Psychoanalysis K - Wake 2017
Psychoanalysis K - Wake 2017
Psychoanalysis K Anthony
Nguyen
Notes
Intro
Anthony Nguyen (Westwood HS 18)
[email protected]
File mentored by Calum Matheson
The following notes are from Calum Mathesons psychoanalysis
lecture:
Why Psychoanalysis?
1) Its your thing whether you know it or not a ton of philosophical
arguments you read now, a lot of them have intersections with
psychoanalysis.
2) To say you dont care about it as a blanket theory is wrong - there is
no one opinion on psychoanalysis
3) Because its integrated everywhere, you get an enormous advantage
if you have dug into the stuff when your opponent has not.
Basic Psychoanalysis Principles
What distinguished Lacan from other psychoanalysts he would say
return to Freud and then make something up. His main departure
from Freud was to externalize the psyche.
Id- drive, the thing that insists/wants.
Ego- mechanism to channel the id.
Superego- the absorbed sense of morality that limits the ego.
Pleasure principle- demands for happiness.
When children demand something and parents say no, thats when
the ego demands.
Ego is the path for the baby to fulfill its desires.
Second no when the baby tries to do something when the parent says
thats wrong.
That forms the superego, the child incorporates morals and ethics.
Dominant theory in the US- describes individuals and their hidden
interiority (whats inside their heads, when you have desires for stuff
youre socially not allowed, you repress them).
Libido- repressed will to get what you want, its channeled somewhere
else to stand in for something it really wants.
Lacan wanted to externalize that the formation of the subject,
desire, repression, are all external in some way. The subject is the
product of them, but they are not the product of the subject. Baby has
no concept of subjectivity babies arent integrated because they
dont understand themselves as discrete entities, the self/other
boundary is very vague. The self forms when it identifies with
something it calls the self.
Formation of the subject happens through the mirror stage- sees
reflective image, now when the baby moves its arms, the thing in the
mirror moves its arm, it comes to identify itself with the thing in the
mirror. In the description of the mirror stage, the baby sees itself,
identifies with it, then the Big Other (parent) says yes, thats you. The
baby identifies itself with its specular image. The reflection is the first
part of its identity. There is no hidden babyness of the baby thats not
in the mirror, it forms its identity with the mirror. The reflected
identity is the signifier.to address others is to address yourself in a
certain way. That image is what you come to identify with. I want you
to give that to me describes how the other interacts with you, id
want other to give that to ego. The big O Other- the whole order of
language and signification, the way the subject forms to identify with
the signifier is the way it can participate in the whole of language
overall.
Order of exchange in language you can participate in language and
be a member of society, but you have to lose the sense of continuity
with everything else. Theres always something missing, when you
demand stuff it has to happen through the medium of the signifier,
language doesnt totally capture the world, and as a result, your desire
is never entirely fulfilled because concepts/linguistic objects dont
restore that sense of lost harmony with everything else. This is the
Lack the pole in the center of your existence that isnt fulfilled even
when you get the object that you insist on, its wanting fulfillment in
an impossible way, to eliminate the Lack is to break the universe
between self and universe. The desire is impossible to fulfill because
it would destroy the subject itself, when you seek the Lack, you seek
self-destruction. For a subject, its an impossible demand. The thing
thats missing is the Lack, subjects arent aware of their own Lack.
People imagine their desire to be for specific things, they imagine an
object that would fulfill that Lack, but each object that you desire even
when you attain it, the minute that you have it, you want something
else. Theres an endless chain of objects, petit objet a, it could be
anything but it is also nothing, no real object in the world fulfills that
Lack but you desire specific objects because you attach to them,
become affectively invested. The signifier that represents the lack.
You have an asymptotic relationship to the object.
Theres a drive for stuff, but each thing you attain is a failure in a way,
you can never fulfill desire but you keep doing it, you keep trying, this
is the drive. Freuds drives were Eros and Thanatos, Eros is desire for
love/union/make whole, Thanatos is desire for destruction/return to
inorganic state. Why do people continue to do things that dont make
them happy. Repeating a game that it cant win gives it control over
absence/presence, it wants to control it, no absence or presence, this
is the repetition compulsion. For Lacan theres no separate, theres
only one drive and its the death drive, its not really about death, but
repetition in the face of failure, people attach to things as a result
even when they dont bring them pleasure while its self-destructive.
Jouissance- enjoyment, has more ambivalence, the sense of enjoying
the thing but it also has some element of death, yet people repeatedly
do it (affective investment in a thing) but we keep doing stuff even
when it hurts us because we keep telling ourselves this is what the
subject is so it keeps investing itself. One doesnt see the Lack
invested. The death drive isnt internal to the subject, described it in
biological terms but its not something that organism has. Not
internal biology but product of the symbolic, the set of signifiers in
which you live, desire mediated through signifying elements so as a
result it always has a social component. What people want that would
fulfill the lack changes over time and place, its culturally dependent
so theres no inbuilt desire, the symbolic order is what defines those
things for you, youre aware of signifiers/concepts that you dont
come up with, but youre still exposed to, you have internal desire.
Mimetic desire, you know what you want because other people
around you want the same thing. There is no you the subject is
socially construct, theres a split subject not a unified subject due to
the repeated identification with things that arent you. Mimetic desire
is the process where as a set of identities you built a concept of what
you want, they exist in language, theyre all words/signifiers but by
necessity theyre available to everybody else. Theres no signifier
thats special for you. You want objects of desire because other people
want them, part of the death drive is the kind of competition that
results from that. People would rather destroy the object than
maintain it if they cant have it. Theres a foundational antagonism
where sometimes desires are in conflict with one another. As a result
theres some irreducible conflict in the social.
The death drive is a social force that necessitates that, it can be
generalized to the way societal interactions work at a social level.
Lacan adapted Hegel to describe social relations of mastery, the four
discourses. The master is the signifier of sheer will, the monarch that
insists that they have a right to rule just because (s1). Greek slavery
matters because slaves were often tutors- produced knowledge, the
master is the insistent groundless expression that intervenes into an
order of society and demands something. The thing that the master
demands and is produced is knowledge, while they know nothing. $ is
the lacking subject, the master insists to fulfill the barred subject.
Academic discourse changes it. S2 desires knowledge, the master
demanding the split subject, the real project of Marxism wasnt that
the law produces knowledge, but whats going on beneath the surface
is the master is defining what the subject should be, the project of
enlightenment European philosophy. What you demand is a new
master and you will get one.
Applications to debate- when we imagine a better society, in some
ways, the imagination of those improvements is just imagining an
object that stands in for something else. Mimetic desire and the death
drive-> utopian projects are always failure. The imagination of
societies occur in the symbolic, concepts that are related to one
another. We mistake reality for the real, for Lacan there were 3
orders of human experience. Symbolic is the set of protocols that link
signifiers together- grammar, you can read a nonsense sentence and
recognize that its grammatically correct even if the meaning of it
doesnt make any sense. Content of signifiers is imaginary- X + Y = Z,
symbolic is protocol for solving, but what you get is another scenario,
Imaginary is how you attach that variable to meaning, the set of
signifiers that are structurally related to one another,
collectively/affectively invest into the subject. The Real is not mind
independent reality- the Real means its when the mind-independent
reality suddenly show up and demonstrate the arbitrariness of our
world. We tend to take things for granted until something goes wrong
or gets disrupted. Some phenomenon happened that isnt
incorporated into our world. When we plan perfect socities they
arent really perfect because they follow the intersection of the
symbolic and the imaginary, when something oges wrong, politically
the first response isnt because of the death drive, but scapegoating.
Famines/purges- great example of how the death drive gets out of
control, someone had to be blamed, violence escalated without a
grand plan behind it. Soviet Union famine kill the kulaks, party bosses
shooting kulaks so that its competitive.
Project of policy based fiat is a similar thing- the object desires the
ballot to make the world a better place and theres a constant
competitive drive to accumulate them but that perfect society never
materializes them. Used as a framework argument, the question to
achieve the perfect world, the ballot stands in for an infinite
signifying chain, the ballot stands in for mimetic desire. General link
argument, the death drive could be used as an alternate explanation
through the example of the ballot.
Responses to Psychoanalysis
It is non-falsifiable, no scientist has ever found the death drive in the
wild. Psychoanalysis is like a priesthood that describes a hidden
structure of the unconscious, creates all social relations and
psychoanalysis is a totalitarian science to claim access to its hidden
real and is an oppressive tool as a result. Its wrong because the
theory of the unconscious cant be proved, theres no such thing as an
active unconscious. Probably true about Freud where he was wrong
about the biology of the drive, but for Lacan stuff isnt biological, not
about specific subjects, his innovation was to make the unconscious
not something inside your skull, but a society phenomenon.
Unconscious is set of relations but we arent necessarily directly
aware of. Tracing the way words evolve over time. Covering over
those things is repression. There is no internal you, so the theory of
the active unconscious isnt real. Repressed things are signifiers in
the unconscious, an external phenomenon of language and not an
internal phenomenon of the subject. None of the social sciences are
actually sciences and no theory in the humanities is actually
falsifiable, that standard would destroy almost every statement.
Correlating data points doesnt prove causality, historical theories are
not falsifiable, aggregation of a bad data. Human beings make
predictions very difficult- complexity mathematics, describe the
inevitability that there are increases and decreases in economic
activity.
Things to Read
Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric by
Christian Lundberg
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of
Psychoanalysis by Todd McGowan
Lacan and the Political by Yannis Stavrakakis
Shells
1NC Lundberg
The 1ACs demand to be recognized as a form of political dissent is an
investment in the hegemonic order the power of demand stems
from the authority of the system. Their failure to theorize desire turns
the 1AC into a moment of jouissance that betrays their radical
intentions in order to maintain the possibility of protest. The 1AC is
structured by an agential fantasy This constant repetition of the
demand that to change our representations that will never be fulfilled
invests desire solely onto the level of demand creating a constant
repetition of the same The 1NC is a no to the affirmative and
disrupts the agential fantasy in favor of reinvesting desire in light of
the death drive.
Lundberg 12 (Christian Lundberg is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies, Lacan in Public:
Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric, 11/26/12) AqN *modified for ableist and gendered
rhetoric*
In the run up to the 2003 World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in Cancun, the
Mexican Government composed a list of the sixty most globalophobic leaders of
antiglobalization groups. The document, subsequently leaked to the Mexican newspaper La Reforma, was met with predictable criticisms regarding
the relationship between state security apparatuses, the institutions of global economic governance, and democratic protest. But there were less predictable responses: in
addition to criticisms that the list chilled democratic dissent, some antiglobalization groups criticized the list for not being comprehensive enough, demanding its expansion.
protest. Here, the lack of recognition does not make the protest ineffective, instead
the fact that the Mexican government and the WTO underestimate the danger
posed by ordinary citizens animates this critique. Not to be outdone, the Mexico Solidarity Network created an online
form letter for self-identified dangerous antiglobalization groups: Dear Government Agents Bent on Restricting Civil Liberties, I recently found out about the watch list
prepared by Mexican authorities, purportedly to quell the voice of civil society at the upcoming WTO Ministerial in Cancun. . . . Please add my name to your watch list
immediately!! Nothing less is acceptable.26 One might read such demands as parodic critiques of globalization and security, as ironic calls for mobilization, as a strategy of
as a means of democratizing global governance, these demands are not simply for
inclusion: they are also demands to be recognized as dangerous and in solidarity
with other similarly dangerous global citizens. How is it possible to ground a reading of the rhetorical functions of the
demand to be recognized as dangerous? For Laclau, such demands ought be read through their
Specific political
(mis)identification and the set of identitarian equivalences inaugurated by investing in the specific content of the demand.
There is no achievable
contains a brief discussion of the concept of jouissance in Copjecs work, which Laclau summarizes by saying:
jouissance except through radical investment in an objet petit a. But the same discovery (not merely an
analogous one) is made if we start from the angle of political theory. No social fullness except through hegemony; and
achievable as the preceding quotation might suggest. Far from being the
consummation of a logic of structure and investment, enjoyment is a supplement
to a failing in a structure: for example, Lacan frames jouissance as a useless
enjoyment of ones own subjectivity that supplements the fundamental failings of a
subject in either finding grounding or consummating an authoritative account of
its coherence. This uselessness defines the operation of jouissance. When Lacan suggests that language is not the speaking subject in the seminar On
Feminine Sexuality, lodging a critique of structural linguistics as a law governing speech, jouissance is understood as something excessive that is born of the failure of structures
of signification. Language is not the speaking subject precisely because what is passed through the gristmill of speech is the result of a misfiring of structure as much as it is
prefigured by logics of structure, meaning, and utility. Therefore the interpretive difficulty for a structuralist account of enjoyment: the moment that the fact of enjoyment is
Framing
recoded in the language of structure, the moment that it is made useful in a logic of subjectivization, is precisely the moment where it stops being jouissance.
this reversal is that the subject is simultaneously produced and disfigured by its
unavoidable insertion into the space of the Symbolic. An Es assumes an identity as a subject as a way of
accommodating to the Symbolics demands and as a node for producing demands on its others or of being recognized as a subject.34 As I have already argued, the demand
demonstrates that the enjoyment of ones own subjectivity is useless surplus produced in the gap between the Es (or it) and the ideal I. As a result, there is excess jouissance that
remains even after its reduction to hegemony. This remainder may even be logically prior to hegemony, in that it is a useless but ritually repeated retroactive act of naming the
self that produces the subject and therefore conditions possibility for investment in an identitarian configuration. The site of this excess, where the subject negotiates the terms
of a nonrelationship with the Symbolic, is also the primary site differentiating need, demand, and desire. Need approximates the position of the Freudian id, in that it is a
Sheridan notes, there is no adequation between need and demand.35 The same type of split that
inheres in the Freudian demand inheres in the Lacanian demand, although in Lacans case it is crucial to notice that the split does not derive from the empirical impossibility of
the specificity
fulfilling demands as much as it stems from the impossibility of articulating needs to or receiving a satisfactory response from the Other. Thus,
of the demand becomes less relevant than the structural fact that demand
presupposes the ability of the addressee to fulfill the demand. This impossibility
points to the paradoxical nature of demand: the demand is less a way of
addressing need to the other than a call for love and recognition by it. In this way, writes Lacan,
demand annuls the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love, and the very satisfactions that it obtains for need are reduced to the
level of being no more than the crushing of the demand for love.36 The Other cannot, by definition, ever give this gift: the starting presupposition of the mirror stage is the
constitutive impossibility of comfortably inhabiting the Symbolic. The structural impossibility of fulfilling demands resonates with the Freudian demand in that the frustration
of demand produces the articulation of desire. Thus, Lacan argues that desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results
from the subtraction of the first from the second.37 This sentiment animates the crucial Lacanian claim for the impossibility of the other giving a gift that it does not have,
demand becomes separated from need: this margin being that which is opened up
by demand, the appeal of which can be unconditional only in regards to the Other .
. . having no universal satisfaction. . . . It is this whim that introduces the phantom
of omnipotence, not of the subject, but of the other in which his demand is
installed.38 This framing of demand reverses the classically liberal presupposition regarding demand and agency. Contemporary and classical liberal democratic
theories presume that the demand is a way of exerting agency and, further, that the more firmly the demand is lodged, the greater the production of an agential effect. The
Lacanian framing of the demand sees the relationship as exactly the opposite: the
more firmly one lodges a demand, the more desperately one clings to the
legitimate ability of an institution to fulfill it. Hypothetically, demands ought reach
a kind of breaking point where the inability of an institution or order to proffer a
response should produce a reevaluation of the economy of demand and desire . In
analytic terms, this is the moment of subtraction, where the manifest content of
the demand is stripped away and the desire that underwrites it is laid bare. The
result of this subtraction is that the subject is in a position to relate to its desire,
not as a set of deferrals, avoidances, or transposition but rather as an owned
political disposition. As Lacan frames it, demanding subjects are either learning to
reassert the centrality of their demand or coming to terms with the impotence of
the Other as a satisfier of demands: But it is in the dialectic of the demand for love
and the test of desire that development is ordered. . . . [T]his test of the desire of the Other is decisive not in the
sense that the subject learns by it whether or not he has a phallus, but in the sense that he learns that the mother does not have it.39 The point of this disposition is to bring the
subject to a point where they might recognize and name their own desire and, as a result, become a political subject in the sense of being able to truly argue for something
without being dependent on the other as a support for or organizing principle for political identity. Thus, desire has both a general status and a specific status for each subject. It
is not just the mirror that produces the subject and its investments but the desire and sets of proxy objects that cover over this original gap. As Easthope puts it: Lacan is sure
that everyones desire is somehow different and their ownlack is nevertheless my lack. How can this be if each of us is just lost in language . . . passing through demand into
desire, something from the Real, from the individuals being before language, is retained as a trace enough to determine that I desire here and there, not anywhere and
Lacan terms this objet petit a . . . petit a is different for everyone; and it can
everywhere.
expense of ever articulating a desire that is theirs. In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the hysterics
demand that the Other produce an object is the support of an aversion toward ones desire: the behavior of the hysteric, for example, has as its aim to recreate a state centered
on the object, insofar as this object . . . is . . . the support of an aversion.43 This economy of aversion explains the ambivalent relationship between hysterics and their demands.
On one hand, the hysteric asserts their agency, even authority, over the Other. Yet, what appears as unfettered agency from the perspective of a discourse of authority is also
Thus, as
simultaneously a surrender of desire by enjoying the act of figuring the other as the one with the exclusive capability to satisfy the demand.
hysterics you demand a new master: you will get it! At the register of manifest
content, demands are claims for action and seemingly powerful, but at the level of
the rhetorical form of the demand or in the register of enjoyment, demand is a
kind of surrender. As a relation of address the hysterical demand is more a demand for recognition and love from an ostensibly repressive order than a
claim for change. The limitation of the students call on Lacan does not lie in the end they sought but in the fact that the hysterical address never quite breaks free from its
over and against hegemony but rather the practices of enjoyment that sustain an
addiction to mastery and a deferral of desire. Hysteria is a politically effective subject position in some ways, but it is
politically constraining from the perspective of organized political dissent. If not a unidirectional practice of resistance, hysteria is at best a politics of interruption. Imagine a
world where the state was the perfect and complete embodiment of a hegemonic order, without interruption or remainder, and the discursive system was hermetically closed.
universally impose the same demands without any concern for universally
distributing the means for satisfying them, thus helping to legitimate the
inequality that one merely records and ratifies, while additionally exercising (first
of all in the educational system) the symbolic violence associated with the effects
of real inequality within formal equality.3 According to Reay, the upshot of raising educational
expectations and broadening educational opportunity as a means toward greater
social and economic equality is an imposition of upper-class values on any
working-class student willing to sever ties with familial and class identities: In England, in the
minority of cases when the equation of working class plus education equals academic success, education is not about the valorization of
working classness but its erasure.4 Education in these circumstances thus promises a means of escape from the culture into which one is born, but as Reay
this notion of escaping ones own, and especially of contributing to negative
argues,
up the question of students suffering and resistance in language more commonly associated with pathology, melancholia has maintained an
ambivalent place in Western thought for as long as it has been recognized as a
marginal characteristic of the human psyche: as with Antigone, melancholia serves as both an
individual pathology and an indicator of social ills. Aristotle seems to have been the first to identify the excess of black bile (melaina
chole), from which the term melancholia is derived, with an exceptional, generative aspect of human nature coextensive with mans anxiety in Being.7 The ambivalence of
for a lost or unspeakable object can be seen as a potential outcome at every stage of
the subjects educational life, and the preference or erotization of suffering that
grows from this refusal is at stake in each attempt made by the student to
rediscover and reinvent him- or herself [themselves] in the language of the
curriculum. While the interpellation of the subject within language is necessary to
its education in any particular discourse of human flourishing, in order to remain
a distinct self rather than be swallowed whole by the interests of a discourse the
subject must engage in some sort of refusal of language in its own formation . That
this assertion of something in the self that is more than the sum of its influences
a character or personal style derives more from the limitations of language to
account for its own creations than from an original nature or inborn disposition
has important consequences for the way we understand the recalcitrant child, the
refusal of curricular goals, and the formation of competent human subjects.
It is
we prevent their final realisation?. [How can] we return to a non-utopian society, less perfect and more free (Berdiaev in Berneri, 1971:309). 2
particularly the political experience of these last decades that led to the dislocation
of utopian sensibilities and brought to the fore a novel appreciation of human
finitude, together with a growing suspicion of all grandiose political projects and
the meta-narratives traditionally associated with them (Whitebook, 1995:75). All
these developments, that is to say the crisis of the utopian imaginary, seem
however to leave politics without its prime motivating force: the politics of today is
a politics of aporia. In our current political terrain, hope seems to be replaced by pessimism or even resignation. This is a result of the crisis in the
dominant modality of our political imagination (meaning utopianism in its various forms) and of our inability to resolve this crisis in a productive way. 3 In this chapter, I will
try to show that Lacanian theory provides new angles through which we can reflect on our historical experience of utopia and reorient our political imagination beyond its
suffocating strait-jacket. Lets start our exploration with the most elementary of questions: what is the meaning of the current crisis of utopia? And is this crisis a development to
it
be regretted or cherished? In order to answer these questions it is crucial to enumerate the conditions of possibility and the basic characteristics of utopian thinking. First of all
seems that the need for utopian meaning arises in periods of increased uncertainty, social instability and
conflict, when the element of the political subverts the fantasmatic stability of our political reality.
Utopias are generated by the surfacing of grave antagonisms and dislocations in the social field. As Tillich has put
it all utopias strive to negate the negativein human existence; it is the negative in
that existence which makes the idea of utopia necessary (Tillich in Levitas, 1990:103). Utopia then is one of the
possible responses to the ever-present negativity, to the real antagonism which is constitutive of human experience. Furthermore, from the time of Mores Utopia (1516) it is conceived as an
communities in which these antagonisms and the dislocations fuelling them (the element of the
political) will be forever resolved, leading to a reconciled and harmonious worldit is not a coincidence
that, among others, Fourier names his utopian community Harmony and that the name of the Owenite
utopian community in the New World was New Harmony. As Marin has put it, utopia sets in view an imaginary resolution to social
contradiction; it is a simulacrum of synthesis which dissimulates social antagonism by projecting it onto a screen representing a harmonious and immobile equilibrium (Marin, 1984:61). This
final resolution is the essence of the utopian promise. What I will try to do in this chapter is, first of all, to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of utopian politics. Simply put, my
argument will be that every utopian fantasy construction needs a scapegoat in order to
constitute itselfthe Nazi utopian fantasy and the production of the Jew is a good example, especially
as pointed out in ieks analysis.4 Every utopian fantasy produces its reverse and calls for
its elimination. Put another way, the beatific side of fantasy is coupled in utopian constructions with a
horrific side, a paranoid need for a stigmatised scapegoat. The naivetyand also the dangerof utopian
structures is revealed when the realisation of this fantasy is attempted. It is then that we are brought
close to the frightening kernel of the real: stigmatisation is followed by extermination. This is not
an accident. It is inscribed in the structure of utopian constructions; it seems to be the way all fantasy
constructions work. If in almost all utopian visions, violence and antagonism are eliminated, if utopia is based on the expulsion and
repression of violence (this is its beatific side) this is only because it owes its own creation to violence; it
is sustained and fed by violence (this is its horrific side). This repressed moment of violence resurfaces, as Marin points out, in the difference inscribed in the name
utopia itself (Marin, 1984:110). What we shall argue is that it also resurfaces in the production of the figure of an enemy. To use a phrase
enunciated by the utopianist Fourier, what is driven out through the door comes back through the window (is not this a precursor of Lacans dictum that what is foreclosed in the symbolic
reappears in the real?VII:131).5 The work of Norman Cohn and other historians permits the articulation of a genealogy of this manichean, equivalential way of understanding the world,
from the great witch-hunt up to modern anti-Semitism, and Lacanian theory can provide valuable insights into any attempt to understand the logic behind this utopian operationhere the
approach to fantasy developed in Chapter 2 will further demonstrate its potential in analysing our political experience. In fact, from the time of his unpublished seminar on The Formations of
Lacan identified the utopian dream of a perfectly functioning society as a highly problematic
the Unconscious,
area (seminar of 18 June 1958). In order to realise the problematic character of the utopian operation it is necessary to articulate a genealogy of this way of representing and making sense
of the world. The work of Norman Cohn seems especially designed to serve this purpose. What is most important is that in Cohns schema we can encounter the three basic characteristics of
continuous battle with the unexpected there is always a need to represent and master this unexpected,
to transform disorder to order. Second, this representation is usually articulated as a total and universal
representation, a promise of absolute mastery of the totality of the real, a vision of the end of history. A
future utopian state is envisaged in which disorder will be totally eliminated. Third, this symbolisation
produces its own remainder; there is always a certain particularity remaining outside the universal
schema. It is to the existence of this evil agent, which can be easily localised, that all persisting disorder is
attributed. The elimination of disorder depends then on the elimination of this group. The
result is always horrible: persecution, massacres, holocausts. Needless to say, no utopian fantasy is ever
realised as a result of all these crimesas mentioned in Chapter 2, the purpose of fantasy is not to satisfy an (impossible) desire but to constitute it as such. What is of great interest for our
approach is the way in which Cohn himself articulates a genealogy of the pair utopia/demonisation in his books The Pursuit of the Millennium and Europes Inner Demons (Cohn, 1993b,
1993c). The same applies to his book Warrant for Genocide (Cohn, 1996) which will also be implicated at a certain stage in our analysis. These books are concerned with the same social
phenomenon, the idea of purifying humanity through the extermination of some category of human beings which are conceived as agents of corruption, disorder and evil. The contexts are, of
course, different, but the urge remains the same (Cohn, 1993b:xi). All these works then, at least according to my reading, are concerned with the production of an archenemy which goes
together with the utopian mentality. It could be argued that the roots of both demonisation and utopian thinking can be traced back to the shift from a cyclical to a unilinear representation of
history (Cohn, 1993a:227).6 However, we will start our reading of Cohns work by going back to Roman civilisation. As Cohn claims, a profound demonising tendency is discernible in Ancient
Roman world, although Judaism was regarded as a bizarre religion, it was nevertheless a religio licita, a
religion that was officially recognised. Things were different with the newly formed Christian sect. In fact the Christian Eucharist
could easily be interpreted as cannibalistic (Cohn, 1993b:8). In almost all their ways Christians ignored or
even negated the fundamental convictions by which the pagan Graeco-Roman world lived. It is not at all surprising
then that to the Romans they looked like a bunch of conspirators plotting to destroy society. Towards the end of the second century, according to Tertullian, it was taken as a given that the
Christians are the cause of every public catastrophe, every disaster that hits the populace. If the Tiber floods or the Nile fails to, if there is a drought or an earthquake, a famine or a plague, the
cry goes up at once: Throw the Christians to the Lions!. (Tertullian in Cohn, 1993b:14) This defamation of Christians that led to their exclusion from the boundaries of humanity and to their
relentless persecution is a pattern that was repeated many times in later centuries, when both the persecutors and the persecuted were Christians (Cohn, 1993b:15). Bogomiles, Waldensians,
the Fraticelli movement and the Catharsall the groups appearing in Umberto Ecos fascinating books, especially in The Name of the Rosewere later on persecuted within a similar discursive
context. The same happened with the demonisation of Christians, the fantasy that led to the great witch-hunt. Again, the conditions of possibility for this demonisation can be accurately
defined. First, some kind of misfortune or catastrophe had to occur, and second, there had to be someone who could be singled out as the cause of this misfortune (Cohn, 1993b:226). In
Cohns view then, social dislocation and unrest, on the one hand, and millenarian exaltation, on the
other, do overlap. When segments of the poor population were mesmerised by a prophet, their
understandable desire to improve their living conditions became transfused with fantasies of a future
community reborn into innocence through a final, apocalyptic massacre. The evil onesvariously identified with the Jews, the
clergy or the richwere to be exterminated; after which the Saintsi.e. the poor in questionwould set up their kingdom, a realm without suffering or sin. (Cohn, 1993c:1415) It was at
times of acute dislocation and disorientation that this demonising tendency was more present. When people were faced with a situation totally alien to their experience of normality, when
they were faced with unfamiliar hazards dislocating their constructions of realitywhen they encountered the realthe collective flight into the world of demonology could occur more easily
(ibid.: 87). The same applies to the emergence of millenarian fantasies. The vast majority of revolutionary millenarian outbreaks takes place against a background of disaster. Cohn refers to the
plagues that generated the first Crusade and the flagellant movements of 1260, 13489, 1391 and 1400, the famines that preluded the first and second Crusade, the pseudo-Baldwin
It is perhaps striking
movement and other millenarian outbreaks and, of course, the Black Death that precipitated a whole wave of millenarian excitement (ibid.: 282).7
that all the characteristics we have encountered up to now are also marking modern phenomena such
as Nazi anti-Semitic utopianism. In fact, in the modern anti-Semitic fantasy the remnants of past demonological terrors are blended with anxieties and resentments
emerging for the first time with modernity (Cohn, 1996:27). In structural terms the situation remains pretty much the same. The first condition of possibility for
its emergence is the dislocation of traditional forms of organising and making sense of society, a
dislocation inflicted by the increased hegemony of secularism, liberalism, socialism, industrialisation,
etc. Faced with such disorientating developments, people can very easily resort to a promise for the re-
establishment of a lost harmony. Within such a context Hitler proved successful in persuading the
Germans that he was their only hope. Heartfields genius collages exposing the dark kernel of National
Socialism didnt prove very effective against Nazi propaganda. It was mass unemployment, misery and anxiety (especially of the middle
classes) that led to Hitlers hegemony, to the hegemony of the Nazi utopian promise. At the very time when German society was turning into one of the great industrial powers of Europe, a
land of factories and cities, technology and bureaucracy, many Germans were dreaming of an archaic world of Germanic peasants, organically linked by bonds of blood in a natural
community. Yet, as Cohn very successfully points out, such a view of the world requires an anti-figure, and this was supplied partly by the liberal West but also, and more effectively, by the
The emergence of the Jew as a modern antichrist follows directly from this structural
Jews (Cohn, 1996:188).
necessity for an anti-figure. Rosenberg, Goebbels and other (virtually all) Nazi ideologues used the phantom of the Jewish race as a lynch-pin binding the fears of
the past and prospective victims of modernisation, which they articulated, and the ideal volkish society of the future which they proposed to create in order to forestall further advances of
modernity. (Bauman, 1989:61) No doubt the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy is a revival, in a secularised form, of certain apocalyptic beliefs. There is clearly a connection between the
famous forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the antichrist prophecy (Cohn, 1996:48). The Protocols were first published by Nilus as part of his book The Great in the Small:
Antichrist Considered as an Imminent Political Possibility and were published in 1917 with the title He is Near, At the DoorHere comes Antichrist and the Reign of the Devil on Earth. As the
famous Nazi propagandist Rosenberg points out One of the advance signs of the coming struggle for the new organisation of the world is this understanding of the very nature of the demon
antichrist, that is the Jews, is considered as the remedy for all dislocations, the key to a new harmonious
world. Jews were seen as deserving death (and resented for that reason) because they stood between
this one imperfect and tension-ridden reality and the hoped-for world of tranquil happinessthe
disappearance of the Jews was instrumental in bringing about the world of perfection. (Bauman, 1989:76) As Sartre
claims, for the anti-Semite the Good itself is reduced to the destruction of Evil. Underneath the bitterness of the anti-Semite one can only reveal the optimistic belief that harmony will be
reconstituted of itself, once Evil is destroyed. When the mission of the anti-Semite as holy destroyer is fulfilled, the lost paradise will be re-established (Sartre, 1995:435).8 In Adornos words,
charging the Jews with all existing evils seems to penetrate the darkness of reality like a searchlight and to allow for quick and all-comprising orientation. It is the great Panaceathe key to
the elimination of the Jew is posited as the only thing that can transform
everything (Adorno, 1993:311, my emphasis). Simply put,
the Nazi dream to reality, the only thing that can realise utopia.9 As it is pointed out by an American
Nazi propagandist, our problem is very simple. Get rid of the Jews and wed be on the way to Utopia
tomorrow. The Jews are the root of all our trouble (True in Cohn, 1996:264, my emphasis). The same is, of course, true of Stalinism. Zygmunt Bauman brings the two cases together:
Hitlers and Stalins victims were not killed in order to capture and colonise the territory they occupied. They were killed because they did not fit, for one reason or another, the scheme of a
perfect society. Their killing was not the work of destruction but creation. They were eliminated, so that an objectively better human worldmore efficient, more moral, more beautiful
could be established. A Communist world. Or a racially pure, Aryan world. In both cases, a harmonious world, conflict free, docile in the hands of their rulers, orderly, controlled. (Bauman,
1989:93) In any case, one should not forget that the fact that the anti-figure in Nazi ideology came to be the Jew is not an essential but a contingent development. In principle, it could have
personality Theodor Adorno and his colleagues point out that subjects in our sample find numerous
other substitutes for the Jew, such as the Mexicans and the Greeks (Adorno, 1993:303). Although the need for the structural position
of the anti-figure remains constant the identity of the subject occupying that position is never given a priori. This does not mean that within a certain historical configuration with a particular
Of course,
social sedimentation and hegemonic structure all the possibilities are open to the same extent; it means though that in principle nobody is excluded from being stigmatised.
the decision on who will eventually be stigmatised depends largely on the availability within a particular
social configuration of groups that can perform this role in social fantasy, and this availability is socially
constructed out of the existing materials. As Lacan points out in Anxiety, although a lack or a void can be filled in
several ways (in principle), experienceand, in fact, analytic experienceshows that it is never actually
filled in 99 different ways (seminar of 21 November 1962). What we have here is basically a play of incarnation.
