subjectivity – Page 4

foucault copjec

Christopher Lane, “The Experience of the Outside: Foucault and Psychoanalysis” Lacan in America edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, New York: Other Press, 2000. 309-348.

the subject is constructed by forces lying beyond conscious apprehension and social meaning. 321

The difficulty of establishing where psychoanalysis stands relative to experience and its interpretation not only haunted Foucault’s career but partly determined it. One strand of Foucault’s intellectual project was aimed at complicating historical materialism by building on Nietzsche’s work. Another strand—tied conceptually to the first—focused on challenging the intellectual sovereignty in France of Jean-Paul Sartre. But a third and less successful strand devolved on establishing the importance of psychoanalysis for modern thought without at the same time endorsing Lacan’s “return to Freud.”

In refusing the psychoanalytic argument that sexuality isn’t determined wholly by discourse and social practices, however, Foucault could understand the ontological difficulty of sexuality only the way antiquity represented this phenomenon — that is, as an “effect.. . of errors of regimen [les erreurs de regime]” (UP, p. 16; UPS, p. 23).

Foucault’s insistence even here in approaching sexuality from primarily a culturalist perspective exacerbated his self-acknowledged difficulties. Yet his commitment to engaging some of the psychic repercussions of subjectivation — which dovetailed into his study of the modes of subjection (mode d’assujettisement, G, p. 353) — ironically obliged him to return to psychoanalysis for a better understanding of their diverse effects. I am suggesting that throughout Foucault’s career this pincer-like approach to psychoanalysis overdetermined his perspective on subjectivity. While his first published essay critiqued works by Ludwig Binswanger and Freud, for example, it didn’t dispute the appearance or effect of the unconscious. 328

While subtle differences therefore arise between The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and Discipline and Punish (1975) concerning the role of the dispositif … the thread linking these books is Foucault’s suggestion that “[t]he individual is the product of power.” The underside to this conception of subjectivity — and, perhaps, the obvious extension of it is the near-metaphysical idea that subjectivity, once freed from outside regulation, would lack “inner conviction” (MF, pp. 89,42). This idea surfaces periodically in Foucault’s 1954 essay on dreams, and it culminates logically with the demand that subjectivity be let alone, whether to silence, abstraction, or pleasure. 331

Bersani valuably represents Foucault’s claims about subjecti vation in the following way: “The mechanisms of power studied by Foucault produce the individuals they are designed to dominate” (S, p. 3).

“The fundamental thesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis,” adds Zizek, “is that what we call ‘reality’ constitutes itself against the background of [symbolic] ‘bliss,’ i.e., of such an exclusion of some traumatic Real. This is precisely what Lacan has in mind when he says that fantasy is the ultimate support of reality: ‘reality’ stabilizes itself when some fantasy frame of a ‘symbolic bliss’ closes off the view into the abyss of the Real.” Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 118

… psychoanalysis departs conclusively from materialist accounts of reality and consciousness, as well as from related critiques of reality’s many shortcomings. By insisting on the ego’s basic ” [in]aptitude for dealing with reality,” Bersani — like Freud and Lacan — shows us why the subject’s alienation is neither explained nor repaired by altering the diverse forms of political oppression that impede and partly shape us, an argument quite different from the frequent and unjustified claim that psychoanalysis is uninterested in our oppression.

Owing to their faith in the underlying influence of these external causes on the subject, Foucauldian and materialist approaches to subjectivity argue that factors such as gender, ethnicity, and even sexuality are egoic effects of varied, contradictory, and unjust social demands.

From this perspective, however, the ego is invested with an ability to modify, subvert, and even repair these demands in order to diminish their effects and sometimes render them meaningless.

The Psychic Life of Power displays at the outset ambivalence about the psychoanalytic argument that only a nonsocial factor — the drive — is capable of determining psychic life. More important for us here, The Psychic Life of Power restates the logic of external causation, which paradoxically restores in principle the forms of social influence that 1 am challenging here. For invaluable discussion of this point, published just before this essay went to press, see S. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), especially pp. 247-312.

Although this faith in the influence of external causes relies erroneously on the ego’s capacity for congruency with the outside, I should stress that in opposing this faith I am
not refuting the influence of external factors. To do so would undercut my emphasis on the asymmetry of psychical and physical reality; it would reproduce another form of voluntarism, generating precisely the characterizations of psychoanalysis that I am objecting to here. The fantasy that the ego determines consciousness slips easily into solipsism and epistemic relativism, a fantasy that we simply make our own reality.

I am objecting instead to the crass suggestion—voiced repeatedly by constructivists and Foucauldians—that subjectivity is merely an “effect” of discourse, a suggestion that renders subjectivity politically transparent, devoid of drives and unconscious causes. 343

This suggestion culminates in a conceptual deadlock, in which social practices and power are caught in a circular relationship that thwarts the possibility of transformation. Let us iterate that Foucault wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge precisely in an atttempt to shatter this deadlock.

One way that psychoanalysis departs conclusively from materialism is by insisting that we can’t test our reality without confronting our perception of the external world. According to Freud, the structure of loss that frames our perception and desire serves as a guide for all subsequent perspectives on reality.

As he argued in “Negation,” building on a related and now famous claim in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality:

The first and immediate aim … of reality-testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to re-find such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there.” 66

S. Freud, “Negation,” Standard Edition 19:233-238, 1925, paraphrasing his earlier claim in Three Essays and the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Standard Edition 7:

“The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” (p. 222).

This statement shows us clearly why Freudian psychoanalysis differs from the conservative idea that therapy consists in adapting the patient’s ego to reality.

For Freud and Lacan, the idea of patient adaptation was preposterous, because egregiously coercive. Indeed, the very question of adaptation returns us to The Order of Things, where Foucault usefully points up a conclusive split between psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Poised between rationalism and unreason in Madness and Civilization, Freudian psychoanalysis surfaces in The Order of Things and even Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality as one of the primary fields that avoids, and even preempts, the coercive logic of psychiatry.

It is psychiatry, Foucault insists, that claims the patient must sacrifice his or her reality for pre-existing forms of social reality.

Lacan of course agreed, arguing in the 1930s — long before Foucault began publishing — that the very idea of “sacrifice” is both manipulative and delusive, insofar as “adaptation” merely substitutes one fantasy about reality for another.

JOAN COPJEC SPEAKS

Contrary to the common misperception, reality testing is not described here as a process by which we match our perceptions against an external, independent reality.

In fact, it is the permanent loss of that reality—or real: a reality that was never present as such—that is the precondition for determining the objective status of our perceptions.

Not only is the real unavailable for comparison with our perceptions but, Freud concedes, we can assume that the latter are always somewhat distorted, inexact. [Read My Desire, p. 233]

Copjec shows us here why psychoanalysis and historicism offer quite different perspectives on reality; she illustrates too that by highlighting the profound repercussions of Freud’s argument about reality, Lacan completely discredited the idea that reality can ever be reparative for the subject.

“In the name of what is social constraint exercised?” he asks in Seminar VII. “[Reality isn’t just there so that we bump our heads up against the false paths along which the functioning of the pleasure principle leads us.”

