Democracy or Your Life! Knowledge,Ignorance and the Politics of Atheism in Saramago’s Blindness and Seeing 1

I. From Seeing, to Knowledge, to Existence (By-Passing Truth)

A long and well-respected tradition in western philosophy, stretching as far as Plato’s Timaeus, draws a neat and clear line between human beings’ capacity to “see” or “perceive” outside phenomena or themselves, to the claim that “seeing” or “perceiving” such phenomena establishes “knowledge” of those phenomena and from such knowledge to the “existence” or “being” of such phenomena. The lineage thus proceeds from seeing, to knowing, to being. To see is to know, and to know is to be, and conversely, to not see is not to know and therefore not to be.

For the paradigmatic thinker of the Enlightenment, René Descartes, the certitude of the cogito derives from its visibility: I see, therefore I think, and because I think, therefore I am. As Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen puts it, “the Cartesian cogito is primarily an eye.” ² Although few philosophers go as far as the Bishop of Berkeley to reject the existence of anything that is not open to perception, Berkeley’s extreme idealism is a natural extension of this oculacentric doctrine: the only things that exist, for the Bishop, are those that we can apprehend with our senses; “existence” or “being” is being seen or being perceived and thereby “being known.” Conversely what cannot be seen, touched, heard, in other words, what cannot be perceived, cannot be known and therefore does not exist. As his notorious motto goes, esse est percipi. ³

My argument in this article, through a reading of Jose Saramago’s twin dystopian fiction Blindness and Seeing, is that the lineage between seeing, knowing, and being, is all very well except for the unfortunate detail that it by-passes truth. Moreover, this lineage, by assuming masculine notions of what it is to see, to know, and to be, also by-passes the feminine. The fact that truth and the feminine are by-passed by the same drives is no coincidence, and the relationship between truth and the feminine has not gone unnoticed by the same philosophical tradition: male philosophers’ and male analysts’ frustration at ever managing to “know” the feminine, is well documented, as I have discussed before. ⁴ As we see later, in their different ways Lacan and Saramago suggest that women, or those sexed beings on the feminine side of the formula of sexuation, have the potential of attaining a closer relationship to the Real, that is to a truth beyond language. ⁵ Saramago’s tragic heroine in both novels is not the man of science, referred to as the Doctor, nor the police superintendent who goes against his superiors’ orders, but the woman we know only as “the Doctor’s wife.” The suggestion is that the truth the Doctor’s wife possesses, which neither the men of science nor of law manage to approximate, is a truth beyond science, beyond politics, and beyond even language. It is a truth that another long-suffering wife possessed and taught her famous husband: that is, the truth about love that transcends knowledge, perception and representation and which Socrates admits he learned from his wife Diotima.

The question to explore first, is whether our obsession with knowledge, with what we can see and know, apart from being perhaps a masculine obsession, is, more profoundly, a defense against truth. Like love, in other words, perhaps truth is not only blind but blinding. My suggestion will be that Lacan and Saramago explore and expose the limits of western epistemology and its version of truth and in the process strip away the defensive layers we build to protect us from the blinding truth, and bring us face to face with what is normally out of view, that is, the raw Real.

On the one hand Lacan teases out the limits of western philosophy by pointing out what it ignores or, more accurately, represses, in its pursuit of knowledge as the only truth. In contrast to modern philosophy, Lacan poses psychoanalysis as a discourse that resists science’s obsession with seeing and with knowledge. Modern science, Lacan agrees, has given birth to the subject of psychoanalysis but psychoanalysis is the Oedipal child that resists and challenges science. In particular, the Enlightenment produced a rupture between “reality,” between what we can know and represent, and the “Real” which is contingent, unknowable and therefore beyond our capacities for representation. ⁶

What is it that restricts, or limits, our version of reality? Reality, knowledge and existence dwell in the realm of the symbolic, that is, in the register of language, of what is said and sayable. That knowledge, Lacan reminds us, is never pure but always mediated by another, what Lacan later came to call the Big Other of the symbolic order: “knowledge is something which is spoken, something said” so there can be no knowledge without language. ⁷ The subject cannot speak, and therefore cannot know herself outside the limits of language; but since language both precedes and is outside the subject, residing in the field of the symbolic order, the subject cannot know herself outside the confines of the pre-existing cultural and linguistic order. There is always a gap, therefore, between reality, which the subject can try to know and represent, and the Real which, as we will see, stuns, transforms, and indeed destroys the subject.

II. Reality and the Real

If Lacan the anti-philosopher pushes the limits of philosophy, Saramago, through his fiction, pushes the limits of the possible and alerts us to the possibility of the impossible. In the harrowing novel Blindness the unimaginable horror of a whole society being progressively and helplessly stricken with an epidemic of blindness is related in all its ugly intimacy. The novel begins with a scene we can all recognize, until that is, the horror strikes: a driver is sitting in his car in a queue of traffic waiting for the lights to change from red to amber to green when suddenly and inexplicably he goes blind. The traffic is thrown into instant chaos but that is the least of our fictional society’s problems. Their woes soon accumulate exponentially with the initial attack of blindness being transmitted to anyone the victims come into contact with: the passer-by who helps the driver get home is the next victim of the epidemic of blindness. His distraught wife who finds herself powerless to help him, soon joins him in the ranks of the blind. The Doctor who examines his eyes and is at a loss to understand the cause of his affliction, is another of the early victims. In a few short hours, the initial traffic chaos in the town center is a miniscule inconvenience in the face of the plague of blindness that gradually but surely spreads through the entire country.

Here I suggest, Saramago presents us with a horrifying example of what Lacan terms the Real; that is, the unimaginable which, contrary to all expectation, does irrevocably and catastrophically happen. The Real is not, as sometimes assumed, something that does not happen; what is horrific about the Real is that, unimaginable as it is, it nevertheless does happen, or more accurately “strikes.” But what renders it “Real” is that it exceeds our capacity for representation; since we do not have the words to represent it, it remains unassimilable in our experiences.

