Misdirected V

Alex: But, Sir... Missus... I see that it's wrong! It's wrong because it's like against like society. It's wrong because everybody has the right to live and be happy without being tolchocked * and knifed.

Dr. Brodsky: No, no, boy. You really must leave it to us, but be cheerful about it. In less than a fortnight now, you'll be a free man.

- Violent criminal Alex de Large failing to convince the doctor who is administering the Ludovico ** treatment that he is cured in A Clockwork Orange (1971) [1]

I chose the above-quoted dystopian film about social conditioning to delve further into Anxiety [2] and its relation to culture, will and the law.

We hear gongs from Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary ring over a screen colored blood red. The screen turns blue and red again over minimal credits before we get a closeup of the protagonist.  Alex, his head bowed and right eye sporting fake eyelashes, stares up at us. He maintains his unsettling stare as the camera slowly pulls out, and he raises a glass to his lips, pauses for split-second as if toasting us, then drinks. The music continues as the camera moves further back, showing four other youths – also drinking something white and, like Alex, wearing black hats, white overalls and codpieces – and ultimately reveals the other patrons and bizarre furnishings of the Korova Milk Bar (furnishings consisting of white fiberglass depictions of naked females as tables and as taps) as well as walls decorated with swishing logos of the bar’s mind-altering “milks.” Alex, in voiceover, introduces himself and his “droogs” - Pete, Georgie, and Dim - and tells us one of the advertised product’s - “Moloko-plus’s” - value in getting ready for the evening’s activities. We cut to an old homeless man lying in a tunnel holding a bottle (an empty one beside him.) He sings “Cockles and Muscles” as the long shadows of the four cross him. The narrator expresses disgust at drunken singing before we see Alex leading the others in mocking applause, then driving his cane into the man’s stomach. The “tramp” defiantly tells them to kill him, declaring that the world, with “men on the moon and men spinning around the earth” and “no attention paid to earthly law and order” is “no world for an old man any longer.” He resumes singing, and then the gang, laughing, batter him with chains and walking sticks. We cut to a painting of a vase filled with flowers and hear the overture from The Thieving Magpie playing over a woman’s screams. The camera pans down past a molded king to a stage on which five gang members are tearing the struggling woman’s clothes off and dragging her to a mattress. Alex and his droogs come out of the darkness, our protagonist taunting the leader, “Billy Boy” - “Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou.”

{We’ll use this interruption to complete the quote from my last entry:} For the woman, it is initially what she does not have as such which is going to become, to constitute at the beginning the object of her desire; while at the beginning for the man it is what he is not, it is where he fails. [3]

The young woman flees, and a grinning Billy boy flicks his switchblade open, spits, and says, “Let’s get ‘em, boys!” The Thieving Magpie continues to play as we watch the droogs triumph in a balletic brawl. Police sirens join the music, and Alex tells his gang to run. The music plays on as we cut to the gang in a speeding car, Alex driving others off the road to his droogs’ glee. We get closeups of each member’s face, ending with Alex’s crazed stare as his voiceover tells us of the “warm, vibraty feeling” of driving the stolen Durango-95 and of his intention to pay a “surprise visit.” The car stops at a roadblock next to a lit sign reading, “Home,” and the youths get out to creep up on a large, isolated house. Inside, Mr. Alexander, a man perhaps in his 50’s, wearing a red-and-white bathrobe, stops typing on hearing the doorbell. His wife, sitting nearby, says, “I'll see who it is.” She goes out to the hall, a hall mirrored on both sides, and approaches the door. At her question, Alex says that his friend is bleeding to death and asks to use her phone to call an ambulance. She tells him they don’t have one, but her husband, overhearing, has her let him in. Alex enters, now wearing a Pinocchio-like mask, followed by his also-masked comrades, their number seemingly multiplied by the mirrors.

{In our next passage, Lacan asks us to return to his mirror stage, discussing a film that had been made “once upon a time” in England involving how infants of both sexes confronted themselves in a looking-glass. He says that the} little boy … looks at his little problematic tap. He vaguely suspects that it is something a little bizarre. For his part, he has to learn – at his own expense as you know – that, as one might say, what is there does not exist, I mean compared to what Daddy has, to what his big brothers …. etc…., have, you know the whole first dialectic of comparison.

He will subsequently learn that, not only does it not exist, but that it wants to know nothing or more exactly that it behaves exactly as it wishes. [4]

Dragging, then carrying Mrs. Alexander into the living room, they kick her husband down the stairs, and Georgie holds him down. Alex has Pete check the house and Dim hold the struggling woman, then he sings and dances to “Singing in the Rain,” striking and gagging the couple in time with the music. He continues his performance as he uses scissors to remove Mrs. Alexander’s red jumpsuit, finally dropping his own pants. He jumps down to look Mr. Alexander in the eye, and we get a shot of Alex looking straight at us down his long-nosed mask as he says, “Viddy well, little brother, viddy well.” Back at the Milk Bar we see Dim approach the chained, kneeling “milk” tap. Addressing it as “Lucy,” he tells it he has “been working hard,” puts a coin in the slot, raises a glass to its breast and pulls a handle between its legs, obtaining his nightcap. We see a group of TV studio “sophistos,” at one of the “tables” as the only woman in the group starts to sing. Over a closeup of Alex’s disturbing face, his voiceover describes his reaction: “I felt all the malenky little hairs on my plott standing endwise, and the shivers crawling up like slow malenky lizards and then down again. Because I knew what she sang. It was a bit from the glorious ‘Ninth’, by Ludwig van.” A less appreciative Dim blows a raspberry, for which Alex quickly whacks him in the crotch with his walking stick. At Dim’s query, he explains, barely turning away from the singer, that the punishment is “for being a bastard with no manners,” and raises his glass to the young woman. Unsatisfied with the explanation, Dim declares himself no longer his brother, and challenges Alex to a fight for “aiming tolchocks at me reasonless. It stands to reason, I won't have it.”

{We can stop at Dim’s attempt to set boundaries for our next quote, in which Lacan compares a woman to a weaver and a man to a potter:} The woman, of course, presents herself under the appearance of a vase. And obviously this is what deceives the partner, the homo faber in question, the potter. He imagines that this vase may contain the object of his desire. … The phantastical presence of the phallus, I mean of the phallus of another man, at the bottom of this vase is a daily object of our analytic experience.

