jouissance – Page 9

phallic enjoyment the thing

Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: One World, 2009.

In the seminar in 1957, the objet petit a begins to take on the meaning of the object of desire, which means not this or that specific object that you think you desire, but what is aimed at or sought after that seems to be contained within a particular object – for convenience, one may begin to think of it as the ‘desirable quality’ of the object, or what is desirable in the real-world object. 129

“the object of desire in the usual sense is either a fantasy which supports the desire, or a lure.” Lacan specifies here that the objet petit a is the “imaginary cause of desire” rather than “what the desire tends towards”, to emphasise that this is not a “real world object” (a thing), but an object in the sense of “object relations” – that is, the vehicle upon which a function is exercised (the breast, the stool, the genitalia), and whose relational properties (e.g. controllability for the stool, excitability for the genitalia) form the basis of the different kinds of relationship one may have with the exterior world.

Lacan never suggested that the objet petit a was derived from part objects, only that real-world objects which have something of the properties of part objects are often the ‘receptacles’ for the objet petit a. For example, money shares the property of the stool (the object of the anal function) in being something that may be lost or retained, the unexpected loss of which may be a cause of anxiety, the ‘spending’ of which may be a cause of enjoyment in its own right (how common is the phenomenon of ‘spending money for its own sake’?), and giving and retention of which both have meaning for other people. In other words, it is not money in itself that is an object cause of desire, but its stool-like properties make it a good receptacle for the object cause of desire. 129

The objets petit a may be seen as a fragment of the Phallus, which arises from castration, when the child understands that the Phallus is possessed neither by itself nor its father, nor yet any living person.

However, the lost Phallus cannot be forgotten – the Subject knows it must have existed from the fact that it has lost it.

The Phallus leaves traces of itself everywhere – a little like the mirror of the Snow Queen in the fairy tale, which breaks into a thousand pieces that lodge themselves in objects and people. These Phallic fragments are the objet petit a – the object cause of desire—and can be found in many things: fast cars, the latest technological gadget, the ‘perfect’ cocktail dress … and in other people – a woman who hankers after the love of a powerful man may well be attracted to the Phallic fragment he appears to possess.

The quest to possess the Phallic fragment is a well-spring of creativity and effort: the search for the solution to the insoluble maths problem, to invent a new chess strategy, to perfect your skill at the piano, to discover the structure of DNA …

The pursuit of the Phallus is qualitatively different from the pursuit of fame or social recognition, as it is object-focused (or objective-focused) rather than purely narcissistic (although there will necessarily be a narcissistic element in everything we do); it is to do with the attempt to incorporate in oneself the Phallic fragments.

The Name-of-the-Father is an object of identification for the Subject, as well as the representative of the Other: it is central to the construction of both Subject and its ego. It is the signifier that the Subject can enunciate as representing the object of desire; the master signifiers that take its place will have exactly the same character. This is why Lacan attributes such an important structural role to the master signifiers as being the backbone upon which the Subject is built. Consider the following example:

A man loves sailing and has built much of his image and identity around this; many of his desires revolve around the sea and sailing and the sort of society that goes with it – all this is observable in his choices of clothes, homes, women, etc. ‘Sailing’ is among his master signifiers. In his early life, this man’s father was a keen sailor, and in his identification with his father and fierce rivalry with his brothers for his father’s attention, the boy’s skill at the helm became his main ‘weapon’ of power – his representation of the Phallus (or objet petit a).

If you think of how the Name-of-the-Father hides the true object of the mother’s desire (who was, after all a seaman), one can easily see how ‘sailing’ has replaced the Name-of-the-Father as the metaphorical representation of the object of desire. 133

Just as the master signifiers are substitutes for the Name-of-the-Father, the object cause of desire replaces the lost Phallus as the only thing that can answer the subject’s lack that causes anxiety. I hope this final example will show clearly the relationship between these elements:

A woman in her forties suffered chronic insomnia, caused by her inability to stop thinking, or to ‘switch off her mind’. She was a mathematician by career, and her master signifiers included ‘rationality’ and ‘logic’: she was almost exasperatingly rational.

Beneath the bar of her master signifiers was hidden her great desire for a rational universe, for achievable solutions to problems; the Phallic enjoyment of her life revolved around this. Analysis revealed a child hood in which she had suffered greatly from a mother whose apparently illogical decisions had cost the family greatly and whose ‘childish irrationality’ was a great source of suffering and anger to the child, who proceeded to build her own personality around the signifier and the objects that she felt were her best defence. Beneath the bar of ‘irrationality’ in her unconscious was, as ever the anxiety of the helplessness – castratedness—she had experienced as a result of it as child. Because there is jouissance in the functioning of the psychological apparatus, part of the woman’s problem was that she enjoyed thinking too much (in her insomniac moments, she would solve chess problems in her mind). The defence mechanism she had developed in childhood against the anxiety caused by her helplessness against irrationality had got out of control: her jouissance was transgressing both the pleasure and reality principles. The insomnia became particularly bad whenever situations arose that caused her to re-experience castration anxiety: difficulties at work that she could not ‘solve’ however much she thought would cause her completely sleepless nights, resulting in exhaustion and a vicious circle of not being able to think clearly, and feeling even more anxious about this. 135-136

The Thing (das Ding)

The Thing attracts desire perhaps because it is the object of loss itself: the unsymbolisable and unimaginable reality of loss.

Freud’s Thing is the object of yearning, of desire; it creates jouissance, and is the object of language, while being unsymbolisable. We seek to approach it all the time in what we say, but we can only circle it. Freud held that the Thing was the ‘sovereign good’ to which subjects aspire, but which is always unattainable, because attaining it would transgress the reality principle and will be experie3nced as suffering or evil. …

Lacan’s innovation was to equate the Thing with the mother – not the real mother, obviously, but the mother-who-is-lost: the absence of mother. … the Subject is constituted by its separation from and emotional relationship with the Thing, which is unsymbolisable and therefore cannot be repressed. This relationship with the Thing is so charged with primary affects characteristic of the mother-baby relationship …

I would postulate that if a primary characteristic of the Thing is to be unsymbolised and unsymbolisable, then perhaps the Thing is what is lost at the point of birth: the environment in utero, a state in which the baby had no needs, because all its needs were being met by the functioning of the mother. … 138

Although the Thing has something of the effects of the objet petit a arises from the Phallus, and thereby indirectly from the desire of the mother, the Thing arises from the primary affects of a relationship with what is not-yet-represented – the unforgettable-but-already-forgotten other. To return to a total enjoyment of this phantasmatic mother – this mother-as-world – would require a dismantling of the Subject – a kind of regression to a pre-language state that is simply impossible.

Because the Subject is brought into being by signifiers, and the Thing exists outside the Symbolic realm, absolute jouissance in the Thing would require an exit from the realm of signifiers, which is the realm of subjectivity, and the Subject itself would be erased, annihilated. 139

… what is the most intimate thing for a Subject, and yet the most threatening, in terms of its potential to block its access to the Symbolic? The mother is in many ways the gatekeeper of the Symbolic – it is her presence/absence that creates the polarities in which proto-thinking can begin, it is she who embodies the Other, and only she can invoke the Name-of-the-Father.

Therefore, the mother – structurally inaccessible, signified as prohibited, and imagined by the baby Subject as the sovereign good – constitutes, in her absence and in the impossibility of fully accessing her, the Thing. 139-140

The Thing is therefore an object of transgression, which is observable in behaviours that begin as seeking jouissance, and end in self-destruction. The Thing may be thought of as the object of the death drive: those who seek oblivion in heroin or people who strangle themselves in the name of sexual excitement may be acting out their search for the Thing. The search for the Thing exists in tension with the pursuit of the Phallus, and of the objet petit a; this dynamic of tensions set up between the different objects can be seen as the sum of the forces of creativity. 140

phallic identification

Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: One World, 2009.

Phallic Jouissance

Before the infant accesses the paternal metaphor, it supposes that the mother is there entirely for its satisfaction, and it en joys this mother-object, who is the whole and highly satisfactory world to it; at the same time, it has identified the mother as the representative of Other – the Omnipotent and Omniscient – and itself with her. Its identification with her at this stage is so intense that it experiences her as the powerful part of itself. Lacan described the infant’s psychological position at this point as being in ‘la jouissance de l’Autre’ (the enjoyment of the Other, Otherly enjoyment) … the Other referred to is a proto-Symbolic Other, as the child has not clearly situated it outside its dyadic relationship. Furthermore, the child’s enjoyment of this other is based upon its fantasy of omnipotence as conferred by its identification with the mother – an untenable albeit attractive state. 121

L’Autre jouissance is what can be observed in babies and small children; echoes of it remain in all of us. The infant is entirely sensualist and self-centred in its ‘Otherly’ enjoyment, it believes the objective world to be designed for its satisfaction, and that its will reigns supreme. However, at some point, this fantasy will be severely curtailed by the submission to the paternal metaphor and the infant’s entry into the Symbolic realm, in which it learns to take a different form of enjoyment – la jouissance phallique.

When a child begins to function well in the Symbolic realm – the realm of language, laws and all the social constructs that arise from these – it is the access to Phallic enjoyment that allows it to learn to read; to take pleasure in structured games in which there are rules (as opposed to purely physical play); to be able to include more and more elements of the real world in its imaginary games; to appreciate humour in which the joke consists in overturning rules of language or society; and to understand puns and clever rhymes where an appreciation of the underlying rule is necessary for the thing to work. The child as this stage will become interested in learning, and will start to develop its grown-up theories of the universe. All these things are manifestation of its Phallic enjoyment. But what is the impetus for the child to enter into Phallic enjoyment? Why should its symbolic castration make it go down this route? The answers to these questions are at the heart of the building of the Subject and its ego, and in them one may find the status of desire in the formation of the Subject. 122

The absences or ‘disobedience’ to the child of the mother (who is busy pursuing her own desire) are the cause of great anxiety and rage in the child: still relatively helpless, its fantasies of omnipotence (when mother is there and attentive) are damaged by the reality of its impotence (when she is not, or refuses it what it wants). The supposition that the mother is seeking the Phallus in her absence, or obeying its dictates when she goes against the will of the child, makes it the ultimate object of desire for the child, by this sequence of unarticulated thoughts:

– It must be a wonderful thing if she spends so much time on it – it must be desirable in itself; also, it must be a powerful thing if she must obey it, even more powerful than she is – the child’s desire forms around the Phallus

– Maybe if I can get it, then she will want to be with me and I will not have to face her absences and I will get whatever I want – the Phallus as an attainable object and a defence against anxiety.

