Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism. 2005.
THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
What difference does Žižek make by his intertextual conjunction of psychoanalytic sublimation with the Kantian sublime? Lacan’s Seminar 7 concerns the ethical implications of psychoanalysis. The question it asks is what psychoanalysis offers as its outcome for the analysand.
Given that ‘the goods’ – duty, self-sacrifice, the conventional virtues – solve nothing, what would it mean to be free from the symptom, which always conceals the drive towards the Thing? How, in other words, can we avoid, on the one hand, the naked aggressivity that represents the direct projection outwards of the death drive and, on the other, the effect of repression, the symptom’s deception, by which neurosis promises its own pathological version of satisfaction?
It is in answer to the question how to avoid pathology that Lacan impels us not to give ground relative to our desire (1992: 319). His instance of the tragic outcome of this ethic is Antigone, whose bond with her brother impels her to defy Creon’s law, knowing that the consequence is to be walled up alive in her own tomb.
The rest of us, less heroic, may be less ready to venture beyond everything we think we know, or more eager to postpone the moment, since we are all required to rejoin the real in the end. For us, what is deadly in desire must be acknowledged, but may also be tamed, pacified, fenced off, as a way of living with – or, indeed, surviving – the effects of that uncompromising commitment.
The beautiful, then, is the acceptable barrier to ‘the unspeakable field of radical desire that is the field of absolute destruction’ (216).
People are speaking beings, organisms-in-culture, able to find themselves fully at home neither in the organic real nor in the symbolic order. The Thing beckons with the promise of gratification at the level of the real, but the price we should pay for such jouissance would be the dissolution of the subject.
Conversely, the symbolic order, the Other which constitutes us as subjects, is empty; it cannot give a satisfaction it does not possess. Sublimation in Lacan’s account offers a way of inhabiting the symbolic without submission to the exorbitant demands of the ferocious moral Law. Sublimation, which gratifies without repression, involves the pleasure principle. 143
Sublimation appears repeatedly in Freud’s work from 1905 onwards as a diversion of part of the sexual drive towards other aims.
Under the influence of the ego, he argues, people relinquish a proportion of organic satisfaction in favour of culturally acceptable activities. Art is the effect of sublimation.
At times Freud displays all the scepticism of science in his depiction of the artist. ‘He’ (artists are characteristically male, of course, in Freud) is probably exceptionally driven, but also exceptionally socially inept. What he wants is what all men want: glory, power and the love of women. But when he fails to secure any of them, the artist retreats into fantasy, imagines the satisfaction he seeks. Whereas most people in these circumstances would have to make do with their meagre day-dreams, however, the artist, Freud explains, is especially good at making his fantasies public in acceptable forms, while disguising their origins. Artists convert imagination into works of art. By means of this skill, they go on to acquire glory, power and the love of women in the process, thus securing their objectives after all, but by another route (Freud 1976: 423– 4). Elsewhere, however, Freud’s account is more elegiac.
Something in the nature of the sexual drive, he proposes, is incompatible with civilization, so that for human beings, divorced by culture from their organic origins, perfect sexual gratification is not possible. But paradoxically, the pleasure that culture withholds in this way reappears in culture itself by means of sublimation:
[Freud quote] The very incapacity of the sexual instinct to yield complete satisfaction as soon as it submits to the first demands of civilization becomes the source, however, of the noblest cultural achievements which are brought into being by ever more extensive sublimation of its instinctual components. For what motive would men have for putting sexual instinctual forces to other uses if, by any distribution of those forces, they could obtain fully satisfying pleasure? 144
That element of lack in the sexual relation was to reappear in Lacan’s account of unconscious desire as indestructible and insatiable, and in his repeated insistence in Seminar 20 that there was no sexual relation (rapport). But what complicates the issue further is Freud’s increasing conviction after the First World War that there are two drives, the libido on the one hand, and the death drive on the other. While Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920, holds them apart only with some degree of uncertainty, Civilization and its Discontents, ten years later, insists on the distinction and pays renewed attention to the dangerous capabilities of the death drive. Externalized, it leads to cruelty and brutality towards others; internalized, it produces the self-destructive and voracious superego, conscience, an exorbitant sense of moral obligation that can never be fully met, and which therefore creates unending anxiety:
[Freud quote] ‘Every renunciation of instinct now becomes a dynamic source of conscience and every fresh renunciation increases the latter’s severity and intolerance’ (Freud 1985a: 321).
Civilization is necessary as a defence against unqualified aggressivity, but its effects remain disappointing. Among its discontents we must include the self-denying, self-excoriating ethical imperatives of the superego, aggression itself by another name. 144-145