lacan – Page 7 – objet (a)

Ž Hegel Lacan

Žižek, S. (2009) The Cunning of Reason: Lacan as a Reader of Hegel. The Harvard Review of Philosophy. XVI. 104-117.

The status of prosopopoeia in Lacan changes radically with the shift in the status of the analyst from the stand-in for the “big Other” (the symbolic order) to the “small other” (the obstacle which stands for the inconsistency, failure, of the big Other).

The analyst who occupies the place of the big Other is himself the medium of prosopopoeia: when he speaks, it is the big Other who speaks (or rather, keeps silence) through him — that is, in the intersubjective economy of the analytic process, the analyst is not just another subject, but occupies the empty place of death.

The patient talks, and the analyst’s silence stands for the absent meaning of the patient’s talk, the meaning that is supposed to be contained in the big Other.

The process ends when the patient can himself assume the meaning of his speech. The analyst as the “small other,” on the contrary, magically transforms the words of the analysand (patient) into prosopopoeia, de-subjectivizing his words, depriving them of the quality of being an expression of a consistent subject and his intention-to-mean.

The goal is here no longer for the analysand to assume the meaning of his speech, but to assume its non-meaning, its nonsensical inconsistency, which implies, with regards to his own status, his de-subjectivation, or what Lacan calls “subjective destitution.”

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt2

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics and tragedy in Lacan. (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, New York: Cambridge UP. 173-190.

IT IS EASIER TO ACCEPT INTERDICTION THAN TO RUN THE RISK OF CASTRATION.

To put it simply: the law gives a signifying form to the impossibility involved in the very phenomenon of desire.

The fundamental operation of the law is always to forbid something that is in itself impossible. The fact that the law links this impossible to some particular object should not prevent us from seeing this.

By designating a certain object as forbidden, the law does two things:

1) it isolates the impossible Thing that the desire aims at but never attains, and

2) it provides an image of this Thing. This image (my neighbor’s wife, for instance) has to be distinguished from what, on the level of the symbolic, is nothing else but the signifier of the impossible as such.

The law condenses the impossible involved in desire into one exceptional “place.” Via this logic of exception, it liberates the field of the possible. This is why the intervention of the law can have a liberating effect on the subject.

It makes it possible for Achilles not to spend every minute of his life trying to figure out why he cannot catch up with the tortoise, or trying obstinately to do so. It can make him a productive member of the community.

This is the reason why Lacan, although he refuses to put analysis into the service of producing happy members of the community, also refuses to subscribe to the discourse advocating the liberation of desire from the repression and the spoils of law.

His point is that the law supplements the impossibility involved in the very nature of desire by a symbolic interdiction, and that it is thus erroneous to assume that by eliminating this interdiction, we will also eliminate the impossibility involved in the desire.

What he warned against, for instance, in the turmoil of 1968, was not some chaotic state that could result from the abolition of certain laws and prohibitions.

He didn’t warn against human desire running crazy. On the contrary, he warned against the fact that desire, tired of dealing with its own impossibility, will give up and resign to anything rather than try to find its own law. 178

We have already quoted Lacan’s thesis according to which “it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration.” However, as should be clear from what we just developed, this does not mean that interdiction keeps us safe from being exposed to castration (that is, from undergoing a loss of something that we have).

The “fear of castration” is the fear of losing that which constitutes a signifying support for the lack involved in the experience of the desire as such. Interdiction is what provides that support; it is what gives a signifying form to the lack (or to the experience of “castration”) which is already there.

Psychoanalysis, as Lacan conceived it, is not something that will restitute the good old law where it is lacking. Although many clinical problems can indeed be traced to the failure of the law to function for the subject as a stabilizing factor, the job of psychoanalysis is in no way to make sure that the subject will finally subscribe to the ideal of this or that authority.

One should rather say that once things have gone so far (as to produce a neurosis, for instance), they can only go further.

In principle, it is easier to go by the law than to find one’s own way around desire.

