Unconscious Incarnations: Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Perspectives on the Body 9780815394952, 9780815394945

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title Page......Page 6
Copyright Page......Page 7
Table of Contents......Page 8
Notes on contributors......Page 10
Acknowledgements......Page 12
Introduction: real flesh, imaginary bodies—phenomenology and Lacan on embodiment......Page 14
1 The hermeneutics of wounds......Page 34
2 Encountering the psychoanalyst’s suffering: discussion of Kearney’s “The hermeneutics of wounds”......Page 56
3 The place of das Ding: psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and religion......Page 63
4 The cost of das Ding: a response to Manoussakis’ “The place of das Ding”......Page 79
5 The real of ethics: on a widespread misconception......Page 89
6 The ethics of the real: a response to De Kesel......Page 107
7 Lacan and the psychological......Page 126
8 (Ab)normality as spectrum: Merleau-Ponty, post-Kleinians, and Lacan on autism......Page 154
Index......Page 174

Citation preview

Unconscious Incarnations

Unconscious Incarnations considers the status of the body in psychoanalytic theory and practice, bringing Freud and Lacan into conversation with continental philosophy to explore the heterogeneity of embodied life. By doing so, the body is no longer merely an object of scientific inquiry but also a lived body, a source of excessive intuition and affectivity, and a raw animality distinct from mere materiality. The contributors to this volume consist of philosophers, psychoanalytic scholars, and practitioners whose interdisciplinary explorations reformulate traditional psychoanalytic concepts such as trauma, healing, desire, subjectivity, and the unconscious. Collectively, they build toward the conclusion that phenomenologies of embodiment move psychoanalytic theory and practice away from representationalist models and toward an incarnational approach to psychic life. Under such a carnal horizon, trauma manifests as wounds and scars, therapy as touch, subjectivity as bodily boundedness, and the unconscious ‘real’ as an excessive remainder of flesh. Unconscious incarnations signal events where the unsignifiable appears among signifiers, the invisible within the visible, and absence within presence. In sum: where the flesh becomes word and the word retains its flesh. Unconscious Incarnations seeks to evoke this incarnational approach in order to break through tacit taboos toward the body in psychology and psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary work will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as philosophy scholars and clinical psychologists. Brian W. Becker is Associate Professor of Neuropsychology at Lesley University. His research focuses on the intersections of phenomenology, religion, and psychoanalysis.

John Panteleimon Manoussakis is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, and an Honorary Fellow at the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy of the Australian Catholic University. David M. Goodman is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Advising at the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College and Associate Professor of Practice in the Philosophy department at Boston College’s Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences.

Psychology and the Other David M. Goodman Series Editor

Brian W. Becker, Donna M. Orange, Eric R. Severson Associate Editors

The Psychology and the Other book series highlights creative work at the intersections between psychology and the vast array of disciplines relevant to the human psyche. The interdisciplinary focus of this series brings psychology into conversation with continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, and social/critical theory. The cross-fertilization of theory and practice, encompassing such a range of perspectives, encourages the exploration of alternative paradigms and newly articulated vocabularies that speak to human identity, freedom, and suffering. Thus, we are encouraged to reimagine our encounters with difference, our notions of the “other,” and what constitutes therapeutic modalities. The study and practices of mental health practitioners, psychoanalysts, and scholars in the humanities will be sharpened, enhanced, and illuminated by these vibrant conversations, representing pluralistic methods of inquiry, including those typically identified as psychoanalytic, humanistic, qualitative, phenomenological, or existential. For a full list of titles in the series, please visit the Routledge website at: https://www.routledge.com/Psychology-and-the-Other/book-series/ PSYOTH

Unconscious Incarnations

Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Perspectives on the Body

Edited by Brian W. Becker, John Panteleimon Manoussakis, and David M. Goodman

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Brian W. Becker, John Panteleimon Manoussakis and David M. Goodman; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized 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. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-8153-9494-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-8153-9495-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-18019-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times by Keystroke, Neville Lodge, Tettenhall, Wolverhampton

Contents



Notes on contributors Acknowledgements

ix xi

I ntroduction: real flesh, imaginary bodies—phenomenology and Lacan on embodiment

1

BRIAN W. BECKER AND JOHN PANTELEIMON MANOUSSAKIS

1

The hermeneutics of wounds

21

RICHARD KEARNEY

2

 ncountering the psychoanalyst’s suffering: discussion E of Kearney’s “The hermeneutics of wounds”

43

ELIZABETH A. CORPT

3

 he place of das Ding: psychoanalysis, phenomenology, T and religion

50

JOHN PANTELEIMON MANOUSSAKIS

4

 he cost of das Ding: a response to Manoussakis’ “The place T of das Ding”

66

BRIAN W. BECKER

5

The real of ethics: on a widespread misconception

76

MARC DE KESEL

6

The ethics of the real: a response to De Kesel

94

MARI RUTI

7

Lacan and the psychological DEREK HOOK

113

viii  Contents

8

( Ab)normality as spectrum: Merleau-Ponty, post-Kleinians, and Lacan on autism

141

YUE JENNIFER WANG

Index

161

Contributors

Brian W. Becker is Associate Professor of Neuropsychology and Assistant Chair in the Division of Psychology & Applied Therapies at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. He co-edited In the Wake of Trauma: Psychology and Philosophy for the Suffering Other (Duquesne, 2016) and Critical and Theoretical Perspectives in Psychology: Dialogues at the Edge of American Psychological Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Elizabeth A. Corpt is a practicing psychoanalyst in Arlington, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston/Cambridge. She is a supervising analyst, previous president and current faculty member of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, and a teaching associate and clinical supervisor at Harvard University, Department of Psychiatry, Cambridge Hospital Program for Psychotherapy. Marc De Kesel is Academic Secretary and Senior Researcher at the Titus Brandsma Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands). He is doing philosophical research in fields such as Theory of Religion and Mysticism, Holocaust Reception, and Freudo-Lacanian Theory. He has published on the ethics of psychoanalysis (Eros and Ethics, State University of New York Press, 2009), on the critical core of monotheism (Goden breken [Breaking Gods], Boom, 2010), on the logic of giftgiving (Niets dan liefde [Nothing but Love], Sjibbolet, 2012), on Holocaust reception (Auschwitz mon amour, Boom, 2012), and on Slavoj Žižek (Žižek, Boom, 2012). David Goodman is the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Advising at the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College, Associate Professor of the Practice in the Philosophy department in BC’s Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences, the Director of Psychology and the Other, a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, and

x  Contributors

a Teaching Associate at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Hospital. Dr. Goodman has written over a dozen articles on continental philosophy, Jewish thought, social justice, and psychotherapy. Derek Hook is Associate Professor in Psychology at Duquesne University and Extraordinary Professor in Psychology at the University of Pretoria. He is author of (Post)apartheid Conditions: Psychoanalysis and Social Formation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Six Moments in Lacan (Routledge, 2018), and Lacan’s Écrits: A Reader’s Guide – Volumes 1 and 2 (forthcoming, Routledge, 2018). Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and has served as a Visiting Professor at University College Dublin and the University of Paris (Sorbonne). He is the author of over 20 books on European philosophy and literature (including two novels and a volume of poetry) and is director of the international Guestbook Project. His most recent books include Anatheism: Returning to God after God (Columbia University Press, 2010), Carnal Hermeneutics (Fordham University Press, 2015), and Reimagining the Sacred (Columbia University Press, 2016). John Panteleimon Manoussakis is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross. His publications focus on philosophy of religion, phenomenology, Plato and the Neo-Platonic tradition, Patristics, and psychoanalysis. He is the author of God After Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic (Indiana University Press, 2007, translated into Russian and Romanian) and more recently of The Ethics of Time: Phenomenology and Hermeneutics of Change (Bloomsbury, 2017). Mari Ruti is Distinguished Professor of Critical Theory and of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of ten academic books, including The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (Fordham University Press, 2012), Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2015), and The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects (Columbia University Press, 2017). Yue Jennifer Wang is a PhD student in the philosophy department at Villanova University. She studies the phenomenology of art, especially music and film, and psychoanalysis, with an emphasis on the Kleinian and Lacanian traditions. She is also interested in Patristic theology and medieval Christian mysticism. Jennifer is currently working on interrogating pre-subjective conditions of experience.

Acknowledgements

Interdisciplinary work often entails a kind of vulnerability as it requires entering into domains where one has little authority to traverse. To address such questions, when not having received the rigorous education of a philosopher nor psychoanalyst, requires relying on the good graces, patience, and wisdom of those who have. First among them are my co-editors, John and David, and the authors of this volume. John’s scholarship has traversed phenomenology, religion, and psychoanalysis and his two volumes, God After Metaphysics and The Ethics of Time, serve as well-springs of inspiration for this volume. And it was David’s vision and leadership to bring together scholars from such diverse disciplines that cleared the debris to offer a home for such conversations to take place, most notably at the Psychology and the Other conference and now in the Psychology and the Other book series, of which this book represents the first volume. Moreover, I would like to express my gratitude toward our authors. This group has been exceptionally collegial both in their responsiveness and enthusiasm for this project. Several others deserve mention for their integral role as conversation partners while working on this volume, notably Heather Macdonald who has been not only my best and most consistent interlocutor but also a great friend. I would also like to thank Emmanuel Falque for welcoming me into his course at Boston College in fall 2016 and for his invitation to the International Network in Philosophy of Religion (INPR). Others who have played an integral role while working on this volume include Donald Wallenfang, Eric Severson, Peter Capretto, Brent Slife, and my student Richard Love. I would also like to thank president Jeff Weiss and Lesley University for providing institutional support to make Psychology and the

xii  Acknowledgements

Other possible and especially to Lesley’s supervising campus planner Matthew Brownell for all his time, patience, and support. Finally, and most importantly, I thank my wife, Elis, and daughter, Isabella, who continually teach me how to live embodied. Brian Becker

Introduction Real flesh, imaginary bodies— phenomenology and Lacan on embodiment Brian W. Becker and John Panteleimon Manoussakis No one has ever experienced the concept of ‘pain’ or ‘pleasure’ in another. We have witnessed furrowed eyebrows, tense postures, eyes wide open or shut tight; a child, shaking, curled in the corner of a room; a head, lying limply on a shoulder with the slightest hint of a smile encroaching upon the corner crevice of the mouth. We hear the moans and groans of ecstasy and defeat, voices that call us to attend to the invisible and inaccessible. I have never seen the concept in myself either, except through tense shoulders or levity in my step. Of course, we feel but do not encounter a representation of ‘feeling,’ only the tangible sensitivities and movements of a body whereby we belatedly abstract a notion of inner experience, a supposed cause of the bodily effect to which we have access. Bodies incarnate the invisible recesses of these inchoate yearnings and affectations that evade adequate representation. However, the body is often neglected within psychological discourse and, in its place, these representations of intrapsychic and intersubjective processes dominate. Perhaps this tendency in psychology is due, in part, to an ambiguity concerning the body’s status, being dominated as it is in our contemporary intellectual milieu by biological interpretations of neurochemistry and endocrinal secretions. Here, affects are analyzed in terms of valence and arousal, localized in specific brain regions. As legitimate as these explanations may be, the phenomena of unconscious activity, bodily incarnated, render these explanations ineffective in accounting for the variegated manifestations of psychic life. For whereas representations generalize and simplify, incarnations reveal truth as irreducibly singular events of the flesh.1 “[Incarnation] refers to the arrival in the flesh, to the process from which it came and in which it remains,” a revelation of life itself.2 This volume explores this phenomenology of

2  B. W. Becker and J. P. Manoussakis

incarnation as it pertains to the revelation of the invisible and intangible recesses of unconscious life in and as the body. A return to the body, should there be one for psychoanalysis, requires reexamining its meaning and the senses in which it gives itself, not only in its representational variant of res extensa (Descartes) but as a lived modality of chiasmatic crossings (Merleau-Ponty), a source of giving saturated intuition and life (Henry, Marion), and a raw animality distinct from mere materiality (Falque). Psychoanalysis has an ambiguous relationship with representation, being accused of representational excesses and yet contributing prescient insights into the unrepresentable dimensions of life,3 exemplified by the Freudian id and Lacanian real. This volume considers the status of the body in psychoanalytic theory and practice, often drawing upon phenomenological resources to explore possible links, and in this introduction we seek to offer the mise-en-scène, examining the status of the body in Lacan’s thought and bringing it into conversation with phenomenological analyses of the body. By situating Lacanian discourse alongside these philosophical explorations, we can begin to appreciate how Lacan’s sundry senses of bodily manifestations converge with and diverge from phenomenological considerations. The chapters that follow will take up these explorations of embodiment, touching upon wounds and scars (Kearney and Corpt); das Ding and the flesh (Manoussakis and Becker); ethics, desire, and the real (De Kesel and Ruti); the imaginary, objectification, and the body (Hook and Wang). A Flor de Piel: Incarnating as re-membering Artists are adept at expressing the incarnational quality of invisible life. The work of Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, in particular, is notable for her incarnational approach whereby she brings to light, and touch, the invisibility of trauma through “constructing material gestures of mourning.”4 In A Flor de Piel, part of an exhibition entitled The Materiality of Mourning, hundreds of rose petals are woven into a delicate, fragile shroud, sprawled on the ground with a vermilion hue and folded waves strewn across it. The roses, suspended through chemical treatment, reside between life and death, reflecting an ambiguity “between actions of damage and actions of healing.”5 “[I]ts decaying beauty signifying the entropic body,” wounded but resurrected.6 Each petal is exceptionally delicate, capable of tearing

Introduction  3

at the slightest touch while being stitched together. Thoughtful consideration of the work reveals the scrupulous care that went into weaving each petal. The expression ‘a flor de piel’ is an idiom indicating ‘raw emotion’ and ‘sensitivity.’ It conjures the act of bringing the innermost ‘skin’ to the surface, such as the effusive love of a friend or a mother’s grief upon losing a child.7 Salcedo’s sculpture emerged from her research into the torture and dismemberment of a female nurse, one of the many who “disappeared” during the peak of Colombia’s political killings, leaving a gaping absence without recourse to cathartic release.8 This loss is inaccessible to us, unrepresentable as death always is. But even death finds its material forms that express without representing. As Judith Butler writes, “loss must be marked and it cannot be represented; loss fractures representation itself and loss precipitates its own modes of expression.”9 Salcedo’s incarnational approach marks this invisible trauma as she reveals the victim’s pain, the agony of dis-membering, in an incarnational act of re-membering, whereby a subterranean skin rises above the ostensible. To re-member is first and foremost not to represent but to re-body, to materialize the inaccessible.10 “In this summoning of the tortured body, [A Flor de Piel] succeeds in locating a material vessel capable of communicating some of the extra-linguistic condition of enduring extreme pain.”11 In Lacanian terms, Salcedo’s art evokes the possibility of the real breaking into the symbolic, a re-membering that welcomes a stranger amidst the chain of signifiers. This is reflected in Antigone who ‘‘incarnates the sublime, bringing into that which cannot be represented: death . . . her desire for death shatters the imaginary, incarnating the real within the symbolic.”12 All remembering is not re-membering however. Rather, it often takes the form of re-presenting, which is an abstraction from incarnational acts into a series of disembodied categories that we call ‘history.’ This remembering grounds the present in the past to arrive at ‘understanding,’ which is situated within a particular constellation of signifiers and intersects with the imaginary, glossing over memory’s gaps to institute a seamless, coherent narrative. Re-membering, by contrast, confronts artists, and psychoanalysts, with an impossible lack that is never undone but still communicated in a “material vessel.” This is a “living remembrance” of the past so beautifully articulated by Proust where, in a more felicitous context, he pens these renowned lines:

4  B. W. Becker and J. P. Manoussakis

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me . . . And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray . . . when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.13 Proust’s meticulous description of tasting the madeleine, paralleling Salcedo’s sculpture, offers insight into the invisible recesses of the past that are not remembered until re-bodied. What this bodily remembering gives in intuition is not an intellectual reflection of moments with identifiable temporal coordinates but, rather, a living presence of an absent past. Memory lacks presence but makes present absence. Reflecting on her own work, Salcedo writes that “[t]he only possible response I can give in the face of irreparable absence is to produce images capable of conveying incompleteness, lack, and emptiness.”14 This incarnational gesture is a function of all living bodies, the only place where we encounter the unsymbolizable dimension of the unconscious, housing the terrifying, uncanny excess of the lost ‘Thing’ (das Ding). Saceldo’s sculpture and Proust’s prose assist us in appreciating the possibilities of unconscious incarnations that the analyst encounters and must learn to welcome without returning to an ego psychology that supports and reifies remembering as understanding. Salcedo’s sculpture illustrates how the body contains a unique logic of manifestation quite distinct from that objective body studied by science and rendered objectified by the market economy. Thus, our central claim is as follows: We must overcome a univocal understanding of the body, especially if psychoanalysis is to be situated in the living rather than the abstract. For this reason, we turn to Lacanian theory and phenomenology in this introduction for their contributions to the heterogeneity of embodied life.

Introduction  5

Imaginary and real incarnations Although Lacan is usually considered the psychoanalyst who grounds the unconscious in language, the body holds a striking, though understated, importance in his writings, taking on different forms across his work and among his three registers of the real, imaginary, and symbolic. As this section will show, the body weighs heavily in the imaginary and real. However, this may erroneously lead to the conclusion that signifiers are something other than the body, but this is not the case. As counterintuitive as it may seem, even language remains tethered to a kind of bodily materiality. In fact, Lacan’s work “proposes a profound relationship between language and the body in the coming-to-be of the subject.”15 For Lacan, “language is not immaterial. It is a subtle body, but body it is.”16 Language can be “caught up” with the imaginary body, subject to lesions and castration. Words become “trapped” or solidified in a body, particularly when the signifier is repressed, giving rise to the significations of the body, whether through hysteric conversions, somatizations, or dysmorphias. Johnston writes that “[t]he signifier is, indeed, a special sort of matter, an incarnate form of material being.”17 What it incarnates is the symptom and, thus, the truth of the body. Though the remainder of this section focuses on the imaginary and real, we must keep in mind that it is only through the signifier that incarnation is made possible, just as Salcedo’s petals incarnate the traumatic kernel of the nurse’s death. The word becomes flesh, and the flesh becomes word. Lacan’s most explicit writings on the body take place in the context of the imaginary. In fact, with some exceptions, whenever Lacan overtly discusses the body, it concerns the imaginary where the ego emerges.18 Here he also most directly engages phenomenology. In particular, he marks the influence of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment for offering a “lived experience prior to any objectification . . . and reflective analysis” that contributed to Lacan’s development of the imaginary and its theory of the ego (moi).19 During the mirror stage of the imaginary, the infant grasps an image of itself as a unified body, furthering Freud’s proposal that “[t]he ego is first and foremost a bodily ego.”20 The child relies on the primacy of visual perception, a sense that develops earlier than others according to Lacan, which provides this imagined wholeness prototypically demonstrated in one’s mirror reflection.21 The newly formed body-image offers the child an “envelope of mastery” that contains the otherwise fragmentary and threatening experience of the

6  B. W. Becker and J. P. Manoussakis

bodily real.22 Lacan conceptualizes this pre-imaginary real as an undifferentiated, unsymbolized dimension of bodily existence, a frightening state of fragmentation that “the visionary Hieronymus Bosch fixed for all time in painting.”23 It is “the plentitude of the pre-Symbolic flesh, the brute, raw immediacy of the body prior to its being colonized and overwritten by the signifiers of the big Other.”24 Following the installation of the symbolic, this unaccounted excess is never subsumed by the body-image and never fully articulated in the symbolic order. Instead, it lives on as an immortal state of undeadness that now finds expression as “an insubstantial, ephemeral nothingness, a fleeting non-presence haunting the constituted field of reality and rendering it ‘not whole.’”25 Lacan’s later lectures shift from the real as a source of unmediated bodily excess to this post-symbolic expression of a lack and “surplus effect of representation” that moves from the “prelinguistic” to a “bodily consequences of the insufficiency of the symbolic law.”26 Having entered the imaginary and its narcissistic fantasy of wholeness, the child must now contend with limits (i.e. finitude, death), experienced most immediately as the absence of the mother. Just as the infant sought to master its bodily fragmentation, the child now faces the challenge of mastering the mother’s absence, which it attempts to do with the signifier (exemplified by Freud’s description of the “fort/da” episode).27 Yet, as with Salcedo’s sculpture, absence is still present and never fully mastered. The unmitigated lack of the mother gives birth to desire that, unlike need, never achieves complete satisfaction and, unlike demand, has no proper object. The symbolic bars the newly born subject (je) from actualizing its desire. Emerging from the constitutive lack of the symbolic order, desire no longer pursues the ‘Thing’ it originally sought, what Žižek calls the “corpo-real” and where the real mother is situated. Instead, desire pursues a residual echo of ‘the Thing’ in the form of objet a, which structures desire and offers partial satisfaction. This transition is most palpable in the psychopathological fetishes of individuals but can be identified systemically through commodity fetishism and racism.28 The object serves as a gravitational force around which desire circles. However, objet a is not permanently located in any particular object but in the lack that those objects offer, as evidenced by the rapid succession of objects to endlessly fascinate us in this market economy. Is it possible to plunge back into the real in pursuit of das Ding (assuming, for a moment, the question has merit)?29 Following the inspiration of

Introduction  7

Salcedo’s sculpture, we are inclined to view this revolutionary plunge as an incarnational act of re-membering through “material gestures of mourning.” Materiality and absence are not counterfactual realities in the psyche. Summarizing Žižek’s interpretation, Johnston writes that the “Lacanian Real is simultaneously the positive plentitude of material, bodily being as well as the negative void of absence evading incarnation and defying representation; it both overflows and withdraws from the register of the Symbolic, being a surplus and a deficit all at once.”30 The work of art is a case-in-point. The invisible grund in A Flor de Piel is the gaping absence opened by death. The artist, in weaving a rose petal tapestry, materializes absence through a visible object, fragile and delicate, that, in turn, calls us back to an original, invisible loss. The object standing in for this lack is objet a, which requires a parallax viewing to behold its invisible incarnational act amidst the object’s visible banality. Boothby notes that “the objet a marks a locus of indeterminacy, it is linked to bodily structures, but is also crucially distinct from all embodiment.”31 The first objet a is the mother’s breast, which “becomes a part of the child’s body in the form of the objet a. Because the a has become separated and lost but is also included within the body of the child, it becomes the ‘presence of a void.’”32 The ego seeks to cover over these absences through fantasy, only to burn out in melancholic dismay. To turn melancholy into mourning requires a remembering that is not objectifying but incarnational, that embraces the tension of absence amidst presence, and is incarnated in the signifier that embodies this lack, a material stranger amidst the adopted chain of signifiers. The flesh: Imaginary or real? What then is the relation between, on the one hand, the bodies of psychoanalysis with, on the other, phenomenologies of the body? This question requires understanding a crucial distinction made in phenomenology between what Husserl first described as the living body or flesh (Leib), and the objectified physical body (Körper), which laid the groundwork for subsequent phenomenologists to develop.33 The body (Körper) conforms to the measurable coordinates of spatial extension. It is a kind of “corpse,”34 amenable to its medicalization in contemporary psychology.35 In contrast, the phenomenological notion of flesh (Leib) specifies the invisible livedexperience of the visible body. The flesh is not an object of study like the body for it cannot be measured nor dissected. The flesh of the other is

8  B. W. Becker and J. P. Manoussakis

inaccessible to me except through the mediation of my own flesh, lending to what Henry describes as an auto-affection. It serves as a center of orientation and medium for all perception.36 Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty maintains a special place here in light of his direct engagement with psychoanalysis and, in turn, Lacan’s explicit connection between the imaginary and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. Despite Lacan linking the ego with the lived-body, the imaginary appears to reflect features more consistent with the body (Körper) than the flesh (Leib). This imaginary ego serves as the seat of primary narcissism and the beginnings of alienation. It is a false identification with an adopted specular image. While it constitutes a unifying sense of wholeness as the flesh constitutes a unifying lived-experience, the ego-body, for Lacan, is illusory and objectifying. It is unified in the same sense a group of outsiders are perceived as homogenous. It is a unity that unduly oversimplifies. Within phenomenology, the body (Körper) is an abstraction, removed from a primordial living flesh (Leben-Leib). The body resides ‘over there,’ constituted, one may say imagined, as a spatially locatable and restricted object of inquiry. While from a naturalistic attitude Körper is assumed to be the most elemental substance, such a conclusion is arrived at by abstracting from life itself, just as causes are an abstraction from effects rather than preceding them.37 As the imaginary body is secondary to the primordial bodily real, the Körper is secondary to the Leib. In his later writings, Merleau-Ponty discusses another dimension of flesh as an “anonymity innate to Myself” that precedes representation.38 This notion of embodiment is not only a source of intentionality expressed through motility but a unified perceptual experience of the incarnate flesh emerging from the chiasmatic crossings between object/subject and self/ other, a Mobius strip between inside and outside reflecting a “reversibility” between touching and that which is touched.39 This “flesh of the world” is an “anonymous intercorporeity that precedes the division between subject and object,”40 expressing the “thickness” between self and thing, and is the “sole means . . . to go unto the heart of the things, by making myself a world and by making them flesh.”41 Flesh is where the things themselves are given, “concentrat[ing] the mystery of its scattered visibility.”42 From a psychoanalytic perspective, we might say that this notion of flesh returns us to the primordial unity of infancy between mother and child, something forgotten over time and through socialization.43 As such, it is not surprising

Introduction  9

that Merleau-Ponty noted a foundational role of flesh for psychoanalysis, writing in his working notes that “the philosophy of Freud is not a philosophy of the body but of the flesh— . . . The Id, the unconscious— and the Ego (correlative) to be understood on the basis of the flesh.”44 Other phenomenologists have picked up on this link as well. Marion writes that “[i]t is unquestionable that an unconscious inhabits me, and keeps me busy-my flesh that arouses itself.”45 Manoussakis has recently furthered the phenomenological connection, writing that the flesh “remains unsaid and unsayable, more intimate to me than my body, yet irreducible to any form of signification or reflection . . . occup[ying] the place of das Ding.”46 This description of the flesh would seem to suggest that it offers a phenomenological analog to the Lacanian real more apt than the imaginary. However, an important difference between the Lacanian real and a phenomenology of the flesh is that the former lacks any sense of a psychosomatic unity and does not constitute a lived-experience in the phenomenological sense. As Hook discusses in his chapter, Lacan held reservations toward phenomenology concerning a possible perpetuation of the “myth of immediate experience” and its association with consciousness, perception, and interiority. The phenomenological notion of flesh as a unified lived experience speaks to “the tendency of philosophy to succumb to the temptations of Imaginary closure.”47 For this reason, we can see why Lacan draws upon Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to develop his notion of the imaginary rather than the real. The raw materiality of the real is not some unified, subjective, lived-experience but rather a sphere of chaotic, violent drives. Johnston articulates well the differences between the phenomenological notion of a lived-body and the concept of a transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity offered by Lacan and Žižek, arguing that phenomenologists, most notably Merleau-Ponty, respond with an anti-Cartesian attempt to undo mind-body dualism and replace it with a unified lived-body. However, this “blissful union of ‘self’ and ‘stuff’ risks resulting in a conflict free model of subjectivity. Embodiment theory threatens unjustifiably to downplay the various ways in which the body becomes a burdensome problem, something violently dis-identified with by the ‘I.’”48 In contrast, the “I” of psychoanalysis emerges as a negation of our primordial materiality. The mind and body are “negatively related” in a kind of “oppositional discord” whereby subjectivity represents an “immanent

10  B. W. Becker and J. P. Manoussakis

genesis” of corporality that is, nonetheless, in “antagonistic opposition to this primordial material Grund.”49 In situating the imaginary and real within phenomenology’s distinction between body and flesh, we are not left with any simple resolutions here. However, recent developments in phenomenology suggest other possibilities for further exploration. For instance, Jean-Luc Marion’s discussion of the flesh shifts away from its articulation as a unified lived-experience to a kind of counter-experience that imposes itself with an excess of intuition.50 It precedes le sujet and gives rise to l’adonné, the one who receives itself from what is given. The flesh is passively received in a manner that surpasses any possible concept or understanding, an excess that principally reveals itself as suffering.51 Henry, whom Marion is most directly influenced by here, speaks of the flesh as the auto-revelation of life. The flesh is the inescapability of life itself, with its “pathos and suffering,” bursting through us in “thought’s unthought.”52 This formulation of the flesh, in contrast to Merleau-Ponty’s, perhaps offers greater convergences with the Lacanian real. However, another issue concerns the radical passivity of the flesh found in these phenomenologists, which appears at odds with the Lacanian real’s active dynamism within the psychic economy. The bodily real is not passive (even assuming a passivity anterior to inactivity and activity). It does more than receive but rather serves as an active force in a manner that bears a closer resemblance to Nietzsche’s philosophy of the body. Babich presents such an argument, writing “that Nietzsche’s concept of nature . . . is a notion corresponding to the value of the register of the Real for Lacan.”53 Another phenomenologist, Emmanuel Falque, shares this concern regarding phenomenology’s emphasis on a unifying lived-experience of the flesh and its passivity. Falque argues that the phenomenological notions of body and flesh leave out the “organicity” of the body in its raw animality with its forceful and chaotic passions and drives. This primordial bodily chaos “overflows, without ever being received or transformed into consciousness,”54 reaffirming Nietzsche’s original claim that “[m]y body is then unconscious.”55 Falque’s proposal for a dimension of bodily chaos, or raw animality, as an active force appears distinct from the extant phenomenological literature on the flesh and provides potentially fruitful intersections with the Lacanian real. In language that sounds remarkably Lacanian, he writes that “[c]haos remains as a fissure, or gap, in the abyss

Introduction  11

of all existence . . . at once yawning gap and opening . . . and mixture and confusion,” a “non-signifying Chaos,” that goes deep down in our emotions as well as into our drives and into our physiological and instinctive bodies . . . It starts as a kind of bottomless descent into our own animality . . . it ensures that our embodiment, or our drives, reach into what we live without ever being able to signify what it is that we live.56 Falque continues: “[t]he organicity of the animal, as of our own bodies, comes first from its materiality as subject to decay (putrefaction).”57 This parallels closely Žižek’s interpretation of the real as an “obscene mass of raw, putrefied flesh, palpitating slime. Behind the calm, banal façade of reality . . . lies ‘the horror of the Real’ as ‘putrefied flesh,’ as ‘the disgusting substance of life’ and the ‘ugliness’ of jouissance.”58 For Falque, this notion of organic, active flesh (Fleisch) offers a missing dimension of bodily experience not found in the objectified, extended body (Körper) and the living, passive flesh (Leib). And so we find here three bodies that may correspond to the three Lacanian registers of the real, imaginary, and symbolic, respectively, giving rise to a future possibility of a psychoanalysis where no aspect of psychic life is conceived separately from a dimension of embodiment.59 Explorations of unconscious incarnations How one resolves these interdisciplinary tensions has several implications for a working anthropology that organizes our understanding of psychological difficulties and corresponding therapeutic approach. The chapters in this volume raise distinct questions that touch upon various aspects of this volume’s central concern regarding embodiment in Freudian/ Lacanian psychoanalysis. The following will briefly describe the contents of each chapter, organized in pairs (main chapter and response) that address particular psychoanalytic questions with significant ramifications for embodied life. Our first chapter is by Richard Kearney, and is entitled “The Hermeneutics of Wounds.” It explores the notion of the wounded body, which can be healed, though not cured, through narrative catharsis and carnal workthrough. Kearney turns to stories of wounded healers in Odysseus, Oedipus,

12  B. W. Becker and J. P. Manoussakis

and Chiron to establish literary examples for this therapeutic transformation. Each character carries traumatic wounds, which are timeless and unrepresentable, but are manifested in the touchable and temporal mark of scars, a form a ‘proto-writing.’ This brings to mind Salcedo’s A Flor de Piel, which incarnates the invisible trauma in the materiality of woven petals. Kearney argues that through narrativizing trauma, a form of talkingcure that transforms our signifiers, we can endeavor to turn melancholy into mourning. Guiding this process, the wounded healer requires tactfulness, “[a]n art of ‘exquisite empathy’” in assisting the wounded patient through a process of narrative catharsis and carnal working-through. Elizabeth Corpt’s response essay, “Encountering the Psychoanalyst’s Suffering” (Chapter 2), speaks to this tactfulness in her own encounter with a patient who expressed a wish to “touch” her therapist’s wounds, to “know her tender spots.” Corpt indicates that there is something about the openness and vulnerability in seeking this ‘touch,’ opening up the possibility for a therapeutic transformation. John Manoussakis’ “The Place of das Ding: Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, and Religion” (Chapter 3) explores the relation of flesh to the Lacanian das Ding. He argues that the void of das Ding is the place where the flesh resides yet the flesh itself is housed in a second, broken body that imprisons it. The metaphor of the olive jar is used to illustrate this point. The void of the jar functions as the place where the flesh resides but the void itself is housed in the outer layer of the jar (body) that both protects and restrains das Ding from pouring out in unmediated jouissance. Brian Becker’s response, “The Cost of das Ding” (Chapter 4), shifts from a question of ‘where’ and ‘when’ to a question of ‘how much.’ This chapter explores Lacan’s characterization of the excremental gift in light of the ways the symbolic economy ‘contains’ its excess by placing upon das Ding a price to pay for becoming a subject. Through this sacrificial exchange, the child learns to withhold its gift, laying the foundation for the alienating effects of the symbolic that pushes out that excremental remainder that does not conform to the logic of the symbolic economy. Marc De Kesel’s “The Real of Ethics: On a Widespread Misconception” (Chapter 5) addresses an ongoing debate as to whether it is possible and even preferable at times for one to ‘plunge’ into the real or to always maintain a safe distance from it. De Kesel argues against a trend in recent Lacanian scholarship that interprets Lacan as arguing for an “ethics of the real” rather than an “ethics of desire.” His reading of Lacan leads him to

Introduction  13

conclude that although desire is oriented toward the real, Lacanian “ethics is about recovering our way of becoming the subject of . . . desire again.” To plunge into the real would amount to a self-annihilation. Rather than transgress the symbolic, De Kesel argues that we should transform it, through sublimation, offering the possibility of partial satisfaction without being destroyed by the unmediated jouissance of das Ding. Although agreeing with the main outlines of De Kesel’s argument, Mari Ruti, in “The Ethics of the Real: A Response to De Kesel” (Chapter 6), argues that the “ethics of the real” and the “ethics of desire” cannot be fully dissociated. Rather, she claims that “signification (sublimation) without the input of the real will remain anemic.” It is by elevating the object of desire to the level of the Thing (das Ding) that we find the courage to engage in rebellious acts that seek to overcome oppressive social forces. Derek Hook’s “Lacan and the Psychological” (Chapter 7) argues how the discipline of psychology with its “objectifying tendency” principally functions within the imaginary and ultimately “fails the subject” by both attempting to “grapple with something . . . ostensibly ‘more primary’ than spoken language,” and inordinately emphasizing and bolstering the ego, particularly through linking treatment to adaptation. Yue Jennifer Wang’s response, “(Ab)normality as Spectrum: Merleau-Ponty, post-Kleinians, and Lacan on Autism” (Chapter 8), takes up Hook’s analysis to address the clinical implications of the imaginary where the symbolic is foreclosed in childhood autism. In particular, she addresses the lack of “bodily boundedness” in autism that leads to troubled relationships and other perturbations. Using both psychoanalytic and phenomenological resources, Wang draws upon Merleau-Ponty to demonstrate how his notion of flesh offers the possibility for situating this lack of bodily boundedness within the larger context of a shared human experience of the lived-body. Conclusion It is appropriate to conclude this introduction where this volume picks up in the next few chapters: on touch, a much-neglected sense in Western philosophy.60 As Jean-Luc Nancy claims, “[t]here’s no taboos more widespread than the taboo of touch, from the many rules and hang-ups of certain rituals . . . to current rules of contact.”61 What is taboo is forbidden from being touched. Taboo, as the symbolic law, restrains and restricts the flesh. If the body remains an unspoken remnant within Lacan’s work, touch

14  B. W. Becker and J. P. Manoussakis

is marked even more by its absence. When Lacan addresses the senses, his focus is principally on vision and hearing. The Body . . . has a few orifices, the most important of which is the ear because it can’t be sealed, shut, or closed off. It is because of this that there is a response in the body to what I have called the voice. The trouble is surely that there is not only the ear. The gaze also puts up some stiff competition.62 If vision is primary for the imaginary and hearing for the symbolic, then, though Lacan never makes this connection, it would appear that touch is the sense most primary for the real. This parallels a phenomenological exploration of the senses where Manoussakis writes “[i]f sight has the eye as its organ and hearing works through the ear, the sensorium of touch is none other than our flesh.”63 Despite Lacan’s claim, vision is not the most developed sense in early childhood, but rather touch (and smell). The child, barely able to see its mother’s face, needs only the felt-touch of the mother’s body to locate its source of life-giving sustenance, and at that moment, arises the comforting contact among bodies, infant and mother. It is a primordial form of pre-symbolic communication that is ultimately lost in the process of being an alienated subject. Herein we suggest the sense that precedes the vision of the imaginary is the touch of the real and the real of touch. By bringing the phenomenology of the body and psychoanalysis together, this volume seeks to evoke a desire for an incarnational approach; to break through the discipline’s tacit intellectual taboos toward the body by, as Salcedo writes, looking for “the most fragile way of touching the untouchable” to encounter “a vulnerable body.”64 A psychoanalysis that seeks to enact the transformational possibilities of the real within the symbolic has recourse to touch as a non-representational path for connecting the signifier with the unsignifiable, visible with the invisible, presence with absence: in short, to incarnate the unconscious. Notes   1 The “message of the incarnation is neither an ‘idea’ nor a ‘system’ (that would be an oxymoron), no matter how wonderful or lovely—it is flesh: body and blood.” John Panteleimon Manoussakis, God After Metaphysics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 53. Of course, “the incarnation” and incarnation more generally are not the same and yet the analogical imagination

Introduction  15

opens up the space for cross-fertilization between the discourse of theology and that of phenomenology and psychoanalysis.   2 Michel Henry, “Incarnation and the Problem of Touch,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 136.   3 See Michel Henry’s argument in The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Brick (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993).  4 Katherine Brinson, “The Muted Drum: Doris Salcedo’s Material Elegies,” in Doris Salcedo, ed. Julie Rodrigues Widholm and Madeleine Grynsztejn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 209.   5 Ibid., 211.   6 She adds that the rose “might also suggest an act of transubstantiation, as the wafer-like rose petals . . . are symbolically transmuted to flesh while simultaneously achieving the appearance of ‘eternal life.’” Ibid., 212.   7 The literal translation from Spanish is “like the flower of skin” and perhaps the best English, yet still crude, equivalent is to “wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve,” which doesn’t quite capture the bodily meaning in Spanish.   8 Salcedo writes, “The genesis of A Flor de Piel arose when I began to wonder: how could I initiate even the slightest movement toward a tormented body, even if only to present a flower offering? At this point I began looking for the most fragile way of touching the untouchable . . . It was at the outer limits of the fragility that I encountered a vulnerable body.” Doris Salcedo, “A Work in Mourning,” in Doris Salcedo, ed. Julie Rodrigues Widholm and Madeleine Grynsztejn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 216.   9 Quoted in Brinson, “The Muted Drum,” 209. 10 Franck, summarizing Husserl’s analysis of internal time consciousness, writes: “The retention itself is not a looking-back that makes the elapsed phase into an object . . .” Didier Franck, Flesh and Body: On the Phenomenology of Husserl (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 213 n.7. Quoting Husserl, he writes: “[Fresh remembrance] is an intentional modification of the realm of pure passivity it takes places . . . without any participation of the activity radiating from the ego-centre.” Ibid. 11 Brinson, “The Muted Drum,” 211. 12 Marcus Pound, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma (London: SCM Press, 2007), 109, italics added. 13 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1: Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Random House, 1981), 48–50, Italics added. 14 Salcedo, “A Work in Mourning,” 215. 15 Charles W. Bonner, “The Status and Significance of the Body in Lacan’s Imaginary and Symbolic Orders,” in The Body, ed. Donn Welton (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1999), 232. 16 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 248. 17 Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008). 18 Such as where he writes, “The idea of the self, the self as a body, carries weight. This is what is called the Ego.” Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques

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Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016), 129. 19 See “Presentation on Psychical Causality” in Lacan, Écrits, 146. This essay was originally delivered in 1946, almost three years before delivering his most notable formulation of the mirror stage in the essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” 20 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. J. Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1962), 20. 21 Although Merleau-Ponty appears to have influenced Lacan at this point, Merleau-Ponty, in turn, notes Lacan’s contribution, writing that “[f]or psychoanalysts the visual is not simply one type of sensibility among others . . . With the visual experience of the self, there is . . . the advent of a new mode of relatedness to self . . . The sensory functions themselves are thus redefined in proportion to the contribution they can make to the existence of the subject and the structures they can offer for the development of that existence.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” trans. William Cobb, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 137–138. 22 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 170–171. 23 See Lacan’s essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” in Écrits, 78. 24 Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 147. 25 Ibid. 26 Charles Shepherdson, “A Pound of Flesh: Lacan’s Reading of ‘The Visible and the Invisible,’” Diacritics 27, 4(1997), 7 n.9. 27 Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits. 28 See Sheldon George, Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (Wako, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016). In this work, George argues that “whiteness” serves as a master signifier that attempts to suture the gap between the real, imaginary, and symbolic. 29 The question of ethics and whether we should enter the real is an ongoing debate, as we will see the following chapters by De Kesel and Ruti. 30 Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 109. 31 Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan (New York: Routledge, 2001), 242. 32 Raul Moncayo, Evolving Lacanian Perspectives for Clinical Psychoanalysis: On Narcissism, Sexuation, and the Phases/Faces of Analysis in Contemporary Culture (London: Karnac Books, 2008), 10. 33 French translations of Husserl utilize the word ‘la chair’ for ‘Leib’ and ‘le corps’ for ‘Körper.’ The terms ‘la chair’ was translated into English as ‘flesh,’ which has led to some confusion as the word ‘flesh’ in English can connote a piece of dead meat, which is more analogous to an objective body. We will continue with the word ‘flesh’ in keeping with the traditional translation. Special thanks to Emmanuel Falque for pointing out this issue of translation.

