In late March I’ll be giving a talk before the Lacanian psychoanalysts in Toronto where I discuss what Lacan called “the discourse of the capitalist” and what analysts have been calling “the new symptom”. As usual, I’m a nervous wreck about this because I think the analysts– real practicing analysts –know a thing or two and am always frightened of making a mess of things. Nonetheless, I plod on.
The “new symptom” refers to symptoms such as addiction, anorexia, bulimia, cutting, depression, anxiety disorders, and so on. We might even be able to add things such as hoarding and compulsive shopping. While many of these symptoms existed in earlier eras, they are appearing in the clinic with greater and greater frequency. My suggestion, is that these symptoms indicate a fundamental mutation in how the symbolic order is structured. What is unique about these symptoms compared to those that dominated the clinic in Freud and Lacan’s time (hysteria, obsession, phobia) is that 1) these symptoms do not seem to signify, 2) that they are therefore not a veiled demand addressed to the Other, and 3) that they are a sort of immediate jouissance that doesn’t pass through the battery of signifiers (S2). This comes out most clearly, I think, in the case of addiction. Where the traditional neurotic symptom is one that is addressed to the Other and requires the support of the Other for the jouissance it attains, addiction seems to be a symptom in which the subject attempts to cut the Other as mediator of jouissance out of the picture. The addict attempts to refuse passing through the Other as a detour to jouissance, instead relating to an object or activity (alcohol, internet porn) as a way of attaining jouissance. Where the neurotic symptom signifies or is a sort of cypher, the new symptom is a direct jouissance without signification. Indeed, there’s a sense in which it attempts to repress signification altogether.
read on!
Why, then, we should wonder, have symptoms increasingly come to take this form? My thesis is these symptoms are appearing with greater frequency because the social relation has taken a new form. As I have argued elsewhere (“Zizek’s New Universe of Discourse“, .pdf), we are no longer living in the “universe of the master” (depicted to the left, above), but have entered a new universe that I refer to as the “universe of the capitalist”. As I argue, a “universe” is not any particular discourse taken in isolation, but rather is the total possible permutations of the mathemes arranged in a particular order. There are six possible universes, allowing for a total of 24 possible discourses. However, in any particular universe there will only be four interrelated discourses.
The universe of mastery begins with what Lacan called “the discourse of the master” (right). I won’t get into all the intricacies of these discourses, but one way of interpreting Lacan’s discourse of the master is in terms of his definition of the subject: “the signifier (S1) represents the subject ($) for another signifier (S2).” Insofar as no signifier ever manages to name the subject because the signifier can’t signify itself (Seminar 14), a remainder is always produced, something always slips away (objet a). This is what gives rise to the repetitive nature of the symptom in the universe of mastery. The subject’s unconscious produces a number of signifying coagulations in an attempt to fill the lack (objet a) that can never be filled within the symbolic order. These signifying coagulations are the hysteric’s and obsessional’s symptoms.
The key thing to notice in the universe of mastery is that we have relations where the master-signifier (S1) and the battery of signifiers (S2) are unified. In the universe of capitalism (whose initial cell is represented to the left, above), we get something very different. Here we will notice that it is structurally impossible for there to ever be a direct relation between S1 and S2 (S1—>S2). The two are always separated by a third term.
Before proceeding to talk about this, it’s first important to note that I’ m not conjuring this discourse out of thin air. In Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan associated capitalism with the discourse of the university (right) belonging to the universe of mastery. However, the very next year in Seminar XVIII and the “Milan Discourse”, Lacan changes his mind and specifically introduces the discourse of the capitalist which doesn’t correspond to any of the four discourses he had explored the year before in Seminar XVII. In my article “Zizek’s New Universe of Discourse”, I argue that the moment Lacan introduces the discourse of the capitalist, he also calls forth three other discourses, though he never names them or formalizes them. The universe of capitalism would thus be as follows (apologies for the notation):
Discourse of the Capitalist:
$/S1 —>S2/a
S1/a—>$/S2
a/S2—>S1/$
S2/$—>a/S1
In other words, we get an entirely different set of permutations where we no longer have the discourse of the master, hysteric, analyst, or university. This suggests that the social relations– which Lacanian discourse theory formalizes –is fundamentally different under capitalism. Is there any evidence that Lacan himself thinks the universe of mastery where we get the discourse of the master, hysteric, analyst, and university is disappearing? Yes. In Seminar XVII, when discussing the discourse of the master, Lacan says that increasingly we hardly ever see masters anymore. This is also equivalent to saying that the universe of Oedipus is disappearing, insofar as the discourse of the master is just a formalization of Oedipal structure. If this is true, then it would follow that the symptom takes on a new form within the universe of capitalism.
