lacan – Page 34 – objet (a)

Ž four discourses four subjects

Žižek, Slavoj. “Four Discourses, Four Subjects” in Cogito and the Unconscious. ed. Slavoj Žižek, Duke UP, 1998. 75-113.

The illusion of the gesture of the Master is the complete coincidence between the level of enunciation (the subjective position from which I am speaking) and the level of the enunciated content, that is, what characterizes the Master is a speech-act that wholly absorbs me, in which “I am what I say,” in short, a fully realized, self-contained performative.

Such an ideal coincidence, of course, precludes the dimension of fantasy, since fantasy emerges precisely in order to fill in the gap between the enunciated content and its underlying position of enunciation.

Fantasy is an answer to the question, “You are telling me this, but why? What do you really want by telling me this?”

The fact that the dimension of fantasy nonetheless persists thus simply signals the ultimate unavoidable failure of the Master’s discourse.

There is thus no reason to be dismissive of the discourse of the Master, to identify it too hastily with “authoritarian repression”: the Master’s gesture is the founding gesture of every social link. Let us imagine a confused situation of social disintegration, in which the cohesive power of ideology loses its efficiency: in such a situation, the Master is the one who invents a new signifier, the famous “quilting point,” which again stabilizes the situation and makes it readable; the university discourse that then elaborates the network of Knowledge that sustains this readability by definition presupposes and relies on the initial gesture of the Master. The Master adds no new positive content — he merely adds a signifier, which all of a sudden turns disorder into order, into “new harmony,” … Therein resides the magic of a Master: although there is nothing new at the level of positive content, “nothing is quite the same” after he pronounces his Word. …

The University discourse is enunciated from the position of “neutral” Knowledge; it addresses the remainder of the real (say, in the case of pedagogical knowledge, the “raw, uncultivated child”), turning it into the subject . . The “truth” of the university discourse, hidden beneath the bar, of course, is power (i.e., the Master-Signifier):

the constitutive lie of the university discourse is that it disavows its performative dimension, presenting what effectively amounts to a political decision based on power as a simple insight into the factual state of things.

What one should avoid here is the Foucaultian misreading: the produced subject is not simply the subjectivity that arises as the result of the disciplinary application of knowledge-power, but its remainder, that which eludes the grasp of knowledge-power. “Production” (the fourth term in the matrix of discourses) does not stand simply for the result of the discursive operation, but rather for its “indivisible remainder,” for the excess that resists being included in the discursive network (i.e., for what the discourses itself produces as the foreign body in its very heart). 78

Suffice it to recall the market expert who advocates strong budgetary measures (cutting welfare expenses, etc.) as a necessity imposed by his neutral expertise devoid of any ideological biases: what he conceals is the series of power-relations (from the active role of state apparatuses to ideological beliefs) that sustain the “neutral” functioning of the market mechanism. 79

In the hysterical link, the . . over a stands for the subject who is divided, traumatized, by what an object she is for the Other, what role she plays in Other’s desire: “Why am I what you’re saying that I am?” … What she expects from the Other-Master is knowledge about what she is as object (the lower level of the formula).

In contrast to hysteria, the pervert knows perfectly what he is for the Other: a knowledge supports his position as the object of Other’s (divided subject’s) jouissance. For that reason, the matheme of the discourse of perversion is the same as that of the analyst’s discourse.

Lacan defines perversion as the inverted fantasy (i.e., his matheme of perversion is a-$), which is precisely the upper level of the analyst’s discourse. The difference between the social link of perversion and that of analysis is grounded in the radical ambiguity of objet petit a in Lacan, which stands simultaneously for the imaginary fantasmatic lure/screen AND for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure.

*So when we pass from perversion to the analytic social link, the agent (analyst) reduces himself to the void, which provokes the subject into confronting the truth of his desire. Knowledge in the position of “truth” below the bar under the “agent,” of course, refers to the supposed knowledge of the analyst, and, simultaneously, signals that the knowledge gained here will not be the neutral objective knowledge of scientific adequacy, but the knowledge that concerns the subject (analysand) in the truth of his subjective position.

In this precise sense, the analyst’s discourse produces the master signifier, the swerve of the patient’s knowledge, the surplus element that situates the patient’s knowledge at the level of truth: after the master signifier is produced, even if nothing changes at the level of knowledge, the same knowledge as before starts to function in a different mode. The master signifier is the unconscious sinthome, the cipher of enjoyment, to which the subject was unknowingly subjected.

*Text here is modified according to https://www.terada.ca/discourse/?p=7106

So, if a political Leader says “I am your Master, let my will be done!” this direct assertion of authority is hystericized when the subject starts to doubt his qualification to act as a Leader (“Am I really their Master?” What is in me that legitimizes me to act like that?”); it can be masked in the guise of the university discourse (“In asking you to do this, I merely follow the insight into objective historical necessity, so I am not your Leader, but merely your servant who enables you to act for your own good. …”); or, the subject can act as a blank, suspending his symbolic efficiency and thus compelling his Other to become aware of how he was experiencing another subject as a Leader only because he was treating him as one.

It should be clear, from this brief description, how the position of the “agent” in each of the four discourses involves a specific mode of subjectivity:

– the Master is the subject who is fuly engaged in his (speech) act, who, in a way, “is his word,” whose word displays an immediate performative efficiency;

– the agent of the university discourse is, on the contrary, fundamentally disengaged: he posits himself as the self-erasing observer (and executor) of “objective laws” accessible to neutral knowledge (in clinical terms, his position is closest to that of the pervert).

– the hysterical subject is the subject whose very existence involves radical doubt and questioning, his entire being is sustained by the uncertainty as to what he is for the Other; insofar as the subject exists only as an answer to the enigma of the Other’s desire, the hysterical subject is the subject par excellence.

Again, in clear contrast to it, the analyst stands for the paradox of the desubjectivized subject, of the subject who fully assumed what Lacan calls “subjective destitution” that is, who breaks out of the vicious cycle of intersubjective dialectics of desire and turns into an acephalous being of pure drive.

objet a and the drive id-evil

Žižek, Slavoj. Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses also in an article in Russell Grigg and Justin Clemens Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis. 2006

Portions of this stuff are reprinted in The Parallax View starting on page 303.

Can the upper level of Lacan’s formula of the university discourse — S2 directed toward a — not also be read as standing for the university knowledge endeavoring to integrate, domesticate, and appropriate the excess that resists and rejects it?

One of the telltale signs of university discourse is that the opponent is accused of being “dogmatic” and “sectarian.” University discourse cannot tolerate an engaged subjective stance. Should not our first gesture be, as Lacanians, to heroically assume this designation of being “sectarian” and engage in a “sectarian” polemic?

University discourse as the hegemonic discourse of modernity has two forms of existence in which its inner tension (“contradiction”) is externalized: capitalism, its logic of the integrated excess, of the system reproducing itself through constant self-revolutionizing, and the bureaucratic “totalitarianism” conceptualized in different guises as the rule of technology, of instrumental reason, of biopolitics, as the “administered world.”

We should not succumb to the temptation of reducing capitalism to a mere form of appearance of the more fundamental ontological attitude of technological domination; we should rather insist, in the Marxian mode, that the capitalist logic of integrating the surplus into the functioning of the system is the fundamental fact.

Stalinist “totalitarianism” was the capitalist logic of self-propelling productivity liberated from its capitalist form, which is why it failed: Stalinism was the symptom of capitalism.

