ABSTRACT
Staging is mise-en-scène. You are staging an ‘other’ scene that is composed of both signifiers and objects of fantasy. The signifier is used to delimit or denote, or to point to where the objects of fantasy are. The effect of the Real would be something that is obscure or illuminating about the scene. The scene can also give you a sense of social reality. The ‘reality’ that the other scene gives rise to is the aspect of the Real that darkens or obfuscates and renders the scene enigmatic. When you watch it, you are a bit at a loss, confused, or perplexed about the impact it has on you or where it is hitting you.
There’s an aspect of the signifier qua nothing that is important because that’s what allows for combination to take place. The meaning of each signifier must be empty for it to function as an element of a combination. Subjects also behave like signifiers. There’s something about each one of us that is a ‘nothing’, that is ‘nonself’. We think it is interesting when Socrates was being judged, and when he offers a speech of defense at his trial, he wants to preserve his soul and purity uppermost. He doesn’t care that he risks being killed because he’d rather be killed than compromise his beliefs. He said: “You can kill me, but even if you kill me, you do nothing to my soul because only I can do something to my soul”. It’s an interesting formulation, whereas the abuses of the Other on the subject do nothing to the individual soul however counterintuitive that may sound in terms of how we think of abuse and trauma. And because Socrates says something about this soul being nothing and if he keeps it as nothing, then dying doesn’t matter (or something like that). The way he keeps it as ‘a nothing’ is to be consistent with what he thinks, with his beliefs and so on. So with all the signifying networking that was going on there with Greece, with the trial, and did he do this or that or did he reject the gods and so forth. He represented a fierce kind of individuality at a time when the society expected you to be bound by guilt and shame, responsibility to others, and honor to your family, and so on. Socrates stressed the importance of the subject – and his way of going, of dying, was his way of manifesting that.
Socrates says it doesn’t matter what others do to you, because, ultimately, they cannot destroy your soul. Only you can destroy your soul. Your responsibility is to take care of yourself and to be attuned with your mind/psyche. While Socrates didn’t have a monotheistic God, he had a sense of a God that perhaps would be attuned with rationality. And he was rejecting the gods of his time, and for that, they wanted to kill them. That was one reason; the other was teaching young people to think independently. Power wanted young people thinking according to what society thought at the time.
