Category: objet (a)

From politics of the extimate to axiomatic politics

Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107

[Žižek] searches for exceptional social agents that would replace the proletariat in transforming capitalism. Slums, in Žižek’s recent work, seem to be the privileged site for such social agents. Marginalized and dispossessed of “all but their chains,” “excluded from citizenship,” slum dwellers, for Žižek, hold the position of the extimate, the “part of no part,” the torque that could unravel the capitalist system (2007, 56-58). We wonder, however, whether this political vision is not rendering Žižek susceptible to the same critique that he has previously extended to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

We are referring here to Žižek’s critique of Hardt and Negri’s politics of immanence and its reliance on a messianic awakening in which the dormant potential of the multitude realizes itself (2007). Is the politics of the extimate, at least in the manner occasionally articulated by Žižek, not premised on a similar understanding of political agency that is simply asserted, rather than constructed—although this time, the political agent refers to some exceptional social group (i.e., slum dwellers) rather than the multitude? 101

Initially, Žižek’s notion of the extimate appears to differ from the Hardt and Negri’s use of immanence. By rendering capitalism and its potential opposition as perfectly overlapping,

a politics of immanence eliminates the theoretical space needed to actually construct a position of real difference from which economic transformation can proceed.

For Žižek, the concept of the extimate refers precisely to such a political position that incarnates real difference. At a closer look, however, both Hardt and Negri and Žižek are unable to situate difference. If all difference collapses into a (capitalist) sameness in Hardt and Negri, difference is introduced in a manner that remains arbitrary and
unwarranted in Žižek. This common shortcoming does not come as a surprise
to us. Žižek shares with Hardt and Negri a similar ontology of the economy,
permeated by the logic of self-driven and self-regulating capitalist accumulation.

Limiting the constitution of the economy to the masculine logic of the capitalist-all, Žižek is hard pressed to carve up a position within capitalism that is heterogeneous to it.

The latter, then, is arbitrarily assigned to a selected set of marginalized positions, such as slum collectives, with an alleged disposition to revolt. Slums could certainly be a potential site for social transformation, or they might not be. What we wish to question, however, is the political cogency of trying to locate the “real” social agents of change.

After all, Marxian history is replete with stories of resentment when class-in-itself fails to transpire into class-for-itself (that is, when certain dominated and marginalized groups, anticipated to resist and mobilize due their marginalized position, fail to do so).

Axiomatic politics enables us to extricate ourselves from limiting the potential of transformation to a privileged set of social groups, economic sectors or geographical scales. It displaces the agent of class transformation from a social group to an abstract principle that could insert itself into every occasion in which decisions over the use of surplus are being instituted, rendering each concrete class organization an inconsistent and failed attempt.

Yet, it is also important not to confuse the communist gesture of refusal of an exception with the hysterical questioning of the Master. If the communist axiom fails to constitute an all, this is not because it has doubts about the authenticity, the legitimacy, the validity of that which occupies the position of the exception. By leaving the exception in place, such an understanding would remain blind to the radical commitment of the axiom. Rather, it is because the axiom, to repeat Joan Copjec’s perceptive claim, is only “half-said” (2002, 171, 175). That is, the potential of the axiom is only actualized as it encounters and engages with the function of exception in various concrete contexts, as its universalizing aspiration propels it to move beyond the cooperative workplaceto the local economy, beyond the local economy to the nation-state, and beyond the nation-state to a community of states, and so on. 101-102

Masculine economies of surplus labor

Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107

In this vein, it is only appropriate to consider the different organizations of surplus as various institutional attempts to furnish us with a knowledge of how to come to terms with the impossibility of the class relation. Under feudalism, for instance, the feudal manor constitutes a set, an all gathered together under the feudal lord qua the exception to the set. While all feudal agencies (from the knights that protected the manor from the attacks of the other lords and the vassals that managed the lord’s demesne to the church that provided the rules of conduct under the feudal order), receive a cut from the surplus for the services and functions that they render, it is only the lord who occupies an exceptional status that designates him as the sole recipient of the (products of the) surplus labor performed by the serfs. This highly stylized description of the feudal system can be formalized through

the masculine logic of exception, where the exception to the set (the feudal lord) that appropriates the surplus labor, delineates the boundaries of the affective and political economy of the feudal order. 93

Provided that theexceptional status of the lord is upheld, the social agencies that fall under the feudal form can engage in endless struggles with each other. Moreover, the
endless variations that the feudal form has passed throughout the long transition from feudalism to capitalism (Dobb 1946; Hilton 1976; Ashton and Philpin 1985) as well as its continuing (albeit highly fragile and unstable) presence in the contemporary household (Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff 1994; Gibson-Graham 2006; Safri 2006) attest to the fact that it is both fairly resilient yet at the same time highly unstable.

[W]e discern the masculine logic of exception that Marx identified in the feudal system (the universal set of the feudal manor constituted around the lord as its constitutive exception) in the other “canonical” modes of production, including slavery and capitalism. For instance, under the modern capitalist enterprise (i.e., the joint-stock company whose existence can be traced back all the way to the inception of Dutch East India Company in 1602), all the factors of production, “all individuals really active in production from the manager down to the lowest day labourer” as Marx puts it (1991, 568, emphasis added), must give something to get something (a portion of the living labor): the workers have to perform labor, the managers have to manage, the accountants have to keep the accounts, the financiers have to loan capital and so on. In this sense, under the joint stock company, “the capitalist” qua entrepreneur dissolves into its functional components and, thereby, evaporates.

Nevertheless, this universal set of all subsumed under the capitalist enterprise is still constituted by an exceptional entity, or better yet a function, that enjoys “other people’s surplus” without giving anything in return: the Board of Directors.

As long as the reproduction of the exceptional status of the Board of Directors as the sole appropriator of surplus, as the entity that gets “something for nothing,” is not jeopardized, the affective and political economy of capitalism can accommodate an infinite range of distributions of surplus, a wide array of consumption practices, and a variety of modes of exchange. According to our reading, therefore, (portions of) surplus value becomes the object cause of desire (as the currency that enables these subjects to participate in the commodity economy) for the subjects of this capitalist-all only within the delimited frame constituted by the exception to the exchange-function universalized by the market system: from the worker who demands a union premium (efficiency wage) to the executive manager who tries to secure funds for new investment in R&D, they all struggle with each other to justify (to the symbolic Big Other) why they should get a larger cut from the surplus appropriated by the Board of Directors.

The drive-effect

Early on in the paper, we welcomed the recent psychoanalytical literature on “the administration of enjoyment under late capitalism” and its analysis of the logic of desire in consumption. And then, in concretizing our “There is no class relation” thesis, we argued that surplus labor/value is the object cause of desire for the subjects of  capitalist-all (or any other exploitative form structured around a constitutive exception). In both cases, we were able to identify concrete desiring subjects.  Nevertheless, if we are speaking of the case of a joint stock company and if there is no actual capitalist but only a series of functionaries subsumed under the capitalist-all, then how are we going to impute a desire or a drive to the capitalist corporation?

