowski (Cracow: 2000), pp. 46-47. [Unless indicated otherwise, quotations in English were translated from Polish by M.H.Ż.].
A classic example of modernist conservatism in right-wing radical terms that was fostered by the fear of the ‘mechanical’ aspect of technology was the seminal work Perfektion der Technik (1946; translated into English as The failure of technology) by Friedrich Georg Junger, the younger brother of the well-known writer Ernst Junger. Friedrich Georg, who just like Ernst participated in the First World War, was severely wounded in the attack on Langemarck, a fact which, it would seem, largely defined his view of technology (with war being its ‘genetic element’ according to him and which de facto had never been anything else than a war with Nature, and which represented the side of the ‘Titans’ in a constant struggle with the ‘gods of the Olympus’, which had been unfolding for centuries in the basis of Christian culture). Junger intended to explicate the ‘Tytanic’ (‘demonic’) aspect of technology through, e.g., a description of the so-called ‘material battle’ (this is a strategic term) during the First World War, which led to a complete destruction of the landscape and its transformation into a barren ‘volcanic’ (exposing chthonic elements) and ‘lunar’ landscape (contrasted with, naturally, both the solar aspect of the rule of the gods of the Olympus and the harmony of Nature, which keeps those dark powers deep inside Earth). Junger’s work also features an important for this discussion association of technology with epic narration (see: F.G. Junger, The failure of technology, transl. F.D. Wieck, introduction F.D. Wilhelmsen [Flinsdale: 1949]). At this point one should remember about Derrida’s common position, supported completely by, e.g. Junger, that opposition towards mechanicality is related to the ‘totalitising’ authoritarian aspect of modern culture to an at least equal extent as technology or ‘technocracy’ is.
The same fundamental relationship between life and narration was not, of course, discovered by post-modern humanities; quite the contrary, the conviction about its existence lay at the basis of modernity appearing in, e.g., the Romantic version of German idealistic philosophy. As Katarzyna Filutowska argued in System i opowieść. Filozofia narracyjna Schellinga w latach 1800-1811 [System and story. Schelling’s Narrative Philosophy in the years 1800-1811] (Wrocław: 2007): ‘Cosmic narration begins [in Schelling’s works – M.P.] by dint of divine decision, through a descent into darkness of the foundation, nature or matter (…) For Schelling in System of transcendental idealism the material (…) of the epic of history is the mythical content contained in the so-called common ocean of poetry, from which all discourses have emerged and to which they will eventually return (…) Therefore, also the highest comprehensible truth shall have a symbolic and mythological nature, that is one which is fictional from the point of view what is empirical (see: K. Filutowska, System i opowieść…, pp. 36 and 38).
S. Žižek, The indivisible remainder: An essay on Schelling and related matters (London-New York: 1996), p. 4.
Idem, Lacan: Przewodnik Krytyki Politycznej [Lacan: A Guide of Political Criticism], transl. and introduction J. Kutyła (Warsaw: 2008), pp. 78-79.
Interestingly enough, when Žižek was writing about Lacan’s symbol (or rather the pseudo-myth) of lamella, which combined the problem of the mechanical nature of libido or the death drive and the ‘seeming’ nature of life, he referred to, as he used to, popular culture, i.e., the film Alien by Ridley Scott and to the well-known image of the germinating version of the antagonist that wrapped itself tightly around a person’s face while at the same time (using an organic probe) developed as an embryo inside the victim’s stomach (see: S. Žižek, The indivisible remainder…, pp. 79-80). In a fragment of Lem’s Obłok Magellana where the protagonist participates in a marathon during Olympic games, which was for him a kind of a rite of passage that turned him not just into an adult male but actually a ‘superhuman’ befitting of a futuristic communist utopia, the protagonist eliminates his final challenger, a superb runner by the name Mehilla, accidentally revealing to him his... face terribly disfigured by the mechanical effort of the run (see: S. Lem, Obłok Magellana [Cracow: 2005], pp. 26-27).
