Category: lacan

mcgowan desire anorexic

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

It is the initial act of sacrifice that gives birth to desire: the subject sacrifices nothing in order to create a lost object around which it can organize its desire. … The subject’s desire is oriented around this lost object, but the object is nothing as a positive entity and only exists insofar as it is lost. This is why one can never attain the lost object or the object that causes one to desire.

The coming-into-being of this object originates the subject of desire, but, having no substance, the object can never become an empirical object of desire. We may see an object of desire as embodying the lost object, but whenever we obtain this object, we discover its emptiness. The lost object is constitutively rather than empirically lost. 29

The anorexic doesn’t simply refuse to eat but eats nothing, the nothing that is the lost object. While all positive forms of food fail to address the subject’s lack, nothing does speak to the subject’s desire and allows that desire to sustain itself. The anorexic starves not because she can’t find … any food that would satisfy her but because she has found a satisfying food, a food that nourishes the desiring subject rather than the living being. The logic of anorexia lays bare the hidden workings of desire that operate within every subject.

Subjects believe that they pursue various objects of desire (a new car, a new house, a new romantic partner, and so on) and that these objects have an intrinsic attraction, but the real engine for their desire resides in the nothing that the subject has given up and that every object tries and fails to represent. Objects of desire are desirable only insofar as they attempt to represent the impossible lost object, which is what the anorexic reveals. Still the anorexic is exceptional, most nonanorexic subjects imaging that their lost object can be found in something rather than nothing. 30

The key to the politics of the death drive is grasping, in the fashion of the anorexic, the nothingness of the object and thereby finding satisfaction in the drive itself. But the subject’s relationship to its object inherently creates an illusion that makes this possibility almost impossible.

Though the lost object that initiates subjectivity has no substance, its status for the subject belies its nothingness. For the subject, the originary lost object is the object that seems to hold the key to the subject’s very ability to enjoy. Subjects invest the lost object with the idea of their own completion: the loss of the object retroactively causes a prior state of completion to arise – a state of completion that never actually existed – and the object itself bears the promise of inaugurating a return to this imaginary prior state. In short, it promises to fill in the subject’s lack and answer its desire. As a result of this investment on the part of the subject, the initial lost object becomes the engine for all the subject’s subsequent desiring. 31

Without the initial act of sacrifice, the would-be subject neither desires nor enjoys but instead suffocates in a world of self-presence, a self-presence in which one has no freedom whatsoever.  Through the loss of the privileged object, one frees oneself from the complete domination of (parental or social) authority by creating a lack that no authority can fill.  Ceding the object is thus the founding act of subjectivity and the first free act.  31

mcgowan breaking from autoerotic state sacrifice

… the subject’s openness to alienation in language, its willingness to sacrifice a part of itself in order to become a speaking subject, suggests a lack in being itself prior to the entry into language.

That is, the act through which the subject cedes the privileged object and becomes a subject coincides with language but is irreducible to it. The subject engages in the act of sacrifice because it does not find its initial autoeroticism perfectly satisfying – the unity of the autoerotic being is not perfect – and this lack of complete satisfaction produces the opening through which language and society grab onto the subject through its alienating process.

If the initial autoerotic state of the human animal were perfectly satisfying, no one would begin to speak, and subjectivity would never form.

Speaking as such testifies to an initial wound in our animal being and in being itself.

But subjectivity emerges only out of a self-wounding. Even though others encourage the infant to abandon its autoerotic state through a multitude of inducements, the initial loss that constitutes subjectivity is always and necessarily self-inflicted. Subjectivity has a fundamentally masochistic form, and it continually repeats the masochistic act that founds it. The act of sacrifice opens the door to the promise of a satisfaction that autoerotic isolation forecloses, which is why the incipient subject abandons the autoerotic state and accedes to the call of sociality.

But the term “sacrifice” is misleading insofar as it suggests that the subject has given up a wholeness (with itself or with its parent) that exists prior to being lost.

In the act of sacrifice, the incipient subject gives up something that it doesn’t have. The initial loss that founds subjectivity is not at all substantial; it is the ceding of nothing. Through this defining gesture, the subject sacrifices its lost object into being.