In his The Parallax View, Žižek recognizes this problem and distinguishes the drive of capitalism from desire within capitalism. In contrast to desire, which is located on the side of the interpellated subjects of consumption who jump from one commodity to another in search of satisfaction, drive “…inheres to capitalism at a more fundamental, systematic, level: drive is that which propels the whole capitalist machinery, it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction (emphasis added). 95

We enter the mode of drive the moment 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.” […] (2006, 61)

As noted earlier, Žižek borrows this economic determinist narrative from a particular tradition within Marxism that has long defined “expansion through contradiction” as the “law of motion” of capital, and saw in it the telos of capitalism’s end (Norton 2001).
Žižek’s innovation is to turn this narrative upside down and associate drive with capitalism’s resilience rather than its destruction. Even though a pantheon of Marxist political economists, including Paul Sweezy, David Gordon, and David Harvey, posit that “accumulation for accumulation’s sake” is “the rule that governs the behaviour of all capitalists” (Harvey 1982, 29), the argument that the endless circular movement of the circuit of capital is propelled by an accumulation drive is not necessarily one that Marx himself would subscribe to.

Indeed, if we were to expand our concept of capitalism to include Marx’s explorations in Volumes 2 and 3, and his analysis of the numerous claims on surplus value, then it becomes very difficult to reduce the movement of capital into a self-regulating “expanded self-reproduction.”15 We have already noted that, within the masculine universe of the capitalist corporation, in the shape of endless struggles over the surplus, we find “an infinite movement of the desire within a finite, delimited frame” (Zupančič 2000, 289). An endless number of social agencies located within and outside of the actual corporation (but, to the extent they do not question the status of the constitutive exception, within the “capitalist-all”) strive to receive a cut of the surplus and to this end, they need to struggle with one another and, on occasion, justify their “necessity” for the continued existence of the capitalist form of extraction and distribution of surplus value.

This capitalist-all (with its constitutive exception embodied in the Board of Directors) frames the field within which a whole range of “competitive battles” takes place (Ruccio and Amariglio 2003, 239-244). The agencies of these competitive battles could be different recipients of surplus distributions within a corporation, different corporations (within and across industries), different forms of capital (industrial, financial, and merchant), and even nation-states and trans- and inter-national institutions (Resnick 2006). In this sense, the capitalist-all is a topological whole and its consistency is sustained by the taboo status of the exception: as long as (the institutional form that embodies) the exception is sustained and remains unquestioned, the particular location of a particular claimant/recipient of surplus value is only incidental.

We have already argued that, what sets in motion the circuit of capital is a host of social technologies of reproduction. Therefore, from our perspective, the question is not so much what propels the circuit of capital and the process of the self-expansion of value, but rather what throws it out of balance.

In fact, the aggregate outcome of the internal dynamic fueled by the logic of desire at the level of the subjects of capitalist-all is the mad dance of capitalism caught in a circular movement, sometimes resulting in expanded reproduction, sometimes in simple reproduction, and sometimes in non-reproduction. What are economic recessions and depressions, if not the unexpected aggregate outcomes of the uncoordinated activities as well as the competitive battles among the subjects of the capitalist-all? 97

Therefore, the cause of this directionless circular movement is not a drive to accumulate or “an impersonal compulsion to engage in […] expanded selfreproduction” (Žižek 2006, 61). Rather,

the blind movement of the circuit of capital is the overdetermined outcome of, on the one hand, the social technologies of reproduction that uphold/maintain the exception, and on the other hand, the competitive battles and intractable contradictions that crisscross the capitalist-all.

And if there is a drive, it is either at the level of the particular subjects of the capitalist-all, or, if it is at the aggregate level, then it is only as a drive-effect—not really as a drive, but rather a semblance of drive, giving an impression of inevitability and necessity in what seems like a “repetition compulsion.” 97

The question of difference

On the one hand, we have touched upon and highlighted economic difference as it is inflected within capitalism, in the figure of the different claims on the distributions of surplus value. On the other hand, we have demonstrated the different forms of configuring the relation to surplus labor within the delimited economies of capitalism, feudalism, and slavery. Nonetheless, in order to explicate what we mean by the ethico-political in the realm of the economy, we need to produce a particular notion of difference that embodies not only a break from the libidinal economy of capitalism but from all delimited structures of class. To be able to think this difference, we turn to psychoanalysis.

the possibility of formulating a meaningful economic difference that would unsettle the capitalist field of differences. We proffer that, when grafted onto the Marxian field of economic difference,

sexual difference (qua Lacan’s formalization of Kant’s dynamical and mathematical antinomies) helps to articulate difference as such. It allows distinguishing between the kind of difference within the delimited frame of the masculine logic of exception—including the differences among the various class structures that fall under the masculine logic of exception—and the difference between this masculine logic and the feminine logic of non-all.

The masculine logic defines a whole, an all, by positing a constitutive exception. Within the bounds of this set, all kinds of differences are permitted—with the proviso that the constitutive exception remains untouched.

The feminine logic of non-all, on the other hand, refuses to posit an exception at the expense of failing to constitute a coherent whole.

Contra capitalism, or any other exploitative form of appropriation of surplus (e.g., slavery, feudalism), the logic of non-all refuses to assign exclusive appropriative rights to any particular set of social agents.

This also includes those who were exploited under the ancien régime, namely the workers. Communism is generally understood to be the reparation of collective justice or the completeness of social being, which would be achieved once what is stolen from the workers is given back to them. Rejecting the substitution of one exception (i.e., board of directors) by another (i.e., the worker), the logic of non-all disrupts this fantasy. It is important to note that the exception that constitutes the capitalist-all is a function, even though it is embodied in the institution of the Board of Directors in our contemporary social formations. That is, various economic ideologies can sustain the function assumed by the Board of Directors. The ideology of economic growth, for instance, as the unchanging answer of classical political economy, neoclassical economics, and late neoclassical economics to their constitutive and shared problematic of how to reconcile rational choice and social harmony, seems to be a prominent example. In a passage, uncharacteristic in its declaration of the inevitability of capitalism as a “fetish,” Žižek skillfully argues for the need to counter this discourse:

“Whenever a political project takes a radical turn, up pops the inevitable blackmail: ‘Of course these goals are desirable in themselves; if we do all this, however, international capital will boycott us, the growth rate will fall, and so on.’ […] Many fetishes will have to be broken here: who cares if growth stalls, or even becomes negative? Have we not had enough of the high growth rate whose effects on the social organism were felt mostly in the guise of new forms of poverty and dispossession? What about a negative growth that would translate into a qualitatively better, not higher, standard of living for the wider popular strata? That would be a political act today…” (2004, 74) 99

Žižek aptly exposes the efficiency with which the superegoic imperative of growth holds back the contemporary subjects as its captives. The discourse of “negative growth” is a sobering gesture to undo the grip of the growth fantasy. However, our emphasis is on interrupting the logic of exception in all of its manifestations,  irrespective of the particular economic discourses that sustain it. After all, this logic can be perpetuated not only in the ideology of growth, but also in the economic fantasies of “local development,” “alleviation of poverty,” “enhancing human capital,” “creation of jobs,” “economic efficiency,” “freedom of choice,” and so on. That is why we approach economic difference instigated and materialized by the “non-all” as a moment, a perspective, a principle, which refuses the exception as such, and not just the particular social group that occupies the position of the exception, or the particular social discourse that articulates this function. We call this difference the communist moment.

Utopianism or dystopianism? No, thanks!

Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107

If we were to distinguish surplus labor from surplus value and reconstruct the proper homology as one between surplus labor and surplus jouissance, then an entirely different picture emerges.

In this alternative construction of the homology, not just capitalism but all forms of production, appropriation, and distribution are disrupted by the paradoxical topology of surplus jouissance.

By universalizing the psychoanalytical insight, in this manner, to all class formations, we intend to steer away from the dual dangers of utopianism as well as dystopianism. On the one hand, we reject utopianism by acknowledging the impossibility of a social link purged from surplus jouissance and the impossibility of the class relation, echoing the Lacanian insight pertaining to the impossibility of the sexual relation. On the other hand, we would be rejecting dystopianism by not restricting the homology to capitalism and retaining the Marxian insight pertaining to the possibility of another way of relating to surplus. Moreover, through our reconstruction of the homology, we will be able to produce a more robust and distinctively Marxian explanation as to why surplus labor/value, and not an inexorable accumulation drive, is indeed the absent “cause” that sets the circuit of capital in motion. 91

“There is no class relation”

We also believe that the numerous refutations and reinstatements of the labor theory of value, by reducing it to a theory of price determination, obscure Marx’s radical insight pertaining to the impossibility of the class relation (92).

For Marxian economics, neither the respective quanta of necessary- and surplus-labor nor the potential destinations of the appropriated surplus-labor could be determined a priori.  Indeed, there is no stable and universally accepted logic for conducting and institutionalizing the process of the performance, appropriation, and distribution of surplus-labor. To the extent that

there is no true, correct, or just way of dividing the total labor-time performed by direct laborers into its necessary and surplus components and distributing the surplus labor to their destinations, all social organizations of surplus labor will be structured around a foundational, constitutive lack.

This is the sense in which we construct the homology between surplus labor and surplus jouissance. Since there exists no pre-constituted/pre-given guideline or knowledge as to how to organize the surplus labor, there exists a surplus of knowledge. Indeed, historically concrete forms of the social organization of class (that designate who is the lord and who is the serf, who is the master and who is the slave, who is the capitalist and who is the worker) are already so many different, and ultimately failed, attempts to overcome this constitutive impossibility of the class relation and make up for the absence of a ready-made knowledge of what to do with the living labor. Yet each formation, each form of organizing surplus labor is inevitably thrown out of balance,
insofar as all social links are smeared with surplus jouissance. At the end of the day, to the extent that we are speaking of surplus labor, whether it is directly materialized in products/services or in currency with which one can buy products/services, the dialectics of desire as well as the obdurate logic of partial drives will be present.

All social links, therefore, including class formations, are structured around a constitutive lack that simultaneously invites and frustrates the communities.

We consider this foundational, constitutive lack as the absent cause, the foundational antagonism, the constitutive impossibility, around which sociality is constructed.

As Žižek once put it, the antagonism between the “bosses” and “workers” is “already a ‘reactive’ or ‘defence’ formation, an attempt to ‘cope with’ (to come to terms with, to pacify…) the trauma of class antagonism” 92

The homology, therefore, is not so much between the surplus labor and surplus jouissance as it is between the way a particular organization of surplus labor is a response formation to a foundational impossibility and the way the desire of the subject is sustained by a fantasy formation that wraps itself around the constitutive lack embodied in the objet petit a. 93

Diverging from Žižek, we do not restrict the conceptual content of surplus labor
to the paradoxical logic of capitalism, although we concur that there is a capitalist way of organizing the surplus labor, just as there could be a feudal or a communist way of organizing it. This seems more in tune with the original spirit of Marx. While he discussed surplus value as the form of surplus labor under capitalism, Marx neither derived the concept of surplus labor from, nor reduced it to, capitalism. Rather, the concept emerged as a consequence of Marx’s repeated attempts to make sense of the changing forms of economic organizations that existed side by side in the long process of the so-called transition from feudalism to capitalism. To argue otherwise and assert that
Marx constructed surplus labor exclusively through his focus on capitalism would be to neglect how Marx persistently studied, theorized and compared the different economic forms, such as feudalism, primitive communism, simple commodity production, capitalism, and so on, before he arrived at the concept of surplus labor.

In this precise sense, we consider surplus labor to be the “concrete universal” of the Marxian tradition. While surplus labor as a concept emerges out of Marx’s analysis of its various concrete manifestations, it always fails to be given a final shape by any one of these forms. 93

respecting other’s diversity hmm

Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.

Thus, the need to restore the autonomous and legitimate diversity of “other narratives” often functions in subtle ideological terms, namely as a kind of “fantasy screen”, an unquestioned fascination with the other qua fetish-object which allows the gaze of the critic-observer to preserve the unproblematic identity of his or her own subject position. 148

… our point of view is never ideologically neutral, but instead always constituted through the foreclosure of its excessive “internally external” cause … surplus-jouissance. And it goes without saying that this historically specific surplus, today, is co-extensive with capital.

… realty emerges as an object of cognition only on condition that the material surplus of thought is disavowed and transposed into the sublime object of desire “out there”.

I can think something (for instance, a politics of emancipation) only if the constitutive non-coincidence of my thought with itself is externalized as objet a, the elusive X which sets my desire to know (my thought) in motion.

… only by yielding unreservedly to the object (objet a) can the subject find itself; only by going through to its epistemological limit, can thought realize itself.  …

the actualization of any political theory that aims at subverting the status quo depends on an unexpected event which ruptures the seemingly unbreakable continuum of history (or an act which opens up the possibility of radical subjective change) and is perceived as materializing not so much the theory behind it but the very deadlock of (that) theory. From this angle, the task of political thought would seem to be not just to propose a consistent project, but especially to intervene in the symptomal point of our socio-symbolic order in the attempt to seize the Benjaminian “revolutionary chance” coincidental with history’s sudden openness.

What follows logically is that theory can only connect with praxis at the level of the Real, and not at the level of conscious rational signification.

More extensively: precisely because the only point of contact between theory and praxis is in the Real, signification needs to be at least minimally distorted and betrayed if it is to successfully actualize itself.  148

libidinal surplus and signifier

Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.

consubstantial: Of the same substance, nature, or essence … Christian theol  (esp of the three persons of the Trinity) regarded as identical in substance or essence

Entropy:  a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed system

It is Lacan’s notion of the signifier that discloses the intrinsic limitation of Marx’s discovery:

the unpaid labour-power responsible for the creation of surplus-value is ultimately nothing but the constitutive, non-symbolizable libidinal surplus that accompanies any intervention of the signifier, that is to say of any knowledge.

Why? Because knowledge by definition strikes on the wall of its lack (of knowledge), its limit, thereby secreting an entropic addendum, i.e. a measure of libidinal energy which is not available to perform work. This is surplus-jouissance, whose presence proves that an unconscious knowledge is, literally, at work.

Everything hinges on the dialectic of knowledge and jouissance, for the surplus of jouissance (qua lack) is correlated to the arrival on the scene of the signifier.  Language therefore ‘institutes the order of discourse’ but simultaneously ‘it does bring us something extra’.  When Lacan claims that knowledge is a means of jouissance he explains that when at work, knowledge produces entropy, a point of loss, which is the ‘the sole regular point at which we have access to the nature of jouissance.   (44).

