symbolic – Page 3

Universality is Universality of Struggle
Symbolic Castration
Father confused impotent person, but his symbolic identity you respect him
Famous Ninotchka Joke: Coffee Without Cream/Run Out of Cream/Only Have Milk/Coffee Without Milk
What you don’t have (negativity) is part of your identity. What is missing is part of your identity. Coffee without what it is.
I don’t drink coffee, that’s ok, I don’t have any. Today, the way ideology works today, is not as a direct lie, in the sense it directly tells something not true, ideology lies in not in what it says, it lies it says what it says, by generating in us implicit meaning, while it relies on the opposite meaning. To use the example of coffee, it is giving us coffee w/o milk, but it claims it is giving us coffee w/o cream. Be attentive to these implicit meanings, what is said w/o being said. In Europe, austerity, when those in power want to impose people austerity measures, they pretend they are offering coffee w/o milk, when they are really offering coffee w/o cream. Why is this so important?

– Hegelian Totality
precisely a totality of what there is, and what there is not. in true dialectical analysis, the point is not to include particular events in larger harmonious totality, the point is not to look at phenomena isolated, look holistically, this is NOT enough, but include in concept all its failures and so on, take capitalism, to take it as a totality, it is not enough to say as a system it is good, NO we should look at all those points where it fails, inside a country and outside, i.e., APPLE as a country, oooh, see it as a success, but we say NO Apple without FOXCON. or take the CONGO. It is a state that is immensely mineral rich but the state doesn’t funciton, you simply have local warlords and directly deal with foreign companies. Congo is not developed enough to be part of global capitalism NO. There are child warriors, as such as this hell on earth, CONGO IS PART OF TODAY’S GLOBAL CAPITALISM. global capitalism is also the dark side.
South Korea: One of your big companies, had intentions to buy all arable land in Madagascar. throw out local farmers. This is global capitalism. A proper dialectical analysis begins, you have a ideal universal notion, then look at failures and non-intended by-products, the dialectic will show these failures are NECESSARY failures, all mistakes, antagonisms are part of the UNIVERSAL NOTION.

The category which is more and more becoming crucial is the category of UNEMPLOYMENT
In standard Marxist story: Exploitation. But today the unemployed are becoming more and more crucial, not just RESERVE ARMY. but the forever UNEMPLOYABLE. Whole countries, Somalia, Congo, or whole regions in countries, in a sense Unemployed, excluded from world markets, you have people in advance that are Unemployable. Millions of students who study, but realize there is no chance they will get a job in the domain of their studies. We have somehow to expand the Domain of Proletarians. It is NOT just who work and exploited, it is those who are not working. Capitalism is more and more generating NECESSARY UNEMPLOYMENT.

Why don’t we see this more clearly? This shows the strength of the ruling hegemonic ideology. The omniprescence of anti-capitalism, look at any popular media, you have many anti-capitalist stories, but all these critiques are moralistic critiques, greedy bankers, polluting environment. The problem is what changed in recent capitalism, that this greed can be realized with such catastrophic consequences. The limit of this moralistic anti-capitalism, by blaming people, it prevents us from doing the crucial analysis of the SYSTEM. what is wrong with the SYSTEM as such. Almost everyone today is a Fukuyamist. Liberal democractic capitalism is the only game in town. All we can do is make it a little better. a little more efficient.
We can easily imagine the end of the world, but a little change in capitalism we can’t imagine.

class struggle: antagonism deadlock is constitutive of society
multiculturalist where problem is recognition, how can we be recognized: gay, women etc.
I am still for BINARY logic against multiplicity of struggles.

Laclau critique none of these struggles have apriori central position, all strategic consideration. There is no priority

Politico-economic antagonism is not at same level of these other struggles, it has a MORE SUBSTANTIAL position, of overdetermining, structuring other struggles.

Buddhism and Dalai Lama

Origin of fall of Buddhism. Mahayama: Bhodisava, you were already there liberated, out of this compassion with humanity, you CAME back into this world of suffering, so you postponed your liberation until all others are liberated this is a SACRIFICIAL logic. I don’t trust anybody that is willing to sacrifice themselves for you.

Communism will win There are miracles but only for those who believe in the miracle. Communism will win means that we who are engaged in the struggle, we can read events as signs of communism: Tahir Sq. etc, are all signs that point towards a possible communism but there is no guarantee, no objective necessity, communism will win for those who believe in communism, a bit of a tautology.

Truth is not a neutral objective truth. Truth is universal: but it is nonetheless PARTIAL. No if you look neutrally you see nothing, you only see truth if you are interested in truth, an emancipatory truth. Communism will come as an unintended consequence We Chinese commies are the best managers of capitalism. It less and less needs democracy. This should worry us. In Lacanian the gap between what you want and what you desire. People desire communism but they don’t want. What people usually desire they don’t want. People all the time think they desire something, but when they come close to it, they think its horrible and don’t want it. What you want is not the same is what you desire. Communism will come but people will not want it.

Why still keep the stupid name?

on Egypt

on Greece

On Marx To be a Marxist today, means not to return to Marx, in a radically critical way, totally reconstruct radically his analysis. A fundamental flaws we can see today in his notion of communism. His notion of communism is still a capitalism, that is, capitalism without the private property, then this wild development will continue. He didn’t see that this dynamism is only possible within the capitalist frame. Second limitation, he had ingenious insights 1848 revolution, 18th Brumaire, but in terms of analysis of power, he didn’t develop it properly. The horrors of 20th Century communism you can’t explain through a critical Marxism. Stalinism occured because communsm developed in the wrong place. No. This is wrong.

