Author: logocentric

Review of Excessive Subject

In this book Molly Anne Rothenberg makes clear that progressive political theorists need to re-think their understanding of the subject because the current deadlock has resulted in either structuralist dead-ends, or immanentist ‘Foucaultian’ type analyses that don’t account for the nature of agency and resistance, and so can’t with any sort of robustness contribute to an understanding of social change that includes an idea of radical subjectivity. According to Rothenberg, social theory has been deadlocked around these two versions of subjective agency and their respective theories of causality. She suggests that we toss these theories into the wastebin, and look at an newly emerging way of thinking the ‘social field’ reflected in the recent work of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek and Alenka Zupancic. I think she benefits most from the theory of Badiou, but is definitely influenced by the latter two as well. Critical of Zizek’s notion of the Act, she nonetheless draws much theoretical weight from his notion of subjective destitution, which Rothenberg, much to her credit, takes to new heights in this book. It is a difficult concept, but one can see Rothenberg struggling to articulate a new approach to thinking subjectivity and its articulation to the social field through an ‘excess’ and a ‘relation of non-relation’. Her final chapter rewards the reader’s discipline (the book overall is a challenging yet clear and insightful read) and patience. Taking up an alternative reading of Melville’s Bartleby, R. allows the reader to get a further handle on her theory of the ‘excessive subject’. Additionally the reading of Felix Guattari’s early work shows the extent to which R. does not shy away from seeking to show how a relation to ‘excess’ via a Möbius subjectivity allows us to begin to think a radical newness and an ethicality that is truly radical and original. Buy this book.

Note: Adam Kotsko in the latest installment of the Journal of Zizek Studies, helpfully points out that Zizek reads Agota Kristof’s novel The Notebook, and claims the twin boy characters as new vehicles of a radical ethical subjectivity. One certainly wonders what Rothenberg would make of this, that is, whether she would see this as a more positive elaboration by Zizek of his important notion of the de-constituted subject, hence shadowing her idea of the Möbius subject? Reading Kotsko’s article together with Rothenberg’s book, gives me the impression that there is a subtle groundswell for a different articulation of the subject that gets us beyond many of the deadlocks that have stymied creative and radical theory for so long now.

retroversive act

[For] Žižek … an act becomes a properly political Act when it leads to its own politicization/legitimation after the fact. Explaining that the “Act occurs in an emergency when one has to take the risk and act without any legitimization, ” Žižek adheres to his sense that strategizing for success or making claims about being able to foresee and bring about a desired future — in short, the whole apparatus of political fulfillment — are illusory routes to political practice.  It is a fantasy to imagine that a procedure or political form could guarantee a promised result — or, perhaps more importantly, guarantee that no unforeseen, horrible consequences will occur.  Such people want “an Act without an Act” (Rothenberg citing Welcome to Desert 153).  Žižek is decisive on this point: “there is no guarantee against the possibility of excess — the risk has to be assumed, it is part of the very field of the political” (WDR 153-154 in Rothenberg 166).  Not even democracy can furnish such a guarantee. Since we cannot know in advance what will happen, our only criterion for the Act must come after the fact, in a retroversive movement of politicization. (166)  “we have to take a risk, a step into the open with no big Other to return our message to us,” (169).

Rothenberg replies:

every single act that anyone might undertake whether the act is large or small and whether it is enacted by someone authoritative (for example, de Gaulle) or not (for example, Rosa Parks), carries with it a significative excess — that is, a potential for appropriation, misunderstanding, and causing unforeseen consequences.  We can recall here that Butler makes the error of proposing a distinction among types of actions on the basis of some imagined ability to assume a risk (for example, taking a risk in order to keep signification open). The risk is part and parcel of all signification, not just “the political field itself.”  Does Žižek think that there is some quality that makes an Act inherently political or not? (168)

Žižek’s preferred example of an Act is not Park’s nonviolent refusal to take a seat at the back of the bus, an act which was prepared for in advance by political organizing and a discourse of legitimation, and which resulted in further politicization and ultimately changes in laws and social insitutions. Instead he nominates the heroic action of the “famous Jewish ballerina” who shot the Nazi guards for whom she was forced to dance, effectively committing suicide in the process. The difference between these two incidents is striking: a nonviolent act that achieves politicization in Parks’ case versus a violent one that does not. Nonetheless, Žižek specifically designates the example of the ballerina as “the way of the act” (Rothenberg 172, citing Žižek in Revolution at the Gates 249).

