2014
Alenka Zupančič : The Lacanian concept of the Real allows for a problematization of this opposition which had become paralysing and unproductive philosophically. We must of course be wary of the tendency to see in this Lacanian move a simple affirmation of a naive realism – the Real understood in this objectivist fashion. The ‘Real’ for Lacan is not reducible to the discursive but neither is it simply an advocation of an ontological realism, understood unproblematically. Especially since Lacan introduces a key difference between the notion of the Real and that of being. They are related via a ‘third dimension’, that of the ‘signifier’, but they do not coincide.
What Lacan wants to tell us is that the signifier has ontological significance, the signifier tells us about ontology in a way that the notion of the signified is unable to (this latter being the usual realist referent; the object as the signified).
The signifier is interesting not because we could reduce everything to it and to different signifying operations (this reductionist question is completely false), but because there is something in the signifier and its operations that cannot be reduced back to the signifier and its operations.
This is the crucial point, and not some mythical or original outside of the signifier, irreducible to it. This is also what the ‘materialism of the signifier’ amounts to. Not simply to the fact that the signifier can have material consequences, but rather that the materialist position needs to do more than to pronounce matter the original principle. It has to account for a split or contradiction that is the matter. It has to grasp the concept of the matter beyond that imaginary notion of ‘something thick and hard’. I’m not saying: ‘For Lacan, the signifieris the real matter’, not at all.
I’m saying that, for Lacan, the signifier is what enables us to perceive the non-coincidence between being and the Real, and that this is what eventually leads to a new kind of materialism.
From this point of view, we can say that Lacan develops the modern moment in philosophy, but as Žižek says, ‘he develops it with a twist’. Then there is the new concept of the subject – another Lacanian ‘revolution’ in philosophy, retroactively relating the subject of the unconscious to the Cartesian cogito. This is often one of the great misunderstandings of Lacan (and psychoanalysis), that it jettisons the cogito, that it is anti-Cartesian pure and simple. This is a significant misunderstanding of the psychoanalytical concept of the ‘subject’ which was one of the main concepts for the delineation of a specific Lacanian orientation in the first place. This concept of ‘subject’ distinguished Lacan from the wider structuralist movement and their notion of a ‘subjectless structure’.
But somehow this conception of ‘subject’ is interpreted as anti-cogito, as the ‘subject’ is the unconscious subject. Therefore, it was important to clarify the connection between cogito and the unconscious and for example, there is an important anthology from the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, where we explore this problematic in detail (Cogito and the Unconscious edited by Žižek [1998a] and including essays by all three thinkers as well as others in the Slovenian wider group of theorists). There is also the question of the radical break with premodern metaphysics involved in the Cartesian gesture, which Lacan judges crucial for the emergence of the subject of the unconscious.
This theme is crucial also for his understanding of ethics. In his important early seminar, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992), he is discussing the history of ethical thought as it related for example to the metaphysical tradition. His specific example is Aristotle and there is obviously a debt here on one level to Aristotle’s Ethics as a text and conceptual scheme. However, there is also a clear and radical parting of the ways.
In my own work on ethics, in The Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (Zupančič 2000), I draw out some of these themes. For example, I put forward a critique of what I term ‘bio-morality’ and which, in its contemporary developments, represents an allegiance (albeit in rather reduced ways) to Aristotle’s eudaimonistic ethics and metaphysics of being. This is not simply a criticism of Aristotle, but rather of what a revival of his conceptual paradigm today amounts to.
In relationship to the theme of ethics, I want to stress that what I develop out of Kant’s ethics must not be opposed or seen as completely distinct from politics. As Žižek very rightly pointed out, the contemporary fashion of playing (‘good’) ethics against (‘bad’) politics is more often than not a direct pendant of the ideology of late capitalism and its conception of democracy. Any rigorous political thought is conceived as potentially dangerous and leading to a possible ‘disaster’ (that is to say to a more fundamental change in how the present order functions), whereas ethics seems to be much safer, and centred mostly on our individual responsibility, rather than any kind of collective engagement. My own work on Kant and ethics already went against this tendency, pointing both at an unsettling dimension of Kantian ethics, as well as at its emphasis on the universal, rather than simply individual.
It is similar with psychoanalysis which supposedly also focuses on individual destinies and problems. Here, am I allowed to tell my joke about the grain of seed, or the man who thinks he is one?
