Jacques Lacan and the Logic of Structure: Topology and language in psychoanalysis
 9781315774329, 1315774321

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
Note on references
Introduction
1 The logic of structure in Lacan: the structure of the subject
2 Some reflections on Lacan's theory of discourse structures as set out in "To Jakobson"
3 The structure of Lacan's object a
4 The structure of the drives: where body and mind join
5 The topological dimension of Lacanian optics
6 The practice of the letter and topological structure
7 Kant's Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, read in relation to Lacan's Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Conclusion
Index.

Citation preview

JACQUES LACAN AND THE LOGIC OF STRUCTURE

Lacan

postulated that the psyche

which control

logical

our

be understood

by

means

ofcertain structures,

desires, and which operate differently at different stages of formation. jacques Lacan and the Logic of Structure

lives and

moments or

can

our

reading of the major concepts of Lacan in terms of his later topological theory and aims to show how this was always a concern for Lacan and not only offers

an

us a

issue in the last seminars.

Ragland discusses how various stages of formation can be uncovered topologically within language itself, and operate to place certain properties— fantasy, the drive, jouissance, discourse and ethics in language itself. In this way she explores not only how language actually works in tandem with the properties, but also gives a different idea of what knowledge actually is and what implications that may have for reimagining and reworking differential/diagnostic Ellie

structures.

jacques Lacan and the Logic of Structure is a compelling exponent of the innovative approaches Lacan takes to rethinking what psychoanalysis is and what it can do to enlighten psychoanalysts and treat patients. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and training graduate students in the ?elds Ellie as

of ?lm, literary, gender and cultural studies.

Ragland

is Professor of

English

Frederick A. Middlebush Chair

teaches

psychoanalytic theory

authored and edited books

Honorary French Professor as well the University of Missouri where she

and world literature. She is author of Lacanian

psychoanalysis.

She is



seven

practicing

member of the New Lacanian School and the World

psychoanalyst

and is

Association of

Psychoanalysis.



on

at

and

JACQUES

LACAN

AND THE LOGIC OF STRUCTURE Topology and language in psychoanalysis

Ellie

Ragland

Rou?edge

Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK

First

2015

published by Routledge 27 Church

East Sussex, BN3 2FA

by Routledge

and

Avenue, New York, NY 10017

711 Third

Routledge ?

Road, Hove,

is

an

2015 Ellie

imprint qf the Taylor 8 Francis Group,

business

Ragland

The

right of Ellie Ragland to be identi?ed asserted by her in accordance with sections Designs and Patents Act 1988. All

informa

an

as

author of this work has been

77 and 78 of the

Copyright,

reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now

rights

known

hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the or

publishers. Trademark notice: Product

trademarks, to infringe.

and

are

corporate names may be trademarks or registered used only for identi?cation and explanation without intent or

British A

Library Cataloguing in Publication Data catalogue record for this book is available

from the British

Library qf Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ragland—Sullivan, Ellie, 1941— ]acques Lacan and the logic of structure: Lacanian in psychoanalysis / Ellie Ragland.—First Edition. pages 1.

Library

structures

and

language

cm

Lacan,]acques,

4.Topology.

1901—1981.

2.

Psycholinguistics.

3.

Psychoanalysis.

I.Title.

BF455.R263 2015 150.19'5092—dc23 ISBN: 978-0—415—72131—8 ISBN: 978—0-415-72132—5 ISBN: 978—1—315—77432—9

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CONTENTS

Note

vii

references

on

Introduction

logic of structure subject

The

the 2

Some re?ections

on

structures as set out

in Lacan: the

structure

19

theory of discourse “To jakobson”

Lacan’s in



The

structure

of Lacan’s



The

structure

of the drives: where



The

topological



The

practice of the letter and topological



Kant’s

Religion

relation

to

of

object

78



body

dimension of Lacanian

Within the Limits

Lacan’s Seminar VII:

45

and mind

join

optics structure

of Reason Alone, read in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

104 118 130

144

Conclusion

163

Index

171

NOTE ON REFERENCES

The S.

following

[x]

abbreviations

The Seminar, Boole in New York

BPP

SE

by

[x],

are

used when

referring

to

other works:

the standard edition of Lacan’s works,

the Pleasure

Principle,

Press

of the

published

Norton

Freud’s 1920 essay The standard edition of Freud’s work, published in London

Beyond

as

Freudian Field

NFF

Newsletter

PFC

Four Fundamental

(a journal) Concepts (Lacan’s Seminar XI)

by Hogarth

INTRODUCTION

reply to Daniel Lagache on “Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: ‘Psychoanalysis and the Structure of the Personality’,’1 Lacan maintains that structure in his teaching is always topological. And Miller stresses that it is of the real. The principal topological unit is what the late Lacan calls the Borromean knot or chain. It includes the imaginary, the symbolic, the real, and the symptom. The dimension of the real in Lacan—the impossible to say, to know, to bear— organizes symbolic (language) or imaginary (the ego) dimensions by its a?inity with jouissance which might be described as the accumulation of pain and pleasure we each feel. All these dimensions are marked for jouissance or libido by the real. The addition of the real as a plane of being which marks out our traumata and discontent in a logical way is new to epistemology and enters awkwardly into the scholarship trying to assess what this realm is. Moreover, Lacan teaches that what appears in each dimension—imaginary, symbolic, and real—was always already there, was put there from the outside world. That is, conscious being always comes after what has been imposed on the unconscious to create consciousness as language, the Other’s desire, trauma. Miller stresses that it is the creation of these realms—not the learning of them—that counts. What language ?nally creates is the sinthome (the symptom), a fourth dimension which knots—or not in the case of psychosis—the three dimensions together in reference to some Father’s Name signi?er or supplement.That is, something from the order outside the mother/child symbiosis intervenes in this relation to introduce the social.The speaking being—the parle‘trehbecomes the body plus contingency (what ceases to write itself in the unconscious). Thus, to think of structure as “thing like” is inadequate to the real which bears on language. Rather than “have” thoughts, we are “enjoyed” by them. The early Lacan stressed the installation oflanguage structured by the signi?er, both in linguistic and logical dimensions. He talked of drive as being the echo In his





Introduction

of the a

q?ects

of

sayings (dires)

on

the

body

and he

differential variable of the function of the

the barred

wrote

signi?er.

This

subject as signi?er not only

signi?es a subject for another signi?er, but also works as an elucabration of knowledge on lalangue or the primordial language Lacan sometimes calls maternal murmurings.What speaks, then, is not just language, but also jouissance, another word for affect or passion.Thus,jouissance is split between the real and meaning and is, ?nally, taken as sense or meaning felt by the body. As we know, the unconscious is not only structured like a language, it is also made up of words and is the discourse of the

Other.Yet,

we

are

less familiar with the idea that

language promotes jouissance, not just communication, or information. The “body” of the structure is put forth, not its meaning per se. In this sense, the structure of individuals is, topologically speaking, toric—shaped like a doughnut where the inside and outside coalesce. Such meaning is created by the drives— the oral, anal, invocatory, and scopic—which dynamically join signi?ers to the body via the “letter” which is sublirnated jouissance. In Chapter 1, “The logic of structure in Lacan: the structure of the subject,” I take up the matheme, S barred (S), which represents a subject for another signi?er. The barred subject is, strange to realize, a response of the real, a join between one signi?er and another which produces a uniqueness for each person listening to language and, ultimately, to the jouissance which holds a place in it. In this sense, structure is topological and equivalent to an energetics of the partial drives. Topological structure means, then, that there are sets of functions in play. The surface of the body itself is the site of the structure of the drives which function by a topology of the rim of the eyes, ears, mouth, and so on. The drives connect desire to some desired object’s return to respond to the bodily experience of loss.This could be a breast, the image of a face, a favorite toy, a beloved partner, and so on. Nonetheless, the organs at the surface of the body are separable from the body as an imaginary whole and are marked by the drives as they emanate from the real.The mirror—stage is a topology of functions where two people are taken as one.The ego created in that logical moment marks a certain ab-sens from the ideal egos (others) that gradually create the ego ideal, an unconscious formation.Thus, one sees already that Lacan’s critique of Daniel Lagache’s essay on structure changes Lagache’s idea of sets which supposedly have a natural hierarchy. For Lacan, structure is not form. Lagache, a structuralist, critiques natural aspects of a supposedly descriptive character and explains structural distance as experience that comes from being based on an a priori model. For Lacan, structure is purely and simply a combinatory of the signi?er which itself is Borromean, as Lacan makes clear in Seminar XX, Encore. That is, signi?ers construct the three different dimensions of knowledge—the real, the symbolic, the

imaginary—mentioned above,

all of which could be

seen

as

versions of

according to Miller. This triadic structure—knotted by the symptom—directs the subject in a certain way, totally unlike Lagache’s idea of structure as an economic—dynamics. Lagache’s genetics and adaptation fail, as well. the Father’s Name

Lagache separates

structure

and function and Lacan

explains

that

one cannot

do

Introduction

that. For

Lacan,

enlightenment

structure

functions. Lagache’s

view of consciousness.

view of the

pleasure principle

Indeed, Freud himself did

not

is



an

differentiate

various apparatuses. By separating systems as Lagache does one can end up with the fantasy of a total organism, not one that exists by the partial objects that cause

desire, the myriad objects that ful?ll desire, and the partial drives which animate these functions, leaving behind a body that is made of parts and pieces.

being, which marks the idea of a cut of the real into the subject. While Lagache thinks one can differentiate Freud’s systems by their physiological ?inctions, Lacan shows that even before birth a child is already a part of the Other’s discourse. One is talked about, desired (or not), constructed. The truth, then, lies in the alienated identi?cations into which one is born, while the early subject merges subject and object. That is, a baby depends upon an “object relation” in the real. Language itself merely represents desire at one remove. Thus, there is no intersubjective subject arising out of signi?ers of the Other. Rather, fading occurs when desire is suspended.The subject becomes the cut, the edge of anxt.There is no synthesis of id—ego—superego. Rather the id, the place of the death drive which aims for entropy, knows no negativity, nor does the unconscious. For Lacan the death drive functions by repetition.The real disorganizer of the drives occurs at random, but, nonetheless, leaves an order of the good (Bejahung); and the bad (Ausstossung). Lacan retains Freud’s idea of source, direction, aim, and object of the drives which function as ?xed signi?ers whose dwelling place comes from the Other which Lacan called the treasury of the signi?ers. He describes these early signifying chains as rigid, as ?xions, both ?ctive and ?xated. At this early period the breast is good (Bejahung) not because of some intrinsic trait of mothering, but insofar as it has been lost and, then, refound as something which gives comfort.While Lagache says the drive disturbs the ego, Lacan points out that Freud privileged the id, not the ego. Drives, then, become a living language.What is incorporated by Bejahung (affirmation) comes second.You lose it and want it back because loss lets you know you had something of value. Lagache thinks there is no distinction of the subject from the drives, aim, and object, but that the barred subject is dispersed among these relations, the subject itself being absent. Lagache confuses the functions of denying, fading, and signifying representa— tions with the subject as a holding place, a want—to-be. One sees that, for Lagache, the ego is intersubjective, one ego being equivalent to another ego. Lacan teaches, rather, that the ego is a vacuous shell.While Freud made of repression a place of i(a’) which he calls the Ego-IdeaJ-Ego, judgment, Lacan reverses this to i(a) a merging which is demonstrated in the vase schema put forth in Seminar 11. While the subject is equivalent to the void or hole at the level of a ?indamenta] inconsistency in being, unary traits made by strokes of the signi?er are originary marks that structure the ego idea]. So, the upside down vase gives real images which are dream—like. The barred subject functions in relation to the object a, a being a kind of speaking id. One desires—what one lacks—what one has been taught to desire. The “nor-m?le” functions as a capital phi ((1)) which represents Seminar XX puts forth the

S(Q),

or



the void

at

the

center

of



Introduction

socially acceptable language and law—distance away from desired objects and the void produced by there being no set of all sets, no meta-language, no Other of the Other. Moreover, Lagache leaves out the end of analysis, its personal terms where spoken language came ?rst and continues to play its role as it is rewritten in analysis. In Chapter 2 on discourse theory as presented by Lacan to Roman Jakobson, Lacan adds a new matheme to his already existing ones.There is an excess in jouissance which gives a surplus jouissance: ]——+a. Jouissance as an excess is carried by signi?ers, by the pleasures and displeasures of the body and by the shocks of the sinthome. One adjusts to one’s symptoms, but their presence never ceases to perturb one.]ouissance qua a?ect prioritizes the body as agent of its own causes.Topology draws pictures (i.e. the Borromean chain) of body plus language plus world which equal a surplus jouissance that appears as e?ects on the body. The Borromean chain is knotted or not by the X, the matheme that represents the sinthome as supplied by the Father’s Name signi?er. In other words, language and identi?cation form the objects desired that satisfy the subject divided by desire and jouissance. Furthermore, there is a real of excess in jouissance which is represented by the sinthome of discontinuity.Thus, Lacan offers no coherence theory or correspondence theory of drive or jouissance. There is always discontinuity and residue—One minus—in Lacan’s teaching. At the foundation of the ego, one ?nds its ordinary paranoia, a you versus me dialectic. In a larger picture of ego jouissance, one ?nds the unconscious knowledge in the Other aiming toward the speaking being and this is, then, directed towards the others that validate

(or invalidate)

words, Lacan is saying that discourse evolves

it. In

more

understandable

topological structure of the unconscious. The mirror stage is topological. The jouissance effects in play emanate from the void (0) at the center of all being and knowing. The object a, insofar as it ?lls the void or marks it by its dialectical moment of emptiness/ ful?llment points out that something can always be lost, something which produces the jouissance effects of consistency, pleasure (or displeasure), of being, nothingness, of the sublime or the vulgar.All these effects give a kind of substantive value to things and events. Moreover, language plus the real plus loss create trauma. Discourse places topological structure in different modes of response to speaking, to another person in a relationship, to truth, to the meaning produced by a given interplay of signi?ers. So, topological structure is a knowledge of being, not an academic knowledge. While academic dis— course wants to master, the analyst’s discourse does not want to master at all. Interpretation lies on the side of the patient’s unconscious, not in the analyst’s knowledge. But seeking jouissance in conscious thought alone is a false route for it always misses ?nal appeasement or satisfaction.There is no subject to be ?lled, only signi?ers that re—present a subject for another signi?er. And, primordially, these emanate from the ?rst language, lalangue. The alterity of signi?ers and images are, indeed, equivalent to the unconscious Other which does not really exist. as



Introduction

In



discourse

structure

there

are



four

places—topologically speaking—that are of space. These signi?ers and mathemes

equivalent to the quaternary structure are ?xed functions that produce structure. Lacan’s discourse conventions pre— condition meaning in reference to the master signi?er (SI), knowledge (32), the subject (3), and the surplus value that produces desire and jouissance (a). The four stances that Lacan lays out in discourse—agent, other, product of meaning, truth—are all stances taken towards the sinthome of the Father’s Name or towards the R.S.I. which interprets the sexual difference as the NF/

MD'90ther/phallus—)Other/Jouissance.

While the real of the drives hides

meaning of a Father’s Name signi?er, the master signi?er lacks the evanescent qualities of the object a. Knowledge has the authority of author, as well as knowledge about jouissance. Meanwhile the hysteric knows that there is always something that is lacking in knowledge. As the a ?lls the lack-in-being for any subject—consciously or unconsciously—it both gives relief to the lack in jouissance and anchors itself in ?xed repetitions meant to avoid lack at all costs. Thus, jouissance with its homeostasis blocks the ever-moving ?ow of desire. And this is another de?nition of structure. Since “topologizing” is

jouissance

not

and the

linear, but leads

comes to

the limit

to to

the “no relation” from which

language

sex

and death emanate,

one

in the real in terms of jouissance.

trying to give meaning to effects of structure, interpretation works as a metaphor which allows substitution of one thing for another. Indeed, this is the functional law of castration, of accepting to be a divided subject (unlike the psychotic who forecloses subject division). By substitutions, metaphor gives meanings that refer metonymically—by displacement—to the unconscious. While myths are elaborations of metaphors regarding origin, discourse shows that the origin from which we speak is metaphor. We could not speak if language were not always already given to us to use. But, for Lacan, unlike for Chomsky, language is imposed from the outside. It is not innate or hardwired into the brain. Moreover, language copulates with the real insofar as the excess in jouissance creates a blockage—a hole—in the symbolic.Topology teaches that discourse is about love—tying together, coming apart .The hysteric knows that something lacks in knowledge; that the law is empty. The hysteric as agent of speech stands on the question, on subversion. In the analytic discourse, jouissance lies at the base of the desire for satisfaction. But the analysand’s jouissance (Other) is not a sign of love. Lacan says that love appears in a change of discourse. Love is an awareness ofjouissance emanating from the real, while the imaginary and the real link narcissism to the body.Ana.Iytic discourse, meanwhile, is a transference of the analyst’s own knowledge onto the question mark the analysand has about his or her desire.While the analysand’s desire is alienated in ideals and inert jouissance that make the subject a response of the real, love repeats the prior desires. Jouissance comes out of a real hole, linked to death, while self myths make desired objects an equivalent to jouissance. One can conclude this part by saying that In



discourse is also



stance



particular truth, toward the (sens).” So, jouissance is attached to language. It is

taken toward individual,

unconscious, “outside of sense





Introduction

negation of the void as it takes on a value in reference to one’s body as imaginary object.As such, the desired object is an ever—changing discontinuity

radical

an

that orients the drives.

presenti?es the discontinuity of the divided signi?er to another signi?er. In order that words—signi?ers—refer to an absent object that rejoins language to the real, there cannot be a meta—language concomitant with concrete language that would make up an energetics of lack (desire) and loss (jouissance). But this does not make sense unless one realizes that Lacan made of desire, fantasy, drive, jouissance, formalizable properties of language. Miller teaches us that the signi?er as object is extimate. It is the master as narcissistic, as m’étre (to be me). The word

“Identity,” then, depends is

an

absent

structure) What

to remove

take for

we

the limits ofjouissance

one can

bear.The unconscious

for the master, whose

signi?er

is

on

goal, qua obsessional (or any desire from language, to speak pure superego. reality is a certain consistency of jouissance.

other

Read

topologically, the discourses work this way. The master discourse aims the master signi?er (SI) toward the signi?er for knowledge (SQ).These signi?ers stand over the bar where the divided subject (3) is aimed at by some object a. Indeed, Lacan’s formula for fantasy is written as ¥ 0 a. Lacan says that the master denies any subject division or excess jouissance that support the signi?ers in his or her discourses. For the master there is, rather, the One of the signi?er which denies the —o of castration. The master signi?er, in other words, denies that anything is lacking in being or speech. So, this discourse aims for something that will make his one’s

in

position

or

her

language,

bound

perfect together. no

?ll

always

Put another way, there is

There is

the lack in desire, convey the certainty of but the signi?ed meaning always misses its referent.

point,

beyond



solution where

in

meaning,

jouissance

that is

intention and

just missed. jouissance are

The four fundamental

concepts—transference, the unconscious, repetition, and drive—screen out the unconscious. This is why there is no unity of One. These always block such unity.These concepts show the misrecognition of desire as bearing on jouissance. Thus, the telos of the unconscious is ethical, not

conceptual.The signi?er consistency

as

equivalent

virtual One.The

other, object

of a substance which

a causes

enjoys. Imaginary

desire which seeks satisfaction in

signi?ed, and ego ideal. Overall the body is joined language by the drives. The Ding is the real which appears in language a symbolic.]ouissance replaces the object a as a visible effect of the drive.

the drives to

creates a

is the

We

as

want to

be

For Lacan,

seen,

a,

heard,

philosophy

to consume,

poses

as an

tainty of the master’s opinions. The

control.

equivalent

master

of truth which reveals the

cer-

is unlike Socrates whom Lacan calls

question standing in the forefront, becoming an equivalent of science where there is an impossibility in knowledge. The hysteric’s question is answered by a “but it’s not that” (cf. S. XXIII, ch. 1). By revealing the question of her being—am I a woman or a man?—the hysteric marks herself as a subject who manifests being as pure 13Ck-in-being (3). Language itself manifests a lack an

hysteric,

the

Introduction

of central rapport in being.That is, there is no central everything else together—no set of coherent truths



which holds

or

innate

or

meanings. The hysteric’s

sense

lack and loss—to the death

drive—places anxiety and agony at the forefront of her discourse. In this sense, she shows language itself to be burden- some. The hysteric who shuns cure—an obsessionalizing of her thought—shows that she loves her symptom more than herself. The analyst, meanwhile, knows that she or he does not know the patient’s unconscious desire or jouis-sens. Indeed, Lacan argues, the only true neurosis is the obsessional ‘s where the barred subject proximity

to

is laid bare

shows that or excess.

as

the base identi?cation

part of jouissance clinging to her image of the ideal father, she remains stuck in her

some

By

of everyone. Hysteria, on the other hand, can be translated by the signi?er—its truth

sinthome. Gender and

body bring together the linked questions about sex and existence. The hysteric’s jouissance does not come from sex itself, however, but from the gaze. And the analyst’s goal is the effort at breaking up her or his representational jouissance. In my chapter on “The structure of Lacan’s object a,” Lacan breaks rank with the history of those who have de?ned objects. He places the object in the beginning, there where there was ?rst loss. The object in question is not the philosophical one, then, but the one constructed for desire/jouissance in psy- choanalysis. The question of losing an object and re?nding a lost object or its replacement becomes a dynamic dialectic. There is no question of the object as a material thing, or simply another person, but of the object as the equivalent of the phallus or the third thing that creates a division.The one who loses an object experiences this as a loss of being, as in death and mourning. Early on in Lacan’s work, constellations of objects were seen as complexes. Later, he placed the object a at the center of structure, Borromean structure. In between these periods of his teaching, the notion of the object changed many times. In Seminar IV he focused on the object as lost and, then, refound.And he spoke about the object between the sexes—the ideal aimed at—as keeping man or woman from being all one sex. In Seminar VIII Lacan made the object a equivalent to a libidinal substance, an agalma whose jouissance is the symptom as its partner. In Seminar XI, he linked the a to desire and drive. The object becomes the beloved other in Seminar XX. As



semblant, the



lies between the

symbolic. In Seminar XXI, the object becomes that which tries to ful?ll lack, to sustain fantasy (3 O a), by circling around the logics of alienation and separation.2 In 1974—1975 Lacan places the a at the center of the three rings of the Borromean knot—the real, the symbolic, the imaginary—plus the fourth dimension, the sinthome, which links the other three together. In this late period of his teaching, Lacan refers to the unary traits of the real and argues that the ego ideal breaks with the Freudian id/ego/superego topography. Rather, the ego joins the conscious and unconscious as structured by narcissistic identi?cation, ultimately with the signi?er for the Father’s Name. Earlier, in Seminar IV, Lacan places the castrated object (—0) in the imaginary dimension and the castrated subject (/3) in the symbolic. But in Seminar XX, real and the



Introduction

he links the

object

to

the a, to the

subject,

to

the void in the Other, and

the void

to

the

by the a. But not only is loss involved, castration is also in play and makes the object appear in the illusion that being ?lls lack. In Seminar II, the object is displayed as here and gone, as an optical vase that one sees as full with ?owers in it, an imaginary illusion, or as incomplete when empty. The object a works, there, as an ab—sens.The ditch surrounding it in the Fort! Da! game is a literal void, a real capital phi.

In Seminar XX in the sexuation

graph,

(0)

is ?lled

loss of the

imaginary consistency of the image of a person or the loss of the sound of a voice. Why does a child cry when its mother leaves? Lacan’s point is that the mother herself is not the goal, but the illusion of homeostasis which her presence brings.When the a is lost, the metaphorical a becomes a metonymical one. The metonymy refers to a material piece of the real which appears when a void opens up around one. The intervention of the real into the symbolic has made an actual hole in the symbolic, one example of which would be a moment of identi?cation with pre—mirror-stage fragmentation of the body. The object a is a semblance of identi?cation with libidinal objects. Moreover, it has the property of marking the outside and the inside at the same time— having the form of a topological torus, a doughnut hole. In this context one can say that having and being are connected with the a. The a also subtends the master discourse and stands in for das Ding which is the eternally lacking essence ofWoman qua unique, beyond her existence as a mother.While the meanings given the object a are vast, there are also primordial meanings. Primary organs of the body connect with objects—the mouth, the eye, the ear, the anus—these organs are identi?ed with jouissance, at which body and being meet the

giving shape

to a

positive or negative. Lacan called the point “letter.”]ean-Michel Rabaté de?nes it as libidinal logic which governs discourse.3 The experience of

primordial objects causes infantile hallucinations of fear, anxiety, and so on.When the night light is turned out, a little child may believe a ghost has come into his room. We are all familiar with such nighttime phenomena, but rarely think of them as having a logic. Interestingly enough, the father’s name taken as a symptom is also an object a. The paternal metaphor itself— Q/a—makes a hole in the Other via imaginary castration and through language and law creating the void in the Other. Notably, the object a is never lost from the real in psychosis. For everyone else, it remains repressed. Primordial objects are the ?rst givens, given by the symbolic mother, loss of

whatever her unconscious desire The

imaginary

the real of her ravage toward her child. lack of the phallus—the father’s name, language, law—is experi— or

symbolic.The real takes in all the imaginary that show up as objects symbolic. Fantasy—¥ 0 a—is the equivalent of a perception, reality being

enced in the in the

view of the world. Lacan’s ?nal

writing of the paternal metaphor shows that any object a can ?ll the central void. For example, the voice ?lled the Q for James Joyce. In phobia, the a can act as a signi?er, as a representation of jouissance: 0/] (a).The object is lacking in symbolic castration (—9)) and func- tions, rather, as partial features of the body. Such features are the drives Lacan one’s

fantasy

Introduction



montage in Seminar XI. Put another way, we are not uni?ed within ourselves. We simply make impasses around pseudo-consistencies. As subjects describes

we are

to

as a

divided and driven in relation

itself. As

the

object,

extimate

an



the real which is in external exclusion

to

which

joins

the interior and exterior does

reciprocity between them. Rather, the Other acts as a signi?er for the object body. Agalma—jouissance—is the object that is each one’s greatest good.Yet, the material of the object cannot close the gap between signi?ers. Objects provide substitutes for jouissance in between the symbolic and real dimensions and between the imaginary and symbolic, and the real and the imaginary. In the chapter on “The structure of the drives,” I discuss Lacan’s emphasis on not create a

Freud’s dissident notion of the drives. Freud called them both perverse and sys— tematic.Where Freud ?nds system, Lacan speaks of a chaos of the drives. Lacan located the drives in the treasury of the appears in demand when the dialectical

signi?ers in the 1960s. He says the drive subject disappears.The partial drive of the one

Her

ensemble fades into

example, in the moment putting together her makeup and clothes

mark

as

asks

friend how she looks.

gaze would appear, for

she seeks validation of her efforts in the ?eld

drives, the

cut

remains: that is, the

structure

of the





question

of the drives. In the

duplicity

of

language

itself

stays intact. One can say, then, that the drive is not instinctual, but that which remains in language as a demand made to the Other on the side of castration. While not

one

whole,

waits for as

an

answer to

one’s

question,

the

subject presents itself

as

fading.

(1915), he describes the instincts or drives as having four possible characteristics.They are either repressed, sublimated, that which reverts into its opposite, or that which returns onto the self. While Freud eventually called the drives a myth, Lacan called them a fundamental ?ction.Vicissitudes are disjointed into source, aim, goal and object. The drives are ?rst constituted as a cut—the space between the cup and lip, and so on—and reappear as such, as that which breaks up a seemingly uni?ed surface. Drive is, then, a paradox. It is a repeated constancy that creates discontinuity (S. XI, p. 164). In its efforts to remain constant, the drive aims at reaching a goal through sublimation or repetition, for example. In these cases there is In Freud’s essay “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”

satisfaction of the drive without or

physical

energy,

but, rather,



repression.There is no assimilation to biology topology of disjunction and conjunction, union

and frontier.

Although James Strachey translated Freud’s word for drive, Trieb, as instinct, Freud stressed, rather, the psychic force of drive, not its a?irnty with the animal kingdom. In classical psychoanalytical theory, Trieb is driven by the pleasure— seeking id. Freud tried to put together physics and physiology. The object- relations theorists who followed after his death, lack Lacan, at

on

the other hand, did

the surface of the

body

montage of the drives

as

comes

not

look

at

the



nervous

drive concept, however. system as did Freud, but

topology made up of holes, rims, edges. The from the symbolic or imaginary having entered a

10



Introduction

hole and

themselves

binding

the Other of identi?cations as

the kernel of an

its rim

to

which

as



trait. These traits build up

begin giving

their

markings

to an

as

infant

identity.

sexuality and, thereby, confused the infantile pleasure principle and the adult reality principle. Lacan said, rather, that the unconscious comes from the drive and its subject structure is to be found in organs—anal, oral, scopic, and invocatory.Whatever of these that is repressed in the real returns in the symbolic. The subject of the unconscious desires what lacks in the drives which want jouissance. Partial drives materialize speech for jouissance and, thereby, overdetermine language for jouis-sens. The drives, then, place a libidinal dimension in language as lack or as the fantasy of what will accomplish one’s jouissance which is sought via others and the Other. The objects a that cause desire cut into the ego ideal fantasy and into the symbolic and imaginary by producing discontinuity and con?ict. At the center of being are real holes which reside there prior to any meaning or thought. Freud’s nephew playing the bobbin-reel game of Fort! Da! at around 18 months of age seeks to ?ll the void with an object.When his mother leaves, he cries, showing that when one loses one’s grounding in objects, an encounter is produced with the void. Thus, the aim at the object in the drives differs from the goal.The goal is not the object sought, but, rather, homeostasis. The remainder, or object a, is of the primordial real where an edge is bound to a hole—the edge being the surface. The identi?cation bound to the hole is a real unary trait—not some meta-language.What is sought is the dimension of One, of constancy which is produced in the time of the real. But language creates a subject divided between the conscious and unconscious, thus, the obstacle to this pleasure principle of constancy is the real which subverts homeostasis by the death drive, by points of one dimension.The limit point of impossibility that enters language as meaning is that of a cut. It returns from the real into the symbolic as loss and discontinuity. Its action is that of inertia to change.A dialectic of drive9demand-) temporal tension is introduced into language. One sees the dimension of the One as constancy, the surface of reality, the word produced in the time of the real. Language, then, creates a divide between this dimension of One and also produces meaning. The erogenous zones enter language as a rim whose drives aim at jouissance. Something is exchanged with the void, put into a hole. Satisfaction, then, is achieved by the real of sublimation. And, the topological dimension of the real Freud found the

roots

is made up of Freud’s of the rim and the

in

language

of drive in childhood

einziger zugen,

unary

traits, divine details.The cut, made up

hole, calls forth the response of

remainder of the

object

suture

Although

the

whose effects exist

has

only one dimension, repetition buckles it and has two dimensions. The Mobius strip is a dyad of metaphor and metonymy. Finally, desire—metonymy—is the demand for sexuality as a cover over the non—rapport of the sexual relation. Drive, meanwhile, is a dynamic axis which seeks to ?ll its own void, to make the Mobius strip equal to the time of desire as a quest for jouissance. as



a.

cut

Introduction

11

imaginary judgments that are made leave a remainder, a virtual real which orders infant perception/introjects (Bejahung). In the topological sphere, the oral drive is a sphere while the anal drive is a torus. The Mobius strip— shaped like a ?gure 8—represents the gaze while the cross—cap represents the voice.While Charles Sanders Peirce’s cut is typological, as Charles Pyle reminds us, Lacan’s is topological and gives the logic of place and means of the real produced as material eITects in language by intersections or junctions. Lacan’s topology gives us paradoxes of contradictions, such as the cut’s creating the hole which creates the rim which also creates the hole. Beyond concept, biology, or culture, Lacan places a real in language that has meanings, that links organs to meaning—the voice, the gaze, the breast, the feces. Lacan’s cut introduces a new theory of cause and referent into meaning.There is an Ur object that cannot be grasped in a mirror. The virtual imaginary clothes this Ur object. Representation arises as a substance between the real, symbolic, and imaginary. Language, then, is duplicitous, something the hysteric hears and which catalyzes a certain paranoia. Given that there are no biological instincts in Lacan’s teaching, no natural sexuality, one ends up, rather, with drives which give rise to desire and a hole which gives rise to a surface. The cut remains in the demand, installing a material tension/torsion which corresponds to the lack/hole. Thus, drives produce an affective concrete knowledge by entering language at the point which is oriented within the closed surface of the body. Holes create edges and perforate the imaginary, while the real cuts into the imaginary. The hole itself is made of discontent, of real trauma, of loss against which the The ?rst

hedge, a source in the drives which are quanti?ed as such insofar as they push against something. The demand for satisfaction is equivalent to the lack in knowing. From the Freudian drives, Lacan retains only jouissance and drops Freud’s drives in the 19605 as themselves a phobia. In 1964 he takes the Drang, the push, to be the Other as a cause of desire. The push engages the aim surface is



of the drives while the surface becomes the return

to

the

zero

source

of the drives. Ziel

or

aim is



dimension of total satisfaction. The dialectic between drive

and desire, then, is the

Drang

or

the thrust that

pushes

the drives into

language.

chapter on the “Topological dimension,” I discuss how the bond of mirror—stage oneness between mother and infant is broken by a third term.The phallus is a signi?er that lifts the veil of the illusion of oneness. Indeed, the difference between the sexes produces the effect of a third thing. The gaze is not a conscious agency looking at a phenomenological object as American ?lm theory has thought. Rather, it is a drive which adds jouissance and demand as already created by the signi?er which only seems more powerful than jouissance. In painting, the gaze inverts perspective and catches the viewer in its trap. One is dealing with perspective plus perception. In Seminar XIII Lacan says that the object has priority over the divided subject. The gaze as object is a drive, the topological real of structure. It is important insofar as what cannot be said is tacitly shown.The a is lodged as within a window by the structure that shows it as a singularity. But what is this object? It is made up of identi?catory unary traits In the

12

Introduction

whose

goal

the drives seek

to

attain. One could call the

a a

metaphor

for traits

drops (J/a), bringing the real into language via the drives. Topology gives the logic of what creates the hole that surrounds the drives. Indeed, the scopic ?eld of perspective holds all the other drives in its cusp. The gaze equals consciousness which Lacan de?nes as seeing oneself being seen, even from the start of life. The infant, then, starts out as an object, not a subject. The ego ideal (I[A]) is the child as it was desired before birth. It is important to note that topology is not a metaphor for psychoanalysis. Desire is linked to language by the drives that are limited to the body. Psychoanalysis situs means psychoanalysis in space and in three dimensions.Time is oriented by the real of the word.Topology shows the real of structure which cannot speak itself and the divided subject refers to the place of.The imaginary means schemas of images while the symbolic is made up of points. The Borromean knot is a picture of the sites of the real.Topology offers foundations of the subject’s posi- tion. The picture is the matheme for visual structure. The symbolic plus a trait yields perspective by threading an identi?catory mark to a hole where the a is of jouissance it

recessed.The gaze is the foundation of the surface which is

call form, constellation.The semblant is

to

be found

and the real, appearing in the scopic drive (connai't) the language of the libido.

as

the

at

at

the base of all

the apex of the

jouissance

we

symbolic

traits that know

geo—metric.While the fantasy gives an image of the body, the gaze is quattrocentric.Thus, the fantasy and the gaze are on different topological planes. Descartes’ extended body is an impasse in thought as is Plato’s Thus, thought and body

are

form, impasses which Lacan says denote the presence of the real. In Lacan’s the mirror and

equivalent relations.They transform them- selves from catoptrique and geometric, to topologic.The surface of these is the symbolic linked to the scopic. Perspective, then, has four Borromean surfaces and the object a is an enigma between a subject and an object.Ancient cave paintings were a writing before writing, a way to make a meaningness Lacan called the letter. As such, the mark is a unary trait of an edge and a hole. It shows depth. When the signi?er morti?es the object and causes an emptying of its real, one has gone from geometry to topology. While science fantasizes couples, Lacan

thought,

shows that there is

gives

rise

from The

rapport between individuals, but, rather, distance which and ?ight which gives birth to metonymy.

metaphor chapter on “The practice of the letter,” I Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar VII) saying

to

In my structure

no

measure are

of ?ction and that truth and ?ction

of the letter is

on

Lacan’s axiom

that every truth has the linked by the Ietter.The function

he says. That is, it indicates the place where language linked. Moreover, language and being are linked by

topological,

and the unconscious

are

phallus in the place topology and that ?xations

the real is

are

focus

of ab-sens. In Seminar XX, Lacan says that structure to signifying chains have the form of the torus.

Extimité (1991—1992) Jacques-Alain Miller refers to Lacan’s “Rome Discourse” (1953) where Lacan ?rst talked about an empty center within In his Course

on

language which is



conduit

to

speech.

And it is

not

myth

or

metaphor,

but is

Introduction

real. In his

“Hommage

Lacan says “a

center

is



Marguerite

not

the

Duras

sur

Le ravissement de Lol V

on

all surfaces.

as

upon which structure

of

of the real that appear discontinuities. The real of the later Lacan means a repressed part of

torus:

in it

(9. Language

Stein,”

Singular on a ?at surface, complex surface, it can produce an odd knot”

same

everywhere on a sphere, on a more (Rabaté, pp. 114, 125, 194). But the gaze is the foundational surface the drives come into the real of language through the extimate the

13

cannot cover over

the

remnants

jouissance that returns into the symbolic to disrupt the consistencies of language. It provides a rim encircling the erotic hole left by jouissance (Rabaté, p. 28). Marguerite Duras’s ?ctional story “Moderato Cantabile” is organized around one of the partial objects cause-of-desire, the voice. It functions as a piece of the real in the symbolic. Using minimalist language, Duras uses the voice to infer death into her ?ctional language. It is heard as a signi?er of the void in being (cf. extimité). It brings jouissance into the ?ctional bed of language. The dream of love is exposed by Duras as an illusion. The main characters, Chauvin and Anne, seek the oneness of love through the object a of the voice. Each speaks, ?lling his or her lack—in—being by their fantasized new lives together. Jacques-Alain Miller talks about bringing dimensions of space into play within language (“Topology,” p. 10): He lists the knot, metaphor, structure, the real, plus the “thing.” If one puts this series within the structure of the Borromean knot—the real, the symbolic, the imaginary, linked by the fourth knot of the symptom—one ?nds the real of the body residing within the symbolic. In the imaginary the body is at a distance from the object a cause—of—desire, the primordial thing of the real.This means that distance from the sexual thing which comes

from the fact that The Woman does

not

exist, except

as a

reminiscence of

replaced by the voice. These Ideas appear in literature metonymically. In Lacan’s “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” he says that the unconscious touches on the practice of the letter. The signi?er and the real meet there.This special “language” can be ?irther divided into language of the all on the side of the masculine group and the not all on the side of the primordial Woman who does not exist as an essence.The logic of the not all makes meaning in a “sens joui” outside grammatical language. In 1975 Lacan added jouis-sens as unconscious meaning in between the symbolic and imaginary. This language presenti?es the real which is, itself, unsymbolized because it is profoundly traumatic. In the later Lacan, however, the real is retrievable in bits and pieces. Language digs out hollows within itself, its own effects returning as metaphor and metonymy. The creative word trumps phenomenological being. Rabaté says the letter circumscribes the edges of a hole opened by jouissance (p. 35). In 1964, Lacan put forth the idea that we are creatures of shame (homology) and this “existence” replaces the being that Heidegger placed in logos and alethéia. Not only are we creatures of jouissance, we are also attached to the symptom that incites us to seek objects that do not wish our good. In Duras’s short story, Anne and Chauvin build a love castle by the hope and nostalgia in their voices.The darkness of despair in the voice of each represents a beyond the the

mother,

can

be

14

Introduction

negative jouissance joins the death drive. In literature, the lures, semblants and impasses in the imaginary. In his “Homage”

pleasure principle one

to

sees

where

Duras Lacan says the unconscious is

the letter—like the

linked loss

of the real, in the

curve

hidden, but functions in the

the part of the the unsymbolic real ?nds erasure at

“1ittoral.”Thereby, to Heidegger, Lacan in the

not

to

the

place

coast a

where

via

and sand meet, the

language.

in

place

sea

text

In

opposition

practice of the letter. Fiction resides, then,

of the void.

In Extimité

(1985—1986) Miller says language introduces the real in the form of sexuality.The real returns where ?ction and life fail. Duras writes a simple love story where the glamorous, wealthy wife secretly wants love and adventure. Chauvin, the worker, wants money and luxury. Duras’s real genius in writing this story does not lie in its plot nor in its characters, but in her ability to make the invocatory drive resonate.This is a dif?cult feat within the domain of literature, while it functions well in song, theatre, or ?lm. But Duras brings the death weight of the real with her focus on the two voices, against the backdrop of music playing moderato cantabile.The jouis-sens in play is a ciphering of the unconscious. Thus, jouissance and the signi?er join in the practice of the letter. All this gives us a new de?nition of sublimation rather than the commonplace idea of it as repression. Sublimation creates something new in the symbolic. Miller explains in De la Nature des Semblants (1991—1992) that Lacan ?rst tried to explain the real in seeking to conceptualize truth. As the inverse of language, the object a escapes the principle of contradiction for it is absolute. The power of metonymy comes into play where the a gives rise to jouissance and one can place the a topologically in the torus where it resides both inside and outside at the same time. Curiously enough, while metaphor might seem to come ?rst, giving a sense of language as it does, it is actually metonymy derived from the corporal real derived from the libido surrounding the drives that comes ?rst. One is condemned to one’s body which resists division. The goal of language is to negate desire, avoid the real. In Anxiety (Seminar X, 1962—1963), Lacan describes the voice as coming from Elsewhere, not commensurate with language. It in-corp-orates itself.]ouissance stands over the real, the voice therein modeling our own emptiness. In Duras’s story, Anne and Chauvin meet each week

the café located

the

of

of

passion.When they met during Anne’s son’s piano lessons, they talked of the crime and, gradually, of love itself.Their own dead desires seek to ?ll the lack in each of them through the object of the voice of love (S/a). In her elegant home, Anne has no voice. Chauvin, a laborer, has no voice in society. Each voice resonates with the pain of its own destitution. As they create a scene of Oneness of love with each other, at

at

corner

a scene

hope grows. But Lacan’s formula appears: there is In this

couple,

each

one wants

what the other

no



crime of

sexual relation of Oneness.

wants to

shed.What

we

hear in

extimacy, the coming together of interior and exterior hole of discontinuity into the surface of language.

this minimalized story is to

pierce



The late Lacan said

language

dropped

the idea of the Father’s Name

and its “sense” is the

only thing

one

Other and, ?nally, could call a meta-language. as

Introduction

15

explains that what one seeks at some “meta” level, which is not “meta” at all, is a representation of a primary jouissance in the Other. Anne asks Chauvin how love dies. This is the opposite of Chauvin’s question to her—how is love built? He ?nally answers Anne’s question: There are long silences at night and other times. It might take months for the lovers to know. He intersperses this explanation with questions about the interior of her home. He can only say that the man ?nally threw his wife out. We see that Duras materializes language Miller

around jouissance which is connected to the unconscious Other. Anne tells Chauvin she cannot run away with him. I wish you were dead he replies. In other

words, the real murder in the novel foreshadows the metaphorical murder of the

fantasy built by Anne and Chauvin.The voice falls out of language—the fall of the object a—a jouissance effect. Jacques—Alain Miller makes sense of this in saying that art provides jouissance which clusters around the drives whose ?rst cause

is desire.

chapter of this book, I work with Kant’s Religion Within the Limits queason Alone (1793) read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psycho- analysis (1959—1960). In addition I frame my discussion in reference to Alenka Zupancic’s “Fantasy within the limits of reason alone,” disagreeing with parts of her reading of Kant’s late essay. In general, my aim is to bring together Kant’s In the last

evacuation of control within the law with Lacan’s

premise that there is a void place at the center of being and, thus, within individuals and society itself. I take up Lacan’s idea that the passion of ignorance has the structure of the master discourse. Given the reign of narcissism in the master discourse and the idea of

an

re?isal of the unconscious,

one

begins

to see a structure to

man’s

inhumanity

to

together with Kant’s late idea that man is “radically evil” because he cannot go beyond self-love to moral law, to the categorical imperative, I argue, referring to Lacan that not only does narcissistic jouissance reign supreme in human life, but that the will to ignorance has both a structure and a logic: Lacan locates the passion of ignorance within his topological Borromean “picture” between the real and the symbolic at the jouissance place where language and man.

law

Put

((1)) play

good and evil



master

discourse role. Ethics would be situated

the site of ignorance. One does

know

there, between

anything beyond one’s own fantasy view of the world which Lacan calls the I/Veltanschauung or “reality” each person perceives. Zupancic’s belief that she is correcting Kant’s late essay by pinpointing what she calls his fantasies would make her view one more fantasy regarding an age—old question concerning ethics.And she does not offer the logic of a structure beyond the word “fantasy” itself except to say that the worst evil and the highest good cancel themselves out in Kant. In Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1964) Lacan offers the two overlapping vels of alienation and separation in which one could place good and evil as well, with a residue located in the middle. The residue shares a part of each vel. In between good and evil, I would place ethics. Kant gives us an ethics of the categorical imperative—The good of one is the good of all—while Lacan gives us an ethics of desire, and later jouissance. Ethics, then, at

not

16

Introduction

lack—in-being of the divided subject. In other words, there is a lack within good and within evil. Total good is impossible, as Zupancic says, but, then, she argues that by the highest good and the highest evil, Kant means the same thing—progress toward some realization of the immortal soul. For Lacan, we are ruled by the jouissance of the Other, that is, for each subject—one by one—his or her greatest good. One person’s evil, drinking wine with dinner, for example, is another person’s good. Insofar as the obverse face of lack is desire, each person’s lack-in—being (except for the psychotic) is ?lled by the object a that resides in the formula for fantasy: 3 O a. Fantasies come from the Other of a given time and place as created by images and signi?ers that represent a subject for another signi?er which comes to constitute a knowledge for a subject.These signifying chains—rigid Lacan says— would have

cover

do with how

one

?lls up the

the gap with the identi?cations, images, and sinthomes that knot the real, symbolic, and imaginary sought as the repetitions that equal

over

together what

to

calls one’s

good. In Kant’s idea of the good—the progress of the immortal soul toward the categorical imperative—and Lacan’s idea of das Ding (?rst taken from Freud’s “Project” as the Bahnung, the rails) as the object a, one can argue that one does not willfully, produce evil from “free will,” but, rather, from symptoms. The Lacanian das Ding comes from an unconscious level where “defenses” are actually the ways in which we hurt ourselves by giving into them rather than by dropping them as identi?cations, one by one. While Kant’s good comes from certainty, universality, no divided subject, the late Kant’s man reverses the progress towards this moral law with radical evil. Zupancic says that this essay “more than any other of Kant’s texts, surprised, shocked, and scandalized his contemporaries” (p. 87).4 While Zupancic tries to explain away this text, saying Kant made errors in his reasoning here, that there was no divided subject in the late Kant, she misses that the subject in this essay is divided in at least two ways. There is a split between the subject of the categorical imperative and the one of radical evil.And there is a split between the subject of radical evil and the diabolical subject. Like the late Kant’s subject, the Lacanian subject is unconsciously constructed to hurt itself by repetitions beyond the pleasure principle, rather than to submit to a good—moral or psychoanalytic—that does not conform to its sinthome. Thus the binary of good and evil itself becomes an imaginary fantasy. In relations with one

own

others the ego ideal unconscious formation interacts in ways that ideal egos have

already subject

formed

5inthomes.This is yet one more way in which the is divided: between its being and its sinthome.And humans ?ll the void in as

equivalent

to

the Other in any way rather than confront the anxiety the sinthome brings in its wake. Humans lie.They care nothing for the truth. Rather than admit to one’s

good as being narcissism, people rationalize with theories of altruism, the categorical imperative, the golden rule above all. Like Lacan, the late Kant ?nds primordial encounters with a moral law to be “bad” encounters. The dialectic, then, is between the reality principle and the pleasure principle. Yet, the reality principle does not mean the good, merely one’s fantasy of what own

Introduction

serves

one’s

own

desire, the real of one’s fantasies. One

can see

17

this in Russell

Slavoj Ziiek’s idea of a “pure ethical act” in which one says “no” to the Other. Grigg argues that such an act implies “loss of loss” itself for Ziiek. No act can be pure—even ifit be revolutionary—insofar as its consequences count too,5 Grigg says. Rather than Antigone’s act being a pure act of revolutionary desire, Grigg points out that it is formed within the law, a simple “no” to Creon’s Grigg’s critique

of

law. In her lamentation she accepts womanhood, the dire choices that must sometimes be made for love and the effects that follow from that. She accepts

(p. 129). Ziiek’s “pure ethical act” becomes idealized desire (Grigg, p. 130), transcendental, I would say. Lacan argues that insofar as the mirror—stage logical moment constructs one’s fantasy of what will serve one’s desire, the “reality” constructed is natural. By “natural” Kant meant sensual or sexual. By “natural” Lacan meant the sinthome— what becomes of one’s jouissance as it undergoes the unconscious desire of the mother and the function of the father supplement.To understand Lacan’s topology more thoroughly one need grasp the projective plane onto which the ego asserts itself—whether psychotic or not. This topological ontology goes in only one her fate

direction, that of one’s

own

narcissism.This is how I understand Kant

on

radical

evil, the placing of self—love above the moral law, self—love being that which he also calls the

pathology

of desire and lust. For Lacan the

experiences of imaginary

a?ects—jealousy, narcissism, agressivity, ideals, and so on—are felt in the body, rendering it unable to feel itself as whole, calm.Thus, body and mind are but the names one gives things or experiences that are inseparable from one another from the

start



of life.

logic of paranoia. We are making of the ego a “you” or “me” of language/law. There is, of course, psychotic paranoia where the ego reigns over the symbolic to the point of excluding it. But in normal paranoia, the ego holds sway in daily life and in moral practices. Indeed, theories of ego wholeness go against the most fundamental of realities—the basis of law itself—that of being divided into two of the ego all under the gaze,

topology

sexes,

male

or

means

female, which refer

that

to

no

one

can

escape the

the third—term effect of difference that Lacan

calls castration—the law says “no” to the One. The topological Lacanian analyst Jean-Paul Gilson

that

jouissance resides on the slope of the real, not on the slopes of the imaginary or symbolic. When Kant cannot ?nd anything but self—interest among people, he concludes that there is no universal humanity, no eternal progress of the soul towards the stresses

Good. And Lacan concludes that desire is

particular and that the law concerns the issue of sexual difference (or not, as in the psychoses). If anyone decompletes the psychotic’s ego, the psychotic subject retaliates by revenge, by killing the other if deemed necessary in order to protect his or her ?ctional “wholeness.” Both Kant and Lacan make the same point: any question of the good is always

posed

in reference

to some

law.

replaced his Oedipal myth with the superego in his second topology. Lacan replaces both with the paternal metaphor and, later, castration.The father Freud

18

Introduction

is not

We



are

function that transforms language into a symbolic dimension. constructed by lalangue, then by signi?ers which quickly become alienated person, but



forms and sounds and dead, archaic words. So, Lacan’s father of castration is the real father, the dead father.

Imaginary fathers

semblances such

priests, Archie Bunker, Santa Claus. Insofar as the phallus is a third term that requires that a differentiation be made between the sexes—unless there be psychosis—a new ethics is required. The late Lacan argued that the law is a symptom in the real, a sublimation of the Father’s Name, and that it must be reidenti?ed in some are

as

psychoanalysis. He does not foresee any progress toward cure in the repressions of moral or political ideologies or religion. While Kant describes evil as “principalities and powers,” Lacan will not look to the world outside, but to the language of the master discourse which functions as a passion of ignorance.While Kant is concerned with the universal and the common weal, Lacan accepts that each subject is jealous of the other, envies the other qua other. That is, each of us always thinks the other has what way

we

through

the

want, could

talking

that is

have, could—have—been. More brutal than Kant’s condemnation

?nally meets is not love, but hate, a fantasy wherein the other always has goods one will never attain. Thus, the good encounters destruction, not creativity. One can only ask Kant what reason can do when confronted with the humble requirements of the narcissistic subject? The ten commandments have been tried. I would conclude by saying that Lacan opted for the hope of a bien dire, speaking the truth about the real.This would not end all symptoms or change any structures. But there is sinthome change in it. Kant ended, I would say, with a tragic view of human nature, his hope for the immortal progress of the human soul, given his lifelong dream that the good of one could be the good of all. of self—love, Lacan says that what

one

Notes 1

Jacques Lacan, “Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: ‘Psychoanalysis and the Structure of Personality’,” Ecrits, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), pp. 543—574.



Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1964), ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), cf. ch. 16.

3 4 5

Jean—Michel Rabaté, jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 28. Alenka Zupanéié, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London, New Yorszerso, 2000), cf. “Good and Evil: Fantasy within the limits of reason alone,” pp. 79—105. Russell Grigg, Lacan, language, and Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University ofAlbany Press, 2008), cf. “Absolute Freedom and Radical Change: On Ziiek,” pp. 119—131, p. 123.

1 THE LOGIC OF STRUCTURE IN LACAN The structure of the

Lacan’s The

reconceptualization

meaning

aspects of his

subject

of structure

of structure in Lacan is

one

of the

most

important

and least treated

teaching. Many critics of Lacan have thought of him as a linguistic or anthropological structuralist. Such an erroneous reading of Lacan bases itself upon the fact that he ?rst looked at contemporary linguistics and anthropology to rethink psychoanalysis. But he radically modi?ed the linguistic sign thought of by de Saussure as made up of signi?er—acoustic sound—and the signi?ed, conceived of as a concept to which sounds referred.Although de Saussure never solved the problem of whether sound or concept comes ?rst, he, nonetheless, left the superior position to the signi?ed. Lacan argued, rather, that the signi?er is that which re-presents a subject for another signi?er. And he rede?ned subject as that which is divided between conscious and unconscious language. He explained this as there only being a sense of being insofar as one conceives of oneself in reference to the initial sense of self—believed descriptions.To assume these meanings, one must refer to them over a gap of loss between a representation and one’s taking it on. In this sense, the subject is divided. Structure, then, is already topological, multidimensional, spatial.Thus, the signi?er becomes that which is initially taken on only in refer— ence to some other signi?er.A cup represents a cut from the breast for a baby. In reference to the signi?er breast, the cup comes to mean whatever the symbolic dimension (the local Other) surrounding it de?nes it as. In reference to this signi— ?er, the subject—the child’s desire to obtain food or to be held—is formed as that which the signi?er cup represents within a local universal. Not only does sound form concepts, it does so in a dialectical referential process of meaning. Indeed,]acques—Alain Miller calls the subject a response of the real. It is as a real subject—rather than as an imaginary body or symbolic signi?er—that the

20

The

logic

of the structure of the

subject de?nes itself qua attributes of the

subject

subject.l Although

progressing

I shall work with the

in this

chapter, subsequent chapters structure was ?nally in the real.2

that, for Lacan, But, for the moment, let

statement

subject

symbolic-order

bear

out

Miller’s

build up the idea of the aforementioned subject, from infanthood to childhood, as re-presented by a “no” to Oneness

with the mother in the

us

name

of accepting difference via

some

father

supplement.

The cup for the

baby would be a symbol of progression towards the infant’s acting older.Thus, the subject is ?rst formed both as a signi?er and as a fading being. The fading slope of the subject means that part of the object a—cause and satisfaction of a desire—gives ful?llment and an imaginary illusion of consistency. Such an illusion is integrated into the signi?er. But the other part of being con- cerns castration, the baby’s giving into loss—coming and going—as some part of desire.Although the cup means whatever it is designated as meaning, plus what— ever it means within the logic ofjouissance—a system that is operated by the drives and by desire—it generally means development towards socially accepted codes of adulthood. Such Lacan



intricated way of thinking subject construction makes of structure in dynamics of the partial drives, even though they are antithetical terms an

(Miller, “Profane Illuminations”), not a static sociological reality where the sign transparently means itself in some Whor?an linguistic sense, or in some philo- sophical Hegelian would—be dialectic of syntheses.The subject is always open and changing because fading away into the primacy of the meanings that have already constituted it, always forms a part of it. The signified, in Lacan is, thus, the combination of eEects of the signi?er, as it represents a subject for another signi?er.Thus, the signi?er has primacy, not the signi?ed.The signi?ed includes the meaning of the cup in reference to the breast, or any other signi?er, plus the effects of the drive for jouissance and the intention of ?lling the lack implicit in wanting or desiring. The irony in this theory of the sign is that the signi?ed forms the signi?er, but only after it is formed by the referentiality of two signi— ?ers: breast and cup taking on meaning in terms of whether a baby has become a “big girl”—one who can drink from a cup-—or not; i.e., socially acceptable in the eyes of the external Other who is supposed. A further obstacle to understanding Lacan’s innovative use of structure lies in some of the assumptions taken on as the basis of Western thought.These have been in?uenced both by Freud’s developmental genetic stages and byjean Piaget’s developmental theory of the infantile and of childhood. Lacan says, “Piaget had got us used to examining the genesis of the communal world within the indi- vidual consciousness ti?c

thought.”3

But

to

the

extent

that he included in it the

Freud, before Piaget, maintained that

categories of scien— the infant undergoes

periods in sexual maturation.These periods are also said to be commensu- rable with subject formation. Freud called them the oral, anal, and genital stages.4 The oral phase is associated with dependence and neediness, while the anal stage is correlated with stinginess, greed, and control.The genital phase, which Freud thinks most people do not reach, is contiguous with generosity, reciprocity, and three

The

logic

of the structure of the

subject

Freud’s 1905

21

theory is not used today in the strict sense by anyone except orthodox Freudian analysts. It has, nonetheless, affected popular think- ing about the relation of sexuality to personality. Orally ?xated people are often thought of as excessively dependent or co—dependent in relations with others. People who are miserly can readily be stereotyped as anal. The genital label is linked to all that is good and mature in “character.” Lacan will argue, instead, that the experiences of the primordial “objects” that cause desire—the breast, the feces, the imaginary phallus, the urinary ?ow, the gaze, the voice, the phoneme, and the nothing—are constructed topologically.5 For Piaget, a structure is a system of transformations. For Lacan, structure expresses relations of one thing to another.And topological structure describes sets of func— tions.That is, the surface of the body is the site of structuration of the drives in terms of their signi?ed erogenous meanings. Rim-like organs and openings are favored and, thus, the lips and mouth are privileged over, say, the teeth and esophagus.The rim is the edge of the erogenous zones (“Subversion .,” p. 692). The result of the experience of connecting desire for the return of an object to the bodily experience of the meaning of loss and return of an object gives rise to the partial drives. Lacan ends his teaching by maintaining that there are four partial objects that give rise to desire—the breast, the feces, the voice, and the gaze. Although he continued to use the eight partial objects—cause-of—desire in his Seminars, he linked the four special ones to the four partial drives—oral, anal, invocatory, and scopic.The difficult point he establishes is that surface organs are separable from the body at the level of experience and perception and are also erotogenized for meaning. Indeed, Miller says we are not a body at the level of being, but at the level of having disparate reactions to various parts of the organism we “have.” The stomach, esophagus, and so on, are desexualized, although internal organs are inscribed for meaning within given imaginary, symbolic, and real dimensions. One begins to see how Lacan’s structures are rendered dynamic by the inseparability of meaning and jouissance aimed at in the drives. But it is not Freud’s dynamics of con?ict that is in question here. Nor do Lacan’s dynamics obviate the ?at concreteness of the unconscious. Lacan’s thought also runs counter to Piaget’s developmental theory of psycho— motor stages. Piaget linked the development of children to a concept of the norm based on regular educational practices. A child learns “no” at certain stages, he says. But all childhood learning evolves as a move away from egocentrism. The most advanced developmental stage is that of giving which transcends childhood narcissism. Lacan proposed, rather, that the structures of the subject evolve in reference to the experience of learning separation from the mother in terms of the father’s “no,” which is also a third—term signi?er for difference itself. The resulting experiences of the phallus and castration—in which an infant learns a grounding signi?er (or not in the case of psychosis)—give rise to the normative (sexual) masquerade based on repression of the sexual difference as apart from its cultural meanings, the neuroses of hysteria and obsession that stem from denial of the difference, the repudiation of the difference which establishes perversion,

giving.





