the real – Page 14

rothenberg excess psychoanalysis

Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2010. Print.

The theorizing of an excess that sticks to and flows from all signification (whether in speech or in bodily gesture) is the hallmark of a psychoanalytic approach. The excess is inescapable, irremediable, and unsymbolizable: in Lacanian parlance it subsists in the register of the Real (106).

🙂 Rothenberg continually hammers Butler over the fact that Butler totally misunderstands the nature of this excess. Butler’s excess is taken up in a bodily way and read off transparently, as if meaning was transparent. For R. this excess is irresolvibly non-transparent, beguiling even. “(Butler) uses the trappings and terminology of psychoanalysis but spectacularly fails to appreciate precisely what distinguishes psychoanalysis from Foucaultianism — the theorization of the dimension of excess inherent in every speech act. This failure inflects her version of subject formation: in disavowing the extimate cause, Butler leaves herself with no way to theorize the subject as a site of excess, as a Möbius subject” (107).

rickert

Rickert, Thomas. Acts of Enjoyment.

feldner masochism liberation

In Žižek’s Lacanian terms, the emergence of pure subjectivity coincides with an ‘experience of radical self-degradation’ whereby I, the subject, am emptied ‘of all substantial content, of all symbolic support which could confer a modicum of dignity on me’. The reason why such a (humiliating and potentially perverse) position of self-degradation is to be assumed, Žižek argues, is that within a disciplinary relationship (between ‘master and servant’), self-beating is, in its deepest configuration, nothing but the staging of the other’s secret fantasy; as such, this staging allows for the suspension of the disciplinary efficacy of the relationship by bringing to light the obscene supplement which secretly cements it. Žižek’s central point is that the obscene supplement ultimately cements the position of the servant: what self-beating uncovers is ‘the servant’s masochistic libidinal attachment to his master’, so as ‘the true goal of this beating is to beat out that in me which attaches me to the master’ (Revolution at the Gates, 252)

Why is masochism the first necessary step towards liberation?

When a subject stages a masochistic scenario and says ‘I am a priori guilty, and therefore I want to be punished!’, it is the
law that, in effect, reveals its impotence and frustration, since its universalistic foundations are exposed as merely functional to the superego command (‘Enjoy!’).

If a subject does not need the law to punish him, for he can do it himself outside the remit of the law, the latter inevitably loses its coercive character and exhibits its fundamental lack of purpose, its being anchored in jouissance. The masochist, therefore, teases out and identifies with the libidinal (fundafundamentally irrational and self-destructive) kernel of the law itself. 119

Feldner

Vighi, Fabio and Heiko Feldner. Žižek Beyond Foucault. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.

act proper (radical agency)

performative activity within a hegemonic structure

What qualifies a free act, according to Žižek, is an intervention whereby “I do not merely choose between two or more options WITHIN a pre-given set of coordinates, but I choose to change this set of coordinates itself’ (Žižek, On Belief 2001c, 121).

For Lacan, there is no ethical act proper without taking the risk of … a momentary ‘suspension of the big Other’, of the socio-symbolic network that guarantees the subject’s identity: an authentic act occurs only when the subject risks a gesture that is no longer ‘covered up’ by the big Other (Žižek, 1993, Tarrying with the Negative 262-4).

Here is a crucial quote that pretty much sums up their (Butler and Žižek) respective differences, (okay its pretty condensed)

… only the Real allows us to truly resignify the Symbolic. (110)

Žižek maintains that for all Butler’s radicality, she remains caught up in a resistance at the level of the symbolic, that is, at the level of signification. Judy Butler’s work doesn’t touch the Real.

A quote by Žižek from the book:

we cannot go directly from capitalist to revolutionary subjectivity: the abstraction, the foreclosure of others, the blindness to the other’s suffering and pain, has first to be broken in a gesture of taking the risk and reaching directly out to the suffering other — a gesture which, since it shatters the very kernel of our identity, cannot fail to appear extremely violent. (Žižek, Revolotion at the Gates 2002a, 252)

Žižek communist hypothesis pt 2

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

For this reason, a new emancipatory politics will stem no longer from a particular social agent, but from an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletariat who have “nothing to lose but their chains;’ we are in danger of losing everything: the threat is that we will be reduced to abstract subjects devoid of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.

This triple threat to our entire being renders us all proletarians, reduced to “substanceless subjectivity” as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure —in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially a homo sacer, and the only way to stop that from becoming a reality is to act preventively. If this sounds apocalyptic, one can only retort that we live in apocalyptic times.

It is easy to see how each of the three processes of proletarianization refer to an apocalyptic end point: ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives . . . At all these levels, things are approaching a zero-point; “the end of times is near. ”

Apocalypse is characterized by a specific mode of time, clearly opposed to the two other predominant modes: traditional circular time (time ordered and regulated on cosmic principles, reflecting the order of nature and the heavens; the time-form in which microcosm and macrocosm resonate in harmony), and the modern linear time of gradual progress or development.

