Category: desire

verhaeghe

Psychoanalysis in times of Science An Interview With Paul Verhaeghe, 2011

When you are working analytically, you have the so-called preliminary conversations. That means that you postpone the moment when you have someone lying on the sofa, on the couch. You have to have an indication of when to begin, a point where you can say: now is the time that I can put someone on the couch. With a number of people this point was never reached because the problem for which they came was of such a nature that putting them on the couch would have had a contra-therapeutic or contra-analytic effect. Then I ask myself why this is the case. What problem am I dealing with here? Which diagnosis, with all the nuances of the word diagnosis, which diagnostic structure is facing me? The first answer that I could defend, that I could do something with and which I still defend, was an old Freudian category, Aktualpathologie. Here I found a description in part of a number of symptoms present among these people, primarily panic attacks and somatisation, in combination with an inadequate potential to symbolise, to work through something, to put something into words. This entailed that our most important instrument, namely free association, was disabled. You then have to deal with, as it were, meaningless symptoms, panic attacks, and you had people that could not express it — whatever ‘it’ may be.

That is why I continued working face-to-face with this group and very consciously sought other ways to deal with them. To make a long story short, as concerns the method of treatment, with this group you have to, so to say, do the opposite as with the other group. The classic group of psychoneurosis suffer from an excess of meaning, an excess of history, an excess of the imaginary, and this you have to deconstruct. With the new group there is a lack on all these levels. They do not trust the other. If there is transference, it is negative transference. They hardly have the potential for symbolising. They hardly have a history. They have a history, but they cannot verbalise that history. You have to provide them as it were the instruments and in particular develop a relationship with them by which they can work through a number of things. That means that I indeed work psychoanalytically, but in the opposite direction. To return to the social aspect, I ask myself why the radical shift?

Why is it that we see classical hysteria and obsessional neurosis far less than before? Then we arrive at your question about the risk of psychologisation, the risk of decontextualisation. The most obvious answer is found in psychology and to some extent in contemporary attachment theory, which is more or less psychoanalytic, although it is becoming increasingly cognitive. The answer there is the reference to the mother, the processes of reflection that occur between mother and child — mirroring. Although with this you all too quickly end up in a psychologising model, in a decontextualising model and in the mother-blaming model, because it is the fault of the mother. Consequently, we have to widen our scope: if it is indeed the case that mothers no longer function as they used to function, then that must have to do with a different social context. Then you have to try — and this is very difficult for a classically trained analyst/psychologist — to obtain some insight into those social factors.
[—]
The most common term of abuse used these days on the playground at primary school is ‘loser’. Isn’t that terrible? It has to do with children eight, nine years old. If they call each other loser, what does that say about the model of our society? Can I do something with this psychoanalytically? Yes, psychoanalysis always works on the tension between individual and society on the level of enjoyment and desire. If you want to summarise the core of Freud’s theory, this is what it is about. There is the individual, there is society, and society ensures certain rules when it comes to pleasure and desire. The individual resists them, but at the same time also needs them. But the social model in which we are now living is exactly the opposite of the model in Freud’s time. In his day, all emphasis was on desire. Pleasure was for the afterlife, by way of speaking. These days the accent is on pleasure. We should enjoy ourselves immensely; pleasure has become a commodity, on credit if need be, but in any case pleasure is everywhere. Desire has been killed….

mcgowan desire death drive

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

The neurotic mistakes the experience of the death drive for the experience of desire, and psychoanalysis attempts to reveal the drive where the neurotic mistakenly sees desire.

We misrecognize satisfaction as dissatisfaction because we imagine, in our present state of lack, that we once had a completeness that we have now lost.

That is to say, we believe that our privileged object once had a substantial existence and fail to see that it became a privileged object through the very act of being lost.

This misrecognition allows us to continue to believe in a previous and possible future completeness. Though it is neurotic, this misrecognition is inherent in the very nature of desire, and it is through this fundamental misrecognition that desire first begins and later sustains itself. 59

Desire constantly seeks out the object that would satisfy it, but this object always eludes it — or, to be more precise, desire eludes the object, keeping desire perpetual (and perpetually dissatisfied). 59-60

Desire, in other words, doesn’t attempt to achieve satisfaction but to sustain itself as desire, to keep desire going. This is why desire constantly seeks out a satisfying object and yet never quite gets it. It leads us to see ourselves as dissatisfied and to fail to see the satisfaction we obtain from the circulation of the drive.

