Category: drive

reinhard lacan with levinas

Reinhard, Kenneth. “Kant with Sade, Lacan with Levinas” MLN The Johns Hopkins University Press, 110.4 (1995) 785-808.

Hence for Lacan the sixties did not signal the libido’s momentary liberation from the constraints of repressive cultural ideals, but the construction of yet one more line of defense against the disturbing impossibility of intersubjective sexuality, the inconsistency in the symbolic order that materializes as a factum or “Thing” whose concealment, according to Lacan, both defines human relations and marks their limit.

“Love” has at least two distinct and perhaps contradictory valences for Lacan. On the one hand, love can dissimulate the unavailability of a sexual relationship by imagining a relationship between the self and the other. This version of love projects a “specular mirage” that simulates symbolic interaction by addressing me from a hypothetical point where I am seen in the way I would like to be seen, thereby fostering an illusion of reciprocity that is “essentially deception” (Seminar XI 268).

footnote: In Seminar VIII: Transference (1960-1) and Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1963-4), Lacan distinguishes between the two modalities of love in terms of two aspects of transference. The goal of analysis that emerges in the later sixties and seventies involves “traversing the fantasy,” the process in which the analyst, idealized in the first moment of transference as a supposed subject of knowledge, is de-idealized or “de-completed” in transference’s second moment of “separation,” in which love’s effect of imaginary coherence is stripped away to reveal love as pure drive.

On the other hand, Lacan suggests that there is another love, a love not bound by the circulation of images, but which arises, as Juliet Flower MacCannell has written, “outside the limits of the law” (25)–neither within nor beyond specularity, but on what we might call, after Levinas, the “hither side” of the mirror, more proximate to me than either myself or my alter-ego.3 Insofar as it aims precisely at the traumatic lack of a sexual relationship, this love is closely allied with the sublimation of the excessive enjoyment or jouissance that in Lacan’s Seminar VII forms the imperative of the ethics of psychoanalysis.4 At the conclusion of Seminar XI, Lacan warns that specular love barely conceals an internecine aggressivity that culminated most horrifically in the sacrificial fury of the Holocaust (274-6). 5

The “other” love, on the other hand, in aiming, as Renata Salecl writes, at “what remains of the object when all the imaginary and symbolic features are annihilated,” sacrifices precisely those illusory characteristics of the other person that fuel the love of sacrifice. 6

For both Lacan and Levinas, substitution does not imply an act of self-sacrifice within an economy of expiation and redemption, but rather the sacrifice of sacrifice. The moral economy of sacrifice entails giving up enjoyment for a place in the symbolic order (always advertised as a “higher” pleasure). The sacrifice of sacrifice, on the other hand, insists not on the enjoyment that attends responsibility, but rather on the responsibility for enjoyment, the obligation to maintain the jouissance that makes responsibility possible. In Lacan’s dictum, “the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire” (SVII 321); renunciation in the name of the symbolic order to morality is merely a ruse, a resistance to desire and the trauma that is its cause. For Levinas, enjoyment is not simply renounced by the subject of responsibility, but remains its intimate and ongoing condition: “only a subject that eats can be for-the-other, or can signify” (OTB E 74). Levinas articulates the responsibility of “for-the-other” as a substitution that determines not one meaning among others, but rather opens the field of signification as such. Like Lacan’s substitutive love, Levinasian responsibility institutes the process of metaphorization without abandoning jouissance, which indeed depends on the primal signification of substitution: “I can enjoy and suffer by the other only because I am for-the-other, am signification” (OTB 90). For Levinas the subject’s passive responsibility for its neighbor is experienced as a “deafening trauma” that creates the subject as the response to a call so loud or so close that it cannot be heard, cannot be fully translated into a message. In the deferred temporality that places ethics before ontology, responsiveness before being, the subject is produced as “the echo of a sound that would precede the resonance of this sound” (OTB 111)

rothenberg acephalous subject

acephalous: without a head, lacking a governing head or chief

Žižek proposes as the properly political subject an “acephalous subject” who assumes the position of the object”   [Organs Bodies 176 cited in Rothenberg 175]

In this move from desire to drive, he fundamentally alters the picture of a political subject as one who calculates an intervention to bring about the future it desires.  175

The “acephalous subject” does not function in this intentionalized mode of traditional political discourse: “the subject who acts is no longer a person but, precisely, an object.” That is, in his view, we must give up, once and for all, our sense of the political — the political act, the political domain, and the political collectivity — as based on promise or calculation. 175

rothenberg subject of drive

In the neurotic fantasy, the lack installed in the subject can be removed by getting rid of the obstacle that prohibits access to the fulfilling objet a. The neurotic fails to understand that there is no such prohibition, that the lack cannot be remediated by transgressing a prohibition: because the lack constitutes the subject, its elimination would dissolve the subject. 174

Even if there were an object that could completely fulfill the subject’s desire and so eliminate the lack at its heart, the subject still would have to “miss” the object in order to remain a subject. This perpetual “missing” is due neither to desire’s inanition [weakness, lassitude, exhaustion] nor to the strength of the prohibition. It is due to the drive.

