drive – Page 2 – objet (a)

zupančič sublimation pt 1

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

If this man were to act as Kant suggests (and thus to renounce spending the night with the Lady), he would embrace the pleasure principle as the ultimate principle of his action.

On the other hand, his decision to spend the night with his Lady, regardless of the consequences, testifies to the opposite… “to spend the night with the desired Lady,” even if we are to hang for it, is a perfect example of sublimation

“To raise an object to the dignity of the Thing,” as a fundamental gesture of sublimation, thus enables us to accept as possible something the possibility of which is excluded from the realm of the reality principle.

The [reality principle] normally functions as the criterion of possible transgressions of the pleasure principle. That is to say: the reality principle sets limits to transgressions of the pleasure principle; it tolerates, or even imposes, certain transgressions, and excludes
others.

For instance, it [reality principle] demands that we accept some displeasure as the condition of our survival, and of our social well being in general, whereas it excludes some other transgressions of the pleasure principle that serve no such purpose (or no purpose at all).

Its [reality principle] function of criterion hence consists in setting limits within the field governed by the binary system pleasure/pain. Sublimation is what enables us to challenge this criterion, and eventually to formulate a different one.

The important thing to point out here is that the reality principle is not simply some kind of natural way associated with how things are, to which sublimation would oppose itself
in the name of some Idea.

The reality principle itself is ideologically mediated; one could even claim that it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical fact or (biological, economic . . .) necessity (and that we tend to perceive as nonideological).

Thus, the Lacanian theory of sublimation does not suggest that sublimation turns away from the Real in the name of some Idea; rather, it suggest that sublimation gets closer
to the Real than the reality principle does.

It [sublimation] aims at the Real precisely at the point where the Real cannot be reduced to reality.

One could say that sublimation opposes itself to reality, or turns away from it, precisely in the name of the Real.

To raise an object to the dignity of the Thing is not to idealize it, but, rather, to “realize” it, that is, to make it function as a stand-in for the Real.

Sublimation is thus related to ethics insofar as it is not entirely subordinated to the reality principle, but liberates or creates a space from which it is possible to attribute certain values to something other than the recognized and established “common good.”

The creative act of sublimation is not only a creation of some new good, but also (and principally) the creation and maintenance of a certain space for objects that have no place in the given, extant reality, objects that are considered “impossible.” Sublimation gives
value to what the reality principle does not value.

If Antigone raises her brother’s funeral to the dignity of the Thing, Sophocles raises to the dignity of the Thing the very passion or desire that supports Antigone in her act.

In the play Antigone, we have Antigone’s act, but we also have Sophocles’ act, which consists in giving an uncontestable value to the “irrational passion” of Antigone’s act.

We are thus dealing with a rather unusual meaning of the term sublimation: it concerns the creation of a certain space, scene, or “stage” that enables us to value something that is situated beyond the reality principle, as well as beyond the principle of the common good. It is at this point that sublimation is related to ethics.

However, another remark is necessary here. The attribution of value to the beyond of the reality principle is never a direct, immediate one. In other words, what sublimation allows us to value or to appreciate is never the Thing (das Ding) itself, but always some more or less banal, everyday object, a quotidian object elevated to the dignity of the Thing (and an object that also somehow always masks the Thing as the central void): the night spent with the Lady; a brother’s burial. . . .

In Lacanian terms, sublimation stages a parade, displaying a series of objets petit a that have it in their power not only to evoke the Thing, but also to mask or veil it. They obfuscate the difference between themselves and the void to which they give body, the void to which they owe what appears to be their most intrinsic feature of value.

From there emerges the other significant theme that Lacan develops in relation to sublimation: the theme of delusion or lure. It is no coincidence that the chapter introducing the discussion of sublimation bears the title “Drives and Lures.”

freeland ethics Sem VII pt. 2 Desire borne by death

Freeland, C. 2013. Antigone in Her Unbearable Splendour: New Essays on Jacques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Albany: State University of New York Press.

borne: to bring, transported, transmitted by, spread by, carried by

Lacan probably ses the traditional philosophical persepectives on ethics as framed and trapped in the theater of a philosophical mirror stage wherein the human, ethical subject is conceived as born prematurely, a fragile, helpless and fragmented body confronting and recognizing its wholeness in the other of the mirror image before it and longing to be that wholenes. Is Lacan’s psychoanalytic ethic not first and essentially the critical attempt to move beyond this ethical mirror stage, to move beyond the search for the anticipated wholeness of a “meaning of life”? 39

ethics for Lacan is ethics of speech … then the ethical, psychoanalytical Truth that arises in the psychoanalytic brushes with death would not wish to install or monumentalize Truth or Death itself as the ultimate and hidden meaning in life.

Its pronouncements would not articulate either a timeless Truth or a terrifying Death as the “one” meaning of life, for this might make psychoanalysis a type of hermeneutics, and “death” would then be something, a “meaning,” that, given the proper methodology, the proper hermeneutic, could somehow be brought from the depth to the surface of language and stated — phenomenalized, made to appear — perhaps in the form of a proposition, or in a form of life, as the statement of a Truth that would guarantee that life is not “for nothing.”

In Lacan’s work, the relationship between language and death is completely different than this familiar scheme. The Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis is therefore first a disruption of this hermeneutical scheme a form of resistance to the systematic statement of philosophical meaning of life taken as the key element and link in the triumvirate of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Must the Lacanian ethic not first and fundamentally be a resistance to the Hegelian way of taking up death, …

Is the Lacanian ethic not undermining the very meaning of “oneness” and “meaning” in life? Is the “one meaning” always going to be “not one”? Is Lacan’s statement not the instauration of the ethical necessity of confronting the disruption and the destitution of life that abides in every such statement, a death that takes place in language, that is to say, in desire?

Disruption rather than salvation in and through the systematic statement of the ultimately religious telos of Truth and Oneness: is this not Lacan’s desire, a desire borne by the death of philosophy. 40

freeland ethics Sem 7

Freeland, C. 2013. Antigone in Her Unbearable Splendour: New Essays on Jacques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Albany: State University of New York Press.

More than a “yearning,” the death drive is a drive unbound and immeasurable, a drive that defines human life.

As a work of poetic art, Antigone’s work is thus the work of truth, where gtruth in this case is the truth of desire, the death drive. … a “zeropint” of word and image, a pooint where the word equals zero, where signification stumbles and comes to a halt. 7

his heroically implring his audience against any giving up or “giving way” on desire. and while it may not at first seem to be much, it is also here that he leveraged the only remaining posibilites for human fredom and self-assertion in the face of seemingly impcable necessity 11

il n’y a pas de sujet connaissant there is no such thing as a knowing subject. Beyond the measured articulations of the philosophical subject “who knows,” and who first of all has “self-knowledge,” Lacan approached through the neologism lalangue another dimension of the enoyment of speaking that he calls the jouissance of speech, “an enjoying of speech qua jouissance of speech (parole jouissance en tant que jouissance de parole),” that is quite beyond and inaccessible to the measured articulations of the philosophical subject who knows what he/she wants. But this reference to jouissance requires that not only the enjoyment but also the suffering introduced by language be stressed.

