Parallax

ISSN: 1353-4645 (Print) 1460-700X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tpar20

‘You’d have to be stupid not to see that’

Alenka Zupančič

To cite this article: Alenka Zupančič (2016) ‘You’d have to be stupid not to see that’, Parallax,
22:4, 413-425, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2016.1229164

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2016.1229164

Published online: 03 Oct 2016.

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parallax, 2016, Vol. 22, No. 4, 413–425, Right in Front of our Eyes
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2016.1229164

‘You’d have to be stupid not to see that’

Alenka Zupančič

If we take up the theme of this special issue from the perspective of social
antagonisms, the question to ask is perhaps the following: what are today the
dominant means by which these antagonisms are displaced and their mecha-
nisms concealed, placed out of our reach? And the (perhaps not so) paradox-
ical answer is: by means of being un-shamefully displayed and blatantly
stated, by being put right in front of our eyes, fully acknowledged. Not all
the time, of course; there is still room for good old secrecy and classical
hypocrisy, but ‘realism’ and ‘calling things by their names’, ‘knowing what
things are really all about’, seems to be the prevailing mode which ideologi-
cally fortifies and sustains things just as they are. In other words, the fact
that we know (and ‘see’) that something is highly problematic, in no way
implies that we should, or could, do something about it. Indeed, not only it
does it not imply that, I would further argue that it actively blocks this impli-
cation. In other words, this is not simply about knowing what is wrong, but
not having the strength or the will to do anything about it. There is some-
thing in the modern ideological structuring of knowledge (which often takes
the form of revealing what is ‘behind the scenes’ – before anybody even
thinks to ask) that seems to absorb the question of consequences and to make
it literally meaningless, incomprehensible.

I propose to explore this ideological structuring of revelation and knowledge

with the help of a film: a generally less well-known film by Lars von Trier: a
comedy – yes, comedy – taking place in the contemporary corporate uni-
verse, The Boss of it All (2006). The film is, among other things, a most inter-
esting study of the image (appearance) of the contemporary figures of
corporate power. It is very much about how power appears by flagging, put-
ting forward an image of its own point of difficulty; and about how, by doing
that, it does something different from simply ‘telling the truth’: it captivates
us, it forces us to watch and support it.1

The Boss of it All is a story of a boss and owner of an IT company, Ravn, who
has been running his company for some time with the help of a fiction he
has invented: namely that he was himself subjected to a higher boss (‘the
boss of it all’), who owns the company and runs the business from the States.
This fiction had a double function. On the one hand, it helped the actual
boss, Ravn, to put the unpopular decisions concerning the employees on the
account of this supposed higher boss, the boss of it all, while preserving for
himself the image of good and gentle ‘bear’, who genuinely loves and cares

Ó 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group parallax

413
 for his employees. At the same time, Ravn also used the fiction of the boss of
it all in a more concrete and nuanced way, writing personal e-mails to his
employees as if they were written by this higher boss. For example: when
one of the employees wanted to quit her job, she received a mail from this
boss, hinting at his secret passion and longing for her; to another he hinted
that he was gay… All these were manipulations that helped Ravn to run the
company according to his desires. The scheme works perfectly until Ravn
decides to sell the company, and he needs to ‘produce’ his fiction, the boss
of it all, to sign the deal (on account of which everybody would lose their
jobs, as well as property rights for their past patents). He hires an actor
(Kristoffer) to play the part, and here the comedy (as well as the film) begins.
The actor is himself quite a character – an avant-garde actor with his own
peculiar approach to acting and taste in theatre. Ravn’s first plan is to
engage the actor to appear just once: at the meeting with the Icelandic busi-
nessman, during which he would sign over the power of attorney to Ravn,
who would then proceed with the rest of the deal. But this plan fails because
the Icelander wants to have dealings with the big boss throughout the deal.
So the actor is forced to stay and to keep playing the ‘boss of it all’ (Sven)
until the deal is concluded. He gets to meet the employees, which leads to
all kinds of difficult and comic situations, since he is not aware of Ravn’s pre-
vious machinations. At some point he learns about the dark side of the deal,
which Ravn has concealed from him: he learns that there is no boss of it all
(Ravn’s story was that the real boss could not come, but the deal needed to
be signed right then, which is why he needed Kristoffer to stand in) and that
everybody will lose their jobs and more when the deal is signed. He starts
sabotaging Ravn’s plan, eventually tricking him into confessing everything to
his employees and to deciding to not go through with the sale. But then
comes the final twist. During the last meeting with the Icelandic businessman
the actor finds out that the Icelander shares his own passion for an obscure
author called ‘Gambini’. He still has the power of attorney and, on the spur
of the moment, he signs the fatal contract, although Ravn has just changed
his mind and confessed everything. As a consequence, everybody is sacked
(except Ravn, of course, who has already exempted himself when writing the
contract, and who also gets all the money). In other words, although every-
body knows everything there is to know, this does not prevent the mis-
chievous deal from being concluded. In the last shot we see the Icelander,
his translator and Ravn watching Kristoffer perform Gambini (the 3-hour
‘Chimney sweep’s monologue’ from ‘A Town without Chimneys’.)

