Tutt, Daniel. The Object of Proximity: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis in Žižek and Santner via Lacan. American University Also available here danielp.tutt(at)gmail.com
The Psychotheology of Over-Proximity
The ethical problem of proximity to the neighbor introduces a number of ethical implications for ethics, and the ethical relation to the Other in Eric Santner’s work, The Psychotheology of Everyday Life. For Santner, the ultimate problem of the neighbor is based on the whether the subject accepts the Other (or neighbor) in their jouissance, or REAL excess, and in so doing, how they come to handle this over-proximity. Santner characterizes the Freudian “mental excess” (what Lacan would later deem jouissance) as an “excess of validity over meaning,” as the “undeadness of biopolitical life,” and his primary ethical concern is in how to convert the excess into a “blessings of more life.”[25] This mental excess that the subject inhabits, or what Santner refers to as “undeadness” colors everyday life as “a paradoxical kind of mental excess that constrains by means of excess.”[26] Santner develops a slightly different type of Otherness than that of Lacan, based on Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic theory of “seduction. ” Laplanche was an intimate student and colleague of Lacan, and in his conception of the Other, or the “enigmatic signifier” the traumatic encounter with the Other’s desire becomes constitutive of the inner strangeness we call the unconscious itself. Therefore, unlike the Lacanian Other, Santner’s Other is stripped of its material properties, a position that evokes Derrida’s notion of the spectral aura of the Other:
“the other is not reducible to its actual predicates, to what one might define or thematize about it, anymore than the I is. It is naked. Bared of every property, and this nudity is also its infinitely exposed vulnerability: its skin. This absence of determinable properties, of concrete predicates, of empirical visibility, is not doubt what gives to the face of the other a spectral aura.” [Derrida, Adieu. To Emmanuel Levinas, pg. 111]
The subject is placed in a relationship with the enigma of the Other’s desire not through language (as in Lacan) but through an unconscious transmission that is neither simply enlivening nor simply deadening but rather “undeadening” – the encounter with the Other produces an internal alienness that has a sort of vitality, and yet belongs to no life at all. This “undeadness” creates an encounter with legitimation, or what Freud referred to as the death drive, a “too much-ness” of pressure and the build of an urge to put an end to it.
Santner’s ethics at this point, in light of the crisis of symbolic identity is concerned with whether we ought to assume our identity in the social body based on the symbolic mandates that determine our identity, or whether the subject ought to break with this system. The two poles of ethical action he develops are the “sciences of symbolic identity,” and the “ethics of singularity.” The strength of Santner’s ethical position is that only when we “truly inhabit the midst of life” are we able to “loosen the fantasy” that structures everyday life.
Thus, similar to what we see in Lacan, to own one’s fantasy is to really live as a free subject, aiming at the truly ethical question that Lacan poses: “have you acted in conformity with the desire which inhabits you?” for it is desire that aims at the real.
The Crisis of Symbolic Investiture
How the subject in Santner’s the Psychotheology, as well as Lacan’s ethical subject deals with “the crisis of symbolic investiture” are a matter of ethics, which we will explore below.
For both Lacan and Santner, ethics requires a confrontation with the Other to free oneself of the Other and then surrender to the real, or everyday life. The confrontation with everyday life, or the Lacanian real is a collapse of the subject’s symbolic constructed identity.
The symbolic identity crisis that Lacan and Santner refer to can be more clearly understood through Santner’s reading of the book Soul Murder, and Lacan’s theory of the Name of the Father. Soul Murder and Name of the Father are instructive to understanding how “the crisis of symbolic investiture” operates through psychoanalytic theory. Both Lacan and Santner refer to the crisis of symbolic identity when discussing the infamous case of the Judge Daniel Schreber, who upon receiving the symbolic authority in society as a Judge experienced a total psychotic breakdown where his very ability to assume a symbolic identity rooted in authority became penetrated with “a kernel of invasiveness, which introduced the subject into too much reality.” What is it about this “too much reality” that created the conditions for the “the crisis of symbolic investiture?” To fully understand this crisis, a reading of Lacan’s late capitalist “university discourse” and the complex insertion of the Name of the Father bring the crisis into more clarity.