Lacan and Religion 9781844657032, 9781844657049

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Intellectual biography
2. The basic concepts
3. Jouissance and feminine sexuality
4. A review of the literature
5. Lacan as a theologian
Notes
Further reading
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

LACAN AND RELIGION

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LACAN AND RELIGION ARON DUNLAP

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published in 2014 by Acumen Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group, an informa business © Aron Dunlap, 2014 This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights 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 known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

: 978-1-84465-703-2 (hardcover) : 978-1-84465-704-9 (paperback) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

For my father.

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CONTENTS

Introduction 1. Intellectual biography

1 6

2. The basic concepts

32

3. Jouissance and feminine sexuality

80

4. A review of the literature

107

5. Lacan as a theologian

141

Notes Further reading Bibliography Index

165 170 174 181

vii

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INTRODUCTION Religion is a symptom … As for being relieved of a symptom, I promise them nothing. (Lacan 1975) I have one problem, and I wouldn’t trade it for a thousand solutions. (Turkish proverb)

This book is a general introduction to the life and work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, as well as an attempt to understand Lacan in relation to the discourses of religion and theology. Our guiding thread throughout will be the clinical origins and contexts of Lacan’s thought, in accord with the constant reminder he gave his listeners that, notwithstanding his many forays into philosophy, art and religion, he was first and foremost an analyst: “We enter this field of knowledge by way of a unique experience that consists, quite simply, in being psychoanalyzed” (Lacan 2008: 9). To neglect the importance of Lacan’s work as an analyst – in the attempt to fit his thought into a philosophical or religious mould of some sort – would only serve to distort Lacan’s thought and make a challenging writer that much harder to approach. Furthermore, it will be for us precisely the clinical perspective that will allow us to consider, in the final chapter, what resources Lacan might provide for the religious scholar or the theologian. While Lacan was an avowed atheist who would perhaps have blanched at the prospect of a book that reads him from the perspective of religion and theology, there is nevertheless something resolutely theological in the way that he situates religious content in his discourse. He does not subsume religion under psychoanalysis, as did his master Freud; on the contrary, he quite freely admits that it is always the religious aspect that takes precedence in the psychic life of the human subject. However, Lacan is not interested in a comparative study of religion or in speculating as to what role, in general, religion or religions might play in a culture or for an individual. Lacan is much more concerned with accepting – on faith, we might say – the religious material that an analysand (that is, the person 1

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undergoing analysis) presents to the analyst, and then working from those principles. The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was an atheist who assumed that psychoanalysis would ultimately be considered an authentic science of the human mind, and that, as such, it would eventually be capable of proving religion redundant. He conceived of neurosis as an “individual religiosity” and religion as a “universal obsessional neurosis” (Freud 1995: 435). In other words, religion, whether of the individual or the collective, was pathological, and Freud saw the categories of psychoanalysis as sufficient to explain this particular pathology away. Lacan, as an ardent follower of Freud, also embraced atheism. Early in his career he expressed the hope that psychoanalysis might one day attain scientific status; however, he ultimately came to believe that it was closer to rhetoric than any scientific discipline and that the “analyst is a rhetor” (Lacan 1977–8: 15/11/77).1 Likewise, his atheism was more complicated than Freud’s; while Lacan rued the manner in which the psychoanalytic community looked at times like a modernist secular church,2 he was a persistent and very subtle reader of the Bible, of Christian and Jewish theologians, and of scriptures from other traditions. For Freud, religion was a cultural illusion destined to be expelled by the growing light of scientific modernity. Lacan, in accepting the fact that psychoanalysis would never become properly scientific, came to hold the position that religion played an irreplaceable role in people’s lives – that it offered something to the human subject that scientific and psychoanalytic knowledge would never be able to grant. As he said towards the end of his life when asked about the conflict between psychoanalysis and religion: “If psychoanalysis does not triumph over religion, it is because religion is unstoppable … It is not just psychoanalysis over which religion will triumph, but a whole lot of other things as well. One cannot imagine the power of religion” (Lacan 2005b: 79).3 Lacan did not have any patience for the approach of Carl Jung, Freud’s most famous disciple, who broke from Freud and came to see all religions as variations on a universal method of psychic healing. Lacan has Jung as well as a particular type of religious scholar in his sights when he dismisses the academic study of religion as “nothing but a basket category” (Lacan 1998: 113), and when he says that “putting all religions into the same sack and doing what they call the history of religion, it’s really horrible” (Lacan 2005b: 81). When Lacan spoke of the academic study of religion in this manner, he was usually thinking of psychoanalysis as its opposite, as “a science of the particular” (1991a: 21). This does not mean that, for Lacan, religion was not to be taken seriously, but rather that, first, psychoanalysts should not confuse analysis with religion, should not let the ancient and perhaps authentic psychological aids found in many religions become confused with the techniques founded by Freud; and, second, should not 2

INTRODUCTION

simply dismiss the religious beliefs of their analysands as “illusory”, but would pay very close attention to the foundational role that a particular religion has played in their psychological history. A brief example may clarify Lacan’s approach. In 1952, in the first of his famous seminars, Lacan tells the story of a patient of his who had grown up in an Islamic environment and who was suffering from an inexplicable paralysis in his arm: He had already been in analysis with someone else before coming to me. He had quite peculiar symptoms connected with the use of the hand, an organ of some significance for those entertaining activities on which analysis has shed so much light. An analysis conducted along classical lines did its utmost, without success, to organize, at any cost, his various symptoms around, obviously, infantile masturbation, and the prohibitions and the repressions that it would have brought with it in his environment … Unfortunately, it explained nothing, nor did it resolve anything. (Lacan 1991a: 196) Lacan quite explicitly rejects the “classical” viewpoint which automatically and unthinkingly connected all references to the hand to infantile masturbation – completely ignoring the religious significance of this symptom – and instead directs his attention to the unique circumstances of this particular analysand: One of the most striking elements of the story of his subjective development was his estrangement from, his aversion to the Koranic law. Now, this law is something infinitely more complete that we can imagine, in our cultural sphere, defined as it is by Render unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s. In the Islamic sphere on the contrary, the law has a totalitarian character which will on no account permit the isolation of the juridical from the religious plane. So the subject manifested a failure to recognize the Koranic law. In a subject who belonged, through his ancestry, his functions, his future, to this cultural sphere, this was something which struck me in passing, in line with the idea, which I believe to be sound enough, that one should not fail to recognizes the symbolic appurtenances of a subject. In fact the Koranic law decrees the following, with respect to the person who is found guilty of theft – The hand will be cut off. Now, the subject had, in his childhood, been caught up in a whirlwind both private and public, which amounted to the 3

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following, that he had heard it said – and it was quite a scene, his father being a civil servant and having lost his position – that his father was a thief and must therefore have his hand cut off. (Ibid.: 196–7, original emphasis) Lacan is taking into account, here, a specific feature of Islamic law, seeing its symbolic importance in the subject’s history, and focusing on how the subject deals with this symbolic node in the recounting of his story. Lacan’s interpretation connected his patient’s difficult relation to the law in which he was raised – even if his father was only threatened with such a punishment in an environment where the injunction was rarely taken literally – with the peculiarity of his symptom. As Lacan notes: “For every human being, everything personal which can happen to him is located in the relation to the law to which he is bound. His history is unified by the law, by his symbolic universe, which is not the same for everyone” (ibid.: 197). Since the laws in which we are raised are very often connected with a particular religion, or even with the rejection of a particular religion, to fail to consider the religious element in the course of an analysis would be a grave error. It should be clear that Lacan is not interested in articulating an overarching “theory of religion” or an account of religion that would simply fit particular religions into a generic frame. But while Lacan may have rejected such generalizations of religion he held that to examine religious belief in an individual’s life is to examine the nature of human assumption-making in general: There is a certain way of carrying out the reduction of the field of the divine which, in its final term, in its final source, is quite favourable in ensuring that all the little fish are finally gathered into the same big net. What is at stake when what we are dealing with is the divine dimension and generally that of the spirit, turns entirely around the following: what do we suppose to be already there before we discover it? (Lacan 1967–8: 15/11/67) We will return to this passage in the conclusion of the final chapter of this book; for now, let it suffice to say that religion is viewed by Lacan as uniquely equipped to provide a unifying role within the psyche, providing meaning by determining at the outset what can and cannot be found. Strangely enough, then, while Lacan rejects any homogenization within the religious field, he affirms the supremely homogenizing power of religion itself, which is like a net that determines the shape of its catch, no matter what is to be caught. In the above case study Lacan not only places great importance on the religious elements of his analysand’s life, but he also makes the point that 4

INTRODUCTION

different religions have quite different functions and effects. In regard to the Nietzschean motto, “God is dead”, that Freud accepted implicitly, Lacan introduced a nuance in line with his overall attitude towards religion: “The true formula of atheism is not God is dead … [but rather] God is unconscious” (Lacan 1978: 59; emphasis in original). If God is simply dead, then theology is pointless and the study of religion is merely the analysis of an illusion. But if God is unconscious, the theological notion of revelation would seem to play a crucial role in the human psyche; accordingly, we should not be surprised that Lacan’s treatment of his analysands aims at the revelation of something that doesn’t necessarily fit into an already given theoretical framework, not even that of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis. The two premises of Lacan’s treatment of religion – an avowal of its particular power, and a rejection of any tendency to generalize in the field of the divine – can perhaps be summed up in the following way. In dismissing the study of religion as a “waste basket” category, Lacan is perhaps not telling us that we need to take out the trash, but rather hinting that we might learn a little something by picking through it – just as the dream will form itself by sifting through the detritus of the day’s events, and just as the analyst guides the cure by going through the discarded contents of her analysand’s unconscious. As in Edgar Allan Poe’s story of the purloined letter, which Lacan liked so much (Lacan 2006l), where an incriminating document is left out in the open all the better to conceal it, perhaps that which is most valuable lies where one least expects to find it. In a secular age, when all the holy writs are dumped into the trash can, is it possible that the unconscious aim of such a gesture is to protect these texts, rather than to destroy them? Could it be that the safest place for the most highly valued possession of all is in the garbage dump?

5

1. INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called “Bottom’s Dream”, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death. (William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 4, scene 1)

For someone whose whole career revolved around the tragi-comedies of other people’s families, Lacan is quite conspicuously silent concerning his own. Perhaps this is because, starting in the 1950s, he began to become something of a celebrity – in the way that only intellectuals in Paris can be – and he felt the need to protect his privacy. Or perhaps it was a way of bolstering his status as an intellectual master, the details of whose life are all the more alluring for being unknown. While Freud revealed his discovery of psychoanalysis to the world in a book detailing scores of his own dreams and the intimate details therein, Lacan never gives us so much as a glimpse into his own dream life. If, as some writers have insisted, Freud was a kind of a Moses, it seems that Lacan was fated to play the role of Oedipus. Just as Moses had to remove his shoes before God and suffer an adult circumcision, Freud, in order to give justification to a movement that would lay bare the souls of men and women, had to first lay bare his own. Lacan, though, entered into the treacherous labyrinth of the Freudian hierarchy as a stranger and departed as a pariah, decrepit and led (blindly, some said) by his daughter and her husband. Freudians of a certain ilk will claim that Lacan was an ungrateful son who aimed to slay the father and take his place. They point to the verdict of Lacan’s own analyst (who would become one of his theoretical nemeses) as well as to the novelty of many of Lacan’s concepts, terms and clinical practices. Lacan, though, from the time he called for a “return to Freud” to the point where it was quite fashionable to be called “Lacanian”, proclaimed only loyalty to the father, saying to his followers the year before he died: “It is up to you to be Lacanian if you wish; as for me I am a Freudian” (Lacan 1981). 6

INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY

BEGINNINGS

Jacques Marie-Émile Lacan was born in Paris in 1901 into a family of vinegar merchants whose roots were solidly bourgeois and Catholic. He was the first of four children, but the brother next to him in age, Raymond, died when Jacques was only three. A sister, Madeleine, was born in 1903, and five years later came their brother Marc, of whom Lacan was said to be very protective. In her 1990 biography of Lacan (the only major study to date, which I have relied on heavily for this chapter) Elisabeth Roudinesco notes that while Marc was the favourite of his mother, Jacques enjoyed the affections of their nurse, who called him Jacquot. Their mother was very pious, and had an “ardent streak of mysticism” (Roudinesco 1990: 103). Jacques’s great-uncle on his father’s side, Ludovic Dessaux, was responsible for the success of the family vinegar business at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1880 he revamped the company, requiring a strict dress code, mandatory times for prayer, thirteen-hour work days, and an absolutely sober working environment. The home in which Lacan grew up inherited some of this seriousness, which we see perhaps in Lacan’s early appetite for books and his disdain of sports. Though Lacan would eventually reject the stifling moral atmosphere in which he was raised, the upward mobility which his ancestors valued would also characterize his own personality. He loved fast cars, dressed in immaculately tailored suits, and became a connoisseur of rare books and fine art. He rejected the Roman Catholicism that went hand in hand with the bourgeois habits of the day, and yet did not fail to baptize all of his children. The interest he showed in mysticism throughout his work can perhaps be traced to the influence of his mother and the general religious culture of his upbringing. More than one commentator has noted that the specially made shirts Lacan habitually wore bore a striking resemblance to clerical collars. Lacan’s references to his own biography, and especially to his family life, are extremely rare, and so a denouncement he gave of his paternal grandfather in 1961 is quite remarkable. According to the reminiscences of his brother Marc, Jacques despised his grandfather Émile, who was controlling and tyrannical. Lacan painted this picture in one session of his ninth seminar in 1961: The meaning of “My grandfather is my grandfather” is this: that the said frightfully petit bourgeois, the horrible individual thanks to whom I learned at an early age how to perform the essential act of cursing God – this person is precisely the one officially recorded as the father of my father, since he was married to my father’s mother and since my father’s birth was the subject of the document in question. (Quoted in Roudinesco 1997: 8) 7

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Beyond the singular quality of any statement about his family members, this passage is fascinating for several reasons. First of all, Lacan directly connects this denunciation of his grandfather with his own atheism, suggesting that his lack of religious belief was somehow foisted upon him. There is also the strange emphasis on his father’s birth document as being the only proof that this man is his grandfather. This would agree with Lacan’s thought about fathers, that it was their name that mattered, and the passing on of that name to their children that seemed to be necessary as a kind of “proof ” of fatherhood. But here the presence of the grandfather’s name on the certificate of the father is a curse. Lacan never said anything similar about his father, who, according to his brother, was “loving and loved” (ibid.). From 1907 to 1919 Jacques attended the Collège Stanislas, a prestigious institution with high academic standards, at which Lacan excelled in Latin, German and religion. Stanislas was run by Marist fathers but Jesuits taught there and had a strong influence on the spirit of the school. Although at the age of sixteen Lacan would reject the Roman Catholicism he grew up in, the serious intellectuality of the Jesuits is clearly present in the dense, difficult and allusive writing style Lacan would perfect as an adult. While Stanislas was a conservative school it maintained very high intellectual standards and was not afraid of modernity – at one point the chairman of its board was censured by the Vatican for, according to Roudinesco, “trying to introduce the spirit of the Enlightenment into a reactionary and hidebound church” (ibid.: 9). Descartes was the supreme philosopher at Stanislas, and it is a mark of Lacan’s originality that, later, he did not simply reject Descartes when it became fashionable among intellectuals to do so. Instead, Lacan recast his importance completely, arguing that the Cartesian self-transparency of thought was not simply to be rejected as a naive illusion; on the contrary, in positing the cogito as the result of a kind of absolute doubt, Descartes had intuited the truth of the unconscious. For Lacan, the subject of psychoanalysis is the Cartesian subject, “who appears at the moment when doubt is recognized as certainty” (Lacan 1978: 126). The France of Lacan’s day was an interesting place to study religion. In 1886, as a result of the secularization policy, a section called “religious sciences” was created at the École pratique des hautes études (an esteemed university in Paris for post-graduate studies) to teach what had previously been taught under theology. This was a kind of compromise between those sympathetic to the clerical right, who could not see studying matters of religion apart from a belief in them, and the anti-clerical and secular left, who denounced religion as superstition. Many scholars jumped at the chance to study religious phenomena in an objective and scientific manner free from the watchful eye of the Church. Some of these thinkers, such as Jean Baruzi, taught Lacan at Stanislas. Later on, Lacan would have a particular affinity for the most brilliant thinkers out of this mould – men like 8

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Alexandre Koyré and Henri Corbin – who were able to make their mark by looking at religious phenomena with the eyes of science instead of faith. The atmosphere of the Stanislas academy and of French intellectual culture in general was clearly very influential on Lacan, giving him a sensitivity to religious thought and to Roman Catholic philosophizing specifically. Years later, when he became interested in James Joyce, Lacan would point out that both of them had been educated by Jesuits, and that such people are “unanalyzable” (Lacan 1976). It is not clear exactly what this means for him, though he does briefly mention a resistance to analysis in “true Catholics” who have been formed in the practice of confession. In the same text (and elsewhere) he notes that Japanese people are likewise unanalysable, though for different reasons.1 It is also not quite clear what made a Jesuit education so unique to Lacan; it perhaps had something to do with a Catholic resignation to authority on the one hand, coupled with the famous attitude of inquiry exercised by the Jesuits. Lacan always connected this questioning spirit to the hysterical constitution, saying of himself that he was a “perfect hysteric … one without any symptoms” (in Schneiderman 1983: 16). Is it going too far to say that he learned this attitude from his teachers at Stanislas? The fact that the “unanalyzable personality” seems to be drawn to psychoanalysis – Joyce himself had studied it and mostly mocked it, though he did send his troubled daughter Lucia to be analysed by Carl Jung – suggests that the psychoanalysis of Lacan is not the kind that merely pursues a cure. And if the hysteric seems to be marked by the ability to say “yes” and “no” at the same time – like a precocious Jesuit scholar putting forth ideas that flirt dangerously with notions outside of the Church’s well-defined dogmas – perhaps it is their minds which most clearly reflect Freud’s unconscious, which, even when it is saying “no”, is always also saying “yes”. So, when Jacques was a very young man, he rejected his Catholic heritage, hung a poster of Spinoza’s philosophical system on his wall, jettisoned the “Marie” from his name and started dressing like a dandy.2 He rejected the bourgeois culture in which he had been raised, and perhaps Spinoza, in his status as an outcast, was a symbol of Lacan’s desire to be set apart from that environment. Fifty years later when Lacan was voted out of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) that Freud had founded, he would invoke Spinoza again, this time emphasizing that the philosopher was rejected by a people who were themselves marginalized from European culture – a Jew cast out by his synagogue. The analogy was clear: If the discipline of psychoanalysis was already looked at askance by those in the medical field, to be kicked out of this group – and at that time expulsion from the IPA was tantamount to expulsion from psychoanalysis – was in a way to be rejected by the rejects. And yet, as Lacan’s doctrine of the real would detail, the subject who found himself on the outside of the outside 9

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could very well be surprised to find himself, in a peculiar way, right in the middle of things. Lacan was educated by learned, yet pious, churchmen who were no longer completely satisfied with an attitude of closed-mindedness to modernity. Even if Stanislas was still a conservative place, the crack opened by his teachers was one that Lacan would expand into an abyss in which he would find (or create) the particular brand of atheism that characterized him his whole life: aristocratic and enlightened, yet at the same time patriarchal and conservative – and all the while possessed by a tinge of mysticism. In 1926 Marc Lacan announced his intention to take orders and enter into a monastery. Jacques was firmly against it and convinced his brother to continue his law studies, which he did for about a year. But Marc’s conviction of his calling was strong, and in 1929 he set out for the monastery Abbaye de Hautecombe where he would spend the rest of his long life. Marc’s sequestering was painful for the atheist Jacques, and even though the two carried on a correspondence over the years, Jacques visited Marc only once at the monastery, on the occasion of his brother’s ordination. When Jacques died in 1980 Marc celebrated a mass in honour of his brother, whose atheism had precluded a Catholic funeral. He reminded those present that the work of his brother was steeped in Catholic culture, if not the Catholic Church. From the account that Roudinesco gives of the relationship between the two men, most of which she gets from discussions with Marc and letters he showed her, it seems the two were quite close as children and as young men. At one point in 1953, convinced that his innovative psychoanalytic theories could have a special meaning for the Roman church, Jacques even asked his brother if he could secure him an audience with the Pope. Unfortunately, Marc did not have quite the necessary connections for that. Earlier, in 1932, Lacan dedicated his thesis to his brother with words that, according to his brother, shocked him as well as the surrealists with whom Lacan was associating and who were the first to champion his thought: “To the Reverend Father Marc-Francois Lacan, Benedictine of the Congregation of France, my brother in religion” (in Roazen 1996: 325).3

MEDICAL EDUCATION

Upon graduating from Stanislas, Lacan embarked on the path of a classical medical career, which involved first the study of neurology, then psychiatry. Lacan’s 1932 thesis would show itself to be the logical product of that education, but would also point forward to psychoanalysis. Like Freud before him, who was trained as a neurologist and did not develop the principles of psychoanalysis until he was in his forties, Lacan began to study 10

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psychoanalysis only after he had been through extensive medical training. For both men, then, analysis was something of a second career. Though Lacan did not have Freud’s excuse that prior to him psychoanalysis did not exist, the general state of psychoanalysis in France and the stigma it carried from the perspective of the “serious” medical disciplines of psychiatry and neurology made it such that Lacan had to rediscover, in a way, psychoanalysis for himself and for his countrymen. The medical community in France could accept the doctrines of Freud only insomuch as they did not deviate from their own fundamentally somatic prejudices. They assumed that mental disturbances could be traced back either to a genetic deficiency (this school of thought was known as constitutionalism, which, with its talk of “degeneracy”, easily lent itself to racist and classist diagnoses), or to an organic or energetic disturbance of the body. As Lacan would later emphasize, the transition from either of these schools of thought to psychoanalysis proper must involve the correct understanding of the role that language plays in human development, an understanding that Lacan claimed Freud possessed, though he lacked the technical vocabulary to express it. As Lacan notes, referring to Freud’s groundbreaking publication of 1900: “When the Traumdeutung was published it was way ahead of the formulations of linguistics” (2006d: 426). When, in the 1950s, Lacan called for a return to Freud, it was in order to reinterpret the early works of Freud in the light of post-Saussurian linguistics. This is the reason why Lacan, to the end of his life, always emphasized that he was a Freudian: he saw himself as the one to describe accurately what it was that Freud was aiming at, something that he believed even Freud himself could not do because he was simply born too early. As witnessed in his very earliest writings Lacan was adamant that analysis of psychological ailments must start from a consideration of the linguistic elements, and not from the standpoint of neurology or somatic concerns. Interestingly enough, this position has its origin in one of France’s great neurologists, Jean-Martin Charcot, who put forward in the 1880s the novel thesis that hysteria was a condition unconnected with the uterus, and that it was possible for men to suffer hysteria just as much as women.4 Charcot was much maligned for this position – after all, they said, hystera is the Greek word for uterus. Charcot disassociated this psychological disturbance from the physical organ, but it took his student Freud (who idolized him) to put the disturbance as well as the cure squarely in the realm of language. As the first patient of psychoanalysis, Anna O, would say, the method of Freud and his colleague, the Austrian physician Josef Breuer, was a “talking cure”. The field of medicine into which Lacan was entering had made itself highly resistant to the core doctrines of psychoanalysis. There was not even a French psychoanalytic society until 1926, which happened to be the 11

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very same year in which Lacan presented his first essay (as a co-author) to the Société Neurologique, on a man with a “fixed stare and respiratory tic”. Roudinesco notes that Lacan’s writing was “lengthy, detailed, strictly technical, and devoid of emotion: an arid bit of ordinary hospital routine” (Roudinesco 1997: 17). His style would get much more ornate over the years, yet an attention to detail would always mark his work. From 1927 to 1931 he studied mental disorders at the Saint Anne Hospital in Paris; after that he went to the Special Infirmary of the Prefecture of Police. In 1930 he studied briefly at the famous Burghölzli in Zurich (where Carl Jung and Eugene Bleuler had done their work). From all accounts, Lacan was very well integrated into the medical culture of his day. He was clearly intellectually brilliant, and was respected as a good clinician, even if his personality was difficult to deal with at times. One of his teachers at the Prefecture should be mentioned for his influence on Lacan’s early development. Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault was, according to Lacan, his “sole master in psychiatry” (Roudinesco 1990: 102), and was widely known to have an outstanding clinical mind and to be obsessed with sexual problems. He was also an expert in the Arabian arts of pleating and folding fabrics and the manner in which such clothing drapes over the body, both revealing and concealing its voluptuousness. Lacan’s later interest in topology, the science of the transformations of space, and his understanding of erotics, are indebted to the ideas of this idiosyncratic master. Clérambault is best known now for coining the term “erotomania”, which refers to the “madness of chaste love” from afar (ibid.: 106), in which a deluded person believes he is beloved by a famous personage (perhaps some celebrity or figure of royalty), but when the “lover” fails repeatedly to return passionate letters or show up for a rendezvous, love turns to hatred, with sometimes violent results. The female subject of Lacan’s medical thesis (discussed below) was such a case. Though Lacan would later claim Clérambault as a master, their relations suffered a break when Lacan published an essay entitled “Structures of Paranoid Psychoses” that Clérambault claimed to be a plagiarism of his own work. Lacan had included an ambiguous footnote that couldn’t have helped: “This image is borrowed from the oral teachings of our mentor, Monsieur G. de Clérambault, whom we owe so much of both our matter and our manner that to avoid the charge of plagiarism we should really acknowledge him as the source of every expression we use” (Roudinesco 1997: 25). Is Lacan saying with this convoluted sentence that Clérambault is really the source of everything he writes, or is he mocking the man? And if the “manner” in which this homage is paid is itself awkward, is he not laying this too at the feet of the master to whom he owes that manner? It is no surprise that the teacher (suspicious by nature) angrily confronted the student over this matter. Lacan purportedly replied that it was he, 12

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Clérambault, who was the plagiarist. Clearly, taking a master for Lacan was no simple matter, but involved fierce jealousy and competition, something that his theory of the mirror stage would later provide a framework for understanding. Along with erotomania, mental automatism is another theory to which Clérambault’s name is attached. This theory understood mental disturbances to come from the external world (as opposed to being part of one’s constitution) and to act as a sort of possession of the sick person. The World History of Psychiatry defines it as an “autonomic and automatic nucleus of ideation in pathological thinking which provokes hallucinations of hearing, the impression of actions commentary, a feeling of predicting the thoughts of other people, a feeling of being spied upon” (Pelicier 1975: 133). In Lacan’s words, this ailment concerns one who “cannot make a gesture without being ordered to, without being told: ‘Look, he’s doing that, the little rascal’” (2008: 24). Though not a psychoanalyst, Clérambault, like Freud, thought that madness was logical, that it possessed its own form of truth. While Lacan would reject mental automatism in his doctoral thesis, it most likely influenced him in the direction of Freud and psychoanalysis. In its emphasis on the external origin of symptoms, the language of mental automatism foreshadows the manner in which Lacan would later formulate the Freudian unconscious, as an agency that seems to effect us as if externally, from the “other scene”. Possessing a magnetic personality and a certain kind of genius, Clérambault was also an unapologetic misogynist who did not permit women to take his classes. He committed suicide in 1934.

AIMÉE AND THE SURREALISTS

On 10 April 1931 a young woman named Marguerite Pantaine attacked a starlet of the theatre, Huguette Duflos, with a knife, just as the latter was arriving to perform at a Parisian theatre. Huguette caught the blade with her hand, severing some tendons but escaping any more serious harm. Charges were not pressed; rather, “Aimée”, as Lacan called her in his thesis, was brought to the famous Sainte-Anne asylum. Lacan took up her case with great energy and discovered that his patient, an employee of the railway company, fancied herself a writer and had produced entire “novels”; she was obsessed with successful authors as well as actresses, many of whom she was convinced were out to harm her and her son. She was certain that a certain male novelist was exposing her intimate life in his books, was quite suspicious of the KGB, and wrote love letters to the Prince of Wales. Lacan researched into the family history of his patient and learned that her mother was also tortured by paranoia, and that Aimée had developed with a sister a close bond that had homosexual overtones. 13

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That bond was a precursor to the kinds of idealized relationships Aimée would later project onto the famous people on which she fixated – idealizations that could quickly turn to violent hatred, as in her attack against Duflos, in which Aimée’s obsession with the actress collided with the belief that the woman had designs of some sort against her son. According to Lacan’s thesis, curing Aimée meant showing her that her violence towards feminine others, who functioned for her as doubles, was actually violence against herself. Lacan stated his diagnosis in this way: “The object she strikes has a purely symbolic value, and the act brings her the satisfaction of fulfilled desire, and the delusion, having become superfluous, disappears. It seems to me that the nature of the cure reveals the nature of the disease” (in Roudinesco 1997: 48). Aimée was a woman torn between mirror images. On the one hand she adored people such as Duflos for their magnetic presence; on the other hand she would become convinced that those she idolized had malign intents towards her or her loved ones. But this duality, of course, was in Aimée, and her inability to accept it forced it to find expression “automatically” in writing and in her paranoia. Lacan’s description of her psyche seemed to suggest some of the techniques of the surrealists, in which they attempted to circumvent the control of the conscious mind when writing and making art. Lacanian commentator Jean-Michel Rabaté describes surrealism as a “quasi-Freudian movement that trusted the spontaneous dictation of the unconscious” (2003: 17). Lacan was, in fact, frequenting surrealist circles at this time, discussing his ideas with men like Salvador Dalí and André Breton. Roudinesco claims that it was Salvador Dalí’s ideas that allowed Lacan to break with the doctrine of constitutionalism, and in the following passage from Dalí’s 1930 essay, L’Ane Pourri (the Rotten Donkey), we can see something of Lacan’s description of Aimée’s situation: It is through a plainly paranoid process that it has been possible to obtain a double image, that is, the representation of an object that (without the slightest anatomical or figurative distortion) is simultaneously the representation of another object, similarly bereft of any deformation or abnormality that might reveal any arrangement. (In Roudinesco 1990: 110) An image, in Dalí’s hands, could be two things at once, and while the rational mind (and Aristotelian logic) is repelled by such a conflation, for Dalí it was only in these “paranoid” images that the truth could be grasped. Looking at Aimée from such a perspective, the dual images which caused her so much suffering, the women and men she both adored and feared, were not so much two different images but one “paranoid” image that was, to indulge in the etymology of the term, beside itself. While Lacan did not 14

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cite Dalí or other surrealists in his thesis, their influence on him in the way they understood the Freudian unconscious was profound. For the doctors, Freud’s unconscious had been reduced to a problem in need of correction; but for the surrealists, the unconscious represented another kind of logic, an opening onto something pure and artistic, at once ancient and revolutionary. Psychoanalyst Olga Cox-Cameron holds that what made Lacan’s thesis attractive to the surrealists was the fact that Lacan, in quoting at length from Aimée’s writing, was taking that writing seriously as a form of literature: The central stance adopted by Lacan in this work is the necessity of recognizing the direct link which can exist between psychotic breakdown and the lived experience of the patient. De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité [the title of Lacan’s thesis], in opposition to constitutionalist or organicist schools, focuses on the psychogenesis of paranoia. (Cox-Cameron 2000: 19) Cox-Cameron notes that Lacan is drawing near to the doctrines of psychoanalysis in his thesis inasmuch as he is using the approach of psychogenesis; that is, tracing the patient’s psychosis to life episodes rather than claiming, as did the adherents of constitutionalism, that sickness was part of a degenerate constitution, or, like the partisans of organicism, among whom Clérambault can be counted, that mental illness was a physical disorder of a bodily organ. As the organicist motto, coined by Wilhelm Griesinger, would have it: “Mental diseases are brain diseases” (in Millon 2009: 20). Roudinesco claims that with his thesis Lacan was effecting a “new introduction of Freudianism into France” by “introducing the primacy of the unconscious into clinical understanding” (Roudinesco 1990: 114). While the first introduction of Freud into France was marked by the submission of psychoanalysis to the reigning modes of psychiatry, Lacan was taking his cue from the surrealists, who proclaimed Lacan a leader in a new age of materialism that would battle the idealist prejudices of the old psychiatry. Dalí said that Lacan, in his thesis, had given “for the first time, a global and homogeneous idea of the [paranoid] phenomenon, beyond any of the abject notions in which psychiatry at present is mired” (in Roudinesco 1990: 111). Marxists and communists also raised their voices in praise of the thesis. Communist writer and philosopher Paul Nizan said in regard to it that, “materialism will triumph over the ignorance of the learned professors and emerge as the true method of scientific progress” (in Roudinesco 1997: 59). The communist and surrealist René Crevel saw Aimée as a poor proletarian. Ultimately, Lacan would keep his distance from both communists (whether Marxist or Maoist) and surrealists. As Marcelle Marini notes concerning 15

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his relation to the surrealists, Lacan “did not share their exaltation of madness nor their desire to hold society responsible for the illness” (1992: 32). Ultimately for Lacan, these movements were not so much ends in themselves as they were alternative routes to what really interested him – finding an audience for his novel understanding of Freudian psychoanalysis.

BEFORE LACAN BECAME LACAN

At the time he was writing his thesis Lacan was romantically involved with at least two women. One was Marie-Thérèse Bergerot, a widow fifteen years his senior. She paid for the cost of printing his thesis and made sure he was taking sufficient care of himself while he was hard at work writing, and he included her name on the dedication page. The other woman, Olesia Sienkiewicz, estranged wife of the novelist Pierre Drieu, Lacan would often take on vacations around Europe, all the while writing letters back to MarieThérèse. Lacan would have many mistresses over the course of his life, and neither of his two marriages would change this tendency. He married for the first time in 1934 to Marie-Louise Blondin, the sister of a friend. She, like Lacan, had come from a bourgeois background, but unlike him she never felt the need to live any other way. They married the same year in which Lacan passed an examination to become chief doctor of a hospital (and then “wriggled out” of the job he was selected for; Roudinesco 1997: 80). They would have three children: Caroline, Thibaut and Sibylle. The relationship was troubled by Lacan’s refusal to embrace a properly bourgeois existence as well as by his inability to remain monogamous. During the couple’s honeymoon he sent a telegram to Olesia because he was worried about her reaction to his wedding. The marriage would finally end in 1941, after Lacan had met and fallen in love with Sylvia Bataille (née Maklès), the screen actress and ex-wife of Georges Bataille, who himself was an acquaintance of Lacan and at whose house Lacan held informal seminars in the early 1950s. Sylvia and Georges had been separated for some time, but Lacan was still living with Marie-Louise, so he had to carry on his affair with Sylvia in semi-secrecy. He continued this double life even after having a daughter, Judith, with Sylvia (which child initially took the last name of Bataille due to the complicated nature of the situation). Roudinesco describes an awkward scene in which Lacan was spotted by Thibaut and Sybille as he was driving around town with Sylvia and Judith. Thibaut and Sybille called out to him, but when he saw them he abruptly motored off in the other direction (in Roudinesco 1997: 180–81). His older children had been kept in the dark concerning his other family, but when the situation became impossible to cover up any longer Marie-Louise asked for a divorce, which Lacan granted her. 16

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He married Sylvia in 1953 and they remained together for the rest of their lives, in spite of Lacan’s womanizing. Their only child, Judith, would grow up to marry Jacques-Alain Miller, who became the executor of Lacan’s literary estate and heir to the master’s thought. Just as Freud’s youngest daughter, Anna, had become intimately involved in the psychoanalysis her father had founded, so Judith, in her own right and in her marriage to Miller, would have an important role to play in the legacy of her father’s thought.5 Lacan had been reading Freud for a few years at the time he was writing his thesis, and although he was not yet a psychoanalyst his method of effecting the cure showed a creative working between what he knew of Freud and his own clinical background in psychiatry. It was also at this time (probably beginning in 1932) that Lacan commenced an analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, a famous psychoanalyst who had been analysed by one of Freud’s most loyal followers, Hans Sachs. Loewenstein was one of the top training analysts (senior analysts who supervise the practice of younger colleagues) at the Société Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP), the French psychoanalytic organization founded in 1926 that was affiliated with the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) instituted by Freud. Loewenstein was in the centre of what was considered orthodox Freudianism in France at the time, along with figures like Marie Bonaparte, Edouard Pichon and Sacha Nacht. He was born in Poland in 1898, and educated in Switzerland and Germany. Roudinesco calls him “a perfect representative of a famous type: the wandering Jewish psychoanalyst forever seeking a promised land and forever being hounded from east to west by anti-Semitism and pogroms” (1997: 70). From Germany he came to France in 1925, learned yet another language, and quickly rose to the top of the French psychoanalytic world. But in 1940, with the Nazis in France, he was again in danger and this time fled to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life. He became wellknown as co-founder, along with Ernst Kris and Heinz Hartmann, of the ego psychology school. Lacan’s analysis with him lasted six years and from all accounts was a trying affair for both parties. The two men already possessed very different ideas about how an analysis should go, and their viewpoints would only diverge the more as time went on. For his part, Lacan chafed at having to adopt a subservient position to someone whom he considered an intellectual inferior. In 1938 a vacancy opened up within the SPP due to Hartmann leaving for the United States. Full membership in the group was offered to Lacan (he had been made candidate member in 1934) on the condition that he continue his analysis with Loewenstein. Lacan got the credential that he wanted, but then immediately broke his side of the bargain by ending his analysis with Loewenstein. As was evident in his complex and troubled relationship with his first master, Clérambault, Lacan was not comfortable being in a position of subordination, but instead always felt the need to assert his own powers. As 17

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long as the master was distant, like the ultimate master Freud, there did not seem to be an issue, but with proximity came jealousy and drama. The letters written between Loewenstein and Bonaparte, who were lovers, show that the former was not happy with his analysand and was worried about the kind of influence that Lacan was beginning to wield among the up-andcoming generation of analysts. He concluded that Lacan was simply unanalysable – perhaps one of the few points on which the two men could agree. Roudinesco interprets Loewenstein as someone whose psychoanalytic approach showed the effects of a difficult life: his basic rights were always in danger of being trampled as he was shoved all over the globe because of his Jewishness. The orthodoxy of his Freudianism was based on a respect for the rules that established freedom for all. Later, in the ego psychology that Loewenstein would develop in America with Hartmann and Kris, he would claim that a strong ego in the analyst is necessary to provide the support and structure that an analysand needs. Lacan’s notion of analysis was very different. Although he might agree that psychotic analysands could be helped by a framework in which they are more or less protected by a parental figure, those who fall under the diagnostic category of neurotic (most people, that is) can only be further harmed by such analytic methods. For Lacan, neurotics are already overly attached to parental figures or their “imagos”, and the analyst should rather be looking for the opportunity to set them free onto the path of their own desire. Lacan’s most important connection inside the SPP was to a man by the name of Edouard Pichon, a well-known grammarian as well as an outspoken leader of the chauvinist, nationalist and anti-Semitic branch of the SPP. Though Lacan shared neither Pichon’s extreme patriotism nor his racist viewpoints, the two men did share a love of the French language and a certain aristocratic air. Lacan respected, and would later make use of, Pichon’s work on the grammar of the French language, while Pichon recognized Lacan’s theoretical genius and took him on as something of a protégé. But, in general, the popularity and esteem that Lacan was accruing among the younger analysts did not increase his popularity with more senior figures in the SPP, such as Marie Bonaparte and Rudolf Loewenstein. Starting in 1932 with the publication of his thesis and through the years of the Second World War, Lacan’s publishing was limited to a few pieces for journals and an encyclopaedia essay on the family that his friend, the psychologist Henri Wallon, commissioned him to write. Throughout his life Lacan did not pursue publishing and seemed to be much more comfortable limiting his teaching to its oral form. Even now the vast majority of his writings are transcripts of his seminars or essays based on oral presentations. This should not be surprising coming from an analyst who made his living from listening to others speak and choosing his own words very carefully. There is an ambiguity and multivalence in the spoken word that 18

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Lacan clearly preferred to the rigidity of anything that gets put down on the page. Scholars often divide Lacan’s teaching into three distinct phases connected to the three registers of his metapsychology: imaginary, symbolic and real. According to Dominick Hoens and Ed Pluth, the period between Lacan’s dissertation in 1932 and the Rome report of 1953 is dedicated to developing his thought on the imaginary; from 1953 to 1962 he deals extensively with the symbolic; thereafter, and until his death in 1981, he turns his attention more actively to the real.6 While one could certainly take issue with this way of breaking up Lacan’s thought, for our purposes we can hesitantly accept this chronology as a helpful guide for approaching the complicated whole of Lacan’s oeuvre. In 1936 Lacan gave one of the first clear articulations of the imaginary register in a paper entitled, “The Mirror Stage”, that he prepared for the IPA meeting in Marienbad, Austria. He was interrupted by Ernest Jones at the prescribed time limit, which was twelve minutes, and so was unable to finish his presentation. Lacan was clearly still peeved by the experience when, ten years later, he remarked that Jones interrupted him in the Englishman’s function as “president of the London Psycho-Analytical Society, a position for which he was no doubt qualified by the fact that I have never encountered a single English colleague of his who didn’t have something unpleasant to say about his character” (Lacan 2006h: 151). Lacan chose not to permit what he had prepared to be published as would normally have been the case. Although there is a version of this paper in Écrits, the main collection of Lacan’s writings published in France in 1966, this is, according to Jacques-Alain Miller, a much reworked version of the 1936 paper, and the encyclopaedia essay entitled “La Famille” and published in 1938 is much closer to the talk that Lacan was not allowed to finish at Marienbad (Miller 2005). “La Famille”, which appeared in volume 8 of the Encyclopédie française, is Lacan’s most important work subsequent to his thesis.7 Miller calls it a “sensational synthesis of the theory of psychic development and Freudian clinical practice” (2005). In these early works we can see Lacan moving farther away from his medical upbringing and entering more deeply into the world of psychoanalysis, especially the writings of Freud. He is also beginning to formulate ideas that are clearly original, the most important of which, in these early years, is that of the mirror stage, a formulation he takes credit for even though its original expression belonged to Wallon. Nevertheless, it was Lacan who gave the concept its theoretical foundations. We will discuss the mirror stage in an in-depth manner in the following chapter. Lacan’s 1938 essay was to be the last thing he published until after the Second World War, during which he worked as a doctor at the historic 19

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Val-de-Grâce hospital in Paris’s fifth arrondissement. Many commentators remark on the silence Lacan kept during the war, publishing nothing, taking no part in overt resistance, studying Chinese ideograms, and quietly doing his duties at the hospital while tending to his family, or families, as it were. Lacan summed up that time in this way: For several years I avoided all opportunities to express my views. The humiliation of our times, faced with the enemies of humankind, dissuaded me from doing so. Like Fontenelle, I gave myself over to the fantasy of having my hand filled with truths all the better to hold on to them. (Lacan 2006h: 123) There was a certain danger for Lacan during the war years, or at least for his wife, Sylvia, whose family was of Romanian Jewish origin. At one point the French authorities in Cagnes were harassing Sylvia’s mother, when Lacan stormed into their headquarters demanding to see the family’s files, managed somehow to get them, and after promising to return them promptly tore up the documents. Often when this story is recounted one gets a sense of the teller’s enthrallment to the magical powers of Lacan, who was able to make the Nazis and their collaborators do what he wanted. This aspect of Lacan was no doubt present in his personality. His first important patient, the so-called Aimée, described him as “too attractive” (in Roudinesco 1997: 51), a quality that would help Lacan to keep Parisian intellectuals on the edges of their seats for the nearly thirty of his seminars. And yet his charisma was not without its disadvantages. While Lacan was an object of adulation for many people, his adoring fans could easily turn on him, as happened at various junctures in his career. After the war Lacan journeyed to England and spent five weeks examining the psychiatric situation there. In the talk he gave upon returning to France he spoke very highly of what he had seen, and especially of the use of group therapy, concluding that the diffusion of Freudian ideas in England had brought about spontaneous and beneficial transformations in the treatment of mental health patients. Lacan gave what was for him very high praise when he said of his English experience: “I have found there the miraculous feeling of the first Freudian steps: finding at the very dead end of a situation the vivid force of action” (in Marini 1992: 145). Roudinesco recounts how, during the dark days of the Nazi occupation, Lacan and his friends thought of the British as the world’s last hope. At this time Lacan started to study the English language, of which he became quite a fluent reader. In 1953 the tension between Lacan and some of the other important members of the SPP became focused on the issue of the “short session” (also known as the “variable length session”), that is, Lacan’s technique 20

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of cutting off his analytic sessions at a point he deemed beneficial for the unveiling of unconscious truth. This point might be after an hour or after thirty seconds, though it seemed that many of his sessions were closer to the latter than to the former. Lacan promised many times to discontinue this practice, but after a while it became clear that he in no way considered himself to be bound by the IPA’s mostly unwritten rule of a fifty- or fiftyfive-minute analytic session. In the eyes of Lacan’s detractors, such as Loewenstein and Bonaparte, there were at least two problems with the short session. First of all, these truncated meetings seemed to be prime examples of Lacan’s crime of un-Freudianism, or, to be more accurate, of Lacan’s unwillingness to accept a practice that had come to be considered orthodox, for Freud himself had never established a time limit to the analytic session. The other problem was that by virtue of this practice Lacan was able to analyse more people than the rest of his colleagues, and the more people Lacan came into contact with in his work, the more chances there were to disseminate his “un-orthodox” ideas. The increasing size of Lacan’s bank account (for each session cost the same, no matter how long it lasted) was surely another source of jealousy among his colleagues. Though there were other reasons for certain members of the SPP to be upset or jealous of Lacan, the short session became the focal point of their squabbles with him. It was a convenient issue to exploit because his actions could be formulated as going expressly against the norms of the more established members of both the SPP and the IPA. The ambiguity of Lacan’s position within the SPP did not prevent him from being elected to the presidency in January of 1953, but it was a post he held for only six months before he and several other analysts defected from the organization and founded the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). This defection was not something that Lacan undertook happily, and he considered himself to have been forced out by analysts who were neither as distinguished nor as Freudian as he. To make matters worse, in July of that year, the IPA denied a request for affiliation from the nascent organization. In Roudinesco’s recounting of the events of these years, Lacan was greatly distressed by the rejection he suffered at the hands of his colleagues and the outsider status he was forced to assume. In retrospect, it seems clear that things could not have been any other way, for despite the fact that Lacan was then in his fifties, virtually all of the work for which he would become famous still lay before him. This work bears the marks not only of Lacan’s rebel status (and rebellious nature) but also the impressive way in which he gave up trying to fit into the mould of Freudian orthodoxy and instead created an entirely new mould around the contours of his own thought. Being on the outside, in other words, fitted Lacan quite well, however much he might have complained about it. Perhaps it was an unconscious realization of this fact that stopped him from making any 21

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effort meet the master himself when Marie Bonaparte held a gathering to honour Freud, who, fleeing the Nazis in 1938, was stopping in Paris on his way to London, where he would die the following year. Though their lives overlapped considerably, the only contact between Freud and the “French Freud”, as Lacan came to be known, was when Lacan sent him a copy of his dissertation. Lacan received a perfunctory note in the mail acknowledging only that the manuscript had been received. The link, then, between the two great men was marked by distance and paradox: Freud knew next to nothing of his French admirer, while Lacan knew too much about his Viennese master, a knowledge for which he would be punished more than once in his life.

