CHAPTER TWO
Introduction
Even respected commentators on the original work of Jacques Lacan admit that, at least to the uninitiated, his writings can appear almost impossibly daunting (Homer 2005; Bowie 1991; Macey 1994). His contemporary, Jacques Derrida, in an infamous exchange of essays, portrayed Lacan’s work as systematically hermetic, interpreting the labyrinthine Lacanian prose as a protection against reductionistic meaning and epistemology (Derrida 1988). For Derrida, whose own reputation for difficulty is significant, what lies behind the Lacanian question of style is a ‘critique of semanticism’ enacted through the text: ‘The general question of the text is at work unceasingly in his [Lacan’s] writings, where the logic of the signifier disrupts naive semanticism and Lacan’s style was constructed so as to check permanently any access to an isolatable content, to an unequivocal, determinable meaning beyond writing’ (Derrida 1988: 176).
Given this fact, one of the most curious aspects of the subsequent influence of Lacan’s work is that such an esoteric example of the original movement of French structuralism (the term constantly invoked by Žižek et al. to denote that emergent philosophy of the 1960s) (Žižek et al. 2014) will come to have such a significant impact not simply intra-theoretically but also in a practical-political context, on succeeding thought and history. The influence of Lacan and Lacanianism on succeeding radical political thought in France and beyond has been immense. From within France, there are the influences, for example, on Badiou, Balibar and Rancière (Badiou 2009; Balibar 2007). Within the ambit of post-Marxist theory, there is the influence on Mouffe and Laclau, among others (Laclau 1989). And, finally, among our troika of thinkers, we also see this influence which, as Močnik has shown very well, also extended to an interventionist relation to the wider political and social movements in Slovenia (Močnik 1993).
How can such a paradoxical ‘Lacan effect’ be understood? In this chapter, we will set the scene for the microanalysis of each of our troika of thinkers and interviews with Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič which follows, by contextualising this moment of Lacanianism within the work of Lacan’s own thought. Here, we will make reference not only to commentators on Lacan (Homer 2005; Bowie 1991; Macey 1988, 1994) but also to Lacan’s own texts, most notably Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. 1959–1960 (Lacan 1992), Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1994) and Seminar XX, On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973. ENCORE (Lacan 1998). In particular, we will focus on Seminar VII, arguably Lacan’s most important and influential work in the longer term, as well as the latter’s relation to Lacan’s enigmatic essay on ethics published in the Écrits (Lacan 2002a), entitled ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b). We will see, in the interviews, that each of our troika of thinkers privileges not only the sense of an orthodox Lacanianism but also the sense that psychoanalysis, as one understands it, is first and foremost a kind of philosophy (Dolar et al. 2014). This will also highlight Freud’s original sense of psychoanalysis and its already problematic relation to philosophy, which we will discuss in brief. We will also look to a later relation, that between Lacan and Derrida (a famously problematic relation), to foreground some of the meta-level issues between philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis (Derrida 1988; Hurst 2008).
In conclusion, we will speak to the original development of Lacan in Slovenia, the emergence of the Slovene Lacan. We have already looked at this issue in the first chapter from a more sociopolitical and culturalist perspective. In the discussion of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), we also developed some key points about how this thematic was developed in a more artistic context. But philosophically and conceptually, the Slovenian troika or the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis brings something new to the table. Their elaboration of Lacanian concepts and a conceptual framework is thus faithful to Lacan, while it is also developing in originally important directions.
Interpreting Lacan
We will see in the next three chapters the crucial conceptual interpretations of Lacan provided by our troika of thinkers, Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič. But we will also see how specific this interpretation is and how it evolves to a great extent from the particular dynamics of the Ljubljana and Slovenian contexts of politics and interpretation. We have seen in Chapter 1, in a different way, how the NSK evolve a version of Lacanian analysis more suitable to the artistic context of activity, and how this becomes simultaneously, especially polemical and complex (the ‘interrogation machine’ of the NSK as Monroe well describes it, becoming an ‘interrogation of interrogation’ [Monroe 2005]).
But the influence of Lacan extends beyond the Ljubljana troika and the NSK, and, in contemporary philosophy, it is perhaps surprising that this influence has been so strong. One key figure in contemporary French philosophy, whose influence has also extended more globally in recent years, is Alain Badiou (2009). Although not an orthodox Lacanian in the same manner as the troika, Badiou’s work demonstrates a powerful Lacanian element which, not unlike the troika, also sees this emphasis as compatible with a radical form of contemporary Marxism and political analysis.
In his passionate obituary of Lacan, Badiou helps us to understand what for him are the most radical moments of Lacan, which (in Badiou’s eyes) remain both repressed and misunderstood at the time of his death, but which also point the way to the future development of this thinking (with or perhaps beyond Lacan) (Badiou 2009). Indeed, especially with reference to Badiou’s discussion of ‘ethics’ in Lacan’s work, which he sees as paradigmatic in its ‘intractability’, we see the way forward for the elaboration of Badiou’s own seminal text, Ethics (Badiou 2000). This latter text can also be seen to intersect in its interests and problematics, some of the very themes which have been elaborated by Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič in their more politically oriented work. In his most recent text, for example, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Žižek 2012a), and with specific reference to the troika as a group and to an affinity between the troika and Badiou, Žižek refers to the need for a ‘political suspension of the ethical’ (Žižek 2012a). We can see this as a reading which shows the influence of Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992), on Žižek, as well as the influence of Kierkegaard’s three stages of existence, a Kierkegaardian dialectic which is becoming increasingly significant for Žižek (2012a).
What, therefore, represents for Badiou the key intervention of Lacan, what we are calling the ‘Lacan effect’? Peter Hallward, for example, has elaborated the complexity of Badiou’s lineage in his philosophy, drawing on many sources in philosophy and mathematics, but the influence for Hallward of Lacan is clear (and Hallward’s introduction to Badiou’s ethics is also useful in this regard) (Hallward 2000, 2003). In the first case, and against much of the popular view of Lacan as a kind of obscurantist, Badiou makes the claim for Lacan as a radical, a genuinely radical thinker, ‘on the warpath from the very beginning’ (Badiou 2009: 1): ‘it is a fact that Lacan was on the warpath right from the start, denouncing the illusory consistency of the “ego”, rejecting the American psychoanalysis of the 1950s which proposed to “reinforce the ego” and thereby adapt people to the social consensus and arguing that, because it is symbolically determined by language, the subject is irreducibly the subject of desire, and as such cannot be adapted to reality except perhaps in the imaginary’ (Badiou 2009: 1).
We will see, in succeeding chapters, that the thematic of ‘desire’ is crucial for Lacan’s early work and it is perhaps the most important theme in psychoanalysis more generally. However, we will also see that the concept of ‘desire’ shifts in importance and interpretation from the early to the later Lacan texts. This rereading of desire will have a very significant bearing on, for example, the status of what becomes known as the ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’, referring back to Lacan’s seminar of the same name, Seminar VII (Lacan 1992). We will also see this crucial relation between ‘desire’ and the later developing concept of ‘drive’ as central to the Ljubljana troika’s understanding of the relation between ethics and psychoanalysis. This is especially the case, for example, with Zupančič’s work on the ‘ethics of the Real’ (Zupančič 2000). The discussion of the relation (a relation of irreducible tension) between ‘desire’ and ‘drive’ is also central to Lacan’s development of thought from Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1994) to Seminar XX, On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973. ENCORE (Lacan 1998).
Here, in his obituary of Lacan, Badiou gives a helpful contextualization of the rereading of desire in the later texts of Lacan, against his earlier thinking. Badiou tells us that ‘desire has no substance and no nature; it has only a truth’ (Badiou 2009: 2). One of the aspects of this analysis which is also highlighted, for example, by Terry Eagleton in his Figures of Dissent text (Eagleton 2003), is that the message which Lacan is putting forward is not a harmonious one for the ‘human condition’. Eagleton refers to it as a kind of ‘secularisation of the original sin notion’ (Eagleton 2003). Badiou, for his part, concurs with Eagleton, referring to Lacan’s specific reinterpretation of Freudianism as a ‘particularly bleak vision of psychoanalysis’: ‘his particularly bleak vision of psychoanalysis in which it is the truth and not happiness which is in play’ (Badiou 2009: 3). This meta-level reading of Lacanianism will also be important for us in terms of situating Lacan’s psychoanalysis and his renewed interpretation of an ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ in the context of a more traditional genealogy of ethics, starting paradigmatically with Plato and Aristotle. Lacan’s own thematics constantly foreground this relation to ancient philosophical and metaphysical sources, and indeed Badiou writes additionally of the Lacanian relation to the Presocratics, especially Empedocles and Heraclitus (Badiou 2006), a thematic we will return to below.
In the work of both Freud and Lacan, there is a complex relation between psychoanalysis on the one side and the epochal history of thought on the other, extending from the premodern Hellenic period through early and late medieval metaphysics (itself dominated by monotheistic borrowings from Platonic Aristotelianism) and through to the moderns. On one level, psychoanalysis owes a significant debt to the ancient sources. Freud, for example, as we cited in our Introduction, invokes especially the Platonic theory of ‘Eros’ in his seminal writings on sexuality (Freud 1977, 2002a) and the question of an ‘ontological’ crisis (Zupančič 2008b). Lacan similarly pits Heraclitus firmly against the edifice of Aristotelianism at crucial junctures of his thinking on both ‘ethics’ (Lacan 1992) and on ‘drive’ (Lacan 1994). We will see this gesture repeated in our troika, and, for example, we will discuss in succeeding chapters the brilliant exposition of Plato’s The Symposium (Plato 1961) in Zupančič’s The Odd One In: On Comedy (Zupančič 2008a), which allows her to recast the Freudian/Lacanian conception of sex in classically Platonic terms (albeit as refracted through the enigmatic and comedic figure of Aristophanes).
Alongside this avowed classical (and particularly Heraclitean–Platonic as opposed to Aristotelian) inheritance in psychoanalysis, there is nonetheless a simultaneous disavowal of premodern metaphysics as ‘naive’ or merely ‘figurative’ and the avowal of psychoanalysis as an irreducibly modernist phenomenon. Even Descartes’ Meditations (and thus the paradigm of Cartesianism) is seen as overly influenced by a residual metaphysics in this regard and if the concept of the ‘cogito’ is to be reclaimed, it can only be done so as the ‘cogito of the unconscious’ through a properly Kantian moment, as Dolar eloquently argues (Dolar 1998). Psychoanalysis is thus, by definition, post-Kantian. Indeed, we can go further and say that, from the orthodox Lacanian position adopted by the troika of the Ljubljana school, that ‘philosophy begins only with Kant’ (Žižek et al. 2014).
