Author: logocentric

darian leader psychotic neurotic

Leader, Darian. “Anders Behring Breivik and the logic of madness.” The Guardian, Friday 29 July 2011

The announcement by his lawyers that the Oslo and Utøya killer Anders Breivik may be deemed insane has polarised once again society’s preconceptions and prejudices around madness and the question of responsibility.

For some commentators, to be judged insane would exonerate him from responsibility for his actions, as if madness and responsibility were mutually exclusive. For others, madness would only exaggerate responsibility for the killings, as if insanity and violence were indissolubly linked.

The fact that media reports of “mental illness” so often associate it with violent crime means dramatic outbursts become almost what we expect. Perhaps, at some level, we not only expect but also desire it, as if to externalise the latent feelings of violence we all harbour within ourselves. The horror at the Norway massacre was, after all, tinged with fascination. Everyone wanted to know more, see more, hear more.

Breivik’s case evokes that of Ernst Wagner, the German schoolmaster who strapped guns to his hands and opened fire on the inhabitants of the village of Mülhausen in September 1913. Demonised by the media, his case was used to intensify hostility towards the “mentally unwell”. As Wagner’s psychiatrist, Robert Gaupp, pointed out bravely at the time, recognising and explaining his patient’s psychosis didn’t mean that all psychotic subjects would act in the same way.

Wagner had in fact behaved as a good citizen for at least 20 years before the attack, yet his diaries showed that throughout this time he had been delusional. Like Breivik, the case demonstrated the compatibility of madness and normal life. For many years, Breivik led an uneventful existence – studying, setting up a business, visiting the gym, going out for drinks with friends. He never came to psychiatric attention and there was no spectacular symptomatology, no bizarre behaviour.

Old psychiatry studied these discreet psychoses that fitted in well with society, often never disintegrating into breakdown or crisis. This was a quiet, contained madness, and it allows us to understand Breivik’s actions far better than the plethora of diagnostic categories already bandied about by “experts”. Paranoia has three classical components. The paranoiac has located a fault or malignancy in the world, he has named it, and has a message to deliver about it. For Breivik, the conviction is that Europe is rotten, that the name of this rottenness is Islam and that it is his mission to expose and excise it.

Whereas many schizophrenic subjects experience an invasion inside their body, the paranoiac situates it outside: there is some badness out there in the world. Where for the schizophrenic the other is often too close, intruding into their body; for the paranoiac, self and other are rigidly separated: the other is outside. And hence the paranoiac subject is always innocent: it’s the other’s fault.

Paranoia here should be differentiated from paranoid. Anyone can be paranoid, but paranoia as such implies a rigid system of beliefs with explanatory power, according the subject a fixed place in the world: for Breivik, that of the “perfect knight” battling Islam. The other common misunderstanding of paranoia is to assume it always involves persecution. In fact, many paranoiacs locate the malignancy not in a person but in some aspect of the world: a disease; environmental problems; danger to children.

They then spend their lives campaigning to remove this fault, whether it is by medical research, projects in education or environmental science. The most noble and charitable of pursuits thus often share something with the most tyrannical and murderous: to remove an evil presence from the world.

The paranoiac’s delusion here can be false but it can equally be absolutely true. The FBI may not be plotting against you, but BP may be responsible for destroying nature on part of the American coast. The madness lies not in the content of the beliefs here but in the person’s relation to the belief. If certainty about the belief replaces doubt, we are in the realm of psychosis.

This certainty will often spawn enthusiasm, forming groups or movements. Neurotic people are unsure of their aim in life, and sex, death and existence are open questions. Encountering someone who actually knows the answer to these questions will exert a gravitational effect. Breivik, like many others, will probably attract his followers.

This nuances the old-fashioned idea that the subject is only responsible for a crime if he “knew the difference between right and wrong”, since the central feature of paranoia is precisely that the person does know the difference. That, indeed, is why they are psychotic: they harbour not doubt but utter conviction that what they are doing is the right thing.

subject of statement enuciated subject of the enunciation

This article (from Lacanonline click here) will examine the concepts of the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation, the relationship between them, and look at three examples of where these ideas might be applied.

A first general point to make is on the choice of translation. The English which is most often employed does not bring out the complementarity between the French terms Lacan uses: Le sujet de l’énonciation and le sujet de l’énoncé, where the ‘subject of the statement’ corresponds to the subject of the enunciated, de l’énoncé. Fink’s translation of the Écrits retains this choice, but in Gallagher’s translations of the Seminar the reader commonly finds a more literal translation into ‘enunciation’ and ‘enunciated’.

What is the subject of the statement?

The subject of the statement (or subject of the utterance, as it is sometimes also referred to) is I – the first person. In psychoanalytic terms it can be equated to the ego. It is the subject that in day-to-day discourse we posit in order to attribute an agent to speech. As Lacanian psychoanalyst Philippe Van Haute writes, “The subject of the statement… refers to the subject as it appears to itself and to the other (for example, as someone who believes herself to be a diligent student).” (Van Haute, Against Adaptation, p.40.)

In the Écrits Lacan maintains that this I of the subject of the statement is a signifier, but that it does not signify the subject (Écrits, 800). What does he mean by this? What is known in linguistics as the shifter (or indexical) – I – gives context to what is said so that the sentence is in some way ‘rooted’ or attributed to that subject. But as linguists recognise, in and of itself this I has no meaning. We have to look at the context, provided by the enunciation (in most cases, what follows after the I), to make sense of what has been said.

So the ‘I’ of the statement functions simply as a way of making sense of the enunciation. In Van Haute’s example above, “The shifter ‘I’ has no meaning and no determinable content unless I add something like ‘am a diligent student’.” (Van Haute, Against Adaptation, p.39).

What is the subject of the enunciation?

The subject of the enunciation can be understood as the subject of the unconscious. It is a subject that emerges from within our speech, through our signifiers, and which differs from or contradicts the I of the statement.

