Zupančič, Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis: 3 interventions. Aarhus University Press 2008.
First let us situate on the same line the two elements that we arrived at in our discussion following different paths.
First, the surplus (of) distortion,
which at the same time disturbs and carries the relationship between the manifest and the latent content.
Second, the falloff, the leftover of the conscious interpretation,
which is not simply unconscious, but propels the work of the unconscious interpretation and is present in the unconscious formations as their ‘formal’ aspect (and not as a particular content), as the form of the distortion itself, its ‘grammatical structure.’
To these two, we can add in the same line a third element, namely what psychoanalysis conceptualised with the notion of the drive.
The drive … embodies a fundamental inner split of all satisfaction, the non-relationship between demand and satisfaction, leading to the possibility of another, supplemental satisfaction. This has the effect of de-centring not so much the subject as the Other, and the de-centring at stake could be best formulated as follows: 31
the subject never finds the satisfaction directly in the Other, yet he can only find it through the detour of the Other. This detour is irreducible. 32
The drive is something other than the supposed solipsistic enjoyment, and one should conceptually distinguish between the two. 32
Without entering into a detailed discussion of this difference we can indicate a possible way of its articulation.
Enjoyment (in the strong sense of the Lacanian jouissance) is ultimately always linked to repression, they mutually sustain each other – repression always protects some enjoyment, whereas enjoyment could also be said to protect certain repressions (and the persistence of symptoms beyond the deciphering of their unconscious meaning would belong to this category).
The drive, on the other hand, is precisely not linked to repression as a ‘solution’ of the impasse of the non-relationship between the subject and the Other, since it exists precisely through and as the very ‘life,’ or articulation, of this non-relationship.
These three elements, which are all different articulations of the same fundamental topology, are precisely the ‘navel’ (to borrow Freud’s expression) through which the empirical life of every subject is related to its constitutive conditions in the Other.
If we adopt the Lacanian name for this navel, namely the ‘object small a,’ we can formulate this dialectics as follows: if the concept of the Other refers to symbolic coordinates that structure our word and provide its vocabulary, the object a is always an effect of the Other.
At the same time, however, it also incarnates a specific, singular point of this process, namely the point where the effect maintains an ‘open line’ with the symbolic structure that generates it, so that the latter is itself dependent, ‘vulnerable’ in respect to this object.
In every formation of the unconscious one has to find, locate, and determine this navel, this object.
In order to make any sense, the analysis of the unconscious formations thus relies upon the following double presupposition:
1) the object in question can be detected and found in these formations, and
2) something can be effectively changed, shifted through it, and not only explained.
The object a is, for example, that element of a symptom through which the causality that led to it is kept alive in this symptom as the effect of a certain symbolic impasse.
The symptom is thus, on the one hand, a rather rigid symbolic form (or ritual) that can be automatically triggered by certain circumstances, but in all this rigidity and automatism it is also – to use the fashionable expression – a continuous work in progress, it is the site at which the conflict determining the subject is still operating and continues to be played out in real time.
The very existence of the symptom testifies to this conflict being still alive, and at the same time carries in itself the sensitive point of the structure to which it belongs. 32
From here we can now return to Laplanche and to the point where we have decomposed the Laplanchian ‘enigmatic message’ into two moments
1) the moment of the real involved in the problematic character of the subject’s relationship to the Other, and
2) the moment in which this problematic character is posited in terms of an ‘enigmatic message.’
For what follows from here is an important psychoanalytic lesson for certain contemporary theories of ethics. 33
The work of analysis proceeds in the direction of separating, untying these two things.
It is not only about interpreting, deciphering the ‘true’ meanings; the interpretation also has to produce its own limit, that is to say encircle and locate the very points that constitute the meaningless navel of the field of meaning, or of the field of the Other, and induce a separation here. 33
This separation implies, to put it simply, that
1) the subject will not find the answer to what he is in the Other (nor in himself), but is 2) only likely to find or encounter it in the form of an indivisible remainder of his actions in relation to the Other.