The closest we can come to a depiction of the Real is in the work of poets who can, at times, render an approximate (though never full) representation of that unassimilable trauma. In Saramago’s work, I suggest, what Lacan calls the Real is displayed close to its traumatic rawness. Like all good works of art, Saramago’s fiction functions like the last veil shielding us from the Real and enables us to get close to what is difficult, painful, or impossible to reach. It functions, in other words, like the silent analyst that pushes us towards encountering the truth of our being; a truth which turns out to be very ugly indeed.

In Saramago the limits of science and of knowledge are exposed early on by the Doctor’s inability to explain the onset of blindness on what appear to be a perfectly healthy pair of eyes. Despite using a state of the art scanner that enables him to peer into the depth of his patient’s eyes (an instrument that, Saramago observes, has replaced the church confessional) to his patient’s plea for a remedy, the Doctor can only admit “it would be like prescribing in the dark” (Blindness, 16). The rules of logic the Doctor is used to applying rebel against both Doctor and patient: instead of the Doctor who can see being able to help the blind man, the contagion spreads with the Doctor being the next person infected with blindness. From there on the epidemic of blindness spreads with demonic precision: “This must be the most logical illness in the world, the eye that is blind transmits the blindness to the eye that sees, what could be simpler.” (Blindness, 104)

Lacan with his anti-philosophy therefore, and Saramago with his disturbing ability to approximate the raw Real, confuse our confidence in seeing and in knowing it all and alert us to that which is beyond representation and beyond knowledge. This is the dimension that Descartes, the Bishop of Berkeley and, as we see shortly, Hegel, miss in their assumption that knowledge can be attained (or even only attained) through seeing, through perception and through consciousness. In Saramago the sequence that suggests that science and reason lead to enlightenment and knowledge is reversed with the contagion following the usual rules of logic, but delivering not knowledge and enlightenment but blindness and ignorance. Lacan’s anti-philosophy and Saramago’s harrowing fiction therefore suggest that the Enlightenment’s pursuit of knowledge has served not to understand, let alone unveil truth but as a defense shielding us from the horror of truth. ⁸ For it is in the nature of truth, just as it is in the nature of woman, not to be completely knowable. ⁹

III. The Blind Spot and the Silence

What is it that limits our capacity of seeing and therefore of knowing? For psychoanalysis, however wide our field of vision, there is one point we are never able to see, that is, the point from which we are looked at. This is because, as Lacan explains, “I see only from one point but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.” ¹⁰ This gaze, this staring at the subject by the outside world, pre-exists the subject’s entry into the world: the subject is seen before she is able to see or, as Lacan puts it, before there is “seeing,” there is “a given-to-be-seen.” ¹¹ Indeed it is the subject’s “being seen” that enables her to “see”: the gaze or blind spot is a pre-condition of our seeing anything at all. The pre-existence of this blind-spot means that our ability to see presupposes our “forgetting” or inability to see the gaze. We see, when we start seeing, without ever being able to see from the blind spot.

We can now surmise the contribution Lacan the “anti-philosopher” makes to philosophy: while for much of philosophy seeing coincides with consciousness for Lacan, the gaze pre-exists consciousness, rendering our consciousness finite or, in Lacanian terms, lacking. For Enlightenment thinkers like Hegel, the subject’s ability to see himself see himself, was hailed as man’s progress from consciousness to self-consciousness; for Lacan, however, this achievement ignores that self-consciousness, no less than consciousness, elides the pre-existence of the gaze. ¹² As his famous first intervention in psychoanalytic circles suggested (or at least tried to suggest before Ernest Jones rudely interrupted him), the subject cannot attain self-consciousness from witnessing her own mirror image, from what her eye can see, because the mirror image is literally an image: a mirage and therefore imaginary. ¹³ Consciousness, by relying on the visible world of images is “irreducibly limited”; psychoanalysis alerts us to these limitations and in the process reduces “the privileges of consciousness.” ¹⁴ No wonder the Lacanian unconscious, as Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen puts it, is the unconscious of philosophy itself: “the unconscious that the philosophy of consciousness presupposes while remaining ignorant of it.” ¹⁵

Haunted by the limitation of what we can see and what we can say, human beings desperately try to make up for these limits; for us speaking beings, unlike non-speaking animals, are never at rest with our lot. In Saramago’s scenario, the gap between what the eye can see and the all-seeing gaze, produces the relentless drive to see and to see yet more. In the crowded asylum where the blind are initially incarcerated (and gradually abandoned by the government as their numbers refuse to cease increasing), one unidentified voice functions like the Chorus in a Greek tragedy, the faceless and anonymous reminder of the participants’ and all our frailties: “It sounds like an allegory,” the unknown voice suggests, “the eye that refuses to acknowledge its own absence.” (Blindness, 121). The absence that we refuse to acknowledge is our inability to see it all: however much science, scanners and, as we see shortly, lie-detectors can do, they will never enable us to see the point from which we are looked at. As Saramago chillingly puts it when the newly-blind Doctor looks in the mirror: “his image could see him, he could not see his image” (Blindness, 29).

Hegel’s hailing Oedipus as the paradigmatic subject of self-consciousness, therefore, ignores the fact that although Oedipus did see himself see (as the subject who committed parrincest), even Oedipus did not see himself “not see.” For that to happen, the subject, as Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen puts it, has to go through the looking glass and see himself not just see, but ultimately see himself “not see.” ¹⁶ That self-knowledge, of his lack of knowledge, was achieved by Oedipus not at Thebes, but later on at Colonus, in his self-imposed exile and self-inflicted blindness. ¹⁷ Through his self-punishment, Oedipus achieves the “sight” or “knowledge” of the ethical subject par excellence: the subject tragically at home with his own lack of seeing, in other words, with his own lack of knowledge, his own limitations and ultimately his own mortality. This is the knowledge (of one’s lack of knowledge) that I suggest Saramago’s people achieve in all their Blindness and later display in all their Seeing.

