drive – Page 3 – objet (a)

zupančič why P? 3

Zupančič, Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis: 3 interventions. Aarhus University Press 2008.

First let us situate on the same line the two elements that we arrived at in our discussion following different paths.

First, the surplus (of) distortion,

which at the same time disturbs and carries the relationship between the manifest and the latent content.

Second, the falloff, the leftover of the conscious interpretation,

which is not simply unconscious, but propels the work of the unconscious interpretation and is present in the unconscious formations as their ‘formal’ aspect (and not as a particular content), as the form of the distortion itself, its ‘grammatical structure.’

To these two, we can add in the same line a third element, namely what psychoanalysis conceptualised with the notion of the drive.

The drive … embodies a fundamental inner split of all satisfaction, the non-relationship between demand and satisfaction, leading to the possibility of another, supplemental satisfaction. This has the effect of de-centring not so much the subject as the Other, and the de-centring at stake could be best formulated as follows: 31

the subject never finds the satisfaction directly in the Other, yet he can only find it through the detour of the Other. This detour is irreducible. 32

The drive is something other than the supposed solipsistic enjoyment, and one should conceptually distinguish between the two. 32 Continue reading “zupančič why P? 3”

zupančič Why P? 2008 1

Zupančič, Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis: 3 interventions Aarhus University Press 2008.

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.

Three Essay on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) remains a major text in this respect. If one needed to sum up its argument in a single sentence, the following would come close enough to the mark: (human) sexuality is a paradox-ridden deviation from a norm that does not exist. Continue reading “zupančič Why P? 2008 1”

swales disavowal

Swales, Stephanie S. Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject. Routledge, 2012.

The mechanism of disavowal should be understood as a defense, not against the lawgiving Other’s demand that the child sacrifice jouissance, but against the inadequacy of the lawgiving Other.

Disavowal is a creative attempt to prop up the Law and to set limits to the excess in jouissance experienced due to the child’s problematic relation to the first Other.

The disavowal of the lawgiving Other might be described in the following terms: “I know very well that my father [or father figure] hasn’t forced me to give up my mother and my corresponding jouissance, but I’m going to make believe that the force of Law exists with someone or something that represents my father.” 78

The mechanism ofdisavowal, as I have said, involves the maintenance of two contradictory pieces of knowledge together with a strongly held belief that one of the two pieces of knowledge is true. In matters of superstition — in which a belief is held despite evidence to the contrary—therefore, disavowal is often pertinent.

For example, “I know very well that if, in one breath, I blow out all the flames of the candles on my birthday cake, my wish won’t really come true, but nevertheless I believe it’s true. Consequently, I make a wish every year and try my best to blow out all the candles with one breath.”

foucault copjec

Christopher Lane, “The Experience of the Outside: Foucault and Psychoanalysis” Lacan in America edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, New York: Other Press, 2000. 309-348.

the subject is constructed by forces lying beyond conscious apprehension and social meaning. 321

The difficulty of establishing where psychoanalysis stands relative to experience and its interpretation not only haunted Foucault’s career but partly determined it. One strand of Foucault’s intellectual project was aimed at complicating historical materialism by building on Nietzsche’s work. Another strand—tied conceptually to the first—focused on challenging the intellectual sovereignty in France of Jean-Paul Sartre. But a third and less successful strand devolved on establishing the importance of psychoanalysis for modern thought without at the same time endorsing Lacan’s “return to Freud.”

In refusing the psychoanalytic argument that sexuality isn’t determined wholly by discourse and social practices, however, Foucault could understand the ontological difficulty of sexuality only the way antiquity represented this phenomenon — that is, as an “effect.. . of errors of regimen [les erreurs de regime]” (UP, p. 16; UPS, p. 23).

