lacan – Page 11 – objet (a)

Freud fort – da

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920

The child was in no respect forward in his intellectual development; at eighteen months he spoke only a few intelligible words, making besides sundry significant sounds which were understood by those about him. But he made himself understood by his parents and the maid-servant, and had a good reputation for behaving ‘properly’. He did not disturb his parents at night; he scrupulously obeyed orders about not touching various objects and not going into certain rooms; and above all he never cried when his mother went out and left him for hours together, although the tie to his mother was a very close one: she had not only nourished him herself, but had cared for him and brought him up without any outside help.

Occasionally, however, this well-behaved child evinced the troublesome habit of flinging into the corner of the room or under the bed all the little things he could lay his hands on, so that to gather up his toys was often no light task.

He accompanied this by an expression of interest and gratification, emitting a loud long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-oh’ which in the judgement of the mother (one that coincided with my own) was not an interjection but meant ‘go away’ (fort). I saw at last that this was a game, and that the child used all his toys only to play ‘being gone’ (fortsein) with them.

One day I made an observation that confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string wound round it. It never occurred to him, for example, to drag this after him on the floor and so play horse and cart with it, but he kept throwing it with considerable skill, held by the string, over the side of his little draped cot, so that the reel disappeared into it, then said his significant ‘o-o-o-oh’ and drew the reel by the string out of the cot again, greeting its reappearance with a joyful ‘Da’ (there). This was therefore the complete game, disappearance and return, the first act being the only one generally observed by the onlookers, and the one untiringly repeated by the child as a game for its own sake, although the greater pleasure unquestionably attached to the second act.

The meaning of the game was then not far to seek. It was connected with the child’s remarkable cultural achievement—the foregoing of the satisfaction of an instinct—as the result of which he could let his mother go away without making any fuss. He made it right with himself, so to speak, by dramatising the same disappearance and return with the objects he had at hand. It is of course of no importance for the affective value of this game whether the child invented it himself or adopted it from a suggestion from outside. Our interest will attach itself to another point.

The departure of the mother cannot possibly have been pleasant for the child, nor merely a matter of indifference. How then does it accord with the pleasure-principle that he repeats this painful experience as a game? The answer will perhaps be forthcoming that the departure must be played as the necessary prelude to the joyful return, and that in this latter lay the true purpose of the game. As against this, however, there is the observation that the first act, the going away, was played by itself as a game and far more frequently than the whole drama with its joyful conclusion.

boothby death desire p.73

Boothby, Richard. Death and Desire. 1991.

Freud dubbed the repetitive insistence of such behaviors der Wiederholungszwang the “repetition compulsion.” The mystery presented by the repetition compulsion came down to this: How and why, contrary to the rule of pleasure that Freud took to be the fundamental law of psychic processes, is the ego deliberately subjected to pain? 73

a specific will to mistreatment of the ego for its own sake … The repetition compulsion represented, in effect, a compulsion of the patient to torment his own ego. It indicated the activity of a “primordial masochism.”

Only a biological explanation seemed capable of accounting for the primordiality of the power at work in the repetition compulsion. The fact that this power was capable of overriding the fundamental principle of pleasure suggested the activity of an absolutely elemental force, even more primitive than the erotic instincts. Opposite the life instincts, there must exist a second, more basic class of instincts.

If, as Freud suggested, the death drive evidences its essential character in repetition of the trauma, then we are led to suppose that the essential activity of the death drive involves the infusion of fresh quantities of energy into the psychic apparatus, resulting in an unpleasureable increase in psychic tension. Adopting this view, we can make sense of the title of Freud’s book. The death drive is said to be “beyond the pleasure principle” because the death drive increases rather than decreases psychical tensions and thereby constitutes a source of unpleasure internal to the psychic apparatus.77

Given this initial association of the activity of the death drive with increase of psychical tension, it comes as a complete surprise to find the death drive characterized toward the end of Freud’s book in precisely opposite terms. As an impulse toward return to an inorganic state, the death drive is thought to constitute a drive not toward increase but toward reduction of tensions to an absolute minimum. It is this tendency toward reduction of tensions to zero that warranted identifying the death drive with a “Nirvana principle” (SE, 18:56). What has happened to the original association of the death drive with traumatic increase of tension? We seem faced with an contradiction inhabiting the very heart of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the death drive is first identified with a traumatic increase, then with maximal decrease of tension.2 What has made this inversion possible? 77

