logocentric – Page 13

mellard Beyond Lacan

Mellard, James M. (2006) Beyond Lacan. Albany: State U of New York 288 pages.
Chapter 7: Hart’s Damage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics of Jouissance. pp. 179 – 208.

traditional oedipal subject founded on an ethics of desire to a postraditional subject founded on an ethics of jouissance

Oedipal Subject: eros and social life,
– subject oriented to desire (and thus constrained by castration and the pleasure principle)

– subject of desire
Damage is important in our understanding the shift from the old oedipal order to the new narcissism, from the order of desire to that of the drive.

This shift, Copjec suggests, has a cognate move-epochal, historical, and ongoing, neither personal nor idiosyncratic. It shifts emphasis to concepts — either ” meaning” or “being” — Lacan associates with the vel of alienation.

Heretofore, in that process known as ” oedipalization, ” it has been a good thing for subjects to be oriented to meaning (and thus to desire within the pleasure principle and oedipal law) rather than to being (and thus to drive and jouissance within the domain of the narcissistic ).

PostOedipal, PostTraditional Subject: Thanatos and the death drive

– oriented towards jouissance and thus denying contraints of castration and aiming beyond the pleasure principle. narcissistic subject of jouissance

Femme fatale turns desire toward jouissance

In so far as sexual difference is a Real that resists symbolization, the sexual relationship is condemned to remain an asymmetrical non-relationship in which the Other, our partner, prior to being a subject, is a Thing. Metastases of Enjoyment, 108

We may say that the narrator-protagonist of Damage merely takes a detour through desire and ordinary oedipal subjectivity before becoming the problematical subject of our postuniverse. His detour goes through the femme fatale, one guise of the maternal object who experiences desire and, as Copjec says, serves as a “defense against the drive” by her relation to jouissance (198).

As Zizek suggests in his discussions of film noir, the role of the femme fatale foregrounds the paradoxical role of “woman ” in the construction of ” man . ” That role raises issues of desire and drive. Zizek points out that Lacan’s controversial claim that “Woman is a symptom ” (Feminine Sexuality 168 ) of a man can be understood in two radically opposed ways because in Lacan’s career Lacan himself shifted his views on the symptom. In the first, the ” early”view of the 1950s, Lacan saw the symptom, Zizek says, as “a cyphered message,” one in which therefore the “woman-symptom appears as the sign, the embodiment of man’s fall, attesting to the fact that man ‘gave way as to his desire'” (Enjoy 154).

In this view as illustrated in Zizek’s discussion of the noir universe, “woman is not an external, active cause which lures man into a fall-she is just a consequence, a result, a materialization of man’s fall. So, when man purifies his desire of the pathological remainders, woman disintegrates in precisely the same way a symptom dissolves after successful interpretation, after we have symbolized its repressed meaning” (155).

But, Zizek asks, is there not more? “Does not Lacan’s other notorious thesis — the claim that ‘woman doesn’t exist‘ — point in the same direction? Woman doesn’t exist in herself, as a positive entity with full ontological consistency, but only as a symptom of man.”

In the second view, found in the late writings and seminars and foregrounding drive and jouissance, Lacan regarded the symptom” as a particular signifying formation which confers on the subject its very ontological consistency, enabling it to structure its basic, constitutive relationship to enjoyment (jouissance).”

In this late Lacanian view, both the symptom and woman-as-symptom change. Says Zizek, ” [I]f the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet, disintegrates. In this sense, ‘woman is a symptom of man‘ means that man himself exists only through woman qua his symptom: all his ontological consistency hangs on, is suspended from his symptom, is ‘externalized’ in his symptom.

In other words, man literally ex-sists: his entire being lies ‘out there,’ in woman” (155) . Zizek is especially interested in film noir because, paradox ically, it expresses both these Lacanian views of woman and symptom.

The father Martyn thinks he knows is the oedipal father who in his ignorance allows him desire and pleasure. The one he does not know is the obscene, life- and joy-denying
primordial father who wills his death, murders him, and chooses to become him.

There is good reason Martyn does not know his father is or has become the anal or phallic or primordial father. According to Zizek, the anal father represents the tendency in Lacan’s seminar, especially beginning with The Ethics of Psychoanalysis ( 1959-1960), for every concept to have, as a Mobius strip does, an obverse, a paradoxical reverse or inner lining that contradicts or obviates it. The primordial father, Zizek writes, ” is the obscene, superego anal figure that is real-alive, the ‘Master of Enjoyment.'”

In Freud, this primordial father is the one who is murdered by the primal horde of brothers, murdered precisely because, expressing drive, he forbids their desire and pleasure by taking all the women for himself.

Because of the power of his drive to jouissance, he would murder them if necessary to prevent their desires or drives. Zizek suggests that politically, in the exchange of master for leader, the primordial father paradoxically follows the oedipal father. ” In all emblematic revolutions, from the French to the Russian,” says Zizek, ” the overthrow of the impotent old regime of the symbolic Master (French King, Tsar) ended in the rule of a far more ‘repressive’ figure of the ‘anal’ father-Leader (Napoleon, Stalin ).”

This historical pattern suggests to Zizek that in the myth of the primal horde Freud had things backward.”

The order of succession described by Freud in Totem and Taboo (the murdered primordial Father-Enjoyment returns in the guise of the symbolic authority of the Name) is thus reversed: the deposed symbolic Master returns as the obscene-real Leader.”

In this account, Zizek suggests, ” Freud was the victim of a kind of perspective illusion: ‘primordial father‘ is a later, eminently modern, post-revolutionary phenomenon, the result of the dissolution of traditional symbolic authority” (Metastases 206 ) .

johnston vicious circle super-ego

Johnston, A. (2001) The vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics. Psychoanlytic Studes (3): 3/4. 411-424.

“desire is a defense, a prohibition against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance”

One of the easiest ways to gain a preliminary understanding of Lacanian desire is by returning to the Freudian concepts of Trieb and sublimation.

For Freud, sublimation is the typical means by which Trieb adapts itself to the constraints and obstacles it comes to encounter at the level of the reality principle. Reality forbids certain drive-aims qua the attainment of satisfaction linked to determinate drive-objects. Thus, reality is said to be responsible for what Freud designates as ‘aim-inhibition’ (a catalyst for sublimation). 413

The aim-inhibited drive then seeks other forms of satisfaction via different objects; and, if these alternate modes of securing gratifcation are not at odds with the various prohibitions of the reality principle (usually, socio-cultural laws and norms), then the new libidinal arrangement is dubbed a successful sublimation of the drive.