Apocalyptic time is the “time of the end of time;’ the time of emergency, of the “state of exception” when the end is nigh and we can only prepare for it. There are at least four different versions of apocalyptism today:

Christian fundamentalism, New Age spirituality, techno-digital post-humanism, and secular ecologism. Although they all share the basic notion that humanity is approaching a zero-point of radical transmutation, their respective ontologies differ radically:

Techno-digital apocalyptism (of which Ray Kurzweil is the main representative) remains within the confines of scientific naturalism, and discerns in the evolution of human species the contours of our transformation into “post-humans.”

New Age spirituality gives this transmutation a further twist, interpreting it as the shift from one mode of “cosmic awareness” to another (usually a shift from the modern dualist-mechanistic stance to one of holistic immersion).

Christian fundamentalists of course read the apocalypse in strictly biblical terms, that is, they search for (and find) in the contemporary world signs that the final battle between Christ and the Anti-Christ is imminent.

Finally, secular ecologism shares the naturalist stance of post-humanism, but gives it a negative twist-what lies ahead, the “omega point” we are approaching, is not a progression to a higher “post-human” level, but the catastrophic self-destruction of humanity.

Although Christian fundamentalist apocalyptism is considered the most ridiculous, and dangerous, in its content, it remains the version closest to a radical “milenarian” emancipatory logic. The task is thus to bring it into closer contact with secular ecologism, thereby conceiving the threat of annihilation as the chance for a radical emancipatory renewal.

Such apocalyptic proletarianization is, however, inadequate if we want to deserve the name of “communist:’ The ongoing enclosure of the commons concerns both the relation of people to the objective conditions of their life processes as well as the relation between people themselves: the commons are privatized at the expense of the proletarianized majority.

But there is a gap between these two kinds of relation: the commons can also be restored to collective humanity without communism, in an authoritarian communitarian regime; likewise the de-substantialized, “rootless” subject, deprived of content, can also be counteracted in ways that tend in the direction of communitarianism, with the subject finding its proper place in a new substantial community. In this precise sense, Negri’s anti-socialist title, GoodBye Mr. Socialism, was correct: communism is to be opposed to socialism, which, in place of the egalitarian collective, offers an organic community (Nazism was national socialism, not national communism). In other words, while there may be a socialist anti-Semitism, there cannot be a communist form. (If it appears otherwise, as in Stalin’s last years, it is only as an indicator of a lack of fidelity to the revolutionary event.) Eric Hobsbawm recently published a column with the title: “Socialism Failed, Capitalism Is Bankrupt. What Comes Next?” The answer is: communism.

Socialism wants to solve the first three antagonisms without addressing the fourth-without the singular universality of the proletariat. The only way for the global capitalist system to survive its long-term antagonism and simultaneously avoid the communist solution, will be for it to reinvent some kind of socialism-in the guise of communitarianism, or populism, or capitalism with Asian values, or some other configuration. The future wil thus be communist . . . or socialist (95).

As Michael Hardt has put it, if capitalism stands for private property and socialism for state property, communism stands for the overcoming of property as such in the commons. Socialism is what Marx called “vulgar communism” in which we get only what Hegel would have called the abstract negation of property, that is, the negation of property within the field of property —it is “universalized private property.”

Žižek real communist hypothesis

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

Saving endangered species, saving the planet from global warming, saving AIDS patients and those dying for lack of funds for expensive treatments, saving the starving children . . . all this can wait a little bit. The call to “save the banks!” by contrast, is an unconditional imperative which must be met with immediate action. The panic was so absolute that a transnational and non-partisan unity was immediately established, all grudges between world leaders being momentarily forgotten in order to avert the catastrophe. But what the much-praised “bi-partisan” approach effectively meant was that even democratic procedures were de facto suspended: there was no time to engage in proper debate, and those who opposed the plan in the US Congress were quickly made to fall in with the majority. Bush, McCain and Obama all quickly got together, explaining to confused congressmen and women that there was simply no time for discussion-we were in a state of emergency, and things simply had to be done fast . . . And let us also not forget that the sublimely enormous sums of money were spent not on some clear “real” or concrete problem, but essentially in order to restore confidence in the markets, that is, simply to change people’s beliefs!

Do we need any further proof that Capital is the Real of our lives, a Real whose imperatives are much more absolute than even the most pressing demands of our social and natural reality? (80)

It was Joseph Brodsky who provided an appropriate solution to the search for the mysterious “fifth element:’ the quintessential ingredient of our reality: ”Along with air, earth, water, and fire, money is the fifth natural force a human being has to reckon with most often. If one has any doubts about this, a quick look at the recent financial meltdown should be more than sufficient to dispel them.

