One of the standard arguments conservative political theorists often level against radical leftist political theories and engagements is that humans, by nature, are corrupt and characterized by a sort of originary “fallenness” or “original sin”. For example, it never ceases to astonish me that my students seem to know a whole host of commonplaces, almost as if these commonplaces were innate or a priori. I suppose they wouldn’t be “commonplaces” if they weren’t, well, commonplace. Nonetheless, it is still astonishing that these things so readily come out of the tip of a young mind’s pen, or float off the lips of the fledgling philosopher. After all, I don’t know that these commonplaces are ever explicitly taught or discussed, rather they seem to float about of their own accord. Perhaps we receive them by osmosis. Or maybe they’re transmitted to us through radio waves. Maybe we pick them up from the antennas of our cell phones. Or perhaps, again, there’s some sort of obscure medical procedure conducted at birth that injects them into the brain. I don’t know. What I do know is that my students all seem to know that “everyone is entitled to their opinion”, that “it is always wrong to be intolerant”, that “all opinions are equal to one another”, that “religion is a private matter without social consequences”, that “nothing can be proven”, and above all that…
Drum roll please
Communism is good in theory but not in practice.
The reasoning behind this commonplace is always the same: Humans are greedy, lazy, and selfish by nature, so communism can never work. The premise of this argument, of course, is that communism is premised on altruism (Marx 101 suggests to me that class struggle is a struggle of interests, so I’m not sure how altruism fits in here, but oh well). All of this, of course, is a variant of the theory of original sin. There are certainly secular and theological variants of such a position. Social conservatives will often remind us that man fell as a result of pesky woman (personally I like it when women try to get me to do things I’m not supposed to do, but that’s me), and that for this reason it is sheer arrogance or pride (sin of sins!) to imagine that we could improve this world. Tend your garden, be devout, and wait for the next. Secular variants might make some appeal to human nature or innate biology as that which renders us intrinsically inimical to such arrangements. Nevermind what ethnography might show about alternative economies and social arrangements. “Nonsense!” screams the self-assured biosociologist. Of course, those bio- psychologists and sociologists never bother much with ethnography or anthropology– After all, humans are biologically identical regardless of when and where they live, demonstrating that human nature is the same in all possible universes.
The rhetorical dimension of these arguments are clear enough. By appealing to a fundamentally flawed nature, we bar any attempt to transform society a priori. All social transformation is necessarily doomed to failure and horror because humans are necessarily flawed and horrible. Often I’m inclined to agree. Between what I’ve heard from my patients– you do learn a thing or two about people in analysis –and what I’ve observed, we’re a pretty vile lot. Nonetheless, I am not convinced by claims that such social transformations are doomed to horror. I do, however, find myself wondering whether psychoanalytic political theory does not end up unwittingly repeating this narrative of human nature. Is not the psychoanalyst saying precisely the same thing when he claims that there’s an irreducible real, that there’s always the swerve of drive, that we’re always duped by the unconscious? As a result, is not psychoanalysis an inherently conservative ideology? The question isn’t rhetorical.
August 29, 2007 at 12:29 am
Zizek’s chapter on Kierkegaard in Parallax View is helpful in this regard. There does seem to be an obvious connection between original sin and “the death drive” — but “the death drive” can’t be original sin because even though we’re all born with it (theologically speaking), it’s something that comes upon the human race “from the outside.” Thus theology always distinguishes between the real, pre-sin human nature (Adam and Eve in the Garden had it, then it appears again in Christ — and maybe Mary, depending on how Catholic you are) and “actual existing” human nature, which is distorted.
In that chapter, Zizek says that the “distortion” of drive just is human nature, and the Fall is the imposition of the law, initially as a calming influence.
August 29, 2007 at 1:29 am
I’m not sure this really touches what I’m getting at, however. As I remarked in the post, we can distinguish between secular variants of this theme and religious (or Judeo-Christian, anyway) variants of this theme. The potential concern about psychoanalysis is that it portrays death drive as an ahistorical universal that is the same in all possible universes, thereby repeating these basic conservative arguments about the impossibility of revolutionary change. Psychoanalysis has traditionally been rather pessimistic and conservative about these types of issues based on its conception of human nature (Lacan tended in this direction himself). Zizek, I think, has struggled heroically against these tendencies in psychoanalysis, though I’m not absolutely convinced he’s been successful… I vaguely recall a number of passages that seem to confirm these worries, though I’d have to dig them up.
