Surplus-jouissance, Desire, and Fantasy
In Seminar 6: Desire and its Interpretation, Lacan articulates fantasy as the frame of desire. The fundamental fantasy does not imagine a particular satisfaction, but is rather the frame through which our desire is structured. In this respect, fantasy answers the question of what the Other desires.
As I remarked in my previous post, the desire of the Other is enigmatic and opaque. Fantasy is what fills out this enigma, articulating it, giving it form, such that it embodies a determinate demand. Lacan persistently claimed that “desire is the desire of the Other”. This polysemous aphorism can be taken in four ways. First, at the most obvious level, it can be taken to signify that we desire the Other. Second, and more importantly, it can be taken to entail that we desire to be desired by the Other. Third, it can be taken to signify that we desire what the Other desires. For example, a petite bourgeois might desire a particular car not because of the intrinsic features of the car, but because it will generate envy in his neighbor. Likewise, someone might mow their lawn not because they see an intrinsic virtue in doing so, but because they fear that their neighbor will become angry if they don’t. Finally, fourth, insofar as the unconscious is the “discourse of the Other”, the thesis that desire is the desire of the Other indicates the manner in which desire is articulated through the network of signifiers that haunt our unconscious, producing all sorts of symptomatic formations based on the signifier.
Read on
On the masculine side of the graph of sexuation we see the formula for obsessional fantasy ($ * a) in the lower portion pertaining to the logic of jouissance.
Just as the phallus functions as a supplement to the inconsistency of the symbolic order in the case of feminine sexuation, providing it with consistency, stability, and structure, the objet a as surplus-jouissance, is the remainder sought by the masculine sexuated subject to recoup what is lost as a consequence of one’s alienation in the symbolic. Thus, as Lacan presents it in his graph of jouissance, we see a vector from the symbolic to the real with respect to objet a.
Surplus-joussance can therefore be thought as the real the masculine subject attempts to recoup as a result of alienation in the signifier, but also as the entropic loss produced as a result of alienation in the symbolic.
Objet a is not the object of desire, but rather the object-cause of desire. In short, where desire and the object of desire are the effect, objet a is what causes or produces that effect. This point can be clearly illustrated by reference to Freud’s case of the young homosexual woman. In this case, the young homosexual woman pursues a prostitute, parading about town with her in much the same way that a gentleman courting a woman might parade about with that woman. In other words, she emulates the ideal male gentleman and lover. Initially we might think that the prostitute is this woman’s objet a; however, the prostitute is not the objet a but the effect of how objet a operates in the psychic economy of this young woman. In Seminar 10: L’angoisse, Lacan makes much of Shakespeare’s remark that all the world is a stage. This allows us to differentiate between objet a as cause of desire and the object desired.
What causes this desire is not the prostitute desired, but rather the paternal gaze of her father. Throughout her adventures the young women makes sure that she appears with the prostitute in a very public way in places often frequented by her father. As Lacan explains, the young woman is enacting the manner in which a man should properly love and court a woman. In other words, her activities are staged for the gaze of her father. Proof of this is found in the fact that when she finally does encounter the gaze of her father while walking about with the prostitute, receiving a disdainful look of contempt from him, she subsequently throws herself on the train tracks in an attempt to commit suicide. In this moment, the young woman coincided with objet a and more specifically with her status as a subject being occluded or eclipsed by objet a ($ < a), leading to a passage to the act: the attempt to commit suicide.
The case of the young female homosexual thus illustrates a complex topology of desire governed by the functioning of objet a as gaze. The gaze as objet a produces a three dimensional space staged for this gaze for whom action is staged or enacted, opening a field of desired objects and persons in relation to objet a. It is not objet a that is desired, but rather objet a operates as the motor through which the young woman desires. It is through objet a that the young woman retains a minimal degree of being lost in her alienation in the symbolic. Indeed, when objet a falls away in her fathers contemptful gaze, she disappears as a subject.
We can thus see why fundamental fantasy is not an imagined scenerio of satisfaction, but rather an articulation of the enigmatic desire of the Other. The object of desire emerges in and through this relation to the remainder of the Other in the form of objet a that produces the complex topological field of desired objects.
It is of crucial importance to note that the obsessional fantasy has a dual structure. On the one hand, fantasy produces desire as an effect generating that field of desired objects that would complete the subject and surmount the loss undergone as a result of language. On the other hand, and on the darker side, fantasy generates an account of why the symbolic does not provide the satisfaction it promises or what prevents the symbolic from achieving completeness. Thus, in Nazi ideology the figure of the Jew becomes the fantasy object of what undermines Germany’s idyllic harmony. Among Christian fundamentalists, the homosexual, women, and minorities perturb and destroy the social order. These beings, of course, have nothing to do with the real cause between social antagonism and incompleteness, but rather cover over the constitutive fact of antagonism.
It is in this regard that we can see why Lacan refers to objet a in terms of semblance. If objet a is semblance, then this is because it promises being or completeness while simultaneously giving an account of why it doesn’t exist. Likewise, if phallus is reality, then this is insofar as reality is approached through the frame of fantasy, generating the illusion of a consistent and complete social order. As Lacan puts it in Seminar 11: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, we awake from our dreams at that precise point that we approach truth, the real, or the castration of the Other, so that we might continue on in fantasy. That is, we escape from truth or the real to reality structured in and through fantasy. Finally, if Other-jouissance or feminine jouissance is correlated with truth, then this is because it is the only form of jouissance that takes the lack in the Other, S(A) its incompleteness, as the source of its jouissance.
Social Orders, Sexuation, and Jouissance
Masculine Social Structure and the Return of the Repressed
Based on the foregoing, it becomes possible to make some general observations about social structures organized around masculine and feminine sexuation, or impasses of formalization generating incompletness and impasses of formalization generating inconsistency. Masculine social orders will be hierarchically ordered around some central term whether that be the nation, the homeland, God, or a particular charismatic leader that functions as an exception to the rule of universal law. Thus, in the case of virulent nationalisms, for example, it will be seen as impossible for the nation as signifier to do any wrong. As Spinoza puts it in the 13th proposition of part 3 of the Ethics, “when the mind conceives things which diminish or hinder the body’s power of activity, it endeavors, as far as possible, to remember things that exclude the existence of the first named things.” This is above all the case in virulent nationalisms or in strong identification with master-figures such as Lacan, Žižek, Badiou, Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, etc. Confronted with criticisms of these figures, it is as if the mind is unable to even hear these criticisms, almost as if the subject hearing them undergoes a sort of hysterical blindness emerging from the fantasy of the impossibility of the exception to the law being castrated (fantasy masks or hides the castration or division of the Other (A). As a consequence, there is a swerve that takes place in thought, where immediately– in an often highly irrational manner –the source of incompleteness is instead attacked. It is exceedingly difficult to see and hear for, as Lacan put it, love of truth is love of castration. The master and the nation can do no wrong, and this necessarily by the fact that the system would fall into incoherent inconsistency at the level of the symbolic order were the supplement not operative.