THE SEMINAR YEARS

When Lacan left the SPP and helped to found the SFP in 1953, he also started a weekly seminar at the hospital at Saint Anne’s that would continue (with minor setbacks and in various venues) for nearly thirty years, usually starting in November and continuing through June. At the beginning of the first seminar Lacan invoked the technique of the Zen master to delineate his own style: The master breaks the silence with anything – with a sarcastic remark, with a kick-start. That is how a buddhist master conducts his search for meaning, according to the technique of zen. It behoves the students to find out for themselves the answer to their own questions. The master does not teach ex cathedra a ready made science; he supplies an answer when the students are on the verge of finding it. (Lacan 1991a: 1) Lacan’s break in 1953 with the official Freudian world can be looked at from this same perspective, as a break with everything predictable in order to set out and find his own answers. It was at this point that Lacan began to offer an interpretation of Freud that radically differed not only from that of his opponents in the SPP but from any other perspectives coming from the psychoanalytic world. He was no longer content with the minor audience he had won in the world of surrealist art and left-wing politics. He now needed to articulate his view of Freud as an analyst and convince his colleagues that he was right. This necessitated, in his mind, a kind of Zen punctuation: unexpected, unpredictable, perhaps violent, but always geared towards teaching. Lacan recognized at this point that Freudian orthodoxy had become frozen in a form that contradicted the very core of the master’s thought. Though this thought is “the most perennially open to 22

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revision” it had become a collection of “hackneyed phrases” (ibid.: 1). In the simplest terms Lacan accused “orthodox” Freudians of completely ignoring the unconscious and the death drive in favour of an exclusive focus on the ego. In Lacan’s own language, all their work, analytic as well as theoretical, was being carried out in the imaginary register to the detriment of the symbolic, the register that Lacan considered, at least at that time, to be definitive. Leading analysts in the IPA, like Marie Bonaparte and Freud’s daughter Anna, based their own work on Freud’s second topology of ego, super-ego and id, at the expense of the earlier Freud and his first topology of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Lacan’s position was that Freud’s thought had to be taken as a whole, and his entire œuvre (with its many revisions and transformations) interpreted according to a consistent logic. Additionally, Lacan felt it was the early Freud that should take the upper hand in interpreting the later Freud – should one lose sight of the groundbreaking discoveries contained in The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, one was doomed to end up with a practice not worthy of being called Freudian.8 Having said that, it should be noted that many statements of the later Freud lent themselves to the interpretation of the ego psychologists. For instance, in an essay from 1940 entitled “An Outline of Psycho-analysis” Freud writes: “The analytic physician and the patient’s weakened ego, basing themselves upon the real external world, have to band themselves together into a party against the enemies, the instinctual demands of the id and the conscientious demands of the super-ego” (1989b: 50). Statements like these, tallied with the fact that Freud encouraged the interpretations of his work given by his daughter and others whom Lacan would end up disparaging, causes one to think that the manner in which the ego psychologists developed their theories was not so much un-Freudian as it was unoriginal. Lacan, on the other hand, was much more interested in creatively developing his theories from a Freudian foundation, as opposed to fitting them into a rigid orthodoxy. Often, when Lacan is presenting his thought as coming naturally out of Freud’s own, he is actually downplaying his own original contribution – perhaps overemphasizing that he in no way suffered from a neurotic desire to topple the father. It seems that Lacan would agree with the surrealists that what was groundbreaking about Freud was the powerful role he gave to the unconscious. Lacan claimed that his fellow psychoanalysts, with their focus on the second topology at the expense of the first, had ended up disavowing the unconscious and affirming a lopsided valorization of the powers of the autonomous ego. The representatives of this orthodoxy, by far the dominant reading of Freud in Lacan’s day even before it went by the name of ego psychology in the United States, thought that analysis was a process in 23

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which the weak ego of the analysand was propped up by the stronger ego of the analyst in the direction of a reality determined by the analyst. For Lacan, this was doing psychoanalysis as if the unconscious had never been discovered. Thus, the mainstream of Freudian psychology turned the unconscious from being an insuperable stumbling block to consciousness (and Enlightenment values) into a humdrum, protectionist ideology. In Lacanian terms this could be described as a transition from the discourse of the Master to the discourse of the University. The former is epiphanic, enthralling, and utterly unconventional; the latter, though held in the powerful sway of the Master’s discourse, can preserve only the shell of it. In regard to Freud’s early discoveries, the later Freud and the first and second generation of his followers (excepting Lacan, of course) got the letter of the law, but missed the spirit. And yet their function, which is always the function of the University discourse, was to preserve what they could of the original discovery until someone came along who could see through what was petrified and dead, and resurrect what of the spirit was still living and breathing under the dead ashes of the letter. Because of the seminars that Lacan initiated at this time, as well as a paper he delivered in Rome entitled “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (hereafter known as the Rome report), we can look at 1953 as the year in which Lacan becomes Lacan; that is, in 1953 various aspects of his life and career crystallized into the form that would make him a master to be reckoned with as well as an intellectual celebrity. This is Lacan the thrilling orator who held in rapt attention audiences composed of the most esteemed Parisian writers, philosophers, and artists as he wove together puns, mathematical theorems, and case histories, all delivered in a discourse that was at times abrupt, at times mellifluous, and at times utterly incomprehensible. Upon first seeing Lacan lecture the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss said he possessed “a kind of equivalent of the shaman’s power” (in Roudinesco 1990: 362). Lacan seemed always to play the room as if his audience was his analysand. More than one person who knew Lacan both as a lecturer and as an analyst commented on the similarity between the two experiences, and Lacan himself claimed that it was during his seminars that he himself received his true analysis. If this is so – and we very well might believe it considering the abrupt termination of Lacan’s official analysis with Loewenstein – then we are faced with the strange fact that the two most important figures in psychoanalysis were themselves analysed in very singular ways: Freud, analysed by himself in the depictions of The Interpretation of Dreams, and Lacan, analysed by an ever-changing multitude in his seminars. If, as Lacan claims, there was something in Freud that was “never analysed” and “which the Freudian field of analytic practice remained dependent on”– that Lacan goes so 24

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far as to describe as a kind of “original sin” (1978: 12–13) – is there similarly something in Lacan that neither his analysis with Loewenstein nor his seminars could ever solve? Was it perhaps this unanalysed something that was able to exercise such a powerful draw on the Parisian intelligentsia over the three decades of his seminar, and that still drives the “field of analytic practice” that now attaches itself to the name of Lacan? The 1953 Rome report marks an important moment in Lacan’s development as well as that of the international psychoanalytic community. Lacan had just been forced out of the SPP, and he says at the beginning of his report that his enemies had tried to keep him from speaking in Rome, but that the desire of the students and of the Italian audience had won out. Even though Lacan did not read his paper due to its length, it was copied and distributed at the conference. We can see the importance that Lacan ascribes to this occasion by the reference he makes at the beginning of his talk, in which he points to an etymological derivation of Vaticanus from the Latin verb Vagire, “which designates the first stammerings of speech” (2006c: 198). Accordingly, Lacan says that he wants to seize this “auspicious moment to revamp the foundations our discipline derives from language” (ibid.). Lacan’s report represented a break with all that had gone before and the establishment of a new beginning, one in which the importance of the symbolic would be emphasized as the “only dimension that heals” and the patient’s speech would be seen as the “one medium” of psychoanalysis (ibid.: 206). The Rome Report is also, in a way, an extended defence of Lacan’s controversial use of the short session, which “has a precise dialectical meaning in analytic technique”, and which Lacan admits “bears a certain resemblance to the technique known as Zen” (ibid.: 260). Lacan’s practice of ending the analytic session at a point that he deemed ideal for the analytic process was in its essence a practice of punctuation. It is, says Lacan, “a propitious punctuation that gives meaning to the subject’s discourse” (ibid.: 209). Such a punctuation “shatters discourse only in order to bring forth speech” (ibid.). It is only by realizing that both analyst and analysand are “up against the wall of language” (Lacan 1991b: 244) that there can be any hope of correctly situating analytic practice. By distinguishing the symbolic from the imaginary the difference between the mirages constructed by the ego and the revelation of the unconscious is made clear. Lacan defines the unconscious here as “that part of concrete discourse qua transindividual, which is not at the subject’s disposal in re-establishing the continuity of his conscious discourse” (2006c: 214). We can imagine that the subject’s conscious discourse is a chunk of wood, and the analysand’s punctuation a light tap with an axe at the point of cleavage. This is an intervention that, like an intervention in Zen, is experienced as negative and as disabling the continuity of conscious discourse; as in Zen, such violence is undertaken in the 25

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hope of transformation. As Lacan says: “speech tends toward nothing less than a transformation of the subject to whom it is addressed” (ibid.: 245). In 1959 the SFP again renewed its request to be affiliated with the IPA in order to become an officially sanctioned psychoanalytic organization on a par with the SPP. The IPA accepted their application this time, but on the condition that Lacan and fellow analyst Françoise Dolto be removed from their positions as training analysts. At first Lacan’s colleagues in the SFP stood by him and, in a show of solidarity, elected him president of their organization. But this loyalty did not extend beyond deeper consideration of their own careers, and one year later they made an abrupt turnaround and agreed to have Lacan crossed off the list of acceptable training analysts. Although Lacan could have remained with the SFP as a teacher and analyst, foregoing his training analyses, he chose the path of exile instead, breaking with the group which he had helped to found ten years earlier. For Lacan, this was another major betrayal, and the following month he cancelled, after only one session, that year’s planned seminar “On the Names of the Father”. It has been said that Lacan demanded an almost religious adherence to his teaching, and that his demand for loyalty bordered on the obsessive. When the analyst and philosopher Luce Irigaray was ostracized from the Lacanian community and fired from her teaching post at Vincennes in 1974 after publishing a book critical of Lacan’s “phallocentrism”, the complaints against Lacan’s authoritarian style became more vocal. Lacan, for his part, claimed he was the one under constant attack. When he resumed his seminars in 1964, after his break with the SFP, his first lecture was entitled “Excommunication”, and it consisted of a lengthy comparison between his situation and that of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who had been ousted from his synagogue due to the “heretical” nature of his philosophy. Lacan began by referring to himself as a “refugee otherwise reduced to silence” and went on to claim that what had happened to him was “strictly comparable to what is elsewhere called major excommunication … precisely what Spinoza was condemned to” (1978: 2–4). Although Lacan stressed the fact that his departure from the IPA and SPF was absolute and allowing of no return, the context of this lecture signals that Lacan was being reborn once more. That year’s seminar received, upon publication, the title The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, and it would become one of the most well known of the Lacanian texts and the first of the seminars to be translated into English. Lacan delivered it in an impressive locale at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in the presence of luminaries such as the psychologist Henri Ey and the renowned anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The latter, along with the influential Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, had played an important role in finding a new venue for Lacan’s seminars. So, even though Lacan had suffered another 26

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break with the national and international psychoanalytic communities, he was, due to his formidable influence, in a strong position to compete with them. Over the years he had amassed a sizable following, consisting not only of those who came to hear his lectures, but also of those who had been analysed by him as well as other analysts who had been supervised by him. In 1964 Lacan started another group, the École Française de Psychanalyse, or EFP, which kept the same acronym when the name was changed to the École Freudienne de Paris a short while later. Lacan announced the birth of his school in a charactistic manner with these words: “I hereby found the École Française de Psychanalyse, by myself, as alone as I have ever been in my relation to the psychoanalytic cause” (1990b: 97). The EFP was organized on the basis of three sections: pure psychoanalysis, applied psychoanalysis and the Freudian field. These areas were to provide a comprehensive curriculum that could stand as a full-fledged alternative to the education offered by the more established Freudian bodies. Lacan’s popularity and influence spread as his students went out to occupy important positions in hospitals, clinics, and universities. Some of the brightest of those studying philosophy in Paris were being attracted to Lacan, and they began to read him not only for his psychoanalytical wisdom but also in the light of contemporary philosophy, anthropology and politics. One of the standouts among these was a young philosophy student by the name of Jacques-Alain Miller, who had been directed by his own teacher, Louis Althusser, to read everything Lacan had written. Miller took the challenge seriously, locking himself in a room over a vacation, and emerged as one of Lacan’s most outspoken and brilliant supporters. In 1964 Miller married Judith Lacan, Lacan’s daughter with his second wife Sylvia, and began to stake his position as chief interpreter of the words of the master, a position which he would occupy more and more as Lacan grew older and as the fights around his legacy and teachings grew fiercer. By 1974 Miller had also taken charge, with Lacan’s blessing, of the department of psychoanalysis founded in 1968 at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes, which became a site of heated conflict between analysts who wanted to emphasize the clinical aspect of their work, and those academically minded thinkers like Miller who wanted to focus on formalizing Lacanian thought. Miller’s position was grounded in Lacan’s own increasing concern with a way to transmit his thought in a form that would be, as far as possible, immune to the corruption to which Lacan believed Freud’s thought had succumbed. Lacan’s solution to this problem was an increasing reliance on mathemes, or algebraic condensations of psychoanalytic theory. (The term “matheme” was based on Lévi-Strauss’s “mytheme”, which the latter theorized as the basic building blocks of mythic material with which researchers could analyse material from divergent cultures.) Miller took over at Vincennes in 1974, at which time the department changed its name 27

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to Le Champ Freudien (The Freudian Field), and has since presided over numerous Lacanian organizations and publications. At the present time Miller is in charge of all of Lacan’s posthumous intellectual rights, and has received criticism for heading what many see as a needlessly dilatory rate of publication of Lacan’s seminars. So far, of the twenty-six seminars given by Lacan (not counting 1980’s “Letter of Dissolution”; Lacan 1990e), fourteen have been published in French, and only seven of these have been translated into English, a process also personally supervised by Miller. In 1966, the same year that Jacques-Alain and Judith were married, Écrits, an edited collection of some of Lacan’s publications and talks, was published in France to intellectual, as well as general, acclaim. Lacan was at or near the height of his fame at this point, and even though the text is dense and difficult, sometimes to the point of near unreadability, it was devoured by not only analysts and philosophers, but by mathematicians and linguists as well as by regular folks for whom Lacan was someone with something to say about the human condition. The book nearly became a bestseller, something which is possible for such works, it seems, only in France, where academics and intellectuals are granted a certain relevance by the reading public. Finally, psychoanalysis had arrived in France. At last it was something more than just a Jewish science, as it had been in Freud’s Vienna, or an obsession for those privileged enough to be dissatisfied with the religious tradition they grew up in, as happened around Carl Jung in Switzerland. The only feasible comparison to be made with the popularity of psychoanalysis in France in the late 1960s and 1970s was the popularity that Freud’s thought enjoyed in the United States a generation earlier. But in the American case it had been the Freud of the second topology, the ego psychology of Loewenstein, Hartmann and Kris; and America’s absolute rejection of Freud since that heyday is perhaps a vindication of Lacan’s complaints against this reading of Freud. If Lacan were alive now and perused a psychology textbook that gave no more than a paragraph to Freud, and that mostly on his supposed addiction to cocaine, he would surely say that the Freud whom Americans have rejected was not Freud at all. Even though Lacan was, in 1964, head of his own school and master of an increasingly large universe coming to be known as “Lacanian”, the scandals and skirmishes that had dogged his previous career showed no so signs of abating. In 1967 certain problems in the EFP, many of them stemming from what Marcelle Marini calls the institution’s “monocratism” (1992: 131) started to become impossible to ignore. While on the one hand Lacan demanded absolute loyalty to his teaching – saying, “My teaching has no rival because it alone talks about psychoanalysis” (quoted in ibid.: 132) – on the other hand he was not able to stop others from understanding him in very different ways. His demand for loyalty, instead of fostering 28

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solidarity within his school, set his disciples at each other’s throats as they vied for the master’s approval. Lacan only stoked the fires when he introduced the passe (pass), which was an attempt to formalize (and Lacan-ize) what had always been a tricky transition, that of going from analysand to analyst. Marini describes it this way: The passe would consist of testifying, in front of two passeurs [“pass-bearers” as Anne Dunand translates the term], to one’s own experience as an analysand and especially to the crucial moment of passage from the position of analysand to that of analyst. The passeurs would be chosen by their analysts (generally analysts of the école) and should be at the same point in their analytic experience as the passant [the person undergoing the pass]: they would listen to him and then, in turn, they would testify to what they had heard in front of a committee for approval composed of the director, Lacan, and of some A.E. [analysts of the school]. (Marini 1992: 133) The passe was designed to submit the would-be analyst to a very different set of criteria than that which the IPA had used; he or she had not simply to give the right answers (there were none) but to speak with a certain confidence and persuasiveness. The account had to be persuasive enough to infect, so to speak, two peers who were otherwise detached in the process. Lacan admitted that his école was becoming a “trial” with this new addition (ibid.). Those who broke off from the EFP in 1969 to start the Quatrième Groupe (Fourth Group) seem to have agreed with him. It is no coincidence that Lacan introduced the technique of the passe at a time in his teaching when he was moving away from an emphasis on the symbolic register with its linguistic concerns and moving into the realms of mathematics, logic, and topology (the “third phase” of his teaching). He was moving from language to the non-verbal, and it is significant that what a successful passeur must communicate is essentially extra-linguistic. Though using only the medium of words – analysis, after all, has never been anything but a “talking cure” – the analysands’ secure sense of success must “rub off ” on those to whom they are witnessing. In the end, according to Marini, the issue of the passe was to poison the internal life of the EFP. In 1969, in the aftermath of the student demonstrations of May 1968, the administration at the ENS asked Lacan to move his seminar, due to the fact that his talks were attracting sometimes noisy interruptions by students who were divided into Maoist, Marxist and communist factions. Some demanded Lacan’s approval, while others mocked him. Jean-Michel Rabaté, now a professor of literature at the University of Pennsylvania, relates getting caught up in the excitement, and, as a lark, rigging the sound system 29

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so that Lacan’s lecture would be interrupted by random animal gruntings and sounds of sexual intercourse. Rabaté had gone to the seminar solely to make fun of Lacan and all the sycophants with their microphones; but the next week he returned in all seriousness with his own recording device (Rabaté 2003: 1–2). Lacan was not, in general, enthusiastic towards the student movement, which he called a rebellion as opposed to a revolution (Marini 1992: 135). At one point a student, frustrated by Lacan’s seeming indifference to their fervour, stood up and started to strip in protest. Lacan merely remarked that he had seen better the night before and dared him to go all the way. But Lacan’s most telling rebuttal of this movement was his remark at that same talk (published as “Impromptu at Vincennes”) when he told a rowdy group of students that, “What you, as revolutionaries, aspire to, is a Master. You will have one” (1990c: 126). Clearly, though, Lacan was not going to be the master whom they wanted. After 1969 Lacan moved his lectures to an amphitheatre in the law school at the Pantheon. Though Lacan’s celebrity status in France at this point could not be denied, there were those who came away from his later seminars feeling that he was either becoming senile or deliberately acting the clown. He spent more and more time on the finer points of topology, a branch of mathematics that studied “the properties of a space that remain unchanged when the space itself is distorted” (Roudinesco 1997: 382). Lacan would spend entire lectures twining pieces of string into different kinds of knots. Many of his followers thought this too much of a departure from anything having to do with genuinely psychoanalytic concerns, and quietly made their departure. Others left less quietly, complaining that they had been duped for years by someone who, ultimately, had nothing to offer them but little bits of string. It didn’t help that Lacan, for the last few years of his seminar, would often spend long stretches doodling on the blackboard, or simply remain silent in front of his audience. Only the most devoted stayed. During his twenty-sixth seminar, entitled “Topology and Time”, Lacan completely lost his train of thought and stood helpless in front of the blackboard. A voice was heard from the audience: “It doesn’t matter, we love you just the same” (Roudinesco 1997: 399). It was this kind of absolute love that Lacan never grew tired of demanding, and when he chose to dissolve his school in 1980, when the factious divisions and arguments had become intolerable, he did so in a letter (“Letter of Dissolution”; Lacan 1990e) in which he asked those who wanted to remain with him to write him a letter stating their conviction. With these he started yet another school, one that is still alive today – though there are many organizations, in France and elsewhere, that claim to practise Lacanian psychoanalysis. He called it the École de la Cause Freudienne (ECF). In some ways the last few years of Lacan’s life, before he died in 1981, played out as a tragedy. Suffering from colon cancer, he nonetheless kept 30

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the status of his health a secret from everyone except a small handful of his closest friends and family. As his legacy was being fought over, Lacan seemed to rely completely on his daughter, Judith, and on his son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, whom he trusted more than many others did. Both while Lacan was alive and after he died, many accused Miller of pushing his own agenda in the name of Lacan. They said that he forced the old man to sign documents that Miller himself had penned. Editorials, some of them quite nasty, flew back and forth in the Paris newspapers. But there can be no doubt that Lacan had an absolute faith in Miller to preserve his teaching for generations to come. This faith at times looked like a kind of Pascalian wager, for there is also no doubt that Miller had his own ideas about what Lacanian teaching should look like. We’ve noted that Lacan made every effort to portray his teaching as not being an attack against Freud the father. From the inside at least, this irenic transfer of knowledge and power seemed to have been duplicated with Lacan’s successor, who had even more reason to feel that he was a beloved son. As paradoxical and difficult as his legacy was, at the time of Lacan’s death there was no shortage of persons with an interest in laying claim to a part of it. But Lacan’s wish that his son-in-law’s decisions would be pre-eminent in these matters won out. Although it took four years after Lacan’s death, in 1985 Miller finally managed to secure the sole rights to publication of the seminars. When Lacan died in 1981, after a stroke had put him in a coma, his brother, Marc-Francois, celebrated a mass in his honour before the body was interred near Lacan’s summer home outside Paris.

31

2. THE BASIC CONCEPTS At least three sides are needed to make a pyramid, even a heretical one. (Lacan 2006b: 507)

In Chapter 1 we briefly discussed Freud’s two models of the psyche: his first topology of preconscious, conscious, and unconscious; and the second consisting of ego, super-ego, and id. While Lacan did not reject, per se, either of these models, neither did he adopt one or the other as foundational. Instead, he developed his own terminology of a psychic economy centred on three registers, or “three grand terms” (Lacan 1991a: 73), of the imaginary, symbolic and real. This topology, which Lacan also referred to as a Borromean knot – for his rendering of it imitated the coat of arms of the Borromeo family – is already there in Seminar I, emerging, as Lacan says, “with the birth of these seminars” (1962–3: 13/12/62). The fundamental characteristic of the Borromean knot (Figure 1) is that “if you cut one [ring], every single one of the others becomes free and independent” (Lacan 1998: 124). It is important that the knot is understood as having three dimensions such that, for example, the real passes over the imaginary and under the symbolic. Lacan often used bits of string to embody his topologies, emphasizing their materiality. Lacan was not afraid of talking about his Borromean knot in religious terms. Explaining his use of the abbreviation nœud bo (nœud is French for

Figure 1 The Borromean knot.

32

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knot) he references James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “The appellation nœud bo makes one think of something evoked somewhere in Joyce: On Mount Nebo the law was given to us” (Lacan 2005a: 144). Such a reference might lead one to conclude that the Borromean knot is just as crucial for Lacan as the giving of the law to Moses is for Jewish people. Perhaps, but Lacan’s is surely a law lacking in piety; in fact, he often used the initials R.S.I. as a shorthand for the three registers, playing on the fact that, in French, “R.S.I.” is quite nearly homophonic with hérésie. Though he calls his topology an “infernal trinity” (Lacan 1974–5: 18/2/75), Lacan’s heresy is not a heterodox description of the divinity; he is quite clear that these terms only take on their meaning within the space of what philosophers have called being: “It is within the dimension of being that the tripartition of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real is to be found, those elementary categories without which we would be incapable of distinguishing anything within our experience” (Lacan 1991a: 271). He admits that it is “not for nothing” that there are precisely three terms, suggesting that they perhaps reflect a kind of meta-geometry such that “there must be a minimal law … if, in the plane of the real, you detach a shutter which moves into a third dimension, the minimum number of shutters you need to construct something solid is two” (ibid.). He then connects this to the three fundamental passions of Buddhism: It is only in the dimension of being, and not in that of the real, that the three fundamental passions can be inscribed – at the junction of the symbolic and imaginary, this fault line, if you will, this ridge line called love – at the junction of the imaginary and the real, hate – and, at the junction of the real and the symbolic, ignorance. (Ibid.) On the basis of these few references it is evident that Lacan sees his topology as relevant across diverse arenas: as a revelatory heresy and challenge to the Christian trinity; as a primordial foundation of geometry and other branches of science and maths; and as a heuristic device capable of casting light on the psycho-religious framework of Buddhism. In this chapter we will examine Lacan’s three registers individually. In discussing the symbolic register we will introduce the three clinical classifications that Lacan worked with: psychosis, perversion1 and neurosis. We will conclude with a section devoted to the way in which Lacan, throughout his career, attempted to knit the three rings of his Borromean knot together and account for psychic coherence. Initially, the idealizations of the imaginary register play this role. In his middle period Lacan emphasizes Symbolic elements, the phallus and the Name(s)-of-the-Father. In the final years of his seminar Lacan developed the notion of the sinthome as a fourth ring holding the other three together.2 33

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THE IMAGINARY

You have destroyed the evildoer in the imagination of their hearts. (Luke 1:51) Before Lacan begins to speak of an imaginary register per se, the importance of the image is already clear in such early texts as the paper Lacan gave at the meeting of the IPA in Marienbad in 1936, the encyclopaedia essay published in 1938 and a 1949 paper entitled “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function”. In that latter presentation, the image plays a central role in the stade du miroir (the mirror stage), Lacan’s first concrete example explaining the dynamics of the imaginary register. The mirror stage is formative for a child between the ages of 6 and 18 months. These months are marked by the infant’s fascination with his own image reflected in a mirror, and his ability to jubilantly assume this image as his own. The role played by the child’s other is crucial here. This other, perhaps a parent or caretaker, situates the mirror and props the child up before it; he or she encourages identification, smiling and saying to the child, “Yes, that’s you”. The vision is attractive to the infant because it bespeaks a unity and level of control that he himself does not possess, but that he anticipates owning via the seduction of the image and the positive reinforcement concomitant with it. It is not even necessary that there be an actual mirror in play; the faces of his parents or the forms of siblings or other children also act as mirrors in which the infant can anticipate his own bodily integrity. In the following Lacan defines the mirror stage as a “drama” whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation – and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an “orthopaedic” form of its totality – and to the finally donned armour of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure. (Lacan 2006e: 78) The vision in the “mirror” contrasts sharply with the child’s real experience, with his lack of bodily control, intense vulnerability to external dangers, and painful intestinal surges and stabs of hunger coming from within. From outside and inside both, the infant’s reality is disordered and painful, thanks to which the “first year of his life” composes a “vital misery” (ibid.: 70). The mirror image that the child is presented with is, on the contrary, a symbol of all that is stable, integrated and, apparently, in complete control of its vitality. This image is “orthopaedic” because it acts as a prop or prosthesis to the reality of the child’s incompetence. As 34

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an “ideal unity” and a “salutary imago” (ibid.: 92), this image contrasts with the child’s reality, and therefore can only be assumed through anticipation. Because this anticipation, founded in an other, trumps the real experience of the child, its effects are “alienating”. Nevertheless, it is only via the dynamics of the mirror stage that the child is situated within the human world, and given the chance to eventually achieve a level of mastery over his body and being. Here in Lacan’s simplified L schema (Figure 2), the relation between what the child sees in the mirror and what he anticipates concerning himself is represented by a line, signifying the imaginary dimension, drawn between a and a. (The letter a, whether upper or lower-case, stands for autre, [other]; since the other two letters, S, standing for subject, and A [big Other], concern the symbolic register we will discuss them later.) In this schema Lacan stresses the alienating nature of the imaginary dimension: with the advent of the imaginary dimension the child’s difficult reality is effaced, written over by the seductive vision of integrity that he assumes. In the upper right hand corner of the schema are the child’s “objects”, a, whereas “his ego”, a, is at the bottom left (Lacan 2006f: 459). In other words, the child’s incipient ego is not fundamentally within himself, but its origin is to be found in the objects that the child apprehends; all of which, because of this relation, are mirrors on the basis of which the child forms his identity.

S

a

a’

A

Figure 2 Simplified L schema.

The simplified L schema teaches us that the imaginary is the dimension within which the ego is formed and operates, and that inasmuch as this ego is grounded in identifications which are proleptically assumed, it is marked by a fundamental misrecognition (méconnaisance): “The ego is a capacity to fail to recognize” (Lacan 1991a: 153). When the infant is propped up before a mirror, and his hand made to wave, he is forced to assume that such an image expresses himself. He is, of course, mistaken; what is most clearly represented is simply what an other wants him to identify with. The other must prop up the child’s image, something that also happens at the 35

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level of the proto-symbolic sounds and gestures that the child makes to express its desires. When a child cries it is not usually absolutely clear to the parent what the cry is meant to signify. The latter is forced to make a guess, to assign a signification to the cry, saying “this cry means you are hungry, this cry means you need sleep” etc. The child must accept this meaning even when a hunger pang is rewarded by a lullaby, or when lack of sleep occasions an extra feeding. These miscues and faulty actions also go into the formation of the child’s ego, which Lacan calls the “superimposition of various coats borrowed from the bric-à-brac of its props department” (1991b: 155).3 Lacan says that “the subject becomes aware of his desire in the other, through the intermediary of the image of the other which offers him the semblance of his own mastery” (1991a: 155). At this point it might appear that, because this anticipated mastery is eventually realized to a certain extent in the mature subject, the imaginary register gives a sufficient account of human development. It can’t be denied that the imaginary plays an indispensable role in human development; without it children would have no motivation to take the brave steps of their education, which happens precisely through an imitation of the all the others they are surrounded by. Lacan is well aware of this, and it is quite clear that he sees the imaginary register as the root of the child’s formidable mimetic ability: This child … is prodigiously open to everything concerning the way of the world that the adult brings to him. Doesn’t anyone ever reflect on what this prodigious porosity to everything in myth, legend, fairy tales, history, the ease with which he lets himself be invaded by these stories, signifies, as to his sense of the other? (Ibid.: 49) And yet the benefits of this finely tuned “sense of the other” can only be realized on the symbolic plane. The strategies of imitation by which the child learns must receive direction from the vantage point of the symbolic, which is why we noted above that the imaginary dimension also functions as the child’s first symbol. As Lacan notes: “the regulation of the imaginary depends on something which is located in a transcendent fashion … nothing other than the symbolic connection between human beings” (ibid.: 140). On the level of the imaginary dimension alone, the note of alienation is dominant and results in misrecognition and aggression: At first, before language, desire exists solely in the single plane of the imaginary relation of the specular stage, projected, alienated in the other. The tension it provokes is then deprived of an 36

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outcome. That is to say that it has no other outcome – Hegel teaches us this – than the destruction of the other. (Lacan 1991a: 170) The mirroring that forms the ego – resulting in what Lacan calls the “paranoiac structure of the ego” (2006o: 93) – amounts to a negation of the young subject, and a projection of his internal chaos onto his others: “The two moments, when the subject negates himself and when he accuses the other become indistinguishable … It is the very delusion of the misanthropic beautiful soul, casting out onto the world the disorder that constitutes his being” (ibid.). Because every object on the imaginary plane is endlessly doubled by other objects, as in a hall of mirrors, the child’s ego (which is just another object in this viciously circular hallway) must assert itself if it is to win recognition. According to Hegel’s dialectic of the master and slave, one only survives on the basis of the other’s destruction or abjection. The ferocity of sibling rivalry is carried out on this plane, and one of the classic literary expressions of an imaginary deprived of symbolic direction is William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies.4 The preceding discussion of the imaginary has been from the perspective of ontogeny, that is, in terms of the development of the individual. Lacan also talked about his registers in phylogenetic terms, those pertaining to development of the human species as a whole. In stressing the importance of both perspectives he follows Freud, who allows that “ontogenesis may be regarded as a recapitulation of phylogenesis” (1953a: 131).5 Lacan held that what defined human beings was the fact that they did not “fit” in the imaginary, as animals do. But in what way do animals find themselves at home in the imaginary register? As we have seen, the imaginary is composed of images. When speaking phylogenetically, Lacan refers to these images as forms that, according to the theories of biologists like the German Jakov von Uexküll (whom Lacan read closely), triggered instinctual reactions in animals – and in us as well, though in an insufficient manner. Uexküll used the term Gestalt (form) to refer to an image that unites the Innenwelt (inner world) of the animal with its Umwelt (environment). For example, the bellies of male stickleback fish turn red when they are ready to mate, and the sight of another red stickleback causes aggressive behaviour. The red belly, then, is the form (existing both “in” the male and periodically in his external world) that triggers instinctual behaviour. The example Lacan used most often was that of the pigeon whose gonads do not develop until it sees a member of its own species: It is a necessary condition for the maturation of the female pigeon’s gonads that the pigeon see another member of its species, regardless of its sex; this condition is so utterly sufficient 37

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that the same effect may be obtained by merely placing a mirror’s reflective field near the individual. (Lacan 2006e: 77) The instinctual development of the pigeon is linked to a visual form. Present the pigeon with a different image – of a predator, for example – and you’ll cue another instinct: that of flight. Because of this dependence on the image, an animal can often be fooled with a substitute. Show anything red to a stickleback fish and it will act just like it has seen a competing male. The denizens of nature use this kind of trickery to their advantage as well (e.g. certain orchids who resemble female wasps, thereby triggering the mating action that deposits pollen on the frustrated wasp, which it then carries to other flowers). It is one of Lacan’s central theses that, while the imaginary register is more or less sufficient for animals to maintain their various species lines, in human beings the imaginary function shows itself faulty. We have touched on why this is at the ontogenetic level; at the level of the species the prematuration of human beings – the advanced time that human infants remain in a helpless, immature state – is a key factor. Compared with other animals, human beings are relatively unformed at birth, especially with regard to motor coordination. When an animal is confronted with a Gestalt, more often than not the animal’s physical organism is competent to take the required action that the impulse triggers. The element of impotence and misrecognition that marks our mirror stage does not hamper them. Lacan describes this crucial difference in the following way: The animal makes a real object coincide with the image within him … the coincidence of the image with a real object strengthens it, gives it substance, embodiment. At this moment, behaviour is released, such that the subject will be guided towards its object, with the image as go-between. (Lacan 1991a: 138) But for us: The other which we are, is there where we first saw our ego – outside us, in the human form. This form is outside of us, not in so far as it is so constructed as to captate sexual behaviour, but in so far as it is fundamentally linked to the primitive impotence of the human being. (Ibid.: 140) Freud’s insights into infantile sexuality and what he called the latent phase of sexuality (from around the age of four to the onset of puberty) are a fundamental background to Lacan’s thought in this regard. Freud believed that young children are motivated by strong libidinal urges that, because of the child’s immature sexual organs, lack the organization (the 38

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capacity for “genital love”, as Freud would say) conferred on adult sexuality; hence their “polymorphous perversity”. As Freud famously postulated, the boy’s first love object is his mother, while a girl’s affections will, from a very early stage, alight on her father. But just as infants cannot realize the image they assume in the mirror, they also cannot act on their latent desires. As Freud notes: With boys the wish to beget a child from their mother is never absent, with girls the wish to have a child by their father is equally constant; and this in spite of their being completely incapable of forming any clear idea of the means for fulfilling these wishes. (Freud 1955a: 188) This situation sits at the root of the Oedipus complex and its frustrated desire. The latency period, in which the child’s sexuality is mainly repressed, is marked by the acquisition of language, growing independence from primary caretakers, the formation of strong bonds with members of the same age and sex and the emulation of role models. Ontogenetically speaking, it is during these years when Lacan’s symbolic register starts to reveal its crucial nature.

THE SYMBOLIC

Man’s word is God in man. (Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Idylls of the King”, 1859–85) What is it that spells the end for the polymorphous sexuality of the infant and toddler? According to Lacan, and according to Lacan’s Freud, it is nothing else than the advent of language, what Lacan called the symbolic. But what role does language play, precisely? And how is human language different from the – often very complicated – communication that animals engage in? To answer the second question first, Lacan was always clear that human language is completely different from that of animals due to the former’s equivocal nature. Animal language is bi-univocal; in the animal world any given sign, whether it’s a squawk or a figure-eight dance, has only one referent. In other words, the elements of animal language work exactly like objects in a mirror, in which what makes a reflection is the fact that every point in the reflected image has a one-to-one correspondence with the original object. Signs in human language are split into signifier (the material of speech, its “acoustic image” as Saussure said) and signified (that ideational content to which the signifier refers), with no natural connection between the two. Signifiers can have multiple signifieds – I may say “to”, 39

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but you may understand “two”. Signifieds are likewise overdetermined; for instance, in this chapter I have talked about the importance of the image, but have been able to use a variety of synonyms to express this notion, such as “picture”, “form” or “Gestalt”. In most day-to-day use of language effort is made to minimize equivocation, and context is usually sufficient to determine what meaning of any given word one intends. For Lacan and Freud, though, the truth of language lies not in its success – those times when we are able to make ourselves understood – but in its failure, when language reveals its fundamentally equivocal nature. “Words”, said Freud, “since they are the nodal points of numerous ideas, may be regarded as predestined to ambiguity” (1953b: 340); or, as Lacan notes: “Misunderstanding is the very basis of interhuman discourse” (1997: 163). In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, a text Lacan considered to be one of Freud’s most important, Freud argues that jokes should first and foremost be understood as linguistic phenomena that function to reveal the equivocation of language – that, essentially, the truth of language is its capacity to lie. The following joke that Freud recounted expresses this point perfectly: Two Jews met in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. “Where are you going?” asked one. “To Cracow”, was the answer. “What a liar you are!” broke out the other. “If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?” (Freud 1989a: 137–8) This discourse reveals an impasse: one is lying even when one is telling the truth. Paradoxically, the equivocation that marks language marks it precisely as meaningful. Jokes are especially good examples of this because they often evoke a great deal of meaning, but without specifying what that meaning is (in the above joke we have no idea why the one Jew would want to lie to the other, but we probably recognize the act of telling the truth for the purpose of deception). The act of determining meaning involves more words that likewise have to be determined or interpreted; a joke will often abruptly suspend this infinite movement, thus giving a glimpse into what we might call meaning in its pure, intransitive state (see Lacan 2006b: 515). Lacan defines the subject as one marked by the equivocation of language: You are in the presence of a subject insofar as what he says and does – they’re the same things – can be supposed to have been said and done to deceive you, with all the dialectic that that comprises, up to and including that he should tell the truth so that you believe the contrary … What this subject tells me 40

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is always fundamentally related to a possible feint, in which he sends me, and I receive, the message in an inverted form. (Lacan 1997: 33) Even when we are telling the truth, we are also caught in the capacity to lie. We might even tell the truth in order to perpetuate a lie. But in jokes, in slips of the tongue and in dreams the unconscious hides its treasures right out in the open, taking protection under the equivocation of language. However, we should be careful not to understand equivocity as a kind of semantic relativity, such that the equivocal nature of language signifies that meaning is always out of our grasp or that “everything is relative”. The relativity of language doesn’t change the fact that there is also something real that language revolves around. Lacan, philosophically speaking, is best described as a realist (a term he espouses himself ), notwithstanding his understanding of language as equivocal. Ontogenetically, the transition to language, the accession to the symbolic, is a kind of trauma or cut in the experience of the subject. Before acceding to language, the child is engulfed in what psychoanalysts, speaking rather mythically, have called the mother (or, as we sometimes see it, the mOther), the most important other in the child’s experience. She is the one who responds to the child’s needs and brings to bear her own demands concerning the child’s feeding, excreting and sleeping. This mother (who does not necessarily have to be the biological mother, or even a woman) determines the child’s desire by naming it, and she is the first other whose desire the child endeavours to satisfy. In a way, the “mother” is both mother and child, a closed circuit of desire that gives the illusion of wholeness and perfect satisfaction. In this circuit the child’s grunts, cries and whimpers carry a coded, bi-univocal message, comprehensible only to his privileged other. This relationship clearly affords a great deal of satisfaction to mother and child, and it is understandable why a transition to language would be resisted, and why many children who have a high level of linguistic comprehension might categorically refuse to utter any of the words at their disposal, clinging to their “imaginary” language for as long as they possibly can. The key figure in this family myth, though, the figure whose effectiveness is most crucial in determining one’s psychic structure, is the father. In this, Lacan sees himself as toeing the line drawn by Freud: “The question of the father centres all Freud’s research, all the points of view he has introduced into subjective experience” (Lacan 1997: 321). For Lacan, “father” is the name given to the figure that inserts language as a kind of wedge in between the child and its privileged other (again, the actual identity of this bearer of language is flexible). This wedge functions to “unstick” the imaginary and the real, to turn a bi-univocal world into a ternary one, where there is always a third that mediates between self and other (from 41

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the symbolic perspective, neither self nor other effectively exist prior to the arrival of this third). Lacan pictures language as a kind of “roller” stuck in the mouth of a crocodile that represents the mother’s desire: A huge crocodile in whose jaws you are – that’s the mother. One never knows what might suddenly come over her and make her shut her trap … There is a roller, made out of stone of course, which is there, potentially, at the level of her trap, and it acts as a restraint, as a wedge. It’s what is called the phallus. It’s the roller that shelters you, if, all of a sudden, she closes it. (Lacan 2007: 112) The father’s function is to separate mother from child and to issue the primordial prohibition: thou shall not derive jouissance (pleasure or enjoyment) solely from thy mother. Lacanian analyst and expositor Bruce Fink defines jouissance as: “a pleasure that is excessive, leading to a sense of being overwhelmed or disgusted, yet simultaneously providing a source of fascination” (1997a: xii). “Pleasure in pain” is another way to describe this term, and it should be noted that the verb jouer in French also means to have an orgasm. Lacan followed Freud in considering the above prohibition foundational in human culture, both at the level of ontogeny and also, in the prohibition against incest, at the level of phylogeny. This “roller”, this incipient symbolic, has the effect of alienating the child from her mother’s desire, but it also gives the child a tool in exchange – or, to be more precise, the tool of exchange. With words, the child may symbolize the objects that she desires, and thus exert some control over them that she did not previously have. She is alienated from her objects, but language gives her some independence in relation to them and to the mother. The classic example of this comes from Freud. One day he was observing his young grandchild play a game in which the little boy would toss a spool connected to a string into a crib and then reel it back to himself. The toss would be accompanied by an “o-oo-o” and the retrieval by a “da!” Freud hypothesized that the first utterance was an approximation of the German word fort (gone) and the second was meant to convey da (there), and that the whole game was an early effort by the boy to deal with his mother’s absence in a symbolic manner (in fact, the Greek etymology of “symbol” reveals a throwing together: syn + ballein). By symbolizing her presence and absence, her fort and da, the child was able to exert some little bit of mastery over his predicament, and assert some independence from the desire of the mother, le désir de la mere. The French expression is multi-valent: it can signify the desire that the mother has for the child, the desire the child has for the mother, and the desire that the mother passes on to the child. In alienating himself from his mother, 42

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Freud’s grandson was also finding her again at another level, that of the symbol and language (Freud 1961a: 13–14).

