Category: sinthome

Alenka Zupančič interview

2014

Alenka Zupančič : The Lacanian concept of the Real allows for a problematization of this opposition which had become paralysing and unproductive philosophically. We must of course be wary of the tendency to see in this Lacanian move a simple affirmation of a naive realism – the Real understood in this objectivist fashion. The ‘Real’ for Lacan is not reducible to the discursive but neither is it simply an advocation of an ontological realism, understood unproblematically. Especially since Lacan introduces a key difference between the notion of the Real and that of being. They are related via a ‘third dimension’, that of the ‘signifier’, but they do not coincide.

What Lacan wants to tell us is that the signifier has ontological significance, the signifier tells us about ontology in a way that the notion of the signified is unable to (this latter being the usual realist referent; the object as the signified).

The signifier is interesting not because we could reduce everything to it and to different signifying operations (this reductionist question is completely false), but because there is something in the signifier and its operations that cannot be reduced back to the signifier and its operations.

This is the crucial point, and not some mythical or original outside of the signifier, irreducible to it. This is also what the ‘materialism of the signifier’ amounts to. Not simply to the fact that the signifier can have material consequences, but rather that the materialist position needs to do more than to pronounce matter the original principle. It has to account for a split or contradiction that is the matter. It has to grasp the concept of the matter beyond that imaginary notion of ‘something thick and hard’. I’m not saying: ‘For Lacan, the signifieris the real matter’, not at all.

I’m saying that, for Lacan, the signifier is what enables us to perceive the non-coincidence between being and the Real, and that this is what eventually leads to a new kind of materialism.

From this point of view, we can say that Lacan develops the modern moment in philosophy, but as Žižek says, ‘he develops it with a twist’. Then there is the new concept of the subject – another Lacanian ‘revolution’ in philosophy, retroactively relating the subject of the unconscious to the Cartesian cogito. This is often one of the great misunderstandings of Lacan (and psychoanalysis), that it jettisons the cogito, that it is anti-Cartesian pure and simple. This is a significant misunderstanding of the psychoanalytical concept of the ‘subject’ which was one of the main concepts for the delineation of a specific Lacanian orientation in the first place. This concept of ‘subject’ distinguished Lacan from the wider structuralist movement and their notion of a ‘subjectless structure’.

But somehow this conception of ‘subject’ is interpreted as anti-cogito, as the ‘subject’ is the unconscious subject. Therefore, it was important to clarify the connection between cogito and the unconscious and for example, there is an important anthology from the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, where we explore this problematic in detail (Cogito and the Unconscious edited by Žižek [1998a] and including essays by all three thinkers as well as others in the Slovenian wider group of theorists). There is also the question of the radical break with premodern metaphysics involved in the Cartesian gesture, which Lacan judges crucial for the emergence of the subject of the unconscious.

This theme is crucial also for his understanding of ethics. In his important early seminar, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992), he is discussing the history of ethical thought as it related for example to the metaphysical tradition. His specific example is Aristotle and there is obviously a debt here on one level to Aristotle’s Ethics as a text and conceptual scheme. However, there is also a clear and radical parting of the ways.

In my own work on ethics, in The Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (Zupančič 2000), I draw out some of these themes. For example, I put forward a critique of what I term ‘bio-morality’ and which, in its contemporary developments, represents an allegiance (albeit in rather reduced ways) to Aristotle’s eudaimonistic ethics and metaphysics of being. This is not simply a criticism of Aristotle, but rather of what a revival of his conceptual paradigm today amounts to.

In relationship to the theme of ethics, I want to stress that what I develop out of Kant’s ethics must not be opposed or seen as completely distinct from politics. As Žižek very rightly pointed out, the contemporary fashion of playing (‘good’) ethics against (‘bad’) politics is more often than not a direct pendant of the ideology of late capitalism and its conception of democracy. Any rigorous political thought is conceived as potentially dangerous and leading to a possible ‘disaster’ (that is to say to a more fundamental change in how the present order functions), whereas ethics seems to be much safer, and centred mostly on our individual responsibility, rather than any kind of collective engagement. My own work on Kant and ethics already went against this tendency, pointing both at an unsettling dimension of Kantian ethics, as well as at its emphasis on the universal, rather than simply individual.

It is similar with psychoanalysis which supposedly also focuses on individual destinies and problems. Here, am I allowed to tell my joke about the grain of seed, or the man who thinks he is one?

He gets cured by the psychoanalysts and then he comes running back, crying that he has just been chased by a chicken. Don’t you know you are a human being, they say? Yes, I am cured. I know that I am a human being, and not a grain of seed. But, please, does the chicken know this? This is the crux of the politics (which is also an ethics) in the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. It is not enough simply to deal with the plight of the ‘subject’ and fantasy, through psychoanalysis.

Rather, we must seek to transform the structures of the symbolic which sustain a given order, determine the Impossible-Real that they grapple with.

Sexuality

Alenka Zupančič: Yes, when we understand the question ‘why Freud and Lacan?’, or the question ‘why psychoanalysis?’, we come close to an understanding of the paradigmatic role which a revised notion of ‘sexuality’ must play in this discussion. Joan Copjec succinctly pointed out how, for example, in the term ‘sexual difference’ the term ‘sex’ has been replaced by the more neutered category of ‘gender’. As Joan – an allied member of the ‘Ljubljana School’ – put it: Gender theory performed one major feat: it removed the sex from sex. For awhile, gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex or sexuality is; sex was no longer the subject of an ontological inquiry and reverted instead to being what it was in common parlance: some vague sort of distinction, but basically a secondary characteristic (when applied to the subject), a qualifier added to others, or (when applied to an act) something a bit naughty.

This is very far from what both Freud (from his early, 1905 text Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [Freud 1977]) and Lacan have been saying. For Freud, the notion of the ‘sexual’ is significantly broader than contemporary notions of sex. It is not a substance to be properly described and understood (by psychoanalysis), but more like an impasse that generates and structures different discursive edifices trying to respond to it. It is linked to a notion of a fundamental ontological impasse; this impasse is irreducible for Freud.

But we also see here all the accusations against psychoanalysis, that ‘Freud reduces everything to sex’. In one sense, this accusation is true but what it misses is the complexification and radicalization of what we mean by ‘sexuality’. Freud discovered human sexuality as a problem (in need of explanation), and not as something with which one could eventually explain every (other) problem. He ‘discovered’ sexuality as intrinsically meaningless, and not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning. A clarification of this point is one of my ‘interventions’ in Why Psychoanalysis? Three Interventions (Zupančič 2008b). Lately, I dedicated a whole book to these questions – it came out in 2011 in Slovenia, but I’m still working on its English version.

On Materialism

The materialism of psychoanalysis is not simply materialism of the body;
and Lacan has learnt the philosophical lesson that is essential in this
respect: in order to be ‘materialist’ it is not enough to refer to the matter
as the first principle from which everything develops.

