desire

failure of mirror stage autism

Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: One World, 2009.

At first, the baby appears only to need mild, attention to its hygiene, and rest. Psychoanalysis has made much of the breast, because it is a perfect object for the newborn baby: it is food, drink, warmth, comfort, and love. The newborn, drunk on mild, hardly knows it’s been born. Psychoanalysts point to that state of contentment as something that can never be found again, they point to the breast as a lost perfect object, although not in the same way that the Phallus is a lost perfect object. But that perfect state cannot persist, because the child is growing, and as it does so, its needs become more complex. After a while, it needs to use its developing muscles, and it needs stimulation. Those needs can be met quite easily: a safe room with space to crawl about, furniture to hold onto so that it may pull itself onto its feet, a television and a couple of of toys should suffice … but they don’t.

Studies … of institutionalised babies showed that even when adequately cared for, they failed to thrive: they became listless and depressed … Lacan – and perhaps everyone else – would say that from day one, the child also needs love, but this begs the question why; love is, anyway, a lot of different things, that is so essential to the formation of the child’s mental health? The answer may lie in Lacan’s Mirror Stage, in which the mother’s loving gaze is the child’s first mirror and crucial to the formation of the infant’s sense of identity.

… the failure of this first mirror can lead to a deep fault in the foundation of the baby’s sense of identity, which is the ability to conceive of itself as an object, and a beloved object. Without the means of forming the proto-concept of ‘self’ at the right moment in infancy, there may be severe delays in cognitive development or even a complete failure to develop the concept of ‘subject’ and by extension ‘object’ and all the conceptualisations that follow, resulting in severe autism. All this would imply that ‘love’ is a primary need – perhaps the primary need – with respect to the construction of the human Subject. 113-114

But it is in the dimension of love that demand can never ‘match’ the need, and therefore the dimension in which desire flourishes.

One can only demand love obliquely, because in its very nature, it eludes language. It is not that the child does not try to ask for it, indeed, once a child is able to speak, most of its demands are expressions of its need for love. If you think about it, outside circumstances of extreme economic hardship (in the developing world or in war), it is rare for a child to have to demand something fundamental to its physical survival. Most of the time, what it asks for is ‘extra’: every day and at every opportunity, ‘plain past not filled’ or ‘chocolate cake’ or ‘not the yoghurt with bits in but that one’. It is in the inessential ‘extra’ that is coded the demand for love: in Lacan’s words, ‘the demand cancels the particularity of whatever is given by changing it into a proof of love’.

But why cannot love be demanded directly? Lacan would say that it is because love consists in ‘giving what one doesn’t have’ (Ecrits) – in other words, it can only be seen in the effort put in by the giver of love. Thus, the child ‘deduces’ the mother’s love by the effort and will she puts into satisfying the inessential part of the demand; her love is read in her proofs that her greatest desire is to be with and satisfying to the child. In this relationship, therefore, the child sees the mother’s love as depending upon the existence of a need (Lacan calls it a lack-in-being) and a desire in her – a desire the child thinks it fulfills. 115

unconscious the Other

Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: One World, 2009.

For Lacan, the Subject remained that elusive thing that hides behind the ego, that is alienated from it, that is created in an act of language, and that is largely unconscious. It is the Subject that speaks, but when it speaks, it barely knows what it is saying. And I am no longer referring here to the ‘unconscious discourse’ that appears in clips of the tongue, dreams and pathological symptoms, I am referring to what the speaker (Subject) would think of as ‘conscious speech’. This is because for the most part, the Subject is unconscious of itself.

This view may seem like overstatement: one feels provoked to say, ‘But I do know what I’m talking about … I only make a slop of the tongue very rarely, 99% of the time I mean exactly what I’m saying’, etc.

But the experienced analyst knows instantly when she/he hears denegation (‘Of course, he’s likeable enough’ nearly always means I don’t like him); and even the most common everyday use of language is closely governed by the unconscious. Most of the time, there is an interplay of conscious and unconscious in our speech: we may mean exactly what we say, but we hardly ever know why we say it.

Consider the following examples:

‘Has so-and-so got a partner’ appears a simple question, but what motivates it? Is the questioner a woman worried that the so-and-so in question is interested in her man? Or is it a man interested in so-and-so? Or is it a woman who, motivated by jealousy, hopes to learn that so-and-so is unlucky in love where she herself is not? Whichever it is, the speaker is bound to deny it, and say it’s an innocent question motivated by altruistic concern or curiosity? We can never escape the unconscious – even when it is harmless. 70

‘We’ve cooked a roast for you – we got the joint from such-and-such specialist butcher’ could provoke guilt in a prodigal child, or encourage a guest to bring a bottle of better quality wine than usual (why not just ‘a roast’? Why mention the quality of it?), etc. But again, in both cases, the speaker’s intentions are entirely unconscious.

