Category: objet (a)

zupančič April 2014 Toronto

philosophical ontological implications of psychoanalytic notions of sexuality and unconscious. Something happened to philosophy when this thing started to get articulated. One needs to think through this consequences of this unprecedented articulation. The concept of unconscious in its intrinsic link with sexuality is not simply concept of some newly discovered entity, of being. No.

It is not exactly an entity, it is not simply being nor non-being. Sexuality is constitutively unconscious. Fundamental negativity, non-being or gap implied in sexuality.

When Freud discovered sexuality what did this imply? He insisted against Jung, there is NO natural or pre-established place for human sexuality, it is constitutively out of its place. It is fragmented, dispersed.

3 Essays on Sexuality: Sexuality is nothing other than this out-of-placeness of its satisfaction. The sexual for Freud was not a substance to be properly described and circumscribed but rather the impossibility of its own circumscription and the limitation.

Sexual is NOT a separate domain of human activity or human life. Sexuality is something that exists in-itself only as something other. Sexuality is the very out-of-itselfness of being. Continue reading “zupančič April 2014 Toronto”

swales disavowal

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

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

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

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

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

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

swales pervert

Swales, S. (2012). Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject. New York: Routledge.

Encountering a patient who in the initial sessions does not see himself as lacking is by no means an uncommon event. Most often, this type of patient is obsessive, and his difficulty in seeing himself as lacking in relation to the therapist can be attributed to his structural reasons for negating the Other and attempting to neutralize the Other’s desire.

Correspondingly, the obsessive often fears seeing himself as dependent (even in terms of knowledge) upon the therapist Other.

The obsessive prefers not to see himself as desiring because it threatens him with aphanisis and reveals to him that he is a subject lacking in being.

The process of getting the obsessive to face his own lack in the process of analysis is referred to as hystericizing his desire, and this involves regularly reminding the obsessive of the Other’s presence and desire. 241

However, the perverse patient, as mentioned above, can have a sure answer to the question of identity at the level of jouissance while remaining perplexed at the level of desire. The therapist, then, should foster the perverse patient’s curiosity in himself. Why does he desire what and how he desires?

It is thus important for the therapist to highlight manifestations of the pervert’s putting himself into question, for instance by ending a session when a pervert says, “I don’t know why I …” The therapist’s task of inscribing lack into the pervert will be an ongoing one throughout the process of therapy. 242

For instance, a masochistic patient who has undergone several months of therapy might escalate the dangerous practices in which he engages in the (usually unconscious) hope that the therapist’s anxiety will peak and s/he will enunciate a prohibition of those activities.

In this example, the masochist’s actions put the therapist in somewhat of a bind: if the therapist enunciates a prohibition, s/he deviates from analytic neutrality and the therapy might suffer from the associated risks (e.g., that the pervert attribute to the therapist a lasting wish that he stop engaging in those especially dangerous masochistic practices such that the pervert will repeatedly demand via his actions that the therapist play the role of lawgiving Other and the treatment will become stuck at the levels of perverse enactment and of demand);

if, on the other hand, the therapist does not prohibit the masochist’s dangerous practices, at the most the masochist might end up getting a serious injury or even getting killed and the therapist might face malpractices charges. At the least, the therapist risks being put into the position (illustrated in Jiménez’s 1993 case of Matías) of impotent witness of the pervert’s dangerous and/or criminal activity. 244

swales perverse patient

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

A perverse patient will be especially likely to heed prohibitions if they are given by a trusted group psychotherapist whom the patient has put in the position of symbolic Other. In many cases, perverse patients are looking for ways to bolster their paternal functions, and a group therapist whom the pervert “elects” to the position of symbolic Other can have a good deal of influence on the patient as the subject-supposed-to-No!