For, in this, we easily succumb to a rather idealistic notion of a somehow always-already spirited (‘vibrant’) matter. In recent debates, psychoanalysis – in the same package with all of the so-called post-structuralist thought – is often accused of relying on the formula ‘always-already’ as its magical formula. But this accusation misses the whole point: for psychoanalysis, ‘always-already’ is a retroactive effect of some radical contingency that changes given symbolic coordinates.

What a materialism worthy of this name has to do today is to propose a conceptualization of contingency (a break that comes from nowhere, ‘ex-nihilo’ so to say) in its complex relation to the structuring of the world.

Also, thinking is not simply opposed to things (and to matter), it is part of the thing it thinks, without being fully reducible to it. To advocate materialism and the ‘Real’ is not to advocate anti-thought. Quite the contrary, we might say – it calls for more and more thinking. And this is a problem that I sometimes detect in the recent flourishing of ‘new materialisms’ – a kind of abdication of thinking when it comes to more complex structures and arguments, as if common sense simplicities were inherently more ‘materialist’ than something
which is more complex and perhaps paradox ridden.

On Nietzsche

Alenka Zupančič: A key part of the Nietzschean legacy is I think working against the ‘moralisation’ of the symbolic, which Nietzsche describes so well in The Genealogy of Morals, for example, and which for example is also a key theme in relation to the thematic of the ‘moralisation of politics’, which I mentioned earlier.

Concerning nihilism and to quote Ray Brassier, from his text Nihil Unbound, there are things to be said for nihilism. It depends, of course, on what we mean by nihilism. If we mean by it a certain materialist position which recognizes contingency of, for example, our being in the world, and which points to a limit of ‘making sense of (all) things’, then we must say that to a great extent we cannot go beyond nihilism.

Yet this does not imply for Nietzsche that we sink in the depressive feelings of ‘worthlessness of all things’. On the contrary, it rather implies what he calls ‘gay science’. But, we must simultaneously avoid what Nietzsche calls ‘reactive nihilism’ and this is, of course, bound up with his whole critique of ressentiment (or ‘acting against’, reactiveness). To say that there is no ultimate cause of things is not to say that nothing itself is the ultimate cause of things, which amounts to putting the Nothing in the office of the Absolute.

Describing the difference between active and passive nihilism, Nietzsche famously says that man would ‘rather will nothingness than not will’ (On the Genealogy of Morals). And we could say that what defines (contemporary) passive nihilism is precisely that man would rather not will than will anything too strongly (because the latter supposedly inevitably leads to some kind of ‘nihilist’ catastrophe). And this seems to become synonymous with what ‘ethics’ now is in contemporary culture and society and the wider ‘moralisation of politics’, ‘biomorality’ etc. (to which I strongly oppose an ‘ethics of the Real’). There is a ‘deactivation’ of the will, which is also a deactivation of the ‘political will’, of the political as such as a paradigmatic space and temporality of antagonism, of the ‘Real’.

In my view, the genuinely new Nietzschean notion of nothingor n egativity is not simply that of ‘active nihilism’ as opposed to ‘passive nihilism’, but rather a transfiguration of nothing. Nothing/negativity is not a kind of ultimate absolute, but rather the smallest yet irreducible difference that is inscribed in being qua being. This is what I argue in my book. I use Nietzsche’s own metaphor of ‘the shortest shadow’. When speaking of going beyond the opposition real world/apparent world, Nietzsche describes this moment as ‘Midday; moment of the shortest shadow’ (Twilight of Idols).

Midday is thus not for him the moment when the sun embraces everything,
makes all shadows and all negativity disappear, and constitutes an undivided Unity of the world; it is the moment of the shortest shadow. And, what is the shortest shadow of a thing, if not this thing itself? Yet, for Nietzsche, this does not mean that the two becomes one, but, rather, that one becomes two. Why?

The thing (as one) no longer throws its shadow upon another thing; instead, it throws its shadow upon itself, thus becoming, at the same time, the thing and
its shadow, the real and its appearance. When the sun is at its zenith, things are not simply exposed (‘naked’, as it were); they are, so to speak, dressed in their own shadows. In other words: it is not simply that our representations do not coincide with things, it is rather that things do not simply coincide with themselves. There is thus an imperative to ‘think through’ this negativity. We
need to philosophize, as Žižek has said, philosophy is now more important than ever. It is not a game of textualism as some postmodernists would like to suggest perhaps.

The Subject

Alenka Zupančič: We can say that subject is ‘the answer of the Real’, as Lacan puts it somewhere, or that it is the effect of the rift/inconsistency of the structure. And we can indeed contrast this with the structuralist notion that there is a ‘structure without a subject’, a subjectless structure.

But what is at stake is above all a profound reconfiguration of what both ‘structure’ and ‘subject’ mean, refer to. We can begin with the notion of the structure which differs in Lacan from the classical structuralist notion. Very simply put: for Lacan, structure is ‘not-all’ (or ‘not whole’), which is what he articulates with the concept of the ‘barred Other’. This implies a lack, a contradiction as – so to say – ‘structuring principle of the structure’. Structure is always and at the same time more and less than structure. And this is where the new notion of the subject comes in. Subject is not the opposite of the structure, it is not some intentionality which uses structure to express itself, or which tries to get its more or less authentic voice heard through it.

Subject is a singular torsion produced by the inconsistency of the structure.

Take the simple example of the slips of the tongue: for Freud and Lacan, they do not bear witness to a hidden(unconscious) force repressed by the structure, which nevertheless betrays its presence by these slips.

Rather, they are singular existences of structure’s own inherent negativity. This is also the argument that I want to make in the context of the contemporary debates concerning realism, which often disqualify thought or thinking as something merely subjective (facing external reality). Put in a couple of formulas: Instead of taking it as something situated vis-à-vis being, we should conceive of thought as an objectivized (and necessarily dislocated) instance of the non-relation (contradiction, inconsistency) and rift inherent in being (in ‘objective reality’). Thinking is a necessarily displaced objectification (‘objective existence’) of this rift, that is, of the relation of being to its own
‘non-’, to its own negativity.

Although being is indeed independent of thinking, the rift that structures it only objectively exists as thought, and this perspective opens a new way of conceiving realism and/or materialism. This is precisely how I would also read the Lacanian subject. And this is why if we remove subject from the structure, we do not get closer to objective reality, but rather further away from it.

We can also say that the subject for Lacan is ‘objectively subjective’, there is an asymmetry in the subject, something in the subject which is not just subjective but which is also inaccessible to the subject.

We can see the connection back to Kant. The Kantian subject I would endorse is that ‘pure something, X, which thinks’, the transcendental unity of apperception. The point where subjectivity is not fully assumable and the point where the object is not reducible to or is ‘not yet’ objectivity (this is Lacan’s notion of objet petit a). Here, we see also that the Lacanian subject radicalizes the traditional ‘object’. The concept of the ‘object a’ is perhaps the most significant Lacanian conceptual invention.

