Category: desire

antigone

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

Zeuxis wanted to look behind the veil of the paint that constituted his rival’s picture. The psychoanalytic subject longs to look behind the veil of the signifier, but what it seeks there is not so much the forgotten, repressed real, not that part of itself, or its continuity with the world, cut off by the symbolic and lost. Instead, it looks for the object and cause of its own desire, an identifiable something that would fill the gap created by the loss of the real. This object that motivates and perpetuates desire took on increasing importance for Lacan. In Seminar 7 in 1959– 60, he named it the Thing (das Ding); later, the Thing disappeared, to be remodelled as the objet a. 45

We need to go back a bit. For much of his life Freud insisted that the unconscious motor force of all human life was sexual. But during and after the First World War, his work begins to demonstrate a mounting conviction that there must be another drive that presses towards death. How else to account for the sustained carnage of that extraordinary and unheralded episode of history? Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920, begins by proposing an antithesis between the life-affirming sexual drive towards pleasure and, in contrast, the death drive that seeks inertia for the organism, but may equally be projected outwards by the subject as aggression against others. As Freud’s argument here unfolds, however, the two principles refuse to stay apart. On the one hand, there often seems to be an element of aggression in the sexual act; on the other, the pleasure principle too seeks release from tension, and so shares the aim of the death drive. Do they, then, support rather than oppose each other? Jacques Derrida has brilliantly deconstructed the opposition between the two (1987a), in this instance ably supported by Freud himself, who concluded his book with disarming honesty by admitting that he was not satisfied with a theory that remained purely speculative. 45

Beginning where Freud had left off, but going back to take account of a passage from ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, published five years earlier (Freud 1984: 136– 8), Lacan condensed the two drives into one. His rereading of Freud acknowledges only one drive, and it is both life-giving and deadly. Seminar 7 attends primarily to the quest for pleasure, which Lacan locates on the side of the signifier. Love is allied with pleasure, a form of sublimation, separable from desire itself. But Lacan also brings pleasure together with death here in his account of tragedy. Where Freud roots his theory in the story of Oedipus, Lacan (as a child of Freud?), defies his phallocentric reputation and takes as his heroic protagonist Antigone, daughter of Oedipus and offspring, therefore, of an incestuous marriage. On the basis of the organic bond with her brother, Antigone is impelled to bury him against Creon’s law, and to confront death as the inevitable punishment for her deed. Lacan sees Antigone as heroic because, like Marvell’s lovers, she assumes her fate, her Até, ‘atrocious’ though it is. For Lacan, she represents human sovereignty in the face of death: 46

“Antigone appears as autonomos, as a pure and simple relationship of the human being to that of which he miraculously happens to be the bearer, namely, the signifying cut that confers on him the indomitable power of being what he is in the face of everything that may oppose him.” (1992: 282)

Rather than languish as the victims of incompleteness that the signifier makes us, we are enabled by the same signifier to desire not to remain at its mercy. We can, in other words, want not to be. …  Antigone, in Lacan’s account, just as defiantly precipitates her own death. It is because she loves her brother that she ‘pushes to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such. She incarnates that desire’ (1992: 282).

Lacan’s death drive bears very little resemblance to Freud’s, which depends on the thesis that the organism prefers stasis, or inertia. 46 We do not seek annihilation, Lacan says, for the sake of restoring equilibrium. But he does draw on Freud’s proposal that the organism is driven to die at its own time and in its own way (Freud 1984: 311– 12). In Lacan the death drive operates in the speaking being, at the level of the signifier, and seeks what he calls ‘the second death’.

This is not just physical extinction (the first death), which might take place at any time, by accident. Instead, the second death entails the full recognition of what we are, which is to say, of course, what we are not: not complete, not knowing, not immortal. The tragic hero acts on this understanding, assumes the destiny of a being-for-death and, when the time comes, willingly accedes to the state of non-being that is the outcome of the human condition.

