Category: lacan

sexuation female existential

Female Existential:
‘there is no entity x that says “no” to the phallic function’.

notxphallic

There is not any that is not phallic jouissance, the emphasis going on the first “is.” All the jouissances that do exist are phallic (in order to exist, according to Lacan, something must be articulable within our signifying system determined by the phallic signifier); but that does not mean there cannot be some jouissances that are not phallic. It is just that they do no exist; instead, they ex-sist. The Other jouissance can only ex-sist, it cannot exist, for to exist it would have to be spoken, articulated, symbolized.

(Fink, 2004, 161)

sexuation male existential

——Male Existential:
‘There is an entity x that says “no” to the phallic function.’

onexnot

Nevertheless, there is the belief in another jouissance, in a jouissance that could never come up short.

(Fink, Lacan to the Letter. 2004, 160)

Does the primal father exist in the usual sense? No, he ex-sists: the phallic function is not simply negated in some mild sense in his case; it is foreclosed (Lacan indicates that the bar of negation over the quantifer stands for discordance, whereas the bar of negation over the phallic function stands for foreclosure), and forclosure implies the utter and complete exclusion of something form the symbolic register. As it is only that which is not foreclosed from the symbolic order that can be said to exist, existence going hand in hand with language.

The primal father —implying such a foreclosure— must ex-sist, standing outside of symbolic castration.  He can be said to ex-sist, because, like object (a), the primal father can be written: ∃x Φx

Now the mythical father of the primal horde is said NOT to have succumbed to castration, and what is symbolic castration but a limit or limitation? He thus knows no limits. The primal father lumps all women into the same category: accessible.  The set of ALL women exists for him and for him alone.  His mother and sisters are just as much fair game as are his neighbors and second cousins.

The effect of castration (the incest taboo, in this case) is to divide that mythical set into at least two categories: accessible and inaccessible. Castration brings about an exclusion: mom and sis are off-limits (110).

… a man could only really jouir d’une femme from the position of noncastration … to get off on a woman, to really enjoy her, to take full advantage of her, not from something one imagines that one’s pleasure really comes fro her, not from something one imagines her to be, wants her to be, fools oneself into believing she is or has …

Only the primal father can really get off on women themselves. Ordinary masculine mortals must resign themselves to getting off on their partner object (a). Thus only the mythical primal father can have a true sexual relationship WITH a woman. To him there is such a thing as a sexual relationship. Every other man has a “relationship” with object (a) —to wit, fantasy— not with a woman per se.

The fact that every single man is nevertheless defined by both formulas —one stipulating that is is altogether castrated and the other that some instance negates or refuses castration— shows that incestuous wishes live on indefinitely in the unconscious.  Every man, despite castration (that splitting up of the category of women into two distinct groups), continues to have incestuous dreams in which he grants himself the privileges of the imagined pleasure-finding father who knows no bounds (111).

lacan’s symbolic logic of sexuation

Male ………………. Female

∃x : ‘There is at least one x.’
__
∃x : ‘There is not a single x which …’

Φx : ‘x is subject to the phallic function.’
__
Φx : ‘x is not subject to the phallic function’

∀x : ‘ All x‘s’
__
∀x : ‘Not all x‘s.’

x : jouissance
a : The object (a), Desire’s cause remains beyond signification, unsignifiable. Signifies the Other’s desire insofar as it serves as cause of the subject’s desire; but object (a), considered to play a role “outside of theory,” that is, as REAL, does not signify anything: it IS the Other’s desire, it is desirousness as REAL, not signified.

Φ : The phallic function: the function that institutes lack, that is, the alienating function of language.  The phallic function plays a crucial role in the definition of masculine and feminine structure, for the latter are defined differently in terms of that loss, that lack instituted by alienation, by the splitting brought on by our use of —or rather use by— language (TLS Fink 103).  The phallus is the signifier of lack. The phallus is never anything but a signfier, it is the signifier of desire.  Insofar as desire is always correlated with lack, the phallus is THE signifier of lack.