He gets cured by the psychoanalysts and then he comes running back, crying that he has just been chased by a chicken. Don’t you know you are a human being, they say? Yes, I am cured. I know that I am a human being, and not a grain of seed. But, please, does the chicken know this? This is the crux of the politics (which is also an ethics) in the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. It is not enough simply to deal with the plight of the ‘subject’ and fantasy, through psychoanalysis.
Rather, we must seek to transform the structures of the symbolic which sustain a given order, determine the Impossible-Real that they grapple with.
Sexuality
Alenka Zupančič: Yes, when we understand the question ‘why Freud and Lacan?’, or the question ‘why psychoanalysis?’, we come close to an understanding of the paradigmatic role which a revised notion of ‘sexuality’ must play in this discussion. Joan Copjec succinctly pointed out how, for example, in the term ‘sexual difference’ the term ‘sex’ has been replaced by the more neutered category of ‘gender’. As Joan – an allied member of the ‘Ljubljana School’ – put it: Gender theory performed one major feat: it removed the sex from sex. For awhile, gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex or sexuality is; sex was no longer the subject of an ontological inquiry and reverted instead to being what it was in common parlance: some vague sort of distinction, but basically a secondary characteristic (when applied to the subject), a qualifier added to others, or (when applied to an act) something a bit naughty.
This is very far from what both Freud (from his early, 1905 text Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [Freud 1977]) and Lacan have been saying. For Freud, the notion of the ‘sexual’ is significantly broader than contemporary notions of sex. It is not a substance to be properly described and understood (by psychoanalysis), but more like an impasse that generates and structures different discursive edifices trying to respond to it. It is linked to a notion of a fundamental ontological impasse; this impasse is irreducible for Freud.
But we also see here all the accusations against psychoanalysis, that ‘Freud reduces everything to sex’. In one sense, this accusation is true but what it misses is the complexification and radicalization of what we mean by ‘sexuality’. Freud discovered human sexuality as a problem (in need of explanation), and not as something with which one could eventually explain every (other) problem. He ‘discovered’ sexuality as intrinsically meaningless, and not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning. A clarification of this point is one of my ‘interventions’ in Why Psychoanalysis? Three Interventions (Zupančič 2008b). Lately, I dedicated a whole book to these questions – it came out in 2011 in Slovenia, but I’m still working on its English version.
On Materialism
The materialism of psychoanalysis is not simply materialism of the body;
and Lacan has learnt the philosophical lesson that is essential in this
respect: in order to be ‘materialist’ it is not enough to refer to the matter
as the first principle from which everything develops.
For, in this, we easily succumb to a rather idealistic notion of a somehow always-already spirited (‘vibrant’) matter. In recent debates, psychoanalysis – in the same package with all of the so-called post-structuralist thought – is often accused of relying on the formula ‘always-already’ as its magical formula. But this accusation misses the whole point: for psychoanalysis, ‘always-already’ is a retroactive effect of some radical contingency that changes given symbolic coordinates.
What a materialism worthy of this name has to do today is to propose a conceptualization of contingency (a break that comes from nowhere, ‘ex-nihilo’ so to say) in its complex relation to the structuring of the world.
Also, thinking is not simply opposed to things (and to matter), it is part of the thing it thinks, without being fully reducible to it. To advocate materialism and the ‘Real’ is not to advocate anti-thought. Quite the contrary, we might say – it calls for more and more thinking. And this is a problem that I sometimes detect in the recent flourishing of ‘new materialisms’ – a kind of abdication of thinking when it comes to more complex structures and arguments, as if common sense simplicities were inherently more ‘materialist’ than something
which is more complex and perhaps paradox ridden.
On Nietzsche
Alenka Zupančič: A key part of the Nietzschean legacy is I think working against the ‘moralisation’ of the symbolic, which Nietzsche describes so well in The Genealogy of Morals, for example, and which for example is also a key theme in relation to the thematic of the ‘moralisation of politics’, which I mentioned earlier.
Concerning nihilism and to quote Ray Brassier, from his text Nihil Unbound, there are things to be said for nihilism. It depends, of course, on what we mean by nihilism. If we mean by it a certain materialist position which recognizes contingency of, for example, our being in the world, and which points to a limit of ‘making sense of (all) things’, then we must say that to a great extent we cannot go beyond nihilism.
Yet this does not imply for Nietzsche that we sink in the depressive feelings of ‘worthlessness of all things’. On the contrary, it rather implies what he calls ‘gay science’. But, we must simultaneously avoid what Nietzsche calls ‘reactive nihilism’ and this is, of course, bound up with his whole critique of ressentiment (or ‘acting against’, reactiveness). To say that there is no ultimate cause of things is not to say that nothing itself is the ultimate cause of things, which amounts to putting the Nothing in the office of the Absolute.