At this stage of Lacan’s work the object of the drive is identified as the Thing. An archaic, maternal, forbidden and impossible object of desire, the Thing is ‘both living and dead’ (1992: 300), at once life-giving and deadly. Lacan’s name for it is partly ironic, since no such object exists in the real; at the same time, there is the suggestion of a pun in French on la Chose and the cause of desire that we attribute to the Thing. The Thing is ‘that which in the real, the primordial real, I will say, suffers from the signifier’ and ‘presents itself’ to the analyst in the gap produced by the signifying cut (1992: 118). Constructed retroactively to occupy the space of pure loss that is left by the erasure of the real, the Thing marks the place where the real was, constitutes itself as filling the emptiness that resides there for the speaking being. Subsequently the object of the drive is renamed by the even more evasive term, objet a, and located more firmly at the level of demand. Lacan also calls it the petit a, to differentiate the little ‘a’ from the Autre, the big Other, which is language itself. Little Ernst’s wooden reel offers an example of the objet a.

real

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

According to Lacan’s version of Freud, social reality offers gratifications, including sexual gratifications. But because language is irreducibly Other than the organism that we also are, the satisfactions available to the speaking being never quite match the wants they are intended to meet. When the little human animal becomes a symbolizing subject, something is left out of what language permits it to say. Its demands, in other words, belong to the alien language, not to the organism, and the gap between the two constitutes the location of unconscious desire. Desire, then, subsists in ways that are not culturally scripted, not the result of habit or the repetition of speech acts. Desire, unfortunately for us, is never quite ‘performed’ in our speech acts, but continues to make its disruptive presence felt in them for that very reason.13

Psychoanalysis sees human beings as driven by determinations that bear a more complex relation to culture.The drives are psychic representatives of instincts. They thus participate in both culture and the real. The ‘person’ in psychoanalysis does not consist of ideas that materialize a body, and still less a mind and a body. Instead, we are speaking beings, divided between a real organism that inhabits an organic world and a subject that makes demands in symbols so irreducibly Other that they leave in place a memory of loss, which continues to insist as unconscious desire. From this perspective, the real, culture’s difference, without which the term has no meaning, is that silent or silenced exteriority which is also inside us, and which we cannot symbolize, delimit, specify or know, even when we can name it ‘the real’. That term invests it with a substantial but remarkably indeterminate character. We shall, however, revert to the real in the end, in death. Death doesn’t do fiction, but eliminates the body and the speaking subject, with all it thinks it knows. Death puts an end to the cultural game for each of us. The real is not nature, the terrain that Western science has set out since the seventeenth century to map and master, … Nor is the real a fact – of the kind bluff common sense might invoke to crush speculation. Still less is it the truth, a foundation on which to base new laws or dogmas, or an alternative reality with which to contrast appearances. On the contrary, the real is a question, not an answer. 14

Nor is the real a fact – of the kind bluff common sense might invoke to crush speculation. Still less is it the truth, a foundation on which to base new laws or dogmas, or an alternative reality with which to contrast appearances. On the contrary, the real is a question, not an answer.

Though it exists as a difference, there is no meaning in the real. Indifferent to description, it exceeds representation and brings language to an impasse. If we experience it, we do so as a gap, or alternatively as a limit, the point at which culture fails us. The real is what our knowledge, individually or collectively, both must and cannot accommodate. 14

Kojève negativity being

Negativity is pure nothingness: it is not, it does not exist, it does not appear. It is only as negation of Identity — that is, as Difference. … Negativity is real freedom which realizes itself and manifests or reveals itself as action.  … Man as Man is not given Being, but creative Action.  To be sure, Man is also given-Being and Nature: he also exists “in himself,” as animals and things exist. But it is only in an by Action that he is specifically human, and that he exists and appears as such —that is— as Being-for-itself … And by acting, he realizes and manifests Negativity or his Difference from natural given Being. 221-222

