Taken from Žižek’s criticism of Lacanian Left by Yannis Stavrakakis.
Because he ignores this excess of drive, Stavrakakis also operates with a simplified notion of “traversing the fantasy” – as if fantasy is a kind of illusory screen blurring our relation to partial objects. This notion may seem to fit perfectly the commonsense idea of what psychoanalysis should do: of course it should liberate us from the hold of idiosyncratic fantasies and enable us to confront reality the way it effectively is… this, precisely, is what Lacan does NOT have in mind – what he aims at is almost the exact opposite.
In our daily existence, we are immersed into “reality” (structured-supported by the fantasy), and this immersion is disturbed by symptoms which bear witness to the fact that another repressed level of our psyche resists this immersion. To “traverse the fantasy” therefore paradoxically means fully identifying oneself with the fantasy – namely with the fantasy which structures the excess resisting our immersion into daily reality, or, to quote a succinct formulation by Richard Boothby:
‘Traversing the fantasy‘ thus does not mean that the subject somehow abandons its involvement with fanciful caprices and accommodates itself to a pragmatic ‘reality,’ but precisely the opposite: the subject is submitted to that effect of the symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality. To traverse the fantasy in the Lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed by the fantasy than ever, in the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with that real core of the fantasy that transcends imaging.
Boothby is right to emphasize the Janus-like structure of a fantasy: a fantasy is simultaneously pacifying, disarming (providing an imaginary scenario which enables us to endure the abyss of the Other’s desire) AND shattering, disturbing, inassimilable into our reality.
The ideologico-political dimension of this notion of “traversing the fantasy” was rendered clear by the unique role the rock group Top lista nadrealista (The Top List of the Surrealists) played during the Bosnian war in the besieged Sarajevo: their ironic performances which, in the midst of the war and hunger, satiricized the predicament of the Sarajevo population, acquired a cult status not only in the counterculture, but also among the citizens of Sarajevo in general (the group’s weekly TV show went on throughout the war and was extremely popular).
Instead of bemoaning the tragic fate of the Bosnians, they daringly mobilized all the clichés about the “stupid Bosnians” which were a commonplace in Yugoslavia, fully identifying with them – the point thus made was that the path of true solidarity leads through direct confrontation with the obscene racist fantasies which circulated in the symbolic space of Bosnia, through the playful identification with them, not through the denial of this obscenities on behalf of “what people really are.”
No wonder, then, that, when Stavrakakis tries to provide some concrete examples of this new politics of partial jouissance, things go really “bizarre.” He starts with Marshal Sahlins’ thesis that the Paleolithic communities followed “a Zen road to affluence”: although deeply marked by divisions, exchange, sexual difference, violence and war, they lack the “shrine of the Unattainable,” of “infinite Needs,” and thus the “desire for accumulation”. In them,
enjoyment (jouissance) seems to be had without the mediation of fantasies of accumulation, fullness and excess. /…/ they do show that another world may, in principle, be possible insofar as a detachment of (partial) enjoyment from dreams of completeness and fantasmatic desire is enacted. /…/ Doesn’t something similar happen in the psychoanalytic clinic? And isn’t this also the challenge for radical democratic ethics? (281)
The way the Paleolithic tribesmen avoided accumulation was to cancel the lack itself – it is the idea of such a society without the excess of “infinite Needs” which is properly utopian, the ultimate fantasy, the fantasy of a society before the Fall.
What then follows is a series of cases of how “political theorists and analysts, economists, and active citizens – some of them directly inspired by Lacanian theory – are currently trying to put this radical democratic orientation to work in a multitude of empirical contexts.”(281)
For example: “A group of cooperative workers /Byrne and Healy/ have examined tried to restructure their enjoyment in a non-fantasmatic way”(281) – it would be certainly interesting to hear in detail how this “restructuring” was structured! Then come Robin Blackburn’s proposal for the democratization of Pension Funds, Roberto Unger’s proposal to pass from a family to a social inheritance system, Toni Negri’s proposal of a minimum citizenship income, the projects of participatory budgeting in Brazil…(282) – what all this has to do with jouissance feminine remains a mystery.
The vague underlying idea is that, in all these cases, we are dealing with modest pragmatic proposals, with partial solutions which avoid the excess of radical utopian re-foundation – definitely not enough to qualify them as cases of jouissance feminine which is precisely Lacan’s name for an absolute excess.
Stavrakakis’s attempt to relate Lacanian concepts like jouissance, signifier of the lack in the Other, etc., to concrete socio-political examples is thus thoroughly unconvincing.
When he quotes Joan Copjec’s precise thesis on how suppléance “allows us to speak well of our desire not by translating jouissance into language, but by formalizing it in a signifier that does not mean it but is, rather, directly enjoyed”(279), he reads it as a “way to think of enjoyment and the production of a signifier of lack in a democratic perspective”(279) – but does Copjec’s description not fit perfectly also nationalism?
Is the name of our Nation not such a suppléance? When a passionate patriot exclaims “America!”, does he thereby not produce a signifier which “does not translate jouissance into language, but formalizes it in a signifier that does not mean it but is, rather, directly enjoyed” – when “America!” is passionately exclaimed, it is the signifier itself which is enjoyed?
Stavrakakis’ political vision is vacuous: it is not that his call for more passion in politics is in itself meaningless (of course today’s Left needs more passion), the problem is rather that it resembles all too much the joke quoted by Lacan about a doctor asked by a friend for a free medical advice – reticent to render his service without payment, the doctor examines the friend and then calmly states: “You need a medical advice!”
Paradoxically, with all his (justified) critique of Freudo-Marxism, Stavrakakis’ position can be designated as “Freudo-radical democracy”: he remains within Freudo-Marxism, expecting from psychoanalysis to supplement the theory of radical democracy in the same way Wilhelm Reich, among others, expected psychoanalysis to supplement Marxism.
In both cases, the problem is exactly the same: we have the appropriate social theory, but what is missing is the “subjective factor” – how are we to mobilize people so that they will engage in passionate political struggle? Here psychoanalysis enters, explaining what libidinal mechanisms the enemy is using (Reich tried to do this for Fascism, Stavrakakis for consumerism and nationalism), and how can the Left practice its own “politics of jouissance.”
The problem is that such an approach is an ersatz for the proper political analysis: the lack of passion in political praxis and theory should be explained in its own terms, i.e., in the terms of political analysis itself. The true question is: what is there to be passionate about? Which political choices people experience as “realistic” and feasible?