Larval Subjects .

The last few days have left me feeling despondant and without a thought in the world, though I’m dreaming a good deal, which must, from an analytic point of view, mean that I’m doing some serious thinking. I feel as if my brain has fallen out of my ear. Last night’s dream involved an old friend Dan, who first introduced me to philosophy in highschool, holding a German luger pistol to my head and laughing as I squirmed. I wonder what that’s all about. In the dream it turns out that after all these years he still works at Long John Silver’s as a fry cook. My father has such a gun… Hmmm.

At any rate, in my quest to better understand the series of critical questions that N.Pepperell over at Rough Theory has been posing vis a vis the conditions for the possibility of critique, I’ve returned to Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, a text that always, for some reason, fills me with guilt… The guilt of a missed encounter. Just in traversing the first few pages, I can see why N.Pepperell has been intrigued by a good deal of the work I’ve been doing here, as much of Adorno resonates closely with Lacan and Zizek. The following remarks are more placeholders than anything else, designed to forge a sort of translation device or lexicon, rather than to propose an argument. Of course, any translation is already an interpretation, so perhaps I should bear that in mind.

In a striking remark that cannot fail to ring significantly to the Lacanian ear, Adorno claims that,

The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy… It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.

Yet the appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself, in its pure form. To think is to identify. Conceptual order is content to screen what thinking seeks to comprehend. The semblance and the truth of thought entwine. The semblance cannot be decreed away, as by avowal of a being-in-itself outside the totality of cogitative definitions… Aware that the conceptual totality is mere appearance, I have no way but to break immanently, in its own measure, through the appearance of total identity. Since that totality is structured to accord with logic, however, whose core is the principle of the excluded middle, whatever will not fit this principle, whatever differs in quality, comes to be designated as a contradiction. Contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity; the dialectical primary of the principle of contradiction makes the thought of unity the measure of heterogeneity. (5)

This is perhaps the pithiest expression of the Lacanian borromean knot between the symbolic, the real, and the imaginary I have ever encountered. I have never been particularly fond of the term “imaginary” in Lacanian psychoanalysis, as it too readily lends itself to common usages suggesting what is false or imagined, whereas for Lacan the imaginary pertains to the dimension of the image, of our identification with our bodily image that always differs from the lived body of movement, that we can never fully assume or be identical with. Of course, this is part of the point in Lacan’s use of language: It is a pedagogy that teaches the difference between signifier and signified, of their radical discontinuity, and that enjoins us not to assume the signified as inherently attached to the signifier, but to look for it among those signifiers immanently attached to it in a text or the speech of an analysand. The imaginary is the domain of identification, and marks our yearning for completeness, wholeness, totality, and identity. Dylan Evans puts it nicely in his Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis,

The basis of the imaginary order continues to be the formation of the ego in the mirror stage. Since the ego is formed by identifying with the counterpart or specular image, identification is an important aspect of the imaginary order. The ego and the counterpart form the protypical dual relationship, and are interchangeable. This relationship whereby the ego is constituted by identification with the little other [the mirror image or image of another person] means that the ego, and the imaginary order itself, are both sites of a radical alienation; ‘aleination is constitutive of the imaginary order’ (S3, 146) [we are alienated insofar as we are never identical to the image, hence the identification generates rivalry and aggressivity as can often be witnessed in the blogosphere when various bloggers go to war with one another in thinly veiled struggles for prestige and recognition]. The dual relationship between the ego and the counterpart is fundamentally narcissistic, and narcissism is another characteristic of the imaginary order. Narcissism is always accompanied by a certain aggressivity. The imaginary is the realm of image and imagination, deception and lure [deception insofar as I confuse myself with what I am not, my frozen image]. The principle illusions of the imaginary are those of wholeness, synthesis, autonomy, duality and above all, similarity [images appear whole, whereas language and movement are not]. The imaginary is thus the order of surface appearances which are deceptive, observable phenomena which hide underlying structure; the affects are such phenomena. (82)

Returning then to Adorno, then, the concept can loosely be translated into the domain of the symbolic, while the totality or whole can be translated into the domain of the Lacanian imaginary. As Adorno will say a few pages later, “No object is wholly known; knowledge is not supposed to prepare the phantasm of the whole” (14). Those philosophical systems that present the whole such as, for instance, Whitehead, can be situated as the symbolic under the dominion of the imaginary. They fantasize an image without remainder, without blindspot or tain, without gaze before which they dance. And it is remarkable that variants of holism so often paradoxically generate aggressivity.