Introduction  17

34 Descartes writes: “I considered myself, firstly, as having a face, hands, arms, and the whole machine made up of flesh and bones, such as it appears in a corpse and which I designated by the name of body.” René Descartes, The Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 104. The link between corpse and Körper is strengthened in their shared etymology. 35 This is not to deny the proliferation of “body therapies” to have emerged in recent years, whether these integrate some form of eastern practice (e.g. yoga) or body process work well established by gestalt therapists. However, as Colette Soler argues, these “physical therapies are techniques of the signifier . . . the aim is to make the body fit into an order.” Colette Soler, “The Body in the Teaching of Jacques Lacan,” Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research 6 (1995), 6–38. 36 For Husserl’s analysis of the body see §§18 and 35–42 in Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy, Book 2: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989). 37 Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. J. L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 38 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 139. 39 “The Flesh is that which is ontologically prior to the distinction between sensible object and sensing subject, as well as prior to the distinction between the seer and the visible.” Lysane Fauvel, “The Blind Spot of the Sovereign Eye: On the Gaze in Merleau-Ponty and Lacan,” Philosophy Study 2, 7 (2012), 453. 40 Ibid., 452. 41 Ibid., 135. 42 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 136. 43 If we are to take Sartre’s account seriously that Merleau-Ponty “never recovered from an incomparable childhood . . . that private world of happiness from which only age drives us,” we gain a sense of Merleau-Ponty’s desire to return to “the pre-reflective world of experience . . . to recapture the immediacy of his happy childhood.” Quoted in Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 391. 44 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 270. 45 Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. S. E. Lewis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 142. 46 John Panteleimon Manoussakis, The Ethics of Time: A Phenomenology and Hermeneutics of Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 155. 47 Tom Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 123. 48 Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 53. 49 Ibid., 57. 50 Marion’s work on the flesh are found primarily in two texts: The Erotic Phenomenon (op. cit.) and In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. R. Horner and V. Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002).

18  B. W. Becker and J. P. Manoussakis

51 “The essential property of my flesh has to do with its suffering, its passivity, and its receptivity.” Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess, 87. Henry writes: “For our flesh is nothing other than what suffers and undergoes, and supports itself and thus experiences itself and enjoys itself through continually renewed impressions.” Henry, “Incarnation and the Problem of Touch,” 130. 52 Henry, Genealogy of Psychoanalysis. 53 See Babette Babich, “On the Order of the Real: Nietzsche and Lacan,” Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections 13 (1996), 55. 54 Emmanuel Falque, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist, trans. George Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 22. 55 Ibid., 107. It should be noted that Falque sees Nietzsche’s formulation of this unconscious to be more radical than “Freudianism” which “does not work as well as Nietzsche’s approach here because it fixes drives to some particular end, whether they are repressed or disguised (sublimation).” Ibid., 27. A debatable question here is whether Freud would fit in with this “Freudianism,” and certainly Lacan would not. 56 Ibid., 16, 23, 26. 57 Ibid., 100. 58 Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 24. 59 Could the flesh (Leib) be thought in terms of the symbolic? Falque seems to suggest so in his articulation of a “signifying flesh.” Locating Leib at the level of the symbolic would support the proposal by other phenomenologists mentioned who link it with the unconscious. However this would be the symbolic unconscious rather than the unconscious real. As already mentioned, Lacan considers the signifier to be a kind of subtle body where its signifiers are expressed in the body itself as symptom. I (Brian) have further developed the comparison between Lacan and Falque. See Brian W. Becker, “From Psychoanalysis to Metamorphosis: The Lacanian Limits of Žižek’s Theology,” in Žižek and Christianity, ed. Sotiris Mitralexis and Dionysis Skliris (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). 60 Richard Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 61 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Rethinking Corpus,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 81. 62 Lacan, Seminar XXIII, 9. 63 Manoussakis, God After Metaphysics, 120. 64 Salcedo, “A Work in Mourning,” 216.

Bibliography Babich, Babette, “On the Order of the Real: Nietzsche and Lacan.” Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections 13 (1996), 43–68. Becker, Brian W. “From Psychoanalysis to Metamorphosis: The Lacanian Limits of Žižek’s Theology.” In Žižek and Christianity, edited by Sotiris Mitralexis and Dionysis Skliris. New York: Routledge, forthcoming.

Introduction  19

Bonner, Charles W. “The Status and Significance of the Body in Lacan’s Imaginary and Symbolic Orders.” In The Body, edited by Donn Welton, 232–251. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1999. Boothby, Richard. Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan. New York: Routledge, 2001. Brinson, Katherine. “The Muted Drum: Doris Salcedo’s Material Elegies.” In Doris Salcedo, edited by Julie Rodrigues Widholm and Madeleine Grynsztejn, 209–214. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Descartes, René. Meditations. Translated by F. E. Sutcliffe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968. Eyers, Tom. Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real.’   New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Falque, Emmanuel. The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist. Translated by George Hughes. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011/2016. Fauvel, Lysane. “The Blind Spot of the Sovereign Eye: On the Gaze in MerleauPonty and Lacan.” Philosophy Study 2, 7 (2012), 450–462. Franck, Didier. Flesh and Body: On the Phenomenology of Husserl. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Translated by J. Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1962. George, Sheldon. Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity. Wako, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016. Henry, Michel. The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis. Translated by D. Brick. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Henry, Michel. “Incarnation and the Problem of Touch.” In Carnal Hermeneutics, edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, 128–144. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy, Book 2: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989. Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008. Kearney, Richard. “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics.” In Carnal Hermeneutics, edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, 15–56. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by John Forrester. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by A. R. Price. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016. Manoussakis, John Panteleimon. The Ethics of Time: A Phenomenology and Hermeneutics of Change. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

20  B. W. Becker and J. P. Manoussakis

Manoussakis, John Panteleimon. God After Metaphysics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007. Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by J. L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by S. E. Lewis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Marion, Jean-Luc. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by R. Horner and V. Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Child’s Relations with Others.” Translated by William Cobb. In The Primacy of Perception, edited by James M. Edie, 96–155. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Moncayo, Raul. Evolving Lacanian Perspectives for Clinical Psychoanalysis: On Narcissism, Sexuation, and the Phases/Faces of Analysis in Contemporary Culture. London: Karnac Books, 2008. Moran, Dermot. Introduction to Phenomenology. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Rethinking Corpus.” In Carnal Hermeneutics, edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, 77–91. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Pound, Marcus. Theology, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma. London: SCM Press, 2007. Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1: Swann’s Way. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. New York: Random House, 1981. Salcedo, Doris. “A Work in Mourning.” In Doris Salcedo, edited by Julie Rodrigues Widholm and Madeleine Grynsztejn, 215–217. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Shepherdson, Charles. “A Pound of Flesh: Lacan’s Reading of ‘The Visible and the Invisible.’” Diacritics 27, 4 (1997), 70–86. Soler, Colette. “The Body in the Teaching of Jacques Lacan.” Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research 6 (1995), 6–38.

Chapter 1

The hermeneutics of wounds Richard Kearney

How are we to ‘interpret’ psychic traumas which appear to defy meaning and language? Traumatic wounds are by definition unspeakable. Yet from the earliest of literature, we find tales of primal trauma which tell of a certain catharsis through storytelling and touch. And we witness a special role played in such tales by figures called ‘wounded healers.’ By way of exploring this cathartic paradox of ‘telling the untellable,’ I will look at some examples from both classical Greek mythology and contemporary literature (including Freudian psychoanalysis, Joycean fiction and Holocaust testimony). My basic hypothesis is that while traumatic wounds cannot be cured, they can at times be healed—and that such healing may take place through a twin therapy of (1) narrative catharsis and (2) carnal working-through. In short, healing by word-touch. A double transformation of incurable wounds into healable scars. Originary stories of wounding I begin with some Greek tales of wounded healers—Odysseus, Oedipus, and Chiron. Odysseus

In Homer’s Odyssey, the hero Odysseus is condemned to act out the wound of his own inherited failure, his own existential finitude, again and again. The name Odysseus means ‘bearer of pain’ and we learn during the course of the poem that he is carrying wounds both suffered and inflicted by his forebears. Indeed, the ultimate act of recognition when Odysseus returns

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to Ithaca coincides with the exposure of his childhood scar, identified by his nurse Euryclea. The poem begins with Odysseus absenting himself from the wounds of his birth and upbringing, his autochthonous origins in Ithaca, sailing off to heroic glory. But his attempts to become an immortal warrior are constantly thwarted by reminders of his mortality (the brutal carnage of Troy and subsequent calamities and failures). The decisive rupture of the lure of Calypso is central to this disillusionment—Odysseus chooses earthly nourishment over godly ambrosia. Originally leaving Ithaca as an aspirant hero, Ulysses returns as a beggar: a lowly outcast finally recognized by the smell of his flesh (by his dog, Argos) and the touch of a scar on his thigh (by his nurse, Euryclea). It is significant that Euryclea only touches her master’s scar after a very detailed narrative about how Ulysses received the original wound in a childhood hunting incident with his grandfather, Autolycus (Odyssey 19.393–469)—a typical example of transgenerational trauma.1 The narrative ‘working through’ leading up to the Euryclea’s touch, takes all of seventy-seven lines. The climactic moment of ‘recognition’ (anagnorisis), in short, takes the form of a double catharsis of narrativity and tactility. The hero comes to final self-knowledge by both acknowledging and embodying the story of his own primal wounding. Telemachus, expecting a triumphant victor to return, does not at first recognize his own father. He is so fixated on his great expectations of the paterfamilias that he does not see the wound on his body. The son is blinded by illusory imagos, and delusions abound until he finally acknowledges, sharing food in a swineherd’s (Eumaeus’) hut, that the mortified stranger before him is in fact his real father. Tasting simple fruits of the earth is how they finally come together as host and guest: hospitality as antidote to the hostile curse of fate (ate). The word Homer uses for ‘scar’ in this final recognition episode is oulen (Odyssey 19.391). It is a term often associated in Greek literature with ‘trauma,’ as in Plato’s Gorgias, 524c, “oulas en to somati . . . hypo traumaton,” where oulen means both ‘trace’ and ‘scar.’ While the wound is timeless, the scar appears in time: It is a carnal trace which can change and alter over time though it never disappears. Scars are written on the body; they are forms of proto-writing. And narrative catharsis is a process of working through such carnal traces. Put simply: While the wounds remain timeless and non-representable, scars are the marks left on the flesh

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to be seen and touched, told and read. Scars are engraved wounds that may, or may not, be healed.2 What I am suggesting—following Aristotle’s notion of mythos-mimesis in the Poetics—is that certain kinds of narrative may bring about a catharsis of our most basic passions, through a “the purgation of pity and fear.” But such healing is to be understood in a very specific manner—not as facile closure or completion but as open-ended story: namely, as a storytelling which forever fails to cure trauma but never fails to try to heal it. As Samuel Beckett’s unnamable narrator puts it: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” And in the very effort to narrate the unnarratable, there is, curiously, not only therapeutic caring but pleasure: the pleasurable purgation of pity and fear by pity and fear.3 More precisely, we interpret the role of narrative catharsis here as a twofold transformation of the passions (pathemata)— namely, the distilling of (1) pathological pity (elias) into compassion and (2) of pathological fear (phobos) into serenity. Compassion spells a proper way of being ‘near’ to pain; serenity a proper way of remaining ‘far’ from it (keeping a healthy distance, as we say, lest we over-identify or fuse with the other’s pain). Catharsis, according to Aristotle, makes for healthy citizens. Purged emotions lead to practical wisdom. Oedipus

Now to my second story—Oedipus. It has been noted by Lévi-Strauss and others that the proper names for Oedipus and his patrilineal ancestors all refer to ‘wounds’ which cause difficulty in walking: Labdacos (lame), Laios (left-sided), Oedipus (swollen footed). Each of these figures acts out the crimes and wounds of the previous generation: Laios raped the son of his host, Pelops, thereby committing the equivalent of incest and the betrayal of hospitality. His double transgression replicates the curse (ate) of his own father, Labdacos, and is repeated by Oedipus in the next generation. This fatal trans-generational lineage comes under the heading of the ‘House of Labdacos’ and involves a recurring acting out of unspoken traumata (Greek for wounds). This recurrence of trauma (inflicted or suffered) takes place over three generations, and the only solution to this curse of cyclical repetition is, it appears, the conversion of the untold wound into a form of enacted storytelling—in this case, the symbolic emplotment of Oedipus’ tragic narrative. Only this, according to Lévi-Strauss, can affect a cathartic

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transformation of passions which suspends the compulsive acting out of trauma. The basic thesis, in sum, is that myths are machines for the purging of wounds: strategies for resolving at a symbolic level what remains irresolvable at the level of lived empirical experience. (Oedipus’ selfblinding at his own hands is another aspect of wounding-into-wisdom, as the blind healer Tiresias also reminds us. The double sense of blesser as blessing and wounding captures this). Let me briefly unpack Lévi-Strauss’ argument. Human existence is cursed by a tragic, because impossible, desire to escape the trauma of our autochthonous origins. Namely, the desire to buck our finitude—to deny death. (As Levinas puts it, “l’existence est notre traumatisme originel”). In the Oedipus cycle, this tragic curse is epitomized, as noted, by the patrilineal names for wounds that bind us to the earth. And the poetic role of muthosmimesis—that comprises drama for Aristotle—is to narrate both our heroic desire to transcend our terrestrial nature and our mortal inability to do so! Our effort to surmount our earthly finitude is repeatedly acted out in our overcoming of monsters: Cadmos kills the dragon, Oedipus defeats the Sphinx. But these attempts to overcome mortality are ultimately impossible for we are scarred by irreconcilable fidelities: to both earth and sky, to immanence and transcendence, matter and spirit, nature and culture. So for Lévi-Strauss, great mythic narratives—beginning with the synchronic myths of la pensée sauvage—are attempts to procure cathartic relief by balancing these binary opposites in symbolic constellations or ‘mythemes.’ In a word: What is impossible in reality becomes possible in fiction.4 Let us return to the plot. Oedipus finally comes to a recognition of his traumatic finitude—and the transgenerational crimes of his forebears— through a series of woundings culminating in the removal of his eyes. This ultimately leads, not to curing (that is impossible, the eyes are gone forever), but to a certain cathartic healing through: 1 a new kind of vision (he sees differently); 2 a new kind of touching (as he is led by the hand of Antigone); and 3 a new kind of speaking: his final words at Colonus where he accepts his estranged outsider status as a mortal human being. Oedipus’ wound has finally become a scar, a witness for later generations to recall. His empty tomb serves as a talisman for Athens. (We might recall here, apropos of Oedipus’ wounding-into-wisdom that those who remind

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him of his errant wandering and send him back to Ithaca are the blind Tiresias and the ghost of his dead mother. It is two wounded healers who guide Odysseus home to be healed by the touch and testimony of Euryclea— the nursemaid who bathes his childhood scar and narrates the origin of his wound). Chiron

The woundings of Odysseus and Oedipus recall a whole series of other wounded healers in Greek mythology, from Tiresius and Cassandra to Philoctetes and Chiron. I confine myself here to the last of these—Chiron. Chiron was a demi-god and centaur, half man and half horse. He was the son of the Titan, Kronos (Saturn) and the love-nymph, Philyra, and was wounded by Herakles during a boar hunt when a poisoned arrow pierced his leg and would not heal. Though Chiron could not cure himself, he found that he could cure others and became known as a wise and compassionate healer. Those who came to him in his underground cave found understanding and compassion. In his wounded presence, they felt more whole and well, which is why they called him “the wounded healer.”5 Because his wound was incurable and unbearably painful, Chiron voluntarily relinquished his immortality and underwent death, eventually being assigned a place among the stars as the constellation Centaurus. Interestingly Chiron became the teacher of Asclepius, one of the two founders of Western medicine, the other being Hippocrates. Chiron, who dwelt in a cave, taught Asclepius the art of healing through (1) touch (Chiron means hand, kheir, or more precisely, skilled with the hands, the word kheirourgas means surgeon) and (2) song (Chiron used music along with healing herbs from the earth and induced dreams). By contrast, Hippocrates, the other patron of western medicine, followed the way of Zeus, Chiron’s brother, who dwelt on Mount Olympus and promoted a method of superintendence and control. In short, while Asclepius promoted healing through carnal nature and nocturnal dreaming from below, Hippocrates promoted curing through inspection and intervention from above. The former worked through taste, touch, and fantasy; the latter through cognitive management. There are further things to be noted about Chiron. As a hybrid of human and animal form, he is a half-creature who reconnects with our deeper unconscious feelings and earth belonging. As son of not only Chronus

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(saturnine melancholy) but Philyra (love), Chiron suggests another approach to the compulsive and often violent repetitions of ‘chronological’ time—he prefers an art of loving care, inherited from his mother of that name (philia). And this opens up to another kind of time, a time after time, après-coup, nachtraglich—a healing repetition not backward but forward, which permits a break from cyclical recurrence and a release into the future. Unlike his brother Zeus who continues the periodic blood cycle of father–son castration (Chronos castrates his father Ouranus, Zeus castrates his father Chronos), Chiron chooses a different route. He puts an end to the compulsive repetition of patricidal castration, giving birth instead to a daughter, Hegeia, a priestess of healing (whence our word hygiene). And what is more, in renouncing the vicious cycle of father–son violence, Chiron assumes the wound into his own body. Instead of acting it out violently and compulsively on others, he turns it into a power of empathic healing through touch, taste, and song. (Indeed in Ovid’s version it is Chiron who takes the arrow from another wounded centaur and drops it onto his own foot: a typical gesture of self-sacrifice). Pindar praises him accordingly as “wise hearted Chiron who taught Asclepius the soft-fingered skills of medicine’s lore” (Neman Ode 3.52 ff.). And Homer has Eurypylos address Patroclos as follows: “Cut the arrow out of my thigh . . . and put kind medicines on it, good ones, which they say you have been told of by Achilles since Chiron, most righteous of the Centaurs, told him about them” (Illiad 11.832, trans. Lattimore). Indeed it is curious that the Homeric Odysseus, like Chiron, receives his wound in a childhood boar hunt. So where exactly is narrative catharsis in all this? I think it is telling that a key ingredient in Chironic healing involves dream stories—visions invigilated by Oneiros and Hypnos—as well as dramatic retelling (the ancient Aesclepian site of Epidaurus is renowned for its famous theatre). In his book The Wounded Healer, Michael Kearney, one of the founders of palliative care medicine in Britain and North America, contrasts the Asclepian tradition of healing with the Hippocratic. The former was inspired by Chiron who worked in a cave under the ground and practiced earth wisdom. The latter, Hippocratic method, took its tune from Zeus and the Olympian gods and prescribed pain control strategies—that is, means of identifying (diagnosing) and seeking and destroying (treating) the disease, using evidence-based practice. It is this heroic model of outsmarting and overpowering the enemy that prevails in 21st century Western medicine and is, of course, very successful. It is effective in curing disease,

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lessening suffering, and improving quality of life in chronic and terminal illnesses. And it has often proved a good match for physicians’ own natural pain phobia, allowing the doctor to come close to patients who are suffering while remaining safely behind the protective barrier of a white coat, stethoscope, and professional persona. The result of a successful therapeutic encounter, on this standard medical account, is relief all around; a lessening of the physician’s pain along with that of the patient’s.6 However, the heroic-Hippocratic model does not address all kinds of pain nor tell the whole story. Pain control only works when the pain can be managed by our interventions. Something else is also required in the face of uncontrollable malaise. And here we may look to Asclepius and Hegeia. A different way of understanding suffering and of responding to it. The Asclepian approach suggests that even though the healer cannot completely control the pain and grief of dying, one can choose to be with and hold that pain. With self-knowledge and mindfulness, healers can learn to recognize the pattern of what happens when one hits the limits of what one can do in the face of suffering. One can choose to stay with one’s own distress as a way of staying with the other in their suffering. The mutual abiding with suffering becomes a form of shared witness—a bi-lateral healing beyond uni-lateral curing. Drawing on the story of Chiron, the author writes: The wounded healer is one who holds her own pain while staying present to the other in theirs, knowing that this, more than anything else he or she may do, is what awakens the inner healer in the other. The wounded healer is one who knows that even when there is nothing left to do, we still have choice . . . we each carry a potential for healing within us . . . our woundedness being the very ground from which the green shoot of healing emerges . . . The more we can be with our own pain, the more we can be with others in theirs. This encourages the other to stay with their own suffering, which is where they need to be if they are to experience healing.7 With the path of the wounded healer, one finds, so to speak, a second leg to stand on. There is a different therapeutic model at play. When we are no longer confined to the heroic medical model, we are no longer trapped in a power-down, one-way dynamic of the expert

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responding to the one needing expertise. Doctor and patient now meet as two human beings, both of whom are wounded and both of whom carry an innate potential for healing within. It is precisely this recognition of our mutual humanity, combined with the capacity to stay with our own suffering that releases this potential. While we suffer alongside the patient on this path, we may also experience the freshness of being, the peace of mind, and the sense of meaning that are the hallmarks of arriving in a place of healing.8 Other therapists, like Françoise Davoine, observe a similar Asclepian practice with the notion that “trauma speaks to trauma.” By sharing one’s own pain with one’s patient in an exchange of narratives, one allows for a certain reciprocity of healing—another way of listening and speaking.9 And I would suggest that the shared witnessing of pain in twelve-step programs is yet another powerful example of Asclepian healing through the exchange of words and wounds. The poet Rumi already acknowledged this way of the wounded healer when he wrote, “Don’t turn your head. Keep looking at the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.”10 I hasten to add that the model of the wounded healer is by no means confined to the Greeks. The biblical tradition also features stories of such figures, from Jacob and Jesus to Francis of Assisi and Padre Pio. Jacob, we recall from Genesis, was wounded at the hip while wrestling with a dark stranger at night, and only thus wounded could he receive the sacred name of Israel and be reconciled with his estranged rival, Esau, next day. Likewise, Christ is, for many, a salvific wounded healer whose crucified and risen body was to become an emblem of healing for centuries—with many subsequent wounded healer madonnas and saints, from the heartpierced Mater Dolorosa to stigmata-bearing saints who could heal others though they could not heal themselves. Think here of Francis of Assisi’s bleeding hands and eyes or John of the Cross’s invocation of the “wounded stag” in his Spiritual Canticles. Indeed it is curious how the Christian tradition has variously interpreted the wounds of Christ’s body, some proclaiming it a blemish that would be removed in the Glorious Mystical Body in the Kingdom (See Shelly Rambo’s work on Calvin and Gregory of Nyssa.)11 Even Hegel claimed that Absolute Spirit has no scars. While, on the other hand, many insisted that the blessed wound/blessure was a positive feature of the Christian message. (See Caravaggio’s painting of Thomas touching Jesus’ wound.) Though, it must be said, the celebration

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of woundedness could sometimes veer to cultic extremes of sadomasochistic excess as in the Spanish Baroque and Counter-Reformation. But that is a discussion for another paper. For now suffice it to say that Christ, like Chiron, willingly abandoned immortality in order to assume the wounds of others into his own body, thereby offering himself as a sacrificial healer for mortals. Christ healed the sick both haptically and narratively—he touched wounds and told stories (parables)—and invited others to repeat this double act after him. Modern stories of wounded healers Freud: Trauma and transference

Many modern psychologists have supported Lévi-Strauss’ claim that the cathartic function of myth is by no means confined to ‘primitive’ societies but continues to operate in the human psyche today. Examining the depth structures of mythic stories, both Maria Louise Von Franz and Bruno Bettelheim make the point that folklore and fairy tales can serve to heal deep psychic wounds by allowing trauma victims or other disturbed persons find expression for inhibited feelings.12 Myths enable us to experience certain otherwise ‘inexperienced experiences’—that is, events that were too painful to be properly registered at the time but which can, après coup, be allowed into expression indirectly, fictionally, ‘as if’ they were happening. Thus good and evil mothers, for example, of famous folktales allow for the symbolic articulation of children’s deeply ambivalent attitudes towards their own mothers (good fairy godmother because loving, nourishing, present/wicked witch or foster mother because controlling, punishing, absent). And the same goes for surrogate fathers (as benign protectors or malign castrators). Freud had, of course, already alluded to this phenomenon of child fantasy in his famous account of the fort/da scenario. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he recounts how one day he witnessed his grandchild struggle with the painful absence of its mother. The infant, Ernst, managed to overcome his acute anxiety at the departure of his mother by playing a game of symbolic naming—there/here—as he cast a cotton reel into his cot and then pulled it back again. So doing, he was, Freud observed, fictionally imitating the otherwise intolerable comings and goings of the mother. Freud recognized this primal scene of symbolic play as the shortest story

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ever told—one which brought about a basic sense of catharsis which appeased the child. What remained unbearable at the level of reality (the separation from the mother) was resolved, at least momentarily, in the playacting with the cotton reel and the words of make-belief fort/da. Imagining that the game of words was imitating the game of life, the child performed its first therapeutic feat of ‘let’s pretend!’ It created a fantasy self that healed the wounds of the real self. Now my question is this: Might not Freud have recognized his own unbearable separation anxiety in his grandson’s little “trauma” at his parents’ absence (mother away, father at war)? And might he not have recognized the magical power of words to ‘work through’ wounds? Working through as talking through? When Freud wrote of his grandson’s loss of his mother, was he not also writing about his own loss of his own daughter (the same person—Sophie Freud)? For Sophie was, significantly, Freud’s favorite daughter who died tragically in January 1920, several months before Freud, devastated by the loss, wrote the fort/da scene. This scene, incidentally, was inserted into the book’s narrative quite abruptly after Freud’s initial outline of a series of examples of First World War trauma. And this interpolation of a ‘little trauma’—separation from a loved one—into Freud’s seminal account of ‘Big Trauma’—unspeakable violence at war—opens up, I believe, the whole conversation about relations between ordinary and extraordinary trauma.13 A topic we cannot go into here. My suggestion for now is that the mirror play of Sophie Freud’s ‘disappearance’—enacted between her father (Freud) and her son (Ernst)— is a micro-drama of transgenerational trauma (with a small t). It signals a crossing of identifications where Freud is at once Sophie’s father and son, “writing the book of himself,” as Joyce put it, so as to mourn a departed loved one (a lost object). In other words, Freud is acting here as a modern Chiron endeavoring to turn melancholy into mourning. A further example of “trauma speaking to trauma” and by extension, trauma listening to trauma. Indeed, it is interesting that some of the most important modern pioneers of trauma therapy were themselves victims of war traumatisms— Bruno Bettleheim, Victor Frankl, Dori Laub, and Françoise Davoine. All four survived violence and went on to help others speak their unspeakable wounds into healable scars. And something similar might be said of Emmanuel Levinas who lost most of his family in the Holocaust before going on to compose his path-breaking philosophy of human relations with

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the Other as a response to “un traumatisme originel.” Each, in his/her own way, was a wounded healer. Joyce: Writing trauma into fiction

Many writers are also wounded healers. In the case of Joyce, we find someone who wrote books in order to transform personal and collective trauma into art. The personal traumas related to the death of Joyce’s young brother (alluded to in the first of his famous ‘Epiphanies’) and a brutal mugging in Dublin in 1904. The collective trauma related primarily, I believe, to the Irish famine. When Joyce visited Carl Jung in Zurich— hoping he would cure his daughter, Lucea—Jung replied that he could not cure Lucea’s madness and that Joyce had only managed to cure his own by writing Ulysses! In short, Joyce is Stephen Dedalus “writing the book of himself” in order to save himself from melancholy. Let me say just a brief word about the mugging at the root of Ulysses. In a letter to his brother Stanislaus on November 13, 1906, Joyce announced that he had just started a new “short story.” It was called Ulysses. He came up with the idea, he explained, because of a memory triggered by a recent mugging in a street in Rome. He had just been fired from his job at the NastKolb Schumacher bank and drunk all his severance pay (which should have paid the rent and helped provide for his one-year-old son, Giorgio). On his way home, Joyce was robbed and left lying in the gutter, destitute, despondent, and bleeding. And it was at that very moment that he suddenly remembered something: being assaulted several years previously (June 22, 1904) in Dublin and rescued from the gutter by a man called Hunter, “a cuckolded Jew” who dusted him down and took him home for a cup of cocoa— “in true Samaritan fashion,” as Joyce put it. This repetition of woundings triggered a lost memory where an immigrant Jew came to the rescue of a wounded Dubliner and planted a seed of caritas in his imagination. Several weeks after the Rome mugging, Joyce and Nora were given tickets to an opera whose librettist was called Blum. This second moment of happenstance, after his humiliating fall in a Roman alleyway, furnished the name of his paternal protagonist, Leopold Bloom. Thus was born the longest short story ever told—Ulysses. The tale of a father (Bloom) and a son (Stephen) traversing wounds on the way to healing. In a pivotal scene in the National Library, at the heart of Ulysses, Stephen expounds his central theory of the father/son idea in Hamlet. His thesis is

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that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet the year his son, Hamnet, died and his own father, John Shakespeare, was dying. The play, he argues, is about the transmission of mortal trauma between fathers and sons. In short, according to Stephen, Shakespeare wrote “the book of himself” in order to avoid the madness of melancholy, that is, in order to properly mourn his father and his son in a way that he was unable to do in real life. The play itself thus serves as a symbolic ‘working through’ of an otherwise irresoluble crisis in which a father (King Hamlet) commands his son (Prince Hamlet) to do something impossible: that is, to remember what cannot be remembered! To tell something that cannot be told. A double injunction. An unbearable burden. An impossible story. The double bind of trauma: To speak is impossible, not to speak is impossible . . . Remember me, remember me . . .14 says the ghostly father to his son, while at the same time adding: But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison house I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul . . .15 The ghost’s unspeakable secrets—for which he is condemned to the latency of purgatory, those “sulphurous and tormenting flames”16—these very things are precisely what remains secret. The secret “crimes committed in his days of nature” (youth) are, King Hamlet tells us, forbidden tales. In short, the things to be remembered cannot be told in the first place! We are concerned here, I suggest, with traumas. Unspeakable things which we do not possess but which ‘possess us’—like specters. For traumas, as Cathy Caruth writes, describe “overwhelming experiences of sudden, or catastrophic events, in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrolled repetitive occurrence of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.”17 I think Hamlet perfectly qualifies. My suggestion is that Joyce offers a literary correlative for Freud’s therapeutic narrative of fort/da. The longest short story ever told (Ulysses) echoing the shortest (gone/back again)!18 Joyce admitted that he wrote much of his fiction when he was “Jung and Freudend” and we also have the Finnegans Wake boast: “I can psoakoonaloose myself any time I want!”19 Joyce did just that in writing his personal and national traumas

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into words, prefiguring his fellow expat writer, Eugene O’Neill, when he confessed that Long Day’s Journey into Night was written in “blood and tears.” Their books saved them from sickness and insanity. And perhaps others too, for in turning “ghosts into ancestors” (as Hans Leowald recommended), Joyce may have helped many of readers recover from their personal or collective traumas. Bamber: The good listener

A final example of a modern Chironic narrator is Helen Bamber. The main reason for this, we are told in her biography by Neil Belton, is that she managed to integrate her own suffering into her understanding and was accordingly an exceptionally ‘good listener.’ A trauma therapist in practice more than theory, Bamber was both a founding member of Amnesty International and one of the first counselors to enter the concentration camps after the war. Her goal was to encourage survivors of torture and horror to somehow convert their trauma into stories and thereby find some release from their mute and immutable paralysis. In Bergen-Belsen, Bamber encountered ‘impossible stories’ which had to be told. She describes this narrative paradox—of telling the untellable— in her experience of counseling victims after her arrival in the camps in the immediate wake of the liberation: [I] would be sitting there in one of those chilly rooms, on a rough blanket on a bed, and the person I was talking to would suddenly begin to tell me what they had seen, or try to tell what it was like . . . Above all else there was the need to tell you everything, over and over and over.20 Eventually, Bamber realized that what was most important was to sit closely beside the survivors and to “listen and receive this,” as if it were part of you and that the act of taking and showing that you were available was itself playing some useful role. A sort of mourning beneath and beyond tears: “it wasn’t so much grief as a pouring out of some ghastly vomit like a kind of horror.”21 The purgative idiom here is not accidental. (Catharsis in Greek most commonly referred to the physical act of voiding toxic liquids). What Bamber’s accounts of these basic first-hand testimonies makes evident is that Holocaust stories—like all stories of deep pain—are to be understood less as tales of heroic triumph over adversity, than as

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truncated, tentative quasi-narratives that call out to be heard: impossible stories that the victims and survivors nonetheless have to tell. Indeed Primo Levi, one of the most famous narrator-survivors, compared this narrative impulse to retell the story as something as basic as an “alimentary need.” For without such conversion from aphasia to testimony, from silent wounds to narrated words (however stammered or inarticulate), the survivors could not survive their own survival. They could not lift themselves from their bunks and walk out the gates of the camps. They could not pass from death back into life. One especially vivid account of narrative testimony in Bergen-Belsen says this with terrible poignancy. Bamber describes a play in Yiddish which was performed for remaining survivors by other survivors. It re-enacted a typical family at the table and was received in total attention by the audience. She writes: The family portrayed would be an orthodox family; and then the Nazis would come in. And they would drag or kill the mother; and the power of the scene turned around the abuse of the mother, and the break-up of the family. The depiction of the Nazis was realistic and violent. The sense of disaster about to happen could be felt in that hall. Nothing explicit about the aftermath was shown, as I remember it. I have never seen anything so effective, despite the crudity of the stage and the performance. It was raw and so close to the experience of the audience. There was never any applause. Each time was like a purging.22 In other words, basic catharsis. The key to the releasement from the nightmare, which this elementary muthos-mimesis permitted, is the fact that it balanced the act of identification with a theatrical representation so that the pain, which could not be lived directly, could be re-lived by being re-presented ‘as if’ it were happening again but this time from a certain distance (the ‘estrangement’ being provided, however minimally, by the theatrical form and plot). The survivors were thus permitted to re-experience their own previously un-experienced experience—un-experienced because too unbearable to be registered or processed in the original immediacy of the trauma. And this, we might add, requires its own special temporality: there is a time for wounds to open and a time for wounds to close. As with the physical process of granulation where scar tissue is formed from within the wound, allowing for a proper

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mix of exposure to air and protective closure, so too with the psyche. Working-through of trauma calls for a delicate equipoise between silence and speaking, invisibility, and visibility, if the wound is to grow into a healing scar. If one covers the pain too soon, it festers and needs to be reopened at a later time for a new scar to form; if one covers it too late, infection can set in and the pain becomes intolerable. Wounded healers know, from their own experience of woundedness, two basic things: (1) the right timing between too early and too late, and (2) the right spacing between too near and too far. As important as sensitivity to timing, is being careful neither to over-identify with suffering (too close) nor to remain an indifferent observer (too removed). It is a matter of tact, in the sense of both tactility and know-how. An art of ‘exquisite empathy.’23 Conclusion What these various examples suggest is that stories become cathartic to the extent that they combine empathic imagination with a certain acknowledgment of the cause and context of the suffering, thereby offering a wider lens to review insufferable pain. The degree of detachment afforded by the narrative representation may be small indeed, but without it one would be smothered by trauma to the point of numbness. Without some mediation through mimesis-mythos, one risks succumbing to the sheer overwhelmingness of horror. Indeed, in this regard, it is telling that several camp survivors have recounted how they finally achieved some relief from the trauma when they recognized themselves, from a certain formal distance, in characters portrayed in narrative accounts of the Holocaust, often well after the events took place. One could cite here the important debates on the role of mourning in recent cinematic works like Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985), or Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997), not to mention the literary accounts of authors like Wiesel, Hillesum, Amos, or Levi.24 Indeed one concentration camp inmate who was fortunate to make it onto Schindler’s survivor list confessed that she was never able to reconnect with her trauma in the camps until she actually saw herself being played by a professional actor in the Spielberg’s movie—half a century later. Only then, through the detour of fictional narrative, could she reintegrate her pain and tell her own story. These various narrative testimonies—cinematic, theatrical, literary, documentary—invite first and subsequent generations to recall, in however

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flawed or fractured a manner, the unspeakable events of trauma ‘as if’ they were experiencing them for themselves. And even though such narrative representations inevitably fail to do full justice to the singularity of the original horror, they allow, in spite of all the odds, many people to remember what actually happened; and this is important so that, in Primo Levi’s words, “it may never happen again.” Genuine cathartic witness implies something more profound than mere cognitive information of facts (though this is crucial). Narrating stories of horror is a way of never giving up on the dead. “We must acknowledge the truth as well as having knowledge of it.”25 This double duty of testimonial recognition (through narrative affect) and scientific cognition (through empirical explanation) seeks to honor the forgotten and commemorate the forfeited of history. When it comes to healing wounds, we need both Hippocrates and Asclepius. We need, as Paul Ricoeur puts it, to “count the cadavers and be struck by the pain.”26 If we possess narrative compassion we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love. The loving is in the healing, in the cathartic balancing of what Joyce called “identification with the sufferer” and knowledge of “the hidden cause.”27 We might say, in conclusion, that narrative catharsis, performed by a listener–narrator, offers a singular mix of empathy and distance, whereby we experience the pain of other beings—patients, strangers, victims—‘as if’ we were them. Cathartic healing involves the narrating of past wounds both as they happened and as if they happened in this way or that. And it is precisely this double response of truth (as) and fiction (as if) that emancipates us from our habitual protection and denial mechanisms. One suddenly experiences oneself as another and the other as oneself—and thereby begins to apprehend otherwise unapprehendable pain.  Wounded healers are those, in sum, who maintain such equilibrium in a subtle interplay of word and touch, narrativity and tactility, effect and affect. To have the ‘healing touch’ means knowing when it is time to listen and when it is time to speak. When to draw close and when to draw back. When to hold and when to withhold. In the final analysis, it’s a matter of tact. What Chiron knew and imparted. Notes   1 Speaking of transgenerational trauma in the Odyssey, there is also the trauma of the son—Telemachus. In addition to the childhood wound at his father’s premature departure and mother’s subsequent obsession with Odysseus’