It has long been a source of perplexity to many commentators that Freud’s identification of the death drive with the Nirvana principle makes the force of the death drive almost indistinguishable from the workings of the pleasure principle. Both the Nirvana and the pleasure principles seek to diminish tensions through the reduction of excitations to zero or, failing that, through the maintenance of a constant level of excitation. Are the death instinct and the pleasure principle one and the same? 78

mcgowan occupy interview

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

Once we accept that the good is antithetical to our enjoyment, is a barrier to our enjoyment, it becomes possible to think politics beyond the good. The politics of enjoyment can eschew the good altogether, I think. But we can’t fall into the trap of saying that the world will be better if we adopt a different organization of our enjoyment. No, in some sense it will become worse because we would lose the justifications that accompany our failures to enjoy fully. What we would gain, however, is what I would call an authentic relation to our enjoyment. I think we have to insist absolutely on the concept of authenticity in order to conceive of politics, just as resolutely as we have to abandon the good. In this way, I would replace the good with authenticity. That’s what we can’t do without in fact, even if it has been discredited by the association with Heidegger.

What is important about psychoanalysis to me is its theoretical intervention, its discovery of the death drive and the role that fantasy plays in our psyche. This is the great advance. And political struggle can integrate these theoretical insights without any help from actual psychoanalysis.

What allows one to disinvest in the capitalist mode of subjectivity is not, in my view, the psychoanalytic session. Instead it is the confrontation with a mode of enjoyment that ceases to provide the satisfaction that it promises. This prompts one to think about alternatives.

It’s impossible to understand how contemporary authority functions without psychoanalysis. Lacan is very clear in his explanation of the superego as an agency not of prohibition but of enjoyment, and nothing is more evident in today’s authorities. We are constantly bombarded with commands that we enjoy ourselves, and we feel guilty not for our sins but for our failures to enjoy as much as our neighbors. Psychoanalysis shows us that this command to enjoy is integral to how authority operates and that obedience can feel transgressive. This is the key to the power of contemporary authority. We obey but never experience ourselves as obedient. … We don’t know how obedient we are, and we require psychoanalysis to show us.

I was completely in support of Occupy Wall Street and even had several students who took part with my full encouragement. That said, there is a theoretical problem, and it is located exactly at the point you bring up. Occupy didn’t identify with the missing binary signifier but involves an identification with the excluded. I have a real problem with the slogan that identifies the movement with the 99%. What happens? Instantly, a new Other is produced that is the 1%, and if we can just eliminate this 1%, then we will achieve the good. That’s the logic at work. In this sense, Occupy, despite its successes (including, I would claim, the re-election of Barack Obama), remained within a very traditional political paradigm.

Identification with the missing binary signifier would insist, in contrast, would involve an identification with the inherent failure of the Other or the system itself. It would have to say something like “No One Belongs” rather than the two alternatives — either we are really the ones who belong or we are those who don’t belong. Not we are all citizens but no one is a citizen.

We shouldn’t give the 1% credit with really enjoying themselves or knowing what they’re doing. Badiou calls these finance capitalists legitimate gangsters. I don’t disagree, but this creates the sense that they are on the inside while the rest of us are on the outside.

Isn’t the lesson of Michael Mann’s masterpiece The Insider with Russell Crowe that the insider is always an outsider and that enjoyment, despite what we believe, is located on the outside?

mcgowan enjoyment

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

McGowan explores another modality of enjoyment which departs somewhat from the enjoyment of the death drive, this enjoyment is an libidinal, affective enjoyment as opposed to knowledge. McGowan’s uses the work of filmmaker Michael Moore as a case in point.

Combating the expert is much more difficult than combating the master: the knowledge that would subvert mastery becomes part of the power that the expert wields and thus loses its subversive power. 171

The Enjoyment The Expert derives from providing counsel

CSI: Crime Scene Investigations and House M.D. display this dynamic in its most open form: the shows present a problem that appears utterly unsolvable to the viewer, and then they reveal the expert’s genius at finding a solution. Expert knowledge – a knowledge not accessible to the ordinary subject – has all the answers and thus becomes the undisputable locus of authority. The popularity of these shows derives from their ability to allow audiences to share in the expert’s enjoyment, an enjoyment that typically is the site of trauma for the subject. 172

Contact with expert authority has a traumatic effect on the subject because of the proximity of the expert. While the old master remained at a distance, the expert is always in the subject’s face, like Dr. Buddy Rydell in Anger Management, never allowing the subject room to breathe. As Anger Management shows, this proximity has the effect of stimulating the subject. Under the rule of the expert, subjects experience what Eric Santner calls “a sustained traumatization induced by exposure to, as it were, fathers who [know] too much about living human beings.