The real then, of course, would be the remainder that resists conceptualization. This remainder seems to function in a two-fold way. When Adorno suggests that to think is to identify, he immediately seems to back up, expressing hesitation, treating this remainder as the motor that propels the imaginary yearning for identification. It is precisely because the object differs from itself, that thought strives to identify. A perfect identity would leave no space, no gap, calling for the thing to be thought. The thing would reside purely within itself, never producing the distance that calls for it to be thought. It is only insofar as identity already is minimally indifferent that we’re driven to try to identify. As Hegel puts it in an important passage in the Logic (and I think Adorno is pretty far off the mark in his interpretation of Hegel),

This proposition in its positive expression A = A is, in the first instance, nothing more than the expression of an empty tautology. It has therefore been rightly remarked that this law of thought has no content and leads no further. It is thus the empty identity that is rigidly adhered to by those who take it, as such, to be something true and are given to saying that identity is not difference, but that identity and difference are different. They do not see that in this very assertion they are themselves saying that identity is different; for they are saying that identity is different from difference; since this must at the same time be admitted to be the nature of identity, their assertion implies that identity, not externally, but in its own self, in its very nature, is this, to be different. (413)

Hegel goes on to argue that the contradiction embodied in the principle of identity is not simply that identity is different from difference– though this is true as well –but immanent to identity itself as a contradiction or difference between form and content. At the level of form, any proposition of the form “x is…” calls for a predicate that enriches the subject with some new content. For instance, I say a “pen is a utensil”. However, at the level of content, all we get is “A is A”, such that the predicate gives us no additional content, but merely repeats, tautologously, the initial subject. What we thus get is a marking of the difference betwen form and content. It is precisely because the content fails that we are able to become aware of the form of this species of propositions. Thus, even in the most formal presentation of identity already contains the elusive remainder within it or its own resistance to complete conceptualizations or symbolization.

We might begin from an epistemic stance, arguing that this remainder is a deficiency in thought, a deficiency in knowledge, that could perhaps be surmounted by gaining more information and understanding. Here the world, in-itself, would be free of such remainders and would be complete. It would simply be a matter of a disadequation between thought and being. However, in a vein very similar to Zizek’s, Adorno goes on to claim that in fact it is the world itself that is antagonistic, that doesn’t have the smooth functioning of the signifier (when conceived under the dominion of the imaginary):

However, varied, the anticipation of moving in contradictions throughout seems to teach a mental totality– the very identity thesis we have just rendered inoperative. The mind which ceaselessly reflects on contradiction in the thing itself, we hear, must be the thing itself it is to be organized in the form of contradiction; the truth which in idealistic dialectics drives beyond every particular, as onesided and wrong, is the truth of the whole, and if that were not preconcieved, the dialectical step would lack motivation and direction. We have to answer that the object of a mental experience is an antagnoistic system in itself– antagonistic in reality, not just in conveance to the knowing subject that rediscovers itself therein…

…Regarding the concrete utopian possibility, dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things. The right state of things would be free of it: neither a system nor a contradiction. (10-11)

The obvious target here is Hegel, who Adorno portrays as the thinker of a complete and whole system where everything has its place. However, when Hegel speaks of absolute knowledge, it is precisely this antagonism, this remainder, reflected back into the thing itself (rather than the knowing subject) that he is speaking of. Put a bit differently, reality is already dialectical in itself, or just is this tension between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. The real is the undoing of any totality, but is also the motor that drives towards totality. Therefore it has an ambiguous status.

