lack – Page 6 – objet (a)

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 2

difference between Lacan and the postmodernists: Although Lacan accepts the priority of the signifier in the formation of meaning he also focuses on the ways this signifier mythologically attempts to embody the real, the ways in which it constructs the imaginary illusion of anchoring our symbolic being to a pre-symbolic level of immediate fulfilment of need. In other words, prioritising the signifier is coupled with exploring the complex ways in which this signifier produces the effect of the signified. The point de capiton is one of these ways. 60

If the role of the point de capiton is necessary (or universal) in structural terms, its particular content (the signified produced by its signifying predominance) is not a matter of mirroring a pre-existing objective reality but of hegemonic struggle. 61

if the level of construction is engulfing the totality of the real, what stimulates the production of new social constructions? What stimulates the desire to articulate new constructions of reality?

Dislocation can be conceived as a confrontation with the real.

The real is what destroys, what dislocates this fantasmatic reality, what shows that this reality is lacking.

The real and the not-all

If reality constitutes the symbolically constructed and fantasmatically supported part of objectivity, the real also belongs to the objective level, it is what exceeds the domesticated portion of the objective. It is exactly what accounts for the failure of all symbolic representations of objective reality … the real is not an ultimate referent of external reality but the limit which hinders the neutral representation of external (symbolic) reality … it is exactly what keeps identification from resulting in full identity. … it is exactly what reveals all symbolic truth to be ‘NOT-ALL’, it can only be thought as the internal limit of the symbolic order. 68

… in opposition to standard versions of constructionism Lacanian theory of symbolic meaning and fantasmatic coherence can only make sense in its relation to the register of a real which is radically external to the level of construction. This Lacanian real-ism is, however, alien to all other standard versions of epistemological realism in the sense that this real is not the ultimate referent of signification, it is not something representable but exactly the opposite, the impossible which dislocates reality from within. The real does not exist in the sense of being adequately represented in reality; its effects however are disrupting and changing reality, its consequences are felt within the field of representation. 69

The real dislocates social objectivity 70

WE MUST PRECIPITATE A CRISIS, AN EVENT, THAT CONFRONTS THE LIMITATIONS OF OUR MEANING STRUCTURES

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 1

(1-12) How can we talk about Lacan and not fall prey to psychologistic analyses that reduce social to individual? Freud wrote a good deal using that combined a psychoanalytic framework with a social analysis Civilization and Its Discontents, Jokes etc. and Lacan even more so, develops a socio-political conception of subjectivity that is “not reduced to individuality, a subjectivity opening a new road to understanding of the ‘objective’. 4

The million dollar question is what the hell does Stavrakakis mean here? He quotes Laclau here to buttress the point about the impossibility of the construction of any identity.

Mirror Stage

Captivated by its image in the mirror. “But this captivation, the anticipation of synthesis, can never eliminate the real uncoordination of the body of the infant, it can never erase the external and alienating character of its own foundation. This ambiguity is never resolved” (18).

🙂 Stavrakakis here argues that the mirror image of the child is alienating, even though it is this image the infant recognizes, reaches out to as a basis of her identity, but it nevertheless remains fundamentally alienating, meaning, that there exists a gap, the infant is still uncoordinated yet his image gives him the appearance of a totality, of a wholeness that is complete and unified. Remember the imaginary is already caught up within the symbolic. “If the ego emerges in the imaginary the subject emerges in the symbolic (19).

If the imaginary, the field of specular images, of spatial unities and totalised representations, is always built on an illusion which is ultimately alienating for the child, his or her only recourse is to turn to the symbolic level, seeking in language a means to acquire a stable identity. By submitting to the laws of language, the child becomes a subject in language, it inhabits language, and hopes to gain an adequate representation through the world of words … ‘the subject is the subject of the signifier — determined by it” (Citing Lacan) (20).

