subjectivity – Page 17

world without alterity

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism.

Why, in more general terms, should we worry about idealism? Or, to put it differently, what has cultural criticism to gain by invoking the Lacanian real? … Lacan … offers an independent material alterity: ‘the real is what does not depend on my idea of it’ (Fink 1995: 142). 56

‘What could it possibly mean’, Lacan asks early on, ‘to say that the subject is everything?’ (1988b: 98). What indeed? Perfect sovereignty for the subject, damaged or not, of course. Idealism delivers what the free West prizes most.

In a world without alterity, I increasingly constitute my own origin; moreover, I construct my own body, cause my own diseases by bad habits or irrational worry, and bring about my own death if I am foolish enough to let either of these get out of hand. Western culture treats life as a constant process of self-fashioning, unimpeded by external constraints.

In science fiction Hollywood heroes materialize their anxieties; in cultural theory I materialize my own sex. Death, however, remains frightening, as does the threat of physical impairment that would impugn our autonomy. Idealism turns the object of desire into an increasingly prosthetic immortality, secured by remorseless self-discipline: a regime of diet and exercise, supplemented by surgery.

Lacan saw the possibility of assuming our own being-for-death as heroic, the consequence of a struggle to be what we are in the face of everything that may oppose us. His Antigone asserts her autonomy against the cultural script, and against the ‘good sense’ of other people, who urge her not to break the law.

Idealism, by contrast, leaves such autonomy there for the taking, or rules it out on the basis of cultural determinism. In the absence of any substantial alterity, how or what should we oppose? The abolition of opposition in turn does away with the heroism. 57

Critique of Žižek

Žižek, aware of the seductions of imaginary sovereignty, repeatedly insists that we should ‘traverse the fantasy’ presented by the symbolic order, go through the cultural screen to encounter the emptiness beyond it (1997: 30– 31). This bleak proposition takes Lacan’s account of the death drive to its logical conclusion, but it is his subscription to idealism in the first place that makes it all the more imperative for Žižek to prescribe suicide as the supreme ethical act. Traversing the fantasy to the void both constitutes a counterweight to the self-indulgence of an idealist culture, and at the same time installs the true sovereignty of the subject itself (see, for example, 1991: 63– 4; 1992a: 77– 8). 57

objet a

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud recounts the story of his grandson, who was greatly attached to his mother. At the age of one and a half, the child invented a game which he played again and again. This involved throwing away a wooden reel attached to a piece of string with a sound his grandfather, perhaps optimistically, interpreted as ‘fort’ (‘gone’), and then recovering it with a joyful ‘da’ (‘there’). Freud reads this game as a way for Ernst to allow his mother to go away without protesting: 47 for the child the reel compensated for her absences, took her place (Freud 1984: 283– 6). It was the first action, throwing away the reel, that the child repeated tirelessly.

This construction of a symbolic opposition between two terms, ‘fort/da’, with the emphasis on the first, marks, Lacan affirms, the advent of language, of the signifying subject, and the splitting off of the real that that entails.

What Ernst translates into representation, as he throws the symbolic reel, is not a need that might require his mother’s return. On the contrary, he does not even look at the door in expectation of her return. Nor in Lacan’s reading does the reel symbolize the child’s mother as such. Instead, the object attached to the string represents a part of himself, stands in for the child’s loss of continuity with the world around him, replaces and supplants the lost real of the connection that meets his needs, the particularity of his organic relationship with his mother. The reel takes the place of the real in the symbolic. And Lacan adds his own story to Freud’s. He too, he says, has seen a child traumatized by the fact that he was going away, and has returned to find the same child ready to fall asleep on the shoulder of ‘the living signifier that I had become’ (1979: 62– 3).