Stalinism involved the matrix of general intellect, of the planned transparency of social life, of total productive mobilization- and its violent purges and paranoia were a kind of a “return of the repressed,” the “irrationality” inherent to the project of a totally organized “administered society.” This means the two levels, precisely insofar as they are two sides of the same coin, are ultimately incompatible: there is no metalanguage enabling us to translate the logic of domination back into the capitalist reproduction-through-excess, or vice versa.

The key question here concerns the relationship between the two excesses:

1) the economic excess/surplus integrated into the capitalist machine as the force that drives it into permanent self-revolutionizing and

2) the political excess of power — exercise inherent to modern power (the constitutive excess of representation over the represented: the legitimate state power responsible to its subjects is supplemented by the obscene message of unconditional exercise of Power —laws do not really bind me, I can do to you whatever I want, I can treat you as guilty if I decide to, I can destroy you if I say so).

The master’s discourse stands not for the premodern master, but for the absolute monarchy, this first figure of modernity that effectively undermined the articulate network of feudal relations and interdependences, transforming fidelity to flattery: it is the “Sun-King” Louis XIV with his L’état, c’est moi who is the master par excellence. Hysterical discourse and university discourse then deploy two outcomes of the vacillation of the direct reign of the master:

the expert-rule of bureaucracy that culminates in the biopolitics of reducing the population to a collection of homo sacer (what Heidegger called “enframing,” Adorno “the administered world,” Foucault the society of “discipline and punish”);

the explosion of the hysterical capitalist subjectivity that reproduces itself through permanent self-revolutionizing, through the integration of the excess into the “normal” functioning of the social link (the true “permanent revolution” is already capitalism itself).

Lacan’s formula of the four discourses thus enables us to deploy the two faces of modernity

1. total administration and
2. capitalist-individualist dynamics

as two ways to undermine the master’s discourse:

doubt about the efficiency of the master-figure (what Eric Santner called the “crisis of investiture”) can be supplemented by the direct rule of the experts legitimized by their knowledge, or

the excess of doubt, of permanent questioning, can be directly integrated into social reproduction.

Finally, the analyst’s discourse stands for the emergence of revolutionary-emancipatory subjectivity that resolves the split of university and hysteria.

In it, the revolutionary agent – a – addresses the subject from the position of knowledge that occupies the place of truth (i.e., which intervenes at the “symptomal torsion” of the subject’s constellation), and the goal is to isolate, get rid of, the master signifier that structured the subject’s (ideologico-political) unconscious.

Or does it? Jacques-Alain Miller has recently proposed that today the master’s discourse is no longer the “obverse” of the analyst’s discourse. Today, on the contrary, our “civilization” itself-its hegemonic symbolic matrix, as it were-fits the formula of the analyst’s discourse. The agent of the social link is today a, surplus enjoyment, the superego injunction to enjoy that permeates our discourse; this injunction addresses $ (the divided subject) who is put to work in order to live up to this injunction. The truth of this social link is S2, scientific-expert knowledge in its different guises, and the goal is to generate S1, the self-mastery of the subject, that is, to enable the subject to cope with the stress of the call to enjoyment (through self-help manuals, etc.). Provocative as this notion is, it raises a series of questions. If it is true, in what, then, resides the difference between the discursive functioning of civilization as such and the psychoanalytic social link? Miller resorts here to a suspicious solution: in our civilization, the four terms are kept apart, isolated; each operates on its own, while only in psychoanalysis are they brought together into a coherent link: “in civilization, each of the four terms remains disjoined… it is only in psychoanalysis, in pure psychoanalysis, that these elements are arranged into a discourse.”

However, is it not that the fundamental operation of the psychoanalytic treatment is not synthesis, bringing elements into a link, but, precisely, analysis, separating what in a social link appears to belong together? This path, opposed to that of Miller, is indicated by Giorgio Agamben,Giorgio Agamben, who, in the last pages of The State of Exception, imagines two Utopian options of how to break out of the vicious cycle of law and violence, of the rule of law sustained by violence.

One is the Benjaminian vision of “pure” revolutionary violence with no relationship to the law.

The other is the relationship to the law without regard to its (violent) enforcement, such as Jewish scholars do in their endless (re)interpretation of the Law.

Agamben starts from the right insight that the task today is not synthesis but separation, distinction: nor bringing law and violence together (so that right will have might and the exercise of might will be fully legitimized), but thoroughly separating them, untying their knot.

Although Agamben confers on this formulation an anti-Hegelian twist, a more proper reading of Hegel makes it clear that such a gesture of separation is what the Hegelian “synthesis” is effectively about. In it, the opposites are not reconciled in a “higher synthesis”; it is rather that their difference is posited “as such.”

However, is this vision not again the case of our late capitalist reality going further than our dreams? Are we not already encountering in our social reality what Agamben envisages as a Utopian vision?

Isn’t the Hegelian lesson of the global reflexivization-mediatization of our lives that it generates its own brutal immediacy?

This has best been captured by Etienne Balibar’s notion of excessive, nonfunctional cruelty as a feature of contemporary life, a cruelty whose figures range from “fundamentalist” racist and/or religious slaughter to the “senseless” outbursts of violence performed by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reasons.

All the talk about foreigners stealing work from us or about the threat they represent to our Western values should not deceive us: under closer examination, it soon becomes clear that this talk provides a rather superficial secondary rationalization. The answer we ultimately obtain from a skinhead is that it makes him feel good to beat foreigners, that their presence disturbs him. What we encounter here is indeed Id-Evil, that is,

the Evil structured and motivated by the most elementary imbalance in the relationship between the ego and jouissance, by the tension between pleasure and the foreign body of jouissance in the very heart of it.

Id-Evil thus stages the most elementary short circuit in the relationship of the subject to the primordially missing object cause of his desire. What bothers us in the other (Jew, Japanese, African, Turk) is that he appears to entertain a privileged relationship to the object — the other either possesses the object treasure, having snatched it away from us (which is why we don’t have it), or he poses a threat to our possession of the object.

What one should propose here is the Hegelian “infinite judgment,” asserting the speculative identity of these “useless” and “excessive” outbursts of violent immediacy, which display nothing but a pure and naked (“non-sublimated”) hatred of the Otherness, with the global reflexivization of society. […] the response of the neo-Nazi skinhead who, when really pressed for the reasons for his violence, suddenly starts to talk like social workers, sociologists, and social psychologists, quoting diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood-the unity of practice and its inherent ideological legitimization disintegrates into raw violence and its impotent, inefficient interpretation.

This impotence of interpretation is also one of the necessary obverses of the universalized reflexivity hailed by the risk-society-theorists: it is as if our reflexive power can flourish only insofar as it draws its strength and relies on some minimal “prereflexive” substantial support that eludes its grasp, so that its universalization comes at the price of its inefficiency, that is, by the paradoxical re-emergence of the brute real of “irrational” violence, impermeable and insensitive to reflexive interpretation. So the more today’s social theory proclaims the end of nature or tradition and the rise of the “risk society,” the more the implicit reference to “nature” pervades our daily discourse: even when we do not speak of the “end of history,” do we not put forward the same message when we claim that we are entering a “postideological” pragmatic era, which is another way of claiming that we are entering a postpolitical order in which the only legitimate conflicts are ethnic/cultural conflicts?

