Author: logocentric

Ž critique stavrakakis

Taken from Žižek’s criticism of Lacanian Left by Yannis Stavrakakis.

Because he ignores this excess of drive, Stavrakakis also operates with a simplified notion of “traversing the fantasy” – as if fantasy is a kind of illusory screen blurring our relation to partial objects. This notion may seem to fit perfectly the commonsense idea of what psychoanalysis should do: of course it should liberate us from the hold of idiosyncratic fantasies and enable us to confront reality the way it effectively is… this, precisely, is what Lacan does NOT have in mind – what he aims at is almost the exact opposite.

In our daily existence, we are immersed into “reality” (structured-supported by the fantasy), and this immersion is disturbed by symptoms which bear witness to the fact that another repressed level of our psyche resists this immersion. To “traverse the fantasy” therefore paradoxically means fully identifying oneself with the fantasy – namely with the fantasy which structures the excess resisting our immersion into daily reality, or, to quote a succinct formulation by Richard Boothby:

‘Traversing the fantasy‘ thus does not mean that the subject somehow abandons its involvement with fanciful caprices and accommodates itself to a pragmatic ‘reality,’ but precisely the opposite: the subject is submitted to that effect of the symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality. To traverse the fantasy in the Lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed by the fantasy than ever, in the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with that real core of the fantasy that transcends imaging.

Boothby is right to emphasize the Janus-like structure of a fantasy: a fantasy is simultaneously pacifying, disarming (providing an imaginary scenario which enables us to endure the abyss of the Other’s desire) AND shattering, disturbing, inassimilable into our reality.

The ideologico-political dimension of this notion of “traversing the fantasy” was rendered clear by the unique role the rock group Top lista nadrealista (The Top List of the Surrealists) played during the Bosnian war in the besieged Sarajevo: their ironic performances which, in the midst of the war and hunger, satiricized the predicament of the Sarajevo population, acquired a cult status not only in the counterculture, but also among the citizens of Sarajevo in general (the group’s weekly TV show went on throughout the war and was extremely popular).

Instead of bemoaning the tragic fate of the Bosnians, they daringly mobilized all the clichés about the “stupid Bosnians” which were a commonplace in Yugoslavia, fully identifying with them – the point thus made was that the path of true solidarity leads through direct confrontation with the obscene racist fantasies which circulated in the symbolic space of Bosnia, through the playful identification with them, not through the denial of this obscenities on behalf of “what people really are.”

No wonder, then, that, when Stavrakakis tries to provide some concrete examples of this new politics of partial jouissance, things go really “bizarre.” He starts with Marshal Sahlins’ thesis that the Paleolithic communities followed “a Zen road to affluence”: although deeply marked by divisions, exchange, sexual difference, violence and war, they lack the “shrine of the Unattainable,” of “infinite Needs,” and thus the “desire for accumulation”. In them,

enjoyment (jouissance) seems to be had without the mediation of fantasies of accumulation, fullness and excess. /…/ they do show that another world may, in principle, be possible insofar as a detachment of (partial) enjoyment from dreams of completeness and fantasmatic desire is enacted. /…/ Doesn’t something similar happen in the psychoanalytic clinic? And isn’t this also the challenge for radical democratic ethics? (281)

The way the Paleolithic tribesmen avoided accumulation was to cancel the lack itself – it is the idea of such a society without the excess of “infinite Needs” which is properly utopian, the ultimate fantasy, the fantasy of a society before the Fall.

What then follows is a series of cases of how “political theorists and analysts, economists, and active citizens – some of them directly inspired by Lacanian theory – are currently trying to put this radical democratic orientation to work in a multitude of empirical contexts.”(281)

For example: “A group of cooperative workers /Byrne and Healy/ have examined tried to restructure their enjoyment in a non-fantasmatic way”(281) – it would be certainly interesting to hear in detail how this “restructuring” was structured! Then come Robin Blackburn’s proposal for the democratization of Pension Funds, Roberto Unger’s proposal to pass from a family to a social inheritance system, Toni Negri’s proposal of a minimum citizenship income, the projects of participatory budgeting in Brazil…(282) – what all this has to do with jouissance feminine remains a mystery.