The drive is what keeps desire alive by producing the illusion that there is an object to aim at as it “circles” the place where the object should be, like a strange attractor. In this way, the drive ensures no encounter with an object while maintaining the illusion of its existence. In this account, the subject is a subject of the drive, not a subject of desire. 174-175

undead Kant

What Butler (as well as Adorno) fails to render thematic is the changed status of the “inhuman” in Kant’s transcendental turn.

Perhaps the best way to describe the status of this inhuman dimension of the neighbour is with reference to Kant’s philosophy. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and indefinite judgement: the positive statement ‘the soul is mortal’ can be negated in two ways. We can either deny a predicate (‘the soul is not mortal’), or affirm a non-predicate (‘the soul in non-mortal’).  The difference is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, between ‘he is not dead’ and ‘he is undead’.

The indefinite judgement opens up a third domain that undermines the distinction between dead and non-dead (alive): the ‘undead’ are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous ‘living dead’.  And the same goes for ‘inhuman’: ‘he is not human’ is not the same as ‘he is inhuman’.  ‘He is not human’ means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while ‘he is inhuman’ means something thoroughly different, namely the fact that he is neither human nor inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as humanity, is inherent to being human.

And perhaps one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian philosophical revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, while with Kant, the excess to be fought is immanent and concerns the very core of subjectivity itself.  (Which is why, in German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, the ‘Night of the World’, in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness around.)

In the pre-Kantian universe, when a hero goes mad he is deprived of his humanity, and animal passions or divine madness take over.  With Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being.  [How to Read Lacan46-47,2006. TN 159-160 2005]

Critique of Levinas

This dimension is missing also in Levinas. In a properly dialectical paradox, what Levinas (with all his celebration of Otherness) fails to take into account is not some underlying Sameness of all humans but the radical, “inhuman” Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure of the Muselmann, the “living dead” in the concentration camps. TN 160, 2005

… the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical “gentrification” of the neighbour, the reduction of the radically ambiguous monstrosity of the Neighbor-thing into an Other as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. [TN 163, 2005]

Although I try to isolate a certain emancipatory kernel of religion, I must nonetheless emphasize that I am an absolute materialist. I think that one of the trends to which I am very much opposed is the recent post-secular theological turn of deconstruction; the idea being that while there is no ontotheological God there is nonetheless some kind of unconditional ethical injunction up to which we cannot every live.  So what re-emerges here is a split between ethics and politics.  Ethics stands for the unconditional injunction which you can never fulfill and so you have to accept the gap between unconditional injunction and the always contingent failed interventions that you make. Ethics becomes the domain of the unconditional, spectrality, Otherness and so on, whereas politics consists of practical interventions. This Levinasian Otherness can then be formulated directly as the divine dimension, or it can be formulated just as the messianic utopian dimension inherent to language as such and so on.

I think Lacanian ethics breaks out of this.  Lacan cannot be incorporated into this paradigm.  What Lacan does is precisely to assert the radical politicization of ethics; not in the sense that ethics should be subordinated to power struggles, but in terms of accepting radical contingency. The elementary political position is one that affirms this contingency and this means that you don’t have any guarantee in any norms whatsoever. You have to risk and to decide. This is the lesson of Lacan.  Do not compromise your desire. Do not look for support in any form of big Other – even if this big Other is totally empty or a Levinasian unconditional injunction. You must risk the act without guarantee.

In this sense the ultimate foundation of ethics is political. And, for Lacan, depoliticized ethics is an ethical betrayal because you put the blame on the Other.  Depoliticized ethics means that you rely on some figure of the big Other. But the Lacanian act is precisely the act in which you assume that there is no big Other. Conv162-163 2004

 

[Lenin’s] idea is simply that there is no big Other; you never get the guarantee; you must act.  You must take the risk and act. I think this is the Lenin who is truly a Lacanian Lenin. Conv164

 

Žižek universal singularity

Which is why, from the Lacanian perspective, it is problematic to clam that we humans “seem to have enormous difficulty in accepting our limitedness, our finiteness, and this failure is a cause of much tragedy”: on the contrary, we humans have enormous difficulty in accepting the infinity`(undeadness, excess of life) in the very core of our being, the strange immortality whose Freudian name is the death drive. IDLC 344