I don’t like the term Third Way. If you want the Third way, what is Second way: Fascism, Communism, the Second way failed because they stayed within capitalism, total productivity, efficiency and so on. I don’t like to talk about the Third way because the Second way wasn’t a serious second way. Too much of this we have extremes and we need proper balance. I don’t like balance, I like extremes.

on Violence: Hitler and Ghandi, the quote that got him in a lot of trouble

Hitler was afraid to do real social change. Tahir Sq. they stopped the entire functioning of the state. Mubarak’s violence was a violence aimed at restoring social order. It’s not that we live in peaceful times and some crazy revolutionary starts violence, but what about violence in Congo? Structural violence, the violence that is here as part of NORMAL state of things. The positive violence is violence of just occupying space and preventing things from going on as normal. Ghandi was much more violent than Hitler, because his aim was to stop the state from functioning. It was an anti-systemic violence.

vanheule foreclosure delusional metaphor

Vanheule, Stijn. The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

A delusion is primarily a speech event which is why he studies delusions in terms of ruptures in the conventinal use of speech. 98
… at the basis of psychotic outbreak a dramatic mental decomposition can be found and a delusion is an adaptive reaction to this problem of disintegration. … Delusions defend the subject against radical breakdown. … [but] delusions do not inherently provide stability. Only to the extent that a delusion creates an anchor, based on which the process of signification is stablized, can it be thought to be a stabilizing factor in mental life. 99-100

eyers Hegel Lacan is non dialectical

Eyers, Tom. Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’ New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

It is worth registering at this early juncture the significance of Lacan’s insistence on the inability of Hegelian logic to capture the paradoxical
character of the psychoanalytic object. If it is commonplace to associate the development of Lacan’s early ideas as discussed above with Hegel’s account of the lord and bondsman in his Phenomenology, then such a reading is placed in question if, as I argue, the precisely non-dialectical object finds its genesis in a concept (the ideal-ego) located and consolidated at this putatively ‘Hegelian’ stage of Lacan’s thinking. 31-32

Lacan himself makes this link explicit when he describes the ‘i(a)’ qua image of the other, in a discussion of the myth of Oedipus, as the ‘complement’ to the object-cause of desire: ‘he [Oedipus] is thus the victim of a lure, through which what issues forth from him and confronts him is not the true petit a, but its complement, the specular image: i(a)’.

If, for Kojève’s Hegel, desire is ultimately a desire for recognition predicated on a negativity conspicuous in its contingent movements but statically fixed in form, Lacan here figures desire in an ambivalent relationship to an object that is simultaneously constituting and threatening, in the same way that the pre- Oedipal relationship with the mother is both mourned by the post- Oedipal subject and emerges in fantasy as something over-proximate and anxiety inducing.

Lacan takes from Kojève’s Hegel something of the contingent movement of what he calls, as the title of a famous article, the ‘dialectic of desire’, but not the immovability of the form of productive negativity, stopping up the movement of desire with objects whose obstinacy consists as much in their refusal to succumb to dialectical supersession as in the impossibility of the subject ever truly to ‘possess’ or know them, situated as they are in the opaque field of the Other 34 … Philosophically, we might distinguish between Kojève and Lacan’s logic here in terms of a distinction between dialectic and paradox.

While the dialectician seeks an overcoming that retrospectively reconstitutes what it has superseded at a higher level of becoming, the Imaginary (and later Real) object of paradox discussed by Lacan represents an impasse in such a movement, an impasse that can be generative as well as disruptive. 34

to the extent that the Real permits of no absence, no division and no mediation, the ontological ‘being’ of the signifier, paradoxically, escapes the metonymic logic of the Symbolic 53

The signifier qua letter, defined as it is through its persistence in the Real , is constructed by Lacan as a material unit that underlies, and undermines, the temporary epistemological sedimentation of meaning via the ‘Imaginary effects’ of the signifier-in-relation. 53

The dispersed protosignifiers that shore up the movement of primary narcissism, minimally co-coordinating the process of ego-formation, seem to live on in the signifier’s post-Oedipal isolated dimension, a paradoxical point of nondialectical collusion between the Imaginary and the Real-in-the-Symbolic… 53-54

What might seem, then, to be the relatively simple positing of a material, formal substrate and its Imaginary effects, a kind of linguistic structure of form and content, is in fact the overcoming of the form/content division, a theory of signification that posits a Real materiality only to insist on its Imaginary genesis. 54

eyers Real Symbolic

Eyers, Tom. Lacan the Concept of the ‘Real’ New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

A successful navigation of the Oedipal imbroglio, then, only allows the emphasis of the Symbolic to fall upon the negatively constituted movements of the signifier in relation. But as the title of a section of the seminar on psychoses states, ‘the signifier, as such, signifies nothing’, which is to say that in isolation and at its most material, which according to this logic points to its lack of relation, its lack of reliance on another signifier, the signifier stops up, rather than facilitates, meaning. […]

This is the signifier as isolated underpinning the movements of sense as its material ground. … Those signifiers that, in their isolation, actively signify the nothing, do so insistently within psychotic subjectivity, whereby the lack of a paternal signifier (essentially a ‘third term’ that dissolves the dyadic logic of the Imaginary) exposes signification to isolation and the failure of relation. Each psychotic signifier, then, is only countable as one; it cannot be taken as containing the potential for a total set of meanings, a logic that Lacan will later expand through his account of non- phallic, or ‘feminine’, sexuality. 43

that aspect of the signifier which cleaves most closely to the Imaginary, those isolated signifiers that route the most elementary forms of egoic identification, persist throughout to the degree that all signifiers, by their ‘nature’, have the potential to uncouple from relations of meaning and exist in isolation. 44

For the psychotic, it is the potential of the signifier to refer to something other than itself that is lost, namely the signifier in its relational aspect; and Lacan usefully compares this loss with the loss of the fundamental human ability to deceive, for signification to say more than it might mean: ‘you are in the presence of a subject insofar as what he says and does – they’re the same thing – can be supposed to have been said and done to deceive you’. …

Lacan’s comment highlights the multidimensional quality of relational signification, whereby the paradigmatic act of communication is to tell a lie by literally telling the truth; to lose this capacity is to reveal the materiality of the isolated signifier in its brute insistence.

What must be more firmly established … however, is the more general claim that the Symbolic as such, for all subjects, contains Real elements that point to the constant potential for meaning to dissolve, even as the very same elements form the essential foundation that allows the very horizon of the Symbolic to cohere.