Lack

But instead of transgressing alienation in the direction of acquiring a solid identity, the subject of the signifier, the subject constituted on the basis of the acceptance of the laws of language, is uncovered as the subject of lack par excellence. (20)

This lack can only be thought as a trace of the ineliminable ACT OF POWER at the root of the formation of subjectivity, as the trace of an ex nihilo decision entailing the loss of certain possibilities or psychic states (the imaginary relation with the mother, for example) and the formation of new ones (20). …

Already this is indicative of the political relevance of the Lacanian category of the lacking subject. This lack can only be thought as a trace of the ineliminable act of power at the root of the formation of subjectivity, as the trace of an ex nihilo decision entailing the loss of certain possibilities or psychic states (the imaginary relation with the mother, for example) and the formation of new ones.

The subject can only exist on the condition that it accepts the laws of the symbolic.

It becomes an effect of the signifier. In that sense it is a certain subordination, an exercise of POWER, that constitutes the condition of possibility for the constitution of subjectivity.

Judith Butler is right when, in her recent book The Psychic Life of Power, she argues that there is no formation of subjectivity without subordination, the passionate attachment to those by whom she or he (the subject in question) is subordinated (Butler, 1997:7).

[However Butler] remains within the limits of a somewhat traditional conceptualisation of power when she is personalising her account (those to whom we are subordinated are presumably our parents, especially during our early formative years).

In Lacan, it is the signifier that is revealed as the locus of this power forming the subject: ‘power is coterminous with the logic of the signifier’ (Dyrberg, 1997:130).

This POWER of the signifier cannot be reduced to the physical presence or the behaviour of the biological parents. It is the NAME-OF-THE-FATHER, the symbolic and not the real father, who is the agent of this POWER, the agent of symbolic Law (20).

Signifier and Signified

Meaning is produced by signifiers; it springs from the signifier to the signified and not vice versa … 25

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.

[T]he signified disappears because it is no longer associated with the concept, as in Saussure, but is conceived as belonging to the order of the real; that’s why the bar dividing signifier and signified, … is understood as a barrier resisting signification, as a limit marking the intersection of the symbolic with the real (citing Boothby 1991). 26

Loss of the Signified

In Lacan, … the signified disappears as such, that is to say as the epicentre of signification, exactly because in its real dimension it is situated beyond the level of the symbolic.

What is retained is the locus of the signified which is now designated by a constitutive lack. What is also retained is the promise or the aspiration of attaining the lost/impossible signified, to fill in the vacuum in the locus of the absent signified.

Signification is articulated around the illusion of attaining the signified; but this illusion itself is a result of the signifying play. The signified, as we have pointed out, is an effect created by the signifier in the process of signification. 26-27

… if there is a signified it can only be a signifier to which we attribute a transferential signified function.

The signified, what is supposed to be, through its links to external reality, the source of signification, indeed belongs to the real. But this is a real that resists symbolisation — this is the definition of the real in Lacan; the real is what cannot be symbolised, the impossible. Surely, if this real is always absent from the level of signification it cannot be in itself and by itself the source of this same signification. Its absence however, the constitutive lack of the signified as real can. This lack constitutes something absolutely crucial for signification.

This absence has to be compensated if signification is to acquire any coherence. It is the absence of the signified in its real dimension which causes the emergence of the transference of the signified. What emerges is the signified in its imaginary dimension.

There is, however, one more dimension to this signifying play. This transference of the signfiied, the emergence of the imaginary signified can only be the result of the play between signifiers. This is how the third dimension, the dimension of the symbolic, determines signification. It is the predominance of the signifier that produces the imaginary signified in order to cover over the absence of the real signified or rather of the signified as real. 27

Here we need to introduce lack.

[I]rreducible lack is inscribed within the symbolic structure, a lack due to the priority of the signifier and the nature of the symbolic order; the subject becomes identical to this lack … by being born with the signifier, the subject is born divided. 28

The fact that we speak itself divides the subject: the gap between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the statement can never be bridged.