At issue here, then, is also a radical rereading by Lacan of the Freudian inheritance. Lacan is constantly the one to reiterate his being a ‘Freudian’, as he does polemically (and infamously) against any attempt to instigate a ‘Lacanian’ psychoanalysis in his name at his last talk in Caracas in 1981. ‘It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish. I am a Freudian’ (Macey 1988: 257). Similarly, Lacan is insistent in his emphasizing of the motto of ‘a return to Freud’ to describe on a meta- level his interpretation of psychoanalysis as such in the seminars and the Écrits (Lacan 2002a). Nonetheless, these pronouncements only intensified the censure of much of the psychoanalytical community against Lacan, both in France and abroad, especially in America where his disdain for the ‘ego psychology’ interpretation of Freudianism was so controversial. It is in this context, for example, that we can best understand the title of his opening essay in Seminar XI, on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1994), called ‘Excommunication’. As Macey (1994) and Badiou (2009) make clear, this conceptual title refers also to the very real excommunication of Lacan from the standard psychoanalytical associations: Lacan was ‘excommunicated by the psychoanalytic international’ (Badiou 2009: 2). Such gestures of iconoclasm against the established authorities are very much also a part of the philosophical style of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. In his important introduction to his first major monograph in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek launches a comparable attack on the attempt by Herbert Marcuse to combine critical theory and Freudianism, lambasting it as ‘psychoanalytical essentialism’ (Žižek 1989).
Alongside the conceptual developments and intricacies, we can also say that there is a crucial political dimension to the whole relation to psychoanalysis. This politicized aspect to Lacanianism is one of its most influential and significant contributions to contemporary thought. Freud was already well aware, for example, of the sociopolitical implications of bringing his psychoanalysis to a wider audience; witness his infamous quip on arriving in the United States that he was bringing the ‘plague’ (Bowie 1991). Lacan’s own relation to an explicit politics was always highly ambiguous. As Badiou (2009) states, for Lacan, political ideology is often misconceived and naive from a psychoanalytical perspective. In a related key, we might cite Lacan’s criticism of the most significant explosion of leftist politics in the 1960s, the moment of May 1968, when he offers warnings concerning the psychological motivations of the young protestors (indicating their desire for a ‘master’ figure) (Bowie 1991).
But alongside this explicit political reticence, a more vehement politicization emerges from within Lacan’s thinking, especially as it develops from early to late. Perhaps the most striking example of this is the increasing significance which the concept of the ‘Real’ is given in Lacan’s philosophy in his later works, coming to be increasingly at odds with (and subversive of) the earlier hegemonic register of the ‘symbolic’ (Bowie 1991; Homer 2005). We can see this exact thematic (as well as its overt political resonances) being taken up by the succeeding thinkers who invoke Lacan, from the case of Badiou’s own militant politics (Badiou 2009) to the nuanced philosophical leftism of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis (Žižek 2000). In his obituary of Lacan, this is one of the key points which Badiou takes up. What Badiou finds striking as we have described it, is not simply the political dimension of Lacanianism but rather the juxtaposition of the critique of political ideology (which appears to rule out a political position tout court), alongside such a radical political aspect.
Part of this issue of politics relates back to the previous discussion of Lacan’s ‘excommunication’ from the orthodox Freudian schools. Lacan’s alternative ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’, at odds with the therapeutism of the ego psychology interpretation, thus culminates in a new school, ‘his own school’; ‘The need to organise the transmission of his thought and to train analysts who would work in accordance with what he believed to be the ethics of psychoanalytic practice, led him to found his own school’ (Badiou 2009: 3). But this new ethics is also a new politics of psychoanalysis, and Lacan’s criticisms of therapeutism are not simply on issues concerning the intra-textual readings of Freud. At issue, as stated by Badiou, is also a whole politics of ‘transmission’, where therapeutic practices are seen as simply justifications for the political status quo. It is the antagonism to precisely this sociopolitical conservatism which is at the heart of Badiou’s reference to Lacan ‘being on the warpath from the very beginning’ (Badiou 2009). We will return to this issue in a moment in exploring how Badiou addresses the problematic of the Marxist relation to Lacan’s thought (and here Badiou, in 2009, is very much thinking of the relation to a contemporary Marxism). We will also see this Marxist dimension (‘Lacan and Marx’) addressed by each of our troika of thinkers in their respective interviews. Laclau, in his preface to Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology, set the scene for this reception of the ‘Lacan and Marx dimension’ in the English-speaking world (Laclau 1989). But we have seen, in Chapter 1, how this evolution of the problematic was already very well developed in Slovenia through the early 1970s and early 1980s. It is also precisely this radical political edge of Lacanianism which constitutes the lever for the moment of ‘breakthrough’, as, for example, Močnik (1993) describes it. We have also seen how this was far from being simply a contribution to academic discourse on the political. In the former Yugoslavia at least, and especially in Slovenia, Lacan and Lacanianism came to have a highly significant impact on the politics of everyday life as well as more centralized institutionalized political questions, as Slovenia developed these latter problematics both before and after national independence (Močnik 1993; Gantar 1993; Žižek 1997).
Psychoanalysis and philosophy
Alongside the political importance of psychoanalysis, and despite the protestations of Lacan to the contrary, there is the complex question of the relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Macey’s seminal (but also highly controversial) interpretative text on Lacan and Lacanianism, entitled Lacan in Contexts (Macey 1988), is one of the most interesting attempts to provide a genealogy of the evolution of Lacan’s thinking. It is controversial for one reason, because it accuses much so-called Lacanianism of deliberately forgetting the developmental aspect of psychoanalysis and focusing instead on a counter-productive and obscurantist ‘myth of the hero’: ‘For a long time, the reader of Lacan has been faced with a stark dilemma: total acceptance or total rejection. In one sense, this is a reflection of the fierce loyalties and hatreds inspired by a redoubtable individual, and of the sectarian affections that are so often inspired by psychoanalysis. But it is also an effect of the illusion that Lacan’s work is a whole which is entire unto itself, that it has no basis in five decades of French intellectual life, that it is the result of some immaculate theoretical conception. If his work is to be evaluated critically, rather than being rejected out of hand or reproduced with filial piety, that illusion must be dispelled’ (Macey 1988: x).
Rather than being a creation ex nihilo (‘some immaculate theoretical conception’), then, Macey powerfully maps out the coordinates of Lacan’s thought, as it draws from a history of French psychiatry, from Freud, from surrealism and from the history of philosophy. In the latter case, the thematic of the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis, which will become a crucial theme for the troika of Ljubljana thinkers in its own right, is foregrounded (Zupančič 2008b). As Macey demonstrates, the relation between psychoanalysis and philosophy is problematical from the inception of Freud’s thinking onwards. For example, Macey notes that ‘Freud’s epistemologically and metapsychologically based suspicions of philosophy are voiced on a number of occasions, but rarely more clearly than in the New Introductory Lectures of 1932–33. Here, he explicitly argues that psychoanalysis is antithetical to the elaboration of a specific Weltanschauung’ (Macey 1988: 76). Nonetheless, despite this suspicion (voiced even more vehemently in Freud’s diagnostic of the illusory satisfactions of the ‘total philosophical system’ as a form of ‘paranoia’ and an ‘overevaluation of the magic of words’ [Macey 1988: 77]), we have nonetheless seen in the Introduction that Freud often relies on philosophical sources. The most obvious case in point is the example of Plato’s philosophy of the erotic, which Freud draws on crucially in his early lectures on sexuality (Freud 1977) as well as in later key texts such as Civilisation and Its Discontents (Freud 2002a).
The relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis, in the case of Lacan, is perhaps more complex again. Badiou (2006), for example, has drawn attention to the strong Presocratic philosophical influence on Lacan, most notably in the case of Heraclitus, who Lacan explicitly posits against what he sees as the diametrically opposed philosophical influence of Parmenides. Similarly, Badiou makes reference to the influence of Empedocles on Lacan’s conception of an intractable ‘strife’ in life, which will go on to influence his later formulations of the concept of the ‘Real’ (Badiou 2006). In Seminar XI, for example, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1994), the notion of ‘drive’ (in effect, ‘death drive’) is seen as connecting back to the figure of Heraclitus and his image of a bow in tension between life and death (Lacan 1994).
But, as with Freud, Lacan can also be very vehement in his more explicit rejections of philosophical influence. As Macey notes, in both cases ‘the critique of philosophy is also a defence of psychoanalysis’ (Macey 1988: 78). We know that there is a very tense relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis in university settings, and for example, in France, the development of the Department of Psychoanalysis at Vincennes is an interesting case in point (Macey 1988: 90), with Lacan’s daughter Judith and son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller being at the helm. Miller especially, and his very particular reading of Lacan (in addition to him being the authorized and exclusive editor of the seminars), has been a very significant influence on the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. Both Žižek and Dolar studied closely with Miller in Paris (Žižek et al. 2014) and Zupančič also refers to his specific readings of Lacan. But Miller is also far from being a universally accepted figure, even within Lacanian circles, and there has been much controversy surrounding the politics of psychoanalysis, and the legacy of Lacan, in this regard (Macey 1988).
Going back to 1975, for example, two key philosophers at Vincennes perceived the situation at the Department of Psychoanalysis to be sufficiently acute as to require a very strongly worded riposte and intra-institutional critique. In the wake of several staff ‘firings’, Jean Francois Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze in a short piece entitled ‘Concerning the Vincennes Psychoanalysis Department’ (Lyotard and Deleuze 1993: 69) say the following: ‘What psychoanalysis presents as its knowledge is accompanied by a kind of intellectual and emotional terrorism that is suitable for breaking down resistances that are said to be unhealthy. It is already disturbing when this operation is carried out between psychoanalysts, or between psychoanalysts and patients, for a certified therapeutic goal. But it is much more disturbing when the same operation seeks to break down resistances of a completely different kind, in a teaching section that declares itself to have no intention of “looking after” or “training” psychoanalysts’. Lyotard and Deleuze go on to specifically identify Lacan’s position as a supposed authority in this seemingly malignant context: ‘A veritable unconscious blackmail is directed against opponents, under the prestige and in the presence of Dr Lacan, in order to impose his decisions without any possibility of discussion’ (Lyotard and Deleuze 1993: 69). We can also note the polemical atmosphere in French philosophy with regard to Freud and Lacan, for example, in highly charged anti-psychoanalytical texts such as Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004) Anti-Oedipus. We will return below to the related example of the inter-textual communications between Lacan and Derrida (Hurst 2008).
With this background in mind, it is hardly surprising that Lacan should oftentimes seek to defend psychoanalysis against philosophical attack. As Macey notes, one can also argue that this critique of philosophy on behalf of Lacan goes significantly beyond a localized dispute: ‘Lacan clearly does not subscribe to Freud’s tacit positivism but he does display the overt distrust of philosophy, arguing that the very term “world-view” is antithetical to psychoanalytic discourse and even that all “philosophical – ologies (onto, theo, cosmo and psycho alike) contradict the basic tenet of the existence of the unconscious”’ (Macey 1988: 81). One of the complexities of this situation is the way in which this ‘overt distrust’ of philosophy is not something in any way shared by the later Lacanian development. The so-called ‘Slovene Lacan’ as evolved from the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis is a Lacan completely at home with philosophy, this variant of (non-clinical and ‘theoretical’) psychoanalysis being one which, while remaining a distinct discipline, is nonetheless in constant dialogue with philosophical concepts and the philosophical tradition. Again, we can say that Lacanian orthodoxy as understood by Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič is far from being literalist, and rather constitutes orthodoxy as ‘transformation’ (Dolar et al. 2014). Despite the different conceptions of the exact relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis, however, (and Macey also notes how Lacan’s conception of the history of philosophy is naively ‘traditionalist’), there is also a strong continuity in relation to a certain illusion of ‘mastery’ which the philosophical tradition often posits. As Macey observes, ‘his (Lacan’s) objections to the project of totalisation crystallize in the critique of the “discourse of the Master”, one of the four discourses . . .’ (Macey 1988: 81). Thus, the overt distrust of philosophy also relates back to Freud’s diagnostic reading of some of the intentionality behind philosophical and metaphysical system building in the history of thought. In his later seminar, Seminar XX, On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973. ENCORE (Lacan 1998), Lacan powerfully parodies this system building in a punning sentence which draws on the French literary tradition, from Cinna (Corneille’s heroic drama of 1640): ‘Je suis m’être, je progresse dans la m’etrise, je suis m’être de moi comme de l’univers’ (‘I am my-being: I progress in my-being/mastery; I am master/my-being of myself and of the universe’) (Macey 1988: 82). This attempt at universalizing mastery is seen as characteristic of philosophy as a discipline and at the root of the overt distrust from psychoanalysis vis-à-vis such philosophy.