But all the malfunctions and dysfunctions that appear in the clinic (as well as in the psychopathology of everyday life) remind us not only that this doesn’t always work, but also that it never works perfectly.

Psychoanalysis is not here to repair the damage, to help the social machine to function more smoothly and to reconstruct whatever was ill-constructed.

It is there to take us further along the path that our “problems” have put us on, it is there as the “guardian” of the other way, the one that consists in finding our own way around our desire.

Emblematic of this “other way” is the story of Oedipus who, although unknowingly, steps out of the shelter of interdiction, is led to give up the thing that captivated him, and enters the realm where “the absolute reign of his desire is played out . . . something that is sufficiently brought out by the fact that he is shown to be unyielding right to the end, demanding everything, giving up nothing, absolutely unreconciled” (S VII, p. 310).

This is what makes it possible for Lacan to insist upon the fact that the renunciation of goods and of power that is supposed to be a punishment, “is not, in fact, one” (S VII, p. 310).

Consequently, tragedy, at least in the perspective of what Lacan calls the tragic dimension of analytical experience, is not necessarily all that “tragic,” but can produce the kind of liberation that takes place in the case of Oedipus.

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt1

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics and tragedy in Lacan. (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté New York: Cambridge UP. 173-190.

Duties that we impose on ourselves and experience as “sacrifices” are, as often as not, a response to the fear of the risks involved in the case if we did not impose these duties. In other words, they are precisely the way we hang on to something that we fear most of all to lose. And it is this fear (or this “possession”) that enslaves us and makes us accept all kinds of sacrifices.

Lacan’s point is that this possession is not some empirical good that we have and don’t want to lose. It is of symbolic nature, which is precisely what makes it so hard to give up.

To renounce this “good” is not so much to renounce something that we have, as it is to renounce something that we don’t have but which is nevertheless holding our universe together.

In other words, “psychoanalysis teaches that in the end it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration” (S VII, p. 307).

This formula is, in fact, crucial for the “ethics of psychoanalysis,” which could be defined as that which liberates us by making us accept the risk of castration.

In a certain sense, it puts us in the position where we have nothing to lose. However, while not false, this way of putting things can be misleading, since it suggests some kind of ultimate loss beyond which we no longer can desire or get attached to anything, which is precisely not the point.

The loss in question is rather supposed to liberate the field of the desire – liberate it in the sense that the desire no longer depends upon the interdiction (of the Law) but is led to find and articulate its own law.

The intervention of the law, far from simply “repressing” our desire, helps us deal with the impasse or impossibility involved in the mechanism of the desire as such. To put it simply: the law gives a signifying form to the impossibility involved in the very phenomenon of desire. 178

zizek cogito and real

Žižek’s talk on the second day March 29, 2011 at ICI Berlin.

How to relate symbolic order with Real of trauma?

If you read Freud’s Wolfman, he is not saying that the child was doing ok, the small wolfman and then he sees the coitus, and gets traumatized. No when the small wolfman saw the coitus it was not a trauma, he did nothing, he just inscribed it as neutral trace he didn’t know what to do with it. Only at 5-6 when perpelexed by sesxuality, and then to answer to symbolic deadlock he then retroactively traumatised the experience.

It is not about real as brutally intruding, it is the curvature of symbolic space which precedes its cause. The cause is a retroactive projection.

For Lacan we should take ontology literally: Ontic (beings) and logos (language) and this GAP the gap between being and logos, this gap is antagonistic.

Language is the torture house of being, of the radical Incompatibility between: Body of jouissance and Language

Antigone Heidegger’s reading, he ignores what Lacan calls ‘between 2 deaths’ between symbolic and real deaths. Francois Balmes, he wrote on Lacan, he was excellent, Zein and Seit may sound stupid but accurate: The problem with Heidegger is that his theory works for neurotics but can’t cover psychotics. In neurosis you are still within Dasein, past and future etc. In psychosis you are outside normal functioning of language, future past preset. But in a way you are still within human universe, you are outside but in a way still inside.