Foucault’s insistence even here in approaching sexuality from primarily a culturalist perspective exacerbated his self-acknowledged difficulties. Yet his commitment to engaging some of the psychic repercussions of subjectivation — which dovetailed into his study of the modes of subjection (mode d’assujettisement, G, p. 353) — ironically obliged him to return to psychoanalysis for a better understanding of their diverse effects. I am suggesting that throughout Foucault’s career this pincer-like approach to psychoanalysis overdetermined his perspective on subjectivity. While his first published essay critiqued works by Ludwig Binswanger and Freud, for example, it didn’t dispute the appearance or effect of the unconscious. 328

While subtle differences therefore arise between The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and Discipline and Punish (1975) concerning the role of the dispositif … the thread linking these books is Foucault’s suggestion that “[t]he individual is the product of power.” The underside to this conception of subjectivity — and, perhaps, the obvious extension of it is the near-metaphysical idea that subjectivity, once freed from outside regulation, would lack “inner conviction” (MF, pp. 89,42). This idea surfaces periodically in Foucault’s 1954 essay on dreams, and it culminates logically with the demand that subjectivity be let alone, whether to silence, abstraction, or pleasure. 331

Bersani valuably represents Foucault’s claims about subjecti vation in the following way: “The mechanisms of power studied by Foucault produce the individuals they are designed to dominate” (S, p. 3).

“The fundamental thesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis,” adds Zizek, “is that what we call ‘reality’ constitutes itself against the background of [symbolic] ‘bliss,’ i.e., of such an exclusion of some traumatic Real. This is precisely what Lacan has in mind when he says that fantasy is the ultimate support of reality: ‘reality’ stabilizes itself when some fantasy frame of a ‘symbolic bliss’ closes off the view into the abyss of the Real.” Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 118

… psychoanalysis departs conclusively from materialist accounts of reality and consciousness, as well as from related critiques of reality’s many shortcomings. By insisting on the ego’s basic ” [in]aptitude for dealing with reality,” Bersani — like Freud and Lacan — shows us why the subject’s alienation is neither explained nor repaired by altering the diverse forms of political oppression that impede and partly shape us, an argument quite different from the frequent and unjustified claim that psychoanalysis is uninterested in our oppression.

Owing to their faith in the underlying influence of these external causes on the subject, Foucauldian and materialist approaches to subjectivity argue that factors such as gender, ethnicity, and even sexuality are egoic effects of varied, contradictory, and unjust social demands.

From this perspective, however, the ego is invested with an ability to modify, subvert, and even repair these demands in order to diminish their effects and sometimes render them meaningless.

The Psychic Life of Power displays at the outset ambivalence about the psychoanalytic argument that only a nonsocial factor — the drive — is capable of determining psychic life. More important for us here, The Psychic Life of Power restates the logic of external causation, which paradoxically restores in principle the forms of social influence that 1 am challenging here. For invaluable discussion of this point, published just before this essay went to press, see S. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), especially pp. 247-312.

Although this faith in the influence of external causes relies erroneously on the ego’s capacity for congruency with the outside, I should stress that in opposing this faith I am
not refuting the influence of external factors. To do so would undercut my emphasis on the asymmetry of psychical and physical reality; it would reproduce another form of voluntarism, generating precisely the characterizations of psychoanalysis that I am objecting to here. The fantasy that the ego determines consciousness slips easily into solipsism and epistemic relativism, a fantasy that we simply make our own reality.

I am objecting instead to the crass suggestion—voiced repeatedly by constructivists and Foucauldians—that subjectivity is merely an “effect” of discourse, a suggestion that renders subjectivity politically transparent, devoid of drives and unconscious causes. 343

This suggestion culminates in a conceptual deadlock, in which social practices and power are caught in a circular relationship that thwarts the possibility of transformation. Let us iterate that Foucault wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge precisely in an atttempt to shatter this deadlock.

One way that psychoanalysis departs conclusively from materialism is by insisting that we can’t test our reality without confronting our perception of the external world. According to Freud, the structure of loss that frames our perception and desire serves as a guide for all subsequent perspectives on reality.