Žižek on form formalism distinction

🙂 Rothenberg on Žižek’s insistence that the truth is a thoroughly partisan process.  Yet Žižek refuses relativism, so how can he argue truth is partisan but not relativistic.  Rothenberg cites a lengthy passage from Žižek [which I’ve broken up below for purposes of emphasis]:

Form is not the neutral frame of particular contents, but the very principle of concretion, that is, the “strange attractor” which distorts, biases, confers a specific colour on every element of the totality … [W]e should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-multiculturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of “narratives” — not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can coexist peacefully — in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and opportunity to tell their story … The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the impossibility of this liberal notion of Form:

Form has nothing to do with “formalism”, with the idea of a neutral Form independent of its contingent, particular content; it stands, rather, for the traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism which “colours” the entire field in question. In this precise sense, class struggle is the Form of the Social: every social phenomenon is overdetermined by it, so that it is not possible to remain neutral towards it.

(Rothenberg 161, citing guess who from Revolution at the Gates, 190, original emphasis)

Rothenberg on universality

Universality based on the excess generated by the formal negation does not depend upon finding a common ontic property, that is a property which is just one more difference within the situation.   All such properties can be used to name differences that are mobilized in the game of hegemony, empty spaces, and master-signifiers, as we have see in the discussion of Laclau’s political thought.  Only the minimal self–difference (described as the radical antagonism cutting across every element) escapes this play of signifiers, existing in an extimate relation to the situation, rather than in its encyclopedia.[I have no idea what she means ‘encyclopedia’ here, but R. does provide more insight on 168]  This self-difference or (self-)antagonism subsists (ex-sists, Lacan would say, to emphasize its extimacy) as the hidden dimension. Accordingly, Žižek goes on to argue for Badiou as the exemplar of the  philosopher of extimate causality, while admonishing Laclau … for ultimately recasting antagonism as agonism, that is, as differences among self-same elements in the social field (Rothenberg 164, referring to Žižek Iraq Broken Kettle 90).

rothenberg universal particular

Rothenberg quoting Žižek from Revolution at the Gates: “universal truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive, but condition each other: the universal truth of a concrete situation can be articulated only from a thoroughly partisan position; truth is, by definition, one-sided” (177).  Rothenberg then continues “[M]eanings are not at the disposal of the speaker but change with the auditor. If there were such a thing as a universal unaffected by the particular positions from which it is engaged then meanings would be stablized once and for all, and the fulfillment of political promises would be an easy task” (Rothenberg Excessive 161).

Lacan: at What Point is He Hegelian?

Žižek says this:

To put it simply, each of these relations to the Hegelian system is always that of a “I know well, but all the same.” One knows well that Hegel affirms the fundamentally antagonistic character of actions, the decentring of the subject, etc., but all the same … this division is eventually overcome in the self-mediation of the absolute Idea that ends up suturing all wounds. The position of Absolute Knowledge, the final reconciliation, plays here the role of the Hegelian Thing: a monster both frightening and ridiculous, from which it is best to keep some distance, something that is at the same time impossible (Absolute Knowledge is of course unachievable, an unrealizable Ideal) and forbidden (Absolute Knowledge must be avoided, for it threatens to mortify all the richness of life through the self-movement of the concept). In other words, any attempt to define oneself within Hegel’s sphere of influence requires a point of blocked identification – the Thing must always be sacrificed…

For us, this figure of Hegel as ‘panlogicist’, who devours and mortifies the living substance of the particular, is the Real of his critic’s, ‘Real’ in the Lacanian sense: the construction of a point which effectively does not exist (a monster with no relation to Hegel himself), but which, nonetheless, must be presupposed in order to justify our negative reference to the other, that is to say, our effort at distantiation. Where does the horror felt by post-Hegelians before the monster of Absolute Knowledge come from? What does this fantasmatic construction conceal by means of its fascinating presence? The answer: a hole, a void. The best way to distinguish this hole is by reading Hegel with Lacan, that is to say, by reading Hegel in terms of the Lacanian problematic of the lack in the Other, the traumatic void against which the process of signification articulates itself. From this perspective, Absolute Knowledge appears to be the Hegelian name for that which Lacan outlined in his description of the passe, the final moment of the analytic process, the experience of lack in the Other. If, according to Lacan’s celebrated formula, Sade offers us the truth of Kant, then Lacan himself allows us to approach the elementary matrix that summarizes the entire movement of the Hegelian dialectic: Kant with Sade, Hegel with Lacan. What is implied, then, by this relationship between Hegel and Lacan?

Get the rest of this fascinating article here
This might be a slightly older version, but I don’t know.

Žižek Hegel

Žižek, Slavoj. “Article on Hegel and Interview” The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. eds. Bryant, Levi., and Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. Melbourne: Re.press, 2011. 202-223. 406-415.

It is here that, in order to specify the meaning of materialism, one should apply Lacan’s formulas of sexuation: there is a fundamental difference between the assertion

‘everything is matter’

(which relies on its constitutive exception—in the case of Lenin who, in his Materialism and Empiriocriticism, falls into this trap, the very position of enunciation of the subject whose mind ‘reflects’ matter)

and the assertion ‘there is nothing which is not matter’

(which, with its other side, ‘not-All is matter’, opens up the space for the account of immaterial phenomena).