The hermeneutics of wounds  37

absence—there are several accounts of the child Telemachus being subjected to a terrifying death experience. According to Hyginus, Palamedes (a friend of Odysseus) “put the baby Telemachus in front of his father’s ploughshare . . . to expose Odysseus’ pretended madness.” But there are further allusions to patricide and infanticide in the story, told by Eugammon of Cyrene in the epic Telegoneia, which describe Telemachus being “killed unwittingly by Telegonus, Odysseus’ son by Circe”. Telemachus’ traumatic wounds, like those of his father, remain, however, largely hidden and uncovered—alluded to rather than exposed. The father-son cycle of patricide-infanticide clearly finds echoes in the later Oedipus cycle, as we shall see below.   2 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Odysseus’ name, given by his grandfather, Autolyces, means ‘son of pain.’ It comes from the fact that his grandfather was a bringer of great pain to many whom he plundered and robbed—in collusion with Hermes, the ‘partner of his crimes.’ Odysseus himself is both a bringer of pain to others (the Trojans) and a witness of great pain himself (the death of his friends and his own exile and homesickness). The fact that the name Odysseus is given in the middle voice carries this double sense of being both a receiver and giver of pain. It is only when the secret scar on his thigh (which even Athena could not disguise) is revealed by Euryclea (Odyssey 19.455–527), that the secret story of his name and his childhood wounding is also finally disclosed, the scar serving as a trace of repressed (and repetitively acted out) wounds which have informed Odysseus’ life from childhood to old age and which are only disclosed in the last act. In addition to Auerbach’s seminal essay on the subject, one might also note here the pioneering research on hermeneutic meanings of wounds and scars by Shelley Rambo, “Refiguring Wounds in the Afterlife (of Trauma),” in Carnal Hermeneutics, edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015) and Karmen MacKendrick, Word Made Flesh: Figuring Language at the Surface of Skin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). See also the examples of writing the flesh in the discussion of carnal hermeneutics—Queequeg’s tattoos, stone and skin hieroglyphics etc.—in Richard Kearney, “What is Diacritical Hermeneutics?,” Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 1, 1 (2011) and in Kearney and Treanor, Carnal Hermeneutics. For some more explicitly therapeutic analyses of scarring (including self-cutting) as a form of bodily protowriting see Gillian Staker, “Signing with A Scar,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 16, 1 (2006) and Stuart Pizer, “Catharsis and Peripeteia,” in In the Wake of Trauma, edited by Eric R. Severson, Brian Becker, and David Goodman (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2016).   3 See the development of this Aristotelian theory of catharsis in Richard Kearney, “Narrating Pain: The Power of Catharsis,” edited by Richard Bégin, Bernard Perron, and Lucie Roy, in Figures de violence (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012), and Richard Kearney, “Writing Trauma: Narrative Catharsis in Homer, Shakespeare and Joyce,” in Making Sense: Beauty, Creativity and Healing, edited by Bandy Lee, Nancy Olson, and Thomas P. Duffy (New York: Peter Lang Press, 2015).   4 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth” and related essays on the therapeutic power of stories, “The Effectiveness of Symbols” and

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“Shamanism and Psychoanalysis,” in Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963). See the commentary on this discussion of the cathartic potential of oral, written and cinematic narratives (in myths, novels and holocaust testimonies) in Richard Kearney parts 1–2 and 4 of On Stories (London: Routledge, 2002), 1–76 and 125–156.   5 Michael Kearney, Mortally Wounded: Stories of Soul Pain, Death and Healing (New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal, 2007). See also the author’s insightful development of the notion of the wounded healer in subsequent books such as Michael Kearney, A Place of Healing: Working with Nature and Soul at the End (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). One might also mention here the pioneering work of another physician, Rita Charon, in her Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) and as co-editor with Martha Montello in Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2002); and co-editor with Peter L. Rudnystsky in Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine (New York: SUNY University Press, 2008). Also see Robert Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (Boston, MA: Houghton, 1990).  6 Kearney, Mortally Wounded.   7 Ibid.   8 Ibid.   9 For more on this notion of ‘trauma speaking to trauma’ and ‘suffering alongside’, see Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, History Beyond Trauma (New York: The Other Press, 2014) and Pizer, “Catharsis and Peripeteia.” 10 Rumi, The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks and John Moyne (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), 142. 11 Rambo, “Refiguring Wounds.” 12 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Uses of Fairytales (New York: Knopf, 1971); Marie Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales (Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, 1996). 13 I develop this reading of Freud on trauma in Kearney, “Writing Trauma.” 14 S. Weitz cited by Cathy Caruth, “Recapturing the Past: Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 154. On this double injunction to tell and not tell trauma, see also the chapter “Hamlet’s Ghosts: From Shakespeare to Joyce,” in Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2003), 141–162. On Joyce’s 1906 letter to his brother, Stanislaus, about the Bloom/Hunter connection, see Richard Ellmann, James Joyce: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968) and Giorgio Melchiori, “The Genesis of Ulysses,” in Joyce in Rome, edited by Giorgio Melchiori (Rome: Bulzoni, 1984), 37ff. On the Ulysses/Hamlet connection see Declan Kiberd, Ulysses: Annotated Student’s Edition (New York and London: Penguin, 1992), 1013 and his Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece (London: Faber & Faber, 2009). Kiberd argues that just as Joyce sought to become his own father by writing Ulysses, so too Shakespeare sought to become his own father (as Ghost) of his literary son (Prince Hamlet). He also notes the revealing fact that Shakespeare’s son

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Hamnet was eleven when he died and Bloom recalls in his final bedtime reverie that it was almost eleven years since his son, Rudy, had died. On Stephen Dedalus’ theory of Hamlet see also René Girard’s chapter “Croyezvous vous-même à votre théorie?,” in his Shakespeare: les feux de l’envie (Paris: Grasset, 1990), 313–330 and Harold Bloom, Hamlet, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 390: “For him [scil. Joyce/Stephen], Hamlet the Dane and Hamnet Shakespeare are twins, and the ghostly Shakespeare is therefore the father of his most notorious character.” For other pieces of information on the father/son motif in Ulysses I am also grateful to my Joycean colleagues, Joseph Nugent, Joseph O’Leary, Luke Gibbons and Susan Brown. A challenging psychoanalytic contribution to the discussion is to be found in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster, Stay Illusion: The Hamlet Doctrine (New York: Pantheon Books, 2013). 15 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 1, sc. 5. 16 Ibid. 17 Cathy Caruth, “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History,” in Literature and the Ethical Question, edited by Claire Nouvet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 181. Caruth adds: “The experience of the soldier faced with sudden and massive death around him, for example, who suffers this sight in a numbed state, only to relive it later on in repeated nightmares, is a central and recurring image of trauma in our century.” (ibid.) For other current definitions of trauma—especially relating to major horrors of war, rape, torture, genocide and natural catastrophe—see Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Charles Figley, ed., Trauma and Its Wake, vols 1 and 2 (New York: BrunnerMazel, 1985–1986); Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), especially 1–15; Dori Laub, “Re-establishing the Internal ‘Thou’ in Testimony of Trauma,” Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society 18, 2(2013), 184–198; and Dori Laub and Soshana Felman, Testimony (New York: Routledge, 1992). 18 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. Gregory Richter (Toronto: Broadview, 1984), 55–65. The incident of little Ernst playing with the spool of string occurred in 1915 when Freud visited the Hamburg home of his daughter Sophie, who later died in January 1920 as Freud was still composing his text. See also the commentaries by Jacques Derrida in The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. A. Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Eric Santner, “History beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, edited by Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 143–155. It might be interesting to ask if there is also a basic isomorphic rapport between (1) the primordial therapeutic play of fort/da, and (2) the cathartic play of pity (identification with immediate suffering right here/da) and fear (distance of the one who detaches, mediates and lets go over there/ fort) as expounded by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? If so, we might be tempted to ask what the equivalent of Ernst’s spool play is in Joyce’s own writing. Is Stephen, to put it fancifully, his fort and Bloom his da? And what role has Molly in the drama of pity and fear? Does she turn the tragic purgation into comic serenity? The split dyad of father/son into a dialectical triad? We

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might draw useful suggestions here from feminist reinterpretations of the fort/ da game by such thinkers as Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. G. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) and, more recently, Anne-Claire Mulder, Divine Flesh, Embodied Word: Incarnation as a Hermeneutical Key to a Feminist Theologian’s Reading of Luce Irigaray (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2006), 41ff. 19 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin, 1999), 522, ll. 31–34. 20 Neil Belton, The Good Listener—Helen Bamber: A Life Against Cruelty (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998). Cited in Kearney, On Stories, 139–140. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 The common notion of ‘tact’ as both carnal and cognitive, finds another etymological ally in the equally colloquial term, ‘savvy’, with its double sense of both knowing (savoir) and tasting (sapere, savourer). See my opening essay, Richard Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” in Kearney and Treanor, Carnal Hermeneutics, especially 15–56. A similar sense of hermeneutic tact and savvy is part of the process of ‘exquisite empathy’ currently being researched by a number of pioneering physicians and therapists. See Michael Kearney et al., “Self-Care for Physicians Caring for Patients at the End of Life,” The Journal of American Medical Association 39, 11 (2009). 24 See the sections “Testifying to History: The Case of Schindler” and “The Paradox of Testimony” in Kearney, On Stories, 41–77, and the chapter “The Immemorial: A Task of Narrative” in Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters. See also Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 25 See Belton, The Good Listener, 228 et seq. 26 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 27 James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: B. W. Huebsch).

Bibliography Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Belton, Neil. The Good Listener—Helen Bamber: A Life Against Cruelty. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Uses of Fairytales. New York: Knopf, 1971. Bloom, Harold. Hamlet, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. Caruth, Cathy. “Recapturing the Past: Introduction.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 151–157. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995.

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Caruth, Cathy. “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History.” In Literature and the Ethical Question, edited by Claire Nouvet, 181–192. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Charon, Rita. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Charon, Rita, and Martha Montello, editors. Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics. New York: Routledge, 2002. Coles, Robert. The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination. Boston, MA: Houghton, 1990. Critchley, Simon, and Jamieson Webster. Stay Illusion: The Hamlet Doctrine. New York: Pantheon Books, 2013. Davoine, Françoise, and Jean-Max Gaudillière. History Beyond Trauma. New York: The Other Press: 2014. Derrida, Jacques. The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by A. Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1996. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Figley, Charles, editor. Trauma and Its Wake, volumes 1 and 2. New York: Brunner-Mazel, 1985–1986. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by Gregory Richter. Toronto: Broadview, 1984. Friedlander, Saul, editor. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution.’ Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Girard, René. Shakespeare: les feux de l’envie. Paris: Grasset, 1990. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Irigaray, Luce. Sexes and Genealogies. Translated by G. Gill. New York: Colombia University Press, 1993. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Penguin, 1999. Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: B. W. Huebsch. Kearney, Michael. A Place of Healing: Working with Nature and Soul at the End. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Kearney, Michael. Mortally Wounded: Stories of Soul Pain, Death and Healing. New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal, 2007. Kearney, Michael, Radhule Weininger, Mary Vachon, Richard Harrison, and Balfour Mount. “Self-Care for Physicians Caring for Patients at the End of Life.” The Journal of American Medical Association 39, 11 (2009), 1155–1164. Kearney, Richard. “Narrating Pain: The Power of Catharsis.” In Figures de violence, edited by Richard Bégin, Bernard Perron, and Lucie Roy, 137–153. Paris: Collections Esthétiques, L’Harmattan, 2012. Kearney, Richard. On Stories. London: Routledge, 2002. Kearney, Richard. Strangers, Gods and Monsters. London: Routledge, 2003. Kearney, Richard. “What is Diacritical Hermeneutics?” Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 1, 1 (2011), 1–14. Kearney Richard. “Writing Trauma: Narrative Catharsis in Homer, Shakespeare and Joyce.” In Making Sense: Beauty, Creativity and Healing, edited by Bandy Lee, Nancy Olson, and Thomas P. Duffy, 131–144. New York: Peter Lang Press, 2015.

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Kearney, Richard and Brian Treanor, editors. Carnal Hermeneutics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Kiberd, Declan. Ulysses: Annotated Student’s Edition. New York and London: Penguin, 1992. Kiberd, Declan. Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. Laub, Dori. “Re-establishing the Internal ‘Thou’ in Testimony of Trauma.” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 18, 2 (2013), 184–198. Laub, Dori, and Sashara Felman. Testimony. New York: Routledge, 1992. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1963. MacKendrick, Karmen. Word Made Flesh: Figuring Language at the Surface of Skin. New York: Fordham University Press, New York, 2004. Melchiori, Giorgio. “The Genesis of Ulysses.” In Joyce in Rome, edited by Giorgio Melchiori, 52–66. Rome: Bulzoni, 1984. Mulder, Anne-Claire. Divine Flesh, Embodied Word: Incarnation as a Hermeneutical Key to a Feminist Theologian’s Reading of Luce Irigaray’s Work. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2006. Pizer, Stuart. “Catharsis and Peripeteia: Considering Kearney and the Healing Functions of Narrative.” In In the Wake of Trauma, edited by Eric R. Severson, Brian W. Becker, and David M. Goodman, 91–98. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2016. Rambo, Shelley. “Refiguring Wounds in the Afterlife (of Trauma).” In Carnal Hermeneutics, edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, 263–278. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Rambo, Shelley. Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, volume 3. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Rudnystsky, Peter L., and Rita Charon, editors. Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine. New York: SUNY Press, 2008. Rumi. The Essential Rumi. Translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995. Santner, Eric. “History beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In Probing the Limits of Representation, edited by Saul Friedländer, 143–154.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Staker, Gillian. “Signing with a Scar: Understanding Self-Harm.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 16, 1 (2008), 93–112. Von Franz, Marie-Louise. Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, 1996.

Chapter 2

Encountering the psychoanalyst’s suffering Discussion of Kearney’s “The hermeneutics of wounds” Elizabeth A. Corpt The psychoanalytic therapist as wounded healer It is my pleasure to have this opportunity to discuss Richard Kearney’s “The Hermeneutics of Wounds” (Chapter 1, this volume). My focus will be on the wounded healer, or, for my purposes, the psychoanalytic therapist as wounded healer. I want to consider whether the analyst’s personal narrative of suffering, the story of her wounds, plays a curative role in the back and forth of the therapeutic relationship. I suggest that, although the analyst’s own wounds do and must remain background for a majority of the time, there are certain circumstances when a particular patient may need to ‘touch’ the wound of the therapist, much as Thomas needed to ‘touch’ the wounds of Jesus; to encounter the real in the other as a way to access the real in oneself. As Kearney suggests in this paper, trauma, in order to be healed, requires what he calls a double transformation, that is, through both a narrative catharsis and a carnal—all the way down—working-through. For some patients at some particular time, touching the wounds of the analyst provides just such an opportunity. One of the most terrifying yet oddly hopeful, and even comforting, aspects of entering into a psychoanalytic therapy relationship is the peculiar idea of baring one’s soul to a complete stranger. This someone remains unknown; a person whose story one neither has access to nor an expectation to concern oneself with, that is, beyond what one’s curiosity might glean from Google or Psychology Today. That’s part of the set-up. The analyst and her story, including her own personal narrative of human suffering and wounds, for the most part, remain background, private, and secondary to the task at hand: that of attending to the patient and his wounds and suffering. In essence, the patient is protected from the burden of knowing

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the analyst’s story and having to care for the analyst and her troubles. There are good reasons for this. Our patients often enter treatment having been inappropriately and destructively weighted down by the troubles and wounds of others. They must be protected from the intrusion of ours. It is a unique and odd human relationship in this sense: a setup with a purposeful asymmetry. This arrangement was originally based on Freud’s1 assumption that the analyst could, through the minimization of his own personhood and the strict exercising of neutrality, create enough of a blank screen against which the patient’s intra-psychic troubles, brought to life via the transference, could emerge. This allowed the analyst the necessary clues needed to understand and interpret the patient’s psychic malady. In “Whose Story is it Anyway? The Case of Dora,” Kearney is in concert with Freud’s belief that the wounded soul enters analysis to get to “the bottom of things. The suffering subject strives to remember and recount the whole story, or at least as much of it as is recoverable given the lapses of time between the events of trauma and the recall of these events.”2 It was, and still is, the obligation of the analyst to attend to her own ‘‘whole story’’ in her own psychoanalysis, far from her patient’s ears. Kearney’s interest in narrative as curative has led him to closely consider the case of Dora, found in Freud’s 1905 “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.”3 Freud’s interpretation of Dora’s narrative missed the mark, further traumatized her, and caused her to flee the treatment prematurely. In this case, Freud’s attempt at an ‘inaccurate but sufficient’ construction of her story fell short. One imagines that Freud was left to suffer his own questions and doubts about the outcome of the aborted case. Looking back, we can wonder, if the analysis had proceeded beyond that of being a mere fragment, if there had been a stronger connection between Freud and Dora, could Dora have had the opportunity, while still in Freud’s presence, to wrestle with her deep sense that Freud was misunderstanding her? Could she have had the opportunity to feel the presence of Freud’s suffering to reach her as he tried to comprehend the source of her psychic pain? It is possible that her suffering and her sense of his suffering to understand her could have played a potentially curative role in the treatment. Suffering with and for Analysts and therapists suffer every day to reach their patients and often suffer for the patient’s benefit. The literature is replete with case studies in

Encountering the psychoanalyst’s suffering  45

which an analyst takes on, takes in, or bears witness to a patient’s suffering. In true Winnicottean4 fashion, a significant portion of our work is that of surviving—and suffering through—the abrasions and ruptures of therapeutic caretaking. Our patients often sense our suffering to understand them and this sensing can often help to hold an analytic pair together when all else seems lost. But, does the analyst’s personal suffering ever play more than a background, resonant, or empathic role? Can the analyst’s personal suffering ever be of actual therapeutic usefulness to a patient, that is, without it devolving into a wild analysis? These days, patients spend a much longer time with their analytic therapists than in Freud’s day. In a sense, we are psychically cohabitating with our patients, often through the living out of our own life crises, our own professional transitions, and our own aging process. And in this postmodern world where uncertainties abound, we are no longer under the illusion that we can necessarily get to the ‘bottom of things’—we’re pretty sure there isn’t even a discreet ‘bottom of things’ to get to—for either our patients or ourselves. And as for the whole story, we know that stories shift depending on one’s perspective and one’s point in time. The ‘whole story’ can be layered, and cavernous, with many unexpected twists and turns. Dissociated or unformulated experience can suddenly surface and take one by surprise. I think of a patient who entered treatment hating her monstrous father—insisting that she never wanted to see him again—and then several year later finding herself wanting to buy him a warm flannel shirt to ease his chill and vulnerability as he lay dying. Years later still, she held an even more complex and nuanced view of the man he once was; both a monster and the sole encouraging presence in her family’s household. As Kearney says of the therapeutic use of narrative, it can “emancipate the past into future possibilities” and “transforms binding stories into freer ones.”5 The point these days is to help the suffering patient come to terms with the subjective and intersubjective complexity of her life and sort out the multiple sources that contribute to her suffering; the past, present, and future co-mingle and constantly influence each other. Along the way, she will live and suffer the intensity of the analytic experience itself, including her experience of the analyst as other, as fellow human being, and as fellow sufferer. So, the person of the analyst actually comes to matter quite a bit: her character, her psychological sturdiness, relational flexibility, capacity for human connectedness, her intellect, curiosity, creativity, and life experiences over time, including her experiences of human suffering. All

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this, and her theoretical perspective and ideas about care and cure have a lot to do with how the fit between patient and analyst will work and evolve. Touching the wound of the analyst What would prompt a patient to reach out to touch her therapist’s wounds, or be curious about her therapist’s suffering? In “Narrating Pain: The Power of Catharsis,” Kearney contemplates the far-reaching effects of trauma, and suggests that healing requires the transformation of pathological pity into compassion and pathological fear into serenity. But for this to happen, catharsis is necessary, and catharsis requires mimesis or imitation. To quote Kearney: “In the play of narrative re-creation we are invited to revisit our lives—through the actions and personas of others—so as to live them otherwise. We discover a way to give a future to the past.”6 To this, I would add that the traumatized patient, severely impoverished in his ability to feel, act, or even exist, may at times turn to the embodied person of the other, in this case, his therapist, in order to make contact with the real possibility of living a life otherwise. Several years into a reasonably successful treatment, a patient continued to be profoundly constricted and subsequently frustrated in his ability to feel deeply. Despite the working through and resolution of some major conflicts, emotionally charged moments in his life continued to drift by, felt only superficially, causing pain, confusion, and a sense of his feeling sealed within himself and closed off from others. He came by these difficulties honestly, given an early traumatic past. One day he began a session by tentatively inquiring as to whether he could ask me some personal questions. Surprised and curious by the poignant feel of his request, I agreed. He continued. “I want to know where your tender spots are; I want to know what pains you.” Quite taken aback by the extraordinary intimacy of his question—not the usual “do you have children?” or “where are you going on vacation?” or even “I wonder how you really feel about me,” I braced myself and began considering what was unfolding between us and how I would respond to him. We were suddenly in the deep end of the pool. As I thought about what to make of his intent, aggression did not seem accurate, so I began to read his query as his desire to reach for a deeper level of connection—an increased aliveness and intimacy—with me, certainly—but there seemed to be more to it. I understood his queries as his attempt to make contact with the constricted and deadened parts of

Encountering the psychoanalyst’s suffering  47

himself through the making of contact with my affective experience of pain and suffering. What he was asking to know from me was exactly what he couldn’t access within himself; his tender spots and pains that sealed over so quickly, we could barely hold onto them long enough for him to get to know them. As Kearney says: “In the play of narrative re-creation we are invited to revisit our lives—through the actions and personas of others—so as to live them otherwise.”7 Without being sure where we were headed, or where I was yet willing to go, I responded by asking him what he wanted to know, assuring him that I would decide what I was comfortable answering. What ensued was a thoughtful series of questions about my past, my childhood, and my mother, specifically. And about whether my childhood had contributed to my becoming an analyst. He was particularly interested in whether my mother had hurt me and how I had come to understand her reasons for her doing so. I took my time and answered his questions with careful responses that came from a well analyzed and what I felt to be an emotionally manageable place; manageable for him and for me. During the course of this exchange, I began to feel myself shift into another realm of being with my patient; something more open and fully in my body, yet, I was able to continue to think clearly. I felt quite touched and deeply moved by his questions. They were thoughtful, careful, and respectful. At no time did I feel inappropriately intruded upon. He listened intently and politely, accepting the answers I gave without pushing for more. We were, together, two wounded human beings now considering my pains and tender places as a way to somehow help him more fully access his. After the questions ended, he began to talk in a more descriptive and affectively full manner about his own remembrances of his mother and how she was similar and different from mine. He recalled the scariness of her red angry face and the feel of her yelling. For the first time, he began to share reflections about his father and his father’s general absence during his early years. Prior to this time, mention of his father had barely ever made it into our conversations. We ended the session by my saying something like: “So here we are, two human beings, each with our own difficult story, each of us finding our way, in whatever way we can.” There was no miraculous change after this session, only an incremental gain, however, I think a significant one. We still had much work to do. We moved on. There were no more personal questions, just the slow and steady continuation of our explorations. But there was something helpful and

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crucial about this unusual experience: something about his touching my wound and my responding to his gesture with an openness and vulnerability that made an important difference in the work. I felt enlisted in providing him a surrogate human emotional experience for his use and benefit. It was as though, through reading my narrative and exploring my pain in relation to his, he could somehow more affectively experience and begin to articulate his own. Kearney’s double transformation as a necessary antidote to trauma, including both a narrative catharsis and a carnal, affectively resonant, working-through, proved true for this patient in this work. From my experience, there are times when the patient’s need to feel like a human among humans8 takes precedence over psychoanalytic neutrality. When moments like these present themselves, we are called upon to be humanly open, clinically generous, and analytically thoughtful. Notes 1 See Sigmund Freud, “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing PsychoAnalysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII, edited by James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1958 [1912]), 109–120. 2 Richard Kearney, “Whose Story is it Anyway? The Case of Dora,” in his On Stories (New York: Routledge, 2002), 137. 3 See Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII, edited by James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1958 [1901–1905]), 1–22. 4 See Donald W. Winnicott, “The Use of an Object,” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 50 (1969), 711–716. 5 Kearney, “Whose Story is it Anyway?,” 45. 6 Richard Kearney, “Narrating Pain: The Power of Catharsis,” Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 30, 1 (2007), 51. 7 Ibid. 8 See Heinz Kohut, How Does Psychoanalysis Cure? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Bibliography Corpt, Elizabeth. “The Complications of Caring and the Ethical Turn in Psychoanalysis.” In The Ethical Turn: Otherness and Subjectivity in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, edited by David M. Goodman and Eric R. Severson. New York: Routledge, 2016. Freud, Sigmund. “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII, edited by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1958 [1901–1905].

Encountering the psychoanalyst’s suffering  49

Freud, Sigmund. “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psycho-Analysis.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII, edited by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1958 [1912]. Kearney, Richard. “Narrating Pain: The Power of Catharsis.” Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 30, 1 (2007), 51–66. Kearney, Richard. On Stories. London: Routledge, 2002. Kohut, Heinz. How Does Psychoanalysis Cure? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Winnicott, Donald W. “The Use of an Object.” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 50, (1969), 711–716.

Chapter 3

The place of das Ding Psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and religion John Panteleimon Manoussakis

Introduction “One, two, three, but where is the fourth?” I was reminded of this question while reading Professor Brian Becker’s paper “Flight from the Flesh”1 as he attempts to translate Freud’s topological tripartition of the soul into Marion’s phenomenology. Becker’s paper establishes an analogy of sorts between the id and the flesh, the body as idol and the ego, while, in conclusion, speculates that the third saturated phenomenon, the icon, could correspond to the superego. Yet, the fourth saturated phenomenon, the event, remains unaccounted for in this conceptual correspondence. So, like Socrates at the beginning of Plato’s Timaeus, I ask: “But where is the fourth?” To re-read Freud through Marion, to translate psychoanalysis to phenomenology and phenomenology to psychoanalysis is an admirable task of which I am fully supportive. Without question, it is the ability of a synthetic mind and of a good scholar to recognize family resemblances between one’s own field and that of others, to be “multilingual” when it comes to the language games by which specific schools of thought articulate themselves, and to refuse the confinement to one’s epistemic home. Freud himself was famous for being such a merchant of ideas, importing and exporting concepts and terms that have now become a commodity of our everyday language. Yet, what I found fascinating in Prof. Becker’s paper was not so much the dialogue between psychoanalysis and phenomenology per se, as much as the implications of this dialogue. It takes some time for the reader of his paper to realize that the application of phenomenology’s sorcerous potions on psychoanalysis transforms the discussion about the soul into what one

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may take to be its very opposite, namely, a discussion centered around the body. Here both psychic entities or functions—the id and the ego—become translated into the language of the bodily, as flesh and body respectively. We will return to this conversion of the soul to the bodily later on. For now, I would like to pick up the task of the dialogue between psychoanalysis and phenomenology from where Becker’s paper has left it. In the final paragraph of his paper, Prof. Becker writes: Among the many possibilities still before us, one of the most intriguing is the connection between the interiority of the subject, defined in terms of saturated phenomena, and the understanding of intersubjectivity in terms of the gift. It is a limitation of this paper that I have not addressed more explicitly the fundamental role of intersubjectivity in the formation of subjectivity other than what is implicit in some of the notions discussed in this paper. Thus, a fecund direction for future work should endeavor to consider the manner in which the other is constitutive of my subjectivity, looking to the concept of the icon as a reformulation of the superego, an introjection of the other who we do not see but whose gaze pierces us with eyes that gives the ability to see again but with a sight that is not our own.2 One could indeed raise some legitimate questions on the proposed correspondence between the icon and the superego. Yet, more important is the appearance of the Other in a conceptual scheme organized by the trinity of id, ego, and superego. Following Becker’s suggestion that “a fecund direction for future work should endeavor to consider the manner in which the other is constitutive of my subjectivity” I propose that we learn counting beyond three. The missing fourth We are aware of three spatial dimensions within which we move and live and within which we encounter objects, things present- and ready-at-hand, to recall Heidegger’s analysis of being-in-the-world in Being and Time, a world which unfolds mostly within the confines of three-dimensionality. Is there, however, a place for the Other in such a three-dimensional world or is our encounter with the Other in a world of three dimensions already governed by the logic of objectification, limiting, that is, the Other to the

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contours of an object? Within three-dimensional space, the space of threes, one can only discover oneself and others as objects—as objectified bodies (Körper). Yet, there is a fourth dimension, that of time, which would seem to allow us to move beyond the space of objects to the time that makes alterity possible, first and foremost in terms of alteration, change: change in space, such as locomotion, but also ontological change: beings coming-to-be and passing-away. There is being only in time and never in space. It would be impossible to write a book under the title of Being and Space. Alterity, therefore, becomes first possible in time and first as an alterity to be discovered within ourselves, more precisely, the alterity of ourselves from ourselves, the distance opened up and traversed by the three “ecstasies” of time, namely, past, present, and future. These three temporal ecstasies map a different “space,” that of the soul, whose very distention time itself is, as Augustine reminds us in the XI book of his Confessions. It is precisely in this threefold distention of the soul and in its corresponding modalities of being, knowledge, and will, that St Augustine recognized a trace (vestigium) of the Other par excellence, that is, of God. Yet, how other could an otherness be that springs and flows from within ourselves? An otherness that returns to ourselves insofar as it is by means of time that one is re-collected to oneself, that one becomes and remains oneself? Time, even though fourth to the three dimensions of space, is itself limited by its own trinity of past, present, and future. The fourth we thought we got hold of is now proven to be yet another form of the same triptych. The question, therefore, must be posed once more: Where is, then, the fourth? Perhaps we should return to the original locus where the question about the fourth is first raised: the Platonic Timaeus. The Timaeus takes place on the third night after Socrates’ famous visit to Piraeus on the occasion of a newly established festival. He spent that night at the house of Cephalus with Glaucon and Adeimantus, among others, discussing what we know today as the Republic. But if we know of the Republic at all, that is because Socrates recounts the discussion of the previous night in all its details the very next day to the triumvirate of Timaeus, Hermocrates, and Critias, that is to the three persons who would assume the duties of the host and serve Socrates a different feast of speeches in return, as recorded in the dialogues which bear as titles their names: the Timaeus and the Critias. To summarize, then, the Timaeus takes place on the third day after that night when the

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discussion about the ideal city—and of the soul, of the soul as the magnified paradigm of the polis—took place. At the beginning, now, of the Timaeus, not only Socrates himself provides the reader with a summary of the Republic, but also Critias narrates a story that would become famous as re-told in the dialogue that bears his name, that is, the story of Atlantis. The story, Critias tells us, was told to him by his grandfather on the third day of the festival Apaturia. The authorship of the lost city’s story, however, belonged to Athens’ famous lawgiver, Solon. The mise-en-scène is familiar. Three nights ago, Socrates had assumed precisely the role of a lawgiver in establishing a similarly fantastical city. Only with one difference: Solon’s story is true (21d8, 26d, 26d2–3, 26e 4–5), while Socrates’ account of the ideal city is called a myth (26c8, 26e4). Is then the Timaeus the truth of the Republic? If our quest for the fourth, or at least for the conditions on the basis of which the question of the fourth can be raised lead us through the dense terrain of the Republic, then this is the route we must take. Let us then begin again with the Republic and begin with its beginning, or rather its beginnings, as one could count three different beginnings: one beginning at the beginning, a second beginning after the abortive conclusion of the first book that begins anew with Book II (through Book IV), and a third beginning at the beginning of Book V, where the opening scene of that first beginning is repeated and perhaps parodied. Three beginnings. The third beginning—we could say the “third movement” in the Symphony of the Republic—consists, in turn, of the unfolding of three waves, as Socrates calls them (457b7–457c5 and 472a3–4). These are: • • •

the discussion about the equality between men and women in the City (451b9–457b6); the discussion about the community of spouses and children in the City (457c10–471c3); and the discussion about the Philosopher-Kings (473c11–to the end of the book, continuing on book VI and VII).

Every one of these three waves puts forward in some respect the question of the Other. In the two first waves, the Other manifests itself as the feminine and the child. In the third wave the Other, as the prerogative of the

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philosopher’s knowledge, assumes the form of that which is “otherwise than being,” the Good “beyond being.” Even though the Other makes a threefold appearance in the Republic, or, precisely because its appearance remains threefold, that is, unable to move beyond the limits of trinitarian structure, otherness is suppressed by the laws of the City. There is no place for otherness in the (Platonic) political. The theme of that suppression was announced already from the very first pages of the Republic, when Cephalus draws a parallelism between sexual desire and political authority. Getting older, Cephalus said, frees oneself from the mania of a wild Master (329d and 329c4). Furthermore, in the same prelude to the dialogue, Cephalus is told to be not the father of his wealth and therefore he “does not love money that much” (330b8–9)—not as much, at least, as poets love their own poems and fathers their own children (330c3–4). I see in this double metaphor an oblique reference to the discussions on the poets (in Book III) and on parenting (in Book V, second wave). Desire is to be either excluded or repressed in the City. Cephalus serves as the emblem of that City and his name (“the Head”) already tells us enough about what kind of City we are to encounter, a City of Heads (where the “heads” of the City, the rulers, are disproportionally discussed in comparison to the other classes) and, therefore, a City where there is no place or consideration for the body (e.g., in Book V, the difference between women and men is reduced to the difference between bold and hairy men [454c2] or, the fact that gymnastics is also to benefit the soul, with little or no reference to the body [in Book III, 403d]). This is the time to remind you that Socrates turns to the discussion of this ideal city only insofar as it can serve as an image of the soul, whose tripartition into the rational, the spirited, and the desiring part is famously established throughout this dialogue’s pages. That tripartition of the soul is, of course, not unknown to all of us who recognize in it Freud’s three celebrated psychic agents, namely, the super-ego, the ego, and the id, respectively. If we were, for a moment, to look back at the Timaeus, from where we began this journey, we will see that here (69b–71a) the three parts of the Soul are localized to distinct parts of the human anatomy: the head for the rational part, the breast for the spirited part, and the belly and what lies under the belly for the desiring part. Thus, we come back to the image that the name of the Republic’s host implies, that of a bodiless head, a city only of rulers, a soul rational alone. In his insightful reading of Oedipus Rex, Goux draws a comparison between the tripartite monster that

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Oedipus confronts (the Sphinx) and the tripartite structure of the soul as presented by Plato’s psychology.3 This allows him to be critical of Hegel’s reading of the confrontation between the Theban king and the Sphinx as the inaugural moment of rationality.4 If this is so, Goux argues, it is at the expense of the irascible and concupiscent elements of the soul that the exclusive identification of man with reason does not defeat, but rather allows them to operate on their own, it leaves them uncontrolled and, ultimately, enables them to return as the desire to kill the father (irascible) and sleep with the mother (concupiscent). Where, in such sequence of metaphors and in the proliferation of trinities that come along with them, is the Other? Where is the fourth? Yet, Plato himself has warned us that the division of the City into three classes is a lie, albeit noble (414c), and that the difference between rulers, guardians, and producers does not correspond to a metallic difference in their origin (in gold, silver, and bronze or iron respectively). One is to draw from this that the tripartition of the soul, which was based upon and illustrated by the division of classes in the City, is equally artificial and that therefore there is no essential difference between the rational part and the desiring part, or—I am still following Plato—between one’s head and one’s genitals. Trinity has collapsed into unity; it has revealed itself as the specter of the most metaphysical of all concepts or numbers, the One. Thus, we have traced the unfolding of the Republic from the one definition of justice, which Book I seeks, but fails to capture (a definition cannot but be one); to the two dimensions of the paradigm (the City, Socrates says, is depicted as if painting); to the three dimensions of the Republic’s dialectics (“just like a sculptor” Glaucon remarks at the end of Book VII). Where is the fourth? The Timaeus represents indeed a fourth beginning, and the rehearsal of the Republic at the opening of the dialogue indicates the connection with its great counterpart. Especially as Socrates states that, “like someone who has spent a long time staring at beautiful animals, either painted, or alive but motionless, has now the desire to see them moving and in action, so I feel with regards to the City which we have discussed” (19b–c). It is as if Socrates says that the City—and, remember, this is still an image of the soul—has been sufficiently analyzed in theory, it is, therefore, time to see it springing to action, in movement, that is, in history. He, the philosopher, cannot proceed further. It is Critias and Hermocrates who can accomplish this task of bringing the theoretical, indeed one can say here the eidetic, to the everydayness of the concrete and

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historical. And that was the master plan of Plato’s great tetralogy, consisting of the Republic, the Timaeus, the Critias, and the Hermocrates. By each dialogue, as if by a new step, the reader would have been brought closer to contemporary history, to the history of oneself. In inheriting Socrates’ ideas of the Republic, Timaeus in his dialogue gives us a genesis, a cosmogony, stopping, appropriately, with the creation of the first human beings; Critias, then, picked the story from where Timaeus had left it and went through humanity’s mythical past. Finally, Hermocrates, in the dialogue that would have been named after him, would have completed the progression by taking us to the present now. As you know, the Critias was left abruptly unfinished, and a Hermocrates was never written. The fourth dialogue—and along with it, the quest for the fourth—remains an unfulfilled promise. The place of das Ding The foregoing has been an effort to inscribe das Ding within a philosophical genealogy that begins with Plato and extends all the way to Kant, Heidegger, and Marion, connecting psychoanalytic discourse with that of philosophy and phenomenology in particular. Let us trace this connection a little more closely. Lacan, in his effort ‘to return to Freud,’ moved beyond Freud, insofar as the ‘return to Freud’ took the form of a Husserlian ‘return to the things themselves’ or at least to the ‘thing itself,’ das Ding an sich. The Kantian influence on Freud is noted by Lacan as much as it is by Becker in his paper.5 Thus, Lacan writes: “That is something which emerges in the philosophy of someone who, better than anyone else, glimpsed the function of das Ding, although he only approached it by the path of the philosophy of science, namely, Kant.”6 Kant’s categories, namely quality, quantity, relation, and modality, provided Marion with the index according to which he organized the phenomenon of saturation. The event overflows quantity, the idol quality, the flesh overcomes relation, and the icon resists modality.7 So Marion writes: If we follow the guiding thread of the Kantian categories, we locate, according to quantity, invisible phenomena of the type of the event (collective or individual); according to quality, phenomena the look cannot bear (the idol and the painting); according to relation, absolute phenomena, because defying any analogy, like flesh (Leib); finally,

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according to modality, phenomena that cannot be looked at, that escape all relation with thought in general, but which are imposed on it, like the icon of the other person par excellence.8 Marion’s re-writing of the Kantian categories of epistemology is not the first such attempt. Nor is Kant’s classification of any possible judgment with respect to any phenomenon in general under those four categories without precedence. By tracing the genealogical connection of both Freud and Marion, of both psychoanalysis and phenomenology, to Kant we have glimpsed at a philosophical tradition which counts up to four. Access to the fourth is provided by Lacan, who writes: I have already asked the question here as to what the critical conceivable minimum is for a signifying scale, if the register of the signifier is to begin to organize itself. There cannot be a two without a three, and that, I think, must certainly include a four . . .9 He, then, goes on to recommend to the attendants of his seminar Heidegger’s lecture given in 1950 under the title Das Ding. Heidegger’s guiding question in this lecture is the seemingly simple question: ‘What is a thing?’ In search of an answer, Heidegger takes up the example of a jug. To know what a jug is it would seem enough to know that it was made—made by a potter, made by earth, made for the purpose of containing, made in the form of a jug.10 Thus, Heidegger rehearses Aristotle’s four causes: efficient (the potter), material (the earth), final (the task of containing), and formal (the form of a jug). Yet, in a characteristic Heideggerian twist, Heidegger re-writes Aristotelian causality by calling attention to “the emptiness, the void” of the jug. “The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel.”11 In creating the jug, the potter does not create a thing, or rather it creates a thing only to the extent which, in a manner of a creation ex nihilo, “he shapes the void. For it, in it, and out of it.”12 Thus, “the vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.”13 The void of the jug, however, is a void saturated with givenness. For “to pour from the jug,” Heidegger continues, “is to give.” “The nature of the holding void is gathered in the giving.”14 “The jug’s jug-character consists in the poured gift of the pouring out.” “In the gift of water, in the gift of wine, sky and earth dwell. But the gift of the outpouring is what makes the