This will only be possible, however, if the patient puts the therapist in the position of symbolic Other; if the patient relates to the therapist on the imaginary plane—as an other like himself—then the group therapist’s prohibitions will have no therapeutic effect. 236

Consequently, the therapist should look for signs that the patient is speaking to her or him as a symbolic Other before advising the patient to abstain from doing something. Such signs often include the patient’s admissions that there is some kind of knowledge—namely, unconscious knowledge — that is at work in her or him of which s/he her- or himself is ignorant, but about which the therapist is a knowledgeable authority. So too is symbolic transference evident when the patient thinks of the therapist as being the cause of her or his desire to be curious about himself and put his understandings of his life into question.

The necessary condition for true analytic or psychodynamic work is the patient’s having a question about himself that he addresses to an Other (the analyst or therapist) with the expectation that the Other (as subject-supposed-to-know) knows something about the answer that eludes the patient himself.

In my work with Ray, that question was “Why am I an exhibitionist, and how can I prevent committing future acts of exhibitionism?” Even though we understand the “constancy of [the pervert’s] jouissance as an answer, an answer which is already there” (Miller 1996b, p. 310) the pervert’s desire enables him to have a question that drives the progress of the analysis or therapy. 238

While the pervert may seem to want to get away with murder, what he really desires is to bolster the lawgiving Other’s existence. In his article, Clavreul made no mention of the pervert’s suffering due to the inadequacy of the paternal function. When the pervert’s subject position is seen as an attempt to prop up the paternal function, one can no longer maintain that the pervert cannot undergo traditional Lacanian analysis and that the only two positions available to the analyst of a pervert are those of moralizer and impotent voyeur. 239

Certainly, it is difficult to do analytic work with perverts. This is largely because the pervert prefers to play the role of object a (object cause of the Other’s jouissance) in relation to the therapist, causing her anxiety and jouissance. Analytic work with a pervert requires that the therapist maneuver the pervert into the role of split subject (as someone who sees himself as lacking at a certain level) so that the therapist can take up the role of object a as object cause of the patient’s desire to do therapeutic work. In working with a pervert, the therapist must be alert to ways to get the patient intrigued by his own unconscious manifestations when the pervert occasionally lapses back into the role of object a. 239

Situating the work at the symbolic level of desire means, for one thing, that the therapist should avoid responding to the patient’s requests for advice and interpretation.

Although it is common for a patient at the beginning stages of his psychotherapy to see his psychotherapist as a subject-supposed-to-know, the psychotherapist should not fall prey to the trap of believing that s/he holds privileged knowledge about the patient and what is good for him (or that if s/he does not give him advice, no one else in the patient’s life will do so; in the vast majority of cases, the patient gets plenty of advice from his PO, his group therapist and fellow participants, and his friends and family).

Interpreting from the position of subject-supposed-to-know incites an imaginary order relationship of rivalry with the patient in which the patient sooner or later tries to disprove the therapist’s theories and interpretations. Working at the level of demand means giving knowledge to the patient and fostering a relationship which is based on the patient’s dependency on that knowledge. In providing the patient with ready-made interpretations, the therapist puts words into the patient’s mouth and stymies the patient’s own curiosity about himself.

Working at the symbolic level of desire, however, involves the therapist’s expressions of desire that the patient do the work of psychotherapy.

Correspondingly, the therapist should aim to be positioned in the transference as the object-cause of the perverse patient’s desire to participate in psychotherapy and as the placeholder for the patient’s unconscious. This transferential position enables the patient to work through (via emotive speech) his issues with the Other.

Another way in which Lacan described the analytic progress of a subject is “the constant culmination of the subject’s assumption of his own mirages” (1953/2006a, p. 251).

One of the functions of the analytic method is to enable the subject to discover something about his unconscious, realizing that what he took to be his own individual thoughts and desires are actually ones he appropriated from the Other.

The subject calls who he thinks he is—the sum total of his ego misidentifications — radically into question.

The therapist aims to get the patient to speak about his experiences, fantasies, and dreams, to associate to them, and to be interested in possible Other, unconscious meanings of his utterances.