This play of incarnation is marking both the pole of the utopian fantasies and the
pole of the evil powers that stand between us and them. As Cohn concludes, Middle Ages prophecies had a deep
effect on the political attitudes of the times. For people in the Middle Ages, the drama of the Last Days was not a distant and hazy but an infallible prophecy which at any given
moment was felt to be on the point of fulfilment: In even the most unlikely reigns chroniclers tried to perceive that harmony among Christians, that triumph over misbelievers,
that unparalleled plenty and prosperity which were going to be the marks of the new Golden Age. When each time experience brought the inevitable disillusionment people
merely imagined the glorious consummation postponed to the next reign. (Cohn, 1993c:35) But this fantasy cannot be separated by the coming of the antichrist which was even
more tensely awaited. Generation after generation of medieval people lived in continuous expectation of signs of the antichrist, and since these signs, as presented in the
prophecies, included comets, plague, bad rulers, famine, etc. a similar play of incarnation was played out in terms of determining the true face of the antichrist (ibid.).
Subjects engage in acts of self-sacrifice and self-sabotage because the loss enacted
reproduces the subject's lost object and enables the subject to enjoy this object.
Once it is obtained, the object ceases to be the object. As a result, the subject must
continually repeat the sacrificial acts that produce the object, despite the damage
that such acts do to the subject's self-interest. From the perspective of the death drive, we turn to violence
not in order to gain power but in order to produce loss, which is our only source of
enjoyment. Without the lost object, life becomes bereft of any satisfaction . The
repetition of sacrifice, however, creates a life worth living, a life in which one can
enjoy oneself through the lost object. The repetition involved with the death drive is not simply repetition of any particular experience. The
repetition compulsion leads the subject to repeat specifically the experiences that
have traumatized it and disturbed its stable functioning. The better things are
going for the subject, the more likely that the death drive will derail the subject's
activity. According to the theory implied by the death drive, any movement toward the good - any progress - will
tend to produce a reaction that will undermine it. This occurs both on the level of
the individual and on the level of society. In psychoanalytic treatment, it takes the form of a negative therapeutic reaction, an effort to sustain one's
disorder in the face of the imminence of the cure. We can also think of individuals who continue to choose romantic relationships that fail according to a precise pattern. Politically, it means that
progress triggers the very forms of oppression that it hopes to combat and thereby
incessantly undermines itself, there is a backlash written into every progressive
program from the outset. The death drive creates an essentially masochistic
structure within the psyche. It provides the organizing principle for the subject
and orients the subject relative to its enjoyment, and this enjoyment remains
always linked to trauma. This structure renders difficult all attempts to prompt subjects to act in their own self-interest or for their own good. The death
drive leads subjects to act contrary to their own interests, to sabotage the projects
that would lead to their good. Common sense tells us that sadism is easier to understand than masochism, that the sadist's lust for power over the object makes sense in
a way that the masochist's self-destruction does not. But for psychoanalysis, masochism functions as the paradigmatic form of subjectivity. Considering the structure of the death drive, masochism becomes easily
explained, and sadism becomes a mystery. Masochism provides the subject the enjoyment of loss, while sadism seems to give this enjoyment to the other. This is exactly the claim of Jacques Lacan's revolutionary
interpretation of sadism in his famous article "Kant with Sade." Though most readers focus on the essay's philosophical coupling of Kantian morality with Sadean perversion, the more significant step that Lacan
takes here occurs in his explanation of sadism's appeal. Traditionally, most people vilify sadists for transforming their victims into objects for their own satisfaction, but Lacan contends that they actually turn
Though
themselves into objects for the other's enjoyment. He notes: "The sadist discharges the pain of existence into the Other, but without seeing that he himself thereby turns into an 'eternal object:"
the other suffers pain, the other also becomes the sole figure of enjoyment. What the sadist
enjoys in the sadistic act is the enjoyment attributed to the other, and the sadistic act attempts to bring about this enjoyment. In this sense, sadism is nothing but an inverted form of masochism, which remains the
because the death drive is the drive that animates us as subjects. Unlike Herbert Marcuse, Norman 0. Brown,
another celebrated proponent of psychoanalytically informed political thought, attempts to construct a psychoanalytic political project that focuses on the death drive. He does not
simply see it as the unfortunate result of the repression of eros but as a powerful category
on its own. In Life against Death, Brown conceives of the death drive as a self-annihilating
impulse that emerges out of the human incapacity to accept death and loss. As he puts it,
"The death instinct is the core of the human neurosis. It begins with the human
infant's incapacity to accept separation from the mother, that separation which
confers individual life on all living organisms and which in all living organisms at
the same time leads to death:'23 For Brown, we pursue death and destruction,
paradoxically, because we cannot accept death. If we possessed the ability to
accept our own death, according to Brown's view, we would avoid falling into the death drive and
would thereby rid ourselves of human violence and destructiveness. Like Marcuse, Brown's
societal ideal involves the unleashing of the sexual drives and the minimizing or
elimination of the death drive. He even raises the stakes, contending that unless we manage to realize this
ideal, the human species, under the sway of the death drive, will die out like the
dinosaurs. Despite making more allowances for the death drive (and for death itself) than Marcuse, Brown nonetheless cannot avoid a
similar error: the belief that the death drive is a force that subjects can overcome. For
Freud, in contrast, it is the force that revenges itself on every overcoming, the repetition that no utopia can fully leave behind. An authentic recognition of the
death drive and its primacy would demand that we rethink the idea of progress
altogether.
1NC Policy Regulate Education
Education reform is a project that seeks to create psychic dead zones
structured by the death drive. The very language of education
constricts the symbolic this produces a desensitization and psychic
numbness that serve to smooth the processes of governmentality.
Taubman 17 (Peter Taubman is a professor of secondary education at the Brooklyn College,
Death by Numbers: A Response to Backer, Sarigianides, and Stillwaggon, SYMPOSIUM: ON
THE UNMOURNED LOSSES OF EDUCATIONAL GROWTH. GUEST EDITOR: JAMES
STILLWAGGON, Educational Theory, 2/7/17) AqN *modified for ableist rhetoric*
Freud's initial claim was that the death drive compels us to return to an inanimate
or inert state.11 What if we were to read the death drive not in the literal sense but
rather in the figurative sense, as a drive to put an end to memory, and history, and
therefore to feelings? What if the death drive kills that which, in fact, makes us
human? What if we have within us as individuals or groups a drive that, provoked
and shaped by particular constellations of social and historical forces or by
particular conditions, impels us to create psychic dead zones, to render ourselves
and others less than human? As Michael Eigen said, When one is dead, one fears being alive.12 The Death of History
If repetition results from not remembering or is a form of remembering without
working through, if it is a way, as Adam Phillips suggests, of making memory
impossible, of determinedly wishing not to know or creating states of mind in
which there is nothing left to remember,13 then can we not read the death drive
in terms of a force that destroys history and memory? Might not the compulsion to
repeat, in which Freud initially located the death drive, be seen in the repetition
compulsion of education, returning again and again to the same purported
panaceas as a way to avoid the trauma of its inherent impossibility? To be locked
in the past, James Baldwin wrote, means that one has no past, since one can
never assess it, or use it, and if one cannot use the past, one has no present.14 One is, as
Baldwin warns, stuck in a perpetual youth, a corrupt innocence. Can we not see such corrupt innocence in education
reform's insistence on its newness, its certainty, and its nowness? Anyone who
opposes ed reform is cast as living in a dead past. Can we not see this blind [blank]
innocence in the failure to work through histories and dreams of and dependence
on, for example, white supremacy or misogyny? Certainly in the United States, the
inability to face the trauma of race and the resistance to looking at the role of white
supremacy in the formation of identities, fortunes, and education policies create
not only racial melancholia but psychic dead zones and reveal the workings of a
death drive. Sarigianides suggests as much in her reading of American Born Chinese.15 As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, the tenacious dream of white, straight, male
exceptionalism that thrives on generalization, limiting questions, and privileging immediate answers numbs memory and erases history.16 This drive to
architecture as analogies for teaching, or when they base their views of teaching in
the learning sciences, they effectively remove teaching from the world of history.
The Death of Feelings But if memory and history disappear, what happens to feelings? Let us follow Brian Massumi and take feelings to be both personal and biographical. They
are, he writes, body-based sensations, checked against remembered experiences that emerge in language.18 What will happen to feelings if memory and history vanish and the
language in which feelings take form diminishes? If the language of education reform increasingly constricts
the symbolic I imagine many of us have had the experience of feeling suffocated or flattened by that language at meetings and if it makes
relationships suspect I imagine, too, we have all felt interpersonal exchanges rushed, diminished, or mistrusted under the glare of audit
might we not also venture that such language diminishes the world of feelings?
Certainly we know that education reform culls its language from the worlds of
finance and business, which reduce all behavior to the bottom line; from the
learning sciences, which render knowledge and wisdom as information and insist
on predictability and replicability; from the military, with its focus on command
and control; and from the world of sports, which knows only winners and losers.
The language of these worlds evacuates our subjectivity, except insofar as it
demands that we endlessly monitor, control, and improve ourselves and others.
This demand for constant improvement, a kind of superego of education reform,
lacerates us with the harsh and narrow language of failure, substituting imperious
judgment for conversation and, as Adam Phillips suggests in Unforbidden
Pleasures, submitting our lives to one, often cruel, correct interpretation.19 The
self-denigration with which Freud distinguished melancholia from mourning
appears in the impoverished language of the superego that harbors the drive to
turn us into objects. The language of the superego, Phillips further suggests, is
filled with petty and cruel demands and vicious charges that we are never
enough.20 There is no dialogue, no poetry, no interpretive flexibility. There is only
the one right answer, and we are reduced to an object whipped and rendered inert,
left with only depression or, turned outward, rage, and a lingering affect provoked
by the constrictions of deadened identities and numbed and numbered selves. The
superego that stuck record that endlessly reiterates its scathing criticism in its
impoverished vocabulary first turns us into an object by telling us who we are
before it unleashes its scorn on us. As Phillips writes, [T]he superego treats the ego like an object not a person.21 Can we
not see [recognize] the work of the death drive in the way teachers and students
are articulated as bundles of skills, lists of rules and procedures, and scripts
written, designed, and packaged somewhere else? It's no wonder that education
reformers talk so much of building a better teacher. Through various
vocabularies and practices of quantification, we are rendered and render
ourselves as machines: efficient, predictable, and easily programmed, machines
that elicit and process numerical data. The impoverishment of language results
not only from the barrage of terms culled from the worlds of business, the learning
sciences, the military, and sports, but also from ed reform's fascination with and
promotion of technology. Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has perhaps written most persuasively about the
role of technology in the transformation of our feeling life. She is particularly worried about the decline in empathy among young people and the blurring of boundaries between
machines and humans, as robots come to be programmed to give the appearance of feeling.22 If feelings disappear or emerge only in terms of spatial descriptions I feel high,
Deprived of feeling,
low, flat, as Fredric Jameson so many years ago claimed was happening in our postmodern state23 what happens to thought?
does not thought itself dry up? Bound by rules of statistical evidence, empirical
verifiability, experimental design, and linear sequential logic, rendered always in
terms of cognitive operations or in terms of Bloom's taxonomy, thinking hardens.
The rigor demanded by education reformers becomes rigor mortis. If repetition
compulsion signals the presence of the death drive, then perhaps we can say that
such repetition is indeed in the service of an ultimately deadening psychic stasis,
of numbing feelings. Even the addict who would seem to be seeking the rush of affect and who is certainly caught in a repetition compulsion is trying hard
not to feel. This is why recovery can be so hard too many feelings. Is it possible, then, that all the various defenses
we erect serve to defend against feelings, to achieve psychic numbness? Are they
perhaps all really minions of the death drive? Can we read the death drive in Theodor Adorno's manipulative character, who
is distinguished by a rage for organization and a certain lack of emotion and one who is obsessed with doing things as well as becoming a thing, or in Christopher Bollas's
normotic, who fails to symbolize in language his subjective states of mind and is inclined to reflect on the thingness of objects, on their material reality, or on data that relates
drive for numbness, for forgetting, for psychic deadness. And perhaps this drive
both constitutes and inflames a superego inflated by the ineffable losses of
melancholia. If the death drive is a drive to psychically numb ourselves and
neoliberalism provides conditions under which this drive grows in intensity, and if
melancholy, which Freud said diminishes our interest in the outside world and
the capacity to love,25 becomes the dominant structure of feeling, what hope is
there? This, Freud felt, was the fateful question.26 He offered as a response that hope lay in the other of the two Heavenly Powers, eternal Eros.27 Perhaps our task,
then, is to engage in a project of remembering and feeling or at least creating the conditions such that these are possible. In their contributions to this symposium, Backer,
Sarigianides, and Stillwaggon suggest particular approaches to classroom discourse, the choice of texts, and teaching writing that might constitute such conditions. I want to
focus, however, on Freud's third claim that Eros is the preserver of life.
But aside from the consensualism, evident in the emphasis on all parties singing from the same song sheet, and the
instrumentalism, obvious in the characterisation of schools as a locus of improved
productivity, this statement is noteworthy as an illustration of the operation of
fantasy in the Lacanian sense in education policy. Within this theorization, fantasy operates
in a dialectical relationship with the fundamental lack that is inscribed in us
through our entry into the symbolic realm, within which we are mere placeholders
in a socially shared semiotic system that precedes and exceeds us. Fantasy arises as
the vehicle of potential explanation and amelioration of this lack, whilst resulting
from a continual denial/forgetting of the ontological impossibility of such
fantasmatic fulfilment. As Dean puts it what is crucialis the way the fantasy keeps open the possibility of enjoyment by telling us why we are not
really enjoying (Dean, 2006, p. 12). What seems to be overlooked in this fantasmatic vision of the
1
Social capitalist is the label adopted by the Australian Federal (Labor) government to describe its third way
policy agenda.
or at least presuppose an impossible union between incompatible elements
(Glynos & Howarth, 2007, p. 147). Such fantasies also serve to decontest and hence depoliticise both
equity and quality by harmonising all potential discord between them and hence
draining them of any sociopolitical tension. We can also see the operation of
fantasy-supported consensualism as a mode of depoliticisation in relation to the
framing of teachers work in the Education Revolution and in particular, in the
way teachers are positioned as the lynchpin of educational reform, student success
and national competitiveness. Thus, in a passage on High Quality Teaching in All Schools, Quality Education asserts, It is well established
that teacher quality is the single greatest in-school influence on student engagement and results. In addition evidence indicates the improving the quality of the teaching
workforce is fundamental to any overall improvements in schooling. The impact of teaching is cumulative a poor-quality teacher not only imparts less knowledge for the period
they teach the student, but can leave the student worse off when they later attempt higher levels of work. The 2007 McKinsey report, which identified features common to the
worlds top-performing school systems, argues that the quality of an education system simply cannot exceed the quality of its teachers and that the only way to improve
well established truth regarding the pivotal position of teachers. But aside from the attempt at
bracketing out factors like the socioeconomic status of students by restricting the claim to in-school influences as if the in- and out- of school contexts could be neatly
beatific, salvation narrative, whereby quality teachers and teaching will ensure the
future success of all students, while education is positioned as the source of
salvation for society, providing indispensible social and economic benefits an
implicit if unintended meaning implied in the very notion of an education
revolution. The overall consequence, with the role of wider societal inequality in
socioceconomic and educational success rendered invisible and irrelevant, is to
add to the broader depoliticisation of education that is the focus of this paper.
It is
we prevent their final realisation?. [How can] we return to a non-utopian society, less perfect and more free (Berdiaev in Berneri, 1971:309). 2
particularly the political experience of these last decades that led to the dislocation
of utopian sensibilities and brought to the fore a novel appreciation of human
finitude, together with a growing suspicion of all grandiose political projects and
the meta-narratives traditionally associated with them (Whitebook, 1995:75). All
these developments, that is to say the crisis of the utopian imaginary, seem
however to leave politics without its prime motivating force: the politics of today is
a politics of aporia. In our current political terrain, hope seems to be replaced by pessimism or even resignation. This is a result of the crisis in the
dominant modality of our political imagination (meaning utopianism in its various forms) and of our inability to resolve this crisis in a productive way. 3 In this chapter, I will
try to show that Lacanian theory provides new angles through which we can reflect on our historical experience of utopia and reorient our political imagination beyond its
suffocating strait-jacket. Lets start our exploration with the most elementary of questions: what is the meaning of the current crisis of utopia? And is this crisis a development to
be regretted or cherished? In order to answer these questions it is crucial to enumerate the conditions of possibility and the basic characteristics of utopian thinking. First of all it
seems that the need for utopian meaning arises in periods of increased uncertainty, social instability and
conflict, when the element of the political subverts the fantasmatic stability of our political reality.
Utopias are generated by the surfacing of grave antagonisms and dislocations in the social field. As Tillich has put
it all utopias strive to negate the negativein human existence; it is the negative in
that existence which makes the idea of utopia necessary (Tillich in Levitas, 1990:103). Utopia then is one of the
possible responses to the ever-present negativity, to the real antagonism which is constitutive of human experience. Furthermore, from the time of Mores Utopia (1516) it is conceived as an
communities in which these antagonisms and the dislocations fuelling them (the element of the
political) will be forever resolved, leading to a reconciled and harmonious worldit is not a coincidence
that, among others, Fourier names his utopian community Harmony and that the name of the Owenite
utopian community in the New World was New Harmony. As Marin has put it, utopia sets in view an imaginary resolution to social
contradiction; it is a simulacrum of synthesis which dissimulates social antagonism by projecting it onto a screen representing a harmonious and immobile equilibrium (Marin, 1984:61). This
my
final resolution is the essence of the utopian promise. What I will try to do in this chapter is, first of all, to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of utopian politics. Simply put,
argument will be that every utopian fantasy construction needs a scapegoat in order to
constitute itselfthe Nazi utopian fantasy and the production of the Jew is a good example, especially
as pointed out in ieks analysis.4 Every utopian fantasy produces its reverse and calls for
its elimination. Put another way, the beatific side of fantasy is coupled in utopian constructions with a
horrific side, a paranoid need for a stigmatised scapegoat. The naivetyand also the dangerof utopian
structures is revealed when the realisation of this fantasy is attempted. It is then that we are brought
close to the frightening kernel of the real: stigmatisation is followed by extermination. This is not
an accident. It is inscribed in the structure of utopian constructions; it seems to be the way all fantasy
constructions work. If in almost all utopian visions, violence and antagonism are eliminated, if utopia is based on the expulsion and
repression of violence (this is its beatific side) this is only because it owes its own creation to violence; it
is sustained and fed by violence (this is its horrific side). This repressed moment of violence resurfaces, as Marin points out, in the difference inscribed in the name
utopia itself (Marin, 1984:110). What we shall argue is that it also resurfaces in the production of the figure of an enemy. To use a phrase
enunciated by the utopianist Fourier, what is driven out through the door comes back through the window (is not this a precursor of Lacans dictum that what is foreclosed in the symbolic
reappears in the real?VII:131).5 The work of Norman Cohn and other historians permits the articulation of a genealogy of this manichean, equivalential way of understanding the world,
from the great witch-hunt up to modern anti-Semitism, and Lacanian theory can provide valuable insights into any attempt to understand the logic behind this utopian operationhere the
approach to fantasy developed in Chapter 2 will further demonstrate its potential in analysing our political experience. In fact, from the time of his unpublished seminar on The Formations of
Lacan identified the utopian dream of a perfectly functioning society as a highly problematic
the Unconscious,
area (seminar of 18 June 1958). In order to realise the problematic character of the utopian operation it is necessary to articulate a genealogy of this way of representing and making sense
of the world. The work of Norman Cohn seems especially designed to serve this purpose. What is most important is that in Cohns schema we can encounter the three basic characteristics of
continuous battle with the unexpected there is always a need to represent and master this unexpected,
to transform disorder to order. Second, this representation is usually articulated as a total and universal
representation, a promise of absolute mastery of the totality of the real, a vision of the end of history. A
future utopian state is envisaged in which disorder will be totally eliminated. Third, this symbolisation
produces its own remainder; there is always a certain particularity remaining outside the universal
schema. It is to the existence of this evil agent, which can be easily localised, that all persisting disorder is
attributed. The elimination of disorder depends then on the elimination of this group. The
result is always horrible: persecution, massacres, holocausts. Needless to say, no utopian fantasy is ever
realised as a result of all these crimesas mentioned in Chapter 2, the purpose of fantasy is not to satisfy an (impossible) desire but to constitute it as such. What is of great interest for our
approach is the way in which Cohn himself articulates a genealogy of the pair utopia/demonisation in his books The Pursuit of the Millennium and Europes Inner Demons (Cohn, 1993b,
1993c). The same applies to his book Warrant for Genocide (Cohn, 1996) which will also be implicated at a certain stage in our analysis. These books are concerned with the same social
phenomenon, the idea of purifying humanity through the extermination of some category of human beings which are conceived as agents of corruption, disorder and evil. The contexts are, of
course, different, but the urge remains the same (Cohn, 1993b:xi). All these works then, at least according to my reading, are concerned with the production of an archenemy which goes
together with the utopian mentality. It could be argued that the roots of both demonisation and utopian thinking can be traced back to the shift from a cyclical to a unilinear representation of
history (Cohn, 1993a:227).6 However, we will start our reading of Cohns work by going back to Roman civilisation. As Cohn claims, a profound demonising tendency is discernible in Ancient
Roman world, although Judaism was regarded as a bizarre religion, it was nevertheless a religio licita, a
religion that was officially recognised. Things were different with the newly formed Christian sect. In fact the Christian Eucharist
could easily be interpreted as cannibalistic (Cohn, 1993b:8). In almost all their ways Christians ignored or
even negated the fundamental convictions by which the pagan Graeco-Roman world lived. It is not at all surprising
then that to the Romans they looked like a bunch of conspirators plotting to destroy society. Towards the end of the second century, according to Tertullian, it was taken as a given that the
Christians are the cause of every public catastrophe, every disaster that hits the populace. If the Tiber floods or the Nile fails to, if there is a drought or an earthquake, a famine or a plague, the
cry goes up at once: Throw the Christians to the Lions!. (Tertullian in Cohn, 1993b:14) This defamation of Christians that led to their exclusion from the boundaries of humanity and to their
relentless persecution is a pattern that was repeated many times in later centuries, when both the persecutors and the persecuted were Christians (Cohn, 1993b:15). Bogomiles, Waldensians,
the Fraticelli movement and the Catharsall the groups appearing in Umberto Ecos fascinating books, especially in The Name of the Rosewere later on persecuted within a similar discursive
context. The same happened with the demonisation of Christians, the fantasy that led to the great witch-hunt. Again, the conditions of possibility for this demonisation can be accurately
defined. First, some kind of misfortune or catastrophe had to occur, and second, there had to be someone who could be singled out as the cause of this misfortune (Cohn, 1993b:226). In
Cohns view then, social dislocation and unrest, on the one hand, and millenarian exaltation, on the
other, do overlap. When segments of the poor population were mesmerised by a prophet, their
understandable desire to improve their living conditions became transfused with fantasies of a future
community reborn into innocence through a final, apocalyptic massacre. The evil onesvariously identified with the Jews, the
clergy or the richwere to be exterminated; after which the Saintsi.e. the poor in questionwould set up their kingdom, a realm without suffering or sin. (Cohn, 1993c:1415) It was at
times of acute dislocation and disorientation that this demonising tendency was more present. When people were faced with a situation totally alien to their experience of normality, when
they were faced with unfamiliar hazards dislocating their constructions of realitywhen they encountered the realthe collective flight into the world of demonology could occur more easily
(ibid.: 87). The same applies to the emergence of millenarian fantasies. The vast majority of revolutionary millenarian outbreaks takes place against a background of disaster. Cohn refers to the
plagues that generated the first Crusade and the flagellant movements of 1260, 13489, 1391 and 1400, the famines that preluded the first and second Crusade, the pseudo-Baldwin
It is perhaps striking
movement and other millenarian outbreaks and, of course, the Black Death that precipitated a whole wave of millenarian excitement (ibid.: 282).7
that all the characteristics we have encountered up to now are also marking modern phenomena such
as Nazi anti-Semitic utopianism. In fact, in the modern anti-Semitic fantasy the remnants of past demonological terrors are blended with anxieties and resentments
emerging for the first time with modernity (Cohn, 1996:27). In structural terms the situation remains pretty much the same. The first condition of possibility for
its emergence is the dislocation of traditional forms of organising and making sense of society, a
dislocation inflicted by the increased hegemony of secularism, liberalism, socialism, industrialisation,
etc. Faced with such disorientating developments, people can very easily resort to a promise for the re-
establishment of a lost harmony. Within such a context Hitler proved successful in persuading the
Germans that he was their only hope. Heartfields genius collages exposing the dark kernel of National
Socialism didnt prove very effective against Nazi propaganda. It was mass unemployment, misery and anxiety (especially of the middle
classes) that led to Hitlers hegemony, to the hegemony of the Nazi utopian promise. At the very time when German society was turning into one of the great industrial powers of Europe, a
land of factories and cities, technology and bureaucracy, many Germans were dreaming of an archaic world of Germanic peasants, organically linked by bonds of blood in a natural
community. Yet, as Cohn very successfully points out, such a view of the world requires an anti-figure, and this was supplied partly by the liberal West but also, and more effectively, by the
The emergence of the Jew as a modern antichrist follows directly from this structural
Jews (Cohn, 1996:188).
necessity for an anti-figure. Rosenberg, Goebbels and other (virtually all) Nazi ideologues used the phantom of the Jewish race as a lynch-pin binding the fears of
the past and prospective victims of modernisation, which they articulated, and the ideal volkish society of the future which they proposed to create in order to forestall further advances of
modernity. (Bauman, 1989:61) No doubt the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy is a revival, in a secularised form, of certain apocalyptic beliefs. There is clearly a connection between the
famous forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the antichrist prophecy (Cohn, 1996:48). The Protocols were first published by Nilus as part of his book The Great in the Small:
Antichrist Considered as an Imminent Political Possibility and were published in 1917 with the title He is Near, At the DoorHere comes Antichrist and the Reign of the Devil on Earth. As the
famous Nazi propagandist Rosenberg points out One of the advance signs of the coming struggle for the new organisation of the world is this understanding of the very nature of the demon
antichrist, that is the Jews, is considered as the remedy for all dislocations, the key to a new harmonious
world. Jews were seen as deserving death (and resented for that reason) because they stood between
this one imperfect and tension-ridden reality and the hoped-for world of tranquil happinessthe
disappearance of the Jews was instrumental in bringing about the world of perfection. (Bauman, 1989:76) As Sartre
claims, for the anti-Semite the Good itself is reduced to the destruction of Evil. Underneath the bitterness of the anti-Semite one can only reveal the optimistic belief that harmony will be
reconstituted of itself, once Evil is destroyed. When the mission of the anti-Semite as holy destroyer is fulfilled, the lost paradise will be re-established (Sartre, 1995:435).8 In Adornos words,
charging the Jews with all existing evils seems to penetrate the darkness of reality like a searchlight and to allow for quick and all-comprising orientation. It is the great Panaceathe key to
the elimination of the Jew is posited as the only thing that can transform
everything (Adorno, 1993:311, my emphasis). Simply put,
the Nazi dream to reality, the only thing that can realise utopia.9 As it is pointed out by an American
Nazi propagandist, our problem is very simple. Get rid of the Jews and wed be on the way to Utopia
tomorrow. The Jews are the root of all our trouble (True in Cohn, 1996:264, my emphasis). The same is, of course, true of Stalinism. Zygmunt Bauman brings the two cases together:
Hitlers and Stalins victims were not killed in order to capture and colonise the territory they occupied. They were killed because they did not fit, for one reason or another, the scheme of a
perfect society. Their killing was not the work of destruction but creation. They were eliminated, so that an objectively better human worldmore efficient, more moral, more beautiful
could be established. A Communist world. Or a racially pure, Aryan world. In both cases, a harmonious world, conflict free, docile in the hands of their rulers, orderly, controlled. (Bauman,
1989:93) In any case, one should not forget that the fact that the anti-figure in Nazi ideology came to be the Jew is not an essential but a contingent development. In principle, it could have
personality Theodor Adorno and his colleagues point out that subjects in our sample find numerous
other substitutes for the Jew, such as the Mexicans and the Greeks (Adorno, 1993:303). Although the need for the structural position
of the anti-figure remains constant the identity of the subject occupying that position is never given a priori. This does not mean that within a certain historical configuration with a particular
Of course,
social sedimentation and hegemonic structure all the possibilities are open to the same extent; it means though that in principle nobody is excluded from being stigmatised.
the decision on who will eventually be stigmatised depends largely on the availability within a particular
social configuration of groups that can perform this role in social fantasy, and this availability is socially
constructed out of the existing materials. As Lacan points out in Anxiety, although a lack or a void can be filled in
several ways (in principle), experienceand, in fact, analytic experienceshows that it is never actually
filled in 99 different ways (seminar of 21 November 1962). What we have here is basically a play of incarnation.
This play of incarnation is marking both the pole of the utopian fantasies and the
pole of the evil powers that stand between us and them. As Cohn concludes, Middle Ages prophecies had a deep
effect on the political attitudes of the times. For people in the Middle Ages, the drama of the Last Days was not a distant and hazy but an infallible prophecy which at any given
moment was felt to be on the point of fulfilment: In even the most unlikely reigns chroniclers tried to perceive that harmony among Christians, that triumph over misbelievers,
that unparalleled plenty and prosperity which were going to be the marks of the new Golden Age. When each time experience brought the inevitable disillusionment people
merely imagined the glorious consummation postponed to the next reign. (Cohn, 1993c:35) But this fantasy cannot be separated by the coming of the antichrist which was even
more tensely awaited. Generation after generation of medieval people lived in continuous expectation of signs of the antichrist, and since these signs, as presented in the
prophecies, included comets, plague, bad rulers, famine, etc. a similar play of incarnation was played out in terms of determining the true face of the antichrist (ibid.).
Subjects engage in acts of self-sacrifice and self-sabotage because the loss enacted
reproduces the subject's lost object and enables the subject to enjoy this object.
Once it is obtained, the object ceases to be the object. As a result, the subject must
continually repeat the sacrificial acts that produce the object, despite the damage
that such acts do to the subject's self-interest. From the perspective of the death drive, we turn to violence
not in order to gain power but in order to produce loss, which is our only source of
enjoyment. Without the lost object, life becomes bereft of any satisfaction . The
repetition of sacrifice, however, creates a life worth living, a life in which one can
enjoy oneself through the lost object. The repetition involved with the death drive is not simply repetition of any particular experience. The
repetition compulsion leads the subject to repeat specifically the experiences that
have traumatized it and disturbed its stable functioning. The better things are
going for the subject, the more likely that the death drive will derail the subject's
activity. According to the theory implied by the death drive, any movement toward the good - any progress - will
tend to produce a reaction that will undermine it. This occurs both on the level of
the individual and on the level of society. In psychoanalytic treatment, it takes the form of a negative therapeutic reaction, an effort to sustain one's
disorder in the face of the imminence of the cure. We can also think of individuals who continue to choose romantic relationships that fail according to a precise pattern. Politically, it means that
progress triggers the very forms of oppression that it hopes to combat and thereby
incessantly undermines itself, there is a backlash written into every progressive
program from the outset. The death drive creates an essentially masochistic
structure within the psyche. It provides the organizing principle for the subject
and orients the subject relative to its enjoyment, and this enjoyment remains
always linked to trauma. This structure renders difficult all attempts to prompt subjects to act in their own self-interest or for their own good. The death
drive leads subjects to act contrary to their own interests, to sabotage the projects
that would lead to their good. Common sense tells us that sadism is easier to understand than masochism, that the sadist's lust for power over the object makes sense in
a way that the masochist's self-destruction does not. But for psychoanalysis, masochism functions as the paradigmatic form of subjectivity. Considering the structure of the death drive, masochism becomes easily
explained, and sadism becomes a mystery. Masochism provides the subject the enjoyment of loss, while sadism seems to give this enjoyment to the other. This is exactly the claim of Jacques Lacan's revolutionary
interpretation of sadism in his famous article "Kant with Sade." Though most readers focus on the essay's philosophical coupling of Kantian morality with Sadean perversion, the more significant step that Lacan
takes here occurs in his explanation of sadism's appeal. Traditionally, most people vilify sadists for transforming their victims into objects for their own satisfaction, but Lacan contends that they actually turn
Though
themselves into objects for the other's enjoyment. He notes: "The sadist discharges the pain of existence into the Other, but without seeing that he himself thereby turns into an 'eternal object:"
the other suffers pain, the other also becomes the sole figure of enjoyment. What the sadist
enjoys in the sadistic act is the enjoyment attributed to the other, and the sadistic act attempts to bring about this enjoyment. In this sense, sadism is nothing but an inverted form of masochism, which remains the
fundamental structure of subjectivity.22 Self-destruction plays such a prominent role in human activities
because the death drive is the drive that animates us as subjects. Unlike Herbert Marcuse, Norman 0. Brown,
another celebrated proponent of psychoanalytically informed political thought, attempts to construct a psychoanalytic political project that focuses on the death drive. He does not
simply see it as the unfortunate result of the repression of eros but as a powerful category
on its own. In Life against Death, Brown conceives of the death drive as a self-annihilating
impulse that emerges out of the human incapacity to accept death and loss. As he puts it,
"The death instinct is the core of the human neurosis. It begins with the human
infant's incapacity to accept separation from the mother, that separation which
confers individual life on all living organisms and which in all living organisms at
the same time leads to death:'23 For Brown, we pursue death and destruction,
paradoxically, because we cannot accept death. If we possessed the ability to
accept our own death, according to Brown's view, we would avoid falling into the death drive and
would thereby rid ourselves of human violence and destructiveness. Like Marcuse, Brown's
societal ideal involves the unleashing of the sexual drives and the minimizing or
elimination of the death drive. He even raises the stakes, contending that unless we manage to realize this
ideal, the human species, under the sway of the death drive, will die out like the
dinosaurs. Despite making more allowances for the death drive (and for death itself) than Marcuse, Brown nonetheless cannot avoid a
similar error: the belief that the death drive is a force that subjects can overcome. For
Freud, in contrast, it is the force that revenges itself on every overcoming, the repetition that no utopia can fully leave behind. An authentic recognition of the
death drive and its primacy would demand that we rethink the idea of progress
altogether.