PSYCHOSIS

As for those suffering from paranoia, delusions, psychosis, they love their delusion as they love themselves. (Freud, cited in Lacan 1997: 215) However loosely we use the term in our daily discourse, psychosis, for Lacan, is a diagnosis with a very precise meaning; in brief, it describes someone in whom a key element in the symbolic register, the Name-of-the-Father, was never instantiated, either through a neglect of parental figures or through some quirk of an individual’s psychic make-up. What makes Lacan’s understanding of psychosis (and his other clinical categories) unique is that his diagnosis is made on the basis of language, not on the organic or neurological analyses that psychologists and therapists often rely on. As Lacan notes, “psychosis consists of a hole, a lack, at the level of the signifier” (1997: 201). Psychosis, for Lacan, is not understood as a disorder of the brain, but as a condition brought on by a fault in language acquisition – and the only dependable way to determine if someone is psychotic is to listen to him speak. The anchor of the symbolic is what Lacan called the Name-of-theFather. This is a “primordial signifier” that, in neurotic subjects, is accepted as a replacement for the desire of the mother. Lacan schematizes this in the following way (2006f: 465): Le Nom-du-Père Le Désir de la Mère Just as the désir de la mère is understood multi-valently, so also is the Nomdu-Père. Nom means name, but its pronunciation is more or less identical with non, no. And so we must understand this phrase to signify both the name and the “no” of the father. In the above schematic the desire of the mother is not simply effaced for the (neurotic) subject; rather, it is repressed and forever stands behind the Name-of-the-Father and the vast web of language that hangs from that primordial hook. To clarify this Lacan often referred to the Hegelian notion of aufhebung (sublimation), in which something is simultaneously overcome and yet preserved on a different register. When Lacan says that language is equivocal this is what he means: signifiers do not simply refer to signifieds, nor do they merely direct one to other signifiers, but alongside this movement – or, to use a 43

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favourite metaphor of Lacan’s, on another stave of this score – the desire of the mother is also operative, flashing forth in the brilliancy of metaphor, in the instance of creation. Like Jupiter imprisoning his father Saturn underground in the prehistory of humanity, the Name-of-the-Father holds sway on the basis of the repression of desire. But, like Saturn erupting at the time of the winter solstice and turning the lawful Roman world into a Saturnalia, this repression, built out of the stones of language, is riddled with chinks through which desire might whisper for those who have ears to hear. As Lacan noted, referring to the chain of repressed linguistic links, but in which we might also hear the chains of confinement: “The chain nevertheless continues to run on beneath the surface, express its demands, and assert its claims – and this it does through the intermediary of the neurotic symptom. This is where repression is at the base of neurosis” (1997: 84). All of the above, though, is precisely what does not happen in psychosis. Whereas Freud’s grandson accepts a chain of signifiers in lieu of his mother, the psychotic is unable to make this step – the question for us being: what makes it possible for a person, most people in fact, to accept a replacement that, at the time, cannot seem very attractive? For Lacan, the role of the father here is more important then the child’s ability to choose. The choice, in fact, is a “forced choice”, in which the child is faced with either losing his object (mother) and getting nothing in exchange, or losing his object and getting something, words, in exchange. Lacan compared this choice to the mugger’s “Your money or your life!”; whatever choice I make when faced with this dilemma, my money is as good as gone; the only question is whether I will forfeit my life as well (Lacan 1978: 212). At the root of neurosis is an acceptance (Freud’s Bejahung) of the symbolic mediated via the Name-of-the-Father. At the root of psychosis is a foreclosure (Verwerfung) of that name, which means that that psychotic is incapable of repression, because nothing has been admitted which could function to repress the desire of the mother. Hence, the equivocation that marks normal language will be absent in psychotic speech, as will the fundamentally metaphorical structure that allows for us to create something new when we speak. Bruce Fink describes psychotic language in the following passage: “The psychotic way leads to language learning by imitation alone, no split between conscious and unconscious (and thus no ambivalence per se), and an inability to hear both literal and figurative meanings of an expression at the same time” (Fink 2007: 19). Fink gives an example of a psychotic patient who, as a child, was called “tape recorder” because of the way she acquired and utilized language, which she describes in the following terms: When I talk to other people I translate my picture into stock phrases or sentences I have “on tape” inside my head … The 44

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reason I don’t sound like a tape recorder anymore is that I have so many stock phrases and sentences I can move around into new combinations. (Ibid.) Because the psychotic subject, at a primordial point in her history, refused the “paternal metaphor”, her speech will never operate at two levels simultaneously, at the level of both father and mother, conscious and unconscious. The mysterious and burgeoning form that poetic language evokes is out of reach of the psychotic’s speech. Nevertheless, just because the psychotic has not been integrated into the symbolic register does not mean that this register does not exist for her. On the contrary, the Other of language is potentially all the more destructive in that its ways remain foreign. Because there exists, for her, a hole where the root of language ought to be, a confrontation with the full force of the Name-of-the-Father could result in a psychotic break. In fact, for Lacan, this hole is the sine qua non of such a break: “For psychosis to be triggered, the Name-of-the-Father – verworfen, foreclosed, that is, never having come to the place of the Other – must be summoned to that place in symbolic opposition to the subject” (Lacan 2006f: 481). When those with psychotic psychic structures are confronted with the Name-of-the-Father in such a way that their symbolic lack cannot be papered over the danger of a psychotic break arises in which “whatever is refused in the symbolic order … reappears in the real” (Lacan 1997: 13). That is, the whole force of the Other of language and socially constructed meaning will assault the psychotic in the form of voices, visions or other phenomena that she can only apprehend as being real, even though an outsider would have to judge them as being purely imaginary: “The Other with a big O, qua bearer of the signifier, is excluded. The Other is thereby all the more powerfully affirmed between it and the subject, at the level of the little other, of the imaginary” (ibid.: 194). Psychoanalysis’s most famous psychotic was a German judge named Daniel Schreber who in 1903 penned a fascinating account of his psychotic breaks in Memoirs of My Mental Illness. Though Schreber never found himself on Freud’s couch, the latter was so taken by Schreber’s acutely honest testimony that he wrote an analysis based on Schreber’s text. Lacan’s third seminar is dedicated to a close reading of both Schreber’s book and Freud’s analysis. According to Lacan Schreber’s psychosis was triggered by a promotion to a position of authority that placed him among men twenty years his senior and required of him certain paternalistic responsibilities. This precipitated an intense delusion in precisely the opposite direction: that he, Schreber, was destined to be turned into a female and become “the wife of god” (Freud 2003a: 21) via mysterious “divine rays” (ibid.: 9) that communicated a kind of “elementary language” (ibid.: xxiv) directly into Schreber’s 45

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nervous system – all of which Schreber described in explicitly sexual language. Commenting on a dream he had just prior to his breakdown Schreber remarks that “it must really be a rather nice thing to be a woman undergoing intercourse” (ibid.: 6). What was the meaning of this delusion? In Lacan’s view, because Schreber did not have the ability to respond to the responsibility summoned up in the notion of being a father – “He is interpellated on terrain where he is unable to respond” (Lacan 1997: 307) – his only alternative was to retreat as far as possible from that call, a retreat that involved him changing his sex and taking the absolutely passive position as the wife of the ultimate father. According to Lacan, every psychotic must construct a “delusional metaphor” (2006f: 481) that replaces the absent paternal metaphor and gives the psychotic subject some hold on the otherwise shifting ground of the symbolic world: The subject will have to bear the weight of this real, primitive dispossession of the signifier and adopt compensation for it, at length, over the course of his life, through a series of purely conformist identifications with characters who will give him the feeling for what one has to do to be a man. (Lacan 1997: 205) The delusional metaphor must pick up the slack for the absent Name-ofthe-Father. It must tie down meaning as best it can and hook signifiers to signifieds at certain crucial points, so that the psychotic can find some protection from the unlimited jouissance of the Other and the “invasion” of the signifier that characterizes the psychotic episode. Lacan sums up Schreber’s situation in the following way: It is the lack of the Name-of-the-Father in that place which, by the hole that it opens up in the signified, sets off a cascade of reworkings of the signifier from which the growing disaster of the imaginary proceeds, until the level is reached at which signifier and signified stabilize in a delusional metaphor. (Lacan 2006f: 481) By situating himself as the wife of God (his “delusional metaphor”), Schreber was able to protect himself from the calamity that issued from the hole where the Name-of-the-Father ought to have afforded him some protection. Lacan noted that those who suffer from psychosis often have extremely domineering fathers who present themselves to their children as the living embodiment of the law, as opposed to being subservient to an impersonal law (i.e. castrated). It is the father’s castration that makes space for the ambiguous feelings concomitant with the Oedipus complex, 46

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without which the father is only ever an imaginary rival, especially to his sons. According to the Freud scholar Colin MacCabe, Schreber’s father – quite famous in Germany as the author of a textbook entitled Medical Home Gymnastics – “offered an image of omnipotence which allowed the child to imagine that he could avoid castration, that he could speak a language entirely under this control” (in Freud 2003a: xiv). When Schreber suffered his psychotic break his body was wracked by “spontaneous orgasms” (ibid.: 7) at the same time that he felt as if he was being “systematically destroyed and reconstituted” (ibid.: 14). Lacan suggests that we see in these symptoms a brutal return of many of Schreber’s father’s own “gymnastic devices”. Freud’s grandson, in his fort–da experiment, accepted a symbolic substitute for his mother and gained an invaluable weapon capable of transforming a world-shattering experience – the absence of his primary other – into an experience he could deal with, even manipulate. Absence does not have to be nothingness, the destruction of the world; the lesson of the spool is that absence can be represented by an object (signifier), and its effect absorbed and integrated. In his made-up game Freud’s grandson taught himself the first lesson in dealing with death; that is, he grasped that an absence can be taken as an absence within a structure of presence and absence, which is essentially what Lacan considered language to be – “Insofar as it forms part of language, the signifier is a sign which refers to another sign, which is as such structured to signify the absence of another sign, in other words, to be opposed to it in a couple” (Lacan 1997: 167). While the animal may never know death, and while we may suffer from fear of it, ultimately our freedom is not a freedom from death but a freedom to deal with death, to discharge its power into life. The psychotic is essentially confined to an imaginary world, a world in which the binding between real and imaginary was never loosened by a symbolic lever. Lacan did not think that this was a situation that could be overcome via psychoanalysis, or any other therapeutic. It is not exactly clear when the cut-off point for the institution of the symbolic occurs in a person’s life, though it seems that if it hasn’t happened by puberty, it isn’t likely to. Analysts who work with children, though, may be called upon to usher their charges into the symbolic realm in the absence of a parental figure that could fulfill this role. When working with adults, the aim of the analyst is to weave an imaginary world, a delusional metaphor, that both allows the psychotic to live a full life while protecting her from traumatic confrontations with a symbolic realm that is alien to her. Lacan refers to this as a “supplementing” of the paternal function, such that the psyche is protected from the complete unravelling that occurs in psychotic breaks. Just as the infant is propped up in front of the mirror to accommodate his first imaginary fixations, the analyst’s propping up of the missing paternal 47

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function in the psychotic is likewise work within the imaginary register, which is the psychotic’s only avenue to appropriate the language of the symbolic. As Fink notes: “the therapist must build up a sense of self in the psychotic that defines who the psychotic is and what his or her place is in the world” (1997b: 109). Like the woman mentioned above who was able to use language effectively because of the great stock of words and phrases she had “recorded”, it is perfectly possible that a psychotic may succeed at making her way in the symbolic, and perhaps never feel the need for the help of an analyst or pharmacologist. Lacan’s verdict that psychotics are essentially confined to the imaginary register runs the risk of dehumanizing psychotic persons, and Lacan’s early emphasis on the symbolic as the human register par excellence made such a conclusion almost impossible to avoid. Later on, when Lacan orients himself more explicitly from the perspective of the real, he manages to provide more hopeful options for the psychotic subject. Following years of careful study of the writings of James Joyce, Lacan came to the conclusion that the groundbreaking Irish author was structurally psychotic, yet had succeeded in analysing himself via his writing and had forged for himself a creative existence that, according to Lacan’s earlier formulations, were out of reach for the psychotic. We will delve more fully into this topic at the end of the present chapter.

PERVERSION

The psychotic is one who has not been alienated by language, and forever lives in the closed bubble of the Mother/Other. The pervert, on the other hand, has been successfully alienated into language but has not undergone the second operation of separation that, in a sense, completes the first operation. In separation, the child experiences true subjectivity, the birth of desire, inasmuch as she achieves distance not only from the mother but also from the object of the mother’s desire. The pervert does not manage this second, crucial step. Returning to Lacan’s image of the crocodile’s jaw wedged open by the phallus, the pervert’s world has been opened up by the phallus (the paternal function), yet the pervert cannot be persuaded to leave. He lingers in the open mouth of the mother and identifies himself with that phallus which he imagines is the object capable of satisfying his privileged Other. Instead of accepting the phallus at the level of the symbol such that it could set desire in motion and make complete identification with one particular image or object impossible, the pervert is satisfied to freeze his desire on a particular imaginary constellation. The symbolic is only halfway instituted for the pervert, and he feels he must prop up the symbolic law with his very being. He must become the cause of the Other’s 48

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desire with the result that his own desire becomes stuck, like the wedge in the crocodile’s mouth. In fact, the course of his desire reveals that he is that wedge. As Lacan notes: The whole problem of the perversions consists in conceiving how the child, in its relationship with its mother—a relationship that is constituted in analysis not by the child’s biological dependence, but by its dependence on her love, that is, by its desire for her desire—identifies with the imaginary object of her desire insofar as the mother herself symbolizes it in the phallus. (Lacan 2006f: 463) Fink provides some helpful schemas to conceptualize the difference between psychosis and perversion (1997b: 195). For the psychotic there is only the sphere of the mother. The psychotic’s subjectivity is unborn, remaining engulfed in the mother’s desiring. For the pervert, subjectivity is limited to the space that has been made for a privileged object, the imaginary phallus. He has achieved alienation from his mother, but not what we can truly call subjectivity, since his desire remains completely bound up with hers. Another way to approach this difference, again coming from Fink, is to imagine that the pervert is the one who has admitted the “no” of the father, but not the name. The Name-of-the-Father, in the pervert’s case, has only been halfway heard. We can imagine a situation in which the father figure stipulates that the child can’t sleep in the mother’s bed anymore, but that when the father is away, the mother indulges the child in the prohibited behaviour. In this instance, the child may recognize the mother’s desire, but in becoming the object of her desire, finds no space for his own desire or subjectivity. The pervert has achieved a little bit of breathing room from the mother’s desire, but because that desire has not been named, the pervert assumes that the answer to the question of what his mother desires can only be him. But this level of closeness, far from providing comfort to the child, causes anxiety. Anxiety, according to Lacan, is caused by a too-close proximity to the Mother/Other, a lack of a lack (of the other). In such a situation “there is no possibility of lack, when his mother is always on his back” (Lacan 1962–3: 5/12/62). The symptoms of perversion are, accordingly, ways for the pervert to achieve some manner of freedom from the oppressive desire of the mother and from the necessity of fulfilling her desire all by himself. In fetishism, a diagnosis that falls under perversion, some specific object, like a pair of boots, or a coat that is cut in a certain way, takes on the role of the desired object and in so doing temporarily relieves the pervert himself of having to perform that role. Lacan calls the fetish the “absolute condition of desire” for the pervert (2006j: 571). 49

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The pervert’s fetish object is an instantiation or embodiment of what Lacan called objet a (to be read, “object little a” – the a, as usual, standing for other). While I give a more detailed exposition of this important concept below, I would like to briefly introduce it at this point because it is crucial for a basic understanding of Lacan’s nosology. Primarily, objet a is what is lost for the subject upon its emergence into the human (symbolic) world. It is that “privileged object, which has emerged from some primal separation, from some self-mutilation induced by the very approach of the real” (Lacan 1978: 83). It is “something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ” (ibid.: 103). It is situated directly in the centre of the three overlapping psychic registers (see Lacan 2005a), but far from corresponding to an object in reality it is precisely what makes it impossible for us to ever make reality completely objective, or for us to completely agree on what we mean by the term reality. In Seminar XI (Lacan 1978) Lacan discussed objet a in the context of the work of art. In a painting objet a is not some thing that we can look at, but it is rather a gaze that looks at us from some unlocalizable point in the painting, transfixing and unsettling us. In his analysis of Hans Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors, Lacan tells us that the anamorphic skull at the bottom of the painting that gazes at us but which, looking at the picture head on, we are unable to identify, is an example of objet a. The ostensible subject of the painting is the two richly adorned Renaissance men surrounded by the various instruments employed in their pursuit of knowledge (i.e. books, astrolabes). Obscured by this lavish culture, and yet literally staring us square in the face, is a looming death for which no knowledge will ever be able to account. One could argue that the “dark spot” at the centre of it all, the effects of which are undeniable, but the strict evidence for which we are never quite able to summon, dominates the pursuit of knowledge in our day more than ever. In fact, the most recent estimate of astrophysicists is that more than 95 per cent of the universe is composed of a combination of dark matter and dark energy which there is no consistent manner of detecting; yet the postulate of such an enormous mystery is crucial for explaining how it is that the universe of which we are conscious doesn’t fly apart. Slavoj Žižek, a philosopher who employs Lacanian terminology for the purposes of cultural critique, points out that neurotics often imagine perverts to be indulging in behaviour that they themselves can only dream about. It appears to the neurotic as if the pervert has figured out the game of desire and has wriggled out of the law that places the desired object always just out of reach. The pervert seems to suffer neither from doubt nor anxiety concerning the tension between desire and the law. For Žižek, though, far from evading the strong arm of that law, the pervert’s satisfaction depends on it absolutely, and, as we have already seen, functions to prop up that law. The pervert has turned himself into an object of that very 50

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law, and in reality experiences none of the freedom or the desire that the neurotic attributes to him. Not only this, but according to Žižek it is the pervert who gives the lie to the dignity of the law, for it is he who shows that the law is always covering up its own “obscene underbelly” (see Žižek 2003: ch. 2). Žižek uses examples ranging from Stalinist Russia to the world of American evangelical Christianity to make this point. The (symbolic) law in communist Russia was that all people lived harmoniously outside the dominion of capitalism. The obscene underbelly to this was the horrific violence perpetrated by Stalin in order to assure this “peace”: “A true Stalinist politician loves mankind, but nonetheless performs horrible purges and executions – his heart is breaking while he is doing it, but he cannot help it, it is his Duty towards the Progress of Humanity” (Žižek 2007: 105). Equally problematic is the American abortion protester who values the sanctity of life to such a degree that he is willing to murder an abortion doctor to protect it. For Žižek, the burning question is how we might establish a law that does not depend on this obscene underbelly, that does not rely on a self-destructive internal contradiction. The writings of Saint Paul and the relationship between Christianity and Judaism are crucial reference points for Žižek’s project. We will return to this issue in Chapter 5. Lacan liked to play on the term perversion as a père-version, that is, a direction or way to the father (père). Just as the psychotic person must create a delusional metaphor to make up for the lack of the paternal metaphor in her structural history, the pervert must prop up the paternal law with his own being. We will see that in neurosis, while the Name-of-theFather has been successfully stitched into the fabric of the subject’s psyche, the separation that this name effects can be incomplete and problematic – the pattern of fatherly stitches, that is, can end up chafing against the smooth surface of the neurotic’s existence.

NEUROSIS

While the psychotic has undergone neither alienation nor separation, and the pervert has undergone alienation but not separation, the neurotic has undergone both, though she may be driven to an analyst by the effect of an incomplete separation. As we noted above, separation is what occurs when the Name-of-the-Father replaces (structurally) the desire of the mother. This, essentially, is what Lacanians refer to as castration. The mother is put under erasure, and in exchange the child is given the tools of language, with which she can rediscover the mother on a different stave, as Freud’s grandchild did with his game of fort and da. The desire of the mother, and the question which that desire puts to the child – what am I for my mother, for my parents? – becomes dialectized; that is, it does not remain frozen on 51

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an imaginary object (phallus) as it did for the pervert, but it is set out on language as a skiff on the water. In a word, it drifts (French: dérive); but, as Lacan would emphasize, dérive and drive are just one letter apart (notwithstanding the difference in languages) (2006n: 681). So the neurotic is set adrift on the current of desire and is assailed by the drives rising up from the deeps, like so many big fish belied by calm waters. A “normal” neurotic – who never experiences the urge to see an analyst – is one whose repressions manage to keep the drives at bay. This is probably the lot of most people. According to Lacanian philosopher Ellie Ragland: Most people protect themselves from the Real by identifying with what is predominantly valued by the Symbolic/Imaginary knowledge of their local (universal) cultural content. In this way individuals need not address the specificity of their symptoms. They merely “mouth” the conventions of the masquerade in play. (Ragland 2004a: 63) Ragland’s use of the term “Symbolic/Imaginary” serves to emphasize the fact that fantasies plays a substantial role in how a given society will define normality. In other words, to be normal (in the Lacanian world) is to have one’s fantasies in line with the fantasies of people around you. Psychic stability can be lost when an identification with mundane cultural expectations (the Symbolic/Imaginary) is lost – resulting in a neurotic symptom. A “normal” person, then, is a neurotic who doesn’t manifest any symptoms because he is neurotic in a way that his society accepts and expects. The neurotic, properly speaking, has the (mis)fortune to be neurotic outside the pale of that acceptance. Whereas the psychotic has no subjectivity to differentiate him from his mother, and the pervert can only achieve some distance from her by becoming the object that she desires, the neurotic, thanks to the space created by separation, can come into her own as a desiring subject. Because the neurotic is firmly anchored in language – rather, language is firmly anchored in her – and because, paradoxically enough, language always sets meaning adrift, she will have a healthy lack of certainty concerning her place in the world, especially in regard to the symbolic, or the big Other. Her desire is in fact expressed in this uncertainty. As Lacan always said, the neurotic is the one who asks questions. Within the world of neurosis, male neurotics tend to be obsessive while female neurotics often fall on the hysterical side. These are, of course, rough guidelines, and it is not uncommon for there to be male hysterics and female obsessives – Lacan referred to himself as an hysteric without any symptoms. The reader will probably notice that our descriptions of obsessives tend to fit stereotypes of (Western) men, while the descriptions 52

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of hysterics tend to agree pretty well with stereotypes concerning women in our society. It should be noted that these descriptions are precisely that – they are not meant to be taken as prescriptions. It is also important to realize that as our world changes, and especially as technology plays an ever more invasive role in our lives, these clinical categories will shift, as will the place of men and women in relation to those boundaries. Slavoj Žižek and Jacques-Alain Miller are two contemporary Lacanians who are important to read in this respect. The neurotic is someone whose desire has been born via the subjectification of language, and, in distinction to a psychotic or a pervert, stands to win the most freedom in regard to her desire. She is also the only one who, it seems, might be able to go beyond the limits of her categorization through a process Lacan called “traversing the fantasy”. Inasmuch as desire drifts it is anxiety producing, and obsessives and hysterics have different ways of dealing with their anxiety. Let us begin with hysterics, for whom the fundamental question, according to Lacan, is: “Am I a man or a woman?” (1997: 171). According to Fink, the hysteric identifies with the object and attempts to become the object for the others in her life.6 She attempts, that is, to be the spur for the desiring of the other. Inasmuch, then, as she identifies with the object she adopts a feminine position within a structure ordered by the phallus. Phallic desire, though, is determinative for both men and women; thus, the hysteric evokes desire in both men and women.7 This is the situation of the most well-known hysteric that Freud analysed, a woman he referred to as Dora, who felt herself caught in a “quadrille” (Lacan 2006i: 179) between two men, her father and the husband of her father’s mistress, and a woman, that same mistress. As Lacan notes, “the problem of [Dora’s] condition is fundamentally that of accepting herself as a man’s object of desire, and this is the mystery that motivates Dora’s idolization of Frau K [the mistress]” (ibid.: 181). While our socially determined reality expects women to be the object of male desire, the hysteric sees that she (or he) occupies the place of an object that is desired in general. Thus, for Lacan, homosexuality in hysteria plays a “subjective role” that “cannot be overestimated” (ibid.: 182). We might say that the hysteric has put her finger on a contradiction within the symbolic itself; for the symbolic organizes a law founded on the distinction of the sexes but then determines a desire that confounds that very distinction. Freud speaks about this in terms of the difficulty children experience transitioning from the bisexual state of infancy to a world in which boys and girls are radically distinguished. The intense identification with role models of their own sex at this juncture is typically accompanied by a sudden and exaggerated aversion to members of the opposite sex. The hysteric rediscovers, in a way, her primordial bisexuality (a state that is quite different from a consciously avowed bisexual identity), and at the same time touches 53

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on the fact that the primordial love object for both men and women is a woman, the mother. Lacan often describes the hysteric as an intrepid pioneer who finds and taps with her very being the contradiction at the heart of the symbolic. In fact, Lacan thought that obsessives had to be “hystericized” before they could hope to be cured, suggesting that hysteria was somehow closer to the analytic ideal than obsession. For Lacan, the hysteric’s endless questioning of symbolic masters (such as analysts) was a crucial mode of accessing the real, and he considered authentic scientific inquiry to be a kind of hysterical project. Lacan tells us that “the starting point of modern science [is] not to trust the phenomena and to look for something more subsistent behind them that explains them” (1997: 143). According to him it is precisely this questioning that the hysteric excels at, in that “the hysteric’s discourse questions the master” (Lacan 2001: 438). In Television, the text of Lacan’s televised interview with his son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan claims that the hysteric’s discourse and scientific discourse have “almost the same structure” (Lacan 1990d: 19), and then seems to suggest that if the scientist can be likened to the collector of honey, the hysteric is the much more important bee: I prefer to ask myself what distinguishes scientific discourse from the hysteric’s discourse, in which it must be said that Freud, in gathering her honey, was not out of the picture. Because what he invents is the work of the bee, who does not think, nor calculate, nor judge. (Ibid.) Scientists, of course, are the ones who think, calculate and judge, but if science is revolutionary – and Lacan thought that the science that began with Galileo was precisely that – it is because it has joined this calculating with something much more powerful, a demand to know. We might say, in imitation of Lacan’s sometimes bawdy style, that the hysteric is the one who “gets off ” by questioning the authority of the master. The hysteric herself, however, in the throes of her symptom experiences her neurosis as suffering and looks for ways to alleviate this suffering. One such way, opted for by Freud’s Dora, has been embodied in the figure of the Virgin Mary inasmuch as she is placed beyond the pale of human desire, whether of men or of women, by becoming the chosen object of God Himself. Lacan, at least at this early juncture of his teaching (1951), seems to consider Dora’s identification with the Virgin to be part and parcel of Freud’s failure in this particular analysis: In her long meditation before the Madonna and in her recourse to the role of distant worshipper, this mystery [that she is 54

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the object of man’s desire] drives Dora toward the solution Christianity has offered for this subjective impasse by making woman the object of a divine desire or a transcendent object of desire, which amounts to the same thing. (Lacan 2006i: 181) This identification was, of course, quite similar to that President Schreber opted for in order to save himself from complete psychotic dissolution: becoming the woman that God will impregnate for the salvation of the world. Christianity is not, by any means, the only religion to idealize Woman as the divine love object. The mother of the Buddha also conceives through a dream,8 and in certain forms of Hinduism we see that a woman is only the wife of her husband after first knowing herself to be the wife of the gods.9 In Taoism’s counter-cultural affirmation of yin, we see something like a universalization of the feminine essence. “Hysteria”, as Lacan tells us, “is characterized by the function of an unsatisfied desire” (1997: 17). That is, the hysteric endeavours to make sure that her desire and the desire of her others manages to remain unfulfilled. Why does she do this? Because, inasmuch as she identifies with objet a, if desire were to be satisfied, her very being would be in question. Her actions, then, are paradoxical. She induces desire, but works very hard to make sure that this desire fails to find its satisfaction. Once it does, desire dries up, and what she is really looking for is a purified desire, a desire that looks to desire, pure and simple. We can see this dynamic quite clearly in the innumerable women’s magazines found in any grocery store. The images in these magazines have been very carefully produced to arouse a desire in the reader, whether that be a desire to have sex with one of the models, or a desire to learn the secrets of the model at whom others never tire of gazing. The magazine will also promise various kinds of satisfaction, perhaps a foolproof way to achieve an orgasm, or an exhilarating new sexual position or a new cream that will fight acne or smooth wrinkles. It is clear that few, if any, of these promises can be delivered, if only for the reason that the exact same promises are made month after month in many different publications, all of which are more or less indistinguishable from each other. Surely, if one of these creams actually produced the effects that it proclaims, or if a given sexual position were actually as mind-blowing as its “discoverers” tout, it would easily sell itself without the need for supermodels and glossy images. This would, or course, be a disaster for the continuing sale of such magazines; thus, they bank (quite literally) on the failure of their various promises, and, consequently, on the undeniable success of the insatiable desire that is their true product. The hysteric asks, “Am I a man or am I a woman?” and she endeavours to arouse a desire in the Other which cannot be satisfied. The obsessive, on the other hand, asks “Am I alive or dead?” (Lacan 2006c: 258–9; Fink 55

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1997b: 126), and his usual strategy is to avoid awakening desire in the Other, because his originary trauma (his first “sexual experience”) involved intense feelings of guilt. His desire is thus arranged so as to limit jouissance (satisfaction), or, as Bruce Fink says, to make sure that the Other doesn’t get off on him. As Lacan says: “Desire is a defense, a defense against going beyond a limit in jouissance” (2006n: 699). The methods of avoiding satisfaction often function to win some smaller, more manageable, satisfaction for the obsessive. A situation, though, in which substitute satisfactions start to become more painful than satisfying may often cause the obsessive to seek out an analyst. Whereas the hysteric maintains her desire as perpetually unsatisfied (she can never get enough) the obsessive maintains his as the “function of an impossible desire” (Lacan 1977: 17). The object of his desire is constructed so as to be attainable only in fantasy. This protects him from being exposed to the voracious jouissance of the Other. Colette Soler tells the story of a certain obsessive analysand who, at the precise time he was making love to one woman, would always make sure that another woman called him on the telephone. This diversion allowed him to protect his being from the full power of the other with whom he shared a bed. As Soler comments, “He is trying to prove to himself that there is no object that is capable of making him vanish” (1996a: 270). If the images in magazines and television commercials are hysterical attempts to arouse desire, their success clearly depends on the readiness of obsessives to accept these images as their true others, in order to avoid exposure to the much more dangerous others in their lives. This perhaps explains why putting a bikini-clad woman on top of a car can be a very important part of selling it. While assumedly no man would admit to buying a car because he thought it would come with the woman pictured lounging on its hood, at the unconscious level this woman embodies a crucial piece of the fantasy that sustains neurotic desire. When the poor obsessive comes home with a mustang (or a power saw, or a speed boat) he is berated by his wife for his wasteful expenditure. Her anger is well placed – though probably ineffective – for the purchase was, at bottom, an investment in the only enjoyment the obsessive allows himself to entertain – one that is impossible. When the neurotic, as a child, accedes to language, he allows his very being, his living body, to be written over with signifiers, an operation that cadaverizes the subject at a certain level. This is especially clear in the obsessive who, because he retreats from the Other who is the source of his language and his meaning, will often worry that he is quite nearly dead, devoid of desire: The obsessional is always an other. Whatever he tells you, whatever feelings he brings to you, it is always those of someone other than himself … He isn’t dead to himself, nor in actual fact. 56

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For whom is he dead? For the person who is his master. And in relation to what? In relation to the object of his pleasure [jouissance]. (Lacan 1991b: 269) Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” could be called the motto of the obsessive. Hamlet utters it because he feels already dead at some level. “Man delights not me” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 2, scene 2), he says, after giving one of the most evocative descriptions of the world and of man in all of literature. For Hamlet, the world exists only as “words, words, words” (ibid.), while he himself feels nothing. We could take up many pages exploring the roots of Hamlet’s neuroticism, and Freud and Lacan both were fascinated by the gloomy prince. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum is another obsessive motto, especially when restated by Lacan as “I am thinking: ‘therefore, I am’” (2006d: 734). In other words, the obsessive is only when he is thinking. When the words cease, being ceases, and so the obsessive must keep on thinking and speaking as if his life depended on it. Though his life might not, his jouissance definitely does. While a “normal” obsessive may reap sufficient secondary satisfaction from such a situation, the obsessive in a state of crisis, one like Hamlet, will no longer be able to find enough jouissance in his thoughts and words to sustain his being. He goes to an analyst because he longs to experience an enjoyment beyond the kind he has always been able to conjure up in his fantasies and endless monologues. He goes in search of an enjoyment that is real. I have condensed an extremely complicated nosology into just a few pages. Because we have covered so much ground so quickly it might be helpful to here briefly review, in slightly different terms, what we have stated thus far. In Lacanian analysis, the symbolic register is, for many reasons, the central register. All of Lacan’s clinical categories are based on whether this register is accepted or rejected, and, if rejected, the precise manner in which this rejection takes place. If it is foreclosed, if the symbolic was never instituted in any way for the subject, psychosis results. If it is disavowed, that is, if the name of the father becomes instituted only in an imaginary way, perversion will result. Freud’s initial example of disavowal was when a young boy sees the lack of a penis in his little sister or female playmate, but immediately disregard this perception, and hallucinates a corrective (Freud 1961d: 195). Thereafter, the pervert identifies himself as the (mother’s) phallus, the object that fills her lack. In neurosis, the name of the father is admitted in its fully symbolic character so that the child accepts the symbolic wedging apart of imaginary and real. This results in repression, which is the fortunate lot of most people, the possible overcoming of which, though, Lacan does make hints concerning. In suggesting a possible beyond to neurosis, he disagrees with Freud, who spoke of the bedrock of castration and implied that a certain level of neurosis was just something that civilized people had to learn to live with. 57

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THE SYMBOLIC REVISITED

Just as we discussed the imaginary register both ontogenetically and phylogenetically we can also approach the symbolic register from these two perspectives. In outlining the importance of the Name-of-the-Father in the individual’s development we have tried to give Lacan’s understanding of the ontogenetic function of the symbolic. Phylogenetically, Lacan links the appearance of the symbolic register in human activity with the marks found on prehistoric animal bones, which, according to archaeologists and ethnologists, signify animals killed by Paleolithic hunters. The marks that indicate separate kills function not as numbers but as indications of pure difference: God knows that catching an animal isn’t any easier now than it was in the days of the so called bushmen … It seems that after having hit the animal it was necessary to track it for a long time to see it succumb to the effect of the poison. I kill one, it’s an adventure. I kill another, and it’s a second adventure, which I must distinguish by certain traits from the first, but which it essentially resembles in being marked by the same general line. By the fourth time, it becomes a little confused: what is to distinguish it from the second, for example? (Lacan 1961–2: 6/12/61) Lacan calls this hunter’s mark a “unary trait”, which is the translation he gives to Freud’s einziger Zug. For Freud, the einziger Zug was a feature that the subject latches onto in the ideal ego in order to give support to an imaginary identity. It is what causes a certain primordial narcissism to always be rooted in some feature of the other. It is what, beyond genetics, causes a man to smile like his father did, or that causes a couple to each walk down the street with the same gait – an unconscious identification that perhaps causes not the dog to look like the owner, but the owner to imitate some precious characteristic in the pet.10 Lacan points out that these notched bones shows up at a later point in history than the realistic images of bulls and other animals found on the walls of caves in France, Spain and other places, images “which, from the point of view of the art of painting, are still beyond us” (1961–2: 6/12/61). A certain imaginary identification preceded, then, the altogether different symbolic identification. While the imaginary register is one that human beings share with animals, the entrance into the symbolic is marked, for Lacan, by the killing of an animal. The killing of that animal become a mark, and this comes to represent the birth of the symbolic. This first mark is analogous to the father’s thunderous “no” that breaks up the unity of the 58

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mother and child. The mark is phallic in that it sticks out from the smooth surface of the real, while also “hollowing out” that real, and injuring it with an absence. It is a unary trait because it creates the symbolic register as a unity, as a world carved out from the disorder of the “sensorium” experienced as primordial nothingness.11 Lacan makes a connection between the hollowed out notch on a rock, bone or piece of wood and the monoliths found in stone-age settlements all over the world. Both notch and monument have the phallic capacity to “stand in” or erect themselves for the totality of language and meaning. Paleolithic men and women worshipped phallic monuments (stones, poles, trees) as the polar axis of their being, while the notches etched on animal bones expressed their domination of the world. When, in Norse mythology, Wodin is hung from the tree (axis mundi), the entire Scandinavian worldorder hangs there with him. If he did not have the ability to be saved from that tree, there would be no language with which to tell his story. Likewise, the Christian cross becomes a notch upon which hangs a God-man and the hope of all creation. The resurrection from that hanging comes first, in a way, for it is only from the vantage point of those saved from the cross that the cross can be inserted into a meaningful narrative. Accordingly, one of the most incisive metaphors that Lacanians have used for the human subject is a religious one: the empty tomb. This is both a sign of a body escaped from death (as in Christianity) as well as the tomb or the burial plot before one has come to occupy it – such as, for example, one might prepare for oneself on the death of a spouse. It is the stone rolled away from the tomb as well as the weighty monolith keeping the dead in the ground. The Lacanian analyst Stuart Schneiderman has suggested that the empty grave is also a subject (1983: 6–7), a conclusion he comes to based on an examination of Lacan’s use of set theory in which, before we can start to count, we must first posit the empty set: {}. This is not a zero but a structure that is empty, “a set which has no elements, a symbol which transforms nothingness into something by marking or representing it” (Fink 1997a: 52; emphasis in original). This ground zero of the symbolic is also what is most real about a subject. It stands for everything that I am not able to symbolize (represent) to myself, like a grave that is prepared for me when I still number myself among those who speak, that grave which will mark me when my speech no longer does.12 The subject is an empty tomb inasmuch as this subject is a notch hollowed out of the real: both the preparation for death – the space made for death in language and culture – as well as the mysterious absence of death itself, in that the symbolic register is what makes man immortal through his ability to make his mark on language.13 The animal does not know that it will die, but the human being, through killing the animal, does have this knowledge. The famous opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey imagines the emergence of 59

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humanity from its ape-like precursors. We see these creatures sitting around, eating and drinking, when all of a sudden a rectangular monolith (phallus) appears towering before them. Some kind of signal emanates from inside this smooth black structure, and, while the chords of Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra swell we see one of the creatures take a bone and begin to joyously smash a skeleton lying next to him on the ground. As the camera zeroes in on the bone raised high in anticipation of its violent descent we see that this bone is both a mirror in which this proto-human idealizes himself as well as the phallic instrument capable of hollowing out the real, unarizing it with one thunderous mark. This being jubilantly feels himself to be born in the very bone with which he kills those whom he hunts. That bone is himself, and he hangs his subjectivity on it, as a weaning child wagers his being on a scrap of blanket. What makes this depiction of the primordial birth of the human subject truly Lacanian is that it shows it to be inspired not from within, as evolutionary theory would demand, but from a mysterious and alien Other. As Lacan often repeated: “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other” (1978: 235). The film In the Name of the Father also provides us with a vivid image of the real impact of the primordial symbolic stroke. The picture traces the story of a group of Irish adolescents, the Guildford Four, who were wrongly imprisoned for fifteen years for an IRA terrorist bombing that the British government needed scapegoats for. The plot centres around one of the falsely accused, Gerry Conlon, a petty thief whose hijinks are clearly linked to disdain for a father who, at least according to Gerry, only ever saw what was wrong in his son – driving Gerry, at one point in his childhood, to trace his father’s name in the dust only to piss on it. But when his father, also falsely implicated in the crime and sent to join his son in prison, dies in the cell that he shared with his son we see Gerry undergo a crucial transformation. Rejecting both the seething anger and resentment at his father (and at “the British”) as well as the violent ideology of a real IRA operative that he meets in prison, Gerry reaches out to a lawyer interested in reopening the case of the unjustly accused young people. These efforts, done in the name of his dead father, ultimately win justice and exoneration not only for Gerry but for his father and the others whose lives had been all but ruined by a corrupt system. The Lacanian point to be made is that Gerry is not capable of fighting for his father (on whom, while alive, he blamed his life of lying and thieving), but only in the name of his (dead) father. When he pursues justice in the name of his father, he empties, in a way, his father’s grave – he takes him from under the ground and places him amidst the stars (the first home, as we will see, of the real). As Freud put it, “the dead father became stronger than the living one had been” (1950: 143). This is what Lacan means when he says that the symbolic is capable of hollowing out a place in the real. 60

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Scholars of religion cannot fail to be struck by the prevalence of religious language when Lacan speaks of the symbolic. This is clearly not accidental. For Lacan, it is in the register of the symbolic that human life is ordered, the only point from which it can actually be said to be human. In speaking of the Nameof-the-Father with its clear reference to the language of Christian prayer and practice he was emphasizing the dimension of the Other so crucial to human identity. (Lacan’s surprising rejection of evolutionary notions as a reference point for psychoanalysis is rooted in this demand that the Other is the foundation of human society through the instantiation of the Word.) Similarly, by stressing that the symbolic register was the domain of the law he was giving it an importance that is echoed in countless sacred texts. To cite just one example among many, in a Vedic hymn to Indra we read that: The praise-hymn of eternal law, arousing, glowing, hath oped the deaf ears of the living. Firm-seated are eternal law’s foundation; in its fair form are many splendid beauties … To law belong the vast deep earth and heaven: milch-kine supreme, to law their milk they render. (Radhakrishnan & Moore 1989: 25) Such a hymn has much in common with passages in the Hebrew psalms in praise of Torah (law). Psalm 119, a long acrostic poem, is especially noteworthy for its intense and repetitive praise of God’s law. While Lacan dismissed the transcendental assumptions of religion, he had his own way of understanding why those assumptions were made, namely, to emphasize the life-or-death character of the symbolic register. While the Catholic Christian realizes her authentic nature by being baptized “in the name of the Father”, and the worshipper of Indra sees the world rightly only by seeing it all as an offering to the eternal law, for Lacan, it is the symbolic order alone that defines the origins and limits of human civilization. In his emphasis on a law exterior to and predominant over nature and man Lacan was in whole-hearted agreement with the hymn-makers of old.

THE REAL

While existence is granted only through the symbolic order (the alienated subject being assigned a place therein), being is supplied only by cleaving to the real. (Fink 1996: 87) The imaginary is the world that we share with the other residents of the animal kingdom. The symbolic is the space of the properly human world of 61

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language, law and order. Lacan associates the real with the eternal order of the stars, and the constellations that so many different cultures, independently of each other and with no apparent respect for realistic approximation, have named after various animals. Neither an image (for there is a decided lack of one-to-one correspondence with actual animal forms), nor a linguistic reality, with its presence in absence, but something real such that “we always find them in the same place” (Lacan 1991b: 238). Stars are real, integrally real, in principle, there is absolutely nothing about them pertaining to an alterity with respect to themselves, they are purely and simply what they are … the perfectly regular movement of the sidereal day is clearly what gave men their first opportunity of sensing the stability of the changing world surrounding them, and of starting to found the dialectic of the symbolic and the real, in which the symbolic apparently springs out from the real, which naturally isn’t any more well-founded than thinking that the so-called fixed stars really revolve around the Earth. (Ibid.) It is clearly not for nothing that always, and in all cultures, the names given to the constellations play an essential role in establishing a certain number of fundamental symbolic relationships. (Lacan 1997: 98) The connection between symbolic and real that Lacan posits – between laws and sacrifices on the one hand and blind consistency (non-alterity) on the other – can be seen in the two levels of Greek deities. On the one hand there are the gods that possess a symbolic function (Zeus, Athena, etc.); they are the givers of the law who regulate human relationships and who demand sacrifice. Most of the characters in the heavenly zodiac of the Greeks are related to these gods who possess a differentiating and symbolic function that distinguishes man from beast. It is only worship of these gods that makes human beings what they are. But “behind” the gods of Mount Olympus there is fate (moira) and the trinity of goddesses who draw, measure out and snip off each person’s fate. These gods do not demand sacrifice, and they have neither beginning nor end. The heavenly shield of constellations, therefore, takes on the character of a semi-diaphanous mirror whose pinpricks let shine through a divine light from beyond while simultaneously reflecting the totemic contests and sacrifices played out in the secular theater. The laws by which we regulate all human intercourse – needed precisely because we stand out like a sore thumb in the world of nature and her creatures – are given validation and justification in having their origins traced to the stars. 62

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According to Ragland, the Lacanian real is a “brute, pre-symbolic reality which returns to the same place in the form of need, such as hunger” (1996: 192). Ontogenetically speaking, this is the “primordial real” in which the infant is submerged – primordial so-called to distinguish it from the real that is “leftover” after being pushed through the sieve of the symbolic register and that takes the form of objet a, the object-cause of desire (see below). Lacan understands the biological needs of the child, for food, sleep, etc. to be rooted in this primordial real. The symbolic register does not yet function here to divide things up into manageable units; thus, the infant is exposed to the raw and uncensored “sensorium” that assails her from both inside and out. Life is a destructive real for the infans (the one lacking speech), and every cry of the infant expresses the horror of non-being, the cry of one abandoned in the void. For Lacan, though, this void is not nothing, but the fullness of the real unmediated by any pacifying symbolic structure. The first responsibility of the child’s primary other (the “mother”) is to address the biological drives emanating from the primordial real of the child – to feed, change, and comfort. While the infant’s needs are real, though, the mother’s addressing of these needs is symbolically derived. The mother is forced to translate a need, such as a hunger pang, into a demand (e.g. for milk). For Lacan, need and demand are two fundamentally different things, for while a need is concerned only with the satisfaction of its own circuit, demands are always, at bottom, demands for love. Thus, a mother is a mother in name only if she merely feeds her child – merely addresses the need but neglects to also give love. She understands the cry of the child to be both a cry for food and a cry for love, and the child learns to understand his need in the same way (meaning and desire, again, come from the other). Far from being merely sentimental or self-satisfying supplements the attentive gaze of the mother giving nourishment and her gentle touches at bedtime or while changing diapers – the coos and whispers that accompany every action – are the infant’s first exposure to the world of the symbolic. They are the unary traits that act as the future guidelines of the symbolic, without which there would be no possibility of human life (i.e. desire) for the child. The baby learns to coo from his parents. According to Lacan’s genealogy, “Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second” (2006m: 580). For the adult (neurotic) subject the primordial real is always out of reach, perpetually veiled beneath the web of signifiers. Desire, though, is like a bloodhound following the trail of the real that remains, the little bits of the real caught in that web that are the true motivators, the true causes, the crucial determinants of human experience. While a need can be satisfied, the demand (for love) cannot; thus, desire (need subtracted from demand) 63

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is indestructible. As Lacan explains, “desire is produced in the beyond of demand, because in linking the subject’s life to its conditions, demand prunes it of need” (2006b: 525). Our desire cannot be fulfilled by any one object, because what we thought would be a definitive proof of love turns out to be somehow lacking. Slavoj Žižek sees this logic in the stereotypical cigarette smoked after sex in movies, a cigarette that belies the natural assumption that the act of lovemaking has perfectly satiated desire. The act that we assumed would be the proof of the other’s love (and of our being), turns out always to be inadequate. For Lacan, desire is only ever saying: “I ask you to refuse what I offer you”, because “that’s not it” (1998: 126). Once language is firmly instituted for a subject, the real becomes that which was lost and which pops up in various guises as objet a, simultaneously the “it” we are looking for and “no being” (ibid.). In the overture to his Écrits Lacan introduces objet a in terms of “the division in which the subject is verified” – a division which is: at the crux of what emerges at the end of this collection that goes by the name of object a (to be read: little a). It is the object that (cor)responds to the question about style that I am raising right at the outset. In the place man marked for Buffon, I call for the falling away of this object, which is revealing due to the fact that the fall isolates this object, both as the cause of desire in which the subject disappears and as sustaining the subject between truth and knowledge. (Lacan 2006g: 4–5) The reference to Buffon is to the famous saying that Lacan places at the very beginning of his overture: le style est l’homme meme. The style is the man. It must be significant that it is with this quotation that Lacan starts his most important book (we could even say that Écrits – “writings” – is the only book he wrote, for his published seminars are transcriptions of oral presentations). Our first clue is in the way Lacan introduces what he held to be his most important contribution to psychoanalysis – objet a is “to be read”. In other words there is something in objet a that can’t be heard. There is something in objet a that escapes the world of spoken discourse, and thus the world of the unconscious (for psychoanalysis detects the unconscious via speech). When we see “objet a” we read “objet (petit) a”. It is this “little” that escapes the symbolic order as it simultaneously orders it according to the lack it embodies. In linking objet a to style at the opening of Écrits, Lacan is offering himself to his readers at one level while withdrawing on another, saying that there is something of him that falls away in his writing, namely, himself. Lacan’s style, so famously difficult, is not something to work through so that his concepts can be understood, for his concepts cannot be separated 64

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from this style. When Lacan remarks that his Écrits “were not meant to be read” (1998: 26) and that he will “leave the reader no other way out than the way in, which I prefer to be difficult” (2006d: 412), he does not mean that we should leave off reading Écrits and simply use it as a doorstop. Rather, we should recognize this difficulty in reading as the impasse of the real from within the symbolic. In following Lacan through some of his tortuous prose we perhaps catch a glimpse of the fall of objet a in its eternally fugitive nature, deigning to sparkle but never to shine. We might say that the real follows a logic of scintillation in which the subject both “disappears” in the fall of objet a, and yet is also sustained “between truth and knowledge”. Whereas science pursues a knowledge that shines – we define knowledge as scientific precisely when it is confirmed repeatedly and without fail – psychoanalysis, because it avows the importance of the subject, finds itself in possession of a knowledge that flickers and dims in light of the subject’s difficult truth. The subject’s truth, its status in the real, is difficult because it is marked with anxiety, “the signal of the real” (1962–3: 6/3/63). And just like the stars are real inasmuch as they always return to the same place, anxiety is “the one that does not deceive” (ibid.). The relation between symbolic and real is contradictory. For while on the one hand the symbolic is rooted in the real, the symbolic functions, in large part, to protect the subject from a too close proximity to the real, and to mediate what of the real it can. This can be seen in the way Lacan talks about psychotics or the way he understands child psychology. The struggle of the psychotic, who is invaded by the real because of a faulty instantiation of the symbolic, is to put a (imaginary) barrier and defence between himself and the real. The infant, that being not yet in possession of speech, lives a life of sporadic contentment alternating with fits of horror at her suffocating proximity to the real. The voraciousness and unequalled skill with which a young child masters language is motivated by the threat emanating from the real – a threat to scatter every collection, tear down every wall, batter all defences, and leave no distinction between matter and man, between life and death. At a certain level, the real, in its perpetual and incestual return, gives the lie to the very essence of the symbolic, founded as it is on the prohibition against incest. This reveals again the nature of the relation between symbolic and real, which is both link and fracture, for while the symbolic register defines what it is to be human, the real is that aspect of human life that cannot be symbolized (or imaged) – that moment in a horror film right before something dreadful happens. Alternately, the real is revealed at the moment right before we enjoy something we have been anticipating. As Winnie the Pooh admits, his favourite thing is not to eat honey, but to savour the moment right before he begins to eat his favourite treat. In both cases, whether it is something we dread or something we anticipate, we 65

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catch a flicker of the real in that which can neither be captured by the symbolic nor given an imaginary semblance. In the case of Winnie the Pooh, while his eating of the honey is in accordance with symbolic norms – for a bear has to eat – the real of his anticipation must be linked to the inevitable overeating he indulges in, signalled in the illustrations by the overturned honey pots and a painfully bulging gut. Perhaps it is because children are not quite totally inscribed within the symbolic that they are so attracted to what oversteps the boundaries of the human within the human – represented, not surprisingly, by animals that speak. The real is momentarily unveiled in the dread/anticipation of horror films and shy bears, and both support the analytic truism that all enjoyment (jouissance), any encounter with the stuff of the real, involves a transgression (of the symbolic).14 This would seem to put psychoanalysis at odds with a certain religious perspective, in which following the law is not only seen as virtuous but, ultimately, as the only path to true enjoyment.15 This connection between law and enjoyment is precisely what Confucius, in his Analects, seems to stress in looking back at his life: “At fifteen my heart was set on learning; at thirty I stood firm; at forty I had no more doubts; at fifty I knew the mandate of heaven; at sixty my ear was obedient; at seventy I could follow my heart’s desire without transgressing the norm” (2003: 9). Confucius understands the goal of life to be such that one’s deepest desires find harmony with the eternal law. This is also what Dante stresses in the final stanzas of his Paradiso, as he describes his vision of the eternal Godhead: And I, who neared the goal of all my nature, Felt my soul, at the climax of its yearning, Suddenly, as it ought, grow calm with rapture … as I grew worthier to see, the more I looked, the more unchanging semblance appeared to change with every change in me (Dante, Paradiso, canto 33, lines 46–8, 112–14; trans. J. Ciardi) Dante makes it quite clear throughout the Divine Comedy, as well as in his Vita Nuova, that the philandering which marked his earthly sojourn was a paltry enjoyment to the rapture to be experienced gazing on God Himself in the beatific vision, a vision that not only fulfilled Dante’s deepest desires but created more desire with which to engender more satisfaction. Such a theology originates, ultimately, in Jesus’ linking of love with obedience when he says to his disciples: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). But how can love (or desire) be commanded? This was one of Freud’s complaint against religion, and much of the evidence 66

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of psychoanalysis shows not only how jouissance and the law are always at odds with each other, but, further, that the possibility of enjoyment depends on breaking the law. This is why Lacan flips the declaration of Ivan Karamazov on its head. Instead of all things being permitted when God is dead, Lacan holds that should God (the Other supporting the law) be absent, nothing would be permitted – it would be impossible to attain enjoyment. If Freud condemned religion as illusory, it is partly because of the evidence he saw that fulfillment never came from following the law, as religions, almost without exception, suggest (the “left-handed” practice of certain Hindu groups, which make a law of breaking the law, being no exception). Freud saw his civilization in danger from a too strident repression of enjoyment. The super-ego needed to let up a bit in his opinion: “In the severity of its commands and prohibitions it troubles itself too little about the happiness of the ego, in that it takes insufficient account of the resistances against obeying them” (Freud 1961b: 108). Inasmuch as our culture has relaxed its strictures on everything from sex to food we are indebted to Freud. But our lack of expected enjoyment gives the lie to Freud’s conclusions. Lacan, as we’ve noted, was much more attuned to the manner in which enjoyment depends on the law, but is his emphasis on the necessity of the law for enjoyment a vote for religion? This is one way to read him – he did say, for example, that “we spend our time breaking the ten commandments, and that is why society is possible” (Lacan 1992: 69). In other words, we need a law, but it is equally necessary that we break this law. This is not a very satisfactory answer though, inasmuch as it is hard to imagine a law that no one takes seriously being very effective. If a law is just there to break, it ceases to become a law. We will see in the next section that Lacan finds other, more persuasive, ways of addressing the impasse between law and enjoyment.