The vague underlying idea is that, in all these cases, we are dealing with modest pragmatic proposals, with partial solutions which avoid the excess of radical utopian re-foundation – definitely not enough to qualify them as cases of jouissance feminine which is precisely Lacan’s name for an absolute excess.

Stavrakakis’s attempt to relate Lacanian concepts like jouissance, signifier of the lack in the Other, etc., to concrete socio-political examples is thus thoroughly unconvincing.

When he quotes Joan Copjec’s precise thesis on how suppléance “allows us to speak well of our desire not by translating jouissance into language, but by formalizing it in a signifier that does not mean it but is, rather, directly enjoyed”(279), he reads it as a “way to think of enjoyment and the production of a signifier of lack in a democratic perspective”(279) – but does Copjec’s description not fit perfectly also nationalism?

Is the name of our Nation not such a suppléance? When a passionate patriot exclaims “America!”, does he thereby not produce a signifier which “does not translate jouissance into language, but formalizes it in a signifier that does not mean it but is, rather, directly enjoyed” – when “America!” is passionately exclaimed, it is the signifier itself which is enjoyed?

Stavrakakis’ political vision is vacuous: it is not that his call for more passion in politics is in itself meaningless (of course today’s Left needs more passion), the problem is rather that it resembles all too much the joke quoted by Lacan about a doctor asked by a friend for a free medical advice – reticent to render his service without payment, the doctor examines the friend and then calmly states: “You need a medical advice!”

Paradoxically, with all his (justified) critique of Freudo-Marxism, Stavrakakis’ position can be designated as “Freudo-radical democracy”: he remains within Freudo-Marxism, expecting from psychoanalysis to supplement the theory of radical democracy in the same way Wilhelm Reich, among others, expected psychoanalysis to supplement Marxism.

In both cases, the problem is exactly the same: we have the appropriate social theory, but what is missing is the “subjective factor” – how are we to mobilize people so that they will engage in passionate political struggle? Here psychoanalysis enters, explaining what libidinal mechanisms the enemy is using (Reich tried to do this for Fascism, Stavrakakis for consumerism and nationalism), and how can the Left practice its own “politics of jouissance.”

The problem is that such an approach is an ersatz for the proper political analysis: the lack of passion in political praxis and theory should be explained in its own terms, i.e., in the terms of political analysis itself. The true question is: what is there to be passionate about? Which political choices people experience as “realistic” and feasible?

object-cause of desire and object loss of drive

Taken from Žižek’s criticism of Lacanian Left by Yannis Stavrakakis.  Glynn Daly compares the politics of Žižek and Essex Lacanians

Modern society is defined by the lack of ultimate transcendent guarantee, or, in libidinal terms, of total jouissance. There are three main ways to cope with this negativity: utopian, democratic, and post-democratic.

The first one (totalitarianisms, fundamentalisms) tries to reoccupy the ground of absolute jouissance by attaining a utopian society of harmonious society which eliminates negativity.

The second, democratic, one enacts a political equivalent of “traversing the fantasy”: it institutionalizes the lack itself by creating the space for political antagonisms.

The third one, consumerist post-democracy, tries to neutralize negativity by transforming politics into apolitical administration: individuals pursue their consumerist fantasies in the space regulated by expert social administration.

