logocentric – Page 24

Žižek EGS 2009 sexual difference

Lacan and Sexual Difference Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (March 23, 2011) This lecture is longer by 15 minutes than the one below.
This is identical recording of Žižek’s lecture by another person.
Mp3 audio recording of lecture here.

Lacan reasserts the ontological status of sexual difference How can he re-sexualize universe without regressing in a premodern ontology.

Sexual difference is purely formal. The way SD functions in the human universe is not immediately linked to biological functions of sexuality. Even natural sexuality can be sexualized.

Formal structure and immediate reality: you can imagine a couple just doing it as a pure instrumental activity, doing it mechanically. And we do some things that have nothing to do w/ sexuality but can be sexualized. Imagine I meet you, we shake hands, the very simple act of squeezing your hand, and not letting go.

This act of repetition sexualizes it. Sexuality spills over, is not sign of its strength, but its weakness. It doesn’t work in its own domain so it must expand.
We should move to ontology of incompleteness. Like Kant mathematical and dynamic antinomies, the Lacanian not-all. This impossibility of getting it all, of getting a totalized reality. The first thing Lacan gets us to do: We move from Kant to Hegel.

Kant remains too epistemological, he thinks there is an objective reality out there and because of the limitations of our categories we can’t get at it. Hegel says what if we transpose this structure of failure hinderance into the thing-itself. Heisneberg thinks its epistemological way, but Bohrs, this impossibility is in the thing-itself.

Incompleteness of society The incompleteness of the structure of reality and in order to make it consistent is to supplement with a virtual fiction. Bentham’s point is yes we can distinguish what is fiction/reality, BUT if we take away the fiction we lose reality itself. This point was made by GK. Chesteron.
Necessity of fictional supplement: We all know that we want to do that (have sex) but the question in what way. You ask 5 men, what you want to do, the cloud should show you need a fiction to do it, that is don’t just show cloud of naked woman, but the cloud should show, while reading a book, while walking on the beach etc.
Reality structured like a fiction: show only reality, but to make us experience it as a magical fiction.
Children of Men At the very end, in a small boat to a scene where some kind of ship called ‘tomorrow’. It seems so obvious that although it is shot like reality, the ship is pure appearance, it was the dying dream. A radical ambiguity at the end.
Home Alone

Lacan formalization of Sexual Difference

ideal ego mirror

Swales, Stephanie S. Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject Routledge, 2012.

The infant’s mirror image is the first representation of the ideal ego (written in Lacanian algebra as i(a)). The ideal ego, an imaginary order projection, is an illusory and beautiful self-image.

This ideal self-image is precious to the child, and she will defend it as a prized possession, passionately contesting anything that implies that she is not as perfect as she believes. The analytic subject may therefore respond with aggression when an analytic intervention exposes the mirages of the ideal ego or the ego (Lacan, 1953/2006a).

The ideal ego changes over time, because the child’s conception of the perfect self is an evolving one. Therefore, the ideal ego is impossible to achieve, and “will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming” (Lacan,1949/2006a, p. 94).

“Man’s ideal unity… is never attained as such and escapes him at every moment” (Lacan, 1978/1991b, p. 166) although he is unfailing in his attempts to catch up to it.

butler lecture sept 15 2013

Watch Professor Judith Butler’s lecture, ‘Freedom of Assembly, or Who are the People?‘ held on September 15, 2013 in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University.

The freedom of assembly is a basic right, but how is it to be understood? How is the freedom of assembly related to the freedom of expression? The right of assembly cannot be asserted by a single person, so how do we understand the plurality that makes that claim? It seems that “the people” assert the right of assembly, but who decides who “the people” are?

And how do actual assemblies change our idea of what it means to assert a right? Rights are not only asserted vocally, but also enacted with movement, stillness, gesture, and silence.

Indeed, there can be no freedom of assembly without bodily enactments, including speech. Consequently, we have to rethink the bodily forms in which this right is enacted.

And though modes of assembly and solidarity are at once embodied and virtual, the very idea of assembly presupposes that bodies act together. What kind of right is that which is enacted bodily, and who are the people who enact this right? Are these “the people”?

🙂 Butler is describing the collection of peoples in the square.

8:50 The Assembly is already speaking before it utters its declarative speech act.

The ‘we’ voice is already enacted by the assembly of bodies, their gestures their movements. Actions where people come together who enact their convergence is irreducible to a single claim. Plurality of embodied actors who enact their claims sometimes through words sometimes not.

Freedom of Assembly

a collection of people associated in a demonstration May be spoken or enacted in another way
such acts as plural action, who enact their convergent purposes can’t be reduced to one collective we
13:00 Does FOA depend on being protected by government? or from government?

Freedom of Association independent of every government. When the legitimacy of a gov’t or power of state is being contested by such an association.

power of state to protect rights and power of state to withdraw that protection – arbitrary and legitimate power.

What is being opposed, is that FOA can be lost as a right when State opposes such assembly. Financial institutions transforming public entitlements into goods and market services.
Legitimacy of a gov’t that has assumed authoritarian powers, no one is say free markets and democracy work together.
Privatization and authoritarianism are being opposed, the state moves in to suppress FOA to censor those viewpoints and confine those who hold them.

FOA can’t be a specific right protected by state.