Žižek mentions that Heidgegger’s correspondence with Swiss psychiatrist he only comments on those cases where patients probably neurotic, are still within symbolic. He doesn’t touch what Žižek calls the Musselman or what Malabou calls post-traumatic. This leads him to the subject of Antigone. Humans beings no longer Dasein in Heideggarian sense. Why keep for them the term subject? People so totally traumatized their personalities are erased, you are not engaged in reality, you are a living dead. There is no space in Heidegger for living dead.

Human beings which are no longer Dasein, you don’t get engagement, Musselman, why do you keep the term subjects. Early Heidegger dismisses modern subjectivity presupposes, as if I am here, reality is over there, I passively observe it, but no we are thrown into it. In naive terms of people so traumatised their personality was erased, you find this type of subject, you are living dead, you are not engaged. No wonder Heidegger made tasteless remark about producing corpses, but this terrifying position in which you are living dead, alive but no engaged, death camps, Here we come to COGITO. The reason after long flirting with Heidegger and different subversions of ego, logic of fantasme he returns to COGITO.

I think where I am not. I think where I am not. The unconscious is not being outside thought, but thought outside being. Finally he asserts cogito ergo sum, as an empty identity. Unique point where I neither think nor am, brief nobody without substance. This empty point of cogito, is neither onto, nor logical. It is real of jouissance

Heidegger doesn’t have concepts to think this, the terrifying position of Musselman, the living dead in Auschwitz.

There is another dimension in cogito, a dimension is a first step this gap between BEING and LOGOS, language and thinking.

There must be a deadlock in substance to push it towards productivity.

Hegel: Things become what they always were, becomes what it is. Things become what they always already are, always already are is necessity, become is contingency.

Caesar just crossed a shitty small river, by crossing it he retroactively structured his past.

ACT: the true act is beyond the realization of possibilities, the true act creates his own possibilities. T.S. Eliot every really great work of art doesn’t only designate a break, it chages the entire past. The entire past is differently structured. The best example is Kafka, Borges wrote on Kafka had forerunners, Blake, Dostoevsky, but we can only say that after Kafka is here, Kafka retroactively creates his own forerunners. This is what Hegel means by totality or concrete universality. Historicist thinks in continuous evolution, for a dialectical materialist there is no continuum, retroactively re-written, history is continually being rewritten, history is constantly rewriting the totality itself.

The primordial form of negativity, is excessive

Hegel and Madness: Hegel tries to develop out of animals human spirituality emerge. He starts at habits, to simplify, his idea is that first you have traumatic gap: madness, which you try to control through mechanical habits. If you want to think creatively, you can only do it against the background of thinking automatically, you can be free only as far as you obey the rules of language. Madness always remains as a potential threat to our existence, we can be human only against the persisting insisting background of madness.

When you have a totality and something appears as its lowest excremental outpost, that is truth of totality. The standpoint of truth is the outcast. Why is notion of Rabble important?

Hegel’s concrete universality is totally misunderstood, if think parts vis a vis an organic totality. We cannot be members of society as directly abstract individuals, you can only occupy a place in a specific role: worker, mother. No. Hegel’s point is totality becomes concrete when you include abstraction.

Cogito: Marx of German Ideology, cogito is ideological illusion, what exists is concrete living people blah blah. You experience yourself as actually existing abstraction, you relate to all your particular features as contingent. Lacan says personality is the stuff of the “I”.

My truth is the void of the cogito.

You have to be shattered, you have to say hello and encounter abstract negativity: WAR and the necessity of rebellion. From time to time you have to have war.

Sexuality: Hegel is not radical enough measured by his own standards. He is almost a vulgar evolutionist. We humans gradually put on it human symbolic mediated form. Instead of directly raping her, I write poems a sumblimated idealized form.

The CUT as such. Isn’t it clear, here Hegel is not at level of Freud. It is not culture overcome sexuality making it civililized, sexuality is precisely the domain that separates humans from animals.

Rituals try to control not nature but death drive, sexual passion.