1NC K
The 1ACs demand to be recognized as a form of political dissent is an investment in
the hegemonic order the power of demand stems from the authority of the system.
Their failure to theorize desire turns the 1AC into a moment of jouissance that betrays
their radical intentions in order to maintain the possibility of protest. The 1AC is
structured by an agential fantasy This constant repetition of the demand that to
change our representations that will never be fulfilled invests desire solely onto the
level of demand creating a constant repetition of the same turns case.
Lundberg 12 (Christian Lundberg is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies, Lacan in Public:
Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric, 11/26/12) AqN *modified for ableist and gendered
rhetoric*
In the run up to the 2003 World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in Cancun, the
Mexican Government composed a list of the sixty most globalophobic leaders of
antiglobalization groups. The document, subsequently leaked to the Mexican newspaper La Reforma, was met with predictable criticisms regarding
the relationship between state security apparatuses, the institutions of global economic governance, and democratic protest. But there were less predictable responses: in
addition to criticisms that the list chilled democratic dissent, some antiglobalization groups criticized the list for not being comprehensive enough, demanding its expansion.
protest. Here, the lack of recognition does not make the protest ineffective, instead
the fact that the Mexican government and the WTO underestimate the danger
posed by ordinary citizens animates this critique. Not to be outdone, the Mexico Solidarity Network created an online
form letter for self-identified dangerous antiglobalization groups: Dear Government Agents Bent on Restricting Civil Liberties, I recently found out about the watch list
prepared by Mexican authorities, purportedly to quell the voice of civil society at the upcoming WTO Ministerial in Cancun. . . . Please add my name to your watch list
immediately!! Nothing less is acceptable.26 One might read such demands as parodic critiques of globalization and security, as ironic calls for mobilization, as a strategy of
as a means of democratizing global governance, these demands are not simply for
inclusion: they are also demands to be recognized as dangerous and in solidarity
with other similarly dangerous global citizens. How is it possible to ground a reading of the rhetorical functions of the
demand to be recognized as dangerous? For Laclau, such demands ought be read through their
Specific political
(mis)identification and the set of identitarian equivalences inaugurated by investing in the specific content of the demand.
There is no achievable
contains a brief discussion of the concept of jouissance in Copjecs work, which Laclau summarizes by saying:
jouissance except through radical investment in an objet petit a. But the same discovery (not merely an
analogous one) is made if we start from the angle of political theory. No social fullness except through hegemony; and
achievable as the preceding quotation might suggest. Far from being the
consummation of a logic of structure and investment, enjoyment is a supplement
to a failing in a structure: for example, Lacan frames jouissance as a useless
enjoyment of ones own subjectivity that supplements the fundamental failings of a
subject in either finding grounding or consummating an authoritative account of
its coherence. This uselessness defines the operation of jouissance. When Lacan suggests that language is not the speaking subject in the seminar On
Feminine Sexuality, lodging a critique of structural linguistics as a law governing speech, jouissance is understood as something excessive that is born of the failure of structures
of signification. Language is not the speaking subject precisely because what is passed through the gristmill of speech is the result of a misfiring of structure as much as it is
prefigured by logics of structure, meaning, and utility. Therefore the interpretive difficulty for a structuralist account of enjoyment: the moment that the fact of enjoyment is
Framing
recoded in the language of structure, the moment that it is made useful in a logic of subjectivization, is precisely the moment where it stops being jouissance.
this reversal is that the subject is simultaneously produced and disfigured by its
unavoidable insertion into the space of the Symbolic. An Es assumes an identity as a subject as a way of
accommodating to the Symbolics demands and as a node for producing demands on its others or of being recognized as a subject.34 As I have already argued, the demand
demonstrates that the enjoyment of ones own subjectivity is useless surplus produced in the gap between the Es (or it) and the ideal I. As a result, there is excess jouissance that
remains even after its reduction to hegemony. This remainder may even be logically prior to hegemony, in that it is a useless but ritually repeated retroactive act of naming the
self that produces the subject and therefore conditions possibility for investment in an identitarian configuration. The site of this excess, where the subject negotiates the terms
of a nonrelationship with the Symbolic, is also the primary site differentiating need, demand, and desire. Need approximates the position of the Freudian id, in that it is a
Sheridan notes, there is no adequation between need and demand.35 The same type of split that
inheres in the Freudian demand inheres in the Lacanian demand, although in Lacans case it is crucial to notice that the split does not derive from the empirical impossibility of
the specificity
fulfilling demands as much as it stems from the impossibility of articulating needs to or receiving a satisfactory response from the Other. Thus,
of the demand becomes less relevant than the structural fact that demand
presupposes the ability of the addressee to fulfill the demand. This impossibility
points to the paradoxical nature of demand: the demand is less a way of
addressing need to the other than a call for love and recognition by it. In this way, writes Lacan,
demand annuls the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love, and the very satisfactions that it obtains for need are reduced to the
level of being no more than the crushing of the demand for love.36 The Other cannot, by definition, ever give this gift: the starting presupposition of the mirror stage is the
constitutive impossibility of comfortably inhabiting the Symbolic. The structural impossibility of fulfilling demands resonates with the Freudian demand in that the frustration
of demand produces the articulation of desire. Thus, Lacan argues that desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results
from the subtraction of the first from the second.37 This sentiment animates the crucial Lacanian claim for the impossibility of the other giving a gift that it does not have,
demand becomes separated from need: this margin being that which is opened up
by demand, the appeal of which can be unconditional only in regards to the Other .
. . having no universal satisfaction. . . . It is this whim that introduces the phantom
of omnipotence, not of the subject, but of the other in which his demand is
installed.38 This framing of demand reverses the classically liberal presupposition regarding demand and agency. Contemporary and classical liberal democratic
theories presume that the demand is a way of exerting agency and, further, that the more firmly the demand is lodged, the greater the production of an agential effect. The
Lacanian framing of the demand sees the relationship as exactly the opposite: the
more firmly one lodges a demand, the more desperately one clings to the
legitimate ability of an institution to fulfill it. Hypothetically, demands ought reach
a kind of breaking point where the inability of an institution or order to proffer a
response should produce a reevaluation of the economy of demand and desire . In
analytic terms, this is the moment of subtraction, where the manifest content of
the demand is stripped away and the desire that underwrites it is laid bare. The
result of this subtraction is that the subject is in a position to relate to its desire,
not as a set of deferrals, avoidances, or transposition but rather as an owned
political disposition. As Lacan frames it, demanding subjects are either learning to
reassert the centrality of their demand or coming to terms with the impotence of
the Other as a satisfier of demands: But it is in the dialectic of the demand for love
and the test of desire that development is ordered. . . . [T]his test of the desire of the Other is decisive not in the
sense that the subject learns by it whether or not he has a phallus, but in the sense that he learns that the mother does not have it.39 The point of this disposition is to bring the
subject to a point where they might recognize and name their own desire and, as a result, become a political subject in the sense of being able to truly argue for something
without being dependent on the other as a support for or organizing principle for political identity. Thus, desire has both a general status and a specific status for each subject. It
is not just the mirror that produces the subject and its investments but the desire and sets of proxy objects that cover over this original gap. As Easthope puts it: Lacan is sure
that everyones desire is somehow different and their ownlack is nevertheless my lack. How can this be if each of us is just lost in language . . . passing through demand into
desire, something from the Real, from the individuals being before language, is retained as a trace enough to determine that I desire here and there, not anywhere and
Lacan terms this objet petit a . . . petit a is different for everyone; and it can
everywhere.
expense of ever articulating a desire that is theirs. In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the hysterics
demand that the Other produce an object is the support of an aversion toward ones desire: the behavior of the hysteric, for example, has as its aim to recreate a state centered
on the object, insofar as this object . . . is . . . the support of an aversion.43 This economy of aversion explains the ambivalent relationship between hysterics and their demands.
On one hand, the hysteric asserts their agency, even authority, over the Other. Yet, what appears as unfettered agency from the perspective of a discourse of authority is also
Thus, as
simultaneously a surrender of desire by enjoying the act of figuring the other as the one with the exclusive capability to satisfy the demand.
hysterics you demand a new master: you will get it! At the register of manifest
content, demands are claims for action and seemingly powerful, but at the level of
the rhetorical form of the demand or in the register of enjoyment, demand is a
kind of surrender. As a relation of address the hysterical demand is more a demand for recognition and love from an ostensibly repressive order than a
claim for change. The limitation of the students call on Lacan does not lie in the end they sought but in the fact that the hysterical address never quite breaks free from its
over and against hegemony but rather the practices of enjoyment that sustain an
addiction to mastery and a deferral of desire. Hysteria is a politically effective subject position in some ways, but it is
politically constraining from the perspective of organized political dissent. If not a unidirectional practice of resistance, hysteria is at best a politics of interruption. Imagine a
world where the state was the perfect and complete embodiment of a hegemonic order, without interruption or remainder, and the discursive system was hermetically closed.
academic that is not confrontational. This occurs when the student identifies with
a specific trait of the educatorperhaps how she touches her hair or speaks [they touch their hair
or speak] and, especially, when the student adopts the value and norms that the
professor is assertinghis or her [their] planning (and perhaps other) master
signifiers (Van Haute 2002, 96). In this way, consciously and often
unconsciously, students learn to be members of a school culture that has a
particular structure of authority and norms (Baum 1997, 23). For Lacan (1977), this
identification with the master signifiers, the special traits of their educators, is
what constitutes the formation of the professional ego-ideal of the novice planner.
Students attempt to get their professors to act in a manner that fulfills their
desires and consolidates their egos (Bracher 1999, 133). This is called
transference. The relationship between the teacher and the pupil is always based
on transference, that the teacher is the subject supposed to know for the pupil
(Salecl 1994, 168). Symbolic-order transferences are in place when the teacher
functions primarily as an authority figure from whom the student seeks
recognition, positive reinforcement, or new, more powerful, master signifiers or
knowledge (Bracher 1999, 133). The students seeking of gratification from the teacher is crucial to learning. As all educators know, the
students ego already contains a whole organisation of certainties, beliefs, of coordinates, of references that is often wrong but resists correction and change (Lacan 1988a, 23).
The
[continue to be] submitted to a systematic distortion (Boothby 2001, 144), a misrecognition that now incorporates the S1 of planning and those of its subdiscourses.
ego fails to understand its own subjects fundamental unconscious bodily desires
for ontological security, resulting in a distorted perspective to our perception of
reality (Boothby 2001, 144). When harmony is not present it has to be somehow
introduced in order for our reality to be coherent (Stavrakakis 1999, 63). At a
fundamental level, the student (and everyone else, including the educator)
overlooks contradictions, missing gaps, inconsistencies, and the undesirable
aspects of the knowledge sets and beliefs supporting his or her [their] S1s. We
fundamentally desire to make existence harmonious, enjoyable, and just plain
bearable, and we construct imaginary fantasies to make it so (Zizek 2002a). These
harmonious fantasies constitute what we define and share as a common reality. To
illustrate this, let us return to the S1 of sustainability. Most students (and academics, including this author) in developed countries readily buy into the S1 of sustainability and
support it in their planning values and practices. At the same time, most knowingly and voluntarily continue to partake of conspicuous consumption that is well outside of the
sustainable ecological footprint of their environments. In this example, we want our ideological cake of promoting a sustainable future while overlooking our nonsustainable
It is
we prevent their final realisation?. [How can] we return to a non-utopian society, less perfect and more free (Berdiaev in Berneri, 1971:309). 2
particularly the political experience of these last decades that led to the dislocation
of utopian sensibilities and brought to the fore a novel appreciation of human
finitude, together with a growing suspicion of all grandiose political projects and
the meta-narratives traditionally associated with them (Whitebook, 1995:75). All
these developments, that is to say the crisis of the utopian imaginary, seem
however to leave politics without its prime motivating force: the politics of today is
a politics of aporia. In our current political terrain, hope seems to be replaced by pessimism or even resignation. This is a result of the crisis in the
dominant modality of our political imagination (meaning utopianism in its various forms) and of our inability to resolve this crisis in a productive way. 3 In this chapter, I will
try to show that Lacanian theory provides new angles through which we can reflect on our historical experience of utopia and reorient our political imagination beyond its
suffocating strait-jacket. Lets start our exploration with the most elementary of questions: what is the meaning of the current crisis of utopia? And is this crisis a development to
it
be regretted or cherished? In order to answer these questions it is crucial to enumerate the conditions of possibility and the basic characteristics of utopian thinking. First of all
seems that the need for utopian meaning arises in periods of increased uncertainty, social instability and
conflict, when the element of the political subverts the fantasmatic stability of our political reality.
Utopias are generated by the surfacing of grave antagonisms and dislocations in the social field. As Tillich has put
it all utopias strive to negate the negativein human existence; it is the negative in
that existence which makes the idea of utopia necessary (Tillich in Levitas, 1990:103). Utopia then is one of the
possible responses to the ever-present negativity, to the real antagonism which is constitutive of human experience. Furthermore, from the time of Mores Utopia (1516) it is conceived as an
communities in which these antagonisms and the dislocations fuelling them (the element of the
political) will be forever resolved, leading to a reconciled and harmonious worldit is not a coincidence
that, among others, Fourier names his utopian community Harmony and that the name of the Owenite
utopian community in the New World was New Harmony. As Marin has put it, utopia sets in view an imaginary resolution to social
contradiction; it is a simulacrum of synthesis which dissimulates social antagonism by projecting it onto a screen representing a harmonious and immobile equilibrium (Marin, 1984:61). This
my
final resolution is the essence of the utopian promise. What I will try to do in this chapter is, first of all, to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of utopian politics. Simply put,
argument will be that every utopian fantasy construction needs a scapegoat in order to
constitute itselfthe Nazi utopian fantasy and the production of the Jew is a good example, especially
as pointed out in ieks analysis.4 Every utopian fantasy produces its reverse and calls for
its elimination. Put another way, the beatific side of fantasy is coupled in utopian constructions with a
horrific side, a paranoid need for a stigmatised scapegoat. The naivetyand also the dangerof utopian
structures is revealed when the realisation of this fantasy is attempted. It is then that we are brought
close to the frightening kernel of the real: stigmatisation is followed by extermination. This is not
an accident. It is inscribed in the structure of utopian constructions; it seems to be the way all fantasy
constructions work. If in almost all utopian visions, violence and antagonism are eliminated, if utopia is based on the expulsion and
repression of violence (this is its beatific side) this is only because it owes its own creation to violence; it
is sustained and fed by violence (this is its horrific side). This repressed moment of violence resurfaces, as Marin points out, in the difference inscribed in the name
utopia itself (Marin, 1984:110). What we shall argue is that it also resurfaces in the production of the figure of an enemy. To use a phrase
enunciated by the utopianist Fourier, what is driven out through the door comes back through the window (is not this a precursor of Lacans dictum that what is foreclosed in the symbolic
reappears in the real?VII:131).5 The work of Norman Cohn and other historians permits the articulation of a genealogy of this manichean, equivalential way of understanding the world,
from the great witch-hunt up to modern anti-Semitism, and Lacanian theory can provide valuable insights into any attempt to understand the logic behind this utopian operationhere the
approach to fantasy developed in Chapter 2 will further demonstrate its potential in analysing our political experience. In fact, from the time of his unpublished seminar on The Formations of
Lacan identified the utopian dream of a perfectly functioning society as a highly problematic
the Unconscious,
area (seminar of 18 June 1958). In order to realise the problematic character of the utopian operation it is necessary to articulate a genealogy of this way of representing and making sense
of the world. The work of Norman Cohn seems especially designed to serve this purpose. What is most important is that in Cohns schema we can encounter the three basic characteristics of
continuous battle with the unexpected there is always a need to represent and master this unexpected,
to transform disorder to order. Second, this representation is usually articulated as a total and universal
representation, a promise of absolute mastery of the totality of the real, a vision of the end of history. A
future utopian state is envisaged in which disorder will be totally eliminated. Third, this symbolisation
produces its own remainder; there is always a certain particularity remaining outside the universal
schema. It is to the existence of this evil agent, which can be easily localised, that all persisting disorder is
attributed. The elimination of disorder depends then on the elimination of this group. The
result is always horrible: persecution, massacres, holocausts. Needless to say, no utopian fantasy is ever
realised as a result of all these crimesas mentioned in Chapter 2, the purpose of fantasy is not to satisfy an (impossible) desire but to constitute it as such. What is of great interest for our
approach is the way in which Cohn himself articulates a genealogy of the pair utopia/demonisation in his books The Pursuit of the Millennium and Europes Inner Demons (Cohn, 1993b,
1993c). The same applies to his book Warrant for Genocide (Cohn, 1996) which will also be implicated at a certain stage in our analysis. These books are concerned with the same social
phenomenon, the idea of purifying humanity through the extermination of some category of human beings which are conceived as agents of corruption, disorder and evil. The contexts are, of
course, different, but the urge remains the same (Cohn, 1993b:xi). All these works then, at least according to my reading, are concerned with the production of an archenemy which goes
together with the utopian mentality. It could be argued that the roots of both demonisation and utopian thinking can be traced back to the shift from a cyclical to a unilinear representation of
history (Cohn, 1993a:227).6 However, we will start our reading of Cohns work by going back to Roman civilisation. As Cohn claims, a profound demonising tendency is discernible in Ancient
Roman world, although Judaism was regarded as a bizarre religion, it was nevertheless a religio licita, a
religion that was officially recognised. Things were different with the newly formed Christian sect. In fact the Christian Eucharist
could easily be interpreted as cannibalistic (Cohn, 1993b:8). In almost all their ways Christians ignored or
even negated the fundamental convictions by which the pagan Graeco-Roman world lived. It is not at all surprising
then that to the Romans they looked like a bunch of conspirators plotting to destroy society. Towards the end of the second century, according to Tertullian, it was taken as a given that the
Christians are the cause of every public catastrophe, every disaster that hits the populace. If the Tiber floods or the Nile fails to, if there is a drought or an earthquake, a famine or a plague, the
cry goes up at once: Throw the Christians to the Lions!. (Tertullian in Cohn, 1993b:14) This defamation of Christians that led to their exclusion from the boundaries of humanity and to their
relentless persecution is a pattern that was repeated many times in later centuries, when both the persecutors and the persecuted were Christians (Cohn, 1993b:15). Bogomiles, Waldensians,
the Fraticelli movement and the Catharsall the groups appearing in Umberto Ecos fascinating books, especially in The Name of the Rosewere later on persecuted within a similar discursive
context. The same happened with the demonisation of Christians, the fantasy that led to the great witch-hunt. Again, the conditions of possibility for this demonisation can be accurately
defined. First, some kind of misfortune or catastrophe had to occur, and second, there had to be someone who could be singled out as the cause of this misfortune (Cohn, 1993b:226). In
Cohns view then, social dislocation and unrest, on the one hand, and millenarian exaltation, on the
other, do overlap. When segments of the poor population were mesmerised by a prophet, their
understandable desire to improve their living conditions became transfused with fantasies of a future
community reborn into innocence through a final, apocalyptic massacre. The evil onesvariously identified with the Jews, the
clergy or the richwere to be exterminated; after which the Saintsi.e. the poor in questionwould set up their kingdom, a realm without suffering or sin. (Cohn, 1993c:1415) It was at
times of acute dislocation and disorientation that this demonising tendency was more present. When people were faced with a situation totally alien to their experience of normality, when
they were faced with unfamiliar hazards dislocating their constructions of realitywhen they encountered the realthe collective flight into the world of demonology could occur more easily
(ibid.: 87). The same applies to the emergence of millenarian fantasies. The vast majority of revolutionary millenarian outbreaks takes place against a background of disaster. Cohn refers to the
plagues that generated the first Crusade and the flagellant movements of 1260, 13489, 1391 and 1400, the famines that preluded the first and second Crusade, the pseudo-Baldwin
It is perhaps striking
movement and other millenarian outbreaks and, of course, the Black Death that precipitated a whole wave of millenarian excitement (ibid.: 282).7
that all the characteristics we have encountered up to now are also marking modern phenomena such
as Nazi anti-Semitic utopianism. In fact, in the modern anti-Semitic fantasy the remnants of past demonological terrors are blended with anxieties and resentments
emerging for the first time with modernity (Cohn, 1996:27). In structural terms the situation remains pretty much the same. The first condition of possibility for
its emergence is the dislocation of traditional forms of organising and making sense of society, a
dislocation inflicted by the increased hegemony of secularism, liberalism, socialism, industrialisation,
etc. Faced with such disorientating developments, people can very easily resort to a promise for the re-
establishment of a lost harmony. Within such a context Hitler proved successful in persuading the
Germans that he was their only hope. Heartfields genius collages exposing the dark kernel of National
Socialism didnt prove very effective against Nazi propaganda. It was mass unemployment, misery and anxiety (especially of the middle
classes) that led to Hitlers hegemony, to the hegemony of the Nazi utopian promise. At the very time when German society was turning into one of the great industrial powers of Europe, a
land of factories and cities, technology and bureaucracy, many Germans were dreaming of an archaic world of Germanic peasants, organically linked by bonds of blood in a natural
community. Yet, as Cohn very successfully points out, such a view of the world requires an anti-figure, and this was supplied partly by the liberal West but also, and more effectively, by the
The emergence of the Jew as a modern antichrist follows directly from this structural
Jews (Cohn, 1996:188).
necessity for an anti-figure. Rosenberg, Goebbels and other (virtually all) Nazi ideologues used the phantom of the Jewish race as a lynch-pin binding the fears of
the past and prospective victims of modernisation, which they articulated, and the ideal volkish society of the future which they proposed to create in order to forestall further advances of
modernity. (Bauman, 1989:61) No doubt the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy is a revival, in a secularised form, of certain apocalyptic beliefs. There is clearly a connection between the
famous forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the antichrist prophecy (Cohn, 1996:48). The Protocols were first published by Nilus as part of his book The Great in the Small:
Antichrist Considered as an Imminent Political Possibility and were published in 1917 with the title He is Near, At the DoorHere comes Antichrist and the Reign of the Devil on Earth. As the
famous Nazi propagandist Rosenberg points out One of the advance signs of the coming struggle for the new organisation of the world is this understanding of the very nature of the demon
antichrist, that is the Jews, is considered as the remedy for all dislocations, the key to a new harmonious
world. Jews were seen as deserving death (and resented for that reason) because they stood between
this one imperfect and tension-ridden reality and the hoped-for world of tranquil happinessthe
disappearance of the Jews was instrumental in bringing about the world of perfection. (Bauman, 1989:76) As Sartre
claims, for the anti-Semite the Good itself is reduced to the destruction of Evil. Underneath the bitterness of the anti-Semite one can only reveal the optimistic belief that harmony will be
reconstituted of itself, once Evil is destroyed. When the mission of the anti-Semite as holy destroyer is fulfilled, the lost paradise will be re-established (Sartre, 1995:435).8 In Adornos words,
charging the Jews with all existing evils seems to penetrate the darkness of reality like a searchlight and to allow for quick and all-comprising orientation. It is the great Panaceathe key to
the elimination of the Jew is posited as the only thing that can transform
everything (Adorno, 1993:311, my emphasis). Simply put,
the Nazi dream to reality, the only thing that can realise utopia.9 As it is pointed out by an American
Nazi propagandist, our problem is very simple. Get rid of the Jews and wed be on the way to Utopia
tomorrow. The Jews are the root of all our trouble (True in Cohn, 1996:264, my emphasis). The same is, of course, true of Stalinism. Zygmunt Bauman brings the two cases together:
Hitlers and Stalins victims were not killed in order to capture and colonise the territory they occupied. They were killed because they did not fit, for one reason or another, the scheme of a
perfect society. Their killing was not the work of destruction but creation. They were eliminated, so that an objectively better human worldmore efficient, more moral, more beautiful
could be established. A Communist world. Or a racially pure, Aryan world. In both cases, a harmonious world, conflict free, docile in the hands of their rulers, orderly, controlled. (Bauman,
1989:93) In any case, one should not forget that the fact that the anti-figure in Nazi ideology came to be the Jew is not an essential but a contingent development. In principle, it could have
personality Theodor Adorno and his colleagues point out that subjects in our sample find numerous
other substitutes for the Jew, such as the Mexicans and the Greeks (Adorno, 1993:303). Although the need for the structural position
of the anti-figure remains constant the identity of the subject occupying that position is never given a priori. This does not mean that within a certain historical configuration with a particular
Of course,
social sedimentation and hegemonic structure all the possibilities are open to the same extent; it means though that in principle nobody is excluded from being stigmatised.
the decision on who will eventually be stigmatised depends largely on the availability within a particular
social configuration of groups that can perform this role in social fantasy, and this availability is socially
constructed out of the existing materials. As Lacan points out in Anxiety, although a lack or a void can be filled in
several ways (in principle), experienceand, in fact, analytic experienceshows that it is never actually
filled in 99 different ways (seminar of 21 November 1962). What we have here is basically a play of incarnation.
This play of incarnation is marking both the pole of the utopian fantasies and the
pole of the evil powers that stand between us and them. As Cohn concludes, Middle Ages prophecies had a deep
effect on the political attitudes of the times. For people in the Middle Ages, the drama of the Last Days was not a distant and hazy but an infallible prophecy which at any given
moment was felt to be on the point of fulfilment: In even the most unlikely reigns chroniclers tried to perceive that harmony among Christians, that triumph over misbelievers,
that unparalleled plenty and prosperity which were going to be the marks of the new Golden Age. When each time experience brought the inevitable disillusionment people
merely imagined the glorious consummation postponed to the next reign. (Cohn, 1993c:35) But this fantasy cannot be separated by the coming of the antichrist which was even
more tensely awaited. Generation after generation of medieval people lived in continuous expectation of signs of the antichrist, and since these signs, as presented in the
prophecies, included comets, plague, bad rulers, famine, etc. a similar play of incarnation was played out in terms of determining the true face of the antichrist (ibid.).
breeds bureaucracy and that establishes and rationalizes the values of any possible
knowledge economy. What occupies the place [of the agent] is this S2, which is specified as being, not knowledge of everything [savior de tout]weve
not reached that point yetbut all-knowing [tout-savoir]. Understand this is what is affirmed as being nothing other than knowledge, which in ordinary language is called the
bureaucracy. (31) In the Lacanian or post-Lacanian literature we find much discussion of the imperative to Enjoy! A critique of the discourse of the university formalizes and
underpins those discussions, even as in many instances I think that they stray from Lacan in pursuing their own ends, and ironically where they often stray is into the very
discourse they diagnose. But, let it be said, I too am operating firmly within the presumptions of the university discourse here, doing my part to keep on knowing more, even as I
am hystericized again and again. Lets back up to the masters discourse for a moment. As was discussed above, Lacan maps Hegels master and slave onto this and also refers to
Plato and Marx. In each case the master/ruler/capitalist commands the slave/proletarian to make things work [S1S2]. As the slave learns to do this, he develops know-how but
not abstract knowledge of the principles of his work. Enter the philosopher who, on behalf of the master, questions the slave and derives from his answers the general principles
involved. This knowledge [S2], conscious knowledge at this point, has thereby become
the masters knowledge. On a hypothetical factory floor we can imagine the same thing taking place: the workers become
better at what they do, and they have to, as they are pitted against one another in
competition for their survival. An innovation made by one will soon enough be used by others and eventually mandated by the capitalist at the
top. This knowledge born of work, just as wealth in Reaganomics (inverting its rhetoric), trickles up, if, that is, it doesnt simply flood uphill. But something
happens over the course of time and Lacan explicitly lays much of the blame for
this transformation at the feet of philosophy, whereby the old form of master, the
one who doesnt desire to know how it works only that it work, ceases to be so
common and the form of the modern master takes hold in the university
discourse (31). This is precisely analogous to the historical shift from monarchies to representative governments in that the monarch was master because he just
was, but once a constitution and so forth is in place the master is but a placeholder within symbolic space; a master with a term of office. So how does the university discourse
work? The agent, knowledge in the sense of that which is consciously knowable and fantasmatically masterable, commands an other [S2a] not simply to know, to understand
what is commanded, but to enjoy this knowing. Here one might recall the phrase often delivered with a smirk both to children and to students complaining of the work asked of
astudied, uniting object a and student in this neologism (105). In doing so the
agent of the university discourse, this new tyranny of knowledge (32), is driven
onward by the demand of the master, now unconscious, inaccessible and dead, to
[k]eep on knowing more (105). The command to enjoy is identical even as it
seems different. The reason for this is that whether the agent of the university
discourse commands that an other learn or understand some specific content or
engage in some action that knowledge has deemed to be good for the other or
productive of happiness, what is being demanded is that the others jouissance be
served up in response. You must do this and you must not only get something out
of it, you must get off on it too. But there is a wrinkle here as this jouissance above the bar is neither the jouissance of the lost object regained
nor is it the surplus jouissance that is the product of the masters discourse; instead it is an imitation (81). But this is also part of what makes the university discourse effective,
subjects desire the neat and tidy, non-threatening jouissance that is mandated
whether it be reflected in the smiles of models as they interact with consumer
products or the less quantifiable esteem that is believed to result from academic
achievement. This lure, Lacan notes, can catch on. One can do a semblance of surplus jouissanceit draws quite a crowd (81). With the product we come to the
somewhat ambiguous downside of the university discourse. This discourse is driven by S1 in the place of truth; [t]he myth of the ideal I, of the I that masters, of the I whereby at
least something is identical to itself, namely the speaker, is very precisely what the university discourse is unable to eliminate from the place in which its truth is found (63).
But, S2 in the dominant, through the lure of a simulated jouissance, has the unheard of pretension of having a thinking being, a subject, as its production. As subject [] there
is no question of its being able to see itself as the master of knowledge (174). What exactly is the problem here? As I understand it (and I have doubts about my understanding)
further alienation. Recall that in the masters discourse the demand of the master always fails, and though this impotence is not recognized as it would upset
the masters function, neither is it inscribed as failure upon anyone else. But in the university discourse the inability to be the master of a simulated knowledge-as-jouissance
that is commanded is something at which we all must fail. I fail to find ecstacy in my new iPod and I fail to present myself as master of Lacans thought in this paper10 and I fail,
the old adage that the more I learn (pursue knowledge) the more I realize how
little I know and, perhaps to update it as follows, the more I pursue enjoyment the
more I realize how little I enjoy. In the university discourse, so far as jouissance is concerned, more is less.
Academic/University Discourse
The interaction between the educator and the educated operates
within the framework of the university discourse students become
banal normalized subjects to which master signifiers are imposed.
