Category: the real

Žižek desire Other pt1

Žižek, S. (2005). Connections of the Freudian Field to Philosophy and Popular Culture. Interrogating the Real. In R. Butler & S. Stephens (Eds.), Interrogating the Real (pp. 62-88). New York, NY: Continuum.

So, in this subjective destitution, in accepting my non-existence as subject, I have to renounce the fetish of the hidden treasure responsible for my unique worth. I have to accept my radical externalization in the symbolic medium. As is well known, the ultimate support of what I experience as the uniqueness of my personality is provided by my fundamental fantasy, by this absolutely particular, non-universalizable formation.

Now, what’s the problem with fantasy? I think that the key point, usually overlooked, is the way that Lacan articulated the notion of fantasy which is, ‘OK, fantasy stages a desire, but whose desire?’

My point is: not the subject’s desire, not their own desire. What we encounter in the very core of the fantasy formation is the relationship to the desire of the Other: to the opacity of the Other’s desire. The desire staged in fantasy, in my fantasy, is precisely not my own, not mine, but the desire of the Other.

Fantasy is a way for the subject to answer the question of what object they are for the Other, in the eyes of the Other, for the Other’s desire. That is to say, what does the Other see in them? What role do they play in the Other’s desire?

What is their role in the desire of the Other?’ This is, I think, absolutely crucial, which is why, as you probably know, in Lacan’s graph of desire, fantasy comes as an answer to that question beyond the level of meaning, ‘What do you want?’, precisely as an answer to the enigma of the Other’s desire.

Here, again, I think we must be very precise. Everybody knows this phrase, repeated again and again, Desire is the desire of the Other.’ But I think that to each crucial stage of Lacan’s teaching a different reading of this well-known formula corresponds.

freeland ethics Sem VII pt. 2 Desire borne by death

Freeland, C. 2013. Antigone in Her Unbearable Splendour: New Essays on Jacques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Albany: State University of New York Press.

borne: to bring, transported, transmitted by, spread by, carried by

Lacan probably ses the traditional philosophical persepectives on ethics as framed and trapped in the theater of a philosophical mirror stage wherein the human, ethical subject is conceived as born prematurely, a fragile, helpless and fragmented body confronting and recognizing its wholeness in the other of the mirror image before it and longing to be that wholenes.  Is Lacan’s psychoanalytic ethic not first and essentially the critical attempt to move beyond this ethical mirror stage, to move beyond the search for the anticipated wholeness of a “meaning of life”?  39

ethics for Lacan is ethics of speech … then the ethical, psychoanalytical Truth that arises in the psychoanalytic brushes with death would not wish to install or monumentalize Truth or Death itself as the ultimate and hidden meaning in life.

Its pronouncements would not articulate either a timeless Truth or a terrifying Death as the “one” meaning of life, for this might make psychoanalysis a type of hermeneutics, and “death” would then be something, a “meaning,” that, given the proper methodology, the proper hermeneutic, could somehow be brought from the depth to the surface of language and stated — phenomenalized, made to appear — perhaps in the form of a proposition, or in a form of life, as the statement of a Truth that would guarantee that life is not “for nothing.”

In Lacan’s work, the relationship between language and death is completely different than this familiar scheme. The Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis is therefore first a disruption of this hermeneutical scheme a form of resistance to the systematic statement of philosophical meaning of life taken as the key element and link in the triumvirate of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Must the Lacanian ethic not first and fundamentally be a resistance to the Hegelian way of taking up death, …

Is the Lacanian ethic not undermining the very meaning of “oneness” and “meaning” in life? Is the “one meaning” always going to be “not one”?  Is Lacan’s statement not the instauration of the ethical necessity of confronting the disruption and the destitution of life that abides in every such statement, a death that takes place in language, that is to say, in desire?

Disruption rather than salvation in and through the systematic statement of the ultimately religious telos of Truth and Oneness: is this not Lacan’s desire, a desire borne by the death of philosophy. 40

johnston vicious super-ego part 2 of 2

Johnston, A. (2001) The vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics. Psychoanlytic Studes (3): 3/4. 411-424.