This was discussed by Mariusz M. Leś in the already-mentioned book (Stanisław Lem wobec utopii, p. 116): ‘The mind is always aided by intuition and its every statement is aided by some sense of things that cannot be exhausted by cognition. Once statements are stripped of their existential halo and a deductive system is built on their basis, the unexpected appears (…).’ Yet in Lem’s works that kind of ‘mythical’ background of cognitive conviction can only be revealed through a complex literary form, by dint of its ambiguity. As Leś posited: ‘(…) Lem has never made any ultimate statements about whether mythical extra-rational acts of cognition are true or not. (…) That would mean their inclusion into the cognitive order and a destruction of their specificity. To retain their load, they must remain a mystery,’ (ibid., p. 141).
As Chris Shilling argued in The body and social theory (London: 2003), the identification of the ‘live–dead’ distinction as key for the modern experience of the body had been often stressed by the sociologist Anthony Giddens: ‘modern individuals have become increasingly aware that they live in circumstances of “existential contradiction”; being of the inanimate world, yet set off against it,’ (see: Ch. Shilling, The body and social theory, pp. 159-160).
To engage in such a reflection one would, of course, need to move beyond the simplistic conclusion that authoritarian control of corporeality and sexuality demands also (or possibly most of all) power over the body and its potencies. Indeed, this statement, though one could not dispute its obvious reading on the surface, holds the banner of truth only at the common-sense level; it is only a simplified application of Foucault’s theory of discursive formations to the interpretation of the problem. In fact, that framing of the notion of ideological ‘puritanism’ remained in contradiction with communism’s clearly ambivalent attitude towards corporeality and sexuality, e.g., the discourse’s relative acceptance of promiscuity (divorces were common, contraceptives were not banned, and abortion was generally available in the Soviet Union and its satellite states).
This particular quality of science fiction literature was indicated by Joanna Russ in To write like a woman: Essays in feminism and science fiction (Bloomington: 1995). She has argued that the basic figure of science fiction is the ‘dislocated’ world, which consists mainly of the fact that science fiction discusses that ‘which has not [actually – M.P.] happened’ (which, of course, does not mean that it could not have happened in the past or could not happen in the future). That freedom enjoyed by science fiction when it comes to the order of facts enables one, according to Russ, to define its status as the modern myth or the mythology of modernity, more specifically, modern technical civilisation. She claims that the function of science fiction is to deliver ‘new myths’ to interpret the current human experience (J. Russ, To write like a woman…, pp. 7-8, 92).
Lem’s later text, i.e., the short story Maska [Mask] (1974), which seems to be expanding on a problem particularly close to Lem, i.e., of the relationship between the experience of corporeality and shame and the topic of mechanicality, as well as with the cultural image of women (a problem, mind you, indicated quite clearly in Obłok Magellana) offers an excellent description of shame in a ‘source’ form. The female persona (a machine/woman) thus accounts her key experience of a Lacanian ‘encounter with the Real’, which consists of discovering the ‘mechanicality’ hidden in the ‘organism’ of her own body: ‘The slashed skin-white surface opened and I saw in the mirror a nestled silvery shape like a huge foetus, as if a glistening chrysalis hidden inside me. (...) Not for fear but because of terrible shame [emphasis – M.P.] crushing my throat I tried with both hands to hide the silvery ovoid inside me, but it was too big and my cut was to extensive for that to succeed.’ (As quoted in: W Michera, Piękna jako bestia. Przyczynek do antropologii obrazu [Beautiful as a beast. Contribution to the anthropology of the image] (Warsaw: 2010), pp. 394-395. Michera’s book quotes the text of Lem’s short story in extenso).
Ch. Shilling, The body and social theory, p. 185.
Shilling posited: ‘the search for distinction remains a major motor force behind impression management in contemporary society and (…) can be seen as promoting levels of mutual identification between people which are far higher than in previous historical eras. Accompanying this process of mutual identification was an advance in thresholds of shame and embarrassment (…)’ (see: Ch. Shilling, The body and social theory, p. 139).