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jug a jug.” So, in conclusion, Heidegger arrives at a new definition: “[T]he pouring jug occurs as the giving gift.”15 Marion’s indebtedness to Heidegger here is beyond question. It should be added that Heidegger’s quest to think the thingness of the thing is framed by a discussion on nearness and distance along the very lines we find in Marion’s study from 1977, The Idol and Distance. It is in this book, as well as in its companion God Without Being—both quite noticeably under Heidegger’s influence—that the terminology of idol and icon, one of the two pairs of saturated phenomena, was first developed. Furthermore, the fourfold of saturation—the event, the flesh, the idol, and the icon—is Marion’s own attempt to re-write Heidegger’s now famous Geviert—earth, sky, mortals, and gods—as it was first developed in the lecture “Das Ding.” Plato’s tetralogy of dialogues, Republic, Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates, is in both cases (Heidegger’s and Marion’s) condensed so much as to fit into four corresponding concepts. In their respective endeavors, both thinkers, Heidegger and Marion, attempt to re-think reality. Yet, one could not hope to make much progress in this attempt without confronting, or rather without being confronted, by the thing. After all, reality is above all the realm of the res. In Greek reality, πραγματικότητα, is the domain of the thing, of the πράγμα. Heidegger, in the same lecture we have been discussing, offers a thoughtful lineage of the various transformations and transmutations which such words as res and causa underwent through history. For us here, however, it is enough to note that the secret of the reality-principle is held by the thing, by das Ding,16 insofar as it comes to signify an exteriority by far more alien to the subject than the external world which is, at the same time, more intimate than the subject is to itself: hence, Lacan’s term extimacy.17 The whole of the psychoanalytic project has often been summarized in Freud’s phrase: “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden”—which Becker translates for his purposes as “Where idol gives, there shall flesh give!”18—and which, in another language and in another narrative, was known as “ubi tu, ibi et ille,” that is, “where [your] mother is, there shall you be.”19 Yet, how could one occupy the mOther’s place? That is, what does it mean to occupy the place of das Ding? What we were thinking in speaking of a place in relation to das Ding?20 Can we assign it a place, unless, of course, this phrase, “the place of das Ding,” is nothing but an infelicitous metaphor, a manner of speaking. Yet, if for one fleeting moment, we were to take ourselves seriously, wouldn’t we be surprised by the implication of what we had said

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without explicitly saying it—wouldn’t we come to realize that what is left unsaid, yet inescapably implied, in speaking of “the place of das Ding” is that it, as the thing par excellence, insofar as of all things it alone is only a thing and nothing else, a thing and nothing more, a thing without qualities or attributes, as “a plentitude that is empty,”21 as an excess of nothingness, then it, if it is to take place, must be something bodily, if not the body. This phrase, then, which we have chosen as the title of our presentation, already announces from the outset its central intention, namely, the body as das Ding. The broken body “[F]leeing from the flesh,” writes Becker with reference to the title of his paper, is like fleeing from the scene of a crime in which one will inevitably became caught, the facticity of the flesh cannot be undone, and will give itself all the more indubitably in the ego’s attempts to run away from it.22 “Omne corpus fugiendum esse”: This saying, attributed to Porphyry (Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XXII.26) suggests that, in order to attain happiness, the soul must flee from the bodily. I would like to make a bold assertion here and say that such “flight from the flesh” is indeed impossible; insofar as the body is the “flight from the flesh,” to a flesh one is always bound to return. For both psychoanalysis and phenomenology the soul, in its most profound and fundamental understanding, which is also the less understandable, is somatic or, better yet, sarkic (from sarx), that is, flesh. I have in mind here Freud’s observation about the “somatic influences” of the id23 and Husserl’s distinction between, on the one hand, a body (Körper), organized by language, and, on the other, the in-articulable flesh (Leib).24 Flesh is that which remains unsaid and unsayable, more intimate to me than my body, yet irreducible to any form of signification or reflection. The flesh as l’impossible à dire,25 as the intimacy of exteriority, as extimacy, occupies the place of das Ding.26 “The flesh puts the self ‘under house arrest,’ by delivering the ego to itself,” writes Becker.27 The metaphor of self-captivity here is suggestive and invites, by a way of an illustration, the telling of a story as we find it in Pirandello’s Undici Novelle.28 The story is not about Heidegger’s jug but

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about an oil jar. It is the story of a miscarried attempt to repair—one could even say “heal”—a crack that inexplicably has split the jar into two halves. A tinker is called to repair the broken jar, and we are presented with two possible solutions. One is a “miraculous” resin cement that the tinker himself has invented; the other is the more traditional method of opening holes along the crack and holding together the two halves of the jar by applying rivets. The owner of the jar, Don Lollò, prefers that latter method. The option of the resin cement would have mended the jar while preserving a more or less visible trace of its crack. One is here reminded of the Japanese art of kintsugi which, instead of striving to disguise the cracks in the body of an object—as in the vain attempt to restore it to the way it looked when new—it rather highlights them by means of a golden resin, thus allowing the object to acquire its own history. In the process of mending the broken jar, the tinker rivets himself inside the jar—“imprisoned, imprisoned there, in the jar he himself had repaired.”29 Don Lollò, fearing that freeing the tinker could only mean breaking the jar once more, decides to keep him there, in spite of his lawyer’s warning that such an action would amount to “illegal confinement,”30 unless, of course, the tinker is willing to pay him for the value of the jar. But this is the problem: for the tinker the jar is already broken and, thus, it has no value, at least not the value that its owner would wish. So the tinker refuses to leave his confinement and remains within the jar. There are some points of interest for our discussion of this story. The confinement of the tinker within the jar came as a result of the owner’s insistence. As one of the farm hands observes: “the man on top gives orders . . . and the man on bottom is damned!”31 The comment is about Don Lollò, the man on top, and the employed tinker Dima Licasi, who, as the man on bottom (and soon to find himself on the bottom of the jar quite literally) follows orders. Yet, we wonder whether the man on top and the man on bottom might not be the same man. To say this is not only to pay homage to Heraclitus’s saying “the way up and the way down is one and the same” (Fr. 60), but to think of the artificiality—Plato’s noble lie—of such stratifications whether in the Republic or in the dynamic operation of the psyche. There is no secret about the secret alliance between the superego and the id at the ego’s expense. Seeing it under this light, the tinker’s confinement inside the jar is self-inflicted. More importantly, the central idea of this story seems to be that somehow a short, ugly tinker who, as we are told, looks “like the old stump of

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a Saracen olive tree,”32 comes to occupy the place of the jar’s void. The complication, the story’s complex, if you wish, is that a man looking like an olive tree takes the place where olive oil should have been. A metonymic substitution: the olive tree for the olive oil. “Oil oozes out,” as Don Lollò observes, anticipating perhaps the filling of the jar with something that cannot simply been poured out. Finally, something about the jar itself. By becoming confined within it, the jar becomes the tinker’s outer shell, a thicker skin and an extension of his body, a second body (Körper). We said that he is imprisoned there by Don Lollò’s insistence to follow his orders, that is, by the “top man” in him and, in spite of his initial demands to be liberated, the imprisoned tinker decides to “take up residence in the jar.”33 He becomes identified with this second body—the body-idol in Becker’s terms. If Dima the tinker is to come out—if the olive tree looking like man is to “ooze out” like oil—then, he has to be pressed, crashed like an olive in order to flow like oil. The Brothers Taviani narrated this story as the epilogue in a film structured by five stories under the common title Kaos. The title is interesting as it allows us to make a connection between the film and Lacan’s reading of the Heideggerian jug as a paradigm of creation ex nihilo: from chaos to cosmos.34 In more than one way, Lacan’s three registers are organized in the image of the jug, with the symbolic and imaginary orders structured around the nothingness of the real, as means of both coping with it and protecting from it. Das Ding, then, occupies the place of an excluded fourth, at once exterior and interior to the subject, and the origin of an original trauma that allows us “to consider the manner in which the other is constitutive of my subjectivity.” The reason is that das Ding is at the center only in the sense that it is excluded. That is to say, in reality das Ding has to be posited as exterior, as the prehistoric Other that it is impossible to forget—the Other whose primacy of position Freud affirms in the form of something entfremdet, something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me . . .35 Finally, to Heidegger’s jug and to Pirandello’s jar, let us add a third example, that of the Eucharistic chalice. It is by means of a trauma, like the pressing of the grapes and of olives, that the nothingness of the void inside the chalice is filled with the wine that is offered both to God, like

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Heidegger’s libations, and to all who participate in the Eucharist. The pouring out of the Eucharistic chalice presupposes a previous kenosis, that of Christ’s self-emptying. It is by virtue of that self-emptiness that the word became flesh, and subsequently this flesh became a body wounded and crucified, a broken body, which will be continuously broken at what is known since the medieval times as the Torculus Christi, that is, the mystical winepress in which Christ’s flesh substitutes the vine’s grapes.36 At the culmination of this celebration, the celebrant invokes over the void of the chalice the Holy Spirit, re-enacting thus the principal moment of creation ex nihilo, when the Spirit of God hovered over the chaotic abyss. Creation begins again, endlessly, as a gift that keeps giving itself in excess. Notes   1 This version of the paper was presented at the conference Breached Horizons: The Work of Jean-Luc Marion in London, Canada, in March 2015. See Brian W. Becker, “Flight from the Flesh: Freud’s Id and Ego as Saturated Phenomena,” in Breached Horizons: The Work of Jean-Luc Marion, edited by Rachel Bath, Antonio Calcagno, Kathryn Lawson, and Steve Lofts (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).   2 Ibid., 264 (emphasis added).   3 “[Oedipus] relies on the victories won by pure reflection and on a clear consciousness of self. His failure to recognize the forces he should have controlled and integrated is thus allowed to burgeon. Instead of letting the wise element dominate the others, the irascible and the concupiscent elements, Oedipus detaches this reasonable element, gives it a kind of autonomy and independence (by self-reflection), to such an extent that the lion and multiform beast find themselves unchained, released, liberated. Patricide and incest, even involuntarily committed, are the most searing and profound expression of that liberation, itself involuntary, unpremeditated, of two nonhuman elements. When Oedipus gets angry and kills Laïus, it is the lion element that is rebelling against the head. When Oedipus manages to share the queen’s bed, it is the concupiscent element that is secretly satisfied. Each of Oedipus’s involuntary crimes embodies a return of a part of the Sphinx, the return of an unconsumed and uncomforted element of the tripartite monster that represents the monstrosity of the soul itself in its cryptic profundity.” Jean-Joseph Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 157.   4 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume I, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 361: “It is in this sense that the Sphinx in the Greek myth, which we ourselves may interpret again symbolically, appears as a monster asking a riddle. The Sphinx propounded the well-known conundrum: What is it that in the morning goes on four legs, at

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mid-day on two, and in the evening on three? Oedipus found the simple answer: a man, the he tumbled the Sphinx from the rock. The explanation of the symbol lies in the absolute meaning, in the spirit, just as the famous Greek inscription calls to man: Know thyself.” Hegel offers these remarks at the end of the section entitled, significantly enough, “Unconscious Symbolism.” It is also interesting to note that he connects Oedipus’ answer with the Delphic inscription (an allusion to Apollonian, and by extension, Socratic spirit). See also, Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher, 164–166.   5 Becker, “Flight from the Flesh,” 254–255.   6 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 55.   7 See Kevin Hart’s introduction to saturated phenomena in Jean-Luc Marion, The Essential Writings (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 76–77.   8 Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 112.   9 Lacan, Seminar VII, 65. 10 Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in his Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), 165–166. 11 Ibid., 167. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 169. 15 Ibid., 170. 16 “It is in this way that another typology is established, the typology which institutes the relation to the real. And now we can define this relation to the real, and realize what the reality principle means.” Lacan, Seminar VII, 66. 17 Ibid., 139. 18 Becker, “Flight from the Flesh,” 263. 19 See, Augustine, Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding (New York: New City Press, 2002), III.11.20; the reference is to an interpretation of Monica’s dream. 20 Lacan, Seminar VII, 66: “The Other of the Other only exists as a place.” And again, “I mean that the whole development at the level of the mother/child interpsychology—and that is badly expressed in the so-called categories of frustration, satisfaction, and dependence—is nothing more than an immense development of the essential character of the maternal thing, of the mother, insofar as she occupies the place of that thing, of das Ding” (ibid., 67, emphasis added). 21 Paul Moyaert, “Lacan on Neighborly Love: The Relation to the Thing in the Other Who Is My Neighbor,” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 4, 1 (1996), 7. 22 Becker, “Flight from the Flesh,” 261, with reference to Marion’s In Excess. 23 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, trans. J. Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1965), 91. 24 This distinction is made most clearly in Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern

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University Press, 1970), §28, 107, although frequently employed in his earlier works. 25 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). 26 Further evidence in support of this connection can be gleamed from MerleauPonty’s insight that the body in its ambiguous state (neither consciousness nor a thing of the world) is phenomenology’s closest approximation to the Freudian unconscious. See his Preface to A. Hesnard, L’Oeuvre de Freud et son importance pour le mode modern (1960), cited by Paul Ricoeur in Freud and Philosophy, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 417, note 99. See also Emmanuel Falque, God, the Flesh, and the Other: From Irenaeus to Duns Scotus, trans. William Christian Hackett (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 117 ff. 27 Becker, “Flight From the Flesh,” 261. 28 Luigi Pirandello, “The Oil Jar” in his Eleven Short Stories: Undici Novelle, trans. Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover, 1994). 29 Ibid., 103. 30 Ibid., 105. 31 Ibid., 101. 32 Ibid., 99. 33 Ibid., 109. 34 Lacan, Seminar VII, 121: “And that is why the potter, just like you to whom I am speaking, creates the vase with his hand around this emptiness creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole.” 35 Ibid., 71. 36 For iconographic examples see H. L. M. Defoer, “Pieter Aertsen: ‘The Mass of St. Gregory with the Mystic Winepress’,” Master Drawings 18, 2 (1980), 134–141, 197.

Bibliography Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Maria Boulding. New York: New City Press, 2002. Becker, Brian. “Flight from the Flesh: Freud’s Id and Ego as Saturated Phenomena.” In Breached Horizons: The Work of Jean-Luc Marion. Edited by Rachel Bath, Antonio Calcagno, Kathryn Lawson, and Steve Lofts. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Defoer, H. L. M. “Pieter Aertsen: ‘The Mass of St. Gregory with the Mystic Winepress.’” Master Drawings 18, 2 (1980), 134–141, 197. Falque, Emmanuel. God, the Flesh, and the Other: From Irenaeus to Duns Scotus. Translated by William Christian Hackett. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis. Translated by J. Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1965. Goux, Jean-Joseph. Oedipus, Philosopher. Translated by Catherine Porter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.

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Hart, Kevin. “Introduction.” In Jean-Luc Marion, The Essential Writings. Edited by Kevin Hart. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume I. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Perennial Classics, 2001. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Dennis Potter. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. Marion, Jean-Luc. God Without Being. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Idol and Distance. New York: Fordham University Press, 1977. Marion, Jean-Luc. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Moyaert, Paul. “Lacan on Neighborly Love: The Relation to the Thing in the Other Who Is My Neighbor.” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 4, 1 (1996), 1–31. Pirandello, Luigi. Eleven Short Stories: Undici Novelle. Translated by Stanley Appelbaum. New York: Dover, 1994. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970.

Chapter 4

The cost of das Ding A response to Manoussakis’ “The place of das Ding” Brian W. Becker

In this response to Manoussakis’ insightful “The place of das Ding” (Chapter 3, this volume), I will ask a different question that concerns one’s relation to the other: not “when?” (time) or “where?” (place) but rather “how much?” (cost). This question emerges from the link Manoussakis makes between Lacan’s das Ding with that of Heidegger’s. Their respective analyses share in common an emptiness constitutive of das Ding. Lacan writes: This nothing in particular that characterizes [the vase] in its signifying function is that which in its incarnated form characterizes the vase as such. It creates the void and thereby introduces the possibility of filling it. Emptiness and fullness are introduced into a world that by itself knows not of them.1 Influenced as it is by him, this closely parallels Heidegger’s formulation: “When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel.”2 What Lacan appears to leave out in his analysis of das Ding in Seminar VII, however, is the gift-character that Heidegger attributes to this void, as discussed by Manoussakis. Further analysis of select texts within Lacan’s other seminars addresses this apparent omission, revealing that das Ding can indeed be characterized as a kind of gift, and this proposed gift-character of das Ding calls forth a contrasting characterization of the Lacanian subject as produced by an economic logic of sacrificial exchange that turns this gift into a fetishized commodity. Thus, to ask “what is the cost of das Ding?” is to inquire as to how the gift is economized or, in Lacanian terms, how ‘the real’ of das Ding comes under the influence of ‘the symbolic’

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economy. In this response, I unfold the significance of das Ding as gift showing that, in fact, a link can be established in Lacan’s brief discussions of the gift as the excremental real. I then move into the manner in which das Ding is economized through a process of symbolic exchange and where the excessive remainder is removed and hidden from view. Gift and economy The concept of the gift has received much attention within structuralism, deconstructionism, and phenomenology.3 Debates among this literature often revolve around its relationship to economies. Some structural anthropologists, for instance, have interpreted gift giving as an economy of symbolic exchange, forming the basis for societal relations (Mauss, LéviStrauss) while certain poststructuralists have interpreted the gift to be an excess residing outside of all exchange (Bataille, Derrida). Derrida, in particular, considered the gift as what contradicts, upsets, and departs from the economy (despite the oxymoron of the so-called ‘gift economy’). A gift in its definitional sense constitutes an act that is outside the usual logic of exchange and reciprocity. Repayment is anathema to the gift. Derrida goes so far as to argue that even expectation of a “thank you” is enough to annul a gift. Yet, this very condition of the possibility of the gift (residing outside the cycle of economic exchange) is also the condition of its impossibility, for a gift made present will inevitably become caught up in cycles of exchange. In other words, there are always strings attached. Furthermore, the economy is predicated upon stability and regularity. Unpredictability is damaging to the health of an economy. As such, whereas Manoussakis’ inclusion of time seeks to incorporate a “fourth dimension,” the economy is predicated upon the exclusion of an “eventamental” conception of time4 in favor of a linear and cyclical conception necessary for constituting objects. The gift has also received attention in phenomenology (Heidegger, Marion). Though accepting Derrida’s distinction between gift and economy, Marion denies the gift’s impossibility, resorting to a phenomenology of givenness to establish the possibility of a gift that remains outside economic exchange. Through systematically bracketing giver, givee, and gift, he demonstrates the possibility of giving where no exchange transpires.5 One of the more notable elements of this analysis is that a gift does not require any object to be given or, if some object is handed off, it merely stands in

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for the thing being given. For example, giving one’s word (a promise) is a gift that contains no object and never achieves final accomplishment (until death) but can only be perpetually given or reneged. The same can be said of giving time, giving one’s life, etc. There is a kind of lack constitutive of these gift, just as the giving of the jug is made possible by its inner void. Heidegger’s influence on Marion on this point is notable, despite glaring and important differences. This lack is not produced by a deficit of intuition but rather a deficit in signification as the gift saturates with an excess beyond all possible meaning. It is this excessive quality that places the gift outside the circle of economic exchange and, as we shall see, is characteristic of the gift of das Ding in Lacan’s work as well. Das Ding and the gift The structuralist influence on Lacan’s presentation of the gift in the Rome Discourse (1953) is evident. Here he links the “first gifts” with the emergence of a “symbolic commerce” between the Danai and Argonauts.6 While the actual objects exchanged between these two groups were “empty” and “useless,” their symbolic function served to establish a peaceful pack between the two groups. This analysis offers a model for thinking of signifiers more generally as empty containers, lacking any concrete signified but rather existing in a chain connected to other signifiers. The logic of exchange among signifiers provides the basis for Lacan’s formulation of the subject as resulting from a sacrifice of jouissance in exchange for meaning. The consequence of such a sacrifice is an alienation from das Ding. A piece of jouissance is given up in exchange for a place within the symbolic order. “Thus the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire.”7 The subject receives, in effect, “the gift of speech” (le don de la parole) from the sacrifice of das Ding. This is in contrast to another kind of gift: love, which is “the gift of what one doesn’t have” (le don de ce qu’on n’a pas). Whereas the gift of speech resides in the lack of the symbolic, the gift of love functions as “an imaginary offering that attempts to fill in for the absent phallus.”8 While much more could be said regarding these symbolic and imaginary ‘‘gifts,’’ I will focus here on the gift that functions at the level of ‘the real.’ Here a surprising link is discovered between das Ding and the gift. As the pure excess of life itself, das Ding resists being dialecticized and

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incorporated into the economy of symbolic exchange, and it is this quality that renders it as excremental. Lacan notes that das Ding, in the form of objet a, manifests itself in various forms, one of which being the anal object that is known “by way of the phenomenology of the gift, of the gift given when one is beside oneself [dans l’émoi].”9 Linking gift and feces has precedent in Freud who wrote that “[the contents of the bowels] are clearly treated as a part of the infant’s own body and represent his first ‘gift.’”10 This shift from “the gift of speech” to the gift of excrement may, as Moore argues, be a product of the changing influence upon Lacan from Lévi-Strauss to Bataille, an observation also made by Žižek who claimed that Bataille is “the philosopher of the passion of the Real.”11 The excremental gift departs from all forms of symbolic exchange, serving as an excessive remainder for the economy. This gift is a sacrifice of economic sacrifice, producing “a life that exceeds subjectivity.”12 In Seminar XI, Lacan expresses most clearly this connection between gift and excremental remainder, stating that “[t]here is only any gift precisely right where it’s always been perfectly well spotted, at the anal level. At the anal level, something stands out, something looms up, which arrests the subject upon the realization of the gap, the central hole . . .”13 We see a variant of Heidegger’s jug here but, for Lacan, the void reveals the poison (das Gift) that is this gift. After bypassing the imaginary gift of love and symbolic gift of speech, we find the “unrecognizable, shitty remainder . . . [the] ‘excremental kernel of the Real’ . . . stripped of the fantasmic support that rendered it palatable to subjective experience.”14 Truly, the excremental is the most elemental. This analysis of the excremental gift is distinct from another analysis by Lacan of the fecal object where it appears in childhood as an “obsessive fantasy” to please the Other who gains satisfaction in “playing the doting parent.”15 Freud offered a similar observation: “[B]y producing them [excrement] he can express his active compliance with his environment.”16 Lacan’s analysis of the gift of excrement here appears to be situated at the level of the imaginary as a gift of love and precursor to all future “oblation.” However, it is not entirely clear that this interpretation is adequate. Though foreshadowing castration, what is remarkable about the child’s gift is the notable departure from its symbolic and imaginary counterparts for it serves no exchange and resists reciprocity. This excremental excess has no value, has no receiver (for it is rejected), and thus has no return on investment. The child may seek love in return but, instead, will only find

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disapproval for, by the time a child reaches the age of offering such a gift, the parents only accept it upon certain conditions. The hope to evoke a “doting parent” requires conforming to certain demands fostered upon the child (i.e. to defecate at certain places and at certain times—the economization of the gift). The child does eventually learn to produce such of ‘gift’ and will receive its reward as a result (meaning, subjectivity). However, prior to symbolic exchange, the child offers a more gratuitous gift, one of unbridled, unconditioned excess. The givee is suspended under these conditions, only the ungrateful rejectors (disapproving parents) appear. Yet, as Marion argues, the rejected gift still accomplishes its function as a gift and, in fact, achieves it all the more for not being received. “It was abandoned by its giver, then by its (non)givee, but in this abandon, it remains clear that the gift was well and truly given and given in a complete loss . . .”17 Loving intentions are not sufficient to render a gift economical for this places undue importance upon ‘the will’ in making a gift. Givers do not decide to make a gift but rather the gift decides its own givability. “I am insofar as I am susceptible to a decision, which does not belong to me and which determines me in advance.”18 This gift of the real is an act of pure abandonment, free for the dialectics of symbolic exchange as well as an imaginary love. The transition from excremental real to fecal oblation does mark an important transition for the body. It sacrifices its jouissance for the sake of appeasing the Other and, thus, achieves a ‘guarantee’ of meaning within the symbolic order. The child previously had no aversion to its own feces or in sharing it but now is faced with the “forced choice” of withholding it and masking the elemental trauma of its existence. When the economy rules, the jug no longer pours freely. The body, as we see with Dima Licasi, becomes restricted in its movements, hidden from public viewing, despite the occasional peeking of its head over the lips of the olive jar. Defecation, more so even than nakedness, is the great source of shame. We are fully ready to have another see us naked before ever, if ever, being seen to defecate. Genesis notes Adam and Eve’s shame of their nakedness. However, we may now wonder if this was perhaps a tactful euphemism for the far more primordial indignity of defecating in the presence of the Other. At the same time, this withholding would have allowed Adam and Eve to retain the digested remnants of the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. This withholding is our entry into the logic of the economy, which will subsequently manifest its most characteristic forms of

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possessiveness: envy, jealousy, greed, and, through reaction formation, various forms of incontinence. The cost of das Ding Recognition comes at a price: To be recognized one must be economized. Yet, this economization of the subject takes on distinct features within our late modern capitalist context where financialization and utility serve as fundamental currency. Economics trickles down into the invisible core of our flesh, joining together the Lacanian sign for the barred subject ($) and the dollar sign ($). If the unconscious is like a language, then commerce is its syntax under capitalism. Michael Sandal, in What Money Can’t Buy, demonstrates the creeping encroachment of economics into our daily life.19 From paying off one’s carbon footprint to fees to hunt wildlife with proceeds going to repopulating that species, an increasing range of human activities are being brought into conformity with the logic of marketplace values. Sandal’s analyses fulfill Nobel laureate Gary Becker’s claims that the calculus of economic utility does not pertain to a narrow domain within the market but, rather, to all forms of human activity including lifeand-death decisions, who we marry, and when we divorce.20 If a thing cannot be economized, it must be exorcised. Marion broadens the analysis of economics to include its metaphysical underpinnings, As a form of metaphysics is adheres to the Leibnizian principle of sufficient reason whereby intelligibility is contingent upon identifiable causes. Applied to the economy, financial evaluation is the measuring stick for achieving such justification. Pricing, possession, and exchange mediate knowledge and whatever cannot be economized becomes the repressed excremental remainder. In scenes from Pirandello’s story “La Giara” (“The Oil Jar”), Don Lollò, a wealthy landowner, displays all the features of this economic logic.21 He views others and justice itself in economic terms. He looks upon a poor boy and questions God’s justice, not for the boy’s condition, but for his own, having so many riches but far fewer years to enjoy them then this boy. Don Lollò has produced such a large olive crop that he orders an immense container to capitalize upon it. The jar becomes his proudest possession, a symbol of withholding. However, when it mysteriously breaks, Dima Licasi, the shadowy tinker figure, fixes himself within the jar in his attempt to repair it, and consequently becomes an economic object himself, a customer who inhabits the jar as Don Lollò

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confers with his lawyer about the amount he intends to charge Dima Licasi for lodging in his property. However it turns out that Dima Licasi’s stay within the jar cannot be exchanged for an equitable price. Thus, he must be expelled as the excremental remainder that he is. That which cannot be priced, rendered accountable within the symbolic order must be excluded altogether, exiled from the economy. In Negative Certainties, Marion discusses those persons who fail to conform to the definition of an economic identity: job seekers, homeless, undocumented, mentally ill, etc.22 Focusing on undocumented immigrants, Marion’s analysis offers parallels to the treatment of Dima Licasi in the film. Undocumented immigrants are the ones who contradict the essentialist identity of our political economy, being unable to prove their existence, lacking the necessary tax numbers of a social security identity card. Here the identification number serves as a master signifier and manifestation of the metaphysical principle of sufficient reason. The undocumented contradicts this ideology and, thereby, makes manifest an excess that society seeks to expel. The undocumented immigrant reveals the alienating effects of the symbolic order that places a dollar sign at the center of our being, and they, in turn, mirror back the excluded gap within our own economic subjectivities that we have managed to cover over by imaginatively ‘filling in the gaps.’ Conclusion: Some thoughts on therapy There is a parallel between the economizing of the jar’s void and the economizing that the field of psychology performs upon the therapeutic space. When clients (an appropriate economic descriptor) take up residence within this space, they do not leave the economy but find themselves situated in one of its principal instruments. Yet, we also see that the jar, and the economy it represents, is broken, wounded by a traumatic intrusion of the real, the flowing saturated givenness that resists all definition, all pricing. Our bodies are bought and sold but the excremental flesh will not be contained. The gift operates “clandestinely behind enemy lines” to quote C. S. Lewis, while the economic logic dances and swirls around the gift (as seen in the film La Giara). The task of the psychoanalyst is to welcome this excess by putting a stop to the logic of exchange by disrupting the perverse sacrificial system that leads to alienation within our capitalist economy. Žižek suggests that analysts, by being paid for services rendered, are enabled to “avoid getting mixed up in the libidinal circuit of (symbolic)

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debt” and “to stay out of the ‘sacred’ domain of exchange and sacrifice.”23 Indeed, a certain kind of exchange is suspended that would be present in an unpaid therapeutic relationship where the implicit rules of reciprocity would otherwise govern. However, as a profession where services are rendered at a price, all forms of psychotherapy, including psychoanalysis, find themselves on precarious ground when it comes to the possibility of taking on such a role. It is not entirely clear that payment suspends symbolic exchange but merely repositions psychoanalysis vis-à-vis the master signifier of the dollar sign. Perhaps the best such a model can offer is to fortify the container to more adequately contain the uncontrollability of the excluded excremental gift that continuously finds ways of seeping out despite our best efforts to control and hide it. Notes   1 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Potter (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 120.   2 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1971), 167.   3 For structuralist approaches to the gift see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990); Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969); Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 1: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1991). It may be incorrect to include Bataille in this group as he is also associated with poststructuralism. For discussions of the gift from phenomenological and deconstructive approaches see: John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999); Robyn Horner, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001); Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).  4 Along with John Manoussakis’ recent publication, The Ethics of Time: A Phenomenology and Hermeneutics of Change (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), I recommend to the reader Claude Romano’s Event and World, trans. Shane Mackinlay (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).   5 Examples include an inheritance where the giver is bracketed, giving to an enemy whereby the givee bracketed, and giving one’s word (a promise) whereby the gift is bracketed. See Marion, Being Given, 85–113.

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  6 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 225.   7 Ibid., 262. Italics added.   8 Gerald Moore, Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 42.   9 Jacques Lacan, On the Names-of-the-Father, trans. Bruce Fink (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), 66. 10 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 52. 11 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 55. 12 Moore, Politics of the Gift, 65. 13 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), 321. 14 Moore, Politics of the Gift, 68. 15 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015), 203. 16 Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 52. 17 Marion, Being Given, 90. 18 Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 25. 19 Michael J. Sandal, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012). 20 Gary Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976). 21 Luigi Pirandello, “La Giara”/“The Oil Jar,” in his Eleven Short Stories: Undici Novelle, trans. Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover, 1994). 22 Jean-Luc Marion, Negative Certainties, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 23 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 60–61.

Bibliography Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 1: Consumption. Translated by Robert Hurley. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1991. Becker, Gary. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Caputo, John D. and Michael J. Scanlon, eds. God, the Gift, and Postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. Derrida, Jacques. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1962.

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Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1971. Horner, Robyn. Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. Lacan, Jacques. On the Names-of-the-Father. Translated by Bruce Fink. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Dennis Potter. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translation by Bruce Fink. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by A. R. Price. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Translated by James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969. Manoussakis, John Panteleimon. The Ethics of Time: A Phenomenology and Hermeneutics of Change. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Marion, Jean-Luc. Negative Certainties. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. Moore, Gerald. Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Pirandello, Luigi. Eleven Short Stories: Undici Novelle. Translated by Stanley Appelbaum. New York: Dover, 1994. Romano, Claude. Event and World. Translated by Shane Mackinlay. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. Sandal, Michael J. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

Chapter 5

The real of ethics On a widespread misconception Marc De Kesel

Psychology and the Other.1 Can a title be more Lacanian? Where exactly is the logos of the psyche to be located? For Lacan it is clear: in the Other. What ages ago was called psyche, what we still sometimes call with that name (though in fact we don’t know what we say then) is to be located, neither in the body, nor in the mind, nor even with us, but with the Other, i.e. with what we share among us: logos, language—language on its most material level: signifiers. Our psyche is to be found somewhere else than in the ‘self’ we think we are. Its location is the autonomously functioning language system or, with the term Lacan borrows from Lévi-Strauss, the symbolic order. The ‘self,’ ‘soul,’ and ‘psyche’ we suppose we are, is a supposition indeed: It is what, in an imaginary and phantasmatic way, is supposed to be the owner and the ground of the signifiers we live by, by sharing them with others. Our ‘self’ is the supposed ‘subject’ (‘subjectum,’ ‘hypokeimenon,’ ‘bearer’) of the Other, of the symbolic order we live by. It is the core of Lacanian theory. Signifiers are the stuff we are made of. That this core insight of Lacanian theory is profoundly subversive might find evidence in the fact that not language, but its opposite is nowadays the central term in Lacanian theory. There, as well as in many psychoanalytically inspired critical discourses, it is the notion of ‘the real’ that has become the most important concept. It is generally one of the central notions and, in some cases, even the one on which the entire argument depends. However, didn’t Lacan precisely warn us that we should be suspicious about notions—or other signifiers—placed in the center of a discourse? Is their central position not often due to the fact they, if not meaningless in themselves, are able to say the opposite of what they apparently seem to say? And is this not the case with the concept of the real in current Lacanian

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discourse and critical theories? Or, to put it into Lacan’s proper terms: Is this concept not frequently used as a ‘point de capiton’ (quilting point),2 that is, the point where an entire discourse is hung on an empty signifier that, precisely in this quality, is able to give sense to the totality of that discourse? With respect to the importance of what Lacan tries to say with the concept of the real (note that, for myself as well, the ‘real’ is one the most important concepts in Lacanian theory), one ought to be aware of the risks of using this term as a central ‘point de capiton.’ In many cases, this concept runs the risk of re-covering—rather than discovering—the crucial point at stake in Lacanian theory. It frequently re-covers the kernel of psychoanalysis, its ‘cause freudienne’ (as Lacan puts it). This is, for example, the case when the real is linked to ethics. For the readers of Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, the “ethics of the Real” is supposed to be a comprehensible expression, intended to be able to clarify other, less comprehensible concepts and issues.3 Yet, this chapter will cast doubts on the clarity of the expression “ethics of the real.” My argument is that anyone who does not consider it a contradiction in terms simply misses the point and will never understand what ‘the real’ implies for the question of ethics. Let us, at once, serve up one of the most symptomatic quotes that plays a major role in so many Lacanian analyses: “ne pas céder sur son désir” (“do not give way on your desire” or, as Zupančič translates it,4 “do not give up on your desire”). To regard this well-known sentence as the core of Lacanian ethics (as well as the core of the “the ethics of psychoanalysis,” the title of the seminar it is quoted from),5 simply gives evidence of having read Lacan all too quickly and of having been caught by the imaginary force of concepts such as the real. For the core of Lacanian ethics (i.e. what, according to Lacan, ethics really is about) is not: “ne pas céder sur son désir.” The concept—and even the idea—of an “ethics of the real” is simply absent in Lacan’s seminar on ethics as well as in the other seminars. It seems to be the mere effect of an imaginary, symptomatic misreading of the Lacanian text. Before directly arguing these claims, it is worth revisiting the basic principles of Lacanian theory. Redundant as it might seem, a correct understanding of Lacan’s basic insights is indispensable in order to discover what is really at stake when he, at a certain moment in his oeuvre, introduces the notion of the real. For, indeed, this is what happens precisely in his seminar on ethics, although this certainly does not legitimate talking of an “ethics of the real.”

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Primacy of the signifier When, in 1972, during an interview for the Belgian Television in Brussels, Lacan was asked what, in a nutshell, is the very core of his entire theory (note we are in 1972, the notion of ‘objet petit a’ as the persistence of the real in the symbolic is already a main topic in his seminar for years), he replied seriously and with his usual pathos that Freud’s discovery is the importance of language.6 We, analysts as well as analysands, can solely rely on language: This is the core of psychoanalytic praxis as well as of its theory. Its basic insight into the human being is that it is made of language: We ‘are’ language, our very being is speakbeing, parlêtre. Yet in 1977, Lacan writes, concerning the Freudian unconscious: “[W]hat we should propose as being its structure, is language. This is the very core of what I teach.”7 The primacy of language: This is the heart of his theory; this is what he has seen; or, more exactly, what he has seen that Freud has seen, and to which he, Lacan, in fact was not able to add anything new. To this axiom psychoanalysis again and again has to come back in order not to forget its raison d’être. What we face in a psychoanalytic cure, what we face when we encounter the unconscious, what we face when we run into trouble with ourselves is language. It is the only material we work with, the only reality we deal with. This is to say: We never deal with real reality, with ‘the real.’ Listening to the analysand, the analyst has to listen, not to what is said, neither to the supposed real behind, but to the mere materiality of this speaking—a materiality defined as a signifier. When, in therapy or any other kind of mental health care, you wish to understand someone and approach his case scientifically, the domain you must operate in is a radically superficial one, just as the problems you have to deal with are to be approached in a strictly material way. “We are living in a material world, and I am a material girl” is what—with Madonna—the troubled girl sings on the couch. Except that the material in question is language—language in its aspect of pure materiality, pure externality, taken not for its content or meaning but for the materiality of its signifiers. In one sense, the modern therapist must do something which—at least formally—is similar to what Isaac Newton did the first time he scientifically (in the modern sense of the word) observed an apple falling from a tree. At that moment, Newton’s question was no longer what was falling down, i.e. he no longer presumed a connection between the essence of this apple and

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the move it made or the distance it covered. For, in his time, this was precisely how science (i.e. Aristotelian based science) commonly proceeded. ‘Pre-modern’ science presumed every movement to be reducible to the essence of the moving thing. An apple felt its essence (i.e. its potentiality of being) attracting it down to the earth. Composed of the four elements (i.e. earth, water, air, and fire), at a certain moment the earth in the apple predominates and makes the apple move toward the earth. And it is also at this precise moment that the life animating the apple’s being needs to fall to the earth so that the apple, after rotting there, can germinate and let the apple be what it always had been: the potentiality—the (living) essence— of being an apple tree. With Newton, the question of being and essence, until then the condition sine qua non of science, lost all importance. The external protocol of the way a thing—not an essence but a quantum of mass—falls down: This is now what a scientific observation takes into account. Scientific research is now limited to outlining the mathematical laws deducible from that phenomenon. It leaves all essentialist questions behind. The move away from an inner essence to mere superficiality is, in a sense, a move Lacan proposes too: not concerning physics, i.e. concerning the object-site of science (as it is called since Descartes), but concerning the domain of the subject, i.e. the domain which, since the emergence of ‘modern science,’ could never found a proper logic and which had been erroneously ascribed the logic of the object. This is the solution proposed (but never proved) by La Mettrie and eighteenth-century materialism, and it is still—and perhaps more than ever—the unquestioned paradigm of the contemporary social sciences. According to Lacan, Freud’s psychoanalysis is to be seen as an attempt to outline a really new, proper logic of the subject. It is a libidinal and (therefore) somewhat cunning kind of logic: the logic of the pleasureprinciple in which negation loses its validity, and where repression and denial are the norm rather than the exception. It is a logic of lies, however, which do not disappear once the truth is discovered—thus a logic where the truth re-affirms and sometimes even re-establishes the lies it unmasks. This kind of libidinal logic is at work in the way a libidinal being expresses itself in language—note: in language understood as a surface phenomenon, as a realm of signifiers disconnected from their meaning (signifié) and held together only by referring, superficially, to one another.