No animal commits suicide out of simple shame or pure vanity … no animal risks its life to capture or recapture a flag, to win officer’s stripes, or tobe decorated; animals never have bloody fights for pure prestige, for which the only reward is the resulting glory and which can be explained neither by the instinct of preservation (defense of life or search for food) nor by that of reproduction; no animal has ever fought a duel to pay back an insult that harmed noen of its vital interests, juist as no female has died “defending her honor” against a male. Therefore it is by negating acts of htis kind that Man realizes and manifests his freedom—that is, of Humanity— in the natural World: Work is another. …

In Hegel, Work “appears” for the first time in Nature in the form of slavish work imposed by the first Master on his first Slave (who submitted to him, moreover, voluntarily, since he could have escaped from slavery and work by accepting death in combat or by killing himself after his defeat).

Kojève slave work

The purely warlike attitude of the Master does not vary throughout the centruies, and therefore it cannot engender a historical change. Without the Slave’s Work, the “first” Fight would be reproduced indefinitely: hence nothing would change in Man, through Man, for Man; the World would remain identical to itself, it would be Nature and not a human historical World. 51

Quite different is the situation created by Work. Man who works transforms given Nature. Hence, if he repeats his act, he repeats it in different conditions, and thus his act itself will be different. After making the first ax, man can use it to make a second one, which, by that very fact, will be another, a better ax. Production transforms the means of production; the modification of means simplifies production; and so on. Where there is Work, then, there is necessarily change, progress, historical evolution. 51

And since it was he (the Slave rt) who changed the World, it is he who changes himself, whereas the Master changes only through the Slave.

Therefore, the historical process, the historical becoming of the human being, is the product of the working Slave and not of the warlike Master. To be sure, without the Master, there would have been no History; but only because without him there would have been no Slave and hence no Work. 52

Therefore … thanks to his Work, the Slave can change and become other than he is, that is, he can —finally— cease to be a Slave. Work is Bildung, in the double meaning of the word: on the one hand, it forms, transforms the World, humanizes it by making it more adapted to Man; on the other, it transforms, forms, educates man, it humanizes him by bringing him into greater conformity with the idea that he has of himself, an idea that —in the beginning— is only an abstract idea, an ideal.  If then, at the start, in the given World the Slave had a fearful “nature” and had to submit to the Master, to the strong man, it does not mean that this will always be the case.

Thanks to his work, he can become other; and, thanks to his work, the World can become other. And this is what actually took place, as universal history and, finally, the French Revolution and Napoleon show. 52

Man is not a Being that is: he is a Nothingness that nihilates through the negation of Being.

Kojève desire for recognition the master

The man who desires a thing humanly acts not so much to possess the thing as to make another recognize his right … to that thing. 40

And Hegel says that the being that is incapable of putting its life in danger in order to attain ends that are not immediately vital —i.e. the being that cannot risk its life in a Fight for Recognition, in a fight for pure prestige —is not a truly human being. 41

Therefore, human, historical, self-conscious existence is possible only where there are, or —at least— where there have been, bloody fights, wars for prestige.  And thus it was sounds of one of these Fights that Hegel heard while finishing his Phenomenology, in which he became conscious of himself by answering his question “What am I?”  41

The Master is the man who went all the way in a Fight for prestige, who risked his life in order to be recognized in his absolute superiority by another man. That is, to his real, natural biological life he preferred something ideal, spiritual, nonbiological: …45

It was to become Master, to be Master that he risked his life, and not to live a life of pleasure.  Now, what he wanted by engaging in the fight was to be recognized by another — that is, by someone other than himself but who is like him, by another man.  But in fact, at the end of the Fight, he is recognized only by a Slave.  To be a man, he wanted to be recognized by another man.  BUt if to be a man is to be Master, the Slave is not a man, and to be recognized by a Slave is not to be recognized by a man. He would have to be recognized by another Master.  But his is impossible, since  —by definition— the Master prefers death to slavish recognition of another’s superiority.  In short, the Master never succeeds in realizing his end, the end for which he risks his very life.  the Master can be satisfied only in and by death, his death or the death of his adversary.  … Now, is it worthwhile to risk one’s life in order to know that one is recognized by a Slave? Obviously not.  And that is why, to the extent that the Master is not made brutish by his pleasure and enjoyment, when he takes account of what his true end and the motive of his actions —i.e., his warlike actions— are, he will not, he will never be befriedigt, satisfied by what is, by what he is.

