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.

Notes for the Debate: Alien vs. Specter

I want to briefly sketch out how hauntology, or the particular revision of it I have been working on, not only relates to but is ultimately indispensable for a xenoeconomic approach to capitalism. I am still finishing a more detailed post working this question out in relation to finance capital and speculation, but I feel the need to provide an abstract of my position, so as to build upon the debate that naughtthought has so pertinently outlined.

My point of departure was Rough Theory's critique of Derrida's Specters of Marx, the text in which hauntology was first developed. Derrida's approach here in large part continues his formalization of Benjamin's Marxism, resulting in a 'Messianic without messianism', a messianic promise emptied of every content, every substantial identification of the messiah or messianic time. Yet, following Agamben, I found this hollowed out version of Benjamin thoroughly unsatisfying, and this was only emphasized when Derrida applies the same operation to Marx, claiming that any substantial ontologization of the spectral - be it the proletariat, communism, the commodity-form, et cetera - is self-defeating, leading us to lose the truly subversive core of Marxism, which is the revelation of the spectral inherence/inheritance in and of existence. Derrida claims that any such ontologization is in the service of a conjuration seeking to rid us of the spectral, to lead us back to its real source in material existence.

My claim is that this completely misses the point of both Benjamin and Marx. Whereas Derrida seems completely preoccupied by apparitions, returns, revenants, hauntings, and so on, I claim that what Marx accomplishes with the notion of proletariat is a break with this logic. My thesis develops this in greater detail, but the basic point is that we can find in Marx hints that proletariat names not an existing social group amongst others, but moreover, a spectral inherence in politico-economic reality. The difference between this spectrality and those that Derrida analyzes, however, is that the proletariat is characterized not by incessant apparitions, hauntings, and so on, but rather, by an incessant failure to appear, an inapparation and absence. Unlike other ghosts, the proletariat haunts us by not appearing, not returning, despite our expectations and longing.

It is this spectral absence that is attested to in the whole symptomatology of failed revolutionary attempts and experiments. My point is that the proletariat is the name (or, to borrow a locution from Brassier or Laurelle, the non-conceptual symbol) of that which must remain inexistent, absolutely absented from the capitalist world. Inexistence here does not simply mean not existing as opposed to existing, but rather, something that neither exists nor doesn't exist for capitalism, something that cannot even enter the capitalist frame, something irreparably foreclosed to capital. Because existence or non-existence depends upon determination within a world, and the inexistent can never enter into such a world but is always rejected, left out and dispossessed, inexistence then characterizes something utterly indifferent to existence or non-existence, to any determination of existence.

The proletariat is then a peculiar kind of spectrality, that of the ancestral. (I started using this locution before reading Meillassoux, as a reference to the oppressed class of history in Benjamin's theses. Now that I have read After Finitude, my version of this concept has significantly deepened, and I have been working on a critical assessment of his work on the basis of what I'm doing here. So this is the first intersection between hauntology and specualtive realism.) The ancestral as I define it is that which is absolutely anterior to a world, that which must have been left out of a world so that it could have been, something that absolutely must not be (or moreover, that absolutely must not not-be either). The proletariat, as the revolutionary subject position generated by the very antagonistic structure of capitalism, must have been necessarily left out, a-voided, neutralized from the outset. So the question of contemporary Marxism is not, why did the revolution fail to happen, why did the proletariat act against its class interests?; the starting point must be the assertion that the proletariat does not exist.

In other words, the proletariat as ancestral is that which is necessarily foreclosed to capital; capital and its world only exist insofar as the proletariat is absolutely absented. [Here, the concept of foreclosure points toward another interesting intersection, between Laurelle's non-philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The crucial question is that of Lacan's later usage of this term, as it differs from his early work on psychosis, and primarily of the primordial foreclosure constitutive of the symbolic. As I understand it, if psychosis results when something foreclosed from the symbolic returns in the real, the ancestral involves something foreclosed from the real returning in the symbolic, as a non-conceptual symbol or non-signifier.] This brings up the matter of xenoeconomics: my point is that the non-correlational, non-decisional essence of capital is none other than the proletariat qua foreclosed ancestrality.

Capital only becomes capital, that is, it only admits the power to create value, once labor-power has been completely absented and dispossessed, that is, once it 'never existed in the first place', at least not as the original creative capacity to endow things with value. Labor-power is, for capitalism, only capable of investing objects with value insofar as capital first invests labor with this power, rather than the converse. By identifying the speculative Real of capital with the foreclosed proletariat, we are not secretly re-humanizing capital, because the proletariat is the complete loss of man, as Marx famously says. (This is not coincidently the title of my thesis.)

The political problem that arises from this is not one of reclaiming the power to create value from capital, or of becoming or reanimating or avenging the proletariat. It is a matter of redemption, which involves naming the proletariat as irreparably foreclosed to us. It is a matter of enacting the incompletion of capital by forcing into its texture the non-signifier of its foreclosed Real. Or, to be more concrete, it means organizing and reorganizing on the basis of a new social bond, or a shift within the existing social bond. If the capitalist social bond involves the already-accomplished foreclosure of the proletariat, then the bond I am describing simply means taking responsibility for this foreclosure, naming it rather than allowing it to go unspoken. The consequences, and concrete implementation, of this shift are precisely what I am trying to develop by way of a systematic explication of schizoanalytic practice.

So this is where I stand: xenoeconomics cannot do without a hauntology of the ancestral, a rigorous explication of the foreclosed Real of capital, which is to say, a forcing into existence of the inexistence of the proletariat. Perhaps this can lend a new ring to Marx's great task of the Communist party: to organize the proletariat as a class...To make a class of the non-class, so as to undermine class itself.

Schizoanalysis 1: Infancy, Ancestrality, and the Non-Signifier

A child is born into language, and is from the outset a speech-being, a speaking thing. The child is not without language, and does not have to be led to language, taught to acquire language, nor does it have already the innate capacity for language that has only to be activated. The child is already a speaking thing, not by virtue of speaking or being able to speak, but by already being claimed by language and in language, by belonging in language, having a place there for it. The name, but also the very noun - a child, a life - impregnates language with the child, and language will carry it to term, developing it in all of its unique predicability.