Gunder 4 (Michael Gunder is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and
Planning at the University of Auckland, Shaping the Planners Ego-Ideal A Lacanian
Interpretation of Planning Education,
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0739456X03261284, 3/1/04) AqN *modified for
gendered rhetoric*
Lacans theory is based on four elements: the master signifier (S1); the network of
signifiers that is knowledge (S2); the product that is both excluded and produced
by knowledge as loss or surplus of jouissance, represented by the lost object (a);
and the split subject (S| ), split between the unconscious and conscious (Bracher
1993, 53). In each of Lacans four discourses, these elementsS1S2a S|rotate through different placements in the following structural
relationship, or model of discourse, illustrated in Figure 1 and explained in the subsequent text. The positions on the left of Figure 1 visualize the active
factors of the speaking subjectthe agent driven to speak by his or her desire as truth. The positions on the right visualize the active factors of the
interpellated, or hailed, subject. The observable elements of the agent and the Other in the speech act are located on the top. The bottom positions are
those of the covert, latent, implicit, or repressed factorthe internal factors within each actor that drive the speech act or are created by it (Bracher
1993, 54). The position of agency and dominance is located in the top left. It is that of the speaking agent and is the overtly active component of the
discourse. The internal element of truth driving the dominant agent exists in the concealed place on the bottom leftthe factor that supports,
grounds, underwrites, and give rise to the dominate factor, or constitutes the condition of its possibility (Bracher 1993, 54). The Other on the top
right is engaged by the factor within the receiver called into acceptance by the interpellation of the communication. It is what makes you turn your head
when someone calls out, Hey you, and you somehow know that you are the you being hailed. Knowledge
passes easily
when the subject adopts a passive attitude towards discourse and empties itself of
any existing knowledge that might interfere with the new knowledge taken in
(Alcorn 1994, 43). This is facilitated by positive transference: one learns where
one loves (Verhaeghe 2001, 44). But this has a cost. By permitting ourselves to accept the message,
receivers, consciously or not, internally create the product at the bottom right of the figurea product that generally has little to do with the truth of the
agent initiating the discourse (Verhaeghe 2001). This product should then induce the receiver to respond to the agent of the speech act, that is, feed
back to the speaker seeking more of the driving force of truth underlying the original message. But this feedback is largely blocked, as is the original
communications to a much less extent, because the receiver has existing beliefs that induce misconceptions, and language inherently lacks
completeness for perfect communication. For if there were perfect communications, we would never need to repeat ourselves (Lacan 1977)! The
educator deploys all four discourses, but fundamentally, each starts with an agent
driven by a truth to speak to another with as a result a product (Verhaeghe 2001, 41). Yet it is
never possible for the academic to transmit a complete message, something is
always lacking. The agents speech is always driven by desire constituted as truth.
Yet this is a truth that cannot be completely verbalised, with the result that the
agent cannot transmit his [sic] desire to the other; hence a perfect
communications with words is logically impossible (Verhaeghe 2001, 23). Both the
impossibility and incapability are the effect of the radical heteronomy of the truth: part of it lies beyond the signifier and belongs to the realm of
jouissanceoutside of language and the symbolic (Verhaeghe 2001, 41). The masters demand to be the first discourse, and this is illustrated in Figure 2.
The masters are the unquestionable authorities. They seek no justification for this
imperative, dogmatic power: it just is. The master is not concerned with
knowledge in itself, rather with certainty. I AM = I AM KNOWLEDGE = I AM THE
ONE WHO KNOWS (Ragland 1996, 134). The masters are satisfied provided
everything works, and their authority is believed and maintained. The
authoritarian teacher commands that the pupils learn and organize their
knowledge (S2) in a way that supports the masters own beliefs and values (S1s)
while repressing and restricting contrary knowledges, desires, and fantasies at
odds with the S1s of the educator (Bracher 1994, 121). For this to work, the other
has to sustain the master in his [sic] illusion that he is the one with the knowledge.
. . . The pupils make the master (Verhaeghe 2001, 27). The masters weakness is that they are unconscious of their own desire,
the actual reason for asserting the master signifier (S1), for the hidden truth of the discourse is that of the divided subject. The masters discourse
directly attempts to mold the receivers ego-ideal, as one reads or hears such a discourse, one is forced, in order to understand the message, to accord
full explanatory power and/or moral authority to the proffered master signifiers [S1] and to refer all other signifiers [S2] (objects, concepts, or issues)
Globalization, sustainability, and new urbanism
back to the master signifiers (Bracher 1993, 64).
(choose one, or any alternative S1) are important truths because the educating
master says they are, and the educator is the master who always knows! Students
in obeying the master forgo jouissance as the loss of enjoyment or frustration, not
to mention loss of spontaneity and creativity, produced by their obedience and
conformity to the master. Regrettably, as desirous as the ability to assert total authority might be for some academics, the
masters discourse can seldom belong to the enlightened university educator. The teacher is by no means in the position of the Master: knowledge (S2)
and the Master (S1) are mutually exclusive (Salecl 1994, 168). The planning educator, at least in the Anglo-Saxon university, can rarely command, as
the scientific academics must provide explanation for their assertions from legitimizing epistemic evidence. The educator is seldom the agent of the
masters discourse; rather, the academic is more often the agent of the university discourse, in which the masters assertion of lies (S1) as the agents
own truth and the teachers interpellations of knowledge (S2) shape the student as an alienated subject within the symbolic order. In Figure 3, the
speech act produces the alienated subject (S| ) of the university educational system (Bracher 1993). In attending planning school, students
place themselves into a planning knowledge system (S2) that constitutes the
professional body of knowledge for the discipline. By doing so, the knowledge-receiving students are
eventually transformed into planners. Yet as students gradually acquire the identifications of
planners, they are alienated from their own original desires and beliefs and are
eventually obligated to reproduce, reinforce, and apply their received planning
knowledge and practices on the public. Under this discourse, planning educators
seek to produce new planners who are inspired agents of the academics own
master signifiers and supporting knowledges! The more systematic knowledge is
received, the more students are transformed into normalized planners,
symbolically regulated by these norms, knowledges, and practices, while at the
same time they become progressively more alienated from their own unconscious
desires and any passionate response, or challenge, to the received wisdom
(Verhaeghe 2001, 43; Zizek 1998, 107). Fink (1995, 132) observes that there is a
sort of historical movement from the masters discourse to the university
discourse, the university discourse providing a sort of legitimation or
rationalization of the masters will. Educators can seldom, if ever, compel the
student to believe. They can only represent the master signifiers (S1) truth as its
agent by asserting the S1s subcodes of knowledges, norms, and beliefs (S2). The
teacher is therefore polite in the relationship not to the pupil but to the knowledge
of the Other, to which he [sic] is a responsible subject as a representative of
socially recognised knowledge that forms the very frame structuring our
perception of reality (Salecl 1994, 168). Educating agents in this discourse are driven by
the truth of their belief in their master signifiers. These are the S1s that guarantee
knowledgethe anchoring stopping points under which the knowledge sets reside.
Initially, Lacan argued that the university discourse was that of scientific research within the academy, in which knowledge in its own right is the
master signifier (S1; Fink 1995). Lacans later thinking shifted to consider that this
discourse uses systemic knowledge
to justify any signifier. In this regard, the university discourse is the use of
systemic knowledge for rationalization by the agent of the speech act. Here, the
receiving subject is interpellated by any knowledge, or assertion, attempting to
justify the master signifier (S1) of the dominant agent of the discourse, which
might not be only that of the academic but also the agent of the dominant societal
perception of social reality itselfthe ideologies that construct our reality. This discourse
suggests that objectivity, the classical requirement of science . . . to be a mere illusion (Verhaeghe 2001, 31). As a consequence, Lacans latter view of
genuine scientific activity correspond[s] to the structure of the hysterics discourse (Fink 1998, 34). In the hysterics discourse (Figure 4), the dominant
position is occupied by the split subject, hailing the master signifier to answer the agents dissatisfaction. This agent goes at the master and demands
that he or she [they] show his or her [their] stuff, prove his or her [their] mettle by producing something serious by way of knowledge, as the hysteric
gets off on knowledge (Fink 1995, 133). The hysterical structure is one in force whenever a discourse is dominated by the speakers symptomsthat is,
his or her conflicting mode of experiencing jouissance (a), a conflict manifested (in experiences such as shame, meaninglessness, anxiety, and desire) as
a failure of the subject (S| ) to coincide with, or be satisfied with the jouissance underwritten by, the master signifiers [S1] offered by society and
embraced as the subjects ideals (Bracher 1993, 66). Driven by jouissance, this discourse is one of disapproval, complaint, and often outright resistance
(Fink 1995). Moreover, this is also the discourse of both the questioning academic and the questioning planning student seeking the production and
assurance of new knowledge (S2). It corresponds to the question always arising from students in class, But what about . . . ? This author suggests that
the hysterical discourse is to be valued. It is the discourse from which may arise ethical inquiry, challenge for change, and the potential for creativity. It
is a discourse that should be actively encouraged in the student, for it is a necessary discourse to develop the passionate, reflective, adaptable, creative,
and ethicalIs this fair?practitioner. Moreover, despite the hysterics dissatisfaction with the master signifier, the hysteric remains in solidarity
with it (Bracher 1994, 122). The hysteric agent (S| ) hails the receiving master to respond with an answer that contains new knowledge (S2). The
hysteric specifically seeks knowledge that has a secure meaning that will overcome anxiety and give a sense of meaningful, and respectable identity
(Bracher 1993, 67). This is one role of the planning educator. Furthermore, this quest for promises of certainty can also instigate academic research that
continually attacks scientific contradictions and paradoxes until new insights and answers emerge (Fink 1995, 1998). Yet for the questioning planning
student or researcher, the answer supplied is inherently not quite the one sought. This is because the new knowledge produced is unable to produce a
particular answer about the particular driving force of the object a at the place of truth that drives the hysteric agent (Verhaeghe 2001, 29). For Lacan,
the analysts discourse (Figure 5) is the only ultimately effective means for countering the psychological and social tyranny exercised through
language (Bracher 1994, 123). In clinical practice, the external factor of the psychoanalysts desirousness is used to draw out the unconscious
obstructions and fixations that underlie the analysands subjective agency. The analyst continually probes the subject at the split between the conscious
and unconscious so that hints and scraps of master signifiers creating dysfunction can slip into speech. The task of the psychoanalyst is to bring master
signifiers induced by forgotten trauma and hidden in the unconscious into relation with conscious signifiers and, in so doing, negate them (Fink 1995).
As Gunder (2003, 303) argued, drawing on Bourdieu (2000) and Butler (1997b), just as the unconscious is not knowable by the conscious, the
underlying ideological distortions and norms comprising the planning field, or game, are not always visible, or knowable, to those emerged within them
in planning practice. The
planning fields norms and ends produce ideological illusions for
the players that can only be exposed by the critical researcher located at a point of
observation external to the set of practices under study. Gunder suggested that
this is the role of the critical planning theorist and hence, perhaps, that the
analysts discourse is the correct home of the post-structuralist academic
discourse (p. 303). The analysts discourse also provides value to the planning educator. Students (generally) want to please the teacher, but
they often do not know what the educator really desires of them. As Bracher (1999) asserts, if educators make their teaching desires clear to the
students, they are much more likely to be fulfilled. This goes beyond a mere list of teaching objectives or outcomes to what the educator really wants the
students to become as completed subjects. This author desires his students to passionately reflect and question why they think and act as they do. His
planning theory courses readings and assignments are set out to facilitate this self-critique, but key to the whole process is repeatedly stating this
fundamental desired object a to the students (see Gunder 2002). The same
techniques can also be deployed in
encouraging creativity and innovation from the student to offset the repression
induced by symbolic regulation of the masters and university discourses, which
inherently produce subjects progressively alienated by increasing knowledge from
their own spontaneity, desire, and feelings (Verhaeghe 2001, 43). Lacans four discourses
illustrate how transference can be used in a twofold way, either to impose
signifiers or to make someone produce them (Verhaeghe 2001, 47). Planning
education is more than just passing facts from the educator to the student. It
involves the shaping of the students identity through the adoption of new
identifications produced by suturing signifiers and the resultant production and
loss of desirejouissancethat this incurs. Teaching is more than just a
transmission of knowledge; it also induces alienation and change in the students
identifications and sense of self. Both contribute to group formation around
shared signifiers, that is, beliefs of the planning discipline (Verhaeghe 2001, 47).
Furthermore, for the planning educator, this very process of transference via
symbolic discourse results inevitably in a confrontation with the limits of this
knowledge, and thus with the part of truth that lies beyond verbalisation
(Verhaeghe 2001, 45). For many of us, this drives our research. It is also why Freud called teaching an impossible profession.
University discourse is bad- it produces a divided subject stripped of
authenticity
Brown et al 14 (Tony Brown is a professor at the Education and Social Research Institute
Manchester Metropolitan University, Harriet Rowley has a PhD in Education at the Manchester
Metropolitan University, Kim Smith is a Careers Consultant at The University of Manchester,
Rethinking Research in Teacher Education, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2014.955080,
British Journal of Educational Studies, 10/15/14) AqN
Lacans schemata of the four discourses are referenced to: systems of knowledge
(university); discourses of control or governance (master); the alienated or
divided subject split between alternative discursive modes (hysteric); and
systematic resistance to oppressive power structures (analytic). For this paper, the
schemata is drawn on in conceptualising how teacher educators craft their sense
of being with reference to the discursive orders that determine their subjectivities.
It provides a helpful model in depicting the schizophrenic subject positions that university
teacher educators are obliged to confront. For example, the individual will form
identifications with political, academic or administrative discourses which shape
that individuals thought and affect enjoyment and the meanings that he or she
[they] assigns to different situations. It is through this route that the paper will theorise
how the changing policy environment variously impacts on individuals and how they
understand their mode of professional participation. We shall take these discourses in turn. The
university discourse comprises systematic knowledge. For individuals to
understand this discourse, they need to be receptive to the idea of pre-constituted
knowledge. This requires that the individual empties themselves of any knowledge
that might interfere with the knowledge in the discourse becoming an amorphous,
non-articulated substance to be articulated by discourse (Bracher, 1994, p.
109). They are produced as a divided subject as a result of this interpellation that
captures part of them; for example, a teacher educator is appreciated merely to the
degree that their practice complies with inspectorial criteria. It is admissible only
insofar as you already participate in a certain structured discourse (Lacan, 2007,
p. 37) but part of their selves is left out in this encounter, a gap, marking the
divide. In turn, others may gauge the degree of this individuals submission according to
particular criteria and judge their performance according to their degree of alignment. For
instance, a trainee mathematics teacher may be assessed in their ability to teach fractions in a
step-by-step fashion according to a curriculum schema that specifies particular developmental
stages of a childs learning. Other aspects of their teaching, such as their humanist
mode of interaction, may not register on this scale. A new entrant to the profession of
teacher education, meanwhile, might be able to play one version of university discourse off
against another (e.g. practical versus academic expertise) as teacher education boundaries lose
definition. One of our interviewees specifically criticised a new policy of staff needing PhDs. She
favoured a more school-based expertise in universities: the vast majority of people in schools
dont have a masters never mind a doctorate and so it worries me that we will not get
experienced teachers in. I think there are some great people in the schools that we should
headhunt but none of them will meet that criteria. This production of the divided subject,
however, is not the whole story, as Lacan portrays systems of knowledge as being
in the service of alternative master discourses shaping the situation in question:
the masters discourse can be said to be congruent with, or equivalent to, what
comes and functions in the university discourse (2007, p. 102). That is, the
subjective production results from participation in a form of knowledge that is
motivated by some underlying interest (mode of sponsorship, pedagogical
preference, kinship, etc.).
itself is forged through the denial of humanity to the Black.5 Through situating the Black as anti-
human, object and voiceless, the Human is thus constituted. In South Africa, the Philosophers poor is also, always, Black. For the
academic Left, I would argue that there is a cruelly optimistic attachment or relation with a
fungible poor-Black. This optimistic relation is bound up with emancipatory, and sometimes
pseudo-revolutionary, desires for another possible world. This attachment or relation is not limited to South Africa, but
very often it is Black bodies (or the bodies of indigenous people) who are objectified for this kind of
fantasy to play out. The fundamental antagonism is one in which the poor-Black is a repository for the projected desires
and longings of (white) revolutionary fantasya strange nostalgia of some impossible vanquished time that existed in the pure space of non-knowledge.
Lauren Berlant reminds us that your desire misrecognizes a given object as that which will
restore you to something that you sense effectively as a hole in you. Your object, then, does not
express transparently who you are but says something about what it takes for you to anchor
yourself in space and time. (2011, 110) This is a romance between the Human and the necessarily non-
Human, the Other, which is always fantasy. The poor-Black becomes object onto which
revolutionary desires can be projected and fantasized. For the revolutionary fantasy to hold, they
must remain in their wretchedness, must remain as objects denied the complex existencethe
being Humanenjoyed by those who hold the power of representation and fantasy construction.
Of course, the horrible irony of such a situation is that while the poor-Black as an object of desire might offer an anchor for such
fantasmic investments towards a better world for the Left, in so doing it effectively denies that
world from ever appearing. For how can such a world erupt from such a depraved and violent
denial of being? The fantasy of the fungible poor-Black is a romance full of optimism and
aspirations, as well as full of dangerous denials and objectifications. Ultimately it is also a romance like any other: full of
false hopes, good intentions and lots of fantasy (Bob 2005; Levenson 2012). The implication of leaving behind
revolutionary subjectivities as vestibules for political optimism and hope is difficult, but it must
be done. Indeed a critique of the ways social movements, and the poorBlack, have been
constructed, and at times desired, in Left academia is crucial, and one that I hope will open
spaces for reimagining what solidarity could look like. This is no easy task. As Berlant (2013) reflects, All political movements ... are complicated
spaces where the courageous insistence on interrupting the reproduction of toxic normativity is a relief from resignation to life. But every movement that weve ever been in reproduces issues of inequality around
race, gender, sexuality and education, along with the inevitable personality glitches. That also can be devastating. Berlant encourages a dose of humour to counter the devastation, to laugh at the foibles, missteps
hope that the fantasy can be abandoned, that there can be a way forward that will
and false romances. I sincerely
include a transparent reflection on the nature and exercise of political power within and around
social movements in South Africa, reflection that takes seriously race, gender and institutional power.
Capitalism
Capitalism alienates subjects by creating a state of permanent
dissatisfaction. In the face of the demand for accumulation, only a
form of mediated satisfaction and giving up hope can disrupt the
process of capitalist subject formation.
McGowan 13 (Todd McGowan is an Associate Professor of English at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, University of
Nebraska Press) AqN *modified for ableist and gendered rhetoric*
Capitalist ideology aims at producing subjects who experience their existence as
dissatisfied and simultaneously invest themselves completely in the ideal of
happiness or complete satisfaction. 15 This idea manifests itself not just in the everyday workings of capitalism but in its most serious
theorists - from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. According to Adam Smith, society can attain the satisfaction of true prosperity as long
as it unleashes humanity's natural propensity for accumulation. He writes: "The natural effort of every individual to better his [their] own condition, when suffered to exert itself
with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of
surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions." 16 The desire to accumulate enables capitalist subjects to
overcome barriers and obtain happiness. For Smith and others, there is no question of an insurmountable barrier and no
possibility of enjoying the barrier itself. Capitalism survives on the basis of the same misrecognition
that plagues Freud's neurotic: the mistaking of desire for drive, the inability to see
[recognize] satisfaction in the act of not getting the object. Without engendering
this collective misrecognition, capitalism could not sustain itself as capitalism.
Capitalist subjects structurally fail to see [recognize] their own inherent self-
satisfaction, and it is this failure that keeps them going as capitalist subjects. Freud's
thought reveals this, and it reveals that there is a beyond of the capitalist subject- a beyond that is the death drive. The emancipatory politics of
supplies a need for the material. ... The need which consumption feels for the
object is created by the perception of it. The object of art - like every other product - creates a public which is sensitive to art and
enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject
for the object:' I7 Capitalism functions by sustaining- and even increasing- a sense
of dissatisfaction commensurate with desire. This explains capitalism's infatuation with the new. Capitalism
constantly seeks out and embraces what is new, because the new keeps desire
going by helping to create a sense of lack. The new holds the promise of a future
enjoyment that will surpass whatever the subject has experienced before . This promise is the
engine behind capitalism's creation of ever more needs. The more represents a constant lure, the next more - at least from afar - always seems to be it, the object that would
provide the elusive enjoyment. A portrayal of the inherent dissatisfaction that capitalism requires even among the wealthy occurs near the end of Roman Polanski's Chinatown
(1974). In the film's penultimate scene, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) reproaches Noah Cross (John Huston) for continuing a pattern of ruthless accumulation despite having
already obtained a vast fortune. Their conversation makes clear the insatiable nature of the imperative to accumulate. Jake asks, "How much are you worth?" Cross, sensing the
possibility ofbuyingJake oft says, "I have no idea. How much do you want?" But Jake doesn't want money; he wants to know what keeps Cross going. Jake continues, "No, I
just want to know what you're worth. Over ten million?" Cross responds, "Oh my, yes:' Then Jake asks, "Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy
that you can't already afford?" Cross gives an answer emblematic of the capitalist subject: "The future, Mr. Getz [sic], the future." Cross's appeal to the "future" indicates that he
believes in the promise of capitalism - that the future holds the lost enjoyment that always eludes us today. Despite his millions, his emphasis on the future demonstrates that
sense of their own dissatisfaction, but it also holds out the lure of future
enjoyment, which prompts both the capitalist to create a new commodity and the
consumer to buy it. Just as the capitalist hopes that every newly created
commodity will be it, so does the consumer. However, no new commodity can ever provide the lost enjoyment for either the
capitalist or the consumer, no matter how successful the commodity is, because the enjoyment has only an imaginary status. Once the commodity is
realized for each (put on the market, in the case of the capitalist, or purchased, in
the case of the consumer), it necessarily loses its enjoyment value. In this sense, capitalism depends
upon the dynamic of the child at Christmas time. On Christmas Eve all the presents under the tree offer the promise of a future enjoyment, but by afternoon on Christmas Day
the child ends up bored and desiring once again, not having found the elusive enjoyment in any of the opened packages. This boredom isn't just the sign of the child's narcissism
promise of future enjoyment and then the inevitable dissatisfaction that follows
can only perpetuate itself as long as capitalist subjects continue to hope, that is, to
believe in the promise that the new commodity holds out. More than anything else,
hope keeps capitalism going. Giving up hope - and yet continuing on, enjoying
continuing on -moves us from desire to the drive. This type of transformation also
entails the end of the capitalist subject: capitalist subjects without hope are no
longer capitalist subjects. What holds us back from this possibility is our inability
to discover a way of finding satisfaction satisfying. This failure, perhaps even more than its human costs, is what most
disturbs Marx about capitalism. The points in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts at which Marx seems to slip into humanism as he recounts the effects of capitalism
are the points at which he tries to articulate, though he wouldn't put it this way, the capitalist system's resistance to the death drive: capitalism doesn't allow us to find
satisfaction in our satisfaction. Its logic is one that Marx calls "self-renunciation:' As he puts it in perhaps the most famous passage from the Manuscripts, "The less you eat,
drink and buy books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save - the greater
becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour- your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life, the more you
have, the greater is the store of your estranged being."19 What Marx describes here as "alienated life" is not a life made unnatural by capitalism but a life where satisfaction is not
satisfaction involved with eating, drinking, and buying books; rather, it is the
ability to achieve a mediated satisfaction, becoming satisfied with the satisfaction
that is already ours. The key, in other words, is not what we do so much as how we
do it. It is on the level of this "how;' rather than a "what," that capitalism alienates
its subjects from their satisfaction. It fosters this type of alienation through its
unrelenting demand for accumulation.
Climate Change
In the Anthropocene, the paradoxical anxieties of control and
preservation unconsciously push environmental fixes outside the
confines of reality. The affirmatives technological attempt to address
climate change enables the maintenance of ecological fantasies that
decenter the effect of the human to continue the acceleration of
environmental degradation.
Clarkson 17 (Lindsay Clarkson is a member of the Princeton Center For Advanced
Psychoanalytic Studies and received her medical degree from Duke University School of
Medicine, Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
and Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0003065117712706, SAGE journals,
6/23/17) AqN *modified for ableist rhetoric*
The bond of community between humans and the animal kingdom must create a
terrible threat if we must so forcefully obscure this linkage to ourselves. If we
extend Freuds reach to include the human disinclination to recognize our
dependence on the web of life, then we become aware of the scotoma so common
in our conscious existence. Awareness of the finiteness of the earths resources
and biodiversity interferes with human wishes to live in an ideal world in which we
are in total control and there are no limits, or consequences, to our actions. If we turn
a blind eye [are ignorant] to the effect we have on the environment, we do not have to
We
the infant who cannot make such a clear differentiation: to some extent the interaction between external and internal danger-situations persists throughout life (p. 39).
are now threatened and made uneasy by changes to the world that we as a species
have caused. We could look at the degradation of the environment as a symptom of
a disturbance within ourselves that is reflected in our attitude toward the
nonhuman earth that is our sustaining home. During analyses conducted during World War II, Klein described analysands
who brought anxieties that were due to objective threats to life such as aerial bombardment or conflagrations. Klein observed that such anxieties could be settled only if deeper
analytic work traced the activation of dangerous worries involving primitive fantasies summoned in response to such external hazards. Through understanding and working
through these internal terrors, patients could better tolerate the ongoing perils. Other patients expressed no conscious worries about their actual risk, in fact endangering
themselves further by taking no precautions to ensure their safety. Klein postulates that the extent of their unconscious anxiety stirred fierce defenses, resulting in manic denial.
A more
The revival of earlier fantastic anxieties was so pressing that the real and present danger had to be denied. In other patients, an internal security prevailed.
integrated and benign relationship with ones internal objects affects ones sense
of safety in the realistically hazardous outside world, while allowing preservative
action commensurate with the actual scale of threat. While the potential harm of
climate change is less available to our immediate senses than a bomb, our
acknowledgment (or lack thereof) of its relevance to our existence, and that of
future generations, is affected by our internal situations. Searless 1972 paper drew
attention to the primitive anxieties stirred up by the deteriorating state of the
environment, leaving humans unable to face and cope with the problems they have
created. His article is a model of a complex and serious psychoanalytic approach to understanding the relationship of humans to the natural world: I
postulate that an ecologically healthy relatedness to our nonhuman environment
is essential to the development and maintenance of our sense of being human and
such a relatedness has become so undermined, disrupted, and distorted,
concomitant with the ecological deterioration, that it is inordinately difficult for us
to integrate the feeling-experiences, including the losses, inescapable to any full-
fledged human life. Over recent decades we have come from dwelling in an outer
world in which the living works of nature either predominated or were near at
hand, to dwelling in an environment dominated by a technology which is
wonderfully powerful, and yet nonetheless dead, inanimate. I suggest that in the process we have
come from being subjectively differentiated from, and in meaningful kinship with,
the outer world, to finding the technology-dominated world so alien, so complex,
so awesome, and so overwhelming that we have been able to cope with it only by
regressing, in our unconscious experience of it, to a degraded state of
nondifferentiation from it [pp. 236237]. Searles goes on to discuss the allure of the omnipotence we associate with technology. In his view, we
are involved in ongoing conflict between an omnipotent, autistic [introverted] state of
mind that protects us from the diminishment we fear suffering if we are aware of
being simply human, and a more tolerant state of mind in which we recognize
our stature and kinship with the earth, its nonhuman processes, and its other
inhabitants. In 1949 Aldo Leopold, a renowned conservationist, advocated adoption of a land ethic that changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the
land-community to plain member and citizen of it (p. 204). Searles addresses the psychic obstacles to embracing such a perspective. One might not agree with all of his
formulations, but he is trying to use psychoanalytic tools to engage with the profound effects our psychic reality has on our ability to settle into a complex place in the natural
Carbon dioxide and methane levels are rising. The report notes a marked rise in species extinction rates, and profound
changes occurring in the assemblages of species, primarily due to species movements across the globe into previously alien areas, and intensified farming and fishing. The
reform's insistence on its newness, its certainty, and its nowness? Anyone who
opposes ed reform is cast as living in a dead past. Can we not see this blind [blank]
innocence in the failure to work through histories and dreams of and dependence
on, for example, white supremacy or misogyny? Certainly in the United States, the
inability to face the trauma of race and the resistance to looking at the role of white
supremacy in the formation of identities, fortunes, and education policies create
not only racial melancholia but psychic dead zones and reveal the workings of a
death drive. Sarigianides suggests as much in her reading of American Born Chinese.15 As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, the tenacious dream of white, straight, male
exceptionalism that thrives on generalization, limiting questions, and privileging immediate answers numbs memory and erases history.16 This drive to
architecture as analogies for teaching, or when they base their views of teaching in
the learning sciences, they effectively remove teaching from the world of history.
The Death of Feelings But if memory and history disappear, what happens to feelings? Let us follow Brian Massumi and take feelings to be both personal and biographical. They
are, he writes, body-based sensations, checked against remembered experiences that emerge in language.18 What will happen to feelings if memory and history vanish and the
language in which feelings take form diminishes? If the language of education reform increasingly constricts
the symbolic I imagine many of us have had the experience of feeling suffocated or flattened by that language at meetings and if it makes
relationships suspect I imagine, too, we have all felt interpersonal exchanges rushed, diminished, or mistrusted under the glare of audit
might we not also venture that such language diminishes the world of feelings?
Certainly we know that education reform culls its language from the worlds of
finance and business, which reduce all behavior to the bottom line; from the
learning sciences, which render knowledge and wisdom as information and insist
on predictability and replicability; from the military, with its focus on command
and control; and from the world of sports, which knows only winners and losers.
The language of these worlds evacuates our subjectivity, except insofar as it
demands that we endlessly monitor, control, and improve ourselves and others.
This demand for constant improvement, a kind of superego of education reform,
lacerates us with the harsh and narrow language of failure, substituting imperious
judgment for conversation and, as Adam Phillips suggests in Unforbidden
Pleasures, submitting our lives to one, often cruel, correct interpretation.19 The
self-denigration with which Freud distinguished melancholia from mourning
appears in the impoverished language of the superego that harbors the drive to
turn us into objects. The language of the superego, Phillips further suggests, is
filled with petty and cruel demands and vicious charges that we are never
enough.20 There is no dialogue, no poetry, no interpretive flexibility. There is only
the one right answer, and we are reduced to an object whipped and rendered inert,
left with only depression or, turned outward, rage, and a lingering affect provoked
by the constrictions of deadened identities and numbed and numbered selves. The
superego that stuck record that endlessly reiterates its scathing criticism in its
impoverished vocabulary first turns us into an object by telling us who we are
before it unleashes its scorn on us. As Phillips writes, [T]he superego treats the ego like an object not a person.21 Can we
not see [recognize] the work of the death drive in the way teachers and students
are articulated as bundles of skills, lists of rules and procedures, and scripts
written, designed, and packaged somewhere else? It's no wonder that education
reformers talk so much of building a better teacher. Through various
vocabularies and practices of quantification, we are rendered and render
ourselves as machines: efficient, predictable, and easily programmed, machines
that elicit and process numerical data. The impoverishment of language results
not only from the barrage of terms culled from the worlds of business, the learning
sciences, the military, and sports, but also from ed reform's fascination with and
promotion of technology. Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has perhaps written most persuasively about the
role of technology in the transformation of our feeling life. She is particularly worried about the decline in empathy among young people and the blurring of boundaries between
machines and humans, as robots come to be programmed to give the appearance of feeling.22 If feelings disappear or emerge only in terms of spatial descriptions I feel high,
Deprived of feeling,
low, flat, as Fredric Jameson so many years ago claimed was happening in our postmodern state23 what happens to thought?
does not thought itself dry up? Bound by rules of statistical evidence, empirical
verifiability, experimental design, and linear sequential logic, rendered always in
terms of cognitive operations or in terms of Bloom's taxonomy, thinking hardens.
The rigor demanded by education reformers becomes rigor mortis. If repetition
compulsion signals the presence of the death drive, then perhaps we can say that
such repetition is indeed in the service of an ultimately deadening psychic stasis,
of numbing feelings. Even the addict who would seem to be seeking the rush of affect and who is certainly caught in a repetition compulsion is trying hard
not to feel. This is why recovery can be so hard too many feelings. Is it possible, then, that all the various defenses
we erect serve to defend against feelings, to achieve psychic numbness? Are they
perhaps all really minions of the death drive? Can we read the death drive in Theodor Adorno's manipulative character, who
is distinguished by a rage for organization and a certain lack of emotion and one who is obsessed with doing things as well as becoming a thing, or in Christopher Bollas's
normotic, who fails to symbolize in language his subjective states of mind and is inclined to reflect on the thingness of objects, on their material reality, or on data that relates
drive for numbness, for forgetting, for psychic deadness. And perhaps this drive
both constitutes and inflames a superego inflated by the ineffable losses of
melancholia. If the death drive is a drive to psychically numb ourselves and
neoliberalism provides conditions under which this drive grows in intensity, and if
melancholy, which Freud said diminishes our interest in the outside world and
the capacity to love,25 becomes the dominant structure of feeling, what hope is
there? This, Freud felt, was the fateful question.26 He offered as a response that hope lay in the other of the two Heavenly Powers, eternal Eros.27 Perhaps our task,
then, is to engage in a project of remembering and feeling or at least creating the conditions such that these are possible. In their contributions to this symposium, Backer,
Sarigianides, and Stillwaggon suggest particular approaches to classroom discourse, the choice of texts, and teaching writing that might constitute such conditions. I want to
focus, however, on Freud's third claim that Eros is the preserver of life.
