What Do Women Want?

Sexologists attempt to answer Freud’s question.

 

Deleuze and Guattari avec Lacan

In what sense can Guattari’s thought be understood as a radicalization of Lacanian psychoanalysis? And what does it mean to say that Guattari’s thought is a radicalization of Lacanian psychoanalysis? First, to characterize Guattari’s relationship to Lacan as a radicalization of Lacanian thought is not to claim that Guattari was an orthodox Lacanian. Rather, Guattari’s schizoanalysis is a radicalization of psychoanalysis in the sense that Hegel is a radicalization of Kant or Spinoza is a radicalization of Descartes. Just as Hegel and Spinoza deeply transform the thought and projects of their most important predecessors, Guattari significantly transforms Lacanian thought. However, before such a question can even be posed it is first necessary to determine just where Deleuze and Guattari share common ground with Lacan.

While it is certainly true that Guattari transforms Lacan’s thought in radical ways, it is also true that this relationship between the two has been presented as being one that is deeply antagonistic and hostile. Nietzsche pointed out that we arrive at the perspective of substance ontology, that there are substantial things composed of predicates, due to a set of illusions produced through language where words create the belief that there are unchanging things corresponding to these words. In the secondary literature on Deleuze and Guattari, one gets the sense that something similar occurs with reference to psychoanalysis. Often psychoanalysis is treated as if it is a monolithic entity, as the arch-enemy, characterized by homogeneity, despite the fact that psychoanalysis is characterized by a heterogeneous diversity of different schools and orientations often at odds with one another.

This is extremely odd for two reasons: First, it is odd that followers of the champions of difference would require identity in their enemy. It is as if somehow the ontological claim of the ontological primacy of multiplicities gets entirely forgotten and the target gets reduced to a molar and simplified identity without heterogeneous vectors and tendencies of its own. Second, it is especially odd that American Deleuzians seem so intent on toppling psychoanalysis, as if it were the most pressing political struggle within the American situation. Psychoanalysis is hardly anywhere to be found in the United States at the level of practice or predominant theory. Indeed, what we instead get in the States is the complete exorcism of the subject from the clinical setting, treating diagnostic categories as if they were natural kinds and signs, the ignorance of anything like a symptom, and a therapy that tends to be premised on the normalization of its patients so that they might tolerate normal, married, heterosexual conjugal relations, go to work and produce, and be good little consumers. One would think that were Deleuzians looking for a worthy project along the lines of Anti-Oedipus, they would begin not with psychoanalysis– which at least provides the possibility of providing a space where all that resists the “normal” might at least be enunciated, where the treatment isn’t 8 meetings with a cognitive-behavioral psychologist with tried and trusted methods to get rid of the symptom, where the solution isn’t a chemical straight-jacket –but rather with a Foucault and Bourdieu style analysis of the evolution of the DSM-IV, the relationship between therapeutic practice and insurance companies, the relationship between therapeutic practice and the legal system and work, an analysis of the statistical methods through which certain diagnostic categories are produced and generalized, and an analysis of the discourses through which certain attitudes towards life, the body, and mental health are produced. This sort of critique would potentially reveal something about American life in general, something un-thought and at the level of the unconscious in the structural or systematic sense, and would have potential for generating more active struggles, transforming what appear to be individual problems into collective symptoms. But alas, apparently psychoanalysis is the arch-enemy.

Read on

 

How Woman Came to Name Man

I came across the following passage from Mark Twain’s Eve’s Diary: Translated from the Original MS in Roberto Harari’s brilliant How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan.

Twain tells the story in Eve’s words. Having caught sight of the male creature, she thinks “it” must be a reptile, and tries to attract its attention by throwing clods of earth:

One of the clodes took it back of the ear, and it used language. It gave me a thrill, for it was the first time I had ever heard speech, except my own. I did not understand the words, but they seemed expressive. When I found it could talk, I felt a new interest in it, for I love to talk; I talk all day, and in my sleep, too, and I am very interesting, but if I had another to talk to I could be twice as interesting, and would never stop, if desired.