Describing the difference between active and passive nihilism, Nietzsche famously says that man would ‘rather will nothingness than not will’ (On the Genealogy of Morals). And we could say that what defines (contemporary) passive nihilism is precisely that man would rather not will than will anything too strongly (because the latter supposedly inevitably leads to some kind of ‘nihilist’ catastrophe). And this seems to become synonymous with what ‘ethics’ now is in contemporary culture and society and the wider ‘moralisation of politics’, ‘biomorality’ etc. (to which I strongly oppose an ‘ethics of the Real’). There is a ‘deactivation’ of the will, which is also a deactivation of the ‘political will’, of the political as such as a paradigmatic space and temporality of antagonism, of the ‘Real’.
In my view, the genuinely new Nietzschean notion of nothingor n egativity is not simply that of ‘active nihilism’ as opposed to ‘passive nihilism’, but rather a transfiguration of nothing. Nothing/negativity is not a kind of ultimate absolute, but rather the smallest yet irreducible difference that is inscribed in being qua being. This is what I argue in my book. I use Nietzsche’s own metaphor of ‘the shortest shadow’. When speaking of going beyond the opposition real world/apparent world, Nietzsche describes this moment as ‘Midday; moment of the shortest shadow’ (Twilight of Idols).
Midday is thus not for him the moment when the sun embraces everything,
makes all shadows and all negativity disappear, and constitutes an undivided Unity of the world; it is the moment of the shortest shadow. And, what is the shortest shadow of a thing, if not this thing itself? Yet, for Nietzsche, this does not mean that the two becomes one, but, rather, that one becomes two. Why?
The thing (as one) no longer throws its shadow upon another thing; instead, it throws its shadow upon itself, thus becoming, at the same time, the thing and
its shadow, the real and its appearance. When the sun is at its zenith, things are not simply exposed (‘naked’, as it were); they are, so to speak, dressed in their own shadows. In other words: it is not simply that our representations do not coincide with things, it is rather that things do not simply coincide with themselves. There is thus an imperative to ‘think through’ this negativity. We
need to philosophize, as Žižek has said, philosophy is now more important than ever. It is not a game of textualism as some postmodernists would like to suggest perhaps.
The Subject
Alenka Zupančič: We can say that subject is ‘the answer of the Real’, as Lacan puts it somewhere, or that it is the effect of the rift/inconsistency of the structure. And we can indeed contrast this with the structuralist notion that there is a ‘structure without a subject’, a subjectless structure.
But what is at stake is above all a profound reconfiguration of what both ‘structure’ and ‘subject’ mean, refer to. We can begin with the notion of the structure which differs in Lacan from the classical structuralist notion. Very simply put: for Lacan, structure is ‘not-all’ (or ‘not whole’), which is what he articulates with the concept of the ‘barred Other’. This implies a lack, a contradiction as – so to say – ‘structuring principle of the structure’. Structure is always and at the same time more and less than structure. And this is where the new notion of the subject comes in. Subject is not the opposite of the structure, it is not some intentionality which uses structure to express itself, or which tries to get its more or less authentic voice heard through it.
Subject is a singular torsion produced by the inconsistency of the structure.
Take the simple example of the slips of the tongue: for Freud and Lacan, they do not bear witness to a hidden(unconscious) force repressed by the structure, which nevertheless betrays its presence by these slips.
Rather, they are singular existences of structure’s own inherent negativity. This is also the argument that I want to make in the context of the contemporary debates concerning realism, which often disqualify thought or thinking as something merely subjective (facing external reality). Put in a couple of formulas: Instead of taking it as something situated vis-à-vis being, we should conceive of thought as an objectivized (and necessarily dislocated) instance of the non-relation (contradiction, inconsistency) and rift inherent in being (in ‘objective reality’). Thinking is a necessarily displaced objectification (‘objective existence’) of this rift, that is, of the relation of being to its own
‘non-’, to its own negativity.
Although being is indeed independent of thinking, the rift that structures it only objectively exists as thought, and this perspective opens a new way of conceiving realism and/or materialism. This is precisely how I would also read the Lacanian subject. And this is why if we remove subject from the structure, we do not get closer to objective reality, but rather further away from it.