However, especially in the later texts of the second topography, Freud repeatedly emphasizes that Trieb is ‘fundamentally conservative’, that drives unceasingly seek to recover their earliest forms of satisfaction. Furthermore, in, for example, Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that ‘instinctual renunciation’ (i.e., the aim-inhibition of the drives demanded by human reality) is, despite appearances to the contrary, an unavoidable libidinal fate for all subjects

As such, the Freudian subject lives in a state of unsatisfactory compromise: sublimation provides pleasurable outlets for Trieb, but Trieb itself is incapable of ever being fully satisfied with these compromises, since they are, by the very definition of the mechanism of sublimation, deviations from the original cathetic trajectory (i.e., the ‘earliest state of affairs’ which all drives struggle in vain to recover; in the seventh seminar, Lacan designates this posited ‘ground zero’ of the libidinal economy das Ding).

The libidinal life of the human being is therefore marked by certain constitutive ‘lacks’ or ‘absences’—as Lacan puts it, the ‘sovereign Good’ of das Ding is always missing from the reality of subjective ‘ex-sistence’ — and this condition of (non-)existence is precisely what Lacan intends for his notion of ‘desire’ to designate.

Desire is the residual remainder/by-product of the subjection of jouissance (i.e., Trieb an sich, the unconditional attachment to das Ding) to the ego-mediated negotiations between the pleasure and reality principles.

Das Ding
But where does this take us? Is the Law the Thing? Certainly not. Yet I can only know of the Thing by means of the Law.

In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet it if the Law hadn’t said: ‘Thou shalt not covet it.’ But the Thing finds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. (Lacan, Book VII, p. 83).

zizek copjec lefort balibar bhabba borch-jacobsen 1992

Conference Review: The Buffalo Symposium on Literature & Psychoanalysis that took play in MAY 1992.

By Jonathan Elmer (And here is Joan Copjec’s paper if you click here)

I don’t know whether this has been the case in each of the seventeen years SUNY Buffalo has been hosting these events, but this year’s Buffalo Symposium in Literature & Psychoanalysis was really structured like a symposium: that is, because there were no concurrent panels, no shuttling in and out of Frangipani and Cedar Rooms, no schlepping to entirely different hotels, it felt as if all the events were meant for all the participants. Continue reading “zizek copjec lefort balibar bhabba borch-jacobsen 1992”

badiou encounter

Interview with Alain Badiou: ‘People cling onto identities… it is a world opposed to the encounter’ By Clement Petitjean, 14 April 2014

What is an encounter?

It is a contingent, chance element of existence. Something happens to you that nothing among your existing world’s points of reference made likely or necessary. You encounter someone who you do not know and yet who strikes you, attracts you, enters into your life.

In your book In Praise of Love, you say, in substance, that there is no encounter without risk…

For it to be a genuine encounter, we must always be able to assume that it is the beginning of a possible adventure. You cannot demand an insurance contract with whomever it is that you have encountered.

Since the encounter is incalculable, if you try to reduce this insecurity then you destroy the encounter itself, that is to say, accepting someone entering into your life as a complete person. It is precisely this that distinguishes the encounter from libertinism.

And the encounter, you always say, supposes construction

I say that with regard to what follows from the encounter. It must, indeed, give rise to shared consequences, shared innovations. And this construction cannot be left to pure chance, because it is formed of a whole series of decisions.

‘The encounter is a beginning. But the beginning of what? It is at the point of acceptance: Accepting or refusing what is happening to you’

But right from the outset, the encounter is not, for you, an experience…

Improbability distinguishes it from an ordinary experience. When the encounter happens to you, when you have the very strong feeling that it is happening to you, there is a phenomenon of attraction or repulsion – sometimes the two are mixed – toward what has disturbed the rhythm of your existence.

Experience, for its part, can perfectly well fit within your work or family activities, whereas the encounter is a beginning. But the beginning of what? It is at the point of acceptance: accepting or refusing what is happening to you.

To take the example of an amorous encounter, the whole problem lies in knowing whether to declare it or not. People speak of a declaration of love. The encounter has to be declared, that is, accepted.

That being the condition for its real existence?

Yes. A person found themselves there at the same time as you were, you exchanged glances, something happened. But unless it is uttered, declared, ratified, the encounter remains in suspense.

Why is philosophy not so concerned with the encounter?

There is a deep historical reason for that. To simplify things, we could say that since its origins philosophy has been divided into two main orientations. The rationalist one, based on the development of the sciences, which proposes that there is an explanation for everything. And the empiricist one, which proposes that everything relates to some experience.

So we find ourselves caught between a logic of necessity and a logic of experiences. But the encounter is reducible neither to rationality, nor experience, but represents an element of contingency, and philosophy has no love for contingency. We must, therefore, accept that some things occur within existence that are neither calculable nor experienced. That something happens…

Yes, what is it that happens?

The need to choose. You are constrained, you must accept what happens or else you will alienate, obscure and refuse it.

Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and the first existentialist, saw this link between chance and the need to choose. The miracle of the encounter is this paradoxical conjunction between the pure exterior – a person whom I encounter – and pure interiority – the consequences that I must draw by myself…

Is it really a miracle? Is there not a savoir-faire of the encounter: that is, some people are better at it than others?

That is its ‘rationalisable’ side, where the sites of encounter tend to make up a sort of popular savoir-faire. You only engage in the encounter with the right person, with the person who will reduce the margin of insecurity to the minimum. But are these encounters?

The pick-up artist who knows how to attract attention to himself probably only takes on the most minimal consequences of the encounter, which risks just being an experience, indeed an asymmetrical one. A person who has savoir-faire is in control; whereas the person who believes it is an encounter, but then realises that it is an experience, suffers.

‘There must be some disposition towards openness, the virtue of accepting that something is happening that you had not foreseen’

But if such ‘savoir-faire’ is placed to one side, then does that not mean that we need special qualities to be happy in the encounter?

There must be some disposition towards openness, thus a fundamental relation of confidence. And moreover, bizarrely, a passive faculty, a sort of virtue – to use an old-fashioned word – the virtue of accepting that something is happening that you had not foreseen.

Today it is interest in the amorous encounter that predominates. Was this always the case?

It has often been said that the Greek world was the world of friendship… I am a little troubled by this retrospective vision according to which the ancient Greeks had the serene world of friendship and the Christian West the impassioned world of love. It is an intellectual construct, elaborated by Denis de Rougement in his late 1930s work L’Amour et l’Occident. In reality, there was love even in Homer’s Iliad: Hector and Andromache are a magnificent couple.

Do the different types of encounter – be they amorous, political or artistic – obey the same rules?