Demand vs K
The 1ACs demand to be recognized as a form of political dissent is an investment in
the hegemonic order the power of demand stems from the authority of the system.
Their failure to theorize desire turns the 1AC into a moment of jouissance that betrays
their radical intentions in order to maintain the possibility of protest. The 1AC is
structured by an agential fantasy This constant repetition of the demand that to
change our representations that will never be fulfilled invests desire solely onto the
level of demand creating a constant repetition of the same turns case.
Lundberg 12 (Christian Lundberg is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies, Lacan in Public:
Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric, 11/26/12) AqN *modified for ableist and gendered
rhetoric*
In the run up to the 2003 World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in Cancun, the
Mexican Government composed a list of the sixty most globalophobic leaders of
antiglobalization groups. The document, subsequently leaked to the Mexican newspaper La Reforma, was met with predictable criticisms regarding
the relationship between state security apparatuses, the institutions of global economic governance, and democratic protest. But there were less predictable responses: in
addition to criticisms that the list chilled democratic dissent, some antiglobalization groups criticized the list for not being comprehensive enough, demanding its expansion.
protest. Here, the lack of recognition does not make the protest ineffective, instead
the fact that the Mexican government and the WTO underestimate the danger
posed by ordinary citizens animates this critique. Not to be outdone, the Mexico Solidarity Network created an online
form letter for self-identified dangerous antiglobalization groups: Dear Government Agents Bent on Restricting Civil Liberties, I recently found out about the watch list
prepared by Mexican authorities, purportedly to quell the voice of civil society at the upcoming WTO Ministerial in Cancun. . . . Please add my name to your watch list
immediately!! Nothing less is acceptable.26 One might read such demands as parodic critiques of globalization and security, as ironic calls for mobilization, as a strategy of
as a means of democratizing global governance, these demands are not simply for
inclusion: they are also demands to be recognized as dangerous and in solidarity
with other similarly dangerous global citizens. How is it possible to ground a reading of the rhetorical functions of the
demand to be recognized as dangerous? For Laclau, such demands ought be read through their
Specific political
(mis)identification and the set of identitarian equivalences inaugurated by investing in the specific content of the demand.
There is no achievable
contains a brief discussion of the concept of jouissance in Copjecs work, which Laclau summarizes by saying:
jouissance except through radical investment in an objet petit a. But the same discovery (not merely an
analogous one) is made if we start from the angle of political theory. No social fullness except through hegemony; and
achievable as the preceding quotation might suggest. Far from being the
consummation of a logic of structure and investment, enjoyment is a supplement
to a failing in a structure: for example, Lacan frames jouissance as a useless
enjoyment of ones own subjectivity that supplements the fundamental failings of a
subject in either finding grounding or consummating an authoritative account of
its coherence. This uselessness defines the operation of jouissance. When Lacan suggests that language is not the speaking subject in the seminar On
Feminine Sexuality, lodging a critique of structural linguistics as a law governing speech, jouissance is understood as something excessive that is born of the failure of structures
of signification. Language is not the speaking subject precisely because what is passed through the gristmill of speech is the result of a misfiring of structure as much as it is
prefigured by logics of structure, meaning, and utility. Therefore the interpretive difficulty for a structuralist account of enjoyment: the moment that the fact of enjoyment is
Framing
recoded in the language of structure, the moment that it is made useful in a logic of subjectivization, is precisely the moment where it stops being jouissance.
this reversal is that the subject is simultaneously produced and disfigured by its
unavoidable insertion into the space of the Symbolic. An Es assumes an identity as a subject as a way of
accommodating to the Symbolics demands and as a node for producing demands on its others or of being recognized as a subject.34 As I have already argued, the demand
demonstrates that the enjoyment of ones own subjectivity is useless surplus produced in the gap between the Es (or it) and the ideal I. As a result, there is excess jouissance that
remains even after its reduction to hegemony. This remainder may even be logically prior to hegemony, in that it is a useless but ritually repeated retroactive act of naming the
self that produces the subject and therefore conditions possibility for investment in an identitarian configuration. The site of this excess, where the subject negotiates the terms
of a nonrelationship with the Symbolic, is also the primary site differentiating need, demand, and desire. Need approximates the position of the Freudian id, in that it is a
Sheridan notes, there is no adequation between need and demand.35 The same type of split that
inheres in the Freudian demand inheres in the Lacanian demand, although in Lacans case it is crucial to notice that the split does not derive from the empirical impossibility of
the specificity
fulfilling demands as much as it stems from the impossibility of articulating needs to or receiving a satisfactory response from the Other. Thus,
of the demand becomes less relevant than the structural fact that demand
presupposes the ability of the addressee to fulfill the demand. This impossibility
points to the paradoxical nature of demand: the demand is less a way of
addressing need to the other than a call for love and recognition by it. In this way, writes Lacan,
demand annuls the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love, and the very satisfactions that it obtains for need are reduced to the
level of being no more than the crushing of the demand for love.36 The Other cannot, by definition, ever give this gift: the starting presupposition of the mirror stage is the
constitutive impossibility of comfortably inhabiting the Symbolic. The structural impossibility of fulfilling demands resonates with the Freudian demand in that the frustration
of demand produces the articulation of desire. Thus, Lacan argues that desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results
from the subtraction of the first from the second.37 This sentiment animates the crucial Lacanian claim for the impossibility of the other giving a gift that it does not have,
demand becomes separated from need: this margin being that which is opened up
by demand, the appeal of which can be unconditional only in regards to the Other .
. . having no universal satisfaction. . . . It is this whim that introduces the phantom
of omnipotence, not of the subject, but of the other in which his demand is
installed.38 This framing of demand reverses the classically liberal presupposition regarding demand and agency. Contemporary and classical liberal democratic
theories presume that the demand is a way of exerting agency and, further, that the more firmly the demand is lodged, the greater the production of an agential effect. The
Lacanian framing of the demand sees the relationship as exactly the opposite: the
more firmly one lodges a demand, the more desperately one clings to the
legitimate ability of an institution to fulfill it. Hypothetically, demands ought reach
a kind of breaking point where the inability of an institution or order to proffer a
response should produce a reevaluation of the economy of demand and desire . In
analytic terms, this is the moment of subtraction, where the manifest content of
the demand is stripped away and the desire that underwrites it is laid bare. The
result of this subtraction is that the subject is in a position to relate to its desire,
not as a set of deferrals, avoidances, or transposition but rather as an owned
political disposition. As Lacan frames it, demanding subjects are either learning to
reassert the centrality of their demand or coming to terms with the impotence of
the Other as a satisfier of demands: But it is in the dialectic of the demand for love
and the test of desire that development is ordered. . . . [T]his test of the desire of the Other is decisive not in the
sense that the subject learns by it whether or not he has a phallus, but in the sense that he learns that the mother does not have it.39 The point of this disposition is to bring the
subject to a point where they might recognize and name their own desire and, as a result, become a political subject in the sense of being able to truly argue for something
without being dependent on the other as a support for or organizing principle for political identity. Thus, desire has both a general status and a specific status for each subject. It
is not just the mirror that produces the subject and its investments but the desire and sets of proxy objects that cover over this original gap. As Easthope puts it: Lacan is sure
that everyones desire is somehow different and their ownlack is nevertheless my lack. How can this be if each of us is just lost in language . . . passing through demand into
desire, something from the Real, from the individuals being before language, is retained as a trace enough to determine that I desire here and there, not anywhere and
Lacan terms this objet petit a . . . petit a is different for everyone; and it can
everywhere.
expense of ever articulating a desire that is theirs. In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the hysterics
demand that the Other produce an object is the support of an aversion toward ones desire: the behavior of the hysteric, for example, has as its aim to recreate a state centered
on the object, insofar as this object . . . is . . . the support of an aversion.43 This economy of aversion explains the ambivalent relationship between hysterics and their demands.
On one hand, the hysteric asserts their agency, even authority, over the Other. Yet, what appears as unfettered agency from the perspective of a discourse of authority is also
Thus, as
simultaneously a surrender of desire by enjoying the act of figuring the other as the one with the exclusive capability to satisfy the demand.
hysterics you demand a new master: you will get it! At the register of manifest
content, demands are claims for action and seemingly powerful, but at the level of
the rhetorical form of the demand or in the register of enjoyment, demand is a
kind of surrender. As a relation of address the hysterical demand is more a demand for recognition and love from an ostensibly repressive order than a
claim for change. The limitation of the students call on Lacan does not lie in the end they sought but in the fact that the hysterical address never quite breaks free from its
over and against hegemony but rather the practices of enjoyment that sustain an
addiction to mastery and a deferral of desire. Hysteria is a politically effective subject position in some ways, but it is
politically constraining from the perspective of organized political dissent. If not a unidirectional practice of resistance, hysteria is at best a politics of interruption. Imagine a
world where the state was the perfect and complete embodiment of a hegemonic order, without interruption or remainder, and the discursive system was hermetically closed.
In the run up to the 2003 World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in Cancun, the
Mexican Government composed a list of the sixty most globalophobic leaders of
antiglobalization groups. The document, subsequently leaked to the Mexican newspaper La Reforma, was met with predictable criticisms regarding
the relationship between state security apparatuses, the institutions of global economic governance, and democratic protest. But there were less predictable responses: in
addition to criticisms that the list chilled democratic dissent, some antiglobalization groups criticized the list for not being comprehensive enough, demanding its expansion.
protest. Here, the lack of recognition does not make the protest ineffective, instead
the fact that the Mexican government and the WTO underestimate the danger
posed by ordinary citizens animates this critique. Not to be outdone, the Mexico Solidarity Network created an online
form letter for self-identified dangerous antiglobalization groups: Dear Government Agents Bent on Restricting Civil Liberties, I recently found out about the watch list
prepared by Mexican authorities, purportedly to quell the voice of civil society at the upcoming WTO Ministerial in Cancun. . . . Please add my name to your watch list
immediately!! Nothing less is acceptable.26 One might read such demands as parodic critiques of globalization and security, as ironic calls for mobilization, as a strategy of
as a means of democratizing global governance, these demands are not simply for
inclusion: they are also demands to be recognized as dangerous and in solidarity
with other similarly dangerous global citizens. How is it possible to ground a reading of the rhetorical functions of the
demand to be recognized as dangerous? For Laclau, such demands ought be read through their
There is no achievable
contains a brief discussion of the concept of jouissance in Copjecs work, which Laclau summarizes by saying:
jouissance except through radical investment in an objet petit a. But the same discovery (not merely an
analogous one) is made if we start from the angle of political theory. No social fullness except through hegemony; and
achievable as the preceding quotation might suggest. Far from being the
consummation of a logic of structure and investment, enjoyment is a supplement
to a failing in a structure: for example, Lacan frames jouissance as a useless
enjoyment of ones own subjectivity that supplements the fundamental failings of a
subject in either finding grounding or consummating an authoritative account of
its coherence. This uselessness defines the operation of jouissance. When Lacan suggests that language is not the speaking subject in the seminar On
Feminine Sexuality, lodging a critique of structural linguistics as a law governing speech, jouissance is understood as something excessive that is born of the failure of structures
of signification. Language is not the speaking subject precisely because what is passed through the gristmill of speech is the result of a misfiring of structure as much as it is
prefigured by logics of structure, meaning, and utility. Therefore the interpretive difficulty for a structuralist account of enjoyment: the moment that the fact of enjoyment is
Framing
recoded in the language of structure, the moment that it is made useful in a logic of subjectivization, is precisely the moment where it stops being jouissance.
this reversal is that the subject is simultaneously produced and disfigured by its
unavoidable insertion into the space of the Symbolic. An Es assumes an identity as a subject as a way of
accommodating to the Symbolics demands and as a node for producing demands on its others or of being recognized as a subject.34 As I have already argued, the demand
demonstrates that the enjoyment of ones own subjectivity is useless surplus produced in the gap between the Es (or it) and the ideal I. As a result, there is excess jouissance that
remains even after its reduction to hegemony. This remainder may even be logically prior to hegemony, in that it is a useless but ritually repeated retroactive act of naming the
self that produces the subject and therefore conditions possibility for investment in an identitarian configuration. The site of this excess, where the subject negotiates the terms
of a nonrelationship with the Symbolic, is also the primary site differentiating need, demand, and desire. Need approximates the position of the Freudian id, in that it is a
Sheridan notes, there is no adequation between need and demand.35 The same type of split that
inheres in the Freudian demand inheres in the Lacanian demand, although in Lacans case it is crucial to notice that the split does not derive from the empirical impossibility of
the specificity
fulfilling demands as much as it stems from the impossibility of articulating needs to or receiving a satisfactory response from the Other. Thus,
of the demand becomes less relevant than the structural fact that demand
presupposes the ability of the addressee to fulfill the demand. This impossibility
points to the paradoxical nature of demand: the demand is less a way of
addressing need to the other than a call for love and recognition by it. In this way, writes Lacan,
demand annuls the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love, and the very satisfactions that it obtains for need are reduced to the
level of being no more than the crushing of the demand for love.36 The Other cannot, by definition, ever give this gift: the starting presupposition of the mirror stage is the
constitutive impossibility of comfortably inhabiting the Symbolic. The structural impossibility of fulfilling demands resonates with the Freudian demand in that the frustration
of demand produces the articulation of desire. Thus, Lacan argues that desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results
from the subtraction of the first from the second.37 This sentiment animates the crucial Lacanian claim for the impossibility of the other giving a gift that it does not have,
demand becomes separated from need: this margin being that which is opened up
by demand, the appeal of which can be unconditional only in regards to the Other .
. . having no universal satisfaction. . . . It is this whim that introduces the phantom
of omnipotence, not of the subject, but of the other in which his demand is
installed.38 This framing of demand reverses the classically liberal presupposition regarding demand and agency. Contemporary and classical liberal democratic
theories presume that the demand is a way of exerting agency and, further, that the more firmly the demand is lodged, the greater the production of an agential effect. The
Lacanian framing of the demand sees the relationship as exactly the opposite: the
more firmly one lodges a demand, the more desperately one clings to the
legitimate ability of an institution to fulfill it. Hypothetically, demands ought reach
a kind of breaking point where the inability of an institution or order to proffer a
response should produce a reevaluation of the economy of demand and desire . In
analytic terms, this is the moment of subtraction, where the manifest content of
the demand is stripped away and the desire that underwrites it is laid bare. The
result of this subtraction is that the subject is in a position to relate to its desire,
not as a set of deferrals, avoidances, or transposition but rather as an owned
political disposition. As Lacan frames it, demanding subjects are either learning to
reassert the centrality of their demand or coming to terms with the impotence of
the Other as a satisfier of demands: But it is in the dialectic of the demand for love
and the test of desire that development is ordered. . . . [T]his test of the desire of the Other is decisive not in the
sense that the subject learns by it whether or not he has a phallus, but in the sense that he learns that the mother does not have it.39 The point of this disposition is to bring the
subject to a point where they might recognize and name their own desire and, as a result, become a political subject in the sense of being able to truly argue for something
without being dependent on the other as a support for or organizing principle for political identity. Thus, desire has both a general status and a specific status for each subject. It
is not just the mirror that produces the subject and its investments but the desire and sets of proxy objects that cover over this original gap. As Easthope puts it: Lacan is sure
that everyones desire is somehow different and their ownlack is nevertheless my lack. How can this be if each of us is just lost in language . . . passing through demand into
desire, something from the Real, from the individuals being before language, is retained as a trace enough to determine that I desire here and there, not anywhere and
Lacan terms this objet petit a . . . petit a is different for everyone; and it can
everywhere.
expense of ever articulating a desire that is theirs. In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the hysterics
demand that the Other produce an object is the support of an aversion toward ones desire: the behavior of the hysteric, for example, has as its aim to recreate a state centered
on the object, insofar as this object . . . is . . . the support of an aversion.43 This economy of aversion explains the ambivalent relationship between hysterics and their demands.
On one hand, the hysteric asserts their agency, even authority, over the Other. Yet, what appears as unfettered agency from the perspective of a discourse of authority is also
Thus, as
simultaneously a surrender of desire by enjoying the act of figuring the other as the one with the exclusive capability to satisfy the demand.
hysterics you demand a new master: you will get it! At the register of manifest
content, demands are claims for action and seemingly powerful, but at the level of
the rhetorical form of the demand or in the register of enjoyment, demand is a
kind of surrender. As a relation of address the hysterical demand is more a demand for recognition and love from an ostensibly repressive order than a
claim for change. The limitation of the students call on Lacan does not lie in the end they sought but in the fact that the hysterical address never quite breaks free from its
over and against hegemony but rather the practices of enjoyment that sustain an
addiction to mastery and a deferral of desire. Hysteria is a politically effective subject position in some ways, but it is
politically constraining from the perspective of organized political dissent. If not a unidirectional practice of resistance, hysteria is at best a politics of interruption. Imagine a
world where the state was the perfect and complete embodiment of a hegemonic order, without interruption or remainder, and the discursive system was hermetically closed.
ritually repeated connections elicit the investment of the subjects who employ
them. Reading discourse as both a formal and affective economy, Lacans psychoanalysis affords rhetoric a means for
analyzing the cumulative effects of discursive labor in producing durable social
formations. Thus, Lacans turn to rhetoric hazards a response to the questions of structure, contingency, agency, and the allied constellation of terms occupying our contemporary theoretical
context in the wake of poststructuralism. In reading signification and representation rhetoricallyas
The American rhetorical tradition largely ignores the economically derived formal
rhetorical functions of trope, which work to feign unicity, and the structuralist
traditions largely ignore the rhetorical accent that Lacan places on the concept of
trope as a compensatory function in the context of failed unicity. An implied tension between these two claims
abates if one begins with a theory of rhetoric as both failed and feigned unicity. Rhetoric relies on a transcontextual logic of trope and signification that figures the means of its effectivity for the subject in specific
signifiers and the world, there are a limited number of ways that a speaking
subject can both employ a signifier as a referent to the external world and
differentiate it from other signifiers. This condition is so all encompassing that it
figures the contents, modes of address, and social forms that underwrite
rhetorical exchange. A theory of trope ought to gain primacy in rhetorical theory, because trope is always immanent within
and constitutes the specific contexts where persuasion, identification, propriety,
or any of the other readily available rhetorical means for understanding the
function of discourse are operative. Lacans conception of trope offers rhetoric the possibility of framing the ontological and discursive operations
underwriting the varied contexts within which critics attend to rhetorical effect. Put more directly, Lacans work identifies the overarching context of the specific contexts that the rhetorical traditions engage by
providing a means of reading the general economy of discourse as the ground of specific, contextually bound discursive practices.9 Paradoxically, Lacans commitment to a rhetorical conception of tropology also
imply that one must not only cast out the last vestiges of unicity in the idea of
structure itself but one also must pay attention to the impossibility of separating
the formal logic of signification from the empirical contexts within which
discourse emerges. Although undoubtedly influenced by the structuralist tradition, and even identified by some as the high-water mark of this tradition, Lacan turns to rhetoric to
understand the genesis and performance of the subject without reaffirming the automatic structuring function of language.10 Instead, Lacan replaces structure
with the metaphor of economy in a radical embrace of his maxim that language is
not the speaking being.11 More to the point, one does not only find an account of structure in Lacans work, one also finds a commitment to the materiality of speech,
attention to the specificity of affects, an account of address, and, perhaps most significantly, a theory of the failures of structure in ordering the Real that works against a reduction of his thought to an
unproblematic structuralism. Lacans ruminations on rhetoric have not gone unnoticed by his readers, although the extent of his reliance on rhetoric is often overlooked. For example, Bruce Fink, who is
mere manners of speaking, but are at work in the rhetoric of the discourse that
the analysand actually utters . . . to the analyst, nothing is ever just a figure of
speech.12 Fink claims that while the analysand spontaneously employs well-
known rhetorical figures to keep from saying certain things and to keep certain
ideas from surfacing . . . [i]n his typical fashion, Lacan does not elaborate on this, neither here nor anywhere else, to the best of my knowledge.13 As I hope to show,
Lacans oeuvre contains a rich account of the regulatory function of trope in organizing speech. This realization has begun to take hold in the fields of composition and communication studies. Work on Lacan in
communication studies extends as far back as 1977, when Lloyd Pettegrew introduced Lacans work on transference to figure the place of metaphor in a theory of discourse.14 Similarly, Michael Hyde took up
Lacans theory of the sign in 1980, arguing for a reading Lacans structuralism in the context of the phenomenological and hermeneutic elements of his work.15 These interventions sought to expand rhetorical
studiess vocabulary for addressing speech and language by situating Lacans account of signification against a number of experiential registers (transferential, phenomenological, and hermeneutic).16 Work on
Lacan in communication studies saw a fairly rapid expansion in the years after 1999, which marked the publication of Henry Kripss Fetish: An Erotics of Culture.17 Kripss purpose in Fetish was to provide a
theory of the fetish and the gaze informed by Marxs and Lacans reading of Freud, detailing the ways that these concepts bridge the gap between the psyche and culture by attending to their production around
specific objects, texts, and practices. For Krips, the central questions are both how can a subjective psychoanalytic conception, like the gaze, account for the public, objective effects of images and how is it
possible to bridge the gap between individual psychic responses and the communal effects of cultural artifacts?18 Asking similar questions of public politics, James P. McDaniel took up a reading of Lacan and
iek to understand the roles of public address in American politics, specifically by attending to the role of fantasy and figure in democratic life.19 Though neither Krips nor McDaniel focus on Lacans account of
the ontology and functions of rhetoric, both employ a rhetorically inflected understanding of psychoanalysis to engage political and cultural production. Although also interested in sites of political production,
Barbara Biesecker and Joshua Gunn have taken up the relationship between rhetoric and psychoanalysis in more direct terms. Gunn has argued for closer critical attention to Lacans work in understanding the
function of rhetoric in contemporary public culture. Gunn has done groundbreaking work in rehabilitating a conception of fantasy in rhetorical studies, with close attention to the understanding of the
intersubjective bond in public life, in understanding the function of voice, and the relationship between rhetoric and love by critiquing rhetorics of identification.20 Bieseckers Rhetorical Studies and the New
Psychoanalysis begins with the modest claim that rhetorical theorists and critics will be considerably enriched by engaging Lacanian psychoanalysis in the process of ideological critique.21 Biesecker is
tempted to make the stronger claim that Jacques Lacan will have already been the great theorist of rhetoric for the twenty-first century because his work makes visible the limits of a number of contemporary
theories of rhetoric that foreclose, disavow, or devalue the speaking beings affective attachments . . . and gestures toward strategies for overcoming them.22 Biesecker has taken up this task with deftness in both
detailing the rhetorical production of the melancholic citizen-subject in the war on terror and in her treatments of national commemoration.23 More recently, Biesecker has taken up the task of delineating an
evental rhetoric defined by four qualities: one, evental rhetoric is more than performative in Derridas sense since it is full speech in the Lacanian sense; two, evental rhetoric takes the form of the exorbitant
demand; three, evental rhetoric works by and through the logic of sublimation and not by and through the logic of representation or articulation; four, evental rhetoric does not abide the binary logics of the timely
and untimely, the appropriate and inappropriate or the possible and impossible; it forces their displacement that, with Freud and Lacan, I would call the uncanny.24 Bieseckers charge to think evental rhetoric
has strong resonance with the reading of rhetoric that I will offer here, which is also premised on privileging the tropological charge in speech (which is the hallmark of Lacans full speech), figuring speech as a
as a practice of signifying in a
meaningfully engaged as a product of the structurally determined relations that precede and produce it. Conversely,
condition of failed unicity, rhetoric names the fact that structures fail in efficiently
structuring the world. While Lacans work undoubtedly assimilates the structuralist insight that actors in the social world are figured by discourses that exceed and produce them,
his work on the concepts of enjoyment and the labor of signification reveal a commitment to
figuring the failure of structure in constituting the world without remainder. Next, poetics:
those who read Lacan through structuralist poetics are primarily concerned with the effect of trope independent from speech as the medium that carries the trope. One of the strongest indicators of Lacans
commitment to rhetoric is that his work rarely engages the formal properties of discourse without noting the modes of relation and practices of investment that underwrite them. Consider this commitment from
the question of mimesiswith the various ways that human discourse relies on
imitation as the method or process of making actions or representations
imitate nature.31 Poetics takes up the question of style to understand the ways
that mimetic processes embody certain formal qualities, often in the form of
language that draws attention to its character as tropologically inflected. As a
result, a poetic account presumes a constitutive disconnection between the act of
imitation and the imitated, driving Aristotle toward a treatment of poetics as an art in itself.32 Though focused on modes of discursive production, poetics takes the
formal properties of mimesis as a primary site of concern. If poetics aims at the trope in itself, rhetoric aims at an
properties of the trope are productive, but the trope is also inextricably linked
with the larger economy of socially situated practices of feigned unicity and,
therefore, with the failures of discourse to inscribe the word onto the thing.
Education Bad
Educational regulation attempts to ameliorate a collective Lack. Their
consensual politics of equity props up schools as depoliticized
capitalist spaces.
Clarke 13 (Matthew Clarke is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University
of New South Wales in Sydney, Terror/enjoyment: performativity, resistance and the teachers
Psyche, London Review of Education, 2013 Vol. 11, No. 3,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14748460.2013.840983, 7/4/13) AqN
Another classic instance of consensualism is found in the education revolution
agenda to simultaneously deliver equity and excellence in our schools, an agenda that can
only be achieved, however, with the concerted and united national effort that focuses on improving the productivity of all Australian schools (Rudd & Gillard, 2008, p. 35).
But aside from the consensualism, evident in the emphasis on all parties singing from the same song sheet, and the
instrumentalism, obvious in the characterisation of schools as a locus of improved
productivity, this statement is noteworthy as an illustration of the operation of
fantasy in the Lacanian sense in education policy. Within this theorization, fantasy operates
in a dialectical relationship with the fundamental lack that is inscribed in us
through our entry into the symbolic realm, within which we are mere placeholders
in a socially shared semiotic system that precedes and exceeds us. Fantasy arises as
the vehicle of potential explanation and amelioration of this lack, whilst resulting
from a continual denial/forgetting of the ontological impossibility of such
fantasmatic fulfilment. As Dean puts it what is crucialis the way the fantasy keeps open the possibility of enjoyment by telling us why we are not
really enjoying (Dean, 2006, p. 12). What seems to be overlooked in this fantasmatic vision of the
equity and quality by harmonising all potential discord between them and hence
draining them of any sociopolitical tension. We can also see the operation of
fantasy-supported consensualism as a mode of depoliticisation in relation to the
framing of teachers work in the Education Revolution and in particular, in the
way teachers are positioned as the lynchpin of educational reform, student success
and national competitiveness. Thus, in a passage on High Quality Teaching in All Schools, Quality Education asserts, It is well established
that teacher quality is the single greatest in-school influence on student engagement and results. In addition evidence indicates the improving the quality of the teaching
workforce is fundamental to any overall improvements in schooling. The impact of teaching is cumulative a poor-quality teacher not only imparts less knowledge for the period
2
Social capitalist is the label adopted by the Australian Federal (Labor) government to describe its third way
policy agenda.
they teach the student, but can leave the student worse off when they later attempt higher levels of work. The 2007 McKinsey report, which identified features common to the
worlds top-performing school systems, argues that the quality of an education system simply cannot exceed the quality of its teachers and that the only way to improve
well established truth regarding the pivotal position of teachers. But aside from the attempt at
bracketing out factors like the socioeconomic status of students by restricting the claim to in-school influences as if the in- and out- of school contexts could be neatly
beatific, salvation narrative, whereby quality teachers and teaching will ensure the
future success of all students, while education is positioned as the source of
salvation for society, providing indispensible social and economic benefits an
implicit if unintended meaning implied in the very notion of an education
revolution. The overall consequence, with the role of wider societal inequality in
socioceconomic and educational success rendered invisible and irrelevant, is to
add to the broader depoliticisation of education that is the focus of this paper.
Education Good
Their faith in education as a democratic tool to better the conditions
of students is misplaced. Instead, education has become a process of
the re-subjectification of students in which their identities are erased
in the name of academic achievement and performance.
Stillwaggon 17 (James Stillwaggon obtained a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Education at the
Teachers College of Columbia University, A FANTASY OF UNTOUCHABLE FULLNESS:
MELANCHOLIA AND RESISTANCE TO EDUCATIONAL TRANSFORMATION, Educational
Theory, Volume 1) AqN *modified for ableist and gendered rhetoric*
Democratic systems of education cannot help their attraction to the idea of the
self-made man, or, less colloquially, the ideal educated subject as constructed
entirely through its adventures and experiences in the world. The radically mutable understanding of childhood that
can be traced from John Locke, through John Watson and B. F. Skinner, to the patchwork of developmental and cognitive educational psychologies that inform educational policy in our own time grounds the
promise that democratic schooling will not only be a matter of sifting out the naturally talented from the rest, but will offer every student an opportunity at becoming something more than the accidental
universally impose the same demands without any concern for universally
distributing the means for satisfying them, thus helping to legitimate the
inequality that one merely records and ratifies, while additionally exercising (first
of all in the educational system) the symbolic violence associated with the effects
of real inequality within formal equality.3 According to Reay, the upshot of raising educational
expectations and broadening educational opportunity as a means toward greater
social and economic equality is an imposition of upper-class values on any
working-class student willing to sever ties with familial and class identities: In England, in the
minority of cases when the equation of working class plus education equals academic success, education is not about the valorization of
working classness but its erasure.4 Education in these circumstances thus promises a means of escape from the culture into which one is born, but as Reay
argues, this notion of escaping ones own, and especially of contributing to negative
understandings of ones own through a willingness to escape, produces problems
of identity for the very student subjects we would rely upon to bring about the kind
of changes that democratic educational reforms aim to realize: among its many
promises and possibilities, higher education poses a threat to both authenticity
and a coherent sense of selfhood. Class hybridity does not sit easily with a sense
of authenticity. Feelings of being an imposter are never far away.5 To use Reays language, successful working-class students
may experience the threat of losing oneself6 to a system of interconnected
discourses that fail to represent any aspect of their life experiences outside of
school, and may forego the widely recognized benefits of higher education for the more familiar identity categories of the home. Alternatively, successful working-class (or otherwise culturally different)
students who remain engaged with the target culture in which they have been educated may find themselves at a loss: always feeling the split between their outward, professional identity and their inner feelings of
belonging. Students in the latter group may even subject themselves to judgmental critique as they attempt to bring the various and often unspoken commitments that constitute their sense of identity under a
single narrative. Reays findings validate my sixth graders statements of resistance, insofar as they already anticipated the alienation necessary to their academic growth. While it may appear inappropriate to take
up the question of students suffering and resistance in language more commonly associated with pathology, melancholia has maintained an
ambivalent place in Western thought for as long as it has been recognized as a
marginal characteristic of the human psyche: as with Antigone, melancholia serves as both an
individual pathology and an indicator of social ills. Aristotle seems to have been the first to identify the excess of black bile (melaina
chole), from which the term melancholia is derived, with an exceptional, generative aspect of human nature coextensive with mans anxiety in Being.7 The ambivalence of
for a lost or unspeakable object can be seen as a potential outcome at every stage of
the subjects educational life, and the preference or erotization of suffering that
grows from this refusal is at stake in each attempt made by the student to
rediscover and reinvent him- or herself [themselves] in the language of the
curriculum. While the interpellation of the subject within language is necessary to
its education in any particular discourse of human flourishing, in order to remain
a distinct self rather than be swallowed whole by the interests of a discourse the
subject must engage in some sort of refusal of language in its own formation . That
this assertion of something in the self that is more than the sum of its influences
a character or personal style derives more from the limitations of language to
account for its own creations than from an original nature or inborn disposition
has important consequences for the way we understand the recalcitrant child, the
refusal of curricular goals, and the formation of competent human subjects.
Foreign Languages
The ability to establish absolute knowledge over a foreign language is
impossible, they seek to create an instrument of power that mobilizes
an excess of signs carried by language.
Felman 82 (Shoshana Felman is a Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and
French at Emory University, Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and
Interminable, Yale French Studies, No. 63, The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary
Genre) AqN *modified for gendered language*
Western pedagogy can be said to culminate in Hegel's philosophical didacticism:
the Hegelian concept of "absolute knowledgen-which for Hegel defines at once the
potential aim and the actual end of dialectics, of philosophy-is in effect what pedagogy
has always aimed at as its ideal: the exhaustion-through methodical investigation-of all there is
to know; the absolute completion termination-of apprenticeship. Complete and
totally appropriated knowledge will become-in all senses of the word-a mastery.