In its general idea and movement the film seems to be following the classical
comic theme of appearances (Ravn’s fiction of ‘the boss of it all’) gaining the
upper hand, getting out of control, and the main character getting swal-
lowed, overrun by his own fiction. Ravn invents the boss of it all, believing
he can control and use him as his own instrument, and then the material
truth of this fiction wins over the supposed ‘essential’ truth. Yet with the
final turn the film goes a step further and produces yet another twist: it is
not the (character of) the boss of it all who has the final word (‘he’ is in fact
ready to join Ravn in not signing the contract), but ‘Gambini’.
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In his commentary on the film (‘Outsourcing Authority’) Benjamin Noys
makes two important points.2 First, the film refuses the kind of ideology cri-
tique that implies we can simply expose false authority at its source. Instead
of a simple tracking of authority back to its source, the film, in line here with
psychoanalysis, insists that authority is primarily and by definition outsourced.
This is indeed a fundamental Lacanian lesson. Authority always comes from
the outside and is essentially symbolic, non-immediate: it does not grow from
within ourselves, but is bestowed upon us. The other, even more important
point made by Noys, is perhaps more surprising. Used as we are, he sug-
gests, to various versions of the claim that ‘the Other doesn’t exist’, it appears
that we remain all too ready to believe that there is no ‘boss of it all’ really.
And it may take a comedy to teach us differently. This does indeed describe
perfectly the movement of the film, and of ourselves as spectators who are
certainly ‘taken for a ride’ by it. We ‘know’ from the very start that there is
no boss of it all, and that it is all just Ravn’s invention, designed to help him
get what he (coldly) wants, while at the same time protecting his own senti-
mental image of himself and satisfying his need to be loved by everyone. We
think we get the picture. But then the question remains, quite simply: if all
this is only Ravn’s invention and doesn’t really exist, who then signs the infa-
mous contract in the end? There is an old psychoanalytic joke: A patient
comes to see his analyst, complaining that a crocodile is hiding under his
bed. During several sessions the analyst tries to persuade the patient that this
is all in his imagination. The patient stops seeing the analyst, who believes
he has cured him. A month later the analyst meets a friend, who is also a
friend of his ex-patient, and asks him how the latter is. The friend answers:
‘Do you mean the one who was eaten by a crocodile?’ The lesson of this joke
is profoundly Lacanian. If we start from the idea that the crocodile is a
purely subjective invention/projection, what are we then to call this thing
which killed, which ‘ate’ the subject? Or, in our example, if there is no boss
of it all, who was it then that eventually signed the disastrous contract?

The heart of Noys’ polemic with the ideology critique inspired by psycho-
analysis concerns precisely this point, and the lesson about mastery it implies.
He first refers to Slavoj Žižek and his description of modern masters:

A “postmodern” boss insists that he is not a master but just a

coordinator of our joint creative efforts, the first among equals;
there should be no formalities among us, we should address
him by his nickname, he shares a dirty joke with us … but dur-
ing all this, he remains our master. In such a social link, relations
of domination function through their denial: in order to opera-
tive, they have to be ignored.3

Ravn’s image in the movie does indeed correspond perfectly to this descrip-
tion: he pretends to be the first among equals, everybody’s buddy: the rela-
tions of domination in the collective are fully operative, while ignored (and
because they are ignored). Žižek continues:

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 Paradoxically, in such a situation, the first act of liberation is to
demand from the master that he act like one: one should reject
false collegiality from the master and insist that he treat us with
cold distance, as a master.4

