Category: Žižek

zupančič sublimation pt 2

Zupančič, A. (2003) The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. MIT Press

Here we come to the last grand narrative from the era of the end of grand narratives: there is no Real, everything is convention, language games, a labyrinth of different possibilities that, at least in principle, are all of equal value. What is the effect of this thesis?

Its effect is not exactly the disappearance of the Real, but, rather, its full coincidence with reality. In other words, the reality principle is now conceived of as the only and ultimate Real.

This is what Nietzsche calls “modern nihilism” and the “crisis of values,” the latter being precisely the “crisis of sublimation” in the sense described above.

At issue is not a complaint about the corruption of values, and lack of respect for them, but a diagnosis concerning the weakening of the sublimatory force, the force that could produce or create some distance toward the reality principle and its claims.

It entails the closure of the very space of creativity. This is why it is very important to keep insisting upon the notion of the Real that, in turn, has to be defined in terms other than those of some “authentic Real” lurking behind the deceptive appearances. And the (late) Lacanian notion of the Real can help us to do precisely that.

The Real is not some authentic Beyond, constituting the truth of the reality. The Real is not the Beyond of reality, but its own blind spot or dysfunction—that is to say, the Real is the stumbling block on account of which reality does not fully coincide with itself. The Real is the intrinsic division of reality itself.

zupančič sublimation pt 1

Zupančič, A. (2003) The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. MIT Press

If this man were to act as Kant suggests (and thus to renounce spending the night with the Lady), he would embrace the pleasure principle as the ultimate principle of his action.

On the other hand, his decision to spend the night with his Lady, regardless of the consequences, testifies to the opposite… “to spend the night with the desired Lady,” even if we are to hang for it, is a perfect example of sublimation

“To raise an object to the dignity of the Thing,” as a fundamental gesture of sublimation, thus enables us to accept as possible something the possibility of which is excluded from the realm of the reality principle.

The  [reality principle] normally functions as the criterion of possible transgressions of the pleasure principle. That is to say: the reality principle sets limits to transgressions of the pleasure principle; it tolerates, or even imposes, certain transgressions, and excludes
others.

For instance, it [reality principle] demands that we accept some displeasure as the condition of our survival, and of our social well being in general, whereas it excludes some other transgressions of the pleasure principle that serve no such purpose (or no purpose at all).

Its [reality principle] function of criterion hence consists in setting limits within the field governed by the binary system pleasure/pain. Sublimation is what enables us to challenge this criterion, and eventually to formulate a different one.

The important thing to point out here is that the reality principle is not simply some kind of natural way associated with how things are, to which sublimation would oppose itself
in the name of some Idea.

The reality principle itself is ideologically mediated; one could even claim that it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical fact or (biological, economic . . .) necessity (and that we tend to perceive as nonideological).

Thus, the Lacanian theory of sublimation does not suggest that sublimation turns away from the Real in the name of some Idea; rather, it suggest that sublimation gets closer
to the Real than the reality principle does.

It [sublimation] aims at the Real precisely at the point where the Real cannot be reduced to reality.

One could say that sublimation opposes itself to reality, or turns away from it, precisely in the name of the Real.

To raise an object to the dignity of the Thing is not to idealize it, but, rather, to “realize” it, that is, to make it function as a stand-in for the Real.

Sublimation is thus related to ethics insofar as it is not entirely subordinated to the reality principle, but liberates or creates a space from which it is possible to attribute certain values to something other than the recognized and established “common good.”

The creative act of sublimation is not only a creation of some new good, but also (and principally) the creation and maintenance of a certain space for objects that have no place in the given, extant reality, objects that are considered “impossible.” Sublimation gives
value to what the reality principle does not value.

If Antigone raises her brother’s funeral to the dignity of the Thing, Sophocles raises to the dignity of the Thing the very passion or desire that supports Antigone in her act.

In the play Antigone, we have Antigone’s act, but we also have Sophocles’ act, which consists in giving an uncontestable value to the “irrational passion” of Antigone’s act.

We are thus dealing with a rather unusual meaning of the term sublimation: it concerns the creation of a certain space, scene, or “stage” that enables us to value something that is situated beyond the reality principle, as well as beyond the principle of the common good. It is at this point that sublimation is related to ethics.