In this configuration, the Other no longer appears as the Other of an enigmatic message. 33
The opacity of the field of the Other no longer ‘interpellates’ the subject to find its possible meanings, but should incite the engagement of the subject in his own destiny as always-already social, that is, as always-already taking place in the field of the Other and irreducibly connected to it.
The crucial moment of ‘separation’ involved in psychoanalysis should be understood in this sense: not as a simple separation from the Other, from all symbolic structures and the social mediation of the subject’s being, but as the separation of the Other from the object that drives its structure. 33
Levinas
There is, however, a whole school of contemporary ethical reflection, inspired more or less directly by Emmanuel Levinas, which has as its central point precisely the affirmation (and fortification) of the enigma of the Other. 33
In this ethics, the subject is confronted, or has to be confronted with, the enigma of the Other – a Demand in relation to which the subject is absolutely responsible. 33
We have seen above how psychoanalysis brings to light the fact that the constitution of the enigma of the Other, the elevation of the latter to the place of an infinite enigmatic Demand, is the precise counterpart of (primal) repression.
This does not prevent repression from necessarily belonging to the constitution of the subject, neither does it mean that psychoanalysis must attempt to prevent it (in advance) at any price (rather, psychoanalysis always approaches it after the fact, by an operation of ‘separation’ performed on an already accomplished ‘original’ synthesis). 33
However, to recognize the necessity of repression in the constitution of the subject is not the same as to promote repression to the rank of the highest ethical maxim. 34
Which is exactly what the above mentioned ethics does. The ethics based on the Other as the locus of an infinite enigmatic demand/message is an ethics that elevates repression to the level of the ethical principle.
In this sense, it is definitely foreign to the ethics of psychoanalysis.
It is that ethics in which the infinite demand of the Other coincides with our ‘infinite responsibility’ as to the way in which we interpret the Demand of the Other, its enigma.
The enigma of the Other demands our interpretation (and the engagement that follows from it), but at the same time we are absolutely responsible for this interpretation (and hence for our actions).
This is also the point at which this ethic situates freedom. As formulated by Levinas, the human will “is free to assume this responsibility in whatever sense it likes: it is not free to refuse this responsibility itself.” We are dealing with something that could be described as infinite, never-ending interpretation – the production of the unconscious – and our infinite responsibility for it.
The responsibility is thus essentially double responsibility, or unconditional duty, to interpret, and at the same time the responsibility for the way in which we interpret.
In spite of all the emphasis that this ethics puts on the original and central place of the figure of the (radical) Other, the latter is somehow reduced to a catalyst via which the subject comes to know his unconscious and assumes responsibility for it (and keeps generating more of it). 34
The enigma of the Other appears as the point through which the subject refers to itself via the constitutive interval of interpretation. 34
Quite differently from this perspective, psychoanalysis supplements the work of (possibly endless) interpretation with the gesture described above, separating the meaningless object, which drives the machinery of meaning, from the site where the meaning is constituted (the Other); it separates the meaningless object that functions as generator of meaning from the semantics of words and gestures. 34
This separation is something very different from the infinite responsibility with which the subject actively but never altogether successfully ‘fills in’ the lack in the Other. This logic of endlessly supplementing the lack in the Other, which has the effect of intensifying the Demand of the Other, is what brings Levinasian ethics dangerously close to what Freud describes as the vicious circle of the superego. The following passage is most eloquent in this respect: 34
Duties become greater in the measure that they are accomplished. The better I accomplish my duty, the fewer rights I have, the more I am just, the more guilty I am. 35 [Lacan]
According to Freud, the superego (as ‘internalised authority’) has precisely this same vicious way of behaving: the more virtuous the man is, the more severely and distrustfully it behaves, “so that ultimately it is precisely those people who have carried saintliness furthest who reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness.”
As we have already stressed, the separation involved in psychoanalysis is something other than this kind of infinite responsibility (that increases by being accomplished). 35
It rather induces something like a singular, and quite precise, responsibility — responsibility in relation to this singular object which is not the Other, but which is the decentred point through which the Other, and its corresponding subjectivity, are being maintained or not.