In order to approach these problems adequately, it will be necessary to invent new forms of large-scale collective action; neither the standard forms of state intervention nor the much-praised forms of local self-organization will be up to the job. If such problems are not solved one way or another, the most likely scenario will be a new era of apartheid in which secluded parts of the world enjoying an abundance of food, water and energy are separated from a chaotic “outside” characterized by widespread chaos, starvation and permanent war. What should people in Haiti and other regions blighted by food shortages do? Do they not have the full right to violent rebellion? Communism is once again at the gates (84).

First, as was noted earlier with regard to Mali, while imposing the globalization of agriculture on Third World countries, the developed Western countries are taking great care to maintain their own food self-sufficiency with financial support for their own farmers, etc. (Recall that financial support to farmers accounts for more than half of the entire European Union budget-the West itself has never abandoned the “policy of maximum food self-sufficiency”! )

Second, one should note that the list of products and services which, like food, are not “commodities like others” extends much further, including not only defense (as all “patriots” are aware), but above all water, energy, the environment as such, culture, education, and health . . . Who is to decide on the priorities here, and how, if such decisions cannot be left to the market? It is here that the question of communism has to be raised once again (85).

… the great defining problem of Western Marxism was the lack of a revolutionary subject or agent. Why is it that: the working class does not complete the passage from in-itself to for-itself: and constitute itself as a revolutionary agent? This problem was the main motivation for the turn to psychoanalysis, evoked precisely in order to explain the unconscious libidinal mechanisms which were preventing the rise of class consciousness, mechanisms inscribed into the very being (social situation) of the working class. In this way, the truth of Marxist socio-economic analysis could be saved, and there was no need to give ground to “revisionist” theories about the rise of the middle classes. For this same reason, Western Marxism was also engaged in a constant search for other social agents who could play the role of the revolutionary subject, as understudies who might replace the indisposed working class: Third World peasants, students, intellectuals, the excluded . . .

The failure of the working class as a revolutionary subject lies already at the very core of the Bolshevik revolution: Lenin’s skill lay in his ability to detect the “rage potential” of the disappointed peasants. The October Revolution took place under the banner of “land and peace:’ addressed to the vast peasant majority, seizing the brief moment of their radical dissatisfaction. Lenin had already been thinking along ‘ these lines a decade earlier, which is why he was so horrified at the prospect of the success of the Stolypin land reforms, aimed at creating a new and stronger class of independent farmers. He was sure that if Stolypin succeeded, the chance for revolution would be lost for decades.

All successful socialist revolutions, from Cuba to Yugoslavia, followed same model, seizing a local opportunity in an extreme and critical co-opting the desire for national liberation or other forms of “rage capital.” Of course, a partisan of the logic of hegemony would here point out that this is the “normal” logic of revolution, that the “critical mass” is reached precisely and only through a series of equivalences among multiple demands, a series which is always radically contingent and dependent on a specific, unique even, set of circumstances. A revolution never occurs when all antagonisms collapse into the Big One, but when they synergetically combine their power.

But the problem is here more complex: the point is not just that revolution no longer rides on the train of History, following its Laws, since there is no History, since history is an open, contingent process. The problem is a different one. It is as if there is a Law of History, a more-or-less clear and predominant line of historical development, but that revolution can only occur in its interstices, “against the current.”

Revolutionaries have to wait patiently for the (usually very brief) moment when the system openly malfunctions or collapses, have to exploit the window of opportunity, to seize power —which at that moment lies, as it were, in the street—and then fortify their hold on it, building up repressive apparatuses, and so forth, so that, once the moment of confusion is over and the majority sobers up only to be disappointed by the new regime, it is too late to reverse things, for the revolutionaries are now firmly entrenched.

The case of communist ex-Yugoslavia is typical here: throughout World War II, the communists ruthlessly hegemonized the resistance against the German occupying forces, monopolizing their role in the anti-fascist struggle by actively seeking to destroy al alternative (“bourgeois”) resisting forces, while simultaneously denying the communist nature of their struggle (those who raised the suspicion that the communists planned to grab power and foment a revolution at the end of the war were swiftly denounced as spreading enemy propaganda). After the war, once they did indeed seize full power, things changed quickly and the regime openly displayed its true communist nature. The communists, although genuinely popular until around 1946, nonetheless cheated almost openly in the general election of that year. When asked why they had done so-since they could easily have won in a free election anyway-their answer (in private, of course) was that this was true, but then they would have lost the next election four years later, so it was better to make clear now what kind of election they were prepared to tolerate. In short, they were fully aware of the unique opportunity that had brought them to power. An awareness of the communists’ historical failure to build and sustain genuine long-term hegemony based on popular support was thus, from the very beginning, taken into account.

