lacan – Page 12 – objet (a)

Žižek EGS 2009 sexual difference

Lacan and Sexual Difference Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (March 23, 2011) This lecture is longer by 15 minutes than the one below.
This is identical recording of Žižek’s lecture by another person.
Mp3 audio recording of lecture here.

Lacan reasserts the ontological status of sexual difference How can he re-sexualize universe without regressing in a premodern ontology.

Sexual difference is purely formal. The way SD functions in the human universe is not immediately linked to biological functions of sexuality. Even natural sexuality can be sexualized.

Formal structure and immediate reality: you can imagine a couple just doing it as a pure instrumental activity, doing it mechanically. And we do some things that have nothing to do w/ sexuality but can be sexualized. Imagine I meet you, we shake hands, the very simple act of squeezing your hand, and not letting go.

This act of repetition sexualizes it. Sexuality spills over, is not sign of its strength, but its weakness. It doesn’t work in its own domain so it must expand.
We should move to ontology of incompleteness. Like Kant mathematical and dynamic antinomies, the Lacanian not-all. This impossibility of getting it all, of getting a totalized reality. The first thing Lacan gets us to do: We move from Kant to Hegel.

Kant remains too epistemological, he thinks there is an objective reality out there and because of the limitations of our categories we can’t get at it. Hegel says what if we transpose this structure of failure hinderance into the thing-itself. Heisneberg thinks its epistemological way, but Bohrs, this impossibility is in the thing-itself.

Incompleteness of society The incompleteness of the structure of reality and in order to make it consistent is to supplement with a virtual fiction. Bentham’s point is yes we can distinguish what is fiction/reality, BUT if we take away the fiction we lose reality itself. This point was made by GK. Chesteron.
Necessity of fictional supplement: We all know that we want to do that (have sex) but the question in what way. You ask 5 men, what you want to do, the cloud should show you need a fiction to do it, that is don’t just show cloud of naked woman, but the cloud should show, while reading a book, while walking on the beach etc.
Reality structured like a fiction: show only reality, but to make us experience it as a magical fiction.
Children of Men At the very end, in a small boat to a scene where some kind of ship called ‘tomorrow’. It seems so obvious that although it is shot like reality, the ship is pure appearance, it was the dying dream. A radical ambiguity at the end.
Home Alone

Lacan formalization of Sexual Difference

ideal ego mirror

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

The infant’s mirror image is the first representation of the ideal ego (written in Lacanian algebra as i(a)). The ideal ego, an imaginary order projection, is an illusory and beautiful self-image.

This ideal self-image is precious to the child, and she will defend it as a prized possession, passionately contesting anything that implies that she is not as perfect as she believes. The analytic subject may therefore respond with aggression when an analytic intervention exposes the mirages of the ideal ego or the ego (Lacan, 1953/2006a).

The ideal ego changes over time, because the child’s conception of the perfect self is an evolving one. Therefore, the ideal ego is impossible to achieve, and “will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming” (Lacan,1949/2006a, p. 94).

“Man’s ideal unity… is never attained as such and escapes him at every moment” (Lacan, 1978/1991b, p. 166) although he is unfailing in his attempts to catch up to it.

mcgowan subjectivation

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

Chapter 6: The Appeal of Sacrifice (pt 2)

The sacrifice that subjects make in order to enter society repeats the earlier sacrifice, but what occurs is repetition with a difference. While the initial sacrifice of the privileged object installs the death drive in the subject and thereby constitutes the individual as a subject, the repetition of this sacrifice marks an attempt to domesticate the death drive at the same time as it follows the death drive’s logic. That is, the death drive leads us to this repetition, but the repetition attempts to solve the impossible bind that the death drive creates for us. Society is an attempt to solve the problem of subjectivity itself. 146

Of course, the idea that subjectivity in the psychoanalytic sense exists prior to society is absurd, since subjectivity only becomes possible through the imposition of a societal demand on an animal being. But within society the process of subjectivization occurs in two steps: an initial loss occurs that constitutes the subject, and subsequently the subject makes an additional sacrifice in order to commemorate the first loss and to join the social order.

