logocentric – Page 65

a sinthome

Schroeder, Jeanne L. The Four Lacanian Discourses or Turning Law Inside-Out. New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2008.

objet petit a

Lacan’s theory is one of negativity and gaps. The subject is barred, split, castrated. As a consequence, the subject always desires. The objet petit a as object cause of desire is by definition a lost, excluded object that stands in for the radical negativity of the subject’s soul. If it were not excluded, if the subject ever obtained his true desire, he would cease to be castrated, and lose his subjectivity. Consequently, the relationship between the barred subject and the objet petit a is, necessarily, an impossibility, a non-relationship. There can be no connection between the two in the symbolic order. The barred subject, however, finds this gap between him and the object of his desire intolerable. He, therefore, imagines that he can bridge this gap and attain the object. This is “fantasy”— imagining that one obtains and has a relationship with the object cause of one’s desire. 178

sinthome

Lacan’s metaphor for the relationship between the three orders is the Borromean knot – three circles overlapping in such a way that if one is broken, the knot comes undone. This expresses the idea that each order – and subjectivity itself—necessarily requires the others.

Unfortunately, Lacan found that his theory of the knotting of subjectivity ran aground with respect to empirical evidence. Clinical experience indicated that breaking one ring of the knot does not always throw the analysand into psychosis. His theory would be falsified unless he could hypothesize an ancillary theory that would explain this apparent empirical anomaly.

Late in life Lacan proposed that the empirical problem of the Borromean metaphor was in fact the same as the empirical problem of the Freudian theory of trauma and symptoms. Freud and Lacan originally hypothesized that a trauma and its symptoms should dissolve in analysis. This seemed true by definition: if a trauma is that which is real because it has not been integrated into the symbolic, its symptoms should no longer occur once a trauma is articulated. Nevertheless, some analysands lovingly cling to their symptoms even after “successful” analysis. Once again, this observation threatened to falsify the theory, unless Lacan could develop an ancillary hypothesis explaining this apparent empirical anomaly. Lacan’s late revelation was that the same ancillary hypothesis could solve both the mystery of the persistence of subjectivity and the mystery of the persistence of symptoms.

Studying the mathematical field of topology, Lacan realized that the traditional terminology of the Borromean knot is misleading. The figure is not technically a knot, but a chain – which is why it should fall apart when the weakest link is broken. Lacan posited that there might be a fourth category – a true knot – keeping the three orders bound together in the event of breakage. Using what he claims is an old French word for symptom, he called this fourth the sinthome. Metaphorically, the sinthome is like the safety chain on a bracelet that keeps it from falling off in the event the clasp breaks. The knot of the sinthome ties together his earlier understanding that it is the real of the symptom that gives structure to the subject. Understood in this way, the sinthomeis not merely real. Like the objet petit a, it also participates in the imaginary and the symbolic. The sinthome is located where the three orders meet. It is precisely the limit where the fantasies of the imaginary are unable to cover up the holes in the symbolic that constitutes the trauma. This is why symptoms can linger even after trauma is articulated. Even though the trauma is integrated into the symbolic through its interpretation, there is a part that remains supplementary to the symbolic and, therefore, serves as the real of trauma. This symptom that is at the center of the Borromean chain knitting together the three orders is in effect nothing but the subject herself. The persistence of the symptom actually explains the persistence of the subject despite the breaking of the Borromean chain. In other words, it is neurosis itself that keeps psychosis at bay. 110-111

Four Discourses

Schroeder, Jeanne L. The Four Lacanian Discourses or Turning Law Inside-Out. New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2008.

The master’s and university’s discourses are masculine while the analyst’s and hysteric’s discourses are feminine. The masculine is the subject who is totally identified with the symbolic order of law, and the feminine is the subject who is not wholly so subject – who is to some extent excluded or alienated from the symbolic order.

“[T]here are no sexual relations.” Sexuality is an impossibility, a fundamental impasse that cannot be bridged in the symbolic order. The two sexes are not complements, like yin and yang, that can fit together to form a perfect whole. When combined, the sexes result not in a single whole, but a melange of fulsome overlaps and obscene gaps. This sounds depressing, but it has its positive side. If two people could really satisfy each other and join as one, they would lose their individuality and subjectivity. The individuation that remains despite our desire to merge allows us occasionally to achieve something much more valuable than any object of desire – love.

The critic, speaking the hysteric’s discourse, does not address the legal economist in his public persona as expert (S2). Rather she addresses the truth hidden below this pretense – power (S1). The legal economist, speaking the university discourse, does not address the subject subjected to law, but rather what he sees as the collective goals of society and the law. The hysteric cries, “Look what your law is doing to me!” The university replies, “The law has a purpose.” The university might be “correct” in his justification of the law in that societies do necessarily have collective purposes, positive laws are adopted instrumentally to achieve these purposes by affecting the behaviour – thereby restricting the freedom – of those subjected to the law, and this might conflict with the subjective desires of any specific subject. Nevertheless, the university’s reply is not an answer to the hysteric’s question arising out of the truth of her pain. It is equivalent to Ring Lardner’s immortal conversation ender, “Shut up,” he explained. It does not help her integrate within the symbolic order of law but further alienates her. 177

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Discourse of the Analyst

The goal of psychoanalysis, like speculative philosophy, is to help the subject actualize her freedom by writing her own ethical law. The analyst’s discourse addresses the barred subject and hystericizes her. It helps the analysand change from a masculine subject who believes he is completely bound by the symbolic order, to a feminine one who understands she partially escapes it. Analysis must then set the analysand free and allow her to speak. This creates the hysteric’s discourse. 106

If the master commands and university lectures, the analyst interrogates. Consequently, the analyst’s address consists largely of silence – through an absence of speech. The analysand speaks to fill in the gap represented by the analyst. When the analyst does speak, it is not in her own voice as master or teacher. She tries to articulate the analysand’s voice, helping him to articulate his desire – to dissolve the traumatic symptom lost in the real by integrating it into the symbolic.

The other addressed by the object of desire is the barred subject himself. The analyst “interrogates the subject in his or her division, precisely at those points where the split between consciousness and unconscious shows through.”

The truth hidden beneath the analyst is knowledge. Lacan calls the analyst “the subject supposed to know.” The analysand goes to the analyst because the analysand is a barred subject – he is traumatized, unhappy, and alienated. The analyst is the expert who is supposed to know what is wrong.

The knowledge that is the truth underlying the little a is neither savoir faire nor expertise. Rather, this hidden knowledge is the analysand’s own unconscious knowledge. The truth of the analysand’s desire is within himself. This is not to deny that the person who is a psychoanalyst also has savoir faire – she knows how to treat patients – and expertise – she is a highly educated professional. Nevertheless, these forms of knowledge are not the truth of analysis.

The result of analysis is the master signifier. But this time, it is not the master signifier imposed upon her by the Big Other (as in the master’s discourse) but his own “new master signifiers (S1), ultimate values, formulations of their identity or being.” 108

To hear the call of the hysteric, one must step out of the university discourse and back into the master’s discourse to which the hysteric discourse leads. To communicate with the hysteric, one must step out of the university’s discourse and forward into the analyst’s discourse. These two discourses [hysteric and university] are opposed to each other, in the way the two sexes are. … Communication between them must be mediated through the other two discourses. The idea that there can be a direct relationship between the two discourses is a fantasy in the technical sense of the term.

The master declares law, telling you what to do. The university justifies law, explaining why you should obey. The analyst interprets law, asking you what you want from it. The hysteric questions the law. “The hysterical subject is the subject whose very existence involves radical doubt and questioning, her entire being is sustained by the uncertainty as to what she is for the Other.” The hysteric’s question for the big Other is “What do you want from me?”

The other addressed in the hysteric’s discourse is the Big Other, what takes on the place of the master signifier. 149

Discourse of the Hysteric

The hysteric can learn several things through her discourse. First, mundanely, she can learn what the Other wants from her – what she needs to do or say to fit better into the symbolic. It is, however, a fundamental Lacanian point that a perfect fit is never possible – every normal subject remains split and castrated. Consequently, and more critically, the hysteric can learn what is lacking in the symbolic – to identify its flaws and decide whether to cope or seek to change them.

This can lead to the final stage of knowledge – the knowledge that the Big Other does not exist. The reason the Big Other can never truly answer the hysteric`s questions; “What do you want?” is explained by its alternate version as the accusation, “You are wanting!” The Big Other – the symbolic—is not a pre-existing “thing.” It is a human creation, a work in process.

The subject learns, in effect, that only the subject herself can answer the question of how to follow her own desire and how to change the Big Other better to accomplish this. In this discourse, once again, there is no direct relationship, under the bar, between the subject’s desire as the discourse’s truth and subject’s knowledge that is the discourse’s product. This is because this knowledge is precisely that the Big Other does not hold the truth of the subject’s desire. It is the hysteric’s discourse that allows this indirect relationship to come about. This ultimate knowledge the subject seeks is the answer to the question, what is the ethical law? The answer was given by Kant: every subject must self-legislate her own law. 150

The Other is not merely incomplete, but necessarily so. This knowledge can lead to two results. The first id depression and impotence. The Lacanian feminine is the sadder but wiser sex. Why should the hysteric try, when the task of completing the Other is doomed to failure? How can the hysteric face the fact that she is partially responsible for the imperfection (and resulting violence and injustice) of the social order she cannot cure?

Alternately, this knowledge gives the hysteric the courage to go on. The feminine subject is not just sadder, but wiser. Once one rejects the impossible goal of making the Other perfect, the hysteric’s profession of building the Other becomes possible. The fact that the Other is not natural means that it is a work of art – an artefact. The fact that it is not complete means that it is a work in progress. The hysteric can express her creative freedom by furthering its progress. The hysteric can harbour the hope that she can at least partially expiate her guilt for participating in the injustice of the status quo. She knows that she cannot create perfect justice but she might be able to right specific wrongs. 151

In the hysteric’s discourse, as in “real life,” unrequited desire can in a snap of the fingers change to fury. By asking “What do you want?”, “What do you desire?” the hysteric comes to realize that the Big Other wants and desires. This means it must be wanting. The Big Other (the symbolic, the law) is not complete and totalizing as it, the masculine subject and the power discourses insist. In other words, first the hysteric addresses the Other because she lacks. The feminine hysteric learns that her love, the Big Other, does not exist. And she cannot forgive his betrayal.

Consequently, the hysteric’s question “What do you want? What do I lack?” becomes the accusation “You are wanting!” “How must I change to accommodate you?” is now “You must change to accommodate me!” The hysteric’s discourse is that of the true critique. It opens up, not revolution or the impossible search for perfection, but the possibility of imperfect reform. 154

Once the hysteric realizes not only that the Big Other as it (non)exists is not inevitable and understands her role in creating and sustaining that Big Other, she is in a position of challenging and seeking to change the Big Other … she cannot, of course, destroy the Big Other without destroying herself. Her subjectivity – her very ability to speak – depends on the existence of a symbolic of language, law, and sexuality. … Accordingly, the hysteric is not seeking to do away with the law, but to be let inside.

In Bracher’s words:

It is only with the discourse of the Analyst that the subject is in a position to assume its own alienation and desire and , on the basis of that assumption, separate from the given master signifiers and produce its own, new master signifiers – identity and values less antithetical to its fundamental fantasy and the desires arising from that fantasy. [Bracher, eds. Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject Structure and Society 1994]

Lacan once taunted the Parisian student radicals, who were acting as hysterics, “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.” He is correct.

Although the hysteric challenges the status quo of positive law, by establishing a new rule of law, she establishes a new master’s discourse. Legal practice is always conservative by definition because it cannot be anarchic. By Lacan’s terms, to address an issue within the framework of law is to accept law to some extent. 155

If psychoanalysis hystericizes the analysand, the hysteric must be given the opportunity to speak in her own voice. Consequently, once analysis is complete, it can only be given effect through the hysteric discourse.

Lacan admits that governing, teaching, and psychoanalyzing are impossible professions. The only discourse that Lacan does not identify as impossible is the hysteric’s. Unlike the master’s discourse that seeks pure power, the university’s discourse that seeks pure knowledge, and the analyst’s discourse that seeks pure desire, the hysteric understands that purity is impossible. She claims to be precisely what she is – castrated – or to put this within a feminine metaphor, impure.

