drive – objet (a)

Johnston on Tomšič

Johnston, A. (2017). From Closed Need to Infinite Greed: Marx’s Drive Theory. Continental Thought and Theory, 1(4), 270-346.

The capitalist drive for self-valorization is an unsatisfiable demand, to which no labour can live up to.” Johnston quoting Tomšič. Johnston like much of what Tomšič says. However he finds that Tomšič is not sufficiently sensitive to what Johnston points out are the specificities of capitalism. Stating:

Simply and bluntly put, the Lacanian drive-desire distinction is not, for Lacan himself, peculiar to properly capitalist socio-economic systems … whereas the Marxian greed-mania distinction is (as I show throughout the preceding) (318).

And Johnston disagrees with Tomšič’s de-historicizing tendencies. Johnston believed libidinal drive pre-dates capitalism, nevertheless with the advent of capitalism, it ramped up this drive. Here’s Johnston’s point:

Immediately identifying, as Tomšič appears to do, manic consumerism with Lacan’s désir dehistoricizes the former, tearing it out of its capitalist context by decoupling it from its dependence upon and connection with the specifically capitalist drive (i.e., abstract-qua-quantitative hedonism as the circuit M-C-M′). Likewise, greed als Mehrwertstrieb comes into effective existence and operation only in and through capitalism.

and further Johnston goes on:

As a Lacanian, I would say that the metapsychology of the libidinal economy transcends and is irreducible to merely one or several historical contexts, with capitalism (as one of these contexts) at most generating differences-in-degree between pre-capitalist and capitalist libidinal economics. But, as a Marxist, I would say that these differences-in-degree generated by capitalism are so broad and deep as to be tantamount de facto to differences-in-kind.

Tracy McNulty

Demanding the Impossible: Desire and Social Change

Volume 20, Number 1 2009
doi 10.1215/10407391-2008-015
d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

What is the relationship between desire and social change?

the ethical stance or subjective position of an individual might incite a change of position in other people

The larger question these examples raise is whether the subjective stance of one person can initiate broad change or inspire collective action by means other than the group psychology: in other words, not by appealing to a particular set of values or ideals, or by cementing the group through identification or libidinal cathexes, or by offering some kind of external or even transcendental foundation for the ego, but by foregrounding the experience of the willing subject.

One can be determined to live a good or a moral or a selfless life, and yet this determination often fails inasmuch as it is fundamentally in conflict with an unconscious position, which it attempts to repress or control.

Desire, on the other hand, supposes the subject of the unconscious: it is not sustained by identification with something “outside” the subject that would allow it to repress the drives or facilitate its refusal to know anything about the unconscious. When Lacan offers as a formulation of the ethics of psychoanalysis the imperative not to give up on one’s desire—ne pas céder sur son désir—he suggests that desire is what admits of no compromise or concession, and that it therefore always bears some relation to death (Ethics 319).

Hallward is interested not in the role of the ideal in soliciting identification, but in the force of will and the voluntarist dimension of change. His examples are all the more provocative in that they include not only the great leaders who have given their names to religious and political movements but individuals working in relative obscurity whose apparently very modest acts have unexpectedly brought about important social transformations

I propose to take a more psychoanalytic approach to the problem by considering the individual act not principally as an instance of will or determination, but for the way it lays bare the stakes of desire. What distinguishes desire from determination or will?

What distinguishes desire from determination or will?

The interest of the question “What would Jesus do?” for example, is that it makes an implicit distinction between Jesus as a support for identification and Jesus as a subject of desire. The question supposes a kind of immovability in the desire of Jesus, something nonnegotiable: it implies that Jesus would not make concessions, that he would not waver.

If the answer to the question is somehow obvious, it is not because it concerns some specific content or principle, but because desire is an orientation or a stance with respect to the impossible object that causes it, and not a response to a particular case or circumstance.

The question is of a very different order than “What would Jesus say?” or “What would Jesus teach?” because it isn’t a matter of ideals, agendas, or programs.

It is also different from “What would Jesus want?” or “What would Jesus tell you to do?” because it is not a matter of demands or of satisfying a leader or an idealized role model by doing what we think he wants.

Desire gives rise to a new object, an object that did not exist before, that intervenes in the world so as to transform it

it is fidelity to an impossible cause of desire, not fidelity to a constituency

Desire is an orientation or a stance with respect to the impossible object that causes it, and not a response to a particular case or circumstance

Desire presents a challenge because it concerns the status of the act and not the affirmation of ideals or beliefs. It makes us aware of how the ideals we espouse make it possible not to act.

how desire differs from the idealizing love at stake in identification and therefore about its transformative potential.

Anxiety is the affect of psychoanalysis, because it responds to the analyst’s desire to know by overcoming the censorship applied to unconscious thoughts. Only by traversing this anxiety can the subject come to have another knowledge about what is happening to him or her, and thus find liberation from the repetition-compulsion of the fantasy.

Desire must find expression in an act or in the production of a new object that intervenes in the world so as to transform it.

This is the essence of sublimation, in which the absolutely singular and subjective nature of desire manages to find expression in the production of an object that is collectively valorized.

The “great man” is someone whose object constitutes a sublimation not only for himself but for his age.

Each of the examples I have discussed bears witness to the tension between the anxiety induced by desire and the effects it produces, and the restorative tendency to silence or efface that desire and to shore up the ego. They also qualify the possible optimism about social change by reinforcing the extent to which this change occurs at an individual level, through a painstaking process of self-overcoming that is by no means certain and that only occurs in a minority of cases.

Religious history in particular suggests that it is much easier to hide behind the ideal ego or to take comfort in the illusion of the all-powerful father than to confront the Other’s desire or absence. This is why psychoanalysis is ultimately pessimistic about the possibility of social change and hesitates to affirm the social beyond the “minimal social link” inaugurated by the transference. If the members of the group do not also traverse castration, the anxiety that results from the confrontation with the Other’s desire will simply provoke repression and violence, and not a change of position.

anxiety is the affect of freedom

But while the desire of the founder may not be sufficient in and of itself to incite change, these examples also make clear that the anxiety it induces can have a transformative effect.

