|
|
poniedziałek, 22 stycznia 2007
Subject and Body
"In order to survive as a subject, the body is sometimes almost sacrificed, either by starving it or by exploding it."
"Love in a Time of Loneliness. Three essays on drive and desire", Paul Verhaeghe, Rebus Press 1999
wtorek, 02 stycznia 2007
Sinthome
"In Seminar 23, The Sinthome,
Lacan remarks that no one is interested in another person's symptom.
This moment marks a substantial transition from Lacan's earlier work, a
transition that he'd been approaching for a number of years. In earlier
seminars, following on the wake of the famous Rome Discourse, Lacan had
argued that the symptom could be entirely resolved at the level of the
signifier through interpretation. This position was not unlike that of
the early Freud, who believed that the neurotics symptom could be
entirely eradicated through interpretation. However, just as Freud
eventually encountered the death drive or the compulsion to repeat, so
too would Lacan discover that there's something that resists over the
course of analysis, a remainder that can't be eradicated. In some
circumstances, the so-called "negative therapeutic reaction" would take
place, and analysis would suddenly take a left-turn for the worse,
characterized by extreme hostility towards the analyst. In other cases,
the analysand would leave analysis only to have the symptom flare up
once again with all the force and drama that it had possessed prior to
analysis. Or, as Freud had worried in his late essay Analysis Terminable and Interminable,
the work of analysis could go on infinitely, with analysand and analyst
(it's always the analysand that does the majority of interpreting in
genuine analysis) endlessly interpreting new slips of the tongue,
symptoms, dreams, etc.
In Seminar 22, RSI, Lacan will present two options: Either the analysand believes in the symptom (in which case analysis has failed), or the analysand identifies with
the symptom. If the first option marks a failure of analysis, then this
is because it marks a residue of transference that has not fallen away
over the course of analysis. To believe
in the symptom is to believe that there is a final signifier, a last
interpretant. Yet this is equivalent to believing that the Other
exists, that there is an answer to the symptom that could tell us what
we are once and for all. On the other hand, identification with the
symptom would consist, perhaps, of two things: 1) the subject that
identifies with the symptom is the subject that says "I am that", and
2) the subject that identifies with the symptom is the subject that
identifies with the process by which symptoms are produced, with the
nonsense and the activity of meaning making that is called for in this
nonsense. In other words, the late Lacan has carried out a separation
of the symptom from the field of meaning, from the field of the Other,
which is what will lead him to create the new concept of "sinthome" as
a sort of symptom purified of all meaning with respect to the Other, a
pure process, such as what we find in the literature of Joyce. I
identify with this nonsense at the heart of my being. This is the Lacan
that will begin to focus on writing and the letter, in contrast to the
signifier and the signified. It is the literality of the letter as
opposed to the play of the signifier, and it is a literality that
promises the subtraction of a mute jouissance of the letter, no longer
caught up in the web of the Other."
http://larval-subjects.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html
sobota, 29 lipca 2006
I am a poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject
"A certificate tells me that I was born. I repudiate this certificate: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject."
Jacques Lacan, Preface to the English-Language edition of the "Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis", The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI,
poniedziałek, 24 lipca 2006
An accidental, replaceable find (from necessity to contingency)
"Disbeing the object a involves encouraging analysands to realize that the supposed subject of knowing and the agalma, whose brilliance once reassured them in their love, are but replaceable objects a, semblances of being whose power does not outmatch that of other potential objects and whose promise of enjoyment is doomed to remain inadequate. The result of this operation, which the analyst effectuates by reducing himself to nothing but a gaze or a voice, is that the analysand can undertake a 'crossing' (traversee) or succeeds in dropping out (decoir) of his fantasy. Again, this result correlates with a moment of subjective destitution which Lacan promoted as the precondition for entering the practice of psychoanalysis."
"Chosen in an unexpected, yet fortunate encounter and gradually transformed into a standard feature of the analysand's life, the analyst tries to re-establish her original position as an accidental, replaceable find. This restoration of contingency is a prerequisite for the analysand's discovery that everything will fall short of the 'perfect match' or, to use Lacan' s words in the second part of the above sentence, that the sexual relation is impossible."
