logocentric – Page 14

fundamentalist

But are the terrorist fundamentalists really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the United States — the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the nonbelievers’ way of life.

If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by nonbelievers. Why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns.

He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the nonbelievers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. This is why the so-called fundamentalists of ISIS are a disgrace to true fundamentalism.

pluth logical time on badiou

Pluth, E. and Hoens, D. (2004) What if the Other is Stupid? Badiou and Lacan on ‘Logical Time’ In Think Again Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Edited by Peter Hallward. 182-190.

The enthusiast knows he or she is making claims that cannot be proved, but is courageous enough to proceed and is confident that the claim is true and that sufficient reasons for it will show up. The enthusiast is by definition modest. He or she has neither the modesty of someone who decides nothing (‘I cannot decide, there are not enough premises, I don’t have enough information, my knowledge is too limited’, etc.) nor the modesty of the fanatic who says that he or she is sure about a claim but that it is only a subjective point of view and that, of course, others may have another opinion (the contemporary, liberal ideology of tolerance, where everything is ‘an interesting opinion’).

The enthusiast is modest in making a claim precisely because of how he or she is positioned ‘on the way to’ truth. Or put differently, the enthusiast leaves the gap between the singular decision and a universal truth open until the situation changes in such a way that the singular can be universally assumed as ‘a given’.

Furthermore, the situation is limited by the way it is set up, and in particular by the fact that there are only two possibilities: either one is white or black. A’s entire reasoning process is based on these two possibilities. Whatever claim A then makes can already be verified within the terms of the situation.

While we have been trying to point out the similarities between Badiou’s theory of decision or intervention and the situation in ‘Logical Time’, the two don’t quite match, and the reason for this is very simple: there is no event in ‘Logical Time’. In the absence of an event, it is difficult to see what the act is based on.

Elsewhere in Badiou’s theory, of course, decisive acts, or truth-processes, are contingent upon events. By contrast, an event seems radically excluded from the situation of ‘Logical Time’, because there are only two signifiers, or two names, available (black or white), and they fully describe all the elements of the situation among which one has to choose.

Apart from these problems inherent to the situation described in ‘Logical Time’, the situation there does allow both Badiou and Lacan to show the importance of a singular moment of acting which precedes an intersubjective verification process.

This implies that the individual decision might be mistaken. What is important is what follows. Using the distinction between enthusiasm and fanaticism again, we see that there are two modes of acting: the enthusiast can enthusiastically make mistakes, but what will always differentiate the enthusiast from the fanatic is the way he or she fails.

The fanatic resembles a prisoner who might have learned the truth from a whisper in his ear by the prison warden. Like this prisoner, the fanatic does not go through the anxious moment of the act.

As Badiou formulates it, ‘only the intervener will know if there was something that happened’. A fanatic is not actually intervening, because he or she has not made a decision and therefore does not participate in a truth process.

Only someone who has decided can put a decision to the test. This reminds us of one of the commonly acknowledged features of enthusiasm: enthusiasm is contagious, it needs others with whom it can share its ‘divine insight’. The fanatic does not need others because in the end he or she is completely satisfied with a mystical union with supersensible truths.

Put in these terms, of course, no one would want to be a fanatic: fanaticism is pathological. Therefore, to avoid fanaticism, one might be inclined to think of the undecidable as something which ought to be preserved in its undecidability. The question then is whether such an advocate of the undecidable is really so very different from the fanatic.

Whereas the fanatic immediately embraces revelations that cannot be discussed, thereby negating the undecidable directly, the advocate of the undecidable would, in ‘Logical Time’, remain forever positioned in that uncomfortable, anxious moment of conclusion, never acceding to a process of verification, in fear of doing injustice to the truth-moment of anxiety.

The enthusiast goes through the truth-moment of anxiety, and remains faithful to that moment precisely by replying to it: by replying to it with an act. As Lacan puts it in his unpublished Seminar on anxiety: ‘to act is to pull a certitude out of anxiety’.

Put in these terms, of course, no one would want to be a fanatic: fanaticism is pathological. Therefore, to avoid fanaticism, one might be inclined to think of the undecidable as something which ought to be preserved in its undecidability.

The question then is whether such an advocate of the undecidable is really so very different from the fanatic. Whereas the fanatic immediately embraces revelations that cannot be discussed, thereby negating the undecidable directly, the advocate of the undecidable would, in ‘Logical Time’, remain forever positioned in that uncomfortable, anxious moment of conclusion, never acceding to a process of verification, in fear of doing injustice to the truth-moment of anxiety.

The enthusiast goes through the truth-moment of anxiety, and remains faithful to that moment precisely by replying to it: by replying to it with an act. As Lacan puts it in his unpublished Seminar on anxiety: ‘to act is to pull a certitude out of anxiety’.

At the opening of his discussion of ‘Logical Time’, Badiou declares that what is at stake for him is the fixing of an ‘irreducible gap’ between his theory and Lacan’s. We have shown that when it comes to an understanding of the act, both thinkers are quite similar. Where Badiou differs from Lacan is in his ability to draw explicit ethical and political lessons from the kind of act described in ‘Logical Time’. In political terms, Badiou’s conclusion implies adherence to a familiar Leninist principle:

When the popular insurrection bursts out, it is never because the calculable moment of this insurrection has come. It is because there is nothing left for it but to rise up, which is what Lenin said: there is a revolution when ‘those on the bottom’ no longer want to continue as before, and the evidence imposes itself, massively, that it is better to die standing than to live lying down. [Lacan’s] anecdote shows that it is the interruption of an algorithm that subjectivates, not its effectuation (TS 272–3).