From Identity to Identification

The fullness of identity that the subject is seeking is impossible both in the imaginary and in the symbolic level. The subject is doomed to symbolise in order to constitute her- or himself as such, but this symbolisation cannot capture the totality and singularity of the real body, the close-circuit of the drives.

Symbolisation, that is to say the pursuit of identity itself, introduces lack and makes identity ultimately impossible. For even the idea of identity to become possible its ultimate impossibility has to be instituted. Identity is possible only as a failed identity; it remains desireable exactly because it is essentially impossible. It is this constitutive impossibility that, by making full identity impossible, makes identification possible, if not necessary. Thus, it is rather misleading to speak of identities within a Lacanian framework. 29

What we have is only attempts to construct a stable identity, either on the imaginary or the symbolic level, through the image or the signifier. The subject of lack emerges due to the failure of all these attempts. What we have then, if we want to be precise and accurate, is not identities but identifications, a series of failed identifications or rather a play between identification and its failure, a deeply political play. 29

The concept of identification becomes crucial then for any understanding of the Lacanian conception of subjectivity, … The ontic horizon of identification is that of ultimate failure; its ontological horizon that of impossibility. Yet this is not, strictly speaking, a failure of identification, but a failure of identity, that is to say a failure to achieve identity through identification.

It is, however, this same impossibility to achieve identity (substance) that that makes identification (process) constitutive. This is not only true for the life of the child but for the life of the adult as well, something which reveals the relevance of the concept of identification for social and political analysis.

Since the objects of identification in adult life include political ideologies and other socially constructed objects, the process of identification is revealed as constitutive of socio-political life. It is not identity which is constitutive but identification as such; instead of identity politics we should speak of identification politics.

Name-of-the-Father introduces a certain lack, the Name-of-the-Father is a signifier that disrupts the imaginary relation between mother and child by erecting the prohibition of incest, the Paternal Function isntitutes a new order, an order structurally different from the natural order, an order instituting human society, a certain community of meaning (32).

… in order to gain the signifer we have to sacrifice the signified

Symbolic identification is an identification structured around the acceptance of this constitutive lack.

But the objective sphere is also lacking, how?

40 In a section entitled The objective is also lacking. Stav insists that even though Lacan made innovative theoretical strides on subjective side, the importance of Lacan for political theory comes through with his work on the ‘objective’ side. Roughly the social.

These two levels are not, of course identical but in any case they are not antithetical; there is something linking the individual to the collective, … it is the subject, symbolic lack itself, which splits the essentialist conceptions of individuality; it is the same subject as lack that introduces division into human collectivity. 40
How does the subject ‘introduce division into human collectivity”?

Laclau is quoted by Stav, “‘Objectivism’ and ‘subjectivism’ are symmetrical expressions of the desire for a fullness that is ultimately impossible.” HSS 13

Lack in the Other

It is the Lacanian subject of the signifier, the lacking subject, that provides the first link between psychoanalysis, society and politics, and this precisely because it highlights its dependence on the socio-symbolic order: …

By locating, at the place previously assigned to an essence of the individual psyche, a constitutive lack, Lacanian theory avoids the essentialist reductionism of the social to the individual level and opens the way to the confluence of psychoanalysis and socio-political analysis, since this lack can only be filled by socio-political objects of identification. 37

If I need to identify with something it is not only because I don’t have a full identity in the first place, but also because all my attempts to acquire it by identifying with a supposedly full Other are failing.