The hysteric’s discourse is the discourse of possibility because it embraces imperfection. I stated that the representation of clients speaks the hysteric’s discourse. As such, legal practice is the one possible profession. It is possible precisely because its goals are always necessarily limited, its results always necessarily imperfect compromises. Insofar as it is ever successful, it is because it accepts some degree of failure as inevitable.

The fact that justice is always a work in progress is itself the possibility of freedom. If justice were ever achieved, the world would be inscribed within a perfect legal system with all cases within Hart’s core. All subjects would be “men” perfectly circumscribed within the symbolic order – Kant’s automatons. But Hegel and Lacan take Kant to his logical extreme and insist that freedom requires a moment of pure spontaneity unrestrained by all bounds. This is the radical negativity that Hegel believed constituted the heart and soul of personality. This is the feminine.

Implicated and enraged

The Immanent Frame interview with Judith Butler posted April 1, 2011

NS: Some commentators have said that the uprisings now taking place are remarkable for being secular in nature. Do you think it’s helpful to speak of them that way?

JB: Well, I am not at all sure why they’re saying that. In Cairo, it was clearly the case that secular, Christian, and Muslim people were in the square, and that it was an impressive mixture. I would be interested to know who has access to the groups involved in Libya to know with certainty that they are secular. Perhaps some of us impose our ideological dreams on concrete situations that we either fail to investigate or have trouble finding out about.

NS: How relevant are these ideological dreams? Do you think that the question of whether these movements are secular is worth caring about?

JB: I myself do not care, and I wonder why people do. It seems to me that the secular/religious debate has not been at the forefront of these uprisings. They have been against censorship, military control, graft, and outrageous class differences, and they have been for various kinds of democratization. And we have seen women in these movements, veiled and unveiled, working together. It is clear that demands for democratization of various kinds are articulated through religious and secular discourses and practices, and sometimes a combination of the two.

NS: But isn’t that precisely what seems so secular about these events? That those religious divisions are no longer the central issue?

JB: Well, you could say that religious difference is not central, or you could say that religious difference is ever-present. Perhaps both are true.

NS: Let’s take a specific example. Would the revolution be “betrayed,” in your view, if, say, the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in Egypt? Or if something comparable to the regime in Iran were to emerge?

JB: If the Muslim Brotherhood is elected to positions in government, and the elections are free and unconstrained, then that is a democratic outcome. Whether or not one wishes for that outcome, it cannot be contested as undemocratic if it follows from open and free elections. Democracy often means living with results that we find difficult, if not abhorrent. But I have been somewhat shocked that, in the face of this most impressive of uprisings, the “specter” of the Muslim Brotherhood is raised time and again as a way of diminishing and doubting the importance of this mass movement and revolutionary action. I think those biased against Islam will have to get used to the idea that demands for democratization can and do emerge within Muslim lexicons and practice, and that democratic polities can and must be composed of various groups, religious and not. Islam is clearly part of the mix.

NS: Do these popular uprisings affect how we should think about power and sovereignty, as armed dictators are being coerced by nonviolent movements?

JB: I understand the desire to come up with theoretical generalizations. I spend a good deal of my time doing precisely that. But even though nonviolent practices have been important in some of these uprisings, we are also seeing new ways of interpreting nonviolence, and new ways of justifying violence when protestors are under attack from the military. The events in Libya are clearly violent, and so I think we are probably left with new quandaries about whether the line between violent and nonviolent resistance ever can be absolutely clear.

NS: Where in particular do you see that line blurring?

JB: We have to be careful to distinguish between nonviolence as a moral position that applies to all individuals and groups, and nonviolence as a political option that articulates a certain refusal to be intimidated or coerced. These are very different discourses, since most of the moral positions tend to eliminate all reference to power, and the political ones tend to affirm nonviolence as a mode of resistance but leave open the possibility that it might have to be exchanged for a more overtly aggressive one. I am not sure we can ever evacuate the political frame. Moreover, it is important to think about how one understands violence. If one puts one’s body on the line, in the way of a truck or a tank, is one not entering into a violent encounter? This is different from waging a unilateral attack or even starting a violent series, but I am not sure that it is outside the orbit of violence altogether.

NS: President Obama sometimes seems to be policing that distinction in his rhetoric about these uprisings: demanding that protesters and regimes both remain nonviolent, and then bringing U.S. military force to bear in Libya when the state turns to military force. But I would think the difference between how the movements in Egypt and Libya have progressed actually reaffirms that the line between violence and nonviolence is a useful one.

JB: Well, it is interesting that the U.S. affirms that the anti-government forces in Libya are resistance fighters and seeks to provide aerial bombing support to their forces on the ground. So it seems that even liberal public discourse makes room for justified armed resistance. What is most interesting is to figure out when certain forms of violence are considered part of an admirable struggle for freedom, and when, on the contrary, violence is understood as the terrorist activities of non-state actors. Do you have an answer to that?

NS: I certainly can’t think of a consistent rule that would apply to all cases, and probably for good reason. The case of Israel-Palestine comes to mind.

JB: Indeed, it does.

NS: What do you think the Arab uprisings mean for Israel, surrounded by them on all sides as it is?

JB: We can only hope that the movement toward greater democratization will affect Israel as well, so that we can finally see widespread public demands for Israeli Palestinians to be treated on an equal basis, widespread public acknowledgment that the occupation is illegal according to every standard of international law, and a similar affirmation of the right to self-determination of Palestinians. The public acknowledgment of these obvious truths would, in fact, constitute one of the most remarkable advances in the democratic revolutions underway. I think as well that any legitimate democracy would have to provide restitution to those inhabitants whose lands were confiscated. So let us hope that democratization finally comes to Israel and Palestine.

NS: If I may raise the question again, does the religious or secular character of these movements affect how Israelis perceive them?

JB: Israel, of course, is asking its Palestinian citizens to swear loyalty to a Jewish state, which is hardly a very secular thing to do. So, though Israel seems to support secularization in countries where Islam is predominant, it seems to except itself from that standard. This leads to a question of which religions are set in opposition to secularism and which are not? It seems to me that those who call for a secular state in Israel, which would mean separating citizenship from religion or religious status, are often accused of trying to destroy Israel. So we have to watch these debates carefully to see when and where secularism is treated as if it were the very sign of democracy, and when and where secularism is treated as if it were equal to genocide. Public discourse has yet to arrive at very consistent positions here.

NS: In The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, you find reasons to critique Israeli state violence in a kind of Jewish thought articulated by Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. Yet this seems far from what seems to count as Jewishness in public discourse today. Do you think those thinkers can be made to matter in public?

JB: I have no idea. Let’s remember that we are also in the midst of a paroxysm of anti-intellectualism within the U.S., coupled with an attack on public education and the academy. So your question implies these broader issues.

NS: What, then, would you say anti-intellectualism is keeping people from realizing?

JB: In order for democratic principles to have a chance in Israel-Palestine, there has to be a recognition of the ways in which Zionism, though understanding itself as an emancipatory movement for Jews, instituted a colonial project and the colonial subjugation of the Palestinian people. In order for this contradiction to be understood and effectively addressed, we have to be able to tell two histories at once, and to show how they converge, and how the claim of freedom for one became the claim of dispossession for another. Benjamin made use of Jewish intellectual resources to criticize the kind of progressive narrative that underwrites Zionism, and he concerned himself with the question, avant la lettre, of how the history of the oppressed might erupt within the continuous history of the oppressor.

NS: Asking people to remember two histories at once does seem like a public-relations challenge. And what can we learn from Arendt?

JB: Arendt was herself involved in public politics, actively defending notions of federated authority for Palestine in the 1940s, prior to the catastrophic founding of Israel on the basis of Jewish sovereignty in 1948. Her own views were problematic, often racist, and yet she knew that the production of a new stateless class would lead inevitably to decades of conflict.

NS: Why do you turn to Jewish sources like Benjamin and Arendt to criticize Israeli militarism? Why not appeal to something more universal?

JB: One doesn’t need to turn to Jewish sources, and I’ve never argued that one should. One could criticize not only present-day Israeli militarism but the occupation, the history of land confiscation, or even Zionism itself, without any recourse at all to Jewish sources. One could do it on the basis of universal rights, human rights, a history and critique of settler colonialism, a politics of nonviolence, a left understanding of revolutionary struggle on the part of the stateless, legal rights of refugees and the occupied, liberal democracy, or radical democracy. In fact, if one only used Jewish sources for the critique of Israeli state violence, then one would be unwittingly establishing the Jewish framework, again, as the framework of reference and valuation for adjudicating the competing claims of the region. And even if such a framework were Jewish anti-Zionism, it would turn out to be effectively Zionist, producing a Zionist effect, since it would tacitly hold to the proposition that the Jewish framework must remain dominant.

NS: I also see how some Jews in turn could perceive those claiming to speak in “universals” as potential oppressors. But—among Jews, at least—does it make sense to have the discussion within the framework of Jewish tradition?

JB: It depends on whether you are working within an identitarian Jewish framework or a non-identitarian one. One could argue that the obligation to the non-Jew forms the core of any Jewish ethic, which means that we do not sustain obligations only to those who are also Jewish, but equally to those who are not. This means that one is under an obligation, even a Jewish obligation, to displace the exclusive Jewish framework. Otherwise, one’s ethic is bound by nationalism, sameness, even xenophobia.

NS: Do you think it’s necessary for Jews around the world to feel somehow responsible, or especially concerned, for the actions of the Israeli state?

JB: It’s strange that you ask about “necessity.” It assumes that if we could show that, logically, it isn’t necessary for Jews around the world to have such a reaction, then Jews would be freed from the grip of such a conviction. These forms of identification are, fortunately or unfortunately, more profound and less logical than that. Indeed, it would be great if we could all be liberated through reason, but I think it only gets us part of the way. After all, someone may have a very logical view, but for other reasons we may still fail to hear what that person says, or we may turn their words around so that they are understood to say the opposite. The task is really to find ways of addressing deep-seated forms of fear and aggression that make it possible to hold to manifestly inconsistent views without quite acknowledging them.

NS: Where do you see logic breaking down in this case?

JB: For instance, my view is that many liberal and radical democrats, leftists, socialists, and progressive people are willing to name and oppose colonization, to name and oppose illegal occupation, even to name and oppose forms of racism in all parts of the world—except in Israel, for fear that to speak out against those injustices will somehow implicate one in anti-Semitism. We have to ask how this lockdown of thought and politics became possible, and why the world believes that Palestinians should pay the price for the Nazi genocide of the Jews. This is nonsense, and yet it persists. For those of us who emerged from within Jewish and Zionist backgrounds, criticism of Israel was regarded as nothing more than an excuse for anti-Semitism. And if Jews voiced such positions, then they were regarded as self-hating. My belief is that public discourse in general will not be able to express the same outrage over the colonization of Palestine and the ongoing violent occupation of its lands and people until we are able finally to separate anti-Semitism, which is in every instance wrong and must be opposed, and the colonial subjugation of the Palestinian people, which is in every instance wrong and must be opposed.

NS: But what strikes me is that many more of these “progressive people” in the U.S. feel compelled at least to take a stand about Israel-Palestine, as opposed to, say, various conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa or the dispute in Kashmir. And the difference seems much more than merely secular. Do you think Israel-Palestine would be better off if, as in Egypt’s uprising, religious divisions became subsumed in more worldly goals?

JB: I am not sure I agree that religious divisions have been subsumed in worldly goals. It sure seems that religion is very worldly at the moment. But the idea that a religious attachment to the land is what finally fuels Israel is, I think, probably wrong. I understand that it is part of the rationale and legitimating discourse for land confiscation and ritual expulsion, but we are dealing with a savvy military state, a reformulation of settler colonialism, an institutionalized form of racism—and we cannot derive all of these, or, perhaps, any of these, from religious grounds alone.

NS: How implicated do you feel personally in what Israel does, compared to any other country?

JB: I only feel implicated and enraged when Israel claims to represent the Jewish people, since there are myriad strands of diasporic Judaism and Jewishness that have never felt represented by Israel, that no longer feel represented by that state, and who dispute the legitimacy of that state to represent the Jewish people or Jewish values. Those who insist on the representative function of the Israeli state are trying to make it true. They know it is not true, but they are battling to deny and dispute those fault-lines. But even as one opposes such formulations, it is important not to become identitarian or even communitarian in response. After all, the point is to live in a complex world, not in an enclave, and not in separatist polities. If we are looking for signs of democratization, then surely we are looking as well for forms of living on equal terms in and among cultural differences. Many religious and non-religious traditions point to this possibility.