In a not unrelated vein, I’ve been pretty deeply impressed by ethnographic and political arguments Deleuze and Guattari develop in Anti-Oedipus as I’ve come to understand them better. Once you get past the exuberant and playful language, they give pretty compelling arguments showing how psychoanalysis treats the family-setting as a sort of “Ur-narrative” or master-narrative to which all phenomena are then traced back. This is problematic for two reasons: 1) It either a) ignores the diversity of the material presented in an analysand’s discourse (as can be readily seen in Freud’s study of Schreber, where the rich material pertaining to history, race, religion, politics, nationalism, etc., in the Memoir almost completely disappears, and b) it illicitly treats every formation of the unconscious as a representation or stand-in for the family structure (i.e., the kid playing “soldier” is simply playing at being dad, satisfying his desire to oust his father). This is illicit in the sense that the psychoanalytic clinic is premised on the immanence of the analysand’s discourse, such that the analyst cannot introduce themes from without but must find them there in the discourse, albeit separated and disconnected (Freud treats the separation of representations as one mechanism of repression, for example). 2) It treats the nuclear family as we know it today as a universal– the Ur-narrative again –thereby ignoring the tremendous variety of kinship relations that have historically existed (and risking ignoring the emergence of new kinship structures as we might be witnessing today in a growing field of single parent families and the growing importance of professional caregivers). This book chronicles an excellent example of a kinship structure that the Freudian would have great difficulty working with:
http://www.zonebooks.org/titles/HUAC_SOC.html
To be fair, Deleuze and Guattari praise and defend Lacan consistently (almost without fail) throughout Anti-Oedipus. They seem to think he avoids these difficulties. Later they become a bit more critical in A Thousand Plateaus. But generally they are positive.
The symbolic being what it is, I have difficulty conceiving of a possible universe where it does not produce a remainder that enacts drive. However, I am becoming more convinced by some alternative formulations of the semiotic realm that treat signifiance as one subdivision among many others that have different structurations.
August 29, 2007 at 1:36 am
But in Christian theology, original sin isn’t ahistorical — it’s something that befalls the human race. It’s not like God directly created humanity with original sin “pre-installed.”
August 29, 2007 at 1:45 am
Ah, I see your point. This is not quite what I’m getting at in referring to the ahistorical, but fair enough. My point is that short of the second coming, all human beings subsequent to that event are necessarily stained by that sin. Ideologically this functions as an advance argument for dismissing the possibility of humans ever improving social conditions (the thought that humans could do so is tantamount to the sin of arrogant pride). And, of course, that second coming is always effectively deferred or is a future that is always approaching us without ever reaching us. This, at least, is how the argument is deployed in conservative circles seeking to undercut social reformers. These references to the sinful nature of humans come up more often than I would have ever thought or expected.
August 29, 2007 at 1:56 am
I totally agree with you about how it’s used by conservatives. I’m just trying to open up avenues of arguing against them on theological terms — you could say, for instance, “If original sin can’t even be ameliorated, then what good was Christ’s death on the cross? Why would he have bothered to set up a particular community?” etc. There are strains of the Christian tradition that claim you can “get rid of” original sin in this life — John Wesley’s early Methodist movement, for instance, which had a strong social activist element. (Perhaps similar to Zizek’s views on the cure and the possibility of using “the discourse of the analyst” as a social link — which as far as I understand is very, very optimistic compared to the mainstream of the psychoanalytic tradition.)
Even if they aren’t convinced, such arguments will at least piss them off, which I think is important to do sometimes.
August 29, 2007 at 3:09 am
John Wesley is actually a close family relative (my brother was named after him). I grew up with an old leather bound multi-volume set of his sermons and diaries on the living room bookcase. Interesting stuff.
August 29, 2007 at 6:22 am
Unfortunately, I can’t find my copy at the moment, but I believe that Herbert Marcuse actually makes a (somewhat spurious, if I recall correctly) argument for the historicality/contingency of the death-drive itself in his book *Eros and Civilization*.
August 29, 2007 at 12:23 pm
A case could be made that original sin didn’t start making people really depraved until Augustine. Yahweh’s curse on Adam and Even in the Garden has nothing to do with concupiscence. In the very next chapter of Genesis Yahweh tells Cain, “Why are you angry, and why is your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” Jesus doesn’t push original sin; he preaches morality as if he thought people could actually do right. Paul doesn’t harp on the subject, though he does open the door with his old/new man discourse. Paul certainly sees human corruption as a universal condition, which separates him from the Jewish tradition, but his attributing sinful nature to Adam is a vague gesture. He’s more persuasive about how the Law exposes and stimulates sinful desire — the Lacanian theme.
This sense of having always already lost something gets progressively displaced from conscious willfulness (Old Testament) to unconscious or even preconscious experience (Paul), to an event that befalls everyone even before birth, at the beginning of historical time (Augustine and his Protestant successors). That’s where Hegel places the loss event too, I believe.
August 29, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Weird factoid: John Wesley’s best-selling book was a medical text, mainly compiling folk remedies that seemed to be most effective.
August 29, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Thanks for that, Ktismatics. In certain moments I’ve often thought that Christianity has been the greatest conspiracy against the Gospels ever devised. Or, to put it differently, a good deal of Christianity seems like a massive defense formation against what Jesus said. Somehow everthing gets inverted and transformed, and there’s an odd way in which the actual words of Jesus seem actively prohibited or repressed. I understand this is a crass generalization, but I think it’s a catchy way of putting it.
August 29, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Eisenkowski, I had heard Marcuse argues something to this effect, but have never read Eros & Civilization myself. When Marcuse refers to the death drive, is he talking about death drive in the sense of aggressivity (what Lacan attaches to the realm of the imaginary or dual relations and the struggles they engender), or is he talking about the compulsion to repeat (which Lacan associates with the insistence of the signifier in the unconscious, and later the real)?