A difficult and delicate stage of the pervert’s treatment is the beginning stage. It is more difficult to get a perverse patient than a neurotic patient to question who he is and why he has become who he is. This is the question that psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy aims to answer. This question, when unanswered, is what drives the patient to undergo psychotherapy. 241

mcgowan death in life

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

Rather than championing life against death or insisting on death as the necessary limit on life, it focuses on the death that remains internal to life. This death within life is what Freud calls the death drive 236

Viewed from the perspective of the death drive, the uniqueness of a subject does not derive from the divine. As the earlier chapters have contended, that uniqueness is the product of a primordial act of loss through which the subject comes into being.

The subject emerges through the sacrifice of a privileged object hat the act of sacrifice itself creates.

This act is correlative to the acquisition of a name which allows the subject to enter into a world of meaning and signification — a world that brings with it an indirect relation with the world of objects and with its privileged object. With the acquisition of a name, the subject becomes a subject of loss.

The entire existence of the subject becomes oriented around its lost object, even though this object only comes in to being through the subject’s act of ceding it.

This death that founds the subject creates in it a drive to return to the moment of loss itself because the originary loss creates both the subject and the subject’s privileged object.

The only enjoyment that the subject experiences derives not from life nor from death but from the death-in-life that is the death drive. 236

The signifier writes itself on top of life and reifies life’s supposed vitality in its death-laden paths. Every signifier is at bottom a stereotype, a rigid category for apprehending and freezing the movement of life. … the general suspicion of the signifier and its link to death is widespread among the forces of emancipation.

No matter how productive the signifier becomes, it will never access the flow of life itself and will always remain an interruption of that flow. … The very act of theorizing an embrace of pure life violates the theory in the process of constructing it. 237 -238

There is no system of pure life. In order to advocate a turn to life, one must take a detour through death. The philosophers of life conceive of the signifier as an evil that might be overcome.

The muteness of pat of the subject’s body is the form that resistance to symbolization necessarily takes. One affirms one’s subjectivity not through proclaiming it but through a certain mode of keeping silent. 239

The psychoanalytic project involves helping the subject to recognize its symptom — the part of the body that resists full integration into the symbolic order — as the source of its enjoyment and freedom. The part of the body that gives us trouble, that refuses integration, is the expression of our subjectivity, the kernel that negates or refuses what has been imposed on it. By identifying ourselves with our mute body part, we take up the death drive and affirm a value that transcends pure life.

Like the conservative project, a psychoanalytic political project rejects the mechanical flow of pure life and instead privileges the disruption of that flow. But like leftist politics, it refuses to adhere itself to that which transcends life and limits it from the outside — such as God or death. This does not mean that psychoanalytic politics represents a compromise between the Right and the Left, some sort of median position. Instead, it operates outside the confines of the established opposition and presents a political choice that transcends the philosophical limits inherent in both the Right and the Left. 239

johnston objet a seminar 1965-66 pt1

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.
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The object of Jacques Lacan’s thirteenth seminar of 1965–1966, entitled ‘‘The Object of Psychoanalysis,’’ is, unsurprisingly, none other than his (in)famous objet petit a

This a quickly becomes, after Lacan’s introduction of it as a concept-term to his theoretical arsenal in the late 1950s, a condensed knot of associated meanings and references tied together with varying degrees of tightness over time.

On the one hand, objet a is said to be ‘‘non-specularizable,’’ namely, impossible to inscribe within the spatio-temporal registers of representation

On the other hand, it is equated with a series of determinate libidinal coordinates (i.e., breast, feces, phallus, gaze, and voice), coordinates marked by entities and events situated in space and time

How can this object simultaneously be utterly beyond representability in space and time and yet concretely incarnated in ‘‘specularizable’’ spatiotemporal avatars?