Lacan calls the subject of the enunciation “the subject not insofar as it produces discourse but insofar as it is produced [fait], cornered even [fait comme un rat], by discourse” (Lacan, My Teaching, p.36). Here Lacan is pointing to the fact that the subject is not quite the agent of what he says: as much as he speaks he is spoken. The words that he uses carry a meaning which exceeds the one he hoped to convey when he opened his mouth.

It is through the act of enunciation that we have access to the unconscious in the psychoanalytic sense. This is why Lacan says in the Écrits that ”the presence of the unconscious, being situated in the locus of the Other, can be found in every discourse, in its enunciation.” (Écrits, 834.)

The difference between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation is key in understanding why it is in speech and language that Lacan locates the psychoanalytic unconscious. In Seminar XII Lacan tells his audience that the difference between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation demonstrates why language cannot be thought of as a code, in which a fixed and unambiguous meaning is passed from one user to another. “Language is not a code”, he says, “precisely because in its least enunciation it carries with it the subject present in the enunciating.” (Seminar XII, 10.03.1965.)

Lacan’s idea is that rather than involving a single subject who uses language to convey a meaning or sentiment, there is a subject revealed which is not equivalent to the one speaking as I, a subject which can be detected in the very words or signifiers themselves.

Separating out these two subjects in speech can also help us understand how Lacan’s famous maxim that the signifier represents the subject for another signifier refers to exactly this split between the speaking subject that enunciates words or signifiers and the I of the subject of the statement.

Lacan says in the Écrits that “what the unconscious brings back to our attention is the law by which enunciation can never be reduced to what is enunciated in any discourse.” (Écrits, 892.) In other words, an unconscious production is one in which you do not recognise yourself in what you have actually said. This is an experience well-known to anyone who has undertaken a psychoanalysis.

Rather than being found in the hidden depths or recesses of the mind, the unconscious for Lacan is therefore akin to an undercurrent of what the subject says, especially about him or herself. This is why in Seminar VI Lacan refers to the enunciation as being “unconscious in the articulation of the word.” (Seminar VI, 12.11.1958.)

Elaborating on this point, Evans writes that, ”In designating the enunciation as unconscious, Lacan affirms that the source of speech is not the ego, nor consciousness, but the unconscious; language comes from the Other, and the idea that ‘I’ am master of my discourse is only an illusion.” (Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, p.55.)

So let’s now take three examples of ways in which the divide between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation can be made apparent.

Example 1: ‘I am lying’.

The distinction Lacan makes between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation help us to comprehend the seemingly paradoxical sentence ‘I am lying’. Indeed, we only see the paradox in this statement if we perform the mental operation of separating the subject of the statement from the subject of the enunciation. What is confusing about this sentence is that we do not know whether the subject of the statement – here, ‘I’ – is telling the truth about the enunciation – here, ‘… am lying’.

In other words, we do not know whether the speaker is telling the truth about telling the truth. As Lacan phrases it, “If you say, I am lying, you are telling the truth, and therefore you are not lying, and so on.” (Seminar XI, p.139.) This is an example that Lacan returns to throughout his work. He first mentions it in Seminar IX, highlighting the paradox:

“The two lines that we distinguish as enunciating and enunciation are sufficient to allow us to affirm that it is in the measure that these two lines are mixed up and confused that we find ourselves before a paradox which culimates in this impasse of the ‘I am lying’ on which I made you pause for an instant.” (Seminar IX, 15.11.1961.)

But a couple of years later, in Seminar XI, he explains that despite this paradox there is nothing formally wrong with the sentence, and it is by separating the subject of the statement from the subject of the enunciation that we can demonstrate this:

”It is quite clear that the I am lying, despite its paradox, is perfectly valid. Indeed, the I of the enunciation is not the same as the I of the statement, that is to say, the shifter which, in the statement, designates him. So, from the point at which I state, it is quite possible for me to formulate in a valid way that the I – the I who, at that moment, formulates the statement – is lying, that he lied a little before, that he is lying afterwards, or even, that in saying I am lying, he declares that he has the intention of deceiving….

This division between the statement and the enunciation means that, in effect, from the I am lying which is at the level of the chain of the statement – the am lying is a signifier, forming part, in the Other, of the treasury of vocabulary in which the I, determined retroactively, becomes a signification, engendered at the level of the statement of what it produces at the level of the enunciation – what results is an I am deceiving you.” (Seminar XI, p.139-140.)

So is the subject lying, or is he telling the truth? Lacan’s answer is that he is telling the truth via his lie. At the level of the subject of statement, he is lying; at the level of the subject of the enunciation, he is telling the truth about that lie. The psychoanalytic response that Lacan suggests to elicit this truth involves sending the subject back his own message in inverted form (Écrits, 41).

Lacan continues:

“The I am deceiving you arises from the point at which the analyst awaits the subject, and sends back to him, according to the formula, his own message in its true signification, that is to say, in an inverted form. He says to him – in this I am deceiving you, what you are sending as message is what I express to you, and in doing so you are telling the truth.  In the way of deception in which the subject is venturing, the analyst is in the position to formulate this you are telling the truth, and my interpretation has meaning only in this dimension.” (Seminar XI, p.139-140.)

In his 1925 paper ‘Negation’ Freud had noted that ”A negative judgement is the intellectual substitute for repression; its ‘no’ is the hall-mark of repression, a certificate of origin – like, let us say, ‘Made in Germany’.” (SE XIX, p.236). In a similar way, the subject of statement, corresponding here to the speaker’s ego, believes itself to be lying; but it is in the enunciation that the truth is signaled.

Where a negation signals the subject of the statement, what follows in the enunciation signals the truth. Psychoanalysts, Lacan suggests, should, “… displace ourselves in the exactly opposite but strictly correlative dimension which is to say: ‘but no, you do not know that you are telling the truth’, which immediately goes much further. What is more: ‘you only tell it so well in the measure that you think you are lying and when you do not want to lie it is to protect yourself from that truth’.” (Seminar IX, 15.11.1961.)

