Sacrificial Desire in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale

Sublimate as much as you like; you have to pay for it with something. And this something is called jouissance. I have to pay for that mystical operation with a pound of flesh. That’s the object, the good, that one pays for the satisfaction of one’s desire. . . . It is, in effect, there that the religious operation lies. . . . That good which is sacrificed for desire—and you will note that that means the same thing as that desire which is lost for the good—that pound of flesh is precisely the thing that religion undertakes to recuperate.

—Jacques Lacan ¹

The justice which began with the maxim, “Everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off,” ends with connivance . . . at the escape of those who cannot pay to escape—it ends, like every good thing on earth, by destroying itself. . . . The self-destruction of Justice . . . ! we know the pretty name it calls itself—Grace! . . . it remains, as is obvious, the privilege . . . of the strongest, better still, their super-law.

—Friedrich Nietzsche ²

Sacrifice the sacrifice . . .

—Slavoj Zizek ³

The discourses of charity that proliferated in medieval culture, that sought to determine what it meant to be “poor in spirit,” gave to the powerful a remarkable ally and model in the figure of the poor. The practice and casuistry of charity offered multiple points of crossover between poverty and power—between, as Nietzsche puts it, “those who cannot pay to escape,” and those determined not to. ⁴ The “super-law” of grace; the hypereconomy of sacrifice which seeks, as in mourning, to keep that which it gives up; the absurd and infinite love of a God who plays “scapegoat for his debtor”—these concepts, as Derrida has argued, accredit the believer who must believe in the unbelievable, who must give credence to that which is beyond instruments of credit, submit to an incomprehensible law. ⁵ We know who is left out of, indeed who is corrected by, the hypereconomy of sacrifice, except of course insofar as they subsidize it: those who can or must pay, the Jew, the sodomite, the usurer, the infidel, the heretic, those figures whose sacrifices Christian culture did not want to pay for, and who disturbed for centuries Christian calculations of forgiveness, of the love of the neighbor that refuses requital. ⁶

The logic of sacrifice structures the militant European Christian subject (Derrida, GD, 29–33). This logic, the function of which is to recuperate aggressivity and loss, includes the infinite compassion that requites and corrects, and the renunciation of life, for example the penitential subject’s gift, without hope of reward, of one “broken heart” (far more satisfying to God than the rectitude of many just men) to an inscrutable and incalculable divinity, whose response (the gift of ultimate enjoyment) is assured in the apparent indeterminacy and infinity of the hypercontract of mercy. The logic of sacrifice must be taken into account if one wishes to consider the history of European militancy, of the knights of faith; and it lies at the heart of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.

What is at stake in these assertions?

One thing that is at stake is an ethics that counters the logic of sacrifice, that embraces the possibilities opened up by finitude without sacralizing the death of mortal creatures. Such an ethics is the disavowed alternative to ethical formulations (those at work in the Knight’s Tale, for example) that offer the subject only the impoverished choices of passion versus order, private desire versus self-sacrifice on behalf of the community. Psychoanalysis has transformed ethics in a number of ways, for example through Lacan’s stunning commitment to the “deep finality of [the] . . . really remarkable diversity of desire,” which is to say, to the dependence of the subject’s experience of satisfaction on the other (EP, 5, 39). And consideration of how the “ethics of psychoanalysis” differs from traditional ethics can help us understand the ideological functions of the latter.

So let us begin with Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage, in which the infant takes on her image as such through the mediation of an “other” image, the image in the mirror or the image reflected in the face of the mother. The implications of Lacan’s figure of the mirror stage for fantasies and practices of (chivalric) rescue are far-reaching. A subject founded on the image of an other is a subject that will never be full, or fully be; it is and will always be, irreducibly, other to itself. And because of this its ability to help or to be helped is finite, as is its access to enjoyment. ⁷ For Lacan, this is so partly because the Other that structures the subject also has its limits (EP, 73, 304). The symbolic order is open, it offers no absolute guarantee of meaning or redemption or enjoyment, and its import is the finitude of powers and of the subjects who take shape through their workings. And if the power of the Other is limited, then in relation to his finitude man “can expect help from no one”; nor can ultimate enjoyment be attained any more than absolute power, because desire is change as such (EP, 293). As Zizek puts it in the closing movement of The Sublime Object of Ideology, the radical transformation in the subject sought by psychoanalysis is one whereby “the subject no longer presupposes himself as subject . . . he assumes not the existence but the nonexistence of the big Other” (230–31). In the place of the fantasy of a big Other without lack, he puts the “barred” Other, whose limitations mean that the subject constructed in relation to it will also and always be radically incomplete.

But is such an embrace of finitude merely ascesis again, more renunciation? How does the subject’s “acceptance” of her very foundation in absence, of her otherness to herself, differ from renunciation, from the valorization of death as that which gives the subject meaning; and why does the question matter? ⁸

It matters partly to the problem of scapegoating. Scapegoating is a projective sacrificial mechanism that relies on a putative distinctiveness of subject and object, while repressing (sometimes even acknowledging) the identificatory structure that permits the scapegoat to make sacrifice on behalf of the subject in the first place. The centrality of the very distinction of subject from object to the fantasy of the scapegoat means that, in order to work through this fantasy, we must subject the meaning of the subject itself to a certain ascesis. Such an ascesis would bring out not the meaningfulness of the subject, the “jouis-sense” of meaning proper to ideology, as Zizek would put it, but rather the impossibility of the subject’s meaning anything fixed or stable, because the symbolic order through which the subject takes on meaning is itself flawed, unstable, shifting in its desires. ⁹ We need, for the sake of our jouissance, which also means for the sake of the other within and without us, to undo the lethal promise of ultimate rescue, the promise that any other, whether divinized or abjected, can make us whole. That the Other, itself lacks, desires, is transitory, is precisely what the logic of sacrifice seeks to occlude.

