lacan – Page 29 – objet (a)

rothenberg Möbius subject alt0246

Rothenberg on page 201: For Lacan … every individual becomes a subject in an encounter with the Other (an Other that is far from radically other). This encounter functions as the extimate cause of the subject*: every subject is non-self-coincident; every subject incorporates the other at its core; every subject’s inside is an outside. Every subject is, from the get-go, a Möbius subject.

:): Rothenberg argues that in the encounter with another person, the very fact that we can never know what we mean to the other person, their interpretation of our message as we speak to them. This is because of the excessive nature of our relations with other humans. When she says this other is at the core of ourselves, R is suggesting that we’re never in control, we are not the centred subject, an egological “I”. But this isn’t new.

We can recall first that the Möbius subject’s excess or non-self-coincidence derives from its inability to know its own meaning for others. … The subject’s experience of its own excess provides the motive for entering into the social relation, criss-crossed by fantasy though it is. 202

The encounter with the other functions as the extimate cause of the subject* The Möbius subject incorporates the other at it core. Every Möbius subject begins its social life as an extimate subject — its fundament is already a function of otherness. 202

In the extimate version, the subject must perpetually seek a response from the others because, in fact, the subject will never be sure of the meaning of the response it gets, yet the subject has nowhere else to go to get it. The other is not radically other — it is close enough to the subject in kind to warrant the desire for relationship while distant enough in its ability to fulfill the subject’s deepest desire to maintain its otherness. At the same time, the “other” to whom the subject relates does not truly exist in the way the subject believes: this other is a fantasmatic projection of a wish. So the subject has a relation of nonrelation to the actual others in the social space.

undead Kant

What Butler (as well as Adorno) fails to render thematic is the changed status of the “inhuman” in Kant’s transcendental turn.

Perhaps the best way to describe the status of this inhuman dimension of the neighbour is with reference to Kant’s philosophy. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and indefinite judgement: the positive statement ‘the soul is mortal’ can be negated in two ways. We can either deny a predicate (‘the soul is not mortal’), or affirm a non-predicate (‘the soul in non-mortal’). The difference is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, between ‘he is not dead’ and ‘he is undead’.

The indefinite judgement opens up a third domain that undermines the distinction between dead and non-dead (alive): the ‘undead’ are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous ‘living dead’. And the same goes for ‘inhuman’: ‘he is not human’ is not the same as ‘he is inhuman’. ‘He is not human’ means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while ‘he is inhuman’ means something thoroughly different, namely the fact that he is neither human nor inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as humanity, is inherent to being human.

And perhaps one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian philosophical revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, while with Kant, the excess to be fought is immanent and concerns the very core of subjectivity itself. (Which is why, in German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, the ‘Night of the World’, in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness around.)

In the pre-Kantian universe, when a hero goes mad he is deprived of his humanity, and animal passions or divine madness take over. With Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being. [How to Read Lacan46-47,2006. TN 159-160 2005]

Critique of Levinas

This dimension is missing also in Levinas. In a properly dialectical paradox, what Levinas (with all his celebration of Otherness) fails to take into account is not some underlying Sameness of all humans but the radical, “inhuman” Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure of the Muselmann, the “living dead” in the concentration camps. TN 160, 2005

… the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical “gentrification” of the neighbour, the reduction of the radically ambiguous monstrosity of the Neighbor-thing into an Other as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. [TN 163, 2005]

Although I try to isolate a certain emancipatory kernel of religion, I must nonetheless emphasize that I am an absolute materialist. I think that one of the trends to which I am very much opposed is the recent post-secular theological turn of deconstruction; the idea being that while there is no ontotheological God there is nonetheless some kind of unconditional ethical injunction up to which we cannot every live. So what re-emerges here is a split between ethics and politics. Ethics stands for the unconditional injunction which you can never fulfill and so you have to accept the gap between unconditional injunction and the always contingent failed interventions that you make. Ethics becomes the domain of the unconditional, spectrality, Otherness and so on, whereas politics consists of practical interventions. This Levinasian Otherness can then be formulated directly as the divine dimension, or it can be formulated just as the messianic utopian dimension inherent to language as such and so on.

I think Lacanian ethics breaks out of this. Lacan cannot be incorporated into this paradigm. What Lacan does is precisely to assert the radical politicization of ethics; not in the sense that ethics should be subordinated to power struggles, but in terms of accepting radical contingency. The elementary political position is one that affirms this contingency and this means that you don’t have any guarantee in any norms whatsoever. You have to risk and to decide. This is the lesson of Lacan. Do not compromise your desire. Do not look for support in any form of big Other – even if this big Other is totally empty or a Levinasian unconditional injunction. You must risk the act without guarantee.

In this sense the ultimate foundation of ethics is political. And, for Lacan, depoliticized ethics is an ethical betrayal because you put the blame on the Other. Depoliticized ethics means that you rely on some figure of the big Other. But the Lacanian act is precisely the act in which you assume that there is no big Other. Conv162-163 2004

[Lenin’s] idea is simply that there is no big Other; you never get the guarantee; you must act. You must take the risk and act. I think this is the Lenin who is truly a Lacanian Lenin. Conv164

Žižek universal singularity

Which is why, from the Lacanian perspective, it is problematic to clam that we humans “seem to have enormous difficulty in accepting our limitedness, our finiteness, and this failure is a cause of much tragedy”: on the contrary, we humans have enormous difficulty in accepting the infinity`(undeadness, excess of life) in the very core of our being, the strange immortality whose Freudian name is the death drive. IDLC 344

… for Lacan, the radically heterogeneous Thing whose traumatic impact decenters the subject is, … the primordial “Evil Thing,” something that cannot ever be sublated (aufgehobun) into a version of the Good; … It is … the very unconditional “fanatical” commitment to a Cause which is the “death drive” at its purest and, as such, the primordial form of Evil: it introduces into the flow of (social) life a violent cut that throws it out of joint. The Good comes afterwards, it is an attempt to “gentrify,” to domesticate, the traumatic impact of the Evil Thing. In short the Good is the screened/domesticated Evil. IDLC 345

… the incompatibility of the Neighbour with the very dimension of universality. What resists universality is the properly inhuman dimension of the Neighbour. This brings us back to the key question: does every universalist ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal? The answer is: every ethics that remains “humanist” (in the sense of avoiding the inhuman core of being-human), that disavows the abyssal dimension of the Neighbour. “Man,” “human person,” is a mask that conceals the pure subjectivity of the Neighbour.