Today, when democracy is gradually evolving into consumerist post-democracy, one should insist that democratic potentials are not exhausted – “democracy as an unfinished project” could have been Stavrakakis’ motto here. The key to the resuscitation of this democratic potential is to re-mobilize enjoyment: “What is needed, in other words, is an enjoyable democratic ethics of the political.”(269) The key question here is, of course, WHAT KIND OF enjoyment:

Libidinal investment and the mobilization of jouissance are the necessary prerequisite for any sustainable identification (from nationalism to consumerism). This also applies to the radical democratic ethics of the political. But the type of investment involved has still to be decided. (282)

Stavrakakis’ solution is: neither the phallic enjoyment of Power nor the utopia of the incestuous full enjoyment, but a non-phallic (non-all) partial enjoyment. In the last pages of his book, trying to demonstrate how “democratic subjectivity is capable of inspiring high passions”(278), Stavrakakis refers to the Lacanian other jouissance, “a jouissance beyond accumulation, domination and fantasy, an enjoyment of the not-all or not-whole”(279). How do we achieve this jouissance? By way of accomplishing “the sacrifice of the fantasmatic objet (a)” which can only “make this other jouissance attainable” (279):

The central task in psychoanalysis – and politics – is to detach the objet (a) from the signifier of the lack in the Other /…/, to detach (anti-democratic and post-democratic) fantasy from the democratic institutionalization of lack, making possible the access to a partial enjoyment beyond fantasy. /…/ Only thus shall we be able to really enjoy our partial enjoyment, without subordinating it to the cataclysmic desire of fantasy. Beyond its dialectics of disavowal, this is the concrete challenge the Lacanian Left addresses to us. (280-282)

The underlying idea is breathtakingly simplistic: in total contradiction to Lacan, Stavrakakis reduces objet (a) to its role in fantasy – objet (a) is that excessive X which magically transforms the partial objects which occupy the place of the lack in the Other into the utopian promise of the impossible fullness of jouissance.

What Stavrakakis proposes is thus the vision of a society in which desire functions without objet (a), without the destabilizing excess which transforms it into a “cataclysmic desire of fantasy” – as Stavrakakis puts it in a symptomatically tautological way, we should learn to “really enjoy our partial enjoyment.”

For Lacan, on the contrary, objet (a) is a(nother) name for the Freudian “partial object,” which is why it cannot be reduced to its role in fantasy which sustains desire; it is for this reason that, as Lacan emphasizes, one should distinguish its role in desire and in drive.

Following Jacques-Alain Miller, a distinction has to be introduced here between two types of lack, the lack proper and hole: lack is spatial, designating a void WITHIN a space, while hole is more radical, it designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the “black hole” in physics).

Therein resides the difference between desire and drive: desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being.

In other words, the circular movement of drive obeys the weird logic of the curved space in which the shortest distance between the two points is not a straight line, but a curve: drive “knows” that the shortest way to attain its aim is to circulate around its goal-object. (One should bear in mind here Lacan’s well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive: while the goal is the object around which drive circulates, its (true) aim is the endless continuation of this circulation as such.)

Miller also proposed a Benjaminian distinction between “constituted anxiety” and “constituent anxiety,” which is crucial with regard to the shift from desire to drive: while the first one designates the standard notion of the terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety which haunts us, its infernal circle which threatens to draws us in, the second one stands for the “pure” confrontation with objet petit a as constituted in its very loss.

Miller is right to emphasize here two features: the difference which separates constituted from constituent anxiety concerns the status of the object with regard to fantasy. In a case of constituted anxiety, the object dwells within the confines of a fantasy, while we only get the constituent anxiety when the subject “traverses the fantasy” and confronts the void, the gap, filled up by the fantasmatic object.

However, clear and convincing as it is, this Miller’s formula misses the true paradox or, rather, ambiguity of objet (a): when he defines objet (a) as the object which overlaps with its loss, which emerges at the very moment of its loss (so that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breasts to voice and gaze, are metonymic figurations of the void, of nothing), he remains within the horizon of desire – the true object-cause of desire is the void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations.

While, as Lacan emphasizes, objet (a) is also the object of drive, the relationship is here thoroughly different: although, in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of objet (a) as the object-cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost,

while, in the case of 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.

There is thus a DOUBLE distinction to be drawn here: not only between objet (a) in its fantasmatic and post-fantasmatic status, but also, within this post-fantasmatic domain itself, between the lost object-cause of desire and the object-loss of drive.