Ethics

Alenka Zupančič: No, the notions of good and evil are not simply irrelevant to ethics, I would say, although they are indiscernible in advance. The responsibility we have is to decide what is good. It is difficult to overstate Kant’s significance in this respect. He did two things which may look incompatible: first, he founded ethics exclusively in human reason: no God or any other pre-established Good can serve as basis of morality. But instead of this leading to a kind of ‘relativised’, finitude-bound morality, it led to the birth of the modern thought of the absolute, the unconditional, and of the infinite as the possible, even imperative dimension of the finite.

Whatever objections we may raise to the Kantian ethics –for example, and already, from Hegel’s perspective – it was with Kant that the standing oppositions like absolute/contingent, lawful/unconditional, finite/infinite broke down, and the path was opened for a truly modern reconfiguration of these terms.

In the twentieth century, Kantian ethics has been largely domesticated to serve as an important ideological foundation of the contemporary democratic liberalism and of the gradual replacement of an emancipatory politics with the discourse of human rights or simply ethics.

I’ve always been astonished by the fact that a really radical, uncompromising and excess-ridden writing like Kant’s could be referred to in order to pacify the excess (of the political or something else). When the Nazi criminal Eichmann infamously defended himself by saying that in his doing he has been simply following the Kantian categorical imperative, this was of course an obscene perversion of Kant’s thought.

As Žižek succinctly formulated: what follows from Kant is not that we can use moral law as an excuse for our actions (‘oh, I wouldn’t do it, but the moral law commanded so’), we are absolutely responsible for the very law we are ‘executing’.

But Eichmann’s perverse defence did point at the unsettling core exposed by Kant: the unconditional law is one with (the excess of) freedom.

Lacan was probably the first to properly recognize this unsettling, excessive moment that Kant discovered at the very core of ethics.

When he wrote his famous essay ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b), the point was not that Kant is in truth as excessive as Sade, but rather that Sade is already a ‘taming’, a pacification – in terms perversion – of the impossible/real circumscribed by Kant. This is the thread I tried to follow in my book: Kant’s discovery of this unsettling, excessive negativity at the very core of Reason. I was not interested so much in ethics as ethics, as in this thing that Kant has formulated through his considerations of ethics.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Does this mean that the ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ simply pits the Real against the symbolic or is there something else going on here? Also, how does the concept of ‘drive’ and especially the concept of ‘death drive’, which Žižek emphasizes,relate to an ethical dimension? Finally, what does the Lacanian concept of ‘desire’ (as he describes it in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) have to do with this? Is ‘desire’ simply jettisoned in the later work?

Alenka Zupančič: In respect to the relation between symbolic and the Real, there are certainly oscillations and shifts at work already in Lacan, as well as in the work of the three of us (together and separately). The idea that the Real is a kind of unbearable, repulsive thickness beyond the symbolic, left out of it and inaccessible to it, may have had some presence in our work at some point. But I think it is fair to say that for many years now we are all struggling precisely with the problem of a different way of relating them as absolutely crucial. There are some differences in the way we go about it,

but the main and shared shift of perspective that orientates our work could be perhaps summed up as follows: the Real is not any kind of substance or being. It pertains to being (and to the symbolic) as its inherent contradiction/antagonism.

I started working on this issue first by getting a bit more into Nietzsche (the first, Slovene version of the Nietzsche book was published in 2001). Borrowing from Badiou his notion of the ‘minimal difference’ and relating it to Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘shortest shadow’, I tried to develop the notion of the Real as not that of some Thing, but of the fundamental non-coincidence of things with themselves. This non-coincidence is not caused by the symbolic; rather, the symbolic is already a response to it: it is discursivity as necessarily biased by the constraints of the contradiction in being.

Parallel to this work on Nietzsche was also my working on the theme of love, and later on comedy as possible ways of articulating what is at stake in the relation between the symbolic and the real. Lately, and for some time now, I have been working on this through the question of the ontological implications of the psychoanalytic notion of the sexual. I could perhaps put it in one formula: The real is part of being which is not being (or which is not qua being), but which as such dictates the (symbolic) logic of its appearance.

The real is part of being which is not being (or which
is not qua being), but which as such dictates the (symbolic) logic of
its appearance.

the Real is not any kind of substance or being. It pertains to being (and to the symbolic) as its inherent contradiction/antagonism.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Can you say a bit more about the two key Lacanian concepts (not without political ramifications of course) of ‘desire’ and ‘drive’. You have already explicated these, to some extent, but can you develop some of the tensions between them? Also, how do these concepts develop in your work, as they seem to have a paradigmatic status while undergoing some transformation for example from the ‘Ethics of the Real’ book to the book on ‘comedy’. Finally, are there philosophical tensions between your work and the other members of the troika on this fraught relationship between ‘desire’ and ‘drive’?

Alenka Zupančič: Certainly, you are right to point to these concepts as paradigmatic, and they are also crucial when it comes to the articulation of the relationship of the symbolic, the imaginary and the Real You are also correct that there are some differences here – one would expect nothing less in a philosophical movement worth its salt.

In my own work, I take up the themes of desire and drive throughout. In Ethics of the Real I focused mostly, although not exclusively, on Lacan from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and The Transference (Seminars VII and VIII). The concept of desire is in the foreground in both, but there is also a shift that starts taking place there, a conceptual move from das Ding as the impossible/Real as the focal point of desire, to the introduction of the object a. This shift then gets a further and very complex elaboration in Lacan’s subsequent seminars. But to formulate what is at stake very briefly and simply, we could say that what is involved here is a move from the Real as the abyssal beyond of the symbolic,

to a concept (of the object a) which undermines the very logic and nature of the difference on which the previous conception of the Real was based.

Object a is neither symbolic nor Real (in the previous sense of the term). It refers to the very impossibility to sustain this kind of difference between the symbolic and the Real, and it is this impossibility that is now the Real.

This also opens the door for a more systematic introduction of the concept of the drive. The notion of the object a is crucial both for desire and drive, they are different ways of relating this impossible non-ontological dimension (a) to what is, to being. In the Seminar X (Anxiety) Lacan provides a formula that I think is absolutely crucial and which I also took as the guiding line of my work after Ethics: he says that love is a sublimation, and then defines sublimation in a very surprising way, namely that sublimation is what makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire. If one remembers the famous definition of sublimation from Lacan’s seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (‘sublimation is what elevates an object to the dignity of the Thing’) then the shift is indeed dramatic and surprising. This new notion of sublimation becomes directly associated with the question of the drive, for sublimation is also defined as a ‘nonrepressive satisfaction of the drive’.

