Mladen Dolar on Psychoanalysis and Politics

In a recent lecture, Mladen Dolar offers an instructive meditation on the (non-)relation of psychoanalysis and politics. He claims that psychoanalysis institutes a social bond on the basis of the death drive, as that negativity inscribed in every positive social relation, ultimately the potential unbinding or untying of these relations, their precariousness. In this way, psychoanalysis prepares the site of politics, which amounts to the rejection or suspension of substantial, conventional sociality, the interruption of the positive order. Yet in doing so, psychoanalysis cannot go any further than a 'preparation' - it cannot engage in a political struggle, cannot prescribe political commitments, or in other words, it can promote the interruption of these bonds, but cannot offer anything positive to replace them.

By way of contrast, if psychoanalysis falls short of political intervention, by preparing the political site, only to leave the intervention up to an extra-psychoanalytic moment of decision, then politics (in the Badiouian sense) goes too far, covering over or erasing the moment of negativity of the political site through the institution of a new positive social order, qua evental fidelity. Dolar seems to offer a kind of solution to that great problematic core of Badiou's doctrine of the Event, as noted by, among others, Adrian Johnston (PDF) and Levi Bryant (PDF) - the question of a pre-evental preparation, or of the intra-situational conditions of an Event. Badiou seems stuck in fundamental ambiguity between the claim that Events are entirely incalculable and unaccountable in terms of the situation in which they arise, and the claim that Events don't 'come from nowhere', that they are grounded in and conditioned by the spectral traces of effaced events, inertly circulating within existing situations (what he calls 'evental recurrence').

Dolar seems to offer up psychoanalysis as precisely a praxis of preparation, of bringing about the Evental site qua condition. In this way, we can easily understand psychoanalytic symptoms as symptoms of failed, effaced, or missed Events (this is how, for example, Eric Santner understands symptoms); and the Lacanian subject positions can be read as 'compromise formations' resulting from the failure of Evental fidelity, the products of failed subjectivation. The twist here is that, for psychoanalysis, there can only be 'failed subjectivations', the subject as such is a failure of the symbolic mandate, it is a way of coping with the imposibility of fully 'becoming what one is'. So while Dolar seems to propose, albeit problematically, that psychoanalysis can fill the missing role in Badiou's theory of a 'pre-evental discipline of time', as Johnston puts it, there is nonetheless a fundamental incongruity. If psychoanalysis 'merely' prepared the site for a proper Evental/political subjectivation, then it would seemingly be complicit in betraying its own definitive insight - that subjectivation is inherently 'improper', and that the subject is ultimately the result of a failure; the subject is intrinsically symptomatic, and so the failure cannot be 'undone' without the subject also coming undone.

Dolar already offers the key to this deadlock, when he describes both psychoanalysis and Badiouian politics as circling around the political site of pure unbinding, the former falling short of it, the latter going too far beyond it. Can we envision a political praxis that seeks, like psychoanalysis, to open up this site, but rather than instrumentalizing this site as the means to some specific political end, makes the opening and holding-open of this site its explicit goal? This is something Zizek has been hinting at for quite some time, and the he, in his lecture following Dolar's, continues to foreshadow.

For anyone familiar with this blog, my answer should come as no surprise: the name of such a praxis is schizoanalysis. Dolar, in his lecture, does briefly touch upon Deleuze and Guattari, if only to implicitly suggest that Guattari's politicization of analytic practice, in subordinating the political site of 'unbinding' to explicit political goals, thereby misses the crucial dimension of analysis in the same way as Badiou. To put it in schizoanalytic terms, Dolar criticizes schizoanalysis as subordinating analytic deterritorialization to a corresponding political reterritorialization. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, by remaining an eternal 'prelude' to politics, seeks to attain 'absolute detteritorialization', in a desire for 'pure difference'.