But if the subject cedes nothing, this initial act of sacrifice seems profoundly unnecessary. Why can’t the subject emerge without it? Why is the experience of loss necessary for the subject to constitute itself qua subject? The answer lies in the difference between need and desire. While the needs of the human animal are not dependent on the experience of loss, the subject’s desires are. 28

mcgowan fantasy 2

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

The encounter with the traumatic gap in signification is inherently a political event because it exposes the contingency of the symbolic structure and makes evident the fundamental symbolic lie. At the point of this encounter, the symbolic law’s hold over the subject evaporates as its ultimate groundlessness and meaninglessness are revealed.

Subjects invest themselves in and submit to the symbolic law insofar as they believe in its ability to confer meaning and identity, and this is precisely what the encounter with the traumatic gap gives the lie to. Thus, fantasy’s ability to lure the subject toward the encounter with this trauma attests to the political importance of fantasy.

Fantasy assists public ideology by obscuring the dimension of the trauma, but in this very act of obscuring it, fantasy stages an encounter with it. In this way, the qualities that allow fantasy to assist ideology allow it to subvert ideology as well. 216

The political task as it might be envisioned by psychoanalytic thought entails not attempting to eliminate fantasy but transforming our relationship to it.

Fantasy functions in an ideological way when it works to cover over the structural necessity of absence within the social order, but fantasy appeals to us because it also conveys an experience of loss or absence that we can access nowhere else. One could say that we are never more inauthentic than when we fantasize but never more authentic at the same time. In order to provide the pleasure that comes from overcoming absence, fantasy must introduce and narrate loss. As it does so, it allows the fantasizing subject to experience the impossible loss that founds subjectivity itself. In every fantasy, this loss is enacted, whether implicitly or explicitly.

The political task involves fostering the recognition that we enjoy our fantasies for their depiction of loss rather than for the illusion of return. 221

mcgowan fantasy stavrakakis

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

Marxist claim: subjects must break the hold that fantasy has over them before they can take authentic political action and act according to their own class interests. Attacking fantasy thus becomes, for Western philosophy and for Marxism, the sine qua non of political activity. 207

🙂 McGowan disagrees with Stavrakakis, as McGowan thinks his notion of of traversing the fantasy is caught up, like the Marxists that Stavrakakis himself criticizes, in trying to rid oneself of fantasy, since fantasy hides the gap, we need, according to Stavrakakis, to make this gap apparent, be cool with it.

Quoting Stavrakakis “Fantasy negates the real by promising to ‘realise’it, by promising to close the gap between the real and reality, by repressing the discursive nature of reality’s production.”  Here, Stavrakakis sees the ideological dimension of fantasy, and psychoanalysis for him facilitates this recognition and provides a way to dissolve fantasy’s power.

This kind of psychoanalytic politics evinces the attitude toward fantasy that both modern philosophy and Marxism take up, and this attitude certainly seems faithful to psychoanalytic practice and its attempt to assist the subject in “traversing the fantasy.”

Fantasy offers the subject a transcendent experience, and this transcendence, despite its illusory quality, has a political content. It represents a moment at which the subject is no longer bound by the limitations of the symbolic structure that ordinarily constrain it. As such, this moment of fantasmatic transcendence poses for the subject a fundamental challenge to the authority of that symbolic structure. In fact, the radical import of fantasy is located in precisely the same feature that causes fantasy to further ideology: the illusions of fantasy keep subjects content with the ruling symbolic structure, but they also provide a venue for thinking beyond that structure.  209