The wooden reel, this ‘privileged object’, that has emerged from the primal separation between the subject and the organism, from the ‘self-mutilation’ that cuts off the possibility of encountering the real, is the objet a (1979: 83), and it is in itself nothing much. Indeed, by way of compensation, it is nothing at all. Ernst will go on to abandon the plaything, but not the lack it symbolizes. And in later life he will no doubt seek a succession of stand-ins to fill this lack. None of them, however, will fully do so. Like the wooden reel, the object of love can never replace what is lost. Instead, ‘that’s not it’.

‘“That’s not it” means that, in the desire of every demand, there is but the request for object a, for the object that would satisfy jouissance’ (1998: 126). No such object exists. As ‘the void presupposed by a demand’, the objet a represents non-being more explicitly than the Thing (1998: 126). It constitutes the nothing that is to be found behind the veil, the object-cause, both object and cause, of desire. In love, ‘I love in you something more than you – the objet petit a’ (1979: 263). 48

Like the Thing, it has no existence in the real, since no actual object can satisfy the unconscious desire that pure loss serves to perpetuate. 49

The real, then, surrounds us. It also inhabits us as the condition of our ex-sistence. Human beings remain uneasy composites, the conjunction of an unreachable real organism and the subjects they become.

The unconscious is not the real, nor the repository of the real, but the consequence of its loss.

Driven though it is, and constituted by culturally constructed images of reality, the subject remains ultimately empty. A drive is not an instinct, but its representative in the psyche, like a delegate sent to take its place. Lacan insists that the drive is not to be understood as the pressure of a need, such as hunger or thirst. Nor is it the incursion into the mind of the real, living organism (1979: 164). But the real of the organism as lost to the subject remains the condition of the existence of the drive. ‘The real . . . is the mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the unconscious’ (1998: 131). 50-51

drive

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism.

Freud insisted throughout his work on the organic life of his patients, but he also insisted that the symptoms which so commonly marked their bodies did not originate there. The drive, he affirmed, was the representative in the psyche of an instinct, and thus to be found ‘on the frontier between the mental and the physical’ (Freud 1977a: 83). 2

That instinct itself no longer exists as such in the speaking being, but its residue survives in the psyche to exert an influence on mind and body, or mind-and-body, since in this account the two interact in a way that renders them no longer so easily distinguishable. 37.

In consequence, the cultural script is never absolute. It plays a crucial role, of course: we cannot account for Anna O.’s behaviour without reference to the specificity of her cultural moment. At the same time, that cultural moment does not fully explain the ‘absences’ that made her unaware of her surroundings, the ‘bad self’ that threw cushions at her visitors and tore the buttons off her bedclothes, or the loss of her own culture in its inscription in her native language. For that we need to recognize what culture withholds, or the inability of the script to cover the lack that appears in culture itself. 37

The abolished particularity returns as resistance, marking the speaking being’s loss of the unnameable real, which is still there, but no longer there-for-a-subject. This resistance makes itself felt not only in individual experience, but also as incoherences in the apparent homogeneity of culture itself. A cultural criticism that takes this into account is able to acknowledge the silences that mark the inscriptions of culture, the complexity and the hesitations of the texts, as well as their noisier affirmations.

anna o

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism.

The worst of her symptoms, he discovered, could be traced to a night in July. The father she loved was seriously ill, and while her mother was away, Anna was left alone to nurse him. Sitting by his bedside, she fell into a ‘waking dream’, and seemed to see a snake coming from the wall to bite her father. Apparently, there may have been snakes in the field behind the house in the country, where the family was staying, and this might have motivated the image. She tried to keep off the hallucinatory snake, but ‘it was as though she was paralysed’. At the same time, ‘language failed her: she could find no tongue in which to speak’, until eventually she remembered some nursery rhymes in English, and then she found herself able to communicate – and pray – in that language (92– 3). What was the meaning of Anna O.’s encounter with the uncanny snake, and the severe disorder, at once physiological and psychological, it brought about? Breuer does not say, though he insists (optimistically, as subsequent investigations have revealed (BorchJacobsen 1999)), that as soon as she had reproduced her waking dream for him under hypnosis, her condition improved dramatically. With hindsight, however, and in the light of more than a century of subsequent psychoanalytic theory, it is not hard to develop on the basis of Breuer’s text a (possible, partial) reading of Anna O.’s waking dream. 34.