This same ambivalence between the intentions of the subject of the statement at the level of the ego, and the subject of the enunciation at the level of the unconscious, is discussed by Lacan in an example he gives in the Écrits, but which he also comments on in his Seminar. The phrase Lacan highlights is ‘I fear that he will come’, which in French is put in a curious way – “Je crains qu’il ne vienne”, (Écrits, 664):

“[With] the ne of this [phrase] you immediately put your finger on the fact that it means nothing other than ‘I was hoping that he would come’, it expresses the discordance of your own feelings with respect to this person, that it carries in a way its trace which is all the more suggestive because it is incarnated in its signifier… in psychoanalysis we call it ambivalence.” (Seminar IX, 17.01.62.)

Whilst the ne in this sentence is commonly used in French to signal a negation – rather than having a translation in and of itself – as Van Haute explains, Lacan uses this ne explétif in French as an example of the way in which “the subject of the enunciation can also be present in the subject of the statement in ways other than via the shifter ‘I’.” (Van Haute, Against Adaptation, p.40). In discussing the phrase “Je crains qu’il ne vienne” in the Écrits, Lacan uses this ne to demonstrate – by way of a cheeky attack that is effected in its forcefulness by this same ne – that the ne has a value which offers a clue to the subject of the enunciation beyond the subject of the statement, I.

Example 2: Advice.

A simple answer to why Lacan privileges speech in its connection with the unconscious is to make clear that we can speak about ourselves without realising that we are doing so. The distinction to be made is not simply between what you say and what you mean, but which subject is at work in speech. In positing two subjects, the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation Lacan gives us, as he puts it, ”the right way to answer the question ‘who is speaking?’ when the subject of the unconscious is at stake. For the answer cannot come from him if he doesn’t know what he is saying, or even that he is speaking, as all of analytic experience teaches us.” (Écrits, 800).

Lacan’s distinction between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation allows us to ask a simple but intriguing question about advice: when advice is given from one person to another, to whom does the advice pertain? Does the advice fit better the one offering it than the one receiving it?

Here is an example. A man is in a bar with a colleague discussing work. The conversation turns to the deals they are each expecting to be able to announce in the near future. When the talk turns to how likely certain of these deals are to be sealed, the man offers his colleague advice about the confidence with which he should report these to his superiors with the words ‘Never commit, never commit’.

This advice would not have been so notable were the man not in the bar precisely to celebrate his engagement to his fiancé! With the words ‘never commit’ we can wonder what commitment was being avoided, and who therefore the advice was aimed at. In Seminar IX on identification Lacan makes a comment that is useful in thinking about how to view advice, which we can apply to this example:

“… By this very fact in the enunciating, he [the subject] elides something which is properly speaking what he cannot know, namely the name of what he is qua enunciating subject. In the act of enunciating, there is this latent nomination….” (Seminar IX, 10.01.1962).

The nomination in our example – of the subject himself as recipient of his own advice to ‘never commit’ – is not possible at the level of the statement. The unconscious here cannot express itself with the first person pronoun. The only way for the unconscious thought to be voiced was through an enunciation which was intended ostensibly for someone else.

This impersonalisation is common where the unconscious is concerned. If as Lacan says the unconscious is Other, it is not possible for us to assume it at the level of the ego, and so through mechanisms such as advice it is given or attributed to someone else. Lacanian psychoanalyst Joel Dor points out that “Most often it is with ‘I’ that the subject actualises himself in his own utternaces. But the subject of the utterance may also be adequately represented by ‘one’, ‘you’, ‘we’ and so on.” (Joel Dor, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan, p. 151).

The failure to include oneself at the level of the enunciation that we see in incidences of giving and receiving advice is something that Lacan refers to via an anecdote, which he finds in the work of the psychologist Alfred Binet, about a child who uses the phrase ‘I have three brothers, Paul, Ernest and me’ instead of ‘We are three brothers, Paul, ernest and me.’ (Seminar VI, 03.12.1958.)

As with the example of ‘I am lying’ discussed above, Lacan returns to discuss this ‘mistake’ several times in the course of his Seminar. We can take this as a signal that there is something about this anecdote that he treats as axiomatic, and he begins his reflections on it in Seminar VI by commenting that “everything about the implication of the human subject in the act of speech is there.” (ibid).

The speaker in Lacan’s example talks about himself as a brother even though he is speaking about the fact that he has brothers. He is confused between being and having, as Lacan says. In Seminar XII Lacan points out that, “Here, ‘me’ must be in two places, in the place of the series of brothers and also in the place of the one who is enunciating.” (Seminar XII, 20.01.1965.). But the year before, in Seminar XI, Lacan allows that the child’s mistake is quite understandable: “But it is quite natural – first the three brothers, Paul, Ernest and I are counted, and then there is the I at the level at which I am to reflect the first I, that is to say, the I who counts.” (Seminar XI, p.20).

The little boy counts the subject of the statement twice – mistakenly as one of the brothers, on the grounds that he is a brother, but also has brothers. The child does not deduct himself from the enunciation. As Lacan explains, ”the child does not see this enunciation as coming from elsewhere as he should, namely that the subject does not yet know how to deduct himself.” (Seminar VI, 10.12.1958.)

In the same way, where advice is offered it is worth asking: who does this advice fit best – the one giving it or the one receiving it? Perhaps a Lacanian response to advice when it is offered would be to send the subject back his own message in inverted form, as Lacan suggests in the Écrits; that is, to give it its true signification (Écrits, 41).

The signifiers the subject enunciates belongs to the discourse of the Other, of the unconscious as Other. At the level of the subject of the enunciation it is clear that repression is taking place. “We see when repression is introduced”, says Lacan in Seminar VI, “it is essentially linked to the absolute necessity of the subject being effaced and disappearing at the level of the process of enunciating.” (Seminar VI, 03.12.1958.)

