Category: objet (a)

johnston objet a seminar 1965-66 pt2

Johnston, A. (2013).The object in the mirror of genetic transcendentalism: Lacan’s objet petit a between visibility and invisibility Continental Philosophy Review. 46:251–269  Here is Part 1

In the Ur-event of identification, the primal scene of mirroring, the child’s entranced enchantment by the power-and-salvation-promising image in the shiny surface leaves him/her blind to the surrounding framing functions — these functions include the looks, gestures, speech, and various expressions of interest in the body of the child by its supporting big(ger) Others — responsible for constituting (invisibly off-stage, as it were) this visuallymediated experience as what it appears to be. Lacan’s list of spatio-temporally incarnate instances of object a (again, breast, feces, phallus, gaze, and voice) makes a
lot of sense in this connection. Continue reading “johnston objet a seminar 1965-66 pt2”

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt1

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

Duties that we impose on ourselves and experience as “sacrifices” are, as often as not, a response to the fear of the risks involved in the case if we did not impose these duties. In other words, they are precisely the way we hang on to something that we fear most of all to lose. And it is this fear (or this “possession”) that enslaves us and makes us accept all kinds of sacrifices.

Lacan’s point is that this possession is not some empirical good that we have and don’t want to lose. It is of symbolic nature, which is precisely what makes it so hard to give up.

To renounce this “good” is not so much to renounce something that we have, as it is to renounce something that we don’t have but which is nevertheless holding our universe together.

In other words, “psychoanalysis teaches that in the end it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration” (S VII, p. 307).

This formula is, in fact, crucial for the “ethics of psychoanalysis,” which could be defined as that which liberates us by making us accept the risk of castration.

In a certain sense, it puts us in the position where we have nothing to lose. However, while not false, this way of putting things can be misleading, since it suggests some kind of ultimate loss beyond which we no longer can desire or get attached to anything, which is precisely not the point.

The loss in question is rather supposed to liberate the field of the desire – liberate it in the sense that the desire no longer depends upon the interdiction (of the Law) but is led to find and articulate its own law.

The intervention of the law, far from simply “repressing” our desire, helps us deal with the impasse or impossibility involved in the mechanism of the desire as such. To put it simply: the law gives a signifying form to the impossibility involved in the very phenomenon of desire. 178

 

dolar being and void pt2

Mladen Dolar (2013) “The Atom and the Void – from Democritus to Lacan.” Filozofski vestnik Volume XXXIV, Number 2, 11–26.

Hasn’t one avoided the void by espousing it? The void can be seen as the way to make non-being manageable, to turn it into something countable, the very condition of count.

But ‘is’ there non-being which cannot be quite accounted for by the binary couple of the one and the void?

dolar 1 into 2 (pt2)

Dolar, Mladen “One Divides into Two.” e-flux journal #33 March 2012.

What, if anything, is the Other? What is the Other the name for?

The first answer proposed by Lacan develops in the direction of the Other as the Other of the symbolic order, the Other of language, the Other upholding the very realm of the symbolic, functioning as its guarantee, its necessary supposition, that which enables it to signify.

And if this claim is to be placed within the general thrust of structuralism, which was then dominant, the name of the Other, in this view, would be the structure.

The Other is the Other of structure, and one can nostalgically recall its Saussurean and LŽevi-Straussian underpinnings.

What follows from there, in the same general thrust, is the notorious formula The unconscious is structured like a language — The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.
****

Footnote:   What if anything, is the Other? But asking “What?” already precludes another way of asking, namely, “Who is the other?” For the question of the other is first dramatically posed in relation to another person, this alter ego next to me, the same as me and for that very reason all the more the Other.

This is where the whole drama of what Lacan famously called the mirror stage comes in, the mirror stage “as formative of the function of the ego,” as the title of his first paper runs.

In this drama, the “alter ego” is constitutive of the ego, precisely insofar as it is the agent of alterity, opacity, the foreignness of the Other, under the auspices of “the same,” and it is only by this other and through it that one can assume the self of the ego as “my own,”

The foreignness of the other intersects with the own-ness of the self; the other is on the one hand homogenized, so that I can recognize myself in it, but only at the price of alienating myself in this image of the other — the other is the same as me, my double, and precisely because of that my competitor, my opponent, an intimate enemy who threatens my life and integrity.

