{"id":12723,"date":"2014-04-14T13:43:01","date_gmt":"2014-04-14T17:43:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=12723"},"modified":"2014-04-16T21:27:31","modified_gmt":"2014-04-17T01:27:31","slug":"zupancic-2008-3-interventions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2014\/04\/14\/zupancic-2008-3-interventions\/","title":{"rendered":"zupan\u010di\u010d Why P? 2008 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zupan\u010di\u010d, Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis: 3 interventions<\/em> Aarhus University Press 2008.<\/p>\n

Freud discovered human sexuality<\/span> <\/strong>as a problem (in need of explanation), and not as something with which one could eventually explain every (other) problem. He \u2018discovered\u2019 sexuality<\/span> as intrinsically meaningless,<\/strong> and not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning.<\/p>\n

Three Essay on the Theory of Sexuality<\/em> (1905) remains a major text in this respect. If one needed to sum up its argument in a single sentence, the following would come close enough to the mark: (human) sexuality is a paradox-ridden deviation from a norm that does not exist<\/span><\/strong>. <\/p>\n

Freud starts with the discussion of \u2018sexual aberrations\u2019 … homosexuality, sodomy, paedophilia, fetishism, voyeurism, sadism, masochism, and so on. In discussing these \u2018perversions\u2019 and the mechanisms involved in them (basically the deviations in respect of the sexual object, which is supposed to be an adult person of the opposite sex, and deviations in respect of the sexual aim \u2013 supposedly reproduction) Freud\u2019s argument simultaneously moves in two directions.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, he extensively demonstrates how the \u2018aberrant\u2019<\/strong> mechanisms involved in these practices are very much present in what is considered to be \u2018normal\u2019 or \u2018natural\u2019 sexual behaviour. Insofar as they well integrated in what is considered to be \u2018normal\u2019 sexuality, they are not viewed as perversions.<\/p>\n

They are only considered as perverse aberrations if they become<\/span> altogether independent of the \u2018appropriate\u2019 sexual object and of the supposed sexual aim<\/strong>, if they become<\/span><\/strong> autonomous in their fragmented, partial aims that serve no meaningful purpose<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Freud would object, however, to the word \u2018become\u2019<\/span> <\/strong>\u2013 and this constitutes the second, crucial line of his argument. Drives are fragmented, partial, aimless and independent of their object<\/span> to start with<\/i><\/strong>. <\/b>They do not become such due to some ulterior deviation.<\/p>\n

The deviation of drives is a constitutive deviation. Freud writes that \u201cthe sexual drive<\/span> <\/strong>is in the first instance independent of its object<\/strong>; nor is its origin likely to be dues to its object\u2019s attractions.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is why \u201cfrom the point of view of psychoanalysis, the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating<\/span><\/strong> and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

… the central point of Freud\u2019s discovery was precisely that there is no \u2018natural\u2019 or pre-established place of human sexuality, that the latter is constitutively out-of-its-place, fragmented and dispersed, that it only exists in deviations from \u2018itself\u2019 or its supposed natural object, and that sexuality is nothing other than this \u2018out-of-placeness\u2019 of its constitutive satisfaction.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In other words, Freud\u2019s fundamental move was to de-substantialise sexuality<\/strong>: the sexual is not a substance to be properly described and circumscribed; it is the very impossibility of its own circumscription or delimitation<\/strong>. It can neither be completely separated from biological, organic needs and functions (since it originates within their realm, it starts off by inhabiting them), nor can it be simple reduced to them. Sexual is not a separate domain of human activity or life, and this why it can inhabit all the domains of human life. 10-11<\/p>\n

Psychoanalysis does, of course, start out from the vicissitudes of human beings, on which it focuses its investigations. What keeps it from becoming a kind of \u2018psychologised\u2019 human-interest philosophy, however, is precisely its discovery of, and insistence on the sexual<\/span><\/strong> as a factor of radical disorientation<\/strong>, a factor that keeps bringing into question all our representations of the entity called \u2018human being.\u2019<\/p>\n