The effects of the introduction of language into the living human being are not always so salutary in Lacan’s view as they may be for the philosophical ethical tradition, where the measured eloquence of truth brings self-mastery and has a healing effect, for language in the Lacanian universe introduces not only mastery an salvation, it also brings subjection.

It can even be seen as a parasite, a disease, virulence, an Other in which the subject from the day it is named, from the day it is a subject, is captured and defined. 19-20

The individual who is affected by the unconscious is the same individual who constitutes what I call the subject of a signifier. It is this subject — and not the subject as one “who knows” (connaissance) — that must also become the ethical subject caught in the knots of desire and moral-ethical law, a subject that is bound by the limits of language and that is inscirbed within the limits of the symbolic order.

Among the affects of the unconscious on the subject, would also include a desire to transgress those limits, a desire, and an unavowed passion to get back behind or beyond the limits of language, to exceed the limits of the law. This is a desire for the “Real,” … With the insciption in to the symbolic order comes order, comes regulations, and the reign of moral. law. The real is whatever disrupts that order and that law; whatever breaks the operation of the symbolic order.

Access to the real is difficult and perhaps danbgerous, but also not without a certain enjoyment, a certain jouissance 23

Todestrieb

Badioiu marks this lmit and present the psychoanalytic rupture with Platonic ontology by way of a resonance he brings into view between Lacan and the pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Heraclitus. deconstructs Plato by going back behind him, or before him, to a pre-Platonic thinking, … that came before the ontological metaphysics of Plato, and that may have in fact conditioned it, but which was subsequently silenced, left in fragments by the tradition of thought that emerged from Plato. … where Plato is the philosopher of the great higher unity of a transcendental Eidos, a true philosopher of the infinite, Hereclitus is a thinker of difference and of the gap, a philosopher of the enigmas of finitude and of the lack of final resolution andclosure in being. 36

It is in tragic drama, not philosophy, according to Lacan, that one encountes the drive and the distress of death. It is by “digging into verse,” as Mallarmé put it, that one encounters the abyss of death and the absence of God, forfeits the sureties of being, and is thereby brought to the limit where one must break with everything, even the traditional horizons of truth and the promise of futurity.

johnston vicious super-ego part 2 of 2

Johnston, A. (2001) The vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics. Psychoanlytic Studes (3): 3/4. 411-424.

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

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

The introduction of the Law generates desire ex nihilo. Instead of forbidding a pre-existent set of urges in the individual, it teaches the subject what to covet, if only as an inaccessible vanishing point whose appearance of possible accessibility is a mirage engendered by the seemingly contingent nature of the Law and its authority.

Lacan is not so much interested in proposing a new prescriptive ethics as in comprehending the precise nature of ‘moral masochism’,

in fully grasping how the constellation of the id, the super-ego, and the socio-symbolic Umwelt of reality ‘pathologize’ the ethical field. At most, this Lacanian analytic diagnosis of moral masochism should be interpreted as a preparatory clearing of the ground for a genuine ethics, as a mapping out of the obstacles hindering the construction and enactment of a non-pathological ‘metaphysics of morals’.

At the beginning of this quotation, Lacan alludes to an observation that Freud formulates in his 1924 paper ‘The economic problem of masochism’. In the concluding paragraphs of that essay, Freud notes that the more the subject complies with reality’s prohibition of aggression, the greater the guilt the subject feels, the harsher the demands of the super-ego become.

Unlike external authorities, which can only observe and punish externalized acts of transgression, the super-ego sees and judges the subject’s ‘inner’ intentions. Freud pinpoints this as a paradox of sorts: the more the subject overtly obeys the rules of reality, the more the super-ego (unconsciously) inflicts the negative affect of guilt.

This paradox is illuminated by the theory of the super-ego as presented in Civilization and Its Discontents: the super-ego is a subliminatory channel for the id’s sadism; the id diverts the aggressive drives onto the subject’s own ego when the reality principle prevents it from discharging this aggression against others;

thus, the more the ‘moral’ subject refrains from enacting these aggressive drives in reality (i.e., the more he/she heeds the ‘ethical’ principles of his/her social milieu), the more the id is compelled to utilize the super-ego to ‘work off’ aggression against the ego (hence, the greater the feeling of guilt, since Freud claims that guilt is the ‘pain’ consciously experienced by the ego as a result of the unconscious subliminatory dynamic occurring at the level of id and super-ego). How does Lacan integrate this line of Freudian reasoning?

it isn’t simply a matter of claiming that the Law arouses desire out of nowhere through its prohibitions: it’s also the case that obedience to the Law is cemented in place by the struggle to fend off these desires, that the more rigid the subject’s adherence to the rules, the presumably greater is his/her need to repress increasingly powerful urges to contravene it.

Consequently, when Lacan speaks about being guilty for having ‘ceded’ or ‘given ground’ relative to one’s desire, what he really means is the following:

the more the subject surrenders (to) his/her desires by obeying the restrictions of the Law, the more guilty he/she feels,

since such concessions only aggravate the (unconscious) volatility and intensity of these same desires (namely, ‘internal’ repressed desires which never fail to escape the notice of the omniscient authority of the sadistic super-ego). 419

Near the end of his 1974 television interview, Lacan clearly advances this claim in saying that, “Freud reminds us that it’s not evil, but good, that engenders guilt” (Lacan, p. 45). At no point does Lacan contest the Freudian definition of guilt as a negative affect resulting from the super-ego’s punishment of the ego.

Hence, Lacan, in following Freud here, isn’t treating guilt as a properly ethico-moral sentiment, but, rather, as a symptom of super-ego aggression (with this aggression itself being acknowledged as arising from ceded, aim-inhibited desires whose intensity increases the longer and more severely they’re held in check).

Consequently, one can be ‘guilty’ before the tribunal of the super-ego without, for all that, being actually guilty in an ethico-moral sense per se. 419

Lacan merely brings one to the point where the essential question that must be answered if a psychoanalytic ethics is to be possible at all poses itself:

Can conscience function beyond the super-ego, namely, is the subject able to break out of the cycle running from Law to desire to guilt?

If not, then the Freudian diagnosis of conscience as a symptomatic by-product of the superego’s id-driven sadism really does represent the end of ethics in any meaningful, philosophically consistent mode.

