Category: lacan

jodi dean politics without politics

Dean, Jodi. “Politics without Politics” Parallax, 2009, vol. 15, no. 3, 20–36.

In this concrete sense, Žižek is right to claim that attachment to democracy is the form our attachment to capital takes. In the consumption and entertainment-driven setting of the contemporary United States, one’s commitments to capitalism are expressed as commitments to democracy. They are the same way of life, the same daily practices of ‘aware-ing’ oneself and expressing one’s opinion, of choosing and voting and considering one’s choice a vote and one’s vote a choice.

… democracy names left castration (‘I know, but nevertheless’). Because the left presents itself as appealing to and supporting democracy, it fails to take a stand, to name an enemy. Instead of drawing a line and saying what it is against, what it excludes, left political theory in the contemporary United States advocates inclusion, universality, multiplicity, the plurality of modes of becoming, and ethical responsiveness (Dean 21).

Insofar as left political theory adopts democracy as its primary aspiration, it disavows the fundamental antagonism conditioning politics as such. For the left (in the United States and in parts of the European Union), democracy thus takes the form of a fantasy of politics without politics (like fascism is a form of capitalism without capitalism): everyone and everything is included, respected, valued, and entitled. No one is made to feel uncomfortable. Everyone is heard and seen and recognized and has a place at the table (George Lakoff identifies Barak Obama as a key figure in the new politics, which is precisely this ‘politics’ of unity, empathy, and understanding) (Dean 21).

There are at least three sites a theory of democracy might
designate:

a. democracy might designate a site of resistance, struggle or opposition;

b. democracy might designate a system of governance, order, or rule;

c. democracy might designate a society, culture, or spirit (ambient milieu).

Which of these three is correct? Derrideans would say the fourth one: democracy is always to come and hence necessarily exceeds the three aforementioned sites. But this answer is just another version of ‘I know but nevertheless’. Democracy remains an ideological fantasy covering the failures, excesses, and obscenities of real existing democracy. The Derridean response thus returns me back to where I started: democracy as the solution to the problems of democracy or the democratic capture of left aspirations to equitable and sustainable distributions of resources, labor, and its products.

Derridean democracy to come and the post-politics, post-democracy thesis are two sides of the same coin. They are two aspects of democratic time, past and future, but not now (Žižek might say that their relation is that of a parallax; we can see democracy from each perspective but not from the two perspectives simultaneously). Consider a chant repeated at hundreds and thousands of protests over the last decade: What do we want? Democracy! When do we want it? Now! This chant works as a protest because it is clearly impossible. What would happen if the response were ‘Okay, protestors, you’ve got your democracy. Now what are you going to do?’ Imagine the executive branch of the US government walking off the job, handing their codes and files and top-secret stamps to the throngs outside their gates, the protestors wondering what to do with their puppets, signs, and bongos as they fragment into affinity groups and try to decide what their goals and priorities are. The protestors are not really demanding democracy now. Their demand is not meant to be met. Democracy has already arrived – as language of right and left, governance and electoral politics, ambient milieu. This is what democracy looks like, real existing democracy. To avoid the trauma of the real, of getting what we wished for, leftists move from actuality to possibility (from what we have to what could be) … (Dean 25).

But this move from actual to possible democracy doesn’t quite work. It misses its own movement or moving, the torsion that the shift from actual to possible entails. Žižek’s description of the temporal anamorphosis (distortion) of objet petit a is appropriate here:

Spatially, a is an object whose proper contours are discernible only if we glimpse it askance; it is forever indiscernible to the straightforward look. Temporally, it is an object which exists only qua anticipated or lost, only in the modality of not-yet or not-anymore, never in the
‘now’ of a pure, undivided present.18

This description applies to democracy. Democracy is anticipated or lost, but never present. When one looks at the present, all one sees is a gap, perhaps manifested by multiple attempts to fill it, as in the various definitions of democracy as resistance, governance, or ambient milieu.

There can be past democratic ideals – nostalgic fantasies of Athens, town meetings, our days in the resistance – or there can be hope for the future, justification of present acts in terms of this future, but there isn’t responsibility now. So disavowing democracy’s arrival, democracy now, contemporary left fantasies of democracy animate its diagnoses of post-politics and inspire its rejections of law, regulation, and the state.