La: Indicates Woman‘ who does not fall into a set, as she is not completely defined by the phallic function.  “Woman does not exist”: there is no signifier for, or essence of, Woman as such. Woman can thus only be written under erasure: Woman.

-image deleted- signifier of the barred Other, feminine jouissance, Other jouissance (TLS 115).

***********

It is precisely because masculinity and femininity represent two non-complementary structures, defined by different relationships to the Other, that there can be no such thing as a sexual relationship. What we do in any relationship is either try to turn the other into what we think we desire or turn ourselves into that which we think the other desires, but this can never exactly map onto the other’s desire. In other words, the ‘major problem of male and female subjects is that they do not relate to what their partners relate to in them’ (citing Salecl 2002:93, in Homer 106). In a sense, we always miss what we aim at in the other and our desire remains unsatisfied. It is this very asymmetry of masculinity and femininity in relation to the phallus and the objet a that means that there can be no such thing as a sexual relationship (Homer 106).

copjec ethics of psychoanalysis

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

44:”Do not give way on your desire.”  … In short the ethics of psychoanalysis filiates itself with Kant’s argument that ethical progress has nothing to do with that form of progress promoted by modern industry, or the “service of good,” but is rather a matter of personal conversion, of the subjective necessity of going beyond oneself.

GAP BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL AND SPECIES: Freud argues that this gap can never be reabsorbed; moreover, it is the very maintenance of this gap that permits the individual subject from being annihilated by the history she inherits.

46: Creon is driven by his superego, which is that psychic agency which fosters in the subject a distaste for mundane, compromised pleasures and maintains us in a state of dissatisfaction.  Creon’s fixation on the lost object causes him to be relatively indfferent to all others available to him. He remains glued to an ideal he will never attain, since it is derived from his nostalgia for something he never possessed.

47: When she covers the exposed body of her brother, Antigone raises herself out of the conditions of naked existence to which Creon remains bound.

Copjec can’t get back to mom

Secularized notion of infinity

Death Drive: this drive is inhibited as to its aim, part of this drive is to prevent itself from attaining its ultimate aim: death

The satisfaction of the drive through the very inhibition of its aim is the very definition of sublimation.

33: the psychoanalytic theory of Freud replaces [Kant’s] transcendental forms with empty, nonobjectifiable objects, the objects of the drive.

39: “But that’s what I like about them, that they come that way” Jasper Johns

There could not be a better description of drive/sublimation: it so wills what occurs that the object it finds is indistinguishable from the one it chooses.

copjec obdurate desire to endure

41: the singular truth of Antigone’s love for her brother must have a universal destiny, must be openly declared. The proclamation of love occurs in a passage that has struck several critics as so strange as to provoke the wish that it would one day be found to be an interpolation

If my husband had died, I could have had another, and a child by another man, if I had lost the first, but with my mother and father in Hades below, I could never have another brother.

This is the sentiment we express when we say of someone, “they broke the mold after they made him.”  Antigone lets us know that her brother is unique, irreplaceable. There will never be another like him.  His value to her depends on nothing he has done nor on any of his qualities. She refuses to justify her love for him by giving reasons for it, she calls on no authority, no diety, none of the laws of the polis to sanction the deed she undertakes on his behalf.

42: That Antigone does not give reasons for her love does not imply that her brother is unfathomable to her but that she is, as even the Chorus perceives, autonomous. She gives herself her own law and does not seek validation from any other authority. In other words, it is not the otherness but the nonexistence of the Other on which Lacan’s interpretation turns.

42: Antigone’s affirmation of love is, I am arguing, similar to Jasper Johns’s affirmative declaration, “But that’s what I like about them, that they come that way.”  Johns declines to offer reasons for his fascination with targets or American flags or a particular set of commercial stencils; he, too, attests, in Lacan’s phrase, to the “ineffaceable character of what is.” We are invited once more to taste the tautologism of love, and perhaps now we can say in what it consists, namely the coincidence, or near coincidence, of the drive with its object. This is what Lacan sometimes called the “illusion of love”: one believes the beloved is everything one could hope for without recognizing the role one’s love for him or her plays in one’s satisfaction.  … For, love is that which renders what the other is loveable.  This is not to say that Antigone overlooks part of what he is, that she fails to see that is a traitor to Thebes or that he has any personal flaws. It means she loves him as he is, the way he comes.