This is because it exposes the profound freedom of an act founded on desire, in and beyond the castration or lack it implies. Translated into a more existential idiom, my argument is really that anxiety is the affect of freedom.

Freud sees in Moses a free man, one who threw off the shackles of superstition and nature worship to create a space for the subject as something other than a product of nature or the object of a capricious deity.

Desire is what is most free in the subject, because it involves a liberation from the fantasy of seduction and its particular colonization of the psychic object. Freud sees in Moses a free man, one who threw off the shackles of superstition and nature worship to create a space for the subject as something other than a product of nature or the object of a capricious deity.

While Jewish legend promotes the idea that Moses is the chosen instrument of God, the much more interesting truth is that the man Moses invents something new for civilization: something we can all draw upon and that no God can take away. The difference between ideals and desire is the difference between ascribing their freedom to an omnipotent God and assuming responsibility for that freedom themselves.

In the same way, Freud himself will attempt to free the subject of the unconscious from the shackles of morality and to prevent its reduction to an object of scientific observation.

But he makes clear that this freedom can come only through traversing anxiety and not avoiding it. It is a difficult freedom, whose stakes are nowhere better expressed than in the words imputed to Jesus: “I lay down my life in order to take it up again.”

While these words have been interpreted by many as a promise of eternal life, I believe that the anxiety and solitude with which Jesus approaches his own death points to a more difficult interpretation. His act emphasizes that there is something more than “mere life” and that desire opens onto a life that can be accessed only by traversing death. In a similar vein, the practice of psychoanalysis is founded on the supposition that true freedom comes only from traversing the death drive and not repressing or avoiding it.

desire finds expression in an act or in the production of a new object that intervenes in the world so as to transform it

Freud invents a mechanism that allows the analysand to free himself by confronting castration. But the end of analysis could be construed not merely as a liberation but as a call to change the world by demanding that it make place for a new object.

It involves the assumption of the truth that there is no object for desire, but more importantly, the necessity of constructing a new object: if there is no object or aim that would satisfy desire, this also means that desire is not bound by any existing object and is therefore innately transcendent. The logical conclusion of an analysis supposes that desire finds expression in an act or in the production of a new object that intervenes in the world so as to transform it.

But as Hallward reveals through the simple example of a man who clears space for a new soccer field, this new object need not be something so lofty. What is important is that it create a space for the subject, a space that was not there before. The creation of this new object gives rise to social change without even aspiring to do so, because it is not guided by ideals or goals, but by the desire of a subject.

The creation of this new object gives rise to social change without even aspiring to do so, because it is not guided by ideals or goals, but by the desire of a subject.

Tracy McNulty 2013

The New man’s Fetish The Southern Journal of Philosophy Volume 51, Spindel Supplement 2013

Alenka Zupančič interview

2014

Alenka Zupančič : The Lacanian concept of the Real allows for a problematization of this opposition which had become paralysing and unproductive philosophically. We must of course be wary of the tendency to see in this Lacanian move a simple affirmation of a naive realism – the Real understood in this objectivist fashion. The ‘Real’ for Lacan is not reducible to the discursive but neither is it simply an advocation of an ontological realism, understood unproblematically. Especially since Lacan introduces a key difference between the notion of the Real and that of being. They are related via a ‘third dimension’, that of the ‘signifier’, but they do not coincide.

What Lacan wants to tell us is that the signifier has ontological significance, the signifier tells us about ontology in a way that the notion of the signified is unable to (this latter being the usual realist referent; the object as the signified).

The signifier is interesting not because we could reduce everything to it and to different signifying operations (this reductionist question is completely false), but because there is something in the signifier and its operations that cannot be reduced back to the signifier and its operations.

This is the crucial point, and not some mythical or original outside of the signifier, irreducible to it. This is also what the ‘materialism of the signifier’ amounts to. Not simply to the fact that the signifier can have material consequences, but rather that the materialist position needs to do more than to pronounce matter the original principle. It has to account for a split or contradiction that is the matter. It has to grasp the concept of the matter beyond that imaginary notion of ‘something thick and hard’. I’m not saying: ‘For Lacan, the signifieris the real matter’, not at all.

I’m saying that, for Lacan, the signifier is what enables us to perceive the non-coincidence between being and the Real, and that this is what eventually leads to a new kind of materialism.

From this point of view, we can say that Lacan develops the modern moment in philosophy, but as Žižek says, ‘he develops it with a twist’. Then there is the new concept of the subject – another Lacanian ‘revolution’ in philosophy, retroactively relating the subject of the unconscious to the Cartesian cogito. This is often one of the great misunderstandings of Lacan (and psychoanalysis), that it jettisons the cogito, that it is anti-Cartesian pure and simple. This is a significant misunderstanding of the psychoanalytical concept of the ‘subject’ which was one of the main concepts for the delineation of a specific Lacanian orientation in the first place. This concept of ‘subject’ distinguished Lacan from the wider structuralist movement and their notion of a ‘subjectless structure’.

But somehow this conception of ‘subject’ is interpreted as anti-cogito, as the ‘subject’ is the unconscious subject. Therefore, it was important to clarify the connection between cogito and the unconscious and for example, there is an important anthology from the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, where we explore this problematic in detail (Cogito and the Unconscious edited by Žižek [1998a] and including essays by all three thinkers as well as others in the Slovenian wider group of theorists). There is also the question of the radical break with premodern metaphysics involved in the Cartesian gesture, which Lacan judges crucial for the emergence of the subject of the unconscious.