If the latter, his arguments might not be as spurious as they might initially appear. I might just be drawing a blank, but the first real thematization of repetition I can think of occurs in Hegel’s analysis of the Reign of Terror in the Phenomenology. Kierkegaard picks up the theme of repetition around the same time. Prior to that, the theme of a “demonic” compulsion to repeat seems almost entirely absent in the history of philosophy (do others have earlier examples?). Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, and the Stoics all seem to take it for granted that action can easily be changed through thought and belief. Aristotle indeed talks about repetition in the Nichomachean Ethics, but there he is not referring to a compulsion to repeat, but how repating a particular action produces a habit that then serves as the ground of character. This historical specificity– if it is indeed historically specific –raises a number of provocative questions.
August 29, 2007 at 4:37 pm
1. Regarding Christianity, agreed with Adam that there is an original goodness to beings, humans, etc., and that original sin befalls, etc. But then the quesiton becomes, how does one interpret the “reality” of Jesus’ destroying sin and bringing about the kingdom of God. There is the Augustinian tendency (which is the major one in Western Chrsitianity) which someone like Yoder resists, when Yoder says that one can live the commands of Jesus now (ie, we could do the Sermon on the Mount now, if we wanted to).
2. Regarding Lacan and political change, there was an interview i read with Guattari where he said that Lacan provided the best available description of capitalist subjectivity, but precisely for this reason was unable to provide an analysis of the psyche that would break with that (ie, Lacan = analysis of psyche-under-spell-of-”original sin”). And thus Guattari regarded himself in this sense as making an absolute break with Lacan. So in that sense, I very much agree with the idea that psychoanalysis is conservative.
August 29, 2007 at 7:19 pm
As a point of interest, especially in relation to conservative political theory, Strauss repeats nearly ad nauseum that politics is only possible if man is, by nature, evil. A properly political theory cannot presuppose a philosophical anthropology claiming that humans are, by nature, good. Strauss, who clearly distinguishes between political and the theological, would likely surprisingly hold that this form of original sin isn’t necessarily a theological truth; but it is a political truth. But then Strauss also takes Jerusalem as a symbol for the theological.
August 29, 2007 at 8:02 pm
Craig, thanks for the reference. Does Strauss give any sort of account or reasoning as to why the political must necessarily presuppose this? My assertion isn’t so much that theories that assert the fallen nature of man are theological, so much as it is the assertion that they have unconsciously taken up a certain dominant historical narrative that they inherit.
I wonder how Strauss’ position would compare to that of other thinkers such as Badiou or Ranciere, who thematize the political in very specific and precise ways. Lurking in the background here, of course, is the monumental figure of Carl Schmitt, who I believe functions as a sort of underground influence for a number of thinkers on both the left and the right.
August 29, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Another relevant question would be that of how Strauss understands by the “political”. Does he simply mean the state or governmentality? Would the thesis then be that politics only makes sense if man is a fallen animal that needs to be controlled, moderated, and governed? This would contrast starkly with conceptions of the political such as those found in Badiou, Ranciere, and Zizek, where the political isn’t the State or governmentality, but a highly specific intervention in a situation. I do not know Schmitt very well, but they seem very close to Schmitt in this connection, though in inverted form. Where for Schmitt political is the sovereign deciding the exception, for these other thinkers the political isn’t the action of the sovereign, but rather the political comes from “below” among the demos or the rabble, with respect to the “real” appearing in situations. I realize I’m putting this very gesturally. In any event, these other conceptions of the political aren’t issues of governmentality, how the state should be organized, the legislation of policy, etc.
August 29, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Or, to put it differently, a good deal of Christianity seems like a massive defense formation against what Jesus said.
But dr. Sinth, doesn’t that happen to most intellectual systems, as in dr. Zizek’s defense formation against Lacan?
On Communism, I think the biggest problem is that those who think about it are now young enough not to have lived in it; they don’t really know just how bad it was. The other problem is that Communism proper never came to be, as it was always a disguised form of capitalism. Now this isn’t only negative. Perhaps the lack of experience will open up the possibility for a proper Communism. If you can view the world with a child’s eyes, perhaps you won’t see that evil that followed the psychoanalysts.
August 29, 2007 at 9:34 pm
I will pay you back for that ”heroic effort” of dr Zizek!
September 1, 2007 at 8:46 am
If Zizek says that original sin befalls humans, and that Kierkegaard says that, I’d like to know what book he got that from. Original sin does take on an historical dimension in Kierkegaard’s thought. It is what we are born into as fallen beings–to use a Heideggerian phrase. But original sin in its subjective dimension is only historical as it relates to the sins I actually commit, not as a member of species or anything else.
September 1, 2007 at 11:18 am
“the monumental figure of Carl Schmitt”
Really? I was under the impression that the relative prominance of Carl Schmitt was a fairly recent phenomenon. As a sort of experiment one could check the number of references to Schmitt in, say, Kenneth Arrow.
The modern reevaluation of Schmitt seems more like the deliberate extension of nineteenth century political thought: useful for those whose main problematic is establishing a social situation commensurate with the deployment of a style of discourse at once condescending and archaic.