Significantly, the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis vehemently continue this disavowal of system building and overarching or totalizing philosophies. However, where they discontinue with Lacan’s reading of philosophy is in their precise affirmation of a non-totalizing philosophical practice. A recent powerful example of this simultaneous critique and affirmation of philosophy is Zupančič’s text Why Psychoanalysis?: Three Interventions (Zupančič 2008b). There, invoking both Freud and Lacan, Zupančič attempts to demonstrate how even the most seemingly anti-philosophical of psychoanalytical concepts, for example that of ‘sexuality’, can be seen as precisely inaugurating a renewed philosophical epistemology and ontology, sensitive to the gaps and aporias of a more authentic existence (Zupančič 2008b). Here, philosophy seems to have completely rejected the ‘discourse of the master’ on Lacan’s terms and sought to work through some of the ‘paranoia’ which Freud seems to ascribe to the philosophical will to system building (Macey 1988).
Psychoanalysis and surrealism
The tendency to see Lacan’s psychoanalysis in terms of a ‘for’ or ‘against’ mentality has already been described, and Macey describes how this is at least partly the result of a tendency to occlude the real genealogy of influence on French psychoanalysis (Macey 1988). In such a context, Lacan’s thought takes on the appearance of pure autonomy and independence. Pointing rather to the complexity of influence which is present in Lacan’s thought allows us not only to see his borrowings and dependencies, but also to see that the weaknesses and strengths of his approach are not simply his weaknesses and strengths, but partly at least are shared by other movements and schools of thought. Nonetheless, this is not to say that Lacan’s thought is wholly unoriginal and certainly, as we will see, there are particular aspects and interpretations which are quite unique to him.
One aspect of his genealogy which demonstrates both these facets, his borrowings and his originality, is his relation to surrealism. As Bowie (1991) and Macey (1988) describe in some detail, the relation to surrealist thought and art is very significant in Lacan’s work. Nonetheless, he is far from being an orthodox surrealist and if he does utilize many surrealist motifs and ideas (not always explicitly), it can also be said that he redeploys these conceptions in a very different context from their original one. In this, we might argue that he has far more in common with so-called ‘dissident surrealists’ such as Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski (Irwin 2010) than he has with more orthodox surrealist figures such as Breton (Macey 1988). As Macey (1988: 45) notes, ‘surrealism is the only identifiable “school” to which Lacan refers so consistently’. But what does Lacan define as surrealism? Typically, he gives a very idiosyncratic and provocative definition of the latter: ‘[surrealism is] a tornado on the edge of an atmospheric depression where the norms of humanist individualism founder’ (Macey 1988: 46).
As Irwin (2010) has argued in his book on Derrida, Derrida and the Writing of the Body, the French avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s remains a very underestimated source for later philosophical thinking. It is clear, for example, in a crucial Derridean text like Writing and Difference (from 1967), that the influence of this avant-garde is far stronger on Derrida than the simultaneous influence of phenomenology; nonetheless, commentators tend to emphasize the latter at the expense of the former. In Derrida’s case, the main influences can be said to be Artaud and Bataille, among others (Irwin 2010). The situation with Lacan is not dissimilar. As Macey (1988: 47) notes, ‘the inflections of his discourse are profoundly marked by his encounter with the tornado of surrealism’. This influence of surrealism is both artistic and philosophical. In the case of art, we might note among many others the influence of the work of Salvador Dali and André Masson on Lacan. Indeed, in the former case, there was also a very strong relationship between Freud and Dali, although Freud was far more suspicious of the general surrealist movement led by Breton (Macey 1988). But what of surrealist philosophy? Here, we can look ahead in order to look back. One of the key questions which we will pose to the Ljubljana troika of thinkers, Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič, is precisely ‘why Lacan?’. That is, in the context of the wider influence of what Žižek et al. (2014) refers to more generally as ‘French structuralism’ on earlier 1970s Slovenian thought, what were the factors which led to the more specific and singular commitment to Lacanianism from the late 1970s onwards? We have seen how this commitment to Lacan was not simply exclusive to our troika of thinkers under discussion, but it was part of a wider ‘Slovenian Lacan’ which was to have a very significant impact on the relationship between theory and political life in Slovenia leading up to independence (Močnik 1993). This Lacanianism went beyond the philosophers and also came to be central to the avant-garde and artistic movements, brought together under the banner of the NSK (Močnik 1993; Motoh 2012).
One way to understand the specificity of Lacan vis-à-vis the other main structuralist thinkers (Althusser, Foucault etc.) is to see his work in the context of the very particular influence of surrealist thought and philosophy. As Macey makes us aware, the surrealists are misunderstood if one sees them simply as an aesthetic phenomenon. Instead, the ‘intellectual breadth’ and philosophical radicalism of their work is perhaps the most striking aspect. ‘These manipulators of signs and symbols irrevocably altered the intellectual landscape of France’ (Macey 1988: 49). In the ‘Surrealist Manifesto’ of 1924, Breton defines surrealism in a ‘once and for all’ manner as: ‘pure psychic automatism, by which we propose to express the real functioning of thought, verbally, in writing, or by any other means. The dictation of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason and regardless of any aesthetic or moral preoccupations’ (Macey 1988: 51). Breton goes on to magnify the definition and more in philosophical or conceptual terms: ‘a belief in the higher reality of certain forms of associations which have hitherto been neglected, in the omnipotence of dreams and in the disinterested play of thought’ (Macey 1988: 51).
The influence among the surrealists of Bataille on Lacan is perhaps more striking than that of Breton, as Bataille rejects what he sees as the ‘residual idealism’ of Breton’s approach to the notion of ‘Eros’ in surrealist thought (Mundy 2006; Bataille 2001). This leads to Bataille being referred to as a ‘dissident surrealist’ in philosophical terms (Ades and Bradley 2006: 11). We will see a similar critique of idealism coming from Lacan in his Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1994). Additionally, the close and rather bizarre family ties linking Bataille and Lacan (with Lacan marrying Bataille’s ex-wife Sylvia and adopting Bataille’s daughter Laurence to whom he will become very close) have been well documented and are another key feature of their relation (Macey 1988). It is clear that while Bataille seems to have overtly avoided reading Lacan, that Lacan was a close and highly influenced reader of Bataille. The lack of explicit acknowledgement of this element by Lacan is significant in itself.
The strong connections to Bataille’s thinking, as well as to related dissidents such as Pierre Klossowski (1991), bring Lacan into dialogue with a very particular tradition of French thinking, going back at least to Sade (and we will see the importance of Sade’s philosophy to Lacan below). Charles Taylor (2007), in his recent text A Secular Age, has foregrounded another possible way of interpreting this line of intellectual development. Here, Bataille and Lacan can be seen to have inherited the spirit of what Taylor refers to as the ‘immanent Counter-Enlightenment’ in French literature, the poet maudits or damned poets, such as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Lautréamont and Mallarmé espousing an ‘immanent transcendence’ (Taylor 2007). This is also very much the key thematic of Macey’s analysis of Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis, which he views as having been decontextualized from this pre-history (Macey 1988).
Another reinforcement of this view can be claimed from the rereading of Sade practised within this tradition, which is clearly borrowed by Lacan (2002b) in his reading of ‘Kant and Sade’, as we will see below in more detail. Susan Sontag (2001), in her essay ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, foregrounds this reinterpretation of the Marquis De Sade (Sontag 2001: 96) after World War II: the crucial ‘importance of the reinterpretation of Sade after World War II by French intellectuals . . . a crucial point of departure for radical thinking about the human condition’ (Sontag 2001: 102). She notes what she terms ‘the prevailing view of sexuality as a perfectly intelligible source of emotional and physical pleasure’ (Sontag 2001: 102). It is ‘these assumptions [which] are challenged in the French Sadean tradition’ (Sontag 2001: 102). Here, the link ahead to Lacan is undeniable but, as Lacan tries to show in ‘Kant with Sade’, there is also a strong connecting link between this avant-garde tradition and Freud’s own original insights. In this context, the rereading of Freudian texts such as Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud 1977) and Civilisation and Its Discontents (Freud 2002a) in light of this avant-garde would be especially important. This, perhaps surprisingly, is not a line of interpretation which has been developed directly by the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, although Žižek especially has been explicit in connecting Lacan with surrealism (Žižek 1997). Here, the reference to surrealist cinema has been especially important for Žižek, whether in the shape of earlier surrealists such as Luis Buñuel, or later in the evolution of a more differentiated surrealism in auteurs such as Alfred Hitchcock or David Lynch (Žižek 1997). Hitchcock’s cinema has taken on paradigmatic significance not simply for Žižek but for the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis as such, for example in their important collection of essays from 1992, edited by Žižek and containing several contributions also from Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič, entitled Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (Žižek 1992b).
The final reference to surrealism which we can make in this context vis-à-vis Lacan and Lacanianism, is in relation to the reading or reinterpretation of Hegel during the period of surrealism (Baugh 2005). Bruce Baugh, for example, in his seminal text, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (Baugh 2005), provides some very helpful historical contextualization of this problematic and begins by complicating ‘the notion that Kojève’s lectures brought Hegel to France’ (Baugh 2005: 1). This argument with regard to Kojève underestimates the influence of surrealism, Marxism and also Jean Wahl, whose book on the ‘unhappy consciousness’ in Hegel precedes Kojève by a decade, beginning in 1929/1939.