Anna ‘was markedly intelligent’, Breuer tells us, ‘with an astonishingly quick grasp of things and penetrating intuition. She possessed a powerful intellect which would have been capable of digesting solid mental pabulum and which stood in need of it – though without receiving it after she had left school’ (Freud and Breuer 1974: 73). It was Anna O. who invented the phrase, the ‘talking cure’, to describe Breuer’s treatment of her symptoms (83). She was fluent in several European languages. However, according to the case history, ‘This girl, who was bubbling over with intellectual vitality, led an extremely monotonous existence in her puritanically-minded family’ (74). In July the father she adored fell ill, and for the first few months Anna devoted all her energy to nursing him, until in December her own health broke down, and she was no longer able to care for him. She developed a cough, which began at her father’s bedside when she heard dance music next door, felt a sudden longing to be there, and then was overcome with self-reproach. After the waking dream of the snake, the cough was compounded by the more severe symptoms. And she could no longer speak her own language. When she is well, we might construe, Anna reproduces the cultural script, and duly performs the proper meaning of the word ‘woman’ in Vienna in 1880.

She stays at home, where her intelligence has no outlet; but she puts others first and nurses her sick father, when she would rather go dancing. In her illness she rejects this meaning in its entirety, and the language in which it takes its place, refusing the obligations of ‘womanhood’. All she can remember are nursery rhymes in a foreign language, the culturally transmitted but alien inscription of childhood and its irresponsibility. The hallucination surely fulfils a desire that cannot be consciously acknowledged, in which she neglects her responsibilities as a nurse by day-dreaming. And in this state, she makes no effort to save her father’s endangered life. 35

Where does her resistance come from? Not from consciousness, evidently: Anna loves her father and doesn’t consciously want to be rid of him. But not from ‘nature’, either. And still less from the body. The unconscious represents the residue of the obliteration performed by language of the instinctual, organic self. In Lacan’s terms, Anna’s forbidden impulse to go dancing, and her even more inadmissible wish not to have to nurse her father day and night, demonstrate the reappearance beyond the symbolic order, beyond anything she can recognize or control, of a desire that stems from pure loss. Dancing and day-dreaming are not an end in themselves, not the final object of unconscious desire, but stand-ins for something that would take the place of the missing real. Unconscious desire marks its loss to the speaking subject. 35-36

When smokers contracted lung cancer without knowing what caused it, they encountered the real. If medieval sailors nudged at the edge of the world, but failed to fall off, they encountered the resistance of the real. This is the real that exists outside us as a limitation on our power to make the world in our own image of it. In the psychic life of speaking beings, meanwhile, the real of the organisms they also are is lost to consciousness. This particularity is cancelled by the Other of language.

But what is lost reappears as a residue, unconscious desire for something else, which may, as in this case, be deadly in its aim. Anna’s forgotten, repressed, waking dream is subsequently ‘written’ on her body as a symptom, in the form of the paralysis which follows. Release from her illness is possible only when she remembers the event under hypnosis and narrates it in words to Breuer, ‘rewrites’ it at the level of the signifier. Inscribed on Anna’s body, presented, however inadequately, in the talking cure, and re-presented, however partially, in Breuer’s case history,

the hallucination of the snake reveals another identity for Anna O., another subject position, or perhaps more than one, in excess of the identification her culture offers as the proper, self-sacrificing meaning of what it is to be a woman. What she resists is the specific cultural script available to respectable young women, especially in Orthodox Jewish families, in late nineteenth-century Vienna.