And one can, in another quick aside, point to the fact that Levinas took his cue from this same constellation, from the question of “Who is the other?” from the alterity of the other, epitomized strikingly and immediately by his or her face, in a way that cannot be circumvented and that circumscribes the very notion of the self so his whole enterprise hinges massively on the question of the two and how to conceive it, and on the ethics that follows, taking the Other as its guideline. This is his particular way of taking up the question of the two.

******

There are two perspectives on this structure.

1.) The first, stemming from Saussure, treats language as a system in which all entities
are differential and oppositive, made of differences. No element has an identity or substance of its own; it is defined only through its difference from others, its whole being is exhausted by its difference, and hence they hang together, they are bound together with an iron necessity of tight interdependence. The symbolic is made of differences, and only of differences — and since it has no firm, substantial hold it can equally and with equanimity be applied to language, kinship, food, myth, clothing — the whole of culture.

2.) But the second perspective, the one that Freud opens up with the unconscious, presents the slide of contingency within this well-ordered system.

The words contingently and erratically sound alike; not ruled by grammar or semantics, they
contaminate each other, they slip, and this is where the unconscious takes the chance of appearing in cracks and loopholes.

The first perspective hinges on necessity, ruled by differentiality, which is what makes linguistics possible.

The second perspective hinges on contingent similarities and cracks and is the nightmare of linguistics, because its logic is quirky and unpredictable; it pertains to what Lacan called linguisterie and lalangue.

So if we have on one hand the Other of the Saussurean structure, or system, then the unconscious represents a bug in the system, the fact that it can never quite work without a bug.

With the unconscious the structure slips.

What was supposed to work as the Other, the bearer of rule and necessity, the guarantee of meaning, shows its other face, which is whimsical and ephemeral and makes meaning slide. The Other is the Other with the bug.

And what is more, it is only the bug that ultimately makes the Other other — the Other is the Other not on account of structure, but because of the bug that keeps derailing it.

The bug is the anomaly of the Other, its face of inconsistency, that which defies regularity and law.

Inside the Other of language, which enables speech, <strong>there emerges another Other that derails speech and makes us say something else than we intended</strong>, derailing the intention of meaning.

Yet the second Other cannot be seized and maintained independently of the first as another Other, the Other within the Other — the Other cannot be duplicated and counted, the bug makes it uncountable.

The alterity of the unconscious is not cut of the stuff of symbolic differences, it opens a difference that is not merely a symbolic difference, but that is, so to speak, “the difference within the difference,” another kind of difference within the symbolic one, a difference recalcitrant to integration into the symbolic, and yet only emerging in its bosom, with no separate realm of its own.

And the very notion of subjectivity pertains precisely to the impossibility of reducing the second difference to the first one.

In other words, the subject that emerges there is premised on a “two,”on the relation to a kernel within the symbolic order that cannot be symbolically sublimated.

So the bottom line would be: there is an irreducible two, an irreducible gap between the One and the Other, and the unconscious, at its minimal, presents the figure of two that are not merged into one.

The problem that remains is that, well, the Other doesn’t exist.

dolar 1 into 2 pt1

Dolar, Mladen “One Divides into Two.” e-flux journal #33 March 2012.

This was an old Maoist slogan from the 1960s. Despite its air of universal truth it has become dated, and I fully realize the danger of appearing dated myself by starting in this way. Nowadays, one can recite this slogan in front of a class full of students and none will have ever heard it or have any inkling as to its bearing or its author — it’s almost like speaking Chinese.

However much we count, however many ones we add to the first one, we cannot count to the two of the Other. The progression of counting extends the initial one into a homogeneous and uniform process, while the Other presents a dimension that would be precisely “other” in relation to this uniformity.

In a nutshell, the otherness of the Other, if it can be conceived, is a dimension that cannot be accounted for in terms of One. If the Other exists, then we have some hope of escaping from the circle, or the ban, of One.