IV. The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth

Since the range of what we, as humans, are able to see, and therefore know, and be, is limited, to heal the lack left by our limitations we speak: we talk, and keep talking, to ourselves and to each other, to make up for our lack and convince ourselves and the other that we are, despite it all, loveable. Talking in effect is a demand. Worse, as Lacan adds, “Language is a demand that fails” ¹⁸ since, just as the “seeable” revolves around what cannot be seen, the “sayable” revolves around what cannot be said. Our speaking, just like our seeing, is not only irretrievably limited but limiting: we pay a price for starting to talk, just as we suffer a loss on starting to see: in seeing we lose the gaze, in talking we are alienated from the ineffable truth. It is as if, as Alenka Zupančič puts it, “we have eyes in order not to see” ¹⁹ and, by extension, we have tongues in order not to speak; at least in order not to see or to speak the truth.

Where does truth lie then if it does not lie in seeing, in knowledge and representation? For psychoanalysis, if there is a truth to our being, it lies not in the symbolic universe, but beyond language. What the subject cannot see, or speak, in other words, what is lacking in the constitution of the subject, is, for psychoanalysis, the kernel of her being. That kernel cannot be represented in speech but can be glimpsed when speech fails: when words run out and speech breaks down, when the signifiers at our disposal are no longer adequate, then we may glimpse part of the truth emerging. That is why we can only ever speak part of, never the whole, truth. So despite the fact that, for instance in a court of law we insist, on oath and on more, “to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” for Lacan that is precisely what we will not say. ²⁰ Because, as Lacan insists, only the unconscious does not deceive while the ego is more interested in manipulating language in the interest of confirming its own delusions and misrecognitions.

The speaking being’s difficulty in telling the truth, whether it is about herself or about others, is born out in Saramago’s sequel Seeing. The novel, written, importantly, after September 11, begins by recounting the results of a general election and the shocking revelation that “more than seventy per cent of the total votes cast were blank” (Seeing, 16). Baffled and frustrated, the government stages a repeat election a week later; this time, eighty-three per cent of the electorate cast a blank vote. What is the meaning of this apathy, this calm lack of concern by the voters whom the politicians prefer to see as “the supreme defenders of democracy, without whom tyranny, any of the many tyrannies that exist in the world, would long ago have overwhelmed the nation that bore us” (Seeing, 5–6).

The government’s methods for fathoming the motives behind this affront to democracy include, in what resembles an echo of Guantánamo Bay, “retaining, not detaining, you notice” five hundred people (Seeing, 41) and subjecting them to interrogation. The technique favored by the government, predictable given its reluctance to abandon faith in science, is the polygraph, or lie detector. The dignity of the human being, Saramago notes, is reduced here to “a piece of damp paper recording the tremors of the souls of those observed” with results that are far from successful. According to the machine, all those subjected to interrogation, even one of the officers administering the lie detector, appear to be lying. As a detainee protests, since human beings are not “talking stones,” within “every human truth there is an element of anxiety or conflict so we lie when we tell the truth and tell the truth when we lie” (Seeing, 49).

As we see later, the few officials who resist the government’s draconian measures against the silent population express their concern by challenging the government’s “semantic errors”; they point out that while casting a blank vote used to be a “legal right,” it has now been transformed, or deformed, into “a legal abuse” (Seeing, 55), “a thinly disguised subversive act” (Seeing, 58), a “virus” (Seeing, 67), a “plague” (Seeing, 77). What these officials appreciate, is that the divorce between the signifier and the signified lies at the heart of their constitution as human beings, that is, that they become humans, not when they start to talk but when they start to lie. Lacan, echoing Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fictions, suggests that, since all language is fictional, there is always an element of fiction in our accounts of reality: without fiction there would be no language, legal or otherwise, indeed there would be no reality. ²¹

Analysis has always taken advantage of the fact that the patient’s lies can show the way to the truth, prompting Lacan to suggest that, not only the way to the truth is through the medium of fiction, but also that “every truth has the structure of fiction.” ²² Saramago here echoes the same view: “human beings are known universally as the only animals capable of lying, and while it is true that they sometimes lie out of fear and sometimes out of self-interest, they also occasionally lie because they realise, just in time, that this is the only means available to them of defending the truth.” (Seeing, 40); of defending the truth but also, Lacan would add, of speaking the truth.

V. To See, Too Much

The failure of the interrogation methods, suggest as Lacan insisted, that the subject is not the one who sees, and therefore thinks, and then speaks, but precisely that part of the subject that does not see and therefore can not think: as Lacan responds to Descartes, “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.” ²³ In a parallel way, the central elements of our subjectivity as speaking beings are not the bits we actually speak but the bits we cannot speak. Lacan called this enigmatic absence the little object a. In Saramago the Doctor calls this kernel a “soul” but the girl with the dark glasses, “surprisingly if we consider we are dealing with a person without much education” is more accurate as well as more eloquent: “Inside us there is something that has no name,” she suggests, “that something is what we are.” (Blindness, 261). So the kernel of our being is not the bits we can see and know and speak, but precisely the bits we can neither see, nor speak, that is, the missing bits. ²⁴

Saramago’s people are not alone in refusing to acknowledge that nameless absence that forms the core of their being and the limitations in what they can see, know and be. The scopic drive, in wanting to “see it all,” as Freud discussed in a short paper on psychogenic disturbance of vision, is typically pornographic. The refusal to acknowledge this pornographic scopophilia, and the attempt to repress it can lead, Freud suggests, to the repressed drive taking revenge for being held back by overcoming the organ at its service, that is, the eye. It is as if, he suggests, a punishing voice was speaking from within the subject, and saying: “Because you sought to misuse your organ of sight for evil sensual pleasures, it is fitting that you should not see anything at all any more.” ²⁵

The idea of tallion punishment is illustrated by Freud with Coventry’s legend of Lady Godiva who rode naked through the town while the inhabitants hid behind shuttered windows to preserve her modesty. The legend’s example of an early peeping Tom (who could not resist gazing at her “revealed loveliness” and was struck by blindness), may be one motif for Saramago’s allegory of the epidemic of blindness here. I take this idea further and suggest that Saramago’s people’s relentless drive to see what cannot be seen, that is, the point from which they are looked at, the source of their origin and indeed of their very being, leads in this tale to them being reunited with the lost object. The bit that has been severed from the subject in order to enable her to see, as I discuss earlier, is the blind-spot. The blatantly pornographic drive to see and to know it all, leads to Saramago’s people being reunited with the lost object. When Saramago’s people are reunited with the bit that has been severed from them in order to be able to see, they see too much which in effect disables them from seeing at all.

