{"id":12755,"date":"2014-04-16T16:30:04","date_gmt":"2014-04-16T20:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=12755"},"modified":"2014-07-07T21:10:22","modified_gmt":"2014-07-08T01:10:22","slug":"zupancic-why-p-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2014\/04\/16\/zupancic-why-p-3\/","title":{"rendered":"zupan\u010di\u010d why P? 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

First let us situate on the same line the two elements that we arrived at in our discussion following different paths.<\/p>\n

First, the surplus (of) distortion,<\/p>\n

which at the same time disturbs and carries the relationship between the manifest and the latent content.<\/p>\n

Second, the falloff, the leftover of the conscious interpretation,<\/p>\n

which is not simply unconscious, but propels the work of the unconscious interpretation and is present in the unconscious formations as their \u2018formal\u2019 aspect (and not as a particular content), as the form of the distortion itself, its \u2018grammatical structure.\u2019<\/p>\n

To these two, we can add in the same line a third element, namely what psychoanalysis conceptualised with the notion of the drive<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The drive … embodies a fundamental inner split of all satisfaction, the non-relationship between demand and satisfaction, leading to the possibility of another, supplemental satisfaction. This has the effect of de-centring not so much the subject as the Other, and the de-centring at stake could be best formulated as follows: 31<\/p>\n

the subject never finds the satisfaction directly in the Other, yet he can only find it through the detour of the Other. This detour is irreducible. 32<\/p>\n

The drive is something other than the supposed solipsistic enjoyment, and one should conceptually distinguish between the two. 32 <\/p>\n

Without entering into a detailed discussion of this difference we can indicate a possible way of its articulation.<\/p>\n

Enjoyment<\/span><\/strong> (in the strong sense of the Lacanian jouissance) is ultimately always linked to repression, they mutually sustain each other \u2013 repression always protects some enjoyment, whereas enjoyment could also be said to protect certain repressions (and the persistence of symptoms beyond the deciphering of their unconscious meaning<\/strong> would belong to this category).<\/p>\n

The drive, on the other hand, is precisely not linked to repression as a \u2018solution\u2019 of the impasse of the non-relationship between the subject and the Other, since it exists precisely through and as the very \u2018life,\u2019 or articulation, of this non-relationship.<\/p>\n

These three elements, which are all different articulations of the same fundamental topology, are precisely the \u2018navel\u2019<\/span> <\/strong>(to borrow Freud\u2019s expression) through which the empirical life of every subject is related to its constitutive conditions in the Other.<\/p>\n

If we adopt the Lacanian name for this navel<\/span><\/strong>, namely the \u2018object small a<\/span><\/strong><\/em>,\u2019 we can formulate this dialectics as follows: if the concept of the Other<\/span> refers to symbolic coordinates that structure our word<\/strong> and provide its vocabulary, the object a<\/span> <\/em><\/strong>is always an effect of the Other.<\/p>\n

At the same time, however, it also incarnates a specific, singular point of this process, namely the point where the effect maintains an \u2018open line\u2019 with the symbolic structure that generates it, so that the latter is itself dependent, \u2018vulnerable\u2019 in respect to this object.<\/p>\n

In every formation of the unconscious<\/span><\/strong> one has to find, locate, and determine this<\/strong> navel<\/strong><\/span>, this object.<\/p>\n

In order to make any sense, the analysis of the unconscious formations thus relies upon the following double presupposition:<\/p>\n

1) the object in question can be detected and found in these formations, and<\/p>\n

2) something can be effectively changed, shifted through it<\/strong>, and not only explained.<\/p>\n

The object a<\/span><\/strong><\/em> is, for example, that element of a symptom through which the causality that led to it is kept alive in this symptom as the effect of a certain symbolic impasse.<\/p>\n

The symptom<\/span><\/strong><\/em> is thus, on the one hand, a rather rigid symbolic form (or ritual)<\/strong> that can be automatically triggered by certain circumstances, but in all this rigidity and automatism it is also \u2013 to use the fashionable expression \u2013 a continuous work in progress<\/strong>, it is the site at which the conflict determining the subject<\/strong> is still operating and continues to be played out in real time.<\/p>\n