That is to say, the politics of attacking fantasy does not allow us to transcend the limitation that the prevailing ideology places on us. Through offering us an illusory image of transcendence, fantasy takes us beyond the limitation that the symbolic order places on us, and in doing so, it opens us to possibilities that were previously foreclosed. It is through fantasy that one sees the possibility of the impossible. If psychoanalysis allows us to see the political effectiveness of fantasy, it doe so because it emphasizes how fantasy allows us to experience the impossible. 211

mcgowan enjoyment is veil not miniskirt

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

They see an enjoying other where there is nothing but the image of enjoyment. The suicide bomber sees Western women in revealing clothes and believes that the bare skin promises an opening to enjoyment, but this represents a failure to understand that enjoyment operates through limitations and barriers rather than through revelations and transgressions. One can never go far enough in the direction of transgression to reach real enjoyment. It is the veil, not the miniskirt, that is the true garment of enjoyment . 110

mcgowan pt 2: real encounter between enjoying subject and enjoying other

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

Traditional authority figures ruled through prohibition: they demanded that subjects sacrifice their enjoyment for admittance into the social order. This type of paternal authority governs through the establishing of distance — distance between the authority figure and the subject, as well as distance between the subject and enjoyment.

The new authority, however, abandons distance for the sake of proximity. Rather than confronting us with an impenetrable demand that remains out of our comprehension, he assaults us with displays of his enjoyment. 103-104

Whereas prohibition creates a social authority that exists at a distance from the subject — or that installs distance within all of the subject’s relationships – the absence of an explicit prohibition leaves the contemporary subject in the proximity of a real other.  🙂 And this is a good thing!  Get close to the real other.

The social field of prohibition is a terrain stripped of all enjoyment where everyone is reduced to the form of symbolic identity. Without this terrain (which is the contemporary situation), one encounters the other beyond its symbolic identity, the enjoying other. It is others listening to music with their headphones, talking loudly on a cell phone, eating excessive amounts of food, communicating in an unknown language, or emitting an unusual odor. Public displays of enjoyment occur with increasing frequency today because the dominant form of authority does not function through prohibition. Rather than violating the ruling social imperative, the public display of enjoyment heeds it.  The result is rampant anxiety.  Without the distance from the other requisite for desire, one experiences the anxiety produced by its presence.
104

The ethical position, for psychoanalysis, necessarily involves the embrace of this anxiety — and this is at once the path to enjoyment 105

🙂 embrace the anxiety, embrace this brush with the real other. Screw the symbolic! It only produces a desiring subject. No?

mcgowan neighbour other enjoyment

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

🙂 Here 100 pages in, the neighbor or other that enjoys, doesn’t include us and we get paranoid or at least uneasy. We feel insignificant, but when we go to sporting events and music concerts we identify with the enjoyment that we see thereby “avoid the trauma of the encounter with the other’s enjoyment.”

The neighbor or real other is the enjoying other.

The other’s mode of enjoyment marks the other as absolutely singular. Everything else about the other — emotions, thoughts, desires, achievements, and so on — can be understood and communicated through the order of signification or language. We can share all these experiences through the mediation of the signifier, which informs them in their very origin. The other’s enjoyment unlike everything else about the other, disturbs us when we encounter it because it does not take us into account. While the other’s symbolic identity includes us as the source of the look that validates it, the other’s enjoyment not only ignores us but seems to go so far as to occur at our expense. When we encounter the enjoying other, we experience our own isolation, our own absolute insignificance for the other.

The encounter with the enjoying other occurs at moments when a radical cut emerges between the other and the subject. Events such as basketball games and rock concerts allow spectators to identify with the enjoyment that they see and thereby to avoid the trauma of the encounter with the other’s enjoyment. In contrast, the shared laughter of people speaking a foreign language, the rumor of an orgy at a secret society, or the strange noises that a toddler hears behind the closed door of the parental bedroom do not provide any opening to the outsider. One hears the enjoyment without any possibility of partaking in it through the act of identification, and one almost inevitably imagines that one’s exclusion is part of the enjoyment. The distinction between an enjoying other enjoying itself at my expense and an enjoying other indifferent to me becomes negligible. The pertinent fact is the other’s enjoyment that doesn’t include me. 102

Ž critique of Butler October 2010

Žižek Penn Humanities Forum 13 Oct. 2010
pure surface, frozen image, positive ethical utopia of eternity, this image is real and at the same time virtual. Plato has to corected, a Platonic ideal is not deeper, just an ethical act when it occurs, this is eternity, this is the Real. The Real as virtual.