Nature — civiliszed sex. you have something in between, even Kant got this: Man is an animal who needs a master, Why? Not to control civilized instincts, but there is a strange excessive, unruliness, that has to be controlled. Cutting its links to organic reproductive goal, and develops other plurality of aims. Sacrifice all utilitarian interests for this.

Something has to repeat itself (without aufhebun). Madness, sexual passion, war are always there as a possibility.

STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION: when I see/encounter another consciousness, I am the absolute, and now there is another which is an absolute, 2 are there when there is only place for 1.

There is no sexual relation: women are from Mars blah blah

Sexual difference is not the difference between men and women, but difference of gap, incessant production of what is feminine and masculine, we are constantly are defining what is masculine and feminine but because there is a difference that produces this incessant production

Sex/Gender

sexual difference is niether sex nor gender it is precisely what stands at the of nature and culture

zupancic the real

Zupančič Realism in Psychoanalysis
ICI Conference Berlin 2011 Lecture on the second day, 29 March 2011

The absolutely crucial point of this ‘psychoanalytic realism’ is that the real is not a substance or being, but precisely its limit.

That is to say, the real is that which traditional ontology had to cut off in order to be able to speak of ‘being qua being’.

We only arrive at being qua being by subtracting something from it – and this something is precisely the ‘hole’, that which it lacks in order to be fully constituted as being;

the zone of the real is the interval within being itself, on account of which no being is ‘being qua being’, but can only be by being something else than it is.

One can ask, of course, how can it matter if one cuts off something that is not there to begin with?

It matters very much not only because it becomes something when it is cut off, but also since the something it becomes is the very object of psychoanalysis.

zupancic materialism and real

Zupančič Realism in Psychoanalysis

Conference ICI Berlin
One Divides Into Two: Dialectics, Negativity & Clinamen
Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, and Mladen Dolar
March 2011

One of the great merits of Meillassoux’s book is that it has (re)opened, not so much the question of the relationship between philosophy and science, as the question of whether they are speaking about the same world.

I emphasize … another dimension of his [Meillassoux’s] gesture, a dimension enthusiastically embraced by our Zeitgeist, even though it has little philosophical (or scientific) value, and is based on free associations related to some more or less obscure feelings of the present Unbehagen in der Kultur. Let us call it its psychological dimension, which can be summed up by the following story:

After Descartes we have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside, the Real, and have become prisoners of our own subjective or discursive cage. The only outside we are dealing with is the outside posited or constituted by ourselves or different discursive practices. And there is a growing discomfort, claustrophobia in this imprisonment, this constant obsession with ourselves, this impossibility to ever get out of the external inside that we have thus constructed.

There is also a political discomfort that is put into play here, that feeling of frustrating impotence, of the impossibility of really changing anything, of soaking in small and big disappointments of recent and not so recent history. Hence a certain additional redemptive charm of a project that promises again to break out into the great Outside, to reinstitute the Real in its absolute dimension, and to ontologically ground the possibility of radical change.

One should insist, however, that the crucial aspect of Meillassoux lies entirely elsewhere than in this story which has found in him (perhaps not all together without his complicity) the support of a certain fantasy, namely and precisely the fantasy of the ‘great Outside’ which will save us – from what, finally?…

it is a fantasy in the strict psychoanalytic sense: a screen that covers up the fact that the discursive reality is itself leaking, contradictory, and entangled with the Real as its irreducible other side. That is to say: the great Outside is the fantasy that covers up the Real that is already right here.

In Lacan we find a whole series of such, very strong statements, for example: ‘Energy is not a substance…, it’s a numerical constant that a physicist has to find in his calculations, so as to be able to work’.

The fact that science speaks about this or that law of nature and about the universe does not mean that it preserves the perspective of the great Outside (as not discursively constituted in any way), rather the opposite is the case. Modern science starts when it produces its object.

This is not to be understood in the Kantian sense of the transcendental constitution of phenomena, but in a slightly different, and stronger sense.

Modern science literally creates a new real(ity); it is not that the object of science is ‘mediated’ by its formulas, rather, it is indistinguishable from them; it does not exist outside them, yet it is real.

