Category: lacan

pluth correlationism thinking being meillassoux 2/4

correlationism“the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (Meillassoux 5)—that is, we never have access to being as it really is, except through the medium of thought, which, precisely as a medium, distorts what it targets.

One way to oppose correlationism would be with a naïve realism, which supposes that access to what is other than thought is possible and even relatively unprob-lematic—that the relation of being to thought can be immediate. Meillassoux, by contrast, wants to hang on to the idea that there is something problematic about this relation.

Naïve realism, according to him, does not sufficiently appreciate the weirdness presented by our ability to make meaningful claims about, for example, what preceded the emergence of any conscious being whatsoever, as we do when we make meaningful statements about the nature of the universe before the existence of humanity.

Meillassoux claims that it is being’s ability to be “mathematized” that gives us a way out of correlationism, and this also requires us to reconsider the Kantian turn in philosophy, whose essence can be described as follows: “being and thinking must be thought as capable of being wholly other”—as good a definition of what Meillas-soux understands as correlationism as there is (Meillassoux 44). Yet a strong correlationism goes further than this, positing a strong separation of thinking from being, making thought into something radically other than being—not superior to it, not a cause of it, but typically more of a sub-being, a mere epiphenomenon, appearance, fiction, or illusion, as it would be for a Nietzschean as well as for an eliminative or reductionist materialist.

In this case, thinking would have access only to what it produces, while being would continue on, independent of and indifferent to what is (rightly or wrongly—it hardly matters) thought about it.

What I want to show next is how Meillassoux’s project, precisely in its most compelling gesture—its reconsideration of a kind of mathematical realism, its evocation of the Galilean mathematization of nature as a continued inspiration for thought—over-looks an opportunity to make a more vigorous materialist claim about the union of thinking and being.

Consider more closely the relationship between thinking and being that is asserted in Meillassoux’s work. Being is said to be mathematizable, and so correlationism is wrong, because mathematics shows us how the “Parmenidean postulate” can be returned to: it shows us where “being and thinking are the same” (Meillassoux 44).

Yet this does not mean that mathematics is, or is even part of, the really real. Mathematics is a thinking. It is through mathematics that being and thinking are sup-posed to be joined together. Yet this still amounts to an imbalanced union, because Meillassoux’s way out of correlationism does not allow for anything like a “knowledge in the real”—an idea I will discuss via the notion of lalangue in the next section. It is doubtful that Meillassoux wants to say that being itself knows anything about mathematics. It would be erroneous to say that the real knows the laws of physics and chemistry. And there is also no need to posit a subject in the real who knows these laws. The formal languages we use for such laws are not at all etched into the heart of things either. Must it then be said that such formal expressions of laws “correlate” to the real? Yet this cannot be what Meillassoux wants to say!

This leads me to conclude that the way in which Meillassoux articulates the relation of mathematics to thinking poses a problem for his speculative materialism. While he says of his work that it refutes correlationismby bringing thinking and being back into a union with each other (via mathematics), this relation turns out to be one-directional and therefore not as far from correlationism as it is possible to go.

Let’s agree that being is mathematizable. This still leaves being ultimately unaffectedby its mathematization—and therefore, mathematics does not show us where there is an interactionand interrelation—not to mention union—of thinking and being. (If there is not even a strong interaction between thinking and being, it is hard to see how there could be a meaningful union . . . unless Meillassoux really meant to go all-out Parmenidean on us, by claiming that thinking is being, and vice versa: the monist direction, in other words. But I see no evidence for this in what I’ve read of him.)

The hard sciences, and mathematics, can only take us from one kind of correlationism to another, it seems. What is needed, for a different sort of materialism, one of human practice, is a reconsideration of the status of the so-called “human” sciences.

pluth on milner meillassoux 1/4

One of the great merits of Milner’s reading of Lacan is not only the fact that he places Lacan within the materialist tradition in philosophy, but that, by bringing Lacan into relation to Wittgenstein, he gets us to pay attention to a topic that any materialist project now should attempt to clarify: the relation between thinking and being. It is perhaps obvious why materialisms avoid this topic, since it seems to be the very stuff of idealism.

A common point shared by most contemporary materialisms is their degradation of the status of thinking, which is usually considered to be epiphenomenal and non-real, reducible to and constituted by brain activity. Why bother accounting for its status? Therefore, many contemporary philosophical materialisms do not at all require that thinking, or anything like it, be considered a part of the real.

