Category: Žižek

Žižek, Slavoj. Violence

[H]uman communication in its most basic, constitutive dimension does not involve a space of egalitarian intersubjectivity. It is not ‘balanced’. It does not put the participants in symmetric mutually responsible positions where they all have to follow the same rules and justify their claims with reasons. On the contrary, what Lacan indicates with his notion of the discourse of the Master as the first (inaugural, constitutive) form of discourse is that every concrete, ‘really existing’ space of discourse is ultimately grounded in a violent imposition of a Master-Signifier which is strico sensu ‘irrational’: it cannot be further grounded in reasons. It is the point at which one can only say that ‘the buck stops here’; a point at which, in order to stop the endless regress, somebody has to say, ‘It is so because I say it is so!” Here, Levinas was right to emphasise the fundamentally asymmetcial character of intersubjectivity: there is never a balanced reciprocity in my encountering another subject.. the appearance of égalité is always discursively sustained by an asymmetric axis of master versus servant, of the bearer of university knowledge versus its object, of a pervert versus a hysteric, and so on. This, of course, runs against the predominant ideological approach to the topic of violence which understands it as ‘spontaneous’ … 53

page 55: This is why language itself, the very mdedium of non-violence, of mutural recognition, involves unconditional violence. IN other words, it is language itself which pushes our desire beyond proper limits, transforming it into a ‘desire that contains the infinite’, elevating it into an absolute striving that cannot ever by satisfied. What Lacan calls objet petit a is precisely this ethereal ‘undead’ object, the surplus object that causes desire in its excessive and derailing aspect. One cannot get rid of excess: it is consubstantial with human desire as such.

Dean, Tim. Beyond Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2000.

I like where he’s going with the real, only that he’s taking his time getting there. Oh my god can this guy talk. His writing is ok, but you get the impression that he has a lot to say and has trouble ‘filtering’.

The problem with the idea of the intersubjective dialectic is, as Lacan noted of Hegel, that intersubjectivity remains at the limit of anthropology, in which the other always retains the staus of subject. Thus intersubjective relations are, in principle if not in practice, symmetrical and reversible. But when Lacan reconceives the subject-other relation as a subject-Other relation, he insists that there cannot be an Other of the Other, since the Other’s conceptual value — as it accumulated throughout the 1950s — is that it is strictly divested of subjective status. The subject-Other relation, which describes a fully symbolic subject, is definitively asymmetrical. 43

[Lacan’s] early conception of [desire] as “desire of the other” maintains desire within a Kojève-Hegelian intersubjective dialectic, in which it is impossible not to reduce desire — and fantasy — to imaginary scenarios. … In Hegel desire is the desire for recognition, a desire for the other to ratify my existence by means of affirmation; thus insofar as the imaginary is ordered by recognitions and especially by misrecognitions (méconnaissances), this Hegelian persepecive reduces desire to the imaginary level. 44

His subsequent account of desire as an unconscious effect of the cause he names OBJECTA. At his moment in Lacan’s thinking, his notion of the object as something that can never appear in the mirror —and which therefore remains heterogeneous to the imaginary register — has not yet emerged. 45

Lacan’s theory of desire is later detached from the category of the imaginary other as a causal explanation and resituated as an effect of language.

Since it is primarily the phallus’s imaginary attributes that permit it to represent the signifier of signifiers, we must deduce that it is purely conventional and therefore, in the final analysis, arbitrary that the phallus should hold any indisputable priority in relation to the symbolic order’s exigencies. Though Lacan never relinquished the phallus as a concept, his theory of OBJECTA makes clear that desire has multiple causes, many of which have no relation whatsoever to gender or sexual difference. Rather than trying to purify the phallus of its imaginary residue or, alternatively, showing the impossibility of any such purification, I want to suggest that the phallus as Lacan’s model for the causal principle of desire may be bracketed once the full significance of OBJECTA comes into view. Such an appreciation enables us to move beyond interminable and increasingly sterile debates over the phallogocentric biases of Lacan’s account of the phallus toward a more interesting “1960s Lacan” of the object.