"Since the destiny and drama of love hinges on a shift from contingency to necessity, as Lacan put it in Seminar XX, the ultimate psychoanalytic effect can only involve a reduction of the established necessity of the analytic effects themselves to the status of simple contingency. This process requires an analysis of the analytic experience, in which the analysand can come to realize that it was no more than an accident on his particular journey through life. The ultimate analytic effect thus coincides with the termination of psychoanalysis, after which the analysand will hopefully understand, at least if the treatment was Lacanian, not the true signification but the nonsensicality of the entire experience, not the necessity but the impossibility of finding definitive answers to the questions of life."
"Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis", Dany Nobus, 2000
wtorek, 18 lipca 2006
Undermining the vicious circle of recurrent combinations of signifiers
"Instead of the classical analytic question "What has happened to me (during my childhood) that could possibly explain my present misery?', the Lacanian analyst ushers the patient to ask 'What is going to happen to me that will explain both my current situation and my life-history?'. For the analysand, this Lacanian strategy implies that he is freed from the deterministic historical truth and introduced into a new realm of freedom. Whereas in a Freudian setting analysands cannot alter the pathogenic impact of the circumstances they have been subjected to, Lacanian analysands are being given the keys to their own destiny, since the pathogenic impact of an event is dependent upon the future, whose face has evidently not been decided upon. Rather than reducing the impact of traumatic events by liberating them from their historical dungeons and relocating them into a remote, innocuous past, the Lacanian analyst is thus held to liberate history as such by ensuring that its meaning can depend on the future.
A further possibility of change resides in Lacan's assertion that repetition is part and parcel of the network of signifiers. As an organization of innumerable discrete elements, the symbolic order does not represent a closed circuit characterized by stability, inertia and linear causality. Each signifier can contribute to the organization of the symbolic order, a particular series of signifiers can spark off a whole range of subsequent signifiers, one signifier can originate in a variety of previous signifiers, and there is a continuous effect of 'retro-version (feedback) whereby every signifier is simultaneously the cause and the effect of another signifier (Lacan 1977k[1960]:306). The rise and development of cybernetics during the 1950s inspired Lacan to model this functioning of the symbolic order on the patterns of interaction within natural and artificial systems as described by Norbert Wiener, Ludwig von Bertalanffy and others. The results of cybernetics informed Lacan's Seminar II (1988c[ 1954-55]: 294-308), especially his reading of the itinerary of the letter in Poe's story of 'The Purloined Letter' (1972[1956]), but they continued to support his descriptions of the symbolic order, as well as his graphical representations of unconscious processes. Because the symbolic order operates according to the principles of an open system, its patterns of repetition are not inherently durable. When durable patterns do occur, it is due to an installed impermeability, an inflexible obduracy, or what could perhaps also be dubbed 'network sclerosis'. Hence, enduring patterns of repetition only come into operation when something (an accident, an encounter with the real) has been sedi-mented into a sclerotic nucleus. Countering these sclerotic nuclei implies that their force is being weakened to the point where their constitutive parts re-enter a relationship with the other components of the network.
Strange as it may seem, this is exactly what the Lacanian analyst is held to do, at least with neurotics and perverts. Dissolving coagulated centres of signification, undermining the vicious circle of recurrent combinations of signifiers, opening up a space of desire between age-old patterns of demand and complaint, and urging the analysand to avow this desire, the Lacanian analyst operates on the network of signifiers in light of the production of something new. Unlike the Freudian analyst, the Lacanian practitioner does not engage in archaeological sleuthing. Within a Lacanian analytic format, change is not to be expected from plumbing the depths of the psyche - as Freud himself was forced to confess now and again - but only from the reorganization of the symbolic system. To the extent that Freudian analysis can be associated with 'depth psychology', Lacanian practice is therefore extremely 'superficial'."
"Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis", Dany Nobus, 2000
poniedziałek, 17 lipca 2006
The ethics of the not-known
"Lacan touched on this point when he proposed his ethical maxim: 'do not give up on your desire' ['ne pas ceder sur son desir']. For desire is constitutive of the subject of the unconscious; it is thus the not-known par excellence, such that 'do not give up on your desire' rightly means: 'do not give up on that part of yourself that you do not know'. We might add that the ordeal of the not-known is the distant effect of the evental supplement, the puncturing [trouee] of 'some-one' by a fidelity to this vanished supplement, and that 'do not give up' means, in the end: do not give up on your own seizure by a truth-process.
