Thy Neighbor's Life

WHY ARE WE SO CONCERNED ABOUT THE PLEASURES OF OTHERS?

TO LOVE ONE'S NEIGHBOR MEANS, WHILE REMAINING WITHIN THE EARTHLY DISTINC­TIONS ALLOTTED TO ONE, ESSENTIALLY TO WILL TO EXIST EQUALLY FOR EVERY HUMAN BEING WITHOUT EXCEPTION. - SI1EM

uring a recent visit to California, I attended a party at a professor's house with a Slovene friend who is a heavy smoker. Late in the evening, my friend be­came desperate and politely asked the host if he could step out onto the veranda for a smoke. When the host (no less politely) said no, my friend said he would step out onto the public street. Even this was rejected by the host, who claimed such a public display of smoking could hurt his status with his neighbors. What really surprised me was that, after dinner, the host offered us (not so) soft drugs, and this kind of smoking went on without any problem— as if drugs were less dangerous than cigarettes.

Such impasses of today's consumerism illustrate our failure to cope with the deadly excesses of enjoyment. We seek to reduce it to pleasure that is by definition moderate and regulated by a proper measure. We thus have two extremes: On the one hand we have the en­lightened hedonist who carefully calculates his plea­sures to prolong his fun and avoid getting hurt, and on the other hand we have the jouisseur who is ready to consummate his existence in a deadly excess of en­joyment. In terms of our society, we have the consum-erist calculating his pleasures—well protected from all kinds of harassments and health threats—and we have

the drug addict (or smoker) bent on self-destruction. En­joyment is what serves nothing, and the great effort of our contemporary "permissive" society is to incorporate this un(ac)countable excess into the field of (ac)counting.

What lesson should we draw from this? The basic strategy of enlightened consumerist hedonism is to deprive enjoy­ment of its excessive dimension, of its disturbing surplus, of the fact that it serves nothing. Enjoyment is tolerated, solicit­ed even, but only on the condition that it remain healthy and not threaten our psychic or biological stability—chocolate, yes, but fat free; Coke, yes, but diet; coffee, yes, but without caffeine; beer, yes, but without alcohol; sex, yes, but safe sex. Recall the reports in popular magazines that advocate sex as something good for your health: The sexual act is like jogging—it strengthens the heart and relaxes tensions. Even kissing is good for your health.

There seems to be one (or rather two) exception(s) to this happy universe of healthy enjoyment: cigarettes (and, up to a point, drugs). For different (mostly ideological) rea­sons, it proved impossible to sublate the pleasure of smok­ing into a healthy and useful one. Smoking remains a lethal addiction, a feature that obliterates all its other characteris­tics (it can relax me, it helps to establish friendly contacts). The strengthening of this prohibition can be discerned in the gradual change of warnings on cigarette packs. Years

ago we usually got a neutral expert statement like the surgeon gen­eral's warning: "Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health." The tone gets more aggressive over time: "Smoking can kill you"—a clear warning that excess enjoyment is lethal. Furthermore, the warning gets larger and larger and is eventu­ally accompanied by color images of open lungs black from tar.

No wonder, then, that this prohi­bition on smoking has expanded so rapidly. First, smoking was banned in offices. Then airplanes were de­clared smoke free, then restaurants, then airports, then bars, then even private clubs. When this proved insufficient, smoking was banned within 50 yards of the entrance to a building. In a unique case of peda­gogical censorship reminiscent of the Stalinist practice of retouching pho­tos of nomenklatura, the U.S. Postal Service removed cigarettes from im­ages used for stamps of both Robert Johnson and Jackson Pollock. Such prohibitions target the Other's ex­cessive and risky enjoyment, which is embodied in the act of "irrespon­sibly" lighting a cigarette and inhal­ing deeply with unabashed pleasure (in contrast to Clintonite yuppies who smoke without inhaling or have sex without penetration or eat food without fat). As Jacques Lacan put it, after God is dead, nothing is any­more permitted.

The best indicator of the new status of smoking is, as usual, Hol­lywood. After the gradual dissolu­tion of the Hays Code from the late 1950s onward—when all the taboos (homosexuality, explicit sex, drugs, etc.) were suspended—one

taboo not only remained but was newly imposed as a pro­hibition: smoking. Smoking became a replacement for the multiplicity of the old Hays Code prohibitions. Back in the classic Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s, on-screen smok­ing was not only totally normal, it functioned as one of the great seduction techniques (recall, in To Have and Have Not, Lauren Bacall asking Humphrey Bogart for fire). Today, the rare people who smoke on-screen are Arab terrorists, other criminals and antiheroes. One even considers the option of digitally erasing cigarettes from old classic movies. This new prohibition indicates a shift in the status of ethics. The Hays Code focused on ideology, on enforcing sexual and social codes. The new ethics focus on health: What is bad is what threatens our health and well-being.

Consider the ambiguous role of the electronic cigarette, which functions like sugarless sugar. This electrical device simulates the act of tobacco smoking by producing an inhaled mist that bears the physical sensation, appearance and often the flavor and nicotine content of inhaled tobacco smoke— though without its odor. It is intended to omit the health risks associated with cigarettes. Sometimes e-cigarettes are prohibited on planes because they show addictive behavior. An e-cigarette is difficult to classify and regulate: Is it itself a drug? A medicine?