FOA must precede and exceed any gov’t. not to condone mob rule, but FOA is a precondition of politics itself, bodies can move and gather in unregulated ways, redefine public by virtue of these enactments.

They don’t speak in 1 voice or 1 language.
popular sovereignty distinct from state sovereignty.
FOA and idea of popular sovereignty.

20:00 Sovereignty is not bad word, think of indigenous peoples struggle for sovereignty

The meaning of PS has never been exhausted by the act of voting, the exercise of S. neither begins or ends with the act of voting. something of PS remains untransferable marking the outside of the electoral process.

S of the People: critical, resistance, revolution. PS translates into electoral power when people vote, but doesn’t exhaust it, untranslatable

PS runs counter to and exceeds, outruns every parliamentary form that it institutes and grounds. PS is a condition of an Parliamentary character, it threatens every Parl with dysfunction, dissolution an “anarchist interval” one that shows up at moments of founding and moments of dissolution

Who are the People?

24:00

We can’t simply point to the people, aerial photographs, (not demographic forensics) because there is a FRAME. limited perspective but which its object is selectively crafted.

Editing/Selecting what and who will count. Who the people are — technology that establishes and disestablishes who counts as people.

Some people are outside purview of street and camera i.e., prison …

Arrive together in some space and time and photographed in some exclusive way. Speaking in unison is a fantasy. “we the people” always misses, some fail to represent, doing something else, texting, blogging some not speaking at all, so THE PEOPLE never arrives and speaks in unity

28:00 We the People is NOT A UNITY

Butler totally dismantles any notion of unity. We have to re-think who the people are, some people don’t want what others want. Fragility and ferocity that marks hegemonic struggle over name the PEOPLE are signs of its democratic operation.

The PLURAL WE: I don’t describe who the we is, but I POSIT A WE

30:30 Something NON-Electoral is at work the ANARCHIST INTERVAL. The people who speak the WE constitute themselves as the people, standing silent together in the face of the police.

People

pre-existing collection, can’t adequately rep. collectivity because it is in process of being made.

WE: needs desires demands not fully known, practices of Self-determinination not same as self-representation.

Brings people into being who it names = PERFORMATIVE

33:00 Popular Sovereignty as distinct from State Sovereignty

PS only makes sense in this act of separating itself from SS

34:00 The Enactment of political Self-Determination (it is not always just verbal)

1:14 She speaks on splits and disharmony.

1:18 She says that Michael Hardt’s recent work on love is problematic and she disagrees with his view.

1:19 When a group of people do come together to claim rights etc. they do so that indexes the people or the populace

1:22 opposition to entire scheme of values, and other values must be brought to fore and that’s about solicitation, and persuasion, a hegemonic contest of who the people can be. The people as a term is a hegemonic struggle.

1:25 How does the relationship to police power have to be cultivated to expand the life of a solidarity/democratic movement so it isn’t condemned to be ephemeral. It requires an elaborate network including lawyers and media people willing to take risks.

1:34 Reply to second last question. “Citizen” can be used by state to bring them, appropriate them, instrumentalize them and interpellate them
1:37 Reply to last question: study and practice of social movements more broadly

mcgowan subjectivation

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.

Chapter 6: The Appeal of Sacrifice (pt 2)

The sacrifice that subjects make in order to enter society repeats the earlier sacrifice, but what occurs is repetition with a difference. While the initial sacrifice of the privileged object installs the death drive in the subject and thereby constitutes the individual as a subject, the repetition of this sacrifice marks an attempt to domesticate the death drive at the same time as it follows the death drive’s logic. That is, the death drive leads us to this repetition, but the repetition attempts to solve the impossible bind that the death drive creates for us. Society is an attempt to solve the problem of subjectivity itself. 146

Of course, the idea that subjectivity in the psychoanalytic sense exists prior to society is absurd, since subjectivity only becomes possible through the imposition of a societal demand on an animal being. But within society the process of subjectivization occurs in two steps: an initial loss occurs that constitutes the subject, and subsequently the subject makes an additional sacrifice in order to commemorate the first loss and to join the social order.

It is only through the repetition of loss that the social order really gets a hold on the subject because the second loss involves an investment through sacrifice in the good of the social order as a whole. In this sense, subjects do exist prior to their entrance into the social order, and properly socialized subjects are only those who have sacrificed for the sake of the social good. The subject who would refuse to make this sacrifice for the sake of society would not participate in the social bond and would exist as an outsider within the social order. This is the position that the psychotic occupies. 146

mcgowan sacrifice

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.

Chapter 6: The Appeal of Sacrifice

Neither subject nor social order exists independently but emerge out of the other’s incompleteness. The subject exists at the point of the social orders failure to become a closed structure, and subject enters into social arrangements as result of its own failure to achieve self-identity. The internal contradictions within every social order create the space for the subject, just as the internal contradictions of the subject produce an opening to externality that links the subject to the social order. Failure on each side provides the connective apparatus and constitutes the bond between the subject and the social order. 145

To put it another way, the subject’s entrance into a group or society depends on the originary loss that gives birth to its subjectivity. Without this loss and the desire that it produces in the subject, no one would agree to enter into a social bond, a bond that places a fundamental restriction on the subject’s ability to enjoy.