Thus again, it is not enough simply to remain faithful to the communist Idea; one has to locate within historical reality antagonisms which give this Idea a practical urgency.

The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are four such antagonisms:

the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe;
the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called “intellectual property”;
the socioethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics);
and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums.

There is a qualitative difference between this last feature-the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included-and the other three, which designate different aspects of what Hardt and Negri call the “commons;’ the shared substance of our social being, the privatization of which involves violent acts which should, where necessary, be resisted with violent means:

-the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of “cognitive” capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, the postal system, and so on;

-the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to rain forests and the natural habitat itself);

– the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity); with new biogenetic technology, the creation of a New Man in the literal sense of changing human nature becomes a realistic prospect.

What the struggles in all these domains share is an awareness of the potential for destruction, up to and including the self-annihilation of humanity itself, should the capitalist logic of enclosing the commons be allowed a free run. Nicholas Stern was right to characterize the climate crisis as “the greatest market failure in human history.” (91)
It is the reference to the “commons” which justifies the resuscitation of the notion of communism: it enables us to see the progressive “enclosure” of the commons as a process of proletarianization of those who are thereby excluded from their own substance.

We should certainly not drop the notion of the proletariat, or of the proletarian position; on the contrary, the present conjuncture compels us to radicalize it to an existential level well beyond Marx’s imagination. We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject, a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito.

Žižek postmodern

one should nonetheless admit that, when Jean-Francois Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition, elevated the term from simply naming certain new artistic tendencies (especialy in writing and architecture) to designating a new historical epoch, there was an element of authentic nomination in his act. “Postmodernism” now effectively functioned as a new Master-Signifier introducing a new order of intelligibility into the confused multiplicity of historical experience.

At the level of consumption, this new spirit is that of so-called “cultural capitalism” : we primarily buy commodities neither on account of their utility nor as status symbols; we buy them to get the experience provided by them, we consume them in order to render our lives pleasurable and meaningful. This triad cannot but evoke the Lacanian triad RSI: the Real of direct utility (good healthy food, the quality of a car, etc.), the Symbolic of the status (I buy a certain car to signal my status-the Thorstein Veblen perspective), the Imaginary of pleasurable and meaningful experience.

This is how capitalism, at the level of consumption, integrated the legacy of’68, the critique of alienated consumption: authentic experience matters. A recent Hilton Hotels publicity campaign consists of a simple claim: “Travel doesn’t only get us from place A to place B. It should also make us a better person:’ Only a decade ago, could one have imagined such an ad appearing? Is this not also the reason we buy organic food? Who really believes that half-rotten and overpriced “organic” apples are really healthier than the non-organic varieties? The point is that, in buying them, we are not merely buying and consuming, we are simultaneously doing something meaningful, showing our capacity for care and our global awareness, participating in a collective project . . . (54)

The new spirit of capitalism triumphantly recuperated the egalitarian and anti-hierarchical rhetoric of 1968, resenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organizations characteristic of both corporate capitalism and Really Existing Socialism-a new libertarian spirit epitomized by dressed-down “cool” capitalists such as Bil Gates and the founders of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream (56).

On the information sheet in a New York hotel, I recently read: “Dear guest! To guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us, this hotel is totally smoke-free. For any infringement of this regulation, you will be charged $200:’ The beauty of this formulation, taken literally, is that you are to be punished for refUSing to fully enjoy your stay . . . The superego imperative to enjoy thus functions as the reversal of Kant’s “Du kannst, denn du sollst!” (You can, because you must ! ) ; it relies on a “You must, because you can ! ” That is to say, the superego aspect of today’s “nonrepressive” hedonism (the constant provocation we are exposed to, enjoining us to go right to the end and explore all modes of jouissance) resides in the way permitted jouissance necessarily turns into obligatory jouissance.

This drive to pure autistic jouissance (through drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when the emancipatory sequence of 1968 had exhausted its potential. At this critical point (the mid-1970s), the only option left was a direct, brutal, passage a l’acte, a push-towards-the-Real, which assumed three main forms: the search for extreme forms of sexual jouissance; Leftist political terrorism (the RAF in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, etc., whose wager was that, in an epoch in which the masses have become totally immersed in the capitalist ideological morass, the standard critique of ideology is no longer operative, and only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence- l’action directe-will awaken the masses); and, finally, the turn towards the Real of an inner experience (oriental mysticism) (58).

What all three shared was the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement into a direct contact with the Real. This shift from political engagement to the post-political Real is perhaps best exemplified by the films of Bernardo Bertolucci, that arch-renegade, whose works range from early masterpieces like Prima della rivoluzione to late aestheticist-spiritualist self-indulgences such as the abominable Little Buddha. This span achieved full circle with The Dreamers, Bertolucci’s late film about Paris ’68, in which a couple of French students (a brother and sister) befriend a young American student during the whirlwind of the events. By the film’s end, however, the friends have split up, after the French students become caught up in the political violence, while the American remains faithful to the message of love and emotional liberation (59).