I realize here that I am only repeating points that I’ve already made to N.Pepperell: That the non-identity of identity is the necessary but not sufficient condition for critique, that it is what accounts for how critique is possible in the first place. However, it is a first step, I think, in unfolding the question of self-reflexivity, or accounting for the conditions for the possibility of a critical subject. What is needed in addition to this is a socio-historical account of the conceptual web such a subject swims in at a particular juncture… A conceptual web that must already be non-identical to itself to be recognized as such. Additionally, my interest in all of this, revolves around questions of how it is possible to philosophically appropriate psychoanalysis and various other forms of social theory drawing on some explicit or implicit notion of the unconscious. These forms of thought remain dogmatic so long as they are baldly or empirically asserted as is so often the case. Moreover, it is clear that philosophical stances based on the primacy of the classical subject such as those found in Descartes or Husserl, are inadequate in dealing with anything resembling the unconscious or social systems. Finally, embedded approaches such as Heidegger’s or Merleau-Ponty’s seem to inevitably lead to mystical obscurantism. What a dialectical approach provides is precisely the means of thinking the identity of identity and difference… And what is the unconscious but that “Other scene” that differs from identity but which I nonetheless am?

Apologies for the scattered and random remarks.

Those interested in Lacan, Zizek, and psychoanalysis will not want to miss Foucaultisdead:

Now why are these two controversies interesting when viewed together? They are interesting because they reveal how “Big Brother” – the impersonal voice of the show’s producers, which effectively functions as a site of negotation between the contestants and the desires of the outside world (usually for humiliation and entertainment but, in these rare instances, rectification of some sort of perceived injustice) – situates himself in relation to the housemates and the outside world. These controversies effectively reveal why Big Brother is not the Lacanian big Other.

The standard example employed to explain Lacan’s concept of the big Other (which is capital ‘A’ on Lacan’s graph of desire) is that of a judge who declares judgement on a case before him. Through this judge, the impersonal big Other utters its judgement – in other words, the judge effectively makes no judgement at all. He is merely an instrument of the big Other. This is not the only way to think about the big Other. Zizek often equates it to the analytic philosopher Donald Davidson’s “charity principle”, the assumption (without which, all human communication is impossible) that we all share a set of mutual understandings. Of course, the big Other is a functional illusion (as Lacan said: ‘the big Other does not exist’), a communal fiction – judges frequently make perverse judgements due to quirks of personality and there certainly is no stable set of mutual understandings. So the big Other provides the necessary communal fiction for social interaction to function. In other words, we voluntarily submit to it because the benefits it provides are immense. (Of course, there are some people – psychotics – who do not submit to the big Other, and who sadly struggle to function well in society.)

Read the rest here.

Dejan over at Cultural Parody Center has an interesting take on the ubiquity of apocalyptic narratives in contemporary culture:

Here I have to think about the devastating effects of virtualization. When the barebacking trend started on the sex scene, it appeared a form of ”the nostalgia for the Real”, where the barebacking subject evokes the bliss of ”authentic contact” through the skin. (I think this also happens in the apocalyptic fantasies of Sinthome’s clients. In their nitty-gritty imaginings of urban dystopia, they are trying to ”get back in touch” with some authentic life substance; a lot like the young brutalists’ idea of the ”concreteness” in ”really-existing” socialism of yore… )

For Lacan, of course, the real must not be confused with reality. Where reality is understood as a combination of the symbolic and the imaginary characterizing the familiarity of our everyday lifeworld, the real is to be properly understood as the impossible or those formal deadlocks that haunt the symbolic and prevent its closure. I am not, of course, suggesting that Dejan misses this. Dejan’s point seems to be that reality is always already virtualized, such that this “nostalgia for the real” is always beset by the return of the real in the formal Lacan sense: The return of inherent impossibilities and antagonistic deadlocks.