September 1, 2007 at 11:18 am
…or maybe you were being sarcastic
September 1, 2007 at 11:21 am
Anyway, I think Lucretius was aware of repetition compulsion:
“Lovers’ passion is storm-tossed, even in the moment of fruition, by waves of delusion and incertitude. They cannot make up their mind what to enjoy first with eye or hand. They clasp the object of their longing so tightly that the embrace is painful. They kiss so fiercely that teeth are driven into lips. All this because pleasure is not pure, but they are goaded by an underlying impulse to hurt the thing, whatever it may be, that gives rise to these budding shoots of madness.”
***
“For in love there is the hope that the flame of passion may be quenched by the same body that kindled it. But this runs clean counter to the course of nature. This is the one thing of which the more we have, the more our breast burns with th evil lust of having.”
- On the Nature of Things
September 1, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Where, precisely, are you seeing repetition compulsion in these passages from Lucretius?
September 1, 2007 at 7:19 pm
“Where, pecisely”?
here:
“the flame of passion may be quenched by the same body that kindled it”
how is this not repetition compulsion?
September 1, 2007 at 7:20 pm
sorry, should have been precisely
September 1, 2007 at 8:13 pm
For starters, a repetition compulsion is something that is not quenched by the object of its desire and is thus something quite different than what Lucretius alludes to here (I’m not sure where you’re seeing repetition or compulsion in the quoted sentence). For instance, in the case of sexual addiction or an eating disorder, acquiring the object of desire does not lead to the disappearance of the desire. More benign versions of such compulsion can be seen among collectors. One of the major differences between ancient thought and contemporary thought is that the former tends to posit the satitiation of a desire when it reaches its object. Freud’s death drive or compulsion to repeat was a scandal even among the psychoanalysts. Why this should have been so perplexing can be seen when reflecting carefully on the nature of the pleasure principle. In the original topology the pleasure principle functions to dissipate tension within the psychic system. By all rights it should lead to the complete absence of repetition. Yet in the case of death drive we have a perpetual and ineradicable build-up of tension within the psychic system that repeats again and again, as if the telos of the system were not the dissipation of tension but its promotion.
September 2, 2007 at 6:35 am
Dr. Larval, As to your comments on original sin, drive, and the political: a Kierkegaardian religious understanding of this would suggest that you can’t have a free and just society until there’s equality. Given sinfulness, though, and human finitude, that is impossible. Only God has the ability to see each in an equal way, without socio-cultural accretions occluding one’s view.
OTOH, through an awareness and continuing awareness of sinfulness and the attempt to stay on guard vis a vis that sinfulness, one can begin to follow the commandment to love neighbor and enemy. This only occurs, of course, when one realizes that given other circumstances and contingencies I would or could indeed be in the same situation as that other. Yet, it’s only with an awareness of something that provides a transcendent horizon, where nothing is ever final and ultimate in this life except death that I can find the motivation to realize the ethical and moral imperatives of that awreness.
Death is the horizon within which all things in some way gain a proper perspective. Kierkegaard doesn’t so much see death as a drive, as he does as a shirking of responsibility in one regard, an easy way out in another. This lines up with one aspect of despair, but only the passive despair that despairs of ever being oneself. Because we can’t be who we are, especially who we think we should be, then we want to die.
Westphal in his book on God, Guilt and Death, marshals Freud and Kierkegaard, throwing in Heidegger to boot, to examine the relationship between the transcendent desire to be who I am–eg, a good person, a fulfilled person–and the facing of death. In face of that, there’s a form of resentment that forms and humans begin to take out their resentment on themselves and others. Using this framework, Westphal analyzes Freud’s atheism in terms of his father’s sheepish responses to antisemitism.
Westphal has noted in another work that Kierkegaard’s political attitude begins from within the notion that all is questionable and nothing is absolute. He calls it Religiousness C, which is a form of ideology critique that takes to task any ideology that might set itself up as absolute and beyond question. At the same time, the motivation behind such critique is the awareness of sinfulness and that this brings with it an identification with the persecuted other.
Others have taken the Kierkegaardian insights in secular directions: early Marcuse, Heidegger, Sartre, Habermas, and Matustik. Most demythologize sinfulness and replace it with supposed secularized cognates. Matustik is the most consistent and most Kierkegaardian.
In her analysis of how Heidegger (mis)appropriated Kierkegaard, Patricia Huntington notes that Heidegger de-ethicizes Kierkegaard’s category of authenticity. He turns it into an ontological category, eschewing the ontic, and by doing so identifies the authentic self with an ethical substrate borne by culture and social institutions, as well as wayward ontologies. In doing this, Huntington, argues, Heidegger abstracts authentic being and thereby identifies coming to know myself as who i truly am with fate. In this regard, only some are born to be great and true selves, while others are minions of the great They.
Kierkegaard does not ontologize authenticity in this way, aware as he is that sinfulness is an individual event of personal history. The task of regaining a true self is never identified with that realm of historical sin which he recognizes as original sin and which, it seems, Heidegger inappropriately identified as a form of necessary historical unfolding.