Lacan is not so much interested in proposing a new prescriptive ethics as in comprehending the precise nature of ‘moral masochism’, in fully grasping how the constellation of the id, the super-ego, and the socio-symbolic Umwelt of reality ‘pathologize’ the ethical field.

At most, this Lacanian analytic diagnosis of moral masochism should be interpreted as a preparatory clearing of the ground for a genuine ethics, as a mapping out of the obstacles hindering the construction and enactment of a non-pathological ‘metaphysics of morals’.

The introduction of the Law generates desire ex nihilo. Instead of forbidding a pre-existent set of urges in the individual, it teaches the subject what to covet, if only as an inaccessible vanishing point whose appearance of possible accessibility is a mirage engendered by the seemingly contingent nature of the Law and its authority.

Lacan is not so much interested in proposing a new prescriptive ethics as in comprehending the precise nature of ‘moral masochism’,

in fully grasping how the constellation of the id, the super-ego, and the socio-symbolic Umwelt of reality ‘pathologize’ the ethical field. At most, this Lacanian analytic diagnosis of moral masochism should be interpreted as a preparatory clearing of the ground for a genuine ethics, as a mapping out of the obstacles hindering the construction and enactment of a non-pathological ‘metaphysics of morals’.

At the beginning of this quotation, Lacan alludes to an observation that Freud formulates in his 1924 paper ‘The economic problem of masochism’. In the concluding paragraphs of that essay, Freud notes that the more the subject complies with reality’s prohibition of aggression, the greater the guilt the subject feels, the harsher the demands of the super-ego become.

Unlike external authorities, which can only observe and punish externalized acts of transgression, the super-ego sees and judges the subject’s ‘inner’ intentions. Freud pinpoints this as a paradox of sorts: the more the subject overtly obeys the rules of reality, the more the super-ego (unconsciously) inflicts the negative affect of guilt.

This paradox is illuminated by the theory of the super-ego as presented in Civilization and Its Discontents: the super-ego is a subliminatory channel for the id’s sadism; the id diverts the aggressive drives onto the subject’s own ego when the reality principle prevents it from discharging this aggression against others;

thus, the more the ‘moral’ subject refrains from enacting these aggressive drives in reality (i.e., the more he/she heeds the ‘ethical’ principles of his/her social milieu), the more the id is compelled to utilize the super-ego to ‘work off’ aggression against the ego (hence, the greater the feeling of guilt, since Freud claims that guilt is the ‘pain’ consciously experienced by the ego as a result of the unconscious subliminatory dynamic occurring at the level of id and super-ego). How does Lacan integrate this line of Freudian reasoning?

it isn’t simply a matter of claiming that the Law arouses desire out of nowhere through its prohibitions: it’s also the case that obedience to the Law is cemented in place by the struggle to fend off these desires, that the more rigid the subject’s adherence to the rules, the presumably greater is his/her need to repress increasingly powerful urges to contravene it.

Consequently, when Lacan speaks about being guilty for having ‘ceded’ or ‘given ground’ relative to one’s desire, what he really means is the following:

the more the subject surrenders (to) his/her desires by obeying the restrictions of the Law, the more guilty he/she feels,

since such concessions only aggravate the (unconscious) volatility and intensity of these same desires (namely, ‘internal’ repressed desires which never fail to escape the notice of the omniscient authority of the sadistic super-ego). 419

Near the end of his 1974 television interview, Lacan clearly advances this claim in saying that, “Freud reminds us that it’s not evil, but good, that engenders guilt” (Lacan, p. 45). At no point does Lacan contest the Freudian definition of guilt as a negative affect resulting from the super-ego’s punishment of the ego.

Hence, Lacan, in following Freud here, isn’t treating guilt as a properly ethico-moral sentiment, but, rather, as a symptom of super-ego aggression (with this aggression itself being acknowledged as arising from ceded, aim-inhibited desires whose intensity increases the longer and more severely they’re held in check).

Consequently, one can be ‘guilty’ before the tribunal of the super-ego without, for all that, being actually guilty in an ethico-moral sense per se. 419

Lacan merely brings one to the point where the essential question that must be answered if a psychoanalytic ethics is to be possible at all poses itself:

Can conscience function beyond the super-ego, namely, is the subject able to break out of the cycle running from Law to desire to guilt?