N.Pepperell over at Rough Theory has written a very nice response to my musings on the ubiquity of apocalyptic fantasies in contemporary culture, drawing on Adorno. Expressing hesitation over certain elements of my claims, N.P. writes:

Sinthome thus expresses the hope that apocalyptic fantasies manifest a desire for something other than their explicit content – something more than the desire for destruction and death. I raise this point, not to hold up Freud’s text against Sinthome’s appropriation – for we have no obligation for interpretive fidelity to Freud’s work and, in any event, even Freud’s “typical” examples contain permutations that might be amenable to Sinthome’s appropriation (Freud suggests that “typical” dreams can manifest historical content, for example – ephemeral wishes once felt, but long since rejected, etc.) – but because I think it provides a good frame for understanding Adorno’s very different attempt to merge psychoanalytic theory with sociology in the service of critique. If Freud offers two interpretive paths, one of which Sinthome has followed in the hopes that apocalyptic fantasy might signify a nonmanifest content – a longing for transcendence – we can understand Adorno’s work as an attempt to reflect seriously on the second path – on the possibility that certain mass movements might genuinely desire to achieve what their fantasies express: destruction and death.

I do not have much to add to N.P.’s excellent analysis, except to point out that I do not believe there’s any substantial disagreement here between my claims and what she’s drawing from Adorno. This point comes into greater clarity with regard to other fantasmatic structures. An acquaintance of mine suffers from an overwhelming sense of guilt that pervades nearly every aspect of his daily life. For instance, his wife will ask him to do something innocuous and straightforward and he’ll be paralyzed by anxiety feelings of guilt, encountering her request not as a simple request, but as an accusation claiming that he failed to do something that he should have done. Similarly, whenever faced with some form that he must fill out for the government or his job, he encounters this form as implying that he’s done something wrong in much the same way that Joseph K’s engagements with the castle and the court all imply some ambiguous and unfathomable guilt in The Castle and The Trial. Finally, his dream life is pervaded by dreams where he commits some horrible act of crime and is to be punished.

The point not to be missed here is that the manifest content of this frame with respect to how he organizes his intersubjective relations and relations to the world– the frame through which he views and interprets the address of others to him –is taken as a genuine and true reading of what is actually going on. He genuinely, for instance, experiences his wife as accusing him, and this leads him to act in response to these accusations, demonstrating that he is in fact innocent, that she is the guilty one (for not telling him before), etc., thereby generating conflict between himself and his spouse.

Over the course of our discussions– which have largely been of a theoretical and impersonal nature, often about the structure of the moebius strip and rhetoric –he has increasingly come to believe that, in fact, these guilt affects have little or nothing to do with anything unfolding in the present. Rather, when he was very young his mother died of cancer and underwent a long and very painful treatment. During this there were times when he would wish for her to die. At present, then, his working hypothesis is that this ubiquitous guilt is a sort of return of the repressed wherein he seeks punishment for these wishes. Indeed, for Freud one of the central marks of obessessional neurosis, the mechanism of repression operative in repression, is a splitting that occurs between affect and signifier, such that the affect is displaced and appears elsewhere in our intersubjective relations. Freud points out that the obsessional, unlike the hysteric, is often quite aware of particular events, but recollects these events without their proper affective content. Instead, the affect becomes connected to signifiers that appear completely unrelated to the originary signifying content. My friend’s repetition of this guilt in relation to events unrelated to his wish for his mother’s death can thus be seen as serving two functions: On the one hand, it provides him with the punishment he believes himself to deserve. On the other hand, it gives him the opportunity to prove, again and again, his innocence by acting in the present with regard to whatever manifest content happens his way, demonstrating that he has been unjustly accused.