The psychoanalytic name for this foundational loss is the human animal’s “premature birth” a condition that creates an undue dependence not present in other animals. But whether or not one wants to defend the idea of humanity’s premature birth, the idea of a foundational loss is nonetheless essential for theorizing the emergence of subjectivity. Without loss, there could be no desire and no subjectivity. This loss leads the subject to society as the site where loss might be redeemed. 145

Once deceived by the lure of an imaginary complete enjoyment and disappointed with all the enjoyment it experiences, the subject is ready to agree to the entrance requirements of a society. The frustrated subject accedes to societal restrictions on enjoyment as she/he sees that others have also accepted these restrictions. a society circumnavigates the antagonisms between its member by promoting equality or justice among them all. … The subject’s individual frustration with the inadequacy of every actual enjoyment measured against he anticipated enjoyment finds an outlet in the societal demand for equality, a demand that proscribes [forbids] this enjoyment for all. The subject sacrifices a complete enjoyment that it never attains for the equality that derives from membership in society. 145-146

badiou’s subject

Phelps, Hollis. Alain Badiou: Between Theology and Anti-Theology. Acumen Publishing. 2013 B2430.B274 P44 2013 Rye U
🙂 Phelps delves into Cantor’s infinity and also provides very useful discussion of Badiou as witness below. I should read this book carefully, because its a good resource for any work on Badiou in the future.

Badiou’s subject does not immediately correspond to the human individual. There is no one-to-one relationship between them. This gap between inidivudals and subject ruls out thinking of the subject in finite terms, as a category of morality, a locus or register of experience, or an ideological fiction.

First, concerning the subject of morality, it does not matter for Badiou if it is the (neo-)Kantian subject of human rights or the Levinasian subject that underpins the “ethics of difference”: both tend to flatten the subject “onto the empirical manifestness of the living body. What deserves respect is the animal body as such” (LW 48; cf. E 4-29).

Conceiving the subject primarily in moral terms ultimately reduces the human being to “the status of victim, of suffering beast, of emaciated, dying body, [it] equates man with his animal substructure, it reduces him to the level of living organism, pure and simple”

Badiou’s main point is that understanding the subject as a category of morality confines the subject to finitude, to the limitation constitutive of individual human beings. The reduction of the subject to finitude is part and parcel of what Badiou pejoratively refers to in Logic of Worlds as “democratic materialism”, whose axiom is: “There are only bodies and languages” Democratic materialism, and the subject that corresponds to it, takes as its horizon “the dogma of our finitude, of our carnal exposition to enjoyment, suffering and death.” The claim that “there are only bodies and languages” amounts to little more than a “bio-materialism” that reduces “humanity to an overstretched vision of animality”.

Second, if the subject is not a category of morality, it is also not “a register of experience, a schema for the conscious distribution of the reflexive and the non-reflexive; this thesis conjoins subject and consciousness and is deployed today as phenomenology” (LW 48). The phenomenological or existential subject is, as Badiou points out, irrevocably bound to meaning, to the circulation of sense. It does, to be sure, exercise a transcendental function in relation to experience, but this subject can only conceive of the infinite as a horizon, as a negative correlate of the immediacy of its own essential finitude (BE 391).
[…]
Third, although Badiou rejects conceiving the subject in either moral or existential terms, this does not lead him to reduce the subject to a mere ideological fiction, an “interpellation” of the state and its apparatuses, as Louis Althusser thought. At both the political and the ontological level, the state certainly reproduces itself through various ideologies and their mechanisms. But strictly speaking that state exerts this pressure through the re-presentation of individuals, which latter, we have said, do not correspond to subjects for Badiou.

In contrasts to these three broad understandings of the subject, Badiou’s subject is a formal category. Badiou’s subject is “any local configuration fo a generic procedure from which a truth is supported” (BE 391); the subject is for Badiou the “local status of a procedure, a configuration in excess of the situation. 74-75

mcgowan sustaining anxiety

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.

The Structure of Chapter 4 Sustaining Anxiety Here are my blog notes on this chapter

Hegel and recognition and his insight into its ultimate failure: when a subject seeks recognition “it devotes itself to becoming someone inthe eyes of social authority and the search for recognition validates this authority. 101
At the point where the subject does not experience social recognition, it discovers the neighbor. 101
Recognition gentries this experience of the enjoyment of the other, the real other.
Encounter with the real other is the key to subject’s ethical being.
Traditionally: DEMAND prohibiting enjoyment and “exhorting contribution to public good.”
Now authority flaunts its enjoyment and encourages the subject to do the same. 103
As a result, the subject does not face a choice between sticking to the explicit demand or seeking the hidden desire but rather the choice between trying to obey the imperative to enjoy or searching for the missing demand hidden somewhere in the social fabric. This is the choice between the position of the pathological narcissist and that of the fundamentalist, and it defines our era. 103
Authority has become too close, and its obscenity has become visible. The transformation of paternal authority — a turn from the prohibition of enjoyment to a command that the subjects enjoy themselves — fundamentally alters the subject’s relation not just to authority itself but to the other as such.
Prohibition creates a social authority that exists at a distance from the subject, — or that installs a distance within all the subject’s relationships
The absence of an explicit prohibition leaves the contemporary subject in the proximity of a real other.
Much (physical and psychic) violence today oc curs in response to the ANXIETY of the encounter with the enjoying other. Both the violence of the fundamentalist suicide bomber and the violence of the War on Terror have their origins in the experience of anxiety.
Women not covered up, discos, this is not enjoyment, this might be the image of enjoyment. McGowan insists that “Enjoyment operates through limitations and barriers.”