If not, then the Freudian diagnosis of conscience as a symptomatic by-product of the superego’s id-driven sadism really does represent the end of ethics in any meaningful, philosophically consistent mode.

Both Freud and Lacan have made signiŽficant inroads into demystifying the origins and mechanisms of feeling guilty. However, it remains doubtful if psychoanalysis has yet pronounced its deŽfinitive verdict as regards being guilty.

vanheule

Metaphor in psychosis: on the possible convergence of Lacanian theory and neuro-scientific research. HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY, 03 June 2015

Lacan considers the subject as an effect of this connotation and thus concludes that the subject is only half-said, which is expressed by the bar through S in the symbol for the subject: $.

In terms of the process of signification, $ is the result of a dialectical tension. At the level of the message, speech functions to build images regarding who we are. These images make up the ego, but are selective imaginary self-representations that exclude certain signifiers.

The unconscious subject consists of these“forgotten”signifiers,acrosswhichthe
subject is fundamentally scattered; hence the idea that the subject is divided.

In neurosis this division is experienced as internal, hence the neurotic tendency
to repress, where as in psychosis it is experienced as disconnected from one’s own intentions and as coming from without.

In his interpretation a special signifier is installed during the Oedipus complex: the paternal signifier or Name-of-the-Father. This signifier nominates the desire of the maternal figure with which the child is first confronted, and it opens up the
dimension of the law.

Through the Name-of-the-Father people understand themselves and others in terms of rules and standards that one should obey. They use this signifier to make sense of
desire and it helps them to experience permanency in social relations.

eagleton trouble with strangers 1

Eagleton, T. Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Whereas the angelic, as Milan Kundera argues, are notable for their peculiarly ‘shitless’ discourse, all vapid rhetoric and edifying sentiment, the demonic see nothing around them but shit. Parsons and politicians are angelic, whereas tabloid journalists are demonic. The deominic are not evil, since to be evil entails believing in value if only to negate it. 133

Angelo’s interview with Isabella is by no means his first encounter with the shattering  force of desire, whatever he may suppose himself. On the contrary, the snake was curled up in the garden from the outset. Its deadly venom has infected him already in the form of his pathological will to dominion, within which Freud would doubtless detect the shadow of the death drive. Angelo represents a pure cult of the superego, with its lethally aggressive rage for order,

its neurotic fear that without fine definitions and unimpeachable grounds the world will collapse into chaos.

Because they are secretly fuelled by the death drive, the very powers which set out to subdue chaos are secretly in love with it. The urge to order is itself latently anarchic. It is prepared to subjugate the world into sheer nothingness.

The superego as Freud taught, borrows its terrifyingly vindictive force from the unruly id. 136

This is why Angelo can keel over with scarcely a struggle from ascetic authoritarian to libidinal transgressor. The same goes for the law, or indeed for any system of symbolic exchange.

Because such symbolic economies are precisely regulated, they tend to stability; but because the rules which regulate them can permutate any one item with another, indifferent to their specific nature, they can breed an anarchic condition in which every element blurs indiscriminately into every other, and the system appears to be engaging in transactions purely for their own sake. There is something in the very structure of stability which threatens to subvert it.

This is most obviously so in the case of the symbolic order, which in order to work effectively must allow flexible permutations between its various roles, and thus cannot avoid generating the permanent possibility of incest. Without this monstrous horror at its heart, the system would not be able to operate.  137

mellard Beyond Lacan

Mellard, James M. (2006) Beyond Lacan. Albany: State U of New York 288 pages.
Chapter 7:  Hart’s Damage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics of Jouissance.  pp. 179 – 208.

traditional oedipal subject founded on an ethics of desire to a postraditional subject founded on an ethics of jouissance

Oedipal Subject:  eros and social life,
– subject oriented to desire (and thus constrained by castration and the pleasure principle)

– subject of desire
Damage is important in our understanding the shift from the old oedipal order to the new narcissism, from the order of desire to that of the drive.

This shift, Copjec suggests, has a cognate move-epochal, historical, and ongoing, neither personal nor idiosyncratic. It shifts emphasis to concepts — either ” meaning” or “being” — Lacan associates with the vel of alienation.