Consequently, when one asserts the Neighbour as the impenetrable “Thing” that eludes any attempt at gentrification, at its transformation into a cozy fellow man, this does not mean that the ultimate horizon of ethics is deference towards this unfathomable Otherness that subverts any encompassing universality.

Following Alain Badiou, one should assert that, on the contrary, only an “inhuman” ethics, an ethics addressing an inhuman subject, not a fellow person, can sustain true universality.

The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasps this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity of the subject qua Neighbor-Thing into universality, not standard “general” universality, but universal singularity.

the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular. ID16-17

Žižek cartestian subject cogito

Žižek, Slavoj. SIC Cogito and the Unconscious. Durham: Duke University Press 1998

Introduction: Cogito as a Shibboleth

There are two standard ways to approach the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Philosophers usually search for so-called philosophical foundations of psychoanalysis”: their premise is that, no matter how dismissive psychoanalysis is of philosophy, it nonetheless has to rely on a series of conceptual presuppositions (about the nature of drives, of reality, etc.) that psychoanalysis itself does not render thematic and that bear witness to the way in which psychoanalysis is only possible within a certain philosophical horizon.

On the other hand, psychoanalysts at their worst, indulge in so-called “psychoanalyzing of philosophers,” trying to discern pathological psychic motivations beneath fundamental philosophical attitudes (philosophical idealism as the last vestige of the childish belief in the omnipotency of thoughts; paranoiac systematizing as the foundation of the need to form all-embracing philosophical systems, etc.). Both these approaches are to be rejected. While the psychoanalytic reduction of philosophy to an expression of psychic pathology is today, deservedly, no longer taken seriously, it is much more difficult to counter the seemingly self-evident claim that psychoanalysis cannot relate anything truly relevant to philosophy, since psychoanalysis must itself rely on a set of philosophical presuppositions that it is unable to reflect upon.

What if, however, references to the Freudian subject are not external to philosophy, but can, in fact, tell us something about the modern, Cartesian subject?

What if psychoanalysis renders visible something that the modern philosophy of subjectivity accomplishes without knowing it, its own grounding gesture, which philosophy has to disavow if it is to assume its place within academic knowledge?

To use Lacan’s pun, what if psychoanalysis renders visible the ex-timate kernel of modern subjectivity, its innermost core that philosophy is not ready to assume, which it tries to keep at a distanceor, to put it in a more fashionable way, what if psychoanalysis renders visible the constitutive madness of modern philosophy?

We are thus playing a double strategic game: this ex-timate kernel of philosophy is not directly accessible to the psychoanalysis conceived of as a branch of psychology or psychiatry — what we encounter at this level are, of course, the “naive” pre-philosophical theses. What one has to do, is to bring to light the philosophical implications of psychoanalysis, that is, to retranslate, to transpose psychoanalytic propositions back into philosophy, to “elevate them to the dignity of philosophical propositions”: in this way, one is able to discern the ex-timate philosophical kernel of psychoanalysis, since this transposition back into philosophy explodes the standard philosophical frame. This is what Lacan was doing all the time: reading hysteria or obsessional neurosis as a philosophical “attitude of thought towards reality” (the obsessional compulsion to think” if I stop thinking, I will cease to exist” — as the truth of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum), etc., etc. Are we thus not again engaged in “psychoanalyzing philosophy”? No, since this reference to madness is strictly internal to philosophy — the whole of modern philosophy, from Descartes onward, involves an inherent reference to the threat of madness, and is thus a desperate attempt to draw a clear line that separates the transcendental philosopher from the madman ( Descartes: how do I know I’m not hallucinating reality? Kant: how to delimit metaphysical speculation from Swedenborgian hallucinatory rambling? ).

This excess of madness against which modern philosophy fights is the very founding gesture of Cartesian subjectivity.

…At this point, anyone versed in postmodern deconstructionism will utter a sigh of bored recognition: of course, the Cartesian ego, the selftransparent subject of Reason, is an illusion; its truth is the decentered, split, finite subject thrown into a contingent, nontransparent context, and this is what psychoanalysis renders visible…. Things, however, are more complicated.

[…]

It is against this background that one should appreciate the paradoxical achievement of Lacan, which usually passes unnoticed even by his advocates: on the very behalf of psychoanalysis, he returns to the modern rationalist notion of subject. Philosophers and psychoanalysts, of course, promptly exclaim “We are here on our home terrain!” and proceed to reduce the Freudian subject to a psychological subject of introspection, to philosophical self-consciousness, to Nietzschean will to power…. Lacan’s underlying thesis here is even more radical than with the unconscious:

not only has the Freudian subject nothing to do with the self-transparent, unified self-consciousness, it is the Cartesian subject itself (and its radicalization in German Idealism, from Kant’s transcendental apperception to self-consciousness from Fichte onward) … the standard philosophy of subjectivity, … misrecognize the gap that separates the Cartesian subject (when it is “brought to its notion” with Kant) from the self-transparent ego, or from man, from the “human person.”

What they fail to see is that the Cartesian subject emerges precisely out of the “death of man” “transcendental subjectivity” is philosophical antihumanism at its purest.

One can see, now, why, in his seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Lacan asserts that the subject of psychoanalysis is none other than the Cartesian cogito: the Freudian unconscious emerges through the very reduction of the “person’s” substantial content to the evanescent punctuality of the cogito.