{Locating the most structurally important part of a vase as the edge, “the cut by which it is isolated as vase,” he mentions a subject he will take up later – a logic of choice that psychoanalyst Imre Hermann had begun to develop involving the “castration pot,” a vase on which} one can pass with the greatest of ease from the inside face to the outside face without ever having to cross the edge. [5]

Alex turns to Dim, saying, “I’ll scrap anytime you say,” staring at his droog until Dim submits, - “Bedways is rigthways now.” We then watch Alex walk home in the dawning light through garbage-strewn courtyards and past a broken elevator and obscene graffiti (graffiti defacing what had been meant as an ennobling mural.) After using the pot he enters his bedroom and removes his eyelashes before a mirror which reflects a cartoonish print hanging by his bed – a print of a nude woman lying back, her spread legs toward the viewer. He lies on the bed, opens his drawer, and deposits his night’s “earnings” with his previous collection of money, trinkets and cameras. His voiceover tells us of his need to give the night the perfect ending with a Beethoven tape, and we see him putting one of the “Ninth” into his deck. As the music blares from the speakers covering one of his walls, we get a montage of images from his bedroom, images starting with a closeup of the aforementioned print with his pet snake facing it strategically, the camera scrolling down to a ceramic of four naked and thorn-crowned Christs forming a sort of chorus line. The camera moves from one part of this sculpture to another in time with the music, making it seem to dance. It then shows us Alex’s rapt face above his shoulders, betraying the back and forth movement of his arms, before showing us a black-and-white print of Beethoven while the voiceover tells us, “As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures.” We then get a montage of these pictures – A shot from under a scaffold of the trapdoor opening, the condemned, wearing a white dress and noose, falling and stopping just above us; Alex’s face with blood dripping from vampire-sized fangs; explosions; an avalanche crushing a group of cavemen; and, lastly, an erupting volcano.

{Lacan claims that any erotic ”crowd of images” can easily give us access to knowledge that} this original little pot has the closest relationship with what is involved as regards sexual potency, with the intermittent springing forth of its force. … That the decanting (transvasement) here allows us to grasp how the o takes on its value because it comes into the pot of (~<p), takes on its value by being here -o, the vase half-empty at the same time as it is half-full…

{He qualifies this claim. It “is not the phenomenon of decanting that is essential”, but} that the vase here becomes anxiety-provoking … [b]ecause what comes to half-fill the hollow constituted from the original castration, is the small o in so far as it comes from elsewhere, that it is only supported, constituted through the mediation of the desire of the Other. And it is there that we rediscover anxiety and the ambiguous shape of this edge which, because of the way it is made at the level of the other vase, does not allow us to distinguish either the inside or the outside. [6 (scholarly citations removed)]

The music continues as we get a shot of the hallway outside Alex’s room, decorated with a painting of a woman covering her breasts with her arms. Alex’s middle-aged mother (“Em,” to her son) wearing a black leather dress and purple wig, approaches and knocks at his door. Inside, our protagonist snoozes with his pet snake in front of the window (We find that the image of Beethoven we had seen is the window-shade decoration) and another print of the composer on a poster. We cut back and forth between Em and Alex as she tries to get him to prepare for school. Her son’s eyes remain closed as he tells her that he has a headache and, to her protest that he hasn’t gone all week, that if he doesn’t rest, he’s liable to miss a lot more. She tells him she’ll put his breakfast in the oven and goes to the kitchen table to finish her own before leaving for her factory job. Her husband, “Pee,” having overheard the exchange, asks her what time their son got home. When she says she doesn’t know - “I'd taken my sleepers,” he wonders where the youth goes to work at night. Em answers, “Well, like he says, it's mostly odd things he does, helping like…” We then cut to a shot of a combination lock being opened and see Alex, in nothing but his briefs, emerge from his bedroom. He walks down the hall and turns off the light, then when he reaches the living room, he does a double-take.

{Lacan, for his part, promises to bring light to how this primordial castration relates to circumcision. He connects the ritual to the constitution of the autonomy of the o, of the object of desire, incarnating a kind of order into} this constitutive failure of primordial castration …

The circumcised person is consecrated, though less consecrated to a law than to a certain relationship to the Other, to the big O, and that is the reason why the small o is involved. {He promises to discuss the operation} at the level that we can find in the configuration of history something which is supported by a big 0, who is there more or less the God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition {mentioning the story of how Jacob’s sons used the custom to murder the Shechemites for their prince’s nerve in trying to marry their sister} [7]

We watch as he returns up the hallway and see a trench-coated man sitting on Alex’s parents’ bed (Mrs. de Large’s wigs* in the background) – it is our protagonist’s post-corrective advisor, Mr. Deltoid. Telling the youth that his mother had given him the key and had told him that he had “a pain somewhere” he expresses skepticism behind a palpably insincere amity. He turns down Alex’s offer of tea and asks him to sit beside him. Alex does so, asking if anything is wrong, and Deltoid, still (badly) feigning warmth, roughly tousles his charge’s hair, warning him, “Next time it’s not going to be the corrective school anymore.” Alex professes innocence of any wrongdoing “The millicents have nothing on me, brother, sir, I mean.” Deltoid suddenly pulls the youth’s shoulders back so they are both lying on the bed, their legs hanging off it toward the camera. While he continues to hold Alex down, he dismisses his “clever talk,” telling him about some “nastiness” he had heard regarding Billyboy’s gang and warning him again, professing himself “the one man in this sore and sick community who wants to save you from yourself.” He ends this speech with an attempt to grab his charge’s crotch, but Alex’s fist is in the way, somewhat mitigating the blow. The youth rises, again protesting innocence, but the older man tells him to keep his “handsome young proboscis out of the dirt.” He asks if he makes himself clear, and Alex replies “as an azure sky…”

{We’ll use Deltoid’s attempt to reach Alex to grasp Lacan’s suggestion that “Moses,” who, according to the Bible was raised Egyptian, would have received the practice of circumcision from the earlier civilization. He notes that Herodotus had expressed the belief that Egyptians used this operation for hygienic reasons. He then draws a copy of an ancient Egyptian representation of the practice for his students before reminding them of another Biblical myth - of Moses’ wife, Zippotrah protecting her uncircumcised husband from God’s attempt to kill him, protecting him with the use of the prepuce from her son’s operation. Lacan notes that she had used a stone knife, as the Egyptian in the drawing our professor had copied. He then uses the knife to date the practice as far back as the Neolithioc Age and linguistic analysis of the Egyptian work to suggest its meaning, finishing the class by saying he will come back to the subject through another enigmatic Biblical passage.} [8 (scholarly citations removed)]

We cut to a music store as a young woman licking a multicolored Popsicle reads a top ten list. Here, a synthesizer plays the “Ninth,” while Alex struts through the garish corridors in a purple frock coat. He approaches the desk, where the woman is now standing with her friend, and asks about an order he had placed. When the cashier leaves to check, our protagonist makes remarks about the inadequacy of the friends’ Popsicles and boasts the powers of his audio system, inviting them to “come with Uncle and hear all proper.” We then hear the “William Tell Overture” as we watch a fast-motion scene of the three copulating, the women dressing and Alex undressing them and returning them to bed several times throughout.

