interpellation – objet (a)

Zupančič review of McGowan

“Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets” by Todd McGowan Reviewed by Alenka Zupančič

Continental Thought and Theory. Volume 1 | Issue 3: Feminism 757-761 | ISSN: 2463-333X http://ctt.canterbury.ac.nz

Relying on some fundamental theses of psychoanalytic (Freudian and Lacanian) theory, McGowan proposes the following argument: the signifying structure is consubstantial with a loss/lack which induces and forms the logic of desire: no object can fully satisfy the latter, because they all function as stand-ins for the impossible lost object.

Here’s a McGowan quote from his article on Trump and the movie Citizen Kane

Entry into language – the subjection to the signifier – produces a lacking subject,

Entry into language – the subjection to the signifier – produces a lacking subject, a subject with desires that cannot be realized. These desires provide satisfaction through their non-realization rather than their realization, through the repetition of failure that characterizes desire.

Whenever the subject finds a particular object that promises to fulfill its desire, it quickly moves on to another object. No object proves fully satisfying because no object can be the object – the object that embodies what the subject feels that it has lost. In the guise of a search for a variety of empirical objects, the subject seeks out a non-existent lost object that would provide it the ultimate satisfaction.

The failure of desire is the result of the type of object that desire hinges on. It is not a present object but an absent one. Even though one cannot see an absence, one can nonetheless recognize the satisfaction that derives from what isn’t there. This is what psychoanalysis unlocks but what capitalist subjectivity forces us to disavow because it would shatter the illusion that gives the commodity its allure.

The defining trauma for subjectivity is its inability to separate lack from excess. Our capacity for excessive enjoyment is inextricably linked to our status as lacking subjects.

Next 4 years under Biden

The Election Is Over. Here’s a Vision From the Left for the Next Four Years.
Organizers and thinkers on where we are in the major fights of our moment—from prison abolition to climate justice and the housing crisis—and where we go next. Melissa Gira Grant, Nick Martin, Katie McDonough, J.C. Pan

We have a new president, but little else has changed in terms of the work ahead. A Biden administration may be more vulnerable to pressure from the left, but its positions on climate disaster, police and private right-wing violence, mass precarity and poverty, and other compounding crises of our moment will do little to pull us out of the fire. Our elite institutions are largely incapable of responding to the urgency of the moment or the left movements rising to meet it.

McGowan

On ‘symbolic disinvestment’ as a way to resist the obscene excess of capitalism

Freedom through Conversion

Rupture with my given identity. Not all conversions are the same. No one is self-identical. But if no-one converts, this lack of self-identity never becomes evident, this act of conversion attests to this self-division and makes it explicit, and this freedom that self-division gives you.

Self-division makes us free. Conversion makes self-division or division of subject apparent.

Leap into some new form of satisfaction. Without security that this new form of authority will ground yourself like the old authority it is a Leap Of Faith. The problem is most conversions, are conversions into new forms of certainty. We convert into something that will give us even a more secure form that the old identity.

Radical Openness. Michael Clayton the movie. As a example of conversion, it leaves him a blank slate. It doesn’t give him a new sense of security, sense of wholeness.

Problem with conversion: Looking for a new form of satisfaction that will fill in their lack. Overcome their self-division. Richard Dawkins is one of the most renowned atheists in the world. Even though in that conversion to atheism, there is a way to recoup self-division, in security, he can fill in the lack with his belief in atheism. Atheism will increase one’s satisfaction, will give the person more marvels to look at in the world. Whole vistas of possibility will open up. Conversion becomes a more satisfying form of satisfaction, one without any LACK at all.

Zupančič reviews McGowan

Alenka Zupančič reviews Todd McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, 2016 Columbia University Press

“With the onset of capitalism, the speaking being enters a system that promises relief from the absence that inheres within the basic structure of signification.”

According to McGowan this promise (whichs also the promise of a better future) is an essential feature of capitalism. It is also what m akes critique of it very difficult: for how are we to criticize capitalism without (at least implicitly) proposing a better (alternative) future? Yet the moment we do this, we get entrapped into the logic of capital: “The task is thus that of freeing critique from the promise of a better future.”

Interestingly, German philosopher Frank Ruda dedicates his recently published book Abolishing Freedom almost entirely to a very similar task, formulated by Ruda in slightly different terms, namely as an attack on the concept of freedom as potentiality (to be realized). Freedom as possibility, as potentiality, as capacity to do something (exemplified in the liberal capitalist freedom of choice), argues Ruda, has become a signifier of oppression and functions as the best antidote to actual freedom.

Once the mode of possibility enters the game and structures it, one should resist understanding or presenting the stakes simply in terms of possibility versus actuality (actual action), that is, in terms of the opposition between a possibility and its realization.

For this is precisely how freedom as oppression works in practice. It works following the logic of the superego, most concisely defined by Žižek as the reversal of the Kantian “you must, therefore you can” into “you can, therefore you must.”

Possibilities are here to be taken, realized, by all means an at any price: You can do it, therefore you must!

The culture (and economy) of possibilities is not suffocating simply because there are so many possibilities, but because we are supposed not to miss out on any of them. A person who just sits at home, relishing in the idea of all the possibilities and opportunities capitalism has to offer and doing nothing to realize them is not the kind of person this system needs.

What we are expected to do is to realize as many possibilities as possible (to act), but never to question the framework of these possibilities as possibilities. Which is precisely where “actual” freedom has to be situated: not simply in the actual realisation of possibilities, but in “unscrewing” the very framework which is based on the idea of freedom as possibility to be (yet) realized.

Ruda proposes to do this by advocating what he calls “comic fatalism.” He formulates several slogans of such fatalism: they suggest that a way out of this freedom-as-oppression is to act as if there were no future

“Act as if the apocalypse has already happened!”
“Act as if you were dead!”
“Act as if everything were always already lost!”

There is thus an interesting connection between the way in which both McGowan and Ruda see the dismantling of the promise/potentiality (set in the future) as a crucial step in undermining the ideological and libidinal power of capitalism.

This proximity goes very far, for the way in which McGowan proposes to go about this undermining could actually be formulated in a single maxim coined upon Ruda’s examples:

“Act as if you were already satisfied!”

As he notes explicitly, McGowan sees the most important novelty of his approach to the critique of capitalism in conceiving the core of the problem not in terms of the injustice or inequality (following Marx), nor in terms of repression (following the Frankfurt school) – including the Foucauldian reversal of the “repressive hypothesis” – , but it terms of satisfaction.

The promise of a better future is the promise of a future (full) satisfaction which drives our desire. Yet what we don’t see is that the repetition of the failure to find full satisfaction is precisely the real s ource of satisfaction. This real source of satisfaction is traumatic in its nature, and capitalism – with both its economic and ideological structuring – allows this traumatic source to remain unconscious. It provides a gigantic armature for the metonymy of our desire, and hence protects us against confronting the trauma of loss as constitutive (and not empirical).

The ultimate commodity sold (to us) by capitalism is not this or that commodity, but its dissatisfaction as such: “No matter how attractive it appears, there is no commodity that holds the appeal of a lasting dissatisfaction.”

Dissatisfaction, and the repetition of the failure to find full satisfaction is the very source of satisfaction that accompanies capitalism. It is the reason what we cling to it so tightly.

