Herein lies the scandal of psychoanalysis, unbearable for philosophy: what is
at stake in the Lacanian critique of selfconsciousness is not the commonplace
according to which the subject is never fully transparent to itself, or can
never arrive at full awareness of what is going on in its psyche; Lacan's
point is not that full self-consciousness is impossible since something
always eludes the grasp of my conscious ego. Instead, it is the far more
paradoxical thesis that this decentered hard kernel which eludes my grasp is
ultimately self-consciousness itself; as to its status, selfconsciousness is
an external object out of my reach. More precisely, selfconsciousness is the
object qua objet petit a, qua the gaze able to perceive the true meaning of
the stain which gives body to the unbearable truth about myself.
"I Doubt, Therefore I Am"
Lacan's achievement with regard to cogito and doubt could be summed up in the
elementary, but nonetheless far-reaching operation of perceiving (and then
drawing theoretical consequences from) the affinity between the Cartesian
doubt and the doubt that dwells at the very heart of compulsive (obsessive)
neurosis. This step in no way amounts to a "psychiatrization of philosophy"—
the reduction of philosophical attitudes to an expression of pathological
states of mind—but rather to its exact contrary, the "philosophization" of
clinical categories: with Lacan, compulsive neurosis, perversion, hysteria,
etc., cease to function as simple clinical designations and become names for
existential-ontological positions…. In short, Lacan as it were supplements
Descartes' I doubt, therefore I am—the absolute certainty provided by the
fact that my most radical doubt implies my existence qua thinking subject—
with another turn of the screw, reversing its logic: I am only insofar as I
doubt. This way, we obtain the elementary formula of the compulsive
neurotic's attitude: the neurotic clings to his doubt, to his indeterminate
status, as the only firm support of his being, and is extremely apprehensive
of the prospect of being compelled to make a decision which would cut short
his oscillation, his neither-nor status. Far from undermining the subject's
composure or even threatening to disintegrate his self-identity, this
uncertainty provides his minimal ontological consistency…. It is this
inherent dialectical inversion that characterizes the subject of doubt and
suspicion: "officially," he strives desperately for certainty, for an
unambiguous answer that would provide the remedy against the worm of doubt
that is consuming him; actually, the true catastrophe he is trying to evade
at any price is this very solution, the emergence of a final, unambiguous
answer, which is why he endlessly sticks to his uncertain, indeterminate,
oscillating status. There is a kind of reflective reversal at work here: the
subject persists in his indecision and puts off the choice not because he is
afraid that, by choosing one pole of the alternative, he would lose the other
pole…. What he truly fears to lose is doubt as such, the uncertainty, the
open state where everything is still possible, where none of the options are
precluded. It is for that reason that Lacan confers on the act the status of
object: far from designating the very dimension of subjectivity ("subjects
act, objects are acted upon"), the act cuts short the indeterminacy which
provides the distance that separates the subject from the world of objects.
These considerations enable us to approach from a new perspective the motif
of "Kant avec Sade." Today, it is a commonplace to qualify Kant as a
compulsive neurotic: the uncertain status of the subject is inscribed into
the very heart of the Kantian ethics, i.e., the Kantian subject is by
definition never "at the height of his task"; he is forever tortured by the
possibility that his ethical act, although in accordance with duty, was not
accomplished for the sake of duty itself, but was motivated by some hidden
"pathological" considerations (that, by accomplishing my duty, I will arouse
respect and veneration in others, for example). What remains hidden to Kant,
what he renders invisible by way of his logic of the Ought (Sollen), i.e., of
the infinite, asymptotic process of realizing the moral Ideal, is that it is
this very stain of uncertainty which sustains the dimension of ethical
universality: the Kantian subject desperately clings to his doubt, to his
uncertainty, in order to retain his ethical status. What we have in mind here
is not the commonplace according to which, once the Ideal is realized, all
life-tension is lost and there is nothing but lethargic boredom in store for
us. Something far more precise is at stake: once the "pathological" stain is
missing, the universal collapses into the particular. This, precisely, is
what occurs in Sadeian perversion, which, for that very reason, reverses the
Kantian compulsive uncertainty into absolute certainty: a pervert knows
perfectly what he is doing, what the Other wants from him, since he conceives
of himself as an instrument-object of the Other's Will-to-Enjoy. In this
precise sense Sade stages the truth of Kant: you want an ethical act free of
any compulsive doubt? Here you have the Sadeian perversion!
