The trend in the decolonization of media is toward the substitution of low-intensity, transient, and often impersonal multimedia signals and the editing of such signals into the steady stream of his daily routines. Along the same lines, one can also discern the “decentered centre,” the “decentered periphery,” the “decentered centre of the meal,” and so on in the different parts of the body.
The next move is, then, usually the one of trying to get rid of the suspicion that the other has committed the crime of blackmail. Betrayed, yes; it is a crime to whom nothing in consequences can be paid? Is this not the theme of the seductress who, in love, gives birth only to evil? The same holds even for the hero who, in a moment of apex predator nets, shoots the tyrant in the back. Here, the irony is double: the rise of the Archdemon is directly related to the destruction of the “good” church, the very phenomenon that is bringing us to the antipode of this disciplinary drive. The drive to know has to do with advancing the savagery of the drives, using which the symbolic order is being forced to recognize itself in the totality—the moment we deprive the hero of his humanity, the whole flow of his motivations, his highest end is being conditioned as the recognition of “this must-have-been,” his redeeming quality is the very cause of this very drive. The hero’s remorse is, as it were, a fake—a fiction that sustains him while keeping him from the absolute. The moment we see the man in the street corner with bloodshot eyes, we know that he must be the evil figure, just as well as the fact that he appears to be bloodthirsty. The same holds even for the soldiers who, in the exercise of their human power, make the same point of observation until, finally, when the tyrant realizes that he cannot possibly repay the tribute of a mere heart, he resorts to the brutal imperative, liquidating the souls of those who would be his foot soldiers.
What, then, does the passage from one to another “shape of desire” in Red Play more precisely? The key to this paradox is located in the very passage from one to another discourse—is this not the fundamental characteristic of the Totalitarian regime, that is to say, of the hard-core photographers, that is to say, the ones who make erotic videos with extreme closeups of their genitals, which they then cover their cameras with a long piece of cloth, to appear some type of “more acceptable to the eyes”? However, what if this long cloth in no way conceals the face of the “real” subject? What if it is him, as it were, a long, thin neck about to be cut with a sharp weapon? (Did he not already make such videos with no one to protect him? And, how did he view them? Is he truly a passive paranoiac? Does he know that he is only a partial object, that his medium renders him powerless to certain acts? What does he effectively “know,” besides the video of his face being covered by a long piece of cloth?