‘I’m still recovering from the weekend’ is a commonly heard phrase, but why does the speaker think the listener needs to know this? Is she/he boasting about her/his exciting social life, bolstering the edifice of an ego which includes the master signifiers ‘socially successful’ or ‘popular’? or is she/he trying to convince her/himself that she/he had a good time, when in fact she/he was very bored? 70

Even ‘Please may I have a kilo of potatoes’ could be multilayered statement: why not simply, ‘a kilo of potatoes’ – why the time spent on a formula of politesse? Is the questioner trying to show her/his good breeding? Or if, on the contrary, all politesse is dispensed with – they why the rudeness? Might that be a way of establishing higher status over the lowly greengrocer? And is a kilo enough – or is the speaker being mean and not buying enough, or displaying an anxiety about inadequacy and asking for too many? 70
These trivial examples only underline the power of the unconscious in directing the selection and combination of signifiers into chains with or without our conscious ‘will’; Lacan saw this interplay between conscious and unconscious in the Subject as being like the continuum of the surface of a moebius strip.

The Other is manifest not only in language (even though this may be its principal domain), but also in the whole set of hypotheses that exert their influence upon the Subject. The Law, societal rules, taboos, mores and expectations, and even Time are different faces of the Other. The Other is constituted by the entire symbolic realm of human productions; accessing the Other involves the crossing of the bar described in chapter 3; it also involves the act of alienation described in the Mirror Stage, which situates the Subject within the Other. These processes of alienation and symbolisation which tie together Subject and Other are the essential basis of human creativity. 70-71

mirror stage

Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: One World, 2009.

… Lacan’s subject … depends on the user accepting that there are elements of one’s identity of which one is unconscious; anyone who thinks that one’s identity is only what one wishes to say about oneself (‘I am Irish, I am an independent career woman’, etc.) is talking about what Lacan would have called the ego. Lacan’s Subject is composed of and revealed by signifiers, which it utters without knowing what they mean.

As developmental psychologies Henri Wallon pointed out, the human baby is very premature at birth compared with other animals, including the higher primates, from birth up until maybe eighteen or more months, the infant is unable to stand up, walk, or handle objects with dexterity, and the sense of ‘self’ and ‘wholeness’ that is allowed by mature proprioception (perception of the whole body within its environment) is absent. However, this human baby – immature, helpless, perceiving itself only in a fragmented way – is, at some point between the ages of six and eighteen months, going to see an image in the mirror, and realise that it is itself. This will be the first time the baby discovers itself as a unitary being, and this discovery is the source of an intense feeling of joy and excitement, which is usually shared with the adult present; the infant, having made this discovery, turns back to look at it smother, for example, and shares with her its pride and surprise. This founding act, leading to the formation of the ego and the perception of the Subject, is attended by powerful emotion. 29

Lacan said: ‘we have to understand the mirror stage as an identification … the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image’. The baby’s discovery of self is an intellectual act; it involves the translation of an image into an idea – the idea of ‘me’ or ‘self’; hence, human identity is based on a primary act of intellect. But this is not a restatement of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. Indeed, Lacan was completely opposed to ‘any philosophy issuing directly from the cogito’: for him, the opposite was true – I think, therefore I am not, or I am fully a subject only when I am not thinking – the very act of thinking about oneself nullifies the Subject. 30

While identifying itself in the mirror, the child also identifies with something from which it is separated: it is as an ‘other’ that the Subject identifies and experiences itself first. The founding act of identity is therefore not just emotional and intellectual, it is also schismatic, separating the Subject from itself into an object. For Lacan, the Mirror Stage is ‘the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to it being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject’. At the Mirror Stage, the intellectual perception of oneself is an alienating experience and the beginning of a series of untruths; but it is a necessary alienation that allows the Subject access to the symbolic realm. 30

Méconnaissance is a French word encompassing non-recognition of and obliviousness to something; it is sometimes translated as ‘misrecognition’ – a translation I find goes wide of the mark. ‘Misrecognition’ suggests that something has been recognised, only wrongly. In my preferred translation of obliviousness or non-recognition, the subject is completely blind to the object. One of Lacan’s most important maxims is that human beings are very largely oblivious of their own Subject; the ego is what a person says of him/herself; the Subject is the unrecognised self that is speaking. Psychoanalysis is about accompanying the patient towards his/her subjective truth, or towards the point where the objective ‘me’ and the subjective ‘I’ can be united. 35

As the child’s language develops, it begins to attach ideas to the objectified self, which is to become the ego or ‘le moi’: the ideas it attaches are often produced by a denial of reality, denegation, or wishful thinking. The three year old who cries, ‘Race you, Daddy! I’m winning!’ is showing his/her desire to win, in the face of an easily observed reality – that Daddy’s legs are four times longer and much faster. The father is likely, for his part, to let the child win – precisely because he wishes to help the development of the child’s image of itself as a winner, he is, in fact, aiding and abetting the fiction of his child’s ego (in this case a necessary defence against the anxiety of being so small and helpless). And this fiction is maintained and nurtured throughout one’s life; denegation too helps: ‘I’ve got no problem with so-and-so’ is almost always a contradiction of the truth; but it helps the speaker maintain his/her fiction that she/he is easygoing/unaffected by the so-and-so in question. 36

The factitious, ‘created’ nature of the ego is behind Lacan’s opposition to ‘any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogitio’: the cogito of Cartesian thinking relies mostly on the status of consciousness – the status in which the ego believes itself most to be in control. But for Lacan, the real ‘I’ is the Subject – I in ‘I am’ – and this is necessarily hidden by conscious thought about itself. At the Mirror Stage, one may think of the Subject as the part that ‘invents’ the stories about its image-self or ego, affixing to it signifiers as it acquires language: girl, blonde, pretty, likes chocolate, hates pink, good at drawing, etc.; but it also represses as many signifiers as it selects, and in doing so, tries to hide something of itself. Indeed, the Subject can only come into being when it is not thinking, because the very act of any thinking that involves its ego creates a smokescreen behind which it disappears. 36

tim dean

Žižek, Slavoj. Violence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THINKING SEXUALITY OUTSIDE THE TERMS OF GENDER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Verhaeghe Does Woman

Discourse of Hysteric

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

drive bibliography Žižek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can drive fight drive?