22

The

logic

of the structure of the

subject

and the foreclosure of difference which establishes

constructed in the

learning

of difference

psychosis.These structures are sexual difference—except for the

as

psychotic who eschews this difference qua lack—as difference away from symbiosis with the primary caregiver and toward a third—term effect. Everyone but the psychotic learns these terms, although they manifest themselves in different ways of treating the Father’s—Name signi?er. There is no normative standard in question except the idea of the masquerade, which is, itself, a Charade based on repression.The Other as such does not exist except as rei?ed through the structures of desire and its treasury of signi?ers. Lacan’s mirror

stage

Lacan’s mirror stage is

one

of the best known of his structures.What is

considered is that the mirror stage is

rally

moment



topological

in transition from the notion of the infantile

not

structuration of a to

that of

gene-

logical

structure.

The

acquires a sense of identity in terms of the identi?cations given him or her by mirror—stage others, as well as by the dicta of his or her symbolic sphere— infant

via the Other. This dual feed—in terms

of

of its

what

happens

and

and

imaginary agressivity,

not

reciprocity. Moreover,

in childhood and

structure—such

base

structuration, albeit

own

awareness

system“

constitutes any person in the in

the



direct

(sociological)

structure

subsequently develop

transparency does not, then, describe

into

all taken

phase. Rather, throughout life, the narcissism, jealousy,

an

the mirror stage one—remains active structure bringing along the affects of

as

concrete

adult

symbiotic dual structuration of the ego between other and the ego ideal created thereby. Indeed, this is the structure that gives rise to the transference which allows psychoanalysis to take place. We become “one” by starting out as two. In his Seminar on Anxiety7 Lacan deve- lops the concept of the return in the mirror stage as one basic to this moment. The infant looks back at the other holding him or her as he looks into the mirror. The return is part of perception that we never lose.The gaze pushes us to conti- nually look around, to see how we are seen, heard, evaluated.We are always beset by the wish to be intimate—to be one—with certain others to the exclusion of others.This is not something for which we are mysteriously wired via the brain, but from the fact of taking on being—the ego ideal—in the eyes of others (ideal egos) to start with. The sense that one is One with certain others and not all others harkens back to the mirror—stage logic of collusion.8 In Formations of the Unconsciou5,9 Lacan explains that the structuration of the ego by mirror—stage effects results in an unconscious formation of the ego ideal. In everyday life, we know that we are drawn by certain attributes of others and things, but we ?nd the origin of such choices to be enigmatic and mysterious. We call them “chemistry.”Thus, the ego ideal is something that only unveils itself in analysis. It is like a black hole that we can deduce is present at a certain location and can de?ne by some of the properties and attributes that surround it, but we cannot see it as such.The ego ideal’s pristine form, acquired from ideal egos and on

in the

The

the Other, is lost

popular

or

overcome.

the

experienced

never

in the real of

Lacan and

base

to

being

trauma

Indeed,

mirror-stage



the idea that

to

effects, not

radically

moment

we

as

subject

go from the

structure

evolutionary

autistic child is

and, thus, evolves

one

as

23

is the

moments

who has

existing only

and violence.10

Lagache where Lacan takes up the topic of structure and the subject the paper given by Daniel Lagache, he points out that “structure”

(p. 543)

In the Ecrits

in response

as a

returns in the form of certain real

be advanced

to

of the structure of the

the world of consciousness.Thus in Lacan

to

notion of the infantile

base, but it

logic

to

constitutes the

word of Lagache’s paper and

key

characteristics is the

(. .). Lagache .

says

with

means

of the category of the set, from the idea that we are not

promotion

we set out

that: One of its

of elements, but with

principle of the unitas multiple dealing with isolated

whose parts are themselves structured. Pointing out that every structuralist of the moment in 1959 and 1960 was using the word structuralist to mean something different, Lacan traces his use elements

or

of the word back

sums

to

of the

clari?es

them. He is

set

the elements of the

of it. Lacan agrees with Lévi-Strauss’s basic that which avoids the implications of totality, or

Lévi—Strauss’s

notion

as

sets

quick

to

use

point

out,

however, that that does

have been isolated

not mean

that

summable. He is

equally quick to say that he is interested in the meaning of the set as advanced by the rigor of mathematical theory: “That its parts should themselves be structured” (Ecn'ts, pp. 543—544) would mean “that they too are capable of symbolizing all the rela— tions de?nable for the set, which go far beyond their differentiation and their amalgamation, which are nevertheless inaugural” (p. 544). Lacan continues, pointing out that the elements are de?ned by the possibility of their being placed in terms of sub-sets covering some relation or other de?ned for the set. One of the marks of Lacan’s genius is to have grasped that this pos— sibility has as its essential characteristic that it is not limited by any “natural hierarchy” (p. 544). Furthermore, he suggests that in order to grasp what he is getting at regarding the nature of structure, one best leave aside the term “part.” Lacan refers again to Lagache’s phrasing when he argues that “the psychological?eld is the set of relations of the organism that is not in a situation, nor is there a situ— ation except for an organism.A necessity, which, in the ?nal analysis, is geometri— cal (. .)” (pp. 5, 544). Lacan insists in his early teaching that “structure is not form” and “what is needed is just to cut people’s teeth on a topology, necessitated by structure alone” (p. 544).At this point his emphasis is on the fact that structure is no longer a simple transcendental aesthetics of the imagination, but is reconstituted since the birth of linguistics which de?nes it by signi— fying articulation as such (p. 544). Harkening back to two elements given by Lagache, Lacan adds a third. Lagache claims that ?rst structure critiques natural aspects of a descriptive character. Second, he says, structure resides at set

or are





distance from experience in the

sense

that it relies

on a

theoretical model. Lacan

24

The

logic

of the structure of the

subject

up Lagache’s antinomy by pointing out that structure refers to the “effects that combinatory[—]pure and simple[—]of the signi?er determine

takes

produced” (p. 544). Indeed, in Seminar XX, he argues that structure is Borromean.” By Borromean he means the knotting together of the symbolic, imaginary, and real dimensions bound together by the symptom/sinthome. In adding this third aspect to the meaning of structure, Lacan undoes Lagache’s second criterion. “The distance from experience” of structure vanishes since structure operates, not as a theoretical model, but “as the original machine which directs (in the dramatic sense) the subject in that place” (p. 544). Indeed, struc— ture speaks from our ?eld of experience as the Schema L claims in positing a picture of the mirror-stage logical moment, or as the Schema R claims in posit— ing a picture of the structure of psychosis.12 Lagache’s theory is based on an economico—dynamic point of view, including the organic material and its inter- pretation from which structure supposedly insinuates itself into our experience. Lacan’s metaphor is, rather, of a set of equations of a turbine machine bringing itself to a natural waterfall to produce energy (p. 544). Freud’s genetic criteria can only fail, then. Nor does the thesis of adaptation solve the problems of the beginning of structure given the impasses in post-revolutionary problems. Lagache erred, moreover, in trying to distinguish structure from function in Freud. Once again, seeking a developmental logic, Lagache argued that primary process is pinpointed in the identity of thought to itself and proceeds from the unconscious, while secondary process is aligned with reality, primary process being aligned with perception and the pleasure principle. In this model he comes up with an enlightenment view of consciousness. in the

reality

in which it is

Still, Freud made

no

such

error.

Lacan

stresses

Freud’s insistence that there

differentiated apparatuses in the organism as to any of the systems of his topography. That is, all the systems work together simultaneously and support are no

one

another. In Lacan’s

furthering of Freud’s thought, he pinpoints the dimensions

that intersect and interact in the Borromean chain. engages all four levels

Any along with the jouissance meanings

act

of consciousness

that intersect

at

their

points of overlap.13 To separate out systems as Lagache has done is to fantasize a totality of the organism, Lacan claims. By showing us how partial objects- cause-of—desire (the breast, the feces, the urinary ?ow, the voice, the phoneme, the gaze, the nothing, the imaginary phallus, Ecrits, p. 693) give rise to four

partial drives—the oral, the anal, the invocatory, and the scopic—Lacan depicts a real body sewed together as to its wholeness by an imaginary fantasy of the union of the parts based on a literalization of the outside considered in imaginary opposition to the inside.This is the reduction of the body to its form, its Gestalt.

Indeed, structure itself picks up pieces of its corporal Gestalt and subjugates them to

itself.

conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic, for example, one ?ssures and heterogeneity, into the consistency of the fantasy/reality of the world.Although the tendency is to mask these, to place a veil

Out of the introduces one

makes

The

logic

of the structure of the

subject

25

them—be

they a burp, a cough, a moment of forgetting, a confusion of the linkage of words to images—one can understand their origin if their principle is grasped.When a child hears the mother or someone else saying,“the line is busy,” meaning the telephone line is busy, everyone laughs when the child says her “lion” is busy on the telephone, not seeing that there is an effort to understand language and meaning in linking her imaginary to the symbolic around her. When another child says he will be a bee for Halloween—designating the image that will represent him—and go bzzzzzzz—referring to the symbolic sounds over

he has been

represent the noise the bee makes—and that that sounds like the noise he makes when he goes pee—zzzzzzz—in the real of the biological

given

to

easily miss that he has linked the imaginary to the symbolic and the real to make meaning. The symptom of the Father’s Name is not yet in evidence, but lurks in the wings. Daddy helped him choose his costume and is going to take him trick—or—treating.Whatever the link to the Borromean structure, the Father’s Name signi?er, its “no,” knots the three exigencies together (except in psychosis). It is in this sense that one can speak of the Other as existing. It ex-sists as that which implies a knotting together of forms and words such that cohesion reigns in a supposed lawfulness of the universe. Structure is serious, says

body,

one

may

Lacan, it is serial.I4

Praising Lagache for advancing the thesis that we have made no progress in understanding the nature of consciousness since Freud got stuck in his own impasses, Lacan insists that the organism does not go scot—free. The organism sacri?ces some part of its body in its coming—to-consciousness. This sacrifice occurs

in the social interdiction of full satisfaction of desire.The Other says “no.”

But if one says, not

exist—one

as

does Lacan in his later work, that the Other is

must

still realize that

no

human function is



?ction—does

possible

without

one’s

supposing the linkage of similarities to the difference that marks the Other as law in a given time and place. In Seminar IV15 Lacan lays out the relations of lack to the object that causes desire. The agent of symbolic castration is the real father whose interdictory “no” means that the infant must give up its oneness with the breast and be weaned to the symbolic order cup or glass. This is an imaginary castration (—o). The effect on the body is one of requiring the substitute of language for the loss of the illusion of oneness. Freud’s nephew played with the bobbin reel, saying Fort! Da! (Here! There!) in the effort to cover up his

tears

the illusion of being

one

her gaze and voice,

to

away.16 This

game links the real of a loss of with the mother—the real of anxiety—in proximity to

when his mother walked

the sounds of the

symbolic

order

requisite

language, giving up a

to

image of a spool of thread that becomes a substitute for piece of bodily well—being in the reality of loss. One might say that the infant’s Cry is a cry of anxiety, a moment in the real, a piece of an a?ect whose object is the void place in being itself (0) (S. XX, see the sexuation graph, p. 78; See also S. X). In Seminar XX Lacan places the void—the experience of real loss registered in the moment of the cut between wholeness and the real of its absence—on the feminine side of sexuation, in the place of trauma. and

to

the

26

The

logic

of the structure of the

subject

The Borromean structure

imaginary frustration, the infant loses the symbolic mother’s breast or its substitute gift by way of the gaze or voice.17 That is, the breast is real insofar as the cut away from its reassuring presence marks loss as loss of the object a—any object that proposes itself as that which ?lls up the lack-in-being that its primary loss creates. The imaginary father is the agent of real privation in that his interdiction can destroy the illusion a child has of its place in the symbolic dimension. In Freud’s “Young Homosexual Woman” case, the father’s interdicting gaze causes his daughter—who is courting a young woman of spurious reputa- tion—to leap over a railroad bridge in an effort at self—annihilation, maybe even In the

moment

of

((1)).The body

part she sacri?ces to social interdictions is life itself.18 Unlike Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Rudolph Lowenstein, Lacan does

suicide

not

misrecognize

that Freud

trying

was

to

puzzle

out

the

problem

of what

con-

stituted the ego in “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914) (p. 546).19 Indeed, general explanations of how this ego is constituted are foolish in Lacan’s eyes.

Object—relations theorists, for example, propose that if there is any inconsistency in the infant—mother bonding, the adult will become anxious, harkening back to gaps between islands of oneness which the mother should have provided. Lacan enables us to see that the initial inconsistencies are unavoidable, are of the imagi— nary, symbolic, and real, and that they create the subject as a subject of trauma, not a subject of blessed unity. The only subject that believes in the Oneness— refuses the father’s interdiction—is the psychotic. 2" Lacan wonders “what on earth does this baroque conception have to do with psychoanalysis unless it is to choke back the technique to the point of exploiting the most obscure preju— dices?” (Lagache, p. 546). Daniel Lagache proposes that one can differentiate Freud’s systems one from the other by their physiological functions. Lacan says this is not radical enough. Praising Lagache for getting away from the idealist ideas of the world derived supposedly from consciousness—a world founded on the observation of children—Lacan points out that Piaget has already done that. But for Lacan, before a subject is born, he is already a pole of attributes, of signi?ers in a discourse. Indeed, Lacan says the child before birth, is, a part of the discourse of the Other.There is, then, no what he is “in himself,” as Piaget would have it and

Lagache claims. Rather,“Law covers language, and truth covers speech,” Lacan says (p. 547). The “truth” will later become the alienated lies of semblance a subject advances as “himself.”The subject’s desire is determined by the effects of the signi?er on him or her. Lacan questions Lagache’s idea that before there is any “primary differentiation” of the subject, before there is any cognitive structure, “the subject functions and actualizes himself successively through the needs .One thing that is true is that these functional which awaken and motivate him object relations are not structured, in the sense that the subject and the object are not differentiated” (Lacan, p. 548). For Lagache, Lacan says, such an idea leaves in suspense the signifying usage on which the subject depends. “It is an object as





The

logic

of the structure of the

relation in the real” (p. 548). Here Lacan advances his

principles By

early

use

of the

subject

27

structuring

of need and demand.

need he

demand he

means

means

the basic necessities of survival—food and drink.

the cry for attention which

quickly

becomes the

appeal

By

made

for love. Before there is any cognitive structure, the real begins to structure the infant. Lacan’s point of disagreement with Lagache at this juncture lies in his that the

imaginary, symbolic, and real exigencies allow one to escape psychological ideas such as “the symbiotic participation of the child in the mother [or] the interplay of maturation and apprenticeship” (pp. 548—549). Need

stressing .

..

becomes drive. Need becomes demand, which has the is structured ?rst in the real

as

the infant’s call for

Afterwards, need becomes the symbol of



?lling

structure

of drive. Drive

essential survival needs.

satisfaction of love. It is, then, in



symbolic prematuration that the infant inscribes itself in the discourse of the Other.There is no reciprocal interchange of self and other, of infant and mother. Such a theory does away with what it takes to become a subject of the Other and, indeed, there is no reciprocity at the earliest moments. “The drama of the subject in language is that it is there that he experiences his want—to—be, and it is there that the psychoanalyst would do well to de?ne certain moments of it” (Lacan, p. 654). Images, words, and objects come to the place of desire/lack to ?ll in the hole, to ward off the moment of feeling lack—in—being which manifests itself as a bodily effect. The function of the imaginary here is what object—relations theorists call projection.The symbolic, by contrast, marks out the space Lacan calls the hole, and this occurs by what object-relations theorists called introjection (p. 549). While Lagache ?nds the infant’s (and later the adult’s) relation to the other to be intersubjective—the other as a symmetrical counterpart—Lacan emphasizes his difference with Lagache here. Rather, the subject has to arise out of the signi?ers that cover him or her in an Other who is their repository. There is no ego-subject who pushes back an ego-object. The subject does not take itself as an object. Rather, the subject of desire hides beyond knowledge in the Thing, a concept introduced that year in Lacan’s Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis?‘ The Thing (das Ding) has its origins in philosophy, but is recast by Lacan as that which we elevate through sublimation and, in turn, desire. It has the structure of partaking of the real while being a step away from it, a veiled substitute. Lagache places fading between his ego—object and his subject—object. Lacan points out that, instead, fading occurs when desire is suspended, when the subject is eclipsed in the signi?er and demand and in the ?xation of the fantasy “because the subject himself becomes the cut which causes the partial object to glitter in its ineffable vacillation” (p. 550).

Rethinking the

id

To think of the subject as a cut means to think of her as one with the topology that describes her. In the moment of the cut she is the edge of anxt that occurs

28

The

logic

of the structure of the

subject

the juncture of separation from the gaze or the voice. In part [I of his response to Daniel Lagache, Lacan asks “So where is the Id?” Rather than ?nding a whole at

of ego, id, and superego—bad dialectics says Lacan—as Lagache suggests, Lacan returns to Freud’s impasses in mismatched statements. In seeking to expostulate the structure of the id, Freud claims that it is unorga-

person in



nized, but

at

synthesis

the

time is

same

rediscovers itself therein via the There is, nonetheless,

further in the



indestructible, maintaining the repressed which

compulsion

structure

principles

to

of repetition

(Wiederholungszwang).22

be found in Freud’s

he attributes

to

impasse

if

the unconscious: it does

one

not

reads know

negation. This is true of the id. The id is chaotic, but exists as something pro- grammed from the outside world, from traumata and erotomania. Although Freud corrected his statements about the id from The Interpretation of Dreams23 by de?ning the structure of the drives—postponement, inhibition, representation by means of an opposite—there is still no contradiction between the drives inhabi— ting the id (p. 657).That is, he gives us no logical exclusion of one thing by the other in the id.Yet, there is one further postulation advanced by Freud: the death drives reign in the id.24 But what are the death drives? What is their logic? They have the structure of repetition by which the ?xations are put in place that we, in turn, live from.25 And we repeat because we seek pleasure, paradoxically, via the repetitions signi- fied in the unconscious. One cannot do without the function of the signi?er in explaining Freud. Its properties are its irreducible materiality. Only such materiality will support the coexistence of disorder (in synchrony) and the inde— structibility of this order (in diachrony).26 The id is created in the present time of synchrony while its indestructibility appears in the historical (diachronic) repetition of the moments of its own structuration. The rigor of diachrony owes itself to associations and commutativity. By these functions the signi?er is interchangeable with the ?rst register. One could think of its subsistence as sustainable by connotation. Nonetheless, this consistent chain contains contradic- tory paradoxes—the truth—functionality of a third realm of sense between the being of the organism and the meanings encrusted upon it.27 Lacan argues that from the moment Descartes separated the realms of organism and mind, science has gone ever further in the direction of attributing meta-meanings to pure functions of mentality, while ascribing the organism to pure feelings known as emotions that supposedly take their logic from themselves, rather than from the signi?ers that inscribe meaning as intricated with being and organism. Indeed, when someone says something cruel to another and the other replies “you have kicked me in the gut,” there is no gene or brain structure that cause the moment of bodily twinge of pain experienced in receiving such a hurtful message. Language is the cause. Lacan, brilliantly, argues that real disorganization of elementary drives occurs at random but, then, leaves an order—one, two, three. From this postulate, one can deduce that certain drives may come up missing. The order of the signi?er is that “the notion should be taken as a social link” (S. XX, p. 17). There are,

The

however, discourses that do other is source,

drive

experienced

as

ego,

direction, aim, and

comes

from the

not

make

not as



logic

of the structure of the

signi?er

the id is

or

“reservoir of drives.” “A reservoir, yes, if

terms

of its



mental and

but what is



theory

cognitive—wherein one

so

organic

construct,

does away with the id would be

a a

wishes, that is what the Id is,

it, missives of prayer or denuncia— it from the outside, and if it heaps up there, it is in order to sleep”

reserve,

comes to

drive in

Lacan argues that the energetic status of the and from the experience of the organism via the

simplistic organicism—neuroscienti?c

tion,



object.28

yet in both parts it is inscribed for meaning. Such

even a

29

social link—that of psychosis where the

other. One dismantles

partial objects—cause-of—desire. Thus,

and

subject

(p. 552).We

pray

father. And,

we

produced

in

the Other, asking for love or defending the name-of—the— denounce the other’s name-of—the—father in the same place. to

The

subject’s relation to the signi?er is designated in the death drive. That is, the signi?er is ?xed by the associations that give it a unique meaning for each subject. Lacan calls this the process of alienation (8. X1, ch. 16). One is oneself as an alienated being. Lacan’s

paradoxical logic

Lagache retains Freud’s formulation of the unconscious as knowing “neither negation, nor doubt, nor degree of certainty” (p. 552). But Lagache confuses affirmation and certainty, Lacan says, for certainty must be structured in reference to uncertainty. Paradoxically, Bejahung (af?rmation) can only occur in reference to Ausstossung (negation). That is, if the structure is that of af?rming, for example, “the good breast,” such structuration can only occur insofar as oneness with the primordial other is refused. The breast is good “because the infant loses it and wants to re-?nd it.”The cut—?rst of separation or inter— section, then, of the symbolic father’s castration—ensures that af?rmation be a?irmation by loss. The refusal of castration results in psychosis, in the lack of a primordial Ausstossung. Ausstossung must precede Bejahung in order that Verneinung, or denial, may function.A psychotic person has dif?culty with denial, denial being, rather, the mark of the neurotic subject. Lacan calls the psychotic’s sexual identi?cation that of the pousse-d-la-?zmme—the push towards the Oneness of union with the primordial mother or Woman. In sexuation, the structure of psychosis can be seen as an identi?cation with the feminine side of the sexuation

While

graph.29

the ego that Freud’s drift

Lagache privileges

maintains, rather,

privileging

by arguing

opposite direction, towards bahnungen of pleasure, are judgments.30

went

the id.The ?rst connections,

that the drive disturbs it, Lacan

in the

In other words, judgments are denials, refusals of loss.31 How does the subject ?nd a place, given his being—in-the-drives? Lacan seems to equate the drives with

living language” (p. 554). So quickly is the subject of the drives—the oral, the anal, the scopic, and the invocatory—drenched in language that there seems to “a

be

no

separation between the drive and the words that represent them.32 When

30

The

logic

of the structure of the

subject

the drives appear, they seem out of place, Lacan says. “When on the act, the drives, rather, multiply and the question

language comes in [the issue] would be to know how the subject is going to ?nd himself a place at all” (p. 554). If one feels neglected in the gaze, a representational (Entstellung) affect appears. The spoken words of“see me”—“Got that!”“Listen!”—break the consistency of a smooth symbolic moment. Lacan is concerned not only with what the drives are, but where the drives appear. He answers, in the hole the subject makes for himself—as, for example, at the edge of a moment in the anal drive when control manifests itself as an issue, or anxiety is answered by some compulsion. Freud erred in attributing priority to a judgment of attribution, giving it logical antecedence over negation in which the latter is founded (p. 554). Having listened to philosopher Franz Brentano’s teachings regarding the assimilation of sweetness, the good, Freud decided that Bejahung was primary. From this he developed the theory of an initial condensation of pleasure. Freud later decided that repetition—the death drive—blocked any theory of a primary pleasure prin— ciple (BPP). But Lacan does not throw away the detail of the tiny ?rst judgments of pleasure.These, he said, manifest a combinatory structure (cf. p. 593, Ecrits)33 as he will later say on the side of lalangue or primordial murmurings.There can be no sense of a pleasure without one's having already lost the object that, in retrospect, is thought to have provided that pleasure (S. IV, any experience of the object is based on the loss of the object).The structure is not only invested with meaning, but also with the temporality that will mark desire as the desire for something missing and thought to be ?ndable in time. Lacan calls such af?r— mation an affirmation by juxtaposition connected with an effect of obstruction. The meaning attributed positively to a certain object, nonetheless, moves from positive to negative depending on one’s mottled experience of objects. “This partiality could only refer to a ?eld of language, to be distinguished as the ?eld of what is uttered” (p. 555). While holding her baby does a mother croon “I love you,” or “Hurry up! I’ve got things to do”? With Lacan, one need not choose imaginarily, either/or—a good mother or a bad one. One is confronted, rather, with both utterances coming from the same mother. Seeking to prove that the subject is one of signifying and fading, Lacan com- ments upon the pleonastic “ne,” the form of negation that is prehensile, that exists in an affirmative sentence, yet has no meaning—no negative meaning— other than that of tradition: “je crains qu’il ne Vienne” (Lacan, p. 663). Here the subject is not that of the “I,” but that of the utterance—Lacan’s (cf. Lacan “La troisiéme jouissance”).This grammatical structure—a haste made in the logic of language—has its correlative in unconscious energetics insofar as the fatigue of the subject of neurosis is not primarily a muscular fatigue, but the fatigue of a

dissatis?ed desire. One is faced with the ambivalence of the unconscious, with

an

no

unconscious that knows

time, Lacan

effected

counters

following

revivi?cation

of





no

time. If

one

thinks that the unconscious knows

“that tension entails time and that identi?cation

scansion”

dormant

is

(p. 556). A moment of association produces a signi?er—a scansion. Moments of tension—loss of

The



husband,

at

stake is



nothing

“I do not/ I matter

child, am

an

less

not

logic

of the structure of the

subject

31

argument—fell the subject, knock it for a loop. What is than the interplay of the defense with the drive (p. 557).

...”

of rationalization,

so

often

sour

means

grapes,

etc.

“I do/ It is ...” The defense is

Rather, the defense is of



not a

denial,

an

admission of desire that is put up against the demands of the drives.

The effects of defense

distinguish

the

subject

from its structure—that of the

signi?er—one restores the effects of defense. “We are charged with upholding the magical power of language” (p. 557). One dreams that one has lost one’s purse and is running around lost in the streets of Paris. Both events have occurred in reality, although not at the same time in the same place. One is changing one’s ego identity and the bits and pieces of dream images re?ect this.What does Lacan mean by this To

statement? What

we

effect of

are

saying

suppression of the signi?er, whatever the causes, and were it to produce the sublimation

is that

displacement

it

no

‘Aujhebung’, could ever do more than liberate a reality from the drive which, puny though its part of need may be, would only be all the more resistant for being a remainder. (p. 557) which German translates

If one is lost in one’s desire,

as

displaces this meaning onto a lost purse, being lost in the streets. The parts of signifying meaning—the lack in desire and the demand in drive—come together in a strange, unHegelian, kind of sublation (Aujhebung).The terms of one’s loss also give the terms of being found—?nding one’s ideal self (ego ideal)—in the drives. One seeks refuge from one’s dismissal in the gaze, part of this drive supplying the essence of being—being stabilized in the gaze—at the level of need, the need to survive, to survive the fatigue of a loss in desire, to take as a referent a positive smile from the Father’s Name signi?er. “The original manner of eliding a signi?er, which we are trying to conceive here as the matrix of ‘Vemeinung’, af?rms the subject in a negative manner, while managing the emptiness in which it ?nds its place” (p. 558).The gaze of the Other gives place. In one era women have no place. In a post-civil rights era in the USA women are given a place in what was a masculine symbolic order (cf. ch. 1 in Ragland, The Logic of Sexuation). Going in another direction, one might postulate that insofar as the place of the subject is structurally empty, the mystery of memory is linked to the necessary gathering of oneself together for the gaze of the Other. When symbolic level duties wane, as in retirement, and in old-age institutional centers where the symbolic is marked chie?y by one

meal times, the individuals’ memory also fades. That is, the cut resides in the signifying chain. It is its

most

radical element. It

is that which makes the chain discontinuous rather than smooth and

always

The

32

logic

of the structure of the

subject

85-year-old woman tells the waitress at a restaurant that her daughter lives in Chicago (when the daughter actually lives in a small town in Mississippi), the old woman is not “gaga,” but evincing another imaginary, another symbolic. (Everyone stops, disrupts the chain to laugh and say “but rnmooottther ...”) The older woman’s daughter had lived in Chicago in the past and would like to live there again.The mother also wishes that her daughter lived nearby her in Chicago and so is associating in a way that brings diachrony and synchrony together from a past time, not from the present moment, albeit consistent. When

in

desire for



not



an

different future. Her statement, if taken in Lacanian terms, is

false. It is truth-functional. It

comes

from the

cut.

The

of past— his or her

overlaying

with present ones enables the subject to con?rm subsistence in chain links. The cut, moreover, creates a gap. The gap, like the time

meanings

property of language. Lagache makes the further

cut, is



arguing that the subject “is not distin— guished from the drive, the aim and the object” (p. 558). Rather, for him, the subject is dispersed among these different object relations or their groupings. One ends up with a multiplicity ofWhole—Ones, Lacan maintains. There is a lack of

logic

rigor of moments

in

error

of

argument which comes from a failure to follow the Still, the knower does come together with the known in

Lagache’s

structure.

where the ideal is realized. Indeed,

we

enshrine such

moments

cultur—

“Thanksgiving,” “Christmas,” birthdays, and so on. Lacan asks: “How can one not see that the whole of analytic experiences rises up against this: in the dismemberment it reveals as originary in the combinatory of the unconscious, as well as structural in the dismantling of the drive?” (p. 558). What is the subject, then? It is absent, while still being produced somewhere in the unorganized id. It is the defense one could call natural. Indeed, it is burnt in the ?eld of the drives to better offer other agencies a place to camp.The marks of the subject, then, are repression, denial, fading, signifying re—presentation. ally

An The

and call them

upside-down logic dif?culty

of

theory of structure depends upon a turning upside down and inside out of everything we already know. The judgment of existence founds reality, he says (p. 558). “It can only do this by taking it up from the distortion in which it receives this reality from a judgment of attribution which has already been af?rmed” (p. 558). One must take the signi?ers one is given and one can only take the ones that have been af?rmed, not those that have been foreclosed. Thus, one may have a psychotic who has never affirmed his or her difference—distance—from the primordial mother. “It is the structure of this place which demands that nothingness be at the basis of creation” (p. 559). And the nothingness is quickly attenuated by the objects that present themselves in the cause of desire which marks the subjects who are not psychotic (the psychotic having foresworn desire for demand). And it is to this primordial place ofjouissance that we are invited in later life to purge our woes. understanding

Lacan’s

The

logic

of the structure of the

subject

33

primordial place where the ?rst objects are of the real that Lacan calls the place of “the ignorance of the subject with respect to the real, which gives him [the subject] his condition as essential in our experience, orders psychoanalytic thought to be creationist, to be understood as not contenting oneself with any references to evolutionism” (p. 559). Thus, we come into being as wanting—to—be. Such faith could even be found at the base of the Galilean development of science (p. 559). Indeed, this place does not call for a supreme being. It is from Elsewhere that the impersonal voice of the id comes, from the silence of the drives. For Lagache, the ego is autono— mous. It is intrasystemic.Yet, says Lacan, the ego is never so obvious as when it is serving the law of another, serving that law even in defying it, misrecogniz- ing it. Indeed, the ego takes up residence in the empty place of the subject.The unconscious appears in the meeting of the subject with the narcissistic image. “The subject meets this image in the conditions which make apparent to him that it is usurping his place” (pp. 559—560).The mother who says her daughter is living in Chicago, when the daughter does not, has an image of her daughter as a big-city person who lives in Chicago, New York, Paris, London. The mother’s unconscious has spoken.What non—Lacanian analysts refuse to recog— nize is that the ego is itself a function of misrecognition. The error such analysts make is in believing that analysis can straighten out some sort of curvature of the the ego. Lacan describes the ego thus: “the cyclopian egg. It is but a shell double bar that branches, self—like, from its curve, indicating its vacuity, and reminding us of the piggy-bank to which we have already likened it” (p. 561). Freud argued that a repression takes the place of a judgment. He even places Venuegfung (which becomes Lacan’s foreclosure) there.Yet, Lacan points out that a judgment takes the place of a repression. Sublimations reign supreme, libidinal- izing all of language with the real in which they were ?rst drenched. The ?rst structures of enunciation are not preconscious verbal links dredged up from the unconscious, but the linkages of Gestalt: the form of a breast, the timbre of a voice, the tenor of a phoneme, the ghost of a gaze, the shadow of anxiety in the social gaze, or the effort at control of something, reminiscent of the anal func— tion. But it is not the form of the imaginary at stake. It is, rather, the imaginary dragged through the real. One does not remember these ?rst moments, although they condition what appears constantly through re—memoration. The symbolic The

structure

of this



be translated without

structures of the unconscious could

never

forms,

given symbolism.

some structure

inherent

to a

Once



some common

form is

given the

the ego ideal of unconscious formation. In trying to differenti- ate ego from ego ideal, Lagache spoke of its antinomy to the super ego/ego ideal (p. 562).The persona, the ego, is a mask, Lacan says: ego, it settles in

as

experience that the mask be separated into two halves that are not symmetrical expressed in an image, that the mask combine two pro?les, whose unity can only be sustained so long as the mask remains closed, even as the discordance encourages its opening. It is

an

elementary

datum of

our



The

34

logic

of the structure of the

subject

being, if there about the persona?

But what about

face, what

is

nothing behind? And if there is only



(p. 562) Lagache tries to understand the difference ego by citing what is observable in analysis: In the relation of the

subject

to

in accordance with the law that

between the ego ideal and the ideal

the other of

authority, please leads

the ego ideal, the subject to

enjoins to be displeased as the price of obeying the commandment; the ideal ego, at the risk of displeasing, can only triumph by pleasing in spite of the commandment.

(p. 562) please the analyst over telling the truth about his failures in his ego ideal aspirations. Lagache would have it that the other as ideal ego is the model on which the ego ideal bases its aspirations. Lacan refers, instead, to the Schema he developed in the ?rst year of his Seminar at Sainte—Anne Hospital to try and show the structural functioning of the ideal ego in relation to the ego ideal.34 His model is optical. He notes that an object placed at the center of a curvature of a spherical mirror produces an image which is symmetrical to it and which is a real image (p. 563). In the inverted bouquet optic, the desiring subject (3), located on the plane of the symbolic and imagi- nary, as castrated (—0), is structured by its own ideal ego in the place of the vase with a bouquet in it——serving as the object a—and intersected via the mirror by the Other. This unconscious formation—the ego ideal—is what appears in the conscious realm.This period of thinking represents Lacan’s topological onto- logy which focused on the gaze and later in his teaching dropped any notion of ontology to stress the real, the drives,“sense,” and jouissance. The links that appear by analogy, says Lacan, refer to the (intra—)subjective structures as such and represent the relation to the other, making it possible to distinguish the double incidence of the imaginary and the symbolic (p. 563). He stresses the importance of the distinction to be made between the symbolic and the imaginary; the subject speaking symbolically while conveying the imagi- nary, but knowing nothing about what is betrayed in an illusory ideal, nothing at all. In the inverted schema, the vase is not sitting on the box, it is inside it. The

seeks

The ?owers

remain

subject realizing

With

to

top of the box, while the container goes inside the box. the ideal ego and the ego ideal, the subject is like a person within order standing on the edge of the spherical mirror, trying to on

regard to the imaginary see the real image.What she sees, instead, is an illusion, a virtual image, a castra— tion.The real image comes from the plane mirror and is ?rst conceived in the Other, from the perspective of the symbolic. Another example of learning whole images in the imaginary domain which is, then, named in the symbolic, is found in Oliver Sack’s recounted examples of

The

logic

of the structure of the

subject

35

people blind from birth being given sight by laser surgery. Once given sight, many quickly became depressed, some committing suicide. They could not see anything but blurs, and were far from conceiving a tree as a whole thing.They saw holes everywhere.35 Such a logic sets up the subject as a calculating machine of desire, moving around within the Other, seeking to say the “right thing,” do the “right thing,” changing horses in midstream in order to “?t in.” The one who does not—as, for example, in Muhammad Ali’s refusing to be drafted in the Vietnam War because no Vietcong had ever called him “nigger”— goes to jail. He has broken the law of the symbolic sphere, ?xed in stone by words and penalties become legal conventions (but in Ali’s case overturned in appeal to the Supreme Court on the grounds of“conscientious objection”). The illusions by which we live in a universe of seemingly whole objects, only of these individuals

if the eye is situated inside the cone. Distance and non—wavering maneu- vering on the part of the image aid us in believing in its consistency. Certainly, occur

techniques of contemporary ?lm play with this imaginary propensity by making ?lm images wavy and then receding, to place another truth in view. The vase is inside the box while its real image—the ?owers—are placed on top of the box. The ?owers are something like the object a, placed in the Other. In order to see her real image in space—to which the virtual space engendered by a plane mirror corresponds point by point—the subject of the symbolic must see from within the image that delimits the possibilities of illusion (p. 564). Yet, the seeing requires castration, experiencing lack such that things are not taken as whole. Still, we see/think/live by illusions. At one point, Lacan placed the unconscious within the imaginary. So necessary is that dimension that it enables us to see by consistent wholes with an inside and an outside, giving us the illusion of mastery of the world of things. The function in play, the logic according to which we live, is that of misrecognition. The blind people who could only see blurs and holes saw more truly than we who see a world of con— sistent living matter. Moreover, this logic is taught in mirror-stage illusions of identi?cation where a unary trait is taken to be whole. Lacan’s dif?cult point is that the part is inseparable from the whole. He refers to Cantor’s trans?nite number, the realization that any part will ultimately be discernible as a part of the

the whole it makes up and vice versa.There is no meta-subset of the set of the whole.Yet, each of us is the set of the whole and its parts that make us up.

Misrecognition Lacan goes

on to

Of the ego. We

and the ego call the function of

misrecognition

the

crux

of the formation

bodily consistency via the spectral image, some time between the ages of six and eighteen months. This creates a perceptual pre— maturation in humans due to a discordance in neurological development.Thus, assume



the optical subordination of the image i(a)—ideal ego—to the ego ideal [(A) is

literally, but as that which supports an analogous imaginary Subordination. In the synthesis of resolution at stake here, one ?nds intimidator not to

be taken

36

The

logic

of the structure of the

relations that introduce

Thus, the i(a) is

anteriority. the subject

The

at

the

vase

subject

principle of false mastery and fundamental alienation. beginning of the interior vase model in order to mark its a

is contained in the

box, which re?ects the meager

access

reality of his body. He has no access to it on its inside at the limit where he imagines it as inside. The folding of this image as if in an envelope, then, stitched around the rings of ori?ces, is like a glove turned inside out (p. 566). Lacan calls it an “obscure intimacy.” “The analytic process, far removed from such techniques, gives a scansion to the libidinal progress using accents that bear on the body as container and on its ori?ces” (p. 566). How does the body perceive the image i(a) at all? The answer is by way of the other, represented in the model by the ?owers outside the box. If one likes art (but is not an artist, nor has ever been trained in any study of art) and secretly—unconsciously, even—considers oneself an expert on art, it is not surprising to ?nd that such a subject competed with a sibling to be an artist when young. The older identi?cation with artists, dead or alive ?lls the lack—in—being around the signi?er artist. If one is a Catholic mother (or Jewish, or English, etc.) has

and believes

to

as an

the

article of faith that she is

one

of the best mothers around, she

being to the misrecognition that makes up her ego ideal. If she calls the son who catalyzes sibling rivalry, “evil, hateful,” saying to him “I wish you were dead. I am going to kill you with a gun standing up,” she will blame this ?ve—year old child for things that go awry with her other children. The only chance she has of breaking out of her misrecognitions is to be shown the truth by another, outside her purview. But she would then betray the lie in the family structure in her own signi?ers, signi?ers that intersect the symbolic with the imaginary and tell her she is a great Mom.We believe we are who the myths the Other tells us we are. And this incrustation of the Other onto being and identi?cations is experienced as a castration, a division, as a learning what to do/be as being Other. That human infants experience a perceptual prematuration compared to other animals due to a discordance in neurological development and the building up of perception via the real, symbolic, imaginary, and the symptom makes humans dependent on the outside world for feeling a sense of being. In his Seminar on Anxiety Lacan talks about the importance in the jubilatory mirror—stage moment of assuming identi?cation with the body image as a moment of turning from the mirror to look at the other, the adult, who is holding the infant up to see herself in the mirror.As we said earlier, this return is a gesture so basic to the scopic drive and to perceptual reality that it continues throughout life (L’Angoisse, Nov. 28, 1962, p. 50).The ?owers in the optical model represent the objects with which we identify, the objects that enable the subject to perceive the image of its own ideal ego, the i(A) taken from others. The important point here is that even though the ?owers are but partial objects, the part is mistaken for the whole. Object-relations theorists miss the very essence of their discovery in mistaking the partial character of images for a totality. Indeed, object—relations theorists take the mother to be reality itself, as is the infant.They are bound, then, by a simple will

not

link the truth of her

The

intersubjectivity

that

they

think

can

logic

be studied

of the structure of the

empirically, as

37

subject

if the role of obser-

vation enabled the

such

whether

as

looks

experimenter to see from a meta—distance and ?gure out things the mother is good or bad in terms of the number of times she

her infant,

at

imaginary Despite such

some

cuddles her,

or

scale established

by

or

talks

the

to

her. Bad mothers fail in

psychological

terms

of

observer.

holistic theories, Lacan says,

presumed organic harmony has always had trouble when it comes to putting desires in order. And we do not believe that Freud emancipated our views on sexuality and its aims,just so that analysis could add its own mumbo jumbo to the efforts of secular moralists to bring

it

seems

to

us,

that

man’s desires back

to

the

norms

of his needs.

(pp. 566—567) Nonetheless, transitivism,

antinomy of images I’(a) and i(a) resolves itself in a constant merging of one with the other via identi?catory traits that non— genetic or biological conditions for survival of the species. Lacan

the a

Lacanians call

ofjouissance that we evince in order to connect ourselves to the world.36 Through such a transitivism the Ego—Ideal—Ego is produced and reified, “permitting well-de?ned zones and ?efdoms within their complex” (p. 567).Yet, Lacan has no concept of a healthy or unhealthy ego, meant to be corrected via the reality paradigm of the analyst’s reality Ego. Rather, the early Lacan says psychoanalysis best centers itself in the symbolic. From there it can make a conquest of the analysand’s unconscious, the advent of her history, and the recognition of the signi?er via the medium of speech. The mother who calls them the marks

swears

she is the world’s best mother talks

year—old

son.

This

sets

off alarm bells of

on a

and

on

about the evil of her ?ve—

gap between her ego ideal and the

happening in the symbolic for a Lacanian analyst. It’s ignored in favor of some imaginary siding with her or her

truth of what’s

words in



to

be

who is the best parent. It is the mother’s ideal image of herself.

divorce battle

everything

to

Reshaping

over



case

not

just

husband

of harm that

owes

the ego

It is, then, via the

signi?er that analysis reshapes the imaginary status of the ego. Lagache refers to a fading of the Ego-subject whose noesis (intellectual or perceptual grasp) is abstract. Lacan points, rather, to a fading phenomenon Connoted by the structural effect which constitutes the subject in an elision of the signi?er. The two-year-old who is learning to represent the world via the alphabet pronounces “k” as cake. He likes cake. He elides himself as a perfect pronouncer of his abc’s in bringing forth a piece of desire into the alphabet Song (“h, i, j, Kake,” etc). The point about the ego idea] is that it occupies a place in the symbolic from which it was formed. And from that place, it is hooked up to the ego’s imaginary—ideal ego—coordinates. Lacan goes so far as

38

to

The

of the structure of the

logic

claim that it

was to

show such

of id—ego-superego. Freud the id and autonomous

to

to

“duty the

can

structure



depicted

the ego

that Freud as

wrote

connected

via the superego. He in

no

to

his second

topology

the unconscious via

way meant to

depict

an

object—relations theorists have come to see it.What he tries in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”37 is how the identify with an evil leader.]acques-Alain Miller shows us how

ego

understand

ego ideal

society

subject

as

and the drives” coalesce in identi?cation

group.38 The

answer

also

resonates

in the ego—to—ego connection of with the identi?cation with an idealized

of beliefs in the name—of-whose—father

set

Lacan is amazed that Freud’s careful can

signi?er one speaks. thought regarding how

arise and be successful because of group support can,

somehow

an

evil Fiihrer

then, be interpreted

as

strong, autonomous, healthy ego. Freud’s contribution to “civilization and its discontents” has been reversed by such International

producing



Psychoanalytic Association analysts.

though an analyst of this sort takes his that such practice is not “apt to diminish

Even

be the idea], Lacan says the function of speech among the determinants own

ego

to

we

seek for the ultimate

source

subjectivation” (p. 567). In his early symbolic dimension topology Lacan designates the source of speech as the Other, the place which corresponds in the spherical vase graph to the real space on which the virtual images superimpose39 themselves “behind the rnirror.”And the infant ?xes his place there on the basis of some “I.” Lagache errs in thinking the distance between the ego and the other is a matter of simple intersubjectivity. But the child could not identify with itself in a mirror by a jubilant assumption of the image there if this image had not already been portrayed to it in the Other via the other. The identi?cation with the mirror image is that of a third moment of logical structuration.The Other who ?rst provided the basis for a body image may be absent at the moment the infant identi?es self with a mirror image.The infant asserts its being with the anteriority of a limit—that of the whole body—assured by the discourse, in that signifying reserve of attributes where the subject makes himself a space. The clinical rami?cation of this theory is that it creates the illusion of the mother as a reality, a whole person with positive or negative attributes. Such an analyst sees an analysand’s problems in adolescent or adult life as caused by the mother’s not having made a consistently good bonding with her child, for example. The analysand is said to have fallen into neurosis, as if the attachment bond were a real and consistent ?ber that would support one throughout life if it had been put in place. And, indeed, one can understand attachment theory in relation to the imaginary, the real, and the body. However, in such a theory as it stands in Anglophone thought, no inconsistency would ever insert itself. The irregularities and discontinuities of the real, symbolic, and imaginary do not impact on this imaginarized picture of a good or bad mother, a theory whose shadow is to be found in Melanie Klein’s argument that a good or bad breast of

lies

at

the heart of whether

mothering attentions (pp. 568—569).

in



person becomes

question

are

nothing

healthy

more, says

or

neurotic. Indeed the

Lacan, than anonymous

The

have said, the

logic

of the structure of the

subject

39

signi?ers, itself an absence.The inverse face of the subject’s representing itself by a signi?er is the subject as fading in the moment of its loss of place as established in the Other and in the drives.Yet, the Other is not complete within itself (Q). As I

subject

is constituted in

an

elision between

two

Moreover, it is inconsistent in its re—creation of a given subject, while the drives are originally made up of the cut (0) of loss that includes the void as itself a

signi?er: recognize this emptiness as the thing which is nearest, and even to hollow it out again in the lap of the Other, by making his cry resound there? He will prefer, rather, to re?nd [in the Other] the marks of response which had the power of turning his cry into a call. (p. 569)

[the subject]

How is he

Originary marks,

unary

traits,

to

are

highlighted through

the stroke of the

“It is the constellation of these emblems that constitutes for the ideal”

(p. 569).

Other

to

One ?nds

obtain

some

imaginary and can ideal eg0.The function

oneself in the

mirage of the

signi?er.

the ego tilt the mirror in the

subject

of this

optical

model

image of how the relation to the mirror and the capture of the ideal ego draw the subject into the ?eld where he hypostasises himself in the ego ideal. Ironically, it is the upside—down vase in the mirror re?ection which gives the real image that is grasped in the gesture of turning around. Here Lacan aims to prune back the imaginary, to emphasize, rather, the desire that works in a metonymy of signifying repetitions. The hysteric, he reminds us, retains her desire as unsatis?ed.That is, given that the lack—in—being is in the place of conscious agent of perception for the hysteric, she will always be lacking—-still desiring—in having failed to place the identi?cation with a solid gender mode in the position of subject.40 For the obsessional, desire is impossible. He cannot give up his primordial ?il?llment by the mother in order to substitute other(s’) desires for his own.When an obsessional parcels out his or her day by the clock— We will eat dinner at 7:00 on the stroke—he tries to enshrine desire by catching it and codifying it. He or she is not free to cope with the other’s desire for a “play it by ear” time for dinner. Thus, desire is impaled on the clock, as is any jouis— sance of choosing a rhythm of the stomach as one of many rituals. In phobia, the object a acts as a weapon, that which will keep desire from disappearing. In the perverse structure, the subject tries to ensure sexual enjoyment by the use of a fetish, which becomes an “absolute condition of desire” (p. 571). Only a certain kind of underwear or stiletto heels will bring about desire.The act of sex becomes the antithesis of spontaneity and celebration. is

to

The

give

an

object



The point is that the a is a part of any structure from the outset. It is selected from among the body’s appendages as an index of desire and, thereby, is already,

40

of the structure of the

logic

The

subject

in Lacan’s mathematical terms, the exponent of function.The function in

sublimates the the level of

object

a even

before it exercises its

own

question

function; that is, it raises

absence the “it is” which has

nothing to say, except that this absence comes from where it speaks: Ca parle. The object a is, then, the id, a speaking id. Sublimation becomes an action of primordial repressions, which are named: “Take the cup, not the breast or bottle. Go play with your Lego. Mommy can’t be here watching you all the time. Listen to your music box. Mommy can’t sing all night.” Later, when the adult becomes an a?cionado of opera, she may to

well

remember the ?rst

not

But her

an

ear

voice. The before he

has been

subject

prepared

was

for

compact disk. certain sublimated attachment to the singing

she heard a

is abolished in

one

wanted

which he ?nds

taught

to



if he

wants

the radio

or on a

into the void—

substitute function.That is, the

subject

reify himself in terms of whether “The subject is called to a rebirth in

desire,

(or not) before his birth. out

on

function—fading, falling

realize himself in desire in

can

desires what he has been he

tune

to

what he desires





.This is the kind of truth that

brought to light with the invention of analysis” (pp. 571—572). One daughter may “want” to become a good cook and a mother, while her sister wants only a career. Each desires what the Other has taught her to desire. The life quest of the mother/cook is to complete a doctorate and accede to an Freud

elevated

position in a university. The life quest of her sister is to marry and have a child (as well as to exhibit her masterful cuisine).We want what is wanted for us, but we also want what we were taught not to desire.And, at that point, analysis comes into play, since repetitions of ideal ego behavior and ego ideal fantasies imposed on us prevent us from ful?lling the desires we were taught were not licit.Analysis “is a ?eld in which the subject has above all to pay with his person for the ransom of his desire.Whereby psychoanalysis calls for a revision of ethics” (p. 572). In this ethics, transgression of licit and illicit desires comes into play. Not only are our desires qua “identity” in question, but also our desires based on having assumed a sex in terms of roles to be played.What, then, should the end of analysis aim for? First, one must deal with the phallic ?inction of the lost signi?er. In other words, we have already sacri?ced a part of being sexed to the requirements of the phallic castration (if we are not psychotic). If one identi- ?es away from the primordial real and toward the restrictions and masquerades of the

(cf.

symbolic, one

Seminar

tion

has identi?ed away from the feminine toward the masculine

XX, ch. 7, the sexuation graph, p. 78). It is

spoken

between the mother and child, herself as

symbolic

in the name—of—the—father’s to

her

imaginary phallus—that is, his

object

Woman The

as

a,

<I>(a)

or

her identi?cation

?(—¢)

of woman’s desire

holes in the Other

phallus

are

to

though he wants to object of his fantasy.41

even

the beloved

?lled

which could be

by

realm

forbidding

means

or

that which

be the

being the mother’s phallus phallus that will possess the

primordial

the woman’s illusion of a

being

his

sacri?ce

that the

represented by

as

castra-

oneness

this demand that the infant sacri?ces

ful?lls the mother’s desire.The male is asked as

this “no,” this

to

baby,



job,

cuts

having

or



that ?rst

the

lover

create

imaginary who gives

The

glamour

to

her

as

logic

the

particular phallic signi?er phallus, a position he must

believe he is the

subject

41

is constituted

so as

of the structure of the

he is.A

man

subject of desire (1ack).A woman is constituted to believe that she lacks the phallus and, in this sense, must ?nd objects to ?ll up the lack. At the end of an analysis, she will have analyzed the imaginary components of the objects and signi?ers she has taken on to ?ll up that primordial void. She will have gained identi?cation with desired phallic traits, while the man will have lost identifying with being the phallus she lacks. to

This is, indeed, the

analysis.

For

Freud,

manhood, while



reverse

“Analysis Terminable

at

and Interminable”42 that

feels castrated in relation

wants to

end

to an

take

on

analysis,

phallic

to

an

other

men

he himself advances in

the end of even the best

while

a woman

saw

registered

it

as a

failure. One

the end of analysis

as

the

analysis

eschews castration

attributes. For Lacan this end would be

while Freud

however, that the later Lacan tion with his



would become the

structure

and

become

of what Freud recommended for the end of

Lacan maintains that Freud discovered the

a man

to

imaginary phallus to gain his would have forsaken her phallic attributes. Nonetheless,

man

a woman

forsake



must

analysand’s

successful

remember, identi?ca-

her sinthome. In Lacan’s words,‘“the function (I) of the lost

signi- ?er lead[s] us to this end of analysis of which Freud, in castration, bequeathed us the aporia”43 (p. 572). Daniel Lagache leaves out of his ?eld the end of analysis regarding castration. Lacan denotes Lagache’s failure to understand the subject of the unconscious in personalist terms. Lacan concludes his response to Lagache by pointing out that nothing less than the questions of existence and the intellect are at stake. He refers to Immanuel Kant’s proposition that there are two agencies wherein the subject can see the heteronomy of his being ?gured: “‘the starry sky above him and the moral law within’” (p. 572).The conditions under which such a contemplation is possible have changed, Lacan says: .



or



The in?nite

spaces have

paled

behind the little letters,

more

reliable for

supporting the equation of the universe, and the only say in the matter [of] which we are willing to admit, apart from that of our scientists, is that of any other inhabitants who might address signs of intelligence to us whereby the silence of these spaces has lost its terror. @. 572) —

There

are no concrete

places

of heaven

or

hell

to

which

ascends upon be found within, at the site our

spirit

only concrete and in?nite space is to of the void place in being whose encounter causes anxiety. Myths of every variation abound from culture to culture to explain away the empty spaces— the holes in the Other—people generally ?nd unbearable. Even now, in the USA, it has been “discovered” that people playing the stock market look for reliable patterns on which to base their decisions.When these patterns change, they dump their stock. Brainwaves have been measured for consistency and death. The

42

The

logic

of the structure of the

subject

discontinuity and it is argued, then, that the brain itself is programmed for

reliability.

The

for

liability can be found demarcated by Lacan’s “little letters,” his mathemes. In the mirror—stage structure, the programming for reliability comes from dependence on the other44 (and the signi?ers from the programming

Other which inscribe belief around Man is inhabited

this

way.And

these

the

by

given Father’s Name).



that gave him his being, “hominized” in have been on this planet since prehistory (p. 572).

structures

structures

thing is true for the moral law.Why is that so? For the same reason that we pass from language to speech, he proposes.This is enigmatic. We pass from the language of the Other to our individual uses of it in speech. Indeed, de Saussure made a distinction between language (1e langage) and speech (la parole). But Lacan is innovative in arguing that there is a progression to be made from written language (le langage) to spoken language (the parlétre who speaks also from lalangue). The reverse is usually considered to be true. Lacan points out that we make the same kind of progression from mirror—stage obliviousness to the Other to accepting castration—“no”/ the lack-in-being—as Lacan says that the

same

moral deference made



to

the Other in which

ego is “the voice of conscience.” Before it is

Tablets of the

people

But, the tablets

at

is

located.Thus, the Super—

law, it is the voice of authority. The

Sinai in biblical times

came

?rst from the voice of God.

?rst, the murmurings that will become the Voice of law.

come

Otherwise, the people name

one

at

Sinai would

of God.That which is written

of

speech itself. One sounding through).

starts out

not on

have known what

was

uttered in the

the tablets of Sinai is, indeed, the laws

with the laws of persons, of the per-sona

What arises from these Laws of how

people

are to treat one

(the

another? An ethic

arises. But the ethic in

play quickly becomes silence, not out of fear, but out of desire. We honor one another by keeping at bay sexual thoughts and feelings, Violent and aggressive thoughts and feelings. Paradoxically, the “chatty route” of analysis leads one through the paths of silence to the place of desire. The aim of analysis is to extricate the ego from its being lost in the paths that mark the way with desire on one side and law on the other. “Compared with that game, humanism is but a dilettante profession” (p. 573).What is knowledge, then, if it is caught somewhere among law, desire, and the ego? Lacan looks at the word noscit and to ignosit (to be ignorant of) to show that the spelling makes its points by using false pre?xes to mean non—knowledge.Yet, forgetfulness consumes pardon.We are forgiven for not knowing, not remembering, never stopping to think that such action concerns the unconscious. Indeed, the verb for dying (nescit) leads us to consider negation as only a feint, negation being but a mask of ?rst persons (p. 573).