Desire is predicated on the incommensurability of body and subject. 200

THINKING SEXUALITY OUTSIDE THE TERMS OF GENDER

… in the end Freud’s contention that we’ve all made a homosexual object-choice (whether we know it or not) doesn’t go far enough, because his notion of object-choice remains trapped within the terms of gender. The very possibility of describing object-choice as homosexual or heterosexual takes for granted that the object chosen is genderred and that — no matter how partial or fragmented the obejct may be — it’s somehow identifiable as masculine or feminine. In contrast, Lacan’s concept of OBJECTa radically revises the Freudian notion of object-choice by leaving gender behind, in a move whose far-reaching implications I wish to delineate. 219

Thus for Lacan sexuality is explicable in terms of neither nature NOR nurture, since the unconscious cannot be considered biological — it isn’t part of my body and yet it sin’t exactly culturally constructed either. Instead, the unconscious may be grasped as an index of how both biology and culture FAIL to determine subjectivity and sexual desire. Thinking of the unconscious as neither biological nor cultural allows us to distinguish (among other things) a properly psychoanalytic from a merely psychological notion of the unconsicous.
… Lacan’s account of sexuality remains unassimilable to the nature (Simon LeVay The Sexual Brain)/nurture debate, essentialists and social constructionists [Hello Judith Butler].

By describing sexuality in terms of unconscious desire, I wish to separate sexual orientation from questions of identity and of gender roles, practices, and performances, since it is by conceiving sexualty outside the terms of gender AND identity that we can most thoroughly deheterosexualize desire. 221-222

Thus although historicism shares with psychoanalysis the view that identities are essentially illusory, historicism resorts to the empiricist solution of investigating discrete social and cultural practices, whereas psychoanalysis focuseds on what, though not exactly illusory, nevertheless resists empirical verification, namely, FANTASY. 224

… Lacan helps to distinguish a psychoanalytic from a more psychological notion of the unconscious as denoting interiority, depth, or the repsitory of drives and complexes. If we think of the real in light of the PSYCHOANALYTIC unconscious, we will see more clearly how the real is connected with —indeed remins inseparable from— sexuality. 231

The paradox of human sexuality, according to Freud, consist in its diphasic emergence: its initial efflorescence in childhood, prior to maturation of the sexaul organs, is succeeded by a period of latency before sexuality reemerges alongside, yet forever out of synch with, organic changes in the body. Freud’s claim on behalf of infantile sexuality entail recognizing that sex comes before one is ready for it — either physically or psychically. In the case of children it seems relatively clear what being physically unprepared for sex means; psychically it means that the human infant encounters sexual impulses — its own as well as other people’s — as alien, unmasterable, unassimilable to its fledgling ego, and hence ultimately traumatic. As a consequence of this capacity to disorganize the ego or coherent self, sexuality bcomes part of the UNCONSCIOUS; and it is owing to this subjectively traumatic origin that Lacan aligns sex with the order of the real.
The real — like trauma — is what resists assimilation to any imaginary or symbolic universe. Another way of putting this would be to say that the premature emergence of sexuality in humans — its original noncoincidence with biology — splits sexuality off from reality and reassigns it to the domain of FANTASY. In so doing, human sexuality is constituted as ireemediably PERVERSE. 231-232

In Freud’s theory of sexualty, perversion doesn’t represent a detour or falling away fromthe norm, as it does in the prepsychoanalytic, theological conception of perversion. Instead, for Freud the reverse is true: perversion is primary, rather than a secondary deviation. In the form of polymorphous infantile sexuality, perversion PRECEDES the norm, and therefore normal sexuality — that is, reproductive genital heterosexuality — represents a deviation or falling away from perversion. To specify this relation more precisely, perhaps we could say that within the Freudian dialectic of sexuality, the norm SUBLATES perversion, ostensibly superseding but never actually eliminating it. 235

