{"id":12794,"date":"2014-04-20T10:19:27","date_gmt":"2014-04-20T14:19:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=12794"},"modified":"2014-04-20T10:54:13","modified_gmt":"2014-04-20T14:54:13","slug":"zupancic-unconscious-not-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2014\/04\/20\/zupancic-unconscious-not-mother\/","title":{"rendered":"zupan\u010di\u010d not-mother pt 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zupan\u010di\u010d, Alenka. Not-Mother: On Freud\u2019s Verneinung.<\/a> E-flux Journal 2012<\/p>\n

The negation itself is negated (we could say that we now get something like, “this is not not-mother”), yet something of it persists \u2014 the repression, the symptoms persist beyond becoming conscious of the repressed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Here, we come across one of the crucial (and constitutive) discoveries of psychoanalysis, without which the latter would be little more than a hermeneutics of the unconscious, depending entirely on the (correct) interpretation, or translation, of the text deformed by the unconscious into its full and nondeformed version.<\/p>\n

Soon after his early enthusiasm that things might indeed work this way, Freud came up against the problem that they actually don’t, that the right interpretation (and its acceptance) doesn’t yet eliminate the symptom<\/strong>, and that the real kernel of the unconscious is not to be situated \u2014 in the case of dreams, for example \u2014 in the latent content, as opposed to the manifest content, and as “deciphered” from it<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

For our present purposes, and at this stage, this could be formulated as follows: We can accept the (repressed) content, eliminate it, but we cannot eliminate the structure of the gap, or crack, that generates it<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This irreducible crack becomes visible precisely through double negation, as its “indivisible remainder.” For we are dealing precisely with something like, “it is not not-mother,”<\/span><\/strong> and this double negation circumscribes something that makes it irreducible to simply “mother”<\/span><\/strong> (or her absence).<\/p>\n

“It is not not-mother”<\/span> is not the same as “(it is) mother,”<\/span> <\/strong>a difference that is crucial for psychoanalysis, since the unconscious is to be situated precisely in this odd, fragile dimension.<\/p>\n

Lacan pointed out the flip side that the term “unconscious” has on account of its being
\nnegative, that is, the negative opposite of “conscious.”<\/p>\n

More importantly, it is because the unconscious is to be situated in this “third” and odd dimension that Lacan says at some point that the status of the unconscious is not ontical but ethical<\/span><\/strong>: Ontically, the unconscious is the elusive (l’inconscient c’est l’\u00e9\u008evasif) \u2014 “but we are beginning to circumscribe it in a structure, a temporal structure, which, it can be said, has never yet been articulated as such.”<\/p>\n

The unconscious is not an alternative reality into which we could translate the slips and symptoms of our reality. Going back to the discussed example, we could also claim that what the patient wanted to say is precisely what he said<\/span>. It was neither someone other than mother nor mother; rather, it was the<\/strong> “not-mother,”<\/span><\/strong> or “the mother-not.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is an excellent joke told at some point in Ernest Lubitsch’s film Ninotchka (1939), which I’ve already used in my paper on “Sexual Difference and Ontology.” Yet it would be difficult to avoid referring to it again here, since there is hardly any better way to get a grip on the singular object “mother-not.”<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A guy goes into a restaurant and says to the waiter: “Coffee without cream, please.” The waiter replies: “I am sorry sir, but we are out of cream. Could it be without milk?”<\/em><\/p>\n

This joke carries a certain real<\/span><\/strong>, even a certain truth about the real, which has to do precisely with the singular negativity<\/strong> introduced or discovered by psychoanalysis.<\/p>\n

A negation of something that is neither pure absence nor pure nothing nor simply the complementary of what it negates.<\/p>\n

At the moment it is spoken there remains a trace of that which is not<\/span><\/strong>. This is a dimension that is introduced (and made possible) by the signifier yet is irreducible to it.<\/p>\n

It has (or can have) a positive, albeit spectral, quality, which can be formulated in the precise terms of “with without (cream)” as irreducible to both alternatives (cream\/no cream).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zupan\u010di\u010d, Alenka. Not-Mother: On Freud\u2019s Verneinung. E-flux Journal 2012 The negation itself is negated (we could say that we now get something like, “this is not not-mother”), yet something of it persists \u2014 the repression, the symptoms persist beyond becoming conscious of the repressed. Here, we come across one of the crucial (and constitutive) discoveries … Continue reading “zupan\u010di\u010d not-mother pt 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":[72,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-objet-a","category-unconscious"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12794","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=12794"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12804,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12794\/revisions\/12804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}