In the account I’ve offered thus far, democracy appears as an obscure object-cause of desire, something that can never be fully attained or reached without ending the desire for it. But this is only one aspect of objet a. The other is its status in drive, not as something lost but as a hole or gap, not as an impossible lost object but as loss itself.

DRIVE

Drawing from Lacan, Žižek construes drive as fixation, not as the thing onto which one is fixated. In drive, enjoyment comes from missing one’s goal, from the repeated yet ever failing efforts to reach it that start to become satisfying on their own. Drive circulates around an object, generating satisfaction through this very circulation. Perhaps paradoxically, then, drive is at the same time disruptive. Fixation cuts into and derails the regular course of things, what is taken for the conventional patterns of everyday life, assessments of benefit and risk, pragmatic realism, and the organic attempts to secure the conditions of life. It’s a traumatic kernel in the reality of the symbolic order itself.

This drive dimension better describes democracy for the left; it is our circling around, our missing of a goal, and the satisfaction we attain through this missing. It accounts for the attachments and repetitions to which we are stuck, even as this very stuckness undermines our possibilities for political efficacy. Democratic drive, then, is another way of conceiving democracy as ambient milieu, a way that highlights the circulation we can’t avoid, but which at the same time can’t be understood as giving us what we want even as it gives us something else instead, some kick of enjoyment. We protest. We talk.We complain.We undercut our every assertion, criticizing its exclusivity, partiality, and fallibility in advance as if some kind of purity were possible, as if we could avoid getting our hands dirty. We sign petitions and forward them to everyone in our mailbox, fetishizing communication technologies as the solution to our problems. We worry about conservatives even as we revel in our superiority – how can anyone be so stupid? We enjoy (Dean 26).

I’ve presented post-politics and democracy-to-come as two sides of the same coin. I’ve suggested that the gap separating and connecting them be thought in terms of the closed circuit of drive rather than the openness of desire. So understood, democracy is not what we seek but never reach, not a name for political desire as such, but instead a term for the capture of political aspiration in the circuit of drive. Democracy is a remnant from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we have yet to escape. Differently put, if democracy names a political desire that is never fulfilled,
then it is accompanied by a political drive wherein democracy is what we fail to escape. In this dimension of drive, democracy designates our political stuckness (Dean 28).

My argument is that gaps emerge; they are political, and contemporary democracy organizes enjoyment as an effect of circling around these gaps. Rancie` re’s narrativization, then, is better understood an image of the capture of politics in the circuits of democratic drive. The contemporary setting is not one of simple opposition between post-political consensus and the eruption of irrational violence (and eruption Rancie`re views as a return of the archaic). Rather, it involves the satisfaction of the democratic drive as its aims remain inhibited (Dean 35).

Rather than achieving the goal of equality, then, disagreement produces satisfaction; I’ll call it a political satisfaction, by staging the lack of equality. Although it might seem paradoxical that one’s aim is not agreement to one’s demand – the demand for equality – the paradox occurs only in the register of desire. Understood in terms of drive, the bending or distortion or change in the aim such that the failure to reach it provides enjoyment makes sense. The aim of equality is sublimated in the drive to make one’s disagreement with inequality appear. One gets satisfaction by appearing in one’s disagreement. This provides its own partial enjoyment and in fact can only continue to provide it so long as there is inequality, so long as the ostensible aim in staging the disagreement isn’t reached (Dean 35).

Rancière’s account of the staging of disagreement, rather than figuring the political as such (the political confrontation between politics and the police) exemplifies the sublimation of politics in democratic drive. As drive, democracy organizes enjoyment via a multiplicity of stagings, of making oneself visible in one’s lack. Contemporary protests in the United States, whether as marches, vigils, Facebook pages, or internet petitions aim at visibility, awareness, being seen. They don’t aim at taking power. Our politics is one of endless attempts to make ourselves seen. It’s as if instead of looking at our opponents and working out ways to defeat them, we get off on imagining them looking at us. And since, as Lacan reminds us in Seminar XI, the object of the drive is of total indifference,46 the disagreement one imagines oneself being seen as staging is irrelevant. Egalitarian or elite, anarchist or communist, any political gap will provide a charge sublimated as it is within the democratic drive. We want to make ourselves seen as political without actually taking the risk of politics (Dean 35).

foreclosure

Grigg, Russell. Lacan, Language and Philosophy. New York: SUNY Press, 2008.