“I love in you something more than you,”

…. Lacan means to say that this “something more” is accessed through love. If one were to receive identical gifts or identical reports of an event one has unfortunately missed both from an acquaintance and from a beloved friend, one would get more, a surplus satisfaction, from the latter.  A gift given by a beloved friend ceases to coincide with itself, it becomes itself plus the fact that it was given by the friend.  The same is true of everything I get from the beloved, all the qualities, everything he or she is.  That is, the “is” of the beloved is split, fractured. The beloved is always slightly different from or more than herself. It is this more, this extra, that makes the beloved more than just an ordinary object of my attention.

copjec singularity immortality sublimation

23: Someone dies and leaves behind his place, which outlives him and is unfillable by anyone else. This idea constructs a specific notion of the social, wherein it is conceived to consist not only OF particular individuals and their relations to each other, but also AS a relation to these unoccupiable places. The social is composed, then not just of those things that will pass, but also of relations to empty places that will not. This gives society an existence, a durability, despite the rapid and relentless alterations modernity institutes.  If, with the collapse of eternity, the modern world is not decimated by historical time, it is because this unoccupiable place, this sense of singularity, somehow knots it together in time.  Singularity itself, that which appears most to disperse society, is here posited as essential rather than antagonistic to a certain modern social bond.

Singularity

This notion of singularity which is tied to the act of a subject is defined as modern because it depends on the denigration of any notion of a prior or superior instance that might prescribe or guarantee the act. ”Soul”, ”eternity”, ”absolute”, patriarchal power, all these notions ”have to be destroyed” before an act can be viewed as unique and as capable of stamping itself with its own necessity.
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One calls singular that which “once it has come into being, bears the strange hallmark of something that must be,” and therefore cannot die (Lacan cited in Copjec Antigone)
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24: For it is through the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation that we will be able to clarify exactly how singularity is able to figure and not be effaced by the social bond. … However incomplete the notion of sublimation remains at this point, it is nevertheless clear that it is meant to bridge the gap between singularity and sociality.

Immortality and Sublimation

25: dogma: bare life is sacred  [code for Butler’s essential vulnerability, wow I get it now, Copject is arguing that Butler’s emphasis on abject, bare life is well … ]

26: Agamben faults Foucault for failing to demonstrate how political techniques and technologies of the self (by which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power) converge to produce that form of involuntary servitude” which characterizes the modern subject, we recognize a need to know more about the biological definition of life if we are ever going to be able to explain how modern power is able to sink its roots so thoroughly —so inexhaustibly— into bare life.  What is it about this definition of life that allows power to assume such an extensive, even capillary hold over it?

29:  [on the pessimism and bleakness of Agamben] For, by focusing, however productively, on historical continuities, Agamben is led to downplay the rupture the nineteenth century &quot;life sciences&quot; represented, and it is precisely the notion of rupture, of a thought or act that would be able to break from its immanent condition, that is needed to restore power to life.  The most insidious difficulty confronting us, however, is the fact that we ourselves remain dupes of the dogma that death is imbedded in life; that is, we remain victims of the theme of bodily finitude, or of bare life

The real romantic heritage —which is still with us today— is the theme of finitude. The idea that an apprehension of the human condition occurs primordially in the understanding of its finitude maintains infinity at a distance that’s both evanescent and sacred … the only really contemporary requirement for philosophy since Nietzsche is the secularization of infinity. (Badiou)

This statement strikes one as a long overdue correction of certain contemporary commonplaces. Yet its judgment will remain incomprehensible to cultural theorists [Copjec attacks here the cultural theorists and Butler no doubt] who continue to misrecognize bodily finitude as the sobering fact that confounds our Romantic pretentions. For these theorists —for whom limits are almost always celebrated, insofar as they are supposed to restrict the expansionism of political modernism and its notions of universalism and will— the body is the limit, par excellence, that which puts an end to any claim to transcendence.