After it has formulated in the imaginary the hypothesis of the Phallus, the child may, for a period, cling to the hope that it has the Phallus (which is proven by the mother’s presence), but if castration is successful and complete, then it relocates the Phallus in association with (hidden beneath) the Name-of-the-Father, in an act of symbolisation. Then, in accepting its barred (castrated) state ($), the child begins to seek the lost Phallus, which is now attachable to all manner of signifiers, in the exterior world (in its object relations, in the jargon of psychoanalysis). 123

As we have seen, the acceptance of the paternal metaphor is a way out of the impasse of its real impotence in the face of Mother’s absence or disobedience, and for two additional reasons: because the Phallus is relocated ‘elsewhere’ as a lost object, it or something of it is retrievable again; and because one may aspire, in identifying with the Name-of-the-Father, to gaining it. Because the Name-of-the-Father is a signifier, it is infinitely replaceable with others; the Phallus is an idea of the ultimate object of desire, attached to a representation that is in the unconscious but is also replaceable.

What the child supposes the Phallus to be for its mother will depend upon her real desires: a mother who is highly sociable and constantly in company may have a child who thinks that the object of her desire is contained in the concept of ‘sociability’ or ‘popularity’; a mother who is a piano teacher and whose object of desire seems to be enshrined in the ability to play the piano may have a child who, in his quest for the Phallus, becomes a concert pianist.

The desire to possess the Phallus is the motor behind much of human activity, which keeps at bay the anxiety that arises out of the acceptance of one’s lack of it. 124

Castration brings with it a new psychological need – that of possessing the Phallus, the metaphorical object of desire which will ensure the Subject’s own desirability; the Phallus now serves as the new object of the libidinal drive, whose organs of expression are not only the genitalia but also the intellect. There is just as much, if not greater jouissance in the functioning of the mind than in the functioning of any other bodily part. The ability to cross the bar of metaphor, to operate in the symbolic realm – to conceptualise, to analyse, and to rationalise – are all libidinal functions, which entail enjoyment of the mere functioning of the intellect. 124 … Phallic enjoyment is every bit as powerful component of desire as that related to a bodily function; as Lacan rather pithily said: “I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well! I can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were fucking. That’s all it means.”

The mother is not the only embodiment of the Other for the child (indeed, if she remains this way, the result is psychosis, as we have already seen).

The Other – the symbolised mental universe – is different for everyone: every small other has an Other. The child soon comes into contact with other Others – that of its father and a little later, those of its peers. With each new Other that is encountered, the desire of this Other is transmitted in language; thus, as she/he grows up, the individual’s desire becomes moulded by the desire of the many Others the Subject has identified with.

Lacan suggests that in these secondary identification, the ‘influence’ exerted by the others upon the Subject is that of a structuring (or restructuring) of desire, which passes through the medium of signifiers: ‘It does not involve the assumption by the subject of the other’s insignia, but rather the condition that the subject find the constitutive structure of his desire in the same gap opened up by the effect of signifiers in those who come to represent the Other for him, insofar as his demand is subjected to them.’ The individual Subject is thus formed by the complex interplay of many different identifications, as well as other environmental factors; so too is its desire. 127

Impossibility and impotence

Nobus, Dany. Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2005. p 137.

The four discourses usher in darkness and cast a shadow over knowledge. The four discourses thus direct us to an increasingly tight spiral, linking clarity and brevity of articulation to that which is ‘absolutely irreducible, completely obscure’.

The lesson for anyone interested in extraclinical applications of the four discourses is that they have an operative function, not an interpretative one. They reveal an unconscious that is present and at work, but they are not a means to describe and analyse the unconscious workings of discourse.

Nor are they an ideal device, as Bracher would have it, for analysing the discursive structure of a speech act and its socio-political impact on a receiving subject. This distinction between what we have called an ‘operative’ and an ‘interpretative’ approach to the four discourses corresponds to the division between the traumatic loss of knowledge and the ‘epistemological drive’ to know more.

The introduction of Lacanian discourse theory ought to have a limiting or circumscribing effect on knowledge itself. It should produce a better account of the irreducibly obscure and not be used as a means for producing a kind of hyper-academic knowledge out of a ‘real world’ situation. None of the authors we have mentioned go as far in the straightforward application of the four discourses as Diane Rubenstein … 138.

If we turn our attention away from an idealist standpoint on the four discourses and proceed to examine, as did Lacan, the world in which psychoanalysts have come to exist, a radically different picture presents itself. Rather than being discernible simply as controlling elements of speech within a subject, an institution or a social bond, the four discourses can be seen to exist in a hegemonic or hierarchical relationship. This relationship is determined by the division between truth as cause of speech, and truth as an effect of meaning. This division creates an invisible wall that runs across each of the four discourses in turn. One reason that we have laid such stress on the relationship of the master and the analyst is that it requires an effort to disentangle the relationship of these two discourses from the manner in which the master’s discourse is secreted within, and occluded by, the discourse of the university.

Impossibility and Impotence

One answer to this discursive hegemony and aggregation of forces is to highlight the structural importance of the functions of impossibility (impossibilité) and impotence (impuissance) in the four discourses. This emphasis takes us back to the model of a ‘traumatic epistemology’ with which we opened this chapter, insofar as it reveals the joints and seams within discourse, and the manner in which the discourses of the master, the university and the hysteric cement a relationship between connaissance and savoir by avoiding the implications of ‘knowledge as a means of jouissance’. Two of the four discourses, those of the master and the university, stave off or prevent a moment of traumatic collapse. Another of the discourses, that of the hysteric, speaks from the place of confusion and disorder, yet reconstructs the master as an idol who is asked to provide an answer to the perennial question ‘who am I?’

Only the remaining discourse, that of the analyst, is satisfied with the condition of traumatic disorder, seeing it as a place to begin, rather than as a terminal point.

The analyst’s speech, precisely because it does not aim at truth, allows truth to assume a causal or initiating role for the analysand. The first step towards understanding the role of impossibility and impotence in the four discourses is to grasp the paradox that the truth both is and is not spoken. The truth speaks, it drives and structures speech, but for that very reason the truth cannot take the form of a metalinguistic statement of ‘the truth about the truth’.

The function of truth here is causal. It sets discourse in motion through the action of the signifier on the body and the division of the field of thought. The unconscious truth that drives discourse and the conscious truth that is striven for initiate the shifting movements from one discourse to another.

Conscious thought escapes from its causal determinations by altering its course from a discourse of mastery to one of rationalization, or from rationalization to hysterical dissidence. The four discourses thus represent four possible positions regarding the relationship between truth as an unconscious cause and truth as a consciously achieved effect. The manner in which the truth as cause sets discourse in motion is in the four relationships of truth, agency, Other and product within each discourse, which are always positioned in the same way:

The relationship agency–>Other represents the ideal of conscious speech, in which a speaker communicates with a receiver and produces a result. The wild card in this arrangement is the presence of truth as discursive cause at the bottom left-hand side of the diagram. The fact that truth as cause is inassimilable into the relationship agency–>Other–>product leads Lacan to posit two levels of communicative disjunction within his theory of discourse

The upper disjunction, that of impossibility, concerns the failure of a metalanguage, the failure to ‘tell the truth about truth’.

The lower disjunction, that of impotence (sometimes called ‘inability’) takes us still further from the ‘truth about truth’, since it is evident that the product of the agent’s speech, as delivered by the Other, is double-barred from access to the truth as cause of the agent’s speech.

Discourse is thus a one-way street, leading from the action of the signifier to the endless circuits of desire-in-language that it generates. The upper and lower levels of the diagram therefore posit an interpretation shadowed by its negation or, to put this another way, the relationship between connaisance and savoir is fundamentally attended by the demon of jouissance. Even before the staging points of the master, the university, the analyst and the hysteric have been introduced, we already have the two basic elements of Lacanian epistemology here, namely a desire to know (the epistemological drive) and a certain failure of knowledge, both conjoined in the speaking body as initiated by the signifier.

What is the foundation, then, of the epistemological drive, and the establishment of the modern, technocratic master? Correspondingly, what is the place of the unconscious in a technocracy? To address these questions, it is worth comparing the place of S2 (unconscious knowledge, savoir), within the discourse of the master and that of the university in order to see how it maintains the primary alienation of truth as cause, from truth as a discursive product.

In the two diagrams, we have highlighted the position of knowledge, S2 , within these two formulas. The master signifier, S1 , occupies the position of agency in the master’s discourse, but in the university discourse it takes the role of the hidden truth. Knowledge, S2 , is situated in the ‘passive’ place of the Other in the master’s discourse, but assumes the site of agency in the university discourse.

In the latter discourse, these machinations have the effect of expelling the (absent) subject of the unconscious, $, from the scene, and of constructing a hygienic barrier between $ and S1 , which limits the threat posed by $ in the place of truth in the master’s discourse. The threat posed by the subject of the unconscious to the master concerns the revelation of the master’s fundamental impotence, his self-undermining dependence on the Other to establish a sense of meaning. The discourse of the university is therefore a safeguard, a ‘castling’ manoeuvre; the master signifier is stowed away in the knapsack of the soldier/bureaucrat who rationalizes the exercise of power.

Yet, most importantly, in the transition from the master discourse to that of the university, something also happens to knowledge, inasmuch as it has been abstracted from the other and delivered back to the agency:

[I]n the initial status of the discourse of the master, knowledge is on the side of the slave…. [W]hat happens between the discourse of the classical master and that of the modern master, which is called capitalist, is a modification in the place of knowledge…. The fact that the all-knowledge [tout-savoir] has moved into the place of the master is something that, far from throwing light on it, obscures a bit more what is in question, namely, truth. Where does it come from, the fact that there is a master’s signifier in this place? For that is well and truly the S 2 of the master, revealing the bare bones of how things are in the new tyranny of knowledge. (Lacan 1991 [1969– 70]: 34– 35)

In the structure of the master’s discourse, the Other (or the slave, according to Lacan’s Hegelian formulation) is dispossessed of knowledge, just as the worker in a capitalist economy is dispossessed of his labour. 143

In the university discourse, ‘the new tyranny of knowledge’ into which mastery regresses and dissimulates itself, rationalizes these same products in an attempt to establish control over human resources, pleasures and desires. The slave is thus exploited twice, once as a member of the underclass and again as a ‘student’, an underclass subject to the tyranny of rationalization. Nowadays, a student is as likely to be someone attending benefit agencies, receiving computer training, and adopting the psycho-bureaucratic discourse of the television soap opera—‘Let’s talk it out!’—as someone paying for a higher degree of ‘finish’ at a university.

One can sum this up by saying that the discourse of the university aims to make products (outputs, students) that also ‘speak product’ and thus intellectualize their alienation. As we suggested earlier, this phenomenon is by no means confined to actual universities— modern technocratic governments make students of all their citizens, without exception.

This is another reason why the four discourses must be seen as a means of shutting down and foreclosing the possibilities of further knowledge, rather than opening them up for extra-psychological and supra-sociological adventurism.