In this precise sense, one could say that Martin Luther was the first great antihumanist: modern subjectivity is not announced in the Renaissance humanist celebration of man as the “crown of creation”, that is, in the tradition of Erasmus and others (to which Luther cannot but appear as a “barbarian”), but rather in Luther’s famous statement that

man is the excrement who fell out of God’s anus.

Modern subjectivity has nothing to do with the notion of man as the highest creature in the “great chain of being,” as the final point of the evolution of the universe: modern subjectivity emerges when the subject perceives himself as “out of joint,” as excluded from the “order of the things,” from the positive order of entities. For that reason, the ontic equivalent of the modern subject is inherently excremental: there is no subjectivity proper without the notion that, at a different level, from another perspective, I am a mere piece of shit.

For Marx, the emergence of working-class subjectivity is strictly codependent to the fact that the worker is compelled to sell the very substance of his being (his creative power) as a commodity on the market, that is, to reduce the agalma, the treasure, the precious kernel of his being, to an object that can be bought for a piece of money — there is no subjectivity without the reduction of the subject positive-substantial being to a disposable “piece of shit.”

In this case of the correlation between the Cartesian subjectivity and its excremental objectal counterpart, we are not dealing merely with an example of what Foucault called the empirico- transcendental couple that characterizes modern anthropology, but, rather, with the split between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated:

If the Cartesian subject is to emerge at the level of the enunciation, he is to be reduced to the “almost-nothing” of a disposable excrement at the level of the enunciated content.

Or, to put it in a slightly different way, the intervention of the subject undermines the standard premodern opposition between the universal order and the hubris of a particular force whose egotistic excess perturbs the balance of the universal order: “subject” is the name for the hubris, the excessive gesture, whose very excess grounds the universal order; it is the name for the pathological abject, clinamen, deviation from the universal order, that sustains this very universal order. The transcendental subject is the “ontological scandal,” neither phenomenal nor noumenal, but an excess that sticks out from the “great chain of being,” a hole, a gap in the order of reality, and, simultaneously, the agent whose “spontaneous” activity constitutes the order of (phenomenal) reality. If, for the traditional ontology, the problem was how to deduce chaotic phenomenal reality background image from the eternal order of the true reality (how to account for the gradual “degeneration” of the eternal order), the problem of the subject is that of the imbalanced excess, hubris, deviation, that sustains the order itself. The central paradox of the Kantian transcendental constitution is that the subject is not the absolute, the eternal grounding principle of reality, but a finite, temporal entity — precisely as such, it provides the ultimate horizon of reality.

The very idea of the universe, of the all of reality, as a totality that exists in itself, is thus rejected as a paralogism: what appears as an epistemological limitation of our capacity to grasp reality (the fact that we are forever perceiving reality from our finite, temporal standpoint), is the positive ontological condition of reality itself. Our philosophical and everyday common sense identifies the subject with a series of features: the autonomous source of spontaneous, self-originating activity (what German Idealists called “self-positing”); the capacity of free choice; the presence of some kind of “inner life” (fantasizing); etc.

Lacan endorses these features, but with a twist: the autonomous source of activity — yes, but only insofar as the subject displaces onto an Other the fundamental passivity of his being (when I am active, I am simultaneously interpassive, i.e., there is an Other who is passive for me, in my place, like the weepers, the hired women who cry for me at funerals in so-called “primitive” societies); the free choice — yes, but, at its most radical, the choice is a forced one (i.e., ultimately, I have a freedom of choice only insofar as I make the right choice); the presence of fantasizing — yes, but, far from coinciding with the subject in a direct experience of “inner life,” the fundamental fantasy is that which cannot ever be “subjectivized,” that which is forever cut off from the subject….

What Lacan focuses on is this specific twist, this additional turn of the screw that confronts us with the most radical dimension of subjectivity. How, then, does this endeavor of ours relate to Heidegger’s well known attempt to “think through” the horizon of subjectivity? From our perspective, the problem with Heidegger is, in ultima analisi, the following one:

the Lacanian reading enables us to unearth in the Cartesian subjectivity its inherent tension between the moment of excess (the “diabolical Evil” in Kant, the “night of the world” in Hegel) and the subsequent attempts to gentrify-domesticate-normalize this excess.

Again and again, post-Cartesian philosophers are compelled, by the inherent logic of their philosophical project, to articulate a certain excessive moment of “madness” inherent to cogito, which they then immediately endeavor to “renormalize.” And the problem with Heidegger is that his notion of modern subjectivity does not seem to account for this inherent excess — in short, this notion simply does not “cover” that aspect of cogito on account of which Lacan claims that cogito is the subject of the unconscious.

One of the basic presumptions of contemporary doxa is that the Cartesian cogito paved the way for the unheard-of progress of modern science that profoundly affected the everyday life of mankind. Today, however, it seems as if the Cartesian cogito itself has acquired the status of a prescientific myth, superseded by the very progress of knowledge it unleashed. For that reason, the title Cogito and the Unconscious is bound to give rise to two immediate associations: that it is to be understood as designating the antagonism between cogito (the transparent subject of self-consciousness) and the unconscious, its opaque Other that subverts the certitudes of consciousness; and, consequently, that cogito is to be repudiated as the agency of manipulative domination responsible for all present woes, from patriarchal oppression to ecological catastrophes. The specter of the “Cartesian paradigm” roams around, simultaneously proclaimed dead and feared as the ultimate threat to our survival.

In clear contrast to this predominant doxa, Lacan pleads for a psychoanalytic return to cogito.

Today’s predominant position involves the assertion of multiple subjectivities against the specter of (transcendental) Subject: the unified Subject, the topic of transcendental philosophy, the constitutive source of all reality, is dead (or so we are told), and the void of its absence is filled in by the liberating proliferation of the multiple forms of subjectivity– feminine, gay, ethnic….

One should thus abandon the impossible search for the Subject that is constitutive of reality, and, instead, focus attention on the diverse forms of asserting one’s subjectivity in our complex and dispersed postmodern universe….

What, however, if we perform the exact opposite of this standard operation, and endeavor to think a subject bereft of subjectivity (of the self-experience of a historical agent embedded in a finite horizon of meaning)?

