the real – Page 9

abyss of the Other’s desire 1

Žižek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.

An ethics grounded in reference to the traumatic Real which resists symbolization, the Real which is experienced in the encounter with the abyss of the Other’s desire

Che Vuoi? What do you want [from me]?

… the trauma qua real is not the ultimate external referent of the symbolic process, but precisely that X which forever hinders any neutral representation of external referential reality. … the Real qua traumatic antagonism is, as it were, the objective factor of subjectivization itself; it is the object which accounts for the failure of every neutral-objective representation, the object which ‘pathologizes’ the subject’s gaze or approach, makes it biased, pulls it askew. … the very stain or spot which disturbs and blurs our ‘direct’ perception of reality — which ‘bends’ the direct straight line from our eyes to the perceived object. (Plague of Fantasies 214)

sexual difference is not some mysterious inaccessible X which can never by symbolized but, rather, the very obstacle to this symbolization, the stain which forever keeps the Real apart from the modes of its symbolization. Crucial to the notion fo the Real is this coincidence of the inaccessible X with the obstacle which makes it inaccessible — as in Heidegger, who emphasizes again and again how Being is not simply ‘withdrawn’: Being ‘is ‘nothing but its own withdrawal…’ 216-217

… the unique strength of Kant’s ethics lies in this very formal indeterminacy: moral Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty. that is to say, it is not possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation from the moral Law itself — which means that the subject himself has to assume the responsibility of ‘translating’ the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations. In this precise sense, the point of Kant’s ethics is (to paraphrase Hegel) ‘to conceive the moral Absolute not only as Substance, but also as Subject’: the ethical subject bears full responsibility for the concrete universal norms he follows — that is to say, the only guarantor of the universality of positive moral norms is the subject’s own contingent act of performatively assuming these norms. (221)

It is therefore Kant’s very ‘formalism’ which opens up the decisive gap in the self-enclosed ethic and/or religious Substance of a particular life-world: I can no longer simply rely on the determinate content provided by the ethical tradition in which I am embeded; this tradition is always already ‘mediated’ by the subject; it ‘remains alive’ only in so far as I effectively assume it. The way to undermine ethical particularism (the notion that a subject can find his or her ethical Substance only in the particular tradition outof which he grew) is thus not via reference to some more universal positive content (like the unfortunate ‘universal values shared by all humanity’), but only by accepting that the ethical Universal is in itself indeterminate, empty, and that it can be translated into a set of positive explicit norms only by means of my active engagement, for which I take full responsibility … thus there is no determinate ethical universality without the contingency of the subject’s act of positing it as such. 221

trieb death drive post-Hegel radical evil condition of goodness jean dupuy

An Interview with Slavoj Žižek “On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, Volume 1, Issue 2, Spring 2004 ” Joshua Delpech-Ramey

And here is Ž man strictly talking to Trieb in Berlin March 6, 2009 at the ICI which is where the journal Cultural Inquiry originates.

But the paradox for me, as I try to develop in my work, is that death drive is a very paradoxical notion if you read Freud closely. Death drive is basically, I claim, the Freudian term for immortality. Death drive has nothing to do, as Lacan points out, convincingly, with this so-called nirvana principle where everything wants to disappear, and so on. If anything (and because of this I like to read Richard Wagner’s operas where you have this), death drive is that which prevents you from dying. Death drive is that which persists beyond life and death. Again, it’s precisely what, in my beloved Stephen King’s horror/science fiction terminology he calls the “undead”: this terrifying insistence beneath death, which is why Freud links death drive to the compulsion to repeat. You know, it can be dead, but it goes on. This terrifying insistence of an undead object.

Death Drive insists beyond life and death: Immortality

Undead [From Berlin lecture March 2009]

Negative Judgements –> Negate a predicate: He is not dead. He is alive.

Infinite Judgements –> Assert a non-predicate: He is undead (doesn’t mean alive). He’s alive as dead, living dead, a 3rd domain, an endless undead, an immortal domain emerges. This is the domain of drive.

The object of drive is not getting rid of tension but the reproduction of tension as such. What brings you satisfaction is not getting rid of tension but endless repetition of tension. A strange bad infinity.

The post-Hegelian moment: is this weird repetition for which in a way there is no place in Hegel. It is not the progressive circularity or bad spurious infinity. Kierkargard and Freud meet at the topic of repetition. Repetition that generates precisely NO AUFHEBUNG.

On the one hand Mature Marx refers to Hegel. in Grundrisse, is a postive one, Marx claims Hegel process is mystefied, but a formulation of emancipatory revolutionary process.

But later in Capital something changes, it’s more Capital itself that is formulated in terms of subject itself. With “capital” money passes from substance to subject. it becomes self-reproducing. It is endlessly repetitive as a drive. The whole goal of circulation is the reproduction/expansion of circulation itself. Marx says “capital works as an automatic subject.” It is a Hegelian subject but caught in this endlessly reproductive repetition. Thus Marx might have moved beyond Hegel here.

Another line of thought: Elevate Todestrieb into a key to understand German idealist “self-relating negativity”. Todestrieb has to be elevated to this kind of transcedental principle.

Hegel’s dialectics: The dialectic of necessity and contingency. The way Hegel is usually read according to usual doxa, Hegel admits of contingency but only as a moment of necessity, it externalizes itself in nature but then this contingency is aufhebung into necessity. Negative and contingency are allowed but as a tactical retreat. The Absolute is playing a game with itself. Ž says the reversal, it is not only necessity of contingency, global necessity realizes itself through multiple contingencies, but there is also Contingency of Necessity.

There is a contingent process of how necessity emerges out of contingency. The French, rational-choice theorist Jean-Pierre Dupuy. Drew attention to “something contingently becomes necessary”. It’s contingent whether a thing happens or not, but once it happens, it happens necessarily.

A new event retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility. An impossible event takes place, once it happens it is instantly domesticated and retroactively appears as possible and is naturalized.

First I saw the film, Billy Bathgate I was disappointed by the film. After I saw the film, I saw how the film missed the novel, the film was a bad copy. Then I read the novel, the novel was even worse. The very repetition creates the 3rd point of reference. 1+1=3. First you have a shitty novel, then a shitty film, the bad copy of the novel retroactively creates the possibility of how it could have been a good film or novel.

Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition: Deleuze gives the best explanation to death drive that Žižek has ever read. Paradox of Freud: the renunciation of enjoyment generates enjoyment in the very act of renunciation. You renounce desire, but then you get libidinally attached to the very rituals of renouncing desire.