Of what, more exactly, does this ontological uncertainty of the subject
consist? The key to it is provided by the link between anxiety and the desire
of the Other: anxiety is aroused by the desire of the Other in the sense that
"I do not know what object a I am for the desire of the Other." What does the
Other want from me, what is there "in me more than myself" on account of
which I am an object of the Other's desire—or, in philosophical terms, which
is my place in the substance, in the "great chain of being"? The core of
anxiety is this absolute uncertainty as to what I am: "I do not know what I
am (for the Other, since I am what I am only for the Other)." This
uncertainty defines the subject: the subject "is" only as a "crack in the
substance," only insofar as his status in the Other oscillates. And the
position of the masochist pervert is ultimately an attempt to elude this
uncertainty, which is why it involves the loss of the status of the subject,
i.e., a radical self-objectivization: the pervert knows what he is for the
Other, since he posits himself as the object-instrument of the Other's
juissance….
For that reason, it is quite legitimate to associate perversion, in its
fundamental dimension, with the "masochism" of the anal phase. In his Seminar
on transference, Lacan made it clear how the passage from the oral into the
anal phase has nothing whatsoever to do with the process of biological
maturation, but is entirely founded in a certain dialectical shift in the
intersubjective symbolic economy. The anal phase is defined by the adaptation
of the subject's desire to the demand of the Other, i.e., the object-cause of
the subject's desire (a) coincides with the Other's demand, which is why
Lacan's mathem for the "anal" compulsive neurosis is that of drive, S O D.
True, the oral phase does imply an attitude of wanting to "devour it all" and
thereby satisfy all needs; however, due to the child's dependency, caused by
the premature birth of the human animal, satisfying its needs, from the very
beginning, is "mediated" by, hinges upon, the demand addressed to the Other
(primarily mother) to provide the objects which meet the child's needs. What
then occurs in the anal phase is a dialectical reversal in this relationship
between need and demand: the satisfaction of a need is subordinated to the
demand of the Other, i.e., the subject (child) can only satisfy his need on
condition that he thereby complies with the Other's demand. Let us recall the
notorious case of defecation: the child enters the "anal phase" when he
strives to satisfy his need to defecate in a way that complies with the
mother's demand to do it regularly, into the chamber-pot and not into his
pants, etc. The same holds for food: the child eats in order to demonstrate
how well-behaved he is, ready to fulfill his mother's demand to finish the
plate and to do it properly, without dirtying his hands and the table. In
short, we satisfy our needs in order to earn our place in the social order.
Therein lies the fundamental impediment of the anal phase: pleasure is
"barred," prohibited, in its immediacy, i.e., insofar as it involves taking a
direct satisfaction in the object; pleasure is permitted only in the function
of complying with the Other's demand. In this precise sense, the anal phase
provides the basic matrix for the obsessional, compulsive attitude. It would
be easy to quote here further examples from adult life; suffice it to recall
what is perhaps its clearest case in "postmodern" theory, namely the
obsession with Hitchcock, the endless flow of books and conferences which
endeavor to discern theoretical finesses even in his minor films (the
"save-the-failures" movement). Can't we account, at least partially, for this
obsession by way of a compulsive "bad conscience" on the part of
intellectuals who, prevented from simply yielding to the pleasures of
Hitchcock's films, feel obliged to prove that they actually watch Hitchcock
in order to demonstrate some theoretical point (the mechanism of the
spectator's identification, the vicissitudes of male voyeurism, etc.)? I am
allowed to enjoy something only insofar as it serves Theory qua my big Other.
The Hegelian character of this reversal of oral into anal economy cannot but
strike the eye: the satisfaction of our need by means of the Other who
answers our demand "attains its truth" when complying with the Other's demand
is directly posited as the sine qua non, the "transcendental frame," the
condition of possibility, of satisfying our needs. And the function of the
third, "phallic," phase, of course, is precisely to disengage the subject
from this enslavement to the demand of the Other.
The Precipitous Identification
…what is at stake in a symptom is not only the hysteric's attempt to deliver
a message (the meaning of the symptom that waits to be deciphered), but, at a
more fundamental level, his desperate endeavor to affirm himself, to be
accepted as a partner in communication. What he ultimately wants to tell us
is that his symptom is not a meaningless physiological disturbance, i.e.,
that we have to lend him an ear since he has something to tell us. In short,
the ultimate meaning of the symptom is that the Other should take notice of
the fact that it has a meaning.