Now, in Lacan, as well as in our reading of him, there is indeed perceptible a turn from the logic of desire to that of the drive as somehow truer. But this is not simply a turn (of interest) from the symbolic to the Real, as it sometimes seems. What is at stake is rather the recognition of the fact that the status of the Real as the impossible Beyond of the symbolic is actually an effect of desire and its logic. Desire casts the internal contradiction that drives it in terms of the inaccessible Beyond to which it can only approach asymptomatically. With drive, the contradiction remains internal, and the impossible remains accessible as the impossible. This, I think, is absolutely crucial, and this is what

I tried to formulate with the formula the ‘Real happens’: the point of Lacan’s identification of the Real with the impossible is not simply that the Real is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, and in this reading, the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impossible happens. This is what is so surprising, traumatic, disturbing, shattering – or funny – about the Real. The Real happens precisely as the impossible. It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it happen, or expect it, or are ready for it. It is always something that doesn’t fit the (established or the anticipated) picture, or fits it all too well. The Real as impossible means that there is no ‘right’ time or place for it, and not that it is impossible for it to happen (‘On love as comedy’, Zupančič 2000).

The Real happens precisely as the impossible. It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it happen, or expect it, or are ready for it.

So what is important to stress in this whole ‘turn’ to the logic of the drive is the following: this is not simply a turn to the drive on account of its supposedly being closer, truer to the Real (as established independently), but rather a turn toward a different conception of the Real as such.

With drive, the Real is no longer a relational notion (sustaining questions like ‘what is our attitude toward the Real?’). It rather suggests something like: our relation to the Real is already in the Real. This is why questions like ‘How to get outside to the Real?’ seem to be the wrong kind of questions.

This is because there is no outside of the Real from which one would approach the Real.

Zizek’s reply to Boucher

Boucher, G. (2005) The Law as a Thing : Žižek and the Graph of Desire.  In G. Boucher, J. Glynos, & M. Sharpe (Eds.), Traversing the Fantasy Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek. (pp. 23-44). Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Žižek Responds:

[…] my critics often fall into the trap of what Hegel called “reflexive determination”; what they describe as my oscillation is the projection into my work of the inadequacy of their own reading of my texts. They start with reducing my position to a simplified account of it, and when, afterwards, they are compelled to take note of how my texts do not fit this frame, they misperceive this gap as my own inconsistency or oscillation.

In the present volume, it is Boucher’s basic critical argument which, I think, can serve as an example: he first reads my opposition of public Law and its obscene superego supplement as the opposition between the conscious Law and the unconscious Real, i.e., he “essentialises” the obscene superego into a “pre-cultural Real”; then, of course, when he realises that my notion of the obscene superego doesn’t fit this substantialised “pre-cultural Real,” he transposes this inconsistency into my own theoretical edifice and arrives at the “antinomy governing Žižek’s theory”:

. . . on the one hand. the Real is only the “inherent transgression” of the Symbolic, and so we should cleave to the symbolic field by rejecting the allure of superego enjoyment. On the other hand, however, the symbolic field is nothing but a ruse, secretly supported by an obscene enjoyment that in actuality reigns supreme. … Because of the way Žižek has structured this subject, there is no way to get beyond the oscillation between the symbolic field and an obscene enjoyment, except by dispensing completely with the unconscious.

This alternative itself is false: both “hands” are here Boucher’s, i.e., what I advocate is neither the reduction of the obscene underside of the Law to its secondary “safety valve” to be rejected in the pursuit of a more adequate symbolic law,  nor a substantial Real which effectively “runs the show” and devalues the public Law into an impotent theatre of shadows.

The obscene underside, of course, is the supplement of a Law,  its shadowy double, its “inherent transgression”; it is not merely a secondary “safety valve,” but an active support of the public Law not a tolerated pseudo-excess, but a solicited excess. For this very reason, it functions as a Lacanian sinthome: a knot which literally holds together the Law — you dissolve the excess, and you lose the Law itself whose excess it is.

[…] what if the “oscillation” in question is not simply an epistemological default, but is part of the “thing itself,” a feature of the described socio-symbolic process?

An example from Boucher. again: ”The oscillation between the advocacy of presidential Bonapartism and a religious commune determines the compass of Žižek’s politics”.

What, however, if these are the two sides of the same coin — what if it is precisely because (what Boucher calls) the ”presidential Bonapartism” is the “truth” of democracy, that one should at least keep the space open for what Boucher calls my, advocacy of a “religious
commune” (actually, I locate religious communes into a series with revolutionary collectives like councils (“soviets”) and psychoanalYtic associations !).

There is another-politically much more crucial case of “oscillation” that my critics do not mention that fits this model, the one concerning the status of the obscene underside of the symbolic order: is this obscene underside of unwritten rules mainly the “inherent transgression” of the public Law (and, as such, its ultimate support), or does it also have a positive emancipatory function (the motif that I develop in my Lenin booklet: how an authentic contact with the ethnic, cultural — Other can only pass through an exchange of obscenities). Is, however, this really a case of my oscillation? What if this ambiguity is inscribed into the thing itself — what if the status of obscenity is ambiguous in itself?

fantasy sinthome

If fantasy is ‘the support that gives consistency to what we call reality’ (Ž Sublime Obj:49) on the other hand reality is always a symptom (ŽŽ 1992). Here we are insisting on the late Lacanian conception of the symptom as sinthome.

In this conception, a signifier is married to jouissance, a signifier is instituted in the real, outside the signifying chain but at the same time internal to it. This paradoxical role of the symptom can help us understand the paradoxical role of fantasy.  Fantasy gives discourse its consistency because it opposes the symptom (Ragland-Sullivan, 1991:16). Hence, if the symptom is an encounter with the real, with a traumatic point that resists symbolisation, and if the discursive has to arrest the real and repress jouissance in order to produce reality, then the negation of the real within fantasy can only be thought in terms of opposing, of stigmatising the symptom. This is then the relation between symptom and fantasy.

The self-consistency of a symbolic construction of reality depends on the harmony instituted by fantasy.

This fantasmatic harmony can only be sustained by the neutralisation of the symptom and of the real, by a negation of the generalised lack that crosses the field of the social. (Stavrakakis 1999, 64-65)

But how is this done? If social fantasy produces the self-consistency of a certain construction it can do so only by presenting the symptom as ‘an alien, disturbing intrusion, and not as the point of eruption of the otherwise hidden truth of the existing social order’ (ŽŽ 1991 Looking Awry:40). The social fantasy of a harmonious social or natural
order can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. […]

When, however, the dependence of fantasy on the symptom is revealed, then the play — —the relation— — between the symptom and fantasy reveals itself as another mode of the play between the real and the symbolic/imaginary nexus producing reality. (65)

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive 2004

Impervious to analysis and beyond interpretation, the sinthome — as stupid enjoyment, as the node of senseless compulsion on which the subject’s singularity depends — connects us to something Real beyond the “discourse” of the symptom, connects us to the unsymbolizable Thing over which we constantly stumble, and so in turn, to the death drive …  38

Thus, homosexuality is thought as a threat to the logic of  thought itself insofar as it figures the availability of an unthinkable jouissance that would put an end to fantasy — and, with it, to futurity — by reducing the  assurance of  meaning in fantasy’s promise of continuity to the meaningless circulation and repetitions of the drive.