Sadly, Lacan tells us precious little about just how we are to understand the discourse of the capitalist, but based on how we interpreted the discourse of the master above, I think we can hazard a well educated guess. The discourse of the capitalist says something like “the maternal superego (S1) commands the subject ($) to enjoy in the form of commodities (S2).” I won’t here go into detail as to why I associate the superego of capitalism with the maternal superego, beyond saying that where the superego in the universe of mastery functions as a prohibition, in the universe of capitalism the superego now seems to command enjoyment. “You must find ever more exotic and different forms of enjoyment!” However, we’ll note that in the position of the product of this discourse we now see objet a or the remainder. In the “Milan Discourse” Lacan claims that the discourse of the capitalist is the most ingenious discourse to date in that it creates something like an “eternal motion machine”. For each commodity (S2) the divided subject ($) consumes, he experiences a disappointment (“this is not it!”). He is thus compelled to pursue yet another commodity to fulfill the superegoic imperative. And so it goes continuously: nothing is ever enough because no commodity is ever “it”. Moreover, insofar as we are obeying the superegoic imperative to enjoy, and insofar as the more we obey the superego, the more guilt we feel, this consumption is accompanied by profound guilt and anxiety.
I think the first thing to note with this initial discourse is that we’ve now discovered where to situate compulsive symptoms such as hoarding and compulsive buying. If there’s a truth to capitalism, if there’s a “capitalist type”, this is perhaps best exemplified by the hoarder and the compulsive buyer. Both suggest a subject that consumes not for the sake of any use-value, but simply for the sake of consuming and accumulating. I would also suggest that it also makes sense to place the bulimic and anorexic here. Unlike the hoarder, the bulimic and anorexic are subjects that refuse the command of the maternal superego to enjoy. They consume nothing in a desperate attempt to maintain a place of desire.
This morning, much to my surprise, I encountered one of my four discourses arising from the universe of capitalism in Rik Loose’s brilliant Subject of Addiction (Karnac 2002). Although Loose makes no connection between addiction and the discourse of the capitalist, he there proposes that the “discourse of the capitalist” is structured as follows:
a/S2—>S1/$
He proposes to read this discourse as “lack or the object-cause of desire (a) installing a substance or activity– alcohol, heroine, internet porn, gambling(?) –in the place of the master-signifier (S1)”. In the universe of mastery, the discourse of the hysteric is organized around an identification with a master-signifier (S1) in the form of a leader, the name of a movement or nation, God, a doctor, etc ($—>S1). All of these identifications are symbolic in nature and pass through the intermediary of the Other. The addict in capitalism, by contrast, attempts to place a substance in the place of the master-signifier so as to overcome constitutive lack (a). It’s not difficult to see that the subject of addiction is a kind of attempt to form a perfect capitalist subject ($ <> S1); a subject that is a pure master of himself, that has no need to pass through the mediation of the Other for his enjoyment. The subject of addiction is a subject awash in jouissance that attempts to escape the castrating effects of the signifier (S2) in and through his relation to a particular substance or activity.
All of my remarks here are sketchy as I’m still working through all of this. There are, however, a couple points worth making. First, where the universe of mastery is characterized by the predominance of desire or deferral as a defense against jouissance, the universe of capitalism is a universe awash in individualistic jouissance. I suspect this is part of why we’ve seen such a dramatic rise in anxiety and depressive disorders. As Lacan and Freud argued, the closer the proximity of the jouissance of the Other, the greater the anxiety. Similarly, depression, melancholia, seems to arise where desire is erased and the subject has faded in the jouissance of the Other. Second, where the universe of mastery is characterized by a relation between subject and Other ($—>S1 or S1–>S2), this relation is increasingly absent in the universe of the capitalist. The Other as that through which enjoyment must be mediated increasingly disappears, such that a direct relationship to the object replaces it. Paraphrasing Marx, “under commodity fetishism, relationships between people are confused with relationships between things.” If I’m right about the symptomal structure of the universe of capitalism, this structure of “social” relations actively functions to foreclose relations to others. Finally, third, because there is never a direct relation between the master-signifier and the battery of signifiers (S1–>S2), it follows that symptoms are no longer signifying constellations, e.g., symptoms such as the agoraphobic woman who’s terrified of going out in public because she might “fall down” (i.e., she’s a “fallen woman” and her symptom is telling the Other this), increasingly disappear. Instead we get subjects submerged in jouissance that no longer really signify (here it would also be appropriate to talk about Zizek’s “id violence”). In this connection, I’m particularly interested in asignifying trends that seem to be becoming increasingly common such as tatoos and body art (think of Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the savage socius in Anti-Oedipus), tumbler blogs that have picture after picture without any text and that also seem to revolve around light BDSM, and cutting. These things all seem to suggest the emergence of a new structure of subjectivity organized around jouissance rather than signification.