What homosexuality expresses —indirectly and in popular form— is desire’s disquieting disregard for gender and for persons. … DESIRE’S OBJECTS REMAIN ESSENTIALLY CONTINGENT. BUT WHEN HOMOSEXUALITY BECOMES THE BASIS FOR AN IDENTITY, THIS CONTINGENT RELATION BETWEEN DESIRE AND ITS OBJECTS VANISHES. … “Homosexual desire is perverse in the Freudian sense, i.e. it is simply an-Oedipal, as long as it expresses the disorganisation of the component drives. It becomes neurotically perverse in the ordinary sense when it relates to a face, when it enters the speher of the ego and the imaginary.” … THIS QUESTION CONCERNS HOW WE MAY CONCEIVE OF DESIRE AS NOT RELATING “TO A FACE”: HOW CAN WE DEPERSONIFY OR IMPERSONALIZE DESIRE SO AS TO RETAIN ITS ORGINARY PERVERSE FORCE WITHOUT SIMPLY PLUNGING INTO SEXUAL ANARCHY? 239

*****
How can we INHIBIT the prosopopoeia —the face-making trope— that accompanies libidinal investments while still honoring the other’s alterity? 239
******
Hocquenghem speaks not of “depersonifying” or “impersonalizing” desire but, more austerely, of its DEHUMANIZATION: “The sexualisation of the world herealded by the gay movement pushes capitalist decoding to the limit and corresponds to teh disolution of the human; from this point of view the gay movement undertakes the necessary dehumanisation.” 240

Thus we might say that man is unmanned in antihumanist philosophy, finding himself no longer master of his world since no longer master of himself. The principal name psychoanalysis gives to this loss of mastery or decentering of the human is THE UNCONSCIOUS. From this it follows that we may nuance the potentially misleading terms “antihumanism” and “dehumanization” by substituting for them DE-EGO-IZATION, since it is less the death of humanity of or Man perse that is at stake than the obsolescence of a particular conception and ideology of the self. Hocquenghem makes this clear when he concludes … “homosexual desire is neither on the side of death nor on the side of life; it is the killer of civilised egos.” 241

Not only does fangtasy fulfill a crucial mediating function, htereby permitting us to complicate teh relation between desire and the social, but it does so by deeping perversion alive and in play. thus, in my view, quieer theory cannot afford to accept Foucault’s —or Deleuze and Guattari’s— dismissal of fantasy as a ruse of idealism. For me the significance of Lacan’s inverting his formula for fantasy ($<>a) to make the formula for perversion (a<>$) lies in its maintaining fantasy as always potentially perverse, while also guaranteeing perversion a mobility that defers it soldification into an identity (THE pervert). Hence the full significance of the <> sign … that links $ and a, and which Lacan says “is created to allow a hundred and one different readings, a multiplicity that is admissible as long as teh spoken remains caught in its algebra” (Ecrits 313). This <> sign indicates a set of possible relations between the subject of the unconscious and its object, a veritable repertoire of relationality. To appreciate how this works, we need to clarify the ambiguous status of the OBJECTa, which, designating neither a person nor a thing, occupies a distincly multivalent position in Lacan’s theory of sexuality. 246-247

The new perspective on humanity inaugurated by the discovery or invention of the unconscious involves a sense of loss, but this loss is a consequence of excess — that is, a loss of mastery that stems from an excess of signification. Thus the paradox whereby excess is not so much the alternative to lack as its precondition entails a more specific problem, namely, that the boon of linguistic subjecvity comes at the cost of subjective unity. This excess of meaning called the unconscious genertes desire as a multiplicity of possible connections, metonymic links between signifiers that engender subjectivity. Another way of putting this is to point out how linguistic duplicity —the very possibility that language can deceive— produces the perpetual illusion of a secret located beyond language, and it is this enigma that elicits desire. HENCE FOR LACAN, THE SUBJECT AND DESIRE COME INTO BEING AT THE SAME MOMENT; AND HE NAMES THIS CONSITUTIVE DIVISION THAT FOUNDS THE SUBJECT “OBJECTa” a term intended to designate the remainder or EXCESS that keeps self-identity forever out of reach, thus maintaining desire. 250

