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
While moving 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 if it were some 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.
A few minutes later, he left his own mark. A third the size of mine, barely anything. And he screamed. A cry of agony that came from the bottom of his heart, a curse against himself for having touched the wall, a twisting of the body, hands striking the air, and then a full turn that brought him face to face with the tiny mark again, as if to verify his disaster. And as if that storm were an ordinary event, he returned to calm.
Two almost identical physical marks: displaced paint, a minimal groove. But they are not the same mark. Mine was a scratch. His was a scratch plus an imaginary punishment. And between the two, no substance travelled, no energy. What travelled was a very precise way of responding to an error. The difference was not in the size of the mark: it was in the distance between two readings of the same scratch. Not in the thing, but in the interval. There, on the white wall, through that tiny mark, I saw emerge the very face of evil.
Everything that exists is immersed in what Lacan called the Real. Not the reality we name and organise, but that which exceeds our names. A house, a tree, a scratch on a wall are already forms cut out from something much greater that we never fully come to know. The Real is neither good nor evil. It simply happens.
The problem begins when something of that Real enters the subject’s experience and has to be received. It may arrive as accident, loss, error, rejection, desire, or an encounter with another. In that first instant there is not yet guilt or explanation. There is impact. This is why evil is not necessarily in the thing that happens, but in the relation that forms around it.
A painful experience can become a memory that protects, but it can also become a machine that anticipates the same pain where it no longer exists. A subject may learn that error means punishment and end up punishing himself before anyone else does. He may also avoid what he does not want to endure by shifting the cost onto another: lying instead of explaining, dominating instead of negotiating, punishing instead of understanding. Suffering received, fear learned, and harm produced are therefore not different substances, but possible moments within the same circuit of desire.
Kabbalah offers an extraordinary map for thinking about this. The Tree of Life can be read, in psychological terms, as a human machine of desire. Its sefirot are vessels, points where desire takes form before becoming action.
In the model I am proposing here, Tiferet represents the ego as the mobile centre of this machine. Not a fixed centre, but a point that moves between different forces. On one side is Gevurah, limit, cut, and law, that which says this far; beneath it is Hod, word, classification, and symbolic formulation. On the other side is Chesed, expansion and acceptance, that which allows one to continue existing despite error; beneath it is Netzach, expression, affect, and imaginary movement.
On the central axis, Yesod concentrates bond, sexuality, and impulse before desire reaches Malkhut, where it finally becomes act, body, and world. Above Tiferet appears the upper triad of Keter, Chokhmah and Binah, a region the ordinary ego does not directly command.
Desire circulates among all these forces. The health of Tiferet does not consist in remaining forever at the centre, but in being able to move: approaching Gevurah when a limit is needed, Chesed when acceptance is needed, Hod when something must be named, Netzach when something needs expression, and Yesod when the moment comes to bond or to act. The problem begins when this movement stops and the orbit becomes captured by a single response.
There is a particularly delicate point in this machine: the crossing between Chesed and Gevurah, immediately above Tiferet. One force pushes toward expansion and the other compels restraint. One says that the subject still has value; the other remembers that something happened and demands a response.
Neither of the two is evil, and neither could disappear without destroying the system. Chesed without Gevurah would be expansion without form. Gevurah without Chesed would be cutting until nothing remained. Form exists precisely because the two forces limit one another.
Here the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil can be read in another way. Good and evil would not be two substances placed on opposite sides of the universe, but possibilities that arise when the subject has to respond to a contradiction that cannot be eliminated. And it is there that pain appears.
When Tiferet enters this tension, it can sustain it or escape from it. The quick way out is to fall. It can fall toward Hod and turn what happened into a sentence: “I am guilty.” It can fall toward Netzach and discharge it as crying, rage, trembling, or gesture. It can fall toward Yesod and turn it into compulsion, repeated action, or an immediate search for relief.