Yet such a criticism misses the point. Wherein lies the 'political' dimension of schizoanalysis, the sense in which it 'politicizes' Lacan? Schizoanalysis does not make analysis a means of promoting this or that political agenda, but rather makes the multiplication, promulgation, and perpetuation of analytic instances itself the political agenda. Rather than making politics a secondary moment, derived from the opening of the political site, schizoanalysis makes the opening/unbinding analytic operation as the political instance par excellence. If schizoanalysis is militant, it is in the spreading of analytic practice, installing analytic units wherever possible, opening political sites in every amenable situation. Schizoanalytic practice, then, involves a missionary ethics of promulgation, of 'spreading the good news', in the tradition of St. Paul. Paradoxically, schizoanalysis reproaches Lacanian psychoanalysis, not because it is too 'church-like', but because it isn't church-like enough, it is content to practice analysis where it is already comfortably accepted, rather than attempting to spread its word everywhere.

Where Dolar does explicitly criticize Deleuze and Guattari, he claims that their denunciation of Oedipus in the name of an unconscious that is already social misses the point. Oedipus names the fact that the formation of the ego already depends on social relations (those of the family, et cetera). But moreover, Oedipus is not the name of a conservative familialism - the Oedipus complex is that which ceaselessly undermines traditional paternal authority, disturbing the consistency of the familial triangle from within. This internal moment of negativity or inconsistency, moreover, attests to the social - or rather, political - nature of the unconscious, which already undermines familial and all other form of authority, rather than assuming or reinforcing them.

Dolar's criticism, however, itself seems to miss the point. Deleuze and Guattari clearly accept that castration and Oedipus are given facts of our current predicament. Their reproach is not that psychoanalysis accepts these coordinates, but rather, that it limits analytic practice to these coordinates, rather than generalizing itself. What does this mean? Oedipus and familialism, for Deleuze and Guattari, amount in the last instance to figures of the linguistic structure of the signifier. Their criticism is that psychoanalysis restricts its structuralism to that of the signifier, rather than generalizing itself to differential structures of different orders. Practically speaking, psychoanalysis takes the subject (of the signifier) for granted, as given in the analysand, whereas schizoanalysis seeks to analyze, within collective social arrangements, the emergence of instances of subjectivation at the intersection of several structural orders - physical-mechanical, biological-genetic, cognitive, linguistic, politico-economic, artistic, digital-technological, et cetera. On the specificities of this praxis, I can for now only hint.

If schizoanalysis is a political radicalization of psychoanalysis, this is not because it seeks to enlist analysis in the service of some overt political end, but rather, because it makes analysis itself - its promulgation and promotion - the only political end, with all other political projects and goals as themselves experimental figures within a greater analytic movement.

Paper Abstract - Strange Times: Aliens, Ghosts, and the Non-Event

This is my paper proposal for the CFP here, for the conference Affirmation, Negation, and the Politics of Late-Capitalism. Any questions or comments on the project are welcome.

"Strange Times: Aliens, Ghosts, and the Non-Event".

This paper will develop the concept xenoeconomics by way of a theory of temporality. This will proceed in three parts.

First, I will analyze Jacques Derrida's discussion of spectrality in Specters of Marx as a way of conceiving the time of speculative finance capital, which determines value as an infinitely postponed realization or redemption of debt. I will demonstrate the inadequacy of his formulation of the spectral dimension, and the necessity of supplementing it with another mode of spectrality. I will conjure this 'other specter' by way of challenging Derrida's readings of both Marx and Benjamin, and by drawing from their work, as well as that of Quentin Meillassoux.

Second, I will turn a closer eye on Meillassoux, and distinguish this other mode of spectrality, which I will also call ancestrality, from his version of the latter. I will bring up several points in After Finitude, concerning the temporal modality of the ancestral, that will lead me to complicate, if not disagree with, his arguments. I will then attempt to resolve this complication by reference to Giorgio Agamben's concept of operational time in The Time That Remains. This will allow me to present a consistent formulation of ancestral time, as distinct from correlational time, and the political consequences of this distinction.