It is only through the repetition of loss that the social order really gets a hold on the subject because the second loss involves an investment through sacrifice in the good of the social order as a whole. In this sense, subjects do exist prior to their entrance into the social order, and properly socialized subjects are only those who have sacrificed for the sake of the social good. The subject who would refuse to make this sacrifice for the sake of society would not participate in the social bond and would exist as an outsider within the social order. This is the position that the psychotic occupies. 146

mcgowan sacrifice

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

Chapter 6: The Appeal of Sacrifice

Neither subject nor social order exists independently but emerge out of the other’s incompleteness. The subject exists at the point of the social orders failure to become a closed structure, and subject enters into social arrangements as result of its own failure to achieve self-identity. The internal contradictions within every social order create the space for the subject, just as the internal contradictions of the subject produce an opening to externality that links the subject to the social order. Failure on each side provides the connective apparatus and constitutes the bond between the subject and the social order. 145

To put it another way, the subject’s entrance into a group or society depends on the originary loss that gives birth to its subjectivity. Without this loss and the desire that it produces in the subject, no one would agree to enter into a social bond, a bond that places a fundamental restriction on the subject’s ability to enjoy.

The psychoanalytic name for this foundational loss is the human animal’s “premature birth” a condition that creates an undue dependence not present in other animals. But whether or not one wants to defend the idea of humanity’s premature birth, the idea of a foundational loss is nonetheless essential for theorizing the emergence of subjectivity. Without loss, there could be no desire and no subjectivity. This loss leads the subject to society as the site where loss might be redeemed. 145

Once deceived by the lure of an imaginary complete enjoyment and disappointed with all the enjoyment it experiences, the subject is ready to agree to the entrance requirements of a society. The frustrated subject accedes to societal restrictions on enjoyment as she/he sees that others have also accepted these restrictions. a society circumnavigates the antagonisms between its member by promoting equality or justice among them all. … The subject’s individual frustration with the inadequacy of every actual enjoyment measured against he anticipated enjoyment finds an outlet in the societal demand for equality, a demand that proscribes [forbids] this enjoyment for all. The subject sacrifices a complete enjoyment that it never attains for the equality that derives from membership in society. 145-146

dolar keeping the ball in the air persistence perseverance

Here is the interview online

Badiou’s four truth procedures, four areas where truth emerges.

Science, and above all the completely constructed science like mathematics. It doesn’t refer to anything in the world, it just creates its own entities, pure entities.
Poetry and art as such.
Politics not of opinions but politics of truth. There’s an opposition between the two. Democracy basically is a democracy of opinions. Anybody is free to hold any kind of opinion and then you count the votes. This is not a politics of truth. There is a sort of truth at stake in politics which has to do with justice and equality, it has to do with an idea.
Love, which is the emergence of a truth event. A subjective truth event.

Badiou lists the four areas as the areas in which this break happens. I am not sure that this list is the best, exhaustive or conclusive. Maybe this list is too neat in some way. I think things are messier in life. In many everyday situations, even trivial ones, there may be a sudden and unexpected break, people show an inventive creativity and do something very unexpected, and actually change the parameters of the situation and their own lives and the lives of others. I would leave this field open.

I think passion is what drives you, drives you towards something. But it’s not that passion as such is enough. It’s not that it just drives you and you let yourself be driven. It actually demands a hell of a lot if you want to pursue this passion! It demands that you put something, everything at stake.

To risk the usual ways of your life, the ‘bequemes Leben’, if you are lucky enough to have a comfortable social position. There is the spontaneous hang to pursue your social survival within a certain slot, the script for your career is waiting for you. And this is where the question of break comes in.

The passion is what makes a break.

But the break, it demands a hell of a lot of ‘Anstrengung’ and you have to put things at risk. Sometimes drastically at risk. You risk everything for the question of passion, to pursue your passion.

What Freud names ‘Todestrieb’ (death drive) in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) is not some striving towards death, but too much of life. There’s too much life, more than you can bear.

So this is the excessive moment which derails the usual course of things and in order to pursue this it takes a lot of courage and persistence, perseverance.

I think most people give up at a certain point. There are many ways of giving up, also as an artist. One way of giving up is to somehow be content with your role or to… ‘übereinstimmen’.

So that you consent to being that role. And this is a socially assigned role which can bring glory and awards. If it started with a break, then the big danger is that the break starts functioning as the institution of the break. The break itself gets institutionalised and highly valued.

Dolar: Yes, it has a place then. Freud has this wonderful phrase “people ruined by their own success“. And I think that in art many people are ruined by their own success. Precisely by succeeding in what they wanted to do and then they fit into this.

They have made an institution of themselves and somehow started to believe that they are this.

You have this wonderful phrase in Lacan: who is a madman? It’s not just an ordinary person who thinks that he’s a king. The definition of a madman is a king who thinks that he’s a king. And you have this madness among artists who believe that they are artists. This is psychosis, in a certain sense, if you really think that you are what you are. You really think that you are an artist. This is the end of art, I think.