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

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

capital as real

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

Capital as Real: The Marxian Parallax

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He writes: …the ultimate parallax of the political economy [is] the gap between the reality of everyday material social life (people interacting among themselves and with nature, suffering, consuming, and so on) and the Real of the speculative dance of Capital, its self-propelling movement which seems to be disconnected from ordinary reality….Marx’s point here is not primarily to reduce the second dimension to the first (to demonstrate how the supernatural mad dance of commodities arises out of the antagonisms of “real life”); his point is, rather that we cannot properly grasp the first (the social reality of material production and social interaction) without the second: it is the self-propelling metaphysical dance of Capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life development and catastrophes. (Žižek 2006b: 383)
16

Žižek also describes the Marxian parallax of the political economy as follows:

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

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

drive desire objet petit a

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

objet a and the drive id-evil

Žižek, Slavoj. Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses also in an article in Russell Grigg and Justin Clemens Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis. 2006

Portions of this stuff are reprinted in The Parallax View starting on page 303.

Can the upper level of Lacan’s formula of the university discourse — S2 directed toward a — not also be read as standing for the university knowledge endeavoring to integrate, domesticate, and appropriate the excess that resists and rejects it?

One of the telltale signs of university discourse is that the opponent is accused of being “dogmatic” and “sectarian.” University discourse cannot tolerate an engaged subjective stance. Should not our first gesture be, as Lacanians, to heroically assume this designation of being “sectarian” and engage in a “sectarian” polemic?

University discourse as the hegemonic discourse of modernity has two forms of existence in which its inner tension (“contradiction”) is externalized: capitalism, its logic of the integrated excess, of the system reproducing itself through constant self-revolutionizing, and the bureaucratic “totalitarianism” conceptualized in different guises as the rule of technology, of instrumental reason, of biopolitics, as the “administered world.”

We should not succumb to the temptation of reducing capitalism to a mere form of appearance of the more fundamental ontological attitude of technological domination; we should rather insist, in the Marxian mode, that the capitalist logic of integrating the surplus into the functioning of the system is the fundamental fact.

Stalinist “totalitarianism” was the capitalist logic of self-propelling productivity liberated from its capitalist form, which is why it failed: Stalinism was the symptom of capitalism.

Stalinism involved the matrix of general intellect, of the planned transparency of social life, of total productive mobilization- and its violent purges and paranoia were a kind of a “return of the repressed,” the “irrationality” inherent to the project of a totally organized “administered society.” This means the two levels, precisely insofar as they are two sides of the same coin, are ultimately incompatible: there is no metalanguage enabling us to translate the logic of domination back into the capitalist reproduction-through-excess, or vice versa.

The key question here concerns the relationship between the two excesses:

1) the economic excess/surplus integrated into the capitalist machine as the force that drives it into permanent self-revolutionizing and

2) the political excess of power — exercise inherent to modern power (the constitutive excess of representation over the represented: the legitimate state power responsible to its subjects is supplemented by the obscene message of unconditional exercise of Power —laws do not really bind me, I can do to you whatever I want, I can treat you as guilty if I decide to, I can destroy you if I say so).

The master’s discourse stands not for the premodern master, but for the absolute monarchy, this first figure of modernity that effectively undermined the articulate network of feudal relations and interdependences, transforming fidelity to flattery: it is the “Sun-King” Louis XIV with his L’état, c’est moi who is the master par excellence. Hysterical discourse and university discourse then deploy two outcomes of the vacillation of the direct reign of the master:

the expert-rule of bureaucracy that culminates in the biopolitics of reducing the population to a collection of homo sacer (what Heidegger called “enframing,” Adorno “the administered world,” Foucault the society of “discipline and punish”);

the explosion of the hysterical capitalist subjectivity that reproduces itself through permanent self-revolutionizing, through the integration of the excess into the “normal” functioning of the social link (the true “permanent revolution” is already capitalism itself).

Lacan’s formula of the four discourses thus enables us to deploy the two faces of modernity

1. total administration and
2. capitalist-individualist dynamics

as two ways to undermine the master’s discourse:

doubt about the efficiency of the master-figure (what Eric Santner called the “crisis of investiture”) can be supplemented by the direct rule of the experts legitimized by their knowledge, or

the excess of doubt, of permanent questioning, can be directly integrated into social reproduction.

Finally, the analyst’s discourse stands for the emergence of revolutionary-emancipatory subjectivity that resolves the split of university and hysteria.