… for Lacan, the radically heterogeneous Thing whose traumatic impact decenters the subject is, … the primordial “Evil Thing,” something that cannot ever be sublated (aufgehobun) into a version of the Good;  … It is … the very unconditional “fanatical” commitment to a Cause which is the “death drive” at its purest and, as such, the primordial form of Evil: it introduces into the flow of (social) life a violent cut that throws it out of joint.  The Good comes afterwards, it is an attempt to “gentrify,” to domesticate, the traumatic impact of the Evil Thing.  In short the Good is the screened/domesticated Evil. IDLC 345

… the incompatibility of the Neighbour with the very dimension of universality. What resists universality is the properly inhuman dimension of the Neighbour. This brings us back to the key question: does every universalist ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal? The answer is: every ethics that remains “humanist” (in the sense of avoiding the inhuman core of being-human), that disavows the abyssal dimension of the Neighbour. “Man,” “human person,” is a mask that conceals the pure subjectivity of the Neighbour.

Consequently, when one asserts the Neighbour as the impenetrable “Thing” that eludes any attempt at gentrification, at its transformation into a cozy fellow man, this does not mean that the ultimate horizon of ethics is deference towards this unfathomable Otherness that subverts any encompassing universality.

Following Alain Badiou, one should assert that, on the contrary, only an “inhuman” ethics, an ethics addressing an inhuman subject, not a fellow person, can sustain true universality.

The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasps this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity of the subject qua Neighbor-Thing into universality, not standard “general” universality, but universal singularity.

the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular. ID16-17

Žižek cartestian subject cogito

Žižek, Slavoj. SIC Cogito and the Unconscious. Durham: Duke University Press 1998

Introduction: Cogito as a Shibboleth

There  are  two  standard  ways  to  approach  the  relationship  between  philosophy  and psychoanalysis.  Philosophers  usually  search  for  so-called philosophical  foundations  of psychoanalysis”:  their  premise  is  that,  no  matter  how  dismissive  psychoanalysis  is  of philosophy, it nonetheless has to rely on a series of conceptual presuppositions (about the nature  of  drives,  of  reality,  etc.)  that  psychoanalysis  itself  does  not  render  thematic  and that  bear  witness  to  the  way  in  which  psychoanalysis  is  only  possible  within  a  certain philosophical  horizon.

On  the  other  hand,  psychoanalysts  at  their  worst,  indulge  in  so-called “psychoanalyzing of philosophers,” trying to discern pathological psychic motivations beneath  fundamental  philosophical attitudes  (philosophical  idealism  as  the  last  vestige  of the  childish  belief  in  the  omnipotency  of  thoughts;  paranoiac  systematizing  as  the foundation  of  the  need  to  form  all-embracing  philosophical  systems,  etc.).  Both  these approaches  are  to  be  rejected.  While  the  psychoanalytic  reduction  of  philosophy  to  an expression of psychic pathology is today, deservedly, no longer taken seriously, it is much more difficult to counter the seemingly self-evident claim that psychoanalysis cannot relate anything  truly  relevant  to  philosophy,  since  psychoanalysis  must  itself  rely  on  a  set  of philosophical presuppositions that it is unable to reflect upon.

What if, however, references to the Freudian subject are not external to philosophy, but can, in fact, tell us something about  the  modern,  Cartesian  subject?

What  if  psychoanalysis  renders  visible  something that  the  modern  philosophy  of  subjectivity  accomplishes  without  knowing  it,  its  own grounding  gesture,  which  philosophy  has  to  disavow  if  it  is  to  assume  its  place  within academic  knowledge?

To  use  Lacan’s  pun,  what  if  psychoanalysis  renders  visible  the ex-timate  kernel  of  modern  subjectivity,  its  innermost  core  that  philosophy  is  not  ready  to assume, which it tries to keep at a distanceor, to put it in a more fashionable way, what if psychoanalysis  renders  visible  the  constitutive  madness  of  modern  philosophy?