Exposure to this type of authority, to “this excess of knowledge,” produces “an intensification of the body [that] is first and foremost a sexualization.” Instead of emancipating the subject, knowledge traumatizes and plays the central role in the subjection of the subject to the order of social regulation. 172

Unlike the master, the earlier form of social authority, the expert not only prohibits enjoyment but also appears to embody this enjoyment through the act of laying down regulations. The expert enjoys informing subjects about the dangers they face or the ways they should alter their behavior, and it is this enjoyment that subjects rebel against.

Reign of expert: transformation of knowledge from a vehicle of liberation to an instrument of power (172)

As long as authority remains in the position of the traditional master, knowledge can have a revolutionary function. 173 Political activity consists in acts of informing, raising consciousness and bringing issues to light.

Conservatism permits people a way of organizing their enjoyment in a way that today’s emancipatory politics does not. Emancipatory politics may offer a truer vision of the world, but the Right offers a superior way of enjoying. 173

Whereas emancipatory politics could offer the enjoyment that comes from defiance of authority, conservatism could offer the enjoyment that comes from identification with it. This is the enjoyment that one feels when hearing one’s national anthem or saluting the flag. It resides in the fabric of the national’s military uniform that makes the fingers touching it tingle. This eroticism is not that of emancipatory politics – and it is perhaps not as powerful – but it is nonetheless a form of eroticism. It produces a libidinal charge. The struggle between conservatism and emancipatory politics has historically been a struggle between two competing modes of organizing enjoyment with neither side having a monopoly. 174

Knowledge is important only insofar as it relates to the way that subjects mobilize their enjoyment. If subjects see through ideology manipulation and have the proper knowledge, this does not necessarily inaugurate a political change.

The enjoyment of a Twinkie does not derive from the physiological effect of sugar on the human metabolism but from the knowledge of the damage this substance does to the body. Knowing the harm that accompanies something actually facilitates our enjoyment of it, especially when we are capable of disavowing this knowledge. 175

Enjoyment … depends on some degree of sacrifice that allows the subject to suffer its enjoyment. Sacrifice is essential to our capacity for enjoying ourselves. There is a fundamentally masochistic structure to enjoyment.

Through sacrifice and loss, we reconstitute the privileged object that exists only as an absence. This is why actually obtaining the privileged object necessarily disappoints: when the lost object becomes present, it loses its privileged status and becomes an ordinary empirical object.

Knowledge thus helps us to enjoy not in the way that we might think – that is, by showing us what is good for our well-being – but by giving us something to sacrifice: if we know, for instance that cigarettes are unhealthy and could kill us, this elevates the mundane fact of smoking into an act laced with enjoyment. With each puff, we repeat the sacrifice and return to the primordial experience of loss. The death that we bring on is not simply the price that we pay for smoking; it is the means through which we enjoy the act of smoking. In this sense, every cigarette is really killing the smoker. If it didn’t, the act would lose its ability to provide enjoyment (though it may still produce bodily pleasure).

Under the rule of the traditional master, prohibition sustains the possibility for this type of enjoyment: we can enjoy an act because it transgresses a societal prohibition. 176

But prohibition no longer plays this role in contemporary society. No universal prohibition bars certain activities; instead, knowledge about the harm that activities cause begins to play the role that prohibition once played. We don’t avoid smoking simply because it is wrong but because we know the harm that it causes. We don’t refrain from extramarital sex because it is wrong but because we know the societal and physical dangers it entails. Even conservative think and talk this way.

When, for instance, conservatives argue for excluding information about condoms from sex education classrooms, they claim that we know condoms aren’t 100 percent safe in preventing the spread of HIV. In each case, the authority is knowledge, not law. The libidinal charge in politics involved with challenging the master has largely disappeared today, and now that libidinal charge has attached itself to challenging the experts, who represent the new agents of authority. 176

Conservative populism – the most powerful form of right-wing politics today – owes its ascendancy to the development of this form of authority. The appeal of populist leaders consists in the relation that they take up to enjoyment. While the traditional master prohibits enjoyment, the populist leader liberates subjects from the restrictions on their enjoyment posed by experts.