Insofar as it overlaps with entropy, surplus-jouissance has no use-value: it is waste, a quantity of libido that is both produced by and lost to any working activity, for we cannot gain control over it — it remains other. (45)

We must clarify that, strictly speaking, we do not have jouissance in addition to the signifier, but as the very impasse consubstantial with the signifier: ‘Anything that is language only obtains jouissance by insisting to the point of producing the loss whereby surplus jouissance takes body’.  Jouissance per se is a mythical entity, while surplus-jouissance is the libido materializing the loss that emerges from this myth — which means that whenever we speak of jouissance we refer to a surplus that can only be given as entropy, a plus that, as it were, coincides with a minus; and that for this reason it cannot perform any work.

Surplus-value is grounded in surplus-jouissance.

Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.

The psychoanalytic contribution to revolutionary politics can be gauged in the claim that radical change becomes possible only at that epistemological conjuncture where the symbolic knowledge supporting the subject fails. (54)

As surplus-jouissance is converted into surplus-value, the object-cause of desire (objet a), by definition unnameable, sheds its disturbing weight and is demoted to the level of commodity. Paradoxically, then, what was hidden in the master’s discourse is now further repressed as it undergoes a radical transformation affecting its substance.  The constant reintegraton and valorization of excess (knowledge) produces more valorized excess (knowledge), in a seemingly endless spiral. From this we infer that the libidinal aim of consumer society is to prevent anxiety by, as it were, dressing up jouissance in sexy garments and making it available everywhere, to the extent, however, that its endogenous reproduction generates nothing but more anxiety.  In today’s consumer society, enjoyment and anxiety coincide.  Although we know full well that commodities only bring ephemeral and angst-ridden pleasures, our answer to this predicament is to consume more, if only to avoid falling behind in the treadmill contest with our fellow consumers (55).

Surplus-value is grounded in surplus-jouissance: the elimination of surplus-value effectively determines the disappearance of the productive drive itself. … Žižek mentions the gap between Madeleine (object of desire) and her curl of blonde hair (objet a, the cause of desire) to argue that Marx’s object of desire (unconstrained productivity) also depends on the presence of surplus-value.

Just as, for Scottie, Judy would not “become” Madeleine without her blond curl, so there is no production without the “inherent obstacle” named surplus-value. Why? Because — and this is the key point — surplus-value like the blond curl, stands for, or overlaps with, the foundational surplus (qua lack) that qualifies jouissance.

The problem with Marx’s hypothesis of the elimination of surplus-value, therefore, is that it obfuscates the ontological presupposition of surplus-value itself, namely surplus-jouissance, upon which everything (the construction of any social order) hinges. (57)

The logical outcome of this critique is that any alternative social system which does not contemplate the dialectics of desire and objet a — the structuring of desire into a socially viable whole through its link to an excessive/elusive element embodying the surplus of jouissance — is also doomed (58).

As history has indeed shown us, the elimination of surplus-value, and consequently profit, does not automatically usher in the elimination of misery, since it fails to consider how surplus-value has its roots in surplus-jouissance.  A combined reading of Lacan’s critique of surplus-value and Sohn-Rethel’s analysis of intellectual and manual labour suggests that

unless we find a way to re-politicize both the sphere of material production and its foundation in entropic jouissance, it is unlikely that we shall succeed in promoting a sustainable alternative to capitalism.  Today, politicizing the Real coterminous with any knowledge-at-work amounts to politicizing the key symptom of our immersion in the symbolic order. 58

surplus-jouissance

Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.

… the historical success of capitalism as an economic as well as socially synthetic system ultimately depends on what we might call, resorting again to the fortunate image popularized by Žižek, the parallax between surplus-value and surplus-jouissance: a minimal shift of perspective reveals that

what we perceive as value is actually, in its deepest connotation, the inerasable lack at the heart of being from which the little a emerges, this thing, “in us more than ourselves” that bothers us from the moment we enter the social link to the moment we relinquish our ties with it.

Today’s global incorporation and valorization of this constitutively human surplus coresponds to an unprecedented attempt to construct a social order on an act of recycling, for what we are sold as desirable value is the end product of the invisible conversion of surplus-jouissance into enjoyment (42).

the unpaid labour-power responsible for the creation of surplus-value is ultimately nothing but the constitutive, non-symbolizable libidinal surplus that accompanies any intervention of the signifier, that is to say of any knowledge.

technological innovation allows the capitalist to deskill workers and increase the reserve army of the unemployed.  Logically, then, the automatization of production, fuelled by various advances in modern science, caused labourers to completely forsake their original control over production — in Lacanian terms, they had to forsake their knowledge qua surplus-jouissance, knowledge as a “spark” that cannot be taught. (50)

subject*

social change is irremediably fantasmatic (206)

The excess (*) attending the subject, to repeat, is therefore both the medium of its connection to other subjects and the obstacle to that connection. This dual function comprises the “relation of nonrelation” that undergirds the social field, a relation predicated on an obstacle to relationality.

… because the Möbius subject encompasses both its symbolic properties (elements of the set) and its formal properties (set-ness, empty set), de-personalization doesn’t rid the subject of its ontic properties but it sets them off, revealing them as contingent (rather than necessary) bearers of meaning.  By making visible the relation of nonrelation through symbolic divestiture the subject situates itself as the source of the non-orientability of the social field, without however being able to account for its own effects within that field in any predictive or comprehensive sense.

In this way, the subject takes ethical responsibility for its parallax oscillation, exposing the excess that sticks to itself (as if it were being seen from the perspective of others) and establishing distance from it, which is a prerequisite to tolerating it nondefensively (207).

As far as I can see, the suspension of the defense against excess — or the neutralization of the more destructive defenses — is the only way that the subject’s transformation of its relation to its own jouissance can affect others.  This suspension means that the subject accepts the relation of nonrelation, giving up its fruitless but often destructive efforts to locate the excess outside itself or to eradicate it.  By refusing to defend itself (or by refusing to deploy destructive defenses such as narcissism, aggression, projection, and scapegoating), the subject decreases its contribution to the affective storm in a social field that circulates excess like a hot potato.  The potentiation of affect decreases, however temporarily, when the subject absorbs some of the affective energy without releasing it back in a destructive form (207).

… in general the absorption of affect by one member of the group provides an opening for others to change their own affective posture.

In any case, no matter what the specific defense aroused, the encounter with the neosubject will make apparent the dominant identifications and defenses of others.  This display of the dominant tendencies in a particular social universe permits reflection on what works and what doesn’t, helping to aggregate and focus social energies.  These may be actions that put the brakes on violence, stymie bullies, alleviate suffering, secure privacy, promote stability and so on.  That is, the encounter with the neosubject forces into the open the rationalizations for the status-quo, and in so doing can foster the conditions under which people will have a choice to make at the level of practices — individual, familial, institutional.