The fatal flaw of the discourse of the university is that its product, $, the (absent) subject of the unconscious, merely reveals the vanity of the attempt to rationalize and streamline the production of human resources. As Verhaeghe puts it: ‘[T]he product of this discourse is an ever-increased division of the subject; the more knowledge one uses to reach for the object [object a] the more one becomes divided between signifiers, and the further one gets away from home, that is from the true cause of desire’ (Verhaeghe 1995: 95).

The failure of the university discourse and its inevitable return to desire also indicate the trauma and the ultimate ‘fall’ of philosophy. In Seminar XVII, Lacan first of all traces the complicity of philosophy with mastery through a reading of Aristotle’s Politics, in which, he argues, the slave’s ‘know-how’ (his support of everyday life) is colonized by philosophy in the service of the master: ‘The function of the episteme in so far as it is specified as transmissible knowledge . . . is, entirely, still borrowed from the techniques of the craftsman, that is to say of serfs. It is a matter of extracting its essence so that this knowledge becomes the master’s knowledge…. Philosophy in its historical function is this extraction, this betrayal I would almost say, of the slave’s knowledge, so as to obtain its transmutation as master’s knowledge’ (Lacan 1991 [1969– 70]: 21– 22).

The advancement of the philosopher through the dispossession of the slave meets a barrier with the emergence of the ‘subject of science’. The division between the action of the signifier and the effort of signification/communication, which, according to Lacan, was first introduced by Descartes, makes philosophy and nonsense interchangeable, because the signifying chain can generate multiple discourses, from the erudite to the foolish, quite independently of the body it colonizes. The psychoanalyst, who invites the analysand to say anything she wishes, accepts the reality of this division. The philosopher, who is locked into the drive for abstract knowledge, cannot. Lacan uses the example of Wittgenstein’s discourse, a man possessed by a férocité psychotique (Lacan 1991 [1969– 70]: 69) to illustrate the trauma of the philosopher whose work comes to grief on the distinction between the signifier and signification. … What Wittgenstein cannot admit, however, is … any further atomization of knowledge that would create a division between an autonomous chain of signifiers and the world to which they refer. Wittgenstein, like all philosophers, ‘wants to save the truth’ (ibid.: 71) and, whilst admitting the notion of a world constructed by language, draws back from the radically disarticulated scene offered by Lacanian lalangue (‘llanguage’).

By contrast, the ‘fall of knowledge’ that the Lacanian epistemology aims at changes the historical trajectory that runs from the slave to the philosopher, by using ‘know-how’ as a means to disarticulate and dispossess abstract knowledge.

It does so in the name of the possibilities introduced by the subject of science, as they are formalized in the structure of the four discourses. In this chapter we have argued that the four discourses must be seen as part of an operation conducted on knowledge which divides the signifier from signification. Furthermore, ‘the signifier is stupid’, and not only does the analyst encounter ‘a stupid of signifiers’ in the speech of the analysand but this same stupidity of the signifier is the very basis of his own discourse. This is the source of the ‘horror’ Lacan refers to in ‘Science and Truth’, namely, that the unconscious speech of ‘I, the truth, am speaking’ is as reckless, obdurate and inchoate as our own words are reasonable, rational and articulate. This point returns in Seminar XVII:

‘Knowledge— I think I have insisted upon it sufficiently to get it into your head— knowledge is a thing that says itself, that is said. Well then, the knowledge that speaks on its own— that’s the unconscious’ (ibid.: 80).

The only epistemology adequate to this knowledge is an epistemology that encounters the horror of this ‘speaking truth’ head on, as well as the traumas of the disarticulation of knowledge and the loss of meaning that it introduces. A besetting problem of commentary on Lacan is that the danger of dismemberment and loss is never worked through within the structure of the commentary, so that the four discourses are treated as interpretative options, rather than as four contingent solutions to the intrinsic collapse of the communicative act into stupidity, non-knowledge and the circuits of desire. 145

lacanian epistemology

Nobus, Dany. Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2005. p 132.

Doing justice to the radical difference of the model of knowledge that Lacan constructs in Seminar XVII thus also requires attention to the manner in which its positioning of the discourses of the master and that of the analyst corresponds to a distinction between a technocratic social order and the liberating potential of an unconscious.

For Marx, the ‘secret product’ of modernity is surplus value, extracted from the labour of the worker and concealed within class structures and divisions of labour.

To Lacan, following Marx’s terminology, the secret product is surplus jouissance, generated as a by-product of the technocratic orders of knowledge by which the subject is determined, and accessible in the analytic setting through a knowledge whose exercise corresponds to its acquisition. The discourse of the analyst, in which knowledge operates in the place of truth, corresponds neither to culture nor to its products and heralds the possibility of revolution and radical change.

‘Keep going. March. Keep on knowing more’ (Lacan 1991 [1969– 70]: 120). With these words, Lacan relayed the disembodied, motiveless command of the modern master. … In the master’s command, the agency that issues the order to know and the actual agents of knowledge that are set to work by this order … in the headlong pursuit of ‘knowledge for its own sake’.

However, rather than endorsing the psychoanalytic value of this command to know more, Lacan insists on the value of stupidity, ignorance, loose talk and bullshit— the disavowed waste products of the epistemological drive — and the manner in which this ‘waste of knowledge’ indicates the path from conscious knowledge (connaissance) to unconscious reason (savoir) and thence to jouissance.

Lacan’s introduction of the discourses of the master, the university, the analyst and the hysteric is subsumed within a deeper logic, which juxtaposes the position of the analyst with the changing face, or increasing facelessness, of the master within modern forms of social life. The role of the ‘master’s discourse’ is to mark the beginning of a dynamic of concealment and subterfuge, which the analyst’s discourse exposes to scrutiny. Yet this same process of concealment, alienation and dissimulation has created the analytic function itself. In the formulae of the four discourses, the discourse of the master and that of the analyst are two aspects of the state of knowledge within modernity. 132

Mastery survived, developed and dissimulated itself through the progressive and violent transformation of tacit and embodied knowledge into abstract social agency.

In turn, analytic work occupies the sites of this process in the damaged bodies and psyches of modernity’s subjects, identifying mastery’s loci of control, its causes and its divisive effects.

As such, embodied knowledge or ‘know-how’ is co-opted to mastery, which then resides as the hidden kernel of a self-perfecting technological consciousness. This technological consciousness ultimately conceals the weakness and infirmity of the classical master within a ‘master function’ that efficiently disposes of social products, bodies and of knowledge. 133

Psychoanalysis addresses the ‘master function’ by setting up camp in the very sites of epistemological division and the traces they leave in the organization of the self.

The logic of misunderstanding that exists between academics and analysts is laid out in the dynamic relationship established by the four discourses. ‘The university discourse’ is another term for an apparatus of dissimulation and concealment in which the impotence of the master is disguised by the puissance [strength power] and agency of knowledge itself, alienated into a social product that exists ‘for its own sake’ and for the sake of the master simultaneously.

Quackelbeen thus completely ignores, or fails to understand, Lacan’s injunction that the four discourses are not abstractions to be applied to real situations, but are ‘already inscribed in what functions as this reality’ (Lacan 1991 [1969– 70]: 13). The discourses are not to be used as keys to the meaning of speech, but as means of separating speech from meaning, thus isolating the reality of the unconscious from the real world as it is generally understood. 137

capital as real

Boyle, Kirk. “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.” International Journal of Žižek Studies Vol 2.1 (2008) 1-21.

Capital as Real: The Marxian Parallax

The more fundamental and systemic mode of the capitalist drive no longer operates in the symbolic order where individuals are interpellated as subjects of desire.

To be clear about where the mode of drive operates in capitalism, another term needs to be introduced: the Lacanian Real. In Lacanian psychoanalysis the Real is a purely formal concept; it is nothing more or less than the inherent limit of a symbolic order, that which must be repressed so this order can function. Because the Real is “simultaneously the thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle which prevents this direct access,” it can only be experienced in itssymptomatic effects (Žižek 2007: 243).

Žižek identifies two homologous forms of the Real , which are “detectable within the Symbolic only under the guise of its disturbances”: the traumatic core of sexual antagonism and the social antagonism of “class struggle” (Žižek 1994: 30). Both of these conceptions of the Real may be said to comprise the “minimalist” or “negative” anthropology of Lacanian Marxism. It is the Real of sexual antagonism, for instance, which prevents “it” from being “It”: objet a will always thwart the coincidence of the object of desire with the object-cause of desire. Likewise, the Real of social antagonism will always prevent the formation of a fully (self-)transparent utopian society. Reminiscent of Althusser’s claim that ideology is eternal, psychoanalysis holds that a minimal degree of misrecognition, reification, and fetishistic disavowal—“I know very well what I am doing, but I am doing it anyway”—is endemic to all symbolic orders. Although antagonism is eternal, Žižek adamantly disclaims that the sociotranscendental status of the Real denies the existence of History [i.e., Butler’s criticism of Lacan]. The Real does not replace temporality with synchronicity or cyclicality. Rather, historical change derives from the emergence of new symbolic formations to deal with the traumatic core of sexual and social antagonism.

Because we still live within a world-economy structured by the “class struggle” inherent within capitalism, Žižek calls it the Real of our epoch. He writes:

The universality of capitalism resides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a civilization, for a specific cultural-symbolic world, but the name for a truly neutral economico-symbolic machine which operates with Asian values as well as with others… The problem with capitalism is not its secret Eurocentric bias, but the fact that it really is universal, a neutral matrix of social relations—a real in Lacanian terms. (Žižek 2005a: 241) … As Žižek states, “the structure of the universe of commodities and capital in Marx’s Capital is not just of a limited empirical sphere, but a kind of sociotranscendental a priori, the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations” (Žižek 2006b: 56).

Thus, Žižek transcodes the Marxist concepts of “commodity fetishism” and “class struggle” into the Lacanian notion of the Real. Where the older Marxist terms have long since been confused with empirical entities like the “working class” and actual commercial goods, the Lacanian Real has the benefit of emphasizing the purely formal, and therefore universal, status of capitalism and its overdetermination of the totality of social relations.

If we no longer accept a linear model of economic determinism where the economy directly causes sociopolitical events, how are we to understand the ways in which capitalism as Real overdetermines the totality of social relations?

Žižek adopts Althusser’s causal model of overdetermination: if “‘the logic of capital’ is a singular matrix which designates [capitalism’s] Real,” then it operates precisely as the absent cause of the totality-effects that occur within the sociopolitical realm (Žižek 2007: 211).

In the Lacanian Marxist base/superstructure model, as in its Althusserian predecessor, economic events of the Real do not cause Symbolic phenomena directly. Contrary to Althusser’s subject-less base/superstructure model, however, Žižek’s model maintains the subjectivity of the social antagonism of “class struggle” at the heart of the economy by introducing the concept of “parallax.”

The “Marxian parallax” refers to the irreducible gap between Real absent cause and Symbolic totality-effect.