… the Real simultaneously supports and threatens the Symbolic from within. 45

fink

Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique Harvard University Press 1997.

As Bruno Bettelheim once put it, “love is not enough” when it comes to raising children, and even the contemporary espousers of “tough love” do not usually grasp the distinction between setting limits and establishing the Law as such. Parents often set limits for their children simply because it is more convenient for them to do so, and the limits depend on nothing but the parents’ own mood or whimsy. If I tell my children they have to go to bed by 8:30 pm every school night, and then I let them stay up until 11pm on a school night because I feel like having company, I show them I consider myself to be the only limit to their jouissance. If I tell them they have to obey property rights and speed limits, and then proceed to steal little things from hotels and try to talk my way out of speeding tickets, I show them that I accept no law above myself, no legitimate limitations or restrictions on my own will and desire. 252 note 71

The law of the symbolic pact, on the other hand, applies to all parties, limits all parties. If I promise my child that Saturday afternoons arc his to do with what he will, then I cannot arbitrarily decide that he has to spcnd all of this Saturday afternoon cleaning up the toy room, his bedroom, and his closet. According to the symbolic pact, I am bound by my promises just as much as my child is If I make as many exceptions as I like, nothing remains of the rule, and the child — perceiving that I consider myself my own law — aspires simply to dethrone me and become his own law in turn.

A mother is just as likely (if not more likely) to grasp the importance of the law of the symbolic pact (or law with a capital L”) as a father is, but both mothers and fathers, insofar as they are neurotic, are likely to have their own problems accepting the Law (as we shall see in the next chapter) and are more likely to criticize each other’s breaches of the Law than to criticize their own. We find it far easier to detect capriciousness, selfishness, and inconsistency in another’s speech and behavior than in our own. A single mother can, in theory, provide both a loving mother-child bond and appeal to a law beyond herself (whether Dr. Spock or the U.S. Constitution, either of which could scrve as a Name-of-the-Father in Lacanian terms) that applies equally to mother and child, thereby introducing that necessary symbolic third term. So too, single fathers and gay couples could, in theory, provide both love and Law. Given how frequently the traditional family structure already fails, despite centuries of dividing love and Law between the sexes in considerably codified sex roles, what are the chances that both roles will be played by one parent alone or by two parents raised into similarly codified sex roles? Isn’t the incidence of psychosis likely to rise in such cases?

Our relation to the Law is obviously a very complicated matter, and I have barely scratched the surface in these brief comments. For we can always raise the question or the injustice or immorality of the law (whether local, state, national, or international), and this has been done from Antigone to Thoreau, from the civil disobedience tradition to the civil rights and women’s rights movements, and takes myriad forms. In such cases, we appeal to a notion of right or justice beyond the particular laws of the land, questioning what it is that makes the law right or just in the first place and thereby raising the question of what Lacan calls the “guarantee” — that is, what legitimates or lends authority to the Other, to the Law itself. The problem being that there can never be a guarantee: there is no absolute justification of the Law (in Lacanian terminology, no “Other of the Other, no stable bedrock outside the Other that serves as the Other’s foundation or anchor in truth, no outside point that guarantees the Other’s consistency and coherence). […]

But the more the law’s representatives appear untrustworthy, the more the law itself can be thrown into question, and the less we are inclined to accept the sacrifices exacted by the law (that is, to accept limitation/castration). If we are to preserve some notion of a just Law above and beyond the particular laws of the land — given the current legitimation crisis of the legal, juridical, and executive branches of government — a just Law that is equitably and uniformly enforced, we must have an experience of Law at home which at least approaches that ideal to some degree. As rare as this experience may be in the stereotypical nuclear family, practices currently being advocated seem likely to make it rarer still. As Lacan once said, in a pessimistic vein, “I won’t say that even the slightest little gesture to eliminate something bad leaves the way open to something still worse — it always leads to something worse” (Seminar III, 361). 254

zupančič sexual difference and real pt 2 of 4

Video of this presentation March 2011

Here is the paper online without works cited page

Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) he insists on the original nonexistence of any germ of two sexes (or two sexualities) in preadolescent time.

The auto-erotic activity of the erotogenic zones is, however, the same in both sexes, and owing to this uniformity there is no possibility of a distinction between the two sexes such as arises after puberty … Indeed, if we were able to give a more definite connotation to the concepts of “masculine” and “feminine,” it would even be possible to maintain that libido is invariably and necessary of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women and irrespectively of whether its object is a man or a woman.

In other words, at the level of the libido there are no two sexes. And if we were able to say what exactly is “masculine” and “feminine,” we would describe it as “masculine” — but we are precisely not able to do this, as Freud further emphases in the footnote attached to the quoted passage. 7

So, when confronted with the question of sexual difference, the first answer of psychoanalysis is: From the strictly analytical point of view, there is in fact only one sex, or sexuality.

Moreover, sexuality is not something that springs from difference (between sexes); it is not propelled by any longing for our lost other half, but is originally self-propelling (and “autoerotic”). Freud writes, “The sexual drive is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object’s attractions.”

Does this mean that sexual difference is only and purely a symbolic construction? Here waits the other surprise (not unrelated to the first, of course) of the psychoanalytic stance: Sexual difference doesn’t exist in the symbolic either, or, more precisely, there is no symbolic account of this difference as sexual. “In the psyche, there is nothing by which the subject may situate himself as male or female being.”

That is to say, although the production of meaning of what it is to be a “man” or a “woman” is certainly symbolic—and massive—it doesn’t amount to producing sexual difference as signifying difference. In other words, sexual difference is a different kind of difference; it doesn’t follow the differential logic.

Mladen Dolar quote: “There is a widespread criticism going around that aims at the binary oppositions as the locus of enforced sexuality, its règlementation, its imposed mould, its compulsory stricture. By the imposition of the binary code of two sexes we are subjected to the basic social constraint. But the problem is perhaps rather the opposite: the sexual difference poses the problem of the two precisely because it cannot be reduced to the binary opposition or accounted for in terms of the binary numerical two. It is not a signifying difference, such that it defines the elements of structure. It is not to be described in terms of opposing features, or as a relation of given entities preexisting the difference One could say: bodies can be counted, sexes cannot. Sex presents a limit to the count of bodies; it cuts them from inside rather than grouping them together under common headings.”