This is also the point to which psychoanalysis relates the question of the cause, as well as the question of freedom, which becomes the question of a singular causality: a causality that is not a ‘causality through the subject,’ not a ‘causality through the Other,’ but a causality through object. 35
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Psychoanalysis starts as an interpretation of symptoms. Yet, insofar as these symptoms are themselves already an interpretation, connection, synthesis of different elements, the work of analysis is actually the work of de-interpretation.
In this respect, one can only agree with Laplanches’s emphasis on the radically analytical character of psychoanalysis (as method). Synthesis is always on the side of repression. Freud’s capital discovery in relation to dreams and their interpretation was the rejection of their supposed symbolism and of the existence of a key to their interpretation.
Free associations are something very different: they disintegrate a more or less coherent story, take its elements in utterly divergent directions, introduce new elements, etc. Whereas symbolism makes the free associations silent.
We should add, however, that this interpretation as de-interpretation and unbinding is not the whole story – there is also the crucial operation of separation, which consists in circumscribing and isolating the very split that sustains this infinite production of meaning ( and its interpretation), and which is not itself an element of meaning. 35
Isolating this split as such amounts to isolating the drive and its object. 36
This does not mean, however, that the object-drive is simply an ‘elementary particle’ which remains when analytical unbinding (interpretation as de-interpretation, the untying of the symptomatic ties) is realized to its – more or less – bitter end. 36
It suffices to briefly recall Freud’s theory of the constitution of the drive from the inner split of (the satisfaction of) need, or else the Lacanian conceptualisation of the drive through the divergence between goal and aim (encapsulated in the formula that the drive finds it satisfaction without attaining its aim) – it suffices to recall this in order to grasp that the drive is an elementary form of the split (and not an elementary particle).
It is the divergence/split that is elementary, i.e. more elementary than its ‘particles.’ The object of drive is the split, the gap itself as object. 36
As counterintuitive as it might sound, this topology (the split somehow precedes that which is split in it) is indeed crucial for an understating of the drive, especially if we bear in mind that, at bottom, this split entails nothing less than the division between the mental and the physical and their possible articulation.
If we take this division in its largest sense, as the division between ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ we could say that psychoanalysis discovered the drive as the point of the short circuit between the two terms.
Yet what does this mean? Does it mean that we can define human beings as the zone where the two realms overlap? Although not altogether false, this formulation can be strongly misleading and wide open to religious reading of human beings as composed of two principles of the natural (or material) and the spiritual. 36
The crucial point to make is that what is at stake is not an overlapping of two already well-established entities, but an intersection which is generative of both sides that overlap in it. 36
In other words, human beings are not composed of the biological and the symbolic or of the physical and the metaphysical – the image of composition is misleading.
Human beings are rather so many points where the difference between these two elements, as well as the two elements themselves as defined by this difference, are generated, and where the relationship between the two dimensions thus generated is being constantly negotiated (posited, re-posited, repeated, solidified, defined, and redefined).
From this perspective, there is no ‘pure life’ (pure nature) or ‘pure symbolic’ prior to this curious intersection or split.
The generating point of the symbolic is this paradoxical joint, and the symbolic as a wholly independent, autonomous realm, is something produced – it is produced at the periphery of the movement generated by the intersection and retroactively affects it own point of generation, its own ‘birth,’ so to say.
And the drive is intrinsically connected to this split as such, to the split as elementary – more elementary than the ‘elements’ that split in it. 37
This has yet another important consequence. If drive is the elementary form of the split that is itself a tie, a copula. The drive is the incidence of a fundamental heterogeneity which, through the very operating of the drive, is maintained as heterogeneity within the very field to which it is heterogeneous. 37
The drive is a tie with a radical otherness, a tie that functions beyond – or perhaps more precisely: on this side – of the tie provided by meaning (the transformation of this heterogeneity into a Message, an enigmatic Demand, etc.). 37
The drive is the split, the heterogeneity as the form of a tie that is not the form of meaning/message. 37
The point I have attempted to make is thus the following the dismantling of the ties practised by analysis (interpretation as de-interpretation) stumbles against another, different kind of tie, which is isolates and where it stops: it stumbles against the tie that irreducibly binds the subject and the Other in an element that is heterogeneous to both; is stumbles against the subject of the drive that binds the self and the otherness in their very split, in their very heterogeneity, as the point of their (inner) dialectics on ‘montage.’ 37
The big question, the ‘million dollar question,’ that necessarily arises here is of course, this:
can this singular type function as the ground of any social tie, or is the latter [social tie ]always based on the repression of the former [singular type]?