We know that Lacan did diligently attend Kojève’s lectures on Hegel, although we also know that, in many respects, the interpretation of Hegel which he developed on this basis has been significantly criticized by recent commentators. Indeed, this is one of Dolar’s key points in his discussion of the Hegel and Lacan relation in his interview (Dolar et al. 2014). Briefly put, Kojève, according to Dolar, misreads Hegel as an ‘anthropological thinker’, and accords too much significance (almost exclusive significance) in his reading of Hegel’s texts specifically to the Phenomenology of Spirit. In broad outline, Lacan follows Kojève in his analysis of Hegel. But Dolar’s claim will be that the strong influence of Hegel on the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis is not a Hegel understood through this line of thought. Rather, for Dolar and the troika, here Lacan must be read somewhat against Lacan, so as to delineate a reading of Hegel (and indeed of Lacan) which is ‘orthodox’ but not literalist. Another feature here of this scene of interpretation concerning surrealism which is significant is the relation between these early readings of Hegel in 1920s and 1930s France and the philosophy of Kierkegaard. The philosophy of Kierkegaard is often presented as completely opposed and mutually exclusive with the Hegelian system, but during this period, as Baugh (2005: 5) shows, the interpretations of Hegel by the ‘neo-Kierkegaardian’ Jean Wahl also developed a penetrating analysis of ‘a self divided against itself, an internally divided and self-alienated subject; a subject that strives vainly for synthesis but instead oscillates between self and non-self, being and nothingness’. The description here of this divided self (with its hybrid of Hegel and Kierkegaard’s philosophies) strikingly anticipates some of Lacan’s own pronouncements on the notion of the ‘subject’ (for example, Lacan 1994). The early work of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis certainly seemed to favour a strong relation between Lacan and Hegel (but without explicit reference to Kierkegaard). However, it is perhaps unsurprising, given the reference to Wahl and surrealism, that more recent works of the troika have seen Kierkegaard’s philosophy take on a more important role in breaking through some of the remaining philosophical ‘deadlocks’, most notably in one of Žižek’s most substantial and important recent texts, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Žižek 2012a). We will return to this thematic in the chapter on Žižek and also in our Epilogue.
In the next two sections, having previously explored some of the key influences on Lacan in relation to philosophy and surrealism, we will turn to the more specific detail of Lacan’s own texts and his foregrounding of paradigmatic concepts and thematics. Here, we will take the crucial thematic of ‘ethics’ or ‘the ethics of psychoanalysis’ as it is developed especially in Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992) but also as it relates to the important essay in the Écrits (Lacan 2002a), entitled ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b). We will begin with an analysis of the latter, moving back to its connections with the former work. We will also attempt to briefly trace some of the key developments of this thematic as it relates to two important seminars: Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1994) and Seminar XX, On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973. ENCORE (Lacan 1998). As we will see in succeeding chapters on our troika of thinkers, Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič, this thematic and these specific Lacanian seminars will also play a pivotal role in the evolution of the ‘Slovenian Lacan’. We will briefly return to this question of the relation between the seminars (Lacan 1992, 1994, 1998) and the more contemporary philosophical concepts of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, in the conclusion to this chapter.
‘Kant with Sade’
Lacan’s infamous and provocative essay ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b), published in the Écrits (Lacan 2002a), was originally intended to serve as a preface to a new edition of the Marquis de Sade’s own Philosophy in the Bedroom (Sade 1980). It was eventually published in the journal Critique, a journal with strong surrealist associations, having been founded and edited for a long period by Bataille. The essay shows definite surrealist influences, not least in its very juxtaposition of two intellectual figures from very different worlds; Kant, the arch-figure of dutiful Germanic morality, and Sade, the paradigm figure of French libertinage and rabid anti-moralism. In this section, we will employ some of the detail of this curious Lacan text to explore some of the philosophical problems which will be more systematically developed by Lacan in his seminars, and especially in Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992).
What Lacan’s essay ‘Kant with Sade’ does first of all is to rehabilitate the figure of Sade philosophically. Against the view that Sadean thought is simply a catalogue of the perverse (Lacan 2002b: 765), Lacan is keen to stress a certain philosophical lineage, extending all the way back to the Platonic Academy: ‘I, on the contrary, maintain that the Sadean bedroom is of the same stature as those places from which the schools of ancient philosophy borrowed their names: Academy, Lyceum and Stoa. Here as there, one paves the way for science by rectifying one’s ethical position’ (Lacan 2002b: 765). What Lacan has added here, then, is a sense of philosophical importance as well as a more specific intervention: the rectification of one’s ethical position. Ethics, from a psychoanalytical perspective, consequently, will involve a revolution in how we think ethically, in how we position ourselves ethically.
As Lacan notes, there is a process of ‘subversion’ going on here in relation to both the history of philosophy and the history of ethics. But the subversion is not simply from the Sadean side. Against appearances, Kantian ethics is also, for Lacan, subversive. Moreover, it is subversive in a way which brings it into close proximity with the thought of Sade. This is the shocking aspect of Lacan’s essay, most of all that Sade and Kant would somehow be in philosophical and ‘ethical’ complicity in their simultaneous critique of the tradition. Lacan notes the originality of this thesis: ‘Sade represents here the first step of a subversion of which Kant, as piquant as this may seem in light of the coldness of the man himself, represents the turning point – something that has never been pointed out as such, to the best of my knowledge’ (Lacan 2002b: 645). For Lacan, Sade in this text can be said to ‘complete’ the meaning of the Kantian ethical critique but the latter is here understood in terms of an unconventional ‘subversive core’ which leads the reader to an ‘incredible exaltation’ (Lacan 2002b: 646), although Lacan is also clear that this radical experience is not open to those who view Kant with the usual ‘academic piety’ (Lacan 2002b: 646). This opening section of Lacan’s essay thus claims to be about an extraordinary story about ethics and philosophy, a story which might seem to turn all the usual moral understandings on their heads. Again, in this very moment of ‘subversive’ thinking, we are reminded precisely of the revolutionary aims of Breton as the originator of surrealism, for example, in his claim that the most exemplary surrealist act would be to run out into the street and fire a gun at passers-by at random (Macey 1988).
As Walter Benjamin puts it in his essay ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (Benjamin 1979: 236), ‘since Bakunin, Europe has lacked a radical concept of freedom. The Surrealists have one’. Benjamin’s essay is also instructive for us in the measure to which it takes direct aim at what it calls the complicity between ‘idealistic morality’ and (leftist) ‘political practice’ (Benjamin 1979: 234). At stake for both Benjamin and Lacan here is an attempt to subvert the residual moralism of supposedly radical philosophy and/or psychoanalysis. We have already seen this in terms of Lacan’s being (in Badiou’s phrase) ‘on the warpath from the very beginning’ (Badiou 2009) against, for example, ego psychology. But this attack on ego psychology is misunderstood if it is simply understood as a localized spat between psychoanalysis and more conservative psychology. Rather, what is at stake here is a whole politics of knowledge and the way in which certain kinds of knowledge can be used to reinforce the status quo. This is precisely Lacan’s concern – that the radical implications of Freudianism are being domesticated and used in the service of a therapeutic culture which will only succeed in reinforcing the very same conventions which Freud (2002a) exposes as a lie. It is the same point which Žižek makes against Marcuse’s ‘psychoanalytical essentialism’ in his introduction to The Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek 1989). In the supposed radical Marcuse texts surrounding 1968 and the student revolts, Žižek can only detect a ruse for a domesticating conservatism.
In his obituary of Lacan, Badiou (2009) takes this radical critique one stage further, and here he is directly in accordance with Benjamin’s reading of surrealism. What differentiates Badiou’s reading of Lacan here is that he applies it directly to the hypocrises (as he sees them) of contemporary leftist or supposedly emancipatory ‘Marxist’ thought. We will see in later chapters that Žižek also directs his attention towards such supposedly ‘revolutionary’ political discourse (Žižek 1989). Against all appearances to the contrary for Badiou, Lacan (in his very disavowals of political ideology) is precisely offering the most radical critique of ideology. Such a critique of ideology, to be pertinent in a very complex contemporary scene of interpretation, will have to invoke not simply the ‘political’ but also the notion of the ‘ethical’. In relation to the notion of both, no conventional understandings will be possible but each conception (or process) will have to be radically reworked. Here, we see the direct connection back to Lacan’s thematics in ‘Kant with Sade’ and in Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and succeeding seminars. As Lacan puts it there, ‘one paves the way for science by rectifying one’s ethical position’ (Lacan 2002b: 765).
The detail of the discussion in ‘Kant with Sade’ is too intricate to describe in total but here we can perhaps focus on one aspect of it which is particularly relevant to our thematic of the ‘Lacan effect’. That is, Lacan’s rereading in this context of the Sadean inheritance, the philosophical framework of Sade’s work, which he cites as having been completely misunderstood. Although Macey (1988) is right to point to an obscurantist tendency in Lacan (and Lacanianism) which tends to obscure the genealogy of Lacan’s influences, in this case it is interesting that he does cite one significant precursor. Near the conclusion of ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b), Lacan refers to Pierre Klossowski’s work, Sade, mon prochain (Sade, My Neighbour) (Klossowski 1991), as particularly important for the rereading of Sade that he is proposing. We have already mentioned Susan Sontag’s foregrounding of this dissident surrealist reinterpretation of Sade in the 1930s and 1940s, and her key point of reference was Bataille (Sontag 2001). But Klossowski’s reading is as important if not more important to Lacan than that of Bataille. In his footnotes to the essay, Lacan comments that: ‘Sade, mon prochain is the title of Klossowski’s work that was published by Seuil in 1947. It is the only contemporary contribution to the Sadean question that does not strike me as marred by the tics of the highbrow literati’ (Lacan 2002b: 668). A brief exploration of Klossowski’s rereading of Sade will thus allow us to understand somewhat more precisely what Lacan means by the notion of ‘rectifying one’s ethical position’ (Lacan 2002b: 765). We will also see how this relates to Badiou’s reading of Lacan’s critique of ideological Marxism in the obituary (Badiou 2009). At stake here is the relation between ‘ethics’ and ‘politics’, and a refusal of the tendency, in Mouffe’s terms, to bring about a ‘moralisation’ or a ‘moralising’ of the political sphere (Mouffe 2005). Instead, we are seeking here rather what Žižek refers to as a ‘political suspension of the ethical’ (Žižek 2012a).
But what of Klossowski’s rereading of Sade? What is crucial to understand here is the recontextualization of Sade’s work, outside the traditional reading of his work as a wild, naturalized ‘liberation of desire’ (Lacan 1992). This, of course, was also the dominant reading of psychoanalysis and Freudianism, not just from its opponents, but also from its supposed defenders such as those in ‘ego psychology’ who would seek to overcome traditional prohibitions, especially of the sexual kind. Understood in this way, psychoanalysis is about becoming at ease (‘becoming natural’) with one’s sexuality. Sade would obviously represent a more radical version of this ideology than Freud, but still, Sade too is interpreted traditionally in this way. But when Lacan tells us in his introduction to The Ethics of Psychoanalysis that ‘the liberation of desire has failed’ (Lacan 1992), he is already indicating that his ‘return to Freud’ will not be on such terms.
In Sontag’s terms, we can refer to the liberationist reading as ‘the prevailing view of sexuality as a perfectly intelligible source of emotional and physical pleasure’ (Sontag 2001: 102). However, for Sontag as for Lacan, it is ‘these assumptions [which] are challenged in the French Sadean tradition’ (Sontag 2001: 102). This alternative tradition is where we can also authentically locate Freud and Lacan and the psychoanalysis of sexuality, or to use Freud’s preferred term ‘psychosexuality’ (Freud 1977). In this alternative tradition, the obscene is a primary notion of human consciousness, human sexuality is a highly questionable and contested phenomenon and there are extreme and demonic forces in consciousness which are linked to the desire for death. Of course, the latter notion especially will increasingly come to dominate discussions of sexuality and the erotic in psychoanalysis, in Freud’s later work and in Lacan’s work from the beginning (Freud 2002a). Nonetheless, as we shall see, the emphasis on death drive and simply on ‘drive’ (Lacan 1994) should not be seen as excluding the emphasis on ‘eros’ or ‘desire’. This has also been a key point of contestation for the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, as we shall see. If their early work, especially that of Žižek, can be seen as somewhat overstressing the notion of ‘drive’ (also the related notion of the ‘Real’), more recently the work of Dolar and Zupančič (Zupančič 2008a) can be seen as redressing this imbalance, with a renewed stress on the concepts of ‘love’ and a notion of ‘drive’ mediated by ‘desire’ (e.g., through the notion of comedy in Plato’s The Symposium [Zupančič 2008a]).