The point, then, that I am trying to make is that the manifest content can very well be treated as the “real McCoy”, as the real problem, and we perpetually take up action in relation to this manifest content. The case is similar with regard to apocalyptic fantasies. It is both possible for apocalyptic fantasies to be expressive of frustration with social relations, yearnings for a different type of social order, and repressed wishes for all of society to collapse so that this social order might become possible, and for the subjects inhabited by these fantasies to misrecognize their desire and treat the manifest content as something to be promoted or fought against exactly as Adorno suggests. Zizek makes a similar point apropos the Jew and anti-Semitism. For Zizek, the anti-Semite’s animosity towards the Jew is expressive of a series of social antagonisms that have nothing to do with Jews themselves. They are representative of the anti-Semite’s own disavowed desire (for a more detailed discussion of Zizek’s analysis of anti-semitism see here). However, none of this prevents the anti-Semite from targeting the Jew as a source of violence and unjust legislation, by treating the manifest content of the symptom as a genuine reality. For me, then, the question is that of how fetishistic fascination with the manifest content can be shifted so as to focus on both these disavowed desires and latent content pertaining to social antagonisms.

As a final caveat I would like to add that my basic position is that psychoanalysis is not a psychology but a theory of intersubjectivity. As Freud puts it in the very first paragraph of Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego,

The contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely. It is true that individual psychology is concerned with the individual man and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his instictual impulses; but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is individual psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponenet; and so from the very first individual psychology, in the extended by entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well. (SE 18, 69)

Lacan pushes this thesis to its logical conclusion, treating psychoanalysis not as a psychology, but rather as a transcendental theory of the analytic setting… Or more properly, transference. As such, all questions of psychoanalysis are already questions of the social field, not of individual minds. This is one reason that Lacan was led to investigate topology for forms of relation not premised on outside/inside binaries, but rather continuous relations between self, Other, and world.

In an interesting post over at I Cite, Jodi Dean makes reference to a pessimistic discussion about the future unfolding over at K-Punk and Poetix. In the context of this discussion, the question revolves around the issue of whether or not the damage to the world is irrevocable and whether another world is possible (i.e., whether there’s a limit to capitalism or an alternative to capitalism). Rather than directly taking a stand on these questions, I would instead like to approach the issue psychoanalytically from the standpoint of collective fantasies.

One of the things I began noticing a few years ago is that I was encountering patients whose sexual and amorous fantasy life was deeply bound up with visions of apocalypse or the destruction of civilization. For instance, I would encounter patients who had all sorts of fantasies about post-apocalyptic settings such as life after an eco-catastrophe, nuclear war, a massive plague, or a fundamental economic and technological collapse, where, at long last, they would be able to be with the true objects of their desire and their life would finally be meaningful (struggling to survive, to rebuild the world, etc). As I reflected on this phenomenon a bit, I began to notice that these sorts of fantasies populate the social space everywhere. In cinema there is an entire genre of apocalyptic films from both rightwing and leftwing perspectives such as Independence Day, Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, Dante’s Peak, Volcano, Deep Impact, and many more I cannot remember. In the world of “literature” the Left Behind novels have been a stunning success, selling millions of copies and leading to popular television shows and made for television movies. In news media, of course, we are perpetually inundated with apocalyptic threats from eco-catastrophe, to the bird flu, to the threat of massive meteors hitting the earth or supervolcanos exploding or even a star going supernova and evaporating our atmosphere, to terrorist attacks employing nuclear or bio-weaponry. The Discovery and Science Channel regularly devote shows to these themes.

While I am certainly not dismissing the possibility of these threats, the psychoanalytic approach suggests that we ask how our desire is imbricated with these particular representations or scenerios and enjoins us to analyze how our thought collectively arrives at these visions of the present rather than others. How is it that we are to account for the the ubiquity of these scenerios in popular imagination… An omnipresence so great that it even filters down into the most intimate recesses of erotic fantasy as presented in the consulting room? In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud presents an interesting take on how we’re to understand anxiety dreams such as the death of a loved one. There Freud writes that,

Another group of dreams which may be described as typical are those containing the death of some loved relative– for instance, of a parent, of a brother or sister, or of a child. Two classes of such dreams must at once be distinguished: those in which the dreamer is unaffected by grief, so that on awakening he is astonished at his lack of feeling, and those in which the dreamer feels deeply pained by the death and may even weep bitterly in his sleep.