What this means is that a truly radical materialism is by definition non-reductionist: far from claiming that ‘everything is matter’, it confers upon the ‘immaterial’ phenomena a specific positive non-being.

Is it Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today

For this consciousness was not in peril and fear for this element or that, nor for this or that moment of time, it was afraid for its entire being; it felt the fear of death, the sovereign master. It has been in that experience melted to its inmost soul, has trembled throughout its every fibre, and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it. This complete perturbation of its entire substance, this absolute dissolution of all its stability into fluent continuity, is, however, the simple, ultimate nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure self-relating existence, which consequently is involved in this type of consciousness. Phen of Spirit

What, then, does the Servant get in exchange for renouncing all the wealth of his particular Self? Nothing—in overcoming his particular terrestrial Self, the Servant does not reach a higher level of a spiritual Self; all he has to do is to shift his position and recognize in (what appears to him as) the overwhelming power of destruction which threatens to obliterate his particular identity the absolute negativity which forms the very core of his own Self. In short,

the subject has to fully identify with the force that threatens to wipe him out: what he feared in fearing death was the negative power of his own Self.

There is thus no reversal of negativity into positive greatness — the only ‘greatness’ there is is this negativity itself. Or, with regard to suffering: Hegel’s point is not that the suffering brought about by alienating labour of renunciation is an intermediary moment to pass, so that we should just endure it and patiently wait for the reward at the end of the tunnel—there is no prize or profit to be gained at the end for our patient submission, suffering and renunciation are their own reward,

all that is to be done is to change our subjective position, to renounce our desperate clinging to our finite Self with its ‘pathological’ desires, to purify our Self to universality.

This is also how Hegel explains the overcoming of tyranny in the history of states: ‘One says that tyranny is overturned by the people because it is undignified, shameful, etc. In reality, it disappears simply because it is superfluous’.  It becomes superfluous when people no longer need the external force of the tyrant to make them renounce their particular interests, but when they become ‘universal citizens’ by directly identifying the core of their being with this universality — in short, people no longer need the external master when they are educated into doing the job of discipline and subordination themselves. …

Let us take social struggle at its most violent: war. What interests Hegel is not struggle as such, but the way the ‘truth’ of the engaged positions emerges through it, i.e., how the warring parties are ‘reconciled’ through their mutual destruction. The true (spiritual) meaning of war is not honour, victory, defence, etc., but the emergence of absolute negativity (death) as the absolute Master which reminds us of the false stability of our organized finite lives.

War serves to elevate individuals to their ‘truth’ by making them obliterate their particular self-interests and identify with the State’s universality. The true enemy is not the enemy we are fighting but our own finitude

— recall Hegel’s acerbic remark on how it is easy to preach the vanity of our finite terrestrial existence, but much more difficult to accept this lesson when it is enforced by a wild enemy soldier who breaks into our home and starts to cut members of our family with a sabre ….

In philosophical terms, Hegel’s point is here the primacy of ‘self-contradiction’ over external obstacle (or enemy).

We are not finite and self-inconsistent because our activity is always thwarted by external obstacles; we are thwarted by external obstacles because we are finite and inconsistent.

In other words, what the subject engaged in a struggle perceives as the enemy, the external obstacle he has to overcome, is the materialization of the subject’s immanent inconsistency: the fighting subject needs the figure of the enemy to sustain the illusion of his own consistency, his very identity hinges on his opposing the enemy, so that his (eventual) victory over the enemy is his own defeat, disintegration.

As Hegel likes to put it, fighting the external enemy, one (unknowingly) fights one’s own essence.

So, far from celebrating engaged fighting, Hegel’s point is rather that every struggling position, every taking-sides, has to rely on a necessary illusion (the illusion that, once the enemy is annihilated, I will achieve the full realization of my being).

This brings us to what would have been a properly Hegelian notion of ideology: the misapprehension of the condition of possibility (of what is an inherent constituent of your position) as the condition of impossibility (as an obstacle which prevents your full realization) — the ideological subject is unable to grasp how his entire identity hinges on what he perceives as the disturbing obstacle. This notion of ideology is not just an abstract mental exercise: it fits perfectly the Fascist anti-Semitism as the most elementary form of ideology, one is even tempted to say: ideology as such, kat’ exochen. The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew, this foreign intruder who disturbs and corrupts the harmony of the social order, is ultimately a fetishist objectivization, a standin, for the ‘inconsistency’ of the social order, for the immanent antagonism (‘class struggle’) which generates the dynamic of the social system’s instability (208).