Increasingly you hear analysts express dismay that traditional forms of the analytic act (interpretation) no longer produce any subjective effects. If I’m right, we here have an explanation as to why this is taking place. First, unlike the subject in the universe of mastery, the relation of the subject is no longer a relation to an Other to which the symptom is addressed in the form of a veiled demand. Rather, the subject’s symptom is now organized around solipsistic jouissance that resembles masturbation in a number of respects. Second, this jouissance doesn’t have a signifying structure in the universe of capitalism, but actively functions– as in the case of addiction –to foreclose the Other. If this is the case, then one question of treatment would be that of how to establish a relation to the Other where a demand (rather than the forgetfulness of jouissance) might begin to be articulated.
Larval Subjects . 
February 11, 2013 at 9:17 pm
Would “the new symptom” also be found in the so-called “Personality Disorders”? BPD, NPD, ERD, C-PTSD and so on?
Looking at outofthefog.net, a leading personality disorder recovery website, there is so much comorbidity, misdiagnoses, multiple diagnoses — and so many problems with even determining whether these are valid categories at all. It seems that the rise of personality disorders coincides with this “new symptom” in the capitalist universe.
Are you familiar with Louise Kaplan’s FEMALE PERVERSIONS (1994)? Excellent book. Talks a lot about cutting, anorexia, stuff like that. You know there are so-called “pro-an” blogs out there now which are all about getting that addictive rush, the unmediated jouissance as you call it — and harm-reduction, how to remain anorexic as a mode of jouissance. Kaplan has some great insight into this. For her, it has to do with power: the anorexic has been jealous of others her (or his) entire life, jealous of their power over her (or him). Finally with the discovery of anorexia, the power struggle is reversed: suddenly it is the parents or therapist who are jealous. “They envy me now” is the implicit cry of the anorexic. “I have the power to frustrate them as they have frustrated me in the past” — revenge. There is a collusion which occurs when the anorexic attempts to enlist or induce certain roles, presenting as helpless (when truly just afraid), trying to get the other to infantilize oneself and so on. This is all part of the game, which is why it is so difficult to treat anorexics because even the attempt to cure them can be collusion, part of the enactment of a fantasy which is the original goal of the symptom.
Here are two other great resources I found, the first a very short “cheat sheet” on HPD/BPD and the other an in-depth manual on treatment for BPD which draws heavily on the work of Jacques Derrida:
Click to access Hysterical%20personality.pdf
Click to access ddp_manual.pdf
I’m curious if you think these are still “old symptom” (you mention hysteria as an old symptom) or if hysteria (and its extreme version, BPD) have changed or adapted to the “new symptom.”
February 11, 2013 at 9:25 pm
I forgot to mention, I want to hear more of your ideas about the superego of capitalism as maternal superego — love it! This is a very interesting area of development. I know Zizek explored the idea of maternal superego some years ago but has dropped the thread in recent times (as far as I know).
The maternal superego is associated with the maternal imago by Howard Schwartz, as well as the breakdown of the paternal superego and the paternal function (i.e. prohibition which acts on behalf of reality principle). Now such prohibitions are seen as tools of oppression. Schwartz talks about institutional narcissism which develops within organizations (and societies!) as the libidinal economy of the maternal imago takes over, winning out over the previous libidinal economy of the paternal function. This is metonym and scapegoating winning out over metaphor. In the libidinal economy of the maternal imago, respect is devalued and love is suddenly valued, the question being no longer who is worthy of respect, but who is worthy of love — and the answer being, the most marginalized, the disenfranchised as so on.
The libidinal economy of the maternal imago perpetuates what Timothy Morton calls Beautiful Soul Syndrome. It produces Good™ people, but we would do well to remember this Bertolt Brecht poem, THE INTERROGATION OF THE GOOD:
Step foward: we hear
That you are a good man.
