The Fissure in Matter
The Fissure in Matter
Even the darkness is not dark to you,
and the night shines like the day.
Darkness and light are alike to you.Psalm 139:12
Arranging some furniture with a relative I know very well, I brushed against the wall and left a mark. A small scratch, only a few millimetres long, in the paint. I looked at it, registered it, and moved on. The person helping me noticed it: “you made a mark on the wall,” he said calmly. I nodded and joked, “I left my mark on the wall,” as though it were a legacy to be proud of, without giving it much importance. It was not my house, but it did not weigh on me either: I knew it could be fixed.
Minutes later, he left his mark too. A third the size of mine, almost nothing. And he screamed. A cry of agony rising from the depths of his heart, a curse hurled at himself for having touched the wall, a convulsion, his hands striking the air, and then a full turn that left him facing the tiny mark again, as though to verify the scale of his disaster. And as if that whirlwind were an ordinary event, he became calm again.
Two almost identical physical marks: displaced paint, a minute groove. But they are not the same mark. Mine was a scratch. His was a scratch plus an imaginary punishment. And between the two of us no substance travelled, no energy. What travelled was a clear way of responding to an error. The difference was not in the size of the mark: it lay in the distance between two readings of a scratch. Not in the thing, but in the interval. There, on the white wall, through that tiny mark, I saw the very face of evil emerge.
Everything that exists is immersed in what Lacan called the Real. Not the ordered reality we name and measure, but what remains beyond every name. The subject is immersed in that ocean, suspended between word and image, between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, while the Real exceeds it on every side. The subject traces forms and names them —a house, a tree, a dog— and the Real is everything that remains outside the name: what that house is in its exactness, what a tree truly is. No name is the thing (ceci n'est pas une pipe); almost everything escapes every definition. But the Real is not only what we fail to describe: it is what insists, what always returns to the same place, what refuses to be named however much we try. The scratch on the wall returns, not as a fact but as pain whose why remains unknown. The Real is neither good nor evil: it is the uncertainty concealed by knowledge.
From that same ocean, something reaches the subject and remains inside: an error, a scratch, an impact, something that entered and does not fit. At its origin it is nothing yet: neither good nor evil, only what broke in. And here begins what matters: evil is not in what enters, but in what is done with it. In how it is received, interpreted, or discharged. Three ways, three faces.
1) What enters and hurts: suffering. An accident that changes a life, fingers in an electrical socket, a word that wounds, a diagnosis, news that splits a life in two, a loss, the encounter between subjects whose universes prove incompatible. It is the Real breaking in before the subject can understand what is happening. In that first instant there is as yet no explanation, guilt, or meaning. There is impact. The structure that crushes arrives faceless, as an irruption whose author or meaning cannot yet be read. Seen from the side of the one who receives it, this is the first face of evil: suffering.
2) What has already entered and returns as a reading of the present: learned fear. The same scratch on the wall: for one person it was a scratch; for the other, a scratch plus punishment. Here we are no longer dealing only with what happens, but with a subject who interprets what happens through something that happened before. And that reading is not free: it comes from a circuit that learned what to anticipate. At first, that anticipation protects: something hurt, it was registered as dangerous, and the subject learned to recognize it before suffering it again. Not putting one’s hand into the fire twice is memory that protects. But the same mechanism can close in upon itself. Then it no longer recognizes danger, but produces it in advance. It condemns the thing or the other before allowing either to appear as something new. What arrives from outside may be minimal; what the subject projects onto it may be enormous. The past takes the place of the present. This is the second face of evil: learned fear.
3) What goes out toward another: transgression. There is a third possibility: what the subject does not want to traverse can be discharged onto someone else. Lying, theft, domination, abuse are different forms of this movement. They work as shortcuts. Between what the subject wants and what actually exists there is a distance that would demand effort, waiting, renunciation, negotiation, or acceptance of a limit. Transgression shortens that path by transferring the cost to another. From one end, for the person who receives it, it is a wound; from the other, for the person who carries it out, it may function as relief, advantage, security, or discharge. The same event therefore has two positions. The evil one receives and the evil one does belong to the same circuit: a tension that, instead of being traversed, finds a rapid way out and leaves its cost upon oneself or another. What is not traversed in oneself is traversed in another. This is the third face of evil: transgression.
And none of these responses is evil in itself. One can destroy by pruning what is diseased, or by devastating what is healthy; one can create by raising a shelter, or by fabricating a lie; one can preserve by caring, or by suffocating. Evil is never in the act itself: it is in the relation, in the one who suffers it and in the one who does it.