What Badiou is here proposing is that our idea of bodily finitude assumes a point of transcendence. Like Agamben, Badiou argues that death becomes immanentized in the body only on condition that we presuppose a beyond. [As opposed to those postmodernists who reject any notion of transcendence as well… plain wierd. (RT)]

how thought escapes being a mere symptom of its historical conditions

What is needed, in this case, is a rethinking of the body.  where the body is conceived not as the seat of death but, rather as the seat of sex.  Contrary to what Foucault has claimed, the sexualization of the body by psychoanalysis does not participate in the regime of biopolitics; it opposes it. 29

What is needed is not an abandonment of current interest in the body, but a rethinking of it… for in truth another notion of the body has already been proposed, precisely as a challenge to the one offered by the (bare) life sciences… the one suggested by psychoanalysis, where the body is conceived not as the seat of death but, rather, as the seat of sex...

Borrowing Badiou’s phrase … through its definition of the sexualized body, psychoanalysis provided the world with a secularized notion of infinity. Or the concept of an immortal individual body, which Kant could not quite bring himself to articulate, is finally thinkable in Freud.

copjec antigone gives herself own law

31: Hegel – Polynices is forever entombed in his own “imperishable individuality,” his own imperishable finitude. In this way bare, bestial life has been dignified, rendered sacred.

32: Lacan’s interpretation turns on his recognition that the body  is the site of a different obscenity, a jouissance that opens a new dimension of infinity, immortality.  Thus will Lacan be led to describe Antigone’s deed not as a bestowal of “imperishable individuality” on her brother, but as an “immortalization of the family Até.”

  • But what does this difference signify in regard to Antigone’s relation to the dead, to her familial past, or to the city?
  • And what does it signify … in regard to the relation between the “individual organism,” which may be looked at, as Freud put it, “as a transitory and perishable appendage to the quasi-immortal germ plasm bequeathed to him by his race,” and the species?
  • How can our argument —that Lacan reconnects body and act, the very terms Hegel’s analysis sunders— be reconciled with Freud’s contention that sublimation pries the act, whether it be a physical act or the act of thinking, from the body’s grip?

Death and only death is the aim of every drive

32: There is no drive impelling the subject toward any sort of fusion with others … we must then definitively reject the “benevolent illusion” that there is among men a drive toward perfection or progress.  Drive pushes away from or against the stabilization of unities or the dumb progress of developments.

… death drives are described by Freud as … working instead toward winning for the subject what we can only regard as potential immortality. How so?

33: Directed not outward toward the constituted world, but away from it, the death drive aims at the past, at a time before the subject found itself where it is now, embedded in time and moving toward death. What if anything does this backward trajectory, this flight from the constituted world and biological death discover?  … drive discovers along its path something positive, certain “necessary forms of thought’ … that time does not change … in any way and [to which] the idea of time cannot be applied”  Freud does conceive his notion of drive as an intervention in Kant’s philosophy, but the drive does not lend credence to the “Kantian theorem that time and space are … ‘necessary forms of thought'” … rather it significantly revises that theorem.  … Freud replaces the transcendental forms with empty, nonobjectifiable objects, the objects of drive.

The aim of the drive is death, “the restoration to an earlier state of things” a stat of inanimation or inertia. Now this state exists only as an illusion … Psychoanalysis rewrites this mythical state as the primordial mother-child dyad, which supposedly contained all things and every happiness and to which the subject strives throughout his life to return.

34: the drive inhibits as part of its very activity, the achievement of its aim, some inherent obstacle —the OBJECT of the drive— simultaneously BRAKES the drive and BREAKS IT UP, curbs it, thus preventing it from reaching its aim, and divides it into partial drives … the now partial drives content themselves with these small nothings, these objects that satisfy them. Lacan gives to them the name objects a: they are, as it were, simulacra of the lost (maternal) object, or as Freud and Lacan both refer to it, of das Ding.  Object a is, however, the general term, Lacan designates several specific objects: gaze, voice, breast, phallus. In other words he gives them the names of bodily organs.  Why are the objects given these names? How do they displace Kant’s “necessary forms of thought”.