There are some important differences. For example, my main political encounter is probably more an encounter with collective situations rather than with individuals. Similarly, the artistic encounter is the hold that some type of organised imaginary exerts on you. But the common element is always this feeling that ‘this is happening to you’. A novel that changes you, is something that you have to deal with, even if later your taste changes and you ask yourself ‘why did I like this book when I was younger?’, exactly as Proust’s hero asks himself why he loved a woman who ‘wasn’t his type’…

Are we in an epoch favourable to the encounter, or not?

On the one hand, the field of possibility for the encounter is widening, because of our means of transport and communication. On the other hand, as always, this enlargement comes at the cost of a ‘loss of intensity’. Encounters are so easy and numerous that the intensity of the change that we could accept as a result is no longer the same as it once was. We introduce a set of precautions: I will take someone sufficiently similar to me that I can hope to go along with this person while myself remaining exactly the same. This is a tendency of the contemporary world, to introduce a false variety within a vast sameness.

‘I dream of a world where encounters are less coded by the social, professional, cultural and linguistic universes’

Are these not encounters?

No, these are mere consumption. Since the hidden model of all this is the market. You are offered a range of products that change all the time, but always remain the same. Consumption is, in its very essence, repetitive. You can change your ‘type’ of woman, without necessarily needing an encounter.

And the encounter that stays at the virtual stage?

The distinction between the virtual and the real never struck me as being of capital importance. After all, we can have great encounters in the forms of absence, abstinence or virtuality. We can have a love that remains even at a great distance. Heloise and Abelard or Tristan and Isolde are myths, but they indicate that the instances of loving fidelity are extremely varied. We have considerable loyalty for the absent just as we have considerable dishonesty toward the present.

Is it true that we more and more ‘stick to our own kind’?

There are very rigid social divisions that are not of recent vintage. In the nineteenth century, a young daughter of the bourgeoisie did not encounter the worker in the street: she never even saw him. But transgressions are always possible. The most beautiful of Conrad’s novels revolve around this, an English adventurer’s love for a Malayan, and its novelistic substance is to show the intensity of this, even though faced with a slim chance of success. I dream of a world where encounters are less coded by the social, professional, cultural and linguistic universes. If I can allow myself to use a word that is no longer in fashion: less coded by class barriers.

‘The current regression is spectacular. Its tendency is to create micro-milieux, in the image of American society, namely as a collection of ghettoes’

Are they not in fact being accentuated?

Yes. I lived through the late ‘60s to mid-‘70s period, we met a huge number of people whom we would never have met beforehand; and, alas, nor would we do so afterwards. To speak to people who did not have the same culture as us absolutely did not prevent us doing projects together, back then. The current regression is spectacular. Its tendency is not to create mass, class solidarity, but micro-milieux, a type of marquetry, in the image of American society, namely as a collection of ghettoes.

Are we threatened by this in France?

Since commodities are the principal motor of society, each person is called to appear before the market as a subject-consumer. In correlation with this, people fall back on identities, since to be drowned in this abstract world as an individual is a nightmare, wandering without end. So we cling onto family, provincial, national, linguistic and religious identities. Identities that are available to us because they refer back to the dawn of time. It is a world opposed to the encounter, a world of defensive retreat.

A world of the Right, whereas the world of the encounter would be a world of the Left?

I fear that the audacity of the Left does not go very far… It makes so many concessions to the identitarian retreat, to the privatisation of everything. For the people of the nineteenth century, Marx first among them, internationalism was a key notion, one that they opposed to wars and national egoism.

‘Internationalism seems, to me, a value of capital importance if we do not want to be devoured by aggressive identities…’

But this internationalism is constructed against an enemy, the class enemy…

Of course! I am not fanatical about the idea of class that once had a considerable rigidity about it; but internationalism seems, to me, even more than in the nineteenth century, a value of capital importance if we do not want to be devoured by aggressive identities…

So what, ultimately, is an enemy?

Someone who thinks that the world is excellent just as it is now, and that it must continue down the same road.

Is the encounter with an enemy interesting?

It is always interesting to make the contradictions public – as rationally as possible. Above all if your adversary is prepared to debate them without relying on invective. It is like theatre, which has a didactic role…

Was encountering Alain Finkielkraut, as you did in your book L’Explication, an encounter with an enemy?

No, because he does not think that the world is excellent just as it is now and that it must continue down the same road. On the contrary, he is passionately attached to Third Republic-era [1870-1940] schooling. He has this passion, it is honourable, I do not blame him for it: my four grandparents were teachers! So our head-to-head was something of a piece of theatre, with each of us playing his role as a presumed adversary.

And I was really struck, I must admit, through the twists and turns of our dialogue, by two points that attest to the truth of our encounter. The first was a form of patriotism that, in the last analysis, I share with him: I love France, its history – the Revolution, the Paris Commune, the Resistance, May ’68 – in sum, the famous France of the rights of man, such as it continues to be viewed abroad.

And I suffer its actual state, defensive and tired, its lack of political inventiveness, which I can clearly see that Finkielkraut also suffers, though in my view for mistaken reasons…

The second point of mutual understanding was our common recognition that we exist in a world where there are many factors to make intellectuals melancholic. The difference between us is that while Alain Finkielkraut never stops looking for these factors, I for my part try to combat them.

How so?

In directing my attention toward amorous encounters, small political experiences, people of whose existence I am glad, and new works of art. It is not true that society is sterile and empty, even if I am not content with the turn that things have taken. It is a question of encounters. I have always had the impression that Finkielkraut exaggeratedly limits the possible terrain of his encounters.

‘Contrary to what Finkielkraut says, you have an encounter based on what you are, not by making a void within yourself’

Alain Finkielkraut says, in your regard, that ‘As not to exclude anyone, you would have to make a void within yourself, pluck out any substance of your own, and be nothing else, in the last analysis, than the very gesture of opening out to others’…

But I never said that no one should be excluded: and we do have enemies! Contrary to what Finkielkraut says, you have an encounter based on what you are, not by making a void within yourself.

He has at least convinced me of one thing: the ideological-political front dividing humanity today does not lie between those who have a melancholic vision of the country (like him) and those who try to have a more creative vision of it (like me). But rather, between those who consider the present state of things excellent, feeling perfectly at ease with it and making propaganda for it, and everyone else…

Is there not also another form of ‘front line’, connected to each person’s intellectual laziness?

We are talking about the ‘external’ enemy, but if you want also to address the ‘internal’ enemy, then yes, of course! Many people barricade themselves within their ignorance of a number of matters, not wanting to have to know – they have a ‘passion for ignorance’, as one of my teachers, Lacan, put it.

In Jean-Luc Godard’s Film socialisme you give a talk in front of… no one!

It is an allegory… Jean-Luc Godard spent a long time telling me that he planned to film me like that. He wanted this sequence to express the idea that on this ship symbolising consumer society, I was a dissident, solitary figure…

Can an author or a philosopher transform your existence?

