Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism.
Beyond the signifier, alien to the subject, the Thing also constitutes the absence that appears at the heart of the subject with the advent of signification. An archaic, maternal construct from the subject’s prehistory, the unforgettable Thing is the source of an impulsion towards life and death, the (non-existent) object of the single drive that comprehends both. 70
As the nothing at the centre of the speaking being, the Thing is what we unconsciously want in the lost real. But it can never be found, Lacan insists. On the contrary, the subject must keep its distance from the Thing. Too close an encounter, he affirms, even supposing it were possible, would bring about the dissolution of the subject, the symbolic order and culture in its entirety. But its converse, the Law, conscience, the order represented by the symbolic Father, offers no satisfaction either. As Lacan’s appropriation of the Freudian superego, the Father in Lacan’s account is consistently dead, a ‘morbid’ tyrant whose demands for renunciation are insatiable, exorbitant. Like the Thing, the Law is a stranger, but it is also the source of an ‘obscene and ferocious’ jurisdiction (1992: 7).
Conscience is a ‘parasite’ that feeds on the satisfactions we give it and still demands more (89). Lacan contemptuously dismisses its ethical values of self-sacrifice, duty and discipline as ‘the goods’. 71
There is no ‘Sovereign Good’. Instead, the forbidden, deadly Thing is also the source of good, and ‘there is no other’ (70). Since Lacan joins Freud’s two imperatives of desire and death in a single drive, the object of the drive, the maternal Thing gives life as well as death. Hostile to the subject (52), and yet ‘on its side’ (1986: 125), the Thing constitutes the source of love and hate alike, its place both living and dead (300). It thus initiates the will to create as well as destroy – to destroy, indeed, Lacan argues, in order to create anew.
Creativity is the project of culture. By this means, culture offers a detour that keeps the Thing itself at bay, defers with its own signifying presence the impossible jouissance of the encounter with pure absence, and gives pleasure in the process. Lacan sees cultural objects as encircling the lost Thing, keeping it within bounds, without denying its existence. Funeral monuments go back a long way as a paradigm instance of culture. John Simson’s surrounds absence with the signifier, and offers a certain pleasure as it does so. 71
As Freud points out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Lacan reiterates, pleasure for the subject is to be found on the side of the symbolic, not the real (Lacan 1992: 12). The object of the drive, the Thing, missing from the symbolic, outside representation, absent, is both inconceivable and terrifying. But the symbolic order, which in the first instance divorced the human infant from gratification in the real, goes on to form a ‘magic circle’, which separates us from the Thing (134). Little Ernst replaced the organic connection to his mother with the signifying wooden reel, and thus came to accept her absences. But it is important to note that, while this process named the pain of absence, it did not do away with it. It is in the context of this story that Freud mentions the artistic pleasures of grown-ups. These often incorporate loss at the level of the signifier, he points out. His instance is tragedy, which dramatizes suffering and death, and yet may be experienced as enjoyable (Freud 1984: 287).
The pleasure principle does not repress the drive, but deflects it, imposing the signifying screen that protects us from a direct encounter with the desired, impossible, deadly Thing. At the same time, the pleasurable signifier alludes to its loss. Even comedy, from Shakespeare to Four Weddings and a Funeral, notoriously also recognizes the dark side of human experience. The pleasure principle is aligned with culture in the broadest sense of that term. 72