…She goes on: “I think it would be a he. I think so. IN that case, one would parse it thus: nominative he; dative him; possessive, his’n. Well, I will consider it a man and call it he until it turns out to be something else.”

Eve now goes on to the subject of nomination. “I have taken all the work of naming things off his hands, and this has been a great relief to him, for he has no gift in that line, and is evidently very grateful.” (41 – 42)

What a marvelous illustration of Lacan’s mysterious feminine jouissance… An enjoyment in language as such without the need for the phallic dimension of totality. At any rate, Harari’s book is well worth the read. He deftly navigates Lacan’s theory of the borromean knots, the sinthome, the different orders of jouissance, and proposes a new end of analysis beyond traversing the fantasy in identification with the sinthome, where the process of analysis is conceived as an untying and retying of the three orders and the formation of a purified symptom, an inexchangeable singularity, from which the subject draws its jouissance. This is a far more optimistic account of the end of analysis than that of traversing the fantasy where the subject undergoes subjective destitution and lives on in a sort of tragic and masochistic position with respect to the jouissance circumscribed by the fundamental fantasy. Compared to Harari’s book on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis and Seminar 10: Anxiety, both of which presuppose a strong background knowledge in Lacanian theory and which are replete with mathemes (a boon, I think), this text is very accessible… Though all the books of the Argentinian analyst are valuable and illuminating, and well worth the read.

 

Sexuation 3: The Logic of Jouissance (Cont.)

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

 

Sexuation 1– The Logic of the Signifier

The Real, Repetition, Incompleteness, and Inconsistency

As I remarked in a previous post, Lacan’s graphs of sexuation can be understood as two ways in which the totalization of language fails and the jouissance that emerges as a result of this failure of totalization.

According to Lacan, there is a masculine and feminine way in which this failure occurs. The masculine failure of totalization and the jouissance this failure produces can be found on the left side of the graph, while the feminine failure of totalization and the failure it produces can be found on the right side of the graph of sexuation. We can refer to the upper portion of the graph of sexuation where the equations are located as “the logic of the signifier”, while we can refer to the lower portion of the graph with the arrows as “the logic of jouissance. The left or masculine side of the graph of sexuation can be referred to as failure as incompleteness. 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.

It is important to note that biologically gendered subjects can occupy either side of the graph of sexuation or neither side of the graph of sexuation. Thus, for example, you can have a male body that is structured according to the feminine side of the graph of sexuation. Likewise, psychotic subjects occupy neither side of the graph of sexuation. In this respect, it comes as no surprise that postmodernity, where the name-of-the-father is largely foreclosed in the social field (the structural failure in the borromean knot that generates psychosis), is also accompanied by a plurality of sexes and sexual identities. This is exactly what we would expect in the absence of Oedipal structure. In this connection, I believe that the debates between Copjec and Žižek directed at Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, and Butler premised on the real of sexual difference are poorly formed because the two sides of the debate are dealing with very differently structured systems at the level of the logic of the signifier.

Read on

 

Murkey Thoughts– From Name-of-the-Father to Sinthome Part 2

In a previous post I suggested that psychoanalysis became a pre-occupation for Marxist thought due to a certain impasse at the heart of Marxist theory. Here, in response to Nate’s excellent remark, my aim was not to suggest that psychoanalysis became a pre-occupation of a Marxist praxis, but rather to account for a certain strain of French Marxist theory characterized by figures like Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Baudrillard, and Lyotard. What was at issue was a two-fold question: First, why did the Soviet situation lead to such dire results? Indeed, why did the French communist party take on such a repressive structure despite its explicit egalitarian ideals and ideals of liberty? And second, why, despite changing conditions at the level of production did certain social formations remain the same. The conclusion of these thinkers, while varied, was that accounts of political economy were not enough, but that a theory of desire, micro-power, etc., was necessary to account for our attachment to certain forms of power. As Deleuze and Guattari so beautifully put it in providing one possible answer to this question (Foucault gives a very different answer in terms of micropower),