Any revolutionary act must work with the troubling undecidability inherent to a symbolic universe, and acts precisely as a reply to the real of an event.

But as we have shown, Badiou nonetheless emphasizes the necessary struggle or work to be done to name this event. This process of naming eventually creates a new symbolic order whose operational closure, to use Lacanian terminology, will be ensured by other master signifiers.

desire drive love

Salecl, R. (1997) The Satisfaction of the Drives. Umbr(a) #1
Umbr(a) Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture 409 Clements Hall Buffalo, NY 14260-4610

Drive first needs to be understood as a leftover of the operation by which the subject becomes the subject of the signifier and is incorporated into the symbolic structure.

When the subject becomes a speaking being, he or she will no longer be able to have sex in an animal’s instinctive way. Instead of a sheer loss, however, we encounter a force that essentially marks the subject by imposing a constant pressure on him or her.

This force is what Lacan named variously: libido, drive or lamella. Through this naming, Lacan offers another angle on Freudian theory. For Freud, libido primarily concerns the subject’s ability to find sexual satisfaction in different ways. Aside from having sex, the subject can find this satisfaction through eating, shitting, looking, speaking, writing, etc. Libido is always linked to a libidinal object, which is not simply a material object, but what Lacan names object a.

It is crucial for the subject that only partial drives exist, and no genital drive as such. The subject is determined on the one hand by these partial drives, and on the other by the field of the Other, the social symbolic structure.

Already for Freud, love, for example, is not to be found on the side of the drives, but on the side of the Other. And it is in this field of the Other that anything which might resemble some kind of genital drive finds its form.

The paradox of drive is, therefore, that it is what is left out in the process of symbolization, but this does not mean that it has no link with the field of the Other.

Let us exemplify this with the scopic drive. In the scopic drive, the subject is not simply
someone who looks or gazes at objects: the subject causes him- or herself to be gazed at.

The voyeur thus secretly observes something, but the whole point is that the subject wants to be gazed at by the Other.

In the scopic drive the subject makes himself the object that complements the Other, who is supposed to enjoy gazing at this subject.

In the case of the scopic drive, therefore, the subject necessarily needs the Other. in order to set in motion the drive and obtain satisfaction.

Lacan gives here examples of the exhibitionist for whom the victim has meaning only as long as the Other is looking at the exposed exhibitionist: the victim’s horror or uncomfortable reaction would thus have a value for the exhibitionist as long as he knows that he has been gazed at in his act.

The same goes for the sadist. The pain he imposes on the victim has to be looked at by the Other.

Lacan says that “the course of the drive is the only form of transgression that is
permitted to the subject in relation to the pleasure principle.”

The pleasure principle is to be understood here as the symbolic law, a safeguard, a homeostasis which tries to prevent the irruption of the jouissance that is linked to the satisfaction of drive.

Already for Freud drive is what lies beyond the pleasure principle, but Lacan adds to this the notion that the transgression linked to drive is in some way permitted by the symbolic
Law itself.

As long as drive involves the Other, the subject receives from the Other a certain permission for the transgression.

Drive and desire each have a different relation to the symbolic structure.

Desire is essentially linked to the law, since it always searches for something that is prohibited or unavailable. The logic of desire would be: “It is prohibited to do this, but I will nonetheless do it.”

Drive, in contrast, does not care about prohibition: it is not concerned about overcoming the law. Drive’s logic is: “I do not want to do this, but I am nonetheless doing it.” Thus, we have a contrary logic in drive since the subject does not desire to do something, but nonetheless enjoys doing exactly that.

For Lacan, drive paradoxically always finds satisfaction, while desire has to remain unsatisfied, endlessly going from one object to another, positing new limits and
prohibitions.

Drive is thus a constant pressure, a circulation around the object a, which
produces jouissance-a painful satisfaction.

Jacques-Alain Miller points out that in the later seminars of Lacan, the object a,
the object around which the drive circulates, needs to be understood as a special kind of
satisfaction: “The object that corresponds to the drive is satisfaction as object.”

As Miller points out, drive in this search for a satisfaction resembles perversion. For perverts, it is essential that they search for sexual satisfaction outside simple copulation. But perverts differ from neurotics who are always lacking satisfaction and are thus going from one object to another, not knowing what they want, endlessly questioning the nature of their desire.

Perverts, in contrast, are satisfied: they find the object and thus also sexual satisfaction. That is why perverts rarely demand analysis, or demand it only when they are perplexed as to whether or not the satisfaction that they found is the proper one (see Fink).

In the same way as the perversion does not seek sexual satisfaction with the opposite sex, drive also is not directed towards the opposite sex: there is only drive towards the libidinal object, towards “a partial satisfaction as the object.”

Drive thus circulates around the partial object, the object a and this circulation precisely constitutes the satisfaction.

If desire constantly questions, drive presents an inertia where questioning stops.
Here the dynamic of drive resembles perversion because the pervert also does not ask for
any permission.

For Lacan, drive is in the final instance always the death drive, a destructive
force, which endlessly undermines the points of support that the subject has found in the
symbolic universe.

In regard to drive, desire plays a paradoxical role of protection, since desire, by being subordinated to the law, pacifies the lawless drive and the horrible jouissance that is linked to it. The subject of desire is the subject of identification: this is the subject who constantly searches for points of support in the symbolic universe, the ego ideals with which he or she can identify and thus achieve an identity.

Such a point of identification can be a teacher, lover, analyst, etc. But on the level of drive, there is no longer any identification, there is only jouissance.

What desire does is to open the fantasy, a scenario, which for the subject masks the jouissance of the drive.