It has real consequences or consequences in the real. More precisely: the new real that emerges with the Galilean scientific revolution (the complete mathematisation of science) is a real in which – and this is decisive – (the scientific) discourse has consequences.

Such as, for example, landing on the moon. For, the fact that this discourse has consequences in the real does not hold for nature in the broad and lax sense of the word, it only holds for nature as physics or for physical nature.

At stake is a key dimension of a possible definition of materialism, which one could formulate as follows: materialism is not guaranteed by any matter. It is not the reference to matter as the ultimate substance from which all emerges (and which, in this conceptual perspective, is often highly spiritualized), that leads to true materialism.

The true materialism, which – as Lacan puts is with a stunning directness in another significant passage – can only be a dialectical materialism, is not grounded in the primacy of matter nor in matter as first principle, but in the notion of conflict, of split, and of the ‘parallax of the real’ produced in it.

In other words, the fundamental axiom of materialism is not ‘matter is all’ or ‘matter is primary’, but relates rather to the primacy of a cut. And, of course, this is not without consequences for the kind of realism that pertains to this materialism.

dolar being and void pt2

Mladen Dolar (2013) “The Atom and the Void – from Democritus to Lacan.” Filozofski vestnik Volume XXXIV, Number 2, 11–26.

Hasn’t one avoided the void by espousing it? The void can be seen as the way to make non-being manageable, to turn it into something countable, the very condition of count.

But ‘is’ there non-being which cannot be quite accounted for by the binary couple of the one and the void?

dolar 1 into 2 (pt2)

Dolar, Mladen “One Divides into Two.” e-flux journal #33 March 2012.

What, if anything, is the Other? What is the Other the name for?

The first answer proposed by Lacan develops in the direction of the Other as the Other of the symbolic order, the Other of language, the Other upholding the very realm of the symbolic, functioning as its guarantee, its necessary supposition, that which enables it to signify.

And if this claim is to be placed within the general thrust of structuralism, which was then dominant, the name of the Other, in this view, would be the structure.

The Other is the Other of structure, and one can nostalgically recall its Saussurean and Levi-Straussian underpinnings.

What follows from there, in the same general thrust, is the notorious formula The unconscious is structured like a language — The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.
****

Footnote: What if anything, is the Other? But asking “What?” already precludes another way of asking, namely, “Who is the other?” For the question of the other is first dramatically posed in relation to another person, this alter ego next to me, the same as me and for that very reason all the more the Other.

This is where the whole drama of what Lacan famously called the mirror stage comes in, the mirror stage “as formative of the function of the ego,” as the title of his first paper runs.

In this drama, the “alter ego” is constitutive of the ego, precisely insofar as it is the agent of alterity, opacity, the foreignness of the Other, under the auspices of “the same,” and it is only by this other and through it that one can assume the self of the ego as “my own,”

The foreignness of the other intersects with the own-ness of the self; the other is on the one hand homogenized, so that I can recognize myself in it, but only at the price of alienating myself in this image of the other — the other is the same as me, my double, and precisely because of that my competitor, my opponent, an intimate enemy who threatens my life and integrity.

And one can, in another quick aside, point to the fact that Levinas took his cue from this same constellation, from the question of “Who is the other?” from the alterity of the other, epitomized strikingly and immediately by his or her face, in a way that cannot be circumvented and that circumscribes the very notion of the self so his whole enterprise hinges massively on the question of the two and how to conceive it, and on the ethics that follows, taking the Other as its guideline. This is his particular way of taking up the question of the two.

******

There are two perspectives on this structure.

1.) The first, stemming from Saussure, treats language as a system in which all entities
are differential and oppositive, made of differences. No element has an identity or substance of its own; it is defined only through its difference from others, its whole being is exhausted by its difference, and hence they hang together, they are bound together with an iron necessity of tight interdependence. The symbolic is made of differences, and only of differences — and since it has no firm, substantial hold it can equally and with equanimity be applied to language, kinship, food, myth, clothing — the whole of culture.