{With this overture we can raise the curtain on Lacan’s next lecture, which he begins by placing the aforementioned operation in the “economy of desire” by reminding his students of other Biblical passages, such as God’s intention to “punish every circumcised man in his prepuce.” He discusses what} is involved every time the term of circumcised and uncircumcised is effectively employed in the Bible, {including references to} “Uncircumcised lips” “uncircumcised heart”, these are terms which right through this text, appear numerous, almost current, almost common, underlining that what is involved is always an essential separation from a certain part of the body, a certain appendix, from something which in a function becomes symbolic of a relationship to the body itself henceforth alienated, and fundamental for the subject. [9]

We see Alex’s droogs in the lobby by the defaced mural (Dim, sitting in a partly disassembled baby carriage, uses one of the removed tires as a steering wheel for a pretend drive.) Alex, now in “uniform,” walks downstairs and, surprised, asks why the whole gang has gathered there – “I was not awakened when I gave orders for awakening.” When Georgie and Dim treat him in a less deferential way than usual, He walks to Dim and suddenly sits on his lap, trapping his surprised droog’s arms. Turning his smirk on each of them in turn, he asks for the reason for their sarcasm, grabbing Dim’s chin and asking what his “great big horsy gape of a grin” portends. Georgie tells him not to pick on Dim – “That's part of the new way.” We get a closeup of his face as he tells of the opportunity to earn “big big money” (Dim echoing various phrases as his fellow rebel talks,) calling Alex’s opinion that they have everything they need “childish.” Our protagonist smiles, “Initiative comes to them as waits. I've taught you much, my little droogies. Now tell me what you have in mind...” Georgie says that they should have a Moloko-plus to sharpen them up first – “you especially. We have the start.” On the way, Alex overhears the overture from The Thieving Magpie from a nearby stereo and, based on its “inspiration,” knocks the two ringleaders of the attempted coup into the water. Covertly removing the handle from his cane, uncovering a knife, he reaches one hand toward Dim as if to help him out, then grabs his comrade’s hand - cutting a gash on the backside. We then see the gang in a pub, our narrator informing us that he had not cut any of Dim’s “main cables.”

{This seems a good place to mention Lacan’s coining of a new word, “objectality” as opposed to objectivity, the former} the correlate of a pathos about the cut, and precisely of the one through which this [formalism of objectivity], in the Kantian sense of this term … rejoins its miscognised effect in the Critique of pure reason, an effect which accounts for this formalism even in Kant, in Kant especially I would say, remains hewn out of causality, remains suspended on the justification that no a priori has up to now managed to reduce, of this function which is nevertheless essential to the whole mechanism of the lived experience of our mental life, the function of the cause

{Designating this “appendix” as the “causal guts,” Lacan remarks how western texts ignore the male sexual organ and the prepuce as spiritual metaphors in favor of other bodily parts, especially the heart:} how can it be explained, if not by the fact that the cause is already lodged in the gut… [10]

The narrator continues, “A real leader knows always when like to give and show generous to his unders,” and we see him tell them, “Well, now, we’re back to where we were.” He asks about the opportunity that Georgie had mentioned in the apartment lobby and, when his fellow droog demurs, teases, “We're not little children, are we…?” George tells him about an isolated health farm owned by a “very rich ptitsa who lives there with her cats. The place is shut down for a week and she's completely on her own, and it's full up with like gold and silver and like jewels.”

{We’ll break at Georgie’s revelation of this opportunity to cover Lacan’s discussion of the arm as an intermediary between its owners’ will and act, remarking of many analysands’ need for reassurance} that it will not escape, even when one takes into account an instant of inattention... {He connects this need with the cause, which} arises in correlation with the fact that something is omitted in the consideration of knowledge, something which is precisely the desire which animates the function of knowledge… {and discusses the Greek philosophical} prime mover which comes to put itself in the place of the Anaxagorian nous, which nevertheless can only be for him a deaf and blind mover to what it sustains, namely the whole cosmos. The desire for knowledge with its consequences had been put in question, and always in order to put in question what knowledge believes itself obliged to forge precisely as final cause. … [E]very time we find ourselves confronted with this final functioning of the cause, we ought to search for its foundation, its root in this hidden object, in this object qua syncopated. [11]

The Magpie overture continues while we see the woman under discussion in a room decorated with large “erotic” prints of the kind Alex had in his own bedroom. She curses at being interrupted from her yoga exercises by his urgent knocking, and walks past her numerous cats to ask who is there. When Alex makes his sham telephone request, she suggests he goes to the Public House about a mile down the road, and says that she never opens the door to strangers after dark. Our protagonist seems to give in, then walks by concrete sphinxes on either side of the door and then ducks into the bushes. He then has Dim help him climb up to a bathroom window. The woman returns to the yoga room, walks past a large fiberglass sculpture of a penis and dials her phone. Telling the police of her recent exchange, she remarks that the words the young man had used “sounded exactly like what was quoted in the papers this morning in connection with the writer and his wife who were assaulted last night.” After hanging up she starts at seeing our masked hero enter the doorway. After he says that their talk through the letterhole was not satisfactory, she demands that he leave. Noticing the sculpture, he lifts his hand to touch it, and the woman barks at him to leave it alone - “It’s a very important work of art” and asks what he wants. He says that he is “selling magazines,” and she tells him to “cut the shit.”

{We’ll use this argument to incarnate what Lacan calls the “very contestable certainty” of essentialist proof from these Greek roots through Descartes, claiming that} if this precarious and derisory certainty maintains itself despite all criticism, if we are always forced from some angle to come back to it, it is only because it is the shadow of … another certainty … that of the anxiety linked to the approach to the object… {Saying, “The subject once he speaks is already implicated in his body by this word” (“knowledge in the phantasy”,) Lacan notes the evasion continued in contemporary phenomenology:} “After long centuries succeeded in making a spiritualised body for us in art, the body of contemporary phenomenology is a corporalised soul.” [12]

She demands he leave, and when he hits the sculpture, she picks up a bust of Beethoven, saying she’ll teach him “to break into real people’s houses.” He dances around, holding the piece of art between them as she swings the bust at him several times, but she finally hits him on the head, knocking him to the floor. He grabs her legs so she falls, then he gets up, raising the heavy work above his head. We see her eyes widen and her mouth open as she screams, then we cut a quick montage of her pop art graphics – one of two sets of concentric mouths, one of a hand grabbing a breast, one of a gagged women with parts of her top cut off similarly to how he had cut Mrs. Alexander’s, and one of a hand covering a female crotch. We then hear a siren and watch him look around, replace the statue, back out of the room and run to the front door. As he fumbles with the knob, Dim, on the outside, holds a milk bottle behind him in his bandaged hand. When Alex exits, his droog hits him in the face with it, and the gang runs, leaving him writhing on the ground yelling that he can’t see. We then watch him inside a police station telling the inspector and policemen that he won’t say anything without his lawyer. One of them tries (“flirtatiously”) to intimidate him, and, failing, presses into the wound that Dim had made. Alex grabs the man’s testicles, incapacitating him, but the other policeman jumps up and hits him in the face, drawing blood. Mr. Deltoid enters, noting that “this boy does look a mess, doesn't he?” and the inspector replies, “Violence makes violence.”