Thus “foreclosure” refers not to the fact that a speaker makes a statement that declares something impossible — a process closer to disavowal — but to the fact that the speaker lacks the very linguistic means for making the statement at all.

This is where the difference between repression and foreclosure lies. On Lacan’s analysis of Freud’s classic studies on the unconscious —The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious— The mechanisms of repression and the return of the repressed are linguistic in nature. His thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language implies the claim that for something to be repressed it has first of all to be registered in the symbolic. Thus repression implies the prior recognition of the repressed in the symbolic system or register. In psychosis, on the other hand, the necessary signifiers are lacking altogether, and so the recognition required for repression is impossible. However, what is foreclosed does not simply disappear altogether but may return albeit in a different form, from outside the subject (4).

butler desubjectivation

Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.

According to the logic of conscience, which fully constrains Althusser, the subject’s existence cannot be linguistically guaranteed without passionate attachment to the law. This complicity at once conditions and limits the viability of a critical interrogation of the law. One cannot criticize too far the terms by which one’s existence is secured.

But if the discursive possibilities for existence exceed the reprimand voiced by the law, would that not lessen the need to confirm one’s guilt and embark on a path of conscientiousness as a way to gain a purchase on identity? What are the conditions under which our very sense of linguistic survival depends upon our willingness to turn back upon ourselves, that is, in which attaining recognizable being requires self-negation, requires existing as a self-negating being in order to attain and preserve a status as “being” at all?

In a Nietzschean vein, such a slave morality may be predicted upon the sober calculation that it is better to “be” enslaved in such a way than not to “be” at all. But the terms that constrain the option to being versus not being “call for” another kind of response. Under what condition does a law monopolize the terms of existence in so thorough a way? Or is this a theological fantasy of the law?

Is there a possibility of being elsewhere or otherwise, without denying our complicity in the law that we oppose? Such a possibility would require a different kind of turn, one that, enabled by the law, turns away from the law, resisting its lure of identity, an agency that outruns and counters the conditions of its emergence. Such a turn demands a willingness not to be — a critical desubjectivation —in order to expose the law as less powerful than it seems. What forms might linguistic survival take in this desubjectivized domain. How would one know one’s existence? Through what terms would it be recognized and recognizable?

How are we to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire? How is such a desire exploited not only by a law in the singular, but by laws of various kinds such that we yield to subordination in order to maintain some sense of social “being”? (129-130)

Butler on kinship and symbolic

Butler, Judith. “Quandaries of the Incest Taboo” (2000) in Undoing Gender. 2004, 152-160.

To insist that kinship is inaugurated through linguistic and symbolic means which are emphatically not social is, I believe, to miss the point that kinship is a contingent social practice. In my view, there is no symbolic position of Mother and Father that is not precisely the idealization and ossification of contingent cultural norms. 158

Thus, the law that would secure the incest taboo as the foundation of symbolic family structure states the universality of the incest taboo as well as its necesary symbolic consequences. One of the symblic consequences of the law so formulated is precisely the derealization of lesbian and gay forms of parenting, singly-mother households, blended family arrangements in which there may be more than one mother or father, where the symblic position is itself dispersed and rearticulated in new social formations.

