Abstract
This study attempts to show how Harold Pinter’s literary agenda turned towards radical political intervention during the last period of his literary and political activism. In order to do this, Slavoj Žižek’s rereading of F. W. J. Von Schelling, the German Idealist philosopher, in light of the Lacanian psychoanalytic concept of sinthome will be used in order to show how Harold Pinter opted for a radical politics of negativity in Ashes to Ashes as embodied in Rebecca’s ultimate identification with the sinthome of the modern era.
Highlights
This study attempts to show how Harold Pinter’s literary agenda turned towards radical political intervention during the last period of his literary and political activism
As Slavoj Žižek makes it clear, his whole philosophical project is to revive the philosophical legacy of German Idealism which has recently passed into oblivion through reading it in light of the Lacanian psychoanalysis: “the core of my entire work is the endeavour to use Lacan as the privileged intellectual tool to reactualise German Idealism” (Pound, 2008, p.27)
In order to remove Himself from this lawless, chaotic situation God needs to contract Himself into the negativity of pure potentiality of a Will which paradoxically “opposes itself to itself in the guise of its own inherent counter-pole, the Will which wants something, that is the positive Will to expansion”
Summary
As Slavoj Žižek makes it clear, his whole philosophical project is to revive the philosophical legacy of German Idealism which has recently passed into oblivion through reading it in light of the Lacanian psychoanalysis: “the core of my entire work is the endeavour to use Lacan as the privileged intellectual tool to reactualise German Idealism” (Pound, 2008, p.27). As it was earlier argued, the subject needs to make a decision before it expands itself in order to name the void of contraction This decision is, according to Žižek, accompanied by a certain faith in the act itself, that is, the withdrawal into the ‘madness’ of the drives needs a complete trust in the cause which demands from the subject to abandon even what is most dear to him, namely his life. The issue of identification with the sinthome brings to the forth once again the Schellingian God-like status of the subject who must contract itself in order to identify with that ex-timate kernel. It is the direct, unmediated contactidentification with sinthome which occasions the existence of the true Lacanian subject. “Truth is contingent; it hinges on a concrete historical situation; it is the truth of this situation, but in every concrete and contingent historical situation there is one and only one Truth which, once articulated, spoken out, functions as the index of itself and of the falsity of the field subverted by it” (Žižek, 1999, p. 131)
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