However, as Lacan was fond of pointing out, repression is always a return of the repressed. There is no repression so complete, so successful, that it does not generate effects at the level of the symbolic (this, incidentally, is how objet a functions as the motor or engine of symptom formation). Consequently, while masculine structure indeed attempts to mask or repress the constitutive incompleteness of the symbolic order (A), this constitutive incompleteness must nonetheless be marked… Yet marked as a semblance. Here the trick lies in rendering what is real, necessary, or structural as contingent. That is, the constitutive incompleteness and antagonism of the symbolic and social order is transformed into a contingent antagonism. This issues from the bifurcated structure of fantasy in masculine sexuality, where, on the one hand, there is a fantasy of completeness, harmony, and totality (the hallmarks of the order of the imaginary), while, on the other hand, there is the dark fantasy of what prevents this harmony and completeness from being achieved.
We can thus hypothesize that the more a social order aims at identity and completeness, the more it will see itself as persecuted or perturbed by some outsider that prevents it from achieving this harmony and completeness (the Jew, minorities, women, homosexuals, immigrants, counter-revolutionaries, etc). In other words, the tendency of hierarchical social structures towards racisms, homophobia, anti-Semitism, sexism, religious intolerance, etc., is not an accidental feature of a historical situation, but a structural and necessary by-product of how these social structures navigate the real or the formal impasse preventing totalization.
Feminine Sexuation and the Impasse of Network Society
Initially we might think that social structures premised on feminine sexuation fare better. After all, feminine sexuation emphasizes difference, contingency, and singularity. As Lacan liked to quick, where masculine sexuation is homme-sexual, feminine sexuation is the only true hetero-sexuality. This claim about masculine sexuality can be seen clearly in the case of Freud’s infamous Totem and Taboo, as well as his analysis of military organizations in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Here the point isn’t that those that are sexuated male are gay, but rather that they are all subject to one and the same law governing their jouissance and desire. Thus, when the band of brothers kill the primal father in Totem and Taboo, they institute the law of exchange and the prohibition against having the mother and sister. By contrast, claims Lacan, feminine sexuated subjects have the true love of difference, of the hetero, insofar as “not-all of speaking being is subordinated to the law of castration”.
However, social structures organized in feminine terms encounter their own impasse as well. Masculine social structures can be thought in terms of transcendence and necessity– The transcendence of the leader, the boss, the father, God, the nation, etc., with respect to its subjects and how these subjects relate to the Law. The Law here is understood as transcendent and universal with only one exception to the Law (perhaps this is why the last 26% of Bush supporters are not troubled by the illegalities of his administration). By contrast, feminine social structures can be understood as immanent and contingent. Here the emphasis is decidedly on the formation of relational networks that are ever shifting and changing. Yet while these networks might appear more appealing insofar as the don’t generate the same terrifying bifurcated forms of collective fantasy that caused so much horror in the last century, they do cause a set of other problems.
On the one hand, network based social formations are decidedly more difficult to politically contest as it is not clear where the enemy is. As Žižek liked to joke, it is far easier to protest the totalitarian Oedipal father than the new, sensitive post-modern father. The totalitarian Oedipal father tells you that “you’re going to your grandmother’s whether you like it or not!” In this way a space of freedom is preserved– if only in the Stoic form –insofar as one is permitted to go to one’s grandmother’s without enjoying it, and second, insofar as one can contest the Oedipal command. This holds likewise for protest against the various Oedipal regimes, where the target of resistance is clear. By contrast, the new age, postmodern, sensitive father says “you do not have to go to your grandmother’s if you don’t want to, but if you do you better like it!” Here it is no longer clear who is calling the shots or exactly what resistance would mean. If you go to your grandmother’s you feel guilt because you have betrayed your desire. Yet if you don’t go you feel guilt as you wonder whether your sensitive father did not secretly harbor a desire for you to go. In all cases you lose.
Perhaps more fundamentally, feminine networked society is accompanied by the emergence of a search for phallic masters or gurus of all types. In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello analyze management literature between the 60s and the 90s, demonstrating a fundamental shift from centralized, top-down, master-based models of management during the 60s (Oedipal models of social organization), to de-centralized, network based, non-hierarchical, difference based models of management. In the latter model, the manager is no longer the one running the show, but is rather the guru who has a general Vision of where the corporation is to go and who cedes implementation of this Vision to a series of lower level managers who are largely autonomous. The new structure of management portrays itself as egalitarian and open-ended, without a hierarchy between upper management and lower management. Boltanski and Chiapello are able to show how capitalism was able to integrate the radical critiques of 60s anti-capitalist theory, turning these critiques into new ways of producing capital.
Accompanying this shift from transcendent models of social organization to immanent and egalitarian models of social organization, we everywhere see a search for masters or gurus. Perhaps this is because the new freedom of desire opened up by a networked based society fill subjects with anxiety, as there is no longer a compass that would tell them what to desire. “I know I desire, but what desire is the right desire for me and what desire will make me desirable?” This might also account for the rise of fundamentalisms of all sorts, where subjects cleave to hierarchical social models so as to create a space of desire and avoid the empty depressive stance of late capitalism. In short, while preferable in a number of respects, and while premised on the true or real insofar as it recognizes the “not-all” of the symbolic, it cannot be said that feminine sexuation will save us.
However, the point to be borne in mind is that both masculine and feminine sexuation are premised on an order organized around the name-of-the-father and the Oedipus. In other words, while sexuation pertains to the real, there is only masculine and feminine sexuation insofar as the name-of-the-father is the primary modality through which subjectivity is formed. The late Lacan envisioned another possibility. There, in Seminar 23: The Sinthome, Lacan observes that “it is possible to do without the name-of-the-father so long as one makes use of it.” Likewise, the name-of-the-father is pluralized, allowing for a variety of signifying structures to serve its function. Finally, psychosis becomes generalized to all subjects, such that Oedipal structures organized around the name-of-the-father are one way of tying the borromean knot among others or one way of responding to the inexistence of the big Other (A). Instead, the sinthome comes to tie the three strings of RSI, allowing for a social link that need not be Oedipal in character. Perhaps, then, the borromean clinic provides an alternative way of tying the knot beyond the Oedipus (which Lacan refers to as Freud’s myth) that would generate different formal impasses beyond those of masculine and feminine sexuation.