NS: While others point away from it. What do you think will make people choose, in the terms you draw from Arendt, to “cohabit the earth” with each other?

JB: It does not matter whether or not they choose it. Remember, Arendt claimed that Eichmann erred when he sought to choose with whom to inhabit the earth. The populations with whom any of us inhabit the world precede our existence and exceed our will. It has to be that way if we are committed to an anti-genocidal position.

Law and Lacan

Schroeder, Jeanne Lorraine. The Four Lacanian Discourses or Turning Law Inside-Out. New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2008.

Hegel favors the term Aufhebung because it paradoxically means both negation and preservation. Hegel is, indeed, a totalizing philosopher buthis totality is incomplete — there is a radical negativity at the heart of the totality. the whole is built around a hole.

the imaginary is an attempt to suppress the true nature of the symbolic and the real. Fantasy is defined as the imaginary proposition that the barred subject actually achieves a relationship with the object cause of her desire.

If I say that “Dick and Jane were exposed, when they were young children and in a repeated manner, to …” the listener does not know how to understand “exposed” until I finish the sentence with “harmful radiation,” “foreign languages,” or even “their uncle the exhibitionist” … The end of the sentence determines how the listener understands or “rereads” the beginning of the sentence; the end of the sentence fixes the meaning(s), putting an end to the sliding (without necessarily reducing multiple meanings to one single meaning) “At a young age, the children were exposed to …” (Bruce Fink, Reading Êcrits Closely 90, cited in Schroeder 136)

Badiou responds to Nancy

Alain Badiou responds to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Libération article “What the Arab peoples signify to us”:

Yes, dear Jean-Luc, the position you adopt in favour of ‘Western’ intervention in Libya was indeed a sorry surprise for me.

Didn’t you notice right from the start the palpable difference between what is happening in Libya and what is happening elsewhere? How in both Tunisia and Egypt we really did see massive popular gatherings, whereas in Libya there is nothing of the kind? An Arabist friend of mind has concentrated in the last few weeks on translating the placards, banners, posters and flags that were such a feature of the Tunisian and Egyptian demonstrations: he couldn’t find a single example of these in Libya, not even in Benghazi. One very striking fact about the Libyan ‘rebels’, which I’m surprised you didn’t note, is that you don’t see a single woman, whereas in Tunisia and Egypt women are very visible. Didn’t you know that the French and British secret services have been organising the fall of Gaddafi since last autumn? Aren’t you amazed that, in contrast to all the other Arab uprisings, weapons of unknown origin emerged in Libya? That bands of young people immediately began firing volleys in the air, something inconceivable elsewhere? Weren’t you struck by the emergence of a supposed ‘revolutionary council’ led by a former accomplice of Gaddafi, whereas nowhere else was there any question of the masses who had risen up appointing some people as a replacement government?

Don’t you realise how all these details, and many more, chime with the fact that here, and nowhere else, the great powers were called in to support? That such riffraff as Sarkozy and Cameron, whose aims are transparently sordid, were applauded and worshipped – and you suddenly give them support. Isn’t it self-evident that Libya provided an entry for these powers, in a situation that elsewhere totally escaped their control? And that their aim, completely clear and completely classic, was to transform a revolution into a war, by putting the people out of the running and making way for arms and armies – for the resources that these powers monopolise? This process is going on before your eyes each day, and you approve it? Don’t you see how after the terror from the air, heavy weapons are going to be supplied on the ground, along with instructors, armoured vehicles, strategists, advisers and blue helmets, and in this way the reconquest (hopefully a fitful one) of the Arab world by the despotism of capital and its state servants will recommence?

How can you of all people fall into this trap? How can you accept any kind of ‘rescue’ mission being entrusted to those very people for whom the old situation was the good one, and who absolutely want to get back into the game, by forcible means, from motivations of oil and hegemony? Can you simply accept the ‘humanitarian’ umbrella, the obscene blackmailing in the name of victims? But our armies kill more people in more countries than the local boss Gaddafi is capable of doing in his. What is this trust suddenly extended to the major butchers of contemporary humanity, to those in charge of the mutilated world that we are familiar with? Do you believe, can you believe, that they represent ‘civilisation’, that their monstrous armies can be armies of justice? I am stupefied, I must confess. I ask myself what good is philosophy if it is not immediately the radical critique of this kind of unreflecting opinion, moulded by the propaganda of regimes such as our own, which popular uprisings in regions strategic for them have put on the defensive, and which are seeking their revenge.

You say in your text that it will ‘later’ be up to ‘us’ (but who is this ‘us’, if today it includes Sarkozy, Bernard-Henri Lévy, our bombers and their supporters?) to make sure that oil and arms deals, and the like, don’t make their return. Why ‘later’? It is now that we have to make sure, by stopping the great powers as much as we can from interfering in the political processes under way in the Arab world. By doing all that is possible so that these powers, fortunately out of the picture for a number of weeks, cannot reintroduce – under the damaged name of ‘democracy’ and the moral and humanitarian pretexts that have been used ever since the first colonial conquests – oil and other deals, which are quite simply the only deals that these powers and their states are interested in.

Dear Jean-Luc, in circumstances of this kind it makes no sense for you or me to go with the grain of the Western consensus that says: ‘we absolutely have to remain in charge of everything happening’. We have to make a stand against the grain, and demonstrate that the real target of Western bombers and soldiers is in no way the wretched Gaddafi, a former client of those who are now getting rid of him as someone in the way of their higher interests. For the target of the bombers is definitely the popular uprising in Egypt and the revolution in Tunisia, it is their unexpected and intolerable character, their political autonomy, in a word: their independence. To oppose the destructive interventions of the powers means supporting the political independence and the future of these uprisings and revolutions. This is something we can do, and it is an unconditional imperative.

With friendly greetings,
Alain

tim dean

Žižek, Slavoj. Violence

[H]uman communication in its most basic, constitutive dimension does not involve a space of egalitarian intersubjectivity. It is not ‘balanced’. It does not put the participants in symmetric mutually responsible positions where they all have to follow the same rules and justify their claims with reasons. On the contrary, what Lacan indicates with his notion of the discourse of the Master as the first (inaugural, constitutive) form of discourse is that every concrete, ‘really existing’ space of discourse is ultimately grounded in a violent imposition of a Master-Signifier which is strico sensu ‘irrational’: it cannot be further grounded in reasons. It is the point at which one can only say that ‘the buck stops here’; a point at which, in order to stop the endless regress, somebody has to say, ‘It is so because I say it is so!” Here, Levinas was right to emphasise the fundamentally asymmetcial character of intersubjectivity: there is never a balanced reciprocity in my encountering another subject.. the appearance of égalité is always discursively sustained by an asymmetric axis of master versus servant, of the bearer of university knowledge versus its object, of a pervert versus a hysteric, and so on. This, of course, runs against the predominant ideological approach to the topic of violence which understands it as ‘spontaneous’ … 53

page 55: This is why language itself, the very mdedium of non-violence, of mutural recognition, involves unconditional violence. IN other words, it is language itself which pushes our desire beyond proper limits, transforming it into a ‘desire that contains the infinite’, elevating it into an absolute striving that cannot ever by satisfied. What Lacan calls objet petit a is precisely this ethereal ‘undead’ object, the surplus object that causes desire in its excessive and derailing aspect. One cannot get rid of excess: it is consubstantial with human desire as such.

Dean, Tim. Beyond Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2000.

I like where he’s going with the real, only that he’s taking his time getting there. Oh my god can this guy talk. His writing is ok, but you get the impression that he has a lot to say and has trouble ‘filtering’.

The problem with the idea of the intersubjective dialectic is, as Lacan noted of Hegel, that intersubjectivity remains at the limit of anthropology, in which the other always retains the staus of subject. Thus intersubjective relations are, in principle if not in practice, symmetrical and reversible. But when Lacan reconceives the subject-other relation as a subject-Other relation, he insists that there cannot be an Other of the Other, since the Other’s conceptual value — as it accumulated throughout the 1950s — is that it is strictly divested of subjective status. The subject-Other relation, which describes a fully symbolic subject, is definitively asymmetrical. 43

[Lacan’s] early conception of [desire] as “desire of the other” maintains desire within a Kojève-Hegelian intersubjective dialectic, in which it is impossible not to reduce desire — and fantasy — to imaginary scenarios. … In Hegel desire is the desire for recognition, a desire for the other to ratify my existence by means of affirmation; thus insofar as the imaginary is ordered by recognitions and especially by misrecognitions (méconnaissances), this Hegelian persepecive reduces desire to the imaginary level. 44

His subsequent account of desire as an unconscious effect of the cause he names OBJECTA. At his moment in Lacan’s thinking, his notion of the object as something that can never appear in the mirror —and which therefore remains heterogeneous to the imaginary register — has not yet emerged. 45

Lacan’s theory of desire is later detached from the category of the imaginary other as a causal explanation and resituated as an effect of language.

Since it is primarily the phallus’s imaginary attributes that permit it to represent the signifier of signifiers, we must deduce that it is purely conventional and therefore, in the final analysis, arbitrary that the phallus should hold any indisputable priority in relation to the symbolic order’s exigencies. Though Lacan never relinquished the phallus as a concept, his theory of OBJECTA makes clear that desire has multiple causes, many of which have no relation whatsoever to gender or sexual difference. Rather than trying to purify the phallus of its imaginary residue or, alternatively, showing the impossibility of any such purification, I want to suggest that the phallus as Lacan’s model for the causal principle of desire may be bracketed once the full significance of OBJECTA comes into view. Such an appreciation enables us to move beyond interminable and increasingly sterile debates over the phallogocentric biases of Lacan’s account of the phallus toward a more interesting “1960s Lacan” of the object.

Desire is predicated on the incommensurability of body and subject. 200

THINKING SEXUALITY OUTSIDE THE TERMS OF GENDER

… in the end Freud’s contention that we’ve all made a homosexual object-choice (whether we know it or not) doesn’t go far enough, because his notion of object-choice remains trapped within the terms of gender. The very possibility of describing object-choice as homosexual or heterosexual takes for granted that the object chosen is genderred and that — no matter how partial or fragmented the obejct may be — it’s somehow identifiable as masculine or feminine. In contrast, Lacan’s concept of OBJECTa radically revises the Freudian notion of object-choice by leaving gender behind, in a move whose far-reaching implications I wish to delineate. 219

Thus for Lacan sexuality is explicable in terms of neither nature NOR nurture, since the unconscious cannot be considered biological — it isn’t part of my body and yet it sin’t exactly culturally constructed either. Instead, the unconscious may be grasped as an index of how both biology and culture FAIL to determine subjectivity and sexual desire. Thinking of the unconscious as neither biological nor cultural allows us to distinguish (among other things) a properly psychoanalytic from a merely psychological notion of the unconsicous.
… Lacan’s account of sexuality remains unassimilable to the nature (Simon LeVay The Sexual Brain)/nurture debate, essentialists and social constructionists [Hello Judith Butler].