Let us say (and she has reason to think so) that the subject posits that the Other wants something from her; but she cannot translate this desire of the Other into a positive mandate, a clear mission, a signifier that would be her “own” (Zizek, SOI, 113–15). In place of this impossibility she puts the demand of the Other, through the figure of sacrifice, the “gift of death,” which condenses the Other’s multiple desires (including the Other’s indifference) into the Other’s desire for the subject herself, for the subject as such. The Other is seen to desire the subject to be subject—to be interpellated as a subject, to subject itself to interpellation. Thus in the logic of sacrifice, in the gift of death, the subject denies the decentered, contingent, and ultimately indifferent process through which she has come into being, by refiguring her own role in that process (her attempt to locate and assume “her” signifier) as a gift—a gift of life from the Other, and, to the extent that her own activity is acknowledged, as a gift that gives back her life to the Other, imagined as her creator. The subject enters into this fantasmatic exchange of gifts in the hope that the Other desires her, and in the hope that such an exchange will reward and thus perpetuate that desire, despite its inscrutability, which is an effect of its fantasmatic status. (How can we know, reward, and rekindle a desire that does not exist?) Thus the subject tries to secure her belief in the power, indeed in the subjective status, of the Other as that which can recognize her and thereby give her life as a subject, through the specularity of the gift. ¹⁰

But because the mandate, the signifier, through which the subject is constituted, is arbitrary, she can learn not only that she cannot know exactly what the Other really desires with regard to her—to go this far is only to go as far as the inscrutability of that father who sees in secret, whose reasons are his own, but who knows and can calculate what the subject has given, suffered, loved (GD, 56–57); she can learn also that the Other doesn’t know what it wants from her either, because the Other is barred, un-conscious, shot through with the remnants of the very jouissance it carves up with its significations. It is precisely the flawed sentience of the barred Other that is masked by the fantasy of the omniscient big Other. And this secret must be guarded, as indeed Theseus seeks to do, insofar as the contingency of the symbolic order means that it is open to our intervention.

What is opened to us thereby is something different from the elaboration of a subjective identity, from a subjectivation, through the philosophical or religious “taking-on” of death, which must always be a melancholic incorporation of death, a bid for triumph, for a living beyond finitude (GD, 16). What is opened to us is the possibility of jouissance, not as full and absolute enjoyment (which, since it is impossible, must always be deferred, bought and paid for with the sacrifice of enjoyment—thus we explain to ourselves why the Other isn’t making us perfectly happy: because we are waiting, disciplining, readying ourselves), but as broken, transitory, explosive. And crucial to this ethical ascesis of the subject is the analysis of how desire is at stake in the logic of sacrifice, in those practices of renunciation which seek to recuperate loss by making us choose it.

Thus part of this ethical project is to assert that the sacrifice of the object, indeed of the subject-as-object, enjoined in charity is not opposed to concupiscence but is itself a passional mode of enjoyment—as is shown us by the hypereconomy of grace, which never fails to promise us our reward, however much that reward is posited as being beyond exchange. That there is a jouissance of sacrifice, of responsibility, that sacrifice and responsibility give us access to an obscene enjoyment (SOI, 43, 81); this is what the discourse of charity seeks to obscure by driving its absolute wedge between selfless love and love of self. There is no pure self, no pure selflessness, as late medieval English theology itself makes all too evident. ¹¹ That theology is, in its own way, as open to the difficulty of distinguishing between desire and the law as is psychoanalysis, which, as Lacan remarks of Freud, locates “the genesis of the moral dimension . . . nowhere else than in desire itself” (EP, 3).

The logic of sacrifice occludes both the irreducible particularity of the subject, its finitude, its nonsubstitutability in death (GD, 41), and the ways in which that subject is made of otherness: to whom do we give, if not to the other on whom our image was founded? If our distinctiveness, as subjects, is both radical and incomplete—we are not the “same” as the other, but the other nonetheless inhabits us—there can be no absolutely responsible self, no self purely free of the heedless daimon within. But this does not mean there is not responsibility. It means, as Derrida has argued, that we have no warranty for where and when and to whom we are responsible; we must always choose our responsibilities in a perpetually open and shifting field that is nonetheless already given to us (GD, 68). We cannot secure our justness; and to know this is essential to the practice of an ethics of jouissance, because if we refuse to sacralize some responsibilities and demonize others, scapegoating might begin to recede. Such a conception of responsibility might yield not simply an ethics of greater consciousness or knowledge but one that will shift the fantasy of sacrifice, and therefore the ways in which it is socially productive, so that desire would be posited with respect to its finitude in the Other as well as in the subject, and might poison us less thoroughly through the imaginary of guilt and atonement. ¹²

In addition to psychoanalysis, queer theory is another important locus for a rethinking of renunciation. Foucault’s critique of the “repressive hypothesis” in volume one of The History of Sexuality was followed, in The Care of the Self, by an exploration of antique modes of subjectivation—“in which one is called upon to take oneself as an object of knowledge and a field of action, so as to transform, correct, and purify oneself, and find salvation.” ¹³ Foucault viewed these modes of subjectivation as “stylization” rather than “renunciation,” a position taken up by David Halperin in Saint Foucault as offering the promise of an artfulness of desire, of a subject artful in its desires. ¹⁴ Does “stylization” differ from renunciation? Yes, but we cannot simply say, with Deleuze, “Ascesis, why not?” without risking again the role played by centuries of discipline in readying the subject for death and domination. ¹⁵ We can say, “Ascesis, why not?” only if ascesis is acknowledged as a mode of enjoyment, if the subject is understood as inhabited by a jouissance that is at the same time unalterably other to it, “extime.” ¹⁶

So, for example, to choose one of the ethical issues that has been of concern to theorists of pleasure: how might erotic sadomasochism differ from torture? It differs from torture insofar as sadomasochism enacts itself not as a practice of masterful self-coincidence, but rather as a practice of enjoyment, in which the desires of both master and slave are at stake—no pretense of disengagement, of being beyond mortal loves ¹⁷ —and thereby as a practice of enjoyment that calls forth the otherness within the subject, open to erogenous rezoning—with all the shattering consequences thereof for the ethical subject who would triumph over the flesh, its desires, its mortality; indeed with all the shattering consequences thereof for the sublime, militant, angelic body, shining, sempiternal, surviving, superexistent, triumphant, and thereby completely imbued with—one might almost say, made of—the power to rescue and to “correct,” and to carry God’s mandates to his sublunary missionaries. ¹⁸

The embrace of the subject’s strangeness to itself involves not the philosophical “vigil” over death that has for so long promised to give the subject to itself (Derrida, GD, 13), but rather an openness to jouissance, and a knowledge of the risks entailed therein: death of the self-identical subject, death period. That this involves a knowledge of what Lacan would call the “evil” of the jouissance that we might pursue, as well therefore as of the evil jouissance that lies likewise in the heart of our neighbor (EP, 186), is the ethical challenge posed by desire, a challenge which we might address partly through the virtue of prudential calculation (EP, 323): know what you risk, for yourself as well as for the other; you will not be able to keep what you have given away, your losses may be irremediable, the losses of the other may be irremediable. There will only be, and even then not always, a new way of desiring, a new love; our old loves indeed survive, “live on” in us and in our new loves through mourning and repetition, but the way they live on is not the way they lived before. This is to say that exchange breaks with itself, it needs no hypereconomy; what we return is never exactly the same as what we have been given, what we receive is never exactly the same as what we gave up. As Elaine Scarry has so beautifully pointed out, in the losing time of emergency, we must count. ¹⁹ This may be seen as passional calculation, once it is dislodged from the hypereconomy that devalues the calculation of the old law, the Jew, while of course retaining the power of calculation to count its inestimable gains.