The subject’s words will effectively overtake him in their enunciation. By addressing advice to someone else certain ideas can be expressed in the third person rather than the first. Something more is being communicated about the speaker than that which the speaker attributes to himself as ego, as advisor. Similarly, the subject can talk about someone else whilst seeming to be talking about themselves. In Seminar III Lacan states that, “The I is the I of him who is pronouncing the discourse. Underneath everything that is said there is an I who pronounces it. It’s within this enunciation that the you appears.” (Seminar III, p.274.)

Example 3: The back-handed compliment.

Even though in many cases there is nothing unconscious about a back-handed compliment, what is interesting about them from the perspective of Lacan’s distinction between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation is that where there is an intent to cause offence it can only be detected at the level of the enunciation.

Usually back-handed compliments can be broken into two parts – the first part is ostensibly complimentary; the second is insulting. The speaker makes a back-handed compliment from the position of the subject of the statement, the level at which it could be regarded as a genuine compliment. In the actual content of the remark there is probably little to argue with, but it is in the enunciation itself that the intent is revealed, even if this is unconscious to the speaker.

When used consciously the backhanded compliment is a fairly subtle way for the speaker to distance him or herself from the intention of his or her own words, in much the same way as a negation can be used for this purpose. In this sense, the division between the subject of the statement and the enunciation could be said to be deliberate. But a backhanded compliment can also be uninitentional, revealing the speaker’s unconscious thoughts through words they do not attribute to themselves as subject of the statement. Take the following examples:

‘I always feel more intelligent after reading your articles’.
‘You’re smart to do your laundry on Saturday night, when everyone else is out.’

The speaker’s statement occupies the position of a compliment, but in its enunciation there is an insult.

Another noteworthy aspect of the back-handed compliment is that it doesn’t go without saying. It can be thought of as something that corresponds to what Lacan calls a ‘half-said’.  Dor quotes Lacan here from L’Étourdit:

“That doesn’t go without saying’ – we see that that is the case with many things, even with most of them, including the Freudian thing as I defined it as being the said [le dit] of the truth…. This is how the said doesn’t go without saying. But if the said always presents itself as the truth, even if it never goes beyond a half-said [un mi-dit], the saying [le dire] is coupled with it only to ex-sist [ex-sister] there, that is, not to be of the spoken-dimension [la dit-mension] of the truth.”

(Cited by Dor in Introduction to the Reading of Lacan, p.152).

happiness

Simon Critchley on Happiness

Here is “Reveries of a Solitary Walker” J.J. Rousseau  (emphases Critchley’s)

If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.

***

This is as close to a description of happiness as I can imagine. Rousseau is describing the experience of floating in a little rowing boat on the Lake of Bienne close to Neuchâtel in his native Switzerland. He particularly loved visiting the Île Saint Pierre, where he used to enjoy going for exploratory walks when the weather was fine and he could indulge in the great passion of his last years: botany. He would walk with a copy of Linneaus under his arm, happily identifying plants in areas of the deserted island that he had divided for this purpose into small squares.

On the way to the island, he would pull in the oars and just let the boat drift where it wished, for hours at a time. Rousseau would lie down in the boat and plunge into a deep reverie. How does one describe the experience of reverie: one is awake, but half asleep, thinking, but not in an instrumental, calculative or ordered way, simply letting the thoughts happen, as they will.

Happiness is not quantitative or measurable and it is not the object of any science, old or new. It cannot be gleaned from empirical surveys or programmed into individuals through a combination of behavioral therapy and anti-depressants. If it consists in anything, then I think that happiness is this feeling of existence, this sentiment of momentary self-sufficiency that is bound up with the experience of time

Look at what Rousseau writes above: floating in a boat in fine weather, lying down with one’s eyes open to the clouds and birds or closed in reverie, one feels neither the pull of the past nor does one reach into the future. Time is nothing, or rather time is nothing but the experience of the present through which one passes without hurry, but without regret. As Wittgenstein writes in what must be the most intriguing remark in the “Tractatus,” “the eternal life is given to those who live in the present.” Or ,as Whitman writes in “Leaves of Grass”: “Happiness is not in another place, but in this place…not for another hour…but this hour.”

Rousseau asks, “What is the source of our happiness in such a state?” He answers that it is nothing external to us and nothing apart from our own existence. However frenetic our environment, such a feeling of existence can be achieved. He then goes on, amazingly, to conclude, “as long as this state lasts we are self-sufficient like God.”

God-like, then. To which one might reply: Who? Me? Us? Like God? Dare we? But think about it: If anyone is happy, then one imagines that God is pretty happy, and to be happy is to be like God. But consider what this means, for it might not be as ludicrous, hybristic or heretical as one might imagine. To be like God is to be without time, or rather in time with no concern for time, free of the passions and troubles of the soul, experiencing something like calm in the face of things and of oneself.

Why should happiness be bound up with the presence and movement of water? This is the case for Rousseau and I must confess that if I think back over those experiences of blissful reverie that are close to what Rousseau is describing then it is often in proximity to water, although usually saltwater rather than fresh. For me, it is not so much the stillness of a lake (I tend to see lakes as decaffeinated seas), but rather the never-ending drone of the surf, sitting by the sea in fair weather or foul and feeling time disappear into tide, into the endless pendulum of the tidal range. At moments like this, one can sink into deep reverie, a motionlessness that is not sleep, but where one is somehow held by the sound of the surf, lulled by the tidal movement.

Is all happiness solitary? Of course not. But one can be happy alone and this might even be the key to being happy with others. Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud when walking with his sister. However, I think that one can also experience this feeling of existence in the experience of love, in being intimate with one’s lover, feeling the world close around one and time slips away in its passing. Rousseau’s rowing boat becomes the lovers’ bed and one bids the world farewell as one slides into the shared selfishness of intimacy.