The real, for these materialisms, can well be considered silent, and its silence is an unproblematic one — all the more reason why the “showing” of the real would be better than any possible “speaking” about it, which will always be off the mark. The real’s silence does not cause any difficulties for the sciences that study it, since these sciences circumvent ordinary human language and linguistic meaning in the first place, precisely by relying on a mathematization of nature.

It is not ordinary human language that hits the real at all, but a more formalized “language” that does so. None of this stops natural scientists from trying to convey in ordinary language
something about their discoveries sometimes but we know that, when they do this, their writing approximates the status of poetry, as Merleau-Ponty pointed out, and that such written texts are not really the conveyors of scientific knowledge anyway.

Such knowledge is in the formulas, the math (if it can be said to “be” anywhere), and not in the ordinary language descriptions of those formulas, which are always metaphorical.

Whatever is going on at the atomic or sub-atomic constitutive level of nature defies our ability to think, imagine, or intuit. Furthermore, our ability to manipulate the constitutive level of nature does not require that we think anything particularly clearly about it either. It simply requires a technical know-how, based on proper formalizations; not on the creation of correct linguistic expressions about it, and not on having proper intuitions about it either.

The sciences show us a way, then, in which knowledge is transmitted through mathemes, and what is said about them is basically superfluous.

According to Milner’s reading, Lacan embraces the Borromean knots because they are “saying” even less about the real than the mathemes do, and are therefore respecting even more ably what is supposed to be an inviolable barrier between the shown and the spoken. For that reason, Lacan’s is a failed or unachieved materialism: in fact, less a materialism than a mysticism.

trauma and lacan

Belau, Linda. Trauma and the Material Signifier. George Washington University  lbelau@gwu.edu

Abstract: Through an analysis of the signifier and its relation to traumatic repetition, this essay explores the necessity of psychoanalytic theory for an analysis of trauma. Arguing that deconstructive approaches, which have come to form the center of what is currently known as “trauma theory,” ignore the structure of the subject and, consequently, the significance of the psychoanalytic primal scene for the analysis of trauma, the essay argues for a more psychoanalytically-inflected understanding of trauma and the missed event. Inhabiting a time before time, an impossible time, the primal scene — which, for Freud is the most significant missed event — marks the inaugurating moment of society, repression, and the law. Because analytic practices themselves open onto the space of trauma, enacting a missed encounter, they are necessary to begin the arduous process of understanding, or of what Freud calls “remembering, repeating, and working through.” Because psychoanalysis is able to commemorate the traumatic missed encounter as the forgotten event, it is able to attend to the structural force of trauma without giving way to the temptation to idealize the experience as something untouchable or inaccessible. Such idealization, the essay claims, has been the tendency of some deconstructive theories of trauma that maintain tha trauma is beyond the limits of representation and our symbolic periphery. Through an analysis of the role of the signifier in the traumatic event, the essay argues that trauma, like Lacan’s notion of the real, is very much a part of the symbolic, even though it only makes its mark negatively.

universal bartleby

Daly, Glyn. “Politics of the political: psychoanalytic theory and the Left(s).” Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2009), 14(3), 279–300

In this sense our autonomy is at once more precarious and more radical. Today we are bombarded with all sorts of choices (consumption, lifestyles, customization of computers, cell-phones, iPods, MySpace, Facebook, etc.) that identify us as ‘free individuals’. Yet we also possess the capacity to refuse the field of choosing and freedom; to reject the very modality of making changes to our lives and to break with the terms and conditions that are implicit in the latter.

Along the lines of the famous monologue from Trainspotting, we are in a position in which we can choose ‘not to choose life’.  This involves a more radical ethical freedom in which one can assume a certain position of ‘being impossible’: i.e. a position of refusing the terms of socio-political engagement and identitarian inscription; of refusing the terms of existing possibility.

In other words, what is needed is the development of forms of political subjectivity that do not embrace the conventions and protocol of existing hegemonic engagement.

Both Žižek’s Bartleybyan politics and Badiou’s politics of subtraction—i.e. the effective withdrawal from official political/participatory structures in such a way that it undermines simultaneously their symbolic purchase and constitutive logics—point in a different direction. Thus it is not so much a question of siding with the underdog in the game of existing democracy, but rather rejecting the very terms of the latter. In other words, it involves a critique of how democracy, through its mythologization of the idea that all underdogs are potential winners provided they play the game effectively, can become drawn into, and start to function on behalf of, the dominant politico-economic forces.

Second, and related, the political focus is placed not so much on marginalized groups/identities in general but rather on those whose position (or perhaps, more accurately, lack of position) embody the symptomal truths of our age — i.e. those whose situation appears naturalized as irresolvable, inert and beyond any feasible or direct solution.