Though conservative populists often call for a return to traditional values (advocating restrictions on abortion, prayer in schools, and the like), they do not deploy these values in the service of prohibition.. instead, their rhetoric places traditional values in the position of liberation and freedom. The populist leader proposes to free subjects from constricting expert authority in order that they might freely embrace the traditional values that this new authority threatens to eviscerate. In this way, traditional values, despite their function as a source of prohibition, become transformed into their opposite – a source of apparent liberation. 177

Creationism is a doctrine linked in its very foundation to authoritative rule and prohibitions on behavior. … But today the champions of creationism characterize themselves as rebellious challengers of authority rather than its acolytes. They fight for the freedom to believe and teach a doctrine that defies the ruling ideas laid down by expert authority – scientists who understand the complexitieis of evolutionary science that no layperson can master. 177

… proponents of teaching creationism characterize themselves as its most vociferous opponents. This sounds like a radical cause to take up, a way of refusing to believe just what we’re told. The way in which proponents of creationism advance their case exemplifies the tactics of the contemporary populist leader. 177

Whereas the distribution of enjoyment once created a level playing field for the forces of emancipation and those of conservatism. Now both modes of enjoying – enjoying transgression and enjoying obedience – become the exclusive province of conservatism, and emancipatory politics is stuck with knowledge, which provides enjoyment only for the experts themselves (and those who identify with them). 178

According to Dolar, “The whole point of Lacan’s construction of university discourse is that this is another lure, that the seemingly autonomous and self-propelling knowledge has a secret clause, and that its truth is detained by the master under the bar.” In university discourse, the master signifier occupies the position of truth, which means that expert authority works ultimately in the service of mastery.

For her part, Zupančič adds, “What Lacan recognizes in the university discourse is a new and reformed discourse of the master.” University discourse emerges in response to the failure of the discourse of the master, but it is not a radical social structure. It represents a retooling of the authority involved in mastery in order to allow that authority to cope with the exigencies of capitalist relations of production. As the truth of university discourse (and expert authority), mastery is hidden and all the more effective because of this obscurity within which it dwells. 182

When Moore succeeds as an activist filmmaker, he mobilizes the enjoyment of the spectator and works to align this enjoyment with increased freedom and equality.

Moore’s own presence in the films functions as an avatar of the enjoyment that derives from challenging the injustice of contemporary capitalism. His disheveled hair, his old baseball cap, his excess weight – all these aspects of his physical appearance attest to his personal commitment to enjoyment rather than propriety. He looks more like a bowling partner than an expert authority, and this look helps to link the cause of emancipation with enjoyment in his films.

mcgowan discourse of university

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

In university discourse, the master signifier occupies the position of truth, which means that expert authority works ultimately in the service of mastery. For her part, Zupancic adds, “What Lacan recognizes in the university discourse is a new and reformed discourse of the master.”

University discourse emerges in response to the failure of the discourse of the master, but it is not a radical social structure. It represents a retooling of the authority involved in mastery in order to allow that authority to cope with the exigencies of capitalist relations of production. As the truth of university discourse (and expert authority), mastery is hidden and all the more effective because of this obscurity within which it dwells. 182

mcgowan not-all

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

The figure of the enemy offers subjects within society an explanation for the loss that they experience as members of society and as subjects. Trotsky provides a reason for the failure of the Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union, and Israeli hegemony produces the misery that the Palestinians experience. Of course, in some cases, the enemy really does contribute to the loss that occurs within a society, but no enemy bears responsibility for loss as such, which comes first with subjectivity and then with the social order itself.

The enemy transforms an ontological phenomenon — loss within the social order — into an empirical one — instances of loss.

Through the obstacle that it places in the way, the enemy facilitates the belief that the collective identity within the social order or an authentic social bond is something that we might have. The barrier transforms an absence of collective identity into the illusory possibility of having this identity, and the possibility of having is integral to the male logic of exception.

Whereas male subjectivity is preoccupied with what it believes it has or should have, female subjectivity, as a structural position, involves an embrace of what one doesn’t have. To adopt the feminine position is ipso facto to recognize that all having involves having nothing.

Female subjectivity does not orient itself around an ideal of noncastration. There is no figure of the primal mother who appears to have the ultimate enjoyment and to hoard this enjoyment for herself. Though various ideals of female subjectivity certainly exist had have an impact on female identity, there is not simply one ideal. Instead, there is a plethora of them, and they often contradict each other. This is why Lacan insists that “there’s no such thing as Woman, Woman with a capital W indicating the universal.” 157

The result is that female subjectivity rests on a more tenuous ground: without the exception as a reference point that the male has, the female subject has no unified category within which to place herself. Because an exception is necessary to constitute the rule (or an outside is necessary to constitute an inside), there is no coherent category of female subjectivity. What results instead is a series of singularities without a clear rule defining them. As Kenneth Reinhard notes, “Unlike the case of men, for whom there is a unified category, “all men,’ that they are identified as being members of, women are RADICALLY SINGULAR, not examples of a class or members of a closed set, but EACH ONE AN EXCEPTION.” The absence of an exceptional defining the category of female subjectivity renders female subjectivity as such exceptional. 157 – 158