Heretofore, in that process known as ” oedipalization, ” it has been a good thing for subjects to be oriented to meaning (and thus to desire within the pleasure principle and oedipal law) rather than to being (and thus to drive and jouissance within the domain of the narcissistic ).

PostOedipal, PostTraditional Subject:  Thanatos and the death drive

– oriented towards jouissance and thus denying contraints of castration and aiming beyond the pleasure principle.  narcissistic subject of jouissance

Femme fatale turns desire toward jouissance

In so far as sexual difference is a Real that resists symbolization, the sexual relationship is condemned to remain an asymmetrical non-relationship in which the Other, our partner, prior to being a subject, is a Thing.  Metastases of Enjoyment, 108

We may say that the narrator-protagonist of Damage merely takes a detour through desire and ordinary oedipal subjectivity before becoming the problematical subject of our postuniverse. His detour goes through the femme fatale, one guise of the maternal object who experiences desire and, as Copjec says, serves as a “defense against the drive” by her relation to jouissance (198).

As Zizek suggests in his discussions of film noir, the role of the femme fatale foregrounds the paradoxical role of “woman ” in the construction of ” man . ” That role raises issues of desire and drive. Zizek  points out that Lacan’s controversial claim that “Woman is a symptom ” (Feminine Sexuality 168 ) of a man can be understood in two radically opposed ways because in Lacan’s career Lacan himself shifted his views on the symptom. In the first, the ” early”view of the 1950s, Lacan saw the symptom, Zizek says, as “a cyphered message,” one in which therefore the “woman-symptom appears as the sign, the embodiment of man’s fall, attesting to the fact that man ‘gave way as to his desire'” (Enjoy 154).

In this view as illustrated in Zizek’s discussion of the noir universe, “woman is not an external, active cause which lures man into a fall-she is just a consequence, a result, a materialization of man’s fall. So, when man purifies his desire of the pathological remainders, woman disintegrates in precisely the same way a symptom dissolves after successful interpretation, after we have symbolized its repressed meaning” (155).

But, Zizek asks, is there not more? “Does not Lacan’s other notorious thesis — the claim that ‘woman doesn’t exist‘ — point in the same direction? Woman doesn’t exist in herself, as a positive entity with full ontological consistency, but only as a symptom of man.”

In the second view, found in the late writings and seminars and foregrounding drive and jouissance, Lacan regarded the symptom” as a particular signifying formation which confers on the subject its very ontological consistency, enabling it to structure its basic, constitutive relationship to enjoyment (jouissance).”

In this late Lacanian view, both the symptom and woman-as-symptom change. Says Zizek, ” [I]f the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet, disintegrates. In this sense, ‘woman is a symptom of man‘ means that man himself exists only through woman qua his symptom: all his ontological consistency hangs on, is suspended from his symptom, is ‘externalized’ in his symptom.

In other words, man literally ex-sists: his entire being lies ‘out there,’ in woman” (155) . Zizek is especially interested in film noir because, paradox ically, it expresses both these Lacanian views of woman and symptom.

The father Martyn thinks he knows is the oedipal father who in his ignorance allows him desire and pleasure. The one he does not know is the obscene, life- and joy-denying
primordial father who wills his death, murders him, and chooses to become him.

There is good reason Martyn does not know his father is or has become the anal or phallic or primordial father. According to Zizek, the anal father represents the tendency in Lacan’s seminar, especially beginning with The Ethics of Psychoanalysis ( 1959-1960), for every concept to have, as a Mobius strip does, an obverse, a paradoxical reverse or inner lining that contradicts or obviates it. The primordial father, Zizek writes, ” is the obscene, superego anal figure that is real-alive, the ‘Master of Enjoyment.'”

In Freud, this primordial father is the one who is murdered by the primal horde of brothers, murdered precisely because, expressing drive, he forbids their desire and pleasure by taking all the women for himself.

Because of the power of his drive to jouissance, he would murder them if necessary to prevent their desires or drives. Zizek suggests that politically, in the exchange of master for leader, the primordial father paradoxically follows the oedipal father. ” In all emblematic revolutions, from the French to the Russian,” says Zizek, ” the overthrow of the impotent old regime of the symbolic Master (French King, Tsar) ended in the rule of a far more ‘repressive’ figure of the ‘anal’ father-Leader (Napoleon, Stalin ).”