Lacan’s very affirmative comments on Klossowski’s reading of Sade can be read in the specific context of Klossowski’s 1947 essay ‘Under the Mask of Atheism’, which is included as part of his text Sade, My Neighbour (Klossowski 1991). In a highly idiosyncratic and original reading of Sade, Klossowski argues that the Sadean system which appears focused on the concepts of ‘Nature’ and ‘perpetual motion’ is, in fact, a transposition of themes connected with that which works ‘against nature’. Here, we can refer back to what we discussed above concerning Lacan’s critique of what he termed the ‘natural liberation of desire’. Just as psychoanalysis (whether of Freud or of Lacan) is completely misunderstood if it is seen as advocating some kind of ‘free desire’, so too in the case of Sade. At least on Klossowski’s terms (and in ‘Kant with Sade’ Lacan follows Klossowski’s analysis more than any other), Sade’s philosophy operates in the exact opposite manner with regard to desire and sexuality: ‘The terms Nature and perpetual motion have served only to transfer the mystery and incomprehensibility of God into metaphysical entities, without resolving or exhausting that mystery of being which is the possibility of evil and of nothingness’ (Klossowski 1991: 99).
The problem with the notion of ‘nature’ or ‘what is natural’, then, is that it simply repeats the very metaphysics from which it is supposedly attempting to liberate us. Against such notions of ‘nature’ or ‘natural sexual desire’ (or related Enlightenment ideas such as ‘freedom’, ‘autonomy’ etc.), Klossowski instead foregrounds completely antithetical concepts in his analysis of what is crucial in Sade’s discourse on sex: ‘the possibility of evil and of nothingness’ (Klossowski 1991: 99). Far from being the ultimate modernist, Sade is rather pre-modern, invoking concepts and experiences which constitute a reawakening of the most ancient sources: ‘In the soul of this libertine great lord of the century of Enlightenment, very old mental structures are reawakened; it is impossible not to recognise the whole ancient system of the Manichean gnosis, the visions of Basilides, Valentinus, and especially Marcion’ (Klossowski 1991: 100). As Klossowski interprets Sade consequently (and Lacan follows more or less exactly), the Sadean system, far from being some kind of hyper-Enlightenment project, is one of the most exemplary cases of a radical ‘counter-Enlightenment’ perspective. Again, what is crucial for our purposes here is to realize that this is also Lacan’s way of repositioning not simply Sade (or indeed Kant) vis-à-vis the Enlightenment but psychoanalysis itself, as a discipline of thought and a practice. Psychoanalysis, for Lacan, in its authentic Freudian vision, would be radically counter-Enlightenment, anti-Enlightenment. But what would this mean for any possible notion of the ‘ethical’, or indeed of the ‘political’, two key notions often crucially reclaimed by the Enlightenment from premodern metaphysics?
In the next section, we will explore this issue in terms of Lacan’s most direct analysis of the problematic, in Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992), a seminar which will have a formative influence on the work of the succeeding Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. But here, to conclude this section, let us just say something about how these conceptions of ethics and politics might be conceived through the rereading of Sade in ‘Kant with Sade’, and also with brief reference to the earlier discussion of Badiou’s understanding of the radicalism of Lacan’s politics (Badiou 2009).
Under the mask of being an atheist modernist, in fact of being the atheist modernist, and some kind of Enlightenment libertine, Sade is rather an opponent of modernism. Klossowski compares Sade to Baudelaire, figures looking back from modernity to pre-modern themes, and also looking forward to post-modernity, to the demise of modernity; caught temporally in what Lyotard has referred to as the ‘future anterior’. Sade has been so misinterpreted because he has been looked at exclusively through a modernist lens, on both Klossowski and Lacan’s terms. Judged by the values of rational morality and social conscience representative of modernity (Klossowski 1991: 108), Sade’s work can only be misread. ‘Everything in Sade will thus predispose him, in these last years of the century of Voltaire, to speak the language of a latent Jansenism’ (Klossowski 1991: 106). The religious reference is obviously important here (the interpretation of Sade as a non-atheist, ‘under the mask of atheism’) but in this context, the crucial implication for our reading concerns the relation to ethics and politics. Here, in Lacanian terms, Klossowski’s foregrounding of the concept of ‘sin’ is especially significant (Klossowski 1991: 108ff). The key to understanding Sade, according to Klossowski, is the medieval Christian conception of delectatio morosa or ‘morose delectation’ (also ‘morbid pleasure’) (Klossowski 1991: 112). In Klossowski’s analysis, this concept serves an analogous function to Bataille’s use of the concept of felix culpa. ‘Morose delectation consists in that movement of the soul by which it bears itself voluntarily towards images of forbidden carnal or spiritual acts in order to linger in contemplation of them’ (Klossowski 1991: 113).
Again, we can return to Sontag’s contextualization of the problematic (Sontag 1981). Sexuality is not something ‘natural’ to be ‘liberated’ or made more ‘permissive’. For Sade (and also for Lacan/Klossowski), this is to misrecognize a more ‘morbid’ dimension of the sexual. This then allows us to make better sense of Lacan’s often misunderstood disavowal at the beginning of his seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992) of the ‘libertine’ project to emancipate desire from societal and/or traditionalist shackles. The libertine project to naturalize desire, to free desire, ‘has failed’, Lacan tells us. Instead of such notions as ‘freedom’ being foregrounded, what interests Lacan in Sade’s discourse is precisely (through the reading of Klossowski) the reintroduction of premodern concepts such as ‘evil’ and ‘nothingness’; ‘the possibility of evil and of nothingness’ (Klossowski 1991: 99). Of course, despite Lacan’s provocative disavowals of modernist notions in this essay, we must be careful not to simply interpret his reading of Sade’s or Klossowski’s concepts as simply those of psychoanalysis. Rather, in their employment by Lacan, there is also a recontextualization of these concepts (concepts such as ‘sin’, ‘nothingness’, ‘evil’, ‘delectatio morosa’ etc.).1
But, if such a recontextualization is the case, where does this leave either the notion of the ‘ethical’ or the conception of the ‘political’, on Lacanian terms? Below, we will turn to a closer analysis of Seminar VII to understand Lacan’s approach to this problem (Lacan 1992). But Badiou’s obituary of Lacan, in its points concerning the ethical–political, already gives us some direction in advance (Badiou 2009). For Badiou, what is crucial to understand with regard to an interpretation of Lacan, is the latter’s fundamental ‘materialism’ (Badiou 2009: 4). Again, we can stress here the critique of idealism in Seminar XI as paradigmatic (Lacan 1994), where Lacan laments the complete misconstrual of psychoanalysis as some kind of therapy for ‘narcissism’. The attack on (American) ego psychology is also close to this argument and it allows Lacan to introduce the notion of the ‘Real’, which enables Lacan to reassert the commitment of psychoanalysis to ‘experience’ (Lacan 1994). At the same time, any notion of the political based on such materialism must also take account, Badiou warns us, of Lacan’s suspicion of the very notion of the sociopolitical. As Badiou (2009: 4) notes, ‘he [Lacan] used to say that “the social is always a wound” and yet it so happens that even a Marxism in crisis cannot avoid making reference to the dialectic of the subject that he outlines’.
This last statement captures the ambiguity of the Lacanian (political) position perfectly. Lacanianism undermines any simple objectivist notion of the ‘social’ or the ‘political’ (and by implication of the ‘ethical’) but by the same token, more typically, objectivist accounts of the political (such as Marxism) are in ‘crisis’. It is here that Lacan’s far more fragile or traumatic conception of the ‘political’ (which Badiou also refers to here as ‘the product of a break’ [Badiou 2009: 4]) can come into its own. Thus, Badiou concludes, we can say that Lacan developed ‘an ethics of thought that is highly unusual’ which he contrasts with the ‘platitudes and relative self-abasement of our [public] intellectuals’ (Badiou 2009: 7). But there remains a significant work of interpretation (or reinterpretation) to be done. For Badiou, there is an ‘almost incalculable import’ (Badiou 2009: 7) to such a Lacanian ethics. In the next section, we will look at Lacan’s own most systematic attempt to come to terms with the implications of this enigmatic and revolutionary ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ (Lacan 1992).
Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Given what we have explored in terms of Lacan’s revolutionary understanding of the Sadean system (and what he has referred to as the rather shocking ‘complicity’ of the latter with Kantianism), one might expect Lacan to jettison the conception of ‘ethics’ entirely.2 Indeed, looking back to Freud’s approach to these issues, especially in his later work, it is far from clear that Freud is interested in salvaging any notion of the ethical. If we look, for example, at one of the key texts of Freud’s later period, Civilisation and Its Discontents (Freud 2002a), this polemical work may be perceived as a work of ‘destruction’ more than any attempt at rehabilitation. Leo Bersani’s reading of this work is a case in point. Briefly, Bersani (2002) reads Freud’s text as a powerful and singularly uncompromising descent into a kind of joyous nihilism. The concept of the ‘death drive’ is central to how Bersani reads this text, although he also uses this notion to reread Freud’s earlier texts, especially the texts on sexuality (Freud 1977), in an analogous manner. On this interpretation, Freud would be a vehemently anti-ethical thinker, and psychoanalysis would be intent on dismantling the fearful pretensions of traditional morality. Lacanianism, as viewed by Bersani, constitutes simply an ever more intensified version of such original Freudian ethical–political nihilism (Bersani 2002).
There is certainly some substance to Bersani’s textual reading. Civilisation and Its Discontents (Freud 2002a), as the work of the elder Freud, is stark in its assessments of the self-deceptions at the heart of the human condition. As Bersani notes, the foregrounding of the notion of the ‘death drive’ is uncompromising in this text and, for example, Freud’s reading of religion here is vehement (he describes religion, as such, as a form of ‘psychic infantilism’ [Freud 2002a]). The text seems intent on not simply deconstructing what Sartre was later to refer to as the ‘bad faith’ of human illusion, but on destroying in as casual a manner as possible this very self-deception. Similarly, it is difficult to disagree with Bersani’s analysis of some of the more destructive aspects of the development of Freudianism by Lacan. If the ‘death drive’ is emphasized more in the later Freud, it is also true that Lacan seeks to assert its destructive force all the more unequivocally. Here, for example, one can cite Lacan’s Seminar XX, On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973. ENCORE (Lacan 1998) as some kind of ultimate rebooting of Civilisation and Its Discontents (Freud 2002a). Moreover, taking this meta-level reading of Lacanianism one stage further, the works of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis become the contemporary, ever more nihilistic versions of the same (with Žižek as the high priest of such anti-ethical carnage). One can find these readings of Žižek, for example, in a text such as The Truth of Žižek (Bowman and Stamp 2007).