Desire is nothing but a misrecognition of the death drive. 60

note 14. The intrinsic link between desire and the death drive makes it possible to transition from desire to drive through fully insisting on one’s desire. This is why Alenka Župančič claims: “In order to arrive at the drive, one must pass through desire and insist on it until the very end” (Alenka Župančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan [New York: Verso, 2000], 239).

Todd McGowan, May 8, 2020 DEATH DRIVE

McGowan 2004 on traversing fantasy

I have just read a 2004 article by Todd McGowan “Fighting Our Fantasies: Dark City and the Politics of Psychoanalysis” from his edited book on Lacan and Cinema.  Now that I’ve read McGowan in 2013, I see that he’s moved a bit from this position on fantasy.  Not a lot mind you, but instead of fantasy as concealing a truer reality, or a real, I think McGowan now would subscribe to the theory that fantasy is necessary, that it provides us with an opportunity to transcend the symbolic, and in expounding on this he cites the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin.  I don’t think McGowan is so big on the “traversing the fantasy” stuff anymore.

Psychoanalytic interpretation allows individuals to recognize functioning of ideology and role private fantasies play does nothing to help individuals act “politically as part of a larger group.” Žižek here stakes his position on the identity of psychoanalysis and politics by claiming that psychoanalysis demands the political Act – the traversal of fantasy because for Žižek fantasy “keeps the subjects within the hold of ideology.” But for McGowan this answer is very individualistic.

“Traversing the fantasy—the end of analysis—seems to be something that occurs only on the level of the individual. It may provide freedom for the individual, but this freedom exists, according to Marxism, within the larger unfreedom of capitalist society. Historically, this has been the problem with psychoanalysis for Marxism: it works for the satisfaction of the individual, not the whole.”

The strength of what I get from McGowans 2004 article is his discussion of objet a as something that even authority, Big Daddy in this case, desires, over and above their demands. For example he cites the play/movie Cat On a Hot Tin Roof and the patriarchal father desires his son that fucks up and rebels and is homosexual, over the one that becomes a lawyer, has a family, gives him grandchildren etc. McGowan’s explanation is as follows:

“The more Brick acts against Big Daddy’s demand, the more Big Daddy desires him. Brick’s resistance to Big Daddy’s authority attracts Big Daddy’s desire because it indicates the presence of the objet petit a — something that absolutely resists assimilation to the demands of authority. Big Daddy, like the Strangers, seeks out this object that seems to hold the secret of jouissance that always remains just outside the reach of those in power. Symbolic authority’s lack constitutes a political opening for the subject, which is why the subject must constantly remain aware of it.”

But it’s McGowan’s last sentence that doesn’t convince me. Yes there is lack in the Other, but how does the subject remain constantly aware of it? In what sense? How does the lack in the Other manifest itself politically?

“Often, the strongest barrier to overcome in the political act is the belief that symbolic authority is without fissure, that there is no opening in which the act can occur. By showing the Strangers’ desperate search for the jouissance of the subject, the film shatters this belief. Rather than embodying an invariable mastery that thwarts all challenges to it, the Strangers betray the inconsistency of mastery, its lack. And because even symbolic authority lacks, we need not succumb to its demands. Symbolic authority’s lack creates the space at which we can oppose it, and taking up this opposition is what it means to act politically. But the primary barrier to such an act is our investment in the fantasy that fills in symbolic authority’s lack.

Because symbolic authority is lacking or split, ideological control is not absolute. This means that it needs a fantasmatic support in order to entice subjects to buy into it. If ideology simply demands submission, subjects will be reluctant to buy into it. But fantasy fills in this lacuna, offering a reward (an image of the ultimate jouissance) that ideology offers in exchange for submission.

Hence, far from subverting ideological control, fantasy perpetuates it and follows from it. The Strangers provide the inhabitants of the city with fantasies—images of an experience beyond ideological control—and these fantasies assist in rendering the people docile. In the case of Murdoch, we see clearly how ideological control depends on a fundamental fantasy. For Murdoch, this fantasy is that of Shell Beach, a place of warmth and light in contrast to the dark, dreary city. Shell Beach occupies this important place in Murdoch’s psychic economy because it represents his point of origin—home. He believes that if he can return to this point, he will find the answers to all of his questions about his identity and gain a sense of completion.” 160

“When a subject traverses the fantasy, he or she moves from desire (continually seeking the object) to drive (circling around an objectless void). One resists this transition because it entails the loss of any hope for escape. Desire promises a transcendent future, a future beyond present constraints. But the drive makes no promises; it involves only a perpetual circling. Murdoch is not the only character in the film to pass from desire to drive. 164-165