“In truth,” Lacan continues, “we make reality out of pleasure” (EP y p. 225), a statement inverting the standard materialist claim that we extract whatever pleasure we can from a reality that pre-exists us.

That the ego exists in relation to a structural méconnaissance overturns all existing claims about false consciousness: “By definition,” Lacan says in Seminar II, “there is something so improbable about all existence that one is in effect perpetually questioning oneself about its reality.”

… Foucault’s and Lacan’s rather different perspectives on the subject’s structural relationship to reality and axiomatic dependence on resistance. To my mind the kernel of this difference arises in Freud’s claim, near the end of his study of the Wolfman, that “[a] repression is something very different from a condemning judgement.”

What Freud brings to our attention here is that repression’s importance lies less in what we contain, than in what we can’t evade.

“I’d say that that is the very essence of the Freudian discovery,” remarks Lacan in Seminar I.

To put this another way, repression, for psychoanalysis, doesn’t signify what we can possess of the past; it dramatizes the effort it takes to accomplish forgetting, to remove or dislodge us from a past—and thus a history — that threatens to overwhelm us.

This claim points up a form of difficulty that isn’t altered or resolved by will, whether individual or collective, and the difficulty helps us refute the simplistic objection that psychoanalysis is ahistorical. … our failure to rid ourselves of the past is one of the factors binding us involuntarily to history.

mcgowan notes

In the Project, Freud sees the psyche as a system designed to discharge psychic energy that is transmitted through neurones. Energy bombards the psyche from both inside and out – through endogamous forces and external stimuli. At this point in his thought, Freud believes that the aim of psychic life involves returning to a zero level of excitation, an aim that he later aligns with the pleasure principle. By warding off excitation, the psychic process free the psyche from unpleasure and return it to a state of satisfaction. 53

🙂 – Freud of 1895 Project focused on warding off excitation from external stimuli, too much excitation leads to unpleasure, less excitation more satisfaction

Once Freud conceived of the death drive in 1920, his conception of satisfaction underwent a fundamental shift. Whereas in the vision of the Project and his other pre-1920 work (which views the psyche in terms of the pleasure principle) satisfaction is a state tha the psyche arrives at through the discharge of excitation, after the discovery of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle satisfaction will consist in the movement of the drive itself, not in the aim that it attains. Nonetheless, what remains constant in these two different economic modes is the absolute psychic primacy of satisfaction. The psyche strives above all to sustain its satisfaction, and it is successful at doing so.

🙂 – pre 1920 Freud said satisfaction = discharge of excitation : post 1920 in Beyond satisfaction = movement of the drive itself
– what is common or constant to both is psychic primacy of satisfaction.

Satisfaction occurs in the operations of the psyche because, as Freud sees it in 1895, the discharge of excitation always occurs. Though there are infinite differences among individual subjects, we can say that all subjects are satisfied subjects insofar as they partake in the process of discharging excitation. For every subject, this process finds a way to occur successfully, even if it encounters a circuitous path in the psyche. Individual difference manifests itself in different psychic paths, but not in the fundamental fact of discharging excitation. 53-54

That is, what the psyche does in universal, but how the psyche goes about doing this varies in each particular case. The universality of what the psyche does allows Freud to recognize that the economy of the psyche produces satisfaction for every subject, even if the subject is unaware of its own satisfaction.

This remains true when Freud turns from the 1895 model of the psyche to the later one centered on the death drive, though in the later theory satisfaction derives from the drive’s constant force rather than from a discharge of excitation. The drive provides an inescapable satisfaction of never letting up.

🙂 – Mcgowan says here that Freud breaks from 1895 Project discharge of excitation : opts for 1920 drive’s constant force provides satisfaction and satisfaction of death drive is constant repetition

The satisfaction that the death drive produces stems from its circular structure: rather than trying to attain satisfaction through an external aim, the drive produces that satisfaction through the process of the repeated movement itself. … The aim of the psychoanalyst – the analyst’s desire – must be to remove the detours that the analysand has placed along the path of the drive in order to allow the analysand to take up completely her or his position in the drive. 55

In Seminar XI, Lacan lays out the situation confronting the analyst: “What we have before us in analysis is a system in which everything turns out all right, and which attains its own sort of satisfaction. If we interfere in this, it is only in so far as we think that there are other ways, shorter ones for example.”

In submitting to analysis, the analysand submits, albeit unknowingly, to this desire for shortening or economizing the path of the drive. This shortening is the analytic cure, and Freud first comes to understand it as such in the 1895 Project where he emphasizes the costs of psychic detours that the subject erects to the flow of psychic energy. 55

mellard beast in jungle henry james

James, Henry. The Beast in the Jungle.
Project Gutenberg
Audiobook on youtube

Below are excerpts from an article by James Mellard, “A ‘Countable Unity’: The Lacanian Subject in ‘The Beast in the jungle'” Using Lacan, Reading Fiction. 1991.

If this analysis of “The Beast in the Jungle” accomplishes anything it should be the demonstration that the subject is a creation of a social relationship, the creature not only of language, but also of the Other in whom language resides for the subject. John Brenkman has discussed this aspect of Lacanian theory. ” Lacan’s project,” says Brenkman, “has been the attempt to give language and intersubjectivity primacy within the theory as well as the practice of psychoanalysis.” Brenkman goes on to consider that what Lacan calls “the Umwelt, the environment or outer world, of even the newborn is preeminently social . From birth,” says Brenkman, “the human being is affected by actions, gestures, wishes, and intentions that are already i mbued with the symbolic and that occur within the constraints of specific, historically determined institutions. In Lacan’s terms, the subject is, from the outset, radically dependent on the field of the Other-for objects of one’s satisfactions, for the benchmarks of one’s i dentity, and for the language that will make one’s interaction with others possible”.

It is easy enough to fit James’s tale into this model. As we have seen, May Bartram becomes the other, the mother, and the community of one within which john Marcher has his being as a subject. His extreme dependence upon her has the larger significance, one might suggest, of indicating just how dependent the individual subject is upon the community that provides him or her a place as a signifier within a system of signifiers. But his dependence also suggests that there must be a signifier beyond, above, or outside the community as well.

The dyad of the mother and child may represent the origin of the social community, but it must be breached by the signifier of the father if there is to be the Symbolic triangulation that will permit change, growth, transformation within that social structure. Neither a community nor a person should remain locked within a narcissistic self-worship. It is not that Paternity — the signifier of the Father — is “better” than Maternity — the signifier of the Mother; it is only that the subject, whether individual or community, must be able to see around the other, to envision possibilities of thirdness, of an other kind of otherness, to permit the transformations of culture that have marked human history.

*********************************
Figuratively, Marcher as subjectivity is at locus zero and awaits the countable unity conferred by another who bounds the set of zero and 1 ; in this move, he achieves “oneness.” As Ragland-Sullivan says, “One, by contrast [to zero], is the number marking the infant’s attainment of a sense of body unity by [its] mentally identifying with a Gestalt exterior to it. Therefore, it is the number of symbiosis, denoting both mirror-stage psychic fusion and corporal identification with the human form. 114

What Marcher has encountered in this metaphorical moment of his constitution as a subject is the phenomenon Lacan, borrowing the term from Ernest Jones, calls aphanisis. Aphanisis is the name Lacan gives to the moment in which the subject comes into being as a result of a signifier-and not j ust any signifier, either, but a signifier of/from the other-and simultaneously disappears under it. There is no a priori ego, in other words; there is only a subject represented as a signifier for another signifier. The subj ect is constituted, Lacan i nsists, in what can only be regarded as fundamentally a social relation. For Lacan, ”a signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier” (FFC 207), and that other signifier is taken from the social order.