Dolar: Feeling at home. Is there a good way to feel at home? I don’t know. I think there’s always an ideological trap in this. What you mostly feel at home with is always ideology because it offers a sort of security. I mean security in the sense of providing a certain status within which you can dwell. And also security of meaning, which means that it provides you with some answers as to ‘What does it all mean?’ ‘We live in parliamentary democracy, we’re a free society, in the era of progress and prosperity’, etc.

I mean the words which fulfil a certain horizon of meaning which situates you within a certain social moment and social structure, within a certain type of social relations. And this is always ideology, ideology is what makes this run. And I think that the break that we are talking about – the break with meaning or the break with the continuity of things – it could be described as a break with ideology.

Art and ideology are at the opposite ends. Art always makes a break, a cut into the ideological continuity of what you most feel at home with. And what you feel at home with is entrusted upon you. But this is not to say that art is immune to ideology, it can easily be made into ideology.

WgK: At that point when you feel content.

Dolar: Yes. When you feel content in your role. One could make a certain opposition between art and culture. I think culture is a sort of domestication of art. You establish canonical artworks which you are taught at school. And it’s a question of what comes into the canon and is it a good thing to have a canon or how to include or exclude works. Of course you always have a canon. There’s no escaping this, but at the same time you have to understand that culture is always a domestification of what is dangerous or excessive in art. It domesticates things by giving them a sort of proper place and value. You can say: ‘Well, Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist of all time.’ I mean it’s quite true, but it’s also a very forced statement to domesticate Shakespeare’s work. You glorify it instead of dealing with it.

WgK: It ends their quality of being a break by giving them a place.

Dolar: Yeah. You reinscribe them into a continuity of a tradition, of a cultural identity.

WgK: I have the feeling it’s a regressive desire.

Dolar: For home?

WgK: Yeah. Isn’t it?

Dolar: Yes. Ultimately yes. I think that being at home means being in the ideology and being in the meaning and having some sort of meaning secured. And I think that creating a home as a way of being with yourself – or being with another person – is precisely to try to deal with the unhomely element of it. To keep the unhomely element of it alive. What Freud called das Unheimliche, litterally the unhomely, but with the utter ambiguity where it can be given the comic twist. I think that love is keeping the non-homely element alive. It’s not to finally ‘go home’ with someone, but actually to keep this thing in the air. Keep this thing in the air. And comedy is precisely – to keep the ball in the air. Keep the ball in the air, I mean constantly.

mcgowan hegel master slave

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.
Chapter 3: Class Status and Enjoyment.

McGowan argues that what Hegel fails to see “how recognition functions as a barrier to enjoyment. In the struggle for recognition,the master wagers her or his enjoyment precisely because it has no value for the master. Unlike the slave, the master finds no satisfaction in her or his own enjoyment, which is why she or he can risk it – with life itself – for the sake of prestige [recognition].

As a result, the master may eat, wear, or hold what the the slave produces, but she or he cannot enjoy it. In assuming the position of mastery and acquiring the recognition that accompanies it, the master makes a fundamental sacrifice of enjoyment that obtaining an object from the slave cannot redeem. The slave, on the other hand, remains free to enjoy, which is what, as Jacques Lacan points out, Hegel fails to see. 93

🙂 The upshot of this is that the master invests in the idea of symbolic status and derives an identity from it while the slave adopts an attitude of indifference toward symbolic identity and is thus able to enjoy. 94

🙂 In capitalism this structural elimination of the outside position (the slave’s position) means the elimination of a site for enjoyment that existed in earlier societies not found on appropriation of surplus value. Here the slave can enjoy and its only limit to enjoyment is what his/her master dictates, the restriction is an external one. McGowan is trying to make that point that with capitalism, the restriction becomes internal. According to McGowan:

Within capitalist society, recognition becomes that which no one can avoid – a universal that structures subjectivity. If one becomes an enjoying subject, one can do so only by passing through and then rejecting the lure of recognition and class status. One can enjoy only after having initially sacrificed enjoyment in search of recognition. This process reveals the true nature of enjoyment, obscured in precapitalist societies. Enjoyment is never direct but always based on a prior loss or sacrifice. One enjoys through this loss, and thus one enjoys partially.

[…] the partiality of today’s enjoyment does not point toward a future enjoyment that would be complete. Its partiality is based on an internal necessity: without the loss of the its object, the subject cannot enjoy; it enjoys the object only in its absence. This enjoyment, like that of precapitalist epochs, has an infinite quality to it. But it is a fully realized infinite, an infinite that includes its limit – the necessity of the prior loss – internally, rather than continually moving toward this limit and never reaching it. 97

To give in to the temptation of recognition and class status is to continue to sacrifice one’s enjoyment for the sake of the production and reproduction of the social order.