Noys’ reading of the The Boss of it All is that at the end we get precisely the
old, capricious, artistic Master – a master who does act like a master. Yet one
could hardly say, he concludes, that we are any better off because of this: ‘Is
it really better to be made unemployed by the master acting as a master?’5
The end of the movie would thus confront us with the limit of this ‘first act
of liberation’, making conspicuous the absence of a second act of liberation
that would amount to a more radical breakage. It is here that Noys situates
‘a neuralgic point in the articulation of psychoanalytic ideology-critique.
After all, for ideology-critique to be anything more than an exercise in
knowledge, in the construction, precisely, of the non-dupe or the “subject
supposed to know”, it must be able to make possible a shift in the very terms
of our symbolic coordinates.’6

I will not try to respond to this directly, but rather by the bias of a particular
point that can be made in relation to Noys’ analysis of the movie. The read-
ing according to which the end of the film stages a return to a previous form
of mastery (to a master who acts like a master) could be disputed. This, at
least, will be my argument. Furthermore, the opposition between the old
and the new forms of mastery does not lie simply in the difference between
openly exerting mastery, and hiding it behind a false pretence of friendship
and equality. In other words, the question is not simply whether the master
signifier is hidden or openly leading the game, for everyone to be seen. The
friendly appearance of new masters is not just a mask of something else (of
the ruthless master behind the scenes), it is a peculiar mask that allows for
the ruthlessness to be displayed quite openly, but without consequences.

So let us return to the film. We must first avoid the obvious temptation of a
psychological reading of Ravn’s proceedings, suggesting that Ravn ‘hasn’t
got the balls’ to be a real boss and to take upon himself what this entails,
which is why he hides behind the fiction of the boss of it all. The more the
movie advances the more it becomes clear that what Ravn is staging as much
as the existence of the boss of it all, is his need to hide behind him. We could
even say that ‘the boss of it all’ is the fiction with the help of which Ravn
constructs yet another fiction: himself as a split, weak, ‘castrated’ boss. What
we are dealing with here is a creation and the rise of a public image of a
weak, castrated master. Indeed, and as it gets more and more clear with
every minute of the film, Ravn as a person who hasn’t got the balls to be a
real boss and to take upon himself what this entails is, strictly speaking, his
public image (and not his private weakness). This (and not simply the fiction
of the boss of it all) is his principal ‘cover’ or, rather, it is the structure within
which his power operates. The fact that he craves to be loved is not some-
thing that our psychological reading of him reveals as his deep and hidden
desire, on the contrary, this is what is most out in the open, he doesn’t miss
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any opportunity to display it (with everything he does and says, he is send-
ing this message). The split subject (and not simply one side of this split) is
his role, his act, his image.

And this is precisely why his eventual ‘coming out’, his revelation, his confes-
sion works as it does: as a perfect non-event which changes nothing and
even reinforces his position. What happens in this scene?

The crack Kristoffer eventually finds in Ravn’s system is his (cheap but gen-
uine) sentimentality. Before signing the disastrous contract, as Ravn still
wants him to do at this point, and with all the employees (victims of this con-
tract) present at the occasion, Kristoffer (as the boss of it all) delivers a really
sleazy speech, praising Ravn and thanking him for his unselfish and generous
leading of the company. As the Icelandic gentleman quite rightly remarks:
nobody could believe such a load of sentimental crap. On this cue, Ravn
breaks down in tears – he does believe it, is moved by it and cannot stand the
situation any longer. He confesses: ‘I’m the boss of it all. I own the company.
I make the decisions.’ Upon this, one of the employees punches him in the
nose. Slightly bleeding he cries, sobbing that he is sorry. Then another
employee thanks Ravn for finally admitting it. She always knew he was the
boss, she says, and ‘you’d have to be stupid not to see that’. ‘I forgive you,
Ravn’, she adds. And so does everybody else: they all end up embracing Ravn
and comforting him. In other words, it’s the old scheme all over again.7

So, the ‘revelation’ of his being the actual boss is a complete non-event;
rather, it reinforces Ravn’s position and works as just another sign of his
weakness. What the revelation turns out to be about is not so much that he
is the true master making all the decisions, but – again – that he is patheti-
cally split between his bossy self and his sentimental self, which is precisely
how he wants to appear. In other words, the supposed revelation of what is
behind is actually in the service of maintaining the ideological front, Ravn’s
main fiction, his image. However, we should perhaps make a further concep-
tual step here and formulate what is at stake more precisely. It is not that
Ravn pretends to be weak, whereas in fact he is not: rather, his displayed
(and quite actual) weakness is the generic point of his discursive power,
which operates through and with the help of this weakness; it is the very dis-
playing of it that makes him unassailable. Rather than simply ‘hiding’ the
workings of the actual cold and brutal power, this public image of weakness
gives them their truly modern form, thereby capturing its ‘subjects’ in a specific,
perverse dialectics. And the way in which all the employees are caught in this
dialectics is an important focus of the movie.

