The Absent Third

This piece was written as a more generalized companion piece to Social Sciences and Apres Coup. It suffers from granting too much privilege to the symbolic, to the detriment of the subject and the real, which is inevitable given the manner in which it relies so heavily on Seminars 4-6. However, I think there is much here that is worthwhile and that continues to be relevant to questions of reflexivity and symbolic systems.

The Absent Third

It is a central thesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis that there can be no desire that is not supported by the letter (L'identification, Seminar 9, 6.12.61). Of course, Lacan's concept of the letter will undergo a substantial evolution between 1961 and the seventies, but at this point in his development, we can simply treat the letter as the signifier. It is this special relationship between desire and language that differentiates desire from need. For if desire is different than need, then this is because desire is a relationship to an absence that can never become present. Where the privation encountered in need can be satiated and filled, desire desires only to desire. Desire maintains itself in its desire in such a way as to actively flee placing itself in a situation in which it could finally satisfy or complete itself. Here we might think of the way in which Bill Gates continuously accumulates money. It is clear that Gates' relationship to money long ago ceased being a relationship of need. There is no amount of money that would ever satisfy Gates. Rather, we here have a ravenous desire with a limitless appetite. Gates seems to be seeking something quite different than money in his pursuit of money. Gates searches for the objet a "in" or "behind" the money. What this is could only be discerned in the course of an analysis. None of this is meant as a moral critique of Bill Gates. Desire, for everyone, is always this way. Desire is always singular and limitless.

If desire has a special relationship with the letter, then this is because only the letter sustains the possibility of absence. In order to understand this, it is first necessary to understand something of the Freudian conception of the wish. In his opus The Intepretation of Dreams, Freud had contendend that in addition to the manner in which the dream functions as a wish-fulfillment of a latent dream thought, the dream is also the expression of an eternal infantile wish around which the subject's entire psychic life is organized. Freud is very mysterious as to the nature of this wish or how we might go about discovering it, but we can see that Lacan's account of desire is designed to respond precisely to this question. If desire, the eternal infantile wish, can only be supported by the signifier, then this is because only the signifier can support an eternal wish. Only the signifier is capable of preserving something in its absence and through the infinite variations (substitutions) that desire undergoes in passing through its myriad substitute objects (the endless metonymy of desire).

This marks an essential difference between need and desire. There is no such thing as an eternal and persistant need, because a need disappears the moment it is satisfied. By constrast, a desire persists even when it appears to be satisfied by its object. This is the truth of the anorexic. The anorexic is the one who refuses to eat because she literally eats nothing... Which is to say the desire of the Other. The anorexic knows the manner in which food is caught up in those relations of desire belonging to the Other and seeks to express the real object of her desire or this lack embodied in the Other. She shows the difference between the demanded food (or demand to eat) and the response to the demand as an expression of love. In not eating, she symptomatically attenuates the manner in which eating itself is an expression of desire insofar as desire is the desire of the Other (the first moment of this desire being witnessed in the mother's demand that the infant sup at her breast).

Desire thus shares a special relationship to lack or absence that is sustained through the instance of the letter. This allows us to give a very precise definition to the notion of a "complex". A complex is a structure of desire insofar as it is sustained by a set of relations among letters. It is because something has a place that it can be missing from its place. However, having a place is a symbolic function or a function of the letter. The number on the spine of a library book marks its place within the library. This number is a letter in the Lacanian sense. If, then, desire can only be sustained by the letter, then this is because language produces the possibility of an absence or lack around which desire might circulate.

Thus we encounter one of the ways of distinguishing between reality and the real. According to the definition of the real Lacan provides in his earliest seminars, the real is that which is without lack or fissure. Another way of saying this would be to say that the real is an absolute plentitude in which nothing is out of place (since it has no place to which it belongs). At the level of the real a book can never be missing from its place because a book just always is where it is. By contrast, reality is defined by the system of places and positions inaugurated by the signifier in which lack and absence become possible. It is for this reason that Lacan claims that reality is not the real. Reality is a symbolic structure, while the real (at this point in his career) is that which is anterior to all symbolic structuration. If it is claimed that the world is a trace of language rather than language a trace of the world, this is not an idealist statement that is meant to suggest that somehow language creates matter, the planet earth, etc., but is simply the thesis that the organized experience we rely upon on a day to day basis is made possible through the agency of language that imposes an organization upon the world. Here "world" must not be thought of as the ontic object or entity "earth", but must be thought as Heidegger thinks it as the manner in which our experience is characterized by significance, meaning or sense.

Here Deleuze, contrary to the belief of some of his enthusiasts, is thoroughly consistent with Lacan. In his masterpiece, Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that lack isn't a primary term, but rather all lack is based on a prior affirmation. Lacan does not disagree with this. In order for lack to be possible, says Lacan, there must a symbolic code or network defining a system of places from which something might be lacking or out of place. This symbolic system or language is thus the affirmation upon which lack is founded.

What, then, is it about the relationship between desire and the letter that leads Lacan to claim that desire is forever cuckold by language or that the relationship between the organism and its umwelt is forever off kilter as a result of the intervention of the signifier? A man is cuckold when his wife cheats on him with another man. The wife, who is the object of his desire insofar as she is thought to return his desire, instead has a desire that lies elsewhere. Consequently, completing the analysis of the metaphor, language is to the wife as desire is to the husband. In other words, there is something about the nature of my desire that is out of step with what I seem to desire. My desire, in its dependency on language, serves ends other than those I think it serves.

There can be little doubt that Lacan's little formulas often look like Zen koans, representing a paradox of thought which is impossible to resolve. So long as we think of language as a tool for communication, it is impossible to understand what Lacan could possibly mean by his suggestion that desire is cuckold by language. In fact, if we think of language as a mere tool used to represent our mental or psychic states, then Lacan's entire psychoanalysis must appear completely mysterious and absurd. For this reason it is helpful to resort to analogies and metaphors to better help us locate or develop a vision of various regions of our experience that might be overlooked or ignored. Like all analogies, these analogies fail to be complete, but they have the benefit of allowing us to see something that we might not have seen before. In this respect, the relationship between a game player and an arcade game provides a nice analogy for understanding what Lacan has in mind.

When I play an arcade game such as Mortal Combat, I, the player, experience myself as simulating some great warrior (usually someone versed in martial arts or possessing a great expertise with weapons like battle axes and swords) thrown into competition with other warriors (often gorgeous, scantily clad women that are nonetheless deadly). The game provides an entire virtual space in which my virtual body is capable of things that my real body is not and in which I am allowed to do things that I would never do in day to day life. Video games give us a perfect way of thinking about the relationship between subject and object. Here the player is the subject, while all that unfolds on the screen can be understood as the object. In playing the game, the would-be warrior's experience is thus organized in terms of a specific set of desires: namely, the desire to beat his opponent, advance levels, gain prizes and increase in strength and power, etc. Desire is thought of as what appears on the screen.

This is exactly how we tend to think of our desire in day to day life. When we speak of desire, we are speaking of either those things we want or those persons towards whom our amorous favours are directed. My desire is a desire for this or that car, for this or that book, for these clothes, etc. Similarly it is this or that person I desire or I am unsure whether I am desired by that person and so on. Just as my desire is directed towards objects and persons in day to day life, my desire is directed towards acquisition and gaining power in the realm of arcade games.

Lacan does not deny the thesis that our desire alights on objects and persons-- in fact, Lacan, in seminar 5, Les formations de l'inconscient, claims that we can only arrive at knowledge of desire by tracing the metonymical shards of the object; which is to say, the manner in which desire endlessly dances from one object to the next --but complicates this thesis in a decisive and far reaching fashion. Amusingly, it is the arcade game that allows us to see this other dimension of desire that Lacan has in mind when he claims that desire is cuckold by language.

What the naive relationship to the arcade game fails to take into account is the manner in which the programming of the game moulds and structures the relationship of the player to the game. The programming of the game is the absent third mediating between the player and the events that take place in the game. As the player plays the game, all of his attention is directed towards the events taking place on the screen and the goals that he has set for himself. However, without the programming or that massive system of zero's and one's, the game would not take place at all.