However, another remark is necessary here. The attribution of value to the beyond of the reality principle is never a direct, immediate one. In other words, what sublimation allows us to value or to appreciate is never the Thing (das Ding) itself, but always some more or less banal, everyday object, a quotidian object elevated to the dignity of the Thing (and an object that also somehow always masks the Thing as the central void): the night spent with the Lady; a brother’s burial. . . .

In Lacanian terms, sublimation stages a parade, displaying a series of objets petit a that have it in their power not only to evoke the Thing, but also to mask or veil it. They obfuscate the difference between themselves and the void to which they give body, the void to which they owe what appears to be their most intrinsic feature of value.

From there emerges the other significant theme that Lacan develops in relation to sublimation: the theme of delusion or lure. It is no coincidence that the chapter introducing the discussion of sublimation bears the title “Drives and Lures.”

freeland ethics Sem VII pt. 2 Desire borne by death

Freeland, C. 2013. Antigone in Her Unbearable Splendour: New Essays on Jacques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Albany: State University of New York Press.

borne: to bring, transported, transmitted by, spread by, carried by

Lacan probably ses the traditional philosophical persepectives on ethics as framed and trapped in the theater of a philosophical mirror stage wherein the human, ethical subject is conceived as born prematurely, a fragile, helpless and fragmented body confronting and recognizing its wholeness in the other of the mirror image before it and longing to be that wholenes.  Is Lacan’s psychoanalytic ethic not first and essentially the critical attempt to move beyond this ethical mirror stage, to move beyond the search for the anticipated wholeness of a “meaning of life”?  39

ethics for Lacan is ethics of speech … then the ethical, psychoanalytical Truth that arises in the psychoanalytic brushes with death would not wish to install or monumentalize Truth or Death itself as the ultimate and hidden meaning in life.

Its pronouncements would not articulate either a timeless Truth or a terrifying Death as the “one” meaning of life, for this might make psychoanalysis a type of hermeneutics, and “death” would then be something, a “meaning,” that, given the proper methodology, the proper hermeneutic, could somehow be brought from the depth to the surface of language and stated — phenomenalized, made to appear — perhaps in the form of a proposition, or in a form of life, as the statement of a Truth that would guarantee that life is not “for nothing.”

In Lacan’s work, the relationship between language and death is completely different than this familiar scheme. The Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis is therefore first a disruption of this hermeneutical scheme a form of resistance to the systematic statement of philosophical meaning of life taken as the key element and link in the triumvirate of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Must the Lacanian ethic not first and fundamentally be a resistance to the Hegelian way of taking up death, …

Is the Lacanian ethic not undermining the very meaning of “oneness” and “meaning” in life? Is the “one meaning” always going to be “not one”?  Is Lacan’s statement not the instauration of the ethical necessity of confronting the disruption and the destitution of life that abides in every such statement, a death that takes place in language, that is to say, in desire?

Disruption rather than salvation in and through the systematic statement of the ultimately religious telos of Truth and Oneness: is this not Lacan’s desire, a desire borne by the death of philosophy. 40

freeland ethics Sem 7

Freeland, C. 2013. Antigone in Her Unbearable Splendour: New Essays on Jacques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Albany: State University of New York Press.

More than a “yearning,” the death drive is a drive unbound and immeasurable, a drive that defines human life.

As a work of poetic art, Antigone’s work is thus the work of truth, where gtruth in this case is the truth of desire, the death drive.  … a “zeropint” of word and image, a pooint where the word equals zero, where signification stumbles and comes to a halt. 7

his heroically implring his audience against any giving up or “giving way” on desire. and while it may not at first seem to be much, it is also here that he leveraged the only remaining posibilites for human fredom and self-assertion in the face of seemingly impcable necessity 11

il n’y a pas de sujet connaissant  there is no such thing as a knowing subject. Beyond the measured articulations of the philosophical subject “who  knows,” and who first of all has “self-knowledge,” Lacan approached through the neologism lalangue another dimension of the enoyment of speaking that he calls the jouissance of speech, “an enjoying of speech qua jouissance of speech (parole jouissance en tant que jouissance de parole),” that is quite beyond and inaccessible to the measured articulations of the philosophical subject who knows what he/she wants. But this reference to jouissance requires that not only the enjoyment but also the suffering introduced by language be stressed.

The effects of the introduction of language into the living human being are not always so salutary in Lacan’s view as they may be for the philosophical ethical tradition, where the measured eloquence of truth brings self-mastery and has a healing effect, for language in the Lacanian universe introduces not only mastery an salvation, it also brings subjection.