We  are thus  playing  a  double  strategic  game:  this  ex-timate  kernel  of  philosophy  is  not  directly accessible  to  the  psychoanalysis  conceived  of as a  branch  of psychology  or psychiatry  — what we encounter at this level are, of course, the “naive” pre-philosophical theses. What one has to do, is to bring to light the philosophical implications of psychoanalysis, that is, to  retranslate,  to  transpose psychoanalytic  propositions  back  into  philosophy, to “elevate them  to  the  dignity  of  philosophical  propositions”:  in  this  way,  one  is able  to discern  the ex-timate  philosophical  kernel  of  psychoanalysis,  since  this  transposition  back  into philosophy explodes the standard philosophical frame. This is what Lacan was doing all the time:  reading  hysteria  or  obsessional  neurosis  as  a philosophical  “attitude  of  thought towards  reality”  (the  obsessional  compulsion  to  think” if  I  stop  thinking,  I  will  cease  to exist” — as the truth of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum), etc., etc. Are we thus not again engaged in “psychoanalyzing philosophy”? No, since this reference to  madness  is  strictly  internal  to  philosophy  —  the  whole  of  modern  philosophy,  from Descartes onward, involves an inherent reference to the threat of madness, and is thus a desperate attempt to draw a clear line that separates the transcendental philosopher from the madman ( Descartes: how do I know I’m not hallucinating reality? Kant: how to delimit metaphysical  speculation  from  Swedenborgian  hallucinatory  rambling?  ).

This  excess  of madness against which modern philosophy fights is the very founding gesture of Cartesian subjectivity.

…At  this point,  anyone  versed  in  postmodern  deconstructionism will  utter  a sigh  of  bored  recognition:  of  course,  the  Cartesian  ego,  the  selftransparent  subject  of Reason,  is  an  illusion;  its  truth  is  the  decentered,  split,  finite  subject  thrown  into  a contingent,  nontransparent  context,  and  this  is  what  psychoanalysis  renders  visible…. Things,  however,  are  more  complicated.

[…]

1

It  is  against  this  background  that  one  should  appreciate  the  paradoxical  achievement  of Lacan,  which  usually  passes  unnoticed  even  by  his  advocates:  on  the  very  behalf  of psychoanalysis, he  returns  to  the  modern  rationalist  notion  of  subject.  Philosophers  and psychoanalysts,  of  course,  promptly  exclaim  “We  are  here  on  our  home  terrain!”  and proceed  to  reduce  the  Freudian  subject  to  a  psychological  subject  of  introspection,  to philosophical self-consciousness, to Nietzschean will to power…. Lacan’s underlying thesis here  is  even  more  radical  than  with  the  unconscious:

not  only  has  the  Freudian  subject nothing  to  do  with  the  self-transparent,  unified  self-consciousness,  it  is  the  Cartesian subject  itself  (and  its  radicalization  in  German  Idealism,  from  Kant’s  transcendental apperception to self-consciousness from Fichte onward) … the  standard  philosophy  of  subjectivity, … misrecognize the gap that separates the Cartesian subject (when it is “brought to its  notion”  with  Kant)  from  the  self-transparent  ego,  or  from  man,  from  the  “human person.”

What  they fail to  see  is that  the Cartesian subject  emerges  precisely  out of  the “death of man” “transcendental subjectivity” is philosophical antihumanism at its purest.

One  can  see,  now,  why,  in  his  seminar  on  The  Four  Fundamental  Concepts  of  Psycho-Analysis, Lacan asserts that the subject of psychoanalysis is none other than the Cartesian cogito:  the  Freudian  unconscious  emerges  through  the  very  reduction  of  the  “person’s” substantial content to the evanescent punctuality of the cogito.

In  this  precise  sense, one  could  say  that  Martin Luther  was  the first  great antihumanist: modern subjectivity is not announced in the Renaissance humanist celebration of man as the  “crown  of  creation”, that  is,  in  the  tradition  of  Erasmus  and  others  (to  which  Luther cannot but appear as a “barbarian”), but rather in Luther’s famous statement that

man is the excrement who fell out of God’s anus.

Modern subjectivity has nothing to do with the notion of man as the highest creature in the “great chain of being,” as the final point of the  evolution  of  the  universe:  modern  subjectivity  emerges  when  the  subject  perceives himself  as  “out  of  joint,”  as  excluded  from  the  “order  of  the  things,”  from  the  positive order of entities. For that reason, the ontic equivalent of the modern subject is inherently excremental:  there  is  no  subjectivity  proper  without  the  notion  that,  at  a  different  level, from  another  perspective,  I  am  a  mere  piece  of  shit.

For  Marx,  the  emergence  of  working-class subjectivity is strictly codependent to the fact that the worker is compelled to sell the very substance of his being (his creative power) as a commodity on the market, that is, to reduce the agalma, the treasure, the precious kernel of his being, to an object that can be bought for a piece of money — there is no subjectivity without the reduction of the  subject  positive-substantial  being  to  a  disposable  “piece  of  shit.”