Larval Subjects . 
November 27, 2008 at 2:30 am
“Likewise, the name-of-the-father is pluralized, allowing for a variety of signifying structures to serve its function.”
Could you elaborate on what this pluralization entails? In what sense are there “a variety of signifying structures to serve its function”?
November 27, 2008 at 2:51 am
I’ll develop that at a later point. Basically late Lacan ceases to privilege the name-of-the-father as a crucial or necessary signifier. In his work on Joyce Lacan shows how the name-of-the-father was not operative in his psychic system leading to a slipping away of the order of the imaginary. Nonetheless, according to Lacan, Joyce was able to surmount the improper tie in the Borromean knot through his production of a unique sinthome that linked the three orders together. In my view, this suggests that a recent tone adopted in psychoanalytically inflected discourses is overblown… Namely that claim that the collapse of the Oedipus necessarily leads to universal social psychosis.
November 27, 2008 at 3:49 am
LS: “In his work on Joyce Lacan shows how the name-of-the-father was not operative in his psychic system leading to a slipping away of the order of the imaginary. Nonetheless, according to Lacan, Joyce was able to surmount the improper tie in the Borromean knot through his production of a unique sinthome that linked the three orders together.”
Kvond: Would this not collapse also the injunction, the “failure of the totalization of language”. as you describe earlier,
“That is, the masculine way of attempting to totalize the symbolic or the big Other leads to a constitutive incompleteness calling for a supplementary element or term. Likewise, the feminine way of attempting to totalize or complete the symbolic leads to a constitutive inconsistency.”
Does this not suggest a synthomic capacity for language to totalize, if through oscillation between these two “incompletions”?
November 27, 2008 at 4:03 am
No, language isn’t totalized through the sinthome, it’s just another way of tying the knot. Late Lacan shifts towards a generalized theory of psychosis premised on the thesis that the big Other doesn’t exist or that it is necessarily incomplete. The symptom, whether in the form of the name-of-the-father (late Lacan describes it as a symptom) or the sinthome is a response to this structural incompleteness.
November 27, 2008 at 4:11 am
I suppose I should suggest a bit of background to explain my interest in all of this. Psychosis, as opposed to neurosis, is argued by many Lacanians to be the absence of any social link. That is, while the psychotic might interact with other persons, it is claimed that the psychotic does not encounter other persons as Others or as having subjectivity, but only as mirror images of himself. Recently, there’s been a good deal of Lacanian theory arguing that there has been a collapse of the name-of-the-father, Oedipal structure, and symbolic efficacy as a result (the symbolic is no longer operative as it once was). The long and short of this thesis is that it is being claimed that the only alternative to neurosis is pyschosis, i.e., the absence of any sort of social link where social formations will inevitably be characterized by paranoid delusions, etc.
For me the interest of the late Lacan is two-fold. On the one hand, Lacan, in contrast to his earlier accounts of psychosis, shows how Joyce, who he argues is a psychotic, successfully forged a social link for himself despite the absence of the name-of-the-father in his subjective economy. In other words, rather than facing us with the stark alternative between neurosis or psychosis (“your money or your life!”), Lacan demonstrated a psychotic alternative that did not involve the collapse into a solipsistic universe without intersubjectivity. Second, and on a closely related note, Lacan’s late theory of the borromeon knots and the sinthome is the point at which he comes closest to the anti-Oedipal thought of Deleuze and Guattari. But more on that another time.
November 27, 2008 at 5:07 am
[…] am reading through Larval Subjects’ crisp recapitulations of, and comments upon, Lacan, [here and here, etc.] And a single line come to me as she/he talks about the non-totalizing effects […]
November 27, 2008 at 5:31 am
LS,
I wonder, if Joyce is ONLY tying the knot in another way, but if this way evades the typtical injunctions, I don’t understand what determines this as “non-totalizing”, other than just saying it is so.
Let me put it this way, if someone like Badiou can say that mathematics can somehow speak Being, then an interpersonal psychosis (if one wants to call it that) in certain sense, speaks Being. I have in mind for instance Kleist, an author who speaks Being is a different, though still verging on psychotic manner (perhaps we could turn to later Holderlin in this as well).
Consider the “rhyming” of Küsse and Bisse accomplished by Kleist in his play, Penthesilea, a favorite of Deleuze and Guattari [a post inspired by your thoughts here: http://kvond.wordpress.com/2008/11/27/do-kusse-and-bisse-rhyme-penthesilea-breaking-the-injunction/
His strategy is different from Joyce (and we cannot diagnosis him as psychotic, though his suicide is symptomatic of something).
I would have to ask, if indeed there can be intersubjective psychosis, in what exactly would its non-totalizing property consist. The logical collapse of intersubjectivity no longer is something one could lean upon, it would seem.
Rather, any either/or of discourses, it would seem that language has within its capacities strategies which involve the weaving of suggested antitheses, not to mention a great variety of tactical manuveurs which summon up Being in seemingly constitutive ways (i.e. totalizing).
November 27, 2008 at 6:09 am
LS,
If I may add an additional thought, if we might grant Deleuze and Guattari some weight in description of Kleist’s Penthesilea as a literature of the war machine,
“sentiments are torn from the interiority of a ‘subject’ so they may be violently projected into a milieu of pure exteriority that instills in them an incredible speed, a catapulting force: love or hatred are no longer sentiments but affects. These affects are so many instances of the becoming-woman, the becoming-animal of the warrior (bear, dogs). Affects traverse the body like arrows, they are arms of war. The deterritorialization speed of the affect” (MP 440; 356)”
How are we to read this as a process that is logically non-totalizing? If linguistic means are capable of being affect-vehicles, chariots of affect :), wherein does either the “incompleteness” or the “incoherence” of their expression lie?
And if one refuses the D&G description, then it would seem that it falls upon a Lacanian to delineate the non-totalizing nature of the intersubjective psychotic Joycean path.
[forgive my agrammaticisms above, as I do not always catch and normalize my parataxis.]