But since the truth-process is fidelity, then if 'Do not give up' is the maxim of consistency - and thus of the ethic of a truth - we might well say that it is a matter, for the 'some-one', of being faithful to a fidelity. And he can manage this only by adhering to his own principle of continuity, the perseverance in being of what he is. By linking (for such, precisely, is consistency) the known by the not-known.
It is now an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a truth: 'Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you'.'"
"Ethics", Alain Badiou, 2001
niedziela, 16 lipca 2006
A hysterical matter of knowledge(with Hegel)
"One of Lacan's basic tenets is that the impact of the signifier also entails the subject, that this subject of the signifier is by its nature hysterical, and that hysteria is a "universal" trait of the speaking being, the consequence of the assumption of speech. Language hystericizes the subject. It produces a subject always in deficit in relation to what he or she is saying, always somewhere else, a subject impossible to pin down to the signifier which tries to fix it, name it, assign it a place, as well as the subject irreducible to the meaning and to the signifiers he or she produces. This follows from the very basic formula, the definition of the signifier, namely that the signifier represents the subject for another signifier, which also implies that there is no signifier of the subject, so that this is a process of an always failing representation.
"The hysterical nature of this subject bores a hole into knowledge, into all different types of knowledge (and Hegel's wager is to establish the complete "all-inclusive" list of all possible attitudes of knowledge, theoretical and practical, individual and social, abstract and historical). It is propelled by a desire that can find no rest and satisfaction in any particular figure of knowledge. But in this permanent dissatisfaction it is a subject that produces knowledge, and in the hysteric's discourse knowledge, S2, is situated in the place of the product. "The desire to know is not what leads to knowledge. What leads to knowledge ... is the hysteric's discourse". A knowledge that doesn't know itself, a subjectivity that eludes self-grasp, a desire that cannot find a hold..."
"The subject that cannot know itself, that cannot self-reflexively grasp itself, the nonphilosophical consciousness that wants to grasp the truth with its knowledge, but that perpetually fails to do so, becomes the protagonist of philosophy. The subject constantly tries to justify its knowledge before a big Other, but a big Other that it has itself instituted or unwittingly brought about. The wager of "The Phenomenology of Spirit" is that knowledge is measured by the standards it itself proposes and implies, and it always falls short. The attempt to grasp the truth by means of knowledge—the minimal initial requirement for the subject—is always insufficient. Each figure of knowledge fails, but through this series of failures knowledge is actually produced — but not a knowledge within the subject's grasp. It is rather a knowledge that escapes him, a knowledge "hinter dem Rucken des Bewusstseins," as Hegel puts it, "behind the back of consciousness". The inability to satisfy its own standards produces a constant hysterization of the subject, it has to make ever-renewed attempts, and this is the spring that generates knowledge. The irreducibility of $ to S1 and S2 is the key to the progress of consciousness and the constant production of S2. Bear in mind that knowledge, das Wissen, le savoir, is something other than understanding, comprehension, das Erkenntnis, la connaissance (a distinction somewhat difficult to maintain in English). Lacan insists on this: "What we discover in even the slightest bit of psychoanalytic experience is, indeed, of the order of knowledge and not of acquaintance [connaissance] or representation". Even more: "No, there is nothing in common between the subject of connaissance and the subject of the signifier".
Knowledge is not a matter of understanding. Understanding would be that knowledge which knows itself, which grasps itself and finds itself in objects, the knowledge of representation and correspondence, of adae-quatio, and hence prey to fantasy. "On ne comprend que ses fantasmes," says Lacan in one of his famous slogans, one understands only one's own fantasies. Understanding is fatally entwined with recognition, cognition falls into the trap of re-cognition, reducing the unknown and the foreign to the well-known, known since times immemorial, finding what one always already knew, with the effect of "yes, this is it," or, which is the same, "yes, this is me." Understanding is finding oneself in fantasy, reestablishing its framework to accommodate more and more, enlarging it, not dissipating it, not traversing it—but traversing the fantasy is the point psychoanalysis should lead to, in a process that is contrary to understanding, a dissipation of understanding, and hence an affair of knowledge.