By describing sexuality in terms of unconscious desire, I wish to separate sexual orientation from questions of identity and of gender roles, practices, and performances, since it is by conceiving sexualty outside the terms of gender AND identity that we can most thoroughly deheterosexualize desire. 221-222

Thus although historicism shares with psychoanalysis the view that identities are essentially illusory, historicism resorts to the empiricist solution of investigating discrete social and cultural practices, whereas psychoanalysis focuseds on what, though not exactly illusory, nevertheless resists empirical verification, namely, FANTASY. 224

… Lacan helps to distinguish a psychoanalytic from a more psychological notion of the unconscious as denoting interiority, depth, or the repsitory of drives and complexes. If we think of the real in light of the PSYCHOANALYTIC unconscious, we will see more clearly how the real is connected with —indeed remins inseparable from— sexuality. 231

The paradox of human sexuality, according to Freud, consist in its diphasic emergence: its initial efflorescence in childhood, prior to maturation of the sexaul organs, is succeeded by a period of latency before sexuality reemerges alongside, yet forever out of synch with, organic changes in the body. Freud’s claim on behalf of infantile sexuality entail recognizing that sex comes before one is ready for it — either physically or psychically. In the case of children it seems relatively clear what being physically unprepared for sex means; psychically it means that the human infant encounters sexual impulses — its own as well as other people’s — as alien, unmasterable, unassimilable to its fledgling ego, and hence ultimately traumatic. As a consequence of this capacity to disorganize the ego or coherent self, sexuality bcomes part of the UNCONSCIOUS; and it is owing to this subjectively traumatic origin that Lacan aligns sex with the order of the real.
The real — like trauma — is what resists assimilation to any imaginary or symbolic universe. Another way of putting this would be to say that the premature emergence of sexuality in humans — its original noncoincidence with biology — splits sexuality off from reality and reassigns it to the domain of FANTASY. In so doing, human sexuality is constituted as ireemediably PERVERSE. 231-232

In Freud’s theory of sexualty, perversion doesn’t represent a detour or falling away fromthe norm, as it does in the prepsychoanalytic, theological conception of perversion. Instead, for Freud the reverse is true: perversion is primary, rather than a secondary deviation. In the form of polymorphous infantile sexuality, perversion PRECEDES the norm, and therefore normal sexuality — that is, reproductive genital heterosexuality — represents a deviation or falling away from perversion. To specify this relation more precisely, perhaps we could say that within the Freudian dialectic of sexuality, the norm SUBLATES perversion, ostensibly superseding but never actually eliminating it. 235

What homosexuality expresses —indirectly and in popular form— is desire’s disquieting disregard for gender and for persons. … DESIRE’S OBJECTS REMAIN ESSENTIALLY CONTINGENT. BUT WHEN HOMOSEXUALITY BECOMES THE BASIS FOR AN IDENTITY, THIS CONTINGENT RELATION BETWEEN DESIRE AND ITS OBJECTS VANISHES. … “Homosexual desire is perverse in the Freudian sense, i.e. it is simply an-Oedipal, as long as it expresses the disorganisation of the component drives. It becomes neurotically perverse in the ordinary sense when it relates to a face, when it enters the speher of the ego and the imaginary.” … THIS QUESTION CONCERNS HOW WE MAY CONCEIVE OF DESIRE AS NOT RELATING “TO A FACE”: HOW CAN WE DEPERSONIFY OR IMPERSONALIZE DESIRE SO AS TO RETAIN ITS ORGINARY PERVERSE FORCE WITHOUT SIMPLY PLUNGING INTO SEXUAL ANARCHY? 239

*****
How can we INHIBIT the prosopopoeia —the face-making trope— that accompanies libidinal investments while still honoring the other’s alterity? 239
******
Hocquenghem speaks not of “depersonifying” or “impersonalizing” desire but, more austerely, of its DEHUMANIZATION: “The sexualisation of the world herealded by the gay movement pushes capitalist decoding to the limit and corresponds to teh disolution of the human; from this point of view the gay movement undertakes the necessary dehumanisation.” 240

Thus we might say that man is unmanned in antihumanist philosophy, finding himself no longer master of his world since no longer master of himself. The principal name psychoanalysis gives to this loss of mastery or decentering of the human is THE UNCONSCIOUS. From this it follows that we may nuance the potentially misleading terms “antihumanism” and “dehumanization” by substituting for them DE-EGO-IZATION, since it is less the death of humanity of or Man perse that is at stake than the obsolescence of a particular conception and ideology of the self. Hocquenghem makes this clear when he concludes … “homosexual desire is neither on the side of death nor on the side of life; it is the killer of civilised egos.” 241

Not only does fangtasy fulfill a crucial mediating function, htereby permitting us to complicate teh relation between desire and the social, but it does so by deeping perversion alive and in play. thus, in my view, quieer theory cannot afford to accept Foucault’s —or Deleuze and Guattari’s— dismissal of fantasy as a ruse of idealism. For me the significance of Lacan’s inverting his formula for fantasy ($<>a) to make the formula for perversion (a<>$) lies in its maintaining fantasy as always potentially perverse, while also guaranteeing perversion a mobility that defers it soldification into an identity (THE pervert). Hence the full significance of the <> sign … that links $ and a, and which Lacan says “is created to allow a hundred and one different readings, a multiplicity that is admissible as long as teh spoken remains caught in its algebra” (Ecrits 313). This <> sign indicates a set of possible relations between the subject of the unconscious and its object, a veritable repertoire of relationality. To appreciate how this works, we need to clarify the ambiguous status of the OBJECTa, which, designating neither a person nor a thing, occupies a distincly multivalent position in Lacan’s theory of sexuality. 246-247

The new perspective on humanity inaugurated by the discovery or invention of the unconscious involves a sense of loss, but this loss is a consequence of excess — that is, a loss of mastery that stems from an excess of signification. Thus the paradox whereby excess is not so much the alternative to lack as its precondition entails a more specific problem, namely, that the boon of linguistic subjecvity comes at the cost of subjective unity. This excess of meaning called the unconscious genertes desire as a multiplicity of possible connections, metonymic links between signifiers that engender subjectivity. Another way of putting this is to point out how linguistic duplicity —the very possibility that language can deceive— produces the perpetual illusion of a secret located beyond language, and it is this enigma that elicits desire. HENCE FOR LACAN, THE SUBJECT AND DESIRE COME INTO BEING AT THE SAME MOMENT; AND HE NAMES THIS CONSITUTIVE DIVISION THAT FOUNDS THE SUBJECT “OBJECTa” a term intended to designate the remainder or EXCESS that keeps self-identity forever out of reach, thus maintaining desire. 250

As I have been arguing throughout this book, the logic of this concept, OBJECTa, demotes or relativizes that of the phallus: whereas the phallus implies a univocal model of desire (insofar as all desiring positions are mapped in relation to a singular term), OBJECTa implies multiple, heterogeneous possibilities for desire, especially since OBJECTa bears no discernible relation to gender. 250

OBJECTa takes multple forms as a consequence of the drive’s partiality … In Lacan’s theory the object results from an excess of signification that Freud calls the UNCONSCIOUS; more specifically, it is the effect of this excess on the human body that brings desire into being. In his Three Essays Freud describes this phenomenon in terms of plymorphous perversity, emphasizing the infant’s capacity for autoerotic pleasure in any number of bodily openings, surfaces and activities. As is well known, Freud designates these multiple corporeal apertures and surfaces EROGENOUS ZONES and this inspires Lacan’s account of OBJECTa. 251

<<
The very delimitation of the “erogenous zone” that the drive isolates … is the result of a cut expressed in the anatomical mark of a margin or border — lips, “the enclosure of the teeth,” the rim of the anus, the tip of the penis, the vagina, the slit fromed by the eyelids, even the horn-shaped aperature of the ear …. the mamilla, faeces, the phallus (imaginary object), the urinary flow. (An unthinkable list, if one adds, as I do, the phoneme, the gaze, the voice — the nothing.) [Ecrits 314-315 Cited in Tim Dean Beyond Sexuality 252]

Erogenous zones — which are always multiple, never singular — come into being as soon as sexuality is separated from organic functions, that is, in the reflexive moment of autoeroticism. Lacan describes this process as “the result of a cut” that occurs at any number of bodily borders. Not only is “this mark of the cut” (WHICH CREATES OBJECT a) multiplied throughout the body, but it is my own body on which the symbolic order makes these incisions. thus for Lacan, as for Freud, sexual desire originates in autoeroticism. Dean, Beyond Sexuality 252

The significance of this logic for our purposes lies in the implication that desire emerges independently of heterosexuality or homosexuality; and hence the gendering involved in “object-choice” must be a secondary process performed on objects THAT PRECEDE GENDER — as Lacan’s example of “the horn=shaped aperture of the ear” clearly demonstrates. This secondary process, which organizes and thus totalizes OBJECTSa into a gendered object-choice, shows how personification functions as a strategy of normalization. We might even say that the psychoanalytic notion of object-choice is itself a heterosexist invention, one that runs counter to psychoanalysis’s own logic of unconscious desire. 253

I’d like to look a little harder at the material object Lacan takes as his prototype for OBJECTa — the turd. Looking unblinkingly at a psychoanalytic theory of exrement offers the benefit of enabling us to gauge just how incidental to Lacan’s account of fantasy, sexuality, and desire is the phallus. … Speaking of what happens to the human organism in the process of subjectification —when, that is, language impacts the body — … Lacan’s model for subjective loss is not the phallus but feces, an ungendered object. In the face of THI|S object-cause of desire, the controversy over the concept of the phallus pales into insignificance, since whether or not we’re all —men as well as women— missing the phallus, certainly we’ve all lost objects from the anus. And this distinction remins universally true —irrespective of gender, race, class, nation, cutlure, or history— in that although we never may be completely certain that nobody has the phallus, we can be sure everybody has an anus. … The explanatory virtue of turds over the phallus lies not only in the fact that everybody loses them, but also in the fact that their loss is repeated: it’s because loss from this part of the body is multiplied over and over that feces so aptly figure OBJECTSa. Now this formulation confronts us with the disturbing implication that in fantasy ($ <> a) we find the subject relating to its shit. 264-265

Perhaps it takes a gay man to observe that the phallus is simply a turd in disguise … 266

Let me make clear that I’m claiming not that sexual difference is inconsequential to this account of sexuality, just that it is secondary. Desire emerges before sexual difference, through the anal object, and therefore there can be no a priori gendering of the object-cause of desire. “to encounter desire is first of all to forget the diference in the sexes” and [to instead focus] on anal erotics. … excrement remains an extraordinarily difficult topic for sustained discourse: the anal object tests the limits of sexual tolerance far more stringently than mere homosexuaity or other manifestation of queerness. In deed, homosexuality’s being branded “the love that dare not speak its name” must have been a consequence primarily of its association with anality. Even Freud, whose broadmindedness still retains the capacity to astonish, deems perversion most unequivocally pathological when it involves sexual contact with shit. 267

Freud reminds us that originally the object of desire is not another person, much less a member of the opposite sexj, but somethign rather more abject. Thinking of sexual object-choice in terms of persons entails a kind of sublimation, an idealizing consolidation of the object, rather than the idealization of the instinct manifested in Freud’s examples of necrophilia and coprophagy. When we grasp the idea that erotidc desire for another person itself depends on some sort of sublimation —rather than sublimation standing as the alternative to interpersonal desire, as is commonly supposed— then we can begin to appreiate just how strange, how distant from the normalizing perspective on love and sex, psychoanalytic theory really is. In its most fundamental formulations psychoanalysis is queer theory. [End of chapter] 268

Dean, Tim. “Lacan and Queer Theory” Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Cambridge Campanion to Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2003. 239-

As Simon Watney has shown in his analysis of media discourse about AIDS in Britain and the United States, the diea of a general population implies a notion of disposable populations in much the same way that the category of the normal defines itself in relation to the pathological, on which it necessarily depends. hence the “general population” can be understood as another term for heteronormative society. those excluded from teh general population —whether by virtue of their sexuality, race, class, or nationality— are by definition QUEER.