November 27, 2008 at 6:14 am
I think I see what you’re saying. I don’t know that I’ve made the claim that psychosis doesn’t attempt to totalize the symbolic order. In its non-“successful” form one of the central problems with psychosis is that it has an explanation for everything. For example, a car drives by the psychotic’s house three times and he’s convinced that this event has meaning and significance. In this form of psychosis– akin to what Deleuze and Guattari call “paranoia” –there is no contingency whatsoever but rather everything takes on meaning within some global overarching system. What I’m looking for is more along the lines of a social formation that doesn’t lead to Oedipal hierarchy on the masculine side or the search for the guru and unassailable network relations on the feminine side. The sinthome is one promising route such an account might take, though it also comes from the most dense and difficult period of Lacan’s teaching so I’m very much still working through these things. As I said in my previous post, I want to avoid the forced alternative some psychoanalytically informed political theorists are proposing where you either have to accept Oedipal neurosis and all the hierarchies it brings or fall into a mute paranoid psychosis.
I’m a little confused by how you seem to be equating being and totalization. I wouldn’t understand Badiou’s ontology as a totalization of being by any means, but as exactly the opposite. What Badiou effectively demonstrates– and he deserves a great deal of credit for this –is that being qua being is pure multiplicity without one one or identity. Set theory demonstrates that sets can be infinitely decomposed without reaching any primitive terms that would then possess identity. Consequently, there is not identity at the primitive level of being as in the case of someone like Lucretius. But moreover, drawing on set theoretical paradoxes like Cantor’s paradox, Badiou also effectively demonstrates that “the whole is not”. Insofar as the power set of a set is always larger than the initial set from which it is composed, it follows that we cannot form a set of all sets as the power set of this set or the set of all its subsets would still be larger than that set of all sets, and so on ad infinitum.
I think, if we use a little imagination, we can see a great deal of similarity between Joyce’s late literature and Badiou’s claim about the excess of inconsistent multiplicities over any and all consistent multiplicities. Just as the set theorists demonstrated the infinite dissemination of being (according to Badiou), Joyce’s literature demonstrates the infinite dissemination of language. Like a set that can form subsets or multiplicities included in the set to infinity, Joyce’s late literature presents the infinite dissemination of language in that the polysemous effects of his language can never be mastered or pinned down (this, incidentally, is the dimension of desirousness in language: “you’re telling me this but what do you really mean?”). As Deleuze so nicely put it in Difference and Repetition, Joyce creates a chaosmos.
I would thus argue that it’s important to distinguish the following terms: Being/One/Whole/Totality. Being must be de-sutured from the predicates of the One, the Whole, and Totality, such that it becomes possible to speak of being without immediately entailing a totality or a one. Here I think Lacan, Deleuze, and Badiou all make significant contributions as to just how this might be thinkable. Lacan’s account of the real perpetually uncovers the various aporia of the One, showing how it is undermined from within. Deleuze shows how identity, the same, and the similar, far from being primitive ontological terms are effects of difference. Badiou develops a rigorous account of multiplicities where the One is not presupposed and where we encounter the ruin of any totality. I know this doesn’t answer your initial question/criticism, but as I said I haven’t answered it yet myself… Ergo free association!
November 27, 2008 at 7:20 am
Kvond: As far as Badiou and mathematics, I am merely following your claim (which “Splintering Bone Ashes” denies):
“When Badiou equates ontology with maths, claiming that maths says all that can be said of being qua being, he essentially is committed to the thesis that thinking and being are identical.”
Given this identity, I think it safe to say that for Badiou mathematics speaks Being.
If we allow the strategies of the poet (Joyce, Kleist, Holderlin, etc) to produce a Scylla and Charybdis negotiation of two limits, as affective expressions of signfication, then too, language can speak being in an intersubjective non-signifying project (this is a minimum achievement).
Consider how Kleist forces in the contingency of language for two words, Küsse and Bisse, to rhyme, without collapsing into paranoia. In a sense, there is no-contingency (or at least, contingency does not lie outside of a categorical limit), because it is swept up in a signification and act. Küsse and Bisse must rhyme, because they should rhyme as causes of the violent confusion. There is no over-arching global system, but neither is there a bleeding network of connections. There is the forced meaning produced within two lines of flight, the weave between the two limits, so to speak: terriorialization/deterriorialization if you want to be D&G about it, incompleteness/incoherence if Lacanian.
What are produced are signifying, intersubjective bodies under no one regime. Local transports. Notions of categorical Completion and coherence simply do not serve. If I recall Joyce said something about the censors of Ulysses, they can burn the bridge now that I have marched my army over it (terribly paraphrased no doubt). The coherence and completion that are required to determine if Küsse and Bisse actually do rhyme are inherent in the work, in the act, a crushing conflation of word and deed.
LS: “I’m looking for is more along the lines of a social formation that doesn’t lead to Oedipal hierarchy on the masculine side or the search for the guru and unassailable network relations on the feminine side.”
Kvond: I’m assuming that somehow you read Capital to have fallen onto the “unassailable network relations on the feminine side”. But why would this be? Is Capital unassailable? Rather, due to the proliferation of affects across its connectability, it strikes me as infinitely assailable. The inputs are everywhere.
LS: “I would thus argue that it’s important to distinguish the following terms: Being/One/Whole/Totality. Being must be de-sutured from the predicates of the One, the Whole, and Totality, such that it becomes possible to speak of being without immediately entailing a totality or a one.”
Kvond: To me an immanentist view of Being undoes this problem. Being is spoken in all intersubjective action, wherein the subject is not a foreclosed category. The “One” falls outside of articulation, because it is already within articulation, within the pragmatics of bodies in assemblage. If you and I walk down the street together and hear a loud bang, the predication of the One, of Totality, simply imposes itself as we duck and look to each other. The world is experienced as to CAUSE both our consonant behaviors (and experience undervalued by the lovers of pure difference). If I yell out, “Watch it!” the articulation of the One is immanent, it does not have to be guaranteed, it simply works; subsequent fractures of this One also are perpetually displaced along new vectors of bodies in consonance. The very nature of action, as readable, requires a shared world as a causal matrix of understanding.
If I read an author who makes dramatic use of these fractures and consonances, all the same, there is a constitutive assemblage of effects, a specific world summoned, which forces contingency together. Küsse and Bisse come to rhyme.