Death drive in Deleuze’s reading is not a specific drive, it does this self-sabotaging thing. The space of desire is curved. You don’t go directly at it. Death drive is nothing but the transcendental principle of “lust principe” What is human sexuality formally? It is not simple pleasure. But pleasure got in the postponement and return and repetition … for example if I keep repeating the shaking of your hand I don’t let go, the very repetition eroticizes it in an obscene way. Death drive doesn’t have an autonomous reality, it is not, “I want pleasure but secretly I want to torture,” Death drive is this transcendental distortion which complicates my access to pleasure.

Ž disagrees strongly with Freud here on eros/thanatos and says Freud really backed away from his discovery. Žižek says this good constructive Eros versus bad destructive death drive (Todestrieb) is total bunk. Love is a catastrophe, it’s totally destructive. One point of obsession and everything is ruined, literally out of joint. Love is totally paradoxical focusing all of your life, the whole world is thrown out of balance, love is radically destabilizing. I’m passionately in love and ready to risk everything for it. Insistence on a particularity, you are ready to go to the end.

Antigone is pure death drive: I insist on this particular point I am ready to put at stake everything for it. Death drive is the ethics at its zero level. It resides in this paradoxical domain where good coincides with radical evil. A detailed reading of Kant and Schelling later work on religion. Kant proposes there the notion of radical evil. He steps back though. First he proposes to read radical evil as diabolical evil. If for Kant you can be good out of principle. Then why cannot you be evil out of principle? Not just good, but evil as well. But then the whole distinction between good and evil falls apart. You are evil without any pathological possibility, you are just evil.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni: Commandatore, tells Giovanni, repent. Giovanni knows he will die, Commandatore tries to save Giovanni, if yo urepent you will be saved in after life. From standpoint of rational calculus Giovanni should agree. But Giovanni says no. He acts out of pure fidelity to Evil. It’s not pathological, no personal gain. This is the greatness of Kant, he goes very far in this direction.

Death drive is the radical non-pathological evil, which is transcendental apriori of every possible form of goodness.

Kant withdraws, says we don’t have diabolical evil only radical evil which is simply a tendency of human nature which is not fulfilling your duty. But Lacan reads Kant with Sade. The point of Lacan, Sade is a Kantian. The Sadian imperative of unconditional jouissance, it goes beyond the pleasure principle. It’s non-pathological.

Sade proposes purely Kantian idea of ‘radical crime’ that doesn’t simply follow natural impulses, but a crime which breaks with the chain of natural causality, a crime literally against nature itself. Freedom that breaks the phenomenal chain of natural causality. The paradox that Kant and Schelling struggle with is this obscure domain where radical evil is apriori condition of goodness.

Antigone: you must have this radical excess of evil if you want to go to the end. From the sympathetic human point it is Ismene who is human warm, Antigone is an aggressive bitch. Creon is right, he basically says, if we publicly do the funeral old hatreds will explode again, we’ll fall into civil war. Antigone’s counter-argument is so what? It is pure insistance. It is just pure insistence, “I want, I want“.

Žižek wants to present another Antigone, where she succeeds and Creon lets her bury her brother, the whole city is ruined, the last scene Antigone “I was created for love not for hatred” where blood and death is now all around her.

Stalinist version: Antigone and Creon are fighting and Chorus intervenes like a committee for public safety and proclaims a popular dictatorship.

Death Drive as radical evil as a condition of goodness.

Shraing Illusions: We make fun of soemthing, denounce illusions as illusions, but nonetheless they work.

Ž mentions Logic of Capital School at beginning of part II.

******

Point two: The big breakthrough of Heidegger is to totally reconceptualize the notion of finitude. Already we have this in the early Heidegger with special reference to Kant. Already you see precisely how the other of finitude, the big stuff—infinity, eternity, and so on—is a category, modality, horizon of finitude. This was, for Heidegger, Kant’s big breakthrough: transcendental as opposed to transcendent is a category of finitude. All this somehow gets lost, in Badiou.

[But] the whole category of “event” works only from the category of finitude. There are events only in finite situations. You can prove it only from his own position. Only for a finite being do you have this infinite work, what he likes to describe, in Christian terms, this trinity of faith, hope, love. Faith that the event did take place, hope in the final state (in Christianity universal redemption, in Marxism I don’t know, communism at the end) and love as work, as what is between the two, fidelity to the event and so on.

But . . . when in his last work, Badiou tries to articulate the structure of totalitarian danger, he calls “forcing the event,” which means simply to ontologize the event, as if the event were not an infinite process whose place you have to discern in reality, as if the event totally permits its irrealities.

But the gap between event and reality, that which is covered up by totalitarianism, is precisely the gap of finitude—so there is something missing at this level in Badiou.

[…] there is a certain dimension of Christianity which … is missed, I think, by Badiou, because of his overall view that there is no place for finitude, as for example in his critique of Heidegger where he misses the point. He even goes into this mode where being-toward-death is just the animal level of being threatened . . . although I don’t identify Heidegger’s being-toward death with death drive, Badiou is also missing that, because he cannot elevate finitude to its transcendental a priori dignity. He remains precisely, at a certain level, a pre-kantian metaphysician.

psychopedagogy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

stavrakakis 8 of 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s not it

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

stavrakakis subject of enjoyment 7

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

Beyond Identification,Yet Internal to It: The Subject of Enjoyment

If this structural and structuring role of the command provides the ontological nexus within which the subject learns to interact with their social environment — the symbolic preconditions of subjection and obedience — it cannot explain, however, why some commands produce obedient behaviour and others are ignored. It cannot account for the occurrence of disobedience and for instances of resistance. In fact, if we were to stay at this level, it would be impossible to account both for the failure of certain commands and for the complex ‘extrasymbolic’ means through which the organized Other supports and/or attempts to reinstitute its authority. Here, the Lacanian answer is simple. On the one hand, the real exceeds the subject and the lack this inscribes within subjective identity is what stimulates desire (for subjection to the Other).

On the other hand, the real also exceeds the Other and the lack this inscribes in the Other explains the ultimate failure of fully determining subjectivity. It is this second failure that makes resistance possible, at least in principle. It is in the traumatic fact that the Other cannot fully determine the subject that a space for freedom starts to emerge. But this is a freedom that the subject has learned to fear.

As Judith Butler has formulated it, this predicament of the subject is usually resolved with the adoption of the following stance: ‘I would rather exist in subordination than not exist’ (Butler 1997b: 7).

Both the Other and the subject prefer to repress or disavow, to defer this realization of the lack in the Other.