As I have been arguing throughout this book, the logic of this concept, OBJECTa, demotes or relativizes that of the phallus: whereas the phallus implies a univocal model of desire (insofar as all desiring positions are mapped in relation to a singular term), OBJECTa implies multiple, heterogeneous possibilities for desire, especially since OBJECTa bears no discernible relation to gender. 250

OBJECTa takes multple forms as a consequence of the drive’s partiality … In Lacan’s theory the object results from an excess of signification that Freud calls the UNCONSCIOUS; more specifically, it is the effect of this excess on the human body that brings desire into being. In his Three Essays Freud describes this phenomenon in terms of plymorphous perversity, emphasizing the infant’s capacity for autoerotic pleasure in any number of bodily openings, surfaces and activities. As is well known, Freud designates these multiple corporeal apertures and surfaces EROGENOUS ZONES and this inspires Lacan’s account of OBJECTa. 251

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The very delimitation of the “erogenous zone” that the drive isolates … is the result of a cut expressed in the anatomical mark of a margin or border — lips, “the enclosure of the teeth,” the rim of the anus, the tip of the penis, the vagina, the slit fromed by the eyelids, even the horn-shaped aperature of the ear …. the mamilla, faeces, the phallus (imaginary object), the urinary flow. (An unthinkable list, if one adds, as I do, the phoneme, the gaze, the voice — the nothing.) [Ecrits 314-315 Cited in Tim Dean Beyond Sexuality 252]

Erogenous zones — which are always multiple, never singular — come into being as soon as sexuality is separated from organic functions, that is, in the reflexive moment of autoeroticism. Lacan describes this process as “the result of a cut” that occurs at any number of bodily borders. Not only is “this mark of the cut” (WHICH CREATES OBJECT a) multiplied throughout the body, but it is my own body on which the symbolic order makes these incisions. thus for Lacan, as for Freud, sexual desire originates in autoeroticism. Dean, Beyond Sexuality 252

The significance of this logic for our purposes lies in the implication that desire emerges independently of heterosexuality or homosexuality; and hence the gendering involved in “object-choice” must be a secondary process performed on objects THAT PRECEDE GENDER — as Lacan’s example of “the horn=shaped aperture of the ear” clearly demonstrates. This secondary process, which organizes and thus totalizes OBJECTSa into a gendered object-choice, shows how personification functions as a strategy of normalization. We might even say that the psychoanalytic notion of object-choice is itself a heterosexist invention, one that runs counter to psychoanalysis’s own logic of unconscious desire. 253

I’d like to look a little harder at the material object Lacan takes as his prototype for OBJECTa — the turd. Looking unblinkingly at a psychoanalytic theory of exrement offers the benefit of enabling us to gauge just how incidental to Lacan’s account of fantasy, sexuality, and desire is the phallus. … Speaking of what happens to the human organism in the process of subjectification —when, that is, language impacts the body — … Lacan’s model for subjective loss is not the phallus but feces, an ungendered object. In the face of THI|S object-cause of desire, the controversy over the concept of the phallus pales into insignificance, since whether or not we’re all —men as well as women— missing the phallus, certainly we’ve all lost objects from the anus. And this distinction remins universally true —irrespective of gender, race, class, nation, cutlure, or history— in that although we never may be completely certain that nobody has the phallus, we can be sure everybody has an anus. … The explanatory virtue of turds over the phallus lies not only in the fact that everybody loses them, but also in the fact that their loss is repeated: it’s because loss from this part of the body is multiplied over and over that feces so aptly figure OBJECTSa. Now this formulation confronts us with the disturbing implication that in fantasy ($ <> a) we find the subject relating to its shit. 264-265

Perhaps it takes a gay man to observe that the phallus is simply a turd in disguise … 266

