Category: lacan

mcgowan god contingency the other

The key to fighting against the nefarious effects of belief involves promulgating the recognition that we cannot but believe.

Armed with this recognition that God is a structural necessity rather than a being in whom we might opt to believe, we transform the believer’s conception of God.

Though in one sense widespread acceptance of the necessity of belief wouldn’t change much, it would allow this transformation in the nature of what is believed. The subject who grasps belief as a necessity and God as a structural entity recognizes that even God doesn’t know – and this is the fundamental recognition inherent in every politicization.

If psychoanalysis is atheistic, it is atheistic in the sense that it insists that even though there is God qua gap in the signifying order, there is no knowledge in this gap. Or as Lacan puts it in Seminar XI “The true formula of atheism is God is unconscious.” 253

To know that the other in the gap doesn’t know or that God is unconscious is to understand that nothing grounds human existence. The recognition that nothing grounds human existence founds any genuinely emancipatory political project. 254

Recognizing belief as necessary or God as unconscious requires an ability to see contingency at the point were explanations break down and where one typically posits the mysterious power of God.

The place where the binary signifier is missing represents the place where the contingent resides. 254

Rather than stressing the godless nature of the universe or the inutility of faith, his film shows the contingency operating at the point of the absent signifier, where believers would locate God.

Instead of God connecting everyone to each other, Babel shows the contingent nature of the social bond. Contingency becomes the source of the link between disparate worlds, and the contingent encounter provides a possibility for the realization of this link.

The contingent encounter forces the subject to confront a lack of knowledge concerning the other. One has no assurance about what the other desires, and no one can provide this assurance – not even the other itself. 257

As Babel shows, the contingent encounter offers the subject the opportunity to act – to thrust itself toward the other without any guarantee concerning how the other might respond.

In doing so, it brings the subject back to the moment of its entry into symbolization and the point at which belief first manifests itself. 258

mcgowan sacrifice subjectivity enjoyment

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

…[Why do we think that] if people simply had all the facts, they would abandon either their religious belief or their investment in the capitalist mode of production.

But religious belief and ideological commitment are not reducible to knowledge. Both represent libidinal investments that provide adherents with a reward that no amount of knowledge can replace. … the enjoyment that derives from believing 247-248

Enjoyment has an inverse relationship to utility: we enjoy in proportion to the uselessness of our actions. …

Given the odds, belief represents a poor investment and should attract very few adherents. But if the driving force behind belief is not eternal bliss but the very act of sacrifice itself – a wasteful rather than a productive act – the arguments against belief would lose all of their force.

Wasteful sacrifice appeals to us because we emerge as subject through an initial act of ceding something without gaining anything in return. The creative power of the human subject stems from its ability to sacrifice.

Through sacrificing some part of ourselves, we create a privileged object that will constitute us as desiring subjects, but this object exists only as lost or absent and has no existence prior to the sacrificial act that creates it.

There is a fundamental dissatisfaction written into the very structure of subjectivity that no one can ever escape. But at the same time, the act of sacrifice allows us to create anew our lost object. 249

Especially in the contemporary world, religious belief provides respite – an oasis of enjoyment – for the subject caught up in the capitalist drive to render everything useful and banish whatever remains unproductive. 249

mcgowan death drive subject of loss 3

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

If we locate the origin of the subject in the act where it loses nothing, this promises to revolutionize our thinking about the struggle between life and death or between Left and Right.

Privileging an originary loss allows us to see how death, rather than acting as an external limit, inheres in life itself for the subject.

There is no life for the subject that does not have its origin in death.

The subject begins its life with a death – a loss of what is most valuable to it – and no subsequent loss or death will ever be the equal of this originary one (which occurs only structurally, not empirically).

We do not have to seek out death in order to render life valuable; death is always already present within our lives and providing us value. We don’t recognize it because we resist the notion that we originate as subjects through loss and that loss is the only vehicle through which we can enjoy.