May Bartram is that other, of course, but the consequence of Marcher’s realization is his disappearance beneath that signifier she has provided. He is now, in May’s view, at an indeterminate place. “What we find,” says Lacan, “is the constitution of the subject i n the field of the Other . . . . If he is apprehended at his birth i n the field of the Other, the characteristic of the subject of the u nconscious is that of being, beneath the signifier that develops its networks, its chains and its history, at an indeterminate place” (FFC 208). Marcher counts to one reaches oneness, that is-by covering over a void, a zero, a locus that he is incapable of filling by himself or even of recognizing without the other – the second person – who calls him into being. The scene with May in Naples is momentous, then, not because it really exists-Lacan would say, Who cares?-but because it calls into existence John Marcher as a subject, Marcher as a subject for another, a subject for another signifier identified in May Bartram.

For it is castration-always subjective, rather than physical-that Marcher aims to evade. Indeed, one may say that virtually the entire tale after Marcher’s “birth” as a subject from the meeting with May at Weatherend is involved in Marcher’s determination to avoid castration, that is, the structure of alienation that embodies Lacan’s concept of castration. His aim is forever to live in the fullness of the eyes of the (m)other-here represented by May.

May thus is involved in Marcher’s denial of castration, not merely in permitting him to avoid anxiety, but also in permitting him to feel he has in fact avoided castration altogether. Thus May plays the role of the mother who permits the child to believe that he is all to or for her. 120

So, one asks, why is marrying a problem? James answers for Marcher: that about which Marcher, narcissistically, is obsessed-though that is not how James says it-is “a privilege he coul d [not] invite a woman to share” (79). In his narcissism and from the vantage of the Imaginary unity May has conferred upon him, Marcher thinks he has the privileged it, the phallus, the “little old thing.” But of course he neither is it nor has it; he may have only its replacement, and that replacement (part or part-object) is signified by or in May herself. What he ought to realize is that he can have “it” by having May. But to take her on as a lover would be to give her up as a figure of the mother. And that he works hard to avoid, for it would bring into the picture the necessity of a phallic father to replace the desire of the phallic mother. 123-124

Protecting himself from the spectre of the Oedipus and castration, he thus, in a complex transformation, turns May into the phallic mother who needs his protection […]

His anxiety before her answer is an anxiety of castration, of loss of the one in whom he woul d remain whole. Having decided that, indeed, she knows, that she possesses knowledge, he begs her for it before she departs from him forever. Again, he looks to her face, starting with her eyes, “beautiful with a strange cold light”, eyes “one of the signs” that she now possesses what he wants-knowledge of a fate even more “monstrous” than the beast he h imself had enfigured. He had thought that the two of them together had “looked most things in the face”, and he even thinks he could have “faced” the worst alone, but he fears what she must now know: ” I see in your face and feel here, in this air and amid these appearances, that you’re out of it. You’ve done. You’ve had your experience. You leave me to my fate”. His is the anxiety of the child “abandoned” by the mother before the child has realized that he cannot have her, cannot be her everything, cannot be the phallus for her. 127

This loss, in Lacanian terms, represents castration in the subject’s recognition not of its own lack, but the mother’s lack. Lacan says that the “signification of castration” is clinically important because it represents the “discovery [of] the castration of the mother” (Ecrits: A Selection 282). Castration also insists upon the differentiation of the subject from the mother, who as phallic mother has to this point in the subj ect’s life represented the object of every need, demand, desire. In these connections Julia K risteva has said, “As the addressee of every demand, the mother occupies the place of alterity. Her replete body, the receptacle and guarantor of demands, takes the place of all narcissistic, hence imaginary, effects and gratifications; she is, in other words, the phallus. The discovery of castration, however, detaches the subject from his dependence on the mother, and the perception of this lack [manque] makes the phallic function a symbolic function-the symbolic function” (47). In Lacan, the mirror phase and acceptance of castration are successive moments in the constitution of the subject. The latter moment-which Lacan sometimes calls “the phallic stage” (Ecrits: A Selection 282)-purs “the finishing touches on the process of separation that posits the subject as signifiable, which is to say, separate, always confronted by an other” (Kristeva 47). 129

Thus, it seems plain that while Marcher has entered the mirror phase of identification with an imaginary other, with May as imago and mother, he has yet to pass through castration and, therefore, overlay the Imaginary with the register of the Symbolic. Book 5 of James’s text, in its vitiating, “merely” Imaginary repetition of Marcher’s primary narcissism, illustrates profoundly the way in which Marcher is virtually trapped in the first, identificatory moment of the mirror phase, seemingly unable ever to give over his identity to the Symbolic, triangulating knowledge of castration.s As in the tale’s previous books, book 5 shows again and again how Marcher sees his life absorbed by May Bartram. Caught in his mirror-stage, narcissistic repetitions, he does not regard her as independent other so much as
merely an extension of himself. 129

… from his still narcissistic perspective, “she was dying and his life would end” ( 1 08; my emphasis). He begins to see some glimmering of what loss, loss of the desire of the (m)other, might mean, but he does not yet accede to such knowledge: “What could the thing that was to happen to him be, after all, but just this thing that had begun to happen? Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude-that was what he had figured as the Beast in the Jungle, that was what had been in the lap of the gods” ( 1 08). The Oedipal moment is out there, but Marcher shall deny as long as possible.

So long as Marcher is stuck in merely Imaginary relations as laid out in the mirror stage, May Bartram can be for him only a symbol of a mother assumed still to possess that phallus which can deny his own “deficiency.” She dies, true enough, and is lost to Marcher, but that does not prevent his assuming that somehow he can fill his lack and regain the totality of being she had represented. In this maternal guise, she is indeed-as K risteva says of the mother-the phallus for Marcher. Consequently, in a predictable metonymic transfer, May, who originally helped Marcher see the beast, but who then was to be saved from the beast, eventually becomes the beast.

What Marcher envies in the man is his acknowledged loss, his ability to feel lack, privation. Marcher finally understands, moreover, that what he has missed in life is knowledge of the lack and the passion that such knowledge permits-a passion associated, in his case, with loving a woman for herself and, it follows, the ability to mourn her for herself when that time comes, too: “what he presently stood there gazing at wasthe sounded void of his life. He gazed, he drew breath, in pain; he turned in his dismay, and, turning, he had before him in sharper incision than ever the open page of his story. The name on the table [of May’s tomb] smote him as the passage 132-133

of his neighbor had done, and what it said to him, full in the face, was that she was what he had missed” ( 1 25). To sound that void is not only to face the death of the other, but also to face the fact that one’s being is founded upon a void.