Within the confines of the thirteenth seminar, Lacan introduces the non-specular
status of object a through a comparison of it with the Möbius band, one of his
favorite topological structures

Topology being a mathematical science of configurations formed through continuous series of permutations of surfaces — Lacan’s turns to topology enable him to abandon the problematic Euclidean geometrical picture-thinking permeating the depth-psychological discourse, with its misleading metaphors of outer layers and inner recesses, from which he rightly wants to dissociate Freudian psychoanalysis.

As is common knowledge, this sort of strip is a single surface twisted such that uninterrupted movement along it transports one between two opposed faces.

The distinguishing warp of the Möbius band makes two seemingly separate sides seamlessly communicate with one another; this twist is the mere inflection of a single surface nonetheless generating a manifest distinction between a recto and a verso.

The comparison between objet a and the Möbius strip already suggests that this a is to be construed as an insubstantial distortion of the lone immanent plane of psychical reality, a contortion forming a switch-point at which apparently separate conscious and unconscious dimensions intersect and pass into each other.

following this introduction of object a qua non-specularizable via topology — any appearance of this analytic object is said to defy capture by mirroring, to reflect nothing in reflecting devices. Like a vampire, whose menacing shadowy presence is disturbingly palpable and yet an invisible blank in the clear surfaces of surrounding mirrors, objet petit a tangibly haunts its subject in a similarly elusive, hard-to-see fashion.

So, with this frame in place, how is the mirror stage relevant to the project of elucidating the status of object a as in-between visibility and invisibility? An answer to this question can begin with a detail contained in the 1949 narration of this stage contained in Écrits.

Therein, Lacan, speaking of ‘‘the striking spectacle of a nursling in front of a mirror who has not yet mastered walking, or even standing’’ (i.e., an infant, a nascent subject-to-be, still very much mired in the affective muck of an anxiety-inducing prematurational helplessness … describes the young child in this psychoanalytic Ursituation as ‘‘held tightly by some prop, human or artificial (what, in France, we call a trotte-bébé [a sort of walker]).’’

This detail comes to serve as a lever for certain of Lacan’s later recastings of the mirror stage. These recastings are deployed so as to combat crude developmentalist (mis)readings of his theory according to which Imaginary identification with the imago-Gestalt of the moi is a phase chronologically situated between a prior phase of immersion in the ‘‘blooming, buzzing confusion’’ (as William James would describe it) of the primitive Real and a posterior phase of ascension to the proper social mediation of Symbolic structures setting in with language acquisition.

In seminars eight, ten, and twelve, the trotte-bébé , as an inert, inhuman object, drops out of the picture, with only the speaking subjectivity (parlètre) of older Otherness remaining instead.

These post-1949 presentations of the mirror stage in le Séminaire insist upon the necessary role of a parental ‘‘big Other’’—such a figure is both physically bigger (i.e., not prematurationally helpless like the infant) as well as an instantiation of the socio-symbolic grand Autre — in initially prompting and thereafter maintaining the small child’s multi-level investments (simultaneously cognitive, affective, and libidinal25) in his/her ‘‘selfimage.’’

Identification by the germinal subject á venir with the Gestalt of the imago in the reflective surface of the mirror is triggered by bigger supporting Other-subjects who communicate encouragements of and urgings to latch onto the image by employing a combination of words and gestures (i.e., linguistic and proto/quasilinguistic mechanisms—the archetypal example of this would be the mother’s speech exclaiming things like ‘‘That’s you there!’’ while she points with her index finger at the reflection of the delicate, diminutive body held up to the mirror).

Especially for this later Lacan, the imago-Gestalt of the moi is overdetermined from the start by the pre-existent universe of signifiers into which the child is thrown (a thrown-ness preceding even the biological moment of birth) and within which his/her specular reflection is embedded and contextualized. From the get-go, the image is suffused by the mediation of the signifier, rather than being a self-sufficient stand-alone phenomenal immediacy unto itself only secondarily taken up into symbolico-linguistic constellations.