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Here, we face Lacan’s most basic intuition: This surface phenomenon called language—which is the sole element in which the libidinal being can live, i.e. gain pleasure—lies by definition about one thing, i.e. that, in language, there is simply no place for the one about whom all its signifiers are talking. In the discourse by which the libidinal being lives, there is no space for the subject of which its signifiers pretend to speak. This is the basic trauma inherent to our libidinal condition. We only live in—and thanks to—the symbolic order (i.e. the signifiers) that represents us, which implies we are never really present, not even in that symbolic universe of signifiers. And if this trauma is repressed (which is necessarily the case), it is not kept hidden in some mysterious depth; it is kept at the surface itself. It coincides with the operative impossibility language lives by. It coincides with language’s constitutive lack, with the radical incapacity of the signifier to definitively say its signifié (meaning). Hence, the satisfaction of the pleasure principle, being impossible at the level of ‘the real,’ becomes possible at the symbolic level, at the level of the signifier and language. For the signifier’s inability to really say what it has to say is nothing less than its operative principle. The impossibility of really saying and of expressing things (i.e. to replace their real presence) is language’s most proper condition. This is why language as such, in its merely formal quality, is the most adequate environment for the libidinal being to repress its impossibility of obtaining pleasure at the level of the real. Because we live by the pleasure-principle which is incompatible with the real, we are forced to rely on language. In a sense, signifiers are the air we breathe, the food we live by. For the one in psychological trouble searching for his true self (his ‘subject’) as well as for the one who spends his professional life treating and curing such a person, there is no other material to rely on than language. Yet, precisely within language, that self or subject can only be absent. When someone talks about himself, the one about whom he is talking is never the same as the one who is talking. The speaking subject—or, as Lacan puts it, the “subject of the enunciation”—only exists insofar as it is represented by the signifiers being used. These signifiers talk solely about “the subject of the enunciated,” which never coincides—and never will coincide—with “the subject of the enunciation.” The subject we ‘are’ is never really present nor is it ever really ‘real.’ In the final analysis, it is nothing but a radically dead point of reference in the discourse, which nevertheless constantly talks about it. Anyone who looks for his true ‘self’

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(and nobody can escape this: It is the very definition of the human insofar as we are—in the Cartesian sense—not simply objects but also subjects) must depend on the superficiality of the signifier with which he talks about himself in order to find out, at the end, that he has been nothing more than a dead point of reference in the language in which he (as real reality) always has been alienated. In other words, man is desire dancing on the wings of language; he is radically unfulfilled and radically unfulfillable desire. Although he supposes himself a fixed identity, he is continuously de-centered by his own symbolic subject position. In the case of an individual neurosis, he has become stuck in the demand about who he is and what he wants, a demand Lacan characterizes as imaginary. It is, then, as Lacanian theory teaches, a matter of rigorously elaborating this demand on the level of its material surface-structure (i.e. at the level of the signifier). For the aim of the treatment is not to answer the patient’s demand, but to liberate the desire locked up (repressed) in it. For desire—unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire—is man’s truth; it is the most basic thing humans live by. Although lived as satisfaction of desire, enjoyment nonetheless leaves desire unfulfilled. For, as Lacan has pointed out, enjoyment only feels as if desire has left all lack and void behind. In fact, however, in enjoyment, the subject of desire only fades away for a while. In the moment of enjoyment, the entire libidinal economy no longer rests in its subject (in its bearer, its hypokeimenon, its subjectum), but in its fantasy, i.e. in a little scenario of imaginarily fixed signifiers circling around the ultimate object of desire.8 In the very instant the subject finally enjoys usufruct of the desired object (which is the etymological meaning of the French word jouissance), in the instant his desire becomes entirely satisfied, it has already lost itself, which is to say it has lost its subject, i.e. the point from where it rules its entire libidinal economy. At the very moment of enjoyment, the libidinal system is no longer able to say ‘I enjoy.’ At this moment, it has been lost in its desired object or, more precisely, in its fantasy, i.e. a set of signifiers gathered around the ultimate object of desire. Desire’s object as real Reflecting in the late fifties on the status of this object, Lacan becomes more and more sensitive to one of its dimensions he had neglected until then. The object of desire is not only to be considered as symbolic and

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imaginary, it is real as well. It was Lacan’s self-criticism that brought him to this. Until then, Lacan located the central ruse of libidinal life in the coincidence of desire’s ultimate object with the lack or void by which the signifier operates. That is why human desire makes full circle and can become man’s essence: since desire’s ultimate object was a lack, even satisfaction and enjoyment keeps people desiring—which, in this case, means: living. That man was full of lack and discontent, that he never gets what he wanted, that he is not even present in his moments of enjoyment: These are all the hallmarks of man’s tragic condition. It is the libidinal condition of what makes him live, i.e. of the desire he ‘is.’ Human desire, coming full circle—this is the core of Lacan’s teaching until the first half of 1958. Yet desire might make a bit too full a circle, Lacan must have thought in his sixth seminar (Le désir et son interpretation, 1958/59).9 For what would be the difference between his theory of desire and the one implied in the work of a Jewish-born Christian author, social militant, and mystic, Simone Weil? As we know from the way he quotes her in his seminar, Lacan was particularly impressed by some passages from her book La pesenteur et la grâce. According to Weil, too, the weight (la pesenteur) that makes life hard is at the same time the key to seeing life as light and full of grace—if only we regard the weight of the lack of being in a different way.10 Lack should not be considered as what limits and torments life; it is at the same time its condition of possibility.11 Weil develops the idea in the line of Christian mysticism. What else is God than the nothing or nada that John of the Cross locates at top of the Mount Carmel and which keeps his desire burning at the very moment it enjoys its final satisfaction? What else is God than the name of the void or the death that supports us and in which not even our dying finds an end, as Teresa of Avila12 puts it, in order to stress the infinity of the life God gives us? So, if Lacan’s insights can so easily be illustrated by passages from Christian mysticism, where is the difference distinguishing his theory from Christianity’s theory of desire? Is his own theory really more than a Freudian rewriting of insights already accurately developed in Christian tradition? And, second question: If desire finds its ultimate answer in its own lack, does this not lead Lacan to the conclusion that man is able to harmonize his desire, to be reconciled to it? Should we in that case no longer consider Oedipus’ performance in Colonos as a radically tragic confrontation with desire? On the verge of death, the chorus understands

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the incestuous tyrant as wishing not to be born at all (“mè phunai”).13 In his second seminar, Lacan referred to this passage as man’s ultimate confrontation with himself as with the irreconcilable desire he is.14 Now, the same ultimate confrontation seems to be much more reconcilable. It seems to be the moment in which desire comes full circle and, so, becomes reconciled. Reflecting on these issues in his sixth seminar, Lacan’s oeuvre takes a turn in a very different direction from the path upon which Simone Weil seems to have led him for a moment. He rediscovers desire as never reaching full circle, not even in its very lack. Hence, a conciliatory confrontation with desire will become impossible. Only now, Lacan will rediscover the truly tragic structure inherent to this confrontation. Here, in the late lessons of his sixth seminar, the emphasis of the real emerges that is so typical of Lacan’s later work. Again and again, Lacan will stress that the ultimate object of desire has a real dimension which can neither be neglected nor fully acknowledged. Although he considers this object the lack the symbolic order (the signifier) operates with, the object is not only that. It has also a radically non-symbolic, real dimension. What the libidinal being longs for in the last resort is the real beyond the symbolic and its signifiers. In spite of the signifier’s infinite ruses, it is not able to completely fool the libidinal being and to bury the real (i.e. the lack on the level of being) once and for all beneath the operative lack of the symbolic. In other words: The symbolic universe in which the libidinal being performs his desire, does not protect it once and for all from the death drive. Desire is driven by what, at long last, can turn against the self-preservation of the desiring organism. This is to say that desire is inherently excessive. Although it seems to make full circle by appropriating its own lack, desire cannot avoid our libidinal life being characterized by an inherently excessive tendency. In addition to the lack of the signifier, another lack should be acknowledged, i.e. the Thing, whose topological place is in the domain of the real and which, on a destructive—and even self-destructive— way, is the point of attraction for the entire libidinal system.15 The entire symbolic life of the libidinal being turns around an excessive point to which it is attracted and towards which, at the same time, it keeps its distance. Henceforth enjoyment, too, will be defined in a modified way. It no longer loses itself exclusively in the lack with which the symbolic order operates. Now it loses itself in the real as well—a loss that is only

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prevented from being lethal because of the fading of the subject. The goal to which desire is driven is no longer only a lack that, once enjoyed, reanimates desire. Desire and its satisfaction are now defined as inherently transgressive.16 The aim of libidinal life now lies beyond the order of the symbolic lack, i.e. in the real, which, once reaching that aim, would imply the death of the libidinal being, were it not that its subject was capable of fading away on the very moment it reaches this goal. The real of ethics It is not by accident Lacan develops these ideas during his seminar on “the ethics of psychoanalysis.” His new definition of enjoyment (enjoyment as transgressing the limits of the symbolic order) implies that the way we deal with the good—the ‘good’ in the moral as well as in the material, economic sense of the word (the goods)—ultimately coincides with the destruction of all good(s). With Aristotle, the entire tradition considers the goal of ethics to be the Supreme Good. For Lacan, however, this so-called Supreme Good is to be analyzed as enjoyment, i.e. as what lies beyond all goods (in the ethical and economic sense of the word), or, what amounts to the same thing, as what lies beyond the signifier. In the moment of jouissance— entering the domain where traditional ethics situates the Supreme Good (the realization of our desires)—we in fact leave all goods behind, so Lacan argues. What was supposed to be the Supreme Good, then, is unmasked as lying beyond any good, i.e. as lying beyond the element in which—and by which—we live. The Supreme Good turns out to be radical evil. Acknowledging the human being as desire implies acknowledging that what he finally desires is indeed a radical, self-destroying evil; in other words, that the truth of Kantian ethics is to be read in the horrifying fantasies of Marquis de Sade. There we face the real we long for. There we find a representation of what happens when our final object of desire becomes realized at the level of the real (and no longer at the level of the symbolic). Is this what we should do, then? Is it our ethical duty to realize our desire right up to the level of the real? Is this “the ethics of the real?” Certainly not. This would be a mere promotion of sadism. For, indeed, the truth of desire is to long for the real, i.e. for a transgression of the symbolic, a transgression that ends in the (self)destruction of the subject. Ethics should first of all protect us against this truth. According to Lacan, ethics is essentially an ethics of desire, an ethics that promotes desire and, therefore,

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protects us against satisfaction, i.e. against the self-destructive ultimate object to which, unconsciously, it is attracted. In this sense, Lacan is more Kantian than we often admit. But does Lacan not claim “we should not give way to our desire” (“Ne pas céder sur son désir”): Does this famous Lacanian maxim not constrain us to remain faithful to our desire, even to the bitter end? Is it not our ethical duty to remain as faithful to our desire as Antigone did, even when we run the risk of being destroyed? Is this not the ultimate ethical lesson to be drawn from Lacan’s seminar on ‘the ethics of psychoanalysis?’ There is really a persistent misreading of the passages in Lacan’s ethics seminar in which he develops his ideas about “ne pas céder sur son désir.” It has, for instance, become commonplace to promote Antigone as a moral example, illustrating the ethical imperative developed in Lacan’s seminar on “the ethics of psychoanalysis.” This imperative, however, is simply nowhere to be found in the Lacanian text. There, Antigone is precisely said not to illustrate the order of ethical imperatives or, as Lacan defines it, the “function of the good” (“la function du bien”).17 So, Antigone does not stand for a good we, in the name of ethics, should aim at. She does not exemplify a good we should have or be. Instead, she illustrates what Lacan calls “the function of the beautiful” (“la function du beau”):18 She shows us beauty as “the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear”— to quote a famous passage from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies19—to which Lacan, strikingly, never refers, neither in his seminar on ethics nor in his other seminars. Antigone shows where, in the final analysis, human desire leads: i.e. beyond the good, beyond the realm of the livable goods (signifiers). She illustrates desire’s ultimate goal, which is no longer compatible with the self-preservation of the desiring subject. Anyone who promotes this goal as an ethical imperative, promotes in fact the transgression of the law as the law itself, which inevitably ends up in a universe described in the work of Marquis de Sade. This is the precise reason why Lacan, in his seventh seminar, introduces a conceptual distinction between sublimation and perversion. In sublimation, the subject acknowledges the primacy of desire by “elevating its object to the dignity of the Thing”—as Lacan defines sublimation there.20 It is a way of affirming that one is unable to occupy the position of the ultimate object of desire. For, as Lacan discovers in his seminar on ethics, that object cannot be subjectivized at all. That is why it is no longer to be defined as simply symbolic, as the lack in which the chain of signifiers

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rests, i.e. as the point where that chain gets subjectivized. It is true that this point is the locus of the subject of desire, but precisely as what does not coincide with its ultimate object. Sublimation—such as courtly love for instance21—celebrates the distance between the subject and the object, i.e. the subject’s impossibility of occupying the object’s position. The opposite of sublimation, Lacan argues in the same seminar, is perversion.22 There, too, the subject acknowledges that the ultimate object of desire is the Thing (i.e. the ‘beyond’ of the signifier). But the perverse kind of acknowledgment operates from the very position of the Thing. The subject knows the Thing is real and untouchable, but this act of knowledge already secretly proceeds from that position and, thus, coincides with a denial of the very impossibility of reaching the Thing. This typically perverse denial can be found in the fantasies described in Sade’s oeuvre. They illustrate the radical freedom of desire, for there, indeed, the Sadian hero does not give up on any possible desire. But the place he occupies as subject of desire is the place of its object: He fully and consciously enjoys desire’s ultimate object. Pretending to real enjoyment, he shows desire freed from any lack, any void, any restricting law. On second glance, however, these Sadian fantasies clearly show that desire’s lack is not at all filled in but only denied. It is precisely this denial that causes sadism’s inhuman cruelty. For the Sadian hero literally transfers the lack of his own desire (i.e. the hallmarks of his own finitude) onto the body of his victim, in order there to deny on this tortured body the lack of his own desire, the hallmarks of his own finitude. The sadist’s full acknowledgment of desire and enjoyment coincide with the denial of what is the indispensable base of both desire and enjoyment: the lack or the void, affirming man’s finitude, man’s impossibility of being anything else than (unfulfillable) desire. This is precisely not how Antigone acts. It is certainly not the position she takes when she decides to bury her ‘bad’ brother, i.e. the brother condemned by Creon, the representative of the law. Her decision to strew sand over the corpse of Polyneices is not so much a “jump into the real” (a jump out of the symbolic order) as a genuinely symbolic act. She realizes that her brother is on the verge of being evacuated from the symbolic order by Creon. Protesting against this, her intent to bury him affirms her brother as a signifier, i.e. a being once and for all marked by the Logos (i.e. the signifier). It is Creon who, in a perverse way, is clearly intent on denying the very existence of Polyneices. He wishes—not to destroy Polyneices’ life (for he is already dead)—but to destroy that which was the

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very support of that life, i.e. the signifier ‘Polyneices.’ Forbidding his burial, he wants to deny the basic ground of his existence; he wishes Polyneices never to have existed. He wants to erase his name from the book of the world (i.e. the symbolic order). He doesn’t simply want him to be dead, he wants a ‘second death’ for him, the death of the signifier he ‘is.’ For the latter is what is acknowledged in a funeral par excellence. It is the celebration of the human being surviving, as signifier, in the symbolic order. ‘Surviving’not in some kind of afterlife but in this life; ‘surviving,’ in the way that, from birth as a subject he always already is surviving. For this is the proper situation of the libidinal being. It always already ‘survives’ in the symbolic order, or, as Lacan puts in his formula, in a “signifier representing the subject for a signifier.”23 It is in his quality of signifier that Polyneices is elevated to the level of the Thing. So, from Lacan’s perspective, Antigone’s act is an act of sublimation. She does not ‘jump into the real,’ it is only her brother she puts in this position, in order to recognize him for what, on his most basic level, he ‘really’ is, i.e. a signifier. It is only in this way she performs the radical nature of her own desire. This is also why she considers herself as already dead.24 Hence her indifference to the threat of Creon’s death sentence. In fact, she takes the position, which, according to Lacanian theory, the subject of desire always takes, i.e. the position of a dead point existing solely thanks to the signifiers referring to it. In this perspective, it is clear that her act is really an act of sublimation: Putting her brother on the level of the Thing, she promotes him in his quality of signifier, and she acknowledges herself as the subject of desire, circling around the privileged signifier—a privileged one in the sense it indicates the final object of desire. Creon, on the contrary, illustrates the opposite of sublimation. He is the one who wishes to destroy Polyneices as signifier, i.e. as marked by the lack his existence rests upon. Although not with the same ‘consciousness’ as the Sadian hero, Creon, too, transfers the lack to another—in this case Antigone as well as her lover, his own son Haemon—in order to deny in them the lack he himself (as well as the law he represents) rests upon. It should now be clear that Antigone (the play) is not meant to deliver some moral example. It is only meant to give us a view of the tragic shape of our desire. Is a figure like Antigone ethically irrelevant, then? Is she solely an aesthetic image, incapable not only of being a moral example, but also lacking any ethical value in general? On the contrary, as Lacan emphasizes

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in his seventh seminar. It is precisely in her aesthetic quality that the protagonist of Sophocles’s Antigone is of moral value. She offers an insight into what we suppose to be the supreme good but in fact is radical evil. She deconstructs our ‘normal’ faith in the supreme good, and analyses it as evil. It is this deconstructive gesture performed in the play that is of ethical value. It warns us against the possibility of evil at work even in the heart of our most ethical intentions. In other words, it warns us against the death drive which is operative in ethics—in our desire for the good—too. Yet this is not to say that we should give free rein to that kind of death drive or (which amounts to the same thing) to desire “à l’état pur.” But it is a dimension of our desire which we will meet when we go in search of ‘ourself.’ We will indeed then have to check where we have or have not “given way to our desire.” Although almost every author cites it as an actual quote, in Lacan, the imperative “ne pas céder sur son désir” is nowhere literally to be found. The only thing we find there is that, if during the cure the patient faces feelings of guilt, he has only one norm in reference to which this guilt can be measured; this norm is desire. Confronted with the feelings of guilt in this way, anyone who wants to get in touch with his desire has only one criterion: Did I or did I not give way to my desire? And, of course, I have given way to my desire. Nobody escapes this. Yet it makes no sense to accuse the analysand for having done so. This criterion is only a way to ‘de-center’ the question of guilt, to turn the patient’s imaginary questions in such a way that they make the truth of his desire come to surface. The fantasies at work in his demands must be elaborated in order to discover the true object of desire. It is here the analysand faces his fantasy as a last defense mechanism against the real, unreachable object of his desire, a defense mechanism which is at the same time desire’s final support. This fantasy supports the analysand’s desire, even when—for instance, in ‘enjoyment’—the analysand is no longer able to be the subject of his libidinal economy and, for a moment, fades away. So, fantasy is a last ‘screen’ keeping the subject in touch with and at distance from its last, real truth (in Lacanese: his object a as real). However, once this truth has been discovered, it is not a matter of appropriating it in order to make it a new foundation for moral behavior. The fact is that, by definition, we cannot appropriate that truth, i.e. that ultimate object of desire. Nonetheless, it is a fact as well that we are the subjects—the bearer—of the desire for that object. We are so, not in an ontological way, but in a performative way: We are that subject only

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insofar as we are to be that subject.25 For the analysand, only one thing matters in the “ethics of psychoanalysis:” to recover a way of becoming the subject of his desire again. The ethics of psychoanalysis is an ethics of desire, and even if the real is a main point of reference for desire, from a psychoanalytic perspective, ethics can never be defined as an ethics of the real. Our desire is oriented towards the real, but ethics can only be characterized as an ethics of desire. Locked up in the imaginary ruses of my demand, I must discover the desire repressed in it, and, therefore, I must discover myself as the subject of that desire: not the subject my demand speaks of (i.e. the “subject of the enunciated,” the ‘ego’ I necessarily suppose is speaking when I perform my demand), but the subject denied by this very demand: the “subject of the enunciation.” In other words: The subject of my desire, which can only be found in—and as—what remains absent in the signifiers used in my demand. This is why the ethics of psychoanalysis must be connected above all to the signifier. Certainly, confronted with his fantasy, the analysand faces the real, but this confrontation only emphasizes all the more that he only has signifiers in order to give his desire (for the real or for whatever) a chance. In the signifiers, human desire—i.e. human life—finds its support. Only as supported by the signifier can human desire be oriented towards the real and at the same time protected from it. This is why the good that psychoanalysis can give to the analysand is by definition never the good the latter asks for. The ‘good’ the analysand finally asks for lies beyond the goods that people can share. In other words, it lies beyond the signifier. So, in its cure, psychoanalysis can only offer a experimental space where the analysand can fight, not with the content, but with the materiality—i.e. the signifier—he uses in his demand, in order to recover himself as the ‘dead’ point in his discourse, as the one who is forever absent from the signifiers he lives by. Only such kind of ‘mourning’ can bring him in touch with his truth as being the subject of desire. The ethics of psychoanalysis must be linked to the signifier for yet another reason, which is ‘the desire of the analyst’—a topic of ever-increasing importance in the course of Lacan’s teaching.26 During an analytic session, the analysand unconsciously puts the analyst in the position where the answer to his demand is supposed to be found. In this way, the analyst is constantly tempted to indulge that demand. And since this demand hides a desire, the analyst is in fact put in the position of the ultimate object of the analysand’s desire, a position which is impossible to occupy. This is why

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the main task of the analyst is to keep that position empty. This is a difficult job, since he, too, is inclined to satisfy his desire—in this case his desire to help the analysand—and, thus, to give him what he demands. Constantly put in the position where his desire is to find satisfaction (enjoyment), he must precisely do everything in order to avoid this. This is why, not unlike his analysand, he has to remain the absentee of his own discourse as well as that of the other, the patient. Therefore, he must stick to the signifiers—the signifiers of his own discourse and, more visibly in the cure, the signifiers of the patient’s discourse. Certainly, within the discourse of his analysand, he is put in the locus of the real, but he has only the signifiers of that discourse at his disposal in order to find his position in it and to keep that position empty (to remain absent of it). In order to help his analysand (and this is what the ethics of psychoanalysis is about), he must operate at the surface of his discourse and has only signifiers to rely on. The ethics of psychoanalysis is not an “ethics of the real.” If it were so, this would perhaps make psychoanalysis more popular, more accepted by current psychology and other social sciences. For, as the title of “ethics of the real” suggests, psychoanalysis could then be perceived as being founded in the real state of things, in a state modern science claims to deal with.27 Contrary to this, the approach of psychoanalysis is thoroughly ‘superficial.’ The analyst cannot ground any of his claims in the real in the way that science does (or, at least, as science is perceived to). He cannot give the certainty the sciences are supposed to offer. Instead, he operates on the superficial surface of the signifier in an attempt to confront his patient with ‘himself,’ as with something that, even on that surface, is absent without being elsewhere—really—present. But precisely in this lack of ‘real ground’ and persevering in this superficiality, psychoanalysis finds its ethical raison d’être. Its ethics, being an “ethics of desire,” must remain superficial. It is the only way of giving space to modern man’s ‘essence,’ i.e. to his absence of any essence. In other words, it’s the only way to give space to his desire. And giving space to desire is what, according to Lacan, ethics is about. Notes   1 Editors’ note: This is the title of the conference where many of the chapters in this volume were originally presented.   2 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre III: les psychoses, 1955–1956, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris : Les Éditions du Seuil, 1981), 303; Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 93–94.

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  3 Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000), 4, 5; Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 213–239, appendix III: “The Unconscious Law.” See also the “Conclusion” in Jan Jagodzinski, Music in Youth Culture: A Lacanian Approach (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).   4 Zupančič, Ethics of the Real, 238.   5 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre VII: l’éthique de la psychanalyse, 1959– 1960, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1986), 368; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Potter (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 319.   6 This is what Lacan emphasizes in the beginning of the interview: “I have always insisted on what is evident . . . The analysis is a practice of language. . . . there is no other apprehension of the unconscious in Freud than an apprehension via language [appréhension langagière]” (Jacques Lacan, “Entretien à la télévision belge avec Françoise Wolff portant sur ‘Les grandes questions de la psychanalyse,’” October 14, 1972, retrieved from http://aejcpp.free.fr/ lacan/1972-10-14a.htm; my translation). And it is the same when, in July 1973, he gives a radio talk in France-Culture. The difference between a good and a false psychoanalysis depends on the following, he says: “Does the analyst, yes or no, recognize (as I teach) that the unconscious is structured as a language? . . . what Freud has discovered is that the speaking being does not know his thoughts, he has used that word, the thoughts that guide him: he insists that is thoughts, and when one reads him, one notices that these thoughts, like any other, are characterized by the fact that there is no thinking that does not function as speech, that does not belong to the field of language” (Le Coq-héron, 46/47 (1974), 4).   7 See www.lutecium.org/Jacques_Lacan/transcriptions/1977-00-00.doc.   8 Lacan introduces his concept of ‘fantasy’ (phantasme) in Le séminaire, Livre VI: le désir et son interprétation, 1958–1959, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Les Éditions de La Martinière, 2013); Jacques Lacan Écrits. The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 75.   9 Lacan, Séminaire VI. 10 Ibid., 108, 442. 11 Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce (Paris: Plon, 1948); Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (New York: Routledge, 2002). 12 “Dying from not dying”: this is one of Teresa’s descriptions of the mystical enjoyment, when the soul gets unified with God. 13 See Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, trans. David Greene. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 14 Jacques Lacan Le séminaire, Livre II, Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique psychanalytique, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1978), 269, 272, 277; For Lacan’s reference to this passage in Oedipus at Colonos, see Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre VII: l’éthique de la psychanalyse, 1959–1960, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1986), 292, 357, 361–362; 1992: 250, 320, 313–314.

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15 Lacan introduces “das Ding” (a concept from Freud’s Entwurf einer Psychologie, 1895) in his seminar on ethics; Lacan, Séminaire VII, 55–86. 16 See the chapter in Lacan’s seminar on ethics: “La jouissance de la transgression”; ibid., 225–239; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Potter (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 191–204. 17 See the chapter in Lacan’s seminar on ethics: “La fonction du bien”: Lacan, Séminaire VII, 257–270; Lacan, Seminar VII, 218–230. 18 See the chapter in Lacan’s seminar on ethics: “La fonction du beau”: Lacan, Séminaire VII, 271–281; Lacan, Seminar VII, 231–240. In the three following lessons, Lacan comments Sophocles’ Antigone. Already the composition of the seminar makes clear that Antigone illustrates Lacan’s notion of the “function of the beautiful.” 19 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies, trans. A. S. Kline, retrieved on August 11, 2017 from www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/Rilke.htm. 20 Lacan, Séminaire VII, 133; Lacan, Seminar VII, 112. 21 In his seminar on ethics, this is Lacan’s favorite example of sublimation. See: Lacan, Séminaire VII, 150–152, 167–184; Seminar VII, 125–127, 139–154. 22 In this seminar, Lacan only introduces this distinction, as “two forms of transgression” (Lacan, Séminaire VII, 131; Lacan, Seminar VII, 109). It is only in the early sixties, with Kant avec Sade, he really affirms this conceptual distinction. See the chapter on sublimation in my Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII, trans. Sigi Jöttkandt (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), 163–203. 23 Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 819; Lacan, Écrits: Complete Edition, 694. 24 In the beginning of the play, she voluntarily accepts the death sentence she expects. To Ismene, she says: “but I / will bury him. For me it’s noble to do / This thing, then die. With loving ties to him, / I’ll lie with him who is tied by love to me” (Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 56, vv. 71–74). And later, in another dispute with Ismene, she is even more clear: “you chose to live, and I to die,” so Antigone says to Ismene (v. 555; ibid., 78). 25 This is Lacan’s interpretation of what, in Freud, sounds: “Wo Es war soll Ich werden” (Lacan, Écrits, 801; Lacan, Écrits: Complete Edition, 678). 26 See for instance Lacan, Écrits: Complete Edition, 514: “An ethics must be formulated that integrates Freud’s conquests concerning desire: one that would place at the forefront the question of the analyst’s desire” (Lacan, Écrits, 615). 27 At least, this is how nowadays science is perceived. Although it is itself the result of a ‘superficial’ view on the world (see what is said above about Newton), science is often still perceived to delivered an ontologically based truth.

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Bibliography De Kesel, Marc. Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII. Translated by Sigi Jöttkandt. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009. Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Jagodzinski, Jan. Music in Youth Culture: A Lacanian Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1966. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Lacan, Jacques. Le séminaire, Livre II, Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique psychanalytique. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1978. Lacan, Jacques. Le séminaire, Livre III: les psychoses, 1955–1956, Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1981. Lacan, Jacques. Le séminaire, Livre VI: le désir et son interprétation, 1958–1959. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Les Éditions de La Martinière, 2013. Lacan, Jacques. Le séminaire, Livre VII: l’éthique de la psychanalyse, 1959–1960. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1986. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. Translation by Dennis Potter. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992. Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Duino Elegies. Translated by A. S. Kline. Retrieved on August 11, 2017 from www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/Rilke. htm. Sophocles. Antigone. Translated by Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus. Translated by David Greene. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Introduction and postscript by Gustave Thibon. Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr, London/New York: Routledge, 2002. Weil, Simone. La pesanteur et la grâce. Paris: Plon, 1948. Žižek Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997. Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London: Verso, 2000.

Chapter 6

The ethics of the real A response to De Kesel Mari Ruti

In his provocative quarrel with the advocates of the so-called Lacanian “ethics of the real,” Marc De Kesel (Chapter 5, this volume) proposes that these advocates—among whom he singles out Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič—have fallen into an erroneous romance of the real: a wholly imaginary approach to ethics that finds no support in Lacan’s writings. More specifically, if those who promote an ethics of the real equate ethics with a destructive (even suicidal) plunge into the jouissance of the real, De Kesel insists that the ethics of psychoanalysis cannot in the final analysis be anything but an ethics of desire, of “giving space to desire.” This ethics of desire only has one tool at its disposal: language as a system of signification that revolves around a void. In other words, the ethics of psychoanalysis is predicated on sublimation, on the subject’s (or signifier’s) power—as Lacan famously states—to raise an object “to the dignity of the Thing.”1 De Kesel admits that the ultimate object of the subject’s desire is always the Thing, the primordial (non)object that it imagines having lost and that beckons it to dive headlong into the jouissance of the real. That is, De Kesel admits that desire is intrinsically transgressive, seeking to breach the limits of the symbolic so as to reach the real (to unite with its object). However, given that the subject cannot achieve this aim without destroying itself, De Kesel concludes that psychoanalysis cannot possibly endorse it as an ethical paradigm. Instead, psychoanalysis recognizes that desire protects the subject against excessive jouissance, keeping it at a safe distance from the very thing (or Thing) that it most covets, and allowing it to pursue the sublimatory satisfaction of ceaselessly moving along a chain of signifiers. De Kesel writes, “Only as supported by the signifier can human desire be oriented towards the real and at the same time protected from it,” adding that

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even if the real is a main point of reference for desire, from a psychoanalytic perspective, ethics can never be defined as an ethics of the real. Our desire is oriented towards the real, but ethics can only be characterized as ethics of desire. I understand this to mean that (Lacanian) psychoanalysis accepts that it is our lot as human beings to be separated from the ultimate object of our desire, that as subjects who have been wounded by the signifier, we have no choice but to mourn the loss of our object (which, on some level, is always our own wholeness, the plenitude that the Thing promises). The task of psychoanalysis is to facilitate this mourning, which can only be accomplished—though never completed—with the aid of signifiers that allow us to circle the lost object, the Thing, without ever fully falling into its destructive orbit. Sublimation is how we undertake this task. De Kesel juxtaposes sublimation with perversion, the latter being a matter of fully embracing one’s (self)destructive desire, as the Sadean hero does. From this perspective, the ethics of the real, for De Kesel, amounts to “a mere promotion of sadism,” which is yet another reason that psychoanalysis cannot possibly advance the ideal of “not ceding on one’s desire” in the sense that Žižek and his followers have done. In this context, De Kesel contrasts the Sadean hero with Antigone, aligning the former with perversion and the latter with sublimation. In so doing, De Kesel challenges the Žižekian interpretation of Antigone’s act of defying Creon’s ban on burying her brother Polyneices: If Žižek reads Antigone as a stubborn heroine who—“perversely,” if we adopt De Kesel’s term—pursues her desire until she collapses into death-dealing jouissance, De Kesel reads her as a figure of sublimation. According to De Kesel, Antigone seeks to rescue Polyneices from Creon’s attempt to strip him of his symbolic identity, which is why “her decision to strew sand over the dead corpse of Polyneices is not so much a ‘jump into the real’ (a jump out of the symbolic order) as a genuinely symbolic act.” In other words, if Creon wants to expel Polyneices from the symbolic order—thereby, as it were, killing him a second time—Antigone wishes to protect Polyneices from symbolic oblivion by preserving his legacy as a name (as a signifier). In this sense, Antigone’s act does not exemplify a suicidal rejection of the symbolic order—as Žižek has long claimed—but rather defends Polyneice’s status within the symbolic. As De Kesel would have it, Antigone counters Creon’s symbolic violence not with an antisymbolic act but rather with a sublimatory one.

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On this reading, Antigone is emblematic of the ethics of psychoanalysis insofar as psychoanalysis seeks to mobilize the sublimatory potential of the signifier. Even though the analysand is inevitably chasing the truth of her desire, and even though this truth cannot be separated from the death drive, from the fact that the ultimate aim of desire is to transgress symbolic boundaries, it would make no sense for analysis to push the analysand to pursue her desire this far, for doing so would annihilate her as a speaking subject. Instead, De Kesel asserts that the only thing that matters in the ethics of psychoanalysis is for the analysand to find a way of becoming the subject of her desire, a subject who is capable of grappling, on an ongoing basis, with the signifiers of her desire. I take this to mean that becoming the subject of one’s desire means being able to ride the sublimatory power of the signifier in innovative (or at least resourceful) ways. The ethics of the real It is easy for me to agree with the main outlines of De Kesel’s argument because one of the goals of my 2012 book, The Singularity of Being, was to demonstrate that the Žižekian ethics of the real is not the only way to understand Lacanian ethics.2 Like De Kesel, I proposed that desire mediates jouissance so as to make the latter liveable. Like De Kesel, I defended the ethics of sublimation. And like De Kesel, I asserted that psychoanalysis cannot be a matter of advocating the subject’s destruction. Yet I also have a degree of appreciation for Žižek’s line of reasoning. In part this is because my version of the ethics of sublimation is not entirely incompatible with Žižek’s ethics of the real: As I will show in the second half of this essay, the ethics of the real and the ethics of sublimation arguably intersect in productive ways. But in part I have some appreciation for the ethics of the real because, unlike De Kesel, I see some support for it in Lacan’s seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis. At the beginning of his chapter, De Kesel writes: Let us, at once, serve up one of the most “symptomatic” quotes that plays a major role in so many Lacanian analyses: “ne pas céder sur son désir” (“do not give way on your desire” or, as Zupančič translates it, “do not give up on your desire”). To regard this well-known sentence as the core of Lacanian ethics . . . simply gives evidence of having read Lacan all too quickly and of having been caught by the imaginary

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force of concepts such as the Real. For the core of Lacanian ethics (i.e. what, according to Lacan, ethics really is about) is not: “ne pas céder sur son désir.” The concept—and even the idea—of an “ethics of the Real” is simply absent in Lacan’s seminar on ethics as well as in the other seminars. It seems to be the mere effect of an imaginary, symptomatic misreading of the Lacanian text. It is true that the concept of an ethics of the real is never explicitly stated in Lacan’s seminar. But I do think that it is implied insofar as “ne pas céder sur son désir”—and of this there can be no doubt—is implied. Lacan writes: It is because we know better than those who went before how to recognize the nature of desire . . . that a reconsideration of ethics is possible, that a form of ethical judgment is possible, of a kind that gives this question the force of a Last Judgment: Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you? . . . I propose then that, from an analytic point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire.3 Lacan here clearly states that, from an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of is “of having given ground relative to one’s desire.” To me, this sounds more or less like the idea that one should not cede on one’s desire. Equally important, Lacan views this maxim as the basis of his “reconsideration of ethics.” This reconsideration relies on a psychoanalytic, secular version of the Last Judgment, urging us to consider whether we have acted “in conformity with” the desire that is in us. Slightly later in the text, Lacan states: “What I call ‘giving ground relative to one’s desire’ is always accompanied in the destiny of the subject by some betrayal—you will observe it in every case and should note its importance.”4 In such instances, one “gives ground to the point of giving up one’s own claims and says to oneself, ‘Well, if that’s how things are, we should abandon our position; neither of us is worth that much, and especially me, so we should just return to the common path.’”5 “Giving ground relative to one’s desire”—ceding on one’s desire—is here plainly presented as a form of self-betrayal that ushers the subject back onto “the common path,” a path that Lacan definitely does not wish to endorse. Whether we should read these statements as an invitation to pursue one’s desire (and, as a consequence, to avoid “the common path”) at any cost,

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even at the cost of one’s social viability, as Žižek believes, remains an open question. But I would say that Lacan admires Antigone as an ethical heroine not merely because she raises Polyneices to the dignity of the Thing but also because she defies Creon’s version of the symbolic order. I read such admiration in the following statement: “When she explains to Creon what she has done, Antigone affirms the advent of the absolute individual with the phrase ‘That’s how it is because that’s how it is.’”6 It seems to me that what Lacan here privileges is not Antigone’s capacity to preserve the symbolic legacy of Polyneices but rather her fearless “No!” to Creon. For Lacan, Antigone is an ethical heroine precisely because she does not give ground relative to her desire but rather pursues this desire beyond social limits, to “a place where she feels herself to be unassailable.”7 Lacan observes that tragic heroes are frequently isolated in this fashion, in one way or another separated from the social order that surrounds them. While most human beings situate themselves within a network of conventional signifiers, the hero as a singular creature attaches herself to “the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man.”8 This “break” (the hole in the symbolic through which jouissance gushes into the realm of sociality) is, of course, where the Thing appears as lost so that what distinguishes the hero from her less noble compatriots is her willingness to directly confront the lack (or “nothingness”) at the heart of her “being.” In addition, while the ordinary subject tends to capitulate its desire in the face of external pressure, the hero pursues the track of her desire to its conclusion regardless of the price. In Lacan’s words, “the voice of the hero trembles before nothing.”9 I agree with De Kesel that it makes no sense for an analyst to urge the analysand to commit an ethical act in the Žižekian sense. But if one accepts the fact that Žižek—rightly or wrongly—is rarely interested in the clinical implications of Lacanian theory, that he instead reads Lacan as a philosopher who has politically relevant things to say about ethics, it may not be entirely unreasonable that he gleans an antinormative ethics from Lacan’s seminar on ethics. After all, Lacan is highly critical of both Aristotelian moderation and Kant’s “disinterested” ethics, arguing that these merely serve “the morality of the master.”10 He is equally critical of “the service of goods”11— the principle of relentless productivity—that sustains the master’s normative order. He juxtaposes this service of goods with desire, invariably voting for desire. As a result, an anticapitalist thinker such as Žižek can