This theme is crucial also for his understanding of ethics. In his important early seminar, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992), he is discussing the history of ethical thought as it related for example to the metaphysical tradition. His specific example is Aristotle and there is obviously a debt here on one level to Aristotle’s Ethics as a text and conceptual scheme. However, there is also a clear and radical parting of the ways.

In my own work on ethics, in The Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (Zupančič 2000), I draw out some of these themes. For example, I put forward a critique of what I term ‘bio-morality’ and which, in its contemporary developments, represents an allegiance (albeit in rather reduced ways) to Aristotle’s eudaimonistic ethics and metaphysics of being. This is not simply a criticism of Aristotle, but rather of what a revival of his conceptual paradigm today amounts to.

In relationship to the theme of ethics, I want to stress that what I develop out of Kant’s ethics must not be opposed or seen as completely distinct from politics. As Žižek very rightly pointed out, the contemporary fashion of playing (‘good’) ethics against (‘bad’) politics is more often than not a direct pendant of the ideology of late capitalism and its conception of democracy. Any rigorous political thought is conceived as potentially dangerous and leading to a possible ‘disaster’ (that is to say to a more fundamental change in how the present order functions), whereas ethics seems to be much safer, and centred mostly on our individual responsibility, rather than any kind of collective engagement. My own work on Kant and ethics already went against this tendency, pointing both at an unsettling dimension of Kantian ethics, as well as at its emphasis on the universal, rather than simply individual.

It is similar with psychoanalysis which supposedly also focuses on individual destinies and problems. Here, am I allowed to tell my joke about the grain of seed, or the man who thinks he is one?

He gets cured by the psychoanalysts and then he comes running back, crying that he has just been chased by a chicken. Don’t you know you are a human being, they say? Yes, I am cured. I know that I am a human being, and not a grain of seed. But, please, does the chicken know this? This is the crux of the politics (which is also an ethics) in the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. It is not enough simply to deal with the plight of the ‘subject’ and fantasy, through psychoanalysis.

Rather, we must seek to transform the structures of the symbolic which sustain a given order, determine the Impossible-Real that they grapple with.

Sexuality

Alenka Zupančič: Yes, when we understand the question ‘why Freud and Lacan?’, or the question ‘why psychoanalysis?’, we come close to an understanding of the paradigmatic role which a revised notion of ‘sexuality’ must play in this discussion. Joan Copjec succinctly pointed out how, for example, in the term ‘sexual difference’ the term ‘sex’ has been replaced by the more neutered category of ‘gender’. As Joan – an allied member of the ‘Ljubljana School’ – put it: Gender theory performed one major feat: it removed the sex from sex. For awhile, gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex or sexuality is; sex was no longer the subject of an ontological inquiry and reverted instead to being what it was in common parlance: some vague sort of distinction, but basically a secondary characteristic (when applied to the subject), a qualifier added to others, or (when applied to an act) something a bit naughty.

This is very far from what both Freud (from his early, 1905 text Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [Freud 1977]) and Lacan have been saying. For Freud, the notion of the ‘sexual’ is significantly broader than contemporary notions of sex. It is not a substance to be properly described and understood (by psychoanalysis), but more like an impasse that generates and structures different discursive edifices trying to respond to it. It is linked to a notion of a fundamental ontological impasse; this impasse is irreducible for Freud.

But we also see here all the accusations against psychoanalysis, that ‘Freud reduces everything to sex’. In one sense, this accusation is true but what it misses is the complexification and radicalization of what we mean by ‘sexuality’. Freud discovered human sexuality as a problem (in need of explanation), and not as something with which one could eventually explain every (other) problem. He ‘discovered’ sexuality as intrinsically meaningless, and not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning. A clarification of this point is one of my ‘interventions’ in Why Psychoanalysis? Three Interventions (Zupančič 2008b). Lately, I dedicated a whole book to these questions – it came out in 2011 in Slovenia, but I’m still working on its English version.

On Materialism

The materialism of psychoanalysis is not simply materialism of the body;
and Lacan has learnt the philosophical lesson that is essential in this
respect: in order to be ‘materialist’ it is not enough to refer to the matter
as the first principle from which everything develops.

For, in this, we easily succumb to a rather idealistic notion of a somehow always-already spirited (‘vibrant’) matter. In recent debates, psychoanalysis – in the same package with all of the so-called post-structuralist thought – is often accused of relying on the formula ‘always-already’ as its magical formula. But this accusation misses the whole point: for psychoanalysis, ‘always-already’ is a retroactive effect of some radical contingency that changes given symbolic coordinates.

What a materialism worthy of this name has to do today is to propose a conceptualization of contingency (a break that comes from nowhere, ‘ex-nihilo’ so to say) in its complex relation to the structuring of the world.

Also, thinking is not simply opposed to things (and to matter), it is part of the thing it thinks, without being fully reducible to it. To advocate materialism and the ‘Real’ is not to advocate anti-thought. Quite the contrary, we might say – it calls for more and more thinking. And this is a problem that I sometimes detect in the recent flourishing of ‘new materialisms’ – a kind of abdication of thinking when it comes to more complex structures and arguments, as if common sense simplicities were inherently more ‘materialist’ than something
which is more complex and perhaps paradox ridden.

On Nietzsche

Alenka Zupančič: A key part of the Nietzschean legacy is I think working against the ‘moralisation’ of the symbolic, which Nietzsche describes so well in The Genealogy of Morals, for example, and which for example is also a key theme in relation to the thematic of the ‘moralisation of politics’, which I mentioned earlier.

Concerning nihilism and to quote Ray Brassier, from his text Nihil Unbound, there are things to be said for nihilism. It depends, of course, on what we mean by nihilism. If we mean by it a certain materialist position which recognizes contingency of, for example, our being in the world, and which points to a limit of ‘making sense of (all) things’, then we must say that to a great extent we cannot go beyond nihilism.