LS: “Badiou develops a rigorous account of multiplicities where the One is not presupposed and where we encounter the ruin of any totality.”
Kvond: Honestly, this thinking of mulitiplicities of the One vs. Not-the-One is to my ear pathological of Binary thinking, seeing binarys as determinative, and doing all one can to struggle against them, through them. If one simply takes a Spinozist view towards the One, and allows all mediational structures to be organizations of the imaginary, modal expression, then ANY bodily formation/assemblage necessarily assumes an infinite projection which steers it. Multiplicities are always seen in conjunction. There is no aporia. There are just degrees of action and agency, degrees of Being. Multiplicity simply becomes a vector of power.
This is just my view. But there is a kind of addiction to “lack” in the Lacanian school and its offspring. And part of this is due to its hand-and-glove fit into the Captitalist picture of desire. Lack must be presupposed, ontologically (!) so that we can accurately diagnosis it in our “system” as a mode of critique, at the cost of forever being sickened by the closed variety of its nosology (we can only be sick of desire in fixed calculable ways, already prestated). This ontological prepositing of lack (which I read in Badiou as well), ensuring the illusion of a concrete diagnosis (the lack of Capital is in the very structure of Being), is the very thing that prevents the construction of ways out, body on body.
LS: “Ergo free association!”
kvond: Much appreciated.
November 27, 2008 at 8:22 am
I do not always catch and normalize my parataxis.
Dr. Sinthome, Kvond has single-handedly earned himself an Adumbration of the Year ™ Parody Oscar! Amazing!
November 27, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Lastly, LS, perhaps if we qualify my thoughts in specific reference to your summaries of incompleteness/inconsistency, my immanent point would become more salient:
1). LS: “Thus, in the upper equation of the graph reads “there exists a speaking being that is not subject to the phallic function or the law of castration”. This being is a being that does not make a sacrifice of jouissance in order to enter the social field. This being can be the Primal Father of Totem and Taboo, God, the sovereign in the work of Carl Schmitt, the father of the Oedipal triangle, the nation, and so on. The key point not to be missed is that this being is a phantasmatic entity produced as an effect of the universalization of the law. It now becomes possible to see why the masculine side of the graph of sexuation is a logic of incompleteness. Insofar as the universalization of the law generates the necessity of an exception so that the law might be discernible, there is always at least one entity that escapes or stands above the law. It is insofar as the universalization of the law of the signifier requires the supplement of an exception that it is constitutively incomplete. This exception is, of course, a fantasy, sham, or fiction that creates the illusion that the Other exists, but it functions no less for all that.”
Kvond: In a Spinozist approach, this “exception” of the one who enjoys clearly is Substance, God, Nature. The enjoyment is not that of pleasure (moving from one degree of perfection to a greater degree), but of pure expression, action and constituted Being. (Only in anthropomorphic fantasies of an enjoying God is the Taboo really a taboo.) Here the Totality is pure jouissance, an unbearable, even circulation of expressional effects. There indeed is a One which by virtue of its adequacy of Idea and action, is its own cause.
2.)LS: “The lower formula for the feminine graph of sexuation reads “not all of speaking-being is subject to the law of castration.” In short, there is something of being that escapes the loss imposed by language or that cannot be articulated in language. It is between these two propositions that we encounter the inconsistency of feminine sexuation. On the one hand, not all of speaking-being is subject to the law of the signifier, yet on the other hand there does not exist a speaking being that is not subject to this law. The shift from the universal quantifier in masculine sexuation (V) to the existential quantifier in feminine sexuation, has important consequences for how the speaking-being in question experiences herself. Insofar as we are no longer talking about a universal and a necessity, but a contingency and a particularity, it follows that there is no signifier in the symbolic order capable of providing a fixed and stable identity for the subject in question. That is, we are dealing with singularities rather than universally shared features. As a result, this subject experiences their relation to the symbolic order as fraught and where they have no secure or stable place.”
Kvond: And here we have modal expressions, singularities (bodies in ratio), under varying degrees of perfection and capacity to act. The universalization is a horizon which is never reached, or even approximated as a degree of freedom, for each particular body is vectored against, and dependent upon, others, in a mutual expression.
Key to the surpass of Lacan’s two injunctions is Spinoza’s degree-of-Being treatment of affect, power and freedom. Being is not a Category, not a binary (Being or Not-Being). It is an expressional degree. This degree-of-Being, immanent approach, is what allows categorial foreclosure to fall to analyses of power, localized but against a horizon of ultimate freedom.
There are two paths at least which such an approach allows, one of which is affirmed by Spinoza. Linguistic beings are not foreclosed from the Real (there is no castration), but rather expressions of it, along degrees of freedom. The use of language allows us to hold more and more adequate Ideas, without ever being completely active beings. By accepting that we are fundamentally passive beings, beings that rely upon, and are expressions of causes outside of ourselves we cannot fully know, it is not the acceptance of castration, as in loss, but asymptotic projects of increase, which rule our emancipation. As we increase our adequacy of our ideas, our activity as Real, constitutively increases.
But there is another linguistic path, one that is not affirmed by Spinoza, but I believe is supported by his framework. That is that semiotic experimentation, lived body to body unions, perhaps “lines of flight” also can work to produce experiences of activity which subsume the jouissance of God, Nature, Substance. That is, we can affectively identify with, on the sub-sub-ject level, the very circulations of modal expression (this is what the poet does). These epiphanic, cross-genus play of intensities can serve to open our bodies to degrees of freedom, otherwise closed off by a point in history.
In either case, it is the degree-of-Being understanding of Being (not as a binary, but as a vector) which understands Lacan’s logic of failures to be something of an analytic illusion, built upon a constitutive ontology of “lack”. Now certainly one can imagine the world in that way, but this would, I believe, cut off a great number of our paths to freedom, (and as Spinoza would say, Joy).
November 27, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Kvond, I don’t know that we’re really all that far apart in what we’re talking about here; though I think we’re working at different strata of being here. The level I’ve been working at in these posts is not the ontological, but the psychological. In other words, these posts could be seen as a certainly psychological and sociological diagnosis of forms of thought and life not unlike what what Spinoza does in the appendix to part 1 of the Ethics and in part 3 of the Ethics. As Spinoza puts it in the first scholium to proposition 8, part 1,
Substance qua substance (viewed sub species eternitas) contains absolutely no negation or negativity, but rather only different degrees of intensity or being. However, Spinoza does not deny that modes are populated by all sorts of illusions about the nature of substance: the supposition that nature functions according to ends or purposes, the experience of lack, etc. Deleuze makes a similar point in Difference and Repetition. Deleuze does not deny lack and negativity as phenomena, but rather denies that these are ontologically primitive terms. Lack is for Deleuze an effect of difference, not what produces difference. The question then becomes that of how this is produced or what forces or powers generate this sort of negativity. Deleuze and Guattari minimally need the presence of such lack to account for the paranoid pole of social formations that manufacture lack. Another way to read the graphs of sexuation would be as two forms transcendental illusions take in channeling desire (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense) in a particular way and to particular objects.