This historical pattern suggests to Zizek that in the myth of the primal horde Freud had things backward.”

The order of succession described by Freud in Totem and Taboo (the murdered primordial Father-Enjoyment returns in the guise of the symbolic authority of the Name) is thus reversed: the deposed symbolic Master returns as the obscene-real Leader.”

In this account, Zizek suggests, ” Freud was the victim of a kind of perspective illusion: ‘primordial father‘ is a later, eminently modern, post-revolutionary phenomenon, the result of the dissolution of traditional symbolic authority” (Metastases 206 ) .

Stavrakakis Saussure

From Yannis Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political

Lacan starts his exploration of structural linguistics with the founding stone of modern
linguistics, the concept of the sign. For Saussure, language is a formal system which is
constructed on the basis of pure difference:

In the language itself there are only differences (Saussure, 1983:118).

The content of a word is not determined by what it contains but by what exists outside it. The value of a concept is purely differential: concepts are defined negatively by contrast with other items in the same linguistic system.

Accordingly, defining one unit demands taking into account the whole structure of language, a structure that classical structuralism accepts as a closed system — this closure will later on be disputed and deconstructed by poststructuralism.

But Saussure retains the concept of difference as applicable only to the levels of the signifier (the ‘sound pattern’) and the signified (the ‘concept’) when viewed independently from one another.

Viewed together they produce something positive: the sign.

Lacan is not keen in retaining this isomorphism characteristic of the Saussurean schema … there is no isomorphism between the two domains, that of the signifier and that of the signified.

Saussure, despite his efforts to avoid such a development, appears to be reintroducing a representationalist conception of signification.

In Saussure, the distinction between signifier and signified can be described as “a relic, within a theory allergic to it, of a representationalist problematic of the sign” (Borch-Jacobsen, 1991:175).

It is clear that Lacan’s reformulation of Saussurean linguistics moves beyond any such kind of representationalism. Lacan articulates a refined position which seems to take into account the critique of the Saussurean idea of the arbitrariness of the sign.

For Saussure, arbitrariness is a defining characteristic of the relation between signifier and signified, a relation which is conceived as alien to any kind of natural connection. It is this idea of the absence of any natural connection that puzzles Benveniste.

If by signified we mean the concept and not the referent (as Saussure was keen to point out from the beginning) then what is the meaning of Saussure’s statement that there is no natural connection between the two domains? Why would one think something like that?

It is clear that the argument is falsified by an unconscious and surreptitious recourse to a third term which was not included in the initial definition. This third term is the thing itself, reality.

Even though Saussure said that the idea of ‘sister’ is connected to the signifier s-ö-r, he was not thinking any the less of the reality of the notion. When he spoke of the difference between b-ö-f and o-k-s, he was referring in spite of himself to the fact that these two terms applied to the same reality. Here, then, is the thing, expressly excluded at first from the definition of the sign, now creeping into it by detour, and permanently installing a contradiction there.

This contradiction is never resolved in Saussure’s work, since the problem of external reality is never elaborated in length.

There is a certain realist representationalism still haunting Saussure’s work or some of its many applications:  between the lines it seems to be presupposed that the signified precedes the emergence of the signifier which is there only in order to express and communicate it; meaning springs from the signified to the signifier; language is conceived as standing in for or as being identical with the real world.

As Derrida has put it, in such a schema, not only do signifier and signified seem to unite, but in this confusion, the signifier seems to be erased or to become transparent so as to let the concept [a concept linked to external reality] present itself, just as if it were referring to nothing but its own presence. (Derrida, 1981:32-3)

For Lacan, a theory of meaning founded on a recourse to some kind of referent, to a supposedly accessible order of objective reality, is clearly insufficient.

Lacanian theory offers a tentative solution to this problem by subverting the relation between the signifier and the signified.

Instead of the unity between the signifier and the signified, Lacan stresses their division; if unity prioritises the signified, division gives priority to the signifier over the production of the signified, a production which only now becomes fully elucidated.