And sex does not function as a stumbling block of meaning (and of the count) because it is considered morally naughty. It is considered morally naughty because it is a stumbling block of meaning.

This is why the moral and legal decriminalization of sexuality should not take the path of its naturalization (“whatever we do sexually is only natural behavior”).

We should instead start from the claim that nothing about (human) sexuality is natural, least of all sexual activity with the exclusive aim of reproduction. There is no “sexual nature” of man (and no “sexual being”). The problem with sexuality is not that it is a remainder of nature that resists any definite taming; rather, there is no nature here — it all starts with a surplus of signification.

If we now return to the question of what this implies in relation to ontology in general, and, more specifically, to the performative ontology of contemporary gender studies, we must start from the following, crucial implication: Lacan is led to establish a difference between being and the Real. The real is not a being, or a substance, but its deadlock. It is inseparable from being, yet it is not being. One could say that for psychoanalysis, there is no being independent of language (or discourse)—which is why it often seems compatible with contemporary forms of nominalism.

All being is symbolic; it is being in the Other. But with a crucial addition, which could be formulated as follows: there is only being in the symbolic — except that there is real. There “is” real, but this real is no being. Yet it is not simply the outside of being; it is not something besides being, it is — as I put it earlier — the very curving of the space of being. It only exists as the inherent contradiction of being.

Which is precisely why, for Lacan, the real is the bone in the throat of every ontology: in order to speak of “being qua being,” one has to amputate something in being that is not being.

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

We only arrive to being qua being by subtracting something from it — and this something is precisely that which, while included in being, prevents it from being fully constituted as being.

The real, as that additional something that magnetizes and curves the (symbolic) space of being, introduces in it another dynamics, which infects the dynamics of the symbolic, makes it “not all.”

Now, a very good way of getting closer to the relationship between sexuality as such (its real) and sexual difference is via an excerpt from a lecture by Joan Copjec, in which she made the following crucial observation:

“The psychoanalytic category of sexual difference was from this date [the mid-1980s] deemed suspect and largely forsaken in favor of the neutered category of gender. Yes, neutered. I insist on this because it is specifically the sex of sexual difference that dropped out when this term was replaced by gender.

Gender theory performed one major feat: it removed the sex from sex.

For while gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex or sexuality is; in brief, 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.” [Copjec The Sexual Compact]

Goto Part 3

zupancic

2001 interview with Zupancic

Within reality as it is constituted via what Lacan calls the Imaginary and the Symbolic mechanisms, there is a “place of the lack of the Image,” which is symbolically designated as such. That is to say that the very mechanism of representation posits its own limits and designates a certain beyond which it refers to as “unrepresentable.” In this case, we can say that the place of something that has no image is designated symbolically; and it is this very designation that endows whatever finds itself in this place with the special power of fascination. Since this unrepresentable is usually associated with the transgression of the given limits of the Symbolic, it is spontaneously perceived as “evil,” or at least as disturbing.

In To Be or Not To Be, Lubitsch provides a very good example of “the image that occupies the very place of the lack of the Image.” At the beginning of the film, there is a brilliant scene in which a group of actors is rehearsing a play that features Hitler. The director is complaining about the appearance of the actor who plays Hitler, saying that his make-up is bad and that he doesn’t look like Hitler at all. He also says that what he sees in front of him is just an ordinary man. The scene continues, and the director is trying desperately to name the mysterious “something more” that distinguishes the appearance of Hitler from the appearance of the actor in front of him. One could say that he is trying to name the “evil” that distinguishes Hitler from this man who actually looks a lot like Hitler. He is searching and searching, and finally he notices a photograph of Hitler on the wall, and triumphantly cries out: “That’s it! This is what Hitler looks like!” “But sir,” replies the actor, “this picture was taken of me.” Needless to say, we as spectators were very much taken in by the enthusiasm of the director who saw in the picture something quite different from this poor actor. Now, I would say that there is probably no better “image” of the lack of the Image than this “thing” that the director (but also ourselves) has “seen” in the picture on the wall and that made all the difference between the photograph and the actor. One should stress, however, that this phenomenon is not linked exclusively to the question of evil, but to the question of the “unrepresentable” in general.

reinhard lacan with levinas

Reinhard, Kenneth. “Kant with Sade, Lacan with Levinas” MLN The Johns Hopkins University Press, 110.4 (1995) 785-808.

Hence for Lacan the sixties did not signal the libido’s momentary liberation from the constraints of repressive cultural ideals, but the construction of yet one more line of defense against the disturbing impossibility of intersubjective sexuality, the inconsistency in the symbolic order that materializes as a factum or “Thing” whose concealment, according to Lacan, both defines human relations and marks their limit.

“Love” has at least two distinct and perhaps contradictory valences for Lacan. On the one hand, love can dissimulate the unavailability of a sexual relationship by imagining a relationship between the self and the other. This version of love projects a “specular mirage” that simulates symbolic interaction by addressing me from a hypothetical point where I am seen in the way I would like to be seen, thereby fostering an illusion of reciprocity that is “essentially deception” (Seminar XI 268).

footnote: In Seminar VIII: Transference (1960-1) and Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1963-4), Lacan distinguishes between the two modalities of love in terms of two aspects of transference. The goal of analysis that emerges in the later sixties and seventies involves “traversing the fantasy,” the process in which the analyst, idealized in the first moment of transference as a supposed subject of knowledge, is de-idealized or “de-completed” in transference’s second moment of “separation,” in which love’s effect of imaginary coherence is stripped away to reveal love as pure drive.