35-36:  The various aspects of the mother, what she was like, will be captured by Vorstellungen, the system of representations or signifiers that form the relatively stable and familiar wold we share in common with our “fellow human-beings” or neighbors.  But some aspects of the primoridial mother cannot be translated into these representations, since they are, Freud says, “new and non-comparable” to any experience the child has of himself.”  A hole thus opens in the system of signifiers since those that would enable us to recall these new and noncomparable or singular aspects of the mother are simply unavailable, they simply do not exist.

… At the core of this matter of the unforgettable but forever lost Thing, we find not just an impossibility of thought, but of a void of Being.

The problems is not simply that I cannot think the primordial mother, but that her loss opens up a hole in being.  Or, it is not that the mother escapes representation or thought, but that the jouissance that attached me to her has been lost and this loss depletes the whole of my being.

butler foreclosure

I also don’t think that the foreclosures that produce the subject are fixed in time in the way that most Lacanians do. They really understand foreclosure as a kind of founding moment. My sense is that it is always the case that the subject is produced through certain kinds of foreclosure-certain things become impossible for it; certain things become irrecoverable-and that this makes for the possibility of a temporarily coherent subject who can act. But I also want to say that its action can very often take up the foreclosure itself; it can renew the meaning and the effect of foreclosure.

For instance, many people are inaugurated as subjects through the foreclosure of homosexuality; when homosexuality returns as a possibility, it returns precisely as the possibility of the unraveling of the subject itself: “I would not be I if I were a homosexual. I don’t know who I would be. I would be undone by that possibility. Therefore, I cannot come in close proximity to that which threatens to undo me fundamentally.” Miscegenation is another moment-it’s when you suddenly realize that a white subject assumes that its whiteness is absolutely essential to its capacity to be a subject at all: “If I must be in this kind of proximity to a person of color, I will become undone in some radical way.” We see forms of segregation and phobic forms of organizing social reality that keep the fiction of those subjects intact. Now, I think it’s possible sometimes to undergo an undoing, to submit to an undoing by virtue of what spectrally threatens the subject, in order to reinstate the subject on a new and different ground. (Butler interview with Salih, 2000)

lloyd melancholia

Lloyd, Moya. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 2007.

Mourning: takes place when an object (such as a loved one, an ideal or a country) is lost. In such cases, the libido (mental energy) that was once invested in that object gradually detaches from it and is cathected onto (invested in) another object. The subject thus comes to terms with its loss and is able to form a new emotional attachment —to fall in love for instance. At this point, ‘the ego becomes free and uninhibited again’ and the work of mourning is completed.

Melancholia: The individual in this case is unable to get over its loss in the usual way. Instead it incorporates the lost object into its ego. It identifies with it, taking on certain of its characteristics. As a consequence, ‘a new structure of identity’ is created in which certain qualities of the lost other are permanently internalized in the ego. Diana Fuss captures this process nicely when she notes that ‘by incorporating, the spectral remains of the dearly departed love-object, the subject vampiristically comes to life’. Where mourning is the ‘normal’ reaction to loss, melancholia is a pathological response (since the melancholic subject is unable to accept its loss).

“the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and … it contains the history of those object-choices.” To rephrase, the ego is formed melancholically. It is an effect of its identifications. It is this idea that Butler takes over and applies to the question of gender identity.

When Butler talks about the gender identity being structured melancholically she writes that ‘the process of internalizing and sustaining lost loves is crucial to the formation of the ego “and its object-choice”‘ (Gender T. 74 cited in Lloyd 84). It is not only the ego that is formed melancholically, it is also the subject’s sexual orientation — their object choice. That is, whether they choose an object (person) of the opposite sex to or of the same sex as themselves.