Traversing the fantasy doesn’t allow us to escape the limits of our present situation; instead, it allows us to see that there is nothing beyond those limits, that the image of the beyond is the product of the limits themselves. That is to say, fantasy doesn’t conceal the “real world” (however bleak), but instead works to convince us that such a place exists, just beyond our reach. Traversing the fantasy involves the recognition that there is no beyond—or, rather, that the beyond exists within the present world. 167

mcgowan desire anorexic

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

It is the initial act of sacrifice that gives birth to desire: the subject sacrifices nothing in order to create a lost object around which it can organize its desire. … The subject’s desire is oriented around this lost object, but the object is nothing as a positive entity and only exists insofar as it is lost. This is why one can never attain the lost object or the object that causes one to desire.

The coming-into-being of this object originates the subject of desire, but, having no substance, the object can never become an empirical object of desire. We may see an object of desire as embodying the lost object, but whenever we obtain this object, we discover its emptiness. The lost object is constitutively rather than empirically lost. 29

The anorexic doesn’t simply refuse to eat but eats nothing, the nothing that is the lost object. While all positive forms of food fail to address the subject’s lack, nothing does speak to the subject’s desire and allows that desire to sustain itself. The anorexic starves not because she can’t find … any food that would satisfy her but because she has found a satisfying food, a food that nourishes the desiring subject rather than the living being. The logic of anorexia lays bare the hidden workings of desire that operate within every subject.

Subjects believe that they pursue various objects of desire (a new car, a new house, a new romantic partner, and so on) and that these objects have an intrinsic attraction, but the real engine for their desire resides in the nothing that the subject has given up and that every object tries and fails to represent. Objects of desire are desirable only insofar as they attempt to represent the impossible lost object, which is what the anorexic reveals. Still the anorexic is exceptional, most nonanorexic subjects imaging that their lost object can be found in something rather than nothing. 30

The key to the politics of the death drive is grasping, in the fashion of the anorexic, the nothingness of the object and thereby finding satisfaction in the drive itself. But the subject’s relationship to its object inherently creates an illusion that makes this possibility almost impossible.

Though the lost object that initiates subjectivity has no substance, its status for the subject belies its nothingness. For the subject, the originary lost object is the object that seems to hold the key to the subject’s very ability to enjoy. Subjects invest the lost object with the idea of their own completion: the loss of the object retroactively causes a prior state of completion to arise – a state of completion that never actually existed – and the object itself bears the promise of inaugurating a return to this imaginary prior state. In short, it promises to fill in the subject’s lack and answer its desire. As a result of this investment on the part of the subject, the initial lost object becomes the engine for all the subject’s subsequent desiring. 31

Without the initial act of sacrifice, the would-be subject neither desires nor enjoys but instead suffocates in a world of self-presence, a self-presence in which one has no freedom whatsoever.  Through the loss of the privileged object, one frees oneself from the complete domination of (parental or social) authority by creating a lack that no authority can fill.  Ceding the object is thus the founding act of subjectivity and the first free act.  31

neill lacanian subjectivity 2011 pt1

Neill, Calum. Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity 2011

Against what one might characterise as the ‘common-sense’ notion that language (pre)exists as a tool to be utilised by a subject (or person) in the expression of their (pre-linguistic) needs, wants, beliefs etc., the notion of subjectivity in Lacan’s work posits a subject who only ever comes to be anything at all because of the signifying chain of language, because of the (pre)existence of a symbolic order in which it comes to operate.

What is crucial here is that, if it is the order of signifiers which takes logical precedence, then signifiers are not arsenal to be deployed between subjects, or, to oversimplify, words are not carriers of meaning between people, but, rather, it is the subject which is constituted in the movement of signifiance between signifiers.  45

It is in this sense that Lacan borrows Hegel’s dictum that ‘the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing’ and adds that ‘this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire’ (Ibid.).

An example of this notion of the signifier representing the subject for another signifier is already apparent in Freud when he writes, in A Project for a Scientific Psychology, of a soldier’s willingness to sacrifice himself for his country’s flag or, as Freud emphasises it, for ‘a many coloured scrap of stuff’ (Freud, 1966: 349). Here, the soldier is clearly not concerned with the thing of the flag, the flag as material object. The flag only assumes its significance in relation to another signifier, in this instance, the ‘fatherland’ (Ibid.). The soldier, the subject, is given his subjectivity through the mediating representation between one signifier, ‘the flag’, and another, ‘the fatherland’. 45

johnston ethics desire Seminar VII part 2 das Ding

Johnston, Adrian. “The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics.” Psychoanalytic Studies. 3.3/4 (2001): 411-424.