By accepting the psychic or psychoanalytic perspective adopted by McGowan there nevertheless remains one question that concerns what we may call “material conditions of the reproduction of our psyche”. This question is intrinsic to the psychoanalytic theory itself.

The unconscious is out there
Jacques Lacan

Lacan is famous for his statement that “the unconscious is out there”, which implies that we can perhaps also change it only out there. Commodity functions as it does because of our attitude to it, but such an attitude is already part of the commodity as its objective functioning, and this functioning continues pretty much independently of what we think and know about the object in the first instance.

Surveillance Capitalism

Shoshana Zuboff

In 2017, a leaked Facebook document acquired by The Australian exposed the corporation’s interest in applying “psychological insights” from “internal Facebook data” to modify user behavior. The targets were 6.4 million young Australians and New Zealanders. “By monitoring posts, pictures, interactions and internet activity in real time,” the executives wrote, “Facebook can work out when young people feel ‘stressed,’ ‘defeated,’ ‘overwhelmed,’ ‘anxious,’ ‘nervous,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘silly,’ ‘useless’ and a ‘failure.’” This depth of information, they explained, allows Facebook to pinpoint the time frame during which a young person needs a “confidence boost” and is most vulnerable to a specific configuration of subliminal cues and triggers. The data are then used to match each emotional phase with appropriate ad messaging for the maximum probability of guaranteed sales.

Zupančič interview What is a subject?

CRISIS & CRITIQUE Interview by Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda
VOLUME 6 / ISSUE 1 pp. 435 – 453.

Zupančič, A. (2019, April 2). Philosophy or Psychoanalysis? Yes Please! Crisis & Critique. 6(1) 435-453.

Question: Why psychoanalysis?

Zupančič: At the moment when philosophy was just about ready to abandon some of its key central notions as belonging to its own metaphysical past, from which it was eager to escape, along came Lacan, and taught us an invaluable lesson: it is not these notions themselves that are problematic; what can be problematic in some ways of doing philosophy is the disavowal or effacement of the inherent contradiction, even antagonism, that these notions imply, and are part of. That is why, by simply abandoning these notions (like subject, truth, the real…), we are abandoning the battlefield, rather than winning any significant battles. This conviction and insistence is also what makes the so-called “Lacanian philosophy” stand out in the general landscape of postmodern philosophy.

Question: Some claim that psychoanalysis, especially following Lacan, is first and foremost a clinical practice and should not be considered to be a “theoretical” enterprise. In this sense it would not be a science (and if we are not mistaken, Lacan famously remarked that the subject of psychoanalysis is the subject of modern science, but not that psychoanalysis is a science). What is your view on this?

I believe that genuine psychoanalytic concepts are not derivatives of the clinic, but kind of “comprise” or contain the clinic, an element of the clinical, in themselves. I believe it is possible to work with these concepts in a very productive way (that is a way that allows for something interesting and new to emerge) even if you are not a clinician. But you need to have an ear, a sensibility for that clinical element, for that bit of the real comprised in these concepts. Of this I’m sure. Not everybody who works with psychoanalytic theory has it, but – and this is an important “but” – not everybody who practices analysis has it either.

One of the predominant ways or strategies with which psychoanalysts today aim at preserving their “scientific” standing, is by trying to disentangle themselves from philosophy (or theory), returning as it were to pure clinic. I think this is a very problematic move.

The Clinic should not be considered as a kind of holy grail providing the practitioners with automatic superiority when it comes to working theoretically, with psychoanalytic concepts.

There are, perhaps even increasingly so, attacks coming from the clinical side against “mere theorists” who are condemned for being engaged in pure sophistry, operating on a purely conceptual level and hence depriving psychoanalysis of its radical edge, of its real. Yes, there are many poor, self-serving or simply not inspiring texts around, leaning strongly – reference-wise – on psychoanalytic theory, and producing nothing remarkable. But interestingly, they are not the main targets of these attacks. No, the main targets are rather people whose “theorizing” has effects, impact, and makes waves (outside the purely academic territories). They are accused of playing a purely self-serving, sterile game. I see this as profoundly symptomatic. For we have to ask: when was the last time that a genuinely new concept, with possibly universal impact, came from the side of the accusers, that is, from the clinical side? There is an obvious difficulty there, and it is certainly not “theoretical psychoanalysts” that are the cause of it, for there is no shortage of practicing analysts around, compared to, say, Freud’s time. This kind of confrontation, opposition between philosophy (or theory) and clinic is in my view a very unproductive one. (436)

Which brings us back to your inaugural question: psychoanalysis is not a science, or “scientific” in the usual sense of this term, because it insists on a dimension of truth which is irreducible to “accuracy” or to simple opposition true/false.

At the same time the whole point of Lacan is that this insistence doesn’t simply make it unscientific (unverifiable, without any firm criteria…), but calls for a different kind of formalization and situates psychoanalysis in a singular position in the context of science. And here philosophy, which is also not a science in the usual sense of the term, can and should be its ally, even partner. They are obviously not the same, but their often very critical
dialogue shouldn’t obfuscate the fact that there are also “sisters in arms”.

My claim is that the Freudian notion of sexuality is above all a concept, a conceptual invention, and not simply a name for certain empirical “activities” that exist out there and that Freud refers to when talking about sexuality.

As such, this concept is also genuinely “philosophical”. It links together, in a complex and most interesting way, language and the drives, it compels us to think a singular ontological form of negativity, to reconsider the simplistic human/animal divide, and so on … (438)

QUESTION: There is a widespread return of ontology, ontologies even, after a long period in which ontological claims were almost always bracketed as metaphysical or replaced by a straightforwardly pragmatist approach. But is this proliferation of ontologies symptomatic of something else? We read your most recent work as an attempt to offer, if not answer, this question. We are saying this because your reading of the concept of sexuality has a bearing on the most fundamental ontological concepts. Yet, at the same time, you do not simply suggest to identify the psychoanalytic account of sexuality with ontology – so that psychoanalysis would simply be the newest name of ontology. Rather in psychoanalysis, if we are not mistaken, we can find an account of being and its impasses and of subjectivity and its impasses. Both are systematically interlaced (in such a way that subjectivity with its impasses has something to do with being and its impasses). And this conceptual knot has an impact on our very understanding: not only of sexuality’s ontological import, but also on our understanding of ontology itself. Could you help us disentangle some bits of this knot?

There is this rather bafflingly simplifying claim according to which Kant and the “transcendental turn” to epistemology was just a big mistake, error, diversion — which we have to dismiss and “return” to ontology proper, to talking about things as they are in themselves. Kant’s transcendental turn was an answer to a real impasse of philosophical ontology. We can agree that his answer is perhaps not the ultimate, or philosophically, the only viable answer, but this does not mean that the impasse or difficulty that it addresses was not real and that we can pretend it doesn’t exist. The attempt to “return to” the idea of sexuality as a subject of ontological investigation is rooted in my conviction that psychoanalysis and its singular concept of the subject are of great pertinence for the impasse of ontology that Kant was tackling. So the claim is not simply that sexuality is important and should be taken seriously; in a sense, it is spectacularly more ambitious. The claim is that the Freudo-Lacanian theory of sexuality, and of its inherent relation to the unconscious, dislocates and transposes the philosophical question of ontology and its impasse in a most interesting way. I’m not interested in sexuality as a case of “local ontology,” but as possibly providing some key conceptual elements for the ontological interrogation as such. (439)

QUESTION: So what is sex?