We can measure here clearly the distance that separates Hegel from Nietzsche: the innocence of exuberant heroism that Nietzsche wants to resuscitate, the passion of risk, of fully engaging in a struggle, of victory or defeat, they are all gone—the ‘truth’ of the struggle only emerges in and through defeat.

This is why the standard Marxist denunciation of the falsity of the Hegelian reconciliation (already made by Schelling) misses the point. According to this critique, the Hegelian reconciliation is false, it occurs only in the Idea, while real antagonisms persist — in the ‘concrete’ experience of the ‘real life’ of individuals who cling to their particular identity, state power remains an external compulsion.

Therein resides the crux of the young Marx’s critique of Hegel’s political thought: Hegel presents the modern constitutional monarchy as a rational State in which antagonisms are reconciled, as an organic Whole in which every constituent (can) find(s) its proper place, but he thereby obfuscates the class antagonism which continues in modern societies, generating the working class as the ‘non-reason of the existing Reason’, as the part of modern society which has no proper part in it, as its ‘part of no-part’ (Rancière). …

In other words, instead of rejecting the Hegelian false reconciliation, one should reject as illusory the very notion of dialectical reconciliation, i.e., one should renounce the demand for a ‘true’ reconciliation. Hegel was fully aware that reconciliation does not alleviate real suffering and antagonisms—his formulas of reconciliation from the foreword to his Philosophy of Right is that one should ‘recognize the Rose in the Cross of the present’, or, to put it in Marx’s terms, in reconciliation, one does not change external reality to fit some Idea, one recognizes this Idea as the inner ‘truth’ of this miserable reality itself. The Marxist reproach that, instead of transforming reality, Hegel only proposes its new interpretation, thus in a way misses the point—it knocks on an open door, since, for Hegel, in order to pass from alienation to reconciliation, one does not have to change reality, but the way we perceive it and relate to it.

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 4

Sinthome

an identification with the symptom, a recognition in the real of our symptom of the only support of our being (Stav citing Žižek 1989) 133

Wo es war soll Ich werden: the subject must identify with the place where the syumptom already was: ‘In its pathological particularity [it] … must recognise the element which gives consistency to [its] being’ (Žižek 1989) 133

By saying ‘We are all Jews’, ‘We all live in Chernobyl!’ or ‘We are all boat people!’ — … we elevate the symptom, the excluded truth of the social field (which has been stigmatised as an alien particularity) to the place of the universal — to the point of our common identification which was up to now, sustained by its exclusion or elimination. The same happens when we say ‘We are all gypsies!’ — … What is promoted here is an attitude consistent with identifying with the symptom of the social and traversing social fantasy.

It is only by accepting such an impossible representation, by  making this declaration of impossibility, that it is possible to ‘represent’ the impossible or rather to identify with the impossibility of its representation. Identification with the symptom is thus related to the traversing of the fantasy. Going through fantasy entails the realisation of the lack or inconsistency in the Other which is masked by fantasy, the separation between objet petit a and the Other, a separation which is not only ethically sound but also ‘liberating’ for our political imagination.  134

What is clearly at stake here is the possibility of enacting symbolic gestures that institutionalise social lack, that is to say incorporate the ethical recognition of the impossibility of social closure.

Critique of Judith Butler, Will Connolly, Simon Critchley

Critchley’s Levinaisan ethics of the Other [and probably Butler’ s too]. ‘The community remains an open community in so far as it is based on the recognition of difference, of the difference of the Other’ (citing Critchley 1992).

The problem with such an analysis is that it presupposes the Other as a unifed totality or, even if this is not always the case, it seems to be offering a positive point of identification remaining thus within the limits of traditional ethical strategies or, in any case, not undermining them in a radical way.  What has to be highlighted is that it is precisely this relation — the identification with the Other — that attempts to bring closure to the social.

In order to have a non-totalisable relation to the Other we must relate — identify — with the lack in the Other and not with the Other per se. This is the radical innovation of Lacanian ethics.  And this is what democracy needs today. 139

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 3

It is the lack created by dislocation that causes the desire for a new discursive articulation. It is this lack created by a dislocation of the social which forms the kernel of the political as an antagonistic articulation of different discourses that attempt to symbolise its traumatic nature, to suture the lack it creates. In that sense the political stands at the root of politics, dislocation at the root of the articulation of a new socio-political order, an encounter with the real moment of the political at the root of our symbolisation of political reality. 74

Trapped as we are within the world of social meaning, all our representations of reality are doomed to fail due to their symbolic character. Every attempt to construct what is impossible to be constructed fails due to our entrapment within the world of construction.  The only moment in which we come face to face with the irreducible real beyond representation is when our constructions are dislocated. It is only when Nature, our construction of external reality, meets a stumbling block, something which cannot be symbolically integrated, that we come close to the real of nature, nature, constructed Nature, is nothing but “a mode of concealment, a cloak of abstractions which obscures that discomforting wildness that defies our paranoid urge to delineate the boundaries of Being” (Stav quoting Evnden 1992) 86