September 2, 2007 at 9:20 am
this the whole passage:
“This, then, is what we term Venus. This is the origin of the thing called love – that drop of Venus’ honey that first drips into our heart, to be followed by numbing heart-ache. Though the object of your love may beabsent, images of it still haunt you and the beloved name chimes sweetly in your ears. If you find yourself thus passionately enamoured of an individual, you should keep well away from such images. Thrust from you anything that might feed your passion, and turn your mind elsewhere. Vent the seed of love upon other objects. By clinging to it you assure yourself the certainty of heart-sickness and pain. With nourishment the festering sore quickens and strengthens. Day by day the frenzy heightens and the grief deepens. Your only remedy is to lance the first wound with new incisions; to salve it, while it is still fresh, with promiscuous attachments; to guide the motions of your mind into some other channel.
Do not think that by avoiding grand passions you are missing the delights of Venus. Rather, you are reaping such profits as carry with them no penalty. Rest assured that this pleasure is enjoyed in a purer form by the healthy than the love-sick. Lovers’ passion is storm-tossed, even in the moment of fruition, by waves of delusion and incertitude. They cannot make up their mind what to enjoy first with eye or hand. They clasp the object of their longing so tightly that the embrace is painful. They kiss so fiercely that teeth are driven into lips. All this because pleasure is not pure, but they are goaded by an underlying impulse to hurt the thing, whatever it may be, that gives rise to these budding shoots of madness.
In the actual presence of love Venus lightens the penalties she imposes, and her sting is assuaged by an admixture of alluring pleasure. For in love there is the hope that the flame of passion may be quenched by the same body that kindled it. But this runs clean counter to the course of nature. This is the one thing of which the more we have, the more our breast burns with th evil lust of having. Food and fluid are taken into our body; since they fill their allotted places, the desire for meat and drink is thus easily appeased. But a pretty face or a pleasing complexion gives the body nothing to enjoy but insubstantial images, which all too often fond hope scatters to the winds.
When a thirsty man tries to drink in his dreams but is given no drop to quench the fire in his limbs, he clutches at images of waer with fruitless effort and while he laps up a rushing stream he remains thirsty in the midst. Just so in the midst of love Venus teases lovers with images. They cannot glut their eyes by gazing on the beloved form, however closely. Their hands glean nothing from those dainty limbs in their aimless roving all over the body. Then comes the moment when with limbs entwined they pluck the flower of youth. Their bodies thrill with presentiment of joy, and it is seed-time in the fields of Venus. Body clings greedily to body; moist lips are pressed on lips, and deep breaths are drawn through clenched teeth. But all to no purpose. One can glean nothin from the other, nor enter in and be wholly absorbed , body in body; for sometimes it seems that that is what they are craving and striving to do, so hungrily do they cling together in Venus’ fetters, while their limbs are unnerved and liquefied by the intensity of rapture. At length, when the spate of lust is spent, their comes a slight intermission in the raging fever. But not for long. Soon the same frenzy returns. The fit is upon them once more. They ask themselves what it is they are craving for, but find no device that will master their malady. In aimless bewilderment they waste away, stricken by an unseen wound.”
September 2, 2007 at 9:31 am
“Freud’s death drive or compulsion to repeat was a scandal even among the psychoanalysts. Why this should have been so perplexing can be seen when reflecting carefully on the nature of the pleasure principle. In the original topology the pleasure principle functions to dissipate tension within the psychic system. By all rights it should lead to the complete absence of repetition. Yet in the case of death drive we have a perpetual and ineradicable build-up of tension within the psychic system that repeats again and again, as if the telos of the system were not the dissipation of tension but its promotion.”
this reminds me actually of Wilhelm Reich’s dispute with the Communist Party whose leadership was apparently scandalised by his ideas about fascism which also broke with established tenets concerning the economics of pleasure; Marx being based on utilitarian type ideas:
(”Marx 101 suggests to me that class struggle is a struggle of interests”)
Isn’t it possible it was the commonplaces that Freud upset that were historically specific (nineteenth century liberalism) rather than the basis of his theory?
September 2, 2007 at 9:37 am
…commonplaces that wouldn’t apply to the social structure of the Roman world.
Of course one could disagree as to whether Lucretius is talking about the same thing as Freud, and Lucretius certainly isn’t presenting a general theory.
September 2, 2007 at 10:51 am
PS I would suggest that the Xtian Right makes the same category mistake that Heidegger did. That is, they ontologize original sin, thereby making the problem of modernity a problem of ethos. Therefore, you want to change what’s wrong with America or the world, you must change the ethos. They do not follow, obviously, Heidegger’s route of destruktion, but instead do so via various strands of natural theology, whether Thomistic or Calvinist/Lutheran.
September 2, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Dr. Sinthome, would you then say that from D&G’s criticism of the family as Ur-narrative, that the ethnographic diversity of kinship relations* should compell us to consider NOT that there must be multiple ways of treating pathology, but that there are multiple ways (perhaps even contradictory) of thinking pathologically? I mean that the typical recourse to this sort of diversity, in a more general sense, would be that we must adopt different approaches to what is essentially the same problem, rather than step back from and critiquing our very interest in maintaining a universal concept of pathology.