The weird thing is that Stavrakakis’ idea of sustaining desire without objet (a) contradicts not only Lacan, but also Laclau, his notion of hegemony: Laclau is on the right track when he emphasizes the necessary role of objet (a) in rendering an ideological edifice operative. In hegemony, a particular empirical object is “elevated to the dignity of the Thing,” it start to function as the stand-in for, the embodiment of, the impossible fullness of Society.

Referring to Joan Copjec, Laclau compares hegemony to the “breast-value” attached to partial objects which stand-in for the incestuous maternal Thing (breast).

Laclau should effectively be criticized here for confounding desire (sustained by fantasy) which drive (one of whose definitions is also “that what remains of desire after its subject traverses the fantasy”): for him, we are condemned to searching for the impossible Fullness.

Drive – in which we directly enjoy lack itself – simply does not enter his horizon.

However, this in no way entails that, in drive, we “really enjoy our partial enjoyment,” without the disturbing excess: for Lacan, lack and excess are strictly correlative, the two sides of the same coin.

Precisely insofar as it circulates around a hole, drive is the name of the excess that pertains to human being, it is the “too-much-ness” of striving which insists beyond life and death (this is why Lacan sometimes even directly identifies drive with objet (a) as surplus-jouissance.)

death drive Ž’s reply to adrian johnston

Žižek’s reply to Johnston et. al. from a 2010 issue of Subjectivity

Something is missing here in this vision of the archaic natural substance, which is gradually, but never completely civilized or ‘mediated’ by the symbolic order. We find the first indication of this third dimension – neither nature nor culture – already in Kant, for whom discipline and education do not directly work on our animal nature, forging it into human individuality. As Kant points out, animals cannot be properly educated as their behavior is already predestined by their instincts.  What this means is that, paradoxically, in order to be educated into freedom (qua moral autonomy and self-responsibility), I already have to be free in a much more radical – ‘noumenal’ or even monstrous – sense.  The Freudian name for this monstrous freedom, of course, is death drive.

It is interesting to note how philosophical narratives of the ‘birth of man’ are always compelled to presuppose a moment in human (pre)history when (what will become) man, is no longer a mere animal and simultaneously not yet a ‘being of language’ bound by symbolic Law; a moment of thoroughly ‘perverted’, ‘denaturalized’, ‘derailed’ nature, which is not yet culture.

In his anthropological writings, Kant emphasized that the human animal needs disciplinary pressure in order to tame an uncanny ‘unruliness’ that seems to be inherent to human nature – a wild, unconstrained propensity to insist stubbornly on one’s own will, cost what it may. It is on account of this ‘unruliness’ that the human animal needs a Master to discipline him: discipline targets this ‘unruliness’, not the animal nature in man. … the most cruel barbarians; part of nature and yet thoroughly denaturalized; ruthlessly manipulating nature through primitive sorcery, yet simultaneously terrified by the raging natural forces; mindlessly brave cowards.

we, humans, no longer just make love for procreation, we get involved in a complex process of seduction and marriage by means of which sexuality becomes an expression of the spiritual bond between a man and a woman and so on.  However, what Hegel misses is how, once we are within the human condition, sexuality is not only transformed/civilized, but, much more radically, changed in its very substance: it is no longer the instinctual drive to reproduce, but a drive that gets thwarted as to its natural goal (reproduction) and thereby explodes into an infinite, properly metaphysical, passion.

the excess of sexuality itself that threatens to explode the ‘civilized’ constraints, sexuality as unconditional Passion, is the result of Culture. … In this way, the civilization/Culture retroactively posits/transforms its own natural presupposition: culture retroactively ‘denaturalizes’ nature itself, and this is what Freud called the Id, libido.

So, back to Johnston, this retroactive excess of de-naturalized nature is missing in the image he proposes of a gradual cultural ‘mediation’ of nature.