We usually talk about or invoke sex as if we knew exactly what we are talking about, yet we don’t. And the book is rather an answer to the question why this is so. One of the fundamental claims of my book is that there is something about sexuality that is inherently problematic, “impossible”, and is not such simply because of external obstacles and prohibitions. What we have been witnessing over more than half a century has been a systematic obliteration, effacement, repression of this negativity inherent to sexuality – and not simply repression of sexuality. Freud did not discover sexuality, he discovered its problem, its negative core, and the role of this core in the proliferation of the sexual. Sexuality has been, and still is, systematically reduced, yes, reduced, to a self-evident phenomenon consisting simply of some positive features, and problematic only because caught in the standard ideological warfare: shall we “liberally” show and admit everything, or “conservatively” hide and prohibit most of it? But show or prohibit what exactly, what is this “it” that we try to regulate when we regulate sexuality? This is what the title of my book tries to ask: What IS this sex that we are talking about? Is it really there, anywhere, as a simply
positive entity to be regulated in this or that way? No, it is not. And this is precisely why we are “obsessed” with it, in one way or another, also when
we want to get rid of it altogether. 440

The question orientating the book was not simply what kind of being is sex, or sexuality, but pointed in a different direction. Sex is neither simply being, nor a quality or a coloring of being. It is a paradoxical entity that defies ontology as “thought of being qua being”, without falling outside ontological interrogation. It is something that takes place (“appears”) at the point of its own impossibility and/or contradiction.

So the question is not: WHAT is sex?, but rather: What IS sex? However, the two questions are not unrelated, and this is probably the most daring philosophical proposition of the book. Namely, that sexuality is the point of a short circuit between ontology and epistemology.

If there is a limit to what I can know, what is the status of this limit? Does it only tell us something about our subjective limitations on account of which we can never fully grasp being such as it is in itself? Or is there a constellation in which this not-knowing possibly tells us something about being itself, its own “lapse of being”? There is, I believe; it is the constellation that Freud conceptualized under the name of the unconscious. Sexuality is not simply the content of the unconscious, understood as a container of repressed thoughts. The relationship between sex and the unconscious is not that between a content and its container. Or that between some primary, raw being, and repression (and other operations) performed on it. The unconscious is a thought process, and it is “sexualized” from within, so to say. The unconscious is not sexual because of the dirty thoughts it may contain or hide, but because of how it works. If I keep emphasizing that I’m interested in the psychoanalytical concept of sexuality, and not simply in sexuality, it is because of the fundamental link between sexuality and the unconscious discovered by Freud. Sexuality enters the Freudian perspective strictly speaking only in so far as it is “unconscious sexuality”. Yet “unconscious sexuality” does not simply mean that we are not aware of it, while it constitutes a hidden truth of most of our actions. Unconsciousness does not mean the opposite of consciousness, it refers to an active and ongoing process, the work of censorship, substitution, condensation…, and this work is itself “sexual”, implied in desire, intrinsic to sexuality, rather than simply performed in relation to it. (440)

Phallus is not a signifier because men have it and masculinity is naturally favored, but because women don’t have it, and this negativity, this non-immediacy, this gap, is constitutive for the signifying order.

Now, the question of sexual difference is that of how one relates to this signifier or, which is the same question, how does one handle castration, relate to it. Men are identified as those who venture to put their faith into the hands of this signifier, hence acknowledging symbolic castration (the signifier now represents them, operates on their behalf), with different degrees of how (un)conscious this acknowledgement actually is. There are many men who strongly repress the dimension of castration involved in their access to symbolic power, and believe that this power emanates directly from them, from some positivity of their being, and not from the minus that constitutes phallus as the signifier. The anatomy obviously plays a part in facilitating this “masculine” identification, but the latter still remains precisely that: an identification, and not a direct, immediate consequence of anatomy. One can be anatomically a man and this identification doesn’t take place. Not all subjects identify with the signifier (of castration) in this way, accept its representation of them, take the symbolic order at is face value, so to say. Those who do not, identify as “women”, and tend to expose the “nothing”, the gap at the very core of the signifier and of symbolic identifications.

This opens a really interesting perspective on psychoanalysis and feminism, which is often missed. It is not that women are not acknowledged, fully recognized by the symbolic, oppressed by it; no, to begin with, women are subjects who question the symbolic, women are the ones who, by their very positioning, do not fully “acknowledge” its order, who keep signaling its negative, not-fully-there dimension. This is what makes them women, and not simply an empirical absence of an organ. This is their strength – but also the reason for their social repression, the reason why they “need to be managed” or “put in their place”. But these are two different levels. If we don’t keep in mind the difference between these two levels, we risk to fall prey to versions of liberal feminism which loses sight of precisely the radical positioning of “women”, depriving this position of its inherent thrust to question the symbolic order and all kinds of circulating identities, replacing this thrust with the simpler demand to become part of this circulation, to be fully recognized by the given order.

Contingency is not the same as relativism. If all is relative, there is no contingency. Contingency means precisely that there is a heterogeneous, contingent element that strongly, absolutely decides the structure, the grammar of its necessity – it doesn’t mean that this element doesn’t really decide it, or that we are not dealing with necessity. To just abstractly assert and insist that the structure could have been also very different from what it is, is not enough. This stance also implies that we could have simply decided otherwise, and that this decision is in our power. But contingency is not in our power, by definition, otherwise it wouldn’t be contingency. Ignoring this leads to the watered-down, liberal version of freedom. Freedom understood as the freedom to choose, for instance between different, also sexual, identities. But this is bullshit, and has little to do with freedom, because it doesn’t even begin to touch the grammar of necessity which frames the choices that we have. Freedom is a matter of fighting, of struggle, not of choosing. Necessities can and do change, but not because they are not really necessities and merely matters of choice.

The sexual in psychoanalysis is a factor of radical disorientation, something that keeps bringing into question all our representations of the entity called “human being.” This is why it would also be a big mistake to consider that, in Freudian theory, the sexual is the ultimate horizon of the animal called “human,” a kind of anchor point of irreducible humanity in psychoanalytic theory; on the contrary, it is the operator of the inhuman, the operator of dehumanization.

And this is precisely what clears the ground for a possible theory of the subject (as developed by Lacan), in which the subject is something other than simply another name for an individual or a “person.”

What Freud calls the sexual is thus not that which makes us human in any received meaning of this term, it is rather that which makes us subjects, or perhaps more precisely, it is coextensive with the emergence of the subject.

So this subject is not the Althusserian subject of interpellation, emerging from “recognition”. But this is not simply to say that (the Lacanian) subject is directly an antidote for ideological interpellation. Things are a bit more complicated than that. I would almost be tempted to turn Althusser’s formula around. Not “ideology interpellates individuals into subjects”, but rather: ideology interpellates subjects into individuals with this or that identity. In some sense, ideology works like “identity politics”. By turning the Althusserian formula around I don’t mean to suggest that subject is a kind of neutral universal substrate on which ideology works, like “individuals” seem to be in Althusser’s formula.