The setting-off of the subject’s substantive traits — through, for example, self-deprecating humor — both exposes the contingent meaning of those traits and reflects back to others the way those traits get used as explanations for social discord. In this way, the subject brings something new into the social field — not only a de-emphasis on ontic properties and a revelation of a dimension of universality independent of such properties, but also a new way of being in the social field that nondefensively accepts the relation of nonrelation.  What is more, unlike the immanent cause or the exceptional cause, the effects of the deployment of the extimate cause, as it generates new behavior and new relations, can be tracked, studied, and analyzed (208).

relation of nonrelation

Although every subject in the field is a Möbius subject, all subjects are marked by their own history and mobilize different defenses against the experience of excess.  The individuals within the social space are diverse, even though they share the common characteristic of excess. put another way, the fact that they are subjects of excess makes it possible for them to be individuated differently and still seek out and maintain connections to one another, even as some of those connections are heavily imbued with aggression and hatred (204).

… by placing the relation of nonrelation front and center, the formal properties of the subject clearly emerge as the route to its universalization and the link to its political potential.  In order for social change to come about, something new has to enter the situation, something that is not simply a funciton of that situation’s determinates (204).

Möbius subject and the relation of nonrelation

The Möbius subject has two driving motivations, that is, motivations at the level of the drive:

1. The first is to maintain the extimacy that is the ground of its existence: as we know, the drive circulates around objet a, the missing object, established by way of the encounter with the formal negation, the Non/Nom-du-Père.

2. The second is to defend itself against the anxiety generated by its excessive status. This anxiety, understood in Lacanian terms, is simply affect itself, a function of the Möbius condition of subjectivity.

The motivations may be at odds, but they derive necessarily from the subject’s founding.  Taken together, they provide the means by which the social space itself is propagated and sustained.

Because, at the level of the drive, the subject comes into existence only if it seems as though objet a is possible, prohibited rather than impossible, the subject has a stake in the very condition that produces anxiety — its status as a signifier depends upon the impossibility of objet a and its status as a signifier makes its ultimate stability, its final meaning or self-consistency, unreachable.  In this dynamic, seen from the level of Symbolic relations, it can seem that the other’s failure to stabilize the subject’s meaning is willfully aggressive (or negligent) rather than a function of impossibility.

As a result, the Möbius subject relates to the other both as the solution and the obstacle to its own inconsistency — a relation of nonrelation.  That is, thanks to the excess that sticks to each subject, and thanks to the fantasy that the other is consistent in a way that the subject is not, the social relation necessarily emerges as a relation of nonrelation (202).

In the Levinasian version the subject seeks to overcome the radical alterity that, in this view, properly belongs to the other.  In the extimate version, the subject must perpetually seek a response from the others because, in fact the subject will never be sure of the meaning of the response it gets, yet the subject has nowhere else to go to get it.  The other is not radically other — it is close enough to the subject in kind to warrant the desire tor the relationship while distant enough in its ability to fulfill the subject’s deepest desire to maintain its otherness.

At the same time, the “other” to whom the subject relates does not truly exist in the way the subject believes: the other is a fantasmatic projection of a wish.  So the subject has a relation of nonrelation to the actual others in the social space.  It is in this relation of nonrelation that we find the sustaining of the duality of subject and other that Levinas requires for ethics but fails to provide.

The hatred and envy that can arise from the subject’s frustration at the other’s inability to repair the subject’s self-inconsistency could easily galvanize the destruction of the very space of the social … (203).  The destruction of that space, however, would spell the demise of the subject qua subject. Subjects mobilize a number of (necessarily inadequate) defenses — including perversion and hysteria — to avoid that result.  … We don’t want to feel that “we’re all in this together” if that means everyone is subject to excess.  We want to feel that someone can solve this problem or be targeted as its source.  But because these wishes do not actually resolve the excess, the best we can do is to try to send it on its rounds, even though it inevitably “returns” to us — since, of course, in reality it never left.  We are stuck with and to excess. From this point of view, it appears that the motivation for the social relation is not the preservation of the other’s distinct existence, as Levinas and Critichley would have it, but rather the need to preserve the social field itself — the field without which the subject (all subjects) as such cannot exist — from a threat of dissolution.

That is, the subject fantasizes that the continual dissolution and reassemblage of the social field made possible and necessary by excess is a threat to the field rather than the very condition of its perpetuation (203).

subject of the drive and the universal

Rothenberg, Molly. The Excessive Subject. Malden, M.A. : Politiy Press, 2010.

As long as we are fixated — as happens in multiculturalism and identity politics — on the symbolic identifiers of our personal identities, we obscure the link between the subject and the drive as the true engine of the subject’s existence.

Molly isn’t big on ‘subject of desire’
For when we focus on the symbolic dimension of identity, we are conceiving of the subject as a subject of desire, perpetually seeking to overcome its lack by finding its object of desire.  Any political action founded on this premise dooms the actors to a futile search for a utopia which, of necessity, must always be deferred (176).

In Žižek’s view, the political meaning of one’s acts has nothing to do with one’s “sincerity or hypocrisy” — that is, one’s “subjective self-experience” is irrelevant to the objective truth of one’s actions. Rather, the subject of the drive institutes a gap between itself and its symbolic subjective dimension.

The subject’s identification with objet a re-casts it, not as a set of symbolic properties, but as connected directly to the order of objectivity.  Introducing a distance towards one’s own symbolic identity puts one in a position to act in an “objective-ethical” way (OWB 182).

Presumably, it is this link to the objective that makes solidarity possible.  The manifold differences or symbolic properties of individuals move to the background, while each subject, as identified with the object of the drive, finds its way to the objective order, the only terrain on which meaningful change can occur. Solidarity, then, emerges not from intersubjective relations but rather from the relations of subjects purified of their symbolic identities, subjects who meet on the ground of objectivity, as objects (177).

***** Lacan’s four 4 discourses *****

Bracher, Mark. “On the Psychological and Social Functions of Language: Lacan’s Theory of the Four Discourses” Lacanian Theory of Discourse. New York UP: New York. 1994. Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn et al. (eds) pp. 107-128.

Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psycho- analysis. Routledge: New York, 1996.

Fink, Bruce. “Master Signifier and the Four Discourses.” Key Concepts in Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Danny Nobus (ed), Rebus Press. 1998.

Lacan’s 4 discourses stress the nature of intersubjectivity, that speech always implies another subject. Lacan identifies four possible types of social bond, four possible articulations of the symbolic network which regulates intersubjective relations. These ‘four discourses’ are the discourse of the master, the discourse of the university, the discourse of the hysteric, and the discourse of the analyst. Lacan represents each of the four discourses by an algorithm: each algorithm contains the following four algebraic symbols:

S1 (Master Signifier)

The force then —psychological and social— of the articulated systems of knowledge derives from the systems’ positioning the subject at certain points within them and thus establishing a certain “identity” for the subject.

These positionings entail a certain sense of identity (or ego), a certain jouissance, and a certain structuring of the unconscious. The most significant factor in these positionings is the imposition of the trait unaire, or singular characteristic. This singular characteristic is the earliest significance through which the child experiences itself —as a result of significations attributed to it by the Other (mother, father, and ultimately society as large).

This constitutes the subject’s primary identification, and this primary identification continues throughout the subject’s existence to exercise a decisive influence on the subject’s desire, thought, perception, and behaviour. But the trait unaire established by primary identification is supplemented and extended by various secondary identifications that serve as its avatars. It is, in fact, only through these secondary identifications that the primary identification manifests itself. And these secondary identifications, which are certain (usually collective) values or ideals, play a crucial role in discourse. They are what Lacan calls master signifiers, S1

A master signifier is any signifier that a subject has invested his or her identity in —any signifier that the subject has identified with (or against) and that thus constitutes a powerful positive or negative value. Master signifiers are thus the factors that give the articulated system of signifiers (S2) — that is, knowledge, belief, language —purchase on a subject: they are what make a message meaningful, what make it have an impact rather than being like a foreign language that one can’t understand.