Ž at EGS 2012 Žižek_Big_Other.mp4

Žižek doesn’t accord much to Lacan’s seminar on Ethics of Psychoanalysis.  He said it ended in a deadlock.   Lacan immediately turned away.  Jean Claude Milner, “Do not give way as to your desire” Lacan says this only once or twice in one lecture.  He never returns to it.  This is because it is not Lacan’s position.  He was trying to work something out and things are more complicated. Continue reading “Ž at EGS 2012 Žižek_Big_Other.mp4”

Western and Star Wars

Another example from cinema history is provided by one of its great mysteries: the sudden eclipse of the Western in the mid-1950s. Part of the answer lies in the fact that, at the same moment, space opera emerged as a genre―so one can venture the hypothesis that space opera took the place of the Western in the late 1950s. The dialectical point here is that the Western and space opera are not two subspecies of the genre “adventure.” Rather, we should shift the perspective and start only with the Western―in the course of its development, the Western then encounters a deadlock and, in order to survive, has to “reinvent” itself as space opera ―space opera is thus structurally a subspecies of the Western, in the same way that, for Kieslowski, fiction is a subspecies of documentary.

A and B are not parts (species) of their encompassing universality; A cannot fully become A, actualize its notion, without passing into B, which is formally its subspecies, but a subspecies which undermines the very species under which it is formally subsumed. 363

Every species contains a subspecies which, precisely insofar as it effectively realizes the notion of this species, explodes its frame: the space opera is “a Western at the level of its notion” and, for that very reason, no longer a Western. Instead of a universality subdivided into two species, we thus get a particular species which generates another species as its own subspecies, and

true (“concrete”) universality is nothing but this movement in the course of which a species engenders a subspecies which negates its own species. 364

This is why the idealist approach always demands a multitude of examples ― since no single example really fits, one has to enumerate a great many of them in order to indicate the transcendent wealth of the Idea they exemplify, the Idea being the fixed point of reference for the floating examples.

A materialist, on the contrary, tends to return obsessively to one and the same example: it is the particular example which remains the same in all symbolic universes, while the universal notion it is supposed to exemplify continually changes its shape, so that we get a multitude of universal notions circulating around a single example.

Is this not what Lacan does, returning to the same exemplary cases (the guessing-game with five hats, the dream of Irma’s injection, etc.), each time providing a new interpretation? The materialist example is thus a universal Singular: a singular entity which persists as the universal through the multitude of its interpretations.l

objet (a)

Schroeder, L. Wall Street’s Bonus Obsession. Cardozo L. Rev. 33   2011-2012  pp. 2308-2356.

quoting Ž

However, what we must avoid at any price is conceiving of this left-over as simply secondary, as if we have first the substantial fullness of the Real and then the process of symbolization which “evacuates” jouissance, yet not entirely, leaving behind isolated remainders, islands of enjoyment, objets petit a. If we succumb to this notion, we lose the paradox of the Lacanian Real: there is no substance of enjoyment without, prior to, the surplus of enjoyment.

The substance is a mirage retroactively invoked by the surplus.

The illusion that pertains to a qua surplus-enjoyment is therefore the very illusion that, behind it, there is the lost substance of jouissance in other words, a qua semblance deceives in a Lacanian way: not because it is a deceitful substitute of the Real, but precisely because it invokes the impression of some substantial Real behind it; it deceives by posing as a shadow of the underlying Real.  [Žižek Tarrying with the Negative 36-37]

subject of desire subject of drive

Žižek, The Lesbian Session Lacanian Ink 2000  And here too

What we get after “traversing the fantasy,” i.e. the pure being of drive which emerges after the subject undergoes “subjective destitution,” is NOT a kind of subjectless loop of the repetitive movement of drive, but, on the contrary, the subject at its purest; one is almost tempted to say: the subject “as such.”   Saying “Yes!” to the drive, i.e. precisely to that which can never be subjectivized, freely assuming the inevitable (the drive’s radical closure), is the highest gesture of subjectivity.