Anxiety as Ethics

No distance from other’s enjoyment 113
The other’s private enjoyment — its smell, its way of talking, its gestures — ceaselessly bombards the subject. This is an assault that occurs all the time in the contemporary social world.
One way to escape anxiety is to restore prohibition and paternal law which involves an avowal of the lost object and its ability to deliver enjoyment. to return to the reign of traditional symbolic authority. 115
To create distance from enjoyment through our various efforts to resurrect prohibition — these efforts take form of various fundamentalisms.
As fundamentalism restores prohibitions, it creates more intense sites of enjoyment. whereas the cynical subject sees no enjoyment in the revelation of tf an almost-naked body, the fundamentalist subject sees enjoyment proliferating with the baring of a small patch of skin. in a world of anxiety, even the attempt to create distance has the effect of creating more enjoyment. 115
When we tolerate the other’s “excessive and intrusive jouissance” and when we endure the anxiety that it produces, we acknowledge and sustain the other in its real dimension. 116
Tolerance: insists on tolerating the other only insofar as the other cedes its enjoyment and accepts the prevailing symbolic structure. We tolerate the other in its symbolic dimension, the other that plays by the rules of our game.
This type of tolerance allows the subject to feel good about itself and to sustain its symbolic identity. the problem is that … it destroys what is in the other more than the other — the particular way the other enjoys. 117

It is only the encounter with the other in its real dimension — the encounter that produces anxiety in the subject — that sustains that which defines the other as such.

Authentic tolerance tolerates the real other, not simply the other as mediated through a symbolic structure. In this sense, it involves the experience of anxiety on the part of the subject. This is difficult position to sustain, as it involves enduring the “whole opaque weight of alien enjoyment on your chest.” The obscene enjoyment of the other bombards the authentically tolerant subject, but this subject does not retreat from the anxiety that this enjoyment produces … To reject the experience of anxiety is to flee one’s own enjoyment. 117

The tolerant attitude that never allows itself to be jarred by the enjoying other becomes … further from encountering the real other than the attitude of hate and mistrust. The liberal subject who welcomes illegal immigrants as fellow citizens completely shuts down the space for th other in the real. The immigrant as fellow citizen is not the real other. The xenophobic conservative, on the other hand, constructs a fantasy that envisions the illegal immigrant awash in a linguistic and cultural enjoyment that excludes natives. This fantasy, paradoxically, permits an encounter with the real other that liberal tolerance forecloses. Of course, xenophobes retreat from this encounter and from their own enjoyment, but they do have an experience of it that liberals do not. The tolerant liberal is open to the other but eliminates the otherness while the xenophobic conservative is closed to the other but allows for the otherness. The ethical position thus involves sustaining the liberal’s tolerance within the conservative’s encounter with the real other. 119-120

dolar keeping the ball in the air persistence perseverance

Here is the interview online

Badiou’s four truth procedures, four areas where truth emerges.

Science, and above all the completely constructed science like mathematics. It doesn’t refer to anything in the world, it just creates its own entities, pure entities.
Poetry and art as such.
Politics not of opinions but politics of truth. There’s an opposition between the two. Democracy basically is a democracy of opinions. Anybody is free to hold any kind of opinion and then you count the votes. This is not a politics of truth. There is a sort of truth at stake in politics which has to do with justice and equality, it has to do with an idea.
Love, which is the emergence of a truth event. A subjective truth event.

Badiou lists the four areas as the areas in which this break happens. I am not sure that this list is the best, exhaustive or conclusive. Maybe this list is too neat in some way. I think things are messier in life. In many everyday situations, even trivial ones, there may be a sudden and unexpected break, people show an inventive creativity and do something very unexpected, and actually change the parameters of the situation and their own lives and the lives of others. I would leave this field open.

I think passion is what drives you, drives you towards something. But it’s not that passion as such is enough. It’s not that it just drives you and you let yourself be driven. It actually demands a hell of a lot if you want to pursue this passion! It demands that you put something, everything at stake.

To risk the usual ways of your life, the ‘bequemes Leben’, if you are lucky enough to have a comfortable social position. There is the spontaneous hang to pursue your social survival within a certain slot, the script for your career is waiting for you. And this is where the question of break comes in.

The passion is what makes a break.

But the break, it demands a hell of a lot of ‘Anstrengung’ and you have to put things at risk. Sometimes drastically at risk. You risk everything for the question of passion, to pursue your passion.

What Freud names ‘Todestrieb’ (death drive) in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) is not some striving towards death, but too much of life. There’s too much life, more than you can bear.

So this is the excessive moment which derails the usual course of things and in order to pursue this it takes a lot of courage and persistence, perseverance.

I think most people give up at a certain point. There are many ways of giving up, also as an artist. One way of giving up is to somehow be content with your role or to… ‘übereinstimmen’.

So that you consent to being that role. And this is a socially assigned role which can bring glory and awards. If it started with a break, then the big danger is that the break starts functioning as the institution of the break. The break itself gets institutionalised and highly valued.

Dolar: Yes, it has a place then. Freud has this wonderful phrase “people ruined by their own success“. And I think that in art many people are ruined by their own success. Precisely by succeeding in what they wanted to do and then they fit into this.

They have made an institution of themselves and somehow started to believe that they are this.