In Freudian theory, the sexual<\/span><\/strong> … is the operator of the inhuman<\/strong>, the operator of de-humanisation or \u2018de-anthropomorphisation.\u2019\u00a0 This is what sweeps the ground for a possible theory of the subject as something other than simply another name for an individual or a \u2018person,\u2019 which is to say, for a universal theory of the subject that is not a neutral abstraction from all the particularities of the human but singular, concretely-universal point of their inherent contradiction.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In other words, it is precisely the sexual as the operator of the inhuman that opens the path of the universal, which psychoanalysis is often accused of missing because of its insistence on the sexual. What Freud calls the sexual<\/span> is thus not that which makes us human in any received meaning of this term, it is rather that which makes us subjects<\/strong>, or perhaps more precisely, it is coextensive with the emerging of the subject<\/strong>. 12<\/p>\n

Freedom and cause<\/strong><\/span>
\nWhen speaking about the philosophical and, more generally, social implications of psychoanalysis and of psychoanalytical theory, we cannot avoid the always rather tricky question of how the latter stands in relation to the notion of freedom<\/strong>. 21<\/p>\n

Is freedom a relevant issue at all for Lacanian psychoanalysis? On the face of it, one would not say so. Psychoanalysis seems to have little use for this notion; moreover it posits, at the very heart of its theory \u2013 at the point that concerns the constitution of the subject \u2013 the theory of the \u201cforced choice,\u201d\u00a0 which constitutes itself as a peculiar anamorphosis<\/strong><\/em>* of freedom.<\/p>\n

* a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image. A distorted projection or drawing that appears normal when viewed from a particular point or with a suitable mirror or lens.<\/em><\/p>\n

The choice, which is by definition supposed to imply a certain freedom, is precisely that through which the subject emerges as subjected to the symbolic order<\/span> and determined by it<\/strong>. 21<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the structure of this forced choice<\/span><\/strong> (illustrated by Lacan with the famous \u201cYour money or your life!\u201d<\/span><\/strong> does not only imply that there is no choice, and that we can in fact only choose one of the two things or lose both, but involves yet another turn of the screw. Even that which we forcibly choose emerges from this choice as necessarily curtailed (\u2018life without money\u2019 or, as the terms of this choice are posited by Lacan through the alternative \u2018being or meaning<\/strong>\u2019:<\/p>\n

the meaning of the subject in the symbolic field of the Other, deprived of what would link this meaning to the subject\u2019s being).<\/p>\n

The Lacanian theory of forced choice<\/span><\/strong> \u2013 also when further turned, as illustrated by the revolutionary slogan \u201cFreedom or death\u201d, where the only way to choose freedom is to choose death and thus show that you have freedom of choice \u2013 certainly offers many crucial elements that one can use in the critique of the ideological slogans of freedom and of free choice, which play such a significant role in the economic and political hegemony of late capitalism. 22<\/p>\n

What interests us here, however, is a different question:<\/span> does psychoanalysis allow for the possibility of a concept of freedom that would not only be irreducible to this logic of \u2018non-repressive\u2019 (yet all the more effective) mechanisms of constraints,<\/strong> but would even be able to counter the latter, or disarm them?<\/span><\/p>\n

In spite of all the attested \u2013 and one should perhaps add \u2013 \u2018healthy\u2019 pessimism of Freud and Lacan concerning a \u2018final solution\u2019 of individual and social conflicts and antagonisms, the fact remains that inscribed in both the theory and practice of psychoanalysis is the possibility of a real qualitative shift<\/span><\/strong>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

That is to say, of a shift that is not simple as exchange of one pathology for another (more acceptable), nor simple an understanding\/awareness of the mechanisms that determine us, but one that involves a tectonic shift in the very functioning of these mechanisms<\/span><\/strong>. <\/span><\/p>\n

And the possibility of this shift is not at all unrelated to the dimension of forced choice, it is not simply its other, but emerges only against its background [of the forced choice]. 22<\/p>\n