It is thus only after assuming a fundamental indifference towards the Other’s desire, getting rid of the hysterical game of subjectivization, after suspending the intersubjective game of mutual (mis)recognition, that the pure subject emerges …

We have thus Roark as the being of pure drive in no need of symbolic recognition (and as such uncannily close to the Lacanian saint

Roark displays the perfect indifference towards the Other characteristic of drive, while Dominique remains caught in the dialectic of desire which is the desire of the Other: she is gnawed by the Other’s gaze, i.e. by the fact that others, the common people totally insensitive to Roark’s achievement, are allowed to stare at it and thus spoil its sublime quality. The only way for her to break out of this deadlock of the Other’s desire is to destroy the sublime object in order to save it from becoming the object of the ignorant gaze of others

Roark, of course, is well aware of how her attempts to ruin him result from her desperate strategy to cope with her unconditional love for him, to inscribe this love in the field of the big Other; so, when she offers herself to him, he repeatedly rejects her and tells her that the time is not yet ripe for it: she will become his true partner only when her desire for him will no longer be bothered by the Other’s gaze — in short, when she will accomplish the shift from desire to drive.

What the hystericized prime mover must accept is thus the fundamental existential indifference: she must no longer be willing to remain the hostage of the second-handers’ blackmail  “We will let you work and realize your creative potential, on condition that you accept our terms,”

… she must be ready to give up the very kernel of her being, that which means everything to her, and to accept the “end of the world,” the (temporary) suspension of the very flow of energy which keeps the world running.

In order to gain everything, she must be ready to go through the zero-point of losing everything. And far from signalling the “end of subjectivity,” this act of assuming existential indifference is perhaps the very gesture of absolute negativity which gives birth to the subject.

What Lacan calls “subjective destitution” is thus, paradoxically, another name for the subject itself, i.e. for the void beyond the theatre of hysterical subjectivizations.

Ayn Rand’s work thus contains two radically different narratives which are not to be confused:

1) the standard masculine narrative of the struggle between the exceptional One (Master, Creator) and the “crowd” which follows the universal norm,

2) as well as the feminine narrative of the shift from desire to drive, i.e. from the hysteric’s entanglement in the deadlocks of the Other’s desire to the fundamental indifference of the desubjectivized being of drive.

For that reason, the Randian hero is not “phallocratic” — phallocratic is rather the figure of the failed Master (Wynand in The Fountainhead, Stadler in Atlas Shrugged): paradoxical as it may sound, with regard to the formulas of sexuation, the being of pure drive which emerges once the subject “goes through the fantasy” and assumes the attitude of indifference towards the enigma of the Other’s desire is a feminine figure.

What Rand was not aware of was that the upright, uncompromising masculine figures with a will of steel that she was so fascinated with, are, effectively, figures of the feminine subject liberated from the deadlocks of hysteria.

Such a reading also enables us to draw a crucial theoretical conclusion about the limits of subjectivity: hysteria is not the limit of subjectivity — there is a subject beyond hysteria.

What we get after “traversing the fantasy,”i.e. pure being of drive which emerges after the subject undergoes “subjective destitution” is not a kind of subjectless loop of the repetitive movement of drive, but, on the contrary, the subject at its purest; one is almost tempted to say: the subject “as such.”

Saying “Yes!” to the drive, i.e. precisely to that which can never be subjectivized, freely assuming the inevitable (the drive’s radical closure), is the highest gesture of subjectivity.  It is thus only after assuming a fundamental indifference towards the Other’s desire, getting rid of the hysterical game of subjectivization, after suspending the intersubjective game of mutual (mis)recognition, that the pure subject emerges.

One can see, now, in what precise sense, the struggle between the hysterical feminine heroine and the persistent male hero, which forms the center of Ayn Rand’s both great novels, can be conceived as a barely concealed presentation of a lesbian (psychoanalytic) session: of the painful process in the course of which the feminine analysand traverses her fantasy and thus overcomes her hysterical position.

alexithymia

Stijn Vanheule, Paul Verhaeghe “In search of a framework for the treatment of alexithymia.”  Psychology and psychotherapy. 2010