You have this wonderful phrase in Lacan: who is a madman? It’s not just an ordinary person who thinks that he’s a king. The definition of a madman is a king who thinks that he’s a king. And you have this madness among artists who believe that they are artists. This is psychosis, in a certain sense, if you really think that you are what you are. You really think that you are an artist. This is the end of art, I think.

Dolar: Feeling at home. Is there a good way to feel at home? I don’t know. I think there’s always an ideological trap in this. What you mostly feel at home with is always ideology because it offers a sort of security. I mean security in the sense of providing a certain status within which you can dwell. And also security of meaning, which means that it provides you with some answers as to ‘What does it all mean?’ ‘We live in parliamentary democracy, we’re a free society, in the era of progress and prosperity’, etc.

I mean the words which fulfil a certain horizon of meaning which situates you within a certain social moment and social structure, within a certain type of social relations. And this is always ideology, ideology is what makes this run. And I think that the break that we are talking about – the break with meaning or the break with the continuity of things – it could be described as a break with ideology.

Art and ideology are at the opposite ends. Art always makes a break, a cut into the ideological continuity of what you most feel at home with. And what you feel at home with is entrusted upon you. But this is not to say that art is immune to ideology, it can easily be made into ideology.

WgK: At that point when you feel content.

Dolar: Yes. When you feel content in your role. One could make a certain opposition between art and culture. I think culture is a sort of domestication of art. You establish canonical artworks which you are taught at school. And it’s a question of what comes into the canon and is it a good thing to have a canon or how to include or exclude works. Of course you always have a canon. There’s no escaping this, but at the same time you have to understand that culture is always a domestification of what is dangerous or excessive in art. It domesticates things by giving them a sort of proper place and value. You can say: ‘Well, Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist of all time.’ I mean it’s quite true, but it’s also a very forced statement to domesticate Shakespeare’s work. You glorify it instead of dealing with it.

WgK: It ends their quality of being a break by giving them a place.

Dolar: Yeah. You reinscribe them into a continuity of a tradition, of a cultural identity.

WgK: I have the feeling it’s a regressive desire.

Dolar: For home?

WgK: Yeah. Isn’t it?

Dolar: Yes. Ultimately yes. I think that being at home means being in the ideology and being in the meaning and having some sort of meaning secured. And I think that creating a home as a way of being with yourself – or being with another person – is precisely to try to deal with the unhomely element of it. To keep the unhomely element of it alive. What Freud called das Unheimliche, litterally the unhomely, but with the utter ambiguity where it can be given the comic twist. I think that love is keeping the non-homely element alive. It’s not to finally ‘go home’ with someone, but actually to keep this thing in the air. Keep this thing in the air. And comedy is precisely – to keep the ball in the air. Keep the ball in the air, I mean constantly.

mcgowan hegel master slave

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.
Chapter 3: Class Status and Enjoyment.

McGowan argues that what Hegel fails to see “how recognition functions as a barrier to enjoyment. In the struggle for recognition,the master wagers her or his enjoyment precisely because it has no value for the master. Unlike the slave, the master finds no satisfaction in her or his own enjoyment, which is why she or he can risk it – with life itself – for the sake of prestige [recognition].

As a result, the master may eat, wear, or hold what the the slave produces, but she or he cannot enjoy it. In assuming the position of mastery and acquiring the recognition that accompanies it, the master makes a fundamental sacrifice of enjoyment that obtaining an object from the slave cannot redeem. The slave, on the other hand, remains free to enjoy, which is what, as Jacques Lacan points out, Hegel fails to see. 93

🙂 The upshot of this is that the master invests in the idea of symbolic status and derives an identity from it while the slave adopts an attitude of indifference toward symbolic identity and is thus able to enjoy. 94

🙂 In capitalism this structural elimination of the outside position (the slave’s position) means the elimination of a site for enjoyment that existed in earlier societies not found on appropriation of surplus value. Here the slave can enjoy and its only limit to enjoyment is what his/her master dictates, the restriction is an external one. McGowan is trying to make that point that with capitalism, the restriction becomes internal. According to McGowan:

Within capitalist society, recognition becomes that which no one can avoid – a universal that structures subjectivity. If one becomes an enjoying subject, one can do so only by passing through and then rejecting the lure of recognition and class status. One can enjoy only after having initially sacrificed enjoyment in search of recognition. This process reveals the true nature of enjoyment, obscured in precapitalist societies. Enjoyment is never direct but always based on a prior loss or sacrifice. One enjoys through this loss, and thus one enjoys partially.

[…] the partiality of today’s enjoyment does not point toward a future enjoyment that would be complete. Its partiality is based on an internal necessity: without the loss of the its object, the subject cannot enjoy; it enjoys the object only in its absence. This enjoyment, like that of precapitalist epochs, has an infinite quality to it. But it is a fully realized infinite, an infinite that includes its limit – the necessity of the prior loss – internally, rather than continually moving toward this limit and never reaching it. 97

To give in to the temptation of recognition and class status is to continue to sacrifice one’s enjoyment for the sake of the production and reproduction of the social order.

The path to enjoyment is much more difficult. It involves resisting the image of enjoyment that social recognition uses to sell itself and focusing on an enjoyment that can’t be imagined.

