Page 255 - Cyberculture and New Media

246 Desistant Media
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or as insufficiency – according to a strict thinking of
finitude. The subject is originally the infirmity of the
subject and this infirmity is its very intimacy, in a state of
dehiscence. Or, in other words, differance is inherent in the
subject, forever preventing it from being subject (or, in
other words, from being a stable essent) and essentially
determining it as mortal.

Derrida has suggested that this inherent infirmity – without which
no relation (either to oneself or to others) could be established and in whose
absence there would be neither consciousness nor sociality – should be,
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ultimately, termed desistance. Desistance brings to the light of day the
insanity or unreason, the anoia against which Platonic onto-ideology, or even
Heidegger’s interpretation of it is established, installed, stabilized. But just as
it is not reducible to a negative mode of the stance, it is not to be confused
with madness – though in doubling or disinstalling everything that secures
reason, it can resemble insanity. Madness against madness. The double bind
oscillates between two madnesses, for there can also be a madness of reason,
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of the defensive stiffening in assistance, imitation and identification.
When we look into the depths of a mirror we must remember that
false positioning of the figure of man can be, as Derrida argues elsewhere,
forged signature as a sign of our presence. In all, it is not a mastering
program. According to him, play is the disruption of presence. The presence
of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a
system of differences and the movement of a chain. Play is always play of
absence and presence. This movement of play is the movement of
supplementary. One cannot determine the centre and exhaust totalization
because the sign, which replaces the centre, which supplements it, taking the
centre’s place in its absence – this sign is added, occurs as a surplus, as a
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floating supplement.
Within mise-en-abyme we are at the threshold of distortion and
complexity, instead of the threshold of the visible, as Kaja Silverman
proposes in her book under the same title. Mimesis is not an interpretation of
the seen but as mentioned, a relation that itself is problematised.
Analyses of art work such as Lynn Hershman Leeson’s 1995
Paranoid Mirror and Joachim Sauter’s and Dirk Lüsebrink’s 1992 Zerseher
(transl. De-Viewer) show that interactivity, or, rather, the participatory
threatens the Lacanian idea of an eye as camera – camera understood here as
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one of our primary identification tools. To construct the strange our eye
must function like fertile vulva: Paranoid Mirror and Zerseher both come
into being in the act of perception, and in the first of these, pictures of
ourselves emerge only through our sight apparatus. Paranoid Mirror changes
through a sensor under a rug on the floor and in Zerseher the picture changes