Identification only becomes thinkable as a result of the lack within the structure, the structure of the social Other. The objective as a closed totality is a semblance; the objective Other is lacking. 41

This then takes Stav into a discussion of the nature of this lack, and hence the introduction of jouissance and desire. Lack is a lack of jouissance, “lack of a pre-symbolic real enjoyment which 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” 42

As soon as we enter the symbolic, the pre-symbolic – that which is impossible to integrate in the symbolic – is posited as an external prohibited object. “The universality of language cannot capture the singular real of the pre-symbolic mythical subject. The most intimate part of our being is experienced as something lost.” 42

The emergence of desire cannot be conceived independently of the family drama of the subject. The Name-of-the-Father demands the sacrifice of jouissance. … This loss … the prohibition of jouissance, is exactly what permits the emergence of desire, a desire that is structured around the unending quest for the lost/impossible jouissance. The paradox here is that what is prohibited is by definition impossible. 42

The trick of the Law is that it creates desire as a result of the lack imposed by the prohibition of incest. … it is the prohibition itself, the performative institution of symbolic Law, that makes possible the desire to ‘recapture’ this impossible jouissance. 43

This is the nodal point of the Oedipus complex … The Law makes us believe that what is impossible really exists and it is possible for us to encounter it again … What is revealed here is a dialectic between desire and the Law. The prohibition of an impossible jouissance creates the desire for its attainment …

It means that it is lack that introduces the idea of fullness and not vice-versa. It means that it is an act of power, an act of exclusion, that retroactively produces the fullness we attribute to what was excluded, to that unknown impossibility. 43

“It is … lack that introduces the idea of fullness and not vice-versa” 43

The individual’s entry into symbolic means a loss of jouissance (pre-symbolic real). Is thus always seeking identification, and thus this is what is behind the emergence of the subject and yet “if full identity is proven ultimately impossible, what makes us identify again and again? … What stimulates our desire for new identification acts? ” 45

It is this repetition of failure that sustains desire as a promise to attain the mythical jouissance; if the realisation, the full satisfaction of desire is impossible, then the promise of this realisation becomes necessary; without it no desire can be sustained. But what is the exact nature of this promise? … the name for this promise is fantasy. 45

Fantasy veils the lack in the Other

Fantasy is a scenario that veils the lack in the Other effected by castration. If the human condition is marked by a quest for a lost/impossible enjoyment, fantasy offers the promise of an encounter with this precious jouissance, an encounter that is fantasised as covering over the lack in the Other and, consequently, as filling the lack in the subject. 46

… fantasy emerges as a support exactly in the place where the lack in the Other becomes evident; it functions as a support for the lacking Other of the symbolic. … In short, it attempts to take the place of the lacking Other of the Other, of the missing signification that would, this is our mythology, represent our sacrificed enjoyment. It is because reality is articulated at the symbolic level and the symbolic is lacking, that reality can only acquire a certain coherence and become desirable as an object of identification, by resorting to fantasy; the illusory nature of fantasy functions as a support for the desire to identify. 46

What has to be stressed … is that the domain of fantasy does not belong to the individual level; fantasy is a construction that attempts, first of all, to cover over the lack in the Other. As such it belongs initially to the social world; it is located on the objective side, the side of the Other, the lacking Other. 51

Fantasy sustains our sense of reality. Our social construction of reality acquires its ontological consistency due to its dependence on a certain fantasy frame. When this frame disintegrates, the illusion – the promise – of capturing the real that sustains reality, the illusion that closes the gap between the real and our symbolisations of it, between signifier and signified, is dislocated 51-52

How can we preserve within our symbolisations a space for the recognition of the impossibility of their closure? 93

The Lacanian system is perhaps the closest we can get to a discourse opening itself up to what exceeds its limits. 93

The elimination of lack through a definite symbolisation of the real is impossible. Yet this is the condition of possibility of our freedom because it means that no order, no matter how repressive it might be, can acquire a stable character … 95

graph of desire

surplus-jouissance

Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.

… the historical success of capitalism as an economic as well as socially synthetic system ultimately depends on what we might call, resorting again to the fortunate image popularized by Žižek, the parallax between surplus-value and surplus-jouissance: a minimal shift of perspective reveals that

what we perceive as value is actually, in its deepest connotation, the inerasable lack at the heart of being from which the little a emerges, this thing, “in us more than ourselves” that bothers us from the moment we enter the social link to the moment we relinquish our ties with it.