The dimension of the Other might present a two that would really make a difference, not merely a difference between one and another, that is, ultimately, between the one and itself, the count based on the internal splitting of one, but rather another difference altogether, beyond the delightful oxymoronic phrase “same difference.”

One can immediately appreciate the high philosophical stakes here. A large part of modern philosophy, if not all of it, has aligned under the banner of the Other, in one way or another, whatever particular names have been used to designate it, and if philosophy has thus espoused the slogan of the Other it has done so in order to establish a dimension that would beable to break the spell of One, in particular its complicity with totality, with forming a whole.

There is a hidden propensity of One to form a whole, to encompass multiplicity and heterogeneity within a single first principle. That program was pronounced at the dawn of philosophy, spelled out by Parmenides in three simple words, the slogan hen kai pan, one and all

So if the Other exists, if it can be conceived in terms other than the terms of one, it would permit us to get out of this ban and this circle.

Indeed, the task of modern philosophy, if I may take the liberty of using this grossly simplified and massive language, was to think the Other that would not be complicit in collusion with the One of hen kai pan, and thus, ultimately, the task to think the two, to conceive the Other that wouldn’t fall into the register of the One

***

I will invoke Freud and now I will take the tricky path of conceiving the two in terms of the Other in psychoanalysis, the Other being a key psychoanalytic term

I said above “If the Other exists …” and this brings me to a very basic asset that lies at the heart of psychoanalysis and the work of Jacques Lacan. There is something like a spectacular antinomy at the foundation of psychoanalytic theory,

an antinomy worthy of Kantian antinomies, and Kant has brought the notion of antinomy to a pinnacle  where reason, as a striving for unity, runs into an irremediable two, an opposition that cannot be reduced.

This Lacanian antinomy of the two pertains to the nature of the Other.

One can pose it as the antinomy of two massively opposing statements:

1.  There is the Other, which is the essential dimension that psychoanalysis has to deal with. Notoriously, Freud spoke of the unconscious as “ein anderer Schauplatz,” the other scene, another stage, a stage inherently other in relation to the one of consciousness, to its count and to what it can account for. It defies the count of consciousness, which is ultimately the homogeneous count providing sense as a unitary prospect

So there is the Other of the unconscious. … “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.”

And another of his formulas runs: “Desire is the desire of the Other”

There is an Other that agitates our desires and prevents us from assuming them simply our own. These two short statements, in no uncertain terms, place the unconscious and desire under the banner of the Other.

There is the unconscious, and there is desire only insofar as each intimately pertains to the Other, they are “of the Other,” and the Other is what stirs their intimacy.

There is the Other at the heart of all entities that psychoanalysis has to deal with, … the Other of a qualitatively different nature in relation to the realm of One.

2. The second part of this antinomy, in stark contradiction to the first, states bluntly: The Other lacks.

There is a lack in the Other, the Other is haunted by a lack, or to extend it a bit further: The Other doesn’t exist.

“There is the Other” vs. “The Other doesn’t exist.”

How can the very dimension on which psychoanalysis is ultimately premised not exist?

What is the status of this Other that is emphatically there, permeating the very notion of the unconscious, of desire, and so forth, and that yet at the same time emphatically lacks?

Can the two statements be reconciled in their glaring contradiction?

Is this a case of a Kantian antinomy, exceeding the limits of knowledge and unitary reasoning?

And how can one posit the Other as the very notion surpassing the boundaries and the framework of One while maintaining that it lacks?

Is this an exhaustive alternative?

dolar being and void pt 1

Mladen Dolar (2013) “The Atom and the Void – from Democritus to Lacan.” Filozofski vestnik, Vol XXXIV, Number 2, 11–26.

The path of the void and of non-being is the path that one cannot possibly adopt and therefore one must not adopt it (‘it must not be’) – but why the prohibition since one cannot conceivably adopt it at all?

Why prohibit something that cannot be anyway?

The tacit presupposition of the first statement, its implicit assumption, is that one must act in favour of being to counteract a possible catastrophe, to abjure the void. One is on a battlefront, and being is a weapon one has to use against an unfathomable enemy.