This is the real enjoyment that the subject endures rather than performs. It is an enjoyment that generates anxiety and suffering; it is rooted in loss but at the same time, it is the only enjoyment that leaves the subject satisfied rather than continually seeking a richer experience elsewhere. 98

On page 95 McGowan’s argument goes a bit haywire. He should stay away from trying to connect sacrifice of enjoyment with surplus enjoyment. I think we need to connect with Zupancic here.

Capitalism we have surplus labor which worker performs over and above the paid labor. There is necessary labor time which worker must perform to reproduce itself, surplus labor time “in contrast is done for the sake of progress. … In the act of performing surplus labor, one spends time working that might otherwise be spent enjoying; one works excessively at the expense of one’s enjoyment, which is itself excessive.” 95

🙂 Surplus labor is the excessive work and time that could have otherwise gone towards enjoyment. McGowan states, “surplus value that surplus labor creates is the way that sacrificed enjoyment manifests itself in the capitalist system, and the universality of the appropriation of surplus value renders this sacrifice inescapable. 95

McGowan class and enjoyment dirty jokes

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.
Chapter 3: Class Status and Enjoyment.

🙂 This chapter really takes off from Žižek’s claim that I don’t want to hear about your food and costumes, tell me your dirty jokes.

Thesis: Psychoanalytic critique of capitalism differs from Marxist theories because it recognizes that even the rich, well-off upper class do not enjoy, in fact they enjoy less than the workers and lower classes. This is because the former must sacrifice more enjoyment to attain the material worth etc.

But McGowan states that even though they may be on top in the the game of capital, they are still are unable to get satisfaction from their satisfaction. “It is only when one blows up one’s class possibilities that the opportunity for real enjoyment appears. Enjoyment requires sacrifice, but not the sacrifice of one’s time for the sake of accumulation. It demands the sacrifice of accumulation itself.” 86

But this isn’t libertarian, Hayekian right-wing platitudes. These conservatives generally argue for an emergence of an aristocratic elite, that with freedom class division is inevitable. Whereas for psychoanalysis class society is founded on a particular form of non-freedom, arguing that its “implicit ideal guiding psychoanalytic treatment is that of a classless society.” 81 Hmm sounds like Marx; so what gives Todd?

While Marxism shows the economic and social costs of class exploitation … psychoanalysis emphasizes the psychic costs of capitalism for the whole society, including those that most directly benefit … the upper and middle classes. Its concern is … the suffering endured by those who, when one regards their situation from the outside, should be happy. Psychoanalysis arises in response to the psychic costs demanded by capitalist class based society. 82

Psychoanalysis shows how even those who most surely benefit the most from capitalism don’t really enjoy.

If this sounds rather odd for a socially progressive guy like McGowan, he then explains:

Of course, no one wants to lament the misfortune of the poor little rich kid or try to generate sympathy for the suffering of Bill Gates. The point is rather to emphasize the unfreedom and lack of enjoyment that haunt the beneficiaries of capitalism and all class society. Even those who win in the capitalist game lose, and this provides what is perhaps the ultimate indictment of the capitalist system. 82

This is an interesting tact, McGowan implies here that Marxist theory by unearthing the exploitation of workers, and thus basing the overthrow of capitalism on a sense of justice and equality, should also stop to look at the fact that the rich owners are not as well off psychically as many assume.

The reason being is that for McGowan

Workers suffer less repression
Class privilege requires a more circuitous route to enjoyment 84
Class privilege demands repression in exchange for the social advantages that it offers 83

McGowan cites Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious where Freud explains the trajectory of jokes in terms of social class.

lower classes (w/o privileged status in class society) the true sexual or smutty nature of joke can be openly revealed
as go higher in class status in order to remain acceptable the joke undergoes more and more “deformation and repression, so that the original sexual dimension appears only obliquely or indirectly.” 84

McGowan concludes the upper classes have made more of a sacrifice of enjoyment than lower classes, “Class status involves forgoing more enjoyment and living more strictly according to the dictates of the social law that commands its sacrifice.” 84 Class privilege requires a more circuitous route to enjoyment. 84 What does he mean exactly?

When the upper class experience a smutty joke, they feel outrage or disgust. But this is an unrecognized enjoyment, but an enjoyment nonetheless. “But enjoyment in the form of outrage or disgust is a case of enjoyment that occurs with too much trouble.”

“The upper-class subject who enjoys its superiority takes a circuitous route to find its satisfaction, and this circuitous route is the inevitable product of upper-class status. Though wealth and social recognition make material life easier, they elongate the path of the drive and thereby deprive the subject of the ability to embrace its own mode of enjoying.”

The commodity does provide enjoyment, but only insofar as one doesn’t have it. 85

Capitalism is a system in which we cannot avow our enjoyment. Therefore psychoanalysis calls for more enjoyment, not less. The call for more enjoyment, not less, is a tricky proposition because it threatens to devolve into erecting enjoyment as a social duty, which is the fundamental form of contemporary authority.

We must also clearly distinguish enjoyment, which one endures and suffers, from pleasure and happiness, both of which promise the overcoming of loss. Note 14 p. 303

Recognition

Here McGowan gets into Hegel’s Master/Slave. He distinguishes between acceding to the demand and on the other hand, going beyond demand to desire. Being stuck on authority’s demand and trying to fulfill it, follow it slavishly. But the authority doesn’t know what it wants.