Scrooge [in Dickens novel The Christmas Carol], as sinthomosexual, denies, by virtue of his unwillingness to contribute to the communal realization of futurity, the fantasy structure, the aesthetic frame, supporting reality itself. He realizes, that is, the jouissance that derealizes sociality and thereby threatens, in Zizek’s words, “the total destruction of the symbolic universe.” 44

Scrooge,the self-denying miser — living alone, and in darkness, on gruel — extends to his neighbors, however un­neighborly it no doubt makes him appear, the same self-denying enjoyment to which he readily submits as well.

In this he enacts the nega­tivity both Freud and Lacan discerned in the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself; he unleashes,that is,as the love of his neighbor, the force of a primal masochism like that of the superego asserting its sin­gular imperative, “Enjoy!”

What might seem to bespeak narcissistic isolation from everyone around him — his self-delighting stinginess, his solipsistic rejection of comforts, no less for others than for himself­ instantiates, then, a death drive opposed to the ego and the world of desire. It expresses, that is, the will-to-enjoyment perversely obedient to the superego’s insatiable and masochistic demands.

Scrooge’s persistence, therefore, as Scrooge, as the child-refusing sinthomosexual whom the spirit of Christmas Yet to Come exposes as a life-denying black hole, must be under­stood as determining that there can be no future at all.

Only by thus renouncing ourselves can queers escape the charge of embracing and promoting a “culture of death,” earning the right to be viewed as “something far greater than what we do with our genitals.”

A Christmas Carol, with astonishing clarity, spells out just how we gain that “right” when we learn that Scrooge, now family-friendly and bliss­fully pro-natalist, subsequently had (alas, poor Marley) “no further inter­course with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards”.  By accepting this peter-less principle, we might even­tually gain acceptance as the “social equals and responsible citizens” that Larry Kramer and others have demanded we become; we might find ourselves, like Scrooge, reborn, made over as “second father[s] “to the future, permitted to perform our part in the collective adoration of the Child and so to reinforce the fantasy always figured by Tiny Tim. 47

the sinthome refers to the mode of jouissance constitutive of the subject, which defines it no longer as subject of desire, but rather as subject of the drive

Where the symptom sustains the sub­ject’s relation to the reproduction of meaning, sustains, that is, the fan­tasy of meaning that futurism constantly weaves, the those fantasies by and within which the subject means.  And because, as Bruce Fink puts it, “the drives always seek a form of satisfaction that, from a Freudian or traditional moralistic standpoint, is considered per­verse,” the those fantasies by and within which the subject means.

And because, as Bruce Fink puts it, “the drives always seek a form of satisfaction that, from a Freudian or traditional moralistic standpoint, is considered per­verse,” the sinthome that drives the subject, that renders him subject of the drive, thus engages, on a figural level, a discourse of what, be­cause incapable of assimilation to heterosexual genitality, gets read, as if by default, as a version of homosexuality, itself conceived as a mode of enjoyment at the social order’s expense. As Fink goes on to observe: “What the drives seek is not heterosexual genital reproductive sexuality, but a partial object that provides jouissance.”

Sinthomosexuality, then, only means by figuring a threat to meaning, which depends on the promise of coming, in a future continuously deferred, into the presence that recon­ciles meaning with being in a fantasy of completion — a fantasy on which every subject’s cathexis of the signifying system depends.  As the shadow of death that would put out the light of heterosexual reproduction, how­ever, sinthomosexuality provides familial ideology, and the futurity whose cause it serves, with a paradoxical life support system by providing the occasion for both family and future to solicit our compassionate inter­vention insofar as they seem, like Tiny Tim, to be always on their last legs. 113

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2004.

Impossibly, against all reason, my project stakes its claim to the very space that “politics” makes unthink­able: the space outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears and so outside the conflict of visions that share as their presupposition that the body politic must survive. Indeed, at the heart of my polemical engagement … lies a simple provocation: that queerness names the sideof those not “fighting for the children,” the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.

The embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself. 6

parallax kant sade

So, far from announcing a triumphant solution, Lacan’s “Kant avec Sade,” his assertion of Sade as the truth of Kant, rather names an embarrassing problem that Lacan failed to resolve — and did not even fully confront — in his Ethics seminar: how are we to distinguish the appearance of pure desire—the violent gesture of transgressing the social domain of “servicing goods” and entering the terrifying domain of ate, that is, the ethical stance of the subject who “does not compromise his desire”—from the fully consummated “passion for the Real,” the subject’s disappearance-immersion in the primordial jouissance? 95

What, then, is the Fall from this Kantian perspective? Consider the first moments of a feminist awakening: it all begins not with a direct attack on patriarchy, but with experiencing one’s situation as unjust and humiliating, one’s passivity as a failure to act—is this very overwhelming awareness of failure not in itself a positive sign? Does it not, in a negative way, bear witness to the fact that women clearly perceive the need to assert themselves, that they perceive the lack of it as a failure? In the same way,“Fall” is the first step toward liberation—it represents the moment of knowledge, of cognizance of one’s situation. Thus “fall into sin” is a purely formal change: nothing changes in reality, it is just the subject’s stance toward reality that undergoes a radical change.

This means that the Fall in the religious sense (the knowledge of sin) is already a reaction to the Fall proper, the retreat from the “dizziness of freedom.”This is why it is crucial to realize that Kierkegaard leaps over the first contraction of finitude, the first emergence of a sinthome which makes the subject a creature proper, and goes directly from the primordial repose to the Prohibition.We should focus on the difference between the two withdrawals from the Void of infinity: the first one is the primordial contraction that creates the sinthome — it precedes Prohibition, while it is only the second one, the retreat from the “dizziness of freedom,” which is the Fall proper: with it,we enter the domain of the superego, of the vicious cycle of the Law and its transgression.

taking responsibility for excessive jouissance

In arguing that the subject’s relationship to itself changes as a consequence of symbolic divestiture, Žižek promotes a conception of ethics that psychoanalytic theorists will recognize as Lacanian insofar as it depends upon an intrasubjective relationship. Lacan’s statement that the only ethics proper to psychoanalysis involves the subject’s relationship to its desire (“do not give way on your desire”) explicitly contrasts both with the ethics of responsibility to the other extolled in Levinas and Derrida and with the “service of goods” that underwrites utilitarian versions of ethics. While remaining committed to an intrasubjective version of ethics, Žižek derives a somewhat different ethical stance from the later Lacanian theory of the sinthome.