Desire is therefore trapped within the pleasure principle, while drive goes beyond this principle.

Paradoxically, for Miller, the subject is always happy at the level of drive: although because of drive, the subject can actually suffer terribly and tries to get rid of its enormous pressure, in this suffering there is at work jouissance, which means precisely this painful satisfaction that is the highest happiness on which the subject can count.

The major issue in Lacan’s late work is how the subject in analysis can be brought
to abandon the endless perturbations of the Other’s desire in order to begin dealing with his or her drive.

The essential question that perturbs the subject and encourages him or her to seek analysis is: What am I for the desire of the Other? And the whole process of analysis is devoted to answering this question.

Lacan’s thesis is that at the end of analysis, the subject finds the answer, which is that the desire of the Other is actually the subject’s own desire. But how does the subject come to this answer?

As Colette Soler has pointed out, neither the Other nor the subject can give this answer. The Other cannot provide the answer because we find with the Other on the one hand a series of signifiers, which can never fully represent the subject, but can only represent him or her for another signifier. On the other hand, there is a lack in the Other, which for Lacan is supposed to be understood as an interval between the signifiers.

Meanwhile, at the site of the subject of speech, there is a split between the series of signifiers that represents the subject and a radical lack; that is why the subject also cannot give the answer to the question.

Therefore, something else is required to arrive at the answer, and this something else is
drive.

As Colette Soler says: The answer to the question ‘what is the subject beyond the signifier?’ is the drive.

Thus the interval, intersection, or void between the subject and the Other is not as empty as all that, but it is an emptiness into which something comes. It is object a, insofar as object a is not only a logical, but also a bodily consistency, and also insofar as object a is a plus de jouir, as Lacan says — surplus jouissance.”

Drives, however, answer the question in silence, they do not speak but satisfy themselves silently, in action.

For Lacan, drive is essentially what splits the subject, what is his or her “true will” (but not a conscious one); as such “drive is something the subject can’t help or stop in him or herself.”

But drive is paradoxically also what attracts us to the other, what makes another person the object of our love.

However, here we have to invoke again the partial character of drive. When we take a whole person as our object we are not at the level of drive but love.

So, in our perception we always love the other as a whole. When deeply in love, we are usually not clear about what attracts us to some person, everything about him or her seems fascinating, even odd habits at first seem to be endearing. This is because in love our fascination makes the other person complete, ideaL Our perception of love, therefore, masks the fact that we actually fall in love with the object a, with what the other does not have.

According to the distinction between drive and desire developed above, this object a has to be understood as a paradoxical object which is at the same time the never attainable object of desire and the attained object of drive.

We can thus agree with Lacan’s thesis from the seminar on transference: we love the other because he or she is a split, desiring subject. But by taking into account Lacan’s later work on drive, one needs to add here that what makes the other the object of love is actually the very jouissance that is linked to the way the other satisfies his or her drive.

There is thus a paradoxical attraction that obtains between the subject and the drive and the desire in the other.

On the one hand, the loving subject is attracted because the other is also a desiring subject, which means both that the loved subject is perturbed by the question: What does the other desire? And also that the loved subject hopes to become the object of the other’s desire.

On the other hand, the loving subject is also perturbed and attracted to the jouissance of the other. It is well known that in. the case of hatred (which is always a counterpart of love), as with racism or nationalism, the subject primarily objects to the other because of the very way he or she enjoys.

This ungraspable jouissance of the other then incites all kinds of fantasies when people object to how the others enjoy their food, music, etc. On another level, in the case of love, we encounter this kind of attraction (which can easily turn into repulsion) to the jouissance of the other.

This jouissance gets inscribed in the gaze of the other, his or her voice, smell, smile, laughter, etc. Lacan in his seminar on anxiety mysteriously says that it is only love that allows jouissance to condescend to desire.

If desire has to be understood as fundamentally dependent on the Other in the sense that “desire is desire of the Other”, one has to add that what is behind the Other’s desire, what in the final instance keeps our desire in motion, is the unbearable jouissance of the Other.

What attracts us in the Other is thus not, simply his or her desire, but drive — which forces the other into some activity, regardless of how painful. this activity might be.

fink on Badiou 1996

Fink, B. (1996) Alain Badiou. Umbr(a): One, 1: pp. 11-12.

Hegel marks, according to Badiou, a romantic, historicist tum in Western thought away from the mathematical concept of the infinite, Hegel seeing the latter as “interesting” but fundamentally unsubstantiated compared to the “properly philosophical” view that man’s existence is essentially finite.

Whereas Plato views mathematics as establishing a realm of discourse which has no need to resort to myth or any other discourse to found its conclusions — which thus breaks with mythopoetic discourse and can serve as the foundation or precondition of another discourse (philosophy or dialectics) with its own grammar and methods — Hegel opposes philosophy and mathematics, invalidates mathematical notions of infinity, and rather than effecting an Aufhebung (sublation), returns to a pre-Platonic view whereby a certain myth (of man’s finitude) rules philosophical “reason.”

This romanticism can be seen, according to Badiou, in both the Heideggerian project and co the “postmodem” project, both of which refuse the notion of the infinite nature of every human situation, subjecting infinities to the horizons of the “human.”

The lack of serious attention devoted to mathematics — whether by Carnap, Heidegger, or Derrida — is indicative of a philosophical tendency which is ultimately conservative and romantic in content, Badiou argues, and which leads directly to the view that philosophy has reached its end.

Badiou proposes that we rethink the very notion of endpoint and limit using modern developments in mathematics, a project which reestablishes mathematics as a condition of philosophy and allows us to think beyond the latter’s supposed end.