Notes 1

jacques—Alain Miller, Les réponses du réel, Seminar of 1983—1984. Given in the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of Paris, Saint Denis. Unedited Seminar.

The





4 5

Jacques—Alain Miller,

“Profane

logic

of the structure of the

Illuminations,” lacam'an ink,

No. 28

subject

43

(Autumn 2006):

10—25; cf. p. 18. Jacques Lacan, “Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: ‘Psychoanalysis and the Structure of the Personality?” Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 647—684, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), pp. 543—574.Translations of the Ecrits are my own. I have provided Bruce Fink’s page numbers to his translation of the Ecrits for the interested English reader. Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on Sexuality” (1905) SE,VII pp. 125—245. Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (1960), Ecrits, trans. by Bruce Fink (NewYork: Norton, 2006),

pp. 673—702; cf. p. 693. 6 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique

of Psychoanalysis (1954—1955), 7



9 10

11

12 13

ed.

by Jacques-Alain Miller,

trans.

by Sylvana Tomaselli

(New York: Norton, 1988), cf. the Schema L, p. 109. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book X: Anxiety (1962—1963), trans. by Cormac Galligher, Seminar of Nov. 28, 1962, p. 35, Le séminaire, livre X: (1962—1963), Angoisse, text established by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2004). Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Experience” (1949); and “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis” (1948), Ecrits, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006): pp. 75—81 and 82—101. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre V: Les formations de l’inconsa'ent (1956—1957), text established by jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1998). Ellie Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1995); cf. ch. 6. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar: Boole XX: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge (1972—1973), ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller, trans. with notes by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998); cf. ch. X. Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” (1957—1958), Ecrits, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 462. jacques Lacan,“La troisie‘me,” Lettres de l’école Freudienne, Bulletin of the EFP, 16 (1975): 178—203.

by Jeffrey Mehlman in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 28—54. 15 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre I V: La relation d’objet (1956—1957), text established by Jacques—Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1994), p. 249; forthcoming as The Object Relation, trans. by Alexandra Lyn Roche. 16 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), SE, 18: 3—64. 17 Jacques—Alain Miller, Silet, Seminar given in the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII, Saint Denis, 1994—1995. Unedited Seminar; cf. also Ellie Ragland, “The Voice and the Gaze,” Reading Seminar X, ed. by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (New York: SUNY Albany, 1995). 18 Ellie Ragland,“The Physical Nature of Trauma: Freud’s Dora, theYoung Homosexual Woman and the Fort! Da! Paradigm,” Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Memory, ed. by Linda Belau and Peter Ramadovic (New York: Other Press, 2002) pp. 75—100. 19 Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism:An Introduction (1914),” SE, 14: 67—104. 20 Ellie Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1995); cf. ch. 2. 21 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959—1960), ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller, trans. by Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1986). 22 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), SE, 18: 1—64. 23 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation qf Dreams (1900—1901), SE, 4—5: xi—752. 24 Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id” (1923), SE, 19: 12—59. 14

Jacques Lacan,“Seminar

on

‘The Purloined Letter’,”

(1956),

trans.

44

The

logic

of the structure of the

subject

Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1995), cf. ch. 5 on the “Death Drive.” Ellie Ragland, “Stealing Material: The Materiality of Language According to Freud

25 Ellie

26

and Lacan,” lacan and the Human Sciences, ed. by Alexandre Leupin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), pp. 59—105.

27

jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book VII: The Four Fundamental Concepts (1964), ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1979), cf. chs. 16 and 17.

28 29

30 31

32 33 34 35

36

37

Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and TheirVicissitudes” (1915), SE, 14: 111—140. Ellie Ragland, The Logic of Sexuation: From Aristotle to Lawn (New York: SUNY Albany, 2004), p. 80. Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895), SE, 1: 281—397. Hyppolite’s Commentary on Freud’s ‘Verneinung’,” Ecrits, trans by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), pp. 318—333. Jacques—Alain Miller, “The Drive is Speech,” trans. by Kirsten Stolte, Umbr(a), vol. 1 (1997): 15—33. Jacques Lacan, “In Memory of Ernest Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism,” Ecrits, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 593. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique (1953—1954), ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller, trans. by john Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988). Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistoole His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tbles (New York:Touchstone, 1998). jacques-Alain Miller, Les divins details, Seminar given analysis, University of Paris VIII at Saint—Denis

in the

in

Department

of

1989. Unedited

Psycho-

Seminar;

published in Spanish, forthcoming in French. Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921), SE,

18:

88-145.

of the Freudian Field, vol. 6, no. 1/ 2 (Spring/Fall 1992): 5—15. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar ofjacques Lacan, Boole II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Tizchnique of Psychoanalysis (1954—1955), ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Sylvia Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 109. Ellie Ragland,“The Hysteric’s Truth,”_]acques Lawn and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Re?ections on Seminar XVII, ed. by Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 69—87. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book V (1956—1957): Desire and the Interpretation of Desire, unedited Seminar; cf. also Shoshana Felman, ed. of Literature and Psychoanalysis:

38 Newsletter 39

40

41

The Questions of Reading Otherwise, Yale French Studies, nos. 55—56, 1977. 42 Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and lnterminable” (1937), SE, 23: 209—254.

Ragland, “Lacan,]acques,” Feminism and Psychoanalysis:A Critical Dictionary, ed. by Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 206. jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954—1955), ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Sylvana Tomasellj (New York: Norton, 1988), cf. the schema from p. 243.

43 Ellie 44

2 SOME REFLECTIONS ON LACAN'S THEORY OF DISCOURSE STRUCTURES AS SET OUT IN ”TO IAKOBSON”

Discourse

as a

social link

language are marked by an enigmatic something, the more than language in language that Lacan called an excess or limit point in jouissance. This excess—the object a—is a concrete ?ller to loss, paradoxically marking the fact that something that was there has been lost. And the knowledge of loss appears in any of three forms ofjouissance, all produced as responses of the body: 1) as a battery of signi?ers; 2) as pleasure or displeasure that mark corporal limits; 3) as the shocks we get in clinging to our symptoms making a bon-heur (happiness) out of a malheur.l Suddenly we have a different Lacan than the Lacan of the signi?er, for to equate jouissance with affect or feelings prioritizes the body as agent of its own causes. Rather than the “body” produced by the real, symbolic, or imaginary inscribed on the organism, Lacan took this age—old mind/body problematic and developed psychoanalytic logic, teachable by reference to topological models of the Borromean chain, as well to other mathematical formalizations. As a mathematical knowledge of the real, topology itself draws “pictures” ofhow body, language, and world co-exist, intertwined in contradictory ways, that can be explained logically all the same. Although we are more or less familiar with the imaginary and symbolic dimensions in Lacan’s teaching, one can better understand his topologized struc— ture of the subject if one grasps what he means by a surplus in jouissance, taken as an enigmatic, albeit decipherable, writing of impasses in and on the body, a writing that joins the effects of language—desire, trauma and jouissance—to the body by the symptom (sinthome). The real, symbolic, and imaginary are knotted (or not) to produce an order of the particular—the sinthome, which tells the story Most

uses

of how

tity

to



of

mother’s unconscious desire refers her infant’s

the

signi?er

for



Father’s Name

as

questions of sexual iden— represented in the paternal metaphor.

46

Lacan’s

theory

of discourse structures

Here Lacan writes her desire

as

coming

from her unconscious attitude

to

her

person’s life is predetermined by how language and identi?cations “write” the subject as “subject” of desire and ofjouissance. Lacan spoke of lalangue to show a primordial murmuring or bab— bling of language which gradually shapes a person’s discourse by aligning social myths of the symbolic with a sense of identity in the imaginary, both orders own

castration. The way the orders intersect in



interpreting (elaborating) the traumata of the real that Lacan called the a priori e?ects—the pre—specular Ur—lining of the subject—that give rise to desire in the ?rst place.2 The real of an excess in jouissance—surplus value—appears as the sinthome; something that does not work smoothly. And this excess functions continually to destroy illusions of unity and autonomy in the imaginary dimen— sion of seemingly consistent identi?cations and the closed symbolic system of grammatical language and cultural conventions. In the realm of causality, there is neither coherence of nor correspondence to some a priori essence of selfhood, desire, text, or methodology, neither in philosophy or psychoanalysis, which would explain what drives us to BE and DO. Rather, desire shows how people seek enjoyment, in ways that de?ne structures derived from how the phallus is inscribed for sexual difference (or not): neurosis (hysteria and obsession), psychosis, perversion, or the normal/nor—méle which Lacan called ordinary paranoia in the 19305 and the basic hysteria fundamental to all subjects in 1945.Although traits of all these ways of enjoying persist in all ways of writing desire, such clinical diagnostic structures are ultimately decipherable as precise relations between the subject of desire, (3), the excess in jouissance (a), and the ?eld of language (SI and 82). Moreover, even if a subject changes something in psychoanalytic treatment, changes the way she enjoys by reconstituting her desire, she will not be “cured” of her structure of desire, only freed up in terms of what she does with her symptoms.What can be changed is desire, the satisfactions one desires, the way one names oneself, the jouissance that blocked desire and can be transformed by new identi?cations. Discourse, for Lacan, makes a social link.3 Desire, language, the other, and the limit point in jouissance come together to produce the world as one links oneself to it.While the psychotic subject will be in language, he or she does not use language in order to make a social link, to connect to the other. Rather, this person speaks his or her thoughts—what Jacques—Alain Miller calls one’s partner.4 Those inscribed in the discourse structures modify their own thoughts to try to please the other, repeat their sinthomes, attain jouissance. But the psychotic seeks to control the other’s jouissance and thought alike. Unlike other discourse theories that posit whole units—self, text, letter, and so on—Lacan’s theory of a topological “structuring” of the unconscious, shows the signifying chain as myriad units of an interlocking Borromean necklace surrounding loss or holes (Q) at the heart of words (the symbolic), being (the real), images and the body (the imaginary).These unveil the desire for reparation as an unconscious inten- tionality threading through language. Such intentionality is an ordering whose referents are both a lack—in—being (S) and radical loss at the center of everything

Lacan’s

from which jouissance effects emanate.The

annul loss, is also

left—over,

theory

object



of discourse structures

47

that ?lls the hole, seeming

something lost. What do I mean by jouissance effects? I mean a level of consistency (Miller), a“substance” of pleasure/displeasure (Lacan), being/nothingness, the sublime/ the vulgar—the “substance” which gives each of us worth in moments of “self” valuing depending on the signi?ers with which one identi?es as the object a in play in the drives that promise consistency in a constellation of jouissance moments.5 Desire shows up in discourse at the point where the subject drops out (3) in fading moments or instances of lack that show memory and language to be ?awed.Thus language operates on a paradoxical axis.While trying to nego— tiate the satisfaction ofjouissance, language also bears the burden of avoiding (or, paradoxically, seeking to encounter) the real which makes loss intervene as a positivized presence carrying the traumas one has experienced in life. In Lacan’s theory, language is not only operated by desire qua metonymies which place gaps or slippages in language, even more powerful is the call upon language to stuff up a bottomless hole at the center of knowing and being (0). In his essay “To jakobson,” delivered in 1972 in his twentieth Seminar (Encore), Lacan replied to Roman Jakobson’s communication theory models of addressor/ addressee, and so on, by de?ning discourse as four different kinds of links forged among speaking beings: to





remaining

trace

of

distinguished.There are four of them only on the basis of the psychoanalytic discourse that I articulate and using four places each place founded on some e?ect of the signi?er .These categories that I situate as the last discourse in this deployment are structured only on the basis of the existence of psychoanalytic discourse. I will remind you of the four discourses I







Toward the end of Seminar XX

analytic I

(p. 119),

Lacan



this theme of the

returns to

discourse:

knowing it. I speak with my body and I do so unbe- knownst to myself. Thus I always say more than I know. This is where I arrive at the meaning of the word “subject” in analytic discourse.What speaks without knowing it makes me ‘1’, subject in [the] analytic discourse. What speaks without knowing it makes me ‘I,’ subject of the verb. That with what I am forced to put in doesn’t suf?ce to bring me into being being enough knowledge for it to hold up, but not one drop more.That is what was hitherto called form. In Plato’s work, form is the knowledge that ?lls being It is real in the sense that it holds being in its glass .That knowledge is prohibited. Form is the knowledge of being speak

without



















The

true

real, the referent,

is

not







form, but is situated, rather, beside the signi?ed

symptom where Lacan placed the produces jouissance effects. or



..

objet



as

the “form” that ?lls

being

and

48

Lacan’s

of discourse structures

theory

1969—1970, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan said:

In his Seminar of

approximation of the reference of a discourse: it is that it acknowledges wanting to master.That suf?ces to classify it precisely in the kinship line of the master discourse and that is of course the dif?culty with the one I try to bring as near as I can to the discourse of the analyst. It [the analyst’s discourse] must be found opposed I would like

to

to

give

you this rule of ?rst

least attested to, of mastery. I say ‘at least attested to,’ not that hide it, because after all it is always easy to reclothe it in the dis-

all desire,

it has

to

at

of mastery. To tell the truth,

course

we

always

start

from there in what there

the discourse of synthesis, is taken up again every day inde?nitely also How can it happen the discourse of the consciousness which masters —



otherwise than

dream, when

apprehend

to

one

all this





psychic activity

other than

hears thousands and thousands of times in the

as

course



of

[analyst’s] days this bastard chain of destiny, and or inertia, of throws of the die [dice] and of stupor, of false successes and of misunderstood the

which make up the current text of a human life? Do not wait for anything more subversive in my discourse than to not pretend to have encounters

the solution. Nevertheless it is clear that what refers that it

[discourse]

is

more

burning than constantly in

jouissance in discourse. Discourse touches it it again and tries to return to this origin, and it is in that it

to

moves

nothing

contests

any

appeasement."

help to understand the four discourses in question—the master, the academic, the hysteric, the analyst—if we recall Lacan’s de?nition of a signi?er: that which re-presents a subject for another signi?er (S. XX).There is no subject qua subject. There are only signi?ers whose re-presentational function is both “meta” (anticipatory) and “retro” (retroactive).They buckle meaning by standing in for something missing—the lost object—that creates and lacks in knowledge, being, and enjoyment. In Lacan’s four discourses, ¥ is the matheme that designates the subject as something absent which must be presented again—because its original form is lost—within a closed circuit of signifying words and images Lacan calls the radical alterity of the unconscious Other that contains associative sets of signi?ers. Since this time, Miller has shown us that the Other too is a myth that contains only the treasury of one person’s signi?ers, one person’s words and thoughts (“Committee of Ethics”). Lacan located the four discourse places, topological places referring to the quaternary structure of space, as founded on the analytic discourse: It may

the other

the agent the truth The

terms

the

that

3, the subject;

a,

production

rotate

the

in these

surplus

in

places are: S1, the master signi?er; ¥2, knowledge; enjoyment which is never a dialectical signi?er,

Lacan’s

theory

of discourse structures

49

(S. XX, 21). S1 and 52 are Lacan’s mathemes, or little letters, that denote the ?eld of language. Many ¥15 add up to an 82. Lacan uses S1 and

but

always

an

absolute

rather than mind, self, text,

supposed agency of meaning. S1 is the ?rst countable signi?er that lays down an identi?catory point of reference in a given discourse. 82 is the cumulative body of knowledge that refers back to ascertainable master signi?ers. As such, the signi?ers are ?xed functions that produce something else: dis— make a binary differential. As such they are a course structure. Two signi?ers structure or beginning of a series that marks an order or orientation. Moreover, signi?ers accrete and attempt to formalize an écriture based on the truths told in an écrit; that discourse itself concerns the pre—conditions of meaning. Although the object a is not a signi?er, it has the meaning ofjouissance whose knowledge belongs to desire as cause and jouissance as goal.]acques—Alain Miller has rewrit- ten this to place jouissance under meaning (M/_]) as its support (“Aphorisms and Questions on Meaning and the Real,” trans. by Adrian Price, Speaking in 'Ibngues II, pp. 59—70,]an. 15, 1997, from “The Other Who Does Not Exist and its Committees of Ethics”). Symbolizing an excess in jouissance, its meanings are exterior to grammatical language—hors sens—although still attached to it as lalangue and libido. The (a) (pre)determjnes language to be divided by the presence of what it “knows” of jouissance but cannot represent directly as information or communicable knowledge.

82

or

any other

name

for



The four discourses In Lacan’s discourse

theory, language

is enunciated

alternately

and

simultaneously

signi?ers and the a, each quarter turn of the elements in the four discourses producing ?rst the position of master, then the academic, followed by the hysteric, and leading to the analyst. These positions denote four “social” as a surplus stances taken toward the jouissance matrix which Lacan rede?ned value connected to the sinthome—standing in for the name of the father—whose meanings are governed in the various dimensions (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary).7 Indeed, the life saga of any subject is structured in reference to the knotting of these spheres (or not in psychosis) by the jouissance and meanings which gives rise to four desiring structures that enact the family “novel” whose main cha- racters are children who evolve as perverse, psychotic, neurotic, or as subjects of a normative masquerade, in reference to the way the sexual difference is inter- preted by each one.Any subject may speak from the position of master, academic, hysteric, or analyst, without necessarily revealing anything of the unconscious structure of their desire. Emanating from radically repressed fundamental fanta— sies, only desire for something substitutive can be deciphered within analytic discourse, where repetitions, the drives, the unconscious, and transference make a pathway to the real of the drives that hide the meaning of a symptom. Putting aside the idea of a master discourse for a moment, any person’s “knowledge” depends upon master signi?ers (SI) that hide the 3 which denotes from the

50

Lacan’s

theory

of discourse structures

subject dwells in suspension. The last term, the object a, is not a signi?er, but is initially constituted as the e?ect of loss and separation. It is an empty form that crystallizes as ego, puri?ed libido surrounding the eight partial objects that ?rst caused desire for an object (to return) at the time of its loss when it is (re)—cognized as desirable.The agent of a master discourse has lost the evanescent quality of the (a). Spoken in the name of an authority qua authority (31), this discourse refers to a guarantee of knowledge, to a signi?er or signi?ers for a prestigious Father’s Name (be it Daddy or a river god). Such a discourse is typical of the obsessional, as well as the philosopher, those who seek to close out knowledge of the unconscious by substituting superego words for jouissance ones. The “master” tries to embody the law itself, that being the law of language: an “I know,”“l said,”“I have shown.” Whether an academic desires as obsessional, hysteric, analyst, perverse subject, or psychotic one, the university discourse makes a social link because it is enunciated in the name of a body of knowledge Sz->a aimed at the other’s surplus jouissance. The hysteric’s discourse puts forth the lack of an innate signi?er for aligning gender with identity in any mastery of knowledge. Neither a master a larger truth; that something is or a professor, the hysteric’s position signi?es always lacking in knowledge: ¥48]. The hysteric speaks the truth of the lack insofar as neither knowledge or being are in and of themselves whole. She also speaks the truth of knowing the value of the object a as that which one seeks to ?ll any lack-in—being. But the analyst’s discourse depends on knowing what the hysteric unwittingly dramatizes, while adding one piece more. Any gain in vitality, freedom, creativity, or symptom relief, can only be won at the cost of relinquishing an excessive jouissance that has become unbearable in its ?xed repetitions. Lacan speaks of this truth as absent or hidden.8 Even though the analyst speaks from an impossible position, trying to allow the patient to say what the gaps

has

not

or

splits

within

been said in his

psychoanalysis

on

or

language

where the

her discourse, Lacan, nonetheless, built

this direction of the

confront themselves

treatment.

In his

an

ethics of

ethics, human beings

desir(ing), idealizing, narcissistic, mistaken, enjoying, driven, and suffering. For Lacan a life that continually projects such realities of impasse “outward” is unethical—because the ensuing pain has no price, except the price of a life threaded around the death drives.When one lets certain objects fall—pieces of the real or sinthomes—a restructuring ofjouissance will, of neces- sity, follow. But the reconstituted jouissance is no absolute panacea, merely the invention of a more tenable, less costly, symptom. as

Beyond linguistics taught that psychoanalysis—from start to ?nish—concerns life and death. While the subject matter of the unconscious is the real, desire, and jouissance, jouissance is not itself unconscious, but responds to unconscious drives. Rather, jouissance effects are paradoxical in both elaborating and blocking desire. The song says “You can’t always get what you want.” The question is “why?”What Lacan

Lacan’s

can

theory

be done about desire that has been alienated? And

of discourse structures

why

is jouissance

so

51

costly

in its excess? Lacan considered the four discourses he elaborated

the

analytic

that “buckles”

only ones founded by taking a stand on

be the

to

completes the others issues ofdesire and jouissance. In analysis one “passes” from one discourse to another, any discourse going toward hystericization caused by the questioning implicit in talking about the meaning of one’s life.Yet, in analytic talk, language shows the limits of its capacities to express itself outside consciousness at the point where jouissance hooks into something more. But how can language show a “beyond” transparent meaning in the medium of language itself? Jacques—Alain Miller has spoken often in his own recent Seminars about language’s being rooted in lalangue and about the “sense” of meaning that lies just beyond apparent meaning, in a new imaginary. In “On Jakobson” Lacan explained that he was not speaking about linguistics, as Jakobson had, but from his own linguisterie (p. 20).What, he asked, would measure the distance between linguistics and Iinguisterie? We have left behind the linear logic of linguistics and phenomenology and walked into the universe ofmuItiform, contradictory logic that Lacan calls a way of“topologizing.” Lacan gave a clue. One clue is that certain effects imply causes not represented in language, in the Other.Those causes center most precisely on sex and death. In Seminar XX (p. 9), Lacan said he had referred the previous year in Séminaire XIX (1971—1972) to: on

one

or

the strict

equivalence of topology and structure. If we take that as a pointer, the thing that distinguishes anonymity from what one refers to as jouis— sance—to wit what right ordains—is a geometryA geometry is the hetero- geneity of a place; namely, that there is a place of the Other.What do the most recent developments in topology allow us to put forward from this place of the Other, from a sex as Other, as absolute Other? Here I shall put forward the term ‘compactness.’There is nothing more compact than a fault [break], if it is quite clear that the intersection of everything therein enclosed being allowed as existing in an in?nite number of sets, it follows that the intersection implies this infinite number.That is the very de?nition of‘compactness.’ This intersection that I am talking about is the one I put forward a while ago as being what screens, what creates an obstacle to supposed sexual rapport.

Only supposed, however, since rests on no

other

statement



am

stating [e’nonce]

than that there is

no



that

analytic discourse that it is impossible to propositions of analytic .



such sexual rapport. It is in what the discourse can show, and through that same, that the latter determines how

postulate

things really

stand

regarding

the

status

of all other discourses.

Although language appears to be in?nitely combinable, there is a limit to our language. This limit lies in an orientation of the real, producing excesses of

52

Lacan's

theory

jouissance, where

of discourse structures

we

can

Moreover, desire seeks demand:

encore or

to

access

certain

encompass the

answers

excesses

or

knowledge (connaissance).

its satisfaction has

come

to

repetition.

That limit is whatever in

subject—presents itself as a break, a fading, an intervention of the formula “sexual being,” insofar as being sexed involves our jouissance (S. XX, p. 16).There are sexual relations of all kinds. But there is no sexual “relation,” that is, no single and clear cut joining of the opposition masculine/feminine in the unconscious. In the laying down of an unconscious network of representations, children learn two signi?ers—boy and girl—and one imaginary symbol for sexual difference: the phallus. Each pretends imaginarily that there is a sexual One, a whole couple.Although a signi— ?er for One identity for either sex lacks, each sex, nonetheless has a relation to a third term: the phallus or mark of lack. This is the (—0), sign of castration or alienation by language that makes of language, in turn, the desire to interpret. Interpretation seeks to give meaning to the effects of structure. As such, the phallic signi?er enables an infant to count himself as a name, body, identity, and a

being—the object

that divides the

desire.

Although refers

the

to

the

imaginary phallus penis as an organ. It

is is



pre-specular object, cause—of—desire, Lacan

a cause

of desire—not because both

sexes

organ—but because it seems detachable from the little girl’s body. And the Ur—objects cause-of-desire all have the property of seeming to belong to the body while, actually, being separable from it, thus belonging to the logic of separation from which the drives are born as demands for wholeness, for satisfaction. Since there is no binary—no equal opposition between male and female bodies written in the unconscious—the greatest signi?cance of this absent rapport between the sexes lies in thiszThis loss, paradoxically, motivates the search for rapport via desire which supports the fantasy out of which drive comes. In order to copulate at all, some function of compensatory harmony is necessary. And metaphor is the functional law of castration, whether one speaks of static want to

possess that

symptoms that hide the meaning of the drive. Indeed, myths are elaborated metaphors concerning questions of origin. In its simplest, and perhaps most complex sense, discourse, taken as that which forges substitutions

or

social link, organizes questions of identity—beginnings, around knowledge. There one always ?nds an ordering or a

lineage, gender—

meaning where a minimal enigma has maximum repercussions. Rabelais’ Gargantua is born from his mother’s ear. Contemporary babies are delivered by the stork, or equally mythical ovum and sperm. That is, neither images nor stories adequately cover

unrepresentable questions regarding birth, death, and sex. In Lacanian discourse theory, we speak metaphor which depends on metonymies that are over

the

contiguous body parts that cause desire. Thus, metaphor copulates, is sexual, because it points to the couple; one thing substitutes for another. Language (51—62) copulates with the real insofar as the excess in jouissance creates a blockage

based

symbolic—the impasse between the sexes. In such encounters Lacan found only enigma and frustration, but also a logic wherein discourse makes a social

in the not

on

Lacan’s

link because it seeks

to

of

closing

of discourse structures

53

know what is

impasse after impasse that make

impossibility

theory



missing or askew, despite the reality of language a knowledge (connaissance) about the

gaps.

Lacan gave another clue in Seminar XX

as to

the difference between

linguistics

and his linguisterie (p. 20).What measures the distance between the two? The sign of love, he said. Over the years he said he learned the most about this from the

quintessentially desiring subject who wants to remain unful?lled and thus lives at the level of paradox, living for and by “love” that must be endlessly replaced in order that she remain unful?lled. But Lacan was more interested in what he saw as her most intimate knowledge, that something is wrong in knowledge, something missing in the symbolic sphere’s myths and laws. She sees through the emptiness of the law—the arbitrariness of laws—without realizing that her very awareness that the emperor wears nothing under his clothes causes her suffering. But paradoxically this knowledge regarding the emptiness of meaning places her in the position to put a master to work on her behalf. For she seeks, each in terms of her particular story, to question knowledge and its masters right up to the limits they incarnate in authority and law, and beyond.

hysterics,

The sign of love sign of love have to do with analysis? While the concept of a sign generally retains the semiotic meaning given it by Charles Sanders Peirce— that which represents something for someone—Lacan changes its meaning particularly when he talks of love as a sign. Pleasure, desire, jouissance—things usually associated with love—take on a paradoxical and contradictory meaning when love is the sign of transference (to a person or thing). But what is transferred in the analytic discourse? jacques-Alain Miller has proposed that jouissance is But what does the

“projected” or

transferred

as

the desire for satisfaction—via the drives. “It” is the

“level” of excitation each of us

scene,

on

to

feed

to

make



world, giving it

to

the other

(“A Reading of Some Details ."). Love is a sign ofjouissance, a sign pointing to something in language that transcends the ?at information of pure communication.9 In Charles Sanders Peirce’s de?nition of the sign, love is clearly not a “something.” And it is not always represented for “someone.” What is not a sign of love, says Lacan, is the jouissance of the Other—that of the Other sex that inhabits a subject parasitically—and the inhabited body that symbolizes it as a symptom (S. XX, 20—21).The Other sex in Lacanian parlance is the place from which each person loves, desires, speaks, enjoys, and knows. The particular traits that draw one to love another are precisely the love each of us has for our own ego. Love occurs spontaneously as if caused by “chemical” attraction. But, it is only the echo of an ideal that calls out to us, promising wholeness and resolution to our own lacks and losses. If we ?nd in the other what we lack in the Other, then love is but a repetition of an Other on

which

produces

which

our



partners

are



only incidental players.

54

Lacan’s

theory

of discourse structures

Lacan’s discourse as

he

reverses

theory

turns

the

ordinary

the standard view of discourse

others.We all know that love is

upside down, much communicative exchange with

view of love

as a

that

oppositions are change of discourse

imaginary phenomenon,

an

complementary. But what is a sign of love? Love appears in a that traverses itself, Lacan says: “Changing of discourse—that moves you no one is immune to its impact. But it is useless for me to say that this notion of discourse is to be taken without relationship to that in linguistics which speci?es itself as grammar” (S. XX, p. 23).What changes a discourse? An awareness ofjouissance, knowing that one has entered the social lane of the drives: being heard, seen, desired, discarded, and so on. On one hand, love proceeds by a collusion of identi?catory symbolic and imaginary traits; attraction to familiar details, as well as to ideals sought. On the other hand, what we exchange with one another is jouissance: that excess knowledge of what one is “worth” that .

comes

from the viscera of the real.At this level the











imaginary and real join hands

in

linking being qua narcissism to body qua libido.Yet love also concerns knowledge, what one desires to know—what one represses, denies, or does not know about one’s Other—but which insists anyway as a shadow pressure regarding who or what one is or is not, especially at the level of the sinthome. wish

to

sign of Freud’s genius in his linkage of transference (love/hate) to knowledge. What does the Other know? What does the Other want of us? In desiring others we follow a lure or decoy in a quest to obey, avoid, or answer the absent Other——treasury of signi?ers—incarnated in analysis by the analyst’s actual body.Yet people usually prefer the stagnation of the imagi- nary illusions of love—idealizing or blaming others—rather than knowing what or why they love. Or that their loves hide a quest to know who they are in terms of what the Other wants of them. Although we desire in the name of love, with Lacan found another

its co—extensive side of hate, desire

to

most

know who and what

we

of us—and Lacan includes himself—-do

are,

have been,

or

will be. We do

not

not

desire

to

by recognition of alien forces that control us. Rather we act out of the Other, relating to others by guilt, blame, aggression, thwarted ideals—by affects. But what does the analysand love? Lacan proposes that an analysand’s love is for the “impersonal” that might have been—the ego ideal—in the desiring context of what might come to be. That is, the analysand loves the image of a fantasy of a missed encounter with whatever he or she imagines will set his or her world right. Although analysands think they love (or hate) the analyst qua other, the analysand ?nds “cure” only in passing from a discourse based on misrecognition of his own truth(s) in the degree he learns what the analyst knows: that the analysand’s desire is alienated in ideals and in jouissance(s) that make of the subject a response of the real. Because the real dwells just out of grasp, and its jouissance effects seem enigmatic—lost as a cause one can understand or explain—no knowledge, method, system, pleasure, love, or idea] can ever o?er be humbled

resolution, make We

whole.

why there is passage from one discourse university to hysteric to analyst—based on the idea

begin

master to

one

to see

to

another—from

that love is

always

Lacan’s

deceived (trompe') when lovers think they human dilemmas in

theory

of discourse structures

55

pinpoint the solutions to personal ideologies.The master makes the epis— can

people, things, or temological error of believing he or she is constituted in the field of conscious language alone. Speaking the analyst’s discourse, which he claimed Freud learned from hysterics, Lacan offered love as the only path by which analysts can help analysands unhook themselves from alienating desires and parasitical jouissances. Thus, transference is not neurotic in itself as Freud thought. Lacan saw transfer— ence love occurring only because love refers to something prior. But this priority is not caused by repetition of some substantive primal scene or by some essence of parental relations. Rather, this something prior is the objet a, cause of desire, that turns into the partial drive in its trajectory toward satisfaction, a sexualized something.Yet it gives us enough ego ?ber from which to ex—sist as simulated wholes, semblants.That is, one at least knows it is not only sex which is at issue in love (S. XX, p. 27). And one knows (whether one acts on it or not) that the other partner is not the point of aim, but the Other qua desiring. Unlike others who have spoken of love, Lacan separated it out from desire in order to study its relation to the knowledge sought in the transference. Mystics and saints of old confused the love of God with love cum desire.Although Ovid implied something wrong in love when speaking about it as a malady, Lacan says only Socrates understood that it linked knowledge to desire.10 Going perhaps in the direction of Ovid, as well as Socrates, Lacan points to the untenable; that love is poison. In being narcissistic, self—seeking, and ego—oriented, love dwells on the slope ofjouissance and death. Desire, rather, is concerned with knowledge, or the signifying chains that constitute the Other. Because love depends on the or

inert

jouissance of the real, desire “drives”

always

wish

our

good.

One may well grasp

jouissances that do not something paradoxical and surprising

us to

seek the

here. We all know that

people disagree, that acts of language are loaded with desires aiming toward incompatible enjoyments. But, paradoxically, people also seek agreement at all costs. Few and far between are those who analyze the reality warring discourses present as having anything to offer theories of meaning,

language, transference, If,

as

Lacan

taught,

and

so on.

any individual is the

product

of

split



between

belief system and the objet a as an irreducible and opaque kernel then, it makes sense that we fantasize things that will make us whole

etc.)



“self”

ofjouissance, (right, good,

impress. On the one hand, desire operates discourse because its raison d’é'tre is teleological: to possess whatever promises satisfaction. Things are desirable, not only because they are missing or lacking, but paradoxically, because they compose a subject ex—sisting as an object a that in the eyes of others

is in internal exclusion

we care to

to

its

own

Misrecognition” Slavoj Ziiek that or

we

ex-sist in identi?cation

integrated unity

with “self”

is the real of disuniry.11 The

itself

to

BE.

conscious

constructs.

summarizes Lacan’s last with as a

subject

jouissance objects,

text,

is

ideal,

not

or

In “Truth Arises From

theory

the symptom; rather than in any actual

any other

on

thing. Indeed, the

where it thinks it is,

nor

real

where it thinks

56

Lacan’s

theory

of discourse structures

theory

teaches

problems, or to life’s ills.That does not mean, however, that it is not the main path of hope open to us. By love and talk we can change, not only our relationship to the social, but the social itself. It requires a rethinking of one’s life in order to desire apart from the Other.Why should this be a dif?cult task? Because love with its static Lacanian

demand for ideals, refuses of the Other with its

not

not a

solution

to our

know that desire for the other passes via the desire

exist except in the

damental fantasies that ?ll libido. We

to

that love is

predetermining stranglehold on persons who apparently will. Instead, we are retro—actively governed from the

have free choice and Other which does

us

suppositions

we

make from the fun—

up the radical void of loss with words, images, and effects emanating from a real hole that penetrates all

subject to discourse with judgment, disgust, lust, and so on, effects that call forth a range ofaffective responses.The object a links symbolic codes (differentials) and imagi- nary identi?cations (collusions) to the palpable presence of real loss itself. And loss, in turn, in?ltrates grammar linking it to love via the objet a or the excess in any identity with the same—either in being or body. Put another way, unconscious signifying chains—associative orderings of real, symbolic, imaginary traits—are linked by a paternal metaphor that produces a fourth term: the effect of differ— ence that establishes identity in the order of the symptom where gender and body “tell”—albeit in code—the particularities (the sinthome) of a life. Discourse not only makes a social link, then, but also represents a stance are

taken toward the unconscious. The

master

says

no

to

it. The academic is half-

seduced, uni-vers-cythére. The hysteric knows something is lacking and she

pain of some version of a master/slave war. The analyst knows that the “way in is the way out,” along the paths of language, desire, and jouissance as expressed in the sinthome (2), the mark that writes on the body to say that there is a meaning “beyond” meaning (hors sens). Signi?ers accepts

to

drown in the

constitute the “said”——the

dit, (énoncé) being, identity, consciousness which later saying (énonciation) of what returns—the dire, desiring,

signi?eds, in the knowing, the enigmatic part, the “more in you than you” of the unconscious. Jouissance effects are always attached to the language matrix Lacan denoted by the return as

S1

and

52.

Discourse and the

object



symbolic difference—over imaginary collusion— necessary to ground any sense of unity one might call an identity based on lack, the articulation of the other signi?er (or ¥2) is positivized around the void of loss itself. The radical negativity of the void takes on its own positive value. But insofar as the referent of articulations is rarely present in a visible or quanti?able sense, indeed, is often born of articulation itself, we automatically produce something new when we speak, because the referent is the void—a negativity. People have usually thought meaning was produced from an a priori positive. Lacan taught that the only priori are the objet a—voice, void, gaze, and so

While

S1

is the minimal

Lacan’s

theory

of discourse structures

57

paradox: both the cause and aim of desire. Discourse carries these objects along.While other objects appear in visible relations, the objet a links meaning to body by a palpable, yet invisible, bond.12 Thus Lacan splits the concept of“object” from its phenomenological sense, as well as from its objectal or biological material sense. If the object a “appears” as a discontinuity and orients the partial drives that only seem consistent in language and imagery, we are dealing with a theory where the signi?er replaces the thing in the older sense of object meaning. Lacan’s object embodies the real in the drive Lacan named the object a, that which is the spatio—temporal subject at the level of an “excess” in jouissance. One is alternately an object of the gaze, a void moment of anxiety, and so on. The function of the word is to present(ify) this discontinuity of the subject to another as unity.l3 Neither the image qua representation, nor das Ding an sick as the undecidable, underlie language. Rather, the unconscious signi?er insists in moments or instants of fading, showing gaps caused by something Other. This something Other—the object a of desire—undoes the smooth relation of signifier to signi?er which tries to close symbolic systems.That signi?ers refer to the absent object, rejoins language to the real. In Lacan’s theory the object a, which comes to replace Kant’s das Ding, is inferred between signi?ers, making of language a writing about and around the missing object. The object a shines through the emptiness of symbolic dimension meanings to show that representation occurs only because meaning covers over a void reference, or what Lacan called a negative (—0): 3.”

on—produced

Taken

as a

functional

as a

unit, each of Lacan’s discourse

language:

the double, substitutive

the referent of opaque

meaning

structures structure

that Lacan maps

has the

of

structure

metaphor.15

according

to

four discourses is the unassimilated kernel of the real—the void

Moreover

position at

of any in the

the heart of

signifying chain—that excavates discontinuities, impasses, or cuts, transforming them into the seemingly uni?ed sense of a life narrative. On a very speci?c plane, the excess in jouissance reveals whether a given discourse is spoken from the place of master, academic, hysteric, or analyst. In a more general sense, however, any verbal act conveying meaning bespeaks a master discourse which uses statements as authoritative postures. Lacan knew that any discourse produces something of this effect, insofar as speaking beings cling to some logos to unify themselves, alone or together. If there is no meta—language, only concrete language, then the referent for authority is always already lost in the saying or writing which is itself the law, even if the law is the law of destruction. Only in the very movement of language, when some whiE of desire spills over from the drive’s trajectory, or a piece of the real intrudes to block a smooth ?ow of meaning, does one sense a “positive” void that constitutes an energetics of desire (lack) and loss (jouissance), where the object (1 appears to be at stake. If the ?rst lack (not loss) is the lack of a precise signi?er to represent sexual identity, it is not surprising that things do not naturally work harmoniously between the sexes, nor that this “fact” has every

58

Lacan’s

theory

of discourse structures

far-reaching repercussions

for the

reproduction of myths,

institutions, and the power lines of national concerns,

the

not to

organization

mention power

relations between individuals.The failures of everyday life tend to be blamed

individuals, ideologies, discourse that

or

serves as

Lacan oriented the

institutions, without analysis of the

of

structure

of a

on

given

the actual foundation.

helping analysands speak the words for which their symptoms stand in, the goal being to enable articulation of some part of the real of fundamental fantasies that are in use in the analysis itself. When spoken, when a satisfaction is reached regarding one’s symptoms, when a name is found, one is at the end of an analysis. But to traverse a fundamental fantasy means giving up on some jouissance attachment that the symptom hides with meaning. The position of “analyst” incarnates a kind of “pure” place of waiting; a “what do you want?”What can you not say? What do

psychoanalytic

you not know? If language is

clinic towards

language can never adequately signify the real of It can only pre—determine it as seemingly objecti?ed in various systems. Since signi?ers are not pinned to signi?eds anyway, it makes sense that Lacan’s SI or master signi?er would pin down a knowledge that is certain only for a time, for an individual, or in a culture. Although 32 is a signi?er for knowledge that is “true” anytime, insofar as it is relative only to its own tautological rei?cations, master signi?ers—communism, capitalism, etc.—are not contiguous with the master discourse. The master always already human experience.

discourse is

for fact.A to

an

a?air of desire which mistakes

master

the desire and

“knowledge”

as

discourse will

about

was

the

always

jouissance that

err

structure

52

for

Sr Opinion/doxa

because the truth of a it

as

subject

being

are

taken

is relative

of/ to the Other,

not to

savoir.

Lacan has been accused of

that he

meta,

master

speaking

a master

discourse, which is

of his discourse which elaborated

way

something new does not one who “sees,” a closed, fanatical ideologue. To label Lacan a master or a “true believer” misses the point. Lacan argued that the analyst’s discourse rests on only one certainty: that what an analysand cannot say pre—determines his or her suffering as resistance. Desire, on the contrary, appears as insistence of a temporal instance in one’s quest for satisfaction. Social codes seek to impose distance and the conventions of“laws” to regulate the ups—and—downs inferred by unconscious desire, and the inconsistencies presented by the real. Most people identify with any seeming unity or visible artifact rather than admit that each of us is constituted as a multiform balancing act, always aiming just askew of the goal in our quests for satisfaction. Any demand for being as knowledge, narcissism as an end point, will always miss the true object of its request: a certain recognition that a particular person can accept as love. Paradoxically, the subject creates stability by losing the object in which it ?nds temporary certainty, again and again, alternately experiencing itself as an absolute value. Being or nothingness ?ow in and out of each other, as language

thinking. On the automatically make of the

other

hand,

to

discover

a new

only in of thinking

true

Lacan’s

and identi?cation

subject

as

object

move

the

subject

around

an

that Lacan called the extimate

be “framed” because it circles around this

theory

inert

59

of discourse structures

object, giving

birth

object.I6 Language, thus,

object, placing

the

imaginary

to

the

cannot

and real

in it.17 It makes

sense

in this

context

that



master

discourse derive its

authority his thought,

repressing subject division.The “master” makes himself equal to denying aphanisis. For the master forgetting is caused by green cheese, the other as disrupting, and so on. In this discourse structure where language is treated as transparently self-referential, or simply as a tool for referring to things or events, the verb “to be” is stressed. If the master were to “hear” the narcissism implicit

from

in his

or

her discourse—m’étre/to—be—me—it would be clear that this discourse the

imperative (S. XX, p. 31).The master remains a master only in that he or she is free from questioning the linkage of his or her knowledge to the identi?cations of childhood, of equating being and “self”—worth with the other’s unquestioning acceptance of his or her knowledge as “truth.”“I am what I say” is the master’s cogito. Slavoj Ziiek has called this discourse the symbolic

depends

on

economization of Narcissus. The

her

denies any source from which his if one could reduce the functioning of

master

knowledge emanates, acting as (the binary signifier) to itself by dismissing

or

52

signi?er as constitution of knowledge.18 When one questions a master knowledge as to its authority, basis, proof, etc., the speaker of this discourse usually refers to an even greater authoritative system: usually insofar as a person, an idea, or method equal proof. Failing to convince the other, the “master” may well become hystericized, ?nding it unbearable to have the limits of his or her being/knowledge sub- mitted to question or scrutiny. Anger is a typical response of the “master” who has not accepted the admission of castration (-0) that works from an acceptance any master

of lack.

identity depends on limits set by the jouissance one can bear. It appears in the point of a signi?er unaware that it functions from signi?eds (symptoms) constructed by signi?ers. Constitutive signi?ers have been trans— formed into signi?eds that dwell on another (unconscious) plane and do not recognize their mode of construction. The hidden dimension in a master’s discourse, then, is the signi?er m’étre (to—be-me) which pretends that one can give oneself a being that knows. Such knowledge is said to come from innate causality, outer forces, and so on, all intending to explain away the enig— matic or unknown by appeal to paradigmatic models, be it the analyst’s insight, empirical evidence, or horoscopic wisdom. Lacan ?nds the “being” of philosophy, its fundamental reality, that is, to be only a signi?ed, induced were it only the word “to be.”19 Lacan or inferred by the signi?er, portrays the symbolic as that which ex-sists extrinsic to being. Put another way, the unconscious is an absent symbolic that the master takes to be natural or trans- parent. “I know” is a master’s answer. In this refusal of anything beyond a closed feedback loop, everything bears on validating an answer, and nothing encourages a new question. That

60

theory

Lacan’s

of discourse structures

Obsessional and Lacan does

not

hysterical

discourse

list the obsessional discourse in his discourse

make

structures

insofar

as

obsessional—usually a male—is said to speak a master discourse.20 Such a discourse, actually has an anti—social goal: to remove desire from language.Typically, obsessionals deploy a master discourse through rules, strategies, plans, team-work, group accommodations. Although obsessional work is often “busy” work, the ritual oEers these men affective peace and the reassurance of a steady symbolic system.And, often, non-innovative work gets done. But the obsessional’s larger aim is to keep the feminine out oflanguage. it does

Men are

not

or women

social link

easily.

who subvert the

But the

neat

and closed methods ofobsessional discourse

of group function, except insofar as they accept the roles of balloon burster, bearer of occasional righteous anger, and so on. Such

screened

court



jester,

out

by the unconscious, revealing that it is not so easy to exclude desire from everyday life, whether one calls it pathology or not. The obsessional’s expression of desire takes culturally speci?ed forms, but structurally speaking, always “speaks” a superego discourse. His goal is to identify with the law, not to override or kill it. The paradox, of course, is the di?iculty of“living” by a law which requires one to play dead. Having incurred a debt to the father, the guilt of patricide, stirs up the memory of the only thing worth living for: the “roles”

sacred

are

determined

name

of his mother.

hysteric desires that desire not be ?nally ful?lled, the obsessional desires an impossible desire, which is to live as if he were dead. He must, then, screen out desire so he can “play” at life from a position of stasis.To this end he identi?es with knowledge systems and rituals of all kinds, even eroticizing them. While the

Lacan

wrote

this matheme for the obsessional discourse:

keeps him just off—center, enslaved by the Other’s desire, the wish that the son’s ?delity to his mother be total. His paradoxical battle makes him ?ght the women from whose desire he lives parasitically. The overwhelming effort to exclude “the personal” tells the story of a horror of incest: in-cest, fear of proximity to the material object which is not distant enough to give this “loving”/beloved son peace of mind or body. Both the hysteric and obsessional mourn the lack of a strong signi?er for a Father’s Name, the hysteric by identifying with its absence and the obsessional by building his life around substitute masculine ideals. Not ?rmly anchored to a signi?er for sexual difference (via the imaginary father or his symbolic name)—the obsessional’s question—“Am I alive or dead?”—demands proof of ontological place. That obsessionals are sceptics and doubters, alternately hopeless, helpless, or hapless, despite their sometime career successes, is not surprising. For their lot is that of Sisyphus. The obsessional’s overkill

Lacan's

theory

of discourse structures

61

inadequacy, against any hint of the Other in whose thrall he is rendered passive, the hysteric is clearly identi?ed to the desire of the Other. Hers is the only structure that opens a clear path to the unconscious. Since hysterics want to make up for what is lacking in the Other, they desire to show the Other. The hysteric identi?es with lack in the position of agent. In a quarter—turn to the analyst’s discourse, the analysand is addressed at the point of lack. The analyst’s aim is to help the analysand re—present the cause of his or her desire, insofar as the cause is lost. If an analysand grapples with desire at the level of cause, a piece of the real falls out of knowledge, showing an excess in jouissance produced by the unassimilated kernel Lacan called the object a; a useless redundancy of unconscious symptomatology that Freud recognized as the death drive. Lacanian analysts use language to work on symptoms. The signi?er operates on signi?eds. But what does this mean? In the realm of the particular, Jacques-Alain Miller has described the symptom as a signi?ed, resisting knowl— edge of its cause, while desire inhabits knowledge as “visible” effects of the unconscious.The signi?ed dwells in the realm of the blind king, in the realm of the drives,21 while the signi?er belongs in the ?eld of enunciations. On the Schema L, the signi?ed would be located on the imaginary axis at the place of the ego and the ideal ego, while the signi?er dwells in the Other and re-appears in speech as desire.22 Dwelling in the imaginary realm, the obsessional resides at the place of ego narcissism, while the hysteric identi?es with the Other, with the other’s desire. But all this is confusing unless one realizes where Lacan has placed us in his rethinking of the Saussurean terms “signi?er” and “signi?ed.” While the obsessional defends

against

any intimation of his

Signifier and signified general level, the signi?ed is language itself, structuring the signi?er qua word dependent upon word. Indeed, this is what it means to say that the uncon— scious interprets as the analysand speaks. Only the analysand’s unconscious knows his or her dilemma. Moreover, signi?er and signi?ed never come together in a unity. Desire and jouissance keep the referent—the void—at odds with lan— guage.23 Language, trying to oscillate between the imaginary and the real, is misinformed, distorted, off the mark.Yet it is our only means of reconstituting our jouissance within identi?catory relations. It is also our only access to the traumas that form symptoms out of the real.The radical gaps between language and jouissance lead us to use language as if it were a uni?ed body.Yet the signi?er offers a false unity which can only believe itself to be One from the misrecogni- tions built up in the de?les of need, desire, and demand. And while grammatical language appears linear and ?at, actually the signi?ed is thought of as a concept, or something perceived, the unique subjective chain of signi?ers from which each person speaks, writes, and knows, breaking up apparent linguistic unity with truths that structure that person as a ?ction, resonant in three contradictory dimensions. Desire itself is a signi?er that breaks up unities, in a timing Lacan

At



62

Lacan’s

called the

theory

of discourse structures

intentionality

of unconscious desire: Che vuoi? You say that, but what

do you want? What do you really mean? Clearly Lacan’s theory is a radically

(or writing)

carry desire

or

the

weight

new

idea, proposing that speech

of the real that

corpori?es language

for

jouissance effects. When Lacan tells us that “discourse” is not grammar, nor do signi?ers equal phonemes, although they incarnate phonemes—which is not to say that one may not well combine homophones with the words taille (size) and grandeur (grandeur) to create the word tailleur (tailor) when taille was meant at a

reasons

Pascal’s argument that “the heart has know” than to Saussure’s or Derrida’s equation of

conscious level—we

that

reason

does

not

are

closer

to

rethinking, we are confronted with a reversal of the Saussurean signi?er over signi?ed. The bar itself becomes a signi?er of the division that splits the subject by the alienating effects of language and the cuts that produce loss. Thus, the splitting has its own logic in the castration that makes hysteria the structure potentially fundamental to all, but the psychotic. When Lacan says the signi?er cannot represent itself for itself, this is not merely opinion, but a law of language. The effect of learning difference in the name of the diacritical opposite to woman or mother creates a structural under— pinning of confusion regarding identity that governs meaning systems, race relations, class relations, and sexual relating in a dialectic of the law of a minimal difference necessary to any coherent use of language. So symbols are taken in by infants in reference to the need (for food) and in the transference relations that set up desire and demand as a dialectic.These symbols come to signify some- thing for another signi?er, to represent some subject for another signi?er, not for someone, pace Charles Sanders Peirce. And, for Lacan, these oppositions mul— tiply their meanings in three registers (real, symbolic, imaginary), ?nally settling into psychotic, perverse, neurotic or normal/nor-mdle (believing in the Oedipal myths in play as Jacques-Alain Miller has said), desiring structures depending on how the three registers evolve as a sinthome of reference to a signi?er for a Father’s Name, given as a correlate of the mother’s unconscious desire. In his recent seminars,jacques-Alain Miller has simpli?ed Lacan’s writing of the paternal metaphor, which in Lacan’s ?nal teaching was simply Q/a. Miller’s rewriting of it places the Other over jouissance. In an earlier version, Miller placed the object a at the interface between these two (“To Interpret the Cause: From Freud to Lacan,” NFF,Vol. 3, No. 1/2, Spring/Fall 1989, pp. 30—50, given by ].—A. Miller at the Paris—New York Psychoanalytic Workshop, April 9—10, 1989). But Lacan’s Oedipal formula from the late 19505 still helps in psychoanalytic theory when one is confronted with a child raised within parental coupling.The Lacanian signifying chain is made up of Borromean knots in the Other. They are interchained by replicating themselves in circles like an interlinked necklace around a hole in the Other. This places radical loss in being, representation, identifications, desire, bodily experience, and so on. Thus, loss is the real referent—beyond the paternal metaphor—to which all other sound. In Lacan’s

signi?er

to

referents

point.

Lacan’s

theory

of discourse structures

63

Beyond language taught that no analysis of the unconscious—i.e. the effects of results of putting signi?ers (82) into a chain—can occur except by stopping the discourse of signifieds (the ?ow of the meaning or “signi?erness”) at a signi?er, and ?nally at an object a. One confronts the problem that the signifying chain is not, however, grammar, language, or writing, but, rather, a chain of dimensions—Real, Symbolic, Imaginary—knotted (or not) by a signi?er for the meaning of difference itself which gives rise to symptoms.Although language is “driven” by desire, no inter— pretation of it can occur except through its transformation by and return into language. So language is not simply linear grammar, nor rhetorical tropes, nor individual narratives, or multiple voices that would create a meta—body imposed on the biological body, structuring it by language and identi?cations. That is, the body is cut up by language. In 1958 in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Lacan said the signifying chain in the unconscious has subjective status, equivalent to Freud’s primal repression (Urverdra'ngung) The interest of this early statement lies not only in Lacan’s signifying chains and the primordially repressed object a, but as Lacan evolved his theory of the cut in relation to the drive, we begin to see the logic that links an object a to the body and to language through responses that are not caused by the organic per se. Rather, it is the object a as ?ller of a void place that gives rise to the partial drives that partake of the organ that produces them, although they are detachable Lacan



from the organ

at

the level of effect:

The very delimitation of the ‘erogenous zone’ that the drive isolates from the metabolism of the function is the result of a cut (coupure)

expressed

of

margin or border—lips, ‘the enclosure of the teeth’, the rim of the anus, the tip of the penis, the vagina, the slit formed by the eyelids, even the horn—shaped aperture of the ear Observe that this mark of the cut is no less obviously present in the object described by analytic theory: the mamilla, faeces, the phallus (imaginary object), the urinary ?ow. (An unthinkable list, if one adds, as I do, the phoneme, the gaze, the voice—the nothing). For is it not obvious that this feature, this partial feature, rightly emphasized in objects, is applicable not because these objects are part of a total object, the body, but because they represent only partially the function that produces them? These objects have one common feature in my elaboration of them they have no specular image, or, in other words, alterity. It is what enables them to be the ‘stu?’ or rather the lining, though not in any sense the reverse, of the very subject that one takes to be the subject of consciousness. For this subject, who thinks he can accede to himself by designating himself in the statement, is no more than such an object. .,” pp. 692—693, my emphasis) (“The Subversion ..

in the anatomical mark

(trait)











64

Lacan’s

theory

effort

not to

of discourse structures

lose what

thereby breaking up the illusion of a surface consistency between the perceiver and her or his world, infants (and later adults) identify with the jouissance left over from what they have lost: the lost tooth is replaced by some gift from the tooth fairy; the lost breast is replaced by a bottle or cup; the lost feces are replaced by gift-giving and exchange of goods; the void, by belief in Santa Claus, God or any object or person or myth that will appease the anxiety caused by lack hovering near the loss one hurries to close out.Thus the real appears “beyond” (hors) lack, as an In

an

disappears

or

recedes in the present,

jouissance caused by the loss of objects. Lacan called the effect of loss a cut; that is, the structure of separation which causes us to identify ourselves as (and with) inconsistent, partial, fragmented parts of our world. Yet such identi?cations give us a sense of consistency of identity with an object a, a excess

in

no—thing, an empty object, we embrace as if embracing ourselves.The satisfaction obtained in identifying with objects of the world comes, not from the objects, but from the satisfaction of feeling anchored in images and within familiar constellations. So, we try to “in—corp—orate” words, images, things, events, people, trying to relate them to the organ that appears to produce them in a supposed perceptual unity. The structure of a knowledge (82) is whatever quali?es it as a supposed whole, then. In this way, the ?eld of language refers not to reality, but to whatever conveys a consistency ofjouissance taken to be reality. In “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (1958) Lacan wrote: In

our

deduction it is easier

to

understand

why

it

was

necessary

to

question

oneself regarding the function that supports the subject of the unconscious, to grasp that it is difficult to designate that subject anywhere as subject of a

statement, and therefore

as

the articulator, when he does

not even

know

that he is

speaking. Hence the concept of drive, in which he is designated by an organic, oral, anal, etc., mapping that satis?es the requirement of being all the farther away from speaking the more he speaks. But although our completed graph [of desire, p. 692] enables us to place the drive as the treasury of the signi?ers, its notation as (S O D) maintains its structure by linking it with diachrony. The drive is what proceeds from demand when the subject disappears in it. It is obvious enough that demand also disappears, with the single exception that the cut remains present in that which distinguishes the drive from the organic function it inhabits: namely, its grammatical arti?ce, so manifest in the reversions of its articulation to both source and object. (pp. 691—692) Earlier in the

same

satisfaction

to

structurally

similar

its

essay Lacan prepares his innovative

dependence

on

underpinnings

linking

of the drive for

fundamental fantasies (S O a) by ?nding in

Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, Freud’s

discontents of civilization, and Lacan’s

own

idea of



“skewed” relation that

Lacan’s

separates the subject from the

theory

of discourse structures

65

being, and his speaking (p. 683). But by what means do signifying chains and fantasy “drive” language? In the essay entitled, “To Interpret the Cause: From Freud to Lacan,”]acques— Alain Miller points out that although the unconscious does not itself have laws, as Freud once thought, Lacan made sense of the laws of language: metaphor and metonymy. Miller clari?es Lacan’s rethinking of the Saussurean sign by pointing out that one meaning given to the bar between the signi?er and signi?ed is that of a bar of pure substitution. Now this is Lacan’s formula for metaphor, for the laws which “drive” language. Metaphor works by substitutions that refer to jouissance which has been lost, and so, must be displaced (metonymy) or te-presented by a signi?er trying to compensate for lost jouissance by symboli- zing or signifying it.Where there was already one thing, which is gone as such, something comes to replace it, metaphor or signi?ed. In the Tractatus, Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig von Wittgenstein argued that everything we say is futile because the idea that a true proposition is only an attribute of a believed proposition leaves out a crucial item: The ?rst being suppressed, something must support the second.24 In Lacan’s thinking, substitutions—i.e. signi?ers——stand in for something actually lost which, none— theless, left a trait, an outline of the object a come to ?ll in a concrete loss. Metaphor, thus, copes in reference to a ?rst suppressed thing, but has the ?Jnction of saying one thing to supplement another. Put another way, the referents (metonymies) to which the effects of signi?eds or symptoms point remain approximations of the real which is a virtual imaginary. There can be no 52 without an SI, in other words, the S1 being the Master signi?er that governs the other signi?er (82) as a Slave signi?er (“To Interpret the Cause”). But what does SI do? In Everything You HaveAlways Wanted to KnowAbout Lacan, But Never Dared to Ask (1988), Slavoj Ziiek says that “it ?xes consistency 82 as knowledge or myth, dwells on the side of the imaginary, thus substantivizing, essentializing, and elaborating founding myths” (p. 177). On the subjective side of knowledge—de?ned as what any person knows at a given moment—Lacan offers the imaginarized/symbolic signifying chain wound around S1: the master signi?ers that serve as designators or quali?ers, both rigid and empty at the same time. Master signi?ers appear to be auto—referentia], seemingly autonomous meanings, both performative and eccentric in relation to being. But the paradox lies in the retroactive nature of meaning. S1 gives rise to 52 that, in turn, de?nes the body of meaning surrounding the master signi?ers that appear to anchor ideologies, myths, etc. But something always falls out of this chain, something unrepresentable at the level of comprehension; or some place where the subject of the drive is blind to the jouissance underlying the demand for satisfaction. In this sense, SI and 52 are supported by the subject of desire as a lacking signi?er (8), and the excess in jouissance that marks the cause of BEING in its relation to sexuality and death.The paternal metaphor is another name for the symbolic that denotes the difference between the sexes as causative of a lack in human understanding.The Father’s Name stands in as an interdiction cause

of his

sexuality,

his

66

to

Lacan’s

of discourse structures

theory

the jouissance

implicit

in

identifying with

the

primary object, the mother.That

language castrates or forbids inundation in the corporality ofjouissance which gives the joy of feeling psychic Oneness. Language is the law that cuts up the body as sensations that represent it for meaning. The master signi?er turns toward the law of the cultural as the place where language starts to count, as a kind of essentialized clothing for man and woman, a Carlylian Sartor Resartorus. Lacan shows us that language adorns a rapport that is not One. is,

The

analytic

discourse

But how does the

leads own

to

nothing

bend







analyst

use

less than

what,

as

to

this? “To follow the thread of the break

again, than

to

in?ect, than

analytic to

discourse

mark with its

such, produces the fault, the discontinuity” (S. XX, p. 44).

heeding his or her own associations to the analysand’s word.Transferred onto the analyst, the patient’s word is to be taken mathemati— cally; as a cipher to be calculated in the sense that it is a knowledge that does not think, or judge, but carries with it the “word-effect” (or signi?erness) of desire and jouissance, a sense “outside meaning.” The analysand’s word bears the label “no return to sender” (i.e., I like my story. I like me as I am).The analyst must ascertain where language breaks to reveal the symptom behind the story, full of The

analyst listens

without

illusions of whatever

gives



false

consistency,



semblance—a death mask—to

the

analysand’s life. The analyst resembles Diogenes hearing the lies in ego ?ctions, in the language of symptoms, as supposed “truth.” But “truth” is a problematic word when linked to a subjective chain of knowledge whose structure of ?ction rises up to support the ego. In his seminar ofJanuary 21, 1970, Lacan said:“Our truth seems strange to us. It is doubtlessly with us, but without concerning us, as one says” (“Historic d’une moitié de sujet”). On the objective side, Lacan’s object a denotes the something beyond language, beyond the repressed letter, whose truth is not structured as a ?ction, but can be located as the name of a subject’s cause in his or her jouissance.Where the subject is a missing link (3), his or her cause appears in libido; in the vague outline or form of an object a, it tells some story about the mother’s desire in reference to a signi?er for the Father’s Name. Thus, the object a is congealed as a residual lure between what can be spoken and the unspeakable jouissance from symbolic systems, but as a presence in its very excluded absence.]acques—Alain Miller wrote that structural relation like this:

1A

(a).

beyond desire, Lacan pinpointed the real as actual knots, unassimilable pieces of meaning, that produce an excess in jouissance. There where repetition yields displeasure, one can pinpoint the symptoms that do not In the

objects

wish one’s

that dwell

good.25

Lacan’s

Insofar are

as

repressed

discourse seeks in the

to

master one,

make

but



are

social

theory

of discourse structures

67

link, wherein desire and jouissance

the focus of analysis in the

analytic

one,

rethinking of the signi?ed as a limit or symptom of what cannot be said in one’s speech. In Seminar XX Lacan reminds us that Saussure quali?ed his idea of the signi?er/signi?ed relationship as arbitrary, as suggested by his work on anagrams.Although the effects of signi?eds seem to have nothing to do with what causes them, Lacan argued that in the gap between cause and effect, which generally passes for the arbitrary or the realm of perception, signi— ?eds have the appearance of being autonomous meanings because people stop one can

grasp Lacan’s

there in their search for



real

or true

cause.