Finally, I will bring the preceding analyses to bear on certain questions Adrian Johnston has raised concerning Alain Badiou's political ontology, and what he calls a ‘pre-evental discipline of time’. Xenoeconomic temporality, as I formulate it, can help us treat this problem, and the concrete issues of political praxis it entails. I will conclude by proposing a concept of the operational time of intervention, which will form the groundwork for a future critical engagement with Badiou, and for a political praxis indebted to his theory of the event, as well as to speculative realist philosophy.

Nothing Doing

In my previous post, "If All Else Fails", I gave a brief overview of the typology of violence that Slavoj Zizek develops in his new book, Violence. I did so to indicate a form of violence I believe Zizek to have omitted, or rather, to explicate the relation between revolutionary violence and the other types, a relation Zizek leaves unclear. However, I should clarify my account of his typology, which was perhaps too brief. Zizek does not simply enumerate three distinct forms of violence - subjective, systemic, and symbolic - but aims to show how violence is always caught in the knot of these three modes, which parallel the Lacanian triad of Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real.

Subjective violence is simply what we would ordinarily recognize as such: abusive, injurious actions that occur between people, inflicted by one person or group of people on another. This has the simple form of an Imaginary relation, in which the relation of ego to others and the predominance of Eros are the frame.

Such subjective violence is only visible against the background or context of normal, nonviolent relations, and is hence a disturbance of this equilibrium. Systemic violence is precisely an anonymous and impersonal collateral effect of sustaining the nonviolent background of Imaginary relations, it is that which cannot enter the contextual frame of subjective experience, but sustains this frame. If such violence does enter into the frame of our experience, we cannot help but to contextualize it, to ascribe it to a particular offender violating the normal run of things; we cannot accept that our comfortable life-world is sustained by an immense suffering. In this sense, systemic violence is the Real, that which cannot be integrated into Imaginary/Symbolic legibility, but is only a blotch or distortion, or better, the horrible thing behind the veil of non-violent normalcy.

Symbolic violence is visible as the relation between the subjective violence and its context, in the sense that the very standards by which we can recognize something as violent, and hence stand apart from it in a non-violent reflection, already is a form of violence itself. It is not simply that normalcy is sustained by a violence hidden behind its veil - the very act of veiling, of covering-up, is the very source of what it must hide, or better, what it hides is the fact that nothing is hidden. There is no reason for the massive excesses of systemic violence to not be recognized as such, they are not covered up or denied, but ignored, disavowed. "I know very well there is a genocide occuring somewhere in Africa, that hundreds of millions live in the worst poverty in urban slums, that children are starving all over the world, but nevertheless...what does that have to do with me, my non-violent lifestyle, in my innocent little town?" It is the very symbolic medium that, in enabling us to not subjectively register some things as violent, or better, to not subjectively account for the systemic violence that sustains our contextual life-world, is the most pressing form of violence.

In the aforementioned post, I elaborated the link between Symbolic violence and mythic violence, or law-founding violence, as Benjamin conceives it. Zizek also draws this link, and from there elaborates his notion of revolutionary or emancipatory violence, which he links to Benjamin's divine violence. Yet here we find a difficulty. Zizek associates this divine violence with what he calls "Bartleby politics", or passive aggression. The point here is that any intervention we make to correct the violent excesses of capitalism is inevitably incorporated into the system, making it run more smoothly. Every form of resistance is assimilated, and so all we can do is 'nothing'; that is, everything we try to do to change things ends up reinforcing the way they are, but if we do nothing, if we refuse to intervene, it would be unbearable for the system, it would not know how to react. This kind of passive aggression is the answer he offers to his own question from the final chapter of his book on Deleuze: how is revolution possible against an order that constantly revolutionizes itself?

The difficulty with this position has been registered in the philo-blogosphere, with complaints and criticism being the standard reaction. Moreover, this position seems quite inconsistent, both with the ethic of discipline and self-sacrafice (Those who have nothing have only their discipline, to paraphrase Badiou) that he elaborates in Lost Causes, and with his claim that we find examples of divine violence in the revolutionary terror of the French Revolution, the October Revolution, and so on. Can these apparent inconsistencies be reconciled?