Recognising the constitutivity of the real does not entail that we stop symbolising; it means that we start trying to incorporate this recognition within the symbolic itself, in fact it means that since the symbolic entails lack as such, we abstain from covering it over with fantasmatic constructs — or, if one accepts that we are always trapped within the field of fantasy, that we never stop traversing it. The guiding principle in this kind of approach is to move beyond fantasy towards a self-critical symbolic gesture recognising the contingent and transient character of every symbolic constuct. 89

Fantasy negates the real by promising to ‘realise’ it, by promising to close the gap between the real and reality, by repressing the discursive nature of reality’s production.  Yet any promise of absolute positivity — the construction of an imaginarised false real — is founded on a violent/negative origin; it is sustained by the exclusion of a real — a non-domesticated real — which always returns to its place. Sustaining a promise of full positivity leads to a proliferation of negativity. As we have already pointed out, the fantasy of a utopian harmonious social order can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. 108

The fantasmatic ideal of harmony is still with us

Can we have passion in politics without holocausts?  Furthermore, is it possible to have a politics of hope, a politics of change without utopia?  … Democratisation is certainly a political project of hope.  But democratic discourse is not (or should not be) based on the vision of a utopian harmonious society.  It is based on the recognition of the impossibility and the catastrophic consequence of such a dream.

Radical Democracy

What differentiates democracy from other political forms of society is the legitimisation of conflict and the refusal to eliminate it through the establishment of an authoritarian harmonious order.  Within this framework the antagonistic diversity between different conceptions of the good is not seen as something negative that should be eliminated, but as something to be “valued and celebrated.  … To believe that a final resolution of conflict is eventually possible, even when it is envisaged as asymptotic approaching to the regulative idea of a free unconstrained communication as in Habermas, is to put the pluralist democratic project at risk.” (Stav quoting Mouffe 1996)  111

Democratic politics — and politics in general — can never eliminate conflict and dislocation, antagonism and division.  the aim is rather to establish unity within an environment of conflict and diversity; to create a thoroughly doubtful society, beset by productive self-doubt, a society that traverses its utopian mirror image by identifying with its supposed enemy (Stav quotes Beck 1997) … accepting the anti-utopian dimension of antagonism and dislocation, the constitutivity of the politcal qua encounter with the real. 112

Lacanian political theory aims at bring to the fore, again and again, the lack in the Other, the same lack that utopian fantasy attempts to mask, [therefore] it would be self-defeating, if not absurd, to engage itself in utopian or quasi-utopian fantasy construction. 116

Democracy is not based on or guided by a certain positive, foundational, normative principle.  On the contrary, democracy is based on the recognition of the fact that no such principle can claim to be truly universal, on the fact that no symbolic social construct can ever claim to master the impossible real. Democracy entails the acceptance of antagonism, in other words, the recognition of the fact that the social will always be structured around a real impossibility which cannot be sutured. 120

Democracy provides a concrete example of what we would call a post-fantasmatic or less-fantasmatic politics. 120

Democracy entails the acceptance of antagonism, in other words, the recognition of the fact that the social will always be structured around a real impossibility which cannot be sutured.

Thus the project of radical democracy, is based not on the futile fantasmatic suture of the lack in the Other but on the recognition of its own irreducibility.  … But this is not possible as long as the ethics of harmony are still hegemonic.  What we need is a new ethical framework. This cannot be an ethics of harmony aspiring to realise a fantasy construction.

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 2

difference between Lacan and the postmodernists: Although Lacan accepts the priority of the signifier in the formation of meaning he also focuses on the ways this signifier mythologically attempts to embody the real, the ways in which it constructs the imaginary illusion of anchoring our symbolic being to a pre-symbolic level of immediate fulfilment of need.  In other words, prioritising the signifier is coupled with exploring the complex ways in which this signifier produces the effect of the signified.  The point de capiton is one of these ways. 60

If the role of the point de capiton is necessary (or universal) in structural terms, its particular content (the signified produced by its signifying predominance) is not a matter of mirroring a pre-existing objective reality but of hegemonic struggle. 61

if the level of construction is engulfing the totality of the real, what stimulates the production of new social constructions?  What stimulates the desire to articulate new constructions of reality?

Dislocation can be conceived as a confrontation with the real.

The real is what destroys, what dislocates this fantasmatic reality, what shows that this reality is lacking.