As he argued in “Negation,” building on a related and now famous claim in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality:

The first and immediate aim … of reality-testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to re-find such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there.” 66

S. Freud, “Negation,” Standard Edition 19:233-238, 1925, paraphrasing his earlier claim in Three Essays and the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Standard Edition 7:

“The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” (p. 222).

This statement shows us clearly why Freudian psychoanalysis differs from the conservative idea that therapy consists in adapting the patient’s ego to reality.

For Freud and Lacan, the idea of patient adaptation was preposterous, because egregiously coercive. Indeed, the very question of adaptation returns us to The Order of Things, where Foucault usefully points up a conclusive split between psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Poised between rationalism and unreason in Madness and Civilization, Freudian psychoanalysis surfaces in The Order of Things and even Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality as one of the primary fields that avoids, and even preempts, the coercive logic of psychiatry.

It is psychiatry, Foucault insists, that claims the patient must sacrifice his or her reality for pre-existing forms of social reality.

Lacan of course agreed, arguing in the 1930s — long before Foucault began publishing — that the very idea of “sacrifice” is both manipulative and delusive, insofar as “adaptation” merely substitutes one fantasy about reality for another.

JOAN COPJEC SPEAKS

Contrary to the common misperception, reality testing is not described here as a process by which we match our perceptions against an external, independent reality.

In fact, it is the permanent loss of that reality—or real: a reality that was never present as such—that is the precondition for determining the objective status of our perceptions.

Not only is the real unavailable for comparison with our perceptions but, Freud concedes, we can assume that the latter are always somewhat distorted, inexact. [Read My Desire, p. 233]

Copjec shows us here why psychoanalysis and historicism offer quite different perspectives on reality; she illustrates too that by highlighting the profound repercussions of Freud’s argument about reality, Lacan completely discredited the idea that reality can ever be reparative for the subject.

“In the name of what is social constraint exercised?” he asks in Seminar VII. “[Reality isn’t just there so that we bump our heads up against the false paths along which the functioning of the pleasure principle leads us.”

“In truth,” Lacan continues, “we make reality out of pleasure” (EP y p. 225), a statement inverting the standard materialist claim that we extract whatever pleasure we can from a reality that pre-exists us.

That the ego exists in relation to a structural méconnaissance overturns all existing claims about false consciousness: “By definition,” Lacan says in Seminar II, “there is something so improbable about all existence that one is in effect perpetually questioning oneself about its reality.”

… Foucault’s and Lacan’s rather different perspectives on the subject’s structural relationship to reality and axiomatic dependence on resistance. To my mind the kernel of this difference arises in Freud’s claim, near the end of his study of the Wolfman, that “[a] repression is something very different from a condemning judgement.”

What Freud brings to our attention here is that repression’s importance lies less in what we contain, than in what we can’t evade.

“I’d say that that is the very essence of the Freudian discovery,” remarks Lacan in Seminar I.

To put this another way, repression, for psychoanalysis, doesn’t signify what we can possess of the past; it dramatizes the effort it takes to accomplish forgetting, to remove or dislodge us from a past—and thus a history — that threatens to overwhelm us.

This claim points up a form of difficulty that isn’t altered or resolved by will, whether individual or collective, and the difficulty helps us refute the simplistic objection that psychoanalysis is ahistorical. … our failure to rid ourselves of the past is one of the factors binding us involuntarily to history.

mcgowan notes 3

psychoanalysis frees the subject to find satisfaction through the subject’s symptomatic disruption rather than continuing to view the disruption as the obstacle to the ultimate satisfaction that the subject is constantly missing. 56-57

🙂 – McGowan is using satisfaction and enjoyment interchangeably, point is satisfaction in symptom rather than viewing the symptomatic disruption as obstacle to something better.

The neurotic mistakes the experience of the death drive for the experience of desire, and psychoanalysis attempts to reveal the drive where the neurotic mistakenly sees desire.