The displayed weakness is thus not simply a false appearance, a cover for
what is actually a brutal power, but rather its active carrier and form. It is
the point through which the brutal power exists and is being exercised, it
doesn’t exist somewhere behind it. This is indicated (or rather spelled out)
very nicely at a key point in the film. Kristoffer, pretending to be the real
boss, gets into trouble with the employees because he is not aware of
parallax
417
 everything that Ravn has built into his fiction of the boss of it all. Following
which he and Ravn take a kind of ‘time out’ (they meet outside the office)
during which Ravn coaches him and gives him this advice: ‘Don’t take it so
seriously. All that stuff about controlling and subduing is probably fine… but
it’s easier not to. Make the audience do the work…. Just say “Yes” (whenever
they come to you).’ In short, just like the classical master the new age master
also doesn’t act in an immediate way (i.e. by trying to make people work by
means of directly controlling and subduing them), but by emitting only stu-
pid signs8 on the basis of which people get caught in a dialectics in which
they do everything by themselves.9 The difference between the two figures
of mastery is that the split and inconsistency are now part of the ‘image’ of the
master.

In order to see and formulate this more clearly, we will now look at what
the film articulates and proposes as the comic (‘phallic’) signifier of this new
constellation, namely: Gambini.

What is the status of (the reference to) ‘Gambini’ in the movie? At a first
sight ‘Gambini’ seems to be a bizarre, whimsical element brought into play
quite accidentally by the actor whom Ravn chooses to play the ‘boss of it all’,
the bizarre element of Kristoffer’s peculiar artistic taste that threatens the
smooth carrying out of Ravn’s plan. Whenever he refers to ‘Gambini’,
Kristoffer seems to come close to jeopardizing the role he is supposed to play
(we anticipate that he will do something stupid). Yet, if not before, it
becomes clear at the end that rather the opposite is the case, and that the
alleged obstacle is actually the very means of the full, even surplus realization
of Ravn’s original plan.

When the two (Ravn and Kristoffer-as-Sven) fail, falling prey – as they are
supposed to in comedies – to the public image of themselves, it is thanks to
‘Gambini’ and his ‘intervention’ that the fatal contract gets signed neverthe-
less. Although it seems that this goes against Ravn’s will, we mustn’t fail to
see how it actually makes Ravn’s original plan not only succeed, but succeed
with a surplus – were his plan ‘only’ to succeed, he would remain hated by his
employees after the final sale, but this way he sells the company under his
conditions, and still comes across as a good guy, which is more than originally
planned … In short, Gambini is no accidental, heterogeneous element; this
‘irrational’ and ‘fictional’ element is the very rationale of the new order of
things.

What is Gambini’s specialty, his main characteristic? It is the breaking of the

(theatrical) illusion, disclosing things for what they are. This very significant
detail is stated during the first scene Gambini gets mentioned, which is also
the first scene between Ravn and the actor, Kristoffer. Ravn has just hired
Kristoffer and is introducing him to his role. He wants Kristoffer to sign a
non-disclosure agreement relating to their contract, explaining to him what
it means: that he has to keep their arrangement a secret. Ravn adds that, as
an actor, Kristoffer is surely used to this: ‘You don’t shoot someone on stage
Zupancic
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and tell the crowd: I’m only acting’. To this Kristoffer replies, pensively: ‘I
don’t know… That particular statement applies to many of Gambini’s anti-
characters.’ This calling of illusion what it is, hence (supposedly) breaking
the illusion, is Gambini’s signature. To shoot someone on the stage and then
say to the crowd ‘I was only acting’ is pure Gambini.

Is this not, precisely, what also describes Ravn’s mode of operation perfectly?
Not only does he keep doing things and then say ‘I’m only acting’ (on behalf
of the boss of it all), he is also subject to ‘artistic’ whims and dramatic
changes of mood: his sentimentality is as much a whim as is his calculating
coldness. Von Trier’s Gambini, we could say, is a mock modernity – it is an
artistic equivalent of the modern boss, more than it is a figure of the master
who openly acts as a master (as Noys suggests, opposing Ravn’s sentimental-
ity to ‘Gambini’s’ open indifference and caprice).