I am against the notion of Otherness Universal solidarity of struggle. India I had a wonderful time. I was in a taxi with my friend and the driver asked in his language to Ž’s friend … dirty joke as entry exchange of obscenity as moment of solidarity, we are not politically correct b.s., to have authenticate relation to other you need a surplus enjoyment, and then you can go on to talk seriously.   I don’t understand my culture, I don’t understand yours, ditto for you, but we have a common universality of struggle.  we are eternal.  this is a sublime moment.

Real as virtual
flesh, blood veins, repuslive body of decay, we take recourse in decaying body in order to avoid fascination of the Real.
real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle, this is what we deny when we cut up chickens on stage, directly address the audience etc.
There is nothing transgressive talking about veins, shit underneath, aging bodies, gas, there is nothing sublime going on here.
Ethical Experience and critique of Judith Butler
This dimension of eternity is necessary to supply the big motive of pomo ethics, the precarious fragility of human being
caught in decentred representations, this precarious state of subjectivity which for Butler and Levinas accounts for zero level of all ethics.
The others face makes an unconditional demand on me. The encounter with the other which opens up the space for discourse, the Real of a violent encounter which throws me off my existence as a simple human animal.
Crux of the difference between Žižek and Butler
Desire is desire of the other.
dimension of ethical in psychoanalytic experience.
In my unconditional responsibility, I assume supremacy over the other (acts of charity, bombard us with images of starving children).  Butler explains which faces are worthy of grief and which are not, the pictures dying of napalm, helped end Vietnam war.  But Ž says images of sick and starving children, fragility of other staring back at you has the obverse, the moment the other doesn’t want to play this role, we all love this weak other, like Starbucks ads say we can save by buying a capuccino, but the minute they the other organize, they become terrorists.  Who cares about computers when kids are starving in Africa says Bill Gates.  This is an effort at depoliticization. Forget about politics and ideology, and get together, business and charity and don’t think.
Starbucks is today the example of Levinasian ethical paradigm
This vulnerable precarious other
Žižek goes into the animal that I am. Another gaze excluded by Levinas, the gaze of a wounded suffering animal.
dfas
Monstrosity of the HUMAN
What are we for animals?  This is not New Age b.s.  If you turn around the perspective and ask simply not what does it mean the gaze of the frightened animal, but what do you see in the animals gaze, you see your own monstrosity, this is what philosophers don’t want to talk about.  What?  DEATH DRIVE.
Kant: Man is an animal that needs a master, wild irrational excess of violent freedom in man, which animals don’t have, which is why animals don’t need education, it is nature “turned against itself”an excess of wild freedom.
What were the first Christians in the eyes of the Jewish establishment. What kind of monsters were they?

Locate properly our Monstrosity
So called fundamentalists are not egotists, but are ready to sacrifice their lives, same with capitalists, MEME, spreads like a computer virus, it programs its own retransmission, we humans are nonetheless are unwitting victims of a thought contagion.  Daniel Dennett too. we are dealing with a parasite that occupies the individual and uses it for its own purposes.  An idea can spread even if in the long term it can only bring destruction to its bearers.  CAPITAL: like a meme, they use us to reproduce and multiply itself, the productive force, the capitalist process of production is development of productive forces, capitalism is NOT sustained by greed of capitalists, greed is subordinated to impersonal power of capital.  What we need is MORE not less EGOTISM.  In Lacanian terms, individual greed and striving of capital to expand is difference between DESIRE AND DRIVE.  Krugman says most of would still follow the herd even knowing there would be a breakdown.  Memetic functioning of capitalist drive.
Fetishist Disavowal
Marx’s key insight remains valid  Freedom is not located in political sphere proper, are human rights respected, is there free judiciary etc.  The key to freedom for Marx is apolitical network of social relations from market to family, a change in social relations which appear apolitical, a change that can’t be done through elections in narrow sense, we don’t vote about who owns what, about relations in factory.  Radical changes in this domain have to be done outside legal sphere.  This limitation of legal democratic approach was shown in Obama’s reaction to BP oil spill.  Sue them! it is all held within a narrow legalistic frame. The true task is not COMPENSATION, but to change situation so that they won’t be in situation to cause damage
They tell you about global warming and then you go outside and see the sun and the birds chirping and you say “my god can this be true”
Humanity should get ready to live in a more plastic nomadic way.  Large population migrations will be necessary, desertification, global warming, large population movements who will organize it. Trans-state global mechanism to do it.
Sometimes the impossible happens: The Act  You do something which within the existing ideological universe appears impossible, but while doing it it creates its own possibility, through the act itself it becomes possible.  This is what we need.
Future: continuation of the present, full actualization of the tendencies already here.

