LITMIR.BIZ

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that the game draws individuals into language, and against the Other as opponent, through obligation derived from legitimation and from the promise of the possible (i.e. wholeness). The game, which has claims to knowledge about the lost territory, works through the opposition between centrality (institutionalization) and those who are excluded, the corruption that is presupposed in the notion of purity. On this topic, Derrida’s Dissemination will be useful in explaining the processes of inclusion and exclusion, which dictate the death of the individual for the sake of the social system.

      If innocence means being harmless (etymologically)12 and is also what has been lost, and if the whole of the social space has lost that innocence, it follows that a social system whose identity is at stake must work continuously toward not being harmful to itself. For the system to be finally whole, it would mean that all of its individuals would work so harmoniously to sustain it that no alteration would further be needed within it. This is assumed to have been the starting point of any given system within language, before it has been corrupted by individuality, by foreign elements occupying the territory. Yes, it is true! Any individual ultimately corrupts any territory. Of course, the moment before this corruption is misrecognized as innocent and it is a mythical construct. Contrary to the traditional association between innocence and childhood, for the purposes of the social space, the child’s desire is a social desire, and the child is born into fallenness. Even though childhood is commonly essentialized qua innocence,13 it is only in retrospect that it appears as such, and in connection to a mythical territory. In order to see how the concepts of fallenness and innocence are violent, the child needs to be seen as already in language as soon as the child acquires a position in the social space (which happens as soon as the child enters the mirror stage).

      The child does not exist outside relationality. The fantasy of totality misrecognized in the mirror stage is a spatial metaphor used to demonstrate that the social system is already inscribed on the (imaginary) body of the baby, to “mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development,” explains Lacan.14 The imago, which is situated in the symbolic space of the Other, “inaugurates … the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations.”15 As the baby now sees itself as whole, this is an already socially defined baby, with a place in the social space that is already expecting him or her even before birth. In actuality, innocence cannot be traced back to the space of childhood, because childhood is part of the territory.

      Innocence is then a symbolic and not a “real” concept. It is not something that a child possesses, but what a child is expected to possess and to lose in the process of becoming an adult. With maturity, the subject attaches desire, in the unconscious, to the loss with which it has already identified. It is important to acknowledge that this misrecognition already takes place at the foundation of individuality, and is not something that the subject comes across along the way.

      The most convenient definition of the fall from innocence is encountered in the Judeo-Christian conception of the fall, or that generally given by Western orthodox theologians. The notion of sin is not related to a voluntary transgression from something otherwise ideal, but to a corruption in which all participate by being born into the very system that defines corruption. This is why there are no degrees to sin, because anything less than whole is enormously distanced from that wholeness (here, God).

      In order to exist at all, the system (mythical, religious, social, political) must always be right. This does not mean that the system is a space of wholeness. It is only the space where identity (as whole) exists as a possibility, but nobody will reach wholeness within the social space. Even though it is rather strange to say that neither the system is whole, nor anybody in it, we can say that, as no territory is the initial territory, no social system reaches the level of sacredness that the ideal, lost realm of wholeness is supposed to possess. The sacred is characterized by wholeness. Religion, as other social orders, strives to structure the social space based on the sacred model. This model is not in the world and will never belong to the world. If sin is a rupture in wholeness, what is ruptured is not in the social space but in what this space has lost in constituting itself, the “Great Time” that is only a has-been and a to-be but never a present.

      This is where Derrida pinpointed the flaw that will never leave any system that tries to define itself. If language as representation is the site where it all “begins,” then in language the efforts to define anything within strict limits appear as necessarily doomed to failure. Representation places everything in the space of its own potential, as representation cannot exist without contamination—but a redeemable contamination. For Derrida, contamination is language itself. This “grand Parasite” that prevents any discourse from being pure, or “serious,” is the very condition of possibility of the functioning of language, or of its iterability. In Limited Inc, he maintains that iterability is the ability of language to be disseminated and, in the process, of losing its initial message, which becomes only a trace, instead of a presence. Contamination is at the heart of the transmissibility of language.

      The system functions in view of a purpose projected from a misrecognized past, and fallenness is all that has not yet reached the goal of wholeness. For this reason, it is not enough to function within the system, and not against it, but the subject of language must serve the purpose of language.

      A system, language, the symbolic: these terms already imply an (ideally) ordered interaction between their subjects, or rather, those who have chosen to belong to these realms. The reason why every participant (even unwilling participants) sustains this ordered interaction is related to lack and desire. These two concepts condition the individuals, and individuals condition one another, based on their need to fulfill their own definition through the Other, who has given them a glimpse at themselves from the very start. In other words, participation is a function of the desire for recognition, identified by Hegel, for whom the Other is only a mediation between self and self, or the negative of self. The self and the Other are entities who “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.”16 The concept of recognition is refined by Alexandre Kojéve, who points out that desire is directed toward another desire, so that “human reality can only be social …. If the human reality is a social reality, society is human only as a set of Desires mutually desiring one another as Desires.”17

      What this would mean as far as identity is concerned is that every subject desires to possess an identity that is desired by an Other, but both the self and the Other remain at the level of desiring, because the recognition of their identity cannot be fully realized. Lacan brings this line of thought to further refinement by shifting the discussion to language. Here, desire has no object, but involves a movement from signifier to signifier, where every subject becomes a signifier for another signifier precisely because every Other whose desire is desired is a mirror reflection of a mirror reflection, a remainder (what he called objet petit a) of a hypothetical lost unity, or territory.

      The connection between the concept of desire and fallenness should be clear by now. An organizing system in itself does not offer innocence (the lost perfection) except as potential, and as something lost and to be retrieved only in death. It follows that there is no ultimate signifier that can be possessed in actuality, during one’s life. The search for innocence is a death sentence. It brings death to those who refuse to partake in its potentiality and it structures individuals around the pursuit of death. Take the Judeo-Christian model, where wholeness is achieved post-mortem, after a life of imperfection improved by sacrifice. Last but not least, the pursuit of innocence also excludes certain people from the search for innocence: the uncivilized, the enemy, the Other.

      We can say, therefore, that the fall from and toward innocence is a mythical concept in the sense that it is an organizing principle. It is always present through its absence, so it is needed in order to define a system unstable without it. Innocence is a stake, while being fallen is a momentum solidified into law. In the convenient example of Judeo-Christianity, humanity’s identity is defined through the loss of the territory of Eden, a loss solidified into the law of God that

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