truth is the same thing as the path to itself. A Pole and a Jew are sitting in the same carriage in a train. Something is bothering the Pole and he keeps fidgeting in his seat. Finally, he can’t hold it in any longer and blurts out: “Tell me how it is that you Jews are able to get so rich by bleeding people down to their last cent?” The Jew answers: “Okay, I’ll tell you, but I won’t do it for free. Give me five zlotys.” After pocketing the coins, he begins: “First, you have to take a dead fish, cut off its head, and pour its guts into a glass of water. Then, when the moon is full, you bury this glass in a graveyard.” “And,” the Pole asks greedily, “if I do that I’ll be rich?” “Not so fast,” the Jew replies; “there is more to it, but if you want to hear the rest you’ll need to give me five more zlotys.” The money is exchanged and the Jew continues his story, soon asks for more money, etc., up until the Pole finally explodes: “You cheat! You think I’m not on to you? There’s no secret, you just want to take all my money!” The Jew calmly replies: “There you go, now you understand how the Jews …” Every aspect of this little story is worth interpreting, starting with the very beginning. The fact that the Pole can’t stop looking over at the Jew means that he is already in the process of transferring onto the Jew; for him the Jew embodies the subject who supposedly knows (the secret of how to extract every last cent from people). The fundamental lesson is that ultimately the Jew did not trick the Pole: he kept his word, he fulfilled his part of the deal by showing him how Jews, etc., etc. The decisive twist takes place in the gap between the moment in which the Pole gets angry and the Jew gives his final answer. When the Pole explodes, he is already speaking the truth, he just doesn’t know it yet. He sees how the Jew took his money from him, but he only considers this to be some kind of Jewish trick. To put this in topological terms, he does not yet see that he’s already passed onto the other surface of the Möbius strip, that the trick itself contains the answer to the initial question, given that the reason he paid the Jew was precisely to teach him the way in which Jews … The mistake lies in the Pole’s perspective; he was waiting for the Jew’s secret to be revealed at the end of the story. He thought that the story the Jew was telling was just a path toward the final secret. His fixation on the hidden Secret, the final point of the narrative chain, blinded him as to the true secret, which was the way in which he was tricked by the Jew’s story about said secret. The Jew’s “secret” lies in the Pole’s desire, and therefore our own desire; it lies in the fact that the Jew knows how to make use of our desires. This is why the conclusion of this little story corresponds perfectly to the final moment of analysis, the exit from the transfer and the traversal of the phantasy, the two stages of which are split between the final two moments of the joke’s denouement. The Pole’s explosion of anger marks the point where he exits the transfer, where he realizes that “there is no secret” and thus the Jew ceases to be the “subject who supposedly knows.” The Jew’s final comment articulates the traversal of the phantasy. Isn’t the “secret” that causes us to follow the Jew’s story so attentively the object a, the chimerical “thing” of phantasy that provokes our desire, all while being retroactively posited by the desire itself? In this sense, the traversal of the phantasy coincides precisely with the experience that the object, the pure semblant, does nothing more than positivize the hole in our desire. In addition, this story is also a perfect illustration of the unique and irreplaceable role of money in the analytical process. If the Pole was not paying the Jew for his story, he would not reach the level of anger necessary for him to exit from the transfer. It is puzzling that, as a general rule, we do not recognize the structure of this Witz in another, much more famous, story. I am talking, of course, about the Witz of the entrance to the Law in Chapter IX of Kafka’s The Trial and its final reversal when the man from the country who is waiting asks the guard: “Everyone seeks the Law,” the man says, “so how is it that in all these years no one apart from me has asked to be let in?” The doorkeeper realizes that the man is nearing his end, and so, in order to be audible to his fading hearing, he bellows at him, “No one else could be granted entry here, because this entrance was intended for you alone. I shall now go and shut it.” (Kafka 2009b: 155) This reversal is quite analogous to the twist at the end of the story of the Pole and the Jew. The subject finally understands that he was included in the game from the beginning, that the door was already designed for him alone – in the same way that in the story of the Pole and the Jew, the point of the Jew’s story is, ultimately, just to catch the Pole’s desire. And, I should add, it is the same as in the story from Arabian Nights I mentioned earlier in which the hero’s accidental entrance to the cave turns out to have been long-awaited by the wise men. We could even rework Kafka’s story about the entrance to the Law in a way that would make it all the more similar to the Witz of the Pole and the Jew. Let us imagine that, after a long wait, the man from the country suddenly exploded in anger and started to scream at the guard: “You dirty liar! Why are you pretending to guard the entrance to unknown secrets, when you yourself know that there is not a single secret behind that Door, because that entrance was designed for me alone, it serves only to capture my desire?” – to which the guard would calmly reply: “There you go! You’ve finally discovered the true secret of the entrance to the Law.” In these two cases, the logic of the final twist is strictly Hegelian, functioning similarly to what Hegel called the “sublation of the bad infinity.” Both cases start out the same way: the subject is confronted with an inaccessible, transcendental, substantial truth, a forbidden secret that is infinitely deferred. In one case there is the inaccessible Heart of the Law that lies beyond the infinite series of entrances, in the other there is the inaccessible final answer to the question of how Jews manage to get people to give them all their money down to their last cent (because it is clear from the narrative that the Jew could keep going forever). In both stories, the denouement, the solution, is the same – instead of finally succeeding in lifting the final curtain and unveiling the ultimate secret, the Heart of the Law/the way in which the Jews extract people’s money, the subject realizes that he was included in the game from the very beginning, that his exclusion from the Secret and his desire to learn the Secret were already included in the very way the Secret operated. This reveals the dimension of a certain type of reflexivity that is missed by the classical philosophical conception of reflexivity. Philosophical reflexivity consists in the mediating movement through which the One comes to include its alterity, the Subject appropriates the substantial content opposed to it by positing itself as the unity of itself and its other. But this idea of the positivation of impossibility necessarily implies a whole different kind of reflexive reversal, whose key moment occurs when the subject recognizes that the impossibility of appropriating the Heart of the Other is a positive condition for the definition of his own status as subject

http://ift.tt/2rg7kgs