The importance of Badiou’s insight here goes far beyond the “simple” conditioning of philosophy upon mathematics. For what he refers to as romanticism is essentially defined by what he terms the “regime of the One,” that is, the regime or rule of a discourse of totalization.

As antitotalizing as certain modem discourses may claim to be, they too succumb, Badiou sustains, to a Parmenidean view of the whole, “counted as One,” complete with notions of limits which predate modern mathematics.

Badiou’s emphasis on the modem concept of multiple infinities, of infinities of infinities, subverts traditional views of limits and horizons, and moves in a radically non-logocentric direction. Badiou, in a sense, moves from the post-modem to the post-finite, from the end of philosophy to the beginning of philosophical multiplicity: towards the liberation of philosophy from the regime of the finite.

shepherdson Sexuation

Shepherdson, C. (2003) “Lacan and Philosophy.” In: J. Rabaté (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. New York, London: Cambridge University Press, pp. 116-152.

Sexuation informative website

Phallic Jouissance

First path: the sexuation graph. Having taken this step towards the “Other jouissance,” in which the general law of symbolic castration is no longer the whole story, Lacan now develops Freud’s claim by means of symbolic logic, in the “sexuation graph” which maps out two modes of relation to the Other, correlated with sexual difference.

On the “male” side, the “normal” or “phallic” position is defined through the proposition that all subjects, being unmoored from nature, are destined to find their way through the symbolic order. Lacan expresses this claim in symbolic notation, with the formula

“All subjects are submitted to the phallic signifier”.

Now this position (the universal law of symbolic existence) is paradoxically held in place by an exception to the law, which Lacan elaborates in keeping with Freud’s analysis of the primal horde in Totem and Taboo, where Freud explains that the sons all agree to abide by the law (to accept symbolic castration), precisely in contrast to the “primal father,” who stands as the exception to the rule, in relation to which the law is to be secured. Thus, the “male” side of the sexuation graph includes another formula

“There is one subject who is not submitted to the phallic signifier”

and this second formula, which forms part of the law of castration on the male side, is cast as an excluded position, an exception to the law, as Freud also claims when he explains that the primal father must always be killed, since his expulsion from the community by murder insures that the symbolic community will be established.

The two formulae thus appear to present a simple contradiction, logically speaking, but in a clinical sense they are intended to define the antinomy that structures masculine or phallic sexuality, in the sense that the exception to the law, where the possibility of an unlimited jouissance is maintained, is precisely the jouissance that must be sacrificed, expelled, or given up for the field of desire and symbolic exchange to emerge.

Such is the logic of symbolic castration. It would obviously be possible to play out this “logic of masculinity” in some detail, with reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger and others, whose films represent the masculine fantasy in which the law of the civilized community can only be upheld, paradoxically, by an exceptional figure who is able to command an absolute power of violence, which is itself used to expel the monstrous, mechanical, or demonic figure (the uncontrollable machine or corrupt corporate demagogue) whose absolute jouissance threatens the space of democracy and capitalistic exchange.

In masculinity, democracy and totalitarianism are not simply contradictory, as though they could not exist together, but are on the contrary twins, logically defining and supporting one another.

Such elaborations – always too quick in any case – are not our purpose here, but we can at least note Lacan’s attempt to provide a rigorous theoretical account, through symbolic logic, of the “contradictions” of masculinity. 138

“Not all of a woman is subject to symbolic castration.”

While the “masculine” side of the graph provides a relation to symbolic castration which is total (“All men are subject,” etc.), the “feminine” side, by contrast, provides a second pair of formulae in which the subject is not altogether subjected to the law.

The second of these formulae, can be read as “Not all of a woman is subject to symbolic castration.” The universal, which functions on the masculine side (“All men”), is thus negated on the side of femininity (“Not all”).

Something of woman may thus escape symbolic castration, or does not entirely submit to the symbolic law (“they show less sense of justice than men” and “their super-ego is never so inexorable”).

“Feminine jouissance” is thereby distinguished from “phallic jouissance” by falling partly outside the law of the signifier. Subjected to the symbolic order like all speaking beings, the “feminine” position is nevertheless “not-all” governed by its law.

And as was the case on the masculine side, so here we find a second formula, but in this case it is not an exception to the law (as with the primal father). Instead, we find a formula that indicates an inevitable inscription within the law

“There is no subject that is not subjected to the symbolic law”

[…] it is worth noting that in this second formula, which articulates the feminine version of subjection to the law, we do not find a universal proposition, a statement that could be distributed across all subjects (“All men,” etc.).

Instead, we find a formulation that relies on the particular (“There is no woman who is not” etc.). The universal quantifier “all” (∀) is thus replaced with a quasi-existential “there is” (∃) …

Lacan remarks on the “strangeness” of this feminine mode of being: it is ´etrange, Lacan says, playing on the word for “angel” (ˆetre ange means “to be an angel”), this mode of being which falls outside the grasp of the proposition (“it is . . .”). We cannot say that “it is” or “it exists,” just like that, because it does not all belong to the domain of symbolic predication, and yet, this same impasse in symbolization means that we cannot say “it is not” or it “does not exist” (or indeed that “there is only one libido”).

Beyond the “yes” and “no” of the signifier, beyond symbolic predication and knowledge (is/is not), this mode of being, presented through the Other jouissance, would thus be like God, or perhaps (peut-ˆetre – a possible-being) more like an angel. Thus, as Lacan suggests, and as Irigaray also notes, though in a very different way, the question of feminine sexuality may well entail a theology and an ontological challenge in which the law of the father is not the whole truth.