Jean-Claude Milner is keenly aware of how the establishment succeeded in undoing all threatening consequences of 1968 by way of incorporating the so-called “spirit of ’68” and thereby turning it against the real core of the revolt. The demands for new rights (which would have meant a true redistribution of power) were granted, but merely in the guise of “permissions” -the “permissive society” being precisely one which broadens the scope of what subjects are allowed to do without actually giving them any additional power:

“Those who hold power know very well the difference between a right and a permission . . . . A right in a strict sense of the term gives access to the exercise of a power, at the expense of another power. A permission doesn’t diminish the power of the one who gives it; it doesn’t augment the power of the one who gets it. It makes his life easier, which is not nothing”

This is how it goes with the right to divorce, abortion, gay marriage, and so on and so forth- these are all permissions masked as rights; they do not change in any way the distribution of powers. Such was the effect of the “spirit of ’68”: it “effectively contributed to making life easier. This is a lot, but it is not everything. Because it didn’t encroach upon powers.” Therein resides “the secret of the tranquility which has ruled in France over the last forty years”

While May ’68 aimed at total (and totally politicized) activity, the “spirit of ’68” transposed this into a depoliticized pseudo-activity (new lifestyles, etc. ), the very form of social passivity (60).

Žižek desire drive review of Fink 1996

On the web here at lacan.com

This paper was first published in the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 1 (1996), 160-61, as a review of Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Insofar as, according to Lacan, at the conclusion of psychoanalytic treatment, the subject assumes the drive beyond fantasy and beyond (the Law of) desire, this problematic also compels us to confront the question of the conclusion of treatment in all its urgency. If we discard the discredited standard formulas (“reintegration into the symbolic space”, etc.), only two options remain open: desire or drive.

– That is to say, either we conceive the conclusion of treatment as the assertion of the subject’s radical openness to the enigma of the Other’s desire no longer veiled by fantasmatic formations,

– or we risk the step beyond desire itself and adopt the position of the saint who is no longer bothered by the Other’s desire as its decentred cause.

In the case of the saint, the subject, in an unheard-of way, “causes itself”, becomes its own cause. Its cause is no longer decentred, i.e., the enigma of the Other’s desire no longer has any hold over it.

How are we to understand this strange reversal on which Fink is quite justified to insist? In principle, things are clear enough: by way of positing itself as its own cause, the subject fully assumes the fact that the object-cause of its desire is not a cause that precedes its effects but is retroactively posited by the network of its effects: an event is never simply in itself traumatic, it only becomes a trauma retroactively, by being ‘secreted’ from the subject’s symbolic space as its inassimilable point of reference.

In this precise sense, the subject “causes itself” by way of retroactively positing that X which acts as the object-cause of its desire. This loop is constitutive of the subject.

That is, an entity that does not ’cause itself’ is precisely not a subject but an object. However, one should avoid conceiving this assumption as a kind of symbolic integration of the decentred Real, whereby the subject ‘symbolizes’, assumes as an act of its free choice, the imposed trauma of the contingent encounter with the Real.

One should always bear in mind that the status of the subject as such is hysterical: the subject ‘is’ only insofar as it confronts the enigma of Che vuoi? -“What do you want?”- insofar as the Other’s desire remains impenetrable, insofar as the subject doesn’t know what kind of object it is for the Other. Suspending this decentring of the cause is thus strictly equivalent to what Lacan called “subjective destitution”, the de-hystericization by means of which the subject loses its status as subject.

The most elementary matrix of fantasy, of its temporal loop, is that of the “impossible” gaze by means of which the subject is present at the act of his/her own conception. What is at stake in it is the enigma of the Other’s desire: by means of the fantasy-formation, the subject provides an answer to the question, ‘What am I for my parents, for their desire?’ and thus endeavours to arrive at the ‘deeper meaning’ of his or her existence, to discern the Fate involved in it.

The reassuring lesson of fantasy is that “I was brought about with a special purpose”. Consequently, when, at the end of psychoanalytic treatment, I “traverse my fundamental fantasy”, the point of it is not that, instead of being bothered by the enigma of the Other’s desire, of what I am for the others, I “subjectivize” my fate in the sense of its symbolization, of recognizing myself in a symbolic network or narrative for which I am fully responsible, but rather that I fully assume the uttermost contingency of my being.The subject becomes ’cause of itself’ in the sense of no longer looking for a guarantee of his or her existence in another’s desire.

Another way to put it is to say that the “subjective destitution” changes the register from desire to drive. Desire is historical and subjectivized, always and by definition unsatisfied, metonymical, shifting from one object to another, since I do not actually desire what I want. What I actually desire is to sustain desire itself, to postpone the dreaded moment of its satisfaction.