Being reunited with the lost object, therefore, spells not jubilation and the end of lack for the subject, but the end of all sight, indeed the end of subjectivity as such. When the subject, like Oedipus, like Saramago’s people, is reunited with the lost object, they see the gaze, that is, they cannot see at all. The gradual but sure march of blindness in Saramago’s tale leaves a population that is no different from a horde of warring, sick and dying animals. In line with a literary tradition from Bocaccio’s Decameron to Camus’ The Plague and more recently Philip Roth’s Nemesis, the allegory of an epidemic is used to highlight what is basest rather than noble in human nature and Saramago’s tale is no exception.

My reading here, that Saramago’s people see “too much” rather than not seeing at all, is supported by repeated descriptions in the book: the onset, as well as the experience of blindness is described in terms of something positive, affording the blind an image of luminosity rather than of darkness. As the first victim describes it, “it came on all of a sudden”; “like a light going out” the Doctor suggests. “No,” the patient continues, “more like a light going on.” (Blindness, 15) Throughout the narrative those infected describe blindness as being “forever surrounded by a resplendent whiteness, like the sun shining through mist … blindness did not mean being plunged into banal darkness, but living inside a luminous halo.” (Blindness, 86) In short, the suggestion is that the blind are not lacking in sight but rather see “too much”; their eyes have not descended into darkness but have become “dim suns” (Blindness, 68), while their bodies and minds, including their eyes, are, in medical terms, perfectly flawless (Blindness, 71–2).

If Saramago’s people suffer from seeing “too much,” they also, to follow the Doctor’s thoughts and Enlightenment philosophers’ coupling of seeing with knowledge and blindness with ignorance, they know, indeed are, too much. As the Doctor relates the case to one of his colleagues, the first man to go blind “sees everything white, a kind of thick, milky whiteness that clings to his eyes.” But it cannot be a case of “agnosia,” ignorance, or “psychic blindness,” they both agree, since “agnosia is the inability to recognise familiar objects” and there is no doubt this patient does not have that problem. “It also occurred to me,” the Doctor continues, “that this might be a case of amaurosis, but remember what I started telling you, this blindness is white, precisely the opposite of amaurosis which is total darkness unless there exists some form of white amaurosis, a white darkness as it were, yes, I know, something unheard of, agreed” (Blindness, 27–8).

We see here the start of a theme that Saramago revisits throughout his work, that is, what he euphemistically refers to as “semantic errors” with the received meaning of words being distorted to signify the opposite of the word’s usual meaning. In the sequel Seeing, the few officials who oppose the government’s introduction of repressive measures, insist that injustice starts with the distortion of the meaning of words. This distortion, however, is already at work in Blindness: what etymologically used to signify knowledge, that is “seeing” and “gnosis,” is now threatened by a “white amaurosis” that is, a “white blackness” which the Doctor agrees is unheard of. It is also significant that those protesting the government’s distortion of words are exclusively men: the Minister of Culture, the Council leader, the police superintendent. The women in the book, on the other hand, do not bother pointing out the government’s semantic errors. That is because, as I suggested earlier, women’s relation to truth goes beyond words, or, to put it another way, women never trusted words to begin with. Unlike their male counterparts, therefore, they are far from shocked when the government abuses the meaning of words for their own political ends.

Faced with the paradox of a “luminous blindness,” or an all-seeing blind being, the Doctor, a creature of science, unable to call on religion, finds himself, like many of us, appealing to poetry: “There are a thousand reasons why the brain should close up,” he continues, “like a late visitor arriving to find his own door shut. The ophthalmologist was a man with a taste for literature and had a flair for coming up with the right quotation.” (Blindness, 20–21) In the absence of an all-knowing God, literature becomes the refuge, or, as I describe in another paper, the little object a that we hope will fill the gap that neither law nor science can provide. ²⁶ Since sense, or meaning, cannot be made of the phenomena themselves, of what can be seen or perceived, metaphor becomes the next resort: The ophthalmologist “looked up the indexes, to work methodically he began reading everything he could find about agnosia and amaurosis, with the uncomfortable impression of being an intruder in a field beyond his competence.” (Blindness, 21) The shut door we push, and try to trespass in, is the door leading to a territory beyond our knowledge, beyond our capacity to see as well as to speak. This is the door to the impossible Real which is beyond representation, unseeable and unspeakable: to law, to science, and even to poetry.

VI. Knowing Ignorance

Where does the refusal to acknowledge our own limits, our relentless drive to see what is impossible to see, and to know, and to be, lead? In line with Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Saramago suggests that when the drives, unimpeded, run riot, the results are devastatingly demonic. In Saramago’s harrowing Blindness, the drive to see more, to know more, and thus to be more are pushed to their ultimate extremes: the drive to see turns into blindness, the drive to know turns into ignorance and the drive to be turns into the death drive. In these circumstances, the only possible response for the speaking being is not to try to “see” more, to “know” more, or to “be” more but the exact opposite. The speaking being has to come to terms with her blindness, learn to live with her ignorance, and accept her finite condition; in other words, like a subject at the end of analysis, the subject must learn to live with her limitations and her inevitable mortality.