I thus see the thought of Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari as complementary and as dealing with different ontological levels. Guattari, of course, did his analysis with Lacan and never left Lacan’s school. Anti-Oedipus is almost uniformly positive towards Lacan, though very critical of Lacanians (who they see as smuggling back in the Freudian Oedipus that Lacan has largely destroyed). Where Deleuze and Guattari can be seen as cartographers of affirmative being and desiring-machines, Lacan can be seen as a cartographer of the paranoid pole of social structures that dominate and manage these flows, functioning to halt and attach their desiring production.
November 28, 2008 at 5:35 pm
The difference is, and this is a PRIMARY difference, between Lacan and Spinoza, that Lacan’s diagnosis of Being (be that psychological Being, if you want to assume that distinction), is that Being is fundamentally pathological, it is illness (neurotic, psychotic, etc.) and STRUCTURED by lack. One’s “health”, if one can call it that, is a kind of placing oneself equidistantly from the four walls of a prison determined by castration. One is forever negotiating from an inalienable, (and alienating) loss.
For Spinoza NO ONE is sick. Even at the moment of death vitality is pushing through in the conatus. Lack is diagnositically an illusion, and only degrees of Being (manifest as pleasure, power, perfection — and their opposites). Paths to freedom have nothing to do with LOSS, but only organizing constitutively more powerful, more Joyous bodies. It is understanding that there is NO subject, in any sense that Lacan, (or traditionally others), figures it. Freedom and its path is moment to moment available to you – at any moment one can increase the number of ways your body can be affected and effect others, and you have become more free.
The categorical foreclosures of Lacan (beyond which no human being is supposed to be able to escape), really become ontological expressions of Being, things not to escape, or accept, but manifest through.
As to Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan, your distinction between “psychological” ontology and “ontology ontology” is the distinction that they both drive home. The point of Anti-Oedipus was that YES the Oedipus Complex is real, in the same sense that “God” was real sometime before Nietzsche had declared him dead. We had HISTORICALLY become Oedipal. But this means that the avenues available to freedom are not found in “psychological ontology” (what history has made of us), but in “ontology ontology” what we are capable of doing, feeling, experiencing, acting upon, becoming. The four walls of mommy/daddy, perversity/fantasy, signifier/signified, Other/petite a (to name a few) do not delineate our possibilities (nor prescriptions for health).
LS: Guattari, of course, did his analysis with Lacan and never left Lacan’s school. Anti-Oedipus is almost uniformly positive towards Lacan.
Kvond: I am not sure what you mean by “never left Lacan’s school”. Do you mean the literal institution of Clinique La Borde, founded by the Lacanian Oury, or do you mean he never stopped being a Lacanian of some stripe or other?
If the latter, I find it very hard to say that he never “broke” with Lacan…perhaps it is the better/more-unlikely to say that he never broke with Freud? His Transversal theory, which came out of his work at La Borde, found the analyst/analysand binary (transference) completely inadequate, instead deciding to focus on groups and the instutitions in which binaries occur. Is this a “break” from Lacan? What is left of Lacan if the transference binary is not left as the ultimate determination in analysis? I don’t know. But it is precisely the attention to the institutional conditions, the libinal organization of groups that lead Guattari away from “psychological ontology” (ontology governed by the subject in relation to the signifier, we could say) to “ontology ontology” (what is possible) for instance manifested in his theory of the four functors:
http://kvond.wordpress.com/2008/11/22/guattaris-four-ontologies/
In reading Gary Genosko’s account, instead of Lacan, it was from Winnicott’s “transitional object” that Guattari took his notion of an “institutional object”, around which he organized his departure from Lacan. He retained something of Lacan – in a sense his work is dialogue with, but still AGAINST Lacan – but he found linguistic reductions, (Becoming solely under the auspices of universal relations to the Signifier) a temptation to continually resist. This is how Genosko speaks of the differences between Guattair and the Lacanian Oury (which I quote at some length, because it goes to the point quite well),
“Oury’s unrepentant structuralizations of the collective – whether they are Greimasian, Lacanian, or otherwise, are not upheld by Guattari. It is not that his models are less semiotic; they are, however, less linguistic, more material, and less inclined toward topological (concerned with proximity of relational terms with regard to defining criteria, and negative definitions of relationality) in favor of the processual, emergent and self-organized, although some would claim that even post- or structural models are heirs to structure-thought” (An Aberrant Introduction).
By the end of the 70’s Genosko counts Guattari’s thought to have matured to the point of leaving Lacan’s essentialized linguistic notion of the subject behind.
“…the disymmetry between subject and signifier in Lacan was dismissed as Guattari’s own theoretical model matured: ‘The status of the subject does not rest therefore on the play of signifiers, as one would say in structuralist psychoanalysis; it is assembled by an ensemble of heterogenous components…” (IM 43). The fruits of the critique of structuralism were harvested at this moment in concepts of assemblage – collective – of enunciation in a mixed semiotics with a pragmatic and material foundation. The critique of structuralism in ATP (critique of invarients, universals, homogeniety, majoritarian languages and the rest) was already accomplished.
Subjectivity is a group phenomenon. It is deindividuated (from ego psychology), depersonalized (from personological egology) and ecologized (fully interrelational and polyphonic, although even this dialogical term has structural overtones from Barthe’s polyphony of codes, for instance), a consequence of foregrounding the social environment of the institution. There are different kinds of subjectivity, but they are always of a group. Subjectivity involves, then, non-predetermined interrelations, non-linear and non-logical unfolding, and a production of differences.”
If we take Genosko’s summation of Guattari’s thought in this period as accurate, this strikes me as rather non-Lacanian. I can see Lacan being read as the cartographer of the paranoia pole of social structures, but why on earth would you go to a Paranoid doctor (he believed his cartography) to tell you what was wrong with you, or what was wrong with society?