The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows. (Anti-Oedipus, pg. 293)

In other words, revolution at the level of production is not enough, there must also be a revolutionary desire as well, an analysis of desire, and all of these micro-attachments that bind us to a particular world. In a lovely aside about love, Deleuze and Guattari will say that we do not fall in love with persons, but with the worlds another person envelops. And likewise in our attachment to certain institutions, forms of social organizations, and all the rest. If Deleuze and Guattari treat Kafka as a privileged political theorist in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, then this is because Kafka was the cartographer of this universe of desiring-machines or the eroticism that lies beneath our attachment to certain social formations. Indeed, in one incarnation Joseph K even is a cartographer… And, of course, the books of law contain pornographic pictures in The Trial. However, my aim here is not to discuss how Deleuze and Guattari solve this problem– in the first part of this essay I begin with the remark “Take the example of Deleuze and Guattari” –but to show how Deleuze and Guattari’s solution to this problem leads to a certain impasse at the level of political theory. What I ultimately hope to argue is that Lacan’s account of the sinthome provides the means for responding to these difficulties without falling back into models of Oedipally structured social formations or sovereignity as the only possible way in which the social can be organized. In other words, the sinthome provides the means of knotting the three orders of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic in a way that 1) is cognizant that the big Other does not exist (in contrast to Oedipal totalization and obfuscation of the lack in the Other), and 2) that need not resort to the structuring function of the name-of-the-father as the only way of avoiding a fall into paralyzing psychosis that negates the social relation. In short, the work of the late Lacan with the borromean knots leads to a “psychotic solution”, where psychosis is no longer the absence of the social relation (psychoanalysts refer to this form of psychosis as “Ordinary Psychosis”), and where psychosis now becomes a generalized state (universal psychosis common to all subjects), such that neurosis and perversion are not other than psychosis but rather specific ways in which the knot of the three orders are tied together. I set this issue aside for the moment.

Read on

 

Perverse Egalitarianism

In response to my recent diary on the public, Shahar of Perverse Egalitarianism writes:

the “pedagogic” comments are all too irritating, but then again, the hazard of the public is of course, nothing less than the perverse egalitarianism of the internet.

Recently, in an argument or line of reasoning that makes me suspicious or somewhat uncomfortable, I’ve been thinking that democracy is the one “true” form of the political. This line of reasoning arises in response to Socrates’ question in the Euthyphro where it is asked “is piety pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious?” Under the first option, we get the logic of sovereignity, where the sovereign is the first term (whether that sovereign be the gods, God, the emperor, the priest, or the leader) such that the sovereign makes the good what it is. That is, under this first option there is nothing intrinsic to the nature of the good, but rather it is the will of the sovereign that makes the good what it is. Thus, for example, it is impossible to claim that the actions of Caligula or Nero are wrong in themselves, for Caligula and Nero, as sovereigns, are those who decree and create the law. By contrast, under the second option– moral realism –there are transcendent standards by which sovereignity itself can be evaluated. If the actions of the Greek gods or the Christian God can be said to be wrong, if it is possible to claim that the caesar is a bad emperor, then this is because there is some standard that transcends the gods, God, and the caesar. All of this is bound up intimately with previous diaries I have written on Lacan’s graphs of sexuation and, in particular, the masculine side of the graph of sexuation.

 

God and the big Other

Adam Kotsko has written an interesting post over at An und fur sich on God, the big Other, and Calvinism. There is much that is commendable and of value in this post, however I disagree with Adam’s claim that the big Other cannot be treated as God. God is one way in which the symbolic manifests itself in the thought of human subjects. Yet, since he has banned me from the site I will instead outline my reasons here as this point is important from the standpoint of how psychoanalysis conceives structuration of the subject. Adam writes:

A common misconception in the early stages of learning Lacanian theory is to assume that “the big Other” is God. In point of fact, this is not the case. The big Other refers to the realm of officiality and quasi-officiality, and the use of the word “big” rather than, say, “grand” in translating this concept testifies to a fundamental silliness. We all know objectively that the social order is impersonal, but we act like there’s a person out there — not like all the other others, but a really big Other — whose recognition we need and who, in some cases, must be kept in the dark.