🙂 Johnston does not agree with Žižek’s take on das Ding.

Žižek’s definition: das Ding doesn’t exist prior to the ‘backwards glance’ of the nostalgic subject of the Symbolic wishing to have lost something he/she never possessed in the Žfirst place (das Ding is a result of the fundamental strategy of fantasy, wherein the structural impossibility of the drives’ ‘full satisfaction’ qua ‘jouissance obtained’ is concealed from the subject by making it seem as if this enjoyment is hypothetically re-obtainable).

However, this is a misleading exaggeration that treats Lacan as wholly Hegelian.

The most misleading feature of virtually every extant commentary on Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis is the attribution to him of the imperative “Do not give way on your desire!”

In the seventh seminar, Lacan does not present the link between desire and guilt in the form of a command, an injunction to ‘persist’ in one’s desire.

Instead, he merely states that guilt is the result of ‘ceding on’ (i.e., not enacting in reality, refraining from concrete actualization ) one’s desires—“Je propose que la seule chose don t on puisse être coupable, au moins dans la perspective analytique, c’est d’avoir cédé sur son désir”.

At the beginning of this seminar, Lacan remarks that psychoanalysis is confronted , across the range of its analysands, with the omnipresence of guilt in human life.

Lacan is not so much interested in proposing a new prescriptive ethics as in comprehending the precise nature of ‘moral masochism’, in fully grasping how the constellation of the id, the super-ego, and the socio-symbolic Umwelt of reality ‘pathologize ’ the ethical Žfield.

At most, this Lacanian analytic diagnosis of moral masochism should be interpreted as a preparatory clearing of the ground for a genuine ethics, as a mapping out of the obstacles hindering the construction and enactment of a non-pathological ‘metaphysics of morals’. 417

Lacan repeatedly makes reference to the Freudian super-ego as an excessive, greedy, and out-of-control agency. Echoing Freud, he observes that, “the more one sacrifiŽces to it, the more it demands”.

The super-ego isn’t satisfied with mere external/behavioral conformity to ethico-moral precepts; it uncompromisingly insists upon the impossible purification of intentionality itself (thus, the super-ego is, in a manner of speaking, a spontaneous Kantian). 418

… when Lacan speaks about being guilty for having ‘ceded’ or ‘given ground’ relative to one’s desire, what he really means is the following: the more the subject surrenders (to) his/her desires by obeying the restrictions of the Law, the more guilty he/she feels, since such concessions only aggravate the (unconscious) volatility and intensity of these same desires (namely,‘internal’ repressed desires which never fail to escape the notice of the omniscient authority of the sadistic super-ego).

Near the end of his 1974 television interview, Lacan clearly advances this claim in saying that, “Freud reminds us that it’s not evil, but good, that engenders guilt” (Lacan, p. 45).
To be Continued …

 

 

johnston desire ethics Kant Antigone seminar VII

Johnston, Adrian. “The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics.” Psychoanalytic Studies. 3.3/4 (2001): 411-424.

🙂 In this article Johnston takes on Lacan’s “Do not give way on your desire!” What does this mean? It does not mean, “do not give way on your jouissance!”

AJ starts with Nietzsche. Why? Because Nietzsche is totally against Kant.

In the standard version of the Kantian schema, the subject’s intentions are most ethical when they are least tied to the particularity of the individual (i.e., his/her inclinations, desires, wishes, circumstances, etc.).

The categorical imperative (“I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law”) functions as a kind of ‘sieve’ meant to strain out, as much as possible, these pathological materials tainting the intentional purity of duty.

Conversely, the injunction of the eternal return—perhaps this injunction is capable of being rendered in the imperative form as “I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my concrete, unique , and utterly individual act should be ‘universalized’, namely, should endlessly recur for all eternity ”—demands exactly the opposite of the categorical imperative.

In a Nietzschean ‘system of valuation’, rather than being the basest, most unworthy of intentional states , the particular, idiosyncratic desires of the individual subject are the highest standards by which to measure actions.

Only if an action expresses the strongest of subjective urges, urges so strong that the subject would will them to infinitely manifest themselves again and again in all their singular uniqueness, is it of any worth.  412

Most reading s of the Lacanian dictum “Do not give way on your desire!” understand him to be proposing something similar to Nietzsche: (pure) desire is conceived of as jouissance, as the uncompromising , unconditional thrust of Trieb once operative outside the confining consequentialist calculus of the pleasure principle.