In this way “QUEER” came to stand less for a particular sexual orientation or a stigmatized erotic identity than for a critical distance from the white, middle-class, heterosexual norm. … a new style of political organization that focused more on building alliances and coalitions than on maintaining identity boundaries: … entailed a critique of identity and an acknowledgement that different social groups could transcend their identity based on paricularisms in the interest of resititng heteronormative society. thus while gay oppses straight, queer sets itself more broadly in opposition to the forces of normalization taht regulate social conformity. QUEER IS ANTI-IDENTITARIAN AND IS DEFINED RELATIONALLY RATHER THAN SUBSTANTIVELY. QUEER HAS NO ESSENCE, AND ITS RADICAL FORECE EVAPORATES —OR IS NORMALIZED— AS SOON AS QUEER COALESCES INTO A PSYCHOLOGICAL IDENTITY. 240

Composed in a Lacanian milieu (though without ever mentioning Lacan’s name), The History of Sexuality launches a polemic against what Foucault calls the repressive hypothesis. This hypothesis states that human desire is distorted by cultural constraints, which, once lifted, would liberate desire and permit its natural, harmonious fulfillment, thereby eliminating the various neuroses that beset our civilization. Picturing desire and the law in an antagonistic relation, the repressive hypothesis infers a precultural or prediscursive condition of desire in its “raw” state. Foucault —like Lacan— maintains that no such prediscursive state exists. Instead, desire is positiviely produced rather than repressed by discourse; desire follwos teh law, it does not oppsoe it. In 1963, more than a decade before the History of Sexuality Lacan argued that “Freud finds a singular balance, a kind of co-conformity — if I may be allowed to double my prefixes — of Law and desire, stemming fro the fact that both are born together. (T, p.89). This affirmation comports well with Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis. 241

However Fouclult’s critique of a naive conception of repression — repression considered as a purely external force — prompts him to argue against all formulae of negation where desire is concerned, and thus his polemic leaves little conceptual room for any consideration of negativity. … While Lacan wants to reconceptualize the unconscious in de-individualed terms, Foucault wishes to rethink that which structures subjectivity in purely positive terms, without recourse to notions of repression, negation, or the unconscious. 242

But in denaturalizing sex and sexuality, Lacan suggests more than the comparatively familiar idea that sex is a social construct. Psychoanalytic antinaturalism does not boil down to mere culturalism. Rather, his account of how discourse generates desire specifies more precisely the function of negativity in creating human subjectivity. Lacan locates the cause of desire in an object (L’OBJECT PETITa) that comes into being as a result of language’s impace on the body, but that is not itself discursive. The OBJECT PETITa is what remains after culture’s symbolic netoworks have carved up the body, and hence the object reminds us of the imperfect fit betwen language and coproreality. …. Lacan argues that the object-cause of desire is EXTRADISCURSIVE — something that cannot be contained within or mastered by language, and therefore cannot be understood as a cultural construct.

… in its origins DESIRE IS NOT HETEROSEXUAL: desire is determined not by the opposite sex but by L’OBJECT PETITa, which necessarily precedes gender. 244

In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Freud claimed that the peculiar termporality of human sexual life compelled him to conclude that the instinct has no predetermined object or aim: “It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object’s attractions” (SE 7, p.148). By invalidating the popular notion that erotic desire is congenitally oriented toward the opposite sex, this psychoanalytic insight poses a fundamental challenge to heteronormativity. And it is thanks to ideas such as this one — the instinct’s original independence of its object — that Freud rather than Foucault may be credited as the intellectual founder of queer theory.
In order to grasp Lacan’s theory of L’OBJECT PETITa and how it deheterosexualizes desire, we need to consider fruther Freud’s account of the sexual instinct and its contingent object. As his severing of the natural link between instinct and object implies, Freud disassembles the instinct into it components, arguing that the notion of a unified instinct in which the parts function together harmoniously on the model of animal instinct is a desuctive fiction; it does not describe accurately how human instinctual life operates. there is no single, unifed sexual instinct in humans, Freud maintains, but only partial drives, component instincts. Instinct is an evolutionary concept, a way of thinking about an organism’s adaptation to its environment. For Freud, however, the human subject is constitutively maladapted to its environment, and the unconscious stands as the sign of this maladaption. Psychoanalytic thinkers after Freud have formalized the distinction between instinct and drive that remains somewhat inchoate in Freud’s own work. The distinction is particularly important in terms of the epistemological status of psychoanalysis, since drive theory tends to be taken as one of the most retrograde aspects of Freudianism, a mark of its essentialism. But in fact the instinct/drive distinction confirms Freud’s departure from biologistic conceptions of sexuality. IF INSTINCT CAN BE SITUATED AT THE LEVEL OF BIOLOGICAL NECESSITY, THEN DRIVE IS THE RESULT OF INSTINCT’S CAPTURE IN THE NETS OF LANGUAGE, ITS HAVING TO BE ARTICULATED INTO A SIGNIFYING CHAIN IN ANY ATTEMPT TO FIND SATISFACTION.

Lacan spells out this distinction: “the instinct is the effect of the mark of the signifier on needs, their transformation as an effect of the signifier into something fragmented and panic-stricken that we call drive” (Seminar VII, 301). Fragmented or partialized by symbolic networks, the drive is thereby DISoriented (“panic stricken”) in a manner that gives the lie to conventional motions of sexual orientatation. The very idea of sexual orientation assumes that desire can be coordinated in a single direction, that it can be streamlined and stabilised. Another way of putting this would be to say that the idea of SEXUAL ORIENTATION DISCIPLINES BY REGULATING ITS TELOS. The notion of orientation —including same-sex orientation— can be viewed as normalizing in that it attempts to totalize uncoordinated fragments into a coherent unity. The conceptual correlate of orientation is sexual identity, a psychological category that confroms to the instinctual understanding of sex. Instinct, orientation, and identity are psychological concepts, not psychoanalytic ones. These concepts normalize the weirder psychoanalytic theory of partial drives and unconscious desire by unifying the latter’s discontinuities into recognizable identity formations. The impulse to coordinate and synthesize is a function of the ego and betrays an imaginary view of sex. This is true of the notions of homosexual orientation and gay identity as it is of heterosexual identity. Both straight and gay identities elide the dimension of the unconscious. As an orientation or identity, homosexuality is normalizing though not socially normative. In other words, while homosexuality is far from representing the social norm, as a minority identity it does conform to the processes of normalization that regulate desire into social categories for disciplinary purposes. 245-246

With this distinction in mind, we can begin to appreciate how Freud’s radical claim that psychoanalysis “has found that all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconsciuos” does not go far enough in dismantling an identititarian view of sex. The contention that everyone has made a homosexual object-choice in his or her unconscious undermines the notion of a seamless sexual identity, but without challenging the assumption that object-choice is determined by gender. For an object-choice to qualify as homosexual, it must represent a selection based on the similarity of the object’s gender to that of the subject making the selection. This implies that the gender of objects still is discernible at teh level of the unconscious, and that sexuality concerns recognizably “whole” objects, such as men and women (or at least masculine and feminine forms). But such assumptions are invalidated by Freud’s own theory of partial drives, as well as by the concept of OBJET PETITa, a kind of partialized object that Lacan derives from Freudian drive theory. In developing his concept of OBJET PETITa, Lacan invokes the oral, anal, and scopic drives that Freud discusses in “Instincts and their vicissitudes” (1915), adding to Freud’s incomplete list the vocatory drive (in which the voice is taken as an object). From the partial drives Lacan emphasises, one sees immediately that the gender of an object remains irrelevant to the drives’ basic functioning. … THE DRIVES’ PARTIALITY REVOKES HETEROSEXUALITY AT THE LEVEL OF THE UNCONSCIOUS. 246

If, as far as the unconscious is concerned, it makes no sense to speak of heterosexual or homosexual object-choices, then a theory of subjectivity that takes the unconscious into account could be extremely useful from a queer perspective. … Freud’s partializing of the drive discredits not only the viability of sexual complementarity, but also the possibility of subjective harmony. In contrast to the functionality of sexual instinct, drive discloses the dysfunctionality of a subject at odds with itself as a result of symbolic existence. Characterized by repetition rather than by development, the drive does not necessarily work toward the subject’s well being. In fact, its distance from organic rhythms means that the drive insists at the level of the unconscious even to the point of jeopardizing the subject’s life. For this reason, Lacan aligns the drive with death rather than life, claiming that “the drive, the partial drive, is profoundly a death drive and represents in itself the portion of death in the sexed living being” (Seminar XI 205). It bears repeating that the death drive is not an essentialist or organicist concept, since it derives from an inference about the effect of language on bodily matter; it is as CULTURAL subjects that humans are afflicted with the death drive. There is no essential, inborn death drive; rather, the dysfunctional, antinaturalistic way in which partial drives fail to conduce toward life lends every drive an uncanny, death-like quality. 247

Nobus, Dany. “Lacan’s Science of the Subject: Between Linguistics and Topology” Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Cambridge Campanion to Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2003.

… Lacan also mapped out the antagonism between self-consciousnes identity and unconscious subject across the two poles of opposition between the subject of the statement (sujet de l’énoncé) and the subject of the enunciation (sujet de l’énonciation). Freud’s famous joke of the two Jews who meet at a station in Galicia still serves as an excesslent example of what Lacan was trying to demonstrate here. When the first Jew —let us call him Moshe — asks the second, who will go by the name of MOrdechai, “So where are you going?” Mordechai says, “I am going to Cracow.” This message instantly infuriates Moshe, who exclams: “You’re a dirty liar, Mordechai, because you are only telling me you’re going to Cracow in order to make me believe that you’re going to Lemberg, but I happen to know that you are going to Cracow!” Of course, the joke is that Moshe accuses Mordechai of being a liar, whereas what Mordechai says is a truthful description of his journey plan. Moshe acknowledges that the subject of the statement is telling the truth about himself — “I know you are going to Cracow” — but he also pinpoints the deceitful intention behind Mordechai’s statement, which reveals the subject of the enunciation: “Your true intention is to deceive me.” Mordechai may or may not have been aware of his intention, the fact of the matter is that Moshe acknowledges the presence of another subject behind the subject of the statement. 61-62

Verhaeghe Does Woman

Discourse of Hysteric

The questions put to the master are bascially the same: “Tell me who I am, tell me what I want.” Although this master can be found in different places — it could be a priest, a doctor, a scientist, an analyst, even a husband — there is always one common factor: the master is supposed to know, he is supposed to know and to produce the answer. That is why we find knowledge, S2, in the position of product. Typically, this answer always misses the point. S2 as general knowledge is impotent in producing a particular answer to the particular driving force of objectA in the place of truth: a//S2. This inevitably results in a never ending battle between the hysterical subject and the particular master on duty. …

Structurally, the discourse of the hysteric results in alienation for the hysterical subject and in castration for the master. The answer given by the master will always miss the point, because the true answer concerns objectA, the object which is forever lost and cannot be put into words. The standard reaction to this failure is to produce even more signifiers but they only lead one further and further from the lost object in the position of truth. This impossibility causes the failure of the master, and entails his symbolic castration. Meanwhile, the master, in the position of the other as S1, has produced an ever increasing body of S2, of knowledge. It is this very knowledge that the hysterical subject experiences ass profoundly alienating: as an answer to her particular question she receives a general theory, …. Whether or not she complies with it, whether or not she identifies herself with it, is besides the point. In every case, the answer will be felt as alienating. Knowdledge as a product is unable to say anything important about objectA in the place of truth: a//S2 (Verhaeghe, Does the Woman 110).

[The master’s] truth is that he is also castrated, divided and subject to the Law. The paradox is that in striving to attain jouissance, the only thing he can produce is a knowledge which always falls short and which automatically makes him fail as a master. Ineed, if he wants to display his knowledge he has to speak, but the moment he does, he reveals his division. the only way for a master to say master is to keep away from the game of desire.
[…] Only he who does not desire is not submitted to castration, remains undivided and can occupy the position of master. … The idealised father of the hysteric is teh dead father, the one who, freed from all desire, is no longer subjected to the fundamental lack and can produce in his own name, S1, a knowledge, S2, concerning jouissance. Verhaeghe 112

Discourse of University (Verhaeghe, Does the Woman 116-117)

In the discourse of the university, the master functions as a formal guarantee for knowledge, thereby denying the ever-problematic division of the one who knows. In the end, this denial will be a failure. It is this knowledge that takes up the position of agent in the discourse of the university. If we turn the terms in the discourse of the master back a quarter, we obtain the discourse of the university as a regression of the discourse of the master, and as the inverse of the discourse of the hysteric. The agent is a ready-made knowlege, whereas the other is reduced to mere object, cause of desire: S2 –>a

The history of psychoanalysis illustrates this aim of the discoruse of the university: Freud is reduced to a merer guarantee of a closed and well-established knowledge. The problematic aspect of his work is put aside, only his name remans as the master signifier necessary for the guarantee: “Made in …” The unifying aspect of this S1 already shows itself in the fact that post-Freudianism reduced Freud to a massive whole, a monolith without any internal dynamic. Certainly, the ‘evolution’ in his work was recognised, but only in the sense of a cumulative progression, which began before Freud (‘dynamic’ psychiatry), and resulted after him in the pinnacle known as Ego psychology …

This knowledge is presented as an organised and transparent unity which can be applied straight from the textbook. the hidden truth is that it can only function if one can guarantee it with a master-signifier.

In the position of the other, we find the lost object, the cause of desire. The relationship between this object and the signifying chain is structurally impossible: the object is precisely that element, Das Ding, which is beyond the signifier. As a result, the product of this discourse is a growing division of the subjuct: the more knowledge one uses to reach the object, the more one becomes divided between signifiers, and the further one moves away from home, that is, from the true cause of desire: S2–>a.