Master signifiers would include words like “God”, “Satan”, “sin” “heaven”, and “hell” in religious discourse and “American”, “freedom”, “democracy” and “communism” in political discourse. [Mark Bracher, 1994. 111]

S2 (Knowledge)

a (The Plus-de-Jouir)

The Real, that which is simultaneously produced and excluded by the system of knowledge and its master signifiers

When the divided subject $, arises inthe intervention of S1 in S2, another factor isproduced as well: the object a.

(The barred subject)

The subject split between the identity to which it is interpellated (S1) and the plus-de-jouir (a), the jouissance that it sacrifices in assuming that identity.

What distinguishes the four discourses from one another is the positions of these four symbols. There are four positions in the algorithms of the four discorses, each of which is designated by a different name. Each discourse is defined by writing the four algebraic symbols in a different position. The symbols always remain in the same order, so each discourse is simple the result of rotating the symbols a quarter turn.

Speaker       Receiver

Agent —–> Other
Truth        Production

Production: the enjoyment/jouissance produced by discourse

The left-hand positions designate the factors active in the subject who is speaking or sending a message, and the right-hand positions are occupied by the factors activated or elicited in the subject who receives the message.

The top position on each side represents the overt or manifest factor

The bottom position the covert, latent, implicit, or repressed factor — the factor that acts or occurs beneath the surface.

More specifically, the top left position is the place of agency or dominance; it is occupied by the factor in a discourse that is most active and obvious. The bottom left position is the place of (hidden) truth — that is, of the factor that supports, grounds, underwrites, and gives rise to the dominant factor, or constitutes the condition of its possibility, but is repressed by it.

On the right, the side of the receiver, the top position is designated as that of the other, which is occupied by the factor in the receiving subject that is called into action by the dominant factor in the message. The activation of this factor is a prerequisite for receiving and understanding a given message or discourse. For example, if systematic knowledge is the dominant element of a discourse (occupying the top left position), receivers, in order to understand this discourse, must (for a moment, at least) be receptive to a preconstituted knowledge, which means emptying themselves of any knowledge that might interfere with the knowledge in the discourse and becoming an amorphous, nonarticulated substance, a, to be articulated by the discourse. What is produced as a result of their allowing themselve to be thus interpellated by the dominant factor of a discourse is represented by the position of production, the bottom right. (Bracher, 1994, 109).

The Discourse of the Master

S1 —> S2
$             a

Žižek, Slavoj  Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle. London: Verso, 2004.

There is 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 bond. Let us imagine a confused situation of social disintegration, in which the cohesive power of ideology has lost its efficiency: in such a situation, the Master would be the one who invented a new signifier, the famous ‘quilting point’, which again stablized the situation and made it readable; the University discourse, which would then elaborate the network of Knowledge which sustained this readability, would by definition presuppose and rely on the initial gesture of the Master. The Master adds no new positive content; he merely adds a signifier which suddenly turns disorder inot order — into ‘new harmony’ … Let us take as an example anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1920s: people felt disorientated, succumbing to an undeserved military defeat, an economic crisis which ate away at their life savings … and the Nazis provided a single agent which accounted for it all: the Jew, the Jewish plot. That is 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 (Ž 138).

The most salient feature: dominance of the master signifier S1. Upon reading or hearing such a discourse, one is forced, in order to understand the message, to accord full explanatory power and/or moral authority to the proffered master signifiers and to refer all other signifiers (objects, concepts, or issues) back to these master signifiers. In doing this, the receiver of the message enacts the function of knowledge (S2). As a result of enacting this function, the receiver produces a plus-de-jouir that is, the suppressed (i.e., beneath the bar) excess of enjoyment, no longer to be enjoyed, for which there is no place in the system of knowledge or belief (S2) enacted by the receiver in response to the master’s S1. It is this a, this plus-de-jouir, that carries the power of revolution, of subverting and disrupting the system of knowledge (S2) and its master signifiers (S1). (Bracher 1993, 121)

[All attempts at totalization are doomed to failure. The discourse of the master ‘masks the division of the subject’ The master (S1) is the agent who puts the slave (S2) to work; the result of this work is a surplus (a) that the master attempts to appropriate. Dylan Evans 45]

The discourse of the Master restricts this a, the unsymbolized cause of desire, to the receiver (the slave, the one in the position of powerlessness), who has no voice (no legitimation of his or her own subjectivity).; The speaker, or master, is oblivious to the cause of his own desire (a)and has even repressed his own self-division ($) The essence of the position of the master is to be castrated: a certain jouissance is forbidden to him. The speaker is totally oblivious, unaware of the reason for promulgating its master signifiers.

Discourses that promote mastery, discourses that valorize and attempt to enact an autonomous, self-identical ego by instituting dominance of master signifiers (S1), which order knowledge (S2) according to their own values and keep fantasy ($♦a) in a subordinate and repressed position.

It is only by confronting this lack in its relation to the cause of desire (a) that the impetus behind S1 can be understood and, perhaps redirected, displaced. By interrogating the something of the subject that is left out by the master signifier, it becomes possible to reclaim that which has been suppressed and repressed and thus institute a new economy of both the psychological and the social structure. If one wants to be subversive, Lacan suggests, one might do worse that to approach “the hole from which the master signifier gushes”. (Bracher 121)

All teaching begins as a discourse of mastery with the imposition of basic concepts of a discipline i.e., master signifiers that serve to ground and explain the procedure of a body of knowledge that constitutes the discipline. Medical teaching for example, consists of acts of reverence to terms considered sacred, that is master signifiers. Philosophy is a clear instance of the discourse of the Master. Philosophical works are ultimately nothing other than attempts to promote a certain way of speaking, to promote certain master signifiers.

No discourse can operate without master signifiers, rather the question is what use we put the master signifiers to. My aim is to use these (Lacanian) master signifiers as means to promote change rather than as holy words with which we might baptize or consecrate certain phenomena and thereby ascend to some state of blessedness.

Lacanian master signifiers and knowledge S1 and S2 like any others, as soon as they become the dominant factor in a discourse, constellate a discourse of the Master and a discourse of the University, respectively, unless subordinated to an alternative aim, which the discourse of the Analyst provides.

From Paul Verhaeghe, Does the Woman Exist? 1997, 1999 rev. ed.

He (the master) is blind to his own truth, he cannot recognise this truth, because if he did he would fall from his position and cease to be master.  108

The Discourse of the University

For centuries, knowledge has been pursued as a defense against truth. Jacques Lacan

S2 —> a
S1       $

[The dominant position is occupied by knowledge. This illustrates the fact that behind all attempts to impart an apparently ‘neutral’ knowledge to the other can always be located an attempt at mastery (master of knowledge, and domination of the other to whom this knowledge is imparted). The discourse of the university represents the hegemony of knowledge, particularly visible in modernity in the form of hegemony of science. Evans 46]

We begin our academic careers as students in the position of a receivers of the system of knowledge S2. Subjected in this position to a dominating totalized system of knowledge/belief (S2), we are made to produce ourselves as (alienated) subjects ($) of this system.