Decidedly, this is not the ethics of the “service of goods,” the traumatic encounter with the impossible demand of the Other, some officious busy-ness in the lives of our neighbours, or adherence to the Golden Rule. Instead, the ethical stance requires taking responsibility for one’s own excessive dimension and jouissance. (Rothenberg, Excessive 194)

a sinthome

Schroeder, Jeanne L. The Four Lacanian Discourses or Turning Law Inside-Out. New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2008.

objet petit a

Lacan’s theory is one of negativity and gaps. The subject is barred, split, castrated. As a consequence, the subject always desires. The objet petit a as object cause of desire is by definition a lost, excluded object that stands in for the radical negativity of the subject’s soul. If it were not excluded, if the subject ever obtained his true desire, he would cease to be castrated, and lose his subjectivity. Consequently, the relationship between the barred subject and the objet petit a is, necessarily, an impossibility, a non-relationship. There can be no connection between the two in the symbolic order. The barred subject, however, finds this gap between him and the object of his desire intolerable. He, therefore, imagines that he can bridge this gap and attain the object. This is “fantasy”— imagining that one obtains and has a relationship with the object cause of one’s desire. 178

sinthome

Lacan’s metaphor for the relationship between the three orders is the Borromean knot – three circles overlapping in such a way that if one is broken, the knot comes undone. This expresses the idea that each order – and subjectivity itself—necessarily requires the others.

BorromeanKnot240X230

Unfortunately, Lacan found that his theory of the knotting of subjectivity ran aground with respect to empirical evidence. Clinical experience indicated that breaking one ring of the knot does not always throw the analysand into psychosis. His theory would be falsified unless he could hypothesize an ancillary theory that would explain this apparent empirical anomaly.

Late in life Lacan proposed that the empirical problem of the Borromean metaphor was in fact the same as the empirical problem of the Freudian theory of trauma and symptoms. Freud and Lacan originally hypothesized that a trauma and its symptoms should dissolve in analysis. This seemed true by definition: if a trauma is that which is real because it has not been integrated into the symbolic, its symptoms should no longer occur once a trauma is articulated. Nevertheless, some analysands lovingly cling to their symptoms even after “successful” analysis. Once again, this observation threatened to falsify the theory, unless Lacan could develop an ancillary hypothesis explaining this apparent empirical anomaly. Lacan’s late revelation was that the same ancillary hypothesis could solve both the mystery of the persistence of subjectivity and the mystery of the persistence of symptoms.

Studying the mathematical field of topology, Lacan realized that the traditional terminology of the Borromean knot is misleading. The figure is not technically a knot, but a chain – which is why it should fall apart when the weakest link is broken. Lacan posited that there might be a fourth category – a true knot – keeping the three orders bound together in the event of breakage. Using what he claims is an old French word for symptom, he called this fourth the sinthome. Metaphorically, the sinthome is like the safety chain on a bracelet that keeps it from falling off in the event the clasp breaks. The knot of the sinthome ties together his earlier understanding that it is the real of the symptom that gives structure to the subject. Understood in this way, the sinthomeis not merely real. Like the objet petit a, it also participates in the imaginary and the symbolic. The sinthome is located where the three orders meet. It is precisely the limit where the fantasies of the imaginary are unable to cover up the holes in the symbolic that constitutes the trauma. This is why symptoms can linger even after trauma is articulated. Even though the trauma is integrated into the symbolic through its interpretation, there is a part that remains supplementary to the symbolic and, therefore, serves as the real of trauma. This symptom that is at the center of the Borromean chain knitting together the three orders is in effect nothing but the subject herself. The persistence of the symptom actually explains the persistence of the subject despite the breaking of the Borromean chain. In other words, it is neurosis itself that keeps psychosis at bay. 110-111

capital as real

Boyle, Kirk. “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.”  International Journal of Žižek Studies Vol 2.1 (2008) 1-21.

Capital as Real: The Marxian Parallax

The more fundamental and systemic mode of the capitalist drive no longer operates in the symbolic order where individuals are interpellated as subjects of desire.

To be clear about where the mode of drive operates in capitalism, another term needs to be introduced: the Lacanian Real. In Lacanian psychoanalysis the Real is a purely formal concept; it is nothing more or less than the inherent limit of a symbolic order, that which must be repressed so this order can function. Because the Real is “simultaneously the thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle which prevents this direct access,” it can only be experienced in itssymptomatic effects (Žižek 2007: 243).

Žižek identifies two homologous forms of the Real , which are “detectable within the Symbolic only under the guise of its disturbances”: the traumatic core of sexual antagonism and the social antagonism of “class struggle” (Žižek 1994: 30). Both of these conceptions of the Real may be said to comprise the “minimalist” or “negative” anthropology of Lacanian Marxism. It is the Real of sexual antagonism, for instance, which prevents “it” from being “It”: objet a will always thwart the coincidence of the object of desire with the object-cause of desire. Likewise, the Real of social antagonism will always prevent the formation of a fully (self-)transparent utopian society. Reminiscent of Althusser’s claim that ideology is eternal, psychoanalysis holds that a minimal degree of misrecognition, reification, and fetishistic disavowal—“I know very well what I am doing, but I am doing it anyway”—is endemic to all symbolic orders. Although antagonism is eternal, Žižek adamantly disclaims that the sociotranscendental status of the Real denies the existence of History  [i.e., Butler’s criticism of Lacan].  The Real does not replace temporality with synchronicity or cyclicality. Rather, historical change derives from the emergence of new symbolic formations to deal with the traumatic core of sexual and social antagonism.

Because we still live within a world-economy structured by the “class struggle” inherent within capitalism, Žižek calls it the Real of our epoch. He writes:

The universality of capitalism resides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a civilization, for a specific cultural-symbolic world, but the name for a truly neutral economico-symbolic machine which operates with Asian values as well as with others… The problem with capitalism is not its secret Eurocentric bias, but the fact that it really is universal, a neutral matrix of social relations—a real in Lacanian terms. (Žižek 2005a: 241)  …  As Žižek states, “the structure of the universe of commodities and capital in Marx’s Capital is not just of a limited empirical sphere, but a kind of sociotranscendental a priori, the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations” (Žižek 2006b: 56).

Thus, Žižek transcodes the Marxist concepts of “commodity fetishism” and “class struggle” into the Lacanian notion of the Real. Where the older Marxist terms have long since been confused with empirical entities like the “working class” and actual commercial goods, the Lacanian Real has the benefit of emphasizing the purely formal, and therefore universal, status of capitalism and its overdetermination of the totality of social relations.

If we no longer accept a linear model of economic determinism where the economy directly causes sociopolitical events, how are we to understand the ways in which capitalism as Real overdetermines the totality of social relations?