The path to enjoyment is much more difficult. It involves resisting the image of enjoyment that social recognition uses to sell itself and focusing on an enjoyment that can’t be imagined.

This is the real enjoyment that the subject endures rather than performs. It is an enjoyment that generates anxiety and suffering; it is rooted in loss but at the same time, it is the only enjoyment that leaves the subject satisfied rather than continually seeking a richer experience elsewhere. 98

On page 95 McGowan’s argument goes a bit haywire. He should stay away from trying to connect sacrifice of enjoyment with surplus enjoyment. I think we need to connect with Zupancic here.

Capitalism we have surplus labor which worker performs over and above the paid labor. There is necessary labor time which worker must perform to reproduce itself, surplus labor time “in contrast is done for the sake of progress. … In the act of performing surplus labor, one spends time working that might otherwise be spent enjoying; one works excessively at the expense of one’s enjoyment, which is itself excessive.” 95

🙂 Surplus labor is the excessive work and time that could have otherwise gone towards enjoyment. McGowan states, “surplus value that surplus labor creates is the way that sacrificed enjoyment manifests itself in the capitalist system, and the universality of the appropriation of surplus value renders this sacrifice inescapable. 95

McGowan class and enjoyment dirty jokes

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.
Chapter 3: Class Status and Enjoyment.

🙂 This chapter really takes off from Žižek’s claim that I don’t want to hear about your food and costumes, tell me your dirty jokes.

Thesis: Psychoanalytic critique of capitalism differs from Marxist theories because it recognizes that even the rich, well-off upper class do not enjoy, in fact they enjoy less than the workers and lower classes. This is because the former must sacrifice more enjoyment to attain the material worth etc.

But McGowan states that even though they may be on top in the the game of capital, they are still are unable to get satisfaction from their satisfaction. “It is only when one blows up one’s class possibilities that the opportunity for real enjoyment appears. Enjoyment requires sacrifice, but not the sacrifice of one’s time for the sake of accumulation. It demands the sacrifice of accumulation itself.” 86

But this isn’t libertarian, Hayekian right-wing platitudes. These conservatives generally argue for an emergence of an aristocratic elite, that with freedom class division is inevitable. Whereas for psychoanalysis class society is founded on a particular form of non-freedom, arguing that its “implicit ideal guiding psychoanalytic treatment is that of a classless society.” 81 Hmm sounds like Marx; so what gives Todd?

While Marxism shows the economic and social costs of class exploitation … psychoanalysis emphasizes the psychic costs of capitalism for the whole society, including those that most directly benefit … the upper and middle classes. Its concern is … the suffering endured by those who, when one regards their situation from the outside, should be happy. Psychoanalysis arises in response to the psychic costs demanded by capitalist class based society. 82

Psychoanalysis shows how even those who most surely benefit the most from capitalism don’t really enjoy.

If this sounds rather odd for a socially progressive guy like McGowan, he then explains:

Of course, no one wants to lament the misfortune of the poor little rich kid or try to generate sympathy for the suffering of Bill Gates. The point is rather to emphasize the unfreedom and lack of enjoyment that haunt the beneficiaries of capitalism and all class society. Even those who win in the capitalist game lose, and this provides what is perhaps the ultimate indictment of the capitalist system. 82

This is an interesting tact, McGowan implies here that Marxist theory by unearthing the exploitation of workers, and thus basing the overthrow of capitalism on a sense of justice and equality, should also stop to look at the fact that the rich owners are not as well off psychically as many assume.

The reason being is that for McGowan

Workers suffer less repression
Class privilege requires a more circuitous route to enjoyment 84
Class privilege demands repression in exchange for the social advantages that it offers 83

McGowan cites Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious where Freud explains the trajectory of jokes in terms of social class.

lower classes (w/o privileged status in class society) the true sexual or smutty nature of joke can be openly revealed
as go higher in class status in order to remain acceptable the joke undergoes more and more “deformation and repression, so that the original sexual dimension appears only obliquely or indirectly.” 84

McGowan concludes the upper classes have made more of a sacrifice of enjoyment than lower classes, “Class status involves forgoing more enjoyment and living more strictly according to the dictates of the social law that commands its sacrifice.” 84 Class privilege requires a more circuitous route to enjoyment. 84 What does he mean exactly?

When the upper class experience a smutty joke, they feel outrage or disgust. But this is an unrecognized enjoyment, but an enjoyment nonetheless. “But enjoyment in the form of outrage or disgust is a case of enjoyment that occurs with too much trouble.”

“The upper-class subject who enjoys its superiority takes a circuitous route to find its satisfaction, and this circuitous route is the inevitable product of upper-class status. Though wealth and social recognition make material life easier, they elongate the path of the drive and thereby deprive the subject of the ability to embrace its own mode of enjoying.”