But in order to attempt that in a persuasive manner, the symbolic command is not enough. Something more positive is needed, given the fact that the lack marking subject and Other is a lack of jouissance. This is what fantasy attempts to offer. Let us examine in some more detail the basis of this argument. In order to sustain its hegemony, the performative, formal aspect of the command has to be supported by a fantasy scenario investing it with some supreme value at the level of enjoyment. We have seen in the previous section how Lacanian theory conceives of the different planes operating in identity formation at the intersection of subject and organized Other. We have also seen how Lacan’s negative ontology of lack leads to an attempt to encircle the real of enjoyment, a real which provides the (absent) cause of the dialectic of (failed) identifications partially constituting subjective and social reality.

Here is where Lacan’s originality — in relation to the general field of poststructuralism — is most clearly located. Why? Precisely because poststructuralism remains largely attached to what Harpham has described as ‘the critical fetish of modernity’: Language. … As a result of the linguistic turn … Language has become ‘the critical fetish of modernity’.

However, focusing on the symbolic aspects of identity … is not sufficient in order to reach a rigorous understanding of the drive behind identification acts, to explain why certain identifications prove to be more forceful and alluring than others, and to realize why none can be totally successful. In fact, poststructuralism has often employed models of subjectivity reducing it to a mere linguistic structure (reproducing a rationalist idea that control of talk and discourse means control of political belief) (Alcorn 2002: 97):

‘When poststructuralist theory imagines a subject structured by discourse, it has great difficulty making sense of subjects caught in patterns of repetition unresponsive to dialectic. To understand discourse fully is to understand the limitations of discourse … its inability to persuade the anorexic to eat, and its inability to intervene in those mechanisms of subjectivity that drive actions inaccessible to dialectic.’ (Alcorn 2002: 101)

‘Because of a kind of adhesive attachment that subjects have to certain instances of discourse, some discourse structures are characteristic of subjects and have a temporal stability. These modes of discourse serve as symptoms of subjectivity: they work repetitively and defensively to represent identity … some modes of discourse, because they are libidinally invested, repeatedly and predictably function to constitute the subject’s sense of identity.’ (Alcorn 2002: 17)

The libidinal, fantasmatic character of these attachments is also deeply implicated in processes of social change, which, under this light, can only be described in terms of a dialectic of dis-investment and re-investment … ‘to disinvest social constructions, one must do more than use language or be rational, one must do the work of withdrawing desire from representations.

This work is the work of mourning’ (Alcorn 2002: 117). Discursive shifts presuppose the ‘unbinding of libido’ and the re-investment of jouissance (Alcorn 2002: 118).

When Milgram perceptively writes that the experimenter fills a gap experienced by the subject, the association with Lacan’s formula of fantasy is unavoidable, since fantasy entails a link between the split (castrated) subject of the signifier and his objet-cause of desire, an object purporting to cover over its lack and ‘heal’ or, at least, domesticate castration.

The obvious question thus becomes: is there a fantasmatic frame that supports the symbolic command and binds the subject to the elementary structure of obedience revealed in Milgram’s experiment?

It is far from surprising that Milgram does isolate such a fantasmatic frame; he even highlights its ideological nature. This frame is science itself. What guarantees that the command of the experimenter will be taken seriously, what defers resistance, is that it is presented as part of a scientific experiment. Whatever happens in the experiment is commanded and justified by Science. As Milgram puts it, ‘the idea of science and its acceptance provide the overarching ideological justification for the experiment’ (Milgram 2005: 143).

Of course such a justification is always culturally specific: ‘if the experiment were carried out in a culture very different from our own — say, among Trobrianders — it would be necessary to find a functional equivalent of science in order to obtain psychologically comparable results’ (Milgram 2005: 144). It is also socially and politically specific: when the Yes Men, for example, make an outrageous WTO presentation to a group of students in New York they are met with hostility and not with acceptance (The Yes Men 2004: 146–7).

However, what is most important here is that this fantasmatic frame adds a positive support to the negative/formal character of the symbolic command since science is obviously invested with a positive value: ‘Ideological justification is vital in obtaining willing obedience, for it permits the person to see his behaviour as serving a desirable end’ (Milgram 2005: 144).

What seems to be implied is a particular form of attachment that can only be thought of in terms of positive investment. Thus, the experiment can function only because in the experimenter’s face the empty gesture of symbolic power and the fullness of its fantasmatic support seem to unite.

The other side of the negative force of castration implicit in the command is the fantasy channelling and sustaining in a much more positive and productive way the desire stimulated by this castration itself.

In Milgram’s words, ‘once people are brought into a social hierarchy, there must be some cementing mechanism to endow the structure with at least minimal stability’ (Milgram 2005: 149), and this mechanism involves a certain reward structure (Milgram 2005: 139), which can obviously be conceptualized in ways far more sophisticated than the ones Milgram himself could envisage. Only now can one begin to make real sense of the bond developed between experimenter and subject.

The subject of the experiment submits to the command not merely because it is a symbolic command but also because it is supported by an (imaginarized) supreme knowledge projected onto the person of the experimenter; in this case the experimenter is accepted as an agent of Science.

This projection, however, does not depend exclusively on the particular fantasy present here: it also reveals a more general condition relating to the nature of the bond between authority and subject. In Milgram’s own words, ‘Because the experimenter issues orders within a context he is presumed to know something about, his power is increased. Generally, authorities are felt to know more than the person they are commanding; whether they do or not, the occasion is defined as if they do’ (Milgram 2005: 143).

My reading may be guided by my Lacanian bias, but isn’t Milgram implying that the relation between experimenter and subject is a relation of transference? Isn’t he demonstrating that the experimenter functions as a subject supposed to know?

And, as we know from psychoanalysis, a transferential relation is never purely cognitive: it is primarily affective and libidinal; it also involves a certain enjoyment. Without such an emotional tie obedience would easily break down and disobedience would occur. Besides, how else can we explain the ‘curious’ feelings of compassion towards the experimenter, who issues the commands, and not so much towards the (supposedly) suffering person who receives the (fake) electric shocks, that Milgram detects in his subjects? The ‘unwillingness to “hurt” the experimenter’s feelings, are part of those binding forces inhibiting disobedience’ (Milgram 2005: 152).

In that sense, Milgram can contribute two major points to our inquiry.

1. obedience to authority has a lot to do with the symbolic source of the command and very little with its concrete (rational or irrational, factual or fictional) content.

2. our attachment to this symbolic source is, to a large extent, extimate to the symbolic itself.

Beyond the formal force of the symbolic command, Milgram reveals a lot about the more positive aspects of attachment and obedience to power structures. Not only are these formal structures supported by a fantasy frame manipulating our desire, but the nature of this attachment itself is also of a libidinal, transferential nature.

Symbolic power presupposes a particular type of relation between those who exercise power and those who are subjected to it, a relation of belief which results in complicity.