On the other hand, Lacan suggests that there is another love, a love not bound by the circulation of images, but which arises, as Juliet Flower MacCannell has written, “outside the limits of the law” (25)–neither within nor beyond specularity, but on what we might call, after Levinas, the “hither side” of the mirror, more proximate to me than either myself or my alter-ego.3 Insofar as it aims precisely at the traumatic lack of a sexual relationship, this love is closely allied with the sublimation of the excessive enjoyment or jouissance that in Lacan’s Seminar VII forms the imperative of the ethics of psychoanalysis.4 At the conclusion of Seminar XI, Lacan warns that specular love barely conceals an internecine aggressivity that culminated most horrifically in the sacrificial fury of the Holocaust (274-6). 5

The “other” love, on the other hand, in aiming, as Renata Salecl writes, at “what remains of the object when all the imaginary and symbolic features are annihilated,” sacrifices precisely those illusory characteristics of the other person that fuel the love of sacrifice. 6

For both Lacan and Levinas, substitution does not imply an act of self-sacrifice within an economy of expiation and redemption, but rather the sacrifice of sacrifice. The moral economy of sacrifice entails giving up enjoyment for a place in the symbolic order (always advertised as a “higher” pleasure). The sacrifice of sacrifice, on the other hand, insists not on the enjoyment that attends responsibility, but rather on the responsibility for enjoyment, the obligation to maintain the jouissance that makes responsibility possible. In Lacan’s dictum, “the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire” (SVII 321); renunciation in the name of the symbolic order to morality is merely a ruse, a resistance to desire and the trauma that is its cause. For Levinas, enjoyment is not simply renounced by the subject of responsibility, but remains its intimate and ongoing condition: “only a subject that eats can be for-the-other, or can signify” (OTB E 74). Levinas articulates the responsibility of “for-the-other” as a substitution that determines not one meaning among others, but rather opens the field of signification as such. Like Lacan’s substitutive love, Levinasian responsibility institutes the process of metaphorization without abandoning jouissance, which indeed depends on the primal signification of substitution: “I can enjoy and suffer by the other only because I am for-the-other, am signification” (OTB 90). For Levinas the subject’s passive responsibility for its neighbor is experienced as a “deafening trauma” that creates the subject as the response to a call so loud or so close that it cannot be heard, cannot be fully translated into a message. In the deferred temporality that places ethics before ontology, responsiveness before being, the subject is produced as “the echo of a sound that would precede the resonance of this sound” (OTB 111)

rothenberg final chapter

Guattari is looking for a method that will allow the release of creativity in the expression of desire, which is not the same as interpreting the symptoms that arise from desire’s blockage. 222

Žižek comment on Butler 2001

Hanlon,Christopher. “Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj .” New Literary History, 32 (2001): 1-21. PDF rest of interview in this blog is here

Question: Judith Butler—with whom you have engaged in ongoing if cordial debate—maintains that the Lacanian topology is itself dubious for its nonhistorical, transcultural presuppositions. You yourself have written that “jouissance is nonhistorical” How do you respond to complaints such as Butler’s?

Žižek: Ah! This is what we are struggling with for dozens, maybe hundreds of pages, in this book. My answer is to say that she is nonhistorical. That is to say, she presents a certain narrative, the same as Ernesto [Laclau]. With Ernesto, it’s that we have an older type of essentialist class politics, then slowly, slowly, essentialism starts to disintegrate, and now we have this contingent struggle for hegemony where everything is open to negotiation . . . . With Judith Butler, there is the same implicit narrative: in the old times, there was sex essentialism, biologically-identified; then slowly, slowly, this started disintegrating into a sex/gender distinction, the awareness that gender is not biologically— but rather culturally—constructed; finally, we come to this performativity,contingency, and so on and so on. So the same story, from essentialist zero-point to this open contingency where we have struggles for hegemony which are undecided. My first reproach as a philosopher to this is that here, some metanarrative is missing. To ask a very stupid, naïve question: why were people one hundred and fifty years ago essentialists? Were they simply stupid? You know what I mean? There is a certain, almost teleological narrative here, in which from the “bad” zero-point of essentialism, slowly we come to the “good” realization that everything is a performative effect, that nothing is exempted from the contingent struggle for hegemony. But don’t you need a metanarrative if you want to avoid the conclusion that people were simply stupid one hundred and fifty years ago?

CH: Well, perhaps not a metanarrative in the sense of a guiding historical trajectory, but an acceptance of a loosely Foucauldian premise, that one hundred and fifty years ago there were in place certain institutional mechanisms, powerdiscourses, which coerced belief from their subjects, engendered them . . .

Žižek: Ah! But if you accept this Foucauldian metanarrative, then things get a little complicated. Because Foucault is not speaking about truth value; for him, it is simply the change from one episteme to another. Then . . . OK, I ask you another question—let’s engage in this discussion, with you as Butler. So: is there a truth-value distinction between essentialism and the performativity of gender or is it simply the passage from one episteme to another? What would you say?

CH: I won’t speak for Butler, but if I were a Foucauldian, I would say that the latter is the case, though I may prefer the later episteme in light of my own political objectives.

Žižek: Yeah, but Butler would never accept that.

CH: You don’t think so?

Žižek: You think she would? Because I think that the epistemic presupposition of her work is implicitly—even explicitly, at least in her early work—that, to put it bluntly, sex always already was a performative construction. They just didn’t know it then. But you cannot unite this with Foucauldian narrative, because Foucauldian narrative is epistemologically neutral, in which we pass from one paradigm to the other. You know, sex was confessionary then; sex is now post-confessionary, pleasurable bodies, whatever . . . . But OK: Foucault would be one possible metanarrative. Marxism would provide the other one, in the sense that “the development of capitalism itself provoked a shift in subjectivity,” whatever. But again, what I claim is that there is some unresolved tension concerning historicity and truth-value. I ask you a different question. Both in Laclau and in Butler, there is a certain theory: Butler—and I’m speaking of early Butler; later, things get much more complex, much more interesting, a more intense dialogue becomes possible . . .

CH: So we’re talking about Gender Trouble, parts of Bodies That Matter . . .