What kind of monster remains when we subtract from the background image subject the wealth of self experience that constitutes subjectivity? The present volume provides an answer to this question: its underlying premise is that

the Cartesian subject is this monster, that it emerges precisely when we deprive the subject of all the wealth of the “human person.”

Notes […]

2. See Jacques Lacan, Érits: A Selection ( New York: Norton, 1977), 300.

3. For a more detailed account of this excess, see, in the present volume, Slavoj Žižek, The Cartesian Subject versus the Cartesian Theater.

dean revolutionary desire vs. democratic drive 2

By Jodi Dean draft version that is not to be cited

I’ve argued that the sublimation of the drive captures the subject in the repetitive circuits of communicative capitalism. What’s left? A new, shifted, desire, one that recognizes the impossibility of reaching or achieving its object and holds on, refusing to cede it. … Zizek links this new desire to Lacan’s notion of the “desire of the analyst.” [Ticklish Subject 296 and Ecrits, ‘From the Freudian Trieb to the Desire of the Analyst”]

Such a desire is collective, sustaining a community even as it has moved past the need for some kind of phantasmic support. Collective, built around a lack, provides a common desire capable of breaking through the self-enclosed circuit of drive.

The part-of-no-part doesn’t designate a subset of persons, a “we” or a “concrete identity” that can be empirically indicated. It names the gap, division, or antagonism that marks the non-identity of any ordering with its own components. The Lacanian term for the part-of-no-part would then be objet petite a, an impossible, formal object produced as the excess of a process or relation, a kind of gap that incites or annoys, the missingness or not-quite-rightness that calls out to us.

So we have a rupture or a gap and the subjectification of this gap. But subjectification in what sense? There are different politicizations, different mobilizations and subjectifications that call out to and organize different convictions and interests.

The emphasis on the gap necessary for communist desire indexes the non-coincidence of communism with its setting, echoing Marxist themes of negation and affirming the communist legacy of revolution. Nonetheless, communism is not the only political ideology that mobilizes negation and revolution. In fact, it shares such a revolutionary mobilization of negation with capitalism itself, hence communism as the negation of the negation.

The difference in the way they subjectivize the gap, then, is crucial. Capitalist subjectification, the desire it structures and incites, is individual, (even as it tends to sublimate desire in drive, or, differently put, even as individuated desires get caught up in and give way to drive’s powerfully repetitive circuits). To invert Althusser, capitalism interpellates subjects as individuals. A communism that does likewise fails to effect a rupture or install a gap. Communist desire can only be collective.

In a setting of capitalism’s distractions and compulsions, one may very well feel like something is wrong, something is missing, something is deeply unfair. Then one might complicate this idea, or contextualize it, or forget about it and check email. Or one might try to make a difference—signing petitions, blogging, voting, doing one’s own part as an individual. And here is the problem, one continues to think and act individualistically. Under capitalist conditions, communist desire entails “the renunciation of individual freedom,” the deliberate and conscious subordination of self in and to a collective communist will. This subordination requires discipline, work, and organization. It is a process carried out over time and through collective struggle.
Indeed, it’s active collective struggle that changes and reshapes desire from its individual (and for Lukacs bourgeois and reified form) into a common, collective one.

In this provisional sketch of a theory of communist desire, I’ve emphasized the lack (the openness of desire) and its subjectification. I’ve argued that communist desire is the collective subjectification of the lack. It is a collective assumption of the division or antagonism constitutive of the political, an assumption that takes collectivity as the form of desire in two senses: our desire and our desire for us; or, communist desire is the collective desire for collective desiring.

Oh, demographers and statisticians! What have you unleashed?As capital demolishes all previous social ties, the counting on which it depends provides a new figure of belonging! Capital has to measure itself, count its profits, its rate of profit, its share of profit, its capacity to leverage its profit, its confidence or anxiety in its capacity for future profit. Capital counts and analyzes who has what, representing to itself the measures of its success. These very numbers can be, and in the slogan “We are the 99%” they are, put to use. They aren’t resignified—they are claimed as the subjectification of the gap separating the top one percent from the rest of us. With this claim, the gap becomes a vehicle for the expression of communist desire, that is, for a politics that asserts the people as divisive force in the interest of over-turning present society and making a new one anchored in collectivity and the common.

In a close engagement with Catherine Malabou’s discussion of severe brain injuries, Zizek discusses the logic of dialectical transitions, “after negation/alienation/loss, the subject ‘returns to itself,’ but this subject is not the same as the substance that underwent the alienation—it is constituted in the very movement of returning to itself.”[i] Zizek concludes, “the subject is as such the survivor of its own death, a shell which remains after it is deprived of its substance.” Proletarianization is a name for the process of this deprivation under capital (as I discuss in chapter three). The deprivation of substance—common, social, substance—leaves collectivity as its shell, as the form that remains for communist desire.

This collective form overlaps with the object-cause of communist desire, the people understood as the part-of-no-part. As I argue above, the part-of-no-part names the gap or antagonism that marks the non-identity of any ordering with its own components. It can thus be designated with Lacan’s objet petit a, an impossible formal object produced as the excess of a process, a missingness or off-ness that calls out to us.

Zizek notes that for Lacan, the object of desire always remains at a distance from the subject; no matter how close the subject gets to the object, the object remains elusive.[ii]

The distinction between object and object-cause is not the same as any old object to which it attaches.

The object-cause of communist desire is the people and, again, the people not as a name for the social whole but as a name for the exploited, producing majority.

