In what some will probably interpret as a cheap prank, or perhaps a desperate attempt to gain some of that elusive academic respectability sought by the integral community, we’ve decided to publish an excerpt from a forthcoming essay by a certain Slovenian philosopher, called The Jouissance of Tutteji:
The first reaction of the Leftist critics of Western Buddhism, Mindfulness, Integralism, “Spirituality”, and so on, was to conceive of Tutteji as the ironic imitation of X-Buddhist, Neo Advaita, or Wilberian rhetoric. Now, their support of Tutteji is always accompanied by an uneasy feeling, however: “What if he really means it? What if he truly identify with this ’spiritual’ crap?” – or, a more cunning version of it, transferring one’s own doubt onto the other: “What if Tutteji overestimates his audience? What if the morons take seriously what Tutteji mockingly imitates, so that Tutteji actually strengthens what he purports to undermine?”
This uneasy feeling is fed on the assumption that ironic distance is automatically a subversive attitude. What if, on the contrary, the dominant attitude of the contemporary “postideological” universe is precisely the cynical distance toward public values (including, of course, those values hallmarked by the pontifs of pseudo- alternative subcultures)? What if this distance, far from posing any threat to the system, designates the supreme form of conformism, since the normal function of the system requires cynical distance?
In this sense the strategy of Tutteji appears in a new light: it “frustrates” the ideological systems, precisely insofar as it is not its ironic imitation, but over-identification with it – by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system, over-identification suspends its efficiency. (In order to clarify the way this baring, this public staging of the obscene fantasmatic kernel of an ideological edifice, suspends its normal functioning, let us recall a somehow homologous phenomenon in the sphere of individual experience: each of us has some private ritual, phrase [nicknames, etc.] or gesture, used only within the most intimate circle of closest friends or relatives; when these rituals are rendered public, their effect is necessarily one of extreme embarrassment and shame – one has a mind to sink into the earth.)
The ultimate expedient of Tutteji Wachtmeister is his deft manipulation of transference: his audience (especially intellectuals) is obsessed with the “desire of the Other” -what is Tutteji’s actual position, is he truly an x-buddhist, or an integralista, or blah blah … or not?
(To this one could, of course, add the anti- or phobic intellectuals, e.g. the integralistas’, obsession with the desire of integralism itself.)
In other words, they address Tutteji with a question and expect from him an answer, failing to notice that Tutteji himself does not function as an answer but a question.
By means of the elusive character of his desire, of the indecidability as to “where he actually stands,” Tutteji compels us to take up our position and decide upon our desire.
tuttejiorg 