In the study of Kabbalah, the Tree of Life serves to show where and how this happens. In psychological terms it is a machine of desire: a medieval schema that, intuitively, models how the subject handles desire, balancing between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, and descending from idea to act. It proves nothing; it is a map. And it allows us to locate the point where the line we draw as the boundary between good and evil breaks, where the Real erupts and gives rise to the different faces of evil.
The ten sefirot are, to use a visual language, vessels: containers, points on a map of the soul. Above, the originating idea; below, the action or the thing that is done. The ego is one of them, at an intermediate point: Tiferet, the only one of the ten vessels that moves. The others are fixed; it is not. The other vessels are precipitates of desire translated into the Imaginary or the Symbolic, and they hold the ego with a kind of cords, pulling it from different sides, each with its own force. Tiferet is not a still vessel: it is a knot held taut among the cords of the five vessels surrounding it. That knot, in Lacanian language, is the ego, suspended between two columns without coinciding with either. The left column is the Symbolic: law, limit, word. The right is the Imaginary: expansion, image, feeling.
The left column, the Symbolic, stacks two vessels: Gevurah, above, the limit, what is permitted and what is forbidden, the law that cuts, the Name of the Father; and beneath it Hod, word and communication. The right column, the Imaginary, stacks two others: Chesed, above, expansion and welcome —you still have worth, the error does not require your punishment—; and beneath it Netzach, emotional and artistic expression. At the centre, below Tiferet, stands Yesod: sexual impulse and bond. It belongs to neither column because it combines both —the Symbolic and the Imaginary are knotted there before descending— and for that reason it occupies the middle axis, the one that leads toward the world: Malkhut, that which descends until it becomes concrete reality. And above Tiferet, crowning the Tree, rises a higher triad —Keter, Chokhmah, Binah—, the region from which everything descends, which the ego does not yet touch. None of them is the problem. All are necessary forces, and all are needed.
Desire moves through the Tree like a wave: an energy channelled between the columns and concentrated at each point on the map. Tiferet moves within that field. It is not fixed: it orbits, and its orbit approaches each force according to what the moment requires —Gevurah when a limit is needed, Chesed when welcome is needed, Yesod when it is time to act. That is its health: not a perfect and motionless centre, but a centre of gravity capable of shifting, a broad orbit that ranges through the Tree without becoming lodged at any one point.
But the problem is not approaching a force; it is moving out of range. And there are two opposite ways of doing so. By deficiency: the orbit closes around a single vessel, the centre of gravity becomes fixed, and Tiferet is imprisoned by a point it once merely visited. By excess: the orbit spills outward, beyond the Tree, toward the desire of the qlippot, where each force short circuits at its extreme. In both cases the force remains legitimate; what becomes distorted is the orbit that has lost its breadth. An old wound is what throws that movement off centre, and this is the exact form of learned fear: not a feeling, but the geometry a wound left fixed in the way one moves.
There is a place on the Tree where two of these vessels confront one another directly, like the two poles of a spark: the crossing between Chesed and Gevurah, above Tiferet. The same opposition between expanding and restraining runs through the entire Tree, but here it reaches its fullest and most human form —giving without measure against cutting without measure— and it is the only place that bears directly upon the ego.
There is a place on the Tree where two vessels pull the ego in opposite directions, each with equal force: the crossing between Chesed and Gevurah, above Tiferet. The opposition between expanding and restraining runs through the entire Tree, but only here does it reach its fullest and most human form —giving without measure against cutting without measure—, and only here does it bear directly upon the ego. Here, at the centre of the Tree of Life, that other tree of the garden lies hidden: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
“Good and evil” does not name two opposing substances, but the two extremes of a single field —just as “heaven and earth” names everything between them. In the tradition, these two vessels are precisely water and fire: Chesed flowing, Gevurah burning. What is opposed at this crossing is not yet good against evil, but giving against restraining, permission against limit. Of good and evil we still know nothing: they will arise later, according to how the ego sustains this opposition.
And that opposition is not a defect. It is there so that something can take form. Chesed alone would expand without end; Gevurah alone would cut until nothing remained. Only from the tension between them does a contour arise, a measure, a habitable form. Nothing can be delimited, differentiated, exist as form, except by being sustained between a giving and a restraining. That is why pain is inscribed in the very geometry of the Tree: when Tiferet is drawn into that crossing and must sustain at once the giving of Chesed and the cut of Gevurah, pain appears.