The paradox is that the child already belongs to and in language, it is already spoken of and awaited as the absent partner of a conversation. The child does not acquire language, we do not acquire language: language has already acquired us from birth. The trauma of this claim of language on the child is that there is no opportunity, no possibility of the pure incarnation of biological life, an unqualified, bare life; life is qualified from its outset, and biological life is overdetermined from the instant of conception by symbolic life, as its mere occasional cause and support.

Ancestrality, as the dimension of an existence unqualified by givenness in language, unfettered by the trappings of the symbolic, is nonetheless held hostage by its pre-appropriation in language. Yet we can say that the ancestrality of a life is, if not pre-given and auto-donated, certainly taken, taken over by and taken over to language, it is stolen, mis-taken and held inappropriately. It inheres in language as the inappropriate, the inappropriateness of language. Not the inadequateness of a representation to its object, but the fact that language now possesses the ancestral as its property, and yet it is not properly of language, it is wrongly taken by language or taken to be of language.

As a dimension not attributable to a relation to language, but that dimension existing absolutely independently of such relation, radically indifferent to such a relation, foreclosed to language, radically left out of and even inexistent for language, it would seem contradictory to call it a 'property' of language, even if this is an illegitimate propriety, a theft. Yet this means precisely that the foreclosure of the ancestral necessary for langauge nonetheless inheres negatively in language, as a hole in the very fabric of the symbolic (differential relations between signifiers). The ancestral inheres in language, but this inherence must be enacted through the circulation of some non-signifier, a symbol deprived of any possible signfying relation (direction toward a concept - signified - even if it be indeterminate or displaced), purely embodying the hole in this fabric, not only 'standing in for it' but enacting it. The hole is not something that cannot be signified by any signifier, but rather, a signifier that cannot signify anything, nor even appear to signify anything. The non-signifier simply explicates this hole of the foreclosure that is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition of the symbolic, radically psychoticizing the symbolic itself. It is the signifier of the fact that it is not a signifier, a kind of symbolic ouroboros.

The ancestral dimension of life, when seized upon by the symbolic, interpellated by it, decided upon by it, devolves into creaturely life (Santner), that life held in exception in law, subject to the force-of-law but unqualified by law. This is, we might say, the ancestral as such, distinct from the ancestral itself (Brassier, Laurelle). What law/language cannot speak to is the indistinction itself, it cannot think the creature/ancestor without its distinction and separation from the legible/legitimate. In other words, the ancestral itself is posited as unthinkable, only thinkable as such, that is, as distinct from the symbolic. It cannot think the radical expropiation undergone here: the ancestral no longer has a proper owner, being stolen and now owned inappropriately by language. We directly posit this necessary expropriation, this foreclosure of propriety to language. This is not to say that there is a proper being of the ancestral apart from language - this is the very decisional operation of language. Rather, what we are saying is that propriety itself is dependent upon determination by langauge, and at the same time the ancestral is necessarily determined in langauage by expropriation, determined as inappropriate.

This expropriation or foreclosure to language of the ancestral is enacted in language through the circulation of non-signifiers, or a-signifying signs that are not signifiers of a loss, even of something that exists qua signified/signifiable only as lost (the signified lost-object is the ancestral itself, the signifier of loss the ancestral as such); rather, the (non)-signifier is directly the loss itself, it embodies the foreclosure of the ancestral, and the hole this leaves in the symbolic, or rather, it enacts them, it brings them into (linguistic) being. This enacting of foreclosure, refusing to forget/overlook it and retaining it as unforgotten, repeating the founding decision of a linguistic social bond and recovering it from abandonment in an eternal past - this is the elementary task of schizoanalysis as an applied non-philosophy. Schizoanalysis accomplishes this task through the proliferation and circulation of non-signifiers or a-signifying signs.

We should see how, in the infant's appropriation by language, we nonetheless can identify a dimension of ancestral time, the time of an absolute anteriority, a time foreclosed to thought. We can take here as our model what Giorgio Agamben calls, in The Time that Remains, operational time. If we only ever experience time as schematized and organized into a past, present, and future, operational time is precisely the time it takes to apply this schema to intuition and hence experience time as such. Because this time is necessarily anterior to schematic time, it is foreclosed to schematic time, but nonetheless inheres negatively within it. The infant, who exists only as already symbolized, nonetheless is submitted to the operation of symbolization, and hence embodies a residual anteriority to the symbolic schematism. This is not pre-symbolic any more than operational time is pre-temporal. It is rather the symbolic itself as separated-without-separation from the symbolic schematized as such, which is to say, in thought.

Here we have, directly embodied in the infant (though negatively embodied), the ancestral dimension of language - the hieroglyph. This is a sign that acts a cipher, a code, but which obscures not some hidden content, but the very fact that nothing is hidden. It is a cipher of a cipher, a sign that disguises the very fact that it is a sign, or disguises the fact that it says anything (or nothing). This is a ruin of language, an artifact, a language without any connection to its ability to communicate. This hieroglyphic character is the original character of infant-speech, which only secondarily gives way to communication. Rather, the infant says language itself, as a pure impartibility without object. It is this character that we seek to recover through the use of the non-signifier, or the transfiguration of signifiers into non-signifiers.

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?

Giving Rise

John McCain has recently engaged in some creative history in an attempt to cover his own tracks. As the above video recounts, he misrepresented the time-line of the War in Iraq, claiming the Anbar Awakening occurred after and because of the 'Surge' strategy, when in fact it began at least half a year prior. The next day, he claimed this was not a mistake, and that the Surge began long before it was announced as a general strategy. Rather, according to McCain, 'surge' refers to any counterinsurgency strategy whose aim is to hold and secure territory, as opposed to simply chasing enemies without regard to sustained security. In this regard, the tactical engagement that enabled the Anbar Awakening was the begining of such a strategy, which was months later announced as a general strategy, one that would oblige a great increase in troop levels.

As has been pointed out, McCain is taking great liberty with the facts here. The Surge was so-named because of the 'surge', that is, increase or rise, in troop levels, and so decribing previous tactics that were meant to be generalized as part of this strategy is misleading. Even if McCain is correct in claiming that the tactics involved in Anbar were an inspiration or model for the Surge, this would still contradict his claim that the latter caused or enabled the former. Clearly, even in McCain's revised account, the contrary is still the case.