Thus, although starting from a Saussurean angle, Lacan draws a very different distinction between signifier and signified from that of Saussure. What is most important here is that, although this second order interacts historically on the first, it is the structure of the first that governs the direction of the second

Tthis position will be further radicalised in the course of Lacan’s teaching. In “Agency of the Letter” (1957) Lacan makes a crucial move with reference to the Saussurean algorithm, which he presents as S/s.

Here, the signifier (S) is located over the signified (s), this ‘over’ corresponding to the bar separating them, a barrier resisting signification.

This barrier is exactly what makes possible “an exact study of the connections proper to the signifier, and of the extent of their function in the genesis of the signified” (E: 149).

If the dominant factor here is the bar which disrupts the unity of the Saussurean sign, then the unity of signification can only be an illusion.

What creates this illusion (the effect of the signified) is the play of the signifiers: “the signifier alone guarantees the theoretical coherence of the whole as a whole” (E: 126).

In Lacan’s schema then, the signifier is not something which functions as a representation of the signified; nor is the meaning of the algorithm S/s that there is a parallelism between the two levels, between that of the signifier and that of the signified.

Simply put, meaning is produced by signifiers; it springs from the signifier to the signified and not vice versa (as argued by realist representationalism).

It is this idea that Lacan captures with his famous example of the toilet doors. In this case the signified — loosely defined as external reality — is the same — two identical doors presumably leading to two identical toilets.

What creates the different meaning in each case, what creates the difference between the ladies’ toilet and the gentlemen’s toilet is the different signifier, that is to say the fact that each door carries a different label (‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’).

The signifier manifests the presence of difference and nothing else, making impossible any connection between signs and things.

In other words, reference to signs implies a reference to things as guarantees of signification, something which Saussure himself was ultimately unable to avoid, while the notion of the primacy of the signifier breaks with such representationalist connotations.

If an intuitive theory of meaning is usually based on a ‘picturing’ or denotative schema, as exhibited in the Augustinian picture of language according to which words signify objects,  Lacan clearly subverts this simplistic theory.

At this point, however, it is crucial to avoid a common misconception. This subversion is not effected through the elimination of the structural position of the signified.

What happens then to the signified in the Lacanian schema?

Lacan understands the signified as an effect of transference. If we speak about the signified it is only because we like to believe in its existence.

It is a belief crucial for our construction of reality as a coherent, ‘objective’ whole; a belief in something that guarantees the validity of our knowledge, sustaining the fantasy of an adaequatio between language and the world.

But for Lacan, as he argues in his seminar on The Psychoses (1955-6), even “the transference of the signified, so essential to human life, is possible only by virtue of the structure of the signifier” (III:226).

Put another way, “the supposed realism of describing the real by details is only conceivable in the register of an organized signifier …the formal articulation of the signifier predominates with respect to transference of the signified” (III:229).

Lacan then is radicalising the semiological idea, implicit in Saussure and expressed by Barthes, that “it appears increasingly more difficult to conceive a system of images and objects whose signifieds can exist independently of language”.

The world of signifieds is none other than that of language (Barthes, 1973:10).

The signified is never a full presence constituted outside language. Lacan’s radicalisation, however, entails the definitive break with the isomorphism between signifier and signified and a refined resolution of the problem of external reality.

The archimedian point of his solution is the following: the symbolic is not the order of the sign, as in Saussurean linguistics, but the order of the signifier.

Meaning is produced by the signifier: It’s the signifier that creates the field of meanings. (III:292).

boothby death desire 1a

Boothby, Richard. (1991) Death and desire: psychoanalytic theory in Lacan’s return to Freud. London: Routledge.

Over the past forty years, however, the most significant treatment of Freud’s most unpopular conception has been the work of a renegade French analyst named Jacques Lacan.

Lacan does more than reemphasize Freud’s notion of the death drive, he re-installs it at the very center of psychoanalytic theory. To ignore the death instinct in [Freud’s] doctrine,” he insists, “is to misunderstand that doctrine completely” (E:S, 301).

Lacan characterizes Beyond the Pleasure Principle as the “pivotal point” in the evolution of Freud’s thought (S.II, 165).