In  this  case  of  the correlation between the Cartesian subjectivity and its excremental objectal counterpart, we are  not  dealing  merely  with  an  example  of  what  Foucault  called  the  empirico- transcendental couple that characterizes modern anthropology, but, rather, with the split between  the  subject  of  the  enunciation  and  the  subject  of  the  enunciated:

2

If  the Cartesian subject is to emerge at the level of the enunciation, he is to be reduced to the “almost-nothing” of a disposable excrement at the level of the enunciated content.

Or,  to  put  it  in  a  slightly  different  way,  the  intervention  of  the  subject  undermines  the standard premodern opposition between the universal order and the hubris of a particular force whose egotistic excess perturbs the balance of the universal order: “subject” is the name  for  the  hubris,  the  excessive  gesture,  whose  very  excess  grounds  the  universal order;  it  is  the  name  for  the  pathological  abject,  clinamen,  deviation  from  the  universal order,  that  sustains  this  very  universal  order.  The  transcendental  subject  is  the “ontological  scandal,”  neither  phenomenal  nor  noumenal,  but  an  excess  that  sticks  out from the “great chain of being,” a hole, a gap in the order of reality, and, simultaneously, the agent whose “spontaneous” activity constitutes the order of (phenomenal) reality. If, for  the  traditional  ontology,  the  problem  was  how  to  deduce  chaotic  phenomenal  reality background image from the eternal order of the true reality (how to account for the gradual “degeneration” of the  eternal  order),  the  problem  of  the  subject  is  that  of  the  imbalanced  excess,  hubris, deviation, that sustains the order itself. The central paradox of the Kantian transcendental constitution  is  that  the  subject  is  not  the  absolute,  the  eternal  grounding  principle  of reality, but a finite, temporal entity — precisely as such, it provides the ultimate horizon of reality.

The very idea of the universe, of the all of reality, as a totality that exists in itself, is  thus  rejected  as  a  paralogism:  what  appears  as  an  epistemological  limitation  of  our capacity  to  grasp  reality  (the  fact  that  we  are  forever  perceiving  reality  from  our  finite, temporal standpoint), is the positive ontological condition of reality itself. Our  philosophical  and  everyday  common  sense  identifies  the  subject  with  a  series  of features:  the  autonomous  source  of  spontaneous,  self-originating  activity  (what  German Idealists called “self-positing”); the capacity of free choice; the presence of some kind of “inner  life”  (fantasizing);  etc.

Lacan  endorses  these  features,  but  with  a  twist:  the autonomous  source  of  activity  —  yes,  but  only  insofar  as  the  subject  displaces  onto  an Other the fundamental passivity of his being (when I am active, I am simultaneously interpassive, i.e., there is an Other who is passive for me, in my place, like the weepers, the hired women who cry for me at funerals in so-called “primitive” societies); the free choice —  yes,  but,  at  its  most  radical,  the  choice  is  a  forced  one  (i.e.,  ultimately,  I  have  a freedom of choice only insofar as I make the right choice); the presence of fantasizing — yes,  but,  far  from  coinciding  with  the  subject  in  a  direct  experience  of  “inner  life,”  the fundamental fantasy is that which cannot ever be “subjectivized,” that which is forever cut off from the subject….

What Lacan focuses on is this specific twist, this additional turn of the screw that confronts us with the most radical dimension of subjectivity. How, then, does this endeavor of ours relate to Heidegger’s well known attempt to “think through” the horizon of subjectivity? From our perspective, the problem with Heidegger is, in  ultima  analisi,  the  following  one:

the  Lacanian  reading  enables  us  to  unearth  in  the Cartesian subjectivity its inherent tension between the moment of excess (the “diabolical Evil” in Kant, the “night of the world” in Hegel) and the subsequent attempts to gentrify-domesticate-normalize  this  excess.

Again  and  again,  post-Cartesian  philosophers  are compelled,  by  the  inherent  logic  of  their  philosophical  project,  to  articulate  a  certain excessive moment of “madness” inherent to cogito, which they then immediately endeavor to “renormalize.” And the problem with Heidegger is that his notion of modern subjectivity does not seem to account for this inherent excess — in short, this notion simply does not “cover” that aspect of cogito on account of which Lacan claims that cogito is the subject of the unconscious.