My suggestion is that the traumatic experience of Saramago’s blind, enables them to find the truth about themselves; Saramago’s suggestion is that we can only see ourselves, the kernel of our being, when we are blind; that “perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.” (Blindness, 121). And what is the truth of their being? In short, it’s not pretty: the truth of theirs, like all our beings, our innermost kernel is ugly, disgusting, shameful, obscene. One by one the blind, like the Doctor, discover something they “should have known a long time ago … This is the stuff we’re made of, half-indifference, half-malice” (Blindness, 31). Lacan’s suggestion that it is not “ontology” that we should be discussing, but “hontology” is echoed by Saramago whose blind people exhibit to the seeing eye “the eminently scatological nature of the human condition” (Blindness, 125).

In line with this shameful condition, the ethics of blindness was accurately perceived in Freud’s dark Civilization and Its Discontents. The horror Freud expresses at the commandment to love one’s neighbor arises, as Lacan suggests, because of the evil that dwells in the neighbor and therefore also in oneself. ²⁷ Saramago’s people reach the same conclusion: “Your worst enemy, according to the law of the blind, is always the person nearest you” (Seeing, 260). Or, as Žižek warns, the injunction should be, not “love” but “fear your neighbour as thyself!” ²⁸

In a sea of indifference and malice, however, there is one person, the doctor’s wife, who takes the others firmly by the hand, saying, simply, “Come along, love.” (Blindness, 31) It is no coincidence that these are the Doctor’s wife’s first words and serve to define her role throughout the drama. Why was it necessary to have one subject, the Doctor’s wife, spared of the trauma of blindness? In the analytic scenario, the subject who sees without being seen is, of course, the analyst. As the one person who retains her sight in a sea of blindness, the Doctor’s wife occupies the position of the analyst, the subject supposed to know the patient’s unconscious desires. And what is it that any good analyst knows? In short, like the first analyst Socrates, what the analyst knows is that she knows nothing: she knows, simply, how not to know. In knowing her own ignorance, the Doctor’s wife helps her “patients” to “see” and ultimately accept, the truth about themselves: “to accept what one has is the most natural thing when one is blind” (Blindness, 275).

But that is not all: more positively, Socrates of Plato’s Symposium admits that, thanks to his wife Diotima, he knows a little bit about love. What is there to know about love, that Socrates’ wife taught him and that the Doctor’s wife also appreciates? What the Doctor’s wife appears to know is Lacan’s supreme protest regarding the relations between the sexes, that is, that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship. ²⁹ Lacan’s insight here is that of course men and women have sexual and other amorous liaisons, but the notion of complimentarity, unity or completion between the sexes is, unfortunately, just a myth. Nothing can bridge the irrevocable and abiding bedrock of sexual difference, although the miracle or mirage of love makes up for the absence of the sexual relationship. This love which accepts the other person in all their lack, and does not aim or pretend to heal or complete her, is fundamentally the love that Socrates, and any good analyst, offers to their Alcibiades. The Doctor’s wife seems to have understood this and articulates it in her silence on encountering a blind couple in the midst of lovemaking:

The doctor’s wife stopped in her tracks to watch them, not out of envy, she had her husband and the satisfaction he gave her, but because of an impression of another order, for which she could find no name, perhaps a feeling of sympathy, as if she were thinking of saying to them, Don’t mind my being here, I also know what this means, carry on, perhaps a feeling of compassion, Even if this instant of supreme pleasure should last you a lifetime, you will never become united as one. (Blindness, 146–7)

This supreme compassion, this quiet knowledge about the nature of love and of the limitations of the sexual relationship, is enough to put the Doctor’s wife in the position of the analyst. It is also what, ideally, the experience of analysis can teach the patient.

In contrast to the drive to see, to know, and ultimately to master all, analysis is a practice of learning to live with our ignorance and our own limits: of enabling us to see the limits of what we are able to see, and know, and be. Like a work of art, and unlike the discourses of science and law, analysis does not aim at knowledge but at truth; not at abstract, supposedly objective knowledge, but at the subjective truth of the subject’s being. ³⁰ The point is not to judge, punish or praise the subject, or insist on right answers but to enable her to live with her ignorance.

Like subjects at the end of analysis, Saramago’s people have crossed the fantasy of a benign humanity of neighbors respecting and protecting each others’ rights. They have seen, as Lacan would say, the evil that dwells in the neighbor because they have seen the evil that dwells in themselves. The experience of blindness has shattered the mirrors reflecting both their own imaginary egos as well as of their neighbors’. In their blindness, as the interior minister sarcastically but accurately put it, they have “seen the light” (Seeing, 99). And this light has enabled them, above all, to come to terms with their own mortality; with the knowledge that we obstinately refuse to know for most of our lives. ³¹ In their blindness they have realized that “Anyone who is going to die is already dead and does not know it, That we are going to die is something we know from the moment we are born, That’s why, in some ways, it’s as if we were born dead.” (Blindness, 191)

While the Doctor’s wife, like Socrates’ Diotima, was already privy to this knowledge, before long her fellow blind travellers come to consciously share this unconscious knowledge. On returning from trying to find some food for the group, she reports that the people of the town have been reduced to “going around like ghosts” (Blindness, 229). These living ghosts, or undead zombies, are deadly alive in a world which has obliterated any meaningful difference: “There’s no difference between inside and outside, between here and there, between the many and the few, between what we’re living through and we shall have to live through” (Blindness, 229). The order that insists that the dead should be among the dead and the living among the living also dissolves as the blind “are already dead, we’re blind because we’re dead or we’re dead because we’re blind, it comes to the same thing.” (Blindness, 238). If it is possible to call these people “subjects” then, it is subjects at the zero level of subjectivity, destitute and beyond even despair.