Let me make clear that I’m claiming not that sexual difference is inconsequential to this account of sexuality, just that it is secondary. Desire emerges before sexual difference, through the anal object, and therefore there can be no a priori gendering of the object-cause of desire. “to encounter desire is first of all to forget the diference in the sexes” and [to instead focus] on anal erotics. … excrement remains an extraordinarily difficult topic for sustained discourse: the anal object tests the limits of sexual tolerance far more stringently than mere homosexuaity or other manifestation of queerness. In deed, homosexuality’s being branded “the love that dare not speak its name” must have been a consequence primarily of its association with anality. Even Freud, whose broadmindedness still retains the capacity to astonish, deems perversion most unequivocally pathological when it involves sexual contact with shit. 267

Freud reminds us that originally the object of desire is not another person, much less a member of the opposite sexj, but somethign rather more abject. Thinking of sexual object-choice in terms of persons entails a kind of sublimation, an idealizing consolidation of the object, rather than the idealization of the instinct manifested in Freud’s examples of necrophilia and coprophagy. When we grasp the idea that erotidc desire for another person itself depends on some sort of sublimation —rather than sublimation standing as the alternative to interpersonal desire, as is commonly supposed— then we can begin to appreiate just how strange, how distant from the normalizing perspective on love and sex, psychoanalytic theory really is. In its most fundamental formulations psychoanalysis is queer theory. [End of chapter] 268

Dean, Tim. “Lacan and Queer Theory” Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Cambridge Campanion to Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2003. 239-

As Simon Watney has shown in his analysis of media discourse about AIDS in Britain and the United States, the diea of a general population implies a notion of disposable populations in much the same way that the category of the normal defines itself in relation to the pathological, on which it necessarily depends. hence the “general population” can be understood as another term for heteronormative society. those excluded from teh general population —whether by virtue of their sexuality, race, class, or nationality— are by definition QUEER.

In this way “QUEER” came to stand less for a particular sexual orientation or a stigmatized erotic identity than for a critical distance from the white, middle-class, heterosexual norm. … a new style of political organization that focused more on building alliances and coalitions than on maintaining identity boundaries: … entailed a critique of identity and an acknowledgement that different social groups could transcend their identity based on paricularisms in the interest of resititng heteronormative society. thus while gay oppses straight, queer sets itself more broadly in opposition to the forces of normalization taht regulate social conformity. QUEER IS ANTI-IDENTITARIAN AND IS DEFINED RELATIONALLY RATHER THAN SUBSTANTIVELY. QUEER HAS NO ESSENCE, AND ITS RADICAL FORECE EVAPORATES —OR IS NORMALIZED— AS SOON AS QUEER COALESCES INTO A PSYCHOLOGICAL IDENTITY. 240

Composed in a Lacanian milieu (though without ever mentioning Lacan’s name), The History of Sexuality launches a polemic against what Foucault calls the repressive hypothesis. This hypothesis states that human desire is distorted by cultural constraints, which, once lifted, would liberate desire and permit its natural, harmonious fulfillment, thereby eliminating the various neuroses that beset our civilization. Picturing desire and the law in an antagonistic relation, the repressive hypothesis infers a precultural or prediscursive condition of desire in its “raw” state. Foucault —like Lacan— maintains that no such prediscursive state exists. Instead, desire is positiviely produced rather than repressed by discourse; desire follwos teh law, it does not oppsoe it. In 1963, more than a decade before the History of Sexuality Lacan argued that “Freud finds a singular balance, a kind of co-conformity — if I may be allowed to double my prefixes — of Law and desire, stemming fro the fact that both are born together. (T, p.89). This affirmation comports well with Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis. 241

However Fouclult’s critique of a naive conception of repression — repression considered as a purely external force — prompts him to argue against all formulae of negation where desire is concerned, and thus his polemic leaves little conceptual room for any consideration of negativity. … While Lacan wants to reconceptualize the unconscious in de-individualed terms, Foucault wishes to rethink that which structures subjectivity in purely positive terms, without recourse to notions of repression, negation, or the unconscious. 242

But in denaturalizing sex and sexuality, Lacan suggests more than the comparatively familiar idea that sex is a social construct. Psychoanalytic antinaturalism does not boil down to mere culturalism. Rather, his account of how discourse generates desire specifies more precisely the function of negativity in creating human subjectivity. Lacan locates the cause of desire in an object (L’OBJECT PETITa) that comes into being as a result of language’s impace on the body, but that is not itself discursive. The OBJECT PETITa is what remains after culture’s symbolic netoworks have carved up the body, and hence the object reminds us of the imperfect fit betwen language and coproreality. …. Lacan argues that the object-cause of desire is EXTRADISCURSIVE — something that cannot be contained within or mastered by language, and therefore cannot be understood as a cultural construct.