Typically, in today’s critical and political discourse, the term worker has disappeared from the vocabulary, substituted or obliterated by immigrants or immigrant workers: Algerians in France, Turks in Germany, Mexicans in the United States.

In this way, the class problematic of workers’ exploitation is transformed into the multiculturalist problematic of “intolerance of otherness,” and the excessive investment of the multiculturalist liberals in protecting immigrants’ ethnic rights clearly draws its energy from the “repressed class dimension. Although Francis Fukuyama’s thesis on the “end of history” quickly fell into disrepute, we still silently presume that the liberal-democratic capitalist global order is somehow the finally found “natural” social regime, we still implicitly conceive conflicts in the Third World countries as a subspecies of natural catastrophes, as outbursts of quasi-natural violent passions, or as conflicts based on the fanatic identification to one’s ethnic roots (and what is “the ethnic” here if not again a code word for “nature”?). And, again, the key point is that this all-pervasive renaturalization is strictly correlative to the global reflexivization of our daily lives.

What this means, with regard to Agamben’s Utopian vision of untying the knot of the Law and violence is that, in our postpolitical societies, this knot is already untied: we encounter, on the one hand, the globalized interpretation whose globalization is paid for by its impotence, its failure to enforce itself, to generate effects in the real, and, on the other hand, explosions of the raw real of a violence that cannot be affected by its symbolic interpretation. Where, then, is the solution here, between

– the claim that, in today’s hegemonic constellation, the elements of the social link are separated and as such to be brought together by psycho-analysis (Miller),

– and the knot between Law and violence to be untied, their separation to be enacted (Agamben)?

What if these two separations are not symmetrical? What if the gap between the symbolic and the raw real epitomized by the figure of the skinhead is a false one, since this real of the outbursts of the “irrational” violence is generated by the globalization of the symbolic?

When, exactly, does the objet a function as the superego injunction to enjoy? When it occupies the place of the master signifier, that is, as Lacan formulated it in the last pages of his Seminar XI, when the short circuit between S1 and a occurs. The key move to be accomplished in order to break the vicious cycle of the superego injunction is thus to enact the separation between S1 and a.

Consequently, would it not be more productive to follow a different path, that is, to start with the different modus operandi of l’objet a, which in psychoanalysis no longer functions as the agent of the superego injunction — as it does in the discourse of perversion?

This is how Miller’s claim of the identity of the analyst’s discourse and the discourse of today’s civilization should be read: as an indication that this latter discourse (social link) is that of perversion.

That is to say, the fact that the upper level of Lacan’s formula of the analyst’s discourse is the same as his formula of perversion (a-$) opens up a possibility of reading the entire formula of the analyst’s discourse also as a formula of the perverse social link: its agent, the masochist pervert (the pervert par excellence), occupies the position of the object instrument of the other’s desire, and, in this way, through serving his (feminine) victim, he posits her as the hystericized/divided subject who “doesn’t know what she wants.”

Rather, the pervert knows it for her, that is, he pretends to speak from the position of knowledge (about the other’s desire) that enables him to serve the other; and, finally, the product of this social link is the master signifier, that is, the hysterical subject elevated into the role of the master (dominatrix) whom the pervert masochist serves.

In contrast to hysteria, the pervert knows perfectly what he is for the Other: a knowledge supports his position as the object of his Other’s (divided subject’s) jouissance.

The difference between the social link of perversion and that of analysis is grounded in the radical ambiguity of objet a in Lacan, which stands simultaneously for the imaginary fantasmatic lure/screen and for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure.

Consequently, when we pass from perversion to the analytic social link, the agent (analyst) reduces himself to the void, which provokes the subject into confronting the truth of his desire. Knowledge in the position of “truth” below the bar under the “agent,” of course, refers to the supposed knowledge of the analyst, and, simultaneously, signals that the knowledge gained here will not be the neutral objective knowledge of scientific adequacy, but the knowledge that concerns the subject (analysand) in the truth of his subjective position.

Recall, again, Lacan’s outrageous statements that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological. Along the same lines, one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological – because it represses the true reason the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position.

So, in the case of anti-Semitism, knowledge about what the Jews “really are” is a fake, irrelevant, while the only knowledge at the place of truth is the knowledge about why a Nazi needs a figure of the Jew to sustain his ideological edifice.

The crucial point not to be missed here is how the late Lacan’s identification of the subjective position of the analyst as that of objet petit a presents an act of radical self-criticism. Earlier, in the 1950’s, Lacan conceived the analyst not as the small other (a), but, on the contrary, as a kind of stand-in for the big Other (A, the anonymous symbolic order). At this level, the function of the analyst was to frustrate the subject’s imaginary misrecognitions and to make them accept their proper symbolic place within the circuit of symbolic exchange, the place that effectively (and unbeknownst to them) determines their symbolic identity. Later, however, the analyst stands precisely for the ultimate inconsistency and failure of the big Other, that is, for the symbolic order’s inability to guarantee the subject’s symbolic identity.

One should thus always bear in mind the thoroughly ambiguous status of objet a in Lacan. Miller recently proposed a Benjaminian distinction between “constituted anxiety” and “constituent anxiety”: while the first designates the standard notion of the terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety that haunts us, its infernal circle that threatens to draws us in, the second stands for the “pure” confrontation with objet a as constituted in its very loss.

Miller is right to emphasize here two features: the difference that 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 get the constituent fantasy only when the subject “traverses the fantasy” and confronts the void, the gap, filled up by the fantasmatic object.

Clear and convincing as it is. Miller’s formula misses the true paradox or, rather, ambiguity of objet a: when he defines objet a as the object that overlaps with its loss, that 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 the 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 the 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, but by 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 object 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 the drive. Far from concerning an abstract scholastic debate, this distinction has crucial ideologico-political consequences: it enables us to articulate the libidinal dynamics of capitalism.

Following Miller himself, a distinction has to be introduced here between lack and hole. Lack is spatial, designating a void within a space, while the 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 two points is not a straight line, but a curve: the drive “knows” that the shortest way to attain its aim is to circulate around its goal-object. At the immediate level of addressing individuals, capitalism of course interpellates them as consumers, as subjects of desires, soliciting in them ever new perverse and excessive desires (for which it offers products to satisfy them); furthermore, it obviously also manipulates the “desire to desire,” celebrating the very desire to desire ever new objects and modes of pleasure. However, even if if already manipulates desire in a way that takes into account the fact that the most elementary desire is the desire to reproduce itself as desire (and not to find satisfaction), at this level, we do not yet reach the drive.

The drive inheres to capitalism at a more fundamental, systemic level: drive propels the entire capitalist machinery; it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction. The capitalist drive thus belongs to no definite individual – it is rather that those individuals who act as direct “agents” of capital (capitalists themselves, top managers) have to practice it. We enter the mode of the drive when (as Marx put it) the circulation of money as capital becomes “an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.” 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.

Kaloianov, Radostin. Hegel, Kojeve and Lacan – The Metamorphoses of Dialectics – Part I: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and its Kojevian Interpretation as a Point of Reference for the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan, Part II: Hegel and Lacan”

Mirror Stage

the process which forms the subject

Man’s desire is a desire for the desire of the other

slave jouissance

Žižek, Slavoj. “Love Thy Neighbor? No , Thanks!” in Psychoanalysis and Racism. ed. Anthony Lane, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 154-175.) a slighty different version of this essay appears in The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.