This way we come to one of the key themes of the film, which is precisely
the question of representation. Or, more specifically, the question of ‘real-
ism’ and disillusionment as prominent ideological practices of representation. In
other words, the question here is not only how is it possible that revela-
tions like ‘the Emperor is naked’ (or, in Ravn’s case, ‘I’m naked’) don’t
necessarily work, but further and more specifically, how do these kinds of
revelations themselves contribute to sustaining the very illusion they alleg-
edly disrupt.

There are two levels at which this can be addressed. Firstly, through the
question of (material) truth.

When Ravn says: ‘I’m the boss of it all. I own the company. I make the deci-
sions.’ – is this simply the truth? It is a confession to a fact that hides more
than it reveals. It is the kind of factual truth that helps obfuscate another
truth, which is that, as boss, he doesn’t really know what he is doing. The
sad truth is that the bosses don’t really know what they are doing (which, of
course, is no excuse, rather the opposite!) Even when they cynically admit
that they are into it only because of ‘money and power’, we should not be
trapped into thinking that they know all the ropes and know exactly what
they are doing. Their (and our) realistic awareness of ‘what this is really all
about’ is the very form of (contemporary) ideological illusion. In this sense,
Ravn’s oscillation between an utterly stupid sentimentality and clever, calcu-
lating coldness is quite genuine, and a very good way of articulating this
‘identity of the opposites’. Calculating cleverness is not the opposite of senti-
mentality; the self-confidence of calculating cleverness (that knows exactly
how things stand and has no illusions) is the biggest stupidity. This level of
material truth is also a possible way of reading the end of the movie: mate-
rial truth of Ravn’s position triumphs, even if he changes his mind meanwhile
and becomes a ‘better person’ (decides not to sell the company). It could
even be that he now genuinely wants to save the employees, but it is too late:
‘Gambini’ will carry the deal through when he decides to pull out. Which
proves, again, that he didn’t know what he was doing.
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419
 If we relate this to the beginning of our discussion, we can now ask the fol-
lowing question: Is there or isn’t there, after all, a boss of it all? If we are to
maintain that the formula ‘there is no boss of it all’ (or that ‘the big Other
doesn’t exist’) still carries some subversive truth, we need to concretize its
meaning. We can do this by going back to the crocodile psychoanalytic joke.
The point of the joke is not a return to simple realism: the point is not that
‘sometimes things are just what they are, and a crocodile is really and simply
a crocodile’, whereas psychoanalysis would have us believe that it is all in our
heads (or that the crocodile is actually our mother or father). The point is
rather that what is ‘all in our heads’ can quite materially kill us. And that
most ‘irrational’ beliefs have objective material existence that affects every-
body. This (or rather the ignoring of this) is the problem. Žižek has written
on this on different occasions in relation to Marx and his notion of fetishism.
For example and put simply: the true problem is not people believing that
money has mystical powers and that it is more than it actually is; the true
problem (or lie) is the ‘realist’ belief that ‘money is just a kind of voucher
entitling you to a part of the social product’.10 Why is this a problem, a lie?
Because ‘in your social reality, by means of your participation in social
exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that the commodity really
appears to you as a magical object endowed with special powers’.11 In order
to account for the functioning of ideology Žižek replaces the distinction
between how things really are and how they appear to you, with the differ-
ence between how things appear to you, and how they really appear to you.
Our social interactions, and not our knowledge, are the place to look if we
want to know how things really appear to us. Thus, for example, the some-
thing in money more than just a printed piece of paper is something quite
real at work in our social relations; and it is this something that we need to
analyze most seriously, instead of dismissing it as non-existent, as mere illu-
sion. This is why ‘realist’ seeing and ‘realist’ representation is an (often very
welcome) form of misrepresentation. It shows us all there is to see. But in
doing this, it performs another operation as well: it makes us believe that all
there is to see is also all there is to things. Or, that all there is to things
appears directly in them, as their inherent part. This way it not only conceals
the presuppositions, the negative conditions of visibility/existence, it cuts
them off altogether. These presuppositions cannot be seen directly, because
there is nothing to see: money really is just a printed piece of paper – if we
look at a dollar bill from all sides, and know all about how it is made, we’ll
never be able to see in it that which ‘makes the world go around’ in a very
specific, monetary way. We see everything except what cannot be seen, and
what is essential for the existence of what can be seen. We are reduced to
what Lacan called ‘geometrical vision’: we can see all there is to see except
that which constitutes the field of vision by falling out of it.12 This fallen-out
element (which Lacan relates to the object-gaze) is not what is hidden (and
could be revealed). It determines the very frame through which we see
things. In order to see something of this fallen out element, we have to look
elsewhere: for example in our social interactions, in the ‘fictions’ that struc-
ture these interactions. It is only in this way, and not by looking at things

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directly and realistically, that we can get some idea about the real at work in
social reality.