Male subjectivity always strives for the ultimate enjoyment that it posits in the unattainable position of exceptionality. Its enjoyment is always futural, and it depends on the act of obtaining or having its object. Female subjectivity provides enjoyment through what it doesn’t have; one enjoys one’s loss as a female subject. This type of enjoyment is not exclusionary in the way that the male form of enjoyment is. It is not confined to a few exceptions, because there is nothing but exceptions, according to the logic of female sexuation. 158

The foundation of the social bond is a loss held in common, a collective sacrifice of nothing for the sake of the social order. This experience of collective sacrifice or loss provides enjoyment in the form linked to female sexuation. It is the enjoyment of a shared not-having, and it is the form that the social bond necessarily takes at first. Each subject sacrifices something in order to live together collectively, and through the shared sacrifice, subjects constitute the social bond. This bond is traumatic and shameful because its avowal places subjects in a position where their lack is completely exposed. When subjects experience the essence of the social bond — the moment of collective self-sacrifice — they simultaneously experience the humiliation of rendering their loss visible. The enjoyment of this bond comes with a steep price, and no society is willing to pay it for very long. 158

Consequently, every social order obscures the traumatic nature of the social bond, which operates according to the female logic of not having, through recourse to a male logic of exception, manifested most directly in the friend/enemy distinction. This male logic is a logic of the all — a totality forged through the position of the exception — and it continually leaves subjects in a state of dissatisfaction, seeking a completeness that they will never attain.

The female logic of not-having or universalized exceptionality is not a separate logic of the social order, a logic describing an alternative form of society. It is, rather, the hidden bond lying beneath the phallic order founded on exception. Every society has both logics simultaneously at work, but the underlying logic of the not-all is the one that societies find themselves unable to avow. 158-159

… the logic of the not-all posits that there are only enemies, only outsiders, and only exceptions. The point is not that everyone is a friend but that everyone is an enemy, including oneself. According to this idea of the universalized exception, we can’t erect a firm distinction between inside and outside because those inside — friends — are defined solely in terms of what they don’t have, and this renders them indistinct from those outside — enemies. 159

Our enjoyment of the social bond operates according to the logic of not-having: we enjoy the shared experience of loss. But the pleasure that we take in the social bond follows from the male logic of the all and the exception. We find pleasure in the possibility of having a collective identity that sets us apart from outsiders. This pleasure works in one sense to facilitate our enjoyment by hiding it from us. While most members of a society can accept the pleasure that derives from a sense of having a collective identity — almost no one objects to the affirmation of national unity embodied by a flag, for instance — few can embrace the idea that the social bond exists through a shared sense of loss. This is why the moments when the shared sense of loss become visible are often quickly followed by the attempt to assert a positive collective identity. Or, to put it in other terms, when enjoyment becomes visible, we retreat toward pleasure. 159

mcgowan desire death drive

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

The neurotic mistakes the experience of the death drive for the experience of desire, and psychoanalysis attempts to reveal the drive where the neurotic mistakenly sees desire.

We misrecognize satisfaction as dissatisfaction because we imagine, in our present state of lack, that we once had a completeness that we have now lost.

That is to say, we believe that our privileged object once had a substantial existence and fail to see that it became a privileged object through the very act of being lost.

This misrecognition allows us to continue to believe in a previous and possible future completeness. Though it is neurotic, this misrecognition is inherent in the very nature of desire, and it is through this fundamental misrecognition that desire first begins and later sustains itself. 59

Desire constantly seeks out the object that would satisfy it, but this object always eludes it — or, to be more precise, desire eludes the object, keeping desire perpetual (and perpetually dissatisfied). 59-60

Desire, in other words, doesn’t attempt to achieve satisfaction but to sustain itself as desire, to keep desire going. This is why desire constantly seeks out a satisfying object and yet never quite gets it. It leads us to see ourselves as dissatisfied and to fail to see the satisfaction we obtain from the circulation of the drive.

Desire is nothing but a misrecognition of the death drive. 60

note 14. The intrinsic link between desire and the death drive makes it possible to transition from desire to drive through fully insisting on one’s desire. This is why Alenka Župančič claims: “In order to arrive at the drive, one must pass through desire and insist on it until the very end” (Alenka Župančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan [New York: Verso, 2000], 239).

Todd McGowan, May 8, 2020 DEATH DRIVE

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

subject failed articulation

ŽIŽEK, SLAVOJ. A reply: with enemies like these, who needs friends? Revue Internationale de Philosophie 2012. 439-457.

Download Revue internationale de philosophie here.

Communism should no longer be conceived as the subjective (re)appropriation of the alienated substantial content — all versions of reconciliation conceived as “subject swallows the substance” should be rejected.