It can even be seen as a parasite, a disease, virulence, an Other in which the subject from the day it is named, from the day it is a subject, is captured and defined. 19-20

The individual who is affected by the unconscious is the same individual who constitutes what I call the subject of a signifier. It is this subject — and not the subject as one “who knows” (connaissance) — that must also become the ethical subject caught in the knots of desire and moral-ethical law, a subject that is bound by the limits of language and that is inscirbed within the limits of the symbolic order.

Among the affects of the unconscious on the subject, would also include a desire to transgress those limits, a desire, and an unavowed passion to get back behind or beyond the limits of language, to exceed the limits of the law. This is a desire for the “Real,” … With the insciption in to the symbolic order comes order, comes regulations, and the reign of moral. law. The real is whatever disrupts that order and that law; whatever breaks the operation of the symbolic order.

Access to the real is difficult and perhaps danbgerous, but also not without a certain enjoyment, a certain jouissance  23

Todestrieb

Badioiu marks this lmit and present the psychoanalytic rupture with Platonic ontology by way of a resonance he brings into view between Lacan and the pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Heraclitus. deconstructs Plato by going back behind him, or before him, to a pre-Platonic thinking, … that came before the ontological metaphysics of Plato, and that may have in fact conditioned it, but which was subsequently silenced, left in fragments by the tradition of thought that emerged from Plato. … where Plato is the philosopher of the great higher unity of a transcendental Eidos, a true philosopher of the infinite, Hereclitus is a thinker of difference and of the gap, a philosopher of the enigmas of finitude and of the lack of final resolution andclosure in being. 36

It is in tragic drama, not philosophy, according to Lacan, that one encountes the drive and the distress of death. It is by “digging into verse,” as Mallarmé put it, that one encounters the abyss of death and the absence of God, forfeits the sureties of being, and is thereby brought to the limit where one must break with everything, even the traditional horizons of truth and the promise of futurity.

johnston vicious super-ego part 2 of 2

Johnston, A. (2001) The vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics. Psychoanlytic Studes (3): 3/4. 411-424.

Lacan is not so much interested in proposing a new prescriptive ethics as in comprehending the precise nature of ‘moral masochism’, in fully grasping how the constellation of the id, the super-ego, and the socio-symbolic Umwelt of reality ‘pathologize’ the ethical field.

At most, this Lacanian analytic diagnosis of moral masochism should be interpreted as a preparatory clearing of the ground for a genuine ethics, as a mapping out of the obstacles hindering the construction and enactment of a non-pathological ‘metaphysics of morals’.

The introduction of the Law generates desire ex nihilo. Instead of forbidding a pre-existent set of urges in the individual, it teaches the subject what to covet, if only as an inaccessible vanishing point whose appearance of possible accessibility is a mirage engendered by the seemingly contingent nature of the Law and its authority.

Lacan is not so much interested in proposing a new prescriptive ethics as in comprehending the precise nature of ‘moral masochism’,

in fully grasping how the constellation of the id, the super-ego, and the socio-symbolic Umwelt of reality ‘pathologize’ the ethical field. At most, this Lacanian analytic diagnosis of moral masochism should be interpreted as a preparatory clearing of the ground for a genuine ethics, as a mapping out of the obstacles hindering the construction and enactment of a non-pathological ‘metaphysics of morals’.

At the beginning of this quotation, Lacan alludes to an observation that Freud formulates in his 1924 paper ‘The economic problem of masochism’. In the concluding paragraphs of that essay, Freud notes that the more the subject complies with reality’s prohibition of aggression, the greater the guilt the subject feels, the harsher the demands of the super-ego become.

Unlike external authorities, which can only observe and punish externalized acts of transgression, the super-ego sees and judges the subject’s ‘inner’ intentions. Freud pinpoints this as a paradox of sorts: the more the subject overtly obeys the rules of reality, the more the super-ego (unconsciously) inflicts the negative affect of guilt.