{This proverb can give force to our next passage, where Lacan notes that the dialectic of Umwelt and the Innenwelt is caused by something “statuefied” in the body:} the pound of flesh which reminds us of this law of debt and of gift, this total social pact… {He then returns to the “Christian [masochistic] solution” to this Old Testament myth, illustrating the concept with a recent encounter he had had with a “very average” western illustrator who expressed distrust of Asian peoples.} [13]

Deltoid tells Alex that this is “end of the line” for him, and our protagonist declares himself innocent, urging the police to catch his droogs, who “forced” him to do it. At this, his advisor lets out a slightly deranged laugh, telling him that his victim has died. When Alex protests that this communication is “some new form of torture,” Deltoid says, “I hope to God it will torture you to madness.” Then, after a policeman sympathetically offers to hold Alex down if Deltoid wants to hit him, the advisor spits in the youth’s face. We cut to helicopter views of a prison while hearing that our “humble narrator” was sentenced to 14 years, “the shock sending my dadda beating his bruised and kroovy rookas against unfair Bog in his Heaven…” We watch as Alex is inducted by the chief prison guard [14] who gives him his new name (“655321,”) has him sign for his valuables, and undress, meanwhile questioning him while correcting him on various points, points such as how to place objects on a desk, how to preface anything said to a prison officer with “Sir,” and that the proper way to express his religion is “The Church of England,” not “C of E.”

{We’ll use these corrections to help dispel the illusion that Lacan illustrates with his acquaintance’s distrust:} the illusion of the Christian who always believes he has more heart than the others … {He explains this distrust as projection – “because the Orient is not Christianised” -of the hypocrisy of masochism. He promises to take a new angle to his subject through a discussion of the practice of Zen, introducing the subject by showing his students} a montage of three photos of a single statue … whose qualifications, denominations I am going to give you and whose function I am going to make you glimpse, and which is found at the women’s monastery, at the nunnery of Todai-Ji at Nara. [15]

As Alex undresses, he hands each item to a check-in officer. The officer describes the articles, down to our protagonist’s “zippered, worn” boots and white underpants, and puts them into a box. The chief guard continues to question his new prisoner, asking him if he is, or ever has been, a homosexual, and, inspecting his anus with a penlight, if he has any venereal disease. After finishing, he indicates one of the bathtubs in the room and sends Alex to it. We cut to a chaplain [16] attempting to frighten his convict audience with descriptions of hell that he claims God had sent him in visions. We see Alex on the platform operating an overhead projector as a prisoner covertly winks and blows kisses at him. After this admirer and other prisoners interrupt the sermon with burps and raspberries, the chaplain has them sing the hymn, “A Wandering Sheep,” the Chief Guard enjoining them to “Sing up damn you.” We then watch Alex in the priest’s library reading the Bible as his voiceover tells us that he used it to help the chaplain with Sunday service and had developed a personal interest in it. Kubrick shows us some fantasies that fueled this interest while our hero describes them – whipping Christ while “dressed in the height of Roman fashion” and being one of the Old-Testament’s “yahoodies” battling the enemy and “getting on to the bed with their wives' handmaidens. That kept me going.” The priest interrupts Alex’s reverie, approvingly reading a line from the page he had left open, then our protagonist asks to talk to him in private. When the chaplain encourages him, “I know all the urges that can trouble young men deprived of the society of women,” Alex says that it is not that – he asks about the “Ludovico Technique,” a “treatment that gets you out of prison in no time at all and makes sure you never get back in again.” The priest tries to dissuade him, saying that its effectiveness has not been proven, that the Governor has doubts about it, and that there are “very serious dangers involved,” but Alex discounts these objections – “I want for the rest of my life to be one act of goodness.” His mentor replies, “When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man,” and Alex quotes scripture in response, “Instruct thy son and he shall refresh thee…”

{The scenes of fantasy and philosophy can help us meditate on Lacan’s discussion of the Buddhist formula, “desire is illusion.” He warns that it does not imply a final truth; that the term illusion simply means “it has no support … no outcome in nor aim towards anything.” Similarly, the concept Nirvana does not mean a pure reduction to nothingness. He explores the linguistics of the sign meant to convey Buddhist negation, “‘mou’… a very particular negation which is a ‘not to have’” which conveys a sense of a non-dualism. He further identifies the idea, “Tat tuam asi,” - “it is yourself that you recognise in the other,” as already inscribed in the Vedanta. Telling his students that the statue as representing ascetic Buddhist experience can help in understanding “the function of the mirror in our relationship to the object,” he refers to an article he had written on psychic causality. He notes how common to gnosology use of mirror symbolism is, making the idea of projection both easy to accede to and to make an error about.} But if we introduce the object o as essential in this relationship to desire, the business of dualism and of non-dualism takes on a completely different relief. If that which is most myself in the outside is there, not so much because I projected it there, but because it was cut off from me, the fact of my rejoining it or not and the paths that I will take to ensure this recuperation take on all sorts of possibilities, of eventual varieties. [17]

We see a crowd of prisoners walking in a circle inside a bare, high-walled courtyard, then we hear “Pomp and Circumstance March Number 1” play as we cut to a prison corridor. The chief guard officiously lets in some well-dressed visitors, and one of them, the Minister of the Interior, walks into Alex’s cell, picks up a bust of Beethoven, and, looking with distaste at some pictures on the wall of female nudes, starts to leave. He then notices a print of Beethoven, and looks back and forth between it and the bust before leaving the cell. The chief guard then comes into the courtyard and yells at the prisoners to line up against the far wall, and the visitors enter. The Minister walks down the lines of men, discussing the ineffectiveness of the prison system. When another visitor, the Governor, says that larger prisons would help, the Minister answers, “Soon we may be needing all of our prison space for political offenders.” Continuing to pontificate, he passes Alex, saying that the inmates “enjoy their so-called punishment,” and Alex boldly agrees. Over the objection of the chief guard, the Minister asks, “Who said that?” and, on further questioning, decides that he is perfect for the treatment – “This vicious young hoodlum will be transformed out of all recognition.” To Alex’s thanks, he says, “Let's hope you make the most of it, my boy.”

{We’ll use Alex’s debt of gratitude to help us recollect Lacan’s next thoughts: Warning us not to read his next claim as taking the path of idealism, Lacan says that} the eye is already a mirror, that the eye, I would go so far as to say, organises the world in space, that it reflects what in the mirror is reflection, but which reflection is visible to the most piercing eye, the reflection that it itself carries of the world in this eye that it sees in the mirror, that in a word there is no need for two opposing mirrors for there to be already created the infinite reflections of the hall of mirrors. {He connects this formation to “the original difficulty of arithmetic, the foundation of the one and the zero” and adds that the eye without the mirror is sufficient because} there is a one which contains multiplicity as such, which is prior to the deployment of space as such, which is never anything but a chosen space where there can only be sustained juxtaposed things as long as there is room. Whether this room is indefinite or infinite does nothing to change the question. {To illustrate the “many in the one” idea, he describes the sculpture of a “bodhisattva,” a name which means “to go quickly and create a void.” Noting that “it would be completely a Buddha if precisely it was not there,” Lacan remarks that the image demands obeisance from Buddhists:} [Y]ou owe, I think, recognition to the unity which has troubled itself in such a great number to remain within range of bringing you help. [18 (scholarly citations removed)]