The real and the not-all

If reality constitutes the symbolically constructed and fantasmatically supported part of objectivity, the real also belongs to the objective level, it is what exceeds the domesticated portion of the objective. It is exactly what accounts for the failure of all symbolic representations of objective reality … the real is not an ultimate referent of external reality but the limit which hinders the neutral representation of external (symbolic) reality … it is exactly what keeps identification from resulting in full identity. … it is exactly what reveals all symbolic truth to be ‘NOT-ALL’, it can only be thought as the internal limit of the symbolic order. 68

… in opposition to standard versions of constructionism Lacanian theory of symbolic meaning and fantasmatic coherence can only make sense in its relation to the register of a real which is radically external to the level of construction.  This Lacanian real-ism is, however, alien to all other standard versions of epistemological realism in the sense that this real is not the ultimate referent of signification, it is not something representable but exactly the opposite, the impossible which dislocates reality from within. The real does not exist in the sense of being adequately represented in reality; its effects however are disrupting and changing reality, its consequences are felt within the field of representation. 69

The real dislocates social objectivity 70

WE MUST PRECIPITATE A CRISIS, AN EVENT, THAT CONFRONTS THE LIMITATIONS OF OUR MEANING STRUCTURES

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 1

(1-12)  How can we talk about Lacan and not fall prey to psychologistic analyses that reduce social to individual?  Freud wrote a good deal using that combined a psychoanalytic framework with a social analysis Civilization and Its Discontents, Jokes etc. and Lacan even more so, develops a socio-political conception of subjectivity that is “not reduced to individuality, a subjectivity opening a new road to understanding of the ‘objective’. 4

The million dollar question is what the hell does Stavrakakis mean here?  He quotes Laclau here to buttress the point about the impossibility of the construction of any identity.

Mirror Stage

Captivated by its image in the mirror. “But this captivation, the anticipation of synthesis, can never eliminate the real uncoordination of the body of the infant, it can never erase the external and alienating character of its own foundation. This ambiguity is never resolved” (18).

🙂 Stavrakakis here argues that the mirror image of the child is alienating, even though it is this image the infant recognizes, reaches out to as a basis of her identity, but it nevertheless remains fundamentally alienating, meaning, that there exists a gap, the infant is still uncoordinated yet his image gives him the appearance of a totality, of a wholeness that is complete and unified. Remember the imaginary is already caught up within the symbolic.  “If the ego emerges in the imaginary the subject emerges in the symbolic (19).

If the imaginary, the field of specular images, of spatial unities and totalised representations, is always built on an illusion which is ultimately alienating for the child, his or her only recourse is to turn to the symbolic level, seeking in language a means to acquire a stable identity.  By submitting to the laws of language, the child becomes a subject in language, it inhabits language, and hopes to gain an adequate representation through the world of words … ‘the subject is the subject of the signifier — determined by it” (Citing Lacan) (20).

Lack

But instead of transgressing alienation in the direction of acquiring a solid identity, the subject of the signifier, the subject constituted on the basis of the acceptance of the laws of language, is uncovered as the subject of lack par excellence. (20)

This lack can only be thought as a trace of the ineliminable ACT OF POWER at the root of the formation of subjectivity, as the trace of an ex nihilo decision entailing the loss of certain possibilities or psychic states (the imaginary relation with the mother, for example) and the formation of new ones (20). …

Already this is indicative of the political relevance of the Lacanian category of the lacking subject. This lack can only be thought as a trace of the ineliminable act of power at the root of the formation of subjectivity, as the trace of an ex nihilo decision entailing the loss of certain possibilities or psychic states (the imaginary relation with the mother, for example) and the formation of new ones.

The subject can only exist on the condition that it accepts the laws of the symbolic.

It becomes an effect of the signifier. In that sense it is a certain subordination, an exercise of POWER, that constitutes the condition of possibility for the constitution of subjectivity.

Judith Butler is right when, in her recent book The Psychic Life of Power, she argues that there is no formation of subjectivity without subordination, the passionate attachment to those by whom she or he (the subject in question) is subordinated (Butler, 1997:7).

[However Butler] remains within the limits of a somewhat traditional conceptualisation of power when she is personalising her account (those to whom we are subordinated are presumably our parents, especially during our early formative years).

In Lacan, it is the signifier that is revealed as the locus of this power forming the subject: ‘‘power is coterminous with the logic of the signifier’’ (Dyrberg, 1997:130).

This POWER of the signifier cannot be reduced to the physical presence or the behaviour of the biological parents.  It is the NAME-OF-THE-FATHER, the symbolic and not the real father, who is the agent of this POWER, the agent of symbolic Law (20).

Signifier and Signified

Meaning is produced by signifiers; it springs from the signifier to the signified and not vice versa … 25

What happens then to the signified in the Lacanian schema? Lacan understands the signified as an effect of transference. If we speak about the signified it is only because we like to believe in its existence.