But, further, it is not merely one concept among others. Perhaps more than any other point in the Freudian theory, it is with respect to the death drive that Lacan’s innovation is rightly called a “return to Freud.”

What makes the death-drive theory so important is its pivotal position in the structured totality of the psychoanalytic theory. For Lacan, the death drive is the key to understanding the topography of id, ego, and superego upon which Freud based the final and most complete elaboration of his theory

According to Lacan, the problem of the death drive opens psychoanalysis to question and, ultimately, to reformulation. But what sort of reformulation is announced here?

The answer is not immediately easy to determine. The question of the death drive in Lacan will take us to the heart of his theoretical innovations insofar as he links the meaning of death in psychoanalysis to the faculty of speech and language, on the one hand, and to the fate of desire, on the other.

In this way, two of the prime themes of Lacan’s thought, language and desire, can be seen to intersect in his treatment of the death drive. The question, one that will occupy us throughout this book, remains: How are language, desire, and death related?

“The function of desire must remain in a fundamental relation with death” (S.VII, 351).

The difficulty of Lacan’s style is not wholly unintentional. Convinced that the curative effect of analysis does not consist in explaining the patient’s symptoms and life history, convinced, that is, that the analyst’s effort to understand the patient only impedes the emergence of the unconscious within the transference and that what is effective in analysis concerns something beyond the capacity of the analyst to explain, Lacan’s discourse is calculated to frustrate facile understanding.

His aim in part is to replicate for his readers and listeners something of the essential opacity and disconnectedness of the analytic experience. Often what is required of the reader in the encounter with Lacan’s dense and recalcitrant discourse, as with that of the discourse of the patient in analysis, is less an effort to clarify and systematize than a sort of unknowing mindfulness.

We are called upon less to close over the gaps and discontinuities in the discourse than to remain attentive to its very lack of coherence, allowing its breaches and disalignments to become the jumping-off points for new movements of thought.

IMAGINARY

The imaginary was the first of the three orders to appear, introduced in 1936 by Lacan’s article on the “mirror stage.” It was inspired by research in ethology, which associated behavior patterns in animals with the perception of specific visual images. Lacan proposed that a similar “imaginary” function operates in human beings. In the “mirror phase,” the most rudimentary formations of psychic life are organized for the six- to eighteen-month-old infant as it identifies itself with a body image; either its own image in a mirror, or that of a caretaker or peer.

For Lacan, the “imaginary” designates that basic and enduring dimension of experience that is oriented by images, perceived or fantasized, the psychologically formative power of which is lastingly established in the primordial identification of the mirror phase.

Lacan’s first and arguably most original and far-reaching innovation in psychoanalytic theory was to characterize the Freudian “ego” as a formation of the imaginary.

The symbolic, announced in his 1953 paper on “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” was conceived by Lacan from the outset in dynamic opposition to the captures of the imaginary. Lacan’s notion of the symbolic is indebted to the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, and to the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss.

SYMBOLIC

The symbolic is the register of language and of linguistically mediated cognitions. In the “symbolic order,” Lacan envisions a complex system of signifying elements whose meaning is determined by their relation to the other elements of the system — a grand structure, then, in which meaning is free to circulate among associated elements or signifiers without necessarily referring to a particular object or signified.

In opposition to the gestalt principles and relations of perceptual resemblance that govern the semiotics of the imaginary, the order of the symbolic functions in accordance with rules internal to the signifying system itself. Lacanian psychoanalysis came fully into its own when Lacan identified the Oedipus Complex discovered by Freud with the formative moment in which the child, molded and snared by the imaginary, accedes to a symbolic mode of functioning. It is a good deal more difficult to characterize briefly the Lacanian sense of the “real.”

Especially in his later work, Lacan tries to show the interconnectedness of the imaginary, symbolic, and real, comparing them to the three interlocking rings of a Borromean knot.

But the notion of the real is perhaps best introduced as being precisely that which escapes and is lacking in the other two registers. Neither figured in the imaginary nor represented by the symbolic, the real is the always still – outstanding, the radically excluded, the wholly uncognized. As Lacan puts it, “the real is the impossible.”37

In Lacan’s sense, then, the real has very little to do with common “reality.” By the measure of everyday reality, the Lacanian real is closer to being un- or sur-real.