The upshot of this is that figurative, metaphorical ‘‘mirroring’’ of the tiny, fragile human by the more-than-visual looks, gesticulations, and utterances of the larger people involved in this situation is a prior possibility condition for the literal, non-metaphorical mirroring fixated upon the spectacle of the (‘‘self’’-)image.

In the latter, the sight of the picture of the whole body contained in a shiny, reflective surface becomes an alluring, captivating mirage of anticipated cohesion and mastery, a virtual reality eliciting triumphant jubilation and provoking venomous aggression (aroused by envy and frustration visa`- vis this unattainable ideal) at one and the same time.

In the updated, 1960s version of the mirror stage, language-using (and language used)
big(ger) Others bathe the infant in a cascade of statements and behaviors whose saturating effects endow the specular components of the mirroring moment, Lacan’s primal scene of inaugural identification, with their special, fateful status.

The petit a(utre) of the child’s forming ego, partially bound up with imagistic representation, is originally and primordially a precipitate of ‘‘the desire of the
Other.’’

In other words, this moi begins condensing on the basis of the conscious and
unconscious fantasies of the familial actors surrounding the child, actors who both
wittingly and unwittingly transfer their desire-organizing fantasies regarding the
child’s past, present, and future into his/her psyche via the discourses and actions
through which they frame the mirror-experience for him/her.

Insofar as the ego itself, as what becomes intimate ‘‘me-ness,’’ is born by crystallizing around a core kernel of external Other-subjects’ fantasy-formations, it could be said to be an instance of extimacy in Lacan’s precise sense of this neologism.

Put differently, at the very nucleus of the recognized ‘‘me’’ resides a misrecognized (á la Lacanian méconnaissance) ‘‘not-me,’’ something ‘‘in me more than myself,’’ as the Lacan of the eleventh seminar (1964) might phrase it.

Similarly, invisible traces of alterity, impressed upon the body-image by desire/fantasy-conveying Others (with their
gazes, voices, demands, loves, jouissance, and so on), are infused into the visible avatars of this estranging, ego-level identity, this ‘‘self’’ created and sustained within a crucible of unsurpassable otherness.

one could say that the desires of Others inscribe a Möbius-type twist within the surface of the mirror such that the specular side of the ‘‘little other’’ of the Imaginary ego/alter-ego axis (i.e., a—a’) is in seamless continuity with its constituting envers qua the non-specular (and largely unconscious) flip-side of libidinal and socio-symbolic forces and factors stretched across vast swathes of different-but-overlapping temporalities.

rothenberg dimly lit garage

Imagine that you walk into your dimly lit garage and discover a mess. The place is so jumbled that you cannot even distinguish one thing from another.

Now, let’s say that, suddenly, the walls of the garage disappear, and you discover that this jumbled mass stretches in all directions.

One final gesture: remove yourself from the scene, so that you cannot serve as a reference point or means of orientation. No up nor down, no inside nor outside. No spaces between things, no background against which they stand out, no standpoint from which to assess their relationships.

It is as though everything is glued to everything else in what Copjec calls the “realtight.”

I will follow Alain Badiou in calling this state of affairs “being,” where things have no particular identity or relationship to one another, where there is no subject, and where orientation is impossible. In this state, no thing is determined because no thing has any relation to anything else.

[…] The simple addition of a formal property, the empty set, which has no substance in and of itself, negates the state of sheer being that attends each thing-as-such. It does so by establishing a minimal point of orientation – like making a small cut in a sheet of paper. Once this cut is added, then “things” can bear some minimal relation to each other – they all have a relation to this minimal point of orientation. The “cut” of the empty set creates a vector, and with this stroke, things precipitate into a world of identities, properties, and relationships – as objects.33

mcgowan death drive violence politics

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

The conceptual breakthrough involved with the abandonment of the seduction theory paved the way for the discovery of the death drive because it permitted Freud to consider violence not as primarily coming from someone else but as what the subject itself fantasizes about. After this development in his thought, it would make theoretical sense to conceive of an original violence that the subject does to itself as the genesis of subjectivity and the death drive, which is the move that Freud makes in 1920.