The subject is – if you’d pardon my language – a universal fuck-up of a neutral substrate, it is a crack in this substrate. But this in itself is not what resists ideology, on the contrary, it is rather what makes its functioning possible, it is what offers it a grip. Subject as a crack, or as interrogation mark, is in a sense “responsible” for the ideological interpellation having a grip on us.

Only a subject will turn around, perplexed, upon hearing “Hey, you!” But this is not all. Precisely because the subject is not a neutral substrate to be molded into this or that ideological figure or shape, but a negativity, a crack, this crack is not simply eliminated when an ideological identification/recognition takes place, but becomes part of it.

It can be filled up, or screened off, but its structure is not exactly eliminated, because ideology is only efficient against its background. So not only is the subject in this sense a condition of ideology, it also constitutes its inner limit, its possible breaking point, its ceasing to function and losing its grip on us.

The subject, as negativity, keeps on working in all ideological structures, the latter are not simply monolithic and unassailable, but also fundamentally instable because of this ongoing work. Ideology is not something that we can resist (as subjects). This usually gets us no further than to a posture of ironical or cynical distance. It is not by “mastering” our relation to ideology that we are subjects, we are, or become, emancipatory subjects by a second identification which is only made possible within the ideological parallax: say by identifying with the underdog, by locating the gaps that demands and generate “positive” repression… In a word, the subject is both, the problem and the possible (emancipatory) solution.

The fact that to be a “woman” has always been a socially recognized sexual position, did little to protect women against harsh social discrimination (as well as physical mistreatment) based precisely on this “recognized” sexuality. Part of this discrimination, or the very way in which it was carried out, has always led through definitions (and images) of what exactly does it mean to be a woman.

So a recognized identity itself does not necessarily help. And the point is also not to fill in the identity of “woman” with the right content, but to empty it of all content. More precisely, to recognize its form itself, its negativity, as its only positive content. To be a woman is to be nothing. And this is good, this should be the feminist slogan. Obviously, nothing” is not used as an adjective here, describing a worth, it is used in the strong sense of the noun.

Emancipatory struggle never really works by way of enumerating a multiplicity of identities and then declaring and embracing them all equal (or the same). No, it works by mobilizing the absolute difference as means of universalization in an emancipatory struggle.

I strongly believe, perhaps against all contemporary odds, that the inherent and radical political edge of sexuality consists in how it compels us to think the difference. A difference that makes the difference.

As for #MeToo, it is a very significant movement, already and simply because it is a movement. But movements have a way of sometimes inhibiting their own power. #MeToo should not become about “joining the club” (of the victims), and about demanding that the Other (different social institutions and preventive measures) protect us against the villainy of power, but about women and all concerned being empowered to create social change, and to be its agents. Movements generate this power, and it is vital that one assumes it, which means leaving behind the identity of victimhood. And this necessarily implies engagement in broader social solidarity, recognizing the political edge of this struggle, and pursuing it. (450)

To eliminate passion from politics is to eliminate politics (in any other sense than simple management). And this is what’s happened. But it is crucial here to avoid a possible misunderstanding: I’m not saying that politics needs to make space for passions as well, and needs to involve them as well. This way of speaking already presupposes the wrong divide, an original distinction between politics and passion, their fundamental heterogeneity: as if politics were something completely exterior to passion, and would then let some passion in when needed, and in right dosages. One should rather start by dismantling the very idea that passions are by definition “private” and apolitical (because personal). No, passion is not a private thing! Even in the case of amorous passion, it concerns at least two, and has consequences in a wider social space of those involved. Politics, different kind of politics, are different articulations of a communal passion, of how we live together and how we would like to live together.

To allow for political passion, or politics as passion, does not mean to allow for people to freely engage in all kinds of hate speech as expression of their feelings. First, feelings and passion are not exactly the same thing, passion is something much more systematic, it allows for organization, thinking, strategy… When I say “passion” I also don’t mean frenzied gaze and saliva coming out of our mouth. What is political passion? It is the experience of being concerned by ways in which our life in common (as societies) takes place, and where it is going. We are all subjectively implied in this communal space, and it’s only logical to be passionate about it. (452)

Elif Shafik on CBC Ideas

Women in their own private space can be matriarchs of the house, how they navigate their way through patriarchy but the same time public space is very partriarchal

Authoritarian regimes first thing that is curbed is HUMOUR. Laugh at yourself, laugh at people holding positions of power. Once you lose that it indicates loss of democracy as well.

Nostalgia, political Imperial Nostalgia. come to power with liberal promises, but longer stay in power, they become more inward looking, authoritarian, illusions of a golden era that we have lost, lost it because of foreigners, US/THEM, etc.

Golden Imperial past, re-constructed, re-invented, symbols and rhetoric, posing with Ottoman soldiers, assumption that we were one big great empire, homogenous, but we were not, story of Ottoman empire changes
concubine in harem, slave, Armenian silversmith, Jewish miller, prostitute working in brothel, or shamam. Offical history wants only one history

Head scarf ban created backlash. resentment.

EMOTIONS
21:00 something is happening in the cultural sphere, a culture clash within every society, not between countries. People’s perceptions are determined/shaped by emotions. A fundamental fact is that we humans are emotional creatures, but in poly sci, emotions are not measurable data, quantitative data fails to capture what is happening right now, because what is happening right now can’t be captured in empirical data

Liberal Elite versus Real people
Who are not part of the ‘real people’ immigrants, race, class. Romanticization of the ‘real’ people is dangerous. the VOLK, real people, not corrupted. untainted by western ideology, resentment against intellectuals and educated.

Leaders of populist movement are elites, just as elitist as people they claim to criticize, Marie Le Pen, Nigel Farage, vested interests in business world and political establishment.

Little people, poor people and the ELITES. Duality re-cast for the 21st century.
Pareto: Italian sociologist, swing from liberal elites to republican elites. Liberal elites fail to understand nationalism, republican elites rise in nationalism, jingoism. 100 years later, we have forgotten this.

32:00 Sweden, there is a re-branding right-wing nationalists are calling themselves democrats

dolar beyond interpellation 1

Dolar, Mladen. “Beyond Interpellation” Qui Parle 6.2 (1993): 75-96.

But the famous formula of interpellation – “the ideology interpellates individuals into subjects” – implies a clean cut as well. There is a sudden and abrupt transition from an individual- a pre-ideological entity, a sort of materia prima — into the ideological subject, the only kind of subject there is for Althusser.

One becomes a subject by suddenly recognizing that one has always already been a subject: becoming a subject has always takes effect retroactively — it is based on a necessary illusion, an extrapolation, an illegitimate extension of a later state into the former stage. A leap — a moment of sudden emergence — occurs. 76

… there is a part of individual that cannot successfully pass into the subject, an element of “pre-ideological” and “presubjetive” materia prima that continues to haunt subjectivity once it is constitued as such. A part of external materiality that cannot be successfully integrated in the interior.

Interpellation was based on a happy transition from a pre-ideological state into ideology: successfully achieved it wipes out the traces of its origin and results in a belief in the autonomy and self-transparency of the subject. The subject is experienced as <em>causa sui</em> — in itself an inescapable illusion once the operation is completed.