We can only give up the pursuit of death when we realize that we have already found it – or that it has found us at the moment of our emergence as subjects. 240

We embrace loss itself as the key to our freedom and our enjoyment rather than trying to flee the experience of loss through having. Recognizing the creative power of loss for us as subjects would imply a political transformation as well.

We cannot trace a through-line from the evolutionary development of animals to the emergence of subjectivity.

Subjectivity emerges through a break, through a moment in which death is injected into life and thereby throws life off its course. But in order for this disruption to be possible, a fundamental gap in the evolutionary process must have already been there. That is to say, if the evolutionary process moved forward without a hitch, there would have been no space for the emergence of language and subjectivity.

The very existence of a subject of the death drive – a being that doesn’t desire its own good – testifies to a profound lacuna within evolutionary theory. This reveals that even the movement of life in the natural world has an unnatural dimension to it, or else the death drive as such could never emerge. The natural world harbors death within it as an excess that permanently disrupts its forward movement. 241

[Subjectivity] persists only as long as it sustains the experience of loss and continues to return to this originary experience.

To recognize the excessive presence of death in life would result in a fundamental transformation of the social order. It would create neither the pure productivity of the Marxist utopia nor the strict prohibitions (and resulting ultimate enjoyment) of the fundamentalist’s dreams.

The world in which recognized death in life would contain at once more suffering and more enjoyment. We would see the trauma of loss as our only destiny, but we would also see loss as the site of our enjoyment. 242

mcgowan death drive subject of loss 2

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

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 [Deleuze, Hardt] conceive of the signifier as an evil that might be overcome. This conception of the signifier fails to account for the inseparability of negation and production.

The signifier does in fact kill; it does mortify the body. But this mortification is itself a productive act. Prior to the mortification of the body, the body is not vital and productive; it is simply stupid.

The signifier writes itself on top of this stupid body and transofmrs it into a signifiying body. But this transformation is not complete: there are points at which the body resists its signification, where it refuses to speak. The troubled passage from the living body to the signifiying body reveals the antagonism between the subject and the social order that leads to the formation of psychoanalysis.

Hysterics originally came to Freud and Breuer because of the disjunctive relationship between the body and the world of signification. Part of the hysteric’s body refuses to speak, to accept it integration into the symbolic order, and this refusal is symptomatic.

The signifier deadens the entire body in order to make it signify, but part of the body resists the deadening process and becomes mute. This occurs literally in the case of aphasia, though every hysterical ailment follows the same pattern the muteness of part of the subject’s body is the form that resistance to symbolization necessarily takes.

One affirms one’s subjectivity not though 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 its 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.

The source of our enjoyment and the source of whatever value we find in existence is neither life nor death. It is a product of the collision between death and life, between the signifier and the body.

The signifier’s deadening of the body opens up the space for a part of the body that resists this deadening. It creates value not directly but through the bodily remainder that escapes its power. This remainder is not a present force but an object irretrievably lost for the subject. 239

mcgowan death drive subject of loss 1

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

… psychoanalysis in fact represents a third way. 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.

Viewed from the perspective of the death drive, the uniqueness of a subject does not derive from the divine … 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 that 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 into being through the subject’s act of ceding it. 236

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.

mcgowan on stavrakakis 1

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

The main thrust of Yannis Stavrakakis’s The Lacanian Left involves forging the link between democracy and enjoyment. He sees that this is a link that most advocates of democracy – even radical democracy – have insufficiently emphasized because they fail to see the possibilities of an enjoyment derived from the experience of failure or of the not-all.

He says: “Far from being antithetical to jouissance, democratic subjectivity is capable of inspiring high passions. … They mobilise a jouissance beyond accumulation, domination and fantasy, an enjoyment of the not-all or not-whole.”

Severing democracy from the image of the social good requires emphasizing its scandalous dimension – the location of power in an entity (the people) that does not substantially exist.

Democracy emerges not through the expression of the popular will in institutionalized forms but when we experience the ultimate groundlessness of political power itself, when we experience the absence of any foundational social authority making itself felt.