I am not here suggesting that we need to give more respect to programmers. Rather, I am seeking to underline an analogy between the symbolic order, language or the big Other and the programming that renders the relationship of the gamer to the game possible. One feature of the programming is that it is invisible while I play the game. I do not see the zero's and one's or lines of code involved in the game while playing the game. These lines of code are all there, but hidden such that they seem to be taking place in another scene. When Zizek claims that the unconscious is the form of thought that is external to thought who's ontological status is not that of thought itself, he has something like this in mind. The programming is not the actual thought of the player, but the exterior form in which that thought has to be expressed in order for the game to be played. Thus, while the player is directed towards the events on the screen, he fails to see the manner in which these events and the goals that drive his relationship to these events, are molded by the invisible code working in the background. This code or program is neither a property of the mental life of the subject (the game player) nor the events taking place in this specific instance on the screen (the object), but that which mediates and enables the relationship between the subject and object.

Perhaps the most important feature of the program as it relates to Lacan's concept of the big Other or the symbolic order is that it cannot be changed by playing the game. No matter how poorly or how well I play Mortal Combat (and presumably I play pretty poorly), the outcome of my game fails to modify the programming of the game itself. The programming of the game remains exactly as it was before after each instance of playing the game.

This, then, gives us a glimpse of what Lacan has in mind when he claims that desire is cuckold by language. From the standpoint of my conscious experience as a subject, I naively experience my desire as being a direct relationship to an object or the other person. I fail to see the manner in which my desire is caught up in the "programming" of the culture I live in, embodied in language. I fail to see that third that intervenes between me and the object. Consequently, in pursuing my desire I am really pursuing something else. And this is unavoidable, for insofar as desire only comes into being through the intervention of language in the life of the subject, it follows that there can be no desire independent of language. Language is the absent third that mediates and informs all of my desire.

We can thus see the seriousness of Lacan's conception of desire as it applies to our individual lives and social struggle. For if playing the game (i.e., myopically fixating on the object of my desire) leaves the nature of the game unchanged, social struggles that fixate on some particular object are doomed in their possibility of effecting real social change. If I kill the king, this might make for better social conditions under the new king, but it is still a fact that I'm playing the same game and continue to live under a Monarch. Killing the king does not get rid of the position of the king. The only real object of political struggle should be the code itself or the symbolic Order, the system of language, that informs and structures our relations to ourselves and others. But if such struggle is to be possible, then it is necessary that we become aware of that absent third, or the discourse of the Other which functions as the social unconscious.

Social Sciences and Apres Coup

The brilliant Foucaultisdead and I have been having an interesting conversation surrounding asperger's syndrom and my recent remarks on the symptom that reminded me of this piece I wrote a number of years ago surrounding concerns about how diagnosis functions in contemporary American clinical contexts. In response to his call take opportunities to make Lacanian psychoanalysis more available to the mainstream media and lay public, I wrote a rant worthy of my recent mood, that reminded me of this piece:

I tend to be a bit more pessimistic about what is easy from the standpoint of the mainstream media and lay people, as it seems to me that a good deal of the contemporary constellation in the United States where therapy is concerned is premised on the complete eradication of the subject from discourse. From the side of the various therapeutic orientations, not only do we have the vested economic interests of insurance companies that would like to see the minimization of lengthy costly treatment through medication and a set number of consultations (usually around twelve, sometimes more though at a frequency of every two weeks to every month), but also the rise of the predominance of the discourse of the university where every patient must be neatly subsumable in a diagnostic category in advance such that there are no surprises (hence the DSM-IV, which is largely for the benefit of insurance companies, not practitioners).

On the side of those seeking treatment, the growing collapse of various identities due to globalization in economics and media technologies and the continued crumbling of the big Other, has led to a corresponding increase in symptoms of hysteria such as anxiety disorders, as well as omnipresent depression (what's being mourned here?). As a result, rather than a discovery of oneself as a subject as in analysis, therapy-- which I always distinguish from analysis --has precipitated the search for a master capable of naming the subject, thereby guaranteeing a minimal ontological substantiality. The new names of the subject are strange indeed: Borderline, depressive, schizoid, dissociative, panic, etc. In being given these names-- the name of the symptom here always comes from the guru therapist, and is not an act of self-naming with respect to the symptom as in the case of analysis... One wonders why the therapist feels compelled to diagnose at all --the patient assumes a minimal identity.

Or to put it a bit differently, one wonders why it isn't more widely recognized and thought about that nomination or diagnosis is not simply descriptive of a pathology, but also is performatively formative of identity for the patient that then identifies with the nomination and takes it as a descriptor of his being. Addiction becomes all the more powerful in *nominating* myself as an addict, for instance; and, of course, we can recognize the performative and ritual aspects of this performativity in 12 Step programs where the first step is "admitting you have a problem", i.e., agreeing to nominate yourself and bring a certain identity into being, thereby positing the Other or making it exist at one and the same time (it's not a mistake that one of the steps consists in placing oneself in the hands of a higher power).

Although they have no idea what they are in their day to day interpersonal relations (how could they in a world where there are layoffs every couple of years, where family relations continously crumble, where relationships are virtual, and where ethnic and national identities progressively recede) their new name as "depressive", "anxious", "dissociative", "borderline", etc gives them an identity, a *knowledge* (in the imaginary), of who they are that then serves both as a self-reinforcing feedback loop (the patient must enact the identity and begins to read up on their "disorder" in the self-help section to play the role and disover who they are), and a new set of rights and protocols surrounding victimhood in their interpersonal relations. These are unheard of nominations that have come to replace the older and failing nominations like family names, national names (American, German, French, English, etc), and ethnic names (Jew, Catholic, and so on...), and therefore provide the new ideal ego (for the ego ideal of the therapist's gaze) of a very peculiar sort.

All of this functions as a massive defense formation against the void and singularity of their unconscious and the way in which life in contemporary capital calls for us to give way on our desire. The focus on the subject has always been what has guaranteed psychoanalysis the status of a "ghetto science" and has always invited a sense of defensive horror. "What, no master to name me or university to categorize me? What, an auto-elective nomination? Gasp!" As Kurtz says at the end of Apocalypse Now, "The Horror! The Horror!"

Although I'm not entirely sure that my argument fully holds up in terms of more recent developments in my thinking about psychoanalysis, I think much of it remains solid. I believe this post also converges with some of N.Pepperell's thoughts on self-reflexivity and critique. Hopefully others will find it of some interest. I'm really rather shocked that no one has written a Foucaultian style analysis of the history of the DSM-IV and how it's used in Anglo-American clinical contexts. Without further ado:

Social Sciences and Apres Coup

There can be little doubt that the division between hard and soft sciences functions as an unbridgeable chasm defining the division between objectivity and subjectivity for conventional wisdom. The standard rap seems to be that hard sciences are able to present an impartial view of the phenomena they seek to describe, whereas soft sciences (the human sciences) are unable to objectively represent their phenomena due to the inherent complexity of what they seek to describe. In other words, the human science are thought to contain too many variables, to be too complex, to be properly described.

No doubt there is a measure of truth in this evaluation, but, as is so often the case with conventional wisdom, this point is true for the wrong reasons. The standard fantasy underlying the opposition between hard and soft sciences is the thesis that these sciences (psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, history, etc.) are themselves ultimately reducible to the principles of the hard sciences, but have not yet been reduced by virtue of our inability to pierce the complex set of variables involved in these phenomena. Thus we look to fields like neuroscience and the field of genetics as possibly offering us the bridge through which social phenomena will finally be reducible to physical phenomena.

The dream is that someday all psychic phenomena will be reducible to brain events and interpretable in terms of electro-chemical reactions. This has already had a tremendous impact on both psychological theory and practice, where mental disorders are regularly reduced to certain electro-chemical profiles in the brain and treated through various chemical cocktails. This approach is regularly supported through observations of the brains of people suffering from these disorders, coupled with studies of families in which these disorders appear.

Two points should be made at this juncture: First, patients suffering from disorders such as obsessional neurosis, psychosis, depression and whatever other illness we might like to cite will show certain electro-chemical profiles in their brain. The person influenced by psychoanalysis should not be ashamed of admitting this point. Though, as we shall see, it should be admitted with reservations. Second, it is likely that in many of these cases certain mental disorders will appear consistently in the families of those suffering from these disorders. Psychoanalysis should unabashedly admit both of these points.

However, as is so often the case, the problems with the physicalist approach to the study of human phenomena are to be found at the level of certain fundamental theoretical assumptions that are not philosophically or theoretically sound. In short, physicalist psychology and the therapeutic practice that accompanies it is based on a fundamental confusion surrounding the notion of causality and how it functions in the field of social phenomena.