The chief guard marches Alex into the Governor’s office, and the official, believing in “an eye for an eye,” expresses disapproval of the Minister’s plan. Telling our protagonist that he will be sent to the treatment center tomorrow, he asks him to sign some release papers, and we get a closeup of the guard, who had been barking at his charge throughout the scene, frowning and pursing his lips. Pomp and Circumstance, March 4, plays as the guard brings Alex into the Ludovico facility, his loud tenor and marching footsteps echoing in the quietly informal lobby. After getting numerous signatures from the doctor and telling him, “You'll have to watch this one” he glares and again purses his lips as the youth is led away. We see the administrator’s assistant, Dr. Branom, introduce herself to Alex and give him a shot. He asks if it contains vitamins, and she replies, “Something like that.” At his query, she says that Alex will watch some films. He asks, “You mean like going to the pictures?” and she again replies, glancing sideways at him through lowered eyes, “Something like that.” We cut to an orderly applying clamps to the straightjacketed youth’s eyes, then applying drops as Alex watches the movies. Our narrator tells us of his admiration for the films of gang rape and violence, especially when “the red, red vino on tap, the same in all places like it's put out by the same big firm, began to flow.” He then describes feeling sick, and we see him telling the orderly to get him something to be sick in. We get a closeup of the administrator, Dr. Brodsky, coolly describing Alex’s state: “like death, a sense of stifling and drowning.” We cut to Alex back in his room as Dr. Branom tells him that he will have two sessions tomorrow. At his incredulity, she says, “I imagine you'll be feeling a little bit limp by the end of the day, but we have to be hard on you. You have to be cured.” During the second session of the next day, the doctors show clips from Triumph of the Will as the synthesizer version of “The Ninth” plays. We get a closeup of Alex receiving his eyedrops as he realizes what he is hearing and starts to scream, “It’s a sin!” When Dr. Brodsky asks what he means, Alex cries, “Using Ludwig van like that!” On hearing further desperate answers to their questions, Dr. Branom looks at Alex with horrified pity and turns to Brodsky, who says that it can’t be helped. “Here's your punishment element perhaps.” Raising his voice, he tells Alex, “…you'll have to bear with us for a while.” Alex, using the words at the start of this entry, tries to convince the doctors that he is cured, but Brodsky tells him to take his chance. “The choice has been all yours.”

{At this promise of Alex’s transformation, I’ll turn to our next passage. Lacan names the sculpture of the bodhisattva as representing “Avalokitesvara,” the one who hears the tears of the world, and tells us that it had metamorphosed over time into a female divinity. He discusses various names and incarnations of this bodhisattva, noting that in Japan, not all forms of this divinity, there known as the Kannon, are feminine, and that the different levels of these pre-Buddhic divinities reveal the radically illusory character of all desire, connecting them to the Indian Shakti. [19]

We cut to a small auditorium, where an orderly brings Alex to the stage, and the Minister rises and addresses the audience, the chief prison guard and chaplain among them. Indicating the youth’s apparent physical fitness and alertness, he boasts about his speedy transformation into “as decent a lad as you would meet on a May morning.” He contrasts this change with the inability of two years of prison to effect any change except for teaching him “a false smile, the rubbed hands of hypocrisy…” We get a closeup of the chief guard as the Minister continues: “…the fawning, greased, obsequious leer. Other vices [Here, the guard looks sideways and down] prison taught him as well as confirming him in those he had long practised before.” The camera turns back to the Minister as he claims that his party has now met its promise “to restore law and order and to make the streets safe for the ordinary peace loving citizen.” Saying that actions speak louder than words, he sits. A young man comes from behind a curtain and insults, then attacks Alex, finally pushing him to the ground and holding him under his foot. Alex, consumed by the sickness, pleads to get up, and his attacker demands, to the obvious pleasure of the chief guard, that the youth lick his boot first. After our protagonist complies several times, the Minister thanks the “actor,” who bows and leaves, and a woman, wearing only bikini briefs, enters the stage. Demonstrating the same result for the youth, she too bows and leaves, and the Minister gushes that our protagonist is now “impelled towards good by paradoxically being impelled toward evil.” To the chaplain’s protest that our protagonist has now ceased to be “a creature capable of moral choice,” the Minister replies, “The point is that it works!”

{With this demonstration of Alex’s lost virility we can examine Lacan’s discussion of the ambiguously-sexed character of the Kannon, and his own discovery that for many, the question of whether the statue represented a male or female never arose. Then he describes the eye of the statue, noting that the half-closed organ characteristic of Buddhist statues is missing in this one, due to its devotees’ desire} to wipe away the tears from this figure par excellence of divine recourse {a sign of} the inverted radiation onto it of what one cannot fail to recognise as something like a long desire borne throughout the centuries by these recluses towards this divinity of psychologically indeterminable sex. [20]

We hear the tinny sound of a woman’s singing, on the radio, to a bouncy tune, “I want to marry a lighthouse keeper…” as Alex enters his parents’ apartment. Carrying his belongings in brown wrapping paper, he walks by two pictures of women not quite showing their bare breasts, and his smile fades as he stares into his bedroom at an unmade bed, a wall covered with pictures of soccer players, and a set of dumbbells on the shelf. We cut to his parents and a young man eating breakfast, all of them reading newspapers featuring Alex’s story. Alex brashly enters, kissing his mother and asking his father, with a playful punch in the air, if he is “keeping fit.” Pee flinches, laughs uncomfortably and turns off the radio. His mother asks why he hadn’t told them he was coming, and Alex replies that he had wanted to surprise them. His still disoriented father remarks, “it's a surprise all right...not that we're not very pleased to see you again. All cured too, eh?” Alex, after declaring himself “completely reformed,” places a hand on his seated father’s chair and asks, in a rather menacing stage whisper, who is eating with them. Mr. de Large introduces Joe, who is renting Alex’s room. Alex smirks and advances on the seated border, his unsettling stare returning, and asks sarcastically if he finds the room comfortable. Joe coolly tells Alex that he knows about him, “breaking the hearts of your poor grieving parents.” Standing up, he tells him that he won’t let him make their lives miserable, because they have let him “be more like a son to them than like a lodger.” Alex raises a clenched fist, and, as Joe drops back onto the couch next to Em, starts to retch. Staggering backwards, he knocks a bottle and a couple glasses on the bar over. To Joe’s remarks that Alex’s reaction is “enough to put you off your food,” Em says to let him alone - “it’s the treatment” - as her son sits down. Alex shakes his head to her offer of tea, and sad violin music plays as he sits clutching his package to him. To his queries, his father says that his snake has “passed away” and that the police took all his things as “compensation for the victims.” Finally, our protagonist asks, “What’s going to happen to me?” and Pee tells him that Joe has signed a 2-year contract and has already paid next month’s rent. The lodger, solemnly describing Alex’s weeping as “craft and artfulness,” advises his parents to let him find another place to live and learn “the errors of his way” and that he “doesn’t deserve such a good Mom and Dad as he's had.” Alex responds, “I've suffered and I've suffered, and I've suffered and everybody wants me to go on suffering.” As Em starts to cry, Joe pontificates, “You've made others suffer. It's only fair that you should suffer proper.” The boarder continues to scold Alex, Mrs. de Large’s crying becoming more intense as he talks, and he finally says, “Now look what you've gone and done to your mother,” and puts his arms around her. Alex slaps his knee, rises, saying he’ll make his own way - “Let it lie heavy on your consciences!” - and leaves. His father stands up and calls after him, “Now don’t take it like that, son…” and then turns towards a bawling Em. Joe reaches up to Pee, who moves to embrace his wife, and, pulling them all together, strokes Mr. de Large’s bald head.