Žižek: Yeah, I’m talking about Gender Trouble with Butler, and about Hegemony and Socialist Strategy with Laclau. Why? Because let’s not forget that these two books were the only two authentic “big hits” of the time. . . . I’ll tell you why: both Gender Trouble and Hegemony and Socialist Strategy were read as a model for a certain political practice. With Gender Trouble, the idea was that performativity and drag politics could have a political impact; it was, to put it in naïve, Leninist terms, “a guideline for a certain new feminist practice.” It was programmatic. It was the same with Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. It was a justification for the abandonment of so-called essentialist class politics, after which no specific struggle takes priority, we just have to coordinate our practices, cultivate a kind of “rainbow coalition,” although Ernesto rejects the term . . . . Now, what are these theories? Are they universal theories—of gender or of social/political processes—or are they specific theories about political practice, sex practice, within a certain historical/political moment? I claim that the ambiguity is still irreducible. At the same time that it’s clear that these theories are rooted in a certain historical moment, it’s also clear that they touch upon a universal dimension. Now my ironic conclusion is that, with all this anti-Hegelianism, what both Ernesto and Judith do here is the worst kind of pseudo-Hegelian historicism. At a certain point, it’s as if the access to truth or what always already was true is possible only in a certain historical situation. So in other words, philosophically, I claim that beneath these theories of contingency, there is another narrative that is deeply teleological.

CH: But either Butler or Laclau might rebut this reproach by pointing out that even such an embedded teleology is no worse than a matrix of non-historical Lacanian presuppositions.

Žižek: But my God, this is the big misunderstanding with her! Butler systematically conflates what she calls “Real” with some nonhistorical symbolic norm. It’s interesting how, in order to qualify the Lacanian notion of sexual difference as a nonhistorical Real, she silently slips in this nonhistorical gender norm, to then claim that “we homosexuals are excluded from this,” and so on. So her whole criticism inveighs against this notion that Lacan thinks of sexual difference as part of a nonhistorical, heterosexual normativity, and that this is what should be subverted . . . .

Of course, my counterpoint is that “Real,” for Lacan, is the exact opposite.

“Real” is that on account of which every norm is undermined. When [Butler] speaks of historicity, my point is not that there is something nonhistorical which precedes us. My point is that the Lacanian Real, in a way, is historical, in the sense that each historical epoch, if you will, has its own Real. Each horizon of historicity presupposes some foreclosure of some Real.

Now, Judith Butler would say “OK, I agree with this, but doesn’t this mean that we should re-historicize the Real, include it, re-negotiate it?” No, the problem is more radical . . . . Maybe the ultimate misunderstanding between us—from my perspective— is that for her, historicity is the ultimate horizon. As an old fashioned Freudian, I think that historicity is always a certain horizon which has to be sustained on the basis of some fundamental exclusion. Why is there historicity? Historicity doesn’t simply means that “things change,” and so on. That’s just stupid evolutionism; not in the biological sense, but common sense.

Historicity means that there must be some unresolved traumatic exclusion which pushes the process forward. My paradox would be that if you take away the nonhistorical kernel, you lose history itself.

And I claim that Judith Butler herself, in her last book, is silently approaching this position. Because in Gender Trouble, the idea that your psychic identity is based on some primordial loss or exclusion is anathema; it’s the Big Bad Wolf. But have you noticed that, if you read it closely, in The Psychic Life of Power she now accepts this idea of a primordial loss when she speaks of these “disavowed attachments”? The idea is now that we become subjects only through renouncing the fundamental passionate attachment, and that there’s no return, no reassumption of the fundamental attachment. It’s a very Freudian notion. If you lose the distance, the disavowal . . . it’s psychosis, foreclosure. The big problem I have with this shift is that it’s a very refined political shift of accent. What I don’t quite accept in her otherwise remarkable descriptions is how, when she speaks about the “marginalized disavowed,” she always presupposes—to put it in very naïve terms—that these are the good guys. You know: we have Power, which wants to render everything controllable, and then the problem is how to give voice to those who are marginalized, excluded . . .

CH: You see it as a kind of vulgar Bakhtinianism?

Žižek: Yeah, yeah—you know what I’m aiming at. What I’m aiming at is . . . aren’t racist, anti-Semitic pogroms also Bakhtinian carnival? That’s to say that what interests me is not so much the progressive other whom the power is controlling, but the way in which power has to disavow its own operation, has to rely on its own obscenity. The split is in the power itself. So that . . . when Butler argues very convincingly against—at least she points to the problematic aspects of—legal initiatives that would legalize gay marriages, claiming that in this way, you accept state authority, you become part of the “visible,” you lose solidarity with all those whose identity is not publicly acknowledged . . . I would say, “Wait a minute! Is there a subject in America today who defines himself as marginalized, repressed, trampled by state authority?” Yes! They are called survivalists! The extreme right! In the United States, this opposition between public state authority and local, marginalized resistances is more and more an opposition between civil society and radical rightwing groups. I’m not saying we should simply accept the state. I’m just saying that I am suspicious of the political pertinence of this opposition between the “public” system of power which wants to control, proscribe everything, and forms of resistance to subvert it. What I’m more interested in are the obscene supplements that are inherent to power itself.

psychopedagogy

Cho, Daniel. Psychopedagogy. London: Ashgate, 2009.

The force that keeps the unconscious from being heard is the imaginary relation that the analysand constructs between their ego and the analyst’s. To state it differently, the analysand enters into a mirror-relation with the analyst’s ego. The analysand identifies with the analyst by grasping onto the ways they are similar. In a way, the analysand is saying to the analysts, “You are like me!” The analysand will even go so far as to be alienated by the analyst’s ego: “After all,” as the analysand seems to say, “the analyst is the trained professional, the expert.” By regarding the analyst as a mirror-image of one’s self results in attempts to master that image, the analyst. Returning for a moment to Dora – all of her resistance stems from her desire for mastery over Freud, which means the ego is at the bottom of the conflict. Dora is trying to maintain the integrity of her ego by mastering the image qua Freud.

