Zupančič, Alenka. “Psychoanalysis” in Columbia Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas, New York: Columbia UP. 2007. 457-468.
If we focus on the signifying chain, precisely in its independece and autonomy, we are bound to notice that it constantly produces, from itself, quite unexpected effects of meaning, a meaning which is, strictly speaking, a surplus meaning that stains signifiers from wihin. This surplus meaning is also a carrier of certain quotas of affect or enjoyment, ‘jouissance‘: Lacan points at the coincidence of the two by writing jouissance as joui-sens, ‘enjoy-meant.’
It is precisely through this surplus meaning as enjoyment that signifiers are intrinsically bound to reality to which they refer.
Incidentally, this is also the kernel of Lacan’s insistence on the truth being not-all: the effect of the signifier cannot be fully reduced back to the signifier as its cause.
Master signifier (signifier falls into the signified) is representation AS enjoyment. This is Lacan’s solution of the point that Freud was struggling with, when he came to realize that his early optimistic belief in the sole powers of interpretation (presenting the patients with the right interpretation of their symptoms should bring about the dissolution of the latter) was premature: symptoms persisted beyond their ‘being deciphered.’
Freud thus started to distinguish between the (repressed) representation and the quota of affect attached to it, suggesting that their destinies could be very different, and that the destiny of the affect is much more important in the process of repression. With the ‘master-signifier’ Lacan conceptualizes the point where the two destinies are nevertheless inseparably bound together.
objet a
To put it simply, object a will come to name the other (the real) object of the drive as ‘independent of its object’: object a ‘satisfaction as an object’. And it is also as such that it can function as the CAUSE of desire (as different from the need), so that the cause of desire should be distinguished from its object or objective. It is not what the desire ‘wants,’ but what keeps it going. 465
One could even say that human sexuality is ‘sexual’ (and not simply ‘reproductive’) precisely insofar as the unification at stake, the tying of all the drives to one single Purpose, never really works, but allows for different partial drives to continue their circular, self-perpetuating activity.
Death Drive
Nothing could be further from from the Lacanian notion of death drive than the idea that something in us ‘wants to dies,’ and aims at death and destruction. If the death drive can be lethal, it is because, on the contrary, it is altogether indifferent to death.
In the human subject, there is something that has for its one and only purpose to go on living and perpetuating itself, regardless of the question of whether it kills the subject or makes her prosper (JOUISSANCE being one of the principle names for this something).
This is why the image that Lacan chooses for the death drive (the myth of lamella) is not an image of destruction, but instead the image of an ‘indestructible life’ (Lacan 1979: 198).
Since this notion of death drive is often at issue in contemporary philosophical debates, and has earned Lacan the reputation of assigning to death the determinant role in human subjectivity ( along the lines of the Heideggerian Being-toward-death), we cannot stress this point too much.
Lacan’s ‘death drive’ is precisely that on account of which a subject can never be reduced to the horizon of her death, or determined by it. This is not to say, on the other hand, that the death drive saves us from our finitude, but rather that it transposes its configuration. We are not finite simply because we die, we are finite because something that wouldn’t die introduces a limit to our life, a limit that divides it from within.
Subject is what lives — and dies — on both sides of this limit. 467
To be continued …