How exactly would materiality entail subjectivation? Why would interpellation require materiality? One could say that materiality and subjectivity rule each other out: if I am (already) a subject, I am necessarily blinded in regard to materiality.

The psychoanalytic point of departure is the remainder produced by the operation; psychoanalysis does not deny the cut, it only adds a remainder. The clean cut is always unclean, it cannot produce the flawless interiority of an autonomous subject. The psychoanalytic subject is coextensive with that very flaw in the interior. (One could say that the psychoanalytic symptom, the starting point of analysis, is its most obvious manifestation). In short, the subject is precisely the failure to become the subject, — the psychoanalytic subject is the failure to become an Althusserian one.

For Althusser, the subject is what makes ideology work; for psychoanalysis, the subject emerges where ideology fails. The il1usion of autonomy may wel1 be necessary, but so is its failure; the cover-up never holds fast. The entire psychoanalytic apparatus starts from this point: different subjective structures that the psychoanalysis has discovered and described – neurosis (with its two faces of hysteria and obsession), psychosis, perversion — are just so many different ways to deal with that rest, with that impossibility to become the subject.

On the social level as well — on the level of discourse as a social bond — the four basic types of discourse pinpointed by Lacan are four different ways to tackle that remainder. Interpellation, on the other hand, is a way of avoiding it: it can explain its proper success, but not how and why it does not work.

death drive in the early middle late Lacan barred subject vs. subject positions

Žižek, Slavoj. “Zizek_TheLacanianReal_Television” The Symptom 9 Summer 2008.

That’s why the Stalinist victim is the perfect example of the difference between the sujet d’énoncé (subject of the statement) and the sujet d’énonciation (subject of the enunciating). The demand that the Party addresses to him is: “At this moment, the Party needs the process to consolidate the revolutionary gains, so be a good communist, do a last service to the Party and confess.”

Here we have the division of the subject in its purest form: the only way for the accused to confirm himself as a good communist at the level of the sujet d’énonciation, is to confess, i.e., to determine himself, at the level of the sujet d’énoncé, as a traitor.

Ernesto Laclau was perhaps right when he once remarked that it isn’t only Stalinism which is a language-phenomenon; it is already language itself which is a Stalinist phenomenon. 2

Here, however, we must carefully distinguish between this Lacanian notion of the divided subject and the “post-structuralist” notion of the subject-positions. In “post-structuralism,” the subject is usually reduced to subjection.

He is conceived as an effect of a fundamentally non-subjective process: the subject is always caught in, traversed by, the pre-subjective process (of “writing,” of “desire,” etc.), and the accent is put on different modes of how individuals “experience,” “live,” their positions as “subjects,” “actors,” “agents” of the historical process.

For example, it is only at a certain point in European history that the author of works of art, a painter or a writer, began to see himself as a creative individual who, in his work, is giving expression to his interior subjective richness. The great master of such analysis was, of course, Foucault: one might say that the main point of his late work was to articulate the different modes of how individuals assume their subject-positions.

But with Lacan, we have quite another notion of the subject. To put it in a simple way: if we abstract, if we subtract all the richness of the different modes of subjectivization, all the fullness of experience present in the way individuals “live” their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place which was filled out with this richness; and this original void, this lack of the symbolic structure is the subject, the subject of the signifier.

The subject is therefore to be strictly opposed to the effect of subjectivation: what the subjectivation masks is not a pre- or trans-subjective process of writing but a lack in the structure, a lack which is the subject.

Our predominant idea of the subject is, in Lacanian terms, that of the “subject of the signified,” the active agent, the bearer of some signification who is trying to express himself in the language. The starting point of Lacan is, of course, that the symbolic representation represents the subject always in a distorted way, that it is always a displacement, a failure, i.e., that the subject cannot find a signifier which would be “his own,” that he is always saying less or too much, in short: something other than what he wanted, intended to say.

The usual conclusion from this would be that the subject is some kind of interior richness of meaning which always exceeds its symbolic articulation: “language cannot express fully what I’m trying to say…”

The Lacanian thesis is its exact opposite: this surplus of signification masks a fundamental lack. The subject of the signifier is precisely this lack, this impossibility to find a signifier which would be “his own”: the failure of his representation is a positive condition.

The subject tries to articulate himself in a signifying representation, and the representation fails; instead of a richness we have a lack, and this void opened by the failure is the subject of the signifier.

To put it in a paradoxical way: the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of his own representation; that’s why the failure of representation is the only way to represent him adequately. 3-4

It is at the level of this difference between the two deaths, of this empty place in the very heart of the Other, that we must locate the
problematic of the death drive.

The connection between the death drive and the symbolic order is a constant with Lacan, but we can differentiate the various stages of his teaching precisely by reference to the different modes of articulation of the death drive and the signifier.

In the first period (the first seminar, “The Function and the Field of Speech and Language…”), it is the Hegelian phenomenological idea that the word is a death, a murder of a thing: as soon as the reality is symbolized, caught in a symbolic network, the thing itself is more present in a word, in its concept, than in its immediate physical reality.

More precisely, we cannot return to the immediate reality:even if we turn from the word to the thing, from the word “table” to the table in its physical reality, for example, the appearance of the table itself is already marked with a certain lack. To know what a table really is, what it means, we must have recourse to the word, which implies an absence of the thing.

In the second period (the Lacanian reading of Poe’s Purloined Letter), the accent is shifted from the word, from speech, to language as a synchronic structure, a senseless autonomous mechanism which produces meaning as its effect If, in the first period, the Lacanian concept of language is still basically the phenomenological one (Lacan is repeating all the time that the field of psychoanalysis is the field of meaning, la signification), here we have a “structuralist” conception of language as a differential system of elements.

The death drive is now identified with the symbolic order itself: in Lacan’s own words, it is “nothing but a mask of the symbolic order.” The main thing here is the opposition between the imaginary level of the experience of meaning and the meaningless signifier/signifying mechanism which produces it.

The imaginary level is governed by the pleasure principle; it strives for a homeostatic balance. The symbolic order in its blind automatism is always troubling this homeostasis: it is “beyond the pleasure principle.” When the human being is caught in the signifier’s network, this network has a mortifying effect on him; he becomes part of a strange automatic order disturbing his natural homeostatic balance (through compulsive repetition, for example).

In the third period, where the main accent of Lacan’s teaching is put on the real as impossible, the death drive again radically changes its signification. This change can be most easily detected through the relationship between the pleasure principle and the symbolic order.

Till the end of the fifties, the pleasure principle was identified with the imaginary level: the symbolic order was conceived as the real “beyond the pleasure principle.” But starting from the late fifties (the seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) it is on the contrary the symbolic order itself which is identified with the pleasure principle: the unconscious “structured like a language,” its “primary process” of metonymic-metaphoric displacements, is governed by the pleasure principle; what lies beyond is not the symbolic order but a real kernel, a traumatic core. To designate it, Lacan uses a Freudian term das Ding, the Thing as an incarnation of the impossible jouissance (the term Thing is to be taken here with all the connotations it possesses in the domain of horror science-fiction: the “alien” from the movie of the same name is a pre-symbolic, maternal Thing par excellence).