*The most interesting book I’ve come across in this field is David Schneider’s “Critique of the Study of Kinship.” It’s from the ’80s, and simply put undermines the biological-centeredness of the study of kinship in Anthropology and elsewhere. What’s interesting about it is that it illuminates how our very concept of kinship in the West, as an intellectual category for study as well as casual-personal, arises from our own, as he puts it, ethno-epistemology. In our case, biology and quasi-biology are the determinants in how we determine and maintain kinship relations. He also rails against the notion of fictive kin as practically contradictory; fictive kin ARE real kin, because we treat them as such. All that said, he brings attention to differing ways that strong kinship-ties are maintained, though traditional kinship categories confuse or obsfucate. Ultimately he challenges the anthropological world to either do away with the notion of kinship, or figure out a way to assess it that does not privilege, much less assume, biological relatedness as a factor. A professor who used to teach at my school would eventually make a gesture towards such a system.
September 2, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Absolutely. Levi-Strauss already underlined this in An Introduction to Marcel Mauss, where he argued that different social structures give rise to different types of symptoms. For instance, he argues that schizophrenia is absent in particular types of social systems.
I am not at all in disagreement with Schneider’s apparent argument here, but I find it strange to say the least. The great discovery of ethnography during the last century was that kinship structures and the incest taboo have very little to do with biology. It is impossible to understand anything of Lacan– especially why he introduced the symbolic and the name-of-the-father –if the anthropology of Levi-Strauss is not fully kept in mind. This book as an excellent illustration of the non-biological nature of these social structures:
http://www.zonebooks.org/titles/HUAC_SOC.html
One of the reasons this society is particularly interesting is that it is both possible and sanctioned for a daughter to mate with her biological brother or father. The reason for this is that the name-of-the-father is operative in this society in a very different way, and, because the child does not know who their father is it becomes possible to mate with ones biological father or brother. Examples such as this are not at all rare in ethnography. From the Lacanian perspective, very different ethnographies will emerge as a result of these different structurations. For instance, Lacan, in an early essay, argued that neurosis is unique to our contemporary historical moment and absent in totemic society by virtue of the fact that for totemic societies the name-of-the-father is separated from the imaginary father (i.e., the male that assists in childcare) and is instead embodied in the totem (you can’t mate with anyone sharing the same totem in your tribe). By contrast, in contemporary society the name-of-the-father (the prohibition against incest) and the imaginary father (the male caregiver) are embodied in one and the same person, generating all sorts of conflicts (as the imaginary father simultaneously serves as an ego-ideal and a prohibition of that ideal). According to Lacan, these two differing structural configurations generate very different symptomologies.
I’ve tried to outline some of the problems with American psychotherapeutic practice and its biologism (and neurologism) in previous posts on this blog:
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2007/01/23/the-absent-third/
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2007/01/23/social-sciences-and-apres-coup/
The problem lies in an abstract conception of the individual that divorces it from the symbolic, treating the symbolic as if it had no formative impact on individuals. This comes as no surprise giving the reigning individualist, capitalist ideology in the United States, that renders scientists individuated in this context especially prone to abstraction and a disavowal of the social.
September 3, 2007 at 6:09 pm
I’ve never found the argument that people are by nature sinful to be philosophically limiting. In fact, the opposite.
If we are by nature unable to reach perfection, how is it we can even conceive of perfection?
Or perhaps our conception of perfection is itself flawed? Maybe there is no perfection – but the concept reflects a desire, a fantasy, to simply avoid error. Is perfection just a lack of error?
Is it possible for people to create anything without error, without an assumption, without some gap?
For example, if people were involved in writing any part of the Bible, and since no human is perfect, how is it that people can believe that the Bible is a reference containing no mistakes? Not to argue about the Bible, but how is that on the one hand we can hold that human fallibility is inherent, but on the other accept a work by inherently error-prone humans as perfection?
And perhaps the belief of attaining material perfection was what doomed the communist experiment?
These are simple twists on commonplace beliefs, sometimes needed to get students off their unconsciously accepted ideologies.
September 3, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Pebird, nice to see you!
Is the claim that people are sinful identical to the claim that we are imperfect? I completely agree that we perpetually posit ideals and values (I would argue they change throughout history) and that we experience ourselves as falling short of these values. By contrast, it seems to me that assertions of inherent sinfulness are often saying far more than this. Here the claim is that there is something fundamentally– for lack of a better word –malevolent in human nature that entails the necessary failure of any attempts to change aspects of science. This line of argument comes up quite often, in my experience, in fundamentalist circles. Somehow the claim that humans are sinful and we are forgiven by Christ gets translated into the claim that we are forgiven and shouldn’t even try to engage in any good works or attempts at self-betterment because 1) since we are already forgiven there’s no point in doing so anyway, and 2) because we are sinful by nature we’ll necessarily fail in trying to do so. Often these claims asserted at the level of individual ethics get transferred to political change.I should emphasize that I’m not just pulling this thesis out of thin air, but have observed this rhetoric at work far more than I would have ever expected from those who are predominantly conservative in their thought. Moreover, I’m uninterested in whether talk of inherent sin is accurate theologically or is true, but only with the way this particular rhetoric seems to function (a number of the posts in this thread have gotten into discussions about the theological accuracy of this claim, which strikes me as beside the point).