“It is insofar as her jouissance is radically Other that woman has more of a relationship to God” (S XX, p. 83).

other voices a different outlook on autism

The New York Freud-Lacan Analytic Group & New School Psychoanalytic Workshop invite you to a screening and discussion of:

Other Voices – A Different Outlook on Autism
A film by Ivan Ruiz and Silvia Cortes Xarrie

Wednesday, August 20, 2014, 7pm

The New School — Klein Conference Room (A 510)
66 West 12th St, New York, NY 10011

Interview (Spanish) of Ivan Ruiz by Radio Lacan

The question of autism in this country has traditionally been situated within the broad field of learning difficulties. Autism has thus been considered primarily as a developmental disorder, assessed in terms of failure to achieve expected developmental milestones. The treatments available for autism then tend to be conceived in terms of programs of re-education aimed at making up for these supposed deficiencies.

Clinical approaches to autism inspired by the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, however, are indexed on the primacy of the subject involved.

Rather than highlighting developmental deficiencies measured against some abstract normative ideal, Lacanian psychoanalysis emphasizes the particularity of each individual, to the point of considering autism a subjective choice, as the child’s particular way of being in the world.

Foregrounding the subject enables us to consider the symptomatic presentation associated with autism not merely in terms of pathological behaviors to be modified or preferably eliminated by re-education, but rather as functional elements that the child makes use of in order to manage his experience of insertion in a world perceived as hostile, threatening or unmanageable.

Rather than fighting to remove the symptoms of autism, Lacanian psychoanalysis aims to work with those symptoms and with the child who holds on to them while finding more adaptive ways of managing in the world.

This of course requires spending sufficient time with the child and with his or her parents, giving them each a say in the process, before deciding what it is that we are supposed to be trying to cure.

This approach can perhaps be summed up in the notion of listening to autism. Rather than setting out to cure autism, to master the problem of autism, perhaps we would do better to ask whether there is something that we can all learn from autism, something that we struggle to hear, but which concerns each one of us, whether as parents, as clinical practitioners, or simply as human subjects each struggling to do the best we can with the world we find ourselves in.

Spanish filmmaker Ivan Ruiz will be at the New School this month to present his film Other Voices – A Different Outlook on Autism. This is a film inspired by personal experience of autism as well as by his engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis.

In this film he has taken on the challenge of listening to autism and of finding ways to convey something about the message at stake to a wider audience. Ivan will be available to answer your questions and to discuss what he discovered along the way.

By bringing to us the testimony of these other voices, this film thus presents us with a unique opportunity while addressing each one of us with a unique challenge.

Are we ready to hear what it is that autism might be trying to say to us and learn a little bit about what it might have to teach us?

About The Irish Circle of The Lacanian Orientation ICLO

The Lacanian orientation in psychoanalysis is based on the fact that the human subject is constituted as a speaking-subject. Simple and perhaps obvious as this statement may be, it nevertheless has a crucial ethical implication, namely, that listening to speech – and appropriately responding to it – are ways (and indeed perhaps the only ways) of treating the human being with dignity and with results that have effects on the mind and body that are not merely cosmetic, temporary or about adaptation to presumed norms or ideals.

Considering the human subject from this point of view allows a different response to human suffering, one that resists the ubiquitous standardisation and homogeneity so often promoted in the face of such suffering.

Indeed and from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective there is an awareness that socio-cultural pressures actively shape, to a considerable extent, subjective suffering.

Lacanian psychoanalysis considers it of the utmost importance that the homogeneity and standardisation of contemporary suffering, which finds its expression in symptoms like depression, addiction, eating-disorders and self-harm, is not responded to in a protocolled and standardised kind of way but, precisely, on a case by case basis. Only such a response will bring forward the radical creative singularity of each speaking-being.

boothby death desire 2

Boothby, R. (1991) Death and desire: psychoanalytic theory in Lacan’s return to Freud. London: Routledge.

The human being’s relation to language is less like that of a workman to his tools than it is like that between a fish and the water in which it swims and breathes. 121
As Lacan thinks of it, the subject is constituted by the entry into language. The subject is an effect of the unfolding of the signifying chain. According to his definition, “a signifier is that which represents the subject for another signifier” (E:S, 316). What does this mean? What are we talking about when we refer to the “signifying chain”?

Meaning in language is ultimately less a function of any one-to-one correspondence of words to things than it is a function of the ways in which words follow upon and interpret one another. 125

Lacan calls the “decentering of the subject.” The meaning of the subject’s discourse always and essentially outstrips his or her intention in speaking. … The unfolding of the chain of discourse is immanently conditioned by the structure of the symbolic order. The status of the Lacanian subject is thus put at a double remove from any conception of autonomous and sovereign intentionality.

The subject is “strung along” by the unfolding of the signifying chain, but, in addition, the course of that unfolding is determined in large part by the network of grammar and syntax, of codes and meanings that comprise the symbolic order. 126

The two doors in the diagram do not indicate two different rooms but a single room under the influence of two signifiers. Lacan’s example thus illustrates how different modes of signification determine the very being of the thing signified. And what is this signified? It has assumed the status of the real. Without the intervention of the signifier, it remains completely undifferentiated. The signifier functions to realize an order of being that did not exist before.

Further, it is because the signified for Lacan ultimately occupies the place of the real that the line dividing signifier and signified in the diagram — the line that indicates an absolutely intimate connection for Saussure, a connection he compares at one point to the two sides of a piece of paper — must be recognized as a bar, a barrier to all signification. At the very heart of the sign there is a failure of transmission, a lack of any ultimate connection to the signified. There is something in the real that forever escapes the attempt to signify it. 127

… the effect of the signifier consists only in the negation of the imaginary. This, too, is suggested by the “Ladies and Gentlemen” inasmuch as it is the dynamics of sex difference that is at stake in it. By means of its imbrication in a system of signification, the signifier lifts the entire issue of sex difference out of the specular order in which it is originally registered and renders it available to an unending slippage of significations.

boothby death desire 1a

Boothby, Richard. (1991) Death and desire: psychoanalytic theory in Lacan’s return to Freud. London: Routledge.