3

One of the basic presumptions of contemporary doxa is that the Cartesian cogito paved the way for the unheard-of progress of modern science that profoundly affected the everyday life of mankind. Today, however, it seems as if the Cartesian cogito itself has acquired the status of a prescientific myth, superseded by the very progress of knowledge it unleashed. For  that  reason,  the  title  Cogito  and  the  Unconscious  is  bound  to  give  rise  to  two immediate associations: that it is to be understood as designating the antagonism between cogito  (the  transparent  subject  of  self-consciousness)  and  the  unconscious,  its  opaque Other that subverts the certitudes of consciousness; and, consequently, that cogito is to be repudiated  as  the  agency  of  manipulative  domination  responsible  for  all  present  woes, from  patriarchal  oppression  to  ecological  catastrophes.  The  specter  of  the  “Cartesian paradigm”  roams  around,  simultaneously  proclaimed  dead  and  feared  as  the  ultimate threat  to  our  survival.

In  clear  contrast  to  this  predominant  doxa,  Lacan  pleads  for  a psychoanalytic return to cogito.

Today’s  predominant  position  involves  the  assertion  of  multiple  subjectivities  against  the specter  of  (transcendental)  Subject:  the  unified  Subject,  the  topic  of  transcendental philosophy, the constitutive source of all reality, is dead (or so we are told), and the void of its absence is filled in by the liberating proliferation of the multiple forms of subjectivity– feminine, gay, ethnic….

One should thus abandon the impossible search for the Subject that  is  constitutive  of  reality,  and,  instead,  focus  attention  on  the  diverse  forms  of asserting  one’s  subjectivity  in  our  complex  and  dispersed  postmodern  universe….

What, however,  if  we  perform  the  exact  opposite  of  this  standard  operation,  and  endeavor  to think a subject bereft of subjectivity (of the self-experience of a historical agent embedded in a finite horizon of meaning)?

What kind of monster remains when we subtract from the background image subject  the  wealth  of  self experience  that  constitutes  subjectivity?  The  present  volume provides an answer to this question: its underlying premise is that

the Cartesian subject is this monster, that it emerges precisely when we deprive the subject of all the wealth of the “human person.”

Notes […]

2. See Jacques Lacan, Érits: A Selection ( New York: Norton, 1977), 300.

3. For a more detailed account of this excess, see, in the present volume, Slavoj Žižek, The Cartesian Subject versus the Cartesian Theater.

dean revolutionary desire vs. democratic drive 2

By Jodi Dean draft version that is not to be cited

I’ve argued that the sublimation of the drive captures the subject in the repetitive circuits of communicative capitalism.  What’s left? A new, shifted, desire, one that recognizes the impossibility of reaching or achieving its object and holds on, refusing to cede it. … Zizek links this new desire to Lacan’s notion of the “desire of the analyst.”  [Ticklish Subject 296 and Ecrits, ‘From the Freudian Trieb to the Desire of the Analyst”]

Such a desire is collective, sustaining a community even as it has moved past the need for some kind of phantasmic support. Collective, built around a lack, provides a common desire capable of breaking through the self-enclosed circuit of drive.

The part-of-no-part doesn’t designate a subset of persons, a “we” or a “concrete identity” that can be empirically indicated. It names the gap, division, or antagonism that marks the non-identity of any ordering with its own components. The Lacanian term for the part-of-no-part would then be objet petite a, an impossible, formal object produced as the excess of a process or relation, a kind of gap that incites or annoys, the missingness or not-quite-rightness that calls out to us.

So we have a rupture or a gap and the subjectification of this gap. But subjectification in what sense? There are different politicizations, different mobilizations and subjectifications that call out to and organize different convictions and interests.

The emphasis on the gap necessary for communist desire indexes the non-coincidence of communism with its setting, echoing Marxist themes of negation and affirming the communist legacy of revolution. Nonetheless, communism is not the only political ideology that mobilizes negation and revolution. In fact, it shares such a revolutionary mobilization of negation with capitalism itself, hence communism as the negation of the negation.

The difference in the way they subjectivize the gap, then, is crucial. Capitalist subjectification, the desire it structures and incites, is individual, (even as it tends to sublimate desire in drive, or, differently put, even as individuated desires get caught up in and give way to drive’s powerfully repetitive circuits). To invert Althusser, capitalism interpellates subjects as individuals. A communism that does likewise fails to effect a rupture or install a gap.  Communist desire can only be collective.

In a setting of capitalism’s distractions and compulsions, one may very well feel like something is wrong, something is missing, something is deeply unfair. Then one might complicate this idea, or contextualize it, or forget about it and check email. Or one might try to make a difference—signing petitions, blogging, voting, doing one’s own part as an individual. And here is the problem, one continues to think and act individualistically. Under capitalist conditions,  communist desire entails “the renunciation of individual freedom,” the deliberate and conscious subordination of self in and to a collective communist will. This subordination requires discipline, work, and organization. It is a process carried out over time and through collective struggle.
Indeed, it’s active collective struggle that changes and reshapes desire from its individual (and for Lukacs bourgeois and reified form) into a common, collective one.