According to Butler, when the child reaches the Oedipal phase, they have already been ‘subjected to prohibitions which “dispose” them in distinct sexual directions’ (GT 82, Lloyd 84). They have already acquired heterosexual desires, albeit incestuous ones.

The fact that at the resolution of the Oedipal phase the boy identifies with his father, following the logic of melancholia, must mean that he has lost his father as an object of desire and has not been able to let go of —or grieve— that loss. Ego formation, after all, requires the internalization of —or identification with— the lost object. Similarly the fact that the girl identifies ultimately with her mother must again mean that she has lost her as a love object and has been unable to grieve that loss.

In both cases the lost desire for the parent of the same sex is installed melancholically in the ego. Heterosexual desire is bought at the price of denying —or, in psychoanalytic language, disavowing or foreclosing (what we might think of as negating or repressing)— prior homosexual desire. Heterosexuality thus has a melancholic structure. (85)

When Freud tells the story of the Oedipus complex he narrates it in terms of the taboo against incest, a taboo which he, like Lévi-Strauss … saw as foundational to culture and society. When Butler re-tells the story, she does so in order to uncover what is hidden in Freud’s narrative: that the Oedipus complex relies upon a prior taboo against homosexuality.

The psychoanalytic story of desire, as told by Freud, is thus incomplete: it does not, perhaps cannot, tell of the loss of same-sex desire that exists prior to the Oedipal scene where the incestuous heterosexual love object is renounced and where the subject is initiated into both their sexual identity and the moral order (85).

lloyd oedipal

Lloyd, Moya. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 2007.

According to Lévi-Strauss there is a universal law that regulates the exchange of women in all kinship systems: this is the incest taboo, which ensures that women are exchanged between clans of men not related by blood. The incest taboo is crucial in two ways

1. it generates a non-incestuous heterosexuality

2. the taboo represents the crucial step in the transition from nature to culture. It inaugurates society. … the taboo leads to compulsory heterosexuality. How?

It divides the universe of sexual choice into categories of permitted and prohibited sexual partners and it presupposes a prior less articulate taboo on homosexuality. Incest taboo = invariant transcultural symbolic law

Because Rubin believes all humans are sexually polymorphous, she adheres to an idea of ‘sexuality “before the law”‘ rather than as Butler would have it, sexuality as an effect of the law (81).

… it is clear that much of the conceptual apparatus Butler deploys in her own analysis of Lévi-Strauss, Freud and Lacan is borrowed from Rubin’s earlier text: her assumption of a prior prohibition on homosexuality, an understanding of heterosexuality as compulsory and a concern with the intractability of symbolic law (81).

In Freud’s estimation, all infants experience incestuous desires for their parents. How these desires are resolved determines not only the subject’s future sexual orientation but also how its ego and superego (conscience) develop.

Key to Freud’s account, according to Butler, is the idea of primary bisexuality. Freud assumes, that is, that all babies are born with both feminine and masculine dispositions… A masculine disposition, he suggests, is expressed in the child’s desire for its mother, while a feminine disposition is expressed in the child’s desire for its father. The sex of the child in question is irrelevant.

For Butler this can mean only one thing. Freud understands primary bisexuality heteronormatively: as ‘the coincidence of two heterosexual desires within a single psyche’ (Butler Gender Trouble 77 cited in Lloyd 83).

Why is Freud unable to imagine the possibility of pre-oedipal homosexuality? Butler’s supposition (echoing Rubin) is that the reason for this is that the Oedipus complex, and thus Freud’s theory of psycho-sexual development, presumes a prior prohibition on homosexuality.

In order to expose this prior prohibition, Butler set about demonstrating that far from masculinity and femininity being dispositions that naturally inhere in persons, they are, in fact, effects of identification.

Identification refers to the process whereby the individual acquires its identity, or aspects thereof, from someone (or something) else. One of the ways in which this occurs is through … introjection.

Introjection: is when the subject takes into its ego —into him or herself— objects from the outside world in order to preserve them. Introjection is a response to loss.