As for how people can believe the Bible contains no mistakes… The thesis is that the Bible is divinely inspired such that even though it was written by people it was actually written by God who animated these people. Ergo it can contain no mistakes.
It seems to me that we can come up with many more reasons for why the communist experiment failed, not the least of which was Stalinism (i.e., the belief that the transformation of economic conditions is sufficient to transform social conditions). Couple this with a state centered, hierarchical bureaucratic form of government that believes it can predict all needs and you get quite a mess.
September 3, 2007 at 9:53 pm
Sinthome,
I, too, am interested in the conservative “nature” of psychonalysis. I would locate, however, any possible Ur-narrative in its insistence on sexual difference and not in the Oedipal romance. The law can and does propose alternatives to familial relations, but Lacan proposes with his concept of the phallic function the operation of some mechanism that has us all unconsciously lining up under one “banner” or the other (with possible little regard to our biological equipment). The question is: is this proposition an inherently conservative one? There is obviously a school of thought in the university that says yes. And I am the first to admit that they could be right. But I have my doubts. I think about the XXth seminar and try to appreciate the rupture that Lacan sees in the human world because there is no sexual relation, there is no “one.” My reflections follow this rickety chain: this is the foreclosure of any utopia–yet introduces the possibility of an ethic based on the recognition of the impossibility of satisfaction from the other. A conclusion that does not mean that psychoanalysis is anti-communist, but that a psychoanalytic view of communism would never mistake it for a utopia. There can be no social or political panacea, but that a priori in no way prevents change in these spheres.
What is of concern is the use of psychanalytic theories in the defense of reactionary and homophobic positions. I’m thinking here of French intellectuals who used Lacanian concepts like “le nom-du-pere” to campaign against civil unions in France. Camille Robcis (sp?) from Cornell has done good work in tracking the genesis of this movement. I think one is right to ask if there is something inherent in the concepts that lends to these kinds of reasoning (and strident critics do). On the otherhand, I would be quick to look at the historical context in which Lacan’s theories were put to this use and to ask if they yield similar results in other contexts. This is, albeit, difficult to do since it is only in France and Argentina that psychoanalysis has the culture weight to enter into mainstream political discourse, but one could look at proponents of Lacanian psychoanalysis in, say, American universities to gauge its reactionary effects. Anecdotal experience shows me that Lacanians are not conservative, reactionary, nor homophobic–but they do have a tendency to get married and settle down. That sounds flippant but it’s not far from the truth…anybody else noticed that? It’s not that psychoanalysis is conservative but it seems to be normalizing? Maybe another way to say that is–the removal of symptoms and the accession to desire (which in academics is most often expressed in intense, rewarding, and productive intellectual endeavor) looks a lot like growing up and getting over it already.
September 3, 2007 at 10:54 pm
This is interesting. Could you flesh out these arguments a bit more?
What exactly are the claims these people are making? On the surface they sound extremely strange. Not only was Lacan well-known for working with homosexuals (when the IPA prohibited this practice), but Lacan is pretty clear in arguing that there’s no such thing as a “normal” sexuality. Somehow this line of argumentation seems premised on the thesis that there is a sexual relationship.
I have to confess that I have a number of reservations about Lacan’s account of sexuation. I can understand the graphs themselves well enough. For me the problem is how he gets there. Lacan is fairly clear in arguing that sexuation and biological sex are distinct, such that we can have males that fall under the feminine side of the graph and women that fall under the masculine side of the graph. Yet if this is the case, then why refer to it as sexuation at all? Why not rather refer to it as a particular structure of desire? Moreover, at a certain point it seems as if discussions of sexuation fall back on the empirical, conflating the phallus, which is a signifier, with the penis and then allowing all sorts of contingent events to do the work of explanation, i.e., the same things that caused Freud trouble by virtue of relying on contingent experiences of being told that it would be “cut off”, etc. Despite the work of Ragland, Sollers, and Verhaeghe, I just haven’t seen a convincing discussion of sexuation in the secondary lit to day. When I read seminars 14 – 21 where Lacan developed his account, his discussions strike me very much as a work that is underway and that hasn’t yet been pinned down. Somehow, whether by accidents of publication history (the release of seminar 20), or other factors, it seems that Lacan’s very provisional claims on these issues have solidified into dogma.
September 4, 2007 at 5:07 am
Using error instead of sin creates some distance from the moral argument – which I don’t think one can have until (especially with students) until some basic groundrules are established.
You seriously have students who think that if they are forgiven they don’t need to engage in good works? Have they never seen Unforgiven?
I am grateful for the link to Altemeyer’s book – his research on how people come to hold certain beliefs and the lack of influence logic and evidence has on their ‘thinking’ has scary implications.
September 4, 2007 at 5:38 am
The point of the argument about orginal sin was not to suggest that it was true or not, but whether there are alternative ways of discussing it in a more psycological vein. As I noted, Kierkegaard’s analysis doesn’t question whether there is sinfulness but instead provides a psychological/phenomenological discussion of the conditions that lead up to the actual sin. While sinfulness is an actuality it can only be experienced as such by the individual. It arises from a sense of guilt (a strangely familiar term from psychoanalysis, no?) but goes beyond guilt which may indeed be simply a psycho-biolgical phenomenon. Sinfulness, however, is an awareness of an inability to make ethical/moral decisions because of a propensity to do evil because one has not attaine dthe proper psychological/motivational distance from one’s socio-cultural matrix..
