The Real and Its Double

Reality is structured like an Oracle. How will you master it?

The great ruse is that things are as they are. Fichte  

When I taught in the jail I assigned the philosophical essay The Real and Its Double by Clément Rosset.¹ There is something highly captivating in this short work and I wanted to encourage the students to think about fate and the truth. The argument is that reality has the structure of an oracle. And the radical thing about an oracle is that they come true even when they are denied. Oedipus fulfills the oracle by going in a total opposite direction to what was predicted of his life, so much so that when the oracle was fulfilled, Oedipus was completely duped by its occurrence. Oracles come true despite our willful refusal of them.

If the truth of our fate is governed by a site that is effectively beyond our control, this means there are effectively two “reals”, i.e., there is the immediate reality and the oracular real or what Hegel called supersensible real. This is not entirely novel because the idea that there are two levels to the real or truth stretches back to Plato who effectively erases the real (the present) and replaces it with the past of the future. In Plato’s notion of the truth of the forms, he sets the immediate real of sense and perception aside and points to another world that corresponds to a truer version of the real.

The philosophical question comes down to this: what is the status of the truer real, of the original real? Is the truer real a non-substantial thing? What is its ontology? In other words, that oracular source that governs our fate, is it also the source of what makes us unique and singular? There is the ‘metaphysical’ solution that claims the core thing that makes us unique can be accessed and that a merger between one’s empirical everyday self and the higher core singular self can indeed occur.

For Rosset, the singular thing about us is in actuality a fragile thing because what constitutes our essence never has any participation in being. This is not to say that we are not unique, it is to say that the unique is in abeyance to us. We cannot merge with it. In fact, we duplicate our idea of the unique and out of that duplication we remain asynchronous with our present reality and that is why we constantly flee from reality. This is the core notion of the double, and the ontological status of the unique real is not a pristine or harmonious entity residing in our souls. It is a flimsy non-existent mediator which is non-substantial. But that does not mean that we do not make it out to be something greater than it is. In fact, Rosset says that we flee from reality because the real is in excess over our immediate confrontation with reality. Our relationship to reality is oracular, we are always on the run.

But where does the true real reside? What determines it? In my class at the jail I would try to get the students to think about this concept of the true real as a life event that determines us by reading Fred Moten’s essay “Aunt Hester’s Scream.” In this remarkable essay, Moten suggests that Frederick Douglass’ experience as a young enslaved man hearing his aunt scream from the brutal lashing she received emerged as a primal scene that fundamentally shaped him, alerting young Frederick to a horror of existence that he could only flee from. But he fled through art, he did not run. This is an experience Douglass recounts in his autobiography and the event becomes a pivot point around which a profound artistic and intellectual sublimation occurs. Moten all but suggests that Douglass begins to turn to music and books as a result of running away from this scene. Rosset develops the following maxim:

It is the fate of everything that exists to deny by its very existence any form of different reality.²

In an oracle there is a primary scene that sets the stage for the oracle to unfold, whether it be a parricide, a murder, or some sort of a traumatic event. It is noteworthy that in all of the great heroes of oracles—from Oedipus to Socrates—they fulfill the oracle’s prediction by mistake. There is a fundamental impossibility of any merging between the truer real with the mundane real of everyday life in such a way that they unite or that the separateness between them disappears. But they do merge. What comes of this merger? Rosset argues that the real event takes the place of an event that was more expected and more plausible, and thus “by happening, the predicted event renders null and void the prediction of a possible double. In coming to existence, it eliminates its double; and it is the disappearance of this pale ghost.”³

Rosset argues that when the truth coincides with the everyday such as when we experience déjà vu the double appears in the present. When we project an expectation onto reality this presents a structure of a duplicate: we posit a copy and an original. We predict without expecting its concrete realization and this means that when something happens that we predict that is positive we experience amazement.

So again, there is a unique thing—a real part of us—but we lack access to it. Contra the metaphysicians, we cannot blissfully merge our existence in the world with that unique part of our true self. As such, our being is found in the negativity of the unique thing that is in abeyance to us and to which we duplicate. We thus experience our truest being in a zone of life that Rosset calls existence. Rosset’s existential conception of the subject closely aligns with Lacan who argued that the subject’s being is found in what he once referred to as the wondrous emptiness of non-being, not in a totality or in the Ego or in a merger with some true substantial self.

What is remarkable about the fact that truth is oracular is that it causes our existence to be caught up in the same crime circuit as Oedipus. We do not aim to comport a great harmony with our double, we flee from our oracle. We flee from our fate. We are existential fugitives that need to find a way to deal with the double we have created.

MERGING OF SELF WITH SELF

Rosset argues that a true self portrait cannot ever be achieved. The painter cannot merge with their unique self, or even force some sort of unity between their two selves. This is why the greatest self-portrait is Vermeer’s Painter in his Studio as it shows the impossibility of the double. It disproves the metaphysicians who claim that the merger of A to A stands as the highest panacea of self realization. As you can see in the painting, Vermeer has instead merged with his environment. He has put the ego behind. He has refused the metaphysical merger thesis.

“The fate of the vampire, whose image–even inverted–is not reflected in mirrors, here symbolizes the fate of everyone: the fate of not being able to experience one's existence with the aid of a real doubling of the unique, and hence of existing only problematically.”⁴

The failure of any true merger with the double is a fate that marks humanity. Some have accepted this, others have not. There is a narcissistic wound leads some to refuse to accept that we live problematic existences.

Rosset says there are two paths available to becoming who you are: you can accept things are they are or you can reject them so as to hasten the event. The latter option is the oracular structure of life that we find in Oedipus. Rosset is decidedly on board with the first option even though he is not denying the importance of the oracular in our conception of reality and truth. For Rosset, to accept things as they are also requires that one work to abandon the self gives which can give rise to bliss in Rosset’s view. If the painter has painted his own absence he has discovered a post-romantic strategy of existence. Keep in mind that in romantic literature and art the double must remain; if he disappears then the hero’s very being disappears. The task Rosset sets for his reader is that they should aim to cultivate strategies to overcome the anxiety of having your double.

The fact remains that we need a double to attest to our being. We are not Gods. And yet in modern life, our double’s are made of paper – think about the feeling that comes after Googling yourself – it becomes an assurance that you exist. Why do you read an email that you have sent twice? You read it to inhabit the other’s position back onto your own message to them. We need an other existence in order to guarantee our own, and this leads to what Rosset calls the “narcissistic wound”, i.e., we need attention/reinforcement from others as a way to resolve our problematic existence—by virtue of the failure of any true doubling we require the reinforcement of the other.

In closing, I want to suggest that Rosset’s work invites us to inquire further into the changing historical conditions of how the double constitutes itself in an age when bureaucratic institutions shape and mold our lives in such dominant ways. We can speculate that in modern life, existential anxiety is less about death than it is about existence as such. Take bureaucratic institutions, or what Lacan calls university discourse, in these milieus what sanctions or guarantees one’s existence is a piece of paper. The double in the bureaucratic milieu is thus flimsy and non-substantial, however this flimsiness is for the first time known and processed as such. We can immediately see an insidious nihilism emerge out of this condition. When the truth of our fleeting point of singular existence is recognition from professional gatekeepers.

1. You can read my lecture notes from a course on Existentialism which I based my jail lectures around where I incorporate The Real and its Double.

2. Rosset, Clement The Real and its Double, p. 21.

3. Ibid, p. 17.

4. Ibid, p. 58.