If one holds to the enduring symbolic efficacy of this law, then it seems to me that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of incestuous practice as taking place. It also becomes difficult if not impossible, to conceive of the psychic place of the parent or parents in ways that challenge heterosexual normativity. Whether it is a challenge to the universality of exogamic heterosexuality from within (through incest) or from rival social organizations of sexuality (lesbian, gay, bisexual, as well as nonmonogamous), each of these departures from the norm becomes difficult to acknowledge within the scheme that claims that the efficacious incest taboo determines the field of sexual intelligibility. In a sense, incest is disavowed by the law on incest, and the forms of sexuality that emerge at a distance from the norm become unintelligible (sometimes, for instance, even psychosis-inducing, as when analysts argue in the structuralist vein that same-sex parenting risks psychosis in the children who are raised under such conditions). 158

It might then be necessary to rethink the prohibition on incest as that which sometimes protects against a violation, and sometimes becomes the very instrument of a violation. What counters the incest taboo offends not only because it often involves the exploitation of those whose capacity for consent is questionable, but because it exposes the aberration in normative kinship, an aberration that might also, importantly, be worked against the strictures of kinship to force a revision and expansion of those very terms. If psychoanalysis, in its theory and practice, retains heterosexual norms of kinship as the basis of its theorization, if it accepts these norms as coextensive with cultural intelligibility, then it, too, becomes the instrument by which this melancholia is produced at a cultural level. Or if it insists that incest is under taboo and, therefore, could not exist, what forfeiture of analytic responsibility toward psychic suffering is thereby performed? These are both surely discontents with which we do not need to live. 160

Butler Psychic Life of Power Chapter 5 part 2

The masculine and feminine are not dispositions but accomplishments

Accomplishments which emerge in tandem with the achievement of heterosexuality. Here Freud articulates a cultural logic whereby gender is achieved and stabilized through heterosexual positioning, and where threats to heterosexuality thus become threats to gender itself. 135

Hence the fear of homosexual desire in a woman may induce a panic that she is losing her femininity, that she is not a woman, that she is no longer a proper woman, that if she is not quite a man, she is like one, and hence monstrous in some way. Or in a man, the terror of homosexual desire may lead to a terror of being construed as feminine, feminized, of no longer being properly a man, of being a “failed” man, or being in some sense a figure of monstrosity or abjection. 136

Consider that gender is acquired at least in part through the repudiation of homosexual attachments; the girl becomes a girl through being subject to a prohibition which bars the mother as an object of desire and installs that barred object as a part of the ego, indeed, as a melancholic identification. Thus the identification contains within it both the prohibition and the desire, and so embodies the ungrieved loss of the homosexual cathexis. If one is a girl to the extent that one does not want a girl, then wanting a girl will bring being a girl into question; within this matrix, homosexual desire thus panics gender. 136

___

Jay, Meg. “”Individual Differences in Melancholy Gender Among Women: Does Ambivalence Matter?” Journal of the Am erican Psychoanal Assoc 2007; 55; 1279

Drawing most closely from Freud’s theory of melancholy, she argued that, because these losses are unrecognized in a heterosexual culture, they can never be mourned, leading to unresolved grief and a melancholic identification with the same-sex lost object. To Butler, gender is that melancholic identification. To put it simply, we are what we cannot have, in that we settle for being personally what we cannot have sexually. Femininity and masculinity are the funeral garb we wear in tribute to our lost homoerotic possibilities.

To Butler, gender is that melancholic identification. In a heterosexual culture, “we are what we cannot have” as we settle for being personally what we cannot have sexually: men cling to a masculine identification because they lose their chance for experiencing erotic love for other men and women take on femininity because they cannot experience erotic love for other women. 117 Jay 2007a

Indeed, classical and contemporary psychoanalytic theory have noted that the path toward sexual and gender identification is different for males and females because the pre-oedipal primary attachment is homosexual for girls and heterosexual for boys. (1285 2007)

Butler Psychic Life of Power Chapter 5

What Freud here call the “character of the ego” appears to be a sedimentation of objects loved and lost, the archaeological remainder, as it were, of unresolved grief.

