{"id":12378,"date":"2013-12-11T21:21:30","date_gmt":"2013-12-12T02:21:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=12378"},"modified":"2013-12-11T22:37:09","modified_gmt":"2013-12-12T03:37:09","slug":"12378","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/12\/11\/12378\/","title":{"rendered":"foucault copjec"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Lane, “The Experience of the Outside: Foucault and Psychoanalysis” Lacan in America<\/em> edited by Jean-Michel Rabat\u00e9, New York: Other Press, 2000. 309-348.<\/p>\n

the subject is constructed by forces lying beyond conscious apprehension and social meaning. 321<\/p>\n

The difficulty of establishing where psychoanalysis stands relative to experience and its interpretation not only haunted Foucault’s career but partly determined it. One strand of Foucault’s intellectual project was aimed at complicating historical materialism by building on Nietzsche’s work. Another strand\u2014tied conceptually to the first\u2014focused on challenging the intellectual sovereignty in France of Jean-Paul Sartre. But a third and less successful strand devolved on establishing the importance of psychoanalysis for modern thought without at the same time endorsing Lacan’s “return to Freud.”<\/p>\n

In refusing the psychoanalytic argument that sexuality isn’t determined wholly by discourse and social practices, however, Foucault could understand the ontological difficulty of sexuality only the way antiquity represented this phenomenon \u2014 that is, as an “effect.. . of errors of regimen [les erreurs de regime]” (UP, p. 16; UPS, p. 23).<\/p>\n

Foucault’s insistence even here in approaching sexuality from primarily a culturalist perspective exacerbated his self-acknowledged difficulties. Yet his commitment to engaging some of the psychic repercussions of subjectivation \u2014 which dovetailed into his study of the modes of subjection (mode d’assujettisement, G, p. 353) \u2014 ironically obliged him to return to psychoanalysis for a better understanding of their diverse effects. I am suggesting that throughout Foucault’s career this pincer-like approach to psychoanalysis overdetermined his perspective on subjectivity. While his first published essay critiqued works by Ludwig Binswanger and Freud, for example, it didn’t dispute the appearance or effect of the unconscious. 328<\/p>\n

While subtle differences therefore arise between The Archaeology of Knowledge<\/em> (1969) and Discipline and Punish<\/em> (1975) concerning the role of the dispositif … <\/em> the thread linking these books is Foucault’s suggestion that “[t]he individual is the product of power.” The underside to this conception of subjectivity \u2014 and, perhaps, the obvious extension of it is the near-metaphysical idea that subjectivity, once freed from outside regulation, would lack “inner conviction”<\/strong> (MF, pp. 89,42). This idea surfaces periodically in Foucault’s 1954 essay on dreams, and it culminates logically with the demand that subjectivity be let alone, whether to silence, abstraction, or pleasure. 331<\/p>\n

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

“The fundamental thesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis,” adds Zizek, “is that what we call ‘reality’ constitutes itself against the background of [symbolic] ‘bliss,’ i.e., of such an exclusion of some traumatic Real. This is precisely what Lacan has in mind when he says that fantasy is the ultimate support of reality: ‘reality’ stabilizes itself when some fantasy frame of a ‘symbolic bliss’ closes off the view into the abyss of the Real<\/span><\/strong>.” \u017di\u017eek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 118<\/p>\n

… psychoanalysis departs conclusively from materialist accounts of reality and consciousness, as well as from related critiques of reality’s many shortcomings. By insisting on the ego’s basic ” [in]aptitude for dealing with reality,” Bersani \u2014 like Freud and Lacan \u2014 shows us why the subject’s alienation is neither explained nor repaired by altering the diverse forms of political oppression that impede and partly shape us, an argument quite different from the frequent and unjustified claim that psychoanalysis is uninterested in our oppression.<\/p>\n

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

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

The Psychic Life of Power<\/em> displays at the outset ambivalence about the psychoanalytic argument that only a nonsocial factor \u2014 the drive \u2014 is capable of determining psychic life.<\/span><\/strong> More important for us here, The Psychic Life of Power <\/em>restates the logic of external causation<\/strong>, which paradoxically restores in principle the forms of social influence that 1 am challenging here. For invaluable discussion of this point, published just before this essay went to press, see S. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology<\/em> (New York: Verso, 1999), especially pp. 247-312.<\/p>\n

Although this faith in the influence of external causes relies erroneously on the ego’s capacity for congruency with the outside, I should stress that in opposing this faith I am<\/strong>
\nnot refuting the influence of external factors<\/strong>. To do so would undercut my emphasis on the asymmetry of psychical and physical reality; it would reproduce another form of voluntarism, generating precisely the characterizations of psychoanalysis that I am objecting to here. The fantasy that the ego determines consciousness slips easily into solipsism and<\/strong> epistemic relativism, a fantasy that we simply make our own reality.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am objecting<\/strong> instead to the crass suggestion\u2014voiced repeatedly by constructivists and Foucauldians\u2014that subjectivity is merely an “effect” of discourse, a suggestion that renders subjectivity politically transparent, devoid of drives and unconscious causes.<\/span><\/strong> 343<\/p>\n

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

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

As he argued in “Negation,” building on a related and now famous claim in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality:<\/p>\n

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

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

“The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it<\/span><\/strong>” (p. 222).<\/p>\n

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

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

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

Lacan of course agreed, arguing in the 1930s \u2014 long before Foucault began publishing \u2014 that the very idea of “sacrifice” is both manipulative and delusive, insofar as “adaptation” merely substitutes one fantasy about reality for another.<\/p>\n

JOAN COPJEC SPEAKS<\/p>\n

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

In fact, it is the permanent loss of that reality\u2014or<\/strong> real<\/span><\/strong>: a reality that was never present as such\u2014that is the precondition for determining the objective status of our perceptions<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Not only is the real<\/span><\/strong> unavailable for comparison with our perceptions but, Freud concedes, we can assume that the latter are always somewhat distorted, inexact. \u00a0 [<em>Read My Desire<\/em>, p. 233]<\/p>\n

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

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

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

That the ego exists in relation to a structural m\u00e9connaissance<\/em> overturns all existing claims about false consciousness: “By definition,” Lacan says in Seminar II, “there is something so improbable about all existence that one is in effect perpetually questioning oneself about its reality.”<\/p>\n

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

What Freud brings to our attention here is that repression’s importance lies less in what we contain, than in what we can’t evade<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

“I’d say that that is the very essence of the Freudian discovery,” remarks Lacan in Seminar I.<\/p>\n

To put this another way, repression<\/span><\/strong>, for psychoanalysis, doesn’t signify what we can possess of the past; it dramatizes the effort it takes to accomplish forgetting, to remove or dislodge us from a past\u2014and thus a history \u2014 that threatens to overwhelm us. <\/strong><\/p>\n

This claim points up a form of difficulty that isn’t altered or resolved by will, whether individual or collective, and the difficulty helps us refute the simplistic objection that psychoanalysis is ahistorical. … our failure to rid ourselves of the past is one of the factors binding us involuntarily to history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christopher Lane, “The Experience of the Outside: Foucault and Psychoanalysis” Lacan in America edited by Jean-Michel Rabat\u00e9, New York: Other Press, 2000. 309-348. the subject is constructed by forces lying beyond conscious apprehension and social meaning. 321 The difficulty of establishing where psychoanalysis stands relative to experience and its interpretation not only haunted Foucault’s career … Continue reading “foucault copjec”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125,32,24,15,41,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drive","category-foucault","category-lacan","category-subjectivity","category-the-real","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12378"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12384,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12378\/revisions\/12384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}