The seduction theory would have prevented Freud from recognizing that subjectivity has its origin in violence that the subject does to itself – the violent sacrifice of the privileged object that begins desire. The death drive, the structuring principle of the psyche, engages the subject in a perpetual repetition of this violence.

Both nostalgia and paranoia try to flee the subject’s original self-inflicted violence. But even the attempt to avoid violence leads back to it. Nostalgia and paranoia lead almost inevitably to violence directed toward the other who appears as a barrier to the subject’s enjoyment

[…] Violence against the other attempts to replace violence against the self; this type of violence attempts to repeat the subject’s initial moment of loss on the cheap, so to speak. It seeks repetition while sparing the subject itself the suffering implicit in this repetition.

Aggressive violence toward the other tries to separate the enjoyment of repetition (which it reserves for the subject) with the suffering of it (which it consigns to the other).

Understood in terms of the death drive, one can readily see the appeal of aggressive violence. It provides a seemingly elegant solution to the troubling link between enjoyment and suffering. 49-50

[…] Aggressive violence is nothing but a detour or prolongation of the path toward self-inflicted violence. In this sense, the other’s violent act of vengeance in response to the subject’s own violence is precisely what the subject unconsciously hopes to trigger when committing a violent act in the first place.

The other’s violent response allows us to experience the loss that we have hitherto avoided. Violence directed to the other does not satisfy the subject in the way that violence directed toward the self does. In order to accomplish the repetition that the death drive necessitates, external violence must finally lead back to violence directed at the self.

The power of repetition in the psyche leaves the subject no possibility for escaping self-inflicted violence. This is what psychoanalytic thought allows us to recognize and to bring to bear on our political activity.

The only question concerns the form that this violence will take. Will the subject use the other as a vehicle for inflicting violence on itself, or will it perform this violence directly on itself?

By recognizing the power of unconscious repetition, we can grasp the intractability of the problem of violence, but we can also see a way out of aggressive violence that doesn’t involve utopian speculation.

Rather than trying to avoid violence, we can restore to it its proper object – the self. The more the subject engages in a violent assault on its own forms of symbolic identity, its own ego, its own deepest convictions, the more the subject finds an enjoyable alternative to the satisfactions of aggression. 51

mcogowan object never existed nostalgia for the fullness that never was

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

Even though loss is a constitutive experience that founds the subject in its relation to the object, this initial loss misleads us into believing that we have lost something substantial.

We often fail to see that we have lost nothing and that our lost object is simply the embodiment of this nothing.

The belief in the substantiality of the lost object fuels the prevalence of nostalgia as a mode of relating to our origins. We dream of recovering the object and restoring the complete enjoyment that we believe ourselves to have once had prior to the experience of loss.

This enjoyment never existed, and the recovery of the object, though it may bring some degree of pleasure, always brings disappointment as well, which is why sustaining our feeling of nostalgia depends on not realizing the return to the past that the nostalgic subject longs for.

By insisting that loss is constitutive for the subject, psychoanalytic thought works to combat nostalgia and its poisoning of contemporary politics. 39

mcgowan loss

p.33 No subsequent acquisition or reward can redeem the loss of the privileged object that founds subjectivity; it is a loss without the possibility of recompense.

And yet, ideology proclaims that every loss has a productive dimension to it. In this sense, ideology is singular: all ideologies are but forms of ideology as such. According to Christian ideology, our suffering on earth finds its reward in heavenly bliss. According to capitalist ideology, our labor today has its reward in tomorrow’s riches. According to Islamic fundamentalist logic, our suicidal sacrifice results in an eternity in paradise.

No ideology can avow a completely unproductive loss, a loss that doesn’t lead to the possibility of some future pleasure, and yet an unproductive loss is precisely what defines us.