The democratic impulse is tied to the absence at the heart of the social order, but the association of democracy with capitalism and the good has had the effect of filling this absence with the myth of the sovereign substantive people. The contemporary geopolitical universe has broken this association and returned the scandal to democracy, placing it in the position of the lost object. 194

But we are already seeing the enjoyment that derives from contemporary invocations of democracy. The enjoyment that surrounded Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and the enjoyment that the 2011 Arab revolutions evinced are but two examples of this phenomenon, which becomes possible when the status of democracy shifts from being central to the capitalist order to being excessive.194

Identifying democracy with enjoyment can also change the way that we articulate its appeal.

We can make evident the contemporary disjunction between democracy and the good and emphasize the necessity of sacrificing the good for the sake of democracy and the enjoyment it provides.

If democracy becomes recognized as a lost object among contemporary subject and the advocates of democracy can marshal the enjoyment that it might engender, they will have a chance to triumph over the reign of the universalized service of goods that is global capitalism.

The political project of psychoanalysis is fundamentally democractic, but it envisions democracy as an excess that we can enjoy, though we cannot reconcile it with our enlightened self-interest.

It is not more knowledge that will bring about our emancipation but more enjoyment. 195

mcgowan on michael moore

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

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

Highlighting Bush’s obscene enjoyment fails as a political strategy because the people who identify with Bush do so precisely because of this enjoyment, not in spite of it.

If Bush doesn’t read reports, skips meetings, vacations too much, or stumbles when talking to reporters, such failures provide possibilities for identification. Popular identification with a leader occurs on two distinct levels. On the one hand, we identify with the strength of the leader and see ourselves expressed in that strength. This identification affirms our ego and provides pleasure. On the other hand, we identify with the weaknesses of the leader. This identification is the key to our ability to enjoy the leader. The more [Moore’s film] takes the side of knowledge against Bush’s obscene enjoyment, the more it cements the identification between supporters and him through a shared enjoyment. 188

Many figures on the side of emancipatory politics see the documentary as a valuable tool because it provides knowledge that traditional media outlets do not. It helps people to break from the ideological manipulation that dominates them. But … the documentary form’s obsession with the facts causes it to miss the role of enjoyment. … the focus of documentary form on revealing facts rather than facilitating enjoyment hinders its effectiveness as a political tool. It seems inherent to take the side of knowledge and thereby enable opponents to enjoy through disregarding what it teaches. 188

[Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth] Gore warns against excessive enjoyment – overuse of electricity, driving environmentally unfriendly vehicles, consuming without educating oneself, and so on. The entire film is an act of consciousness-raising and enjoyment-restricting. By seizing on Gore’s film as a rallying point, the forces of emancipation again cede the terrain of enjoyment to conservatism … 189

mcgowan superego

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

Freud’s vision of the superego emphasizes its role in prohibition. The superego restricts what the subject can think and do; it extends the power of mastery by placing an authority within the subject’s psyche that is more demanding than any external master.

… Lacan picks up on Freud’s claim that the superego draws its energy from the reservoir of the id … Lacan dissociates the superego from prohibition and aligns it with an imperative to enjoy. Even when the superego bombards the subject with imperatives that appear in the guise of prohibitions, Lacan insists that these imperatives actually command enjoyment. 183

The superego … constantly reminds the subject of its failure to enjoy, and it promulgates an ideal of the ultimate enjoyment as a measuring stick against which the subject can contrast its own failures. No subject can obey the demands of the superego because the ideal it provides remains ever out of reach. The closer the subject approaches to it through obedience, the faster it recedes. The superego enjoins an enjoyment that it never allows the subject to find. 183

… the superego only emerges as such with the rise of expert authority and the decline of the traditional master. .. under the regime of the master, the idiotic and purely despotic dimension of the law manifests itself in the figure of the master. The master lays down the law that must be obeyed not because it is justified or practical but simply because the master says so, and the master’s authority derives from the nonsensical and completely random fact of birth or wealth.