2.) But the second perspective, the one that Freud opens up with the unconscious, presents the slide of contingency within this well-ordered system.

The words contingently and erratically sound alike; not ruled by grammar or semantics, they
contaminate each other, they slip, and this is where the unconscious takes the chance of appearing in cracks and loopholes.

The first perspective hinges on necessity, ruled by differentiality, which is what makes linguistics possible.

The second perspective hinges on contingent similarities and cracks and is the nightmare of linguistics, because its logic is quirky and unpredictable; it pertains to what Lacan called linguisterie and lalangue.

So if we have on one hand the Other of the Saussurean structure, or system, then the unconscious represents a bug in the system, the fact that it can never quite work without a bug.

With the unconscious the structure slips.

What was supposed to work as the Other, the bearer of rule and necessity, the guarantee of meaning, shows its other face, which is whimsical and ephemeral and makes meaning slide. The Other is the Other with the bug.

And what is more, it is only the bug that ultimately makes the Other other — the Other is the Other not on account of structure, but because of the bug that keeps derailing it.

The bug is the anomaly of the Other, its face of inconsistency, that which defies regularity and law.

Inside the Other of language, which enables speech, <strong>there emerges another Other that derails speech and makes us say something else than we intended</strong>, derailing the intention of meaning.

Yet the second Other cannot be seized and maintained independently of the first as another Other, the Other within the Other — the Other cannot be duplicated and counted, the bug makes it uncountable.

The alterity of the unconscious is not cut of the stuff of symbolic differences, it opens a difference that is not merely a symbolic difference, but that is, so to speak, “the difference within the difference,” another kind of difference within the symbolic one, a difference recalcitrant to integration into the symbolic, and yet only emerging in its bosom, with no separate realm of its own.

And the very notion of subjectivity pertains precisely to the impossibility of reducing the second difference to the first one.

In other words, the subject that emerges there is premised on a “two,”on the relation to a kernel within the symbolic order that cannot be symbolically sublimated.

So the bottom line would be: there is an irreducible two, an irreducible gap between the One and the Other, and the unconscious, at its minimal, presents the figure of two that are not merged into one.

The problem that remains is that, well, the Other doesn’t exist.

dolar 1 into 2 pt1

Dolar, Mladen “One Divides into Two.” e-flux journal #33 March 2012.

This was an old Maoist slogan from the 1960s. Despite its air of universal truth it has become dated, and I fully realize the danger of appearing dated myself by starting in this way. Nowadays, one can recite this slogan in front of a class full of students and none will have ever heard it or have any inkling as to its bearing or its author — it’s almost like speaking Chinese.

However much we count, however many ones we add to the first one, we cannot count to the two of the Other. The progression of counting extends the initial one into a homogeneous and uniform process, while the Other presents a dimension that would be precisely “other” in relation to this uniformity.

In a nutshell, the otherness of the Other, if it can be conceived, is a dimension that cannot be accounted for in terms of One. If the Other exists, then we have some hope of escaping from the circle, or the ban, of One.

The dimension of the Other might present a two that would really make a difference, not merely a difference between one and another, that is, ultimately, between the one and itself, the count based on the internal splitting of one, but rather another difference altogether, beyond the delightful oxymoronic phrase “same difference.”

One can immediately appreciate the high philosophical stakes here. A large part of modern philosophy, if not all of it, has aligned under the banner of the Other, in one way or another, whatever particular names have been used to designate it, and if philosophy has thus espoused the slogan of the Other it has done so in order to establish a dimension that would beable to break the spell of One, in particular its complicity with totality, with forming a whole.

There is a hidden propensity of One to form a whole, to encompass multiplicity and heterogeneity within a single first principle. That program was pronounced at the dawn of philosophy, spelled out by Parmenides in three simple words, the slogan hen kai pan, one and all

So if the Other exists, if it can be conceived in terms other than the terms of one, it would permit us to get out of this ban and this circle.

