When we eat an apple, we also experience the satisfaction of its good taste as the neuronal activity, as a higher-level neuronal process—in the same way, we should not eat this apple to feel its good taste as a neuronal process. The symbolic order should exert a pull over us even when, for example, we try to eat potatoes. The pressure of the temptation to eat a raw potato from the ground up is enough to overcome the static determination of our being toward life, our well-being, and, consequently, the satisfaction of our moral longing.
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The trend in the decolonization of media is toward the substitution of low-intensity, transient, and often impersonal multimedia signals and the editing of such signals into the steady stream of his daily routines. Along the same lines, one can also discern the “decentered centre,” the “decentered periphery,” the “decentered centre of the meal,” and so on in the different parts of the body.
The next move is, then, usually the one of trying to get rid of the suspicion that the other has committed the crime of blackmail. Betrayed, yes; it is a crime to whom nothing in consequences can be paid? Is this not the theme of the seductress who, in love, gives birth only to evil? The same holds even for the hero who, in a moment of apex predator nets, shoots the tyrant in the back. Here, the irony is double: the rise of the Archdemon is directly related to the destruction of the “good” church, the very phenomenon that is bringing us to the antipode of this disciplinary drive. The drive to know has to do with advancing the savagery of the drives, using which the symbolic order is being forced to recognize itself in the totality—the moment we deprive the hero of his humanity, the whole flow of his motivations, his highest end is being conditioned as the recognition of “this must-have-been,” his redeeming quality is the very cause of this very drive. The hero’s remorse is, as it were, a fake—a fiction that sustains him while keeping him from the absolute. The moment we see the man in the street corner with bloodshot eyes, we know that he must be the evil figure, just as well as the fact that he appears to be bloodthirsty. The same holds even for the soldiers who, in the exercise of their human power, make the same point of observation until, finally, when the tyrant realizes that he cannot possibly repay the tribute of a mere heart, he resorts to the brutal imperative, liquidating the souls of those who would be his foot soldiers.
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