For the unconscious to be heard, the ego must be muted. But one does not mute the ego by debasing, insulting, or shaming it; for indeed the ego will simply redouble itself against such efforts at traumatisation. Rather one disarms the ego by breaking the imaginary identification that alienates the analysand`s subjectivity in the analyst`s, that is, by causing separation. For this reason, Lacan says that the analyst must be ‘not a living mirror, but an empty mirror’ (SII 246). The analyst must be a mirror that reflects an empty image, that is, an image with which the patient cannot identify. The analyst does so by functioning as object a, that obscure object which sullies a perfect picture. And the analyst functions this way by speaking on behalf of the unconscious – the true subject of psychoanalysis. 42

Thus the lesson of the Ratman: we always possess more knowledge than we should like to admit – sometimes more than we ourselves are consciously aware. Learning therefore does not always mean acquiring absolutely new knowledge; it sometimes requires relearning the traumatic knowledge we do “not-want-to-know” but possess all the same. 81

Class consciousness is thus the knowledge of the mode of production contained, or as Lukacs has it, “imputed,” to a particular structural class position within the total system, its thrust is that it places knowledge on the side of the system itself. It no longer much matters what individuals actually think or know about the system. The system functions regardless; and by functioning, the system literally “thinks” the appropriate thoughts for the individuals. For example, the individual worker need not imagine extracting living labor power from the body in order to sell it as a commodity on the market in order for capitalism to function. This knowledge – that is, of classes and their particular functions – is possessed by the system of capital production itself, and as it operates, the system literally thinks about the extraction, sale, and consumption of labor power so that the individual does not have to. In other words, while empirical individuals may not care about the economy or politics, the economy and politics care about empirical individuals. Class consciousness, in other words, on Lukacs’s account, exists on a similar formal level as does the psychoanalytic unconscious. 84

But as suggestive and provocative Lukacs’s unadulterated Marxian variation on consciousness may be, even he does not take into account the various resistances, in the psychoanalytic sense of the word, individuals will produce in order not to know the traumatic knowledge yielded by certain standpoints. We must therefore follow through with the

Just as Lukacs correlates class consciousness to the system itself, effectively rubbing out the individual’s relevance, so Lacan and psychoanalysis also correlate the unconscious to a kind of nonindividual subject: “if there is an image which could represent for us the Freudian notion of the unconscious, it is indeed that of the acephalic subject, of a subject who no longer has an ego, who doesn’t belong to the ego” (S II: 167).

Lacan describes his notion of the subject as acephalic (that is, headless) because its thought is no longer tided to the consciousness of the ego but is now taken over by the unconscious itself. Because of its ties to the ego, consciousness is considered by Lacan as an obstacle or resistance to the knowledge of the unconscious. In dividing thought and being between the unconscious and the subject, Lacan introduces a fundamental division into his variation on the subject, that is to say, the Lacanian subject is a split-subject , which he conveys in his nomenclature: $. 87

Lukacs, similarly, introduces a split into the subject of the proletariat with class consciousness, as we saw, on the side of the system itself, separated from the individual’s being. In both Lukacs and Lacan, the acephalic subject becomes the image to which we must hold on.

The overcoming of the ego leaves a clearing in which the subject of the unconscious can emerge. This is why, for Lacan, the subject can only be described negatively. Only when conscious thought or positive identity (i.e., I am a man, I am a teacher, I am able-bodied, etc.) – in short, the ego – is subtracted from individuals, that is, only when they are transformed into the negativity that is the Lacanian subject, can they learn the unconscious. 87

If class consciousness corresponds to the unconscious in that they are both forms of repressed knowledge, then trauma would be the sign of class consciousness’s emergence. Therefore the criticism that Marx issues his political economist contemporaries on the basis of their not having learned the miserable truth of capitalist accumulation is a bit off the mark. For Marx grants them too much benefit of the doubt. More correct would have been to make the psychoanalytic critique, namely, that the bourgeois political economists knew this truth quite well but nonetheless did “not want to know” about it. They felt the trauma of capitalism and attempted to rationalize it away. 88

stavrakakis 8 of 8

Stavrakakis, Yannis. Subjectivity and the Organized Other: Between Symbolic Authority and Fantasmatic Enjoyment Organization Studies 2008 29: 1037

This is not to say that resistance is impossible. It is merely to imply that our dependence on the organized Other is not reproduced merely at the level of knowledge and conscious consent, and thus a shift in consciousness through knowledge transmission is not enough to effect change. What is much more important is the formal (symbolic) structure of power relations that social ordering presupposes. The subject very often prefers not to realize the performative function of the symbolic command — the fact that what promises to deal with subjective lack is what reproduces this lack perpetuating the subject’s desire for subjection. Most crucially, the reproduction of this formal structure relies on a libidinal, affective support that binds subjects to the conditions of their symbolic subordination. What makes the lack in the Other ‘invisible’ — and thus sustains the credibility of the organized Other — is a fantasmatic dialectic manipulating our relation to a lost/impossible enjoyment. It is impossible to unblock and displace identifications and passionate attachments without paying attention to this important dimension.

[A]ny analysis that purports to capture the complex relation between subject and structure cannot remain at the level of signification, although the role of the symbolic command remains extremely important. But, then, how exactly should one theorize the ‘material’ irreducible to signification?

The importance of this question appears to be elevated in a context in which passion and affect are given increasingly prominent roles in the study of society and politics. Here, contrary to what is widely believed, Lacan does not limit his insights within the level of representation and signification.

One needs to stress the productivity of the Lacanian distinction between the ‘subject of the signifier’ and the ‘subject of enjoyment/jouissance’ in addressing this question, and to develop its implications for how we can or should consider the relation between subject and organized Other.

… Lacanian theory accounts for the … lack in the Other, the lack that splits subjective and objective reality, as a lack of jouissance … This lack is always posited as something lost, as a lost fullness, the part of ourselves that is sacrificed — castrated — when we enter the symbolic system of language and social relations. As we have already seen, however, this lack of jouissance should not be viewed as a nihilistic conclusion. It is, rather, what constitutes and sustains human desire: the prohibition of jouissance — the nodal point of the Oedipal drama — is exactly what permits the emergence of desire, a desire structured around the unending quest for the lost, impossible jouissance.