You cannot be bought, but the lightning
Which strikes the house, also
Cannot be bought.
You hold to what you said.
But what did you say?
You are honest, you say your opinion.
Which opinion?
You are brave.
Against whom?
You are wise.
For whom?
You do not consider personal advantages.
Whose advantages do you consider then?
You are a good friend
Are you also a good friend of the good people?
Hear us then: we know
You are our enemy. This is why we shall
Now put you in front of a wall.
But in consideration of
your merits and good qualities
We shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you
With a good bullet from from a good gun and bury you
With a good shovel in the good earth.
A few relevant papers by Schwartz:
Organization in the Age of Hysteria (pdf)
Summary: Civilization and organization require interplay between the spontaneous imaginary and the objective character of the symbolic, but these two are always in tension. Hysteria represents an attempt to end that tension through the destruction of the symbolic by the imaginary. A psychoanalytic theory of hysteria, based on the work of Lacan, Verhaeghe and Chasseguet-Smirgel is developed. The interdependence and antagonism of the imaginary and the symbolic are explored. Four aspects of this antagonism toward organization are discussed.
http://www.sba.oakland.edu/faculty/schwartz/Hysteria%20and%20organization%20final.htm
The Sin of the Father: Reflections on the Roles of the Corporation Man, The Suburban Housewife, Their Son, and Their Daughter in the Deconstruction of the Patriarch (pdf)
Click to access SinFather.pdf
The Psychodynamics of Political Correctness (pdf)
Click to access PCRP.pdf
February 11, 2013 at 9:59 pm
Excellent project. I am excited to read about it as you develop it more. Renata Salacel is fond of referencing the Milan lecture on the capitalist discourse, as is Dany-Robert Dufour in “The Art of Shrinking Heads” where he examines the shifting status of the symbolic. I was in a seminar with Zizek and asked him about the capitalist discourse and his eyes lit up and said, “let’s hope so!” He sees in the capitalist discourse something like an emancipatory potential, and I think there is a line to consider in this context: i.e. what might a political resistance to this discourse look like that goes beyond what G & D sought to do in Anti-Oedipus?
February 11, 2013 at 11:11 pm
Interesting research coming out of neuroscience/sociology about internet-compulsion itself too.
Nicholas Carr’s book ‘The Shallows’ is a fascinating review of the impacts – realised or potential – of the internet, and I would take it further and say that the ‘symptom pool’ has changed – as it does with all changes in cultural and economic conditions – within the West. I like this piece of yours, interesting work. I am a bit cautious about the mathematical analogies, are they needed?
Finally, in line with your ecological investigations, I would say that the entirety of our connection with Earth and its residents (human and animal and otherwise) itself has changed so dramatically in the last 10 years, it isn’t surprising these types of shocks are happening. Then again, I am happy that certain psycho-pharma medications have been developed, as it is a better alternative to getting my skull drilled into! :)
Warmly, Eilif
February 12, 2013 at 3:09 am
Makes me think of a story I wrote some time ago–A Theology of Anorexia.
http://fictionaut.com/stories/jacob-russell/a-theology-of-anorexia
February 12, 2013 at 1:42 pm
February 12, 2013 at 3:02 pm
Dr Sinthome, I must be suffering from this new affliction because I keep coming here even though I never even get the crumbs off the table; I function solely as your private entertainment, good for an occasional laugh but otherwise fairly irrelevant. I have SHAMED myself this way in front of a worldwide audience. Remember that sometimes, when you’re feeling sorry for yourself, as you often do.
February 12, 2013 at 6:40 pm
you ask:
“Why, then, we should wonder, have symptoms increasingly come to take this form?”
Did you read A.Kiarina Kordela’s essays “Capital – at least it kills time” and “Crisis and (Im)Mortality” ?
There she elaborates a highly unusual answer, somehow proposing time itself as capital’s object-a.
February 12, 2013 at 7:03 pm
Baudrillard brought up the problem of maternal superego in 1976,
in his book “Symbolic Exchange and Death”, chapter 4 section 5
February 13, 2013 at 12:32 am
this sounds a lot like the reason our civilization can’t seem to come to grips with anthropogenic climate change. all we can think of to do, is CONSUME DIFFERENTLY…
February 13, 2013 at 12:52 am
Ah, Forgot to mention: Renata Salecl’s work on Choice and Anxiety is also excellent for this!