In it, the revolutionary agent – a – addresses the subject from the position of knowledge that occupies the place of truth (i.e., which intervenes at the “symptomal torsion” of the subject’s constellation), and the goal is to isolate, get rid of, the master signifier that structured the subject’s (ideologico-political) unconscious.

Or does it? Jacques-Alain Miller has recently proposed that today the master’s discourse is no longer the “obverse” of the analyst’s discourse. Today, on the contrary, our “civilization” itself-its hegemonic symbolic matrix, as it were-fits the formula of the analyst’s discourse. The agent of the social link is today a, surplus enjoyment, the superego injunction to enjoy that permeates our discourse; this injunction addresses $ (the divided subject) who is put to work in order to live up to this injunction. The truth of this social link is S2, scientific-expert knowledge in its different guises, and the goal is to generate S1, the self-mastery of the subject, that is, to enable the subject to cope with the stress of the call to enjoyment (through self-help manuals, etc.). Provocative as this notion is, it raises a series of questions. If it is true, in what, then, resides the difference between the discursive functioning of civilization as such and the psychoanalytic social link? Miller resorts here to a suspicious solution: in our civilization, the four terms are kept apart, isolated; each operates on its own, while only in psychoanalysis are they brought together into a coherent link: “in civilization, each of the four terms remains disjoined… it is only in psychoanalysis, in pure psychoanalysis, that these elements are arranged into a discourse.”

However, is it not that the fundamental operation of the psychoanalytic treatment is not synthesis, bringing elements into a link, but, precisely, analysis, separating what in a social link appears to belong together? This path, opposed to that of Miller, is indicated by Giorgio Agamben,Giorgio Agamben, who, in the last pages of The State of Exception, imagines two Utopian options of how to break out of the vicious cycle of law and violence, of the rule of law sustained by violence.

One is the Benjaminian vision of “pure” revolutionary violence with no relationship to the law.

The other is the relationship to the law without regard to its (violent) enforcement, such as Jewish scholars do in their endless (re)interpretation of the Law.

Agamben starts from the right insight that the task today is not synthesis but separation, distinction: nor bringing law and violence together (so that right will have might and the exercise of might will be fully legitimized), but thoroughly separating them, untying their knot.

Although Agamben confers on this formulation an anti-Hegelian twist, a more proper reading of Hegel makes it clear that such a gesture of separation is what the Hegelian “synthesis” is effectively about. In it, the opposites are not reconciled in a “higher synthesis”; it is rather that their difference is posited “as such.”

However, is this vision not again the case of our late capitalist reality going further than our dreams? Are we not already encountering in our social reality what Agamben envisages as a Utopian vision?

Isn’t the Hegelian lesson of the global reflexivization-mediatization of our lives that it generates its own brutal immediacy?

This has best been captured by Etienne Balibar’s notion of excessive, nonfunctional cruelty as a feature of contemporary life, a cruelty whose figures range from “fundamentalist” racist and/or religious slaughter to the “senseless” outbursts of violence performed by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reasons.

All the talk about foreigners stealing work from us or about the threat they represent to our Western values should not deceive us: under closer examination, it soon becomes clear that this talk provides a rather superficial secondary rationalization. The answer we ultimately obtain from a skinhead is that it makes him feel good to beat foreigners, that their presence disturbs him. What we encounter here is indeed Id-Evil, that is,

the Evil structured and motivated by the most elementary imbalance in the relationship between the ego and jouissance, by the tension between pleasure and the foreign body of jouissance in the very heart of it.

Id-Evil thus stages the most elementary short circuit in the relationship of the subject to the primordially missing object cause of his desire. What bothers us in the other (Jew, Japanese, African, Turk) is that he appears to entertain a privileged relationship to the object — the other either possesses the object treasure, having snatched it away from us (which is why we don’t have it), or he poses a threat to our possession of the object.

What one should propose here is the Hegelian “infinite judgment,” asserting the speculative identity of these “useless” and “excessive” outbursts of violent immediacy, which display nothing but a pure and naked (“non-sublimated”) hatred of the Otherness, with the global reflexivization of society. […] the response of the neo-Nazi skinhead who, when really pressed for the reasons for his violence, suddenly starts to talk like social workers, sociologists, and social psychologists, quoting diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood-the unity of practice and its inherent ideological legitimization disintegrates into raw violence and its impotent, inefficient interpretation.

This impotence of interpretation is also one of the necessary obverses of the universalized reflexivity hailed by the risk-society-theorists: it is as if our reflexive power can flourish only insofar as it draws its strength and relies on some minimal “prereflexive” substantial support that eludes its grasp, so that its universalization comes at the price of its inefficiency, that is, by the paradoxical re-emergence of the brute real of “irrational” violence, impermeable and insensitive to reflexive interpretation. So the more today’s social theory proclaims the end of nature or tradition and the rise of the “risk society,” the more the implicit reference to “nature” pervades our daily discourse: even when we do not speak of the “end of history,” do we not put forward the same message when we claim that we are entering a “postideological” pragmatic era, which is another way of claiming that we are entering a postpolitical order in which the only legitimate conflicts are ethnic/cultural conflicts?

Typically, in today’s critical and political discourse, the term worker has disappeared from the vocabulary, substituted or obliterated by immigrants or immigrant workers: Algerians in France, Turks in Germany, Mexicans in the United States.