Here-- deviating a bit from Lacan's analysis of causality as it functions in psychoanalysis ("Science and Truth"), though not disagreeing with him --we might say that physicalist psychology confuses what Aristotle called "material causality" with what he called "efficient causality". For Aristotle, the material cause of something consists of the substance that thing is made of. Thus, for instance, the material cause of a statue might be the bronze of which it is fashioned. By contrast, the efficient cause of something is that by which the thing comes to be. In the case of the statue, the efficient cause would be the artist who fashioned the statue.

The problem with physicalist psychology is that it treats the material cause (the brain, genetics) as if it were the efficient cause of mental disorders and then proceeds to treat the material cause rather than the psychic structure itself. If this approach is mistaken, it is mistaken first because the simple presence of an electro-chemical profile in the brain is not enough to establish that the brain is the cause of the mental disorder. All we have established here is that all psychic phenomena require an inscription of some sort. This does not establish the origin of the inscription. Assuming that we adopt some sort of materialist ontology (in other words, that we reject any mind/body dualism), it should come as no surprise that any psychic phenomena will express itself as a trace in the brain. But this is not enough to establish that the brain is the cause of the mental disorder, only that the mental disorder is inscribed, as it were, in the brain.

The case is similar with respect to genetics. The fact that a certain mental disorder can be found to repeat in a family is not sufficient to establish that the disorder is genetically grounded or caused. The very mark of the social is to be located at the level of language or the transmission of "codes" that, like DNA, replicate themselves and proliferate through the field of those upon whom they supervene. In fact, such structures are a necessary condition for something being a family at all. As Lacan has shown us, these symbolic structures inform the nature of self-identity and interpersonal relationships in a way that cannot be underestimated, and thus can produce the repetition of disorders (in much the same way that a curse repeats throughout the family of Oedipus) through a family. This is true even in the case of adoptive children that display mental disorders found in their biological parents. The simple fact of being the adopted child, of being the child without a parent or the abandoned child, can produce far reaching effects in the psychic economy of the child. There is no reason to suppose that these mental disorders could just as easily be explained from a social or environmental perspective (a symbolic, rather than genetic perspective).

It seems to me that these variables tend to go unexplored in the field of US psychology. No doubt this is for the reasons that Derrida has cited regarding the nature of the signifier... Namely, that the very fact that in speech I hear myself speak tends to produce the illusion of a relation of immediacy between the act of speaking and hearing myself speak such that I overlook the constitutive role the signifier plays in structuring my thought and self-identity. I efface my alienation in the act of speaking, but in such a way as to further alienate myself.

The problem with contemporary psychology is that it is founded on what might be called the medical gaze. This has profound consequences for how therapy is actually practiced in the United States. The medical gaze is that gaze in which the doctor treats himself as being independent of the illness from which is patient suffers. Thus, for instance, when a doctor diagnoses his patient with cancer it is clear that the doctor cannot be thought of as a part of the patients cancer or that his diagnosis has any causal effect on the patient's cancer.

The medical gaze is uncritically extended to the practice of therapy in the US as well. Thus, for instance, when the therapist (not the analyst) diagnoses someone with a particular mental disorder they do so on the assumption that they are not a part of the disorder and that their diagnosis has no effect on the disorder. In other words, the therapist thinks of him or herself as being independent of the person that they diagnose... As being numerically or ontologically unrelated to that person. This is equivalent to saying that the relation between the suffering patient and the therapist is conceptualized as an external relation such that the patient would be what they are regardless of whether or not she entered the therapist's office.

The therapist/psychologist is thus the one who subtracts herself from the equation. In doing so she adopts an observational view of the patient, in which the patient is conceived as being something simply looked upon such that the looking does not effect that which is looked at. While I am certainly simplifying things here, there can be little doubt that there's more than a little truth in this evaluation of how therapy is today organized. This is immediately evident the moment you walk into a therapists office and are given a five hundred question test to take in which your disorder is neatly categorized according to the prevailing wisdom of the then current university discourse.

Here, then, in this final point, we at last reach Lacan. For it is with respect to 1) the material causation of psychic phenomena, and 2) the belief that diagnosis has no effect on the person diagnosed, that we find the difference between psychoanalysis and psychology. As the sociological theorist Niklas Luhmann has pointed out, social systems differ from classical physical systems in that they 1) have the ability to represent themselves, and 2) the manner in which they represent themselves can have an effect on how the system itself is organized. Zizek makes a similar point in his amusing discussion of what he calls "the subject supposed to believe." From the perspective of the functioning of social systems, what is at issue is not what I myself believe, but what I believe my neighbor believes. Thus, for instance, at the beginning of Bush's term I, being a savvy, intelligent person, might very well believe that Bush's rhetoric about the waning economy is really a lot of hot air, but I think that my friend Larry and a lot of his friends are complete morons who will take this rhetoric seriously (i.e., believe it) and start selling their stocks madly. For this reason, if I am prudent, I too will sell my stocks lest I become the victim of the ignorant belief of my fellows. Here the description of the system (Bush's description of the economy) comes to have an effect on the economy even if I think descriptively that it is nonsense.

The therapist, as opposed to the analyst, is someone who believes that the normative and descriptive use of concepts can be clearly kept apart. In other words, they fail to take account of the self-referentiality of social systems or the manner in which descriptions of social systems are themselves causal variables of these systems. In their use of diagnostic categories drawn from the DSM-IV, the therapist believes that their act of naming or diagnosing their patient is a purely descriptive act, with no normative dimension (Here U.S. psychological practices scream for a Foucault-style genealogical analysis that examines the relations of power implicit in these categorizations. An academia myopically fixated on the continent as if it were the only place where history takes place, has not yet taken on such an important task... At least, not to my knowledge). Why else would the therapist reveal her diagnosis to the patient? The only rationale for revealing a diagnosis is the belief that the diagnosis is a purely descriptive affair that has no effect on the patient and how the patient comports herself.

Unfortunately, social and psychic systems, unlike physical systems such as those found in two billiard balls hitting one another, are such that it is impossible to clearly separate the normative and descriptive functioning of categories. The minute that a descriptive category is applied to a patient, it already begins to function as a normative category.

For instance, when a patient is diagnosed as suffering from borderline bi polar depressive disorder, that diagnosis comes to function as a norm for the patient in which all actions are evaluated. Suddenly the patient finds a way to comprehend and understand all their past actions, as well as a way of determining their future actions. For instance, we can imagine a patient that begins to let herself run loose a little bit more simply because she is a borderline bi polar manic depressed person.

Moreover, these diagnoses have great importance in interpersonal relations as well, given that they allow the patient to change their social status, getting benefits for their disorder and sympathy for their suffering. In other words, diagnosis proves to be a path to jouissance or enjoyment. For this reason, mental illness might today be one of the real forms of protest against the system of capital and the way in which it shackles us to interminable labor. Through mental illness we are able to recoup some of our stolen jouissance by forcing business and state to afford us special privileges. Could the person suffering from mental illness be one example of the modern proletariat or subject of revolution? How might the plethora of multiplying symptoms be transformed from mute inscriptions of alienation to revolutionary subjectivity? In other words, how might this proletariat be brought to consciousness about the true meaning of their symptom... Or how might they move from "enjoying their symptom" in an unconscious way, to becoming the agent of their symptom?

Regardless of whether or not this is the case, the category thus begins to function as an imperative of how I act and behave and thus effects the psychic system that it originally set out merely to describe. This is an example of the strange logic of apres coup or the manner in which the signifier functions in terms of "what it will have been". The odd thing about social and psychic systems as opposed to physical systems is that they do not obey the ordinary temporal logic of cause and effect. In physical systems (at least those at the Newtonian scale) we are accustomed to the notion that the effect follows the cause. However, strangely, in social and psychic systems what is taking place in the present can have effects on what is taking place in the past such that the manner in which the past functions with respect to the present is itself transformed. This, for instance, is what occurs when we arrive at a new picture of what happened in the past such that we transform how we behave in the present. Reinterpretations of the colonization as they've functioned in the struggles of American-Indians here come to mind. On the one hand we have pre-critical theories of colonization in which matters were framed in terms of the famed meeting of the Pilgrims and the Indians, on the other we have the pictures of brutal colonialist exploitation that have served as a catalyst for rethinking the status of existing American Indians today. The signifier thus does not simply describe past events-- it is not merely descriptive or referential --but has an entirely different temporal structure than the sort of structure we find in ordinary physical phenomena such that it can actually PRESCRIBE certain phenomena. It is precisely this dimension that is overlooked in the contemporary field of therapy, where words are thought to function in a way that is only referential, for the sake of communication. The simple act of naming something, already transforms the way in which that thing behaves.

