An interesting verse in Quran says:

When you enter the house, greet yourself. (Nur 61)

Since verbally greeting oneself doesn’t sound rational, one usually inserts “(each other)” in parenthesis and it’s interpreted as the one who enters the house greeting the members of his/her family. Well then, what if we read this verse literally?

The best example of a failure to greet while passing a threshold is again found in Quran: After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve say:

Our Lord! We have wronged ourselves. (Araf 23)

Notice that they don’t say “we wronged you”: What makes the act wrong is neither solid justifications for the violated prohibition nor the fact that the one who forbids is perfect or invincible; it is the fact that this prohibition is a prohibition. The true problem is not that eating the forbidden fruit would cause a certain injury or loss of reputation, but that this act is illegitimate.

Adam and Eve pass a forbidden threshold and they are unable to greet themselves; this is how they wrong themselves. This is precisely Lacan’s Law of Desire:

from an analytical point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire. (Seminar 7)

The forbidden fruit divides and fragments desire, it makes desire contradict itself and thereby ensnares it. The force that pushes them to violate the prohibition is not desire, on the contrary, it is what betrays desire: the compulsion to enjoy:

Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance – Enjoy! (Seminar 20)

Thus the Law of Desire is not about tasting worldly pleasures or satisfying one’s lust; the field of contact and circulation that truly belongs to desire is where greetings are given and received [1], and primarily it is the ability to greet oneself and to receive one’s own greeting (self-greeting).

This means that conscience is not the Superego but the Law of Desire. The one with a guilty conscience has passed such a threshold that (s)he has become unable to greet himself/herself. At this point, criticism and analysis approach the matter in different ways: Criticism concerns itself with whether the passed threshold were right or wrong. Analysis concerns itself with the correlation between the ability to pass a threshold and the ability to greet oneself.

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] Concerning this we find an interesting parallel between Lacan and Hegel:

“For the unconditionality of demand [for love], desire substitutes the ‘absolute’ condition.” (Jacques Lacan, The Signification of Phallus)

“Revolution of the East … made the Unconditioned [das Verhältnisslose] the condition [Verhältniss] of existence.” (G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, “Mohametanism” chapter)

See “Ideal Ego, Ego Ideal, Superego, Law of Desire” Slavoj Žižek, “Genuine Analysis is Beyond Criticism: Criticism Reveals Imposture, Analysis Reveals Self-Sabotage”, “Abese İrca ve Abese İcra”, “Düşmüş Meleği Yeniden Ayağa Kaldırmak”, “Sevgilinti: Leyla ile Mecnun”, “Aşk-ı memnu hırs-ı memnudur”, “Kendinibütün, Kendindar, Kendinsiz”, “Ev Semptomdur”, “Evrendeki sıfırtının yankısı: xwe”