Of course! The person who most altered my existence was Sartre, to whom I was subsequently very disloyal. In final year high school science class my intention was to become an inspector of forests and lakes – my future was very clear and planned-out. And then I read L’Imaginaire, then Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions, then Being and Nothingness. And I reoriented myself, from the sciences towards letters: it was an overwhelming encounter.

Which artists were decisive encounters, for you?

In the field of poetry, Mallarmé taught me that the power of art hangs on the notion of the event: to think and formalise what happens as it happens, and not as it is. As for music, I learnt from Haydn that you can create extraordinary effects from very little material, using limited and almost banal ‘cells’ of music. This made me used to seeking the extraordinary within the ordinary. As for the visual arts, Tintoretto showed me how a painter can grasp the boldest monumentality of something coming to being, as it is happening.

Different epochs privilege certain types of encounters. For example, we hardly ever speak of mystical encounters. What do you think of these?

Saint Teresa of Avila or Saint John of the Cross had a profound conviction – substituting for the real – of an amorous fusion and an absolute encounter. And I think that these were authentic encounters, even if I think that maybe God does not exist.

Then again, to introduce such a conception within worldly love – wanting it to fuse with some ideal archetype – seems dangerous and negative, to me. This leads to something that I do not like much at all: the cult of a supposed feminine transcendence, which we find in German romanticism and was propagated right up until the Surrealists. The last sentence of Goethe’s Faust, ‘The eternal feminine/Draws us on high’ is, for me, a very problematic sentiment. It transposes the mystical order within a terrestrial order that is in part a rebellion against it.

‘Everything is pushing toward an atomisation of society, composed of free consumers who above all else seek the objects that interest them on the world market’

What do you think of a recent study by the Fondation de France reporting that four million French people suffer from loneliness?

The paradigm of the contemporary world is the consumer. Its target, as they say… And objects do not bring you out of loneliness.

But the market has not destroyed the encounter – it is not as powerful as that!

Thank God! You are speaking to an optimist, I have never thought that the market destroyed sociability. Such a catastrophist vision belonged far more to my colleague Jean Baudrillard. There do exist solidarities, encounters, artistic productions: I do not at all have a nihilist vision. But I do see that everything is pushing toward an atomisation of society, composed of free consumers who above all else seek the objects that interest them on the world market.

So the encounter is under threat?

Absolutely. On the cruise ship in Godard’s Film socialisme, there were three thousand people. And I can tell you, they were very lonely.

seminar XI

From Gallagher’s notes on Lacan’s Seminar XI 4 Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

The unconscious is an effect of language

It is only in the interaction between the living being, the inchoate subject, and the symbolic that the unconscious is constituted.

Much of the current Seminar is taken up with the role of the Vorstellungsrepresentanz, the representative of a representation

But what Lacan chooses to emphasise in his summary is the notion of the unconscious as a temporal pulsation which appears to be more primary than its linguistic structuring.

Now, in practice, what does that mean? In practice that means that the unconscious opens and closes, there is a temporal pulsation and you can see this concretely anytime you listen to somebody speaking, especially in an analytic session.

Somebody said to me no later than yesterday – he is complaining about the fact that he is being dominated by his female partner that ‘the terms of the relationship are always dictated to by Mary’. The intrusion of the little word ‘to’ is a manifestation of another discourse intervening here.

For a moment something opens and then closes to produce a disturbance of the preconscious organisation that governs his speech and it is there that as an analyst you are called on to intervene by revealing to the subject in his own speech something about his position of which he knew nothing – his own dictatorial stance with regard to his female partners. The intervention has to be a punctual one.

The unconscious, as Lacan says, is never going to be a tourist attraction because it is always just closing when you get there.

It is a commonplace in analysis to say that traumatic experiences are repeated, but trauma is precisely defined as what could not be mastered or assimilated or understood. In other words it is around what has failed to achieve a representation, a Vorstellung, that your history revolves.

… let me rather take a simple example from Freud’s Irma dream to which we already referred. Freud is told by a colleague that he is not doing a good job with Irma and he has the sort of reaction of annoyanace that any one of us might have but as he says ‘my disagreeable impression was not clear to me’.

Now that, I believe, is the missed encounter. It is what you cannot put your finger on in a particular situation that evokes one of the missed encounters that have structured your existence, a repetition that puts you in touch with the reality of that lack and gives rise to a desire that in Freud’s case gave rise to the dream that inaugurated psychoanalysis.

Transference, Lacan describes in this Seminar, as something that begins once there is a subject who is supposed to know. As such it is not limited to the analytic situation. If you think that your mother knows everything about your life then there is transference in this sense.

Analysis begins when the person enters into a transference with the analyst and if that does not occur, if the person does not assume, does not presume that you know then they do not come to talk to you and if they do come, they do not stay.

But the crucial moment in the development of the transference is when the presumption of knowledge is transformed into a love, a deceptive love which results in the closure of the unconscious.

Lacan spent a dozen or more sessions in the Seminar on Transference talking about the way, for example, in which Socrates was first approached by his disciples as the one who knew and then became an object of their love.

This transference love was seen by Freud from the beginning as the main agent of change in analysis. This love is deceptive because like all love it is esssentially narcissistic.

It is the assumption that what I am lacking you have and that you as my beloved can make up for what I am lacking. Tn persuading the other that he has what can complement us we assure ourselves of being able to continue to misunderstand what precisely we lack’.

In this Seminar Lacan modifies both the notion of repetition and the notion of transference and distinguishes them from one another. He would say that that notion of transference as simply repetition of a previous situation is a way for the analyst of disavowing his place in the transference and laying the whole responsibility for transference reactions on the shoulders of the analysand.

On the contrary Lacan emphasises that the desire of the analyst is much more a factor in the way the transference develops than the predispositions that the patient brings to the analysis.

For Lacan, Descartes anticipated Freud in his search not for knowledge but for certainty. Descartes subverted all knowledge by his methodical doubt and was left with only the certainty of a subject of thinking from whom all other qualities had been stripped.

Psychoanalysis gives this denuded subject at least the quality of being a desirer transforming the Cartesian Cogito into a Freudian Desidero.

But Freud is a true successor to Descartes when he writes to the Hegelian Putnam: ‘I have never been concerned with any comprehensive synthesis but with certainty alone’ and Lacan states quite categorically that it is certainty rather than hypotheses that should guide the interventions of the psychoanalyst.

The analyst is not the possessor of a general knowledge which is then applied to particular cases. The dictum of Picasso: ‘I do not search, I find’ is quoted approvingly by Lacan.

The analyst is not to construct theories about the subject who is speaking to him, he is there to hear and to reveal to that subject the incontrovertible signifiers which appear concretely in his spoken discourse.