He writes: …the ultimate parallax of the political economy [is] the gap between the reality of everyday material social life (people interacting among themselves and with nature, suffering, consuming, and so on) and the Real of the speculative dance of Capital, its self-propelling movement which seems to be disconnected from ordinary reality….Marx’s point here is not primarily to reduce the second dimension to the first (to demonstrate how the supernatural mad dance of commodities arises out of the antagonisms of “real life”); his point is, rather that we cannot properly grasp the first (the social reality of material production and social interaction) without the second: it is the self-propelling metaphysical dance of Capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life development and catastrophes. (Žižek 2006b: 383)
16

Žižek also describes the Marxian parallax of the political economy as follows:

If, for Lacan, there is no sexual relationship, then, for Marxism proper, there is no relationship between economy and politics, no “meta-language” enabling us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint, although—or, rather, because—these two levels are inextricably intertwined.

The “political” class struggle takes place in the midst of the economy…while, at the same time, the domain of the economy serves as the key that enables us to decode political struggles. No wonder the structure of this impossible relationship is that of the Moebius strip: first, we have to progress form the political spectacle to its economic infrastructure; then in the second step, we have to confront the irreducible dimension of the political struggle at the very heart of the economy. (Žižek 2006b: 320)

hysteric capitalism

Boyle, Kirk. “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.” International Journal of Žižek Studies Vol 2.1 (2008) 1-21.

Any discussion of the homology between surplus-enjoyment and surplus-value must begin with the psychoanalytic understanding of ontological difference. Contrary to popularly held theories that disclaim any notion of human nature, psychoanalysis posits a “minimal difference” that enables us to recognize a specifically-human dimension.

For Žižek, the key to the zero-degree of “humanization” is to be found in the Freudian notion of “death drive.”

Death drive represents:

the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an uncanny excess of life, for an “undead” urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. The ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is never “just life”: humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things. (Žižek 2006b: 62)

The “minimalist anthropology” of death drive—the psychoanalytic conception of ontological difference—allows Žižek to develop the idea of surplus enjoyment, Lacan’s equivalent term for Marx’s concept of surplus-value. There is a certain elegance to this homology: just as surplusvalue sets capitalist production in motion, surplus enjoyment provides the object-cause of human desire, what Lacan designates objet petit a. In Lacan’s hands, surplus-value becomes a subsequent instantiation of surplus enjoyment, with the implication that the latter exists as an eternal condition of human existence. (At one point in Seminar XVII, Lacan jests that Marx would have invented the concept of surplus jouissance if he had not had to “invent” capitalism.)

Objet a introduces an important distinction in the economy of enjoyment. Objet a represents the object-cause of desire, not the object of desire. The object of desire is simply the material object, the body of another, etc. The object-cause of desire, on the other hand, is the je ne sais quoi of this object, what is in a product more than the product itself. In the latter sense, objet a signifies the promise of enjoyment-in-the-Real, of an experience of full jouissance, total fulfillment and satisfaction. The impersonal pronoun starring in the eBay ads works because it represents this object-cause of desire as opposed to the objects of desire available at the click of a mouse button. The “it,” the commodity form, is empty precisely because it can never deliver on its promise of jouissance; the objet a can never coincide with the object of desire.

If eBay promises to make “it” accessible, this promise entails the collapse of an irreducible split between what is obtained from what was expected, what was requested from what proves to be ultimately unsatisfactory. In Lacanian terms, the commodity form obfuscates the difference between desire and demand by asserting the possibility of their equivalence. Against this marketing deception, we should assert that the demand for “it” is always an obfuscated desire for objet a. Moreover, when eBay delivers on our demand—when we obtain that obscure something that we have wanted since a time before we can remember—we can rest assured that our desire will remain as restless as it was before the purchase. Objet a is the name for why we respond to “it” with “that’s not it!”

What happens when enjoyment becomes the mandate of an entire symbolic order? One result of the shift from a superego that fosters guilt to one that demands enjoyment is the emergence of new forms of subjectivity. As Jameson and other theorists of postmodernity have argued, the symptomatic subject of late capitalism is schizophrenic. Yet, prior to schizoid normativity, it was Lacan who postulated that the appearance of hysteria was concomitant with the burgeoning of consumer society. Hysteria emerges at a specific time in history when the symbolic order could no longer guarantee an answer to the subjective question, “What does the Other [the symbolic order] want from me?” The radical cutting of traditional social bonds that occurs with the rise of capitalism universalizes this adolescent question and renders it permanent. The hysteric is no longer able to rely on the symbolic order to structure his or her desire, but suffers from a so-called “identity crisis.” Capitalism exploits the hysterical response to the waning of the symbolic order’s efficiency to create meaningful identifications for the subject. Žižek writes, “The excess of doubt, of permanent questioning, can be directly integrated into social reproduction” (Žižek 2005a: 228). We can refer to the excess of doubt and permanent questioning that capitalism exploits as the “infinite metonymy of desire.”

Capitalism feeds off the historical opening up of this infinite metonymy of desire. “Lacan designated capitalism as the reign of the discourse of the hysteric,” writes Žižek. “The vicious circle of a desire whose apparent satisfaction only widens the gap of its dissatisfaction…is what defines hysteria” (Žižek 1993: 209). We can now see how the surplus-enjoyment of objet a connects with the basic functioning of capitalism.

The hysteric-consumer, in his or her permanent quest to fill the lack (a lack shared by hysteric and symbolic order alike), searches for the object cause of desire in the endless aisles of mega-marts, department stores, antique shops, thrift stores, etc. Through purchases the hysteric begins to construct an identity, but this identity is provisional and always open to alterations.

The seemingly infinite malleability for the hysterical subject to make and remake him- or herself through consumerism (the infamous lifestyle branding heralding a new step in this logic), mirrors capitalism’s constant revolutionizing of its own conditions. “The explosion of the hysterical capitalist subjectivity,” writes Žižek, “reproduces itself through permanent self-revolutionizing, through the integration of the excess into the ‘normal’ functioning of the social link (the true ‘permanent revolution’ is already capitalism itself)” (Žižek 2005a: 228). The normalization of this excess signals a primary (if not the primary) contradiction of capitalism.

What does it mean to cement the social link in surplus-enjoyment? Žižek acutely describes the unparalleled moment we currently live in, and I quote at length:

Capitalism is not just a historical epoch among others…a certain excess which was, as it were, kept under check in previous history, perceived as a local perversion, a limited deviation, is in capitalism elevated into the very principle of social life, in the speculative movement of money begetting more money, of a system which can survive only by constantly revolutionizing its own conditions—that is to say, in which the thing can survive only as its own excess, constantly exceeding its own “normal” constraints (Žižek 2006b: 297).

Žižek’s wager is that the “micro” libidinal economy of the hysteric parallels the “macro” political economy of capitalism. Both are characterized by a permanent process of self-revolutionizing through the integration of an excess,surplus enjoyment for the hysteric and surplus-value for capitalism, and both can survive only by exceeding their own normal constraints. The hysteric paradoxically maintains his or her desire by rummaging through a constant parade of object products in desperate search of “it,” the object-cause of desire. By comparison, the capitalist contradiction centers on objet a: “this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the ‘condition of impossibility’ of the full deployment of the productive forces [that] is simultaneously its ‘condition of possibility’” (Žižek 2005b: unpaginated).

Acknowledging that these surpluses are homologous presents a great challenge for the desire called utopia. Žižek writes:

If we subtract the surplus we lose enjoyment itself, just as capitalism, which can survive only by incessantly revolutionizing its own material conditions, ceases to exist it if “stays the same,” if it achieves an internal balance. This, then, is the homology between surplus-value—the “cause” which sets in motion the capitalist process of production — and surplus-enjoyment, the object-cause of desire. (Žižek 1989: 52)

To repeat Marx but not to fall into the evolutionist trap of believing that communism will spontaneously arise out of capitalism, we must envision a symbolic order that somehow eliminates surplus-value while preserving a certain degree of surplus enjoyment. Such is one task of utopian thought.

commodity fetishism

Boyle, Kirk. “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.” International Journal of Žižek Studies Vol 2.1 (2008) 1-21.

To this example, Žižek adds the emergence of labor as a commodity which represents “the internal negation of the universal principle of equivalent exchange of commodities,” and, in
his most extended illustration of the social symptom, Žižek follows Lacan’s claim that Marx discovered the symptom when he conceived of the structural shift in fetishism that occurred in
“the passage from feudalism to capitalism” (Žižek 1989: 23, 26).

Whereas in feudalism fetishism takes place in a “relation between men,” in capitalism it occurs in a “relation between things.” In a feudal society, “relations of domination and servitude” are immediately transparent (the king rules over his subjects because they recognize him as king, and vice versa), while in a capitalist society these power relations are repressed by the institution of commodity fetishism (the capitalist, despite his conspicuous consumption, is hidden by the fact that he or she enjoys the same formal rights as the rest of us). Although these fetishistic structures are mutually exclusive, they follow the same logic.

Fetishism: consists of a certain misrecognition which concerns the relation between a structured network and one of its elements: what is really a structural effect, an effect of the network of relations between elements, appears as an immediate property of one of the elements, as if this property also belongs to it outside its relation with other elements. (Žižek 1989: 24)

Rephrased in Hegelian terms, this misrecognition concerns the relation between the Universal and the Particular. The Universal is really a structural effect, an effect of the network of relations between particularities, but in fetishism the Universal appears as an immediate property of a particularity, as if this property also belongs to it outside its relation with other particularities. For example, the abstract, universal exchange-value appears as the immediate property of, say, a $50,000 luxury sedan or a $1 loaf of bread.

the social symptom, “the point of emergence of the truth about social relations,” shifts from being a case of ideological misrecognition or “false consciousness” that we can dissolve through the traditional form of Marxist ideology criticism, to become embodied in the reified (the “objectively subjective”) social reality of the world of commodities (Žižek 1989: 26). “It is this world,” Žižek writes, “which behaves ‘idealistically’” (Žižek 1989: 32).

We no longer have to believe in the magical aura emanating from luxury sedans, the cars themselves believe in their thaumaturgy [a miricle, magic] for us.

The ontological status of the social symptom entails that, as Jameson writes apropos of Althusser, “ideology is institutional first and foremost and only later on to be considered a matter of consciousness” (Jameson 2001: xii). Such an admission does not amount to an irreconcilable divorce of … theory from practice. It simply means that when it comes to ideology, doing “speaks louder” than knowing.

Lacan coined the term sinthome to conceptually account for patients whose symptom persisted beyond interpretation. The sinthome is “literally our only substance, the only positive support of our being, the only point that gives consistency to the subject” (Žižek 1989: 75). What would it mean to identify with a social kernel of enjoyment that absolutely resists interpretation?

