edenism

There is an unwritten rule in fiction that seers must be on the margins of society. Examples of stories that abide by this rule abound: The Stand, The Shining, Sula, and even Elie Wiesel's Night. Of course, the obvious counterexample to this rule is that of the biblical prophets; if the seer is necessarily the Remainder, how can a Jewish prophet be the Remainder (in a Jewish tradition)? This is because, as Slavoj Zizek explains in The Puppet and the Dwarf, “the Jews are...a remainder in and of themselves – the rest, that which remains and persists after all the persecutions and annihilations.” The apocalyptic prophet Daniel is no exception to this rule, since he is part of the Jewish Remainder in Babylon (and his Babylonian name, Belteshazzar, bears witness to this fact). The difference, of course, between Daniel and The Stand's Abagail Freemantle, is that (apropos of normative American society) Abagail is the Remainder without, whereas Daniel is the Remainder within. This shift can be attributed to modernity: the passage of the locus of privileged sight from the Remainder within to the Remainder without. The necessity of this shift in modernity is elucidated by examining the nature of this privileged sight. To use Lacanian terminology, the seer is one who is given an ability to partially answer the question “che vuoi” (what do you want?) apropos of the Other, where the Other here is found in some notion of divinity, and in being given this partial answer can attempt to answer the question “what do I want?” With this in mind, it should be apparent how the loss of access to the Other which defines modernity leads to to the locus of this privileged insight shifting to outside the social. Nathaniel Peaslee, the unfortunate victim of possession in Lovecraft's “The Shadow Out of Time,” is the exception that proves this rule. While Lovecraft's horror is often described as the horror of the unknown, it is better described as the horror of the unknown as seen by Society (rather than its Remainder). By giving such a character access to the brutal and incomprehensible Other (which is no less brutal and incomprehensible in the Bible), Lovecraft creates a gross inversion: what should be marginal is normative. To see why this choice is so transgressive, we need only turn to the aforementioned connection between “che vuoi” and “what do I want?” By virtue of Nathaniel's access to an incomprehensible Other (“che vuoi”), the reader is left with a sense of nihilism (“what do I want”). By virtue of Nathaniel's normativity, this nihilism cannot be easily dismissed and threatens the foundations of modernity. It is no surprise, then, that those who read the Necronomicon are thrust from the Social into the Remainder due to insanity.

The Jeff Nichols film Take Shelter, then, as a film that assigns the role of seer to a working-class white man (Curtis), appears to be another exception to the rule of the seer. However, there is an important distinction: whereas Lovecraft's characters come undeniably face-to-face with the Other, Curtis is given only ambiguity, and it is only reasonable to conclude that his mind is the issue he must confront. This is already much different from Lovecraft, because the Other is internal, and it is this that makes all of the difference. If Lovecraft's violation of the rule of the seer is the source of its nihilism, then how is Take Shelter a sincere and meaningful film? This is because Take Shelter does not break the rule of the seer, but adheres to it, and this adherence marks an irreversible shift: the Remainder is no longer without but within. Of course, this event should come as no surprise, for it is the natural conclusion of a societal process that has been running for some time:

“Witness the 'Society' column of Le Monde, in which paradoxically, only immigrants, delinquents, women, etc. appear – everything that has not been socialized, 'social' cases analogous to pathological cases...In designating residual categories as 'Society,' the social designates itself as a remainder.'” — Jean Baudrillard (italics his)

Anyone who denies the reality of or the urgent need to recognize the transubstantiation of the social into the remainder need only observe the “shocking” election of Donald Trump by half of the American population. This is the “storm” of Take Shelter: the vision of the storm, or the process by which Curtis becomes capable of receiving this vision. To explain this effect in terms of social processes: in modernity “God is dead,” so access to the Other must come from the Remainder of society, but the re-integration of the Remainder into the social “proves” that no such access exists. Precisely what makes Take Shelter so compelling is that by stylistically encouraging viewers to compare it to horror, the radical distance between Lovecraft's seer in Society and Nichols's seer in the Remainder becomes all the more apparent.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina appears to provide a refutation to this hypothesis in the form of the character Rosalind Walker, a black instantiation of the archetypal blind seer. To resolve this issue, we turn again to Zizek, who comments in “Is it Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today?” that “after a true historical break, one simply cannot return to the past, one cannot go on as if nothing happened – if one does it, the same practice acquires a radically changed meaning.” What, then, is the new meaning of this seer in the Remainder? It is first worth noting that the vast majority of the characters in this show with significant screentime see themselves as the Remainder, albeit unconvincingly. Sabrina is a woman and the daughter of a subversive leader, Prudence is a disenfranchised daughter, etc. Even the witches as a Whole perceive themselves as the Remainder of persecution. This attitude is echoed in the characters' relationships with Sabrina (and with each other): no friend is a friend, and no enemy is an enemy. All of these relationships are blown about by unpredictable vicissitudes. What we have in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, then, is a world where everyone is, to herself, the Remainder. This is also the reason why the show's attempts at direct social effect feel half-hearted; the viewer is not convinced there is any society left to be remedied. Sabrina's identification as the Remainder is the most complex. If Christ, in crying “My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me,” represents the finite and impotent nature of God, then Sabrina, as the anti-Christ, represents the finite and impotent nature of Luciferian (and liberal) ideals. As Christ is split from God (and God is split from God), Sabrina is at every turn split from herself. In expressing autonomy and individuality, she finds only predestination and coercion, making her the ultimate postmodern subject. In other words, Sabrina's attempts at individuality are constantly thwarted by her inability to answer “che vuoi,” because, whether she turns to her friends, family, deceased family, tradition, Satan, or Lillith she cannot find the locus of her desire. This is, as Sabrina demonstrates, the necessary outcome of liberal processes. Whereas the Other may be identified with the Law in a more conservative society and thereby provide a partial answer to “che vuoi” (even if the only motivation it provides is transgression), by being in such a permissive world Sabrina's inability to identify the Other renders useless her attempts at asserting individuality. This inability to identify the Other explains the instances of privileged sight throughout the show. Rosalind's sight, despite what one would expect, provides no real insight into the Other, Harvey's visions are found to originate in something disappointingly finite, etc. In fact, the impotence of Satan leaves the viewer unsatisfied because Satan was the last remaining candidate for the identity of the Other (a narrative tactic that gives the viewer pleasure in watching Sabrina succumb to his demands). We have, therefore, an indivisible two-fold effect in Sabrina that mirrors the ultimate effect of liberal social processes: individuals are both Remainder and non-Remainder, and the identity of the Other is not ascertainable (i.e. the individual's desires are insoluble and privileged sight is finite). This is why the thorn of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is also its crown; each character's attempt at making herself the Remainder is subtly thwarted. In short, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina may be emotionally and politically impotent, but this is because of its fidelity to the state of the social.