In this way, the class problematic of workers’ exploitation is transformed into the multiculturalist problematic of “intolerance of otherness,” and the excessive investment of the multiculturalist liberals in protecting immigrants’ ethnic rights clearly draws its energy from the “repressed class dimension. Although Francis Fukuyama’s thesis on the “end of history” quickly fell into disrepute, we still silently presume that the liberal-democratic capitalist global order is somehow the finally found “natural” social regime, we still implicitly conceive conflicts in the Third World countries as a subspecies of natural catastrophes, as outbursts of quasi-natural violent passions, or as conflicts based on the fanatic identification to one’s ethnic roots (and what is “the ethnic” here if not again a code word for “nature”?). And, again, the key point is that this all-pervasive renaturalization is strictly correlative to the global reflexivization of our daily lives.

What this means, with regard to Agamben’s Utopian vision of untying the knot of the Law and violence is that, in our postpolitical societies, this knot is already untied: we encounter, on the one hand, the globalized interpretation whose globalization is paid for by its impotence, its failure to enforce itself, to generate effects in the real, and, on the other hand, explosions of the raw real of a violence that cannot be affected by its symbolic interpretation. Where, then, is the solution here, between

– the claim that, in today’s hegemonic constellation, the elements of the social link are separated and as such to be brought together by psycho-analysis (Miller),

– and the knot between Law and violence to be untied, their separation to be enacted (Agamben)?

What if these two separations are not symmetrical? What if the gap between the symbolic and the raw real epitomized by the figure of the skinhead is a false one, since this real of the outbursts of the “irrational” violence is generated by the globalization of the symbolic?

When, exactly, does the objet a function as the superego injunction to enjoy? When it occupies the place of the master signifier, that is, as Lacan formulated it in the last pages of his Seminar XI, when the short circuit between S1 and a occurs. The key move to be accomplished in order to break the vicious cycle of the superego injunction is thus to enact the separation between S1 and a.

Consequently, would it not be more productive to follow a different path, that is, to start with the different modus operandi of l’objet a, which in psychoanalysis no longer functions as the agent of the superego injunction — as it does in the discourse of perversion?

This is how Miller’s claim of the identity of the analyst’s discourse and the discourse of today’s civilization should be read: as an indication that this latter discourse (social link) is that of perversion.

That is to say, the fact that the upper level of Lacan’s formula of the analyst’s discourse is the same as his formula of perversion (a-$) opens up a possibility of reading the entire formula of the analyst’s discourse also as a formula of the perverse social link: its agent, the masochist pervert (the pervert par excellence), occupies the position of the object instrument of the other’s desire, and, in this way, through serving his (feminine) victim, he posits her as the hystericized/divided subject who “doesn’t know what she wants.”

Rather, the pervert knows it for her, that is, he pretends to speak from the position of knowledge (about the other’s desire) that enables him to serve the other; and, finally, the product of this social link is the master signifier, that is, the hysterical subject elevated into the role of the master (dominatrix) whom the pervert masochist serves.

In contrast to hysteria, the pervert knows perfectly what he is for the Other: a knowledge supports his position as the object of his Other’s (divided subject’s) jouissance.

The difference between the social link of perversion and that of analysis is grounded in the radical ambiguity of objet a in Lacan, which stands simultaneously for the imaginary fantasmatic lure/screen and for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure.

Consequently, when we pass from perversion to the analytic social link, the agent (analyst) reduces himself to the void, which provokes the subject into confronting the truth of his desire. Knowledge in the position of “truth” below the bar under the “agent,” of course, refers to the supposed knowledge of the analyst, and, simultaneously, signals that the knowledge gained here will not be the neutral objective knowledge of scientific adequacy, but the knowledge that concerns the subject (analysand) in the truth of his subjective position.

Recall, again, Lacan’s outrageous statements that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological. Along the same lines, one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological – because it represses the true reason the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position.

So, in the case of anti-Semitism, knowledge about what the Jews “really are” is a fake, irrelevant, while the only knowledge at the place of truth is the knowledge about why a Nazi needs a figure of the Jew to sustain his ideological edifice.

In this precise sense, the analyst’s discourse produces the master signifier, the swerve of the patient’s knowledge, the surplus element that situates the patient’s knowledge at the level of truth: after the master signifier is produced, even if nothing changes at the level of knowledge, the same knowledge as before starts to function in a different mode. The master signifier is the unconscious sinthome, the cipher of enjoyment, to which the subject was unknowingly subjected.

The crucial point not to be missed here is how the late Lacan’s identification of the subjective position of the analyst as that of objet petit a presents an act of radical self-criticism. Earlier, in the 1950’s, Lacan conceived the analyst not as the small other (a), but, on the contrary, as a kind of stand-in for the big Other (A, the anonymous symbolic order). At this level, the function of the analyst was to frustrate the subject’s imaginary misrecognitions and to make them accept their proper symbolic place within the circuit of symbolic exchange, the place that effectively (and unbeknownst to them) determines their symbolic identity. Later, however, the analyst stands precisely for the ultimate inconsistency and failure of the big Other, that is, for the symbolic order’s inability to guarantee the subject’s symbolic identity.