Desire is nothing but a misrecognition of the death drive. 60

🙂 – McGowan’s point: consistency between 1895 Project and 1920 Beyond is emphasis on subject’s satisfaction. The subject attains satisfaction. Difference is 1895 it was discharge of excitation, but with the 1920 discovery of death drive, satisfaction is attained via repetition and return to original loss. The second point is the analytic cure does not consist in ridding analysand of symptom, rather the analytic cure consists in executing a more efficient route to her satisfaction. McGowan argues that analysand enters analysis due to symptom malfunctioning in her life, in other words she or he is dissatisfied with their satisfaction, they are satisfied, but dissatisfied with the circuitous nature of the route to satisfaction.

The cure McGowan suggests consists in freeing “the subject to find satisfaction through the subject’s symptomatic disruption rather than continuing to view the disruption as the obstacle to the ultimate satisfaction that the subject is constantly missing.” 56-57

mcgowan notes 2

Typical neurotics enter into analysis believing in their dissatisfaction. They complain of a symptom – insomnia, say – that functions as a barrier to their enjoyment. They view the analyst as a subject supposed to know, that is, as a subject who knows the secret of the symptom. Through the transmission of this knowledge, neurotics hope to overcome their symptom and become able to freely enjoy themselves without this hindrance. Through the duration of a neurosis, symptoms serve as a source of satisfaction for the neurotic.

Analysis emerges as a possibility only when this satisfaction becomes too troublesome, when the symptom begins to debilitate the neurotic and intrude on all aspects of the neurotic’s life.

What neurotics don’t see, however, is the satisfaction that the disruptiveness of the symptom offers.

🙂 – Here McGowan makes the claim that the symptom actually offers satisfaction

The goal of analysis does not consist in eliminating this disruptiveness but in changing the subject’s relation to it.

Rather than seeing the disruptiveness of the symptom as the barrier to a truly satisfying life, the subject must come to grasp this disruptiveness as the source of the subject’s satisfaction. 56

The relationship between psychoanalytic thought and the symptom marks the former’s most dramatic point of rupture from forms of healing (including both other kinds of therapy and medicine). When patients come to their doctors exhibiting a symptom, doctors ideally attempt to treat the underlying illness in order to eliminate the symptom. The symptom is valuable for the doctor insofar as it proves an indication of the underlying illness that can be addressed. For psychoanalytic thought, the symptom is the indication of an underlying disorder, but at the same time it coalesces the subject’s psychic existence.

mcgowan notes

In the Project, Freud sees the psyche as a system designed to discharge psychic energy that is transmitted through neurones. Energy bombards the psyche from both inside and out – through endogamous forces and external stimuli. At this point in his thought, Freud believes that the aim of psychic life involves returning to a zero level of excitation, an aim that he later aligns with the pleasure principle. By warding off excitation, the psychic process free the psyche from unpleasure and return it to a state of satisfaction. 53

🙂 – Freud of 1895 Project focused on warding off excitation from external stimuli, too much excitation leads to unpleasure, less excitation more satisfaction

Once Freud conceived of the death drive in 1920, his conception of satisfaction underwent a fundamental shift. Whereas in the vision of the Project and his other pre-1920 work (which views the psyche in terms of the pleasure principle) satisfaction is a state tha the psyche arrives at through the discharge of excitation, after the discovery of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle satisfaction will consist in the movement of the drive itself, not in the aim that it attains. Nonetheless, what remains constant in these two different economic modes is the absolute psychic primacy of satisfaction. The psyche strives above all to sustain its satisfaction, and it is successful at doing so.

🙂 – pre 1920 Freud said satisfaction = discharge of excitation : post 1920 in Beyond satisfaction = movement of the drive itself
– what is common or constant to both is psychic primacy of satisfaction.