This paradox is illuminated by the theory of the super-ego as presented in Civilization and Its Discontents: the super-ego is a subliminatory channel for the id’s sadism; the id diverts the aggressive drives onto the subject’s own ego when the reality principle prevents it from discharging this aggression against others;

thus, the more the ‘moral’ subject refrains from enacting these aggressive drives in reality (i.e., the more he/she heeds the ‘ethical’ principles of his/her social milieu), the more the id is compelled to utilize the super-ego to ‘work off’ aggression against the ego (hence, the greater the feeling of guilt, since Freud claims that guilt is the ‘pain’ consciously experienced by the ego as a result of the unconscious subliminatory dynamic occurring at the level of id and super-ego). How does Lacan integrate this line of Freudian reasoning?

it isn’t simply a matter of claiming that the Law arouses desire out of nowhere through its prohibitions: it’s also the case that obedience to the Law is cemented in place by the struggle to fend off these desires, that the more rigid the subject’s adherence to the rules, the presumably greater is his/her need to repress increasingly powerful urges to contravene it.

Consequently, when Lacan speaks about being guilty for having ‘ceded’ or ‘given ground’ relative to one’s desire, what he really means is the following:

the more the subject surrenders (to) his/her desires by obeying the restrictions of the Law, the more guilty he/she feels,

since such concessions only aggravate the (unconscious) volatility and intensity of these same desires (namely, ‘internal’ repressed desires which never fail to escape the notice of the omniscient authority of the sadistic super-ego). 419

Near the end of his 1974 television interview, Lacan clearly advances this claim in saying that, “Freud reminds us that it’s not evil, but good, that engenders guilt” (Lacan, p. 45). At no point does Lacan contest the Freudian definition of guilt as a negative affect resulting from the super-ego’s punishment of the ego.

Hence, Lacan, in following Freud here, isn’t treating guilt as a properly ethico-moral sentiment, but, rather, as a symptom of super-ego aggression (with this aggression itself being acknowledged as arising from ceded, aim-inhibited desires whose intensity increases the longer and more severely they’re held in check).

Consequently, one can be ‘guilty’ before the tribunal of the super-ego without, for all that, being actually guilty in an ethico-moral sense per se. 419

Lacan merely brings one to the point where the essential question that must be answered if a psychoanalytic ethics is to be possible at all poses itself:

Can conscience function beyond the super-ego, namely, is the subject able to break out of the cycle running from Law to desire to guilt?

If not, then the Freudian diagnosis of conscience as a symptomatic by-product of the superego’s id-driven sadism really does represent the end of ethics in any meaningful, philosophically consistent mode.

Both Freud and Lacan have made signiŽficant inroads into demystifying the origins and mechanisms of feeling guilty. However, it remains doubtful if psychoanalysis has yet pronounced its deŽfinitive verdict as regards being guilty.

eagleton trouble with strangers 1

Eagleton, T. Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Whereas the angelic, as Milan Kundera argues, are notable for their peculiarly ‘shitless’ discourse, all vapid rhetoric and edifying sentiment, the demonic see nothing around them but shit. Parsons and politicians are angelic, whereas tabloid journalists are demonic. The deominic are not evil, since to be evil entails believing in value if only to negate it. 133

Angelo’s interview with Isabella is by no means his first encounter with the shattering  force of desire, whatever he may suppose himself. On the contrary, the snake was curled up in the garden from the outset. Its deadly venom has infected him already in the form of his pathological will to dominion, within which Freud would doubtless detect the shadow of the death drive. Angelo represents a pure cult of the superego, with its lethally aggressive rage for order,

its neurotic fear that without fine definitions and unimpeachable grounds the world will collapse into chaos.

Because they are secretly fuelled by the death drive, the very powers which set out to subdue chaos are secretly in love with it. The urge to order is itself latently anarchic. It is prepared to subjugate the world into sheer nothingness.

The superego as Freud taught, borrows its terrifyingly vindictive force from the unruly id. 136

This is why Angelo can keel over with scarcely a struggle from ascetic authoritarian to libidinal transgressor. The same goes for the law, or indeed for any system of symbolic exchange.

Because such symbolic economies are precisely regulated, they tend to stability; but because the rules which regulate them can permutate any one item with another, indifferent to their specific nature, they can breed an anarchic condition in which every element blurs indiscriminately into every other, and the system appears to be engaging in transactions purely for their own sake. There is something in the very structure of stability which threatens to subvert it.

This is most obviously so in the case of the symbolic order, which in order to work effectively must allow flexible permutations between its various roles, and thus cannot avoid generating the permanent possibility of incest. Without this monstrous horror at its heart, the system would not be able to operate.  137

duras Lol Stein vanheule

Page 144 Vanheule:  Lacan doesn’t emphasize Lol’s failure to signify her existence, but indicates that by occupying the a-subjective position, and becoming totally absorbed in her fascination with the dancing couple, Lol copes with the desiring relation that unfolds between her financé and Anne-Marie Stretter.