Marcher’s belated knowledge is that May Bartram was not only an other in whom he might see himself (as the child sees itself in the mirror of the mother’s face or gaze); she also might have signified an Other whose presence could have formed in him-instead of a law of narcissism, which was the “law that had ruled him” – a recognition of castration and the Law of the Father. We may see that inchoate recognition in his last scene with May while she is alive. There, Marcher persuades himself that she is indeed his “sibyl” who speaks with “the true voice of the law”, but he never understands what that law is until the stranger’s face-no doubt, as some Freudians have said, the resurrected image of the father-makes the “incision” that cuts him to the void. This knowledge of both the other and the Other casts Marcher back upon the tomb, no longer empty now and now destined to suffer under the sign of the phallic Law in which we see the final transformation of the beast: […] Thus, finally, in the beast, Marcher recognizes his castration and the Law of the Father, and therefore he learns, as it were, to count to three: moi, mother, and father; image, difference, identity myth. But it is a counting-or an accounting-too little and too late for Marcher to enjoy the fruits of his triumph, though, narcissistically, readers can do so in his stead.

Freud fort – da

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920

The child was in no respect forward in his intellectual development; at eighteen months he spoke only a few intelligible words, making besides sundry significant sounds which were understood by those about him. But he made himself understood by his parents and the maid-servant, and had a good reputation for behaving ‘properly’. He did not disturb his parents at night; he scrupulously obeyed orders about not touching various objects and not going into certain rooms; and above all he never cried when his mother went out and left him for hours together, although the tie to his mother was a very close one: she had not only nourished him herself, but had cared for him and brought him up without any outside help.

Occasionally, however, this well-behaved child evinced the troublesome habit of flinging into the corner of the room or under the bed all the little things he could lay his hands on, so that to gather up his toys was often no light task.

He accompanied this by an expression of interest and gratification, emitting a loud long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-oh’ which in the judgement of the mother (one that coincided with my own) was not an interjection but meant ‘go away’ (fort). I saw at last that this was a game, and that the child used all his toys only to play ‘being gone’ (fortsein) with them.

One day I made an observation that confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string wound round it. It never occurred to him, for example, to drag this after him on the floor and so play horse and cart with it, but he kept throwing it with considerable skill, held by the string, over the side of his little draped cot, so that the reel disappeared into it, then said his significant ‘o-o-o-oh’ and drew the reel by the string out of the cot again, greeting its reappearance with a joyful ‘Da’ (there). This was therefore the complete game, disappearance and return, the first act being the only one generally observed by the onlookers, and the one untiringly repeated by the child as a game for its own sake, although the greater pleasure unquestionably attached to the second act.

The meaning of the game was then not far to seek. It was connected with the child’s remarkable cultural achievement—the foregoing of the satisfaction of an instinct—as the result of which he could let his mother go away without making any fuss. He made it right with himself, so to speak, by dramatising the same disappearance and return with the objects he had at hand. It is of course of no importance for the affective value of this game whether the child invented it himself or adopted it from a suggestion from outside. Our interest will attach itself to another point.

The departure of the mother cannot possibly have been pleasant for the child, nor merely a matter of indifference. How then does it accord with the pleasure-principle that he repeats this painful experience as a game? The answer will perhaps be forthcoming that the departure must be played as the necessary prelude to the joyful return, and that in this latter lay the true purpose of the game. As against this, however, there is the observation that the first act, the going away, was played by itself as a game and far more frequently than the whole drama with its joyful conclusion.

mcgowan fool

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis.

Successful normal subjectivity, as Freud defines it, stands in contrast. The normal subject does not exist completely outside the domain of social authority, but this subject is able to enjoy in a way that neurotics, psychotics, and perverts cannot. Rather than keeping the subversion of social authority a private matter (in the manner of the neurotic), the normal subject publicly avows its fantasy. By insisting on its fantasies at the expense of social recognition, such a subject embraces its mode of enjoying. This is the fundamental aim of the psychoanalytic process, and the subject who does this necessarily exposes its fantasy and enjoys in a public way.

By enjoying in a public way, the subject becomes what we might call a fool. The fool is a subject who ceases to court the social authority’s approbation and becomes immune to the seduction of social recognition or rewards. Recognition has a value for the subject only insofar as the subject believes in the substantial status of social authority – that is, insofar as the subject believes that the identities that society confers have a solid foundation. The fool grasps that no such foundation exists and that no identity has any basis whatsoever. The only possible foundation for the subject lies in the subject itself – in the fantasy that organizes the subject’s enjoyment. Such a subject becomes a fool because it constantly acts in ways that make no sense to the social authority. It acts out of the nonsense of its own enjoyment.

This does not mean that the fool acts at random. Nonsensical enjoyment is not arbitrary enjoyment but enjoyment irreducible to the symbolic world of signification. In fact, the fool, having embraced its own mode of enjoying, acts with considerable regularity. This type of subject clearly acts against its own self-interest and in defiance of any good at all. The paradigmatic instance of the fool is the subject pursuing the lost cause or the subject continuing to act when all hope has already been lost. The pursuit of the lost cause reveals that what motivates the subject is not a potential reward but purely the enjoyment of the pursuit itself. The authentic fool doesn’t peruse the lost cause with resignation but with the knowledge that there is no other cause but the lost one. Rather than paralyzing the subject, this recognition emboldens it, as the example of Hamlet demonstrates.

Hamlet

father’s ghost and determines must kill Claudius in order to revenge his father’s murder, he believes in possibility of justice. For Hamlet at the beginning of S’s play, there is an order in the world that his act might restore …

Hamlet [believes] in distributive justice, which tacitly presupposes a social authority with a solid foundation that could distribute justice. This attitude undergoes a radical transformation, however, when he sees Ophelia’s grave. At this point in the play, Hamlet recognizes the groundlessness of all authority and the hopelessness of his own cause. 137

[…] Once his cause has become a lost cause, Hamlet can act.

As long as Hamlet hopes that his act might accomplish something substantial, the moment will never be right for it. Once he ceases to believe in the possibility of restoring justice and understands the act only in terms of his own fantasmatic enjoyment, he frees himself from the search for the proper moment. Subjects who hope to make an impact on social authority never act because they cannot calculate how the authority will respond to the act. Such subjects, like Hamlet at the beginning of the play, spend their time probing the authority.

mcgowan death in life

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.

Rather than championing life against death or insisting on death as the necessary limit on life, it focuses on the death that remains internal to life. This death within life is what Freud calls the death drive 236

Viewed from the perspective of the death drive, the uniqueness of a subject does not derive from the divine. As the earlier chapters have contended, that uniqueness is the product of a primordial act of loss through which the subject comes into being.

The subject emerges through the sacrifice of a privileged object hat the act of sacrifice itself creates.

This act is correlative to the acquisition of a name which allows the subject to enter into a world of meaning and signification — a world that brings with it an indirect relation with the world of objects and with its privileged object. With the acquisition of a name, the subject becomes a subject of loss.

The entire existence of the subject becomes oriented around its lost object, even though this object only comes in to being through the subject’s act of ceding it.

This death that founds the subject creates in it a drive to return to the moment of loss itself because the originary loss creates both the subject and the subject’s privileged object.