Both Freud and Lacan have made significant inroads into demystifying the origins and mechanisms of feeling guilty. However, it remains doubtful if psychoanalysis has yet pronounced its definitive verdict as regards being guilty.

mellard Beyond Lacan

Mellard, James M. (2006) Beyond Lacan. Albany: State U of New York 288 pages.
Chapter 7: Hart’s Damage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics of Jouissance. pp. 179 – 208.

traditional oedipal subject founded on an ethics of desire to a postraditional subject founded on an ethics of jouissance

Oedipal Subject: eros and social life,
– subject oriented to desire (and thus constrained by castration and the pleasure principle)

– subject of desire
Damage is important in our understanding the shift from the old oedipal order to the new narcissism, from the order of desire to that of the drive.

This shift, Copjec suggests, has a cognate move-epochal, historical, and ongoing, neither personal nor idiosyncratic. It shifts emphasis to concepts — either ” meaning” or “being” — Lacan associates with the vel of alienation.

Heretofore, in that process known as ” oedipalization, ” it has been a good thing for subjects to be oriented to meaning (and thus to desire within the pleasure principle and oedipal law) rather than to being (and thus to drive and jouissance within the domain of the narcissistic ).

PostOedipal, PostTraditional Subject: Thanatos and the death drive

– oriented towards jouissance and thus denying contraints of castration and aiming beyond the pleasure principle. narcissistic subject of jouissance

Femme fatale turns desire toward jouissance

In so far as sexual difference is a Real that resists symbolization, the sexual relationship is condemned to remain an asymmetrical non-relationship in which the Other, our partner, prior to being a subject, is a Thing. Metastases of Enjoyment, 108

We may say that the narrator-protagonist of Damage merely takes a detour through desire and ordinary oedipal subjectivity before becoming the problematical subject of our postuniverse. His detour goes through the femme fatale, one guise of the maternal object who experiences desire and, as Copjec says, serves as a “defense against the drive” by her relation to jouissance (198).

As Zizek suggests in his discussions of film noir, the role of the femme fatale foregrounds the paradoxical role of “woman ” in the construction of ” man . ” That role raises issues of desire and drive. Zizek points out that Lacan’s controversial claim that “Woman is a symptom ” (Feminine Sexuality 168 ) of a man can be understood in two radically opposed ways because in Lacan’s career Lacan himself shifted his views on the symptom. In the first, the ” early”view of the 1950s, Lacan saw the symptom, Zizek says, as “a cyphered message,” one in which therefore the “woman-symptom appears as the sign, the embodiment of man’s fall, attesting to the fact that man ‘gave way as to his desire'” (Enjoy 154).

In this view as illustrated in Zizek’s discussion of the noir universe, “woman is not an external, active cause which lures man into a fall-she is just a consequence, a result, a materialization of man’s fall. So, when man purifies his desire of the pathological remainders, woman disintegrates in precisely the same way a symptom dissolves after successful interpretation, after we have symbolized its repressed meaning” (155).

But, Zizek asks, is there not more? “Does not Lacan’s other notorious thesis — the claim that ‘woman doesn’t exist‘ — point in the same direction? Woman doesn’t exist in herself, as a positive entity with full ontological consistency, but only as a symptom of man.”

In the second view, found in the late writings and seminars and foregrounding drive and jouissance, Lacan regarded the symptom” as a particular signifying formation which confers on the subject its very ontological consistency, enabling it to structure its basic, constitutive relationship to enjoyment (jouissance).”

In this late Lacanian view, both the symptom and woman-as-symptom change. Says Zizek, ” [I]f the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet, disintegrates. In this sense, ‘woman is a symptom of man‘ means that man himself exists only through woman qua his symptom: all his ontological consistency hangs on, is suspended from his symptom, is ‘externalized’ in his symptom.

In other words, man literally ex-sists: his entire being lies ‘out there,’ in woman” (155) . Zizek is especially interested in film noir because, paradox ically, it expresses both these Lacanian views of woman and symptom.

The father Martyn thinks he knows is the oedipal father who in his ignorance allows him desire and pleasure. The one he does not know is the obscene, life- and joy-denying
primordial father who wills his death, murders him, and chooses to become him.

There is good reason Martyn does not know his father is or has become the anal or phallic or primordial father. According to Zizek, the anal father represents the tendency in Lacan’s seminar, especially beginning with The Ethics of Psychoanalysis ( 1959-1960), for every concept to have, as a Mobius strip does, an obverse, a paradoxical reverse or inner lining that contradicts or obviates it. The primordial father, Zizek writes, ” is the obscene, superego anal figure that is real-alive, the ‘Master of Enjoyment.'”

In Freud, this primordial father is the one who is murdered by the primal horde of brothers, murdered precisely because, expressing drive, he forbids their desire and pleasure by taking all the women for himself.

Because of the power of his drive to jouissance, he would murder them if necessary to prevent their desires or drives. Zizek suggests that politically, in the exchange of master for leader, the primordial father paradoxically follows the oedipal father. ” In all emblematic revolutions, from the French to the Russian,” says Zizek, ” the overthrow of the impotent old regime of the symbolic Master (French King, Tsar) ended in the rule of a far more ‘repressive’ figure of the ‘anal’ father-Leader (Napoleon, Stalin ).”

This historical pattern suggests to Zizek that in the myth of the primal horde Freud had things backward.”

The order of succession described by Freud in Totem and Taboo (the murdered primordial Father-Enjoyment returns in the guise of the symbolic authority of the Name) is thus reversed: the deposed symbolic Master returns as the obscene-real Leader.”

In this account, Zizek suggests, ” Freud was the victim of a kind of perspective illusion: ‘primordial father‘ is a later, eminently modern, post-revolutionary phenomenon, the result of the dissolution of traditional symbolic authority” (Metastases 206 ) .

johnston vicious circle super-ego

Johnston, A. (2001) The vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics. Psychoanlytic Studes (3): 3/4. 411-424.

“desire is a defense, a prohibition against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance”

One of the easiest ways to gain a preliminary understanding of Lacanian desire is by returning to the Freudian concepts of Trieb and sublimation.

For Freud, sublimation is the typical means by which Trieb adapts itself to the constraints and obstacles it comes to encounter at the level of the reality principle. Reality forbids certain drive-aims qua the attainment of satisfaction linked to determinate drive-objects. Thus, reality is said to be responsible for what Freud designates as ‘aim-inhibition’ (a catalyst for sublimation). 413

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

However, especially in the later texts of the second topography, Freud repeatedly emphasizes that Trieb is ‘fundamentally conservative’, that drives unceasingly seek to recover their earliest forms of satisfaction. Furthermore, in, for example, Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that ‘instinctual renunciation’ (i.e., the aim-inhibition of the drives demanded by human reality) is, despite appearances to the contrary, an unavoidable libidinal fate for all subjects

As such, the Freudian subject lives in a state of unsatisfactory compromise: sublimation provides pleasurable outlets for Trieb, but Trieb itself is incapable of ever being fully satisfied with these compromises, since they are, by the very definition of the mechanism of sublimation, deviations from the original cathetic trajectory (i.e., the ‘earliest state of affairs’ which all drives struggle in vain to recover; in the seventh seminar, Lacan designates this posited ‘ground zero’ of the libidinal economy das Ding).