The symbolic order strives for a homeostatic balance, but there is in its kernel, in its very centre, some strange, traumatic element which cannot be symbolized, integrated into the symbolic order: the Thing.

Lacan coined a neologism for it: l’extimité — external intimacy, which served as a title for one of the seminars of Jacques-Alain Miller. And what is, at this level, the death drive

Exactly the opposite of the symbolic order: the possibility of what was named by de Sade “the second death,” the radical annihilation of the symbolic texture through which so-called reality is constituted. The very existence of the symbolic order implies a possibility of its radical effacement, of the “symbolic death” … the obliteration of the signifying network itself.

This distinction between the different stages of Lacan’s teaching is not of merely theoretical interest; it has very definite consequences for the determination of the final moment of the psychoanalytic cure.

In the first period, where the accent is laid on the word as a medium of the intersubjective recognition of desire, symptoms are conceived as white spots, non-symbolized imaginary elements of the history of the subject, and the process of analysis is that of their symbolization, i.e., of their integration into the symbolic universe of the subject: the analysis gives meaning, retroactively, to what was in the beginning a meaningless trace. So the final moment of analysis is here reached when the subject is able to narrate to the other his own history in its continuity, when his desire is integrated, recognized in a “full speech” (parole pleine).

In the second period, where the symbolic order is conceived as having a mortifying effect on a subject, i.e., as imposing on him a traumatic loss – and the name of this loss, of this lack, is of course the symbolic castration – the final moment of analysis is reached when the subject is made ready to accept this fundamental loss, to consent to symbolic castration as a price to pay for access to his desire.

In the third period, we have the great Other, the symbolic order, with a traumatic element in its very heart; and in Lacanian theory, fantasy is conceived as a construction allowing the subject to come to terms with this traumatic kernel. At this level, the final moment of analysis is defined as “going through a fantasy” (la traversée du fantasme): not its symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating presence, just fills out a lack, a void in the Other. There is nothing “behind” the fantasy; the fantasy is precisely a construction the function of which is to hide this void, this “nothing,” i.e., the lack in the Other. The crucial element of this third period of Lacan’s teaching is then the shift of the accent from the symbolic to the real.

santner taxes

Eric L. Santner, the University of Chicago The New Idolatry: Religious Thinking in the Un-Commonwealth of America September 6, 2011

At a recent debate among Republican presidential candidates in Iowa, all participants raised their hand when asked whether they would oppose a deficit-reduction agreement that featured 10 dollars in budget cuts for every dollar in increased tax revenue. I think one misses something important if one dismisses this moment as a bit of cynical political theater. But it is equally insufficient to see in it a display of genuine political commitments and principles. Rather, this peculiar pledge of allegiance is symptomatic of the ways in which the Republican side of current debates has infused questions about economic policy with religious meanings and values. And as is often the case when religious energies come to be displaced into profane spheres of life, the results are bad—not only for those spheres of life but for religion as well.

For example, one might think about the similarities between the attitude of Republicans to taxes and that of anorexics to food. For both, less is always better, and nothing would be best of all. Republicans have a “taxation disorder” just as anorexics have an eating disorder. Both groups treat what is essentially a practical matter—how much money is needed by the state given the current needs of the country and its people; how much food is needed given the demands of the body—as a matter of a quasi-sacred ethical stance concerning the purity of the body. In both cases, we find a demand for “starving the beast,” a personal or collective body felt to be disgustingly fleshy, to be always too much, to be in need of ever greater reduction, thinning, cutting, fasting. In both disorders we find a deeply pathological form of what Max Weber characterized as the “spirit of capitalism,” a fundamentally this-worldly asceticism fueled by a religious sense of duty and obligation aimed at assuring our place among the divinely elected. (There is surely much to say here about the meaning in all of this of debt, indebtedness, being in default, being in a state of guilt—the German word Schuld means both “debt” and “guilt”—but that is for another discussion.)

What is most bizarre in the current situation is the way in which the Republicans have fused this “Protestant ethic,” as Weber called it, with a sort of polytheistic worship of wealth and the wealthy—in short, with a rather blatant form of idolatry. Why does the beast need to be starved? Why does the “flesh” of the body politic need to be reduced, reduced, reduced? The answer we hear over and over again is: for the sake of the “Job Creators.” The one Creator God has effectively been dispersed into the pantheon of new idols, those to whom we must all sacrifice so that they may show favor on us and create new worlds of economic possibility. Job creation has become the new form of grace or gratuitousness otherwise reserved for divinity. Our duty is to make sacrifices and above all to be vigilant about not calling forth the wrath of the Job Creators lest they abandon us and elect others as their chosen people (other nations who make bigger and better sacrifices).

The old culture wars concerning hot-button social issues have simply assumed a new guise. Tax increases have come to be regarded as a sort of job abortion, the killing of unborn economic life. Republicans have, in a word, invested wealth with the same religious aura that radical anti-abortion groups have always invested in the cells of the fetus. Yesterday’s baby killer is today’s job killer: both are essentially infidels, non-believers. What is clear is that there is no room for debate here. If wealth has come to be regarded as sacred, if its movement into the bank accounts of individuals and corporations represents the moment of conception of (still unborn) economic life, then surely there can be no compromise.

If there is any truth to this analysis, then the real problem we face is not just the impossibility of engaging in real debates about our economic life but the impossibility of engaging with the demands and complexities of religious life as well. For by infusing money with the halo of the sacred, by transfiguring high earners into Job Creators to whom the rest of us owe pledges of covenantal allegiance, what we lose is not only the capacity to think about economic issues in a relatively rational way; we also lose our capacity to live lives informed by the values of our religious traditions. That is certainly one of the lessons of the biblical ban on idolatry.

A similar dynamic is at work on another front in the culture wars, the debate over creationism and so-called “intelligent design.” What is ultimately so disturbing about the case made for these alternatives to the theory of evolution is not that it represents bad science but rather that it demeans and degrades religion by essentially turning the Bible into a kind of science textbook competing with other science textbooks. Creationism is not bad science—it is not science at all—but rather a kind of blasphemy. It reduces the status of the holy books of the Judeo-Christian tradition to that of first-year biology textbooks. The ones who should be enraged are not scientists, but rather priests, pastors, rabbis, and all who care deeply about the moral and spiritual values at the heart of the biblical traditions.

As with evolutionary theory so with economic theory and policy: the infusion of religious values and meanings into debates about deficits, budgets, and taxes do not simply inhibit our capacity to steer our way toward a better economic future; it also represents a threat to the integrity of the life of faith and its difficult demands, demands that always, in the end, pertain to the urgent and needful presence of our neighbor. The hands raised by those Republican candidates at the Iowa debates some weeks ago do not signal strong principles about economic policy but rather a perverse infusion of religious attitudes into the sphere of economic life, a form of idolatry that does damage both to the economy and to religion.

psychopedagogy

Cho, Daniel. Psychopedagogy. London: Ashgate, 2009.