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easily find ammunition for his ethics of the real as an ethics that pursues desire to such an extreme that it meets the death-driven jouissance of the real. In Between Levinas and Lacan, I am wary of Žižek’s tendency to turn antinormativity into a new norm in ways that resonate with De Kesel’s critique.12 Yet I am also somewhat open to the idea that Antigone’s defiance can be productively read as a model for real-life resistance: hunger strikes staged by the suffragettes, the refusal to sit at the back of the bus, the Stonewall rebellion, setting oneself on fire in protest—what these acts have in common is precisely the willingness to risk one’s symbolic edifice and even one’s life. The distance between them and Antigone is shorter than the distance between Antigone and the analyst’s couch, which is why Antigone’s political relevance differs from her analytic relevance. Yet even on the couch, the capacity to utter a passionate No! to whatever is oppressing you—the Name of the Father, your actual father, your phallus-wielding boss, whatever—can arguably be an invaluable part of the process of grappling with signifiers that De Kesel advocates. The signifier and the real For these reasons, I am not able to dismiss the ethics of the real quite as categorically as De Kesel does. Nevertheless, I concur with his assessment that the ethics of sublimation holds greater analytic (and theoretical) potential. De Kesel and I agree that sublimation protects the subject from destruction in the real. To express the matter more precisely, sublimation transforms the jouissance of the drive into a desire that is mediated by the pleasure principle. Although—as De Kesel notes—desire at its utmost limit (where it meets up with the jouissance of the drive) aims at the Thing, the subject cannot endure a direct encounter with the Thing. Sublimation mediates this encounter, forcing desire into the mold of the pleasure principle so that the boundary of manageable excitation is not exceeded and satisfaction becomes a concrete possibility; it inserts the signifier between the subject and the Thing so that what the subject experiences is an endless series of secondary satisfactions rather than the primary satisfaction that it pursues but that, if attained, would immediately result in its demise. Lacan asserts that the pleasure principle is “nothing else than the dominance of the signifier.”13 “The function of the pleasure principle,” he

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elaborates, is “to lead the subject from signifier to signifier, by generating as many signifiers as are required to maintain at as low a level as possible the tension that regulates the whole functioning of the psychic apparatus.”14 To be exact, while the Thing spurs the subject’s quest for satisfaction, it is the pleasure principle that controls the trajectory of this quest, imposing the detours of desire—the winding voyage of cathexes from one object to the next—that keep the subject at a safe distance from the Thing.15 This mechanism is by no means infallible. It can never entirely contain the excess jouissance of the drives, which is why so many of us periodically end up with the kind of “too muchness” of agitation that overwhelms the pleasure principle and causes anxiety. However, without the modulating impact of the pleasure principle—and of sublimation as one of the major instruments of the pleasure principle—our lives would be largely unbearable. De Kesel and I are on the same page about this basic insight. At the same time, my understanding of sublimation diverges somewhat from his because I tend to focus less on how the bar that, within the split Lacanian subject, separates the signifier from the real, than on how the lack that this bar symbolizes is able to accommodate residues of the real (without thereby annihilating the subject). In other words, sublimation, on my reading, is a process through which something ‘real’ takes place through the signifier whereas, for De Kesel, it seems to be primarily a matter of affirming the superficiality of the signifier. As he explains at the end of his essay, the ethics of psychoanalysis—an ethics that, recall, in De Kesel’s view revolves around the signifier—“must remain superficial.” De Kesel here implicitly opposes the signifier and the real. The beginning of his essay draws the same opposition more explicitly when he asserts that signifiers are “the stuff we are made of,” adding: “That this core insight of Lacanian theory is profoundly ‘subversive’ might find evidence in the fact that not language, but its opposite is nowadays the central term in Lacanian theory.” By the “opposite” of language, De Kesel clearly means the real. I would say, though, that besides language, the drives—the real—are “the stuff we are made of.” I do not think that this is an either-or situation. Instead, I would argue, as the later Lacan also did, that subjectivity operates at the intersection of the signifier and the jouissance of the real. The same is true of sublimation, including the sort that takes place on the couch. This is why, if De Kesel upholds a quasi-Derridean notion of “pure” signification—where the emphasis lies on the play of signifiers around an empty core of subjectivity (the subject’s “absence of any essence,” as

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De Kesel describes it)—I favor a more Kristevan vision of signification as what incorporates the energies of the real, including the deeply visceral (affective) impact of the aforementioned “No!” When De Kesel writes, “fantasy is a last ‘screen’ keeping the subject in touch with and at distance from its last, real truth (in Lacanese: his object a as real),” I get the sense that he is gesturing toward the very intersection of the signifier and the real that I am talking about. But for the most part he seems to want to keep these entities apart. The result of this segregation of spheres is that he views the ethics of desire and the ethics of the real as antithetical to each other. In contrast, I believe that the ethics of psychoanalysis is not just an ethics of desire but also an ethics of the real in the sense that the kind of signification that remains agile enough to accomplish the goals of sublimation cannot just circle the empty core of subjectivity but must also occasionally dip into the unruly jouissance of the real. In saying this, I do not mean to portray the real as an “essence” of some kind—far from it. I merely wish to propose that signification (sublimation) without the input of the real will remain anemic, as will the subject of such signification. The swerve of the signifier I arrive at this reading of the relationship between the signifier and jouissance mainly from Lacan’s 1975–1976 seminar on the sinthome, where he gives an interpretation of James Joyce that is strikingly similar to Kristeva’s 1974 account of the “revolutionary potential of poetic language,” arguing that it is Joyce’s capacity to absorb the chaotic energies of jouissance into his writing that allows him to give his signifiers the kind of “nudge”16 that causes them to swerve off their usual course in ways that open a path to innovation. Joyce, as it were, harnesses the death drive for the purposes of creativity, dismembering, mutilating, and fragmenting language so as to reconfigure meaning. This is sublimation stripped of its purity, dragged through the mud of the real so that something newly vitalized can come into being. Or as Roberto Harari glosses the matter, Joyce’s artistic practice is pioneering precisely because it “reaches the edge of the real”17—because it, in fact, allows Joyce “to bite into bits of the real.”18 Lacan thus suggests that in genuinely groundbreaking writing such as Joyce’s, the signifier and jouissance are not separate but intertwined. Joyce’s signifiers breathe to the rhythm of the real. Although there is no

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doubt that language is a trespasser, an intruder, in the domain of the real, Joyce reveals that it is exactly because the real makes language struggle— forces it to fight for its territory—that the encounter with the real can make language fiercely inventive. He demonstrates that even though the real as such cannot be written, one can write in such a way as to brush against it; one’s signifiers can transmit enlivening scraps of the real. This is what Lacan’s notion of jouis-sens is meant to convey. In his seminar on Joyce, Lacan suggests that if the signifier is to remain alive, capable of innovation, it needs to allow itself to risk an encounter with the real; it must risk destruction in order to be reborn. This, I believe, is akin to what the advocates of the ethics of the real argue with regard to the subject’s relationship to the real. Even Žižek is not always rooting for unequivocal destruction. Sometimes he promotes the plunge into the real—subjective destitution—as a temporary extinction of the subject’s symbolic supports, as a provisional demolition of social scaffolding that functions as an opening to a new symbolic system. This is evident, for example, in the following statement: In a situation of the forced choice, the subject makes the “crazy,” impossible choice of, in a way, striking at himself, at what is most precious to himself. This act, far from amounting to a case of impotent aggressivity turned on oneself, rather changes the co-ordinates of the situation in which the subject finds himself . . . Did not Lacan himself accomplish a similar act of “shooting at himself” when, in 1979, he dissolved the École freudienne de Paris, his agalma, his own organization, the very space of his collective life? Yet he was well aware that only such a “self-destructive” act could clear the terrain for a new beginning.19 Žižek here describes the ethical act—the ethics of the real— as a matter of striking at what is most precious to oneself so as to dramatically alter the coordinates of the unbearable situation in which one finds oneself. That is, the subject who ‘acts’ is willing to temporarily destroy its symbolic viability in order to create the possibility of a new symbolic configuration, as Lacan himself did in 1979 when he dissolved his beloved École freudienne. The ‘point’ of dissolving his organization was not to commit definitive symbolic suicide but rather to forge the foundations of a new symbolic existence.

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This is why Zupančič spins Lacan’s question about whether I have acted in conformity with my desire as follows: “[W]ill I act in conformity to what threw me ‘out of joint,’ will I be ready to reformulate what has hitherto been the foundation of my existence?”20 The emphasis here is not merely on honoring whatever throws me “out of joint” but also on my capacity to rebuild the foundations of my life. Such upheavals may seem “crazy,” as Žižek stresses. Yet I can well imagine real-life examples, such as walking out on a job rather than enduring one more day of harassment by one’s superiors (even when doing so puts one in financial jeopardy), or walking out on a lover who keeps causing pain (even when doing so destroys one’s sense of security). The individual who commits an act in this sense strikes at herself, at the very core of her being, in order to liberate herself from blows directed at her from the outside world; she temporarily cuts some of her most important social ties in order to gain the freedom to proceed differently from what is expected of her. I do believe that it is the task of Lacanian analysis (as a clinical practice) to give her the courage to do so, so that, once again, we are not entirely divorced from Antigone’s act of defiance. The echo of the thing Perhaps there is a kernel of the real in many acts of sublimation, as there arguably is in Joyce’s writing. And perhaps there is a kernel of sublimity in some of the acts of defiance that Žižek has grouped under the rubric of the ethics of the real. However, in my own work, I have been most interested in the sublimity that we encounter in ordinary objects; that is, I have been interested in the echo of the Thing that we discover in the myriad objects of our desire. In a way, I have chosen to take Lacan’s statement about sublimation being a matter of raising a mundane object to the dignity of the Thing more literally than De Kesel: if De Kesel seems to link sublimation to the capacity of language to endow significance to an object, as Antigone does when she rescues Polyneices from symbolic extinction, I have read sublimation as a matter of a loving gaze that falls upon cherished objects. In his text on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan gives me several examples to work with, such as his depiction of the decorative string of matchboxes that one of his friends has hung around his mantlepiece: This arrangement demonstrated that a match box isn’t simply something that has a certain utility, that it isn’t even a type in the Platonic

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sense, an abstract match box, that the match box all by itself is a thing with all its coherence of being. The wholly gratuitous, proliferating, superfluous, and quasi absurd character of this collection pointed to its thingness as match box. Thus the collector found his motive in this form of apprehension that concerns less the match box than the Thing that subsists in a match box.21 Lacan asserts that his friend’s collection of matchboxes reveals the “thingness”—rather than the utility or even the Platonic “type”—of the matchbox: It shows “that a box of matches is not simply an object, but that, in the form of an Erscheinung, as it appeared in its truly imposing multiplicity, it may be a Thing.”22 Rather than being merely an assemblage of matchboxes, the collection illuminates the trace of the Thing that “subsists” in the matchbox: It makes the sublime appear in the most commonplace of objects; it induces the Thing to materialize within the weave of everyday life. Although Lacan admits that the matchbox “is a thing that is not, of course, the Thing”—that the object that his friend has elevated to the nobility of the Thing remains a substitute in the sense that it does not yield the Thing-in-itself—he insists that the example demonstrates “the sudden elevation of the match box to a dignity that it did not possess before.”23 That is, the matchbox, in this particular instance, grants its owner a tiny bit of jouissance that connects him to the luster of the Thing. Lacan maintains that something similar happens when we view an apple painted by Cézanne, for “everyone knows that there is a mystery in the way Cézanne paints apples, for the relationship to the real as it is renewed in art at that moment makes the object appear purified; it involves a renewal of its dignity by means of which these imaginary insertions are, one might say, repetitively restated.”24 When Cézanne paints an apple, he “renews” its dignity. Inasmuch as his art forges a relationship to the real—to the dwelling place of the Thing—he taps into a mystery that resides beyond his skill at imitating his object. Cézanne’s apple is never just a simple depiction of an apple, for the deeper objective of his art is a dimension that exceeds mere imitation: The singularity of his art resides in the fact that it “makes the object appear purified,” that it manages to capture something about the enigma (and even the sublimity) of the Thing in its representation of an utterly banal object. Lacan offers yet another example of how objects can emit the aura of the Thing in the following anecdote: Lacan and his wife are staying in a quaint

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London guesthouse. One morning, his wife comes back to their room and says that she knows that Professor D—one of Lacan’s former mentors—is also in the guesthouse. Baffled, Lacan asks her how she knows this. She responds, “I’ve seen his shoes.” Lacan reports that he remained skeptical, not willing to take a pair of worn clodhoppers outside a door “as sufficiently convincing evidence.”25 But, lo and behold, it turned out that Professor D was staying at the guesthouse, as Lacan discovered when he caught the esteemed professor slipping out of his room in his dressing gown, “exposing as he went a pair of long and highly academic drawers.”26 Lacan segues from this anecdote to van Gogh’s peasant shoes, famously analyzed by Heidegger, concluding that “any object may be the signifier by means of which that reflection, mirage, or more or less unbearable brilliance we call the beautiful starts to vibrate.”27 A pair of clodhoppers, he continues, may “in spite of its dumbness” speak—and speak quite eloquently—about the singularity of its owner. Professor D’s shoes, in short, were a site where “the universality belonging to the shoes of an academic was intimately joined to whatever it was that was absolutely specific to Professor D.”28 In this context, recall that Lacan argues that the Thing is “found at the most as something missed. One doesn’t find it, but only its pleasurable associations.”29 “If the Thing were not fundamentally veiled,” he explains, “we wouldn’t be in the kind of relationship to it that obliges us, as the whole of psychic life is obliged, to encircle it or bypass it in order to conceive it.”30 In other words, it is precisely because we feel that we have lost the Thing that we hunt for its “pleasurable associations,” that we hunt for crumbs of sublimity that give us a little taste of the jouissance that is forbidden to us. Such crumbs may grant us mere muffled echoes of the original sublime object, yet they still manage to satisfy us because they transmit a muted imprint of this object. Moreover, one can speculate that if some objects satisfy us more than others, it is because they contain a stronger echo of the Thing. Such special objects cause our desire to meet up and commingle with the jouissance of the drive, thereby bringing us within a striking distance of the Thing. Yet because of the inevitable gap between the Thing and all worldly objects, including the most satisfying ones, they do not push us fully into the whirlpool of jouissance. As a consequence, they bring us (some) satisfaction without causing an utter dissolution of subjectivity. Notably, they also give us a more enduring satisfaction than the ecstasy of undiluted jouissance.

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That such satisfaction is always partial at best does not, in my opinion, diminish its value. That is, the fact that objects never fully satisfy us—that they cannot definitively seal the void of our being—does not mean that they grant us no “real” satisfaction, that there is no jouissance to be had from our relationship to them. As Danny Nobus deftly conveys, “Any artificial stuffing of the hole in the Symbolic coincides with the production of jouissance.”31 Getting satisfaction Human beings are able to tolerate jouissance only in small doses (which is exactly why De Kesel maintains that jouissance needs to be mediated by desire). My interpretation of Lacan’s theory of sublimation, which focuses on treasured objects without thereby ignoring the powers of signification, gives us a way to approach the question of manageable jouissance, for it implies that the very fact that we are barred from the Thing makes it possible for us to savor morsels of jouissance within the confines of symbolic existence. From the string of matchboxes and Cézanne’s apples, the objects we raise to the dignity of the Thing give us (always necessarily partial and diluted) enjoyment. This is why Lacan specifies that even though his friend’s matchbox collection does not go on to “infinity” (does not meet the sublime, if you will), it is still able to grant satisfaction. Another way to state the matter is to say that, sublimation, like the Ercheinung of the matchbox or Cézanne’s apples, ensures that there is something “more than” reality within reality. It creates a space for the real within reality (thereby making the symbolic “not-all”). Zupančič who, despite the title of her 2000 book, Ethics of the Real, is more a theorist of sublimation than an advocate of the ethics of the real in the sense that De Kesel understands the term, explains this beautifully when she proposes that sublimation “aims at the Real precisely at the point where the Real cannot be reduced to reality.” It “opposes itself to reality . . . in the name of the Real. To raise an object to the dignity of the Thing is not to idealize it, but, rather, to ‘realize’ it, that is, to make it function as a stand-in for the Real.”32 In other words, sublimation is what makes the real “appear” within reality: It “realizes” (renders tangible) a little piece of the Thing. Joan Copjec is getting at something similar when she remarks that even though—as Lacan notoriously declares (against Aristotle)—there is no Sovereign Good, Lacan nevertheless also “informs us that representation,

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or thought, can ‘apprehend,’ can by itself grasp hold of some good. Not some of das Ding—this possibility is foreclosed as the subject finds itself perched over the void of das Ding, the void of its absence—but some good, something in place of das Ding.” Sublimation, as it were, permits us to “grasp hold of nonbeing, some jouissance, or satisfaction.”33 This is why Zupančič asserts that when we insist on an unbridgeable chasm between the Thing and all worldly things, we remain perpetually dissatisfied. We become caught up in a hopeless fidelity “to a lost enjoyment” in the sense that we spurn everyday objects because we imagine that only the missing Thing can grant us “authentic” fulfillment: “[I]n the name of the lack of the True object, we reject all other objects and satisfy ourselves with none.”34 Because we convince ourselves that beyond all ordinary objects there is “‘someThing’ which alone would make our life worth living,”35 we fail to appreciate the partial satisfactions offered by worldly things, thereby gradually evacuating our existence of all possibility of jouissance. It is for this reason that sublimation cannot be entirely dissociated from the real, why the ethics of sublimation is always to some extent also an ethics of the real. Sublimation saturates an ordinary object with the radiance of the (real) Thing. In the same way the matchboxes of Lacan’s friend reveal something about a matchbox that normally remains dormant, and in the same way that Cézanne’s apples disclose something about an apple that is not readily apparent in a pile of apples we might find in our local supermarket, the sublimatory gesture through which we elevate certain objects to the dignity of the Thing reveals something about these objects that would otherwise remain invisible. This is why the fictions we fashion, the substitute satisfactions we endow with special significance, hold such value for us. They may fall short of the sublime object yet, insofar as they evoke it, they lend meaning to our lives. And if there are certain objects that move us more than others—if we feel strongly about some objects while others leave us cold—it is because these objects communicate more of the Thing’s aura than others. As “illusory” as the sparkle of such objects may be, we experience them as “real.” The thing’s code of ethics Perhaps most importantly for my exchange with De Kesel, Lacan suggests that our faithfulness to the echo of the Thing establishes a code of ethics

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that is entirely different from normative morality (the morality of the master and the master’s reality principle). As he states: “There is another register of morality that takes its direction from that which is to be found on the level of das Ding; it is the register that makes the subject hesitate when he is on the point of bearing false witness against das Ding, that is to say, the place of desire.”36 This formulation certainly resonates with De Kesel’s view that the ethics of psychoanalysis is an ethics of desire, for Lacan here defines das Ding as “the place of desire.” Yet Lacan’s statement also leans toward the real insofar as he is talking about the kind of fundamental desire that—like Joyce’s signifiers—brushes against the Thing. This is why the subject who upholds this alternative register of morality hesitates when he is about to bear false witness against das Ding. This is an ethics that is not dictated by the practical imperatives of “the service of goods” but rather assesses the value of objects on the basis of their proximity to the Thing. In this rendering of ethics, the object that comes the closest to the Thing is more important, more worth protecting, than one that is merely useful. Concretely speaking, one might say that whenever the Thing’s echo resounds strongly enough in the object we have selected, it overshadows the social voices telling us that we have made an imprudent choice. For example, those around us may try to convince us that we have fallen in love with a person of the “wrong” age, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, social class, or educational level. The miraculous thing about the Thing’s echo is that it gives us the courage to fight the fight, so to speak; it is robust enough to trump the warnings of the social order, making it possible for us to desire in counterhegemonic ways. Recall that De Kesel argues that the goal of psychoanalysis is to ensure that the analysand becomes the subject of her desire. What I have articulated is perhaps merely another way to understand this idea. Allow me to put the matter as follows: The vast machinery of our commercial culture works overtime to eclipse the Thing’s aura; in a society of commodity fetishism, nothing is easier than losing sight of the specificity of our desire. Against this backdrop, insisting on this specificity becomes an ethical stance, making it possible for us to appreciate the preciousness of what we may be culturally encouraged to shun, ignore, or trivialize. When we raise a mundane object to the dignity of the Thing, we infuse it with the Thing’s incomparable worth, thereby signaling that, as far as our desire is concerned, only this object will do; we, in short, deem the object in question irreplaceable.

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The specter of Antigone once again arises, further blurring the boundary between the ethics of desire—the ethics of sublimation—and the ethics of the real, for Antigone deems Polyneices irreplaceable in precisely this sense. Consequently, insofar as we are able to insist on the singular value of our object against the conventions of the big Other, we may be said to have inherited some of Antigone’s insubordination. And to the extent that we are able to hold our ground in the face of the culture industry—to the extent that we are able to resist being sidetracked by sparkly decoys—we are kept from becoming a mere cog in the commercial machine. Even though capitalism in many ways exploits the structure of desire, the gap between the Thing and worldly things, by selling us the fantasy that we can close this gap by acquiring the latest “hot” commodity, it is possible to argue that our desire is also capable of arresting the restless movement of desire that capitalism relies on: the subject who declares that “only this object will do” forsakes all alternative objects, thereby refusing to participate in the mentality that tells us that every object is disposable, that in fact encourages us to discard our objects almost as soon as we have obtained them. Such a subject of desire obstinately fixates on a specific object in ways that undermine capitalism’s demand that we float from one object to the next in a frenzy of consumption. This in turn offers some protection against the impression that the world is a lackluster place where nothing can rouse our passions or move us in any meaningful manner; to the degree that the Thing’s echo makes mundane objects reverberate with an exceptional dignity, it fends off the kind of complacency that strips the world of all ideals, all higher aspirations. But this only works if we are able to recognize the distinctive timbre of this echo in the first place, which is why Lacan is adamant that psychoanalysis should help us revere the specificity of our desire even when it would be easier to capitulate to the desire of the big Other; it is why he asserts that nothing that is, ethically speaking, more important than not giving ground on our desire. This dynamic can admittedly have problematic results in the sense that our stubborn adherence to our most valued object can induce us to injure ourselves for the sake of our object: Antigone is an extreme example of this; the masochistic lover who is unable to reject a beloved who repeatedly devastates him can be found on every street corner. Few things in life are more difficult than giving up an object that connects us to the sublime face of the Thing, for—as I have suggested—such an object promises

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unmitigated satisfaction: the healing of lack and the end of alienation. In some ways, it promises the very thing that De Kesel, rightly, proclaims impossible, namely the subjectivization of the object (the Thing). That the materialization of this promise would result in our demise as subjects does not keep us from being seduced by it. In this sense, our loyalty to the Thing’s echo can endanger us. Yet Lacan also suggests that there are times when this echo causes us to act ethically, as Antigone does in relation to Polyneices. This seems to be De Kesel’s point as well when he argues that Antigone elevates Polyneices to the dignity of the Thing. I hope that my analysis has offered some fresh avenues for understanding this profound assertion. I also hope that my account of Lacan’s ethics of sublimation—which differs somewhat from De Kesel’s account—goes some way in explaining why some of our object choices are so surprising, why we are capable of the kind of desire that defies the dominant happiness narratives and economic objectives of our society. On an even more basic level, it explains why some objects incite our enduring passion while others easily fall into oblivion; it explains why some things speak to us while others remain mute, why it is that some things transcend their “thingness” and come to signify on such a profound level that our attachment to them feels nonnegotiable. Notes   1 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Potter (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 112.   2 Mari Ruti, The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).   3 Lacan, Seminar VII, 314.  4 Ibid., 321.   5 Ibid.  6 Ibid., 278.   7 Ibid.   8 Ibid., 279.   9 Ibid., 323. 10 Ibid., 315. 11 Ibid., 318. 12 Mari Ruti, Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). 13 Lacan, Seminar VII, 134. 14 Ibid., 118–119. 15 Ibid., 58.

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16 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXIII: Le Sinthome, 1975–1976, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005), 133. 17 Roberto Harari, How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan, trans. Luke Thurston (New York: Other Press, 2002), 222. 18 Ibid., 141. 19 Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism?,” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 122–123. 20 Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000), 253. 21 Lacan, Seminar VII, 114. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 117–118. 24 Ibid., 141. 25 Ibid., 296. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 297. 28 Ibid., 296–297. 29 Ibid., 52. 30 Ibid., 118. 31 Danny Nobus, “Illiterature,” in Re-inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan, edited by Luke Thurston (New York: Other Press, 2002), 31. 32 Zupančič , Ethics of the Real, 77. 33 Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 36. 34 Zupančič , Ethics of the Real, 240. 35 Ibid., 240. 36 Lacan, Seminar VII, 109–110.

Bibliography Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Harari, Roberto. How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan. Translated by Luke Thurston. New York: Other Press, 2002. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXIII: Le Sinthome, 1975– 1976. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translation by Dennis Potter. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992. Nobus, Danny. “Illiterature.” In Re-inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan. Edited by Luke Thurston. New York: Other Press, 2002. Ruti, Mari. Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015.

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Ruti, Mari. The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Žižek, Slavoj. “Class Struggle or Postmodernism?” In Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 2000. Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London: Verso, 2000. Zupančič, Alenka. The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

Chapter 7

Lacan and the psychological Derek Hook

In an overview of Lacanian theory in the context of child analysis, Leonardo Rodriguez1 pinpoints what Lacan took to be the overarching agenda of a psychoanalytic treatment. For Lacan, the aim of analysis was the realisation of the subject, which is only possible in speech, in the utterance of the truthful word. The subject constitutes him-/herself in and as what he/she says in analysis to his/her listener, the analyst. In gaining access to that primary language in which desire is written (albeit always incompletely), in talking it aloud, the subject does not simply learn about what is said there. More importantly, the operation itself is constitutive of him-/herself as a subject.2 This clinical objective can be interestingly juxtaposed with the conclusions that Malcom Bowie reaches on the nature of the Lacanian subject: ‘The subject’ is no longer a substance endowed with qualities, or a fixed shape possessing dimensions, or a container awaiting the multifarious contents that experience provides: it is a series of events within language, a procession of turns, tropes and inflections.3 These descriptions challenge many of our commonplace understandings regarding the nature of the psychological subject. Rigorously denied is any assumption of a self-transparent subject—such as the participant of psychotherapy intent on gaining personal insight. More counter-intuitively yet, such a subject—if the ordinary use of the term can still be thought to apply—seemingly lacks the minimal continuity of permanence which underlies our basic assumptions as to what ‘subjectivity’ is.

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The Lacanian subject, to be sure, is not a permanent or constant entity; it is, by contrast, an episodic or vanishing phenomena. It is the subject as event which, like the unconscious itself, fades and resurfaces, proving not merely elusive but essentially discontinuous. This subject is not in fact an ‘entity’ at all, certainly not in any substantial sense. It is rather a flash, a pulse, a spark, a type of truth-possibility. Utterly contingent on the productions of speech that, paradoxically, it itself produces, this subject is at once constituted in and as speech. In this sense the subject encompasses an irreconcilability: It is the disjunction (the ‘real’) evinced between the act of speaking (enunciation) and what is spoken (statement), two facets of speech which can never be fully reconciled. At once something that is constituted (by speech) and self-constituting (in speaking) this subject-asrift is nothing other than the barred subject of the unconscious which psychoanalysis endeavors to treat. My objective in this chapter is to provide a summary overview of Lacan’s views on psychology, particularly as it pertains to the conceptualization of the psychoanalytic subject. My aim is not to systematically work through Lacan’s various criticisms, still less to refute them. Indeed, my objective is neither to evaluate Lacan’s critique of the psychological, nor to adopt a defensive position in respect of the discipline of psychology. After all, Lacan’s various criticisms of psychology—apposite as they often are—are perhaps less instructive regarding what they tell us about psychology itself than they are in respect to how they encourage us to revise our understanding of the subject. There are several excellent existing studies which explore Lacan’s critique of psychology.4 While I will be guided in several respects by this literature, I will steer a somewhat different course. The approach adopted here pivots on Lacan’s notion of the subject. This proves an appropriate focal point insofar as the Lacanian subject, in its inseparability from the unconscious and in its radical incommensurability with the ego, remains arguably the primary concept in the differentiation of Lacanian psychoanalysis from the terrain of the psychological. Psychology’s objects and objectifications In Seminar I, Lacan pauses to consider the nature of the subject: “What do we call the subject?” he asks, before answering: “Quite precisely, what

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in the development of objectivation, is outside the object.”5 This oblique definition provides a useful starting-point: It situates the subject decisively beyond the impetus to ‘objectivate,’ something Lacan sees everywhere in the domain of the psychological. The meaning of this term (‘objectivation’), like so many others that Lacan deploys, is not immediately apparent, and it is worth pausing for a moment to offer a clarification. In what follows I will treat ‘objectivation’ as a compound concept entailing two aspects of psychological conceptualization that Lacan takes issue with. Firstly, there is the objectifying tendency (i.e. objectification) to treat aspects of psychic life, and human subjects, as thing-like (indeed, as objects of knowledge and/or intervention), a stance with clear connotations of control and/or influence, something rejected by Freud and Lacan alike as profoundly anti-psychoanalytic. Secondly, there is the epistemological and scientific goal of objectivity, an objective which is similarly ill-suited to psychoanalysis, partly because the latter prioritizes psychical over ‘objective’ reality. In referring to Lacan’s ‘anti-objectivism’ below (a less clumsy term than ‘anti-objectivation’) I have both such meanings in mind. Considering the relationship between psychoanalysis and criminology, Lacan stresses—in a clear swipe at psychology—that “Psychoanalysis stops short at the objectification of the Id and proclaims the autonomy of an irreducibly subjective experience.”6 Lacan similarly describes himself as taking on “nothing less than the status of the psychological object,”7 preferring to such an approach a description of a “phenomenology of the psychoanalytic relationship as it is experienced between doctor and patient.”8 The writings of the 1950s make this clear: Psychoanalysis is— or should be—opposed to any form of psychological objectification: “Psychoanalytic experience . . . proceeds entirely in . . . [the] subject-tosubject relationship, which means that it preserves a dimension that is irreducible to any psychology considered to be the objectification of individual properties.”9 The objectifying tendency that Lacan associated with psychology, had, by the early 1950s, begun to spread to psychoanalysis. Even the notion of the unconscious, he averred, had been ‘substantialized,’ and done so at the loss of adequate attention being paid to the immediacy of speech. The concepts of ‘ego,’ ‘id,’ and ‘superego’ were likewise being applied not so much as instances of psychical functioning in Lacan’s view, but as psychical entities, as objects, a fact which amounted to a denial of the lived—and potentially transformative—reality of the unconscious as

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event. Malone and Friedlander bring this Lacanian critique to bear on contemporary forms of American psychology: psychology’s objectivistic, objectifying procedures do not and cannot provide us with adequate answers . . . We cannot afford to characterize subjectivity in terms of (a set of) fixed properties or attributes, for instance, rationality, need for attachment, etc. We must reject the vision of an isolated subject as the atavistic shadow of American ideology and psychology’s experimental method.10 For Lacan, the attempt to engender objects, to circumscribe and delimit the subject as a knowable entity, to create ‘identities’ of knowledge, remains an imaginary process, an instance of méconnaissance (or imaginary misrecognition). Parker puts it well when he notes that “Lacan relentlessly de-substantializes phenomena that are usually reified by the discipline [of psychology] . . . that are rendered as if they were observable and empirically verifiable things.”11 ‘Apparatuses of objectivity’ There are multiple facets to Lacan’s critique of psychological objectification. The first of these—Lacan’s dismissal of the reification of various apparent ‘subjective attributes’ that come to be transformed into psychological objects of knowledge—links back to his historical critique of the discipline in his Beyond the Reality Principle. Lacan takes issue there with the classificatory framework of late-nineteenth-century psychology, which, in grouping its phenomena “into sensations, perceptions, images, beliefs, logical operations, judgements, and so on” had stooped to incorporating a series of concepts “borrowed unchanged from scholastic psychology, which had itself borrowed it from centuries of philosophy.”12 Such a derivative conceptual framework falls short, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, in providing an adequate conception of psychical reality. These phenomena (sensations, perceptions, etc.) are not, according to Lacan objective things discovered in ‘psychical reality’ by psychological research, but, rather, ideological or theoretical deposits . . . residues of ‘centuries of philosophy’ . . . ‘products of a sort of conceptual erosion’ that detaches, isolates, solidifies, reifies and objectifies them, presenting them as a ‘guarantee of truth’, as undeniable evidence for psychology, as if they were objective things.13

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Developing concepts from the history of philosophy and scholastic psychology rather than from the realm of clinical practice will not, for Lacan, suffice. The attempt to do so is itself ‘unscientific.’ A discrete area of scientific endeavor, after all, needs to develop the concepts and instruments that have been developed within its own domain and which are best suited to what it undertakes to study. Derivative ideas inherited from other disciplines cannot compete with concepts and methods developed through the dedicated clinical work of attending to the speech of patients. In short: The wrong concepts have been prioritized and objectified in the historical development of psychology. This is a problem confounded by the fact that in imposing such objects and concepts upon the empirical field, psychology has screened out more salient phenomena that as a result, are not adequately appreciated—or even registered—by such a pre-given conceptual framework. In its eagerness to model itself upon existing natural sciences and to assume their conceptual priorities and methods (experimentation, measurement, the isolation of cause-effect relations) the emerging discipline of psychology came, for Lacan, to exclude a series of phenomena existing outside the operations of rational knowledge. Beliefs, delusions, intuitions, dreams, for example, are treated as insubstantial, epiphenomenal, of little—if any—importance despite the role that Freud would historically demonstrate that such phenomena played in directing a psychoanalytic cure. Many of Lacan’s criticisms of psychology as necessitating observable, empirical objects and a positivist natural science methodology can be interestingly articulated with a psychology as a human science critique which similarly argues that in modeling itself on natural sciences, psychology lost sight of the most essential features of the subject.14 Although mounted from a phenomenological as opposed to a psychoanalytic perspective, Giorgi’s arguments about the inappropriate use of natural science methods and concepts resonates with Lacan’s own critical remarks: Natural scientific psychology . . . imitated the methods and procedures of the natural sciences even though it meant a reductionistic understanding of what it meant to be human . . . [Psychology’s] ambition to be a natural science was an ideological commitment that was forced upon its subject matter. Its desire to be a natural science actually preceded an examination of its subject matter and by adopting and

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imitating pre-existing natural scientific methods and criteria, its methods preceded its problems.15 Lacan thus condemns psychology for having failed in its scientific aspirations: by relying on hand-me-down concepts and foregoing ‘truths’ from the natural sciences and scholastic psychology, it has failed to do justice to the distinctive phenomena of psychical reality as it presents in the clinic. The broader disciplinary edifice of psychology has, furthermore, for the most part, missed both the distinctive materiality of the psychical (the domain of speech and language) and the psychical and inter-subjective relativity of its objects by insisting on maintaining an “apparatus of objectivity”16 in how human psychology is approached. Lacan’s general argument then—which we can use as a benchmark in his critique of psychology—is that: Psychical phenomena are . . . granted no reality of their own: those that do not belong to “true” reality [as defined by the natural/physical sciences] have only an illusory reality . . . The role of psychology is merely to reduce psychical phenomena to this system [of the established sciences] and to verify the system . . . It is insofar as this psychology is a function of this truth that it is not a science.17 Such a pseudo-scientific form of ‘psychologism’ can be said to constitute a radical misrepresentation of human nature. Lacan is harsher yet: Such a form of psychologism18 is guilty of “reifying human beings,” accused of perpetrating “a new alienation of man,”19 of producing “a homo psychologicus”20 that is, a thoroughly psychologized species of humanity. It is for the above reasons that Lacan goes to such pains to insist on the nonpsychological nature of the subject, underscoring in Seminar I that “By [the] being of the subject, we do not mean its psychological properties, but what is hollowed out in the experience of speech, which constitutes the analytic situation.”21 Subject made object For Lacan, psychology’s ‘objectivistic’ ethos necessarily fails the subject. A variety of issues—political, conceptual, ethical—spring to the fore here, perhaps the most pressing of which concerns the claim that applied psychology amounts to a normalizing endeavor, a type of social engineering.