As to how far apart we are, I don’t feel that we are far apart at all, (though your thoughtful admiration for Lacan I no longer share). It is with those that one has the greater agreement sometimes that one’s disagreements are the most interesting, and productive.
November 28, 2008 at 6:33 pm
post script: This is the passage I have in mind when it comes to the “reality” of the negation, as it is assumed to be, or confused with privation:
Letter 21 To Blyenberg,
“I will proceed to explain further the words privation and negation, and briefly point out what is necessary for the elucidation of my former letter. I say then, first, that privation is not the act of depriving, but simply and merely a state of want, which is in itself nothing: it is a mere entity of the reason, a mode of thought framed in comparing one thing with another. We say, for example, that a blind man is deprived of sight, because we readily imagine him as seeing, or else because we compare him with others who can see, or compare his present condition with his past condition when he could see; when we regard the man in this way, comparing his nature either with the nature of others or with his own past nature, we affirm that sight belongs to his nature, and therefore assert that he has been deprived of it. But when we are considering the nature and decree of God, we cannot affirm privation of sight in the case of the aforesaid man any more than in the case of a stone; for at the actual time sight lies no more within the scope of the man than of the stone; since there belongs to man and forms part of his nature only that which is granted to him by the understanding and will of God. Hence it follows that God is no more the cause of a blind man not seeing, than he is of a stone not seeing. Not seeing is a pure negation.”
January 28, 1665
When I say that negation is diagnostically a kind of illusion, one begins diagnostically with the notion of Substance which perfectly expresses itself through its modes, all of which are determined (negated) in specific ways. And “lack” or sense of privation, certainly of the kind which Lacan imagines to be constitutive of the Speaking, and therefore desiring Subject, has to be understood not by the psychological relationship to the signifier, but in the real world, (materialist), affective realities which make up its expression, just like any other modal expression. Any limitation is simply a delineation which ALSO connects. Paths to freedom thus are everywhere, because determinations are everywhere.
November 28, 2008 at 8:43 pm
You seem to miss the point that lack can be an illusion produced exactly as Spinoza describes it above and have very real psychological effects. Lacan doesn’t say any different. In his early work he defines the real as that which is without any lack. It is only insofar as memory or the symbolic enters experience that lack is produced. No doubt, despite your Spinozism, you’ve gone to the library and happened to find a book missing, no? What are the conditions for a book missing from its place. Clearly at the material level there can be no lack here. The book is elsewhere and has not ceased to exist. If the book is missing from its place, then this can only be because there is a symbolic system that assigns the book its place. Likewise, if it is possible for New Orleans to be destroyed, this is because the mind compares the present nature of New Orleans with the past nature of New Orleans (ever notice Deleuze devotes a lot of attention to memory in his work?). Lacan explores the consequence of this nature of psychic reality which has very real effects on the speaking-being. I would also strongly disagree with your thesis that for Spinoza no one is sick… He does, after all, devote a great deal of attention to human bondage.
As to my previous remark about Guattari, Guattari stayed with Lacan’s literal school, as a member, for his entire life. That is a significant and important fact. Deleuze also wrote some of the most sensitive psychoanalytic studies in a Lacanian vein that exist. For example, “Coldness and Cruelty”, which Lacan referred to as the finest analysis of sadism and masochism that exist. Lacan also devoted sessions of his seminar to the reading of The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition. I tend to think that English speaking readers have a very poor understanding of the relationship between Lacan and Guattari by virtue of now having the same sort of psychoanalytic context within which to read Anti-Oedipus. It is true that Guattari criticizes psychoanalysis on a number of points, but he also radicalizes it and certainly retains and expands a number of its concepts. Lacan’s position has always been that subjectivity is a group phenomenon… What do you think the symbolic is about?
I personally don’t find it helpful or useful to suggest that “everyone is well” and then blame theorists for talking about sickness (implicitly falling into a performative contradiction where theorists are being called sick). I’ve also spent enough time in the clinic to know that not everyone is well and that it is not simply “analysts” making them sick. Rather, what is needed is a strong critical apparatus that is capable of explaining both how certain phenomena can arise within an affirmative framework of being and what strategies can be devised for responding to that framework of being. I believe that’s precisely what Deleuze does in texts like Nietzsche and Philosophy, and Deleuze and Guattari do in texts like Anti-Oedipus, and what Lacan is up to. The big Other does not exist but continues to function, that’s the problem. The paralogisms Deleuze and Guattari analyze are “diagnostic illusions” with real effects. The question is how to navigate and move beyond these things.
November 29, 2008 at 12:55 am
LS: “You seem to miss the point that lack can be an illusion produced exactly as Spinoza describes it above and have very real psychological effects. Lacan doesn’t say any different.
kvond: Oh, I definitely get this, illusions, imaginary relations, are constructive of history. But ANY effects would be historically contingent, and this certainly is not Lacan’s position. He wants to speak outside of history about the Subject and its relationship to the Signifier. Aside from this, a Lacanian diagnosis involves “lack” as constitutive of Being (what you call psychological Being, the only Being that is available to us). This goes far beyond simply saying that illusions have REAL consequences. It means that the REAL solutions that are meagerly available to us ONLY involve the acceptance of lack. We MUST lack. This is quite different than Spinoza’s prescription in which degrees of freedom are everywhere and plentifully accessable through the renunciation of lack to the degree that we are capable.
LS: “I would also strongly disagree with your thesis that for Spinoza no one is sick… He does, after all, devote a great deal of attention to human bondage.”
kvond; I do not equate bondage, which is the limitation of possibility understood by Spinoza to be a condition of degree, with the pathological, that is, the stategy of adopting which perpetual sickness you are going to manifest. neurosis or psychosis, etc. Not only is there a, to me profound, rhetorical difference between the two, the kinds of freedoms one is capable of, the places one looks for freedom, are very different.
LS: “It is true that Guattari criticizes psychoanalysis on a number of points, but he also radicalizes it and certainly retains and expands a number of its concepts. Lacan’s position has always been that subjectivity is a group phenomenon… What do you think the symbolic is about?”
kvond: The question isn’t whether groups are involve in the phenomena of the Symbolic, but where one turns in Analysis to look for freedom, what does on look at. What Guattari turns to, and what Lacan turns to are very different things. You may call this difference Guattari’s “radicalization” of Lacan, but radicalization involves acting from the root of something. It is hard to imagine what Lacan is without his linguistic reductions, while Guattari has quite a bit in his analysis which is not reducible to language. I suppose one man’s radicalization is another man’s revolution.