The subject becomes a desiring subject by paying attention not to what the social authority says (the demand) but to what remains unsaid between the lines (the desire). The path of desire offers the subject the possibility of breaking from its dependence on social authority through the realization that its secret, the enigma of the other’s desire, does not exist — that the authority doesn’t know what it wants. 88

Flashy cars, conspicuous consumption … Someone who was authentically enjoying would not need to parade this enjoyment. The authentically enjoying subject does not perform its enjoyment for the Other but remains indifferent to the Other. 90

Sacrifice enjoyment:

But no one can make a direct choice of enjoyment instead of recognition. The initial loss of enjoyment, the initial sacrifice is inevitable. As I have insisted in earlier chapters, this enjoyment only exists insofar as it is lost: there is no way for the subject to avoid altogether the loss of enjoyment for the sake of recognition. But what the subject might avoid is the perpetuation of this abandonment of enjoyment through the embrace of recognition. One can’t initially reject recognition, but one can subsequently revisit the original acceptance of the social demand and refuse it by becoming indifferent to recognition’s appeal. 90

Everything in society works against this indifference. The social order receives energy for its functioning from the enjoyment that subjects sacrifice for the sake of recognition. IT continues to operate thanks to a constant influx of enjoyment from those subjected to it.

When subjects embrace their own enjoyment rather than readily sacrificing for it, they do not contribute to the process of production or reproduction in the social order. Enjoyment has no use value for society, though it organizes and sustains the subject’s existence. (The subject who can no longer enjoy loses the will to live altogether.) 90

“The higher the one rises in class status, the more one invest oneself in an order that demands the sacrifice of enjoyment.” 92 McGowan argues that if we can’t entirely overthrow class distinction “we can take up a different relationship to it.” We can view it as what he calls a “necessary encumbrance.” By this he means that social recognition can be viewed as just another thankless task that society must perform. Not so fast though. There is only one problem, and that is the way capitalism has invested in the pursuit of recognition. This investment we all make in social recognition crosses all class barriers and it is what marks “the decisive break that capitalism introduces into history, and it marks the fundmanetal barrier that it erects on the path to tadopting a different relation to social class and recognition.” 92 In order to argue this point he moves to Hegel’s master/slave relationship.

johnston objet a seminar 1965-66 pt1

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.
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The object of Jacques Lacan’s thirteenth seminar of 1965–1966, entitled ‘‘The Object of Psychoanalysis,’’ is, unsurprisingly, none other than his (in)famous objet petit a

This a quickly becomes, after Lacan’s introduction of it as a concept-term to his theoretical arsenal in the late 1950s, a condensed knot of associated meanings and references tied together with varying degrees of tightness over time.

On the one hand, objet a is said to be ‘‘non-specularizable,’’ namely, impossible to inscribe within the spatio-temporal registers of representation

On the other hand, it is equated with a series of determinate libidinal coordinates (i.e., breast, feces, phallus, gaze, and voice), coordinates marked by entities and events situated in space and time

How can this object simultaneously be utterly beyond representability in space and time and yet concretely incarnated in ‘‘specularizable’’ spatiotemporal avatars?

Within the confines of the thirteenth seminar, Lacan introduces the non-specular
status of object a through a comparison of it with the Möbius band, one of his
favorite topological structures

Topology being a mathematical science of configurations formed through continuous series of permutations of surfaces — Lacan’s turns to topology enable him to abandon the problematic Euclidean geometrical picture-thinking permeating the depth-psychological discourse, with its misleading metaphors of outer layers and inner recesses, from which he rightly wants to dissociate Freudian psychoanalysis.

As is common knowledge, this sort of strip is a single surface twisted such that uninterrupted movement along it transports one between two opposed faces.

The distinguishing warp of the Möbius band makes two seemingly separate sides seamlessly communicate with one another; this twist is the mere inflection of a single surface nonetheless generating a manifest distinction between a recto and a verso.

The comparison between objet a and the Möbius strip already suggests that this a is to be construed as an insubstantial distortion of the lone immanent plane of psychical reality, a contortion forming a switch-point at which apparently separate conscious and unconscious dimensions intersect and pass into each other.

following this introduction of object a qua non-specularizable via topology — any appearance of this analytic object is said to defy capture by mirroring, to reflect nothing in reflecting devices. Like a vampire, whose menacing shadowy presence is disturbingly palpable and yet an invisible blank in the clear surfaces of surrounding mirrors, objet petit a tangibly haunts its subject in a similarly elusive, hard-to-see fashion.

So, with this frame in place, how is the mirror stage relevant to the project of elucidating the status of object a as in-between visibility and invisibility? An answer to this question can begin with a detail contained in the 1949 narration of this stage contained in Écrits.

Therein, Lacan, speaking of ‘‘the striking spectacle of a nursling in front of a mirror who has not yet mastered walking, or even standing’’ (i.e., an infant, a nascent subject-to-be, still very much mired in the affective muck of an anxiety-inducing prematurational helplessness … describes the young child in this psychoanalytic Ursituation as ‘‘held tightly by some prop, human or artificial (what, in France, we call a trotte-bébé [a sort of walker]).’’

This detail comes to serve as a lever for certain of Lacan’s later recastings of the mirror stage. These recastings are deployed so as to combat crude developmentalist (mis)readings of his theory according to which Imaginary identification with the imago-Gestalt of the moi is a phase chronologically situated between a prior phase of immersion in the ‘‘blooming, buzzing confusion’’ (as William James would describe it) of the primitive Real and a posterior phase of ascension to the proper social mediation of Symbolic structures setting in with language acquisition.