[i] Living in the End Times, 307
[ii] See Living in the End Times 303

Conclusion

I [Jodi Dean] have attempted to set out an idea of communist desire in the space marked by the end of a certain left melancholy and by an alternative to the way of the drive. Whereas some have viewed drive’s sublimation as the alternative to a desire configured in terms of law and its transgression, I’ve sketched an alternative notion of desire, one that, via collectivity, breaks from drive’s repetitive circuits. Instead of trapped in failure, getting off on failing to reach the goal, communist desire subjectivizes its own impossibility, its constitutive lack and openness.

dean revolutionary desire vs. democratic drive 1

By Jodi Dean draft version that is not to be cited

As is well-known, Freud distinguishes melancholia from mourning. Mourning responds to the loss of an object of love, whether that object is a person, country, freedom, or ideal. Reality confronts the subject with its loss and piecemeal, painfully, and over time, the subject withdraws its attachment from the lost object until the work of mourning is complete and the ego is again free, uninhibited, and capable of love. Although similar to mourning with respect to the absence of interest in the outside world and the general inhibition of activity, melancholia evinces a crucial difference: a lowering of self-regard that is manifest in self-reproach and self-reviling to the point not only of self-punishment but of the very “over-coming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life.” Freud writes:

The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning — an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished. He abases himself before everyone and commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with anyone so unworthy [Freud cited in Dean 2011].

To account for this difference in self-regard, Freud distinguishes between mourning’s consciousness of loss and the unknown and unconscious dimension of object loss in melancholia. Something about the melancholic’s loss remains unconscious.

Even when the melancholic knows that he lost, he does not know what he has lost, in what his loss consists for him. Psychoanalysis addresses this unconscious element of melancholic loss.

Freud’s gesture to the melancholic’s loss of self-respect points in a similar direction. To be sure, he isn’t explicit here. His discussion evades, somewhat, the reason for the loss of self-respect (to which I said I would return). Nonetheless, the example he takes from the clinic hints at why the subject loses self-respect. Describing a woman who “loudly pities her husband for being tied to such an incapable wife,” Freud observes that she is really accusing her husband of incapacity. Her self-reproaches, some of which are genuine, “are allowed to obtrude themselves, since they help to mask the others and make recognition of the true state of affairs impossible.”

Moreover, these reproaches “derive from the pros and cons of the conflict of love that has led to the loss of love” (247). Might it not be the case, then, that the woman is quite rightly recognizing her own incapacity in finding a capable husband, one capable of sustaining her desire?

Might she not be punishing herself for compromising, for making due, for allowing the pros and cons of the conflict of love to constrain her desire as she acquiesces to a reality of acceptance and moderation to which there seems to be no alternative?

If the answer to these questions is yes, then the woman’s loss of self-respect is an indication of the guilt she feels at having ceded her desire.

To use the terms given to us by Lacan, “the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire.” [Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 321]

The woman’s identification with her husband is a compromise, the way she sublimates her desire so as to make him the object of it. The ferocity of her super-ego and the unrelenting punishment to which it subjects her indicates that she has given up on the impossibility of desire, desire’s own constitutive dissatisfaction, to accommodate herself to everyday life.

The enjoyment, jouissance, that desire can’t attain, drive can’t avoid. Unable to satisfy or maintain desire, the subject enjoys in another way, the way of the drive.

If desire is always a desire to desire, a desire that can never be filled, a desire for a jouissance or enjoyment that can never be attained, drive functions as a way to enjoy through failure. In drive, one doesn’t have to reach the goal to enjoy. The activities one undertakes to achieve a goal become satisfying own their own. Because they provide a little kick of enjoyment, they come themselves to take the place of the goal. Attaching to the process, enjoyment captures the subject. Further, as Slavoj Zizek argues, the shift from desire to drive effects a change in the status of the object. Whereas the object of desire is originally lost, “which emerges as lost,” in drive loss itself is an object [Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London, Verso: 2008) 328]. In other words, drive isn’t a quest for a lost object; it’s the enactment of loss or the force loss exerts on the field of desire. So drives don’t circulate around a space that was once occupied by an ideal, impossible object. Rather, drive is the sublimation of desire as it turns back in on itself, this turning thereby producing the loop of drive and providing its own special charge.

An emphasis on the drive dimension of melancholia, on Freud’s attention to the way sadism in melancholia is “turned round upon the subject’s own self,” leads to an interpretation of the general contours shaping the left that differs from Brown’s. Instead of a left attached to an unacknowledged orthodoxy, we have one that has given way on the desire for communism, betrayed its historical commitment to the proletariat, and sublimated revolutionary energies into restorationist practices that strengthen the hold of the capitalism. This left has replaced commitments to the emancipatory, egalitarian struggles of working people against capitalism, commitments that were never fully orthodox, but always ruptured, conflicted, and contested, with incessant activity (not unlike the mania Freud also associates with melancholia) and so now satisfies itself with criticism and interpretation, small projects and local actions, particular issues and legislative victories, art, technology, procedures, and process.

It sublimates revolutionary desire to democratic drive,

to the repetitious practices offered up as democracy (whether representative, deliberative, or radical), having already conceded to the inevitably of capitalism, “noticeably abandoning any striking power against the big bourgeoisie,” to return to Benjamin’s language. For such a left enjoyment comes from its withdrawal from power and responsibility, its sublimation of goals and responsibilities into the branching, fragmented practices of micro-politics, self-care, and issue awareness. Perpetually slighted, harmed, and undone, this left remains stuck in repetition, unable to break out of the circuits of drive in which it is caught, unable because it enjoys.

