Nov 29, 2008
Law, Reality, Fantasy, and Militant Truth
Two of the following three legal actions were actually taken in the recent past; the third occurs in William Gaddis’s masterful 1994 satire of the American legal system, A Frolic of His Own.
- A Pennsylvanian filed a lawsuit against Satan.
- A Californian filed an amicus brief on behalf of God.
- A Nebraskan filed a lawsuit against God.
Which is the fiction?
Counterintuitively for those who’d expect Satan to receive more public hostility than the Almighty, the fiction is the first of the three. The second, as Ed Brayton, president of Michigan Citizens for Science and a fellow at the Center for Independent Media, reported on Tuesday, is true: “The Kingdom of Heaven World Divine Mission“—through its emissary on earth, God’s “Advocatess” the “Divine Queen Mariette Do-Nguyen“—has filed a brief on behalf of God in the case challenging California’s Prop 8.” The third is true too; Brayton: “A lawsuit filed by a Nebraska legislator against God was recently dismissed because God could not be served with papers.” The first, the fiction, Gaddis’s suit against Satan, encounters a similarly practical dead end:
As was held in an earlier case before a district court in Pennsylvania, in which the plaintiff accused Satan of ruining his prospects by placing obstacles in his path, thereby depriving him of his constitutional rights, the complaint was dismissed for its failure to discover Satan’s residence within the judicial district, or instructions for the U.S. Marshal needed to serve the summons, and the failure to meet legal requirements necessary to maintain a probable class action, since the class would be so numerous that getting them all together for this purpose would be impractical.
The verdict, in short: Satan doesn’t live here; if he did, no one could track him down; and if anyone managed to, too many people would want to join in a class action suit against him to make its prosecution feasible. The premise implicitly underlying the logic of this decision, as well as the real-life decision in Nebraska, is that the material presence of the defendant is necessary to rightly impose injunctions or penalties. Yet individuals who take legal actions against or on behalf of fantastical entities cannot have a realistic expectation that the entity in question will ever be materially involved in the proceedings. It’s not as though Gaddis’s complainant against Satan believes that the state of Pennsylvania could somehow force a physical being to stand and answer his charges.
Materiality does not and cannot enter into the thought process of complainants who would take legal action founded on fantasy. For these individuals, their commitment to a belief in the supernatural, their fidelity to the fantastic, is strong enough to override the obvious, practical deterrents to pitting one’s particular fantasy against empirical reason. The Real, for them, consists in their fidelity to the capital-T Truth of their conviction. This is a conviction that is prior to any conception of merely material reality. Fantasy, as Slavoj Žižek says in The Ticklish Subject, is the effort to close the gap between the limitations of material reality and one’s absolute fidelity to one’s particular Truth by “(mis)perceiving the pre-ontological Real as simply another, ‘more fundamental’, level of reality.” Fantasy, in other words, mistakes what reality was before it was—which is, by definition, unknowable—for vindication of, or even synonymous with, one’s own subjective convictions. As Žižek continues, “fantasy projects onto the pre-ontological Real the form of constituted reality (as in the Christian notion of another, suprasensible reality).” Thus can we can say that Jesus fantastically “died for our sins”; or ignore the stench of mass graves and say that the Holocaust did not happen; or suppress (with varying levels of ease) our libidinous urges in order to make a romantic commitment.
Robert Coover
Thus can we, like Hiram Clegg in Robert Coover’s penetrating 1966 novel The Origin of the Brunists, trek across the land in fidelity to the truth of a new messiah, “summoned,” together “by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, to await the end of the world.”1 Material reality does not enter into the equation of faith. The “real world” does not have the status to challenge Hiram’s fidelity to his newfound religious truth. As pilgrims from around the world congregate in tiny West Condon to welcome eternity, the national press descends on the congregation, and a young reporter asks Hiram:
“How long have you been a member of the Brunists?”
Hiram meditated but a moment, then replied, “Perhaps all of my life.”
“I thought this thing just got started this winter,” the man said, scribbling furiously in a notebook.
“Yes,” mused Hiram, “a man’s physical life is numbered by days. But the life of his soul is rooted in the centuries!”
“Oh, I getcha,” said the man, cracking chewing gum between his teeth. “You only meant that figuratively.”
“No, son. Nothing that is true is merely figurative.”
Only the physical is finite, says Hiram, and the finite material world has no relevance to Hiram’s faith. The “life of his soul is rooted in the centuries”—rooted in his subjective commitment to a truth that is prior to all others and larger than himself. Concreteness for Hiram exists precisely in claiming these impossible roots as his own. His roots are neither figurative nor material, but stand outside both as pure subjective conviction. That this conviction is premised on the impossible is precisely necessary for the persistent fervor of Hiram’s faith: we can index and reach for the impossible only by confronting constant disappointment. Mere reality—the merely material and the merely figurative—is always to be met with fantastic militant truth.
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1. Fantasy, as I hope is clear from these varied examples, has no moral charge.