The product of this discourse demonstrates its failure since the result is nothing but the divided subject $. This is a consequence of the impossible relationship between S2 –>a. Knowledge does not yield jouissance, only a subject divided by a knowledge expressed in signifiers. This subject, $, can never be identified with an S1 because it would require a state of non-division. Between truth and product, the disjunction of impotence insists: S1//$.

Moreover, there is no relationship between the subject and the master-signifier in this discourse; the master is supposed to secrete signifiers without there being any relationship with his own subjectivity: S1//$. This illusion is behind the ‘objectivity’ required in classical science.

Impossibility and impotence

Nobus, Dany. Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2005. p 137.

The four discourses usher in darkness and cast a shadow over knowledge. The four discourses thus direct us to an increasingly tight spiral, linking clarity and brevity of articulation to that which is ‘absolutely irreducible, completely obscure’.

The lesson for anyone interested in extraclinical applications of the four discourses is that they have an operative function, not an interpretative one. They reveal an unconscious that is present and at work, but they are not a means to describe and analyse the unconscious workings of discourse.

Nor are they an ideal device, as Bracher would have it, for analysing the discursive structure of a speech act and its socio-political impact on a receiving subject. This distinction between what we have called an ‘operative’ and an ‘interpretative’ approach to the four discourses corresponds to the division between the traumatic loss of knowledge and the ‘epistemological drive’ to know more.

The introduction of Lacanian discourse theory ought to have a limiting or circumscribing effect on knowledge itself. It should produce a better account of the irreducibly obscure and not be used as a means for producing a kind of hyper-academic knowledge out of a ‘real world’ situation. None of the authors we have mentioned go as far in the straightforward application of the four discourses as Diane Rubenstein … 138.

If we turn our attention away from an idealist standpoint on the four discourses and proceed to examine, as did Lacan, the world in which psychoanalysts have come to exist, a radically different picture presents itself. Rather than being discernible simply as controlling elements of speech within a subject, an institution or a social bond, the four discourses can be seen to exist in a hegemonic or hierarchical relationship. This relationship is determined by the division between truth as cause of speech, and truth as an effect of meaning. This division creates an invisible wall that runs across each of the four discourses in turn. One reason that we have laid such stress on the relationship of the master and the analyst is that it requires an effort to disentangle the relationship of these two discourses from the manner in which the master’s discourse is secreted within, and occluded by, the discourse of the university.

Impossibility and Impotence

One answer to this discursive hegemony and aggregation of forces is to highlight the structural importance of the functions of impossibility (impossibilité) and impotence (impuissance) in the four discourses. This emphasis takes us back to the model of a ‘traumatic epistemology’ with which we opened this chapter, insofar as it reveals the joints and seams within discourse, and the manner in which the discourses of the master, the university and the hysteric cement a relationship between connaissance and savoir by avoiding the implications of ‘knowledge as a means of jouissance’. Two of the four discourses, those of the master and the university, stave off or prevent a moment of traumatic collapse. Another of the discourses, that of the hysteric, speaks from the place of confusion and disorder, yet reconstructs the master as an idol who is asked to provide an answer to the perennial question ‘who am I?’

Only the remaining discourse, that of the analyst, is satisfied with the condition of traumatic disorder, seeing it as a place to begin, rather than as a terminal point.

The analyst’s speech, precisely because it does not aim at truth, allows truth to assume a causal or initiating role for the analysand. The first step towards understanding the role of impossibility and impotence in the four discourses is to grasp the paradox that the truth both is and is not spoken. The truth speaks, it drives and structures speech, but for that very reason the truth cannot take the form of a metalinguistic statement of ‘the truth about the truth’.

The function of truth here is causal. It sets discourse in motion through the action of the signifier on the body and the division of the field of thought. The unconscious truth that drives discourse and the conscious truth that is striven for initiate the shifting movements from one discourse to another.

Conscious thought escapes from its causal determinations by altering its course from a discourse of mastery to one of rationalization, or from rationalization to hysterical dissidence. The four discourses thus represent four possible positions regarding the relationship between truth as an unconscious cause and truth as a consciously achieved effect. The manner in which the truth as cause sets discourse in motion is in the four relationships of truth, agency, Other and product within each discourse, which are always positioned in the same way:

The relationship agency–>Other represents the ideal of conscious speech, in which a speaker communicates with a receiver and produces a result. The wild card in this arrangement is the presence of truth as discursive cause at the bottom left-hand side of the diagram. The fact that truth as cause is inassimilable into the relationship agency–>Other–>product leads Lacan to posit two levels of communicative disjunction within his theory of discourse

The upper disjunction, that of impossibility, concerns the failure of a metalanguage, the failure to ‘tell the truth about truth’.

The lower disjunction, that of impotence (sometimes called ‘inability’) takes us still further from the ‘truth about truth’, since it is evident that the product of the agent’s speech, as delivered by the Other, is double-barred from access to the truth as cause of the agent’s speech.

Discourse is thus a one-way street, leading from the action of the signifier to the endless circuits of desire-in-language that it generates. The upper and lower levels of the diagram therefore posit an interpretation shadowed by its negation or, to put this another way, the relationship between connaisance and savoir is fundamentally attended by the demon of jouissance. Even before the staging points of the master, the university, the analyst and the hysteric have been introduced, we already have the two basic elements of Lacanian epistemology here, namely a desire to know (the epistemological drive) and a certain failure of knowledge, both conjoined in the speaking body as initiated by the signifier.

What is the foundation, then, of the epistemological drive, and the establishment of the modern, technocratic master? Correspondingly, what is the place of the unconscious in a technocracy? To address these questions, it is worth comparing the place of S2 (unconscious knowledge, savoir), within the discourse of the master and that of the university in order to see how it maintains the primary alienation of truth as cause, from truth as a discursive product.

In the two diagrams, we have highlighted the position of knowledge, S2 , within these two formulas. The master signifier, S1 , occupies the position of agency in the master’s discourse, but in the university discourse it takes the role of the hidden truth. Knowledge, S2 , is situated in the ‘passive’ place of the Other in the master’s discourse, but assumes the site of agency in the university discourse.

In the latter discourse, these machinations have the effect of expelling the (absent) subject of the unconscious, $, from the scene, and of constructing a hygienic barrier between $ and S1 , which limits the threat posed by $ in the place of truth in the master’s discourse. The threat posed by the subject of the unconscious to the master concerns the revelation of the master’s fundamental impotence, his self-undermining dependence on the Other to establish a sense of meaning. The discourse of the university is therefore a safeguard, a ‘castling’ manoeuvre; the master signifier is stowed away in the knapsack of the soldier/bureaucrat who rationalizes the exercise of power.

Yet, most importantly, in the transition from the master discourse to that of the university, something also happens to knowledge, inasmuch as it has been abstracted from the other and delivered back to the agency:

[I]n the initial status of the discourse of the master, knowledge is on the side of the slave…. [W]hat happens between the discourse of the classical master and that of the modern master, which is called capitalist, is a modification in the place of knowledge…. The fact that the all-knowledge [tout-savoir] has moved into the place of the master is something that, far from throwing light on it, obscures a bit more what is in question, namely, truth. Where does it come from, the fact that there is a master’s signifier in this place? For that is well and truly the S 2 of the master, revealing the bare bones of how things are in the new tyranny of knowledge. (Lacan 1991 [1969– 70]: 34– 35)

In the structure of the master’s discourse, the Other (or the slave, according to Lacan’s Hegelian formulation) is dispossessed of knowledge, just as the worker in a capitalist economy is dispossessed of his labour. 143

In the university discourse, ‘the new tyranny of knowledge’ into which mastery regresses and dissimulates itself, rationalizes these same products in an attempt to establish control over human resources, pleasures and desires. The slave is thus exploited twice, once as a member of the underclass and again as a ‘student’, an underclass subject to the tyranny of rationalization. Nowadays, a student is as likely to be someone attending benefit agencies, receiving computer training, and adopting the psycho-bureaucratic discourse of the television soap opera—‘Let’s talk it out!’—as someone paying for a higher degree of ‘finish’ at a university.

One can sum this up by saying that the discourse of the university aims to make products (outputs, students) that also ‘speak product’ and thus intellectualize their alienation. As we suggested earlier, this phenomenon is by no means confined to actual universities— modern technocratic governments make students of all their citizens, without exception.

This is another reason why the four discourses must be seen as a means of shutting down and foreclosing the possibilities of further knowledge, rather than opening them up for extra-psychological and supra-sociological adventurism.

The fatal flaw of the discourse of the university is that its product, $, the (absent) subject of the unconscious, merely reveals the vanity of the attempt to rationalize and streamline the production of human resources. As Verhaeghe puts it: ‘[T]he product of this discourse is an ever-increased division of the subject; the more knowledge one uses to reach for the object [object a] the more one becomes divided between signifiers, and the further one gets away from home, that is from the true cause of desire’ (Verhaeghe 1995: 95).

The failure of the university discourse and its inevitable return to desire also indicate the trauma and the ultimate ‘fall’ of philosophy. In Seminar XVII, Lacan first of all traces the complicity of philosophy with mastery through a reading of Aristotle’s Politics, in which, he argues, the slave’s ‘know-how’ (his support of everyday life) is colonized by philosophy in the service of the master: ‘The function of the episteme in so far as it is specified as transmissible knowledge . . . is, entirely, still borrowed from the techniques of the craftsman, that is to say of serfs. It is a matter of extracting its essence so that this knowledge becomes the master’s knowledge…. Philosophy in its historical function is this extraction, this betrayal I would almost say, of the slave’s knowledge, so as to obtain its transmutation as master’s knowledge’ (Lacan 1991 [1969– 70]: 21– 22).

The advancement of the philosopher through the dispossession of the slave meets a barrier with the emergence of the ‘subject of science’. The division between the action of the signifier and the effort of signification/communication, which, according to Lacan, was first introduced by Descartes, makes philosophy and nonsense interchangeable, because the signifying chain can generate multiple discourses, from the erudite to the foolish, quite independently of the body it colonizes. The psychoanalyst, who invites the analysand to say anything she wishes, accepts the reality of this division. The philosopher, who is locked into the drive for abstract knowledge, cannot. Lacan uses the example of Wittgenstein’s discourse, a man possessed by a férocité psychotique (Lacan 1991 [1969– 70]: 69) to illustrate the trauma of the philosopher whose work comes to grief on the distinction between the signifier and signification. … What Wittgenstein cannot admit, however, is … any further atomization of knowledge that would create a division between an autonomous chain of signifiers and the world to which they refer. Wittgenstein, like all philosophers, ‘wants to save the truth’ (ibid.: 71) and, whilst admitting the notion of a world constructed by language, draws back from the radically disarticulated scene offered by Lacanian lalangue (‘llanguage’).

By contrast, the ‘fall of knowledge’ that the Lacanian epistemology aims at changes the historical trajectory that runs from the slave to the philosopher, by using ‘know-how’ as a means to disarticulate and dispossess abstract knowledge.

It does so in the name of the possibilities introduced by the subject of science, as they are formalized in the structure of the four discourses. In this chapter we have argued that the four discourses must be seen as part of an operation conducted on knowledge which divides the signifier from signification. Furthermore, ‘the signifier is stupid’, and not only does the analyst encounter ‘a stupid of signifiers’ in the speech of the analysand but this same stupidity of the signifier is the very basis of his own discourse. This is the source of the ‘horror’ Lacan refers to in ‘Science and Truth’, namely, that the unconscious speech of ‘I, the truth, am speaking’ is as reckless, obdurate and inchoate as our own words are reasonable, rational and articulate. This point returns in Seminar XVII:

‘Knowledge— I think I have insisted upon it sufficiently to get it into your head— knowledge is a thing that says itself, that is said. Well then, the knowledge that speaks on its own— that’s the unconscious’ (ibid.: 80).

The only epistemology adequate to this knowledge is an epistemology that encounters the horror of this ‘speaking truth’ head on, as well as the traumas of the disarticulation of knowledge and the loss of meaning that it introduces. A besetting problem of commentary on Lacan is that the danger of dismemberment and loss is never worked through within the structure of the commentary, so that the four discourses are treated as interpretative options, rather than as four contingent solutions to the intrinsic collapse of the communicative act into stupidity, non-knowledge and the circuits of desire. 145

lacanian epistemology

Nobus, Dany. Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2005. p 132.