I will not answer this question here, but will say something else instead. If there is any intrinsic politics of psychoanalysis, it consists in insisting on its work of unbinding and of separation (in the sense sketched out above), and in not succumbing to the following criticism, which is becoming louder and louder: 37
psychoanalysis only disintegrates, dismantles, separates, it is obsessed with negativity and lack, it never amounts to any affirmative, positive project (be it political or simply ‘human’) 37
The politics of psychoanalysis today should be to not yield to this (by trying to ‘nevertheless’ propose something ‘positive’), but to pursue its work of analysis which has always had an intrinsically social character. 37
Does this mean that psychoanalysis has to obtain from passing any kind of social judgment and to uncritically accept, if not even actively support, the contemporary disintegration of social ties, the crumbling of solidarity and of collective projects, the spectacle of the social tissue breaking into tiny pieces, small individual islands of enjoyment? 37
I believe that it has to do something else, namely to critically examine this diagnosis itself, the diagnosis that should raise suspicion already on account of its being so gladly embraced by everybody, by those on the right and those on the left, by the rich and the poor, the religious and the not religious, the exploited and the exploiters. 38
Do we really live in the time of an accelerated dissolution of the social ties and of the emergence of an untied multitude of individuals as solipsistic islands of enjoyment? 38
What we could say, for example, is this: the existence of the multiplicity of individuals as solipsistic islands of enjoyment is precisely the form of existence of the contemporary social link. The socio-economic mobilization of individuals may not take the same form as 100 or 200 years ago, yet this is not to say that it doesn’t take place and that we are not — as individuals with our own way of enjoyment — very much engaged in ‘feeding’ the present social link, which bind us to itself, and to each another.
Here we should stress again what we have already indicated: that perhaps the crucial mistake lies in the fact that we are too fast and too willing to understand enjoyment as something essentially ‘atavistic,’ solipsistic, or simple a-social, cut off from the field of the Other.
Contrary to this, we should recognize the point where — through the dialectics of repression and its maintenance — enjoyment is very much linked to the Other and is always — already social.
More precisely: the subject of enjoyment does not need the Other, except at the point where the latter, with its ‘bare’ existence, guarantees the repression that the enjoyment ‘needs’ in order to emerge as enjoyment.
What is going on and what is being described as a non-belief in the existence of the Other, as a situation in which the symbolic Other no longer has any hold on us, is in fact a situation that should be described slightly differently: namely that the Other no longer has any hold on us in the guise of a concrete, ‘small’ other.
In other words, what is abandoned is the possibility of the link or short-circuit between an other and the Other, the possibility to believe that a ‘small’ other can be the very mode of existence of the big Other. No concrete person (parent, teacher, president, etc.) is truly an instance of the Other, because s/he is always only human, inconsistent, if not altogether weak and pathetic.
Should we not see and recognize here a rather spectacular operation of saving the big Other? 39
We are indeed dealing with a rather panicked conservation of the Other as utterly inactive, but also as utterly un-compromised, intact, absolute; the symbolic order (which is principally ‘our’ economic order) appears as a playground within which we are free to change anything we want, to play with different possibilities and endless variations, yet we are utterly powerless in relation to the crucial parameters of this socio-economic structure itself (there is no sensitive point, no ‘hold’ by means of which one could shift it and change its coordinates).
This also implies — to return to the starting point of this paper — a radical foreclosure of the cause, of the object-cause, and thus of any concrete form of freedom.
In other words, freedom loses its relation to cause and becomes an abstract form of the ‘freedom of choice,’ which promotes the subject to the doubtful status of the container of supposedly authentic inclinations and preferences.