The force that keeps the unconscious from being heard is the imaginary relation that the analysand constructs between their ego and the analyst’s. To state it differently, the analysand enters into a mirror-relation with the analyst’s ego. The analysand identifies with the analyst by grasping onto the ways they are similar. In a way, the analysand is saying to the analysts, “You are like me!” The analysand will even go so far as to be alienated by the analyst’s ego: “After all,” as the analysand seems to say, “the analyst is the trained professional, the expert.” By regarding the analyst as a mirror-image of one’s self results in attempts to master that image, the analyst. Returning for a moment to Dora – all of her resistance stems from her desire for mastery over Freud, which means the ego is at the bottom of the conflict. Dora is trying to maintain the integrity of her ego by mastering the image qua Freud.

For the unconscious to be heard, the ego must be muted. But one does not mute the ego by debasing, insulting, or shaming it; for indeed the ego will simply redouble itself against such efforts at traumatisation. Rather one disarms the ego by breaking the imaginary identification that alienates the analysand`s subjectivity in the analyst`s, that is, by causing separation. For this reason, Lacan says that the analyst must be ‘not a living mirror, but an empty mirror’ (SII 246). The analyst must be a mirror that reflects an empty image, that is, an image with which the patient cannot identify. The analyst does so by functioning as object a, that obscure object which sullies a perfect picture. And the analyst functions this way by speaking on behalf of the unconscious – the true subject of psychoanalysis. 42

Thus the lesson of the Ratman: we always possess more knowledge than we should like to admit – sometimes more than we ourselves are consciously aware. Learning therefore does not always mean acquiring absolutely new knowledge; it sometimes requires relearning the traumatic knowledge we do “not-want-to-know” but possess all the same. 81

Class consciousness is thus the knowledge of the mode of production contained, or as Lukacs has it, “imputed,” to a particular structural class position within the total system, its thrust is that it places knowledge on the side of the system itself. It no longer much matters what individuals actually think or know about the system. The system functions regardless; and by functioning, the system literally “thinks” the appropriate thoughts for the individuals. For example, the individual worker need not imagine extracting living labor power from the body in order to sell it as a commodity on the market in order for capitalism to function. This knowledge – that is, of classes and their particular functions – is possessed by the system of capital production itself, and as it operates, the system literally thinks about the extraction, sale, and consumption of labor power so that the individual does not have to. In other words, while empirical individuals may not care about the economy or politics, the economy and politics care about empirical individuals. Class consciousness, in other words, on Lukacs’s account, exists on a similar formal level as does the psychoanalytic unconscious. 84

But as suggestive and provocative Lukacs’s unadulterated Marxian variation on consciousness may be, even he does not take into account the various resistances, in the psychoanalytic sense of the word, individuals will produce in order not to know the traumatic knowledge yielded by certain standpoints. We must therefore follow through with the

Just as Lukacs correlates class consciousness to the system itself, effectively rubbing out the individual’s relevance, so Lacan and psychoanalysis also correlate the unconscious to a kind of nonindividual subject: “if there is an image which could represent for us the Freudian notion of the unconscious, it is indeed that of the acephalic subject, of a subject who no longer has an ego, who doesn’t belong to the ego” (S II: 167).

Lacan describes his notion of the subject as acephalic (that is, headless) because its thought is no longer tided to the consciousness of the ego but is now taken over by the unconscious itself. Because of its ties to the ego, consciousness is considered by Lacan as an obstacle or resistance to the knowledge of the unconscious. In dividing thought and being between the unconscious and the subject, Lacan introduces a fundamental division into his variation on the subject, that is to say, the Lacanian subject is a split-subject , which he conveys in his nomenclature: $. 87

Lukacs, similarly, introduces a split into the subject of the proletariat with class consciousness, as we saw, on the side of the system itself, separated from the individual’s being. In both Lukacs and Lacan, the acephalic subject becomes the image to which we must hold on.

The overcoming of the ego leaves a clearing in which the subject of the unconscious can emerge. This is why, for Lacan, the subject can only be described negatively. Only when conscious thought or positive identity (i.e., I am a man, I am a teacher, I am able-bodied, etc.) – in short, the ego – is subtracted from individuals, that is, only when they are transformed into the negativity that is the Lacanian subject, can they learn the unconscious. 87

If class consciousness corresponds to the unconscious in that they are both forms of repressed knowledge, then trauma would be the sign of class consciousness’s emergence. Therefore the criticism that Marx issues his political economist contemporaries on the basis of their not having learned the miserable truth of capitalist accumulation is a bit off the mark. For Marx grants them too much benefit of the doubt. More correct would have been to make the psychoanalytic critique, namely, that the bourgeois political economists knew this truth quite well but nonetheless did “not want to know” about it. They felt the trauma of capitalism and attempted to rationalize it away. 88

stavrakakis subject of enjoyment 7

Stavrakakis, Yannis. Subjectivity and the Organized Other: Between Symbolic Authority and Fantasmatic Enjoyment Organization Studies 2008 29: 1037

Beyond Identification,Yet Internal to It: The Subject of Enjoyment

If this structural and structuring role of the command provides the ontological nexus within which the subject learns to interact with their social environment — the symbolic preconditions of subjection and obedience — it cannot explain, however, why some commands produce obedient behaviour and others are ignored. It cannot account for the occurrence of disobedience and for instances of resistance. In fact, if we were to stay at this level, it would be impossible to account both for the failure of certain commands and for the complex ‘extrasymbolic’ means through which the organized Other supports and/or attempts to reinstitute its authority. Here, the Lacanian answer is simple. On the one hand, the real exceeds the subject and the lack this inscribes within subjective identity is what stimulates desire (for subjection to the Other).

On the other hand, the real also exceeds the Other and the lack this inscribes in the Other explains the ultimate failure of fully determining subjectivity. It is this second failure that makes resistance possible, at least in principle. It is in the traumatic fact that the Other cannot fully determine the subject that a space for freedom starts to emerge. But this is a freedom that the subject has learned to fear.

As Judith Butler has formulated it, this predicament of the subject is usually resolved with the adoption of the following stance: ‘I would rather exist in subordination than not exist’ (Butler 1997b: 7).

Both the Other and the subject prefer to repress or disavow, to defer this realization of the lack in the Other.

But in order to attempt that in a persuasive manner, the symbolic command is not enough. Something more positive is needed, given the fact that the lack marking subject and Other is a lack of jouissance. This is what fantasy attempts to offer. Let us examine in some more detail the basis of this argument. In order to sustain its hegemony, the performative, formal aspect of the command has to be supported by a fantasy scenario investing it with some supreme value at the level of enjoyment. We have seen in the previous section how Lacanian theory conceives of the different planes operating in identity formation at the intersection of subject and organized Other. We have also seen how Lacan’s negative ontology of lack leads to an attempt to encircle the real of enjoyment, a real which provides the (absent) cause of the dialectic of (failed) identifications partially constituting subjective and social reality.

Here is where Lacan’s originality — in relation to the general field of poststructuralism — is most clearly located. Why? Precisely because poststructuralism remains largely attached to what Harpham has described as ‘the critical fetish of modernity’: Language. … As a result of the linguistic turn … Language has become ‘the critical fetish of modernity’.