Žižek has used the example of single black mothers to represent the social mean to identify with a social kernel of enjoyment that absolutely resists interpretation? Žižek has used the example of single black mothers to represent the social sinthome, “a knot, a point at which all the lines of the predominant ideological argumentation (the return to family values, the rejection of the welfare state and its ‘uncontrolled’ spending, etc.) meet” (Žižek 2000: 176).

This example strikes me as perspicacious if we consider the jouissance structuring the predominant ideology, but it seems to remain at the level of a social symptom from a progressive perspective. In other words, the example of the single black mother is still interpretable, we can identify with how she interrupts the “service of goods.”

What about a social sinthome that provides the substance that gives consistency to our “collective” subjectivity?

What about commodity fetishism as the definitive social sinthome of capitalist society? As Žižek reminds us, for Marx:

“there is one exceptional “pathological,” innerworldly particular content in which the very universal form of reflexivity is grounded, to which it is attached by a kind of umbilical cord, by which the frame of this form itself is enframed; for Marx, of course, the particular content is the social universe of commodity exchange” (Žižek 2000: 278).

The enjoyment derived from commodity fetishism persists beyond interpretation. Unlike the symptom which loses its enjoyment factor when we gain knowledge of it, the sinthome, as the fully acknowledged “frame” of our existence, maintains its libidinal position.

The particular knot of the “social relations between things” confronts us with the impotence of our critico-political activity. We identify with the pathological point of the social universe of commodity exchange simply by selling our labor power, not to mention the innumerable ways we enjoy this social sinthome . In a topsy-turvy world where not just wooden tables but direct experiences stand on their head, are not the commodities themselves—like Žižek’s celebrated example of canned laughter in television shows—enjoying for us? Do they not function as the “quanta of enjoyment” in late capitalist society, to paraphrase Žižek’s recent analogy that sinthomes are the “Freudian equivalent of superstrings” (Žižek 2006a: 78)?

How do we cut the umbilical cord that attaches us to the social universe of commodity exchange despite our conscious resistance?

Žižek’s recent work displays an acute awareness of this predicament. He frames the problem by drawing an analogy to the psychoanalytic process. He writes, “Just as the unconscious and not the patient must be brought to the truth, the real task is to convince not the subject, but the [commodities]: not to change the way we talk about commodities, but to change the way commodities talk among themselves” (Žižek 2006b:352).

As in the example of the chicken and the man who believes himself to be a grain of seed, we must convince not ourselves but the chicken-commodities that we are not grains of seed in order to defetishize the social universe of commodity exchange.

Ž four discourses four subjects

Žižek, Slavoj. “Four Discourses, Four Subjects” in Cogito and the Unconscious. ed. Slavoj Žižek, Duke UP, 1998. 75-113.

The illusion of the gesture of the Master is the complete coincidence between the level of enunciation (the subjective position from which I am speaking) and the level of the enunciated content, that is, what characterizes the Master is a speech-act that wholly absorbs me, in which “I am what I say,” in short, a fully realized, self-contained performative.

Such an ideal coincidence, of course, precludes the dimension of fantasy, since fantasy emerges precisely in order to fill in the gap between the enunciated content and its underlying position of enunciation.

Fantasy is an answer to the question, “You are telling me this, but why? What do you really want by telling me this?”

The fact that the dimension of fantasy nonetheless persists thus simply signals the ultimate unavoidable failure of the Master’s discourse.

There is thus no reason to be dismissive of the discourse of the Master, to identify it too hastily with “authoritarian repression”: the Master’s gesture is the founding gesture of every social link. Let us imagine a confused situation of social disintegration, in which the cohesive power of ideology loses its efficiency: in such a situation, the Master is the one who invents a new signifier, the famous “quilting point,” which again stabilizes the situation and makes it readable; the university discourse that then elaborates the network of Knowledge that sustains this readability by definition presupposes and relies on the initial gesture of the Master. The Master adds no new positive content — he merely adds a signifier, which all of a sudden turns disorder into order, into “new harmony,” … Therein resides the magic of a Master: although there is nothing new at the level of positive content, “nothing is quite the same” after he pronounces his Word. …

The University discourse is enunciated from the position of “neutral” Knowledge; it addresses the remainder of the real (say, in the case of pedagogical knowledge, the “raw, uncultivated child”), turning it into the subject . . The “truth” of the university discourse, hidden beneath the bar, of course, is power (i.e., the Master-Signifier):

the constitutive lie of the university discourse is that it disavows its performative dimension, presenting what effectively amounts to a political decision based on power as a simple insight into the factual state of things.

What one should avoid here is the Foucaultian misreading: the produced subject is not simply the subjectivity that arises as the result of the disciplinary application of knowledge-power, but its remainder, that which eludes the grasp of knowledge-power. “Production” (the fourth term in the matrix of discourses) does not stand simply for the result of the discursive operation, but rather for its “indivisible remainder,” for the excess that resists being included in the discursive network (i.e., for what the discourses itself produces as the foreign body in its very heart). 78

Suffice it to recall the market expert who advocates strong budgetary measures (cutting welfare expenses, etc.) as a necessity imposed by his neutral expertise devoid of any ideological biases: what he conceals is the series of power-relations (from the active role of state apparatuses to ideological beliefs) that sustain the “neutral” functioning of the market mechanism. 79

In the hysterical link, the . . over a stands for the subject who is divided, traumatized, by what an object she is for the Other, what role she plays in Other’s desire: “Why am I what you’re saying that I am?” … What she expects from the Other-Master is knowledge about what she is as object (the lower level of the formula).

In contrast to hysteria, the pervert knows perfectly what he is for the Other: a knowledge supports his position as the object of Other’s (divided subject’s) jouissance. For that reason, the matheme of the discourse of perversion is the same as that of the analyst’s discourse.

Lacan defines perversion as the inverted fantasy (i.e., his matheme of perversion is a-$), which is precisely the upper level of the analyst’s discourse. The difference between the social link of perversion and that of analysis is grounded in the radical ambiguity of objet petit a in Lacan, which stands simultaneously for the imaginary fantasmatic lure/screen AND for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure.

*So when we pass from perversion to the analytic social link, the agent (analyst) reduces himself to the void, which provokes the subject into confronting the truth of his desire. Knowledge in the position of “truth” below the bar under the “agent,” of course, refers to the supposed knowledge of the analyst, and, simultaneously, signals that the knowledge gained here will not be the neutral objective knowledge of scientific adequacy, but the knowledge that concerns the subject (analysand) in the truth of his subjective position.

In this precise sense, the analyst’s discourse produces the master signifier, the swerve of the patient’s knowledge, the surplus element that situates the patient’s knowledge at the level of truth: after the master signifier is produced, even if nothing changes at the level of knowledge, the same knowledge as before starts to function in a different mode. The master signifier is the unconscious sinthome, the cipher of enjoyment, to which the subject was unknowingly subjected.

*Text here is modified according to https://www.terada.ca/discourse/?p=7106

So, if a political Leader says “I am your Master, let my will be done!” this direct assertion of authority is hystericized when the subject starts to doubt his qualification to act as a Leader (“Am I really their Master?” What is in me that legitimizes me to act like that?”); it can be masked in the guise of the university discourse (“In asking you to do this, I merely follow the insight into objective historical necessity, so I am not your Leader, but merely your servant who enables you to act for your own good. …”); or, the subject can act as a blank, suspending his symbolic efficiency and thus compelling his Other to become aware of how he was experiencing another subject as a Leader only because he was treating him as one.

It should be clear, from this brief description, how the position of the “agent” in each of the four discourses involves a specific mode of subjectivity:

– the Master is the subject who is fuly engaged in his (speech) act, who, in a way, “is his word,” whose word displays an immediate performative efficiency;

– the agent of the university discourse is, on the contrary, fundamentally disengaged: he posits himself as the self-erasing observer (and executor) of “objective laws” accessible to neutral knowledge (in clinical terms, his position is closest to that of the pervert).

– the hysterical subject is the subject whose very existence involves radical doubt and questioning, his entire being is sustained by the uncertainty as to what he is for the Other; insofar as the subject exists only as an answer to the enigma of the Other’s desire, the hysterical subject is the subject par excellence.

Again, in clear contrast to it, the analyst stands for the paradox of the desubjectivized subject, of the subject who fully assumed what Lacan calls “subjective destitution” that is, who breaks out of the vicious cycle of intersubjective dialectics of desire and turns into an acephalous being of pure drive.

objet a and the drive id-evil

Žižek, Slavoj. Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses also in an article in Russell Grigg and Justin Clemens Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis. 2006

Portions of this stuff are reprinted in The Parallax View starting on page 303.

Can the upper level of Lacan’s formula of the university discourse — S2 directed toward a — not also be read as standing for the university knowledge endeavoring to integrate, domesticate, and appropriate the excess that resists and rejects it?

One of the telltale signs of university discourse is that the opponent is accused of being “dogmatic” and “sectarian.” University discourse cannot tolerate an engaged subjective stance. Should not our first gesture be, as Lacanians, to heroically assume this designation of being “sectarian” and engage in a “sectarian” polemic?

University discourse as the hegemonic discourse of modernity has two forms of existence in which its inner tension (“contradiction”) is externalized: capitalism, its logic of the integrated excess, of the system reproducing itself through constant self-revolutionizing, and the bureaucratic “totalitarianism” conceptualized in different guises as the rule of technology, of instrumental reason, of biopolitics, as the “administered world.”

We should not succumb to the temptation of reducing capitalism to a mere form of appearance of the more fundamental ontological attitude of technological domination; we should rather insist, in the Marxian mode, that the capitalist logic of integrating the surplus into the functioning of the system is the fundamental fact.

Stalinist “totalitarianism” was the capitalist logic of self-propelling productivity liberated from its capitalist form, which is why it failed: Stalinism was the symptom of capitalism.

Stalinism involved the matrix of general intellect, of the planned transparency of social life, of total productive mobilization- and its violent purges and paranoia were a kind of a “return of the repressed,” the “irrationality” inherent to the project of a totally organized “administered society.” This means the two levels, precisely insofar as they are two sides of the same coin, are ultimately incompatible: there is no metalanguage enabling us to translate the logic of domination back into the capitalist reproduction-through-excess, or vice versa.

The key question here concerns the relationship between the two excesses:

1) the economic excess/surplus integrated into the capitalist machine as the force that drives it into permanent self-revolutionizing and

2) the political excess of power — exercise inherent to modern power (the constitutive excess of representation over the represented: the legitimate state power responsible to its subjects is supplemented by the obscene message of unconditional exercise of Power —laws do not really bind me, I can do to you whatever I want, I can treat you as guilty if I decide to, I can destroy you if I say so).