Satisfaction occurs in the operations of the psyche because, as Freud sees it in 1895, the discharge of excitation always occurs. Though there are infinite differences among individual subjects, we can say that all subjects are satisfied subjects insofar as they partake in the process of discharging excitation. For every subject, this process finds a way to occur successfully, even if it encounters a circuitous path in the psyche. Individual difference manifests itself in different psychic paths, but not in the fundamental fact of discharging excitation. 53-54

That is, what the psyche does in universal, but how the psyche goes about doing this varies in each particular case. The universality of what the psyche does allows Freud to recognize that the economy of the psyche produces satisfaction for every subject, even if the subject is unaware of its own satisfaction.

This remains true when Freud turns from the 1895 model of the psyche to the later one centered on the death drive, though in the later theory satisfaction derives from the drive’s constant force rather than from a discharge of excitation. The drive provides an inescapable satisfaction of never letting up.

🙂 – Mcgowan says here that Freud breaks from 1895 Project discharge of excitation : opts for 1920 drive’s constant force provides satisfaction and satisfaction of death drive is constant repetition

The satisfaction that the death drive produces stems from its circular structure: rather than trying to attain satisfaction through an external aim, the drive produces that satisfaction through the process of the repeated movement itself. … The aim of the psychoanalyst – the analyst’s desire – must be to remove the detours that the analysand has placed along the path of the drive in order to allow the analysand to take up completely her or his position in the drive. 55

In Seminar XI, Lacan lays out the situation confronting the analyst: “What we have before us in analysis is a system in which everything turns out all right, and which attains its own sort of satisfaction. If we interfere in this, it is only in so far as we think that there are other ways, shorter ones for example.”

In submitting to analysis, the analysand submits, albeit unknowingly, to this desire for shortening or economizing the path of the drive. This shortening is the analytic cure, and Freud first comes to understand it as such in the 1895 Project where he emphasizes the costs of psychic detours that the subject erects to the flow of psychic energy. 55

Freud fort – da

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920

The child was in no respect forward in his intellectual development; at eighteen months he spoke only a few intelligible words, making besides sundry significant sounds which were understood by those about him. But he made himself understood by his parents and the maid-servant, and had a good reputation for behaving ‘properly’. He did not disturb his parents at night; he scrupulously obeyed orders about not touching various objects and not going into certain rooms; and above all he never cried when his mother went out and left him for hours together, although the tie to his mother was a very close one: she had not only nourished him herself, but had cared for him and brought him up without any outside help.

Occasionally, however, this well-behaved child evinced the troublesome habit of flinging into the corner of the room or under the bed all the little things he could lay his hands on, so that to gather up his toys was often no light task.

He accompanied this by an expression of interest and gratification, emitting a loud long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-oh’ which in the judgement of the mother (one that coincided with my own) was not an interjection but meant ‘go away’ (fort). I saw at last that this was a game, and that the child used all his toys only to play ‘being gone’ (fortsein) with them.

One day I made an observation that confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string wound round it. It never occurred to him, for example, to drag this after him on the floor and so play horse and cart with it, but he kept throwing it with considerable skill, held by the string, over the side of his little draped cot, so that the reel disappeared into it, then said his significant ‘o-o-o-oh’ and drew the reel by the string out of the cot again, greeting its reappearance with a joyful ‘Da’ (there). This was therefore the complete game, disappearance and return, the first act being the only one generally observed by the onlookers, and the one untiringly repeated by the child as a game for its own sake, although the greater pleasure unquestionably attached to the second act.

The meaning of the game was then not far to seek. It was connected with the child’s remarkable cultural achievement—the foregoing of the satisfaction of an instinct—as the result of which he could let his mother go away without making any fuss. He made it right with himself, so to speak, by dramatising the same disappearance and return with the objects he had at hand. It is of course of no importance for the affective value of this game whether the child invented it himself or adopted it from a suggestion from outside. Our interest will attach itself to another point.

The departure of the mother cannot possibly have been pleasant for the child, nor merely a matter of indifference. How then does it accord with the pleasure-principle that he repeats this painful experience as a game? The answer will perhaps be forthcoming that the departure must be played as the necessary prelude to the joyful return, and that in this latter lay the true purpose of the game. As against this, however, there is the observation that the first act, the going away, was played by itself as a game and far more frequently than the whole drama with its joyful conclusion.

boothby death desire p.73

Boothby, Richard. Death and Desire. 1991.

