Jones, Paula Satne. “Review of Lacan The Silent Partners” ed. Slavoj Žižek, Verso, 2006. Oct 3rd 2006
‘May ’68, The Emotional Month’. In this article, Copjec examines Lacan’s surprising response to the student revolts of May ’68. Such a response can be found in the seminar delivered by Lacan that very same year: Seminar XVII: The Underside (or Reverse) of Psychoanalysis. In his seminar, Lacan not only accused the students of not being radical enough, but also, and more interestingly, he ended the seminar by abruptly announcing that the final aim of psychoanalysis is the production of shame. Why invoke shame as the final aim of analysis in the context of 1968?
Copjec answers this question by analysing Lacan’s concept of affect [or jouissance in Lacan’s preferred vocabulary] since after all shame is a form of affect. She does this by relating Lacan’s concept of jouissance to Freud’s concept of anxiety, Sartre’s voyeuristic gaze and Levinas’s feeling of ‘being riveted’ [Levinas being the only of the three authors that can be called a ‘silent’ partner].
From Freud, Lacan takes the idea that affect is the discharge, the movement of thought. When this movement stops and becomes inhibited, affect is known by the more specific name of anxiety. However, Lacan goes a step further than Freud because whereas Freud maintains that anxiety, unlike fear, has no object, Lacan asserts that anxiety is ‘not without object’. On the contrary, anxiety is the experience of an encounter with an object of a different kind: object petit a, as it was famously called by Lacan. With respect to Sartre, Lacan also goes a step further because he points out that the gaze that assaults the voyeur from behind is none other than the voyeur’s own, that is, his own surplus-jouissance. Finally, we can also relate Lacan’s concept of affect with Levinas’s phrase ‘riveted to being’. Levinas’s phrase has the implication that being rather than immediately being our being, is forced, adhered or stuck to our being. Here again, Lacan advances Levinas’s argument because for him, the being to which we are riveted or stuck is specifically jouissance.
In Seminar XVII, Lacan also claims that anxiety is the ‘central affect’ around which every social arrangement is organized. The anxiety that the encounter with one’s own jouissance produces must admit some form of escape if society is to be possible. It is at this point that Lacan opposes the Analytic to the University Discourse – a discourse that Lacan linked with the rise of capitalism. In the modern-capitalistic world, originary anxiety is transformed into moral anxiety. Although the modern guilt-laden subject still experiences jouissance, this jouissance, says Lacan, is a sham.
The fraudulent nature of this jouissance comes from the fact that it gives one a false sense that at the core of one’s being there is something possessable as an identity (racial, national, ethnic).The universalizing tendency of the University Discourse does not end up forsaking these inherited identities or differences, but welcoming them with open arms.
It is against this background that Lacan’s call to shame makes any sense. ‘His is a recommendation not for a renewed prudishness but, on the contrary, for relinquishing our satisfaction with a sham jouissance in favour of the real thing. The real thing – jouissance – can never be ‘dutified’, controlled, regimented; rather, it catches us by surprise, like a sudden, uncontrollable blush on the cheek’ (p. 110).
Copjec’s article is interesting not only because it offers an excellent interpretation of a very difficult Lacanian passage, but also because it reminds us of the necessity of going back to the ‘real thing’ and abandoning the universalizing discourse of identity and difference.