One challenges ideology not by proclaiming that loss or sacrifice is unnecessary that might live lives of plenitude but by insisting on the unproductivity of loss.

Once a subject grasps that no future gain can redeem the initial loss, ideology loses its ability to control that subject. In this sense, one of the great anti-ideological works of philosophy is Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. 33

When one reaches absolute knowledge, one recognizes that loss is constitutive of whatever position one holds. This recognition allows one to embrace loss for its own sake and to enjoy it rather than retreating from it or trying to overcome it. … Hegel leads philosophy to the position at which it can resist ideology’s effort to recuperate loss and convince subjects that the status of loss is empirical rather than constitutive. 35

Locating the source of one’s suffering in an external threat functions precisely like imagining a future recompense for that suffering. In both cases loss becomes a contingent fact that one might overcome rather than the foundation of one’s subjectivity.

To avow the structural necessity of loss would deprive ideology of its most powerful incentive, which is why no ideology takes up this relation to loss. Or to put it in other terms, what no ideology can acknowledge is the death drive. 35

mcgowan final chapter death drive

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

There is no path leading from the death drive to utopia. The death drive undermines every attempt to construct a utopia; it is the enemy of the good society. … It is possible to conceive of a positive politics of the death drive.

… we can sketch what a society founded on a recognition of the death drive might look like. Such a recognition would not involve a radical transformation of society: in one sense, it would leave everything as it is. In contemporary social arrangements, the death drive subverts progress with repetition and leads to the widespread sacrifice of self-interest for the enjoyment of the sacrifice itself. This structure is impervious to change and to all attempts at amelioration. But in another sense, the recognition of the death drive would change everything. Recognizing the centrality of the death drive would not eliminate the proclivity to sacrifice for the sake of enjoyment, but it would change our relationship to this sacrifice. Rather than being done for the sake of an ultimate enjoyment to be achieved in the future, it would be done for its own sake. 283

By positing the future where we will attain the ultimate enjoyment (either through the purchase of the perfect commodity or through a transcendent romantic union or through the attainment of some heavenly paradise), we replace the partial enjoyment of the death drive with the image of a complete enjoyment to come.

There is no question of fully enjoying our submission to the death drive. We will always remain alienated from our mode of enjoying.

The enjoyment that the death drive provides, in contrast to the form of enjoyment proffered by capitalism, religion, and utopian politics, is at once infinite and limited. This oxymoronic form of enjoyment operates in the way that the concept does in Hegel’s .

The concept attains its infinitude not through endless progress toward a point that always remains beyond and out of reach but through including the beyond as a beyond within itself.

The enjoyment that the death drive produces also achieves its infinitude through self-limitation. It revolves around a lost object that exists only insofar as it is lost, and it relates to this object as the vehicle for the infinite unfurling of its movement.

The lost object operates as the self-limitation of the death drive through which the drive produces an infinite enjoyment. Rather than acting as a mark of the drive’s finitude, the limitation that the lost object introduces provides access to infinity. 284

A society founded on a recognition of the death drive would be one that viewed its limitation as the source of its infinite enjoyment rather than an obstacle to that enjoyment.

To take the clearest and most traumatic example in recent history, the recognition of the death drive in 1930s Germany would have conceived the figure of the Jew not as the barrier to the ultimate enjoyment that must therefore be eliminated but as the internal limit through which German society attained its enjoyment. … the appeal of Nazism lay in its ability to mobilize the enjoyment of the average German through pointing out a threat to that enjoyment. The average German under Nazism could enjoy the figure of the Jew as it appeared in the form of an obstacle, but it is possible to recognize the obstacle not as an external limit but as an internal one. In this way, the figure of the Jew would become merely a figure for the average German rather than a position embodied by actual Jews.

… recognizing the terrorist as the internal limit of global capitalist society would mean the end of terrorism. The recognition would transform the global landscape and deprive would-be terrorists of the libidinal space within which to act. Though some people may continue to blow up buildings, they would cease to be terrorists in the way that we now understand the term.