Doing justice to the radical difference of the model of knowledge that Lacan constructs in Seminar XVII thus also requires attention to the manner in which its positioning of the discourses of the master and that of the analyst corresponds to a distinction between a technocratic social order and the liberating potential of an unconscious.

For Marx, the ‘secret product’ of modernity is surplus value, extracted from the labour of the worker and concealed within class structures and divisions of labour.

To Lacan, following Marx’s terminology, the secret product is surplus jouissance, generated as a by-product of the technocratic orders of knowledge by which the subject is determined, and accessible in the analytic setting through a knowledge whose exercise corresponds to its acquisition. The discourse of the analyst, in which knowledge operates in the place of truth, corresponds neither to culture nor to its products and heralds the possibility of revolution and radical change.

‘Keep going. March. Keep on knowing more’ (Lacan 1991 [1969– 70]: 120). With these words, Lacan relayed the disembodied, motiveless command of the modern master. … In the master’s command, the agency that issues the order to know and the actual agents of knowledge that are set to work by this order … in the headlong pursuit of ‘knowledge for its own sake’.

However, rather than endorsing the psychoanalytic value of this command to know more, Lacan insists on the value of stupidity, ignorance, loose talk and bullshit— the disavowed waste products of the epistemological drive — and the manner in which this ‘waste of knowledge’ indicates the path from conscious knowledge (connaissance) to unconscious reason (savoir) and thence to jouissance.

Lacan’s introduction of the discourses of the master, the university, the analyst and the hysteric is subsumed within a deeper logic, which juxtaposes the position of the analyst with the changing face, or increasing facelessness, of the master within modern forms of social life. The role of the ‘master’s discourse’ is to mark the beginning of a dynamic of concealment and subterfuge, which the analyst’s discourse exposes to scrutiny. Yet this same process of concealment, alienation and dissimulation has created the analytic function itself. In the formulae of the four discourses, the discourse of the master and that of the analyst are two aspects of the state of knowledge within modernity. 132

Mastery survived, developed and dissimulated itself through the progressive and violent transformation of tacit and embodied knowledge into abstract social agency.

In turn, analytic work occupies the sites of this process in the damaged bodies and psyches of modernity’s subjects, identifying mastery’s loci of control, its causes and its divisive effects.

As such, embodied knowledge or ‘know-how’ is co-opted to mastery, which then resides as the hidden kernel of a self-perfecting technological consciousness. This technological consciousness ultimately conceals the weakness and infirmity of the classical master within a ‘master function’ that efficiently disposes of social products, bodies and of knowledge. 133

Psychoanalysis addresses the ‘master function’ by setting up camp in the very sites of epistemological division and the traces they leave in the organization of the self.

The logic of misunderstanding that exists between academics and analysts is laid out in the dynamic relationship established by the four discourses. ‘The university discourse’ is another term for an apparatus of dissimulation and concealment in which the impotence of the master is disguised by the puissance [strength power] and agency of knowledge itself, alienated into a social product that exists ‘for its own sake’ and for the sake of the master simultaneously.

Quackelbeen thus completely ignores, or fails to understand, Lacan’s injunction that the four discourses are not abstractions to be applied to real situations, but are ‘already inscribed in what functions as this reality’ (Lacan 1991 [1969– 70]: 13). The discourses are not to be used as keys to the meaning of speech, but as means of separating speech from meaning, thus isolating the reality of the unconscious from the real world as it is generally understood. 137

judith butler in toronto and nyc

EPACBI: European Platform for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

A small part of Judith Butler’s talk in Toronto March 9, 2011 and her talk March 11 at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan, as part of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) in New York City

One State Solution: Butler is in favour of this, although BDS hasn’t officially supported this position.

Notes: Occupation is the institutionalization of inequality.

not discriminate on basis of religion, race

colonial occupation of Palestianians in West Bank

Jewish majority rule is unjustifiable on any grounds

– there have always been

– there’s a long history of anti-zionist jews

– modes of co-habitation across lines of gender

non-identitarian principles of working together

rights of Palestinians within the border

1948, 1967, 1993

BDS is an alliance, it is not an identity group, its not restricted to one community or another, its an assemblage, there are no requirements in advance, of where you have to be etc. …

Non-violent mode

Our idea of intelligibility has been constrained.

Do you support the right Israel to exist? What are the presumptions of this question?

What is an appropriate legitimation, to understand a state legitimated itself by establishing jewish sovereignty when over half the population was non-Jewish. Who called the state of Israel into question, it was Israel. The necessity for a refounding of the state, would it not be better for Israel Palestine be a democratic state in a fundamental sense. What we have to do is question the question.

(Part 1 of 5)

BDS Boycott Divestment Sanctions

Hold Israeli state accountable to international law when there are no existing international body to do so. BDS allows citizens exercise the power to call for the enforcement of international law. Academics have to allay with other cultural workers and artists and other public figures who are regularly invited to Israeli institutions and collaborate on projects with Israeli. In 2004 if I talked at an Israeli institution that institution would claim hey JB is against the boycott. Now eith BDS, she is able to take an explict stand and hold Israeli state accountable to international law BDS allows citizens and academics have to allay with other cultural workers and artists and other public figures

(Part 2 of 5)

1) Boycott on citizenship

The argument emerges that a strategy the focuses only on citizenship is discriminatory in that it singles out Jewish state, some faculty from UK no scholar, no emails from Israeli colleagues are not to be returned – lists of righteous Jews and unrighteous Jews,

2) Boycott on institutions

2005: different version of boycott has emerged makes a distinction between boycotting insitutions and boycotting individuals who happen to have a certain kind of citizenship.

Omar Barghouti (born 1964) is a founding committee member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) who is currently studying for a masters degree in philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He was born in Qatar, grew up in Egypt and later moved to Ramallah (West Bank) as an adult.
Boycott Me Movement coming out of Israel

BDS is powerful instrument for forcing Israeli compliance within national law when existing national and legal institutions fail to compel that compliance
Naomi Klein tended to focus exclusively occupation.

To think about the occupation and understand the occupation is to think about itsstructural links to the discrimination of against Palestinian minorities within the border and 1948 rights of refugees

Material oppression of Palestinian academic institutions counts also as violation of academic freedom

How can one talk about rights of cultural exchange

– laws that restrict mobility

BDS: politics of anti-normalization seeks to force a wide range of institutinos and states to stop compliance with the occupation

Occupation of 1967 and not 1948: BDS is a movement of Palestinian self-determination, to join Palestinians trying to chart the course of their lives

Rights of refugees must be included. non-violent palestinian self-determination

=================
(Question and Answer: 3 of 5)

What role Divestment campaign?

DIVESTMENT campaigns: are focused on corporations, and there are easier arguments to be made, corps make military goods, one can show the link, documents, and then move to divest from those companies

BOYCOTT campaign: there is much more confusion, and that’s where charge of discrimination comes in, it’s important to link them, cultural workers, artists, intellectuals all have a way of providing legitimation for the state and its practices. And it is a power we exercise by going, by showing up, we must refuse to go, and then we withdraw the power of legitimation.

Both are complimentary strategies.

(3:06 minute mark) The state of Israel is being singled out. Analagoies between Occupation – setter colonialism , you’re not singling out Israel, but showing Israel is no exception to the general rule of settler colonialism and occupation.

Israel Apartheid Week: gets understood as hate speech. It presumes to be opposed to some aspect of Israel state power and its affect on Palestinians is to be anti-semitic, or Israel should not be compared to Apartheid under South Africa. What is happening in Palestine is part of a tradition of settler colonialism. There are some aspects that are like and some that are unlike South Africa. Apartheid has history, forms of apartheid has changed, depending on where they are located geographically and geo-politically, which does not mean you have to draw absolutely flawless analogy between one and the other, this is an historical context and historical evolving category that is pertinent to this occupation.

Nation of Palestine: 1948 are diasporic, scattered in various locations, Right of Return. Existing the boundaries are the exising sign of illegality

Right of Return:

***********************
(Question and Answer: 4 of 5)

Cultural exchange: there is always a politics to cultural exchange, it presumes that everyone can arrive at the place where cultural exchange can take place, and if rights of mobility are restricted not everybody can arrive. Seeds for Peace, Bereavement groups do cultural exchange … but the problem with these ideas of cultural exchange is that most of them assume that you cannot talk about the power differential that limits participants that restricts or makes exchange impossible.

For a Palestinian academic to get to the USA for a talk: the wait for the visa, a number of hoops, Omar Barghouti ran into this problem, has been detained by bureaucratic officials which implies they are frightened of a certain type of exchange they don’t want BDS exchange, but if you are really radical about cultural exchange, you would militate about equal conditions of participation, you have to dismantle the occupation and then you could talk about cultural exchange.

5:00 minute mark: It will not do for BDS to be a completely male driven organization. It’s not ok to struggle for women’s rights to struggle for women’s/queer rights on the condition that other are deprived of rights, it must be part of radical social justice program, not just a narrow identitarian claim.

stabilizing of categories works to perpetuate subjugation, then de-stabilization of categories is a good thing But sometime de-stabilization of categories is an operation of power the we need to resist.

8:40 minute mark: Think of BINATIONALISM be that would take apart the nationalism of the nation. Even this radical separation by building the wall, binds them to Palestinians for life, and settlements built on West Bank produces a hideous neighborliness, between right-wing Israelis and local Palestinian population so what we have is wretched forms of binationalism. Up-againstness, adjacency …

It’s not possible to have a territory without a boundary if you have a boundary you are connected to the other side you dont’ have to be an advanced Hegelian to understand that

*******************
(Question and Answer: 5 of 5)
these efforts at separation are entrenching modes of relationship and they are subjugated and horrible, but the question for me is what would it mean to think that relationship of unchosen fraught antagonism, the basis of a different kind of binationalism which would be housed within a single state, possibly federated, possibly understood in many different state, I’m holding out for less wretched forms of the binational, think of the bi-national beyond the binary because Palestine and Israel are not monolithic terms.

Queer

1:47 minute: Queer has been a way of characterizing alliance, ways of working across difference, a mode of alliance that moved beyond simple identity categories and special interest politics, mobilizing for this groups rights and not worryied about somebody else’s.

In the 1990s what was hard for me was to see how people struggled when lover’s died and were not able to get public recogntion for loss. AIDS inability to grieve, now in African continent, not recognized sufficiently. Which populations are grievable and which are not. Whose lives count, what populations do you have to belong to for people to believe that those lives are worth protecting . Queerness is a point of departure for thinking those kinds of alliances and their not always predictable alliances are alliances not between identities but alliances between those who face precarity or who face resistance in certain kinds of ways. Queerness is part of a radical social justice project, if not then its become too narrow identitarian, and bought into a liberal framework where you represent just yourself or your position at the expense of everyone else. Its hard to think about forms of alliance that aren’t just collections of identities, but what Queer allows us to do is to think about overlapping or analogous transposable conditions that allow us unite across geopolitical differences and invigorate social justice.

Queer is an alliance struggling for social justice on multple fronts, its not strictly a gay/lesbian front. Without a radical social justice project, queer has no meaning.

drive bibliography Žižek

Boyle, Kirk. “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.” International Journal of Žižek Studies Vol 2.1 (2008) 1-21.

Whither drive in Žižek’s conception of the Marxian parallax?

What role might drive play in a properly political “intervention”? The missing connection between drive’s inherence to capitalism and the “ultimate parallax of the political economy” in Žižek’s work proves frustrating, but we may broach two tentative conclusions.

The location of drive and desire with regards to capitalism seems to fall on either side of the political economy parallax, i.e. from the perspective of the economic Real, drive describes the self-propelling movement of the metaphysical dance of Capital. Desire, on the other hand, describes the same process of endless circulation but from the perspective of the libidinal economy of surplus-enjoyment and the symbolic order of consumer society.8

Both sides of this parallax are economically and politically necessary: financial speculation ceases to exist if there is no hysterical consumer society; no understanding of the personal lure of commodities is possible without reference to the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction.

The distinction between drive and desire also provides a gauge for evaluating the effectiveness of interventions to break the spell of global capitalism.