Closely connected with this phenomenon of apres coup, is that of imaginary transference. The issue here would be that the patient already approaches the therapist as the one who has knowledge of their symptom and, who's favor, they would like to win. In other words, they look at the therapist as a potential friend or figure of authority who's favour could be beneficial and serve as a source of pleasure. A failure to take account of this intersubjective dimension of the relationship between patient and analyst leads to further complications with diagnosis in that we can imagine all sorts of scenarios in which the patient imagines themselves into the symptomology of the disorder as a way of filling what she believes the therapist desires her to be. A great deal more should be said on this. What is here important is that the therapist subtracts herself from the therapeutic setting at both her and her patients peril.

It is very simple to see what follows from ignorance to the interrelated phenomena of apres coup and transference in the therapeutic setting: A failure to be aware of how these things function and effect psychic and social systems cannot but lead to alienation. The first alienation would be at the level of the university discourse, in which the patient is alienated in an abstract system of significations (S2, the system of medical knowledge) that prevents him from discovering the concrete way in which his own psychic system is structured or even discovering that his symptoms are in fact meaningful (physicalist psychology is distinct from psychoanalysis is that it is based on the premise that symptoms do not mean or signify anything, but are just accidents of electro-chemical and genetic malfunctions). Second, it is alienation incarnate in that the relation between therapist and patient is asymmetrical in that the therapist is held to have knowledge of the patients symptom while the patient is ignorant. In short, it does not lead the patient (now analysand) to that point in which they discover that the only real authority or subject supposed to know is the unconscious itself. For this reason, the patient never reaches that moment of separating from the big Other or discovering that the big Other does not exist. Their very attempts to heal themselves, thus further lead to alienation such that their actions themselves come to reinforce the power of the very forces against which they were originally fighting. This is what Judith Butler, following Foucault, has referred to as the danger that arises should it be true that subjects are themselves produced by the juridical systems of power in which they seek representation. This suggests that the very attempt to seek representation produces further subordination to power and domination in that the categories of psychological knowledge are themselves discursive constructions that produce particular subjectivities. The value of psychoanalysis, in this context, is that the silence of the analyst with regard to diagnosis and the emphasis on the speech of the analyst allows the analysand to separate from the big Other (as represented by analyst) and discover those hollows or spaces where the Other lacks as those places where it, the analysand, might come to be. Analysis provides the possibility of a leap out of these infantalizing power relations.

It is for these reasons that psychology can be nothing but alienation incarnated. So long as these things are not taken into account, psychology cannot but maintain us in an infantile state in which autonomy and singularity are never reached. No wonder that the only solution currently offered to us is that found in chemical cocktails, in which one is prescribed the life of a waking dream, rather than knowledge of the real of their desire and the separation from the big Other that comes with it... No wonder the only thing offered to us is further alienation in the big Other or the set of diagnostic categories prescribed by the DSM-IV in which our sole consolation is that our psychic structure comes to be normalized by being medicalized and thereby socially acceptable. This is not nothing, but it also cannot compare to discovering the real of one's desire.

Recoding the Social

In an important passage from The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Lacan asks,

What is a praxis? I doubt whether this term may be regarded as inappropriate to psycho-analysis. It is the broadest term to designate a concerted human action, whatever it may be, which places man in a position to treat the real by the symbolic. The fact that in doing so he encounters the imaginary to a greater or lesser degree is only of secondary importance here. (6)

Perhaps we do not pause to consider this very often, but the remarkable thing about psychoanalytic practice is that speech alone somehow has an effect on the real of the symptom. Over the course of analysis symptoms change, jouissance is transformed, and somehow all through speech alone. Lacan's psychoanalytic theory can thus be thought as a transcendental theory of the conditions under which this is possible. Just as Kant, confronted with the realization that mathematics is not analytic but synthetic, found himself faced with the question of how this is possible, of what mind must be like in order for this to be the case, Lacan finds himself confronted with the question of what must be the case in order for speech to have an impact on the real of jouissance. Why is it, for instance, that a well articulated and enigmatic intervention on the part of the analyst can suddenly cause a paralyzing jouissance, filled with envy, all sorts of dark thoughts and fantasies, and painful affects of anger and obsession, with respect to some other acquaintance like a boss or friend to suddenly dissipate like so much mist in the sun? It is not a question here of the analysand's self-conscious knowledge or some sort of insight given by the analyst, as often the analysand doesn't notice anything at all. Rather, the issue simply disappears from the analysand's discourse without her noticing.

The case is similar with regard to the analysand's field of possibilities at the beginning of analysis. Often the neurotic world is populated by a curious sort of closure, characterized by fixations on certain privileged objects of enjoyment, repetitive deadlocks such as undermining oneself at that precise point where things are going well, and an inability to imagine or conceptualize other possibilities. As Lacan will say in Encore, "Reality is approached with apparatuses of jouissance" (55). The analysand enters analysis with her "devices of jouissance" which Lacan claims are caused by the signifier: "The universe is the flower of rhetoric" (56), "The signifier is the cause of jouissance" (24). How is it that suddenly there's a shift in the field of possibilities for the analysand? Why is it that an analysand suddenly begins to write where before writing was seen as a fundamental impossibility? How does it come about that suddenly new passions and desires emerge in the analysand's discourse where before there was only a monotonous repetition of the same deadlock? Something has shifted in the real of the analysand's jouissance, but what was it that precipitated this shift? How is it that the analysand has become open to discerning new possibilities, where before he saw none?

The analyst gives no medication. He does not employ any clever behavioral techniques such as special mental or physical exercises. She doesn't give any helpful tips on how to be successful or how to change one's behaviors. No, all she says is "talk a little, say whatever comes to mind no matter how embarrassing, apparently boring and unrelated, morally depraved, or untoward". And yet through this, through this work of the symbolic, something is changed in the field of both the real and the possible. Psychoanalytic theory attempts to think the conditions under which these shifts in the real are possible through the symbolic. After all, I cannot treat a broken leg by talking about it, yet somehow analysis is able to have an impact on a major anxiety disorder or phobia. What must the subject be like for this to be possible? And moreover, why are the subject's self-analyses and rational dismissals of their symptom impotent with regard to the symptom? Why is it necessary that this speech be addressed to another for some transformation in the real of the symptom to take place?

I think that it is in relation to this concept of practice, to this work of treating the real by the symbolic, that we should think the relation between Badiou and Zizek. The question that begs to be asked with respect to Badiou is what renders an individual susceptible to an event in the first place? That is, under what conditions is it possible for an individual to both recognize an event and nominate an event. Here it is necessary to use the term "individual", for according to Badiou one does not become a subject until they claim fidelity to an event. As Badiou puts it in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil,

If there is no ethics 'in general', that is because there is no abstract Subject, who would adopt it as his shield. There is only a particular kind of animal, convoked by certain circumstances to become a subject-- or rather, to enter into the composing of a subject. This is to say that at a given moment, everything he is-- his body, his abilities --is called upon to enable the passing of a truth aolong its path. This is when the human animal is convoked to be the immortal that he was not yet.

What are these 'circumstances'? They are the circumstances of a truth. But what are we to understand by that? It is clear that what there is (multiples, infinite differences, 'objective' situations-- for example, the ordinary state of relation to the other, before a loving encounter) cannot define such a circumstance. In this kind of objectivity, every animal gets by as best it can. We must suppose, then, that whatever convokes someone to the composition of a subject is something extra, something that happens in situations as something that they and the usual way of behaving in them cannot account for. Let us say that a subject, which goes beyond the animal (although the animal remains its sole foundation needs something to have happened, something that cannot be reduced to its ordinary inscription in 'what there is'. Let us call this supplement an event, and let us distinguish multiple-being, where it is not a matter of truth (but only of opinions), from the event, which compels us to decide a new way of being...

From which 'decision', then, stems the process of a truth? From the decision to relate henceforth to the situation from the perspective of its evental supplement. Let us call this a fidelity. To be faithful to an event is to move within the situation that this even has supplemented, by thinking (although all thought is a practice, a putting to the test) the situation 'according to' the event. (40-1)

In Being and Event, Badiou refers to the event as what is "indiscernible" according to the encyclopaedia governing the situation. Thus, for Badiou, there is a sharp contrast between knowledge and truth. Knowledge refers to the encyclopaedia and the regime of knowledge governing a situation (most recently Badiou has referred to the encyclopaedia as the "transcendental regime" of a situation). As Badiou remarks:

I also posit that every situation is accompanied by a language, a capacity to name that situation's elements, their relations, their qualities, their properties. And in every situation there is also what I call "the state of the situation"--the order of its subsets. The situation's language aims at showing how an element belongs to such and such a subset. The situation is what presents the elements that constitute it; the state of the situation is what presents, not the situation's elements, but its subsets. From this point of view the situation is a form of presentation, the state of the situation a form of representation. And knowledge, being the way we organize the situation's elements linguistically, is always a certain relation between presentation and representation. Knowledge is most simply defined as the linguistic determination of the general system of connections between presentation and representation. The set of a situation's various bodies of knowledge I call "the encyclopedia" of the situation. Insofar as it refers only to itself, however, the situation is organically without truth.

We can thus think of the encyclopedia of a situation as a regime of predication that defines all those elements that legitimately belong to the situation and their relations to one another. For instance, "democrat" and "republican" are predicates belonging to the field of knowledge, defining a particular place within the United States. An event, by contrast, is a taking place that evades all the predicates belonging to the encyclopaedia of a situation. There is no predicate for a true event and therefore it is "indiscernible" to the situation... We do not know how to count or include an event in a situation. Insofar as an event is effectively invisible to a situation, it only sustains itself by its nomination. It can never be proven to have taken place-- as the situation contains no resources for recognizing the existence of the event --and thus can only sustain itself through the fidelity to subjects of the event.

One of Badiou's favorite examples of an event is love. I will not get into all the details pertaining to Badiou's conception of love and how it relates to an encounter with sexual difference or the Two as such. What is important here is that love cannot be demonstrated to another. The outsider viewing the couple is forever unable to determine whether the two are genuinely in love or whether they are witnessing a simple erotic infatuation. Indeed, it is often disturbing to witness two who have declared their love as their decision-making process seems curiously mutilated and irrational. Not only is this true of the outsider witnessing the two who have declared their love, but this is true for those who have declared their love as well. It is entirely possible to doubt whether or not one is truly in love, to cast about for some sort of proof or demonstration, to wonder whether or not one is simply confused or infatuated. When we cast about for predicates that would allow us to know whether or not we're in love we can find none, and therefore love only sustains itself in and through its declaration, its nomination. If lovers appear mad to each other and to the outside, then it is because they have begun to evaluate their situation in terms of this event, no longer evaluating the situation on the basis of their egoistic aims, ambitions, and needs, but in terms of this event that has taken place that calls for a fundamental transformation of the situation come hell or highwater... At least, if they are ethical subjects and bear fidelity to this event. This is how a truth contrasts with knowledge: A truth evades all predicates of knowledge and only sustains itself in its praxis and declaration.

For Badiou the indiscernibility of an event with respect to knowledge is precisely what guarantees its universality. For what the event reveals is the essential contigency of the social order, of the pure multiplicity underlying the imaginary configuration of reality as an ontologically closed and complete system. Ranciere expresses a very similar conception of the political:

I... propose to reserve the term politics for an extremely determined activity antagonistic to policing [Ranciere's name for the "encyclopaedia", more here on "police"]: whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration-- that of the part of those who have no part. his break is manifest in a series of actions that reconfigure the space where parties, parts, or lack of parts have been defined. Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place's destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise. (Disagreement, 29-30)

The order of knowledge or the police presents itself as a natural order, as a world in which everything has its proper place, function, and identity. However, as Ranciere puts it, "The foundation of politics is not in fact more a matter of convention than of nature: it is the lack of foundation, the sheer contingency of any social order. Politics exists simply because no social order is based on nature, no divine law regulates human society" (16). It is for this reason that the event opens onto the domain of the universal. So long as we remain in the domain of the encyclopaedia or the police it's clear that we never hit upon the universal, as the predicates composing the encyclopedia situate a field of differences that are incommensurate. What the event reveals is the contingency of these counting and ordering mechanisms. It reveals the excess beneath them. As an "animal" or an "individual", I always count myself in a particular way according to the regime of the encyclopaedia governing the situation. But as a subject these differences and distinctions are exceeded by that which can't be identified according to any of the predicates governing the situation.

The question, however, is how it is possible for an "animal" or "individual" to be receptive to an event in the first place. I'm more than happy to grant that all of these consequences follow from an event, but if the regime of the encyclopaedia is as total as Badiou and Ranciere suggest, if the encyclopaedia is organized precisely around disavowing the possibility of anything that isn't counted, then what are the conditions for the possibility under which a subject might be produced at all? For Badiou (and perhaps Ranciere), politics is something that can only follow from the event and one's fidelity to the implications of the event, yet it is difficult to see how the individuals populating a situation are capable of discerning events at all... Unless our situatedness in situations is never complete and always precarious. But if this is the case, it becomes possible to conceive another kind of political work that follows not from an event, but that instead seeks to locate those weak and symptomatic points within the symbolic edifice wherein it might be possible to force an event and precipitate subjects in Badiou's sense of the word.

Zizek raises the possibility of something along these lines in the closing section of Tarrying With the Negative. Quoting a long passage from Ryszard Kapuscinski on the Iranian Revolution, Zizek asks what marks that sudden moment where we shift from believing in the big Other and ceasing to believe in the big Other? Why is it that at one moment I encounter the police officer as a figure of authority capable of compelling me to obey his orders, yet a moment later the officer becomes an ordinary man who is no longer capable of making me budge when ordered to leave the protest?

There is, however, one point at which this formidable description has to be set right or, rather, supplemented: Kapuscinksi's all too naive, immediate use of the notion of fear. The 'third figure' which intervenes between us ordinary citizens and the policeman is not directly fear but the big Other: we fear the policeman insofar as he is not just himself, a person like us, since his acts are the acts of power, that is to say, insofar as he is experienced as the stand-in for the big Other, for the social order. (234)

The social order only supports itself on the basis of belief in the big Other. Consequently, if an event is to be recognized as an event, then there must be a weakening of the big Other. If this weakening is a rare and exceptional thing, then this is because, according to Zizek, we forestall any encounter with the impotence of the Other. "What I am running away from when I voluntarily take refuge in servitude is thus the traumatic confrontation with the big Other's ultimate impotence and imposture" (235). That is, in a paradoxical fashion we already are aware that the big Other is lacking, incomplete, castrated, yet we also try to prop up the Other as complete and uncastrated. This might appear strange as the Other is often a despotic and persecuting; however, Verhaeghe makes the point beautifully in terms of development in his brilliant On Being Normal and Other Disorders:

...[T]he process of separation brings about a major shift that can scarcely be overrated: an internal unpleasurable rise in tension is associated with the external other. The infant quite probably experiences the original internal drive as something peripheral; in any case, it can only disappear through the presence of the Other. The Other's absence will be regarded as the cause of the continuation of the inner tension. But even when this Other is present and responds with words and actions, this response will never be enough either. For the Other must continually interpret the child's crying, and there is never a perfect fit between the interpretation and the tension. At this point, we come up against a central element of identity formation: lack, the impossibility of ever answering the tension of the drive in full. Freud observes what every parent knows: our children seem permanently unsatisfied. 'It is as though our children had remained for ever unsated." The damand through which the dhild expresses its needs leave a remainder in the sense that the Other's interpretation of the demand will never coincide with the original need. It seems that the Other's inadequacy will always be the first thing to be blamed for what goes wrong internally. (158)

The Other is primordially experienced simultaneously as the one who is both responsible for our lack and suffering (the drive pressures that we cannot escape) and as the source of satisfaction of these drives. If an encounter with the impotence of the Other is terrifying, if it is forestalled at nearly any price, then this is because the Other is encountered or experienced as the one that has the solution, that has the response to drive. The collapse of that Other is thus the collapse of the solution. Verhaeghe goes on to show how contemporary affects such as the pervasive sense of guilt and anxiety relate to the growing sense of the Other's impotence, the Other's non-existence. On the one hand, then, there is the issue of how to produce symbolic strategies that weaken the binding force of the Other, creating the possibility of an event and a genuine politics. Zizek, for instance, speaks highly of Freud's discussion of Moses and treatment of Moses as an Egyptian, not because of its truth or veracity, but as a discursive strategy that sacrifices the agalma the Jews and the fantasy support of the anti-semite:

What Freud did was therefore the exact opposite of Arnold Shoenberg, for example, who scornfully dismissed Nazi racism as a pale imitation of the self-comprehension of the Jews as the elected people: by way of an almost masochistic inversion, Freud targeted Jews themselves and endeavored to prove that their founding father, Moses, was Egyptian. Notwithstanding the historic (in)accuracy of this thesis, what really matters is its discursive strategy: to demonstrate that Jews are already in themselves 'decentered,' that their 'originality' is a bricolage. The difficulty does not reside in Jews but in the transference of the anti-Semite who thinks that Jews 'really possess it,' agalma, the secret of their power: the anti-Semite is the one who 'believes in the Jew,' so the only way effectively to undermine anti-Semitism is to contend that Jews do not possess "it." (220-1)

The process here is similar to that which takes place in analysis, where the analysand progressively discovers that the analyst, as stand in for the analysand's fiction of the Other and objet a, doesn't "have it", objet a, such that the analysand separates from the Other, discovering it doesn't exist, reconfiguring the co-ordinates of his or her jouissance. Zizek's various interpretations, from his interpretations of "taboo" philosophers (for the postmoderns) such as Kant, Hegel, Descartes, etc., to his various analyses of contemporary events, can be understood as similar interventions that target the deadlock in the real, resituating the very terms of the debate and the sterile oppositions designed to ensure that the mechanism of counting or the structuration of the situation stay in place. This is an activity of recoding the symbolic so that new possibilities might emerge. However, the flip side of all of this is Freud's bit of wisdom from Totem and Taboo-- When the primal father is murdered, he returns even stronger in the form of guilt and submission to his law. How can a similar fate be avoided with regard to the death of God and the death of the Other?

Seminar 17

At long last Lacan's 17th Seminar, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, is finally available in English translation. This seminar deals heavily with Lacan's four discourses, and themes such as repetition, jouissance, philosophy (which Lacan treats as the other side of analytic discourse) and a host of other issues. The Dallas Society for Structural and Post-Structural Philosophy (hosted by University of Texas at Arlington and founded by myself and Timothy Richardson) will soon be initiating close reading of this text. Should there be anyone in the Dallas/Fort Worth area interested in participating, please contact me by email.

Lacan or Weltanschaung? The Discussion Continues

My Argentinian friend, the analyst Gracelia Ferraro, has honored me with another letter responding to my remarks about the situation of psychoanalysis in the United States and asked that I post it here. I have been remiss in not posting it earlier and hope she will graciously accept my apology. Gracelia writes,

One addition to Lacan's "obscurantism" and the difficulty of reading his work: Lacan uses this speech to make "real", as a dream, that there is no sense of senses or there is no metalanguage. The unconscious is never clear or rational but always enigmatic and I appreciated the difficulties in reading Lacan as part of my training as an analyst. So even if I agree with the fact that simplifying may be useful from the teaching point of view, very useful, the thesis that it is efficacious "transmitting" an encounter with how the rhetoric of the unconscious works is quite inane. We see here the same ethical problem that haunted Freud during the last years of his discoveries. Should we do anything to keep the psychoanalysis alive? (See Ernest Jones’s discussion with Freud about the foundation of the IPA as related to medical vs. psychoanalytical practice). Should we keep its foundations intact with such a high price to pay: fewer analysts with no social or academic achievements? We have to keep in mind that Lacan’s interest in the institution pertains to his question of how an analyst is made. What desire animates an analyst? How does one's own analysis leads to it?

I understand the cultural context you explain as being representative of our cultural differences, and obviously you must be correct according to what I can read elsewhere. However in my country, the problems are of a different shape but lead to the same problem: The Psychoanalytical Institution (APA) loves the symbolic and the mirror stage, but have mixed it with anything at hand resulting in a lame heterodoxy or heterology , while keeping the “contratransferencial” form of interpretation.

We cannot make ourselves the keepers of orthodoxy or the “truth” which being half said reaches the impossible, but we have to care about the enigmatic shape of unconscious and not confuse it with either the mystical or over rational “scientific” biases. That is how I understand what is at stake with Lacan's engagement with knots or mathemes within his discourse: a complete “transmission” of the concept.

How can the Academy can take the extreme and exceptionally precise enunciation "there is not a sexual proportion"? what biologist will agree?. We can trace this extraordinary (for the common sense) assumption back to Freud. But you see Levi, these are questions not discussed, we prefer to see Lacanian “concepts” everywhere except where they have to be seen: at the less-one of the subject, the parletre … Many think that Lacan is a structuralist because of Derrida's influence on Academics (I guess). We need to stress this point if we don’t want to be so divided between our practice and “ the world”.

I have nothing more to add, except perhaps to raise the question of whether the subject is, in fact, present in discussions of Lacan in the United States. By this I am not referring to the level of the concept, where one heroically defends the concept of the subject against postmodern, neuropsychological, and post-phenomenological declarations that the subject is dead. Within Lacanian practice, the subject is never encountered as such, but always fades behind the signifier, disappearing the moment that it appears. The subject is present as enigma. What the appropriations of psychoanalysis by cultural studies risks is an illusory mastery of the subject or suturing shut of the unconscious on the premise that psychoanalysis provides the tools to decipher all formations of the unconscious.

Lacan or Weltanschaung?

I received the following email from a fellow analyst in Argentina and thought it might be productive in generating some discussion here on the blog. X writes:

Dear Levi: I have been reading the lacan yahoo groups since long. Also I have been practicing Lacan theory as much as clinical practice since the seventies. You remark very accurately that since Millerian politics has taken over the majority of the lacanian groups all over the world we have seen the expansion of millerian psychoanalytical point of view..are you sure they follow Lacan's theories on its foundation? Any way My concern (the reason I write to you) is that I have seen Lacan APPLIED to anything on the market from Sufism to cinema, to fashion to Japanese to....cuisine??. I would like to know your view since in my country (Argentina), the country of the thousand analysts, so to speak has not developed such an over explanatory religion as I can imagine in the Us. Is it my perception wrong? it has to do with Zizek simplifying ideas, fashionable impronta?Is the Universitary discourse predominance?. As a practitioner, I see this direction as been very dangerous to psychoanalysis worries me.As Freud warned us. Psy. is not a religion. We must be aware of that. Sorry for my english syntax and grammar. I hope you find my question interesting enough to answer me.

I'm not sure I have a whole lot to add to your observations and hope that you don't find my writings on psychoanalysis to exemplify these characteristics. First, I do not at all disagree with your observation that there is a sort of Lacanian religion emerging in the United States. I think the way in which you pose the question already suggests an answer. You point out that Argentina is the country of a thousand analysts. In the United States we have nothing comparable to this omnipresence of practicing analysts. What passes for therapy in the States is usually some "guru" or master that purports to have knowledge of the brain and how to live one's life successfully if only the proper behavioral activities are followed and the proper drugs are taken. I exaggerate, but not much. In short, we have no living practice of analysis.

I think the absence of a living practice of analysis has profound consequences as to how Freud and Lacan are received in the United States. I cannot speak for you, but in my experience practicing as an analyst one of the most striking things is the manner in which you never completely know what is going on with your analysands. As analysts we listen, we ask questions, we make enigmatic remarks that can be taken in a number of different ways, and we're continuously surprised by what our analysands have to teach us. As I see it, the role of the analyst, the position of the analyst, is an extremely humble position. Or, rather, it is a position that quickly leads one to humility. The analysand might place us in the position of the subject supposed to know, but we are certainly not subjects that do know. Over the course of analysis we do gain a bit of knowledge from our analysands, we do learn, but that knowledge is never complete for as Lacan says "the truth can only be half-said"... It reveals to the same degree that it conceals.

We take our bearings from Freud and Lacan. Their experience orients us. But, in his ecrits "The Position of the Unconscious", Lacan is careful to point out that the unconscious changes with discourse about the unconscious, such that we are forever encountering new symptoms in the clinic and such that we find that interpretations or interventions that might have been successful ten years ago no longer seem to produce effects today. As such, I cannot help but feel that the analyst is very much a Socratic figure who relates to others with an awareness of his or her own ignorance. This, I take it, is one of the central distinctions between an analyst and a therapist. A therapist is not ignorant, but knows... Yet the knowledge of the therapist is a knowledge in the imaginary. It is an imaginary mastery of the patient.

Returning then to the theme of Lacanian theology in the United States, I think one of the central issues is that the vast majority of Lacanian theorists work with "analysands" that do not talk back. Those of us in the States who have not undergone analysis or who do not practice analysis work primarily with non-responsive texts such as novels, social phenomena, films, and television shows. Freud, of course, thought that such cultural analysis was of vital importance for building psychoanalytic knowledge. Both Freud and Lacan gave masterful analyses of various cultural artifacts such as Oedipus Rex and Plato's Symposium, and helped to advance our understanding of the symptom by these means (my view is that psychoanalysis is a transcendental theory of the conditions under which the symptom is possible). However, they were also practicing analysts, and one of the central things we quickly learn in the analytic setting is that just when we think we have an understanding of what is going on the analysand throws us a curve ball that violates all our expectations. That is, there's a dialogical dimension to analysis such that the analysand responds back and this is lacking in the interpretation of cultural artifacts. Absent this dit-mension of response, psychoanalysis easily becomes a discourse of imaginary mastery, generating the attitude of a university discourse that is confident it is able to interpret all formations of the unconscious and culture.

While I have a great deal of admiration for Zizek's work and the manner in which he's rendered the Millerian interpretation of Lacan accessible to a wider audience-- someone on the list recently suggested that perhaps this was written by Zizek, revealing their ignorance of the secondary literature on Lacan and Miller's appropriation in particular, indicating just how much Zizek has come to hegemonize the name Lacan and obscure a vast field of very talented clinical work done by analysts that have their feet on the ground (or bottoms on the couch) working daily with analysands --I do believe that Zizek's work lends itself to this imaginary illusion of mastery and that Zizek himself often succumbs to this lure of mastery. From a clinical point of view this is very counter-productive as it closes off the unconscious by leading us to believe too readily that we know what it is speaking, rather than opening the unconscious by provoking desire through enigma as in the case of Lacan's poetic use of speech in his late seminars which functions to evoke desire by rendering meaning (always a feature of the imaginary) enigmatic and elusive.

I thus find myself torn. As you know, Lacan left us with 27 years of teachings and experience. This material is extremely difficult and much of it is uneven as to its quality. Further, a good deal of it remains unpublished and the translations of these unpublished works are often inaccurate. Few save the most devoted will take the time to trudge through Lacan's difficult work and engage in the intellectual labor of developing his thought. At present, Lacanian psychoanalysis in the United States only exists as a theory, and has a very low degree of intensity as a practice. For the academic laboring under conditions that demand publication, there are diminishing returns when it comes to working directly with Lacan. Moreover, what is the American Lacanian to do? It's nearly impossible to work solely as a clinician in the United States due to how therapy has here been structured via the mediation of insurance companies, government, and a particular ideology of medical science. Moreover, with the exception of a handful of institutions such as Duquesne (and increasingly Emory), psychology departments tend to see psychoanalysis and Lacan as a form of arcane quackery that has been thoroughly disproven or discredited. The only other option is for the defender of Lacan to shack up in social sciences (rarely) or humanities departments and to transform psychoanalysis into a form of cultural and political analysis. Thus, while I have a number of reservations about the predominance of the discourse of the master and university in many of our best and brightest Lacanian theorists in the United States, I feel that at present there is little alternative. However, I do feel that this work-- while scarcely resembling a genuine analytic stance --is nonetheless laying the groundwork for a day in which genuine psychoanalytic practice might here be possible by introducing elements into the symbolic that create the potential for psychoanalysis to be received. It is for this reason that I am grateful for the work of figures such as Zizek and Miller. Zizek popularizes, while Miller codifies Lacan's teachings so that they might become transmissible as a teaching. This, of course, also entails simplifications that lead to omissions and an erasure of other possible interpretations and readings. But it does seem as if progress is being made. Already an entire generation of analysts are emerging who would not have been able to practice at all a decade ago. There is Bruce Fink and students of his practice such as myself, Dan Collins, Yael Baldwin, Kate Briggs, Ed Pluth, and yet others such as Christina Laurita, and Tom Svolos, all of whom are practicing, making contributions to psychoanalytic theory, forming academic departments and conferences, and training other analysts. Right now the work of creating an infrastructure and space of the symbolic is underway, and this is a slow moving task that takes time.

Meaningless Fantasies

Glen, over at Event Mechanics has written a nice diary entitled Parallax of Nihilism, or Nihilism as a Pure Event, dealing with some of the themes I've been discussing with regard to fantasy lately. When Glen writes, "[n]ow the obvious point is that for a nihilist, or most of my generation, or pretty much every teenager, every activity is an idiotic activity", in response to an earlier post where I describe fantasy as an idiotic activity that looks for no reason beyond itself, I confess that I'm a bit disturbed as I didn't realize I had become a part of a generation or had become dated. I suppose this had to happen sometime.

Glen goes on to write,

The entire universe and especially human existence is singular idiotic activity (chaosmos). There is no essential cultural or discursive threshold that differentiates non-idiotic activity from idiotic activity. The question of idiocy is instead precisely one of enthusiasm or the affective associations and qualitative consistency of those associations that implicates us in various assemblages in action. I call idiocy stupidity. As I constantly rant on about here I try to have an intimate relationship with my stupidities.

Here I find myself wondering whether, in psychoanalytic terms, this too couldn't be a certain sort of fantasy. That is, couldn't conceiving the universe in terms of meaninglessness be a way of mastering the universe and all self-Other relations by knowing in advance what those relations are? Moreover, in a universe where everything is meaningless, haven't I profoundly undermined any potential for anxiety by forestalling the possibility that there could be anything meaningful, and by having surrendered any reason to act or do? Or, to put it a bit differently, isn't this the ultimate way of defending against the enigma of the Other's desire, by negating any sort of belief in the Other altogether?

This, I think, can be situated in terms of religious belief. It is sometimes suggested that the religious are weak or soft of mind as they require the reassurance of God to make it through life. However, what if, following Kierkegaard, it is not belief that pacifies anxiety, but rather a lack of belief that pacifies anxiety. While it's certainly true that there's a kind of horror in recognizing that you simply drop out of existence altogether with death, isn't it far more horrifying to imagine, in folk-theological terms, an all-seeing god that knows your every thought and deed, who's will is inscrutable, and who desires for you to live a particular life without telling you precisely what that particular life should be? Isn't this what Kierkegaard is getting at in Fear and Trembling, when he talks about being siezed in one's singularity, knowing that God has called upon you for something, without knowing what that something is? There's a way in which the absence of God is far more reassuring than the presence of God (we don't defend against the Other for nothing), and there's a way in which it's far more reassuring to believe that it's all meaningless, that nothing ultimately matters, that we can make no difference, than it is to believe that there is a bit of meaning, that some things do matter, and that what we do does make a difference. Perhaps the Lacanian prescription would be to be capable of affirming meaning or action, even when all meaning has collapsed. None of this, of course, is to chastise Glen, only to point out that fantasy can be a wily thing.

Fantasy and Subjective Destitution

Continuing with our discussion started a couple days ago and regarding concerns about Zizek's suggestion that traversing the fantasy entails a certain politics as articulated in my post The Beyond of Fantasy, Anon goes on to remark,

Levi, the way I see it, the subject having traversed the fantasy recognizes that there is no a final destination to their desire - what if, then, performing acts that mark their own intrinsic failure like Kinsey's idiotic collecting the incollectable is all there is to the subject of drive? But then, what about pottering or dedicating one's life to studying NFL statistics? Drive or desire? Stavrakakis envisages the traversing of the fantasy in terms of identifying with objet a - something akin to proclaiming "we are all Jews!" in the Hitlerian Germany. What he does not address is why the subject having traversed their fantasy should have any intrinsic motivation to perform any such feats. Why not stick to collecting wasp galls instead?

While I agree with Anon's claim that post-fantasy desire has no final destination, I'm a bit more hesitant regarding his remarks about identification with objet a. Admittedly my thoughts are vague here, so I'll try simply to formulate a way in which this question might begin to be addressed. As I tried to emphasize in a previous post, traversing the fantasy is not simply the recognition that desire has no final destination, but also involves what Lacan refers to as a "subjective destitution". If this is so, then it is because the identity of the subject is dependent on the Other in a sort of topological projective space, such that if the Other falls (when we come to recognize the Other does not exist), the identifications of the subject fall as well, as these identifications require the gaze of the Other in order to sustain itself. It is this relationship between ideal ego and ego ideal that Lacan represents in the second cell of his graph of desire, in the vector running from O to i(o) to e and s(O). As Lacan will remark in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analaysis,

...the identification in question is not specular, immediate identification. It is its support. It supports the perspective chosen by the subject in the field of the Other, from which specular identification may be seen in a satisfactory light. The point of the ego ideal is that from which the subject will see himself, as one says, as others see him --which will enable him to support himself in a dual situation that is satisfactory for him from the point of view of love.