What appears to be telling here is McCain's peculiar claim that 'surge' generally refers to 'counterinsurgency' tactics. Etymologically, 'surge' and 'insurgence' are from the same source, the Latin surgere, to rise. This is a compound of sub-, meaning 'from below', and regere, to lead straight - literally, from below to lead straight. From a position in which the only straight or right course forward is to rise or ascend, it is to lead in this way. This should resonate with my previous mediations on 'leading'. Regere itself is related to rex, 'king', and can translate the Greek arche.

'Surge' literally means to rise up, increase suddenly, swell or rush forward, and 'insurgence' modifies this, meaning to rise up against an authority or rule, to rise from below this rule and exceed it. Yet insurgency here is already complicated, in that this rising already entails being 'led straight', 'leading' here being related to 'rule'. So does this mean insurgence, in rising above a ruling power, must already have recourse to a more 'right' or 'straight' rule, one that, rather than subordinating it and keeping it below, leads it to rise and stand? More than simple academic reflections, I believe these questions bear directly on the political matter at hand.

Recalling Lacan's famous quip in response to the student rebellions of May '68, "You are looking for a master. And you will find one." Are the Iraqi insurgents also looking for a Master, in this case, a theocratic one? This is likely the case for the most part, although there is undoubtly little consensus on the nature of this new rule. The one unifying feature we can point to, however, is that it would be a rule that leads the insurgents 'from below', and hence, is a right and straight leadership. The Nietzschean tones of these sentiments implicate far more reflective potential than I can muster here, although this is ground that needs to be covered.

In any case, it seems likely that, from the purview of American (neo-)conservatives, the insurgents themselves were only acting out under the bad influence of opportunist leaders, and the 'Surge' was in fact part of the ongoing strategy to install a 'right and straight' leadership in Iraq, one that would legitimately allow the people to 'rise above' both the unjust rule of Saddam Hussein, and the chaotic injunctions of terrorist and insurgent leaders. This right leadership that would amount to a legitimate 'rising above subordination', a legitimate 'insurgency', would of course be parliamentary democracy. For the insurgents themselves, however, this would only be the worst kind of subordination.

The problematic heart of this conflict is hence the paradox of how to recognize 'legitimate', right and straight leadership, what it means to rise above, and whether the violent rejection of rule we call 'insurgency' on the one hand, and 'spreading democracy' on the other, can be or should be arrested in the constitution of another rule, a new leader. Are the two senses of leadership, one subordinating and the other liberating, truly distinct or mutually implicated? Can they, should they, be separated and opposed?

Saving Spinoza

We all know the cliché according to which Spinoza remains a pre-critical philosopher insofar as, in his assertion of the identity of God and nature, he naively asserts a kind of reductionist materialism. Spinoza's nature is a 'closed mechanism', a blind chain of necessity, and freedom, far from some mystical exemption from this chain, is no more than the assumption of this necessity, et cetera. Thus Žižek claims that for Spinoza, ethics (deontology) is simply reduced to ontology, to this blind necessity free of any obscurantist language of teleological aims, a 'Good' which should be imposed on the way things simply 'are'. Such 'oughts' are no more than fictions that falsely impute to God a will or aim, when God in truth is ignorant of any aim and refers to the blind mechanism of natural causality.

So Spinoza ultimately leads us to a naive scienticism in which we need only learn the way things 'really work', devoid of any ideological mystifications. This 'post-ideological' reign of a pure science, in which we should simply administer the means of a satisfactory life free of any overriding prescriptions or projects, is the paradigm of submission to capitalism; Spinozism thus becomes the perfect capitalist ideology. There is no place for the Cartesian subject, subtracted from the closure of this natural necessity, lacking a proper place and lost, necessitating some perhaps 'fictional' narrative of a moral telos in order to act. Indeed, in this model there is properly no 'subject', but only the free play of natural impulses which, upon assuming their modest place within the natural causal order, can live free of such delusions and the harm they cause.

This reading of Spinoza is exemplified in his discussion of Adam's fall: God does not arbitrarily prohibit Adam from eating from the Tree of Knowledge in a simple exercise of authority, with death as the punishment; God is simply warning Adam of the 'scientific fact' that this fruit would be poisonous to him, that eating it would simply 'cause' him to die... Yet as A. Kiarina Kordela puts it in her remarkable book, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan, it matters not whether this is an arbitrary prohibition or a mere natural fact, because either way, the notion that Adam should prefer life to death would already entail an aim, that he should live, which imposes on the mere 'facts' a fictional telos. [7-8] The point, then, is that any bare scientific analysis of facts, if it is to have any relevance for us, must already be warped by some fictional (ethical) aim imposed upon them; in short, Adam would've already had to have chosen to live.

Kordela's point, in reading Spinoza 'against himself', is that there is no neutral ontology which can simply see God/nature free of any imputed aims; that we are subjects insofar as we necessitate such a fictional imposition. This is the basic Lacanian point, that any chain of knowledge is incoherent, irrelevant without the stabilizing power of the Master-Signifier, the quilting point which fastens this knowledge to some determinate course of action. This quilting point is a fiction, but a necessary one, without which the world and a 'neutral' ontological analysis thereof would have no consistency for us. Yet can we account for this necessity within Spinoza's thought, or must we resort to 'turning him against himself' so as to draw out the inconsistency of his explicit statements? While I like to think I do not succumb to what she identifies as the 'Neo-Spinozist' tendency to take his words at face value, effacing confrontation with the deadlock intrinsic in his work, I nonetheless think his explicit doctrine is more nuanced than she gives it credit for. To be fair, I have only just begun reading this truly fantastic work, and do not know exactly where she will take her reading; yet, at this early stage, I already find it quite useful in explicating my own reading of Spinoza (to what degree this reading conforms to her's I cannot yet say).