The libidinal life of the human being is therefore marked by certain constitutive ‘lacks’ or ‘absences’—as Lacan puts it, the ‘sovereign Good’ of das Ding is always missing from the reality of subjective ‘ex-sistence’ — and this condition of (non-)existence is precisely what Lacan intends for his notion of ‘desire’ to designate.

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

Das Ding
But where does this take us? Is the Law the Thing? Certainly not. Yet I can only know of the Thing by means of the Law.

In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet it if the Law hadn’t said: ‘Thou shalt not covet it.’ But the Thing finds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. (Lacan, Book VII, p. 83).

boothby objet a

Boothby, R. (2001) Freud as Philosopher. New York: Routledge. Reprinted Figurations of the Objet a. In Jacques Lacan Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory Volume II Philosophy Edited by Slavoj Zizek, London: Routledge, 2003. pp. 159-191.

In toilet training, the anus is “colonized,” to invoke a happily apt pun, by the other’s desire.

Throughout the future life of the individual, the contractions and relaxations of the anal muscle will inevitably call up immensely more global connotations of mastery or submission, independence or dependence. Taken up into this physiologico-emotional complex, the fecal material becomes freighted with significance that utterly outstrips all natural or animal attitudes toward excrement. In accord with a symbolic equivalence already familiar to Freud, the feces become privileged tokens in an exchange of love — excrement as primordial gift.

Lacan extends this distinction between eye and gaze to propose a general theory of vision in which the act of seeing functions precisely to avoid the gaze.

He thus suggests that painting produces a “pacifying, Apollinian effect” that feeds the eye with reassuringly stable objects in order to allow the viewer to put the gaze out of play.

In painting, “something is given not so much to the gaze as to the eye, something that involves the abandonment, the laying down, of the gaze” (FFC, 101). How are we to understand this laying down of the gaze? The painter offers the picture to molify the gaze of the spectator, as if the gesture of painting were a matter of escaping from a predator by distracting it with a piece of meat.

The painter gives something to the person who must stand in front of his painting which, in part, at least, of the painting, might be summed up thus — You want to see? Well, take a look at this! he gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons. (Lacan, 101)

By referring the act of seeing to some third point off the axis of seer and seen, Lacan succeeds in revealing the internal complexity of the scopic drive. The third position, itself invisible yet functioning continually to reenergize the subject’s investment in the object of sight, is none other that the objet a.

Its presence-by-absence serves to produce “the ambiguity that affects anything that is inscribed in the register of the scopic drive” (FFC, 83). To illustrate this point, we can return to the example of the voyeur who, relentlessly goaded on by the scopic drive, is most completely reclaimed by the force of the drive precisely when he fails to see what he is looking for.

That is to say, as a search for the objet a, an object that by definition cannot be given, the scopic drive is most surely reinforced and recreated at the moment when it appears to draw closest to its objective, yet fails to grasp it.

It is as if this very failure is the evidence that the objet a is there. The point is perfectly demonstrated by the essential pose, the veritable sine qua non, of soft-core pornographic magazines: the so-called spread shot.

The centerpiece of this shot is the vulva spread wide for the camera to inspect. Seeking to explain the appeal of this defining image we might naively suppose that the spread shot satisfies insofar as it “shows all.” It leaves nothing to the imagination.

The viewer has finally won unimpeded visual access to the inner secret of the feminine. From a Lacanian point of view, however, the conclusion is exactly the opposite.

What attracts the scopic drive to the vaginal spread shot is precisely what it doesn’t show, to what in fact cannot be shown. The result of the “show all” strategy is to create even more intense hunger for the thing that cannot be imaged: the objet a.

The more you see, the less you find what you are really looking for. The “proof” of the Lacanian view lies in the compulsiveness with which the consumer of pornography moves from one girlie image to another, to another, and so on.

If the spread shot really succeeded in “showing all,” then one image would be enough. But the pornographic drive shows its real essence less in the excitement created by one image than by the insatiable hunger it generates for yet another image.

The enormous commercial potency of pornography derives in part from the fact that it succeeds in continually restimulating the very hunger it promises to satisfy.

The investment of interest in pornography depends upon the subject’s relation to something that ceaselessly escapes the roving, lustful eye, some moment of ultimate satisfaction that is continually promised but never fully given.

In this way, the example of the pornographic image shows very well what Lacan means by saying that the objet a is not the aim of the drive but rather the perpetually eccentric point around which the drive revolves.

The point of crucial theoretical importance in all of this concerns the way in which the objet a irrecoverably triangulates the subject’s relation to the aim of the drive.

The Lacanian gaze is thus understandable only in the triadic structure of desire, the Oedipal structure in which the subject is faced with the question of the Other’s desire.

In the actual experience of the Oedipal stage, the experience of the gaze begins to unfold when the mother no longer simply presents an image to the child but is seen to be looking for something herself, the moment when the suspicion dawns that the mother’s desire is directed beyond the child itself to some third position.

Said otherwise, the gaze is one of the prime figures in which the imaginary relation opens out upon a symbolic horizon.

It is by virtue of its capacity to excite an experience of this dimension of the gaze, precisely through preventing the analysand from seeing the eyes of the analyst, that psychoanalysis sets up the special force field of the transference.

Its place will come to be occupied by the entirety of the symbolic order. In the place of the gaze, the subject will come to experience the call of the signifier.

Correlatively, it is a certain suspension or avoidance of the gaze that founds the entirety of the imaginary register, both the ego and its objects. This elision of the gaze is the very essence of imaginary méconnaissance

desire drive love

Salecl, R. (1997) The Satisfaction of the Drives. Umbr(a) #1
Umbr(a) Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture 409 Clements Hall Buffalo, NY 14260-4610

Drive first needs to be understood as a leftover of the operation by which the subject becomes the subject of the signifier and is incorporated into the symbolic structure.

When the subject becomes a speaking being, he or she will no longer be able to have sex in an animal’s instinctive way. Instead of a sheer loss, however, we encounter a force that essentially marks the subject by imposing a constant pressure on him or her.

This force is what Lacan named variously: libido, drive or lamella. Through this naming, Lacan offers another angle on Freudian theory. For Freud, libido primarily concerns the subject’s ability to find sexual satisfaction in different ways. Aside from having sex, the subject can find this satisfaction through eating, shitting, looking, speaking, writing, etc. Libido is always linked to a libidinal object, which is not simply a material object, but what Lacan names object a.