This is not quite accurate. Adam is right to argue that the symbolic refers to the realm of officiality and the impersonal world of the social. However, there are social and individual instances where God is experienced as serving this function as an element in a structure. God can be one instance of the big Other. The most compelling proof of this comes from the masculine side of the graphs of sexuation. This side of the graphs of sexuation represent symbolic castration or the manner in which subjects are subordinated to the symbolic. You’ll note that the lower portion of the graph reads “all subjects are subject to symbolic castration” whereas the upper portion reads “there is at least one subject that is not subject to the law of symbolic castration”.

It is this upper portion of the graph of sexuation that is here of interest. Lacan’s analysis of masculine sexuation closely follows the logic of Freud’s Totem and Taboo. Many of you will recall that there myth tells the story of the primal father who had exclusive rights to the enjoyment of all women (i.e., he’s bound by no symbolic law and therefore there’s no limit to his enjoyment). Frustrated, the brothers band together and kill the primal father so that they might regain their enjoyment. However, out of a combination of guilt towards what they have done (they also admired the primal father) and practical necessity (they don’t want a repeat of this situation), they agree to institute a limitation to their jouissance, such that it is forbidden for each of the members to enjoy his own mother or sister.

Here then we have a myth of how the symbolic is born or how these prohibitions come to emerge. Lacan’s point is that the symbolic always has a supplement or a fantasmatic shadow that grounds the symbolic and prevents it from sliding all over the place. This limit point is the idea of a being– a fantasmatic idea –that is not castrated or limited or bound by the symbolic. The point, then, is that we have a structure here that can be filled out in many different ways. To understand the concept of structure, we have to think in terms of functionalist mathematics. In a mathematical function you have something of the form F(x), such that for any value of the variable x you get an output. The point is that the function remains the same regardless of whatever is put in the place of the variable. Identity is thus not detemined by the variable or entity in the x position, but rather by the function. The function remains the same across variations.

The Lacanian thesis is thus that any symbolic structure necessarily has an element that fills the place of the upper portion of the graph of sexuation. One example of this is the primal father. Another example of this– from Hegel –is the sovereign king that occupies by his position by nature, thereby functioning as an exception to all other law that is determined by convention. Yet another example of this is how students think of definitions. Some students, when writing papers, begin with something like “According to Webster’s” and then cite a definition. The underlying, unconscious thought process is that language is based on the authority of a grand dictionaire that knows the true meaning of all terms. The point here is that at the level of the lived experience of language we’re all a bit confused about meaning and uncertain of what words mean, and meaning is a product of our collective activities that is always in flux. Nonetheless, we project a figure that does know, a figure that is not “castrated” by this uncertainty, as a fiction of someone that knows the true meaning. This, for instance, is the underlying fantasy of the anti-gay marriage movement that perpetually brays “marriage, by definition is between a man and a woman”. When they claim this they are implicitly claiming that there is an eternal dictionary floating about in Platonic heaven somewhere that isn’t the product of how collectivities or assemblages define terms. Another example would be those social formations that make reference to God as what founds or establishes the law. Thus, for instance, you have Mosaic law as articulated in Leviticus and Deuteronomy on the one hand, and then the supplement that grounds this senseless set of stipulations. Descartes’ third meditation also follows this logic, where God serves the function of grounding the realm of natural law, thereby allowing us to posit an order behind the apparent chaos of our experience. In short, a masculine subject is a subject that believes in God, transcendence, or some functional equivalent.