The critical tradition on the Knight’s Tale oscillates between certain disputed points: whether the chivalric culture for which the knight stands, and which he represents in his tale, is or is not obsolescent; whether the Knight’s Tale represents chivalric culture as the source of order or disorder; whether the tale is or is not fraught with contradictions; whether the knight is or is not blind to those contradictions; whether Chaucer is or is not similarly blind. ²⁰ Though much of the criticism produced through these disputations has been brilliant, the alternatives outlined above are caught up in a certain imaginary characteristic of historical writing on chivalry; and because of this captation, criticism on the Knight’s Tale has done insufficient justice to the vile enjoyment and identificatory power of this tale. Catherine La Farge puts the problem well:

Theseus is like a god and like God. The tale lets us read this the other way around: God is like Theseus. Chaucer’s Providence has too long been granted amnesty on the grounds of its Boethian affinities. . . . In so far as Providence may be responsible for the apparent arbitrariness of the plot, its methods are more than odd: the death of Arcite is a circuitous route to the happy marriage of Palamon and Emelye. ²¹

There is indeed something “odd,” something irresolvable, about the Knight’s Tale. But I think it seems odd to many of its readers because it cannot be confined to the categories of order versus disorder when conceived oppositionally.

In the imaginary that guides so much writing on chivalry and on the Knight’s Tale, the idealism of chivalric culture—its commitment to heroic sacrifice—is understood to be in oppositional relation to the aggressivity of war, to the jouissance of war, the horrors of which become touchstone for the “reality” that is contrasted with the illusory status of the chivalric ideal of sacrificial rescue. ²² The opposition insists on the difference between the jouissance of aggressivity, and noble sacrifice—thus preserving the integrity of the latter even while pointing to the improbability of its having ever been a reality. Critiques of late medieval chivalric culture too often preserve that culture’s own fantasies: the notion that the knight of faith’s “gift of death” would, if it were (or regardless of whether it were) ever indeed offered, be charitable rather than concupiscent; the notion that the knight of faith, if he ever existed, would perform “correction” out of infinite love of the enemy, and not for the concupiscent motives of glory or terrestrial lucre or the malice that demands requital. ²³ Hence the endless preoccupation, in medieval writing on war, with the “heart” of the knight of faith; with the calculation of wartime profit, of when and under what circumstances plunder can be retained, ransom demanded, pillage permitted; with the identification, as noted earlier, of those enemies to which the other cheek must be turned, and of those who may be persecuted. ²⁴

The fantasy of chivalry is a sublime economy that powerfully recuperates the jouissance of aggressivity by rewriting it as incalculable, inscrutable love; it is a structure through which a certain obscene destructivity may be glimpsed and enjoyed, but only to the extent that the gift of death is offered in payment thereof. Military discipline and its breakdown are not opposing forces, as a traditional ethics would have it; they are hand-in-glove, as is exemplified by the stunning beauty of the angelic hosts (if, with Lacan, we read beauty as the sign that points us toward, as well as away from, our jouissance), and by the uncanny power of the theme of “Christ the Lover-Knight.” ²⁵ The “mourning for the front,” for pure confrontation with one’s “proper” enemy, that characterizes histories of chivalry and of atonement is driven by an unacknowledged acknowledgment of the fantasmatic nature of absolute rescue, paired by the manic triumph of surviving death, of superexistence. ²⁶

European military culture has been an eminent cultural site for submission to an arbitrary and exacting law. Both the production of obedience and of transgression are central to military culture. The logic of sacrifice, far from being in an obsolescent relation to the economies of its culture, helps to produce them, through its occlusion of the interdependence of sacrifice and aggressivity—as is attested by the unhappy deployment of the casuistry of charity in connection with the harassment of vagabonds in both France and England and the concomitant elaboration of an ethics of labor. ²⁷ The cultural power of sacrifice is and has always been enormous. ²⁸ It mobilizes subjects for loss and destructivity: the “deterritorializations” of crusade and pogrom and flagellation, massive redeployments of bodies which Lacan would read as the tragic return of the Real when it is foreclosed by the image of sacrifice. ²⁹ In the Middle Ages, spectacular charity monumentalizes itself in stone, in the glorious architecture of surplus value, the “actualization of pain” (Lacan, EP, 60), built to house spiritual paupers and broken penitential hearts. And there are also the “everyday” forms of medieval life, for example the hypereconomizing of kinship and marriage, the sacrifice of the household economy, the oikos, in favor of the sublime capital of the sublime body of Christ—a sacrifice that produces, among other things, an endless series of monastic “reforms.” ³⁰ Or one might think of statist conceptions of community, such as Aquinas’s magisterial reconstruction of Aristotelian notions of the need to discipline private desires on behalf of the common good, on which ground Aquinas stands when re-theorizing the just war and the enemy on behalf of the newly consolidated states of the thirteenth century. ³¹

Before entering into a more detailed analysis of the pleasures of military sacrifice in the Knight’s Tale, I want to explore further how and why renunciation can function as a mode of enjoyment, specifically as a mode of enjoyment that structures communities as well as subjects. In commenting on the Sermon on the Mount, Derrida notes that “the opposition between the mediocre wages of retribution or exchange and the noble salary that is obtained through disinterested sacrifice . . . points to an opposition between two peoples, ours, to whom Christ is speaking, and the others” (the others are ethnici or ethnikoi, translated variously as goyim, pagans, publicans; GD, 105–6). In Lacan, too, we find sacrifice at the heart of “everything that depends on the image of the other as our fellow man” (EP, 196), which we might broaden to “fellow creature”; it is at the heart of everything at stake in the definition of “fellow,” indeed of “creature,” of everything at stake in the harrowing complex of strangeness and intimacy through which subjectivation, always preoccupied with creation and creatureliness, takes place.