In this precise sense psychoanalysis is the last to not take the fiction of the
boss of it all seriously, and to believe that it is enough to dispel it as an illu-
sion. In the film the whole collective is structured through this fiction,
whether they actually believe in it or not. The end of the movie makes this
point very strongly.

But there is still something else, and more specific, that the last part of the
film invites us to consider. It concerns the ideological charge involved in the
contemporary ‘realist’ showing it all, in promoting knowledge as disillusion-
ment. As stated earlier, the question is not only how is it possible that revela-
tions like ‘the Emperor is naked’ (or, in Ravn’s case, ‘I’m naked’) don’t
necessarily work, but further, and more specifically, how does this kind of
revelation itself contribute to sustaining the very illusion it allegedly disrupts.
Put more generally: it is as if a precipitated recognition and knowledge
about some problem (which we now know all about) actually helped us disre-
gard this very problem (as problem). This structure is actually very close to
that of ‘fetishist disavowal’, but with a further twist to it. In the case of fetish-
ist disavowal we are dealing with the split between knowledge and belief (‘I
know very well that there is no X, but I keep believing there is’), in which
the fetish functions as material existence (form) of our disavowed beliefs. We
don’t need to secretly believe what we know is not the case, because the fet-
ish ‘believes’ it in our stead. The belief is outsourced to the fetish, while we
know perfectly well how things stand.13 What then is the further twist that
appears with the new configuration discussed here?

In order to formulate it we can introduce yet another structure discussed by

Freud which we should perhaps read together with that of fetishist dis-
avowal. In one of his short but brilliant pieces Freud discusses the phe-
nomenon of so-called fausse reconnaissance (false memory). He starts by
pointing out how ‘it not infrequently happens in the course of an analytic
treatment that the patient, after reporting some fact that he has remem-
bered, will go on to say: “But I’ve told you that already” – while the analyst him-
self feels sure that this is the first time he has heard the story.’14

What then is the logic at stake in the phenomenon of ‘false memory’ (which
includes things like déjà vu, déjà éprouvé, déjà entendu, déjà raconté)? This is
how we could put it to make the point as clear as possible: A present, con-
temporary ‘event’ of the unconscious (a surprising, unexpected finding) takes
place in the form of a memory of a fait accompli, that is to say in the form of
something that is of no immediate concern (to us, since we’ve known about
it for a long time). Something that has just arisen and is of traumatic/disrup-
tive nature is intercepted (and de-realized) by a precipitated knowledge/
recognition of it; we look at it as belonging to some other time (or temporal-
ity). We are looking straight at the traumatic thing (it is right there, in front
of our eyes, fully acknowledged), yet we see it as coming from far away, as
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421
 strange and indifferent. The fausse reconnaissance thus, paradoxically, main-
tains the unfamiliar (strange, foreign, other, indifferent) character of what
has appeared by means of the very feeling of recognition and familiarity. We
could also say that it maintains it by means of cutting the thing from its pos-
sible articulation as presence in reality: for this articulation appears already
the first time as its own memory.

Is this not, exactly, what happens in von Trier’s movie when Ravn reveals
that he is the actual ‘boss of it all’, to which one of the employees replays:
‘Oh, but I’ve known this all along, you’d have to be stupid not to see that’?
This event seems to be enough for everybody to simply accept and endorse
Ravn’s manipulations. We can see quite clearly how, to put it in psychoana-
lytic terms, in this case the repression (Verdrängung) persists not simply in
spite of the acceptance of the repressed, but rather with its (active) help – which
describes perfectly the very structure we are after.

If we relate this structure to that of fetishist disavowal, we can now formulate

the further twist that can (and does) appear in the latter. In the classical
structure of fetishist disavowal the fetish takes upon itself the material exis-
tence (the existence in the reality) of our disavowed belief, which thus persist
against our better knowledge. What happens with the structure that we are
pursuing here, however, is that knowledge itself starts to function as fetish: the
precipitated knowledge (the awareness of how things really stand) makes it
possible for us to ignore what we know, and even to actively support what
we know to be wrong.