But there is also a very different reading of the original and later Freudian project possible, one which similarly connects this project organically to that of Lacan and the later Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, but which avoids such negative conclusions. Here, while all the ambiguity and inherent tension of Freud and succeeding versions of psychoanalysis are stressed, nonetheless this pessimistic version of interpretation is seen as far too one-sided and reductive. Instead, there are far more possibilities of affirmative ethical and political understanding present in this second interpretation. Here, the Lacanian text The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992) becomes particularly important.
In his ‘Translator’s Note’ (Porter 1992) to this latter text, Dennis Porter speaks to the complex question of Lacan’s ‘style’. We have mentioned above the important discussions in relation, for example, to Derrida and Lacan, deconstruction and psychoanalysis, with regard to style (Derrida 1988; Hurst 2008). There, Derrida speaks of Lacan’s ‘critique of semanticism’ as being at the foundation of Lacan’s approach to the organization of his texts. Our discussion above of the essay ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b) came from the Écrits (Lacan 2002a), which, although itself a diverse collection, nonetheless involves essays completed by Lacan’s own hand. However, in the case of the editing and publication of the seminars, we are dealing with a more complex (and, for some, far more controversial) hermeneutic situation. Macey (1988), for example, is highly critical of the process by which the seminars have come to be published, arguing that this process itself has engendered the kind of ‘myth of the hero’ reading of Lacan which is averse to proper critical discussion. Here, the role of Jacques-Alain Miller is heavily criticized by Macey, although the reading of Miller through the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis is far more positive (Žižek et al. 2014).
Whatever the truth of this politicized process, perhaps a more important point, as Porter notes, is the more positive pluralism of the Lacan seminars in and of itself. As Porter observes here: ‘the experience of those who read the seminar is in the experience of a thought in the making; . . . a captivating spoken word that sometimes meanders, throws out asides. Refers backwards or anticipates future problems, moves through passages dense with difficult ideas, narrates an illustrative comic anecdote, draws out the forgotten etymological significance of a word or resorts suddenly to popular speech’ (Porter 1992: viii). We referred above to the comparison one can make between the Lacanian seminar and the seminars of Kojève. Both were informal, written up not by the speakers but by those who attended, and both were an extraordinary influence on a whole generation of thinkers. As we saw, the Kojève seminars were crucial to Lacan’s own understanding of Hegelianism, as well as his own self-understanding and development as a thinker. But another comparison, equally apt, might be made to the process of Plato’s dialogues (Plato 1961). These dialogues often become congealed into a certain univocal hermeneutics, referred to as ‘Platonism’. But reading the dialogues in and of themselves, one can only be struck by the seemingly endless semantic ambiguities and textual suggestivity. It is striking, for example, how Plato’s dialogues become such an important resource for both Freud (1977) and Lacan (1992). Oftentimes, as we suggested above, this more ambiguous reading of Plato is employed against the more traditionalist approach of Aristotelianism (we will see this again in the discussion of ‘ethics’). Indeed, one of the most powerful developments of the Platonic legacy in recent years has precisely been Zupančič’s (2008a) radical reinterpretation of the discussion of ‘eros’ in The Symposium (Plato 1961). Once more, the connections between Plato and psychoanalysis (this time, through the Ljubljana school) remain strong.
When we come to the seminar itself here, on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, we see that Lacan precisely does want to foreground a robust enough ‘ethics’ to properly deal with the challenge which we have seen him outline already in the essay ‘Kant with Sade’. These texts are both from roughly the same period of Lacan’s work and we can see the shared thematics. In his ‘Outline of the Seminar’ (Lacan 1992: 1), Lacan delineates the substantive issues to be addressed. It is hardly surprising given what we have discussed above in relation to ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b) that his first main topic is what he describes as ‘the attraction of transgression [la faute]’ (Lacan 1992: 1). As Porter notes, the translation of ‘la faute’ is not straightforward. ‘Lacan’s word here “la faute” translated as transgression, has a great range of potential equivalents; from wrong, error, mistake, to blame, misconduct, and offense; “the fault” also’ (Porter 1992: 1). What is perhaps most significant for our purposes is that the notion of ‘transgression’ which is how Lacan seems to mean the term here more or less, is tied very intimately to the tradition of thinking which we saw expressed above through Klossowski (1991) (and also Bataille). In other words, in seeking to reground the notion of the ‘ethical’, Lacan is intent on drawing on a precisely counter-Enlightenment tradition very much at odds with earlier (and more conventional) conceptions of the moral or the ‘Good’. The latter notion especially comes under direct fire from Lacan (we might compare this also with Badiou’s Ethics [Badiou 2000] where the notion of the ‘Good’ is vehemently undermined). At the same time as thus critiquing the more traditional understandings, while drawing on the resources of surrealism and the avant-garde, Lacan is also keen to stress that there is something originally new in what he is terming the ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’: ‘what is new in both Freud’s thought and in the experience of psychoanalysis that derives from it. The experience of psychoanalysis is highly significant for a certain moment in the history of man’ (Lacan 1992: 1).
What is Lacan claiming here? His reference to a ‘certain moment’ suggests that something occurs with the advent of Freud’s thinking and the origins of psychoanalysis as such, which is historically unprecedented in the tradition of philosophy. We will see in the interviews how the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, while drawing on ancient and premodern resources philosophically (both Hellenic and medieval), nonetheless also associate psychoanalysis with an irreducibly modernist moment. On Dolar’s et al. (2014) terms, for example, there are cases where earlier thought can really only offer ‘metaphoric approximations’ of later insights derived, for example, from the transcendental philosophy of Kant. Indeed, Žižek similarly in his interview, speaks of philosophy ‘beginning with Kant’ (Žižek et al. 2014).
Here, in this context, we can also see how this reading of certain epochal shifts in philosophical thinking can also apply directly to the history of thinking on ethics. Zupančič’s work is especially instructive in this regard; for example, her text Why Psychoanalysis? Three Interventions (Zupančič 2008b), where she discusses the whole relation between psychoanalysis and philosophy, but crucially her first monograph in English, The Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (Zupančič 2000). In this latter text, the world of traditional philosophical ethics is turned upside down and made to see its affinities with, of all people, Sade’s discourse (Zupančič 2000), precisely following Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b). As Zupančič notes here, ‘the concept of ethics, as it is developed throughout the history of philosophy, suffers a double “blow of disillusionment” at the hands of psychoanalysis’ (Zupančič 2000). How so? Zupančič goes on: ‘the Freudian blow to philosophical ethics can be summarised as follows: what philosophy calls the moral law – and more precisely what Kant calls the “categorical imperative” – is in fact nothing other than the superego’ (Zupančič 2000: 1). The second blow follows from Lacan’s extension of the Freudian moment to make Kant complicit with Sade: ‘the thesis of “Kant with Sade” is not simply that Kantian ethics has a merely “perverse” value. It is also the claim that Sade’s discourse has an ethical value; that it can be properly understood only as an ethical project’ (Zupančič 2000: 2). It is this latter conception which is perhaps the most shocking in Lacan’s approach, at least from the point of view of conventional morals – Sade as an ethicist. This was certainly Lacan ‘on the warpath’ against conventional morality, society and the repressive psychic register (Badiou 2009).
Lacan, in his outline for the seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992: 2), foregrounds what he sees as a key distinction between the notion of ‘ethics’, on the one side, and the notion of ‘morality’ on the other. As Lacan notes in this context, ‘in speaking of the ethics of psychoanalysis, I might have said morality instead’ (Lacan 1992: 2). But, of course, the key point being made by Lacan here is that there is a world of difference between the two, ethics and morality. Lacan gives an indication of what he understands by such an ‘ethics’ when he refers to the notion of ‘transgression’, ‘the attraction of transgression’ or what he here now calls ‘the morbid universe of transgression’ (Lacan 1992: 2). Again, we can relate this problematic back to our earlier discussion of Klossowski’s theoretical framework, in relation to the essay ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b). There, we explored Klossowski’s radically heterodox reinterpretation of Sade, reading the latter very much against the standard modernist approach and foregrounding the medieval Christian conception of delectatio morosa or ‘morose delectation’ (also ‘morbid pleasure’) (Klossowski 1991: 112). ‘Morose delectation consists in that movement of the soul by which it bears itself voluntarily towards images of forbidden carnal or spiritual acts in order to linger in contemplation of them’ (Klossowski 1991: 113). In his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 2002a), and in a more systematic fashion than in the essay from the Écrits (Lacan 2002a), Lacan once again refers to the ‘morbid universe of transgression’ (Lacan 1992: 2).
We should be careful of simply equating Klossowski’s heterodox reading of Sade with that of Lacan, although Lacan affirms the former reading as very significant (Lacan 2002b). One of the key questions for us will be where we might see Klossowski and Lacan diverge? In seeking to develop what he terms an ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’, Lacan wants to show affinity but also some independence from the position of Klossowski. For example, we have seen him refer at the beginning of his ‘Outline of the Seminar’ (Lacan 1992: 1) to ‘what is new in Freud and from the experience of psychoanalysis’. Certainly, in Klossowski’s reading of Sade in Sade, My Neighbour (Klossowski 1991), there is, at times, simply too much of the logic of an inverted Christian ethic. This becomes clearer in his important Appendix to the text (Klossowski 1991: 137ff), where Klossowski affirms the notion of ‘sin’. Klossowski clarifies the genealogy of this faith in sin through a discussion of Carpocrates, whom he describes as a ‘Gnostic sectarian’ (Klossowski 1991: 138). The Carpocratian sect of the Gnostics gave an especial emphasis to Matthew 5.25-26; ‘agree with thine adversary’ (Klossowski 1991: 138). On their interpretation, this passage involved an acceptance of the adversary of sin: ‘crime is a tribute paid to life, they say, a tribute demanded by the creator of this life. It is necessary, then, that the soul delivers itself over to sin as soon as temptation presents itself’ (Klossowski 1991: 138). The Sadean crimes against humanity are thus interpreted by Klossowski as intrinsically religious acts; they are perpetuated not against the sacred but precisely in the name of the sacred against the rational morality and social solidarity of modernity. Sade thus becomes an unlikely advocate of religiosity and the sacred, albeit in an unorthodox key and under the ‘mask of atheism’.
This Klossowskian interpretation lies behind much of the discussion of ethics in Lacan, during this period of his work especially and in the essay ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b). We will see that the emphases change in, for example, some of the later seminars, such as Seminar XI on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1994) and Seminar XX, On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973. ENCORE (Lacan 1998). However, even here in the earlier texts on ethics, there are different issues at work for Lacan (and his reformulated psychoanalysis) than there are for Klossowski. Most especially, Lacan wishes to draw out the ethical significance of Freud’s work, as he says ‘In Freud, a body of thought and development; the importance of the ethical dimension’ (Lacan 1992: 2).