Drive, on the other hand, involves a kind of inert satisfaction which always finds its way. Drive is non-subjectivized (“acephalic”); perhaps its paradigmatic expressions are the repulsive private rituals (sniffing one’s own sweat, sticking one’s finger into one’s nose, etc.) that bring us intense satisfaction without our being aware of it-or, insofar as we are aware of it, without our being able to do anything to prevent it.

In Andersen’s fairy tale The Red Shoes, an impoverished young woman puts on a pair of magical shoes and almost dies when her feet won’t stop dancing. She is only saved when an executioner cuts off her feet with his axe. Her still-shod feet dance on, whereas she is given wooden feet and finds peace in religion.

These shoes stand for drive at its purest: an ‘undead’ partial object that functions as a kind of impersonal willing: ‘it wants’, it persists in its repetitive movement (of dancing), it follows its path and exacts its satisfaction at any price, irrespective of the subject’s well-being. This drive is that which is ‘in the subject more than herself’: although the subject cannot ever ‘subjectivize’ it, assume it as ‘her own’ by way of saying ‘It is I who want to do this!’ it nonetheless operates in her very kernel.

As Fink’s book reminds us, Lacan’s wager is that it is possible to sublimate this dull satisfaction. This is what, ultimately, art and religion are about.

real of woman

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 127-131

The production of the excluded ‘reality’ of women is evident in, for example, the case of sexual harassment.

Before feminist activism in this area, social discourses did not represent the ‘experience’ of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment existed as a social practice, but it was not possible to articulate that experience as such within the symbolic economy of existing social discourses. These experiences were literally ‘not spoken of’.

Yet at the same time, the sexual harassment of women is a social practice that is produced by gendered social relations. The social discourse produces both the practice and its disavowal. The exclusions of social fictions can be traced to the operation of a phallic Symbolic order that produces discourse as discourse and subject as subject.

In Lacanian terms, the production of the real of women as an excluded term of discourse is linked to the impossibility of symbolically rendering women in a phallocentric Symbolic order. The Lacanian position links the excluded real of women to the symbolically repudiated female body of the Mother in a phallic Symbolic order. In feminist terms, this symbolic economy renders ‘women’ as either the phantasy of The Woman or as an excluded term. In this formulation, feminist discourses articulate the founding symbolic repudiation of the excluded real of women.

Unlike social fictions, feminist discourses render the real of women not as lack but symbolize and reinscribe it into the signifying chain. This reinscription shifts the relation of symbolic elements within the chain, producing a new chain of signifiers. This reinscription produces a new discourse and thus a different representation of women.

Instead, the a should be understood as analogous to the Lacanian concept of the Real. This concept is one of Lacan’s most difficult and complex, as he uses it in many linked senses and its meaning changes over the course of his work. … Lacan posits the Real as excess, impossibility and lack. In Lacan’s earlier work, it is a material plenitude which exceeds the Symbolic order, and in which nothing is lacking … In Lacan’s later work, the real is impossible (‘le réel, c’est impossible’) (S17: 143). It is a logical obstacle that cannot be represented within the symbolic (S17: 143). For this reason, the Real is also lack in language, because it marks that which the Symbolic cannot symbolize. No signifying chain can represent it in its totality – hence its impossibility. Something must always fall out of discourse, which is its excluded a. 131

In this way, the Real can also be understood as the hole in the Symbolic order, the impossibility on which that order is predicated and the absence that it encircles. 131

It is not the matching of a signifier to its correlative signified, because there is no metalanguage able to tell the truth about truth and no transcendental signifier that can fix meaning as a correlate of reality (Lacan 1965: 16, Éc: 867– 868). Knowledge is a discourse of the Real, diffracting it through the prism of discursive structures. The production of a new signifying chain represents a different relation to the Real, and with it a new ‘real’.

My account of feminist knowledge does not understand the Real as a fixed entity that the act of knowing passively uncovers. Rather, it is the constitutive ‘outside’ of the existing limits of discourse. An effect of the excess plenitude of the Real is theoretical and political possibility.

If the Symbolic order does not represent the totality of being, then language can take a different form, can represent a different relationship to the Real, and can represent a different Real. It becomes possible to signify the Real differently. Such a conception grants a utopian dimension to knowledge, for if it is not immutable, then the world that it represents is not given, and it can describe a different Real.

Accordingly, knowledge exists in both a present and a future signifying relation to the Real. If the Real is an impossible plenitude, it becomes possible to accept that we can never fully know or represent it, while also accepting that it offers a multiplicity of possibilities.

There can be other symbolic exclusions from discourse, such that the operations of discourse are less costly to those excluded others of the Symbolic order.