Yet this does not imply for Nietzsche that we sink in the depressive feelings of ‘worthlessness of all things’. On the contrary, it rather implies what he calls ‘gay science’. But, we must simultaneously avoid what Nietzsche calls ‘reactive nihilism’ and this is, of course, bound up with his whole critique of ressentiment (or ‘acting against’, reactiveness). To say that there is no ultimate cause of things is not to say that nothing itself is the ultimate cause of things, which amounts to putting the Nothing in the office of the Absolute.

Describing the difference between active and passive nihilism, Nietzsche famously says that man would ‘rather will nothingness than not will’ (On the Genealogy of Morals). And we could say that what defines (contemporary) passive nihilism is precisely that man would rather not will than will anything too strongly (because the latter supposedly inevitably leads to some kind of ‘nihilist’ catastrophe). And this seems to become synonymous with what ‘ethics’ now is in contemporary culture and society and the wider ‘moralisation of politics’, ‘biomorality’ etc. (to which I strongly oppose an ‘ethics of the Real’). There is a ‘deactivation’ of the will, which is also a deactivation of the ‘political will’, of the political as such as a paradigmatic space and temporality of antagonism, of the ‘Real’.

In my view, the genuinely new Nietzschean notion of nothingor n egativity is not simply that of ‘active nihilism’ as opposed to ‘passive nihilism’, but rather a transfiguration of nothing. Nothing/negativity is not a kind of ultimate absolute, but rather the smallest yet irreducible difference that is inscribed in being qua being. This is what I argue in my book. I use Nietzsche’s own metaphor of ‘the shortest shadow’. When speaking of going beyond the opposition real world/apparent world, Nietzsche describes this moment as ‘Midday; moment of the shortest shadow’ (Twilight of Idols).

Midday is thus not for him the moment when the sun embraces everything,
makes all shadows and all negativity disappear, and constitutes an undivided Unity of the world; it is the moment of the shortest shadow. And, what is the shortest shadow of a thing, if not this thing itself? Yet, for Nietzsche, this does not mean that the two becomes one, but, rather, that one becomes two. Why?

The thing (as one) no longer throws its shadow upon another thing; instead, it throws its shadow upon itself, thus becoming, at the same time, the thing and
its shadow, the real and its appearance. When the sun is at its zenith, things are not simply exposed (‘naked’, as it were); they are, so to speak, dressed in their own shadows. In other words: it is not simply that our representations do not coincide with things, it is rather that things do not simply coincide with themselves. There is thus an imperative to ‘think through’ this negativity. We
need to philosophize, as Žižek has said, philosophy is now more important than ever. It is not a game of textualism as some postmodernists would like to suggest perhaps.

The Subject

Alenka Zupančič: We can say that subject is ‘the answer of the Real’, as Lacan puts it somewhere, or that it is the effect of the rift/inconsistency of the structure. And we can indeed contrast this with the structuralist notion that there is a ‘structure without a subject’, a subjectless structure.

But what is at stake is above all a profound reconfiguration of what both ‘structure’ and ‘subject’ mean, refer to. We can begin with the notion of the structure which differs in Lacan from the classical structuralist notion. Very simply put: for Lacan, structure is ‘not-all’ (or ‘not whole’), which is what he articulates with the concept of the ‘barred Other’. This implies a lack, a contradiction as – so to say – ‘structuring principle of the structure’. Structure is always and at the same time more and less than structure. And this is where the new notion of the subject comes in. Subject is not the opposite of the structure, it is not some intentionality which uses structure to express itself, or which tries to get its more or less authentic voice heard through it.

Subject is a singular torsion produced by the inconsistency of the structure.

Take the simple example of the slips of the tongue: for Freud and Lacan, they do not bear witness to a hidden(unconscious) force repressed by the structure, which nevertheless betrays its presence by these slips.

Rather, they are singular existences of structure’s own inherent negativity. This is also the argument that I want to make in the context of the contemporary debates concerning realism, which often disqualify thought or thinking as something merely subjective (facing external reality). Put in a couple of formulas: Instead of taking it as something situated vis-à-vis being, we should conceive of thought as an objectivized (and necessarily dislocated) instance of the non-relation (contradiction, inconsistency) and rift inherent in being (in ‘objective reality’). Thinking is a necessarily displaced objectification (‘objective existence’) of this rift, that is, of the relation of being to its own
‘non-’, to its own negativity.

Although being is indeed independent of thinking, the rift that structures it only objectively exists as thought, and this perspective opens a new way of conceiving realism and/or materialism. This is precisely how I would also read the Lacanian subject. And this is why if we remove subject from the structure, we do not get closer to objective reality, but rather further away from it.

We can also say that the subject for Lacan is ‘objectively subjective’, there is an asymmetry in the subject, something in the subject which is not just subjective but which is also inaccessible to the subject.

We can see the connection back to Kant. The Kantian subject I would endorse is that ‘pure something, X, which thinks’, the transcendental unity of apperception. The point where subjectivity is not fully assumable and the point where the object is not reducible to or is ‘not yet’ objectivity (this is Lacan’s notion of objet petit a). Here, we see also that the Lacanian subject radicalizes the traditional ‘object’. The concept of the ‘object a’ is perhaps the most significant Lacanian conceptual invention.

Ethics

Alenka Zupančič: No, the notions of good and evil are not simply irrelevant to ethics, I would say, although they are indiscernible in advance. The responsibility we have is to decide what is good. It is difficult to overstate Kant’s significance in this respect. He did two things which may look incompatible: first, he founded ethics exclusively in human reason: no God or any other pre-established Good can serve as basis of morality. But instead of this leading to a kind of ‘relativised’, finitude-bound morality, it led to the birth of the modern thought of the absolute, the unconditional, and of the infinite as the possible, even imperative dimension of the finite.