How then does sacrifice take hold of, go to work through, processes of subjectivation? I want to emphasize two points of Lacanian theory: the notion that desire is always desire of the other, the desire to be recognized by the other; and the notion of the “fundamental dimension of the unknown in desire, of something that doesn’t resemble me.” This dimension has been variously named: jouissance, the unconscious, the Nebenmensch (neighbor), das Ding (the Thing), or, in one of Zizek’s favorite formulations, that which is “in me more than me,” the stranger to myself who is also my closest neighbor, and who, as my desire, structures my relations with all my other neighbors. ³²

If the subject’s wish is to be recognized by the other, but this other who could recognize the subject is difficult to get hold of, since the subject’s most fundamental experience of otherness is in its form of unknowable, unmanageable jouissance, the wish for recognition is doomed. In her attempt to evade the symbolic order, the law of the unconscious—that is, the law that governs the signifier, hence the Other that is open, incapable of totalization—the subject mournfully interiorizes an all-powerful law, capable of recognition, capable of interpellating the subject it questions as the subject who can and must answer to it, capable both of persecution and justification. To this interiorized law is attributed the gift of life, insofar as the subject, who comes into being through her experience of alterity, relocates her emergence in the all-powerful Other. The Other is posited as lacking nothing and therefore as desiring only gratuitously, hypereconomically, but is paradoxically impossible to satiate because of the hypereconomic status of his desire; who knows what he wants since he lacks nothing?—the further step being, that we cannot and should not know what he wants. He sees in secret; he, like the prince, has his reasons; all we “know” is that he does desire us, he desires our recognition of him, in recognizing him we are recognized through a hypereconomic exchange of the gaze, which is also the hypereconomy of the gift of life and of death. Relocating her origin in the Other, what sacrifice can the subject make to the inscrutable desire that made her, except her life? The Other gives to the subject her life through the gift of death by giving to her the fantasmatic knowledge of the dependence of her existence on the Other, that is, the knowledge of her mortality, but in the register of the imaginary; only by taking on this knowledge can the subject paradoxically make the return that will authorize her, give her superexistence. And so, as Derrida and Marcuse would point out, she is a philosopher from the beginning.

At the same time, the subject knows better, or, to be more precise, the subject does not cease to be inhabited by that extimate Thing, that jouissance which suffers from the signifier but does not cease to mobilize it, to put it through its paces. Lacan remarks,

Das Ding presents itself at the level of unconscious experience as that which already makes the law. . . . It is a capricious and arbitrary law, the law of the oracle, the law of signs in which the subject receives no guarantee from anywhere.

(EP, 73)

At this level of experience of the law, the rules that enable the very waywardness of the signifying chain “carve up” or design jouissance, thus producing the subject and her “surplus enjoyment,” that portion or stylization of jouissance resulting from the operations of the signifier. The law of the signifier conveys its “mandate” to the subject, but unintelligibly, leaving to the subject the attempt to scrutinize it, to confer upon it the enjoyment-in-sense proper to ideology, to “identify” with it as “hers.” What clear demand attends the signifier that is one’s name, what does one’s name guarantee, other than the inscription of the subject into an endless chain of relations with other signifiers, whose import can never be grasped in full?

It is on this “level” of the law that Lacan locates the radical dimension of courtly love, in the form of the lady as sublime object, who, standing in the place of but also pointing in the direction of jouissance, of the Thing, appears as an “inhuman partner,” a traumatic object with whom no relation is possible, an apathetic void exacting senseless ordeals. ³³ It is also on this level that Zizek locates the obscene enjoyment at stake in submission to the law. Emphasizing the Lacanian definition of the unconscious as, like the courtly lady in her more rigorous forms, an “automaton,” a dead, senseless letter that leads the mind unconsciously with it, Zizek proceeds to the notion of the “constitutively senseless character of the law” (SOI, 37). We obey the law not because of its positive qualities, not because it is just, good, or beneficial, but because it is the law. True obedience involves obedience to the command as such, that is, not just whether or not, but insofar as, the command is incomprehensible, traumatic, irrational.

The subject’s attempt to internalize, and to give positive meaning to, the senseless injunction never fully succeeds;

there is always a residue, a leftover, a stain of traumatic irrationality and senselessness sticking to it, and . . . this leftover, far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it: it is precisely this non-integrated surplus of senseless traumatism which confers on the Law its unconditional authority: in other words, which—in so far as it escapes ideological sense— sustains . . . the ideological jouis-sense, enjoyment-in-sense (enjoy-meant), proper to ideology.

(SOI, 43–44)

The enjoyment at stake in how we give credence to the law is for Zizek supported precisely by that senseless enjoyment which escapes the law; the enjoyment of our credence takes shape through our experience of the arbitrariness of the law at the level of the Thing, which accounts for how, in theorizations of belief, the notion of our accountability to belief so often takes precedence over its positive qualities. During the Middle Ages, obedience was uncoupled from the positive qualities of law through a number of influential discourses that privileged correction for correction’s sake, often in the company of figures of secrecy: the analysis of tyranny; the rigorous treatment given to the question of military obedience in writing on the just war, whereby, particularly in the later Middle Ages, the conscience of the individual soldier is so often effaced, or more properly, kept confined to the heart; and of course the inscrutability of Providence. ³⁴

Insofar as we experience the law through its senseless structuration of the unconscious, the law points inevitably to jouissance. The scandal involved is partly that the law to which we submit has no foundational claim on us, no ethical content, no rationality; hence allegiance to it cannot produce free and responsible ethical subjectivity, unless we transform it through the sense-making operations of ideology. But the scandal is also that the law, because it stylizes our jouissance, is inextricable from it. What makes the hypereconomy of sacrifice so effective is that it not only infuses obedience to the command with positivity, it even more radically rationalizes the irrationality of submission and our desire for it through the figure of secrecy: that we cannot know the mysterious reasons of Providence or of the prince is an ideological form of non-knowledge, an ascesis of knowledge, a sacrifice of knowledge, that stands in the place of the impossibility of knowing what the law means and in the place of the jouissance signposted by that impossibility. The asymmetry of creature and Creator, of what the creature’s gaze can see and what the Creator’s gaze can see, the taboo on divine knowledge, puts a prohibition on creaturely presumption in the place of an impossibility that has to do with our finitude, with the extimacy—the dead, senseless exteriority—of the law of the signifier which inhabits us, and therefore with our jouissance. The subject’s strangeness to itself, that about itself which it cannot know but which is also its desire, is refigured, through a form of mourning, as that which the Other knows in secret, into what Derrida describes as the “witness that others cannot see, and who is therefore at the same time other than me and more intimate with me than myself” (GD, 109).