The serious real, for Lacan, is the

order(ing). Rather than the objectal real, the common- sense real, or the biological real, the Lacanian real is impossible in the sense of being an impasse, both paradoxical and contradictory. As an irreducible kernel that is alternately something and no—thing, the real appears, nonetheless, in the sinthome which ex—sists (dwells) outside language as the proof that language makes “another” language by its effects, a kind of real real. serial,

The

or

that which has

signifier One

Lacan’s idea that the signifier/signi?ed relation is neither arbitrary,

linked in

theory of the signi?er One (l’Un), as differing from the multiplicity of ones (Ies uns).The One is any master signi?er which, by de?nition, denies and re-presses lack (3). It denies l’Un-en-moins (the one—minus) of castration.The impossibility of an 51’s beco- ming One with its own knowledge (82) in the master discourse is inherent in the very act of speaking.Yet, to equate one’s authority to one’s knowledge ?ies in the face of the structure of language, marked as it is by sutures, holes, gaps, hesi— tations, and fading. One only speaks at “all” because words refer to objects of desire, objects we demand in the drive (S O D), their reality based in the object a that supports them in fantasy (S 0 a), not only in relation to the lack they purvey, but also in reference to the permutations of primordially lost object(s) they seek to re-encounter in some illusory dream of correspondent a

one—to—way, becomes

even

clearer in reference

nor

to

his

Oneness. In “Aliénatie

Separatie: Oerverdringing en Finaliteit van de Khur,” Paul Verhaeghe investigates through the various links of sens to being (ego of S1 or 82), subject (lack or S), non-sens, or the a as in surplus jouissance, and so on. He rewrites the master discourse as the one that excludes desire and jouissance: en

51—. S2

8 // (1.2"

The

master

refuses

moins); that the signi?eds if there



is

acknowledge that One is always points to an indispensable third in to

to

be



?eld of language.That i8, it

One minus

(l’Un—en- the rapport signi?er/ points to the phallus cum

68

of discourse structures

theory

Lacan's

object of desire, paradoxical mark of lack: and that which castrates a child by language, giving him or her the chance to enter the world of the symbolic, the place of social links. Signi?ed meaning is never totalizable, then, because it misses its own referent; the object at which it aims in a desire to capture the beyond in jouissance (S. XX, p. 23). Lacan’s analytic discourse aims to break down the usual resistance or misrecogni— tions that keep people from learning who they are, as distinct from who they think they are, based on whom they want to be. Neither ?xed nor uni?ed, subjects are functions of desire and jouissance that suppose (5e posent) themselves through fantasy and language, as consistent. Paradoxically, fundamental fantasies screen out knowledge ofunconscious savoir, making of all resistance to recognition of desire a construct bearing on jouissance.27 If the signi?ed always misses its referent, and the signi?er cannot be collected as cogent thought because it is basically stupid on its own, then how can one talk about discourse as forging a

social link?

signi?er is stupid, in Lacan’s view, because in and of itself it carries no message, a phenomenon starkly dramatized in psychosis. In everyday life, people speak to each other essentially to say silly things. But with these silly things one enters a new subject, that of the unconscious where a certain real can be reached (S. XX).What is the value of this action? Is the goal a poststruc— turalist injunction to laugh? To invent new word games, or give “freeplay” to nonsense? Not for Lacan. Rather the telos of entering the unconscious is an ethical one, concerning the alleviation of human suffering in the interest of increasing individual creativity, freedom, and capacity to desire beyond the Other’s restrictions. This is the analyst’s ethic. Action is the analyst’s goal. But on a large scale: To enable the patient to love his or her cure more than his or her sinthome. Indeed, if we think differently about the ethics of speaking in relation to the effects caused in establishing the signifying chains that speak to us in the ?rst place, many of whose effects are toxic, we also increase our chances for creating a better human world out of the world of childhood. Lacan’s ethics are far—reaching, into the real residue of poisons imposed on The

children, Other’s

on

any who bears the

scars

of BEING

at

the mercy of the

spoken jouissance.

Discourse and In “On

on

races,

iouissance

Jakobson”

Lacan says the

jouissance (S. XX).

signi?er

But since the

cause

is situated

at

ofjouissance

the level of the substance is the real that is hidden

impossible to assimilate at a given moment in time, jouissance takes a bite out of the body, and thus sacri?ces some part of it to a familiar, yet unacknowledged, trauma. Such corporal sacri?ce welds jouissance to the signifying chain, ensuring that the signi?er be marked by jouissance, by the limits of an individual’s capacity for taking pleasure in pain (8. XX, p. 27). Each person is divided, then, between desire (language) and love/hate (jouissance). from “self”

knowledge,

the

Lacan's

theory

69

of discourse structures

You love in the other what you lack in the Other. The

analytic

discourse

sets

up desire as both the problem and solution, using language to work on the real of jouissance effects that place themselves along the desiring spectrum. In the

analytic discourse, when some unknown thing is spoken, the analysand becomes free to produce new master signi?ers by his or her dropping of the fantasy that the analyst “knows” best (like mother, God, and so on): a—?§

One

that Lacan’s theories

can see

never

jouissance from know— personal set of recognitions

divorce love

or

ledge. But Miller has emphasized knowledge as a (connaissances). Knowledge systems are, rather, missed encounters with what they actually seek to know. Pieces and fragments of the real return the object a into language, telling the listener or reader he or she has encountered an impasse that concerns knowledge too painful to symbolize, often even in dreams.

Many domains other than psychoanalysis work with the object a, trying to make sense of the excess in jouissance that produces a symptom: be it in medicine, in literary productions, art, and so on; it is an enigma.Yet the idea that art or poetry or medical illness, are products of a disturbed remainder of sexuality sounds most improbable.While the master discourse aims to shut out the uncon— scious pressure that inheres in language, implicitly enjoying the authority ofbeing the one who “knows”—Sz—it also aims at being normal insofar as “norm” adheres to cultural ideals of “the good” that will please the Other. The energy that propels this discourse, and the others, is not thermodynamic. Nor is there any Freudian energy of pleasure residing at the level of primary-process fantasy and wish ful?llment, nor any special love of “self” to be gained from the other qua mirror. Rather, energy is catalyzed by transference of the treasury of signi?ers and by the objet a propped up against signi?ers to produce jouissance. Moreover, the oddities and inconsistencies of“drive”—aimjng for it

always just

energy,

opposed energy is only

misses—as

mean

that

to an

imaginary

ever a constant



fullness of satisfaction

smooth

?anctioning

in reference

of drive

the One; the

to

signifier for the illusion of unity. So, energy is not a constant homeostasis as Freud proposed, but the “projection” of discontinuities onto seeming unities. In a sense, “drive” energy is always erotic insofar as jouissance is a knowledge that “frames” traditional knowledge and sustains itself by dismantling and reassembling such savoir in relation to the body’s rims and openings. The object a causes desire which seeks satisfaction in the drives: oral, anal, scopic, and invocatory. The Freudian superego is unity, then, but a scopic drive or an invocatory one that “returns”

no

agency

or

the gaze of master, academic, hysteric, or analyst, splattering the ego into judgments and ideals, as well as haunting voices that are familiar, but uncanny. “Drives”—oral,

anal, scopic,

and

invocatory—link body

to

as

language illuminating

the

more

in

70

Lacan’s

theory

than

of discourse structures

inconsistency and enigma into it, ?nding their limits in the absolutism ofjouissance that makes the “subject” a body ofknowledge (connaissances). In this context, discourse—whether taken as a social link or a psychotic non- link—describes the real obstacle, or non—contingent barrier where the subject’s non-identity to itself appears in the excess, the little a. jouissance transcends ontology. The word kills the “thing” qua external object, making das Ding the real which is (un)symbolized in language, but there as a disembodied writing on the body, a sense outside sense as Miller says.Yet, the object a ferments a kind of logical inconsistency in language, a point of libidinal reference that allows jouissance a place, but only because jouissance (re)places the object a qua visible language

language

that infers

effect of the “drive.”

The

university

discourse and the

hysteric’s

discourse

The university discourse maintains its raison d’é'tre by taking the

signi?er as the condition of knowledge, as truthful support for the knowledge dispensed by the professor. Certain impasses in the university discourse are to be expected in view of this structure. Academic authority is based on the assertion that pro- positions are true because he or she says so. In one sense academic discourse is the condition of its own failure, insofar as it is spoken as fact, in the name of a truth, which is the professor’s master signi?er. Insofar as the desire of the acade— mic is that his or her words be taken by the other as knowledge, they are aimed at the excess in the student’s jouissance, at the place where the impossible to say is supported by what is lacking in knowledge (connaissance) (the 8). Insofar as what one knows depends on what one thinks one knows—doxa, to aim such knowledge—the professor’s savoir plus his or her personal connaissance—at the cause of another’s desire (desire being both intentional and interpretative) is at the least anodyne, at the worst destructive. Indeed, such a discourse is not so different from the International Psychoanalytic Association concept of the analyst master

as master.

The subtle one

stresses

regression the analyst’s

Lacan makes from

discourse

as an

discourse

a master

antithesis of

a master

academic

to an

discourse.While

analyst’s discourse is based on an ideal, an impossibility—the attempt to embody what the other cannot say, his or her cause—the master discourse dis— misses altogether the unconscious and the excess in jouissance. The university the

discourse,

jouissance entirely. Indeed, acade- mic knowledge is used in the service of seduction by knowledge, a discourse voyaging towards Cythera. We remember that Cythera is an island near which Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, daughter of Zeus and Diane, is fabled to

at

least, does

have risen from the

the

cause

of the

not

sea.

exclude desire

Students

are

or

half seduced into

unspoken—but only half (S. XX, though classical philosophy said

paradoxes. Even knowledge with some

master’s

working One

with truth—

p.

44).

it

sought truth,

authority.The analytic

runs

idea that actual

into these

equated change can it

Lacan's

only

occur

with

an

unknotting

of



theory

knowledge

that

of discourse structures

concerns

jouissance

71

is not

entertained. The

hysteric’s laCk-in-being—

discourse is

another

quite

matter.

She identi?es

with her

g, a



the

supported by

impossible in knowledge. In this, Lacan of science, thus opposing it to the master discourse

jouissance

compares her discourse

to

that

of the

spoken by philosophers and obsessionals.28 One wonders how a discourse of philosophy can be even further away from the truth than that of modern science whose empirical failings Lacan did not hesitate to expose? And what does con— temporary science have in common with hysteria? Lacan answers that modern empirical science also identi?es with lack as the place from which an answer will come. But while the hysteric weds herself to lack qua answer, the scientist believes (essentializes) the ever-changing series of answers he “discovers,” even to the point of ?nding truth in the data of“negative veri?cation.”The major difference empiricist equates what he or she knows with what is seen or meas- ured by a supposedly objective method. The hysteric knows that what she sees or hears is not it. But she does not know what it is. Not knowing, she must prove

is this:The

to

herself that she ex-sists.Thus, she

changes style

in



second. Her

of her drama; speaks, remains silent, of being lies in her constant evocation of

acts out

proof

the Other’s presence:

5—1 ¥2, the other’s gaze. Her knowledge supports the master signi?ers of others. The jouissance of anxiety validates her being, which is uncertain at best, because she believes her

founding myths lie in the place of an Other’s knowledge. She honors the Other—place of the unconscious—as the One who knows.This is her glory and her despair. Her desire to remain lacking E a

represents her desire sexual dilemma: am I

to

incarnate desire. She

posture of the Other that does tion is



not

knowing.

not

wish her

her unconscious

hysteric who seeks answers from good, empirical science seeks answers within the

But unlike the

project. Paradoxically, the method becomes its own answer. Search research, an in?nite activity. Proof of the “objectivity” of such method is the

research is

to

to answer

woman? Lacan compares the structure of con— the hysteric’s because the fundamental assump-

a man or a

temporary scienti?c discourse

hopes

72

Lacan’s

theory

of discourse structures

falsi?ability criterion. But no scientist would agree that the desire of the researchers plays any role in the process of knowledge acquisition unless some scandal occurs pointing to greed and lying behind the pursuit of some prize. In 1972 Lacan wrote: The universe is nowhere else except in the cause of desire, not even in the universal. It is from this given that the exclusion of the real originates .

of this real that there is

no

sexual relation, and this from the fact that





an

animal has the itself

an

stability that is language, that to survive, it is also what makes organ for his body organ which, in order to stand outside thus, —

determines him in its

from that

function, and this from before he ?nds it. It is

point that he [man

as

animal]

is

obliged

to

?nd

that his

without other organs, and that each of their functions

not

even

body

causes

is

him

problems.29 These other organs are like the gaze, separable from the eye, the voice as separable from language and vocal cords, the imaginary phallus, as separable from the penis, and

so on.

The

movement

research does

not

differ

markedly

from the

always seek another signi?er— refuse to anchor herself to any one master signi?er—in order to keep desire unful?lled, in order to remain in the place of neurotic suffering. Her desire is movement

not

of the

of scienti?c

hysteric’s

for resolution, but

to

discourse. She

be desired. “Am I

must

a man or

woman?” ?xates

her

to

the

problematic of whether or not she is desirable. It is not surprising that Lacan wrote the hysterical discourse as making a “social link.” She only exists insofar as she is seen or heard by the phallic other whose gaze gives her life. She speaks one truth in myriad voices: her proximity to the death drive anchors her being in a certain agony. The moment her desire is appeased, resolutions found, she

must

demolish the illusion of satisfaction in order

to

continue the quest.

surprise that the hysteric is protean, able to play any role in hiding from herself (and others) the “truth” that no answer is desire’s game. Better than anyone else, the hysteric teaches that the structure of thought is that which always puts “structure” itself into question; the question concerning one’s place in the signifying chain of power and desirability that continually changes and moves on. Indeed the hysteric uses language in such a way as to show its uselessness, its redundancy, its status as something left—over, excessive, and tautological. The hysteric also reveals the satisfaction hidden in the symptom, an undecipherable enigma that conveys a message meant for the Other, but sent It should

to

come

as

no

others. Late in his

hysteria is the norm of the human condition, that only obsession is a neurosis. Perhaps this is another way of saying that Woman is man’s symptom. Perhaps a Lacanian analyst knows only this: she or he has no special knowledge of another person’s unconscious.What he or she does know is that the unconscious derails knowledge, makes knowledge (connaissance) stumble over whatever exceeds the phallic law. The Lacanian analyst’s goal is to deroute career

Lacan said that

Lacan's

the

analysand’s

linear narrative—a

In mathemes, the

analyst’s goal

-’

SI—to

theory

of discourse structures

let unconscious

knowledge

73

appear.

looks like this:

a—vS S<—S 1' 2

analyst occupies the impossible place of the excess in jouissance, aiming at the analysand’s symbolic story as it circumvents the real. The telos of such analysis is to replace the symptom’s pain by deparalyzing speech, to give birth to a confrontation between life and death. Lacan placed the analyst’s discourse The

as

the last of the four, but said all the others derived from it.That is,

another has the

we

all suppose

support our own lack(s). structural, then, not content—oriented.The

knowledge

The

to

help

us

analyst’s aims are analyst’s goal is to enable analysands to reconstitute their narratives, enmeshed as they are in fantasy, narcissism, and the jouissance attached to a seemingly ?xed Other scene. Lacan urged analysts to help analysands contextualize the Other, the unconscious which appears as the tim(ing) of alienated and alienating desire.Thus, Lacan goes in the opposite direction from Anglo-American analysts who urge adaptation to social norms. Such norms usually have the force of the superego dicta Lacan considered “ferocious and obscene.” Indeed, how what is

for

“right”

you?

any other person “know”

analytic repositioning

of oneself within

reality models that would constitute a new superego (d la james Strachey), or install adaptive capacities (& la Heinz Hartmann). Lacan’s theory of discourse structures includes only one neurosis qua neurosis: hysteria.Yet, he later described hysteria as the “normative” or bottom-line struc— ture of everyone. If the only “true” neurosis is obsession, both hysteria (and its “brother” patois, obsession) are readable as questions about the relation of gender to anatomy, sexuality and, ?nally, to existence itself. The question regarding iden— tity is uniquely the hysteric’s, while the problem of existence is most particularly social links does

not

refer

A Lacanian

can

to

what troubles the male obsessional. Within the framework of her neurosis the

hysteric

need

not answer

question. Indeed, she goes against the structuration By keeping alive the question of whether one is

her

of her desire if she does.

it in her identi?cation

with

masculine ego, the hysteric can live out a drama of apparently great vitality.Yet, the circular unchangeability of her life is living proof that signi?ers do not necessarily produce

man or woman,

by posing

some

signi?ers in the symbolic. Signi?ers copulate only in the unconscious. What the hysteric knows in the unconscious is that nothing will ?ll her up. One feces cannot attribute a “normative” penis baby Freudian quanti?er for “femininity” to the hysteric. She knows too much about motherhood, too much other



much about the Shams of closure. So she often opts to stay of the normative game of exchange and alleged resolution, unless she chooses

about out



marriage,

too

play at becoming a “woman” by becoming a mother, or by acquiring a name through marriage.30 These are, indeed, potential imaginary solutions for her to

feminine drama.

74

Lacan’s

theory

of discourse structures

Yet she may stay

accept identi?cation the

Oedipal problem

of the game, thereby declaring a refusal to with her mother’s lot, with “woman’s place.” It is clear that

completely of sexual

out

identity—what

is the relation between the mother

by motherhood, marriage, or sexual practice per se. The structure of hysteria is living proof that some part of the libido cannot be translated in the Signi?er, cannot enter the place of the and the feminine—is

Other

as an

not

solved

once

and for all

unconscious savoir.

At the limit of the

hysterical structure, one ?nds the void. The hysteric has accepted the injunction of the real father to position herself in the jouissance where law is the law of desire: to eschew exchange. She does not realize that in evacuating her being in the service of an Other’s jouissance, she sacri?ces her potential freedom and creativity on a cultural (familial) pyre. Enjoined by her own knowledge of what is at stake in familial games, she stays true to a denigrated father, trying to make up for what was a—miss in the family romance. She ?oats in the nether land of identifying as neither man nor woman. The impotence in her structure shows up as an inertia in desire: an effort to exist by not existing. Her proximity to the hole in the Other, to loss itself, places her beyond a com— fortable identity position where the Father’s Name is effortlessly, conventionally knotted. Thus, her lack is a primary one. She has not altogether disappeared behind the signi?er for alienation, the signi?er whose effects demarcate sexual difference as either/ or positions with which to identify, a choice of being one or the other. While the “nor—male” sister in the sexual

masquerade, the

feminine

one,

bows

authority of phallic law, tying her lack to someone else’s master signi?er, an hysteric identi?es with the sacri?ces she makes, not only of her ego, but of some part of her body as well. Like her obsessional brother, the hysteric speaks a discourse of stasis. He uses words as substitute phallic signi?ers, speaking in an imperative mode. She uses words in a querulous, interrogatory fashion. But beware! The hysteric’s “What do I know?” directed toward a master is always followed by some form of “What do you know?”While the movement of her discourse shows an effort to establish social links only to break them, to recon— stitute them, and break them again, the symptoms written on her body also coalesce to make her the quintessence of sexuality, both guilty and glorious. Her glory lies in a psychic chastity.Whatever her sexuality, she remains enigmatically out of the game. Aloof. Her guilt comes from her unconscious knowledge that she can thwart others by calling their lack(s) into doubt.And she knows this from her awareness that the Other ?lls her lack. She knows her gifts are empty. In either case she is guilty of incest, guilty of taking the place of her mother in the family novel. Her jouissance lies in the paradoxical joy and pain gleaned from having dif?culty with the social bond of exchange. Having failed to identify with her mother in some neutral way, or with women in a general sense, the hysteric to

the

?nds

endless other egos

narcissism

just

as

to

take

on as

daily, lacking adequate

her

own.

In this scenario she remakes her

ego conviction to

the male obsessional smothers within the

?ght her unconscious Other. imaginary closet of his mother’s

Lacan’s

theory

desire, the female hysteric is only alive when spurred male

or

of discourse structures

on

female—desire she

by

75

the gaze of others— and solicits.

alternately rejects, manipulates, hysterics as abandoned daughters.

In childhood their might think of mothers were affectiver absent or unacceptable in ways that pushed them to not identify with their mothers’ lives. She identi?es with her mother as a Woman only through pain or rejection.31 In adult life, the hysteric’s precocious knowledge of having been preferred by a Daddy who looked to his small daughter to

One

compensate for what life had

given him, will be unable to repress her childhood in a way that permits her to exit into the larger novel of social Otherness.32 In her effort to be nothing, lest she be the something her father desires, she risks body and being in a life versus death battle. The hysteric’s jouissance does not reside in the sex act per 5e, then, but in the immediacy of the gaze. Insofar as the position of the phallus in the Other determines a subject’s desiring structure, not gender difference per se, the hysteric pushes to their limit questions about how gender relates to knowledge and desire. At the limit of the analyst’s discourse, desire is the tool wielded in trying to make an analysand speak of Other desire, to prize him or her away from the repetitious jouissance whose excesses speak an enigmatic language. At the limit point where identity is split by an Other’s desire, one ?nds an ideal, a fantasy of not

harmonious sexual relation. Indeed,



with the

norm:

It is



imposed by language, cannot

“cure”



suffering people

dramatize the “trouble”

lie made up of “unnatural” sexual stereotypes and roles myth, identi?catory models, naming, and so on. But one

structure,

nor

the human condition. Moreover Lacan left

us

challenge of learning how to scan discourse by arguing that the only incurable fantasy is the masquerade, the one where people repress well, yet display their symptoms psychosomatically and in truncated discourses that re?Jse to take seriously signi?ers, desire, drives, body, lalangue, or jouissance. with the

Notes 1 2 3









Jacques-Alain Miller, “Duty and the Drives,” Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 6, no. 1/2 (Spring/Fall 1992): 5—15. jacques Lacan, “La troisiéme jouissance,” Lettres de I’école freudienne de Paris, no. 16 (1975): 178—203. jacques Lacan, The Seminar ofjacques Lacan: Book XX, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972—1973, ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller, trans. with notes by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 14—25; cf. p. 17. Jacques-Alain Miller with Eric Laurent, The Other I'Vho Does Not Exist and its Committees of Ethics, ch. XIII (1996—1997), Seminar given to the Department of Psychoanalysis, Paris VIII, Saint Denis, unpublished in French; published in Spanish. Jacques—Alain Miller, “A Reading of Some Details in ”IEIem'sion in Dialogue with the Audience (Barnard College, New York, April 1990),” Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 4, no. 1/2 (Spring/Fall 1990): 4—30. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar ofjacques Lacan, Boole X VII: The Other Side of Psycho- analysis (1969—1970), trans. with notes by Russell Grigg, ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 2007), pp. 69—70. Le séminaire de jacques Mean, livre XXII (1974—1975), Real Symbolic Imaginary text established by Jacques—Alain Miller, forthcoming.

76

Lacan’s

theory

of discourse structures

8 Le séminaire de 9

10

jacques Lacan, lime XVIII (1971), D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, text established by Jacques—Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2006). Philippe La Sagna, “Controversies Over the Mental,” (Re)-Tum:A journal of Lacam'an Studies: Theories of Knowledge, vol. 5, Spring 2010: 33—43. Ellie Ragland- Sullivan, “Plato’s Symposium and the Lacanian Theory of Transference: Or, WhatIS Love?, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 88, no. 4 (Fall 1989): 725—755. Slavoj Zizek, “Truth Arises From M1srecogmt10n Lawn and the Subject qf Language, ed. by Ellie Ragland- Sullivan and Mark Bracher (New York: Routledge, 1991). jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject or the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (1960), Ecrits, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), ”

11 12



p. 693. 13 Le séminaire

dejacques Lacan, Iivre XXV (1977—1978): Le moment

seminar. Lesson of November 15, 1977. 14 Le séminaire dejacques Lacan, livre IV (1955—1956): La relation

15 16

17 18

19 20

21 22

23

de conclure.

d’objet,

Unpublished

text

established

by Jacques—Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1994), p. 269. Jacques—Alain Miller, “To Interpret the Cause: From Freud to Lacan,” Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 3, no. 1/2 (Spring/Fall 1989): 30—50. Jacques—Alain Miller, “Extimacy,” Seminar given in the Department of Psychoanalysis, Paris VIII, Saint Denis in 1985—1986. Unpublished seminar. See also “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (the “Rome Discourse”) (1953) in Ecrits, trans. by Bruce Fink, pp. 263—264; cf. also “Extimité,” Prose Studies II, 3 (Dec. 1988). 121— 131. Helena Schultz—Keil, Lacan Study Notes, vol. 5 (1987): 21—22. Slavoj Zizek, Everything You Have Always I'Vanted to Know About Lacan But Never Dated to Ask (London: Verso, 1992), p. 177. Serge André, Que veut une femme (Paris: Navarin, 1986), p. 206. See also What Does Woman Want?, trans. by Frances Restuccia (New York: Other Press, 1999). Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, “Structure de l’obsession,” Hystérie et obsession: Les structures cliniques de la névrose et la direction de la cure (Paris: Navarin, 1985), pp. 267—270. Jacques-Alain Miller, “Duty and the Drives,” Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 6, no. 1/2 (Spring/Fall 1992): 5—15. jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the chhm'que of Psychoanalysis, 1954—1955, ed. by jacques—Alain Miller, trans. by Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 243. Jacques-Alain Miller, “Language: Much Ado About What?,” Lacan and the Subject (3/ Language, ed. by Ellie Ragland—Sullivan and Mark Bracher (New York: Routledge, 1991; reissued 2014), pp. 21—35.

24

25 26

27

28

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, Logico- Philosphicus, trans. by Charles K. Ogden with an Introduction by Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922). Slavoj Zizek, Everything You Have Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Never Dated to Ask (London:Verso,1992),p. 177. PaulVerhaeghe,“Aliénatie en Separatie: Oerverdringung en Finaliteit van de Khur?”; cf. also Does the Woman Exist? From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine, trans. by Marc du Ry (New York: Other Press, 1997), pp. 213—214. Jacques-Alain Miller,“From Symptom to the Fantasy and Back, Chapter 1, Presentation of the Year’s Theme,” Seminar presented to the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII, Saint—Denis (1982—1983), Unpublished seminar, (Re)- Tum:A journal (J lawm'an Studies, Vol. 2, Spring 2005, p. 19. Ellie Ragland, “Sexuality and Science in Television,” Bien Dire:A journal of Lacam'an Orientation,Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 1994), pp. 6—14. ou pire, text established by Lacan, livre XIX (1971—1972), Jacques—Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2011). Ellie Ragland, “What Lacan Knew About Women: The real and the sinthome,” First WAP Conference on “What Lacan Knew About Women,” Miami, Florida, May 31— ]une 2, 2013,]une 1, 2013 in the panel on “Women of Today.” Appeared as Ellie

29 Le Séminaire de jacques 30

Lacan's

31

32

theory

of discourse structures

77

Ragland,“What Lacan Thought Women Kneszhe Real and the Symptom,” Sinthome (Summer 2013), www.lacan.com/symptom. Ellie Ragland—Sullivan, “The Daughter’s Dilemma: Psychoanalytic Interpretation and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth,” ed. by Shari Benstock, The House of Mirth: Edith Wharton (New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 1994), pp. 464—481. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, “Dora and the Name-of-the-Father: The Structure of Hysteria,” Discontented Discourses: Feminism/Tkxtual Intervention/Psychoanalysis, ed. by Marleen S. Barr and Richard Feldstein (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 208—240.

3 THE STRUCTURE OF LACAN’S

OBJECT



Construction of the “In the

Any

object

beginning









there

was

loss.”

study of Lacan’s theory of the object taken for jouissance, might well start with his

serious

discourse

as

that which materializes

Seminar IV

(The Object object/subject

Relation).1 In this Seminar, he takes up Freud’s comments on the opposition typical of philosophical thought by referring to three of Freud’s classical cases: the Dora case, the Young Homosexual Woman case, and the Little Hans case.2 Having measured the brilliance of Freud’s classical insight into the nature of the object as enduring only in one’s perception of it as a special “libidinal” object that produces excitement or the jouissance of strong affect (such as a certain Clanz auf der Naze), Lacan attributes a logic to the unique properties of such an object, properties derived from how the object is constructed in the ?rst place. Building on Freud’s discovery that the object is marked by having been lost and, then, refound, Lacan argues that the topological procedure by which such an energetics occurs is the basis of the singular libidinal qualities one later attributes to particular objects.3 Depicting the losing and re?nding as a dynamic procedure, opposed to the operation of thinking, Lacan proceeds to rede?ne the object away from Freud’s reduction of “it” to “the thing itself,” be it a spool of thread in the Fort! Da! game, the infant’s beloved mother, or some favorite toy. He thereby gives new conceptualization of the object to psychoanalysis, as well as to

philosophy.

Freud’s

theories that took the

breast,

as

concept of the object gave rise to object—relations to be the material “thing itself,” that is, the mother’s

phenomenological

Melanie

object Klein thought;



transitional

object

such

as

the stuffed animal

The structure of Lacan’s

blanket,

Donald Winnicott

object



79

amalgam of a third person that Heinz Kohut called a self a primal fantasy or hallucination.4 Such object—relations theorists are far from reconceptualizing the object, as did Lacan in Seminar IV, as the phallus. There he used the term phallus to mean that which represents the baby as the third person, desired (or not), by the or

as

imagined; object, or

parental couple (S. IV, pp. 29, 57, 124, 202). the

or some

Four years

later, in the 19605, Lacan

baby as an “object” of desire within the parental couple—but to the first mental perception children have of a potentially separable object. By invoking the imaginary phallus, rather than the penis, he makes the point that the organ itself is not an issue, but rather, the fact that the organ represents something one can potentially lose (or have). Such a new conception of the phallus transforms it from the phenomenological category of person or thing—the baby one values (or does not)—which is an imaginary object that causes an individual to desire something else. Although the Lacanian pre—mirror—stage infant experiences its own body, as well as its mother’s, as fragmented into the partial objects that ?rst cause desire to be the desire for the return of a Oneness with a (partial) object—be it the breast, the feces, the urinary ?ow, the imaginary phallus, the phoneme, the gaze, the voice, or the nothing—the knowledge that loss is the loss of being is experienced when these objects disappear, for their presence supports the infant as desiring, indeed, as desired.5 Long before the infant can speak, he or she can register the wish for the return of a lost object by its most familiar ?rst word—the will

give

name

imaginary phallus—not

to

the

cry. Louder than any other word—indeed, a word enunciated from the real, not the symbolic—the cry lets it be known that loss of an object produces a traumatic

fragments and splits a tenuous imaginary consistency of Oneness that spells pleasure and peace. Lacan argued that the true impact of consciously knowing that one is lacking—split, divided—occurs later when little children register the sexual dif— ference (there is no rapport of oneness) or the meaning of “no” to oneness with the mother (the Oedipal drama). These experiences are particularly traumatic because they found the alienation of the identity of each sex on a secondary formation, coming after the mirror—stage assumption at around two and a half years of age of being as imaginarily uni?ed. In some way, the earliest sense of being takes the visible, the semblant, for identity. Once the child is faced with having to take account of the one minimal difference between the boy and girl—the sexual difference—the perception of having or not having the imagi— nary phallus creates a dialectic of fear and anxiety which is set up around the potential for loss of a supposed whole body image. Such imagined wholeness forestalls any encounter with the void of loss (0) at the center of being. One begins to see that mastery of language, motor control, and “self” image are all mirror—stage assumptions—part and parcel of an imaginary structure that remains concomitant with the ego throughout life—that allow a person to con- ?dently function in the world on the basis of the prediction that his or her body is, and will remain, uni?ed and consistent. effect that

80

The structure of Lacan’s

The

object and the

By rede?ning

the

object



phallus

object,

Lacan made

sense

Little Hans’s fears about the size of his

of Freud’s

penis,

case

study

of ?ve-year-old

about whether animals

or

his

possessed this organ, and so on. Little boys fear loss—not of the penis, per se, but of the imaginary phallus that is their interpretation of the organ. Given that the drama concerning male narcissism and jouissance coalesces in imaginary and symbolic attributions of difference he attributes to the other sex and that these views will de?ne his being as a man, whether homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual, one might ?nd in the conscious fears regarding the penis to which Little Hans gives expression a lifelong low-level anxiety or aggressivity in males. Such anxiety ?nds its non—threatening counterpart in a dream reality where images, words, and parts readily become disarrayed in an undecipherable puzzle.When experienced in conscious life, Freud named the threat of such loss “castration anxiety.” Lacan argued that castration anxiety emanates from the real and is experienced as trauma, impossibility, impasse, at the level of the ?esh. The Lacanian real is not equatable, then, with a joke or a metaphor, any more than is the ?rst experience of castration anxiety that occurs when little boys perceive the gap between the organ—object, the word that names it—and the imaginary potential for losing it. Lacan writes this perception by the matheme (—¢) and places it between the imaginary and symbolic orders in his Borromean topological structuring of three kinds ofjouissances to be found in the overlaps between the imaginary and symbolic, the symbolic and real, and the real and imaginary. It is not the jouissance of a split between image and word that gives its threatening mother also

component to the imaginary phallus, however, but the traits of the real that mark it from the earliest moments of the little boy’s equating being with body which,

unfortunately

The

object

is

only

and its



semblance.

changes

over

time

Indeed, Lacan’s eventual placing of the object

at

the

center

of the

imaginary,

and real dimensions prepares the way for his later rethinking of the entire concept of what an object is, as opposed to a subject, and gives him a way

symbolic

objects that escapes language or the arché—writing to which Derrida refers.6 At the beginning of his teaching, Lacan’s goal was to share his rethinking of Freud with his psychoanalytic friends in England, regarding concepts then current in their object—relations theories and practices within the International Association of Psychoanalysis. He wanted, for example, to demonstrate that an object and a symbol were not the same things. to

argue for

He

wrote to



real existence

on

the side of the

Donald Winnicott in 1960:

passion for work does not leave me time for vain regrets. I might perhaps nevertheless be harboring one today at your telling me of having been able neither to assimilate the meaning of my article nor to gauge its The

The structure of Lacan’s

bearing.

It is there that I

normal diffusion within to me

agree

when it on

concerns

can

our



81

teaching loses at not having its community.And it is all the more perceptible feel what my

you, with whom I feel I have

so

many

reasons to

things. (“Letter

the

object

of Lacan’s

to

Winnicott,” Television, pp.

75—76)7

light of Jacques—Alain Miller’s retrospective periodization of his major conceptual shifts, his focus regarding the nature and role of the object changed radically. In Seminar IV (1956—1957) he was preoccupied with the idea that the object can only be conceptualized at all—not as a thing, organ, or person—but because it has been lost and refound. He stressed, therefore, that the object is ?rst and foremost a lacking object. Lacan’s re?ning of Freud’s theory here also shed new light on Freud’s Oedipa] proposal hypothesizing that we take on identity through a series of crises of alternatively identifying with the mother and father. Lacan argued, unlike Freud, that both boys and girls turn away from their ?rst During

course

identi?cations

thirty—year—long

Seminar—as

with the mother towards identi?cations

we can see

with the

in

father, thereby

transforming primordial associations with fragmentary body parts—images, sounds, and drive—affects linked to the unary traits left over in the wake of the

object—to a unity of identi?catory of language, law and difference:

loss of

order

an

oneness

with the social

symbolic

8(a)





(I)

The Vloman.8

In this ?rst

period of his theorization of the object a, Lacan brought new ideas to bear on the question of an Oedipal dilemma insofar as little boys and little girls try to interpret the sexual difference, although it remains a mystery concerning the links between biological gender, sexuality, and predominantly psychic sexual identi?cation with the male or female parent. Why the phallic difference should cause such ado about little or nothing was a mystery to Little Hans, Dora, the Young Homosexual Woman—classical Freudian cases Lacan reinterpreted in Seminar IV—concerning identi?cation with sexual difference that quickly translates away from biology into an ontological problem—which Miller has explained as ontic in the later Lacan who dropped ontology—that equates one’s sexuality with one’s being in terms of a lack—of-being—all-One-sex. That is, the child tries to square the circle of relating the mother 0 father couple that represents a parental relation to the man 0 woman couple that bespeaks a

sexual relation.9 Not until 1960 did Lacan formulate the matheme, the

VIII.IO This is

not

Seminars, however,

because Lacan had or even

prior

to

no

that.

objet petit a, in Seminar theory of the object in his ?rst three He did. He ?rst theorized the object

The structure of Lacan’s

82

as a

matrix of

Freud had

imagoes

thought.“

object



images in the late 1930s, rather than a “complex,” as depicted the lost object as that which gives rise to the

or

He

Oedipal dilemma as an identi?catory impasse for both sexes in Seminar IV in his reading of the Little Hans case. In that same Seminar, he drew the graph that makes of the real father ofjouissance, interdictor of incest, the agent of the symbolic castration that produces the object as lacking (—(p->S) which is, in turn, ?lled up by the positivized phallus, taken as the language or law of a supposed reality. The symbolic mother is delineated as the agent of imaginary frustration when the real organ—the breast, for example—is in question, while the imaginary father’s

impact generates lack as a real privation experienced at the level of imaginary castration (—(p) of the object (3. IV, p. 269). In Le séminaireVIII (1960—1961): Le transfert, Lacan theorized the object as the

special libidinal “substance” in a person that is more than who he or she is. Referring it to Socrates’s particular allure, he called it agalma. In the 19605, Lacan began to speak of the invisible or ungraspable aspects of the object (a) as that which causes desire at the moment of its loss, at the same time that he emphasized that the object a is not the same as the organ that seems to produce it. Indeed, he placed it in a third position between the perceiving agent and the perceived object, alluding to the object whose return one seeks. One seeks the return which causes the desire for reconstituting the homeostasis of a consistency that ful?lls the criteria of drive repetition that yields jouissance. Such jouissance, Lacan taught, is a remnant of a real unary trait of the ?rst memorable experiences of object familiarity that make of the sinthomes (of the fourth dimension) 3 knotting of the imaginary, symbolic, and real. In Seminar XI, Lacan showed the join between desire and drive in depicting the drive as a montage—constructed out of its own special weave of image, word, and the real, made of bits and ideal that desires and seeks

primordial

master

caused desire

as

to

signi?ers

pieces of the world that constitute one as an ego ?ll its drives in a dialectic of repetition between

of identi?cation

the condition of its

and

primordial objects

that ?rst

own return.

position of the beloved on his sexual graph in “A Love Letter,” showing it as containing the particular traits ofjouissance requisite to ?lling the lack in desire that marks one’s fantasy of the Other sex (S. XX, ch. 8). But, in “Knowledge and Truth,” he placed it between the real and the symbolic as the semblant, suggesting that appearance joins the primary master signi?ers of identi?cation to the object one seeks for satisfying desire (S. XX, ch. 9). Put another way, Lacan has begun to depict the object a as having traits of the real inscribed in it via imaginary and symbolic material (the ¥15 of master signi?ers that constitute the ?rst identi?catory material of any subject).This occurs via the operation he calls imaginary castration (—(p)—— or the third jouissance of the unconscious—that valorizes the gap between the word and the thing (—(p) with master signi?ers, or sinthomes.12 We imaginarize the symbolic around the objects that cause us to desire their return. This is, indeed, Lacan’s formula for fantasy: S O a.13 By

1972 and 1973, Lacan

placed

the

object



in the

The structure of Lacan’s

object



83

equated structure—that which gives order— with the Borromean unit that links the real, imaginary, and symbolic orders by 1974 and 1975, Lacan had

By

the knot he called the sinthome

signifying

chain

(2).At the of mind/body, he placed

heart of this base unit of the interlaced the

object

a,

that parts of it

indicating

dwelt in each of the dimensions—as unary traits in the real, as lure imaginary, as semblances of being or identity in the symbolic.14

The

object

objects

in the

and the ego

In my brief account of different theories Lacan advanced

regarding the object a, I have not yet mentioned the early Seminars 1, II and III where he developed the imaginary register of the object by reworking Freud’s concept of the ego.15 By conceptualizing the ego as a narcissistic/symbolic construct—an ego ideal— constituted from the outside world, Lacan broke with any theory wherein the ego would be an intermediary agency formed between id drives and superego strictures. From these Seminars on, the ego will be



dialectical

structure

within

itself, oscillating between the ego ideal unconscious formation and the ideal egos

(or others)

of the outside world that ?rst formed the identi?cations that fabricate

verify as desirable in the gaze of others and of the Other that structured it. Although Lacan did not say that the ego is an object a, he taught that it is an imaginary structure—structure being that which is formed by laws that can be studied at the level of cause and eHect—whose essential property is that of narcissistic identi?cation. This makes of the ego’s imaginary narcissism either a norm, or a sign of pathology. Put another way, pathology is not a helpful label in dissecting the ego and the subject, given that each person is subject to his or her desires, each with its suffering side. Moreover, the ego is never whole except insofar as a psychotic imagines it to be. It functions, rather, by a dialectical tension. Although most post-Freudians one’s

own

would as a

not

split

ideal that

one,

then, seeks

view this tension

as

to

inherent in the ego itself, but would

between self and other, Lacan viewed con?icts

see

it rather

between self and other

emanating from a dialectical tension already at work in each person’s own ego. Thus, suffering would characterize a normative master logic—albeit repressed— as readily as the more evident unyielding rigor of a psychotic’s certainty. The important point regarding Lacan’s reformulation of the ego is that any initial split comes from the split in the subject of the unconscious which imposes itself on the ego as a divide between conscious and unconscious knowledge. This is quite another idea than the typical one held by analysts who equate psychological health with ego wholeness, while pathology is equated with any sign of a splitting of the ego. We know that the ego is not the object a. And in Lacan’s ?rst three Seminars, the object is far from being the object a of Seminar XI, the paradoxical object that causes one to desire and that one, in turn, desires. At the beginning of his teaching, as Lacan elaborated the logic that gradually culminated in his multifaceted theory of the object a, he progressed from a kind of equivalence between the ego and the object to the idea in Seminar IV that the as

84

The structure of Lacan's

object



basis of

objecta] organization is the lack of the object in the real, imaginary, and symbolic dimensions (cf. note above, S. IV, p. 269).To begin with this proposition— that the structure of the object is its own lack—one has to understand that objects must ?rst be symbolized in order to give an objectal base to language into which they, in turn, infer concrete gaps, or moments of ful?llment that are experienced as the peaceful suturing of a lack. By passing from the real object to the symbolic one via imaginary frustration, one has gone from acknowledging an experimental gap to the idea that the object or image that ?lls the gap will place a negative component in the image, a lack Lacan denoted by the negative square root of 1: from —¢ to E. The mathematics behind such a possible transformation depends on real numbers that function as the fractals that allow one to formalize negativities as a knowledge parallel to the somewhat developmental logic Lacan theorized in the pre—mirror, mirror, and post—mirror organizations of being and body as pre-Oedipal, Oedipal, and post-Oedipal positions taken towards the phallic signi?er. Indeed, Lacan argued as early as Seminar III that physics we have adopted the law that we proceed from the idea that in nature nobody uses the signi?er to signify .You must nevertheless not think that our physics implies the elimination of all meaning. There is a [Nonetheless] no meaning at the limit, but there is nobody to signify it empirical theory is able to account for the existence of even the ?rst whole in

..







numbers.16

The

object

and mathematics rhetorical

Why “can’t the formalization of mathematical logic, which is based only on writing, serve us in the analytic process in that what invisibly holds bodies is designated therein? like the spider’s web that radiates from its body to encircle its universe while catching what falls into it” (p. 93). Lacan’s writing of a few mathemes—the a, the S, the O [Q] and the (D, for example—constitute a support that goes beyond speech, without going beyond language’s actual effects (5. XX, p. 93). Having demonstrated that loss operates in the construction of being and know— ledge by the same logic of certain mathematical principles, Lacan argues that when the object of value—the object a—is lost, some part of its identi?catory Two decades

later,

Lacan asks



question

in

Seminar XX:



traits remain

to

attach unconscious rememoration

to

conscious memory,

primordial repression a knowledge that functions by real lettres or unary traits (Freud’s Einzeger Z?gen and Miller’s divine details) that can be isolated in language, images, affects, and symptoms. Philosophers have labeled such material Cerede, intuition, primary imagination, primary process, or the marginalia of non-sense one can throw out of thought as being essentially empty logocentrisms. Lacan’s early introduction of the annulus or torus—Q—in “The Rome Discourse” (1953) implies that the object a is not making

of

The structure of Lacan’s

just writing, for experience to ?ll

it

be denoted

can

by



symbol

the hole of the void with its

own

or



object



85

letter. It functions in

properties

of familiarity and

Otherness: Q—m.” Put another way, the Lacanian

object

intermediary between the subject’s palpable gaps and voids in being and



is

knowledge that there are concrete and his or her early correlation of the object with the schema of the veil or (S. IV, p. 156). Later, in Seminar XI, he equated the spot or stain beyond with the

Ding, are

(3. XI,

screen

is the sublime

felt in the

body

p.

area as

91). Beyond of in?nite

anxiety, fear,

Seminar VIII, that when the

supporting the

cause

to a

the

of

subject

anxiety

in

object

the screen, which

we

screen

vision

mistake for das

space or unboundedness whose effects or death anticipation. Lacan expressed in a

does

not

?ll

the void of the real

(0),

desire, anxiety appears. He, thus, changed the focus of

from Freud’s disinvestment of the

relation between desire and the void

(cf. S.VIII).

ego’s

erotic components,

But the void is

not

the

nothing of (empty) silence that some Lacanian commentators have confused with the Heideggerean vase where silence is active, or aggressive, or even erotic.18 The

object

and absence

paradoxical one: In order that the object be symbolized such that one can desire it, the object or its image, must ?rst disappear. This picture of the object is a part of Lacan’s theory of castration, developed in Seminar XI as the logic of alienation and separation. An object is lost, or cut. Until it is named by language—alienated behind language—it does not exist except in the Lacan’s

point

is



traits that dwell in the intersection between two circles—which

the

parts of of the cut

are

subject’s sense of being alive that are not lost in the experience (Baits, pp. 692—693; S. XI, chs. 15, 16). Insofar as the presence of the object a sustains an illusion of being, its disappearance giving rise to lack, it produces the effect on most infants of grasping that symbols or images are not inherently stable or reliable.The object’s disappearance leaves an empty place in its wake, thus making absence (ab-sens) the condition of language through the possibility of signifying some Thing as positivizable.Any symbol—a mother’s face, a voice, an elephant, the sun—is only ever “here” insofar as it has a dialectical relation to being “gone.” Lacan illustrated this feature as early as Seminar II with his schema of the optical illusion created by the ?owers in a vase. One sees them as all together in the imaginary. But in the symbolic domain of the dream, where the signi?er is the guide, they are separate, one from another, and from the vase. There they show their true properties of incompleteness (8. II, p. 109). In this transformation between being here and being lost, the symbol turns from being identi?ed as a (positive) image, or word, or organ to the negativizable object a—negative in that its presence is lost or lacking and must be brought forth by substitution; by the logic of metaphor, in other words.Thus the “subject,” as opposed to the object, is not the symbol of the thing—in—itself, but the gap left by the fading of fullness

86

The structure of Lacan’s

object



longer. Language, then becomes the means by which the speaking being tries to cohere by creating correspondences between things, ideas, and people, seeking to eradicate any lacks in them. Lacan also presented the present—absent cause underlying the birth of language as a theory of repression in his discourse theory (5. XX, pp. 16—17): or

presence of something that

was

there, and is

no

S]—>Sz S<—a

sphere of the master discourse ?eld of language that reduces the meanings of things to their de?nitions, or to current usages in conscious parlance. And the lack-in-being whose structure is that of uncon- scious fantasy—[S<—a]—catalyzed by some particular object—cause-of—desire subtends conscious language while acting within it. This is a knowledge that the master discourse denies and rejects entirely. Any admission of lack or desire into a worldview in which words equal things would subvert the safe consistency that keeps the object a at bay. For those in the master logic, objects are present only as lure objects, as stand—ins for a real object that is radically lost, and of which they want to know nothing because the knowledge would be that of the metonymic qualities of desire endlessly deferred while it awaits its moments The

81/32

is the conscious

of jouissance. of the

paradoxically present and absent, Lacan returned to Freud’s “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905),") although he found greater support for his hypothesis in Freud’s comments on his little nephew’s rolling a bobbin reel of thread back and forth, repeating Fort! Da! (Here! There!) as recounted in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).20 Freud’s insight was that this nephew’s repetitive act mixed pleasure and grief, using the pleasure or fun of a game—accompanied by vocalization—to master the sadness he felt at his mother’s departure. Lacan takes a di?erent tack from Freud in his interpretation of this exemplary incident.The little boy’s mother has just left. A ditch of absence has opened up around him.This ditch is a literal void, Lacan says, marking the parameters of the child’s loss of being as a correlate of the position of having previously been grounded in the ?eld of his mother’s gaze. Given this topological logic, it is not surprising that the little boy experiences this loss as a loss of being, which is normally uni?ed in an imaginary consistency where being and body are semblances of wholeness as long as they are tethered to the supposed Other. Freud attributed the cause of repetitive acts to instinct. He believed the continual act of rolling the spool back and forth responded to some biological injunction. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle he writes:“It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore to an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life” (SE, 18, p. 36). forces Repetitions are urges performed at the behest of the biological id in order to In

explanation







of his

theory

of the

structure

object

as

The structure of Lacan's

provide pleasure, de?ned, paradoxically, by

Freud

as

object

the absence of tension

87



or

the

maintenance of homeostasis.

The

object

But Freud

repetitions

in

Beyond the Pleasure Principle perplexed

was

that

are

as

to

why

there would be



beyond pleasure

redolent of the death drive. Lacan conceived of the inertia

which Freud referred

in to

something placed in organic life from the outside, not inherent in it, adding a bit apologetically, that Freud, not having had access to modern linguistic theory, could not know how metaphor or metonymy, for example, function and, thus, could not advance in his logic of the unconscious beyond a biological theory wherein the body causes its own effects. What is repeated in the bobbin reel game, Lacan taught, is not just the signi?er, “Fort! Dal” More importantly, the words become the means by which Freud’s nephew invests (cathects) the bobbin reel with a “material” piece of the real of his being, a real containing inverse sides: The trauma of loss is made manifest in the repetition, while the ability to replicate oneself libidinally by investing things with traits of one’s being also comes from the real. The little boy’s encounter with the real 0f the void catalyzes his becoming detached from a stable image of himself as anchored to the Other, within the scopic ?eld. Topologically speaking, this intervention of the real into the symbolic has made a hole in the symbolic.” The real of the jouissance at play here is the little boy’s loss of the position of being a desired object of the maternal gaze, a foundation in imaginary consistency he takes for granted—and represses—until deprivation of the sustaining gaze and image of the mother herself cut into his semblance of being uni?ed, and whole, bringing an experience of pre-mirror- stage fragmentation with it. Such a theory gives a new meaning to the concept of mastery of the drives. One cannot master them, for by their very structure they subvert one’s imaginary illusion of control by sublimation, repression, reversal into its opposite, or turning back on oneself, as Freud argued.22 The child’s immediate goal

is

to master

eradicate the

cut

as

the loss of his mother’s gaze. Put another way, he wants to of the real that has disrupted his symbolic universe in order

to reinstate the

imaginary illusion of consistency that Lacan called a logical one. Thus, from Lacan’s viewpoint, the bobbin reel is neither metaphor, nor any other kind of symbol that represents the mother. Rather, his question bears on why young children would be driven at all to conquer the temporary loss or

disappearance

of their mothers?

question provided a bridge to object-relations theorists with whom he was in dialogue at that time in 1956—1959. He had already depicted the ego as constituted on the imaginary axis of identi?cations with Others. This mirror-kind of formation makes of the ego a seemingly “internal” Object comprised of the images, words, and desires of others of the external world Lacan called the Other; or the place where the signi?er is localized.Yet, as we Lacan’s

answer to

this

88

The structure of Lacan’s

object



have said, because the ego is formed from the outside, it is permanently split between the sense of “having” an inner being, yet forced to recognize that this being can only be validated by the world outside. Freud’s young nephew’s aim

something else. He wanted to mend the split between the ego and the lost object by putting something in the ditch or gap. For Lacan, such an action validated his discovery that the ego is neither subject or object, but the narcissistic identity one has, one which shows its face, through the ideal egos (or others) one seeks in relationships or in the unary traits that link one to the object a as sinthomes or primordial identi?cations. The aim of any repetition, Lacan argued, is not the object sought, but the goal of attaining jouissance as homeostasis, as Oneness. One gloss on jouissance here would be that which attains and maintains the consistency of keeping anyone from questioning one’s ego ideal ?xities. Indeed, Other discourse is based on the duplicity of the lie, the half—sayings of truths that will please others in the maintenance of their self—?ctions. The structure Freud unveiled in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the lethal, non—pleasurable side of keeping “reality” constant by repetitions that quickly become the habits that mark a person’s ego with an unchangeable rigidity; indeed, with Thanatos. was to

The

reinstate

object

stability, but

as

Ur-lining

his

goal

of the

was

subject

objects—Ur-lining of the subject—are lost to consciousness in any pristine form of knowledge about them, they can only be refound by the substitutes one chooses—words, images, games, relationships, activities, rituals, fantasy, drives, and so on. But there will never be a one-to—one correspondence of a lost “inner” object with an outer object; only the remaining traits of some Insofar

as

the ?rst

differential there

can

structures

be

no

of desire. The

identity

of the

sorrow

object

in love

or

in sexual

found with the

jouissance

is that

object sought, only

the

re?nding of unary traits Freud called Einziger Z?gen and Lacan called the ?rst master signi?ers of identi?cation (or sinthomes) and Miller called divine details.23 Freud knew that Vbrstellungsrepresentiinzen were countable quantities as symbols in dreams and jokes, but he did not have a theory of how to link such representations or signi?ers to the libidinal object. Picking up on Roman Jakobson’s work on the dialectical link between metaphor and metonymy as poetic tropes that make the brain function, Lacan argued that Freud, nonetheless, intuited Jakobson’s theory in his own work on condensation and displacement in dreams. He described condensations as metaphors (substitutes) linked to the object that causes desire (and that one later desires to recapture, at least in some simulacrum of the ?rst one) by the concrete metonymous displacements and contiguities of desire.24 Thus, Lacan set up the base for later linking signi?ers to the object a as real sinthomes (or knots) that join identi?cations to libidinal objects, while hiding within a mask of semblance. Although Freud did not apprehend that the object was neither the mother, nor the spool of thread, he intuited that the game replicated itself by framing its

The structure of Lacan’s

object



89

frame.