The only enjoyment that the subject experiences derives not from life nor from death but from the death-in-life that is the death drive. 236

The signifier writes itself on top of life and reifies life’s supposed vitality in its death-laden paths. Every signifier is at bottom a stereotype, a rigid category for apprehending and freezing the movement of life. … the general suspicion of the signifier and its link to death is widespread among the forces of emancipation.

No matter how productive the signifier becomes, it will never access the flow of life itself and will always remain an interruption of that flow. … The very act of theorizing an embrace of pure life violates the theory in the process of constructing it. 237 -238

There is no system of pure life. In order to advocate a turn to life, one must take a detour through death. The philosophers of life conceive of the signifier as an evil that might be overcome.

The muteness of pat of the subject’s body is the form that resistance to symbolization necessarily takes. One affirms one’s subjectivity not through proclaiming it but through a certain mode of keeping silent. 239

The psychoanalytic project involves helping the subject to recognize its symptom — the part of the body that resists full integration into the symbolic order — as the source of its enjoyment and freedom. The part of the body that gives us trouble, that refuses integration, is the expression of our subjectivity, the kernel that negates or refuses what has been imposed on it. By identifying ourselves with our mute body part, we take up the death drive and affirm a value that transcends pure life.

Like the conservative project, a psychoanalytic political project rejects the mechanical flow of pure life and instead privileges the disruption of that flow. But like leftist politics, it refuses to adhere itself to that which transcends life and limits it from the outside — such as God or death. This does not mean that psychoanalytic politics represents a compromise between the Right and the Left, some sort of median position. Instead, it operates outside the confines of the established opposition and presents a political choice that transcends the philosophical limits inherent in both the Right and the Left. 239

Antigone

Žižek, Dolar. Opera’s Second Death. 2001

This domain of the double provides the answer to the question: what is so unsettling about the possibility that a computer might “really think”? It’s not simply that the original (me) will become indistinguishable from the copy, but that my “mechanical” double will usurp my identity and become the “original” (a substantial object), while I will remain a subject.

It is thus absolutely crucial to insist on the asymmetry in the relationship of the subject to his double: they are never interchangeable – my double is not my shadow, its very existence on the contrary reduces ME to a shadow. In short, a double deprives me of my being: me and my double are not two subjects, we are I as a (barred) subject plus myself as a (non-barred) object.

For this reason, when literature deals the theme of the double, it is always from the subjective standpoint of the “original” subject persecuted by the double – the double itself is reduced to an evil entity which cannot ever be properly subjectivized.

This is what the fashionable critique of the “binary logic” gets wrong: it is only in the guise of the double that one encounters the Real – the moment indefinite multitude sets in, the moment we let ourselves go to the rhizomatic poetry of the “simulacra of simulacra endlessly mirroring themselves, with no original and no copy,” the dimension of the Real gets lost.

This Real is discernible only in the doubling, in the unique experience of a subject encountering his double, which can be defined in precise Lacanian terms, as myself PLUS that “something in me more than myself” which I forever lack, the real kernel of my being.

The point is thus not that, if we are only two, I can still maintain the “non-deconstructed” difference between the original and its simulacra/copy – in a way, this is true, but in the OBVERSE way: what is so terrifying in encountering my double is that its existence makes ME a copy and IT the “original.”

Is this lesson not best encapsulated in the famous scene from Duck Soup, in which one of the brothers (the house-breaker) tries to convince the other (Groucho, the President of Freedonia) that he is just his mirror-image, i.e. that the door frame into the next room is really a mirror: since they are both dressed in the same way (the same white nightgown with a nightcap), the intruder imitates in a mirror-like way Groucho’s gestures, with the standard Marx brothers’ radicalization of this logic ad absurdum (the two figures change sides through the mirror-frame; when the double forgets to follow closely one of Groucho’s gestures, Groucho is for a brief moment perplexed, but when, after a delay, he repeats the gesture, as if to test the fidelity of the mirror-image, and, this time, the double copies it correctly, so Groucho is again convinced of the truth of his mirror image). The game is only ruined when the THIRD Marx brother arrives, dressed in exactly the same way…

Back to the Greek tragedy: the other series, opposite to this line of self-sacrificing women, is that of the excessively destructive women who engage in a horrifying act of revenge: Hekabe, Medea, Phaedra. Although they are first portrayed with sympathy and compassion, since their predicament is terrible (Hekabe sees her entire family destroyed and herself reduced to a slave; Medea, who sacrificed all – her country – for the love of Jason, a Greek foreigner, is informed by him that, due to dynastic reasons, he will marry another young princess; Phaedra is unable to resist her all-consumming passion for Hippolytus, her stepson), the terrible act of revenge these women concoct and execute (killing their enemies or their own children, etc.) is considered pathologically excessive and thus turns them into repulsive monsters.

That is to say, in both series, we begin with the portrayal of a normal, sympathetic woman, caught in a difficult predicament and bemoaning her sad fate (Iphigenia begins with professing her love of life, etc.); however, the transformation which befalls them is thoroughly different: the women of the first series find themselves “interpellated into subjects,” i.e. abandon their love of life and freely assume their death, thus fully identifying with the paternal Law which demanded this sacrifice, while the women of the second series turn into inhuman avenging monsters undermining the very foundations of the paternal Law. In short, they both transcend the status of normal mortal suffering women, prone to human pleasures and weaknesses, and turn into something no-longer-human; however, in one case, it is the heroic free acceptance of one’s own death in the service of community, while, in the other case, it is the excessive Evil of monstrous revenge.

There are, however, two significant exceptions to this series: Antigone and Electra. Antigone clearly belongs to the first series of the women who accept their sacrifice on behalf of their fidelity to the Law; however, the nature of her act is such that it doesn’t fit the existing public Law and Order scheme, so her no-longer-human insistence does not change her into a hero to be worshipped in public memory.

On the other side, Electra is a destructive avenger, compelling her brother Orestes to kill their mother and her new husband; however, she does this on behalf of her fidelity to her betrayed father’s memory. The destructive fury is thus here in the service of the very paternal Law, while in the case of Antigone, the self-sacrificing sublime gesture is accomplished in resistance to the Law of the City.

We thus get an uncanny confusion which disturbs the clear division: a repulsive avenger for the right Cause; a sublime self-sacrificial agent for the wrong Cause. – The further interesting point is the “psychological” opposition between Antigone’s inner certainty and calm, and Electra’s obvious hysterical theater:

Electra indulges in exaggerated theatrical self-pity, and thereby confirms that this indulgence is her one luxury in life, the deepest source of her libidinal satisfaction. She displays here inner pain with neurotic affectation, offering herself as a public spectacle. After complaining all the time about Orestes’ delay in returning and avenging their father’s death, she is late in recognizing him when he does return, obviously fearing that his arrival will deprive her of the satisfaction of her grievance. Furthermore, after forcing Orestes to perform the avenging act, she breaks down and is unable to assist him.