These are the displaced and the destitute, the poverty-trapped, the vagrants, homeless and slum-dwellers. They are the radically excluded who are constitutively excessive, who cannot be accommodated and who present a kind of dysfunctional resistance that is nevertheless necessary to the functioning of the whole. They are the nameless ‘unfortunate’ who are passed over, treated with gentrified deliquescence and kept at a non-threatening distance through the ‘ethical’ concerns of charity and aid. What is needed is a politics that strives to overcome this distancing and to confront directly the primordial repressions that are central to the operation of capitalism as a global economic and socio-cultural system.

It is against this background that distinct approaches to the Lacanian traversing the fantasy emerge.

In radical democratic thought, the lesson of the traversal is one that tends to imply that we should assume a proper distancing in order to avoid getting caught up in the ‘cataclysmic desire of fantasy’. The problem therefore is one of adopting the right predisposition: to detach ourselves from objet (a) and to thereby affect a condition where we can ‘really enjoy our partial enjoyment’.

– Radical politics should consequently restrict itself to revolutionary-reform rather than revolution as such. In general, political engagement should not be excessive but should avoid substantial projects of overhaul in favour of the finite, provisional and pragmatic.

– Yet it is precisely in these terms that radical democracy appears to remain stuck in the register of desire: real emancipation is postponed eternally; we should be enthusiastic in the chase but never believe that we hold it in our grasp. This is a politics of desire, of infinite deferral. It becomes effectively ‘a constant search for something else… (with) no specifiable object that is capable of satisfying it’.

– Radical democratic desire, in this sense, is sustained by not having the ‘object’ of democracy. Democracy is always finally elsewhere. In this context, political subjectivity becomes one of establishing a kind of homoeostatic predisposition or proper distancing: one avoids excess in order to avoid disappointment in never attaining the real Thing.

Yet for Žižek traversing the fantasy does not mean to proceed to a non-fantasmatic or even a post-fantasmatic universe defined simply in terms of a containment and/or domestication of excess (this in itself would be something of a fantasy). There is no transcendence of the fantasmatic (the structuring of desire) as such.

Traversal in this sense is the opposite of exorcism. The point is not simply to expel excess but rather to inflect/assume the latter: to take responsibility for the inherency of excess that is integral to human drive.

Traversal, in this sense, puts one in touch with the object of drive — the hole presupposed by all demand and around which Being revolves.

To put it in the terms of Star Wars, the problem is not to bring balance to the force but to recognize that the force itself is the result of a certain (tilted) excess — a Real intervention/structuring — and that it is only through contingence with the latter that alternative possibilities (a different kind of force, or indeed political) can be shown.

The freedom which is gained here, which can be called post-fantasmatic, is thus not one of overcoming alienation but precisely a freedom through alienation in its most radical sense: i.e. the acceptance of the fact that imbalance/excess is our most basic condition towards which we cannot exercise any pre-given partiality or disposition.

Ž’s Lacanian radicalism can be thought of as something that tries to break out of the endless cycle of desire and to move towards a certain logic of love (involving both desire and drive).

While this may sound hopelessly sentimental, we should recall that in Lacan love is distinguished from desire in coming to terms with the non-ideal and the non-all and with accepting precisely the lack in the Other. Love is its own excess, an uncompromising ‘violence’ that goes beyond mere antagonism (i.e. it does not externalize blockage/failure but accepts this as the very condition of being). Through love one finds, and indeed makes, the universal-divine in all its contingent fragility and failing.

Perhaps a more appropriate way of thinking about this shift is in terms of opening the possibility of a politics of excess; a politics that effectively chooses ‘something else’ — i.e. something other than the current mode of choosing.

It refuses to embrace today’s alibis where social ‘problems’ are displaced onto charities, ethical committees, focus groups and all the institutions of political deferral up to and including existing democracy. In this way it places ‘us’ in the scene and refuses not to take responsibility for the contemporary totality and its symptoms. Such a politics is distinguished from radical democratic hegemony in that it does not give up on the real thing or view concrete projects as merely the ersatz fillers of the empty place.

The point is rather to see how this very division between the universal (as empty place) and particular (contingent filler) is inherent to the latter.

In other words, the universal-divine is manifested … through substantial engagement; through finding and making the universal in the particular and through ‘excessive’ commitment, without excuses or dependency on the Other.   It is a politics that affirms that the only way out is the way in.

Ž critique stavrakakis

Taken from Žižek’s criticism of Lacanian Left by Yannis Stavrakakis.