THE TIE THAT BINDS

Every time you feel you feel you want me, that is a sign I am wanting you. (George MacDonald, The Wise Woman, 1875) Someone once said that you can’t take the lack out of Lacan. This is assuredly true. We should add that neither can you take the lack out of any of the three registers, for it seems to dominate at every level of our examination of them. In the imaginary, the misrecognition that will forever characterize the ego comes about because the infant has no choice but to model herself on the others around her – Lacan calls this the “misrecognizing that is essential to knowing myself ” (2006n: 684). There is a gap between 67

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the ideals that the child’s others embody and the child’s own state of prematuration – “I is an other” (Rimbaud 2007: 64), as Rimbaud noted and Lacan often repeated. This gap that is instituted in the imaginary and that conditions knowledge to always be a form of misrecognition is intensified in the symbolic regime, in which signifiers begin to assert their dominance in the world of the subject, putting the primordial real forever out of reach. That real is encountered by the psychotic as an invasive force against which there is no proper defence (as in the schizophrenic who is helpless against the voice urging him to kill) and by the neurotic as an anxiety producing object against which her desire actually serves as a defence. One might well ask what it is that holds such a beleaguered psyche together – or, conversely, whether Lacan’s picture of the psyche is really all that accurate. For doesn’t this predominance of lack and rupture seem to go against what the majority of people experience most of the time? Don’t most of us, most of the time, feel that the fabric of our existence does hold together? That, despite the various hardships of life, and in defiance of Yeats’s overused phrase, the centre does hold? Isn’t this what makes trauma and lack, precisely, traumatic – that we aren’t usually subjected to them? In fact, Lacan did address this issue, and did not deny a real coherence within subjective life. Towards the end of his teaching, this uncanny coherence even became a fourth ring, what Lacan called the sinthome. In the beginning, though, we might say that what coheres in the psyche is the very mis in misrecognition. What is attractive to the infant, what causes her to mistake herself for another, even to the point of crying when the friend who resembles her takes a tumble (the phenomenon of transitivism), is precisely the integrity she (thinks) she sees in another and mistakenly applies to herself. In Lacan’s words, “consciousness is based on the ego-ideal as unary [one-izing] trait” (2006n: 685). This trait or mark which she sees in another becomes the basis not only for how she thinks about herself, but the basis for any thinking at all. Inasmuch as these unary traits precede even the advent of the signifier in the infant’s world, Lacan associated them with “letters”. Lacan, then, does not deny psychic coherence early on in the subject’s experience, but he characterizes this coherence as precisely mistaken. Consciousness is grounded on a fundamental and necessary misrecognition. Consciousness is misrecognition most basically because the young subject identifies something as whole or one when in fact it is not so. This is why learning the fact of sexual difference is traumatic for a child, splitting, as it does, humanity in two. Men and women are two different things. Mother is different from father, and mother (or father) is different from me. The clinical picture that Freud draws begins with the manner in which young children deal with this problem. He postulated that some boys (specifically, those with a perverse inclination), on seeing the lack of a penis in 68

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a female counterpart, “repudiate” this knowledge and say instead that she does have a penis and that the perception was mistaken. Boys with a neurotic bent will experience anxiety lest they should lose theirs, and girls of a neurotic bent will have “penis envy” and develop an antipathy towards their mother, who must be to blame for this egregious oversight. Freud said that, in general, children possess a theory that both boys and girls once possessed penises, but that girls have lost theirs. For Lacan, it is less physiology than language that carries the lack/difference that so concerns young children. Lacan pinpoints a crucial point in the child’s development – that he originally calls the pre-Oedipal phase but later calls the “first time” of the Oedipal complex – when the child becomes aware of some lack in the Other. The Other, the one who addresses the child’s needs, is not completely satisfied, but is driven by some lack, some desire, the fulfilling of which becomes the child’s main directive. According to Lacan, at this point both boys and girls will attempt to become the (imaginary) phallus for their mother. He describes this as a dangerous game in which the child “is never truly there where he is, and he is never completely absent there where he is not” (Lacan 1994: 193). This “first time” is dissolved by the appearance of the “imaginary” father who “castrates the mother” by separating her from the child and by limiting the child’s access to the mother. This is the “second time” at the end of which “the subject … sees the father as a rival for the mother’s desire” (Evans 1996: 129). The “third time” of the Oedipal complex, and the beginning of its dissolution, is marked by the appearance on the scene of the real father, the one who definitively castrates the child, putting the mother off limits for good. Only by accepting this castration can the subject enter into the domain of desire: “Castration means that jouissance must be refused so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder of the Law of Desire” (Lacan 2006n: 700). Much of this discussion is reminiscent of what has already been said concerning the Name-of-the-Father and its importance in determining clinical categories. For example, just as we talked about psychosis resulting from a foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, we could equally say that the psychotic is one who refuses even the first time of the oedipal complex, and stays in the protective bubble of “mommy and me”. The pervert is the one who is not able to successfully navigate the “third time”, and instead of identifying with the father (and the symbolic) identifies with the imaginary phallus of the pre-Oedipal complex. The neurotic is the one who has accepted her castration, with any pathologies resulting from the fact that rarely can this acceptance be qualified as “full”. Neurotics are always attempting to recover their lost jouissance via fantasy, thus refusing to own up to their desire. It is to neurotics that Lacan addresses what some have called the ethical maxim of psychoanalysis: “The only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire” (1992: 321).16 69

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The “third time” of the Oedipal complex parallels the alienation we spoke of earlier in this chapter, at which point the Name-of-the-Father introduces a definitive break between mother and child. As we noted, this name is not a signifier, though, until it is separated from its referent, from the real father (or whomever the name refers to) and accepted on principle. This is Lacan’s separation, the point at which language is effectively installed in the subject, so the child is not only unable to identify himself as the mother’s object of desire, but is also unable to identify the father as that object. The mother’s desire, for the successfully neurotic person, is infinite, and beyond language. Thinking along these lines we might say that, prior to the child’s identification with the symbolic father, it is better to speak of the (imaginary) phallus instead of the Name-of-the-Father. In transitioning from imaginary phallus to symbolic phallus the child accepts the mediation of language; henceforth, we can speak of the Name-of-the-Father. Once this name has been dialectized, unmoored from its real-life referent, the father is, in a way, dead. Lacan makes this link explicitly, remarking that, for Freud, the myth of the Oedipal complex boiled down to the question: “What is a father? ‘It is the dead Father’, Freud replies, but no one hears him … Lacan [sic] takes it up again under the heading of the ‘Name-of-theFather’” (Lacan 2006n: 688).17 In this way the child effectively loses both mother and father upon being cast into language. The mother as object of jouissance and the father as either imaginary rival or real punisher fade into the non-memory of the young child’s experience. This perhaps explains the absence of parents (and the subsequent desire for them) in stories that have most gripped young readers, from Cinderella and Snow White to A Series of Unfortunate Events and Harry Potter. During the “middle” period of Lacan, when he emphasized the symbolic register, desire and jouissance (or satisfaction) were opposed to each other. Symbolic desire was to be maintained against real (and dangerous) satisfaction. The imaginary fantasy was, besides being the primordial form of (mis)knowing, also a kind of compromise satisfaction, allowing the subject to experience the fulfilment of desire, if only virtually. But it is important to note that fantasies play different roles depending on one’s clinical designation. While the hallucinations of a psychotic are experienced, and interpreted, as real, the neurotic is always able to distinguish between the illusory character of her fantasies (or even her hallucinations) and the dense texture of reality. This does not stop these fantasies from playing an important role in the lives of neurotics. To the degree that a neurotic has not fully accepted her castration, these fantasies will function to prop up subjective reality and obstruct the desire concerning which the neurotic feels guilty about (in the case of obsession) or repulsed by (in the case of hysteria). Whereas desire never leaves any doubt that both subject and Other are marked by lack (otherwise, how could there be desire?), fantasies 70

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are constructed so as to plug up this lack, to give one the assurance that either self or other is whole and unimpeded. Inasmuch as their fantasies regulate their desires neurotics are still captivated by the misrecognition of the imaginary register. For Lacan, acceding to the symbolic means that desire plays a much more important role, and that fantasies fade into the background; that, when a subject is faced with lack, with the truth that all subjects are castrated, this subject does not retreat into an orthopedic fantasy, but pursues her desire – not because it might be fulfilled, but precisely because it leaves her always wanting more, always desiring. Lacan does not want to turn neurotics into hedonists. In fact, he says that that is just another neurotic fantasy: the wish to achieve the kind of consistent satisfaction that the neurotic assumes the pervert possesses. If anything, Lacan’s affirmation of desire is closer to something like asceticism; to desire is to remain unsatisfied, refusing the cold water of any fantasy or act which would quench the ember of the longing which is the heart of desire.18 In the last few years of his seminar, though, this rigid distinction between desire and jouissance became more nuanced with Lacan’s development of the concept of the sinthome. In suggesting that it is possible for analysis (or some surrogate practice) to lead the subject to a place where satisfaction does not quench desire and desire does not function merely as a “defense against jouissance”, Lacan went beyond what Freud designated as the outer boundary of analytic practice, the “bedrock of castration”. Lacan was motivated in this endeavour by the insufficiency of the other forms of suturing he had discussed in his seminars, whether the imaginary efforts of fantasy, or the symbolic expedients of the phallus and the Name-of-the-Father. Whereas the precocious Yes of fantasy is unfit for the rigours of reality, and the No/Name-of-the-Father eschews dealing in the satisfaction of the real, we could say that the sinthome expresses what is real in the fantasy – it is that part of the imaginary Yes that the symbolic No is unable to deny. The sinthome is absolutely particular to each person. It is “what there is singularly in each individual” (Lacan 1982). We see this first of all in the way that Lacan returned to an archaic spelling of symptom that, according to Michael Lewis, testifies to what is particular in the French language: One of the reasons for the spelling “sinthome” is the fact that it belongs to a French language unaffected by the later intervention of Greek. It is a word that can be spoken only in the French language: the very word exists only in a determinate language in an idiomatic form. (Lewis 2008: 214) Inasmuch as sinthome is a pre-modern way of writing “symptom” that affects spelling but not pronunciation, there is something in the sinthome that, like in the case of objet a, can be read but not heard, written but not 71

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spoken. There is thus something in the sinthome that escapes the unconscious. This is also how Lacan understood the writings of James Joyce, especially his last work, Finnegans Wake, a text that Lacan understood to be a rendering of what is real in the unconscious, and that, in its inscrutable scrambling of languages and grammars, operated at the level not of signifiers but of letters, of the real building blocks of the symbolic texture of human reality. Lacan had heard Joyce read Ulysses when he was just twenty and immersed himself in Joyce’s corpus during the 1970s, formulating his concept of sinthome in clear reaction to what he discovered: that Joyce had found a way of coping with a structurally psychotic nature through writing. He had made a name for himself via the creation of art, a discovery that would radically change Lacan’s way of talking about the cure. Lacan held that in Joyce’s subjective world there was a carence paternelle, that is, a deficiency of the father function such that the Name-of-theFather had not been instituted as a stable anchoring point around which meaning could coalesce (and dissolve); and thus Joyce was in danger, as are all psychotics, of losing his grasp on the minimal texture of reality and socially structured existence. Lacan directly links this to Joyce’s own father, whom he describes as a “drunkard and more or less good for nothing, that is to say, fanatic, with two families” (2005a: 15). Even though Joyce suffered from a “deficiency in the linkage of the three ‘rings’ of psychic normalcy” (Goulthorpe 2006: 17), with his writing he was able to save himself from psychosis and “make his name” – Joyce – which of course was the name of his father.19 The shift from symptom to sinthome is, in this case, the turning of a proper name, like Joyce, into a common noun, Joycean; going from a name that is solely particular to a particular that has acquired some sort of universal, socialized meaning. Because James Joyce never received a name from his father (in the sense of symbolic inscription), it was necessary to supplement the lack of such a name in his psychic structure by creating a body of literary work so uniquely influential that it demanded the appellation Joycean. Herein lies the difference between symptom and sinthome. Whereas a symptom is a troubling behaviour that analysis hopes to expel in the cure, sinthome is the shift of perspective that understands this behaviour as the very essence of the person. Joyce’s sinthome is his writing, his style, the essence of who he is. Le style est l’homme meme. For Lacanian commentators Paul Verhaeghe and Frédéric Declercq, Lacan’s emphasis on the sinthome meant a complete rejection of the Nameof-the-Father and the dependence on the Other that it implies: With the early Lacan, the whole emphasis was put on the metaphor of the Name-of-the-Father, whose function was to free the subject from the desire of the mother, and so on. The continuing popularity of this theoretical motif in contemporary 72

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Lacanian thinking contrasts sharply with Lacan’s decision not only to abandon it, but even to replace it with the opposite idea: that there is no Other of the Other. The belief in the father is a typically neurotic symptom, a fourth ring within the Borromean structure. Lacan takes his leave from it, and starts looking for a new signifier to fulfill the required function, to bind together the three rings. (Verhaeghe & Declercq 2002: 71) In equating the Name-of-the-Father with the “Other of the Other” Verhaeghe and Declercq are saying that this phrase of Lacan’s showed that, early on, he still believed in some sort of transcendental security within language. The question for the scholar of religion would be the following: does Lacan’s departure from that formulation, and his invention of the sinthome, also signal that his thought no longer has meaningful analogies with religious discourse? I would answer in the negative, and I would also argue that Verhaeghe and Declercq draw too bold a line between middle and late Lacan. The later emphasis on the sinthome and on the “feminine way” does not mean that the paternal function, and the various terms and theories associated with it, should be summarily dismissed. I would rather emphasize the movement between feminine and masculine in Lacan’s thought – a movement that is not only apparent in the broad sweep of his oeuvre, but sometimes within a single work. It does not seem to me that Lacan forces us to make an absolute choice between a feminine way and a paternal way. A close reading of Lacan will reveal, on the contrary, that the transcendental nature of the Name-of-the-Father has a paradoxical relationship with forms of language and being that operate (partially) outside of the paternal field, forms that Lacan often referred to as feminine. Instead of seeing the final phase of Lacan’s teaching as a repudiation of what had gone before, I see the shift to sinthome as providing a space in which everything Lacan had polemicized against previously – the ego, the fantasy of sexual harmony, a confident view of human inter-subjectivity – is allowed to find a place within the world of his thought. I have already mentioned his criticism of those schools of psychoanalysis that leaned too heavily on the ego and its imaginary axis. While Lacan never withdraws this criticism and never ceases to preach the importance of the Symbolic, he also never says that the fantasies of the ego would be completely done away with. One of his well-known descriptions of the end of analysis is when the fundamental fantasy is traversed, which clearly does not mean that one does away with it, but rather that one moves across it in a certain way.20 This is consistent with Lacan’s structuralism, that emphasized relativity and movement over an absolute choice between opposites (such as symbolic over imaginary, which would be a choice constrained within the imaginary axis). As Fink summarizes: “The traversing of the fantasy is 73

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the process by which the subject subjectifies trauma, takes the traumatic event upon him or herself, and assumes responsibility for that jouissance” (1997a: 63). An even stronger statement by Lacan concerning the end of analysis is that “the experience of the fundamental phantasy becomes the drive” (1978: 273), which leads us to believe that the fundamental fantasy, a core constituent of the ego, is necessary and central for a successful end to psychoanalytic treatment. The difference here is that there would be movement between the three registers (for example, in the form of the additional ring of the sinthome), as opposed to a fundamental fantasy that acts as a wall against the real. This would be something like a fantasy that is real, one that, instead of being a barrier against the jouissance of the drives, has found a way to be true to those drives. Lacan famously quipped that, “il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel” (1998: 61) – there is no sexual relationship – which commentators tell us should be understood in the sense that sexual relationships always fail to fill the lack, to make one integrated and happy, as they seem to promise. But in this final phase of Lacan’s teaching he provides a different way of thinking about this. In his seminar on Joyce he says that: If the non-relationship depends on an equivalence, it is according to the measure in which there is no equivalence that the relationship is structured. There is then both a sexual relationship and a lack of relationship. Where there is a relationship, it is according to the measure of the sinthome, that is, where the other sex is supported by the sinthome. (Lacan 2005a: 101) Lacan does not say here that two people relate directly to each other in an unmediated fashion, and achieve a dependable happiness in this manner, but that when “the other sex is supported by the sinthome” there can be something like a relationship that is not an equivalence. In other words, it may be the case that, as Lacan states, “the sexual rapport is a relation between sinthomes” (in Harari 2002: 54), which I take to mean that when we are at the level of the sinthome sexual partners have a mode of relating to each other that is not based on the fantasy of complementarity between the sexes, but, rather, on a mutual knowing-what-to-do with lack. In the final phase of Lacan’s teaching, when he was developing the notion of the sinthome, punning started to become a consistent feature of his work. His seminars during these years become so jam-packed with plays on language they defy normal reading at times. Sinthome becomes, first of all, saint homme (holy man). For Lacan, what united the holy man and the analyst was that they both voluntarily took on the status of trash, of that which is rejected. For an analysis to come to a (successful) conclusion, it is not the analyst who must reject the analysand, but it is the analysand 74

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who must move beyond the forms of infantile attraction to his analyst and set out on his own, acting out of the knowledge that he no longer needs the person (and the fantasy) that he once did. And the analyst, in a kind of selfsacrifice, fully accepts this rejection and betrayal. Éric Laurent articulates this analogy between saint and holy man in the following way: Holy men were only authorized by the fact that they had become monks at one time in their lives and stayed forty years on the pillar like Saint Simeon Stylites. The analyst, according to Lacan, is like Simeon. It’s not the fact that the analyst is authorized by a hierarchy to absolve man’s sins, but rather that at one time in his or her life, s/he became not a monk, but an analyst, and spent instead maybe fifteen years on a couch and then a number of years in an armchair. In a sense, the analyst’s armchair has to be elevated to the dignity of the kaidan.21 It’s the only authorization the analyst has, and beyond the paternal and maternal position, the fact is that, on his or her seat or kaidan, she can incarnate the dejection monks incarnated in the Western world; s/he can present what the subject was looking for and then what is beyond him or her at the end of his/her analysis. (Laurent 1996: 75) Laurent draws a line of connection between saints in Christianity and Buddhism, but his emphasis on dejection makes the wandering mendicants (sannyasin) of Hinduism perhaps the best example, those ascetics whose closeness to literal trash is emphasized in all they give up when they take their final step towards release from the cycle of reincarnation: family, home, possessions, even clothing, even their very name – leaving them resembling more a discarded object than a human being. At this late stage in Lacan’s teaching, it is to figures such as the sannyasin – rather than to scientists, doctors or poets – that he links the analytic vocation, as a way to stress that the analyst is the one who is willing to descend to the level of inanimate matter for the sake of an other. What authorizes an analyst, then, is not some special ability or knowledge, but rather the fact that she went through a certain ordeal that initiates her into an order of which religion, with its monasteries and anchorites, has given the clearest model. Becoming saint homme is to flip on its head everything which society (and psychology) urges concerning normalization, that is, the importance of defining oneself from within the symbolic register. The symbolic register is determined by sacrifice at every level, from the murder of the primal father (considered both phylogenetically and ontogenetically) to every decision of meaning making in which the material of language is sacrificed to its signification, a process that buries the 75

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particularity of speakers and of meaning itself. In becoming sinthome the subject identifies with the refuse of meaning, with the signifier over the signified, with the letter over the word, with nonsense over sense. The holy man is not an individual among other individuals – for the individual is one that pursues her rights, her pleasures (as opposed to her jouissance) – but he is something like a pure particularity. I would add that, beyond merely “incarnat[ing] the dejection” of the subject the sinthome also assumes and loves it. Lacan turned to examples from his own tradition to articulate the extremity of this dejection: No doubt the question of beyond the pleasure principle, of the place of the unnamable Thing and of what goes on there, is raised in certain acts that provoke our judgment, acts of the kind attributed to a certain Angela de Folignio, who joyfully lapped up the water in which she had just washed the feet of lepers – I will spare you the details, such as the fact that a piece of skin stuck in her throat, etc. – or to the blessed Marie Allacoque, who, with no less a reward in spiritual uplift, ate the excrement of a sick man. (Lacan 1992: 188) It is the duty of the analyst no less than the saint to go beyond the pleasure principle – a societal and symbolic principle of limits – to the extremes of jouissance. While a Christian might say that it is in the extremes of suffering and dejection that the saint touches upon the real of God’s love by embracing the most abject aspect of man’s materiality, Lacan’s point is that, even in an age where such saintly actions are rejected rather than praised there must still be a figure willing to go to the limit of what society can accept, for the very sake of that society. The “saintly” love of the analyst is a paradoxical kind of love, a love for precisely that which the individual has been taught to hate, a love for that which fails to live up to the ego ideal. Since our loving and hating are structured at the level of the unconscious, an engagement with the sinthome involves breaking with the unconscious. Veronica Voruz’s description of this kind of sinthomatic love brings out potential meeting points with theology: Love … is that which ceases to write itself, an inscription of contingency that comes to replace castration as what is necessary in order to make do with the impossibility of the sexual relation. This form of love, arising from an acceptance of the sexual nonrelation, is of the order of invention, of a savoir faire that enables one to make do with the impossibility of the Real without being the slave of the unconscious. (Voruz 2002: 135) 76

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Another way to approach this break with the unconscious would be to understand it as allowing one to never do the same thing in the same way – something that Lacan was proud of in his teaching, that he never formulated his concepts in exactly the same way for his students. This is a break with the unconscious not because it is against the unconscious but, surprisingly, because it lets itself be guided by unconscious elements. When one reads Lacan’s seminars one can feel him being guided by his unconscious slips, feel him change direction as a novel thought hits him, follow him as he goes on a tangent motivated by something unexpected that is happening in the room. Our normal position in regard to the unconscious is to be on guard against it, to not let slip a double entendre, to act appropriately in social contexts. To break with the unconscious, then, is to not let its power be a negative power (the un in unconscious), or to transform the unconscious into the conscious (the fantasy that by becoming “aware of my issues” I can magically make them evaporate), but to somehow reverse that negative into a species of revelation. In short, one aims at something new. The connection between the sinthome and religion is emphasized even more in another pun that Lacan made on sinthome: sinthomadaquin, which a French speaker would hear as Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Saint Thomas Aquinas). Lacan references this greatest of Catholic theologians several times in various texts, casually mentioning in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious”, that “the unconscious dates back to Saint Thomas Aquinas” (2006n: 677). It is not clear exactly what this means, since he then remarks that the unconscious as a “chain of signifiers that repeats and insists somewhere” (ibid.) is Freud’s invention. What would the unconscious of Aquinas be then? We can take a cue from a comment Lacan made in Seminar XX concerning the Angelic Doctor, as Thomas is known in the Roman Catholic tradition: I roll on the floor laughing when I read Saint Thomas (Aquinas), because it’s awfully well put together. For Aristotle’s philosophy to have been reinjected by Saint Thomas into what one might call the Christian conscience, if that had any meaning, is something that can only be explained by the fact that Christians – well, it’s the same with psychoanalysts – abhor what was revealed to them. And they are right. (Lacan 1998: 114) Bruce Fink’s translation of this passage does not, unfortunately, bring out the topological resonances of Lacan’s phrasing. What Fink translates as “rolling on the floor” is expressed by Lacan as “en huit par terre”, or, “in a [figure] eight on the floor”. Lacan’s French implies a connection between Thomas and the topological figure of the inner eight (or interior eight), 77

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with which, says Lacan, “I symbolize the subject” (ibid.: 136), and in which, as his son-in-law says, “the interior/exterior gets crossed up” (Miller 2004: 43). The most important aspect of the inner eight is that it makes impossible a rigid distinction between the interior and exterior of a figure in space (or, for Lacan, a psyche). Is this not precisely what Aquinas did by supporting his theology on two contradictory plinths, the metaphysical presuppositions of the pagan Aristotle on the one hand, and the Biblical revelation on the other? For Lacan, there is a rupture between Aristotle’s philosophy of participation – in which beings only exist by participating in Being, or, for Thomas, God – and the Judaic emphasis on a radical (and traumatic) break between God and man, between creator and creation. It is hard to tell, in the following quotation, whether Lacan is upset or impressed by Thomas’s ingenious methods of braiding these two traditions in his thought: That being as such may provoke hatred cannot be ruled out. Certainly, Aristotle’s whole concern was, on the contrary, to conceive of being as that by which beings with less being participate in the highest of beings. And Saint Thomas succeeded in reintroducing that into the Christian tradition – which is not surprising given that, having spread among the Gentiles, the Christian tradition had necessarily been thoroughly shaped thereby, the upshot being that one had but to pull the strings for it to work again. But do people realize that everything in the Jewish tradition goes against that? The dividing line there does not run from the most perfect to the least perfect. The least perfect there is quite simply what it is, namely, radically imperfect. (Lacan 1998: 99) Lacan seems to be calling for a return to the Jewish roots of Christianity, and suggesting that adopting the Greek notion of gradations of being is a betrayal of the Hebrew tradition. Contrarily, in linking the sinthome to Saint Thomas, Lacan seems to posit the Thomistic synthesis as something to emulate. This is problematic. One way forward would be to see the sinthome as something that has the power to synthesize paradoxical elements into a working texture. The way Joyce stuffed so many foreign languages into Finnegans Wake that his text becomes its own absolutely particular (foreign) language, is one example. While this ability to synthesize is crucial, that which demands synthesis is always changing. Theologians might understand Lacan to be calling on them to effect a new synthesis, demanding that what Aquinas did with Aristotle now needs to be done with the post-Newtonian sciences of the twentieth century: set theory, string theory, quantum mechanics, and so on. While the early and middle 78

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Lacan might have emphasized the ruptures that current scientific research reveals, the Lacan of the sinthome suggests that, paradoxical as the formulations of these sciences are, the psyche possesses the resources to work with them and to draw meaning from them. Lacan gave many definitions of the end of analysis throughout his career, but in his final years he settled for something that sounds almost banal in its emphasis on practicality and savoir faire: In what does this sounding that is an analysis consist? Would it, or would it not be to identify with the symptom, albeit with every guarantee of a kind of distance? To know how to handle, to take care of, to manipulate… to know what to do with the symptom, that is the end of the analysis. (In Verhaeghe & Declercq 2002: 65, original emphasis) Though we will return, in our final chapter, to the question of a Thomistic betrayal of the Jewish tradition, it seems that the value of Thomas, for Lacan, lies in his weaving together of Jewish rupture and Greek coherence. This should be thought from a practical perspective, in the manner of a weaver who, in constructing a shirt or a pair of pants, weaves her material around the necessary holes. In the sinthome language is no longer a wall against the real of sex and the difficult truth of the lack of sexual rapport, but a savvy weaving of being and nothingness, a making do with what one has. Sinthomatic language is all slips and no falls; it relies on puns and double meanings instead of repressing them. In fact, it takes joy (jouissance) in all the seemingly meaningless coincidences of human speech and writing. All of this is perhaps hidden in the missing apostrophe to Joyce’s final masterpiece, which is not, as one sometimes sees it, Finnegan’s Wake – a funeral for a solitary hero – but Finnegans Wake, an apostrophe, a call to a grand multitude of sleeping heroes to rise up and take responsibility for the jouissance that is theirs whether they admit it or not.

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3. JOUISSANCE AND FEMININE SEXUALITY The Lord has created a new thing on the earth; a woman encompasses a man. (Jeremiah 31:22)

In this chapter we will focus mainly on one core concept of Lacan, jouissance, through a close reading of Lacan’s twentieth seminar, entitled Encore. I will not attempt to explicate this seminar from beginning to end, but will define and develop the theme of jouissance as it is elaborated in different ways throughout this text, indulging in the occasional detour. Published in France in 1975 – one of the first of Lacan’s seminars to appear in print – Seminar XX was translated by Bruce Fink into English in 1998.

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This seminar was delivered at the law faculty of the Sorbonne over the course of seven months starting in November of 1972. Lacan paid homage to his surroundings on the first day of the seminar, remarking that the “law basically talks about what I am going to talk to you about – jouissance” (Lacan 1998: 2). Lacan introduces jouissance in the context of the Latin legal term usufruct, which refers to the right of enjoyment and use of the property of another (literally, “use enjoyment”): “‘Usufruct’ means that you can enjoy (jouir de) your means, but must not waste them. When you have the usufruct of an inheritance, you can enjoy the inheritance (en jouir) as long as you don’t use up too much of it” (ibid.: 3). The Oxford English Dictionary shows how this term had some resonance with theology: “Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given him for usufruct alone, not for consumption.”1 In consonance with the connection of jouissance to the real – a feature we emphasized in the previous chapter – jouissance 80

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is what the law is chiefly concerned with. As Lacan notes: “that is clearly the essence of law – to divide up, distribute, or reattribute everything that counts as jouissance” (1998: 3). Jouissance is not only that primordial (real) enjoyment shared between mother and child to which the father directs his “No”; jouissance is also that which is apportioned from within the symbolic. The child could never be convinced to give up the breast in exchange for language were there not some enjoyment in return. Thus, the symbolic deals in the currency of jouissance. In fact, the symbolic can enjoy too much, as Freud saw when he issued his warnings concerning the overweening modern super-ego. For Lacan, while the super-ego does utter moral pronouncements, most fundamentally it has just one mantra, given in the imperative: “Enjoy!” (ibid.). At first glance this looks like a win–win situation, but we quickly see that such a command only complicates the efforts we make to “enjoy ourselves”. Take the typical university student as an example. During the Victorian age of Freud, this young person, while perhaps being pressured by his friends to ignore his studies and have some fun, would be pretty clear about where his moral duties lie, namely, in heeding the voice of his parents telling him to live a sober lifestyle and to earn good grades. Nowadays, though, this parental voice, while still present, is noticeably more feeble, while the “devilish” temptations have actually acquired a moral character, saying: you must sleep around, consume illicit drugs and copious amounts of alcohol – because enjoying life is, far from being the prerogative of the indolent rich, the only thing that really matters. If this beleaguered student, then, were to “behave himself ” and skip the wild parties that his friends were enjoying, he would actually feel guilty. On the other hand, should he choose to indulge his wild side, he could garner “scientific” (even moral) support for his position in an essay from WebMD (and many other sources) pointing to various studies that link sexual activity or the consumption of alcohol to any number of health benefits (Robinson n.d.). From a Freudian perspective this guilt resulting from abstention would be perplexing, but such is the state of good and evil in the age of Lacan, in which “the super-ego … is a correlate of castration” (Lacan 1998: 7). One thing that consistently distinguishes Lacan from Freud is the manner in which Lacan stays true to the logic of the irrational. Whereas Freud always aimed to subsume the nonsense of the unconscious into a systematic structure, Lacan revels in the contradictions of the unconscious and uses the formidable logic of his structural creations as more lure than system. While a close reading of Freud will usually show that the promised structural consistency is always just around the corner, Lacan will lead his readers around the corner only to have them run into a wall. We find such a wall in the first pages of Seminar XX when Lacan, after linking jouissance to the crucial register of the symbolic abruptly informs us that jouissance 81

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is concerned with nothing but bêtises, stupidities. Jouissance is fundamentally “stupid”; it “serves no purpose” (ibid.: 3). Lacan sees this stupidity in his audience members – who are coming to see him again (encore) because deep down they really “don’t want to know” (ibid.: 1) – as well as in himself, for he also continues with his seminar because of a passion for ignorance. Why this offensive and self-deprecating emphasis on stupidity? Why does he revile himself as well as those gathered to hear him talk? Lacan associates jouissance with foolishness in order to make a point concerning the symbolic anchors that Lacan referred to as master signifiers. For Lacan, “master signifiers” (or S1, with “S” standing for signifier) are the most crucial in a given discourse, important precisely because they cannot be defined by any other signifier. It is this hermeneutical opacity which makes them stupid. While the secondary signifiers (S2) must form their meaning in relation to all the other secondary signifiers, the master signifier stops the drift of meaning and referentiality. We see this in an array of discourses, whether high or low. When parents can no longer endure the endless drift of “why” questions from their children, they inevitably resort to that phrase which has halted many an intellectual exploration: “Because I said so!” In modern political discourse in the United States a word like “Freedom” has the consistency of an unassailable master signifier. It expresses an unquestioned value that never needs to be defined, and even though on a day-to-day level there are many other concerns that cause freedom to take a backseat, and even though the term may seem to lose all meaning as a result of its overuse, it yet shows no sign of losing its rhetorical supremacy. The master’s word can therefore be something ungrounded, baseless, even stupid or nonsensical; and yet because masters hold us in their thrall, we often accept their words without question. Ultimately, for Lacan, the meaning of language is not based on anything outside itself, anything that could function as a guarantee for the claims it makes – as he often said, “there is no Other of the Other” (Lacan 1958–9: 13/5/59). This results in our master signifiers – those statements, words, discourses, etc. which ultimately ground our speech – being ultimately based only on themselves; they are literally idiotic, self-referential, which is what the Greek root signifies (cf. idiosyncratic). Scriptural texts are stuffed with master signifiers. These texts – incantations, prayers, rulings and so on – are the absolute authority around which a community bases itself and its language, and they are thus immune from a certain type of critical inquiry. When these master signifiers are questioned, such as happened in Protestant Christianity with the advent of Biblical criticism, the point only seems to be proven even more. That late harvest of Biblical criticism, the Jesus Seminar, is an attempt to locate with absolute surety precisely what, in the gospels (both inside and outside of the canon), can and cannot be reasonably attributed to the historical Jesus. 82

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While this project in and of itself is perhaps inconclusive, what is interesting from a Lacanian point of view is the contemporaneous phenomena forming its obverse: an (originally Protestant) textual Biblical literalism that is, in the most conservative branches of Protestantism, arguably more stringent than anything that had come before. The efforts to dislodge the words of the master only serve to entrench those most important of signifiers even more. And this, for Lacan, is something like an eternal truth of the psyche. But far from condemning Biblical literalism – or any other reverent attitude to a master signifier – Lacan emphasizes the jouissance in such an activity. Like the angel that is “up to its ears in the supreme signifier” (Lacan 1998: 20), a devotion to the word from on high is not primarily about piety or obedience – it is about a connection to the jouissance located at the root of the symbolic. Inasmuch as religion stakes it claim at the level of jouissance, creating the very terms of a culture’s discourse, Lacan suggests that it is an unavoidable aspect of human life, perhaps echoing Nietzsche’s statement that “we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar” (Nietzsche 1972: 483). Language is always tainted, then, with a certain kind of stupidity, which leads Lacan to coin the term linguistery for what he is doing, a neologism Fink translates as “linguistricks” (Lacan 1998: 15). Just as Lacan’s publications are poubellications (ibid.: 26) – poubelle meaning trash can – psychoanalysis cannot make the proud claim of being a science in the way that linguistics can. Psychoanalysis cannot afford, as the sciences can, to be ignorant of the fundamental role played by stupidity in human life. Something similar could be said about religion, that inasmuch as it provides the basic signifiers to make meaning in a given culture, it is both master and potential trash. From Lacan’s point of view the tension between religion as holy and religion as stupid is inherent to religion, even if it doesn’t get fully fleshed out in every case. The rise of Buddhism follows its logic, though, in which the whole panoply of Hindu sacred rites is treated as refuse next to the pure experience of meditation. Shakyamuni Buddha was aware of the danger of putting his experience into words when he refuses at first to become a preacher for this new experience, the essence of which would seem to be its departure from language. It is, strangely enough, the old Hindu gods that persuade him to take on the trappings of religion, with its sutras, rituals and masters.2 This tension – between words and silence, between the externals of religion and its inexpressible core – is inherent to Buddhism and is exemplified in the diversity of its expression: from the ornate language and rituals of the Tibetan tradition – the various combative schools showing themselves to be unafraid to vow allegiance to master signifiers – to the absolute poverty of Zen, in which the koan, “if you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha”, keeps alive that original reticence of Shakyamuni to the entire symbolic structure of a traditional religion. 83

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The apostle Paul uses a similar dynamic to powerful rhetorical effect in his first letter to the Corinthians: The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart”. Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? (1 Cor. 1:18-21) Just as Hindu rites were nothing compared with the pure experience of meditation, Jewish law and Greek philosophy are rejected in light of the saving action of the incarnate Word. This shocking rejection of the majesty of human power and wisdom for a broken body hung to a tree stands as the irrefutable foundation for such a paradoxical science as psychoanalysis, in which truth is unconscious. That truth is not something that can be counted on to play a predictable and valuable social role – such as can knowledge in the hard sciences – but it is always knotted to the weakness and passions of human flesh. In Christianity silence is joined, absolutely, to language in the person of Christ, the Word of His Father who “dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Tim. 6:16). Notwithstanding the silence of Christ before Pilate’s query concerning truth, to his disciples he says boldly, “I am the truth” (John 14:6). Ultimately, Lacan’s discussion of jouissance is rooted in a Christian context that considers language and the body to be inextricably knotted together – “The real, I will say, is the mystery of the speaking body” (Lacan 1998: 131). This is, in Lacan’s terminology, the logic of the extimate; in which what centres a given structure is also, uncannily, exterior to it. The Word is the vehicle of creation, and yet the Word suffers to be born into and subsequently put to death by that very creation. The resurrection is just one further twist to this logic of extimacy; for if Christ is the very principle of life in a world that dies, his murder results only in that principle being centralized at a higher level, expressed in the eternality of human flesh, the clearest example of which we see in the Catholic doctrine of the assumption and coronation of the Virgin Mary. For Lacan, this logic of extimacy is apparent at the beginning of the Western theological tradition in the phenomena of the Jewish Sabbath. Lacan says that, “Jahve distinguished himself with his iron-clad rule of the week” (1998: 135). Now, in relation to the six-day week of the Babylonians, this seventh day functioned as a supplement – something purely gratuitous – onto the unconscious and spatial limit of six; which number, for Lacan, is a kind of absolute limit for the unconscious: “space knows how to count, 84

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not much higher than we do – and for good reason – since it is only up to six, not even seven” (ibid.).3 While the Babylonians, in their sexagesimal method of dividing the circle and the hour (into 360 degrees and 60 minutes) first allowed science to “detach itself ” (ibid.), the innovation of the seventh day subordinates ancient science to the word and law of God.4 What is important about the Jewish Sabbath is not only that it adds something gratuitous to the system already in place, but that this extra day is specifically for enjoyment, for, “on it God rested from all the work that he had done” (Gen. 2:3). In the Bible the Sabbath is the first thing to be mentioned as holy, or set apart; in the Talmud the Sabbath is the most propitious day for sexual intercourse. Happily, the English word “rest” signifies both that which is extra, that which remains, as well as a respite from work, a time to enjoy the fruits of labor. The sexagesimal system of the Babylonians allowed them, via intellectual abstraction, to make breakthroughs in agricultural and architectural techniques that have served as the foundation for human civilization for five thousand years; the Jewish scriptures, though, condemn these civilizing advances as hubristic – the tower of Babel in Genesis chapter 11 is probably an allusion to Babylonian Ziggurats – and puts jouissance back into the pole position.