In the case of Antigone and Medea, the “radical” act of the heroine is opposed to a feminine partner who “compromises her desire” and remains caught in the “ethics of the Good”: Antigone is contrasted to gentle Ismene, a creature of human compassion unable to follow her sister in her obstinate pursuit (as Antigone herself puts it in her answer to Ismene: “life was your choice, when mine was death”);

Medea is contrasted to Jason’s young new bride (or even herself in the role of a mother). In the case of Iphigenia, her calm dignity, her willing acceptance of the forced choice of self-sacrifice on behalf of her father’s desire, is contrasted to the furious outbursts of her sister Electra, hysterically calling for revenge, yet fully enjoying her grief as her symptom, fearing its end.

Why, in this triad of the “radical” heroines (Iphigenia, Antigone, Medea), do we tend to prefer Antigone, elevating her to the sublime status of the ultimate ethical hero(ine)? Is it because she opposes the public Law not in the gesture of a simple criminal transgression, but on behalf of ANOTHER Law?

Therein resides the gist of Judith Butler’s reading of Antigone: “the limit for which she stands, a limit for which no standing, no translatable representation is possible, is /…/ the trace of an alternate legality that haunts the conscious, public sphere as its scandalous future.”(Butler 2000, p. 40)

Antigone formulates her claim on behalf of all those who, like the sans-papiers in today’s France, are without a full and definite socio-ontological status: as Butler emphasizes through a passing reference to Giorgio Agamben (Butler 2000, p. 81), in our era of self-proclaimed globalization, they – the non-identified – stand for the true universality.

Which is why one should pin down neither the position from which (on behalf of which) Antigone is speaking, neither the object of her claim: in spite of her emphasis of the unique position of the brother, this object is not as unambiguous as it may appear (is Oedipus himself also not her (half)brother?); her position is not simply feminine, because she enters the male domain of public affairs – in addressing Creon, the head of state, she speaks like him, appropriating his authority in a perverse/displaced way; and neither does she speak on behalf of kinship, as Hegel claimed, since her very family stands for the ultimate (incestuous) corruption of the proper order of kinship. Her claim thus displaces the fundamental contours of the Law, what the Law excludes and includes.

Butler develops her reading in contrast to two main opponents, not only Hegel but also Lacan. In Hegel, the conflict is conceived as internal to the socio-symbolic order, as the tragic split of the ethical substance: Creon and Antigone stand for its two components, state and family, Day and Night, the human legal order and the divine subterranean order.

Lacan, on the contrary, emphasizes how Antigone, far from standing for kinship, assumes the limit-position of the very instituting gesture of the symbolic order, of the impossible zero-level of symbolization, which is why she stands for death drive: while still alive, she is already dead with regard to the symbolic order, excluded from the socio-symbolic coordinates.

In what one is almost tempted to call a dialectical synthesis, Butler rejects both extremes (Hegel’s location of the conflict WITHIN the socio-symbolic order; Lacan’s notion of Antigone as standing for the going-to-the-limit, for reaching the OUTSIDE of this order): Antigone undermines the existing symbolic order not simply from its radical outside, but from a utopian standpoint of aiming at its radical rearticulation.

Antigone is a “living dead” not in the sense (which Butler attributes to Lacan) of entering the mysterious domain of ate, of going to the limit of the Law; she is a “living dead” in the sense of publicly assuming an uninhabitable position, a position for which there is no place in the public space – not a priori, but only with regard to the way this space is structured now, in the historically contingent and specific conditions.

This, then, is Butler’s central point against Lacan: Lacan’s very radicality (the notion that Antigone locates herself in the suicidal outside of the symbolic order), reasserts this order, the order of the established kinship relations, silently assuming that the ultimate alternative is the one between the symbolic Law of (fixed patriarchal) kinship relations and its suicidal ecstatic transgression.

What about the third option: that of rearticulating these kinship relations themselves, i.e., of reconsidering the symbolic Law as the set of contingent social arrangements open to change? And does the same not hold also for Wagner: is the obliteration of the Law of the Day in Tristan not the obverse of the inability to envision its radical rearticulation?

Is then Lacan – in his celebration of Antigone’s suicidal choice of ecstatic death – the ultimate Wagnerian, the “last Wagnerite,” if not the perfect one, as G.B.Shaw would have put it? It is here that we encounter the crucial dilemma: can that what Lacan calls ate really be historicized, as the shadowy spectral space of those to whom the contingent public discourse denies the right to full public speech, or is it the other way round, so that we can REARTICULATE the symbolic space precisely insofar as we can, in an authentic ACT, take the risk of passing through this liminal zone of ate, which only allows us to acquire the minimum of distance towards the symbolic order?

Another way to formulate this dilemma is with regard to the question of purity: according to Butler, Antigone speaks for all the subversive “pathological” claims which crave to be admitted into the public space, while for Lacan, she is precisely the PURE one in the Kantian sense, bereft of any “pathological” motivations – it is only by entering the domain of ate that we can attend the pure desire. This is why Antigone is, for Lacan, the very antipode of Hegel’s notorious notion of womankind as “the everlasting irony of the community”(Hegel, 1977,p. 288).

Butler was right to emphasize the strange passage from the (unique) individual to the universal which takes place at this point of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Butler 2000, p. 38): after celebrating the sublime beauty of Antigone, her unique “naive” identification with the ethical substance, the way her ethical stance is part of her spontaneous nature itself, not something won through the hard struggle against the egotistic and other evil propensities (as is the case with the Kantian moral subject), Hegel all of a sudden passes into GENERAL considerations about the role of “womankind” in society and history, and, with this passage, the pendulum swings into the opposite extreme: woman stands for the pathological, criminal even, perversion of the public law.

We can see how, far from bearing witness to an inconsistency in Hegel’s argumentation, this reversal obeys an inexorable logic: the very fact that a woman is formally excluded from the public affairs, allows her to embody the family ethics as opposed to the domain of public affairs, i.e., to serve as a reminder of the inherent limitation of the domain of “public affairs.” (Today, when we are fully aware of how the very frontier that separates the public from the private hinges on political rapport of forces, one can easily perceive women as the privileged agents of the repoliticization of “private” domains: not only of discerning and articulating the traces of political relations of domination in what appears to be an “apolitical” domain, but also of denouncing the very “depoliticization” of this domain, its exclusion from the political, as a political gesture par excellence.)

Is this, however, the ultimate scope of the feminine political intervention? It is here that one should consider the break which separates modernity from Antiquity: already in the late Medieval time, with Joan of Arc, a new figure of the feminine political intervention appeared which was not taken into account by Hegel: on behalf of her very universal exclusion from the domain of politics, a woman can, exceptionally, assume the role of the direct embodiment of the political AS SUCH.

Precisely as Woman, Joan stands for the political gesture at its purest, for the Community (universal Nation) as such against the particular interests of the warring factions. Her male attire, her assumption of male authority, is not to be misread as the sign of unstable sexual identity: it is crucial that she does it AS A WOMAN. Only as such, as a woman, can she stand for the Political Cause in its pure universality. In the very gesture of renouncing the determinate attributes of femininity (a virgin, no children, etc.), she stood for Woman as such. This, however, was simultaneously the reason she HAD to be betrayed and ONLY THEN canonized: such a pure position, standing directly for the national interest as such, cannot translate its universal request into a determinate social order. It is crucial not to confound this Joan’s feminine excess (a woman who, by way of renouncing feminine attributes, directly stands for the universal political mission) with the reactionary figure of “Mother-Nation” or a “Mother-Earth” figure, the patient and suffering mother who stands for the substance of her community, and who, far from renouncing feminine attributes, gives body to the worst male ideological fantasy of the noble woman.