We need not conflate the lack in the symbolic with a Symbolic that represents femininity as lack. To claim that it is possible to change a signifying relation to the Real (and with it the signifying relation to object, self and others) is not to claim that it is possible to obtain a mystical fusion with the plenitude of the Real, in which language is adequate to its all and the speaking being suffers no loss. My conception of feminist discourse assumes that there is no knowledge that can ever provide a full and adequate representation of the world. Rather, knowledge is necessarily incomplete, situated and partial, such that it cannot ever represent all, or be a transcendental Truth.

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 132.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/oculryerson/Doc?id=10098962&ppg=145

discourse social fictions excluded objet a

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 127-128

In my earlier model of feminist discourse, I propose that feminist knowledges articulate what a phallocentric Symbolic order does not represent. In this model, these knowledges articulate the symbolic a of discourse. By linking this model to the theory of social fictions, it becomes possible to include an account of intersubjective relations. The theory of social fictions gives social content to the concept of ‘discourse’, which otherwise functions as an abstract term.

Social fictions produce imaginary identities. These identities collapse fantasies of self and the ‘idealizing capital I of identification’ (S11: 272), so that they operate as the phantasy that ‘I am a woman’ or ‘I am a man’ and so on. We can therefore understand social fictions as producing the self as imaginary a – an imaginary object filled with phantasmic content (the objet petit a):

Social fictions: s-s-s-s-s-s identity (imaginary a)

However, Zizek points out that the a ‘stands simultaneously for the imaginary fantasmic lure/screen and for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure’ (1998a: 80). Social fictions therefore have imaginary and symbolic registers:

Social fictions: s-s-s-s-s-s identity | symbolic a

That ‘void behind the lure’ is the symbolic a, that which marks the excluded term of discourse, the gap in or void of its symbolic structure.

Feminism traverses the phantasies of identities that social fictions produce, insisting that those social discourses found themselves upon a repudiated term. This recognition of the symbolic a of social fictions symbolizes it, so that it no longer functions as a term which social discourse excludes. Like psychoanalytic discourse, feminist discourse seeks to sustain the distance between the imaginary object and identity so that it becomes possible to articulate the repudiated a of discourse. Unlike psychoanalytic discourse, feminism seeks to interrogate social discourses. Feminist discourse symbolizes the excluded a in relation to social fictions as descriptions of social relations. A feminist politics permits recognition of this founding lack or excluded a term of social fictions. This repudiated other is the a, the excluded and necessary term of that discourse. Feminist knowledges link that excluded a to women.

For example, two classical themes of feminist analysis concern the exclusion of particular realities of gendered identity from the social representation of women, whether the unequal distribution of wealth between men and women, or the cost of a normative ‘feminine’ identity. In each case, feminist discourses identify the social discourses of gender and the reality of the social experience of women that those discourses exclude. Social fictions represent a fictional identity that excludes from that representation the complex and specific social experiences of women.

An example of this operation can be seen in sexual difference. The operation of social fictions substitutes an imaginary and fictional myth of ‘The Woman’ for the complexity of social experience of women. In their operation, social fictions repudiate that reality and put in its place certain fictional ways to be a female subject. For example, those fictional representations of ‘The Woman’ render her as ‘sexuality’. Yet at the same time, those representations refuse the real bodies of women that have physical existence and functions, a refusal that manifests itself in an array of social taboos that surround the female body. This conception of social fictions does not claim that ‘women’ do not exist (either as fact or in discourse). However, social fictions produce their social experiences as the excluded of discourse, namely as its repudiated a term.

This excluded a of social fictions is the ‘real’ of women. Social fictions do not represent the ‘reality’ of women’s experience – an experience of oppression and domination as well as pleasure and desire …

That excluded term, the symbolic a, is an effect of discourse, just as much as the social fiction is. Social discourses produce it as a term that is excluded from a hegemonic ordering of representation.

Oedipal complex reformulated using mirror stage

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 120.

Discourses of the subject

How do discourses produce subjective identity? In his later work on the four discourses, Lacan suggests that symbolic identification with a master signifier produces the subject. As I discussed in Chapter 3, the master signifier is a symbolic element that represents the subject to itself and to other subjects. It is the ‘unifying’ trait which constitutes the subject and which functions as the signifiant-m’être, that signifier which masters the subject. This represents, in Lacan’s account, the signifier of my ‘being’ (S17: 178).

Identification with that master signifier which ‘names’ the subject produces it within discourse, and so produces its speaking position.

In this reformulation of the Oedipus complex, the imaginary I becomes the social I of identity in its identificatory attachment to those master signifiers which structure the signifying chains of discourse. This account of subject formation explains how the Freudian bodily ego becomes a social identity.

In Lacanian theory, a symbolic representation of the imaginary morphology of the ego of the mirror stage produces the subject as a ‘self’. This symbolic representation is articulated through the master signifiers of the Symbolic order that enable the subject to experience itself as a self – as an I of identity. Identification with the master signifiers of social fictions produces that experience of self.