The idea, however, is not simply that of a \u2018free subject,\u2019 it is not about the notion of the subject that has freedom as one of its essential attributes, and can act \u2018freely,\u2019 Lacan never gets tired of repeating that subject is the effect of the structure, and in this sense it is anything but free<\/strong>. Yet the structure itself is far from being simply non-problematic, clear, or smooth-running. 22<\/p>\n

And perhaps the shortest definition of the subject in this theory would be that \u2018subject\u2019<\/span> <\/strong>is the conceptual name for that point of regularity<\/strong>, of substance, or of structure, in which the latter breaks down, or displays<\/strong> an inner difficulty, contradiction, negativity, contingency, interruption, or a lack of its own foundation<\/strong>.<\/span> Subject is the place where discontinuity, a gap, a disturbance, a stain becomes inscribed into a given causal chain<\/span><\/strong>. 22<\/p>\n

Hence \u2013 on the level of everyday\u00a0life \u2013 things like slips of the tongue, dreams, as well as jokes (surprisingly produced \u2018sense in nonsense\u2019) are the locus of the subject in the symbolic structure.<\/p>\n

They are also the locus where psychoanalysis introduces the notion of the cause.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jacques-Alain Miller has argued at some length that in psychoanalysis the question of the cause<\/strong> <\/span>rises precisely when something interrupts the smooth continuity of events<\/strong> :<\/p>\n

again, the examples range from most \u2018innocent\u2019 slips of the tongue to all kinds of ways in which different symptoms betray points of significant discontinuity.<\/p>\n

This puts the psychoanalytic use of the notion of cause outside its usual connection to lawfulness and regularity, and \u2013 perhaps \u2013 closer to the notion of freedom.<\/p>\n

The question of the cause appears precisely when a (\u2018causal\u2019) chain breaks up<\/strong>, which is to say that what is crucial for the concept of cause<\/strong><\/span> in psychoanalysis is the element of discontinuity<\/span>. 23<\/p>\n

From this perspective, it could be argues that for psychoanalysis the issue of freedom is closely connected to that of the cause<\/span><\/strong>: not with the absence of cause (as this relationship is often posited), but precisely with its presence or incidence.<\/p>\n

We could thus say that freedom only really appears when something has a cause<\/span><\/strong> (perhaps in both meanings that the word \u2018cause\u2019 has in many languages). 23<\/p>\n

between the two levels that psychoanalysis deals with (say the \u2018manifest\u2019 and the \u2018latent.\u2019 To use the Freudian terms) there is no smooth, immediate passage, just as there is no fixed key that could provide the translation of one level into the other. As Mladen Dolar has put this:<\/p>\n

The reconstruction of the latent text behind the strata of distortion is far from presenting us with the unconscious in persona. On the contrary, we are on the track of the unconscious only in the space between the two<\/strong>, in the irreducible interval between the manifest and the latent,<\/span><\/strong> in the surplus of distortion over the \u2018true\u2019 content<\/strong>, in the dream-work that produced the distortion.<\/p>\n

In other words: in principle, the distortion (as a form of discontinuity can be explained, related to its causes, yet besides the unconscious causes of distortion,<\/span> there is also something else at work here, something that we can call the unconscious as the cause of the distortion<\/strong>, as the surplus of the distortion over \u2018true\u2019 content<\/strong>, as a cause motivated by itself.<\/p>\n

Yet, as such, as causa sui<\/em><\/strong>, this cause only exists in the very relationship between the two levels (the manifest and the latent), and not independently of them<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In short, we are dealing with a cause that is linked to the existence of the two levels and to the constitutive gap between them, yet which is not directly determined by, irreducible to, either of them. It only exists as the articulation of their non-relationship<\/strong>. 24<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zupan\u010di\u010d, Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis: 3 interventions Aarhus University Press 2008. Freud discovered human sexuality as a problem (in need of explanation), and not as something with which one could eventually explain every (other) problem. He \u2018discovered\u2019 sexuality as intrinsically meaningless, and not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning. Three Essay on the … Continue reading “zupan\u010di\u010d Why P? 2008 1”<\/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":[125,24,72,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drive","category-lacan","category-objet-a","category-the-real"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12723","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=12723"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12764,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12723\/revisions\/12764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}