The very existence of the symptom<\/span><\/strong> testifies to this conflict being still alive<\/strong>, and at the same time carries in itself the sensitive point of the structure to which it belongs. 32<\/p>\n

From here we can now return to Laplanche and to the point where we have decomposed the Laplanchian \u2018enigmatic message\u2019 into two moments<\/p>\n

1) the moment of the real<\/span> <\/strong>involved in the problematic character of the subject\u2019s relationship to the Other<\/span><\/strong>, and<\/p>\n

2) the moment in which this problematic character is posited in terms of an \u2018enigmatic message.\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

For what follows from here is an important psychoanalytic lesson for certain contemporary theories of ethics. 33<\/p>\n

The work of analysis proceeds in the direction of separating, untying these two things<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It is not only about interpreting, deciphering the \u2018true\u2019 meanings; the interpretation<\/span><\/strong> also has to produce its own limit<\/span><\/strong>, that is to say encircle and locate<\/strong> the very points that constitute the meaningless navel<\/span> <\/strong>of the field of meaning, or of the field of the Other, and induce a separation<\/span><\/strong> here. 33<\/p>\n

This separation<\/span><\/strong> implies, to put it simply, that<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0 the subject will not find the answer to what he is in the Other<\/span> <\/strong>(nor in himself), but is 2)\u00a0 only likely to find or encounter it in the form of an indivisible remainder<\/span><\/strong> of his actions in relation to the Other<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In this configuration, the Other<\/span> no longer appears as<\/strong> the Other<\/strong> <\/span>of an enigmatic message<\/strong>. 33<\/p>\n

The opacity of the field of the Other no longer \u2018interpellates\u2019 the subject to find its possible meanings, but should incite the engagement of the subject in his own destiny as always-already social, that is, as always-already taking place in the field of the Other and irreducibly connected to it.<\/p>\n

The crucial moment of<\/strong> \u2018separation\u2019<\/span> <\/strong>involved in psychoanalysis should be understood in this sense: not as a simple separation from the Other, from all symbolic structures and the social mediation of the subject\u2019s being, but as the separation<\/span> of the Other<\/span> from the object that drives its structure<\/strong>. 33<\/p>\n

Levinas<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

There is, however, a whole school of contemporary ethical reflection, inspired more or less directly by Emmanuel Levinas, which has as its central point precisely the affirmation (and fortification) of the enigma of the Other. 33<\/p>\n

In this ethics, the subject is confronted, or has to be confronted with, the enigma of the Other \u2013 a Demand in relation to which the subject is absolutely responsible. 33<\/p>\n

We have seen above how psychoanalysis brings to light the fact that the constitution of the enigma of the Other<\/span><\/strong>, the elevation of the latter to the place of an infinite enigmatic Demand, is the precise counterpart of (primal) repression<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This does not prevent repression from necessarily belonging to the constitution of the subject, neither does it mean that psychoanalysis must attempt to prevent it (in advance) at any price (rather, psychoanalysis always approaches it after the fact, by an operation of \u2018separation\u2019 performed on an already accomplished \u2018original\u2019 synthesis<\/strong>). 33<\/p>\n

However, to recognize the necessity of repression in the constitution of the subject is not the same as to promote repression to the rank of the highest ethical maxim. 34<\/p>\n

Which is exactly what the above mentioned ethics does. The ethics based on the Other as the locus of an infinite enigmatic demand\/message is an ethics that<\/span><\/strong> elevates repression to the level of the ethical principle<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In this sense, it is definitely foreign to the ethics of psychoanalysis.<\/p>\n

It is that ethics in which the infinite demand of the Other coincides with our \u2018infinite responsibility\u2019 as to the way in which we interpret the Demand of the Other, its enigma.
\nThe enigma of the Other demands our interpretation (and the engagement that follows from it), but at the same time we are absolutely responsible for this interpretation (and hence for our actions).<\/p>\n

This is also the point at which this ethic situates freedom. As formulated by Levinas, the human will \u201cis free to assume this responsibility in whatever sense it likes: it is not free to refuse this responsibility itself.\u201d We are dealing with something that could be described as infinite, never-ending interpretation \u2013 the production of the unconscious \u2013 and our infinite responsibility for it.<\/p>\n