From 1949 onwards, Lacan developed his theory on the mirror stage, wherein the other plays a central role (Lacan, 2006). In short, his starting-point is that human development starts with an experience of organic disturbance and discord. The infant lacks sensory and motor coordination and is moved by needs and impulses it cannot control. In Lacan’s interpretation, the ego comes into being as a reaction against this troubling state. The basis of it is the identification with a body image, which is acquired by identifying with the image of the other. Given its roots in images, this type of identification is called imaginary. The body image offers the infant an opportunity to see itself as a unity, and thus to achieve self-mastery. In the mirror stage, the image of the other serves as a basis for creating a self-image, which indicates that the actual presence of the other is important for creating this experience of unity (for a more detailed account of Lacan’s theory on the mirror stage and identity formation, download an article by Verhaeghe) Continue reading “alexithymia”

Imaginary

Baron, Paula. “Enter the Imaginarium: The Mirror, the Object and the Feminist Project” Australian Feminist Law Journal 43 2011

In terms of individual development, the child is born into the Real, a brief period characterized by a lack of differentiation and therefore a lack of subjectivity. At arond 18 months of age, the child experiences the ‘mirror stage’ which provides entry into the Imaginary.

This mirror stage is the point at which the child recognizes his or her reflection in the mirror. The child’s entry into the Symbolic occurs later, as a result of the Oedipal process. In this latter stage, the intervention of a third party into the mother-child dyad ushers the child into the social world of law and language, the child sacrificing sensual need (the Real) and egotistical demand (the Imaginary) for the laws and values if its culture. This developmental path has been described as the subject’s passage from a ‘Being-in-Itself ‘(the Real) to a ‘Being-for-Itself’ (the Imaginary) to a ‘Being-for-Others’ (the Symbolic).

In Lacanian theory, the Symbolic is the privileged site for overcoming the disabling effects of the Imaginary and the disruptions of the Real.  “What we do as humans is structured by reflected images that lure our desire and reinforce our egos, but we remain grounded in a symbolic network that pervasively supports our speech, ritual and even our perception of the world, and we from time to time come to the edge and touch upon the nameless, the Real that is always there but usually mediated by language.”

The Imaginary is  thus inescapable  and necessary, yet for Lacan, it is  ‘always  trouble’: illusory, deceptive  and  inherently  seductive.  The Imaginary  ‘constantly  exercises  its  seductions  or temptations, inviting one to “fill in”  the unavoidable “gaps” in one’s self and world descriptions or conceptions through recourse to all manner of imaginary fullness’.

We have seen that mirroring is key to the individual’s entry into the Imaginary in Lacanian theory.  The child’s recognition  of her reflection is  at once her first experience of unity and wholeness and a fundamental alienation in her being.

The mirror stage, according to Lacan, gives rise to consciousness, the ego, illusions of coherence, self-sufficiency, unity and the idea of a body:

[In  the mirror stage]  the  child, who experiences  herself as a  fragmented,  incoherent  collection of desires and memories, happens upon an image of herself in a looking glass’ or reflective surface. This image  stimulates the  idea of an entity entirely independent  of others: the  Imago. As the  child grows older, the imago in  turn, becomes invested with all sorts of expectations from without….This primary identification  with the  mirror image  and the consequent imago is  a mistake….because …the subject is necessarily divided, split between the familiar Ego, which posits independence,  and the Id, the locus of unconscious desire.  (Lacan Book III The Psychoses, 1955-56 p. 43)

For Lacan, the ego is nothing in and of itself, but rather a ‘series  of identifications, equivalancies, and oppositions’. As noted in the quote above, there is a split between the chaos and vulnerability of the  individual’s embodied first-person experience and the ideal of the third-person surface perspective. This split can never be reconciled, leading to the individual’s frustration (which is turned upon the self or projected on to others). Because the Imaginary has an inherently  binary logic  (self and other), it functions  to create sameness and ‘a  struggle for recognition that requires the destruction or enslavement of others so as to maintain one’s own identity’.

The Imaginary is thus characterized by rivalry, jealousy, aggression and competition. It is the Symbolic which assures peace by imposing distributive justice: this is mine, that is yours.