Indeed, the task of modern philosophy, if I may take the liberty of using this grossly simplified and massive language, was to think the Other that would not be complicit in collusion with the One of hen kai pan, and thus, ultimately, the task to think the two, to conceive the Other that wouldn’t fall into the register of the One

***

I will invoke Freud and now I will take the tricky path of conceiving the two in terms of the Other in psychoanalysis, the Other being a key psychoanalytic term

I said above “If the Other exists …” and this brings me to a very basic asset that lies at the heart of psychoanalysis and the work of Jacques Lacan. There is something like a spectacular antinomy at the foundation of psychoanalytic theory,

an antinomy worthy of Kantian antinomies, and Kant has brought the notion of antinomy to a pinnacle where reason, as a striving for unity, runs into an irremediable two, an opposition that cannot be reduced.

This Lacanian antinomy of the two pertains to the nature of the Other.

One can pose it as the antinomy of two massively opposing statements:

1. There is the Other, which is the essential dimension that psychoanalysis has to deal with. Notoriously, Freud spoke of the unconscious as “ein anderer Schauplatz,” the other scene, another stage, a stage inherently other in relation to the one of consciousness, to its count and to what it can account for. It defies the count of consciousness, which is ultimately the homogeneous count providing sense as a unitary prospect

So there is the Other of the unconscious. … “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.”

And another of his formulas runs: “Desire is the desire of the Other”

There is an Other that agitates our desires and prevents us from assuming them simply our own. These two short statements, in no uncertain terms, place the unconscious and desire under the banner of the Other.

There is the unconscious, and there is desire only insofar as each intimately pertains to the Other, they are “of the Other,” and the Other is what stirs their intimacy.

There is the Other at the heart of all entities that psychoanalysis has to deal with, … the Other of a qualitatively different nature in relation to the realm of One.

2. The second part of this antinomy, in stark contradiction to the first, states bluntly: The Other lacks.

There is a lack in the Other, the Other is haunted by a lack, or to extend it a bit further: The Other doesn’t exist.

“There is the Other” vs. “The Other doesn’t exist.”

How can the very dimension on which psychoanalysis is ultimately premised not exist?

What is the status of this Other that is emphatically there, permeating the very notion of the unconscious, of desire, and so forth, and that yet at the same time emphatically lacks?

Can the two statements be reconciled in their glaring contradiction?

Is this a case of a Kantian antinomy, exceeding the limits of knowledge and unitary reasoning?

And how can one posit the Other as the very notion surpassing the boundaries and the framework of One while maintaining that it lacks?

Is this an exhaustive alternative?

dolar being and void pt 1

Mladen Dolar (2013) “The Atom and the Void – from Democritus to Lacan.” Filozofski vestnik, Vol XXXIV, Number 2, 11–26.

The path of the void and of non-being is the path that one cannot possibly adopt and therefore one must not adopt it (‘it must not be’) – but why the prohibition since one cannot conceivably adopt it at all?

Why prohibit something that cannot be anyway?

The tacit presupposition of the first statement, its implicit assumption, is that one must act in favour of being to counteract a possible catastrophe, to abjure the void. One is on a battlefront, and being is a weapon one has to use against an unfathomable enemy.

… being would be like a defense mechanism against the void, and by presenting being as a matter of choice and decision there is a disavowed primacy of the void as the lure, the temptation and the threat, lurking behind any talk about being, part and parcel with its logos.

So how did the void come about? It came about as the discourse of being as the defense mechanism against the void.

Atomism emerged as a reaction against the Parmenidian assertion of being, not accepting the choice and the alternative, but taking both paths at the same time, … it introduces the void as the essential component of being. … one posits the non-being at the core of being

atomism includes a certain insight that Hegel sees as valid and far-reaching, namely that there is a principle of negativity which moves both thought and being, and that this principle forms the inside of both at their core,

****
The Lacanian real – and if there is a Lacanian materialism, then it pertains to the notion of the real – is neither a thought, an idea, nor a being (nor matter for that matter), but something emerging precisely in their rift, something that gets lost in the subsequent self-evident division into being and thought and their opposition.
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So what is indivisible to Hegel is neither the one nor the void, the indivisible is the division itself.