The Hegelian subject has no substantial actuality, it comes second, it only emerges through the process of separation, of overcoming of its presuppositions, and these presuppositions are also just a retroactive effect of the same process of their overcoming.

The result is thus that there is, at both extremes of the process, a failure-negativity inscribed into the very heart of the entity we are dealing with.

If the status of the subject is thoroughly “processual,” it means that it emerges through the very failure to fully actualize itself.

This brings us again to one of the possible formal definitions of subject: a subject tries to articulate (“express”) itself in a signifying chain, this articulation fails, and by means and through this failure, the subject emerges: the subject is the failure of its signifying representation — this is why Lacan writes the subject of the signifier as $, as “barred.”

In a love letter, the very failure of the writer to formulate his declaration in a clear and efficient way, his oscillations, the letter’s fragmentation, etc., can in themselves be the proof (perhaps the necessary and the only reliable proof) that the professed love is authentic — here, the very failure to deliver the message properly is the sign of its authenticity. If the message is delivered in a smooth way, it arouses suspicions that it is part of a well-planned approach, or that the writer loves himself, the beauty of his writing, more than his love-object, i.e., that the object is effectively reduced to a pretext for engaging in the narcissistically-satisfying activity of writing.

And the same goes for substance: substance is not only always-already lost, it only comes to be through its loss, as a secondary return-to-itself — which means that substance is always-already subjectivized.

In “reconciliation” between subject and substance, both poles thus lose their firm identity.

Let us take the case of ecology: radical emancipatory politics should aim neither at the complete mastery over nature nor at the humanity’s humble acceptance of the predominance of Mother-Earth. Rather, nature should be exposed in all its catastrophic contingency and indeterminacy, and human agency assumed in the whole unpredictability of its consequences — viewed from this perspective of the “other Hegel,” the revolutionary act no longer involves as its agent the Lukacsean substance-subject, the agent who knows what it does while doing it.

One is even tempted to talk here about Marx’s “idealist reversal of Hegel”: in contrast to Hegel who was well aware that the owl of Minerva takes of only at the evening dusk, after the fact, i.e., that Thought follows Being (which is why, for Hegel, there can be no scientifi c insight into the future of society), Marx reasserts the primacy of Thought: the owl of Minerva (German contemplative philosophy) should be replaced by the singing of the Gaelic rooster (French revolutionary thought) — in the proletarian revolution, Thought will precede Being.

Does, however, this mean that the ultimate subjective position we can adopt is that of a split which characterizes the fetishist disavowal? Is all we can do take the stance of “although I know well there is no big Other, the big Other is only the sedimentation, the reified form, of intersubjective interactions, I am compelled to act as if the big Other is an external force which controls us all”?

Lack in the Other

It is here that Lacan’s fundamental insight into how the big Other is “barred,” lacking, in-existing even, acquires its weight: the big Other is not the substantial Ground which secretly pulls the strings, it is inconsistent/lacking, its very functioning depends on subjects whose participation in the symbolic process sustains it. Instead of either the submersion of the subject into its substantial Other or the subject’s appropriation of this Other we thus get a mutual implication through lack, through the overlapping of the two lacks, the lack constitutive of the subject and the lack of/in the Other itself. It is perhaps time to read Hegel’s famous formula “One should grasp the Absolute not only as substance, but also as subject” more cautiously and literally: the point is not that the Absolute is not substance, but subject. The point is hidden in the “not only… but also”: the interplay between the two, which also opens up the space of freedom — we are free because there is a lack in the Other, because the substance out of which we grew and on which we rely in inconsistent, barred, failed, marked by an impossibility.

However, what kind of freedom is thereby opened up? One should raise here a clear and brutal question in all its naivety: but if we reject Marx’s critique of Hegel and stick to Hegel’s notion of the owl of Minerva which takes off only in the evening — i.e., if we accept Hegel’s claim that the position of a historical agent who is able to identify its own role in the historical process and act accordingly is inherently impossible, since such a self-referentiality makes it impossible for the agent to take into account to impact of its own intervention, how this act itself will affect the constellation —, what are the consequences of this position for the act, for emancipatory political interventions?

Does it mean that we are condemned to blind acts, to risky steps into the unknown whose final outcome totally eludes us, to interventions whose meaning we can establish only retroactively, so that at the moment of the act, we can only hope that history will show mercy (grace) and crown our intervention with a minimum of success?

But what if, instead of conceiving this impossibility to take into account the consequences of our acts as a limitation of our freedom, we conceive it as the zero-level (negative) condition of our freedom?