In other words, Master is an existential impasse. 46

Kojève Hegel desire

Generally speaking to understand Napoleon is to understand him in relation to the whole of anterior historical evolution , to understand the whole of universal history. 34

Before analyzing the “I think,” before proceeding to the Kantian theory of knowledge —i.e., of the relation between the (conscious) subject and the (conceived) object, one must ask what this subject is that is revealed in and by the I of “I think.”  One must ask when, why, and how man is led to say “I… .” 36

Indeed, we all know that the man who attentively contemplates a thing, who wants to see it as it is without changing anything, is “absorbed,” so to speak, by this contemplation— that is, by this thing, the less he is conscious of himself.  he may perhaps talk about the thing, but he will never talk about himself; in his discourse, the word “I” will not occur.

For this word to appear, something other than purely passive contemplation, which only reveals Being, must also be present. And this other thing, according to Hegel, is Desire, Begierde, of which he speaks in the beginning of Chapter IV. 37

Therefore, to speak generally: if the true (absolute) philosophy, unlike Kantian and pre-Kantian philosophy, is not a philosophy of Consciousness, but rather a philosophy of Self-Consciousness, a philosophy conscious of itself, taking account of itself, justifying itself, knowing itself to be absolute and revealed by itself to itself as such, then the Philosopher must —Man must— in the very foundation of his being not only be passive and positive contemplation, but also be active and negating Desire.  Now, if he is to be so, he cannot be a Being that is, that is eternally identical to itself, that is self-sufficient.  Man must be an emptiness, a nothingness, which is not a pure nothingness, (reines Nichts), but something that is to the extent that it annihilates Being, in order to realize itself at the expense of Being and to nihilate in being.  Man is negating Action, which transforms given Being and, by transforming it, transforms itself. 38

… the Animal does nto really transcend itself as given —i.e., as body; it does not rise above itself in order to come back toward itself; it has no distance with respect to itself in order to contemplate itself.

For Self-Consciousness to exist, for philosophy to exist, there must be transcendence of self with respect to self as given. 39

And this is possible, according to Hegel, only if Desire is directed not toward a given being, but toward a nonbeing. To desire Being is to fill oneself with this given Being, to enslave oneself to it. … Desire must be directged toward a nonbeing —that is, toward another Desire, another greedy emptiness, another I.  For Desire is absence of Being, … and not a Being that is.

Alexandre Kojève desire

From Introduction to the Reading of Hegel ed. Allan Bloom Trans. James H. Nichols Jr. New York: Basic Books. 1969. Based on his lectures given in 1933-1939. Published in French under the title Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel 1947.

🙂 In contemplation man is lost in the object, with her head in the clouds, and can only be brought back by Desire: from a state of passive quietude, Desire dis-quiets him and moves him to action.  Born of Desire, action tends to satisfy it, and can do so only by the “negation,” the destruction, or at least the transformation, of the desired object ..” 4

As Desire humans are transformed from animals into an “I” “radically opposed to, the non-I.  The (human) I is the I of a Desire or of Desire. 4

For a man to be truly human, for him to be essentially and really different from an animal, his human Desire must actually win out over his animal Desire. … All the Desires of an animal are in the final analysis a function of its desire to preserve its life.  Human Desire, therefore, must win out over this desire for preservation. In other words, man’s humanity “comes to light” only if he risks his (animal) life for the sake of his human Desire. It is in and by this risk that the human reality is created and revealed as reality; it is in and by this risk that it “comes to light,” i.e., is shown, demonstrated, verified, and gives proofs of being essentially different from the animal, natural reality. And that is why to speak of the “origin” of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of the risk of life (for an essentially nonvital end). 7

In Lacanese, animal desire is merely ‘demand’  and humans differ by seeking, Kojève adds “to desire the Desire of another … I want him to “recognize” my value as his value.  I want him to “recognize” me as an autonomous value.