Since the law governs the operations of the signifier, it is, Zizek argues, the form and only the form of the law, not its positive ethical content, that is interlinked with our desire, and drives us to accept its command, a formality related also to the way in which the beauty of the image, the image of beauty, commands the knight of faith in courtly love (SOI, 81). And our renunciation in relation to this law produces the plus-de-jouir, the leftover enjoyment that sustains our obedience (and also can become the basis for our refusal of obedience). Hence the obscenity of fascism, the “utterly void, formal character of its appeal, . . . the fact that it demands obedience and sacrifice for their own sake” (SOI, 82). The true value of sacrifice “lies in its very meaninglessness,” and its enjoyment is the enjoyment of renunciation itself, that is, the enjoyment of the law’s designation of desire; the renunciation of jouissance so as to produce the plus-de-jouir, the surplus enjoyment that will be embodied in the objet-a, that fascinating but arbitrary object that fills out the void (of sense) in the Other (SOI, 82). This is in part the import of the beautiful captive Amazon Emelye’s appearance to the imprisoned Theban knights, Palamon and Arcite, as a captivating image of freedom; as always-already subdued, but as offering an image of the enjoyment at stake in the taking-on of submission. And it is not only Emelye who functions as objet-a in the Knight’s Tale, but also Palamon and Arcite themselves. They, as subjects, make themselves into the objet-a for the commanding and inscrutably desirous gaze of the law.

The logic of sacrificial subjectivation is at work in Lacan’s notion of courtly love as a “mourning until death” that can be understood with reference to the structure of sadism; it is at work also in the melancholic mania of triumph produced through war, or through the vigil over death, the “care for the self” enjoined by philosophy, or through the transformation of necessity into choice analyzed by Freud in his essay on “The Three Caskets.” ³⁵ It is a logic that transforms finitude into creative power, into the power to make a representation of one’s finitude, a beautiful signifier of the absence of plenitude (which is one reason why the Knight’s Tale closes with such elaborate speechifying). To accept the gift of death from the Other means also to interpret death, to give onself a representation of death, to give oneself (by accepting from the other) a destination. Thus at the moment of this assumption of responsibility for one’s own death, one foresees, keeps vigil; one also falls back upon oneself, recollects oneself, identifies with oneself in relation to one’s own particular death (GD, 10-13). The true philosopher looks death in the face; the concern for death becomes the concern for life. A vigilant superexistence is born from the event of looking death in the face, from the triumph over death, which, like all triumphs, retains the traces of the struggle from which it emerges—preserves “the memory of war” (GD, 16).

The mania of triumph, of superexistence and of superknowledge (of that which cannot be known, i.e., death), which follows upon one’s self-sacrifice, one’s acceptation of death, is the melancholic “jouis-sense,” the form of enjoyment proper to the ideology of death, incorporating the memory of what one had to lose in order to get (back) one’s superexistence. This melancholic jouis-sense domesticates the stranger within. It is named by the word “win,” which appears in the triumphant opening lines of the Knight’s Tale, when the narrator says of Theseus that “Ful many a riche contree hadde he wonne” (line 864). ³⁶

The cognates of “win,” and its senses in Middle English, link together the notions of obtaining, tilling the ground, exerting oneself, gaining by labor or exertion, suffering; striving, conquering, taking possession of, making profit; above all, for my purposes, “To regain, recover (something lost); hence, to make up for (loss, waste); to rescue, deliver; in religious use, to redeem: often with again.” ³⁷ “Win” is indeed a word that retains the traces of struggle, preserves, in triumph, the memory of war; and Theseus is indeed the winner in The Knight’s Tale, as that sovereign subject from whom one must receive and to whom one must yield in order to be recognized as subject. Thus he is accompanied in his triumph not only by his Amazonian captives but by “al his hoost in armes hym bisyde” (874), by an image of community as sublime military body. “Host” is itself a word whose history tracks the path of triumph, from estrangement to the mania of superexistence and redemption: from Latin hostem (hostis), meaning “stranger, enemy,” come the medieval senses of “warlike gathering,” “a great company,” an etymology which marks the power of melancholic incorporation to domesticate the other. ³⁸

Moreover, to say that Theseus is the winner in the Knight’s Tale is also to say that he is its most successful philosopher. The logic of sacrificial subjectivation allows us to understand why this tale tracks a path from war to philosophical discourse; it allows us to decipher the intimacy between war and the consolation of philosophy.

The Knight’s Tale generates a jouissense of thoughtful puzzlement (which indeed is displayed by a number of its characters) over a very long series of riddles. These are: the foundations of Theseus’s authority; the apparent arbitrariness of Palamon and Arcite’s submission (why don’t they do this or that?—the question they of course ask of themselves; why do they simply confess to Theseus in the woods and put themselves under his law? and so on); the apparent arbitrariness of Palamon and Arcite’s identity (that is, whether they deserve their “destinations,” or not); the apparently unmotivated pageant of intercession on behalf of Palamon and Arcite played out by Hippolyta and Emelye; the mystery, made more baffling in Chaucer’s text than in Boccaccio’s, of Emelye’s unrecorded acceptance of Arcite and then Palamon after the brief glimpse Chaucer is careful to give us, during Emelye’s sacrificial rites, of her protest; the awkward, flat, medicalized, almost comic (to some readers, at any rate) tone of the presentation of Arcite’s death, followed by outbursts of communal mourning; the long delay that follows, in Chaucer though not in Boccaccio, which puts in question the meaningfulness of Theseus’s elaborate creation, the amphitheatre and the tournament, as means of resolution; Chaucer’s linkage of the marriage between Palamon and Emelye with reasons of state, which has the same effect; the squabble among the gods, and the perplexing relation between Saturn’s arrangements and Theseus’s final speech.