The charge against Joan at her trial can be summed up in three points: in order to regain mercy and be readmitted into the Catholic community, she should (1) disavow the authenticity of her voice, (2) renounce her male dress, and (3) fully submit herself to the authority of the Church (as the actual terrestrial institution). These three points, of course, are interconnected: Joan did not submit to the authority of the Church, because she gave priority to the divine voices through which God addressed her directly, bypassing the Church as institution, and this exceptional status of her as the warrior directly obeying God, bypassing the customs of ordinary people, was signalled by her crossdressing.

Do we not encounter hear, yet again, the Lacanian triad of the Real-

subject failed articulation

ŽIŽEK, SLAVOJ. A reply: with enemies like these, who needs friends? Revue Internationale de Philosophie 2012. 439-457.

Download Revue internationale de philosophie here.

Communism should no longer be conceived as the subjective (re)appropriation of the alienated substantial content — all versions of reconciliation conceived as “subject swallows the substance” should be rejected.

The Hegelian subject has no substantial actuality, it comes second, it only emerges through the process of separation, of overcoming of its presuppositions, and these presuppositions are also just a retroactive effect of the same process of their overcoming.

The result is thus that there is, at both extremes of the process, a failure-negativity inscribed into the very heart of the entity we are dealing with.

If the status of the subject is thoroughly “processual,” it means that it emerges through the very failure to fully actualize itself.

This brings us again to one of the possible formal definitions of subject: a subject tries to articulate (“express”) itself in a signifying chain, this articulation fails, and by means and through this failure, the subject emerges: the subject is the failure of its signifying representation — this is why Lacan writes the subject of the signifier as $, as “barred.”

In a love letter, the very failure of the writer to formulate his declaration in a clear and efficient way, his oscillations, the letter’s fragmentation, etc., can in themselves be the proof (perhaps the necessary and the only reliable proof) that the professed love is authentic — here, the very failure to deliver the message properly is the sign of its authenticity. If the message is delivered in a smooth way, it arouses suspicions that it is part of a well-planned approach, or that the writer loves himself, the beauty of his writing, more than his love-object, i.e., that the object is effectively reduced to a pretext for engaging in the narcissistically-satisfying activity of writing.

And the same goes for substance: substance is not only always-already lost, it only comes to be through its loss, as a secondary return-to-itself — which means that substance is always-already subjectivized.

In “reconciliation” between subject and substance, both poles thus lose their firm identity.

Let us take the case of ecology: radical emancipatory politics should aim neither at the complete mastery over nature nor at the humanity’s humble acceptance of the predominance of Mother-Earth. Rather, nature should be exposed in all its catastrophic contingency and indeterminacy, and human agency assumed in the whole unpredictability of its consequences — viewed from this perspective of the “other Hegel,” the revolutionary act no longer involves as its agent the Lukacsean substance-subject, the agent who knows what it does while doing it.

One is even tempted to talk here about Marx’s “idealist reversal of Hegel”: in contrast to Hegel who was well aware that the owl of Minerva takes of only at the evening dusk, after the fact, i.e., that Thought follows Being (which is why, for Hegel, there can be no scientifi c insight into the future of society), Marx reasserts the primacy of Thought: the owl of Minerva (German contemplative philosophy) should be replaced by the singing of the Gaelic rooster (French revolutionary thought) — in the proletarian revolution, Thought will precede Being.

Does, however, this mean that the ultimate subjective position we can adopt is that of a split which characterizes the fetishist disavowal? Is all we can do take the stance of “although I know well there is no big Other, the big Other is only the sedimentation, the reified form, of intersubjective interactions, I am compelled to act as if the big Other is an external force which controls us all”?

Lack in the Other

It is here that Lacan’s fundamental insight into how the big Other is “barred,” lacking, in-existing even, acquires its weight: the big Other is not the substantial Ground which secretly pulls the strings, it is inconsistent/lacking, its very functioning depends on subjects whose participation in the symbolic process sustains it. Instead of either the submersion of the subject into its substantial Other or the subject’s appropriation of this Other we thus get a mutual implication through lack, through the overlapping of the two lacks, the lack constitutive of the subject and the lack of/in the Other itself. It is perhaps time to read Hegel’s famous formula “One should grasp the Absolute not only as substance, but also as subject” more cautiously and literally: the point is not that the Absolute is not substance, but subject. The point is hidden in the “not only… but also”: the interplay between the two, which also opens up the space of freedom — we are free because there is a lack in the Other, because the substance out of which we grew and on which we rely in inconsistent, barred, failed, marked by an impossibility.

However, what kind of freedom is thereby opened up? One should raise here a clear and brutal question in all its naivety: but if we reject Marx’s critique of Hegel and stick to Hegel’s notion of the owl of Minerva which takes off only in the evening — i.e., if we accept Hegel’s claim that the position of a historical agent who is able to identify its own role in the historical process and act accordingly is inherently impossible, since such a self-referentiality makes it impossible for the agent to take into account to impact of its own intervention, how this act itself will affect the constellation —, what are the consequences of this position for the act, for emancipatory political interventions?

Does it mean that we are condemned to blind acts, to risky steps into the unknown whose final outcome totally eludes us, to interventions whose meaning we can establish only retroactively, so that at the moment of the act, we can only hope that history will show mercy (grace) and crown our intervention with a minimum of success?

But what if, instead of conceiving this impossibility to take into account the consequences of our acts as a limitation of our freedom, we conceive it as the zero-level (negative) condition of our freedom?

We are free only against the background of this non-transparency: if it were to be possible for us to fully predict the consequences of our acts, our freedom would effectively be only the “known necessity” in the pseudo-Hegelian way, i.e., it would consist in freely choosing and wanting what we know to be necessary. In this sense, freedom and necessity would fully coincide: I act freely when I knowingly follow my inner necessity, the instigations that I found in myself as my true substantial nature… but if this is the case, we are back from Hegel to Aristotle, i.e., we are no longer dealing with the Hegelian subject who itself produces (“posits”) its own content, but with an agent bent on actualizing its immanent potentials, its positive “essential forces,” as the young Marx put it in his deeply Aristotelian critique of Hegel. What gets lost here is the entire dialectics of the constitutive retroactivity of sense, of the continuous retroactive (re)totalization of our experience.

But, again, what does this mean for our ability to act, to intervene into ongoing history? There are in French two words for “future” which cannot be adequately rendered in English: futur and avenir. Futur stands for future as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of the tendencies which are already here, while avenir points more towards a radical break, a discontinuity with the present — avenir is what is to come /a venir/, not just what will be.

Say, in today’s apocalyptic global situation, the ultimate horizon of the “future” is what Dupuy calls the dystopian “fixed point,” the zero-point of the ecological breakdown, of global economic and social chaos, etc. — even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero-point is the virtual “attractor” towards which our reality, left to itself, tends.