We need not consider dreams of the first of these classes, for they have no claim to be regarded as ‘typical’. If we analyse them, we find that they have some meaning other than their apparent one, and that they are intended to conceal some other wish. Such was the dream of the aunt who saw her sister’s only son lying in his coffin. (p. 152) It did not mean that she wished her little nephew dead; as we have seen, it merely concealed a wish to see a particular person of whom she was fond and whom she had not met for a long time– a person whom she had once before met after a similarly long interval beside the coffin of another nephew. This wish, which was the true content of the dream, gave no occasion for grief, and no grief, therefore, was felt in the dream. (SE 4, 248)

No doubt this woman experienced some guilt for her desire for this man and therefore preferred to dream her nephew dead as an alibi of seeing him once again, rather than directly facing her desire. Could not a similar phenomenon be at work in apocalyptic scenerios? In all of these films there is some conflict at work at the social and romantic level. For instance, in The Day After Tomorrow, the husband is estranged from his wife and the boy lacks the courage to announce his love for the young woman. Society is also presented as having run amock in its pursuit of capital, as can be seen in the deleted scenes involving the Japanese business man and the shady deal prior to his death. In short, Freud’s point is that we should look at horrifying manifest content such as this as enabling the fulfillment of some wish. My thesis here would be that whenever confronted with some horrifying scenerio that troubles the analysand’s minds or dreams, the analyst should treat it like a material conditional or “if/then” statement, seeking to determine what repressed wish or desire might become possible for the analysand were the scenerio to occur (e.g., being fired would allow the analysand to pursue his true desire, the loss of a limb would allow the analysand to finally escape her father’s desire for her to play violin, etc).

Here, perhaps, would be the key to apocalyptic fantasies: They represent clothed or disguised utopian longings for a different order of social relations, such that this alternative order would only become possible were all of society to collapse. That is, could not the omnipresence of apocalyptic fantasies in American culture be read as an indication that somehow we have “given way on our desire” or betrayed our desire at a fundamental social level? That is, these visions simultaneously allow us to satisfy our aggressive animosity towards existing social relations, while imagining an alternative (inevitably we always triumph in these scenerios, even if reduced to fundamentally primative living conditions… a fantasy in itself), while also not directly acknowledging our discontent with the conditions of capital (it is almost always some outside that destroys the system, not direct militant engagement).

As such, these fantasies serve the function of rendering our dissatisfaction tolerable (a dissatisfaction that mostly consists of boredom and a sense of being cheated), while fantasizing about an alternative that might someday come to save us, giving us opportunity to be heroic leaders and people struggling to survive rather than meaningless businessmen, civil servants, teachers, etc. Perhaps the real question with regard to this pessimism, then, is that of how the utopian yearnings underlying these representations and the antagonisms to which they respond might directly be put to work.

Special props to N.Pepperell for drawing my attention to this discussion… Though N.P. has no responsibility for my lame and simplistic thesis.

N.Pepperell over at Rough Theory has written a very nice response to my recent post on recoding the social. N.P. writes:

What I want to do here is draw attention to something about the subject – the critical subject – that seems often overlooked in social theoretic discussions, but that seems to me to bear a strong importance for another question you have asked here – a question I also think is vitally important:

what renders an individual susceptible to an event in the first place?

I think you are quite right to ask whether, given the hypothesis that social relations can be defined in ordinary time, so to speak, by what you have called the encyclopaedia (by what I might tend to call a particular network of concrete social relations), we are then in a very difficult position when it comes to explaining how individuals might possess the potential to become subjects – or, as you have expressed the point:

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 of possibility under which a subject might be produced at all.