Yet another example of this structure would be Freud’s analysis of church and military in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. There Freud examines group formations where the leader functions as a necessary principle. It is interesting that for Freud an ideal can serve a similar role, thereby underlining that what is being talked about is a structural function, not a concrete thing (Lacan will make much of this in his account of the unary trait and master-signifier, starting with Seminar 9: L’identification. It could be said that a good deal of psychoanalysis has consisted in the exploration of how alternative social formations without this structure might be possible. Thus, when Lacan denounces the Oedipus in Seminar 17, he is denouncing this structure. Similarly, Lacan’s various attempts to form a psychoanalytic school revolved around the question of how it’s possible to form a social organization that isn’t organized around a master or belief in the big Other, but which squarely recognizes the “hole” in the Other, it’s non-existence.

Finally, it’s important to note the close tie that both Lacan and Freud observe between obsessional neurosis and religious belief. For Lacan, obsessional neurosis is closely connectioned to masculine sexuation (subjects that are biologically male or biologically female can nonetheless be sexuated in a masculine way). This close tie has to do with how obsessionals relate to the symbolic and the fantasmatic supplement they project into the symbolic in the form of a “god-function”.

All of this casts light on Lacan’s claim that psychoanalysis is the only true atheistic discourse (I’m not sure I agree) and what he means when he claims that psychoanalysis is an “atheology”. Lacan defines the end of analysis as traversing the fantasy and overcoming belief in the big Other. No longer believing in the big Other does not mean giving up the symbolic, but relating to the symbolic in a new way. Lacan develops this theme beginning with Seminar 22: RSI, where he distinguishes between believing in the symptom and identifying with the symptom. A subject that believes in the symptom is one that believes there’s a final interpretant out there that would finally unlock the secret of the unconscious process. That is, it presupposes a God function or that the Other is complete. In this regard, many theologies are symptomatic. A subject that identifies with the symptom is a subject that identifies with the unconscious process– not unlike Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic as a process –and draws jouissance from the endless play of the symptom. More needs to be said about this, but I am here merely pointing to it. Rather than supplementing the big Other with the fiction of an uncastrated figure that floats behind it and guarantees order behind the apparent chaos of our social interactions, one no longer believes that there is a true order behind this chaos. In short, one moves to the feminine side of the graphs where encounters with others are evaluated on a subject by subject basis. Joyce, for Lacan, is an instance of a relation to the symbolic that is no longer premised on the belief in the big Other. This is why psychoanalysis is, for both Freud and Lacan, contrary to most monotheistic forms of religiosity… At least as commonly understood. In a nutshell, these formations are, for Lacan, fetishes (recall that a fetish is designed to hide or disavow castration). For Lacan fantasy is designed to cover over castration, and the first of these fantasies is the belief that the big Other exists… That somewhere, somehow, there is an Other that both enjoys and that knows its own desire. God can be one example of this fantasy (I allow that there might be sophisticated theologies that avoid this criticism). I suspect that this is the reason that Adam was compelled to argue that God is not an instance of the symbolic, as Adam’s religious commitments certainly disallow the claim that God is a fetish. Moreover, I find Adam’s rhetoric in the paragraph cited below very interesting. He refers to the “beginning student of Lacan” which has perjorative connotations and functions as an unsupported enthymeme, correcting the wayward and unexperienced student. The problem is that there are numerous places in the seminar where Lacan actually treats God in this way. It is fine that Adam rejects the thesis that God is a fetish or a symptom. There are arguments to be made. But one cannot simultaneously be a Lacanian and advocate a position where God is conceived as transcendent, unlimited, all knowing, outside the flux and bustle of the world, etc. Zizek goes some of the way towards developing a theology that wouldn’t be subject to these criticisms by staunchly treating Jesus as a man and by arguing that Christianity is premised on the impotence of God the father. I suspect that this understanding of Christianity where Christianity becomes a materialism and God is understood as impotent wouldn’t be endorsed by many Christians but would in fact be a heresy. I cannot, however, say this with certainty.