A self-limiting society would still have real battles to fight. There would remain a need for this society to defend itself against external threats and against the cruelty of the natural universe … nuclear weapons to defend itself against comets or meteors that would threaten to wipe out human life on the planet.

But it would cease positing the ultimate enjoyment in vanquishing an external threat or surpassing a natural limit. The external limit would no longer stand in for a repressed internal one. Such a society would instead enjoy its own internal limitations and merely address external limits as they came up. 285

With the assistance of psychoanalytic thought, we might reconceive politics in a direction completely opposed to that articulated by Aristotle … “… the state or political community … aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.”

If we act on the basis of enjoyment rather than the good, this does not mean that we can simply construct a society that privileges enjoyment in an overt way. An open society with no restrictions on sexual activity, drug use, food consumption, or play in general would not be a more enjoyable one than our own. That is the sure path to impoverishing our ability to enjoy, as the aftermath of the 1960s has made painfully clear.

One must arrive an enjoyment indirectly. A society centered around the death drive would not be a better society, nor would it entail less suffering. Rather than continually sacrificing for the sake of the good, we would sacrifice the good for the sake of enjoyment. A society centered around the death drive would allow us to recognize that we enjoy the lost object only insofar as it remains lost. 286

mcgowan missing binary signifier

The status of the missing signifier is transcendental. Its absence serves only to shape the signifying structure in the same way that Kant conceives the regulative ideas of reason shaping the structure of our understanding. 274

The key to responding to the absence of the binary signifier lies in recognizing its presence within the signifying structure, or, to put it in Derrida’s terms, in recognizing the immanence of what resists thought within thought itself.

This signifier [binary signifier]… does not exist, even as a trace, which is what Lacan is getting at when he insists that “the Woman does not exist” or “the Other does not exist.”

Recognizing the nonexistence of this signifier changes the way we relate to the signifying structure and has clear political consequences.

Rather than respecting the gap in signification as the placeholder for the missing signifier, we should recognize that nothing exists in the gap and that nothing really is, for us, something.

The gap marks the point at which senselessness itself is included in the world of signification. Nothing or senselessness is not a specter that haunts the system but the very basis of the symbolic system.

The absence of the binary signifier constitutes the social as such, which means that this missing signifier is not simply absent but present as an absence. The missing signifier is already here, already within the signifying structure, constantly making its effects felt on this structure.

When we recognize the transcendental status of the missing signifier we can give up the impossible pursuit of it that dominates the contemporary popular intellectual landscape. … Hermeneutics embarks on an endless quest for the impossible signifier that it can never find – it is an unending process of seeking – but psychoanalytic interpretation finds without seeking. … I do not seek I find To find, in the sense that Lacan uses the term here, signifies recognizing the missing signifier as a structuring presence. 275

The endless seeking of the hermeneutic position functions as a barrier to genuine political engagement; it allows the subject to avoid the political act of identifying itself with the missing signifier.

This identification is the result of the finding that Lacan mentions. The psychoanalytic position fully takes up the advocacy of the missing signifier, and it can do so because this signifier is not external to the signifying structure but ensconced within it as that which gives the structure its form, so that there is no risk that the identification will transform it into a full presence within the structure.

The missing signifier does not reside elsewhere, on a separate plane, but rather operates within the signifying structure. Even the most banal moments of everyday life center around the missing signifier, which animates them with whatever vitality they possess. Every aspect of the signifying structure takes the missing signifier as its point of departure because this gap marks the point at which the structure opens itself to the new and different.

We affirm the missing signifier not just when we politicize ourselves through fidelity to the exceptional event that occurs in the space of the missing signifier or void but through all the variegations of our everyday lives.

Every aspect of the signifying structure is already informed by the gap. We can identify with the missing signifier in its absence, and this is the gesture that a genuine politics demands. 276