Over the past forty years, however, the most significant treatment of Freud’s most unpopular conception has been the work of a renegade French analyst named Jacques Lacan.

Lacan does more than reemphasize Freud’s notion of the death drive, he re-installs it at the very center of psychoanalytic theory. To ignore the death instinct in [Freud’s] doctrine,” he insists, “is to misunderstand that doctrine completely” (E:S, 301).

Lacan characterizes Beyond the Pleasure Principle as the “pivotal point” in the evolution of Freud’s thought (S.II, 165).

But, further, it is not merely one concept among others. Perhaps more than any other point in the Freudian theory, it is with respect to the death drive that Lacan’s innovation is rightly called a “return to Freud.”

What makes the death-drive theory so important is its pivotal position in the structured totality of the psychoanalytic theory. For Lacan, the death drive is the key to understanding the topography of id, ego, and superego upon which Freud based the final and most complete elaboration of his theory

According to Lacan, the problem of the death drive opens psychoanalysis to question and, ultimately, to reformulation. But what sort of reformulation is announced here?

The answer is not immediately easy to determine. The question of the death drive in Lacan will take us to the heart of his theoretical innovations insofar as he links the meaning of death in psychoanalysis to the faculty of speech and language, on the one hand, and to the fate of desire, on the other.

In this way, two of the prime themes of Lacan’s thought, language and desire, can be seen to intersect in his treatment of the death drive. The question, one that will occupy us throughout this book, remains: How are language, desire, and death related?

“The function of desire must remain in a fundamental relation with death” (S.VII, 351).

The difficulty of Lacan’s style is not wholly unintentional. Convinced that the curative effect of analysis does not consist in explaining the patient’s symptoms and life history, convinced, that is, that the analyst’s effort to understand the patient only impedes the emergence of the unconscious within the transference and that what is effective in analysis concerns something beyond the capacity of the analyst to explain, Lacan’s discourse is calculated to frustrate facile understanding.

His aim in part is to replicate for his readers and listeners something of the essential opacity and disconnectedness of the analytic experience. Often what is required of the reader in the encounter with Lacan’s dense and recalcitrant discourse, as with that of the discourse of the patient in analysis, is less an effort to clarify and systematize than a sort of unknowing mindfulness.

We are called upon less to close over the gaps and discontinuities in the discourse than to remain attentive to its very lack of coherence, allowing its breaches and disalignments to become the jumping-off points for new movements of thought.

IMAGINARY

The imaginary was the first of the three orders to appear, introduced in 1936 by Lacan’s article on the “mirror stage.” It was inspired by research in ethology, which associated behavior patterns in animals with the perception of specific visual images. Lacan proposed that a similar “imaginary” function operates in human beings. In the “mirror phase,” the most rudimentary formations of psychic life are organized for the six- to eighteen-month-old infant as it identifies itself with a body image; either its own image in a mirror, or that of a caretaker or peer.

For Lacan, the “imaginary” designates that basic and enduring dimension of experience that is oriented by images, perceived or fantasized, the psychologically formative power of which is lastingly established in the primordial identification of the mirror phase.

Lacan’s first and arguably most original and far-reaching innovation in psychoanalytic theory was to characterize the Freudian “ego” as a formation of the imaginary.

The symbolic, announced in his 1953 paper on “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” was conceived by Lacan from the outset in dynamic opposition to the captures of the imaginary. Lacan’s notion of the symbolic is indebted to the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, and to the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss.

SYMBOLIC

The symbolic is the register of language and of linguistically mediated cognitions. In the “symbolic order,” Lacan envisions a complex system of signifying elements whose meaning is determined by their relation to the other elements of the system — a grand structure, then, in which meaning is free to circulate among associated elements or signifiers without necessarily referring to a particular object or signified.

In opposition to the gestalt principles and relations of perceptual resemblance that govern the semiotics of the imaginary, the order of the symbolic functions in accordance with rules internal to the signifying system itself. Lacanian psychoanalysis came fully into its own when Lacan identified the Oedipus Complex discovered by Freud with the formative moment in which the child, molded and snared by the imaginary, accedes to a symbolic mode of functioning. It is a good deal more difficult to characterize briefly the Lacanian sense of the “real.”

Especially in his later work, Lacan tries to show the interconnectedness of the imaginary, symbolic, and real, comparing them to the three interlocking rings of a Borromean knot.

But the notion of the real is perhaps best introduced as being precisely that which escapes and is lacking in the other two registers. Neither figured in the imaginary nor represented by the symbolic, the real is the always still – outstanding, the radically excluded, the wholly uncognized. As Lacan puts it, “the real is the impossible.”37

In Lacan’s sense, then, the real has very little to do with common “reality.” By the measure of everyday reality, the Lacanian real is closer to being un- or sur-real.

REAL

The real is sheer, wholly undifferentiated and unsymbolized force or impact. It is an experience of the real, therefore, that lies at the heart of trauma. However, the real is not simply a designation of something unknown external to the individual. It inhabits the secret interior as well. The real is therefore also to be associated with the active yet ineffable stirrings of organic need, the unconsciousness of the body. The tripartite distinction of imaginary, symbolic, and real constitutes the master key of Lacan’s work. To interpret his treatment of the death instinct will therefore ultimately require determining its relation to these three essential registers.