JOUISSANCE AND THE SIGNIFIER

In order to enter fully into the intricacies of Seminar XX we need to familiarize ourselves with some of the linguistic advances of the first part of the twentieth century that so fascinated Lacan, and which, according to some commentators, allowed him to reformulate Freud in such adventurous ways at the beginning of his career as a psychoanalytic teacher. According to Lacan, Freud conceived his major concepts a few years too early to see that his description of unconscious processes were uncannily similar to the way certain linguists were starting to talk about languages and the rules they followed. There are two linguists whom we will have to take note of here, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), both of whom were mentioned briefly in the introduction. The most crucial of the two is the French-speaking Swiss, Ferdinand de Saussure, who, according to Wade Baskin “was the first to see that language is a self-contained system whose interdependent parts function and acquire value through their relationship to the whole” (in Saussure 1959: xii). In other words Saussure looked at language systems not only as they developed over time – what he called the diachronic approach, that the philologists and linguists before him utilized – but he also claimed that one could study the whole of a given language at any moment in time, and analyse the structural relations between all the given elements. This was the 85

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synchronic approach, and it quite simply revolutionized not only the field of linguistics but was foundational for the establishment of semiotics (the study of sign systems) and had tremendous repercussions for twentiethcentury philosophy and critical theory (and, of course, psychoanalysis). The distinction between diachronic and synchronic can be visualized by imagining that all the elements of a given language could be mapped onto a Cartesian graph such that the historical changes in the language were noted on the horizontal coordinate (and could thus be analysed diachronically), whereas if one were to take out a slice of this language along the vertical axis, a moment in time if you please, one could subject that material to a synchronic analysis. In Saussure’s words, linguistics should aim to both “describe and trace the history of all observable languages, which amounts to tracing the history of families of languages and reconstructing as far as possible the mother language of each family”, as well as “determine the forces that are permanently and universally at work in all languages, and to deduce the general laws to which all specific historical phenomena can be reduced” (Saussure 1959: 6). With this seemingly straightforward agenda Ferdinand de Saussure laid the foundation for modern linguistics. Perhaps the most fundamental distinction Saussure made in his discipline was that between speech (parole) and language (langue). Language, according to Saussure, is a “self-contained whole and principle of classification”, while speech is “many-sided and heterogeneous; straddling several areas simultaneously – physical, physiological, and psychological – it belongs both to the individual and to society; we cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity” (ibid.: 9). Speech is always a particular instance of language and inasmuch as Saussure saw language as the “norm of all other manifestations of speech” (ibid.) it was to the analysis of language that he called linguists to turn their attention. While speech was too heterogeneous and complex to merit truly scientific study, language offered itself up to scientific analysis. Language is that which all members of a language community share, yet no one speaker has it all; it is formed by the collectivity of their linguistic existence. It is something that can be transferred into writing, for in the brain it exists in the relationship between the sound-image (signifier) of a word and its concept (signified). It can be tabulated and collected in grammars and dictionaries. Speech, on the other hand, is heterogeneous, slightly different for each speaker of any given language; the complexity of speech sounds as well as the muscular features required to articulate these sounds make speech almost impossible to represent accurately. Any moment of speech works to transform language, and as there are innumerable speakers of, say, English speaking at any given moment, something like a science of speech would be beyond the bounds of reasonable possibilities: “Taken as a whole, speech cannot be studied” (Saussure 1959: 19). Saussure’s emphasis on synchrony 86

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and language (over and against diachrony and speech, respectively) stem from a similar impulse: to grasp the linguistic thing as a whole according to rational, scientific principles. In speech the fundamental units, according to Saussure, are phonemes, defined as “sounds which have differentiating value, those sounds which are able to distinguish words” (ibid.: 28) that are “above all else oppositive, relative, and negative entities” (ibid.: 41). The word “car” has three phonemes, the first represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet by “k”, or voiceless velar plosive (velar refers to the tongues placement on the velum or soft palate, and plosive means that airflow is obstructed in the vocal tract). Saussure argued that a phoneme, such as “k” does not have meaning in and of itself, but it gathers its meaning from the ways in which it is different from all the other phonemes. If the first phoneme of “car” were no longer velar but alveoloar (in that the tongue makes contact with the roof of the mouth at a point closer to the front teeth) we get “tar”. Now even though the difference between velar and alveolar is minute from a physiological perspective, the difference between “k” and “t” is very noticeable, exactly as noticeable as the difference between “car” and “tar”. A phoneme is not so much itself as it is not other phonemes. The important thing with phonemes is, as Jakobson says, “their reciprocal oppositions within a phonological system” (ibid.: 76). Where phonemes play a fundamental role in the analysis of speech, in language Saussure defined the sign as the fundamental unit. Saussure claimed that language could be studied without any material support in phonation or writing, for one can just as easily think a sentence as one can speak it or write it. And yet in thinking it is not phonemes that are decisive (they are ultimately rooted in our vocal apparatus), but signs. The sign is a “two sided psychological entity” that “unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound image” (Saussure 1959: 66). Says Jakobson: “The sign has two sides: the sound, or the material side on the one hand, and meaning, or the intelligible side on the other” (1978: 3). The sound image, or signifier (signifiant), is that which is “uttered” in the mind when one is thinking, while the concept, or signified (signifiée), is that to which the sound-image refers. Saussure provided two simple diagrams to illustrate his notion of the sign (Figure 3).

signifier signified

Tree

Figure 3 The Saussurean sign.

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None of this so far would seem to be very revealing. But in Saussure’s next step we start to see why he was of such great interest for Lacan and so many other twentieth-century intellectuals. This next step was to claim that “the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary” (Saussure 1959: 67). In other words, Saussure is refuting the notion that there exists a natural link between the sounds we use to represent a thing and the thing that is being represented. He points out that, even in regard to onomatopoeic words (like glug-glug or tick-tock), different languages give surprisingly different versions of something that one might think would be universally similar. While speakers of English represent a rooster’s call by “cock-a-doodle-doo”, Germans think that same rooster sounds more like “kikeriki”. The importance of Saussure’s distinction lies in the way in which it freed up linguists to look for the fundamental laws of language outside of any “natural” limitations. This small step not only transformed linguistics, but served as the foundation for an entire school of thought called structuralism – a tremendously influential movement across the disciplines of philosophy, literary criticism, and anthropology. Claude Lévi-Strauss virtually made his career by applying this Saussurean principle to his anthropological data. Lévi-Strauss’s “mytheme” is modelled on the Saussurean phoneme, and stands for a discreet unit within a social framework that, just like the Saussurean phoneme or sign, generates meaning oppositionally, relatively, and negatively. According to Lévi-Strauss the incest prohibition, or at least its “negative expression”, is “also found universally”, and “constitutes an empty form which is nevertheless indispensable if the articulation of biological groups into a network of exchanges whereby they can establish communication is to be both possible and necessary” (in Jakobson 1978: xviii). Saussure’s breakthroughs in linguistics very much parallel Freud’s breakthroughs in dream interpretation. As Freud notes in his The Interpretation of Dreams, dreams had for millennia been interpreted in what he called a “symbolic” (Freud 1953b: 129) manner. For instance, when in the book of Genesis Joseph interprets the dream of Pharaoh – in which seven lean cows eat up seven plump cows – to mean that there would be seven years of plenty in the land of Egypt followed by seven years of famine, it is clear that each dream element means something in and of itself. A fat cow means a year of plenty, and it would not have really mattered whether Pharaoh or someone else had dreamt this dream or whether the cow had replaced by a camel. Freud makes it very clear that his method of interpretation has nothing to do with the ancient kind, which, in his day (and still in ours), found its expression in popular manuals of dream interpretation in which dream elements could be confidently and consistently interpreted. Freud’s breakthrough consists in denaturalizing the dream, breaking the link between the dream elements and what those dream elements refer to, 88

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just as Saussure proclaimed that the link between signifier and signified was arbitrary. While Saussure was foundational for Lacan’s re-reading of Freud, what is equally important for our purposes is how Lacan took Saussurean themes one step further. Figure 4 shows Lacan’s revision of the Saussurean diagram for the sign (Lacan 2006d: 414).

S s

Figure 4 The Lacanian sign.

The big S on top represents, not the signified, as it did for Saussure, but the signifier, while the little s below is Lacan’s signified. For Lacan, the signifier was predominant over the signified because of the way language first accosts us as infants such that we hear and utter sounds before we have a clue as to what they mean. Lacan called that kind of language lalangue. La langue, in French, simply means language, but by writing them as one word Lacan stressed the primitive acoustic foundation of language rooted in the baby’s babble (“la la”). Punning, which Lacan indulges in to an extreme degree in Seminar XX, is also an example of lalangue, because it takes advantage of the purely arbitrary (usually acoustic) coincidences of a particular language, thus making most puns untranslatable. How does one translate Lacan’s âmer, which combines the word for soul (âme) with the verb to love (aimer)? (Fink translates it, with limited success, as “soulove”; Lacan 1998: 84.) This and other terms are very difficult to render into other languages, and so, in order to read Lacan, one is going to have to have at least a modicum of French. The circle that Saussure drew around his diagram is no longer there in Lacan’s version, and neither are the arrows making doubly clear the tight connection between sound image and concept. Both circle and arrow functioned to assure Saussure’s students that, although he was introducing a level of arbitrariness into their world, the sign as a whole could still be counted on to deliver a consistent message, protected as it was by a unifying circle. And even if Saussure was claiming that something like a science of the signifier was no longer possible, the arrows should assure them that a science of the signified was imminent. Lacan retains the bar separating upper and lower elements, but for him it becomes a representative of the phallus, and just as much a barrier as a means of relating. Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in their influential book The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan, put it this way: “Whereas for Saussure, what is essential is the relation (the reciprocity, or the association), Lacan introduces a resistance such that the crossing of the bar, the relation of the signifier to the signified, in short, the production of signification itself, will never be self-evident” (1992: 36). 89

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Essentially, what Lacan’s revisions amount to is the transforming of an image into a symbol, or, as he says, a matheme. While an image has meaning, its meaning is limited to the imaginary register. A mathematical symbol, though, is empty and follows strictly formal regulations, which means that it can be filled with unpredictable meanings. Consider what Lacan has to say about the advance of mathematics: For centuries it stagnated on problems which are now transparent to ten-year old children. And yet these were powerful minds which pondered them … Mathematical progress is not progress in the power of thought of the human beings. It comes good that day some man thinks of inventing a sign like this, √, or like that, ∫. That’s what mathematics is. (Lacan 1991a: 275) For Lacan we think with sign-objects. True advances in science and in knowledge come because a new one has been created (or an old one given a completely new meaning). Words are always dependent on a (constantly shifting) value relative to the other words to which they are connected in the web of language; but mathemes are immune to the kind of distortions and ambiguities attendant on sign systems (languages). Having said that, the following, while not technically a matheme, leads one in the same direction as the mathemes, and is dependent upon the matheme we just discussed. It is Lacan’s revision of Saussure’s tree sign (Figure 5). Lacan tells a story to go along with this image: A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are seated across from each other in a compartment next to the outside window that provides a view of the station platform building going by as the train comes to a stop. “Look”, says the brother, “we’re at Ladies!” “Imbecile!” replies his sister, “Don’t you see we’re at Gentlemen”. (Lacan 2006d: 417)

LADIES

GENTLEMEN

Figure 5 Ladies and Gentlemen.

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If there is a prime example that Lacan saw misunderstanding to be at the heart of the human experience, this is it. Not only do the children mistake the bathrooms for the name of the town they’ve arrived at, they each identify with the opposite gender. Just like in the previous diagram, the signifiers are on top while the signifieds are on the bottom. But whereas in Saussure’s picture there is no doubt that the signifier “tree” refers to the concept of a tree, what Lacan’s picture makes clear is that the signifieds are in a perpetual slide; that is, the signifieds do not have the quality of stabilizing meaning, for while Lacan would not deny that there is a referential movement in language from signifier to signified, at the level of the unconscious signifiers refer merely to other signifiers. In psychoanalytic terms, “the signifier is something that represents a subject for another signifier” (Lacan 1972: 194). What anchors the web of signs for Lacan is not some idea that hovers above and beyond these multifarious signs, but a master signifier, a signifier with no signified. The signified in Saussure’s rendering of the tree is clearly defined. In Lacan’s diagram it is veiled, just as the phallus remained veiled during the rituals of Greek mystery cults – this phallus qua master signifier which determines not only its own meaning, but the entire web of meanings which circle it, yet which is in itself meaningless. What one finds upon opening the door or taking off the veil is that there is nothing behind the door or veil that could clear up one’s confusion. What one finds are simply more signifiers which refer to even more signifiers. When Dorothy and her friends finally penetrate behind the curtain in the castle of Oz, all they find is a nervous little man who has nothing for them but tall tales. Inasmuch as “the unconscious is structured like a language” the rules that Freud discovered by interpreting dreams and listening to his patients should be the very same ones that linguists discover as they examine the languages of the world. The clearest example of this continuity was the connection Lacan made between Freud’s two elements of dream work, displacement and condensation, and Roman Jakobson’s two fundamental axes of language, metaphor and metonymy. As Freud notes in The Interpretation of Dreams, “Dream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two governing factors to whose activity we may in essence ascribe the form assumed by dreams” (1953b: 307–8). Displacement is “entirely the work of the dream censorship” (Freud 1966: 214) and is what happens when the affect that should rightly be associated with a certain element in a dream is transposed onto another element. Freud calls this the transvaluation of dream values and gives an example of it from one of his own dreams. In this dream Freud sees his uncle who is also his friend R, that is, he sees his uncle’s face in the dream but it is clearly (also) his friend. Along with this image he has a warm feeling of affection. But in analysing the dream he could not make sense of the affect (the friendly feeling) for he had no 91

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such feeling for his uncle, and though he esteemed his friend R, his esteem did not match up with strength of the affect experienced in the dream. His conclusion (also based on other elements of the dream which we will not go into here) was that the positive affect had been introduced by the dream censor precisely to cover over the affect he really felt, that of disdain for R. That is, it was the purpose of the dream to denigrate R, who was Freud’s professional rival, in order to fulfill Freud’s own desire for professional acclaim. There is displacement, then, of the unfriendly feeling he has for his uncle that is transformed to its opposite and intensified by the dream censor, the agent of repression (Freud 1953b: 138–45). Because, in Freud’s view, every nonsensical dream has behind it a very clear, and often very disturbing, chain of thoughts that the dream censor must do everything in its power to confuse, invert and complicate, displacement is one obvious way in which a straightforward dream thought might result in a completely bewildering dream. Everyone is familiar with the typical effects of displacement in dreams, in which a trivial situation evokes absolute horror, whereas what should be a horrifying situation is met with an entirely perplexing sang froid. For Freud, the appropriate affect is still there, it has just been displaced onto another element or into another register. Condensation is the other major factor that goes into the construction of the manifest dream content from dream thoughts. While we might think of displacement as moving on a horizontal plane, one thing getting placed onto an adjacent element, condensation is best imagined as operating on a vertical one. What happens on this axis is that several dream thoughts will be condensed into one concise image, resulting in the law that “the manifest dream has a smaller content than the latent one” (Freud 1966: 210). When a figure in my dream seems to be three people all at once, this is the work of condensation. Likewise, when in a slip of the tongue I accidentally combine two words into one. Fundamentally condensation is, like displacement, an action taken by the censor in the attempt to present an unsavoury thought in an acceptable light. Because it consists of several thoughts or images superimposed upon one another Freud compares it to what happens when one takes several photographs on the same plate (Freud 1953b: 139). When Jakobson discusses the issue of metonymy and metaphor, he frames them as examples of the primary processes of language, just as Freud saw condensation and displacement as the primary processes in the construction of dreams. Jakobson’s discussion takes place in his examination of aphasics, people who have lost, to a lesser or greater degree, the capacity for language. According to Jakobson there are two types of aphasics: those who lose the ability to make metaphors – these he calls aphasics with a “similarity disorder” – and those who lose the ability to connect words to each other, which he names a “contiguity disorder”. From a rhetorical point of view, metaphor is an operation in which something is substituted for something 92

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which it resembles, such as when Homer talks about the wine dark sea. The sea is like wine because they are both dark, and the metaphor is powerful because even though the sea was probably not actually red, it brings up in our minds, via another operation of similarity, the redness of blood. In using a metaphor, then, Homer is condensing, in the Freudian sense, various ideas into one simple word. What is fascinating about the operation of metaphor is that, even though it is similarity that seems to govern its effectiveness (both the sea and wine can be dark), it is dissimilarity that provides the strange depth of the most powerful metaphors. In Homer’s famous image there is a jarring inconsistency between wine as giver of mirth and wine as conjuring up the blood of war. Freud is perhaps most illuminating on this account; for him, this would be proof of an unconscious operation where, because of the innately paradoxical nature of the unconscious, similarity and dissimilarity are tightly linked precisely by their opposition. Metonymy for Jakobson is expressive of the function of contiguity, which is association not according to similarity/dissimilarity but rather association in space or time. A typical case of metonymy is when a sail is used to refer to a ship, as in, “three sails on the horizon”. A sail is not so much like a ship or opposed to a ship; rather, it is a functional necessity of a ship. Even more basically, sails are attached to ships in a way which makes them especially noticeable from afar. Similarly, were I to refer to the crown in speaking of the king or queen, I am not saying that crowns resemble kings or queens, but rather that, inasmuch as crowns may sit on the brows of royal persons, it is very often their most distinguishing feature. Just as displacement takes place, most convincingly, on a horizontal plane that emphasizes continuity, one thing after, or next to, another, metonymy also can be imagined to function this way; with its opposite, metaphor (or condensation) taking place on a horizontal plane in which it is not so much one thing after another, but one thing in place of another, in which an absence makes its presence felt. When André Breton says that “love is a pebble laughing in the sun” (in Lacan 2006d: 423), the absent human subject, the one who properly laughs, is somehow more powerfully present in its absence. Lévi-Strauss made use of breakthroughs in linguistics to reinvent anthropology; Roland Barthes used those same means to challenge theories of literature and aesthetics (Barthes 1975, 1981, 1983). It seems to me that much good could come out of a similar appropriation from theologians and scholars of religion. Such an appropriation might well come via the torsions effected on linguistics by Lacan. I offer the following as a brief foray in this direction. If we apply Jakobson’s language to the Christian theology of atonement, Jesus Christ would seem to be situated at the crossing of the metaphorical and the metonymical. He is the arch metaphor in that he stands in for all men and women, taking their sins upon himself. “The Word became flesh”, according to the gospel of John (1:14); while the early church 93

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theologian Athanasius (n.d.) says that, “He, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God” (§54); or as Karl Barth simply notes: “God in Jesus Christ has taken our place” (1961: 216). Christ is also the arch metonym in that he represents all men and women for the Father, as the head stands in for the body (of the church). The strictly human metonymic action of sons replacing fathers and daughters replacing mothers find its end in the one who not only fulfills this sequence on the plane of the horizontal but links it, metaphorically, to a heavenly origin on the vertical. From the psychoanalytic perspective it is no surprise that this collapsing of registers could only be represented by collapsing the boundaries of family relations in a somewhat disturbing fashion. Christ is born of Mary, but is also destined to be joined to Mary (representative of the Church, mater ecclesia) as husband to wife, heavenly bridegroom to heavenly bride. A further twist is given to this image in the book of Revelation, in which the phrase “bride of the lamb” extends the metonymical progression to animal life. Such language is presaged in the gospels where Jesus is a gate, a vine, and so on (see John 10:7, 15:5). Here also is the crux of what might be called the first and last of the great theological issues, that of universal salvation. Metaphorically, Christ replaces all men and women thus assuring the salvation of all the unworthy (and all are unworthy). Origen, arguably the church’s first systematic theologian, preached universal salvation, but his teaching was censured posthumously by the church and seriously disabled by the polemics of Saint Augustine. In the twentieth century the most important theologians, arguably, from the three major strands of Christianity – the Roman Catholic Karl Rahner, the Reformed Karl Barth and the Orthodox Sergius Bulgakov – have returned to this theme in powerfully original ways. It is no surprise that the resistance to the doctrine of universal salvation comes from the ruling bodies within the churches, who, whatever theological sympathy they might have for the idea that Christ died for all people, must take into account the kind of purely human complexities that arise when people living in time accept pre-emptively the reward of the ages. The bride of Christ, living in time’s horizon, is still composed of singular people, within whose hearts must be repeated the test of Love, the test of that primordial metaphoric condensation. We might say, somewhat simplistically, that this topic is impossible to legislate or situate in the symbolic; it is too real, in a sense, to talk about.

JOUISSANCE AND WOMAN: THE GRAPHS OF SEXUATION

The Talmud too says: A man without a woman is no person. (Franz Kafka, diary, 24 November 1911) 94

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Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him. (Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, 1851) In the preceding pages I made the argument that jouissance in Lacan is rooted in a distinctively Christian braiding of body and language, sex and meaning. This could mean that Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis has certain limits when working with individuals coming from cultures in which, linguistically and socially, the influence of the Christian West has been negligible. Lacan does suggest in one place that Japanese people, because of the structure of their language, might be unanalysable; but he also says the same about himself, James Joyce and others raised by Jesuits. At this point I do not think anything conclusive can be said about what kind of people are analysable or not from a Lacanian perspective. What can be said is that Lacan takes quite seriously differences in language, religion and culture. The graphs of sexuation that Lacan deals with in Seminar XX allow Lacan to universalize his teaching in a new way and to approach familiar terrain from a different perspective. Whereas prior to these graphs the overriding issue in analysis was determining whether someone was psychotic, perverse, or neurotic, now one can ask a perhaps simpler and more universal question: is one male or female? But we must complicate this question before we attempt to answer it. For Lacan is not talking about physiology or even gender; he is talking about male and female modes of being in relation to desire and jouissance. Just as it’s feasible for a woman to bear the paternal function for her child, it is quite possible for a man to desire like a woman, or for a woman to know only phallic jouissance. But also, just as the paternal function is most often carried by males, so it is also males that most often act out the desire depicted on the left side of these graphs (Figure 6). Although the figure looks daunting at first, it is actually quite simple to understand and represents some of the clearest and most ingenious

x

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x

x

x

x

x

x

S

S(A)  a

La

 Figure 6 Sexuation graph.

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expressions conceived by Lacan. The symbols should understood in the following way:  signifies an element in a set;  signifies the entire set;  followed by an x signifies castration, while the line above a logical term denotes its negation. So, for example, the equation in the upper left-hand corner reads thusly: there exists one that is not castrated. Under the logical equations we have other Lacanian mathemes: The S under erasure is the divided subject;  alone stands for the phallus; a, as we know, stands for objet a; the S followed by the A under erasure should be read: signifier of the barred Other, whereas the La under erasure is shorthand for La femme n’existe pas (“the woman does not exist”), but always remembering that the La (“the”) is under erasure (in other words, women cannot be subsumed under the universal set of Woman, as men can under Man). It should be noted that, though Lacan uses some symbols of Aristotelian logic in these graphs, he uses them in an idiosyncratic way that many stricter logicians do not accept. Let us start with the left side of the graph, which explicates what Lacan calls male sexuation. The first equation signifies that there exists one that is not castrated, while the equation under it states what would seem to be its opposite, that all are castrated. The contradiction can be broached by seeing that, for Lacan, the logic of the All (tout) that the male side of the graph embodies always depends on an exemplary exception. All accept castration only on the premise that there is one that has remained uncastrated. In Freud’s myth of the primal horde, the band of brothers only accept their castrated and impotent position in the name of their brutal, uncastrated father. When their resentment causes them to murder this figure, their resulting anxiety is the immediate proof that their being actually depended on the existence of an exception to the rule of their sad castration. So they immediately reconstructed their father in religion and myth and took on again the mantle of castration – self-imposed this time – in the form of prohibitions against incest and murder. The Ur-father and his exceptional status was enshrined, and, as Freud noted, this father became much more powerful in death than in life. As we can see, the only subject position on the male side of the graph is that of the divided subject oriented towards objet a, a relation which bypasses the phallus, yet is nevertheless sustained by its fantasmatic presence. This is precisely what we see in the impossible desire of literature’s most famous obsessive, Hamlet. Hamlet dotes on the idealized memory of his dead father who had: “A combination and a form indeed, / Where every god did seem to set his seal, / To give the world assurance of a man” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene 4) – but it is precisely this fantasy which provides the hidden support for Hamlet’s inability to act. Lacan argues that Hamlet was unable to kill Claudius precisely because of the fantasy that Hamlet held concerning his father that had been unconsciously transferred 96

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to Claudius when the latter killed his brother, married the queen, and became Hamlet’s “sometime father”. As Lacan notes: “It’s a question of the phallus, and that’s why [Hamlet] will never be able to strike it, until the moment when he has made the complete sacrifice – without wanting to, moreover – of all narcissistic attachments, i.e., when he is mortally wounded and knows it” (Lacan 1977: 51). Only when this fantasy is dissolved is the impotent son able to take action and exact vengeance against his treacherous uncle, but by that time it is too late. The constituent exception can only be excised from the economy of Hamlet’s desire through the sacrifice of his very life. This male-sexuated logic is essentially the logic of ritual sacrifice in which the entirety of individuals are dependent on one constituent exception – “It was better”, said Caiaphas, “to have one person die for the people” (John 18:14). Inasmuch as it follows this logic of a constituent exception sacrificial religion is determined by the logic of male sexuation. This perhaps gives some insight to the split within Christianity concerning the sex of the priest/pastor. The Roman Catholic and Orthodox emphasis on the necessity of priests being male and the general consensus among Protestants (even very conservative ones) that women also can shepherd the flock could perhaps be explained by the heavy emphasis placed on the sacrificial meal (the Eucharist or mass) of the former traditions, and the decreased importance of this element in the latter. Marriage, in which the all are sacrificed for the one, presents a particular trial for those determined by this male-sexuated logic, which is perhaps why the bachelor party on the eve of the wedding ends up, stereotypically, at the strip club or the brothel where the sacrifice the groom is expected to make for the rest of his natural life – that he sleep with no one else but his wife – is counter-balanced by this final night when he may act as if all women were his for sexual enjoyment except his wife. This is a variation on the Don Juan myth that Lacan alludes to in this seminar whose conquests number as high as mil e tre (one thousand and three). Perhaps the most contemporary of Don Juans is Tony Soprano, from the well-known HBO series The Sopranos, who sleeps with many women (his “goombahs” or mistresses), but never (or almost never) with his wife. For Lacan, the case of Kierkegaard is an extreme example from the side of masculine sexuation. The Danish philosopher and theologian famously pretended to his devoted fiancé, Regine, that he was betraying her in order that she would reject him – all, according to Kierkegaard, out of love for her: “she asked me: ‘Are you never going to marry?’ I answered, Yes perhaps in ten years’ time when I have sown my wild oats; then I shall need some young blood to rejuvenate me” (Kierkegaard 1973: 17). In Lacan’s terminology, he could not accept love if it was to be tainted by objet a, and so he takes on the mantle of Don Juan as a ruse, to extricate himself from love 97

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altogether, or to direct his libido entirely to God and to his writing, the “idea for which I can live and die” (ibid.: 5). According to Lacan, those sexuated as men must either choose to love according to objet a or they must sublimate their love absolutely. In religious terminology, they must either love women or love god, but they cannot do both. As Kierkegaard says: “Either you throw yourself into the wildest kind of life – or else become absolutely religious” (ibid.: 18). This may partly explain why, in the middle ages, the Biblical text most commented upon by the hordes of monks was the erotic epithalamion of Solomon, the Song of Songs. This does not mean, though, that jouissance is out of the picture for the monkish character devoted only to God (or to some Absolute). Kierkegaard, in putting Regine to the cruel test of his own seeming adultery, was attempting to access a jouissance outside of the logic of sacrifice, what Lacan calls the jouissance of the Other. If spousal love can weather any crisis except that of adultery – Jesus himself seems to allow for divorce in such cases (Matthew 5:32) – Kierkegaard was searching for a love that would brook no exceptions: Regine is asked to love him precisely as an adulterer. Regine, wisely it would seem, rejected the premises of this test and simply married someone else. Lacan considered this rejection to be crucial for Kierkegaard’s existence: It’s no accident that Kierkegaard discovered existence in a seducer’s little love affair. It’s by castrating himself, by giving up love, that he thinks he will accede to it. But perhaps, after all – why not? – Regine too existed. This desire for a good at one remove, a good that is not caused by a little a – perhaps it was through Regine that he attained that dimension. (Lacan 1998: 77) Lacan, it seems, is suggesting here that Kierkegaard, in purifying his sexual love out of existence, succeeded in, if not moving to the other side of the graph, at least going beyond phallic jouissance and the logic of exception. Although Kierkegaard claimed that Mozart’s Don Juan was the greatest work of Western art, he showed himself entirely incapable of playing that role, or entertaining the constituent exception, even if only as a fantasy. I do not think these biographical elements can be separated from Kierkegaard’s status as, arguably, the greatest of all Protestant philosophertheologians. In order for him to dedicate his life to God he had to extricate the sacrificial moment from the liturgy of his being. His life and work were that sacrifice. The title of one of Kierkegaard’s well-known texts, Either/Or, sums up the situation on the left side of the graph. Male sexuation, or phallic jouissance, is determined by a choice: either one’s sexual relationships are determined by the fantasmatic screen of objet a, or one rejects sexual life for the 98

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sake of some sublimated good. The other side of this equation could, with a certain reservation, be discussed in terms of the logic of both/and, the reservation being that, whether it is the object or the Other under consideration Woman will be “not all” (pas tout) in relation to it. For Ellie Ragland this is to be interpreted optimistically: “Lacan places psychoanalytic and cultural hopes for change in feminine logic” (Ragland 2004b: 97). Let us examine the logical equations. The first tells us that there is no being that is not castrated, and the second that not all are castrated. Again we would seem to have a contradiction. But we can look at the first equation, there is not one that is not castrated, as primarily a negation of the (fantastical) exception of the male side. While the male side is dominated by the fantasy that there is an Ur-father that has escaped castration, the feminine side does not contain this fantasy, not because this father is castrated, but precisely because there is something in her that escapes the logic of castration altogether. This can be more thoroughly explained by looking at four more logical terms that Lacan borrows from Aristotle (and then gives his customary twist): necessary, impossible, possible, and contingent. The necessary, “that which does not stop being written” (Lacan 1998: 59), is the Ur-father, the one exception to castration. In order for law and society to exist, there must be the supposition that there is one upon which a foundation can bear, the Archimedean point from which, as Kierkegaard notes, one is able “to perceive things as whole”. As Ragland says: … a universal, is a required condition for a society to exist, then subsist. It is necessary, then, that most people believe in a superior being or principle – a symbolic-order Father’s Name signifier – that transcends the law, in order to establish the law as a basis from which to “write itself ” in reference to something. (Ragland 2004b: 96) Directly related to the necessary, and likewise on the male side of the graph, is the realm of the possible, “that which stops being written”, exemplified by the brothers in Freud’s primal horde, for whom desire was possible, yet never actual, precisely because they accepted castration. The necessary and the possible together make up a society’s dominant discourse, its symbolic world. Like the dream of the inveterate gambler, the fantasy that one might occupy the seat of the constituent exception – that one might actually strike it rich – is what keeps the wheels of a society and its all important economy spinning; and yet inasmuch as one lends one’s being to the fantasy one stops writing oneself. The fantasy lives, but I no longer; or, as in the Matrix films, I realize that I am just a fantasy generated by an oppressive real. This gamble between the necessary and the possible is far 99

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from being a grace note to the symbolic; on the contrary, the 2008 worldwide economic collapse has made it abundantly clear how central to our lives are the increasingly complicated gambling technologies that ground today’s stock market. On the feminine side we have the impossible and the contingent. The impossible dictates that there is not one who is not castrated; it is that which does not stop not being written: “the impossible is made out of the necessity of the impossible, taken as the basis of belief in the One-who-knows” (Ragland 2004b: 96). Looking at the bottom of the female side of the graph, we see an arrow going from the La under erasure (the woman does not exist) towards the phallus. We might say that this is the obverse of the necessary, that which doesn’t stop being written, inasmuch as the necessary is a male fantasy that sustains a certain discourse. Thus, the only factor that escapes the fatalism determined by the fantasy of the primal father is that of the contingent, the ability “to stop not being written” (Lacan 1998: 144). As Ragland says, the contingent “lets in enough love to allow deadly repetitions to be rewritten” (Ragland 2004b: 97). The logical operators for contingency can be translated as: not all are castrated. Again, this does not necessarily contradict the claim made on the opposite side of the graph, that “all are castrated”. For Lacan, to be sexuated like a woman is to fall partly outside of the symbolic determinacy, to fall partly outside of the trinity of semblance controlled by a primal father that doesn’t exist. While the necessary, the possible and the impossible are all insularly devoted to a phallic jouissance that Lacan links to masturbation and the “jouissance of the idiot” (Lacan 1998: 81), contingency is an opening up to the Other that is not necessarily phallic. This is why feminine jouissance is split, directed towards the phallus on the one hand but also towards the signifier for the barred other. For Lacan, this is the contradiction of La femme: that those sexuated as women, by being all the way in the symbolic, are able to find a way out of it, whereas those sexuated as men, in order to find some fantasmatic support outside of the symbolic net, find themselves all the more ensnared by it.

JOUISSANCE AND LOVE

One only really loves from a feminine position. Loving feminises. That’s why love is always a bit comical in a man. (Jacques-Alain Miller, “On Love”, n.d.) George Herbert’s “Love III” (1633) is surely among the greatest lyric poems in the English language. It seems to me that this short poem encapsulates the kind of transformation that Lacan is getting at in his discussion of contingency and feminine sexuation at the same time threatening, in 100

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its religious assumptions, to dissolve the matrix of sexuality with which it flirts. Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guiltie of dust and sinne. But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning If I lack’d any thing. A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here: Love said, You shall be he. I, the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare, I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I? Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame Go where it doth deserve. And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame? My deare, then I will serve. You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat. (Herbert [1633] 1987) We are clearly in a Christian context here as Love, or Christ, offers his flesh to be eaten. The setting is also unmistakably erotic as we see a feminine Love seducing a bashful soul. Personified Love, in the Renaissance, is typically thought of as feminine, but in the poem this is set at odds with the allusions to Christ and the fact that Love is addressed as “Lord”. Such a tension was perhaps not insuperable for Herbert’s readers. It is a reversal, though, of the way the salvific relationship is gendered in the New Testament in which Christ is the bridegroom and the Church is the bride. Such a trope is carried over from the Hebrew way of thinking about Yahweh in his relation to a feminized Israel (as in the Song of Songs). Love, in Herbert’s poem, is both masculine and feminine, for while she takes on the passive position – she serves, she seduces gently, she is gazed upon – her struggle is precisely to coax the soul into entering into the love relationship, into tasting her meat, into enjoying her as the Christian is called on to enjoy God. A slip of the tongue reveals to us that the soul aims to keep lack at bay. When Love asks if he “lack’d anything”, he says “a guest”, equating the guest with the lack, and in saying that he does not deserve to be there he is also saying that he cannot bear to embody the lack that such a closeness to Love 101

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entails. When Love tells him he is that guest, she is (like a good analyst) taking her cue from his slip, saying that though he is “lack” he nevertheless ought to enter in, lack filling lack. His seeming revulsion at his own “dust and sinne” is in truth a shield to keep him from the Other and the lack that the Other reveals in him. He says he does not deserve to be there; in fact, he does not want to be there. He would rather indulge in his own failure (which is actually an “idiotic” fantasy of self-sufficiency) than be indulged by Love. While desire, for masculine sexuality, is split from Love (it is precisely to flee from Love that the soul desires the hell of its own masochistic fantasy), Love, coming we might say from the side of feminine sexuality, is joined to jouissance. This according to Lacan’s statement that “only love can cause jouissance to condescend to desire” (1962–3: 13/3/63). While desire is always desire to be unsatisfied (symbolic), and jouissance experienced only as pleasure in pain (real), love functions not so much as the imaginary fantasy covering over the slippage between registers, but as a fourth ring inexplicably able to chaperone a meeting between these two contrary parties. Taking note of all the imaginary ploys used by Love in Herbert’s poem – the “quick” eyes, the gentle pressures, all the feminine wiles – it is more accurate to say that Love overcomes the imaginary roadblock the soul wields against itself by stressing a materiality (the flesh to be eaten) that is not conducive to the language of the mirror. What we see here is the pre-mirror stage element of oral fixation and dependency appearing on the other side of the symbolic, as it were, and the primordial bond with the mother resurrected in the feast prepared by Love.5 The “oceanic” feeling of being lost in the Other – that Freud thought connected the yearnings of religion to the infant’s drives (1961b: 10–15) – reappears here as something that can be freely chosen (or freely rejected). Lacan once suggested that his discourse, bounded as it was to sexuality, could perhaps be superseded by a discourse that took its cue from a thinking grounded in the binary of continuity versus death (1975). In Seminar XX he notes that love is “what makes up for the sexual relationship” (1998: 45). In other words, the foundation stone of Freudo-Lacanian analysis, that the sexual relationship does not exist, can be perhaps taken in another direction when love is taken into account. But is this the same love that can, according to the Christian scriptures (and we might say to the theological imagination in general), conquer death? Though Lacan does not give a clear answer to this, our Lacanian analysis of Herbert’s poem suggests that there is a thread that links Love, the failed sexual relationship and eternal life. In the first stanza the soul “enters in” but then “drew back”. Love witnessed him “go slack”. His impotence is, at the end, compensated for by a meal whose salvific overtones are abundantly clear: “I did sit and eat”. Inasmuch as Love’s invitation to the soul yet retains a certain sexual 102

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suggestiveness – “You must sit and taste my meat” – we could read this meal as informed by a sublimated sexuality or even pre-Oedipal oral drive. Lacan was not unaware of the oral drive beating its drum from within the Eucharistic meal: Christ, even when resurrected from the dead, is valued for his body, and his body is the means by which communion in his presence is incorporation – oral drive – with which Christ’s wife, the Church as it is called, contents itself very well, having nothing to expect from copulation. (Lacan 1998: 113) While mystics have often used erotic language to describe an ineffable experience, Herbert is perhaps even more astute, from a psychoanalytic perspective, by picking up on the resonances between the Christian mass and the libidinal drive that first marks the experience of being human in this world. The Christian heaven is most often imagined as devoid of sexuality, according to Christ’s dictum that in the resurrection “they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Matt. 22:30). But perhaps this statement does not preclude a certain kind of sexuality, one that is, ontogenetically speaking, prior to the secular marital bond. Following Herbert’s lead, perhaps the ultimate religious destination is marked by a reversal of the Freudian progression of drives, in which the oral and anal drives must be tamed and integrated into the final genital drive. Jacques-Alain Miller tells us that analysis is an “experience whose mainspring is love” (Miller n.d.). But it is important to distinguish between two kinds of love in the thought of Lacan, the first “transferential” and the second real. The love that analysis depends on for its initial “draw” is the artificial, “contrived” (ibid.) love of transference, in which, for the duration of an analysis the analysand falls in love with the analyst, the latter becoming the repository of knowledge concerning his being: “We love the one that harbours the response, or a response, to our question: ‘Who am I?’” (ibid.). That analysis depended almost exclusively on transferential love became clear to Freud rather early on in his development of psychoanalysis. At the beginning, says Freud, he thought that he simply had to discover unconscious knowledge and “communicate it to the patient” (1966: 543). But, as he goes on to say, “our knowledge about the unconscious material is not equivalent to his knowledge” (ibid.), and so a transferential situation had to be set up in which the originally traumatic situation that haunts the analysand is recreated, with the analyst sitting in as the “other” (father, brother, sister, lover, etc.). What kind of love is it that exists between analyst and analysand? First of all, it is love for the knowledge that seems to be held by the analyst in his status as sujet supposé savoir, or subject supposed to know (Lacan 1998: 103

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144) – a knowledge which, to the star-crossed gaze of the analysand, functions as the very key to his lost jouissance. But it is a knowledge that is only ever supposed. The analyst is supposed to know the secret to the analysand’s life and to their enjoyment. It would not be going too far to say here that the analyst possesses the mouthpiece of truth as long as she sits in her analyst’s chair, just as the word of the Pope is “infallible” as long as he is speaking ex cathedra, from his throne. Because of this context it must be said that transferential love is ultimately stuck in the imaginary and meant to be swallowed up in the dissolution which is analysis. There is another kind of love, though, for Lacan, of which we find hints in Seminar XX. It seems that the failed love of the analytic situation – for a successful analysis involves a failed love – is preparation for a love that, rooted as it could be in the real, would know success (as un-Lacanian as this may sound). It is this love which Lacan says is “always mutual” (1998: 4), and that causes “jouissance to condescend to desire” (1962–3: 13/3/63). It is also the love we see at the end of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (and perhaps most, or even all, of Shakespeare’s comedies) in which lovers are mysteriously translated from an imaginary and fraught experience of love to one that is marked by peace, according not only with their desires but also with the rule of law. I would argue, as I have in the preceding chapter, that the theme of a desire that might accord with the law – as opposed to being determined in opposition to it – is a distinctively religious one. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream we have the common comedic setting of a pair of young lovers separated from each other by the law. Hermia loves Lysander but her father, the Athenian king, Theseus, demands she marry Demetrius, to whom she is promised; her refusal means death or the nunnery. Hermia runs off to wed Lysander secretly in a “wood near Athens”, but her friend, Helena, because of her unrequited passion for Demetrius, tells that young man of the couple’s plan, hoping that this will somehow win her Demetrius’s love. The plot, of course, follows none (but, ultimately, all!) of these plans; thanks to the magical juice of a “little western flower” and the hijinks of a certain quasi-competent woodland fairy named Puck, the two young men who originally were beguiled of Hermia all of a sudden scorn her in favour of Helena – who thinks they are merely mocking her. Along the way, Bottom the weaver is turned into an ass, which does nothing to stop Titania, queen of fairies, from falling madly in love with him. But all these mistaken loves are revealed as merely play in a mirror and the stuff of dreams when, at the end, the desire of each lover is allowed to light on its proper object: Theseus with his bride Hippolyta, Oberon (king of the fairies) and his love, Titania, Lysander with Hermia, and Demetrius to Helena, whose favours he had been blind to. Whereas Helena had pursued him to the wood in mere “fancy”, by some unknown power his love to Hermia “melted as the snow” and, as he says: 104

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Seems to me now As the remembrance of an idle gaud, Which in my childhood I did dote upon: And all the faith, the virtue of my heart The object, and the pleasure of mine eye, Is only Helena. To her my lord, Was I betroth’d ere I saw Hermia: But, like a sickness, did I loath this food: But, as in health, come to my natural taste, Now do I wish it, love it, long for it, And will for evermore be true to it. (William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 4, scene 1) Whereas earlier Demetrius’s desire had sent him reeling after a jouissance that only caused him pain, now the object that he loves and longs after not only longs for and loves him back but is precisely the one to whom he was originally betrothed – she is that object in the mirror that the mirror is powerless to reflect, and after the hall of mirrors (which is the stuff of comedy) dissolves, she yet remains with all the imaginary jealousies and rivalries dropped away. For these transformed lovers, while we see that they can freely choose their beloveds, there is yet a mystery concerning identity and possession, what Lacan would identify as the of question of having or being the phallus: : Methinks I see these things with parted eye,

When everything seems double. : So methinks:

And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, Mine own, and not mine own. : Are you sure that we are awake? It seems to me That yet we sleep, we dream. Do not you think The duke was here, and bid us follow him? : Yea, and my father. : And Hippolyta. : And he did bid us follow to the temple. : Why then, we are awake: let’s follow him, And, by the way let us recount our dreams. (Ibid.) Helena loves Demetrius now, but he is both hers and not hers. Everything is double – both dream and waking – and yet the “jewel” that each lover now possesses, this singleness which no madness of mirrors can confuse, is proof that their love is real. The fact that they were bid to “follow to the 105

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temple” is their proof that they are not dreaming, for it is in the temple that whatever is real in their dreams is given the stamp of symbolic authority. Love becomes real not only for themselves but for the entire community of which they are a part. When Bottom, who had been turned into a donkey for the majority of the action, is returned to his proper state, he experiences a similar confusion along with a similar desire to have his experience given the stamp of the symbolic order. His speech upon waking plagiarizes Saint Paul (1 Cor. 2:9): The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called “Bottom’s Dream”, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death. (William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 4, scene 1) It was a dream, and yet it was real precisely because he, Bottom, was not in it. That is, all the buffoonery and jealous love which marked him to himself in his waking life was miraculously absent. It thus had a bottomless power that could convince an ignorant and “hard-handed” weaver to be quite clear that here was a power that could be wielded even over death, at a funeral where death is integrated into the symbolic universe of living men and women.

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4. A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE “My Faith is gone!” cried he, after one stupefied moment. “There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil, for to thee is this world given.” (Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown”, 1835)

The purpose of this chapter is to give a sense of the different approaches to Lacan that exist among English-speaking commentators. I cannot claim to have examined all the material on Lacan and religion – happily, there are new books and essay appearing all the time. But I hope I have succeeded in covering a range of the most important voices among those who discuss Lacan and who have interesting perspectives to offer to theologians and scholars of religion.