In relation to the reading of Freud, Lacan has two major aims. To demonstrate, first of all, what we have seen Zupančič describe as the ‘blow of disillusionment at the hands of psychoanalysis’ (Zupančič 2000) which Freudianism inaugurates. And second, that this experience of disillusionment, this ‘undergoing’ is not simply an end in itself for Freud. This kind of nihilistic teleology is the meta-level interpretation of Freud (and Lacan) which we have discussed in relation to Bersani’s controversial reading of the late Freud text Civilisation and Its Discontents (Freud 2002a). But it is precisely this nihilistic reading which Seminar VII is set up against, which it sets out to contest. In his ‘Outline of the Seminar’ (Lacan 1992), Lacan makes clear that this is one of his two main targets, which he associates here with a reading of psychoanalysis as a ‘naturalist liberation of desire’ (Lacan 1992: 3), Freud as connecting back to a tradition of ‘eighteenth century’ libertinage. As he notes here, ‘A certain eighteenth century philosophy; the naturalist liberation of desire has failed’ (Lacan 1992: 3).
Just as in ‘Kant with Sade’, where Lacan seeks to extricate Sade from this tradition of libertinage, now he also seeks to extricate Freudianism and psychoanalysis from such a mistaken (modernist libertarian) permissiveness. We might note in passing here the strong connections between this argument and Bataille’s arguments in his important text, Eroticism, published a few years earlier in 1957 (Bataille 2001). But Lacan also has an equally important target in mind in this text; the tradition of a certain supposed authentic psychoanalysis which, on Lacan’s own terms, quite distorts the Freudian legacy. Here, in a striking and complex passage from the ‘Outline’, Lacan directs his ire. He notes, ‘A general tendency to reduce the paradoxical elements which might bring about a harmonious conclusion; . . . it is worth asking if this theoretical progress was not leading in the end to an even more all embracing moralism than any that has previously existed. Psychoanalysis would seem to have as its sole aim the calming of guilt, the taming of perverse jouissance’ (Lacan 1992: 4).
Although he doesn’t name it here, the ideology of ‘ego psychology’ and its attendant therapy, attempting to transmit a very different Freudianism from that of Lacan, is what is at issue. Lacan is very direct and simple in his opposition to the ‘general tendency’ which is described as being reductionistic and attempting to do away with the ‘paradoxical elements’, so as to bring about ‘harmony’. Lacan also associates this supposed harmony with an ‘all embracing moralism’. It is clear, then, that when Lacan wishes to instigate an ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’, he has no intention of reinstituting such a ‘moralism’. This brings us back to the earlier discussion – Lacan has chosen the concept of ‘ethics’, but not that of ‘morality’. Here, the latter concept of ‘morality’ is indistinguishable from its pejorative expression as a ‘moralism’, which is seen as reducing paradox amidst its generalizations of the ‘Good’, in the name of a false kind of ‘harmony’. In contrast, we can deduce that Lacan’s more authentic ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ will seek to affirm rather than reduce paradox and will be less directed by a teleology of ‘harmony’.
For Lacan, as he now clarifies, this latter logic of harmony has come to define the moral–ethical tradition as we have known it, which Lacan interprets in strongly negative terms as a reductionistic ‘moralism’. Aristotelianism comes to take on a paradigm status once more for Lacan in this context, this time in terms of its moral expression as a teleology of ‘eudaimonia’ (happiness or flourishing). In very direct and militant terms, Lacan contextualizes this seminar in terms of a powerful opposition between this latter eudaimonistic Aristotelianism and a specific Freud – the Freud of Civilisation and Its Discontents (Freud 2002).
The key problem as Lacan sees it in relation to the Aristotle/Freud dualism is summed up in his closing phrase to this key passage: ‘Psychoanalysis would seem to have as its sole aim the calming of guilt, the taming of perverse jouissance’ (Lacan 1992: 4). What is at stake then is not simply an abstract matter of the history of philosophy and the reading of an age-old Aristotelian discourse on flourishing. Rather, what is at stake is the matter of now, here today, the contemporary interpretation of psychoanalysis. In brief, psychoanalysis (in the guise, for example, of ‘ego psychology’) would have become indistinguishable from Aristotelianism as an ethics, as a ‘moralism’. As against the heterodox interpretations of, for example, Klossowski (1991) which we described above, which provide the impetus for Lacan’s rereading of the essay ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b), there would rather be an attempt to domesticate Freudianism as a therapy for perversion and ‘jouissance’ (Lacan 1992: 4). ‘Jouissance’ is the term here which comes to stand for ‘excessive pleasure’ in Lacan’s discourse – he will return to it in Seminar XX, On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973. ENCORE (Lacan 1998). It is also a concept which becomes increasingly important for the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. Here, in an earlier Lacanian seminar, we have a key index of why it does become so important. In effect, ‘jouissance’ in Seminar VII stands for the impossibility of psychoanalysis becoming a therapy of happiness or Aristotelian ‘eudaimonia’ (‘flourishing’). In her later text on comedy, On Comedy: The Odd One In (Zupančič 2008a), Zupančič will refer pejoratively to this reductionistic psychology which has become ever more hegemonic in contemporary society as a ‘bio-morality’. Again, as with Lacan in this context, we should note the key distinction between ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’. Lacan, in Seminar VII, wishes to mark this clear distinction of an authentic psychoanalysis from Aristotelianism: ‘How subversive our experience is; since it serves to render his (Aristotle’s) theory surprising, primitive, paradoxical and in truth incomprehensible’ (Lacan 1992: 5).
Developing this distinction between Aristotle and Freud on ethics, and seeking to reformulate psychoanalysis as an ethics against the false moralism of ego psychology, Lacan draws explicitly on the later Freud in this context, with special reference to the text Civilisation and Its Discontents (Freud 2002a). As Lacan observes: ‘And in order to draw attention immediately to the work in which we will take up the problem, I refer you to Civilization and Its Discontents published in 1922, and written by Freud after working out his second topic, that is to say, after he had placed in the foreground the highly problematic notion of the death instinct’ (Lacan 1992: 6).
Lacan’s oft-quoted ‘return to Freud’ is thus of a very specific sort. We should note the explicit clues that Lacan gives us here, as to his overall meta-level reading of the Freudian legacy for contemporary psychoanalysis. First, Civilisation and Its Discontents (Freud 2002a) will be at the heart of the overall interpretation, which as a work of the later period suggests already a certain progressive or developmental interpretation of Freud. A little further on, in case there was any doubt, Lacan will refer to this text as ‘an indispensable work unsurpassed for an understanding of Freud’s thought and the summation of his experience’ (Lacan 1992: 6). Second, for Lacan, what is particularly foregrounded in this reading is the ‘death instinct’ or ‘death drive’. This becomes a key notion for the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis as we shall see, but we must be wary of an overly simplified reading of this concept. For example, above we spoke of Bersani’s preface to the most recent edition of this text as adopting what we might call a ‘literalist’ understanding of the death drive (Bersani 2002). For Bersani, the death drive equals unabated nihilism. However, this is not the reading which Lacan puts forward here. Aside from the necessary contextualization of this being a text on ‘ethics’, Lacan also warns the reader against literalism by referring to this notion of the ‘death drive’ as ‘highly problematic’ (Lacan 1992: 6). This problematicity goes to the heart of the interpretative enterprise, as it calls into question whether there is a unified meta-level psychoanalysis as such. We will return to this question below with regard to the Lacan–Derrida encounter (Derrida 1988; Hurst 2008) and we will also see it recur more recently in the debate between Žižek (2010) and Catherine Malabou (2012) on the projected future of psychoanalysis (e.g., for Malabou, in relation to critiques coming from neuroscience). We will explore this current debate in the Epilogue (Žižek 2010; Malabou 2012).
More specifically, in this context, Lacan uses this hermeneutic ambiguity to reformulate one of the central Freudian ethical propositions, which Lacan regards as having been fatally misrecognized by ego psychology. In Freud’s principle of ‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden’ (usually translated as: ‘where the id was, the ego shall be’), there has been an apparent justification for the therapy of ‘happiness’ which we described above. But as Porter notes, Lacan begs to differ: ‘Rather than strengthening the ego as the great intellectual and ideological rival of Lacanian psychoanalysis, ego psychology, encouraged the patient to do, Lacan claims that the analysand must [engage in] . . . modifying the moorings that anchor his being’ (Porter 1992: 7). This relates back to Lacan’s earlier statement that ethics requires of the subject a kind of revolutionary transformation or ‘rectification’ (Lacan 1992: 1). As with the notion of the ‘death drive’, such a process would be far from linear and straightforward. At the very least, it would be ‘highly problematic’ (Lacan 1992: 6). In the same way, then, that the subject must undergo an ambiguous and highly problematical process to be ethical, so too must the very meta-level understanding of what an ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ is remain irreducibly problematic. This is where the critique of the more univocal (Cartesian) semantics of ego psychology is unequivocal. It is also where we can see the ‘critique of semantics’ integral to Lacan’s very textual style (which we saw Derrida [1988] describe) dovetail with and provide an authentic philosophical expression for the very ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ (Lacan 1992). It is in its failure to come to terms with such a philosophical and ethical complexity that ego psychology (and mistranslated contemporary versions of Freudian ‘therapy’) can be said by Lacan to ‘shirk [their] tasks’ (Lacan 1992: 7).
This, then, is precisely the task at hand for the future, not to be ‘shirked’, as envisaged by Lacan’s ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’. Again, Lacan wishes to stress that although the foundation for ethics was provided by the Aristotelian tradition and although it might appear that he is seeking to continue this tradition, rather something else is taking place. ‘Insofar as Freud’s position constitutes progress here, the question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the “real”. To appreciate this, one has to look at what occurred in the interval between Aristotle and Freud’ (Lacan 1992: 7). This ‘interval’ between Aristotle and Freud should not be underestimated – it is, in effect, unbridgeable. What Lacan (and Freud) mean by ethics is unrecognizable to an Aristotelian. This at least is the claim being made in Seminar VII: ‘since Aristotle’s time, we have experienced a complete reversal of point of view’ (Lacan 1992: 7).
From ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b) then to Seminar VII on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992), there is a clear outline of a trajectory for a new interpretation of psychoanalysis. However, we might say that what this psychoanalysis rails against is far clearer than what it exactly constitutes in terms of positive content. Lacan, in both these texts, clearly opposes two main traditions of thinking, as we have elaborated. On the one side, he attacks the traditional form of metaphysics, the science of being, and especially the mode in which this metaphysics is articulated through an ‘ethics’ of ‘happiness’, ‘harmony’ etc. This metaphysical ethics, the paradigm for Lacan being the Aristotelian eudaimonistic approach, constitutes a reductionism in relation to human life and possibility for Lacan. It has also, on his interpretation (and this view will be continued by his successors in the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, such as Zupančič [2008a]) had a pernicious effect on societal norms around the desire to be happy and the failure to come to terms with a darker side of the human condition (a key concept for Lacan here being ‘jouissance’ or [excessive/deficient] enjoyment). Lacan captures what he sees as this integral instability in the human condition and desire for pleasure in the phrase ‘plus de jouir’, meaning both ‘more pleasure’ and ‘no more pleasure’ (Lacan 1998).
On the other side, Lacan’s key opponent comes from within the psychoanalytical school itself. This opposition, which is even more vehement than in the first instance, is towards what is referred to as ‘ego psychology’ and the attempt to defend a culture of therapy (not dissimilar to the Aristotelian cultural politics just described) precisely in the name of Freud and Freudianism. This is why Lacan is so keen to pinpoint what he refers to as the ‘interval’ between Freud and Aristotle: ‘since Aristotle’s time, we have experienced a complete reversal of point of view’ (Lacan 1992: 7). The difference between Aristotle and Freud is not simply a localized one, but rather a fundamental discord, an irreducible conflict.