It is crucial for the subject that only partial drives exist, and no genital drive as such. The subject is determined on the one hand by these partial drives, and on the other by the field of the Other, the social symbolic structure.

Already for Freud, love, for example, is not to be found on the side of the drives, but on the side of the Other. And it is in this field of the Other that anything which might resemble some kind of genital drive finds its form.

The paradox of drive is, therefore, that it is what is left out in the process of symbolization, but this does not mean that it has no link with the field of the Other.

Let us exemplify this with the scopic drive. In the scopic drive, the subject is not simply
someone who looks or gazes at objects: the subject causes him- or herself to be gazed at.

The voyeur thus secretly observes something, but the whole point is that the subject wants to be gazed at by the Other.

In the scopic drive the subject makes himself the object that complements the Other, who is supposed to enjoy gazing at this subject.

In the case of the scopic drive, therefore, the subject necessarily needs the Other. in order to set in motion the drive and obtain satisfaction.

Lacan gives here examples of the exhibitionist for whom the victim has meaning only as long as the Other is looking at the exposed exhibitionist: the victim’s horror or uncomfortable reaction would thus have a value for the exhibitionist as long as he knows that he has been gazed at in his act.

The same goes for the sadist. The pain he imposes on the victim has to be looked at by the Other.

Lacan says that “the course of the drive is the only form of transgression that is
permitted to the subject in relation to the pleasure principle.”

The pleasure principle is to be understood here as the symbolic law, a safeguard, a homeostasis which tries to prevent the irruption of the jouissance that is linked to the satisfaction of drive.

Already for Freud drive is what lies beyond the pleasure principle, but Lacan adds to this the notion that the transgression linked to drive is in some way permitted by the symbolic
Law itself.

As long as drive involves the Other, the subject receives from the Other a certain permission for the transgression.

Drive and desire each have a different relation to the symbolic structure.

Desire is essentially linked to the law, since it always searches for something that is prohibited or unavailable. The logic of desire would be: “It is prohibited to do this, but I will nonetheless do it.”

Drive, in contrast, does not care about prohibition: it is not concerned about overcoming the law. Drive’s logic is: “I do not want to do this, but I am nonetheless doing it.” Thus, we have a contrary logic in drive since the subject does not desire to do something, but nonetheless enjoys doing exactly that.

For Lacan, drive paradoxically always finds satisfaction, while desire has to remain unsatisfied, endlessly going from one object to another, positing new limits and
prohibitions.

Drive is thus a constant pressure, a circulation around the object a, which
produces jouissance-a painful satisfaction.

Jacques-Alain Miller points out that in the later seminars of Lacan, the object a,
the object around which the drive circulates, needs to be understood as a special kind of
satisfaction: “The object that corresponds to the drive is satisfaction as object.”

As Miller points out, drive in this search for a satisfaction resembles perversion. For perverts, it is essential that they search for sexual satisfaction outside simple copulation. But perverts differ from neurotics who are always lacking satisfaction and are thus going from one object to another, not knowing what they want, endlessly questioning the nature of their desire.

Perverts, in contrast, are satisfied: they find the object and thus also sexual satisfaction. That is why perverts rarely demand analysis, or demand it only when they are perplexed as to whether or not the satisfaction that they found is the proper one (see Fink).

In the same way as the perversion does not seek sexual satisfaction with the opposite sex, drive also is not directed towards the opposite sex: there is only drive towards the libidinal object, towards “a partial satisfaction as the object.”

Drive thus circulates around the partial object, the object a and this circulation precisely constitutes the satisfaction.

If desire constantly questions, drive presents an inertia where questioning stops.
Here the dynamic of drive resembles perversion because the pervert also does not ask for
any permission.

For Lacan, drive is in the final instance always the death drive, a destructive
force, which endlessly undermines the points of support that the subject has found in the
symbolic universe.

In regard to drive, desire plays a paradoxical role of protection, since desire, by being subordinated to the law, pacifies the lawless drive and the horrible jouissance that is linked to it. The subject of desire is the subject of identification: this is the subject who constantly searches for points of support in the symbolic universe, the ego ideals with which he or she can identify and thus achieve an identity.

Such a point of identification can be a teacher, lover, analyst, etc. But on the level of drive, there is no longer any identification, there is only jouissance.

What desire does is to open the fantasy, a scenario, which for the subject masks the jouissance of the drive.

Desire is therefore trapped within the pleasure principle, while drive goes beyond this principle.

Paradoxically, for Miller, the subject is always happy at the level of drive: although because of drive, the subject can actually suffer terribly and tries to get rid of its enormous pressure, in this suffering there is at work jouissance, which means precisely this painful satisfaction that is the highest happiness on which the subject can count.

The major issue in Lacan’s late work is how the subject in analysis can be brought
to abandon the endless perturbations of the Other’s desire in order to begin dealing with his or her drive.

The essential question that perturbs the subject and encourages him or her to seek analysis is: What am I for the desire of the Other? And the whole process of analysis is devoted to answering this question.

Lacan’s thesis is that at the end of analysis, the subject finds the answer, which is that the desire of the Other is actually the subject’s own desire. But how does the subject come to this answer?

As Colette Soler has pointed out, neither the Other nor the subject can give this answer. The Other cannot provide the answer because we find with the Other on the one hand a series of signifiers, which can never fully represent the subject, but can only represent him or her for another signifier. On the other hand, there is a lack in the Other, which for Lacan is supposed to be understood as an interval between the signifiers.

Meanwhile, at the site of the subject of speech, there is a split between the series of signifiers that represents the subject and a radical lack; that is why the subject also cannot give the answer to the question.

Therefore, something else is required to arrive at the answer, and this something else is
drive.

As Colette Soler says: The answer to the question ‘what is the subject beyond the signifier?’ is the drive.

Thus the interval, intersection, or void between the subject and the Other is not as empty as all that, but it is an emptiness into which something comes. It is object a, insofar as object a is not only a logical, but also a bodily consistency, and also insofar as object a is a plus de jouir, as Lacan says — surplus jouissance.”

Drives, however, answer the question in silence, they do not speak but satisfy themselves silently, in action.

For Lacan, drive is essentially what splits the subject, what is his or her “true will” (but not a conscious one); as such “drive is something the subject can’t help or stop in him or herself.”

But drive is paradoxically also what attracts us to the other, what makes another person the object of our love.

However, here we have to invoke again the partial character of drive. When we take a whole person as our object we are not at the level of drive but love.

So, in our perception we always love the other as a whole. When deeply in love, we are usually not clear about what attracts us to some person, everything about him or her seems fascinating, even odd habits at first seem to be endearing. This is because in love our fascination makes the other person complete, ideaL Our perception of love, therefore, masks the fact that we actually fall in love with the object a, with what the other does not have.