According to Lacan, Hegel, in his dialectics of Lord and Bondsman, misses the key point: Jouissance is on the side not of the Master but rather of his servant — that is, what keeps the servant enslaved is precisely the little piece of jouissance thrown to him by his Master. Lacan’s reproach to the standard version of the Cunning of Reason (the Slave who works and thus renounces jouissance, this way laying foundation for his future freedom, in contrast to the Master who is idioticized by his jouissance) is that it is, on the contrary, the Slave who has access to jouissance from his ambiguous relation to the Other’s supposed jouissance (to Master qua “subject supposed to enjoy”). See Lacan, “Subversion.” (page 174, Note 2)

excremental remainder ethical monster

Kotsko, Adam. “Žižek and the Excremental Body of Christ” Presentation at the American Academy of Religion 2009 Conference

The basic structure of Žižek’s interpretation of Christianity is provided by Hegel, who elaborates a theology of the “death of God” (which was later taken up by American theologians such as Thomas Altizer, whom Žižek discovered after developing his own Hegelian reading of Christianity). Hegel contends that the three persons of the Trinity do not represent three coeternal realities, but rather three decisive and irreversible turning points in the life of God:

the Father empties out the entirety of his divinity into the Son, and by dying the Son then empties out that divinity into the Holy Spirit, which is understood as a new form of social bond.

Coming at this basic structure from a Lacanian perspective and specifically from his use of Lacan to found a contemporary form of ideology critique, Žižek argues that Christ represents a unique form of “master signifier.” Normally “master signifiers” are tautologous authorities whose self-assertion allows some form of symbolic order or ideological structure to crystallize — for instance, in modern society money serves as the foundation of our entire system of values, but when you ask what money is worth, you can only answer that it’s worth… money.

Money is valuable because it’s valuable. The model of this kind of “master signifier” is of course God, whose authority ultimately stems from the fact that he is God. Žižek claims, however, that the founding myth of Christianity provides us with a weird kind of self-effacing or self-denying master signifier — a God who not only dies (many gods have died throughout history, only to be replaced), but who himself becomes an atheist.

In Žižek’s reading, Christ’s cry of dereliction on the cross—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — presents us with an image of a God who doesn’t believe in himself.

Elevating Christ to the level of a “master signifier” thus means effectively giving up on “master signifiers,” producing a whole new form of social bond — one that is outside of ideology.

As I argue in Žižek and Theology, this elaboration of a “death of God” theology as a path to a non-ideological social bond is the end result of a long and difficult development in Žižek’s political thought, because—to put it bluntly — getting rid of master signifiers is difficult.

It’s easy enough to overthrow any given master signifier, but the human tendency to reestablish them seems irresistible — and before his foray into theology, Žižek seemed to be essentially advocating revolution for its own sake, as a kind of moment of pure authenticity and truth, despite the fact that every revolution will necessarily be a matter of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

The reason for this is that “master signifiers” are a way of organizing our enjoyment, keeping the suffocating force of jouissance sufficiently at bay to give us breathing room, while nonetheless giving us access to occasional moments of indulgence.

A key aspect of this is Žižek’s view that every form of law founded in a “master signifier” includes its own “inherent transgression”— that is, it depends on people occasionally feeling like they not only have permission to break the rules but are actively exhorted to do so, so that they have a way to let off steam.

A familiar example of this is the Jim Crow order in the US — in addition to the official laws segregating blacks and whites, the order was characterized by extra-legal attacks such as lynch mobs.

Žižek would argue that these weren’t unfortunate outbursts but were an integral part of the Jim Crow order, allowing whites to “let off steam” by forcibly asserting their dominance while maintaining the public fiction that segregation was a harmonious system with everyone in their natural place.

Inspired by Alain Badiou’s work on St. Paul, Žižek turns to the origins of Christianity as a way of thinking through what it might mean to have a revolution that would be a durable achievement rather than a flash of inspiration between two ideological regimes. His main critique of Badiou is that Badiou one-sidedly emphasizes the resurrection over the cross — in Lutheran terms, Badiou is a theologian of glory rather than a theologian of the cross.

Žižek believes that any new order (represented by the resurrection) must be preceded by a break with the old (represented by the cross) — some act of negation, some negative gesture separating oneself from the reigning master signifier. But again, this is very difficult to achieve.

Not only does the ideological order actively rely on its own violation through the “inherent transgression,” but Žižek had also argued extensively that “cynical distance” from ideology—the sense that “no one really believes this stuff”—is actually a built-in feature of all ideologies. Just “going through the motions” without really believing it isn’t a way of escaping ideology, but rather the most powerful form of submitting to ideology.

If the seemingly most obvious ways to negate ideology are built-in features of ideology already, then where can one turn? In The Puppet and the Dwarf, which represents his most fully realized account of Christian origins, Žižek makes what is, in my view, one of his most interesting moves—he claims that Judaism represents a kind of inherently negative space, a culture that is “unplugged” from the enjoyment provided by the surrounding pagan ideology, so that the logic of the “inherent transgression” and of “cynical distance” alike don’t apply.

Contradicting both Badiou and centuries of Christian interpreters, Žižek thus argues that the point of Pauline Christianity wasn’t to escape from the Jewish law, but to find some way to induct Gentiles into this “unplugged” Jewish stance.

Historically, of course, Christianity wound up betraying its Jewish roots and became an ideological order like any other, so that perhaps Žižek’s attempt to find a durable model that would be something other than the space between two ideologies has failed — yet he believes that the Pauline communities built on engrafting Gentiles into the promises of Judaism provide at least a way of thinking through what a durable non-ideological social bond might look like.

II.

So where does the Body of Christ fit into all this? As I’ve said, he is uninterested in the idea of the Christian community or church as the “Body of Christ,” and this is not only because he has opted to refer to that social bond as the “Holy Spirit”—in addition to his general distaste for anything as “harmonious” or “organic” as a body metaphor would imply, Žižek also has no interest whatsoever in ecclesiology or in the institutional church as such, believing it to be a betrayal of Christianity’s original revolutionary core. Furthermore, Žižek has never, to my knowledge, addressed the sacraments in any serious way, and so the sacramental Body of Christ in the Eucharist is not on his radar.

What remains, though, is the literal, physical body of Jesus, which Žižek basically only discusses in the context of the crucifixion. Like a medieval mystic, Žižek is fixated on Christ’s weakness and suffering, his pathetic and pitiable appearance—the absolute disjuncture between this disgraced and repulsive dying body and the divine nature he embodies. More than that, he claims, in something like an orthodox fashion, that Christ embodies the truth of humanity, the truth that, in Luther’s words, “we are the shit that fell out of God’s anus.” Drawing on this Lutheran inheritance, Žižek defines Christianity as providing a vision of a God who “freely identified himself with his own shit” (Parallax View, 187).

Now this focus on excrement is not entirely new for Žižek, who has always had a fixation of sorts on whatever is disgusting, repulsive, or otherwise off-putting. In fact, one of the key concepts he takes from Lacan, objet petit a, which represents the ever-elusive object and cause of desire, frequently bears the name of the “excremental remainder,” referring to that little “something” that one has to give up in order to join the social order. What Žižek calls Luther’s “excremental anti-humanism,” then, does not simply lead to humanity wallowing in its own self-disgust.