As I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters, this task offers a unique opportunity for clarifying the interrelation of Lacan’s three basic categories to one another. This is true in spite of the fact, or rather precisely because of the fact, that each of the three registers seems to claim the death instinct for its own.

From one point of view, Lacan clearly associates the death drive with the imaginary. “The point emphasized by Freud’s thought, but [that] isn’t fully made out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Lacan asserts, “[is that] the death instinct in man [signifies] that his libido is originally constrained to pass through an imaginary stage” (S.I, 149).

At another point, however, it is the symbolic that appears as the order of death. Thus we read that “the nature of the symbol is yet to be clarified. We have approached the essence of it in situating it at the very point of the genesis of the death instinct” (S.III, 244).

Is the drive toward death to be associated primarily with the imaginary? with the symbolic? Or is it not more fittingly associated with the real? Lacan’s notion of the real — as lack or absence, as the impossible, as the unspeakable force of the trauma, or as the ineffable exigence of the body—seems eminently qualified to be linked with the activity of what Freud called a “death drive.”

As I hope to show in what follows, the problem of death is relevant to each of the three registers, but in a different way. Clarifying these differences yields not only a more adequate solution to Freud’s problem of the death drive but also a better understanding of Lacan’s own thought as it illuminates the relations of the imaginary, symbolic, and real to one another. 20

To begin with, Lacan raises the question of how, within the ego psychological strategy, the patient is ever to move beyond identification with the analyst. But Lacan’s real concern is more radical. From a Lacanian point of view, ego psychology requires that the treatment deepen the very imaginary elationships of the ego that lie at the root of the patient’s deepest conflicts.

Psychoanalysis that deserves the name must effect precisely the opposite, bringing about a certain deconstruction of already existing imaginary encrustations. Lacan suggests that “what is really at issue, at the end of analysis, [is] a twilight, an imaginary decline of the world, and even an experience at the limit of depersonalization” (S.I 232). 37

Lacan’s conception of the mirror phase requires us to think of the situation of the newborn in terms of a primal chaos of wholly unsymbolized somatic excitations. Identification with the imago is said to be “the psychic relationship par excellence” insofar as the imago functions to erect the most elemental forms of psychic life out of an anarchy of unformed and inarticulate organic strivings.18

Prior to the recognition of the primordial imagos of the mirror stage, the force of “instinct” remains dispersed amid a panoply of bodily energies. 58

The pressure of psychically unmastered instinct therefore constitutes, in effect, a force of psychical unbinding from inside the organism itself. … The function of the life instinct is to bind together and to establish unities.

The activity of the death drive, by contrast, is to effect unbinding and disintegration. The crucial polarity becomes … between the organic and the properly psychological, between the force of unbound instinctual energies and the bound structure of the ego. 83

The death drive designates the way the bound organization of the ego is traumatized by the pressure upon it of unbound instinctual energies. 84

In Lacanian terms the death drive represents the return of the real excluded by the imaginary.

The death drive designates the pressure of unbound energies against the limitations of the bound structure of the ego. What is subject to “death” is not the biological organism but the imaginary ego. 84

The effect of the death drive, like the traumatic repetitions that first alerted Freud to its existence, threatens to overload the psychical organization with a wave of unmastered energies. …

The death drive is reinterpreted as the impingement upon the bound structure of the ego of organismic energies as yet inadequately represented int he psychic system. The death drive is the force of the instinctual as such. 85

Ž Hegel Lacan

Žižek, S. (2009) The Cunning of Reason: Lacan as a Reader of Hegel. The Harvard Review of Philosophy. XVI. 104-117.

The status of prosopopoeia in Lacan changes radically with the shift in the status of the analyst from the stand-in for the “big Other” (the symbolic order) to the “small other” (the obstacle which stands for the inconsistency, failure, of the big Other).

The analyst who occupies the place of the big Other is himself the medium of prosopopoeia: when he speaks, it is the big Other who speaks (or rather, keeps silence) through him — that is, in the intersubjective economy of the analytic process, the analyst is not just another subject, but occupies the empty place of death.

The patient talks, and the analyst’s silence stands for the absent meaning of the patient’s talk, the meaning that is supposed to be contained in the big Other.

The process ends when the patient can himself assume the meaning of his speech. The analyst as the “small other,” on the contrary, magically transforms the words of the analysand (patient) into prosopopoeia, de-subjectivizing his words, depriving them of the quality of being an expression of a consistent subject and his intention-to-mean.

The goal is here no longer for the analysand to assume the meaning of his speech, but to assume its non-meaning, its nonsensical inconsistency, which implies, with regards to his own status, his de-subjectivation, or what Lacan calls “subjective destitution.”

Butler review of Parting Ways

Judith Butler 2012 Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism reviewed by Lisa Bhungalia right here

Those familiar with Butler’s scholarship will see a continuation of themes developed in her earlier work on gender and sexuality (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993)) and her more recent ruminations on war and violence (Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2010)). Across these earlier works, Butler has maintained a critical eye to the ways in which categories are constructed and identities policed – a project she extends to Jewish identity in this latest work on Jewishness, Zionism, and Palestine/Israel.

Parting Ways originally began as a Jewish critique of state violence. However, it soon evolved into something much more: a political vision for the future of Israel/Palestine. Butler’s vision draws inspiration from Edward Said’s reflections on diaspora and exile in Freud and the Non-European and Reflections on Exile, in which he asks what kind of ethos and politics might be forged through a consideration of the diasporic character of both Jewish and Palestinian history.

