Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism. 2005
Tracing a path through Freud’s own widely distributed observations, Lacan repudiates the binary opposition Freud holds on to so precariously between the libido and death: for Lacan the drive is both sexual and deadly, at once life-giving and destructive. In Seminar 7 sexual desire is not the central problem. Sex, Lacan says, is fine in its way, but you can’t count on it:
Sex ‘simulates’ the impossible jouissance, the encounter with the Thing, but does not in any circumstances enact it. Meanwhile, however, Seminar 7 is less concerned about sex than death. For Lacan sex was never an origin: instead, it merely ‘occupies’, like an invading army, the field of desire (1977: 287),which is brought into being with the loss of the real entailed in our subjection to the symbolic order.
In Lacan’s account, sublimation includes romantic love; there is conflict between sublimation and sex; on the contrary, sex involves the pleasurable signifier. Sublimation rails off the impossible encounter with the engulfing Thing, not the pleasures of sex. 145
A product of his time, however, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the world held its breath as two superpowers threatened each other with nuclear annihilation, Lacan became increasingly preoccupied by the death drive, and specifically its expression in the capacity of human beings to destroy their world with weapons of mass destruction. Sublimation pacifies the drive without pathology and without destruction.
There are two possible barriers between the subject and the object of the drive, two ways to keep at bay the death-dealing and vital Thing: on the one hand, the superego; on the other, sublimation.
True to Freud, Lacan finds the superego, ‘obscene’, ‘ferocious’ and ‘morbid’ (1992: 7). The more we concede to this ‘parasite’, the more it demands of us, he argues (302). Its ideals are ‘the goods’: conventional values, ‘family goods, domestic goods . . . the goods of our trade or our profession, the goods of the city, etc’. But psychoanalysis is not there, Lacan insists, to support the bourgeois dream, with its puritanical demands for human sacrifice (303).
If, then, we refuse the goods, one option is to go willingly with Antigone, into a heroic region beyond pleasure, a world of total dispossession, the unearthly place of the drive itself. 146
In the meantime, sublimation promises pleasure at the level of the signifier – including the pleasure offered by the plays of Sophocles, and not least, of course, Antigone.
Sublimation, then, is the ‘true’ barrier between us and absolute destruction, preferable to the goods because beauty ‘gets closer’ to the Thing (216– 17). The pleasure principle presents the beautiful as capable of alluding to the Thing, revealing the nature of the drive, and in the process offering a gratification that differs from its aim (111, 293).
There is nothing sentimental or escapist about the beautiful in Lacan. On the contrary, ‘the beautiful is closer to evil than to the good’ (217). Moreover, it is ‘precisely the function of the beautiful to reveal to us the site of man’s relationship to his own death, and to reveal it to us only in a blinding flash’ (295).
By encircling the void, which marks the place of the real that is lost to the subject, culture exercises the creative aspect of the drive to make allusions at the level of the symbolic to the inaccessible Thing, which is itself beyond pleasure. In culture the symbol comes between us and the enticing, terrifying, dangerous object of the drive.
There is in Seminar 7, however, no sublime object, unreasonably elevated to the dignity of the Thing, no fetish, no fantasy offering a focus for antagonism. On the contrary, while the Thing is best acknowledged, it is also preferable that it should be veiled by the signifier. And the signifier gives pleasure. 147
To secure the sublime object of ideology, Žižek sacrifices the version of sublimation that explains the existence of culture. If Žižek offers on the basis of Lacan a theory of human nature, what Lacan offers on the basis of Freud is a theory of human culture as the only hope of a rapprochement between the symbolic and the real. Lacan insists on the gap between the real and the signifier. … Žižek denies the existence of the real but places the sublime object at the heart of culture. 🙂 hmm don’t know about dat.
Paradoxically, however, this leads him to ignore the capacity of the signifier to give pleasure – though he demonstrates it in his own extremely pleasurable writing over and over again. Only Lacan retains a substantial positivity that the signifier cannot master, an unknown region which we encounter in fear and trembling, but with no trace of theology.
Žižek says you have to go through the fantasy to the void; Lacan says you can do that – but in the meantime, you can make things.
Making things is what culture consists of, given that the things in question include pots, beads, stories, paintings, photographs, films, essays and academic books. This is the material of cultural criticism, and only Lacan, who largely ignores the Kantian sublime, gives us a theoretical explanation of its existence. 148