The subjective particularity of pure desire is ethical precisely when its strength overwhelms the mitigating influence of the pleasure-oriented ego.

Various commentaries on the seventh seminar point to the tragic Žfigure of Antigone as proof that this is exactly what Lacan intends to convey. Antigone’s passionate attachment to her dead brother Polyneices drives her to transgress Creon’s edict forbidding the burial of the corpse. Her excessive ‘love’ is then compared with the Todestrieb, since Antigone is compelled to disregard the tragic consequences that she is fully aware await her in the wake of her act.

A Real passage á l’acte (i.e., Antigone’s burial of her brother as a result of her desire) transgressively disrupts the reign of a Symbolic system of Law (i.e., Creon’s denial of funerary rites for Polyneices on the grounds of the interests of the polis).

Is this the distilled essence of Lacan’s ‘ethics of psychoanalysis?’ Is he, like Nietzsche, simply interested in turning Kant on his head, in unreservedly transforming Kant into Sade?

Lacan explicitly states that desire arises from the sacrifice of jouissance: <span style=”font-weight: bold; font-size: 11pt;”>not ceding on one’s desire</span> would seem to entail not surrendering to the siren-song of jouissance, not capitulating to the uncompromising demands of Trieb.

Lacan describes desire as opposing jouissance—“desire is a defense, a prohibition against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance” 413

Lacan means, then “not giving ground on desire” is a translation of Kant’s insistence on the exclusion of pathological drives from properly ethical intentionality, with the psychoanalytic qualiŽfication that the detachment from these drives is itself achieved through and sustained by a subl(im)ation of inclination, a ‘self-subversion’ of Trieb. 413

Lacanian Desire

One of the easiest ways to gain a preliminary understanding of Lacanian desire is by returning to the Freudian concepts of Trieb and sublimation. For Freud, sublimation is the typical means by which Trieb adapts itself to the constraints and obstacles it comes to encounter at the level of the reality principle. Reality forbids certain drive-aims qua the attainment of satisfaction linked to determinate drive-objects. Thus, reality is said to be responsible for what Freud designates as ‘aim-inhibition ’ (a catalyst for sublimation).

The aim-inhibited drive then seeks other forms of satisfaction via different objects; and, if these alternate modes of securing gratiŽcation are not at odd s with the various prohibitions of the reality principle (usually, socio-cultural laws and norms), then the new libidinal arrangement is dubbed a successful sublimation of the drive .

Furthermore in Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that ‘instinctual renunciation’ (i.e., the aim-inhibition of the drives demanded by human reality) is, despite appearances to the contrary, an unavoidable libidinal fate for all subjects.

As such, the Freudian subject lives in a state of unsatisfactory compromise: sublimation provides pleasurable outlets for Trieb, but Trieb itself is incapable of ever being fully satisfied with these compromises, since they are, by the very definition of the mechanism of sublimation, deviations from the original cathetic trajectory (i.e., the ‘earliest state of affairs’ which all drives struggle in vain to recover; in the seventh seminar, Lacan designates this posited ‘ground zero’ of the libidinal economy das Ding). The libidinal life of the human being is therefore marked by certain constitutive ‘lacks’ or ‘absences’—as Lacan puts it, the ‘sovereign Good’ of das Ding is always missing from the reality of subjective ‘ex-sistence’ — and this condition of (non-)existence is precisely what Lacan intends for his notion of ‘desire’ to designate.  413

Desire is the residual remainder/by-product of the subjection of jouissance (i.e., Trieb an sich, the unconditional attachment to das Ding) to the ego-mediated negotiations between the pleasure and reality principles. 414

In other words, desire is symptomatic of the drives’ dissatisfaction with the pleasure-yielding compromises of sublimation. 414

Lacan’s seventh seminar contains two separate lines of argumentation:

1. Lacan seeks to clarify and further develop Freud’s analyses of conscience as a manifestation of a pathological ‘moral masochism’ fueled by an insatiable super-ego;

2. Lacan lays down the preliminary groundwork for a psychoanalytic meta-ethical theory based on the possibility of desire coming to function in a ‘pure’, properly ethical fashion.

These two dimensions of Lacan’s so-called ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ must not be conflated, since doing so results in either muddleheaded confusion or outright error.

 

To be continued …

deleuze queering

Colebrook, Claire. “Queer Vitalism.” New Formations, 68, Spring 2010. 77-92.