If the object can no longer exist in the external world, it will then exist internally, and that internalization will be a way to disavow the loss, to keep it at bay, to stay or postpone the recognition and suffering of loss. 134

Are those identifications that are central to the formation of gender produced through melancholic identification? 135

If the assumption of femininity and the assumption of masculinity proceed through the accomplishment of an always tenuous heterosexuality, we might understand the force of this accomplishment as mandating the abandonment of homosexual attachments or, perhaps more trenchantly, preempting the possibility of homosexual attachment, a foreclosure of possibility which produces a domain of homosexuality understood as unlivable passion and ungrievable loss. This heterosexuality is produced not only through implementing the prohibition on incest but, prior to that, by enforcing the prohibition on homosexuality. the oedipal conflict presumes that heterosexual desire has already been accomplished, that the distinction between heterosexual and homosexual has been enforced (a distinction which, after all, has no necessity); in this sense, the prohibition on incest presupposes the prohibition on homosexuality, for it presumes the heterosexualization of desire. 135

reading Butler’s chapter 2 in GT

Lacanian discourse centers, Butler says, on “a divide”, a primary or fundamental split that renders the subject internally divided and that establishes the duality of the sexes.

But why this exclusive focus on the fall into twoness?  Within Lacanian terms, it appears that division is always the effect of the law, and not a prexisting condition on which the law acts. 54-55

It is clearly not enough to claim thta this drama holds for Western, late capitalist household dwellers and that perhaps in some yet to be defined epoch some other Symbolic regime will goven the laguage of sexual ontology. By instituting the Symbolic as invariably phantasmatic, the “invariably” wanders into an “inevitably,” generating a description of sexuality in terms that promote cultural stasis as its result.

Chiesa

In what precise sense should Marx’s materialism be regarded as a doctrine that conceives of truth as a material cause?

And, most importantly, can Marx still be, in spite of marxism, the man of truth whose revolution of thought psychoanalysis should escort until a new political paradigm is formed?

The reason why class struggle should remain the privileged model, to insist on class struggle occupying a position of centrality is precisely not to invoke the ‘working class’ as the only agent of emancipation. In a sense, that is already to treat class insurgency as if it were yet another ‘multi-cultural’ demand for recognition.

It’s perfectly possible to imagine a capitalism in which, for instance, the demand for recognition of alternative sexualities has been entirely satisfied. But class struggle in the Marxist sense could not be satisfied by anything short of the ‘obliteration of bourgeoisie as a symbolic social space’ (which is by no means the same thing as the extermination of the members of the bourgeoisie).

In a very real sense, the proletariat is that very obliteration. This point is perhaps best made by a joke recently recounted by Lenin on the Tomb. An IRA man in a balaclava is at the gates of heaven when St Peter comes to him and says, ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you in’. ‘Who wants to get in?’ the IRA man retorts. ‘You’ve got twenty minutes to get the fuck out.’

For Zizek, Laclau makes the mistake of treating the critique of political economy as a ‘positive ontic science’ (just as his dismissal of class struggle makes the mistake of treating the proletariat as if it were a positive ontic entity, ‘the working class’, rather than a ‘substance-less subject’). What this ignores is what Zizek, after Derrida, called the ‘spectral’ dimension of Marx. In Marx’s ‘hauntology’ – where undead labour is the correlate of vitalized commodities – it is understood that fiction structures reality. To call capital a ‘self-engendering monster’ is not at all to speak metaphorically.

There is a lot to be done with this. Firstly, we can recognize the current political landscape as inherently populist. It is not only, as Zizek said, that populism (whether it be the ‘progressive’ populism of the anti-capitalist or anti-globalization movements or the reactionary populism of the fuel protesters or the Countryside Alliance) is the complement to administrative post-politics. It is that administrative post-politics is already itself populist. Badiou has argued that post-political malaise is not some accidental side-effect of parliamentary democracy but the terminal phase into which it inevitably declines.  Populism projects a restricted sense of possibilities, always offers us a choice from a fixed and pre-existent menu. It is the expression of the always-already, the anti-Event.

fink

Lack or Loss of something is required to set the symbolic in motion.

The Phallus is the signifier of lack

A woman’s sexual identity can, in fact, involve many different possible combinations, for unlike masculine and feminine structure, which in Lacan’s view constitute an either/or, there being no middle ground between them, ego identification can include elements from many different persons, both male and female. In other words, the imaginary level of sexual identity can, in and of itself, be extremely self-contradictory.