Because he ignores this excess of drive, Stavrakakis also operates with a simplified notion of “traversing the fantasy” – as if fantasy is a kind of illusory screen blurring our relation to partial objects. This notion may seem to fit perfectly the commonsense idea of what psychoanalysis should do: of course it should liberate us from the hold of idiosyncratic fantasies and enable us to confront reality the way it effectively is… this, precisely, is what Lacan does NOT have in mind – what he aims at is almost the exact opposite.

In our daily existence, we are immersed into “reality” (structured-supported by the fantasy), and this immersion is disturbed by symptoms which bear witness to the fact that another repressed level of our psyche resists this immersion. To “traverse the fantasy” therefore paradoxically means fully identifying oneself with the fantasy – namely with the fantasy which structures the excess resisting our immersion into daily reality, or, to quote a succinct formulation by Richard Boothby:

‘Traversing the fantasy‘ thus does not mean that the subject somehow abandons its involvement with fanciful caprices and accommodates itself to a pragmatic ‘reality,’ but precisely the opposite: the subject is submitted to that effect of the symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality. To traverse the fantasy in the Lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed by the fantasy than ever, in the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with that real core of the fantasy that transcends imaging.

Boothby is right to emphasize the Janus-like structure of a fantasy: a fantasy is simultaneously pacifying, disarming (providing an imaginary scenario which enables us to endure the abyss of the Other’s desire) AND shattering, disturbing, inassimilable into our reality.

The ideologico-political dimension of this notion of “traversing the fantasy” was rendered clear by the unique role the rock group Top lista nadrealista (The Top List of the Surrealists) played during the Bosnian war in the besieged Sarajevo: their ironic performances which, in the midst of the war and hunger, satiricized the predicament of the Sarajevo population, acquired a cult status not only in the counterculture, but also among the citizens of Sarajevo in general (the group’s weekly TV show went on throughout the war and was extremely popular).

Instead of bemoaning the tragic fate of the Bosnians, they daringly mobilized all the clichés about the “stupid Bosnians” which were a commonplace in Yugoslavia, fully identifying with them – the point thus made was that the path of true solidarity leads through direct confrontation with the obscene racist fantasies which circulated in the symbolic space of Bosnia, through the playful identification with them, not through the denial of this obscenities on behalf of “what people really are.”

No wonder, then, that, when Stavrakakis tries to provide some concrete examples of this new politics of partial jouissance, things go really “bizarre.” He starts with Marshal Sahlins’ thesis that the Paleolithic communities followed “a Zen road to affluence”: although deeply marked by divisions, exchange, sexual difference, violence and war, they lack the “shrine of the Unattainable,” of “infinite Needs,” and thus the “desire for accumulation”. In them,

enjoyment (jouissance) seems to be had without the mediation of fantasies of accumulation, fullness and excess. /…/ they do show that another world may, in principle, be possible insofar as a detachment of (partial) enjoyment from dreams of completeness and fantasmatic desire is enacted. /…/ Doesn’t something similar happen in the psychoanalytic clinic? And isn’t this also the challenge for radical democratic ethics? (281)

The way the Paleolithic tribesmen avoided accumulation was to cancel the lack itself – it is the idea of such a society without the excess of “infinite Needs” which is properly utopian, the ultimate fantasy, the fantasy of a society before the Fall.

What then follows is a series of cases of how “political theorists and analysts, economists, and active citizens – some of them directly inspired by Lacanian theory – are currently trying to put this radical democratic orientation to work in a multitude of empirical contexts.”(281)

For example: “A group of cooperative workers /Byrne and Healy/ have examined tried to restructure their enjoyment in a non-fantasmatic way”(281) – it would be certainly interesting to hear in detail how this “restructuring” was structured! Then come Robin Blackburn’s proposal for the democratization of Pension Funds, Roberto Unger’s proposal to pass from a family to a social inheritance system, Toni Negri’s proposal of a minimum citizenship income, the projects of participatory budgeting in Brazil…(282) – what all this has to do with jouissance feminine remains a mystery.

The vague underlying idea is that, in all these cases, we are dealing with modest pragmatic proposals, with partial solutions which avoid the excess of radical utopian re-foundation – definitely not enough to qualify them as cases of jouissance feminine which is precisely Lacan’s name for an absolute excess.

Stavrakakis’s attempt to relate Lacanian concepts like jouissance, signifier of the lack in the Other, etc., to concrete socio-political examples is thus thoroughly unconvincing.