According to the distinction between drive and desire developed above, this object a has to be understood as a paradoxical object which is at the same time the never attainable object of desire and the attained object of drive.

We can thus agree with Lacan’s thesis from the seminar on transference: we love the other because he or she is a split, desiring subject. But by taking into account Lacan’s later work on drive, one needs to add here that what makes the other the object of love is actually the very jouissance that is linked to the way the other satisfies his or her drive.

There is thus a paradoxical attraction that obtains between the subject and the drive and the desire in the other.

On the one hand, the loving subject is attracted because the other is also a desiring subject, which means both that the loved subject is perturbed by the question: What does the other desire? And also that the loved subject hopes to become the object of the other’s desire.

On the other hand, the loving subject is also perturbed and attracted to the jouissance of the other. It is well known that in. the case of hatred (which is always a counterpart of love), as with racism or nationalism, the subject primarily objects to the other because of the very way he or she enjoys.

This ungraspable jouissance of the other then incites all kinds of fantasies when people object to how the others enjoy their food, music, etc. On another level, in the case of love, we encounter this kind of attraction (which can easily turn into repulsion) to the jouissance of the other.

This jouissance gets inscribed in the gaze of the other, his or her voice, smell, smile, laughter, etc. Lacan in his seminar on anxiety mysteriously says that it is only love that allows jouissance to condescend to desire.

If desire has to be understood as fundamentally dependent on the Other in the sense that “desire is desire of the Other”, one has to add that what is behind the Other’s desire, what in the final instance keeps our desire in motion, is the unbearable jouissance of the Other.

What attracts us in the Other is thus not, simply his or her desire, but drive — which forces the other into some activity, regardless of how painful. this activity might be.

boothby death desire 1a

Boothby, Richard. (1991) Death and desire: psychoanalytic theory in Lacan’s return to Freud. London: Routledge.

Over the past forty years, however, the most significant treatment of Freud’s most unpopular conception has been the work of a renegade French analyst named Jacques Lacan.

Lacan does more than reemphasize Freud’s notion of the death drive, he re-installs it at the very center of psychoanalytic theory. To ignore the death instinct in [Freud’s] doctrine,” he insists, “is to misunderstand that doctrine completely” (E:S, 301).

Lacan characterizes Beyond the Pleasure Principle as the “pivotal point” in the evolution of Freud’s thought (S.II, 165).

But, further, it is not merely one concept among others. Perhaps more than any other point in the Freudian theory, it is with respect to the death drive that Lacan’s innovation is rightly called a “return to Freud.”

What makes the death-drive theory so important is its pivotal position in the structured totality of the psychoanalytic theory. For Lacan, the death drive is the key to understanding the topography of id, ego, and superego upon which Freud based the final and most complete elaboration of his theory

According to Lacan, the problem of the death drive opens psychoanalysis to question and, ultimately, to reformulation. But what sort of reformulation is announced here?

The answer is not immediately easy to determine. The question of the death drive in Lacan will take us to the heart of his theoretical innovations insofar as he links the meaning of death in psychoanalysis to the faculty of speech and language, on the one hand, and to the fate of desire, on the other.

In this way, two of the prime themes of Lacan’s thought, language and desire, can be seen to intersect in his treatment of the death drive. The question, one that will occupy us throughout this book, remains: How are language, desire, and death related?

“The function of desire must remain in a fundamental relation with death” (S.VII, 351).

The difficulty of Lacan’s style is not wholly unintentional. Convinced that the curative effect of analysis does not consist in explaining the patient’s symptoms and life history, convinced, that is, that the analyst’s effort to understand the patient only impedes the emergence of the unconscious within the transference and that what is effective in analysis concerns something beyond the capacity of the analyst to explain, Lacan’s discourse is calculated to frustrate facile understanding.

His aim in part is to replicate for his readers and listeners something of the essential opacity and disconnectedness of the analytic experience. Often what is required of the reader in the encounter with Lacan’s dense and recalcitrant discourse, as with that of the discourse of the patient in analysis, is less an effort to clarify and systematize than a sort of unknowing mindfulness.

We are called upon less to close over the gaps and discontinuities in the discourse than to remain attentive to its very lack of coherence, allowing its breaches and disalignments to become the jumping-off points for new movements of thought.

IMAGINARY

The imaginary was the first of the three orders to appear, introduced in 1936 by Lacan’s article on the “mirror stage.” It was inspired by research in ethology, which associated behavior patterns in animals with the perception of specific visual images. Lacan proposed that a similar “imaginary” function operates in human beings. In the “mirror phase,” the most rudimentary formations of psychic life are organized for the six- to eighteen-month-old infant as it identifies itself with a body image; either its own image in a mirror, or that of a caretaker or peer.

For Lacan, the “imaginary” designates that basic and enduring dimension of experience that is oriented by images, perceived or fantasized, the psychologically formative power of which is lastingly established in the primordial identification of the mirror phase.

Lacan’s first and arguably most original and far-reaching innovation in psychoanalytic theory was to characterize the Freudian “ego” as a formation of the imaginary.

The symbolic, announced in his 1953 paper on “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” was conceived by Lacan from the outset in dynamic opposition to the captures of the imaginary. Lacan’s notion of the symbolic is indebted to the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, and to the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss.

SYMBOLIC

The symbolic is the register of language and of linguistically mediated cognitions. In the “symbolic order,” Lacan envisions a complex system of signifying elements whose meaning is determined by their relation to the other elements of the system — a grand structure, then, in which meaning is free to circulate among associated elements or signifiers without necessarily referring to a particular object or signified.

In opposition to the gestalt principles and relations of perceptual resemblance that govern the semiotics of the imaginary, the order of the symbolic functions in accordance with rules internal to the signifying system itself. Lacanian psychoanalysis came fully into its own when Lacan identified the Oedipus Complex discovered by Freud with the formative moment in which the child, molded and snared by the imaginary, accedes to a symbolic mode of functioning. It is a good deal more difficult to characterize briefly the Lacanian sense of the “real.”

Especially in his later work, Lacan tries to show the interconnectedness of the imaginary, symbolic, and real, comparing them to the three interlocking rings of a Borromean knot.

But the notion of the real is perhaps best introduced as being precisely that which escapes and is lacking in the other two registers. Neither figured in the imaginary nor represented by the symbolic, the real is the always still – outstanding, the radically excluded, the wholly uncognized. As Lacan puts it, “the real is the impossible.”37

In Lacan’s sense, then, the real has very little to do with common “reality.” By the measure of everyday reality, the Lacanian real is closer to being un- or sur-real.