Rather, it leads to humanity wallowing in its own enjoyment, or as Žižek says, to the emergence of enjoyment as a direct political factor. For Žižek all ideological orders represent a way of organizing enjoyment or jouissance, of keeping it at a distance while allowing periodic indulgence, but what Luther’s position opens up is the possibility of a kind of short-circuit, where jouissance is not just a silently presupposed basis of the political order but instead a conscious emphasis and goal.

The end result is what Žižek characterizes as the contemporary “superego injunction to enjoy” — the perverse situation where authorities are directly exhorting people to enjoy. The most obvious manifestation of this tendency was perhaps George W. Bush’s injunction that people go shopping in response to 9/11, but Žižek believes this basic attitude is absolutely pervasive.

Increasingly, Žižek claims, one feels guilty not for having sex, but for not having enough sex — and even the asceticism of dieting and exercise is geared toward the hedonistic ends of attractiveness and longer lifespan.

Increasingly, contemporary Western subjects, or at least contemporary middle and upper class Western subjects, directly identify with their excremental remainder, with objet petit a — with the end result of a kind of autistic compulsion to enjoy, an obligatory enjoyment that one begins to suspect is not finally all that enjoyable.

The answer to this situation, for cultural conservatives and particularly for conservative Catholics such as Žižek’s dialogue partners G. K. Chesterton and John Milbank, is to reimpose some version of traditional values in order to save enjoyment from itself. For Žižek, however, such a solution is both dishonest and self-undermining, or in other words, perverse — hence the subtitle of The Puppet and the Dwarf:The Perverse Core of Christianity, which refers to Actual Existing Christianity and not to its original, supposedly revolutionary form.

His solution is not to disavow enjoyment, but rather to focus on the enjoyment of the other, to form a community centered on the care for the concrete suffering and enjoying others one happens to encounter. This, in his view, is Christian love, a love he characterizes as “violent” in that it cuts beneath the ideological identity markers of the other and attends directly to the excremental remainder underneath it all.

Though this notion of an authentically Christian community is based in an adaptation of one of the later Lacan’s more opaque concepts, the “discourse of the analyst,” I believe that the clearest example of what he’s talking about can be found in his final contribution to The Monstrosity of Christ. There he discusses Agota Kristof’s novel The Notebook, which for him is “the best literary expression” of an ethical stance that goes beyond the sentimentality of moralism and instead installs “a cold, cruel distance toward what one is doing.”

The novel follows two twin brothers who are “utterly immoral… yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest.” Žižek gives two examples. In one, they meet a starving man who asks for help and get him everything he asks for, while claiming that they helped him solely because he needed help, not out of any desire to be kind. In another, they urinate on a German officer with whom they find themselves sharing a bed, at his request.

Žižek remarks, “If ever there was a Christian ethical stance, this is it: no matter how weird their neighbor’s demands, the twins naively try to meet them.”

(Interestingly, this ethical stance of giving people what they ask for in the most literal way corresponds with one of Žižek’s earliest political prescriptions for dealing with the cynical distance that is inherent to ideology—instead of resisting the demands of ideology, one should take them as literally as possible, because that’s the one response ideology isn’t prepared for.) Žižek commends the twins’ amoral ethics as follows:

This is where I stand—how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity. With more people like this, the world would be a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion. Monstrosity of Christ 303

Such is Žižek’s understanding of Christian ethics, a position I am sure will not be included in any Christian ethics courses any time soon.

III.

I would like to conclude this presentation by connecting Žižek’s work to liberation theology—not through the more obvious path of the reliance of both on the Marxist tradition, but rather precisely through Žižek’s notion of the Body of Christ as a kind of “excremental remainder.” My initial point of contact here might seem superficial initially, but I believe it will prove surprisingly revealing. In his essay “Extra pauperes nulla salus,” or “No salvation outside the poor,” Jon Sobrino begins with a quotation from his fallen comrade Ignacio Ellacuría, who was among the members of Sobrino’s Jesuit community who were massacred by a Salvadoran death squad in 1989 while Sobrino happened to be out of the country:

What on another occasion I called copro-historical analysis, that is, the study of the feces of our civilization, seems to reveal that this civilization is gravely ill and that, in order to avoid a dreadful and fatal outcome, it is necessary to change it from within itself.

Sobrino agrees, claiming that the “excrement” or waste product of capitalist civilization, in the form of massive impoverishment in the Third World, demonstrates that it is profoundly sick. Reciting the massive imbalances in global priorities, for instance the inconceivable sums spent on arms at the same time as people are starving daily, Sobrino concludes that “we are dealing with a metaphysical obscenity” and that “God is furious” (39). That is of course because for Sobrino and for all liberation theologians, God has identified decisively with this excremental remainder of the poor. The parallel here with Žižek’s “God who freely identifies with his own shit” is inexact—most notably because liberation theologians do not believe God is the author of the process that produces the poor as an excremental remainder — but also compelling, insofar as Žižek has written a great deal recently on the obscene inequalities that characterize the contemporary world and has even put forth urban slum dwellers in the Third World as a contemporary parallel to the “unplugged” stance he detects in first-century Judaism.

In addition, Žižek’s account of “Christian love” as naively meeting people’s needs simply because they ask resonates profoundly with the implied premise of Sobrino’s harsh and furious text: people need to eat!

Regardless of whether they’re deserving, whether giving them food would produce bad economic incentives, etc., etc., people need to eat. The same could obviously be said for all basic needs—for example, regardless of whether it undermines someone’s ability to put big numbers in quarterly reports, people who have AIDS need medicine!

A little more literalism and naïveté would certainly help in our present situation. In addition, simply listening to what people are asking for would be a huge improvement over the patronizing tutelage of NGOs and foreign aid, which Sobrino characterizes as actively contributing to the dehumanization of the already dehumanized people they serve, insofar as it deprives them of agency.

The principle here is basically Jesus’s: sell all you have and give to the poor. The focus here isn’t on liquidating your holdings so that you can enjoy the moral righteousness of poverty, but of putting your goods at the disposal of the poor—or, as Jesus says in another setting, of using your dishonest wealth to make friends.

The really difficult question between Žižek and liberation theology, however, is what the end state looks like. For Sobrino as for most liberation theologians, the basic stance seems to be humanist in the broad sense—a society that respects human dignity, that looks to the intrinsic worth of every individual. Yet Žižek remains resolutely anti-humanist and suspicious of the language of human rights. And while Sobrino can look forward to a correction of civilization’s digestive system such that it will stop producing the poor as excrement, Žižek revels in the disgusting and repellant aspect of the “excremental remainder.”

When the case is stated in this way, it seems difficult to favor Žižek over Sobrino, yet I wonder if Žižek is getting at an important truth here—namely that the end state is something that we, blinkered as we are by the ideology of our present sick civilization, simply cannot recognize as beautiful or desirable, that the change we need is so profound that it will change our very concept of what it means to be human.

In any case, both Žižek and Sobrino agree that what it means to be human now entails the production of a massive and appalling waste product—and that what it means to be faithful to the message of Christ is to freely identify with that waste product.

post oedipal traverse the fantasy

Žižek, Slavoj. “Cyberspace, or, How to Traverse the Fantasy in the Age of the Retreat of the Big Other” Public Culture 10:3. (1998) 483-513.

This constellation also provides the key for the problem of the historicity of psychoanalysis. From the early days of his Complexes familiaux ([1938] 1984), Lacan was fully aware of the historicity of the Oedipal complex itself, as well as of its discovery by Freud.

