Hollow Subjects in a Headless World

According to a review of Edmund Morris's memoir of President Ronald Reagan, there was an important difference between Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton in their orientation toward the truth. Clinton had a reputation for telling lies, while Reagan was unable to distinguish lies from what he believed to be true. Reviewer Steven Weisman reports, “[T]he difference [between fact and fiction] clearly did not matter to Reagan. His world was famously populated with welfare ‘queens’ who did not exist, with trees that caused pollution…. Reagan wasn't lying, because he believed what he said, even after being told that it was false” (7). Weisman concludes that Ronald Reagan lived in a world of his own fictions, but he will no doubt go down in history as “a giant who reflected the Zeitgeist of his era and hastened its destiny” (8).

Reagan is indeed a reflection of the Zeitgeist of our era, if we see this era as one where the lie no longer serves to prop up (and shield us from) the truth; where there is not so much the exposing of the father as impostor (for all fathers turn out to be impostors), but rather the loss of the “appearance” of an authority in the big Other.1 According to Slavoj Žižek and others, in this stage of late capitalist development there has been a shift in our symbolic structure, which has recast the subject as an opaque being in an endlessly reflexive world; he is “more than ever caught in an inexorable compulsion that effectively runs his life” (Ticklish 354). We have, according to Žižek been “colonized by reflexivity,” by the endless contingency of choice and scrutiny over all aspects of life, from proper forms of seduction to daily eating habits (Ticklish 336).

The shift we detect is a movement away from the virtual fictions of the symbolic toward imaginary simulacra of virtuality. In this shift and in this indeterminacy of the subject, symptoms emerge in a world of “acephalic” knowledge. Here the ways that are sought to avoid confrontation with the truth para