… being would be like a defense mechanism against the void, and by presenting being as a matter of choice and decision there is a disavowed primacy of the void as the lure, the temptation and the threat, lurking behind any talk about being, part and parcel with its logos.

So how did the void come about? It came about as the discourse of being as the defense mechanism against the void.

Atomism emerged as a reaction against the Parmenidian assertion of being, not accepting the choice and the alternative, but taking both paths at the same time, … it introduces the void as the essential component of being. … one posits the non-being at the core of being

atomism includes a certain insight that Hegel sees as valid and far-reaching, namely that there is a principle of negativity which moves both thought and being, and that this principle forms the inside of both at their core,

****
The Lacanian real – and if there is a Lacanian materialism, then it pertains to the notion of the real – is neither a thought, an idea, nor a being (nor matter for that matter), but something emerging precisely in their rift, something that gets lost in the subsequent self-evident division into being and thought and their opposition.
****

So what is indivisible to Hegel is neither the one nor the void, the indivisible is the division itself.

However far we seek for a minimal element, we never arrive at a one as the minimal and the indivisible, but at the division. … what cannot be divided any further is the division;

Against the Parmenidian exorcism of the void, he takes up the atomistic espousal of the void as the way to address the basic matrix of being.

Against the exclusion of the void, there is the inclusion of the void into each particle, the missing half of anything positively existing, of any manifestation of being, and this invisible missing half endows being with Unruhe, its unrest, its restlessness, its being ever propelled, the fact that it can only be addressed in its becoming, its production and its incompleteness.

zupančič not-mother pt 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

zupančič not-mother pt 1

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

The negation itself is negated (we could say that we now get something like, “this is not not-mother”), yet something of it persists — the repression, the symptoms persist beyond becoming conscious of the repressed.

Here, we come across one of the crucial (and constitutive) discoveries of psychoanalysis, without which the latter would be little more than a hermeneutics of the unconscious, depending entirely on the (correct) interpretation, or translation, of the text deformed by the unconscious into its full and nondeformed version.

Soon after his early enthusiasm that things might indeed work this way, Freud came up against the problem that they actually don’t, that the right interpretation (and its acceptance) doesn’t yet eliminate the symptom, and that the real kernel of the unconscious is not to be situated — in the case of dreams, for example — in the latent content, as opposed to the manifest content, and as “deciphered” from it. Continue reading “zupančič not-mother pt 1”

zupančič why P? 3

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

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

First, the surplus (of) distortion,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

zupančič why P? 2

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

It is in this sense that we should understand a crucial Lacanian thesis concerning the issue of the cause:

“Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche” 

There is but the cause of that which does not work, or which does not add up. 24

(pssst … check out Dolar’s interpretation here)

There are (at least) two important ideas behind this proposition.

1. the non-immediate character of the causal relationship, which has its classic philosophical articulation in the Hume – Kant debate. The connection between cause and effect involves an irreducible gap, or leap, on account of which Hume wanted to dismiss the very notion of the cause, and which led Kant to propose rational subjectivity as the transcendental constitutive background against which the leap involved in the passage from a cause to its effect remained possible without the causal structure simple falling apart. 24

2. the other important idea involved in Lacan’s account of causality: something appears in this hole, in this interval, in this gap, in this structural split of causality, and it is for this something that psychoanalysis reserves the name of the cause in the strict sense of the term (the cause of object a, the objet as the distortional cause of itself). 25

The elements exposed above could be related to yet another discussion of causes in psychoanalysis: to the already mentioned two aspects of the question of the cause (the question of the unconscious causes, and the question of the unconscious as cause) we can add a third one, which seems even more fundamental and concerns

3. the very cause of the constitution of the unconscious. This is a debate developed in a very intriguing way by Jean Laplanche in answer to the deadlocks of the Freudian theory of sexual seduction (of children). 25  Continue reading “zupančič why P? 2”

zupančič Why P? 2008 1

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

Freud discovered human sexuality as a problem (in need of explanation), and not as something with which one could eventually explain every (other) problem. He ‘discovered’ sexuality as intrinsically meaningless, and not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning.

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