{"id":6669,"date":"2011-02-15T13:10:04","date_gmt":"2011-02-15T18:10:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=6669"},"modified":"2011-02-15T15:11:26","modified_gmt":"2011-02-15T20:11:26","slug":"6669","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2011\/02\/15\/6669\/","title":{"rendered":"primal father realtight"},"content":{"rendered":"

Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists<\/em>. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1994.<\/p>\n

The startling claim made by Lacan is that the structures he is diagraming are real<\/strong>. This claim can only have met with the same incomprehension that it continues to elicit today. For those schooled in structuralism, which teaches us to think of structure as nearly synonymous with symbolic<\/strong><\/em>, the proposition presents itself as a solecism, an abuse of language. Lacan was not, naturally, ignorant of the structuralist position, which he shared at the beginning of his teaching . Later, however, his work aimed at critiquing this position, and his argument to the students and to us could at this point be formulated thus : you are right to rebel against structuralism, to complain that it diagrams only moribund relations. You are therefore right to proclaim that structures don’t march in the streets<\/strong> but not for the reasons you think. For the point is not, by changing your analytical model, to make structures take to the streets, to understand them as embedded or immanent in social reality. The point is rather to heed the lesson the original model had to teach:<\/p>\n

structures do not and should not-take to the streets. They are not to be located among the relations that constitute our everyday reality; they belong, instead, to the order of the real<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This argument may be too abstract, even still. What, you may wonder, would an analysis that proceeds from this assumption look like? What difference does it make to our understanding of the actual functioning of a society? In order to answer these questions , we ask you to contemplate two examples of just such an analysis. Each is drawn from the work of Freud, and, significantly, each is associated with an inglorious history of ridicule and incomprehension. Our suggestion is that it is the proposition that underwrites them-” structures are real, ” or “every phenomenal field occludes its cause” which causes them to be so radically unassimilable within, and such valuable antidotes against, everyday historicist thought. 11-12<\/p>\n

The first example is taken from Totem and Taboo<\/em>, where Freud provides an analysis of a society in which relations of equality and fraternity prevail among its citizens, no one is distinguished above the others , and power is shared rather than accumulated in one place. What strikes us as most remarkable about Freud’s analysis is that it does not limit itself to a description of these relations, does not attempt to make this “regime of brothers ” coincide simply with the relations that exist among them. Instead Freud insists on going beyond these relations to posit the existence of some preposterous being, a primal father who once possessed all the power the brothers now equally share and whose murder is supposed to have issued in the present regime<\/strong>. No wonder so many have taken this to be one of Freud’s most crackpot ideas … But to call it crackpot is to miss the point that if this father of the primal horde is indeed preposterous, then he is objectively so. That is to say, he is unbelievable within the regime in which his existence must be unthinkable if relations of equality are to take hold<\/strong>. That he is unthinkable within this regime of brothers does not gainsay [contradict] the fact that the institution of the regime is inexplicable without him.<\/p>\n

For if we did not posit his existence, we would be incapable, without resorting to psychologism, of explaining how the brothers came together in this fashion. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What Freud accounts for in Totem and Taboo<\/em> is the structure, the real structure<\/strong>, of a society of equals, which is thus shown to be irreducible to the labile [fluid changing] relations of equality that never obtain absolutely. The petty jealousies and feelings of powerlessness that threaten these relations, that block their permanent realization, betray their guilty origin, the cause that they must efface. 12
\nThe second example is taken from Beyond the Pleasure Principle<\/em>, in which Freud develops one of his other massively misunderstood notions: the death drive<\/strong>. The common interpretation of this text is that he develops this notion in order to counter the belief that humans are all too humanly ruled by a principle of pleasure<\/strong>. According to this reading, the death drive would be a second principle, co-present and at war with the pleasure principle; that is, the two principles would be seen to occupy the same space, the territory of their struggle with each other.<\/p>\n

Yet this is not what Freud says . Rather than contesting the importance of the pleasure principle, he admits its centrality in psychical life<\/strong>; he then seeks, by means of the death drive, to account for this centrality, to state the principle by which the principle of pleasure is installed<\/strong>. 10<\/p>\n

In other words, Freud’s positing of the death drive parallels his positing of the father of the primal horde in that both are meant to answer to the necessity of accounting aetiologically for an empirical field, where the pleasure principle reigns, in one case, and where a fraternal order obtains, in the other.<\/p>\n

In each case the transcendental principle, or the principle of the principle of rule, is in conflict with the principle of rule itself, though this conflict cannot be conceived to take place on some common ground, since the first order principle and the second order principle are never co-present<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nor can either of these two “warring” principles ever ultimately win out over the other, since the very existence of the empirical field always presupposes the existence of its cause, and since no cause can ever exist abstractly, in the absence of that which it effects.<\/p>\n

But we must also acknowledge that these two powerful modern discourses \u2014 psychoanalysis and historicism, represented here by Lacan and Foucault, respectively \u2014 have in common the conviction that it is dangerous to assume that the surface is the level of the superficial. Whenever we delve below this level, we are sure to come up empty<\/strong>. Yet the lessons each discourse draws from this conviction are strikingly divergent.<\/p>\n

Psychoanalysis, via Lacan, maintains that the exclusivity of the surface or of appearance must be interpreted to mean that appearance always routs or supplants being, that appearance and being never coincide. It is this syncopated relation that is the condition of desire<\/strong><\/em>.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Historicism, on the other hand, wants to ground being in appearance and wants to have nothing to do with desire.<\/p>\n

Thus, when Lacan insists that we must take desire literally, we can understand him to be instructing us about how to avoid the pitfall of historicist thinking.<\/strong> To say that desire must be taken literally is to say simultaneously that desire must be articulated<\/strong> … For if it is desire rather than words that we are to take literally, this must mean that desire may register itself negatively in speech, that the relation between speech and desire, or social surface and desire, may be a negative one. As Lacan puts it, a dream of punishment may express a desire for what that punishment represses. This is a truth that cannot be tolerated by historicism, which refuses to believe in repression and proudly professes to be illiterate in desire. The emergence of a neopopulism cannot be blamed on Foucault, but the historicism he cultivated is guilty of effacing the pockets of empty, inarticulable desire that bear the burden of proof of society’s externality to itself.<\/p>\n

Disregarding desire, one constructs a reality that is realtight<\/strong>, that is no longer self external. One paves the way for the conception of a self enclosed society built on the repression of a named desire.<\/p>\n

If this book may be said to have one intention, it is this: to urge analysts of culture to become literate in desire<\/strong>, to learn how to read what is inarticulable in cultural statements .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1994. The startling claim made by Lacan is that the structures he is diagraming are real. This claim can only have met with the same incomprehension that it continues to elicit today. For those schooled in structuralism, which teaches us to think … Continue reading “primal father realtight”<\/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":[111,32,24,90,15,118,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desire","category-foucault","category-lacan","category-resistance","category-subjectivity","category-symbolic","category-the-real"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6669","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=6669"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6681,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6669\/revisions\/6681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}