Our position as the a simply continues the position we are born into. Before we learn to speak — and even before we are born — we occupy the position of the receiver of speech, and we do so in the form of the a as the as yet unassimilated piece of the Real that is the object of the desires of those around us, particularly our parents, for whom children often function as the object a that promises to compensate for the Other’s lack and thus fill the subject’s lack as well. As we have seen, our preverbal experience of ourselves and the world, mediated as it is by the actions and demeanor of our primary caretakers, is partially determined by the system of knowledge/belief, or language, inhabited by them, and by the position they attribute to us within that system, speaking and thinking of us, as son or daughter, delicate or hearty, future beauty queen or athlete, etc. In the second instance it means that when we begin to understand language and to speak it, we must fashion our sense of ourselves (our identity) out of the subject positions made available by the signifiers (i.e., categories) of the System S2. (Bracher 115)

This discursive structure and hence the totalizing and tyrannical effect of the S2 are not limited however to our infancy or to education. Bureaucracy is perhaps the purest form of the discourse of the University; it is nothing but knowledge — i.e., pure impersonal system: The System, and nothing else. No provision is made for individual subjects and their desires and idiosyncrasies. Individuals are to act, think and desire onlytin ways that function to enact reproduce, or extend The System. Bureaucracy thus functions to educate, in the root sense of that term: it forms particular types of subjects. (Bracher 1993, 55) (1994, 115)

The kind of knowledge involved in the university discourse amounts to mere rationalization, in the most pejorative Freudian sense of the the term. We can imagine it, not as the kind of thought that tries to come to grips with the Real, to maintain the difficulties posed by apparent logical and/or physical contradictions, but rather as a kind of encyclopaedic endeavour to exhaust a field. Working in the service of the master signifier, more or less any kind of argument will do, as long as it takes on the guise of reason and rationality (Fink 34).

The Discourse of the Hysteric (from Bruce Fink)

$ —> S1
a       S2

In the hysteric’s discourse the split subject occupies the dominant position and addresses S1 calling it into question. Whereas the university discourse takes its cue from the master signifier, glossing over it with some sort of trumped-up system, the hysteric goes at the master and demands that he or she show his or her stuff, prove his or her mettle by producing something serious by way of knowledge.

The hysteric’s discourse is the exact opposite of the university discourse, all the positions reversed. The hysteric maintains the primacy of subjective division, the contradiction between conscious and unconscious, and thus the conflictual, or self-contradictory nature of desire itself.

In the lower right-hand corner, we find knowledge S2. This position is also the one where Lacan situates jouissance, the enjoyment produced by a discourse, and he thus suggests here that an hysteric gets off on knowledge. Knowledge is perhaps eroticized to a greater extent in the hysteric’s discourse than elsewhere. In the master’s discourse, knowledge is prized only insofar as it can produce something else, only so long as it can be put to work for the master; yet knowledge itself remains inaccessible to the master. In the university discourse, knowledge is not so much an end in itself as that which justifies the academic’s very existence and activity. Hysteria thus provides a unique configuration with respect to knowledge, and I believe this is why Lacan finally identifies the discourse of science with that of hysteria (Fink 37).

The hysteric pushes the master ”incarnated in a partner, teacher, or whomever” to the point where he or she can find the master’s knowledge lacking. Either the master does not have an explanation for everything, or his or her reasoning does not hold water. In addressing the master, the hysteric demands that he or she produce knowledge and then goes on to disprove his or her theories. Historically speaking, hysterics have been a true motor force behind the medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic elaboration of theories concerning hysteria. Hysterics led Freud to develop psychoanalytic theory and practice, all the while proving to him in his consulting room the inadequacy of his knowledge and know-how.

Hysterics, like good scientists, do not set out to desperately explain everything with the knowledge they already have ”that is the job of the systematizer or even the encyclopedaedist” nor do they take for granted that all the solutions will be someday forthcoming. … In the hysteric’s discourse, object (a) the Real appears in the position of truth. That means that the truth of the hysteric’s discourse, its hidden motor force, is the Real. Physics too, when carried out in a truly scientific spirit, is ordained and commanded by the real, that is to say by that which does not work, by that which does not fit. It does not set out to carefully cover over paradoxes and contradictions, in an attempt to prove that the theory is nowhere lacking” that it works in every instance” but rather to take such paradoxes and contradictions as far as they can go (Fink 37).

The Discourse of the Analyst

a —> $
S2    S1

The discourse of the analyst is produced by a quarter turn of the discourse of the hysteric (in the same way as Freud developed psychoanalysis by giving an interpretive turn to the discourse of his hysterical patients.) The position of the agent, which is the position occupied by the analyst in the treatment, is occupied by objet petite a this illustrates the fact that the analyst must, in the course of treatment, become the cause of the analysand’s desire. The fact that this discourse is the inverse of the discourse of the master emphasises that, for Lacan, psychoanalysis is an essentially subversive practice which undermines all attempts at domination and mastery.

The analyst plays the part of pure desirousness (pure desiring subject), and interrogates the subject in his or her division, precisely at those points where the split between conscious and unconscious shows through: slips of the tongue, bungled and unintended acts, slurred speech, dreams, etc. In this way, the analyst sets the patient to work, to associate, and the product of that laborious association is a new master signifier. The patient in a sense ‘coughs up’ a master signifier that has not yet been brought into relation with any other signifier.

As it appears concretely in the analytic situation, a master signifier presents itself as a dead end, a stopping point, a term, word, or phrase that puts an end to association, that grinds the patient’s discourse to a halt. It could be a proper name (the patient’s or the analyst’s), a reference to the death of a loved one, the name of a disease (AIDS, cancer, psoriasis, blindness), or a variety of other things. The task of analysis is to bring such master signifiers into relation with other signifiers, that is, to dialecticize the master signifiers it produces. That involves reliance upon the master’s discourse … recourse to the fundamental structure of signification: a link must be established between each master signifier and a binary signifier such that subjectification takes place. The symptom itself may present itself a s a master signifier; in fact, as anlysis proceeds and as more and more aspects of a person’s are taken as symptoms, each symptomatic activity or pain may present itself in the analytic work as a word or phrase that simply is, that seems to signify nothing to the subject. Lacan refers to S1 in the analyst’s discourse as la betise (stupidity or ‘funny business’), a reference back to the case of Little Hans who refers to his whole horse phobia as la betise. It is a piece of nonsense produced by the analytic process itself.

S2 appears in analytic discourse in the place of truth (lower left-hand position). S2 represents knowledge here, but obviously not the kind of knowledge that occupies the dominant position in the university discourse. The knowledge in question here is unconscious knowledge, that knowledge that is caught up in the signifying chain and has yet to be subjectified. Where that knowledge was, the subject must come to be.