In contemporary discourses of the subject, such as Judith Butler’s, one must subject oneself to enabling and recognisable norms. To be recognised by, and with, others requires some determined personality. But those necessary norms and figures of personhood are at odds with the act, performance or event which brings them into being. On this account, personhood comes into being through moments or decisions which are perceived only after the event as the outcome of a performance that must be posited as having been. We do not see, live or intuit performativity itself, only its effects. A politics and vitalising imperative follows: do not be seduced by normativity. Recognise that the self who is performed and recognised is at odds with the less stable – one might say ‘queer’ – vital self who acts (who ‘acts but is not’).

This ‘man in general,’ according to Deleuze and Guattari is achieved historically and politically by unifying complex differences into some single figure.

The same applies to ‘woman,’ ‘lesbian,’ ‘trans-sexual’ or – in some cases – ‘queer.’ If the latter term denotes a group of bodies who seek recognition on the basis of their relation to, or difference from, other bodies then ‘queer’ forms a majoritarian mode of politics: a political force that reduces difference for the sake of creating a political subject group.

If, however, ‘queer’ were to operate vitally it would aim to signal the positive potentialities from which groups were formed: there could only be lesbian women because certain differences are possible (such as sexual difference, and difference in orientation), but that would then lead to further and further difference, not only to each individual but within each individual.

Minoritarian politics moves in the opposite direction from recognition and aims to maximise the circumstances for the proliferation and pulverisation of differences.

freedom death drive

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010

As Žižek (PV 61) emphasizes elsewhere, the difference between desire and drive is precisely that “[…] desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being.” note 275 page 204

It is however, as Žižek (OB 92-98; PV 60-63) emphasizes, paramount to distinguish between the gap of the drive and the gap of desire, if we want to avoid a highly misleading confusion between drive and desire. The gap that characterizes desire is, as I have already hinted, the external gap between the substitutable object (that I want) and the forbidden/lost Thing (that I desire). In contrast, the gap that characterises the drive is, according to Žižek (OB 92; PV 61), the inherent gap between its ‘goal’ and its ‘aim’. That is, the gap between the object around which the drive circulates endlessly (goal) and this very endless circulation around the object itself (aim).

This finally brings us back to the issue of theology. In On Belief, Žižek explicitly relates this discussion of the difference between desire and drive to Christianity. In the section entitled ‘God Resides in Detail’, Žižek applies the contrast between Judaism and Christianity to illustrate this difference (and vice-versa).

Following Hegel, Žižek (OB 89; cf. SOI 201-207; FTKN xxx-xxxi) suggests that Judaism is the religion of the Sublime, insofar that it perceives God as the transcendent irreprehensible wholly Other, or in Lacanian terms, as the impossible God-Thing. In other words, Judaism follows the logic of desire.

In contrast, Christianity renounces this transcendent God-Thing of the Beyond with its fundamental
message that Christ (this miserable human-being) is God (the Sublime).

By claiming the absolute identity between God and man, Christianity acknowledges that there is really nothing (no Thing) beyond appearance, or more correctly, as Žižek (OB 89) puts it “[…] Nothing BUT the imperceptible X that changes Christ, this ordinary man, into God.”

That is to say, although Christianity ‘inverses the Jewish sublimation into a radical desublimation’, this inversion is not merely a (Feuerbachian) reduction of God to man, but rather the manifestation of the divine dimension in man (OB 90).

So, in what does this X, this divine dimension in man, consist? Žižek’s (OB 90) answer is that:

[…] far from being the Highest in man, the purely spiritual dimension towards which all humans strive, the ‘divinity’ is rather a kind of obstacle, of a ‘bone in the throat’ – it is something, that unfathomable X, on account of which man cannot ever fully become MAN, self-identical. The point is not that, due to the limitation of his mortal sinful nature, man cannot ever become fully divine, but that, due to the divine spark in him, man cannot ever fully become MAN.

As we know by now this ‘imperceptible X’ (the inherent ‘minimal difference’) that Christ manifests, which according to Žižek is what prevents man from becoming fully man, is of course that which also goes under the name of the subject, the Cartesian Cogito, the self-relating negativity of German idealism, the Lacanian $ or the Freudian death drive.

In Žižek‘s words, Christ “[…] stands for the excess of life, for the ‘undead’ surplus which persists over the cycle of generation and corruption […].” In terms of the issue of the difference between desire and drive and God into God himself, conforms to the transposition of the external gap between the substitutable object (that I want) and the forbidden/lost Thing (that I desire) into an inherent gap in the object itself around which the drive circulates.