Whatever objections we may raise to the Kantian ethics –for example, and already, from Hegel’s perspective – it was with Kant that the standing oppositions like absolute/contingent, lawful/unconditional, finite/infinite broke down, and the path was opened for a truly modern reconfiguration of these terms.

In the twentieth century, Kantian ethics has been largely domesticated to serve as an important ideological foundation of the contemporary democratic liberalism and of the gradual replacement of an emancipatory politics with the discourse of human rights or simply ethics.

I’ve always been astonished by the fact that a really radical, uncompromising and excess-ridden writing like Kant’s could be referred to in order to pacify the excess (of the political or something else). When the Nazi criminal Eichmann infamously defended himself by saying that in his doing he has been simply following the Kantian categorical imperative, this was of course an obscene perversion of Kant’s thought.

As Žižek succinctly formulated: what follows from Kant is not that we can use moral law as an excuse for our actions (‘oh, I wouldn’t do it, but the moral law commanded so’), we are absolutely responsible for the very law we are ‘executing’.

But Eichmann’s perverse defence did point at the unsettling core exposed by Kant: the unconditional law is one with (the excess of) freedom.

Lacan was probably the first to properly recognize this unsettling, excessive moment that Kant discovered at the very core of ethics.

When he wrote his famous essay ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b), the point was not that Kant is in truth as excessive as Sade, but rather that Sade is already a ‘taming’, a pacification – in terms perversion – of the impossible/real circumscribed by Kant. This is the thread I tried to follow in my book: Kant’s discovery of this unsettling, excessive negativity at the very core of Reason. I was not interested so much in ethics as ethics, as in this thing that Kant has formulated through his considerations of ethics.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Does this mean that the ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ simply pits the Real against the symbolic or is there something else going on here? Also, how does the concept of ‘drive’ and especially the concept of ‘death drive’, which Žižek emphasizes,relate to an ethical dimension? Finally, what does the Lacanian concept of ‘desire’ (as he describes it in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) have to do with this? Is ‘desire’ simply jettisoned in the later work?

Alenka Zupančič: In respect to the relation between symbolic and the Real, there are certainly oscillations and shifts at work already in Lacan, as well as in the work of the three of us (together and separately). The idea that the Real is a kind of unbearable, repulsive thickness beyond the symbolic, left out of it and inaccessible to it, may have had some presence in our work at some point. But I think it is fair to say that for many years now we are all struggling precisely with the problem of a different way of relating them as absolutely crucial. There are some differences in the way we go about it,

but the main and shared shift of perspective that orientates our work could be perhaps summed up as follows: the Real is not any kind of substance or being. It pertains to being (and to the symbolic) as its inherent contradiction/antagonism.

I started working on this issue first by getting a bit more into Nietzsche (the first, Slovene version of the Nietzsche book was published in 2001). Borrowing from Badiou his notion of the ‘minimal difference’ and relating it to Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘shortest shadow’, I tried to develop the notion of the Real as not that of some Thing, but of the fundamental non-coincidence of things with themselves. This non-coincidence is not caused by the symbolic; rather, the symbolic is already a response to it: it is discursivity as necessarily biased by the constraints of the contradiction in being.

Parallel to this work on Nietzsche was also my working on the theme of love, and later on comedy as possible ways of articulating what is at stake in the relation between the symbolic and the real. Lately, and for some time now, I have been working on this through the question of the ontological implications of the psychoanalytic notion of the sexual. I could perhaps put it in one formula: The real is part of being which is not being (or which is not qua being), but which as such dictates the (symbolic) logic of its appearance.

The real is part of being which is not being (or which
is not qua being), but which as such dictates the (symbolic) logic of
its appearance.
the Real is not any kind of substance or being. It pertains to being (and to the symbolic) as its inherent contradiction/antagonism.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Can you say a bit more about the two key Lacanian concepts (not without political ramifications of course) of ‘desire’ and ‘drive’. You have already explicated these, to some extent, but can you develop some of the tensions between them? Also, how do these concepts develop in your work, as they seem to have a paradigmatic status while undergoing some transformation for example from the ‘Ethics of the Real’ book to the book on ‘comedy’. Finally, are there philosophical tensions between your work and the other members of the troika on this fraught relationship between ‘desire’ and ‘drive’?

Alenka Zupančič: Certainly, you are right to point to these concepts as paradigmatic, and they are also crucial when it comes to the articulation of the relationship of the symbolic, the imaginary and the Real You are also correct that there are some differences here – one would expect nothing less in a philosophical movement worth its salt.

In my own work, I take up the themes of desire and drive throughout. In Ethics of the Real I focused mostly, although not exclusively, on Lacan from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and The Transference (Seminars VII and VIII). The concept of desire is in the foreground in both, but there is also a shift that starts taking place there, a conceptual move from das Ding as the impossible/Real as the focal point of desire, to the introduction of the object a. This shift then gets a further and very complex elaboration in Lacan’s subsequent seminars. But to formulate what is at stake very briefly and simply, we could say that what is involved here is a move from the Real as the abyssal beyond of the symbolic,

to a concept (of the object a) which undermines the very logic and nature of the difference on which the previous conception of the Real was based.

Object a is neither symbolic nor Real (in the previous sense of the term). It refers to the very impossibility to sustain this kind of difference between the symbolic and the Real, and it is this impossibility that is now the Real.

This also opens the door for a more systematic introduction of the concept of the drive. The notion of the object a is crucial both for desire and drive, they are different ways of relating this impossible non-ontological dimension (a) to what is, to being. In the Seminar X (Anxiety) Lacan provides a formula that I think is absolutely crucial and which I also took as the guiding line of my work after Ethics: he says that love is a sublimation, and then defines sublimation in a very surprising way, namely that sublimation is what makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire. If one remembers the famous definition of sublimation from Lacan’s seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (‘sublimation is what elevates an object to the dignity of the Thing’) then the shift is indeed dramatic and surprising. This new notion of sublimation becomes directly associated with the question of the drive, for sublimation is also defined as a ‘nonrepressive satisfaction of the drive’.