[…]

Mathematics and logic will in fact come to counterbalance linguistics as the second major reference point for Lacan in his continuing attempts to give a scientific status to psychoanalysis and only those of the old guard who were willing to advance into this new territory continued to play an active role in his School.

His analysis of alienation and separation, which curiously is not mentioned here – goes well beyond the popular understanding which applied the concept to almost every social situation in which the individual could not do his or her own thing.

For Lacan the living being is necessarily faced with an alienating choice once they begin to use language. Your money or your life, your alienation in language or your autistic isolation – to become a human being a price must always be paid.

The only way in which we can conquer the little freedom that is open to us is by coming to the realisation that even in the discourse of the Big Other there are gaps which bear witness to a lack and to a desire.

boothby objet a

Boothby, R. (2001) Freud as Philosopher. New York: Routledge. Reprinted Figurations of the Objet a. In Jacques Lacan Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory Volume II Philosophy Edited by Slavoj Zizek, London: Routledge, 2003. pp. 159-191.

In toilet training, the anus is “colonized,” to invoke a happily apt pun, by the other’s desire.

Throughout the future life of the individual, the contractions and relaxations of the anal muscle will inevitably call up immensely more global connotations of mastery or submission, independence or dependence. Taken up into this physiologico-emotional complex, the fecal material becomes freighted with significance that utterly outstrips all natural or animal attitudes toward excrement. In accord with a symbolic equivalence already familiar to Freud, the feces become privileged tokens in an exchange of love — excrement as primordial gift.

Lacan extends this distinction between eye and gaze to propose a general theory of vision in which the act of seeing functions precisely to avoid the gaze.

He thus suggests that painting produces a “pacifying, Apollinian effect” that feeds the eye with reassuringly stable objects in order to allow the viewer to put the gaze out of play.

In painting, “something is given not so much to the gaze as to the eye, something that involves the abandonment, the laying down, of the gaze” (FFC, 101). How are we to understand this laying down of the gaze? The painter offers the picture to molify the gaze of the spectator, as if the gesture of painting were a matter of escaping from a predator by distracting it with a piece of meat.

The painter gives something to the person who must stand in front of his painting which, in part, at least, of the painting, might be summed up thus — You want to see? Well, take a look at this! he gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons. (Lacan, 101)

By referring the act of seeing to some third point off the axis of seer and seen, Lacan succeeds in revealing the internal complexity of the scopic drive. The third position, itself invisible yet functioning continually to reenergize the subject’s investment in the object of sight, is none other that the objet a.

Its presence-by-absence serves to produce “the ambiguity that affects anything that is inscribed in the register of the scopic drive” (FFC, 83). To illustrate this point, we can return to the example of the voyeur who, relentlessly goaded on by the scopic drive, is most completely reclaimed by the force of the drive precisely when he fails to see what he is looking for.

That is to say, as a search for the objet a, an object that by definition cannot be given, the scopic drive is most surely reinforced and recreated at the moment when it appears to draw closest to its objective, yet fails to grasp it.

It is as if this very failure is the evidence that the objet a is there. The point is perfectly demonstrated by the essential pose, the veritable sine qua non, of soft-core pornographic magazines: the so-called spread shot.

The centerpiece of this shot is the vulva spread wide for the camera to inspect. Seeking to explain the appeal of this defining image we might naively suppose that the spread shot satisfies insofar as it “shows all.” It leaves nothing to the imagination.

The viewer has finally won unimpeded visual access to the inner secret of the feminine. From a Lacanian point of view, however, the conclusion is exactly the opposite.

What attracts the scopic drive to the vaginal spread shot is precisely what it doesn’t show, to what in fact cannot be shown. The result of the “show all” strategy is to create even more intense hunger for the thing that cannot be imaged: the objet a.

The more you see, the less you find what you are really looking for. The “proof” of the Lacanian view lies in the compulsiveness with which the consumer of pornography moves from one girlie image to another, to another, and so on.

If the spread shot really succeeded in “showing all,” then one image would be enough. But the pornographic drive shows its real essence less in the excitement created by one image than by the insatiable hunger it generates for yet another image.

The enormous commercial potency of pornography derives in part from the fact that it succeeds in continually restimulating the very hunger it promises to satisfy.

The investment of interest in pornography depends upon the subject’s relation to something that ceaselessly escapes the roving, lustful eye, some moment of ultimate satisfaction that is continually promised but never fully given.

In this way, the example of the pornographic image shows very well what Lacan means by saying that the objet a is not the aim of the drive but rather the perpetually eccentric point around which the drive revolves.

The point of crucial theoretical importance in all of this concerns the way in which the objet a irrecoverably triangulates the subject’s relation to the aim of the drive.

The Lacanian gaze is thus understandable only in the triadic structure of desire, the Oedipal structure in which the subject is faced with the question of the Other’s desire.

In the actual experience of the Oedipal stage, the experience of the gaze begins to unfold when the mother no longer simply presents an image to the child but is seen to be looking for something herself, the moment when the suspicion dawns that the mother’s desire is directed beyond the child itself to some third position.

Said otherwise, the gaze is one of the prime figures in which the imaginary relation opens out upon a symbolic horizon.

It is by virtue of its capacity to excite an experience of this dimension of the gaze, precisely through preventing the analysand from seeing the eyes of the analyst, that psychoanalysis sets up the special force field of the transference.

Its place will come to be occupied by the entirety of the symbolic order. In the place of the gaze, the subject will come to experience the call of the signifier.

Correlatively, it is a certain suspension or avoidance of the gaze that founds the entirety of the imaginary register, both the ego and its objects. This elision of the gaze is the very essence of imaginary méconnaissance

johnston objet a seminar 1965-66 pt2

Johnston, A. (2013).The object in the mirror of genetic transcendentalism: Lacan’s objet petit a between visibility and invisibility Continental Philosophy Review. 46:251–269 Here is Part 1

In the Ur-event of identification, the primal scene of mirroring, the child’s entranced enchantment by the power-and-salvation-promising image in the shiny surface leaves him/her blind to the surrounding framing functions — these functions include the looks, gestures, speech, and various expressions of interest in the body of the child by its supporting big(ger) Others — responsible for constituting (invisibly off-stage, as it were) this visuallymediated experience as what it appears to be. Lacan’s list of spatio-temporally incarnate instances of object a (again, breast, feces, phallus, gaze, and voice) makes a
lot of sense in this connection. Continue reading “johnston objet a seminar 1965-66 pt2”

silverman libido

Silverman, K. (2008). Moving beyond the Politics of Blame Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In: Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism. Edited by Greg Forter and Paul Allen Miller, pp. 123-146.