… And then it is over. Time passes, the reverie ends and the feeling for existence fades. The cell phone rings, the e-mail beeps and one is sucked back into the world’s relentless hum and our accompanying anxiety.

jodi dean communist desire democratic drive

A better way to conceive the division within the people, one capable of expressing the power of the people in and as a collectivity but not as a whole and not as a unity, makes use of the psychoanalytic distinction between desire and drive . While Freud’s vicissitudes of the drive are generally known (reversal in to its opposite, turn ing ro und upon the subject’s own self, repression, and sublimation), two features of the perhaps less familiar Lacanian notion of drive bear emphasizing. The first concerns the difference between drive and desire as relations of jouissance, in other words, as economies through which the subject structures her enjoyment. Desire is always a desire to desire, a desire that can never be filled, a desire for a jouissance or enjoyment that can never be attained.

In contrast, drive attains jouissance in the repetitive process process of not reaching it. One doesn’t have to reach the goal to enjoy. Enjoyment attaches to the process, thereby capturing the subject. Enjoyment, no matter how small, fleeting, or partial, is why one persists in the loop of drive. The second feature concerns the different status of objet petit a in desire and drive.

Zizek In Defense of Lost Causes pg 328: Although, in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of the objet a as the object of desire, we have an object which was originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of the objet a as the object of drive, , the “object ” is directly the loss itself — in the shift from desire to drive we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object.

That is to say, the weird movement called “drive”. is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object; it is a push to directly enact the “loss ” — the gap, cut, distance-itself.

🙂 And here is Dean’s point:

The people as desiring have needs, needs they can only address together, collectively, active and in common. Their sovereignty can be reduced neither to their majority nor to their procedures. Rather, it names the cause and reason for government: the collective people in their desire for a common good. The people as caught in drive are fragmented, dispersed into networks and tributaries. Stuck in drive’s repetitive loops, they pursue their separate enterprises even as they are governmentalized objects, a population.

Ž lectures on Hegel at the egs 2009

Death Drive 1
this is starting point but at the end we have perfect reconciliation.  Hegel was well aware that this excess of negativity could never be culturalized.  In contrast to Kant Hegel never believed in perpetual peace.  Hegel thinks that this radical negativity, this excess will explode again.  This excess is neither Nature nor Culture.  Hegelian progress, once you are in culture, retroactively you de-naturalize nature.  The price we pay to move into culture, what before was a natural instinct becomes an absolute eternal repetitive drive.  That is a REPETITIVE drive.

Aim the true satisfaction of the drive is the circular movement of the drive itself.
Goal is what you official want

Concrete Universality
outlines Schuman and then exposes his source as Charles Rosen

Maybe the true ideological revolution is not a chang in the explicit rules, but the revolution in this background, I’m saying the same thing but the virtual resonance, the virtual background has changed. The implicit, you can’t pin it down, but somehow everything is different.

Billy Bathgate This is a good discussion

Doctorow’s novel and the movie.  The novel must have been better after seeing the movie.  We have a failed novel, we have a failed repetition (movie) but the repetition, generates retroactively a truly spectral presence of what the novel should have been.  It is a virtual object of another kind, the film does not repeat the novel on which it is based, rather they both repeat the virtual X.

Retroactive movement: a movement described it is something which was first conceptualized by Bergson,  in spite of my turmoil, I experienced a feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from abstract to concrete.  THe war exploded, what happened, before at the level of abstract knowledge everybody knew about it, expected it, but nonetheless nobody believed it really could happen, a fetishist disavowal, I know very well but nonetheless I don’t believe it could really happen.  FIrst it was probable but impossible, but then when it happend it suddenly become REAL and possible.  When it really happened, it retroactively became totally possible and acceptable.

The logic we have here is not standard linear logic of possibility.  i.e., we have a sitatuation A, with certain possibilities, and one possiblity is realized. NO.  we have something that is considered impossible HAPPENS and then retroactively it becomes possible.  THIS IS THE LACANIAN ACT.

the ACT it retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.

Get’s back to Hegel here

The Hegelian temporality, eternity it’s always done this way.   You may think Hegel is closure, in development thing becomes what it always already was. … Hegel may appear to be a totally closed structure.  NO. We should read the Hegelian notion of totality in this Bergson way.

Pure Past: T.S. Elliot, every new work of art retroactively changes the past.  After a certain new work of art, classical works of art are perceived in a different way. The priority of synchrony over diachrony.  Yes this is a good 10 minutes

Dostoevsky didn’t only influence Kafka, only through Kafka are we able to note this dimension in Dostoevsky that has become discernible to us.

This retroactive structure in the sense, in every historical point we live in a totality which is necessary, but this totality is retroactively

… Hegel deduces the necessity of contingency. Not only the necessity of contingency but the contingency of necessity.  Things become necessary in a way that is ultimately contingent.

Hegel’s narrative is about the very rise of necessity.  This is why for Hegel, he insists on Monarchy, Constitutional Monarchy.  Hegel was very aware that exactly what people attribute to him, total rational State, where everything is rationally regulated is nonsense, Hegel was aware that in order to have a rational totality you have to have a contingent element on top.  The function of the King is to sign his name, the less he knows all the better.

Hegel’s point is that you have state as rational totality, at the top you need an element of radical contingency

Reality is ontologically incomplete

Reality is not fully constituted.  Great works of art are like shots on a film, but the film wasn’t developed.  If you come later it isn’t an obstacle, there are things you can only understand with a delay.  How I perceive this ontological openness, how to interpret quantum physics.  Ž quotes the shitty book by Nicholas Fearn.  BUt he makes the point of the ontological incompleteness of reality.  He uses the video game analogy.

The difficult reality is incomplete but doesn’t collapse into itself, if you look closely enough it is blurred, there is no zero level, the closer you get is blurred.

The basic operation of Hegel, you have a certain epistemological limitation, you solve the problem, by showing how the problem is its own solution.

Adorno, you have 2 irreducible levels: Its wrong to ask oneself, can we get a unified theory, does this mean that we can’t know society. The result of this individual deadlock between  individual psychic intersubjective experience and autonomous social structures, this gap.  What we misperceive as the limitation of our knowledge of reality, is a basic feature of social reality itself.