REAL

The real is sheer, wholly undifferentiated and unsymbolized force or impact. It is an experience of the real, therefore, that lies at the heart of trauma. However, the real is not simply a designation of something unknown external to the individual. It inhabits the secret interior as well. The real is therefore also to be associated with the active yet ineffable stirrings of organic need, the unconsciousness of the body. The tripartite distinction of imaginary, symbolic, and real constitutes the master key of Lacan’s work. To interpret his treatment of the death instinct will therefore ultimately require determining its relation to these three essential registers.

As I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters, this task offers a unique opportunity for clarifying the interrelation of Lacan’s three basic categories to one another. This is true in spite of the fact, or rather precisely because of the fact, that each of the three registers seems to claim the death instinct for its own.

From one point of view, Lacan clearly associates the death drive with the imaginary. “The point emphasized by Freud’s thought, but [that] isn’t fully made out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Lacan asserts, “[is that] the death instinct in man [signifies] that his libido is originally constrained to pass through an imaginary stage” (S.I, 149).

At another point, however, it is the symbolic that appears as the order of death. Thus we read that “the nature of the symbol is yet to be clarified. We have approached the essence of it in situating it at the very point of the genesis of the death instinct” (S.III, 244).

Is the drive toward death to be associated primarily with the imaginary? with the symbolic? Or is it not more fittingly associated with the real? Lacan’s notion of the real — as lack or absence, as the impossible, as the unspeakable force of the trauma, or as the ineffable exigence of the body—seems eminently qualified to be linked with the activity of what Freud called a “death drive.”

As I hope to show in what follows, the problem of death is relevant to each of the three registers, but in a different way. Clarifying these differences yields not only a more adequate solution to Freud’s problem of the death drive but also a better understanding of Lacan’s own thought as it illuminates the relations of the imaginary, symbolic, and real to one another. 20

To begin with, Lacan raises the question of how, within the ego psychological strategy, the patient is ever to move beyond identification with the analyst. But Lacan’s real concern is more radical. From a Lacanian point of view, ego psychology requires that the treatment deepen the very imaginary elationships of the ego that lie at the root of the patient’s deepest conflicts.

Psychoanalysis that deserves the name must effect precisely the opposite, bringing about a certain deconstruction of already existing imaginary encrustations. Lacan suggests that “what is really at issue, at the end of analysis, [is] a twilight, an imaginary decline of the world, and even an experience at the limit of depersonalization” (S.I 232). 37

Lacan’s conception of the mirror phase requires us to think of the situation of the newborn in terms of a primal chaos of wholly unsymbolized somatic excitations. Identification with the imago is said to be “the psychic relationship par excellence” insofar as the imago functions to erect the most elemental forms of psychic life out of an anarchy of unformed and inarticulate organic strivings.18

Prior to the recognition of the primordial imagos of the mirror stage, the force of “instinct” remains dispersed amid a panoply of bodily energies. 58

The pressure of psychically unmastered instinct therefore constitutes, in effect, a force of psychical unbinding from inside the organism itself. … The function of the life instinct is to bind together and to establish unities.

The activity of the death drive, by contrast, is to effect unbinding and disintegration. The crucial polarity becomes … between the organic and the properly psychological, between the force of unbound instinctual energies and the bound structure of the ego. 83

The death drive designates the way the bound organization of the ego is traumatized by the pressure upon it of unbound instinctual energies. 84

In Lacanian terms the death drive represents the return of the real excluded by the imaginary.

The death drive designates the pressure of unbound energies against the limitations of the bound structure of the ego. What is subject to “death” is not the biological organism but the imaginary ego. 84

The effect of the death drive, like the traumatic repetitions that first alerted Freud to its existence, threatens to overload the psychical organization with a wave of unmastered energies. …

The death drive is reinterpreted as the impingement upon the bound structure of the ego of organismic energies as yet inadequately represented int he psychic system. The death drive is the force of the instinctual as such. 85

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

zizek cogito and real

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

How to relate symbolic order with Real of trauma?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The primordial form of negativity, is excessive

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

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

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

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

My truth is the void of the cogito.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex/Gender

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