By being the mere observer, Lol positions herself as an a-subjective observer in relation to the desiring couple, and gains a feeling of being: ‘this [Lol’s] being is never really specified, personified, presentified in her novel, in so far as she only exists in the form of this core object, this object a of something that exists as a gaze, but which is a gaze, a scattered gaze, a gaze-object, a gaze that we repeatedly see’ (Lacan Sem XII).

Indeed Lol’s a-subjective position as observer is functional: it helps her deal with social situations and avoid the position of the object a in relation to a ferocious Other.

By observing others and by explicitly positioning herself as the ‘excluded third’ (Lacan Other Ecrits) she avoids being the passive object of the gaze. With her outrageous reaction, by contrast, Lol’s mother destroys this a-subjective position vis-a-vis the desiring couple and creates a dual situation. Out of great concern, she actively addresses Lol, expresses her wish that the scene at the party hadn’t taken place and physically touches her. Lol can’t cope with this direct appeal by her mother, which urges Lol to manifest herself as a subject, and attacks her mother.

Another triangular situation, which Lol actively organized, consists of her relationship with Jacques Hold, the narrator of the story, and Tatiana Karl, ‘her best friend during her school years’ (Duras 1965 p. 1). Jacques Hold is fond of Lola Valerie Stein, but has an affair with Tatiana. Lol supports this affair and puts herself in the position of observer, where she watches love scenes between them. Lacan views this situation as subjectively interesting for Lol, and claims that ‘a knot is made again there’. Indeed, by occupying the a-subjective position of observer Lol revives from her lifeless marriage.

However, this triangular situation does not last, and ends up in a dual relationship when Jacques Hold falls in love with Lol. He seduces her, they plan to make love, yet at the moment Hold undresses Lol she literally goes mad. She suddenly thinks the police are in the buidling and that people are being beaten on the stairway, and starts to refer to hereself as Tatiana Karl and Lol Stein at the same time. The direct confrontation with Hold’s desire is a situation she cannot cope with.

[…] It appears that by evading physical interaction with a man who is attracted to the female body, Lol feels at ease and maintains a feeling of identity. obviously abstinence guarantees that she is not overwhelmed by jouissance: the a-subjective position as observer protects her from being the object of jouissance of the Other. At the same time her position qua gaze seems to provide her with a surplus jouissance, and a bearable level of sexual excitation. Through her a-subjective position Lol delimits her own being and creates an experience of consistency. 145

What is innovative about Lacan’s discussion of this fictional case is that it bears witness of a positive view of the object a in psychosis. Although the story does not have a happy ending, it shows tht Lola Valerie Stein’s position as observer doesn’t necessarily exclude her from social bonds. As long as desiring others do not come too close and she can maintain her abstinent position, she is not a victim of the non-instalment of a belief in the Other as a reference for making sense of desire.

Lol’s abstinent sexual attitude is a sublime coping mechanism by means of which she keeps the pressure emanating from desiring others at bay and prevents herself from being the object of jouissance of a cruel Other. The only problem is that she did not remain faithful to this non-physical sexual attitude, which suited her so well. 146

mellard Beyond Lacan

Mellard, James M. (2006) Beyond Lacan. Albany: State U of New York 288 pages.
Chapter 7:  Hart’s Damage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics of Jouissance.  pp. 179 – 208.

traditional oedipal subject founded on an ethics of desire to a postraditional subject founded on an ethics of jouissance

Oedipal Subject:  eros and social life,
– subject oriented to desire (and thus constrained by castration and the pleasure principle)

– subject of desire
Damage is important in our understanding the shift from the old oedipal order to the new narcissism, from the order of desire to that of the drive.

This shift, Copjec suggests, has a cognate move-epochal, historical, and ongoing, neither personal nor idiosyncratic. It shifts emphasis to concepts — either ” meaning” or “being” — Lacan associates with the vel of alienation.

Heretofore, in that process known as ” oedipalization, ” it has been a good thing for subjects to be oriented to meaning (and thus to desire within the pleasure principle and oedipal law) rather than to being (and thus to drive and jouissance within the domain of the narcissistic ).