But the possibility of resistance is structural, a dissatisfaction characteristic of the uneasy conjunction between a human organism and the Otherness of language which erases the particularity of real needs. Anna went on resisting the destiny her culture prescribed for her, but in due course she found a culturally permissible outlet for it in feminism. The non-fictional Anna O., Bertha Pappenheim, went on to give much of her subsequent energy to the emerging cause of women’s emancipation ( Jones 1953: 248). She translated Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women into the German she had now recovered, and wrote a play about sexual exploitation called A Woman’s Right (Appignanesi and Forrester 1992: 78). She never married. 36.

subject in lacan and butler

Ror Malone, Kareen. “Reading Desire and Tracing the Subject in Lacan and Butler: The Problem of Ethics Without Meta-Language. Theoretical Psychology Critical Contributions. Selected Proceedings of the Ninth Biennial Conference of The International Society for Theoretical Psychology. Calgary, Alberta, Canada. June 3 – 8, 2001. Eds. Stephenson, Niamh. and H. Lorraine Radtke, René Jorna, Henderikus J. Stam. Concord: Captus Press Inc, 2003. 233-241.

From the abstract: The “end” of meta-language refers to the necessity of crafting a more precise notion of the interactions that define the “extra-discursive,” authority, and the “reality” secured by language (e.g., norms). It is at the intersection of these dimensions that one may ascertain a form of agency that is both embedded within culture yet able to subvert or take an ethical position in relation to its norms. Language and loss the “inter-dit” in Lacanian interpretation, and Butler’s concept of rhetoricity are implicated as avenues through which one can understand the emergence of this sort of agency and ethics.

Any recourse to a meta-language would render clinical work an ideological game of identification with the so-called reality of the analyst.

To claim that the subject is at the same level as the law is not equivalent to claiming that she is the law, since any conflation of subject with law only reduces her, subjects her absolutely, to the law. At the same level as and yet not the law, the subject can only be conceived at the failure of the law, of language. In language and yet more than language, the subject is a cause for which no signifier can account. Malone, 234 citing Copjec in Read My Desire 1994, 209.

In Seminar XX (1974/1999), Lacan asserted that there is no meta-language, no language about language. In other words, within the Lacanian paradigm, there is no super-ordinate position of exemption from the limits of language. For Lacan, the absence of a meta-language thus implies a limit in two ways. First, language and no position in language can say it all; there is a remainder that is known only by its effects. Secondly, you cannot escape lanugage. The above impasses of language create ethical dilemmas that are often solved by notions of the good, which try to locate some trans-linguistic position that organizes the ends of speech. Regarding the impasses found in the limit of language, Lacan says that:

There is some relationship to being that cannot be known. It is that relationship whose structure I investigate … insofar as that knowledge — which as I just said is impossible — is prohibited (interdicted) thereby. this is where I play on the equivocation — that impossible knowledge is censored or forbidden, but it isn’t if you write (inter-dit” appropriately — it is said between the words, between the lines. We have to expose this kind of real to which it grants us access. Lacan 1974/1999 119.

The inherent lack of foundation in our relation to the Other takes its social bearings in relationship to prohibition. You can only know so much about the Other (your parent’s unconscious fantasy, the arbitrary rule of law etc.)

So there is a question of a non-relation to the Other that cannot be eased by discourse, a limit within discourse encountered only through discourse. This limit has social implications [for example psychotics are only too certain that they know what the Other wants and this is what Rothenberg finds problematic with Butler’s work].

Loizidou norms

Loizidou, Elena. Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics. New York: Routledge Cavendish, 2007.

Hegel, Lacan, Irigaray: Antigone for them is not a political figure, one whose defiant speech has political implication but rather … one who articulates a pre-political opposition to politics representing kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it” (81-81 Loizidou citing JB in Antigone’s Claim 3)

Butler’s subject is one that comes into being through norms and language that pre-exist it. Though, let’s not forget that the subject becomes agentic through its resistance to these norms. This very constellation of the subject puts the subject within the sphere of the public. Language or norms are public. For Butler, in this sense there is no pre-political or private, our coming into the world establishes us as public and therefore political figures. 83

Let’s not forget that Antigone thought that her life was worthless if she was unable to provide her brother with the appropriate burial rites. Antigone, who comes into being through the norms that she does not possess, through a language that is not her own, a human walking towards death, offers, as Butler writes, a catachrestic reading of the human, in the sense that she has been stolen of her humanity. however, in re-appropriating and risking the truth, she turns her inhumanity, her zoe into a possibility for the future.