"In the Hegelian perspective," writes Lacan, "the completed discourse" is "an instrument
of power, the scepter and the property of those who know" (S-11, 91). "What is at
stake in absolute knowledge is the fact that discourse closes back upon itself, that
it is entirely in agreement with itself." (S-11, 91). But the unconscious, in Lacan's
conception, is precisely the discovery that human discourse can by definition
never be entirely in agreement with itself, entirely identical to its knowledge of
itself, since, as the vehicle of unconscious knowledge, it is constitutively the
material locus of a signifying difference from itself. What, indeed, is the unconscious, if
not a kind of unmeant knowledge which escapes intentionality and meaning, a knowledge which
is spoken by the language of the subject (spoken, for instance, by his [their] "slips" or by his
[their] dreams), but which the subject cannot recognize, assume as his [their], appropriate; a
speaking knowledge which is nonetheless denied to the speaker's knowledge? In Lacan's own
terms, the unconscious is "knowledge which can't tolerate one's knowing that one knows"
(Seminar, Feb. 19, 1974; unpublished). "Analysis appears on the scene to announce that there is
knowledge which does not know itself, knowledge which is supported by the signifier as such"
(S-XX, 88). "It is from a place which differs from any capture by a subject that a knowledge is
surrendered, since that knowledge offers itself only to the subject's slips-to his misprision"
(Scilicet I, 38)14."The discovery of the unconscious . . . is that the implications of meaning
infinitely exceed the signs manipulated by the individual" (S-11, 150). "As far as signs are
concerned, man [humanity] is always mobilizing many more of them than he
knows [they know]" (S-11, 150). If this is so, there can constitutively be no such thing
as absolute knowledge: absolute knowledge is knowledge that has exhausted its
own articulation; but articulated knowledge is by definition what cannot exhaust
its own self-knowledge. For knowledge to be spoken, linguistically articulated,.it
would constitutively have to be supported by the ignorance carried by language,
the ignorance of the excess of signs that of necessity its language-its articulation-
"mobilizes". Thus, human knowledge is, by definition, that which is untotalizable,
that which rules out any possibility of totalizing what it knows or of eradicating its
own ignorance.
Hegemony
The affirmatives attempt to construct an American-dominated global
system through hegemony is invested in the construct of a whole
America that sustains itself off Weapon States. In an impossible world
of complete hegemony, destruction of subjecthood occurs through the
fulfillment of all desire.
Solomon 15 (Ty Solomon is a Lecturer in International Relations (Politics) at the School of
Social & Political Sciences, Adam Smith Building, Bute Gardens, University of Glasgow, The
Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.5031921, University of Michigan Press) AqN
The fantasy of Krauthammers discourse differs notably from fantasies offered by neoconservatives at other times. In one sense, this is to be expected. Different times and issues call for different arguments. Yet
many observers note that since the beginning of the movement during the 1970s, one fairly consistent quality of neoconservatism is the ever-present sense of doom just around the corner and national choices that
are always starkly dichotomous. As Bacevich (2005: 77) wryly observes, On the one handif the nation disregards the neoconservative call to actionthere is the abyss. On the other handif the nation heeds that
callthe possibility of salvation exists. Krauthammers text displays many of the usual neoconservative precepts, such as the primacy of military power and the idea that American global hegemony is benevolent
and beneficial for non-Americans. The key tension in Krauthammers text, though, is that the notion of chaos
lurking close-by conflicts with the major thrust of the message of unipolarity. We
can understand the role of desire in the discourse through this tension. Rather
than constructing a subject of lack, Krauthammers discourse largely constructs a
subject much closer to fullness. This, in turn, does not evoke desire for
identification but instead kills desire for identification. Desire (as understood here) is coextensive with lack (Fink 1995: 54).
To exist as a subject, one must desire. Lack evokes desire, desire drives identification, and only through
identification with the social resources of the Symbolic can subjects gain the
recognition they need to achieve a sense of stability and security. Krauthammers discourse presumably does not
spark much desire because the subject it produces is, strictly speaking, not lacking all that much. As the unipolar poweror, as the subject America is constructed through the fantasy of being a unipolar power
desires, desire for that specific object paradoxically begins to fade. If one were to
find the Thing that would truly make one whole, desire would die, and subjectivity
would evaporate. The ultimate contingency of our desire and identifications would set in, and one would cease to be a desiring subject. As Lacan (1998: 111) argues, Thats not it is the
very cry by which the jouissance obtained is distinguished from the jouissance expected when one approaches the perceived missing object. Desire is sustained by not reaching the missing object: The satisfaction
of desire essentially consists of the preservation of its own unsatisfaction, since a subject remains a subject only insofar as . . . he is a desiring lack-of-being that wants-to-be (Chiesa 2007: 155; see also Fink 1995:
103). That is, the closer the subject gets to enjoyment, the more desire fades and the more anxiety sets in, since only through desire do we have subjectivity, and therefore the more desiring the subject becomes.5
fantasys purpose is to ward off anxiety and contingency: This way enjoyment is
Indeed,
kept at a healthy distance, not too far but not too close either; close enough to
support the appeal of an object of identification but far enough from letting us
entertain the vision of full satisfaction as an imminent possibilitysomething that
would kill desire, induce anxiety, and put identification processes in danger. (Stavrakakis
2007: 198) Although Krauthammers message of unipolarity constructs a discursive subject not lacking all that much, thus evoking less desire for identification with it than might otherwise be the case, the fantasy
of the unipolar moment was not completely without lack. This is expressed a few ways in the discourse. First, we can understand the place of object a in this fantasy as the lack of an American-dominated world,
toward which Krauthammerand the subject his discourse constructsis oriented throughout the text. While the international system is, in Krauthammers view, undoubtedly unipolar, it is not unipolar to the
mentioned at all in the text, presumably because they are the outlaws that do not
conform to postCold War order as defined by the United States. North Korea,
Iraq, Libya, Argentina, Pakistan, Iran, and South Africa all pose blockages to
American/global order through their possession (at the time) of weapons of mass
destruction, even though some of these states were more threatening than others.
The obstacle that these few states pose to a truly unipolar worldwhere we no longer must hope for safety but can seemingly achieve complete safetyevokes desire to remove them as obstacles to the fantasy
of enjoyment. Desire is constructed as pushing toward that elusive object believed to bring
the enjoyment of being a complete subject here, understood as an American-
centered world with American-imposed global rules. Although this object is
unattainable (since it is but a Symbolic manifestation of a void), the subjects
fantasy allows it to believe that this object is attainable. An absolutely American-
dominated global systema full subjectis indeed presupposed to exist were it not
for these few states that pose an obstacle. Krauthammers entire discourse guides the audience to believe that a truly American-centered world is
entirely plausible and desirable, yet this object of desire that promises enjoyment does not exist. Not merely the social construction of threat, Krauthammers production
of Weapon States hinges on the movements of desire and enjoyment that make
possible Self-Other relations. The construction of these threats is in one sense, as
many international relations (IR) identity theories would contend, the production
of a hierarchy of identities in which America is differentiated from those states
that are not America or the new American unipolar world (see Weldes 1999).
Weapon States here constitute the opposing side of a binary between those
states that are members of and are perceived to openly welcome the new American
world, and those states that are not us. Yet in contrast to such approaches, more than just the presence of these Others poses an obvious threat to
us. Consequently, it is not enough merely to make explicit the binary construction of identities. As Slavoj iek (1993: 206) contends, It is not sufficient to point out how the . . . Other presents a threat to our
identity. We should rather inverse this proposition: the fascinating image of the Other gives a body to our own innermost split, to what is in us more than ourselves and thus prevents us from achieving full
. Weapon
there will constantly be new threats disturbing our peace. Global stability is our stability, since American domination is (again) good, necessary, and vital if chaos is to be avoided
States that brandish their weapons must be policed to alleviate the threat they
pose, and the rise of intolerant aggressive nationalisms in a disintegrating
communist bloc can be read as moments of fantasy blockages in which the Other
is doing something we should be doing. One gets the sense that as the lone
superpower, America alone should have the right to brandish its weapons of
mass destructionfor example, in unabashedly laying down the rules of world
order. One also gets the sense that the potential rise of aggressive intolerant nationalisms poses a blockage to the desiring American subject because America itself should have the sole right to
engage in the behaviors engendered by such forces. Krauthammers entire discourse is constructed around the idea that America should aggressively promote its own ideas for how the world should be organized
and policed and that no other entity has the ability or license to do so. America alone should dominate the world, and for Krauthammer, America should be intolerant of anyone else attempting to preempt this new
opportunity, for this is the road to chaos. America possesses the strength and will that the rest of the world does not, and thus America rightfully should exercise those qualities to the benefit of all. Others
American nationalist-
aggressive intolerant nationalisms are threatening and not to be tolerated, but American aggressive and nationalistic expansion are to be welcomed.
driven internationalism is beneficial for the world, while other nationalisms are threatening. This illustrates the notion that
constructions of Self and Other are underpinned by desire and enjoymentor,
rather, the perceived theft of enjoyment by others. What we gain, iek (1993:
206) contends, by trans- posing the perception of inherent social antagonisms
into the fascination with the Other . . . is the fantasy-organization of desire.
Through Krauthammers production of threats, one sees the fascination exhibited
by what others are doing, the enjoyment that they are displaying, and how they
are in a sense stealing the enjoyment that we should be having and are lacking.
The fullness that they seem to attain in their enjoyment is perceived as precisely
the Thing that we seem to be missing. America is lacking in some sense, and
the Thing it lacks is the very Thing that Weapon States brandish openly. Moreover, there is the
worry that isolationism keeps America from being fully itself. Indeed, if this revival spreads, an American collapse to second-rank status will not be for foreign but for domestic reasons, such as the countrys
insatiable desire for yet higher standards of living without paying any of the cost (Krauthammer 199091: 2627). Krauthammers fears of isolationism relate to the strength and will of which he speaks in
closing his essay. Yet the manner in which isolationists, in Krauthammers view, define the national interest goes against Americas true national interests, which extend beyond the narrow confines of the nations
borders. America should unashamedly lay down its own rules for global order, since the worlds interests coincide with American interests (33). Although isolationism may indeed be an old theme of American
foreign policy, it is simply out of place in a unipolar world, which by definition must be dominated by the unipolar power. Isolationism in this sense weakens precisely the part of the American subject that must
be utilized in imposing and enforcing world order. Krauthammers emphasis on the necessity of American strength and will for world security points to qualities that the subject America needs to have, in some
sense has, but in another sense does not have. In other words, strength and will are a part of the subject that is missing but that is needed so that the subject can fully become its own image of itself. These
The
characteristics are foremost uniquely American. The rest of the world cannot act without America leading the way, since where the United States does not tread, the alliance will not follow (24).
rest of the world lacks the strength and will needed to define and carry out
global order. In a sense, however, so does the United States. As the unipolar
power, America without a doubt has a great deal more strength and will than any
other power. Yet given a resurgent domestic isolationism and other potential
domestic problems, the United States does not yet have the strength and will
necessary to fully embrace its global role. The subject is lacking some- thing that is
posited as having faithfully served it in the past but that it has lost exactly when it
needs it the most. What precisely Krauthammer means by strength and will is
left undefined, yet their meaning could be filled in any number of ways. This lack
of definitionindeed, the impossibility of fully defining what they meanenables
them to function as signifiers covering the subjects lack in the fantasy. Strength
and will function as the Symbolic stand-ins for what the subject America
currently lacks the full force of, yet in some sense they remain a part of the subject.
They may have been temporarily or partly lost during the current isolationist revival, but they are still a missing part of the subject that must be rediscovered if America is going to more fully step into its proper
role as global leader. The partial enjoyment implied in both of these aspectsin the just-out-of-reach image of an American dominated global system and the strength and will that is both present in and absent
from the subjectsparks the desire for their pursuit. In the fantasy of the unipolar moment, the subject America seeks the perceived to-be-missing parts of itself that it believes will bring it the enjoyment it
seeks, yet the fantasy posits obstacles to explain why enjoyment is not forthcoming and why desire remains frustrated. Although figures such as Weapon States are posited as blocking the culmination and
stabilization of the subject, these figures merely Symbolically cover over the ambiguity, divisions, and frustrations that are inherent to subject formation itself. Even though the signifier isolationism is offered for
Strength and
why our strength and will have not been delivered, this of course does not mean that strength and will would automatically be forthcoming if isolationism were to subside.
will do not represent anything but the lack of what the subject is constructed as
needing to pursue the image of fullness (an Americandominated world), itself an
illusory object projected by the fantasy to pursue enjoyment. However, the desires evoked by the fantasy are very
much in tension with the overall tenor of Krauthammers discourse. Again, as the subject America constructed as the sole superpower, there is not much to desire in Krauthammers text for another object that
might alleviate the ambiguities of subjectivity. As the sole unipolar power, the collective subject is already close to enjoyment in terms of a world shaped by American-imposed rules. However, when the subject
approaches the object it desires, desire itself starts to fade. If one were to find the Thing that would truly make one whole, desire would die, and subjectivity would evaporate. The desires evoked by the fantasy ob-
stacles posed and the evaporation of desire the closer it approaches the enjoyment seemingly promised are in tension in Krauthammers discourse. In other words, there is not much distance between the subject
oppression proper) or are we content with being pissed off so that we are not
pissed on? Incorporated within this critical matter is how we currently frame
multiculturalism in a wider context across the sociological and political spectrum
that is becoming entrenched in the privatization of education (i.e., neoliberal market ideology), focused on
meritocratic ideals, and operated under the pretense that educational inequality is more of a
Universalization
that is, it is only by instituting an ideological dialectic (inclusion/exclusion) that one engages in making a struggle political.
instigates politicalization by, [T]he fact that one, precisely, is not merely that
specific individual exposed to a set of specific injustices consists in its apparent
opposite, in the thoroughly irrational, excessive outburst of violence... In the
equation of universalism with the militant, divisive position of engagement in a
struggle. True universalists are not those who preach global tolerance of differences and all-encompassing unity but those who engage in a passionate fight for the
assertion of the truth that engages them. Universality is ultimately tied into two dimensions of post-politics. The first dimension is
politicization (one could think of it also as publicization).433 Post-politics allows
for "recognition without revolution" in that one acknowledges that an event has
occurred in which an individual or group has been disenfranchised or oppressed
(e.g., the arrest of Dr. Henry Louis Gates) without actually engaging it as a political
event (i.e., one is content with being pissed off as long as one is acknowledged). Such postmodern post- politics relegates the struggle to a spectacle (concealing the
structural implications that still resonate through covert practices embedded in ideology), as well as one that relies on a "divide and conquer" schema under capitalist logic. The
acknowledgement is not enough; therefore, one is willing to fight for their right,
not just talk it out (i.e., one is not just going to be pissed off, they are willing to
fight and get pissed on in order to bring about really existing change). In order to
engage really existing social transformation, one must actively engage (militantly
or through active democratic protest 434) and unhinge the structural ideology that
promulgates the existing torrent of inequality. In other words, one should not
accept post-political "appeasements" (e.g., affirmative action) that force one (i.e.,
the dominant, hegemonic Other) to be tolerant without openly assuming
proprietorship of one's act in the structuring and maintenance of symbolic
ideology. Let me provide a clarifying example of how to understand the post-political dimensions of politicization and politicalization. One may remember the
highly publicized arrest of Dr. Henry Louis Gates for "disorderly conduct" after
being questioned by a police officer that was alerted about a possible break-in in
the area. Dr. Gates questioned his arrest, "Why, because I'm a black man in
America?" 36 After a couple of weeks of media publicizing, what was the outcome of the situation between Dr. Gates and the arresting officer? The two
were invited to the White House by President Obama to share a beer and discuss
the incident in what was deemed "the beer summit." Although Obama invited Crowley (the arresting officer) and
Gates as part of what he called a 'teachable moment,' something significant was missed. The coverage allowed the public to get the ' 'we've come together" photos and video
footage that the White House wanted while keeping the discussion private among the men. The event was individualized, made
particular, being the isolated experience of one Black man and one White police
officer. It is exactly this singularity of an event that reduces its possibility in
becoming universalized in implicating a larger problem embedded in global
capitalism. This is precisely what global capitalism desires, a depoliticization of
struggles reducing them to a singular core. Events like the one involving Henry
Louis Gates are "politicized" as a "race card" event. Thus, it is precisely in it being
an isolated event that it loses its ability to be political and truly acknowledge the
larger social and cultural struggle that still undergirds US society (i.e.,
institutionalized racism . In the post-political era of identity politics, one no longer
has to worry about being beaten or hosed down openly in the streets. Acts of violence, even hate
crimes, are singularities; that is, they are acts committed by individuals without implication of transcending the universal. Without transcendence
interpret first class and second class (and possibly sequential classes, i.e., third,
fourth, and so on in an hierarchical schema) in the language of Us and Them as
well as Us and the Other . This dialectical positioning allows us to begin thinking
about how iek frames jouissance and the Other within the scope of nationalism.
Within the notion of recognition , groups assert their marginalization, but, more
importantly, they attempt to make known their depravation of power in the
hegemonic hierarchy . Fraser explains, [Those who use the identity model ] contend that to
belong to a group that is devalued by the dominant culture is to be misrecognized,
to suffer a distortion in ones relation to ones self. As a result of repeated
encounters with the stigmatizing gaze of a culturally dominant other, the members
of disesteemed groups internalize negative self-images and are prevented from
developing a healthy cultural identity of their own. In other words, first-class citizens are prescribed superiority due to capital
(cultural and financial) as well as historical superiority generated through sex (male), sexuality(heterosexual), religion (Christian), race (White), and other characteristics that create a
hierarchy of inequality with the social sphere. Christine Bennett writes, Members of ethnic minority groups are free to retain many of their
cultural ways as long as they conform to these practices deemed necessary for harmonious coexistence within the society as a whole. In this view, contrary to the
assimilationist discourse, ethnic groups are expected and even encouraged to stick
to their ethnic heritage and cultural traditions as part of comprising the American
ideal. Here, the underlying notion of being American has nothing to do with loyalty or citizenship. Multiculturalists argue, however, that the premise of assimilation is to become more like that nations
dominant ideology, cultural values, and language. Education and curriculum have been key to assimilation to
ensure the dominant ideology and to negate Others. iek points out that the US is a unique space to examine this discontent of
identities and their political implications: The United States plays the unique role of an exception: the key element to standard American ideology consists in the endeavour to transubstantiate the very fidelity to
renounce ones ethnic roots Italians, Germans, Africans, Jews, Greeks, Koreans,
they are all Americans, that is, the very particularity of their ethnic identity, the
way they stick to it, makes them Americans. Since there is no monolithic identity
that implores an authentic or pure nation in the US, iek asserts that it is the very
rejection of a national identity that in itself becomes our national identity. In other words, and
contrary to Roosevelts statement earlier, the US is a nation of no-one-nation . However, the fantasy is still enforced that we can be a
unifying nation. But to imply this is also to venture into the same realm as cultural
studies in which there are numerous subcultures that operate under the general
term culture (e.g., punk culture, fan culture, consumer culture, etc.). Nationalism suffers from the same logical positivist attempt to narrowly define nation under a singular core of truth,
which is impossible to do when dealing with people and sentimentality . Identity politics operates under the auspices of
subjugation in which groups are pushed to the margins and often occupy a place of
no place . Thus groups who are in limbo under the hegemonic hierarchy have no
choice but to fantasize and imagine their own nation, their own institutional and
cultural power, as well as their place amongst the other hegemonic states. Is this
not what Marcus Garvey implies here: The Negro needs a Nation and a country of
his own, where he can best show evidence of his own ability in the art of human
progress. Scattered as an unmixed and unrecognized part of alien nations and civilizations is but to demonstrate his imbecility . . . It is unfortunate that we should so drift apart, as a race, as not to
see that we are but perpetuating our own sorrow and disgrace in failing to appreciate the first great requisite of all peoplesorganization . . . Organization is a great
power in directing the affairs of a race or nation toward a given goal . . . . The
Negro will have to build his own government, industry, art, science, literature and
culture, before the world will stop to consider him. Until then we are but wards of a superior race and civilization, and the outcasts of
a standard social system. Does not Garvey implicate the need to escape this place of no place in
order to have a place, whether it is a physical space or a psychical one in the minds
of its constituents? Thus, we must understand how fantasy operates as a sublime
object of ideology when such calls for nationalism are instigated.
Model Minority
The shared tropes of what it means to be the Model Minority at the
center of the affirmatives project of resistance reifies the color line.
Their Asian spaces of resistance sustain their coherence off this
homogenization which creates the model Model Minority through
processes of coercive mimeticism.
Gaztambide 14 (Daniel Gaztambide is a professor at the Graduate School of Applied and
Professional Psychology at Rutgers University, Im not black, Im not white, what am I? The
illusion of the color line, Psychoanalysis, Culture, & Society) AqN
I also think of Amy, a South Asian social work student. During her participation in a cultural consciousness workshop, the ethnic minorities in the
room were asked by the group leader to sit in the center of the circle and discuss their experiences of discrimination and mistreatment. This was intended as an exercise in which white students could learn from
readily bring to awareness her own experiences with prejudice due to being a
Brown woman. Yet she also had an awareness of herself as economically
privileged due to her familys class background. She verbalized this ambivalence to the group. The group leader responded that it was not
their job to help Amy feel comfortable. Amy clarified that this was not her intent she was not looking for comfort but to expand the conversation in terms of different identities and levels of privilege. Other
woman, she wasnt really a minority. Others said that Asians and Southeast Asians
were model minorities and basically White by association, and hence didnt need
any legal protection from discrimination. Her presence in the group was in question. It almost seemed that so long as her narrative was one of being
a discriminated-against, underprivileged minority, she was an ethnic minority. When she added complexity by noting how she was both underprivileged and privileged, depending on whether one focused on her
conceptualized in terms of in-group and out-group dynamics, and there is certainly no lack of writing on this topic in
the psychoanalytic and social psychology literature. Important as these are, the perspective I am elucidating points us toward a different angle of vision. Part of what I am talking about here is what the Lacanian
whereby there are certain ways in which ethnic minorities must act, believe, dress,
and be in order to present themselves as recognizably ethnic, as Latino-enough, as Black-enough, as Asian-
enough, and so forth. It is mimetic insofar as one has to look into the mirror of ethnic identity
and adapt oneself to that image, reproducing a very particular ego-identity, one
that is often a poor fit to ones more immediate subjective experience. It is also
coercive in that there are institutional, cultural, and societal pressures to conform
to that notion of identity in order to find ones place in the coordinates of race and
ethnicity essentially, to be allotted a place on the color line. We are to take up
our respective place on the chessboard as Black or White, pawns in a much bigger
and deadlier game. Here we can glean both the imaginary and symbolic functions
of racial object maps. These object maps provide coherence and integration in the
imaginary to an otherwise chaotic collection of signifiers the racialized bodies in
which we exist. At the same time, racial object maps yield symbolic categories of
me and not-me, Black and White, and a language with which to organize and
regulate closeness, distance, and racial desire. Conversely, what is contained, or to
be more precise, excluded, through the symbolic and imaginary operations of the
object map is the Real dimension of race the ever shifting, anxiety-producing,
formless nature of the color line. When ambiguously ethnic subjects fail to see
their image in the mirror, when they are unable to play the language games of race
and racial signification, there is a noticeable discomfort and anxiety that sets in
among those who partake in the production of coercive mimeticism. The illusion of
the color line comes into focus, disrupting how we see and define racialized
bodies, evoking the fragmented and uncoordinated nature of the childs body prior
to Lacans (2005a, b) mirror stage. The illusion of wholeness, of being a whole
body-ego whether White, Black, or Brown falters, revealing the destitute,
undifferentiated, and broken nature of race and racial identity. To survive the encounter with the Real of race, I
argue, paves the way for a unique kind of freedom. To give one example, a Puerto Rican-ness is more malleable, flexible, and non-linear than one bound into one static form and yields a fluidity that fosters
experimental and novel ways of responding to oppression. This fluidity at the same time can validate the ghosts of ones ancestors while integrating their wisdom into new, emancipatory potentialities. To be clear,
I am not denying the importance of addressing colorism, racism, and the privileging of white skin that exists in the Latino community and other ethnic minorities (not to mention society as a whole). It is
important for us to have that conversation, and point out how notions of mestizaje, of hybridity in the Latino experience, may mask underlying tensions around race and skin color, and render the relative privilege
of light-skinned Latinos such as myself invisible. At the same time, I am proposing that we also have a conversation that is perpendicular to a critique of racism and colorism, intersecting with it but going towards
and religions as well as cooperation on both the local [] and on global level
under the banners of global communications, global economy, global ecology, and
global politics (212, my emphasis). Similarly, Tomlinson, on the one hand, associates the globalized prevalence of information technology with the liberation from national, local and insular
ideological viewpoints and, on the other hand, calls for a new global civic ethic (or ethical glocalism) that sets up as its core value institutionalized global belongingness, involvement, rights, and
responsibilities, all based on a willingness to engage with the Other (185). And Parikh explicitly puts forth the common ethical principle of the multi-ethnic society: [a] commitment to live together, to share a
common future, to resolve differences [] and to help preserve a collective culture and mutual concern (Racial Justice 287). Do all these not bring us back to the Kierkegaardean problematic of love your
we build up an ethics of love for the neighbor only on condition that we have
neighbor:
Within the
of dialogue equalizing conflicting interests and generating pressures for democracy and, revealingly, call for non-rival competition (Goeudevert 46, 51).
the symbolic order re-emerges in the real (S III 13)? And where can we locate this real dimension in multiculturalism, if not from its gesture of
depoliticizing cultural, ethnic difference? We are tempted to suspect that multiculturalism, as entangled with global capitalism, is consuming the Other through its depoliticizing cultural differences and, hence,
reducing the Otherness of the Other: it is only when its Otherness is deprived that the Other deserves a multiculturalists respect and functions as a desirable object or commodity to be consumed either in the
consumer society or academies. In fact, it is no exaggeration to characterize the contemporary postmodern culture of mass consumption as an artificially-generated world inhabited by schizo-subjects and
cybernomads (McLaren, White Terror 45), which turn out to be nothing but the contingent assemblage of differences (Kahn 104), as is best exemplified in the contemporary urban subculture or culture of the
In their typically
Internet. And it is in this same cultural milieu that academic multiculturalist discourses play their subservient roles for the dominant global capitalist political economy.
multiculturalism has become a code word for race. Anne Phillips explains,
Culture is now widely employed in North America and Europe as the acceptable
way of referring to race, such that people describe a society as multicultural when
previously they would have said multiracial or talk about there being many
cultural minorities when really they mean many people who are black. This
reduction of multiculturalism to race instigates the silent coding of such
utterances like thats just their culture. This latter sentiment is a polite way of
pointing out cultural deficiency and inferior groups, an assertion of ones
superior status to the Other. For Freud, the distinction between civilization and
barbarism is a matter of culture. That is, Civilization describes the whole sum of
the achievements and regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our
animal ancestors. Terry Eagleton points out, though the words civilization and culture go on being used interchangeably, not least by anthropologists,
culture is now also almost the opposite of civility. It is tribal rather than
cosmopolitan, a reality lived on pulses at a level far deeper than the mind, and thus
closed to rational criticism. The very term culture creates problems in our
discourse of understanding what we mean by multiculturalism. Raymond Williams reminds us, Culture
is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. iek proclaims that [T]he ultimate source of barbarism
is culture itself, ones direct identification with a particular culture, which renders
one intolerant toward other cultures. Walter Benjamin wrote, There is no document of culture
which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. What iek, Benjamin, Freud, and Eagleton describe is a
dialectic that exists when one talks about culture. That is, we are always talking about
an Other because we centralize ourselves, our truths, our perspectives, and
desires of the world while situating the opposite, inverted, and perverted cultural
ideologies in the margins, on the periphery. Thus, we are always confronted with
being the other of an Other. What is the natural order of the world? Was the world not born of conquest and will die from conquest? How are we
to see [recognize] any revelation in the multicultural rhetoric if history has already predicted our future? In a sort of prescience, we can use futuristic movies and literature (e.g.,
Wall-E, Star Trek , Star Wars , The Time Machine , etc.) to glimpse into the future, one in which Earths ecological integrity is in shambles and conquest and empire has
secret exclusions. For example, the idea of love is supported by the dialectical
imposition of I know I love you because there are those that I dont love. In other words,
every act of inclusion is a simultaneous act of exclusion . In order to understand
the proponents and opponents of multiculturalism, we should maintain that every
act of progress, justice, and empowerment for an individual or group is a
simultaneous act of regression, injustice, and disempowerment for another .
Therefore, the multiculturalist disavows the necessary obligation of universality to
identify the aberrant other the one who will lose as he wins [they win].
Nuclear War
The aff sustains the nuclear priesthood of debate in an attempt to
control the absolute contingency of the Real, we repetitively invest in
a practice of control over nuclear weapons. The 1ACs enjoyment of
nuclear weapons becomes a form of violent repetition compulsion
that turns the case.
Matheson 15 (Calum Matheson is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the
University of Pittsburgh, Desired Ground Zeroes: Nuclear Imagination and the Death Drive,
6/23/15)
The conflation of Symbolic and Real is at the heart of the Bomb. Jacques Derrida famously wrote that nuclear war is fabulously textual, having
no existence outside of the system of language, which we might broaden to representation, or better yet, mediation. Derrida argued that
because a total nuclear war has not taken place and its coming would obliterate the
archive, it can exist only in its essential rhetoricity as a fantasy or fable that has no
referent in reality (Derrida 24-27). Some, like Masahide Kato, have criticized Derrida on the grounds that nuclear war has taken place in the form of nuclear testing, part of a larger
project of radioactive colonialism and destruction of indigenous peoples (Kato). I read this argument a different way. We do not have to deny that a
nuclear war is in some sense ongoing in order to claim that it has never happened.
The kind of nuclear war imagined by Kistiakowsky at Trinity can never come to pass because it means the end of everything on Earth. The radioactive destruction of
native nations does not qualify as a total nuclear war in the minds of strategists
and their peace activist Doppelgangers because the war they imagine is beyond any material
referent, only hinted at by the presence of the Bomb on Earth. It represents both
the Real in its punishing materiality and a speculation that could not exist
anywhere but the human imagination. The desire to experience the Real is therefore
bound to be frustrated. The final advent of the Bomb always seems imminent but
is never realized, so obliteration is endlessly deferred.7 The desire for the Real described in this chapter is thus a source of
inevitable failure and frustration. But it is only on part of the death drive. Unable to meet the Real and still remain extant as
discrete subjects, taunted by the continuity that lies over the line of taboo, our
desires remain. We are dislocated and decentered by the Bomb, but we do not
accept our being as dust and ashes. Instead, the subject desirous of the nuclear Real
finds its enjoyment in the opposite fantasy: one of power over the conditions of
presence and absence, mastery of contingency and the Real itself. This is the dynamic of
Freuds fort-da game, and in context of nuclear war, it manifests itself in the
compulsion to repetitively simulate nuclear destruction. Atmospheric nuclear testing ended for the USA in 1963. Ultimately
only a relatively small number of people witnessed nuclear explosions anywhere in the world, so inevitably awareness and imagination of the Bombs overwhelming presence would spread in an increasingly
(necessarily incomplete) access to the revealed truth of the Bomb after the end of
atmospheric nuclear testing left its followers merely longing to feel the heat. As these
technologies gave form to videogames and ostensibly anti-war simulations, they would democratize access to the Bomb and cement its force as an organizing metaphor for the Real. Ipsos Custodes In his Seminar
and that the subject receives major determination from the itinerary of a signifier (7).
One is possessed by the signifier, a thrall to its agency: the signifiers displacement determines subjects acts, destiny, refusals, blindnesses, success, and fate...everything pertaining to the psychological pregiven
follows willy-nilly the signifiers train, like weapons and baggage (21). One doesnt have to adopt a fully deterministic attitude towards structure to accept that it is the sign that speaks through us, not vice versa.
Human agency does not operate without restriction, but constitutes a negotiation
of rules that largely prescribe our behaviors. In the itinerary of an individual life,
one can see the influence of accreted structures that give it form. There is perhaps no better example than that
of Vice Admiral Tim Giardina. Giardina is the former deputy head of the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, the
successor to the Strategic Air Command parodied in Dr. Strangelove. In June 2013, Giardina was caught using counterfeit poker chips at a
local casino. It was revealed in the ensuing investigation that Giardina had spent almost 1,100 hours gambling in an eighteen-month period. He was such a common sight that other casino
regulars remembered him as Navy Tim, and recalled comments he had made about the polygraph requirements for U.S. nuclear forces (he was quoted as saying that the purpose is really to find out if one is
having sex with animals or something really crazy). Giardina was banned from several casinos but continued to play even after being caught with counterfeit chips.8 Following an investigation by the Naval
Giardinas
Criminal Investigative Service, he was removed from his post, demoted to Rear Admiral, and reassigned to Washington (Burns). It is not illegal for Navy officers to gamble. Vice Admiral
habitual compulsion to play poker did not seem to have any effect on his official
duties. Giardina had to be punished not because his actions are out of line with the ethos of the Strategic Command, but precisely because they are not. Giardina enjoyed gambling in poker, but in forging
fake chips, he seemed to enjoy gambling on gambling: his was a kind of meta-gambling,
taking risks on the rules that regulate risks.9 In doing so, Giardina exposed what Slavoj Zizek calls the obscene supplement of his system.