Such a belief cannot be cultivated and sustained without the mobilization and fantasmatic manipulation of affect and enjoyment; it is clearly located in an extimate position with regard to symbolic structure: ‘What creates the power of words and slogans, a power capable of maintaining or subverting the social order, is the belief in the legitimacy of words and of those who utter them. And words alone cannot create this belief’ (Bourdieu 1991: 170).

This is why it is so difficult — although, fortunately, not impossible — for subjects to withdraw from the experiment: ‘Though many subjects make the intellectual decision that they should not give any more shocks to the learner, they are frequently unable to transform this conviction into action’ (Milgram 2005: 150).

In other words, resistance cannot rely on a shift in consciousness and knowledge. Resistance is not an intellectual issue precisely because obedience is also not sustained at an intellectual level.

Even those who decide to ignore the command cannot do so without enormous emotional strain: ‘As the subject contemplates this break, anxiety is generated, signalling him to step back from the forbidden action and thereby creating an emotional barrier through which he must pass in order to defy authority’ (Milgram 2005: 154).

It is here, I believe, that one encounters the most disturbing aspect of Milgram’s experiment. It is clearly located in the difficulties in passing from acceptance to dissent and from dissent to disobedience. In other words, the subject has to overcome two emotional barriers in order to resist the violent command.

The first barrier leads to the expression of dissent. But dissent does not necessarily lead to disobedience: ‘Many dissenting individuals who are capable of expressing disagreement with authority still respect authority’s right to overrule their expressed opinion. While disagreeing, they are not prepared to act on this conviction’ (Milgram 2005: 163).

stavrakakis yes men 6

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

Very often, however, experiencing such alienation is not enough to effect a lessening of the bonds attaching us to the socio-symbolic Other. In other words, subjects are willing to do whatever may be necessary in order to repress or disavow the lack in the Other.

This insight is crucial in understanding power relations. Moving beyond the banal level of raw coercion, which (although not unimportant) cannot form the basis of sustainable hegemony, everyone seeking to understand how certain power structures manage to institute themselves as objects of long-term identification and how people get attached to them is sooner or later led to a variety of phenomena associated with what, since de la Boetie, has been called ‘voluntary servitude’. The central question here is simple:

Why are people so willing and often enthusiastic — or at least relieved — to submit themselves to conditions of subordination, to the forces of hierarchical order? Why are they so keen to comply with the commands of authority often irrespective of their content?

The famous words of Rousseau from the second chapter of The Social Contract are heard echoing here: ‘A slave in fetters loses everything — even the desire to be freed from them. He grows to love his slavery …’ Obviously, the Oedipal structure implicit in the social ordering of our societies, the role of what Lacan calls ‘the Name-of-the-Father’ in structuring reality through the (castrating) imposition of the Law, predisposes social subjects to accept and obey what seems to be emanating from the big Other, from socially sedimented points of reference invested with the gloss of authority and presented as embodying and sustaining the symbolic order, organizing (subjective and objective) reality. This central Freudian-Lacanian insight can indeed explain a lot. And this can be very well demonstrated through some empirical examples.

Consider, for instance, the story of The Yes Men, two anti-corporate activistpranksters who have set up a fake ‘World Trade Organisation’ website. Believing that the site is the official WTO site, many visitors have sent them speaking invitations addressed to the real WTO. Mike and Andy decided to accept some of the invitations and soon started attending business meetings and conferences throughout the world as WTO representatives. Although intending to shock and ridicule they soon discovered that their ludicrous interventions generated other types of reaction. This is how they describe their experience themselves:

Neither Andy nor Mike studied economics at school. We know very little about the subject, and we won’t attempt to convince you otherwise; if you are of sound mind, you would see through us immediately. Yet, to our surprise, at every meeting we addressed, we found we had absolutely no trouble fooling the experts — those same experts who are ramming the panaceas of ‘free trade’ and ‘globalization’ down the throats of the world’s population. Worse: we couldn’t get them to disbelieve us.

Some of our presentations were based on official theories and policies, but presented with far more candour than usual, making them look like the absurdities that they actually are. At other times we simply ranted nonsensically. Each time, we expected to be jailed, kicked out, silenced, or at the very least interrupted. But no one batted an eye. In fact, they applauded. (The Yes Men 2005)

Simply put, people seem to be ready to accept anything insofar as it is perceived to be transmitted from a source invested with authority: for businessmen and many academics the WTO is obviously such a source. In other words, the content of a message is not as important as the source from which it emanates. Likewise, the subject’s autonomy in filtering and consciously managing its beliefs seems to be undermined by a dependence on symbolic authority per se.

We saw in the activities staged by the Yes Men how easily people are prepared to accept whatever is perceived as coming from an authority. Obviously, what is at stake here is not only acceptance but also compliance and obedience.

Most people, as is shown in their activities, are indeed prepared to accept and obey anything coming from a source of authority irrespective of the actual content of the command. In fact, this structure of authority seems to be a frame presupposed in every social experience.

As Milgram points out, already before the experiment starts, ‘the subject enters the situation with the expectation that someone will be in charge’. Now, and this is the most crucial point, the role of this someone is structurally necessary, without him the identity of the subject itself remains suspended and no functional social interaction can take place: ‘the experimenter, upon first presenting himself, fills a gap experienced by the subject’. This quasi-Lacanian formulation reveals something essential. First of all, it lends support to the Lacanian understanding of the Name-of-the-Father, the signifier representing authority and order, as instituting the reality of the subject. In his brief Lacanian analysis of the Milgram experiment, David Corfield is right to point out that it ‘reveals something of the super-egoical consequences of the establishment of the paternal metaphor in a clear, albeit brutal fashion’ (Corfield 2002: 200).

The founding moment of subjectivity proper, the moment linguistic/social subjects come to being, has to be associated with symbolic castration, with the prohibition of incest that resolves imaginary alienation and permits our functional insertion into the social world of language.

In other words, the command embodied in the Name-of-the-Father offers the prototype of symbolic power that structures our social reality in patriarchal societies. This is a power both negative and positive, both prohibitive and productive (à la Foucault). The performative prohibition of the paternal function is exactly what makes possible the development of (sexual) desire. Furthermore, it is a power that presupposes our complicity or rather our acceptance; only this acceptance is ‘forced’ since without it no social subject can emerge and psychosis seems to be the only alternative.

And this is a dialectic which is bound to affect our whole life: ‘A power exerted on a subject, subjection is nevertheless a power assumed by the subject, an assumption that constitutes the instrument of that subject’s becoming’ (Butler 1997b: 11).

Without the assumption of castration no desire can emerge. In that sense, if Giorgio Agamben links biopolitics (a characteristically modern phenomenon according to Foucault) with sovereignty per se (Agamben 1998), Lacan seems to be highlighting the inextricable bond between repressive and productive (symbolic) power. Hence, symbolic castration marks a point of no return for the subject.