However far we seek for a minimal element, we never arrive at a one as the minimal and the indivisible, but at the division. … what cannot be divided any further is the division;

Against the Parmenidian exorcism of the void, he takes up the atomistic espousal of the void as the way to address the basic matrix of being.

Against the exclusion of the void, there is the inclusion of the void into each particle, the missing half of anything positively existing, of any manifestation of being, and this invisible missing half endows being with Unruhe, its unrest, its restlessness, its being ever propelled, the fact that it can only be addressed in its becoming, its production and its incompleteness.

glynos fantasy

Glynos, Jason and Yannis Stavrakakis. (2008) “Lacan and Political Subjectivity: Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory.” Subjectivity, 2008, 24, (256-274)

The idea of the subject as lack cannot be separated from the subject’s attempts to cover over this constitutive lack at the level of representation by affirming its positive (symbolic-imaginary) identity or, when this fails, through continuous identificatory acts aiming to re-institute an identity.

This lack necessitates the constitution of every identity though processes of identification with social available traits of identification found, for example, in political ideologies, practices of consumption, and a whole range of social roles; and vice versa: the inability of identificatory acts to produce a full identity by subsuming subjective division (re)produces the radical ex-centricity of the subject and, along with it, a whole negative dialectics of partial fixation. Subjectivity in Lacan’s work, then, is linked not only to lack but also our attempts to eliminate this lack that, however, does not stop re-emerging. (260-261)

A different relation to fantasy and thus mode of enjoyment or subjectivity is possible

– phallic jouissance: a subject is in thrall to his fantasy and thus insensitive “to the contingency of social reality.” an aversion to ambiguity

A non-phallic form of enjoyment (jouissance feminine or Other jouissance) Here the subject is taken to acknowledge and affirm the contingency of social relations and to pursue an enjoyment that is not guided by the impulse to “complete”, to “totalize”, or to “make full or whole”, an enjoyment situated, rather, on the “the side of the not-whole”.

Seminar VI commentary by miller

This is Jacques-Alain Miller’s commentary on Lacan’s Seminar VI Desire and Its Interpretation.

What does Lacan show? That desire is not a biological function; that it is not directed to a natural object; that its object is fantasmatic. Thereby, desire is extravagant. It is elusive to anything that wants to master it. It plays tricks on you. But also, if it is not recognised, it produces symptoms. In an analysis, it is a question of interpreting, that is to say, of reading in the symptom the message of desire that it contains.

If desire goes astray, it arouses in exchange the invention of artifices which play the role of a compass. An animal species has its natural compass, which is unique. In the human species, the compasses are multiple: these are signifying montages, speeches. They say what has to be done: how to think, how to enjoy, how to reproduce. However, the fantasy of each remains irreducible to common ideas.

Until recent times, our compasses, as diverse as they are, always pointed to the same north: the Father. We believed that patriarch to be an anthropological invariant. His decline is accelerated with equality of conditions, the increased power of capitalism, the domination of technology. We are in the process of leaving the age of the Father.

Another discourse is the the process of supplanting the old one. Innovation in the place of tradition. Rather than hierarchy, the network. The attraction of the future outweighs the burdens of the past. The feminine overtakes the manly. There where there was an immutable order, transformational fluxes push incessantly at every limit.

Freud is from the age of the father. He did a lot to save it. The Church ended up finally noticing that. Lacan followed the path opened up by Freud, but it drove him to suppose that the Father is a symptom. He shows it here in the example of Hamlet.

What we learned from Lacan – the formalisation of Oedipus, the accent put on the Name of the Father – was his only starting point. Seminar VI already reworks it: Oedipus is not the unique solution to desire, it is only its normalised form; it is a pathogen it does not exhaust the destiny of desire. In fact it is with a praise of perversion that the volume ends.

Lacan gives it the the value of a rebellion against the identifications which assure the maintenance of the social routine. This Seminar announced “the realignment of previously instated conformisms, or even their explosion”. That is where we are. Lacan speaks to us.