PostOedipal, PostTraditional Subject:  Thanatos and the death drive

– oriented towards jouissance and thus denying contraints of castration and aiming beyond the pleasure principle.  narcissistic subject of jouissance

Femme fatale turns desire toward jouissance

In so far as sexual difference is a Real that resists symbolization, the sexual relationship is condemned to remain an asymmetrical non-relationship in which the Other, our partner, prior to being a subject, is a Thing.  Metastases of Enjoyment, 108

We may say that the narrator-protagonist of Damage merely takes a detour through desire and ordinary oedipal subjectivity before becoming the problematical subject of our postuniverse. His detour goes through the femme fatale, one guise of the maternal object who experiences desire and, as Copjec says, serves as a “defense against the drive” by her relation to jouissance (198).

As Zizek suggests in his discussions of film noir, the role of the femme fatale foregrounds the paradoxical role of “woman ” in the construction of ” man . ” That role raises issues of desire and drive. Zizek  points out that Lacan’s controversial claim that “Woman is a symptom ” (Feminine Sexuality 168 ) of a man can be understood in two radically opposed ways because in Lacan’s career Lacan himself shifted his views on the symptom. In the first, the ” early”view of the 1950s, Lacan saw the symptom, Zizek says, as “a cyphered message,” one in which therefore the “woman-symptom appears as the sign, the embodiment of man’s fall, attesting to the fact that man ‘gave way as to his desire'” (Enjoy 154).

In this view as illustrated in Zizek’s discussion of the noir universe, “woman is not an external, active cause which lures man into a fall-she is just a consequence, a result, a materialization of man’s fall. So, when man purifies his desire of the pathological remainders, woman disintegrates in precisely the same way a symptom dissolves after successful interpretation, after we have symbolized its repressed meaning” (155).

But, Zizek asks, is there not more? “Does not Lacan’s other notorious thesis — the claim that ‘woman doesn’t exist‘ — point in the same direction? Woman doesn’t exist in herself, as a positive entity with full ontological consistency, but only as a symptom of man.”

In the second view, found in the late writings and seminars and foregrounding drive and jouissance, Lacan regarded the symptom” as a particular signifying formation which confers on the subject its very ontological consistency, enabling it to structure its basic, constitutive relationship to enjoyment (jouissance).”

In this late Lacanian view, both the symptom and woman-as-symptom change. Says Zizek, ” [I]f the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet, disintegrates. In this sense, ‘woman is a symptom of man‘ means that man himself exists only through woman qua his symptom: all his ontological consistency hangs on, is suspended from his symptom, is ‘externalized’ in his symptom.

In other words, man literally ex-sists: his entire being lies ‘out there,’ in woman” (155) . Zizek is especially interested in film noir because, paradox ically, it expresses both these Lacanian views of woman and symptom.

The father Martyn thinks he knows is the oedipal father who in his ignorance allows him desire and pleasure. The one he does not know is the obscene, life- and joy-denying
primordial father who wills his death, murders him, and chooses to become him.

There is good reason Martyn does not know his father is or has become the anal or phallic or primordial father. According to Zizek, the anal father represents the tendency in Lacan’s seminar, especially beginning with The Ethics of Psychoanalysis ( 1959-1960), for every concept to have, as a Mobius strip does, an obverse, a paradoxical reverse or inner lining that contradicts or obviates it. The primordial father, Zizek writes, ” is the obscene, superego anal figure that is real-alive, the ‘Master of Enjoyment.'”

In Freud, this primordial father is the one who is murdered by the primal horde of brothers, murdered precisely because, expressing drive, he forbids their desire and pleasure by taking all the women for himself.

Because of the power of his drive to jouissance, he would murder them if necessary to prevent their desires or drives. Zizek suggests that politically, in the exchange of master for leader, the primordial father paradoxically follows the oedipal father. ” In all emblematic revolutions, from the French to the Russian,” says Zizek, ” the overthrow of the impotent old regime of the symbolic Master (French King, Tsar) ended in the rule of a far more ‘repressive’ figure of the ‘anal’ father-Leader (Napoleon, Stalin ).”

This historical pattern suggests to Zizek that in the myth of the primal horde Freud had things backward.”

The order of succession described by Freud in Totem and Taboo (the murdered primordial Father-Enjoyment returns in the guise of the symbolic authority of the Name) is thus reversed: the deposed symbolic Master returns as the obscene-real Leader.”