Ideological fantasies are maintained by disavowing their central, obscene
foundation, a gesture necessary to the function of the fantasy but impossible to
acknowledge, for the lack of distance would collapse the whole edifice (Zizek 35-36). Admiral Cecil
Haney, commander of STRATCOM, said in recent Congressional testimony that the core mission of the organization remains to deter attack on the United States. This means minimizing pervasive uncertainty and
risk. In Admiral Haneys words, Americas nuclear deterrent force provides enduring value to the nation. It has been a constant thread in the geopolitical fabric of an uncertain world, providing a moderating
influence on generations of world leaders (U.S. Senate Comm. on Armed Services, Statement 7). More directly, it is necessary to identify where we are taking risk and where we cannot accept further risk (U.S.
Senate Comm. on Armed Services, Statement 6). Risk and uncertainty appear constantly in Haneys statement, which is a statement for minimizing chance and developing contingency plans to control the
consequences of unforeseen events. The disturbance of Symbolic order by the contingency of the Real is
met with an attempt to restore order, to respond to chance with law. Lacan describes this dynamic as the
interplay of tuche and automaton: Where do we meet this real? For what we have in the discovery of
world against the contingency of the Real, the uncertainty of nuclear war. It is the STRATCOM
automatons answer to the chaos of the Bombs tuche. But the attempt to restore order has at its heart a desire to encounter the Real. In a history of nuclear defense intellectuals, Fred Kaplan described them in
the 1980s at the height of their power having come with the mission to impose order, but lacking any means to control the wild abandon of the Bomb in a hypothetical war for which there was no precedent, in
attained is what requires repetition. When the chaos of tuche reigns, automaton does not surrender, but
comes to be an end in itself, a site of investment. Repetition itself becomes enjoyable. In
repeatedly simulating nuclear war, defense intellectuals who could not experience the
Real of nuclear violence could enjoy the illusion of mastery over the terror and
fascination inspired by the Real by appearing to simulate the conditions of
presence and absencein this case, the presence of the world-for-us and its absence in the Bombs inferno. Langdon Winner distinguishes between risk (a term prevalent in both
nuclear war and poker) and threat or hazard on these grounds: risk always has an implied benefit to it, an element of
desire and an opportunity for control (145). There is little empirical basis for nuclear
war simulations and the calculations of probability they rely on, so nuclear war
plans always require a good deal of faith, and thus to adopt them is a riska
calculation of both hazard and reward (Ghamari-Tabrizi 8). Their parameters are set arbitrarily
by the personnel who design them. In other words, they are games of chance in
which we also manipulate the rules. This is the obscene supplement of nuclear deterrence that Vice Admiral Giardina could not be allowed to reveal: we dont
just repeat nuclear simulations again and again because we think that they will someday be perfect. War games are fun, and we dont always
care about the rules. Poker, after all, was rumored to be the genesis of game theory at the RAND Corporation, prominent modelers of nuclear war, and was a favorite pastime of the
defense intellectuals who sought to tame the world with human reason (Arbella 51-53).
Their nuclear politics are structured by a manic disavowal that
nullifies reality through a creation of a constant state of crisis.
Especially under the age of Trump, their political psychosis creates
the catastrophe that it fears.
Nixon 17 (Mignon Nixon is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at
University College London, Crazy, MIT Press, 3/6/17) AqN
The baby king (a usually masculine despot) licenses a departure from reality and, in particular, a denial of our own badness. To put this another way, the mania of a mad president relieves us of the responsibility to
mourn. For Segal, the failure to mourn the effects of our own destructiveness is a defining
feature of modern American politics. In her writings on nuclear mentality culture, Segal observes that
all groups resist assuming collective responsibility for war, but the history of the
United States from Hiroshima to the Cold War to Vietnam to the First Gulf War to
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is one of manic disavowal.13 The psychic legacy of
the denial of guilt is, in psychoanalytic parlance, a pathological mourning. It is not
only that we do not face up to the death and destruction we have caused, but also
that our energies are consumed in denying their significance by manically
declaring our own omnipotence.14 Every time we begin to mourn the destruction we
have authored, it is morning, or infancy, in America again.15 And the broader
implication of this perpetual recourse to historical amnesia of our own
destructiveness in war is a negation of reality itself. In the spring before the election of the mad president, his predecessor performed
a symbolic act, assuming a measure of collective responsibility for past destruction. In May 2016, after visiting Vietnam, Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to make an official visit to
Hiroshima. After touring the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, he laid a wreath at the cenotaph in the Hiroshima Peace
Memorial Park, met survivors of the atomic bomb US forces dropped on the city in
1945, and made a speech in which he called for the elimination of nuclear
weapons. This simple, long-deferred action, taking place over seventy years after the event but still during the lifetime of some survivors, marked a shift from
an enduring triumphalist rationalization of the atomic bombings of Japan (mania)
to a more hopeful stance (mourning). The annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might still, the president observed, occasion a moral awakening.16
Here was a different vision of mo(u)rning in America, one in which we might finally be able to acknowledge and grieve for the losses we have caused as well as for those we have endured. Following his election in
the president-elect moved swiftly to stock his cabinet with former generals. Days before Christmas, he would announce,
November 2016, months after Obamas visit to Hiroshima,
with his trademark studied casualness, that he was toying with the idea of restarting the nuclear arms race. The
nonfake news over the festive period was filled with speculation about the possibility that nuclear testing would be resumed under the watchful eye of a secretary of energy who had, as a presidential candidate,
called for the elimination of the Department of Energy. There was still some uncertainty about the target of this new nuclear buildup, given the president-elects personal regard for the leader of the historical
archenemy, but there was a certain logic to his tweet that the nuclear show must go on. For if, as Segal had argued, nuclear politics is a form of mass
psychosis in which the prospect of annihilation arouses maniamakes us crazy
then the enemy might truly be a secondary concern. What is crazy about the
nuclear attitude, the psychoanalyst explained, is that it actively creates the
conditions for what it most fears, the end of the world, while alsoand this is
crucialdenying the catastrophic reality it risks. To the extent that the president-elect himself represents a kind of political nuclear
option, which the group has now exercised, the corollary of a reinvigorated nuclear arms race is a logical extension of that
radical act. Writing in the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War and the American war in Vietnam, about the psychical implications of the nuclear threat, the Italian
psychoanalyst Franco Fornari framed the problem as a collective delusion of negation of reality .17 The reality Fornari had in mind was the
climate of reality negation, the melancholic vision of doom has the potential to
enlighten. Perhaps this is our opening. Afflicted as we are by a manic negation of realitythe
realities of climate change, nuclear armaments, the pain of otherswe also, and
not coincidentally, live in a time of mass melancholia.20 Under the headings of an epidemic of opiate addiction and
economically induced despair, mass melancholia was a significant, if unheralded, theme of the 2016 campaign. The selection of the maddest member of the group as our leader might be seen as a radical response
to this morbid state, or as the psychical equivalent of the nuclear option that risks self-annihilation in a frenzy of energizing paranoid-schizoid destructiveness. Love trumps hate, Clintons swan song to the 2016
campaign, attempted to salve the anxiety of the group but also risked a negation of psychic reality to rival the negation of objective reality promoted by her nemesis. For the individual, love has in some
circumstances the power to overcome hatred, but love between groups, as Fornari observed, is far rarer. A principal psychic function of the group, he argued, is to pool our terror and hatred and to export those
opposition between White and Black, or Occidental and Oriental. Rather, what we see is the autochthonous
emergence of a notion of the original people grounded in a linguistic theory, which begins by making subtle distinctions among the Teutons, which properly inaugurates the hierarchical thinking about races
differences, makes every term within the chain refer back to it, and it is in the race
to approximate and appropriate Whiteness that racial practice is born. The
discourse of Whiteness is above all, to use Guillaumins terms, autoreferential rather than altero-referential. Guillaumin writes: The auto-referential
system, centered on the Self, was historically the first to be put in place; it coincided with the pre-eminence of the aristocracy, to whom its race symbolism was specific. Their eyes remain fixed on their own
existence which, both in their own minds and in reality, regulates the course and symbolism of social activity. It is perhaps legitimate to see in this system a form of ethnocentrism. However, aristocratism is not
yet racism because unlike racism, it is not founded on a belief in its own naturalness. Altero-referential racism is centered on the Other, and seems to arise only in egalitarian societies. A fundamental trait of such
a system is the occultation of the Self, of which people have no spontaneous awareness; there is no sense of belonging to a specific group. (Guillaumin 1995:50) Guillaumins terms are useful not so much in
distinguishing between premodern and contemporary notions of race, as she suggests, but rather in discerning the emergence of race through the self-splitting referred to earlier. Guillaumins failure to discern the
notion of Whiteness as the organizing principle of Eurocentrism (as distinguished from banal ethnocentrisms) enables her to exonerate both ethnocentrism and aristocratism as not true racism. But proper
attention to the crucial element of class at play in Whiteness reveals that it is not about aristocratism, but about the people- the volk, with precisely the sense of its own naturalness that Guillaumin disavows as
Thus the
an element in auto-referential systems. I would also suggest that the altero-referential system does not so much displace but is founded on the auto-referential notion of Whiteness.
carry the Negro strain, or the Tartar may carry the Asiatic. The signifier Whiteness is about gaining a monopoly on
the notion of humanness, and is not simply the displaceable or reversible pinnacle
of the great chain of being.22 However, one must not forget that as the
unconscious principle or the master signifier of the symbolic ordering of race,
Whiteness also makes possible difference and racial inter-subjectivity. It orders,
classifies, categorizes, demarcates and separates human beings on the basis of
what is considered to be a natural and neutral epistemology. This knowledge is
also the agency that produces and maintains differences through a series of
socially instituted and legally enforced laws under the name of equality,
multiculturalism, antidiscrimination, etc. Anti-racist legislations and practices, in other
words, work ultimately in the service of race, which is inherently, unambiguously,
structurally supremacist. The structure of race is deeply fissured, and that is discernible in the constitutive tension, or contradiction
between its need to establish absolute differences, and its illegal desire to assert sameness. In fact, race establishes and preserves difference
for the ultimate goal of sameness, in order to reproduce the desire for Whiteness. As
Foucault might have put it, race separates in order to master. However, unlike the technologies of power that Foucault so painstakingly detailed, the analysis of
race cannot be exhausted through its historicization. Race produces unconscious effects, and as a hybrid structure located somewhere between essence and construct, it determines the destiny of human bodies. It
is our ethical and political task to figure out how destiny comes to be inscribed as anatomy, when that anatomy does not exist as such.
Refusal
Their politics of refusal is a demand for something to be refused this
justifies the continued rhetorical existence of the oppressive
structures they hope to resist.
Lundberg 12 (Christian Lundberg is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies, Lacan in Public:
Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric, 11/26/12) AqN *modified for ableist language*
demands
and the assertion of agency is proportional to the deferral of desire to the master upon whom the demand is placed, then demands to be recognized as dangerous are doubly hysterical. Such
are also demands for a certain kind of love, namely, the state might extend its love
by recognizing the dangerousness of the one who makes the demand. At the level
the demands rhetorical function, dangerousness is metonymically connected with
the idea that average citizens can effect change in the prevailing order, or that they
might be recognized as agents who, in the instance of the list of globalophobic
leaders, can command the Mexican state to reaffirm their agency by recognizing
their dangerousness. The rhetorical structure of danger implies the continuing
existence of the state or governing apparatuss interests, and these interests
become a nodal point at which the hysterical demand is discharged. This structure
generates enjoyment of the existence of oppressive state policies as a point for the
articulation of identity. The addiction to the state and the demands for the states
love is also bound up with a fundamental dependency on the oppression of the
state: otherwise the identity would collapse. Such demands constitute a
reaffirmation of a hysterical subject position: they reaffirm not only the subjects
marginality in the global system but the danger that protestors present to the
global system. There are three practical implications for this formation. First, for
the hysteric the simple discharge of the demand is both the beginning and
satisfaction of the political project. Although there is always a nascent political
potential in performance, in this case the performance of demand comes to fully
eclipse the desires that animate content of the demand. Second, demand allows
institutions that stand in for the global order to dictate the direction of politics.
This is not to say that engaging such institutions is a bad thing; rather, it is to say
that when antagonistic engagement with certain institutions is read as the end
point of politics, the field of political options is relatively constrained. Demands to
be recognized as dangerous by the Mexican government or as a powerful
antiglobalization force by the WTO often function at the cost of addressing how
practices of globalization are reaffirmed at the level of consumption, of identity,
and so on or in thinking through alternative political strategies for engaging
globalization that do not hinge on the state and the states actions. Paradoxically,
the third danger is that an addiction to the refusal of demands creates a paralyzing
[transfixing] disposition toward institutional politics. Grossberg has identified a tendency in left politics to retreat from the
politics of policy and public debate.45 Although Grossberg identifies the problem as a specific coordination of theory and its relation to left politics, perhaps a hysterical commitment to marginality informs the
impulse in some sectors to eschew engagements with institutions and institutional debate. An addiction to the states refusal often makes
the perfect the enemy of the good, implying a stifling commitment to political
purity as a pretext for sustaining a structure of enjoyment dependent on refusal,
dependent on a kind of paternal no. Instead of seeing institutions and policy
making as one part of the political field that might be pressured for contingent or
relative goods, a hysterical politics is in the incredibly difficult position of taking
an addressee (such as the state) that it assumes represents the totality of the
political field; simultaneously it understands its addressee as constitutively and
necessarily only a locus of prohibition. These paradoxes become nearly
insufferable when one makes an analytical cut between the content of a demand
and its rhetorical functionality. At the level of the content of the demand, the state
or institutions that represent globalization are figured as illegitimate, as morally
and politically compromised because of their misdeeds. Here there is an assertion
of agency, but because the assertion of agency is simultaneously a deferral of
desire, the identity produced in the hysterical demand is not only intimately tied to
but is ultimately dependent on the continuing existence of the state, hegemonic
order, or institution. At the level of affective investment, the state or institution is
automatically figured as the legitimate authority over its domain. As Lacan puts it: demand in itself . . . is
demand of a presence or of an absence . . . pregnant with that Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy. Demand constitutes the Other as
already possessing the privilege of satisfying needs, that it is to say, the power of
depriving them of that alone by which they are satisfied.46 One outcome of
framing demand as an affective and symbolic process tied to a set of determinate
rhetorical functions enjoins against the simple celebration of demands as either
exclusively liberatory, as unproblematic modes of resistance, as exhausting the
political, or as nodes for the production of political identity along the lines of
equivalence. Alternatively, a politics of desire requires that the place of the demand in a political toolbox ought to be relativized: demands are useful as a precursor to articulating desire; they
are important when moored to a broader political strategy; but they are dangerous if seen as the summum bonum of political life. A politics of desire thus functions simply as a negative constraint on the efficacy of
a politics of demand, and as a practice a politics of desire asks that political subjects constantly test their demands against the measure of desire or against an explicitly owned set of political investments that
envision an alternative world. It is the presence of this alternative, explicitly owned as a desired end state of the political, that might become the prerequisite for desire-based solidarities instead of demand-driven
affinities, and as such, a politics of desire recognizes the inevitability and productivity of frustrated demand as part and parcel of antagonistic democratic struggle.
Settler Colonialism
The affirmatives subversive project relies on a relationship of
dialectical opposition between the settler and indigenous peoples,
this works to sustain the settler subject as the very subject becomes
an object of desire that necessitates destabilization. Their psychic
investment into a reconceptualization of the settler curricular project
only naturalizes new forms of settler desires, and therefore the
violence of indigenization.
Veracini 8 (Lorenzo Veracini is an Associate Professor in History at Swinburne University of
Technology in Melbourne, Australia, Settler collective, founding violence and disavowal: The
settler colonial situation,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07256860802372246, Journal of Intercultural
Studies, 9/16/08) AqN
Settler Colonialism as a Project of Desire Desire (noun): a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to
happen; [mass noun] strong sexual feeling or appetite; something desired. Desire (verb) [with object]: to strongly wish for or want (something); to want (someone) sexually;
colonialism has framed the relationship between racialized subjects and settler
colonialism in legal or political terms.20 This move makes sense, considering that settler colonialism is, at base, a political project
concerned with governance. For example, when Patrick Wolfe critically asserts that settler-colonial invasion is not an event, but a structure, he argues that the event of
invasion is made permanent through technologies of governance, such as settler laws, policies, and institutions.21 Similarly, Lorenzo Veracini, when distinguishing settlerhood
from migration, makes this distinction by suggesting that settlers are founders of political orders, and carry their
sovereignty with them.22 Like Wolfe, Veracini identifies sovereignty and political governance as the feature that distinguishes settler invasion from
migration. Still underexamined in the literature on settler colonialism are the kinds of
emotive investments that settler subjects may have in settler coloniality . To be clear, I am not
denying that settler colonialism is a political project. However, I do wish to emphasize the significance of desire, which I would argue
enables settler-colonial governance and vice versa. This notion that settler
colonialism is as much a project of desire as it is a purely political or legal project
is certainly clear within the emergent literature on Queer Indigenous studies, which has
shown how alternative models of kinship, through figures such as the berdache or two-spirit person, become objects of desire for Queer subjects searching for true or authentic
selves and communities.23 For example, in his research on Queer settler subjectivities, Scott Morgensen discusses how Queer Indigenous identities are appropriated by White
LGBTQ activists to serve their own goals of building Queer movements without simultaneously challenging the logics of settler colonialism.24 Similarly, in When Did Indians
desire.27 However, I would argue that settlerhood is also an object of desire, and settler-desires also do
the work of sustaining colonial power. This is especially true in the case of the
racialized subject seeking belonging in settler society or seeking access to the
benefits and privileges of the settler society. Moreover, settlerhood is not only an
object of desire in and of itself, but desires that are construed as natural or innate
such as settling down and starting a familydo the work of constituting settlerhood as natural and
the word, desire is generally associated with sexual desire, and it is almost always
presumed to operate at the level of the individual rather than the collective . As suggested by
the literature on critical psychoanalysis, however, the spaces of the psychic and social/cultural/structural are
historically situated, its effects exceed language.30 However, racial difference assumes the appearance of
naturalness and ahistoricity. To do this, racial difference relies upon the order of
sexual difference, where sexual difference (via Lacan) is that which cannot be fully
articulated by language.31 Racial difference acquires its tenacity and pervasiveness
by assuming naturalness and ahistoricity. One could ask a similar question about settler/colonial desire: How do
settler desires become naturalized to the point that their violence is erased, their
history disappeared? Even as there is recognition that settler colonialism (or its euphemism, discovery) has a clear history, and even as there is
recognition of First Peoples, the process of settlement itself continues to be construed as benign. Like race, settler coloniality becomes
naturalized or made normal by relying upon the order of sexual difference, such
that the calls to own property or start a (nuclear) family become delinked from
their historical contexts and reconfigured as natural, innate, ahistorical desires. At
the same time, it should be noted that while settler desires are constructed as innate, settlerhood itself
is not marked on the body in the same way as race or sex difference. Rather, the settler/Native
distinction is imprinted on the body through race. That is, there is no inherent recognition of settler-ness except through some sense of racial difference, which is often
ambiguous. Outside of this, claims to settler status are recognized only through political and legal technologies, such as birth certificates, passports, status cards, and so on. It is
colonisers, but rather to be natural sites of Western law.32As a key aspect of this naturalization process, desire
links settlerhood to the category of the humanwith the implication that the
binary counterpart to the settler, the Native, belongs to the category of the
nonhuman. Such was the dilemma that Frantz Fanon described in Black Skin, White Masks. 33 The process of colonization,
argued Fanon, institutes the binary of the colonizer/colonized, which seizes the
subjectivity of the colonized, denying the ability of the colonized ever to be
recognized except through the logic of racial difference.34 For Fanon, only anticolonial struggle held the promise
of recapturing the humanity stolen by colonization. Yet, as Denise Ferreira da Silva has argued, the category of the human is always
is natural, benign, and essentially humanthe erasures are neutralized; the effects
of their violence are rendered void.
their dreams, settler colonials perceived their actions as the performance of good
works. Settlement required the courage to cross the sea, enter into the unknown, build cabins, hew out farms, overcome obstacles, raise families, forge communities, worship God, and build the imagined community of the nation. Settlers could take
cultures who posed an obstacle to the settlement project manifestly were engaged
in wrongdoing. By intruding into settler fantasies and disrupting their good works,
the indigenous people were responsible for the consequences that followed
removal, destruction of their societies, death. In these ways fantasy,
rationalization, narcissism, projection, and guilt permeated the conscious and
unconscious mind of the colonizer, enabling genocidal violence as well as
historical. Lacan illuminate these points. "The domain of the good is
The psychoanalytic theories of Jacques
the birth of power, To exercise control over one's goods is to have the right to
" Lacan explained. "
deprive others of them. "This paradox, is the " Jennifer Rutherford elaborates, identified by Freud and articulated by Lacan,
stemmed from the repeated disruption of the settler colonial fantasies and
projects on the part of the indigenous populations. Not merely the ambivalence
and resistance of the indigenous people but ultimately their very presence
ruptured the settler colonial fantasy. As indigenous peoples appeared to impede
the path of the new chosen peoples they menaced the good that inhered in the
rational, civilized, progressive, and providentially destined settler project. "Within
the frameworks of psychoanalytic discourse, anti-colonial resistance is coded as
mad- ness, dependency or infantile regression The inferior being always ," Ania Loomba points out. "
onto him [them As the indigene becomes the force of evil pitted against the good
]." 93
of the colonizing project, the psychic drives within the colonizer rationalize violent
repression. Despite all ambivalent efforts to work with him [them], to share
culture, religion, and the benefits of civilization, by putting up resistance the
indigene shows that in the end he is [they are] a savage who understands only the
exercise of power. Righteous violence, however lamentable, is therefore justified. "A
true Stalinist politician loves mankind, yet carries out horrible purges and executionshis heart is breaking while he does it, but he cannot help it, it is his Duty towards the Progress of Humanity," the Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek explains. "It is not my
generated by the fact that I conceive of myself as exculpated for what I am doing: I
am able to inflict pain on others with the full awareness that I am not responsible
for it." 94 Settler communities are both "civilized" and "savage" and therefore
must walk a fine psychic line in forging a collective identity and institutions. In the
case of the United States, "There was, quite simply, no way to make a complete
identity without Indians," "At the same time, there was no way to make a Phlip Deloria explains.
complete identity while they remained. "95 Considerable psychic gymnastics arise from the contradictions involved in cleansing the land of the indigenes while appropriating their
authenticity require long-term effort but also entail "a cognitive dissonance, a gap
between knowledge and belief," a repression of knowledge. Thus the unresolved
"historical legacy of violence and appropriation is carried into the present as
traumatic memory, inherited institutional structures, and often unexamined
assumptions."
Suffering Reps
The aff situates their politics in the marketplace of trauma. Their
politics of mourning turns the imprisoned other into a dead object
through which we can construct a sentimental economy of pleasure
and pacification. Their fantasy of change through cruel investment
shields power and violence
Berlant 99 (Lauren, George M. Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of
Chicago, The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics in Cultural Pluralism, Identity
Politics and the Law ed. Sarat & Kearns, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Pg. 49-54)
Ravaged wages and ravaged bodies saturate the global marketplace in which the
United States seeks desperately to compete competitively, as the euphemism goes,
signifying a race that will be won by the nations whose labor conditions are most
optimal for profit? In the United States the media of the political public sphere
regularly register new scandals of the proliferating sweatshop networks at home and
abroad, which has to be a good thing, because it produces feeling and with it
something at least akin to consciousness that can lead to action.3 Yet even as the
image of the traumatized worker proliferates, even as evidence of exploitation is
found under every rock or commodity, it competes with a normative/utopian
image of the U.S. citizens who remains unmarked, framed, and protected by the
private trajectory of his life project which is sanctified at the juncture where the
unconscious meets history: the American Dream.4 in that story ones identity is not borne of
suffering, mental, physical, or economic. If the U.S. Workers lucky enough to live at an
economic moment that sustains the Dream he gets to appear at his least national when he is
working and at his most national at leisure, with his family or in semipublic worlds of other men
producing surplus manliness (e.g., via sports). In the American dreamscape his identity is
private property, a zone in which structural obstacles and cultural differences fade into an ether
of prolonged, deferred, and individuating enjoyment that he has earned and that the nation has
helped him to earn. Meanwhile, exploitation only appears as a scandalous nugget in the
sieve of memory when it can be condensed into an exotic thing of momentary
fascination, a squalor of the bottom too horrible to be read in its own actual
banality. The exposed traumas of workers in ongoing extreme conditions do not generally
induce more than mourning on the part of the state and the public culture to
whose feeling based opinions the state is said to respond. Mourning is what
happens when a grounding object is lost, is dead, no longer living (to you).
Mourning is an experience of irreducible boundedness: I am here, I am living, he
is dead, I am mourning. It is a beautiful, not sublime, experience of emancipation:
mourning supplies the subject the definitional perfection of a being no longer in
flux. It takes place over a distance: even if the object who induces the feeling of loss
and helplessness is neither dead nor at any great distance from where you are? In
other words, mounting can also be an act of aggression, of social deathmaking: it can
perform the evacuation of significance from actually-existing subjects. Even when
liberals do it, one might say, are ghosted for a good cause.6 The sorrow songs of
scandal that sing of the exploitation that is always "elsewhere" (even a few blocks
away) are in this sense aggressively songs of mourning. Play them backward, and
the military march of capitalist triumphalism (The Trans-Nationale) can be heard.
Its Lyric, currently creamed by every organ of record in the United States, is about
necessity. It exhorts citizens to understand that the "bottom line" of national life is
neither utopia nor freedom but survival, which can only be achieved by a citizenry
that eats its anger, makes no unreasonable claims on resources or controls over value, and
uses its most creative energy to cultivate intimate spheres while scrapping a Life
together flexibly in response to the market worlds caprice8. In this particular moment
of expanding class unconsciousness that looks like consciousness emerges a peculiar, though not
unprecedented, here: the exploited child. If a worker can be infantilized, pictured as young, as
small, as feminine or feminized, as starving, as bleeding and diseased, and as a (virtual) sieve,
the righteous indignation around procuring his survival resounds everywhere. The child must
not be sacrificed to states or to profiteering. His wounded image speaks a truth that
subordinates narrative: he has not freely chosen his exploitation; the optimism and play that
are putatively the right of childhood have been stolen from him. Yet only "voluntary" steps are
ever taken to try to control this visible sign of what is ordinary and systemic amid the chaos of
capitalism, in order in make its localized nightmares seem uninevitable. Privatize the atrocity,
delete the visible sign, make it seem foreign. Return the child to the family, replace the children
with admits who can look dignified while being paid virtually the same revoking wage. The
problem that organizes so much feeling then regains livable proportions, and the uncomfortable
pressure of feeling dissipates, like so much gas. Meanwhile, the pressure of feeling the
shock of being uncomfortably political produces a cry for a double therapyto the
victim and the viewer. But before "we" appear too complacently different from the
privileged citizens who desire to caption the mute image of exotic suffering with an
aversively fascinated mooning (a desire for the image to be dead, a ghost), we must note
that this feeling culture crosses over into other domains, the domains of what we
call identity politics, where the wronged take up voice and agency to produce
transformative testimony, which depends on an analogous conviction about the
self-evidence and therefore the objectivity of painful feeling. The central concern of
this essay is to address the place of painful feeling in the making of political worlds. In
particular, I mean to challenge a powerful popular belief in the positive workings of
something I call national sentimentality, a rhetoric of promise that a nation can be
built across fields of social difference through channels of affective identification
and empathy. Sentimental politics generally promotes and maintains the hegemony
of the national identity form, no mean feat in the face of continued widespread
intercultural antagonism and economic cleavage. But national sentimentality is more
than a current of feeling that circulates in a political field: the phrase describes a longstanding
contest between two models of US. citizenship. In one, the classic made}, each citizens value is
secured by an equation between abstractness and emancipation: a cell of national identity
provides juridically protected personhood for citizens regardless of anything specific about
them. In the second model, which was initially organized around labor, feminist, and antiracist
struggles of the nineteenth-century United States, another version of the nation is imagined as
the index of collective life. This nation is peopled by suffering citizens and noncitizens whose
structural exclusion from the utopian-American dreamscape exposes the state's claim of
legitimacy and virtue to an acid wash of truth telling that makes hegemonic disavowal virtually
impossible, at certain moments of political intensity. Sentimentality has long been the
means by which mass subaltern pain is advanced, in the dominant public sphere,
as the true core of national collectivity. It operates when the pain of intimate
others burns into the conscience of classically privileged national subjects, such
that they feel the pain of flawed or denied citizenship as their pain. Theoretically, to
eradicate the pain those with power will do whatever is necessary to return the nation once more
to its legitimately utopian order. Identification with pain, a universal true feeling, then
leads to structural social change. In return, subalterns scarred by the pain of failed
democracy will reauthorize universalist notions of citizenship in the national utopia, which
involves in a redemptive notion of law as the guardian of public good. The object of the nation
and the law in this light is to eradicate systemic social pain, the absence of which becomes the
definition of freedom. Yet, since these very sources of protectionthe state, the law,
patriotic ideologyhave traditionally buttressed traditional matrices of cultural
hierarchy, and since their historic job has been to protect universal subject I citizens
from feeling their culture} and corporeal specificity as a political vulnerability, the
imagined capacity of these institutions to assimilate to the affective tactics of
subaltern counterpolitics suggests some weaknesses, or misrecognitions, in these
tactics. For one thing, it may be that the sharp specificity of the traumatic model of
pain implicitly mischaracterizes what a person is as what a person becomes in the
experience of social negation; this model also falsely premises a sharp picture of
structural violence's source and scope, in tum promoting a dubious optimism that
law and other visible sources of inequality, for example, can provide the best
remedies for their own taxonomizing harms. It is also possible that
counterhegemonic deployments of pain as the measure of structural injustice
actually sustain the utopian image of a homogeneous national metaculture, which
can look like a healed or healthy body in contrast to the scarred and exhausted
ones. Finally, it might be that the tactical use of trauma to describe the effects of social
inequality so overidentifies the eradication of pain with the achievement of justice
that it enables various confusions: for instance, the equation of pleasure with
freedom or the sense that changes in feeling, even on a mass scale, amount to
substantial social change. Sentimental politics makes these confusions credible
and these violences bearable, as its cultural power confirms the centrality of inter-
personal identification and empathy to the vitality and viability of collective life.
This gives citizens something to do in response to overwhelming structural
violence. Meanwhile, by equating mass society with that thing called "national
culture," these important transpersonal linkages and intimacies are too frequently
serve as proleptic shields, as ethically uncontestable legitimating devices for
sustaining the hegemonic field.9
STEM
Education is the primary instance of the University discourse their
form of protest produces alienated subjects constituted by master
signifiers while giving coherence to The System. Scientific knowledge
becomes inauthentic as it becomes a coherent and unquestionable
legitimizing the Masters discourse.
Bracher 94 (Mark Bracher is a Professor of English and Director of the Center for Literature
and Psychoanalysis at Kent State University, Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure,
and Society, http://www.felsemiotica.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Bracher-Mark-et-
al.-Eds.-Lacanian-Theory-of-Discourse.-Subject-Structure-and-Society.pdf, New York
University Press) AqN
Before we learn to speak and even before we are born-we occupy
Our first role in discourse is thus as the a.
the position of the other or receiver of speech, and we do so in the form of the a, as
the as yet unassimilated piece of the real that is the object of the desires of those
around us, particularly our parents: s, s Subjected, in this position, to a
dominating totalized system of knowledge/belief (52 ), we are made to produce
ourselves as (alienated) subjects, $, of this system. This means, in the first instance, that our preverbal experience of ourselves and the
world, mediated as it is by the actions and demeanor of our primary caretakers, is partially determined by the system of knowledge/belief, or language, inhabited by them, and by the position they attribute to us
we begin to understand language and to speak it, we must fashion our sense of
ourselves (our identity) out of the subject positions made available by the
signifiers (i.e., categories) of the system, 52 . This discursive structure and hence the totalizing and tyrannical effect of the S2 are not limited,
however, to our infancy. They are also present in several other realms-most notably in education and bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is perhaps the purest
form of the discourse of the University; it is nothing but knowledge (34)-that is,
pure impersonal system: The System, and nothing else. No provision is made for individual subjects and their desires and
idiosyncracies. Individuals are to act, think, and desire only in ways that function to enact,
know more" (120). All questioning about the value of this master signifier is simply
crushed (120): that knowledge is valuable especially scientific knowledge-goes
without saying in this scientific age. Lacan, however, interrogates the ground of this master signifier and On the Psychological and Social Functions of
Language 1 17 finds that it consists in an even more fundamental master signifier-that of an "I" that is identical to itself and transcendental. Thus the final, root operation that establishes the discourse of the
University is the assumption of such an "I": "The myth of the ideal 'I,' of the 'I' that masters, of the 'I' by which at least something is identical to itself-i.e., the enunciator-is very precisely what the discourse of the
university cannot eliminate from the place where its truth is found" (70-71). Anyone who enunciates scientific knowledge
automatically assumes the position of subject of this coherent, totalized
knowledge, a subject that most Itself be stable, consistent, self-identical. And this assumption is
neither more nor less than the assumption of the self-identical "I" as its master signifier, its ultimate value and truth (70-71). . Since the master signifier in this
academic that is not confrontational. This occurs when the student identifies with
a specific trait of the educatorperhaps how she touches her hair or speaks [they touch their hair
or speak] and, especially, when the student adopts the value and norms that the
professor is assertinghis or her [their] planning (and perhaps other) master
signifiers (Van Haute 2002, 96). In this way, consciously and often
unconsciously, students learn to be members of a school culture that has a
particular structure of authority and norms (Baum 1997, 23). For Lacan (1977), this
identification with the master signifiers, the special traits of their educators, is
what constitutes the formation of the professional ego-ideal of the novice planner.