But who is this Other whose "addictive behavior"—in short,

whose display of excessive enjoyment—disturbs us so much? It is none other than what, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is called the neighbor. A neigh­bor by definition harasses us, and harassment is another word that, though it seems to refer to a defined fact, functions ambiguously. At its most elementary, the word designates brutal facts of rape, beating and other modes of violence that must be condemned. However, in the predomi­nant use of the word harassment, this elementary

meaning slips into a condemnation of any excessive proximity to another human be-

ing, with his or her own desires,

fears and pleasures. Two topics determine our tol­erant attitude toward oth­ers: the respect of other­ness and the obsessive fear of harassment. The Other is okay if his or her pres­ence isn't intrusive, if the Other isn't really Other. My duty to be tolerant to­ward my neighbor means I shouldn't get too close to him and shouldn't intrude into his space. I should respect his intolerance to­ward my overproximity. This may, in fact, be the central human right in late-

capitalist society: the right not to be harassed, to be kept at a safe distance from others.

Courts in most Western societies now impose a restraining order to prevent someone from harassing another person (e.g., stalking or making unwanted sexual advances). The harasser can be legally prohibited from approaching the vic­tim and must remain at a distance of more than 100 yards. Necessary as this measure is, there is something in it of the defense against the Other's desire: Isn't it obvious that there's something dreadfully violent about displaying one's passion for and to another human? Passion by definition hurts its object. Even if its addressee agrees to occupy this place, he or she can never do so without a moment of awe and surprise. Or to vary yet again Hegel's dictum "Evil re­sides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself," intolerance toward the Other resides in a gaze that perceives everywhere intolerant intruding others.

We should be particularly suspicious of men who are ob­sessed with the sexual harassment of women. After barely scratching the "profeminist" politically correct surface, we encounter the familiar male-chauvinist myth about how women are helpless creatures who should be protected not only from intruding men but from themselves. The prob­lem is not that women can't protect themselves but that they may start to enjoy being sexually harassed—that the male intrusion will set free in these women a self-destructive ex­plosion of excessive sexual enjoyment. We should focus on the kind of subjectivity that is implied in this obsession with different modes of harassment: the narcissistic subjectivity for which everything others do (address me, look at me) is a potential threat. With regard to woman as an object of disturbance, the more she is covered, the more our (male) attention focuses on her and on what lies beneath the veil. The Taliban not only forced women to appear in public completely veiled but also prohibited them from wearing shoes with noisy heels. Women were ordered to walk with­out making too loud a sound, which could distract men

and disturb their inner peace and dedication. This is why the ultimate PC sex is cybersex.

Since we deal only with virtual partners, there is no harassment in cybersex. This idea of a

space in which nobody is harassed and we are free to fulfill our dirtiest fantasies finds its ultimate expression in a recent pro­posal in the U.S. to "rethink" the rights of

necrophiliacs. Why should necrophiliacs be deprived of the right to have sex with dead

bodies? The idea was formulated that, in the

same way people give permission

for their organs to be used for medical purposes, one could also allow people to grant permission for their bodies to be turned over to necrophiliacs. This propos­al exemplifies how perfectly the politically correct anti-harassment stance realizes Kierkegaard's old insight into how the only good neighbor is a dead neigh­bor. A dead neighbor—a corpse—is the ideal sexual partner of a "tolerant" subject trying to avoid ha­rassment. A corpse cannot be harassed. At the same time, a dead body does not

enjoy, so the disturbing threat of excess enjoyment to the subject playing with the corpse is also eliminated.

However, this unexpected return of death in the heart of the PC domain signals that it isn't easy to get rid of violence. Violence returns in the attempt to get rid of it. What is the inner logic of what we perceive as sexual ha­rassment? It is the asymmetry of seduction, the imbalance between desire and its object. At every stage of an erotic relation, only contractual reciprocity with mutual agree­ment is allowed. Sexual intercourse is desexualized and becomes a deal in the sense of an equivalent market ex­change between equal free partners, where what is being exchanged is pleasure. The explosive expansion of por­nography in the digital media contributes to this desexu-alization of sex. It promises to provide "always more sex," to show it all, but all it delivers is the endlessly reproduced void and pseudosatisfaction, i.e., more and more of the raw real, from extreme fisting up to direct snuff.

The rise of political correctness and the rise of violence are thus two sides of the same coin. The basic premise of political correctness is the reduction of sexuality to contractual mutual consent. The gay rights movement unavoidably reaches its climax in contracts that stipulate extreme forms of sadomasochistic sex (treating a person like a dog in a collar, slave trading, torture). In such forms of consensual slavery, the market freedom of contract reaches its climax and cancels itself: Slave trade becomes the ultimate assertion of freedom.

One thing is sure: If today Thomas de Quincey were to rewrite the lines of his famous essay "On Murder Con­sidered as One of the Fine Arts," he would undoubtedly replace the last word (which is procrastination): "For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and smoking in public."

PS: I don't smoke (and never did), and I am totally in favor of the prohibitive taxing and punishing of tobacco companies.

THE RISE OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND THE RISE OF VIOLENCE ARE THUS TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN.