{"id":8535,"date":"2011-11-03T22:42:06","date_gmt":"2011-11-04T03:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=8535"},"modified":"2011-11-03T23:10:28","modified_gmt":"2011-11-04T04:10:28","slug":"reinhard-lacan-with-levinas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2011\/11\/03\/reinhard-lacan-with-levinas\/","title":{"rendered":"reinhard lacan with levinas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reinhard, Kenneth. “Kant with Sade, Lacan with Levinas” MLN<\/em> The Johns Hopkins University Press, 110.4 (1995) 785-808.<\/p>\n

Hence for Lacan the sixties did not signal the libido’s momentary liberation from the constraints of repressive cultural ideals, but the construction of yet one more line of defense against the disturbing impossibility of intersubjective sexuality, the inconsistency in the symbolic order that materializes as a factum or “Thing” whose concealment, according to Lacan, both defines human relations and marks their limit.<\/p>\n

“Love” has at least two distinct and perhaps contradictory valences for Lacan. On the one hand, love can dissimulate the unavailability of a sexual relationship by imagining a relationship between the self and the other. This version of love projects a “specular mirage” that simulates symbolic interaction by addressing me from a hypothetical point where I am seen in the way I would like to be seen, thereby fostering an illusion of reciprocity that is “essentially deception” (Seminar XI 268). <\/p>\n

footnote: In Seminar VIII: Transference (1960-1) and Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1963-4), Lacan distinguishes between the two modalities of love in terms of two aspects of transference. The goal of analysis that emerges in the later sixties and seventies involves “traversing the fantasy,” the process in which the analyst, idealized in the first moment of transference as a supposed subject of knowledge, is de-idealized or “de-completed” in transference’s second moment of “separation,” in which love’s effect of imaginary coherence is stripped away to reveal love as pure drive.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Lacan suggests that there is another love, a love not bound by the circulation of images, but which arises, as Juliet Flower MacCannell has written, “outside the limits of the law” (25)–neither within nor beyond specularity, but on what we might call, after Levinas, the “hither side” of the mirror, more proximate to me than either myself or my alter-ego.3 Insofar as it aims precisely at the traumatic lack of a sexual relationship, this love is closely allied with the sublimation of the excessive enjoyment or jouissance that in Lacan’s Seminar VII forms the imperative of the ethics of psychoanalysis.4 At the conclusion of Seminar XI, Lacan warns that specular love barely conceals an internecine aggressivity that culminated most horrifically in the sacrificial fury of the Holocaust (274-6). 5 <\/p>\n

The “other” love, on the other hand, in aiming, as Renata Salecl writes, at “what remains of the object when all the imaginary and symbolic features are annihilated,” sacrifices precisely those illusory characteristics of the other person that fuel the love of sacrifice. 6<\/p>\n

For both Lacan and Levinas, substitution does not imply an act of self-sacrifice within an economy of expiation and redemption, but rather the sacrifice of sacrifice. The moral economy of sacrifice entails giving up enjoyment for a place in the symbolic order (always advertised as a “higher” pleasure). The sacrifice of sacrifice, on the other hand, insists not on the enjoyment that attends responsibility, but rather on the responsibility for enjoyment, the obligation to maintain the jouissance that makes responsibility possible. In Lacan’s dictum, “the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire” (SVII 321); renunciation in the name of the symbolic order to morality is merely a ruse, a resistance to desire and the trauma that is its cause. For Levinas, enjoyment is not simply renounced by the subject of responsibility, but remains its intimate and ongoing condition: “only a subject that eats can be for-the-other, or can signify” (OTB E 74). Levinas articulates the responsibility of “for-the-other” as a substitution that determines not one meaning among others, but rather opens the field of signification as such. Like Lacan’s substitutive love, Levinasian responsibility institutes the process of metaphorization without abandoning jouissance, which indeed depends on the primal signification of substitution: “I can enjoy and suffer by the other only because I am for-the-other, am signification” (OTB 90). For Levinas the subject’s passive responsibility for its neighbor is experienced as a “deafening trauma” that creates the subject as the response to a call so loud or so close that it cannot be heard, cannot be fully translated into a message. In the deferred temporality that places ethics before ontology, responsiveness before being, the subject is produced as “the echo of a sound that would precede the resonance of this sound” (OTB 111)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reinhard, Kenneth. “Kant with Sade, Lacan with Levinas” MLN The Johns Hopkins University Press, 110.4 (1995) 785-808. Hence for Lacan the sixties did not signal the libido’s momentary liberation from the constraints of repressive cultural ideals, but the construction of yet one more line of defense against the disturbing impossibility of intersubjective sexuality, the inconsistency … Continue reading “reinhard lacan with levinas”<\/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":[125,38,21,24,118,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drive","category-ethics","category-jouissance","category-lacan","category-symbolic","category-the-real"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8535","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=8535"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8539,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8535\/revisions\/8539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}