In this account, Zizek suggests, ” Freud was the victim of a kind of perspective illusion: ‘primordial father‘ is a later, eminently modern, post-revolutionary phenomenon, the result of the dissolution of traditional symbolic authority” (Metastases 206 ) .

johnston vicious circle super-ego

Johnston, A. (2001) The vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics. Psychoanlytic Studes (3): 3/4. 411-424.

“desire is a defense, a prohibition against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance”

One of the easiest ways to gain a preliminary understanding of Lacanian desire is by returning to the Freudian concepts of Trieb and sublimation.

For Freud, sublimation is the typical means by which Trieb adapts itself to the constraints and obstacles it comes to encounter at the level of the reality principle. Reality forbids certain drive-aims qua the attainment of satisfaction linked to determinate drive-objects. Thus, reality is said to be responsible for what Freud designates as ‘aim-inhibition’ (a catalyst for sublimation). 413

The aim-inhibited drive then seeks other forms of satisfaction via different objects; and, if these alternate modes of securing gratiŽfcation are not at odds with the various prohibitions of the reality principle (usually, socio-cultural laws and norms), then the new libidinal arrangement is dubbed a successful sublimation of the drive.

However, especially in the later texts of the second topography, Freud repeatedly emphasizes that Trieb is ‘fundamentally conservative’, that drives unceasingly seek to recover their earliest forms of satisfaction. Furthermore, in, for example, Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that ‘instinctual renunciation’ (i.e., the aim-inhibition of the drives demanded by human reality) is, despite appearances to the contrary, an unavoidable libidinal fate for all subjects

As such, the Freudian subject lives in a state of unsatisfactory compromise: sublimation provides pleasurable outlets for Trieb, but Trieb itself is incapable of ever being fully satisfied with these compromises, since they are, by the very deŽfinition of the mechanism of sublimation, deviations from the original cathetic trajectory (i.e., the ‘earliest state of affairs’ which all drives struggle in vain to recover; in the seventh seminar, Lacan designates this posited ‘ground zero’ of the libidinal economy das Ding).

The libidinal life of the human being is therefore marked by certain constitutive ‘lacks’ or ‘absences’—as Lacan puts it, the ‘sovereign Good’ of das Ding is always missing from the reality of subjective ‘ex-sistence’ — and this condition of (non-)existence is precisely what Lacan intends for his notion of ‘desire’ to designate.

Desire is the residual remainder/by-product of the subjection of jouissance (i.e., Trieb an sich, the unconditional attachment to das Ding) to the ego-mediated negotiations between the pleasure and reality principles.

Das Ding
But where does this take us? Is the Law the Thing? Certainly not. Yet I can only know of the Thing by means of the Law.

In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet it if the Law hadn’t said: ‘Thou shalt not covet it.’ But the Thing finds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. (Lacan, Book VII, p. 83).

 

fundamentalist

But are the terrorist fundamentalists really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the United States — the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the nonbelievers’ way of life.

If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by nonbelievers. Why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns.

He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the nonbelievers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. This is why the so-called fundamentalists of ISIS are a disgrace to true fundamentalism.

pluth logical time on badiou

Pluth, E. and Hoens, D. (2004) What if the Other is Stupid? Badiou and Lacan on ‘Logical Time’ In Think Again Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Edited by Peter Hallward. 182-190.

The enthusiast knows he or she is making claims that cannot be proved, but is courageous enough to proceed and is confident that the claim is true and that sufficient reasons for it will show up. The enthusiast is by definition modest. He or she has neither the modesty of someone who decides nothing (‘I cannot decide, there are not enough premises, I don’t have enough information, my knowledge is too limited’, etc.) nor the modesty of the fanatic who says that he or she is sure about a claim but that it is only a subjective point of view and that, of course, others may have another opinion (the contemporary, liberal ideology of tolerance, where everything is ‘an interesting opinion’).

The enthusiast is modest in making a claim precisely because of how he or she is positioned ‘on the way to’ truth. Or put differently, the enthusiast leaves the gap between the singular decision and a universal truth open until the situation changes in such a way that the singular can be universally assumed as ‘a given’.

Furthermore, the situation is limited by the way it is set up, and in particular by the fact that there are only two possibilities: either one is white or black. A’s entire reasoning process is based on these two possibilities. Whatever claim A then makes can already be verified within the terms of the situation.

