Back Door To Hell

March 30th, 2009 by Nagypál Tamás

Introduction

Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire can be described as an extension of one scene: the hero (Jamal), a teenage boy from the Mumbai ghetto, winning the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? He does this by telling us his life story, putting the personal hardships and traumas of his past into little narratives that somehow magically provide answers to all the questions on the show. The setting itself is full of psychoanalytic overtones. First of all, participating in the game involves playing on TV what in Lacanian terms can be called the “subject supposed to believe”. The contestant faces the authority figure of the host, who acts as the “subject supposed to know” for him, making him look ignorant in front of the audience who’s gaze the spectacle is staged for[1]. Ignorance here means not the lack of some factual knowledge but the fact that the hero believes in the Other’s knowledge, that is, the completeness of the symbolic order, that there is out there a gaze that sees what he cannot see, sees his blind spot, knows all, especially what he doesn’t. In this film, such an illusion of full knowledge refers to the truth about the hero himself. As the story goes, similarly to the analytic situation, the subject has to overcome his reliance of the authority/superego figure of supposed knowledge, that is, his belief in him.

In this article I’m interested in role of belief in the creation of subjectivity. Using the categories of Lacanian psychoanalysis, I will show that, despite the apparently unfavorable treatment of the believing subject by Nietzsche, Marx, we can delineate the coordinates of a positive theory of belief in their works by connecting it to the concept of love. Without such connection we end up with a cynical view of the believing subject as I will show through the case of Richard Rorty and Danny Boyle, which I will problematize by criticizing its misogynistic connotations.

The Negative Theory of Belief

In this section I will explore the negative theory of belief put forward by Nietzsche and Marx. In this context both authors are criticizing the supposed subject of belief as the figure responsible for ideological closure, someone supporting the current state of things. They both have their more dignified other subject to contrast to this pathetic figure, but to establish that, it seems, they have to recourse to the use of metaphysics. For such tactics, they later become easy prey for their postmodern critics.