As a specular mirage, love is essentially deception. It is situated in the field established at the level of the pleasure reference, of that sole signifier necessary to introduce a perspective centered on the Ideal point, capital I, placed somewhere in the Other, from which the Other sees me, in the form I liked to be seen. (268)

In short, identification is never a dyadic relation in which I identify with another person and begin to imitate them. Rather, identification is first and foremost an identification with a particular gaze from which I see myself being seen, and which then leads me to embody particular signifiers that would render me lovable to the Other from the standpoint of this gaze. If traversing the fantasy is often so painful, then this is because the collapse of the Other, the discovery that the Other does not exist, also undermines that locus around which the analysand constructs his ideal ego. There is no longer a guarantee of those signifiers that define the subject's being, and the analysand is forced to confront both the void of the Other and the void of himself with regard to the symbolic. Here I think it's worthwhile to carefully think through the function that God serves for Descartes in the third meditation, in securing the trustworthiness of clear and distinct ideas and guaranteeing the very being of the subject. The third meditation is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand both the function of fantasy as it relates to the Other and guaranteeing one's identity.

The identifications of the analysand are, at one level, symbolic identifications or identifications with particularly charged signifiers... The so-called "master-signifiers". In an amusing passage earlier in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Lacan remarks that,

Before any experience, before any individual deduction, even before those collective experiences that may be related only to social needs are inscribed in it, something organizes this field, inscribes its initial lines of force. This is the function that Claude Levi-Strauss shows us to be the truth of the totem function, and which reduces its appearance-- the primary classificatory function.

Before strictly human relations are established, certain relations have already been determined. They are taken from whatever nature may offer as supports, supports that are arranged in themes of opposition. Nature provides-- I must use the word --signifiers, and these signifiers organize human relations in a creative way, providing them with structures and shaping them.

The important thing, for us, is that we are seeking here-- before any formation of the subject, of a subject who thinks, who situates himself in it --the level at which there is counting, things are counted, and in this counting he who counts is already included. It is only later that the subject has to recognize himself as such, recognize himself as he who counts. Remember the naive failure of the simpleton's delighted attempt to grasp the little fellow who declares-- I have three brothers, Paul, Ernest and me. But it is quite natural-- first the three brothers, Paul, Ernest and I are counted, and then there is I at the level at which I am to reflect the first I, that is to say, the I who counts. (20)

Lacan's language here-- no doubt as a result of Jacques-Alain Miller's editing --is extremely precise (especially his set theoretical reference to counting and inclusion). This is actually a slip of the tongue I myself made in analysis once, when I referred to my "brothers", when, in fact, I only have one brother. I was counting myself as a brother or according to my position in the network of signifiers. The point here is that we must distinguish between the count and what is counted. As Badiou argues in Being and Event, the state does not count individuals, but rather classes of individuals:

Marxist thought relates the State directly to sub-multiples rather than to terms of the situation. It posits that the count-as-one insured by the State is not originally that of the multiple of individuals, but that of the multiple of classes, the formal idea that the State-- which is the state of the historico-social situation --deals with collective subsets and not with individuals remains essential. This idea must be understood: the essence of the State is that of not being obliged to recognize individuals-- when it is obliged to recognize them, in concrete cases, it is always according to a principle of counting which does not concern the individual as such. (105)

As a subject of language, I am not counted as the individual that I am, but according to the various symbolic positions embodied by the signifier. It is this difference between the count and the counted that the simpleton above brings about. This, in part, is what Lacan refers to by the "aphanisis of the subject", where the subject never appears, but perpetually "fades behind the signifier". Now, this feature of counting in the symbolic creates a number of challenges for the subject. On the one hand, it is impossible for me to coincide with the signifier. I am always non-identical to the signifiers in which I find myself enmeshed, as signifiers are general whereas I am always singular. Here it's worthwhile to recall Hegel's joke about the man at the market who tries to buy "fruit". You cannot buy "fruit" as such, only this or that type of fruit. At the level of the signifier I am exchangeable with any other person falling under that signifier (i.e., "the average voter"), but at the level of my own being I am singular and irreplaceable, without measure or equivalent. It is impossible to capture this with the signifier. This is one of the meanings of the discourse of the master:

S1->S2
--....--
$.//.a

For any signifier I adopt to signify myself ("male", "American", "professor", "white", etc), there is a remainder that escapes or eludes the articulation of the signifier, something that cannot be signified. And it is for this reason that I am a "barred subject". Between myself and my signifiers there will always be a minimal opacity, not just for the Other (i.e., the Other can't read my mind and I can't read the Other's mind), but for myself as well: "why do these particular characterize me? Am i really a professor? Don't I always fall short of these signifiers? Don't I perpetually fail to embody them (hence a priori guilt)?"

However, we also note that this discourse writes the signifier S1-->S2, which is to say that the signifier represents the subject for another signifier. This problem is perhaps more crucial, for as Lacan will say in Seminar 14, The Logic of Fantasy, "the signifier cannot signify itself". The logic of the signifier follows the logic of Russell's paradox, in that signifiers have the property of not being members of themselves. In order to articulate a signifier, there must immediately be another signifier, a second signifier. This entails that 1) there can be no first or last signifier as the law ~(S1 belongs to S1) holds for all signifiers, and 2) that there cannot be a totality or complete set of all signifiers. As Lacan will say in Seminar 14, "there is no universe of discourse", meaning that there cannot be a complete set of signifiers.

This property of the signifier creates an internal instability where identification is concerned, for insofar as no signifier can signify itself it follows that every signifier requires another signifier in order to articulate itself. But if this is the case, it follows that identification, based as it is on signifiers, perpetually finds itself in a state of instability, as each identification I might take on requires another signifier to establish itself, and so on ad infinitum. As Peirce would say, my identifications are doomed to infinite semiosis. It is this instability internal to the nature of the signifier that simultaneously 1) precipitates the mad dash to identify (I perpetually strive to identify as a way of trying to halt the sliding of the signifier), 2) renders every identification precarious or unstable, and 3) calls forth the necessity of the symptom as that which anchors the sliding of the signifier. As Lacan will remark much later in seminar 22, RSI, there is no subject without a symptom, indicating that the symptom is a formally necessary feature of the subject's topology, not an accident resulting from childhood trauma that Other subjects might escape. In short, the symptom is that which marks the excess of the signifier over the being of the subject, or that wards off the undoing of identity.

It seems to me that it is precisely here that we find the support for Stavrakakis' thesis that in Nazi Germany, having traversed the fantasy, the only legitimate stance is identification with the figure of the Jew. Those principles that hold for the subject also hold for the social system, as there is no such thing as a subject that isn't already a social subject. The position of that the figure of the Jew occupies within Nazi Germany is that of the impossibility of a universe of discourse; which is to say that the figure of the Jew (not to be confused with actual Jews) is the suture that projects German identity from the precariousness of its identity. As Badiou will express a somewhat similar idea in Being and Event,

All multiple-presentation is exposed to the danger of the void: the void is its being. The consistency of the multiple amounts to the following: the void, which is the name of inconsistency in the situation (under the law of the count-as-one), cannot, in itself, be presented or fixed. What Heidegger names the care of being, which is the ecstasy of beings, could also be terms the situational anxiety of the void, or the necessity of warding off the void. The apparent solidity of the world of presentation is merely a result of the action of structure, even if nothing is outside such a result. It is necessary to prohibit that catastrophe of presentation which would be its encounter with its own void,, the presentational occurence of inconsistency as such, or the ruin of the One. (93)

The subject that has traversed the fantasy is the subject that faces this void or inconsistency at the heart of being; or, is effectively, the figure of the Jew (where the "Jew" is understood in functional terms as the supplement to the impossibility of forming a One out of the social system). Such a subject is a subject that has separated objet a, the endless metonymical displacement of desire embodied in drive, from all identifications, and thus effectively identifies with the position embodied by the excess signalled by the Jew. The Jew is precisely that figure that is not counted in the Nazi situation, that can only appear as excess or deficiency, and which thus marks the excess of inclusion over the symbolic's attempt to master inclusion. As such, the Jew is the figure of the symptom, the truth. Along these lines, Lacan will remark that "...the fundamental mainspring of the analytic operation is the maintainance of the distance between the I-- identification --and the a" (Seminar 11, 273). Yet this is just to say that over and above any identifications with master-signifiers, the analytic operation consists in identification with the symptom or the inability of these signifiers to totalize the social field. I'm not sure how much sense these remarks make, but they seem to be a stab in the right direction in understanding why Zizek and Stavrakakis make the claims they do about the social subject. Perhaps the question of "motive" isn't the right question to ask. It is not so much an issue of motives as a question of becoming an acephalous subject or undergoing subjective destitution.