Most of these riddles derive from moments when reasons and intentions are inscrutable, interiorities veiled. These critical cruxes have arisen when, precisely, what cannot be read in the tale is what is in the heart, whether of Jupiter or Providence or Emelye. The marked, insistent illegibility of subjectivity at the tale’s critical moments of questioning, assent, submission, appeal, and sacrifice—Mars and Venus seem to promise what happens, but things take a further turn; Diana gives a sign, but we can’t understand it—actually supports the powerful movement of subjectivation in this tale, by making it clear that we become subject only through these performances for the oracular Other, that the law that will say yes or no to us in fact promises nothing, because the signifier is unstable. The law constitutes us only through our submission to it, at the oracular level of the emergence of the Thing, when our jouissance is designed and our fate decided, through our subjection to the signifier, to words we cannot understand but can only interpret.

The Knight’s Tale is preoccupied with hiding, constraining, burying, and removing the things that emerge or become manifest inside it—things that embody that “fundamental dimension of the unknown in desire, of something that doesn’t resemble me.” The tale begins with an appeal to Theseus to bury the rotting corpses of Thebes, and there follows the creation of another pile of dead bodies, out of which Palamon and Arcite are taken and put into prison. Arcite of course dies and is given a spectacular funeral. After he is wounded, “[a]s blak he lay as any cole or crowe” (2692). The crow is a carrion-eater and harbinger of trouble, marking the fact that Arcite now is fully destined, in between deaths, living only his dying. Coal is “a piece of burnt wood . . . that still retains sufficient carbon to be capable of further combustion without flame; a charred remnant, a cinder,” “sometimes defined as dead, cold, black, quenched coal,” which is the definition associated by the OED with the phrase “as black as a coal” (2a). Arcite is indeed this remnant that can still burn but is already no longer what it once was, a remnant, again, in between deaths, in radical anticipation of death.

What interests me here is in part how drawn-out is the depiction of Arcite’s dying, of his state as remnant; our attention is asked to linger upon his wound, and specifically upon the excess of stuff, of corrupted flesh, that is opened up to our vision through that wound. What emerges in and through Arcite is the Thing, that inert stuff of the real, the “clothered blood” (2745), the massified liquid that cannot circulate, can’t be emptied or moved; it is that which is in him more than himself; and the tale wants us to participate in this “traumatic eruption.” This is, so to say, the most carnal moment in the tale, the moment when there emerges that strangeness within us that is not responsible to, does not respond to, the other; and that strangeness within us is what the law seeks out, insofar as that strangeness is what resists interpellation and must be offered up in sacrifice, as Arcite does here, the sacrifice of his spectacularly broken heart (“tobrosten,” 2691), the culmination of the mourning-until-death that is courtly love: “Allas, the peynes stronge, / That I for yow have suffred, and so longe!” (2771–72); “And if that evere ye shul ben a wyf, / Foryet nat Palamon, the gentil man” (2796–97).

The consternation this scene has evoked in readers of the Knight’s Tale (or coolness—Robertson remarks that “Arcite has very little dignity even in death”), points to the way this scene brings out a certain vile enjoyment, the obscenity of sacrifice: its meaning-less, or perhaps we might say auto-significant (in the sense that, as Zizek puts it, ideology serves nothing, it serves only itself) fascination with opening the subject’s wounds, opening the subject to the shameful remnant of jouissance that lies within, the “stuff” which the signifier designs but from which it also estranges us. ³⁹ The desire of this tale is the desire of the sadist who does not acknowledge his own Thing, who does not acknowledge the way his desire is at stake in his subjection of the body of his victim to the trappings of the law.

What this sadist finds unbearable in the object of his attentions is, according to Lacan, the way that the subject “suffers from” the signifier, is absent to itself, inhabited by non-knowledge, by the remnant of jouissance that is not the subject. This sadist confronts the other with the truth of the subject’s non-knowledge, by suspending the other in an impossible knowledge of the imminence of its death—a carnalization, indeed, of the anticipatory vigil over death sublimed by philosophy—and claiming total mastery over the signifier that is the other. The sadist re-creates the subject as perdurable, sublime object, filling the lack in the other by deferring, extending the period between the two deaths, the knowing of what can’t be known (one’s own death, one’s extimate nonself), suspending the victim in a radical interrogation, finally and fantasmatically filling the lack in the other by annihilating the other, so that the other finally coincides with its own absence, an inverted restoration of presence (Lacan, EP, 202, 261). By transforming the other into the signifier, into “his” signifier, the sadist gains access to the jouissance residing in the fact that one creates a signifier as such, a form; the fantasy scenario of this sadist is an inverted fantasy of rescue, of re-creation of the other, through the gift of death, into an enduring signifier.

This is one way of accounting for how the Knight’s Tale exacerbates the problem of meaning that attends Arcite’s sacrifice at the moment of his dying, an effect that is produced partly through the disjunction between two different rhetorics of loss. The first is the dispassionate, knowledgeable, medicalizing gaze that presents to us in considerable detail the wound in Arcite’s dying body. ⁴⁰ The second is the passionate lamentation that suspends Arcite in the form of the question: he asks, “What is this world? What asketh men to have?” (2777), and gives no answer, nor is any given to him—certainly not by the narrator, who, in another passage that has seemed troubling to readers of the tale, suspends judgment as to Arcite’s final judgment:

His spirit chaunged hous and wente ther, As I cam nevere, I kan nat tellen wher. Therfore I stynte; I nam no divinistre; Of soules fynde I nat in this registre. . . .

(2809–12)

Thus the destination of this by now thoroughly destined Arcite—in the sense that for many lines now he has been nothing but his anticipation of death—is ensealed, made secret. The narrator’s knowledge, unlike that of the narrator of the Teseida, does not penetrate so far.