Today’s global incorporation and valorization of this constitutively human surplus coresponds to an unprecedented attempt to construct a social order on an act of recycling, for what we are sold as desirable value is the end product of the invisible conversion of surplus-jouissance into enjoyment (42).

the unpaid labour-power responsible for the creation of surplus-value is ultimately nothing but the constitutive, non-symbolizable libidinal surplus that accompanies any intervention of the signifier, that is to say of any knowledge.

technological innovation allows the capitalist to deskill workers and increase the reserve army of the unemployed. Logically, then, the automatization of production, fuelled by various advances in modern science, caused labourers to completely forsake their original control over production — in Lacanian terms, they had to forsake their knowledge qua surplus-jouissance, knowledge as a “spark” that cannot be taught. (50)

relation of nonrelation

Although every subject in the field is a Möbius subject, all subjects are marked by their own history and mobilize different defenses against the experience of excess. The individuals within the social space are diverse, even though they share the common characteristic of excess. put another way, the fact that they are subjects of excess makes it possible for them to be individuated differently and still seek out and maintain connections to one another, even as some of those connections are heavily imbued with aggression and hatred (204).

… by placing the relation of nonrelation front and center, the formal properties of the subject clearly emerge as the route to its universalization and the link to its political potential. In order for social change to come about, something new has to enter the situation, something that is not simply a funciton of that situation’s determinates (204).

Möbius subject and the relation of nonrelation

The Möbius subject has two driving motivations, that is, motivations at the level of the drive:

1. The first is to maintain the extimacy that is the ground of its existence: as we know, the drive circulates around objet a, the missing object, established by way of the encounter with the formal negation, the Non/Nom-du-Père.

2. The second is to defend itself against the anxiety generated by its excessive status. This anxiety, understood in Lacanian terms, is simply affect itself, a function of the Möbius condition of subjectivity.

The motivations may be at odds, but they derive necessarily from the subject’s founding. Taken together, they provide the means by which the social space itself is propagated and sustained.

Because, at the level of the drive, the subject comes into existence only if it seems as though objet a is possible, prohibited rather than impossible, the subject has a stake in the very condition that produces anxiety — its status as a signifier depends upon the impossibility of objet a and its status as a signifier makes its ultimate stability, its final meaning or self-consistency, unreachable. In this dynamic, seen from the level of Symbolic relations, it can seem that the other’s failure to stabilize the subject’s meaning is willfully aggressive (or negligent) rather than a function of impossibility.

As a result, the Möbius subject relates to the other both as the solution and the obstacle to its own inconsistency — a relation of nonrelation. That is, thanks to the excess that sticks to each subject, and thanks to the fantasy that the other is consistent in a way that the subject is not, the social relation necessarily emerges as a relation of nonrelation (202).

In the Levinasian version the subject seeks to overcome the radical alterity that, in this view, properly belongs to the other. In the extimate version, the subject must perpetually seek a response from the others because, in fact the subject will never be sure of the meaning of the response it gets, yet the subject has nowhere else to go to get it. The other is not radically other — it is close enough to the subject in kind to warrant the desire tor the relationship while distant enough in its ability to fulfill the subject’s deepest desire to maintain its otherness.

At the same time, the “other” to whom the subject relates does not truly exist in the way the subject believes: the other is a fantasmatic projection of a wish. So the subject has a relation of nonrelation to the actual others in the social space. It is in this relation of nonrelation that we find the sustaining of the duality of subject and other that Levinas requires for ethics but fails to provide.

The hatred and envy that can arise from the subject’s frustration at the other’s inability to repair the subject’s self-inconsistency could easily galvanize the destruction of the very space of the social … (203). The destruction of that space, however, would spell the demise of the subject qua subject. Subjects mobilize a number of (necessarily inadequate) defenses — including perversion and hysteria — to avoid that result. … We don’t want to feel that “we’re all in this together” if that means everyone is subject to excess. We want to feel that someone can solve this problem or be targeted as its source. But because these wishes do not actually resolve the excess, the best we can do is to try to send it on its rounds, even though it inevitably “returns” to us — since, of course, in reality it never left. We are stuck with and to excess. From this point of view, it appears that the motivation for the social relation is not the preservation of the other’s distinct existence, as Levinas and Critichley would have it, but rather the need to preserve the social field itself — the field without which the subject (all subjects) as such cannot exist — from a threat of dissolution.