When he quotes Joan Copjec’s precise thesis on how suppléance “allows us to speak well of our desire not by translating jouissance into language, but by formalizing it in a signifier that does not mean it but is, rather, directly enjoyed”(279), he reads it as a “way to think of enjoyment and the production of a signifier of lack in a democratic perspective”(279) – but does Copjec’s description not fit perfectly also nationalism?

Is the name of our Nation not such a suppléance? When a passionate patriot exclaims “America!”, does he thereby not produce a signifier which “does not translate jouissance into language, but formalizes it in a signifier that does not mean it but is, rather, directly enjoyed” – when “America!” is passionately exclaimed, it is the signifier itself which is enjoyed?

Stavrakakis’ political vision is vacuous: it is not that his call for more passion in politics is in itself meaningless (of course today’s Left needs more passion), the problem is rather that it resembles all too much the joke quoted by Lacan about a doctor asked by a friend for a free medical advice – reticent to render his service without payment, the doctor examines the friend and then calmly states: “You need a medical advice!”

Paradoxically, with all his (justified) critique of Freudo-Marxism, Stavrakakis’ position can be designated as “Freudo-radical democracy”: he remains within Freudo-Marxism, expecting from psychoanalysis to supplement the theory of radical democracy in the same way Wilhelm Reich, among others, expected psychoanalysis to supplement Marxism.

In both cases, the problem is exactly the same: we have the appropriate social theory, but what is missing is the “subjective factor” – how are we to mobilize people so that they will engage in passionate political struggle? Here psychoanalysis enters, explaining what libidinal mechanisms the enemy is using (Reich tried to do this for Fascism, Stavrakakis for consumerism and nationalism), and how can the Left practice its own “politics of jouissance.”

The problem is that such an approach is an ersatz for the proper political analysis: the lack of passion in political praxis and theory should be explained in its own terms, i.e., in the terms of political analysis itself. The true question is: what is there to be passionate about? Which political choices people experience as “realistic” and feasible?

object-cause of desire and object loss of drive

Taken from Žižek’s criticism of Lacanian Left by Yannis Stavrakakis.  Glynn Daly compares the politics of Žižek and Essex Lacanians

Modern society is defined by the lack of ultimate transcendent guarantee, or, in libidinal terms, of total jouissance. There are three main ways to cope with this negativity: utopian, democratic, and post-democratic.

The first one (totalitarianisms, fundamentalisms) tries to reoccupy the ground of absolute jouissance by attaining a utopian society of harmonious society which eliminates negativity.

The second, democratic, one enacts a political equivalent of “traversing the fantasy”: it institutionalizes the lack itself by creating the space for political antagonisms.

The third one, consumerist post-democracy, tries to neutralize negativity by transforming politics into apolitical administration: individuals pursue their consumerist fantasies in the space regulated by expert social administration.

Today, when democracy is gradually evolving into consumerist post-democracy, one should insist that democratic potentials are not exhausted – “democracy as an unfinished project” could have been Stavrakakis’ motto here. The key to the resuscitation of this democratic potential is to re-mobilize enjoyment: “What is needed, in other words, is an enjoyable democratic ethics of the political.”(269) The key question here is, of course, WHAT KIND OF enjoyment:

Libidinal investment and the mobilization of jouissance are the necessary prerequisite for any sustainable identification (from nationalism to consumerism). This also applies to the radical democratic ethics of the political. But the type of investment involved has still to be decided. (282)

Stavrakakis’ solution is: neither the phallic enjoyment of Power nor the utopia of the incestuous full enjoyment, but a non-phallic (non-all) partial enjoyment. In the last pages of his book, trying to demonstrate how “democratic subjectivity is capable of inspiring high passions”(278), Stavrakakis refers to the Lacanian other jouissance, “a jouissance beyond accumulation, domination and fantasy, an enjoyment of the not-all or not-whole”(279). How do we achieve this jouissance? By way of accomplishing “the sacrifice of the fantasmatic objet (a)” which can only “make this other jouissance attainable” (279):

The central task in psychoanalysis – and politics – is to detach the objet (a) from the signifier of the lack in the Other /…/, to detach (anti-democratic and post-democratic) fantasy from the democratic institutionalization of lack, making possible the access to a partial enjoyment beyond fantasy. /…/ Only thus shall we be able to really enjoy our partial enjoyment, without subordinating it to the cataclysmic desire of fantasy. Beyond its dialectics of disavowal, this is the concrete challenge the Lacanian Left addresses to us. (280-282)

The underlying idea is breathtakingly simplistic: in total contradiction to Lacan, Stavrakakis reduces objet (a) to its role in fantasy – objet (a) is that excessive X which magically transforms the partial objects which occupy the place of the lack in the Other into the utopian promise of the impossible fullness of jouissance.