Fredric Jameson alternate Modernities

back to Concrete Universal

fink

Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique Harvard University Press 1997.

As Bruno Bettelheim once put it, “love is not enough” when it comes to raising children, and even the contemporary espousers of “tough love” do not usually grasp the distinction between setting limits and establishing the Law as such. Parents often set limits for their children simply because it is more convenient for them to do so, and the limits depend on nothing but the parents’ own mood or whimsy. If I tell my children they have to go to bed by 8:30 pm every school night, and then I let them stay up until 11pm on a school night because I feel like having company, I show them I consider myself to be the only limit to their jouissance. If I tell them they have to obey property rights and speed limits, and then proceed to steal little things from hotels and try to talk my way out of speeding tickets, I show them that I accept no law above myself, no legitimate limitations or restrictions on my own will and desire. 252 note 71

The law of the symbolic pact, on the other hand, applies to all parties, limits all parties. If I promise my child that Saturday afternoons arc his to do with what he will, then I cannot arbitrarily decide that he has to spcnd all of this Saturday afternoon cleaning up the toy room, his bedroom, and his closet. According to the symbolic pact, I am bound by my promises just as much as my child is If I make as many exceptions as I like, nothing remains of the rule, and the child — perceiving that I consider myself my own law — aspires simply to dethrone me and become his own law in turn.

A mother is just as likely (if not more likely) to grasp the importance of the law of the symbolic pact (or law with a capital L”) as a father is, but both mothers and fathers, insofar as they are neurotic, are likely to have their own problems accepting the Law (as we shall see in the next chapter) and are more likely to criticize each other’s breaches of the Law than to criticize their own. We find it far easier to detect capriciousness, selfishness, and inconsistency in another’s speech and behavior than in our own. A single mother can, in theory, provide both a loving mother-child bond and appeal to a law beyond herself (whether Dr. Spock or the U.S. Constitution, either of which could scrve as a Name-of-the-Father in Lacanian terms) that applies equally to mother and child, thereby introducing that necessary symbolic third term. So too, single fathers and gay couples could, in theory, provide both love and Law. Given how frequently the traditional family structure already fails, despite centuries of dividing love and Law between the sexes in considerably codified sex roles, what are the chances that both roles will be played by one parent alone or by two parents raised into similarly codified sex roles? Isn’t the incidence of psychosis likely to rise in such cases?

Our relation to the Law is obviously a very complicated matter, and I have barely scratched the surface in these brief comments. For we can always raise the question or the injustice or immorality of the law (whether local, state, national, or international), and this has been done from Antigone to Thoreau, from the civil disobedience tradition to the civil rights and women’s rights movements, and takes myriad forms. In such cases, we appeal to a notion of right or justice beyond the particular laws of the land, questioning what it is that makes the law right or just in the first place and thereby raising the question of what Lacan calls the “guarantee” — that is, what legitimates or lends authority to the Other, to the Law itself. The problem being that there can never be a guarantee: there is no absolute justification of the Law (in Lacanian terminology, no “Other of the Other, no stable bedrock outside the Other that serves as the Other’s foundation or anchor in truth, no outside point that guarantees the Other’s consistency and coherence). […]

But the more the law’s representatives appear untrustworthy, the more the law itself can be thrown into question, and the less we are inclined to accept the sacrifices exacted by the law (that is, to accept limitation/castration). If we are to preserve some notion of a just Law above and beyond the particular laws of the land — given the current legitimation crisis of the legal, juridical, and executive branches of government — a just Law that is equitably and uniformly enforced, we must have an experience of Law at home which at least approaches that ideal to some degree. As rare as this experience may be in the stereotypical nuclear family, practices currently being advocated seem likely to make it rarer still. As Lacan once said, in a pessimistic vein, “I won’t say that even the slightest little gesture to eliminate something bad leaves the way open to something still worse — it always leads to something worse” (Seminar III, 361).  254

torture bigelow

Žižek, S. The Guardian, Friday 25 January 2013

Here is how, in a letter to the LA Times, Kathryn Bigelow justified Zero Dark Thirty’s depicting of the torture methods used by government agents to catch and kill Osama bin Laden: “Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.”

Really? One doesn’t need to be a moralist, or naive about the urgencies of fighting terrorist attacks, to think that torturing a human being is in itself something so profoundly shattering that to depict it neutrally – i.e., to neutralise this shattering dimension – is already a kind of endorsement.

Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a big industrial-logistic operation, focusing on the technical problems involved (transport, disposal of the bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators. Where is Bigelow here?

Without a shadow of a doubt, she is on the side of the normalisation of torture.

When Maya, the film’s heroine, first witnesses waterboarding, she is a little shocked, but she quickly learns the ropes; later in the film she coldly blackmails a high-level Arab prisoner with, “If you don’t talk to us, we will deliver you to Israel”. Her fanatical pursuit of Bin Laden helps to neutralise ordinary moral qualms.

Much more ominous is her partner, a young, bearded CIA agent who masters perfectly the art of passing glibly from torture to friendliness once the victim is broken (lighting his cigarette and sharing jokes). There is something deeply disturbing in how, later, he changes from a torturer in jeans to a well-dressed Washington bureaucrat.

This is normalisation at its purest and most efficient – there is a little unease, more about the hurt sensitivity than about ethics, but the job has to be done. This awareness of the torturer’s hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale.

The debate about whether waterboarding is torture or not should be dropped as an obvious nonsense: why, if not by causing pain and fear of death, does waterboarding make hardened terrorist-suspects talk? The replacement of the word “torture” with “enhanced interrogation technique” is an extension of politically correct logic: brutal violence practised by the state is made publicly acceptable when language is changed.