Now, in Lacan, as well as in our reading of him, there is indeed perceptible a turn from the logic of desire to that of the drive as somehow truer. But this is not simply a turn (of interest) from the symbolic to the Real, as it sometimes seems. What is at stake is rather the recognition of the fact that the status of the Real as the impossible Beyond of the symbolic is actually an effect of desire and its logic. Desire casts the internal contradiction that drives it in terms of the inaccessible Beyond to which it can only approach asymptomatically. With drive, the contradiction remains internal, and the impossible remains accessible as the impossible. This, I think, is absolutely crucial, and this is what

I tried to formulate with the formula the ‘Real happens’: the point of Lacan’s identification of the Real with the impossible is not simply that the Real is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, and in this reading, the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impossible happens. This is what is so surprising, traumatic, disturbing, shattering – or funny – about the Real. The Real happens precisely as the impossible. It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it happen, or expect it, or are ready for it. It is always something that doesn’t fit the (established or the anticipated) picture, or fits it all too well. The Real as impossible means that there is no ‘right’ time or place for it, and not that it is impossible for it to happen (‘On love as comedy’, Zupančič 2000).

The Real happens precisely as the impossible. It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it happen, or expect it, or are ready for it.

So what is important to stress in this whole ‘turn’ to the logic of the drive is the following: this is not simply a turn to the drive on account of its supposedly being closer, truer to the Real (as established independently), but rather a turn toward a different conception of the Real as such.

With drive, the Real is no longer a relational notion (sustaining questions like ‘what is our attitude toward the Real?’). It rather suggests something like: our relation to the Real is already in the Real. This is why questions like ‘How to get outside to the Real?’ seem to be the wrong kind of questions.

This is because there is no outside of the Real from which one would approach the Real.

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.

Enjoy Your Work

Thomas J. Catlaw & Gary S. Marshall (2018): Enjoy Your Work! The Fantasy
of the Neoliberal Workplace and Its Consequences for the Entrepreneurial Subject, Administrative Theory & Praxis
https://doi.org/10.1080/10841806.2018.1454241

Knights and Clarke find three emergent types of fragile or insecure identities in the academic workplace: impostors, aspirants, and existentialists.

Impostors are plagued by the feeling that they are getting away with something. Their position is a result of luck or hard work rather than ability, and they are perpetually on the verge of being “found out.” They fall short of the ideal academic almost to the point of wanting to distance themselves from academic work itself. Impostors feel a strong sense of guilt for not measuring up in light of the many and varied audiences that constantly evaluate and judge them.

Alenka Zupančič Death Drive

Alenka Zupančič. Death Drive and Repetition. 2011

Lecture presentation: April 20, 2019 at the Sigmund Freud Museum

Quote from Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”

If we may assume as an experience admitting of no exception that everything living dies from causes within itself, and returns to the inorganic, we can only say ‘The goal of all life is death’, and, casting back, ‘The inanimate was there before the animate’. At one time or another, by some operation of force which still completely baffles conjecture, the properties of life were awakened in lifeless matter. Perhaps the process was a prototype resembling that other one which later in a certain stratum of living matter gave rise to consciousness. The tension then aroused in the previously inanimate matter strove to attain an equilibrium; the first instinct was present, that to return to lifelessness. The living substance at that time had death within easy reach; there was probably only a short course of life to run, the direction of which was determined by the chemical structure of the young organism. So through a long period of time the living substance may have been constantly created anew, and easily extinguished, until decisive external influences altered in such a way as to compel the still surviving substance to ever greater deviations from the original path of life, and to ever more complicated and circuitous routes to the attainment of the goal of death. These circuitous ways to death, faithfully retained by the conservative instincts, would be neither more nor less than the phenomena of life as we now know it. If the exclusively conservative nature of the instincts is accepted as true, it is impossible to arrive at any other suppositions with regard to the origin and goal of life.

hypothesis: life is accidental there is no mysterious will of want to live. There is no struggle, life is a circuitous route to death, will to live just do their job of making the circuitous job operative.

The postulate of the selfpreservative instincts we ascribe to every living being stands in remarkable contrast to the supposition that the whole life of instinct serves the one end of bringing about death. The theoretic significance of the instincts of self-preservation, power and self-assertion, shrinks to nothing, seen in this light; they are part-instincts designed to secure the path to death peculiar to the organism and to ward off possibilities of return to the inorganic other than the immanent ones, but the enigmatic struggle of the organism to maintain itself in spite of all the world, a struggle that cannot be brought into connection with anything else, disappears. It remains to be added that the organism is resolved to die only in its own way; even these watchmen of life were originally the myrmidons of death. Hence the paradox comes about that the living organism resists with all its energy influences (dangers) which could help it to reach its life-goal by a short way (a short circuit, so to speak); but this is just the behaviour that characterises a pure instinct as contrasted with an intelligent striving.

Conservative instincts repeat a required pathways. What is life if we spell out these implications.

At 20 minutes: Life has no ground or source of its own. It’s something that happens to inanimate, it is an interruption and disturbance of the inanimate. Instead of saying the inanimate universe doesn’t give a damn if we live or die, we are invited to consider a possibility that we are mere perversions or strange pleasures of the inanimate itself. Precisely constituting its tics and grimaces. Life is but a dream of the inanimate, more precisely it is a nightmare disturbance, since the inanimate wants nothing but to be left alone.

Big Problem: return to inanimate and cancel out tension … Pleasure Principle: Lowering of tension to reach state of Nirvana (homeostatic state). The death drive is simply another name for Pleasure Principle. Reality Principle, sometimes have to postpone to survive, uses same image of ‘detour’ between life and death drive. Reality Principle, postponement of satisfaction. Life (reality principle) is disturbance of the inanimate, Reality Principle is detour of death drive, or Pleasure Principle, so there is a direct point by point mapping between Pleasure Principle and Death Drive.