I would contend that, far from the naive position that we can be done with the illusion of ethical aims and modestly resort to a neutral scientific analysis of nature, which must be supplemented with the 'critical' assertion of the necessity of these illusions for us, we can take Spinoza a bit further. The point would then be that, if we were to attempt a truly neutral, 'aimless' dwelling within nature, we would find ourselves unable to act, to do anything. Yet far from a mark of our imperfection, our inability to recognize and fully identify with our proper place in the perfect causal order, and the resulting necessity of supplementing this imperfection with a fiction, what if we radically assert that there is nothing to recognize, that there is no 'natural necessity' to which we would conform if freed from fictive aims?

In other words, insofar as God/nature is the complete chain of causes, a 'closed mechanism', that is, insofar as God is not the constitutive exception to the totality of the world but identified directly with the totality without exception, this totality in its 'infinite perfection' is thereby incomplete, inconsistent. Without the exceptional external view which could explicate 'the next link', that is, the 'natural aim' or 'God's will', there is no way to determine the necessary course of things, inclusive of 'what I should do free of any fictive moral aims'. In other words, the only conclusion of a purely neutral knowledge of nature is that necessity coincides with impossibility, with the impossibility of determining necessity without 'taking a chance', acting without any guarantee... We can thus see how Spinoza is the paradigmatic feminine philosopher in the Lacanian sense: God/nature is 'non-All', that is, there is nothing exempted from it, there is no exempted point of God's will (or, for that matter, a 'free subject' in the vulgar sense), but for that very reason this totality cannot attain closure, it remains incomplete and 'open'. Perfection paradoxically coincides with incompleteness just as the completeness of a fictional aim which gives meaning to arbitrary natural necessity is image of imperfection.

So the 'imperfection' of man is not simply his inability to recognize his place within the perfect order of God/nature; rather, this imperfection is transposed into God/nature itself, such that the shift from imperfection to perfection is no more than a change of perspective on one and the same thing. Whereas we, even in accepting that our aims are ultimately fictional, 'relative', may still continue to posit the divine chain of natural causes as simply epistemologically inaccessible to us, though complete in-itself, Spinoza radically asserts, with his 'third kind of knowledge' (intuition), that we can in fact directly know this perfection; my hermeneutical claim is that this 'intuition' involves no more than transposing this inaccessibility of a complete knowledge of perfection into the very incompleteness of perfection itself. We are thus this incompleteness of the Divine as 'for-itself'. (Furthermore, I would propose against Kordela that Deleuze's reading of Spinoza is not filtered through some vulgar Bergsonian vitalism; rather, if we take his understanding of intuition in Bergson as determined by the Spinozan concept as I read it, we can see that, rather than a 'Bergsonized Spinoza', Deleuze already 'Spinozizes Bergson'; I think his reading of élan vital as not some vulgar Universal Life, but rather a principle of self-difference, is evidence in this direction.)

So, to be precise, if we take Spinoza's God/nature along the same lines as the Lacanian assertion that 'God is unconscious', this does not mean that without the fictions constitutive of consciousness we would find a 'true' necessity, a 'proper place' within nature; rather, God/nature is ultimately no more than the impossibility of discovering such a necessity, the limit internal to every aim that prevents it from coinciding with itself, the very incompleteness of perfection as such. Indeed, Kordela hints at such a reading when she insists that Spinoza's assertion that God has no will, that nature is ultimately 'aimless', is to be read in the same way as Lacan's 'the big Other does not exist':

Lacan...maintains that the Other is inconsistent, that "there is no Other of the Other," that the Other in itself has no will or aim... [H]e adopts the Spinozian conception of history as aimless, and supplements it, according to the Spinozian conception of truth, with a willful and intentional gaze (and, hence, aim), which, however, is "a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other". [17]

And precisely as subjects, who depend on fictional impositions of aims in order to make sense of the world, we are no more than this gaze already inscribed in God: not God's will, but God's opaqueness to itself, the fact that even God does not know his own will, that precisely as perfect, God cannot explain why necessity itself is necessary. Think, for example, of God's speech at the end of the Book of Job, in which he enumerates his own creations as if he himself is amazed at them, as if they are inexplicable even to their creator.

Thus, if freedom is affirmed necessity, it is precisely the assumption of the 'miraculous', inexplicable character of this necessity, the fact that not even God can explain why this was necessary. Spinoza never really elaborates a theory of the subject because the subject is no more than this splitting internal to the divine perfection of nature, this incompleteness/openness that is perfection, necessity. To return to the example of Adam, it is not simply that Adam, in order to make a decision regarding the fruit, must choose some aim (to live or to die), out of ignorance of what God really wants from him; the point is that God himself does not know what he wants of Adam, and hence must leave the decision up to Adam's ignorant, impulsive hubris. The gaze desperately seeking meaning from God is already inscribed in God himself, and is, far from a mark of imperfection, is precisely his perfection as such.

Of course this is only the preamble to such a reading of Spinoza, and I am here setting myself a task I probably won't even begin until my thesis is finished. And I still have a long ways to go in Kordela's book, among others. In any case, I highly recommend $urplus, which presents in my opinion the most original and exciting reading of Spinoza since Deleuze. Whether or not it supports my position, that Spinoza is already a 'critical' philosopher in the strict sense, has yet to be seen, but I am resolute that this is in fact the case. What this means is that, far from reducing deontology to ontology, fictive 'oughts' to the scientific 'is', any more than maintaining the gap between them, Spinoza more radically transposes the gap into the 'is' itself, so that Ethics is the name of the impossible coincidence of God/nature, of the One, with itself. The ethical subject then must assume this gap as his very being, he must identify with this gap/incompleteness that defines the perfection of God/nature.

Contrary to Žižek, Spinoza does not reduce deontology to ontology, but rather raises ontology to deontology. Thus we at the same time denounce fictive 'oughts', ideological aims imposed on the world, and a pure necessary order of 'is' accessible to science: the is, the Being of God/nature, is said only of the must, the vertiginous decision of the subject absent of any justification through aims (the Lacanian act): it is this tautological assertion of an act without any grounding in symbolic coordinates that would 'make sense of it' which selects what must be, which remakes 'what is' by dissolving the symbolic framework that previously defined it, retaining only that which can endure a new evaluation (ultimately, no more than the New itself in History, in the guise of the failed attempts to break out of the given symbolic order which were rendered meaningless by that very order; the act is thus one of Benjaminian Redemption). The is, the Lacanian Real, is ultimately nothing but this immanent limit of symbolization, this necessary inconsistency of every symbolic order, and hence the potential for the New to escape its confines.