The commodity does provide enjoyment, but only insofar as one doesn’t have it. 85

Capitalism is a system in which we cannot avow our enjoyment. Therefore psychoanalysis calls for more enjoyment, not less. The call for more enjoyment, not less, is a tricky proposition because it threatens to devolve into erecting enjoyment as a social duty, which is the fundamental form of contemporary authority.

We must also clearly distinguish enjoyment, which one endures and suffers, from pleasure and happiness, both of which promise the overcoming of loss. Note 14 p. 303

Recognition

Here McGowan gets into Hegel’s Master/Slave. He distinguishes between acceding to the demand and on the other hand, going beyond demand to desire. Being stuck on authority’s demand and trying to fulfill it, follow it slavishly. But the authority doesn’t know what it wants.

The subject becomes a desiring subject by paying attention not to what the social authority says (the demand) but to what remains unsaid between the lines (the desire). The path of desire offers the subject the possibility of breaking from its dependence on social authority through the realization that its secret, the enigma of the other’s desire, does not exist — that the authority doesn’t know what it wants. 88

Flashy cars, conspicuous consumption … Someone who was authentically enjoying would not need to parade this enjoyment. The authentically enjoying subject does not perform its enjoyment for the Other but remains indifferent to the Other. 90

Sacrifice enjoyment:

But no one can make a direct choice of enjoyment instead of recognition. The initial loss of enjoyment, the initial sacrifice is inevitable. As I have insisted in earlier chapters, this enjoyment only exists insofar as it is lost: there is no way for the subject to avoid altogether the loss of enjoyment for the sake of recognition. But what the subject might avoid is the perpetuation of this abandonment of enjoyment through the embrace of recognition. One can’t initially reject recognition, but one can subsequently revisit the original acceptance of the social demand and refuse it by becoming indifferent to recognition’s appeal. 90

Everything in society works against this indifference. The social order receives energy for its functioning from the enjoyment that subjects sacrifice for the sake of recognition. IT continues to operate thanks to a constant influx of enjoyment from those subjected to it.

When subjects embrace their own enjoyment rather than readily sacrificing for it, they do not contribute to the process of production or reproduction in the social order. Enjoyment has no use value for society, though it organizes and sustains the subject’s existence. (The subject who can no longer enjoy loses the will to live altogether.) 90

“The higher the one rises in class status, the more one invest oneself in an order that demands the sacrifice of enjoyment.” 92 McGowan argues that if we can’t entirely overthrow class distinction “we can take up a different relationship to it.” We can view it as what he calls a “necessary encumbrance.” By this he means that social recognition can be viewed as just another thankless task that society must perform. Not so fast though. There is only one problem, and that is the way capitalism has invested in the pursuit of recognition. This investment we all make in social recognition crosses all class barriers and it is what marks “the decisive break that capitalism introduces into history, and it marks the fundmanetal barrier that it erects on the path to tadopting a different relation to social class and recognition.” 92 In order to argue this point he moves to Hegel’s master/slave relationship.

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.
Download article here

Goto Part 2

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

rothenberg acephalous subject

Something must be renounced in order for a subject to emerge.

The “acephalous subject” does not function in this intentionalized mode of traditional political discourse: “the subject who acts is no longer a person but, precisely, an object.” That is, in his view, we must give up, once and for all, our sense of the political – the political act, the political domain, and the political collectivity – as based on promise or calculation.

To clarify his point that, in the political Act, the subject assumes the position of the object, Žižek rehearses the relationship of subject to object in Lacanian theory. Psychoanalysis, as we have seen, posits that something must be renounced (or formally negated) in order for a subject to emerge. 175

The objet a comes to stand in for this lost part: “drive is fundamentally the insistence of an undead ‘organ without a body,’ standing, like Lacan’s lamella, for that which the subject had to lose in order to subjectivize itself in the symbolic space of the sexual difference” (OWB 174).

It is in this way that it makes sense to think of objet a as the “correlate” of the subject, even if the object is impossible, i.e., an absence that nonetheless functions as a strange attractor for the drive. In his most straightforward statement about the acephalous subject, Žižek draws explicitly on the metaphor of the Mobius band to elucidate how the subject and the object should be thought together:

[P]ersons and things are part of the same reality, whereas the object is the impossible equivalent of the subject itself. We arrive at the object when we pursue the side of the subject (of its signifying representation) on the Moebius track to the end and find ourselves on the other side of the same place from where we started. One should thus reject the topic of the personality, a soul-body unity, as the organic Whole dismembered in the process of reification-alienation: the subject emerges out of the person as the product of the violent reduction of the person’s body to a partial object. (OWB 175)

The acephalous subject, or subject of the drives, has a Mobius topology. In Žižek’s thinking, the excessive dimension of the Mobius subject comes into play during the political act as the means by which the subject itself encounters the objective dimension. The objet a, the excessive part of the subject, is “the subject’s stand-in within the order of objectivity” (OWB 175).