Freud dubbed the repetitive insistence of such behaviors der Wiederholungszwang the “repetition compulsion.” The mystery presented by the repetition compulsion came down to this: How and why, contrary to the rule of pleasure that Freud took to be the fundamental law of psychic processes, is the ego deliberately subjected to pain? 73

a specific will to mistreatment of the ego for its own sake … The repetition compulsion represented, in effect, a compulsion of the patient to torment his own ego. It indicated the activity of a “primordial masochism.”

Only a biological explanation seemed capable of accounting for the primordiality of the power at work in the repetition compulsion. The fact that this power was capable of overriding the fundamental principle of pleasure suggested the activity of an absolutely elemental force, even more primitive than the erotic instincts. Opposite the life instincts, there must exist a second, more basic class of instincts.

If, as Freud suggested, the death drive evidences its essential character in repetition of the trauma, then we are led to suppose that the essential activity of the death drive involves the infusion of fresh quantities of energy into the psychic apparatus, resulting in an unpleasureable increase in psychic tension. Adopting this view, we can make sense of the title of Freud’s book. The death drive is said to be “beyond the pleasure principle” because the death drive increases rather than decreases psychical tensions and thereby constitutes a source of unpleasure internal to the psychic apparatus.77

Given this initial association of the activity of the death drive with increase of psychical tension, it comes as a complete surprise to find the death drive characterized toward the end of Freud’s book in precisely opposite terms. As an impulse toward return to an inorganic state, the death drive is thought to constitute a drive not toward increase but toward reduction of tensions to an absolute minimum. It is this tendency toward reduction of tensions to zero that warranted identifying the death drive with a “Nirvana principle” (SE, 18:56). What has happened to the original association of the death drive with traumatic increase of tension? We seem faced with an contradiction inhabiting the very heart of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the death drive is first identified with a traumatic increase, then with maximal decrease of tension.2 What has made this inversion possible? 77

It has long been a source of perplexity to many commentators that Freud’s identification of the death drive with the Nirvana principle makes the force of the death drive almost indistinguishable from the workings of the pleasure principle. Both the Nirvana and the pleasure principles seek to diminish tensions through the reduction of excitations to zero or, failing that, through the maintenance of a constant level of excitation. Are the death instinct and the pleasure principle one and the same? 78

mcgowan occupy interview

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Interview with Tutt October 2013

Once we accept that the good is antithetical to our enjoyment, is a barrier to our enjoyment, it becomes possible to think politics beyond the good. The politics of enjoyment can eschew the good altogether, I think. But we can’t fall into the trap of saying that the world will be better if we adopt a different organization of our enjoyment. No, in some sense it will become worse because we would lose the justifications that accompany our failures to enjoy fully. What we would gain, however, is what I would call an authentic relation to our enjoyment. I think we have to insist absolutely on the concept of authenticity in order to conceive of politics, just as resolutely as we have to abandon the good. In this way, I would replace the good with authenticity. That’s what we can’t do without in fact, even if it has been discredited by the association with Heidegger.

What is important about psychoanalysis to me is its theoretical intervention, its discovery of the death drive and the role that fantasy plays in our psyche. This is the great advance. And political struggle can integrate these theoretical insights without any help from actual psychoanalysis.

What allows one to disinvest in the capitalist mode of subjectivity is not, in my view, the psychoanalytic session. Instead it is the confrontation with a mode of enjoyment that ceases to provide the satisfaction that it promises. This prompts one to think about alternatives.