Lacan, Proust, Woolf

This is my final paper for the course I took on Lacan, Proust, and Woolf. It's my first time writing on Lacan and I by no means have a strong grasp of this thought, so if there are any mistakes or confusions or anything, let me know.

...


A Different Subject, A Subject of Difference


We are subjects. As such, we are subjected to the world. Our experience, our knowledge, our very thought is inseparable from this subjection. Must we then resign ourselves to despair, for being hopelessly imprisoned within subjectivity, only ever capable of glimpsing the Real with the forlorn eyes of a prisoner glimpsing the light of day through the barred window of a cell?

~

We are subjects, but first and foremost, we are.

We are subjects, and as such, our way of being is subjectivity. The Real, for us, is constituted through this way of being; it is constituted as subjective. By speaking in this way, we shift the problem: it is no longer the case that we are limited by subjectivity, trapped within it as its denigrated essence. We no longer think of ourselves, our very being, as in principle capable of attaining the Real in itself, though denied this perfection by the immobilizing chains of our subjectivity.

Rather, we must begin to think otherwise. What could it mean when we say that the Real is constituted, composed, created for us in this way? The Real can no longer be thought to preexist, as transcendent and apart from our existence – adrift in a world of change, of production and dissolution, life and death. The Real is no longer a world apart from our own, apart from the cruelty, the violence, the precariousness of our situation; untouched, pristine, divine. We should no longer dwell on an impossible desire to escape this precarious existence into the eternal, into a direct relation with the Real.

Subjectivity is our very way of being, it is in this way that we exist, that we are something that exists. Our existence maintains a certain minimum of consistency and stability, a ground or condition. Condition here does not mean an extrinsic form imposed upon some inert docility, securing dependence and limitation, like shackles and chains. Condition must obtain the sense of a mode of being or of life, a way of being and living. It relates immediately to the process of genesis of existence, which is the ground which any form whatsoever presupposes, as the foundations of a structure presuppose the earth upon which they are lain.

Subjectivity is the very constitution of our existence, be it a fragile constitution. This 'something', this ground or support, this composition or 'makeup', must itself be thought in terms of the process of its genesis, and no longer as some extrinsic and preexistent form of possibility such that any direct experience of the Real is excluded as impossible. We said above that the Real is constituted for us, and this remark will only make sense if we understand ourselves, 'we', in terms of this constitution: the minimum support necessary for the process through which the Real is constituted, which is ultimately inseparable from the process itself.

In this sense, we are able to think ourselves and our relation to the Real such that we are the modes, the conditions, the ways in which the Real is constituted as such. The constitution of my existence is rendered by virtue of the process through which my relation to the Real is constituted, and I am ultimately nothing more than this processual relation. As the Real is constituted for us, we are this constitution and nothing else.

~

If one thinks of the concrete constitution of one's existence, this implies many things. We think of the body, itself nothing more than a multiplicity of organs, tissues, cells, fluids, systems, signals, etc., arranged in a certain way. One thinks of one's social situation, inseparable from a multiplicity of other people, family members and friends, acquaintances and strangers, enemies and lovers; inseparable as well from a multiplicity of physical elements, geographic, ecological, and man-made structures; and of course, sociality is inseparable from concrete discourse, which depends upon the enormous multiplicity of differential elements of articulation and designation that make up language. One thinks of one's so-called 'inner experience', which is inseparable from a multiplicity of sensations, memories, thoughts, passions, prerogatives, shifting relations with the 'outside'.

All of this points to one thing: there is no 'one thing' that is one's self; rather, oneself is itself generated in and of a multiplicity of things belonging to various registers, brought together and agglomerated, composed, constituted in a certain fashion, such that a minimum of stability and consistency endures. 'Oneself' is only ever said of several things. This coherence or consistency is then what we will call subjectivity; even prior to consciousness, conscious experience, the subject is said of the unconscious as that which grounds any experience, but which is irreducible to that which, in us, is inert and incapable of experience, the bare materiality of our makeup, the objective dimension of our existence. In fact, the unconscious, as this minimum consistency, is the condition, the ground, of the 'objective' or 'material' dimension no less than of consciousness and the faculties of cognition.

The unconscious is not simply that which is 'not conscious' within us. Rather, it is that element of the subject, of subjectivity, which grounds the subject's conscious experience, and subjectivity thereby takes on a more profound sense than simple consciousness. Consciousness must be unified in space and through time, depending on the identical self-relation of the one who is conscious, such that I know I am the one who has different experiences, and I know it is the same 'I' that endures throughout the flux of experience. Yet the unconscious is inseparable from a multiplicity that has no preestablished unity, and so rests on an original division, a split or scission, a 'relation of non-relation' as Kierkegaard says.

~

Lacan is a thinker of the utmost profundity if only because he was able to think of this scission as such, as the ground of any experience, without relating it back to some preestablished unity. For Lacan, the subject is always split, divided against itself, and the minimal consistency that relates different registers across a schism – for him, primarily the register of the body with the register of language – is precisely that of the unconscious. By drawing on Freud and Saussure, he develops an account of the process of genesis of this consistency, of the unconscious, which is inseparable from the consistution of the Real as such. In this way, we essentially relate to the Real through the structuration of the unconscious which constitutes the Symbolic register of language, and through the mediation of Imaginary doubles. The Real has no sense apart from these registers, and we are only in the sense that we are constituted in and through these registers, maintaining thereby a primordial relation to the Real. Though it may be inaccessible to conscious experience, apart from the brief glimpses we receive when there appear cracks in the facade, subjectivity in a more profound sense is the way in which, for us, the Real is constituted as such through the Imaginary and Symbolic registers. This way of existing, this way in which we are capable of existing at all, this genetic mode of constitution, is the unconscious.