We can also say that the subject for Lacan is ‘objectively subjective’, there is an asymmetry in the subject, something in the subject which is not just subjective but which is also inaccessible to the subject.
We can see the connection back to Kant. The Kantian subject I would endorse is that ‘pure something, X, which thinks’, the transcendental unity of apperception. The point where subjectivity is not fully assumable and the point where the object is not reducible to or is ‘not yet’ objectivity (this is Lacan’s notion of objet petit a). Here, we see also that the Lacanian subject radicalizes the traditional ‘object’. The concept of the ‘object a’ is perhaps the most significant Lacanian conceptual invention.
Ethics
Alenka Zupančič: No, the notions of good and evil are not simply irrelevant to ethics, I would say, although they are indiscernible in advance. The responsibility we have is to decide what is good. It is difficult to overstate Kant’s significance in this respect. He did two things which may look incompatible: first, he founded ethics exclusively in human reason: no God or any other pre-established Good can serve as basis of morality. But instead of this leading to a kind of ‘relativised’, finitude-bound morality, it led to the birth of the modern thought of the absolute, the unconditional, and of the infinite as the possible, even imperative dimension of the finite.
Whatever objections we may raise to the Kantian ethics –for example, and already, from Hegel’s perspective – it was with Kant that the standing oppositions like absolute/contingent, lawful/unconditional, finite/infinite broke down, and the path was opened for a truly modern reconfiguration of these terms.
In the twentieth century, Kantian ethics has been largely domesticated to serve as an important ideological foundation of the contemporary democratic liberalism and of the gradual replacement of an emancipatory politics with the discourse of human rights or simply ethics.
I’ve always been astonished by the fact that a really radical, uncompromising and excess-ridden writing like Kant’s could be referred to in order to pacify the excess (of the political or something else). When the Nazi criminal Eichmann infamously defended himself by saying that in his doing he has been simply following the Kantian categorical imperative, this was of course an obscene perversion of Kant’s thought.
As Žižek succinctly formulated: what follows from Kant is not that we can use moral law as an excuse for our actions (‘oh, I wouldn’t do it, but the moral law commanded so’), we are absolutely responsible for the very law we are ‘executing’.
But Eichmann’s perverse defence did point at the unsettling core exposed by Kant: the unconditional law is one with (the excess of) freedom.
Lacan was probably the first to properly recognize this unsettling, excessive moment that Kant discovered at the very core of ethics.
When he wrote his famous essay ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b), the point was not that Kant is in truth as excessive as Sade, but rather that Sade is already a ‘taming’, a pacification – in terms perversion – of the impossible/real circumscribed by Kant. This is the thread I tried to follow in my book: Kant’s discovery of this unsettling, excessive negativity at the very core of Reason. I was not interested so much in ethics as ethics, as in this thing that Kant has formulated through his considerations of ethics.
Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Does this mean that the ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ simply pits the Real against the symbolic or is there something else going on here? Also, how does the concept of ‘drive’ and especially the concept of ‘death drive’, which Žižek emphasizes,relate to an ethical dimension? Finally, what does the Lacanian concept of ‘desire’ (as he describes it in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) have to do with this? Is ‘desire’ simply jettisoned in the later work?
Alenka Zupančič: In respect to the relation between symbolic and the Real, there are certainly oscillations and shifts at work already in Lacan, as well as in the work of the three of us (together and separately). The idea that the Real is a kind of unbearable, repulsive thickness beyond the symbolic, left out of it and inaccessible to it, may have had some presence in our work at some point. But I think it is fair to say that for many years now we are all struggling precisely with the problem of a different way of relating them as absolutely crucial. There are some differences in the way we go about it,
but the main and shared shift of perspective that orientates our work could be perhaps summed up as follows: the Real is not any kind of substance or being. It pertains to being (and to the symbolic) as its inherent contradiction/antagonism.
I started working on this issue first by getting a bit more into Nietzsche (the first, Slovene version of the Nietzsche book was published in 2001). Borrowing from Badiou his notion of the ‘minimal difference’ and relating it to Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘shortest shadow’, I tried to develop the notion of the Real as not that of some Thing, but of the fundamental non-coincidence of things with themselves. This non-coincidence is not caused by the symbolic; rather, the symbolic is already a response to it: it is discursivity as necessarily biased by the constraints of the contradiction in being.
Parallel to this work on Nietzsche was also my working on the theme of love, and later on comedy as possible ways of articulating what is at stake in the relation between the symbolic and the real. Lately, and for some time now, I have been working on this through the question of the ontological implications of the psychoanalytic notion of the sexual. I could perhaps put it in one formula: The real is part of being which is not being (or which is not qua being), but which as such dictates the (symbolic) logic of its appearance.