S. Lem, Obłok Magellana, p. 4.
According to a declaration included in the ‘program’ speech by a female character in Yefremov’s utopia: ‘The upbringing of a new person is complicated work (…) Gone is the time when society was satisfied with haphazard, random upbringing of its people, whose drawbacks were justified by heredity and human nature. Now, every ill-bred person is a reproach to all of society, a grave error by a large group of people. (…) Humanity, comprising colossal masses of people, was faced with a real choice – whether to subject itself to society-wide discipline, extensive upbringing and education, or to perish. There were no other ways to survive on our planet, even with its natural plenty!’ (see: I. Yefremov, The Andromeda Nebula, transl. M. K. ( (2014), p. 249 [Kindle edition]).
When recollecting his childhood, a character in Obłok Magellana, concludes: ‘Like in any other home we also had a lot of automatons; for clearing, kitchen or handy work, and gardening. Those in the last category, which looked after flowers and trees, were called Monots. Monot One has been with us since my grandpa’s time. He often gave me a piggy-back ride, something our German shepherd Pluto hated; dogs in general hate automatons. My grandma has told me that all lower creatures in general are afraid of automatons because they don’t understand how something that isn’t alive can move,’ (see: S. Lem, Obłok Magellana, p. 8). This fragment offers a clear depiction of the effort to tame the ‘extraordinary’ quasi-life of humanoid mechanisms by introducing them into ‘warm’ and regular family relations. Soon afterwards, though, one of the mentors of the character notes: ‘it is not befitting for humans to perform works which can be done by automatons. You must know it would undignified,’ (ibid., p. 14). Clearly, automatons fulfilled in that case a similar role to that of slaves in antiquity. One could argue that as per the well-known Hegelian explication of the dialectics of Master and Slave, their emancipation in Lem’s works (in Bajki robotów [Fables of robots] and Cyberiad) had been prepared by the very fact of the proclaimed ‘servile’ subjugation of machines and by their association to the ‘undignified’ aspect of mechanical work.
As one of the ‘spokesmen’ of the communist utopia (Chairman of the Translators Committee) argues with pathos in Astronauci: ‘For more than eight thousand years the human kind has inhabited Earth. Throughout the progression of consecutive generations filled with hardships and suffering humans have not only learnt ways for harnessing the forces of nature but also for managing the forces of society, which for centuries had hampered progress turning against humans,’ (S. Lem, Astronauci: powieść fantastyczno-naukowa [Warsaw: 1970], p. 21).
See: S. Lem, Obłok Magellana, p. 138.
The emergence of the ‘empty’ subject (in an ambivalent yet direct manner related to freedom and nothingness) as the founding gesture of modernity was discussed extensively by Slavoj Žižek in the already quoted The indivisible remainder: An essay on Schelling and related matters, in which he referred both to Hegel and Lacan. He thus saw that attempt by the subject to shed its substance-based nature (meaning: specific and obliging cultural tradition that conditions the subject and gives it a local dimension): ‘the modern subject is strictly correlative with the dimension “beyond the second death”: the first death is the sacrifice of our particular, “pathological” substance for the universal Cause; the second death is the sacrifice, the “betrayal”, of this Cause itself, so that all that remains is the void which is $, the “barred” subject – the subject emerges only via this double, self-relating sacrifice (…)’ (see: S. Žižek, The indivisible remainder…, p. 121). An important moment, constantly emphasised by Žižek, is the Shellingian equivalence of the gesture with the foundational act of the Absolute that established the Cosmos in a ‘void of pure Freedom’ by extracting from itself the ‘own Other’ and rejecting it (where, mind you, Žižek used for the description of this foundational gesture a notion introduced by Julia Kristeva, i.e., ‘abject’); more on this issue see: J. Kristeva, Potęga obrzydzenia: esej o wstręcie [Powers of horror: An essay on abjection], transl. M. Falski (Cracow: 2007); cf. also S. Žižek, The indivisible remainder…, p. 11; an innovative feature of this Schellingian frame would be to associate the human counterpart of the Absolute’s creative activity not so much with intellectual activities (as in Hegel’s philosophy) but rather with a special kind of a phantasm of the ‘transformation of matter’ in human body).