[T]he signified disappears because it is no longer associated with the concept, as in Saussure, but is conceived as belonging to the order of the real; that’s why the bar dividing signifier and signified, … is understood as a barrier resisting signification, as a limit marking the intersection of the symbolic with the real (citing Boothby 1991). 26

Loss of the Signified

In Lacan, … the signified disappears as such, that is to say as the epicentre of signification, exactly because in its real dimension it is situated beyond the level of the symbolic.

What is retained is the locus of the signified which is now designated by a constitutive lack. What is also retained is the promise or the aspiration of attaining the lost/impossible signified, to fill in the vacuum in the locus of the absent signified.

Signification is articulated around the illusion of attaining the signified; but this illusion itself is a result of the signifying play. The signified, as we have pointed out, is an effect created by the signifier in the process of signification. 26-27

… if there is a signified it can only be a signifier to which we attribute a transferential signified function.

The signified, what is supposed to be, through its links to external reality, the source of signification, indeed belongs to the real. But this is a real that resists symbolisation — this is the definition of the real in Lacan; the real is what cannot be symbolised, the impossible.  Surely, if this real is always absent from the level of signification it cannot be in itself and by itself the source of this same signification. Its absence however, the constitutive lack of the signified as real can. This lack constitutes something absolutely crucial for signification.

This absence has to be compensated if signification is to acquire any coherence. It is the absence of the signified in its real dimension which causes the emergence of the transference of the signified. What emerges is the signified in its imaginary dimension.

There is, however, one more dimension to this signifying play.  This transference of the signfiied, the emergence of the imaginary signified can only be the result of the play between signifiers. This is how the third dimension, the dimension of the symbolic, determines signification. It is the predominance of the signifier that produces the imaginary signified in order to cover over the absence of the real signified or rather of the signified as real. 27

Here we need to introduce lack.

[I]rreducible lack is inscribed within the symbolic structure, a lack due to the priority of the signifier and the nature of the symbolic order; the subject becomes identical to this lack … by being born with the signifier, the subject is born divided. 28

The fact that we speak itself divides the subject: the gap between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the statement can never be bridged.

From Identity to Identification

The fullness of identity that the subject is seeking is impossible both in the imaginary and in the symbolic level.  The subject is doomed to symbolise in order to constitute her- or himself as such, but this symbolisation cannot capture the totality and singularity of the real body, the close-circuit of the drives.

Symbolisation, that is to say the pursuit of identity itself, introduces lack and makes identity ultimately impossible. For even the idea of identity to become possible its ultimate impossibility has to be instituted. Identity is possible only as a failed identity; it remains desireable exactly because it is essentially impossible. It is this constitutive impossibility that, by making full identity impossible, makes identification possible, if not necessary. Thus, it is rather misleading to speak of identities within a Lacanian framework. 29

What we have is only attempts to construct a stable identity, either on the imaginary or the symbolic level, through the image or the signifier. The subject of lack emerges due to the failure of all these attempts. What we have then, if we want to be precise and accurate, is not identities but identifications, a series of failed identifications or rather a play between identification and its failure, a deeply political play. 29

The concept of identification becomes crucial then for any understanding of the Lacanian conception of subjectivity, … The ontic horizon of identification is that of ultimate failure; its ontological horizon that of impossibility.  Yet this is not, strictly speaking, a failure of identification, but a failure of identity, that is to say a failure to achieve identity through identification.

It is, however, this same impossibility to achieve identity (substance) that that makes identification (process) constitutive. This is not only true for the life of the child but for the life of the adult as well, something which reveals the relevance of the concept of identification for social and political analysis.

Since the objects of identification in adult life include political ideologies and other socially constructed objects, the process of identification is revealed as constitutive of socio-political life. It is not identity which is constitutive but identification as such; instead of identity politics we should speak of identification politics.

Name-of-the-Father introduces a certain lack, the Name-of-the-Father is a signifier that disrupts the imaginary relation between mother and child by erecting the prohibition of incest, the Paternal Function isntitutes a new order, an order structurally different from the natural order, an order instituting human society, a certain community of meaning (32).

… in order to gain the signifer we have to sacrifice the signified

Symbolic identification is an identification structured around the acceptance of this constitutive lack.

But the objective sphere is also lacking, how?

40 In a section entitled The objective is also lacking. Stav insists that even though Lacan made innovative theoretical strides on subjective side, the importance of Lacan for political theory comes through with his work on the ‘objective’ side.  Roughly the social.

These two levels are not, of course identical but in any case they are not antithetical; there is something linking the individual to the collective, … it is the subject, symbolic lack itself, which splits the essentialist conceptions of individuality; it is the same subject as lack that introduces division into human collectivity. 40
How does the subject ‘introduce division into human collectivity”?