In the modern bourgeois nuclear family, the two functions of the father that were previously separated, or embodied in different persons

(the pacifying Ego-Ideal, the point of ideal identification, and

the ferocious superego, the agent of cruel prohibition; the symbolic function of totem and the horror of taboo), are united in one and the same person.

The previous separate personification of the two functions accounts for the apparent “stupidity” of some aborigines, who thought that the true father of a child was a stone or an animal or a spirit. The aborigines were well aware that the mother was inseminated by the “real” father; they merely separated the real father from its symbolic function.

The unification of the two functions in the bourgeois nuclear family, by giving birth to the ambiguous rivalry with the father figure, created the psychic conditions for the modern, Western, dynamic, creative individualism and, at the same time, sowed the seeds of the forthcoming “crisis of Oedipus” (or, more generally, with regard to figures of authority as such, of the “crisis of investiture” that erupted in the late nineteenth century [Santner 1996). Symbolic authority was more and more smeared over by the mark of obscenity and thus, as it were, undermined from within.

In his early theory of the historicity of the Oedipus complex, Lacan thus already establishes the connection between the psychoanalytic problematic of the Oedipus as the elementary form of “socialization,” of the subject’s integration into the symbolic order, and the standard sociopsychological topoi on how modernity is characterized by individualist competitivity -on how, in modern societies, subjects are no longer fully immersed into and identified with the particular social place into which they were born, but can, in principle at least, freely move between different “roles.” The emergence of the modern “abstract” individual who relates to his or her particular “way of life” as to something with which he or she is not directly identified, but rather which depends on a set of contingent circumstances (the feeling that the particularities of one’s birth, social status, sex, and religion do not determine one fully, do not concern one’s innermost identity) relies on the mutation in the functioning of the Oedipus complex, on the above-described unification of the two aspects of symbolic authority (Ego Ideal and the prohibitive superego) in one and the same person of the “real father.”490

The key question here is: What is going on today when this very modern form of Oedipus is disintegrating– when so-called pathological Narcissism is asserting itself more and more as the predominant form of subjectivity? On the one hand, symbolic prohibitive norms are increasingly replaced with imaginary ideals (of social success, of bodily fitness); on the other hand, this lack of symbolic prohibition is supplemented with the reemergence of the ferocious superego figures. So we have a subject who is extremely narcissistic, who perceives everything as a potential threat to his or her precarious imaginary balance. (See the universalization of the logic of victim: Every contact with another human being is experienced as a potential threat. If the other smokes, if he or she casts a covetous glance at me, he or she already hurts me.) However, far from allowing the subject to float freely in undisturbed balance, this narcissistic self-enclosure leaves him or her to the (not so) tender mercies of the superego injunction to enjoy. One is thus tempted to propose a hypothesis according to which “postmodern” subjectivity involves a kind of direct “superegoization ” of the imaginary Ideal, caused by the lack of the proper symbolic Prohibition: It is the Ideal itself that gives rise to guilty feelings when we fail to reach it, since the (imaginary) Ego-Ideal is no longer supported by the symbolic Ideal-Ego, but directly by the superego.

So, to recapitulate. There is only one consistent answer to the question “Why does the superfluous prohibition emerge, which merely prohibits the impossible?” That is: It obfuscates this inherent impossibility in order to sustain the illusion that, were it not for the externally imposed prohibition, the full (“incestuous”) gratification would be possible. Far from acting as a “repressive” agency that prevents us access to the ultimate object of desire, the paternal figure functions instead to relieve us from the debilitating deadlock of desire, to “maintain hope.” What is missing in “Oedipus on-line” is precisely this “pacifying” function of the paternal figure that enables us to obfuscate the debilitating deadlock of desire. Hence, the strange mixture of “everything is possible” (since there is no positive prohibiting figure) and an all-pervasive frustration and deadlock that characterizes the subject’s experience of cyberspace.

The ontological paradox, scandal even, of fantasy resides in the fact that it subverts the standard opposition of “subjective” and “objective.” Of course, fantasy is by definition not “objective” (in the naive sense of existing independently of the subject’s perceptions); however, it is also not “subjective” (in the sense of being reducible to the subject’s consciously experienced intuitions). Rather, fantasy belongs to the “bizarre category of the objectively subjective-the way things actually, objectively, seem to you even if they don’t seem that way to you” (Dennett 1991, 132).8 When, for example, the subject actually experiences a series of fantasmatic formations which interrelate as so many permutations of each other, this series is never complete-it is always as if the actually experienced series presents so many variations of some underlying “fundamental” fantasy that is never actually experienced by the subject. 507

This brings us back to the mystery of “commodity fetishism.” When a critical Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist’s reproach to him or her is not, “Commodity may seem to you a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people”; rather, the actual Marxist’s reproach is, “You may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations (that, for example, money is just a kind of voucher entitling you to a part of the social product), but this is not how things really seem to you. In your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity really appears to you as a magical object endowed with special powers.”

This is also one of the ways in which to specify the meaning of Lacan’s assertion of the subject’s constitutive “decenterment.” Its point is not that my subjective experience is regulated by objective, unconscious, mechanisms that are “decentered” with regard to my self-experience and, as such, beyond my control (a point asserted by every materialist), but rather something much more unsettling — I am deprived of even my most intimate “subjective” experience, the way things “really seem to me,” the fundamental fantasy that constitutes and guarantees the kernel of my being, since I can never consciously experience it and assume it.

According to the standard view, the dimension that is constitutive of subjectivity is that of the phenomenal (self-)experience. I am a subject the moment I can say to myself “No matter what unknown mechanism governs my acts, perceptions, and thoughts, nobody can take from me what I see and feel now.”

Lacan turns this standard view around: The “subject of the signifier” emerges only when a key aspect of the subject’s phenomenal (self-)experience (the “fundamental fantasy”) becomes inaccessible to him or her, is “primordially repressed.” At its most radical, the Unconscious is the inaccessible phenomenon, not the objective mechanism that regulates my phenomenal experience. So, in contrast to the commonplace according to which we are dealing with a subject the moment an entity displays signs of “inner life”— of a fantasmatic self-experience which cannot be reduced to external behavior — one should claim that what characterizes human subjectivity proper is rather the gap that separates the two — the fact that fantasy, at its most elementary, becomes inaccessible to the subject. This inaccessibility makes the subject “empty.” We thus obtain a relationship that totally subverts the standard notion of the subject who directly experiences herself, her “inner states”— an “impossible” relationship between the empty, nonphenomenal subject and the phenomena that remain inaccessible to the subject. 509

Geneticists predict that in about ten to fifteen years they will be able to identify and manipulate each individual’s exact genome (approximately six billion genetic markers comprising the complete inherited “knowledge”). Potentially, at least, individuals will thus have at their disposal the complete formula of what they “objectively” are. How will this “knowledge in the real,” the fact that I will be able to locate and identify myself completely as an object in reality, affect the status of subjectivity? Will it lead to the end of human subjectivity? Lacan’s answer is negative:

What will continue to elude the geneticist is not my phenomenal self-experience (say, the experience of a love passion that no knowledge of the genetic and other material mechanisms which determine it can take from me), but the “objectively subjective” fundamental fantasy, the fantasmatic kernel inaccessible to my conscious experience.