While we have been trying to point out the similarities between Badiou’s theory of decision or intervention and the situation in ‘Logical Time’, the two don’t quite match, and the reason for this is very simple: there is no event in ‘Logical Time’. In the absence of an event, it is difficult to see what the act is based on.

Elsewhere in Badiou’s theory, of course, decisive acts, or truth-processes, are contingent upon events. By contrast, an event seems radically excluded from the situation of ‘Logical Time’, because there are only two signifiers, or two names, available (black or white), and they fully describe all the elements of the situation among which one has to choose.

Apart from these problems inherent to the situation described in ‘Logical Time’, the situation there does allow both Badiou and Lacan to show the importance of a singular moment of acting which precedes an intersubjective verification process.

This implies that the individual decision might be mistaken. What is important is what follows. Using the distinction between enthusiasm and fanaticism again, we see that there are two modes of acting: the enthusiast can enthusiastically make mistakes, but what will always differentiate the enthusiast from the fanatic is the way he or she fails.

The fanatic resembles a prisoner who might have learned the truth from a whisper in his ear by the prison warden. Like this prisoner, the fanatic does not go through the anxious moment of the act.

As Badiou formulates it, ‘only the intervener will know if there was something that happened’. A fanatic is not actually intervening, because he or she has not made a decision and therefore does not participate in a truth process.

Only someone who has decided can put a decision to the test. This reminds us of one of the commonly acknowledged features of enthusiasm: enthusiasm is contagious, it needs others with whom it can share its ‘divine insight’. The fanatic does not need others because in the end he or she is completely satisfied with a mystical union with supersensible truths.

Put in these terms, of course, no one would want to be a fanatic: fanaticism is pathological. Therefore, to avoid fanaticism, one might be inclined to think of the undecidable as something which ought to be preserved in its undecidability. The question then is whether such an advocate of the undecidable is really so very different from the fanatic.

Whereas the fanatic immediately embraces revelations that cannot be discussed, thereby negating the undecidable directly, the advocate of the undecidable would, in ‘Logical Time’, remain forever positioned in that uncomfortable, anxious moment of conclusion, never acceding to a process of verification, in fear of doing injustice to the truth-moment of anxiety.

The enthusiast goes through the truth-moment of anxiety, and remains faithful to that moment precisely by replying to it: by replying to it with an act. As Lacan puts it in his unpublished Seminar on anxiety: ‘to act is to pull a certitude out of anxiety’.

Put in these terms, of course, no one would want to be a fanatic: fanaticism is pathological. Therefore, to avoid fanaticism, one might be inclined to think of the undecidable as something which ought to be preserved in its undecidability.

The question then is whether such an advocate of the undecidable is really so very different from the fanatic. Whereas the fanatic immediately embraces revelations that cannot be discussed, thereby negating the undecidable directly, the advocate of the undecidable would, in ‘Logical Time’, remain forever positioned in that uncomfortable, anxious moment of conclusion, never acceding to a process of verification, in fear of doing injustice to the truth-moment of anxiety.

The enthusiast goes through the truth-moment of anxiety, and remains faithful to that moment precisely by replying to it: by replying to it with an act. As Lacan puts it in his unpublished Seminar on anxiety: ‘to act is to pull a certitude out of anxiety’.

At the opening of his discussion of ‘Logical Time’, Badiou declares that what is at stake for him is the fixing of an ‘irreducible gap’ between his theory and Lacan’s. We have shown that when it comes to an understanding of the act, both thinkers are quite similar. Where Badiou differs from Lacan is in his ability to draw explicit ethical and political lessons from the kind of act described in ‘Logical Time’. In political terms, Badiou’s conclusion implies adherence to a familiar Leninist principle:

When the popular insurrection bursts out, it is never because the calculable moment of this insurrection has come. It is because there is nothing left for it but to rise up, which is what Lenin said: there is a revolution when ‘those on the bottom’ no longer want to continue as before, and the evidence imposes itself, massively, that it is better to die standing than to live lying down. [Lacan’s] anecdote shows that it is the interruption of an algorithm that subjectivates, not its effectuation (TS 272–3).

Any revolutionary act must work with the troubling undecidability inherent to a symbolic universe, and acts precisely as a reply to the real of an event.

But as we have shown, Badiou nonetheless emphasizes the necessary struggle or work to be done to name this event. This process of naming eventually creates a new symbolic order whose operational closure, to use Lacanian terminology, will be ensured by other master signifiers.