By making a presence out of absence—Fort! Dal—the little boy tells not only about the us something ?irther, object, but also about the nature of Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1915). Some commentators have suggested that own

the child mastered his mother’s absence because he used

signi?ers

to

represent

objects.Yet, Lacan taught from Seminar I on that the word murders the image or thing at the experiential level of enjoyment. As soon as one says “elephant,” elephants themselves begin to disappear (S. I).What Lacan seized upon in Freud’s account of the bobbin—reel incident was that the little boy could replace his lost sense of being through an imaginary identi?cation with a spool. And since he rejected the idea of the spool as a symbol or an object by which to master loss, he depicted it, rather, as an object a—something visible substituted for in fantasy—that sutured the lack opened up when the little boy’s mother went away. Detouring through the alienation of language and the experience of the cut, or separation from the primordial object, fantasy works by an unconscious, constant rhythm to ?ll the lack-in—being with the object a.Although, the structure of fantasy is what the master discourse represses (S. XX, ch. 2), one can deduce process from functioning, even if the subject in question is a boy, aged 18 months. Insofar as the Lacanian subject is a “headless subject,” absent from any immediacy of presence of itself to itself as a full subject, it is always susceptible of being ?lled by objects. Insofar as the little boy’s action mimes the frame that frames him in the world, he is a member of the set or ensemble to which he already belongs. It is in this sense that one can characterize the object a as having properties of insideness and outsideness, while belonging to neither space: ?—>a.The outside properties of an image or object structure what we perceive as inside, while the inside is made up of the elements of the outside. The left—over parts—the non- alienated, remaining residual traits of real jouissance—from the extimate object have qualitative attributes that lodge and wedge them within the frame of quantitative representations by from the outside.25



priori identi?catory

himselfinto



semblance of the

Transforming

?ll the empty space of his

that will ?ll his

virtue of their

own

construction

object

that will

void, the little boy imaginarily becomes the spool

symbolic lack. The dialectical game of presence—absence plugs up the real void of anxiety with words and actions. The game of disappearance and return played by the 18-month-old boy—just exiting from the mirror-stage identi?cations with his mother—is not the “renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting,” as Freud thought (BPP, p. 13), but a ?lling of the split constituted in the formation of the ego during the mirror—stage moment that occurs between approximately six to eighteen months of age and ends with a child’s having mastered bodily motor control and the beginnings of a language syntax. Rather than the whole ego imagined by Freud, Lacan depicted an ego split between the imaginary others and the symbolic Other that formed it, marking it, moreover, with “no” or negation at the point where the symbolic and imaginary axes overlap in the Schema L. At that junction Lacan inferred the phallic signi?er of the law of a local universal limit in the reality supposed.26 own

90

The structure of Lacan’s

object



the top part of the Schema L by others—Lacan concluded that one

Writing



to

must

dotted

line—parlétre—-)——speaking

negotiate

with others

through

language to valorize and revalorize desire via the unconscious formation of one’s (ego) ideal that Lacan designates as a symbolic structure. Insofar as Freud’s little nephew is just becoming conscious of a lack-in—being, Lacan says, he will comprehend at some level that “This reel is not the mother it is a small part of the subject that detaches itself from him while still remaining his” (S. XI, p. 62). Lacan’s interpretation suggests that Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1915) might be explained as an inverse face of On Narcissism:An Introduction (1914). By combining the two texts, one can postulate that narcissism turns into mourning when what one took from the other to .

form one’s

own

ego ideal—the real unary traits of identi?cations—are

thereby opening up the void matheme for

grief this

as

an

empty space. One

might

even

lost,

write the

way:

Subject (S)<—S (0) (divided Other) —>a

[fall The In

of the

object

mourning

object a]

and WOMAN and melancholia,

one

has lost, quite concretely,



part of who

one

is in the real of the traits invested in the other that sustain one’s relations in the

imaginary and one’s place in the symbolic. Not only is loss of the other experienced as an impoverishment of being that motivates a turning away from the fullness of life, precisely because one has shed many concrete pieces from the object a—what Lacan called the fall of the object a—one has also lost the position one inhabited in the Other vis-a—vis the phallic signi?er of symbolic approbation, honor, and ordering. Lacan says in SeminarVII, that the referent for the void is das Ding, de?ned as one’s ?rst Good, a material good ofjouissance whose effects form the primary non—specular objects (a) that cause desire to function as a pressure that compels one to seek jouissance within constellations that resemble the ?rst experiences of the gaze, voice, and so on. Lacan called such effects a murmuring of language, or lalangue as the only “natural language” of which he would admit. He also described this primordial material as the dites maternelles, the language of primary jouis-sens. And jacques-Alain Miller has demonstrated what this language is and how it functions in his many Seminars in the 20005. There he designated das Ding as the object insofar

the

as

it is

eternally lacking,

object a which ?anctions to ?ll the lack. Lacan says das Ding is the genital object as WOMAN. The object is WOMAN, Lacan says, qua lost.That is, the primordial mother is experientially lost in the comings and goings of bits and pieces of the real. Put in other terms, she is not countable by symbolic—dimension signi?ers or conventions Lacan equated with quantities, while

specifying

that it is

not

The structure of Lacan's

but

by

ebbs and ?ows

She is lost, then,

in the

evanescent

amorphousness

object

of libidinal



91

qualities.

positivizable essence. Neither WOMAN nor the mother are the essence or guarantee they seem to be as (THE) totalized antidote to lack.Yet something ofWoman always remains in the “not all,” just as something as



of the Woman remains

Lacan, it will

not

mother in that everyone is born of a woman. But for be of the One, but of the One—minus.Any quest for a (good) as

will dead end, rather,

object a. Each experience of satisfaction or jouissance—each Findung—will only be a re?nding (a VVieder?ndung) of some form of this ?rst object, Lacan says, returning object

to

the

point of loss whose limit will be

some

Freud.

separate Lacan’s theories of THE WOMAN from of desire. One desires the other as a mirror—re?ection of one’s own

In this context,

his

at

theory

one cannot

desires. But, in

actuality, the other is a wall, not a mirror. At the base alienation—experienced in complete ignorance by Freud’s nephew—the to

make THE WOMAN



substitute for THE MOTHER

of his

effort

encounters

an

impossibility that produces the fundamental instability Lacan describes in Seminar XX by the formula—The Woman does not exist—at the level of essential being. The claim that She does—as Mother,Virgin Mary, or any other powerful female ?gure—is a myth which, in Lacanian theory, opens onto the real. The structure of intersection or separation that Lacan writes in mathemes com- as the incomplete Other (0) means, in one rotation, that the very ?rst ings and goings of the mother qua primordial partial-objects—cause-of—desire create the structure of loss that sends individuals in quest of substitute objects throughout life. In the topology of the subject, we are speaking, then, of what is produced between the two overlapping voids of being and thinking: CED. At the intersection between these two sets, the image that seems full and whole— be it of the primordial mother as partial object (her breast, her voice, and so on), or the later fantasy expectation of a scenario, is the image perforated by lack and loss: ima



-¢ (imaginary castration). The effort

to

repair

the lack in

an

image

owes

nothing

to

Hannah

Sega],

object—relation theorist who views analytic cure as a reparation of the ego, supposedly wounded in the ?rst place by inadequate maternal care. Lacan underscored this fact: Given that the Other wants something 0f one—that an infant be quiet, or ?nd a toy to play with until the mother returns, and so on—automatically bespeaks the lack of the Other’s totality, its castration.This becomes a proof that the Other is not whole and will necessarily require that its subject seek substitute objects—the object a—to ?ll the structural lack in being, knowing, and body. This is also, in part, the reason that Lacanians Melanie Klein,

or

any other

Speak of the mother as ravaging the child. She is not ALL, she And often she is unintentionally destructive to her child.

cannot

be such.

92

The structure of Lacan’s

object



Primary objects Insofar

the ego ideal is constituted as a response that ordinarily sustain one in desire, it is

as

to a

series of losses of the

surprising that two of Lacan’s key mathemes are the object a that represents the lost object and the G that denotes the void one seeks to satiate with substitute objects. That life’s jouissance(s) organize themselves around these mathemes is a fact of everyday life. Lacan’s point, beyond showing this dialectical interplay, was to indicate that whatever object one thinks one wants, the true object is not the one aimed at, but the goal of maintaining oneself as whole in jouissance. Indeed, everyone’s ?rst jouissances are investments made in the primary mother—what Freud called the Urverdra'ngte or primordially repressed—which are what materialist idealist philosophers have called phenomenal objects. In contrast to Godel’s undecidable, such thinkers have named the phenomenal an anterior creative imagination, what theologians call spirit, or what Jung called a collective symbology. In his early explanations of the object, Lacan spoke to his colleagues, object— relations theorists in England, pointing out that even though it is not innate, the imagination has been constituted in reference to objects that caused one to desire in the ?rst place. And such objects are quickly con?ised with real organs, such

object



not

the mother’s breast with the oral drive, the eye with the gaze, and so on. One can depict this material as the primordial givens—gifts of the symbolic mother—

as

subsequently beget the demande (Lacan’s word for “drive” in “The Rome Discourse”) for their return.27 What one seeks in fantasy, according to such theory, is not so much the conscious material of a remembered sexual scene, but an extimate replica of the radically repressed primordial material that comprised one’s ?rst memories of jouissance, coming out of the desire for the return of something lost. That such desire gives birth to the drive creates an energetics between the desire ofjouis- sance, known in reference to its loss, and the means deployed to attain it via some object a.]ust when one thinks one has caught the object lost in the drive, it slips away and must be refound through detours that surround the objects that ?rst caused desire to be the desire for the (impossible) return of a Oneness whose base paradigm is close to something as familiar as the proximity of breath. or

tokens of love that

prototype of other efforts ?ll the void with a semblance of

The catch-22 in the bobbin-reel incident, taken to

?ll the void with

objects, is

that in

seeking

to

as a

being, one pursues a composite of traits that have already solidi?ed into the repetitions of images, sexual traits, and words one knows. Such jouissance creates a limit in the drive to re?nd oneself as an object through the other’s eye, for the other, too, is subject to his or her own Other desire. What, then, can one take of the other to satiate his or her lack? If the object is taken as real, this gives anyone his or her existence beyond the imaginary illusions that mark him or her by ideals. But real traits are isolatable only in the “divine details” that return into conscious life as single traits one can gather on a thread as moments of identi?catory jouissance that penetrate language in a tone, one’s

own

The structure of Lacan’s

object



93

sigh, a letter ofbeing.These place a beyond in language that carries its own truth and knowledge. Lacan called this the lettre that joins body to being. Miller talks of it as the “sense” of a meaning. Being becomes the project of ?lling the other’s lack at the level of objects that cause desire and seek jouissance; or of the other ?lling one’s own lack. Thus, one’s object being differs from one’s subject being which belongs, rather, to a closed circuit of a self-contained dialectic that Lacan de?ned in one permutation as the Other as the locus of the signi?er: a

gas

a<——¢. But how

impasse an

get beyond such impasses to the other whose limit is the her Other (sex)—to satisfy one’s jouissance? Sexual pleasure is

can one

of his

or

easy answer,

goal: pleasure

but, for all that, it underscores the split between the aim and the

versus

the validation

one

feels in love. Lacan maintained that the

transference opens a tiny space for love—for the object of ossi?ed jouissance to enter the other—thus, allowing the analyst an entry point into the normally closed

signi?ers of the analysand’s Other. This experience creates the possibility for the analysand to reweave and rearrange the messages that speak him or her as sinthomes (primary identi?cations of master signi?ers), and as a semblance where being hides the real. Transference allows the analysand to recreate himself or herself within the topological spheres of desires projected by the Other’s gaze by reassembling pieces of one’s mask to reorder the meanings inscribed there, although the pieces are all at the surface, at the level of sense. The

a as

Insofar

signifier

of the void

object a is the signi?er of the void (Q), one confronts a paradoxical theorem of cure by reorganizing the semblant Lacan placed between the real and the symbolic in Seminar XX (ch. 9). One can say that Lacan invented the semblant to express the idea that one cannot say the truth regarding the semblant ofjouissance: “What Lacan calls truth is the signi?ed as repressed.”28 Insofar as truth is the repressed signi?er, it becomes necessary to refer to the experience of the unconscious in order to speak truth, for the unconscious is a knowledge, a savoir (qui ne serait pas du semblant) which 5e sait (knows or recognizes itself).29 Since no object that causes primordial desire can be refound per se, one might say the object of any re?nding will consist of unary traits of signi?ers (Frau K.’s beautiful white body, Dora’s father’s cigar smoke), or of libidinal qualities of a primordial object a, such as voice tone, or the sly askance of a look (all inscribed for certain meaning within a culture, nonetheless).Yet, Freud and Lacan insisted on an even more primordial aspect to the object a than those mentioned above. Both argued that the object is hallucinated on the basis of a primary anguishing reality; the loss of traits that amalgamate them into a Thing ofjouissance. as

the

94

The structure of Lacan’s

It could be

seeming

to

be

object



argued that the object is refound in das Ding, or the unapprehensible object

the

imaginary

Lacan described



lure,

as a

pos-

as

symbolic of ritualized activities that form a nexus of social encounters, including speaking itself, which Lacan called a jouissance. In the real, the object is the libidinal pleasure of sexuality, food, the gaze of admiration, or its own inverse face in the loss of tivization of the

real,

or as



semblance of

being

in the

narcissistic comfort where the illusion of nary wholeness.Words

give



consistency corresponds to an imagi— seeming consistency to the vacillations of objects profoundly, when images and words are woven

imaginary. But, most together into ideologies, the sublimation of the Father’s Name serves as the knot that joins the real to the symbolic, and the imaginary and identi?cation with a Father’s Name signi?er offers the guarantee of a true picture of the word, making the object a equivalent to the knot; coherent, calculable, governable, Z [symptom]. reliable, and realistic: ((1) [Father’s Name] Because the object is real, it returns to infer discontinuity into language, being, and body. Is that the limit of its rapport with the real, one asks? This is a crucial question in grasping Lacan’s theory of the object. The penis is a real organ, as are other biological pieces of ?esh. But the phallus is imaginary, a re—presentation of a real organ. And when the breast becomes, not a real organ, but a semblance of that which offers the pleasure of something good that will ?ll the void by re—incorporation of the already-known-to-be-pleasurable, it has been transformed into the strawberry tartes Lacan pointed out that little Anna Freud adored (S. XI, p. 155). Between the object—phallic or otherwise—and the void lies the object’s potential for ?lling the hole in the Other, around the divide of a bar, itself a signi?er of the modes of transformation required in order that the object replicate its primary jouissance conditions: in the

—>

Q 3.

call this formula another way of writing the lack of an essential \X/omanzzllhc”Vilon'tarr.3O Rather than complete the Other, the object a

Indeed,

makes

one

might

hole in the Other, marking it by the cut whose inverse face is loss. Discontinuity breaks the line of imaginary consistency, the seeming wholeness a

comfort, shattered by con?ict. Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein, Ernest jones, and others surrounding Freud, lacked the category of the imaginary, Lacan said, so could only “think” psychic reality in reference to the real of organs. Lacan located the limit of experience at the site where psychic reality (Realit?t) and sensory reality (Wirklichkeit) return to the same place, as the limit point of the object a Freud called repetition.What Lacan mapped in 1974 in his structure of the Borromean knot in La troisiéme, he had already begun to sketch out in Seminar IV in 1956 and 1957 in his presenta— tion of three relations to the lack of the object in each of the three registers. of



narrative,

or

the real of bodily

The structure of Lacan’s

object



95

Mental life

(tuché/encounter) develops via the interaction of these spheres in Lacan’s teaching, not as a developmental set of libidina] stages (oral, anal, genital) organized around tea] organs, or as a set of cognitive sequences, or developmental stages, but as a certain chaos correlated with the object one desires and experi- ences as lacking in symbolic castration; as the organ itself in imaginary frustration; or as the jouissance phallus in real privation (8. IV, p. 269).The dilemma confront- ing any infant is how to mark an ordering between the real object and its ?rst agent, the symbolic mother. Thus, from the start of life, one’s relation to the lack of an object concerns the object as real, symbolic, or imaginary. This tripartite structure of the object underlies what Lacan calls the furor of the drives.What ensues are loss and imagi- nary frustration, not the symbolic dyad of harmony and peace we later mytholo— gize and enshrine in religions, art, and so on. But there is a counter—example against which to balance typical developmental experiences of the object. In psychosis, the object is never lost from the real. The mother remains a physical extension of the psychotic’s own body, such that lack is never constituted. The object—in this case an image of the mother as lacking nothing and an adhe- sion to her voice and gaze in the real—is never lost. Language, consequently, does not function metaphorically—substitutively. One might speak of a pure conversion reaction in psychosis, concerning the whole body, not just sexuality, as in hysteria. However, most subjects do not evolve as psychotic.When there is a real object, such as the symbolic mother’s breast, its lack is experienced as an imaginary frustration. But since images are so quickly caught up in the signi?er, the mother qua primitive object only appears as such starting with the ?rst games, such as presence/absence, plus/minus games.And attachment of the agent to the lack of object is played out around the cry, itself a signi?er. Dialectic enters quickly for most infants (although not for infants whose autism or psychosis is precisely the lack of the dialectic).And it enters by the gifts (or maledictions) insofar as objects become objects of the maternal gift as givens, indeed, as the ?rst givens. Philosophically speaking, then, there are no pre-givens, no innate, or natural facts of being. Rather, these gifts are bestowed by the agent whose power resides in responding (or not) to the cry. The mother is, in this sense, a symbolic agent, purveyor of the gift, the ?rst one being the real breast. Her gift of love is given (or not) as a response to the infant’s demand for nothing, almost nothing. But the almost nothing is subtle. It is the demand, not for things, but for signs, signs of love. In this register, frustration is experienced as an imaginary interpretation concerning a real object. On the other hand, when an imaginary object is in play—such as the phallus— the relation of lack to the object is experienced in the symbolic.Whether one confronts an obsessional’s symbolic debts taken on in the wake of taboos, such as the incest taboo whose agent is the real father as the father ofjouissance, or the symbolic sacri?ces women make in compensation for dubious lacks, the point

is that the

lacking objet

is

imaginary—not real.All the

same,

the lack of an

96

The structure of Lacan’s

object



imaginary object in the symbolic——such as the little boy’s and little girl’s discovery that one has a penis and the other one does not, or vice versa—is experienced as a symbolic castration. One lacks (or the other one lacks) something that is symbolized by both as a castration. This would not be the same relation to the object as exempli?ed by the 18—month—old boy with the bobbin reel. His mother’s departure is experi- enced as a perforation of imaginary consistency. Real holes are punched in the maternal image that seemed whole, the visible always appearing to be ade- quate to itself. The object that lacks, is, then, a familiar grounding image for the imaginary consistency one calls being. The loss of such an image is experienced, I would argue, as a privation in the real of the body. It is felt as the anxiety that calls forth the compensatory response of the symbolic game: Here! There! the little boy says. The aim of the game would be to organize words (Heerrre! Theerrre!) and images around the real of a void. Child play could be taken, then, as an equivalent of the moment between the dream and awakening when one vacillates between being the dream representation and some seemingly uni?ed conscious form we call ego, self, identity, or the like. The symbolic object—the bobbin reel—is not an object per se, then, or even a representation of one. It is, rather, a signi?er, whose dialectical movement goes around a void or a

gap.

Thus, Freud’s little nephew

?ll

his

lack—(S O a)

with

symbolic object. In the transferential movement of the game itself, he has passed through the mirror-stage logical moment when the object at issue is a real object (the mother’s breast) and is working through (Durcharbeiten) the dialectical tension between the vacillation of a seemingly consistent imaginary and the necessity for stopping up the vacillation with a symbolic object. Such a dialectic constitutes the fantasy substructure that subsequently underlies grammatical language. In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud located con?ict between the object sought and the object found. Lacan lays out his structure of this con?ict in Seminar IV: It is either an imaginary frustration organized around a real object; a symbolic castration organized around an imaginary object; or a real privation organized around a symbolic object. And these objects return into language continually as repetitions found at points of impasse between the real, symbolic, and imaginary spheres. Fantasy organizes perception then in a kind of a-perception whose sense is logical, even though the logic is that of a disharmonious return of the object a into language. And its referent is always the object as lacking. Yet from the start, objects are taken for something else. This is because they are marked by the signi?er (S. IV, p. 54). And insofar as objects are absolute or non-dialectical, they are real. Responses of the real can be taken here as an order of unconscious impasses, of material not yet symbolized in conscious thought. In analysis, signifiers try to negotiate such objects in the gap between them where the partial drives continually insert the object material Lacan calls unary traits. While post—Freudian analysts might mistake the con?ict manifest in frustration tries

to



The structure of Lacan’s

actual frustration

by

object



97

the

object—mother, Lacanians see an imaginary response to a real object, based on the error of believing an actual object can ?ll the void once and for all. Although objects are supposed to make one whole again—a state that never actually existed and never can—objects, nonetheless, ?ll a lack. as

Indeed, Lacan’s ?nal formula for the paternal metaphor is based

on

the idea

a. In Seminar IV, Lacan’s objects can ?ll the hole in the symbolic: Q examples are of cases where Freud treated Oedipal problems; not until Seminar XXIII, in the case ofjames joyce, does Lacan give an example of how the object functions in relation to the void in psychosis.“ In Joyce’s case the voice acts as a principle of stability in his effort to negotiate language by jouissance alone in

that

<—

Finnegans Wake. Classical Let

psychoanalytic

us return to

the Dora

cases

case.

One

can

say that the agent of the con?ict

is the

real father of jouissance—Dora’s father. The

object at issue is the imaginary object. In this case the value ofWoman is a plus or minus at the level where lack concerns symbolic castration. Put another way, Dora’s question is, “What am I worth in reference to the imaginary object around which sexual difference is symbolized”? I would agree with the later Freud that the imaginary object around which her Oedipal drama is played out is Frau K. By remaining attached to the Other woman as the one supposed to know what a woman is—be it Frau K. or the Sistine Madonna—Dora avoids the symbolic castration implicit in admitting what an acknowledgement of the sexual difference might mean for her. For acknowledging the male sex means acknowledging male desire. Dora’s question about her place as an object of desire in the social signifying order manifests an irresolution of this question. When Herr K. tells Freud his wife gives him nothing, and repeats this to Dora, she slaps him, marking her distress, I would suggest,

desirability

as 3

In the Little

is the

at

this valuation of his wife in

terms

of her sexual

“nothing.” Hans

case,

let

hypothesize that the the lack of an object is us

agent of his

Oedipal distress of a representation

the lack imaginary father. And of his real penis as a phallus, an imaginary object.Thus, a nascent dialectic devel- ops between Hans’s fear of a privation of the object in the real and the symbolic Signi?er, horse. The signi?er is stuck between meaning and object absolutism, giving the signi?er a kind of “unreal” quality. “In what does [the] singularity [of phobia] consist?,” Lacan asks.

appearing always extremely symbolic, extremely distant from the imaginary. At the moment when it is called to help maintain the essential solidarity threatened by the gap that the apparition of the phallus introduces between the mother and child, the element which intervenes in the phobia has a truly mythic character. ('5. I V p. 58) It is in

98

The structure of Lacan’s

object

Whether he describes the horse



mythic or unreal, Lacan is trying to quantify, by qualifying, the intersection of the object with the signi?er in phobia. Lacan’s point regarding phobia is that the imaginary father is not a suf?cient law giver to shield the child from a phallic mother. Nothing puts the sexual object—the real organ in this case—adequately under the signi?er which ordinarily represents the object at a distance, thus replacing anxiety with fear, and fear with the normal range of narcissistic affect that Lacan calls jouissance (S. IV, p. 22). The issue, then, is the disharmony between the object qua real, even its traumatic character, and the subject’s sense of his or her being. The object is not that of object relations, but the object of the drive. Nor is the object the environment to which one is required to adapt. Rather, the object is the marker of a distance between the real of the body and the symbolic dimension of representations: signi?er

as

Q J01)- Produced in the gap between representations and the quest for libidinal satisfaction, the object is both something and nothing. It marks a memory in the unary trait that links

body

to

language. And

it also marks

empty place. fetish objects in that

an

general sense, one could say that all objects are they protect against castration anxiety, when castration anxiety is taken as the dread produced by contact with the void place in oneself. But in a “positive” sense, the object is an Ur—lining of the subject at the level of the real. In the Ecrits, in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (1960), Lacan ?irther de?nes the attributes of the object. When he was developing the logic of the symbolic dimension, he had focused on the object as something to be replaced, an absence to be symbolized as a presence, as in the bobbin—reel incident. In Seminar IV, his concern was with the object as lacking in symbolic castration, imaginary frustration, and real privation. In the 19605, he was interested in de?ning what properties of the object give rise to desire in the ?rst place. Speaking of“the phantasy [as] really the ‘stuff’ of the ‘I that is originally repressed, because it can be indicated only in the ‘fading’ of the enunciation our attention is now drawn to the subjective status of the signifying chain in the unconscious, or rather in primal repression (Urverdrdngung) It is di?icult,” he says,“to designate that subject [of the unconscious] anywhere as subject of a statement—and therefore as articulating it—when he does not even know he is speaking” (pp. 691—692). In











Indeed, all that remains,

even

of the drive, is the cut,



mark which is

no

less

obviously present in the object described by analytic theory as the mamilla, feces, the imaginary object of the phallus, the urinary ?ow, to which Lacan adds the phoneme, the gaze, the voice, and the nothing. Moreover, these partial features are not applicable to objects because they are part'of a seemingly total object, the body, but because they represent only partially the function that produces them

The structure of Lacan’s

(p. 693).That

function is whatever

object



99

non-specular. “A common characteristic of these objects as I formulate them is that they have no specular image, in other words, no alterity” Lacan says (p. 693). In 1964, in Seminar XI, Lacan says the drive is a montage of objects he names, in a shorthand, the object a. Not only is drive not instinctual, it places multiform libidal effects into language, giving another fate to Freud’s desexualization of sublimation.This makes sense of why the drive, in its demand for jouissance, always misses the object qua object of ?nal pleasure insofar as the aim of the drive is con?ict—free fusion. In the 1970s Lacan developed the object a as that which is lost as memory, but returns in the partial drives as a repetition of a search for jouissance. In other words, the cause that underlies language, desire, and behavior is absent as a phenomenon, but present in its effects. causes

desire

at

the level of the

Discontinuity at the beginning object a is Lacan’s proof that we are not uni?ed within ourselves. Only sexuality unites us to things and to each other intermittently, and in encounters that range from the least to the most, for the little a is a pseudo—Dasein, a placing of repetitive inertia at the site where pleasure is sought. Rather than con?ict or biopsychic drives, Lacan noted that the compulsion to repeat shows the circular function of a discourse pressed under—re—pressed—beyond in the ego, but in which he or she is included.This connaissance or sense ofmeanings is apprehended at the limit of assimilated knowledge The

_Q_ J in the dream, in the symptom, in thwarted desire. It never ceases to write itself and so returns into language as a shattering force.There where we have con?ict

in Freud,

we

have

impasses

consistencies. In Miller

we

in Lacan,

have the

impasses sens

that stop the

of a jouis-sens

movement

of pseudo—

beyond language that has

object is at the beginning, and the at the level of harmony within oneself or between self and other, discontinuity is at the start. Such a principle goes against the history of philosophies and theologies where “in the beginning” there was harmony, or at least the smooth principle of the undecidable. If thought is made out of signi?ers propped against the object a, as Jacques— Alain Miller proposes in his preface to Joyce avec Lacan, the subject thinks via in-corp-orated objects that in—form language; the desire of thinking is to interpret the a where pieces of the real are caught in impasses between conscious and unconscious life.32 The subject is, then, a response or function of the real in

logical meaning of its object is not assimilable



internal exclusion

signi?ers

to

Insofar

as

the

itself. It thinks with its closed circuit of self—referential

objects which seek themselves in acts. In conclusion Lacan’s object a, I shall refer to Miller’s development

and with its

brief schema of

own.

to

this

of the

100

The structure of Lacan's

structure

of its

This refers

extimacy,

object

taken



as

one

basis for Lacan’s structural

topology.

the Other taken inside oneself, to the transformation of das Ding into one’s neighbor, one’s Nebenmensch. At the point where one seeks to ?ll to

object, one seeks what is the most like oneself. But this must be sought in a strange body, outside oneself. One must, then, distinguish the place the object ?lls from what occupies it. Saint Augustin named this place God. Lacan designated this place by using the shape of a torus, and by designating the object as both inside and outside: 0 a. But the interior and exterior are not reciprocal. the void with

an

—+

The extimate

object

What, then, characterizes the extimate object?

1)

The Lacanian

signi?er

becomes the Other

is that “in

as

name a

few of its

the Other

signi?er,

properties: as body; 2)

object, the apt formula to describe the you which is more than you”; 3) The object occupies the where love appears, depicting love as the effort to ?ll a void.

When the other person is taken

object

I shall

register of sacri?ce Here one might take

the con?ict

as an

ofAbraham between his love of God and his

(Isaac/ the narcissistic object) more than his own unconscious (i.e. God)? 4) The extimate object agitates neurotics, a—ffects the subject with its too great proximity; 5) The extimate object is completely distinct from pure exteriority; 6) It causes a gap in the heart of any

love of his

son.

Does he love that in him

identifying topology; 8) It also produces a function effort

at

more

than him

oneself with oneself; 7) It is a has a name; the truth of one’s

place, own

and thus

being



structure,

in the

real; 9)



It

placing a hole in words, giving a center to the word which is exterior to language. And this is more than metaphor, manifesting a dialectical structure to metonymy; 10) This space constructs itself by rendering itself thinkable; 11) All objects, then, have an extimate positiOn insofar as they mark themselves as belonging to one’s own body; 12) It is not, then, their materiality that counts at the level of frustration (the physical material of the real breast, for example), but the insufficiency of the material to close the gap which keeps reappearing; 13) For lack of an object, people substantialize—essentialize by jouissance—objects; 14) To de?ne love as giving what one does not have marks its paradox, as well as the paradox of the object; 15) The extimate object is at the heart of the paradoxes of desire, as well; 16) The outside always returns into the inside, its structure conjugating the outside with the inside such that we can deconstruct the presence of the real in the symbolic. In the Ecn'ts (p. 320 of “Response to the Commentary of jean Hyppolite”), Lacan

of lure,

wrote:

The affective

[in

this

text

of Freud’s, “On

Negation”] is conceived of as primordial symbolization, right

what preserves its effects on the basis of a down to the discursive structuration, this structuration which is also called

‘intellectual’, having been [constructed] in such form of

misrecognition

what the ?rst



way

symbolization

as to

translate in the

owes to

death.

The structure of Lacan’s

object



101

thus

brought to a sort of intersection of the symbolic with the real that one might call immediate, insofar as it occurs without an imaginary inter— mediary, but that is mediated by what was excluded in the ?rst moment [temps] We

are

of symbolization.33

Thus,

one can

situate the extimate

object in in the place

the intersection of the real and

of the interference of an absent symbolic, calling it the symptom; or object whose properties are only too present, between the imaginary and the symbolic; or between the symbolic and the imaginary where a jouis-sens places the unconscious in language as an effect of meaning. In each case this object a serves as a limit point to the Borromean structure of human thought.

Notes 1



Ab)



6 7





jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Iivre IV (1956—1957): La relation d ’objet, text established by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1994) (translations are my own); The Object Relation, trans. by Alexandra Roche, forthcoming. Sigmund Freud, Fragment ofan Analysis (fa Case onysteria (1905 [1901]), SE, 7: 3—22; The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman (1920), SE, 18: 145—172; Analysis ofa Phobia in a Five- Year-Old Boy (1909), SE, 19: 3—149. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921), SE, 18: 3—64. Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works (1921—1945) (London: Virago, 1988); Donald WWinnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971); Heinz Kohut, “The Search for the Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut, 1950—1978, 2 vols., ed. R.H. Ornstein (New York: International Universities Press, 1978). Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject or the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (1960), Em'ts:A Selection, trans. with notes by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 292—325; cf. esp. pp. 314—315; cf. also Em'ts, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), pp. 692—693. Jacques Lacan, La troisiémejouissance, Lettres de I’écolefreudienne, Bulletin de L’EFP, no. 16 (1975): 178—203. Jacques Lacan, “Letter to DW Winnicott,” established by Gloria Gonzalez and trans. by Russell Grigg, in Television, ed. by Joan Copjec, trans. by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. by jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 75—77. jacques Lacan, The Seminar ofjacques Lacan, lime XX (1972—1973): Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. by jacques—Alain Miller, trans. with notes by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 78. Jacques—Alain Miller, “To Interpret the Cause: From Freud to Lacan,” Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 3,

10 11

12

no.

1/2

(Spring/Fall, 1989):

30—50.

Jacques Lacan Le séminaire, livre VIII (1960—1961): Le transfert, text established by Jacques—Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1991). Jacques Lacan, Les complexesfamiliaux dans laformation de l’individu: Essai d ’analyse d’une Fonction en psychologie. This text, commissioned by Henri Wallon, appeared initially in L’Encyclopédie Franwise, vol. 8, in the part consecrated to “la vie mentale,” ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller (Paris: Navarin, 1984); cf. also La Cause du Désir: L’agalma de Platon d Lacan,]ean-Louis Henrion (Cahors: Point Hors Ligne, 1993). Henrion points out that agalma is what makes a transition between the small other and the little object, the decline of the power of fascination with agalma being correlative with the emergence of the object small (a) (p. 103). Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Iivre XXIII (1974—1975): Le sinthome, text established by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2005). Parts have appeared in OmicaIP, vols. 6—10 (1976—1977) and in joyce avec Lacan, ed. by Jacques Aubert (Paris: Navarin, 1987).

102

13 14

15

16

The structure of Lacan’s

object



jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livreV (1957—1958): Les formations de I’inconscient, text established by jacques—Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1998). Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Iivre XXIII (1974—1975): Real Symbolic Imaginary, forthcoming seminar. jacques Lacan, Seminar, Boole XI (1964): The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho- Analysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 77. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar ofjacques Lacan, Boole III: The Psychoses (1955—1956), ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller, trans. with notes by Russell Grigg (NewYork: Norton, 1993), p. 185.

17

Jacques Lacan, The Function and Field (J Speech and language in Psychoanalysis (Report to the Rome Congress, known as The Rome Discourse (1953)), Ecrits, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006): When

we want to

and what is

get at what was before the serial games ofspeech in the subject to the birth of symbols, we ?nd it in death .To say that this

prior mortal meaning reveals in speech a center that is outside of language is more than a metaphor it manifests a structure that differs from the spatialization of the circumference or sphere it corresponds rather to the relational group that symbolic logic designates topologically as a ring. If I wanted to give an intuitive I would have to resort to the three dimensional representation of it form of a torus, insofar as a torus’ peripheral exteriority and central exteriority constitute but one single region. .



(pp. Cf.

18

Jacques—Alain Miller,

263—2 64)

Topology in the Teaching of Lacan,” trans. by Mahlon Stoutz from Mathemas, vol. 1, ed. by Diana Rabinovich (in Spanish) (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Manantial Press, 1986); ed. by Ellie Ragland, pp. 28—48, in Lacan prologically Speaking, ed. by Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milovanovic (New York: Other Press, 2004). The Seminar ofjacques lawn, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959—1960), ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with notes by Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), “Mathemes:

p. 121. 19 The Seminar

ofjacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique (1953—1954), ed. by jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with notes by John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 124.

20 21 22

23

24

25 26

Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), SE, 7: 125—245. Sigmund Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915), SE, 14: 111—140. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917 [1915]), SE, 14: 237—258. The Seminar ofjacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the chhm'que Qf Psycho-Analysis (1954—1955), ed. by jacques—Alain Miller, trans. by Sylvana Tomaselli, with notes by john Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 109; cf. also Jacques—Alain Miller, Les détails divins, Seminar given to the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII, Saint—Denis (1989), forthcoming in French. Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud,” Em'ts, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 428. Jacques—Alain Miller, Extimité, Seminar given in the Department of Psychoanalysis, the University of Paris VIII, Saint—Denis, forthcoming in French. Jacques-Alain Miller, Du sympté'me au?zntasme et du retour (1982), Seminar given in the Department of Psychoanalysis, the University of Paris VIII, Saint—Denis, forthcoming in French.

27 28

jacques—Alain Miller, Silet (1993—1994), Seminar given in the Department of Psychoanalysis, the University of Paris VIII, Saint Denis, forthcoming in French. jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XXIV: L’insu que sait de l’une bévue, s’aille a mourre (1976—1977), text established by jacques-Alain Miller, sections have appeared in Omicar? 12/13, 14, 15, 16, 17/18 (1977—1979), forthcoming in French.

The structure of Lacan’s

29

Jacques Lacan,

32

Jacques-Alain Miller, “Preface,”_]oyce

object



103

séminaire, livre XVIII (1970—1971): D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, text established by jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2007). 30 Jacques-Alain Miller, Donc (1994—1995), Seminar given in the Department of Psychoanalysis, the University of Paris VIII, Saint—Denis, forthcoming in French. 31 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XXIII: Le sinthome (1975—1976), text established by Jacques—Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2005), lesson March 16, 1975, pp. 119—128. Le

1987); cf. also “The Sinthome,

An Introduction, ed.

to

the

(New York: Norton,

1976, pp. 119—128.

lawn, ed. by jacques Aubert (Paris: Navarin,

Symptoms and Fantasy;” The Later Lawn: and Bogdan Wolf (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2007),

Mixture of

by Véronique Voruz

pp. 55—72. 33 jacques Lacan, “Response Bruce Fink



avec

Commentary ofjean Hyppolite,” Ecrits, trans. by 2006), p. 320. (Paris: Seuil, 2005), lesson March 17,

4 THE STRUCTURE OF THE DRIVES Where

body

and mind

join

The drives In “On



Question Preliminary

to

(1957—1958), which is a résumé of (1955—1956), he poses the question:

Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” Lacan’s Seminar III

on

the

psychoses

profoundly dissident character of the notion of drive in Freud, the disjunction of principle between the tendency, its direction, and its object, and not only its original “perversion”, but its implication in a conceptual systematic, a systematic whose place Freud indicated, from the very beginning of his work, under the heading of the Must

we

recall

once more

the

sexual theories of childhood?1

The de?nition

Subject “the

Lacan gave of the drive later, in 1960, in “The Subversion 0f the and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” is this: It is

treasure

of the

signi?ers,”

denoted

as

S O D.

proceeds from demand when the subject disappears enough that the demand also disappears, with the single

The drive is that which in it. It is obvious

exception that the cut remains, for this cut remains present in that which distinguishes the drive from the organic function it inhabits: namely, its grammatical arti?ce, so manifest in the revisions of its articulation to both source

and

object.2

The drive is that which of the

duplicity

its ?nal

form in

proceeds

from the

language itself.3 The logic “Subversion of the Subject of





demand, thus having the of the the vuoi? ” .

(p. 692),

structure

graph, depicted

in

is that of an “I ask you

The structure of the drives

to

give

this

me

drive is not,

as

(or that), but it’s

Freud

not

really

105

that I want.” Lacan teaches that the

thought, instinctual.The

drive resides in

language as a request the temporal tension

(demande) made of or to the Other.Thus, the drive includes implicit in requesting; and the waiting for a response that goes with it. The idea of a seemingly whole, uni?ed subject disappears into the demand for some satisfaction to come. In this context, the subject is not whole or intrinsically uni?ed. Rather, the subject is not only suspended in desire, he or she is also subject to the tim(ing) of desire.Thus, the Lacanian subject is a subject of apham'sis that fades within language in moments of suspense, impasses, stumblings, uncertainties, surprised his interlocutors by assigning a positive value to these phenomena, even though they have the properties of disappearing which makes them seem negative. In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915), Freud says the drive’s energy is characterized by these four vicissitudes: It is repressed; sublimated; reverts into its opposite; or returns onto the self.4 In 1921, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud says repression means that something “beyond” is pushing.5 Lacan counters, saying that the pressed-under part is not the drive, nor is the drive caused internally, naturally, or as a simple instinctual discharge. Nor, he claims, is it a myth.The drive is more like a fundamental ?ction.6 Freud’s four terms governing the vicissitudes of the drives are, moreover, disjointed: Thrust (Drang), source (Quelle), aim (ZieI), and object (Objelet).The drive is ?rst constituted as a cut, and reappears as a cut. That is, it breaks into or cuts up a seemingly consistent or uni?ed surface.7 Perhaps, bringing together Peirce’s logic of the cut and Freud’s logic of the libido, Lacan describes the drive as a repeated constancy that, nonetheless, has the antithetical effect of creating a discontinuity within seemingly consistent meanings.This proves, as Freud had claimed, that the drive is a constant force (S. XI, p. 164). Its constant push is not, however, that of a biological life force or a kinetic energy, but rather, the satisfaction of reaching one’s unconscious fantasy goal, even if only by sublimation or repetition. Lacan calls it the “satisfaction of the drive without repression” (p. 165). Unlike Freud, Lacan rejects any assimilation of the drive to biology which has rhythms, cycles, and seems to be naturally induced (S. XI, p. 165). and

so on.

And Lacan

The drive What

can

as we

Trieb deduce from these

two

Lacanian

statements

about the drives,

intended to give you some “topology notion of the location of the point of disjuncture and conjuncture, of union and frontier” (S. XI, p. 161)? Having examined Freud’s theory of the character of the drive as dissident and perverse, Lacan stressed, rather, that Freud usually described the drive as a Trieb (force), not an instinct.8 He pointed out that Freud’s own model for the drive came from “the fundamental concepts of physics. His masters in physiology [were] those who strive to bring to realization, for example, the integration of physiology with the fundamental concepts of modern physics, statements

which he describes

as



106

The structure of the drives

especially

those connected with

energy” (S. XI,

p.

163).

Lacan unveiled his

referents: “The

[Freudian] Real-Ich is conceived as supported not by the organism as a whole, but by the nervous system. It has the character of a planned, objecti?ed subject. I am stressing the surface characteristics of this ?eld by treating it topologically, and in trying to show you how taking it in the form of a surface responds to all the needs of its handling” (S. XI, p. 164). And Lacan meant quite literally the surface of the body marked by holes and rims (mouth, ear, nose, etc.). As some piece of symbolic or imaginary information enters a hole, binding some trait of itself to the rim or edge of the hole, a montage of the drives begins to build up out ofparts of the Other that give its identi?catory markings to an infant. These are not the dynamics of the drive Freud emphasized which were, rather, its thrust (Drang), aim (Ziel), source (Quelle), and object (Objekt). And he stressed, as well, that its character was dissident and perverse. Reminding us that Freud had found the roots of the drive in childhood sexuality, Lacan says this discovery led him to confuse the pleasure principle with infancy, and the reality principle with adulthood and the maturation of instincts. Putting forth his own characterization of the drive, Lacan designated two major aspects own

itzjust before he located his second characterization of it in the “treasure of the signi?ers,” he stressed that the subject of the unconscious cannot be desig— nated in a statement, even though it articulates something, but only when the to

conscious

the unconscious is

what is

comes

subject does not know said by the unconscious

speaking.

In other

words,

designates the subject of the unconscious in an organic—oral, anal, scopic and invocatory— mapping “that satis?es the requirement of being all the farther away from speak— ing the more he [or she] speaks” (“Subversion of the Subject .,” p. 692).Thus, although language and ego identifications cover over the real of the (partial) drives—?rst named, as such, by Karl Abraham—what is repressed in the real returns, anyway, into the symbolic order of language and social conventions. Lacan’s point is that you cannot, ?nally, avoid the real by the symbolic, or by imaginary relationships, no matter how hard you try or how successful you may be temporarily. At this point, we come to a three-part contradiction. First, the subject of the unconscious has been implicitly de?ned as a subject lacking wholeness—that is, as desiring satisfaction in the drives. Second, this desiring subjeCt—which, by de?nition, lacks something—is not the same as the subject of the drives who demands jouissance or satisfaction. Put another way, if the drive is the demand for jouissance, one wonders how it can negotiate the lack implicit in desire. Thus, although the drive has the passive character of demanding its own satisfaction in and by an object, this satisfaction ends up being deferred, alienated, or cancelled by the language that conveys it.The drive, nonetheless, designates the prevalence of an “organic” dimension of symbolic and imaginary traits that coalesce with the real of the ?esh as a mapping in language, particularly in speech, of the oral, from the drive which



anal, scopic and invocatory.



The structure of the drives

107

XX, Lacan will say that the (partial) drives materialize speech for jouissance—that of the Other; that of a given reality paradigm; that of meaning

By

Seminar

itself. In this

sense,

no

binary opposition

of cognition with affect

or

mind

versus

body obtain, for the drives overdetermine language, so to speak, entering it as a function ofjouissance which places a real libidinal dimension in language via desire as a structure of lack and fantasy, as the fundamental conditions of the particularity of one’s jouissance. But how can the drives enter language via the surface of the body? Lacan says, via the edge of the hole at the surface of organs; that is, from the others and the Other outside. Lacan taught that the objects (a) that cause desire, cut into imaginary (fantasy, idealizing) consistencies of constancy and wholeness, bringing with them the disturbance or discontinuity of con?ict, whose q‘fect is that of a pulling apart or a tearing. But these objects that ?rst cause desire—the breast, the feces, the (imaginary) phallus, the urinary ?ow, the gaze, the voice, the phoneme and the nothing—convey through the partial drives (oral, anal, invocatory, scopic) their desire to retain or regain something, only as a consequence of having been lost. The loss gives rise to the recognition that there has been some pleasurable experience of an object. This has been registered in the real by the binding of a unary trait of the object itself to the hole to which the object addresses itself. Lacan’s addition of an actual hole to the mental apparatus—not as a myth, ?ction, metaphor, metonymy or allegory—adds a new component to any conceptualization of mind structure. Moreover, he places the hole at the origin of meaning and thought, making them secondary. Even prior to thought, we are driven not to experience an encounter with the void place of loss and anxiety. In the Fort! Da! paradigm, which Freud described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in recounting his 18—month—old nephew’s game with the bobbin reel, undertaken as an activity intended to replace the mother’s temporary absence, Lacan said it meant that losing identi?cation with a desired object—in this case, the mother’s gaze and voice—caused the child to experience the agony of falling into a chasm or abyss or void. In experiencing the reality of such a hole in the real, the child’s identi?cational moorings receded, leaving a

hole in their wake.

nephew’s distress was not the fact that his mother qua person was gone, but that the bodily organs and surfaces in which we ground ourselves in relation to others do not produce good or bad effects to which we, then, respond in a phenomenological way. Although these corporal organs and surfaces actually produce an effect only at a third level, they are interpreted by the speci?city of the effects they catalyze. Lacan argued that one’s actual loss of identi?cations with these grounding objects causes an encounter with the void of loss (0) that fragments perception by showing the actual face of anxiety as an The

cause

encounter

of Freud’s

with the void.An infant—or, later,

an

adult in

a moment

of regression

hystericization—attempts to abolish such anxiety by re—establishing solid grounding in object things or object relations, in an effort to restore the seemingly pre—given ordering of a stable universe. or

The structure of the drives

108

The aim of the drive Lacan

argued

While the aim

that the aim of the drive is not, then, the seems to

be the

object sought,

the actual

goal

same

as

its

goal.

is homeostasis

or

the constancy of oneness.The bobbin-reel game placed an activity in the space of the void; the droning of voices on the television set in the background of contemporary life substitutes for the activities of social conversation itself. Thus, Lacan argued that some piece of a left—over remainder constitutes a primary

real, ensuring that, otherwise, there be no Ur—lining of the subject made up of residual traces of the ?rst repressed objects. But to deduce this, one must consider the technical and the material dimensions. How

language Lacan

can

the drives materialize

for

precise jouissance meanings when language represses the drives? advanced the radical theory that a topology of surfaces, an edge—a unary

edge of an actual hole. Jeanne Lafont writes that the absence of a meta—language, as described by Lacan, gives rise to his ?nal teaching regarding topology.9 In Lacan’s optic, she says, topology is not, however, a knowledge to be taught by concepts or fundamental texts: “It is a practice of the hole and its edge” ('Ibpologie lacam'enne, p. 13). Based the structure which constructs reality on the hole and its edge, Lacan de?ned (p. 14). Naming the hole a—one writing of the object a—cause—of—desire—Lacan called this new element he had introduced into his teaching, the dimension of “one” which is speci?c to each operation of thought and act and has the property of constancy; of always sending one back to the hole and the edge (p. 14). trace

of the voice,

or

gaze, and

so

on—is bound

to

the

Moreover, this “one dimension” consists of the word, which

moves

in that

requires two dimensions.Thus, a word is pronounced in the “time of the real” (p. 14). So, it possesses the additional property of creating the subject.That is, the subject is not constructed by learning language in such a way as to then create it.The. reverse occurs.IO But the “one” which creates its own edge or border out of the real dimension of a unary trait, still remains temporal, one-dimensional. And yet, the “one” is inhabited by the hole, not the reverse (p.15). dimension, contrary

The drives This leads

as

to

writing,

which

real

logic of the partial drives that include themselves a real part of the structure of language; not at that mythic level of remove we call analogy, allegory, metaphor, or ?ction? Long before his ?nal topological period, Lacan had begun to resolve this dilemma in Seminar XI by describing the drive in terms of the four vicissitudes Freud attributed to it. Describing the category of the real as the obstacle to the pleasure principle, Lacan, at that point, began to place the real on the side of the Freudian death drive. The real joins hands with repetition “beyond the pleasure principle,” he to our

second

question:

How

can one

formalize



says. It appears as the impasses or points (i.e. dimensions of the one) of resistance in language that point to something residing in language that, nonetheless, lies

The structure of the drives

109

outside grammar or information. Lacan makes clear, as well, that the real in question has nothing in common with concepts of reality, biological material existence, or even Freud’s Real-Ich. Rather, the Lacanian real is the limit point of an

absolute

impossibility that enters language as meaning, and whose effect is that of an unpleasurable or disturbing cut. The impasses and traumas that make up the real are, Lacan said, the impossible

to

bear, the

zone

of

no—man’s—land, the appearance of con?ict which breaks



up uni?ed meaning or being into component parts. And even though the meaning of the real is not immediately symbolizable in conscious thought, it

already been constituted as the meaning of a particular trauma. It (re)turns into the symbolic as discontinuity, as loss. Between the drive’s aim at having the object of satisfaction and the sorrow of losing it, losing a trait of meaning— probably one-dimensional—remains a “deeper” goal of fusion with the object. But from the moment the ?rst object is lost, the structure of the void is con— stituted as a concrete knowledge of the particular conditions of repetitiveness and ?xity that begin to make the symbolic/imaginary shape of a person’s ideal has

ego unconscious formation.

Repetition

returns,

death drive, attesting

then, “beyond the pleasure principle,”

to a

change.The well as calling

intention to

satisfy,

as

“hallucinations” insofar

on

the side of the

certain inertia in will power that inhibits the conscious

real makes

pleasure principle does not into question the concept of pre—uterine fantasmatic as Melanie Klein de?ned them as the production of a us aware

that the

pleasurable satisfaction. If, however, one pays heed to Lacan’s idea of a dialectic of the drive, one ends up with the demand that a lack-in-being be ?lled. This introduces a temporal tension into language. Lacan’s new category—the real—enables us, for instance, to distinguish need from pleasure because no object of need can ever satisfy the drive for satisfaction which Lacan marks by a split between the aim and the goal (FFC, p. 167). Drawing a simple topology of the circuit of the partial drive insofar as it includes this split, in Seminar XI, chapter XIV, Lacan shows the drive entering conscious perception by way of a corporal rim—be it the mouth, the eye, the nostrils. The drive’s trajectory aims at its object of supposed satisfaction, showing that the object itself is not the goal, but that attaining the object is the goal. As the drive circles its object, moving towards this goal, the split between aim and goal appears (PFC, p. 178). Also, a new subject appears, the subject of the drive. That is, the object is particular, manifesting features of the particular conditions of a given subject’s jouissance. In the oral drive, for instance, Lacan cites the mouth as the erogenous zone, not the stomach or esoph- agus: It is the surface and the edge of the mouth that counts at the erogenous level, Lacan points out. Thus, we generally speak of the mouth, teeth, and lips, not the other organs that are equally involved and supposedly “satis?ed” by the oral drive Lacan’s

the

body

(PFC,

p.

169).

topological

answer

to

this

surface where erogenous

enigma valorizes the dual dimension of

zones are

differentiated from the

rest

of the

1 10

The structure of the drives

organism by their rim—like structure. At the rims or edges of organ openings, something can be exchanged with the void, put into a hole. Moreover, the hole of want or demand a central emptiness that exists can be bound. Something can be linked to it, thereby delimiting or marking it for a limit by something quanti?able or countable. But not just any object will do. Referring to Freud’s —



third vicissitude of the drives—sublimation—Lacan says that in sublimation one can be satis?ed without repression. Indeed, the drive puts into question what

suffering. Satisfaction is achieved in sublimated form, for a direct experience of the real skews pleasure, he adds. Although sublimation is, unlike Freud thought, sexualized, the real is not. What is the object of satisfaction, then? satisfaction is, for

Unary One

people

be satis?ed

can

by

their

traits

might

describe Freud’s

Einziger Zagen

as

concept from the marks left behind by an

the

paradigmatic

which Lacan evolved his idea of unary traits, or encounter with some image or icon—an identi?catory

experience, in other is only the topological

palpable inscription, even if it dimension of the real as a base point zero where some rapport between the rim and the hole is registered. Something is made and repeatedly re-made words—whose effect leaves



And the response is marked down, then stitched up, in the action of the suture—in the time of mediation when an identi?cation receives a name.Thus, the time of the cut ex-sists in the present in the drives

as a

response

to

the

cut.

language, but only as a part of the remainder of the object a. The one- dimensional time of the cut, thereby, distinguishes the drive as meaning—even though it departs from a point degree of zero—from its organic function per se. This is the time it takes to create the double—buckle of repetition, which carries the drive: One has/loses/wants the return of a given object. A limit has been marked down that makes a memory remnant susceptible of becoming active. Lacan moves dynamically from the substitution of one thing for another in metaphor by way of equivalence relations, to follow the train of its engagement with metonymy, which might be described as the one-dimensional trait left over from the experience of having and losing. This would be consonant with Roman Jakobson’s description of metonymy as a displacement—in this case, of the objects that cause desire. These can, in turn, be thought of as the support of elemental signi?ers. time of

De Saussure referred

to

the front and the back of

of the substitution of a



page of paper in his

signi?ed for a signi?er. Lacan argued that this ?gure is phenomenological, an equivalent to the exchange of the therapist for a parental ?gure. Lacan’s preferred form is the Mobius strip, shaped like a ?gure 8. Its component identi?catory parts transform from one shape to another at the level of the line, or dyadic dimension, while remaining true to their initial structuration. Lacan’s point about the Mobius surface is that its outside continues its inside, thus enabling us to attribute a dynamic movement effort

to

make

sense

The structure of the drives

to the drives which includes the

meaning making. This

object-cause-of-desire

"I

in the function of

He writes:

image

enables

us

?gure

to

desire

as



locus of junction between

the ?eld

of demand, in which the syncopes of the unconscious are made present, and sexual reality. All this depends on a line that I will call the

line of desire, linked are

made present in

to

demand and

which the effects of

by

sexuality

experience. (FFC,

The drive, then, seeks—?rst

and

p.

