These philosophical positions will remind us of any number of postures: Existentialism, Deleuzian schizophrenia, and of course, Dostoevksy's original targets for his satire/caricature: the nihilists and radicals of the 1860s. Notes from the Underground is not a set of positions but a performance; not a polemic but a (one-person) dialogue; not a critique of society but an immanent critique (à la Hegel) of the contradictions and unravelling of this subjective position and its fraught, untenable paradoxes.
Thus, the revolt of the underground man, his maintaining a "loophole" for himself, an escape route to evade finalization and objectification, is always voiced, petulantly asserted:
What kind of life is manifested by desire, though? Wouldn't we rather say that the Notes evince an avoidance of life? and life's replacement by an unceasing stream of words? The underground man cuts off everyone entirely, is "terribly afraid of being seen, met, recognized," whose apartment "was my private residence, my shell, my case, where I hid from all humanity." And this paranoid isolation... this is the concept of life that follows from the above philosophy. "I wanted to remain alone in my underground."
To be thrust into life is to not have all the answers. Only in the underground does one have all the answers. In life, there is every chance that one will be drawn into the needs and pleadings of others, their sad stories, and find oneself bound (constrained!) to responsibility. To be thrust into life means any number of situations where there is no possible "last word." But the underground man's entire philosophy means having the last word. This is the point of making a scene.
A word about his much-vaunted freedom. It is a bluff, a filibuster. There is no last, fundamental desire at the bottom of the underground man. There is only the next response, the arbitrary shift to one side. As Mikhail Bakhtin notes, "The underground man not only dissolves in himself all possible fixed features of his person, making them all the object of his own inspection, but in fact he no longer has any such traits at all, no fixed definitions, there is nothing to say about him, he figures not as a person from life but rather as the subject of...[a] dream."
The "radical" positions of the underground man can be summarized as follows:
- Consciousness is not to be equated with rationality, but with suffering.
- Desire is independent of egoism and utility.
- Consciousness is immobilizing and incompatible with action, in a kind of Zeno's paradox.
- There is no possible, final foundation for certainty and justification.
Now, on their own, these are positions we should take seriously, criticize, etc. But these positions are not on their own. Rather they emerge, seething, from a bilious insecurity. They are determinate positions, moored in the dubious niches of the underground man's screed.
To begin, the "free, unfettered desire... one's own fantasy, sometimes roused to the point of madness" is not at all represented as free, but (in René Girard's) term is always in Dostoevsky a mediated desire. The underground man has no desire that is original to himself: he learns what to want from the others. The entire address of Part One is quivering with a cringing, crouching anticipation of the (imagined) audience's judgments and response:
(That's a poor joke, but I won't cross it out. I wrote it thinking that it would be very witty; but now, having realized that I merely wanted to show off disgracefully, I'll make a point of not crossing it out!)
I felt how they swarmed inside me, these contradictory elements. I knew that they had been swarming inside me my whole life and were begging to be let out; but I would't let them out, I wouldn't, I deliberately wouldn't let them out. They tormented me to the point of shame; they drove me to convulsions and--and finally I got fed up with them, oh how fed up! Perhaps it seems to you, gentlemen, that I'm repenting about something, that I'm asking your forgiveness for something? I'm sure that's how it seems to you... But really, I can assure you, I don't care how it seems...These contradictory elements are, to be sure, masochism / sadism, exhibitionism / isolation, vanity / self-humiliation, etc. But there is no masochism without the other's desire; there is no exhibitionism without the other's gaze; there is no self-humiliation without the super ego's surveillance.
Thus, the revolt of the underground man, his maintaining a "loophole" for himself, an escape route to evade finalization and objectification, is always voiced, petulantly asserted:
Of course, it was I who just invented all these words for you. That, too, comes from the underground. For forty years in a row I've been listening to all your words through a crack. I've invented them myself, since that's all that's occurred to me. It's no wonder that I've learned it all by heart... But can you really be so gullible as to imagine that I'll print all this and give it to you to read?... Confessions such as the one I plan to set forth here aren't published and given to other people to read.But what does it mean, this undermining of consciousness by desire and the willful frustration of reason? "Desire is a manifestation of all life," we are told. Consciousness is the analytical awareness of this desire to desire, the registering of the sore, rusty taste of dissatisfaction. Consciousness, further, is the agent of this frustration, when it becomes the obstacle itself (as in the discussion of revenge in Chapter I).
What kind of life is manifested by desire, though? Wouldn't we rather say that the Notes evince an avoidance of life? and life's replacement by an unceasing stream of words? The underground man cuts off everyone entirely, is "terribly afraid of being seen, met, recognized," whose apartment "was my private residence, my shell, my case, where I hid from all humanity." And this paranoid isolation... this is the concept of life that follows from the above philosophy. "I wanted to remain alone in my underground."
To be thrust into life is to not have all the answers. Only in the underground does one have all the answers. In life, there is every chance that one will be drawn into the needs and pleadings of others, their sad stories, and find oneself bound (constrained!) to responsibility. To be thrust into life means any number of situations where there is no possible "last word." But the underground man's entire philosophy means having the last word. This is the point of making a scene.
A word about his much-vaunted freedom. It is a bluff, a filibuster. There is no last, fundamental desire at the bottom of the underground man. There is only the next response, the arbitrary shift to one side. As Mikhail Bakhtin notes, "The underground man not only dissolves in himself all possible fixed features of his person, making them all the object of his own inspection, but in fact he no longer has any such traits at all, no fixed definitions, there is nothing to say about him, he figures not as a person from life but rather as the subject of...[a] dream."
He says as much himself, if you know where to look. "The whole of man's work seems to consist only in proving to himself constantly that he's a man and not an organ stop!" That is, the point is the proof, the unattainable certainty and guarantee that one is independent, unconfined, not calculable. This is the cruelest paradox (one also found in Crime and Punishment): the whole story of the underground man is to misbehave so badly, to say something so unforgivable, to cut people off so irreparably, that one's isolation will be confirmed and permanent. "The whole of man's work seems to consist only in proving..." means that this very logic of autonomy is subordinated to a quest for finality: to really be left alone forever. But this is just what is intolerable.
What the underground man wants in this last, undefinable freedom of desire is not freedom or an ontological flux, but to have held something back from the game of otherness. As I wrote elsewhere, "The self-importance of the scandal purports to 'hold back' some image of the self which would not be tainted by finitude or need..." It is really being-something-at-all which is disgusting to the underground man.
Of course, you can read this on the last page: "We're even oppressed by being men--men with real bodies and blood of our very own. We're ashamed of it; we consider it a disgrace and we strive to become some kind of impossible 'general-human-beings.'"
Dostoevsky equates this self-disgust with a cynical need for power, the suppression of pity: "For me love meant tyrannizing and demonstrating my moral superiority." Finally the underground man blurts out, at the critical juncture of his moral life, "They won't let me... I can't... be good!"
Why? Because to be loved, to be needed, is above all to be weak. The utmost exposure and vulnerability rob us of power. When the prostitute Liza understands that the underground man himself was "unhappy," sees that "it must have been very painful for me to utter all of this," it is this sensitive perception which is unforgivable. The entirety of the Notes is a dodge to make sure that this never happen again.