Social fictions are both imaginary and symbolic. In social fictions, the Symbolic order is given content by the imaginary: ‘at the level of the Imaginary, the subject believes in the transparency of the Symbolic; it does not recognize the lack of reality in the Symbolic . . . in effect, the Imaginary is where the subject mis-recognises (méconnait) the nature of the Symbolic’ (Lechte 1994: 68– 69).

Social fictions reproduce the Symbolic order because the production of the subject in identification with its master signifiers gives the fictional Symbolic order ‘flesh’ and so ‘life’. The discourses of social fictions produce subjects through a process of introjection of their master signifiers. If discourse produces the subject, it cannot be separate from the subject but must be integral to subjective formation.

Through that formation, the subject comes to have imaginary relations of phantasy and identification to its symbolic master signifiers and hence to discourse. Psychic mechanisms operate to produce the subject in relation to discursive master signifiers and, in particular, to the social fictions of identity that they represent. Identification with the master signifiers of discourse constitutes subjects, since that is how the subject becomes a subject.

While the Lacanian model addresses the sexuation of the subject, this conception of the social fiction includes other master signifiers of identity, such as sexuality, ethnicity or class. Butler points out that it is necessary to recognize that ‘the order of sexual difference is not prior to that of race or class in the constitution of the subjects; indeed that the symbolic is also at and at once a racializing set of norms, and that norms of realness by which the subject is produced are racially informed conceptions of “sex”’ (1993b: 130).

Social fictions represent discourses of social identity that intersect in overdetermined master signifiers. The theory of social fictions enables us to understand how discourses reproduce the racialized and sexualized subject and intersubjective relations of the Symbolic order. As a discourse, social fictions rest on a foundational and excluded term a. This excluded term is a discursive construct, since it is produced by the operations of social fictions. Social fictions of identity rest on the positing of difference – ‘I am a man (because I am not a woman).’

The assertion of difference is itself filled with imaginary content: ‘If I am a man (because I am not a woman), then I must possess this set of associated masculine qualities.’ In this way, the positing of identity in social discourses is productive because those discourses describe practices which signify how ‘to be’ a subject. At the same time, that ‘being’ rests on the production of a repudiated other – ‘I am not a woman’ – for social fictions rest on symbolic relations of identity and non-identity. The repudiated other functions as the foundational and excluded term a.

Social fictions themselves produce the repudiated term – for that repudiation founds their signifying structure. For example, the social fictions of masculinity rest on the excluded and foundational term of the feminine – a masculine subject defines itself in terms of another which is castrated. The ‘castrated’ ‘feminine’ functions as the excluded a. We can see other examples of the operation of social fictions in Drucilla Cornell’s description of the production of ‘white’ identity that is founded on its repudiated other of ‘black’ identity (1992: 67), and Butler’s description of a ‘heterosexual’ identity that rests on a repudiated ‘homosexual identification’ (1993b: 111).

social fictions symbolic

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 119.

Social fictions are culturally dominant representations of how to be a subject and how to exist as a subject in relation to other subjects.

… Lacan links what he describes as the dominant discourse of our age – the Discourse of the Master – to the rise of capitalism and the modern ego (S17: 207), indicating that discourses are historically and culturally specific. Accordingly, social fictions can be understood as historically and culturally specific forms of the Symbolic order, which articulate particular historical and cultural discourses.

Judith Butler offers a useful reading of the Symbolic order as ‘a register of regulatory ideality’, which includes not only sexualized but racialized interpellations (1993b: 18). For Butler, the Symbolic produces ‘regulatory norms’ which demarcate and delimit forms of family, identity and love (1997b: 66). It represents ‘reigning epistemes of cultural intelligibility’ (1997b: 24), suggesting that it is a set of cultural rules which constitute social norms.

However, in this formulation, the Symbolic remains a closed and monolithic structure that produces a single normative subject. Such a conception of the Symbolic does not explain the many discourses of identity, or their historical specificity – which are precisely the grounds of Butler’s critique of the Lacanian notion of the Symbolic.

‘Social fictions’ help us to understand the ‘register of regulatory ideality’ as a discursive register of social fictions, as discourses of identity that produce it through the identification with master signifiers of sexualized and racialized subjectivity. The Symbolic order also produces racialized and sexualized relations between subjects, operating as a register of regulatory relations. While the Symbolic order structures discourses in terms of the production of sexualized and racialized subjects and intersubjective relations, the ‘content’ of those identities and social relations will be historically and culturally articulated as social fictions. Social fictions are therefore specific to a historical moment of that social order. In this way, social fictions are contingent in the sense that they represent particular cultural and historical forms of the discursive production of identity. If social fictions are contingent and mobile, then they are open to political contestation and change.