In other words … the Desire that generates Self-Consciousness, the  human reality — is, finally, a function of the desire for “recognition.” … to speak of the “origin” of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight to the death for “recognition.” 7

Therefore the human being can be formed only if at least two of these Desires confront one another. Each of the two beings endowed with such a Desire is ready to go all the way in pursuit of its satisfaction; that is, is ready to risk its life —and, consequently, to put the life of the other in danger— in order to be “recognized” by the other, … accordingly, their meeting can only be a fight to the death. And it is only in and by such a fight that the human reality is begotten, formed, realized, and revealed to itself and to others. 7-8

Kojève da Slave

But the Slave, for his part, recognizes the Master in his human dignity and reality,  and the Slave behaves accordingly.  The Master’s “certainty” is therefore not purely subjective and “immediate,” but objectivized and “mediated” by another’s, the Slave’s, recognition.  While the Slave still remains an “immediate,” natural, “bestial” being, the Master — as a result of his fight— is already human, “mediated.”

The relation between Master and Slave, therefore, is not recognition properly so-called. … this recognition is one-sided, for he (the Master rt) does not recognize in turn the Slave’s human reality and dignity.  Hence, he is recognized by someone whom he does not recognize.  And this is what is insufficient —and tragic— in his situation. The Master has fought and risked his life for a recognition without value for him.  For he can be satisfied only by recognition from one whom he recognizes as worthy of recognizing him.  … The Master, therefore, was on the wrong track. After the fight that made him a Master, he is not what he wanted to be in starting that fight: a man recognized by another man.  Therefore: if man can be satisfied only by recognition, the man who behaves as a Master will never be satisfied. 20

If idle Mastery is an impasse, laborious Slavery, in contrast, is the source of all human, social, historical progress.  history is the history of the working Slave. The Slave, in transforming the given World by his work, transcends the given and what is given by that given in himself; hence, he goes beyond himself, and also goes beyond the Master who is tied to the given which, not working, he leaves intact.

For only in an by work does man finally become aware of the significance, the value, and the necessity of his experience of fearing absolute power, incarnated form him in the Master.

The produce of work is the worker’s production.  It is the realization of his project, of his idea; hence, it is he that is realized in and by this product, and consequently he contemplates himself when he contemplates it.  Now, this artificial product is at the same time just as “autonomous,” just as objective, just as independent of man, as is the natural thing. Therefore, it is by work, and only by work, that man realizes himself objectively as man.

Only after producing an artificial object is man himself really and objectively more than and different from a natural being; and only in this real and objective product does he become truly conscious of his subjective human reality. 25

Work, then, is what “forms-or-educates” man beyond the animal.  The “formed-or-educated” man, the completed man who is satisfied by his completion, is hence necessarily not Master but Slave; or, at least, he who passed through Slavery.  25

It is by work in the Master’s service performed in terror that the Slave frees himself from the terror that enslaved him to the Master. 26

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 4

Sinthome

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

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

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

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

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

Critique of Judith Butler, Will Connolly, Simon Critchley

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

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

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

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 3

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

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

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

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

The fantasmatic ideal of harmony is still with us

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

Radical Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 1

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

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

Mirror Stage

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

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

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

Lack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signifier and Signified

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

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

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

Loss of the Signified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here we need to introduce lack.

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

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

From Identity to Identification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the objective sphere is also lacking, how?

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

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

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

Lack in the Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fantasy veils the lack in the Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

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