{At this separation we’ll enter Lacan’s next class, where he proposes to lead us to} the function of castration in this strange fact that the most moving type of object, because it is at once our image and something else, can appear at this level in a certain context, in a certain culture as being unrelated to sex… {He notes that he has indicated} this object defined in its function by its place as o, the remainder of the dialectic between the subject and the Other … that in general it is some cut happening in the field of the eye, of which the desire attached to the image is a function. [21]

The violins continue to play as we see Alex walking on a bridge, then stopping to stare into a deep part of the river. A homeless man approaches him, asking if he can spare some “cutter,” needing to ask three times to break Alex from his thoughts. After the youth gives him some money, the “tramp” recognizes him – It is the man our hero and his droogs had beaten near the beginning of the film. Pursuing Alex into a tunnel filled with other homeless, his former victim identifies him as one of “the poisonous young swine that near done me in,” and incites them into attacking him, “as a prize specimen of the cowardly brutal young.” Two policemen disburse the crowd, telling them, “Stop breaking the State peace,” then ask him what the trouble is. We see Alex look up and his eyes widen in horror. The Funeral of Queen Mary plays as we see, from Alex’s point of view, Dim’s face slowly registering gloating recognition. Our protagonist turns, saying, “I don’t believe it,” and we cut to Georgie smiling, “Evidence of the old glazzies. Nothing up our sleeves…A job for two, who are now of job age.” We cut to a police van driving to a deserted area where Alex’s former droogs exit, giggling and dragging their handcuffed former comrade between them. As they bring him to a water trough, Alex pleads with them, protesting that he’s been cured, and Dim says, “This is to make sure you stay cured.” They force him to his knees and hold his head under the water, Georgie beating him throughout, for about a minute before uncuffing him and leaving, saying they will see him again. We cut to a night scene of Alex stumbling through a thunderstorm toward a lit “Home” sign, his voiceover telling us, “It was Home I was wanting and it was Home I came to, brothers, not realising in the state I was in, where I was and had been before.”

{We can let these coincidences resound Lacan’s description of the castration complex as an impasse Freud had reached, an impasse that resulted in} something like a reflux, like a return which leads the theory to search in the final resort for the most radical functioning of the drive at the oral level. {Describing this drive as not only chronologically but structurally original, he adds that he has already shown the drive’s metaphorical function:} tackling what is happening at the level of the phallic object, a metaphor which allows there to be eluded the impasse created by the fact, which was never resolved by Freud in the final term, of what the functioning of the castration complex is... [22 (scholarly citations removed)]

Our protagonist trips, then crawls toward the house before we cut to Mr. Alexander typing inside. We hear panting, then the doorbell, and the writer asks, “Who on earth could that be?” The camera pans to reveal the source of the heavy breathing - a large bespectacled man sits nearby, wearing very short shorts and a muscle tee-shirt, lifting dumbells. The young man, Julian, approaches the door and asks, “Yes, what is it?” Getting no reply, he opens it, and Alex falls at his feet. He carries the soaking youth, who is bleeding from nose to chin, into the house, telling the now wheelchair-bound writer, “Frank, I think this young man needs help.” We see Alex as he recognizes another of his former victims, and his voiceover tells us, “…there was your faithful narrator being held helpless, like a babe in arms, and suddenly realising where I was and why HOME on the gate had looked so familiar. But I knew I was safe. I knew he would not remember me for, in those carefree days, I and my so-called droogs wore our maskies which were like real horrorshow disguises.” At Frank’s questioning, Alex says the police had beaten him up, and we get a closeup of the writer as he starts to pant himself, glaring up from under his bushy eyebrows at our hero, then suddenly saying, “I know you!” We cut back to Alex’s face as the older man repeats the sentence, then again to Frank’s somewhat deranged face as he asks if Alex is “the poor victim of this horrible new technique.” The writer then grins ecstatically as we hear Alex cry, “Yes, sir, that's exactly who I am, sir... and what I am... a victim, sir.” Frank gushes, his eyes blinking rapidly as his words tumble out, “…The Police are fond of bringing their victims to the outskirts of this village. But it is providential that you, who are also another kind of victim, should come here.” He composes himself, remarking that the young man is cold and shivering, and asks Julian to draw a bath for him. As the weightlifter carries Alex, thanking his benefactor, away, the older man, still looking somewhat crazed, nods, then chews on his thumb.

{This gesture can help us digest Lacan’s elaboration of the Oral Drive, where he says that in order to meet his goal for the day he must repeat a previous step,} namely the point of junction between the o functioning as (-<P), namely the castration complex and this level that we will call visual or spatial, according to the aspect we are going to envisage it under, which is properly speaking the one where we can best see what the lure of desire means ... specify clearly where at this level the function of the cut is. [23]

Alex is relaxing in a bathtub next to a wall-length mirror, in which we see Mr. Alexander’s red-and-white robe (from his “introduction”) hanging on the door. A washcloth covering the upper part of his face, the youth starts to hum softly, then as he gets louder we find the tune is, “Singing in the Rain.” We cut to the writer whispering urgently and somewhat incoherently into the phone, referring to Alex as a potential weapon in the next election as a witness to the current government’s recruiting former juvenile delinquents into the police and using the “will-sapping techniques of conditioning” on citizens. Referring to his opponents’ methods as “the thin end of the wedge” to introduce the “full apparatus of totalitarianism,” he rants, “The people - the common people - must know - must see! There are rare traditions of liberty to defend. The tradition of liberty means all. The common people will let it go! Oh, yes - they will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be led, sir, driven - pushed!!! Thank you very much, sir. He'll be here.” Alex’s singing, now audible through the ceiling, continues after Frank hangs up, and we see his nervously pleased smile fade as he listens. He turns his head, moves his wheelchair toward, and finally puts his ear to the door. We cut to our protagonist, still in the tub, zestfully singing, then to a shot from below of the writer shaking, his mouth wide open and eyes rolled back as the music takes on a creepy echo. We then see Alex in the room where he and his droogs had attacked his benefactor. Wearing the older man’s bathrobe, he sits alone at a small table eating spaghetti, a bottle of wine next to him. Julian enters, carrying the wheelchair, Mr. Alexander still inside, and the youth rises. To Alex’s question whether it was alright to start without them, his writer, struggling to keep a civil demeanor, says, “Of course.” Julian sets his employer on one side of our protagonist and sits himself on the other, and Alex resumes eating. After an uncomfortable silence, the youth jumps as his benefactor suddenly yells, “Food alright?” We see the older man glare as Alex says it is great, then the younger man’s alarmed face as the writer tells him in a strained voice, “Try the wine.” Looking from the giant to Mr. Alexander, our protagonist asks them to join him, but both men decline. Trying to cloak his suspicious examination of the bottle and glass in the airs of a connoisseur, he compliments the year, color, and smell of the wine. Getting no response, he finally closes his eyes, takes a sip, and smiles in relief. After he finishes the glass in one gulp, the writer tells him through gritted teeth to have another. Alex again jumps, putting down the glass, when the older man barks out, “My wife used to do everything for me and leave me to my writing.” Nervously twirling his fork, Alex asks if she is away, and his benefactor yells, “No. She's dead!” Furiously describing her rape and saying that the doctors had attributed her subsequent death to pneumonia, Mr. Alexander says that the real cause was “the modern age.” Calming himself, he wheels up to the squirming youth. He attempts to sound gentle as he calls Alex “another victim of the modern age,” and says that some very important people want to help him. The door rings and Alex rises, saying he doesn’t want to trouble the writer any further. He sits back down, however, at his benefactor’s insistence and a look from Julian, and Mr. Alexander refills his glass. A man and a woman [24] enter and get Alex’s permission to ask him some questions. The woman, Rubinstein, says she had heard that the treatment had inadvertently conditioned him against music, and our protagonist replies, “It's just 'The Ninth.'” He tells them that the music makes him want to “snuff it,” and they ask if he feels suicidal now. He replies, “…put it this way... I feel very low in myself. I can't see much in the future, and I feel that any second something terrible is going to happen to me.” He then passes out, his proboscis falling into the spaghetti.