The way to combat the catastrophe is through acts which interrupt this drifting towards the catastrophic “fixed point” and take upon themselves the risk of giving birth to some radical Otherness “to come.” (We can see here how ambiguity the slogan “no future” is: at a deeper level, it does not designate the closure, the impossibility of change, but what we should be striving for — to break the hold of the catastrophic “future” cover up and thereby open up the space for something New “to come.”) 455

ideal ego mirror

Swales, Stephanie S. Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject Routledge, 2012.

The infant’s mirror image is the first representation of the ideal ego (written in Lacanian algebra as i(a)). The ideal ego, an imaginary order projection, is an illusory and beautiful self-image.

This ideal self-image is precious to the child, and she will defend it as a prized possession, passionately contesting anything that implies that she is not as perfect as she believes. The analytic subject may therefore respond with aggression when an analytic intervention exposes the mirages of the ideal ego or the ego (Lacan, 1953/2006a).

The ideal ego changes over time, because the child’s conception of the perfect self is an evolving one. Therefore, the ideal ego is impossible to achieve, and “will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming” (Lacan,1949/2006a, p. 94).

“Man’s ideal unity… is never attained as such and escapes him at every moment” (Lacan, 1978/1991b, p. 166) although he is unfailing in his attempts to catch up to it.

mcgowan subjectivation

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.

Chapter 6: The Appeal of Sacrifice (pt 2)

The sacrifice that subjects make in order to enter society repeats the earlier sacrifice, but what occurs is repetition with a difference. While the initial sacrifice of the privileged object installs the death drive in the subject and thereby constitutes the individual as a subject, the repetition of this sacrifice marks an attempt to domesticate the death drive at the same time as it follows the death drive’s logic. That is, the death drive leads us to this repetition, but the repetition attempts to solve the impossible bind that the death drive creates for us. Society is an attempt to solve the problem of subjectivity itself. 146

Of course, the idea that subjectivity in the psychoanalytic sense exists prior to society is absurd, since subjectivity only becomes possible through the imposition of a societal demand on an animal being. But within society the process of subjectivization occurs in two steps: an initial loss occurs that constitutes the subject, and subsequently the subject makes an additional sacrifice in order to commemorate the first loss and to join the social order.

It is only through the repetition of loss that the social order really gets a hold on the subject because the second loss involves an investment through sacrifice in the good of the social order as a whole. In this sense, subjects do exist prior to their entrance into the social order, and properly socialized subjects are only those who have sacrificed for the sake of the social good. The subject who would refuse to make this sacrifice for the sake of society would not participate in the social bond and would exist as an outsider within the social order. This is the position that the psychotic occupies. 146

mcgowan sacrifice

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.

Chapter 6: The Appeal of Sacrifice

Neither subject nor social order exists independently but emerge out of the other’s incompleteness. The subject exists at the point of the social orders failure to become a closed structure, and subject enters into social arrangements as result of its own failure to achieve self-identity. The internal contradictions within every social order create the space for the subject, just as the internal contradictions of the subject produce an opening to externality that links the subject to the social order. Failure on each side provides the connective apparatus and constitutes the bond between the subject and the social order. 145

To put it another way, the subject’s entrance into a group or society depends on the originary loss that gives birth to its subjectivity. Without this loss and the desire that it produces in the subject, no one would agree to enter into a social bond, a bond that places a fundamental restriction on the subject’s ability to enjoy.

The psychoanalytic name for this foundational loss is the human animal’s “premature birth” a condition that creates an undue dependence not present in other animals. But whether or not one wants to defend the idea of humanity’s premature birth, the idea of a foundational loss is nonetheless essential for theorizing the emergence of subjectivity. Without loss, there could be no desire and no subjectivity. This loss leads the subject to society as the site where loss might be redeemed. 145

Once deceived by the lure of an imaginary complete enjoyment and disappointed with all the enjoyment it experiences, the subject is ready to agree to the entrance requirements of a society. The frustrated subject accedes to societal restrictions on enjoyment as she/he sees that others have also accepted these restrictions. a society circumnavigates the antagonisms between its member by promoting equality or justice among them all. … The subject’s individual frustration with the inadequacy of every actual enjoyment measured against he anticipated enjoyment finds an outlet in the societal demand for equality, a demand that proscribes [forbids] this enjoyment for all. The subject sacrifices a complete enjoyment that it never attains for the equality that derives from membership in society. 145-146

badiou’s subject

Phelps, Hollis. Alain Badiou: Between Theology and Anti-Theology. Acumen Publishing. 2013 B2430.B274 P44 2013 Rye U
🙂 Phelps delves into Cantor’s infinity and also provides very useful discussion of Badiou as witness below. I should read this book carefully, because its a good resource for any work on Badiou in the future.

Badiou’s subject does not immediately correspond to the human individual. There is no one-to-one relationship between them. This gap between inidivudals and subject ruls out thinking of the subject in finite terms, as a category of morality, a locus or register of experience, or an ideological fiction.

First, concerning the subject of morality, it does not matter for Badiou if it is the (neo-)Kantian subject of human rights or the Levinasian subject that underpins the “ethics of difference”: both tend to flatten the subject “onto the empirical manifestness of the living body. What deserves respect is the animal body as such” (LW 48; cf. E 4-29).

Conceiving the subject primarily in moral terms ultimately reduces the human being to “the status of victim, of suffering beast, of emaciated, dying body, [it] equates man with his animal substructure, it reduces him to the level of living organism, pure and simple”

Badiou’s main point is that understanding the subject as a category of morality confines the subject to finitude, to the limitation constitutive of individual human beings. The reduction of the subject to finitude is part and parcel of what Badiou pejoratively refers to in Logic of Worlds as “democratic materialism”, whose axiom is: “There are only bodies and languages” Democratic materialism, and the subject that corresponds to it, takes as its horizon “the dogma of our finitude, of our carnal exposition to enjoyment, suffering and death.” The claim that “there are only bodies and languages” amounts to little more than a “bio-materialism” that reduces “humanity to an overstretched vision of animality”.

Second, if the subject is not a category of morality, it is also not “a register of experience, a schema for the conscious distribution of the reflexive and the non-reflexive; this thesis conjoins subject and consciousness and is deployed today as phenomenology” (LW 48). The phenomenological or existential subject is, as Badiou points out, irrevocably bound to meaning, to the circulation of sense. It does, to be sure, exercise a transcendental function in relation to experience, but this subject can only conceive of the infinite as a horizon, as a negative correlate of the immediacy of its own essential finitude (BE 391).
[…]
Third, although Badiou rejects conceiving the subject in either moral or existential terms, this does not lead him to reduce the subject to a mere ideological fiction, an “interpellation” of the state and its apparatuses, as Louis Althusser thought. At both the political and the ontological level, the state certainly reproduces itself through various ideologies and their mechanisms. But strictly speaking that state exerts this pressure through the re-presentation of individuals, which latter, we have said, do not correspond to subjects for Badiou.

In contrasts to these three broad understandings of the subject, Badiou’s subject is a formal category. Badiou’s subject is “any local configuration fo a generic procedure from which a truth is supported” (BE 391); the subject is for Badiou the “local status of a procedure, a configuration in excess of the situation. 74-75