PEDOĆIN

by MARCEL ŠTEFANČIČ, JR.

The borders in Europe have disappeared. They are gone. There is only one more border – in Trieste. The last border. The border that won’t go away. And Trieste is clinging to it in panic. The museum of this ultimate border is Pedočin, alias La Lanterna , a famous public bathhouse.

In the wonderful documentary The Last Beach ( L’ultima spiaggia ), filmed in 2016 by Thanos Anastopoulos and Davide Del Degan, Pedočin looked rather dilapidated and dilapidated, sad and abandoned, among tired horizons, in the middle of a suspended future, in an unfinished world – dystopian. We even see an insert from an old film in which the Americans draw a demarcation line that separated Zone A from Zone B and quickly mutated into a Cold War border, part of the “Iron Curtain”, but this border has disappeared. But the metameme has not disappeared: in the middle of the bathing area, since its opening in 1890, there has been a concrete wall separating swimsuits and bathers. Women sunbathe and swim on their side, and men on theirs.

That’s how it was once and that’s how it is now.

The wall still stands and still separates men and women – it survived in the name of the “good old days”, in the name of ritual tradition, in the name of nostalgia for a utopian time when people were separated together and when sexual difference isolated people. Other baths also had walls separating men and women, but they disappeared – but the Pedočin wall survived. And became “normalized”.

Regarding sexual difference, Lacan gave an illustrative example in one of his seminars: two doors, one says “men”, the other “women”, that is what is important – what is written , not the organs that enter inside – sexual difference as a signifying difference that separates, distributes, segregates. Sexual difference as the ultimate ontological difference that distinguishes men and women on the basis of a simple operation of signification is inscribed not only on the doors, but also in language itself, in which sexual difference marks not only people, but also places, objects and all other “words”.

Pedočin is the embodiment of this, moreover, the embodiment of the excess pleasure that comes precisely from the gap of difference. Here, on this beach that embodies sexual difference, we see that nudism (aha!), lazy truisms (“It’s better to sit down than to get up a hundred times”) and spicy jokes (say about a woman who …) do not bother anyone, but it was quite obvious that anxiety was already strongly pressing these elderly bathers and swimsuits, pensioners from the end of the world: the Trieste dialect has disappeared, they moan, gender boundaries have disappeared (“Now women are even in the army”), identity boundaries have disappeared, state borders have disappeared, as have the boundaries between patriots and nationalists and “fools” and Trieste residents. They have died a little with each border. The present gets on their nerves, which is why they cling all the more to these utopias of theirs. The more the present pushes them out, the more they glorify the wall. Every now and then, one of them even senses where the real problem lies: “You live as long as you live. When you die, they throw you out and then rent out your apartment at a profit.”

Capital has an advantage over them. It displaces them, dispossesses them and humiliates them. And before they are cremated after death, and before the crematorium is even disinfected, one of the bathers gasps. They are in too much of a hurry. They are being baked like pizzas. If the crematorium wants to make a profit, it must operate like the Nazi crematoriums once did. Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that society does not exist has been realized here in a grotesque way – solidified into a wall. The metaphor of sexual difference becomes a metaphor of class difference.

In his seminar on The Back of Psychoanalysis, Lacan addressed precisely this connection, namely, the connection between Freud’s theory of the unconscious, within which surplus pleasure plays a key role, and Marx’s theory of surplus value, from which capital is fed through labor. What is capital other than the exploitation of the surplus enjoyment of labor, which is transformed into surplus value through the process of capitalist production?
Passing by the bathers and swimsuits, the guardians of Pedočin, calmly, quietly and coolly – like ghost ships – are the ocean liners, full of containers, symbols of boundless and invasive capitalist expansion. For these bathers and swimsuits to stop capital, they would need a truly strong faith – the kind that the revolutionaries had, who did not feel sick at the sight of blood.

Capital has drained them of desire – passion, life, future. They do not hear the call of Shelley’s famous verse: “There are many of you – a handful of them.” When you look at them, you feel as if they are there with someone – as if they are waiting for their savior. If we had lived in the fifties, we would have been waiting for Godot. They look like Vladimir and Estragon, who in Beckett’s cult play Waiting for Godot (1953) have an appointment with Godot on Saturday evening, but they do not know which Saturday, this one, the next or the one before, or even on Saturday and whether it is under this tree at all. And they do not even know whether today is Saturday or whether Saturday still exists. They would go somewhere else, but they cannot, because they have an appointment with Godot. What if they have no appointment with him at all?

And capitalism, which has convinced all these bathers and swimsuits that the problem is “with them,” operates so smoothly and phantomically that they no longer notice it. It pretends to be invisible (“free market”) so that there is no need for an alternative. It hides itself so that bathers and swimsuits don’t feel that they are in fact in agreement with it.