{With this descent we’ll review Lacan’s comparison of man with some of the most “primitive” mammals, such as the Ornithorhynchus*,} in whom the egg, even though placed in the uterus, has no placental relationship with the maternal organism. {Lacan claims that these mammals best reveal the original function of the breasts and illustrate} that it is necessary for us to conceive that the cut lies between the mammary and the maternal organism {since the} ... mammary of the mother of the ornithorphynchus, needs the stimulation of this little armoured point that the muzzle of the little ornithorphynchus presents, to unleash [the function] of that which appears indeed much more dependent on his presence, on his activity than on something which belongs as a matter of fact to the organism of the mother. {Further evidence for such dependency, allowing “the mammary to function structurally at the level of o,” shows in the hollow form of the platypus mother’s breast:} It is here that this snout which is already armoured, which has not yet hardened in the form of a beak as it will later become, that this snout comes to lodge itself. [25 (Scholarly citations removed)]

Mr. Alexander lifts the youth’s head by his hair, and we get a closeup of his unconscious, soiled face as the male visitor, Dolan, says, “Well done, Frank.” He asks Julian to get the car, and we hear 'The Ninth' again as Alex gags and wakes up in a strange bedroom, “the pain and sickness all over me like an animal.” He clutches his head, then thrashes around the cramped upstairs room, pounds on the locked door, then on the floor, screaming, “Turn it off!” We then see the writer’s face [26], shot from below, beatifically smiling up at the desperate sound. The camera pulls back to reveal a pool table supporting a reel-to-reel audio system and two large speakers aimed at the ceiling. Two of Mr. Alexander’s comrades are on either side of him [27], the other, Dolan, is in the foreground aimlessly rolling the billiard balls around. We cut back to Alex, still clutching his head, banging it on the floor and screaming. He straightens, and the camera pulls in on his face as his voiceover tells us that he felt compelled “to blast off forever out of this wicked cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and then sleep - forever and ever and ever.” We get a shot of him opening a window, then a low-angle one from outside as he jumps out. The screen goes black for a second, then the camera, rolling past a hospital bed, gives us a closeup view of Alex’s numerous bandaged wounds. Our narrator tells us that he woke up from a “black gap of what might have been a million years,” then we hear his moans alternate with those of a woman. Suddenly, a bare breasted nurse emerges from behind a curtain, followed by a young Intern, fumbling with his trousers, to whom she says that the patient has recovered consciousness.

{The scene can awaken us to Lacan’s discussion of the breast, the “o” that is} miscognised as such as having isolated itself from this organism, this relationship to the mother, the relationship of lack is situated beyond the locus where there has been played out the distinction of the partial object as functioning in the relationship of desire.

{Our professor then brings our attention to another organ, the tongue, in which he sees a homology to the} phallic function and its singular asymmetry, … namely that the tongue plays in sucking this essential role of functioning through what one can call aspiration, supports a void, whose power of appeal is essentially what allows the function to be effective, to give us in a first form this something which will remain … in the state of phantasy, at bottom everything that we can articulate around the phallic function, namely the turning inside-out of a glove, the possibility of an eversion of what is at the most profound point of the secret of the interior.

{He brings the two ideas together in the myth of the vampire, which reveals the truth of the} relationship … which adds the dimension of the possibility of the realised lack beyond what anxiety conceals in terms of virtual fears – the drying up of the breast. {He uses this thought to elaborate on Freud’s aphorism, “Anatomy is destiny”:} It becomes true, as you see, if we give to the term “anatomy” its strict and, I might say, etymological sense, the one which highlights – ana-tomy – the function of the cut, which means that everything that we know about anatomy is linked to vivisection. And in so far as there is conceivable this fragmentation, this cutting of one’s own body, which there is the locus of elective moments of functioning, it is in so far as destiny, namely the relationship of man to this function which is called desire, takes on all its animation. [28]

Funeral of Queen Mary returns as we get a montage of newspapers reporting Alex’s story and criticizing the government for its “inhuman means of crime reform.” We see Em, in a bright red slicker and matching cap, and Pee by their son’s bedside. Their comforting smiles fade as Alex, with effort, asks, “what makes you think you are welcome?” Mrs. de Large starts to cry, and her husband puts his arms around her and, again smiling, addresses Alex: “You were in the papers again, son. It said they had done great wrong to you. It said how the Government drove you to try and do yourself in... and when you think about it, son... maybe it was our fault too in a way... your home's your home when it's all said and done, son.” We cut to a woman in a labcoat and indigo wig pushing a cart down the corridor. She approaches Alex and chirpily greets him, introducing herself as Dr. Taylor, his psychiatrist. The youth asks, “What are we going to do? Talk about me sex life?”

{We can use this question to probe Lacan’s summary of his thoughts, where he notes that the oral drive has given them an image} for what has always remained for us – and why? – a paradox up to now, namely that in phallic functioning, in the one linked to copulation, it is also the image of a cut, of a separation, of what we improperly call castration… If there were no Other – and it does not matter whether we should call this Other here the castrating mother or the father of the original prohibition – there would be no castration. …I pointed out to you at other levels, in other orders, in other animal branches, the copulatory organ is a hook, it is an organ of fixation, and can be called the male organ in the most summarily analogical fashion – it sufficiently indicates to us that it is important to distinguish the particular functioning, at the level of the organisations of what are called superior animals, of this copulatory organ; it is essential not to confuse its avatars, specifically the mechanism of tumescence and of detumescence, with something that is, in itself, essential for orgasm. [29]

Dr. Taylor chuckles, saying she just wants him to tell her what he thinks about some pictures. He agrees, but asks if she can first interpret a “very nasty” dream he keeps having, in which numerous doctors “play around” with his brain. The psychiatrist momentarily loses her cheery demeanor, then recovers, saying that this dream is common among patients with injuries similar to his. We get a brief closeup of him smiling, looking at her from the corners of his eyes, as he replies, “Ah!” She explains the test, telling him to reply to the person speaking in each of a series of cartoons. He hesitates on the first picture, of men looking at a peacock, one of them asking, “Isn’t the plumage beautiful?” After she encourages him not to think too long, he blurts, “Knickers... Cabbages... It’s not got a beak.” He laughs delightedly as she says, “Good.” He then looks at pictures of slightly antagonistic situations and responds with gleefully vulgar threats. When shown a picture of a naked woman asking, “what do you want?” to a man standing on a ladder and looking into her bedroom window, he answers, “No time for the old in-out, Luv, I've just come to read the meter.” Lastly, she shows him a picture of eggs, saying he can do whatever he likes with them, and he says, “I would like to smash 'em. Pick up the lot and f...” then, carried away, he hits one hand with the other and cries out in pain. Dr. Taylor says that he seems “well on the way to a complete recovery,” and that he should be released soon.