Even if science formulates the genetic formula of what I objectively am, it will still be unable to formulate my “objectively subjective’’ fantasmatic identity, this objectal counterpoint to my subjectivity, which is neither subjective (experienced) nor objective.

Traversing the Fantasy

A recent English publicity spot for a brand of beer enables us to further clarify this crucial point. Its first part stages a well-known fairytale anecdote: A girl walks along a stream, sees a frog, takes it gently onto her lap, and kisses it; of course, the ugly frog miraculously turns into a beautiful young man. However, the story isn’t over yet: The young man casts a covetous glance at the girl, draws her toward him, kisses her-and she turns into a bottle of beer, which the man holds triumphantly in his hand. For the woman, the point is that her love and affection (signaled by the kiss) turn a frog into a beautiful man, a full phallic presence (in Lacan’s mathems, the big Phi); for the man, the point is to reduce the woman to a partial object, the cause of his desire (in Lacan’s mathems, the object small a). On account of this asymmetry, there is no sexual relationship.

We have either a woman with a frog or a man with a bottle of beer. What we can never obtain is the “natural” couple of the beautiful woman and man. Why not? Because fantasmatic support of this “ideal couple” would have been the inconsistent figure of a frog embracing a bottle of beer. …

This, then, opens up the possibility of undermining the hold a fantasy exerts over us through our very over-identification with it-that is, by way of embracing simultaneously, within the same space, the multitude of inconsistent fantasmatic elements. Each of the two subjects is involved in his or her own subjective fantasizing: The girl fantasizes about the frog who is really a young man, the man about the girl who is really a bottle of beer. What modern art and writing oppose to this is not objective reality but the “objectively subjective” underlying fantasy that the two subjects are never able to assume, something similar to a Magrittesque painting of a frog embracing a bottle of beer, with the title “A man and a woman” or “The ideal couple.” … And is this not the ethical duty of today’s artist-to confront us with the frog embracing the bottle of beer when we are daydreaming of embracing our beloved? Does the artist need to stage fantasies that are radically desubjectivized and which can never be assumed by the subject?

This, then, is the point we were aiming at all along. Perhaps cyberspace, with its capacity to externalize our innermost fantasies in all their inconsistency, opens up to the artistic practice a unique possibility to stage, to “act out,” the fantasmatic support of our existence, up to the fundamental “sadomasochistic” fantasy that cannot ever be subjectivized. We are thus invited to risk the most radical experience imaginable: the encounter with our “noumenal Self,” with the Other Scene which stages the foreclosed hard core of the subject’s Being. Far from enslaving us to these fantasies and thus turning us into desubjectivized, blind puppets, it enables us to treat them in a playful way and thus to adopt toward them a minimum of distance-in short, to achieve what Lacan calls la traversee du fantasme, “going-through, traversing the fantasy.”

So let us conclude with a reference to the (in)famous last proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, davon muss man schweigen” [Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one be silent] (87). This proposition renders in the most succinct way possible the paradox of the Oedipal law that prohibits something (incestuous fusion) which is already in itself impossible (and thereby gives rise to the hope that, if we remove or overcome the prohibition, the “impossible” incest will become possible). If we are effectively to move to a region “beyond Oedipus,” Wittgenstein’s proposition is to be rephrased into: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, davon muss man schreiben” [Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one write].

There is, of course, a long tradition of conceiving art as a mode or practice of writing which augurs that which “one cannot speak about”- the utopian potential “repressed” by the exis ting sociosymbolic network of prohibitions. There is also a long tradition of using writing as a means to communicate a declaration of love too intimate and/or too painful to be directly asserted in a face-to-face speech act.

The Internet is widely used as a space for the amorous encounters of shy people, and, significantly, one of the anecdotes about Edison, the inventor of the telegraph, is that he himself used it to declare love and ask the hand of his secretary (being too shy to do it directly, by the spoken word). However, what we are aiming at is not this standard economy of using cyberspace as a place in which, since we are not directly engaged in it (since we maintain a distance toward it), we feel free to externalize and stage our innermost private fantasies. What we have in mind is a more radical level, the level that concerns our very fundamental fantasy as that “wovon man nicht sprechen kann.”

The subject is never able to assume his or her fundamental fantasy, to recognize him- or herself in it, in a performance of a speech act.

Perhaps cyberspace opens up a domain in which the subject can nonetheless externalize or stage his or her fundamental fantasy and thus gain a minimum of distance toward it.

This, however, in no way suggests that inducing us to “traverse the fantasy” is an automatic effect of our immersion into cyberspace. What one should do here is, rather, accomplish a Hegelian reversal of epistemological obstacle into ontological deadlock.

What if it is wrong and misleading to ask which of the four versions of the libidinal or symbolic economy of cyberspace that we outlined (the psychotic suspension of Oedipus, the continuation of Oedipus with other means, the perverse staging of the law, and traversing the fantasy) is the “correct” one? What if these four versions are the four possibilities opened up by the cyberspace technology, so that, ultimately, the choice is ours? How will cyberspace affect us is not directly inscribed into its technological properties; it rather hinges on the network of sociosymbolic relations (e.g., of power and domination) which always and already overdetermine the way cyberspace affects us.

ego is a passive effect of signifying chain

Verhaeghe, Paul. Does the Woman Exist?: From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine. New York: Other Press, 2009.

The ego does not speak, it is spoken. Observation of the process of free association leads to this conclusion, but even ordinary speaking yields the same result.

Indeed, when I speak I do not know what I am going to say, unless I have learned it by heart or I am reading my speech from a paper. In all other cases, I do not speak so much as I am spoken, and this speech is driven by a desire with or without my conscious agreement. This is a matter of simple observation, but it wounds man’s narcissism deeply;

which is why Freud called it the third great narcisssistic humilation of mankind. He expressed it very pithily: … The Lacanian equivalent of this Freudian formula runs as follows: “Le signifiant, c’est ce qui représente le sujet pour un autre signifiant.” Lacan defines the subject as a passive effect of the signifying chain, certainly not the master of it. 102

the unconscious is the discourse of the other

Verhaeghe, Paul. Does the Woman Exist?: From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine. New York: Other Press, 2009.

Qua theory, the discourses represent the pinnacle of Lacan’s thinking about psychical identity. They also mark a break with the neo-Freudians as well as with Freud himself. Until then, the psyche was thought of as a substantial essence that was buried deep ‘somewhere’ — the inner self of a personality— and the unconscious was the reservoir of all wishes constituting the basement of this inner self. For Lacan, this basement, indeed the whole house, is empty. Everything takes place on the street. Identity is always outside with the Other or, more precisely, in the particular relation to this Other. That is the meaning of … “The Unconscious is the discourse of the Other” or “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” This vision is so new that it has hardly penetrated, even within Lacanian circles. The temptation to think “I am a God in my deepest thoughts” is probably too great. The theory of discourse is a formalisation of this new vision 99

His theory is even in radical opposition to communication theory as such. Indeed, he starts from the assumption that communication is always a failure: moreover, that it has to be a failure, and that’s the reason why we keep on talking. If we understood each other, we would all remain silent. Luckily enough, we don’t understand each other, so we have to speak to one another.

In his discourse theory, Michel Foucault works with the concrete material of the signifier, which puts the accent on the content of a discourse. Lacan, on the contrary, works beyond the content and accentuates the formal relationships that each discourse establishes in the very act of speaking. This implies that the Lacanian discourse theory has to be understood in the first place as a formal system, independent of any spoken word as such.