In this provisional sketch of a theory of communist desire, I’ve emphasized the lack (the openness of desire) and its subjectification. I’ve argued that communist desire is the collective subjectification of the lack. It is a collective assumption of the division or antagonism constitutive of the political, an assumption that takes collectivity as the form of desire in two senses: our desire and our desire for us; or, communist desire is the collective desire for collective desiring.

Oh, demographers and statisticians! What have you unleashed?As capital demolishes all previous social ties, the counting on which it depends provides a new figure of belonging! Capital has to measure itself, count its profits, its rate of profit, its share of profit, its capacity to leverage its profit, its confidence or anxiety in its capacity for future profit. Capital counts and analyzes who has what, representing to itself the measures of its success. These very numbers can be, and in the slogan “We are the 99%” they are, put to use. They aren’t resignified—they are claimed as the subjectification of the gap separating the top one percent from the rest of us. With this claim, the gap becomes a vehicle for the expression of communist desire, that is, for a politics that asserts the people as divisive force in the interest of over-turning present society and making a new one anchored in collectivity and the common.

In a close engagement with Catherine Malabou’s discussion of severe brain injuries, Zizek discusses the logic of dialectical transitions, “after negation/alienation/loss, the subject ‘returns to itself,’ but this subject is not the same as the substance that underwent the alienation—it is constituted in the very movement of returning to itself.”[i] Zizek concludes, “the subject is as such the survivor of its own death, a shell which remains after it is deprived of its substance.” Proletarianization is a name for the process of this deprivation under capital (as I discuss in chapter three). The deprivation of substance—common, social, substance—leaves collectivity as its shell, as the form that remains for communist desire.

This collective form overlaps with the object-cause of communist desire, the people understood as the part-of-no-part. As I argue above, the part-of-no-part names the gap or antagonism that marks the non-identity of any ordering with its own components. It can thus be designated with Lacan’s objet petit a, an impossible formal object produced as the excess of a process, a missingness or off-ness that calls out to us.

Zizek notes that for Lacan, the object of desire always remains at a distance from the subject; no matter how close the subject gets to the object, the object remains elusive.[ii]

The distinction between object and object-cause is not the same as any old object to which it attaches.

The object-cause of communist desire is the people and, again, the people not as a name for the social whole but as a name for the exploited, producing majority.

[i] Living in the End Times, 307
[ii] See Living in the End Times 303

Conclusion

I [Jodi Dean] have attempted to set out an idea of communist desire in the space marked by the end of a certain left melancholy and by an alternative to the way of the drive. Whereas some have viewed drive’s sublimation as the alternative to a desire configured in terms of law and its transgression, I’ve sketched an alternative notion of desire, one that, via collectivity, breaks from drive’s repetitive circuits. Instead of trapped in failure, getting off on failing to reach the goal, communist desire subjectivizes its own impossibility, its constitutive lack and openness.

Bosteels on Žižek

Bosteels, Bruno. The Actuality of Communism.  New York: Verso, 2011.

To envision a new positive order beyond the present horizon thus requires that we take a step back to grasp the moment of genesis of order out of disorder.  “In the end, teh alternative here is between idealism and materialism: is the ‘big Other’ (the ideal symbolic order) always already here as a kind of insurmountable horizon, or is it possible to deploy ts ‘genesis’ out of the dispersed ‘non-all’ network of contingent material singularities?”  Žižek also asks, before answering his own question in the positive: “The answer is a definite ‘yes’ — it is contained in Lacan’s unexpected vindication of the notion of creativity at its most radical, that is, as creatio ex nihilo: by means of reference to the void of the Thing in the midst of the symbolic structure, the subject is able to ‘bend’ the symbolic space she inhabits, and thus to define his/her desire in its idiosyncrasy.”

To justify his belief in the possibility of a transformative act that would open up a new order not limited to the alternative of either the pure lack of desire or else the pure positivity of drives, Žižek thus raises the question of the originary act that brings order out of disorder and breaks with the constraints of the always already existing state of affairs. 204

finitude antigone

Žižek. Traversing the Fantasy eds. Boucher, Glynos, Sharpe. 2005

So what is it that this emphasis on finitude as the ultimate horizon of our existence misses? How can we assert it in a materialist way, without any resort to spiritual transcendence? The answer is, precisely, objet petite a as the ”undead” (“noncastrated”) remainder which persists in its obscene immortality. No wonder the Wagnerian heroes want so desperately to die: they want to get rid of this obscene immortal supplement which stands for libido as an organ, for drive at its most radical, i.e., death drive. In other words, the properly Freudian paradox is that what explodes the constraints of our finitude is death drive itself.

