Feigned unicity is like whistling in the dark. Which is not to say it doesn’t play a role in society. If that which is feigned is named rhetoric and, after Lundberg, rhetoric is what names a failed unicity, this failure results from a structuring that has not allowed for excess, for enjoyment. This implies a relation of identity between excess and enjoyment that must be allowed for without a loss to structural integrity.

“A radical turn to undetermined context implies” “the failure of unicity” within which context subjects might feign unicity (C. Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric 2012, 21).

I read this to say not that enjoyment eludes rhetoric while rhetoric strives to recover it in the face of structural failure whose failure consists in this absence, but that enjoyment consists in rhetoric. Feigned unicity in this sense (the ‘we’ who are all on board (Appiah) to give a historically situated morality) is what produces Lacan’s actor in a public space, the role of rhetoric.

What would be called for in that case is a distinction between “nucleus” versus “network” models of meaning. A discussion of these concepts in relation to Freudian thought features in a recent article written by Liran Razinsky, published in Journal of Modern Literature (“Psychoanalysis and Autobiography: Leiris, Freud and the Obstacle to Self-Knowledge” Fall 2020). The way I use it here cues the present popular understanding in which spaces that are conceived as nuclear versus networked have either a single center of balance or else are decentered. Shifts in balance in the networked model of meaning and inquiry will give less of a felt loss of unicity, therefore preserving the illusion of free will.

To say what I mean by “felt loss,” it’s something like what preoccupies Kafka’s dog narrator, although the trope of totalitarian rootlessness has featured widely in the separate writings of Hannah Arendt, Federico Lorca, and Walter Benjamin, to name a few. In the present case, what’s being examined is the ‘innermost heart’ that is bound by laws even as one feels himself to be an outlaw. I think the illusion of free will consists in this. It is what is most closely felt and it is what runs in excess of the law. The question is how to enjoy “outlaw” status without losing sight of law.

As I relate it to Razinsky’s article on obstacles to self-knowledge, if I consent to know myself objectively, I relinquish knowledge of privations, exclusions, suffering. Subtracting these, what is left to call “myself”? On the other hand, if what is relinquished is only the felt sense of these (free will being the most intensely felt), it should be that the witnessing of these things at a remove, from a position of exteriority (Levinas), is what allows it to be felt absent free will, whereas the subjective perspective might not lend itself as readily to this owing to the instinct of self-preservation interpreted in a way that is more characteristic of a ‘nuclear’ space of meaning.

What follows from the above may be that failed unicity results from the collapse of modern civilization facilitated by indifference, but if this loss is of the felt, immediate kind, it’s that in which the illusion of individual free will consists. But a complete loss of this illusion gives rise to other problems. So, a tentative answer would foreground the rhetorical nature of ‘collapse’ as a space of creativity and enjoyment e.g., zombie apocalypse narratives that seek to fill the space of indifference on which real world collapse is premised.

But indifference is not the same as boredom. One can die from indifference, but for this to happen it seems to require one’s assent. Does one assert himself by giving his assent to dying in the face of indifference? Can one stand up by laying down? The point about indifference is what seems now to give meaning for people who live in an automated, technologically mediated world when they compel others to stand up and be counted. It brings into view a shift away from the exercise of individual free will that traditionally is pegged to voluntary versus involuntary action.

Similarly, where Kafka’s dog says, “I wished to prove that when I retreated before the food it was not the ground that attracted it at a slant, but I who drew it after me,” this is a response to what Edwin Muir in his introductory note described as “a two-fold problem of pursuing at once vocation and acting in accordance with the heavens”:

…the problem is an eternal one, eternal, that is, failing the realization of a perfect society, which is inconceivable. It is also a problem that has become crucial in our time, where we see tradition after tradition crumbling, and society itself a chaos in which it is hard to find one’s way, far less a vocation that has a transcendent sanction. (E. Muir in Kafka 1936, 1960)

The line is as useful today as it was during Kafka’s own time as a critique of justifications of indifference. It continues to give the ground to all people in that situation. It effects a reversal.