Perhaps it is with regard to this feature that a computer message differs
from human intersubjectivity: what the computer lacks is precisely this
self-referentiality (in Hegelese: reflectivity) of meaning. And, again, it is
not difficult to discern in this self-referentiality the contours of a
logical temporality: by means of the signifier of this reflective meaning,
i.e., of the signifier which "means" only the presence of meaning, we are
able as it were to "overtake" ourselves and, in an anticipatory move,
establish our identity not in some positive content but in a pure
self-referential signifying form alluding to a meaning-to-come.41 Such is, in
the last resort, the logic of every ideological Master-Signifier in the name
of which we fight our battles: fatherland, America, socialism, etc.—do they
not all designate an identification not with a clearly defined positive
content but with the very gesture of identification? When we say "I believe
in x (America, socialism ...)," the ultimate meaning of it is pure
intersubjectivity: it means that I believe that I am not alone, that I
believe that there are also others who believe in x. The ideological Cause is
stricto sensu an effect of the belief poured into it from the side of its
subjects.
Keynes concedes that the moment of some final "settling of accounts" would be
a catastrophe, that the entire system would collapse. Yet the art of economic
politics is precisely to prolong the virtual game and thus to postpone ad
infinitum the moment of final settlement. In this precise sense capitalism is
a "virtual" system: it is sustained by a purely virtual keeping of accounts.
Realism
Against this background, one is tempted to propose one of the possible
definitions of "realism": a naive belief that, behind the curtain of
representations, some full, substantial reality actually exists (in the case
of Madame Bovary, the reality of sexual superfluity). "Postrealism" begins
with a doubt as to the existence of this reality "behind the curtain," i.e.,
with the foreboding that the very gesture of concealment creates what it
pretends to conceal.
What does it mean, precisely, that Nothing is to be conceived as the "truth"
of Being? Being is first posited as the subject (in the grammatical sense),
and one endeavors to accord it some predicate, to determine it in any way
possible. Yet every attempt fails: one cannot say anything determinate about
Being; one cannot attribute to it any predicate, and thus Nothing qua the
truth of Being functions as a positivization, a "substantialization," of this
impasse. Such a positivization of an impossibility is at work in every
Hegelian passage from one category to another which functions as the first
category's "truth": the Hegelian development is never simply a descent toward
a more profound and concrete essence; the logic of the notional passage is by
definition that of a reflective positivization of a failure, i.e., of the
impossibility of the passage itself. Let us take a moment X: all attempts to
grasp its concealed essence, to determine it more concretely, end in failure,
and the subsequent moment only positivizes this failure; in it, failure as
such assumes positive existence.
As a rule, one overlooks how closely the elementary Lacanian triad
needdemand-desire follows the inner logic of the Hegelian "negation of
negation." First, we have a mythical, quasi-natural starting point of an
immediate need—the point which is always-already presupposed, never given,
"posited," experienced "as such." The subject needs "natural," "real" objects
to satisfy his needs: if we are thirsty, we need water, etc. However, as soon
as the need is articulated in the symbolic medium (and it always already is
articulated in it), it starts to function as a demand: a call to the Other,
originally to the Mother qua primordial figure of the Other. That is to say,
the Other is originally experienced as he or she who can satisfy our need,
who can give us the object of satisfaction, deprive us of it, or hinder our
access to it. This intermediary role of the Other subverts the entire economy
of our relationship toward the object: on the literal level, the demand aims
at the object supposed to satisfy our need; the demand's true aim, however,
is the love of the Other, who has the power to procure the object. If the
Other complies with our demand and provides the object, this object does not
simply satisfy our need, but at the same time testifies to the Other's love
for us. (When, for example, a baby cries for milk, the true aim of his demand
is that his mother should display her love for him by providing milk. If the
mother does comply with the demand, but in a cold, indifferent way, the baby
will remain unsatisfied; if, however, she bypasses the literal level of the
demand and simply hugs the baby, the most likely result is the child's
complacency.) It is in no way accidental that, to denote this inversion,
Lacan resorts to the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung (sublation): "The demand
sublates (aufhebt) the particularity of everything that can be granted by
transmuting it into a proof of love." By means of the transformation of a
need into a demand, i.e., into a signifier addressed to the Other, the
particular, material object of the need is "sublated": it is annulled in its
immediacy and posited as something "mediated," as a medium through which a
dimension transcendent to its immediate reality (that of love) finds its
expression. This reversal is strictly homologous to that described by Marx
apropos of the commodity-form: as soon as a product of human labor assumes
the form of a commodity, its immediate particularity (its "use-value," the
effective, actual properties by means of which it satisfies certain human
needs) starts to function as the form of appearance of its "exchange-value,"
i.e., of a nonmaterial intersubjective relationship—the same as with the
passage from need to demand, whereby the particular object of need starts to
function as the form of appearance of the Other's love.