Fink’s take on Bollas

Bruce Fink’s take on Christopher Bollas (it isn’t pretty)
Note that Bollas (1983), who is referenced by many relationalists, tried to co-opt Lacan’s term Other by situating the Other in himself as analyst. He wrote, “It is a feature of our present day understanding of the transference, that the Other source of the analysand’s free association is the psychoanalyst’s countertranference” (p.3). This reduces the triad Lacan presented as crucial to the analytic situation — the analysand’s ego, the Other (as the analysand’s unconscious), and the analyst’s ego — to a dyad, which amounts to a collapse of the symbolic dimension into the imaginary. For example, rather than simply ask his analysand “Helen” why she thought she often lapsed into silence (or what was going through her mind at such times, to see if anything had occurred to her from the Freudian “Other scene” known as the unconscious — the “anderer Schauplatz” that Freud 1900/1958 pp. 48 and 536, borrows from Fechner — or if anyone had ever lapsed into silence like that with her in the past, to see if the pauses were related to her history) Bollas responded to her by saying that it must be difficult for her “to speak to this stranger (the analyst) and … to entrust the simplest things to him” (p. 13). This total presumption on his part is based on his own sense of what it must be like to talk to someone new (many of my analysands, for example, have no such trouble at the outset). Moreover, this interpretation, like several others he made based on his countertransference, had little if any effect, and Helen’s silences only seemed to stop when they were connected the experience of her mother — that is, her history with her mother. Note that this is probably what she would have told him at the outset ( that is, approximately a year earlier) had he simply asked if anyone had ever lapsed into silence like that with her in the past, since it was her mother who had done so. The detour he took via his own subjectivity — that is, his attempt to understand her experience through his own experience of himself with her in the analytic setting — seems quite sterile, requiring him to make a series of guesses based on his own personality and countertranference, none of which really seem to hit the mark. And this detour (this attempt to fathom her subjectivity on the bases of his own subjectivity) is necessitated by his failure to ask one of the most elementary questions imaginable. [Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Page 149. note 26.]

Butler take on Bollas

The analyst is, in her own way, dispossessed in the moment of acting as its site of transfer for me, and for reason that I cannot know. What am I calling on her to be? And how does she take up that call? GA 55

… Bollas makes the case that the analyst must not only allow himself to become used but even “be prepared on occasion to become situationally ill” (Bollas 204). The analyst allows hims to be deployed in the environmental idiom of the analysand at the same time as he develops a reflective and deliberate capacity for analysis within that difficult situation. … One patient speaks and then falls silent, leaving Bollas with a sense of aloneness and disorientation. When he finally gives voice to this sense within the session, it is to suggest that for and with him the patient has effectively recreated the environment in which she had felt suddenly isolated and lost as a young child. He asks whether she has asked him to inhabit this experience through her long pauses so that he can know what it was she then felt. What she offers, then, is less a narrative than a recreated scene of suddenly abandoned communication and a disorienting loss of contact.

There is a narrative dimension to his subsequent intervention since he asks whether this experience belongs to her past. The point, however, is less to reconstruct the precise details of the story than to establish another possibility for communication within the transference.

When he suggests that she has given him the position of re-experiencing her own experience of loss and absence, he communicates to her in a way that has not been done before, and the conversation that follows, explicitly thematizing this broken form of communication, constitutes a more connected mode of communication, working to alter the default scene of address.

The model of psychoanalytic intervention that Bollas affirms constitutes a significant departure from the classical notion of the cold and distant analyst who keeps every counter-transferential issue to himself. For Bollas, “the analyst will need to become lost in the patient’s world, lost in the sense of not knowing what his feelings and states of mind are in any one moment” (qtd in Butler 57).

Later he remarks that only when the analyst presents himself to be used by the patient is there any hope that the counter-transference can facilitate a new set of object relations:

“Only by making a good object (the analyst) go somewhat mad can such a patient believe in his analysis and know that the analyst has been where he has been and has survived and emerged intact” (qtd in Butler 57).

Bollas clearly suggests that the analyst must allow him- or herself to be impinged upon by the client, even undergo a kind of dispossession of self, as well as to maintain a reflective psychoanalytic distance and attitude.

His interpretations were meant to be played with — kicked around, mulled over, torn to pieces — rather than regarded as the official version of the truth. [Bollas qtd in Butler 57].

Bosteels on Žižek

Bosteels, Bruno. The Actuality of Communism. New York: Verso, 2011.

To envision a new positive order beyond the present horizon thus requires that we take a step back to grasp the moment of genesis of order out of disorder. “In the end, teh alternative here is between idealism and materialism: is the ‘big Other’ (the ideal symbolic order) always already here as a kind of insurmountable horizon, or is it possible to deploy ts ‘genesis’ out of the dispersed ‘non-all’ network of contingent material singularities?” Žižek also asks, before answering his own question in the positive: “The answer is a definite ‘yes’ — it is contained in Lacan’s unexpected vindication of the notion of creativity at its most radical, that is, as creatio ex nihilo: by means of reference to the void of the Thing in the midst of the symbolic structure, the subject is able to ‘bend’ the symbolic space she inhabits, and thus to define his/her desire in its idiosyncrasy.”

To justify his belief in the possibility of a transformative act that would open up a new order not limited to the alternative of either the pure lack of desire or else the pure positivity of drives, Žižek thus raises the question of the originary act that brings order out of disorder and breaks with the constraints of the always already existing state of affairs. 204

Žižek the real, anamorphosis

Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp eds. The Truth of Žižek London: Continuum. 2007

With Lenin, as with Lacan, the point is that the revolution ne s’autorise que d’elle-même; one should assume the revolutionary act not covered by the big Other — the fear of taking power ‘prematurely’, the search for the guarantee, is the fear of the abyss of the act. 240

🙂 Laclau and his followers claim that every fundamental social antagonism “will always be displaced to some degree since, … antagonism can never be approached directly without political mediation.”

All we have is a series of antagonisms which (can) build a chain of equivalences, metaphorically ‘contaminating’ each other, and which antagonism emerges as ‘central’ is the contingent result of a struggle for hegemony. So does this mean that one should reject the very notion of fundamental antagonism’ (as Laclau does)? 242

In order to explicate the concept of ‘fundamental antagonism’ Žižek cites Lévi-Strauss from his Structural Anthropology. The famous example of the ZERO INSTITUTION.

the very splitting into the two ‘relative’ perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant — not the objective, ‘actual’ disposition of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to account for, to ‘internalize’ to come to terms with — an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole. The two perceptions of the ground plan are simply two mutually exclusive endeavours to cope with this traumatic antagonism, to heal its wound via the imposition of a balanced symbolic structure.