Moral sadism is my name for the erotically charged pleasure we derive when we are
able to treat someone else in the way that our super-ego usually treats us.

The super-ego is created through the introjection of the paternal law—the
voice that says “thou shall not commit murder,” and backs up this prohibition
with the threat of punishment.

But no sooner is it created than it begins to measure us against the standard of the ego-ideal and to berate us for our failure to approximate it.

Because the super-ego reaches deep into the unconscious, it is also able to ferret out desires that are so deeply repressed that we do not even know that we have them.

Cruelly, it refuses to distinguish between them and the desires that we act upon; as far as it is concerned, the unconscious wish to commit murder is murder. And since the super-ego’s life-blood is aggression, the more we resist the temptation to direct ours outwards, the more violently it treats us.

No one can tolerate this pressure forever. Sooner or later, we all succumb to the temptation to rid ourselves of it by re-exteriorizing our aggression.

Now, however, we no longer recognize it as aggression, because it has been “sanitized” by its detour through the super-ego. We are not injuring others; we are — rather — protecting the oppressed, and punishing their oppressors.

We are more in need of psychoanalysis today than we ever have been before, not just as a therapeutic practice and a powerful hermeneutic, but also as a corrective to the dangerous fantasy that if human beings try hard enough, they can achieve absolute “goodness.”

We also need to make room in our politics for the messiness of human desire, both because blame is an atomizing force, and because, in spite of all of its ambivalence, it is within Eros that our transformative potential resides.

Our best guide in this domain is not, I suggest, Freud or Lacan, but rather James Agee, a leftist writer who looks at the problem of Southern poverty from the dual vantage point of psychoanalysis and his own mortal and guilty subjectivity. The resulting book—his and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—not only takes the blame out of leftist politics, it also replaces it with something that isn’t “supposed” to be there: libido.

[Beethoven Seventh 7th Symphony, Schubert C-Major Symphony.

shepherdson antigone

Shepherdson, C. (2009). Antigone: The Work of Literature and the History of Subjectivity. In: Bound by the City: Greek tragedy, sexual difference, and the formation of the polis edited by Denise Eileen McCoskey and Emily Zakin, pp. 47-80.

Lacan insists that Creon’s fault is not a “personal” or “psychological” one, a failure of judgement, or a vaguely Christianized “sing of pride,” or a “fear of femininity” (which is not to say that ancient Greece was not a misogynistic culture or that such psychological issues are entirely irrelevant to tragic drama).

Rather than emphasizing Creon’s individual psychology and his conspicuous egotism (“I won’t be beaten by a woman,” etc.), as one might expect the psychoanalyst to do, Lacan insists that Creon’s mistake is to impose a law at the level of univerality, what Lacan calls a “good that would rule over all,” legislating over “friends and enemies,”

in contrast to Antigone’s radical adherence to a form of singularity, her “irrational attachment to the “unsubstitutable” Polyneices, who (unlike a husband or children, as she says) is singular and “irreplaceable,” which is to say, outside any general law, outside “writing” and the discourse of universals, detached from the level of the “concept” that governs so many Hegelian and post-Hegelian readings, dominated as they are by “family” and “state,” “man” and “woman.”

Lacan thus claims, rightly in my view, that Antigone cannot be positioned in the usual Hegelian way as representing a principle or law that is dialectically opposed to Creon’s law, but rather that

her desire is of another order from the level of the concept and universality that captures Creon’s position.

This critique of the Hegelian frame is extremely useful, especially insofar as it detaches Antigone from the position of “protest” commonly ascribed to her, in which one law (family or blood) is opposed to another law (that of the state and universality), as I have argued elsewhere,

but the opposition between “universality” and “singularity,” which has been central to Lacanian readings of the play (largely guided by Lacan’s account of sexual difference in Encore, where the universal law of masculinity is contrasted with a feminine refusal of totality), in that it construes Creon’s position from the standpoint of the Kantian universal, is also dubious.

Lacan is much too quick in appplying an explicitly Kantian formula to Creon’s position on the “moral law,” for it is quite clear, as Stephen Gill has pointed out in convincing detail, that the Kantian notion of a moral will determined by a universal law is simply nowhere on the horizon of Greek culture.

Such an emphasis on moral universality obscures not only Creon’s self-aggrandizement but also the entire horizon of ethical thought that distinguishes the ancient world from that of Kantianism.

See Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. For the critique of Kantianism as inappropriately imposed on ancient thought, see Gill, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy and Philosophy, … For Lacanian readings of Antigone, see Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (2000), Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (2003). See also Charles Shepherson, “Of Love and Beauty in Lacan’s Antigone,” in Lacan and the Limits of Language (2008).

wallon in boothby

Henri Wallon Key figure who studied the development of self-awareness in small children.

Far from constituting a closed system, the infant is devoid of internal cohesion and quite unable to exercise the least control over even the most fortuitous influences. The newborn’s behavior displays only discrete and sporadic reactions that achieve no more than the elimination, by whatever pathways may be available at the time, of tensions deriving either from organic sources or from external stimuli. . . . Here is a being whose every reaction has to be completed, supplemented, and interpreted. As he is unable to do anything for himself, he is manipulated by others, and it is through the movements of others that his first attitudes will take shape.

The imago of the fellow human being functions to provide coordination in the midst of the infant’s internal anarchy, to produce homogeneity out of an original heterogeneity, to establish organization in the field of a primal discord.

Stavrakakis Saussure

From Yannis Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political

Lacan starts his exploration of structural linguistics with the founding stone of modern
linguistics, the concept of the sign. For Saussure, language is a formal system which is
constructed on the basis of pure difference:

In the language itself there are only differences (Saussure, 1983:118).

The content of a word is not determined by what it contains but by what exists outside it. The value of a concept is purely differential: concepts are defined negatively by contrast with other items in the same linguistic system.

Accordingly, defining one unit demands taking into account the whole structure of language, a structure that classical structuralism accepts as a closed system — this closure will later on be disputed and deconstructed by poststructuralism.

But Saussure retains the concept of difference as applicable only to the levels of the signifier (the ‘sound pattern’) and the signified (the ‘concept’) when viewed independently from one another.

Viewed together they produce something positive: the sign.

Lacan is not keen in retaining this isomorphism characteristic of the Saussurean schema … there is no isomorphism between the two domains, that of the signifier and that of the signified.

Saussure, despite his efforts to avoid such a development, appears to be reintroducing a representationalist conception of signification.

In Saussure, the distinction between signifier and signified can be described as “a relic, within a theory allergic to it, of a representationalist problematic of the sign” (Borch-Jacobsen, 1991:175).