It’s impossible to understand how contemporary authority functions without psychoanalysis. Lacan is very clear in his explanation of the superego as an agency not of prohibition but of enjoyment, and nothing is more evident in today’s authorities. We are constantly bombarded with commands that we enjoy ourselves, and we feel guilty not for our sins but for our failures to enjoy as much as our neighbors. Psychoanalysis shows us that this command to enjoy is integral to how authority operates and that obedience can feel transgressive. This is the key to the power of contemporary authority. We obey but never experience ourselves as obedient. … We don’t know how obedient we are, and we require psychoanalysis to show us.

I was completely in support of Occupy Wall Street and even had several students who took part with my full encouragement. That said, there is a theoretical problem, and it is located exactly at the point you bring up. Occupy didn’t identify with the missing binary signifier but involves an identification with the excluded. I have a real problem with the slogan that identifies the movement with the 99%. What happens? Instantly, a new Other is produced that is the 1%, and if we can just eliminate this 1%, then we will achieve the good. That’s the logic at work. In this sense, Occupy, despite its successes (including, I would claim, the re-election of Barack Obama), remained within a very traditional political paradigm.

Identification with the missing binary signifier would insist, in contrast, would involve an identification with the inherent failure of the Other or the system itself. It would have to say something like “No One Belongs” rather than the two alternatives — either we are really the ones who belong or we are those who don’t belong. Not we are all citizens but no one is a citizen.

We shouldn’t give the 1% credit with really enjoying themselves or knowing what they’re doing. Badiou calls these finance capitalists legitimate gangsters. I don’t disagree, but this creates the sense that they are on the inside while the rest of us are on the outside.

Isn’t the lesson of Michael Mann’s masterpiece The Insider with Russell Crowe that the insider is always an outsider and that enjoyment, despite what we believe, is located on the outside?

mcgowan not-all

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.

The figure of the enemy offers subjects within society an explanation for the loss that they experience as members of society and as subjects. Trotsky provides a reason for the failure of the Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union, and Israeli hegemony produces the misery that the Palestinians experience. Of course, in some cases, the enemy really does contribute to the loss that occurs within a society, but no enemy bears responsibility for loss as such, which comes first with subjectivity and then with the social order itself.

The enemy transforms an ontological phenomenon — loss within the social order — into an empirical one — instances of loss.

Through the obstacle that it places in the way, the enemy facilitates the belief that the collective identity within the social order or an authentic social bond is something that we might have. The barrier transforms an absence of collective identity into the illusory possibility of having this identity, and the possibility of having is integral to the male logic of exception.

Whereas male subjectivity is preoccupied with what it believes it has or should have, female subjectivity, as a structural position, involves an embrace of what one doesn’t have. To adopt the feminine position is ipso facto to recognize that all having involves having nothing.

Female subjectivity does not orient itself around an ideal of noncastration. There is no figure of the primal mother who appears to have the ultimate enjoyment and to hoard this enjoyment for herself. Though various ideals of female subjectivity certainly exist had have an impact on female identity, there is not simply one ideal. Instead, there is a plethora of them, and they often contradict each other. This is why Lacan insists that “there’s no such thing as Woman, Woman with a capital W indicating the universal.” 157

The result is that female subjectivity rests on a more tenuous ground: without the exception as a reference point that the male has, the female subject has no unified category within which to place herself. Because an exception is necessary to constitute the rule (or an outside is necessary to constitute an inside), there is no coherent category of female subjectivity. What results instead is a series of singularities without a clear rule defining them. As Kenneth Reinhard notes, “Unlike the case of men, for whom there is a unified category, “all men,’ that they are identified as being members of, women are RADICALLY SINGULAR, not examples of a class or members of a closed set, but EACH ONE AN EXCEPTION.” The absence of an exceptional defining the category of female subjectivity renders female subjectivity as such exceptional. 157 – 158

Male subjectivity always strives for the ultimate enjoyment that it posits in the unattainable position of exceptionality. Its enjoyment is always futural, and it depends on the act of obtaining or having its object. Female subjectivity provides enjoyment through what it doesn’t have; one enjoys one’s loss as a female subject. This type of enjoyment is not exclusionary in the way that the male form of enjoyment is. It is not confined to a few exceptions, because there is nothing but exceptions, according to the logic of female sexuation. 158