Drawing on Said’s insights, both Jewish and Palestinian identities, Butler argues, are constituted by their relation to alterity, ‘a condition of having been scattered, having lived among those to whom one does not clearly belong’ (Butler 2012, page 214). Butler is careful, as was Said, not to render these histories as synonymous or equal; rather she asks what kind of ethics and political community might emerge from a consideration of their overlap?

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt2

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics and tragedy in Lacan. (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, New York: Cambridge UP. 173-190.

IT IS EASIER TO ACCEPT INTERDICTION THAN TO RUN THE RISK OF CASTRATION.

To put it simply: the law gives a signifying form to the impossibility involved in the very phenomenon of desire.

The fundamental operation of the law is always to forbid something that is in itself impossible. The fact that the law links this impossible to some particular object should not prevent us from seeing this.

By designating a certain object as forbidden, the law does two things:

1) it isolates the impossible Thing that the desire aims at but never attains, and

2) it provides an image of this Thing. This image (my neighbor’s wife, for instance) has to be distinguished from what, on the level of the symbolic, is nothing else but the signifier of the impossible as such.

The law condenses the impossible involved in desire into one exceptional “place.” Via this logic of exception, it liberates the field of the possible. This is why the intervention of the law can have a liberating effect on the subject.

It makes it possible for Achilles not to spend every minute of his life trying to figure out why he cannot catch up with the tortoise, or trying obstinately to do so. It can make him a productive member of the community.

This is the reason why Lacan, although he refuses to put analysis into the service of producing happy members of the community, also refuses to subscribe to the discourse advocating the liberation of desire from the repression and the spoils of law.

His point is that the law supplements the impossibility involved in the very nature of desire by a symbolic interdiction, and that it is thus erroneous to assume that by eliminating this interdiction, we will also eliminate the impossibility involved in the desire.

What he warned against, for instance, in the turmoil of 1968, was not some chaotic state that could result from the abolition of certain laws and prohibitions.

He didn’t warn against human desire running crazy. On the contrary, he warned against the fact that desire, tired of dealing with its own impossibility, will give up and resign to anything rather than try to find its own law. 178

We have already quoted Lacan’s thesis according to which “it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration.” However, as should be clear from what we just developed, this does not mean that interdiction keeps us safe from being exposed to castration (that is, from undergoing a loss of something that we have).

The “fear of castration” is the fear of losing that which constitutes a signifying support for the lack involved in the experience of the desire as such. Interdiction is what provides that support; it is what gives a signifying form to the lack (or to the experience of “castration”) which is already there.

Psychoanalysis, as Lacan conceived it, is not something that will restitute the good old law where it is lacking. Although many clinical problems can indeed be traced to the failure of the law to function for the subject as a stabilizing factor, the job of psychoanalysis is in no way to make sure that the subject will finally subscribe to the ideal of this or that authority.

One should rather say that once things have gone so far (as to produce a neurosis, for instance), they can only go further.

In principle, it is easier to go by the law than to find one’s own way around desire.

But all the malfunctions and dysfunctions that appear in the clinic (as well as in the psychopathology of everyday life) remind us not only that this doesn’t always work, but also that it never works perfectly.

Psychoanalysis is not here to repair the damage, to help the social machine to function more smoothly and to reconstruct whatever was ill-constructed.

It is there to take us further along the path that our “problems” have put us on, it is there as the “guardian” of the other way, the one that consists in finding our own way around our desire.

Emblematic of this “other way” is the story of Oedipus who, although unknowingly, steps out of the shelter of interdiction, is led to give up the thing that captivated him, and enters the realm where “the absolute reign of his desire is played out . . . something that is sufficiently brought out by the fact that he is shown to be unyielding right to the end, demanding everything, giving up nothing, absolutely unreconciled” (S VII, p. 310).

This is what makes it possible for Lacan to insist upon the fact that the renunciation of goods and of power that is supposed to be a punishment, “is not, in fact, one” (S VII, p. 310).

Consequently, tragedy, at least in the perspective of what Lacan calls the tragic dimension of analytical experience, is not necessarily all that “tragic,” but can produce the kind of liberation that takes place in the case of Oedipus.

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt1

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics and tragedy in Lacan. (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté New York: Cambridge UP. 173-190.

Duties that we impose on ourselves and experience as “sacrifices” are, as often as not, a response to the fear of the risks involved in the case if we did not impose these duties. In other words, they are precisely the way we hang on to something that we fear most of all to lose. And it is this fear (or this “possession”) that enslaves us and makes us accept all kinds of sacrifices.

Lacan’s point is that this possession is not some empirical good that we have and don’t want to lose. It is of symbolic nature, which is precisely what makes it so hard to give up.

To renounce this “good” is not so much to renounce something that we have, as it is to renounce something that we don’t have but which is nevertheless holding our universe together.

In other words, “psychoanalysis teaches that in the end it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration” (S VII, p. 307).

This formula is, in fact, crucial for the “ethics of psychoanalysis,” which could be defined as that which liberates us by making us accept the risk of castration.

In a certain sense, it puts us in the position where we have nothing to lose. However, while not false, this way of putting things can be misleading, since it suggests some kind of ultimate loss beyond which we no longer can desire or get attached to anything, which is precisely not the point.

The loss in question is rather supposed to liberate the field of the desire – liberate it in the sense that the desire no longer depends upon the interdiction (of the Law) but is led to find and articulate its own law.

The intervention of the law, far from simply “repressing” our desire, helps us deal with the impasse or impossibility involved in the mechanism of the desire as such. To put it simply: the law gives a signifying form to the impossibility involved in the very phenomenon of desire. 178