I propose that Bartleby politics is far from simply doing nothing, from refusing to engage with struggles and socio-political problems of any kind, despite Zizek's apparent claims to the contrary. Rather, it rests with the distinction between not doing anything, simply not acting, and doing nothing in the sense of enacting a negativity or void, an act which renders visible the nothingness at the heart of the constituted order. Zizek himself gives us evidence in this direction in his exegesis of Saramago's story Seeing, in which the government of an unnamed democratic city is deeply disturbed when an overwhelming majority of their citizens, during an election, submit blank ballots. For Zizek, this mass refusal is a true Act, in the Lacanian sense. But is this a case of not doing anything, of passively sitting back and refusing to engage, or is it rather an act of making nothing happen, of foregrounding the void upon which this world stands, like the coyote hovering over the precipice, before looking down?

Bartleby himself is characterized not by simply not acting, by doing nothing at all. No, Bartleby acts, but in the paradoxical manner of enacting a refusal to act, of acting out nothing, through his familiar refrain: "I'd prefer not to". He does not say no, nor does he simply do nothing in response. He does something, he registers the void of his motivation. This is thus quite similar to other political themes Zizek has mobilized in the past: Badiou's Event as registering the void of the empty set, Ranciere's democracy as the demand of the part-of-no-part, and even Marx's proletariat as articulating their lack of place within the capitalist order. It would be fruitful to explicate the differences between Zizek's turn to Bartleby and these earlier references, but I cannot do so now. I would like to emphasize, however, that there is an undeniable political force - violence, we might say - at work in the tearing asunder of the existing order, the introduction of a void into the space of politics. The practical question is hence, what does it mean to actively do nothing, to will nothingness into existence? And where do we go from there? How do we live together, how do we found a society or reorient this society, on the basis of nothingness?

"God is dead"

I haven't posted in a few months, primarily because my computer died at the beginning of summer, leaving me with only unreliable internet access. When I did have the opportunity to post, I froze. I did write a lot in notebooks, in preparation for my Division III thesis, but it was for the most part nothing I was ready to share. My computer is back, and I'm back at school. After those months of privacy, I think I'm ready to write publicly again. I'm going to be posting regularly with thoughts for my thesis and other projects, hopefully returning to those summer writings with more rigor and clarity.

For now, I'll begin with something very embryonic and probably obscure, sparked by the introduction to Badiou's Briefings on Existence, and fueled by a summer of reading several books by Žižek.

It may well be that God has been agonizing for a very long time. What is surely less doubtful is how, for centuries, we have been busy with successive ways of embalming Him...
I take the formula "God is dead" literally. It has happened. Or, as Rimbaud said, it has passed. God is finished. [Badiou, Briefings p24-5]

Taking seriously the death of God does not result in the vulgar atheism committed to the claim that God "does not exist", that it is a fiction, a social construction or symbolic function. Nor do we fall into agnostic limbo, unable to decide. God is not explained away as an abstract concept with no real and/or confirmable existence. As Badiou says,

If "God is dead" is asserted, it is because the God spoken of was alive and belonged to the dimension of life. When you consider a concept, a symbol, a signifying function, you can say that they have become obsolete, contradicted, and inefficient. They cannot be said to have died. [ibid p24]

When we say "God is dead", we unrepentantly affirm that God was, God existed, lived, and has now passed. God is a reality, a real existence or mode of existence, that has decomposed. What was this mode, this real thing that God had been?

Here we can take some direction from Deleuze's remarkable book on Foucault [sidenote: a book which, for me, is of the utmost importance in reading Deleuze's works as a whole, from D&R and LoS to the latter writings with Guattari; more on that later]. Deleuze there describes this existence as that of a certain formalized combination of forces; specifically, of those forces of which human beings are capable. God, or the "God-form", is a real thing, just as much as you or I: for Deleuze, everything, every mode of existence, is an arrangement of intensive forces whose consistency ('thing-ness', to be crude) is maintained insofar as these forces do not surpass certain limits, remaining within "non-decomposable variable distances" in relation to each other. Every combination or arrangement (agencement, assemblage) of forces is metastable within its limits. Yet if these distances do decompose, if the relations between forces reach the critical point at which a limit loses efficacy and a threshold is crossed, we then pass into a new arrangement, a new distribution and metastability with new limits.