Now according to Lacan, while the analyst adopts the analytic discourse, the analysand is inevitably, in the course of analysis, hystericized. The analysand, regardless of his or her clinical structure — whether phobic, perverse, or obsessive compulsive — is backed into the hysteric’s discourse. Why is that? Because the analyst puts the subject as divided, as self-contradictory, on the firing line, so to speak. The analyst does not question the obsessive neurotic’s theories about Dostoevsky’s poetics, for example, attempting to show the neurotic where his or her intellectual views are inconsistent. Such an obsessive may attempt to speak during his or her analytic sessions from the position of S2, in the university (academic) discourse, but to engage the analysand at that level allows the analysand to maintain that particular stance. Instead, the analyst, ignoring, we can imagine, the whole of a half-hour long critique of Bakhtin’s veiws on Dostoevsky’s dialogic style, may focus on the slightest slip of the tongue or ambiguity in the analysand’s speech — the analysand’s use, for example, of the graphic metaphor ‘near misses’ to describe her bad timing in the publishing of her article on Bakhtin, when the analyst knows that this analysand had fled her country of origin shortly after rejecting an unexpected an unwanted marriage proposal (‘near Mrs.’).

Thus the analyst, by pointing to the fact that the analysand is not master of his or her own discourse, instates the analysand as divided between conscious speaking subject and some other (subject) speaking at the same time through the same mouthpiece, as agent of a discourse wherein the S1s produced in the course of analysis are interrogated and made to yield their links with S2 (as in the hysteric’s discourse). Clearly the motor force of the process is object (a)— the analyst operating as pure desirousness.

What does it mean concretely for the analyst to occupy the position of object (a) for an analysand, the position of cause of the analysand’s desire? Many analysands tend, at an early stage of analysis, to thrust responsibility for slips and slurs onto the analyst. As one patient said to her therapist, ‘You’re the one who always sees dark and dirty things in everything I say!’ At the outset, analysands often see no more in a slip than a simple problem regarding the control of the tongue muscles or a slight inattention. The analyst is the one who attributes some Other meaning to it.

As time goes on, however, analysands themselves begin to attribute meaning to such slips, and the analyst, rather than standing in for the unconscious, for that strange Other discourse, is viewed by the analysand as its cause: ‘I had a dream last night because I knew I was coming in to see you this morning.’ In such a statement, very often heard in analysis, the analyst is case in the role of the cause of the analysand’s dream: ‘I wouldn’t have had such a dream were it not for you.’ ‘The dream was for you.’ You were in my dream last night.’ Unconscious formations, such as dreams, fantasies, and slips, are produced for the analyst, to be recounted to the analyst, to tell the analyst something. The analyst, in that sense, is behind, is the reason for their production, is, in a word, their cause.

When the analyst is viewed as an other like the analysand, the analyst can be considered an imaginary object or other for the analysand. When the analyst is viewed as a judge or parent, the analyst can be considered a sort of symbolic object or Other for the analysand. When the analyst is viewed as the cause of the analysand’s unconscious formations, the analyst can be considered a ‘real’ object, object (a) for the analysand.

Once the analyst has manoeuvred in such a way that he or she is placed in the position of cause by the analysand (cause of the analysand’s dreams and of the wishes they fulfil — in short, cause of the analysand’s desire), certain manifestation of the analysand’s transference love or ‘positive transference,’ typically associated with the early stages of analysis, may well subside, giving way to something far less ‘positive’ in coloration. The analysand may begin to express his or her sense that the analyst is ‘under my skin,’ like an irritant. Analysands who seemed to be comfortable or at ease during their sessions at the outset (by no means the majority however) may well display or express discomfort, tension, and even signs that they are rebelling against the new configuration, the new role the analyst is taking on in their lives and fantasies. The analyst is becoming too important, is showing up in their daydreams, in their masturbation fantasies, in their relationships with the significant other and so on.

Lacan considers this to be the ARCHIMEDEAN POINT OF ANALYSIS, that is the very point at which the analyst can apply the lever that can move the symptom.

The analyst in the position of cause of desire for the analysand is, according to Lacan, THE MOTOR FORCE OF ANALYSIS; in other words, it is the position the analyst must occupy in order for tranference to lead to something other than identification with the analyst as the endpoint of an analysis (identification with the analyst being considered the goal of analysis by certain psychoanalysts).

‘Negative transference’ is by no means the essential sign indicating that the analysand has come to situate the analyst as cause of desire; it is but one possible manifestation of the latter. Nevertheless, the attempt by therapists of many ilks to avoid or immediately neutralize any emergence of negative transference … means that aggression and anger are turned into feelings which are inappropriate for the analysand to project onto the therapist … Patients thereby learn not to express them in therapy … thereby defusing the intensity of the feeling and possible therapeutic uses of the projection. Anger and aggression are thus never worked out with the therapist, but rather examined ‘rationally.’ … It is only by making psychical conflicts — such as aggression against one’s parent or hatred of a family member — present in the relationship with the analyst that the patient can work them through. To work them through means not that they are intellectually viewed and processed,’ but rather that the internal libidinal conflict which is holding a symptomatic relationship to someone in place must be allowed to repeat itself in the relationship with the analyst and play itself out. If verbalization (putting things into words) is the only technique allowed the analysand, a true separation from the analyst and from analysis never occurs. Projection must be allowed to go so far as to bring out all the essential aspects of a conflict-ridden relationship, all the relevant recollections and dynamics, and the full strength of the positive/negative affect. It should be recalled that one of the earliest lessons of Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria was that verbalizing traumatic events without reliving the accompanying affect left the symptom intact.

Transference, viewed as the transference of affect (evoked in the past by people and events) in the here and now of the analytic setting, means that the analysand must be able to project onto the analyst a whole series of emotions felt in relation to significant figures from his or her past and present. If the analyst is concerned with ‘being himself’ or being herself’ or with being the ‘good father’ or ‘good mother’ he or she is likely to try ot immediately distance him or herself from the role in which the analysand is casting him or her, by saying something like, ‘I am not your father’ or ‘You are projecting.’ The message conveyed by such a statement is, ‘Don’t confuse me with him’ or ‘It is not appropriate to project.’ But the analyst would do better to neither encourage or discourage the case of mistaken identity that arises through the transfer of feeling, and to let the projection of different personas occur as it will — unless, of course, it goes so far as to jeopardize the very continuation of the therapy.

Rather than interpreting the fact of transference, rather than pointing out to the analysand that he or she is projecting or transferring something onto the analyst, the analyst should direct attention to the content (the ideational and affective content) of the projection, attempting to get the analysand to put it into words. Not to dissipate it or prohibit it, not to make the analysand feel guilty about it, but to speak it. Here the analyst works — often more by asking questions than by interpreting — to re-establish the connections between the content (thought and feeling) and the persons, situation, and relationships that initially gave rise to it.

Just as one should interpret not the fact of transference but rather its content, one should avoid interpreting ‘resistance,’ transference being but one manifestation of resistance. Resistance, rather than being nothing more than an ego defense, is in Lacan’s view, structural, arising because the real resists symbolization; when the analysand’s experience resists being put into words, he or she grabs onto, digs into, or takes it out on the only other person present: the analyst. Transference is thus a direct product of resistance, of the resistance the real (e.g. trauma) erects against its symbolization, against being spoken. … Of course the analysand resists — that is a given, a structural necessity. Interpretation must aim at the traumatic event or experience that is resisting verbalization, not the mere fact of resistance (Fink 43-45).

Fink, Bruce. “Master Signifier and the Four Discourses.” Key Concepts in Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Danny Nobus (ed), Rebus Press. 1998.