A discourse exists before any concrete word is spoken and to go further, a discourse determines the concrete speech act. This effect of determination is the reflection of a basic Lacanian assumption, namely that each discourse incarnates a fundamental relationship, resulting in a particular social bond. As there are four discourses, there will be four different social bonds.

It is important to understand that each discourse is empty to start with. They are nothing but empty vessels with a particular form which will determine the content that one puts into them, and then they can contain almost anything. The moment one reduces a given discourse to one interpretation, the whole theory implodes and one returns to the science of the particular. As a vessel, each discourse has four different compartment into which one can put things. The compartments are called positions and the things are the terms. 100

There are four different positions, standing in a fixed relationship to each other. The first position is obvious: each discourse starts with somebody talking, called by Lacan the agent. If one talks, one is talking to somebody, and that is the second position, called the other. Those two position are of course nothing else but the conscious expression of each speech act, and in that sense they are at the core of every theory of communication.

Within this minimal relation between speaker and receiver, between agent and other, a certain effect is aimed at. The result of the discourse can be made visible in this effect, and that leads to the next position, called the product.

Up to this point, we are still within classical communication theory. It is only the fourth position which introduces the psychoanalytic point of view. In fact, it is not the fourth, but the very first position, namely the position of truth. Indeed, Freud demonstrated that, while man is speaking he is driven by a truth, even if it remains unknown to himself. It is this position of the truth which functions as the motor and as the starting-point of each discourse. 101

The position of truth is the Aristotelian Prime Mover, affecting the whole structure of a discourse. Its first consequence is that the agent is only apparently the agent. The ego does not speak, it is spoken. Observation of the process of free association leads to this conclusion, but even ordinary speaking yields the same result. Indeed, when I speak I do not know what I am going to say, unless I have learned it by heart or I am reading my speech from a a paper. In all other cases, I do not speak so much as I am spoken and this speech is driven by a desire with or without my conscious agreement. This is a matter of simple observation, but it wounds man’s narcissism deeply; this is why Freud called it the third great narcissistic humiliation of mankind. He expressed it very pithily: dass das Ich kein Herr sei in seinem eigenen hause,” “The ego is not master in its own house.” The Lacanian equivalent of this Freudian formula runs as follows: “Le signifiant, c’est ce qui représente le sujet pour un autre signifiant.”

In this turning of the scales — since it is not the subject but the signifier which leads in the definition — Lacan defines the subject as a passive effect of the signifying chain, certainly not the master of it.

The agent of discourse is only a fake agent, “un semblant,” a make-believe entity. The real driving force lies underneath, in the position of truth.. 102

gorilla jouissance

Verhaeghe, Paul. Does the Woman Exist?: From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine. New York: Other Press, 2009.

The paradoxical result of this Freudian approach, focusing on the individual, even on the individual symptoms of one individual patient, is that Freud is the only one who
succeeded in making a general theory of the human psyche. … Indeed, the core of Freudian theory is based on classical myths and stories, with the Oedipus tragedy and the story of Narcissus being the most famous examples.

In the last volume of the Standard Edition, we find ten pages filled with references to works of art and literature. Freud goes even further with his solution: where he did not find a suitable myth, he invented one himself, and that is of course the story of Totem und Taboo, the myth of the primal father. This Freudian approach resulted in a major breakthrough, a new paradigm. … an important disadvantage has to do with the content of myths and the possibility that this content will be psychologized, which means that it becomes a substantial reality. That is what happened with Jungian and post-Jungian theory. Although we won’t go any further into that, one Lacanian quotation suffices to announce the danger of such an approach…. “If you authenticate the Imaginary, you will fill the waiting-room of madness”.

It is in light of this that we have to consider Lacanian theory as constituting a major breakthrough. Whereas Freud made the step from the individual patient to the underlying myths, Lacan will make the step from these myths to the formal structures which govern those myths. The most important Lacanian structure in this respect is, of course, the theory on the four discourses, and that is my main topic today.

The advantages of these formal structures are obvious. First of all, there is an enormous gain in level of abstraction. Just as in algebra, you can represent anything with those “petites lettres”, the small letters, the a and the S and the A, and the relationships between them. It is precisely this level of abstraction which enables us to fit every particular subject into the main frame. Secondly, these formal structures are so stripped of flesh and bones that they diminish the possibility of psychologizing.

For example, if one compares the Freudian primal father with the Lacanian Master signifier S1, the difference is very clear: with the first one, everybody sees before them an ageing silverback gorilla, running riot among his females. It is very difficult to imagine this ape when writing S1… and it is precisely this that opens up the possibility of other interpretations of this very important function. … 98

Thirdly, the core of the system concerns jouisssance, albeit in a very strange way — each discourse is a specific method of avoiding jouisssance, of erecting a protection against it and of keeping desire intact.

Discourse of Analyst

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology, New York: Routledge 2004.

In the Discourse of the Analyst, a stands in the place of the agent, the $ in the place of the Other, S2 in the place of truth, and S1 in the place of product (Seminar 20 16). In this Discourse, the excluded a puts the subject to work and is the cause of desire. the subject addresses its unconscious as other in its recognition that the Symbolic order produces the barred subject. In this discourse, ‘the subject manifests himself in his gap, namely, in that which causes his desire’ (Seminar 20 11). Knowledge functions in the place of truth, that is, the truth of the subject. Savoir (S2) functions as truth and thus symbolic knowledge is the register of the Analyst. In its articulation of the truth, the subject articulates the master signifier that represents it. For this reason, the master signifer is the product of the Discourse of the Analyst (S20 16-17).

Discourse of the Hysteric

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology, New York: Routledge 2004.

In the Discourse of the Hysteric, $ stands in the place of the agent, S1 in the place of the other, a in the place of truth, and S2 in the place of the product (Seminar 20 Encore 16). The barred subject (representing the unconscious of the subject) acts as its cause, because the Hysteric begins her discourse from the question of castration (Seminar 17 112). Her unconscious desire dominates her speech. Surplus jouissance is in the place of truth in her discourse, not only because of her pleasure in knowing but also because her subjectivity articulates the cost of entry into the Symbolic order (Seminar 17 37). The Discourse of the Hysteric produces S2 because she speaks of the loss inherent to subjectivity. For Lacan, the Discourse of the Hysteric articulates the ‘truth’ of the Master’s Discourse: namely, that it is founded on the operation of castration and that its effect is the unconscious. For this reason, Lacan argues that the Discourse of the Hysteric opens the way for the Discourse of the Analyst. (Seminar 20 41) 52

Discourse of the University

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology, New York: Routledge 2004.

In the Discourse of the University, S2 stands in the place of the agent, a in the place of the other, S1 in the place of truth, and $ in the place of the product (Seminar 20 Encore). In the operation of the University’s Discourse, knowledge is the cause of the subject because the Discourse represents an attempt to master the a, its excluded term. Its truth is the master signifier, which this discourse continually reproduces. For this reason, an anti-clockwise quarter-turn of the schema of the Discourse of the Master produces the schema of the Discourse of the University. The Discourse of the University installs the Discourse of the Master, such that S2 dominates and produces an illusory “all-knowledge’ (Seminar 17: 34). That knowledge of all is illusory because the a always escapes it. For this reason, the product of the Discourse of the University is the barred subject — the unconscious truth of the subject which the discourse refuses. 52