The foundation of the social bond is a loss held in common, a collective sacrifice of nothing for the sake of the social order. This experience of collective sacrifice or loss provides enjoyment in the form linked to female sexuation. It is the enjoyment of a shared not-having, and it is the form that the social bond necessarily takes at first. Each subject sacrifices something in order to live together collectively, and through the shared sacrifice, subjects constitute the social bond. This bond is traumatic and shameful because its avowal places subjects in a position where their lack is completely exposed. When subjects experience the essence of the social bond — the moment of collective self-sacrifice — they simultaneously experience the humiliation of rendering their loss visible. The enjoyment of this bond comes with a steep price, and no society is willing to pay it for very long. 158

Consequently, every social order obscures the traumatic nature of the social bond, which operates according to the female logic of not having, through recourse to a male logic of exception, manifested most directly in the friend/enemy distinction. This male logic is a logic of the all — a totality forged through the position of the exception — and it continually leaves subjects in a state of dissatisfaction, seeking a completeness that they will never attain.

The female logic of not-having or universalized exceptionality is not a separate logic of the social order, a logic describing an alternative form of society. It is, rather, the hidden bond lying beneath the phallic order founded on exception. Every society has both logics simultaneously at work, but the underlying logic of the not-all is the one that societies find themselves unable to avow. 158-159

… the logic of the not-all posits that there are only enemies, only outsiders, and only exceptions. The point is not that everyone is a friend but that everyone is an enemy, including oneself. According to this idea of the universalized exception, we can’t erect a firm distinction between inside and outside because those inside — friends — are defined solely in terms of what they don’t have, and this renders them indistinct from those outside — enemies. 159

Our enjoyment of the social bond operates according to the logic of not-having: we enjoy the shared experience of loss. But the pleasure that we take in the social bond follows from the male logic of the all and the exception. We find pleasure in the possibility of having a collective identity that sets us apart from outsiders. This pleasure works in one sense to facilitate our enjoyment by hiding it from us. While most members of a society can accept the pleasure that derives from a sense of having a collective identity — almost no one objects to the affirmation of national unity embodied by a flag, for instance — few can embrace the idea that the social bond exists through a shared sense of loss. This is why the moments when the shared sense of loss become visible are often quickly followed by the attempt to assert a positive collective identity. Or, to put it in other terms, when enjoyment becomes visible, we retreat toward pleasure. 159

mcgowan desire death drive

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.

The neurotic mistakes the experience of the death drive for the experience of desire, and psychoanalysis attempts to reveal the drive where the neurotic mistakenly sees desire.

We misrecognize satisfaction as dissatisfaction because we imagine, in our present state of lack, that we once had a completeness that we have now lost.

That is to say, we believe that our privileged object once had a substantial existence and fail to see that it became a privileged object through the very act of being lost.

This misrecognition allows us to continue to believe in a previous and possible future completeness. Though it is neurotic, this misrecognition is inherent in the very nature of desire, and it is through this fundamental misrecognition that desire first begins and later sustains itself. 59

Desire constantly seeks out the object that would satisfy it, but this object always eludes it — or, to be more precise, desire eludes the object, keeping desire perpetual (and perpetually dissatisfied). 59-60

Desire, in other words, doesn’t attempt to achieve satisfaction but to sustain itself as desire, to keep desire going. This is why desire constantly seeks out a satisfying object and yet never quite gets it. It leads us to see ourselves as dissatisfied and to fail to see the satisfaction we obtain from the circulation of the drive.

Desire is nothing but a misrecognition of the death drive. 60

note 14. The intrinsic link between desire and the death drive makes it possible to transition from desire to drive through fully insisting on one’s desire. This is why Alenka Župančič claims: “In order to arrive at the drive, one must pass through desire and insist on it until the very end” (Alenka Župančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan [New York: Verso, 2000], 239).

Category: drive