For Lacan, the unconscious is itself inseparable from language, that is, from the signifiers or sound-images that make up language. This 'make-up' composed of signifiers is itself entirely differential, that is, signifiers are only related through their difference from one another, they exist only insofar as they are articulated.¹ In this way, concrete discourse is always made up of a multiplicity of signifiers, strung together in statements as 'signifying chains', that are meaningful only by virtue of the differential relations between them. The meaning of any given statement or series of statements is thereby intrinsic to the differential structure of the signifying chains that compose them; meaning insists in the chain as the differentiation that defines it. “Whence we can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that meaning insists, but that none of the chain's elements consists in the signification it can provide at that very moment.”² The consistency of the chain, the very linking that holds these differences together and in which meaning insists, does not derive from a correspondence with the concepts signified; we must look elsewhere.

What is the source of the consistency of the differential elements of language, if not the fundamental consistency of the natural world of which we speak? What allows meaning to insist in signifying chains, if not a logical consistency that derives from reference to the empirical world, already itself wholly consistent? The problem with these questions is they fail to recognize that, for us, the 'natural' world signified in concrete discourse is inseparable from its signification: the signified is produced as such through the action of signifying chains that enter it and structure it, endowing it with an intelligibility by introducing a differentiation or disjunction. “[I]t is Freud's discovery that gives the signifier/signified opposition its full scope: for the signifier plays an active role in determining the effects by which the signifiable appears to succumb to its mark, becoming, through that passion, the signified.”³

Lacan demonstrates this differentiation of the signifier that shapes the signified with the example of restroom doors, being on all accounts identical until a signifier, 'gentlemen' or 'ladies', enters into its material constitution to make it what it is. “The point is not merely to silence the nominalist debate with a low blow, but to show how the signifier in fact enters the signified – namely, in a form which, since it is not immaterial, raise the question of its place in reality.”⁴ If the signifier shapes the signified by introducing disjunction, it is through this function that it grants meaning to the experience of the situation signified. The meaning that insists in the signifying chain itself is thereby attributed or ascribed to the signified it shapes, but not without first being inscribed in the signified. This inscription constitutes the signified as such by enabling a disjunction, in other words, by making material reality 'differ from itself', so to speak, and it is this function that produces meaning (sens) in the structure of signification. The disjunction produced by this inscription is precisely what endows signifying chains with their consistency, and more profoundly, what endows the structure of signification itself (signifier/signified) with the consistency of meaning (sens).

This disjunction is precisely what we have already called the unconscious. “Starting with Freud, the unconscious becomes a chain of signifiers that repeats and insists somewhere (on another stage or in a different scene, as he wrote), interfering in the cuts offered it by actual discourse and the cogitation it informs.”⁵ Wherever there appear 'cuts' or inconsistencies in signification, the unconscious presents itself, it insists as the disjunction that itself produces meaning. Yet these sights of disjunction do not simply involve a signifier (in the above example, 'restroom door') whose signified remains indeterminate (as regards gender) without reference to another signifier (either 'gentlemen' or 'ladies'). Prior to the actual disjunction between, say, the differently gendered restrooms, there is a purely formal or 'virtual' disjunction that is not between two terms or things, but which is presupposed by such actual cases of disjunction. This formal or formative disjunction is that from which the actual things in disjunction are differentiated as such, that which thereby shapes and structures the signified, granting it the attribution of meaning, and which gives consistency to the signifying chains in which that meaning insists. Thus, the formal or formative disjunction is primarily that between the signifier and the signified as such, determining their relation as the consistency of meaning that produces them both.

Hence, the 'cuts' in the signifying chain that correspond to a differentiation in the signified, and that realize the formative disjunction of signifier and signified, are the source of the consistency of meaning or sense (sens), in that it is here that the unconscious asserts itself. This is thus where we find the unconscious subjectivity of which we spoke at the outset. “The cut made by the signifying chain is the only cut that verifies the structure of the subject as a discontinuity in the real. If linguistics enables us to see the signifier as the determinant of the signified, analysis reveals the truth of this relationship by making holes in meaning the determinants of its discourse.”⁶ Subjectivity is thus a 'discontinuity in the real', an original and formative disjunction, from which the consistency of sense and the continuity of signifying chains in concrete discourse derive.

How then do we account for the genesis of this subjectivity? Lacan does so by reconceiving Freud's own account in terms of linguistics. He locates this disjunctive relation between signifier and signified as the effect of a 'bar', a signifier without a signified that separates all signifiers as such from any direct relationship with the signified, and this function is precisely that of the Freudian 'phallus'. “For the phallus is a signifier...the signifier that is destined to designate meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier conditions them by its presence as signifier.”⁷ This function is conceived in terms of the child's introduction into language. The child, confronted by the speech of the Other, usually exemplified in the mother, knows this other as the source of satisfaction of its every need, and hence is driven to articulate its need to the Other. “'Other' [designates] the very locus evoked by recourse to speech in any relation in which such recourse plays a part.”⁸ Yet the signifiers the Other provides do not yet have any significance; they are without signified. So the child can only articulate its demand through the signifiers it imagines that the Other desires to hear. Language does not serve originally to signify a specific need, but rather to articulate the primordial need for the love of the Other, that is, to be the complete object of the Other's desire, and thereby to have every need satisfied. “Demand already constitutes the Other as having the 'privilege' of satisfying needs, that is, the power to deprive them of what alone can satisfy them. The Other's privilege here thus outlines the radical form of the gift of what the Other does not have – namely, what is known as its love.”⁹

This formulation of the demand alienates the child from its needs. In the signifiers it articulates as the demand, it is not any need that takes precedence, but rather the alienated form of need itself as the need for the Other to satisfy every need, the need to be the object of the Other's desire. “In this way, demand annuls (aufhebt) the particularity of everything that can be granted, by transmuting it into a proof of love, and the very satisfactions demand obtains for need are debased (sich erniedrigt) to the point of being no more than the crushing brought on by the demand for love...”¹⁰ Yet there is no demand the child can make that will fulfill this primal need for love, and so it takes on the repressed form of desire. Just as the child is unable to articulate itself such that it would become the object of the Other's desire, hence rendering this desirable unarticulable, the primal need the subject is unable to formulate as demand becomes its own desire. “What is thus alienated in needs constitutes [a primal repression], as it cannot, hypothetically, be articulated in demand; it nevertheless appears in an offshoot that presents itself in man as desire.”¹¹ The phallus is thus that signifier without a signified, that impossible articulation of desire; both the impossible articulation that is the object of the Other's desire, and the impossible demand that would articulate the subject's own desire.