Žižek adopts Althusser’s causal model of overdetermination: if “‘the logic of capital’ is a singular matrix which designates [capitalism’s] Real,” then it operates precisely as the absent cause of the totality-effects that occur within the sociopolitical realm (Žižek 2007: 211).

In the Lacanian Marxist base/superstructure model, as in its Althusserian predecessor, economic events of the Real do not cause Symbolic phenomena directly. Contrary to Althusser’s subject-less base/superstructure model, however, Žižek’s model maintains the subjectivity of the social antagonism of “class struggle” at the heart of the economy by introducing the concept of “parallax.”

The “Marxian parallax” refers to the irreducible gap between Real absent cause and Symbolic totality-effect.

He writes: …the ultimate parallax of the political economy [is] the gap between the reality of everyday material social life (people interacting among themselves and with nature, suffering, consuming, and so on) and the Real of the speculative dance of Capital, its self-propelling movement which seems to be disconnected from ordinary reality….Marx’s point here is not primarily to reduce the second dimension to the first (to demonstrate how the supernatural mad dance of commodities arises out of the antagonisms of “real life”); his point is, rather that we cannot properly grasp the first (the social reality of material production and social interaction) without the second: it is the self-propelling metaphysical dance of Capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life development and catastrophes. (Žižek 2006b: 383)
16

Žižek also describes the Marxian parallax of the political economy as follows:

If, for Lacan, there is no sexual relationship, then, for Marxism proper, there is no relationship between economy and politics, no “meta-language” enabling us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint, although—or, rather, because—these two levels are inextricably intertwined.

The “political” class struggle takes place in the midst of the economy…while, at the same time, the domain of the economy serves as the key that enables us to decode political struggles. No wonder the structure of this impossible relationship is that of the Moebius strip: first, we have to progress form the political spectacle to its economic infrastructure; then in the second step, we have to confront the irreducible dimension of the political struggle at the very heart of the economy. (Žižek 2006b: 320)

drive desire objet petit a

Boyle, Kirk. “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.”  International Journal of Žižek Studies Vol 2.1 (2008) 1-21.

Žižek’s more recent theorizations of capitalism have turned away from the Lacanian notion of desire to the concept of drive. The previous section discussed the reflexivity of desire, how desire is desire for the object-cause of desire, objet a.

We saw how this desire could not be satisfied in any lasting way, that it was infinite, an infinite metonymy of desire. Drive distinguishes itself from desire in a short-circuit of sorts. Its object is the loss itself of objet a, not the fantasmatic objet a that never yields its promised jouissance, but what Žižek calls the “object-loss of drive.”

He writes, “in the case of objet petit a as the object of drive, the ‘object’ is directly loss itself —

in the shift from desire to drive we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object” (Žižek 2006b: 62). Where desire suffers from the repetitive failure to obtain full jouissance, drive finds triumph in this very failure.

Desire acquiesces to the surplus-enjoyment it receives from partial objects that are metonymies for the impossible Thing; drive finds satisfaction in the loop around an object.

If the hysterical libidinal economy of desire works in cahoots with capitalism to produce and reproduce consumer society, then drive may offer a possible way to break out of this endless chain of metonymic commodities. Žižek writes:

drive is literally a counter-movement to desire, it does not strive towards impossible fullness and, being forced to renounce it, gets stuck onto a partial object as its remainder — drive is quite literally the very “drive” to break the All of continuity in which we are embedded, to introduce a radical imbalance into it, and the difference between drive and desire is precisely that, in desire, this cut, this fixation on a partial object, is as it were “transcendentalized,” transposed into a stand-in for the void of the Thing. (Žižek 2006b: 63)

The above passage posits drive in opposition to desire, which, in turn, is represented as creating a transcendental world of partial objects, all of which sustain the illusion of the “Thing as the filler of its void” (Žižek 2006b: 63). Desire, in fact represents the horizon of Lacan’s early theorizations of psychoanalysis, which remain thoroughly Kantian. In this early stage, Lacan posits a lost jouissance of the inaccessible “maternal” Thing with objet a serving as a leftover or remainder of this primordial enjoyment. The regulative ideal implicit in this formulation requires the subject to renounce the Thing and accept substitutive satisfactions in its stead. Hence, the stoicism often associated with the Freudian field (the point of maturity where we accept the fact that “it” never is “It!”).

The drive disrupts the homeostasis implicit in the position that one must keep a proper distance to the Thing less one gets burned by it. Žižek replaces this “Golden Mean” or “Goldilocks effect”—in Freudian terms, the “pleasure principle”—with a notion of drive which “suspends/disrupts the linear temporal enchainment” (Žižek 2006b: 63). In order to “break the All of continuity in which we are embedded,” the subject of the drive tarries with the negative and becomes caught up in a repeated circuit of jouissance, a self-propelling loop beyond the pleasure principle.  Drive exists in both a pre-and post-fantasmatic space, at once prior to the passionate attachments of desire and beyond them.

The realm of the drive is a primordial abyss of dis-attachment in which the subject exists out-of-joint with its environs. Such a description of the drive, however liberating we might imagine it, smacks of a romantic, individualistic form of resistance, a critique that has been cast at Žižek (especially in his examples of the psychoanalytic act).

The subject of the drive sounds awfully like the existential artist-hero who withdraws from society and its fantasmatic lures, confronts the void, and in true Nietzschean fashion fully affirms the eternal recurrence of the same. Žižek, however, is far from proffering the drive as a line of flight from the deadlocks of desire. The opposite, in fact, is the case.

“The lesson of drive,” he writes, “is that we are condemned to jouissance: whatever we do, jouissance will stick to it; we shall never get rid of it; even in our most thorough endeavor to renounce it, it will contaminate the very effort to get rid of it” (Žižek 2000: 293).

What at first glance appears to be a radical act to break out of the linear continuity of the hysterical economy, now becomes a compulsion to repeat, to obtain jouissance by circulating around the goal-object.

Žižek puts an end to all flirtations with the transgressive nature of the drive when he associates it with the machinations of capitalism. After acknowledging that capitalism addresses individuals on a subjective level when it “interpellates them as consumers, as subjects of desire, soliciting in them ever new perverse and excessive desires,” he claims that: Drive inheres to capitalism at a more fundamental, systemic level: drive is that which propels the whole capitalist machinery, it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction. We enter the mode of drive the moment the circulation of money as capital becomes “an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.” (Žižek 2006b: 61)

At the level of drive, capitalism does not address individuals. In a sense, capitalism addresses itself. Drive inheres to capitalism in a quasi-objective manner. “The capitalist drive belongs to no definite individual,” writes Žižek, “rather, it is that those individuals who act as direct ‘agents’ of capital (capitalists themselves, top managers) have to display it” (Žižek 2006a: 61).