The fall hurts, but it also relieves. Anguish was a contradiction without form; guilt, compulsion, or emotional eruption give it a ground. At times the subject prefers a familiar pain to remaining suspended before something he still does not know how to resolve. This is where what Lacan called jouissance appears: not simply pleasure and not evil either, but that paradoxical satisfaction that allows even what causes suffering to be repeated because repetition offers a familiar way out.
This is why a tiny scratch can produce enormous suffering. The present mark activates an old machine. Perhaps, at one time, error meant punishment. Decades later there no longer needs to be anyone there to punish; the circuit can keep turning on its own. The problem is not that the subject has a wound, because all of us have one somewhere else on the Tree. The problem begins when a single response becomes inevitable and desire stops circulating.
Evil can then appear inwardly, as punishment directed against oneself, or outwardly, when the cost of resolving one’s own tension is placed on another. In both cases something similar happens: a contradiction that could not be traversed found a shortcut.
But falling is not the only possible movement. Tiferet can remain between Chesed and Gevurah. Chesed maintains that the subject still has value; Gevurah remembers that something happened and that responsibility must be assumed. Traversing this tension means sustaining both claims at the same time.
If Gevurah disappears, acceptance becomes indulgence and ends by saying that nothing happened here. If Chesed disappears, responsibility becomes condemnation and it is no longer said that the subject did something evil, but that the subject himself is evil. The way out does not consist in choosing one force and destroying the other, but in sustaining the contradiction long enough for a new position to emerge.
There is a resonance here with what Lacan called traversing the fantasy: ceasing to respond immediately from the script that had already decided who I am, what what happened means, and what my reaction should be.
In the language of the Tree, Tiferet can then move toward what the kabbalists called the Abyss, the boundary separating the seven lower sefirot from the upper triad. The Abyss does not need to be understood as a supernatural place. It is the moment when the answers that organised the subject stop working and a new answer does not yet exist. To cross it means not returning immediately to the familiar response, remaining for a moment without knowing, and continuing.
In that region appears Da'at.
Da'at means knowledge. But it need not be imagined as an eleventh vessel into which Tiferet moves. In the model I am proposing, Da'at is a change in the awareness of the entire machine. The ego ceases to be completely identified with one force and can simultaneously observe what moves it.
It can listen to Chesed without becoming Chesed and listen to Gevurah without becoming Gevurah. It can recognise fear without obeying it, recognise desire without immediately turning it into action, and recognise guilt without transforming it into identity. This ability to sustain simultaneously forces that were previously incompatible is what I call synthesis.
This is why it is suggestive that Da'at is precisely the Hebrew word for knowledge, the same root that appears in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The first knowledge expels us from innocence because it introduces difference: permitted and forbidden, desire and limit, self and other, good and evil. But knowing the difference does not yet mean knowing how to sustain it.
Da'at can therefore be thought of as a second relation to that knowledge. No longer simply discovering the opposition, but being able to remain before it without being captured by one of its extremes.
But understanding repairs nothing. If everything ended in Da'at, the journey would be merely intellectual. This is why, after ascending, one has to descend again. Knowledge must pass once more through the Tree until it reaches Malkhut, where it ceases to be understanding and becomes action.
This is tikkun. Not erasing the error, not denying the pain, and not proving that one was innocent. To repair is to change the position from which one responds to what happened and to make that new position descend into the world.
The mark remains on the wall. What changes is the machine that responds to it. My relative may see a scratch and immediately encounter punishment. I may be able to traverse that scratch without doing so, but I have other marks capable of dragging me toward my own circuits. The Tree is the same; the fissure that displaces each of us is different.
Perhaps this is why evil cannot simply be eliminated from the world. As long as desire exists, there will be a difference between what we want and what we encounter, between expansion and limit, between oneself and the other. What can change is our relation to that difference. We can rebound from it or we can traverse it.
To ascend with will was to cross 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 structures of the Tree and of the act of repairing.
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960). Jouissance and its relation to prohibition.
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964). The Real and the traversing of the fantasy.
• Genesis, chapters 2–3. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the opposition that the human being does not yet know how to sustain.
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