What Stavrakakis proposes is thus the vision of a society in which desire functions without objet (a), without the destabilizing excess which transforms it into a “cataclysmic desire of fantasy” – as Stavrakakis puts it in a symptomatically tautological way, we should learn to “really enjoy our partial enjoyment.”

For Lacan, on the contrary, objet (a) is a(nother) name for the Freudian “partial object,” which is why it cannot be reduced to its role in fantasy which sustains desire; it is for this reason that, as Lacan emphasizes, one should distinguish its role in desire and in drive.

Following Jacques-Alain Miller, a distinction has to be introduced here between two types of lack, the lack proper and hole: lack is spatial, designating a void WITHIN a space, while hole is more radical, it designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the “black hole” in physics).

Therein resides the difference between desire and drive: desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being.

In other words, the circular movement of drive obeys the weird logic of the curved space in which the shortest distance between the two points is not a straight line, but a curve: drive “knows” that the shortest way to attain its aim is to circulate around its goal-object. (One should bear in mind here Lacan’s well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive: while the goal is the object around which drive circulates, its (true) aim is the endless continuation of this circulation as such.)

Miller also proposed a Benjaminian distinction between “constituted anxiety” and “constituent anxiety,” which is crucial with regard to the shift from desire to drive: while the first one designates the standard notion of the terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety which haunts us, its infernal circle which threatens to draws us in, the second one stands for the “pure” confrontation with objet petit a as constituted in its very loss.

Miller is right to emphasize here two features: the difference which separates constituted from constituent anxiety concerns the status of the object with regard to fantasy. In a case of constituted anxiety, the object dwells within the confines of a fantasy, while we only get the constituent anxiety when the subject “traverses the fantasy” and confronts the void, the gap, filled up by the fantasmatic object.

However, clear and convincing as it is, this Miller’s formula misses the true paradox or, rather, ambiguity of objet (a): when he defines objet (a) as the object which overlaps with its loss, which emerges at the very moment of its loss (so that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breasts to voice and gaze, are metonymic figurations of the void, of nothing), he remains within the horizon of desire – the true object-cause of desire is the void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations.

While, as Lacan emphasizes, objet (a) is also the object of drive, the relationship is here thoroughly different: although, in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of objet (a) as the object-cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost,

while, in the case of objet (a) as the object of drive, the “object” IS DIRECTLY THE LOSS ITSELF – in the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object.

That is to say, the weird movement called “drive” is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object; it is a push to directly enact the “loss” – the gap, cut, distance – itself.

There is thus a DOUBLE distinction to be drawn here: not only between objet (a) in its fantasmatic and post-fantasmatic status, but also, within this post-fantasmatic domain itself, between the lost object-cause of desire and the object-loss of drive.

The weird thing is that Stavrakakis’ idea of sustaining desire without objet (a) contradicts not only Lacan, but also Laclau, his notion of hegemony: Laclau is on the right track when he emphasizes the necessary role of objet (a) in rendering an ideological edifice operative. In hegemony, a particular empirical object is “elevated to the dignity of the Thing,” it start to function as the stand-in for, the embodiment of, the impossible fullness of Society.

Referring to Joan Copjec, Laclau compares hegemony to the “breast-value” attached to partial objects which stand-in for the incestuous maternal Thing (breast).

Laclau should effectively be criticized here for confounding desire (sustained by fantasy) which drive (one of whose definitions is also “that what remains of desire after its subject traverses the fantasy”): for him, we are condemned to searching for the impossible Fullness.

Drive – in which we directly enjoy lack itself – simply does not enter his horizon.

However, this in no way entails that, in drive, we “really enjoy our partial enjoyment,” without the disturbing excess: for Lacan, lack and excess are strictly correlative, the two sides of the same coin.

Precisely insofar as it circulates around a hole, drive is the name of the excess that pertains to human being, it is the “too-much-ness” of striving which insists beyond life and death (this is why Lacan sometimes even directly identifies drive with objet (a) as surplus-jouissance.)

death drive Ž’s reply to adrian johnston

Žižek’s reply to Johnston et. al. from a 2010 issue of Subjectivity

Something is missing here in this vision of the archaic natural substance, which is gradually, but never completely civilized or ‘mediated’ by the symbolic order. We find the first indication of this third dimension – neither nature nor culture – already in Kant, for whom discipline and education do not directly work on our animal nature, forging it into human individuality. As Kant points out, animals cannot be properly educated as their behavior is already predestined by their instincts.  What this means is that, paradoxically, in order to be educated into freedom (qua moral autonomy and self-responsibility), I already have to be free in a much more radical – ‘noumenal’ or even monstrous – sense.  The Freudian name for this monstrous freedom, of course, is death drive.