Adam might respond by pointing out that Lacan also says God(s) is the real. Yes he does, but the “also” is important here. On the one hand, Lacan formulates claims in a variety of ways throughout the seminar, so we can’t reduce his claims to just one. On the other hand, this statement entails that God(s) are the impossible or the constitutive deadlock and antagonism that inhabits the heart of any symbolic system. The point is that we place the Gods in the place of these antagonisms as a way of covering them over or hiding them, thereby giving the symbolic some minimal consistency. This aphorism thus returns us to the symbolic function of the God-fetish.

 

Zizek’s Hegel

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

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

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

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

 

Me and My Semblable

On occasion I’ve been known to resemble myself, though instances of this are few and far between. This lack of resemblance started quite early in my life, as I did not know my true name until I was about nine years of age. Prior to nine I had always answered to the name of “Levi”, yet around the age of nine a teacher brutally informed me that my true name is “Paul”. As it turns out, I had been named after my father, “Paul Reginald Bryant”. Before I was born, my uncle had visited the family graveyard with my grandfather– this is not as pretentious as it sounds, as the family graveyard was a small plot of land in the woods on a small old farm in Virginia that they didn’t even own anymore –and had seen the name of my great uncle who had died of some nasty fever very early in his childhood.

Apparently he liked the name “Levi”, so before I was even born he began referring to me as such, and apparently it caught on with the entire family. There’s even a black and white photograph of my mother, while pregnant, standing in the front yard with my father’s ear pressed to her stomach. Both of them have enormous and silly smiles on their faces, and the caption that reads “Listening to Levi”. I grew up with this picture gazing at me in the house and these days I often wonder what impact it might have had on the structuration of my unconscious. Listening to Levi… Is it a mistake that I chose a career as an educator? Is it an accident that I detest loud places such as dance bars or concerts as I am unable to hear; or, better yet, be heard? Is it a mistake that my primary jouissance consists of talking and that I often find myself bored and discontent when attending outings where there is little talk or opportunity for me to talk? Does it come as a surprise that I would later choose “talk therapy” and become captivated by Lacanian psychoanalysis, where the analyst occupies such a passive role? Might this be why I find myself most infuriated when I experience myself as not being heard– I recall the rage I felt many months ago when Jodi Dean had not responded to a couple of my posts on her blog and the rage and dark fantasies that swirled about this silence –and that when I am heard I suddenly feel as if I lose my voice, unable to continue speaking, as if I must walk a fine line between being heard and not being heard so as to sustain my desire. There is also, of course, my obsessive participation on blogs and email lists, my inability to resist responding. On those occasions when I’ve contemplated having a child I’ve often said to myself that I would like him or her to have a name that “they could make for themselves”, like Elizabeth that could be “Beth”, “Liz”, “Lizzie”, “Ela”, etc, or “Finnegan” that could be “Fin”. It wasn’t until recently that I recognize that “making a name for oneself” also signifies something quite different, as if I willfully did not wish to hear what I was saying or recognize my own desire.

And what of the picture itself? My father’s ear is pressed against my mother’s stomach. In a way this is a sort of “primal scene”, a vision of myself being born through the ear of my father or of surmounting the impossibility of witnessing one’s emergence into the world, thoroughly demolishing Kant’s first antinomy which argues that both the claim that the world has a beginning in time and space and does not have a beginning in time and space are false. To be born of an ear and to see oneself born of an ear. And yet the fact that my name issued not from my father, but from my uncle perhaps allows me to sustain the unconscious fantasy that my father is not my father.