Any arrangement or mode can thereby be understood by its immanent limits and the tendency of its constituent forces to respect these limits. If we accept that every individual mode is unique, different from every other, singular (and the reasons for doing so are by no means self-evident), then the mode itself is defined as a singularity. A singularity is not merely a unique thing; it is precisely that which is expressed in the tendency of forces to 'posit' and respect limits immanent to their given unique arrangement. Singularity is not simply the uniqueness of terms within a diversity, but the tendency by which "the given is given as diverse" to paraphrase D&R.

The singularity of a mode is thus the unique configuration of forces and their limitations that compose a thing as consistent and metastable, but moreover it is the tendency immanent in the forces so combined toward that metastability. The mode qua arrangement is a multiplicity of singular points toward which the forces arranged tend; as DeLanda describes it in his Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, it is a topological diagram or vector field within which are inscribed various attractors defining the long-term tendencies of the individuated trajectories/forces. When a force exceeds the 'basin of attraction', the diagram bifurcates, and a new distribution of singular points results, along with a new set of limits and tendencies immanent to the resulting re-arrangement.

The God-form is, on the one hand, such a mode, defined by an immanent diagram of potential permutations of constituent forces. The forces involved are all the individual and collective forces of human beings. Yet what makes the God-form distinct from other possible arrangements of these forces, other possible ways we might exist? The God-form names precisely the formalization of a particular mode such that there is a strict division between two generic forces: the general forces of the human life-world, and the divine forces of 'raising to the infinite' or of realizing perfection. In this way, the former forces become the brute matter whose formation corresponds to the latter, which becomes a formalized function expressed by this formation. Man is born as the Content, submitted to a finite form, only functioning through the Expression of God as the infinity of formalization.

To bring things down to earth: God exists when the immanent limits of human beings become autonomous, external, as a formalized system to which they are submitted, a transcendent imposition of function. It is not simply that people 'reify' their social relations onto some imaginary being; as with Marx's notion of the commodity form, God is an 'objectively necessary appearance' - we may be the 'real' causes of our various functions, but God is a quasi-cause that appropriates all of these functions, formalizing them and reducing our 'non-reified' causality to a subjective illusion. With formations like the God-form, the Man-form, the State-form, the Organism, etc, the organization of forces is no longer immanent to the arranged forces, but becomes autonomous of and reacts back on what it organizes. (Strangely enough, this definition corresponds to that of 'institutions'; this problem is very important for my Div III research, and I'm not really prepared to address it appropriately, but I will say I believe the crucial thing about focusing on institutions in economics is to rediscover in them the forces they formalize, to reintroduce strategy at the heart of stratification.)

As Deleuze never fails to remind us, we should not be too quick to rejoice in affirming the death of God, as a new formalization was already waiting to replace him: the Man-form (for more on this, see the appendix to Deleuze's Foucault). Yet, following Foucault, we should realize the futility of now plotting the assassination of Man, as if our Fall from Grace requires a redemptive sacrifice. In a Hegelian way, Foucault understood that the death of God, far from signaling the new reign of Man, was already the death of Man from the very beginning. As soon as Man seized the empty throne of divinity, his fate was sealed. Fidelity to Man does not do justice to God's death, to what God died for: if God has died, it was not to clear the way for Man's reign, but to warn us that this place that Man will fill is a place of death, that Man, too, will die, and that we must already see in Man that which will overcome him, destroying not only God and Man, but the very place they both occupied (the surface qua plan of organization or plane of transcendence).

When Christ dies on the cross, it is at once the death of God and of the Man who takes his place. This is perhaps what is crucially missing in Paul. If we affirm that God is dead, we should do justice to this death; we should be faithful not to the corpse or the ghost, but to the event of death itself. God died not to set Man free, but to free that which was lost to them both, that which may overcome them: the unlimited (af)finity of the singular in its becoming.