S. Lem, Obłok Magellana, p. 122.
The limitations of allegorical interpretations of science fiction sometimes undertaken by traditional literary criticism have been discussed by Joanna Russ in To write like a woman... She has argued that traditional motifs and topoi cannot constitute a key for unlocking science fiction texts due to their innovative and, at the same time, ‘quasi-mythological’ nature. The interest in science fiction, according to Russ, places itself within the epistemological realm, while the whole genre is a perception-focussed cognitive experiment. Therefore, one should not read science fiction works as ‘allegorical’ texts: if science fiction held an allegory, that would be the allegory of technical civilisation. This mode of radical allegorical generalisation is possible in science fiction by dint of its strong association with the post-industrial culture; it acquires the necessary distance towards both modernity and technology (as well as capitalism as a socio-political formation correlated with them) – see: J. Russ, To write like a woman..., pp. 7-12.
The formulation of the notion (metaphor?) of the ‘indivisible remainder’ (to which many post-modern humanists have referred – not only Žižek but also, e.g., Giorgio Agamben) can be attributed to F. W. J. Schelling. As Katarzyna Filutowska argued in System i opowieść…: ‘according to Habermas, Schelling replaced Hegelian negation with the category of counteraction. “Counteraction is made of a stronger material than negation, it is as if equipped with surplus moral energy that does not fit any logical category.” Therefore, it is the non-reducible and indivisible remainder that is inseparably associated with what truly exists, and it constitutes an unmistakable sign that differentiates fiction from reality.’ (see: K. Filutowska, System i opowieść…, p. 189). For Žižek (who quoted Lacan in this instance) that ‘indivisible remainder’ was the ‘undead’ impulse of libido, which protects the empty modern subject from accepting the truth in the statement: ‘I am animated only by the urge for the Other.’ Please note that unlike in the case of the classical Freudian notion of the Unconscious, located mainly within humans, the indivisible remainder endures and is visible both in human beings and the world they perceive (it possesses a ‘metaphysical’ nature in the sense of its fundamental participation in the world of objects) – see, e.g., Žižek, The indivisible remainder…, p. 75: ‘But the ruleless still lies in the ground as if it could break through once again (…). This is the incomprehensible basis of reality in things, the indivisible remainder, what with the greatest exertion cannot be resolved in the understanding, but rather remains eternally in the ground. From this non-understanding is born understanding in the true sense.’
As Butler argued, interpreting Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: ‘Should materialism consider the practice as a constituent of the very matter of objects and should the practice be understood as activities that introduce social change, such activities would be understood as constituent for materiality itself.’ (see: J. Butler, “Ciała, które znaczą” [Bodies that matter. On the discursive limits of sex], transl. M. Rogowska-Stangret, in: Przegląd Filozoficzno-Literacki [Review of Philosophy and Literature] issue 4 (32) (Warsaw: 2011), p. 18 [Fragment translated from Polish]).
That is the case in Andromeda Nebula, in which in a distant future the human civilisation belongs to the Great Ring, a group of intergalactic extra-terrestrial civilisations, and the level of their development leaves no doubt as to the fact that they commonly accept communism. However, even this extensive circle of Universal Order has an External Other: those include not only the archaic aggressive life forms from the planets of the Black Star, which the members of the expedition led by Erg Noor will have to face during their voyage, but also the mysterious alien spaceship, which centuries ago arrived from a different star system: the Andromeda Galaxy, having travelled an unimaginable distance (approx. 1.5 million light years) to become destroyed in a confrontation with the original forces of Darkness.