Knowledge that doesn't know itself, and which is assigned to the place of production, the product of the hysteric's discourse, will acquire a key function in the process of analysis, for this knowledge accomplishes the work in analysis. The knowledge does the work. "How could saying no-matter-what lead anywhere, unless it was determined that there is nothing in the random production of signifiers that, simply because it involves signifiers, does not bear upon this knowledge that is not known [qui ne se sait pas], and which is really what is doing the work?" asks Lacan. The work of this knowledge can produce truth, and the initial move of analysis always implies the hysterization of the subject, it reminds him or her of the hysteria he or she might have forgotten.
Since the hysterical subject, with its irreducible negativity, is the principle and the driving force of dialectical progress, the lack of correspondence of the subject to itself and to its own criteria produces a constant sense of "this is not it," that any particular configuration of objectivity and knowledge is inadequate—and this is precisely the formula with which Lacan defines hysterical desire as inherently unsatisfied or even as the desire for dissatisfaction, a desire to remain desire. Hegel actually treats this attitude with a gesture analogous to that of the analyst, that is, by insisting that "this is in fact it," that the very failure to find "it" is "it."
"Hegel as the Other Side of Psychoanalysis", Mladen Dolar, 2006 (in: "Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychonalysis - Reflections in Seminar XVII", 2006)
piątek, 14 lipca 2006
Envious eyes of a caged animal
"It is not hard to detect the influence of Kojeve when the term jouissance first appears in Lacan's work, in the seminar of 1953-54. Here, the term is used exclusively in the context of discussions of the dialectic of the master and the slave, and seems to denote no more than a form of pleasure. Thus, when the master puts the slave to work, the slave produces objects which only the master can possess and enjoy:
'Indeed, beginning with the mythical situation [of the master and the slave], an action is undertaken, and establishes the relation between pleasure [jouissance] and labour. A law is imposed upon the slave, that he should satisfy the desire and the pleasure [jouissance] of the other.'
Thus the slave becomes the paradigm of the obsessional neurotic, who is dead, not to himself, but for his master, because he has effaced his own enjoyment. Giving up his own enjoyment, the obsessional neurotic transfers it onto an imaginary other whom he can then watch with the envious eyes of a caged animal."
"Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis", Edited by Dany Nobus, 1999
czwartek, 13 lipca 2006
Way out of the movement of the unconscious
"The goal of analysis, therefore, would be less to grasp or localize femininity than to lead the subject to realize that this very wish to grasp and localize sustains the deception that the unconscious makes him undergo. The obscure problematic of the two sexes, of a masculine that seeks its guarantor in a feminine that is always elsewhere, is constructed on the basis of a sort of bluffing effect produced by the signifier. The phallus—the signifier designating signified-effects in general—is nothing but this message: there is something that is never so much there, symbolically, as when it is absent. One sex evokes another exactly to the extent that one signifier, S1 by nature, always evokes another, S2. But psychoanalysis does not have to give substance to this Other; that would be to give meaning to meaning, whereas the subject has to be made to understand that meaning is created in the signifying process itself, and that meaning has no meaning. The goal of psychoanalysis, in other words, is not to follow the movement of the unconscious, but to find a way out of that movement, that is, to cause it to change."
"What does a woman want?", Serge Andre, 1999
środa, 05 lipca 2006
Disguised enjoyment
"When the analysand says, "A strange feeling came over me," the subject is relating a kind of unrecognized satisfaction. When the analysand reports suffering or great sadness, a disguised enjoyment is at stake. There is a kind of basic equivalence between affect and jouissance (in Freud's terms, between affect and libido or libidinal discharge)—an equivalence that is systematically misrecognized due to fantasy, due to the ways in which we would like to see ourselves, and the analyst must not miss the occasion to point toward the satisfaction in what the analysand characterizes as "painful" affect. This involves overcoming the patient's resistance to seeing where jouissance really comes from, what it is that really turns him or her on; and it is only by overcoming that resistance that the analysand can then adopt a different position—a different subject position—with respect to this jouissance, with respect to the drives that provide satisfaction. It is only then that the analysand can stop inhibiting his or her "own" pursuit of satisfaction at the level of the id."
"A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis", Bruce Fink, 1997
|