I am not sure whether the discovery that my name was not my name, that “Levi =/= Levi”, was traumatic or not. I argued with the teacher, yet she insisted. Later, on the way home, I told my younger sister on the bus, and she was furious, convinced that I was lying. She even declared that she would “tell on me”, ran into the house, and was shocked when my mother said that indeed it was true. I felt betrayed and immediately set about insisting that everyone call me “Paul”. Yet in making this decision, I effaced my own name– what’s in a legal name? –and underwent an aphanisis, a fading, behind the name of my father. Where the extension of a name is = to 1 in most cases, the extension of my legal name was = to 2. Yet since 1 = 1, perhaps I confused myself with the one who had bequeathed me my name, preventing me from discerning any of my own accomplishments as my own. For instance, prior to analysis, my completed dissertation sat on a shelf for many months gathering dust, despite the fact that after I’d written it by mistake– I originally intended it as my master’s thesis, but five hundred pages popped out and my director insisted that I use it as my dissertation and write another master’s thesis –and I was unable to complete the editing until I re-took my name “Levi”. In retrospect I must have looked quite mad to those around me, as once again I went about insisting that I be referred to as “Levi”, that I was no longer “Paul”. From that point on, my intellectual production increased massively, and I no longer felt the crushing anxiety that had before accompanied my engagement on discussion lists or the writing of articles and conference papers. In short, it seems that my psychic structuration precisely mirrored that of masculine sexuation. Even today I still feel the need to crush my name– my original name –and do things such as writing this post that humiliate that name; as if I must cede to my father that which is rightfully his and am committing an act of transgression by embracing my name.

In this regard, I wonder when work is. I phrase this question in this way purposefully. When is work? Last week I posted a diary entitled The Diacritical Production of Identity, that received a good deal of praise and interest both on this blog and in email. Rather than experiencing delight from this recognition, I instead felt rage, anger, and depression, for I had written this article for the Yahoo Lacan list in 2003, and was simply posting it here so as to get my work on Lacan in one easily locatable place. This is a rare thing for me to do. Only a handful of articles on this blog were written previously and many of my other posts receive similar recognition– such as a post a few months ago about Deleuze and individuation or another on Lacan and sexuation –yet strangely I fixate on this post. If I experienced melancholia at the reception of this article, then this was because this reception made me feel fallen, as if I was doing genuine work in the past and was no longer capable of this sort of work. Will I ever do work again that matches the sort of work I was doing in 2003 at the height of my engagement with Lacan or when further back yet when I was writing my book? Has my mind grown thick and slow from age or my nightly glass or two of wine? Are the exingencies of life too pressing, leaving me with no leisure to think? Am I finished?

For me, it seems that work is always something I once did or always something yet to come in the future after I have finally gained intellectual mastery of theory and philosophy. It is never what I am doing now. Peas porridge hot. Peas porridge cold. Peas porridge in my bowl, five days old. I have either already done work or am yet to do work. So in this experience of work that I have done, I experience a hatred of my semblable, of that person that I once was and would like to crush and best that person, exceeding their work… I would like to resemble myself, as perhaps I have done on occasion.

Yet in experiencing my work in this way, it seems that I sustain my desire. Lacan argues that we have a desire to desire, that the aim of desire is not to satisfy desire, but to continue desiring. In obsession, the obsessional has a desire for an impossible desire… A desire that is impossible to fulfill such as seeing oneself born or being alive while being dead. In hysteria the neurotic has the desire for an unsatisfied desire so that he might continue to desire. Occasionally I overcome the idea that work will finally commence at some point in the future, only to find myself in the opposite situation of feeling that work is past. When describing the difference between desire and drive, Zizek tells the joke of a man having sex for the first time. The woman instructing him first tells him to push it in, which he eagerly obeys. She then tells him to pull it out. Again he obeys. Then in again, and so on. Finally, in a moment of exasperation, he exclaims “Make up your mind, woman! Is it to be in or out?” This subject is a subject of desire insofar as he believes that there is a final state, one action he is supposed to engage in. By contrast, the subject of drive is that subject that finds his jouissance not in one or the other state, but rather in the repetition of the idiotic action itself. Why did I use the signifier “fallen” to describe my relation to my previous work. Bruce Fink pointed out that this term has connotations of sin.