REAL

The real is sheer, wholly undifferentiated and unsymbolized force or impact. It is an experience of the real, therefore, that lies at the heart of trauma. However, the real is not simply a designation of something unknown external to the individual. It inhabits the secret interior as well. The real is therefore also to be associated with the active yet ineffable stirrings of organic need, the unconsciousness of the body. The tripartite distinction of imaginary, symbolic, and real constitutes the master key of Lacan’s work. To interpret his treatment of the death instinct will therefore ultimately require determining its relation to these three essential registers.

As I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters, this task offers a unique opportunity for clarifying the interrelation of Lacan’s three basic categories to one another. This is true in spite of the fact, or rather precisely because of the fact, that each of the three registers seems to claim the death instinct for its own.

From one point of view, Lacan clearly associates the death drive with the imaginary. “The point emphasized by Freud’s thought, but [that] isn’t fully made out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Lacan asserts, “[is that] the death instinct in man [signifies] that his libido is originally constrained to pass through an imaginary stage” (S.I, 149).

At another point, however, it is the symbolic that appears as the order of death. Thus we read that “the nature of the symbol is yet to be clarified. We have approached the essence of it in situating it at the very point of the genesis of the death instinct” (S.III, 244).

Is the drive toward death to be associated primarily with the imaginary? with the symbolic? Or is it not more fittingly associated with the real? Lacan’s notion of the real — as lack or absence, as the impossible, as the unspeakable force of the trauma, or as the ineffable exigence of the body—seems eminently qualified to be linked with the activity of what Freud called a “death drive.”

As I hope to show in what follows, the problem of death is relevant to each of the three registers, but in a different way. Clarifying these differences yields not only a more adequate solution to Freud’s problem of the death drive but also a better understanding of Lacan’s own thought as it illuminates the relations of the imaginary, symbolic, and real to one another. 20

To begin with, Lacan raises the question of how, within the ego psychological strategy, the patient is ever to move beyond identification with the analyst. But Lacan’s real concern is more radical. From a Lacanian point of view, ego psychology requires that the treatment deepen the very imaginary elationships of the ego that lie at the root of the patient’s deepest conflicts.

Psychoanalysis that deserves the name must effect precisely the opposite, bringing about a certain deconstruction of already existing imaginary encrustations. Lacan suggests that “what is really at issue, at the end of analysis, [is] a twilight, an imaginary decline of the world, and even an experience at the limit of depersonalization” (S.I 232). 37

Lacan’s conception of the mirror phase requires us to think of the situation of the newborn in terms of a primal chaos of wholly unsymbolized somatic excitations. Identification with the imago is said to be “the psychic relationship par excellence” insofar as the imago functions to erect the most elemental forms of psychic life out of an anarchy of unformed and inarticulate organic strivings.18

Prior to the recognition of the primordial imagos of the mirror stage, the force of “instinct” remains dispersed amid a panoply of bodily energies. 58

The pressure of psychically unmastered instinct therefore constitutes, in effect, a force of psychical unbinding from inside the organism itself. … The function of the life instinct is to bind together and to establish unities.

The activity of the death drive, by contrast, is to effect unbinding and disintegration. The crucial polarity becomes … between the organic and the properly psychological, between the force of unbound instinctual energies and the bound structure of the ego. 83

The death drive designates the way the bound organization of the ego is traumatized by the pressure upon it of unbound instinctual energies. 84

In Lacanian terms the death drive represents the return of the real excluded by the imaginary.

The death drive designates the pressure of unbound energies against the limitations of the bound structure of the ego. What is subject to “death” is not the biological organism but the imaginary ego. 84

The effect of the death drive, like the traumatic repetitions that first alerted Freud to its existence, threatens to overload the psychical organization with a wave of unmastered energies. …

The death drive is reinterpreted as the impingement upon the bound structure of the ego of organismic energies as yet inadequately represented int he psychic system. The death drive is the force of the instinctual as such. 85

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt2

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics and tragedy in Lacan. (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, New York: Cambridge UP. 173-190.

IT IS EASIER TO ACCEPT INTERDICTION THAN TO RUN THE RISK OF CASTRATION.

To put it simply: the law gives a signifying form to the impossibility involved in the very phenomenon of desire.

The fundamental operation of the law is always to forbid something that is in itself impossible. The fact that the law links this impossible to some particular object should not prevent us from seeing this.

By designating a certain object as forbidden, the law does two things:

1) it isolates the impossible Thing that the desire aims at but never attains, and

2) it provides an image of this Thing. This image (my neighbor’s wife, for instance) has to be distinguished from what, on the level of the symbolic, is nothing else but the signifier of the impossible as such.

The law condenses the impossible involved in desire into one exceptional “place.” Via this logic of exception, it liberates the field of the possible. This is why the intervention of the law can have a liberating effect on the subject.

It makes it possible for Achilles not to spend every minute of his life trying to figure out why he cannot catch up with the tortoise, or trying obstinately to do so. It can make him a productive member of the community.

This is the reason why Lacan, although he refuses to put analysis into the service of producing happy members of the community, also refuses to subscribe to the discourse advocating the liberation of desire from the repression and the spoils of law.

His point is that the law supplements the impossibility involved in the very nature of desire by a symbolic interdiction, and that it is thus erroneous to assume that by eliminating this interdiction, we will also eliminate the impossibility involved in the desire.

What he warned against, for instance, in the turmoil of 1968, was not some chaotic state that could result from the abolition of certain laws and prohibitions.

He didn’t warn against human desire running crazy. On the contrary, he warned against the fact that desire, tired of dealing with its own impossibility, will give up and resign to anything rather than try to find its own law. 178

We have already quoted Lacan’s thesis according to which “it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration.” However, as should be clear from what we just developed, this does not mean that interdiction keeps us safe from being exposed to castration (that is, from undergoing a loss of something that we have).

The “fear of castration” is the fear of losing that which constitutes a signifying support for the lack involved in the experience of the desire as such. Interdiction is what provides that support; it is what gives a signifying form to the lack (or to the experience of “castration”) which is already there.

Psychoanalysis, as Lacan conceived it, is not something that will restitute the good old law where it is lacking. Although many clinical problems can indeed be traced to the failure of the law to function for the subject as a stabilizing factor, the job of psychoanalysis is in no way to make sure that the subject will finally subscribe to the ideal of this or that authority.

One should rather say that once things have gone so far (as to produce a neurosis, for instance), they can only go further.

In principle, it is easier to go by the law than to find one’s own way around desire.

But all the malfunctions and dysfunctions that appear in the clinic (as well as in the psychopathology of everyday life) remind us not only that this doesn’t always work, but also that it never works perfectly.

Psychoanalysis is not here to repair the damage, to help the social machine to function more smoothly and to reconstruct whatever was ill-constructed.