And so, whenever in any action —such as moving a piece of furniture— the ego, Tiferet, approaches that zone of tension between what is permitted and what is forbidden, if it fails to do what it should, or does what it should not, it falls. It falls expelled, ejected, into any of the three lower discharges: toward Hod, where it is verbalized as “I am guilty”; toward Yesod, where compulsion appears, the repeated act; or toward Netzach, where it erupts in tears, trembling, gesture. Any of those rapid falls brings relief, and here lies the difficult thing to understand: it relieves not because the pain ceases, but because the pain takes another form. Sustaining the pure tension of the crossing is sometimes unbearable, like being suspended above the void of wanting and not being able; falling into “I am guilty” hurts, but at least it is a ground. The subject prefers a pain with reason, form, and circumstance to formless anguish. And that strange satisfaction —hurting and resting at once in a pain already known— is what Lacan called jouissance. Jouissance is not evil. Jouissance is the rebound that gives an extra sensation, a surplus, a small electric jolt: the fall, then, relieves, and because it relieves, it repeats.
Evil appears differently in the first two forms. When the subject confronts what hurts, with or without a learned script, it may fail to sustain the tension and rebound. We all respond this way at times. The problem begins when the rebound ceases to be a momentary relief and becomes the only possible physics: an orbit turning again and again toward the void, toward what calls from behind the sefirot, the lawless jouissance of the qlippot.
When the ego is ejected, it falls into one of those orbits. And there, in the fiercest of them, punishment confirms that one still exists for that Other who once inscribed the pair error and pain. The more the subject punishes itself, the more securely it assures its place: one suffers in order to continue existing before someone. Symbolic law says: “there was an error, answer for it.” But that law has a ferocious reverse, the superego, which transforms responsibility into a demand for suffering: “there is an error, suffer.” It no longer says “you did something,” but “you are the defect, writhe and do not stop.” The concrete error belongs to a situation and can be repaired; the lack that constitutes the subject is no one’s fault and cannot be paid off. When the superego collects that lack as though it were a debt, the account becomes infinite. The same scratch on the wall ends up being lived as though it were an electric discharge through the marrow.
But the third form follows another logic. Here the subject does not merely rebound from something that reaches it, but voluntarily approaches a shortcut. What attracts it is the promise that what it is about to do in its transgression is necessary, or at least more convenient than the alternatives. Lying instead of explaining, stealing instead of obtaining, dominating instead of negotiating are ways of avoiding the work of having to deal with the desire of the other. There is always a rationalization: there was no other way, it was easier, it was faster, that person deserved it. The shortcut offers escape from the effort of traversing what stands between the subject and what it wants. Someone else pays the price of that convenience.
What travelled between the two marks on the wall was a learned solution to error: a pair, error and punishment, bound together as a single movement. And it did not travel as a substance: it travelled as a misalignment, as a way of failing to coincide with what happens. The person who once received that pair, “you did something, now pay,” reproduces it against himself decades later, with no one standing before him to demand it. My relative, who screams at his own scratch, is not responding to the scratch, which is small and present. He is responding to the punishment he learned to anticipate. Today’s wall remembers nothing; it occupies the place where the punisher once stood.
When that Other is no longer there, the circuit keeps turning by itself. An ancient figure is useful here. In the Book of Job, ha Satan is not God’s rival, but the accuser at the court. His task is to expose the fissure, to show where the vessel does not close. The inherited circuit does something similar: it keeps the accuser alive long after the court has dissolved, and continues searching for the fissure through inertia.
The accuser knows only how to exact guilt. Kabbalah does not make guilt the destiny of error. Error demands a response, and that response is tikkun, repair. Guilt traps the subject inside “I am bad”; responsibility asks, “what do I do now to repair?” The first feeds the orbit; the second begins tikkun.
Kabbalistic tradition introduces an important paradox here. The inclination to evil was also called “very good,” because without it no one would build a house or have children. Behind desire there is a force, and that force is not evil in itself: it can seek the shortcut and discharge tension onto another, or sustain itself until it becomes creation. What changes is not the force, but the path it takes.
When unexpected evil arrives, two movements are possible. We have already seen the first: to rebound. Tiferet approaches the tension between Chesed and Gevurah, cannot sustain it, and falls toward Hod, Netzach, or Yesod. There it finds a momentary outlet: guilt, emotional discharge, compulsion. Pain acquires a form and, precisely for that reason, produces relief. This is the circuit of jouissance.
But another movement is possible: to traverse upward.
Instead of fleeing the tension, Tiferet remains within it. Chesed says: you still have worth. Gevurah says: something happened and you must answer for it. Neither can disappear. If only Chesed remains, welcome can become indulgence: nothing happened here. If only Gevurah remains, law can become infinite punishment: you no longer did something bad, now you are what is bad.
To traverse that zone means sustaining both truths without immediately resolving the contradiction. There is a resonance here with what Lacan called traversing the fantasy: ceasing to respond from the script that had already decided in advance who I am, what what happened means, and what I must feel or do in response to it.
And here the movement opposite to the fall appears.