Thus, the Christian ‘inversion of Jewish sublimation into a radical desublimation’ is not merely the demythologization of desire; it is the manifestation of the dimension of drive in man. Or, to put it in other words: by manifesting the divine dimension in man through its message of Christ on the cross as the death the God, Christianity makes it possible to (re)enter the domain of drives.

By making manifest through his sacrifice on the Cross of the absolute identity between the sublime Thing and miserable human-being (the everyday object) Christ suspends the gap of desire and (re)closes the loop of drive.
At the end the same section in On Belief, Žižek (OB 105) indicates that the fundamental narrative of Christianity, the story of the Fall, could be read as a parallel to the psychoanalytical conception of the emergence of the death drive:

“The story of the (Adam’s) Fall is evidently the story of how the human animal contracted the excess of Life which makes him/her human – ‘Paradise’ is the name for the life delivered of the burden of this disturbing excess.”

So, perhaps we should reverse – in an admittedly completely anachronistic manner – the suggestion made by the German philosopher, Jakob Taubes (1957, 137), that Freud was the last great advocate of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. Is not the Christian doctrine of Original Sin the first great advocacy of the Freudian notion of death drive? Is this not what Žižek hints at? 205

Christianity also releases or ‘redeems’ man from the excessiveness of the death drive: “Out of love for humanity, Christ then freely assumes, contracts onto himself, the excess (‘Sin’) which burdened the human race.” Yet, this redemption (rescue, deliverance from sin, salvation) does certainly not consist in the obliteration of this excess.

The ‘redemption’ from the excess of death drive offered by Christianity is not a ‘healing of the wound’, but rather the possibility of accepting it. In short, in Žižek’s Hegelian reading, the redemption is the wound, the Fall, itself.

“God does not first push us into sin in order to create the need for Salvation, and then offer himself as the Redeemer from the trouble into which he got us in the first place; it is not that the Fall is followed by redemption: the Fall is identical to Redemption, it is “in itself” already Redemption.”

So, what exactly is this redemption, this possibility that Christ opens up with his death, which is already the Fall itself? Žižek’s (MC 273) answer is:

“The explosion of freedom, the breaking out of the natural enchainment — and this, precisely, is what happens in the Fall.”

Or, as he (PD 86) puts it elsewhere:

“[…] for Christianity, the Fall is really not a Fall at all, but ‘in itself’ its very opposite, the emergence of freedom. There is no place from which we have fallen; what came before was just stupid natural existence.”

What does the freedom that the death drive enables look like?

death drive desire

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010

It is this thrust to go (on) beyond biological life (and death) that Žižek (PV 62) identifies with human immortality: “The paradox of the Freudian “death drive” is therefore that it is Freud’s name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an uncanny excess of life, for an ‘undead’ urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption.”

Thus, in the most basic sense, what the strange assertion of immortality of man frequently advanced by Žižek in his more recent work refers to is this unnatural urge to live life in an excessive way beyond biological self-preservation, ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, towards something which cannot be reduced to mere biological life. 199

Thus, paradoxically, in Žižek’s view the automatism of the death drive does not designate an additional kind of natural function determining the cause of man, rather it designates a dimension of autonomy in man that since Descartes has been associated with the term ‘subject’. 199

In his discussion in The Ticklish Subject of the transition from nature to culture, Žižek (TTS 37) underlines … the role of the law (culture) is, in service of the ‘pleasure principle’, to pacify, not man’s natural instincts, but “[…] his excessive love for freedom, his natural ‘unruliness’, which goes far beyond obeying animal instinct […]”, or in short, the death drive.

The law does this by prohibiting the object to which the drive is excessively attached, which forces open the closed loop of the drive, replacing the continuous circulation around one object with a successive movement from one substitute object to another.

Another way to put it is that the law’s prohibition of the object introduces a lack which constitutes what Lacan terms the metonymy of desire; that is, the infinite sliding from one substitute object to another, driven by the loss of the original object, which is in fact nothing but is own lack.

Desire, as the endless transgressing thrust toward the ‘Thing’ (Lacan’s term for the lost/forbidden object of desire), is therefore not prior to the law, but, as Paul already knew, instituted by the law itself (HTRL 42; Evans 2010, 99).

The law is thus not aimed at regulating man’s desire, rather desire is a product of the law’s attempt to regulate the drives and thus in a certain sense part of this regulation.