ADRIAN JOHNSTON

I have pointed our earlier that my reading of Lacan is indebted to that of Bruce Fink. Fink, though, is sometimes criticized as privileging the symbolic register at the expense of the real in his interpretation of Lacan. The American philosopher Adrian Johnston is one of the most prominent thinkers arguing for a reading of Lacan that puts the realm of the real front and centre in the service of critiquing those who are ignorant of, or who would even valorize, the “disguised un-worked-through JudeoChristian heritage persisting within Lacan’s generally atheistic outlook” (Johnston 2011: 1). Johnston, in the various essays I will look at in this section, sees this problematic in two main areas, essentially what I have called the phylogenetic (within the history of the species) and the ontogenetic (within the history of the person). His overarching argument is that, though Lacan himself is not always true to his own atheism, the proper way of reading him is to prioritize the “meaningless” of the real against 107

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the “theological” tendency of the symbolic, with the goal of depicting “subjectivity as a transient transcendence made possible by an underlying ontology of an Otherless, barred Real” (Johnston 2006). While Bruce Fink’s reading of Lacan tends to privilege the weight of the symbolic – a weight that orders and aligns – Johnston’s reading privileges the manner in which the real can upset the balance afforded to the psyche by the symbolic. Johnston’s reading has great value, in my opinion, for a discussion of Lacan’s relation to religion, so it will be worth examining here. All citations are from essays and book chapters by Johnston that are available for free online. In “Lightening Ontology: Slavoj Žižek and the Unbearable Lightness of Being Free”,1 Johnston focuses on the “anti-natural” aspects of the Lacanian subject, which he sums up in the following manner: The big Other, as a non-natural symbolic order, precedes the birth of the individual, preparing in advance a place for him/her in a system obeying rules other than the law of nature. Thanks to these representational mediators and their central role in the processes of subjectification, the Lacanian subject exists as a (non-)being alienated from its corporeal material substratum. (Johnston 2006) In this essay Johnston is using both Lacan and Alain Badiou to arrive at a theory or mode of thinking that he calls “transcendental materialism”, in which The Ideal of subjective thought arises from the Real of objective being [while also maintaining] that this thus-generated Ideal subjectivity thereafter achieves independence from the ground of its material sources and thereby starts to function as a set of possibility conditions for forms of reality irreducible to explanatory discourses allied to traditional versions of materialism. (Ibid.) The picture Johnston provides us with is of the symbolic slowly arising out of the primal real as a kind of reflection, but a reflection that subsequently has a pre-eminent power of influence over the real from which it has arisen. In fact, because of the symbolic’s organizing power, that real no longer exists in the way it “originally” did. Instead, there is the trinity of symbolic, real and imaginary, with the non-primal real functioning to remind the symbolic of the latter’s derivative nature. And yet, it is precisely the power of that now-barred real that is crucial, according to Johnston – for this is what enables the human being to be free: 108

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Being free is a transitory event arising at exceptional moments when the historical, psychical, and biological run of things breaks down, when the determining capacities of natural and cultural systems – these systems are never actually the seamless networks of unfaltering determination (i.e., big Others) they so often inaccurately appear to be – are temporarily suspended as a result of deadlocks and short-circuits being generated within and between these multifaceted, not-whole systems. Individuals are able to exploit the thus-generated (and perhaps rare) openings for autonomy thanks to having a constitution riddled with conflicts. (Ibid.) Johnston’s argument is that the real functions to reveal gaps and insufficiencies within the symbolic. While this is a perfectly acceptable reading of the real in Lacan, it should not be forgotten that the symbolic also has a similar function in regard to the imaginary – it corrects the illusory wholeness projected by that register. Furthermore, as I emphasized in Chapter 2 it is a mistake to read the symbolic register as whole, for it is grounded on an unstable entity, whether that is read as the Name-of-the-Father or the paternal metaphor. In seeming to forget both these aspects of the symbolic, Johnston’s reading is sometimes in danger of valorizing the real at the expense of the other two registers. In “Affective Life between Signifiers and Jouis-sens: Lacan’s Senti-ments and Affectuations” Johnston argues again for a return to the importance of the real in Lacan, this time by claiming that Lacan misread Freud in claiming that it is only signifiers (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz in the latter’s work) that can be properly understood to be repressed. As Johnston notes, in agreeing with the work of Fink on this matter, Freud was “far from consistent in his theorization of affect” (Johnston 2009: 113). Johnston feels that Lacan’s mistake stems from his struggle “against the excessive overemphases on affectivity, embodiment, and energetics promoted by a range of figures and orientations” which pushed him to succumb to an “equally excessive counter-emphasis on the foundational, fundamental primacy of ‘representation’ in psychical life” (ibid.: 120). Johnston’s conclusion is that the double disconnect between signifiers and affect, “first, the shuttling of an affect from one signifier-like ideational representation to another … and, second, the split between an affect and its non-representative ‘representations’ introduced with the originary advent of the mediation of signifiers” (ibid.: 137) permanently impairs our ability to pin down affect, essentially, to be able to “say what we feel”. This issue, which may appear obscure, is vitally important because the answer to the question “what is repressed?” will determine the nature of the cure. If it is a signifier that is repressed, then the release of this signifier will 109

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be the goal of analysis. This way of conceiving analysis is clearly “religious”, even theological, in its emphasis on a controlling and liberating Word. But if there is a possibility for affect to be repressed, then the cure must operate “below” the level of the releasing Word: The analyst can and should guide the analysand to realizations that affects aren’t always directly related to what they appear to be related to in conscious experience … and that given feelings can work to conceal other emotions and their associated thoughts … But, whereas Lacanians often explicitly assert or implicitly assume that the unconscious “truths” masked by the “lies” of conscious emotions (as felt feelings) are non-affective entities (i.e., signifiers, structures, and so on), the preceding glosses on Lacan’s inadequately elaborated metapsychology of affect indicate that, behind the façade of misleading felt feelings, might be other, misfelt feelings, rather than phenomena of a fundamentally non-affective nature. (Johnston 2009: 141) Johnston’s bias as a philosopher is clear here. And while there is nothing problematic about a philosopher or a scientist arguing that his/her job is essentially one that is unending (as we follow one misfelt feeling after another, as we pursue an unending quest for knowledge), the analyst is distinguished by the necessity that she, at some point or another, has to end things. Unless the analysis is to be an interminable one, at some point a cut has to be made into the perhaps too comfortable existence of the analytic relationship. The point of analysis is not for analyst and analysand to become friends. The point of analysis is for the analysand to realize at some point that she no longer needs her analyst. Somewhat ironically considering Johnston’s arguments, this cut is precisely an intrusion of the real into the texture of the imaginary/symbolic fabric of the analytic relationship. What Johnston seems to miss is that this cut is designed to not only curtail a certain symbolic world, but, in the self-same motion, to found another one. The other symbolic will not be perfect, but hopefully it will be good enough – hopefully it will be a world in which the subject knows how to make do with her desire. In his essay “On Deep History and Lacan”, Johnston criticizes Lacan for dismissing the notion that there could be any history before the advent of language. For Johnston, this hews too closely to the Christian narrative, which marks the birth of Christ as the centre-point of countable history, pulling everything into its totalizing net. In this essay Johnston reveals that his mission is one of “forging a fully atheistic and materialist Lacanian theoretical apparatus … by forcing psychoanalysis and the life-sciences dialectically to inter-penetrate each other” (2011: 97). He goes on to argue that: 110

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For an ontogenetic theory of subject-formation elaborated at the intersection of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis and the life sciences not to presume tacitly, in the phylogenetic background, the enigmatic, impossible-to-see-behind “Holy Spirit” of a mysteriously always-already big Other qua Symbolic order – such a presupposition hardly becomes any position purporting to be anti-idealist, immanentist, and atheist – scientifically guided investigations into the early emergence of the properly socio-representational dimensions of humanity (i.e. inquiries into phylogeny) must be pursued and integrated into analytic theory. (Ibid.) Johnston criticizes Lacan for precluding psychoanalytic interest in the “origin of languages” and for holding that “the symbolic universe exists first, and the real universe comes to settle itself down in its interior” (Johnston 2011: 99). For Lacan, just as one cannot analyse affects, one also cannot apply psychoanalytic insights to prehistory. This is part of Lacan’s belief that analysis deals not with emotions or psychic energy, but with language. This can be clearly seen when attempting to analyse a dream, in which one very often has the sense that the dream one can put into words is not the “real” dream – and yet the words that one uses to articulate the dream are the only material the analyst has to work with. Johnston is correct when he argues that to follow Lacan’s prohibition against inquiry into the origins of language, or, analogously, into the world of affect, is to accept an insuperable division between analysis and a properly scientific psychology. It should be remembered that both Freud and Lacan harboured dreams of psychoanalysis becoming properly scientific. Of equal importance, though, is the fact that both men gave up on this dream. When Lacan finally claimed that analysis is more rhetoric than science he was not just being flippant; he was making a concession to the weakness and finitude of human creatures, such that we are hemmed in by time, both in our lives and in our analytic sessions, and at certain crucial junctures we must act with a sort of heedless faith. We must say: here is where I stand, unjustified and unproven, and here is where I push off to go forward. While Lacan never claimed that evolutionary biologists or archaeologists should avoid investigating what Johnston calls deep history, what puts it off limits for psychoanalysis is that the latter is limited to language and the kind of human history that is born with language. Johnston makes the argument that what is barred or broken about the symbolic can be traced back to what is barred in the real; thus, the material real out of which the symbolic has arisen (whether it is the primitive real becoming symbolic speech in the infant, or a prehistorical real turning into a conscious and historical symbolic of culture) must be taken as 111

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our guiding thread. We should not be duped by the closure afforded by the symbolic realm, no matter how comforting or meaningful a closure appears to be. Johnston makes this argument most forcefully in “This Philosophy Which is Not One” (2010), where he brings out a certain paradox in Lacan’s relation to religion. On the one hand, in Lacan’s Le Triomphe de la religion, religion triumphs because it stands against “the all-encompassing fictions of philosophical ontology”, that is, the fiction of meaningfulness (Johnston 2010: 141). On the other hand, Lacan “presents his ‘obstinacy on the path of mathemes’ as a struggle against ‘meaning’ qua ‘always religious’” (ibid.: 144). As Johnston points out (paraphrasing Colette Soler): Lacan comes to place his faith in mathemes modeled on scientific formulas because anti-ancient, mathematized modern science does not “think”—with thinking associated here with modes of cognition that are prone to endow things with sense and significance (indeed, traditional philosophy certainly thinks in this manner). (Ibid.) Johnston concludes by dividing Lacan against himself. On the one hand, we have the good Lacan, the Lacan who puts forth his mathemes and their thoughtlessness against the meaning afforded by the dream of religion and ontology. But there is always that pesky other side of Lacan, the side that never fails to point out that the atheists, and others who believe they are not “duped”, are, in the end, the most duped of all. As Johnston puts it, the late Lacan is marked by two “chains of equivalences … religious-philosophymeaning (grounded and totalized in the ancient finite cosmos) versus psychoanalysis-antiphilosophy-meaninglessness ([un-]grounded and detotalized in the modern infinite universe)” (Johnston 2010: 145). One thing to remember here is that, though Lacan does model his mathemes on post-Galilean science, they are not properly scientific. They do not even function in a properly logical way. In fact, I would say that the eleventh-century theologian Anselm’s motto of “faith seeking understanding” would describe fairly well how Lacan’s mathemes work. They do not work as hypotheses in search of demonstrable “hard” truths. In fact, they are only even thinkable in the most particular of cases and under the judgmental eye of an analyst who must decide at every instant how to employ the formulas bequeathed to her by Lacan. We should be careful with Lacan’s statements concerning the “unthinking” character of his mathemes. While they may be passed on (effectively) by those who refuse to think them out, they are only effectively put to use by one who thinks (or, better, judges) with them. Johnston is following, to a certain extent, Badiou’s mode of talking about the religious element in thinkers like Althusser and Lacan, in which 112

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“religion” describes “the axiom according to which a truth is always a prisoner of the arcana of meaning and a matter for interpretation and exegesis” (quoted in Johnston 2010: 153). The atheistic stance opposite this kind of religiosity declares that “truths have no meaning” (ibid.). This kind of religion, though, is a straw-man and is anathema to the way Lacan understood religion. For Lacan, the statements of religious doctrine, in fact, functioned very much like mathemes. That is, the effectiveness of the teaching that, for example, “Christ is both man and god” is the symbolic effectiveness that there is nothing hidden behind this statement, but that it impinges upon the believer with an absolute necessity. One believes it without asking why or how, and if one does ask questions, it is not from doubt but from the yearning of belief. The symbolic was not a matter for interpretation, for Lacan, and the fact that “true religion” could not be reduced to hermeneutics was a sign of its symbolic effectiveness. Whereas Bruce Fink’s emphasis on the stabilizing power of the symbolic is understandable given his status as an analyst seeking to provide stability to patients, Johnston’s approach is also understandable, inasmuch as he is a philosopher interested in how Lacan’s oeuvre might provide new ways of understanding the paradoxes of human freedom. Johnston’s freely avowed project is to make analysis completely secular. And he is right that analysis must not itself be theological. That is, the analyst must not let religious concerns, her own particular beliefs, influence the course of the analysis. But metapsychology is a different matter, and, quite simply, there is a Judeo-Christian background to psychoanalysis that starts with Freud’s serious religious concerns. I would argue that the atheism at the “core” of analysis, so to speak, is actually part and parcel of its Jewish and Christian heritage. It is Christianity’s emphasis on freedom that gives it, if one cares to speak in this manner, a core of atheism. Prior even to Christ experiencing the absence of God in his cry from the cross (“My God, why have you forsaken me?”), there is the simple fact that, in the story of creation, the love that drives God to create is contingent on the freedom of the beloved. In other words, without the freedom of Adam and Eve to say “no” to God, there would be no possibility that they could love God, that they could give a “yes” that came from them and not from their Creator. Lacan’s wavering between faithful atheism and vestigial religious belief is reflective of the status of freedom within the Christian tradition, namely, that unbelief must always remain a possibility for those who would be free. It is, of course, paradoxical, that the only answer in which freedom bears fruit is the affirmative one (for “no” means slavery to the desires of the self ), but this is consonant with both the undecidability of science (in which there is always more knowledge to obtain and in which meaning is always deferred) and the “good news” of the Bible, that freedom is for something, namely, the pleasures of love. 113

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LACAN AND THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE

While the title of this volume (edited by Edith Wyschogrod, David Crownfield and Carl A. Raschke) is promising, the text itself is marked by the fact that, at the time of its publication in 1989, not enough of Lacan had been translated into English, while the contributors had seemingly little or no direct experience with Lacan’s writing in French. Many of the early editions of Lacan in English were either poorly translated or incomplete excerpts. For the most part the various authors understand Lacan as a psychoanalytic version of Derrida (whose work was more well known in the English-speaking world), and the text stands now more to mark a moment in time, a premature (mis)understanding of Lacan’s significance. Nevertheless, mistakes can be instructive, and some of the contributors make prescient comments about the relation of Lacan to theology and religion. In the introduction to the volume David H. Fisher rightly identifies one of the targets of Lacan in the world of religion and psychology, namely, a naive liberal belief in the integrity of the self: If liberal theology has relocated the essence of religious belief within the psyche, modern approaches to religion and psychology can be construed as apologetic attempts to maintain the liberal humanistic legacy in the contemporary world. A return to the origins of faith is made possible through a return to the authentic origins of the self. (Fisher 1989: 18) While this is an accurate assessment of the kind of bias that Lacan fought against, the problem in this text can be found in what the various authors consider to be Lacan’s positive contribution to theology and religion. Charles Winquist, in his contribution, wants to understand Lacan as giving a license to theologians to practise “deconstruction”: It is here that we can discern a new warrant for theological thinking and place its importance within the study of religion. Theological thinking is relevant because it is other than ordinary discourse and is itself a discourse that can display the otherness of its semantic achievement … We could characterize theology as a deconstructive agent and theological thinking as a deconstructive act within the symbolic order. (Winquist 1989: 30) Whereas Lacan, the atheist psychoanalyst, understands religion to be an insuperable foundation for a given psyche – remember the Muslim analysand from our Introduction –Winquist, the religious scholar, would reduce Christian theology to being a deconstructive agent within the Lacanian symbolic. 114

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Even Freud gave more leeway to religion, illusory as he understood it to be. The only explanation I can give to account for this position of Winquist’s is an overeagerness to make all intellectual activities deconstructive in nature, as if this particular mode of Heideggerian/Derridean philosophizing was the only legitimate kind of thought available to us anymore. The following passage, in which Winquist claims that desire is more important than truth in theology, shows a similarly questionable urge to quickly reinterpret an ancient tradition in the light of the latest poorly digested jargon and terminology: Theological thinking is an ongoing experiment. It may be an experiment with the truth, but it is more importantly an experiment of desire. Theology, with its radical conceptuality, implicates desire in the full range of textual achievements… [Theology] has a special role in its capacity to transgress any closure of the symbolic order. It is its complexification of the symbolic order and its transgression that references the depth of experience as desire. (Winquist 1989: 32) Such a statement, beyond simply being unjustified by anything other than the most superficial reading of Lacan, actually ignores a potentially positive engagement between psychoanalysis and theology. What Freud and Lacan have given us is a subtle and penetrating – and completely novel – understanding of the workings of erotic desire, an understanding that goes way beyond the traditional assignation of desire to concupiscence, and, consequently, provides an variety of new ways for theology to approach desire, even to redeem it. But why this would mean that theology should abandon truth in the name of desire is in no way clear. Furthermore, the language of experimenting with the truth would be abhorrent to Lacan, who, as an analyst, was finally aware that his analysands were entrusting him with their psychic health. It is simply not clear where in Lacan Winquist is finding these notions. My suspicion, again, is that he is reading a ludic Derrida into a Lacan whose punning and playing is much more serious. The only contributor that would seem to escape the volume’s general irrelevance is Mark C. Taylor, who notes that: [Lacan’s] resistance to the myth of the death of God in no way involves a return to traditional religious belief. Lacan’s misprision of Freud points toward a genuine “atheism” that approximates what Bataille labels “atheology” … The unconscious that is “God” is, for Lacan, eternally feminine. When considering Lacan’s rereading of Freud, it is always important to remember his insistence that what leads Freud on, in his relentless chase, is “his passion for the goddess”. (Taylor 1989: 49) 115

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I see Taylor here gesturing in the same direction as the great Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov, who emphasized the necessity to see God in the divine/human image that grounds every human being. In other words, if we accept that Lacan renews our understanding of desire, even discovers the realm of human desire in naming it accurately for the first time, the theological issue becomes how to see God’s image in that desire. Taylor, clearly following up on Lacan’s suggestion that Woman is one of the Names-of-the-Father, effects what Slavoj Žižek would call a short-circuit, revealing to us the possibility of a vital communication between two seemingly disparate fields.

HERMAN WESTERINK

Taking his cue from Lacan’s reference in Seminar VII to a “new direction of thought” (Lacan 1992: 97) that developed in the sixteenth century, Herman Westerink argues for a crucial link between the theology of Luther and Calvin and Freud’s metapsychology and ethics. Westerink argues that Lacan was aware of this “filiation” between Freud and the Reformers and develops it even more explicitly in his own work. According to Westerink it was only with the background provided by those Reformers, who demanded that evil be taken much more seriously than their scholastic predecessors had, that could allow Freud and Lacan to arrive at a conception of human nature in which evil becomes an insuperable drive. Though Westerink cites Michel de Certeau’s work on Lacan he does not go deeply enough into the latter’s leading idea, which is concerned with Lacan’s other major sixteenth-century influence, the Catholic mystics of the Counter-Reformation. Westerink argues that Lacan sides with the Reformers against Spinoza’s notion of amor intellectualis, saying that “it is precisely this denial of evil’s positive reality in human nature according to Spinoza that Lacan calls ‘not tenable’” (Westerink 2012: 103). But he doesn’t see that Lacan ultimately rejects the Protestant Reformers as well to side with the mystics. In Seminar VII, on which Westerink depends for the bulk of his argument, Lacan identifies evil as the fundamental problem in psychoanalysis. According to Westerink, Lacan understands evil to be “an absolute passion or desire that reveals man’s desolation and exile from the good” (2012: 2). Westerink reminds us that Freud was quite aware of this issue as well. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud asks the question whether our “erotic” propensity for buildings communities and cities can ever overcomes the force of thanatos (death drive) and our irrepressible urge to tear down what we’ve built, to hate instead of love. Westerink notes that Lacan’s discussion of evil directly follows a reference in Seminar VII to Luther’s De Servo Arbitrio (On the Bondage of the Will), which was a rebuttal of 116

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Erasmus’s De Libero Arbitrio (On the Freedom of the Will). It was out of this debate that Luther articulated his notion of the existence in God of an “eternal hatred” that existed even before the world was created. This hatred was apparently necessary to justify man’s lack of free will and the impotence of all men and women to do anything to contribute towards or militate against their own salvation. If God damns certain men and women from before the world was created the only explanation can be an eternal hatred of God towards us. As Westerink sums it up: “The problem of God’s eternal hatred appears at the beginning of modernity” (Westerink 2012: 26); the conclusion of that time was that “man’s inclination to do evil (sin) is the effect of an evil motive (hatred) in God” (ibid.: 27). According to Westerink, it is Lacan’s perspective on religion that allows him to see this phenomenon more clearly than did Freud: Lacan reverses the Freudian relation between religion and morality. Freud tends to reduce religion when his focus is on religion as the representation or expression of morality, regarding religion primarily as the outcome and playground of guilt. Lacan supplements the field of morality with reference to religion, in order to point at what lies beyond the domain of the law. Although religion is certainly situated within the symbolic order, when discussing the ultimate object of desire – that which falls outside the symbolic and beyond the law – religion has for Lacan a privileged reference: religion is capable of conceptualizing the relation between law and desire, as well as the Thing as object of desire. (Westerink 2012: 32) Westerink sees Luther’s “abyss” as the precursor to Freud’s Ding and Lacan’s Chose. The abyss, for Luther, was both the depth of God’s love as well as the devil’s abode: “Faith thus consists” for Luther, in “avoiding the abyssal emptiness of the Thing, the hidden God as the gravitational center in Luther’s thought” (ibid.: 55). The Word functions to reveal what can be known about God, but the devil stands at the rim of the abyss and tempts us to enter its depth by asking questions that shouldn’t be asked about God’s justice. Luther’s God is thus split; the devil stands between the God we can see, the Word of the Father, and the Deus absconditus, the God of Justice who chooses before the foundations of the world who will be saved and who will be damned. Westerink notes that: In The Bondage of the Will the hidden God represents the Thing … The hidden God gains his importance as the Thing precisely because of the fact that contemplating him is prohibited, i.e. by the fact that God chose to hide his essence and will. Because 117

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Deus absconditus and Deus revelatus do no coincide something is lost. (Ibid.: 70) While the notion of the Deus absconditus is not new with Luther, what is new is that this hiddenness is now connected with hatred, as opposed to love. Whereas a medieval could not gaze into the light of God because she was blinded by the brightness of God’s love, Luther withdraws his gaze because the blackness of hate threatens to swallow him up. Faith becomes a refuge from thought – pre-eminently the unthinkable thought of God’s hatred – which goes some way to explaining the scission of science and religion that also has its roots in this era: only by denying the validity of this terrible God could thought feel itself free to think. Historically, this eruption of hatred in Luther’s writings could be traced to the loss of the closed medieval world, a world ordered around the possibility and necessity of its creatures being in a relation of love with their Creator. From a theological point of view, Luther’s insistence on God’s hatred is very problematic and can perhaps be traced to the escalating pressures of his debates with Erasmus and other Reformers and Counter-Reformers. Interestingly enough, Augustine’s doctrine of predestination was a late development also incubated in the throes of a furious debate, in his case with Pelagius. Lacan once noted that advances in knowledge always come from these kind of intense struggles that emphasize and exacerbate the imaginary dimension of the psyche. The result, one could argue, with both Augustine and Luther, shows the effect of this struggle in a symbolic expression (double predestination) that is curiously imaginary in its circularity and dualism. Whereas the function of the symbolic is properly to heal imaginary rifts by triangulating, by asserting a third thing that can mediate between two opposed entities, the doctrine of predestination is clearly articulated in the language of the imaginary, in the language of rivalry and irreconcilable difference. The doctrine – whether in Augustine, Luther or Calvin – mirrors, to an uncomfortable degree, the debates that hatched the doctrine. This doctrine essentially says: take heart in knowing that, though God’s will is hidden, you can at least be sure that He hates us (or potentially hates you). The only effective way that the symbolic order can triangulate in Christian theology between salvation and damnation, between love and hate, is in the phenomenon of God’s forgiveness. Westerink lets us see in a new light the tendency of both Freud and Lacan to be suspicious of the ability of psychoanalysis to ultimately provide a cure. If there is in men and women a core of hatred and of evil – and if there is no relief from this hatred in turning to the Creator – than what hope could there be for a cure? What hope could there be in going from unhappy to happy, from sick to healthy? While Luther’s response to this situation was a kind of anti-intellectualism, a mandate not to be curious 118

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about depths that can’t be plumbed, both Freud and Lacan claimed in the end that, though analysis can perhaps not make one happy, it can function to dissolve certain illusions we hold about ourselves and let us more easily live with our unhappiness. This probably means that the practice of psychoanalysis is ultimately marked more by its ties to the Enlightenment than by its debt to the Reformation.

MICHEL DE CERTEAU

The work of the French Jesuit scholar Michel de Certeau is important not so much for what he says directly concerning Lacan and religion, but because of the trajectory of his life and research. A founding member of the École Freudienne de Paris with Lacan in 1964, he had as much direct contact with Lacan as any other writer, perhaps excluding Jacques-Alain Miller. But there are few references to Lacan in his corpus, and he is most well-known for his research into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European mystics. What is interesting about this thinker is that he places the origins of psychoanalytic discourse precisely in the experience and textual revelations of these mystical figures. Certeau tells us that, “among desiring subjects, there remains only the possibility of loving the language that substitutes itself for their communication” (1984: 152). This is, in a nutshell, the thesis that we find in many of his books, which is precisely the reverse of Westerink’s. Whereas Westerink emphasized, in his interepretation of Lacan, that desire and subjectivity are rooted ultimately in a hatred harboured by God, Certeau emphasizes love, but not necessarily love of God or even of the Word, but rather of the words in which we must express our love, even when that love is purely intellectual. Like Lacan, Certeau places great emphasis on the era of the troubadours and their cult of courtly love: Since the thirteenth century (courtly love, etc.), a gradual religious demythification seems to be accompanied by a progressive mythification of love. The One has changed its site. It is no longer God but the other, and in a masculine literature, woman. In place of the divine word (which also had a physical nature and value), the loved body (which is no less spiritual and symbolic, in erotic practice) is substituted. (Certeau 1995: 4) For Certeau, the mystics on whom Lacan focused his attention come in “at strategic moments of discourse” (ibid.: 8), at a time that was already secularized, a time that had already suffered the “vanishing entity of the cosmos” (ibid.: 4) brought about by the breaking up of the medieval 119

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worldview. Their world no longer had access to God, but only an other; no longer access to the Word, but only words, and precisely those shaped by the eroticism of the courtly love poets and their solely secular quest. The mystics, for Certeau, love God within language, not necessarily beyond it. Their prayers are prayers in words, until, that is, they are taken to the other side of language. This is where Bernini placed Theresa of Avila in his famous statue, which was the object of both Lacan’s and Certeau’s attention. For Lacan, the eroticism of Bernini’s Theresa melded without wrinkle into her love of God. Her love of God was erotic. For Certeau, this is because she no longer lives in a world where charity can be considered higher on the hierarchy than eros. It is eros all the way up. It is a secular word of bodies, and even the mystical body of Christ must be approached with the language of courtly love, which, as Lacan reminds us, was not always as chaste as it pretended. Commenting on the environment of loss within which the mystics worked, Certeau notes that “medieval Latin had created the site, without equivalent in Rome or Greece, of a language that was also an articulation of the real”; but the mystics worked in a realm where language was “separate from the real that it intended, depicted, and was confronted with” (Certeau 1995: 123). For Certeau, the mystics ground psychoanalytic language in three ways. They fix the quest for God in the spoken word – “the passing figure of mystics continues to ask us what remains of the spoken word. That question, moreover, is not unrelated to what, in its own area, psychoanalysis restores” (ibid.: 13); second, the experience of the “sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mystics proliferated about a loss” (ibid.); finally, the expression of both realms cannot be divided from the question of style – for Certeau “mystics is a ‘manner of speaking’” (ibid.: 113). For Lacan, echoing Buffon, the style is the man. For Certeau, it is in the mystics that the importance of style finds its birth. While such a thesis might seem to strain credulity, do we not see in pop stars such as Madonna and Lady Gaga, with their crucifixes and their renovation of the cruelest tropes from the tradition of courtly love, that the realm of sexual desire and mystical ascent can only be compassed by one thing – namely, style? Such arresting figures can be directly linked to the prescient fantasies of Schreber and Dora, who first articulated for the twentieth century this particular brand of sublimated sexuality and religious spectacle. The mystics suffered the breakdown of the world-order as a breakdown in authority and hierarchy of the institutions of the church, causing them to turn inward in more ways than one. Certeau remarks on: the necessity, on the part of the sender (or author) … to found the place from which he or she speaks. That place is guaranteed neither by authorized statements (or “authorities”) supporting discourse nor by the social status of the speaker within the 120

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hierarchy of a dogmatic institution … Its value is derived from the sole fact of its being produced in the very place in which the Speaker, the Spirit, el que habla, speaks. (Certeau 1995: 178) Whence will it speak? From where did the mystics derive the authority behind their statements? Certeau replies: Since institutions no more settle this basic question than do propositions handed down through tradition it is the “I” that produces the openness. In the preface or prologue of the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century texts, the “I” serves as an introit to the writing. It is stationed at the threshold as if it were what produced the writing, like a voice that “sets its pitch” to bring about a linguistic body, but in this case the voice fades away – becoming an empty place, a hollow voice – into the body of writing to which it gives birth. (Ibid.: 179) If Westerink is right in saying that Certeau “shows that the modern subject’s inaugural moment is situated in the field of religion” (ibid.: 23), then it is precisely in this split between body and voice, between voice and text, that we can locate it. From a Lacanian point of view, it is most primordially the split between the I as the subject of the enunciation and the I as enunciating subject. As soon as I speak, the “I” I emit hovers in the air or in the ears about me until it and the train of discourse it originates disappears – into texts, into the world – to be transformed on other tongues. On the one hand this authority is founded in an instant, the instant that I speak. On the other hand, it evaporates the second that I cease speaking. Westerink and Certeau help us to see the two sides of Lacan, Protestant and Catholic, if you will, or secular and religious. Westerink’s Lacan uses the hatred of God as a cipher for the nothingness at the heart of desire, a nothingness around which we circle like moths. Certeau’s Lacan is perhaps closer to the Lacan that I aim to bring out in this book, who ultimately sides with religion against psychoanalysis, who sees behind the mystics’ monuments to style adumbrations of something real. In a short essay on Lacan, his most sustained writing on his teacher, Certeau presents the following thesis: Lacan is first of all an exercise of literature (a literature which would know what it is). Maybe it is a scandal within the discipline, but why will literature always be labeled “not serious”? If we follow Lacan where he leads, towards a “speaking” [dire] whose nature is revealed by its analytical experience, he points towards the “truth” of literary practice. (Certeau 1983: 25) 121

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Certeau understands Lacan’s seminar to be a “lectio in the medieval sense” (ibid.: 26) and the actions of a psychoanalyst akin to that of the “solitary being (a monk) who in past times ventured into the desert” (ibid.: 27). Recalling Lacan’s identifying the Other with “the dark God” Certeau quips that “the house is haunted by monotheism” (ibid.: 31). For Certeau, it is not so much a question of whether Lacan affirms this or that religious tradition. While I have formulated the question of Lacan’s religious affiliation as that between Protestant and Catholic, or more blankly between secular and religious, Certeau sees Lacan as a kind of palimpsest of atheism on top of layers of Jewish and Christian thought and practice. In this way Lacan becomes a sign of and cipher to his culture, of an atheism subsisting and strangely flowering on a moulded-over bed of religious fervour. This comes out most clearly in Certeau’s articulation of how a Lacanian analysis works, in which “the lie is the element in which its truth can emerge, the truth that the Other always institutes the subject by alienating it” (ibid.: 29). This could also describe a certain experience of reading Lacan, that he is all style with no substance. His words constitute a lie which somehow draws the truth out of the other, incarnating the wrath of God in order to draw out a love, from the other, for the other, for the otherness of this other’s own history. Drawing on Lacan’s analysis of Hamlet in Seminar VI Certeau gives a penetrating précis of Lacan’s understanding of human life, in which we have been given a slight reprieve from death in order to dedicate stylized and beautiful speech to our only source of comfort, our mother: As Lacan emphasizes, Hamlet does not encounter a dead man in this ghost, but rather death itself, and the action he is commissioned to undertake can be accomplished only if it is fatal, an achievement of the being-for-death … This grace period, the length of a lifetime, is a time devoted to the mother. More precisely, he creates an interspace for the “interventions” to which, on the ghost’s commands, Hamlet must respond, by precious words, literary conceits, slipped in between his mother and the love which binds her to the traitor Claudius. (Certeau 1983: 29–30) This is just as much a work of hatred as it is of love. Being, for Lacan, is a time of wrath, a wrath of man against woman, the woman who brings him into the world, the woman who draws out his desire in the world, and the woman (as earth) who bundles him to rest in his final hour. These three women Freud saw already figured in the three caskets of Portia’s choice in the Merchant of Venice (Freud 1995: 514–22). What Certeau lets us see is that, notwithstanding Lacan’s reminder to us that there is another 122

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kind of desire, a feminine desire that is not motivated by this same hatred, it is the male hatred and the male desire that has determined this secular age. Instead of the love that rules the day in Shakespeare’s comedy, Lacan (and perhaps Freud) posits a hatred that dominates the male principle. Certeau sees this hatred not only in Lacan’s ontology and punning but also in his method and speech: “Behind the work which consists, with the ‘conceits’, in separating the fighting subject, the ‘fighting soul’, from its alienating identification and thereby reinstating the desire for the absent, there is in Lacan, just as in Hamlet, a fury alternately ironic and violent” (Certeau 1983: 31). Does the anger originate, perhaps, from a wager that seems to found this situation? That in order for speech to be raised to the level of being, it must be emptied of all substantial support? On condition that one “never have recourse to any substance” nor to “any being”, “speaking [dire] brings God” and “as long as something will speak, the hypothesis God will be there”. Such a hypothesis, such a “song” (an expression of the mystics) does not come from a void. (Ibid.: 31–2) Just as the mystics had to “invent” God in their speaking in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, so does Lacan understand that, for us, living in a cosmos in which the centre does not hold, a certain kind of speech still has the power to render up God. A certain kind of speech, a certain kind of hatred, calls up the old broken god from the well of the splintered psyche – but how could this last? How could Lacan train any other in this genius of speech, this art of hating? The analyst, or, we should say specifically, Lacan, is for Certeau (as he is for Éric Laurent) a certain kind of modern-day secular saint, modelled on the ascetics of old, but hopeless and filled with a holy hatred. This Lacan is called the “‘Master of truth’, even ‘director of conscience’, a ‘saint’ who ‘wastes away’, one whose speaking, devoted to the price which the body must pay for having access to the symbolic, is a speech structured like that of the person praying” (Certeau 1983: 32). Psychoanalysis, because of its disavowed Christian heritage must take up the project of that religion, which concerns the making and keeping and caring of bodies: The “separation” giving rise to the Christian Logos has as an index the very loss of the body which should hold the place of all others, that of Jesus, so that the “evangelical” word, born of this disappearance, must itself take charge of the creation of ecclesiastical, doctrinal or “glorious” bodies destined to be substitutes for the absent body. (Ibid.: 33) 123

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We have seen how Lacan was driven over the course of his life to make his teaching into a doctrine that could be transmitted by and to a body of other analysts. He was kicked out of two such bodies and founded three more, dismantling one just weeks before his death. For Certeau, Lacan’s project seems always to have been an impossibility. He quotes Catherine Rihoit, who “recalls the following words of Lacan on Freud: ‘I think he missed the mark. Like me, in a very little time, everyone will have had his fill of psychoanalysis’” (in Certeau 1983: 36). Why is the Lacanian body doomed to failure? Why is psychoanalysis bound to fade away? Aren’t psychoanalytic organizations still thriving? Aren’t Lacanians, in France and South America, a burgeoning force? Is it the rising tide of psychiatry, pharmacology and the plethora of theapeutic “modalities” that will eventually drown the true voice, the original impulse of psychoanalysis proper? And if it is drowned, who will have ears to listen to the voice of the other, to hear the call of suffocated desire in the ego’s rambling deceptions? It is hard to imagine that the church, or any religious body, could have these ears. Lacan will, of course, live on in the body of his texts, the fallen seed of his seminars, and maybe that will have to be enough for now.

GRAHAM WARD

Graham Ward is a philosopher, an Anglican priest and the editor of the Certeau Reader. Certeau figures prominently in Ward’s larger project, which partly consists in explicating certain modern currrents of thought, including the work of Lacan, under what he calls the “opacification of the sign”: The Jesuit theologians Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the Jesuit historian and critical theorist Michel de Certeau, concur that in the late Middle Ages there was an opacification of the sign – associated with the rise of nominalism and the linguistics of William of Ockham. The sign is gradually secularised and understood as, at best, functional or, at worst, irrelevant to communication. (Ward 2000: 7) This narrative of a Western secularization, which begins with Ockham and Scotus under the banner of voluntarism and univocity, is a crucial background for Ward’s reading of Lacan (as well as his reading of other twentieth-century secular thinkers such as Foucault, Butler, Deleuze, etc.). For Ward, as for other thinkers, such as John Milbank, associated with the Radical Orthodoxy school, the tradition that starts with the two aforementioned medieval thinkers culminates in Nietzsche, from whom all (or most) of the most important atheistic twentieth-century thinkers and theorists 124

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are descended. The Radical Orthodoxy movement has possessed perhaps the most incisive voice in Christian theology over the last twenty years, and although those who write under its banner rarely take Lacan on explicitly, it is clear that Lacan’s thought and influence looms large for them. Next to Marcus Pound’s book on Lacan, discussed in the next section, Ward’s Cities of God gives us the most sustained treatment of Lacan by a Radical Orthodoxy thinker.2 Though the nominalism and univocity that marks modern thought is no boon for a thinker like Ward, it is precisely figures like Lacan, Deleuze and Foucault who, though Ward is critical of their projects, provide him with stepping-off points for the theological renewal he wants to contribute to. Ward is especially convinced that the “language turn” that Lacan and others instigated in the preceding century is something that bodes well for theologians: In the contemporary linguistic turn, the attention to signification, Christianity is again given an opportunity for continuing, for mapping out for today, for making intelligible for today, a theology of signification so fundamental to Scripture and in the traditional teaching of the Church. Such a theology makes possible a new analogical world-view. (Ward 2000: 9) The analogical worldview that Ward mentions here is what fell out with the “vanishing entity of the [medieval] cosmos”, as Certeau puts it. Whereas in the philosophy of nominalism there is an insuperable gap posited between words and (spiritual) things, an analogical thinker argues that there is a (real) link between words (such as truth or beauty) and the truth and beauty that belong to God. Whereas partisans of univocity claim that all things, from God to jellyfish, can be described with an equal language, that a word means the same thing, no matter to what that word is addressed, analogical thinkers claim that the words we use to describe God can only be used analogically concerning thing in the world. So, I may say that a church building is beautiful, but I recognize the poverty of that particular beauty in relation to the beauty of God. Analogy, or participation as Ward often says, demands a real connection between words and things while also demanding a separation of kind between the different ontological orders of God and creation. Analogical thinking – which, Ward argues, was simply the way Christian theologians always thought about God prior to the late medieval period when the debates between nominalists and realists reached their peak – operates according to two fundamental differences. First of all, there are the differences between the three members of the Trinity, which function not to distance the members from each other, but to facilitate an endless and 125

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overflowing love between them. This is what I will refer to in the following pages as positive difference. Second, there is the difference between God the creator and His creation. This is an ontological difference, but a difference that is mitigated for human beings by the fact that we have been created in the image of God, meaning that we can claim that overflowing trinitarian love – positive difference – as our true heritage, which love has always the power to shine through the second, negative and ontological difference. As Augustine so memorably described it in his Confessions, Christians experience their desire as split. We are drawn to the world of things by virtue of our affinity with other created bodies, but we can only be satisfied if we desire and love these things not for themselves but for the sake of God. As Ward notes: “In the sacramental world-view, physical bodies, social bodies, ecclesial bodies, heavenly bodies, textual bodies, and the body of Christ all cohere palimpsestically” (Ward 2000: 179); and “the visible, when read theologically, manifests the watermark of its creator” (ibid.: 157). In other words, when one loves things for the sake of God, one suffers not the privation of a desire that can never be satisfied, but rather the overflowing joy of the Creator and the love that flows between Father, Son and Spirit: “The economy of [this] desire is one of exceeding the object … what is attained both satisfies and deepens the longing” (ibid.: 173). A properly Christian desire does not begin from the ego; instead, as Ward tells us, “‘We’ is the proper human subject” (ibid.: 153). Because it is the trinitarian God that stands behind all Christian reflection on who we are as the original of which we are the image, a desire that increases the more it is satisfied and the more it is shared is actually what is natural to us. According to Ward, this logic is exemplified most exactly by the rite of the Eucharist, and especially the moment of the fraction, when the body of Christ is broken by the priest, who intones: “‘We break this bread to share in the Body of Christ.’ To which the congregation responds (at least in the old Sarum Missal in the Anglican rite): ‘Though we are many we are one body because we all share in one bread’” (Ward 2000: 152). More than being just a remembrance of torture and death, or even a symbol of God’s redemptive justice, this liturgical action is the oft-repeated induction of the Christian into the life of the Godhead. Christ’s broken body is precisely the ground of the unity of the believers, of the church, for it is through sharing in the feast of his body that the believers are joined to each other and God. It is there that they most experience what it is like for “We” to be their proper subject. Here is how Ward analyses the importance of the moment of fraction: The death of the physical body is not the end of, but rather the opening for further, displacements – the Eucharistic fracturing promoted through the Church. It makes brokenness, and love 126

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as not-having, a sine qua non of redemption. This redemption is not an emptying of oneself into nothingness (à la Lacan); but a recognition of the lack of foundations within oneself which requires and enables the reception of divine plenitude. Lacan returns the subject to the nihilo and denies that God made anything out of it. The Christian awareness of the absent body of Christ, and of death itself, returns us to our createdness – to the giftedness of creation out of nothing. (Ward 2000: 108) Ward is not saying here that the Christian subject is whole. In fact, he would probably admit that it is precisely the inheritors of Nietzsche’s legacy who taught him that such a position would be naive. The Christian subject of desire is, in fact, split by definition: The structure of Christian desire, is, significantly, twofold – not only my desire, but God’s desire for me. It is this twofoldedness which characterizes participation. The self is fissured in such participation, and fissured endlessly. It never had the unity of the Hegelian and Freudian ego living in and for itself. (Ibid.: 107) The Freudo/Lacanian ego is either a unitary singular, or it is dissolved in the other (the primordial real) of prematurity or death. This bring us to Ward’s criticism of Lacan, the biggest factor of which is the latter’s emphasis on nothingness as the ultimate centre point around which swirls human desire. From Ward’s theological perspective Lacan has only one half of the picture concerning our desire, the half that originates from the ontological divide between God and creation, which means that our desire is perpetually unsatisfied by created things. But he is missing the second half, that of the trinitarian dimension with its motion of replenishing love and positive desire. Without the analogical dimension, in Ward’s view, nothingness for Lacan becomes absolute. That is, there is no sense that a deficit – such as the inability of human language to adequately describe God – could hide a larger credit, that the lack which one experiences in love or in life may be an index for a greater good, not only in the beyond of life, but in the very texture of living. According to Ward, the nominalism behind Lacan’s nihilism has its origins in the desire of theologians such as Scotus to isolate the moment of divine presence in the Eucharist, to identify a moment in time when God infuses the host with His spirit: It is Scotus and Ockham who also initiate, as part of their discussions on the intuitive cognition of objects in the world, 127

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investigations into presence. Praesens/praesentialiter in Ockham, comes to refer to the definite location of things, to a certain rigorous spatialising and to a specific and isolatable temporality, the now, the instant, the immediate. Ockham registers a shift towards the modern obsession of seizing the present; a shift also towards space as location. (Ward 2000: 160) In the older understanding of time, based on Augustine’s thought, the present was an absence in that one couldn’t ever locate it, but it was not a nullity when considered in its relations to the past and the present. For Augustine, the present served to remind of the past and orient towards the future. The greatest use of the nothing of the present moment would be to think through it by unifying the subject’s time. For Ockham and the tradition he inaugurated the greatest use of the present is not to unify but to dissever the present, to elevate one present above other presents. According to Ward, it is this kind of temporal thinking that undergirds Lacan’s understanding of desire in which desire is only a “search for identity and presence”, and as such it is a “search for the nothing into which all that is folds” (Ward 2000: 107). We are motivated by our desire, but we must always say “that’s not it” to the objects of that desire. The only rule of desire is to keep desiring. One, perhaps surprising, conclusion that Ward comes to is that Lacan’s analysis of desire is “vulnerable to the criticism that the body, the material world is devalued” (ibid.: 169). While this is said as part of a discussion on the Slovenian philosopher and Lacanian Slavoj Žižek, Ward makes it clear that “behind him stands Lacan” (ibid.). Because our desire is constantly aroused by quasi-fantastical objects that can never satisfy us, our respect for the world of objects can never go too far. In analogical thinking, though, because of our status as created beings, it stands as a point of fact that no one can love God except through things. We need the things that God creates because our senses, created by God, can only see God through the world God has created. The necessity of the world is clear in the injunction to “love your neighbour as yourself ” and to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37-38). Christ adds that these two commandments are alike, that to love one’s neighbour is to love God. Understood analogically, this means that loving one’s neighbour is the venue or the opportunity to love God, that God shines through the neighbour in the act of love. Christian desire is thus directed to the other, and, through the other, to God. It affirms the objects of the world as avenues to love God and admits that the self, too, can be merely another object with which one loves God. For Ward the thought of Thomas Aquinas on otherness “constitutes a refutation of Lacan” for, as Aquinas writes, “it is absurd to say that desire is for 128

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the sake of desiring; desire is essentially a tendency to the other” (in Ward 2005: 102 fn.). Ward’s analysis of Lacan’s desire is powerful, in its specifics as well as in the way that it fits into the larger narrative that the thinkers of Radical Orthodoxy have crafted about the loss of analogy in modern thought. It can’t be denied that Lacan, working within his inheritance from Freud and Hegel, is often forced to conclude that love and desire ultimately revolve around a nihil. And yet, there is another side to Lacan that I have hoped to bring out in this volume, one that challenges the implicit nihilism of his greater project. While I do not want to spend too much time here going over material I have gone over in other chapters, the essence of what Ward’s analysis of Lacan misses is the aspect of the sinthome and a feminine desire that is not dependent on lack (another thinker associated with the Radical Orthodoxy school, Connor Cunningham, also misses this in his analysis of Lacan; see Cunningham 2004). That Ward misses this aspect of Lacan is clear in his discussion of Karl Barth and Luce Irigaray. His conclusion of Barth’s “economy of desire” is that it “is an economy based upon (male) lack and need. It is an economy of privation. This is the libidinal economy of masculine desire found in both Freud and Lacan” (Ward 2000: 190). But, of course, Lacan was clear that in addition to male desire there was an (un)complementary female desire. This female desire was explicitly not modelled on the lack of the male, and in its both/and logic it can look suspiciously like the analogical thinking that Ward is writing about. Here we see again the two Lacans, the nihilist whose desire is marked by lack, versus the mystic for whom “the Woman … is one of the names of God” (Lacan 2005a: 14) and whose feminine desire is one of surplus without lack. Another fault of Ward’s book is a thesis regarding sexuality that Ward does not realize comes directly from Lacan. Ward credits Irigaray with identifying “a culturally pervasive ‘hom(m)osexuality’, that is, a sexuality inscribed from the perspective of men (les hommes); in other words, a phallocentrism” (Ward 2000: 197), and uses this punning insight to argue that, while the (Anglican) church should endorse same-sex unions, they should do so from an intrinsic valuing of difference and alterity, indeed, from a rejection of a phallocentric male-oriented desire that denies that difference and wants only to love the object in the mirror. He states that: There can be self-designated “heterosexual relationships” whose structure of desire is homosexual, and so-called homosexual relationships whose structure of desire is heterosexual. True desire, that is, God-ordained desire can only be heterosexual. Hence … there can be no sexual economy respecting difference and alterity, respecting the interval which separates, which is homosexual. (Ibid.: 201) 129

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A quick glance at Seminar XX (Lacan 1998: 83–9) will reveal that Lacan is the source of these ideas. While Ward wants to use Irigaray to critique Lacan, it is in fact Lacan’s position that he ends up avowing.