The permutation thus also appears at the level of ‘but nevertheless’, which
presupposes an opposition, a contradiction: the structure of fetishist dis-
avowal (‘I know very well, but I nevertheless continue to believe the opposite’),
mutates into ‘I know very well, and this is why I can go on ignoring it’. (Or: ‘I
see it, and this is why I can forget about it’.)

The ‘fetishization’ of knowledge is to be taken here in the clinical, rather

than metaphorical sense: what is at stake is not that knowledge is extremely
valued, overemphasized and in this sense ‘fetishized’; instead, what is at stake
is that knowledge takes the structural place of the fetish as that via which
one can keep doing, enjoying, or simply ignoring things that this knowledge
would seem to contradict. All that is important is that we ‘know all about it’,
and that we are ‘nobody’s dupes’. Which is, of course, the very definition of
the capital dupe. Lacan proposed the following homonymic slogan, which
also constitutes the title of one of his seminars: les non-dupes errent,15 the non-
dupes err – those who refuse to be duped at any price are the biggest dupes;
those who will do anything not to be fooled (or ‘made fools of’) are the big-
gest fools; those who try to make absolutely sure that they do not fall prey to
any appearance, semblance or illusion, are taken in to begin with. The social
valorization of being nobody’s dupe puts us in the position that could per-
haps best be described as that of ‘the dupes of it all’… This social validation
also performs a precise ideological task: it functions as the fetish that makes
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422
it possible for us to support/bear some very bitter facts concerning our real-
ity. To illustrate how fetish works, Žižek recounts a story about a man whose
wife was diagnosed with acute breast cancer and who died three months
later; the husband survived her death unscathed, being able to talk coolly
about his traumatic last moments with her – how? Was he a cold, distant,
and unfeeling monster? Soon, his friends noticed that, while talking about
his deceased wife, he always held a hamster in his hands, her pet object and
now his fetish, the embodied disavowal of her death. When, a couple of
months later, the hamster died, the man broke down and had to be hospital-
ized for a long period. Žižek concludes:

So, when we are bombarded by claims that in our post-ideolog-

ical cynical era nobody believes in the proclaimed ideals, when
we encounter a person who claims he has been cured of any
beliefs, accepting social reality the way it really is, one should
always counter such claims with the question: OK, but where is
your hamster – the fetish which enables you to (pretend to)
accept reality ‘the way it is’? 16

The point I’m trying to make is that, in an intriguing short-circuit, it is the

knowledge itself (about how things really stand) that is our hamster, enabling
us to (supposedly) accept the reality that this knowledge refers to.

We are thus dealing with the structure in which it is the knowledge (about
the repressed content) itself that helps maintain the repression. Freud came
across the paradox that makes this possible already early in his work: the
paradox involving a divergence between the unconscious (‘repressed’) con-
tent and the mechanism, the workings of repression: the repression can
remain operative even when we already know (see) everything concerning
the repressed content. As he explicitly writes in his paper on Verneinung (in
which he analyses another similar structure): even if we know about and
fully accept the (content of the) repressed, ‘the repressive process itself is not
yet removed by this’.17 And it is this that the contemporary form of ideology
is exploiting fully with its ‘realism’: it successfully hides and makes inaccessi-
ble the mechanisms of (social) repression under the overwhelming pile of
knowledge (and direct images) of the ‘repressed contents’. Gambini wins.