… in its origins DESIRE IS NOT HETEROSEXUAL: desire is determined not by the opposite sex but by L’OBJECT PETITa, which necessarily precedes gender. 244

In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Freud claimed that the peculiar termporality of human sexual life compelled him to conclude that the instinct has no predetermined object or aim: “It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object’s attractions” (SE 7, p.148). By invalidating the popular notion that erotic desire is congenitally oriented toward the opposite sex, this psychoanalytic insight poses a fundamental challenge to heteronormativity. And it is thanks to ideas such as this one — the instinct’s original independence of its object — that Freud rather than Foucault may be credited as the intellectual founder of queer theory.
In order to grasp Lacan’s theory of L’OBJECT PETITa and how it deheterosexualizes desire, we need to consider fruther Freud’s account of the sexual instinct and its contingent object. As his severing of the natural link between instinct and object implies, Freud disassembles the instinct into it components, arguing that the notion of a unified instinct in which the parts function together harmoniously on the model of animal instinct is a desuctive fiction; it does not describe accurately how human instinctual life operates. there is no single, unifed sexual instinct in humans, Freud maintains, but only partial drives, component instincts. Instinct is an evolutionary concept, a way of thinking about an organism’s adaptation to its environment. For Freud, however, the human subject is constitutively maladapted to its environment, and the unconscious stands as the sign of this maladaption. Psychoanalytic thinkers after Freud have formalized the distinction between instinct and drive that remains somewhat inchoate in Freud’s own work. The distinction is particularly important in terms of the epistemological status of psychoanalysis, since drive theory tends to be taken as one of the most retrograde aspects of Freudianism, a mark of its essentialism. But in fact the instinct/drive distinction confirms Freud’s departure from biologistic conceptions of sexuality. IF INSTINCT CAN BE SITUATED AT THE LEVEL OF BIOLOGICAL NECESSITY, THEN DRIVE IS THE RESULT OF INSTINCT’S CAPTURE IN THE NETS OF LANGUAGE, ITS HAVING TO BE ARTICULATED INTO A SIGNIFYING CHAIN IN ANY ATTEMPT TO FIND SATISFACTION.

Lacan spells out this distinction: “the instinct is the effect of the mark of the signifier on needs, their transformation as an effect of the signifier into something fragmented and panic-stricken that we call drive” (Seminar VII, 301). Fragmented or partialized by symbolic networks, the drive is thereby DISoriented (“panic stricken”) in a manner that gives the lie to conventional motions of sexual orientatation. The very idea of sexual orientation assumes that desire can be coordinated in a single direction, that it can be streamlined and stabilised. Another way of putting this would be to say that the idea of SEXUAL ORIENTATION DISCIPLINES BY REGULATING ITS TELOS. The notion of orientation —including same-sex orientation— can be viewed as normalizing in that it attempts to totalize uncoordinated fragments into a coherent unity. The conceptual correlate of orientation is sexual identity, a psychological category that confroms to the instinctual understanding of sex. Instinct, orientation, and identity are psychological concepts, not psychoanalytic ones. These concepts normalize the weirder psychoanalytic theory of partial drives and unconscious desire by unifying the latter’s discontinuities into recognizable identity formations. The impulse to coordinate and synthesize is a function of the ego and betrays an imaginary view of sex. This is true of the notions of homosexual orientation and gay identity as it is of heterosexual identity. Both straight and gay identities elide the dimension of the unconscious. As an orientation or identity, homosexuality is normalizing though not socially normative. In other words, while homosexuality is far from representing the social norm, as a minority identity it does conform to the processes of normalization that regulate desire into social categories for disciplinary purposes. 245-246