That was, of course, a thinly-veiled allusion to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and a reference to Plato’s Timaeus. The insertion of the United Stated into the Platonic context helped, on the one hand, assign capitalism the quality of being dated (it was so ‘primaeval’ that the ‘barbarity’ it implied could be placed within the realm of myths) and, on the other, emphasise the inevitability of the failure of Americans and their allies (which is ‘always-already’ foretold, like the disaster of the Atlantis) and that it was only natural to fail (because that was how it had to unfold according to the principles of both natural and social development already identified by Marxism/Leninism). The peculiar modus of the existence of time in the ideology (‘already but still-not’) has been a recurring topic in several of Žižek’s (as well as Giorgio Agamben’s or Alain Badiou’s) books. As Žižek argued in Indivisible remainder, in this case only a minor difference separates ‘revolutionary messianism’ from the most extreme forms of ‘religious fanaticism’: ‘The outcome of the struggle for freedom will determine the meaning of the past itself: in it, it will be decided what things “truly were” (…) the past itself is not fixed, it “will have been” – that is to say, through the deliverance-to-come, it will become what it always-already was. [emphasis: S. Ž.]’ (see: S. Žižek, The indivisible remainder…, p. 67).
That is caused, of course, by the fact that the members of the expedition who have became ‘only mere humans’ as they toiled in fulfilling their everyday routines and being faced with the endlessness of the Cosmos, once on the ‘Atlantean station’ become ‘communists’ once again as they can see themselves the menacing ‘something’ a struggle against which had centuries ago shaped the order of the Logos in which they are living.
Thus, in line with the argument that the entire world depicted in science fiction as a genre is an allegory of modern technical civilisation (cf. footnote 21).
S. Lem, Obłok Magellana, p. 178.
This image is the more significant when one considers the fact that it was preceded by a conversation about death between the protagonist and the pilot Ameta (the latter is soon going to die and he will receive in the novel the status of a ‘martyr in the name of the new quality of social order’ because it will have been his death that will have enabled communication between humans and another intelligent civilisation from a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri; even more so, this death will have been directly linked to the presence of the ‘dark relic’ of human history, i.e., the Atlantean station, in this region of the Cosmos). In the conversation, the fact of individual death is associated with shame and overcoming it: ‘Ameta said: What is death? A terrible reminder of nothingness? An image of that shameful dust [emphasis – M.P.] into which we’ll turn? (…) Yes. But, at the same time, it is a source of the priceless value in every moment, every breath, an imperative to do whatever you can to live long enough to do and convey to new generations as much as you can, a reminder of the unwavering responsibility of every action because you can’t take back or forget anything you do in the tiny period of human life. Through all that, death teaches us to love life, but most of all others, who are mortal just as you are, who carry inside the same courage and fear as you do, who through longing lean outside the limits of their physical existence and build with love that future which they will never be able to see. (…) I say to you: I – shall not let death be taken away from me,’ (see: S. Lem, Obłok Magellana, p. 168).
Ibid., p. 181.
Slavoj Žižek, The indivisible remainder…, p. 13.
Ibid., p. 6.
This was discussed by Peter Brown in The body and society: Men, women, and sexual renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: 2008). He has argued that a distinct feature of the views of Marcion, Tatian, the Encratites, or Valentinus and other Gnostics, which formed in a close relationship to Christianity, was the belief in the ability of humans to regain power over their own bodies (from before the ‘Cosmic Downfall’) by repressing their sphere of urges, the force of which would return to the “divine” sphere of cosmic potencies. Brown posited that: ‘The “present age” might be a vast engine, too large to be seen. Its faceless energy was too dangerously impalpable to the average person, its tyranny too intricate to trace in all its ramifications. But at least one part of that mighty current could be symbolically condensed in the sexual urge and in its manifest consequences, the endlessly repeated cycle of birth and death. In a world seemingly governed by iron constraints, the human body could stand out as a clearly marked locus of free choice. To renounce sexual intercourse was to throw a switch located in the human person; and, by throwing that precise switch, it was believed possible to cut the current that sustained the sinister perpetuum mobile of life in “the present age”,’ (P. Brown, The body and society…, pp. 84-85). When considering Lem’s novel it seems interesting that thus transformed urges, as they deconstructed the social foundation of object-based reality, were according to Gnostics supposed to transform into a kind of a Salvation ‘machine’, thus enabling the soul to ascend to heaven.