156)

?ll up its own hole: to make the inside and outside cohere. Lacan’s addition of this temporal dimension to the drives adds the time of desire

to

basically—to

the quest for

jouissance. Desire/lack seeks

to

eradicate loss where the time of

anxiety is produced in any encounter with the void, thus making a re?ning of the object tantamount to effective living. Lacan makes this radical statement: It is this dynamic axis of the drives on which all thought and behavior turn. Insofar as the ?rst attributes of judgment are imaginary—that is, identi?catory—and constitute a virtual real out of the left- over parts of identi?cation that do not ?t, that are dropped as the object a, the real can be described as a place that orders a knowledge of the remnants of infant introjects Freud described by an interaction of Bejahung (af?rmation) with Ausstossung (negation or rejection). Lacan and CS. Peirce In this context, the

might be

described

(Peircian)

as

similarity—i.e. of metaphor— calls the imaginary (identi?catory)

iconic domain of

equivalent to what Lacan

traits of a Virtual real. In Charles Sanders Peirce’s terms, the icon leaves behind

mark of its

having



been

perceived. He called this mark or trace its index. The trace or cut records a history of marks. Charles Pyle describes Peirce’s cut as the conceptual operation by which something is taken as the sign of something else, even though there are diEerent kinds of cuts—iconic, indexical and symbolic. Lacan adds to this conceptual operation the domain of topological realism, making of the sphere, the torus (the hole), the cross—cap, the Klein bottle, and the Mébius band, psychoanalytic topological operations. Lacan might have been in?uenced by the concept of the although he refers his mathemes to symbolic logic—but

cut

from Peirce—

he, then, typological

used it

kind of conceptually. One goes from a operation, a classifactory one, to a topological logic which shows both the place(s) and the means (alienation and separation) of interface between mind and body. Peirce took us from iconic similarity (an equivalence of the Mébius band) to contact (the leaving behind of a knowledge in the real by the inscrip- tions of indices) t0 the naming of such eEects in the symbolic. The difference in Peirce’s thought and Lacan’s is that Peirce, in his day, advanced a typology of

topologically

rather than

1 12

The structure of the drives

signs, while Lacan was able to get out of the bind one is in when limited to the “concept” and show that the real produces material effects in language through the

contradictory

intersections and

junctions of topological logic. Thus,

beyond biological or cultural materialisms. He advanced the theory in Seminar XX: Encore (1972-1973) that topology has a history of dimensions: gave

us a means to

What

cuts a

go

line, is the point. Since the point has

will be de?ned

as

having

the surface will be de?ned space





Lacan

one. as

Insofar

having

as

two

Thus, Lacan’s topological forms will constitute

language

ungraspable, meanings. Lacan’s

use

of the

as



cut



dimension, the line

surface that

of them

cuts

set



the line,

Since it is

[dimensions].

writing; that could be

.That has all the characters of a

that introduces the real into

it is

zero

this minimal



letter.H

different concept of form; one of affective, albeit emotionally

is consonant,

rather, with



topology

of the hole and rim.

knowledge of unary traits which one might also describe as primordial repressions of identi?cations, one can retain Peirce’s idea of language as a third order which names or symbolizes the ?rst two orders. At the center of the Borromean topological unit—R.S.I.—which Lacan equates with structure is the object (a)-cause-of-desire Lacan described by its feature of being present only insofar as it refers to its own absence. By equating the quality of the object one desires with the corporeal organ from which it emanates, one falls into an impossible reductionism of organ to object. Rather, a subject of the drives records unary, one-dimensional traits of the desired object in constellations surrounding Ur objects.Without his or her understanding of how topological logic can link the effect of an organ to meaning, Lacan could Insofar

as

the Lacanian real is the order of a

have added the voice and gaze to the ?eld that structures meaning. Freud, tied to the breast and feces at the level of biological effects, helped advance the never

biological

realism

imputed

to

psychoanalysis

which Lacan’s entire

teaching

re?ites. Lacan, moreover, shows that the breast does

not

enter

the drives

as

the

biological agent of feeding, but at the point where some satisfaction beyond hunger is given. Likewise, the feces are the ?rst bodily product to occasion social judgment of simultaneous approval or disapproval.They, thus, intersect with the ?rst moment of awareness in the gaze that the Other is judging you in a contra— dictory waszhis, says Lacan, is an initial experience of anxiety. The phoneme, on the other hand, has generally been taken by linguists to be the same as the material of the voice—the vocal cords and their impact. Charles Pyle has shown that this reduction of sound to the vocal apparatus is incorrect: The phoneme is, rather, a sign of sound. It represents the voice. And, just as the gaze is generally confused with the eye itself in relation to objects, causing one to misrecognize the split between the aim and the goal in the drive towards an object, one is confused when what one gets is not really “it.” Lacan’s point was another one.

11 3

The structure of the drives

object per se, but—Oneness with it: constancy or homeostasis. unity or union is the desire for a consistency without cuts or

One wants—not the

The desire for

con?icts. Lacan said in 1960: Observe that this mark of the

cut

described

obviously present in the object mamilla, faeces, the phallus (imaginary

is

no

less

by analytic theory: the object), the urinary ?ow. (An unthinkable list, if one adds, as I do, the phoneme, the gaze, the voice the nothing). For is it not obvious that this feature, this partial feature, rightly emphasized in objects, is applicable not because these objects are part of a total object, the body, but because they represent only partially the function that produces them? .,” p. 692—693) (“Subversion —



That is, the drive

turns

round its

does the



object, in such a way as to remain partial, as Characterizing these ?rst eight objects as the

object that causes desire. Ur-lining of the subject itself, Lacan

said:

objects have one common feature in my elaboration of them they have no specular image, or, in other words, alterity. It is what enables them to be the ‘stu?,’ or rather the lining, though not in any sense the reverse, of the very subject that one takes to be the subject of consciousness. For this subject, who thinks he can accede to himself by designating himself in the statement, is no more than such an object. .,” p. 693) (“Subversion These





We have here

a new

theory

of

cause or

action and

a new



referent:

an

object

grasped in the mirror, but to which the specular image lends its clothes, says Lacan (“Subversion .,” p. 693).The effect of the word on the thing, the image, or the object (a) is caused by this general principle: Relying on Peirce’s ternary topology, Pyle stresses that whenever a second thing takes the place of a ?rst thing, they are in con?ict, so the existence of the second (the real) is that

cannot

be





contingent upon the nonexistence of the ?rst. I understand this to mean that the primary imaginary is transformed or translated into some interface of affective drive meaning from the moment its effects are recorded in the real. Lacan described the problem caused by the effort to make the disappearance of an image existent in poetic terms; to retrieve something that existed and disappeared by calling it “a substance caught in the net of the shadow, and which, robbed of its shadow—swelling volume, holds out once again the tired lure of the shadow as if it were substance” (“Subversion .,” p. 693). In Seminar XX: Encore (1972-1973), Lacan af?rms that the only substance of which he will admit is jouissance (p. 16). And this is produced at the interfaces of all the registers of his categories: Real, Symbolic, Imaginary. In the last period of his teaching, Lacan formalized a logic of the three jouissance(s)—the Other, .

the

reality

of





given local universal, and meaning itself—calling jouissance

as

1 14

The structure of the drives

well—developed, complex, and formalizable a system of meanings as that of representations, which are seemingly more visible and empirically graspable. Indeed, in translating Freud’s theory of a general principle of con?ict into his own theory of the real, Lacan gives himself a basis from which to argue that these three kinds of force

or movement

reside in the intersections among the three

given concept of reality, referred to the signi?er of some Father’s Name; and the jouissance of an uncon— scious dimension in meaning.These three kinds ofjouissance impose three precise kinds of meaning in language.]acques—Alain Miller, in addressing the problem of how language takes on force, has offered the theory that the drive is the spoken word that conveys an unconscious message that responds to three demands: the demand of need, the demand for love, and the demand for jouissance. He has even called the parlétre another name for the unconscious. One could take Pyle’s reading of Peirce’s insistence on a ?rstness, secondness, orders: The

jouissance of the Other; the jouissance of



and thirdness, in which the second annihilates the ?rst,

to mean

that

as soon as

thing—the real—is established in reference to an image or icon, representing the object a, taken as the ?rst, the object has, indeed, been partially annihilated, relegated to the slope of a certain nonexistence.This could be taken as a Heideggerean or Derridean premise. [n his Borromean unit ofbase meaning— with the object a located at its center—Lacan focused on the idea that an object can be known as present only because it has been absent, has been lost. His topological logic enabled him to argue that the ?rst thing—the tying together of the rim and the hole by a unary trait—returns into language in a unary or primary dimension of the real. Lacan says the ?rst object can be made to appear again by repetition of words and affect. Referring to Freud’s Fort! Da! instance, Pyle writes that the underlying thing—the bobbin reel in the case of Freud’s nephew—is not actually annihilated. Lacan shows, rather, that the metonymic process includes in itself that direction of displacement of one thing for another. In other words, language is duplicitous, not only because it is an agent of repression, but also because it does not succeed in repressing the material of identi?cations that aim the drives towards lures, towards the goal of repeating the familiar. In this way, fantasy joins grammar to the reality of experience and of primary desire. The object—cause—of—desire retains a trait of excess, exposing a unary “grammar” of the real that is discernable at the point where the aim of the drive(s) and the goal of the drive(s) split. We remember that Freud described the goal (Ziel) of the drives as entropy. The aim of the drive, on the other hand—Lacan stresses—is to satisfy the particularity of one’s own fundamental fantasy by merging with the object that seems to cause desire. One could, perhaps, characterize Lacan’s split between aim and goal by viewing the goal as a negative aspect of the positive part; the aim.While the aim seeks to realize a fantasy in reference to a particular object and by a unique kind of oneness in jouissance, the goal bears, rather, on reifying particular drives. One might want to receive an invitation to a particular dinner party—not because of the conviviality or food, but because certain repetitions in the scopic ?eld are one with that person’s drive repetitions. the second

1 15

The structure of the drives

Such

giving



characterization of the drives links them

them



grammar of the

body

which takes

to a

as

libidinal base in desire,

its referent the

object—(a)-

cause—of-desire. In this context, the organ that seems to produce the desire for the return of a satisfaction is not the agent of cause. Rather, it has become con— fused with the

cause

of



given desire. Lacan argued

that the

interplay

between

organ—breast, voice, the eye, and so on—and the infant’s desire for the return of a familiar pleasure constitutes a third thing between the organ and the desire. That third thing would be the interpretation of an experience which expresses itself as the drive or demand for the repetition of particular jouissance conditions. the

Thus, the instinctual, impersonal meaning Freud, and others, attached of the drives would

to

any

longer be applicable. Lacan’s conceptualization of the drives would also obviate the impasses which would reduce desire only to a response to sexuality. Such a theory errs by conceiving of an already, naturally constituted sexuality. Lacan shows, rather, that the drives precede desire—just as the hole comes from the surface—constituting desire as a set of responses to the objects that seem to cause them. In this context, desire is that around which fantasy (taken as a lack that seeks to be ful?lled) and drive (taken as the aim of desire towards an object of potential ful?llment) coalesce in a topological way (8. X1, ch. XII). Looking at the drive as “the treasure of the signi?er,” one could not say that language causes desire. The subject does not learn language while creating it. Rather, language names things the subject desires or demands, thereby creating the subject. Lacan reverses any simple notion of creation, then. The word has a temporal dimension—a point of materiality, of unary trait, of drive demand— insofar as something of the cut remains in it. In this sense, the word comes before writing, retaining a zero—degree dimension of discontinuity—a bout du réel the later Lacan says—one might describe as a point or dimension of affect that

theory

inhabits the word in is what the



no

con?ictual, contradictory way. This tension within

topological

Lacan called torsion. And this aspect of the word



word

comes

from the intersection of the drives with the ?rst

objects—cause—of—desire insofar as they place a temporal dimension of lack or wanting in the word, long before anticipation and retroaction function in grammar to buckle the meaning of a sentence.

When Lacanian

topologist jeanne

Lafont says that the dimension of the

“one”—the unary trait—and the mistakes and miscommunications that give rise to interpretations or the lapsus form the hole in the word, she opens the way for this consideration: The con?ict between communicative meaning and the

drive, the presence of the demand (for satisfaction) to

the

edge, limit,

in the

word, gives

and the hole the word surrounds. “You’re



real

edgy”;

meaning

“Don’t

cut

?gures of speech—rhetoric.They are the symbolizations (namings) of the real and imaginary identi?catory material that drives being. By bringing the drives into language as an affective knowledge—a and imaginary, the real and montage of the real and imaginary, the symbolic Symbolic—con?ict or torsion can be proposed as a property of language whose me

off in mid-sentence”;

are not mere

1 16

The structure of the drives

referent is the is a



certain

concrete nature

of the drives.And the main feature of this property

incommensurability

between the torsion

or

presence of



drive in

word and the word itself.

The surface of the

body

We remember that Lacan attributed the dimension of the real unary trait

to

the

language, orienting them within the ?eld of the closed surface of the body.The edges, the holes created perforate the body’s seemingly imaginary wholeness, cutting its surface in a material, libidinal way, making the body erotogenic. One must add that all cuts of the real into the imaginary are not erotogenic; some bring loss, trauma, and anxiety in their wake. First there is the hole of discontinuity—the real trauma of loss—against which the cloth or hedge of a surface serves as the source (Freud’s Quelle) which quanti?es the holes at the point of the Drang (or push) which marks the starting place of a drive’s path, outside the rim. By connecting unconscious desire to the drive——insofar as the drive aims towards the object (a)—that Lacan equated with the level where a demand is made in language (S O D), Lacan ended up connecting a lack—in—knowing—the treasury of the signifiers as Other, absent, memory—to point

or

place

where the drives

enter

the demand for satisfaction. In Seminar XX he, indirectly, offers a de?nition: Speaking itself becomes the third enjoyment: “To speak is also a jouissance.”

pleasure in speaking because it produces meaning there; the meaning of a “sense” beyond grammatical, communicational, infor- mational, conventional uses of language. Perhaps such a claim, on Lacan’s part, led the young Derrida to allege that Lacan’s teaching was phonocentric, that he privileged speaking over writing. Lacan certainly claimed that the unconscious appeared in spoken language (in the parole) in a way it could not in the further remove of written language. But he does not say there is a drive to speak. From the Freudian drives, Lacan takes only the concept ofjouissance, and drops the problematic of the drives in 1960. But in 1964 he took up the drives again, formalizing the topological structuring of dimensions of jouissance in language we have mentioned earlier. I interpret him, thus: Drang is the point zero, or the object-cause-of—desire (a), which engages the drive’s aim; Quelle is the surface (the second material dimension) of the body, broken by the aim (Ziel) whose goal is a return to the zero dimension of the absolute object of a total The unconscious takes

satisfaction. Freud’s idea that the drives aim

to create a

kind of entropy would be explicable not, however, the same. Between the

theory that the aim and goal are two a dynamic movement occurs. The drive, thus, has “Lacan’s Theory of LanguagezThe Symbolic Gap,” Pyle via Lacan’s

dynamic structure. writes (p. 6):



In

predilection among intellectuals to think of language in purely abstract logical terms, it is vital that we become aware that there is a dynamics of language. While Lacan’s theory of language In consideration of the

The structure of the drives

deepens

and broadens

117

language by opening up hitherto ignored dimensions of the logic of language in his own estimation, his opening up of the dynamics of language was his most important contribution .To put it in Peircean terms, just as the realm of physics is governed by laws and those laws have force, so is the realm of semiosis governed by laws (logic) and those laws have force. .

our

understanding

of



by classical Freudian drive theory in which there is a dynamic unconscious, whose dynamics seem to come from a ubiquity or intra—psychic con?ict resulting from an unconscious organization of sex and agressivity in childhood. Lacan’s theory, rather, would This is

make

quite

sense



di?erent

notion than that put forward

of the dialectical

forth from the time he

between desire and drive which he put that the subject lacks the objects it must seek in

movement

argued the outside world precisely insofar as the structural scaffolding of the human subject is created as a lack—in-being (3). Such a dialectic would show up as a dynamic force in language which would place the torsion, not only in the word, but in language itself, stemming from an interaction between the logical operations of alienation and separation. Notes 1



jacques Lacan, “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” Ecrits, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 455. Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Ecrits, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006),

p. 692. 3 Charles

4 5 6







10 11

Pyle, On the Duplia'ty of Language, draft of March 1995. All rights to this unpublished MS rest with the author. Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and TheirVicissitudes” (1915), SE XIV: 109—140. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921), SE XVIII: 1—64. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Seminar XI), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 163. Santanu Biswas, “The poincon (O) in Lacan,” (Re)-Tum:A journal of Lacam'an Studies, vol. 6 (Spring 2011): 135—147; cf. p. 136. Ellie Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan, cf. the Intro— duction,“Traduttore emendatore: The role of translation and interpretation in exegetical renewal” (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1—15. jeanne Granon—Lafont, Rpologie lacanienne et clinique analytique (Paris: Points Hors Ligne, 1990), p. 9. jacques Lacan, “Topology is structure” taken from livre XXII (1974—1975): R.S.l., unedited Seminar, forthcoming in French. Jacques Lacan, Le se’minaire (1972—1973), lime XX: Encore, ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 110; The Seminar, Boole XX: Encore, ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), cf. ch. 10.

5 THE TOPOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF LACANIAN OPTICS

Lacan’s

theory

of the gaze

receptions of Lacan’s theory of the gaze in American and British ?lm theory have merged, the male gaze taken as the active, conscious agent of seeing. The gaze, the eye, and the subject are taken as one concept. This gaze is said to castrate and, thereby, subjugate, the female, making her an object, not a subject (Laura Mulvey),1 although Mulvey herself has long since moved beyond this formulation. Others have con?ated Lacan’s theory of the gaze with his mirror—stage essay of 1949, viewing the lack of wholeness in the image as a Freudian reductionist biologism wherein psychic function is dictated by organ reality.2 Luce Irigaray, for example, argues in The Speculum of the Other Woman that the mirror stage is a matter of a girl’s literally identifying herself in a mirror as lacking the male organ.3 Lacan’s mirror—stage argument is better Certain familiar

summed up in the words of Hal Foster, who uses topology—the logic of place“—— to describe “the negotiation of distance between the ?edgling ego and its

image, between the infant and its mother.”5 At one level, the stakes in Lacanian psychoanalytic praxis and teaching are the necessity of imposing this distance between “self” and “other” in order that one not become psychotic (cf. Seminar III: The Psychoses (1955—1956).6 To be “social” means to be lacking in order to be able

to

“which makes

infant

the other/Other, thus, placing oneself in the discourse social link” (cf. Seminar XX: Encore, ch. 2).7 That the mirror-stage

reach

veers



out to

away from narcissistic Oneness with the mother

order of Otherness

occurs

father”——i.e.,

name

in the

god,

“the outsider” of

thus

breaking

and infant.

the

by of

some

magnetic



her

turning

to

to

the social in “the

the

symbolic

name

third term, be it the mother’s brother,”

primitive tribes, bond of

or some

identi?catory

other

oneness

of the a

river

imaginary Daddy, between mother

The

The gaze and the

topological

dimension of Lacanian

optics

119

phallus

questions Derrida and Foucault as to their potential for undoing political projects that would necessitate mirror-stage distancing of oneself from unsalutary others in larger political games than that of the baby—mother dyad. “Is it too obvious to say that Derridean deconstruction is pledged to the very undoing of that Foucauldean methodology is founded in the very refusal such oppositions of such foundations?” (Foster, p. 15). In Seminar IV: The Relation of the Object (1956—1957), Lacan explained “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience” is the effect of dividing the infant Foster







away from its mother.8 The infant thinks it is one with the mother in the mirror image, but sees the mother holding it. She, then, is a third term, dividing the infant’s illusion that

one.This

repeated in the infant’s e?brts from within a sexual binary. The little boy to distinguish its sexual speci?city sees that the little girl, or his mother, or some other female, has no penis. He realizes he can lose this partial object of his own imaginary body—a logical whole or imaginary consistency—if there is another who does not have it. She believes she can have this organ in varying forms.As an organ shed in childhood, it can be replaced by a baby doll, a can of urine stored away in her competition with her brothers in their “pissing” contests, a career, and so on. Lacan calls this representation of an organ, the phallus which, he tells us in “The Signi?cation of the Phallus” (1958),“is a signi?er whose function lifts the veil [insofar as the signi?er is] intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signi?ed, in that the signi?er conditions them by its presence as a signi?er” (p. 579); that is, its presence signi?es difference as itself an effect.9 Now the signi?ed, in this case, is the gaze that takes sexual difference as a mystery to be deciphered, unveiled. For children, difference, right away, becomes not only a third thing—a split between the biological sexes—but an abstraction. I would go so far as to call this initially perceived diHerence the kernel of (dialectical) thinking. Indeed, psychotics foreclose this difference, identifying organs as real things, not as represented parts, just as they experience words as real things, not as metaphoric imaginaries referring to something else. two are



Nor is Lacan’s gaze the “look.”The gaze is





experience

is



visual gaze



or text







that “sees” and, thus,

can





reeducate

conscious subject agency that instructs the looking other as phenomenological object, as Kaja Silverman argues in The Threshold of the Visible World (1996).10 Silverman’s theory seems to come from a reading of Lacan in which the “look” would be an equivalent of an unconscious linguistic construct,

is the

sum

as some

not a

have understood Lacan’s

of the effects of the word

on a

constitutes itself from the effects of the

statements

subject

at

signi?er.”“

such as:“The unconscious

the level where the What is

missing

subject

here is any

elaboration ofLacan’s arguments on the drive,jouissance, and desire as formalizable constructs created by the signi?er. Indeed, these effects constitute the system of and libido and function with all the force and logic of the system of

fantasy

representations whose words and images somehow make it seem more solid, more scienti?c, and more accessible to critique than does the jouissance system.

120

The

topological

dimension of Lacanian

optics

Lacan’s gaze, he maintains in Seminar X1, in chapter 8, “The Line and the

Light,” can be understood insofar as geometrical optics invert perspective in painting such that “the secret of a picture” catches the viewer in its trap,“capture[s] the subject [in] an obvious relation with desire which, nevertheless, remains enig- matic.”That desire is caught and ?xed in a picture, Lacan argues in Seminar XIII

(1965—1966).12

It

monstrates or

shows the real—that which is, but

cannot

yet be

said. At the very least, a dimension of deceptiveness of perception accompanies the gaze, insofar as the picture entraps the viewer. This dimension, Lacan adds, has

been present in arguments

presented

from Plato

to

Kant. In the well—known

deceptive trick played in percep— tion is the opening of a gap between appearance and being which concerns the irradiation of not being able to see an image or object at a point where the light is too bright. To argue this thesis, he uses the famous sardine can example from his own youth. On a ?shing trip with Breton ?shermen who are being put out of business by the new industry of canning sardines, Petit Jean points to a can ?oating in the waves. The light is breaking apart on the interplay of water, sun and metal; the object—the can—over?ows the image and gives rise to an enig— matic dimension that separates the gaze from the eye; vision from perception. That this example has not truly served those trying to understand Lacan’s theory of the gaze and its relation to objects in the world is not surprising if one takes this example in the perspective of an analogy, even though that was not Lacan’s position at the time.Two years later, when one reads Lacan’s arguments regarding what a “picture” is in Seminar XIII: On the object of psychoanalysis (1966—1967), he clari?es that his is not an analogical/geometrical presentation of the relation between the gaze and the object. Rather his is a topological per— spective that places the object—not the vision or the subject of it—in a place of priority. In consequence, one no longer need think in terms of a split between vision (that sees) and what is seen (an object). Insofar as the gaze is one of the objects—cause-of-desire that “move” by the dynamics similar to the ones Freud ?rst attributed to the drives—indeed the gaze, is a partial drive—Lacan’s new perspective argues thus: For psychoanalysis, topology—the study of the transformation of objects in space that change shape while still retaining the same properties—is not a metaphor, but con?rms the presence of the real in the base scopic ?eld that shows the subject its place in the Other: Topology is an active showing of the real of structure. The representation of the space of the real promotes the notion of a picture which presents sites or points one might (or must) occupy in a social signifying chain.These are real places, not metaphori— chapter

cal

8 of Seminar XI, Lacan argues that the

constructs to

or seen

is

tacitly

The sardine One

can

plays



be donned

aside

at

will

or

episode,

as

well

as

or cast

whim.What

cannot

be said

shown.

can

episode

reread the sardine

central role,

now

can

grasping

that

one

will

other

never

where the gaze understand the relation of texts

The

subject

object in

topological

of an inverted

dimension of Lacanian

optics

121

anamorphosis. In Seminar XI, Lacan spoke phenomenologically, using vision at its limit point of being blinded by light, to try to explain the gaze.Two years later, he argued that one must start with the object that causes one to see something outside the ?eld of the picture. This is reminiscent of one of Lacan’s reformulations of Freud’s depiction of the unconscious: “There from where it looks at me, I do not see; to

there where I

terms

see, it does not

look

perspective, as

at me





.You

one

never

does in

look

at me

from where

you.” In this context, a picture—of any story or ?lm—is a window in which the object (a) is lodged by a frame or structure that shows it as a singularity of the scopic, invocatory, oral, or anal ?elds of the partial drives. And such objects constitute or “found” the subject in its ?eeting appearances in language. The object, in turn, is made up of unary traits (SI) that are identi?catory in only one dimension, and, whose properties are, thus, a non—dialectical absolutism of the object (a)-cause of desire and goal of the drives.The object shown in the sardine can episode is not the can, but the real death laying siege to Petit jean and his ilk.This occasions the aggressive laughter of the ?shermen at young Lacan who seems to be in their picture, but is really only in the picture as a backdrop against which to portray to them the grimmer face of their real:Young jacques Lacan was not really in their picture. He was visiting, going back to Paris. He has distance, difference. He is there as an ideal ego of an Other symbolic, throwing into stark relief the mirror-image identi?cations by which they maintained their own bonds. By 1964, Lacan had understood why they laughed. He was not in their picture. He was outside it, in a different signifying chain. I

see

The

scopic

drive

perspective, the gaze in chapter 8 (S. XI) exempli?es the point of darkness beyond light as meaning the (topological) real which does not conceive of the stain or spot as an equivalent of Freud’s screen memories beyond which one cannot see or think, correlating the point of blackness with the irradiation that makes the object opaque, enigmatic, ambiguous, undecidable. Such a reading is based on an early Lacan. It is not part of his later teaching that offers the key to understanding the difference between the subject and the object by this logic: The object (a) is a metaphor for the unary traits ofjouissance it drops—from the invocatory ?eld, the scopic ?eld, the oral ?eld, the anal ?eld—shedding these From this

traits like

so

perspective.

many

feathers, bringing pieces of the real into language, vision, and grasps the differential topo— his later work where he showed that the space in

Once this Lacan is

acknowledged,

one

logy he brought to bear on play is not the space of the “screen,” or the place of the unfathomable real of an impossible “spot” or “stain.” It is not the place—for example, in the Mobius strip—”where everything is looking at me at the level of the point of light” (S. XI, p. 95). Rather, it is the point where the Mobius strip (?gure eight) has the shape of the gaze, where the edge and surface are contiguities that overlap, thus

transforming themselves

into

one

another

by

the unary trait of identi?cation

122

The

topological

that anchors them

dimension of Lacanian

optics

hole, while also creating the hole they surround.I3 In the cusp of the Mobian twist the secret of the picture is hidden; it resides in the point of an overlap which places all the players in the Petit Jean drama on to an

actual

the surface of the

?gure eight, walking around it, under it, through “narrative” (or visual) movements of passage approximate the dynamic of the drive. But the drive at stake is not the scopic one in any benign It is the

scopic

real of the

?shermen, looking

into the void that faces them one.

as

structure

function.

via the “screen” of a young Lacan,

?shing industry is overtaken by the canning whose larger dimensions in the scopic ?eld of

the

Lacan called forth this gaze,

perspective, hold all the other drives in its cusp. gaze, in its proximity to the void, any subsequent

Insofar

as we are

encounter

with the void, with the death head whose correlates

ter

it: These

are

born into the

with it is

an encoun-

lack and loss. Indeed,

scopic ?eld, this drive separates itself from being, showing the dark angst of the void at the center of being and meaning.Although the movements of the Petit Jean drama may approximate Aristotle’s “movements” (S. XX, ch. 5) and the dynamics Freud sought to fathom with the four charac- when ideals

drop

away in the

teristics of movement he attributed

the

drive—repression, sublimation, turning back on the self, reversal into its opposite—both fail to account for what causes the drive in the ?rst place, for just how it is born out of the dialectical interplay to

of loss and desire. In SeminarV: Formations are

gaze.14

born into the

fondly,jealously,

have

our

desires

well. Indeed,

consciousness; looked

at

Unconscious

From the

start

(1957—1958), Lacan

of life

we

so as

with

stressed that

we

gazed at. As others gaze begin to be named and to

are

aspirations, and so on, we constructed by the Other—by what

at us,

as

of the

the Other has and lacks,

inclusive is the gaze, that Lacan de?ned it in Seminar XI as “seeing oneself being seen.” Becoming aware that one is

by others,

ofjudgment and graph of desire, Lacan placed

constitutes the gaze in its dual function

idealization. Thus, in SeminarV,

at

the base of his

the ego ideal—one’s particular subjectivity or unconscious ego—as it interfaces with lack —I(A) S—the ego, thus, joining unconscious fantasy.Yet, the lacking

emptiness, but lack as the pure real. Lacan de?nes lack in SeminarV as there being no subject, no signi?er which founds it (p. 189). Insofar as the ?rst symbolizations—constituted in a Fort! Da! kind of rhythm between the parents—begin to make of the baby a subject, a desired object, we can say that all we know about the infant—subject is that demands emanate from it and that he or she is formed as a constellation of (object) desires. Lacan pro— posed that the child starts out as an a-sujet “because she experiences and feels, ?rst, profoundly subjected to the caprices on which she depends, even when the caprice is articulated” (p.189).As these primordial demands made on the infant pass through the signifying treasury of language and are ?ltered through the mother’s conscious and unconscious desire (p. 191), the infant is led to seek the desire ofbeing desired.This is an effort to escape unloving, idealizing,judgmental gazes which gave Little Hans, for example, his anxiety and phobia regarding horses (p. 193).

subject (3)

is

not

lack

just

as

The

topological

dimension of Lacanian

123

optics

benign gaze, only the Other/others as desiring, expecting,judging, waiting. Early on, the gaze performs its castrating function of creating an ego. Lacan called the ego a metonymic object which, as a sexual object, is symmetrical for both sexes. The subject is desired or not as an object tethered to the subjectivity of the Other/others; not to the sexual difference itself (p. 199).The message sent by the Other/others is the desire that makes of the subject a barred subject—a place of enuncia- tion of “self” as desiring or desired, an inverted mirror re?ection of the Other and the ego idea] which serve as primordial unconscious formations that let their shadow be cast in what the “I” says and projects in the ideal egos chosen in relationships. But beyond the mother’s desire—taken as a primordial form of the gaze— what does one ?nd? If the child’s desire is to be the object of the mother’s desire—satisfying her gaze, thus winning her love—we can say that the ego ideal becomes the child as he or she was desired (p. 257). The mother’s desire, thus constructs the equation desire fantasy. One fantasizes in the relation of lost and (re)found objects—breast, feces, voice, gaze—and desires the return of certain jouissance traits to ?ll the lack-in—being. Regarding topology Sophie (1964),

In Seminar XI

Lacan argues that there is

no



Marret-Maleval says: If Jacques-Alain Miller recalls that “there is you

can

isolate Lacan’s

turning point,”

Miller nevertheless situates

Chapter 8

no

particular

moment

that he makes his way step

of Seminar XX

as

“the

where

by

moment

step, when

it becomes patent that Lacan renounces the reference to being, renounces ontology, including his own, his modi?ed ontology, in order to privilege

register of the real ...” The passage from ontology to the ontic—the split subject, fading, elusiveness—concerns the displacement of emphasis operated by Lacan from the register of being to that of existence.15 the

This dialectic between the ontic and the of lack is marked

(3 O a)

that

object

comes

to

?ll

the

place

of the ego. Thus, fantasy is narcissistic. But beyond the mother, beyond this level of desire, one ?nds the signi?er for the name of the father whose language, law and con—

at

the

the

fantasy

as

in the

imaginary lineage

magnetic pull of maternal drives— writes this in the the vuoi? graph as the drive seeking to ?ll up loss (8(9)) level of the demand for enjoyment: S(G)/]—> S 0 0.That the drives have

vention

Lacan

by

structure a

turning

away from the

been structured in the relation of

symbolic

desire

fantasy,

and ego to ego ideal, sets up the response a subject will give to the social gaze in its e?brts to be given a place in the social sphere (p. 392). It is in this sense that Lacan places

already

the father

beyond

after

to

in

psycho— of saying what Lacan means by speaking as that which constructs reality as a set of

the mother. Culture

comes

nurture

analytic models. This is another way of the signi?er of the Father’s Name symbolic desires concerning where one places oneself in to be seen, heard, nurtured, controlled, or controlling.

most

the real of the drives:

124

The

topological

dimension of Lacanian optics

Another way Lacan

states

this is

to

capital phi ((1)) is itself a particular signi?er which, in

say that the

signi?ed of the signi?er phallus. “The phallus is this the body of signi?ers, is specialized to designate the ensemble of the effects of the signi?er, as such, on the signi?ed” (S.V, p. 393). On the demands of culture, in other words. Indeed, the demands of culture might well be another name for the gaze of society, as demanding and commanding. Beyond desire, one ?nds drive enunciated by language, but referring to the object a, to jouissance. In “Painting,” Gerard Wajcman argues that topology is not a metaphor for

psychoanalysis.I6 Referring

to

Lacan’s Seminar of May

4,

1966 from his Seminar

object ofpsychoanalysis (1965—1966),Wajcman makes us see the value of Thomas Kuhn’s picture of science as revolutionary, not evolutionary. In the replacement of an old paradigm by a new one, one ?nds revolutionary science. Lacan’s teaching does nothing less. He argues that he is doing a “topologerie”— beyond geometry—and that it has never been done._]oining desire and language by drive, he argues that the scope of thought is reducible to the body. That is, thought only thinks in the limit of the space of the body (Wajcman, p. 152).17 Topology, for Lacan, might be called an equivalent of the gaze. It does not seek, it ?nds. It does not quest. It shows by redoubling the subject silently. Psychoanalysis situs becomes psychoanalyis in space and in three dimensions. Indeed, time is introduced into topology by the real of the word in its unary dimension. The word evokes loss, this giving rise to the structure of desire/lack.At a second level, that of writing, time becomes history; dead letters lack the quality of the “act” pronounced by the word which includes the real, desire, and jouissance in its fabric.Topology shows structure, then, the real of structure which cannot speak itself. Topology situates the subject in a place of the Other, toward which the subject is supposed to orient itself. Lacan’s whole teaching concerns this place in the Other—a common site—and the place of the subject. And, ?nally Lacan will say that the Other does not exist except as the Other sex. One can see why the place of the subject would be so important, given that the subject qua essence does not exist. A body is given a place in the irrealized ?elds of the gaze or the voice, as well as in the signi?ers that represent it.The common place in the Other might be thought of as the cultural dimension—a place where egos can collect and identify with some unifying trait in the group and in a leader. Imaginary place—or space—is marked by the schemas which ?gure the surface by stratifying the planes of the image. Symbolic space is shown by the graph which responds to the places (the points) inscribed there (Wajcman,”Painting,” p. 143). The knotting of the three dimensions constitutes Borromean structure—a structure Lacan called a picture of the sites of the real. XIII: On the

The surface of the

body

Topology, then, is not a metaphor. Not an allegory. It does not represent the subject. It does not even irrealize the subject of the drives and desire as does the object a. Topology presents “the foundations of the subject’s position.” The

The

topological

combines itself in the Borromean unit

subject

dimension of Lacanian

optics

(Wajcman,”Painting,”

p.

125

144).

If

of topology is, then, visual, one confronts a split between the gaze and vision in the sense that a visual structure is torn from the visible (S. XI, the

structure

pp. 77—81). Indeed, visual

structure

?rst led Lacan

to

topology. The

sardine

can

optics beyond that of the interplay of laughter, light, and being. Later, topology will take Lacan back to this picture and enable him to construct the matheme of showing (Wajcman,”Painting,” p. 144), the picture being the matheme of visual structure, transmitting what can only be shown, not said. Descartes’s failure to ?nally separate thought from body leads Lacan to link Descartes’s res extensa to cave—wall paintings which give a logical matrix of the signi?er, and the unary trait which creates perspective by threading an identi?catory mark to a hole—the chosen recess of the object (“Painting,” p. 145). One can, thus, drop the concept of the screen, except insofar as it serves as a surface onto which to inscribe something, the surface, for example of the body which is skin and apertures.Thus, the screen is merely thrown into relief as an imagined support of the image, while the page does the same for the letter. The image veils the screen while the letter shows that it hides a hole. in the Petit

Jean episode points

to an

In this Seminar, Lacan said of the gaze: “The foundation of the surface is at the base of all we call the organization ofform, constellation” (“Painting,” p. 147).

This is

far cry from a gender divide of a masculine desiring subject in?icting his unwanted attentions on a feminine desired object. We all desire from the a

erogenous surfaces of our

constellations because desire and drive

and will

satisfy

serves as a

bodies, from the objects of desire built up into meaning

primordial “objects” are constantly

seems evanescent

the drive. But the

semblance of what satis?es

semblant dwells between the

area

between

thinks the organ caused the desire between the wish and “the thing” only

because

object

lost.This

one

the drive. In Seminar XX, the

object

as a

symbolic and the real.The thing gazed at is never the “real” thing, only the “thing” designated by a given symbolic sphere as its ideal.The image of Marilyn Monroe, for example, is an image of a sex goddess of her day. To look at her was not to ?x the “look” on an object, denigrated by desire—male or female. It was to look upon the falseness of the image.What the image of Marilyn showed was the prototype of sexuality desired in that historical moment (cf. ch.VIII, “Knowledge and Truth”, p. 90).While the scopic drive is constructed as a symbolic dimension convention and in individual imaginary preferences, in the real, it is a jouissance constellation of certain traces written in the unconscious part that knows—connat‘t—the language of the libido, of jouissance.The object a residing between the desirer and the desire is Lacan’s way of saying that space and thought can be said to be homogeneous—as Descartes more or less deduced with his thinking part (mind) and the extended part (body). This is so,Wajcman says, because both thought and body are geo-metric.That is, both can be quanti?ed or measured.Thought is counted up as ideas, words, and concepts, while the body extends itself into space by its desires, fantasies, appetites, and modes ofjouissance.Although any measure of the body as an image that has been “signi?cantized” (given meaning) produces an imaginarized signi?er, one

126

The

topological

learns something

dimension of Lacanian

new

optics

“imagination,” from Lacan: That an image is body—with its parts and erogenous openings—

about the

signi?cantized in the space of a means that imagination is limited, not in?nite. Even the always come down to the terms of the image of a body. Let

think for

greatest fantasies will

about the novel 1984.18 It culminates in

Big Brother’s torturing the bodies of julia and Winston;]ulia’s and Winston’s joining the party to enjoy the “bodily” comforts that political compliance and money will bring them; and, ?nally, their seeing each other and desiring each other no longer because each has grown cynical, jaded, and overweight. The subject, in this view, is not opposed to the world of objects. Rather, the world of objects is enveloped in the clothing of a body—-a sack of skin—which uni?es them.The gaze is embodied in a quattrocentric perspective, then, not a binary one, as Mulvey, Silverman, or Irigaray have proposed. One is the desiring subject of a lack and the object of a potential ful?llment, plus two other terms: us



moment

the gap itself and the distance This gives us nothing less than

to

be covered between desire and satisfaction.

always be overstepped by a metrical geometry. Euclidean space can not contain its “objects” because subject and object are not simple binaries, but are radically separate—the one wanting/lacking and the other an empty promise of repeated moments a new

view of

perspective

which will

of memory. Put another way, Silverman’s ideas would lead us theory of the subject and object, rather than to a theory of

to



coherence

disunity. While subject and object may well co—exist, they reside in different places and on different planes. The man who stares with lust in his eye at Marilyn Monroe is looking at a paper—doll, a sack of skin.

Lacan, Descartes, Plato Lacan called Descartes’s “extended

body” the statement of an impasse, as was Plato’s concept of an ideal form. In his logic of perspective Lacan proposes three terms to explain how one ?gure is inscribed on the surface of another. This does not imply that there will be resemblance, nor equality between two ?gures—the evil patriarch and his innocent victim—but equivalence. Three terms make up an equivalence relation, those being three modes by which one ?gure relates to another: resemblance by re?ection (the mirror), equality by measure, and equivalence by transformation. The technical terms for these three are catoptrique, geometric, and topologic. Another way to say this is that perspective means different surfaces—imaginary, symbolic, real, and symptomal— while the object a merely indicates a point of enigma and opacity between a subject and object. In 1964, Lacan links symbolic structure to the scopic ?eld. In 1966, he read the work of Leroi—Gourhan on cave paintings. Gourhan was perplexed as to why there would be paintings of the lives of individuals in the dark deep interior of the caves that never saw the light of day. Lacan’s answer was that the paintings of the depths had to resemble the paintings of the entrance in order

The

that the that



What to

cave

or

optics

127

they were always who they were—in order thoughts in the deepest moments of darkness.

logic govern their subject represents to himself or

what he

dimension of Lacanian

dwellers believe that

visible a

topological

she does

not

herself represents him

see.And Lacan made of these

matheme. He called them

or

her in reference

paintings



psychoana-

writing before writing whose main property was to make a “letter” or visual representation that would add up to a system of marks.These marks are not, however, signi?ers, but “meaningness” (signi?cance). From the second a mark is made to represent a subject, a couple exists—the mark and the background upon which it is made; a unary trait of an edge and its hole. A mark on a blank page represents a subject for the depth of the page in a

lytic

matrix of one and shows the

zero

whose



structure

is of the real. Put another way, the mark

depth.

example of the sardine can, Lacan existed on the ?shermen’s screen—in their picture—as a mark whose only ?lnction was to illuminate the depth of the picture, to illuminate the true story of those who were not able to see themselves in the real. There was only Lacan as an “exceptional” element present to create the discontinuity that breaks up the imaginary illusion that depth and surface are one, are uni?ed. Lacan called this a real structure of the signi?er, made not of the materiality of the letter, but of the material of which the letter is made. There is a before the letter, a trait or point which must come before the saying of it or marking down of it. Now this does not mean that Lacan is making an analogy between the world of nature and that of culture. He is saying that culture makes what it will of nature—human or otherwise—of the things that are already there. The way he puts it is to say that realism in art is profoundly metonymic, that it designates something other than what it presents to us (Wajcman (French text), p. 153).The male subject who whistles at a female object is (de)monstrating to us—not that she is desirable—but that he can desire, that he is not impotent, that he can ?ght his own double castration.While my analysis does not pretend to address the conventional codes of acceptable or unacceptable behavior in a given cultural context, given that there is no Other of the Other, I am saying that a behavior demonstrates ?rst—monstrates (in the real)—something other than what it looks like it is saying or showing. What is in question here is not what the “letter” says, but what it presents. In “L’étourdit” (1975),19 Lacan says one forgets what is said (“shown”) behind what is heard (seen). In “Agency of the Letter” he spoke of language as signifying something other than what it says.20 When the real of structure—the picture—is at stake, the “letter” does not signify (produce meaning). It designates an impossible to see. I would even place the “Dream of the Burning Child,” recounted by Freud and retold by Lacan within this logic. The father dreams that his son is standing before him with his bandages on ?re, burning horribly and asking: “Father, can’t you see I’m burning?” The father must have known—unconsciously—when he left the boy’s bedside, himself deeply worn by fatigue and heartbreak, that the candle had burned low and that the old man watching his son was dozing off as well. The father left the room in order not to see his son’s death; to sleep To

return to

the

128

The

topological

dimension of Lacanian

optics

elsewhere. But he knew when he heard the candlestick fall

over

that his son’s

body had caught ?re. He knew in a lightning ?ash moment of associations that not only had he lost his son’s life, he was losing his body as well.This was what the dream horror image of his son showed—a picture in the real (cf. Seminar XI). This is what Wajcman calls a moment of the écrit piercing the word, the signi?er, detaching itself from the voice.The “showing” becomes the unsayable and in this sense is the paradoxical impossible letting itself be seen. One might add that much literature depends on just such a device, all the way from the unbearable image ofAntigone’s death scene to the postmodern discomfort with the real and con— temporary literary preoccupation with parody, irony, and distance. What more perfect genre to represent the most barbaric century in Western history? Two World Wars, the Holocaust, Korea,Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and so on. If there is such a thing as the object as real, which only appears in showing itself when the signi?er fails to name something and the image also remains indecipherable, one is in the presence of an optic that is anterior to physiology and in the presence of that which structures the visible, rather than the visible structuring itself. If the signi?er only functions as a morti?cation of the object—

emptying of the real of the object—separation—one has passed from geometry to topology. Points have converged randomly in identi?catory combinatories, of which one will later “read” only the isolate, the in alienation—and

causes an

absolute unary trait—not a dialectic between a word and a thing. Once one is in that dialectic, one has proceeded to an imaginary interaction with falseness: alienation his

(the symbolic) giving

Seminar, Le

moment

names

to

de conclure: Livre XXV

appearance

(the imaginary).

(1978—1979),21

In

Lacan argues that

couples that one calls science. Between Descartes’s “extended part”—the body—and the fantasy, one traverses the distance of the fantasies of sexuality encountering myriad lacks of rapport (December 20, 1977). geometry is

If there is

woven

no

of fantasies of

sexual rapport of oneness between man and woman, or any other only one’s own Other as partner, there is at least the link of

couple, metaphor to fantasy.That is, the subject is divided in two points—the one where he sees, the point of ?ight—and the other where he is seen—the point of distance—from which a picture shows.To construct the object’s perspective there must be one eye in the picture and “another eye” looking.What interested Lacan was not the geometrical space that perspectivists have measured, but that distance itself is required—that a subject must be held at a distance from an object to see it. The ?rst viewpoint is that of the subject of vision, a point of ?ight. As for the real object, it can only be found in the hole. If one thinks of the hole as a window—indeed, window de?ning fantasy quite well here—as that which shows sexual

itself or hides itself, the

Lacan

painted

conclude, but

(French



picture

both hides and reveals.The

himself in the sardine

topological object

text, pp.

166—167).

Lacan

and that which illuminated the

can

narrative is

screen

against

which

not a

concept, we may which shows itself—in the relation of S O (a)

was

both the desired

lacking



in their

object of the Other’s gaze story, perforce both opening

The

topological

dimension of Lacanian

unveiling the lack in the picture, while occasioning (death) object by the metaphorical denial of laughter.

up and

the

optics

129

hiding of the

Notes

Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 14—26. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror—Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949), Ecn'ts, trans. with notes by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006). Luce Irigaray, The Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. by Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Jacques Lacan, My Raching, trans. by David Macey (London and NewYork: Verso, 2008),

1 Laura



3 4

pp. 3—4. 5 Hal Foster, “Postmodernism in 6 7





10 11

12 13

14

15

Parallax,” October 63 (W inter 1993), p. 13.

ofJacques lawn, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955—1956, ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller, trans. with notes by Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993). The Seminar ofjacques Lacan, Boole XX: Encore, 1972—1973, ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller, trans. with notes by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 16—17. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, lime IV: La relation d’objet, 1956—1957, text established by jacques—Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1994); The Object Relation, trans. by Alexandra Roche (New York: Norton, forthcoming). jacques Lacan, “The Signi?cation of the Phallus” (1958), Ecrits, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 579. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996). The Seminar ofjacques Lacan, Boole XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964), ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller trans. with notes by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 116. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XIII: L’objet de la psychanalyse, 1965—1966, text established by Jacques—Alain Miller, forthcoming. Jeanne Granon-Lafont, Rpologie lacam'enne et clinique analytique (Cahors: Point Hors Ligne, 1990); cf. ch. 1. Jacques Lacan, SeminarV: Lesformations de l’inconscient, 1957—1958, text established by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1998). Formations of the Unconscious, trans. by Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, forthcoming). Sophie Marret-Maleval, “Lacan’s Henology: From Ontology to the Ontic (excerpt),” Hurly Burly 9, trans. by D.Trigg and B.Wolf, 2013, p. 792. One must remember that from Seminar XI on, Lacan no longer used the concept of being or the ?eld of ontol— ogy. He spoke, rather, of a “de-being” of the narcissistic sense of being human egos taken on. Although “being” is sometimes used in the Lacanian ?eld as a signi- ?er that refers to something between the lacking subject and the narcissistic ego, after Seminar XX, Lacan refers, rather, to the real and to existence, as Jacques-Alain The Seminar

Miller makes clear. 16 Gérard 17

18 19

Wajcman, “Painting,” Critical Essays

21

jacques Lacan,

ed.

by

Ellie

Ragland

(New York: G.K. Hall, 1999), pp. 142-148. Gérard Wajcman, “??zbleau,” La part de l’oeil, no. 2, Academic des Beaux—Arts (1987) (Bruxelles: Pensée des arts plastiques), pp. 147—167. George Orwell, 1984 (afterword by Erick From) (New York: Signet Classics, 1949, 1984) Jacques Lacan, “L’étourdit,” Scilicet, no. 4 ([1983]: 5—52); Autres écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), pp. 449—495.

20

on

Jacques Lacan,“The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud” (1957), Baits, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), pp. 412—441. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XXV: Le moment de conclure, 1978—1979, text of the Seminar established by jacques-Alain Miller, forthcoming.

6 THE PRACTICE OF THE LETTER AND TOPOLOGICAL STRUCTURE

The

of the letter

practice

My goal in this chapter is

to

make

sense

of the Lacanian idea that

function of the letter is characteristic of

literary language.



topological

I shall argue that

of

language where clearly non-symbolic and non-historical uses of language come together in ways we call ?ction, poetry, drama, and fantasy, for want of a better logic. “Every truth has the structure of ?ction,” Lacan argued in his Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis.1 The name Lacan gave to that which joins the structure of truth—i.e. the real—to ?ction is the lettre, playing on the link in the French language between l’étre (being) and lettre (letter). By working with a short novel by Marguerite Duras, we will try to show the topological space dug out by the effects of the voice on the body and make sense of what Lacan means by the “letter.”At one level, Lacan says writing is the letter in the real, or writing is “the furrowing of the signi?ed in the real.”This thinking was his way of looking for a discourse that would not be a semblance.2 Now let us refer to Lacan’s gloss on L0] V. Stein’s fantasy in the novel by Marguerite Duras. He brings us right into the link between the letter, writing, and topology. He says: “There is no topology without writing topology consists precisely in making holes in what is written” (Biswas, “A Literary Introduction to ‘Lituraterre,’” from “D’un discours .,” note # 9, p. 182). Earlier Lacan had said in his homage to Marguerite Duras: literature is the home of the unconscious real. It is this strange

use







the







all surfaces.

Singular on a ?at surface, everywhere on a sphere, on a more complex surface, it can produce an odd knot You sense that all of this has to do with an envelope having neither an inside or outside, and in the seam of its center every gaze [or voice] turns center

is

not

same on



back into

our

own.3

..

The

In his

“Homage

to

Marguerite

practice of the letter and topological Duras

on

structure

131

The Ravissement de Lol VStein”4 Lacan

place where the sand and ocean meet, at the point of the littoral; for him it is the place where the unconscious touches conscious use of language. By examining, as well, what Lacan meant by the word “structure” in this axiom saying that “?ction has the structure of truth,” we can arrive at a clearer understanding of what he meant by the letter. Rabaté speaks of the “letter” of literature (p. 134). Santanu Biswas asks whether literature as littoral is a sem- blance or not.5 In the broadest sense, he says, the littoral presents a place of erasure de?nes

the “letter”

as

the

where the letter is literal “because it is founded

Topological

on

the littoral,” says Lacan.6

structure and the letter

study here, one sees at work Lacan’s theory that the subject is connected to language in a point of overlap between the real and a void place that dwells in language itself.7 In an article published in 1987, “Topology in the Teaching of Lacan,”_]acques— Alain Miller points out that the concept of topological “structure” is present in Lacan’s writings as early as 1953 in the “Rome Report,” although this concept does not take on its fuller topological sense until 1972—1973 in Seminar XX.8 In “The Discourse of Rome” (1953) Lacan is concerned with the mortal sense of being which shows the presence of death in the subject of the symbolic. He says that such a presence occupies a central place in speech, thereby marking the underlying structure of the absence (ab-sens) that sustains it. And, Lacan argued, this mortal sense is both central to the exercise of speech and external to language, reminding us that in 1953 Lacan was seeking to distinguish “speech” (la parole of le langage) from the system of rules and conventions of grammar that Ferdinand In

Marguerite

Duras’s ?ction,

de Saussure had called la

Moderato Cantabile, the novel

langue.9

we

will

Rabaté has described the “letter”

as

sublimated

jouissance, sublimation being that which raises an object to the dignity of das Ding (S. 7, p. 112), or the vacuole, a small cavity in organic tissue, which refers analogically to the hole opened up at the edge by the letter (Rabaté, pp. 35, 57). Rabaté also calls the “letter” sublimated jouissance or that which provides a rim encircling the erotic hole left by jouissance (p. 28). Although Lacan used topology to formalize and explicate psychoanalysis in the third period of his teaching from approximately 1974 to 1981, he never developed his early reference to a peripheral and central exteriority represented by the three—dimensional form of a torus: @.The challenge was taken up after Lacan’s death by Jacques—Alain Miller in his Course Extimité.10 In his article of 1987, Miller points out the following paradox in Lacan’s idea advanced in 1953. An empty center with a conduit to speech has come into play. And this empty

myth nor metaphor. Between this center of knowledge and the ab-sens caused by jouissance, one ?nds the littoral, as Lacan said on page 7 of “Lituraterre” (Autres écrits). Indeed, in Extimité Miller sustains this concept, showing us that the subject lies beyond metaphor, in a point that is both central the to language and external to it: extimate. And Lacan’s concern was to ?nd center

is neither

132

The

practice

of the letter and

topological

structure

that this

spatial disposition implies. Although Lacan later spoke of the torus, the Mobius strip, the cross-cap, and the sphere, ending up with the ?nal topological unit of the Borromean knot, he knew there was a central emptiness in the subject as early as 1953. structure

The

drives

partial

spoken (or written) language and at the same time external to it, even organizatory of it, is the partial drives—the oral, the anal, the scopic, and the invocatory—that Lacan ?rst denoted in his formula for the partial drives: S O D. Miller points out in Extimité that the drives bring a piece of the real into play, 3 Stuck left over from early experience of the loss of objects that caused desire in the ?rst place. In other words, language cannot entirely cover over or dispense with left—over remnants of the real that ?rst placed discontinuity or disturbance in language, indeed as the cause around which it is organized. In this context, the Lacanian real is not that of his ?rst period of teaching, that which was full and impossible to symbolize. It is, rather, the re-pressed part ofjouissance that returns as the real to disrupt the would-be consistencies that language expresses.11 And the real returns most particularly around the objects-cause—of desire and the partial drives to which they give rise. No ?ction writer does a better job than Marguerite Duras of unveiling the fact that language is organized around the (partial) object, be it the gaze, the voice, or the nothing (rien). In order to understand the organizing role of the voice in Duras’s Moderato Cantabile as exemplary of the idea that the object a denotes a piece of the real in the symbolic, indeed, serves as the signi?er of the hole in the Other (Q) (Extimite’, lesson of March 5, 1986, p. 338), it will help to consider the logic behind Lacan’s idea that the object a refers to an empty place in words and images. Indeed, Miller argued in May of 1988 that as analysis evacuates fantasies and imaginary inertias, along with signifying chains and symptoms, it ends up producing something new: an object a.12 Lacan ends his homage to Duras by saying that for Duras love cannot be domesticated and that she celebrates quiet weddings of an empty life with the indescribable object (“Hommage .,” Autres écrits, p. 197). The void at the heart of language makes the a oscillate in a temporal move- ment of anticipation and retroaction from which the affective lines of space devolve as jouissance lines in whose ?ctional bed language lies. One might even describe literary ?ction as the particular use of language that aims for an unmedi— ated relation to the lure object one hopes will ?ll the lack signi?ed by desire, I shall advance this



once

hypothesis:

That which is central

to



and for all.

I would suggest that Duras exposes the gap in the heart of any ?ction of an identity to oneself. Her characters use a minimalist language to hollow out a

meaning of the object(s) they desire, be it the vacuum in love glimpsed behind Maria’s drinking manzanillas in 10:30 on a Summer Night, or the desperate hope for a new love (and a new life) that subtends the conversations between Chauvin

The

practice of the letter and topological

133

structure

and Anne in Moderato Cantabile. Such minimalist

objects-cause—of—desire

into stark focus and

pure drive. Miller locates the function of

meaning of an object of



lost

sense

the

language

shape

interior, while to a

occurs at

that tries

penetrate

the inner

to

slope

at

the

same

time

as

that which is the closest

being

the real how

to

you, the

exterior. Rabaté says the letter

gives jouissance

libidinal

Showing

to

of the quest for love where seeking a repetition of Oneness is locatable within the sphere of the extimate object, on

which Lacan described in Seminar VII most

language brings the partial makes her language redolent of

logic (p. 28). The translation of knowledge into edge of the hole in knowledge (p. 5). mathematical topology functions to make a logical

set

or

ensemble of the Lacanian concepts of the knot, metaphor, structure, and the real, Miller says that with the addition of The Thing, Lacan brought the three—

dimensionality of space into play within language (Miller, “Topology,” p. 10). In the third period of his teaching Lacan used the Borromean unit—to depict the ordering of the real of the drives, the symbolic ?eld of language, and the imaginary sphere of images and identi?cations, showing the tri—dimensionality of the interlinkings of language and body at play in words. Passage from one dimension—real, symbolic, imaginary—to another marks the associative mean— ings of memory, then, as words (the symbolic) seek to represent the real of the

body (the imaginary)

at a

distance from the

object

referent is la chose

a—cause—of—desire whose

primordiale of the real. Miller de?ned the real in 1988 as what .,” p. 30). But, he does not language is not (“Languagez Much Ado mean that language does not create the real. Signi?ers are nulli?ed by referents which create a place of trauma, loss, discontent, a void that Lacan called the real (Miller, ibid., pp. 29—30).The littoral is marked by erasure, resembling a cloud of a thing (Rabaté, p. 35). In a typical knotting together of the three dimensions mentioned above, a subject’s thought and memory are constituted as the signifying chain(s) of a Borromean necklace. And they are knotted by a fourth order which derives from the Father’s Name signi?er, the order of the symptom which Lacan later writes as the sinthome, stressing the particularity of symptoms to each subject. Words and images function to ?ll in a central gap in the heart of the illusion one has of being a whole identity (Extimité, lesson of November 20, 1985, p. 25). Rather, the ?rst signi?er on which humans depend in relation to others is the “call” made to the other. And the (partial) drives circle around this structure, born of the illusion that there is a plenitude to be found at the site of an imaginary object. And language, ?ctional or not, is structurally materialized for difference in terms of distance from la chose—the sexual thing, the jouissance thing—which always harkens back to primordial memories surrounding the (in)existence of an essential feminine being. The mother, then, is at the center of the real precisely because the objects that represent her metonymically, are lost again and again in primary experiences of the drive, metonymy dwelling in the realm ofjouissance. primary





134

The

practice

The letter and In this context,

referring

to

of the letter and

topological

structure

metonymy literary

?ction

the libido which

which it, in turn, seeks fait a

to

is

most at

home

on

the

language paradoxically

of metonymy, cancels out and for

slope

compensate with all the devices

we

call creative. In

Marguerite Duras,” Lacan says for the ?rst time that the unconscious touches on the practice of the letter.13 Although Lacan only ever used literature as an instrument for clarifying the phenomena of analytic experience, Miller says in his Seminar of 1983—1984, Les réponses du réel, that he understands why literary discourses have taken up Lacan, whereas scienti?c ones have not.14 Not only does literature concern written language and interpretation, it bears more importantly, on the cause of psychoanalysis which might be described as the desire to end suffering by re?nd- ing a (supposedly) lost object.While the medium of such an endeavor is the lettre, the voice implies a feminine—harkening back to the primordial mother—a “beyond” in the language of the symbolic, says Miller, a “beyond” the “law” of the group. One could say that Freud’s early efforts to ?nd tracks (Bahnung) for neurons impacting on the brain ends in Lacan’s “La troisiéme” (1973), where he puts forth his notion of a primordial language that subtends language and calls it Ialangue, or maternal murmurings. Literary critics have always intuited that literary language contains a “sense” outside itself, a sensjoui. In 1975 Lacan added the category ofjouis-sens to his two other jouissances, calling it the jouis-sens of unconscious meaning produced in the overlap between the symbolic and imaginary dimensions at the point where a word or an image fail to function as a limit to anxiety. In such encounters, an impasse which presenti?es the real, appears as a “sense” outside meaning.15 Such moments, moreover, bring the temporal sense of lack into language, demonstrating that the real has remained unsymbolized precisely because it contains traumatic knowledge. Traumatic knowledge is not some mysterious primitive scene in Lacanian thought, however, but an interior knowledge that breaks up the imaginary consistencies to which a given subject clings in a willed méconnaissance. This notion of the real as retrievable in bits and pieces is characteristic of Lacan’s third period of teaching. But even in the 19505 Lacan had already stressed the creative function of the “word” over the phenomenological concern with being. Lacan argued that language digs out hollows within itself, thus allowing its own prior effects to return transformed by metaphor and metonymy and as a function of anticipation and retroaction, rather than as a Derridean overlapping interplay between sound and meaning. The lettre reveals that we do not “have” being, not even as some kind of“becoming” in the Heideggerean sense of a ?uid process of accumulated narcissism or Dasein. Miller will later say that we cannot be a body; rather, we have a body in bits and pieces. In the period when Lacan used Heidegger’s con— cepts of logos and alethe’ia and spoke of his intellectual debt to Heidegger as a work of“didactical borrowing,” he, nonetheless, situated his hontology—that is. we are creatures of shame, not of essential being—in a conjuncture between his

“I-Iommage

The

language

practice of the letter and topological

and its “function and ?eld.” Miller is

explaining

now

structure

135

in his current

Seminar that there is

no

particular

the

[but] reference

when you

moment

can

isolate Lacan’s

turning point

when it becomes patent that Lacan renounces the in order renounces ontology, including his own

moment

being, to privilege the register of the real .The passage from ontology to the ontic concerns the displacement of emphasis operated by Lacan from the register of being to that of existence.16 to



And the ontic

concerns

fading

and



evanescence as

Lacan says in Seminar XI.