With this distinction in mind, we can begin to appreciate how Freud’s radical claim that psychoanalysis “has found that all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconsciuos” does not go far enough in dismantling an identititarian view of sex. The contention that everyone has made a homosexual object-choice in his or her unconscious undermines the notion of a seamless sexual identity, but without challenging the assumption that object-choice is determined by gender. For an object-choice to qualify as homosexual, it must represent a selection based on the similarity of the object’s gender to that of the subject making the selection. This implies that the gender of objects still is discernible at teh level of the unconscious, and that sexuality concerns recognizably “whole” objects, such as men and women (or at least masculine and feminine forms). But such assumptions are invalidated by Freud’s own theory of partial drives, as well as by the concept of OBJET PETITa, a kind of partialized object that Lacan derives from Freudian drive theory. In developing his concept of OBJET PETITa, Lacan invokes the oral, anal, and scopic drives that Freud discusses in “Instincts and their vicissitudes” (1915), adding to Freud’s incomplete list the vocatory drive (in which the voice is taken as an object). From the partial drives Lacan emphasises, one sees immediately that the gender of an object remains irrelevant to the drives’ basic functioning. … THE DRIVES’ PARTIALITY REVOKES HETEROSEXUALITY AT THE LEVEL OF THE UNCONSCIOUS. 246

If, as far as the unconscious is concerned, it makes no sense to speak of heterosexual or homosexual object-choices, then a theory of subjectivity that takes the unconscious into account could be extremely useful from a queer perspective. … Freud’s partializing of the drive discredits not only the viability of sexual complementarity, but also the possibility of subjective harmony. In contrast to the functionality of sexual instinct, drive discloses the dysfunctionality of a subject at odds with itself as a result of symbolic existence. Characterized by repetition rather than by development, the drive does not necessarily work toward the subject’s well being. In fact, its distance from organic rhythms means that the drive insists at the level of the unconscious even to the point of jeopardizing the subject’s life. For this reason, Lacan aligns the drive with death rather than life, claiming that “the drive, the partial drive, is profoundly a death drive and represents in itself the portion of death in the sexed living being” (Seminar XI 205). It bears repeating that the death drive is not an essentialist or organicist concept, since it derives from an inference about the effect of language on bodily matter; it is as CULTURAL subjects that humans are afflicted with the death drive. There is no essential, inborn death drive; rather, the dysfunctional, antinaturalistic way in which partial drives fail to conduce toward life lends every drive an uncanny, death-like quality. 247

Nobus, Dany. “Lacan’s Science of the Subject: Between Linguistics and Topology” Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Cambridge Campanion to Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2003.

… Lacan also mapped out the antagonism between self-consciousnes identity and unconscious subject across the two poles of opposition between the subject of the statement (sujet de l’énoncé) and the subject of the enunciation (sujet de l’énonciation). Freud’s famous joke of the two Jews who meet at a station in Galicia still serves as an excesslent example of what Lacan was trying to demonstrate here. When the first Jew —let us call him Moshe — asks the second, who will go by the name of MOrdechai, “So where are you going?” Mordechai says, “I am going to Cracow.” This message instantly infuriates Moshe, who exclams: “You’re a dirty liar, Mordechai, because you are only telling me you’re going to Cracow in order to make me believe that you’re going to Lemberg, but I happen to know that you are going to Cracow!” Of course, the joke is that Moshe accuses Mordechai of being a liar, whereas what Mordechai says is a truthful description of his journey plan. Moshe acknowledges that the subject of the statement is telling the truth about himself — “I know you are going to Cracow” — but he also pinpoints the deceitful intention behind Mordechai’s statement, which reveals the subject of the enunciation: “Your true intention is to deceive me.” Mordechai may or may not have been aware of his intention, the fact of the matter is that Moshe acknowledges the presence of another subject behind the subject of the statement. 61-62