The Imaginary in Lacanian theory is inherently narcissistic and isolating: Whereas in the symbolic we experience the power of the social order over us, in the Imaginary.. .we feel isolated within the shell that the ego seems to provide’.

This rise  of the  Imaginary  has  been theorized  by McGowan, following  Zizek, as  a symptom of the  transformation to the so-called  ‘Society  of Enjoyment’. This is  a complex notion that highlights the relationship between the Imaginary and the Symbolic in Lacan’s work. According to Lacan, entry to the  Symbolic takes  place through  the  exercise of the paternal function, sometimes called the Name-of-the-Father. This is the intervention of the third party in the mother-child dyad which, as was noted above, ushers the child into the Symbolic, subjecting his drives to the social order, law and language.

The paternal function was so named because, in Lacan’s time,  this  intervention  was commonly achieved by the  father in  a nuclear family structure, but the function can be successfully achieved by someone (indeed, something) else.

Lacan also theorized that, in the movement to the nuclear family, there was a conflation of the Symbolic father with the reality of the (often wanting) father.  The father was thus conceived as having a dual character: the  ‘good’  father, who prohibited enjoyment; and the  ‘obscene’  father who mandated enjoyment. In McGowan’s view, the transformation to the Society of Enjoyment is the result of the decline of the paternal function, that is, the loss of the ideal, prohibiting father and the concomitant rise  of the primal, obscene fathers.

 

todestrieb

Johnston, Adrian. Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. Northwestern University Press, 2009.

Contra Lacan, the sole dimension of one`s being to be sacrificed in a properly political gesture is the axis of individuality qua selfish, mortal animality; through this gesture, Badiou claims, an immortalization-effect transpires in which one thereby becomes a fragmentary moment of eternal justice for all, in which one fully lives.  (In Logiques des mondes, Badiou defines true life as more than mere existence as a non-subjectifed person embedded within the statist transcendental regime of a truthless world; Ž is quite sympathetic to this Badiouian definition of what it is to live.)  Rather than destroying one`s subjectivity, passing through the act (in this case, through answering the call of a political event) makes one into a more-than-finite, more-than-mortal subject. 156-157

Todestrieb, instead of designating something thoroughly bound up with the human animal`s physical finitude, is a psychoanalytic term referring to certain immortal, “metaphysical” facets of psychical being operating with a supreme, serene disregard for the finite, mortal animality of the human individual`s weak flesh. This death drive is a sort of “vanishing mediator,”… Todestrieb … is a name for subjectivity qua the void of a radical negativity irreducible to any and every form of positive inscription or representation, Ž insists on distinguishing between “subject” (as this negative X) and “subjectification” (in this case, Badiou’s subject-of-the-event as a positivized incarnation of an event-driven truth-trajectory — with Ž alleging this to be a secondary crystallization, at the level of inscriptions and representations, of the subject-as-void) serving as a precondition for the positive instantiations of event-revealed truths embodied and enacted by subjects-of-events (i.e., those “subjectified” by the interpellation of events).  156-157

abyssal madness

Žižek in Parallax View “… Ce Seul Objet Dont Le Néant S’honore”

With this abyssal act of freedom, the subject breaks up the rotary movement of drives, this abyss of the Unnamable – in short, this deed is the very founding gesture of naming.

Therein resides Schelling’s unheard-of philosophical revolution: he does not simply oppose the dark domain of the rotary movement of pre-ontological drives, this unnamable Real which cannot ever be totally symbolized, to the domain of Logos, of articulated Word which cannot ever totally “force” it

(like Badiou, Schelling insists on how there is always a remainder of the unnamable Real – the “indivisible remainder” – which eludes symbolization);

at its most radical, the unnamable Unconscious is not external to Logos, it is not its obscure background, but, rather, the very act of Naming, the very founding gesture of Logos.

The greatest contingency, the ultimate act of abyssal madness, is the very act of imposing a rational Necessity onto the pre-rational chaos of the Real.