VII. Ethics of Atheism

The political repercussions of coming face to face with one’s raw being, of coming to know one’s own ignorance, and of “seeing” one’s own blindness, are fleshed out in Saramago’s no less disturbing sequel Seeing. Here it is not only the fantasy of immortality that has been shattered. The seeing people have also crossed the fundamental fantasy of the omnipotence of the Big Other and in particular of their government. The political being’s response in these circumstances is not more representation but no representation, and no more demands from the Big Other but no demands at all; in other words, atheism. If the Big Other would allow it; a big if, as it turns out.

If there is one trait that neurotics, hysterics and obsessives alike share, is the abiding belief in an all-powerful Other. Secret she may be, unconscious, unacknowledged, and unrepresented, nevertheless the neurotic persists in nurturing a belief in an all-knowing Other who has something to give and is insatiable in her demands of the Other to deliver her gifts. In the process of making her incessant demands, however, the neurotic traps rather than releases, let alone satisfies, her desire. As Kafka’s characters so aptly attest, the Other depends for his existence on our endless searching after him. While the people of Blindness at first hope for and expect assistance from a powerful Big Other, their horrific journey to the extreme dregs and baseness of human subjectivity leads them to lose faith in the existence, let alone ability, of the Big Other to help them.

If anxiety torments the subject in the face of her ignorance of the Other, blindness is a culmination and ultimately overcoming of the subject’s anxiety vis-à-vis the Other. In their blindness, they have come to “see” that we never ultimately know what the Other wants of us. Rather than trying to decipher the Other’s desire, they come to accept living with the indecipherability of the Other. Saramago’s people, I suggest, seem to have realized, or seen, in their blindness, that it is the subject herself that brings the Big Other into existence. In contrast to Kafka’s anti-heroes, who bring the Other into existence with their guilt, their incessant demands, and ultimately their self-sacrifice, Saramago’s seeing people stop appealing to the Other altogether.

Like subjects at the end of analysis, they are at last able to tolerate the fundamental lack in the symbolic order without feeling the need to fill it up with fantasies (as in the case of neurotics) or disavow it (as perverts do) or reject it (like psychotics). As individuals and as a group they are now free as they have let go of the fantasies that sustained them. When we encounter the same group of people in the sequel Seeing, it is obvious that they are indifferent and silent vis-à-vis the Other from the outset; as we have seen, the novel starts with the citizens’ quiet abstention from the voting ritual, by casting a preponderance of blank votes.

More fundamentally, the people of Seeing have rejected not only the fantasy that the Big Other exists and has something to give, but the faith in language as a means of communication. If neurosis is a sickness of language, arising from the failure of representation, the people of Seeing are cured of their neurosis by accepting the failure of language and the castration it wreaks with its uncanny, divisive nature: they are reconciled to the fact that not everything can be said. As the conversation between the journalist and the council leader who has resigned his post and joined the silent protest goes, “What amazes me is that there isn’t a single shout, a single long live or down with, not a single slogan saying what it is the people want, just this threatening silence that sends shivers down your spine, Forget the horror movie language, perhaps people are just tired of words.” (Seeing, 128)

What does it mean to be “tired of words”? Saramago’s people, post the trauma of blindness, have lost faith in the symbolic order including language and its meager signifiers. It’s as if the people of Saramago, in their trauma, have appreciated that every word is the “murder of the thing,” that every signifier kills the thing signified: the police superintendent who disobeys orders and sides with the blank voters realizes that “the word was like a dead body he had stumbled across, he had to find out what the word wanted, he had to remove the body.” (Seeing, 114) The people of Seeing do indeed remove the dead bodies of words. They recognize the poverty and inadequacy of the signifiers at the disposal of the speaking being, and choose to remain silent vis-à-vis the Big Other.

If, as I discussed earlier, truth is on the level of the Real, the silent and unrepresentable, communication, by relying on language, is on the level of the symbolic. We talk to each other thinking we make ourselves understood but the minute we use language we alienate not only ourselves but others from the truth of both their being and of ours. If language is a demand that fails, fails the speaker, as much as the listener, then we need to ask whether the “civilization” built on our Babel of languages can be any more successful. Freud, as we saw earlier, had little hope for the promises made by so-called civilization. Saramago pushes the point further: not only is our civilization, in its insistence on representation at the expense of the Real flawed, but representational democracy is an extreme version of this malady. Representational democracy, the argument can go, is the apotheosis of our culture’s fetishism, where our voices are taken over by others so only the fact of enunciation but not the substance of the enunciated remains to be heard. At that point, it may be worth considering, like the people of Saramago, whether it would be better to, well, shut up.

VIII. Big Other Is Dead (But Doesn’t Know It)

In conventional analytic scenarios, the transition from empty to full speech, from the subject who is spoken of (the subject of the enunciated as Lacan calls her) to the subject who speaks herself and is actively and ethically implicated in her desire (the subject of the enunciation), can take years. That is not surprising as it requires the disappearance of the subject as she is and her rebirth; in other words, it requires the constitution of a new subjectivity. The trauma of blindness in Saramago has accelerated and achieved this re-birth in a matter of weeks. The new subject that emerges following the Real of blindness is death drive personified. Post the trauma of blindness, the subject is cut off from her old memories and indeed the people we encounter in Seeing are characterized by their collective agreement not to refer to their experience of blindness: there is, as it were, “national pact of silence to which we all agreed” (Seeing, 157).

More importantly, the people of Seeing, like subjects at the end of analysis, have dethroned the subject supposed to know. They have stopped assuming that knowledge resides in the Other and perceive instead the ignorance, impotence and ridiculousness of the Big Other. They come to recognize that the only person in possession of knowledge is themselves. They have become bona fide atheists in that they don’t even need to articulate their lack of faith or protest the pros and cons of the political order. The only thing that mildly moves or amuses them is the idea that the government may be trying to do something about their predicament: “The news was not very encouraging, a rumour was going round that the formation of a government of unity and national salvation was imminent.” (Blindness, 124).