MARCUS POUND

Marcus Pound is another thinker aligned with the Radical Orthodoxy movement. He draws heavily on both Milbank and Ward for his book Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma, which will be my main focus here. Pound has read more deeply in Lacan than other Radical Orthodoxy partisans, such as Graham Ward and Connor Cunningham, and so avoids some of their mistakes. Pound’s overall argument is bracing in its originality and articulated with great confidence. In fact, perhaps with too much confidence, but we will see that Pound’s is the most helpful text we have so far on the topic of Lacan and religion. His thesis is that Lacan, in certain crucial respects, is merely repeating Kierkegaard, and that we should thus consider psychoanalysis as a form of theology and Lacan as more Kierkegaardian than Freudian. What follows are his reasons why. First of all, Pound holds that Lacan is massively indebted to Kierkegaard’s understanding of repetition, and, indeed, that the whole conceptualization of the cure in Lacanian analysis is nothing more than a form of Christian repetition (as articulated by Kierkegaard). And what is Christian repetition? First, repetition requires a genuine change, which implies that the subject moves from the position of untruth (sin) to truth (conversion), rather than discovering what he or she already was. Second, repetition makes time a premium; history is that site that registers change and Christianity the tradition that recognizes the historical significance of time by advocating a saviour who enters it. Third, repetition relies on a saviour to illuminate and redeem us, without which repetition would become a form of recollection, and for this reason repetition is not only an existential task, it is the decisive Christian category, delineating Christianity from Greek/paganism. (Pound 2007: 63) For Pound it is precisely the understanding of time in this definition that structures Lacan’s notion of the symptom and the symptom’s cure, for “the symptom articulates the trauma through a difference. And just as a symptom is structured through repetition, so is the cure. Through analysis one challenges past meaning with a view to releasing one for action in the present” (ibid.: 64; emphasis in original). As Freud discovered in his study 130

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of shell-shocked First World War veterans, the really difficult thing about symptoms is that they engage us in a repetition of that which is undesirable. There is thus something very confounding about symptomatic behaviour, in which we essentially will something that we don’t want. In Pound’s reading of Lacan, though, the symptom now becomes an opportunity for Christian time to intervene, that is, for the analysand to return to the site of the trauma and be transformed via this return. Why must I “repeat” this pathological behaviour? Because that behaviour directs me to the site of a trauma that continues to define me and that I need to face up to, not by vanquishing it, but by taking it up in my life in such a manner that what is being repeated is not the symptom but the transformation that the symptom represents. In this way the trauma is traumatized; it is drained of its force, which is transferred now, not so much to the subject (again, as if the subject was in the busineness of conquering enemies) but in the subject who now has a renewed capacity to act. As Pounds articulates it: “Repetition co-joins, the temporal with the stable, difference with agency, orientating the subject towards the historical task of becoming. Repetition does not step out of time into eternity; rather, it finds continuity in that most fragile and contingent of things: time” (Pound 2007: 60; emphasis in the original). Pound argues that the place where this structuring (of time) is most apparent in Lacan is in the latter’s concept of concluding (le moment de conclure): The point at which the analysand’s past is decisively challenged by the analyst is the moment of concluding. The moment of concluding “annuls the time for understanding in favour of the moment of concluding which precipitates the mediation of the subject towards deciding the meaning to attach to the original event” [Lacan 2006c: 213; emphasis in original]. Taken together, intervention, the restructuring of the event after the fact and the moment of concluding, bring about a crisis of decision in the subject concerning the signifiers that determine the meaning of his or her life. (Pound 2007: 130) This is a very important clinical aspect of Lacan that Pound brings to the forefront. The point, in Lacanian analysis, is not to understand the analysand or to have the analysand understand the analyst; the point is to bring the analysand to the place where she suffers at the mercy of a pattern of signification that causes pain (pathos), and help her to find a new word, or perhaps a new way of saying the old words, in a way that does not divorce speech from action. Looking at it from this perspective it is no surprise that the “the Word made flesh” from John’s gospel was a formula so often repeated by Lacan. It is not that the analysand, in the cure, has 131

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now understood what was wrong with herself, but that she has returned to a broken chapter in her life and taken life from it, a life that issues forth in words and deeds, not in abstract knowledge. Pound relies on Graham Ward’s thought both to bolster his argument that Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition aligns with an ancient Christian understanding of time, and in the latter’s emphasis on the Eucharist. Pound mentions Ward’s argument concerning the transition from a (good) Augustinian notion of time (in which past and future are brought together in the nothingness of the present) to a (bad) Scotist version in which the present is plucked out of the flow of time and valorized: What is at stake in the fullness of time is not simply the moment as the division of time into the tenses, but the point where the eternal, in the present, draws together the tenses, bridging the past and future. The theological root of this expression should qualify this aspect further: in the fullness of time future hope redeems the past. (Pound 2007: 150) Pound argues, in agreement with Ward, that the notion of time that becomes prominent in the West after the fourteenth century has more in common with pagan time than with a truly Christian understanding of time: In pagan time the subject is left at the mercy of the instant and hence a slave to his own impulses. When analysis adopts this mode of time it can do no more than advise patients to follow their instinct or metaphorically to follow their heart – the new-age equivalent of the Platonic doctrine of recollection. But Christian time construes the eternal as qualitatively different from time, and as such a traumatic incursion in time. (Ibid.: 154) Pound is making the argument here that Christianity and Freudo/Lacanian practice are (or ought to be) allies against a modernism that often takes shelter under the guise of New Age spirituality, whose elevated and spiritual-but-not-religious rhetoric masks its essentially secular origins. In this way Lacan is an ally to those (such as the Radical Orthodoxy theologians) who would look to revive a theology/philosophy that draws life and strength from sources that predate Scotus and Ockham. Pound takes the atheist Lacan and repurposes him to combat the worldview that, though it has roots in a strain of late Medieval Christian thought, has flowered into the secular and atheistic Enlightenment of the West. Notwithstanding Pound’s emphatic argument that Lacan is more properly heir to the Dane than to the Viennese, he is critical of Lacan’s appropriation of Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition, saying that: 132

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For Kierkegaard repetition means precisely to receive everything back albeit in a different form, yet for Lacan repetition remains the search for the fundamental lost object, a backward movement that … has more in common with recollection than repetition. (Pound 2007: 70) How can analysis be a form of Kierkegaardian theology if Lacan doesn’t get the core concept right? Pound does not, in my view, provide a clear answer to this question, but the resulting quandary presents us with an interesting set of alternatives. Either the Lacanian analysis that Pound is describing is more an idealization of what analysis could be were it to remain more true to its theological roots; or, Lacan contradicts himself in that he both structures analysis as an endless search for the (hopelessly) lost object, as well as a journey that ends abruptly with the analysand being led to traverse his fundamental fantasy, assume his own desire, and accept the “Ite, missa est” (“Depart, the Mass is ended”3) of his analyst as the send-off to a better life. It could very well be that both options are true to an extent. I will say more below concerning the ways in which Pound is, perhaps, too idealistic in his reading of Lacan. While it isn’t exactly newsworthy to say that Lacan contradicts himself (“with pleasure!”, I think he would say) it is worth noting here that the late Lacan could be accused of abandoning analysis per se for various forays into contingent disciplines, such as string theory, topological theorems, and advanced punning. Most commentators who are at all interested in the analytic aspect of Lacan’s work will de-emphasize this last phase of his career, as I have done in this text. This could be because we do not have as much published materials from those years, but it could also be because Lacan’s work from the period is simply not as relevant to analysis. Pound’s debt to Radical Orthodoxy, and especially to Graham Ward, shines through in Pound’s emphasis on the importance of the Eucharistic meal for understanding Christian subjectivity and, especially, a Christian sense of trauma. In the preface to his book, in fact, Pound defines his argument around the concept of trauma: In drawing on Lacan there is one concept in particular that I believe speaks the mystery of the Eucharist, in terms of both the transformation that occurs in the bread and wine, and the transformative effect the bread and wine has on the participant: trauma. In short, the wager of this work is that transubstantiation is primarily a traumatic event and the Eucharistic community a traumatic community. (Pound 2007: xiii) He then gives a definition of what trauma means from a Christian perspective: 133

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Trauma is a powerful metaphor for what takes place in the Eucharist. It is traumatic because its central image is of a beaten and bleeding man strung up upon a cross, and it is traumatic because as the liturgy unfolds we are called to identify as the perpetrators of this violent death. But it is also traumatic because it invites the absolute Other – God – into our everyday proceedings, asking us to take what is most mundane – bread – and raising it to the level of the absolute; it is as if a sudden tear in the symbolic structure occurs and lets slip in the transcendence; and the radical breach or caesura destabilizes the ground of experience … And because this trauma destabilizes meaning, new possibilities are opened up, new futures for worldbuilding. (Ibid.: 22) For Pound, the Christian Mass can be looked at as a therapeutic opportunity in which the partaker is faced not only with the mangled body of the traumatized Christ, but also with the recognition that “I did that”. In approaching the altar and ingesting the body and blood, Christians are accepting forgiveness for their own failure to love God and neighbour, but are also playing a role in the transformation of Christ’s body, which is now the Church, that is, all Christians living and dead functioning as one corporate body vivified by the Holy Spirit. The liturgy encourages believers to pour their life into the grail of Christ’s sacrifice, and receive it in a renewed fashion, fixed not by themselves or by a doctor, but remade by the Maker himself. There can be no greater trauma then for the Creator to be murdered by His very creation. However, for God this is the opportunity for the outpouring of a love than which no greater love can be conceived, namely, the love that forgives such a murder, and extends the hand of peace and friendship to the murdering world. The recently renewed are then sent out from the Mass to live out their healing in the world, to put actions to the words and motions of the liturgy, to love and to fail to love their neighbours and themselves. While this description of the Mass may not make it sound very Lacanian, Pound argues that the centring of the Mass around the trauma of Christ’s sacrifice as well as its emphasis on Christians’ agency, both to receive the boon of this sacrifice and to act out the renewal they have been given, makes it “the sine qua non of real analysis” (Pound 2007:  23). Pound understands both the Mass and Lacanian analysis to be balanced between a reliance on an Other and a dependency on the agency of the Self, on the need to act. He understands “the end of the [analytic] session [to be a form] of trauma, an interruption that impresses upon the analysand the need to decide how he or she will re-present his or her experience and assume agency” (ibid.: 54). Pound argues, as I likewise do at the end of 134

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Chapter 2, that one must leave room for conscious agency when interpreting Lacan. One cannot emphasize the (doubtless) power of the unconscious at the expense of the eventual need to “cancel one’s subscription” to that same unconscious: While Lacan considers the self a redundant concept, he nonetheless allows for a strong sense of agency and affirmation, thereby bringing him into proximity with Kierkegaard. Likewise, while Kierkegaard emphasizes the need for existential responsibility and asserting the self through a conscious decision, he too recognizes the profound ways in which selfhood is fragmented by language, dispersed, and displaced by the signifier, and in many cases presupposes Lacan’s central insights about subjectivity. (Pound 2007: 8) Pound draws here on one of Kierkegaard’s most influential and creative contributions, namely that for Christians freedom and anxiety are two sides of the same coin. Anxiety is the response we have when we realize that it all depends on us, that we are given complete responsibility for the eternal state of our souls and for those of others as well. God has offered His love, but it is up to me and no one else to say yes or no to that love. I can depend on no institution, no tradition, no teaching. As a rather extreme example of this attitude, Pound relates the story of Kierkegaard refusing the sacrament on his deathbed for the sole reason that it was being offered him by a priest. For Pound, this emphasis on the subject’s absolute freedom to determine his or her own life, to take up or assume the desire that determines one, is precisely what analysis is about. It is a kind of resolute stubbornness in one’s own otherness – Lacan, at the end of his life, talked about finally becoming completely other, assumedly in death – an almost fanatical need to play the decisive role in the life of desire even when desire seems to so flow wholly from the other. Pound’s perspective on Freud’s own project (borrowed, as Pound notes, from Elizabeth Danto) is that, far from being a Victorian stick-in-the-mud surrounded by bourgeois hysterics, “Freud was a modernist, a social activist caught up in the social democratic movement sweeping across Europe; and the newly discovered psychoanalysis was a crucial tool for social change” (Pound 2007: 169). Pound argues that Freud’s original hope for his new “science” was that it would be made available to people of all classes, and would be more social than individual. Of course that is not how it turned out, and though it seems this thesis of Pound’s could well be debated, it is true that when Lacan visited England after the Second World War he was very impressed by their use of psychoanalysis in group settings. Pound relies on this reading of psychoanalytic 135

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history to argue for an even greater influence of theology on analysis, inasmuch as the church has always understood its liturgy to be a kind of group therapy, especially in the key element of Christ’s body being distributed to feed the multitude of believers. Pound goes so far as to argue that analysis came from the church and should rightfully be taken back by it: “By situating analysis within the sociality of ecclesial worship Christianity is uniquely able to deliver on Freud’s failed vision: to bring together the social and the private in the community, the necessary precondition of real therapy” (ibid.: 170). Pound is careful to note that it is not Freud but his followers who squelched this socialist vision and turned the master’s thought into just another player in the Hobbesian transformation of modern society: Psychoanalysis was key in securing at the level of the individual what was posited of the social. Early interpreters of Freud … all argued that the self was in origin a bundle of self-seeking drives, the primary expression of nature, a chaos which needed to be brought into social conformity through the rationalized principle of the ego … And like Hobbes, man would pass from nature to society through a contractual agreement; only the contractual agreement specifically targets the sexual relation: the ban upon incest. (Pound 2007: 4) In a way, Pound is performing a return to Freud similar to Lacan’s, except that his aim is to recover the lost social dimension of analysis for the church, for “only the Church’s counter-trauma is able to hold good on Freud’s desire to see psychoanalysis as a revolutionary practice” (ibid.: 23). There are moments in Pound’s book when it seems he is actually saying that to do Lacanian analysis authentically one must actuate its repressed Christian origin. I’m not sure if that’s what Pound is actually suggesting, but in the following passage it is hard not to reach such a conclusion: If liturgy can be shown to overcome this modern split between the public and private, by relating to everyone primarily as a member of the enacted body of Christ rather than a self-seeking individual, then its counter-trauma does not simply become one means to return to Freud, but the sine qua non of real analysis. (Pound 2007: 23) Does this mean that a Lacanian analyst should suggest that his analysand go to Mass every day? Or that the analyst himself should be a church-going Christian? My suspicion is that Pound would not go so far as to answer these questions in the affirmative, though such a response would perhaps be most consistent with his argument. Ultimately, though Pound’s text is 136

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surely the most engaging encounter yet between Lacan and Christian theology, his conceiving of Lacanian analysis as a form of theology is a step too far. While I agree with Pound that we should be able to see analysis as “a form of analogical participation in God’s creative work” (ibid.: 27), I think it is important to maintain that this is different from seeing Lacan as the “true heir of theology” (ibid.: 19). And though I am convinced that Lacan can be read very fruitfully from a theological perspective, as I stated at the beginning of this book, Lacan must be considered first and foremost the heir of Freud the analyst. This does not mean that there couldn’t be a form of Christian psychoanalysis that would be indebted to Lacan, but it would of necessity be something very different from what Lacan practised. Pound, in fact, offers a critique of his very own position in an essay criticizing both Žižek and Milbank, suggesting that the latter offers “form without content” (Pound 2010: 11) in his suggestion that Christianity’s highest calling – its highest ethical act – would be to abandon in a Kierkegaardian fashion its own “institutional organization” (ibid.: 11). Pound’s argument in that essay – and I think he is correct – is that ethical acts do not occur in a void, that there needs to be some sort of positive foundation on which we can figure an ethics. Similarly, Lacanian analysis cannot, through an admittedly brilliant critical interpretation, all of a sudden become Christian theology, in a void as it were. Lacan’s own view of this is more pessimistic but probably more astute: when it comes to a battle between analysis and religion, it is religion that wins. Now, this does not mean that analysis cannot serve its purpose, and perhaps there will be a transformation of Lacan’s thought, maybe even a reinvention through and in Christian theology. Pound’s text, in my opinion, is a gesture in that direction.

CHRISTOPH SCHNEIDER

Because of Schneider’s links with the Radical Orthodoxy movement – the essay of his I discuss here is featured in an edited volume entitled Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy – and because it is a rare example of an Eastern Orthodox reading of Lacan, I would like to briefly discuss his piece “The Transformation of Eros: Reflections on Desire on Jacques Lacan”. Schneider’s basic thesis here is that Lacan’s thought can be analysed as a variation of the ancient heresy of Origenism: Lacan’s monistic protology in some respects echoes the past heresy of Origenism (condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople 553 ), so that (aspects of ) the Orthodox critique of the latter also applies to the former. According to Saint Maximus, the cosmological principle underlying Origenism is 137

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rest – movement – becoming. In the beginning there was a primordial unity of rational beings and a state of satiety in which they were all connatural with God (rest). These pre-existing souls fell from their state of perfection which led to a great diversity of rational beings (movement) and were bound to physical bodies of varying material density (becoming). If this principle is applied to Lacan, there is first rest since the real is One, that is, without differentation, and because there is no desire, as all erogenous orifices are fully closed up and satisfied. This state is followed by movement, insofar as the instituting of the symbolic order differentiates the real and constitutes the child as a split and desiring subject. The quasi-religious character of this “fall” from a pre-linguistic realm into language is evident in the aforementioned myth of the lamella. Finally, there is becoming: The subject only acquires being and only emerges as a subject in the process of symbolization, since being and the symbolic order are closely interconnected. And although the subject somehow already “exists” in its bodily dimension “before” it enters the symbolic order, human corporeality in its proper sense only results from the subject’s being “overwrittten with signifiers”. (Schneider 2009: 274–5; emphasis in original) Saint Maximus’s own formulation that he holds up against Origen and his followers “replaces the formula rest – movement – becoming by the tria[d] becoming – movement – rest” (ibid.: 275; emphasis in original). What I would like to emphasize in Schneider’s piece is the very characteristically Orthodox position that there is no (ontological) division between nature and culture. Our nature, which is to commune with God, should shine through our culture. What is essentially wrong with Lacan’s thought, according to Schneider, is that his “origin of desire is based on an immanentist differentiation between nature and culture. It is a differentiation that occurs within creation and which excludes the transcendent” (ibid.: 275–6). This is clearly of a piece with the challenge mounted by Radical Orthodoxy against Lacan, that he only allows for a negative difference, and is blind to the divine positive difference that the Christian tradition claims is the foundation of the human psyche, the image on which humanity is molded. Yet, also like Radical Orthodoxy thinkers, Schneider affirms Lacan’s sensitivity to the Self ’s dependence on an Other, and his rejection of facile individualism: Lacan rejects any atomistic view of the self and emphasizes that human beings are always already exposed to an influence by the Other’s desire … According to Orthodox theology, however, 138

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interpersonal communion is considered a “primary ontology”, as something that corresponds to a human being’s nature, even if under the conditions of the Fall, it can only be realized through the cross and asceticism. (Schneider 2009: 277) So, Lacan is to be praised inasmuch as he recognizes the interdependent and essentially social nature of human beings, but he falls short in that he interprets the influence of the Other in an ambivalent, even antagonistic, way, such that, “the relationship between the subject and the Other remains antagonistic” (ibid.: 280). Schneider’s strongest point comes in the form of a Lacanian reading of the dynamics of sin and salvation: Sin can be defined in terms of the subject’s conviction that deep within itself, there is something which makes it infinitely lovable and which cannot be submitted to the Law. What leads beyond the Law to love is the renunciation of this attachment to a personality core that remains untouched by legal obligation, that is, the “stance of total immersion in the Law”. Neurosis is overcome if the subject’s love for the divine Other is so unconditional that it relinquishes any wish for compensatory pleasure; if the fulfillment of the Law is itself the highest goal of its desire. (Schneider 2009: 281) This is essentially what Lacan described in Seminar XX as a kind of desire that does not depend on the masculine exception but instead overcomes the law by submitting unreservedly to it. Lacan referred, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, to the character Sygne, from the French poet and playwright Paul Claudel’s play The Hostage, as a good example of this. This woman had been forced to marry a man she didn’t love. At the end of her life, having never been unfaithful to him (i.e. she was “all the way” into the symbolic law), she signals that she is, in fact, beyond the law in a nervous shaking of the head that she develops and an (ambiguous) refusal to finally accept forgiveness for her lifelong hatred of her husband. In other words, she holds on to an (almost Lutheran) hatred in the name of the law, though from a religious point of view it means her eternal damnation. For Lacan, she was a symbol of the absolute stubbornness of human freedom in the face of implacable coercion. But Claudel, at the end of his life, commented that the character of Turelure, her husband, was in the right, and not Sygne. It seems that Westerink is right in this case, and that the God operating in the background of Lacan’s thought is a God of hatred, not of love. My opinion is that Lacan’s thought becomes confused at this point, and because he is not allowed to posit an extra-secular frame 139

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to redeem the life of one who, like Sygne, seems to know only ill fortune, he takes her hatred for freedom. Actually, the refusal of those who have been refused by life – for whom, to borrow theological language, the fall was unmitigated – is not an expression of freedom, an expression of power over what little they can wield that power, but it is a final plea to be rescued from their own will to power. Sygne’s nervous tic should be treated as any other symptom, for which a cure would mean a revisiting of the site of trauma. Instead Lacan treats it as the cure itself, or as the sign that, absent any cure, human beings can still, pointlessly, say no.

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5. LACAN AS A THEOLOGIAN I don’t want to fear to be out, I want to love to be in. (Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal, [1946] 2013)

At the beginning of this book I cited the seventy-year-old Lacan saying that religion will triumph over psychoanalysis. When pressed on this issue he clarified that the true religion is the Christian, or even more specifically, the “Roman one” (“la vraie religion, c’est la romaine”; Lacan 2005b: 81). I suggested that, in distinction to that of Freud, Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory takes much more seriously the staying power of religion, in individual psyches as well as in society as a whole; and that certain impasses in his thought might be fruitfully addressed by those whose domain lies not in philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics or anthropology, but in religion. In this chapter I will attempt to flesh out in more detail the ramifications of this thesis. But we must also keep in mind the tension between religion, as a tie that binds the soul to God (or some other ultimate reality), and psychoanalysis, as the unravelling of the knots that the soul is encumbered with. Unlike Freud, Lacan did not see religion and psychoanalysis as mutually exclusive domains; yet, as we have shown, this does not mean that he thought their relation to be unproblematic. He was an atheist from his youth, and he still opposed religion and analysis to each other at a fundamental level. We must also bear in mind that Lacan explicitly considered religion (as an academic subject) to be a “waste basket category”, which we have read as a polemic against speaking of religion in general terms. For Lacan, religions, like analysands, must be taken one by one, on their own terms – primarily because this is the manner in which each one of us must deal with the presence, or absence, of a particular religion in our own lives. For us, this means taking a closer look at the relation of Lacan’s Freudian psychoanalysis to both Judaism and Christianity. 141

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One reason that Lacan always maintained a rather un-Freudian respect for religion is that he saw in what way religious traditions functioned to conserve, solidify and pass on the crucial stories and histories of a given people. For Lacan, the human world is determined most explicitly by a chain of signifiers that, going back in time, is coterminous with what we call history. He is very critical of the modernist prejudice that, since our ancestors were less scientifically minded (or “enlightened”) than we are, we are free to slough off their assumptions and assume ourselves to be free, self-made and autocratic. This is the thesis of a penetrating piece by Kenneth Reinhard and Julia Reinhard Lupton: In Lacan’s analysis, it is not that secular intellectuals suffer from unexamined religious “suppositions” or assumptions, to be swept away through a little ideology-critique or time on the couch. The case is rather, in Lacan’s strong formulation, that religious discourse supposes us – supports and underwrites our very structures of being, subjectivity and social interaction. That is, the secular subject is produced by the religious discourses that precede and continue to speak through it; the challenge for the contemporary critic is not to silence or debunk those discourses, but rather to bring the modern subject to assume responsibility for their enunciation. (Reinhard & Lupton 2003: 71) In other words, I may not like my history, family or tradition, but I disregard it at my peril. Freedom, for Lacan, is not the ability to reject one’s past and live on a clean slate; rather, it is the ability to live between the lines of a text that has been written and written over again and again, a palimpsest bustling with texts known and unknown, desire carved into the recesses of individual souls. We are born into a world that precedes us, Lacan reiterates time and again. This does not mean that we are unable to forge our own path, but only that, should we be brave enough to pick up the instrument to write our lives, we won’t be authoring the primary source – we will be contributing marginalia: commenting, adding, subtracting, emphasizing and parodying a story that has undergone all of that before and will continue to undergo it once we’ve gone. This marginalia, however, should not be marginalized. If psychoanalysis has a special relationship to the Jewish world in which it sprung up and took its first nourishment, it is perhaps most obvious in this domain: that writing one’s life (making one’s name) is like commenting on the Talmud, any given page of which is already impossibly cluttered with more brilliant voices that one’s own – and yet the highest activity of this life, interpreting and enacting God’s law, is undertaken in no other way. This is a crucial facet of Freudian psychoanalysis in Lacan’s view: 142

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It is, perhaps, inconceivable that psychoanalysis could have been born anywhere else than in this tradition. Freud was born into it, and he insists on this fact, as I have stressed, that for making advances in the field he has discovered he only truly has confidence in these Jews who have known how to read for quite a long time and who live – this is the Talmud – on the reference to a text. (Lacan 2007: 158) Taking psychoanalysis seriously means taking seriously its Jewish roots. This is clear when we see that, despite his ardent atheism, Freud’s final book was an intense exploration of Moses, the founding father of the religion he was born into. But if psychoanalysis is an atheistic discipline – which it most properly is – why should we even consider the religious question? The answer, according to Lacan, is that, just as religions are not one and the same, so each atheism is coloured by what it rejects. In Seminar III Lacan emphasizes this in discussing how our atheism might differ from that of the ancient Greeks: The word atheism has quite a different sense for us from that which it could have had in a reference to the Aristotelian divinity, for example, where it’s a question of a relationship to a superior entity, to the supreme entity. Our own atheism is located in another perspective – it’s linked to this always elusive aspect of the I of the other. (Lacan 1997: 288) So, the way we think (or have thought) about the ultimate Other colours fundamentally the way we think about all our little others. This stands whether or not we have turned our backs on that ultimate Other; for if psychoanalysis didn’t give serious attention to that which has been rejected (or repressed) than what discipline would? Accordingly, we will begin this chapter by examining that which psychoanalysis has “rejected”, which, far from being simply the God of the Judeo-Christian legacy is also in a very important way the values of the European enlightenment that, in the few hundred years preceding Freud, had been propped up against the empty cross and vacant mercy seat of Europe’s religious theatre.

A JEWISH SCIENCE, A CHRISTIAN REVELATION

If there is a “Jewish” dimension to psychoanalytic thought, it is this: the cure is indeed a kind of “exodus”, only not one out of Egypt; it offers, rather an exodus out of the various forms of Egyptomania that so profoundly constrain our lives and, while 143

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sustaining a level of adaptation, keep us from opening to the midst of life. (Santner 2001: 45) One finds everywhere in Lacan the vocabulary of textiles, of threads, linings, warps, woofs and knots. Inasmuch as Lacan’s theoretical ventures are fundamentally concerned with the possibility of maintaining the consistency of the psyche, of tying together that which has unravelled, this vocabulary lends itself to him. From an anthropological point of view we might say that the original function of textiles is to cover up our nakedness. And this, for any student of the Bible, will immediately bring up the strange reaction of Adam and Eve to their first sin, namely, their decision to cover themselves with leaves. From a Lacanian point of view these plaited leaves are a sign of the failure of the imaginary and the birth of the symbolic. Perhaps the common source of both text and textile – both refer to a woven cloth and are etymologically rooted in a verb meaning “to make” – lends credence to this position. As we explained earlier animals are capable of living in a reality which is functionally synchronized to their imaginary function, allowing them to live according to their impulses cued up to external images – not necessarily of the visual kind, for a vocalization is just as effective at instigating mating, fleeing, or eating, as is a ruffle of feathers or a flash of hidden colours. In other words the animal world experiences no great difficulty living up to the Biblical injunction to reproduce according to its kind. With us things are a little more complicated. According to the first chapter of Genesis, mankind (Adam) is created in God’s image, and so when the original man and woman (not yet identified as “Adam and Eve”) are told to reproduce according to their kind, inasmuch as “their kind” is actually divine, they are actually under an order to make more beings that are also in the image of God. According to Lacan, the fact of human prematuration is in large part responsible for the breakdown of our imaginary function, or, to be more accurate, for the fact that our imaginary does not map onto our real. The image of a human face and a human body produces much excitement in the infant, but the infant finds it impossible to harmonize what he sees with what he feels. As he grows a little older his erotic impulses are countered by undeveloped gonads. From an evolutionary point of view, this is a problem, and this is why the symbolic must intervene, and this symbolic is precisely a weaving of the discordance between imaginary and real that is the human lot (or knot). What is that mythical pair of Adam and Eve covering up if not the fact of their castration? That is, their being cut off from the bi-univocal communication of the animal world. This covering up is equivalent to a living death, for in the animal kingdom the horizon of death, though it determines all life, does not enter into the life of the individual. What Epicurus claimed 144

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was true for man is actually only true for the animal: “Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not” (Letter to Menoeceus). Because human life is lived in the symbolic, it is death within life; it is meaning always deferred, and satisfaction always delayed. This Lacan learned from Heidegger, though he might have learned it also from the Bible. In fact, he could have learned it from many different places, this sense that “it’s not supposed to be like this”. The Blackfoot of Montana have their own version of this story: Old Woman asked what they should do about life and death; should the people always live, or should they die? They had some difficulty in agreeing on this; but finally Old Man said, “I will tell you what I will do. I will throw a buffalo chip into the water, and, if it floats, the people die for four days and live again. But, if it sinks, they will die forever.” So he threw it in, and it floated. “No,” said Old Woman, “we will not decide in that way. I will throw in this rock. If it floats, the people will die for four days. If it sinks, the people will die forever.” Then Old Woman threw the rock out into the water, and it sank to the bottom. “There,” said she, “it is better for the people to die forever; for, if they did not die forever, they would never feel sorry for each other, and there would be no sympathy in the world.” “Well,” said Old Man, “let it be that way.” After a time Old Woman had a daughter, who died. She was very sorry now that it had been fixed so that people died forever. So she said to Old Man, “Let us have our say over again.” “No,” said he, “we fixed it once.” (Wissler & Duvall 1995: 20) We should be immortal, but because of some arbitrary fault, we’re not. We should be happy, but we’re marked by sadness. From the Lacanian point of view the edenic state that so many mythologies and religions allude to is not so much a state in which men and women don’t die, but one in which they don’t know that they die (though one might assume that Adam and Eve were “immortal” as originally created, the fact that God must eject them from Eden so that they do not “eat of the tree of life and live forever” suggests that perhaps they were not). When it comes time for an animal to die – even one so humanized as a dog or cat – it simply finds a bush or a comfortable spot behind the couch under which to take shelter. The human animal, conversely, spends her entire life obstructing the view of that final end, fleeing from a knowledge she wished she could dispossess herself of. Though death may very well come peacefully, it is a coming that haunts the living, and drives us from one end of the earth to the next. 145

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Freud belonged to a social line that for centuries had been defined by that flight. While countless nations over the ages have been wiped from the face of the earth, the Jewish people have survived, but only on the condition of being expelled – their survival predicated on what we might call a textual consistency, namely, the strength of the story they tell themselves about themselves. While for the bulk of Jewish history this story has been contained in the Bible and the Talmud (and to a lesser extent in other texts and oral traditions), in Freud – and herein lies his world importance – this textual consistency becomes transmuted into a psychoanalytic technique of listening and dream interpretation. What Lacan says to his audience could be applied specifically to Freud and his circle in this regard: “If you are not believers, you still believe in that spiration [for the love of God]. I won’t say that you suppose it; rather, it supposes you” (in Reinhard & Lupton 2003: 71). And just as laughter is both revelation of the unconscious and a sign that one desires to remain ignorant of that very revelation, so is the textural consistency of a given people – but of the Jewish line especially – both an obfuscation of the unthinkable fact of death as well as the crucial, even salvific, telling of the story of that death. This story is like a thread which one may follow to learn how a given people hangs together, how their story provides them with a minimum of social consistency. The psychoanalytic project can only be properly understood by keeping this story in mind, for the psychoanalyst looks to create or reveal in her analysand precisely this textual consistency. Not an untying only of all the knots and symptoms but also a retying of those knots and a savoir faire with whatever knots one finds impossible to cut.1 To say that psychoanalysis is, at its core, a transmutation of Talmudic interpretation into the realm of the secularized individual is only to explain one side of its historical and cultural genesis. The other side – like a textile it must have both front and back – is the scientific worldview of modernity that would seem, in its emphasis on normalization and mathematization, to render irrelevant any story one tells about oneself. We might say that the “right” side of today’s subject is that which can be mapped by all the tools of scientific modernism, while the flip side is that which the analyst plumbs. That side is “Talmudic”, messy, full of knots and seemingly arbitrary bunches of fabric or of thread, the remnant leftover from the making of its ordered obverse. Lacan often stressed the point that the subject of psychoanalysis was the subject of science (1965–6: 15/6/66), for which religion can only be construed as illusion. In other words, psychoanalysis as a discipline is only comprehensible in the context of all the conditions of scientific modernity. Can we blithely assert, then, that because science is (supposedly) a rejection of religion and that psychoanalysis is critical towards scientific subjectivity, as Jürgen Braungardt asserts, “psychoanalysis is the discipline whose object is the excluded subject of science” (2001) – that 146

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psychoanalysis must perforce affirm what science has rejected? Clearly it is not that simple. With its right hand psychoanalysis swears on the bible of modernity and strives to attain to the rigorous standards of scientific verifiability and transmissibility – such was precisely the hope placed by the later Lacan in his mathemes – yet the fingers on the left hand are crossed, as is clear in the reliance of psychoanalysis on the thread of (both ontogenetic and phylogenetic) history, which it must somehow loop through the vacuous eye of the modern subject. Perhaps this is why Freud ranked psychoanalysis (or “healing”) – along with education and governance – among the “impossible professions” (1961e: 273; 1964b: 248). Part of the scientific worldview is the assumption that knowledge won by scientific means is stable enough and reliable enough to bind the human world together, to provide a symbolic fabric capable of not being torn apart. While Freud seems confident enough on this point, how do we understand the strange effort at the end of his life to turn Moses from a Jew into an Egyptian in his Moses and Monotheism (1964a)? Is this book not an effort to wrest monotheism from the grasp of revealed religion and give it to the natural religion of the Egyptians, who modelled their God not on an invisible reality, but on the sun? In other words, the aspects of monotheism that could be said to be naturalistic (in the understanding of Freud, at least) – the emphasis on the father, the importance of the law, the centrality of the family unit, the civilizing tendency of abstraction – these are all things that Freud has in common with the Jewish tradition, and we could even say with the tradition rooted in Biblical and/or Koranic narratives. Freud’s desperate, even absurd, effort to root these traits not in the revealed religion of the Jews but in the proto-scientific thought of the Egyptians gives, perhaps, the lie to his confidence in the scientific credibility of psychoanalysis. As Lacan seemed to understand, the discipline defined by the seriousness with which it took its patients’ histories can itself only be understood in terms of its own history, however irrational, contingent and troubled it might reveal itself to be. To his last day Freud seemed to be uncomfortable with the Jewish nature of the discipline he founded, with its reliance on a revelation over and against a knowledge that could be deemed scientific. In the Jewish tradition that which initially provides the consistency needed to maintain life, that which first makes up for the lost connection with God in the garden, is circumcision: a cut on the male organ of regeneration, and a not-too-subtle hint towards castration. Freud, in his use of the term castration, is concerned with the matter of psychic health, but the condition for this health is likewise a relinquishing of the male organ. Boys must agree to a pleasure outside of an auto-erotic one (centred around the mother), and girls must accept the substitute of a child instead of a penis. For Lacan, the penis is replaced by the phallic function of language, 147

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and the cut is retained. In his myth, each subject regardless of sex is called upon to accept the castrating and delimiting effects of language, the fact that language is a cloak of death that constantly defers satisfaction and orients our lives on a never-ending circle of desire. In that cut, we are born; in that cut we live, breathe and have our being; in that cut, life is revealed as a comedy, the unstoppable laughter of which is a sign not of humour but of anxiety. Surprisingly, in Seminar X, the seminar in which he delineates his notion of objet a as the object of anxiety, Lacan challenges the analogy of circumcision and castration, saying that “there is nothing less castrating than circumcision” (1962–3: 19/12/62). In fact, he feels that the latter is “salubrious”, “aesthetically pleasing” and good for the “division of roles”, while those who would confuse castration and circumcision are seen as too occupied with diminishing the ambiguity between the sexes. We see here Lacan distinguishing between two different (structural) operations. Castration, on the one hand, refers to the necessary sacrifice of jouissance that speaking entails, for “jouissance is prohibited to whoever speaks” (Lacan 2006n: 696). This is a necessary operation in order to enter into the symbolic, that is, to be properly humanized. Circumcision, on the other hand, concerns an inscription in an historical line which has not a castrating effect, but precisely the opposite, for the only liberation that can be had comes within the contingency of one’s own history. In this way circumcision could be seen as way to go beyond castration. The properly “analytic” moment obviously does not come in the male’s decision to become circumcised, but rather in the decision (taken up by the parents) to circumcise their male child, to place him bodily within the line of the Jewish covenant with Yahweh. One might say that this is the structural moment when one passes beyond the temptation to project one’s dissatisfaction onto the “mistakes” (real or imagined) of one’s parents, not simply to pass on the trauma to one’s own child, but to affirm the contingency of one’s story, to affirm that however arbitrary the conditions of that story may be, one is nevertheless able to take responsibility for it and make something out of it. This is a moment of love in the Lacanian sense,2 where one passes from the hysterical discourse that questions the Other as her source of spiritual knowledge, to the analytic discourse that leaves the Other behind, or more precisely, that affirms a minimal distance of freedom from the constriction of the Other – the subject realizes, here, that who she is cannot be put into words. So, it is not castration that makes a person neurotic, but rather the inability to fully accept the fact of castration. To fully accept castration is to be “circumcised”, that is, to accept the arbitrary coincidences of one’s generation, and, from within that matrix, live out a life. While castration is a symbolic violence that must be undergone but that must also be surpassed, circumcision, reading its cut literally, is a evocation of the circulating 148

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drives, and therefore, from the point of view of Lacan’s most radical formulations, is a kind of model for a realized desire of a subject that has become real (or who struggles to become real): circumcision “can no longer appear to you to be a capricious ritual, but something that conforms to that which I’ve taught you to consider in the demand, the circling of the object, as the function of the cut” (Lacan 1962–3: 19/12/62). Both Freud and Lacan are rooted in a fundamentally Jewish conception of social integrity, of what protects human communities and human psyches from dissolution. But if psychoanalysis is a Jewish science why wasn’t it born earlier? Why wasn’t it conceived in the vibrant Jewish communities of medieval Europe, or those of ancient Babylon? Why would a secular Jew from Vienna be the one to invent it, in a day when Jews were about to undergo the greatest test yet of their resilience? Is it not that psychoanalysis comes on the scene at precisely the moment it is most desperately needed, to perform the kinds of suturing actions, and to reintroduce a story line, that had nourished the Jewish community for ages? Freud, in his old age, was more than once compared to Moses. It was his fate to present again the uncomfortable message of the Jewish scriptures, modulated to a new key: Men and women are estranged from their desires and “guilty” in light of them. One is not free to choose her own destiny, but is constrained by her history and by the others around her. Men and women are estranged from each other (“your desire shall be for your husband”) for the exigencies of sex situate them on different levels (“and he shall rule over you”; Gen. 3:16). To be integrated into a society means to suffer a cut (reality principle cutting into pleasure principle). This is what is meant by Freud seeing himself as the one called to “trouble the sleep of mankind”. Even after finishing his dismantling of the Jewish Moses, forced to die in exile from the Vienna he lived in for his entire life, must he not have felt some resemblance to the victorious leader at the end of Genesis, forced to end his life just outside the promised land? If Jewish thought and story is the undeniable background for psychoanalysis in general, the complexity and complication of Lacan’s thought may very well be due to the inscription of the Christian narrative within that matrix. While the connection of psychoanalysis to Judaism is centred on the cut, for Christianity the importance lies with the remainder (le reste), that which is leftover from the cut. In Seminar X Lacan links the notion of the leftover with that of the “stump” from the book of Isaiah, this stump out of which grows the shoot (descendants) of Jesse. We might also point out the importance of this concept in one of the most characteristic parables found in the gospels, that of Jesus miraculously feeding the multitudes. In John 6:14 we read that he fed a crowd of five thousand with only a boy’s five barley loaves and two fish, and that “when they were satisfied, he told his disciples, gather up the fragments left over so that nothing may be 149

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lost. So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets.” The leftover or remainder, in other words, is substantially greater than what they had originally started out with. This is also the case in Lacan’s notion of objet a as remainder: it is the humble leftover which is somehow the key to the truth (of desire). This strange dynamic is also seen in Plato’s Republic in which, while the entire dialogue revolves around the question of what justice is, when finally defining that virtue in book IV Socrates identifies it as what is “leftover” from the other cardinal virtues (Plato 2007: 123). Throughout his work Lacan uses other images for this remainder such as the placenta sloughed off at birth as well as the prepuce leftover from circumcision. In the economy of desire it is objet a, the “object cause of desire”, that evokes the loss of these primordial objects. Formally, Lacan identified eight fundamental objects that can stand in for objet a: breast, faeces, phallus, urinary flow, phoneme, voice, gaze, and nothing (2006n: 693). In one of his most chilling images Lacan improvises on the notion of this leftover, giving it the name of lamella: The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something – I will tell you shortly why – that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal – because it survives any division, any scissiparous intervention … It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents … The breast … certainly represents that part of himself that the individual loses at birth, and which may serve to symbolize the most profound lost object. (Lacan 1978: 197–8) The description of this lamella, strange as it might seem at first, represents a crucial advance in Lacan’s theory of objet a, for here we see that it is linked most fundamentally to the fact of sexual division. In other words, though I earlier defined objet a as arising for a subject with the advent of language, its roots extend into the nature of the species itself. We could say that objet a attains a central place in the psychic economy only with accession to the symbolic, but its tremendous evocative power within that economy derives from resonances it transmits from a primordiality both ontogenetic (from infancy) and phylogenetic (through our biological and 150

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evolutionary history). Lacan’s lamella has all the destructiveness of Freud’s death drive (Thanatos, described below), and yet for Lacan it is actually pure life, “immortal”. It is the immortality that the subject has (primordially) sloughed off in taking the road of sexual reproduction. While countless origin myths (the biblical one not excluded) link death to sexuality, Lacan’s entire theoretical framework is based on the supposition that the objects of desire (or rather, the object causes of desire) in the psychic economy hearken back to the first lamella/objet a. As such they are all “intimations of immortality”; they are all reminders of what we have lost. Is it any wonder that the most addictive objects of desire are simply pain killers, substances that do not give something positive, but merely deaden the pain of a life bounded by death, of a live deprived of its “proper” immortality?3 In Civilization and its Discontents Freud formulated his picture of human culture as an eternal struggle between the “two heavenly powers” (1961b: 112) of Eros – charged with founding and furthering civilization by bringing “people together into large unities” (ibid.: 58) and Thanatos – by which “civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration” (ibid.: 69). For him, the ultimate question concerning human beings was “whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction” (ibid.: 111). It is in this same text that Freud harshly judges the foundation of Christian morality in the commandments to “love thy neighbour as thyself ” and to “love thine enemy” (which Freud takes to be, in essence, one and the same commandment). Freud claimed that, for the vast majority of people, it was impossible and unwise to attempt to follow these commands. Our collective failure in this regard results in a supreme heightening of the powers of the cultural super-ego. And because Freud’s super-ego is essentially an expression of the aggressivity (death drive) of the ego turned back in on itself, to propound Christian morals was, in essence, to support the death drive and the disintegration of human civilization as we know it. This explains, for Freud, why the saintly character is so tortured by his conscience, why it is “precisely those people who have carried saintliness furthest who reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness” (1961b: 87). In other words, in Freud’s view the efforts of the saints are in vain, for their super-egos would treat them much kindlier if they would only make room for a little sin in their lives. Remembering the carnage of the First World War and looking with anxiety, in 1930, at the rise of European fascism, Freud’s analytic advice to his culture was to provide less nourishment to the cultural super-ego (and thus the aggressiveness that it channelled from Thanatos) and give Eros more breathing room. Freud’s advice was, to put it baldly: Let’s quit pretending that we should all be saints. 151

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Lacan’s notion of the lamella takes its inspiration from Freud, but with a crucial difference: while Freud seems to think that the Christian superego can be wound back, corrected as it were, Lacan sees its viciousness as an inescapable aspect of the structure of the psyche. While Freud’s superego issues moral commands such as might be found in the Decalogue, for Lacan the command that exists behind every super-ego injunction is simply that of jouissance: “Nothing forces anyone to enjoy (jouir) except the superego. The super-ego is the imperative of jouissance – Enjoy!” (1998: 3). Slavoj Žižek, taking a cue from Kenneth Burke, points out that this positive command is hidden behind the negative commands in the Decalogue. All it takes is an ellipsis to turn “do not kill” into “do not … kill!” (Žižek 2003: 104–5) – thus a straightforward interdiction becomes a psychotic injunction to murder. One could also perhaps argue that the same structure of a positive command hidden behind a negative is also apparent in the first chapters of the Bible where the more memorable warning of God to Adam not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil causes us to forget that God’s first command to human beings was an indulgence of jouissance: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28). In other words, indulge both erotic and aggressive drives. Could it be that Lacan’s greatest contribution as a religious thinker is his illumination of the Hebrew Bible’s first command and the New Testament’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself? It is his theological sense that lets him discern the continuity of jouissance in the Christian scriptures, but it is his unflagging Freudianism that makes him judge that very continuity as dangerous. His lamella, in other words, that creeping ectoplasmic blob right out of a horror movie or a sweat-drenched nightmare, is nothing else than the Christian call to universal love. This should further clarify the comments made by Lacan on the lives of the saints (cited at the end of Chapter 2) in which the erotic element of their abstentions and charity is brought to the fore. The uniqueness of this Christian love is that it seems to be rooted in the depths of jouissance, where pleasure and pain can no longer be distinguished, where the saint lapping up the leper’s water is equivalent to an expression of sexual bliss, and where the severed breast of Saint Agatha is the truest image of the satisfaction that the breast might provide. Lacan is quite clear that it is Yahweh who is behind this command to enjoy. He mentions this in remarks on the book of Ecclesiastes, which he claims is at once the most holy and most profane book in the Hebrew Bible. Its profanity seems to be linked to the “eat drink and be merry” that is half of the writer’s answer to the fact that “all things are vanity”. The other half of this answer (which Lacan doesn’t address in Seminar X), is the “Fear God, and keep his commandments” (Eccles. 12:13) with which the book ends. 152