The metonymy of desire is furthermore sustained by the fantasy fostered by the law that the ‘Thing’ is not really impossible (nothing but lack), but merely forbidden, and that it therefore at some point will be possible to obtain it; or in short, the fantasy that desire might actually be satisfied. But, as Žižek (AF 80) underlines: “desire is […] always and by definition unsatisfied, metonymical, shifting from one object to another, since I do not actually desire what I want.

What I actually desire is to sustain desire itself, to postpone the dreaded moment of its satisfaction.”

subject of desire subject of drive

Žižek, The Lesbian Session Lacanian Ink 2000  And here too

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Totem and Taboo Freud

Johnston, Adrian. Time driven : metapsychology and the splitting of the drive.  Stoney Brook Press: New York. 2000

In Totem and Taboo, Freud tells the story of an archaic human order in which a single alpha male (the “primal father”) tyrannically rules over the social group (the “primal horde”). This powerful, ferocious paternal figure monopolizes all the women of the horde, preventing the other males, this “band of brothers,” from indulging themselves in their sexual urges.

The subjugated male members of the group finally rise up in rebellion against the feared Urvater, slaughtering him and subsequently devouring his corpse.  On the one hand, the brothers hated the father because he hindered the exercise of their desires — and this hatred eventually be-came intense enough to drive the group to murder. On the other hand, insofar as the father was envied because he occupied the very position desired by each of the brothers, this paternal figure represents a point of identification for the other males—and the cannibalistic consumption of the dead father’s body is, in Freud’s mind, indicative of this identificatory rapport. Freud describes this oscillation between hatred and identification as “ambivalence.”

Like Oedipus, the brothers of the primal horde accomplish in act what most subjects merely entertain in (unconscious) fantasies. But, in Freud’s tale as opposed to Sophocles’ tragedy, the actors know full well what they are doing the entire time. The brothers deliberately cooperate with each other in murdering the primal father; no ignorance clouds their awareness of this forceful assertion of their drives.

However, just as Oedipus is incapable of embracing the actualization of his repressed desires, so is the primal horde profoundly disturbed by its deed. (The story of Electra resembles the Freudian myth of the horde to the extent that, although throughout the course of the play Electra wants nothing more than to avenge her dead father by killing her adulterous mother, she is nonetheless traumatized by her own murderous act once she commits it.)

What is the ultimate result of the elimination of the living primal father? Instead of the brothers finally savoring their newly-won freedom from the oppressive regime of the selfish paternal dictator (as one might reasonably expect them to do), they are so distressed by what they have accomplished that they subsequently establish laws prohibiting anyone from ever acting again as they did. The vanquished father’s ghost returns to haunt them in the form of a restrictive body of laws; just as the living father inhibits aggression and the free circulation of women, so too do the laws established between the band of brothers after-the-fact of their violent acts of revolt condemn these same acts.

Libidinal liberation, as the lifting of supposedly external impediments to Trieb, isn’t so easy to achieve. Whether as the traumatizing deferred comprehension of Oedipus or the spectral paternal remainder haunting the fraternal band, something more than just externally imposed repression (father, society, and so on) prevents subjects from experiencing pleasure in the release of their formerly stifled tendencies. In fact, the myth of the primal horde represents Freud’s displaced realization of the painful truth of the analytically appropriated myth of Oedipus, a truth with which he repeatedly fails to fully come to terms.

A hitch, obstacle, or impediment beyond the recognizable avatars of the Freudian reality principle interferes with the enjoyment of the libidinal economy. The foundational myths of psychoanalysis reveal more than just the existence of certain common desires dwelling within the unconscious lives of each and every individual. These tales of transgression, in which the actors realize the primordial versions of the drives in the field of concrete reality, demonstrate that the allure of such transgressions is sustained strictly insofar as these actions have yet to be accomplished.

Once committed, that is, once drive is transformed from repressed fantasy to actualized fact, the attractiveness of what ostensibly is desired by the unconscious is suddenly transubstantiated into something horrific and disgusting. If Oedipus Rex is indeed timelessly tragic, this is due to his representation of the foundational dilemma of the drives — a dilemma in which Trieb paradoxically “enjoys” what it desires exclusively to the extent that it never accomplishes the fulfillment of its desire.

The drives are not repressed simply because they are at odds with the reality of a socio-legal Umwelt. Even if every external impediment were eliminated, the drives would spontaneously fabricate their own repression in order to preserve their fantasmatic forms of jouissance. Obtaining this jouissance would be the ultimate trauma for Trieb.