The articulation of specific needs is possible only after this essentially insatiable demand, this signifier that 'designates meaning effects as a whole'. This structure, which divorces all signifiers, all articulations, from that which they articulate, separating them through the unsurpassable gap of desire for love, makes any signification, and thereby language itself, possible. “For the unconditionality of demand, desire substitutes the 'absolute' condition: this condition in fact dissolves the element in the proof of love that rebels against the satisfaction of need. This is why desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the very phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung).”¹² Desire as this difference, this remainder, is what constitutes the subject as such. It splits the signifier from the signified, as that unavoidable gap, that original discontinuity or disjunction that constitutes them and holds them together in their very difference, inscribing the signifier in the signified itself. Because the child has learned that it cannot possess the phallus, it cannot eliminate this remainder of desire, it is able to constitute itself as the source of the disjunctive tension of language. This desire forms the unconscious, which asserts itself in the cuts, gaps, breaks, inconsistencies in signifying chains, paradoxically holding them together and assuring their consistency in disjunction.

It is thus the desire constitutive of the subject that is the source of the disjunctive consistency of its multiplicitous components, both the material elements signified and the signifiers that differentiate them and structure them as such. The multiplicity of signifiers, always gathered in signifying chains, have two modes through which they become consistent and thereby constitute the signified.

What is at issue is to refind – in the laws that govern this other scene (ein anderer Schauplatz), which Freud, on the subject of dreams, designates as the scene of the unconscious – the effects that are discovered at the level of the chain of materially unstable elements that constitutes language: effects that are determined by the double play of combination and substitution in the signifier, according to the two axes for generating the signified, metonymy and metaphor; effects that are determinant in instituting the subject.¹³

Metonymy and metaphor are the two dimensions of the multiplicity of signifiers arranged in signifying chains, the dimension of combination or conjunction of signifiers and the dimension of substitution or disjunction, respectively. Metonymy is literally the contiguous connections of several associated signifiers that thereby constitute the fleshed out identity of the signified. Lacan uses the example of signifying an unknown number of ships by referring to them as 'thirty sails'. The signifier of a part ('sail') is intelligible only in terms of its conjunction with the signifier of the whole ('ship'), and it is this conjunction that makes the signifying chain consistent. “This shows that the connection between ship and sail is nowhere other than in the signifier, and that metonymy is based on the word-to-word nature of this connection.”¹⁴ Metonymy thus functions by relating a signifier to other signifiers with which it is associated, thereby involving an implicit combination of signifiers.

Metaphor, on the contrary, involves a substitution of one signifier for another where said signifiers do not bear any direct association. “Metaphor's creative spark does not spring forth from the juxtaposition of two images, that is, of two equally actualized signifiers. It flashes between two signifiers, one of which has replaced the other by taking the other's place in the signifying chain, the occulted signifier remaining present by virtue of its (metonymic) connection to the rest of the chain.”¹⁵ When a signifier is thus replaced by another unassociated, dissimilar signifier, they enter a relation of disjunction such that the replaced or occulted signifier persists as an empty place in the metonymic chain of connection, while the substituted signifier 'stuffs' the signified, constituting it purely through the differences it introduces. The displaced signifier thereby leads to the revelation that the signified itself was only ever blank, a void, an empty space, given form exclusively by signifying chains connected to its signifier. The substituted signifier can thus 'cross the bar' between signifier and signified, entering the void to disguise it with a difference. This void is the sight of the pure disjunction of the subject's desire, a pure difference that is not yet the difference between terms. The difference is only bound, realized, when a metaphor effectively disguises the void with an unassociated signifier, thus constituting the subject as the difference between itself and this signifier. “Thus it is between a man's proper name qua signifier and the signifier that metaphorically abolishes it that the poetic spark is produced... We see that metaphor is situated at the precise point at which meaning is produced in nonmeaning...and at which it becomes palpable that, in deriding the signifier, man defies his very destiny.”¹⁶

Metonymy functions through the conjunction of associated signifiers, whereas metaphor functions by revealing the originary disjunction of the subject as the source of all signification. The former explains the consistency of necessarily finite signifying chains, whereas the latter exposes the source of consistency for any chain whatsoever. We can see these function demonstrated in some examples from literature. Take, for instance, Marcel's encounter with a sleeping Albertine in The Prisoner. When she is awake, Marcel is mercilessly consumed by jealousy, paranoia, and distrust, obsessed with discovering the 'real' Albertine, the one she hides from him, the one involved in worlds, relations, loves, that he will never access. Yet when he finds her in his room, already sleeping on his bed, his disposition changes entirely.

Lying at full length on my bed, in a pose so natural that it could never have been adopted deliberately, she seemed to me like a long, flowering stem that had been laid there; and that was what she was: normally I could dream only when she was not there, but at these times the power of dreaming returned as I lay next to her, as if in her sleep she had turned into a plant. In that way her sleep realized, to a certain degree, the promise of love; when I was alone, I could think about her, but she was not there, she was not mine. When she was there, I could speak to her, but was too removed from myself to be able to think. When she was asleep, I did not have to speak any more, I knew that she could not see me, I did not have to live on the surface of myself. By closing her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had put off, one by one, the various marks of humanity which had so disappointed me in her, from the day that we first met. She was animated only by the unconscious life of plants, of trees, a life more different than my own, stranger, and yet which I possessed more securely.¹⁷

Marcel is incessantly disturbed by Albertine when she is awake, unable to 'possess' her completely; she is never his, she is always removed from him. Yet when she is asleep, Marcel is able to 'possess her' securely, not because he has finally gained access to her whole and complete self, but rather because he can understand her 'real self' as empty, as no more than a void or incompleteness. Thus he is able to compose her anew, as a plant, a flowering stem, disguising this empty space with an unassociated chain of signifiers that thereby shape her substantial being. Through this becoming-plant, this metaphorical substitution, Marcel realizes that Albertine has no 'real self' apart from the disguise itself; she is no more than this empty place that is revealed in when the signifier 'plant' replaces the signifier 'Albertine'. Only through the function of metaphor does he truly obtain her, the Real of Albertine; “Her life was subject to me...”¹⁸