The master’s discourse stands not for the premodern master, but for the absolute monarchy, this first figure of modernity that effectively undermined the articulate network of feudal relations and interdependences, transforming fidelity to flattery: it is the “Sun-King” Louis XIV with his L’état, c’est moi who is the master par excellence. Hysterical discourse and university discourse then deploy two outcomes of the vacillation of the direct reign of the master:

the expert-rule of bureaucracy that culminates in the biopolitics of reducing the population to a collection of homo sacer (what Heidegger called “enframing,” Adorno “the administered world,” Foucault the society of “discipline and punish”);

the explosion of the hysterical capitalist subjectivity that reproduces itself through permanent self-revolutionizing, through the integration of the excess into the “normal” functioning of the social link (the true “permanent revolution” is already capitalism itself).

Lacan’s formula of the four discourses thus enables us to deploy the two faces of modernity

1. total administration and
2. capitalist-individualist dynamics

as two ways to undermine the master’s discourse:

doubt about the efficiency of the master-figure (what Eric Santner called the “crisis of investiture”) can be supplemented by the direct rule of the experts legitimized by their knowledge, or

the excess of doubt, of permanent questioning, can be directly integrated into social reproduction.

Finally, the analyst’s discourse stands for the emergence of revolutionary-emancipatory subjectivity that resolves the split of university and hysteria.

In it, the revolutionary agent – a – addresses the subject from the position of knowledge that occupies the place of truth (i.e., which intervenes at the “symptomal torsion” of the subject’s constellation), and the goal is to isolate, get rid of, the master signifier that structured the subject’s (ideologico-political) unconscious.

Or does it? Jacques-Alain Miller has recently proposed that today the master’s discourse is no longer the “obverse” of the analyst’s discourse. Today, on the contrary, our “civilization” itself-its hegemonic symbolic matrix, as it were-fits the formula of the analyst’s discourse. The agent of the social link is today a, surplus enjoyment, the superego injunction to enjoy that permeates our discourse; this injunction addresses $ (the divided subject) who is put to work in order to live up to this injunction. The truth of this social link is S2, scientific-expert knowledge in its different guises, and the goal is to generate S1, the self-mastery of the subject, that is, to enable the subject to cope with the stress of the call to enjoyment (through self-help manuals, etc.). Provocative as this notion is, it raises a series of questions. If it is true, in what, then, resides the difference between the discursive functioning of civilization as such and the psychoanalytic social link? Miller resorts here to a suspicious solution: in our civilization, the four terms are kept apart, isolated; each operates on its own, while only in psychoanalysis are they brought together into a coherent link: “in civilization, each of the four terms remains disjoined… it is only in psychoanalysis, in pure psychoanalysis, that these elements are arranged into a discourse.”

However, is it not that the fundamental operation of the psychoanalytic treatment is not synthesis, bringing elements into a link, but, precisely, analysis, separating what in a social link appears to belong together? This path, opposed to that of Miller, is indicated by Giorgio Agamben,Giorgio Agamben, who, in the last pages of The State of Exception, imagines two Utopian options of how to break out of the vicious cycle of law and violence, of the rule of law sustained by violence.

One is the Benjaminian vision of “pure” revolutionary violence with no relationship to the law.

The other is the relationship to the law without regard to its (violent) enforcement, such as Jewish scholars do in their endless (re)interpretation of the Law.

Agamben starts from the right insight that the task today is not synthesis but separation, distinction: nor bringing law and violence together (so that right will have might and the exercise of might will be fully legitimized), but thoroughly separating them, untying their knot.

Although Agamben confers on this formulation an anti-Hegelian twist, a more proper reading of Hegel makes it clear that such a gesture of separation is what the Hegelian “synthesis” is effectively about. In it, the opposites are not reconciled in a “higher synthesis”; it is rather that their difference is posited “as such.”

However, is this vision not again the case of our late capitalist reality going further than our dreams? Are we not already encountering in our social reality what Agamben envisages as a Utopian vision?

Isn’t the Hegelian lesson of the global reflexivization-mediatization of our lives that it generates its own brutal immediacy?

This has best been captured by Etienne Balibar’s notion of excessive, nonfunctional cruelty as a feature of contemporary life, a cruelty whose figures range from “fundamentalist” racist and/or religious slaughter to the “senseless” outbursts of violence performed by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reasons.

All the talk about foreigners stealing work from us or about the threat they represent to our Western values should not deceive us: under closer examination, it soon becomes clear that this talk provides a rather superficial secondary rationalization. The answer we ultimately obtain from a skinhead is that it makes him feel good to beat foreigners, that their presence disturbs him. What we encounter here is indeed Id-Evil, that is,

the Evil structured and motivated by the most elementary imbalance in the relationship between the ego and jouissance, by the tension between pleasure and the foreign body of jouissance in the very heart of it.

Id-Evil thus stages the most elementary short circuit in the relationship of the subject to the primordially missing object cause of his desire. What bothers us in the other (Jew, Japanese, African, Turk) is that he appears to entertain a privileged relationship to the object — the other either possesses the object treasure, having snatched it away from us (which is why we don’t have it), or he poses a threat to our possession of the object.

What one should propose here is the Hegelian “infinite judgment,” asserting the speculative identity of these “useless” and “excessive” outbursts of violent immediacy, which display nothing but a pure and naked (“non-sublimated”) hatred of the Otherness, with the global reflexivization of society. […] the response of the neo-Nazi skinhead who, when really pressed for the reasons for his violence, suddenly starts to talk like social workers, sociologists, and social psychologists, quoting diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood-the unity of practice and its inherent ideological legitimization disintegrates into raw violence and its impotent, inefficient interpretation.

This impotence of interpretation is also one of the necessary obverses of the universalized reflexivity hailed by the risk-society-theorists: it is as if our reflexive power can flourish only insofar as it draws its strength and relies on some minimal “prereflexive” substantial support that eludes its grasp, so that its universalization comes at the price of its inefficiency, that is, by the paradoxical re-emergence of the brute real of “irrational” violence, impermeable and insensitive to reflexive interpretation. So the more today’s social theory proclaims the end of nature or tradition and the rise of the “risk society,” the more the implicit reference to “nature” pervades our daily discourse: even when we do not speak of the “end of history,” do we not put forward the same message when we claim that we are entering a “postideological” pragmatic era, which is another way of claiming that we are entering a postpolitical order in which the only legitimate conflicts are ethnic/cultural conflicts?

Typically, in today’s critical and political discourse, the term worker has disappeared from the vocabulary, substituted or obliterated by immigrants or immigrant workers: Algerians in France, Turks in Germany, Mexicans in the United States.

In this way, the class problematic of workers’ exploitation is transformed into the multiculturalist problematic of “intolerance of otherness,” and the excessive investment of the multiculturalist liberals in protecting immigrants’ ethnic rights clearly draws its energy from the “repressed class dimension. Although Francis Fukuyama’s thesis on the “end of history” quickly fell into disrepute, we still silently presume that the liberal-democratic capitalist global order is somehow the finally found “natural” social regime, we still implicitly conceive conflicts in the Third World countries as a subspecies of natural catastrophes, as outbursts of quasi-natural violent passions, or as conflicts based on the fanatic identification to one’s ethnic roots (and what is “the ethnic” here if not again a code word for “nature”?). And, again, the key point is that this all-pervasive renaturalization is strictly correlative to the global reflexivization of our daily lives.

What this means, with regard to Agamben’s Utopian vision of untying the knot of the Law and violence is that, in our postpolitical societies, this knot is already untied: we encounter, on the one hand, the globalized interpretation whose globalization is paid for by its impotence, its failure to enforce itself, to generate effects in the real, and, on the other hand, explosions of the raw real of a violence that cannot be affected by its symbolic interpretation. Where, then, is the solution here, between

– the claim that, in today’s hegemonic constellation, the elements of the social link are separated and as such to be brought together by psycho-analysis (Miller),

– and the knot between Law and violence to be untied, their separation to be enacted (Agamben)?

What if these two separations are not symmetrical? What if the gap between the symbolic and the raw real epitomized by the figure of the skinhead is a false one, since this real of the outbursts of the “irrational” violence is generated by the globalization of the symbolic?

When, exactly, does the objet a function as the superego injunction to enjoy? When it occupies the place of the master signifier, that is, as Lacan formulated it in the last pages of his Seminar XI, when the short circuit between S1 and a occurs. The key move to be accomplished in order to break the vicious cycle of the superego injunction is thus to enact the separation between S1 and a.

Consequently, would it not be more productive to follow a different path, that is, to start with the different modus operandi of l’objet a, which in psychoanalysis no longer functions as the agent of the superego injunction — as it does in the discourse of perversion?

This is how Miller’s claim of the identity of the analyst’s discourse and the discourse of today’s civilization should be read: as an indication that this latter discourse (social link) is that of perversion.

That is to say, the fact that the upper level of Lacan’s formula of the analyst’s discourse is the same as his formula of perversion (a-$) opens up a possibility of reading the entire formula of the analyst’s discourse also as a formula of the perverse social link: its agent, the masochist pervert (the pervert par excellence), occupies the position of the object instrument of the other’s desire, and, in this way, through serving his (feminine) victim, he posits her as the hystericized/divided subject who “doesn’t know what she wants.”

Rather, the pervert knows it for her, that is, he pretends to speak from the position of knowledge (about the other’s desire) that enables him to serve the other; and, finally, the product of this social link is the master signifier, that is, the hysterical subject elevated into the role of the master (dominatrix) whom the pervert masochist serves.

In contrast to hysteria, the pervert knows perfectly what he is for the Other: a knowledge supports his position as the object of his Other’s (divided subject’s) jouissance.

The difference between the social link of perversion and that of analysis is grounded in the radical ambiguity of objet a in Lacan, which stands simultaneously for the imaginary fantasmatic lure/screen and for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure.

Consequently, when we pass from perversion to the analytic social link, the agent (analyst) reduces himself to the void, which provokes the subject into confronting the truth of his desire. Knowledge in the position of “truth” below the bar under the “agent,” of course, refers to the supposed knowledge of the analyst, and, simultaneously, signals that the knowledge gained here will not be the neutral objective knowledge of scientific adequacy, but the knowledge that concerns the subject (analysand) in the truth of his subjective position.

Recall, again, Lacan’s outrageous statements that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological. Along the same lines, one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological – because it represses the true reason the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position.

So, in the case of anti-Semitism, knowledge about what the Jews “really are” is a fake, irrelevant, while the only knowledge at the place of truth is the knowledge about why a Nazi needs a figure of the Jew to sustain his ideological edifice.

The crucial point not to be missed here is how the late Lacan’s identification of the subjective position of the analyst as that of objet petit a presents an act of radical self-criticism. Earlier, in the 1950’s, Lacan conceived the analyst not as the small other (a), but, on the contrary, as a kind of stand-in for the big Other (A, the anonymous symbolic order). At this level, the function of the analyst was to frustrate the subject’s imaginary misrecognitions and to make them accept their proper symbolic place within the circuit of symbolic exchange, the place that effectively (and unbeknownst to them) determines their symbolic identity. Later, however, the analyst stands precisely for the ultimate inconsistency and failure of the big Other, that is, for the symbolic order’s inability to guarantee the subject’s symbolic identity.