Tiferet can traverse the tension between Chesed and Gevurah and move toward the Abyss, the boundary that, on the Tree, separates the seven lower sefirot from the upper triad. This Abyss is not the outer void into which the forces overflow in the qlippot. It is an internal boundary of the map, a threshold between two modes of knowing. To cross it means to move forward when familiar answers have ceased to serve and there is not yet a new position from which to respond.
In crossing it, Da’at appears.
Da’at is often represented in that region of the Tree, but it need not be understood as a place to which Tiferet relocates. In the model I am proposing here, Da’at is rather a form of awareness of the entire Tree: the moment when the ego can recognize simultaneously the forces that move it without being captured by any of them. It is not another vessel. It is an expansion of vision.
This is why overflowing toward the qlippot and Da’at are opposite movements. In the first, Tiferet’s orbit loses freedom and becomes fixed in a response. In the second, it regains breadth. Learned fear had turned a past wound into a present position. Da’at makes it possible to see that position as a position rather than as inevitable reality.
Da’at means knowledge. It is the same word that appears in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eating the fruit cast the human being into the knowledge of an opposition it did not yet know how to sustain. Reaching Da’at can therefore be read as returning to that knowledge, but this time capable of remaining before it without immediately rebounding.
I can tell myself a thousand times: “making a mistake does not mean that I am the mistake”, and continue writhing every time I scratch a wall. That knowledge still belongs to words. Da’at appears when it ceases to be merely a sentence and changes the position from which I respond. The body no longer needs to enact the old script automatically. Knowledge stops describing the circuit and begins to transform it.
But understanding repairs nothing.
That is why, after traversing, there must be a descent. And this descent must not be confused with the earlier fall. In the fall, Tiferet was expelled by a tension it could not sustain. In the descent, it returns voluntarily toward the world with something it did not have before. It descends with knowledge.
That knowledge passes once more through the Tree until it reaches Malkhut, the world of the concrete. There it ceases to be understanding and becomes act. That descent is tikkun: repair.
The difference between fall and descent, then, is not that both end below. It lies in how one arrives there. One can fall, expelled by what one could not bear, or one can descend after having traversed it.
For the third face of evil, transgression, this descent demands something more. If the cost of my shortcut fell upon another, it is not enough to understand why I did it or to feel guilty. Knowledge must reach what was damaged. Repair may mean giving back, correcting, asking forgiveness, rebuilding, or accepting a concrete consequence. Guilt ends in the subject. Responsibility ends in the world.
This is tikkun, repair.
Not erasing the error. Not denying the pain. Nor proving that one was innocent. Traversing what happened, changing the position from which one responds, and making that knowledge descend until it becomes act.
There is still another, quieter way to fail: to understand and not descend. To see the scratch, recognize perfectly what happened, and leave it there. Even guilt can serve this purpose. The one who remains above, punishing himself, can avoid the far less spectacular task of repairing. “I am bad” closes the problem around the subject. “What do I do now?” forces the subject to move beyond himself.
Evil did not enter the world simply through knowing good and evil, but through encountering that tension without knowing what to do with it. Repair, therefore, does not consist in returning to the garden before knowledge. There is no possible return to that innocence. It consists in knowing and being able to sustain what is known.
My relative already knows the difference between what he wanted to do and what he did. The scratch is enough to activate the whole circuit, and so he rebounds. I can sustain that scratch without doing so, but I have my own: other places where a small mark is enough to drag me toward a position I know too well. The Tree is the same. The wound that throws each of us off centre is different.
We cannot prevent suffering from reaching us. But we can prevent it from becoming fixed as fear and from emerging from us again transformed into harm.
The mark remains on the wall. It no longer needs to say who I am. It says only that something happened.
To ascend by will was to traverse the Abyss.
To descend with grace is to repair the soul.
And if necessary, I paint the wall.
— Psalm 139, verse 12. On the equivalence of light and darkness; epigraph to the essay.
— Isaac Luria, sixteenth century Kabbalah. The breaking of the vessels and repair as the structure of the Tree and of the act of repairing.
— Jacques Lacan, Seminar 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960). Jouissance and its relation to the forbidden.
— Jacques Lacan, Seminar 11, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964). The Real and traversing the fantasy.
— Jacques Lacan, Seminar 20, Encore (1972–1973). Jouissance and the imperative of the superego.
— Midrash Genesis Rabbah 9, paragraph 7. The reading according to which “very good” includes the inclination to evil, without which no one would build or beget.
— Book of Job, chapters 1–2. Satan not as God’s rival, but as the accuser within the heavenly court: the figure of the inherited circuit.
— Genesis, chapters 2–3. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the opposition the human being does not yet know how to sustain.
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