It is the command of prohibition and our subjection to it that institutes our social world as a structured meaningful order. Without someone in command reality disintegrates.

What Lacan, in his ‘Agency of the Letter’, describes as the ‘elementary structures of culture’ (Lacan 1977: 148), meaning a linguistically determined sense of ordering, are now also revealed as elementary structures of obedience and symbolic power. The intersubjective effects of this logic are immense: ‘It is not only the subject, but the subjects, caught in their intersubjectivity, who line up … and who, more docile than sheep, model their very being on the moment of the signifying chain that runs through them’ (Lacan 2006: 21).

Without such an elementary structure of obedience — instituted and reproduced in what Milgram calls ‘antecedent conditions’: the individual’s familial experience, the general societal setting built on impersonal relations of authority — the experiment would collapse. And these antecedent conditions have to be understood in their proper Lacanian perspective: they refer primarily to the whole symbolic structure within which the subject is born: ‘the subject … if he can appear to be the slave of language is all the more so of a discourse in the universal movement of which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name’ (Lacan 1977: 63–4).

stavrakakis subjective lack 5

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

Administering Subjective Lack: Symbolic Authority

I have already pointed out that subjective lack is what forces the subject to enter into a dynamic dialectic with the social world and the organized Other. Now, the resources available to the lacking subject in order to constitute her identity are, broadly speaking, of two distinct types: imaginary and, primarily, symbolic. Hence the distinction Lacan draws between imaginary and symbolic identification: 1. The imaginary register is first approached by Lacan in his work on the ‘mirror stage’.

This stage refers to a particular (early) period in the infant’s psychic development in which the fragmentation experienced by the infant is, for the first time, transformed into an affirmation of her bodily unity (through the assumption of her image in the mirror or through similar experiences). In that sense the mirror stage has to be understood as an identification: ‘We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image’. This assumption of a spatial imaginary identity is, however, indicative of the ambivalence involved in ego formation. As Lacan observes, acquiring a first sense of identity is not only cause for jubilation but also of alienation. At first the infant appears jubilant due to her success in integrating her fragmentation into an imaginary totality and unity. Later on, however, jubilation is followed by alienation: By virtue of its inability to represent and control the turbulent real of the infant’s body and of its exteriority, imaginary identification ‘prefigures its alienating dimension’ (Lacan 1977: 2).

If the imaginary representation of ourselves, the mirror image — and imaginary relations in general, such as the one between mother and child — is ultimately incapable of providing us with a stable and functional identity, if it reproduces instead of resolving alienation, the only option left for acquiring one seems to be the field of linguistic representation, the symbolic register. After all, the symbolic is already presupposed in the functioning of the mirror stage since the infant, even before her birth, is inserted into a symbolic network constructed by her parents and family (her name is often discussed and decided in advance, inserting her into a pre-existing family mythology). In Lacan’s work it is clear that the symbolic has a far more important structuring role than the imaginary: ‘While the image equally plays a capital role in our domain, this role is completely taken up and caught up within, remoulded and reanimated by, the symbolic order’ (Lacan 1993: 9). By submitting to the laws of language the child becomes a subject in language, it inhabits and is inhabited by language, and hopes to gain an adequate representation through the world of words: ‘the symbolic provides a form into which the subject is inserted at the level of its being. It’s on this basis that the subject recognizes himself as being this or that’ (Lacan 1993: 179).

This, however, should not lead to the conclusion that entering the symbolic overcomes alienation by producing a solid identity. On the contrary, the subject constituted on the acceptance of the laws of language, of symbolic Law — a function embodied, within the Oedipal setting, by what Lacan calls ‘the Name-of-the-Father’, the agent of symbolic castration — is the subject of lack par excellence. Alienation is not resolved but displaced into another (symbolic) level, to the register of the signifier. On the one hand, due to the ‘universality’ of language, to the linguistic constitution of human reality, the signifier offers to the subject an almost ‘immortal’, ‘neutral’ representation; only this representation is incapable of capturing and communicating the real ‘singularity’ of the subject. In that sense, it is clear that something is always missing from the symbolic, the Other is a lacking Other.

The emergence of the subject in the socio-symbolic terrain presupposes a division between reality and the real, language and jouissance (a pre-symbolic, realenjoyment), a division that consolidates the alienation of the subject in the signifier and reveals the lack in the Other.

The Other, initially presented as a solution to subjective lack, is now revealed as what retroactively produces/consolidates this lack. It promises to offer the subject some symbolic consistency, but the price to be paid is the sacrifice of all access to pre-symbolic real enjoyment — which now becomes the object of fantasy. Fantasy, in this context, signifies a scenario promising to cover over lack or, at any rate, to domesticate its trauma.

stavrakakis lack in the Other 4

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

Indeed, as Laclau and Mouffe have put it, objectivism and subjectivism are symmetrical expressions of the desire for a fullness that is ultimately impossible. In Lacanian theory, moving beyond the Scylla of objectivism and the Charybdis of subjectivism entails the formulation of a novel conception of subjectivity; in fact, it is this new subject, the subject as lack that, through its continuous dialectic with the (equally lacking) Other, symbolic reality, signifies the collapse of subjectivism and objectivism.

Already from his Rome Discourse Lacan formulates his strong objection towards any reference to a closed totality both at the collective and the individual level. And he concludes: ‘it is the subject who introduces division into the individual, as well as into the collectivity that is his equivalent. Psychoanalysis is properly that which reveals both the one and the other to be no more than mirages’. Cederstrom and Willmott are correct to point out that this way in which Lacan intervenes in the agency/structure debate ‘holds out the promise of allowing us to deal with issues of desire and de-centring without falling prey to determinism’. And this applies both to subjective determinism and objective determinism: ‘By advancing a notion of the agent that is predicated on a negative ontology, we challenge the common assumption that the agent either is a free and self-reflexive entity or is a constrained and fully pre-determined category’.

Lacan’s theory of the subject emphasizes thus the notions of ‘desire’ and ‘lack’, the constitutive dialectic between lack and desire. This helps theorists avoid the usual traps of reductionism and essentialism when trying to consider the relationship between subjectivity, society and politics. This relationship is theorized as a function of political identification, leading to a picture of the socio-political field characterized by a complex play of (ultimately failed) identifications, disidentifications and renewed identifications.

Isn’t Ernesto Laclau pointing to the same necessary/impossible dialectic when he highlights the fact that the obstacle limiting my identity and showing its ultimate impossibility is also its condition of possibility insofar as there is no identity without difference and no desire without lack (Laclau 1990: 39)? True, ideological/discursive determination is unavoidable, even necessary. No social reality and subjective identity can emerge without it; and no management of subjective lack. At the same time it is ultimately impossible.