LS: “I personally don’t find it helpful or useful to suggest that “everyone is well” and then blame theorists for talking about sickness (implicitly falling into a performative contradiction where theorists are being called sick).
Kvond: I’m trying to untie this. Are you saying that I have committed a “performative contradiction”…perhaps. I did use the term “addiction” to describe the blood-thirst Lacanians have for seeing “lack” and unresolvable existentialist Desire in everything. But if you ask me if Lacanians are sick, I would have to say “No”. They would like to see society as sick, and so construct an illness-based World-view which allows them to diagnosis without end (literally). When one cannot see outside of one’s assumptions, one has ceased doing philosophy. I find Lacanian thinking quite wonderful, and even revealing of important factors in persons and social relations, but it is in my view a Closed Vision.
LS: “I’ve also spent enough time in the clinic to know that not everyone is well and that it is not simply “analysts” making them sick.”
Kvond: Yes, no doubt illness is something that should be institutionalized…
A careful eye should be placed on the difference between “suffering” and “illness”. You seem to conflate the two some in your (rhetorical) suggestion that I somehow think that analysts have made patients sick. They (and their investments in institutional codificiations), certainly have helped identify people who are suffering, AS sick. Does this mean that they MAKE them sick, well, in a nomological way. The question is, in doing so, have they alleviated suffering (I suspect they really have), and secondly, have they alleviated suffering as much as other methods could have (an open question). We do know that priests and conceptions of sin have alleviated a great deal of suffering over the centuries. Just talking to someone in a framework (apart from the specifics of each theory), can probably do a great deal of human good.
But there is also a vast conflation between the personal experiences of helping those who are suffering (mentally ill, we say), and these same people, speaking on the AUTHORITY of their clinical experiences, about the illnesses of society.
LS: ” I believe that’s precisely what Deleuze does in texts like Nietzsche and Philosophy, and Deleuze and Guattari do in texts like Anti-Oedipus, and what Lacan is up to.”
Kvond: I notice that you distinctly leave out Deleuze’s work on Spinoza, and also the very significant ATP, where Lacan is left much further behind. Perhaps this is because you feel that for Deleuze (and G), where they move away from Lacan they lose their critical “framework of Being”. Why you might think this, I do not know. To me it seems that in these works the critical framework of Being is sharpened.
LS: “The big Other does not exist but continues to function, that’s the problem.”
Kvond: The “big Other” is ONE way of describing the possibilities of freedom and what retard them. If one is a TRUE Lacanian, one knows that the big Other can never be done away with. All one can do is what Zizek calls “changing the chicken”. Perhaps though in your thinking about latter-day Lacan on psychosis and the degrees of freedom Joyce achieved, you will see a way through, in Lacanian terms. It could be though that the very way that you frame the question [A functioning Big Other = a problem] already forecloses the possibility of a solution (dissolution). There are many ways of framing the issue of institutions, and not all of them promote the figuration of the big Other. Just as answering questions without invoking “God” as an explanation lead to “God” playing a less functional role in society, so too ceasing to adopt a theory which requires the big Other as a conditutive description may be a step toward the big Other no longer functioning as it does.
When the world, and oneself is seen as lacking nothing, I think that one gets off on the right foot.
I do not mean to impune you, your experiences as clinician, even your theories about Being, or problems about society. You are a cogent, embracing thinker. Besides this, I do not know you. My comments LARGELY come from my reading of Lacan, Lacanian inspired theory and my personal understanding of society, and partly from the positions I see you state. In a weblog discussion of theory, one must have the freedom to express oneself AGAINST ideas without offending those who champion them. And I am not even clear if you are championing Lacan.
November 29, 2008 at 1:22 am
Lacan certainly does not wish to speak outside of history. As I’ve pointed out on a number of occasions, Lacan articulates neurosis as a structure unique to our particular historical configuration where the name-of-the-father and the imaginary father occupy the same role in the psychic economy of individuals. As Lacan argues in the Family Complexes, you find nothing like neurosis in those kinship structures where the two functions are separated. This would be a historical argument. However, from a clinical standpoint you have to work with the historical setting you’re lodged in. In my forthcoming article on the discourse of the capitalist I develop another historical permutation, that departs from this framework.
You write:
Do you know what an analysis actually looks like or what actually takes place in an analytic setting? You seem to be of the view that the analyst is doing something to the analysand… Namely tracing everything back to lack or absence. In point of fact, nothing of the sort actually takes place in the analytic setting. The analyst barely says anything at all, often simply repeating certain phrases or remarks that the analysand makes, occasionally modifying them slightly. It is the analysand that does all the work. Rather than the imposition of a frame on the analysand, you instead get a factory where connections and associations are being produced by the analysand allowing for new forms of life to emerge, or what the Deleuzian might call lines of flight.
This is an odd observation. One can’t say everything. You could have also said that I left out Deleuze’s work on cinema or his discussions of Bacon, or I could have pointed out that you leave out Spinoza’s Theologico-Politico Treatise. In other words, not mentioning Deleuze’s work on Spinoza or A Thousand Plateaus has nothing to do with not finding them important… They just weren’t relevant to the point I was making at that moment. Poke about the blog a bit and see what you find.
I am not sure where you get your notion of what a “true Lacanian” is. Perhaps you should actually talk to some “true Lacanians”, i.e., clinicians.
At any rate, thank you for the discussion. I think this discussion has exhausted itself.
November 29, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Sinthome,
While we’re on the subject of jouissance, I was wondering if you could turn back to a question I asked you in May that you said you’d have to think about.
That question, in the comments on “Style- Horror at Jouissance,” was part of a discussion about the therapeutic potential of texts and ultimately psychoanalysis itself. You said “psychoanalysis is not psycho-therapy,” to which I replied:
December 1, 2008 at 2:45 pm
[…] Posted by ktismatics on 1 December 2008 There’s a complex and convoluted metapsychology underlying psychoanalytic praxis, a theory about what it’s like to be human and how change happens. But the practice of analysis is minimalist in the extreme. As Sinthome describes it in the commentary to a recent post, the third in a series on Lacanian sexuation: […]
May 11, 2009 at 12:01 am
[…] in a detailed commentary on the graphs of sexuation you can read my prior posts here, here, and here. The left-hand side of the graph of sexuation is the way of Inconsistency, whereas the right-hand […]