The most obscene defence of the film is the claim that Bigelow rejects cheap moralism and soberly presents the reality of the anti-terrorist struggle, raising difficult questions and thus compelling us to think (plus, some critics add, she “deconstructs” feminine cliches – Maya displays no sentimentality, she is tough and dedicated to her task like men).

But with torture, one should not “think”. A parallel with rape imposes itself here: what if a film were to show a brutal rape in the same neutral way, claiming that one should avoid cheap moralism and start to think about rape in all its complexity? Our guts tell us that there is something terribly wrong here;

I would like to live in a society where rape is simply considered unacceptable, so that anyone who argues for it appears an eccentric idiot, not in a society where one has to argue against it.

The same goes for torture: a sign of ethical progress is the fact that torture is “dogmatically” rejected as repulsive, without any need for argument.

So what about the “realist” argument: torture has always existed, so is it not better to at least talk publicly about it? This, exactly, is the problem. If torture was always going on, why are those in power now telling us openly about it? There is only one answer: to normalise it, to lower our ethical standards.

Torture saves lives? Maybe, but for sure it loses souls – and its most obscene justification is to claim that a true hero is ready to forsake his or her soul to save the lives of his or her countrymen.

The normalisation of torture in Zero Dark Thirty is a sign of the moral vacuum we are gradually approaching. If there is any doubt about this, try to imagine a major Hollywood film depicting torture in a similar way 20 years ago. It is unthinkable.

review of copjec may 68

Jones, Paula Satne. “Review of Lacan The Silent Partners” ed. Slavoj Žižek, Verso, 2006. Oct 3rd 2006

‘May ’68, The Emotional Month’. In this article, Copjec examines Lacan’s surprising response to the student revolts of May ’68. Such a response can be found in the seminar delivered by Lacan that very same year: Seminar XVII: The Underside (or Reverse) of Psychoanalysis. In his seminar, Lacan not only accused the students of not being radical enough, but also, and more interestingly, he ended the seminar by abruptly announcing that the final aim of psychoanalysis is the production of shame. Why invoke shame as the final aim of analysis in the context of 1968?

Copjec answers this question by analysing Lacan’s concept of affect [or jouissance in Lacan’s preferred vocabulary] since after all shame is a form of affect. She does this by relating Lacan’s concept of jouissance to Freud’s concept of anxiety, Sartre’s voyeuristic gaze and Levinas’s feeling of ‘being riveted’ [Levinas being the only of the three authors that can be called a ‘silent’ partner].

From Freud, Lacan takes the idea that affect is the discharge, the movement of thought. When this movement stops and becomes inhibited, affect is known by the more specific name of anxiety. However, Lacan goes a step further than Freud because whereas Freud maintains that anxiety, unlike fear, has no object, Lacan asserts that anxiety is ‘not without object’. On the contrary, anxiety is the experience of an encounter with an object of a different kind: object petit a, as it was famously called by Lacan. With respect to Sartre, Lacan also goes a step further because he points out that the gaze that assaults the voyeur from behind is none other than the voyeur’s own, that is, his own surplus-jouissance. Finally, we can also relate Lacan’s concept of affect with Levinas’s phrase ‘riveted to being’. Levinas’s phrase has the implication that being rather than immediately being our being, is forced, adhered or stuck to our being. Here again, Lacan advances Levinas’s argument because for him, the being to which we are riveted or stuck is specifically jouissance.

In Seminar XVII, Lacan also claims that anxiety is the ‘central affect’ around which every social arrangement is organized. The anxiety that the encounter with one’s own jouissance produces must admit some form of escape if society is to be possible. It is at this point that Lacan opposes the Analytic to the University Discourse – a discourse that Lacan linked with the rise of capitalism. In the modern-capitalistic world, originary anxiety is transformed into moral anxiety. Although the modern guilt-laden subject still experiences jouissance, this jouissance, says Lacan, is a sham.

The fraudulent nature of this jouissance comes from the fact that it gives one a false sense that at the core of one’s being there is something possessable as an identity (racial, national, ethnic).The universalizing tendency of the University Discourse does not end up forsaking these inherited identities or differences, but welcoming them with open arms.

It is against this background that Lacan’s call to shame makes any sense. ‘His is a recommendation not for a renewed prudishness but, on the contrary, for relinquishing our satisfaction with a sham jouissance in favour of the real thing. The real thing – jouissance – can never be ‘dutified’, controlled, regimented; rather, it catches us by surprise, like a sudden, uncontrollable blush on the cheek’ (p. 110).

Copjec’s article is interesting not only because it offers an excellent interpretation of a very difficult Lacanian passage, but also because it reminds us of the necessity of going back to the ‘real thing’ and abandoning the universalizing discourse of identity and difference.

Miller shame

Miller, Jacques-Alain. “On Shame.” SIC 6: Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Clemens, Justin, and Russell Grigg eds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 11 – 28. Print.

The disappearance of shame means that the subject ceases to be repre­sented by a signifier that matters. 18

When one has come to the point at which every body tears up his visiting card, where there is no shame any more, the ethics of psychoanalysis is called into question. 19

The virtues of what has emerged as the modern man imply the renunciation of aristocratic virtue and of what it obliged in terms of braving death. One of the places this is brought about is in the work of Hobbes, which reveres aristocratic virtue while at the same time deducing that the social bond is above all established in the face of the fear of death, that is, the contrary of aristocratic virtue. Cultivated minds these days refer to this discourse in which one finds the foundation for the claim that security is essential for modern man. This is to affirm that heroism no longer means anything. 24

This is what psychoanalys is is able to point out, that the shameless are shameful. To be sure, they challenge the master’s discourse, the solidarity between the master and the worker, both being a part of the same system. He refers to the Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and the Roman people, who each benefited from the master signifier.

He indicates to these students that they are placed with the others in excess, that is to say, the rejects of the system, not with the proletariat but with the lumpenproletariat. It is a very precise remark and it runs right across all the years we have lived through since. This enables him to deduce that this system that adheres to the master signifier produces shame.