It is interesting to note how philosophical narratives of the ‘birth of man’ are always compelled to presuppose a moment in human (pre)history when (what will become) man, is no longer a mere animal and simultaneously not yet a ‘being of language’ bound by symbolic Law; a moment of thoroughly ‘perverted’, ‘denaturalized’, ‘derailed’ nature, which is not yet culture.

In his anthropological writings, Kant emphasized that the human animal needs disciplinary pressure in order to tame an uncanny ‘unruliness’ that seems to be inherent to human nature – a wild, unconstrained propensity to insist stubbornly on one’s own will, cost what it may. It is on account of this ‘unruliness’ that the human animal needs a Master to discipline him: discipline targets this ‘unruliness’, not the animal nature in man. … the most cruel barbarians; part of nature and yet thoroughly denaturalized; ruthlessly manipulating nature through primitive sorcery, yet simultaneously terrified by the raging natural forces; mindlessly brave cowards.

we, humans, no longer just make love for procreation, we get involved in a complex process of seduction and marriage by means of which sexuality becomes an expression of the spiritual bond between a man and a woman and so on.  However, what Hegel misses is how, once we are within the human condition, sexuality is not only transformed/civilized, but, much more radically, changed in its very substance: it is no longer the instinctual drive to reproduce, but a drive that gets thwarted as to its natural goal (reproduction) and thereby explodes into an infinite, properly metaphysical, passion.

the excess of sexuality itself that threatens to explode the ‘civilized’ constraints, sexuality as unconditional Passion, is the result of Culture. … In this way, the civilization/Culture retroactively posits/transforms its own natural presupposition: culture retroactively ‘denaturalizes’ nature itself, and this is what Freud called the Id, libido.

So, back to Johnston, this retroactive excess of de-naturalized nature is missing in the image he proposes of a gradual cultural ‘mediation’ of nature.

Ž at EGS 2012 Žižek_Big_Other.mp4

Žižek doesn’t accord much to Lacan’s seminar on Ethics of Psychoanalysis.  He said it ended in a deadlock.   Lacan immediately turned away.  Jean Claude Milner, “Do not give way as to your desire” Lacan says this only once or twice in one lecture.  He never returns to it.  This is because it is not Lacan’s position.  He was trying to work something out and things are more complicated. Continue reading “Ž at EGS 2012 Žižek_Big_Other.mp4”

objet (a)

Schroeder, L. Wall Street’s Bonus Obsession. Cardozo L. Rev. 33   2011-2012  pp. 2308-2356.

quoting Ž

However, what we must avoid at any price is conceiving of this left-over as simply secondary, as if we have first the substantial fullness of the Real and then the process of symbolization which “evacuates” jouissance, yet not entirely, leaving behind isolated remainders, islands of enjoyment, objets petit a. If we succumb to this notion, we lose the paradox of the Lacanian Real: there is no substance of enjoyment without, prior to, the surplus of enjoyment.

The substance is a mirage retroactively invoked by the surplus.

The illusion that pertains to a qua surplus-enjoyment is therefore the very illusion that, behind it, there is the lost substance of jouissance in other words, a qua semblance deceives in a Lacanian way: not because it is a deceitful substitute of the Real, but precisely because it invokes the impression of some substantial Real behind it; it deceives by posing as a shadow of the underlying Real.  [Žižek Tarrying with the Negative 36-37]

subject of desire subject of drive

Žižek, The Lesbian Session Lacanian Ink 2000  And here too

What we get after “traversing the fantasy,” i.e. the pure being of drive which emerges after the subject undergoes “subjective destitution,” is NOT a kind of subjectless loop of the repetitive movement of drive, but, on the contrary, the subject at its purest; one is almost tempted to say: the subject “as such.”   Saying “Yes!” to the drive, i.e. precisely to that which can never be subjectivized, freely assuming the inevitable (the drive’s radical closure), is the highest gesture of subjectivity.