We are free only against the background of this non-transparency: if it were to be possible for us to fully predict the consequences of our acts, our freedom would effectively be only the “known necessity” in the pseudo-Hegelian way, i.e., it would consist in freely choosing and wanting what we know to be necessary. In this sense, freedom and necessity would fully coincide: I act freely when I knowingly follow my inner necessity, the instigations that I found in myself as my true substantial nature… but if this is the case, we are back from Hegel to Aristotle, i.e., we are no longer dealing with the Hegelian subject who itself produces (“posits”) its own content, but with an agent bent on actualizing its immanent potentials, its positive “essential forces,” as the young Marx put it in his deeply Aristotelian critique of Hegel. What gets lost here is the entire dialectics of the constitutive retroactivity of sense, of the continuous retroactive (re)totalization of our experience.

But, again, what does this mean for our ability to act, to intervene into ongoing history? There are in French two words for “future” which cannot be adequately rendered in English: futur and avenir. Futur stands for future as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of the tendencies which are already here, while avenir points more towards a radical break, a discontinuity with the present — avenir is what is to come /a venir/, not just what will be.

Say, in today’s apocalyptic global situation, the ultimate horizon of the “future” is what Dupuy calls the dystopian “fixed point,” the zero-point of the ecological breakdown, of global economic and social chaos, etc. — even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero-point is the virtual “attractor” towards which our reality, left to itself, tends.

The way to combat the catastrophe is through acts which interrupt this drifting towards the catastrophic “fixed point” and take upon themselves the risk of giving birth to some radical Otherness “to come.” (We can see here how ambiguity the slogan “no future” is: at a deeper level, it does not designate the closure, the impossibility of change, but what we should be striving for — to break the hold of the catastrophic “future” cover up and thereby open up the space for something New “to come.”) 455

zupančič drive

The Splendor of Creation: Kant, Nietzsche, Lacan
Alenka Zupančič 1999 UMBRA

When, in The Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan returns to the question of the drive, he reformulates the difference between the object and the Thing in terms of the difference between aim and goal.

Let us suggest an example of this difference, as well as of the difference between instinct and drive: the child’s instinct to suck the nipple in order to be fed becomes the drive when the aim (or the object) of sucking is no longer milk, but the very satisfaction that it finds in sucking.

Thus, a child sucking its finger already has some experience of the drive.

The “change of object” that characterizes the drive, as well as sublimation, is the shift from the object that gives us satisfaction (i.e. the “natural” object, the object that can satisfy a certain need) to the satisfaction itself as an object.

We are not dealing with substitution, but rather with a “deviation” or “detour.” 57

So, contrary to the common belief, sublimation does not proceed from some “unnatural,” “depraved,” or “unacceptable” desire to something more “natural” (in the sense of being more acceptable), but rather from something perfectly natural (sucking a nipple in order to be fed) to something “unnatural” (sucking a woman’s breast or a penis for the sake of sucking, for the very pleasure of sucking).

zupancic UMBRA pt 2 extimité drive Thing

The Splendor of Creation: Kant, Nietzsche, Lacan
Alenka Zupančič 1999 UMBRA

Previously we took the example of “purposiveness without purpose,” which might be slightly misleading since we encounter the same term (purpose) on both sides. A better example is that of “pleasure without interest,” or, in another translation, “liking devoid of all interest,” which will help us to clarify in detail how this “interior exclusion” actually works and what its consequences are.

The notion of “pleasure devoid of all interest” also has the advantage of becoming, since Nietzsche’s critique, the emblem of the Kantian conception of the beautiful and the topos of contemporary philosophical debate concerning the notion of the beautiful (and of art in general). […]

But what exactly does the formula “pleasure devoid of all interest” aim at?

Kant calls the pleasure that is still linked with interest (or need) “agreeableness.” If I declare an object to be agreeable, this judgment “arouses a desire for objects of that kind.” This does not mean that with the next stage, the stage of the beautiful, or “devoid of all interest,” this desire disappears — the point is that it becomes irrelevant.

Let us clarify this with one of Kant’s own examples, the “green meadows.”

The first stage is the objective stage: the green color of the meadows belongs to objective sensation. “Meadows are green” is an objective judgment.

The second stage is the subjective stage: the color’s agreeableness belongs to subjective sensation, to feeling: “I like green meadows” is a subjective judgment, which also means, “I would like to see green meadows as often as possible.” This is a “yes” to the object (green meadows) which is supposed to gratify us (Kant’s term).

The third stage is a “yes,” not to the color, but to the feeling of the agreeable itself, a “yes” not to the object that gratifies us but to the gratification itself, i.e. a “yes” to the previous “yes.”