When Heidegger criticizes metaphysical philosophers for forgetting, in their attempt to find what it means to be human and their preoccupation with the meaning of human, he points out that the human is thrown into the world, is ek-static and through ek-stasy moves towards a future of death. … (For Butler) The human is thrown into the world, it comes into the world through language norms that are represented as culturally intelligible, but at the same time this human is always inhuman, it always resists or deliberates these norms that bring it into being.85

If we are to rethink how we can have livable and viable lives, despite how different and irreconcilable each life is to each other, we need to think of the subject within the parameters that Butler proposes: a subject that deliberates before it acts in the face of absolute difference and moves towards the Other despite this difference. 85

Loizidou ethics antigone

Loizidou, Elena. Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics. New York: Routledge Cavendish, 2007.

a de-struktion of the way philosophy, since Plato, constituted the subject, Levinas’s critique of western metaphysics offered us an important lesson. We have learned that if we are not to regress into morality, if we are to have an ethical relationship with the Other, we are required to establish ethics as a first philosophy.

The requires a reconception of how we understand ourselves. It necessitates the deconstruction of the ego or knowing self when the Other, the one that is external to me, calls upon me. 72

In some respects, the call for this type of ethics could also be a description of moments when my ego, my self-knowledge, is reconstituted via the call of the Other, where I fail to reduce the Other to myself. … It becomes paramount that if we talk of ethics, bereft of moralisation, we need to think of the subject as, unreflexive, not-knowing, a surprise, non-identical and particular. As is by now apparent, Levinas’s critique of western metaphysical philosophy could be comfortably directed towards Descartes and Kant.

quoting Antigone

I’d never have taken this ordeal upon myself, never defied our people’s will. What law, you ask, do I satisfy with what I say? A husband dead, there might have been another. A child by another too, if I had lost the first. But mother and father both lost in the halls of Death, no brother could ever spring to light again. (Robert Fagles Trans.)

burying her brother … was done in honour or celebration of the particularity of her brother. Her brother, unlike a child or a husband, is irreplaceable, especially since both her parents are dead. She stresses that she would not have acted the same in other circumstances, turning her act into a singular act. Ethical subjects — subjects that act responsibly … are the ones that celebrate the singularity of the other, without reducing the other to the universal and the laws that govern this universality. It is not difficult to see how Antigone is made into an ethical heroine, given this. 81

Žižek

Zizek, The Most Sublime of Hysterics: Hegel with Lacan
This essay was originally published in French in Le plus sublime des hystériques – Hegel passe, Broché, Paris, 1999. It appears in Interrogating the Real, London: Continuum, 2005, Rex Butler and Scott Stephens editors.

The idea that one is able from the outset to account for error, to take it under consideration as error, and therefore to take one’s distance from it, is precisely the supreme error of the existence of metalanguage, the illusion that while taking part in illusion, one is somehow also able to observe the process from an ‘objective’ distance. By avoiding identifying oneself with error, we commit the supreme error and miss the truth, because the place of truth itself is only constituted through error. To put this another way, we could recall the Hegelian proposition which can be paraphrased as ‘the fear of error is error itself: the true evil is not the evil object but the one who perceives evil as such.