February 13, 2013 at 3:56 am
I don’t know that you can use addiction as the basis for your hypothesis about the new symptom. Speaking as a veteran of a few battles, I can say that it doesn’t substitute the signifiers for the Other (if that’s what you mean by bypass). It just has nothing to do with the Other. I have to not drink in order not to turn on a switch that obliterates everything. You’re right that that’s a weirdly material (and terrifying) fact, but it’s been the case for a loooooong time:
“and these three men made a solemn vow / John Barleycorn must die”
Do you think it would be fair to say instead that the context of addiction has changed? That smokers and heroin addicts and so on have been ejected from the public and so in a sense de-signified? No more poetry soaked in absinthe, no more heated debates in cafes. Nothing left but the hospital bills!
Then suppose that the public itself is disappearing, and every symptom will show itself along much the same lines: to no one.
(All right. I think I’ve depressed myself enough for one night!)
February 18, 2013 at 4:08 am
Interesting. I’d question the conclusion that addiction forecloses relation to an Other, which seems to be based on the assumption that the addict’s relation to her substance (drug[s] of choice, TV, internet, gambling, porn, whatever) is, properly speaking, a non-relation. “The addict cannot really have a relation to heroin, because heroin is not an Other,” you seem to say. Accordingly, her submersion in that non-relation precludes actual relations with actual Others.
But Otherness isn’t a property belonging to persons or ascribed to its bearers solely by symbolic structures. It’s phantasmatic. My Other is m(y)other. Just as anything (for anyone, in theory–and, for me, in practice, as the particular subject that I am, some analytically interesting subset of ‘anything’) can serve as the locus of objet a, the constraints on what or who can be my Other are pretty open.
And, by and large, addicts seem to develop pretty strong (psychotically phantasmatic, we might want to say, since we standing outside those relations will say they *can’t* be what they’re felt to be) transference relations with their addiction-targets. Certainly, that’s the case for drug addicts. Think about the old AA cats’ concern with “demon alcohol.” It seems to be the case for gamblers as well; witness the shifting attachment to *this* slot machine, *this* assemblage of table and crowd and dealer, etc., which carries an Other-relation from table to table, but maintains some level of phantasmatic consistency for the Other manifesting in each slot, table, etc. It seems to me that other addictions–porn, say–may involve less of a sense of personal relationship from moment to moment (i.e., might serve as better supports for your argument), but even that is debatable.
But so why take issue with this? Because I think for a lot of addicts the symptom (incurable consumption) *is* addressed to their addiction-target as a veiled demand (veiled, of course, like many symptomal demands, from the sufferers themselves); addiction is, in short, very much a signifying process. Healing, then, doesn’t entail the (virtually insurmountable!) hurdle of getting addicts to *begin* developing thus-far foreclosed transference relations and to *begin* demanding something of an Other. Rather, it is a matter of persuading addicts to shift from one (structurally psychotic, self-maintained) style of phantasmatically bidirectional relation (which from without we would characterize as subject->object) to another (more clearly recognizable as subject->Other). The good news in this is that recovery from addiction is not such an enormously complex thing: it’s a matter of relocating phantasmatic identification from the addiction-target to the analyst, say, or to a 12-step group or some other viable and suitably analytic respondent to demand.
As regards the larger question–of whether we are in the throes of a historical shift from an era dominated by the discourse of the master to one dominated by the discourse of the capitalist–I, for one, am persuaded. But it’s critical, in that, to keep in mind that (as suggested by the example of the addict) what looks (from the perspective of any of the classical four discourses) like the loss of proper Other-relations, and hence like the loss of any basis for the transference, isn’t quite that. It’s definitely different from the other discourses–this is where I agree with you–but different largely in that the phantasmatic character of relating must find more unaided support in the subject, not in that relation disappears (since relation, after all, is never what one standing outside would want to call “really relation,” but only a phantasm). For me, your treatment raises the question–and it is, after all, the old question–of how to persuade psychotics to become neurotics.
February 18, 2013 at 1:34 pm
Ira,
I think that’s far too broad a construal of the Other. Minimally an Other has to be encountered as a site of enigmatic desire to count as an Other. This is precisely what a substance such as heroin or alcohol does not do. The addict opts for the non-Other as a way of escaping the anxiety produced in an encounter with the Other’s desire. Internet porn is perhaps the best example here.