It is clear that Lacan’s reformulation of Saussurean linguistics moves beyond any such kind of representationalism. Lacan articulates a refined position which seems to take into account the critique of the Saussurean idea of the arbitrariness of the sign.

For Saussure, arbitrariness is a defining characteristic of the relation between signifier and signified, a relation which is conceived as alien to any kind of natural connection. It is this idea of the absence of any natural connection that puzzles Benveniste.

If by signified we mean the concept and not the referent (as Saussure was keen to point out from the beginning) then what is the meaning of Saussure’s statement that there is no natural connection between the two domains? Why would one think something like that?

It is clear that the argument is falsified by an unconscious and surreptitious recourse to a third term which was not included in the initial definition. This third term is the thing itself, reality.

Even though Saussure said that the idea of ‘sister’ is connected to the signifier s-ö-r, he was not thinking any the less of the reality of the notion. When he spoke of the difference between b-ö-f and o-k-s, he was referring in spite of himself to the fact that these two terms applied to the same reality. Here, then, is the thing, expressly excluded at first from the definition of the sign, now creeping into it by detour, and permanently installing a contradiction there.

This contradiction is never resolved in Saussure’s work, since the problem of external reality is never elaborated in length.

There is a certain realist representationalism still haunting Saussure’s work or some of its many applications: between the lines it seems to be presupposed that the signified precedes the emergence of the signifier which is there only in order to express and communicate it; meaning springs from the signified to the signifier; language is conceived as standing in for or as being identical with the real world.

As Derrida has put it, in such a schema, not only do signifier and signified seem to unite, but in this confusion, the signifier seems to be erased or to become transparent so as to let the concept [a concept linked to external reality] present itself, just as if it were referring to nothing but its own presence. (Derrida, 1981:32-3)

For Lacan, a theory of meaning founded on a recourse to some kind of referent, to a supposedly accessible order of objective reality, is clearly insufficient.

Lacanian theory offers a tentative solution to this problem by subverting the relation between the signifier and the signified.

Instead of the unity between the signifier and the signified, Lacan stresses their division; if unity prioritises the signified, division gives priority to the signifier over the production of the signified, a production which only now becomes fully elucidated.

Thus, although starting from a Saussurean angle, Lacan draws a very different distinction between signifier and signified from that of Saussure. What is most important here is that, although this second order interacts historically on the first, it is the structure of the first that governs the direction of the second

Tthis position will be further radicalised in the course of Lacan’s teaching. In “Agency of the Letter” (1957) Lacan makes a crucial move with reference to the Saussurean algorithm, which he presents as S/s.

Here, the signifier (S) is located over the signified (s), this ‘over’ corresponding to the bar separating them, a barrier resisting signification.

This barrier is exactly what makes possible “an exact study of the connections proper to the signifier, and of the extent of their function in the genesis of the signified” (E: 149).

If the dominant factor here is the bar which disrupts the unity of the Saussurean sign, then the unity of signification can only be an illusion.

What creates this illusion (the effect of the signified) is the play of the signifiers: “the signifier alone guarantees the theoretical coherence of the whole as a whole” (E: 126).

In Lacan’s schema then, the signifier is not something which functions as a representation of the signified; nor is the meaning of the algorithm S/s that there is a parallelism between the two levels, between that of the signifier and that of the signified.

Simply put, meaning is produced by signifiers; it springs from the signifier to the signified and not vice versa (as argued by realist representationalism).

It is this idea that Lacan captures with his famous example of the toilet doors. In this case the signified — loosely defined as external reality — is the same — two identical doors presumably leading to two identical toilets.

What creates the different meaning in each case, what creates the difference between the ladies’ toilet and the gentlemen’s toilet is the different signifier, that is to say the fact that each door carries a different label (‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’).

The signifier manifests the presence of difference and nothing else, making impossible any connection between signs and things.

In other words, reference to signs implies a reference to things as guarantees of signification, something which Saussure himself was ultimately unable to avoid, while the notion of the primacy of the signifier breaks with such representationalist connotations.

If an intuitive theory of meaning is usually based on a ‘picturing’ or denotative schema, as exhibited in the Augustinian picture of language according to which words signify objects, Lacan clearly subverts this simplistic theory.

At this point, however, it is crucial to avoid a common misconception. This subversion is not effected through the elimination of the structural position of the signified.

What happens then to the signified in the Lacanian schema?

Lacan understands the signified as an effect of transference. If we speak about the signified it is only because we like to believe in its existence.

It is a belief crucial for our construction of reality as a coherent, ‘objective’ whole; a belief in something that guarantees the validity of our knowledge, sustaining the fantasy of an adaequatio between language and the world.

But for Lacan, as he argues in his seminar on The Psychoses (1955-6), even “the transference of the signified, so essential to human life, is possible only by virtue of the structure of the signifier” (III:226).

Put another way, “the supposed realism of describing the real by details is only conceivable in the register of an organized signifier the formal articulation of the signifier predominates with respect to transference of the signified” (III:229).

Lacan then is radicalising the semiological idea, implicit in Saussure and expressed by Barthes, that “it appears increasingly more difficult to conceive a system of images and objects whose signifieds can exist independently of language”.

The world of signifieds is none other than that of language (Barthes, 1973:10).

The signified is never a full presence constituted outside language. Lacan’s radicalisation, however, entails the definitive break with the isomorphism between signifier and signified and a refined resolution of the problem of external reality.

The archimedian point of his solution is the following: the symbolic is not the order of the sign, as in Saussurean linguistics, but the order of the signifier.

Meaning is produced by the signifier: It’s the signifier that creates the field of meanings. (III:292).

sharpe on lacan

Information on Jacques Lacan in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
June 2005
Matthew Sharpe Email: matthew.sharpe_at_dewr.gov.au University of Melbourne Australia

Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was born in Paris on April 13 1901 to a family of solid Catholic tradition, and was educated at a Jesuit school. After completing his baccalauréat he commenced studying medicine and later psychiatry.

In 1927, Lacan commenced clinical training and began to work at psychiatric institutions, meeting and working with (amongst others) the famous psychiatrist Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault. His doctoral thesis, on paranoid psychosis, was passed in 1932.

In 1934, he became a member of La Societe Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP), and commenced an analysis lasting until the outbreak of the war. During the Nazi occupation of France, Lacan ceased all official professional activity in protest against those he called “the enemies of human kind.” Following the war, he rejoined the SPP, and it was in the post-war period that he rose to become a renowned and controversial figure in the international psychoanalytic community, eventually banned in 1962 from the International Psychoanalytic Association for his unorthodox views on the calling and practice of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s career as both a theoretician and practitioner did not end with this excommunication, however.

In 1963, he founded L’Ecole Freudienne de Paris (EFP), a school devoted to the training of analysts and the practicing of psychoanalysis according to Lacanian stipulations.