One should thus always bear in mind the thoroughly ambiguous status of objet a in Lacan. Miller recently proposed a Benjaminian distinction between “constituted anxiety” and “constituent anxiety”: while the first designates the standard notion of the terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety that haunts us, its infernal circle that threatens to draws us in, the second stands for the “pure” confrontation with objet a as constituted in its very loss.

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

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

While, as Lacan emphasizes, objet a is also the object of the drive, the relationship is here thoroughly different. Although in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of objet a as the object cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of objet a as the object of the drive, the “object” is directly the loss itself.

In the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object. That is to say, the weird movement called “drive” is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object, but by a push to directly enact the “loss” – the gap, cut, distance – itself.

There is thus a double distinction to be drawn here: not only between object a in its fantasmatic and post-fantasmatic status, but also, within this post-fantasmatic domain itself, between the lost object cause of desire and the object loss of the drive. Far from concerning an abstract scholastic debate, this distinction has crucial ideologico-political consequences: it enables us to articulate the libidinal dynamics of capitalism.

Following Miller himself, a distinction has to be introduced here between lack and hole. Lack is spatial, designating a void within a space, while the hole is more radical — it designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the “black hole” in physics).

Therein resides the difference between desire and drive: desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being. In other words, the circular movement of drive obeys the weird logic of the curved space in which the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, but a curve: the drive “knows” that the shortest way to attain its aim is to circulate around its goal-object. At the immediate level of addressing individuals, capitalism of course interpellates them as consumers, as subjects of desires, soliciting in them ever new perverse and excessive desires (for which it offers products to satisfy them); furthermore, it obviously also manipulates the “desire to desire,” celebrating the very desire to desire ever new objects and modes of pleasure. However, even if if already manipulates desire in a way that takes into account the fact that the most elementary desire is the desire to reproduce itself as desire (and not to find satisfaction), at this level, we do not yet reach the drive.

The drive inheres to capitalism at a more fundamental, systemic level: drive propels the entire capitalist machinery; it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction. The capitalist drive thus belongs to no definite individual – it is rather that those individuals who act as direct “agents” of capital (capitalists themselves, top managers) have to practice it. We enter the mode of the drive when (as Marx put it) the circulation of money as capital becomes “an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.” One should bear in mind here Lacan’s well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive: while the goal is the object around which drive circulates, its (true) aim is the endless continuation of this circulation as such.

primal father realtight

Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1994.

The startling claim made by Lacan is that the structures he is diagraming are real. This claim can only have met with the same incomprehension that it continues to elicit today. For those schooled in structuralism, which teaches us to think of structure as nearly synonymous with symbolic, the proposition presents itself as a solecism, an abuse of language. Lacan was not, naturally, ignorant of the structuralist position, which he shared at the beginning of his teaching . Later, however, his work aimed at critiquing this position, and his argument to the students and to us could at this point be formulated thus : you are right to rebel against structuralism, to complain that it diagrams only moribund relations. You are therefore right to proclaim that structures don’t march in the streets but not for the reasons you think. For the point is not, by changing your analytical model, to make structures take to the streets, to understand them as embedded or immanent in social reality. The point is rather to heed the lesson the original model had to teach:

structures do not and should not-take to the streets. They are not to be located among the relations that constitute our everyday reality; they belong, instead, to the order of the real.

This argument may be too abstract, even still. What, you may wonder, would an analysis that proceeds from this assumption look like? What difference does it make to our understanding of the actual functioning of a society? In order to answer these questions , we ask you to contemplate two examples of just such an analysis. Each is drawn from the work of Freud, and, significantly, each is associated with an inglorious history of ridicule and incomprehension. Our suggestion is that it is the proposition that underwrites them-” structures are real, ” or “every phenomenal field occludes its cause” which causes them to be so radically unassimilable within, and such valuable antidotes against, everyday historicist thought. 11-12

The first example is taken from Totem and Taboo, where Freud provides an analysis of a society in which relations of equality and fraternity prevail among its citizens, no one is distinguished above the others , and power is shared rather than accumulated in one place. What strikes us as most remarkable about Freud’s analysis is that it does not limit itself to a description of these relations, does not attempt to make this “regime of brothers ” coincide simply with the relations that exist among them. Instead Freud insists on going beyond these relations to posit the existence of some preposterous being, a primal father who once possessed all the power the brothers now equally share and whose murder is supposed to have issued in the present regime. No wonder so many have taken this to be one of Freud’s most crackpot ideas … But to call it crackpot is to miss the point that if this father of the primal horde is indeed preposterous, then he is objectively so. That is to say, he is unbelievable within the regime in which his existence must be unthinkable if relations of equality are to take hold. That he is unthinkable within this regime of brothers does not gainsay [contradict] the fact that the institution of the regime is inexplicable without him.

For if we did not posit his existence, we would be incapable, without resorting to psychologism, of explaining how the brothers came together in this fashion.