The responsibility is thus essentially double responsibility, or unconditional duty, to interpret, and at the same time the responsibility for the way in which we interpret.<\/p>\n

In spite of all the emphasis that this ethics puts on the original and central place of the figure of the (radical) Other, the latter is somehow reduced to a catalyst via which the subject comes to know his unconscious and assumes responsibility for it (and keeps generating more of it). 34<\/p>\n

The enigma of the Other appears as the point through which the subject refers to itself via the constitutive interval of interpretation. 34<\/p>\n

Quite differently from this perspective, psychoanalysis supplements the work of (possibly endless) interpretation with the gesture described above, separating<\/span><\/strong> the meaningless object<\/strong>, which drives the machinery of meaning, from the site where the meaning is constituted<\/strong> (the Other<\/span><\/strong>); it separates<\/span><\/strong> the meaningless object that functions as generator of meaning<\/strong> from the semantics of words and gestures<\/span><\/strong>. 34<\/p>\n

This separation is something very different from the infinite responsibility with which the subject actively but never altogether successfully \u2018fills in\u2019 the lack in the Other. This logic of endlessly supplementing the lack in the Other, which has the effect of intensifying the Demand of the Other, is what brings Levinasian ethics dangerously close to what Freud describes as the vicious circle of the superego. The following passage is most eloquent in this respect: 34<\/p>\n

Duties become greater in the measure that they are accomplished. The better I accomplish my duty, the fewer rights I have, the more I am just, the more guilty I am. 35 [Lacan]<\/p>\n

According to Freud, the superego (as \u2018internalised authority\u2019) has precisely this same vicious way of behaving: the more virtuous the man is, the more severely and distrustfully it behaves, \u201cso that ultimately it is precisely those people who have carried saintliness furthest who reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness.\u201d<\/p>\n

As we have already stressed, the separation<\/span><\/strong> involved in psychoanalysis is something other than this kind of infinite responsibility (that increases by being accomplished). 35<\/p>\n

It rather induces something like a singular, and quite precise, responsibility<\/strong> \u2014 responsibility in relation to this singular object<\/strong> which is not the Other, but which is the decentred point through which the Other, and its corresponding subjectivity, are being maintained or not.<\/p>\n

This is also the point to which psychoanalysis relates the question of the cause, as well as the question of freedom, which becomes the question of a singular causality<\/strong>: a causality that is not a \u2018causality through the subject,\u2019 not a \u2018causality through the Other,\u2019 but a causality through object<\/span><\/strong><\/em>. 35<\/p>\n

****<\/p>\n

Psychoanalysis starts as an interpretation of symptoms. Yet, insofar as these symptoms are themselves already an interpretation, connection, synthesis of different elements, the work of analysis is actually the work of de-interpretation.<\/p>\n

In this respect, one can only agree with Laplanches\u2019s emphasis on the radically analytical character of psychoanalysis (as method). Synthesis is always on the side of repression. Freud\u2019s capital discovery in relation to dreams and their interpretation was the rejection of their supposed symbolism and of the existence of a key to their interpretation.<\/p>\n

Free associations are something very different: they disintegrate a more or less coherent story, take its elements in utterly divergent directions, introduce new elements, etc. Whereas symbolism makes the free associations silent.<\/p>\n

We should add, however, that this interpretation as de-interpretation and unbinding is not the whole story \u2013 there is also the crucial operation of separation<\/span><\/strong>, which consists in circumscribing and isolating the very split that sustains this\u00a0infinite production of meaning ( and its interpretation), and which is not itself an element of meaning. 35<\/p>\n

Isolating this split as such amounts to isolating the drive and its object<\/strong><\/span>. 36<\/p>\n

This does not mean, however, that the object-drive is simply an \u2018elementary particle\u2019 which remains when analytical unbinding (interpretation as de-interpretation, the untying of the symptomatic ties) is realized to its \u2013 more or less \u2013 bitter end. 36<\/p>\n

It suffices to briefly recall Freud\u2019s theory of the constitution of the drive from the inner split of (the satisfaction of) need, or else the Lacanian conceptualisation of the drive through the divergence between goal and aim (encapsulated in the formula that the drive finds it satisfaction without attaining its aim) \u2013 it suffices to recall this in order to grasp that the drive is an elementary form of the split<\/strong> (and not an elementary particle).<\/p>\n

