Demanding the Impossible: Desire and Social Change
Volume 20, Number 1 2009
doi 10.1215/10407391-2008-015
d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
What is the relationship between desire and social change?
the ethical stance or subjective position of an individual might incite a change of position in other people
The larger question these examples raise is whether the subjective stance of one person can initiate broad change or inspire collective action by means other than the group psychology: in other words, not by appealing to a particular set of values or ideals, or by cementing the group through identification or libidinal cathexes, or by offering some kind of external or even transcendental foundation for the ego, but by foregrounding the experience of the willing subject.
One can be determined to live a good or a moral or a selfless life, and yet this determination often fails inasmuch as it is fundamentally in conflict with an unconscious position, which it attempts to repress or control.
Desire, on the other hand, supposes the subject of the unconscious: it is not sustained by identification with something “outside” the subject that would allow it to repress the drives or facilitate its refusal to know anything about the unconscious. When Lacan offers as a formulation of the ethics of psychoanalysis the imperative not to give up on one’s desire—ne pas céder sur son désir—he suggests that desire is what admits of no compromise or concession, and that it therefore always bears some relation to death (Ethics 319).
Hallward is interested not in the role of the ideal in soliciting identification, but in the force of will and the voluntarist dimension of change. His examples are all the more provocative in that they include not only the great leaders who have given their names to religious and political movements but individuals working in relative obscurity whose apparently very modest acts have unexpectedly brought about important social transformations
I propose to take a more psychoanalytic approach to the problem by considering the individual act not principally as an instance of will or determination, but for the way it lays bare the stakes of desire. What distinguishes desire from determination or will?
What distinguishes desire from determination or will?
The interest of the question “What would Jesus do?” for example, is that it makes an implicit distinction between Jesus as a support for identification and Jesus as a subject of desire. The question supposes a kind of immovability in the desire of Jesus, something nonnegotiable: it implies that Jesus would not make concessions, that he would not waver.
If the answer to the question is somehow obvious, it is not because it concerns some specific content or principle, but because desire is an orientation or a stance with respect to the impossible object that causes it, and not a response to a particular case or circumstance.
The question is of a very different order than “What would Jesus say?” or “What would Jesus teach?” because it isn’t a matter of ideals, agendas, or programs.
It is also different from “What would Jesus want?” or “What would Jesus tell you to do?” because it is not a matter of demands or of satisfying a leader or an idealized role model by doing what we think he wants.
Desire gives rise to a new object, an object that did not exist before, that intervenes in the world so as to transform it
it is fidelity to an impossible cause of desire, not fidelity to a constituency
Desire is an orientation or a stance with respect to the impossible object that causes it, and not a response to a particular case or circumstance
Desire presents a challenge because it concerns the status of the act and not the affirmation of ideals or beliefs. It makes us aware of how the ideals we espouse make it possible not to act.
how desire differs from the idealizing love at stake in identification and therefore about its transformative potential.
Anxiety is the affect of psychoanalysis, because it responds to the analyst’s desire to know by overcoming the censorship applied to unconscious thoughts. Only by traversing this anxiety can the subject come to have another knowledge about what is happening to him or her, and thus find liberation from the repetition-compulsion of the fantasy.
Desire must find expression in an act or in the production of a new object that intervenes in the world so as to transform it.
This is the essence of sublimation, in which the absolutely singular and subjective nature of desire manages to find expression in the production of an object that is collectively valorized.
The “great man” is someone whose object constitutes a sublimation not only for himself but for his age.
Each of the examples I have discussed bears witness to the tension between the anxiety induced by desire and the effects it produces, and the restorative tendency to silence or efface that desire and to shore up the ego. They also qualify the possible optimism about social change by reinforcing the extent to which this change occurs at an individual level, through a painstaking process of self-overcoming that is by no means certain and that only occurs in a minority of cases.
Religious history in particular suggests that it is much easier to hide behind the ideal ego or to take comfort in the illusion of the all-powerful father than to confront the Other’s desire or absence. This is why psychoanalysis is ultimately pessimistic about the possibility of social change and hesitates to affirm the social beyond the “minimal social link” inaugurated by the transference. If the members of the group do not also traverse castration, the anxiety that results from the confrontation with the Other’s desire will simply provoke repression and violence, and not a change of position.
anxiety is the affect of freedom
But while the desire of the founder may not be sufficient in and of itself to incite change, these examples also make clear that the anxiety it induces can have a transformative effect.
This is because it exposes the profound freedom of an act founded on desire, in and beyond the castration or lack it implies. Translated into a more existential idiom, my argument is really that anxiety is the affect of freedom.
Freud sees in Moses a free man, one who threw off the shackles of superstition and nature worship to create a space for the subject as something other than a product of nature or the object of a capricious deity.
Desire is what is most free in the subject, because it involves a liberation from the fantasy of seduction and its particular colonization of the psychic object. Freud sees in Moses a free man, one who threw off the shackles of superstition and nature worship to create a space for the subject as something other than a product of nature or the object of a capricious deity.
While Jewish legend promotes the idea that Moses is the chosen instrument of God, the much more interesting truth is that the man Moses invents something new for civilization: something we can all draw upon and that no God can take away. The difference between ideals and desire is the difference between ascribing their freedom to an omnipotent God and assuming responsibility for that freedom themselves.
In the same way, Freud himself will attempt to free the subject of the unconscious from the shackles of morality and to prevent its reduction to an object of scientific observation.
But he makes clear that this freedom can come only through traversing anxiety and not avoiding it. It is a difficult freedom, whose stakes are nowhere better expressed than in the words imputed to Jesus: “I lay down my life in order to take it up again.”
While these words have been interpreted by many as a promise of eternal life, I believe that the anxiety and solitude with which Jesus approaches his own death points to a more difficult interpretation. His act emphasizes that there is something more than “mere life” and that desire opens onto a life that can be accessed only by traversing death. In a similar vein, the practice of psychoanalysis is founded on the supposition that true freedom comes only from traversing the death drive and not repressing or avoiding it.
desire finds expression in an act or in the production of a new object that intervenes in the world so as to transform it
Freud invents a mechanism that allows the analysand to free himself by confronting castration. But the end of analysis could be construed not merely as a liberation but as a call to change the world by demanding that it make place for a new object.
It involves the assumption of the truth that there is no object for desire, but more importantly, the necessity of constructing a new object: if there is no object or aim that would satisfy desire, this also means that desire is not bound by any existing object and is therefore innately transcendent. The logical conclusion of an analysis supposes that desire finds expression in an act or in the production of a new object that intervenes in the world so as to transform it.
But as Hallward reveals through the simple example of a man who clears space for a new soccer field, this new object need not be something so lofty. What is important is that it create a space for the subject, a space that was not there before. The creation of this new object gives rise to social change without even aspiring to do so, because it is not guided by ideals or goals, but by the desire of a subject.
The creation of this new object gives rise to social change without even aspiring to do so, because it is not guided by ideals or goals, but by the desire of a subject.
Tracy McNulty 2013
The New man’s Fetish The Southern Journal of Philosophy Volume 51, Spindel Supplement 2013