It is here one can see in what precise sense the real intervenes through anamorphosis. We have first the ‘actual’, ‘objective’, arrangement of the houses, and then its two different symbolizations which both distort in an anamorphic way the actual arrangement. However, the ‘real‘ is here not the actual arrangement, but the traumatic core of the social antagonism which distorts the tribe members’ view of the actual social antagonism. The real is thus the disavowed X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically distorted. It is simultaneously the thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle which prevents this direct access; the thing which eludes our grasp and the distorting screen which makes us miss the thing. More precisely the real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first to the second standpoint: the Lacanian real is not only distorted, but the very principle of distortion of reality. 243

finitude antigone

Žižek. Traversing the Fantasy eds. Boucher, Glynos, Sharpe. 2005

So what is it that this emphasis on finitude as the ultimate horizon of our existence misses? How can we assert it in a materialist way, without any resort to spiritual transcendence? The answer is, precisely, objet petite a as the ”undead” (“noncastrated”) remainder which persists in its obscene immortality. No wonder the Wagnerian heroes want so desperately to die: they want to get rid of this obscene immortal supplement which stands for libido as an organ, for drive at its most radical, i.e., death drive. In other words, the properly Freudian paradox is that what explodes the constraints of our finitude is death drive itself.

Back to the texts in ‘ the present volume: the main thing that I find problematic in Grigg’s contribution is precisely what appears the most natural thing for a psychoanalyst to do-his “clinical” reading of Antigone’s act as a gesture of hysterical provocation. Lacan, surprisingly, avoided this direction completely: there is, in his detailed reading of Antigone, no mention of repression, of the formations of the unconscious, of incestuous desires (although we are dealing here the Oedipus family, the incestuous family !) . . . And I think Lacan was right here: the dimension he is focusing on-that of the ethical act-cannot be rendered (and also not “demystifled”) in clinical terms. Furthermore, I think Grigg is wrong when he claims that Antigone “defies the law of her city in the name of her (Oedipal) law”: it is her brother’s proper burial that she insists on (as the theatre piece informs as in the lines which are often dismissed as problematic, but on whose key importance Lacan insists, it is only apropos her brother that she is ready to go to the end), and it is not clear what this has to do with the Oedipal Law.

Furthermore, we should not forget the obvious fact that we are not dealing here with just any case of the Oedipus complex, but with Oedipus himself-and, as Lacan liked to point out, the Oedipus family, precisely, was not Oedipal, and Oedipus did not suffer from the Oedipus complex.

Grigg’s other counterargument concerns the problematic status of what I call the “act of absolute freedom” which “derives its essential features (its freedom, its gratuitousness, its criminality, its unaccountability and unpredictability) from the fact that it lies outside all possible symbolic dimensions. It strikes me that not only does Antigone not conform to this requirement but also that this requirement makes an act indistinguishable from mere whimsicality. There is no objective criterion and there can clearly be no appeal to any subjective features to distinguish an act of absolute freedom from a gratuitous act.”

As I abundantly developed elsewhere (among other places in my (Ticklish Subject), such a reading of the act is wrong: what makes a certain move an act proper are not its inherent qualities but its structural place within a given symbolic network — to put it in Badiou’ s terms. an act intervenes at the point of the “symptomal torsion” of this network. This is what distinguishes an act from a mere whimsicality, and this is also why, of course, the externality of the act is absolutely internal to the symbolic order-an act is ex-timate, to use Lacan’s pun.

Žižek comment on Butler 2001

Hanlon,Christopher. “Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj .” New Literary History, 32 (2001): 1-21. PDF rest of interview in this blog is here

Question: Judith Butler—with whom you have engaged in ongoing if cordial debate—maintains that the Lacanian topology is itself dubious for its nonhistorical, transcultural presuppositions. You yourself have written that “jouissance is nonhistorical” How do you respond to complaints such as Butler’s?

Žižek: Ah! This is what we are struggling with for dozens, maybe hundreds of pages, in this book. My answer is to say that she is nonhistorical. That is to say, she presents a certain narrative, the same as Ernesto [Laclau]. With Ernesto, it’s that we have an older type of essentialist class politics, then slowly, slowly, essentialism starts to disintegrate, and now we have this contingent struggle for hegemony where everything is open to negotiation . . . . With Judith Butler, there is the same implicit narrative: in the old times, there was sex essentialism, biologically-identified; then slowly, slowly, this started disintegrating into a sex/gender distinction, the awareness that gender is not biologically— but rather culturally—constructed; finally, we come to this performativity,contingency, and so on and so on. So the same story, from essentialist zero-point to this open contingency where we have struggles for hegemony which are undecided. My first reproach as a philosopher to this is that here, some metanarrative is missing. To ask a very stupid, naïve question: why were people one hundred and fifty years ago essentialists? Were they simply stupid? You know what I mean? There is a certain, almost teleological narrative here, in which from the “bad” zero-point of essentialism, slowly we come to the “good” realization that everything is a performative effect, that nothing is exempted from the contingent struggle for hegemony. But don’t you need a metanarrative if you want to avoid the conclusion that people were simply stupid one hundred and fifty years ago?

CH: Well, perhaps not a metanarrative in the sense of a guiding historical trajectory, but an acceptance of a loosely Foucauldian premise, that one hundred and fifty years ago there were in place certain institutional mechanisms, powerdiscourses, which coerced belief from their subjects, engendered them . . .

Žižek: Ah! But if you accept this Foucauldian metanarrative, then things get a little complicated. Because Foucault is not speaking about truth value; for him, it is simply the change from one episteme to another. Then . . . OK, I ask you another question—let’s engage in this discussion, with you as Butler. So: is there a truth-value distinction between essentialism and the performativity of gender or is it simply the passage from one episteme to another? What would you say?

CH: I won’t speak for Butler, but if I were a Foucauldian, I would say that the latter is the case, though I may prefer the later episteme in light of my own political objectives.

Žižek: Yeah, but Butler would never accept that.

CH: You don’t think so?