That is, the subject fantasizes that the continual dissolution and reassemblage of the social field made possible and necessary by excess is a threat to the field rather than the very condition of its perpetuation (203).

rothenberg butler abject

Having accepted the reasonable proposition that subjects are formed through language, she makes her theoretical missteps when she tries to figure out how to confer power on marginalized subjects by imagining that they can control the surplus attending all utterances … relying continually on a belief that somehow, the excess attending signification can be eradicated. In this persistent gesture, Butler reveals that she does not understand the subject as itself a site of excess (107).

🙂 R.’s argument is thus: Butler like Foucault, claims that power is productive and produces resistance, but Butler is aware that Foucault theory of power doesn’t leave enough for the subject, that it is too productive in fact, that discourse only produces positivity and hence no room for contingency, as R. quotes Butler, “any effort of discursive interpellation or constitution is subject to failure, haunted by contingency, to the extent that discourse invariably fails to totalize the social field (Bodies That Matter 191-192)” (108). Rothenberg likes this last quote very much. For a brief shining moment, both seem to be on the same page. That is until …

Butler uses psychoanalysis to pry open Foucaultian immanence. As R. points out, for Butler, psychoanalysis is too ahistorical, “a charge she bases on her belief that psychoanalysis presents castration as a universal form of lack (Bodies That Matter 202 quoted in R). So, in order to benefit from the psychoanalytic model of subjectification, she proposes in Excitable Speech that subjects are formed by the installation of a lack that can be historicized. … She conceives of this lack …. in terms of exclusion, an exclusion that produces a realm of “unspeakability” as the condition of the emergence and sustenance of the subject proper, but the “contents” of which are determined historically” (108). Oh oh.

🙂 Rothenberg pounces on this last gesture by Butler. Remember, the title of R’s book is The Excessive Subject. My point being that R. doesn’t have much time for a theory that presents subject formation in terms of lack.

Feldner

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

act proper (radical agency)

performative activity within a hegemonic structure

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

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

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

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

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

A quote by Žižek from the book:

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

dislocation and identity

Discourse Theory in European Politics., Howarth, David and Jacob Torfing, 2005 Palgrave.

The dislocation of the discursive structure means that the subject always emerges as a split subject that might attempt to reconstruct a full identity through acts of identification. … When it comes to the theory of the subject, post-structuralism has retained a rather structuralist view that threatens to reduce the subject to an objective location within the discursive structure … The idea that the subject simultaneoulsy occupies the position of being a worker, a woman, an environmentalist, and so on, might help us to combat class reductionism, but provides an inadequate understanding of the processes that lead to the formation of multiple selves. Here, the notion of dislocation provides a fruitful starting point.

The recurrent dislocations of the discursive system mean that the subject cannot be conceived in terms of a collection of structurally given positions. The discursive structure is disrupted and this prevents it from fully determining the identity of the subject. The does not mean we have to reintroduce an ahistorical subjectivity that is given outside the structure. The subject is internal to the structure, but it has neither a complete structural identity nor a complete lack of structural identity. Rather it is a failed structural identity. Because of dislocation, the subject emerges as a split subject, which is traumatized by its lack of fullness. The split subject might either disintegrate or try to recapture the illusion of a full identiy by means of identifying itself with the promise of fullness offered by different political projects. Hence a dislocated Russion party functionary might aim to reconstitute a full identity by identifying with the promise of Russion nationalism, neoliberalism, social democracy, or some religious movement. The split subject might identify with many different things a the same time. In this situation the hegemonic struggles will have to offer ways of articulating the different points of identification into a relatively coherent discourse. Social antagonism will play a crucial role for the attempt to unify dissimilar points of identification. The construction of a constitutive outside facilitates the displacement of responsibility for the split subject’s lack onto an enemy, which is held responsible for all evil. The externalization of the subject’s lack to an enemy is likely to fuel political action that will be driven by an illusionary promise: that the elimination of the other will remove the subject’s original lack 17.