This idiotic dimension of the law seems to disappear with the rise of expert authority. In every way, the expert’s status and dictates have a justification that the master’s don’t. 183

Under the regime of the expert, the idiocy of the law migrates to the superego, allowing the superego to exert a power that it never had under the rule of the master.

Thus, the proper birth of the superego occurs with the rise of expert authority and the evacuation of the external law’s idiocy. As the horror of external punishments abates — the practice of drawing and quartering criminals in public is no longer widespread, for instance — the internal horrors mount. This is a ramification of the rule of knowledge. 184

Žižek ethics of the real

Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook awoke in me a cold and cruel passion

Slavoj Žižek The Guardian, Monday 12 August 2013

The young twins are thoroughly immoral – they lie, blackmail, kill – yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest

There is a book through which I discovered what kind of a person I really want to be: The Notebook, the first volume of Ágota Kristóf’s trilogy, which was followed by The Proof and The Third Lie.

When I first heard someone talk about Ágota Kristóf, I thought it was an east European mispronunciation of Agatha Christie; but I soon discovered not only that Ágota is not Agatha, but that Ágota’s horror is much more terrifying than Agatha’s.

The Notebook tells the story of young twins living with their grandmother in a small Hungarian town during the last years of the second world war and the early years of communism. The twins are thoroughly immoral – they lie, blackmail, kill – yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest.

A couple of examples should suffice. One day they meet a starving deserter in a forest and bring him some things he asks them for.

When we come back with the food and blanket, he says: ‘You’re very kind.’
We say: ‘We weren’t trying to be kind. We’ve brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That’s all.’

If there ever was a Christian ethical stance, this is it: no matter how weird their neighbour’s demands, the twins naively try to meet them. One night, they find themselves sleeping in the same bed as a German officer, a tormented gay masochist. Early in the morning, they awaken and want to leave the bed, but the officer holds them back:

Don’t move. Keep sleeping.’
‘We want to urinate. We have to go.’
‘Don’t go. Do it here.’
We ask: ‘Where?’
He says: ‘On me. Yes. Don’t be afraid. Piss! On my face.’
We do it, then we go out into the garden, because the bed is all wet.

A true work of love, if there ever was one! The twins’ closest friend is a priest’s housekeeper, a young voluptuous woman who washes them, playing erotic games with them. Then something happens when a procession of starved Jews is led through the town on their way to the camp:

Right in front of us, a thin arm emerges from the crowd, a dirty hand stretches out, a voice asks: ‘Bread.’
The housekeeper smiles and pretends to offer the rest of her bread; she holds it close to the outstretched hand, then, with a great laugh, brings the piece of bread back to her mouth, takes a bite, and says: ‘I’m hungry too.’

The boys decide to punish her: they put some ammunition into her kitchen stove so that when she lights it in the morning, it explodes and disfigures her. Along these lines, it is easy for me to imagine a situation in which I would be ready, without any moral qualms, to murder someone, even if I knew that this person did not kill anyone directly.

Reading reports about torture in Latin American military regimes, I found particularly repulsive the (regular) figure of a doctor who helped the actual torturers conduct their business in the most efficient way: he examined the victim and monitored the process, letting the torturers know how much the victim will be able to endure, what kind of tortures would inflict the most unbearable pain, etc.

I must admit that if I were to encounter such a person, knowing that there is little chance of bringing him to legal justice, and be given the opportunity to murder him discreetly, I would simply do it, with a minimum of remorse about taking justice in my own hands.

What is crucial in such cases is to avoid the fascination of evil that propels us to elevate torturers into demonic transgressors who have the strength to overcome our petty moral considerations and act freely. Torturers are not beyond good and evil, they are beneath it. They do not heroically transgress our shared ethical rules, they simply lack them.

The two brothers also blackmail the priest: they threaten to let everybody know how he sexually molested Harelip, a girl who needs help to survive, demanding a weekly sum of money from him. The shocked priest asks them:

‘It’s monstrous. Have you any idea what you’re doing?’
‘Yes, sir. Blackmail.’
‘At your age … It’s deplorable.’
‘Yes, it’s deplorable that we’ve been forced to this. But Harelip and her mother absolutely need money.’