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This has the effect of diminishing the pure “Enjoy!” of the super-ego, effectively shading it behind the various moral injunctions of the law. Christianity has a more complicated affirmation of the law. For Christ both abolishes the law and reinstitutes a new law, the outlines of which are not entirely clear, beyond the centrality of self-sacrificial love. For Lacan, what is important about Christianity is the way in which it strips the super-ego of all but its core injunction, its pushing of the subject towards jouissance. We are left with a trio of possible conclusions concerning Lacan’s relation to religion, which we might discuss by way of Lacan’s understanding of saints (for the first two options) and mystics (for the third). We could take Lacan to be part of the (more or less) Kantian tradition in which religion is valued precisely because it gives us rules to break (“We spend our time breaking the ten commandments, and that is why society is possible”; Lacan 1992: 69). This would perhaps explain Lacan’s description of the Roman Catholic Church as the one true religion, for while adopting the new law of Christ, it maintains a conservative reading of the apostle Paul, and accepts the Ten Commandments as the cornerstone of its moral vision. This provides a rock-solid symbolic structure that shades the tender subject from the real nature of God (embodied in the frightful excesses of the saints), while also providing a recuperative structure (in the sacraments, but especially in the sacrament of penance, or confession) that makes room for the subjects unbearable temptation towards the real and his predictable horror at where transgression leaves him in regard to the societal context that both nourishes and constrains him. Unlike Freud, Lacan does not think that the super-ego pressure on the id needs to be relaxed: “The naturalist liberation of desire has failed historically. We do not find ourselves in the presence of a man less weighed down with laws and duties than before the great critical experience of so-called libertine thought” (Lacan 1992: 4). In other words, if we want to experience desire, it is much better to affirm (while breaking) the law, rather than argue for a lessening up of the law. In this particular reading of Lacan we might see the saint as a kind of bogeyman keeping the normalized subjects more or less in line. But there is another way to see Lacanian sainthood in which the saint is the only subject hardy enough to survive an apocalyptic rending of what we take to be reality. Here, we see Lacan as a kind of latter-day Saint John of Patmos gleefully anticipating the eschatological fire storm that the Christian unleashing of jouissance provokes. In Seminar VII, Lacan links this rending of the present world to the worldview of modern science: Modern science, the kind that was born with Galileo, could only have developed out of biblical or Judaic ideology … by allowing free rein to the play of signifiers, it has given rise to a science 153

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whose laws develop in the direction of an increasingly coherent whole, but without anything being less motivated than what exists at any given point … In the end what is expressed for us in the energy/matter equivalence is that one final day we may find that the whole texture of appearance has been rent apart, starting from the gap we have introduced here; the whole thing might just disappear. (Lacan 1992: 122) The same tradition that has given us a morality centred on jouissance has also spawned a way of looking at the world that seems to ignore the possibility of jouissance, that seems to want to tame it out of existence so that it “dries up for everyone” (Lacan 1966–7: 22/11/67). Whereas Freud saw a cleavage between the world of science and the world of Christian morality, Lacan places that split within the tradition itself. Modern science and Christian morality are both traced to the Biblical tradition for him, and Lacan seems perfectly willing to admit that Christianity and the culture it has unleashed is fundamentally apocalyptic, that it aims for a ultimate unveiling of good and evil that threatens the existence of the world as we know it. Prior to the passage cited above from Seminar VII Lacan discusses Christ’s sense of humour, exemplified in the parable of the unjust steward and Christ’s well-known response to the Pharisees when they asked him whether or not the Jews should pay taxes to the Romans: the terrific joke “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” – and after that get on with! It is a form of paradox that may lead to all kinds of evasions or ruptures, to all the gaps opened up by nonsense – those insidious dialogues, for example, in which the interlocutor always manages to slip out of the traps that are set for him. (Lacan 1992: 96) Why does Lacan feel that this represents something very comic – “a humor that surpasses all others” (ibid.) – from the man who never laughed? Is the world so casually rendered up to Caesar precisely because the devil is this world’s present master? Is it perhaps the humour of the death drive? In this sense both science and psychoanalysis come on the tails of the Christian vision in which “no one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18). Lacan recalls this statement of Christ to his listeners in the same lecture that he repeatedly affirms that Freud knows nothing of the Good as an ethical foundation (“the good is radically denied by Freud”; Lacan 1992: 96), in opposition to Aristotle. There is agreement here between Christianity and psychoanalysis, but there is also a profound tension. In the eyes of Lacan and Freud, at least, Christianity asks what is unreasonable of its followers 154

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and unleashes what is destructive (both in the ethical domain and insofar as it lays the foundation for the “symbolic mastery” of modern science). Analysts are left to pick up the pieces as they attempt to hold everything together. If Lacan saw the concept of revelation as key for Christianity, he also understood analysis as effecting a kind of revelation. Lacan often uses the verb “reveal” when discussing the appearance of objet a, as in the following passage: Just as in the first kind of occultation, what we had was – in place of the I am not – the revelation of something that is the truth of the structure. We will see what this factor is; we will see it is the objet a. In the same way, in the other form of occultation, this flaw in thinking, this hole in the Bedeutung [meaning] – something that we have only been able to accede to along the path, entirely traced by Freud, of the process of alienation – its sense, its revelation, is the incapacity of any Bedeutung to cover what is involved in sex. (Lacan 1966–7: 11/1/1967) The revelation of objet a, in other words, is precisely that there is no meaning that can cover up the lack of sex – objet a always reveals a lack. This is, of course, different from the revelation that is crucial in the Christian tradition. In that tradition, according to Lacan, what is defining is the Pauline revelation: If the essence of Christianity is to be found in the Pauline revelation, that is, in a certain essential step taken in relations to the father; if the relationship of love to the father therein is the essential step; if it really represents the breaking through of everything great that the Semitic tradition inaugurated concerning this fundamental relationship to the father of this original Baraka … [there is left] no doubt that the foundation of Christian revelation is indeed therefore in this relationship to grace that Paul makes succeed to the law. The difficulty is the following: it is that the Christian does not maintain himself, and with good reason, at the height of this revelation and that nevertheless he lives it in a society of such a kind that one can say that even reduced to the most lay forms its principles of law issue directly all the same from a catechism which is not unrelated to this Pauline revelation. Quite simply, since the meditation on the Mystical Body is not within everyone’s reach, a gap remains open which means that, practically speaking, the Christian finds himself reduced to something 155

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which is not all that normal or fundamental, of really no longer having any other access to jouissance as such except by making love. This is what I call his troublesome dealings with Venus. (Lacan 1961–2: 14/3/1962) In Lacan’s understanding, it is the love relationship with the Father that is the core of the Pauline (and Christian) revelation, and that it is this revelation that has in some fundamental way determined the course and structure in which the Christian finds herself. Strangely enough, this causes problems for the Christian, because of the impossibility of living up to the mystical ideal, in which, assumedly, jouissance is gained by meditating on the broken body of Christ, the love offering of the Father. Since this is “not within everyone’s reach” jouissance is only available in the act of making love. This is problematic, we can assume, because this act has always been circumscribed, in our tradition, with prohibitions and limitations emanating from the Father. If Lacan is correct, that the love of the Father is something that connects the Semitic and Christian traditions, then we can perhaps see in Yahweh’s words to Adam and Eve the first signs of our “troublesome dealings” with Venus. After the first couple have eaten of the tree of knowledge they hide from God, because, in Adam’s words “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked”. God’s response is telling: “Who told you that you were naked?” In other words, how is it that you replaced an unconscious jouissance with Me, marked by evening strolls in the garden, with shame at the body I made for you? (Gen. 3:8-11) It is often assumed that Adam and Eve are ashamed of being naked in front of each other, but what if they are ashamed of being naked in front of God? What if it is their enjoyment of God that causes them to pluck leaves to cover themselves with? Such a reading perhaps makes some sense of Lacan’s famous statement, cited at the beginning of this text, that God is not dead but unconscious. What is unconscious, for the westerner, is a relationship of love and jouissance with the Maker. If the sexual relationship is impossible, from this point of view, it’s because as creatures, we cannot make love, but can only accept it. What is it, then, that connects Christian and Lacanian revelation? It seems to be precisely the same thing that concerned Yahweh in the garden, namely, “the split between truth and knowledge”, of which Lacan, in Seminar XIII, goes on to say: It is thus indeed that all medieval thinking which, far from being a negligible thinking, in a way rejected – however radical I present to you the cut established by the birth of modern science is illuminating for us as regards this topology which we have to take into account in the situation which is re-established because of the question posed by analytic experience, this 156

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thematic of the opposition between truth and knowledge is inscribed throughout the whole development of medieval thinking in what is called the doctrine of the double truth … [which is] the real foundation of this split which had necessarily to be made by the teachers of this epoch between the field of reason and that of revelation. (Lacan 1965–6: 19/1/66) Knowledge belongs to the field of reason, while truth is that which is revealed outside of this realm (the “doctrine of the double truth” states that there can be two mutually compatible truths, one from science or philosophy and the other from divine revelation). For Lacan, modern science has tipped the scales all the way to the side of reason and knowledge – reversing, of course, the opposite imbalance that had prevailed through history and reached its high point in our tradition with the medievals. Psychoanalysis is the discipline that attempts to resurrect the importance of revelation, but outside of the context of a particular religion. And what is it that analysis reveals? Precisely that which was to be the punishment for eating the fruit of knowledge in the garden: death, or as Lacan calls it in the following passage, the “effacing” of the subject. In sustaining interpretation entirely in this register of the recognition of the hidden unconscious signifying supports in the subject’s demand, we are doing nothing other than if we forget what is in question, namely to confront the subject with his demand. [In so interpreting] we do not perceive that what we produce is precisely the collapse, the effacing of the function of the subject as such in the revelation of this unconscious vocabulary. We solicit the subject to efface him or herself and to disappear. (Lacan 1958–9: 7/1/59) One could argue, then, that Lacan works towards a secular sense of revelation in his analytic practice. And yet his revelation is no less mysterious than what we find in the Bible or the Koran, for it would efface the subject in the name of a truth that is not so much unconscious as, via the unveiling of objet a, going beyond the “unconscious signifying supports” that is apparent in the subject’s demand. What is revealed is radically other; it is not the subject’s object, nor is it the Other in all the Other’s glory, but it is the small object that comes from the Other, that, we could say, is made for order for the subject, but made precisely to efface him. Lacan once said that since he could not become a saint he became an analyst. It is not surprising, then, that his thought on religion seems to resolve into two different versions of sainthood. The saint as an extreme of jouissance, a kind of figure at the limit whose most relevant function may 157

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be to keep others within the domain of the law; and then the saint as an heroic survivor of the coming apocalypse, whose behaviour is occasioned by the extreme conditions of a suicidal modernity. I would like to present Lacan’s notion of the mystic as a third option and a possible way out of his two somewhat unsatisfying conceptions of sainthood. As opposed to the saint who finds herself on the extreme limits of the symbolic, the mystic follows the way of feminine love that we might think of as a penetration through the centre of the symbolic at the precise place where the symbolic is linked to the other registers (and to the sinthome). Think back to the graphs of sexuation discussed in Chapter 3. While on the male side of the graph the one that is not castrated is precisely a fantasy, stuck in the imaginary; on the feminine side the little bit of woman that escapes castration (le reste), by virtue of acceding totally to the symbolic – following the rules, we might say, to a T – becomes real. What does it mean to be real here? Lacan says in Seminar XX that the real “can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalization” (1998: 93). This is paradoxical: the real is written only by coming to the end of that which can be written. Thus, woman is split between, on the one hand, the phallic signifier and the positive anchor of the symbolic, and on the other the lack of the signifier in the Other, the fact that there is no dependable signifier for this Other. There is no Other of the Other. God, inasmuch as God is inscribed in language, slides, as all signifieds do. There is no support outside of language that could guarantee the existence of God. And yet, we might say that, though Lacan himself never said it quite like this, feminine jouissance is the best bet for, not the existence of God, but for a real experience of God. This is the God that survives the death of God. Lacan’s discussions of mystics suggests that, for him, their experiences have to be understood in this way. Lacan rejected the “decent souls around Charcot” who wanted to “reduce mysticism to questions of cum [affaires de foutre]” (ibid.: 77). He makes it very clear that a mystic is in no way a psychotic, that their use of language is radically different. Mysticism, says Lacan, is: Something serious, about which several people inform us – most often women, or bright people like Saint John of the Cross, because one is not obliged, when one is male to situate oneself on the side of (all are castrated). One can also situate oneself on the side of the not-whole … Those are the ones we call mystics … you need but go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini [of Saint Theresa] to immediately understand that she’s coming. There’s no doubt about it. What is she getting off on? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics consists in saying that they experience it, but know nothing about it. (Ibid.: 76) 158

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The mystic is the one who, situated on the feminine side of the graph, experiences a jouissance outside the bounds not only of the phantasmagoria generated by objet a but also of the symbolic itself, for “they know nothing about it”. Let us return briefly to the case of Thomas Aquinas who, as we saw in the third chapter, was so fascinating to Lacan. Perhaps, though Lacan never says it, what is most important about this most important of Roman Catholic saints, is not the multi-volume Summa Theologia, that essentially grounds the symbolic register of that faith, but the moment he knew nothing about theology, the mystical experience he had at the end of his life, after which he dismissed all his voluminous writings as sicut palea, mere dust. To speak in Lacan’s terms, he had perhaps immersed himself so deeply in the symbolic that a certain portion of him (the “not all” portion) found refuge in a beyond of the symbolic. He who so famously argued for the existence of God put his faith not in his arguments but in an experience that reduced those famous proofs and arguments to dust. Concerning our three different ways to figure Lacan and religion, in the first two options the saint is figured as a kind of impossible figure – either as extreme negation or heroic sublimation – but in our third option the mystic is a mundane figure in the sense that she is the subject that survives the tsunami of jouissance unleashed by Judeo-Christian culture in the most surprising way: by an immersion in the increasingly repressive symbolic regime of science and quantifiability, an immersion that gives up or gives away that very same world. In this reading psychoanalysis would be the last science to speak up for the haunted, everyday, subject, in which resides that last spark of something divine that cannot be counted, but can be counted on to emerge when the curtain of the world falls.

CONCLUSION

In 1974 Lacan gave a talk in Rome entitled “The Triumph of Religion”. There is a little book with the same title that contains an edited transcript of that speech, and as a way of concluding I would like to examine a few of the fascinating remarks which are contained in that slim volume. It is here that Lacan several times makes the point that it is religion – or, more specifically, the Roman Catholic religion – that will “triumph” over both science and psychoanalysis. What makes the triumph of Christianity inevitable is that it has an abundance of “resources” to deal with, essentially, the discontents of modern civilization (Lacan 2005b: 81–2). Of course, it is precisely these discontents that psychoanalysis came on the scene to address, as is clear from Lacan’s discussion of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents in another speech (“Discourse aux catholiques”) also included in the volume under discussion. 159

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It seems that religion will triumph over analysis because the former has the resources to better deal with the disturbances introduced by modern science which, in its pursuit of knowledge divorced from meaningful truth, surrounds us with nothing more than a collection of “gadgets”. These gadgets “eat into” (Lacan 2005b: 94) us by virtue of their utter estrangement from their creators to the point where it is quite natural for us to assume that we must accommodate ourselves to our gadgets (cell phones, laptops, GPS devices, etc., but also the Hubble telescope and the latest in military technology) instead of the other way around. These gadgets tear people away, not principally from their “natural” environment, but from an imaginary/symbolic fabric that has always sufficed to ground the individual in the tradition of her ancestors and tie her horizontally to her fellow humans. When Lacan looked to articulate his thought in mythological terms he concocted the myth of the alethosphere, in which our truth is alienated from us in the satellites whirling around our heads, through which, of course, we now do most of our communicating. Lacan says of this new sphere that, “if you have a little microphone here, you are plugged into the alethosphere. What is really something is that if you are in a little vehicle that is transporting you toward Mars you can still plug into the alethosphere” (2007: 161). Lacanian commentator Joan Copjec tells us: In Lacan’s new ultra-modern myth, there is no heavenly sphere, naturally; it has been demolished. All that remains of the world beyond the subject is the “alethosphere”, which is a kind of hightech heaven, a laicized or “disenchanted” space filled none the less with every techno-scientific marvel imaginable: space probes and orbiters, telecommunications and telebanking systems, and so on. The subject is now a “terminal” subject, plugged into various circuitries, suited with wearable computers and fitted with artificial, remotely monitored and controlled organs, implants … In this alethosphere (alethosphere because this space and everything in it is built on the demonstrable truths, rigorous and mathematical, of modern science) the prosthetically enhanced, plugged-in subject does not need to flee reality in order to indulge his pleasure principle, for he is now able to remould reality in accordance with it. In other words, in the ultra-modern, advanced capitalist world, the pleasure principle and the reality principle are no longer in competition, but have merged to form a kind of corporation. (Copjec 2006: 96–7) Copjec is no doubt correct to consider Lacan’s alethosphere as indissolubly linked to the conditions of advanced capitalism. But while for someone like Marx the ultimate tool of alienation was religion, for Lacan it is only 160

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religion that can possibly provide the meaning so desperately lacking in the alethosphere. In a world where truth has been reduced to a gadget only the “true religion” can bring us, in a way, back to earth: In the end, we let [the gadgets] eat away. That is why I am not among the alarmists or those filled with anxiety. When we’ve had our fill with them, we’ll stop, and we’ll occupy ourselves with true things, that is with the things of what I’ve called religion. (Lacan 2005b: 95) While Lacan is uncharacteristically clear here on where the “answer” lies, it is not at all clear what this turn to religion would look like for him. We can almost certainly rule out any kind of backward or conservative turn – he is not telling us to go to church, or even to read the theologians. I would suggest that what Lacan has in mind here is the way in which the “true religion” might function as a kind of exemplary sinthome. For Lacan, what provides meaning within the alethosphere is not something that grounds us back into our tradition, granting harmony to a fractured existence. On the contrary, just as the sinthome works with the material, so to speak, of lack, the turn to religion should be read as something that reveals the way in which we can never be completely at home in the alethosphere. In Copjec’s view, the alethosphere is determined by the assumptions of a capitalist market space in which each subject, in order to participate in that market, must be unmoored from specific or contingent concerns to affirm his or her universality as consumer/producer.4 For Lacan there is something in the life of the psyche that resists this grounding in the ungrounded, and which (via an overbearing and irresistible jouissance) reveals to the subject that “this world is not my home”. The gospel note here should not be ignored. The tremendous energy deployed by conservative Christians in the United States (and, increasingly, around the world) to link the world of capitalism to the Christian confession should, more than anything, make it clear that it is only a “true” Christianity (in its form as the Lacanian “true religion”) that makes a remainderless absorption into the world of capitalism (mercifully) impossible. This seems to me to be the best way to explain Lacan’s strange optimism – “I am not among the alarmists or those filled with anxiety” (2005b: 95) – even in the face of what he frankly admits is the imminent destruction of human beings and even of the “living world” (ibid.: 75). Lacan seems to have a tremendous amount of faith in the rebirth of a world that to all extents and purposes appears to be headed straight for disaster: “It’s a little flash – between two worlds, if I can say, between a world that is passed and a world that is reorganizing itself as a superb world to come. I don’t think that psychoanalysis holds the key to that future” (ibid.: 87). We might 161

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expect Lacan to turn, at this point, to the realm of the real, to perhaps present us with a matheme – a little package of purely formalized and meaningless truth – to emphasize the impossibility of navigating ourselves out of this impasse from within the symbolic. It is therefore curious that Lacan would instead turn to the category of meaning (sens) and religion as the properly human response to life in the alethosphere. In his other works meaning is almost always associated with the imaginary and accompanied by a warning. Lacan’s very prose had always worked against granting his readers any kind of meaning they didn’t have to win with a great amount of “elbow grease” (2006g: 5). We might even read Lacan’s entire career as an admonition to be suspicious of the kind of tidy meaning supplied by other kinds of psychologists and psychoanalysts (Jungians and ego psychologists in particular). Nevertheless, it seems that Lacan, especially in his later life, thought that some kind of meaning is crucial, even triumphant. It would perhaps be best to connect this strange (for Lacan, at least) use of meaning to his understanding of Aristotle’s fourth cause – that of teleology, or, for our purposes, the “direction” that is another meaning of sens – which modern science has had to jettison in order to pursue the purely mathematical, and therefore meaningless, truths that function as its gold standard. When Lacan tells us that, “what is at stake when what we are dealing with is the divine dimension and generally that of the spirit, turns entirely around the following: what do we suppose to be already there before we discover it” (1967–8: 15/11/67), we must understand this not only in terms of what is assumed at the outset – the net, if we recall, that is employed to catch all the “little fish” – but also in terms of the aspect of final meaning that is the condition that must be lacking for modern science to proceed. As products of the scientific revolution we “want to know nothing about the consequences of what this knowledge of science involves at the level of truth” (ibid.), but at the level of the soul or the psyche such a break between knowledge and truth is unacceptable. The gap must be crossed in some manner, and for Lacan it is precisely religion that is capable of doing it. In the end, we can only surmise that what Lacan concludes concerning religion is only “half-said” (mi-dite). On the one hand Lacan is never too far from the warning, inherited from Freud, that the function of religion is to fill men with illusions. Even in “The Triumph of Religion” we see him saying that “religion was made for that, for healing men, that is to say, so men do not see that things aren’t all going well” (Lacan 2005b: 87). Religion is the eternal escape for mankind, filling us with imaginary meaning that the mere world cannot supply. On the other hand, Lacan reminds us that “the Christian religion” that Freud, at the end of his life, directly linked to the overbearing super-ego of modern discontent, was the only discourse with the “resources” to deal with what Marx would have called 162

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modern-day alienation, and what Lacan mythologized in his account of the alethosphere. There is no handy textual reference in Lacan’s work that can cross the distance between these two “hands” (to make them clap, so to speak). But, inasmuch as I hope for some applause as I approach the end of this work, I would like to conclude by making my own attempt to overcome this lacuna at the heart of Lacan’s relevance to religion and theology by asking my readers to remember the distinction I made in the introduction to this text: between the tendency of academics to lump religions together in the discipline of “religious studies” that, according to Lacan, functioned only to make a garbage can for religions; and, conversely, the attention that each analyst must pay to the effects of a particular religion in each and every one of her analysands. I see these two aspects joining forces in the later Lacan in his discussion of Christianity as the “true religion” that must, despite its contingent particularity, do what it is of the essence of religions to do, namely, to be concerned with that which “we suppose to be already there before we discover it”. Christianity as the “true religion” for Lacan functions not as a symptom – a problem to be overcome – but as sinthome, both sickness and cure; for it is woven into the very fabric of the alienating alethosphere while yet providing the best hope that the rising tide of modernity has only served to sharpen what is “true” about religion: that it gives meaning to life, but not a meaning that is tacked on to arbitrarily turn a tragedy into a comedy, but one that was there all along, a telos reigning from “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4). When it arrives it seems to come out of nowhere, like a long-abandoned dream from childhood. To paraphrase the classic children’s book, The Phantom Tollbooth, what started out as imaginary might just well become real (Juster 1961: 16).

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. During another seminar Lacan proclaimed that “the universe is a flower of rhetoric” (1998: 56). 2. “Simulation of the Catholic Church, reproduced whenever the relation to truth as cause reaches the social realm, is particularly grotesque in a certain Psychoanalytic International owing to the condition it imposes upon communication” (Lacan 2006k: 744). 3. All quotations from Lacan (2005b) are given in my own English translation.

1. INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY 1. For an interesting reading of this statement see Kazushige Shingu’s paper, “Freud, Lacan and Japan” (Shingu 2005). 2. The Virgin Mary was the patron saint of vinegar makers; when Lacan took the Marie from his name he was jettisoning Christianity and his bourgeois upbringing in one fell swoop. 3. Michel de Certeau, a philosopher/historian and Jesuit priest who studied with Lacan, was quite sure what these words signified: “Lacan knows what he says. ‘Religion’ here means the ‘religious congregation,’ and ‘brother in religion’ points to a brotherhood based not on blood but on a common sharing in the Order” (1983: 32). Marcus Pound has a similar view of the dedication, saying that in it we see “Lacan’s unconscious desire, hidden in full view” (2007: 24). 4. Mark Micale points out that there were voices prior to Charcot suggesting that men also could suffer what seemed to be hysterical symptoms. But, perhaps persuaded by etymological concerns, they tended to label such men as hypochondriacal (1990: 366–8). 5. Judith is a respected philosopher and, besides working with her husband in editing the publications of Le Champ freudien (including Lacan’s seminars), she has published a memoir entitled Album Jacques Lacan: visages de mon père (1990).

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6. This is the way in which Dominick Hoens and Ed Pluth understand Lacan’s trajectory in “The Sinthome: A New Way of Writing an Old Problem” (2002: 2). Other scholars will give slightly different dates, but most of them agree that there are three distinct periods in Lacan’s teaching. 7. Miller points out that “La Famille” is the title worked out by Wallon. The title given by Lacan is “The Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual” (Miller 2005). 8. We might note that in privileging the early Freud Lacan is supported by the words of Freud himself, who wrote, concerning the breakthrough he experienced in writing The Interpretation of Dreams, “It contains, even according to my present-day judgment, the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime” (Freud 1953b: xxxii).

2. THE BASIC CONCEPTS 1. While Freud considered homosexuality to be a type of perversion, with Lacan, a diagnosis of perversion depended, as did all his diagnoses, on a purely structural description. Homosexuality is different from perversion, and while some homosexual persons may have a perverse psychic structure, this is by no means the rule. Freud’s position on homosexuality showed both conservative and progressive impulses. On the one hand, in considering homosexuality a perversion he made it clear that he considered it a problem and, in the absence of the aim of procreative coitus, even a sign of failure. On the other hand, he never moralized against homosexual persons and surely approached his homosexual analysands with much more of an open mind than did the majority of his contemporaries, remarking how “inappropriate it is to use the word perversion as a term of reproach” (Freud 1953a: 160). 2. My explication of Lacan’s nosology is especially indebted to the work of Lacanian analyst and commentator Bruce Fink. 3. Compare this with Freud’s description of the ego as “a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes [which] contain the history of those object choices” (1961c: 29). 4. In this novella, a group of British schoolboys are shipwrecked on an island. Their initial camaraderie quickly turns into a duel between two rival groups, and their descent into reciprocal violence is mirrored by their increasing identification with predatory animals. The children murder two of their own before a naval captain rescues them and puts an end to the madness that surely would have culminated in total destruction. The lesson here, from a Lacanian perspective, is that the rudder of the imaginary dimension is violence. 5. Freud discusses the relation between phylogeny and ontogeny in Civilization and its Discontents (Freud 1961b: 131, 139–41). 6. The difference between the hysteric and the pervert, from this perspective, would seem to be that the pervert has no choice but to identify with a very particular incarnation of objet a, while the hysteric has the ability to be flexible in her object identifications, and to even go beyond this tendency. As Lacan notes, “whereas in the perversion, the accent is on the object a, the neurosis can be situated as having its accent on the other term of the fantasy, the $ [the barred subject]” (1977: 16). 7. In his later work Lacan would have a lot to say about a kind of desire that escapes the determination of the phallus. At the level of the hysteric’s (and the obsessive’s) fundamental question, though, there is really only one kind of desire, and it is phallic.

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8. “Queen Maya, the mother of Shakyamuni Buddha, dreamed that a white bullelephant entered her womb at the moment of conception. She gave birth to the Buddha in the royal gardens of Lumbini, which were said to resemble Indra’s paradise grove known as Chitraratha. Maya’s dream of the white elephant entering her womb perhaps indicates that the child destined to become the Buddha was originally perceived as an emanation of Indra. Indra and Brahman – the two great gods of the heavens – appeared to the Buddha at the precise moment of his enlightenment requesting him to remain in this world for the liberation of all beings” (Beer 1999: 82). 9. “A girl is first the wife of Agni, then of Soma, then of the Gandharvas; only fourthly does she become the wife of the her human husband, who thus receives her as a leftover of the gods” (Malamoud 1996: 112). 10. Freud discusses this phenomenon in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego: “We have heard that identification is the earliest and original form of emotional tie; it often happens that under the conditions in which the symptoms are constructed, that is, where there is repression and where the mechanisms of the unconscious are dominant, object-choice is turned back into identification – the ego assumes the characteristics of the object. It is noticeable that in these identifications the ego sometimes copies the person who is not loved and sometimes the one who is loved. It must also strike us that in both cases the identification is a partial and extremely limited one and only borrows a single trait from the person who is its object” (1955b: 107). 11. This sensorium is probably best compared with the primordial nothingness in Taoism or, in the Vedas, that which existed before God: “The Gods are later than this world’s production. Who knows whence it first came into being” (Radhakrishnan & Moore 1989: 3). 12. If the twentieth century has created a new subject we might have to say that it is the subject as zombie, that bit of the real which has overcome its symbolic constraints, the greatest of which is perhaps that the dead father must stay dead. This is redolent of a crisis in the law, because for the law to have meaning there must be a non-porous boundary between the living and the dead such that the dead can only live in the memories and legacies of the living. Such a structure works to hold the jouissance of the dead at bay; the zombie, though, is pure jouissance beyond the law. 13. Both Schneiderman and Fink, in the above quoted passages, are making reference to Jacques-Alain Miller’s well-known essay concerning the relevance of set theory to Lacan, entitled, “Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier” (1977–8). 14. There is undoubtedly a Freudian background to Lacan’s jouissance, that we can see in Freud’s description of the orgiastic festival which followed the primitive totem meal: “Every instinct is unfettered and there is license for every kind of gratification. Here we have an easy access to the nature of festivals in general. A festival is a permitted, or rather an obligatory, excess, a solemn breach of a prohibition” (1950: 140). 15. See Marc de Kesel’s excellent discussion of this in his Eros and Ethics: “Is what gives us the greatest pleasure also of the highest ethical value? Is the satisfaction our desire unconsciously leads us to also the ethical good that we consciously have before our eyes? While the majority of psychoanalytic theories answer in the affirmative, it was clear for Lacan that under no circumstances could Freud’s basic intuition allow this” (Kesel 2009: 45). 16. The preceding account of the three times of the Oedipus complex relies heavily on Dylan Evans’s formulation in Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1996). Evans has, since that book was published, repudiated in an absolute fashion Lacanian

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17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

theory. An interesting account of this conversion (or apostasy) can be accessed online in an essay entitled “From Lacan to Darwin” (2005). In Seminar IV, as Dylan Evans (1996) points out, this same structural shift is alluded to in Lacan’s emphasis on the importance of attaining a ternary (mother– child–father–phallus) from the triangular (mother–child–phallus). When there are four elements, the child is no longer in danger of collapsing the father into the phallus. In a ternary, while the father might introduce the law, he no longer represents it absolutely, and the child is provided with a horizon against which he can situate himself – with a law that goes beyond his personal family drama. Lacan evokes a religious example here, the practice of Taoists to avoid ejaculation in their sexual practice: “In order to feel good, one must withhold one’s cum” (1998: 115). Lacan took some pleasure in the “Joy” in Joyce, which translates into German as nothing less than Freude. See Lacan’s unpublished Seminar IX. See also Fink (1997a: 72–3). The kaidan is the ordination platform where a Buddhist monk would take the precepts.

3. JOUISSANCE AND FEMININE SEXUALITY 1. The quote is from George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature, 1864, as cited in Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “usufruct”. 2. “It appeared to him [the Buddha] useless to proclaim the law to those who could not understand it. But Brahma perceiving this doubt, cried out: ‘The world will perish!’ and the cry was echoed by the devas of the wind and rain and by all other brahmas and devas innumerable. Then Brahma appeared before the Buddha and said: ‘My lord, the Buddhahood is hard to obtain; but you have obtained it that you might release the beings of the world from existence; therefore proclaim the law that this may come to pass. O wise one, let the dharma be taught!’” (Coomaraswamy & Nivedita 1967: 273). 3. Ragland-Sullivan summarizes the concept of unconscious counting in Lacan (and Miller) in her book Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (1986: 133–7), as well as in “Counting from 0 to 6: Lacan, ‘Suture’, and the Imaginary Order” (1990: 31–63). 4. We might have here a handy way of understanding Lacan’s thought concerning science and religion. While true science is a rupture with the overly meaningful fantasies that limit ingenuity – many of which stem from religion – true religion is perhaps that which escapes the impressive and dominating reach of such a science. 5. See 1 Peter 2:2-10.

4. A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE 1. This online essay is also the last chapter to Johnston’s book on the thought of Slavoj Žižek, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Johnston 2008). All citations are from the online essay. 2. An interesting book in this regard and one that perhaps should have been included in this chapter is one co-written by John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek entitled The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (2009). 3. The term Mass is etymologically related to the Latin verb “to send off ”. The central experience of Christian life could thus be construed as a sending off or a moment

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of concluding. Mass isn’t something that you go to, it’s something you depart from. Likewise, the point of analysis is not to go, but to leave.

5. LACAN AS A THEOLOGIAN 1. We might say that, for Lacan, every (neurotic) psyche is centred on something like an impossible knot, a tight mess of loops on which even the toughest fingernail splinters. This is the sinthome that one cannot dissolve but that one can learn to live with, and perhaps even create with. This impossible knot in the psyche is analogous to the mystery at the navel of a dream, of which Freud wrote, “there is at least one spot in every dream where it is unplumbable – a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown” (1953b: 111 n.). 2. “Love is the sign that one is changing discourses” (Lacan 1998: 16). 3. Darian Leader points out that lamellae is the term used by archaeologists of ancient Greece to refer to “thin gold plates or foils buried with a cadaver and containing instructions and passwords for use in the next world” (2003: 46). Leader emphasizes here the “opposition between the mortal body and an enduring, separate life substance that is linked to it” (ibid.). 4. Just as Freud saw the vicious super-ego as paradoxically rooted in the Christian mandate to sacrificial love, we must also see the “equitable” realm of capitalism as linked, however perversely, to the Christian call to equality, such that in Christ “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female” (Gal. 3:28).

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A NOTE ON THE TEXTS OF LACAN (AND FREUD) Most of the books recommended in this guide are suitable for someone who is just discovering Lacan or psychoanalysis, though I have noted the few that would best be encountered after some basic familiarity with Lacan has been established. I often suggest that absolute beginners read the Fink and Schneiderman titles before reading any Lacan. Lacan’s earliest seminars (e.g. I–III) are all quite approachable and especially good for getting introduced to Lacan’s clinical side. Those who are more interested in feminism or critical theory, or religion for that matter, can start with Seminar XX (Lacan 1998). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis (the eleventh seminar; Lacan 1978) can also pass as an introduction to his oeuvre. The Écrits, Lacan’s major work, should be approached with some care and digested very slowly. I would not suggest getting to know Lacan by attempting to read this book cover to cover. Of Freud’s texts the one absolutely essential title would have to be The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1953b), a classic that should simply be read by every serious person. For students of religion and theology Civilization and its Discontents (Freud 1961b), Moses and Monotheism (Freud 1964a) and Totem and Taboo (Freud 1950) should come next. After that, readers of Lacan can be guided by their own whim or Lacan’s suggestions (his early seminars especially are in large part commentaries on choice Freudian texts). Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, 2007. Not, perhaps, a text for beginners, but a rewarding examination of some of Lacan’s most potent concepts. For the philosophically minded, a good follow-up to Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject (described below). Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation, 2004. Copjec takes on both Freud and Lacan in regard to their views on woman. Of interest to both philosophers and pop culture aficionados. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, [1972] 2004.

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Not at all a Lacanian text, this is nevertheless a crucial counterpoint to the Freudian perspective. It is wonderfully creative and will provide a philosophical depth (and context) to any study of Lacan. Dylan Evans, Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 1996. This is a very helpful reference tool with entries on the most important Lacanian themes. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus (eds), Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, 1996. Very helpful for those who are approaching Lacan’s earliest seminars, this text is also notable for containing several essays by Jacques-Alain Miller, whose books are not yet translated into English. Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 1997. One of the best places to start learning about Lacan, I often suggest that this be read before actually delving into the writing of Lacan himself, as the latter’s texts can be disorienting for a beginner. Fink puts a very clear frame around Lacan’s complicated thought without oversimplifying or excluding crucial elements. While Fink’s perspective is overtly clinical, his texts are nevertheless the best introduction for all students of Lacan. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 1997. An ideal companion to the above text, here Fink focuses on more philosophical/theoretical issues such as subjectivity and otherness, making this a good introduction to Lacan for students of philosophy, feminism or critical theory. Marc de Kesel, Eros and Ethics, 2009. Lacan was very interested in the questions of ethics and the relation those questions had to his own analytic theories. This text helpfully traces these issues throughout the breadth of Lacan’s oeuvre. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, 1969. Hegel was, arguably, the most important philosophical figure for Lacan, and Kojève was, without any argument, the most influential transmitter of Hegel’s philosophy for Lacan’s generation. A classic, and surprisingly readable. Michael Lewis, Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing, 2008. This book takes up the issue of the “deconstructibility” of Lacan and does a good job of examining the issue of the “letter” that divided him from Derrida. Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan, 1992. One of the first books written on Lacan, this was penned by two of his followers and is critical of the master; nevertheless, Lacan praised the text highly. Marcus Pound, Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma, 2007. In an in-depth comparison of Kierkegaard and Lacan, Pound presents some surprising conclusions. His book should be of special interest to students of Christian theology. Jean-Michel Rabaté (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, 2003. Not perhaps the best introduction to Lacan’s thought, this is nevertheless a strong collection of interesting perspectives on Lacan.

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Ellie Ragland, The Logic of Sexuation: From Aristotle to Lacan, 2004. Ragland’s prose can be tricky but her detailed readings are worth the effort. Here she puts Lacan’s graphs of sexuation into a larger philosophical and theoretical context. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, 1990. The only full-length biography of Lacan, this is written by someone who knew Lacan’s scene intimately. Well written and hard to put down. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, 1997. This is the only other volume of Roudinesco’s history of psychoanalysis in France that has been translated into English and is quite worth reading for someone who would like to deepen their familiarity with Lacan’s historical and intellectual context. Stuart Schneiderman, The Death of an Intellectual Hero, 1983. Written by one of the very first Americans to study with Lacan, this is a delicious introduction to Lacan filled with creative takes on Lacanian themes. Contains a masterful passage on death and logic, and is surely responsible for getting many an English reader interested in Lacan. Colette Soler, What Lacan Said About Women: A Psychoanalytic Study, 2006. Soler is one of the most experienced Lacanian analysts in France and someone who knew Lacan well (having been analysed by him). This is not a text for beginners, but it is indispensable for those who are interested in what Lacan had to say about women. Luke Thurston (editor), Re-inventing the Symptom, 2002. Uniformly strong essays on fascinating topics in the late Lacan. Not a place for beginners to start, but rewarding for those who have some familiarity with Lacan and have perhaps worked their way through the Écrits or some of the later seminars. Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution, 1992. A very helpful text for situating Lacan historically. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, 1991. Discussing the theories of Lacan through dozens of films and other artefacts of pop culture, this is Žižek at his most entertaining. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, 2003. Žižek is undoubtedly responsible for much of Lacan’s popularity, such as it is, in Englishspeaking countries. Probably the world’s most famous living philosopher, Žižek has a thorough grounding in Lacan’s thought. Some consider his readings to be flippant, but they are at least a very entertaining place to start, whether one is coming from philosophy, theology or film. Scholars of religion or theology should find much to occupy them in this book. Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 2007. Perhaps the most approachable text on this list, Žižek introduces his master with his usual array of jokes and movie references. Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, 2000. Zupančič is a leading philosopher and Lacanian theorist who has the ability to make tough theories approachable through her use of literature and film.

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Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy, 2008. This text shows the saliency of Lacan’s theories in diverse fields, from literature and classics to pop culture.

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180

INDEX

Adam and Eve 113, 144–5, 156 affect 109–10 Aimée (Marguerite Pantaine) 13–16, 20 alienation 48–9, 70 Althusser, L. 26–7 analogy 124–9 animals 37–8, 39, 58–62, 65–6, 144–5 Anna O (Bertha Pappenheim) 11 anxiety 49, 65, 148 aphasia 92 asceticism 71, 74–5 atheism 2, 5, 7–8, 10, 107–8, 113, 122, 143 atonement 93-4 Augustine 128 Barth, K. 129 Bataille, G. 16 bisexuality 53–4 Blondin M. L. 16 Bonaparte, M. 17–18 Borromean knot 32–3 Buddhism 33, 55, 75, 83 Zen 22, 2 castration 51, 69, 95, 99, 147–9 Certeau, M. de 119–24 Champ Freudien, Le 27–8 Charcot, J. M. 11

Christianity 59, 84, 97, 101–3, 123, 149, 151–6, 161, 163 Christian theology 66–7, 137 circumcision 147–9 Clérambault, G. G. 12–13, 17 communism 15–16 condensation 91–3 Confucius 66 constitutionalism 11, 14 contingent, the 99–100 Copjec, J. 160–61 Crevel, R. 15–16 Dalí, S. 14–15 Dante 66 death 47, 50, 56–7, 59, 102, 144–5, 157 death drive see Thanatos death of God 158 deconstruction 114 delusional metaphor 46 demand 63 Descartes, R. 8, 57 désir de la mer, le (the desire of the mother) 42–4 desire 48, 53–6, 63–4, 69–71, 126–9 disavowal 57 displacement 91–3 Don Juan 97–8 Eastern Orthodoxy 137–9

181

INDEX

Ecclesiastes 152–3 École de la Cause Freudienne (ECF) 30 École Française de Psychanalyse (EFP) 27–8 ego 35–7, 73, 126 ego psychology 17–18, 23, 28 Eros 151–2 erotomania 12 Eucharist 126–7, 134 evil 116–17 extimacy 84 fantasy 70–71 father 41–2, 60, 70 female sexuation 99–100 feminine way 73, 99–100, 129, 158–9 fetish 49 Fink, B. 44, 49, 53, 77, 107, 113 Finnegans Wake 79 Fisher, D. H. 114 foreclosure 57; see also Freud, verwerfung forgiveness 118 freedom 47, 82, 113, 139–40, 142 Freud A. 17, 23 Freud, S. 6, 9, 10–11, 13, 41, 130–31, 151–2 and evil 116 bejahung 44 Daniel Schreber 45–7 Dora 53–5 dream interpretation 88, 91–2 in the United States 28 and Judaism 146–7, 149 and Lacan 22, 141, 153–4 Lacan’s reading of 17, 19, 23 and language 11, 40, 42–3, 47 latent sexuality 38–9 models of the psyche 32 and Moses 149 myth of the primal horde 96 Oedipus complex 39 polymorphous perversity 39 and religion 2, 66–7, 102 self-analysis 24 and sexuality 53–4, 68–9 verwerfung 44; see also foreclosure Greek gods 62 Griesinger, W. 15 Hamlet 57, 96–7, 122–3

182

Hartmann, H. 17–18, 28 Hegel, G. W. F. master and slave dialectic 37 Aufhebung (sublimation) 43 Herbert, G. 100–103 Hinduism 55, 67, 75, 83 history 110–11 Homer 92 homosexuality 53, 129–30 Hostage, The 139–40 hysteria 11 hysteric 52–6 imaginary (register) 19, 34–9, 45, 47–8, 118 impossible, the 99–100 In the Name of the Father 60–61 incest prohibition 42, 88 Indra 61 International Psychoanalytic Assocation (IPA) 9, 17, 21, 26 Irigaray, L. 26 Islam 3–4 Jakobson, R. 91–3 Jesus Christ 66–7, 82–3, 93–4, 149–50, 154 Johnston, A. 107–16 and atheism 107–8, 113 and religion 109–10, 112–13 Jones, E. 19 jouissance 42, 56, 66, 69–71, 80–106, 148, 152–4, 156, 159 Joyce, J. 9, 33, 48, 72, 95 Judaism 142–3 Jung, C. G. 2, 12 Kierkegaard, S. 97–8, 130–37 Kris, E. 17–18, 28 L schema 35–6 Lacan, M. 7, 10, 31 lalangue 89 lamella 150–52 language 39–41, 43, 69, 71–2, 83, 148 law 50–51, 61, 66–7, 80–81 Lévi-Strauss, C. 24, 26, 27, 88 linguistics 85-94 Loewenstein, R. 17–18, 28 Lord of the Flies 37 love 100–106, 128, 148 “Love III” 100–103

INDEX

Luther, M. 116–19 lying 40–41 male sexuation 95–9 Marxism 15–16 master discourse 24 master signifier 81, 91 matheme 27, 90 Maximus the Confessor 137–8 méconnaisance (misrecognition) 35–6, 67–8 mental automatism 13–14 Merchant of Venice, The 122 metaphor 91–3 metonymy 91–3 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 104–6 Milbank, J. 137 Miller J. A. 17, 27–8 mirror stage 12–13, 19, 34–5 mother 42, 49, 51–2, 70, 122 mystics 119–21, 123, 158–9 mytheme 88 Name(s)-of-the-Father (nom du pere) 33, 43–7, 49, 69–70, 72–3 necessary, the 99–100 need 63 neurosis, 18, 51–7, 69 Nizan, P. 15 nominalism 124–9 objet a 50, 64–5, 71–2, 95–100, 150 obsessive, the 52–3, 56–7 Ockham 127–8 Oedipal complex 69–70 ontogeny 37, 39, 58 oral drive 103 organicism 15 Origenism 137–8 Other 34–6, 45, 46–8, 52, 73, 138–9 passe (the pass) 29 paternal function 47–8, 73 Paul, apostle 84 perversion 48–51, 69 phallic desire 53 phallus 33, 48, 51–2, 59, 70, 89, 95–100 phylogeny 37, 58–61 Pichon, E. 18 Poe E. A. 5 possible, the 99–100

Pound, M. 130–37 predestination 118 prematuration 38, 144 primordial real 63, 108 Protestantism 82–3 psychiatry 15 psychosis 18, 43–8, 49, 69, 72 Rabaté, J. M. 29–30 Radical Orthodoxy 124–5, 129–30, 133, 137–8 Ragland, E. 52 real (register) 9–10, 19, 61–7, 107–10, 162 remainder 149–50 repetition 130–33 repression 44, 57 revelation 5, 155–9 Rome Report 25–6 Sabbath 84–5 sacrifice 75–6, 97–8 saints 74–9, 151, 153–8 sannyasin (mendicants) 75 Saussure, F. de 39–40, 85–91 Schneider, C. 140 Schneiderman, S. 59 Schreber, D. 45–7 science 54, 65, 90, 146–7, 153, 160–63 and religion 118 separation 48, 51 set theory 59 short session 20–21, 25 sign 87, 89 signified 87–91 signifier 43–7, 56, 85–91, 109–10 sinthome 33, 68, 71–9, 129, 161–3 Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP) 21, 26 Société Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP) 17–18, 20–21, 25–6 Socrates 150 Soler, C. 56 Song of Songs 98 speech 25, 39–40, 44–5, 86–9 Spinoza B. 9, 26 structuralism 73, 88 stupidity 80–85 style 64–5 subject 35, 40–41, 59, 159 super-ego 81, 151–2

183

INDEX

surrealism 14–16 symbolic (register) 19, 25, 39–61, 63, 65–6, 107–10, 144 symptom 72, 130–31 Talmud 142–3 Taoism 55 Taylor, M. C. 115–16 teleology 162 Thanatos 151–2 Thus Spoke Zarathustra 60 time 127–8, 131–2 trauma 130–31, 133-4traversing the fantasy 53, 73–4

184

Uexküll, J. von 37–8 unary trait (Einziger Zug) 58–9, 63, 68 unconscious, the 15, 23–4, 25, 41, 135 universal salvation 94 university discourse 24 Virgin Mary 54–5, 94 Ward, G. 124–30, 132 Westerink, H. 116–19 Winquist, C. 114–15 Wodin 59 Žižek, S. 50–51, 64, 152