Here it is the feeling itself, the sensation that becomes the object (of judgment). “Green meadows are beautiful” is a judgment of taste, an aesthetic judgment, which is neither “objective” nor “subjective.” This judgment could be called “acephalous” or “headless,” since the “I,” the “head” of the judgment is replaced, not with some impersonal objective neutrality as in statements of the type “the meadows are green,” but with the most intimate part of the subject (how the subject feels itself affected by a given representation as object).

“Devoid of all interest” means precisely that we no longer refer to the existence of the object (green meadows), but only to the pleasure that it gives us.

Life must involve passion (engagement, zeal, enthusiasm, interest), but this passion must always be accompanied by an additional “yes”—to it, otherwise it can only lead to nihilism. This “yes” cannot be but detached from the object, since it refers to the passion itself.

The great effort of Nietzsche’s philosophy is to think and articulate the two together. “Yes” to the “yes” cannot be the final stage in the sense that it would suffice in itself. Alone, it is no longer a “yes” to a “yes,” but just plain “yes”—the “ee-ahh,” the donkey’s sound of inane, empty enjoyment.

But how exactly does this couple function? We know that any real involvement excludes simultaneous contemplation of it.

And yet they must be somehow simultaneous, they must always walk in a pair (i.e. constitute one subjective figure), otherwise we would not be dealing with the “affirmation of affirmation,” but with two different types of affirmation.

The figure that corresponds to this criterion is the figure of creation — or, in other terms, the figure of sublimation.

The creation is never a creation of one thing, but always the creation of two things that go together: the something and the void, or, in Lacan’s terms, the object and the Thing.

This is the point of Lacan’s insisting on the notion of creation ex nihilo, and of his famous example of the vase: the vase is what creates the void, the emptiness inside it.

The arch-gesture of art is to give form to the nothing.

Creation is not something that is situated in the (given) space or that occupies a certain space, it is the very creation of the space as such.

With every creation, a new space gets created.

Another way of putting this would be to say that every creation has the structure of a veil. It operates as a veil that creates a “beyond,” announces it, and makes it almost palpable in the very tissue of the veil.

zupancic UMBRA pt 1 kant nietzsche lacan extimité

The Splendor of Creation: Kant, Nietzsche, Lacan
Alenka Zupančič 1999 UMBRA

In his Critique of Judgment, Kant approaches the question of the beautiful in four steps, with four paradoxical definitions, which all revolve around the “signifier of the lack” — the word WITHOUT or DEVOID OF.

Beauty is a

“liking without interest,”
“universality without concept,”
“purposiveness without purpose,” and
“necessity without concept.”

Kant’s basic operation in these definitions consists in what one might call essential subtraction: in each of the definitions quoted above, Kant deprives the first notion exactly of that which is considered to be its essential characterization.

Is it not the essence of every liking or pleasure (Wolhgefallen) that it is bound with interest? Is it not the essence of universality and of necessity that they are based on concepts? Is it not the essence of purposiveness that it has a purpose? The beautiful thus becomes the quality of something organized around a central void, and it is this very void which somehow dictates its organization.

“Purposiveness without purpose,” for example, does not simply refer to something that, while having no purpose, nevertheless strikes us as if (the famous Kantian als ob) it had one.

The question is not simply that of the comparison or resemblance, and the opposition is not that of the appearance of a purpose versus the actual absence of any purpose.

The mystery of the beautiful does not reside in the question, “How can something that has no purpose produce such a striking effect of purposiveness?”

The point is rather that the absence of the purpose in the “center” and the purposiveness of what is organized around this central absence are intrinsically connected.

It is not that we detect some purposiveness in spite of the absence of any purpose; that is, it is not that the relation between the two elements is that of contradiction, but rather the relation is that of a specific form of mutual sustaining.

What we called essential subtraction can be expressed even better in terms of extimité, defined by Lacan as the “excluded interior,” as something which is “excluded in the interior.”

This is precisely what Kantian definitions aim at: the beauty names the effect of this excluded interior. Where the excluded dimension remains included as excluded, it is via its exclusion that it becomes operative as the organizing power of its “surroundings.”

It is quite remarkable that in his discussion of art in relation to the question of sublimation, Lacan accentuates almost the same structure as Kant.

He stresses that in every form of sublimation, emptiness (or void) is determinative, although not in the same way. Religion consists of avoiding this void, whereas science and/or philosophy take an attitude of unbelief towards it.

As for art, “all art is characterized by a certain mode of organization around this emptiness.”

(Of course, the emptiness at stake is not just any kind of emptiness or void, but precisely “that excluded interior which . . . is thus excluded in the interior.”

The other name for this void or emptiness is das Ding, the Thing.