This is a problem: Pleasure Principle being a primary principle but what about the compulsion to repeat, something more drive related than the P.P which it overrides. Compulsion to Repeat (CtR), insistance of an organism to endless repeat the state of tension, this corresponds more to Freud’s first idea. Interesting dilemma, abandon notion of D.D. as useless detour, or try to conceptualize in different way and this is what Lacan did. There is something essential to drives, when Freud introduced the D.D. Not D.D. as one drive amongst others (scopic,anal), there is something in the midst of every drive that has this dimension.

Sexual Drive (SD), the SD are something more and less than life. This is the part of Freud’s text, he sets up a dualist view, Eros and Thanatos. This dualist view turns out to be unsustainable for Freud, what undermines it is that sexuality cannot be subsumed under life instinct.

There is not inbuilt principle that orients sexuality. Jung’s Libidinal as neutral substance. Freud’s move was to DE-substantialize sexuality, it is the very impossibility of its own circumscription or delimitation. The sexual is not a separate principal or domain of human life, this is why it can inhabit every domain of human life.

There are only sexual drives, all drives are sexual. Freud inclines to monism, but not of the Jungian kind. Sexual Drives (SD). I love in you something more than you (object a) I mutilate you. Imperceptibly the perspective has changed. to the Monism of Sexual Drives.

45 minutes: Split/Antagonism prevents any substance from being One. We don’t start with one, or two, we start with a problem that prevents being from being One

SPLIT/Contradiction: This negativity, the minus to life becomes the very site of the unconscious. Something gets lost here, death becomes inherent to life, its presupposition. We start talking when one signifier goes missing.

Freudian concept of Unconscious and sexuality. Death is what lurks in the very midst of sexual drives, not as aim, but as negative magnitude or gap, or minus repeated by them.

Lacanian notion of the DD. Repetition in conservative, instinct of self-preservation, repetition, instincts repeat circuitous paths, DD originating in another kind of repetition within this conservative repetition, a repetition within a repetition. Freud in 3 Essays in series of Sexuality. Surplus satisfaction, we eat but there is also pleasure of oral beyond the need for food. This surplus satisfaction is internal cause of tension, it has constant pressure, The drive originating in this surplus, doesn’t seek to minimize tension but to repeat it.

satisfaction comes before the demand, satisfaction and its repetitions goes against PP

2017 article on Death Drive

Zupančič, Alenka. “Death Drive.” Lacan and Deleuze, edited by Boštjan Nedoh and Adreja Zevnik, Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pp. 163-179.

Compulsion to repeat and hypothesis of the death drive.

Human relationships that end is same outcome: teacher-mentor abandoned each time by his/her protégés, however much protégés differ from one another. Person whose friendships all end by the friend, person who raises people to positions of great public or private authority and after a while upsets the authority and replaces them with a new one, or lover each of whose love affairs, “passes through same phases and reaches the same outcome.”

Even ‘passive cases’ i.e., women married 3 times and each time husbands fell ill and she had to cater to and nursed them on their deathbeds. At the level of dreams that are governed by pleasure principle and wish fulfilment, compulsion to repeat particular traumas

Pleasure principle EQUALS maximize pleasure (lowering of tension), minimize displeasure, BUT the compulsion to REPEAT contradicts the Pleasure Principle

Why would somebody be compelled to repeat a distinctly unpleasant experience?

Two divergent accounts in Freud: a) Repetition appears something one can’t remember, “Repetitions is thus fundamentally the repetition (in different ‘disguises’) of a concrete, originally traumatic event or experience.” Ray Brassier has opined that what this repetition repeats is not a traumatic and hence repressed experience, “but something which COULD NEVER REGISTER AS EXPERIENCE TO BEGIN WITH.” In other words the trauma being repeated is according to Z, outside of the horizon of experience (and is constitutive of it).

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)

Metastases of Enjoyment

September 20, 2011

Metastases of Enjoyment. New York: Verso, 1994.

[T]he problem that confronted Lacan was: how do we pass from animal coupling led by instinctual knowledge and regulated by natural rhythms to human sexuality possessed by a desire which is eternalized and, for that very reason, insatiable, inherently perturbed, doomed to fail, and so on? …

So the answer to Lacan’s problem is: we enter human sexuality through the intervention of the symbolic order qua heterogeneous parasite that disrupts the natural rhythm of coupling. 155

Johnston A.

Johnston, A. (2013). Drive Between Brain And Subject: An Immanent Critique Of Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis. The Southern Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 51, Spindel Supplement

I am convinced that the life sciences, in order to do real justice to the richly and unpredictably weird sorts of subjects humans are, must supplement the framing worldview of their spontaneous organicism with the notion that (phrased in Lacanian fashion) there is something in the organic more than the organic itself.

In other words, a nonorganicity is immanent to the most complex forms of the organic. This is by virtue of the reality that, above certain thresholds, complexity of various sorts (be it biological, computational, institutional, social, or whatever) tends, within its given domain(s),to generate inner antagonisms, bugs, glitches, loopholes, short circuits, and tensions (a fact to which any experienced computer programmer, tax lawyer, or government bureaucrat readily would testify).

verhaeghe pt 3 alienation separation

Verhaeghe, P. (1998). Causation and Destitution of a Pre-ontological Non-entity: On the Lacanian Subject. In D. Nobus (Ed.), Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (pp. 164-189). New York: State University of New York Press.

In the first part, we demonstrated how the subject is caused by the primary experience of a lack. The attempt at solving this lack by using signifiers entails a confrontation with another lack, this time within the chain of signifiers.

In this second part, we will concentrate on the two constitutive processes within this causation of the subject: alienation and separation. The first one is fully elaborated by Lacan and can easily by traced back to Freud . The second one concerns Lacan’s interpretation of the end and the finality of the analytic treatment. His theoretical development in these matters comprises an ever shifting interpretation of this idea of separation.