However, focusing on the symbolic aspects of identity … is not sufficient in order to reach a rigorous understanding of the drive behind identification acts, to explain why certain identifications prove to be more forceful and alluring than others, and to realize why none can be totally successful. In fact, poststructuralism has often employed models of subjectivity reducing it to a mere linguistic structure (reproducing a rationalist idea that control of talk and discourse means control of political belief) (Alcorn 2002: 97):

‘When poststructuralist theory imagines a subject structured by discourse, it has great difficulty making sense of subjects caught in patterns of repetition unresponsive to dialectic. To understand discourse fully is to understand the limitations of discourse … its inability to persuade the anorexic to eat, and its inability to intervene in those mechanisms of subjectivity that drive actions inaccessible to dialectic.’ (Alcorn 2002: 101)

‘Because of a kind of adhesive attachment that subjects have to certain instances of discourse, some discourse structures are characteristic of subjects and have a temporal stability. These modes of discourse serve as symptoms of subjectivity: they work repetitively and defensively to represent identity … some modes of discourse, because they are libidinally invested, repeatedly and predictably function to constitute the subject’s sense of identity.’ (Alcorn 2002: 17)

The libidinal, fantasmatic character of these attachments is also deeply implicated in processes of social change, which, under this light, can only be described in terms of a dialectic of dis-investment and re-investment … ‘to disinvest social constructions, one must do more than use language or be rational, one must do the work of withdrawing desire from representations.

This work is the work of mourning’ (Alcorn 2002: 117). Discursive shifts presuppose the ‘unbinding of libido’ and the re-investment of jouissance (Alcorn 2002: 118).

When Milgram perceptively writes that the experimenter fills a gap experienced by the subject, the association with Lacan’s formula of fantasy is unavoidable, since fantasy entails a link between the split (castrated) subject of the signifier and his objet-cause of desire, an object purporting to cover over its lack and ‘heal’ or, at least, domesticate castration.

The obvious question thus becomes: is there a fantasmatic frame that supports the symbolic command and binds the subject to the elementary structure of obedience revealed in Milgram’s experiment?

It is far from surprising that Milgram does isolate such a fantasmatic frame; he even highlights its ideological nature. This frame is science itself. What guarantees that the command of the experimenter will be taken seriously, what defers resistance, is that it is presented as part of a scientific experiment. Whatever happens in the experiment is commanded and justified by Science. As Milgram puts it, ‘the idea of science and its acceptance provide the overarching ideological justification for the experiment’ (Milgram 2005: 143).

Of course such a justification is always culturally specific: ‘if the experiment were carried out in a culture very different from our own — say, among Trobrianders — it would be necessary to find a functional equivalent of science in order to obtain psychologically comparable results’ (Milgram 2005: 144). It is also socially and politically specific: when the Yes Men, for example, make an outrageous WTO presentation to a group of students in New York they are met with hostility and not with acceptance (The Yes Men 2004: 146–7).

However, what is most important here is that this fantasmatic frame adds a positive support to the negative/formal character of the symbolic command since science is obviously invested with a positive value: ‘Ideological justification is vital in obtaining willing obedience, for it permits the person to see his behaviour as serving a desirable end’ (Milgram 2005: 144).

What seems to be implied is a particular form of attachment that can only be thought of in terms of positive investment. Thus, the experiment can function only because in the experimenter’s face the empty gesture of symbolic power and the fullness of its fantasmatic support seem to unite.

The other side of the negative force of castration implicit in the command is the fantasy channelling and sustaining in a much more positive and productive way the desire stimulated by this castration itself.

In Milgram’s words, ‘once people are brought into a social hierarchy, there must be some cementing mechanism to endow the structure with at least minimal stability’ (Milgram 2005: 149), and this mechanism involves a certain reward structure (Milgram 2005: 139), which can obviously be conceptualized in ways far more sophisticated than the ones Milgram himself could envisage. Only now can one begin to make real sense of the bond developed between experimenter and subject.

The subject of the experiment submits to the command not merely because it is a symbolic command but also because it is supported by an (imaginarized) supreme knowledge projected onto the person of the experimenter; in this case the experimenter is accepted as an agent of Science.

This projection, however, does not depend exclusively on the particular fantasy present here: it also reveals a more general condition relating to the nature of the bond between authority and subject. In Milgram’s own words, ‘Because the experimenter issues orders within a context he is presumed to know something about, his power is increased. Generally, authorities are felt to know more than the person they are commanding; whether they do or not, the occasion is defined as if they do’ (Milgram 2005: 143).

My reading may be guided by my Lacanian bias, but isn’t Milgram implying that the relation between experimenter and subject is a relation of transference? Isn’t he demonstrating that the experimenter functions as a subject supposed to know?

And, as we know from psychoanalysis, a transferential relation is never purely cognitive: it is primarily affective and libidinal; it also involves a certain enjoyment. Without such an emotional tie obedience would easily break down and disobedience would occur. Besides, how else can we explain the ‘curious’ feelings of compassion towards the experimenter, who issues the commands, and not so much towards the (supposedly) suffering person who receives the (fake) electric shocks, that Milgram detects in his subjects? The ‘unwillingness to “hurt” the experimenter’s feelings, are part of those binding forces inhibiting disobedience’ (Milgram 2005: 152).

In that sense, Milgram can contribute two major points to our inquiry.

1. obedience to authority has a lot to do with the symbolic source of the command and very little with its concrete (rational or irrational, factual or fictional) content.

2. our attachment to this symbolic source is, to a large extent, extimate to the symbolic itself.

Beyond the formal force of the symbolic command, Milgram reveals a lot about the more positive aspects of attachment and obedience to power structures. Not only are these formal structures supported by a fantasy frame manipulating our desire, but the nature of this attachment itself is also of a libidinal, transferential nature.

Symbolic power presupposes a particular type of relation between those who exercise power and those who are subjected to it, a relation of belief which results in complicity.

Such a belief cannot be cultivated and sustained without the mobilization and fantasmatic manipulation of affect and enjoyment; it is clearly located in an extimate position with regard to symbolic structure: ‘What creates the power of words and slogans, a power capable of maintaining or subverting the social order, is the belief in the legitimacy of words and of those who utter them. And words alone cannot create this belief’ (Bourdieu 1991: 170).

This is why it is so difficult — although, fortunately, not impossible — for subjects to withdraw from the experiment: ‘Though many subjects make the intellectual decision that they should not give any more shocks to the learner, they are frequently unable to transform this conviction into action’ (Milgram 2005: 150).

In other words, resistance cannot rely on a shift in consciousness and knowledge. Resistance is not an intellectual issue precisely because obedience is also not sustained at an intellectual level.

Even those who decide to ignore the command cannot do so without enormous emotional strain: ‘As the subject contemplates this break, anxiety is generated, signalling him to step back from the forbidden action and thereby creating an emotional barrier through which he must pass in order to defy authority’ (Milgram 2005: 154).

It is here, I believe, that one encounters the most disturbing aspect of Milgram’s experiment. It is clearly located in the difficulties in passing from acceptance to dissent and from dissent to disobedience. In other words, the subject has to overcome two emotional barriers in order to resist the violent command.

The first barrier leads to the expression of dissent. But dissent does not necessarily lead to disobedience: ‘Many dissenting individuals who are capable of expressing disagreement with authority still respect authority’s right to overrule their expressed opinion. While disagreeing, they are not prepared to act on this conviction’ (Milgram 2005: 163).