But who is Gambini? He is not another kind of master, the old fashioned
master, as opposed to Ravn. Gambini is very much part of the (post-)modern
landscape. Gambini (or Tramp?) is precisely what we get if – in relation to
modern mastery as embodied in Ravn – we hang on to our ‘hamsters’, to
our knowledge of how things really are.18 Gambini is what we get once we
stop asking ‘naïve’ questions; once we know everything and realistically
accept it, and get used to it. For as Lacan very nicely puts it: ‘We get used to
reality, the truth we repress’.19 This is a very important political point. There
are many critics of capitalism today who emphasize its overwhelming power,
the fact that it can absorb, and turn to its own advantage, just about
anything. This ‘plasticity’ of capitalism and of its master figures seems to be
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423
 without any serious internal antagonisms that one could use when trying to
go against it. The important political lesson of the psychoanalytic ideology-
critique is, very simply, that this is not so. There are huge amounts of systemic
repression; and the latter is never without consequences, but keeps produc-
ing some very serious contradictions. It is not simply useless to point to
them, and to insist upon them, repeatedly, and to look for ways to efficiently
name them in concrete circumstances. Because it is this, in combination with
historically contingent events, that can eventually make a shift in our sym-
bolic coordinates, and orientate this shift. For shifts are occurring frequently,
and our symbolic coordinates are changing dramatically, but mostly to
accommodate the necessity of further systemic repression. They are not shifts
in the ‘right’ direction. And to ‘orientate’ a shift one needs – not an old type
of master (or someone who embodies the repressed/forbidden enjoyment),
but something like a (new) master signifier, which is simply to say a signifier
that ‘works’, ‘makes waves’, and liberates us from certain kinds of attach-
ments. The title of one of Lacan’s late seminars, ‘Towards a new signifier’,
could be understood in this sense as making a ‘political’ point.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1
I briefly discuss this film in an article,
‘Power in the Closet and Its Coming out’,
which appeared in a compendium of texts
on Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy, with
Cambridge University Press (2016). For the
present occasion, however, I engage in a
much more elaborate and extensive discus-
sion of the movie, and of the conceptual
consequences that it can help us draw from
its treatment of the contemporary corpo-
rate power and its laws of visibility. Inevita-
bly, however, there are a couple of points
that overlap in both texts.
2
In his essay Noys refers extensively to
my book, The Odd One In. On Comedy, both
affirmatively and in the mode of friendly
polemics. The latter mostly concerns what
Noys perceives as the limit of the Lacanian
type of ideology-critique, in the work of
Slavoj Žižek and myself. Simply put: while
this kind of critique succeeds in formulat-
ing the truth of contemporary forms of
mastery, it does little to suggest a possible
way out, or a viable alternative. Although
this is not the primary aim of my paper, I
will also try to sketch an answer to this criti-
cism – to the extent to which it is related to
Noys’ reading of von Trier’s film.
3
Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 202.
4
Ibid.
5
Noys, “Outsourcing Authority,” 18.
6
Ibid.
7
Although Ravn decides at this moment
not to sell the company, we can seriously
doubt that to stop here would constitute a
genuine happy ending. For the whole
scene suggests that even if saved for the
moment, there is no doubt that the
employees would get even more monumen-
tally screwed by Ravn at the first opportu-
nity.
8
To make the point/joke even more obvi-
ously, von Trier makes Ravn give the fol-
lowing ‘useful tip’ at the end of their
meeting: ‘when they say off-shoring, they
really mean outsourcing’.
9
As Lacan puts it: ‘In the master’s dis-
course, for instance, it is effectively impos-
sible that there be a master who makes
the entire world function. Getting people
to work is even more tiring, if one really
has to do it, than working oneself. The
master never does it. He gives a sign, the
master signifier, and everybody jumps.’
Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis,
174.
10
Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 300.
11
Ibid.

Zupancic
424
12
See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Con- 16
Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 299.
cepts of Psycho-Analysis, 92–93. 17
Freud, “Negation,” 438.
13 18
The seminal text here is of course Which is how I am inclined to read the
Octave Mannoni’s paper “I know well, but Lars Von Trier’s final narratorial voice-over
nevertheless …” (“Je sais bien, mais quand- stating: ‘Those who got what they came for,
même...”). deserve it.’
14
Freud, “Fausse reconnaissance,” 201. 19
Lacan, Écrits, 433.
15
Which is pronounced exactly as les noms
du père, ‘the names of the father’. The (yet
unpublished) seminar is from 1973-74.

Bibliography
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In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. vol. 13,
edited by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1955.
Freud, Sigmund. ‘Negation.’ In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id and
other works, The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 11. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York, NY: W.W. Norton,
2006.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Alan
Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis.
Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Russell Grigg. New York, NY:
W.W. Norton, 2007.
Mannoni, Octave. Je sais bien, mais quand-même. In Clefs pour l’imaginaire ou l’autre
scène. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969.
Noys, Ben. “Outsourcing Authority: on Lars von Trier’s The Boss of it All.” Accessed
February 15, 2016. http://www.academia.edu/292975/Outsourcing_Author
ity_On_Lars_Von_Trier_s_The_Boss_of_it_All.
Žižek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso, 2008.
Zupancic, Alenka, The Odd One In. On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 2008.

Alenka Zupancic is a research advisor at the Institute of Philosophy of the

Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and professor at the European
Graduate School, Switzerland. Notable for her work on the intersection of
philosophy and psychoanalysis, she is the author of numerous articles and
books, including The Odd One In: On Comedy (2008); Why Psychoanalysis: Three
Interventions (2008); The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (2003)
and Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (2000). Email: alenka.zupancic@guest.
arnes.si

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