You then move on to discuss the notion that our situatedness in any context is never complete – I’ll come back to this point. What I wanted to point out first, not because I think it’s something that you have missed (I take your points as, in a sense, assuming my own – I just want to take the opportunity to spell something out very explicitly here), but because it seems to be something both glaringly visible, and yet often missed in formulations such as those you quote from Badiou and Ranciere: if the encyclopaedia were complete, surely we would not be able to name it as such. Surely the fact that we are engaged in critical discourse already gives the lie to claims – even if these claims understanding themselves to be critical…

This is exactly the sort of question I’m getting at. Either critique is already itself a product of what I’m here calling the encyclopaedia (I’m more inclined to adopt N.Pepperell’s language of “concrete social networks”), or the subject is never completely interpellated by the system of social relations in which its enmeshed. If the latter, it then becomes possible to both explain the subject of critique, but also to explain how one and the same subject seeks to proper up the inconsistencies and symptoms of the encyclopaedia so as to maintain its own tenuous identity… Or something like that. I need to develop what I’m getting at in far more detail, and I realize that a few of my comments towards the end of the previous post were hastey, psychologistic reductions… More placemarkers for future development, than final statements.

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?

There are periods where I find that everything I’m doing suddenly collapses. Or rather, it’s not that anything collapses, but rather it’s as if all my drive suddenly disappears and the things that hitherto held my fascination become dark and grey, pallid, as if they no longer hold the allure of promise they once had. That’s the way it is with desire, I think… Desire renders a portion of the world luminous to the exclusion of everything else, elevating some single element or series of elements to a stand-in for everything else, and when desire loses its force it’s as if the entire world collapses and I’m like one of those zombies from a b-film just shuffling along without any particular interesting in anything. Indeed, this might be a particularly apt metaphor, as these zombie always seem to desire the brains and flesh of the living, of those still animated with desire, as if, like cannibals, they might consume the desires animating others to kickstart their own desire. Is the evaporation of my desire the result of being on vacation for too long and thereby not having the requisite antagonism and sense that my enjoyment has been stolen to animate me? Is it that I’ve had too many successes lately and therefore experience myself in the midsts of a malaise?

What is particularly frustrating about the evaporation of desire is that the desire to write insists. For the blessed Lars of Spurious, the question is always one of how to continue to write, and he has gone so far as to conceive a writing that is not driven by content but a content driven by writing. Yet what of this desire to write in the first place, this oppressive sense that I am somehow violating some duty if I don’t write? Is this not the phenomenon of phallus or symbolic castration? As Zizek puts it,

The status of possibility, while different from that actuality, is thus not simply deficient with regard to it. Possibility as such exerts actual effects which disappear as soon as it ‘actualizes’ itself. Such a ‘short-circuit’ between possibility and actuality is at work in the Lacanian notion of ‘symbolic castration’: the so-called ‘castration-anxiety’ cannot be reduced to the psychological fact that, upon perceiving the absence of the penis in woman, man becomes afraid that ‘he also might lose it.’ ‘Castration anxiety’ rather designates the precise moment at which the possibility of castration takes precidence over its actuality, i.e., the moment at which the very possibility of castration, its mere threat, produces actual effects in our psychic economy. This threat as it were ‘castrates’ us, branding us with an irreducible loss. (Tarrying With the Negative, 159)

In this context Zizek is speaking specifically of the manner in which power functions. What is important where power is concerned is the threat of force and not the exercise itself. That is, a certain potentiality is seen as pervading intersubjective relations– the potentiality of violence –and this potentiality leads to transformations at the level of actuality or how we act. However, generalizing the notion of symbolic castration or the phallic function, then, it can be said that symbolic castration is that moment where possibility enters the world, where the world becomes haunted by incompleteness, and this incompleteness compels us to produce regardless of whether there is any need to produce. Over and above the need to communicate something, over and above the aim of “padding my CV”, or intervening in some situation, there is the insistent call to write even where there is nothing and no reason to write. And even though there is no concrete call to write anything, even though there is nothing to be accomplished in writing, even though there is nothing to be said, I nonetheless feel as if I am failing in some crucial way when I’m not writing, that something in the world is fundamentally incomplete. Why should writing function as such an aim in itself? And why must I feel so wretched when I have nothing to write?