The real is part of being which is not being (or which
is not qua being), but which as such dictates the (symbolic) logic of
its appearance.
the Real is not any kind of substance or being. It pertains to being (and to the symbolic) as its inherent contradiction/antagonism.
Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Can you say a bit more about the two key Lacanian concepts (not without political ramifications of course) of ‘desire’ and ‘drive’. You have already explicated these, to some extent, but can you develop some of the tensions between them? Also, how do these concepts develop in your work, as they seem to have a paradigmatic status while undergoing some transformation for example from the ‘Ethics of the Real’ book to the book on ‘comedy’. Finally, are there philosophical tensions between your work and the other members of the troika on this fraught relationship between ‘desire’ and ‘drive’?
Alenka Zupančič: Certainly, you are right to point to these concepts as paradigmatic, and they are also crucial when it comes to the articulation of the relationship of the symbolic, the imaginary and the Real You are also correct that there are some differences here – one would expect nothing less in a philosophical movement worth its salt.
In my own work, I take up the themes of desire and drive throughout. In Ethics of the Real I focused mostly, although not exclusively, on Lacan from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and The Transference (Seminars VII and VIII). The concept of desire is in the foreground in both, but there is also a shift that starts taking place there, a conceptual move from das Ding as the impossible/Real as the focal point of desire, to the introduction of the object a. This shift then gets a further and very complex elaboration in Lacan’s subsequent seminars. But to formulate what is at stake very briefly and simply, we could say that what is involved here is a move from the Real as the abyssal beyond of the symbolic,
to a concept (of the object a) which undermines the very logic and nature of the difference on which the previous conception of the Real was based.
Object a is neither symbolic nor Real (in the previous sense of the term). It refers to the very impossibility to sustain this kind of difference between the symbolic and the Real, and it is this impossibility that is now the Real.
This also opens the door for a more systematic introduction of the concept of the drive. The notion of the object a is crucial both for desire and drive, they are different ways of relating this impossible non-ontological dimension (a) to what is, to being. In the Seminar X (Anxiety) Lacan provides a formula that I think is absolutely crucial and which I also took as the guiding line of my work after Ethics: he says that love is a sublimation, and then defines sublimation in a very surprising way, namely that sublimation is what makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire. If one remembers the famous definition of sublimation from Lacan’s seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (‘sublimation is what elevates an object to the dignity of the Thing’) then the shift is indeed dramatic and surprising. This new notion of sublimation becomes directly associated with the question of the drive, for sublimation is also defined as a ‘nonrepressive satisfaction of the drive’.
Now, in Lacan, as well as in our reading of him, there is indeed perceptible a turn from the logic of desire to that of the drive as somehow truer. But this is not simply a turn (of interest) from the symbolic to the Real, as it sometimes seems. What is at stake is rather the recognition of the fact that the status of the Real as the impossible Beyond of the symbolic is actually an effect of desire and its logic. Desire casts the internal contradiction that drives it in terms of the inaccessible Beyond to which it can only approach asymptomatically. With drive, the contradiction remains internal, and the impossible remains accessible as the impossible. This, I think, is absolutely crucial, and this is what
I tried to formulate with the formula the ‘Real happens’: the point of Lacan’s identification of the Real with the impossible is not simply that the Real is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, and in this reading, the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impossible happens. This is what is so surprising, traumatic, disturbing, shattering – or funny – about the Real. The Real happens precisely as the impossible. It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it happen, or expect it, or are ready for it. It is always something that doesn’t fit the (established or the anticipated) picture, or fits it all too well. The Real as impossible means that there is no ‘right’ time or place for it, and not that it is impossible for it to happen (‘On love as comedy’, Zupančič 2000).
The Real happens precisely as the impossible. It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it happen, or expect it, or are ready for it.
So what is important to stress in this whole ‘turn’ to the logic of the drive is the following: this is not simply a turn to the drive on account of its supposedly being closer, truer to the Real (as established independently), but rather a turn toward a different conception of the Real as such.
With drive, the Real is no longer a relational notion (sustaining questions like ‘what is our attitude toward the Real?’). It rather suggests something like: our relation to the Real is already in the Real. This is why questions like ‘How to get outside to the Real?’ seem to be the wrong kind of questions.
This is because there is no outside of the Real from which one would approach the Real.