What Freud accounts for in Totem and Taboo is the structure, the real structure, of a society of equals, which is thus shown to be irreducible to the labile [fluid changing] relations of equality that never obtain absolutely. The petty jealousies and feelings of powerlessness that threaten these relations, that block their permanent realization, betray their guilty origin, the cause that they must efface. 12
The second example is taken from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which Freud develops one of his other massively misunderstood notions: the death drive. The common interpretation of this text is that he develops this notion in order to counter the belief that humans are all too humanly ruled by a principle of pleasure. According to this reading, the death drive would be a second principle, co-present and at war with the pleasure principle; that is, the two principles would be seen to occupy the same space, the territory of their struggle with each other.

Yet this is not what Freud says . Rather than contesting the importance of the pleasure principle, he admits its centrality in psychical life; he then seeks, by means of the death drive, to account for this centrality, to state the principle by which the principle of pleasure is installed. 10

In other words, Freud’s positing of the death drive parallels his positing of the father of the primal horde in that both are meant to answer to the necessity of accounting aetiologically for an empirical field, where the pleasure principle reigns, in one case, and where a fraternal order obtains, in the other.

In each case the transcendental principle, or the principle of the principle of rule, is in conflict with the principle of rule itself, though this conflict cannot be conceived to take place on some common ground, since the first order principle and the second order principle are never co-present

Nor can either of these two “warring” principles ever ultimately win out over the other, since the very existence of the empirical field always presupposes the existence of its cause, and since no cause can ever exist abstractly, in the absence of that which it effects.

But we must also acknowledge that these two powerful modern discourses — psychoanalysis and historicism, represented here by Lacan and Foucault, respectively — have in common the conviction that it is dangerous to assume that the surface is the level of the superficial. Whenever we delve below this level, we are sure to come up empty. Yet the lessons each discourse draws from this conviction are strikingly divergent.

Psychoanalysis, via Lacan, maintains that the exclusivity of the surface or of appearance must be interpreted to mean that appearance always routs or supplants being, that appearance and being never coincide. It is this syncopated relation that is the condition of desire.

Historicism, on the other hand, wants to ground being in appearance and wants to have nothing to do with desire.

Thus, when Lacan insists that we must take desire literally, we can understand him to be instructing us about how to avoid the pitfall of historicist thinking. To say that desire must be taken literally is to say simultaneously that desire must be articulated … For if it is desire rather than words that we are to take literally, this must mean that desire may register itself negatively in speech, that the relation between speech and desire, or social surface and desire, may be a negative one. As Lacan puts it, a dream of punishment may express a desire for what that punishment represses. This is a truth that cannot be tolerated by historicism, which refuses to believe in repression and proudly professes to be illiterate in desire. The emergence of a neopopulism cannot be blamed on Foucault, but the historicism he cultivated is guilty of effacing the pockets of empty, inarticulable desire that bear the burden of proof of society’s externality to itself.

Disregarding desire, one constructs a reality that is realtight, that is no longer self external. One paves the way for the conception of a self enclosed society built on the repression of a named desire.

If this book may be said to have one intention, it is this: to urge analysts of culture to become literate in desire, to learn how to read what is inarticulable in cultural statements .

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism. 2005

Lacan sees the void that architecture surrounds as the place of the lost object in the inextricable real, impossible to symbolize and equally impossible to forget. The Thing, the object of the drive, constructed retroactively as forbidden, leaves a hole in what it is possible to signify, and can be represented only by emptiness.

But its loss remains a source of dissatisfaction for the organism-in-culture which is the human being, and it is this structural discontent that gives rise to desire.

Desire in Lacan is a desire for nothing nameable, but it finds stand-ins, often a succession of them, sutured into place as love-objects, in the course of most individual lives. To be united with the Thing, even if it were possible, would be to surrender our existence as subjects, dissolving into pure absence. We need, therefore, to keep our distance.

Architecture both invokes and circumscribes the void which is the memorial to the lost real. Enclosing emptiness, surrounding it with a substantial materiality that is shaped, styled and decorated according to taste, architecture thus reaffirms the power of culture to keep the object of the drive in its place. Much like tombs, then, but on a larger scale than most of them, grand buildings at once allude to loss and contain it, render it present and absent at the same time. They are in consequence places of desire.

Art, which includes architecture, of course, neither delineates the real, nor acts as a substitute for it, but alludes at the level of the signifier to the loss of the real that is the cause of discontent in the signifying subject. All art, then, is a place of desire. We may assume that Mr Darcy’s (Pride and Prejudice) portrait owes nothing to the Baroque, and shows as much restraint as his house. Nevertheless, it is as a signifying surface that the painting arrests Elizabeth, and softens her feelings towards him. 86

thing vase of emptiness

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism.

What gratification can we derive from images of the footwear a peasant has discarded? Where is the pleasure in a painting of these clumsy, graceless and worn shoes, he wonders. What, after all, do they mean? Not walking, not fatigue; neither passion nor a human relationship. On the contrary, Lacan continues, they mean no more than ‘that which is signified by a pair of abandoned clodhoppers, namely, both a presence and a pure absence’ (1992: 297). No one wears these shoes: they are empty. They thus indicate a temporal relationship, a difference from the past, a loss of the wearer, just as a wooden reel symbolizes the loss of the organic relationship with a beloved mother. 73

In the same way, a still life implies a temporal relationship with the future, a potential for loss there too. Milk or fruit, cream, oranges or grapes, depicted at a moment of perfection, depend for the pleasure they give on our awareness that the moment can’t last.