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Reflecting on how psychoanalysis had been taken up in America, Lacan laments how the mindset “known as behaviourism . . . dominates psychological notions in America”22 before regretting how the conception of psychoanalysis in the United States has been inflected toward the adaptation of the individual to the social environment, the search for behaviour patterns, and all the objectification implied in the notion of “human relations.” And the indigenous term, “human engineering,” [which] strongly implies a privileged position of exclusion with respect to the human object.23 Added to this criticism is an epistemological concern. Miller stresses how Lacan was influenced by the anti-objectivism of phenomenology, which he applied to the notions of the unconscious and the subject alike.24 Just as consciousness cannot be rendered in the concepts and categories used to understand physical objects, so the unconscious—and indeed the subject— cannot be viewed as types of substance, as objective or positive categories. The implications of this for clinical practice are obvious enough: We cannot reduce the patient to a general type (an object), or to a series of object properties viewed externally, from “a position of exclusion.”25 Verhaege’s characterization of psychoanalysis as a science of the particular, a treatment modality attentive to the singularity of its patients, is pertinent here.26 To neglect this imperative, to fall back on categorical or objectifying understandings of the patient and their presenting characteristics would compromise the ethical nature of psychoanalysis. It would fail the subject by remaining inattentive to the particularity of their desire.27 And it would detract from the agency of those non-object-like potentialities (of speech, of the unconscious) that the realization of the subject necessarily entails. More bluntly put, such objectifications (of the patient, of their attributes, of categorical psychological knowledge) relegate the psychotherapeutic process to either a type of human engineering or to an knowledge-gathering exercise, thereby reducing it—and one senses here Lacan’s disdain—to the empiricism of a ‘mere psychology.’ From phenomenology to the signifier Phenomenology makes itself felt in Lacan not only in terms of antiobjectivism and the prioritization of inter-subjectivity, but methodologically

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also. The classical phenomenological procedure involves the suspension— or ‘bracketing’—of preconceived notions and constructs, the attempt to attend as faithfully as possible to the phenomena in question without imposing preconceived notions or judgments of objectivity. “In adopting this perspective”, says Miller, “what Lacan found to be the fundamental datum of analytic experience was language.”28 So, whereas the phenomenologist treats experience as primary, Lacan, always ready to borrow and transform a useful idea, insists rather on the irreducible role of language. Speech, that is to say, is to be appreciated in and of itself; it is the fundamental phenomena, not a conduit to a different—or somehow more substantial—level of conceptualization. Clinically, this means not replacing what the patient says with something else (the objectification of imposed themes, the analyst’s own ostensibly ‘objective’ descriptions), or working on the basis of a different order of suppositions (the patient’s body language, their affects, or how those apparent affects rebound off the clinician). Psychology’s inevitable tendency to objectification—which, for Lacan often seems to be one and the same as its inability to appreciate the significance of speech—is stressed when Lacan refers to “the privileged attention paid to the function of nonverbal aspects of behaviour in the psychological manoeuvre, a preference . . . for a vantage point from which the subject is no longer anything but an object.”29 Psychology, for Lacan, inevitably looks behind or beyond the phenomena of speech, attempting to grapple with something else (feelings, evolutionary adaptations, behavioral patterns, cognitive structures, etc.) that are ostensibly ‘more primary’ than spoken language itself. It is precisely in view of such objectifications, in neglecting the primacy of speech that psychology errs, for it is in such verbal and symbolic productions—and these alone—that we access the subject of the unconscious. It is in this sense of neglecting speech, words, and the symbolic exchange of signifiers that “psychology is the field of the “imaginary,” in the sense of the illusory.”30 The structure of inter-subjectivity If psychical life is wholly over-written by symbolic operations, by ‘the signifier,’ and if these operations are in essence social, which is to say, evinced in functions of symbolic exchange, then psychical life is never so much a matter of objects as of inter-subjectivity. Lacan’s prioritization of

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inter-subjectivity is motivated by more than his theoretical anti-objectivism. It is impelled by a pragmatic reason also. Bluntly put: Psychoanalysis can work no other way. Why so? Well, the psychoanalytic exchange requires forms of spoken interaction. This facilitation of, and intervention, by means of speech ensures that psychoanalytic practice retains a basically dialectical character. Secondly, given that the clinician is a focus of transference, their role in the analytic exchange is never merely neutral or ‘objective.’ This role cannot as such be detached from the process of the cure. Thirdly, what occurs in analysis is not merely objective or subjective, but is precisely of the order of a subjectivity premised on another subjectivity. “Lacan,” notes Miller, “emphasized the fact that a patient speaks to someone,”31 and that “speaking to someone is more important than speaking about something.”32 Or, in Lacan’s own words: “analytic experience . . . comes upon the simple fact that language, prior to signifying something, signifies to someone.”33 So, even though it may appear that what the analysand says has no apparent meaning, it will nevertheless be animated by an unconscious intention, a fact which means that the analyst must remain alive to the fact that what is said in analysis is frequently “expressed but not understood by the subject.”34 That is to say, each of the inter-subjective factors stressed above are crucial by virtue of the structural role they play in bringing out the unconscious: “[W]hat happens in an analysis is that the subject, strictly speaking, is constituted through a discourse to which the mere presence of the psychoanalyst, prior to any intervention he may make, brings the dimension of dialogue.”35 Working within the structure of psychoanalytic discourse thus described necessitates the fundamental rule (of free association), the role of the Other, and a gravitation towards unconscious truth. “In short,” concludes Lacan, “psychoanalysis is a dialectical experience,” a “notion [which] should prevail when raising the question of the nature of the transference.”36 Transference, the unconscious, the emergence of the subject: each of these is contingent on the structure of inter-subjectivity constituted by the psychoanalytic treatment.37 We can summarize the foregoing arguments by stressing that objectifying and objectivistic relations (inseparable for Lacan from psychology as such) misapprehend the nature of the subject and impede attempts to elicit the unconscious and to locate the subject in an appropriately transformative dimension. Moreover, such an objectifying and objectivistic approach runs aground in its attempted engagement with the subject—here a new line

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of criticism emerges—insofar as it substitutes its own categorical forms of knowledge for a more open-ended relation of not-knowing. Ignorantia Docta Lacan’s attempt to think beyond the parameters of objectivation involves what we might consider a distinctively psychoanalytic epistemology,38 or more appropriately perhaps, a negative-epistemology, a type of notknowing. Such a stance is explicitly premised against understanding, for, as Fink warns, the process of understanding can be seen to reduce the unfamiliar to the familiar, to transform the radically other into the same, and to render the analyst hard of hearing. Our ability . . . to detect the unconscious . . . is compromised by our emphasis on understanding and can be rectified only by taking as our fundamental premise that we do not understand . . . The emphasis on understanding can also do a disservice to analysands who observe themselves and [begin] to explain their feelings and behaviours to themselves and others in sophisticated terms without necessarily changing.39 This critique of understanding is explicitly tied to psychology by Lacan: “[M]aking-things-understood is and always has been the real stumbling block in psychology.”40 In Seminar II Lacan approvingly cites Plato’s Meno, a Socratic dialogue, the aims of which is “to show us that . . . knowledge bounded by a formal coherence, does not cover the whole field of human experience.”41 Continuing, he notes that: Psychoanalysis is a dialectic . . . The art of conversation of Socrates . . . is to teach the slave to give his own speech its true meaning . . . In other words, the position of the analyst must be that of an ignorantia docta [learned ignorance] which does not mean knowing . . . but is capable of being formative for the subject . . . [T]hese days . . . there is a great temptation to transform the ignorantia docta into . . . an ignorantia docens [taught ignorance]. If the psychoanalyst thinks he knows something, in psychology for example, then that is already the beginning of his loss, for . . . in psychology nobody knows much, except that psychology itself is an error of perspective on the human being.42

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It is in our inability to grasp “what the realisation of the being of man is”43—that is, the emergence of the unconscious in the subject—that we are put into an erroneous perspective, namely, that of ‘the psychological.’ Lacan’s demotion of understanding—which as Fink remarks,44 is not necessary to affect a psychoanalytic cure—must be viewed alongside a correlating methodological principle: attentiveness to the arbitrary and the unremarkable. Speaking of how “analytical experience” is constituted, Lacan asserts that its first condition is formulated in a law of non-omission, which promotes everything that “is self-explanatory,” the everyday and the ordinary, to the status of the interesting . . . usually reserved for the remarkable; but it is incomplete without the second condition, the law of non-systematization, which, positing incoherence as a condition of analytic experience, presumes significant all the dross of mental life—not only the representations in which scholastic psychology sees only nonmeaning (dream scenarios, presentiments, daydreams, and confused or lucid delusions), but also the phenomena that are not even granted a civil status in it . . . since they are altogether negative (slips of the tongue and bungled actions).45 A methodological gravitation to non-meaning, incoherence, and the “dross of mental life” provides yet another point of incompatibility between psychoanalysis and psychology, certainly inasmuch as the latter is premised on a positivist epistemology which is clearly unreceptive to such notably unscientific goals (non-meaning, incoherence, the laws of non-omission and non-systematization). The absent object As early as the mid-30s Lacan was insisting both on the relative status of the object as posited by Freud and upon the role of psychical reality—or, indeed, desire—in the ‘making’ of this object. In a clinical discussion of a man who becomes aroused by the refusal of a woman—a nicely grounded example of the point at hand—Fink observes that it seems to the outside observer that his desire is incited by the object— that it is correlated with a specific object . . . But as soon as that association is broken, as soon as it becomes impossible for him to imbue

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the object at hand with the trait or characteristic that turns him on— refusal—we see that what is crucial is not the object, the specific woman he gets involved with, but the trait or characteristic that arouses his desire.46 This brief vignette is indicative of a more general Lacanian postulate: Desire thus is not so much drawn toward an object (Desire → Object) as elicited by a certain characteristic that can sometimes be read into a particular love object . . . For a while, the object is seen as “containing” the cause, as “having” the trait or feature that incites this analysand’s desire . . . Human desire, strictly speaking, has no object.47 From a Lacanian perspective, the assumption that objects are the animating principles of our desires amounts to what we might call an error by way of the object. Objects do not constitute our desires; objects are rather the screens upon which desires are played out. Lacan’s notion of objet a is thus decidedly not an object at all; it is instead the non-object cause of desire that various imaginary objects come to be conflated with. This conceptualization is faithful to Freud,48 who had long since asserted that the object is contingent and dispensable relative to the aims of the drive. And it translates into a constant injunction in Lacan: Apparent ‘objects’ must be dissolved in their pretend substantiality and viewed instead as—at best—stop-off points, temporary locations in the itinerary of (metonymic) desire. To this we must add the fact that absence—lack, loss—over-determines the apparent presence of the object: What Lacan has emphasized is the radical, absolute character of the loss of the object, in that this object (at the level of drive as well as desire) is constituted as forever lost: it is not that the subject once had it and then lost it, but rather that the subject can only ‘have’ it as lost, as a pure lack . . . Thus, for Lacan, the object relation is the relation with the lack of the object.49 This, then, is how the notion of the object is rethought by Lacan: as first and foremost lack, lack as it is presented in desire, as the wish to have once again what one never really possessed. We should note again here the obvious distinction: Whereas psychology adheres to notions of objective

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‘reality,’ psychoanalysis insists that reality is always infused with, overwritten by psychical reality (fantasy).50 So, while it is true that the subject may have experienced the painful loss of ‘actual’ material objects, these are only pale imitations of the always-already lost object of fantasy: [T]he analytic experience shows . . . that the multiple losses through which the subject goes in his/her life derive their significance qua losses from the essential lack that forms the subject: lack of object, lack of any guarantee of satisfaction, lack-in-being (manqué-. . .).51 This crucial postulate in Lacanian theory—the primacy of lack over substance—both distinguishes Lacanian psychoanalysis from psychology and relates back to his conceptualization of the subject. The triumvirate of lacks noted above (of object, jouissance and being) indicates that for Lacan each such aspect of the subject is best grasped not within the parameters of the object—that is, as an entity capable of a clear ontological status—but rather according to a trajectory of lack. The ego can accordingly be conceptualized as simultaneously caught up within, and formed by, the wishful illusion of its own substantiality. The culture of the ego In Seminar I Lacan warns his audience that there is a fundamental error in cleaving “to the idea that the subject’s ego is identical to the presence that is speaking to you.”52 This is the problem when an “objectifying case of mind” (that is, a psychologizing approach) slides from the ego defined as the perception-consciousness system—that is, as the system of the subject’s objectifications—to the ego conceived of as the correlate of an absolute reality and thus, in a singular return of . . . psychologistic thought, to once again take the ego as the “reality function.”53 Multiple problems converge here for Lacan. A particular objectifying dimension within human psychical functioning—the agency of the ego— has erroneously come to be understood as the subject, as the focus of psychological (and even psychoanalytic) attention over and above the unconscious itself. Worse yet, this reified construct of the ego has come to be seen as ‘autonomous,’ as the psychical representative of reality.

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Such a simplistic notion of ‘reality’ cannot go unopposed by Lacan. Rather than it being the case that reality exists as the objective order of things to which the ego has—or must be—adapted, reality is itself the outcome of the ego’s fictional and defensive misrecognitions. Lacan comments on the need to adopt such a reversal as a key component of psychoanalytic practice. “The point,” he says, “is not to adapt [a patient] to it [reality], but to show him that he is only too well adapted to it, since he [as ego] assists in its very fabrication.”54 Lacan’s Seminar II is uncharacteristically clear in its undoing of the egosubject conflation. The subject, he remarks “is decentred in relation to the individual [as ego].”55 In the previous year’s seminar, Lacan had defined the ego as “that set of defences, of denials, of dams, of inhibitions, of fundamental fantasies which orient and direct the subject.”56 This re-characterization of the post-Freudian ego is now extended: “The ego isn’t a superior power, nor a pure spirit, nor an autonomous agency, nor a conflict-free sphere.”57 The work of retrieving unconscious desire, furthermore, lies beyond “that circle of certainties by which man recognizes himself as ego.”58 Psychology, again, has much to answer for here. The Freudian conceptualization of the ego, claims Lacan, is genuinely upsetting, revolutionary; it threatens to abolish preceding conceptualizations of the psyche. Despite this—and, indeed, as a reaction to it—“a notion of the ego has re-emerged,” one which “tends toward the re-absorption . . . of analytic knowledge within general psychology.”59 As erroneous as such a re-elevation of the ego is, one can understand why it has occurred, particularly given the phenomenological prioritization of consciousness: The notion of the ego today draws its self-evidential character from a certain prestige given to consciousness insofar as it is a unique, individual, irreducible experience. The intuition of the ego retains, in so far as it is centred on experience of consciousness, a captivating character, which one must rid oneself of in order to accede to our conception of the subject. I try to lead you away from its attraction with the aim of . . . [showing] where, according to Freud, the reality of the subject is. In the unconscious, excluded from the system of the ego, the subject speaks.60 Lacan’s attack against the clinical centering of the ego quickly expands into a more expansive critique of those forms of understanding that are rooted in what he calls the imaginary domain. This is a dimension of psychical life that trades in the currency of the image and that continually

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affirms identity and meaning at the cost of investigating the destabilizing terrain of unconscious desire. Psychology as discipline of the imaginary From the beginning of Lacan’s work, the image—the principal vehicle of imaginary identifications—is characterized as deceptive, as maintaining a seductive, captivating, and ultimately alienating hold on the subject. The image thus understood, is the very medium of the ego and a vessel not only of idealizing self-love, projection, and aggressive conflict, but of misrecognition or méconnaissance. It is a place where the gratifying image of what one thinks one already knows—or of what one wants to believe one is—is preferred above the prospect of the more destabilizing truths of unconscious desire. Why do I stress Lacan’s well-known assault on the role of the image here? Well, because there is an echo in Lacan’s terms of critique that must not escape us. Psychology is time and again attacked for its objectifying qualities, and much the same is alleged of the self-objectifying ego’s captivation in images. Psychology itself is thus likened to the ego, viewed, indeed, as itself as egoic. We may take this argument further by considering the elementary features of Lacan’s mirror-stage. The mirror stage involves the imaginary dynamics of the subject looking at, and as intrigued by, an image that they subsequently come to take on as themselves (as the basis of their ideal-ego). Such an image gives the subject an illusory sense of substantiality and identity; it affirms them in a persistent relation of misrecognition (méconnaissance); it enables them to believe that they can reliably know and gain mastery over themselves; and it forms a basis, with which to (narcissistically) love, and be fascinated by, themselves. The claim then is not simply that psychology in some way parallels processes of the ego. The claim is rather that psychology is an extended elaboration of the mirror-stage itself within the epistemological and procedural domains that constitute the discipline of psychology. This is what I take to underwrite a great many of Lacan’s critiques of psychology: the idea that psychology is a disciplinary re-enactment of the mirror stage itself. In retrospect this seems inevitable. Any epistemic formation which takes the psychological terrain of the ego as its primary object will invariably be tainted by the tendencies and suppositions of the ego, that is, by the imaginary. Lacan advances much the same argument when he cautions that

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“[O]bjectification in psychological matters is subject, at it very core, to a law of misrecognition [méconnaissance] that governs the subject not only as observed, but also as observer.”61 The subject of structure, not development Lacan’s anti-objectivism and his antipathy to psychology’s ego-affirmations are matched in vehemence only by his opposition to the assumptions concerning development that permeate so much of the discipline. He declares psychoanalysis “diametrically opposed to everything . . . inspired by a psychology that calls itself genetic.”62 The vigor with which he takes up cudgels against the developmental paradigm is, perhaps, initially surprising, given the layperson’s typical association of Freudian theory and the notion of psychosexual (oral, anal, genital, phallic) stages of development. Nevertheless, Lacan is less than reticent in proclaiming: [T]here is no psychogenesis. . . . [T]here is precisely nothing that could be further from psychoanalysis in its whole development, its entire inspiration and its mainspring, in everything it has contributed, everything it has been able to confirm for us in anything we have established.63 This is not to ignore the importance of the subject’s history, a point that Rodriguez anticipates: “Psychoanalysis deals with history, rather maturational development. And history, oral or written, is grounded in language.”64 Lacan eschews forms of genetic (that is, developmental) psychology that approach children as existing somehow outside of or anterior to language. Attempts to assess children’s aptitudes in comparison to “purely abstract register of adult mental categories” are denigrated for not appreciating how children from their very first manifestations of language, use syntax . . . with a level of sophistication that the postulates of intellectual “genesis” would . . . reach only at the height of a metaphysician’s career.65 Any psychology which claims to “reach the child’s reality” in this manner—via the study of developmental progressions—is dismissed as “idiotic.”66 Much the same argument is made in Seminar I: [O]ne cannot make judgements concerning the acquisition . . . of language on the basis of . . . the mastery revealed by the appearance

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of first words . . . Everyone knows the degree of diversity shown by the first fragments of language as they appear in the child’s elocution. And we . . . know how striking it is to hear the child give expression to adverbs, particles, words, to perhaps or not yet, before having given expression to . . . the minimal naming of an object.67 What seems at first glance an ‘anti-developmentalist’ stance—one doesn’t learn language one word at a time, or, in a nominalist manner, by naming objects—opens up into a more substantial thesis as regards the predominance of structure. Prior to any learning by the subject—and in marked contrast to psychological notions of a pre-linguistic (or pre-verbal) existence— language is always-already there. “Everyone is born into a world where language is already operative . . . the question is how the subject gets inside language and not the other way around.”68 The notion of structure thus undercuts the search for psychological origins: [T]here is no origin of structure: we cannot think unless language is already there. Language is an order . . . a whole composed of interrelated elements. A differential order must be conceived of as a whole, the different component elements being interrelated.69 This throws into perspective a question of agency that remains crucial in Lacan’s disagreement with psychology’s focus on the properties, skills, acquisitions of the individual. It is not how subjects use language, and attain a degree of agency in this way; it is rather the case of how the agency of language (the symbolic, the signifier) over-rides conscious egoproductions and determines it’s speaking subjects. So, although clinical psychoanalysis needs accommodate the singularity of its subjects—the particularity of their speech, their desire—it is largely uninterested in the ‘individuality’ of their apparent psychological attributes, concerned rather with how the agency of the symbolic as spoken through and by them is at once formative and transformative of whom they are as subjects. Hence Lacan’s declaration: One needs to “grasp clearly the autonomy of the symbolic function in the realising of the human.”70 The myth of immediate experience Lacan repeatedly exhibits a fascination with logical forms and linguistic functioning. He routinely over-rides the intuitive attraction of psychologistic

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accounts, preferring structural modes of explanation which remain largely antithetical to psychology. In his theory of logical time, for example, Lacan prioritizes “the essential logical form” to the “so-called existential form . . . of the psychological ‘I.’”71 Alain Badiou helpfully extends this argument: [Lacan] inserts himself into the structuralist galaxy not only because he had recourse . . . to logico-mathematical formalisms, but also because he renounced the reflexive subject as the centre of all experience. From his analytic perspective, the subject hinges on an irreflexive and . . . transindividual structure: the unconscious, which for Lacan depends entirely on language. The science of the unconscious therefore replaces the philosophy of consciousness.72 Lacan’s opposition to certain elementary facets of phenomenology becomes here apparent: From its invention by Husserl, phenomenology folded the thought of the subject back onto a philosophy of consciousness. It is rooted in lived experience, immediate and primitive. The subject is confounded with consciousness . . . It is not by chance that phenomenologists . . . accord so much importance to perception: it is the most elementary experience of this direct and intentional relationship consciousness has with the world.73 Consciousness, perception, experience, individuality: these are all suspect psychological concepts for Lacan inasmuch as they imply autonomy from, and primacy in respect of, the broader determining structure of language. Badiou continues: Moreover—and in this sense French phenomenology is also an inheritor of traditional psychology—the subject is apprehended as an interiority, seen from the point of its feelings, its emotions, and so on. The result is a heavy focus on the reflexive ego or self and the sphere of intimacy or inwardness.74 In Lacanian psychoanalysis then the reflexive individual of consciousness and interiority has been superseded by the irreflexive subject of transindividual and symbolic structure. We are dealing thus with the subject

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of structure rather than of development or accumulated knowledge and experience. Differently put: The interplay of structure (language) is not extrinsic but intrinsic to the subject. Furthermore, psychological or philosophical assumptions regarding the interiority of the individual are themselves symptomatic rather than foundational, so much so that the ego “is only a privileged symptom, the human symptom par excellence.”75 The ‘de-natured’ subject Once we have grasped the idea of the subject as subject of structure, then a further constituent dimension of much psychology quickly becomes untenable: the idea of humans as ‘natural.’ Lacan takes up this line of criticism by noting that human psychology inevitably amounts to an extension of animal psychology: [T]he psychological is, if we try to grasp it as firmly as possible, the ethological, that is, the whole of the biological individual’s behavior in relation to his natural environment. There you have a legitimate definition of psychology. There you have a real order of relations, an objectifiable thing, a field with quite adequately defined boundaries.76 Such a conflation of human and animal psychology is apparent in the presumption—underwriting so much of twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychology—that humans can be studied by focusing predominantly on their behavioral, evolutionary, biological, or non-verbal forms. In doing this, however, in treating humans as ‘natural,’ psychology is in perpetual error. “It has to be said of human psychology,” offers Lacan, “what Voltaire used to say about natural history, which was that it’s not as natural as all that and that, frankly, nothing could be more anti-natural.”77 For Lacan “the human being goes beyond the real which is biologically natural to it.”78 Whereas “animals are strictly riveted to the conditions of the external environment,” the same cannot be said of humans, who are “sufficiently open,”79 that is, under-determined by nature. One has to assume “a certain biological gap” in the human, which is to say that a fundamental discontinuity characterizes the subject’s relation to nature. The subject is derailed from an existence as purely biological entity by the intrusion of language and the symbolic: “The subject . . . is something other than an organism which adapts itself. It is something else . . . its

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entire behaviour speaks of something other than the axis we grasp when we consider it as a function of an individual.”80 The problem with biologizing modes of explanation is that they misconstrue what it is to be a human subject. True enough, to be human is to be a situated biological entity. However, to be a human in the world of language, and symbolic structures is to be biological in a way that is paradigmatically different from the instinctual domain of animals. To be human, by contrast, is always-already to have been plunged into the domain of the signifier which necessarily over-writes and exhaustively (re)articulates any ostensibly ‘pre-symbolic’ aspects of subjectivity. Constitutive disequilibrium: against adaptation A brief digression into Freudian theory should suffice to make it clear why Lacan was so ill-disposed to what he considers the essentially psychological concept of adaptation. As is well known, Freud’s theorization of neurosis— and indeed, of subjectivity in general—is underpinned by the irresolvable conflict (or ‘real’) that he sees as existing between the imperatives of culture and nature.81 This theme is perhaps most famously explored in Civilization and its Discontents, where this ‘irresolvability’ is folded back into the subject themselves, into their own “natural” functioning, so much so that Freud maintained that “there is something inherent in the function [of sex] itself [that denies] us total satisfaction.”82 It is precisely this—the a priori disequilibrium of the subject—which so much of psychology and American psychoanalysis (and ego psychology) had disavowed, that Lacan is determined not to neglect. From a Lacanian standpoint averse to the consolations of the imaginary, the notion of adaptation is itself an instance of méconnaissance, a wishful denial of the ‘primal’ incompatibility of the subject identified by Freud: What does analysis uncover—if it isn’t the fundamental, radical discordance of forms of conduct essential to man in relation to everything which he experiences? The dimension discovered by analysis is the opposite of anything which progresses through adaptation . . . There is a radical difference between any investigation of human beings even in the laboratory, and what happens in animals . . . The animal fits into its environment. There’s adaptation . . . How different it is . . . in man! . . . In man it is the wrong form which prevails.83

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For Lacan the conceptualization of a homeostatic fit between an organism and the environment must be conclusively ruled out in the case of the human subject. This is not only because the concept of adaptation misreads the nature and function of the ego in relation to ‘reality.’ (As we have already seen, it is not a question of adapting the ego to reality, but of showing that the ego is already too well adapted, participating as it does in the very construction of that ‘reality.’) It is also because the ego’s illusions of cohesion and integration impede the emergence of the unconscious and thus of the subject itself. Furthermore, conceiving the subject via the idealized notion of natural harmony avoids completely the radical break from the instinctual that characterizes the subject. It fails, in other words, to register the trajectory of drives, the factor of painful libidinal enjoyment (jouissance) and the excessive, self-destructive component of the death drive. Psychology, treated here as inseparable from such biological, physiological, evolutionary, and developmental—which is to say adaptational— perspectives, is discarded by Lacan: “[T]here is no compromise possible with psychology.”84 Furthermore, once the aim of a psychoanalytic treatment is linked—however implicitly—to adaptation, then the analyst inevitably becomes not only the facilitating agent but the corrective model for the patient within such a process. The implication is stark: From a Lacanian standpoint, allegiant to Freud’s declaration that psychoanalysis is opposed to any cure by means of suggestion, psychoanalytic practice is simply not viable under such conditions. Indeed, to trade an emphasis on the ‘non-resolvable’ nature of subject for assurances of adaptation is not only to sell the subject into a play of influence and social conformity (via the clinical ideal of adaptation), it is also a betrayal of the essentially subversive nature of psychoanalysis. Conclusion There are several conclusions that can be drawn from Lacan’s antiobjectivism, from his anti-developmental, anti-adaptation, and egosubverting arguments against the discipline of psychology. The most basic of these can be stated simply enough: The more psychology confers an object-status on what it studies, the more such psychical phenomena are misrecognized, ‘imaginarized.’ Psychical life, in other words, does not fit within the conceptual parameters of the object but is better grasped in structural terms, within the terms of signifying operations. The futility of

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trying to grapple with the Lacanian subject from within psychology can be highlighted by referring to Evans’s comment that Lacan’s concept of the subject concerns those aspects of the human being “that cannot be (or should not be) objectified, reduced to a thing, nor studied in an objective way.”85 The same holds for developmental, biological, and non/pre-linguistic approaches to the human: These contribute to the psychologizing advance of homo psychologicus, that is, in the reduction of the phenomena of psychical life to the constraining parameters of the psychological. It is precisely this move—which, as we have seen, entails a range of adjoined epistemological, ethical, and political issues—ensures that the subject, that de-natured and divided subject, incommensurable both to its environment and to itself, falls from view in both clinical and conceptual domains. Likewise, approaches which pivot on the notion of a centralized and realityconditioned ego, which elevate imaginary-affirming concepts of experience, consciousness, and individuality to the forefront, will fail. The subject of the unconscious cannot be apprehended within such a remit of concepts. All of this foregoing discussion has, in turn, shed further light on the early Lacan’s minimal definition of the subject as that which is “outside the object.”86 One appreciates better now that such a definition by way of the negative is consonant with a non-objectifying approach: The potentiality of this subject of the unconscious requires just such a bracketing of objectifying (and indeed biological, developmental, natural ‘scientific’) preconceptions and imaginary understandings. Hence also the related notion that the Lacanian subject should be treated as void of any definitive contents. Or, better yet, as Chiesa so adeptly phrases it: This is a subject that is not split or divided but is instead lack subjectivized.87 We have also thus opened up a series of perspectives—appropriately enough at this closing juncture—which segue into the middle and later period of Lacan’s teaching: the ideas of the ‘real’ of the subject, the subject as void, the role of the death-drive, and jouissance within the subject. This means that the multiple failures of psychological conceptualization to adequately grasp this subject are not only errors of theorization, they represent also missed curative—which is to say ethical—opportunities: They amount to modes of failing the subject. While the argument can be made that Lacan’s teaching traces at first a gradual and then ever more assertive and systematic excision of all facets of the psychological, the overall lesson of his teaching cannot be doubted: There is no subject of psychology.

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Acknowledgements This chapter first appeared as Derek Hook, “On the subject of psychology: A Lacanian critique” in Six Moments in Lacan: Communication and identification in psychology and psychoanalysis, (Routledge, 2018). Reprinted permission of Taylor & Francis, LLC. Notes   1 Leonardo S. Rodriguez, “Lacan’s Subversion of the Subject,” in Psychoanalysis with Children: History, Theory and Practice, edited by Leonardo S. Rodriguez (London: Free Association, 1999).   2 Ibid., 116.   3 Malcom Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 76.   4 David Pavón-Cuéllar “Lacan and Social Psychology,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7, 5 (2013); Ian Parker, “Jacques Lacan, Barred Psychologist,” Theory and Psychology 13, 1 (2003); Ian Parker, Psychology After Lacan: Connecting the Clinic and Research (New York: Routledge, 2015).   5 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 194.   6 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 120.   7 Ibid., 131.   8 Ibid.   9 Ibid., 176. 10 Kareen Ror Malone and Stephen R. Friedlander, “Introduction,” in The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists, edited by Kareen Ror Malone and Stephen R. Friedlander (New York: SUNY Press, 2000), 6. 11 Parker, Psychology After Lacan, 25. 12 Lacan, Écrits, 59. 13 David Pavón-Cuéllar, “Beyond the Reality Principle,” in Reading the Écrits—A Guide to Lacan’s Works: Between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, edited by C. Neill, D. Hook, and S. Vanheule (London: Routledge, forthcoming). 14 See Amedeo Giorgi, Psychology as a Human Science (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). This is not to underplay the conflicts between many of the phenomenological ideas underlying the human science approach and Lacan’s (often apparently anti-humanistic) psychoanalytic conceptualizations. 15 Amedeo Giorgi, “Phenomenological Philosophy as the Basis for a Human Scientific Psychology,” The Humanistic Psychologist 42, (2014), 234–235. 16 Lacan, Écrits, 59. 17 Ibid., 63. 18 ‘Psychologism’ is understood here as the reduction of the psychical to psychological categories erroneously modeled on the natural sciences. 19 Lacan, Écrits, 177.

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20 Ibid., 178. 21 Lacan, Seminar I, 230. 22 Lacan, Écrits, 204. 23 Ibid. 24 Jacques-Alain Miller, “An Introduction to Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Orientation Prior to 1953 (I),” in Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, edited by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (New York: SUNY Press, 1996). 25 Lacan, Écrits, 204. 26 Paul Verhaeghe, Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive (New York: Other Press, 2001). 27 I mean desire here in its unconscious or repressed forms, the desire that may be separated—in the form of object a—from alienation in the Other, as discussed by Lacan in Seminar XI’s distinction between alienation and separation: Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981). 28 Jacques-Alain Miller, “An Introduction to Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Orientation Prior to 1953 (II),” in Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, edited by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), 16–17. 29 Lacan, Écrits, 177. 30 Ibid., 65. 31 Miller, “Introduction to Seminars I and II (part II),” 17. 32 Ibid., 19. 33 Lacan, Écrits, 66. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 176. 36 Ibid., 177. 37 Pavón-Cuéllar makes a nice observation in respect of how Lacan’s emphasis on the structure of inter-subjectivity will be transformed in his later work: “We may conjecture that, in the development of Lacanian theory, this early relativism of interpersonal relations would pave the way for the future structuralism of signifying relations, of an ‘intersignifiance’ that explicitly excludes any kind of interpersonal ‘intersubjectivity.’” Pavón-Cuéllar, “Beyond the Reality Principle.” 38 Dany Nobus and Malcolm Quinn, Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology (New York: Routledge, 2005). 39 Bruce Fink, Against Understanding: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key, Volume 1 (New York: Routledge, 2014), 24–25. 40 Ibid., 18. 41 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaseilli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 15–16. 42 Ibid., 278. 43 Ibid. 44 Fink, Against Understanding.

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45 Lacan, Écrits, 65. 46 Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 51. 47 Ibid. 48 Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1957 [1914–1916]). 49 Rodriguez, “Lacan’s Subversion of the Subject,” 122. 50 Hence Lacan’s assertion: “I have opposed the psychologizing tradition that distinguishes fear from anxiety by virtue of its correlates in reality. In this I have changed things, maintaining of anxiety—it is not without an object. What is that object? The object petit a”(Lacan cited in Tom Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’ (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 31. 51 Rodriguez, “Lacan’s Subversion of the Subject,” 122. 52 Lacan, Seminar I, 250. 53 Ibid., 251. 54 Lacan, Écrits, 498. 55 Lacan, Seminar II, 9. 56 Lacan, Seminar I, 17. 57 Lacan, Seminar II, 326. 58 Ibid., 8. 59 Ibid., 3–4. 60 Ibid., 58. 61 Lacan, Écrits, 349. Evidence for this reading of psychology as ‘discipline of the imaginary’ is to be found in the many mythical objects and assumptions that psychology produces, and which Lacan goes about listing in Seminar III: “The myth of unity of the personality, the myth of synthesis, of superior and interior functions . . . all these types of organization of the objective field, constantly reveal . . . misrecognition of the most immediate experience” (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 8). 62 Lacan, Écrits, 116. 63 Lacan, Seminar III, 7. 64 Rodriguez, “Lacan’s Subversion of the Subject,” 114. Rodriguez’s subsequent qualification is worth noting: “Events themselves, traumatic or not, enter into the psychoanalytic scene only as realities of discourse. Similarly, maturation, developmental and psychosexual stages cannot be conceived of as residing outside language, since it is language itself, through the concrete transmission of speech, that constitutes them as ‘factors’ or ‘structural components’” (ibid., 115). 65 Lacan, Seminar III, 116–17. 66 Ibid. 67 Lacan, Seminar I, 54. 68 Jacques-Alain Miller, “An Introduction to Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Orientation Prior to 1953 (III),” in Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, edited by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), 34.

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69 Miller, “Introduction to Seminars I and II (part I),” 13. 70 Lacan, Seminar I, 54. 71 Lacan, Écrits, 170. 72 Alain Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan Past and Present: A Dialogue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 8. 73 Ibid., 6. 74 Ibid., 7. 75 Lacan, Seminar I, 16. 76 Lacan, Seminar III, 7–8. 77 Ibid. 78 Lacan, Seminar II, 322. 79 Ibid., 80 Ibid., 9. 81 Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI, edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1964 [1927–1931]), 57–145. 82 Ibid., 54. This helps to provide an important corrective to the idea that psychoanalysis is all about sex. The prioritization of sexual drive and sexuality in the unconscious is not about some naïve preoccupation with sex itself; it arises because of the impossibility of (a ‘natural’ form of) sexuality ever attaining full satisfaction. From a Lacanian perspective, we may offer multiple reasons why this is so—the never-ending metonymic extensions of desire, the troublesome link between sexual jouissance and trauma, etc.—yet the important point to grasp here is that human sexuality has been de-naturalized, split from within by its own constitutive impossibility. For Freud, this factor of impossibility is likewise transposed onto culture: “unbehagen in der Kultur” characterizes the impossibility of balancing individual enjoyments and the renunciations expected of the social contract. The fact that culture is always already divided from within thus echoes the constitutively divided subject and the fraught nature of human sexuality. The idea of structural discordance (or ‘non-unifiability’) is of course a vital antecedent for an early Freudian form of the subsequent Lacanian notion of ‘the real’. 83 Lacan, Seminar II, 86. 84 Lacan, Écrits, 588. 85 Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1996), 195. 86 Lacan, Seminar I, 194. 87 Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

Bibliography Badiou, Alain, and Élisabeth Roudinesco. Jacques Lacan Past and Present: A Dialogue. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Bowie, Malcolm. Lacan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.

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Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1996. Eyers, Tom. Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real.’ New York: Palgrave, 2012. Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Fink, Bruce. Against Understanding: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key, Volume 1. New York: Routledge, 2014. Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and its Discontents.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI. Edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1964 [1927–1931], 57–145. Freud, Sigmund. “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV. Edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1957 [1914–1916], 109–140. Giorgi, Amedeo. “Phenomenological Philosophy as the Basis for a Human Scientific Psychology.” The Humanistic Psychologist 42 (2014), 233–248. Giorgi, Amedeo. Psychology as a Human Science. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by John Forrester. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955. Edited by JacquesAlain Miller. Translated by Sylvana Tomaseilli. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955– 1956. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. Malone, Kareen Ror and Stephen R. Friedlander. “Introduction.” In The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists. Edited by Kareen Ror Malone and Stephen R. Friedlander. New York: SUNY Press, 2000. Miller, Jacques-Alain. “An Introduction to Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Orientation Prior to 1953 (I).” In Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud. Edited by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus. New York: SUNY Press, 1996. Miller, Jacques-Alain. “An Introduction to Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Orientation Prior to 1953 (II).” In Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud. Edited by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus. New York: SUNY Press, 1996. Miller, Jacques-Alain. “An Introduction to Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Orientation Prior to 1953 (III).” In Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud. Edited by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus. New York: SUNY Press, 1996.

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Nobus, Dany and Malcolm Quinn. Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology. New York: Routledge, 2005. Parker, Ian. “Jacques Lacan, Barred Psychologist.” Theory and Psychology 13, 1 (2003), 95–115. Parker, Ian. Psychology After Lacan: Connecting the Clinic and Research. New York: Routledge, 2015. Pavón Cuéllar, David. “Beyond the Reality Principle.” In Reading the Écrits—A Guide to Lacan’s Works: Between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Edited by C. Neill, D. Hook, and S. Vanheule. London: Routledge, forthcoming. Pavón-Cuéllar, David. “Lacan and Social Psychology.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7, 5 (2013), 261–274. Rodriguez, Leonardo S. “Lacan’s Subversion of the Subject.” In Psychoanalysis with Children: History, Theory and Practice. Edited by Leonardo S. Rodriguez. London: Free Association, 1999. Verhaeghe, Paul. Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive. New York: Other Press, 2001.