There is nothing personal in this blackmail: later, they even become close friends with the priest. When Harelip and her mother are able to survive on their own, they refuse further cash from the priest:

‘Keep it. You have given enough. We took your money when it was absolutely necessary. Now we earn enough money to give some to Harelip. We have also taught her to work.’

Their cold-serving of others extends to killing them if asked: when their grandmother asks them to put poison into her cup of milk, they say:

‘Don’t cry, Grandmother. We’ll do it; if you really want us to, we’ll do it.’

Naive as it is, such a subjective attitude in no way precludes a monstrously cold reflexive distance. One day, the twins put on torn clothes and go begging. Passing women give them apples and biscuits and one of them even strokes their hair. Another woman invites them to her home to do some work, for which she will feed them.

We answer: ‘We don’t want to work for you, madam. We don’t want to eat your soup or your bread. We are not hungry.’
She asks: ‘Then why are you begging?’
‘To find out what effect it has and to observe people’s reactions.’
She walks off, shouting: ‘Dirty little hooligans! And impertinent too!’
On our way home, we throw the apples, the biscuits, the chocolate, and the coins in the tall grass by the roadside.
It is impossible to throw away the stroking on our hair.

This is where I stand, how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity.

With more people like this, the world would have been a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion.

mcgowan war and loss sacrifice

But the result of war is the failure of having and the renewed experience of loss. … of course no one fights wars with the express intention of losing them, but every war brings with it sacrifice and loss, which is ultimately the substance of the social bond and the source of our ability to enjoy that bond. The pursuit of pleasure of having leads to the loss that inevitably accompanies this pursuit. 161

… one cannot discount the fact that societies also go to war simply to defend themselves and survive. But even the seemingly pure war of defense produces sacrifice that allows subjects to enjoy the social bond, and in this way it goes beyond simple defense. Note 28, 316

The conquering drive of empires has its roots in the search for what no amount of imperial possession can provide – the enjoyment of the experience of loss. Empires conquer increasing quantities of territory in order to discover a territory that they can’t conquer… powerful societies ultimately go to war in order to re-enact a constitutive loss and facilitate the enjoyment that this loss entails. 161

mcgowan loss enjoyment

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 becomes 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

Attacks of September 11, 2001 … immediately reinvigorated the social bond for a majority of Americans. The loss that they occasioned brought subjects back to the shared sacrifice that defines their membership in American society. Even as they were horrified by the image of the towers burning and then falling, most Americans, in the strict psychoanalytic sense of the term, enjoyed the attacks insofar as the attacks allowed them to experience once again their social bond with great intensity. …

This is a bond that one suffers, just as one suffers from a terrorist attack. Even though it followed from an attack, this bond was not one formed though the male logic of friend/enemy, which is why the heading in Le Monde on September 12, 2001, could proclaim, “Nous sommes tous Américains.”

The bond formed around the September 11 attacks was not initially a bond of exclusivity with a clear outside and inside. Any subject willing to accede to the experience of loss could become a part of American society at that moment.

The not-all of the social bond occurs through the experience of loss, but the recognition of this type of bond is unbearable. One enjoys it without deriving any pleasure from it. It is, in fact, painful. Not only is it painful, but it also entails complete humiliation. The society experiences the shame of being a victim and enduring trauma – the shame of enjoyment itself. 160

In order to disguise this shameful enjoyment, the United States quickly turned to an assertion of power that would carry with it the promise of a restored wholeness – the recovery of an imaginary perfect security. The attack on Afghanistan brought pleasure to most members of American society. This pleasure had the function of rendering the enjoyment that emerged through traumatic loss bearable, but it could not fulfill its inherent promise. Enjoyment satisfies, and pleasure always disappoints.

Because we seek respite from the loss that binds us, we flee from the social bond despite our purported desire for it. The authentic social bond exists only in the shared experience of loss – that is, only according to the female logic of not-having. 160