It is the divergence\/split that is elementary, i.e. more elementary than its \u2018particles.\u2019<\/strong> The object of drive is the split,<\/span><\/strong> the gap itself as object.<\/span> <\/strong>36<\/p>\n

As counterintuitive as it might sound, this topology (the split somehow precedes that which is split in it) is indeed crucial for an understating of the<\/strong> drive<\/span><\/strong>, especially if we bear in mind that, at bottom, this split entails nothing less than the division between the mental and the physical and their possible articulation.<\/p>\n

If we take this division in its largest sense, as the division between \u2018nature\u2019 and \u2018culture,\u2019 we could say that psychoanalysis discovered the drive as the point of the short circuit between the two terms.<\/p>\n

Yet what does this mean? Does it mean that we can define human beings as the zone where the two realms overlap? Although not altogether false, this formulation can be strongly misleading and wide open to religious reading of human beings as composed of two principles of the natural (or material) and the spiritual. 36<\/p>\n

The crucial point to make is that what is at stake is not an overlapping of two already well-established entities, but an intersection which is generative<\/strong> <\/span>of both sides that overlap in it. 36<\/p>\n

In other words, human beings are not composed of the biological and the symbolic<\/strong> or of the physical and the metaphysical \u2013 the image of composition is misleading.<\/p>\n

Human beings are rather so many points where the difference between these two elements, as well as the two elements themselves as defined by this difference, are generated, and where the relationship between the two dimensions thus generated is being constantly negotiated (posited, re-posited, repeated, solidified, defined, and redefined).<\/p>\n

From this perspective, there is no \u2018pure life\u2019 (pure nature) or \u2018pure symbolic\u2019 prior to this curious intersection or split.<\/p>\n

The generating point of the symbolic is this paradoxical joint, and the symbolic as a wholly independent, autonomous realm, is something produced \u2013 it is produced at the periphery of the movement generated by the intersection and retroactively affects it own point of generation, its own \u2018birth,\u2019 so to say.<\/p>\n

And the drive is intrinsically connected to this split as such, to the split as elementary \u2013 more elementary than the \u2018elements\u2019 that split in it<\/span><\/strong>. 37<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This has yet another important consequence. If drive<\/strong> is the elementary form of the split that is itself a tie, a copula. The drive<\/strong> is the incidence of a fundamental heterogeneity<\/strong> which, through the very operating of the drive, is maintained as heterogeneity within the very field to which it is heterogeneous. 37<\/p>\n

The drive is a tie with a radical otherness<\/strong>, a tie that functions beyond \u2013 or perhaps more precisely: on this side \u2013 of the tie provided by meaning (the transformation of this heterogeneity into a Message, an enigmatic Demand, etc.). 37<\/p>\n

The drive is the split, the heterogeneity as the form of a tie that is not the form of meaning\/message. 37<\/p>\n

The point I have attempted to make is thus the following<\/strong> the dismantling of the ties practised by analysis (interpretation as de-interpretation) stumbles against another, different kind of tie, which is isolates and where it stops: it stumbles against the tie that irreducibly binds the subject<\/span> and the Other<\/span><\/strong> in an element that is heterogeneous to both; is stumbles against the subject of the drive<\/span><\/strong> that binds the self and the otherness in their very split, in their very heterogeneity, as the point of their (inner) dialectics on \u2018montage.\u2019 37<\/p>\n

The big question, the \u2018million dollar question<\/strong>,\u2019 that necessarily arises here is of course, this:<\/p>\n

can this singular type function as the ground of any social tie, or is the latter [social tie ]always based on the repression of the former [singular type]?\u00a0<\/span> <\/strong><\/p>\n

I will not answer this question here, but will say something else instead. If there is any intrinsic politics of psychoanalysis<\/strong>, it consists in insisting on its work of unbinding<\/span> <\/strong>and of separation<\/span><\/strong> (in the sense sketched out above), and in not succumbing to the following criticism, which is becoming louder and louder: 37<\/p>\n

psychoanalysis only disintegrates, dismantles, separates, it is obsessed with negativity and lack, it never amounts to any affirmative, positive project (be it political or simply \u2018human\u2019) 37<\/p>\n