Žižek raises the possibility of resistance on the level of desire when he claims that critiques of capitalism from stable ethical positions appear to be the exception in the “carnivalized” world of late capitalism (Žižek 2007: 235). By harkening back to an ethics of moderation, for example, we might curtail the normal functioning of capitalism to self-revolutionize through the incorporation of ever new forms of surplus-enjoyment.

If we opt out of enjoyment (through elective poverty, for example), do we not throw a wrench in the gears of capital’s incessant circulation? Although resistance on the level of desire sounds feasible, it also smacks of a nostalgia for times that are irrecoverable on a large scale. Capitalism also has an uncanny ability to create new markets out of even the most heroic of bohemian efforts. The scope of a stable ethics to combat capital would be parochial at best, and Žižek’s interest lies with something more radically transformative.

The kind of resistance Žižek envisions would be as large in scale as Capital itself because it seeks to intervene on the level of drive.

Žižek frames the question of the possibility of resisting the capitalist drive as follows: “how are we to formulate the resistance to the economic logic of reproduction-through-excess?…how, then, are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is constant self-revolutionizing? This, perhaps, is the question today” (Žižek 2006b: 321, Žižek 2007: 235).

With a question big enough to be the question today comes no easy answers, only more questions. Does such a thing as a Leftist drive exist? What would a form of resistance on the level of drive look like? Where exactly would this form of resistance intervene?

Can drive fight drive?

Lacan, Jacques (1998a) Seminar IX: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Lacan, Jacques (1998b) Seminar XX: Encore. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Lacan, Jacques (2006) Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

Žižek, Slavoj (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj (1993) Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke.
Žižek, Slavoj (1994) The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality. London: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj (2000) The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. New York: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj (2002) “The Interpassive Subject.” The Symptom, 3. Available at: http://www.lacan.com/interpassf.htm. Accessed Jan 29th 2008.
Žižek, Slavoj (2005a) “Concesso non Dato.” Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek. Eds. Geoff Bucher, Jason Glynos, and Matthew Sharpe. Burlington: Ashgate.
Žižek, Slavoj (2005b) “Objet a as Inherent Limit to Capitalism: On Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.” Available at: http://www.lacan.com/zizmultitude.htm. Accessed Jan 28th 2008.
Žižek, Slavoj (2006a) How to Read Lacan. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Žižek, Slavoj (2006b) The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT.Žižek, Slavoj (2007) “With Defenders Like These.” The Truth of Žižek. Eds. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp. London: Continuum.
Žižek, Slavoj and Glyn Daly (2004) Conversations With Žižek. Cambridge: Polity.

capital as real

Boyle, Kirk. “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.” International Journal of Žižek Studies Vol 2.1 (2008) 1-21.

Capital as Real: The Marxian Parallax

The more fundamental and systemic mode of the capitalist drive no longer operates in the symbolic order where individuals are interpellated as subjects of desire.

To be clear about where the mode of drive operates in capitalism, another term needs to be introduced: the Lacanian Real. In Lacanian psychoanalysis the Real is a purely formal concept; it is nothing more or less than the inherent limit of a symbolic order, that which must be repressed so this order can function. Because the Real is “simultaneously the thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle which prevents this direct access,” it can only be experienced in itssymptomatic effects (Žižek 2007: 243).

Žižek identifies two homologous forms of the Real , which are “detectable within the Symbolic only under the guise of its disturbances”: the traumatic core of sexual antagonism and the social antagonism of “class struggle” (Žižek 1994: 30). Both of these conceptions of the Real may be said to comprise the “minimalist” or “negative” anthropology of Lacanian Marxism. It is the Real of sexual antagonism, for instance, which prevents “it” from being “It”: objet a will always thwart the coincidence of the object of desire with the object-cause of desire. Likewise, the Real of social antagonism will always prevent the formation of a fully (self-)transparent utopian society. Reminiscent of Althusser’s claim that ideology is eternal, psychoanalysis holds that a minimal degree of misrecognition, reification, and fetishistic disavowal—“I know very well what I am doing, but I am doing it anyway”—is endemic to all symbolic orders. Although antagonism is eternal, Žižek adamantly disclaims that the sociotranscendental status of the Real denies the existence of History [i.e., Butler’s criticism of Lacan]. The Real does not replace temporality with synchronicity or cyclicality. Rather, historical change derives from the emergence of new symbolic formations to deal with the traumatic core of sexual and social antagonism.

Because we still live within a world-economy structured by the “class struggle” inherent within capitalism, Žižek calls it the Real of our epoch. He writes:

The universality of capitalism resides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a civilization, for a specific cultural-symbolic world, but the name for a truly neutral economico-symbolic machine which operates with Asian values as well as with others… The problem with capitalism is not its secret Eurocentric bias, but the fact that it really is universal, a neutral matrix of social relations—a real in Lacanian terms. (Žižek 2005a: 241) … As Žižek states, “the structure of the universe of commodities and capital in Marx’s Capital is not just of a limited empirical sphere, but a kind of sociotranscendental a priori, the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations” (Žižek 2006b: 56).

Thus, Žižek transcodes the Marxist concepts of “commodity fetishism” and “class struggle” into the Lacanian notion of the Real. Where the older Marxist terms have long since been confused with empirical entities like the “working class” and actual commercial goods, the Lacanian Real has the benefit of emphasizing the purely formal, and therefore universal, status of capitalism and its overdetermination of the totality of social relations.

If we no longer accept a linear model of economic determinism where the economy directly causes sociopolitical events, how are we to understand the ways in which capitalism as Real overdetermines the totality of social relations?

Žižek adopts Althusser’s causal model of overdetermination: if “‘the logic of capital’ is a singular matrix which designates [capitalism’s] Real,” then it operates precisely as the absent cause of the totality-effects that occur within the sociopolitical realm (Žižek 2007: 211).

In the Lacanian Marxist base/superstructure model, as in its Althusserian predecessor, economic events of the Real do not cause Symbolic phenomena directly. Contrary to Althusser’s subject-less base/superstructure model, however, Žižek’s model maintains the subjectivity of the social antagonism of “class struggle” at the heart of the economy by introducing the concept of “parallax.”

The “Marxian parallax” refers to the irreducible gap between Real absent cause and Symbolic totality-effect.

He writes: …the ultimate parallax of the political economy [is] the gap between the reality of everyday material social life (people interacting among themselves and with nature, suffering, consuming, and so on) and the Real of the speculative dance of Capital, its self-propelling movement which seems to be disconnected from ordinary reality….Marx’s point here is not primarily to reduce the second dimension to the first (to demonstrate how the supernatural mad dance of commodities arises out of the antagonisms of “real life”); his point is, rather that we cannot properly grasp the first (the social reality of material production and social interaction) without the second: it is the self-propelling metaphysical dance of Capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life development and catastrophes. (Žižek 2006b: 383)
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Žižek also describes the Marxian parallax of the political economy as follows:

If, for Lacan, there is no sexual relationship, then, for Marxism proper, there is no relationship between economy and politics, no “meta-language” enabling us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint, although—or, rather, because—these two levels are inextricably intertwined.

The “political” class struggle takes place in the midst of the economy…while, at the same time, the domain of the economy serves as the key that enables us to decode political struggles. No wonder the structure of this impossible relationship is that of the Moebius strip: first, we have to progress form the political spectacle to its economic infrastructure; then in the second step, we have to confront the irreducible dimension of the political struggle at the very heart of the economy. (Žižek 2006b: 320)

drive desire objet petit a

Boyle, Kirk. “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.” International Journal of Žižek Studies Vol 2.1 (2008) 1-21.

Žižek’s more recent theorizations of capitalism have turned away from the Lacanian notion of desire to the concept of drive. The previous section discussed the reflexivity of desire, how desire is desire for the object-cause of desire, objet a.

We saw how this desire could not be satisfied in any lasting way, that it was infinite, an infinite metonymy of desire. Drive distinguishes itself from desire in a short-circuit of sorts. Its object is the loss itself of objet a, not the fantasmatic objet a that never yields its promised jouissance, but what Žižek calls the “object-loss of drive.”

He writes, “in the case of objet petit a as the object of drive, the ‘object’ is directly loss itself —

in the shift from desire to drive we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object” (Žižek 2006b: 62). Where desire suffers from the repetitive failure to obtain full jouissance, drive finds triumph in this very failure.

Desire acquiesces to the surplus-enjoyment it receives from partial objects that are metonymies for the impossible Thing; drive finds satisfaction in the loop around an object.

If the hysterical libidinal economy of desire works in cahoots with capitalism to produce and reproduce consumer society, then drive may offer a possible way to break out of this endless chain of metonymic commodities. Žižek writes:

drive is literally a counter-movement to desire, it does not strive towards impossible fullness and, being forced to renounce it, gets stuck onto a partial object as its remainder — drive is quite literally the very “drive” to break the All of continuity in which we are embedded, to introduce a radical imbalance into it, and the difference between drive and desire is precisely that, in desire, this cut, this fixation on a partial object, is as it were “transcendentalized,” transposed into a stand-in for the void of the Thing. (Žižek 2006b: 63)

The above passage posits drive in opposition to desire, which, in turn, is represented as creating a transcendental world of partial objects, all of which sustain the illusion of the “Thing as the filler of its void” (Žižek 2006b: 63). Desire, in fact represents the horizon of Lacan’s early theorizations of psychoanalysis, which remain thoroughly Kantian. In this early stage, Lacan posits a lost jouissance of the inaccessible “maternal” Thing with objet a serving as a leftover or remainder of this primordial enjoyment. The regulative ideal implicit in this formulation requires the subject to renounce the Thing and accept substitutive satisfactions in its stead. Hence, the stoicism often associated with the Freudian field (the point of maturity where we accept the fact that “it” never is “It!”).

The drive disrupts the homeostasis implicit in the position that one must keep a proper distance to the Thing less one gets burned by it. Žižek replaces this “Golden Mean” or “Goldilocks effect”—in Freudian terms, the “pleasure principle”—with a notion of drive which “suspends/disrupts the linear temporal enchainment” (Žižek 2006b: 63). In order to “break the All of continuity in which we are embedded,” the subject of the drive tarries with the negative and becomes caught up in a repeated circuit of jouissance, a self-propelling loop beyond the pleasure principle. Drive exists in both a pre-and post-fantasmatic space, at once prior to the passionate attachments of desire and beyond them.

The realm of the drive is a primordial abyss of dis-attachment in which the subject exists out-of-joint with its environs. Such a description of the drive, however liberating we might imagine it, smacks of a romantic, individualistic form of resistance, a critique that has been cast at Žižek (especially in his examples of the psychoanalytic act).

The subject of the drive sounds awfully like the existential artist-hero who withdraws from society and its fantasmatic lures, confronts the void, and in true Nietzschean fashion fully affirms the eternal recurrence of the same. Žižek, however, is far from proffering the drive as a line of flight from the deadlocks of desire. The opposite, in fact, is the case.

“The lesson of drive,” he writes, “is that we are condemned to jouissance: whatever we do, jouissance will stick to it; we shall never get rid of it; even in our most thorough endeavor to renounce it, it will contaminate the very effort to get rid of it” (Žižek 2000: 293).

What at first glance appears to be a radical act to break out of the linear continuity of the hysterical economy, now becomes a compulsion to repeat, to obtain jouissance by circulating around the goal-object.

Žižek puts an end to all flirtations with the transgressive nature of the drive when he associates it with the machinations of capitalism. After acknowledging that capitalism addresses individuals on a subjective level when it “interpellates them as consumers, as subjects of desire, soliciting in them ever new perverse and excessive desires,” he claims that: Drive inheres to capitalism at a more fundamental, systemic level: drive is that which propels the whole capitalist machinery, it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction. We enter the mode of drive the moment the circulation of money as capital becomes “an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.” (Žižek 2006b: 61)

At the level of drive, capitalism does not address individuals. In a sense, capitalism addresses itself. Drive inheres to capitalism in a quasi-objective manner. “The capitalist drive belongs to no definite individual,” writes Žižek, “rather, it is that those individuals who act as direct ‘agents’ of capital (capitalists themselves, top managers) have to display it” (Žižek 2006a: 61).

These acephalous agents are the ones we see flailing around the stock market floor or rushing through airports juggling their techno-gadget accoutrements.