As some of you have no doubt noticed, I’ve been on a major Hegel kick lately. This, of course, is always a dangerous thing where French theory is concerned, as Hegel as so often treated as the Enemy or culmination of all things wicked in the tradition of onto-theology (assuming his thought can be characterized as “onto-theological”). This is especially dangerous for me as a good deal of my research revolves around Deleuze, and one can hardly mention the name “Hegel” in Deleuzian circles without faces turning red, spittle appearing on lips, and curses being made. After all, isn’t Hegel the ultimate thinker of mediation, where everything is subordinated to identity, the whole, and the concept. Yet when I turn to Hegel’s Science of Logic and the doctrine of essence, I find it difficult to endorse this reading. At any rate, Zizek seems to present a reading of Hegel strongly at odds with this picture. As Zizek writes in The Sublime Object of Ideology,

My thesis… is that the most consistent model of such an acknowledgement of antagonism is offered by Hegelian dialectics: far from being a story of its progressive overcoming, dialectics is for Hegel a systematic notation of the failure of all such attempts– ‘absolute knowledge’ denotes a subjective position which finally accepts ‘contradiction’ as an internal condition of every identity. In other words, Hegelian ‘reconciliation’ is not a ‘panlogicist’ sublation of all reality in the Concept but a final consent to the fact that the Concept is ‘not-all’ (to use this Lacanian term). In this sense we can repeat the thesis of Hegel as the first post-Marxist: he opened up the field of a certain fissure subsequently ‘sutured’ by Marxism. (6)

This is an exciting and provocative thesis which, if defensible, demolishes a number of the standard critiques of Hegelian thought. On the one hand, in making reference to the “failure of all such attempts”, Zizek is claiming that Hegel is the quintessential thinker of the Lacanian real or how the real insists in every socio-symbolic formation as both its condition of possibility and its undoing. On the other hand, in his reference to the “not-all”, Zizek is claiming that Hegel presents a feminine ontology with respect to Lacan’s graphs of sexuation, where it is demonstrated that there is no over-arching identity rule or principle for being, but rather situations must be taken “one by one”.

Zizek, of course, does not develop this thesis in a systematic or organized way in any of his texts. So my question is this: Does anyone know of serious Hegel scholarship that has taken up this thesis and sought to develop it in terms of Hegel’s system at the ontological level, sans all the focus on politics and ideology? Are there any thoughts on the plausibility of this conception of Hegel?

For those interested in Deleuze’s account of the virtual and the process of actualization, an article by Albert Lautman, one of his major inspirations, is now available online. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that Ideas or Multiplicities– the virtual half at work in the process of individuation –are problems of which individual entities or beings are solutions. Lautman was among the central inspirations for Deleuze’s conception of multiplicities and the virtual, so this article is well worth reading. To date there has been only a rudimentary understanding of Deleuze’s account of individuation and why it is of central importance to his philosophical project. I would argue that the best articulation we have so far is to be found in Beistegui’s Truth and Genesis. Much of this has to do with the fact that Deleuze relies on a number of untranslated and hard to find references, such as the work of Simondon, Lautman, and especially Solomon Maimon. Forays into this body of research reveal just how misguided the characterization of Deleuze as Humean empiricist are, and why Deleuze’s ontology should be understood as a radicalization and transformation of post-Kantian German idealism.

UPDATE: Some have expressed difficulties getting the link to work. It’s working fine from my end, so I’m not sure what the problem is… Perhaps that it’s a PDF file? If the problem persists, you can find it in the “files” section here. Often the discussion is quite good on this list as well.

UPDATE 2: Mystery solved. As N.Pepperell points out, you must be a member of the list to access the files. With Yahoo lists you can opt not to have messages sent to your account, thereby allowing you to access the files without having to clog your mailbox. There are a number of other interesting files in the file section as well.