The politics of psychoanalysis today should be to not yield to this (by trying to \u2018nevertheless\u2019 propose something \u2018positive\u2019), but to pursue its work of analysis which has always had an intrinsically social character. 37<\/p>\n

Does this mean that psychoanalysis has to obtain from passing any kind of social judgment and to uncritically accept, if not even actively support, the contemporary disintegration of social ties, the crumbling of solidarity and of collective projects, the spectacle of the social tissue breaking into tiny pieces, small individual islands of enjoyment? 37<\/p>\n

I believe that it has to do something else,\u00a0 namely to critically examine this diagnosis itself, the diagnosis that should raise suspicion already on account of its being so gladly embraced by everybody, by those on the right and those on the left, by the rich and the poor, the religious and the not religious, the exploited and the exploiters. 38<\/p>\n

Do we really live in the time of an accelerated dissolution of the social ties and of the emergence of an untied multitude of individuals as solipsistic islands of enjoyment? 38<\/p>\n

What we could say, for example, is this: the existence of the multiplicity of individuals as solipsistic islands of enjoyment is precisely the form of existence of the contemporary social link. The socio-economic mobilization of individuals may not take the same form as 100 or 200 years ago, yet this is not to say that it doesn\u2019t take place and that we are not \u2014 as individuals with our own way of enjoyment \u2014 very much engaged in \u2018feeding\u2019 the present social link, which bind us to itself, and to each another.<\/p>\n

Here we should stress again what we have already indicated: that perhaps the crucial mistake lies in the fact that we are too fast and too willing to understand enjoyment as something essentially \u2018atavistic,\u2019 solipsistic, or simple a-social, cut off from the field of the Other.<\/p>\n

Contrary to this, we should recognize the point where \u2014 through the dialectics of repression and its maintenance \u2014 enjoyment is very much linked to the Other and is always \u2014 already social.<\/p>\n

More precisely: the subject of enjoyment does not need the Other<\/span><\/strong>, except at the point where the latter, with its \u2018bare\u2019 existence, guarantees the repression that the enjoyment \u2018needs\u2019 in order to emerge as enjoyment<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

What is going on and what is being described as a non-belief in the existence of the Other, as a situation in which the symbolic Other no longer has any hold on us<\/strong>, is in fact a situation that should be described slightly differently: namely that the Other no longer has any hold on us in the guise of a concrete, \u2018small\u2019 other.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In other words, what is abandoned is the possibility of the link or short-circuit between an other and the Other, the possibility to believe that a \u2018small\u2019 other can be the very mode of existence of the big Other. No concrete person (parent, teacher, president, etc.) is truly an instance of the Other, because s\/he is always only human, inconsistent, if not altogether weak and pathetic<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Should we not see and recognize here a rather spectacular operation of saving the big Other? 39<\/p>\n

We are indeed dealing with a rather panicked conservation of the Other as utterly inactive, but also as utterly un-compromised, intact, absolute; the symbolic order (which is principally \u2018our\u2019 economic order) appears as a playground within which we are free to change anything we want, to play with different possibilities and endless variations, yet we are utterly powerless in relation to the crucial parameters of this socio-economic structure itself (there is no sensitive point, no \u2018hold\u2019 by means of which one could shift it and change its coordinates).<\/p>\n

This also implies \u2014 to return to the starting point of this paper \u2014 a radical foreclosure of the cause, of the object-cause, and thus of any concrete form of freedom<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In other words, freedom loses its relation to cause<\/strong> and becomes an abstract form of the \u2018freedom of choice,\u2019 which promotes the subject to the doubtful status of the container of supposedly authentic inclinations and preferences.<\/p>\n

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

Zupan\u010di\u010d, Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis: 3 interventions. Aarhus University Press 2008. First let us situate on the same line the two elements that we arrived at in our discussion following different paths. First, the surplus (of) distortion, which at the same time disturbs and carries the relationship between the manifest and the latent content. Second, the … Continue reading “zupan\u010di\u010d why P? 3”<\/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":[111,125,112,72,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desire","category-drive","category-foreclosure","category-objet-a","category-subjectivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12755","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=12755"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12984,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12755\/revisions\/12984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}