No ideological determination is ever complete. Social construction is always an imperfect exercise, and the social subject cannot transcend the ontological horizon of lack. Something always escapes from both orders — Lacan reserves a special name for that: the Real, an excessive quantum of enjoyment (jouissance) resisting representation and control. Something that the subject has been forced to sacrifice upon entering organized society, and which, although lost and inaccessible/unrepresentable for ever, does not stop causing all our attempts to encounter it through our identification acts.

Subjectivism posits a source of power external to the subject, immanentism posits a source of power internal, intimate to the subject, while what is needed is to conceptually grasp a form of external intimacy, what Lacan calls extimité. This is the realm of the real as extimate kernel of the subject, as the lost/impossible enjoyment that, through its constitutive lack, kicks off a whole socio-political dialectic of identifications aiming to recapture it.

In other words, the administration of this constitutive lack of enjoyment takes place in a field transcending simplistic dichotomies (individual vs. collective). How can we access this field? And what can Lacanian theory contribute to our understanding of its constitution and functioning? Of how subjects are constituted, human lives lived and social orders and institutions organized and sustained?

Where is power and authority exactly located in this play? And how are their symbolic and fantasmatic dimensions, language and enjoyment, interimplicated?

glynos 2

Glynos, Jason. in Carl Cederström and Casper Hoedemaekers (eds) Lacan and Organization London: MayFlyBooks, 2010

There is a general consensus in the literature that the mode of engagement associated with an ethics of ‘openness’ is to be preferred, especially when thinking critically about the political economy and about the transformation of the organization of work more specifically. What receives much less attention in this literature, however, are questions about

(1) what these alternative modes of engagement actually look like in practice; and (2) the conditions under which a transition is made from one to another mode of engagement.

There is of course considerable theoretical reflection on the concept of ethics in Lacan, which for many has become synonymous with the idea of ‘traversing the fantasy’. But there is a need to add to these ontological discussions a more robust ontical base by, for example, building up a corpus of empirical examples, exemplars, or paradigms of different sorts of ethical engagement associated with the ‘dissolution’ of the logic of fantasy. This would entail supplementing existing studies that furnish negative critiques of modes of engagement characterized by ‘closure’ with rich phenomenological accounts of what appears on the ‘other side’ of posited fantasmatic traversals.

What conditions and devices, for example, might promote a specifically democratic ethos in organizations akin to a Lacanian ‘ethics of the real’?

For a call to explore the relation between a radical democratic ethos and an ‘ethics of the real’, see Mouffe, C. (2000) The Democratic Paradox,(conclusion); on this, see also Glynos, J. (2003) ‘Radical democratic ethos, or, what is an authentic political act?’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2(2): 187-208.

fantasy glynos

Glynos, Jason. ” ” Carl Cederström and Casper Hoedemaekers (eds) Lacan and Organization London: MayFlyBooks, 2010 free download

The tendency of many poststructuralist approaches to highlight the importance of the political dimension of workplace practices signals a desire to eschew the idea that the economy is an extra-discursive force outside of, and acting upon, politics, culture, and society. On the contrary, such a poststructuralist perspective seeks to make explicit the idea that the economy is discursively constructed and thus contestable. The political dimension of workplace practices is thus theorized in a way that diverges from the way politics and power are often understood. The concept of the political is theorized not as a function of the way that power is distributed in the organization, where power is understood in terms of identifiable sovereign authority, capacities, resources, interests, structures, or a dispersed micro-physics of power. From the point of view of poststructuralist theory, the political dimension of a practice is understood in relation to a negative ontology, where to subscribe to a negative ontology means simply to affirm the absence of any positive ontological foundations for the subject (or, to put it differently, to affirm the radical contingency of social relations). Far from leading to a kind of free fall into relativism, such a perspective expands the scope and relevance of critical analysis because it emphasizes the situated, precarious, and thus potentially political, character of interests and structures themselves.

logic of fantasy

In a first approach we could say that the logic of fantasy names a narrative structure involving some reference to an idealized scenario promising an imaginary fullness or wholeness (the beatific side of fantasy) and, by implication, a disaster scenario (the horrific side of fantasy). This narrative structure will have a range of features, which will vary from context to context, of course, but one crucial element is the obstacle preventing the realization of one’s fantasmatic desire. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, realizing one’s fantasy is impossible because the subject (as a subject of desire) survives only insofar as its desire remains unsatisfied.

But the obstacle, which often comes in the form of a prohibition or a threatening Other, transforms this impossibility into a ‘mere difficulty’, thus creating the impression that its realization is at least potentially possible.

This gives rise to another important feature of fantasy, namely, its transgressive aspect: the subject secures a modicum of enjoyment by actively transgressing the ideals it officially affirms (see also Glynos, 2003a; 2008b), for example by trying to eliminate the identified obstacle through illicit means. In this view, there is a kind of complicity animating the relation between the official ideal and its transgressive enjoyment, since they rely on each other to sustain themselves. Fantasy, therefore, is not merely a narrative with its potentially infinite variations at the level of content, although it is of course this too. It also has a certain logic in which the subject’s very being is implicated: the disruption or dissolution of the logic leads to what Lacan calls the aphanisis, or vanishing, of the subject (as a subject of desire). In sum, the logic of a fantasmatic narrative is such that it structures the subject’s desire by presenting it with
an ideal,
an impediment to the realization of an ideal,
as well as the enjoyment linked to the transgression of an ideal.

This conception of fantasy can be readily linked to the literature in organizational studies. Several studies on employee cynicism, for example, suggest how transgressive acts can sometimes serve to stabilize an exploitative social practice, which they appear to subvert. Taking their cue from Michael Burawoy’s study of factory workers in Manufacturing Consent (1979), they draw the conclusion that informal games and cynical distance toward the control systems and company rules imposed by management often have the effect of sustaining the oppressive system which they ostensibly transgress. In a related vein, and referring to Gideon Kunda’s study of cynical workers in Engineering Culture (1992), Fleming and Spicer emphasise how ‘employees performed their roles flawlessly and were highly productive’
despite their recourse to ‘humour, the mocking of pompous official rituals and sneering cynicism’. They suggest how cynicism could help sustain employees’ belief that they are not mere cogs in a company machine, thereby allowing them to indulge in the fantasy that they are ‘special’ or ‘unique’ individuals (Fleming and Spicer, 2003: 164).

That such cynical-transgressive acts sustain the social practice being transgressed appears to be corroborated by studies, which show how personnel officers of many companies actually advise workers not to identify with corporate culture ideals too strongly, and to retain a healthy distance from the company script. These studies point to the normative and political significance of workplace fantasies. In fact recent developments in political discourse
theory bring into focus the critical potential of a Lacanian conception of fantasy by situating fantasmatic logics in relation to what have been called, following the work of Ernesto Laclau, social and political logics (Glynos and Howarth, 2007; see also Stavrakakis, 2007).