Not the least interesting question here as an implication of this fundamental conflict is what it can tell us about the relation between philosophy as such and psychoanalysis. As described by Lacan (1992) in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, for example, the so-called irreducible ‘interval’ between Freud and Aristotle might also be affirmed by an Aristotelian. On this reading, one might argue, as an Aristotelian, that what we have here in effect are two different disciplines of thought, on the one side philosophy (represented by Aristotle) and on the other psychoanalysis (represented by Freud). For the Aristotelian, then, the interval which separates Aristotle and Freud would point to the distorting nature of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic lens. Consequently, the whole attempt to make Kant complicit with Sade would be an example, for the Aristotelian, of the complete failure of psychoanalysis to understand the nature of authentic ethical practice and reflection.
As we discussed earlier, there is also a sense in which Freud and Lacan would agree with this meta-level reading of the relation between psychoanalysis and philosophy, but of course understood from the opposite side. Both thinkers (and especially Freud) tend towards a very suspicious view of philosophy as a discipline and its attempts at ‘system building’. While this view has its merits and its justifications, there are also difficulties attached to it. In many respects, it significantly weakens the case for psychoanalysis if it simply generalizes the whole history of pre-psychoanalytical thought as some kind of reductive and aberrant mistake. Here, as Macey (1988) has suggested, there is also the risk of underestimating the debt which psychoanalysis owes (in the cases of Freud, Lacan and others) precisely to the philosophical tradition. Their significant recourse to Platonism (as in the case of Freud’s theory of Eros) would be just one example of such a debt having to be repaid (Freud 1977).
However, there is a more significant problem for our purposes with this analysis, that of a complete ‘interval’ between Freudian–Lacanianism and the history of philosophy. What such a binarism fails to do is explain in any convincing way the immense influence which Freudian–Lacanian thinking has had, not simply on contemporary culture, but also on succeeding philosophical and political thought. One of the major themes of this book is precisely the question of how Lacanianism, most especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, has had such a singular philosophical and political influence on the former Yugoslavia and Slovenia. But we can only understand this influence by moving beyond the terms of reference which Lacan himself set for his work, especially with regard to the relation between psychoanalysis and philosophy. In an analogous way to the mode in which Lacan sought to sometimes interpret ‘Freud against Freud’ so to speak, so too it would seem that if we are to properly understand the full significance of the ‘Slovenian Lacan’, we will also have to read, in some instances, ‘Lacan against Lacan’. This, then, is where our story moves from Lacan’s original trajectory to a trajectory of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. While, in principle, as we shall see, this evolution of the Lacanian discourse is described by its proponents as ‘orthodox’, it will also become clear that this is no literalist orthodoxy. Rather, as Dolar puts it succinctly in his interview, ‘orthodoxy is transformation’ (Dolar et al. 2014).
Conclusion – Lacanianism via Derrida and the Ljubljana troika
In our discussion of Lacan’s Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992) above, we foregrounded Lacan’s emphasis on Freud’s concept of the ‘death drive’. But we also noted how commentators such as Bersani (2002) have been far too quick to assimilate such a framework to a ‘nihilism’. Instead, Lacan is far more cautious in his reading of Freud, citing the concept but also referring to a reading of it as ‘highly problematic’. This hermeneutic reticence of Lacan has been much criticized, as it is often perceived as a kind of obscurantism or conceptual and philosophical weakness. For example, even in the case of Badiou (2009), who praises highly the Lacanian approach to thought, there is the description of Lacan’s thinking as an ‘anti-philosophy’. We have also seen that even in Lacan (and Freud’s) self-descriptions as thinkers, there is some evidence to suggest that this anti-philosophy perspective might be a valid interpretation.
What is interesting, however, as we go on to develop our reading of this narrative of the ‘Slovenian Lacan’, is that the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, which will take up this reading of Lacan, reject tout court this interpretation of an ‘anti-philosophy’. In this concluding section to the chapter, and before looking in more detail at the individual philosophical systems of Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič, we will briefly look at some of the dilemmas surrounding this question of the relation between psychoanalysis and philosophy. Beginning with an exploration of the infamous encounter between Derrida and Lacan (Derrida 1988; Hurst 2008) and developing through reference to some of the Lacanian aspects of the NSK art practice, I will conclude with a brief anticipation of how the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis can be seen as evolving this problematic. Of course, the answers suggested, or sometimes simply the way the questions are articulated, tend to differ across the examples of the three individual thinkers, Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič, respectively.
First, then, let us refer to the Derrida–Lacan encounter. It is perhaps not coincidental that the encounter should primarily take place around a contested analysis of one of the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, the enigmatic narrative of ‘The Purloined Letter’. Poe’s work, both his gothic narratives and his poetry, can itself be situated in a very close relationship with the avant-garde of French surrealism which we discussed earlier as having such a strong influence on Lacan’s thinking (Macey 1988). Here, we can refer again to Benjamin’s extraordinary essay, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (Benjamin 1979) for some context. Benjamin makes one reference in this essay to Poe, speaking of the ‘depth of the insights of Poe’ (Benjamin 1979: 236) in relation to what Benjamin sees as the genuinely subversive politics (and ‘poetics’) of surrealism: ‘they are the first to liquidate the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom’ (Benjamin 1979: 236). In Lacanian terms, we might say that this puts them on the side of psychoanalysis over against ‘ego psychology’, on the side of an ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ as against the ‘moralism’ which Lacan is so weary of in Seminar VII (Lacan 1992). Benjamin also attacks exactly the combination of this moralism with politics: ‘characteristic of this whole left-wing bourgeois position is its irremediable coupling of idealistic morality with political practice’ (Benjamin 1979: 234).
Benjamin anticipates the critique of the ‘moralisation of the political’, of which Mouffe (2005) has been such a powerful example. In stressing the notion of ethics, psychoanalysis must be careful to avoid becoming complicit with conservative and reactionary moralism. This is Lacan’s point in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992) and it explains why he seeks to make the moral assurance of Kantianism uneasy with a juxtaposition against a far more decadent counter-example (of Sade) in ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b). It is also Benjamin’s exact critique of bourgeois leftism in his seminal essay on surrealism and we will see a very similar unease recur in the Slovenian context in the subversive art practice of the NSK. There is a strong connecting line between the subversions of surrealism and the ‘unbearable’ art practices of Laibach, IRWIN and the NSK as described by Žižek in Ljubljana through the 1980s (Žižek 2003b).
There is also a strong connecting line between surrealism and the Derrida–Lacan encounter (Irwin 2010). In her important text, Derrida vis-à-vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis (Hurst 2008), Andrea Hurst argues that the philosophical and stylistic approaches of Derridean deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis, after a detailed analysis, are far more congruent than one might imagine on first inspection: ‘Derrida, it would seem, loves Lacan. It is, he insists, “for the love of Lacan” that he emphasises the important political obligation to embrace a difficult thinking that rebels against normalisation’ (Hurst 2008: 2). Much has been made, as Hurst also shows, of the seeming ideological rift between the two thinkers, but here we should note the ‘political’ dimension which Derrida foregrounds. Alongside the ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ there would also be a ‘politics’ of psychoanalysis, and on Derrida’s terms, it would be a politics contra ‘normalisation’. We have seen this viewpoint also articulated strongly by no less a radical political thinker and activist than Badiou, in his obituary of Lacan (Badiou 2009): ‘Lacan was on the warpath from the very beginning’.
This is also the related thematic of Benjamin in his essay on surrealism: against all appearances to the contrary, surrealism would be far more politically subversive than the kind of ‘moralism’ associated with ‘bourgeois leftism’ and egalitarianism. The latter political ideologies remain complicit with the worst kind of naive utopianism concerning the ‘good’ (or, even more farcically, the ‘Good’) of human nature: ‘how naive is the view of the Philistines that goodness, for all the many virtues of those who practice it, is God-inspired’ (Benjamin 1979: 234). In another great and revealing phrase, Benjamin refers to the ‘helpless compromises of sentiment’ (Benjamin 1979: 234), the reality being of course that such egalitarian ‘sentiment’ is mostly simply self-serving and self-justifying, reinforcing the privileges of the status quo.
It is precisely in this context that we can better understand Lacan’s recourse to Sade, to Klossowski and to the rather enigmatic notion of ‘evil’ in the essay ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b). Again, in Benjamin’s terms, this is an ‘evil’ which ‘stems entirely from our spontaneity, and in it we are independent and self-sufficient beings’ (Benjamin 1979: 234). The notion of the ‘good’ and the related notions of ‘flourishing’ and ‘eudaimonia’ (or ‘happiness) in Aristotelian terms point towards an objectivist well-being, however ultimately self-deceptive this perspective may be in Lacanian terms. In contrast, the emphasis on ‘evil’ through surrealism, Sade and Klossowski points rather to existential and sociopolitical crises: ‘the Surrealists have understood its present commands. They exchange, to a man, the play of human features for the face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds’ (Benjamin 1979: 239).
In such a context, it is hardly surprising that in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992), Lacan should focus in on the later Freud and especially the Freud of Civilisation and Its Discontents (Freud 2002a). But if this is true, and if the notion of the ‘death drive’ is foregrounded there by Freud (which is then precisely re-emphasized by Lacan against ego psychology), it is also true that this should not be overstated. Rather, an irreducible equivocality regarding the death drive remains in Freud (and thus by implication in Lacan). If Lacan describes the matter as ‘highly problematic’, Freud had already gone one stage further, by reinvoking the drive of Eros as a counterpoint to Thanatos: ‘And now it is to be expected that the other of the two “heavenly powers”, immortal Eros, will try to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary’, with the one last, haunting question added in 1931: ‘And who can forsee the outcome?’ (Freud 2002a: 81).
This, of course, is also a question or an ambiguity concerning the very status of psychoanalysis itself: ‘we don’t know what will become of this psychoanalysis’ (Lacan 2008). Rather than this being some kind of localized hermeneutic error to be remedied or tightened up, it is a systemic ambiguity, a structural and fundamental feature of this philosophical and psychoanalytical perspective. As Lacan says in relation to his reading of Freud: ‘all of us share an experience based upon a system of concepts to which we remain faithful, partly because this system was developed by the man who opened up to us all the ways to that experience and partly because it bears the living mark of the different stages of its elaboration. That is to say, contrary to the dogmatism that is sometimes imputed to us, we know that this system remains open both as a whole and in several of its articulations’ (Hurst 2008: 2). This is a powerful meta-level statement from Lacan (which he sees as precisely being faithful to Freudianism): ‘we know that the system remains open as a whole’.
In the development of this Freudian–Lacanianism by the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, there is one significant shift. Lacan and Freud saw this systemic openness as characteristic of psychoanalysis but oftentimes (at least in principle) as being at odds with the method of philosophical speculation (Macey 1988). In the case, however, of Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič, this systemic openness is shared by both psychoanalysis and philosophy. Where psychoanalysis ends and philosophy begins becomes increasingly hard to decipher, the borderlines being impossible to clearly and distinctly maintain. In the next three chapters, and dealing with each of these individual thinkers in turn, I want to explore how this Lacanian legacy is both adapted and continued.