One already finds this logic of the error interior to truth in Rosa Luxemburg’s description of the dialectic of the revolutionary process. When Eduard Bernstein raised objections apropos of the revisionist fear of taking power ‘too soon’, prematurely, before the ‘objective conditions’ have reached their maturity, she responded that the first seizures of power are necessarily ‘premature’: for the proletariat, the only way of arriving at ‘maturity’, of waiting for the ‘opportune’ moment to seize power, is to form themselves, prepare themselves for this seizure; and the only way of forming themselves is, of course, these ‘premature’ attempts … If we wait for the ‘opportune moment’, we will never attain it, because this ‘opportune moment’ – that which never occurs without fulfilling the subjective conditions for the ‘maturity’ of the revolutionary subject – can only occur through a series of ‘premature’ attempts. Thus the opposition to the ‘premature’ seizure of power is exposed as an opposition to the seizure of power in general, as such: to repeat the celebrated phrase of Robespierre, the revisionists want ‘revolution without revolution’.

Once we examine things more closely, we see that Luxemburg’s fundamental wager is precisely the impossibility of a metalanguage in the revolutionary process:

the revolutionary subject does not ‘conduct’ the process from an objective distance, he is himself constituted through this process; and it is because the time of revolution occurs by means of subjectivity that no one is able to ‘achieve revolution on time’, following ‘premature’, insufficient efforts.

The attitude of Luxemburg is exactly that of the hysteric faced with the obsessional metalanguage of revisionism:

strive to act, even if prematurely, in order to arrive at the correct act through this very error. One must be duped in one’s desire, though it is ultimately impossible, in order that something real comes about.

The propositions of ‘grasping substance as subject’ and ‘there is no metalanguage’ are merely variations on the same theme. It is therefore impossible to say: ‘Although there must be premature attempts at revolution, have no illusions and remain conscious that they are doomed in advance to failure.’ The idea that we are able to act and yet retain some distance with regard to the ‘objective’ – making possible some consideration of the act’s ‘objective signification’ (namely, its destiny to fail) during the act itself – misperceives the way that the ‘subjective illusion’ of the agents is part of the ‘objective’ process itself. This is why the revolution must be repeated: the ‘meaning’ of those premature attempts is literally to be found in their failure – or rather, as one says with Hegel, ‘a political revolution is, in general, only sanctioned by popular opinion after it has been repeated’.

Review of Excessive Subject

In this book Molly Anne Rothenberg makes clear that progressive political theorists need to re-think their understanding of the subject because the current deadlock has resulted in either structuralist dead-ends, or immanentist ‘Foucaultian’ type analyses that don’t account for the nature of agency and resistance, and so can’t with any sort of robustness contribute to an understanding of social change that includes an idea of radical subjectivity. According to Rothenberg, social theory has been deadlocked around these two versions of subjective agency and their respective theories of causality. She suggests that we toss these theories into the wastebin, and look at an newly emerging way of thinking the ‘social field’ reflected in the recent work of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek and Alenka Zupancic. I think she benefits most from the theory of Badiou, but is definitely influenced by the latter two as well. Critical of Zizek’s notion of the Act, she nonetheless draws much theoretical weight from his notion of subjective destitution, which Rothenberg, much to her credit, takes to new heights in this book. It is a difficult concept, but one can see Rothenberg struggling to articulate a new approach to thinking subjectivity and its articulation to the social field through an ‘excess’ and a ‘relation of non-relation’. Her final chapter rewards the reader’s discipline (the book overall is a challenging yet clear and insightful read) and patience. Taking up an alternative reading of Melville’s Bartleby, R. allows the reader to get a further handle on her theory of the ‘excessive subject’. Additionally the reading of Felix Guattari’s early work shows the extent to which R. does not shy away from seeking to show how a relation to ‘excess’ via a Möbius subjectivity allows us to begin to think a radical newness and an ethicality that is truly radical and original. Buy this book.

Note: Adam Kotsko in the latest installment of the Journal of Zizek Studies, helpfully points out that Zizek reads Agota Kristof’s novel The Notebook, and claims the twin boy characters as new vehicles of a radical ethical subjectivity. One certainly wonders what Rothenberg would make of this, that is, whether she would see this as a more positive elaboration by Zizek of his important notion of the de-constituted subject, hence shadowing her idea of the Möbius subject? Reading Kotsko’s article together with Rothenberg’s book, gives me the impression that there is a subtle groundswell for a different articulation of the subject that gets us beyond many of the deadlocks that have stymied creative and radical theory for so long now.