My claim here is that appeal to these logics helps make clearer the normative and ethical implications of the category of fantasy (see also Glynos, 2008a).

In general terms, the category of ‘logics’ seeks to capture the purposes, rules and self-understandings of a practice in a way that is sensitive to
the radical contingency of social relations, or what in Lacanian parlance is called ‘lack in the Other’. Logics thus furnish a language with which to characterize and critically explain the existence, maintenance, and transformation of practices, thus making the approach flexible enough to deal with the porous and shifting boundary of ‘work’ in a wide range of contemporary organizational practices. A practice is here understood in broad terms to comprise a network of activities and intersubjective relations, which is sufficiently individuated to allow us to talk about it meaningfully and which thus appears to cohere around a set of rules and/or other conditions of existence. In this view, a practice is always a discursive practice, which is meaningful and collectively sustained through the operation of three logics: social, political, and fantasmatic logics.

If social logics assist in the task of directly characterizing a practice along a synchronic axis, then political logics can be said to focus more on the
diachronic aspects of a practice, accounting for the way it has emerged or the way it is contested and/or transformed. And if political logics furnish us with the means to show how social practices come into being or are transformed, then fantasmatic logics disclose the way specific practices and regimes grip subjects ideologically (Glynos, 2001).

In the remainder of this section I continue to focus on the way the logic of fantasy sustains particular work relations and patterns. Fantasies supported by the prospect of big profits, generous pay packets, career advancement, consumption of prize commodities, and hobbies, are an obvious way to think about how patterns of work are affected and sustained by fantasies. But such fantasmatically-structured desires shape the nature and content of demands made by workers and by management, as well as the way they are responded to.

But in what way, more specifically, does fantasy sustain the existing political economy of work? One way of thinking about this is in relation to the political dimension of social relations. Insofar as fantasies prevent or make difficult the politicization of existing social relations, relations of subordination inclusive, one can say that fantasy helps reinforce the status quo. The logic of fantasy, then, can be construed as a narrative affirmed by workers, often unconsciously, preventing the contestation of suspect social norms, and making less visible possible counter-logics.

The claim here is that the more subjects are invested in fantasies, the more likely they are to read all aspects of their practice in terms of that fantasmatic narrative, and the less likely they are to ‘read for difference’. Counter-logics are precisely those potential alternative discursive patterns that inhere in the interstices of workplace practices that would provide a counterpoint to a dominant social logic. The subject tends to use fantasy as a way to protect itself from ambiguities, uncertainties, and other features which evoke intimations of anxiety. But it is precisely those ambiguities that open up possibilities for critical distance and alternative ‘becomings’. It thus becomes important to make explicit the normative framework that the researcher brings to the analysis and, through a process of articulation, to actively bring it into contact with those concrete alternatives residing in the practices themselves (Glynos and Howarth, 2007: 177-97).

The insights generated by such a Lacanian-inflected discursive approach to work and the organization may offer us a way to overcome some of the problems identified in approaches inspired by other psychoanalytic schools, and to generate a research programme intended to explore the links between ethics, fantasy, and normative critique in the study of organizations.17 Such a research programme would address
some fairly basic questions, which are important from the point of view of analysis and critique. For example: … how do the identified fantasies operate in such a way as to make less visible to the subjects themselves both the potential grievances and potential alternative ways of structuring workplace practice?

A specifically Lacanian critical political economy, then, would begin with the assumption that economic life is embedded in social and political relations, highlighting the complex and overdetermined character of economic relations and identities.

Here subjects are not only consumers, but ‘also citizens, students, workers, lovers, and parents, and the lives they live in each of these roles affects their involvement in the others’ (Best and Connolly, 1982: 39).

Noting that subjects are multiply affiliated is not uncommon in the literature of course. The observation, however, raises a question about how best to understand the ways in which multiple subject positions combine, separate, or dissolve. From this point of view it is possible to draw on the hermeneutical, post-marxist, post-structuralist work of Best and Connolly (1982), Resnick and Wolff (1987, 2005), Gibson-Graham (2006), Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Laclau (1990) and others, to articulate a connection to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (see also Glynos and Howarth, 2007; Ozselcuk, 2006; Madra, 2006; Ozselcuk and Madra, 2005).

Such an exercise would help make a specifically Lacanian contribution to the critical political economy of work – a field which seeks to politicize dominant socio-economic arrangements, justifications of wealth and income inequality, as well as the various structures of accountability to stakeholders and the public at large (which secure and bolster the allegiance of those subject to such arrangements and structures).

[A] Lacanian-inflected political theory of discourse challenges the idea that such interests have a motivating force which is independent of the way they pass through the self-interpretations of subjects, thereby pointing to the fantasmatic and potentially political aspects of those interests.

Such an approach, therefore, shares an important affinity with those cultural economists who argue that ‘[t]he economy does not exist, out there, but is enacted and constituted through the practices, decisions, and conversations of everyday life’ (Deetz and Hegbloom)

Noting the central role that work plays in social life … A Lacanian-inflected approach would clearly focus on aspects of those practices that exhibit the presence of split subjectivity, the unconscious, and fantasy,

lack in the other

Tutt, Daniel. The Object of Proximity: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis in Žižek and Santner via Lacan. American University Also available here danielp.tutt(at)gmail.com

For Lacan, symbolic identity inhabits an empty place, or the “point de capiton,” which occurs when the subject functions as a signifier embodying a function beyond its own concreteness. The subject is emptied of its particular signification in point de capiton, in order to represent fullness in general. Point de capiton operates in national, religious, political, or ethnic signifiers such as “the nation” or “communism” or even religious identity groupings such as “Christian” or “Muslim,” yet they function as pure negativity, and represent what has to be excluded or negated.

As Yannis Stavrakakis points out in the Lacanian Left, the Name of the Father functions as an insertion into point de capiton, as an operation tied to power relations in late capitalism. Lacan’s Seminar on the Four Discourses introduces the “university discourse” as arising in the wake of the chaotic revolutionary protests of May 1968 in France, and across Europe. The university discourse is a mode of discourse that incorporates scientific discourse to legitimize relations of power. The subject in university discourse becomes equivalent with the social totality, and is situated in the particular historical and late capitalist symbolic space, where the movement occurs, mainly apart from the Master’s discourse, and into university discourse.