S. Lem, Obłok Magellana, p. 181.
These motifs and allusions apply, of course, to the transformation of humans in the sense of creating a being to match future communist utopia. Yet in the quoted scene Piotr of Ganymede, as if a secular Messiah, seems to be celebrating the described by Žižek ceremony of the ‘self-sacrifice’ of the modern subject on the altar of ‘empty transcendence’, (see footnote 19).
For more on the notion of the ‘crypt’ formulated by two French psychoanalysts of Hungarian descent: Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, see: Cryptonimie. Le nerbier de l'homme aux loups (Paris: 1976) see: W. Michera, Piękna jako bestia…, pp. 223-235. For the purposes of further interpretation, as well as for the interpretation of Lem’s short story Maska, offered by Wojciech Michera, Derrida’s argument seems particularly significant: ‘A resident of the crypt is always a living dead that you wish to keep alive but as someone deceased; who you want to keep even if dead, but provided he is retained whole, untouched, healthy [sauf], i.e., alive.’ (as quoted in: W. Michera, Piękna jako bestia…, p. 230]). In an obvious manner this status of a ‘resident of the crypt’ could be associated both with the ‘undead’ state of the ‘indivisible remainder’ of either idealistic yet materialistic ideology (a state discussed by Žižek in reference to Schelling’s discussions) and with the ‘contents’ of the Atlantean space station, which symbolises the recurring impulse of libido/Thanatos (as well as with the Lacanian lamella, the ‘copies’ of which in Alien by Ridley Scott also lay hidden in the ‘crypt’ of the crashed spaceship).
This reflection impacted Lem’s later works, in which the figure of the ‘emancipation of an automa-
ton’ assumed the specific shape of ‘world devoid of humans’ (without subject?). Despite that, grotesque is the indispensable stylistic aspect of those works (e.g. Cyberiad) which, in my opinion, proves that according to Lem emancipated ‘slaves’ would inherit the fundamental sin of their former ‘masters’ (or, to use Lacanian terminology, their ‘fundamental fantasy’), and their rule would not be the Schellingian ‘Parousia of the Logos in the darkness of Ground.’
Judith Butler has come to similar conclusions, though arriving from a different perspective, in the quoted Bodies that matter. She argues, by expanding Luce Irigaray’s interpretation of Timaeus, that rape is the foundational gesture of patriarchal culture and its implied concept of matter (formed ‘according to the male vision of the woman’) as the model of ‘subjective action’ (of the male subject by default) performed on the body of a woman (being a disorganised and reactive substance that Plato called Chora). (Cf. J. Butler, Bodies that matter, p. 43). It seems that the interpretation of the text by Lem, who also in this case has proven to be an honest writer despite his ideological entanglement, completely confirms these conclusions even tough, as I have already mentioned, from a different perspective; regardless of its moral and legal aspects, rape (to use Hegelian terminology) is a kind of ‘modality’ of coitus.
S. Žižek, The indivisible remainder…, p. 165.
Ibid., p. 157.
See: ibid., p. 128; the process outlined here constitutes a definition of Althusserian ‘subjectless process’ i.e., of that shape of the preconditions for a modern image of the world, the allegories of which appear in, e.g., Cyberiad and Bajki robotów by Lem. The modification of Althusser’s concept, performed in this case by Žižek, consisted of introducing an ‘empty’ subject as a ‘fading intermediary’ between different ‘substantial’ (ideological) orders.
In his books, Žižek has often emphasised the fact that by dint of the foundational gesture of modernity, which consisted of the subject’s distancing from their own urge-driven life and shifting it outside, like Julia Kristeva’s abject, any Logos (having established harmonious, though not without a conflict, cohesion of an ‘enclosed’ Cosmos of meaning) will from this moment on reveal itself ‘through the prism’ of the perspective of an egotistic individual, and inevitably has an ‘authoritarian’ or ‘totalitarian’ nature, even if it utilises the most sublime community-focussed rhetoric. As the author of The sublime object of ideology has argued ‘”Evil” is not particularity as such but its erroneous, “perverted” unity with the Universal: not “egotism” as such, but “egotism” in the guise of its opposite.’ Thus, the Universal dimension was degraded ‘to the extent of my own particular will,’ (see: S. Žižek, The indivisible remainder…, pp. 64-65).