Back to the texts in ‘ the present volume: the main thing that I find problematic in Grigg’s contribution is precisely what appears the most natural thing for a psychoanalyst to do-his “clinical” reading of Antigone’s act as a gesture of hysterical provocation. Lacan, surprisingly, avoided this direction completely: there is, in his detailed reading of Antigone, no mention of repression, of the formations of the unconscious, of incestuous desires (although we are dealing here  the Oedipus family, the incestuous family !) . . . And I think Lacan was right here: the dimension he is focusing on-that of the ethical act-cannot be rendered (and also not “demystifled”) in clinical terms. Furthermore, I think Grigg is wrong when he claims that Antigone “defies the law of her city in the name of her (Oedipal) law”: it is her brother’s proper burial that she insists on (as the theatre piece informs as in the lines which are often dismissed as problematic, but on whose key importance Lacan insists, it is only apropos her brother that she is ready to go to the end), and it is not clear what this has to do with the Oedipal Law.

Furthermore, we should not forget the obvious fact that we are not dealing here with just any case of the Oedipus complex, but with Oedipus himself-and, as Lacan liked to point out, the Oedipus family, precisely, was not Oedipal, and Oedipus did not suffer from the Oedipus complex.

Grigg’s other counterargument concerns the problematic status of what I call the “act of absolute freedom” which “derives its essential features (its freedom, its gratuitousness, its criminality, its unaccountability and unpredictability) from the fact that it lies outside all possible symbolic dimensions. It strikes me that not only does Antigone not conform to this requirement but also that this requirement makes an act indistinguishable from mere whimsicality. There is no objective criterion and there can clearly be no appeal to any subjective features to distinguish an act of absolute freedom from a gratuitous act.”

As I abundantly developed elsewhere (among other places in my (Ticklish Subject), such a reading of the act is wrong: what makes a certain move an act proper are not its inherent qualities but its structural place within a given symbolic network — to put it in Badiou’ s terms. an act intervenes at the point of the “symptomal torsion” of this network.  This is what distinguishes an act from a mere whimsicality, and this is also why, of course, the externality of the act is absolutely internal to the symbolic order-an act is ex-timate, to use Lacan’s pun.

Ž the abyss of the Other desire 4

Žižek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.
Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus is a Latin phrase. It means: “Let there be justice, though the world perish.”

Hegel’s (and Lacan’s, incidentally) point is that it is possible to move ‘beyond Good and Evil’, beyond the horizon of the Law and constitutive guilt, into drive …

Hegel’s implicit thesis is that

diabolical Evil is another name for the Good itself; for the concept ‘in itself’, the two are indistinguishable, the difference is purely formal, and concerns only the point of view of the perceiving subject.

In short ‘diabolical evil’ is simply Kant’s name for what Freud [calls] the death drive.

I become aware of my freedom only through the experience of how, on behalf of the moral law, I am able to withstand the pressure of the pathological motivations which tie me to innerworldly phenomenal causality.

the pure moral act is impossible, of how one can never be sure that one is acting solely out of consideration for duty, is the far more uncanny fact that the moral act, precisely as impossible, is simultaneously unavoidable, that which is in a way impossible to transgress.

it is only my failure to act ethically which guarantees that I remain an ethical subject, since were I to accomplish a pure ethical act, I would change into a being of diabolical Evil (in a Sadeian Supreme-Being-of-Evilness). 230

true evil involves precisely the blurring of distinctions between Good and Evil — that is, the elevation of Evil into a consistent ethical Principle. A revolutionary terrorist, for example, is of aesthetic interest if he is not merely a bloodthirsty executioner killing and torturing out of pure egotistical baseness, but a sincere idealist ready to sacrifice everything for his Cause, convinced that he is doing a service to humanity, and thus caught in the tragic deadlock of his predicament. … … such an ‘ethical evil’ is the true diabolical Evil, much worse than the evil of simple egotistical baseness: the cleaner you are (the more your motives are selfless-humanitarian), the greater your evil. 234-235

abyss of the Other’s desire 3

Žižek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.

The standard subject’s reaction to the act is that of aphanasis, of his/her self-obliteration, not of heroically assuming it: when the awareness of the full consequences of ‘what I have just done’ hits me, I want to disappear.  At this precise point Lacan (and already Freud’s notion fo the death drive) parts with the Romantic ideology of a ‘demonic’ self-destructive Will: the death drive is not a ‘will to die’, radical Evil is not a ‘diabolical’ intention that seeks pleasure in inflicting pain on one’s neighbour …