Žižek on form formalism distinction

🙂 Rothenberg on Žižek’s insistence that the truth is a thoroughly partisan process. Yet Žižek refuses relativism, so how can he argue truth is partisan but not relativistic. Rothenberg cites a lengthy passage from Žižek [which I’ve broken up below for purposes of emphasis]:

Form is not the neutral frame of particular contents, but the very principle of concretion, that is, the “strange attractor” which distorts, biases, confers a specific colour on every element of the totality … [W]e should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-multiculturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of “narratives” — not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can coexist peacefully — in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and opportunity to tell their story … The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the impossibility of this liberal notion of Form:

Form has nothing to do with “formalism”, with the idea of a neutral Form independent of its contingent, particular content; it stands, rather, for the traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism which “colours” the entire field in question. In this precise sense, class struggle is the Form of the Social: every social phenomenon is overdetermined by it, so that it is not possible to remain neutral towards it.

(Rothenberg 161, citing guess who from Revolution at the Gates, 190, original emphasis)

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 4

Sinthome

an identification with the symptom, a recognition in the real of our symptom of the only support of our being (Stav citing Žižek 1989) 133

Wo es war soll Ich werden: the subject must identify with the place where the syumptom already was: ‘In its pathological particularity [it] … must recognise the element which gives consistency to [its] being’ (Žižek 1989) 133

By saying ‘We are all Jews’, ‘We all live in Chernobyl!’ or ‘We are all boat people!’ — … we elevate the symptom, the excluded truth of the social field (which has been stigmatised as an alien particularity) to the place of the universal — to the point of our common identification which was up to now, sustained by its exclusion or elimination. The same happens when we say ‘We are all gypsies!’ — … What is promoted here is an attitude consistent with identifying with the symptom of the social and traversing social fantasy.

It is only by accepting such an impossible representation, by making this declaration of impossibility, that it is possible to ‘represent’ the impossible or rather to identify with the impossibility of its representation. Identification with the symptom is thus related to the traversing of the fantasy. Going through fantasy entails the realisation of the lack or inconsistency in the Other which is masked by fantasy, the separation between objet petit a and the Other, a separation which is not only ethically sound but also ‘liberating’ for our political imagination. 134

What is clearly at stake here is the possibility of enacting symbolic gestures that institutionalise social lack, that is to say incorporate the ethical recognition of the impossibility of social closure.

Critique of Judith Butler, Will Connolly, Simon Critchley

Critchley’s Levinaisan ethics of the Other [and probably Butler’ s too]. ‘The community remains an open community in so far as it is based on the recognition of difference, of the difference of the Other’ (citing Critchley 1992).

The problem with such an analysis is that it presupposes the Other as a unifed totality or, even if this is not always the case, it seems to be offering a positive point of identification remaining thus within the limits of traditional ethical strategies or, in any case, not undermining them in a radical way. What has to be highlighted is that it is precisely this relation — the identification with the Other — that attempts to bring closure to the social.

In order to have a non-totalisable relation to the Other we must relate — identify — with the lack in the Other and not with the Other per se. This is the radical innovation of Lacanian ethics. And this is what democracy needs today. 139

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 3

It is the lack created by dislocation that causes the desire for a new discursive articulation. It is this lack created by a dislocation of the social which forms the kernel of the political as an antagonistic articulation of different discourses that attempt to symbolise its traumatic nature, to suture the lack it creates. In that sense the political stands at the root of politics, dislocation at the root of the articulation of a new socio-political order, an encounter with the real moment of the political at the root of our symbolisation of political reality. 74