When the subject identifies directly with this excess, it becomes genuinely revolutionary because it gains access to the register of the Real, the object. How? According to Žižek, the identification with the object de-personalizes the subject, instituting a gap between its subjectivated individuation (all the little preferences and properties that make up our social identities) and its subject-ness, the “pure” subject that emerges as a function of the drive. This shift in perspective, whereby the subject becomes the object (that it always was) and vice versa, is what Žižek calls the parallax view.

It may be helpful to return to our original formulation of the Mobius subject to understand why Žižek places such importance on this depersonalization.

If we think of the subject after subjectification as a set, A = {x, y, z, Ø}, we could draw the analogy that the elements of the set (x, y, z as the things-turned-objects by the formal negation) are the subject’s “properties” in its symbolic identity: piano-player, husband, chocolate lover.

The excessive dimension of this set derives from the fact that the external brackets marking the set correspond precisely to the internal element of the empty set.

Let us recall that setness (the externality of the brackets) correlates to the place of the subject’s inscription in the Symbolic, prior to any specific content, and the empty set (Ø) correlates to the impossible objet a, which counts as an element of the set but does not have any specific properties. The “pure” subject of Žižek’s remarks is reduced to these formal elements, what we have called the subject* considered by way of the operation of “subtraction” of the ontic properties from the presentation of the subject.

As long as we are fixated – as happens in multiculturalism and identity politics – on the symbolic identifiers of our personal identities, we obscure the link between the subject and the drive as the true engine of the subject’s existence. 176

For when we focus on the symbolic dimension of identity, we are conceiving of the subject as a subject of desire, perpetually seeking to overcome its lack by finding its object of desire. Any political action founded on this premise dooms the actors to a futile search for a Utopia which, of necessity, must always be deferred. footnote 18 [176]

In highlighting the difference between the subject of desire and the subject of the drive, Žižek sets the stage for a theory of collective action that does not depend upon the symbolic properties of the individuals involved, including their “common humanity”:

The collective that emerges at the level of such a fighting subjectivity is to be thoroughly opposed to the intersubjective topic of “how to reach the other,” how to maintain the openness and respect toward Otherness. There are, grosso modo, three ways to reach out to the other that fit the triad of ISR: imaginary (“human touch”), symbolic (“politeness,” “good manners”), real (shared obscenity).

Each of the three has its own dangers… It is easy to discern the falsity of such a gesture of empathy [like that of an Israeli soldier towards a Palestinian he is evicting]: the notion [is false] that, in spite of political differences, we are all human beings with the same loves and worries, neutralizes the impact of what the soldier is effectively doing at that moment. (OWB 177)

Other modes, such as shared obscenity, “can function as a fake solidarity masking underlying power relations” (OWB 178). What then does the acephalous subject offer to counter these deficient approaches to solidarity?

In Žižek’s view, the political meaning of one’s acts has nothing to do with one’s “sincerity or hypocrisy” – that is, one’s “subjective self-experience” is irrelevant to the objective truth of one’s actions. Rather, the subject of the drive institutes a gap between itself and its symbolic-subjective dimension. The subject’s identification with objet a re-casts it, not as a set of symbolic properties, but as connected directly to the order of objectivity.

Introducing a distance towards one’s own symbolic identity puts one in a position to act in an “objective-ethical” way (OWB 182).

Presumably, it is this link to the objective that makes solidarity possible. The manifold differences or symbolic properties of individuals move to the background, while each subject, as identified with the object of the drive, finds its way to the objective order, the only terrain on which meaningful change can occur.

Solidarity, then, emerges not from intersubjective relations but rather from the relations of subjects purified of their symbolic identities, subjects who meet on the ground of objectivity, as objects. 177

There is a tentative feel about this argument, as Žižek shifts from considerations of solidarity to ethics to a more general discussion of whether it is possible to distinguish fascism as a form of group solidarity from other political forms that are ranged against it in contemporary theory, and finally to his judgment that the multitude in Hardt and Negri involves the ultimate type of depoliticization.