Thus, in the 1950s Lacan had already begun to leave Heidegger behind. Rather, the Lacanian letter attaches the body to language via desire and the

objects

it motivates

one to

seek. But

the function of lack. Because the

more

subject

unconscious

knowledge

The

and identifications

is

implied

itself is



in this idea than

function of lack

simply

(¥)—i.e.

lacking to conscious thought—subjectivity is struc- tured in a ceaseless movement of fantasy, conscious and unconscious, whose goal is to attain some imaginary object a, ?nally to attain jouissance.

object

is

analysis uncovers—a paradox long familiar to authors—is that individuals seek objects that do not wish their good. Or, if they seek objects meant to spring them from their own sometimes desperate life scenarios, the ?nal hurdle to such change yields but one more set of barriers. In Duras’s The

paradox

Lacanian

Moderato Cantabile, the words that pass between Anne Desbaresdes and Chauvin seek to construct a love castle via the invocatory drive. The voice in its unique

nostalgia, unveils a link to jouissance that owes little to the sounds of words uttered.Through the hollows that Anne’s and Chauvin’s voices dig out in language, one can “hear” a love castle built by idealizing fantasy traits. But it can only ever be made of sand. And such dark literary realism says far more about how life actually functions—given Lacan’s equation of the repetitions beyond the pleasure principle with the negative jouissance of the death drive— than do all the would-be happy-endings dreamt up by the Grimm brothers. For the Ur—objects that cause desire can never correspond to the imaginary objects of fantasy (S O a) sought at the level of lure object. Insofar as the ego ideal ?rst constitutes itself out of these primary objects, it is important to note that this is done from a symbolic order constellation, as well as from imaginary identi?cations. Thus “happy endings” lie within the sphere of some felicitous combination of symbolic, imaginary and real traits, not within Anne’s and Chauvin’s fantasy “Let’s Pretend.”Yet, subjects respond to the Other as if some prefabricated paradigmatic Good—could respond to the concrete particularities out of which each unconscious is made. Text by text, literature celebrates the impasses in the Other (which does not really exist anyway except as the Other proximity

to

136

The

practice

of the letter and

sex), the failures arising

topological

structure

might describe literary language as that which best represents 3 “beyond” fantasy which covers the “grimace of the real” as it enters the symbolic and imaginary planes. In his “Hommage fait a Marguerite Duras” Lacan opened the door to a new theory of the relation between art and the artist as well as text and reader, by stating that the unconscious is not entirely repressed or hidden, but operates and functions in the text: “That the practice of the letter converges with the usage of the unconscious is the only thing to which I will attest in rendering homage to her” (p. 9). In the ?rst period of his teaching in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious” (1957), Lacan described the lettre as a place where being (l’étre) resides between the unconscious and language, calling the Iettre a localized signi?er that one can recognize as language converging with the unconscious. It is to be inserted somewhere between the written (l’écrit) and speech, he says: “It will be half—way between the two” (Ecrits, p. 412). By the time he rendered his homage to Duras “the practice of the letter” had converged with the unconscious. That is, Lacan implies here that the un— symbolized real ?nds a place within language. The unconscious is no longer free—?oating or unborn, as Lacan depicted it in Seminar XI, but has concrete ex-sistence.Although Lacan’s ?rst theory of the letter (“The Agency of the Letter”) is the one adapted by post—structuralists, his second theory, enunciated in praise of Duras, is commensurate with the ?nal phase of his teaching which valorizes his e?‘orts over decades to tie the real to language in a truth—functional out

and material way. At this same period Lacan

of it. One

of Psychoanalysis that the truth of the “creative function of the word” lies in its trying to unveil the thing that both causes desire and paradoxically traumatizes desire. Heidegger took the “thing”—la chose as that which adds the dimension ofspace to the knot, metaphor, structure, and the real—to be the void of nothingness encircled by the clay of a vase. Using this metaphor, Heidegger based his concept of reality on a positive material

or

argued

in The Ethics

“fact.”

opposite direction from Heidegger, to the point of linking the void space created by the loss of things to the “practice of the letter.”Void space is not nothingness, however, not vacuity as Barthes thought, but inscribes itself as the jouis-sens of a unary (identi?catory) trait derived from the earliest experiences of object loss which return as the a—ffects of nostalgia, mourning, anxiety, and so on. Language tries to re—present these identi?catory traits which come from each of the three dimensions.The hole in the symbolic creates a point of conjuncture between the word or image and the real that gives us a strange paradox. The word exists qua word precisely because there is no vase of being encircling or framing a void.There is, rather, a concrete place of inner emptiness in humans that they continually seek to ?ll. Lacan

went

in the

In The Ethics, Lacan the cut

suggested

that ?ction

resides in the

curve

of the real, in

of the void. And, the drives circle around the void, at the edges of the that ?rst constituted the void as a positivity, while language seeks to represent

place

The

practice

of the letter and

this savoir that Lacan called



belongs

the realm of

particularly

topological

structure

137

connaissance. To better understand how the real

literary language, one might contrast Lacan’s view of the function of language to Heidegger’s non—dialecticizable x which is supported by nothing except another process. Lacan remolded the concept of the process by which one uncovers fantasy as the subjective knowledge that gives objective consistency to the knowledge we call reality. most

to

The sinthome and the sexual non-rapport In his Seminar of Lacan had

not

1991—1992, Miller reread Lacan writing in 1957

formulated then: That

form of sexuality.17 When one

pay attention

must

we

to

language

to

also introduces the real in the

say the real is introduced in the form of

Lacan’s

saying

say what

sexuality,

in Seminar XX that the sinthome is

writing of the sexual non—rapport (p. 35). Moreover, the function of the father—the dialectical effect of a third that disrupts the infant— mother dyad—introduces a subjective topology into the subject’s unconscious.” a

knot which is



But, in 1957 Lacan of

structure

was

language

concerned with structure—the unconscious has the

and the “letter” includes the

make

meaning dialectical;

of the

symbolic.Yet,

two

slopes

of the

signi?er

and metonymy—not with the content of the unconscious. One could say, Miller continues, that Lacan placed the real outside at that date, even to the point of foreclosing it to

required

to

the bene?t

symbolic

fails—as ?ction

i.e.

the real

metaphor

returns

anyway at the

point

where the

and life reveal.

In Duras’s Moderato Cantabile, the love affair built up between Anne and Chauvin reveals the yearning for a “beyond” the prison walls of each one’s

“grimace of the real" in this piece of ?ction does not lie so much in the stories told.They are commonplace. She’s wealthy and lonely and unhappy. He’s a worker who aspires to a more glamorous life, a more glamorous love. Duras’s genius is to have captured, in a minimalist fashion, the sorrow of yearning and to express it in the invocatory drive. Insofar as this Lacanian drive is absolute, non-dialectical, Duras shows the point at which the jouis-sens of meaning is a ciphering of the unconscious that seeks to ascertain what death weight the voice carries of the real (Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death, p. 190). And although the real denotes a foreclosure of a certain dimension of the reality of unconscious truth, this dimension emerges anyway as the effect Lacan called the “practice of the letter.” When the unconscious speaks at the juncture where jouissance bends itself to the signi?er, we might refer to that as the practice of the “letter” in literary art. In 1992 Miller names the cause that gives rise to the moments of joining between jouissance and the signi?er that Lacan called the “letter”: “Sexuality it is articulated.”19 speaks and jouissance bends itself to the signi?er and Miller’s formulation allows us to put forth a new axiom for literary studies, one

symbolic.

But the

sexuality in the broader contours that subsume language; organized by the oral, anal, scopic, and invocatory (partial) drives.

that views

i.e.

as

138

The

practice

of the letter and

topological

structure

Miller’s thesis supports Lacan’s reconceptualization of sublimation away from the Freudian con?ation of sublimation with repression. Artists and writers try make the

1987.They try to pierce appearance to the “essence”—in the medieval realist sense—of objects and language. Or, in Lacanian terms, they seek to embrace the cause of jouissance itself, but come up against the paradox that jouissance cannot speak itself. Meanwhile the truth of the real speaks loudly behind the images and words it to

object



appear, Miller said in New York

City

in

shadows. But how does

one

grasp the

logic

of such



statement? In his Seminar

on

“Les

(De la nature des semblants, May 25, 1992), Miller main- tains that Lacan ?rst explained the real in trying to conceptualize truth.While the early Lacan taught that the real cannot be heeded except in a point of ?ction, this point of?xion is precisely what the later Lacan called a semblant (a semblance) which can never be destroyed. This indestructible truth—the object a as a piece of condensed jouissance, an irreducible kernel of non-sense meaning—marks the consistency of the truth of the neurotic. That is, neurotics do not lie as well as their less suffering fellow—creatures who live comfortably enough in the social masquerade that covers the non—rapport of the sexual difference.While I would not argue, by extending this proposition, that literary artists are perforce neurotic, psychotic, or perverse, I would suggest that those more normatively adapted to the social masquerade are entertained by art, rather than producers of art.

noms-du-pére

et

le semblant”

Fiction in the But how does

curve

one

of the real

ascertain unconscious truth in



literary

text? If ?ction

resides

object a that would offer an answer to what Lacan’s axiom means.And even though the trajectory between the drive for satisfaction and the object-cause—of—desire can be far apart, the characteristic of the object a is to always be there, veiled, hidden, wearing different linguistic guises. Lacanian analyst Anny Cordié says that this object lies behind Freud’s in the

curve

of the real, it is the

logic

contention that the unconscious does

language,

the

object



escapes the

of the

not

know contradiction. As the inverse of

principle

of contradiction, for it

cannot

be

negativized.20 which circles around the

object a resides between the lines of a ?ctional weave. This idea gives us the possibility of an entirely new perspective on the power of metonymy within language. It is generally said that metaphor holds sway over metonymy. Metonymical jouissance (or libido) would only serve as a limit or a soupcon of something real beyond language. But Miller points to this:The something outside is, nonetheless, inside language. Put another way, metaphor can only work by substitution because it is supported by a metonymic corporal real that hooks language indissolubly to the body and the drives, a corporal real that sexualizes language around the oral, anal, scopic, and That is, the

jouissance

invocatory drives. One is trans?nite

number.

never

apart from the frame that frames

one,

like Cantor’s

The

The letter and the

practice

of the letter and

topological

139

structure

body

subject is condemned,” Lacan said, “but to his body, which in many ways resists actualizing the division of the subject” (L’angoisse).21 So ordinary language moves carefully lest it stir up the jouissance of sexuality, death, or anxiety. We ?nd most radically, Lacan argues, that there is no meta—language, only concrete language trying to negotiate desire and avoid “It is

the

not to

traumata

In his

his consciousness that the

constituted in the wake of the sexual divide.

“Hommage

fait a

Marguerite Duras,

du ravissement de Lol V

Stein,’



always preceded other thinkers in ascertaining how the human is constituted. Duras does not depend on the force of an argument, the pathos of a story, the beauty of imagery, or the skill of a rhetorical device to advance her narrative, but shapes words carefully, sparingly, around the force of one (partial) drive. Duras’s All Day Long in the Apple Trees is organized around the Lacanian nothing (rien), one of the Ur—objects- cause—of desire he named in “Subversion of the Subject” as the breast, the feces, the voice, the gaze, the (imaginary) phallus, the phoneme, the urinary ?ow, Lacan

af?rms,

and the

as

did Freud before him, that the artist has

nothing.22

Duras’s Moderate Cantabile Having suggested earlier that Moderato Cantabile is organized around the voice, the

invocatory drive, around the “call” made

considers the ?rst

signi?er—the

infant’s call made

to

to

the other which Lacan

the Other—I would add

piano

the title, “Moderately Singing,” implies the voice, rather than the lesson at issue. Against the meaningless, colorless backdrop of an anony-

mous

café, Anne’s and Chauvin’s desolate voices take

that

even

whose its

impact

more

is

metonymic, on obvious signi?cations.

the

slope

of the

sense

on



vacuous

oflanguage

sonority

that transcends

The letter and the voice In his Seminar of 1962—1963, L’angoisse, Lacan described the voice

coming

from Elsewhere,

to

something

not

sonority

commensurable with

language: Linking the

assimilate itself, but incorporates itself,” he says. the signi?er, incorporation will always include a piece of the real,

“A voice does drives

as

as a

not



truth

concerning a fragment ofjouissance knowledge that has not been symbolized by language.And “that gives the voice a function that models our own emptiness,” Lacan says (L’angoisse, p. 318). In other words, the voice is connected to the hole at the center of knowledge in a way the other drives are not. Not the least of the functions of the voice is to calm anxiety, and, indeed, the way in which one is spoken to or of can confer momentary joy or devastation, unwittingly revealing that “being” is a complex illusion, not an essence, or an innate system.

140

The

of the letter and

practice

topological

structure

At the level of the narrative line of Moderato Cantabile

(1958), upper—class Import Export and

Desbaresdes, married for 10 years to the director of Seaboard Iron Foundries, meets by accident a laborer named Chauvin.Their ?rst

Anne

meeting, Retiring someone son

to



the

the stage for their involvement. to a nearby café, they ponder the question of how a person could kill they love. Soon they meet every week during the time Anne brings her

at

scene

lesson. As

piano

between the lines, life

a new

out

of a crime of passion,

at

the

sets

they speak haltingly

point where the

two

of love,

can

we

hear

jouissance

disembodied voices seek

to create

of their dead desires.

We learn that Anne has

glamour. She is the aspirations to being

voice in her

no

hostess who drinks

elevated

by



private

too

world of wealth and social

much. He is

beautiful, wealthy



woman

poor worker with

such

as

Anne. One

hope coupled with disappoint— ment, resonating with the pain of being. As they invent a space of love beyond isolation, hope grows. But the novel ends with the impossibility of their escaping hears

hollowness within their words made of



their old lives. He

wants

from her what she

wants to

shed.

At the level where the voice represents Anne and Chauvin as objects of jouissance, rather than subjects with stories to tell, speech takes on the extimate

ofbeing both external and internal, of unveiling an outside on the inside of language and an inside piercing a hole into the surface outside. Miller calls this the point of extimacy of this Other ofjouissance in relation to which the Other is Other. Put another way, after Lacan dropped the idea of the Father’s Name as being Other, stressing instead the ?ctional function of the father, he never succeeded in explaining why there is no Other of the Other, no meta— language. Miller argues that Lacan could not explain the alterity within the Other because he never understood that it is the repetition of a primary jouissance that function

individuals seek in the Other. The empty inner space that each character’s voice evokes in Moderato Cantabile bears on la chose each one seeks in the other, the sexual attraction serving as the

love quest. But Anne’s questions to Chauvin play on a different than his questions to her. She is trying to understand how love between

cover over a

register a man

and

occurs,

woman

serve

as

dies.The lovers in the ?rst

the basis

on

scene

where the crime of passion

which Anne and Chauvin will talk about love

description of how a man quits loving a woman. “I’d like you to tell me now how they came not to speak to each other anymore,” she says. Chauvin knows this waltz by heart, answering: “I don’t know. Perhaps through the long silences that grew up between them at night, then at other times, silences they found more and more difficult to overcome” (p. 86). Anne’s response is telling. She hunches her shoulders dejectedly, knowing, probably unconsciously, that if he knows this, she would go through it again with him. “One night they pace back and forth in their rooms, like caged animals,” she says, not knowing what’s happening to them. They begin to suspect what it is, and are afraid. “Nothing can satisfy them any longer. They’re overwhelmed by

right

up

to

the crescendo of his

The

what is

room

can’t talk about it yet. Perhaps it will take months. know” (p. 86).Tired of describing how love dies, Chauvin’s

to

immediately

the interior ofAnne’s house.What is it like? Whose

turns to

lies behind the window

again, Anne begs Chauvin crime of passion had not a

141

structure

happening, they

Months for them interest

practice of the letter and topological

?at, expressionless

“They

an

they

evolve, that after wasn’t

long



there

few

before he

without

woman

wanted her lover

went

they

not

in the ?rst

moment

kill her. “Chauvin

meet

of the

went on,

in

heard from him before.”

says,“I

think it

didn’t realize how

forced

they

keep having

by the sea. It was quickly things would was

to

throw her

out.

It

drive her away, away from him, from again.”Anne Desbaresdes stared at that unknown

was

over

to

he would

days

A little later when

?oor?

tell her if the

isolated house,” he

the house. Over and man

the ?rst

voice that she had

lived in

hot. Before

to

on

recognizing him,

to

like



trapped

animal.

(p. 103) If literary

izes

art can

be illuminated

by

the Lacanian idea that jouissance material-

functioning of the practice of the letter than Marguerite Duras. And if, as I have already proposed, the particular poignancy of Duras’s art comes from her telling stories around the principal objects that cause desire, the ones Lacan called a real Ur—lining of the subject, she gives literary meaning to Lacan’s statement in Encore that speaking is always a jouissance and that thought is jouissance (p. 70). Duras’s novel might be said to demonstrate Lacan’s axiom: “There is no

language,

no

writer has done

more

to

depict

such



rapport of sexual Oneness.” Between each person and his or her partner lies the absent Other that Lacan calls the place of the unconscious.That Anne wants an ideal love from Chauvin and that he

prestige from her is just one more formula for the myriad versions of the sexual non—rapport. The exquisite conversation between them resonates with the truth of the non—rapport. Intimacy kills the romance in love because each wants something different than his or her wants

social

object—the more in her than her—in the partner, hoping to ful?ll one’s deepest loneliness via another.Yet the object of ful?llment is not to be had in a relationship, for it is, and has, since infancy, been radically lost. And all the accommodations couples make to this truth cannot completely veil the real of it. partner

wants.

Literature

One seeks the extimate

as

the material of

jouissance

product, it is not because the practice of the letter links the body to language via phonemes but because jouissance coalesces around the object a in language. On the one hand, any literary text is always on the side of the question, then, its unanswered raison d’é‘tre constituting the ?eld of the literary as itself an enigma. Duras ends her story on a note of despair, at the point where language cannot symbolize or say the beyond in itself. If

we

think of

literary

art as a

material

142

The

practice

of the letter and

Anne tells Chauvin she

“It is

’9

impossible. begins with

story murder of



topological

cannot run

away with him. “I’m frightened,” she says. dead,” he replies. “It is done,” she says.The

I wish you were the actual murder of

¢‘

love. The café

structure

two

owner turns

lovers and ends with

the radio up,

too



loud for



“psychic’ people to

overhear their talk.The

hope of a new love dies for each of them. The voice actually falls out of language in this story. A piece of the real is dropped. Lacan taught that when the object a falls out of language, it marks some jouissance effect. But, the fall of an object, in Lacan’s teaching, is not on the same level as the ?at surface of textual narrative. In the “Hommage fait a Marguerite Duras,” he says (p. 10): [the fact]

that the

center

divides itself between the

is

not

alike

on

all surfaces, teaches that vision

and the gaze, that the ?rst model of the derives the radar that offers the cut or cup

image

gaze is the spot from which of the eye to the horizon.

one

In other words, vision is divided between the

imaginary image

and the real

of the gaze, which lies outside the

imaginary ?eld of vision. The gaze looks at you, Lacan says, as a function ofjudgment or idealization. And the voice speaks to you from some point beyond its manifest words, decentering you from the apparent stability of being grounded by words. In April of 1987 jacques-Alain Miller laid the groundwork for a new orientation in theories of the aesthetic:

Art does

not

but rather

provide pleasure,

of unconscious drives. Art is

jouissance,



satisfaction

product of the unconscious (pace Surrealism), but rather that of the most civilizing urge—sublimation— which is popularly confused with repression. For this reason, art can be said to “respond” to the unconscious. The given art object, which can be equated to the objet petit a, lies outside the signifying chain. The precise distinction between art and literature is that literature consists of the effects of such signi?cation while the material speci?city of the art object resists these effects. (Reported in Artscribe, Nov. /Dec. 1987, p. 41) not



life, the subject is framed by a frame which he or she cannot see or hear because denial, repression, and semblance cover over castration, loss, and symbolic holes. Art, on the other hand, takes risks with language that daily conversation In

In the sublimation of art, the

impossible

of

impasses peeks through language, straining words and images at threadbare seams. And in its capacity to elicit a?'ective response from others, art, be it visual or literary, attests to the existence of the real in a work and in its respondents at the level where the real ex-sists as a writing of the body whose jouissance effects cluster around the (partial) drives whose cause is desire. cannot.

The

practice of the letter and topological

structure

143

Notes 1



3 4



6 7

Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book VII (1959—1960): The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller, trans. by Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 12. jacques Lacan, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, Le séminaire, livre XVIII (1971), text established by jacques—Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2006); cf. Santana Biswas, The Literary lawn: From Literature to Lituraterre and Beyond (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012), p. 186. Jacques Lacan, “L’Hommage fait 2‘1 Marguerite Duras, du ravissement de L01 V Stein” (1965), Omicar?, no. 34 (July—Sept., 1985): 7—13. Cited by Jean-Michel Rabaté in jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 125. Santanu Biswas, “A Literary Introduction to ‘Lituraterre’,” The Literary Lawn: From Literature to Lituraterre and Beyond, ed. by Santanu Biswas (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012), p. 173. jacques Lacan, “Lituraterre,” Autres écrits, ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller, trans. by Jack W Stone (Paris: Seuil, 2001); cf. Biswas, p.174 in The Literary lawn. Marguerite Duras, Four Novels: Moderato Cantabile (1958) (NewYork: Grove Weidenfeld, 1965)





10

11

12

13 14

15 16 17

jacques—Alain Miller, “La Topologia en la Ensena?za de Lacan,” et al Matemas, tome I (Buenos Aires: Mantial, 1987), pp. 79—104; “MathemeszTopology in the Teaching of Lacan,” trans. by Mahlon Stoutz, Critical Essays on jacques Lacan, ed. by Ellie Ragland (New York: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 28—48. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, jacques Lawn and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 209. Jacques—Alain Miller, Extimité (1985-1986), Seminar given in the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII, Saint—Denis, unedited Seminar; the translation used here is by Cormac Gallagher; published in Spanish. For an in-depth discussion of the many meanings ofjouissance in Lacan’s teaching, see the introduction,“Traduttore emendatorzThe role of translation and interpretation in exegetical renewal,” in Ellie Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death (New York: Ikoudedge,1995) Jacques-Alain Miller, “Language: Much Ado About What?” (May 1988), ed. by Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher, Lawn and the Subject qf language (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 34; Routledge Library Edition, London, 2014. Jacques Lacan, “Hommagefait d Marguerite Duras, du ravissement de [.01 V. Stein,” Autres écrits, ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p. 193. Jacques—Alain Miller, Les réponses du réel (1983—1984), Seminar given in the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of ParisVIII, Saint—Denis, March 21, 1984, unedited Seminar. Jacques Lacan, “IA troisiéme,” e’colefreudienne de Paris, no. 16 (1975): 178—203. Sophie Marret—Maleval, “Lacan’s Henology: From Ontology to the Ontic,” Hurly- Burly: The International Lacam'an journal of Psychoanalysis, 9, May, 2013. Jacques—Alain Miller, De la nature des semblants (1991—1992), Seminar given in the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII, Saint—Denis, May 25, 1992, unedited Seminar.

18

Jean—Paul Gilson, La 7bpologie de

Lacan: Une articulation de la cure psychanalytique (Montréal: Les editions Balzac, 1994), p. 68; cf. Freud in “a child is being beaten” in Névrose, psychose et perversion (Paris: PUF, 1973), pp. 219—243.

Jacques-Alain Miller, De la nature des semblants (1991—1992), Seminar given in the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII, unedited text. John Miller, Artscribe (London and New York), November/December 1987, p. 41. 20 Army Cordié, Les cancres n’existent pas (Paris: Seuil, 1993), p. 205. 21 Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre X (1962—1963): L’angoisse, text established by Jacques- Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2004). 22 Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (1960), Em'ts, trans. by Bruce Fink (NewYork: Norton, 2006), 19

pp. 692—693.

7 KANT’S RELIGION WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE, READ IN RELATION TO LACAN’S SEMINAR VII: THE ETHICS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

Kant’s Insofar

Religion

Within the Limits of Reason Alone

the drive among its structuring principles, to focus on the radical evil components in an ethics made up of good and evil—indeed, Kant’s proposal in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone consciousness does

as

(1793)—requires to

that

one

on

the moral

desire

bring together

the law with the idea of

limits

not count



principle

theory that between love and of ignorance has the structure

void of a

at

the

“good

or

Kant’s idea of an evacuation of control center

of

society (0)

of the all.”I One

can

and

add

being (3)

to

this Lacan’s

hate—two versions of good and evil—the of the truth of the

master

as

passion

discourse.This discourse,

good—be it in theology, philosophy, political action, or any other domain of morality—is inherently evil because it excludes any recognition of (or action upon) the truths uncovered by psychoanalysis: Fantasy, desire,jouissance, the drives, sense, lalangue, all unconscious bases from which conscious meaning and action emanate.The force behind the refusal to acknowledge these underpinnings is what Lacan (following Buddhist thought) calls the three passions: love, hate, and ignorance.2 Ignorance is an equivalent, I shall argue, of Lacan’s master discourse which one might call a local universal concept of “reality,” equated with conscious thought or an Other who seems to exist in a given place for a given time. It is a passion of certainty and rectitude that enables one to maim or kill others with all humanitarian conviction and moral purpose, making mankind, not only capable of radical evil, but bent on such.And something of this permits Lacan to engage with Kant, for Kant does not go beyond believing that when forced even

to

when it purports

to

the greatest

choose between self—love and moral law,

man

chooses self—love. This is,

Grigg tells us, there is no “self” or whole subject one could call an “I.”3 Lacan’s subject is, rather, anchored in the unconscious. In conscious language, the subject is a of course,

already



problem

in Lacanian terms in

which,

as

Russell

145

Kant, read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII

holding place between two signi?ers, basically an empty posture. Still, at the end of his magni?cent essay, Kant dispenses with “natural” sexual inclinations as of evil, arguing, instead, that it is a matter of fellow—man next to fellow—man wanting to kill the other; not love him. “Radical evil” ensues from the

source

“the

of

pursuit

Zupanéié

egoistic gain” (Religion





.,

p.

xii).

Kant, Lacan, and ethics

on

book, Ethics of the Real, Alenka Zupanéié

In her excellent

writes

chapter



“Fantasy within the limits of reason alone.”4 Referring to the fact that Kant’s contemporaries, as well as subsequent scholars, have been mysti?ed by his book on the limits of reason, she argues that it is “a fantasy of pure practical reason” (p. 80). Coupling Kant with Sade, Zupanéié argues that Kant should have been concerned with the Sadian body, not the sublime body or the soul. De Sade was concerned with libidinal pleasure and the suffering body, as was Lacan. Although Kant would be closer to Lacan if he were to focus on the body, I would suggest, rather, that Kant nearing his later years experienced a despair of the real, in which time he gave up on his categorical imperative that the good of one could be the good of all and opted for an ethics of man’s “radical evil.” It is important, in my view, to examine Zupanéic': here because the approach I am taking on Kant’s essay takes it at face value as to his conclusions about the supremacy of human egotism. And I shall be giving Kant’s theory a different Lacanian interpretation than does ZupanEiE. It’s not that Kant would not have been more Lacanian in being more Sadian, but that does not mean that Kant did not hook himself up to one of Lacan’s topological dimensions in an essay atypical of his usual moral optimism. ZupanEiE is focusing on how Lacan is closer to Sade entitled

on

desire,

not

in

matters

that

concern

some

idea of how the “self”

or

ego is

structured, but in understanding the key roles that the body and the fantasy play in

reality—making.5

Lacan’s ethics This leads

us

to



comment

the ego ideal wishes

steal the other’s as

the semblable

in the infantile

desire

as

the

to

Lacan makes in Seminar VII when he says that

eradicate the other, in favor of oneself, function of

taking

to

kill and

the other

(the Nebenmensche) you should (have been), which could be based on an image ?xed period (cf. ch. XVII in S. VII).Yet, Lacan is not so ready to drop

good.This

cause

is



behind the wish of

one to

eradicate the other:

having made the statements that you would be wrong to consider optimistic about the goodness of man, he explains very well that what we are most ignorant about are the laws that .The laws His proof is absolutely rigorous come to us from heaven I

spoke

about Mencius earlier. After

..

of heaven in

question

are



..

the laws of desire.

(S. VII,

p.

325)

Kant, read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII

146

We will

remember, of course, that desire in Lacan is both sexualized (body/?esh)

and the

seat

of intention

(the mental and desire). Lacan argued that the passion of ignorance can be pinpointed at a precise loca— tion within one of his formal graphs; i.e., it has a topological site between the Lacanian dimensions of the real and the imaginary in his base unit of meaning: the Borromean knot. From within even

its

present

structure





demonstration of this thesis:

is that of the death

topological perspective, one Evil has a structure and a logic.

Lacanian

drive, narcissism, the sinthome,

can

But

the theoretical

not

Zupanéié proposes that Kant advanced as to the possible consequences of freedom (p. 87). Any act concerning the Other, including the ultimate act of suicide, says Grigg, is a message sent to the Other, regarding guilt, and so on (p. 122).6 There is no freedom in Lacan, thought being governed by myriad struc— construct

that curtail any notion of freedom

tures

or

free will. Moreover, in “Limits ...,”

Zupanéié says Kant ?nds “will” corrupt at its root. She says that Kant argues as if from a religious paradigm wherein there is no free will, only original sin (p. 88). Yet, I would say that Zupanéié confuses freedom and free will. Grigg says that any idea of total or absolute freedom postulates a monolithic Other who does not exist and, indeed, subversive acts undermine any notion of it (p. 120). In this way of thinking,Antigone’s suicide would not be an act that cancels the law, as Ziiek and Zupanéié argue, but simply a horrendous act of giving in to Creon, bowing down to the law even though she takes her own life (Grigg, p. 125). Unsatis?ed with Kant’s idea that “will” is corrupt at its root, Zupanéié cites: the frailty of human nature—there being none such—i.e. human nature—in Lacan, I would maintain; the

she claims that

none

of these

impurity answer

of the human will; and wickedness.Yet,

the

question

as to

why

man

would be radi—

cally evil (p. 88).While theology argues that one can choose sin or religious redemption, Lacan can lend one the tools with which to argue this thesis struc- turally, in a non—religious manner, while giving an answer to Immanuel Kant’s sorrow

as to

what he calls the “radical evil” of

man.

Insofar

as

the late Kant

developed his proposition in “Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone” (1793), one might well deduce that he is closer to Voltaire’s Candide devoid of Pangloss. If one uses Lacan’s “?nd” of a third logical category, beyond the stric- tures of symbolic logic and the reductions of binarisms—where contradiction is truth functional—one can situate ethics in the intersection between good and evil. Lacan ?rst developed these intersecting Euler circles as a paradigm, taken from mathematical set theory, wherein two circles are intertwined—a triadic structure—@ in an overlapping way that creates a space between the two which shares properties from both circles, while elaborating a logic from its shared

The

properties taken from the

logic

Lacan

of alienation and

developed

alienation and

two

other

separation

this model in Seminar XI

separation.7

categories.

While Lacan

to

elaborate his

was

concerned

theory to

of

show





logic of concrete

147

Kant, read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII

thinking and being (between mind and body, or between language and the biological organism), even if the logic seems non-sensical, I would like to use this same paradigm to argue that in the middle space between two interlinked circles, each of which would be named good and evil, one can place Lacan’s ethics of desire—wherein the only guilt is to give up on it— and argue that it has both a structure and a logic.While Kant places radical evil under human will, Lacan places the death drive under human intentionality. And the death drive creates symptoms which try to cure themselves by trumping connection between

everyone else’s narcissism with one’s

own

desire and

jouissance.

Lacan

gives

us

precise de?nition of“ethics,” something closer to a universalizable axiom than we would have if we simply de?ned ethics as the particularity of each person’s unconscious desire, as suggested in SeminarVII.8 The place of desire, as a response to whatever lacks-in—being, actually, gives the formula of fantasy: 3 O a.9 As we said above, the subject for Lacan is the subject of unconscious desire which is re-presented by language. In this sense desire is ascertainable in language as one category of the real. Kant’s atypical essay need not be afantasy as Zupancic argues, but, rather, a piece of Kant’s own real, a sinthome. Moreover, she maintains that there is no divided subject in the late Kant (p. 81). But, prior to “Limits .,” Kant cannot have been divided between conscious and unconscious thought, and suddenly not be divided. In Lacan’s teaching, the structure of non—division applies only to psychosis and one cannot become psychotic in later life if one were not previously psychotic. Rather, an even more



the divide between the sublime soul and the narcissistic basis of

place

I would



human “nature.” Or, radical evil could stand above human desire and jouissance. This is the direction Kant took and it is



very Lacanian

reading

of mankind

which

requires the ethics of a psychoanalysis wherein one works with the radical particularity of each subject’s sinthome in its relation to desire and jouissance. On the other hand, Kant’s essay suggests that if narcissism

revolution of the soul would be

Limits





.”

as

saying

or

lust win,



radical

required. Zupancic quotes Kant from “The

that

this merely legally, but morally, a good man cannot be brought about through gradual "formation so long as the basis of the maxims remains impure, but must be effected through a revolution He can become a new man only by a kind of in the man’s disposition if

a man

is

to

become

not



rebirth,

as

it

were a new





creation.

(Kant cited by Zupanfi'c’,

p.

83)

But, she says that in the context of Kant’s ethics it makes no sense to speak of opposition to the moral law (p. 91).There is not even any distinction between good and evil here, she says (p. 92). But there is moral duty versus radical evil. Indeed, here Zupancic is leaving out Lacan’s real, the unconscious, lalangue, jouissance, the sinthome, not to mention the narcissistic ego, the master discourse, and

so on.

148

Kant, read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII

seeming impasse, Zupanéic': goes from this quote to Ziiek’s work on the act, as well as to Lacan’s saying that the “act” eclipses the subject. Lacan argues that passage to the act is an imaginary movement that is caused by some realization from the real, not a transgression of the community to which one belongs, as Ziiek claims.10 Grigg says that an “act” for Lacan is a passage through a symbolic death (p. 125).While Ziiek sees Antigone’s act as one of absolute freedom, Grigg says she is acting upon her conscious desire (pp. 127—128). Ragland claims that Antigone’s act is an identi?cation with the fate of the family, of the mother’s desire that the family stay united despite fate.‘l Zupanéié calls Kant’s idea of a rebirth an “act” which seeks to preserve the consistency of the soul in the Other (p. 83). In “Absolute Freedom and Radical Change: On Ziiek,” Grigg says Antigone’s lamentation is her acceptance of her fate, of the law (pp. 128-129). Rather, Kant calls it a revolution in one’s moral being which, for Lacan, would be Até (S.VII, p. 300). I propose that such a revolution can only be identi?catory and not necessarily an act at all. For example,Antigone does not disrupt the laws of Creon’s city, but opts for identi?cation with her dead brother. Before considering why this would run counter to Lacan, one should take a moment to consider Ziiek’s theory of the “act” and of action, read in light of Zupanéié’s acceptance of Ziiek’s view, and Grigg’s critique of Ziiek’s theory. Ziiek says the act is not action, but a transformation (Zupanéié, p. 83). Zupanéié, following Ziiek, says an act is a crime, a transgression of the Other’s limits. Grigg points out that this notion of radical transformation of the subject is vague as to its political or practical consequences. In religious rebirth experiences, for example, one can feel completely new, yet change nothing (p. 122). One can At



foresee the consequences of an act, its effects, the way it will transform the existing symbolic space (p. 123). Zupanéié claims that in the end we kill ourselves never

in the Other

through

choose

versus

duty

sacri?ce

or even

suicide

law in the end because

the Other is inconsistent

(p. 84).

our

souls

I would say that are

of

we

do

not

necessity impure and

earlier, Grigg stresses Ziiek’s claim that Antigone’s “act” is outside the law, pointing out, rather, that she gives in to Creon’s law (pp. 126—127). Grigg says there is no suspension or

even

non-existent. As I have said

Zupanéié claims (p. 125).While Ziiek maintains that a pure act says “no” to the Other (Zupanéié, p. 44), Grigg says the only pure desire Lacan will accept is the one for death (8. X1, p. 275). In this sense, one might say that Antigone’s act is pure insofar as she chooses death. But she does not choose to transgress Creon’s law. She quits burying her brother and goes to her tomb. While Ziiek argues that an act must break with a social code, Grigg argues that of ethics for

an act a

prior

Antigone

as

transforms its agent, stance

What

causing

an

aphanisis

of the

subject

that

represented

(p.122).

?nally concerns Zupanéié is that Kant’s, according to her,“bad in?nity” makes people think he gave up on the categorical imperative. She claims that this should not in?uence one’s thought about good acts (p. 94).“The ethical ideology struggles against ‘evil’ because this ideology is hostile to the ‘good, to the logic of the act as such’” (p. 95). In excluding the highest good and the highest evil,

Kant, read in relation to Lacan's Seminar VII the

demonic, Kant leaves

us

with “the holiness of the will”

(pp. 189, 102).

149

She

has made his critical

imperative equal to the pure ethical which demands an act outside the law, as Ziiek argues. And the act is always negative because it is a transgression of the good (Ziiek, Enjoy p. 44). Zupancic ends up in the bind where she says the good and the evil cancel each other out in Kant’s ethics which are, after all, for her, only a fantasy. We need to return to Lacan to understand that the signifying chain and jouissance determine ethics. Lacan argues that one signi?er (SI)—the ?rst one, the master signi?er, the unary trait of identi?cation that Freud called the Einzeger Ziigen— refers itself to another signi?er (an accumulation of ¥15 that add up to one’s knowledge at any given moment. Lacan designated this second signi?er by 82). But between these two signi?ers, there is a gap. Something is lacking: The “thing” lacking—the sense of one’s desire as real—can only be approached indirectly. Thus, it can only be represented by the signi?ers that cover over the unconscious gap between one’s narcissistic/ideological identifications with certain images and sinthomes that knot together imaginary identi?cations (the imaginary); to the names one gives them (the symbolic); and “thing” sought at the level of re-petition as one’s Good or one’s agalma (the object-cause-of—desire). In the gap one finds the effects of lalangue working upon lalangue to produce a kind of real meaning outside ordinary sense or meaning. This new meaning will represent a level ofjouissance where the dialectic takes place between the phallus and desire. In Seminar VII Lacan distinguishes the verb to “represent” from “representation,” pointing out that the Wrstellungsreprsentanz “is a matter of that which represents something in unconscious representation, in the form of a sign, as a function of apprehending—of the way in which every representation is represented insofar as it evokes the good that das Ding brings with it.” Lacan goes on to qualify his argument as Kantian. By “Good,” he means the Wohl of Kant’s The Critique qf Practical Reason,12 which is at the level of the pleasure principle or das Cut des Objekts (S. VII, pp. 71—73). Lacan links Kantian and Freudian terms insofar as the Kantian VVohl imposes the law in which a resolution of a tension will be linked to what Freud might call “successful lures” (S. VII, p. 72). Kant’s “Good,” then, concerns a good object which gives the subject a guarantee that there is no gap; a certain security (Sicherung).This, of course, is the security similar to a kind of “ideological” certainty which is quite another object than the “bad object” of Melanie Klein’s theory (S. VII, p. 73), or the “bad in?nity” of Zupancic. No subject will willingly approach a bad object, Lacan argues. Kant advances the same proposition in his insistence that his concern with mankind’s evil has not .

to

do, as it has with

so

many



.,

moralists, with sexual, sensual, or“natural” inclinations.

ampli?es this point by stressing that most subjects keep their distance, even from good objects.Why, then, would they willingly approach bad objects? (8. VII, p. 73). Kant is convinced that man is radically evil—and not because of sexual sin, nor because man has the capacity for being a satanic being insofar as a malignant reason and an evil will are incompatible. Rather, the basis of man’s radical evil depends upon which of the two incentives—moral law or Lacan

Kant, read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII

150

self—love—he makes the condition of the other. is

man

he

evil, but only in that he

adopts

reverses

them into his maxim. He

the law of self—love; yet when he remain as

par with each

on a

or

the best

even

the moral order of the incentives when

adopts, indeed, she becomes

other, but that

condition, he

its supreme

or

“Consequently,

one must

the moral law

along

that these

aware

be subordinated

with

two cannot to

the other

she makes the incentive of self-love, and its

inclinations, the condition of obedience

the moral law; whereas,

to

on

the

contrary, the moral law, as the supreme condition of the satisfaction of self—love, ought to have been adopted into the universal maxim of the will as the sole incentive.Yet,

with this reversal of the ethical order of the incentives in

even

and

through his maxim, Kant does (“Religion .,” pp. 422—424). .

Das

Ding

In Lacan’s

the Freudian das

teaching,

about the

of man

good





where



regulate

Ding

is

already

constructed “at the

mastery over the system of directions his behavior in depth” (S.VII, p. 72). In other words,

[one]

has

no

.” essay could have come from primordial signifying chains from childhood rather than from any mature thinking about “reason.” Man’s

Kant’s “Limits

radical

optimistic

and the lie

and investments that

religious

remain



unconscious level



not





evil, then, would be sin. Of

Lacan says that rather than

course, Kant

willfully producing

aptly

dubbed it self-interest.

encounters

with bad

objects, man

produces symptoms which are at the origin of the “symptoms of defense” (S. VII, p. 73). Lacan’s turn here is surprising.Yet, I believe it approaches the complexity of the problem Kant tries to solve in “Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.” How should we

we

defend ourselves

subordinate itself

understand “defense,” Lacan asks. And he

by hurting

answers

ourselves—not because “self—love”

that

cannot

signifying structurali— zation of the human unconscious, the ego is programmed to defend itself by hurting itself; to re—cognize itself by identifying with its own (unconscious) repetitions, its symptoms. But the defense or the mutilation that is proper to man does not occur only at the level of substitution, that is, metaphor—everything that structures its gravitation with relation to the good object. Human defense takes place by means of something that has a name, and which is, to be precise, lying about evil. At the level of the unconscious, the subject lies: And this

to

lying

the moral law, but because in the

is his

or

her way of telling the truth of the

what] Freud indicates clearly in expressed as “the proton pseudos,”

the

Entwugf

[It is hysteria—

matter

in relation

to







the ?rst lie.

(S. VII,

p.

73)

symptom attached to early, buried memories. They disappear, but the lie of the symptom remains—the symptom of egotism or narcissism. The first lie is



Here, again, Lacan is

not

far away from Kant in “The Limits





.”

151

Kant, read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII

relationship

One’s

one.Thjs, add

says

das

to

Ding

of the real is

not a

good

encounter, but

Lacan, is what the experience of the unconscious has forced



bad

us to

premises regarding ethics, as bequeathed in the Kantian ethics to whose point these questions have been brought (S. VII, p. 74). And Lacan surprises us again; as does Kant: to our

The way in which ethical principles are formulated when they impose themselves on consciousness or when about to emerge from preconscious- ness,

as

commandments, has the closest relationship

to

the second

principle

by Freud, namely, the reality principle [which] is the dialec— tical correlative of the pleasure principle. One is not simply, as one at ?rst imagines, the application of the consequence of the other; each one is really the correlative of the other.Without this, neither one would make any sense. Once again we are led to deepen the reality principle in a way I suggested in connection with the experience of paranoia. (S. VII, p. 74) introduced

This



make





better understand the

reality principle in connection with the experience of paranoia? Lacan ?rst explained paranoia as an incapacity to escape the mirror—stage logic, which he later placed as a mortifying interplay between ideal egos and the ego idea] on the imaginary axis where competition, jealousy, agressivity and narcissism rule the plane; the projective plane from which one transfers a thought or affect to another.What is interesting in Lacan’s discovery here—making use, as it does, of a topological ontology—is his theory that the projective plane of one ego transferring its ideals or ideas onto another ego goes in only one direction. Since, in the imaginary, each is trying to be the other—to take his or her space or place; to reduce the other

seems to

to a

no sense.

semblance of what he

How could

or

she is

or

one

should have been—one

can

say that

plane where mediation or understanding can occur. This is a new way of thinking about the imaginary, but it anticipates the later Lacan whose topology is no longer ontological, but concerns the real and jouissance as themselves organizatory of a logic. the

imaginary sphere

is

not a

dialectical

The projective plane plane, nonetheless, possesses remarkable properties.They are, I would suggest, of a piece with the “natural” tendency for man to be radically evil in Kant’s sense; to place his or her self—love above the moral law when one must be subordinated to another. Lacan’s topological turn, Marc Darmon

comments

here, gives another means

sensual

from the

start

sense to

that this

“natural” than does Kant for whom “natural” often

sexual. Lacan puts forth the thesis that the ego is constituted of life in such a way that it can subsequently function in no other or

analysis.Thjs “way,” then—whether psychotic—is the relating of mentality to desire

way—unless radically changed by normative, neurotic, perverse,

or

trauma or

Kant, read in relation to Lacan's Seminar Vll

152

via the mechanisms of time and space that

in the

to

included in the

mind/body overlap relation of language

and metonymy coordinate the desire. Indeed, one arrives at Jacques-Alain Miller’s idea that

varying

(thought)

are

ways

metaphor

one

is

jouissance as a body effect whose traces mark the unconscious. One’s particular imaginary narcissism is “natural” to the way that ego functions within the parameters of its structure of desire and jouissance. Some of the properties of the projective plane are: 1) It is possible for a place and its inverse side to exist as joined and on the same sug‘ace; 2) A circle can be oriented in such a way that by a simple displacement, as long as it is continuous, it can see its own orientation inverted. The projective plane, like the Mobius band—8—has a non-orientable surface without an edge that Lacan used to explain what he meant by non-specular primordial objects that cause desire.13 Certain objects cause desire because they are lost. The loss is an equivalent of the twist or turn in the experience of having and then not having. If this experience is marked down at the point of the turn or twist, its effects will still remain present/absent. But both the having and, then, losing will remain experiences on the smface of the body: Such an “insight” on Lacan’s part dispensed with the necessity of making mimetic judgments based on a before and after; or an inside and outside; or a totality of the Other. Put another way, the ego is paranoid insofar as its structure is an identi?cation the the other/ the ego ideal given by others and the Other: speaking being one’s

own

<—

—+

Other.This is



shorthand for the Schema L.”When



person becomes enmeshed

in

identity—based relationships of self to other—ego to ego—agressivity, jealousy, narcissistic judgments can only ensue: the passions of love and hate. Any appeal to the moral law—as an ethical way out of the egotistical bind—will fail. The passion of ignorance, paradoxically and dishearteningly, enunciates its certainties in the language of “reality” between the real and the symbolic dimensions. Indeed, for Lacan, such “reality” is identi?ed with the ?eld of language itself as it constitutes and controls a particular local universal. Perhaps one can give some examples of the passion of ignorance by going from the paranoia of normativity (the denial of the master discourse/ the passion of ignorance) to the paranoia of psychosis. In Le séminaire, livre XXIII (1975—1976), Le sinthome,15 Lacan says he resisted the republication of his doctoral thesis—On Paranoid Psychosis in its Relationship to the Personality—for so 16 long because he had come to understand that “psychoanalytic psychology and the personality as such” have no relationship, because they are “the same thing” (S. XXIII, December 16, 1975).

Psychosis In Lacan’s

be the

and the other/Other

teaching,

same,

or

the

the

only

same

case

as, is

operate because the law has Other that Lacan makes arise

the

case

of

psychosis

can

actually

wherein the social fails

to

inscribed the necessary separation from the of a keeping or relinquishing of the primordial

never

out

in which the ego and the other

Kant, read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII

object. Ultimately, this leads as a

153

the acceptance or rejection of the sexual difference difference in and of itself. This may seem non—sensical. But, Lacan’s point is to

that this difference is the ?rst

one an

infant

must account

for. It is his

or

her ?rst

experience of acknowledging difference as a problem to be solved, an enigma. It is the ?rst awareness that metaphor is a necessary function for “well being”—for the Good in Kant’s sense of feeling the pleasure of comfort—because a lack of wholeness—being ALL ONE SEX—requires that one substitute something in the place of the gap.When a child ?rst perceives that something is lacking from his body (or the body of the other)—that is, that neither body is (imaginarily) whole—the effect of this perception splits the ego. The ego no longer feels whole, nor imagines itself as consistent, because its speaking representative—the speakingbeing (parlétre)—must attend to a concrete, actual, real lack-in—being.The result is that the Lacanian subject is—unless psychotic—divided (¥).This split or gap requires that metaphor ?inction to substitute other things—massive numbers of objects and identi?cations—lest any intimation of the real and unbearable angst of fragmentation be encountered. Paradoxically, the acknowledgment that a

bodily diHerence has a major bearing on identity creates what Lacan called the phallic signi?er that places a question mark or enigma between the sexes. It occupies concrete, literal space—a third place—between the sexes. In this sense, the phallus signi?es a third place which does not belong to either sex. Its importance, at this level, does not so much concern sexuality or the sexual difference, as a making possible of dialectical thought. The

logic

That is,

of alienation

puzzling

such that the ego

traveling

in

only

lack—in-being/body links mind to body from early in life, closes upon itself. The illusory nature of the projective plane,

out a

one

her GOOD—must the social: It would be

direction, makes of man



social

creature

who—for his

or

upon the other. Indeed, this could be a de?nition of be de?ned in terms of shared reciprocities—which would

depend not

imaginary dream of a psychological collective, a dream that is continually thwarted by the particularity of the desires of each subject (of the fantasies)—but

as

an

the intervention of the “no”

names

this

cut

implied by

the Otherness of difference. Lacan

of castration the law. The law of the Father’s Name

signi?es

that

object of desire that provides satisfaction there must be a break in the Oneness ofjouissance with the mother. If this does not happen, there will not be alienation into language which allows one to represent jouissance at the distance of one remove which allows mediation and the symbolic at

the level of the maternal

dimension. Distance and difference

perspective

to

can,

thus, be co—ordinated

as

the relation of

perception.

placed the moment of alienation at the end of the mirror—stage drama, at approximately eighteen months of age; at the point when a child is called upon to acknowledge itself as other than a whole semblance of its image——seen in the mirror, or through the “eyes” of the other—as itself an object of desire in a triadic Lacan

154

Kant, read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII of forces. In

“seeing itself as being seen,” the infant partakes of the slope of consciousness and metaphor where he or she substitutes for something the other lackszThe dialectical, social infant will seek to please the Other, rather than remain only an object of enjoyment for itself, thereby, entrapped within a dyad.17 interplay

The

object’s

Before

absence to itself

“radically evil” and Lacan’s response to Kant’s juxtaposition of good with evil by his own rethinking of ethics in Seminar VII, I should like to bring in one more topological idea. Lacan starts with a negative object—one that is made present by substitutions only because rememorations of it insist in the wisps of unary traits that bind themselves to the hole of the object’s absence to itself.This continual negativity— the object existing only because it is always already lost—partially explains why man puts his “self interest” before the moral law or “the good of all.” If one falls into the void of one’s own being, any illusion of being an ego consistency collapses. If one does not continually ?ll up the structural place of lack with object identi?cations of all sorts, one encounters the unbearable void in being (in feelings of dread, loss, despair, desolation, anxiety, and so on). The signifying dialectic in the ?eld of language—the master signi?er (SI), or agent of speech, refers itself as an identity to a body of knowledge (Sz)—and must circle around this central negativity which Lacan structures as passing from a tetradic or quaternary form (such as the che vuoi? or the Schema L) to a projective plane in the discourse structures.jean—Paul Gilson, who works with the topological aspects of Lacan’s teaching, argues that, rather than the self self of the paranoid’s eautoscopie (I seem myself seeing myself), Lacan wanted to show that discourse produces the object a—original cause of desire which returns as the aim of the drives, the lure of the fantasy—and the fading of the subject into the gaps between the identi?cations that make up its objects and signi?ers, two slopes of what Lacan called the “letter/l’étre.” Here begins the interplay between master and slave, between good and evil: The master produces the signi?ers of knowledge (savoir) that convey the law, thus holding the power over a local universal moment or group. The slave must, then, produce another kind of knowledge (a connaissance ofjouissance) which pushes the powerful Other towards the traces of his or her own object a.Although Lacan gave the logic of how the three jouissances ex-sist in the overlaps between the real/symbolic, symbolic/imaginary and imaginary/ real, all of them included in the logic of the symptom or knot which serves as the limit of its own construction, Gilson stresses that in discursivity, jouissance excludes itselffrom the structure.18 Jouissance, rather, resides on the side of the real as jacques-Alain Miller teaches. Perhaps this is why Kant insists so often that the “radical evil” in question has nothing to do with man’s natural (i.e. sexual and sensual) inclinations. Lacan is not so sanguine. He ends his Seminar VII on “The paradoxes of ethics” by returning to the “goodness of man,” saying that what we are most ignorant about returning

to a

consideration of Kant’s notion of

man as



Kant, read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII the laws that

155

from

heaven, the same as Antigone’s. “The laws of heaven in question are the laws of desire,” says Lacan, referring to any seeker after knowledge—be it philosopher, psychoanalyst or scientist (8. VII, p. 325). Kant’s problematic—How can man’s “self—interest” cause a seeming evacuation of content to the moral law, as if against his own will, leads one to juxtapose modern-day enlightenment religions such as the will to progress, freedom, human are

come to us

concept of original sin.19 If the law is arti?cial, imposed, and obscene—as Lacan argues in “Kant with Sade”20— then what will curb the absolute annihilation of the other in the name of one’s own

rights,

and

so on to an

older

theological

good? If there is no will to moral improvement, Kant can only conclude, even if implicitly, that there is no universal humanity. This leads to a Lacanian understanding of desire as particular, while law is the solution each subject comes to in encountering sexual difference. Each person’s response constitutes an obedience to the law of not being ALL, a law that Lacan calls castration. The only subject who does not follow such a law would be the paranoid psychotic for whom his or her ego is not subjugated by a law; not the Other (as lacking and which one wants to please, appease or ful?ll). Radical evil in such a context would give us literary and political ?gures such as Captain Ahab blindly and monomaniacally pursuing Moby-Dick to eradicate—not so much the principle of GOOD, but—the one who stole a piece of his body. Clinically speaking, the psychotic cannot bear to have his or her being as Other without a lack decompleted in any way.Any incursion into his or her thought, or injury to his or her body, is felt as a mortal wound, curable only by a mirror—stage act of vengeance taken upon the alleged (or supposedly) guilty other. This is not to suggest that Herman Melville was a psychotic, but that he depicted a character whose motives of vengeance typify the behavior of a paranoid psychotic. Melville also characterized the mysti?cation of the crew members as all concerned with why the Captain would risk everything, even his own life, for a useless revenge? The answer would not be “satanic evil” as emanating from Satan, something of which Kant considers man incapable, but one of the possible structurations of being discovered by Lacan as the case where desire/lack is ruled out in favor of demand/jouissance. A subject who lacks lack is PURE EGO, is narcissism incarnate. In this

case,

law and ego

are

one; not

life quest and hate is the motive,

antithetical. When vengeance

rules



more

satanic than “radical” because it introduces the

causes

person’s

the other

to encounter

his

or

her

one

might

real, traumatic jouissance that

void.Vengeful persons introduce chaotic principle of the loss of any

own

only as destruction, but as the orientation by law.There is not even a “self interest” versus

evil,

not

say that the evil is



moral law

to

choose

between. Hitler’s vengeance was of this ilk, as was that of Mark David Chapman who killed John Lennon, each believing the other to have occupied the place of his

own

ego. The

imaginary logic

of paranoia

cannot

allow the other

to

co—exist

infantile space. The other has become for him or her, not other to him or her, but a semblable who is appropriating his or her being. This also describes the Schreber’s (seemingly inverse) fall into total delusion Unibomber, as well in

an

asjudge

156

Kant, read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII

called upon to occupy the space of THE Father—a judge of younger age than all those over whom he would have presided—which is the signi?er for difference or law that the psychotic has, by de?nition, foreclosed.” once

he

was

frightening political component of such a reality is that groups can follow a paranoid leader in his or her totalitarianism, becoming totalitarian governments or parties.This can happen, not because individuals are also paranoid, but because each person can be moved from one place to another in his or her passions, in One

identi?cation

identi?cation

with



leader.22 Such

with the real Father

an

identi?cation

is what Lacan called

degree; the ?nal name of the knot that will supposedly give a guarantee to knowledge, behavior, and action and make one proof against any encounter with the void. In one’s passions, one can go from love to hate to ignorance: Between the imaginary and symbolic, Lacan located the jouissance or passion oflove; hate resides between the imaginary and real; while the passion of ignorance is situated between the symbolic and the real.23 This is another way of explaining Freud’s three levels of identi?cation in “Group Psychology”: hysterical identi?cation with the lack or void as the most primitive form of identi?cation; ego to ego identi?cation with the collectivity to

the second

of the group, which leads to a third level. The group attaches love and/ or hate to the master discourse promoted by a given leader.