Trapped as we are within the world of social meaning, all our representations of reality are doomed to fail due to their symbolic character. Every attempt to construct what is impossible to be constructed fails due to our entrapment within the world of construction. The only moment in which we come face to face with the irreducible real beyond representation is when our constructions are dislocated. It is only when Nature, our construction of external reality, meets a stumbling block, something which cannot be symbolically integrated, that we come close to the real of nature, nature, constructed Nature, is nothing but “a mode of concealment, a cloak of abstractions which obscures that discomforting wildness that defies our paranoid urge to delineate the boundaries of Being” (Stav quoting Evnden 1992) 86

Recognising the constitutivity of the real does not entail that we stop symbolising; it means that we start trying to incorporate this recognition within the symbolic itself, in fact it means that since the symbolic entails lack as such, we abstain from covering it over with fantasmatic constructs — or, if one accepts that we are always trapped within the field of fantasy, that we never stop traversing it. The guiding principle in this kind of approach is to move beyond fantasy towards a self-critical symbolic gesture recognising the contingent and transient character of every symbolic constuct. 89

Fantasy negates the real by promising to ‘realise’ it, by promising to close the gap between the real and reality, by repressing the discursive nature of reality’s production. Yet any promise of absolute positivity — the construction of an imaginarised false real — is founded on a violent/negative origin; it is sustained by the exclusion of a real — a non-domesticated real — which always returns to its place. Sustaining a promise of full positivity leads to a proliferation of negativity. As we have already pointed out, the fantasy of a utopian harmonious social order can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. 108

The fantasmatic ideal of harmony is still with us

Can we have passion in politics without holocausts? Furthermore, is it possible to have a politics of hope, a politics of change without utopia? … Democratisation is certainly a political project of hope. But democratic discourse is not (or should not be) based on the vision of a utopian harmonious society. It is based on the recognition of the impossibility and the catastrophic consequence of such a dream.

Radical Democracy

What differentiates democracy from other political forms of society is the legitimisation of conflict and the refusal to eliminate it through the establishment of an authoritarian harmonious order. Within this framework the antagonistic diversity between different conceptions of the good is not seen as something negative that should be eliminated, but as something to be “valued and celebrated. … To believe that a final resolution of conflict is eventually possible, even when it is envisaged as asymptotic approaching to the regulative idea of a free unconstrained communication as in Habermas, is to put the pluralist democratic project at risk.” (Stav quoting Mouffe 1996) 111

Democratic politics — and politics in general — can never eliminate conflict and dislocation, antagonism and division. the aim is rather to establish unity within an environment of conflict and diversity; to create a thoroughly doubtful society, beset by productive self-doubt, a society that traverses its utopian mirror image by identifying with its supposed enemy (Stav quotes Beck 1997) … accepting the anti-utopian dimension of antagonism and dislocation, the constitutivity of the politcal qua encounter with the real. 112

Lacanian political theory aims at bring to the fore, again and again, the lack in the Other, the same lack that utopian fantasy attempts to mask, [therefore] it would be self-defeating, if not absurd, to engage itself in utopian or quasi-utopian fantasy construction. 116

Democracy is not based on or guided by a certain positive, foundational, normative principle. On the contrary, democracy is based on the recognition of the fact that no such principle can claim to be truly universal, on the fact that no symbolic social construct can ever claim to master the impossible real. Democracy entails the acceptance of antagonism, in other words, the recognition of the fact that the social will always be structured around a real impossibility which cannot be sutured. 120

Democracy provides a concrete example of what we would call a post-fantasmatic or less-fantasmatic politics. 120

Democracy entails the acceptance of antagonism, in other words, the recognition of the fact that the social will always be structured around a real impossibility which cannot be sutured.

Thus the project of radical democracy, is based not on the futile fantasmatic suture of the lack in the Other but on the recognition of its own irreducibility. … But this is not possible as long as the ethics of harmony are still hegemonic. What we need is a new ethical framework. This cannot be an ethics of harmony aspiring to realise a fantasy construction.