Verhaeghe Does Woman

Discourse of Hysteric

The questions put to the master are bascially the same: “Tell me who I am, tell me what I want.” Although this master can be found in different places — it could be a priest, a doctor, a scientist, an analyst, even a husband — there is always one common factor: the master is supposed to know, he is supposed to know and to produce the answer. That is why we find knowledge, S2, in the position of product. Typically, this answer always misses the point. S2 as general knowledge is impotent in producing a particular answer to the particular driving force of objectA in the place of truth: a//S2. This inevitably results in a never ending battle between the hysterical subject and the particular master on duty. …

Structurally, the discourse of the hysteric results in alienation for the hysterical subject and in castration for the master. The answer given by the master will always miss the point, because the true answer concerns objectA, the object which is forever lost and cannot be put into words. The standard reaction to this failure is to produce even more signifiers but they only lead one further and further from the lost object in the position of truth. This impossibility causes the failure of the master, and entails his symbolic castration. Meanwhile, the master, in the position of the other as S1, has produced an ever increasing body of S2, of knowledge. It is this very knowledge that the hysterical subject experiences ass profoundly alienating: as an answer to her particular question she receives a general theory, …. Whether or not she complies with it, whether or not she identifies herself with it, is besides the point. In every case, the answer will be felt as alienating. Knowdledge as a product is unable to say anything important about objectA in the place of truth: a//S2 (Verhaeghe, Does the Woman 110).

[The master’s] truth is that he is also castrated, divided and subject to the Law. The paradox is that in striving to attain jouissance, the only thing he can produce is a knowledge which always falls short and which automatically makes him fail as a master. Ineed, if he wants to display his knowledge he has to speak, but the moment he does, he reveals his division. the only way for a master to say master is to keep away from the game of desire.
[…] Only he who does not desire is not submitted to castration, remains undivided and can occupy the position of master. … The idealised father of the hysteric is teh dead father, the one who, freed from all desire, is no longer subjected to the fundamental lack and can produce in his own name, S1, a knowledge, S2, concerning jouissance. Verhaeghe 112

Discourse of University (Verhaeghe, Does the Woman 116-117)

In the discourse of the university, the master functions as a formal guarantee for knowledge, thereby denying the ever-problematic division of the one who knows. In the end, this denial will be a failure. It is this knowledge that takes up the position of agent in the discourse of the university. If we turn the terms in the discourse of the master back a quarter, we obtain the discourse of the university as a regression of the discourse of the master, and as the inverse of the discourse of the hysteric. The agent is a ready-made knowlege, whereas the other is reduced to mere object, cause of desire: S2 –>a

The history of psychoanalysis illustrates this aim of the discoruse of the university: Freud is reduced to a merer guarantee of a closed and well-established knowledge. The problematic aspect of his work is put aside, only his name remans as the master signifier necessary for the guarantee: “Made in …” The unifying aspect of this S1 already shows itself in the fact that post-Freudianism reduced Freud to a massive whole, a monolith without any internal dynamic. Certainly, the ‘evolution’ in his work was recognised, but only in the sense of a cumulative progression, which began before Freud (‘dynamic’ psychiatry), and resulted after him in the pinnacle known as Ego psychology …

This knowledge is presented as an organised and transparent unity which can be applied straight from the textbook. the hidden truth is that it can only function if one can guarantee it with a master-signifier.

In the position of the other, we find the lost object, the cause of desire. The relationship between this object and the signifying chain is structurally impossible: the object is precisely that element, Das Ding, which is beyond the signifier. As a result, the product of this discourse is a growing division of the subjuct: the more knowledge one uses to reach the object, the more one becomes divided between signifiers, and the further one moves away from home, that is, from the true cause of desire: S2–>a.

The product of this discourse demonstrates its failure since the result is nothing but the divided subject $. This is a consequence of the impossible relationship between S2 –>a. Knowledge does not yield jouissance, only a subject divided by a knowledge expressed in signifiers. This subject, $, can never be identified with an S1 because it would require a state of non-division. Between truth and product, the disjunction of impotence insists: S1//$.

Moreover, there is no relationship between the subject and the master-signifier in this discourse; the master is supposed to secrete signifiers without there being any relationship with his own subjectivity: S1//$. This illusion is behind the ‘objectivity’ required in classical science.