The Others (Aliens), the inhabitants of the White Planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, are going to interpret the flash that will have accompanied the destruction of the station (which they have visited before and left it, like a ‘mausoleum of evil’) as a sign of a ‘fratricidal’ war started by other intelligent beings, a war that is sure to come their planet’s way. Therefore, in an act of self-defence, they are going to destroy the initial rockets from Gea, sent to the planet’s surface to establish first contact. (That is when the pilot Ameta, among others, dies ‘a martyr’).
See: P. Brown, The body and society…, p. 125.
Ibid., p. 111. [Fragment translated from Polish]
Žižek noted that a similar idea emerged among Lacan’s successors: ‘Another solution [than the general acceptance of the cynical or ironic attitude in post-modernity as a result of the a-substantial emptiness of the subject – M.P.] proposed by some Lacanians involves the attempt to articulate two distinct modes of the big Other: analysts form a collective of knowledge [emphasis – S. Ž.] kept together by the shared reference to their Cause, (…) in contrast to the regular community of faith (…) [emphasis – S. Ž.]’ (see: S. Žižek, The indivisible remainder…, p. 181).
This distance, it would seem, is the relationship between an active working individual (whose body exists as long as it is useful) and the ‘area’ of their activity defined by society. Thus, it would overlap Nietzsche’s fundamental division of forces into active and reactive.
In Andromeda Nebula Yefremov wrote: ‘The Fire Goblets Festival became a spring women’s festival. Every year (…) the loveliest women of Earth put on dancing, singing, and athletic performances. (…) Equally beautiful was the fall men’s celebration of Hercules that took place in the ninth month.
(…) Young men entering maturity completed their Labors of Hercules. Later it became customary to dedicate this festival to the planet-wide viewing of wonderful projects and achievements accomplished over the course of one year. The festival started including both men and women and became divided into days of Beautiful Usefulness, High Arts, Scientific Courage, and Fantasy,’ (see: I. Yefremov, Andromeda Nebula, p. 222 [Kindle edition]). Anyone interpreting it should not omit either the aesthetising typically Schellingian context of those imagination-based creations or their, so typical for post-modernism, cultural syncretism.
Consider this sample description of ‘bodiless intimacy’: ‘This was great, strange beauty. Oval face, low eyebrows, dark eyes and clear, calm, prominent forehead, and all that not quite yet established, like the dawn of a summer day. Completed, formulated, you might say “final” were only her lips, as if more mature than the rest of her face. In their expression there was something that triggered both happiness and want. Something melodious, light, and yet so earthly. She imparted her beauty to everything she came close to. When she approached the bottom of the stairs, she placed her white hand on the rough scrappy vulcanite and that dead boulder came alive in the blink of an eye. (…) Her heavy loose hair sparkled in all shades of brown which flashed golden when struck by light. (…) her cheeks were smooth, tight, slightly triangular, and she had a child-like dimple in her chin. As she was passing by she looked me in the eyes and the sinews in her neck rose like the strings of a delicate instrument,’ (S. Lem, Obłok Magellana, p. 48).
Ibid., p. 98.
In Andromeda Nebula that is not so much a ‘spatial’ limitation of the description of the face (as it even contains a mention of the breasts of the characters!), but rather a presentation of a woman in a much aestheticised context: while dancing or against the background of a very ‘natural’ landscape filled with active elements, as well as (which is, in fact, both interesting and worthy of further study) as a representative of a certain specific human “race” (!) or ‘interracial dialogue.’
F.W.J. Schelling, Die Weltalter. Erstes Buch, p. 254, as quoted in: K. Filutowska, System i opowieść…, p. 64 (transl. K. Filutowska) [English version translated from Polish].
It seems, that the ‘terror’ implied by that image of the face as a lamella would be based on the fact that it was a mask placed ‘directly’ on the blind vortex of urges. Therefore, it could signal the subjectification of the forces of Ground that only imitate the Logos, pretending to be it.
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