The ultimate horizon of the future, some ecological breakdown, zero-point, a virtual attractor to which our reality if left to itself tends.  We have to break with this through acts, there is no future in future, there is something in avenir.

Avenir: what is to come, a break with the present

We should adopt catastrophe as virtual point.  Bring logic of existing system to end, there is ecological breakdown.  OK this is our destiny, but we can indefinitely postpone it, and slowly undermine it.  Admit the catastrophe as a destiny, but not as natural necessity, but as symbolic destiny, this does not mean it will really arrive, it is a dialectical point, destiny is inevitable, but what we can change is the inevitability of destiny.  If everything is predestined why work, why not sit and masterbate, no if there is a concept marxists should take from theology it is predestination.  It is predestined, we are not free within this predestiny but we are free to change destiny itself.

Every new work of art changes the entire past.   Kafka created his own predecessors.
Commodity Fetishism

critchley and cornel west

Critchley on deconstitution of subjectivity Love is not some kind of tepid contract, nor is it an act of spiritual daring eviscerates excoriate the old self so that a new seslf can come into being, hue and hack at old self large enough for love to enter, an enrichment through impoverishment
How to Live has become the question How to Love.
On Violence

For Lacan the crucial question is how can we preserve within our symbolisations a space for the recognition of the impossibility of their closure?

The Lacanian system is perhaps the closest we can get to a discourse opening itself up to what exceeds its limits.

Besides, the ethics of psychoanalysis, as formulated in the Lacanian tradition, point to the possibility and the ethical superiority of a symbolic recognition and institutionalisation of the political moment of real lack and this opens a huge field of creation of which the democratic revolution constitutes only one example—perhaps the most important.

Even if this move is possible—encircling the unavoidable political modality of the real—is it really desirable, is it ethically and politically satisfactory?

the ethics of the real entails a recognition of the irreducibility of the real and an attempt to institutionalise social lack. Thus it might be possible to achieve an ethically and politically satisfactory institution of the social field beyond the fantasy of closure which has proved so problematic, if not catastrophic. In other words, the best way to organise the social might be one which recognises the ultimate impossibility around which it is always structured.

stavrakakis the political

The unmitigated real provokes anxiety, and this in turn gives rise to never-ending, defensive, imaginary constructs’.

Following from this, ‘all human productions [Society itself, culture, religion, science] …can be understood in the light of that structural failure of the symbolic in relationship to the real’. It is the moment of this failure, the moment of our encounter with the real, that is revealed as the moment of the political par excellence in our reading of Lacan.

It is the constitutivity of this moment in Lacanian psychoanalysis that proves our fantasmatic conception of the socio-political institution of society as a harmonious totality to be no more than a mirage.

It is this traumatic moment of the political qua encounter with the real that initiates again and again a process of symbolisation, and initiates the ever-present hegemonic play between different symbolisations of this real. 73

This play leads to the emergence of politics, to the political institution of a new social fantasy (or of many antagonistic fantasies engaged in a struggle for hegemony) in the place of the dislocated one, and so on and so forth.

It is the lack created by dislocation that causes the desire for a new discursive articulation. It is this lack created by a dislocation of the social which forms the kernel of the political as an encounter with the Lacanian real.

Every dislocatory event leads to the antagonistic articulation of different discourses that attempt to symbolise its traumatic nature, to suture the lack it creates. In that sense the political stands at the root of politics, dislocation at the root of the articulation of a new sociopolitical order, an encounter with the real moment of the political at the root of our symbolisation of political reality. 74