decline of paternal function

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. 155

However, this identificatory process also fails to properly secure and maintain the paternal function. In Lacan’s account of the modern family, the paternal figure is subject to constant attack. For this reason, he perceives ‘the social decline of the paternal imago’ (1938a: 200, FC: 72).

Lacan’s argument in his later seminar Le sinthome (1975– 1976) (S23) (1975d) echoes this claim that the father is a position which must continually be upheld, as there is no support for the paternal function, no Other of the Other. Roudinesco argues that ‘[t]he story is that of modern man, man in our modern civilization, marked by the ineluctable decline of the ideals of the paternalistic family’ (1997: 215). Accordingly, the mark of modernity is not a normative, integrating Oedipus complex that succeeds; but rather one that fails.

The decline of the paternal function structures the modern subject in a failure to surmount its Oedipus complex. The failure of this complex should be understood as the failure of its resolution. A ‘successful’ resolution of this complex involves a repression of the desire for the mother, and the concomitant formation of the ego-ideal and super-ego in paternal identification.

When Lacan describes a ‘failure’ of the Oedipus complex, his argument is not that the complex itself fails, but rather that there is a failure of its paternal resolution. Lacan argues that in the failed modern Oedipus complex the structure of subjective identification shifts from that of traditional patriarchy to its modern form.

In making this argument, Lacan develops the otherwise blurred distinction in Freud’s work between the super-ego and the ego-ideal (Borch-Jacobsen 1991: 37). Lacan draws out two aspects of the paternal function, one that forms the imaginary ego-ideal – ‘be like me, the father’ – and the other which forms the repressive super-ego – ‘do not be like me, because you cannot have the mother’. 155

Lacan’s description of the ‘failed’ Oedipus complex posits a successful sublimation of the imaginary ego-ideal with its injunction ‘be like me’, but also a failure of the formation of the repressive super-ego with its categorical imperative of ‘do not be like me’. The subject does not repudiate maternal desire because the father says ‘no’, but rather because the subject gives up that desire in order to be like the father.154

identification with the socially privileged paternal figure rather than the repressive patriarchal father produces the modern subject.
… the subject sacrifices the mother for paternal identification, and receives in return the power and prestige that the father offers.

In the modern social world, the father represents (and has) social power and prestige in the parental relationship (Brennan 1993: 58). This symbolic and material economy privileges the bearer of the phallus, which the father claims or is given. For this reason, the child perceives the father as having power, prestige and privilege.

Teresa Brennan describes this operation of paternal identification as a process of the recognition of power, where the masculine subject recognizes the father ‘as a shaper and acknowledged recognizer, a namer, into whose dominating kingdom he will one day come’ (1993: 53). With paternal identification, the masculine subject accepts the Law of the Father – ‘I cannot have the mother’ – in return for the power of the father and access to other women.

… that ‘the modern form of the Oedipus, characterized by an ambivalent and “devouring” identification with the real father’, produces a subject that engages in aggressive rivalry with the father (1991: 40). This father is the symbolic father, the paternal legislator whose position the son usurps in his incorporating identification, as he cannot do in reality. With that identification, the son commits a symbolic murder of the father. The symbolic father comes to represent the real father of the subject, who can then incorporate the paternal figure as ego-ideal.

This process is an identification of the order of ‘wanting to be like’. That identification incorporates what Lacan describes as the single mark (trait unaire), the unifying trait of the phallus of the father, which functions as a representative of the Law of the Father and of a cultural order which privileges him.

real of woman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

social fictions symbolic

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

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

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

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

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

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