So, the underlying difficulty of articulating the grounds on which subjects – subjects that are avowedly excessive – can come together as solidary political groups in a way that avoids fascism is never directly addressed. 177

McGowan 2004 on traversing fantasy

I have just read a 2004 article by Todd McGowan “Fighting Our Fantasies: Dark City and the Politics of Psychoanalysis” from his edited book on Lacan and Cinema. Now that I’ve read McGowan in 2013, I see that he’s moved a bit from this position on fantasy. Not a lot mind you, but instead of fantasy as concealing a truer reality, or a real, I think McGowan now would subscribe to the theory that fantasy is necessary, that it provides us with an opportunity to transcend the symbolic, and in expounding on this he cites the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. I don’t think McGowan is so big on the “traversing the fantasy” stuff anymore.

Psychoanalytic interpretation allows individuals to recognize functioning of ideology and role private fantasies play does nothing to help individuals act “politically as part of a larger group.” Žižek here stakes his position on the identity of psychoanalysis and politics by claiming that psychoanalysis demands the political Act – the traversal of fantasy because for Žižek fantasy “keeps the subjects within the hold of ideology.” But for McGowan this answer is very individualistic.

“Traversing the fantasy—the end of analysis—seems to be something that occurs only on the level of the individual. It may provide freedom for the individual, but this freedom exists, according to Marxism, within the larger unfreedom of capitalist society. Historically, this has been the problem with psychoanalysis for Marxism: it works for the satisfaction of the individual, not the whole.”

The strength of what I get from McGowans 2004 article is his discussion of objet a as something that even authority, Big Daddy in this case, desires, over and above their demands. For example he cites the play/movie Cat On a Hot Tin Roof and the patriarchal father desires his son that fucks up and rebels and is homosexual, over the one that becomes a lawyer, has a family, gives him grandchildren etc. McGowan’s explanation is as follows:

“The more Brick acts against Big Daddy’s demand, the more Big Daddy desires him. Brick’s resistance to Big Daddy’s authority attracts Big Daddy’s desire because it indicates the presence of the objet petit a — something that absolutely resists assimilation to the demands of authority. Big Daddy, like the Strangers, seeks out this object that seems to hold the secret of jouissance that always remains just outside the reach of those in power. Symbolic authority’s lack constitutes a political opening for the subject, which is why the subject must constantly remain aware of it.”

But it’s McGowan’s last sentence that doesn’t convince me. Yes there is lack in the Other, but how does the subject remain constantly aware of it? In what sense? How does the lack in the Other manifest itself politically?

“Often, the strongest barrier to overcome in the political act is the belief that symbolic authority is without fissure, that there is no opening in which the act can occur. By showing the Strangers’ desperate search for the jouissance of the subject, the film shatters this belief. Rather than embodying an invariable mastery that thwarts all challenges to it, the Strangers betray the inconsistency of mastery, its lack. And because even symbolic authority lacks, we need not succumb to its demands. Symbolic authority’s lack creates the space at which we can oppose it, and taking up this opposition is what it means to act politically. But the primary barrier to such an act is our investment in the fantasy that fills in symbolic authority’s lack.

Because symbolic authority is lacking or split, ideological control is not absolute. This means that it needs a fantasmatic support in order to entice subjects to buy into it. If ideology simply demands submission, subjects will be reluctant to buy into it. But fantasy fills in this lacuna, offering a reward (an image of the ultimate jouissance) that ideology offers in exchange for submission.

Hence, far from subverting ideological control, fantasy perpetuates it and follows from it. The Strangers provide the inhabitants of the city with fantasies—images of an experience beyond ideological control—and these fantasies assist in rendering the people docile. In the case of Murdoch, we see clearly how ideological control depends on a fundamental fantasy. For Murdoch, this fantasy is that of Shell Beach, a place of warmth and light in contrast to the dark, dreary city. Shell Beach occupies this important place in Murdoch’s psychic economy because it represents his point of origin—home. He believes that if he can return to this point, he will find the answers to all of his questions about his identity and gain a sense of completion.” 160

“When a subject traverses the fantasy, he or she moves from desire (continually seeking the object) to drive (circling around an objectless void). One resists this transition because it entails the loss of any hope for escape. Desire promises a transcendent future, a future beyond present constraints. But the drive makes no promises; it involves only a perpetual circling. Murdoch is not the only character in the film to pass from desire to drive. 164-165

Traversing the fantasy doesn’t allow us to escape the limits of our present situation; instead, it allows us to see that there is nothing beyond those limits, that the image of the beyond is the product of the limits themselves. That is to say, fantasy doesn’t conceal the “real world” (however bleak), but instead works to convince us that such a place exists, just beyond our reach. Traversing the fantasy involves the recognition that there is no beyond—or, rather, that the beyond exists within the present world. 167

death drive

Carel, Havi. Born to be Bad: Is Freud’s Death Drive the Source of Human Evilness? Department of Philosophy, University of Essex download here