Whether this figure of the secret that is death is meant to evoke doubt, and therefore the meaningless-ness of the subject’s gift of death, or whether it is meant to evoke the absolute secrecy that is absolute knowledge of the universe, is not easy to determine. I would suggest both are at stake: the text announces here that the meaninglessness of sacrifice will ultimately be referred to another kind of inaccessibility of meaning, not that of finitude, but of the father who knows in secret. The meanings of “divinen,” from which “divinistre” (a theologian or a prophet) derives, track the ease with which the figure of doubt can be transmuted into the figure of absolute secret knowledge: “divinen” means to foretell future events, to predict, to prophesy, but can also mean to “engage in speculation or guessing”; “to be suspicious”; “to be in doubt about.” ⁴¹ The narrator cannot know, he cannot find souls named in “this registre” (2812); the OED gives the medieval meanings of “register” as “a book or volume in which regular entry is made of particulars or details of any kind which are considered of sufficient importance to be exactly and formally recorded.” No such exteriorized, accessible, written record can tell us Arcite’s fate; for that, again, we would need to penetrate a secret that lies beyond codified knowledge, for that we will need a superknowledge. But the narrator knows what he doesn’t know, which is more than Arcite knows, and is, it turns out, also more than the mourning women of the community know.

As discourses of consolation begin to find their way into the Knight’s Tale, so do discourses of knowledge, of mean-ing. Arcite is joined in the form of the question by the mourning women of the community: “‘Why woldestow be deed,’ thise wommen crye, / ‘And haddest gold ynough, and Emelye?’” (2835–36). This lamentation is followed by the first assertion of philosophical consolation in the tale, offered not by an undifferentiated mass of women or by the corrupt mass of dying flesh that is Arcite, but by Egeus, Theseus’s father, the only man who can “gladen” the distraught duke (2837): “‘Right as ther dyed nevere man,’ quod he, / ‘That he ne lyvede in erthe in some degree, / Right so ther lyvede never man,’ he seyde, / ‘In al this world, that som tyme he ne deyde” (2843–46).

Egeus’s knowledge of “this worldes transmutacioun” (2839)—he has seen the world “chaunge bothe up and doun”—is a dispassionate assertion of superknowledge and of superexistence, the (impossible) knowledge about death which, in their different ways, the sadist, the medicine man, and the philosopher seek to construct—a seminal knowledge, finally a triumphant knowledge of and a care for life, passed on from father to son, intensified through a figure of genealogical survival of wisdom and of “gladness,” of enjoyment. ⁴² But if the melancholic recovery of enjoyment is already underway here, in the form of a simple incorporation of loss through the masculine philosophical subject’s knowledge of its facticity, there are, again, limits to what Egeus knows; “Deeth is an ende” of his knowledge as well as “of every worldly soore” (2849).

As noted earlier, Derrida emphasizes that the vigil over death, the philosophical anticipation of death through which the subject triumphs over that which she doesn’t know, and chooses what she cannot avoid, involves the fashioning of a representation of death, a representation which incorporates the secret of “that which is in the subject more than itself” into the subject, or which, more properly, fashions the subject—and her community and history—through the incorporation of that secret, the corrupt bodily remnant (GD, 9). As with Lacan’s sadist, the process of melancholic incorporation is the production of surplus enjoyment, a re-narcissizing of the subject’s obscene submission to the law of the signifier. This is why melancholic triumph involves not just the power to represent, to make the image, but the power to rescue the decomposing image, the image that threatens to collapse into the corrupt stuff of the Thing that is in the subject more than herself. And since the image of the subject is founded on the image of the other, this triumphant rescue of the image of the subject will involve the triumphant rescue of the image of the other, and vice-versa—a transitivism which Lacan names “the natural basis of pity” (EP, 196), which founds the capacity to identify with the enemy, to attain the superexistence of that form of brotherly love so familiar in war and in charity, which is neither purely a selflessness nor a love of self, but a transitivist celebration of the triumphant reconstitution of signifiers of absent plenitude.

“[T]he soore” that, as he lays dying, “[e]ncresseth” at Arcite’s heart “moore and moore” is refigured in Egeus’s speech in the form of knowledge that “every worldly soore” must end; but this sore has not yet been re-created into something beautiful, into that beauty that is the mark of the signifier itself, of its formal power and its power to form the jouissance of the subject. Arcite’s “soore” has been turned into a fact of life and death, but the aestheticization of his image, and the secret incorporation of his corrupt stuff, is subject to a delay—a delay which is the time of mourning: “By processe and by lengthe of certeyn yeres, / Al stynted is the moornynge and the teres / Of Grekes, by oon general assent” (2967–69).

The end of mourning is then a figure for the unanimity of community and assent, that is, both concurrence and submission, a “compliance” and a willing which Theseus will mirror in line 3075 (“this is my fulle assent”). ⁴³ The time of deferral, which is the time of mourning, is crowned by that figure of chosen constraint which characterizes the gift of death and the economy of sacrifice, and which domesticates the stranger within, the jouissance that “must” be renounced because it was never securely “ours” to begin with. Insofar as the gift of death is a gift, its exchange will feature the delay that Marcel Mauss has identified as essential to the gift, to forms of aristocratic exchange that appear to break with the immediate reciprocity of commerce, that transform the stuff of what is exchanged into the sublime materiality of the gift. ⁴⁴ This delay is also the time it takes to enact the melancholic economy of sacrifice, which seeks to retain what it gives up, but in the form of superexistence. That it is Theseus rather than Egeus who articulates the result of this sacrificial deferral, this period of “incommunication” that establishes the gift as such, its “break” with exchange, is a genealogical figure for the production of sublime and salvific speech, of the signifier that can be transmitted from father to son.

Theseus’s speech is marked at the outset by its performativity, by its status as an artful production of signifiers: “And Theseus abiden hadde a space / Er any word cam fram his wise brest, / His eyen sette he ther as was his lest. / And with a sad visage he siked stile, / And after that right thus he seyde his wille” (2982–86). In the midst of parliamentary speech, of the passive voice (“Among the whiche pointz yspoken was,” 2972), of “oon general assent,” the heterogeneity of the sovereign asserts itself as that sublime subject, that sublime point of communal subjectivation, whose gaze and speech are his will and his “pleasure,” whose gaze and will emanate from an interiority that precedes them and is unaccountable even in the midst of the communal accountability that gives it its ethical force. The ethics of the community are absolutized through a figure of subjective interiority, of a sublime ethical unaccountability. This assertion of the interiority of the will correlates with the deferral that marks the gift, insofar as the spatial difference between the interiority of the sovereign subject and the exteriorized locus of the law is what makes the will sublime, a melancholic figure of recuperated absence, difference, foreign “stuff.”