Chapter 8

(Ab)normality as spectrum Merleau-Ponty, post-Kleinians, and Lacan on autism Yue Jennifer Wang

The experience of autism beginning in childhood has been described as lacking bodily cohesion, without borders or limits. Instead, there is a porousness between oneself and the rest of material reality. At the same time, there appears to be a retreat within oneself. Such a retreat cannot, however, hold back the tide of exteriority that encroaches upon one’s body, even if the autistic person does not conceptualize a distance from the other. In this position, one cannot even fool oneself into believing in the semblance of a substantial subjectivity. The autistic subject appears then to be the subject as lack, as explored by Derek Hook in “Lacan and the Psychological” (Chapter 7, this volume). The constitutive lack of the Lacanian subject described by Hook locates itself in the autistic body, as it were. The broad aim of this chapter is to understand this specific conception of autistic experience, both from analytic observation and from the autistics’ first-hand accounts, and then to explore phenomenological resources for an analog to that experience. The motivation of the latter aim is to determine whether the autistic experience is radically different from ‘normal subjectivity,’ or if it is somehow continuous with that experience. With these goals in mind, we will turn to the psychoanalytic literature on autism, drawing on Lacanian and Kleinian scholars. We will as well try to navigate the perilous waters of current debates over the as yet undetermined causes of autism, whether environmental or genetic-neurobiological. Without trying to arrive at any solutions, we will gesture toward a theoretical basis on which to ground the use of psychoanalysis in the treatment of autism; Lacan’s structure of psychosis and François Sauvagnat’s suggestion that autism and psychosis are continuous will guide that discussion. In transitioning to phenomenology, we will connect Lacan’s structural

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approach with the post-Kleinian Thomas Ogden’s claim that the autisticcontiguous position is synchronic with the other two positions. For both Lacan and Ogden, psychosis and autism respectively are not stages that one ideally grows out of never to return to again. Rather, they are pathological modes of a more universal human experience. At the heart of this investigation is the absence of a radical break between autism and normality. Julia Kristeva serves as a midpoint between psychoanalysis and phenomenology. We will follow her suggestion that communication between analyst–analysand, through the Kleinian phantasy, can be grounded in a phenomenology of the flesh. Her comments about the universality of a sensory cave prophetically anticipate Ogden’s autisticcontiguous position and also allow us to transition to our final figure, Merleau-Ponty, whose notions of the flesh, corporeal experience, and vision therein resonate deeply with the boundedness that is the final cause, as it were, of Ogden’s autistic-contiguous position. While much could be said about the difference between these two modes of interrogating experience (the psychoanalytic and the phenomenological), my aim here is simply to voice these psychoanalytic insights of autism in phenomenological terms so to bring into view an experience that speaks the unspoken world of the autistic, a foreignness with which we are all in some way familiar. The state of autism In recent decades, autism has come into the national and international spotlight because of a purported diagnostic epidemic. From 1987 to 1998, California reported a 273 percent increase in the number of reported cases. As of 2010, the Center for Disease Control estimates that 1 out of every 68 children has an autism spectrum disorder whereas only 1 in 2000 children were diagnosed in the 1970s and 1980s.1 Concurrently, the diagnostic criteria for autism had not changed significantly between the DSM-III of 1980 and DSM-IV, in use until the 2013 release of the DSM-V. The French Lacanian psychoanalyst François Sauvagnat hypothesized about this puzzling situation that the autism “epidemic” is not so much due to an increase in autism itself, but to the changing diagnostic criteria for childhood psychosis. For ideological reasons, Sauvagnat claims that in 1964 an arbitrary separation was made between psychosis and autism by the American psychologist Bernard Rimland.2 While autism was seen more as a result of physical impairment (e.g. with neurological and genetic

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components), childhood psychosis was thought to be psychogenic, forming out of the psycho-social dimensions of early experience and therefore environmental. Following this ideologically motivated dissociation, at the end of the 1970s, the American Psychiatric Association greatly narrowed the diagnostic criteria for childhood psychosis, such that currently the psychopathology of childhood psychosis has been made almost identical to that of schizophrenia. However, in children, psychotic behavior might not present as recognizably as adult hallucination. Sauvagnat has shown that “in numerous cases, psychotic children tend to keep their delusional or hallucinatory experiences secret and camouflage them as character traits or behavior disorders, as they experience that nobody wants to hear about them”3 or perceive that others do not believe they exist. Additionally, psychosis might be transformed into developmental disorders or psychomotor idiosyncrasies.4 As a result of this diagnostic straightening, what was formerly diagnosed as psychosis was then diagnosed as autism, and this migration in part accounts for the autism epidemic. As a result, psychoanalysis has had surprisingly effective results in the treatment of children diagnosed with autism, many of them eventually emerging from their shell and being able to describe their previous experiences.5 Regarding his work with psychotics, Lacan warns that “to use the technique that Freud established outside the experience to which it was applied (i.e. neurosis) is as stupid as to toil at the oars when the ship is on the sand.”6 With this guiding caution, Lacanians have been at the forefront of autism research and the development of psychoanalytic treatments for autism. To responsibly cover all our bases in finding autism’s etiology without getting too entangled in the scientific debate, which would take us too far afield, let us offer some cursory remarks about the positive evidence for a relationship between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Lacanian analyst Judith Mitrani discusses a study conducted by neuroscientists Ramachandran and Obermancall on the presence of “‘broken mirror’ neurons”7 in autistic children, though she also states that as of yet, “scientists say that they do not know which genetic and environmental risk factors can inhibit the development of mirror neurons or alter their function.”8 On the other hand, Giannotti and de Astis provide evidence for the influence of environmental factors.9 In these studies, autistic children with significant neuropathy underwent intensive psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy and presented with absent symptomatology after five years. These studies

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together suggest that in the face of neurological symptoms whose cause might be genetic or environmental, or a combination of both, the intervention of psychoanalysis is not unjustified, as the precise cause of autism remains undetermined. Even if there exists a genetic pattern in those with autism,10 this does not mean that psychoanalysis is categorically incompatible for treating it. Their own testimony From the autistics for whom analysis has been effective, analysts have collected a great deal of data, both from their own observations and from autistics’ self-testimonies, on their experience in the world. In her classic text Autistic States in Children, the pioneering child psychoanalyst Tustin Frances offers insightful clinical illustrations of the autistic’s experience in the world: [Autistics] sometimes use people or parts of them in an unusual way. A characteristic gesture of an autistic child is to get a hold of someone’s arm, place the person’s hand on the knob of a door, and then try to use the hand to turn the doorknob and open the door.11 When Jimmy fell and bumped his knee on the ground he would kiss the spot on the ground where he had bumped his knee to make it better, as if he were not sure which was his knee and which was the ground.12 This body confusion between oneself and the world can be seen as a symptom of lacking body boundedness. Tustin provides reports of this lack of boundedness from patients who eventually emerged from their autistic shells: The wrenching away of the mother’s nipple led John to feel the experience as a “black hole with the nasty prick”13; Jean felt herself to be a jug with a hole from which water was always falling, and herself as “a waterfall, falling forever out of control into a bottomless abyss, into nothingness.”14 Mitrani writes that “Tustin came to understand that the “impressive caesura of birth,” originally referred to by Freud, might include the shock of the premature awareness of bodily separateness experienced by the infant.”15 The infant’s awareness is not conscious and has emerged before it has “developed the capacity to sufficiently differentiate his feelings, emotions and anxieties from his bodily sensations, while, at the

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same time, he has yet to separate himself fully from his mother.”16 Essentially, the infant feels this separation before understanding it and before being fully separated from the mother; the child is thus in a liminal state between connection to and separation from the mother. The infant feels the loss of a part, a part that it initially experienced as of its own body—the mother’s nipples or arms. However, this feeling of ‘ownness’ is not in reference to an individual, discrete body that loses a limb, but is experienced as a broken fusion with the mother, to whom one both belongs and possesses. Thus, from this premature awareness, autistic children experience their bodies to be ineluctably opened onto a torrent of phenomena approaching from the world. Stated otherwise, their bodies become sites of frightening openness, and to protect themselves they withdraw into repetitive sensual experiences to form a crust around themselves. Along with body image problems, we also find attendant language problems with various manifestations including: 1 “the refusal to be directly addressed or called upon . . . by other persons,” “the incapacity to use correctly personal pronouns” 2 “the absence of a ‘symbolic frame of reference’ of the patient’s body” (e.g. anxiety crossing an open space, facing an unstructured crowd; repeatedly asking for directions from adults); and 3 hallucinatory inner speech, “language that is out of control (e.g. functions automatically and cannot be monitored” such as in echolalia).17 Even mute autistic children are often found talking to themselves. Their speech also accompanies the use of autistic objects. The absence of limits between the world and the autistic body affects the status of language because language is not treated as an organizing Other but instead as another object in the world. As just another thing, it is subject to the same problematic status. Thus, for example, echolalia serves the purpose of recreating “a controllable closure of the body” similar to stereotypies (repetitive body movements like rocking, self-caressing, etc.), and as such, has only a temporary success that necessitates repetition.18 Neurotypical, non-autistic children have in their psychosocial development some sort of object to “plug up” the opening of their orifices which are experienced as the sites of terrifying openness. They experience their bodies as self-contained and enclosed. This might result from the use of a transitional object (Winnicott) which marks a “transitional zone” “in which

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the infant develops a sense of independence within the territory controlled by his parents, and as a means to close a crucial body-orifice in order to be “pacified” and partially isolated from the otherside world from some time.”19 Autistic objects, on the other hand, are repetitive and “have been described as mechanical, potentializing excitation, and insuring a very poor bodily movement.”20 Autistic self-medication, so to speak, does not and cannot properly contain their bodies. According to Sauvagnat, the relationship between autism and body image problems has been underestimated in the literature. In contrast, body image problems abound in the testimonies of autistic children and parents. Instead of an autistic spectrum separated from psychosis, Sauvagnat proposes “a continuist model of autistic/psychotic disorders in children, according to which the psychopathology can vary from a very disorganized schizophrenia-like picture to autistic aloneness (refusal of contact) and sameness (stereotypies).”21 Linking psychosis and autism has the further effect of explaining the fact that autistic children are prone to “experience important disorders in their body image structure”22 from an already established Lacanian theoretical framework. A very helpful clue as to where in Lacan to turn is Sauvagnat’s suggestion that a successful bodily containment is a precondition for the success of Lacan’s mirror stage. If a lack of bodily containment is a distinctive feature of autistic experience, and if we ought to think of psychosis and autism as continuous, then it would follow that in Lacan’s description of a psychotic’s failed mirror stage, we should be able to find an experience compatible with that of the one described in autistic symptomologies. We turn now to Lacan’s Seminar III: The Psychoses, framed largely around the problem of psychotic hallucinatory speech, in order to find a basis for the continuity between psychosis and autism. Lacan and the failed mirror stage In Seminar III, Lacan gives an exposition of the psychotic position in contrast to the neurotic one. A major part of the discussion centers on the firsthand accounts of his delusions by the schizophrenic German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber. In his Memoirs of My Mental Illness, Judge Schreber’s psychosis leads him to identify himself as the “permanent woman of God.”23 This identification with the feminine can be understood as the flipside of a failure of identification with the masculine Other,

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whereby identification produces castration. While the neurotic represses symbolic castration, the psychotic forecloses it. For the psychotic, memory of the initial impression of castration by a symbolic figure is not repressed but rather is unacknowledged. This foreclosure has an important bearing on the psychotic’s relationship to language. The pathological psychotic’s verbal hallucinations consist of signifiers and words, but the relation to the symbolic is as something negated and foreclosed (Verwefung). More specifically, what is foreclosed is not any particular element in the symbolic but something foundational to it—the father function or paternal metaphor, which establishes the authority of the symbolic by connecting signifier to signified, language to meaning. When the paternal metaphor is foreclosed and therefore does not perform its function, “what is refused in the symbolic order, in the sense of Verwefung, reappears in the real.”24 In saying this, Lacan does not mean that something reappears in the order of naïve reality but in the order of an unsignifiable, hallucinated real beyond. What appears comes from nowhere, but it appears “in the register of meaning” but “refers to nothing.”25 That is, it appears in the imaginary—the register of meaning—as hallucinated sounds and images. In this strange meaning, coming in the form, for example, of divine speech, the symbolic is “imaginarized.”26 For the psychotic, discourse is learned by the imaginary mechanism of imitation rather than by the threat of castration. Words become things, objects rather than symbols of meaning. The symbolizing function of language, which necessarily entails a distance between signifier and signified, is replaced by a signifier that becomes imaginary and out of control. Lacking a true induction into the symbolic, the psychotic fundamentally has a mirror relation with the world. Lacan’s reformulation of the mirror stage in Seminar VIII has it that the ego, developed through libidinal investment in and internalization of one’s mirror image, is possible only through the intervention of the Other. The father figure must say to the infant, “yes, this is your image!”27 According to Lacan’s Schema L, out of the mirror relationship to one’s specular image emerges two egos, o and o′—the ego and the o′ (ther). They relate such that “the subject speaks to himself with his ego.”28 For normal subjects, this relationship with the o′ther is made ambiguous since one has identified with the seeming wholeness of one’s specular image. The absence of the paternal function, however, makes it so that the imaginary relationship between oneself and one’s specular image (between the two

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egos, o and o′) is not ratified; Instead, the subject sees its specular image as wholly other and the dynamic act of speaking to oneself with one’s ego (o′) is explicit rather than ambiguous. That is, the speech attendant with o′ is unambiguously other than oneself. What would be one’s thinking becomes a speech from a purely imaginary other, thus revealing the Lacanian mechanism of verbal hallucinatory psychosis. It is interesting to note that while Hook, in his chapter, explores the psychologistic tendency to substantialize one’s mirror image in order to underwrite the unity of the ego, the other extreme is to reject one’s mirror image. The former results in the illusory objectivization of the subject, while the other results in its implosion, and so neither extreme is desirable. Two categories of effects emerge from this failed mirror stage. One possibility is a dissociation of one’s internal discourse that becomes other and uncontrollable; for the psychotic, this manifest as an auditory hallucination. Another possibility is a rejection of one’s specular body, an otherness not recognized as one’s own because the Other has not ratified one’s ownership. The effects of autistic experience29 could all reasonably fit in either of these two categories. Though a more careful disambiguation between autism and psychosis is still necessary, for now we can say that the autistic, who cannot even form a whole, specular image to reject, suffers from the same general set of symptoms as the psychotic. Thus, following Sauvagnat, we can indeed understand autism and psychosis as continuous, though with different emphases in terms of symptomology, since in Lacan’s investigation of psychosis, we see already the potential for a description of autistic experience. And following Lacan’s caveat, we must toil cautiously in the work with autism, being careful to apply the right technique to the right experience. Ogden’s autistic-contiguous position and Kristeva’s sensory cave In the spirit of matching technique and experience correctly, we will structure this next section around the following questions: Can we locate something in universal experience that approximates, resembles, and resonates with the autistic’s experience? Can we not so much speak for, with pre-established but perhaps ill-fitting categories, but allow the autistic’s world experience to speak to us? I will also shift from the analytic context to a phenomenological one, with phenomenology broadly understood as

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the investigation of the general structures of experience. The American post-Kleinian psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden has thematized this universal experience as the autistic-contiguous position in his dynamic system of concurrent poles positions. Psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist Julia Kristeva also briefly discusses autism as an entrapment within one layer of shared human experience, and elsewhere she thematizes the carnal metaphor as the means for communicating even across seeming walls of enclosure. Finally, following the suggestion of Kristeva herself, I will turn to Maurice Merleau-Ponty for his work on the phenomenology of the flesh and on child psychology. Though up to now we have been discussing psychosis as a pathology, Lacan ultimately conceived of a psychotic position that was a specific structure of experience. In fact, there are only structures of experience— neurotic, perverse, and psychotic—and no such structure as “health.” Each individual stands in relation to a certain structure, and the work of the analyst is to carefully identify which one that is for the patient. Pathology and health are not, strictly speaking, opposing structures. Similarly, Thomas Ogden formulates a non-pathological “autistic-contiguous position” that necessarily exists in dialectical tension with other positions; pathologies, like autism, occur when there is a collapse into a pole position. Though neither see their respective structures/positions as opposed to an equally healthy structure/position, Lacan conceives of different structures representing different mechanistic relationships to the same elements (Name-of-the-Father, the specular image, the real, etc.), while Ogden conceives of the dynamic relations as different, concurring pole positions. In a 1989 paper entitled “On the Concept of an Autistic-Contiguous Position,” Ogden thematized an autistic position that was relative to Klein’s classical paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. Though positions, or organizations of the psyche, do undergo historical development as newborns mature, they are not reducible to developmental stages. Instead, Ogden says that “this primitive organization represents a pole of a dialectic and thus never exists in pure form any more than the concept of the conscious mind exists independently of the concept of the unconscious mind: each creates, preserves and negates the other.”30 Thus, the autisticcontiguous position is not a primary and pure developmental stage to be passed through. Instead, there is the possibility of holding all three positions in different tensions, and thus in both a pathological and non-pathological tension.

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For Ogden, a child’s working through the more primitive autisticcontiguous position does not mean it is pathologically autistic. Even the paranoid-schizoid position, so often likened to a cosmic battle between good and evil “provides a good measure of the immediacy and vitality of lived (concretely symbolized) experience.”31 Pathologies, on the other hand, “involve hypertrophied versions of the types of defence, form of attribution of meaning to experience, and mode of object relatedness characterizing the normal autistic-contiguous organization.”32 That is, autism, as well as psychosis and manic-depression, are excessive calcifications of their respective positions, and this calcification is what makes them pathological. When there is a collapse or calcification in the direction of the autistic-contiguous mode specifically, the result is “a tyrannizing imprisonment in a closed system of bodily sensations that precludes the development of [Winnicott’s] ‘potential space.’”33 This closed system, however, does not create for the child a sense of bordered bodily containment but only an enclosure within unstable walls of sensation. The child becomes mechanically enclosed within himself in his use of autistic objects in order to create and recreate autistic shapes, which do not have staying power: thus the inconsolable state that an autistic child sometimes falls into when his pattern of self-medication is disturbed. While working through the autistic-contiguous position, the infant experiences an ongoing ordering of raw sensory data by “forming pre-symbolic connexions between sensory impressions that come to constitute bounded surfaces.”34 The autistic-contiguous position offers, under normal conditions, “the barely perceptible background of sensory boundedness of all subsequent subjective states.”35 This boundedness occurs both spatially and temporally, in the surface to surface contact between bodies, as well as in the regularity of interaction between mother and child: in speech, holding, and nursing. Some examples of boundedness generated from relationships of contiguity include: the sense of shape created by the impression of the infant’s skin surface when he rests his cheek against the mother’s breast; the sense of the continuity and predictability of shape derived from the rhythmicity and regularity of the infant’s sucking activity (in the context of a maternally provided holding environment); the rhythm of the ‘dialogue’ of cooing engaged in by mother and infant; the feeling of edgedness generated by the infant’s pressing his gums tightly on the mother’s nipple or finger.36

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The gradual accretion of this boundedness as a surrounding of the infant is the beginning of a sense of self as a sense of place from which the self operates—the beginnings of a boundary to the self, and therefore between self and other. The rhythmicity of experiences slowly approaches a continuity of being, a becoming of being. A failure of ordering—a collapse into the autistic-contiguous pole—would, therefore, lead to that terrifying bodily openness described by so many autistics. From Ogden’s discussion of the relationship between these three position-poles, we learn that the autistic-contiguous position never leaves subjective experience. We do not, so to speak, pass through it, moving on teleologically to higher abstract mental processes. Rather, experience is generated between the autistic-contiguous, paranoid-schizoid, and depressive poles. Thus also, there does not need to be a total collapse into the autistic-contiguous mode for there to be autistic perturbations in what might otherwise appear to be a “normal” person.37 What that dialectically negotiated in-between looks like cannot be programmatically formulated. Rather, like one’s own particular autistic shape, the one by which a measure of boundedness is gained, this negotiation is idiosyncratic and necessary. Julia Kristeva prophetically anticipates the spirit of what Ogden later develops as the autistic-contiguous position in a short section on autism from Time and Sense. She describes an asymbolic sensory cave (an allusion to Plato’s cave but still different from it), though this sensory cave “has not yet been given form by cognitive experience, and . . . often resists it.”38 Continuing on, Kristeva says that lived experience “can nevertheless encounter thing-presentations that endow its inner workings with form and signification.”39 That is, while there is no form in the sense of a symbolic organization of sensory data (e.g. this is a “cat,” that is a “chair”), in the cave, one can encounter significant “thing-presentations,” things without symbolic designation but with form and signification. The sensory cave is, however, experienced as a psychic catastrophe in the most extreme way by those afflicted with autism; from the foregoing discussion, we can hypothesize that this is due to the lack of enclosure in the autistic’s experience of the sensory cave. Though the autistic child withdraws into this cave, which he effectively calcifies, fossilizes, and “renders inexpressible.”40 For others, however, the sensory cave can be experienced as jouissance or transformed into a literary style. The range of possibilities is due to the fact that the cave is, again recalling Ogden, “an essential part of the psychic apparatus, which is heterogeneous”41 and stratified. Like Ogden, Kristeva says that we

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ought to use what Freud calls an “economic” rather than a chronological or developmental conception of the experience of the sensory cave. In discussing the clinical setting, Kristeva instructs us to turn to MerleauPonty’s theory of reversibility and flesh in order to understand the analyst’s identification with the analysand for the purpose of naming the latter’s inexpressible sensations—an interpenetration between the two parties of analysis as a kind of transubstantiation. In her book Melanie Klein, Kristeva says that the Kleinian phantasy, which consists of “drives, sensations, and acts as well as words . . . is a veritable incarnation, a carnal metaphor.”42 The carnal metaphor consists of a variety of expressions that can communicate with each other in spite of their seeming categorical difference. It thus provides us with a variety of means by which analyst and analysand, especially the child analysand, are able to meet each other—thus not only through linguistic speech. Taking Kristeva’s advice, we turn to MerleauPonty’s notion of flesh so as to better understand the transubstantiative experience of the clinic, whose successes show us that the analyst has indeed been able to reach that inexpressible world of the autistic. At the beginning of this section, we framed the investigation as a search for something in universal experience that resonates with the specific autistic experience; to that end, we turned to Ogden’s autistic-contiguous pole of experience to recognize our own sensory cave. We will now explore with Merleau-Ponty the experience of life as flesh. Inching deeper into the rabbit hole, our question now is the following: What is the relationship between oneself and the rest of the world—the relationship revealed by “flesh”—such that communication and identification, while most certainly an imaginary operation, can also be very much real and effective? Merleau-Ponty on corporeal existence Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, and its correlated notions of chiasm, reversibility, and corporeal existence, describe for us an intimacy with the world that underlies all experience. Merleau-Ponty says that human experience is neither a Cartesian ego seated in a control center operating a mechanical body, nor is it a purely reactive bundle of nerves entirely determined by the world and its sensory objects. The former view is a residue of idealism, which Merleau-Ponty rejects, although Husserlian phenomenology has also been accused, at times, of Cartesian idealism; the latter is the position of naturalism in philosophy, behaviorism in psychology,

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and mechanism in biology. Merleau-Ponty work offers one phenomenological resource for avoiding what Hook criticizes as the pitfalls of phenomenology with its reductionistic ties to consciousness. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty instead famously says that our vision is “formed in the heart of the visible, or as though there were between it and us an intimacy as close as between the sea and the strand.”43 He evocatively likens this operation to the touching together of two halves of an orange, since vision is formed out of the coming together of things of the same flesh—my body and the world; vision is thus formed in the heart of the visible, in the immanent midst of it. In corporeal existence, the ego is thus always already part of the world, inextricably stitched into its very fabric. Cartesianism rips consciousness from the fabric of the world, and objectivism erases its distinctiveness from that same fabric. Consciousness is instead always experienced as the Gestaltist figure on a background—a part of a whole. This experience of embodied consciousness has as its correlate the experience of things in the world presenting most basically as a figure on a background. The intimate, intertwined relation of consciousness and the world—a flesh to flesh relation—is well illustrated in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of art in “Eye and Mind.” Art draws on the “pool of brute sense”44 that is the world we inhabit. Painters interrogate the objects they see as to their being and as to why and how they present themselves as objects. Why do they not appear instead as unbounded pixels on the eye or as the “idea” of a mountain? Artistic vision asks objects to “unveil the means, visible and not otherwise, by which [the mountain] makes itself into a mountain before our eyes.”45 In their continual interrogation of objects, painters encounter the eerie feeling of being looked at by the very things at which they gaze. The painter and musician Paul Klee testifies to this: “In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me. . . . I was there, listening. . . . I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it.”46 To be penetrated, to be possessed, is to receive something not of your own invention but which nevertheless shares your very own flesh, and which thereby directs itself at you. These sensory experiences are thematized as Merleau-Ponty’s theory of reversibility, one instantiation of which is the fact that the seeing and the visible remain indefinitely open to a trading of positions. This assumes a liquidity of the substance shared by all bodies, or flesh. This interpenetration

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of flesh by flesh (our flesh, flesh of the world, flesh of the other) anonymizes our perception of the object so that it is as if our vision is turned back upon itself; intentionality is reversed. In this turning back, perception is anonymized insofar as we no longer know where vision begins—is it with us or with the object? Who looks at who first? We see this confusion in the mountain’s self-presentation as a mountain but as necessarily mediated by the interrogator’s gaze. Merleau-Ponty describes the mediation of our flesh in bringing forth this alluring and mysterious visible at the heart of flesh is described as such: “quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because our body welcomes them.”47 The visible is welcomed by, not merely constituted by, our bodies; at the same time, the visible can only be for us insofar as they receive this welcome by our bodies, in which an echo is awakened. Flesh is the condition of possibility for this confusion and all of its attendant effects in our world experience. One main effect is the irreducibility of vision formed in relation to this confusion, a confusion which recalls the earlier description of vision as formed at the heart of flesh’s auto-affection. Thus our embodied consciousness shares a flesh with and confuses itself with the world. In fact, that confusion with the world (which would include all the modalities of the Kleinian carnal metaphor—drives, sensations, acts, and word—by which the analyst and analysand are able to communicate) is the precondition for the various sorts of interpenetrations that we experience daily. Importantly here for us is that interpenetration between the sensation of the autistic patient and the naming of those sensations by the analyst, or whoever else is placed in a position to name with autistic person. The flesh inhabited by the autistic is, if we are to believe that there is this shared flesh into which existence is stitched, in a very important sense our own. Don’t we, in common perception, assume a unity to objects seen, and haven’t we in times of great psychical disturbance felt washed over not only by our own emotions but also by things in the world which seem to have lost their coherence and become unstitched? Ogden’s dynamic model of pole-positions explains how, in psychoanalytic terms, this is possible, since the autistic-contiguous position is always operative within every individual. The experience of the sensory cave’s thing-presentations is something a non-pathological vision may take for granted, but an understanding of how even this basic fixture does not necessarily pre-exist is our inroad into understanding experiences where openness is terrifying. This is not to erase the distinctiveness of autistic experience, but rather

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to suggest that if different registers of our own experience (seen in the diversity of the Kleinian carnal metaphor) can communicate, then assuming again flesh’s auto-affection, autistic experience can communicate with more common human experience and vice versa. Conclusion Merleau-Ponty’s notion of reversibility in flesh contributes to this discussion of autism in that the autistic-contiguous position is constantly being worked through as perception of a sensed wholeness—whether in the work of painting, music, literature, or simply in common perception. Vision never stops interrogating objects. The autistic-contiguous position also tries to negotiate this becoming bounded of one’s body and sensations and a correlate becoming bounded of the sensed other. In Ogden’s discussion of the role of the other, he says that this boundedness can emerge from a spatial or temporal regularity that comes from the outside (much like the painter’s experience of being looked at by a mountain). We might think of the various penetrations by the world as a kind of holding in Winnicott’s sense. There is a boundedness that is other but that comes to organize one’s own, and which one welcomes. And is not the repetitive self-medicating of the pathological autistic-contiguous position a kind of beseeching for this regularity? For Merleau-Ponty as well, the other plays a vital role in a person’s emotional but also intellectual and even perceptual development. In addition to his work on phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty also did immense work on child psychology, lecturing on the subject at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. In the Sorbonne lectures, he notes the finding that “from the end of the second month the nursing infant laughs and smiles, not only to manifest satisfaction but, also to respond to surrounding smiles. This already supposes a relation with the other that precedes the language that will appear in such a context.”48 Currently, the receptivity of the child to the outside world is thought to begin at an even earlier stage. In the lecture segment “The Child’s Relations with Others,” Merleau-Ponty describes how the child’s interpersonal relations (“with his parents, his brothers and sisters, other children, and . . . with his school environment, his social class, and, in general, his relation to culture, to the civilization to which he belongs”49) affects his linguistic and perceptual development, though I will focus on the latter here. Referring to then-contemporary studies,

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Merleau-Ponty says that, “even external perception of sense qualities and space—at first glance the most disinterested, least affective of all the functions—is profoundly modified by the personality and by the interpersonal relationships in which the child lives.”50 For the section on perception, he refers mainly to a study done by Else Frenkel-Brunswick on the correlation between the personality trait psychological rigidity and perception in children, and we will recount the broad conclusions of that study here. Psychological rigidity refers to “the attitude of the subject who replies to any question with black-and-white answers,”51 leaving no room for ambiguity and having difficulty recognizing clashing traits in people and objects. Psychologically rigid children tend in their responses to a “simple, categorical, and summary view.”52 Psychological rigidity is however usually a mask for a much more conflicted personality, which the subject does not want to spill over to the outside; it also presents itself as a constant conduct in a more authoritarian household. From this environment, the child develops a binary but unreconciled image of a parent, “a good mother” and “a bad mother” for Klein, which the child does not reconcile or notice belong to the same person. One parent has this split image, or if there are two parents, one takes on the good and the other the evil role. Frenkel-Brunswick found in this study conducted on 1,500 school children at the University of California that there was a high correlation between psychological and perceptual rigidity. For example, in the most psychologically rigid children, there was resistance to recognizing in a succession of images in which a dog changed gradually to a cat that the final image was indeed of a cat; these children “saw no appreciable change.”53 Thus, a rigidity in personality also presented with a rigidity in perception, an intolerance to change and ambiguity. From this study, Merleau-Ponty says that he does not mean to suggest that external factors (e.g. parents, society) entirely determine the personality of the child and thus the way he perceives—that the “social” determines the “natural.” The rejection of this direction of causality furthermore is not an acceptance of the anti-thesis that the natural determines the social. There is, rather, a constitutive indetermination between these two causes because they are in a person’s life never in isolation from one another. Thus Merleau-Ponty says that “in reality the two orders are not distinct; they are part and parcel of a single global phenomenon.”54 This indetermination also recalls the earlier ambiguity of vision, whether it begins with the subject or the object, self or world. Autistic persons, in all the various ways

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that they try to close the terrifying openness of the world into autistic objects and shapes, and thus to bind their own bodies, take a position in the face of external conditions, as Merleau-Ponty says about the child in general. Yet the world does not stabilize itself into objects that would present themselves in their object-hood. Instead of an ongoing interrogation into why the object presents itself as object, the autistic person only grasps at object-hood; there is an experience of terrifying sameness, instead of difference in one flesh. Because this precondition of enclosed embodiment is lacking, Sauvagnat suggests that there is a failure of the Lacanian mirror stage. Thus, as problematic as the objectivization of the subject is (the consequences of which are explored in Hook’s paper), the lack of bodily integrity in autistic experience, correlated with a foreclosed signifier, is just as troubling; language, and most importantly the signifier, is thus crucial even for a subject constituted by lack, lest there be a calcification in either extreme. This would all seem like a rather hopeless situation if it were not for the fact that the successes in the clinic appear to verify the other part of the global phenomenon. Indeed, clinicians have been able to reach into the autistic’s inexpressible sensible cave with a communication of wholeness, object-hood, boundedness, from the outside, allowing for their patients to come out of their shell; perhaps this happens in a moment or gradually, as the autistic person begins to recognize the analyst as someone who looks, designates, names, and binds. What I take from Merleau-Ponty is a kind of phenomenological hope to guide the psychoanalytic work with which our discussion began that real communication with the autistic person is not impossible, and that this is not only because we are always already working through the autistic-contiguous position but also because we share a multifaceted flesh, even if not a body, with the autistic person in which this working out takes place. Notes   1 “Facts about ASD,” last modified February 24, 2015, retrieved from www. cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/facts.html.   2 Bernard Rimland, Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1964).   3 François Sauvagnat, “Body Structure in Psychotic and Autistic Children.” In Body Image and Body Schema: Interdisciplinary perspectives on the body, edited by Helena De Preester and Veroniek Knockaert (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005), 155.  4 Ibid., 156.

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  5 Judith Mitrani, “Minding the Gap between Neuroscientific and Psychoanalytic Understanding of Autism,” Journal of Child Psychotherapy 36, 3 (2010), 244.   6 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977), 221.   7 Mitrani, “Minding the Gap,” 249.   8 Ibid., 250.   9 Adriano Giannotti and Giuliana De Astis, “Early Infantile Autism: Considerations Regarding its Psychopathology and the Psychotherapeutic Process,” paper presented at the 8th National Congress of the Italian Society of Infantile Neuropsychiatry in Florence (1978); Adriano Giannotti and Giuliana De Astis, Il Diseguale (Rome: Borla, 1989). 10 Autism occurs in families, between identical twins more than fraternal twins. 11 Frances Tustin, Autistic States in Children (New York: Routledge, 1992), 2. 12 Ibid., 5. 13 Frances Tustin, The Protective Shell in Children and Adults (London: Karnac, 1990), 78. 14 Frances Tustin, Autistic Barriers in Neurotic Patients (London: Karnac, 1986), 198. 15 Mitrani, “Minding the Gap,” 242. 16 Ibid. 17 Sauvagnat, “Body Structure,” 161. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 160. 20 Ibid., 161. 21 Ibid., 157. 22 Ibid. 23 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 62–63. 24 Ibid., 13. 25 Ibid., 86. 26 Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 89. 27 Ibid., 88. 28 Lacan, Seminar III, 14. 29 For example, echolalia, mutterings, the inability to relate to others qua other, confusion between oneself and the other, the experience of the body as a black hole, etc. 30 Thomas H. Ogden, “On the Concept of an Autistic-Contiguous Position,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 70 (1989), 127. 31 Ibid., 137. 32 Ibid., 128. 33 Ibid., 137. 34 Ibid., 128. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 129. 37 Ogden gives accounts of patients who are linguists, teachers, philosophy graduate students.

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38 Julia Kristeva, The Portable Kristeva, edited by Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 122–123. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 13. 43 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 130. 44 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” trans. C. Dallery, The Primacy of Perception, edited by J. E. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 166. 45 Ibid., 164. 46 Cited in ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lecture 1949–1952, trans. Talia Welsh (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 10. 49 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” trans. W. Cobb, in Primacy of Perception, 97. 50 Ibid., 100. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 105. 54 Ibid., 108.

Bibliography Center for Disease Control. “Facts about ASD.” Last modified February 24, 2015. Retrieved from www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/facts.html. Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Giannotti, Adriano and Giuliana De Astis. “Early Infantile Autism: Considerations Regarding its Psychopathology and the Psychotherapeutic Process.” Paper presented at the 8th National Congress of the Italian Society of Infantile Neuropsychiatry in Florence, 1978. Giannotti, Adriano and Giuliana De Astis. Il Diseguale. Rome: Borla, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. Melanie Klein. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Kristeva, Julia. The Portable Kristeva. Edited by Kelly Oliver. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955– 1956. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lecture 1949–1952.Translated by Talia Welsh. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Primacy of Perception. Edited by James M. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Mitrani, Judith. “Minding the Gap between Neuroscientific and Psychoanalytic Understanding of Autism.” Journal of Child Psychotherapy 36, 3 (2010), 240–258. Ogden, Thomas H. “On the Concept of an Autistic-Contiguous Position.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 70 (1989), 127–140. Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. and Lindsay Oberman. “Broken Mirrors: A Theory of Autism.” Scientific American (November 2006), 63–69. Rimland, Bernard. Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1964. Rosenzweig, Mark, et al. “Effects of Environmental Complexity and Training on Brain Chemistry and Anatomy: A Replication and Extension.” Journal of Comparative Physiological Psychology 55 (1962), 429–437. Sauvagnat, François. “Body Structure in Psychotic and Autistic Children.” In Body Image and Body Schema: Interdisciplinary perspectives on the body. Edited by Helena De Preester and Veroniek Knockaert, 153–171. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005. Tustin, Frances. Autistic Barriers in Neurotic Patients. London: Karnac, 1986. Tustin, Frances. Autistic States in Children. New York: Routledge, 1992. Tustin, Frances. The Protective Shell in Children and Adults. London: Karnac, 1990.

Index

A Flor de Piel 2–4 absence/loss 3, 6–7, 98, 124–5 see also desire abstraction 8 see also objectification adaptation 132–3 alterity 52 Antigone 85–8, 95–6, 98–9, 109 antinormativity 98–9 Aristotle 23–4 Asclepian practice 25–8 Augustine 52 autism 141–4, 156–7; autistic objects 145–6, 150; autistic-contiguous position 149–51, 155; body boundary problems 144–6, 150–1, 157; flesh 154–5; language problems 145; mirror stage 148; self-testimonies 144–6; sensory cave 151–2 Babich, B. 10 Badiou, A. 130 Bamber, H. 33–5 Bataille, G. 69 Becker, B. W. 1–14, 50–1, 58–60, 66–73 Becker, G. 71 biological fallacy 131–2 body boundedness 144–6, 150–1, 157 Boothby, R. 7 Bowie, M. 113 Butler, J. 3 capitalist logic see economic logic catharsis 22–4, 26, 33–6, 46 Cézanne 104 Chiesa, L. 134 child diagnosis 142–3 child psychology 155–6

Chiron 25–9 Christ 28–9, 61–2 Christianity 28–9 commodification see economic logic Copjec, J. 106–7 corporeal existence see flesh Corpt, E. A. 43–8 cost see economic logic criminology 115 das Ding see Thing, the Davoine, F. 28 De Astis, G. 143 De Kesel, M. 76–90, 94–101, 103, 106–10 death 3, 87 defecation see excremental remainder Derrida, J. 67 desire 81–4, 97, 123–5; ethics of the real 84–90 see also absence/loss; sublimation developmental psychology 128–9 dialectic see inter-subjectivity Dora, case of 44 economic logic 66, 71–2, 108–9; the gift 66–71; therapists 72–3 ego 125–7, 132–3 see also mirror stage embodiment theory see flesh enjoyment 84, 105–7 epistemology 122 ethics: of the real 84–90, 96–9; of the Thing 107–10 eucharistic chalice 61–2 Evans, D. 134 excess 83 excremental remainder 69–73

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fairy tales/folklore 29 Falque, E. 10–11 Fink, B. 122–4 flesh 7–11, 59, 152–5 folklore see fairy tales/folklore fort/da scenario 29–30 fourth dimension 51–6, 58 Frances, T. 144 Frenkel-Brunswick, E. 156 Freud, S. 29–31, 44, 50, 56, 58–9, 69, 124, 132 Friedlander, S. R. 116 Giannotti, A. 143 gift, the 66–71 Giorgi, A. 117–18 Goux, J.-J. 54–5 Greek myths: Chiron 25–9; Odysseus 21–3; Oedipus 23–5 Harari, R. 101 Hegel, G. W. F. 55 Heidegger, M. 51, 57–8, 66–9 Henry, M. 8, 10 Hippocratic method 25–6 Holocaust stories 33–5 Hook, D. 113–34 Husserl, E. 7 image 127 imaginary 5–6, 8–10, 81, 127–8 incarnation 1–2 inter-subjectivity 120–3, 155–6 interpenetration see flesh Johnston, A. 5, 7, 9 jouissance see enjoyment Joyce, J. 31–3, 101–3

objectivation 114–19, 121–2; objet a 6–7, 69, 123–5; psychosis 146–8; signifier 78–81, 119–20; structuralism 128–31, 149; subject 113–14, 131–4; symbolic order 6, 83, 131–2, 147 see also real, the; Thing, the lack see absence/loss language 5, 78–81, 120–1, 128–32, 145, 147 see also signifier Lévi-Strauss, C. 23–4 Levinas, E. 30–1 libidinal logic 79–80 loss see absence/loss Malone, K. R. 116 Manoussakis, J. P. 1–14, 49–62, 66–7 Marion, J.-L. 9–10, 56–8, 67–8, 71–2 market logic see economic logic Merleau-Ponty, M. 5, 8–9, 152–7 Miller, J.-A. 119, 121 mirror stage 5–6, 127, 146–8 Mitrani, J. 143–4 Moore, G. 69 morality see ethics myths see Greek myths Nancy, J.-L. 13 narrative 45, 47; Holocaust stories 33–5; Joyce, J. 31–3, 101–3; working through 22–3, 30, 32, 35 see also Greek myths nature 131–2 neuroscience 143 Newton, I. 78–9 Nietzsche, F. 10

Kant, I. 56–7, 84–5 Kearney, M. 26–7 Kearney, R. 21–36, 43–8 Klee, P. 153 Körper 7–8, 59 Kristeva, J. 101, 151–2

Oberman, L. 143 objectification 114–16, 133–4; critique of 116–19, 121–2; ego 125–7 objects see Thing, the objet a 6–7, 69, 123–5 Odysseus 21–3 Oedipus 23–5, 54–5 Ogden, T. 149–51

Lacan, J. 5–7, 9–11, 56–7, 61, 66–9, 76–7; adaptation 132–3; on American psychology 119; autism 143; desire’s object as real 81–4; ego 125–7; ethics of the real 84–90; imaginary 5–6, 8–10, 81, 127–8; inter-subjectivity 120–3;

paternal function 147–8 perception 155–6 perversion 86 phenomenology 7–10, 50–1, 119–20, 148–9 Pirandello, L. 59–61, 71–2 Plato 52–6, 122

Index  163

play 29–30 pleasure principle 79–80, 99–100 Proust, M. 3–4 psychoanalysis see Freud, S.; Lacan, J. psychoanalytic therapist 43–4, 72–3; autism 157; ethics 88–90; suffering 44–6; touching wounds of 46–8 psychological rigidity 156 psychological subject see objectification; subject psychosis 142–3, 146–8 Ramachandran, V. S. 143 re-membering 3 real, the 6–7, 9–11, 76–7; as desire’s object 81–4; ethics of 84–90, 96–9; and the gift 68–9; signifier 99–103 see also Thing, the recognition 22, 71 reification see objectification representation 2–3, 106–7 Republic 53–6 reversibility 8, 152–5 Ricoeur, P. 36 rigidity 156 Rimland, B. 142 Rodriguez, L. 113, 128 Ruti, M. 93–110 Sade, M. de 84–6 Salcedo, D. 2–4, 14 Sandal, M. 71 Sauvagnat, F. 142–3, 146, 148, 157 scar 22–3 Schreber, D. P. 147 science 78–9, 90 self 76, 80–1 see also subject senses 13–14 sensory cave 151–2 signifier 78–81, 83–7, 89, 99–103 see also language striking at oneself 102–3

structure 68, 128–31, 149 subject 113–14, 118–19, 133–4; adaptation 132–3; conflation with ego 125–7; de-natured 131–2; inter-subjectivity 120–3; structure 128–31 see also objectification sublimation 85–6, 96, 99–101, 103, 106–7, 109–10 suffering 44–6 symbolic order 6, 83, 131–2, 147 taboo 13–14 therapist see psychoanalytic therapist Thing, the 56–9, 83, 85–7, 94–5, 98–100, 103–10; body as 59–62; cost of 71–2; and the gift 68–71 Timaeus 52–3 time 52 touch 13–14 transitional object 145–6 trauma 29–31 see also wounded healers tripartite structure 54–5 Ulysses see Odysseus understanding 3–4, 122–3 value 71–2 Verhaege, P. 119 Wang, Y. J. 141–57 Weil, S. 82 Winnicott, D. 45 working through 22–3, 30, 32, 35 wounded healers 30–1; Bamber 33–5; Chiron 25–9; Freud 29–30; Joyce 31–3; Odysseus 21–3; Oedipus 23–5; psychoanalytic therapist 43–8 Žižek, S. 7, 11, 72–3, 95–6, 98–9, 102–3 Zupančič, A. 103, 106–7