Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1994.

I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no way to say it all. Saying the whole truth is materially impossible: words fail. Yet it’s through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.  Lacan Television

In Foucault’s work the techniques of disciplinary power (of the construction of the subject) are conceived as capable of ” materially penetrat[ing] the body in depth without depending even on the mediation of the subject’s own representations. If power takes hold on the body, this isn’t through its having first to be interiorized in people’s consciousness. “8 For Foucault, the conscious and the unconscious are categories constructed by psychoanalysis and other discourses (philosophy, literature, law, etc. ): like other socially constructed categories, they provide a means of rendering the subj ect visible. governable, trackable. They are categories through which the modern subj ect is apprehended and apprehends itself rather than (as psychoanalysis maintains) processes of apprehension; they are not processes that engage or are engaged by social discourses (film texts, for example).

What is the difference, then, between Foucault’s version and psychoanalysis’s version of the law/desire relation? Simply this : while Foucault conceives desire not only as an effect but also, as I have pointedly remarked, as a realization of the law, psychoanalysis teaches us that the conflation of effect and realization is an error. To say that the law is only positive, that it does not forbid desire but rather incites it, causes it to flourish by requiring us to contemplate it, confess it, watch for its various manifestations, is to end up saying simply that the law causes us to have a desire for incest, let us say.

This position recreates the error of the psychiatrist in one of Mel Brooks’s routines. In a fit of revulsion the psychiatrist throws a patient out of his office after she reports having a dream in which, he relates in disgust, “she was kissing her father! Kissing her father in the dream! ” The feeling of disgust is the humorous result of the psychiatrist’s failure to distinguish the enunciative position of the dreaming patient from the stated position of the dreamed one. The elision of the difference between these two positions enunciation and statement causes desire to be conceived as realization in two ways. First, desire is conceived as an actual state resulting from a possibility allowed by law. Second, if desire is something one simply and positively has, nothing can prevent its realization except a purely external force. The destiny of desire is realization, unless it is prohibited by something outside it. 24

Psychoanalysis denies the preposterous proposition that society is founded on desire — the desire for incest, let us say once again. Surely, it argues, it is the repression of this desire that founds society. The law does not construct a subject who simply and unequivocably has a desire, but one who rejects its desire, wants not to desire it. The subject is thus conceived as split from its desire, and desire itself is conceived as something — precisely — unrealized; it does not actualize what the law makes possible. Nor is desire committed to realization, barring any external hindrance. For the internal dialectic that makes the being of the subject dependent on the negation of its desire turns desire into a self hindering process.

Foucault’s definition of the law as positive and nonrepressive implies both that the law is (1) unconditional, that it must be obeyed, since only that which it allows can come into existence-being is, by definition, obedience- and that it is (2) unconditioned, since nothing, that is, no desire, precedes the law; there is n o cause of the law and we must not therefore seek behind the law for its reasons . Law does not exist in order to repress desire. 25

Now, not only have these claims for the law been made before, they have also previously and prominently been contested.  For these are precisely the claims of moral conscience that Freud examines in Totem and Taboo. There Freud reduces these claims to what he takes to be their absurd consequences: ” If we were to admit the claims thus asserted by our conscience [that desire conforms to or always falls within the law], it would follow, on the one hand, that prohibition would be superfluous and, on the other, the fact of conscience would remain unexplained.” 20

On the one hand, prohibition would be superfluous. Foucault agrees: once the law is conceived as primarily positive, as producing the phenomena it scrutinizes, the concept of a negative, repressive law can be viewed as an excess — of psychoanalysis. On the other hand, the fact of conscience would remain unexplained. That is, there is no longer any reason for conscience to exist; it should, like prohibition, be superfluous . What becomes suddenly inexplicable is the very experience of conscience — which is not only the subjective experience of the compulsion to obey but also the experience of guilt, of the remorse that follows transgression — once we have accepted the claims of conscience that the law cannot fail to impose itself and cannot be caused. Foucault agrees once again: the experience of conscience and the interiorization of the law through representations is made superfluous by his theory of law. 25

The subject is and can only be inculpable (blameless). The relation between apparatus and gaze creates only the mirage of psychoanalysis . There is, in fact, no psychoanalytic subject in sight.