Theseus now introduces the Prime Mover as that absolutely creative subject responsible for the facticity of creaturely death because it is his law: the Prime Mover “Hath stablissed in this wrecched world adoun / Certeyne dayes and duracioun / To al that is engendred in this place” (2995–97). This figure of a law legible to creatures is moreover reconciled with the figure of inscrutable and secret interior reasons: the creature cannot know why, but only that it is so, which makes its submission at once obscene and perfect (perfect because to submit only for a good or positive reason is not absolute credence): “The Firste Moevere of the cause above, / Whan he first made the faire cheyne of love, / Greet was th’effect, and heigh was his entente. / Wel wiste he why, and what thereof he mente” (2987–90). ⁴⁵ Hence also the way in which this speech itself, through its emphasis on performativity, problematizes its credibility; the gamble is that by positing Theseus’s discourse as emanating from a sublimely recessed sovereign interior whose link to Jupiter is, precisely, unknowable, we cannot know its status; we can only believe, submit, assent, or not. But if we do believe, we will have, at once, the obscene surplus enjoyment of submission to that which can make no positive claim on us, as well as the absolute attitude of pure belief, the “ideological attitude” par excellence. What is asked for here is a boundless credence, a credence beyond the bounds of the law, which can only be produced through the arbitrariness of the law and the jouissance of the law’s absurdity. Not all readers will take up this invitation to sacrificial enjoyment, to the sacrifice of knowledge; but we will not be able to sacrifice this sacrifice only by noticing that Theseus’s authority is strangely evanescent.

Theseus then asks us “To maken vertu of necessitee, / And take it weel that we may nat eschue, / And namely that to us alle is due. / And whoso gruccheth ought, he dooth folye, / And rebel is to hym that al may gye” (3042–46). “[T]hat [which] to us alle is due” is death, submission to the law of which is correlated here with submission to authority. “Due” is a transitivist word, linking together the notion of that which “is owing or payable, as an enforceable obligation or debt” (emphasis added), with the notion of “belonging or falling to by right,” “owing by right of circumstances or condition”; it brings together the notion of that which we must pay to the other and that which the other renders to us “by right.” ⁴⁶ Someone who “gruccheth” what is due is someone who murmurs or complains, who makes the “jarring or grating sound” of rebellion, but is also someone who is “reluctant to give or allow (something),” who “begrudge[s].” ⁴⁷

Someone who makes such noises does not sing the “melodye” Robertson identifies with the New Law, with the hypereconomy of Christianity, a “melodye” which appears in the company of “alle blisse” when the bond of matrimony is made between Palamon and Emelye (3094–97), as also in the triumphal opening of the Knight’s Tale, in the company of “victorie” (872), when Theseus is riding into Athens with his “hoost.” Someone who is reluctant to give or to allow something does not join into the sacrificial economy of the community, where, as Theseus puts it, “gentil mercy oghte to passen right” (3089). Despite the fact that the community is of “oon general assent,” the specter of the stranger who refuses the gift of death haunts Theseus’s speech, as does the corrupt terrestrial economy, the corrupt bodily mass, associated here with those who will not cease to mourn the “foule prisoun of this lyf” (“foule” is strongly associated with putrefaction and corruption in its Middle English meanings). ⁴⁸ Difficult though it may be to define Theseus’s faith, to know what Chaucer thought of his “paganism,” the emergence of the Christian hypereconomy is unmistakeable at the end of the Knight’s Tale, as the narrator prays to God on Palamon’s behalf: “And thus with alle blisse and melodye / Hath Palamon ywedded Emelye. / And God, that al this wyde world hath wroght, / Sende hym his love that hath it deere aboght” (3097–3100).

But again, the emergence of this hypereconomy is accompanied by the shadow of a vaguely localized grudge (the community has indeed been mourning, but is not excoriated while it is in mourning). “Hevynesse” must be transformed; this word for those afflicted with what is “hard to bear” has a corporeal weight that must be exchanged for the weightless voice of “melodye,” and for the “heele” (3102) of the sublime body. ⁴⁹ And it is in the context of this transformation that Arcite’s name is freed from the last shreds of that which was in him more than himself, from the grudgingly mournful “lustes” attributed to, though again not at this point displayed by, Palamon and Emelye (3066). There is in the closing movement of the Knight’s Tale an apotheosis of honor, of the knight of faith’s absolute coincidence with the signifier: “And certeinly a man hath moost honour / To dyen in his excellence and flour”; “To dyen whan that he is best of name” (3047–48, 3056). At this moment of Arcite’s “second death”-“second death” in the sense of that moment when the subject’s being as signifier, the subject’s constitutive absence, is most fully registered—Chaucer’s knightly narrator interlinks chivalric sacrifice on behalf of the signifier of subjectivity itself, the name, with the hypereconomy of “mercy.” In doing so the Knight’s Tale sees more than many critiques of chivalry saw even during the Middle Ages; ⁵⁰ it sees that the sacrificial economy of honor, the apotheosis of name and fame, is a mode of subjectivation capable of richly supporting the gift of death in all its forms, including its Christian ones, insofar as it is the name that confers upon the subject that distinctiveness from other subjects without which the subject’s death could not be sacrificially meaningful, could not witness to the scandalous price of absolute credence. In the name of the Lord, Amen: in the name of the Lord, we believe what has been said. ⁵¹

La Farge reminds us of the sacrificial link between the death of Arcite and the marriage of Palamon and Emelye; but whether the marriage of Palamon and Emelye can be termed a “happy” one is another question. ⁵² The belatedness of the marriage, and Theseus’s decision to marry Palamon and Emelye because of his desire to subject Thebes through alliance with Athens, is not a revelation, intended or unintended, of the harsh “realities” lurking behind the fantasy of chivalric benevolence, but another instance of the social productivity of those fantasies: it is yet another sacrifice, insofar as marriage, in D. W. Robertson’s terms, is offered “as a solution to the problems raised by the misdirected concupiscent . . . and irascible passions.” ⁵³ Derrida’s reading, in The Gift of Death, of Jan Patocka’s Heretical Essays on the Philosphy of History reminds us of how often the history of the responsible European subject has been conceived as a history of sexuality, of the incorporation and “enslavement” of orgiastic irresponsibility. ⁵⁴ The ascesis of eroticism that takes place at the end of the Knight’s Tale can make sense only in this context; it is a “fulfillment” that enslaves jouissance to “justice,” one that propels us into the future trailing intimations not so much of plenitude as of the endlessness of the sacrificial demand. But the Knight’s Tale knows that this very effacement of jouissance has plenty of power to enthrall us.