Be that as it may, I found your comments on Levi-Strauss somewhat amusing. The comments brought back fond memories of my my anthropology professor, Alfonso Ortiz, and his anecdote about Levi-Strauss. As you will know, Levi-Strauss’ theory boils down to a primarily binary framework. He asserts that every cultural system has at its base a series of binary opposites which are then permutated in various ways to bring about a culturally coherent world-view.
Ortiz was a Tewa from Santa Clara Pueblo. Besides being a Sacred Clown, he went on to study with some of the most pre-eminent anthropologists of his generation, such as Geertz etc. While at Chicago, he finished his PhD on the Tewa world-view. From his own experience with that cultural system he found that the Tewa work not with binary oppositions but a tertiary system.
While in Paris, a friend set up a meeting with Levi-Strauss to see what he’d say about Ortiz’ thesis. Before they met, however, Levi-Strauss called off the meeting. Later, Ortiz heard that Levi-Strauss said that Ortiz’ thesis was “impossible.”
I can only imagine Levi-Strauss–who never set foot outside of Paris (except an ill-begotten trip) but who hypothesized the theory of all theories for cultural systems–was horrified to meet a real individual whose cultural system seemed to invalidate many of his own theories. Here was a real person who grew up in a culture that seemingly boiled down to more than simply the raw and the cooked! Who knows, maybe Levi-Strauss thought he was aboput to meet a monstrosity or inhuman ghost, someone whose very existence was “impossible!”
September 4, 2007 at 5:51 am
Sinthome,
Here is the reference for the Robcis article which chronicles the use of Lacanian theories in the anti-civil union discourse of French intellectuals and politicians: Robcis, Camille
How the Symbolic Became French: Kinship and Republicanism in the PACS Debates
Discourse – 26.3, Fall 2004, pp. 110-135
The upshot is that Lacan was used by certain members of the debate to maintain a position strikingly similar to the Christian-right’s on gay marriage: heterosexual marriage is the basis of social stability because (for the Lacanians) this social relation is the basis for subject formation. At least, that’s how I understood it when I read this article a few months ago.
I agree that the conflation or a seemingly inevitable slip in talking about the phallus and the penis is troubling, but the theory that there is more than one way that desire is structured is an acceptable one for me until I see something more convincing. I’m familiar with Verhaeghe’s and Sollers’s work on this late Lacan, but not Ragland’s–mind giving some reading suggestions?
May I ask what your clinical experience suggests in relation to the sexuation theory?
September 4, 2007 at 5:59 am
a quick question:
You were talking about Colette Soler? or Philippe Sollers? I know the Soler but not the Sollers work on sexuation.
September 4, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Fullofquestions,
Thanks for the reference. Nothing seems more foreign to me than this sort of normalization in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Yes, I was referring to Colette Soler, not Philippe Sollers (though that makes for an interesting slip, given the context). You might check out Ragland’s Logic of Sexuation: From Aristotle to Lacan. I didn’t get much out of it, but you might.
September 4, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Pebird, I can see how my post might have been a little misleading, given that I begin by talking about commonplaces with respect to students. I was trying to get at commonplaces that pervade the social field at large, and not just students alone. The belief that one doesn’t have to engage in good works if they’ve been saved is actually quite common in some evangelical circles.
September 6, 2007 at 4:57 am
Students and commonplaces aside, there are some issues I have with what you propose.
“The rhetorical dimension of these arguments are clear enough. By appealing to a fundamentally flawed nature, we bar any attempt to transform society a priori.”
I cannot accept that – I instead believe accepting the fundamentally flawed nature of humanity is liberating and increases the possibility of social transformation.
It’s not the realization of our imperfect nature that is limiting – it is our assumption that there is some other being/belief/structure that overcomes this natural sinfulness. It’s just another form of wanting a Big Other – whether that’s the big boss, the big heyzeus, the big socialism.
That was my point about the failure of the first socialist experiment – by maintaining an ideology of social perfectibility (and it was powerful), criticism was foreclosed and repression justified. And you have to remember that in the 20’s and 30’s socialism was viewed by many as a kind of liberating social-theology, as progressing toward some goal of material perfection.
The fact that this was taken advantage of by those who worked their way/found themselves in power is besides the point – the widely held belief of social progression forward to a ‘more perfect’ (which is a weird term, when you think about it) society was a powerful motivating force, but also based on a fundamental flaw – which made it ripe for perversion.
It is difficult to allow this kind of idea if you accept that we cannot, will not, cannot ever be perfect or without sin. But if we desire flawlessness – it is the appeal to this fantasy of perfection that can be manipulated into any number of destructive and anti-libratory actions.
Psychoanalysis may indeed seem conservative – by not indulging certain fantasies and forcing the analysand to address the real there is the appearance of the conventional and traditional. But it has radical potential in the real sense – by getting to the root, approaching the core of one’s being and presenting the gap over which the individual must leap and risk complete failure – how much better a training for revolution is there?