Even after symbolic castration — or, rather, because of it — jouissance remains the catalyst of inter-subjective interaction, a potent political factor.

According to this schema, it is only by sacrificing her pre-symbolic enjoyment that the social subject can develop her desire (including the desire to identify with particular political projects, ideologies and discourses).

The fact, however, that this enjoyment is excised during the process of socialization does not mean that it stops affecting the politics of subjectivity and identification. On the contrary; first of all, it is the imaginary promise of recapturing our lost/impossible enjoyment which provides the fantasy support for many of our political projects and social choices. Almost all political discourse focuses on the delivery of the ‘good life’ or a ‘just society’, both fictions (imaginarizations) of a future state in which current limitations thwarting our enjoyment will be overcome.

… During this imaginary period, which we could call ‘original state’, the nation was prosperous and happy. However, this original state of innocence was somehow destroyed and national(ist) narratives are based on the assumption that the desire of each generation is to try and heal this (metaphoric) castration in order to give back to the nation its lost full enjoyment.

But this is not the full story. Apart from the promise of fantasy, what sustains desire, what drives our identification acts at the level of affectivity/jouissance, is also our ability to go through limit-experiences related to a jouissance of the body.

Otherwise, without any such experience, our faith in fantasmatic political projects — projects which never manage to deliver the fullness they promise — would gradually vanish. A national war victory or the successes of the national football team are examples of such experiences of enjoyment at the national level. However impressive, this jouissance remains partial:

That’s not it

‘“That’s not it” is the very cry by which the jouissance obtained is distinguished from the jouissance expected’ (Lacan 1998: 111); its momentary character, unable to fully satisfy desire, fuels dissatisfaction. It reinscribes lack in the subjective economy, the lack of another jouissance, of the sacrificed jouissance qua fullness, and thus reproduces the fantasmatic promise of its recapturing, the kernel of human desire.

Precisely because the partiality of this second type of enjoyment threatens to reveal the illusory character of our fantasies of fullness, the credibility and salience of any object of identification — and of the organized Other offering it — relies on the ability of providing a convincing explanation for the lack of total enjoyment.

It is here that the idea of a ‘theft of enjoyment’ is introduced (Zizek 1993). If we seem unable to access our lost/impossible enjoyment this is not because castration is constitutive of our symbolic reality, it is not because fullness is impossible, it is only because somebody else is obstructing our access; what we are lacking has been stolen by this satanic other. It may be a foreign occupier, the ‘national enemy’, those who ‘always plot to rule the world’, some dark powers and their local sympathizers ‘who want to enslave our proud nation’, immigrants ‘who steal our jobs’, etc.

The obstacle to full enjoyment shifts depending on the specificity of the fantasmatic narrative at stake, but the logic operating here remains the same.

Conclusion

I have tried in this paper to outline the ways in which Lacanian theory moves beyond subjectivism and objectivism in illuminating the dialectic between subject and organized Other. By understanding the subject as a subject of lack,

Lacan’s negative ontology provides a solution to the paradox of a desire for subjection. There is no desire without lack. And the Other — embodied in the symbolic command — is both what consolidates this lack in the symbolic and what promises to ‘manage’ this lack. At the same time, by understanding the Other as an equally lacking domain Lacan helps us to explain the failure of subjection, the possibility of escaping a full determination of the subject by the socio-symbolic structure.

Why is it then that this option only rarely enacts itself?

To the extent that the lack marking both subject and Other is always a lack of real jouissance, forms of identification offered by the organized Other are obliged to operate at this level also, adding the dimension of a positive incentive to the formal force of the symbolic command. We have thus seen how Lacanian theory illuminates the dialectic between subject and organized Other not only by focusing on the symbolic presuppositions of authority (the irresistibility of the Other’s command), but also by exploring the fantasmatic administration of real enjoyment and its lack, which sustains the credibility of the lacking Other and defers resistance.

Only by taking into account both these dimensions, lack and enjoyment, symbolic command and fantasy, can we start envisaging a comprehensive explanation of what drives identification acts sustaining structures of subjection and, simultaneously, allows a margin of freedom, which, however, can only be enacted with difficulty.

And, of course, the reason for this difficulty is that the symbolic and fantasmatic force of orders of subjection is so overwhelming that resistance or non-compliance itself (when it manages to occur) is usually guided by and ends up instituting a new order of subjection and rarely engages in attempts to encircle lack in a radically democratic ethico-political direction.

Lacan’s reaction to May 1968 is absolutely relevant here (and not only because of the 40th anniversary of the May events). I will very briefly refer to it by way of concluding this essay. During the May events, Lacan observed the French teachers’ strike and suspended his seminar; it seems that he even met Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the student leaders (Roudinesco 1997: 336). One way or the other, his name became linked to the events. However, the relation was not an easy one. In 1969, for instance, Lacan was invited to speak at Vincennes, but obviously he and the students operated at different wavelengths. The discussion ended as follows:

‘The aspiration to revolution has but one conceivable issue, always, the discourse of the master. That is what experience has proved. What you, as revolutionaries, aspire to is a Master. You will have one… for you fulfil the role of helots of this regime. You don’t know what that means either? This regime puts you on display; it says: “Watch them fuck”.’ (Lacan 1990: 126)

A similar experience marks his lecture at the Université Catholique de Louvain on 13 October 1973, when he is interrupted and eventually attacked by a student who seizes the opportunity to transmit his (situationist) revolutionary message. The episode, which has been filmed by Françoise Wolff, concludes with Lacan making the following comment:

‘As he was just saying, we should all be part of it, we should close ranks together to achieve, well, what exactly? What does organization mean if not a new order? A new order is the return of something which — if you remember the premise from which I started — it is the order of the discourse of the Master … It’s the one word which hasn’t been mentioned, but it’s the very term organization implies.’ A grim picture, but one that has to be seriously taken into account in reflecting our current theoretico-political predicament.

Category: symbolic

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