The very existence of sexual identity (sexuation, to use Lacan’s term) at a level other than that of the ego, at the level of subjectivity, should dispel the mistaken notion so prevalent in the English-speaking world that a woman is not considered to be a subject at all in Lacanian theory.  Feminine structure means feminine subjectivity. Insofar as a woman forms a relationship with a man, she is likely to be reduced to an object —object (a)— in his fantasy; and insofar as she is viewed from the perspective of masculine culture, she is likely to be reduced to nothing more than a collection of male fantasy object dressed up in culturally stereotypical clothes: i(a), that is, an image contains yet disguises object (a).  That may very well imply a loss of subjectivity in the common, everyday sense of the word —”being in control of one’s life,” “being an agent to be reckoned with,” and so on— but it in no way implies a loss of subjectivity in the Lacanian sense of the term.  The very adoption of a position or stance with respect to (an experience of) jouissance involves and implies subjectivity.  Once adopted, a feminine subject will have come into being. The extent to which that particular subject subjectivizes her or his world is another question.

McGowan on prohibition and fantasy

McGowan, Todd. “Relocating Our Enjoyment of the 1950s: The Politics of Fantasy in Far From Heaven.” The Cinema of Todd Haynes ed. James Morrison, New York: Wallflower Press, 2007.

Faced with the absolute prohibition against miscegenation or gay sexuality, characters in Far From Heaven nonetheless explore these behaviours in violation of the prohibition. Formally, the film stresses that the enjoyment of these activities stems from the very prohibition that interdicts them. It is in this sense that prohibition authorises enjoyment. Prohibition, as Far From Heaven shows us, carves out a space in which subjects can experience enjoyment. It transforms a quotidian activity —interracial relationships, gay sex— into a sublime experience, an experience that lifts the subject outside the sphere of the quotidian.

In a contemporary world replete with images of enjoyment and with imperatives to enjoy ourselves, the demand for enjoyment grows as the possibilities for it shrink. Today, we suffocate from so many images of enjoyment while feeling ourselves increasingly deprived of it. As a result, we turn to nostalgic fantasies of the 1950s in order to envision the possibility of an enjoyment that the contemporary imperative to enjoy renders more inaccessible. We fantasize about an era of strict prohibition not because we want our enjoyment restricted in a contemporary world that places no limits o nit, but because we crave the enjoyment that we imagine strict limits enabling.

The point here is not that they (Frank Cathy Raymond) enjoy in spite of the widespread disapproval; it is instead that this disapproval enables and fuels their enjoyment. Their time together has the significance it does precisely because the social prohibition does not permit it. The prohibition has the effect of elevating their ordinary love relationship to the status of a sublime Thing.

The Law prohibits and thereby creates a barrier that the subject cannot go beyond. In so doing, it ‘raises an object … to the dignity of the Thing (Lacan cited in McGowan) In Far From Heaven, the relationship between Cathy and Raymond becomes a sublime thing, and we enjoy it as such. It achieves this status due to the powerful prohibition that prevents its ultimate fulfillment. This barrier at once prevents the relationship and makes it possible (119).

wright sexuation

Wright, Elizabeth. Lacan and Postfeminism. Cambridge: Totem Books, 2000.

The logic of the sexualtion formulae produces two sets of speaking beings not in a complementary relation to each other. Crucially, the formulae do not plot which sexual position a subject may take up — they are not hetero-sexuation formulae.

What they reveal are the historical limits of the possibility of change. They are nothing to do with a particular subject’s object-choice, which can go across biology. But however variable object-choice may be, society will still demand a binary of some kind, whatever the biology of human beings might become in the far-flung future. There will still have to be the equivalent of a ‘castration’, without which the entry into language would be foreclosed.

For Lacan, these formulae are concerned with how a speaking being experiences sexuality on the level of the psyche. They have nothing to do with biological sex, neither with the love of a man for a woman, nor that of a man for a man, nor that of a woman for a woman. This implies that a biological male can inscribe himself on the female side and biological female on the male side. Each speaking being can choose to inscribe itself on either side, although this will be a ‘forced’ choice, imposed by the parameters of the history of the subject’s unconscious (31-32).