The experience of blindness has therefore changed their relationship to knowledge and enabled them to “see” that they can live without knowledge about the Other and without the Other knowing about them. Post the trauma of blindness, post the “event” as Badiou might term it, they “continue under their own steam, unprotected by reassuring fictions.” ³² Saramago’s patients have learned how not to know and how to live without knowing. Their incessant demands of the Big Other have given way to atheism the apotheosis of which is silence vis-à-vis the Big Other. Silence at the political ballots is in effect the political subject’s advertisement of the death of their symbolic identity, a death which accompanies the death of their imaginary identity. These subjects are re-born and no longer look for guarantees in the Other’s recognition, be this Other a parent, a god, or an institution.

It is at this zero level of subjectivity, at the subject’s confrontation with its own limits, that Lacan suggests the process of ethics can begin. ³³ For Lacan ethics is not, or not just, about one’s relation to the other but about one’s relation to oneself; before the subject can act ethically she must first come face to face with the Real, that is, with her own death drive. ³⁴ Saramago’s politics of atheism or anti-politics, therefore, is the natural companion and ultimate conclusion to Lacan’s ethics of atheism and anti-philosophy. Post the trauma of blindness, Saramago’s characters cease to make demands of the Other, and conversely don’t take any notice when the Other insists that they make demands of him. When the government, declaring a state of emergency, abrogates the citizens’ right to demonstrate, the citizens do not notice their rights have been suspended: “since the citizens of this country were not in the healthy habit of demanding the proper enforcement of the rights bestowed on them by the constitution, it was only logical, even natural, that they had even failed to notice that those rights had been suspended.” (Seeing, 50)

Unfortunately the Big Other in Saramago’s Seeing has not passed to this state or stage of an ethical subject. When the people of Seeing stop looking for, and stop addressing, the Big Other, the Other, threatened with disappearance, desperately tries to make himself appear through threats and intimidation. In other words, the Big Other may be dead to its subjects but, as Lacan would say, he doesn’t know it, or at least he will not accept that he is dead. Like Žižek’s oft-repeated joke of the cartoon character who continues running long after he has crossed the precipice, the Big Other in Saramago’s tale continues governing long after faith in government has turned into atheism.

IX. Democracy or Your Life!

Like subjects at the end of analysis, Saramago’s blind have come to appreciate that the locus of power is always empty, that the master is no more than a figurehead that is simply structurally necessary to close off the system. The genius of the system of representative democracy, however, is that, while acknowledging and indeed relying on this constitutive lack in the system, at the same time succeeds in concealing that lack. The practice and rituals of contemporary representational democracy, and in particular the media frenzy during election time, foster a belief in the system, a belief which, like all beliefs, functions vicariously and from a distance: we believe because we believe that someone else believes, and functions as the guarantor of our faith. ³⁵ Democracy in effect becomes the fetishistic object, that is, the object that doesn’t speak but is presupposed by its faithful believers.

As Alain Badiou and more recently Žižek have been pointing out, democracy as an object of desire is a given: we are given no choice not to desire it. It is somehow forbidden, as Badiou remarks, not to be a democrat. ³⁶ Or, in Žižek’s words, the present day ideological injunction is that the only choice we have is between liberal democracy and fundamentalism. ³⁷ For President Bush alarmingly, democracy was not only the US’s gift to other people but God’s gift to people; so the US had no choice but to act as God’s agent and bestow democracy to all and sundry, whether they wanted it or not. One wonders whether it is this President that Saramago is caricaturing when his fictional Prime Minister declares grandiosely: “if I could triumph over a subversive action unparalleled anywhere, at any time, an action that attacked the system’s most sensitive organ, that of parliamentary representation, then I would be assured of a lasting place in history, a unique place, as the saviour of democracy.” (Seeing, 140)

What is it that renders democracy such a given, an object that is so hard to dispute, let alone give up? Perhaps, to paraphrase Lacan’s famous suggestion on the question of God, the belief in democracy, like the belief in God, once it has been stripped of its logical consistency, indeed, especially when it has been stripped of its logical consistency, becomes stronger than ever: in other words, it becomes unconscious. Parliamentary democracy in particular does a good job of pacifying the masses, leaving the decision-making to the state apparatus so the appearance of choice is maintained while the people do not actually come anywhere near the decision-making process. And when they do voice their opinion, through public protests and demonstrations, the form of them having spoken is taken to be sufficient to demonstrate democracy while the content of what they have said is declared to be irrelevant. The global public protests against embarking on the war against Iraq, for instance, were used by both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair as examples of a functioning democracy in their respective countries, even while the substantive content of the message of those protests was ignored. This scenario is echoed by Saramago’s fictional government: as the Prime Minister impatiently puts it on being informed that the people are planning to hold a demonstration, “What on earth do they hope to achieve by that, demonstrations never achieve anything, if they did we wouldn’t allow them” (Seeing, 120).

Since fantasies, however, including the fantasy of democracy, are notoriously difficult to dislodge, it takes a major trauma to let go of them. The epidemic of blindness in Saramago’s tale is one such catastrophic event that leads the people to abandon and indeed traverse that fundamental fantasy. The trauma of blindness revealed that the guarantor of the system was himself ludicrously and dangerously impotent, leading to the collapse of the fantasy that sustained the system. Saramago’s people saw, in their blindness, that the system was always already plagued by a lack at its center. This time, however, rather than covering up, or ignoring that gap, they take advantage of it, with crushing results for the system. In short, Saramago’s non-voting electorate did not cause or create the gap in the system: the gap was already there. All the electorate did was to show, through their simple abstention, “the definitive collapse of a political system which, without our even noticing the threat, carried within it, right from the start, in the voting process itself, the seeds of its own destruction” (Seeing, 163).

X. Politics of Atheism

Ironically while the electorate in Saramago have seen the non-existence of the Big Other, and make no further demands from it, the Big Other is the one who starts to shout and demand a response from the electorate. The electorate’s silence doesn’t just baffle the government but threatens its very being. And instead of the electorate falling prey to some mythical conspiracy theory, it is the government that starts fearing that there must be a silent conspiracy against it: “there is some purpose behind all this, an idea, a planned objective because things are happening as if the population really were obeying some plan, as if there were some central coordination” (Seeing, 75).