An excellent example that reveals the procedure of Name of the Father filing in the point de capiton into empty symbolic identity are the popular “culture jamming” Yes Men. The Yes Men are a group of activists who inhabit false symbolic authority by assuming the identity of powerful businessmen, activists, and politicians. They deliver totally ludicrous presentations that are in actuality totally empty of legitimate content. What they have discovered through these presentations to power holders is that their audiences end up listening attentively to their presentations, and more importantly, they end up taking their statements for total fact without question and most often end up agreeing with their absurd findings.

What this indicates more than anything is that symbolic identity construction functions as an empty gesture of symbolic power supported by a fantasmatic supplement, and both unite to form reality. What the Yes Men and the case of Schreber both indicate is that the commands of identity, deployed from the level of fantasy will always be filled up as an empty vessel. The “crisis of investiture” for both Schreber and the Yes Men occur when “the kernel of invasiveness of too much reality” functions on the side of symbolic identity as an empty space that can be filled in with an inherent negativity. This crisis of identity problematizes attempts to adequately symbolize oneself in everyday reality. 🙂 His use of Yes Men here is confusing.

Lack and Desire in the real

In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the mediating force of the Other is desire. Desire is posited as universal, “all desire is desire of the Other,” since all desire is structured around a missing jouissance, around a lack; it is important to understand the way that lack of the Other structures symbolic identities.

Lack … is always introduced through an act of exclusion, an exclusion in part responsible for the fundamental disequilibrium between integrating the Other into the symbolic realm, yet we find that there is something that does fill in the symbolic: fantasy

The imposition of fantasy arises precisely when the desire for filling in, or covering over lack arises. On a structural level, fantasy stimulates and promises to cover over the lack in the Other created by the loss of jouissance.

Since fantasy is also an effect of symbolic castration, it is also a defense mechanism against the fear of symbolic castration. Symbolic castration is defined by Lacan as, “a symbolic lack of an imaginary object,” and symbolic castration is the subject’s first perception of the Other, as not complete, but lacking.

Lacan argues that the subject can only maintain psychic normality by accepting this inherent lack of the other; hence symbolic castration plays a normalizing effect on the subject.

Fantasy then becomes crucial to understanding the role of the “I-Other” relationship and to determining how the Other serves as a support that fills in the void for the lack in the Other, in the realm of the symbolic. The illusory nature of fantasyserves as the central support for the desire to identify, which is inherently impossible in the real, as discussed above.

The Other of fantasy takes on the role of an object, or das Ding to sustains desire itself, and since the Other appears as a remainder, the Other is in an almost mythological status to the subject. The Other promises to provide what the subject lacks and thus unify both as subjects.

The other takes on the role of the object that can potentially unify both the split psyche (of the subject) and of unifying the split social field itself.

over-proximity

Tutt, Daniel. The Object of Proximity: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis in Žižek and Santner via Lacan. American University Also available here danielp.tutt(at)gmail.com

The Psychotheology of Over-Proximity

The ethical problem of proximity to the neighbor introduces a number of ethical implications for ethics, and the ethical relation to the Other in Eric Santner’s work, The Psychotheology of Everyday Life. For Santner, the ultimate problem of the neighbor is based on the whether the subject accepts the Other (or neighbor) in their jouissance, or REAL excess, and in so doing, how they come to handle this over-proximity. Santner characterizes the Freudian “mental excess” (what Lacan would later deem jouissance) as an “excess of validity over meaning,” as the “undeadness of biopolitical life,” and his primary ethical concern is in how to convert the excess into a “blessings of more life.”[25] This mental excess that the subject inhabits, or what Santner refers to as “undeadness” colors everyday life as “a paradoxical kind of mental excess that constrains by means of excess.”[26] Santner develops a slightly different type of Otherness than that of Lacan, based on Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic theory of “seduction. ” Laplanche was an intimate student and colleague of Lacan, and in his conception of the Other, or the “enigmatic signifier” the traumatic encounter with the Other’s desire becomes constitutive of the inner strangeness we call the unconscious itself. Therefore, unlike the Lacanian Other, Santner’s Other is stripped of its material properties, a position that evokes Derrida’s notion of the spectral aura of the Other:

“the other is not reducible to its actual predicates, to what one might define or thematize about it, anymore than the I is. It is naked. Bared of every property, and this nudity is also its infinitely exposed vulnerability: its skin. This absence of determinable properties, of concrete predicates, of empirical visibility, is not doubt what gives to the face of the other a spectral aura.” [Derrida, Adieu. To Emmanuel Levinas, pg. 111]

The subject is placed in a relationship with the enigma of the Other’s desire not through language (as in Lacan) but through an unconscious transmission that is neither simply enlivening nor simply deadening but rather “undeadening” – the encounter with the Other produces an internal alienness that has a sort of vitality, and yet belongs to no life at all. This “undeadness” creates an encounter with legitimation, or what Freud referred to as the death drive, a “too much-ness” of pressure and the build of an urge to put an end to it.

Santner’s ethics at this point, in light of the crisis of symbolic identity is concerned with whether we ought to assume our identity in the social body based on the symbolic mandates that determine our identity, or whether the subject ought to break with this system. The two poles of ethical action he develops are the “sciences of symbolic identity,” and the “ethics of singularity.” The strength of Santner’s ethical position is that only when we “truly inhabit the midst of life” are we able to “loosen the fantasy” that structures everyday life.

Thus, similar to what we see in Lacan, to own one’s fantasy is to really live as a free subject, aiming at the truly ethical question that Lacan poses: “have you acted in conformity with the desire which inhabits you?” for it is desire that aims at the real.

The Crisis of Symbolic Investiture

How the subject in Santner’s the Psychotheology, as well as Lacan’s ethical subject deals with “the crisis of symbolic investiture” are a matter of ethics, which we will explore below.

For both Lacan and Santner, ethics requires a confrontation with the Other to free oneself of the Other and then surrender to the real, or everyday life. The confrontation with everyday life, or the Lacanian real is a collapse of the subject’s symbolic constructed identity.

The symbolic identity crisis that Lacan and Santner refer to can be more clearly understood through Santner’s reading of the book Soul Murder, and Lacan’s theory of the Name of the Father. Soul Murder and Name of the Father are instructive to understanding how “the crisis of symbolic investiture” operates through psychoanalytic theory. Both Lacan and Santner refer to the crisis of symbolic identity when discussing the infamous case of the Judge Daniel Schreber, who upon receiving the symbolic authority in society as a Judge experienced a total psychotic breakdown where his very ability to assume a symbolic identity rooted in authority became penetrated with “a kernel of invasiveness, which introduced the subject into too much reality.” What is it about this “too much reality” that created the conditions for the “the crisis of symbolic investiture?” To fully understand this crisis, a reading of Lacan’s late capitalist “university discourse” and the complex insertion of the Name of the Father bring the crisis into more clarity.