Not An Alternative

Quoting V from The Wachowski Brother’s “V for Vendetta”

Mr. Creedy: “Die! Die! Why won’t you die?… Why won’t you die?”

V: “Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof.”

Here our friend V’s “idea (that) beneath this mask there is more than flesh” is correlative to Zizek’s “organ without body” in that, as Zizek explains “the phallus acts as signifier of castration.” This “idea” is significant because it represents a hole in the structure of power as it is commonly understood. (This is particularly significant to those of us who have come to realize that we are trapped here in this world that is structured around this place called The Change You Want to See because it suggests that there could be an exterior - or as we shall see, an interior of sorts.)  V’s “idea” points to the fact that the particular body that serves to contain the organ (a subject in a position of power), like a mask, serves merely as a cover for that which it conceals. The question that this brings us to is “what does it conceal?”

Many of history’s rulers have demonstrated that there is an incredible power inherent in concealing an unknown from public view with a kind of mask. (ex: The unknowable threat beyond “our nations borders”, for example, is concealed by the blanket “terrorist” term.) What V teaches us is that the reactionary tactic, which responds to such threats with attempts to unmask and reveal the constructed structure of power, is not the only form of challenging an establishment.

The constructed-ness of power for V serves not as a problem that needs to be revealed but instead serves the role of an important usable tool. The fact that power is established around an unknown suggests that there exists a problem within a structure of power: that power behind any given mask is yet to be determined.

And so with regard to the significance of V not dying or more importantly the question of the relationship between the fact that V can’t be killed and the fact that there is no exterior to the world of The Change You Want to See; perhaps it’s that in both cases the structure of the mask that conceals power is mistakenly believed to have something living beyond it. While structures that bring a power to life are fabrications, the fact that they are built around lack of life or false-life means that they are not complete (whole) and therefore represent a kind of non-life. A non-life waiting to inhabited.