Does the satisfaction culture affords depend on beauty in the conventional sense, the kind of beauty we identify with high culture? Not necessarily. The archetypal cultural object, Lacan argues, is the work of the potter, who creates a space by making a vase to surround it (120– 21). And here he echoes another of Heidegger’s essays. What holds the liquid in a jug, Heidegger asks. Not, as it might appear, the sides and floor of the jug. On the contrary, the indispensable element is the hole at the centre. ‘The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel.’ The potter ‘shapes the void’ (Heidegger 1971: 169). And Heidegger adds,since only human beings are aware of death, and specifically their own mortality, ‘Death is the shrine of Nothing’ (178). Lacan appropriates Heidegger’s interpretation of the potter’s work for his own specifically psychoanalytic account of culture.

Whenever the signifier makes a magic circle round the absent Thing, we are entitled to find a kind of beauty. In a certain context, a collection of empty matchboxes encloses and inscribes the lost real (Lacan 1992: 114)

Death is the inevitable fate of the human organism. … But death is alien to the subject of Western culture, constituted as it is in the symbolic and divided in the process from the organism that we also are.

Our languages, with their continuous present and their future tenses, enable us to imagine eternal life but, while culture survives (always subject, of course, to the effective control of weapons of mass destruction), the real withholds the possibility of immortality in this world for the individual human being. The monument, unable to make him present, alluding to loss and motivated by the annihilation of Simson himself, acknowledges that too. At the same time, however, it offers a certain consolation, in so far as it shares with A Pair of Shoes and Dutch painting, jugs, matchbox collections and macaroni the creation of a barrier to the experience, impossible for the subject, of pure absence. And perhaps, in its paradoxical signifying exuberance, the monument to the obscure apothecary (Stimson) also shares with all culture an existence as a pleasurable, pacifying alternative to renunciation, on the one hand, or aggressivity on the other. 80

objet a

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud recounts the story of his grandson, who was greatly attached to his mother. At the age of one and a half, the child invented a game which he played again and again. This involved throwing away a wooden reel attached to a piece of string with a sound his grandfather, perhaps optimistically, interpreted as ‘fort’ (‘gone’), and then recovering it with a joyful ‘da’ (‘there’). Freud reads this game as a way for Ernst to allow his mother to go away without protesting: 47 for the child the reel compensated for her absences, took her place (Freud 1984: 283– 6). It was the first action, throwing away the reel, that the child repeated tirelessly.

This construction of a symbolic opposition between two terms, ‘fort/da’, with the emphasis on the first, marks, Lacan affirms, the advent of language, of the signifying subject, and the splitting off of the real that that entails.

What Ernst translates into representation, as he throws the symbolic reel, is not a need that might require his mother’s return. On the contrary, he does not even look at the door in expectation of her return. Nor in Lacan’s reading does the reel symbolize the child’s mother as such. Instead, the object attached to the string represents a part of himself, stands in for the child’s loss of continuity with the world around him, replaces and supplants the lost real of the connection that meets his needs, the particularity of his organic relationship with his mother. The reel takes the place of the real in the symbolic. And Lacan adds his own story to Freud’s. He too, he says, has seen a child traumatized by the fact that he was going away, and has returned to find the same child ready to fall asleep on the shoulder of ‘the living signifier that I had become’ (1979: 62– 3).

The wooden reel, this ‘privileged object’, that has emerged from the primal separation between the subject and the organism, from the ‘self-mutilation’ that cuts off the possibility of encountering the real, is the objet a (1979: 83), and it is in itself nothing much. Indeed, by way of compensation, it is nothing at all. Ernst will go on to abandon the plaything, but not the lack it symbolizes. And in later life he will no doubt seek a succession of stand-ins to fill this lack. None of them, however, will fully do so. Like the wooden reel, the object of love can never replace what is lost. Instead, ‘that’s not it’.

‘“That’s not it” means that, in the desire of every demand, there is but the request for object a, for the object that would satisfy jouissance’ (1998: 126). No such object exists. As ‘the void presupposed by a demand’, the objet a represents non-being more explicitly than the Thing (1998: 126). It constitutes the nothing that is to be found behind the veil, the object-cause, both object and cause, of desire. In love, ‘I love in you something more than you – the objet petit a’ (1979: 263). 48

Like the Thing, it has no existence in the real, since no actual object can satisfy the unconscious desire that pure loss serves to perpetuate. 49

The real, then, surrounds us. It also inhabits us as the condition of our ex-sistence. Human beings remain uneasy composites, the conjunction of an unreachable real organism and the subjects they become.

The unconscious is not the real, nor the repository of the real, but the consequence of its loss.

Driven though it is, and constituted by culturally constructed images of reality, the subject remains ultimately empty. A drive is not an instinct, but its representative in the psyche, like a delegate sent to take its place. Lacan insists that the drive is not to be understood as the pressure of a need, such as hunger or thirst. Nor is it the incursion into the mind of the real, living organism (1979: 164). But the real of the organism as lost to the subject remains the condition of the existence of the drive. ‘The real . . . is the mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the unconscious’ (1998: 131). 50-51