Freud and Nietzsche offer differing accounts of subject formation that rely on the productivity of the norm. Both account for the fabrication of conscience as the effect of an internalized prohibition (thereby establishing “prohibition” as not only privative but productive).
In Freud and Nietzsche, a prohibition on action or expression is said to turn “the drive” back on itself, fabricating an internal sphere, the condition for self-inspection and reflexivity. The drive turning back on itself becomes the precipitating condition of subject formation, a primary longing in recoil that is traced in Hegel’s view of the unhappy consciousness as well. Whether the doubling back upon itself is performed by primary longings, desire, or derives, it produces in each instance a psychic habit of self-beratement, one that is consolidated over time as conscience.
Conscience is the means by which a subject becomes an object for itself, reflecting on itself, establishing itself as reflective and reflexive. The “I” is not simply one who thinks about him- or herself; it is defined by this capacity for reflective self-relation or reflexivity. For Nietzsche reflexivity is a consequence of conscience; self-knowing follows from self-punishment. (Thus one never “knows” oneself prior to the recoil of desire in question.)
In order to curb desire, one makes of oneself an object for reflection; in the course of producing one’s own alterity, one becomes established as a reflexive being, one who can take oneself as an object. Reflexivity becomes the means by which desire is regularly transmuted into the circuit of self-reflection. The doubling back of desire that culminates in reflexivity produces, however, another order of desire: the desire for that very circuit, for reflexivity and, ultimately, for subjection. 22
Foreclosed Desire
The foreclosure of homosexuality appears to be foundational to a certain heterosexual version of the subject. 23
Freud distinguishes between repression and foreclosure, suggesting that a repressed desire might once have lived apart from its prohibition, but that foreclosed desire is rigorously barred, constituting the subject through a certain kind of preemptive loss. Elsewhere I have suggested [See chap. 5 of Psychic Life] that the foreclosure of homosexuality appears to be foundational to a certain heterosexual version of the subject. The formula “I have never loved” someone of similar gender and “I have never lost” any such person predicates the “I” on the “never-never” of that love and loss. Indeed, the ontological accomplishment of heterosexual “being” is traced to this double negation, which forms its constitutive melancholia, an emphatic and irreversible loss that forms the tenuous basis of that “being.”
Significantly Freud identifies heightened conscience and self-beratement as one sign of melancholia, the condition of uncompleted grief. 23
The foreclosure of certain forms of love suggests that the melancholia that grounds the subject (and hence always threatens to unsettle and disrupt that ground) signals an incomplete and irresolvable grief. Unowned and incomplete, melancholia is the limit to the subject’s sense of pouvoir, its sense of what it can accomplish and, in that sense, its power. Melancholia rifts the subject, marking a limit to what it can accommodate. Because the subject does not, cannot, reflect on that loss, that loss marks the limit of reflexivity, that which exceeds ( and conditions) its circuitry. Understood as foreclosure, that loss inaugurates the subject and threatens it with dissolution (23).