Apple flower

In Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) Slavoj Žižek criticizes flowers:

My relationship towards tulips is inherently Lynchian. I think they’re disgusting. Just imagine, aren’t these some kind of, how do you call it, vagina dentata, dental vagina threatening to swallow you. I think that the flowers are something inherently disgusting. I mean, are people aware, what a horrible thing, these flowers are? I mean basically it’s an open invitation to all the insects “Please come and screw me”. I think that flowers should be forbidden to children. (clip)

Of course the truly dreadful side of the flower (as one messenger of nature) is that it’s entirely indifferent to such criticism, that it’s exempt from Superego control, that it follows its nose (or its phallus). For the same reason Žižek says “Mother Nature is a crazy bitch”: you can never be sure about what will befall from it. The colorful and pretty appearances of trees, flowers and animals amount to the deceptive guise of our fight for survival as living beings against natural/sexual/artificial selection [1]; such games of nicety and attraction are like a cold war that goes on without interruption after an armistice is announced or even after peace is declared. From this perspective, TV and media images, trends and celebrities and today’s influencers stand for the natural cold war in the field of civilization.

This kind of criticism can never reconcile itself with nature because what it doesn’t get is that there is no fruit without flower. Lacan called this non-dupes err (les non-dupes errent). This is the equivocal echo of names-of-the-father (les noms du père), so if we are hoping for a socialization that deserves its name, we cannot rely on sterile utopias that would shut off the deceptive beauty of the flower (or art, or woman, etc.). Not because life without it would be dry and tasteless (secluding oneself is one legitimate and respectable way of getting work done) but because the non-dupes err: There is no escape from magic; the more avoidant you become, the more powerfully the magic affects you. Since every symbol actually marks absence, eliminating the concrete referent will further emphasize the symbol itself. Here are two irrelevant examples:
1) When a smoker attempts to quit smoking “the last cigarette” feels too sweet.
2) When a resistance leader is killed, he becomes a “martyr” and feeds the resistance culture.
Thus we see that the element that is fascinating for being exempt from the Superego is revealed to be the very agent that fuels the Superego mechanism: “The more innocent you are, the more guilty you are!” The less you are duped, the more you err.

Criticism says: every rose has its thorn. As it cannot stand the rose’s “unearned” beauty, it attempts to tackle its thorn and overthrow the rose. Like the folk poet Aşık Veysel, it confronts and discourages the rose by saying “without the love I have for you, you are nothing.”

But analysis knows that there is no fruit without flower. The issue is not “how dare” the flower appears so beautiful, the issue is the meaning and significance of the thorns that the rose carries. This is the psychoanalytic journey that Freud embarked upon by analysing hysteria [2]. By staging the irony of criticizing flowers, Žižek points in the same direction. The original sin is not that Adam and Eve has eaten the apple without deserving it, it’s that they are ashamed of the flower that brought them the fruit (let’s meet the apple flower, see Figure 1). What Hegel said was no different:

The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. (The Phenomenology of Spirit)

Whereas Marx insisted on criticizing flowers:

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. (A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

Who is the “living flower” that the Marxist criticism tries to pluck in its attempt to break the chains of classes? Isn’t it Hegel? And didn’t our contemporary critics do their best in their attempts to pluck Žižek from the same branch? Lacan too likened his work to flowers: “[my concentrated writings] must be placed in water, like Japanese flowers, in order to unfold.” (Triumph of Religion)

(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] See “Žižek’s Attitude towards God and Nature”, “Dikiliş (Doğruluk Endişesi) ve Öz-dikişleme (Sahilik Kaygısı): Evrimsel Seçilim”, “It is unsignally to follow your noise”

[2] See “Psychoanalysis is the emprickle science”, “Genuine Analysis is Beyond Criticism: Criticism Reveals Imposture, Analysis Reveals Self-Sabotage”, “Filozof ve Sefeci, Feleğin Silsillesi: Yerindelik → Yerin Delik”, “Düşmüş Meleği Yeniden Ayağa Kaldırmak”, “Küçük Prens’in Fanustaki Gülü, Sanal Ağa’nın Terraryum’u, Zuckerberg’in Meta’sı”, “Abese İrca ve Abese İcra”