McGowan, Todd. A Violent Ethics: Mediation and the Death Drive Février 2009

McGowan, Todd. Violence of Creation in The Prestige. 2007 International Journal of Žižek Studies. Vol 1.3 download here

In her essay Carel examines Freud’s initial debate with Einstein and pointing out that Freud made use of the death instinct to incorporate a notion of an aggressive drive that needs be pointed outwards, otherwise it directs itself against the subject in a form of repetitive masochistic self-harm. Therefore Carel ends the first part of her essay detailing how it could easily be taken that Freud falls into a more pessimistic stance, detailing the horrors of war and how this instinctual death drive is behind human aggressiveness. However the central point of Carel’s essay is the moment he questions this conclusion:

“This theory of the death drive has been conceived as the height of Freud’s pessimism, as admitting that we are indeed born evil. But is this the only ethical position that can be deduced from the death drive? This same death drive, I claim, can actually offer a solution to the problem of innate aggression.” What is Carel’s answer? Through sublimating the death drive we can control its aggressive nature, and thereby strengthen the superego. Here Carel moves to Freud’s well known treatise on the battle between Eros and Thanatos in her book: Civilization and its Discontents (1920). Carel here states that: human “aggression is innate, but nonetheless not uncontrollable.” Carel’s intention is to show how we can interpret Freud’s take on instinctive aggressiveness, not as strictly a doom and gloom scenario, but can actually turn it around.

“In this sense the ethical question is not whether aggression can be abolished from the human psyche, but rather how this aggression can be channelled to non-destructive activities and turned into a positive energy source, a will to power. We can conclude that the thesis of inherent aggression does not necessarily lead to ethical determinism. Aggression can be regarded as neutral energy, which can be used for various purposes. This idea is reinforced by abandoning the dualistic model, so the death drive is no longer a destructive force whose antidote is Eros, but rather a fundamental human force.”

Carel’s Ethics of Finitude

Psychoanalysis has an ethics, it is to reduce suffering, mitigating the self-blame and harsh talk coming from the superego, the analyst works with the analysand to reduce suffering, the increase a level of acceptance and faithfulness to oneself, regardless of whatever is Truth, the Good etc.

“Freud’s ethical imperative, as stated in the 1915 essay Thoughts for the Times on War and Death is: “If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death”. This is the imperative to prepare for the possibility of loss and mourning, for disappointment and failure. For Freud the death drive is not only the final fact of finitude, our ceasing to exist, but the many forms of loss and transience experienced within life.”

“The ethical imperative inscribed in the death drive is one of tolerance, patience, and acceptance. These are not to be confused with resignation, cynicism or despair. The ethical imperative is to learn the lesson of ambivalence, that life is made out of good and bad, fulfilment and disappointment, and moreover, that the two are inseparably intertwined.”

Todd McGowan is well known as a Lacanian film theorist. But his taste for developing a comprehensive politics based on the teaching of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He starts out his article on violence and the death drive by first drawing our attention to the fact that we are born, that is, our subjectivity emerges out of a violent tearing, or negation of our base, complacent being.

“Violence, and the rupture it suggests, marks the foundation of our subjectivity, and it is necessary for the subject’s sustenance. In his commentary of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Alexandre Kojève makes precisely this point. He notes, ‘Man is not a being that is: he is a Nothing that annihilates by the negation of being.’ Through the violent act, we tear ourselves out of undifferentiated being and emerge as subjects.”

McGowan continues:

“This negating gesture is the positive condition for subjectivity, which remains inseparable from it. Our existence as subjects is thus a thoroughly violent existence. Obviously, the violence that Kojève theorizes is not identical to what we usually think of as violence — fighting, the use of weapons, and so on — but actual acts of violence are a manifestation of the original violence that gives birth to subjectivity. Actual acts of violence repeat and sustain this original negation.”

Here McGowan is talking about the original violence. Is it that 4 years later in his 2013 book, <em>Enjoying What We Don’t Have</em>, he slightly modifies this from violence to loss? Or is this still the same? Perhaps, since I still can not his emphasis on the emergence of subject via a traumatic, originary and constitutive loss.

For McGowan violence is foundational. For socialists, conservative and liberals and utopians alike, they see violence as the result of some other cause: poverty, lack of life chances, poor education, decline in morality etc. McGowan states, “In each case and in numerous others, there is an explanation for violence in other foundational disturbances. … There are few who try to theorize violence itself as foundational. Even one of the great thinkers who attempted to do so, Sigmund Freud, took a long time to accede to this conception.”