February 18, 2013 at 5:18 pm
Hi, Levi,
Well, but that’s exactly my point: for a lot of addicts, substances *are* encountered as sites of enigmatic desire. In focusing on what the substances can reasonably be construed as doing, you’re leaving to the side the way they do actually operate in the psychic economy of many addicts. So, for example, AA still encourages its members to remember that they “deal with alcohol, cunning, baffling, powerful.” And the terminology reflects a pre-existing phantasmatic relation, rather than calling one into being. To the extent that this treatment modality works, one reason that it does is because it begins by providing communal, symbolic support for the actuality of an Other-relation with a substance, an actuality whose support the subject previously bore herself. It’s possible that this is undergoing a historical shift, that people addicted today are no longer experiencing their substances as wanting something from them, but that’s a case that would need to be substantiated, since it’s certainly not always been the case.
By contrast, I suspect you are onto something with internet porn addiction, which seems prima facie like a replacement of Others with anothers. There, the target of addiction is representational; it promises to be a window, with no desire of its own. There’s still the fact that, surely, some addictive porn users experience the represented subjects on the other side of the window as proper Others, enigmatic sites of desire, and that these users neurotically and needfully question or modulate their own pleasure on the basis of the uncertain depth of investment of porn actors in their acting; this would probably explain the shift in cultural focus toward amateur and extreme hardcore porn, since both promise, albeit in opposite ways, to secure a depth of investment from the actors (and both hence hold out new promises of uncertainty as to the desire of the actors). But–and here I am agreeing with you, by and large–even if some addictive porn users develop phantasmatic Other-relations with the actors in porn, there’s still the fact that the “substance” itself, the medium, is not (I think) experienced by those people as a locus of enigmatic desire in the way that many drug addicts do experience their substance as such a locus.
I don’t want to lean too hard on this final thought, but I suspect that part of what strikes me as significant in all this is that it holds out more hope still for interpretation. If many people who seem to have abjured the demand, to have immersed themselves in the recursively solitary structure of an object-relation that is not an Other-relation, can be recognized as still engaged in signifying practices because this object is, for their purposes, an Other and their symptom thus still a veiled demand (and, of course, we know there’s plenty of good grounds for this view in the object-relations literature: Winnicott on transitional objects, for example), then while the analytic act may need recalibration, it hardly needs replacement.
This said, I think another way of looking at the issue would be to suggest that two layers of phantasmatic experience are at work: the one, because subjectivation does still occur relative to the four classical discourses, “traditional,” signifying in the usual ways; the other, an overlay, the veiled demand being levied precisely in the lived fantasy of non-Other relations, relations with objects properly so called. This way of looking at things would acknowledge a hard substrate of signification, would retain the four discourses as a structural heuristic for human experience, while admitting the capitalist discourse as itself symptomal within the domain thereby described. I’m not sold on this perspective, but it seems interesting to hop into and take for an explanatory drive.
February 18, 2013 at 6:13 pm
Ira,
Interesting comments. It strikes me as strange to refer to the substance of an alcoholic or a heroin addict as an Other and locus of desire in the Lacanian sense. While I can see where you’re coming from, it strikes me as more appropriate to speak of drive in this connection rather than desire. The key feature of desire, I take it, is that it is unknown. We experience anxiety when we encounter the desire of the Other because we don’t know what we are for them. This doesn’t seem to be the case with substance abuse. We are driven by the substance and feel in the grips of an alien force, but we don’t seem to experience ourselves as not knowing what we are for the substance. A major difference then is that where ordinarily we have to arrive at jouissance through the indirect route of the enigmatic Other, in substance abuse we cut the Other out of the picture altogether and directly become subjects of jouissance. There’s a breakdown of the social relation in substance abuse; and where the social relation does take place for substance abusers its among communities of users such as folks hanging out nightly at the bar.
February 19, 2013 at 11:53 pm
I’d like to comment on the previous discussion of Bryant and Ira.
If I reverse the shallow aftertaste of “drug substances” and go to the substance of power brokers, high potential persons, potent ideas, etc. I seem to get to this “pre-existing” phantasmatic relation. The Other’s eyes are at potential.
Just now there’s this clip “Djesus unchained”, unleashing even the potential of Jesus Christ as avenging angel. It takes the story from Tarantino’s Django Unchained.
I think the truth of Django is the classical drinker. The one who unfortunately never met his personal white teacher who helped him unleash –
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