It is there to take us further along the path that our “problems” have put us on, it is there as the “guardian” of the other way, the one that consists in finding our own way around our desire.

Emblematic of this “other way” is the story of Oedipus who, although unknowingly, steps out of the shelter of interdiction, is led to give up the thing that captivated him, and enters the realm where “the absolute reign of his desire is played out . . . something that is sufficiently brought out by the fact that he is shown to be unyielding right to the end, demanding everything, giving up nothing, absolutely unreconciled” (S VII, p. 310).

This is what makes it possible for Lacan to insist upon the fact that the renunciation of goods and of power that is supposed to be a punishment, “is not, in fact, one” (S VII, p. 310).

Consequently, tragedy, at least in the perspective of what Lacan calls the tragic dimension of analytical experience, is not necessarily all that “tragic,” but can produce the kind of liberation that takes place in the case of Oedipus.

zupancic materialism and real

Zupančič Realism in Psychoanalysis

Conference ICI Berlin
One Divides Into Two: Dialectics, Negativity & Clinamen
Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, and Mladen Dolar
March 2011

One of the great merits of Meillassoux’s book is that it has (re)opened, not so much the question of the relationship between philosophy and science, as the question of whether they are speaking about the same world.

I emphasize … another dimension of his [Meillassoux’s] gesture, a dimension enthusiastically embraced by our Zeitgeist, even though it has little philosophical (or scientific) value, and is based on free associations related to some more or less obscure feelings of the present Unbehagen in der Kultur. Let us call it its psychological dimension, which can be summed up by the following story:

After Descartes we have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside, the Real, and have become prisoners of our own subjective or discursive cage. The only outside we are dealing with is the outside posited or constituted by ourselves or different discursive practices. And there is a growing discomfort, claustrophobia in this imprisonment, this constant obsession with ourselves, this impossibility to ever get out of the external inside that we have thus constructed.

There is also a political discomfort that is put into play here, that feeling of frustrating impotence, of the impossibility of really changing anything, of soaking in small and big disappointments of recent and not so recent history. Hence a certain additional redemptive charm of a project that promises again to break out into the great Outside, to reinstitute the Real in its absolute dimension, and to ontologically ground the possibility of radical change.

One should insist, however, that the crucial aspect of Meillassoux lies entirely elsewhere than in this story which has found in him (perhaps not all together without his complicity) the support of a certain fantasy, namely and precisely the fantasy of the ‘great Outside’ which will save us – from what, finally?…

it is a fantasy in the strict psychoanalytic sense: a screen that covers up the fact that the discursive reality is itself leaking, contradictory, and entangled with the Real as its irreducible other side. That is to say: the great Outside is the fantasy that covers up the Real that is already right here.

In Lacan we find a whole series of such, very strong statements, for example: ‘Energy is not a substance…, it’s a numerical constant that a physicist has to find in his calculations, so as to be able to work’.

The fact that science speaks about this or that law of nature and about the universe does not mean that it preserves the perspective of the great Outside (as not discursively constituted in any way), rather the opposite is the case. Modern science starts when it produces its object.

This is not to be understood in the Kantian sense of the transcendental constitution of phenomena, but in a slightly different, and stronger sense.

Modern science literally creates a new real(ity); it is not that the object of science is ‘mediated’ by its formulas, rather, it is indistinguishable from them; it does not exist outside them, yet it is real.

It has real consequences or consequences in the real. More precisely: the new real that emerges with the Galilean scientific revolution (the complete mathematisation of science) is a real in which – and this is decisive – (the scientific) discourse has consequences.

Such as, for example, landing on the moon. For, the fact that this discourse has consequences in the real does not hold for nature in the broad and lax sense of the word, it only holds for nature as physics or for physical nature.

At stake is a key dimension of a possible definition of materialism, which one could formulate as follows: materialism is not guaranteed by any matter. It is not the reference to matter as the ultimate substance from which all emerges (and which, in this conceptual perspective, is often highly spiritualized), that leads to true materialism.

The true materialism, which – as Lacan puts is with a stunning directness in another significant passage – can only be a dialectical materialism, is not grounded in the primacy of matter nor in matter as first principle, but in the notion of conflict, of split, and of the ‘parallax of the real’ produced in it.

In other words, the fundamental axiom of materialism is not ‘matter is all’ or ‘matter is primary’, but relates rather to the primacy of a cut. And, of course, this is not without consequences for the kind of realism that pertains to this materialism.

zupančič not-mother pt 2

Zupančič, Alenka. Not-Mother: On Freud’s Verneinung. E-flux Journal 2012

What is at stake in the Freudian discovery that, when dealing with the unconscious, the alternative “mother/not mother” is not exhaustive (negation of negation doesn’t bring us to the supposedly original affirmation)… It is not a “more or less mother,” nor is it a difference in intensity with regard to two extremes, or absolutes; it is a paradoxical entity of “with-without.”

The third term (or third possibility), which is included rather then excluded, is nothing other than the very point of the (onto)logical impossibility of the third.

In other words, what is included as something (as an entity) receives the very logical impossibility on which the alternative mother/not-mother is based.

The fact that it is included doesn’t mean that the impossible now becomes possible (one of the possibilities, as in the intuitionist logic); rather, it is included in its very onto-logical impossibility — hence its spectral character: as included in reality, the impossible-real can only be a specter.

This is then where a first cut is produced, the split between in and out, which also and immediately coincides with the dividing lines between good and bad, foreign, or alien, and familiar.

[In the] original pleasure-ego, these dividing lines simply coincide: the inner — the good — the familiar, on the one side, and the outer — the bad — the alien on the other. But already in the next step things become more complicated and these dividing lines fall out of joint.

but of whether something which is in the ego as a presentation can be rediscovered in perception (reality) as well

In other words, what is at stake here is the famous reality check, or “reality testing,” based on the presupposition of an original loss of pleasure.

The crucial aspect of which is the loss of immediacy: From now on, all pleasure will be a found-again-pleasure.

The same goes for all objects of reality: As objects of reality (which is thus constituted as objective reality, that is, constituted through the opposition subjective-objective) they are never simply found, but always refound, found again,

“The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality testing is not to find an object in real
perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object, to
convince oneself that it is still there.”

So the moment we begin dealing with thinking and with certain relation to reality, both our pleasure and the existence of things are no longer immediate, but bear the mark of repetition and of the gap the latter implies.

The second repartition of the dividing lines doesn’t simply replace the first, however, but adds to it with a twist, resulting in a gap, or a third dimension, that haunts from then on the very consistency of the distinction between inner and outer, and blurs the subject-object division and relation.

We could also recapitulate the movement described by Freud like this. The first mythical difference between inside and outside is not yet a real difference, but a process of differentiating the indifferent, or the indistinct, led by the primary process of the pleasure