These acephalous agents are the ones we see flailing around the stock market floor or rushing through airports juggling their techno-gadget accoutrements.

hysteric capitalism

Boyle, Kirk. “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.”  International Journal of Žižek Studies Vol 2.1 (2008) 1-21.

Any discussion of the homology between surplus-enjoyment and surplus-value must begin with the psychoanalytic understanding of ontological difference. Contrary to popularly held theories that disclaim any notion of human nature, psychoanalysis posits a “minimal difference” that enables us to recognize a specifically-human dimension.

For Žižek, the key to the zero-degree of “humanization” is to be found in the Freudian notion of “death drive.”

Death drive represents:

the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an uncanny excess of life, for an “undead” urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. The ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is never “just life”: humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things. (Žižek 2006b: 62)

The “minimalist anthropology” of death drive—the psychoanalytic conception of ontological difference—allows Žižek to develop the idea of surplus enjoyment, Lacan’s equivalent term for Marx’s concept of surplus-value. There is a certain elegance to this homology: just as surplusvalue sets capitalist production in motion, surplus enjoyment provides the object-cause of human desire, what Lacan designates objet petit a. In Lacan’s hands, surplus-value becomes a subsequent instantiation of surplus enjoyment, with the implication that the latter exists as an eternal condition of human existence. (At one point in Seminar XVII, Lacan jests that Marx would have invented the concept of surplus jouissance if he had not had to “invent” capitalism.)

Objet a introduces an important distinction in the economy of enjoyment. Objet a represents the object-cause of desire, not the object of desire. The object of desire is simply the material object, the body of another, etc. The object-cause of desire, on the other hand, is the je ne sais quoi of this object, what is in a product more than the product itself. In the latter sense, objet a signifies the promise of enjoyment-in-the-Real, of an experience of full jouissance, total fulfillment and satisfaction. The impersonal pronoun starring in the eBay ads works because it represents this object-cause of desire as opposed to the objects of desire available at the click of a mouse button. The “it,” the commodity form, is empty precisely because it can never deliver on its promise of jouissance; the objet a can never coincide with the object of desire.

If eBay promises to make “it” accessible, this promise entails the collapse of an irreducible split between what is obtained from what was expected, what was requested from what proves to be ultimately unsatisfactory. In Lacanian terms, the commodity form obfuscates the difference between desire and demand by asserting the possibility of their equivalence. Against this marketing deception, we should assert that the demand for “it” is always an obfuscated desire for objet a. Moreover, when eBay delivers on our demand—when we obtain that obscure something that we have wanted since a time before we can remember—we can rest assured that our desire will remain as restless as it was before the purchase. Objet a is the name for why we respond to “it” with “that’s not it!”

What happens when enjoyment becomes the mandate of an entire symbolic order? One result of the shift from a superego that fosters guilt to one that demands enjoyment is the emergence of new forms of subjectivity. As Jameson and other theorists of postmodernity have argued, the symptomatic subject of late capitalism is schizophrenic. Yet, prior to schizoid normativity, it was Lacan who postulated that the appearance of hysteria was concomitant with the burgeoning of consumer society. Hysteria emerges at a specific time in history when the symbolic order could no longer guarantee an answer to the subjective question, “What does the Other [the symbolic order] want from me?” The radical cutting of traditional social bonds that occurs with the rise of capitalism universalizes this adolescent question and renders it permanent. The hysteric is no longer able to rely on the symbolic order to structure his or her desire, but suffers from a so-called “identity crisis.” Capitalism exploits the hysterical response to the waning of the symbolic order’s efficiency to create meaningful identifications for the subject. Žižek writes, “The excess of doubt, of permanent questioning, can be directly integrated into social reproduction” (Žižek 2005a: 228). We can refer to the excess of doubt and permanent questioning that capitalism exploits as the “infinite metonymy of desire.”

Capitalism feeds off the historical opening up of this infinite metonymy of desire. “Lacan designated capitalism as the reign of the discourse of the hysteric,” writes Žižek. “The vicious circle of a desire whose apparent satisfaction only widens the gap of its dissatisfaction…is what defines hysteria” (Žižek 1993: 209). We can now see how the surplus-enjoyment of objet a connects with the basic functioning of capitalism.

The hysteric-consumer, in his or her permanent quest to fill the lack (a lack shared by hysteric and symbolic order alike), searches for the object cause of desire in the endless aisles of mega-marts, department stores, antique shops, thrift stores, etc. Through purchases the hysteric begins to construct an identity, but this identity is provisional and always open to alterations.

The seemingly infinite malleability for the hysterical subject to make and remake him- or herself through consumerism (the infamous lifestyle branding heralding a new step in this logic), mirrors capitalism’s constant revolutionizing of its own conditions. “The explosion of the hysterical capitalist subjectivity,” writes Žižek, “reproduces itself through permanent self-revolutionizing, through the integration of the excess into the ‘normal’ functioning of the social link (the true ‘permanent revolution’ is already capitalism itself)” (Žižek 2005a: 228). The normalization of this excess signals a primary (if not the primary) contradiction of capitalism.

What does it mean to cement the social link in surplus-enjoyment? Žižek acutely describes the unparalleled moment we currently live in, and I quote at length:

Capitalism is not just a historical epoch among others…a certain excess which was, as it were, kept under check in previous history, perceived as a local perversion, a limited deviation, is in capitalism elevated into the very principle of social life, in the speculative movement of money begetting more money, of a system which can survive only by constantly revolutionizing its own conditions—that is to say, in which the thing can survive only as its own excess, constantly exceeding its own “normal” constraints (Žižek 2006b: 297).

Žižek’s wager is that the “micro” libidinal economy of the hysteric parallels the “macro” political economy of capitalism. Both are characterized by a permanent process of self-revolutionizing through the integration of an excess,surplus enjoyment for the hysteric and surplus-value for capitalism, and both can survive only by exceeding their own normal constraints. The hysteric paradoxically maintains his or her desire by rummaging through a constant parade of object products in desperate search of “it,” the object-cause of desire. By comparison, the capitalist contradiction centers on objet a: “this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the ‘condition of impossibility’ of the full deployment of the productive forces [that] is simultaneously its ‘condition of possibility’” (Žižek 2005b: unpaginated).

Acknowledging that these surpluses are homologous presents a great challenge for the desire called utopia. Žižek writes:

If we subtract the surplus we lose enjoyment itself, just as capitalism, which can survive only by incessantly revolutionizing its own material conditions, ceases to exist it if “stays the same,” if it achieves an internal balance. This, then, is the homology between surplus-value—the “cause” which sets in motion the capitalist process of production — and surplus-enjoyment, the object-cause of desire. (Žižek 1989: 52)

To repeat Marx but not to fall into the evolutionist trap of believing that communism will spontaneously arise out of capitalism, we must envision a symbolic order that somehow eliminates surplus-value while preserving a certain degree of surplus enjoyment. Such is one task of utopian thought.