{With Alex’s cure we’ll repair to our next quotes, where Lacan points out that the similarity} of the anxiety point in this case is found in a strictly inverted position to the one where it was found at the level of the oral drive; the homologue of the anxiety point is the orgasm itself as a subjective experience. … If at the end of Freudian analysis the patient whoever he may be, male or female, lays claim to the phallus that we owe him, it is in function of this insufficiency through which the relationship of desire to the object which is fundamental, is not distinguished at every level from what is involved as a lack constitutive of satisfaction.

{Lacan suggests therefore the need to examine another object.} [30 (Scholarly citations removed)]

We cut to our protagonist eating supper, a meal the Minister interrupts. The official dismisses the doctor (Sir Leslie,) as well as the nurse, who is feeding Alex. At the official’s query, the youth says that he has “suffered the tortures of the damned.” Seeing our protagonist’s difficulty feeding himself, the Minister offers to help him, and Alex accepts, obviously relishing the minister’s humble services. The dignitary, meanwhile, apologizes profusely for the young man’s misfortunes, telling him, “An enquiry will place the responsibility where it belongs.” Pointing out that Alex is getting the best of treatments, he says, “We never wished you harm, but there are some that did and do, and I think you know who those are.” He specifies “a writer of subversive literature [who] had formed this idea in his head that you had been responsible for the death of someone near and dear to him. We put him away for his own protection.” He then promises Alex an “interesting job” at a salary which he would “regard as adequate,” “not only for the job which you are going to do and in compensation for what you believe you have suffered, but also because you are helping us.” Noting the government’s loss of popularity due to Alex’s story, he says that the youth “can be instrumental in changing the public verdict.” To the Minister’s question, “Do I make myself clear?” Alex replies, “As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer...” As a symbol of their understanding, the Minister has some workers bring in a large sound system, playing "The Ninth." A crowd of reporters follows them, and the Minister and our hero make a great show of their new friendship as multiple cameras flash. Suddenly, Alex’s face goes blank and his head and eyes roll back [31], and we cut to a shot of Alex underneath a woman, both naked, copulating in the center of an applauding group of ladies and gentlemen in nineteenth-century dress. "The Ninth" ends just before our narrator’s last line – “I was cured all right.” The credits roll to the version of “Singing in the Rain” from Hollywood’s self-referential film, and we again see a blood red screen turn blue, then red again before it flashes other bright primary and secondary colors at us,

{… leaving us to reflect on the object o which Lacan specifies at the end of this class – the eyes. To find the aforementioned location, he returns to the functions of these organs in structuring space: Apprehension of space and illusion} is a matter of finding the traces of this excluded function which is already sufficiently indicated for us as a homologue of the function of o in the phenomenology of vision itself. {He discusses the idea of the third eye, an idea meant} to logicize the mystery of the eye, and this at the level of all those who [as in Buddhism] have attached themselves to this form of major capture of human desire. {He notes the resilience of the belief in this organ, up to the time of Descartes, despite lack of any evidence of its ever having existed. He attributes this resilience to its ability to pacify,} expressed for a long time, from earliest times, in the term contemplation, of suspension from the tearing apart of desire.

{He returns to the ambiguity of the sculpture photos he had shown his class, noting that it indicates the} zero point towards which the image of the Buddha seems to carry us in the very measure that his lowered eyelids protect us from the fascination of the look while at the same time indicating to us this figure which in the visible is always turned towards the invisible, but who spares us it, this figure in a word takes entire charge of the point of anxiety here, it is not for nothing that it suspends, that it apparently cancels out the mystery of castration. {He remarks that this idea does not solve the problem of desire-illusion-anxiety,} because precisely there remains this zero point. {He promises that his next lecture will tackle the impasse of the castration complex.} [32 (Scholarly citations removed)]

My original entry on Anxiety discussed how fossil fuel companies funded “studies” to obfuscate the truth about global warming. I’ll end this post with an article [33] revealing another form of environmental degradation caused by the insatiable desires of those in the industry.

1. Stanley Kubrick. A Clockwork Orange (1971.) Based on the Novel by Anthony Burgess. (1962.) in: indelibleinc.com. (Undated.)
* Nadsat word meaning “beaten”. Another example of this fictional slang from this post is Alex’s taunt right before the first Lacan quote.
“Nadsat.” in: Wikipedia.org. (November 16, 2014.)

** Ludivico Technique: a fictional aversion therapy.  in: Wikipedia.org (January 20, 2015)

2. Jacques Lacan. “Anxiety.” from The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X. (1962-63.) pp. 205 – 230. in: springhero.wordpress.com. (January 5-17, 2011.)

3. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [205]

4. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [206]

5. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [206-207]

6. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [208]

7. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [208-209]

* An interesting analysis of this scene can be found at: http://www.collativelearning.com/ACO%20chapter%2009%20.html

8. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [209-211]

9. Lacan. “Anxiety.”[212]

10. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [212-213]

11. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [214]

12. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [215]

13. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [216]

14. Played by the hilarious Michael Bates.
“Michael Bates.” in: wikipedia.org. (March 31, 2015.)

15. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [216-217]

16. Played by Godfrey Quigley, who played Captain Grogan in Barry Lyndon.
“Godfrey Quigley” in: wikipedia.org. (March 20, 2015.)

17. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [217-218]

18. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [218-219]

19. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [219-221]

20. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [221]

21. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [222]

22. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [223]

23. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [223]

24. In the script, the conspirators are named Dolin and Rubinstein, but Alex, despite a couple attempts, never learns either of their names.

25. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [224-225]

26. Here, Mr. Alexander, with his head leaning backwards and his face wearing a strange expression, resemble that of Beethoven’s in the poster that had been in Alex’s bedroom.

27. Mr. Alexander’s co-conspirators stand at either end of a painting which has the proportions of a dollar bill, a painting at the center of which is a circular shape surrounding what looks like a muse.

28. Lacan. “Anxiety.”[226]

29. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [227]

30. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [228]

31. Like Mr. Alexander earlier, he seems to transform into the image of Beethoven from his print.

32. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [228-230]

33. Deirdre Fulton. “US Oil Pipeline Industry Quietly Building Network That 'Dwarfs Keystone.” in: Common Dreams. (March 16, 2015.)