Lacan’s

good

might translate Kant’s idea that evil is the lack or de?cit of something—a blocking of the Good—into Lacan’s reply in “The function of the good” (S. VII, ch. 17) that at the limit of the good, one encounters desire (p. 218). Fantasies seem unimportant here, insofar as one usually denies them because they so manifestly concern narcissism and sex. Metaphor and metonymy are not unimportant insofar as Freud has already taught us that condensation and displacement function as laws of primary—process thought. Metaphor makes substitutions which allow dialectic, while metonymy links itself to metaphor as caused by the combinations and connections of desire that show the body ?owing into the signi?er and the latter structure turning into the imaginary body (The Leforts, Birth p. 333). Having cited Sade’s statement in The Story ofJuliette that tyrants always rise up out of the shadow of laws, Lacan opines that the question of the good will always be articulated ?rst in its relationship to Law. Pointing to the kind of “escape clause” many thinkers evoke, Lacan says “nothing is more tempting than to evade the question of the good behind the implication of some natural law, of some harmony to be found on the way to the elucidation of desire” (S.VII, pp. 220—221). Deleuze’s pre—occupation is, rather, with the law as empty—a Charade of power, a farce—which de?nes the norm as an after—eEect (Copjec. RE, p. xvii). If the law cannot be phenomenologized, if the inclination to good is merely a mindless repetition of the pleasures one knows—however lethal they may be—one comes to the impasses of historians and theologians, as well as those One





.,

157

Kant, read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII

philosophers. Historians can always theologians say paradoxically that one of

free will in

Lacan an

term

which

the

question of the good revelation of his desire.Yet,

to

evasion of the

may choose the

otherwise, while

right path by

his

or

her

of faith.

an act

points

say it should have been

meant a

re?ection

on

made up of defenses and alibis; since the moment ethics became a

as

man’s condition and



calculation

as to

the

proper paths to follow, “all meditation on man’s good has taken place as a function of the index of pleasure”—even to the point of trying to discern true pleasures

from false

and

221).While Kant will start out in “Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone” claiming an original predisposition to good in human nature, placing “self love” and propagation of the species through sex on the side of animality—a category where no reason is demanded—and humanity will require the rationality of practical reason, he comes ever closer to the realization that there is really no progress made by the human species. His one example of progress is the French Revolution. Lacan responds to that in SeminarVII by Sade’s statement that anarchy breeds more anarchy in an endless ones,

so on

(S.VII,

p.

compete with each other in destruction, rather than in historical progress and recti?cation (S. VII, p. 221). chain of totalitarianisms which

Sexuality

seem to

and the ”not all”

overlapping circles—Lacan places an ethics that bears, not on moral behavior or law, but on sexuation and sexuality: Sexuation on the feminine side of the graph entails a logic of “not all” under the phallic discourse, which identi?es truth and knowledge with a transparency of language, thus leaving some space open to desire. Sexuality intersects with ethics insofar as we are placed in a continual intertwining of the real of the drives—oral, anal, invocatory, and scopic—as they intersect with desire, which is fundamentally the desire to ?ll the void with objects of pleasure. The “catch—22” here lies in our protecting ourselves from encountering the real of the holes in the symbolic to which the unary traits bind themselves in a topology of the edge and the hole, thereby constituting substances or essences of jouissance, or libido, which allow us to recuperate something of our lost objects at a libidinal level outside sense that ?ows in and out of the signi?er. The lethal side—the displeasure that accompanies pleasure, thus ensuring that the pleasure principle not be an antithesis to the reality principle—is that one cannot recuperate anything of one’s pleasurable identi?ca— tions (images, sounds, wisps, traces, big memories, fantasies, and so on) without also touching on the loss to which the unary trait binds itself in the tantalizing dialectic of only knowing presence or having in reference to losing and not having. In between

good

and evil—in the

Lacan’s void Either less

one

deals with the

comforting

structure

of “self interest,” which

than Kant would have

us

believe—indeed,

turns out to an

illusory

be far

pretense

158

Kant, read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII

that the moral law of the group truly wishes the particular good of each one is sometimes preferable—or with this topological ontology. The true pro?le of the

void; and/or, the pre-existing surface of the “self” is a bumpy material made of traits taken from the imaginary, symbolic and real, com— surface of the “self” is



bined into associative, interchained units of mind and memory that do in a linear fashion. One can only know the real of the hole insofar as with the

contact

objects

in avoidance of the real

that surround it;

or one

is driven

emptiness of the hole (S. XI,

ch. 12, p.

one

seek the

to

work

not

is in

objects

154). Here,

Lacan

explaining to Kant why the moral law would, in certain cases, be evacuated: A subject puts anything into the real of the hole, no matter how deceptive, temporary or illusory, lest one experience the bad encounter of touching a concrete empty place in the body, whose effects have several permu- is close

to

tations and dimensions. One may even put the tedious rituals and words of already dead language into the real holes that are normally repressed, although

feel the effects

they drag in their wake. Lacan addresses Kant’s question in “The Con?ict of the Faculties” (1798): Is the human race progressing by answering that what Kant misses is that life is not about transcendental categoricals, but about suffering and ethics taken up on the slope of desire, not law?24 Freud also took up this problem in his later work in which the superego replaced the Oedipus complex by way of the threat of castration. Lacan’s rethinking of the Father as a function transforms the superego into the alienation of the symbolic order of language. The symbolic father is, then, the dead father (S. VII, pp. 307—310). The imaginary father is depicted in Le séminaire, livre IV25 as the semblance or ?gure of the invisible real father ofjouissance whose function is to inject law into a social unit, starting with interdicting a oneness in the infant/mother dyad. In The Seminar, Boole III, Lacan argues that if the phallus, taken as a means of quantifying the difference between the two sexes, is foreclosed in the name one can

of any “ism,” the consequence for an infant—or for anyone in later life as well— is the chaos of an encounter with the real of the void.26 This in itself calls for a new

ethics, Lacan

argues, insofar

as

the law

cannot

simply be

evacuated without

beyond Freud of the had found no “beyond” to slay except the obscene superego. This left him as clueless as to the whys of suEering beyond pleasure, just as it had Freud. In “Kant with Sade” (1962), he suggests that only an ethics of sexual desire is good. The new subject is a desubjecti?ed hero of the drives: (a)—de—moralized. By the time he wrote “A Love Letter” in The Seminar, Boole XX: Encore,27 he had found a signi?ed for the phallic signi?er—the structures of desire—which allowed him to postulate a topological third place, an abstraction, out of which mental differentiations arise as a dia—

being psychosis. In the 1960s, Lacan 19205 with the pleasure principle. He

the result

lectical habit of mind context,

one

has

on

not

gone far

which both the social and the law

jumped beyond

the

of desire/lack, measured against the

psychoses.

had

morality of good and empirical case where

are

founded. In this

evil into the ethics lack is

lacking:

the

Kant, read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII

159

The conclusions of Kant and Lacan

“Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone” by saying that the will itself is radically evil because it corrupts the ground of all maxims as a perversity of the heart (p. 424). And he works with the problems caused by having to conceptualize a free will as an intelligible act preceding experience (p. 427); or why man would have an innate will to transgress given that Adam had no propensity for sin (p. 431); he concludes that we cannot explain evil on the temporal plane without an innate natural ground (p. 431), while “rational reason” remains inscrutable (p. 432). Kant concludes

point, arguing that the law is a symptom in the real; a sublimation of the Father’s Name without repression in conscious ideo— logy. In Lacan’s context, Kant’s “pure reason,” taken as the basis of ethical law,28 Lacan

answers

this

on

which marks the asymmetry of the sexual difference the basis of law insofar as law, reason, and will are not identities.While Kant

becomes the as

Kant

phallic signi?er

powers,” Lacan depicts evil as the passion of ignorance; being “all” within the symbolic order of a local universal reality; the master discourse which closes out fantasy, desire, and jouissance; the totalitari— describes evil

as

anisms which

ensue

“principalities

and

when the Father is taken

Man is evil, Kant says

(p. 445),

as

One,

as a

semblance of himself.

because

envy, the lust for power, greed and the malignant inclinations bound up with these, besiege his nature And it is not even necessary to assume that .

these

are men



sunk in evil and



examples

to

lead him astray; it suf?ces

that

they are at hand, that they surround him, and that they are men, for them mutually to corrupt each other’s predispositions and make one another evil.

“good,” will must be universalizable; if not, Kant ?nds it immoral. Thus, a society built on virtue or a good principle will be a juridico—civil one, where the judge is the individual, not a public authority (pp. 445—447). Kant’s representative ideal society would be a household owner, a common invisible To be

moral Father whose a

union of hearts

son

knows his will,



enigmatically that “the good is

at

on

(p. 454).

this, Lacan opposes

To

ethical commonwealth based

an

the level where



is

subject

where power is born, arguing the level of the use of the cloth.The good

domain of not at

may have it

good

at

his

disposal





.The notion of control

good is essential” (S.VII, p. 229). In other texts, Lacan argues that one’s goods are “good” only insofar as they are not non—utilitarian, but utilized to “know” and maximize desire (intention, inclination, the particularity of one’s being for others/being with the Other).And he brings us to a point, not dissimilar to Kant’s ?nal points in “Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone”: of the

This ?inction to

deprive

of the

others is

good engenders a









dialectic. I

mean

that the power

which will merge the other very solid link from

as

160

Kant, read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII

such





.The

important thing

is

to

recognize

that the

depriving agent is

an

imaginary function. It is the little other, one’s fellow man .What is meant by defending one’s goods is one and the same thing as forbidding oneself from enjoying them.The sphere of the good erects a strong wall across the path of our desire. It is, in fact, at every moment and always, the ?rst barrier .

that

have

we

to



deal with.

(S. VII,

pp.

229—230)

problem—the point where evil enters in—is that vis—a-vis the other, man’s inhumanity to man is such that he experiences—not pure jealousy towards the other, but Lebensneid (the envy of taking the other’s life), an affect that Lacan says is not ordinary jealousy, but the belief—derived, perhaps, from early infantile imaginary forms—that the other enjoys a good one will never attain. At this point, Lacan ?nds, rather than communal love, a “point of hatred and the need to destroy” (S. VII, p. 237). One limit to crossing this lethal barrier is the beautiful itself—even the Kantian bounded beautiful which one might equate with the familiar, the known—which blocks desire (S. VII, pp. 237—238).This brings us to the point of the fantasy—of touching the good of the object a in our fantasies— made up, as they are, of the goods of pleasure and the displeasures of individual The

repetitions and antithetical structurations of desire. Bringing together Kant with Lacan, what I want will

can

one

by

to

ask is what

reason

and

do when confronted with the poor, humble requirements—of going one in jouissancehthat make one subject’s good the other’s evil? Kant

by creating an ethics of on the other hand, argues for a psychoanalytic ethics wherein one treats desire and jouissance and reorganizes each one’s sinthomes so that the sinthome can be used constructively and identi?catory jouissance be reorganized. answered this

question, I tragic resignation. Lacan,

would

claim,

in “Limits





.”

Notes 1

Immanuel

of Kant:

2 3 4 5 6

Kant,“Religion Within

the Limits of Reason Alone”

Immanuel Kant’s Moral and Political

an

introduction, by Carl

J. Friedrich, trans. by Hoyt H. Hudson and Theodore M. Greene (New York: Random House, 1993), pp. 403—454. Jean—Paul Gilson, La 7bpologie de Lacan: Une articulation de la cure psychanalytique (Montréal: Les éditions Balzac, 1994), p. 78. Russell Grigg, “Descartes and the Subject of Science,” lawn, language, and Philosophy

(Albany, NY: SUNY, 2008), pp. 133—149. Alenka Zupanéié, Ethics of the Real (London and New Yorszerso, 2000), pp. 79—105. Jacques—Alain Miller; cf. Re-Tum: A Lacam'an Journal of Psychoanalysis, “Chapter 11, Fantasy and the Desire of the Other,” vols. 3 and 4, Spring 2008, pp. 9—32. Russell Grigg, “Absolute Freedom and Radical Change: On Ziiek,” Lacan, Language, and PhiIOSOphy (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2008).



Writings, ed., with

(1793), The Philosophy

Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Boole XI (1964): The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho- Analysis, trans. by Alan Sheridan, ed. by Jacques—Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1977), chs. 16, 17, pp. 203—229.

Kant, read in relation to Lacan’s Seminar VII 8

161

jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book VII (1959—1960): The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. with notes by Dennis Porter, ed. by jacques—Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1992), cf. ch. 16.



10 11

12

jacques-Alain Miller, Ch. 3, Du sympté'me au?mtasme et du retour, Seminar given to the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris, Saint—Denis, (1982—1983), unpublished Seminar. Slavoj Ziiek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 44. Ellie Ragland, “Lacan’s Theory of SublimationzA New Look at Sophocles’s Antigone,” Critical Essays on jacques lacan (New York: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 102—118. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Practical Reason (1788), The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant: Immanuel Kant’s Moral and Political Writings, ed. with an introduction by Carl J. Friedrich, trans. by CJ. Friedrich (New York: Random House, 1993),

pp. 230—291. 13 Marc Darmon, Essais

7bpologie Iacam'enne (Paris: Droguet, 1990), pp. 176—177. and the Subject of Law: Sexuation and Discourse in the

sur

14 Ellie

la

Ragland, “Lacan Mapping of Subject Positions That Give the Ur—Form of Law,” Washington and Lee Law Review, vol. 54, no. 3 (Summer 1997), p. 1093; cf. The Seminar ofjacques Lawn, Boole II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Tizchm'que of Psychoanalysis, 1954—1953, trans. by Sylvana Tomaselli, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 243.

15 16

Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, lime XXIII (1975—1976): Le sinthome, text established by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2005). jacques Lacan, De la psychose paranoi'aque dans ses rapports avec la personalité suivi de

la paranoia (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 17 Ellie Ragland-Sullivan,_]acques Lacan and the Philosophy Premier écrits

sur

of Psychoanalysis (Urbana

and

of Illinois Press, 1986), Cf. ch. 1; Rosine Lefort in collaboration with Robert Lefort, Birth of the Other, foreword by Russell Grigg, trans. by Marc du Ry, Lindsay Watson, and Leonardo Rodriguez (Urbana and Chicago: University of

Chicago: University

Illinois Press, 1994).The Leforts place the moment of perception of the phallus as a point of enigmatic difference much earlier than did Lacan, or object-relations or developmental theorists who have written on the relation of separation/ individuation and ascribed

an

age

to

this occurrence.The Leforts’

conception

of the substitution of

spoons, cups, cereal, etc. for this piece of enigma seems more proximate to Donald Winnicott’s notion that some transitional object must symbolize the difference

between mother and infant from 18 19 20 21

22

early infancy

on,

for health, play and

develop. Jean—Paul Gilson, La 7bpologie de Lawn: Une articulation (Montreal: Les éditions Balzac, 1994), pp. 140—141.

de la

cure

creativity

to

psychanalytique

Joan Copjec,“lntroduction: Evil in the Time of the Finite World,” Radical Evil (London: Verso, 1996), ed. by Joan Copjec, pp. vii—xxviii, cf. pp. viii—ix. Jacques Lacan, “Kant with Sade” (1962), trans. by James B. Swenson, Jn, October, no. 51 (Winter 1989): 54—104. judge Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1955), ed. and trans. by Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1988) Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921), SE, 18: 67—143.

Ragland, “The Passion of Ignorance in the Transference,” Freud and the Passions, by John O’Neill (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996),

23 Ellie

ed.

pp. 151—165. 24 Ellie Ragland—Sullivan and RB. Kershner, “More French Connections,” james joyce 115. Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 115—127, cf. p.

25 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre IV

jacques—Alain

Miller

(1956—1957):

(Paris: Seuil, 1994),

p. 296.

[A relation

d’objet,

text

established

by

162

26

27 28

Kant, read in relation

to Lacan’s Seminar VII

jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book [II (1955—1956): The Psychoses, trans. by Russell Grigg, ed. by jacques—Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1993). Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Boole XX (1972—1973): Encore, trans. by Bruce Fink, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1998). jacob Rogozinski, “IT MAKES US WRONG: Kant and Radical Evil,” Radical Evil, ed. by Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 30—45; cf. p. 37.

CONCLUSION

It is

not

easy

to

grasp Lacan’s

teaching

on

structure, that

is, topological

structure.

departs from the positive sciences we are familiar with and from symbolic logic. His is a teaching based on negativities, lack-in-being, loss that creates a void in the Other, varying negations that create the differential structures of perversion, the neuroses, the psychoses, and the norm which Jacques-Alain Miller has called simply a belief in the myth of the Oedipal structure. Moreover, to communicate his highly developed systematics ofa psychoanalytic logic, Lacan gives new theories of the levels of space that constitute a subject and a new view of temporality as it functions in language. It is dif?cult to grasp that Lacan has departed from Martin Heidegger’s linear concept of a temporality based on circular movement as that which has determined ontology from Aristotle to Hegel. Moreover, Lacan has dropped ontology in favor of the unconscious as ontic—divided and elusive——and ethical, an ethics of the truths that reveal desire and jouissance. In my Introduction I pointed out that jacques—Alain Miller calls Lacan’s topological structure something that comes from the real which Lacan de?nes as the impossible to know, to say, to bear—that which psychoanalysis treats. Miller also stresses that it is not the learning of language that creates the unconscious, but the learning of the structure of the Borromean unit made up of the imaginary (ego and narcissism), the symbolic (language and law), the real (trauma and discontent), and the symptom (the way the Father’s Name signi?er is linked to the mother’s unconscious desire). The speaking being, ?nally, is the body plus contingency. In the game of knowledge,jouissance plays the lead role.We do not “have” thoughts, we are enjoyed by them. In this book you will have encountered terms such as topological place, body surface, holes, rims, the edge and the hole bounded by unary traits, projection of the ego onto the body surface, the energetics of the drives whose source is oral, It

anal, scopic, and invocatory. Language carries drives in their thrust

to

ful?ll desire

164

Conclusion

and in their aim

jouissance, always just missedJean—Michel Rabaté calls these “letters” from the real which join this realm of primordial effects to the unconscious which ?inctions in language. So we are not left just with the unconscious structured like a language, and by language, but with an unconscious to

achieve



which is the discourse of the Other which does

sphere as

of



given

moment.

not

exist per se, but is the cultural

Moreover, language promotes jouissance insofar

unary traits of identi?cation

are

linked

to

the sounds that

name

things

and

signi?ers are born, are laid down from the start of life in something Lacan called lalangue. There is no natural language as linguists think, in other words, but these primordial traits that build up into what Lacan calls the objects a which both cause desire and which are sought in return to ful?ll jouissance.These traits bear the status, paradoxically, of ?inctioning by a stasis of repetition which causes humans to seek constancy or homeostasis, rather than pleasure as Freud ?rst thought. He changed his mind when he discovered the symptomatic function of repetition in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921). Lacan kept the concept of repetition from Freud but divorced it from transference which he based on a supposition made about the analyst’s knowl— edge, rather than as a representative of repeated affects. In Chapter 1, I take up Lacan’s debate with Daniel Lagache regarding the nature of structure. Lagache’s is an old—fashioned International Association of Psychoanalysis way of thinking structure. Lacan shows, rather, that it is not some natural id that drives people to act, but an energetics of the partial drives which trigger sets of functions in play in language and human actions. In other words the organs of the body are not in and of themselves functions that act naturally, but which respond to unary traits, signi?ers, images, sinthomes, to that which builds the subject as something that represents itself as something for another signi?er. One can say the ear is made in order for us to hear. But in analysis one images.And

these traits,

may well have



out

of which

child obsessed with

vacuum

cleaners, their noise, and who talks

softly.When one discovers that the father in this family yells all the time to make things function, as he sees it, the obsession with vacuum cleaners for this child is a way to drown out noise. So his “ears” are symptomatic, not utilitarian. Moreover, for Lacan, structure is not form, but a combinatory of signi?ers, images and sinthomes which make up the Borromean knot. Miller points out that such a diverse combinatory gives many versions of the Father’s Name function which would not be true in psychosis where this function is foreclosed in favor of a mental symbiosis with the primordial mother. Lagache separates functions so as to fantasize a totalized organism. Lacan argues, rather, that the infant as subject begins to be structured by what is said about it even before its birth. The infant depends upon signi?er and object in that objects in the real enable him or her to survive. The dependence is not on the other qua other, but on the object meant to ful?ll desire and, thus, provide the comfort ofjouissance. One sees here that Lacan’s subject is never intersubjective, even from the beginning of its life. Lacan also introduces us to the logic of the cut which carries with it the real of the subject. The very

Conclusion

cuts are

all the absolute traits of identi?cation

These

are

Freud’s

Freud

privileged

saying

that the libido, the drives, become

Einziger Ziigen the id

over

165

that mark the real for a-ffect.

and Miller’s divine details. In

stressing

that

departs from ego psychology, living language which commands

the ego, Lacan a

thought. For Lacan, the ego is a vacuous shell while the subject is a holding place.There is, then, a ?lndamental inconsistency in being and body, although the imaginary dimension thinks of the body as the

trajectory

of behavior and

consistent. A lot has been written XVII: The Other Side

on

Lacan’s discourse theories

of Psychoanalysis.

I have

as

developed

concentrated, rather,

in Seminar

on one

chapter

jakobson” to present Lacan’s theories on love and discourse. In the repressed knowledge in the master discourse that moti- vates affect, surplus enjoyment resides in the place of meaning and dovetails with the death drive in the repetition of symptoms. In these discourses one sees the subject divided by desire and jouissance, as well as by the excess jouissance that comes from the trauma of the real. No one can read this chapter in Encore and still maintain that Lacan’s teaching is a coherence or correspondence theory. There is always a One—minus (discontinuity, remainder of traces, repression of fantasy, refusal of desire, and so on) in Lacan’s teaching. But discourse, nonetheless, makes a social link for Lacan.Thus, the psychotic is in language, but not in dis- course. Rather, the four places and four mathemes by which Lacan structures his discourse theory, are topological places and spaces that one can ascertain from scanning another’s speech, if one knows how. Discourse evolves, Lacan says, as a topological structuring of the unconscious. Moreover, topological structure is a knowledge of “being,” not an academic knowledge. The four places in Lacan’s theory are equivalent to his quaternary structure of space as advanced in the Borromean knot. The mathemes and the four places over which the subject is stretched in each discourse are amply ?eshed out in my Chapter 2.The important thing about these in this book is that one understand that they function topologi- cally, not just conceptually. And topology teaches that discourse is about love— tying together, coming apart, etc. Lacan privileged the hysteric’s discourse insofar as she knows that something lacks in knowledge, that the law itself is empty. Moreover, Lacan continues linkingjouissance to language in his discourse theory insofar as a surplus in jouissance unveils sinthomes. Moreover, the death drive— repeated ?xions—occupies a central place in each discourse structure. Miller teaches us that the signi?er in these theories functions as an extimate object, being both inside and outside, in the shape of a torus. Insofar as individuals take a certain consistency in jouissance for reality, one must work backwards in studying the discourses in order to understand how they offer a picture of the lack of a unity of One, even in the master discourse which maintains that there is such a unity. This discourse reduces itself to the conscious ?eld of language from Seminar XX: Encore entitled “To

and represses the unconscious, desire, fantasy, the drives, and so on. One must start from the analyst’s discourse and read backwards to see how the transference—

agent of

speech

and other, the unconscious—the subject

as

lacking, repetition—the

166

Conclusion

subject

as

repeating

certain

silent desire and the

knowledge, and

excess

in

jouissance

analyst as sitting in for analysand cannot speak,

the drives—the which the

subject totality. Moreover, each signi?er needs to be understood in its own right.The S1 stands for a given master signi?er that marks any person’s major “identity” themes.The ¥2 is the collection of ¥15 that equal a knowledge, while the S is the subject as divided between conscious and unconscious knowledge. The a is the semblance of identi?cation with libidinal objects and joins unconscious knowledge to conscious knowledge through the “letter” and the drives. It can always be found at the place of an excess in jouissance that creates sinthomes. These mathemes can only work in the way Lacan put them together. Moving them around des— troys the topology in play in each discourse. By the time one comes to the analyst’s discourse, one sees that a libidinal object governs discourse.The hysteric knows this and the psychoanalyst sits in to represent this position for the time it takes an analysand to know what governs his or her own desire and jouissance, what sinthomes he or she can drop, what identi?cations can be reshaped. Lacan placed the object a in the place of truth in hysteria, unveiling that overall the body is joined to language by the drives which make one want to consume, screen out

any

be seen, be heard,

to

control, and

so on.

It is

not

the

who leads the game, is in ascendance, but

master

except when his or her own position of authority the hysteric who knows she lacks and thereby reveals the

impossibilities

in

knowledge itself. Hysteria also reveals that some part of jouissance can be translated by the signi?er as in conversion reactions or other kinds of sinthomes. In Chapter 3 on “The structure of Lacan’s object a,” Lacan breaks with the history of those who have de?ned objects variously. Object for him is that which gives place, which stops up lack and loss, which brings drives into language as such and also as the semblances that represent us as subjects. Lacan’s work on the object was extensive, as Miller reveals in his Seminar Extimité (1985—1986) where he shows it as ?rst representing constellations that Freud called complexes. Later, Lacan put it at the center of the Borromean knot. Residing at the center of all dimensions of being, one can see why Miller would describe the a as extimate, as that whose inside is also its outside, but not in a mirror-like or reciprocal way. Early on, Lacan focused on the object as lost and then refound, loss coming ?rst. Later he called it the sexual partner, the one that divides a seeming couple into different people with differing desires, fantasies,jouissances. Indeed, Lacan taught that fantasy—each person’s VVeltanschauung—constitutes what we call perception. Fantasy is also what links the drive and desire to language. And the a is also a semblant that lies between the real and the symbolic and prevents fear, anxiety, doubt by its various identi?cations. It also sustains fantasy across the divide of alienation and separation. In the late period of his teaching, Lacan places the castrated object (—4)) in the imaginary and the castrated subject in the symbolic. Around the same time, he linked the object a to the void in the Other that can be ?lled by imaginary and symbolic objects—by images, things, people, ideas. But the main goal of the object is not satisfaction, but ?lling the void in order to

Conclusion

perpetuate

homeostasis—imaginary consistency—at

the

the

of

167

giving up provides jouissance by

price

not

costly repetitions of one’s symptoms.The object a constituting the drives in such a way as to show that we are not uni?ed within a mind or a body. But with objects one can make bridges over pseudo— consistencies.The object a which starts out as unary traits builds into a complex on

matheme that stands in for many functions in human life. Thus, it can never be reduced to just another person, something material, or even the dreams we

have of ful?lled

jouissance.

Chapter 4,

“The

of the drives,” I take up Lacan’s departure from Freud’s idea that the drives are systematic, albeit perverse. Where Freud In

on

structure

?nds

system, Lacan ?nds a chaos of the drives which can be located in fantasy, action, speech, and so on. Lacan insisted that drives reside in the treasury of the myriad signi?ers that make up what we call “mind.” And the drive appears in demand when the dialectical

subject disappears.The drives reveal how a revolu- tionary idea of Lacan’s functions in language; that is, the cut remains in the drives. Indeed, with the cut, Lacan introduces a new theory of cause and referent to meaning.This makes sense if one thinks of cuts as ?rst being made of unary traits which are ?rst one—dimensional and act as absolute pieces of identi?cation. It makes further sense if one thinks of the link between the cut and its repetitions which gives it the dimension of two. Once it enters the drives, one can see it begin to function as a system of communications from the real. One may exclude another by cutting her eyes away from the other, thus excluding that person from the social Other. One can initiate the cut in the invocatory drive by disrupting, or by cutting off someone else’s speech. Indeed, so central is this knowledge of the link between the voice and the cut that it serves in part as a foundation for the analyst’s remaining silent during an analytic session so that the analysand’s master signi?ers, fantasy objects, jouissance knowledge, and so on, can be put forth. Any interpretation works as a cut and has a very complex meaning in the analyst’s determining when to end an analytic session. Drive, then, is a paradox which is both a repeated constancy as a sinthome which, perversely, creates the discontinuity in which the real comes forth, frag— menting a seemingly uni?ed surface. Appearing in repetitions and sublimations, drives are not assimilated to biological or physical energy, but to a topology of disjunction and conjunction, union and frontier, inside and outside, hole and edge. Stressing the psychic force of the drive, thereby dropping Strachey’s transla- tion of Trieb into instinct, Lacan shows the temporal tension present in the drive as manifested in the time of waiting for something, a response, a gift, a sign of love. Lacan’s drive theory has nothing in common with Freud’s libidinally driven id controlling the nervous system. Rather, Lacan’s terrain is a surface of an imagi- nary consistency of the body, the names of the symbolic linked with “the thing itself,” the traumatic cuts of the real into these surfaces by the symptoms that derive from the relation of some Father’s Name signi?er in its rapport with the mother’s unconscious desire concerning her own castration, or sexual difference. Thus, Lacan’s topology is made of holes, rims, edges which build into the

168

Conclusion

identi?cations

in which

we

anchor

our sense

of

being



“being,”

which Lacan

ontic—fading, divided—and ethical in its search for the truth of its own jouissance. Insofar as repetitions carry sinthomes into language and intentionality, one hears a drive logic when the real creates a disunity in a surface, inserting the edge of the hole of a cut into language—the subject as an edge of angst or fear; not a solid piece of knowledge. In this way a temporal tension is introduced into language. One sees, then, that from Freud’s drives, Lacan retained only jouissance. He took Freud’s physiological Drang (push) to be the Other as cause of desire. The push engages the aim of the drives, derived from the source of the unconscious and the partial drives, toward the object one might call a symptomatic jouissance— repetition of sinthomes which do not wish one’s own good. Lacan found the path of ignoring the unconscious and jouissance unethical. In Chapter 5, on the “Topological dimension of Lacanian optics,” I discuss how the bond of mirror—stage symbiosis is broken by a third term——the phallus as the c?ect of differenceThis effect gives one an awareness of conscious- ness itseIf—that is, as Lacan de?nes it, seeing oneself as being seen.While much ?lm theory has taken the gaze as literally looking at an object, Lacan brings jouissance and unconscious signi?ers into play by adding the scopic drive for jouissance. Gérard Wajcman argues that in painting, the gaze inverts perspective and catches the viewer in a trap where the real of structure is tacitly shown. While desire is linked to language by the drives that are limited to the body, psychoanalysis situs means that psychoanalysis exists in space and in three dimen— sions.While time is oriented by the real of the word, topology shows the real of structure which cannot speak itself and to which place the divided subject refers. Topology offers foundations of the subject’s position: are you seeing (voyeur), or seen (paranoia)? In the Borromean unit which Lacan calls a picture of the sites of the real, the picture is the matheme for visual structure. The symbolic plus a unary trait yield perspective by threading an identi?catory mark to a hole in which the object a is recessed. says is

For

Lacan, the gaze is the foundation of the surface

at

the base of all

we

call

form, constellation.The semblant—the true—seeming mask—resides at the apex of the symbolic and the real, appearing in the scopic drive as jouissance traits. Thus, thought and body are geo—metric. The gaze, meanwhile, is quattrocentric.

fantasy and the gaze on different planes, making of the mirror and the measure equivalent relations that transform themselves from catoptrique and geometric to topologic. And the surface of these is the symbolic linked to the scopic. Perspective, then, has four Borromean surfaces, the a existing as an enigma between a subject and an object.When one drops an object a functioning as a semblant, a sinthome, a piece of jouissance is dropped and something is changed in the real. In Chapter 6, on “The practice of the letter and topological structure,” I focus and ?ction on Lacan’s saying that every truth has the structure of ?ction.Truth are linked by the lettre he says and the function of the letter is topological in that This

places

the

Conclusion

place

it indicates the

X he says the voice In Seminar

of

set not

comes

language

and the unconscious

same

everywhere

on



linked. In Seminar

in-corp-porates itself into language. topology and that ?xations to a given

chains have the form of the

on

are

from Elsewhere and

XX, Lacan says that structure is

signifying

the

where

169

torus

which

means

that

a center

is

all surfaces. It is

sphere,

and

singular—a unary trait—on a ?at surface, produces a knot on a complex surface. But the

gaze is the foundational surface upon which the drives enter the real of language through the extimate structure of the torus. In Marguerite Duras’s short novel, Moderato Cantabile, the voice

serves

as

the

partial drive, object-

cause-of—desire, around which the story plays out. In my view it functions as a piece of the real in the symbolic. Duras exposes the dream of an ideal love as an illusion structured by the “there is no relation of sexual rapport” around which language and knowledge ?nd themselves confounded.Anne and Chauvin seek through speaking at a café once a week to create a dream castle of love through focusing on fantasies spoken aloud. Miller has taught that one brings dimensions of space into play within language by listing the knot, the metaphor, structure, the real, and the “thing” Lacan later called the object a. In his “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” Lacan says that in her ?ction the unconscious touches on the practice of the letter. The signi?er and the real meet there. Here we have the creative word trumping any notion of phenomenological being. In his “Homage .,” Lacan also says that the unconscious is not hidden in her ?ction but exists like the “littoral,” the place where ocean and sand meet. It follows that loss will also be linked to the practice of the letter, ?ction residing in the curve of the real which is the home of the void. In Extimité (1985—1986), Miller says that language introduces the real in the form of sexuality. This real returns, indeed, where ?ction and life fail. Confronting a passionate murder, the couple Anne and Chauvin, slowly dismantle their love dream of escape from .



the isolation of each one’s life and the to

drown

restaurant owner turns

their voices. Miller also

out

that sublimation

creates

something

new

points

out

in the

that

art

symbolic.

the radio up loud

is sublimation and

A certain

jouis-sens

is

ciphering of the unconscious. Here we have jouissance and the signi?er joined in a practice of the letter.While one might think that metaphor can explain this ?ctional logic, it is actually metonymy which comes ?rst, derived as it is from the corporal real where the drives are structured. One reason ?ction and ?lm are so important to people is that they allow one to experience the real which their bodies resist, claiming consistency brought

into

play

which works

as a

above all. In ?ction, ?lm, drama, poetry, and

so

on,

one

seeks the

representation

Other, Miller says. As the voice falls out of the dream Anne and Chauvin have built, a piece of the object a has literally dropped of



out

primary jouissance

in the

of language.

In my ?nal

in relation

chapter,

to

together Kant’s

on

“Kant’s

Religion

Within the Limits

Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics

of Reason Alone, read of Psychoanalysis,” I try to bring

idea that individuals evacuate control within the law with Lacan’s

premise that there is



real void

place

at

the

center

of what

one

may call

being

1 70

Conclusion

and of

Other. In other words, there is no set of all sets. Kant comes to the conclusion in his essay that man is “radically evil,” while Lacan advances the a

given

position that between the symbolic and the real a passion of ignorance reigns, advancing the authoritarianism of the master discourse. In putting forth this theory which compares the late Kant to Lacan, I took issue with Alenka Zupancic’s essay in Ethics in the Real where she argues that Kant’s essay is wrong, a fantasy. My premise is, rather, that Kant stumbled upon the distinction of good from evil at the site of human ignorance.While Zupancic wishes to give us an ethics of Kant’s categorical imperative—the good of one is the good of all— Lacan gives us an ethics of individual truth which concerns the sinthome, the real, and the death drive. Zupanéic argues that Kant meant the same thing by the highest good and the highest evil. She bases this argument on Slavoj Ziiek’s notion that there is such a thing as a pure ethical act,Antigone’s saying “no” to Creon’s dictum becoming the prime example.Antigone’s “no” to Creon becomes a transgression of the Other. Ziiek says that the pure ethical act is a “no” to the symbolic Other. Russell Grigg argues, on the contrary, that Antigone’s act was not pure, but was simply an acceptance of the law Creon had laid down. I make one suggestion that might shed further light on this debate in saying that Lacan claimed that suicide was the one pure act. So, ifAntigone did commit a pure act, it was not in accepting Creon’s law, but in taking her own life. The rest of my chapter rests upon the premise that in discovering that self— interest ruled human life, rather than the categorical imperative, Kant is one with Lacan who claims that we love our repetitious, deadly sinthomes more than ourselves. I also examine the problem of relating any notion of good to the law. symptom in the real, a sublimation of the Father’s Name—of which the imaginary and symbolic are other renditions The late Lacan claimed that the law is

according

to

Miller—which is





?ction, albeit

function in the social rather than drown in up with

an answer as to

what humble



a state

reason can

necessary

one

in order that

ofpsychosis. Kant

one

cannot come

do when faced with the radical

evil of human self—interest. I would say, then, that Kant concludes with a tragic view of human life, while Lacan thought that unconscious truths rewoven in

psychoanalysis could whereby one speaks imaginary.

create

productive jouissance

the truths of the real,

not

and

an access to

the lies of the

the bien dire

symbolic

and

INDEX

1984

(Orwell)

Ausstossung (negation) 29,

126

42

autism 23 a

93—7, 99, 108,



priori 46,

see

also

object



objects 149 barred subject 2—3, see also subject Barthes, R. 136 being 58—9, 65, 168 Bejahung (af?rmation) 3, 29—30, 111 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 86—8, 105,

56

bad

Abraham 100

Abraham, K. 106 absence 39—40, 85—7, 89, 154 academic discourse 49—50, 56, act

70

107, 164 Biswas, S. 131

148—9

affect

see

jouissance

af?rmation

3, 29—30, 111

bobbin-reel game

agalma 9, 82

aim 11,108—9, 114,116 Ali, M. 35 alienation 29, 146, 153 All Day Long in the Apple Trees 139 anal drive 11, see also drives anal stage 20—1

analysis 4—5, 34, 40—2, 53—4, 58, 167 Analysis Terminable and Interminable 41 analyst’s discourse 61, 66—70, 72—3, 75, 165—6; four discourses 49—51;sign of love 55—6

Antigone 17, 128, 146, 148, 155, anxiety 85, 112 Anxiety (Seminar X) 14, 22, 36 Aphrodite 70 Aristotle 122, 163 art

36, 127, 136—9, 142

attachment

theory

Aujhebung 31 Augustin 100

38

170

see

Fort! Da!

body 2, 12—13, 153; discourse 45, 63; ego/ misrecognition 35—7; the letter 139; logic of structure 21, 24; surface 116—17, 124—6 Borromcan knot 1—2, 4, 7, 12—13, 24—5,

133 breast 3, 26, 112—13;cup and 19—20; object’a 78, 94—6 Brentano, F. 30 Candide 146

Cantor, G. 35, 138 capital phi 3, 124 castration 17—18; anxiety 80, 98; logic of structure 20, 25, 34—5, 40—1; object a 82, 85, 96; subject/object 7—8 categorical imperative 15—16, 148

catoptrique 126 cave paintings 126—7 center

130—1

Chapman,

M.D. 155

1 72

Index

childhood

infancy Chomsky,

10, 20—1, 79—81, 87, 89,

see

also

N. 5

communication

theory

47

compactness 51 condensations 88

108—10;scopic 120—5; as Trieb (force) 105—7; unary traits 110—12

real

consciousness 24, 122 contradiction

88; Burning Child 127—8 drives 1—3, 6, 8—12, 104—5, 113—17, 167; aim 108; discourse 64, 69—70; letter 132—3; logic of structure 21, 24, 27—32; as montage 82; object a 92, 98—9; as

dreams

Duras, M. 13—15, 130—2, 135—6, 139—42,

138, 146

Cordié, A. 138

169

Critique of Practical Reason 149 cry 79, 95 culture 124, 127 cup 19—20

Ecrits

écriture 49

9—11, 85, 164—5, 167; discourse 63—4; drives 104—5, 110—13;logic of structure

cut

27, 31—2

Cythera

23, 43n3, 98, 100

70

ego 2—4, 7, 17, 155; discourse 61, 66; gaze 122—3; logic of structure 33—4;

misrecognition 35—7; the object 83—4; object a 87—8; reshaping 37—9 ego ideal 3, 33—7, 39—40, 151; mirror stage 22—3;

Darmon, M. 151

Einziger Zagen

De la Nature des Semblants 14

Encore

death drive

28—30, 61, 109, 146—7,

see

also

of the letter 135

88

Seminar XX

see

energy 69

deconstruction 119

England 80, equivalence

defense 31—2, 150

erogenous

Deleuze, G. 156 demand 27, 114 denial 29, 31

Ethics

repetition

practice

92

126

21, 63, 109 ethics 15—17, 42, 144—52, 157—60; discourse 50, 68

Derrida,]. 62, 80, 114, 116, 119,

134

Descartes, R. 12, 28, 125—6, 128 desire 5—6, 10, 17, 49—56; discourse as social link 46—7; Dora case 97; drives 106—7, 114—15; ethics 145—7, 156—60; 119—20, 122—3, 125—7; jouissance 68—9; logic of structure 21, 27, 31, 39—42; object a 82, 85—6, 88, 91—3;

Ethics

zones

of Psychoanalysis of the Real 145

see

SeminarVII

evil 15—18, 144—51, 154—7, 159—60, 170 excess 45—6, see also object a cxtimate

object 59, 100—1, 140—1

Extimité 12, 14, 131—2, 166, 169

gaze

obsessionaJ/hysterical discourses 60—1; practice of the letter 135—6; signi?er/ signi?ed 61—2; university/hysteric discourses 70—5

Deutsch,

H. 94

developmental theory

20—1

dialectic 117 difference 21—2

Ding, das (Thing) 6, 8, 16, 27; discourse 57, 70; ethics 150—1; object a 85, 90 Diogenes 66 discourse 4—6, 49—52, 86, 165—6; analyst’s 66—8; jouissance 68—70; object a 56—9;

obsessional/hysterical 60—1;sign of love 53—6; signi?er/signi?ed 61—2; as a social link 45—9; university/hysteric 70—5 case

81, 97

Drang (push) 11,

drives 114—15;ethics 160; gaze 123, 128; object a 89, 92, 96; practice of the letter 135—7; reason and 145, 147

father 17—18, 21—2, 26, 74—5; Dora/Little Hans 97—8; ethics 158—9; object a 81—2 Father’s Name 1—2, 4—5, 7—8, 14, 170; a as signi?er of void 93—4; discourse theory

62, 65—6; logic

116

of structure 25, 29;

optics 118, 123 feces 112—13 fetish 39 ?ction 12, 130—2, 136—8, 168—9

Finnegan: l/Vake 97 force 9, 105—7 form 47 Unconscious 22, 122 Fort! Da! 8, 10, 25; drives 107—8, 114; Formations

object

distance 128 Dora

fading 27, 37 fantasy 6, 8, 15—17, 166; discourse 67—8;



of the

86—9, 96

Foster, [-1. 118—19 Foucault, M. 119

1 73

Index

Freud, S. 3, 9—11, 17, 164—5, 167—8;

Beyond

Principle 86—8; theory 54-5, 64—5, 69; drives

the Pleasure

discourse

104—6, 108—12, 114—17; ego 38; id 28; Kant 149—51, 156, 158; object a 80—1, 88—91, 93—4, 96—7; practice of the letter 138—9; structure of the subject 20—1, 24—6, 29—30, 33, 41 Fiihrer 38 function

also childhood instinct 9, 86 Instincts and theirVicissitudes 105

intelligence

41

International

40, 98—9, 142

11—13, 112—13, 118—20, 128, 168—9; body’s surface 124—6; discourse 72, 75; logic of structure 31; object a 86—7;

practice of the letter 142; sardine can episode 120—1;scopic drive 121—4 gender 72—5, see also sexual difference genital phase 20—1 geometry 12, 51, 120, 124—6, 128 Gestalt 24

Gilson,_]—P. 17, givens 95 goal 114, 116

Psychoanalytic

Association

38, 70, 80, 164

gaze

Interpretation of Dreams 28 introjection 27 invocatory drive 69, 137, 167 Irigaray, L. 118, 126

Jakobson, R. 4, 47, 51, 88, 110 jealousy 160 Jones, E. 94 jouis-sens 10, 13—14, 99, 101, 134, 136—7 jouissance 1—2, 4—9, 11—15, 17, 163—9; discourse 50—8, 64—70; discourse as social link 45—9; drives 106—8, 113—14, 116; ethics 149, 154—60; object a 82,

154

88, 90, 92—5; practice of the letter 131—3, 140—2; signi?er/signi?ed 61—2;

God

42, 100 Gédel, K. 92 good 15—18, 149, 156—7, 159—60,

see

also

ethics

Gourhan,

infancy 64, 164; drives 106—7; ego/ misrecognition 35—6; gaze 118—19, 122; logic of structure 20, 26—7, 38; mirror stage 22; object a 79, 95, see

university/hysteric

discourses 70—1,

73—5

Joyce,_]. 8, 97 judgment 32—3, 122—3, jung, C. 92

L. 126

Grigg, R. 17, 144, 146, 148, Group Psychology 38, 156

170

Hartmann, H. 26, 73 hate 18, 54, 144, 156

Hegel, G.W.F. 64, 163 Heidegger, M. 13—14, 85, 114, 134—7, 163

Kant, I. 15—18, 41, 57, 120, 144—6, 156—60, 169—70; alienation/separation 146—50, 153—4; Das Ding 150—1;

object/absence 154—6; projective plane 151—2

Hitler, A. 155 hole 9-12, 27; drives 106—8, 110—1 1; ethics 157—8; as window 128 homology 13, 134

hysteria 5—7, 39, 165—6; discourse 49—50, icon 1 11, 1 14 id 3, 27—9, 38, 40, 167 ideal ego 16, 22, 34—7, 39-40,

identity 62, 64, 74—5 ignorance 15, 144—6,

see

also ego

object

135-7

152

image 34—9, 125—6, 142 imaginary 11, 34, 39, 94—7, 151; phallus incest 60, 74, 95



56—9, 99; sign oflove 53—5 and Truth 82

Kuhn,T. 124

illusion 34—5

79—82

knotting 133 knowledge (32) 5—6, 42, 49—53, 65—72, 165—6; hysteric’s discourse 60—1; object Kohut, H. 79 Kris, E. 26

ideal 156; and the

Klein, M. 38, 78, 91, 94, 109, 149

Knowledge

53, 55—6, 60—1,71—5

identi?cation

155—6

lack 6—7, 16, 27; discourse 57, 71, 74;

ethics 155, 158; gaze 122—3; object 84—6, 89—91, 94—7



Lafont,]. 108, 115 Lagache, D. 1—4, 23—9, 32—4, 37—8, 41, 164

lalangue 2, 4, 90, 134; discourse 46, 51; ethics 149 L’angoisse 139

structures

I 74

Index

language 1—2, 5—7, 10, 12—15, 42, 127, 168;

discourse structures 51—2, 57—60, 63—70; drives 29—30, 106—9, 116—17; ethics 134—44; object a 84—6; partial drives 132—3; Peirce/Lacan 114—15; signi?er/ signi?ed 61—2; as social link 45—9

law 17—18, 42, 53; ethics 146—9, 153, 155—6, 158—9 leaders 156 letter 8, 12—14, 93, 127; metonymy 134—5;

object/identi?cations 135—7; partial drives 132—3; practice of 130—1, 139—42, 168—9; topological structure 131—2 Lévi—Strauss, C. 23 libido

see

material

as

2, 4, 79, 153; gaze 118—19; logic of structure 22—3, 36, 38—9, 42

mirror stage

misrecognition 35—7, 55 Mébius strip 10—11, 110—11, 121—2, Moby-Dick 155

Monroe, M. 125—6 moral law 41—2, 147, 149—52, 155, 158, see

also ethics

53—6, 68—9; object practice of the letter 140—2 Love Letter 82, 158 Lowenstein, R. 26 structures

object



93, 100;

negation 29,

see

also sexual difference

Marret—Maleval, S. 123 master

discourse 6, 15, 48—50, 55—60, 67, 86

master

signi?er (S1) 5—6, 48—9, 56—8,

65—7, 70

murmurings

see

lalangue

mathematics 84—5, 146

meaning 10, 65, 113—14,

127

memory 31

also sexual difference

level 15

neurosis 7, 72—3, 138 normality 69 139 extimate 100—1; and 135—7; primary 92—3

3—10, 12, 14, 99—101, 166—7; absence 85—7; Beyond the Pleasure Principle 87—8; changes over time 80—3; classic cases 97—9; construction of 78—9; discourse 50, 56—9, 63—6, 69—70; drives 114—15; ego 83—4; gaze 121, 125—6, 128; logic of structure 39—42; mathematics 84—5; practice of the letter 132, 138, 141—2; sign oflove 55—6; as a

obsessional discourse 7, 39, 50, 60—1, 72—3

formula 62, 81—2, 84, 97, 158 On Narcissism:An Introduction 26, 90

Oedipal

metaphor 5, 14, 52, 65, 88, 138,

156

metonymy 8, 10, 14, 65, 110, 156; object a

88, 100; practice of the letter 133—5,

One 67—8 Oneness 79 ontic 123, 135, 163

138 m’étre 59

optics 120, 125,

Miller,]-A. 1—2, 6, 12—15, 114, 152,

oral drive 11, 109 oral phase 20—1

163—6, 169—70; discourse

as

social link

51, 53, 65—6; knowledge 69—70; logic of 46, 48—9; discourse

Father’s Name

signi?er of void 93—7; Ur—lining of the subject 88—90;WOMAN 90—1 object relations theory 3, 9, 78—9, 87—8, 91—2; logic of structure 26—7, 36, 38

H. 155 see

see

42

identi?cations

marks 127

meta

126

object 57—9, 80—2;

40—1, 72—4

60,

122

narcissism 59, 61, 83, 90, 147, 152 need 27

object

men

ego/misrecognition 118—19, 122—3; object a 40,

of the father

nothing

150

Melville,

gaze

movements

name

love 5, 13—15, 27, 156, 165; discourse

maternal

152

Moderato Cantabile 13—14, 131—3, 135, 137, 139—42, 169

Mulvey, L. 118, myth 52

look 119, 125 loss 7, 152; discourse 45, 56, 62, 64; a 78—9, 90—1

man

61—2

Mourning and Melancholia 89—90

51—3

146—50

males 80,

signi?er/signi?ed

140, 142;

81—2, 86—92, 95—6

Little Hans 80—2, 97, 122 littoral 131, 133

lying

81, 90, 93,

99; practice of the letter 131—5, 137—8,

36—8;

literature 13—14, 130, 134—41; ofjouissance 141—2

logic



mother 8, 25—7, 133;

jouissance

light 120—1 linguisterie

19—20, 38; object

structure

structures

organism 23—5,

Orwell, G. 126

see

28

also gaze

Index

Other 3—4, 7—9, 14—15; discourse 48, 53—6, 61—2; drives 113—14;ego/

misrecognition 36, 38—9;

19—20, 32—3; object a 80, 87, 94—6; Peirce/Lacan 111—14; practice of the letter 133—4, 136—8, 142

ethics 146,

148, 152—5; gaze 122—4; hysteria 71—5; logic of structure 25, 29, 31, 42; object a 91, 94; practice of the letter 135, 140 Other Side

of Psychoanalysis see

realism 127

15, 144—7, 149—50, 157, 159—60, 169—70

Alone

Ovid 55

see

also

drives

repetition 6, 28, 30, 164; drives 108—9; object a 86—8, 94, see also death drive representation 149 repression 9—10, 21—2, 33, 105 return

Pascal, B. 62



reality principle 16, 106, 151 Religion Within the Limits of Reason

Seminar XVII

Painting 124—5 paranoia 11, 17, 151—2, 155—6 partial drives 21, 24; letter 132—3,

22—3

rim10—11, 21,109—10 Rome Discourse 12, 131

passion see jouissance pathology 83

Peirce, CS. 11, 53—4, 62, 105, 111—17

penis 80, 94, 96 perspective 11—12, 120—2, 125—6, 128, phallus 11, 18, 52, 72; ethics 153, 158; gaze 119—20, 124; object a 40—1,

56—8, 65, see also master signi?er S2 56—9, 65, see also knowledge Sade, M. 145, 156—7 Sak, O. 34 sardine can episode 120—1, 125, 127—8 Saussure, F. 19, 42, 61—2, 65, 67, 110, 131 scansion 30 Schema L 24, 61, 90, 152

S1

168

79—82, 94—5, 97—8

phi 3, 124 philosophy 6, 50, 70—1, 92 phobia 8, 39, 98 phoneme 112—13 physics 105 Piaget,_]. 20—1, 26 picture 120—2, 125, 128—9 place 31, 53 plane 151—3

science 71—2, 124

scopic screen

drive 12, 69, 121—5 85, 121—2, 125

seeing 35, see Segal, H. 91

also gaze; vision

also ego self—interest 150—1, 154—5, 157 semblant 79, 82, 93—4, 138, 168 self

Plato 12, 47, 120, 126

158,

see

pleasure principle 10, 16, 30, 86—8; drives

Seminar II 3, 85 Seminar III 84, 104

post—structuralists 136 primary objects 92—3 primary process 24

Seminar IV

106, 108—9; ethics 157—8

SeminarV

22,

17, 170

push 11, 116 Pyle,C.11,111—14,116 Quelle 1 16

Rabaté,]—M.8, 13, 131, 133,

164

Rabelais, F. 52

Ragland,

(Formations of the Unconscious)

122

(Ethics of Psychoanalysis) 12, 27, 90, 130, 136, 145, 147,149, 154, 157

SeminarVII

projective plane 151—3 psychoanalysis situs 12, 124, 168 psychosis 46, 95, 119; ethics 152—3, 155—6, 158; logic of structure 21—2, 26, 29, 32 act

(The Object Relation) 7, 25,

78—9, 81—3, 96, 98, 119

progress 157 projection 27

pure ethical

1 75

E. 148

real 1, 3, 5—6, 8, 12—14;discourse 47, 54,

67; drives 101, 108—10; ethics 147—8, 152; gaze 120—1; logic of structure

SeminarVIII 7, 81—2, 85 Seminar X (Anxiety) 14,

22,

36

(The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis) 15, 82—3, 85, 99, 108—9, 120—1, 123, 146 Seminar XIII (On the object of psychoanalysis) 120, 124 Seminar XVII ( The Other Side of Psychoanalysis) 48, 165 Seminar XI

Seminar XIX 51 Seminar XX

(Encore) 2—3, 7—8, 12, 24—5,

131, 165; discourse 47, 51—3, 67; drives 107, 112—13, 116; object a 84, 91 Seminar XXI 7 Seminar XXIII 97

1 76

Index

separation set:

146

Three

mathematics 146;

structure

23

Essays

on

sexuation 157

torus

showing 125, 128 sign 112 signi?ed 20, 31, 61—2, 67—8, 119 signi?er 1—2, 6, 165—6; discourse

96

45, 51; drives 105—10; equivalence 126; ethics 146, 151,154,157—8;gaze 118, 120—1, 123—5; letter 130—2; Peirce/Lacan 111—12,114—15

torsion 115—17

shame 13

Theory of Sexuality

topology 2, 4—5, 9—12, 17, 163, 165—9;

7, 40—1 sexual difference 119; discourse structures 51—3, 57, 60, 65, 72—5; object a 79—81, 97; psychosis 153 sexual non-rapport 128, 137—8, 141 sexuality 10, 74—5, 115, 125, 157 sex

the

discourse

structures

8, 11—14, 84, 100, 131, 169 totalitarianism 156—7, 159 Tractatus 65 transference 6, 53—5, 93 transitivism 37

4, 134 Trieb (force) 9, 105—7 truth 12, 66, 70—1, 138, 168

trauma

48—9, 56—63, 73—4; ethics 149; gaze 124; id 28—9; logic of structure 19—20, 39; object a 97—8; One 67—8; practice of the letter 137 Silverman, K. 119, 126 structures

Truth Arises From

Misrecognition

55

Sinai 42

unary traits 110—11, 115—16, 121 unconscious 6, 29—30; discourse structures

sinthome 1, 4, 7, 16—17, 61, 82—3; discourse as social link 45—6; Kant/ethics 147, 150, 160; practice of the letter 133, 137

56, 68, 72—3; drives 106, 117; practice of the letter 135—8 university discourse 49—50, 56, 70

also cut; void social 153—4

Ur

8(0) 3,

object 11 Ur-lining 46, 88,

see

Socrates 6, 55, 82 space 124, 126, 136

vacuole 131

speaking 1, 116, 140—1 Speculum of the Other Woman sphere 11 Strachey,]. 9, 73, 167

vase

118

P. 67

vicissitudes 9, 105, 108, 110 vision 120—1, 125, 128, 142,

void a

(0) 4, 8, 157;

discourse 56—7;

object

85, 90, 92—7; practice of the letter

Voltaire 146

32—5

subject (3) 5—6, 16, 19—20, 30—2, 39, 66, 106, 164—5; Borromean structure 26—7; discourse as social link 46—8; gaze 122—4, 126; Kant 147—8; letter 131;

object a 40, 85, 99; object 88—90; upside-down logic

as

Ur—lining

32—4

Wajcman, G. 124—5, 128, I'Veltanschauung 15

168

will 146—7, 159 Winnicott, D. 79—81

Wittgenstein,

L. 65

MM 149

40—1, 72—5, 81, 94; Dora case 97; WOMAN 90—1, see also sexual

woman

sublation 31 sublimation 14, 40, 110, 138, 142 substance 113

difference also

suicide 146

word 115—16, 124,

superego 38, 42, 50, 69, 73, 158 surface 106—7, 109, 112, 116—17, 124—6

Young

surplus 4—5, 45—6, 49, see also object a symbolic 8, 27, 37, 101; and imaginary

,inel (aim) 11, 108—9, 114,

das

also gaze

136

mirror stage 22—3;

practice of the letter 131—3, 137;

Thing see Ding, thought 125

see

voice 13—15, 167; drives 112—13;practice of the letter 132, 139—42

19, 23 structure 1—2, 4—5, 42, 83, 163—4, 165, 169; Borromean 26—7; gaze 124—5; Lacan’s reconceptualization 19—22;

upside-down logic

3, 34—6, 38—9, 85, 136

Verhaeghe,

structuralism

Lagache 23—5;

98

34

see

signi?er

Homosexual Woman 26, 81 116

Ziiek, S. 17, 170; discourse structures 55, 59, 65; ethics 146, 148—9

ZupanéiE,A. 15—16, 145—9,

170