This reversal is then the first moment, the moment of "negation," which
necessarily culminates in a deadlock, in the unsolvable antagonistic
relationship between need and demand: every time the subject gets the object
he demanded, he undergoes the experience of "This is not that!" Although the
subject "got what he asked for," the demand is not fully satisfied, since its
true aim was the Other's love, not the object as such, in its immediate
particularity. This vicious circle of need and demand finds its ultimate
expression in the nursling's anorexia ("pathological" refusal of food): its
"message" is precisely that the true aim of his demand for food was not food
itself but Mother's love. The only way open to him to point out this
difference is by refusing food, i.e., the object of demand in its particular
materiality. This impasse where a demand for the Other's love can only be
articulated through the demand for an object of need which, however, is never
"that" is resolved by means of the introduction of a third element which adds
itself to need and demand: desire. According to Lacan's precise definition,
"desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love,
but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the
second." Desire is what in demand is irreducible to need: if we subtract need
from demand, we get desire. In a formulation typical of the anti-Hegelian
attitude of his late teaching, Lacan speaks here of "a reversal that is not
simply a negation of the negation"—in other words, one that is still a kind
of "negation of the negation," although not a "simple" one (as if, with Hegel
himself, the "negation of the negation" is ever "simple"!). This "reversal"
is a "negation of the negation" insofar as it entails a return to the object
annulled by the passage from need to demand: it produces a new object which
replaces the lost-sublated object of need—objet petit a, the object-cause of
desire. This paradoxical object "gives body" to the dimension because of
which demand cannot be reduced to need: it is as if the surplus of the demand
over its (literal) object—over what the demand immediately-literally demands
—again embodies itself in an object. Objet a is a kind of "positivization,"
filling out, of the void we encounter every time we are struck by the
experience of "This is not that!" In it, the very inadequacy, deficiency, of
every positive object assumes positive existence, i.e., becomes an object.
This cultural overdetermination of the dividing line between gender and sex
should not however push us into accepting the Foucauldian notion of sex as
the effect of "sexuality" (the heterogeneous texture of discursive
practices); what gets lost thereby is precisely the deadlock of the Real.
Here we see the thin, but crucial, line that separates Lacan from
"deconstruction": simply because the opposition between nature and culture is
always-already culturally overdetermined, i.e., that no particular element
can be isolated as "pure nature," does not mean that "everything is culture."
"Nature" qua Real remains the unfathomable X which resists cultural
"gentrification." Or, to put it another way: the Lacanian Real is the gap
which separates the Particular from the Universal, the gap which prevents us
from completing the gesture of universalization, blocking our jump from the
premise that every particular element is P to the conclusion that all
elements are P.
When a proletarian becomes aware of his "historical role," none of his actual
predicates changes; what changes is just the way he relates to them, and this
change in the relationship to predicates radically affects his existence.
Hegel affirms the basic thesis of speculative idealism: the process of
knowledge, i.e., our comprehending the object, is not something external to
the object but inherently determines its status (as Kant puts it, the
conditions of possibility of our experience are also the conditions of
possibility of the objects of experience). In other words, contingency does
express the incompleteness of our knowledge, but this incompleteness also
ontologically defines the object of knowledge itself— it bears witness to
the fact that the object itself is not yet ontologically "realized," fully
actual. The merely epistemological status of contingency is thus invalidated,
without us falling back into ontological naivete: behind the appearance of
contingency there is no hidden, not-yet-known necessity, but only the
necessity of the very appearance that, behind superficial contingency, there
is an underlying substantial necessity—as in the case of anti-Semitism,
where the ultimate appearance is the very appearance of the underlying
necessity, i.e., the appearance that, behind the series of actual features
(unemployment, moral disintegration ...), there is the hidden necessity of
the "Jewish plot." Therein consists the Hegelian inversion of "external" into
"absolute" reflection: in external reflection, appearance is the elusive
surface concealing its hidden necessity, whereas in absolute reflection,
appearance is the appearance of this very (unknown) Necessity behind
contingency. Or, to make use of an even more "Hegelian" speculative
formulation, if contingency is an appearance concealing some hidden
necessity, then this necessity is stricto sensu an appearance of itself.