In seminars eight, ten, and twelve, the trotte-bébé , as an inert, inhuman object, drops out of the picture, with only the speaking subjectivity (parlètre) of older Otherness remaining instead.

These post-1949 presentations of the mirror stage in le Séminaire insist upon the necessary role of a parental ‘‘big Other’’—such a figure is both physically bigger (i.e., not prematurationally helpless like the infant) as well as an instantiation of the socio-symbolic grand Autre — in initially prompting and thereafter maintaining the small child’s multi-level investments (simultaneously cognitive, affective, and libidinal25) in his/her ‘‘selfimage.’’

Identification by the germinal subject á venir with the Gestalt of the imago in the reflective surface of the mirror is triggered by bigger supporting Other-subjects who communicate encouragements of and urgings to latch onto the image by employing a combination of words and gestures (i.e., linguistic and proto/quasilinguistic mechanisms—the archetypal example of this would be the mother’s speech exclaiming things like ‘‘That’s you there!’’ while she points with her index finger at the reflection of the delicate, diminutive body held up to the mirror).

Especially for this later Lacan, the imago-Gestalt of the moi is overdetermined from the start by the pre-existent universe of signifiers into which the child is thrown (a thrown-ness preceding even the biological moment of birth) and within which his/her specular reflection is embedded and contextualized. From the get-go, the image is suffused by the mediation of the signifier, rather than being a self-sufficient stand-alone phenomenal immediacy unto itself only secondarily taken up into symbolico-linguistic constellations.

The upshot of this is that figurative, metaphorical ‘‘mirroring’’ of the tiny, fragile human by the more-than-visual looks, gesticulations, and utterances of the larger people involved in this situation is a prior possibility condition for the literal, non-metaphorical mirroring fixated upon the spectacle of the (‘‘self’’-)image.

In the latter, the sight of the picture of the whole body contained in a shiny, reflective surface becomes an alluring, captivating mirage of anticipated cohesion and mastery, a virtual reality eliciting triumphant jubilation and provoking venomous aggression (aroused by envy and frustration visa`- vis this unattainable ideal) at one and the same time.

In the updated, 1960s version of the mirror stage, language-using (and language used)
big(ger) Others bathe the infant in a cascade of statements and behaviors whose saturating effects endow the specular components of the mirroring moment, Lacan’s primal scene of inaugural identification, with their special, fateful status.

The petit a(utre) of the child’s forming ego, partially bound up with imagistic representation, is originally and primordially a precipitate of ‘‘the desire of the
Other.’’

In other words, this moi begins condensing on the basis of the conscious and
unconscious fantasies of the familial actors surrounding the child, actors who both
wittingly and unwittingly transfer their desire-organizing fantasies regarding the
child’s past, present, and future into his/her psyche via the discourses and actions
through which they frame the mirror-experience for him/her.

Insofar as the ego itself, as what becomes intimate ‘‘me-ness,’’ is born by crystallizing around a core kernel of external Other-subjects’ fantasy-formations, it could be said to be an instance of extimacy in Lacan’s precise sense of this neologism.

Put differently, at the very nucleus of the recognized ‘‘me’’ resides a misrecognized (á la Lacanian méconnaissance) ‘‘not-me,’’ something ‘‘in me more than myself,’’ as the Lacan of the eleventh seminar (1964) might phrase it.

Similarly, invisible traces of alterity, impressed upon the body-image by desire/fantasy-conveying Others (with their
gazes, voices, demands, loves, jouissance, and so on), are infused into the visible avatars of this estranging, ego-level identity, this ‘‘self’’ created and sustained within a crucible of unsurpassable otherness.

one could say that the desires of Others inscribe a Möbius-type twist within the surface of the mirror such that the specular side of the ‘‘little other’’ of the Imaginary ego/alter-ego axis (i.e., a—a’) is in seamless continuity with its constituting envers qua the non-specular (and largely unconscious) flip-side of libidinal and socio-symbolic forces and factors stretched across vast swathes of different-but-overlapping temporalities.

rothenberg dimly lit garage

Imagine that you walk into your dimly lit garage and discover a mess. The place is so jumbled that you cannot even distinguish one thing from another.

Now, let’s say that, suddenly, the walls of the garage disappear, and you discover that this jumbled mass stretches in all directions.

One final gesture: remove yourself from the scene, so that you cannot serve as a reference point or means of orientation. No up nor down, no inside nor outside. No spaces between things, no background against which they stand out, no standpoint from which to assess their relationships.

It is as though everything is glued to everything else in what Copjec calls the “realtight.”

I will follow Alain Badiou in calling this state of affairs “being,” where things have no particular identity or relationship to one another, where there is no subject, and where orientation is impossible. In this state, no thing is determined because no thing has any relation to anything else.

[…] The simple addition of a formal property, the empty set, which has no substance in and of itself, negates the state of sheer being that attends each thing-as-such. It does so by establishing a minimal point of orientation – like making a small cut in a sheet of paper. Once this cut is added, then “things” can bear some minimal relation to each other – they all have a relation to this minimal point of orientation. The “cut” of the empty set creates a vector, and with this stroke, things precipitate into a world of identities, properties, and relationships – as objects.33