Of course, Albertine's (empty) place is still construed in relation to the metonymic conjunction of associated signifiers, such as the parts of her body, and even her body itself. This empty place, this pure disjunction that is the subject, subsists in the constellation of multiple material elements signified: her breath, her hair, her face, her eyelids, her lips, her hand;¹⁹ but she isn't any of these elements, which bear only a metonymic connection to her subjectivity. Her unconscious subjectivity is revealed to Marcel, and he is able, if only fleetingly, to possess the Real Albertine, only through the metaphoric disjunction. This disjunction that precedes the alternating terms and that endows their dissociative connection with a consistence sense, revealed in metaphor, is precisely the unconscious subjectivity that we have been pursuing. Marcel is able to possess her not simply because he has unbarred access to her body, but rather because he is able to grasp that she is no more her body and its multiplicitous worldly associations than she is a plant, a watch, an animal, or a musical instrument:

I could take her head, tip it back, place it against my lips, put my arms round her neck, she went on sleeping like a watch that never stops, like an animal that goes on living whatever position you put it in, like a climbing plant, a convolvulus that goes on throwing out branches whatever kind of support you give it. Only her breathing was affected by each of my touches, as if she had been an instrument I was playing and from which I drew new chords by producing from one and then another of its strings a variety of notes. My jealousy was being calmed, for I felt that Albertine had become a creature of respiration and nothing more, as was shown by her regular breathing, the expression of this purely physiological function, which in its fluidity lacks the consistency of either speech or silence; lacking all knowledge of evil, this sound, which seemed to be drawn from a hollow reed rather than a human being, was truly heavenly for me who at those moments felt Albertine removed from everything, not just materially but morally; it was the pure song of the Angels. And still in this breathing, I would suddenly say to myself, human names, the residue of memory, must be suspended.²⁰

When asleep before him, she is 'removed from everything'; her materiality, her name, memories of her, all must be suspended; she becomes no more than that empty place disguised by a body, a name, or traits of a plant, a watch, an animal, a song; the Real Albertine shines through as only the disjunction between the various disguises, with nothing beneath these masks but a pure difference, “a life more different” than Marcel's own.

Virginia Woolf's The Waves provides another exemplary case. Not only is every character composed solely through his or her articulations in signifying chains, but nearly every paragraph reveals the constitution of the subject through the play of metaphor and metonymy. Take the character of Susan. She is made consistent throughout the book through the repetition of multiple themes that make up metonymic connections with her environment and situation: the earth, burial, hardness, juxtaposed against light, birds, flight. “I looked between the leaves and saw her. She danced in flecked with diamonds light as dust. And I am squat, Bernard, I am short. I have eyes that look close to the ground and see insects in the grass. The yellow warmth in my side turned to stone when I saw Jinny kiss Louis. I shall eat grass and die in a ditch in the brown water where dead have rotted.”²¹ Jinny is metaphorically disguised as light and dancing, against which Susan distinguishes herself, metaphorically “turned to stone”.

Later, she expresses her frustration at time in school through her destruction of the pages of a calendar: “I have torn them off and screwed them up so that they no longer exist, save as a weight in my side. They have been crippled days, like moths with shriveled wings unable to fly.”²² It is not simply the days themselves, but their existence as instances of her subjectivity, that is disguised as “moths with shriveled wings”, unable to attain their imperative of flying toward the light. Susan never ceases to draw herself through metaphors with ever greater complexity. As she grows older and develops a strong distaste for the city life she had in school, she begins to find herself in the countryside and life without that rigid segmentation and regimentation: “At this hour, this still early hour, I think I am the field, I am the barn, I am the trees...I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November, the mud, the mist, the dawn. I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people. Yet now leaning here, till the gate prints my arm, I feel the weight that has formed itself in my side. Something has formed, at school, in Switzerland, some hard thing.”²³ Susan literally has no existence in the novel apart from the play of metaphors, the disguises she takes up, be they of the cold, damp, hard earth, the passing seasons and the countryside, the crippled moth, or the hardening source of light in her side. It is the disjunction of her unconscious subjectivity, and the repetitions of its metaphoric disguises, that maintains the consistency of her character throughout the story.

Proust and Woolf provide exemplary instances of the play of metonymy and metaphor, and are among the finest examples of 'the poet' as Lacan conceives this figure. “[I]f you are a poet you will make it into a game and produce a continuous stream, nay, a dazzling weave of metaphors.”²⁴ More importantly, they demonstrate the way in which subjectivity in the most profound sense is nothing more than such a “dazzling weave of metaphors”, the consistency of which is the effect of unconscious desire as an originary and formative disjunction or discontinuity, a pure difference which endows the most diverse and dissociated terms with a minimum stability or ground. It is on the ground of discontinuity that signifying chains become consistent and sense can thereby insist in them. Sense is the pure effect of the 'empty place' of the subject, the genetic disjunction that conditions every metonymic conjunction. It is precisely this empty place, this 'desire as lack', that is the Real. When we said that the real is constituted through subjectivity, that the Real as such is subjective, this should not be taken to mean that everything exists only in our conscious experiences and contingent conceptions. Rather, it means that the unconscious core that grounds every conscious experience, the primordial lack or loss that is desire, the 'empty place of the subject', is the Real as such, and there is no sense of the Real other than this. The Real is thus 'meaningless', nonsense, but that nonsense in which all sense, all meaning, is produced as the subjectivity of a life.

~

Notes:
1E 144

2E 145

3E 274

4E 143

5E 286

6E 288

7E 275

8Ibid.

9E 276

10Ibid.

11E 275

12E 276

13E 274-5

14E 148

15Ibid.

16E 149-50

17P 59-60

18P 60

19P 61

20P 100

21W 15

22W 53

23W 97-8

24E 148-9


References:
E - Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits, A Selection.
P - Proust, Marcel. The Prisoner.
W - Woolf, Virginia. The Waves.