In 1980, having single-handedly dissolved the EFP, he then constituted the Ecole for “La Cause Freudienne,” saying: “It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian.” Lacan died in Paris on September 9, 1981.

Lacan’s first major theoretical publication was his piece “On the Mirror Stage as Formative of the I.” This piece originally appeared in 1936. Its publication was followed by an extended period wherein he published little.

In 1949, though, it was re-presented to wider recognition. In 1953, on the back of the success of his Rome dissertation to the SPP on “The Function and Field of Speech in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan then inaugurated the seminar series that he was to continue to convene annually (albeit in different institutional guises) until his death. It was in this forum that he developed and ceaselessly revised the ideas with which his name has become associated. Although Lacan was famously ambivalent about publication, the seminars were transcribed by various of his followers, and several have been translated into English. Lacan published a selection of his most important essays in 1966 in the collection Écrits.

Theoretical Project

Lacan’s avowed theoretical intention, from at least 1953, was the attempt to reformalize what he termed “the Freudian field.” His substantial corpus of writings, speeches and seminars can be read as an attempt to unify and reground what are the four interlinking aspirations of Freud’s theoretical writings: a theory of psychoanalytic practice as a curative procedure; the generation of a systematic metapsychology capable of providing the basis for the formalization of a diagnostic heuristic of mental illness; and the construction of an account of the development of the “civilized” human psyche.

Lacan brought to this project, however, a keen knowledge of the latest developments in the human sciences, drawing especially on structuralist linguistics, the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, topology, and game theory. Moreover, as Jacques Derrida has remarked, Lacan’s work is characterized by an engagement with modern philosophy (notably Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre) unmatched by other psychoanalytic theorists, especially informed by his attendance at Andre Kojeve’s hugely influential Paris lectures on Hegel from 1933-1939.

2. Lacan’s Philosophical Anthropology

a. The Mirror Stage

Lacan’s article “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I” (1936, 1949) lays out the parameters of a doctrine that he never foreswore, and which has subsequently become something of a post-structuralist mantra: namely, that human identity is “decentred.”

The key observation of Lacan’s essay concerns the behaviour of infants between the ages of 6 and 18 months. At this age, Lacan notes, children become capable of recognizing their
mirror image. This is not a dispassionate experience, either. It is a recognition that brings the child great pleasure.

For Lacan, we can only explain this “jubilation” as a testimony to how, in the recognition of its mirror-image, the child is having its first anticipation of itself as a unified and separate individual. Before this time, Lacan contends (drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic observation), the child is little more than a “body in bits and pieces,” unable to clearly separate I and Other, and wholly dependant for its survival (for a length of time unique in the animal kingdom) upon its first nurturers.

The implications of this observation on the mirror stage, in Lacan’s reckoning, are far-reaching. They turn around the fact that, if it holds, then the genesis of individuals’ sense of individuation can in no way be held to issue from the “organic” or “natural” development of any inner wealth supposed to be innate within them. The I is an Other from the ground up, for Lacan (echoing and developing a conception of the ego already mapped out in Freud’s Ego and Id). The truth of this dictum, as Lacan comments in “Aggressivity and Psychoanalysis,” is evident in infantile transitivity: that phenomenon wherein one infant hit by another yet proclaims: “I hit him!” and visa-versa. It is more simply registered in the fact that it remains a permanent possibility of adult human experience for us to speak and think of ourselves in the second or third person. What is decisive in these phenomena, according to Lacan, is that the ego is at base an object: an artificial projection of subjective unity modelled on the visual images of objects and others that the individual confronts in the world. Identification with the ego, Lacan accordingly maintains, is what underlies the unavoidable component of aggressivity in human behaviour especially evident amongst infants, and which Freud recognised in his Three Essays on Sexuality when he stressed the primordial ambivalence of children towards their love object(s) (in the oral phase, to love is to devour; in the anal phase, it is to master or destroy…).

b. Desire is the Desire of the Other

It is on the basis of this fundamental understanding of identity that Lacan maintained throughout his career that desire is the desire of the Other. What is meant by him in this formulation is not the triviality that humans desire others, when they sexually desire (an observation which is not universally true).

Again developing Freud’s theorization of sexuality, Lacan’s contention is rather that what psychoanalysis reveals is that human beings need to learn how and what to desire. Lacanian theory does not deny that infants are always born into the world with basic biological needs that need constant or periodic satisfaction.

Lacan’s stress, however, is that, from a very early age, the child’s attempts to satisfy these needs become caught up in the dialectics of its exchanges with others. Because its sense of self is only ever garnered from identifying with the images of these others (or itself in the mirror, as a kind of other), Lacan argues that it demonstrably belongs to humans to desire—directly—as or through another or others. We get a sense of his meaning when we consider such social phenomena as fashion. As the squabbling of children more readily testifies, it is fully possible for an object to become desirable for individuals because they perceive that others desire it, such that when these others’ desire is withdrawn, the object also loses its allure.

Lacan articulates this decentring of desire when he contends that what has happened to the biological needs of the individual is that they have become inseparable from, and importantly subordinated to, the vicissitudes of its demand for the recognition and love of other people.

Events as apparently “natural” as the passing or holding back of stool, he remarks in Écrits, become episodes in the chronicle of the child’s relationship with its parents, expressive of its compliance or rebellion. A hungry child may even refuse to eat food if it perceives that this food is offered less as a token of love than one of its parents’ dissatisfaction or impatience.

In this light, Lacan’s important recourse to game theory also becomes explicable. For game theory involves precisely the attempt to formalize the possibilities available to individuals in situations where their decisions concerning their wants can in principle both affect and be affected by the decisions of others. As Lacan’s article in the Écrits on the “Direction of the Treatment” spells out, he takes it that the analytic situation, as theorized by Freud around the notion of transference (see Part 2), is precisely such a situation.

In that essay, Lacan focuses on the dream of the butcher’s wife in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. The said “butcher’s wife” thought that she had had a dream which was proof of the invalidity of Freud’s theory that dreams are always encoded wish-fulfillments. As Freud comments, however, this dream becomes explicable when one considers how, after a patient has entered into analysis, her wishes are constructed (at least in part) in relation to the perceived wishes of the analyst.

In this case, at least one of the wishes expressed by the dream was the woman’s wish that Freud’s desire (for his theory to be correct) be thwarted. In the same way, Lacan details how the deeper unconscious wish expressed in the manifest content of the dream (which featured the woman attempting to stage a dinner party with only one piece of smoked salmon) can only be comprehended as the coded fulfilment of a desire that her husband would not fulfill her every wish, and leave her with an unsatisfied desire.

[to be continued]