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Verhaeghe pre-ontological pt 2

Verhaeghe part 1
Verhaeghe part 1a

In Seminar XI, Lacan began his discussion of the causation of the subject with something that was already well-known to his audience: the drive, being always a partial drive, revolves around a lack. However, at that point, Lacan surprised his audience by stating that there are two lacks.

The first one is the lack in the chain of signifiers, the interval between two signifiers.

This is the typically hysterical – and thus Freudian – level in which desire can never be fully expressed, let alone satisfied . In Lacanian terms, this reads that the subject, confronted with the enigma of the desire of the Other, tries to verbalise this desire and thus constitutes itself by identifying with the signifiers in the field of the Other, without ever succeeding in filling the gap between subject and Other.

Hence, the continuous movement from signifier to signifier, in which the subject alternately appears and disappears. The ensuing alienation is a continuous flywheel movement around the lack in the chain of signifiers, resulting in what Lacan called l’avènement du sujet, the advent of the subject. 168

Phylogeny: the evolutionary history of a kind of organism, the evolution of a genetically related group of organisms as distinguished from the development of the individual organism; the evolutionary history of a group of organisms, especially as depicted in a family tree.

Ontogeny: the development or course of development especially of an individual organism; the development or developmental history of an individual organism.

*****
A total aside from Adrian Johnston

Lacanian theory does not require, as Butler vehemently alleges, a dubious dichotomy between the symbolic and the social. An easy way to clarify matters is to invoke the Freudian distinction between phylogeny and ontogeny.

The symbolic order is a historically contingent formation at the phylogenetic level, the level transcending the ontogenetic life history of the individual. In an inverse correlation, for the particular subject whose self-identity is mediated by this pre-existent system, this same symbolic order is effectively transcendental in that it serves as a possibility condition for this form of subjectivity itself.

Without a symbolic order, the individual would not be a proper subject. The massive time lag between the different diachronic speeds of phylogeny and ontogeny is partially responsible for this dual status of the symbolic as paradoxically both historical (with respect to the phylogenetic collective) and transcendental (with respect to the ontogenetic individual).

This temporal discrepancy makes it seem, from the vantage point of the individual subject’s perspective, as if the symbolic order is synchronic, which it de facto is given the slowness of its rates of change versus the comparative brevity and rapidity of the individual’s life history.

Butler fails to fully appreciate Lacan’s philosophical audacity in tacitly relying upon a rigid distinction between the historical and the transcendental to critique him. But, what about Butler’s key assertion that the Lacanian transcendental emperor wears no clothes, in other words, that the binding force of the symbolic rests upon an empty performative act? Is there no other reason for the symbolic’s authority apart from the bald, blunt assertion of this authority by those theorizing about it?

Again, the transcendence of the symbolic order in relation to particular subjects is of paramount importance here. Individuals neither choose what kind of symbolic order to be born into nor have the liberty to capriciously forge their own idiosyncratic symbolic orders ex nihilo. Furthermore, beyond Lacanian theory itself, psychoanalysis in general is committed to the notion that, as the saying goes, “the child is the father of the man.”
*****

The innovation begins when Lacan surprises his audience by stating that there is yet another lack, which he calls anterior and real in comparison to its counterpart.

Furthermore, the lack in the chain of signifiers is only a retake on this primal lack, the originality of which resides in the fact that it has to be understood in the context of [ ‘avenement du vivant (the advent of the living being) .

This entails the emergence of sexual reproduction in phylogeny, which is repeated with every ontogeny.

At this point, the level of Unbegriff (incomprehension), beyond the psychological comprehensibility of the previous lack, is reached .

The anterior lack concerns the price life has to pay for the acquisition of sexual reproduction. From the moment an organism becomes capable of reproducing itself in a sexual way, it loses its individual immortality and death becomes an unavoidable necessity .

At birth, the individual loses something and this loss will be represented later on by
all other substitute objects. 168

The subject encounters a lack in the discourse of the Other, in which the desire of the Other ‘crawls, slips, escapes, like the ferret, ‘ producing an enigma to which the subject has to produce an answer.

It is at that point that the subject recurs to the anterior lack which entails its own disappearance. As an answer to the riddle of the desire of the Other, it presents itself and thus its disappearance: does the Other desire me, can s/he afford to lose me?

This fantasy, in which one’s own death is depicted as a form of testing the limits of the love
of the Other, is fairly well-known in adults and children alike: Veut-il me perdre ?, Does he want to lose me?

zupančič sublimation pt 2

Zupančič, A. (2003) The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. MIT Press

Here we come to the last grand narrative from the era of the end of grand narratives: there is no Real, everything is convention, language games, a labyrinth of different possibilities that, at least in principle, are all of equal value. What is the effect of this thesis?

Its effect is not exactly the disappearance of the Real, but, rather, its full coincidence with reality. In other words, the reality principle is now conceived of as the only and ultimate Real.

This is what Nietzsche calls “modern nihilism” and the “crisis of values,” the latter being precisely the “crisis of sublimation” in the sense described above.

At issue is not a complaint about the corruption of values, and lack of respect for them, but a diagnosis concerning the weakening of the sublimatory force, the force that could produce or create some distance toward the reality principle and its claims.

It entails the closure of the very space of creativity. This is why it is very important to keep insisting upon the notion of the Real that, in turn, has to be defined in terms other than those of some “authentic Real” lurking behind the deceptive appearances. And the (late) Lacanian notion of the Real can help us to do precisely that.

The Real is not some authentic Beyond, constituting the truth of the reality. The Real is not the Beyond of reality, but its own blind spot or dysfunction—that is to say, the Real is the stumbling block on account of which reality does not fully coincide with itself. The Real is the intrinsic division of reality itself.