Laclau is quoted by Stav, “‘Objectivism’ and ‘subjectivism’ are symmetrical expressions of the desire for a fullness that is ultimately impossible.” HSS 13

Lack in the Other

It is the Lacanian subject of the signifier, the lacking subject, that provides the first link between psychoanalysis, society and politics, and this precisely because it highlights its dependence on the socio-symbolic order: …

By locating, at the place previously assigned to an essence of the individual psyche, a constitutive lack, Lacanian theory avoids the essentialist reductionism of the social to the individual level and opens the way to the confluence of psychoanalysis and socio-political analysis, since this lack can only be filled by socio-political objects of identification. 37

If I need to identify with something it is not only because I don’t have a full identity in the first place, but also because all my attempts to acquire it by identifying with a supposedly full Other are failing.

Identification only becomes thinkable as a result of the lack within the structure, the structure of the social Other.  The objective as a closed totality is a semblance; the objective Other is lacking. 41

This then takes Stav into a discussion of the nature of this lack, and hence the introduction of jouissance and desire. Lack is a lack of jouissance, “lack of a pre-symbolic real enjoyment which is always posited as something lost, as a lost fullness, the part of ourselves that is sacrificed/castrated when we enter the symbolic system of language and social relations” 42

As soon as we enter the symbolic, the pre-symbolic – that which is impossible to integrate in the symbolic – is posited as an external prohibited object. “The universality of language cannot capture the singular real of the pre-symbolic mythical subject. The most intimate part of our being is experienced as something lost.” 42

The emergence of desire cannot be conceived independently of the family drama of the subject. The Name-of-the-Father demands the sacrifice of jouissance. … This loss … the prohibition of jouissance, is exactly what permits the emergence of desire, a desire that is structured around the unending quest for the lost/impossible jouissance. The paradox here is that what is prohibited is by definition impossible. 42

The trick of the Law is that it creates desire as a result of the lack imposed by the prohibition of incest. … it is the prohibition itself, the performative institution of symbolic Law, that makes possible the desire to ‘recapture’ this impossible jouissance. 43

This is the nodal point of the Oedipus complex … The Law makes us believe that what is impossible really exists and it is possible for us to encounter it again …  What is revealed here is a dialectic between desire and the Law.  The prohibition of an impossible jouissance creates the desire for its attainment …

It means that it is lack that introduces the idea of fullness and not vice-versa. It means that it is an act of power, an act of exclusion, that retroactively produces the fullness we attribute to what was excluded, to that unknown impossibility. 43

“It is … lack that introduces the idea of fullness and not vice-versa” 43

The individual’s entry into symbolic means a loss of jouissance (pre-symbolic real).  Is thus always seeking identification, and thus this is what is behind the emergence of the subject and yet “if full identity is proven ultimately impossible, what makes us identify again and again? … What stimulates our desire for new identification acts? ” 45

It is this repetition of failure that sustains desire as a promise to attain the mythical jouissance; if the realisation, the full satisfaction of desire is impossible, then the promise of this realisation becomes necessary; without it no desire can be sustained.  But what is the exact nature of this promise? … the name for this promise is fantasy. 45

Fantasy veils the lack in the Other

Fantasy is a scenario that veils the lack in the Other effected by castration. If the human condition is marked by a quest for a lost/impossible enjoyment, fantasy offers the promise of an encounter with this precious jouissance, an encounter that is fantasised as covering over the lack in the Other and, consequently, as filling the lack in the subject. 46

… fantasy emerges as a support exactly in the place where the lack in the Other becomes evident; it functions as a support for the lacking Other of the symbolic.  … In short, it attempts to take the place of the lacking Other of the Other, of the missing signification that would, this is our mythology, represent our sacrificed enjoyment.  It is because reality is articulated at the symbolic level and the symbolic is lacking, that reality can only acquire a certain coherence and become desirable as an object of identification, by resorting to fantasy; the illusory nature of fantasy functions as a support for the desire to identify. 46

What has to be stressed … is that the domain of fantasy does not belong to the individual level; fantasy is a construction that attempts, first of all, to cover over the lack in the Other. As such it belongs initially to the social world; it is located on the objective side, the side of the Other, the lacking Other. 51

Fantasy sustains our sense of reality.  Our social construction of reality acquires its ontological consistency due to its dependence on a certain fantasy frame. When this frame disintegrates, the illusion – the promise – of capturing the real that sustains reality, the illusion that closes the gap between the real and our symbolisations of it, between signifier and signified, is dislocated 51-52

How can we preserve within our symbolisations a space for the recognition of the impossibility of their closure? 93

The Lacanian system is perhaps the closest we can get to a discourse opening itself up to what exceeds its limits. 93

The elimination of lack through a definite symbolisation of the real is impossible. Yet this is the condition of possibility of our freedom because it means that no order, no matter how repressive it might be, can acquire a stable character … 95