Holeness [sic]

I remember reading St. Augustine on perfection, religion’s variation on the theme of wholeness. The conversation occurs across the final books of The Confessions, and concerns the relation between perfection and time. If I remember accurately, Augustine says time is an expression or perception of change. Perfection, however, is eternal and changeless.

By setting the argument up in this way, Augustine positions God and time in a relationship of opposition or contrast. This allows him to establish a theocentric hierarchy that maintains God-as-perfect-being is both prior to and superior to time-as-change. God's superiority lies in what Augustine presents as the self-evident fact that to alter perfection (say, by moving from the timeless realm of God to the historical realm of humanity) is to exchange a greater for a lesser state.

From the perspective of Augustine's model, time is always already a falling off from timeless perfection. We begin with loss, with ruined perfection. Said differently, time represents the unfolding of the nothingness out of which we were created or called. As such, time is both the medium in which we must work out our existence and the antithesis of the perfection or wholeness we are charged to seek.

I’d guess this is not the way most theologians describe Augustine’s model of the inverse relation of time and wholeness. But it is the way I remember it after having been surprised to find strong parallels between Augustine and Lacan (at least the Lacan of the writings on the mirror phase). Augustine recounts how humanity was called out of nothingness toward a perfection which it can never recapture. This is how he accounts for the collective memory of a "Fall" that we find traces of throughout both our collective and our individual lives. Lacan psychologizes this same narrative of primal loss to recount how the human infant is called from an original chaos (infants control very little in their world) toward an idealized wholeness that is then projected into the past as a lost Eden and into the future as an unreachable horizon. As Lacan has it, we assume our identities through an original and originating alienation. Self is always taken up from and through the (m)other.

All of this registers powerfully through our psychology and our art, but none of it is true (if by “true” we mean a one-to-one correspondence between statements and some verifiable ‘external’ state of affairs). Wholeness and fragmentation, perfection and fall, integrity and amputation are binary concepts that depend on each other for their coherence. They sustain an economy in which one cannot do without the other. (A 'top' is only so by virtue of a 'bottom,' and vice versa.) And if we want to understand both how and why such themes circulate in the stories we tell about and to ourselves, I think we need to attend to how this economy functions and to the cultural and psychological work that it is doing.

The underlying economy in stories and models of fall and redemption is unchanged by the fact that the voluptuous rapture of romantic love, the dyadic intensity of mother and infant, and the luminous certainty of spiritual or political conversion all feel like recovery of a lost wholeness – as if we’d found our other half, our personal savior, our once and future home. Even if for the wrong reasons, both Augustine and Lacan are right in this: we are, each of us, radically incomplete, irredeemably finite and frail. This is what each death proves. Everything and everyone we love is shot through by what Annie Dillard calls mortality’s blue streak of nothingness and what Emerson calls the lubricity of existence. It all explodes or slips away on remorseless currents of time.

I think the genre of horror plays with the fort/da economy of integrity and dismemberment in order to make this radical finitude more accessible to experience. Julia Kristeva writes about horror in terms of the theory of abjection – that hovering nausea in which we cannot tell if we are subject or object. One variation of abjection is found in the dread of being unable to distinguish the living from the dead. We see the theme addressed explicitly in films like Night of the Living Dead, short stories like Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” and myths of ghosts, vampires, and zombies. (Freud’s theory of romantic love, I would argue, is one vast ghost story. In it, love is contagion - the presence of the dead past in the living present. And ego integrity – his preferred brand of wholeness – is, if not cure, at least prophylactic.) But we also see confusion over where to draw the line between subject and object in countless other horror themes: the relation between mother and son in Psycho (what would Lacan make of this dyad? And what does it expose about one of the West’s core mythemes?), the theme of men making clothing and furniture out of the bodies of women (or the feminist variation of men 'objectivizing' women), and the kind of dismemberment featured in movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wolf Creek.

I’d like to examine Wolf Creek in particular from this perspective and to think about the difference between dismemberment as a source of humor and as an engine of horror (a marker of abjection). But for now, I think it enough to see that we look away from the fascinations of horror at our peril. Even if what we look toward calls itself paradise, to lose sight of the interdependent economy of totality and fragmentation is to blank ourselves to what is common in the human experience. We lose the very thing we have by being had.