One should thus always bear in mind the thoroughly ambiguous status of objet a in Lacan. Miller recently proposed a Benjaminian distinction between “constituted anxiety” and “constituent anxiety”: while the first designates the standard notion of the terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety that haunts us, its infernal circle that threatens to draws us in, the second stands for the “pure” confrontation with objet a as constituted in its very loss.

Miller is right to emphasize here two features: the difference that separates constituted from constituent anxiety concerns the status of the object with regard to fantasy. In a case of constituted anxiety, the object dwells within the confines of a fantasy, while we get the constituent fantasy only when the subject “traverses the fantasy” and confronts the void, the gap, filled up by the fantasmatic object.

Clear and convincing as it is. Miller’s formula misses the true paradox or, rather, ambiguity of objet a: when he defines objet a as the object that overlaps with its loss, that emerges at the very moment of its loss (so that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breasts to voice and gaze, are metonymic figurations of the void of nothing), he remains within the horizon of desire — the true object cause of desire is the void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations.

While, as Lacan emphasizes, objet a is also the object of the drive, the relationship is here thoroughly different. Although in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of objet a as the object cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of objet a as the object of the drive, the “object” is directly the loss itself.

In the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object. That is to say, the weird movement called “drive” is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object, but by a push to directly enact the “loss” – the gap, cut, distance – itself.

There is thus a double distinction to be drawn here: not only between object a in its fantasmatic and post-fantasmatic status, but also, within this post-fantasmatic domain itself, between the lost object cause of desire and the object loss of the drive. Far from concerning an abstract scholastic debate, this distinction has crucial ideologico-political consequences: it enables us to articulate the libidinal dynamics of capitalism.

Following Miller himself, a distinction has to be introduced here between lack and hole. Lack is spatial, designating a void within a space, while the hole is more radical — it designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the “black hole” in physics).

Therein resides the difference between desire and drive: desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being. In other words, the circular movement of drive obeys the weird logic of the curved space in which the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, but a curve: the drive “knows” that the shortest way to attain its aim is to circulate around its goal-object. At the immediate level of addressing individuals, capitalism of course interpellates them as consumers, as subjects of desires, soliciting in them ever new perverse and excessive desires (for which it offers products to satisfy them); furthermore, it obviously also manipulates the “desire to desire,” celebrating the very desire to desire ever new objects and modes of pleasure. However, even if if already manipulates desire in a way that takes into account the fact that the most elementary desire is the desire to reproduce itself as desire (and not to find satisfaction), at this level, we do not yet reach the drive.

The drive inheres to capitalism at a more fundamental, systemic level: drive propels the entire capitalist machinery; it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction. The capitalist drive thus belongs to no definite individual – it is rather that those individuals who act as direct “agents” of capital (capitalists themselves, top managers) have to practice it. We enter the mode of the drive when (as Marx put it) the circulation of money as capital becomes “an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.” One should bear in mind here Lacan’s well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive: while the goal is the object around which drive circulates, its (true) aim is the endless continuation of this circulation as such.

slave jouissance

Žižek, Slavoj. “Love Thy Neighbor? No , Thanks!” in Psychoanalysis and Racism. ed. Anthony Lane, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 154-175.) a slighty different version of this essay appears in The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.

According to Lacan, Hegel, in his dialectics of Lord and Bondsman, misses the key point: Jouissance is on the side not of the Master but rather of his servant — that is, what keeps the servant enslaved is precisely the little piece of jouissance thrown to him by his Master. Lacan’s reproach to the standard version of the Cunning of Reason (the Slave who works and thus renounces jouissance, this way laying foundation for his future freedom, in contrast to the Master who is idioticized by his jouissance) is that it is, on the contrary, the Slave who has access to jouissance from his ambiguous relation to the Other’s supposed jouissance (to Master qua “subject supposed to enjoy”). See Lacan, “Subversion.” (page 174, Note 2)

excremental remainder ethical monster

Kotsko, Adam. “Žižek and the Excremental Body of Christ” Presentation at the American Academy of Religion 2009 Conference

The basic structure of Žižek’s interpretation of Christianity is provided by Hegel, who elaborates a theology of the “death of God” (which was later taken up by American theologians such as Thomas Altizer, whom Žižek discovered after developing his own Hegelian reading of Christianity). Hegel contends that the three persons of the Trinity do not represent three coeternal realities, but rather three decisive and irreversible turning points in the life of God:

the Father empties out the entirety of his divinity into the Son, and by dying the Son then empties out that divinity into the Holy Spirit, which is understood as a new form of social bond.

Coming at this basic structure from a Lacanian perspective and specifically from his use of Lacan to found a contemporary form of ideology critique, Žižek argues that Christ represents a unique form of “master signifier.” Normally “master signifiers” are tautologous authorities whose self-assertion allows some form of symbolic order or ideological structure to crystallize — for instance, in modern society money serves as the foundation of our entire system of values, but when you ask what money is worth, you can only answer that it’s worth… money.

Money is valuable because it’s valuable. The model of this kind of “master signifier” is of course God, whose authority ultimately stems from the fact that he is God. Žižek claims, however, that the founding myth of Christianity provides us with a weird kind of self-effacing or self-denying master signifier — a God who not only dies (many gods have died throughout history, only to be replaced), but who himself becomes an atheist.

In Žižek’s reading, Christ’s cry of dereliction on the cross—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — presents us with an image of a God who doesn’t believe in himself.

Elevating Christ to the level of a “master signifier” thus means effectively giving up on “master signifiers,” producing a whole new form of social bond — one that is outside of ideology.

As I argue in Žižek and Theology, this elaboration of a “death of God” theology as a path to a non-ideological social bond is the end result of a long and difficult development in Žižek’s political thought, because—to put it bluntly — getting rid of master signifiers is difficult.

It’s easy enough to overthrow any given master signifier, but the human tendency to reestablish them seems irresistible — and before his foray into theology, Žižek seemed to be essentially advocating revolution for its own sake, as a kind of moment of pure authenticity and truth, despite the fact that every revolution will necessarily be a matter of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

The reason for this is that “master signifiers” are a way of organizing our enjoyment, keeping the suffocating force of jouissance sufficiently at bay to give us breathing room, while nonetheless giving us access to occasional moments of indulgence.

A key aspect of this is Žižek’s view that every form of law founded in a “master signifier” includes its own “inherent transgression”— that is, it depends on people occasionally feeling like they not only have permission to break the rules but are actively exhorted to do so, so that they have a way to let off steam.

A familiar example of this is the Jim Crow order in the US — in addition to the official laws segregating blacks and whites, the order was characterized by extra-legal attacks such as lynch mobs.

Žižek would argue that these weren’t unfortunate outbursts but were an integral part of the Jim Crow order, allowing whites to “let off steam” by forcibly asserting their dominance while maintaining the public fiction that segregation was a harmonious system with everyone in their natural place.

Inspired by Alain Badiou’s work on St. Paul, Žižek turns to the origins of Christianity as a way of thinking through what it might mean to have a revolution that would be a durable achievement rather than a flash of inspiration between two ideological regimes. His main critique of Badiou is that Badiou one-sidedly emphasizes the resurrection over the cross — in Lutheran terms, Badiou is a theologian of glory rather than a theologian of the cross.

Žižek believes that any new order (represented by the resurrection) must be preceded by a break with the old (represented by the cross) — some act of negation, some negative gesture separating oneself from the reigning master signifier. But again, this is very difficult to achieve.

Not only does the ideological order actively rely on its own violation through the “inherent transgression,” but Žižek had also argued extensively that “cynical distance” from ideology—the sense that “no one really believes this stuff”—is actually a built-in feature of all ideologies. Just “going through the motions” without really believing it isn’t a way of escaping ideology, but rather the most powerful form of submitting to ideology.

If the seemingly most obvious ways to negate ideology are built-in features of ideology already, then where can one turn? In The Puppet and the Dwarf, which represents his most fully realized account of Christian origins, Žižek makes what is, in my view, one of his most interesting moves—he claims that Judaism represents a kind of inherently negative space, a culture that is “unplugged” from the enjoyment provided by the surrounding pagan ideology, so that the logic of the “inherent transgression” and of “cynical distance” alike don’t apply.

Contradicting both Badiou and centuries of Christian interpreters, Žižek thus argues that the point of Pauline Christianity wasn’t to escape from the Jewish law, but to find some way to induct Gentiles into this “unplugged” Jewish stance.

Historically, of course, Christianity wound up betraying its Jewish roots and became an ideological order like any other, so that perhaps Žižek’s attempt to find a durable model that would be something other than the space between two ideologies has failed — yet he believes that the Pauline communities built on engrafting Gentiles into the promises of Judaism provide at least a way of thinking through what a durable non-ideological social bond might look like.

II.

So where does the Body of Christ fit into all this? As I’ve said, he is uninterested in the idea of the Christian community or church as the “Body of Christ,” and this is not only because he has opted to refer to that social bond as the “Holy Spirit”—in addition to his general distaste for anything as “harmonious” or “organic” as a body metaphor would imply, Žižek also has no interest whatsoever in ecclesiology or in the institutional church as such, believing it to be a betrayal of Christianity’s original revolutionary core. Furthermore, Žižek has never, to my knowledge, addressed the sacraments in any serious way, and so the sacramental Body of Christ in the Eucharist is not on his radar.

What remains, though, is the literal, physical body of Jesus, which Žižek basically only discusses in the context of the crucifixion. Like a medieval mystic, Žižek is fixated on Christ’s weakness and suffering, his pathetic and pitiable appearance—the absolute disjuncture between this disgraced and repulsive dying body and the divine nature he embodies. More than that, he claims, in something like an orthodox fashion, that Christ embodies the truth of humanity, the truth that, in Luther’s words, “we are the shit that fell out of God’s anus.” Drawing on this Lutheran inheritance, Žižek defines Christianity as providing a vision of a God who “freely identified himself with his own shit” (Parallax View, 187).

Now this focus on excrement is not entirely new for Žižek, who has always had a fixation of sorts on whatever is disgusting, repulsive, or otherwise off-putting. In fact, one of the key concepts he takes from Lacan, objet petit a, which represents the ever-elusive object and cause of desire, frequently bears the name of the “excremental remainder,” referring to that little “something” that one has to give up in order to join the social order. What Žižek calls Luther’s “excremental anti-humanism,” then, does not simply lead to humanity wallowing in its own self-disgust.