Žižek: You think she would? Because I think that the epistemic presupposition of her work is implicitly—even explicitly, at least in her early work—that, to put it bluntly, sex always already was a performative construction. They just didn’t know it then. But you cannot unite this with Foucauldian narrative, because Foucauldian narrative is epistemologically neutral, in which we pass from one paradigm to the other. You know, sex was confessionary then; sex is now post-confessionary, pleasurable bodies, whatever . . . . But OK: Foucault would be one possible metanarrative. Marxism would provide the other one, in the sense that “the development of capitalism itself provoked a shift in subjectivity,” whatever. But again, what I claim is that there is some unresolved tension concerning historicity and truth-value. I ask you a different question. Both in Laclau and in Butler, there is a certain theory: Butler—and I’m speaking of early Butler; later, things get much more complex, much more interesting, a more intense dialogue becomes possible . . .

CH: So we’re talking about Gender Trouble, parts of Bodies That Matter . . .

Žižek: Yeah, I’m talking about Gender Trouble with Butler, and about Hegemony and Socialist Strategy with Laclau. Why? Because let’s not forget that these two books were the only two authentic “big hits” of the time. . . . I’ll tell you why: both Gender Trouble and Hegemony and Socialist Strategy were read as a model for a certain political practice. With Gender Trouble, the idea was that performativity and drag politics could have a political impact; it was, to put it in naïve, Leninist terms, “a guideline for a certain new feminist practice.” It was programmatic. It was the same with Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. It was a justification for the abandonment of so-called essentialist class politics, after which no specific struggle takes priority, we just have to coordinate our practices, cultivate a kind of “rainbow coalition,” although Ernesto rejects the term . . . . Now, what are these theories? Are they universal theories—of gender or of social/political processes—or are they specific theories about political practice, sex practice, within a certain historical/political moment? I claim that the ambiguity is still irreducible. At the same time that it’s clear that these theories are rooted in a certain historical moment, it’s also clear that they touch upon a universal dimension. Now my ironic conclusion is that, with all this anti-Hegelianism, what both Ernesto and Judith do here is the worst kind of pseudo-Hegelian historicism. At a certain point, it’s as if the access to truth or what always already was true is possible only in a certain historical situation. So in other words, philosophically, I claim that beneath these theories of contingency, there is another narrative that is deeply teleological.

CH: But either Butler or Laclau might rebut this reproach by pointing out that even such an embedded teleology is no worse than a matrix of non-historical Lacanian presuppositions.

Žižek: But my God, this is the big misunderstanding with her! Butler systematically conflates what she calls “Real” with some nonhistorical symbolic norm. It’s interesting how, in order to qualify the Lacanian notion of sexual difference as a nonhistorical Real, she silently slips in this nonhistorical gender norm, to then claim that “we homosexuals are excluded from this,” and so on. So her whole criticism inveighs against this notion that Lacan thinks of sexual difference as part of a nonhistorical, heterosexual normativity, and that this is what should be subverted . . . .

Of course, my counterpoint is that “Real,” for Lacan, is the exact opposite.

“Real” is that on account of which every norm is undermined. When [Butler] speaks of historicity, my point is not that there is something nonhistorical which precedes us. My point is that the Lacanian Real, in a way, is historical, in the sense that each historical epoch, if you will, has its own Real. Each horizon of historicity presupposes some foreclosure of some Real.

Now, Judith Butler would say “OK, I agree with this, but doesn’t this mean that we should re-historicize the Real, include it, re-negotiate it?” No, the problem is more radical . . . . Maybe the ultimate misunderstanding between us—from my perspective— is that for her, historicity is the ultimate horizon. As an old fashioned Freudian, I think that historicity is always a certain horizon which has to be sustained on the basis of some fundamental exclusion. Why is there historicity? Historicity doesn’t simply means that “things change,” and so on. That’s just stupid evolutionism; not in the biological sense, but common sense.

Historicity means that there must be some unresolved traumatic exclusion which pushes the process forward. My paradox would be that if you take away the nonhistorical kernel, you lose history itself.

And I claim that Judith Butler herself, in her last book, is silently approaching this position. Because in Gender Trouble, the idea that your psychic identity is based on some primordial loss or exclusion is anathema; it’s the Big Bad Wolf. But have you noticed that, if you read it closely, in The Psychic Life of Power she now accepts this idea of a primordial loss when she speaks of these “disavowed attachments”? The idea is now that we become subjects only through renouncing the fundamental passionate attachment, and that there’s no return, no reassumption of the fundamental attachment. It’s a very Freudian notion. If you lose the distance, the disavowal . . . it’s psychosis, foreclosure. The big problem I have with this shift is that it’s a very refined political shift of accent. What I don’t quite accept in her otherwise remarkable descriptions is how, when she speaks about the “marginalized disavowed,” she always presupposes—to put it in very naïve terms—that these are the good guys. You know: we have Power, which wants to render everything controllable, and then the problem is how to give voice to those who are marginalized, excluded . . .

CH: You see it as a kind of vulgar Bakhtinianism?

Žižek: Yeah, yeah—you know what I’m aiming at. What I’m aiming at is . . . aren’t racist, anti-Semitic pogroms also Bakhtinian carnival? That’s to say that what interests me is not so much the progressive other whom the power is controlling, but the way in which power has to disavow its own operation, has to rely on its own obscenity. The split is in the power itself. So that . . . when Butler argues very convincingly against—at least she points to the problematic aspects of—legal initiatives that would legalize gay marriages, claiming that in this way, you accept state authority, you become part of the “visible,” you lose solidarity with all those whose identity is not publicly acknowledged . . . I would say, “Wait a minute! Is there a subject in America today who defines himself as marginalized, repressed, trampled by state authority?” Yes! They are called survivalists! The extreme right! In the United States, this opposition between public state authority and local, marginalized resistances is more and more an opposition between civil society and radical rightwing groups. I’m not saying we should simply accept the state. I’m just saying that I am suspicious of the political pertinence of this opposition between the “public” system of power which wants to control, proscribe everything, and forms of resistance to subvert it. What I’m more interested in are the obscene supplements that are inherent to power itself.