It is thus only after assuming a fundamental indifference towards the Other’s desire, getting rid of the hysterical game of subjectivization, after suspending the intersubjective game of mutual (mis)recognition, that the pure subject emerges …

We have thus Roark as the being of pure drive in no need of symbolic recognition (and as such uncannily close to the Lacanian saint

Roark displays the perfect indifference towards the Other characteristic of drive, while Dominique remains caught in the dialectic of desire which is the desire of the Other: she is gnawed by the Other’s gaze, i.e. by the fact that others, the common people totally insensitive to Roark’s achievement, are allowed to stare at it and thus spoil its sublime quality. The only way for her to break out of this deadlock of the Other’s desire is to destroy the sublime object in order to save it from becoming the object of the ignorant gaze of others

Roark, of course, is well aware of how her attempts to ruin him result from her desperate strategy to cope with her unconditional love for him, to inscribe this love in the field of the big Other; so, when she offers herself to him, he repeatedly rejects her and tells her that the time is not yet ripe for it: she will become his true partner only when her desire for him will no longer be bothered by the Other’s gaze — in short, when she will accomplish the shift from desire to drive.

What the hystericized prime mover must accept is thus the fundamental existential indifference: she must no longer be willing to remain the hostage of the second-handers’ blackmail  “We will let you work and realize your creative potential, on condition that you accept our terms,”

… she must be ready to give up the very kernel of her being, that which means everything to her, and to accept the “end of the world,” the (temporary) suspension of the very flow of energy which keeps the world running.

In order to gain everything, she must be ready to go through the zero-point of losing everything. And far from signalling the “end of subjectivity,” this act of assuming existential indifference is perhaps the very gesture of absolute negativity which gives birth to the subject.

What Lacan calls “subjective destitution” is thus, paradoxically, another name for the subject itself, i.e. for the void beyond the theatre of hysterical subjectivizations.

Ayn Rand’s work thus contains two radically different narratives which are not to be confused:

1) the standard masculine narrative of the struggle between the exceptional One (Master, Creator) and the “crowd” which follows the universal norm,

2) as well as the feminine narrative of the shift from desire to drive, i.e. from the hysteric’s entanglement in the deadlocks of the Other’s desire to the fundamental indifference of the desubjectivized being of drive.

For that reason, the Randian hero is not “phallocratic” — phallocratic is rather the figure of the failed Master (Wynand in The Fountainhead, Stadler in Atlas Shrugged): paradoxical as it may sound, with regard to the formulas of sexuation, the being of pure drive which emerges once the subject “goes through the fantasy” and assumes the attitude of indifference towards the enigma of the Other’s desire is a feminine figure.

What Rand was not aware of was that the upright, uncompromising masculine figures with a will of steel that she was so fascinated with, are, effectively, figures of the feminine subject liberated from the deadlocks of hysteria.

Such a reading also enables us to draw a crucial theoretical conclusion about the limits of subjectivity: hysteria is not the limit of subjectivity — there is a subject beyond hysteria.

What we get after “traversing the fantasy,”i.e. pure being of drive which emerges after the subject undergoes “subjective destitution” is not a kind of subjectless loop of the repetitive movement of drive, but, on the contrary, the subject at its purest; one is almost tempted to say: the subject “as such.”

Saying “Yes!” to the drive, i.e. precisely to that which can never be subjectivized, freely assuming the inevitable (the drive’s radical closure), is the highest gesture of subjectivity.  It is thus only after assuming a fundamental indifference towards the Other’s desire, getting rid of the hysterical game of subjectivization, after suspending the intersubjective game of mutual (mis)recognition, that the pure subject emerges.

One can see, now, in what precise sense, the struggle between the hysterical feminine heroine and the persistent male hero, which forms the center of Ayn Rand’s both great novels, can be conceived as a barely concealed presentation of a lesbian (psychoanalytic) session: of the painful process in the course of which the feminine analysand traverses her fantasy and thus overcomes her hysterical position.

alexithymia

Stijn Vanheule, Paul Verhaeghe “In search of a framework for the treatment of alexithymia.”  Psychology and psychotherapy. 2010

From 1949 onwards, Lacan developed his theory on the mirror stage, wherein the other plays a central role (Lacan, 2006). In short, his starting-point is that human development starts with an experience of organic disturbance and discord. The infant lacks sensory and motor coordination and is moved by needs and impulses it cannot control. In Lacan’s interpretation, the ego comes into being as a reaction against this troubling state. The basis of it is the identification with a body image, which is acquired by identifying with the image of the other. Given its roots in images, this type of identification is called imaginary. The body image offers the infant an opportunity to see itself as a unity, and thus to achieve self-mastery. In the mirror stage, the image of the other serves as a basis for creating a self-image, which indicates that the actual presence of the other is important for creating this experience of unity (for a more detailed account of Lacan’s theory on the mirror stage and identity formation, download an article by Verhaeghe) Continue reading “alexithymia”