Rather, it leads to humanity wallowing in its own enjoyment, or as Žižek says, to the emergence of enjoyment as a direct political factor. For Žižek all ideological orders represent a way of organizing enjoyment or jouissance, of keeping it at a distance while allowing periodic indulgence, but what Luther’s position opens up is the possibility of a kind of short-circuit, where jouissance is not just a silently presupposed basis of the political order but instead a conscious emphasis and goal.

The end result is what Žižek characterizes as the contemporary “superego injunction to enjoy” — the perverse situation where authorities are directly exhorting people to enjoy. The most obvious manifestation of this tendency was perhaps George W. Bush’s injunction that people go shopping in response to 9/11, but Žižek believes this basic attitude is absolutely pervasive.

Increasingly, Žižek claims, one feels guilty not for having sex, but for not having enough sex — and even the asceticism of dieting and exercise is geared toward the hedonistic ends of attractiveness and longer lifespan.

Increasingly, contemporary Western subjects, or at least contemporary middle and upper class Western subjects, directly identify with their excremental remainder, with objet petit a — with the end result of a kind of autistic compulsion to enjoy, an obligatory enjoyment that one begins to suspect is not finally all that enjoyable.

The answer to this situation, for cultural conservatives and particularly for conservative Catholics such as Žižek’s dialogue partners G. K. Chesterton and John Milbank, is to reimpose some version of traditional values in order to save enjoyment from itself. For Žižek, however, such a solution is both dishonest and self-undermining, or in other words, perverse — hence the subtitle of The Puppet and the Dwarf:The Perverse Core of Christianity, which refers to Actual Existing Christianity and not to its original, supposedly revolutionary form.

His solution is not to disavow enjoyment, but rather to focus on the enjoyment of the other, to form a community centered on the care for the concrete suffering and enjoying others one happens to encounter. This, in his view, is Christian love, a love he characterizes as “violent” in that it cuts beneath the ideological identity markers of the other and attends directly to the excremental remainder underneath it all.

Though this notion of an authentically Christian community is based in an adaptation of one of the later Lacan’s more opaque concepts, the “discourse of the analyst,” I believe that the clearest example of what he’s talking about can be found in his final contribution to The Monstrosity of Christ. There he discusses Agota Kristof’s novel The Notebook, which for him is “the best literary expression” of an ethical stance that goes beyond the sentimentality of moralism and instead installs “a cold, cruel distance toward what one is doing.”

The novel follows two twin brothers who are “utterly immoral… yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest.” Žižek gives two examples. In one, they meet a starving man who asks for help and get him everything he asks for, while claiming that they helped him solely because he needed help, not out of any desire to be kind. In another, they urinate on a German officer with whom they find themselves sharing a bed, at his request.

Žižek remarks, “If ever there was a Christian ethical stance, this is it: no matter how weird their neighbor’s demands, the twins naively try to meet them.”

(Interestingly, this ethical stance of giving people what they ask for in the most literal way corresponds with one of Žižek’s earliest political prescriptions for dealing with the cynical distance that is inherent to ideology—instead of resisting the demands of ideology, one should take them as literally as possible, because that’s the one response ideology isn’t prepared for.) Žižek commends the twins’ amoral ethics as follows:

This is where I stand—how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity. With more people like this, the world would be a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion. Monstrosity of Christ 303

Such is Žižek’s understanding of Christian ethics, a position I am sure will not be included in any Christian ethics courses any time soon.

III.

I would like to conclude this presentation by connecting Žižek’s work to liberation theology—not through the more obvious path of the reliance of both on the Marxist tradition, but rather precisely through Žižek’s notion of the Body of Christ as a kind of “excremental remainder.” My initial point of contact here might seem superficial initially, but I believe it will prove surprisingly revealing. In his essay “Extra pauperes nulla salus,” or “No salvation outside the poor,” Jon Sobrino begins with a quotation from his fallen comrade Ignacio Ellacuría, who was among the members of Sobrino’s Jesuit community who were massacred by a Salvadoran death squad in 1989 while Sobrino happened to be out of the country:

What on another occasion I called copro-historical analysis, that is, the study of the feces of our civilization, seems to reveal that this civilization is gravely ill and that, in order to avoid a dreadful and fatal outcome, it is necessary to change it from within itself.

Sobrino agrees, claiming that the “excrement” or waste product of capitalist civilization, in the form of massive impoverishment in the Third World, demonstrates that it is profoundly sick. Reciting the massive imbalances in global priorities, for instance the inconceivable sums spent on arms at the same time as people are starving daily, Sobrino concludes that “we are dealing with a metaphysical obscenity” and that “God is furious” (39). That is of course because for Sobrino and for all liberation theologians, God has identified decisively with this excremental remainder of the poor. The parallel here with Žižek’s “God who freely identifies with his own shit” is inexact—most notably because liberation theologians do not believe God is the author of the process that produces the poor as an excremental remainder — but also compelling, insofar as Žižek has written a great deal recently on the obscene inequalities that characterize the contemporary world and has even put forth urban slum dwellers in the Third World as a contemporary parallel to the “unplugged” stance he detects in first-century Judaism.

In addition, Žižek’s account of “Christian love” as naively meeting people’s needs simply because they ask resonates profoundly with the implied premise of Sobrino’s harsh and furious text: people need to eat!

Regardless of whether they’re deserving, whether giving them food would produce bad economic incentives, etc., etc., people need to eat. The same could obviously be said for all basic needs—for example, regardless of whether it undermines someone’s ability to put big numbers in quarterly reports, people who have AIDS need medicine!

A little more literalism and naïveté would certainly help in our present situation. In addition, simply listening to what people are asking for would be a huge improvement over the patronizing tutelage of NGOs and foreign aid, which Sobrino characterizes as actively contributing to the dehumanization of the already dehumanized people they serve, insofar as it deprives them of agency.

The principle here is basically Jesus’s: sell all you have and give to the poor. The focus here isn’t on liquidating your holdings so that you can enjoy the moral righteousness of poverty, but of putting your goods at the disposal of the poor—or, as Jesus says in another setting, of using your dishonest wealth to make friends.

The really difficult question between Žižek and liberation theology, however, is what the end state looks like. For Sobrino as for most liberation theologians, the basic stance seems to be humanist in the broad sense—a society that respects human dignity, that looks to the intrinsic worth of every individual. Yet Žižek remains resolutely anti-humanist and suspicious of the language of human rights. And while Sobrino can look forward to a correction of civilization’s digestive system such that it will stop producing the poor as excrement, Žižek revels in the disgusting and repellant aspect of the “excremental remainder.”

When the case is stated in this way, it seems difficult to favor Žižek over Sobrino, yet I wonder if Žižek is getting at an important truth here—namely that the end state is something that we, blinkered as we are by the ideology of our present sick civilization, simply cannot recognize as beautiful or desirable, that the change we need is so profound that it will change our very concept of what it means to be human.

In any case, both Žižek and Sobrino agree that what it means to be human now entails the production of a massive and appalling waste product—and that what it means to be faithful to the message of Christ is to freely identify with that waste product.

the unconscious is the discourse of the other

Verhaeghe, Paul. Does the Woman Exist?: From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine. New York: Other Press, 2009.

Qua theory, the discourses represent the pinnacle of Lacan’s thinking about psychical identity. They also mark a break with the neo-Freudians as well as with Freud himself. Until then, the psyche was thought of as a substantial essence that was buried deep ‘somewhere’ — the inner self of a personality— and the unconscious was the reservoir of all wishes constituting the basement of this inner self. For Lacan, this basement, indeed the whole house, is empty. Everything takes place on the street. Identity is always outside with the Other or, more precisely, in the particular relation to this Other. That is the meaning of … “The Unconscious is the discourse of the Other” or “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” This vision is so new that it has hardly penetrated, even within Lacanian circles. The temptation to think “I am a God in my deepest thoughts” is probably too great. The theory of discourse is a formalisation of this new vision 99

His theory is even in radical opposition to communication theory as such. Indeed, he starts from the assumption that communication is always a failure: moreover, that it has to be a failure, and that’s the reason why we keep on talking. If we understood each other, we would all remain silent. Luckily enough, we don’t understand each other, so we have to speak to one another.

In his discourse theory, Michel Foucault works with the concrete material of the signifier, which puts the accent on the content of a discourse. Lacan, on the contrary, works beyond the content and accentuates the formal relationships that each discourse establishes in the very act of speaking. This implies that the Lacanian discourse theory has to be understood in the first place as a formal system, independent of any spoken word as such.

A discourse exists before any concrete word is spoken and to go further, a discourse determines the concrete speech act. This effect of determination is the reflection of a basic Lacanian assumption, namely that each discourse incarnates a fundamental relationship, resulting in a particular social bond. As there are four discourses, there will be four different social bonds.

It is important to understand that each discourse is empty to start with. They are nothing but empty vessels with a particular form which will determine the content that one puts into them, and then they can contain almost anything. The moment one reduces a given discourse to one interpretation, the whole theory implodes and one returns to the science of the particular. As a vessel, each discourse has four different compartment into which one can put things. The compartments are called positions and the things are the terms. 100

There are four different positions, standing in a fixed relationship to each other. The first position is obvious: each discourse starts with somebody talking, called by Lacan the agent. If one talks, one is talking to somebody, and that is the second position, called the other. Those two position are of course nothing else but the conscious expression of each speech act, and in that sense they are at the core of every theory of communication.

Within this minimal relation between speaker and receiver, between agent and other, a certain effect is aimed at. The result of the discourse can be made visible in this effect, and that leads to the next position, called the product.

Up to this point, we are still within classical communication theory. It is only the fourth position which introduces the psychoanalytic point of view. In fact, it is not the fourth, but the very first position, namely the position of truth. Indeed, Freud demonstrated that, while man is speaking he is driven by a truth, even if it remains unknown to himself. It is this position of the truth which functions as the motor and as the starting-point of each discourse. 101

The position of truth is the Aristotelian Prime Mover, affecting the whole structure of a discourse. Its first consequence is that the agent is only apparently the agent. The ego does not speak, it is spoken. Observation of the process of free association leads to this conclusion, but even ordinary speaking yields the same result. Indeed, when I speak I do not know what I am going to say, unless I have learned it by heart or I am reading my speech from a a paper. In all other cases, I do not speak so much as I am spoken and this speech is driven by a desire with or without my conscious agreement. This is a matter of simple observation, but it wounds man’s narcissism deeply; this is why Freud called it the third great narcissistic humiliation of mankind. He expressed it very pithily: dass das Ich kein Herr sei in seinem eigenen hause,” “The ego is not master in its own house.” The Lacanian equivalent of this Freudian formula runs as follows: “Le signifiant, c’est ce qui représente le sujet pour un autre signifiant.”

In this turning of the scales — since it is not the subject but the signifier which leads in the definition — Lacan defines the subject as a passive effect of the signifying chain, certainly not the master of it.

The agent of discourse is only a fake agent, “un semblant,” a make-believe entity. The real driving force lies underneath, in the position of truth.. 102