If, as I suggested earlier, the electorate have become atheists, the government in Seeing have become conspiracy fundamentalists. They assume there is a criminal mastermind behind the electorate’s silence, some machiavellian brainchild “who remains hidden behind the curtain and makes the puppets do exactly as he wants” (Seeing, 154). Like all beliefs, conspiracy theories also assert the belief in a hidden Big Other pulling the strings; in this case, according to the government, the hidden Big Other is the electorate itself: “The proof there is a conspiracy lies precisely in the fact that no one talks about it, silence, in this case, does not contradict, it confirms.” (Seeing, 205) In another echo of the war on terrorism, the Prime Minister boasts of having “plenty of munitions, and arrows on our quiver. All I need is to have the enemy in my sights.” Forgetting of course that, just like in the case of the war on terrorism, “that is precisely the problem, we don’t know where the enemy is, we don’t even know who they are” (Seeing, 77).

The President appears on national television speaking of his pain at the “incomprehensible rift” between himself, the nation’s father, who has been abandoned by his beloved children. Paternal love, he continues, leads him to punish his children by putting the capital city under a state of siege. The idea is that the thoughtless and irresponsible children, abandoned by police and government, will “see the light” and return, “like the prodigal son, to the paternal home” (Seeing, 85). Unfortunately for this caring father, his orphaned children do not notice the government has decamped: “contrary to the fugitive president’s ill-intentioned prognostications, there were no thieves or rapists or murderers”; “it seemed that the police were, after all, not essential to the city’s security” and the population itself, “spontaneously and in a more or less organized manner, had taken over their work” (Seeing, 102).

In short, when the people pass from faith to atheism and stop making demands of the Big Other, it is the Other who panics and starts bombarding them with requests to make demands. To rouse them from their atheism, and in another example of a “semantic error,” the government employ the police to destabilize, rather than protect the city and to force the workers, not to work, but to go on strike. When the workers continue going to work, declaring that “their uniforms,” not them, are on strike (Seeing, 93) the government stoops to the terrorism it accuses its phantom enemies of: they order the planting of a bomb at the city’s underground, killing 34 innocent civilians.

The government’s forlorn hope here is that since the politics of faith no longer works, the politics of fear may be more successful: “we assumed it would be a less powerful bomb,” is the interior minister’s excuse, “just something to give people a bit of a fright” (Seeing, 117). In effect, in Saramago’s Seeing, the forced choice of democracy has taken the proportions of H.L.A. Hart’s gunman situation: the command to the seeing people is “Democracy or your life!” Predictably, the politics of fear do not inspire faith in the atheist citizens and it is the government that has to admit its own ignorance or, in Saramago’s abiding metaphor, its “blindness”: “I suppose we’ll have to continue groping our way blindly forwards” (Seeing, 157), the President grudgingly admits.

Just as blindness was the apotheosis of the drive to see, silence, I suggest, is the apotheosis of the relentless drive to represent. If democracy is the epitome of the drive to represent in the political arena, then, Saramago proposes, silence at the ballots can trump representational democracy. The nameless members of the population who in their thousands abstain from voting, become the people who see, their blank votes showing “a sign of clear-sightedness on the part of those who used it” (Seeing, 159). Silence at the ballots, Saramago seems to suggest, may be the voters’ ultimate revolution; it by-passes even the problem at the 2004 US election when as Bill Clinton quipped, “the people have spoken. We just don’t know what they said.” ³⁸

As we saw earlier, when the people speak, the act of enunciation is taken to be sufficient to demonstrate democracy, while the content of the enunciation can be ignored. The electorate’s silence, however, is far more subversive; the true revolutionary act, as Žižek suggests, is not when people change the way they vote but when they redefine the parameters of what is permitted and what is prohibited, of what is possible and what is impossible. ³⁹ By casting blank votes, the voters redefine the form and not just the content of their enunciation. They seem to have appreciated that in the long run, “it is these small cracks in the varnish of behaviour, rather than noisy revolutions, which, slowly, through repetition and persistence, finally bring down the most solid of social edifices” (Seeing, 192).

Saramago’s tale remind us above all that present day manifestations of democracy are not necessarily a sovereign good not only because there is no such thing as a sovereign good but also because even if there were, the Other, be she a parent, a judge, or a government, cannot deliver it. ⁴⁰ Saramago’s people’s discovery that truth and the good do not reside in the Other renders them ethical in the psychoanalytic sense. Like Lacan’s Antigone, they have crossed over to another register, to an inanimate condition that is death drive personified and which Lacan describes as an essential and beautiful blindness. ⁴¹

Saramago’s people, like Antigone, are now beyond hope and beyond demand: they are reconciled to the fact that language and representation are flawed instruments at the hands of human beings. In their blindness, they have seen that, not only is language unable to represent the Real, but further that, rather than enabling communication, justice or understanding, language can frustrate and put obstacles in the way of those goals. And that, rather than human beings being superior to other animals thanks to their capacity for speech, it may be, as Žižek suggests, that on the contrary “human beings exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak.” ⁴²

Saramago’s people’s silence achieves the dimensions of what Lacan calls an “act” and Badiou a revolutionary “event”: an ethical act that does not simply disobey, or break, the rules but changes the nature of the rules and redefines the game itself. By redefining the electoral game, Saramago’s people do not just tinker with the boundaries of what is forbidden and what is permitted, but change the parameters of what is possible in a political system. The impact of their “political earthquake” (Seeing, 26), is to shatter not just the incumbent regime but the system itself, transforming the political landscape and the nature of politics. Through their refusal to vote, they show that ultimately, if the speaking being becomes forever alienated from the truth of her being on entering language, and if the political system is not able to represent her, then silence is her trump card when the symbolic order does not compensate her for the loss she suffers when she speaks.