The students, by placing them selves outside the system, put themselves in the place of impudence. [offensive boldness, insolent or impertinent, shameless]

This is where we can see what has changed since then.We are in a sys­tem that does not obey the same regulation because we are in a system that produces impudence and not shame, that is, in a system that annuls the function of shame.

We no longer apprehend it except in the form of insecurity — a form of insecurity that is imputed to the subject, who is no longer under the domination of a master signifier.

The present moment of this civilization is permeated by an authoritarian and artificial return of the master signifier. Every one must work in their place or be locked up. While in the system Lacan was in, it was still possible to say “make ashamed.”

Impudence has progressed greatly since, and today it has be­ come the norm. What does one obtain from saying to the subject,”You owe something to yourself”?  There is no doubt that psychoanalysis must define its position in relation to the aristocratic reaction that I have re­ferred to. This is indeed the question that haunts our practice: Is it for everyone? 26

Lacan’s fundamental debate — it is clear in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, as it was already in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis — has always been a debate with civilization in so far as it abolishes shame, with the globalization that is in process, with Americanization or with utilitarianism, that is, with the reign of what Kojeve calls the Christian bourgeois.

The path that Lacan proposes is the signifier as vehicle of a value of transcendence. This is condensed into S1. Again, things have changed since The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, because the signifier has been affected. Speech itself has been reduced to the pair listening and chattering.

What one attempts to preserve in the analytic session is a space in which the signifier retains its dignity. 28

We can estimate the difference between today and the period of The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. We are at a point where the dominant discourse enjoins one not to be ashamed of one’s jouissance anymore.

Ashamed of all the rest, yes, of one’s desire, but not of one’s jouissance .

copjec shame pt 3

Copjec, Joan. “May ’68, the Emotional Month.” Lacan: The Silent Partners Ed. Slavoj Žižek. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

Far from being an abstract idea, the insistent affirmation of a negative contrary is a central fact with which modern philosophy and politics tries to come to grips. I noted earlier that the historical proposition that everything, including man, is malleable implies that he is without foundation, without roots. Deterritorialization therefore reigns, or should be expected to reign, in the scientific/capitalist world. Yet no political fact has asserted itself with such ferocity than that man is ‘not without foundation’, ‘not without roots’. Something insists on disrupting the progress of deterritorialization, time and time again.

Now, to say that one is ‘not without roots’ is different from saying that one has roots in some racial, ethnic or national tradition, as those who engineered the turn to ‘identity politics’ are wont to say. But by way of exploring this critical difference, I want to return to Lacan’s myth of the lathouses, the non-objectified objects that appear from time to time in the alethosphere. Man, the prosthetic God of this alethosphere, is uprooted from every foundation, ungrounded, thus malleable or at one with the Other, but from time to time, and without warning, he encounters one of these lathouses, which provokes his anxiety. The chiasmic intertwining of man and Other, the absorption of the former in the latter, suddenly falters; man is pulled away, disengaged FROM his foundationless existence in the Other; he grows deaf or indifferent to the Other’s appeal. This disruption is not followed, however, by a retreat from the publicity of ‘pleasure-reality incorporated’ into privacy, simply. For what we encounter in this moment is not the privacy of a self, but the other within the alethospheric. This is the moment of extimacy in which we discover an ‘overpopulated’ privacy, where some alien excess adheres to us. 99

The phrase ‘riveted to being’ is revealing. Rather than simply and immediately being our being, coinciding with it, we are ineluctably fastened, stuck to it – or it to us. (Levinas describes this being ‘adhering to’ us, just as Lacan, in his own myth of the lamella, describes the object as ‘sticking to us’.)

The sentiment of being riveted to being is one of being in the forced company of our own being, whose ‘brutality’ consists in the fact that it is impossible either to assume it or to disown it. It is what we are in our most intimate core, that which singularizes us, that which cannot be vulgarized and yet also that which we cannot recognize.

We do not comprehend or choose it, but neither can we gel rid of it; since it is not of the order of objects – but, rather, of the ‘not-without-object’ – it cannot be objectified, placed before us and confronted.  100

copjec the gaze

Copjec, Joan. “The Censorship of Interiority.” Umbra A Journal of the Unconscious. 2009. 165-186.

The gaze, he says, cannot be matched to an actual pair of eyes; it is not locatable in a person. The gaze has no bearer, belongs to no one. If, feeling a gaze rest upon me, I scan the subway car to try to pin it on some suspicious-looking person, the experience of the gaze will evaporate at each point on which my accusation alights.

There is a fantasmatic dimension of the gaze that suggests it cannot be contained within an intersubjective dialectic.

But, in the end, Sartre does not follow up on this suggestion and thus the a-personal dimension of the gaze serves in his account merely to enhance the power of the Other by effacing his limits.

The fact that I cannot attach it to the actual eyes of an objectified other gives the gaze all the more power to objectify and limit me. This is a point Val Lewton, the legendary producer of horror films, well understood: do not show the horrible thing directly embodied in a person, for this will only have the effect of attenuating the threat. 181

Lacan reads the fantasmatic dimension of the gaze differently. There is no warrant, he argues, for Sartre’s placement of the gaze exclusively on the side of an adversarial other. Detached from every observer, it is detached, too, from the voyeur and not only from the Other.

It is as if, through participation in the social or public field, the voyeur were lent a gaze by which he is permitted to see himself appear.

The gaze lends the subject the exteriority or detachment necessary to look back and see the one thing he was unable to see: his own appearance. What this recurvant gaze sees, however, is not merely the subject’s emergent image, but the detachment that permits it to emerge. My image is my disguise, my veil; it enables me to appear in public while preserving my privacy.

In a gesture of sleazy flattery, Behzad tries to establish some silly points of coincidence between Zeynab and Forugh, the leading Persian poet of the twentieth century. There is absolutely no sign, however, that Zeynab is interested in being like the poet. What interests Zeynab is dissimulation (the possibility of which is opened by the poem), the possibility of being able to present herself in public while remaining concealed.