The Master's potential threat is far worse than his actual display of power.
This is what Bentham counts on in his fantasy-matrix of Panopticon: the fact
that the Other—the gaze in the central observing tower—can watch me; my
radical uncertainty as to whether I am being observed or not at any precise
moment gives rise to an anxiety far greater than that aroused by the
awareness that I am actually observed. This surplus of what is "in the
possibility more than a mere possibility" and which gets lost in its
actualization is the real qua impossible.
It is precisely on account of this potential character of his power that a
Master is always, by definition, an impostor, i.e., somebody who
illegitimately occupies the place of the lack in the Other (the symbolic
Order). In other words, the emergence of the figure of the Master is of a
strictly metonymical nature: a Master never fully "measures up to its
notion," to Death qua "absolute Master" (Hegel). He remains forever the
"metonymy of Death"; his whole consistency hinges upon the deferral, the
keeping-inreserve, of a force that he falsely claims to possess. It would be
wrong, however, to conclude—from the fact that anyone who occupies the place
of the Master is an impostor and a clown—that the perceived imperfections of
the Master subvert his authority. The whole artifice of "playing a Master"
consists in knowing how to use this very gap (between the "notion" of the
Master and its empirical bearer) to our advantage: the way for a Master to
strengthen his authority is precisely to present himself as "human like the
rest of us," full of little weaknesses, a person with whom it is quite
possible to "talk normally" when he is not compelled to give voice to
Authority.
Orpheus who looked back and thus intentionally sacrificed Euridice in order
to regain her as the sublime object of poetic inspiration. This, then, is the
logic of perversion: it is quite normal to say to the beloved woman, "I would
love you even if you were wrinkled and mutilated!"; a perverse person is the
one who intentionally mutilates the woman, distorts her beautiful face, so
that he can then continue to love her, thereby proving the sublime nature of
his love. An exemplary case of this short-circuit is Patricia Highsmith's
early masterpiece, the short story "Heroine," about a young governess
extremely eager to prove her devotion to the family whose child she is taking
care of; since her everyday acts pass unnoticed, she ends by setting the
house on fire, so that she has the opportunity to save the child from the
flames. This closed loop is what defines perversion. And is not the same
closed loop at work in the Stalinist sacrificial production of enemies: since
the Party fortifies itself by fighting rightist and leftist deviations, one
is forced to produce them in order to fortify Party unity.
Kant himself gets caught in this circle of perversion in his Critique of
Practical Reason: at the end of Part One, he asks himself why God created the
world in such a way that things in themselves are unknowable to man, that the
Supreme Good is unattainable to him because of the propensity to radical Evil
that pertains to human nature. Kant's answer is that this impenetrability is
the positive condition of our moral activity: if man were to know things in
themselves, moral activity would become impossible and superfluous at the
same time, since we would follow moral commands not out of duty but out of
simple insight into the nature of things. So, since the ultimate goal of the
creation of the universe is morality, God had to act precisely like the
heroine from the Highsmith story and create man as a truncated, split being,
deprived of insight into the true nature of things, exposed to the temptation
of Evil. Perversion is simply the fulfillment of this sacrificial act which
establishes the conditions of Goodness.
the "authoritarian personality" ultimately designates that form of
subjectivity which "irrationally" insists on its specific way of life and, in
the name of its self-enjoyment, resists liberal proofs of its supposed "true
interests." The theory of the "authoritarian personality" is nothing but an
expression of the ressentiment of the left-liberal intelligentsia apropos of
the fact that the "non-enlightened" working classes were not prepared to
accept its guidance: an expression of the intelligentsia's inability to offer
a positive theory of this resistance.
the ultimate proof of the constitutive character of the dependence on the
Other is precisely so-called "totalitarianism": in its philosophical
foundation, "totalitarianism" designates an attempt on the part of the
subject to surmount this dependence by taking upon himself the performative
act of grace. Yet the price to be paid for it is the subject's perverse
self-objectivization, i.e., his transmutation into the object-instrument of
the Other's inscrutable Will.