Students attempt to get their professors to act in a manner that fulfills their
desires and consolidates their egos (Bracher 1999, 133). This is called
transference. The relationship between the teacher and the pupil is always based
on transference, that the teacher is the subject supposed to know for the pupil
(Salecl 1994, 168). Symbolic-order transferences are in place when the teacher
functions primarily as an authority figure from whom the student seeks
recognition, positive reinforcement, or new, more powerful, master signifiers or
knowledge (Bracher 1999, 133). The students seeking of gratification from the teacher is crucial to learning. As all educators know, the
students ego already contains a whole organisation of certainties, beliefs, of coordinates, of references that is often wrong but resists correction and change (Lacan 1988a, 23).
The professor overcomes the students intransigence through transference and
interpolates new master signifiers and supporting subcodesvalue and knowledge
setsthat the student seeks to adopt in identifying with the educator. Yet even when plannings
suturing signifiers and their S2s are integrated into the students ego-ideal, the egos defensive posture, the subjects perceptions of itself, others, and the world around it
The
[continue to be] submitted to a systematic distortion (Boothby 2001, 144), a misrecognition that now incorporates the S1 of planning and those of its subdiscourses.
ego fails to understand its own subjects fundamental unconscious bodily desires
for ontological security, resulting in a distorted perspective to our perception of
reality (Boothby 2001, 144). When harmony is not present it has to be somehow
introduced in order for our reality to be coherent (Stavrakakis 1999, 63). At a
fundamental level, the student (and everyone else, including the educator)
overlooks contradictions, missing gaps, inconsistencies, and the undesirable
aspects of the knowledge sets and beliefs supporting his or her [their] S1s. We
fundamentally desire to make existence harmonious, enjoyable, and just plain
bearable, and we construct imaginary fantasies to make it so (Zizek 2002a). These
harmonious fantasies constitute what we define and share as a common reality. To
illustrate this, let us return to the S1 of sustainability. Most students (and academics, including this author) in developed countries readily buy into the S1 of sustainability and
support it in their planning values and practices. At the same time, most knowingly and voluntarily continue to partake of conspicuous consumption that is well outside of the
sustainable ecological footprint of their environments. In this example, we want our ideological cake of promoting a sustainable future while overlooking our nonsustainable
In its
therefore to a better self. What changes is the place of repetition in this contract, a crisis frequently thematized in formal aesthetic and generational terms.
traditional and political modalities, the sentimental promises that in a just world a
consensus will already exist about what constitutes uplift, amelioration, and
emancipation, those horizons toward which empathy powerfully directs itself.
Identification with suffering, the ethical response to the sentimental plot, leads to
its repetition in the audience and thus to a generally held view about what
transformations would bring the good life into being. This presumption, that the terms of
consent are trans- historical once true feeling is shared, explains in part why emotions, especially painful ones, are
so central to the world-building aspects of sentimental alliance. Postsentimental texts withdraw from the
contract that presumes consent to the conventionally desired outcomes of identification and empathy. The desire for unconflictedness
might very well motivate the sacrifice of surprising ideas to the norms of the world
against which this rhetoric is being deployed. What, if anything, then, can be built from the very different
knowledge/experience of subaltern pain? What can memory do to create conditions for freedom and justice without reconfirming the terms of ordinary subordination? More
have come to stand for in the creation of sentimental national subjects across an almost two-
century span. Three moments in this genealogy, which differ as much from each other as from the credulous citation of Uncle Tom's Cabin we saw in The King and I and
Dimples, will mark here some potential within the arsenal that counters the repetition compulsions of sentimentality. This essay began with a famous passage from James
Baldwin's "Everybody's Protest Novel," a much-cited essay about Uncle Tom's Cabin that is rarely read in the strong sense because its powerful language of rageful truth-telling
would shame in advance any desire to make claims for the tactical efficacy of suffering and mourning in the struggle to transform the United States into a postracist nation. I
cited Baldwin's text to open this piece not to endorse its absolute truth but to figure its frustrated opposition to the sentimental optimism that equates the formal achievement of
sentimentality can mean has been lost in the social-problem machinery of mass
society, in which the production of tears where anger or nothing might have been
became more urgent with the coming to cultural dominance of the Holocaust and
trauma as models for having and remembering collective social experience.20 Currently, as
in traditional sentimentality, the authenticity of overwhelming pain that can be
textually performed and shared is disseminated as a prophylactic against the
reproduction of a shocking and numbing mass violence. Baldwin asserts that the
overvaluation of such redemptive feeling is precisely a condition of that violence.
Baldwin's encounter with Stowe in this essay comes amidst a general wave of protest novels, social-problem films, and film noir in the U.S. after World War Two: Gentleman's
Agreement, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Best Years of Our Lives. Films like these, he says, "emerge for what they are: a mirror of our confusion, dishonesty, panic,
trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream." They cut the complexity of human motives and
self-understanding "down to size" by preferring "a lie more palatable than the
truth" about the social and material effects the liberal pedagogy of optimism has,
or doesn't have, on "man's" capacity to produce a world of authentic truth, justice,
and freedom.21 Indeed, "truth" is the keyword for Baldwin. He defines it as "a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment: freedom which cannot be
legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted."22 In contrast, Stowe's totalitarian religiosity, her insistence that subjects "bargain"
for heavenly redemption with their own physical and spiritual mortification, merely and violently
confirms the fundamental abjection of all persons, especially the black ones who
wear the dark night of the soul out where all can see it. Additionally, Baldwin argues that Uncle Tom's Cabin
instantiates a tradition of locating the destiny of the nation in a false model of the individual soul, one imagined as free of ambivalence, aggression, or contradiction. By "human
being" Baldwin means to repudiate stock identities as such, arguing that their stark simplicity confirms the very fantasies and institutions against which the sentimental is
This national-liberal refusal of complexity is what he elsewhere calls
ostensibly being mobilized.
"the price of the ticket" for membership in the American dream.23 As the Uncle Tom films suggest,
whites need blacks to "dance" for them so that they might continue disavowing the
costs or ghosts of whiteness, which involve religious traditions of self-loathing and
cultural traditions confusing happiness with analgesia. The conventional reading of "Everybody's Protest Novel"
sees it as a violent rejection of the sentimental.24 It is associated with the feminine (Little Women), with hollow and dishonest capacities of feeling, with an aversion to the real
This addiction
violence and die knowing only slightly more than they did before they were sacrificed to a white ideal of the soul's simple purity, its emptiness.
It is
we prevent their final realisation?. [How can] we return to a non-utopian society, less perfect and more free (Berdiaev in Berneri, 1971:309). 2
particularly the political experience of these last decades that led to the dislocation
of utopian sensibilities and brought to the fore a novel appreciation of human
finitude, together with a growing suspicion of all grandiose political projects and
the meta-narratives traditionally associated with them (Whitebook, 1995:75). All
these developments, that is to say the crisis of the utopian imaginary, seem
however to leave politics without its prime motivating force: the politics of today is
a politics of aporia. In our current political terrain, hope seems to be replaced by pessimism or even resignation. This is a result of the crisis in the
dominant modality of our political imagination (meaning utopianism in its various forms) and of our inability to resolve this crisis in a productive way. 3 In this chapter, I will
try to show that Lacanian theory provides new angles through which we can reflect on our historical experience of utopia and reorient our political imagination beyond its
suffocating strait-jacket. Lets start our exploration with the most elementary of questions: what is the meaning of the current crisis of utopia? And is this crisis a development to
it
be regretted or cherished? In order to answer these questions it is crucial to enumerate the conditions of possibility and the basic characteristics of utopian thinking. First of all
seems that the need for utopian meaning arises in periods of increased uncertainty, social instability and
conflict, when the element of the political subverts the fantasmatic stability of our political reality.
Utopias are generated by the surfacing of grave antagonisms and dislocations in the social field. As Tillich has put
it all utopias strive to negate the negativein human existence; it is the negative in
that existence which makes the idea of utopia necessary (Tillich in Levitas, 1990:103). Utopia then is one of the
possible responses to the ever-present negativity, to the real antagonism which is constitutive of human experience. Furthermore, from the time of Mores Utopia (1516) it is conceived as an
communities in which these antagonisms and the dislocations fuelling them (the element of the
political) will be forever resolved, leading to a reconciled and harmonious worldit is not a coincidence
that, among others, Fourier names his utopian community Harmony and that the name of the Owenite
utopian community in the New World was New Harmony. As Marin has put it, utopia sets in view an imaginary resolution to social
contradiction; it is a simulacrum of synthesis which dissimulates social antagonism by projecting it onto a screen representing a harmonious and immobile equilibrium (Marin, 1984:61). This
final resolution is the essence of the utopian promise. What I will try to do in this chapter is, first of all, to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of utopian politics. Simply put, my
argument will be that every utopian fantasy construction needs a scapegoat in order to
constitute itselfthe Nazi utopian fantasy and the production of the Jew is a good example, especially
as pointed out in ieks analysis.4 Every utopian fantasy produces its reverse and calls for
its elimination. Put another way, the beatific side of fantasy is coupled in utopian constructions with a
horrific side, a paranoid need for a stigmatised scapegoat. The naivetyand also the dangerof utopian
structures is revealed when the realisation of this fantasy is attempted. It is then that we are brought
close to the frightening kernel of the real: stigmatisation is followed by extermination. This is not
an accident . It is inscribed in the structure of utopian constructions; it seems to be the way all fantasy
constructions work. If in almost all utopian visions, violence and antagonism are eliminated, if utopia is based on the expulsion and
repression of violence (this is its beatific side) this is only because it owes its own creation to violence; it
is sustained and fed by violence (this is its horrific side). This repressed moment of violence resurfaces, as Marin points out, in the difference inscribed in the name
utopia itself (Marin, 1984:110). What we shall argue is that it also resurfaces in the production of the figure of an enemy. To use a phrase
enunciated by the utopianist Fourier, what is driven out through the door comes back through the window (is not this a precursor of Lacans dictum that what is foreclosed in the symbolic
reappears in the real?VII:131).5 The work of Norman Cohn and other historians permits the articulation of a genealogy of this manichean, equivalential way of understanding the world,
from the great witch-hunt up to modern anti-Semitism, and Lacanian theory can provide valuable insights into any attempt to understand the logic behind this utopian operationhere the
approach to fantasy developed in Chapter 2 will further demonstrate its potential in analysing our political experience. In fact, from the time of his unpublished seminar on The Formations of
the Unconscious, Lacan identified the utopian dream of a perfectly functioning society as a highly problematic
area (seminar of 18 June 1958). In order to realise the problematic character of the utopian operation it is necessary to articulate a genealogy of this way of representing and making sense
of the world. The work of Norman Cohn seems especially designed to serve this purpose. What is most important is that in Cohns schema we can encounter the three basic characteristics of
continuous battle with the unexpected there is always a need to represent and master this unexpected,
to transform disorder to order. Second, this representation is usually articulated as a total and universal
representation, a promise of absolute mastery of the totality of the real, a vision of the end of history. A
future utopian state is envisaged in which disorder will be totally eliminated. Third, this symbolisation
produces its own remainder; there is always a certain particularity remaining outside the universal
schema. It is to the existence of this evil agent, which can be easily localised, that all persisting disorder is
attributed. The elimination of disorder depends then on the elimination of this group. The
result is always horrible: persecution, massacres, holocausts. Needless to say, no utopian fantasy is ever
realised as a result of all these crimesas mentioned in Chapter 2, the purpose of fantasy is not to satisfy an (impossible) desire but to constitute it as such. What is of great interest for our
approach is the way in which Cohn himself articulates a genealogy of the pair utopia/demonisation in his books The Pursuit of the Millennium and Europes Inner Demons (Cohn, 1993b,
1993c). The same applies to his book Warrant for Genocide (Cohn, 1996) which will also be implicated at a certain stage in our analysis. These books are concerned with the same social
phenomenon, the idea of purifying humanity through the extermination of some category of human beings which are conceived as agents of corruption, disorder and evil. The contexts are, of
course, different, but the urge remains the same (Cohn, 1993b:xi). All these works then, at least according to my reading, are concerned with the production of an archenemy which goes
together with the utopian mentality. It could be argued that the roots of both demonisation and utopian thinking can be traced back to the shift from a cyclical to a unilinear representation of
history (Cohn, 1993a:227).6 However, we will start our reading of Cohns work by going back to Roman civilisation. As Cohn claims, a profound demonising tendency is discernible in Ancient
Roman world, although Judaism was regarded as a bizarre religion, it was nevertheless a religio licita, a
religion that was officially recognised. Things were different with the newly formed Christian sect. In fact the Christian Eucharist
could easily be interpreted as cannibalistic (Cohn, 1993b:8). In almost all their ways Christians ignored or
even negated the fundamental convictions by which the pagan Graeco-Roman world lived. It is not at all surprising
then that to the Romans they looked like a bunch of conspirators plotting to destroy society. Towards the end of the second century, according to Tertullian, it was taken as a given that the
Christians are the cause of every public catastrophe, every disaster that hits the populace. If the Tiber floods or the Nile fails to, if there is a drought or an earthquake, a famine or a plague, the
cry goes up at once: Throw the Christians to the Lions!. (Tertullian in Cohn, 1993b:14) This defamation of Christians that led to their exclusion from the boundaries of humanity and to their
relentless persecution is a pattern that was repeated many times in later centuries, when both the persecutors and the persecuted were Christians (Cohn, 1993b:15). Bogomiles, Waldensians,
the Fraticelli movement and the Catharsall the groups appearing in Umberto Ecos fascinating books, especially in The Name of the Rosewere later on persecuted within a similar discursive
context. The same happened with the demonisation of Christians, the fantasy that led to the great witch-hunt. Again, the conditions of possibility for this demonisation can be accurately
defined. First, some kind of misfortune or catastrophe had to occur, and second, there had to be someone who could be singled out as the cause of this misfortune (Cohn, 1993b:226). In
Cohns view then, social dislocation and unrest, on the one hand, and millenarian exaltation, on the
other, do overlap. When segments of the poor population were mesmerised by a prophet, their
understandable desire to improve their living conditions became transfused with fantasies of a future
community reborn into innocence through a final, apocalyptic massacre. The evil onesvariously identified with the Jews, the
clergy or the richwere to be exterminated; after which the Saintsi.e. the poor in questionwould set up their kingdom, a realm without suffering or sin. (Cohn, 1993c:1415) It was at
times of acute dislocation and disorientation that this demonising tendency was more present. When people were faced with a situation totally alien to their experience of normality, when
they were faced with unfamiliar hazards dislocating their constructions of realitywhen they encountered the realthe collective flight into the world of demonology could occur more easily
(ibid.: 87). The same applies to the emergence of millenarian fantasies. The vast majority of revolutionary millenarian outbreaks takes place against a background of disaster. Cohn refers to the
plagues that generated the first Crusade and the flagellant movements of 1260, 13489, 1391 and 1400, the famines that preluded the first and second Crusade, the pseudo-Baldwin
It is perhaps striking
movement and other millenarian outbreaks and, of course, the Black Death that precipitated a whole wave of millenarian excitement (ibid.: 282).7
that all the characteristics we have encountered up to now are also marking modern phenomena such
as Nazi anti-Semitic utopianism. In fact, in the modern anti-Semitic fantasy the remnants of past demonological terrors are blended with anxieties and resentments
emerging for the first time with modernity (Cohn, 1996:27). In structural terms the situation remains pretty much the same. The first condition of possibility for
its emergence is the dislocation of traditional forms of organising and making sense of society, a
dislocation inflicted by the increased hegemony of secularism, liberalism, socialism, industrialisation,
etc. Faced with such disorientating developments, people can very easily resort to a promise for the re-
establishment of a lost harmony. Within such a context Hitler proved successful in persuading the
Germans that he was their only hope. Heartfields genius collages exposing the dark kernel of National
Socialism didnt prove very effective against Nazi propaganda. It was mass unemployment, misery and anxiety (especially of the middle
classes) that led to Hitlers hegemony, to the hegemony of the Nazi utopian promise. At the very time when German society was turning into one of the great industrial powers of Europe, a
land of factories and cities, technology and bureaucracy, many Germans were dreaming of an archaic world of Germanic peasants, organically linked by bonds of blood in a natural
community. Yet, as Cohn very successfully points out, such a view of the world requires an anti-figure, and this was supplied partly by the liberal West but also, and more effectively, by the
The emergence of the Jew as a modern antichrist follows directly from this structural
Jews (Cohn, 1996:188).
necessity for an anti-figure. Rosenberg, Goebbels and other (virtually all) Nazi ideologues used the phantom of the Jewish race as a lynch-pin binding the fears of
the past and prospective victims of modernisation, which they articulated, and the ideal volkish society of the future which they proposed to create in order to forestall further advances of
modernity. (Bauman, 1989:61) No doubt the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy is a revival, in a secularised form, of certain apocalyptic beliefs. There is clearly a connection between the
famous forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the antichrist prophecy (Cohn, 1996:48). The Protocols were first published by Nilus as part of his book The Great in the Small:
Antichrist Considered as an Imminent Political Possibility and were published in 1917 with the title He is Near, At the DoorHere comes Antichrist and the Reign of the Devil on Earth. As the
famous Nazi propagandist Rosenberg points out One of the advance signs of the coming struggle for the new organisation of the world is this understanding of the very nature of the demon
antichrist, that is the Jews, is considered as the remedy for all dislocations, the key to a new harmonious
world. Jews were seen as deserving death (and resented for that reason) because they stood between
this one imperfect and tension-ridden reality and the hoped-for world of tranquil happinessthe
disappearance of the Jews was instrumental in bringing about the world of perfection. (Bauman, 1989:76) As Sartre
claims, for the anti-Semite the Good itself is reduced to the destruction of Evil. Underneath the bitterness of the anti-Semite one can only reveal the optimistic belief that harmony will be
reconstituted of itself, once Evil is destroyed. When the mission of the anti-Semite as holy destroyer is fulfilled, the lost paradise will be re-established (Sartre, 1995:435).8 In Adornos words,
charging the Jews with all existing evils seems to penetrate the darkness of reality like a searchlight and to allow for quick and all-comprising orientation. It is the great Panaceathe key to
the elimination of the Jew is posited as the only thing that can transform
everything (Adorno, 1993:311, my emphasis). Simply put,
the Nazi dream to reality, the only thing that can realise utopia.9 As it is pointed out by an American
Nazi propagandist, our problem is very simple. Get rid of the Jews and wed be on the way to Utopia
tomorrow. The Jews are the root of all our trouble (True in Cohn, 1996:264, my emphasis). The same is, of course, true of Stalinism. Zygmunt Bauman brings the two cases together:
Hitlers and Stalins victims were not killed in order to capture and colonise the territory they occupied. They were killed because they did not fit, for one reason or another, the scheme of a
perfect society. Their killing was not the work of destruction but creation. They were eliminated, so that an objectively better human worldmore efficient, more moral, more beautiful
could be established. A Communist world. Or a racially pure, Aryan world. In both cases, a harmonious world, conflict free, docile in the hands of their rulers, orderly, controlled. (Bauman,
1989:93) In any case, one should not forget that the fact that the anti-figure in Nazi ideology came to be the Jew is not an essential but a contingent development. In principle, it could have
personality Theodor Adorno and his colleagues point out that subjects in our sample find numerous
other substitutes for the Jew, such as the Mexicans and the Greeks (Adorno, 1993:303). Although the need for the structural position
of the anti-figure remains constant the identity of the subject occupying that position is never given a priori. This does not mean that within a certain historical configuration with a particular
Of course,
social sedimentation and hegemonic structure all the possibilities are open to the same extent; it means though that in principle nobody is excluded from being stigmatised.
the decision on who will eventually be stigmatised depends largely on the availability within a particular
social configuration of groups that can perform this role in social fantasy, and this availability is socially
constructed out of the existing materials. As Lacan points out in Anxiety, although a lack or a void can be filled in
several ways (in principle), experienceand, in fact, analytic experienceshows that it is never actually
filled in 99 different ways (seminar of 21 November 1962). What we have here is basically a play of incarnation.
This play of incarnation is marking both the pole of the utopian fantasies and the
pole of the evil powers that stand between us and them. As Cohn concludes, Middle Ages prophecies had a deep
effect on the political attitudes of the times. For people in the Middle Ages, the drama of the Last Days was not a distant and hazy but an infallible prophecy which at any given
moment was felt to be on the point of fulfilment: In even the most unlikely reigns chroniclers tried to perceive that harmony among Christians, that triumph over misbelievers,
that unparalleled plenty and prosperity which were going to be the marks of the new Golden Age. When each time experience brought the inevitable disillusionment people
merely imagined the glorious consummation postponed to the next reign. (Cohn, 1993c:35) But this fantasy cannot be separated by the coming of the antichrist which was even
more tensely awaited. Generation after generation of medieval people lived in continuous expectation of signs of the antichrist, and since these signs, as presented in the
prophecies, included comets, plague, bad rulers, famine, etc. a similar play of incarnation was played out in terms of determining the true face of the antichrist (ibid.).
Alternatives
1NC
The alternative is to embrace the inevitable failures of the death drive.
Our political reconceptualization enables a recognition that subjects
only derive enjoyment from loss, a relocation of enjoyment would
nullify violent human potentialities.
McGowan 13 (Todd McGowan is an Associate Professor of English at the University of
Vermont, Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, University of
Nebraska Press) AqN
The death drive is neither (contra Marcuse) aggressiveness nor an impulse to return to an inorganic state (as Freud's metaphor in Beyond the Pleasure Principle might imply) but
an impetus to return to an originary traumatic and constitutive loss. The death
drive emerges with subjectivity itself as the subject enters into the social order and
becomes a social and speaking being by sacrificing a part of itself. This sacrifice is an act of creation that
produces an object that exists only insofar as it is lost. This loss of what the subject doesn't have institutes the death drive, which produces enjoyment through the repetition of the initial loss.
Subjects engage in acts of self-sacrifice and self-sabotage because the loss enacted
reproduces the subject's lost object and enables the subject to enjoy this object.
Once it is obtained, the object ceases to be the object. As a result, the subject must
continually repeat the sacrificial acts that produce the object, despite the damage
that such acts do to the subject's self-interest. From the perspective of the death drive, we turn to violence
not in order to gain power but in order to produce loss, which is our only source of
enjoyment. Without the lost object, life becomes bereft of any satisfaction . The
repetition of sacrifice, however, creates a life worth living, a life in which one can
enjoy oneself through the lost object. The repetition involved with the death drive is not simply repetition of any particular experience. The
repetition compulsion leads the subject to repeat specifically the experiences that
have traumatized it and disturbed its stable functioning. The better things are
going for the subject, the more likely that the death drive will derail the subject's
activity. According to the theory implied by the death drive, any movement toward the good - any progress - will
tend to produce a reaction that will undermine it. This occurs both on the level of
the individual and on the level of society. In psychoanalytic treatment, it takes the form of a negative therapeutic reaction, an effort to sustain one's
disorder in the face of the imminence of the cure. We can also think of individuals who continue to choose romantic relationships that fail according to a precise pattern. Politically, it means that
progress triggers the very forms of oppression that it hopes to combat and thereby
incessantly undermines itself, there is a backlash written into every progressive
program from the outset. The death drive creates an essentially masochistic
structure within the psyche. It provides the organizing principle for the subject
and orients the subject relative to its enjoyment, and this enjoyment remains
always linked to trauma. This structure renders difficult all attempts to prompt subjects to act in their own self-interest or for their own good. The death
drive leads subjects to act contrary to their own interests, to sabotage the projects
that would lead to their good. Common sense tells us that sadism is easier to understand than masochism, that the sadist's lust for power over the object makes sense in
a way that the masochist's self-destruction does not. But for psychoanalysis, masochism functions as the paradigmatic form of subjectivity. Considering the structure of the death drive, masochism becomes easily
explained, and sadism becomes a mystery. Masochism provides the subject the enjoyment of loss, while sadism seems to give this enjoyment to the other. This is exactly the claim of Jacques Lacan's revolutionary
interpretation of sadism in his famous article "Kant with Sade." Though most readers focus on the essay's philosophical coupling of Kantian morality with Sadean perversion, the more significant step that Lacan
takes here occurs in his explanation of sadism's appeal. Traditionally, most people vilify sadists for transforming their victims into objects for their own satisfaction, but Lacan contends that they actually turn
themselves into objects for the other's enjoyment. He notes: "The sadist discharges the pain of existence into the Other, but without seeing that he himself thereby turns into an 'eternal object:" Though
the other suffers pain, the other also becomes the sole figure of enjoyment. What the sadist
enjoys in the sadistic act is the enjoyment attributed to the other, and the sadistic act attempts to bring about this enjoyment. In this sense, sadism is nothing but an inverted form of masochism, which remains the
because the death drive is the drive that animates us as subjects. Unlike Herbert Marcuse, Norman 0. Brown,
another celebrated proponent of psychoanalytically informed political thought, attempts to construct a psychoanalytic political project that focuses on the death drive. He does not
simply see it as the unfortunate result of the repression of eros but as a powerful category
on its own. In Life against Death, Brown conceives of the death drive as a self-annihilating
impulse that emerges out of the human incapacity to accept death and loss . As he puts it,
"The death instinct is the core of the human neurosis. It begins with the human
infant's incapacity to accept separation from the mother, that separation which
confers individual life on all living organisms and which in all living organisms at
the same time leads to death:'23 For Brown, we pursue death and destruction,
paradoxically, because we cannot accept death. If we possessed the ability to
accept our own death, according to Brown's view, we would avoid falling into the death drive and
would thereby rid ourselves of human violence and destructiveness. Like Marcuse, Brown's
societal ideal involves the unleashing of the sexual drives and the minimizing or
elimination of the death drive. He even raises the stakes, contending that unless we manage to realize this
ideal, the human species, under the sway of the death drive, will die out like the
dinosaurs. Despite making more allowances for the death drive (and for death itself) than Marcuse, Brown nonetheless cannot avoid a
similar error: the belief that the death drive is a force that subjects can overcome. For
Freud, in contrast, it is the force that revenges itself on every overcoming, the repetition that no utopia can fully leave behind. An authentic recognition of the
death drive and its primacy would demand that we rethink the idea of progress
altogether.
dissatisfied subjects, but it also needs subjects who believe that the ultimate
satisfaction is possible. This is accomplished by locating the ultimate satisfaction
in the act of accumulation. Subjects invest themselves in capitalist ideology
because they accept its map of enjoyment. The key to combating this ideology lies
not in undermining the fantasies that it proffers but in revealing where our
enjoyment is located, in proffering a different map. Rather than enjoying the
process of accumulation, we enjoy the experience of loss - the loss of the privileged
object. Accumulation allows us to have objects, but it doesn't allow us to have the
object in its absence. This is why accumulation always leads not to satisfaction
with what one has but to the desire to accumulate more and more. Loss, in
contrast, permits us to experience the object as such. Through the act of losing the
privileged object, we in effect cause this privileged object to emerge. There is no
privileged object prior to its loss. Understood in this way, loss becomes a creative act. The loss of
the object is the foundation of our enjoyment because this act elevates an object
above the rest of the world and embodies that object with the power to satisfy us.
Through the loss of the object, we are able to enjoy the object in its absence, which
is the only form in which the object can motivate our desire. When we enjoy in this
way, we enjoy nothing rather than something. This seems to offer, at first glance, an inferior mode of enjoyment. Why would anyone settle for
the enjoyment of an absent object rather than a present one? Because this type of enjoyment - the enjoyment of absence - is the only type of
which will be enjoyable for the loss and sacrifice that they embody. One cannot
accumulate such objects because they have no positive value attributed to them.
They arrive without the promise of the ultimate future enjoyment attached to
them, and in this sense, they do not function as commodities. The commodity
depends on the invisibility of the labor that produces it, and the subject who
recognizes loss in the object renders labor, which is the loss that gives the object
its value, visible. Those who are able to locate their enjoyment in loss ipso facto value the sacrifice made by society's producers and align themselves politically with this group. This
transformation results not so much from a change of activity as from a change of perspective.
level of social discourse and history. These are the cultural myths that construct
and sustain borders of identity and belonging, and that lay the groundwork for the
ways in which we imagine the future. Informing my discussion above, Kent den Heyer and Laurence Abbott (2011) describe this
mythic quality of fantasy as orienting us in relation to each other and the world
through proper nouns that presumably consolidate a shared identity (p. 616). From this
perspective, fantasy organizes dominant conceptions of what it means to be a girl or a woman or a Canadian on the basis of an imaginary origin that inhabitants of these
formula based on the broad categories of race, income or family structure that
cannot tolerate contradictions or conflict (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2003, p. 150). As noted above, Milners research narrative is very
much rooted in cultural myths that tether the meaning of girl-ness to feminine ideals of good wives and mothers in-themaking (Grumet 1988, p. 48). The problem with such
fantasied myths, den Heyer and Abbott remind us, is that they are cracked (p. 616). Mythic fantasies name subject positions of
identity that we inherit but never fully live out. However this cracked notion of
fantasy is also good news, for it refers to that echo feature of fantasy that exceeds
the social categories endowed to us (den Heyer & Abbott, 2011, p. 616). Fantasy can be thought of here
as the very first psychical representative of affect that introduces an unconscious
element to historical inheritance (Isaacs, 1952, p. 83). Under the condition of the
unconscious, fantasy, in the words of Julia Kristeva (2002), does not wish to be
familiar with the real world (p. 40). And here is where the metaphor of the echo matters, for it refers to the creative revision of an original
source. Echoes are repetitions but not exact replications (den Heyer & Abbott, 2011, p. 616). In this view, fantasy refers to the earliest
capacity of the mind to author the inherited world before it can be understood.
Developmentally, this level of fantasy is necessary, because the infant is having to manage emotional experiences which he does not yet have the capacity psychically to digest
by himself (Waddell, 2000, p. 7). Unconscious and necessary, Susan Isaacs (1952) surveys the history of psychoanalytic thought to describe the incredible content of
unconscious fantasy. For instance, from the experience of hunger, the infant makes a fantasy of omnipotence. The fantasy, I want to eat her all up is also ambivalent, on the
one hand tender in character, I want to keep her inside me and on the other hand, aggressive, I want to tear her to bits (p. 84). From the vantage of unconscious fantasy,
aggression also emerge fantasies of guilt and reparation I want to bring her back
or I want to make her better (p. 84). Psychoanalytically, this incredible set of
internal events constitutes the very first mental organization of the human mind.
And, where we eventually learn to distinguish between the wish and the deed and between external facts and our feelings about them (Isaacs, 1952, p. 85), these
very basic fantasy patterns never entirely go away. Applied to the scene of
research, glimmers of early fantasies can be found in the omnipotent reach for
mastery over uncertainty through knowledge, in the anxiety that can creep up
when new knowledge frustrates existing ideas and aims, or in the helping impulse
to rescue others from their perceived position of unknowingness. Thus, while
external realities of history, whether economic depression, class division, or
educational reform, shape how lives are lived, psychoanalysis shines a light on the
way internal influences, called here fantasy, impact social reality, even while they
remain closed off from the world (Gay, 1985, p. 121). Closed off does not mean irrelevant;
quite the contrary, it means that fantasy animates reality through the
displacement of feeling and time. The psychoanalytic insight here, also the key point of my paper, is that narratives of
educational research will be touched by traces of unconscious conflict that simmer
below the surface of their discursive location. At stake in the very effort to narrate
significance is the return of repressed conflicts grounded in irrational first
experiences of trying to cope with the unknown world through unconscious
fantasy. The human problem of educational research is this: unconscious
fantasies echo within conscious efforts to narrate teaching and learning in the
name of knowledge production. Precisely because of the multiplicity of the echos
return, there is at stake a quality of knowledge that resists cohesiveness and that
presents research as a problem of how to build meaning in the awareness that the
ground of reality is uneven. For Simon, Rosenberg and Eppert, this is a quality of knowledge that humbles any design to master the subject of
inquiry once and for all (2000, p. 7). The challenge for the researcher is how to account for a
multiplicity of influences that emerge from the ruins of expert knowledge and its
presumed certainty. The archived story of Milners school study represents two aspects of fantasy at work in the production of knowledge. The first
operates at the level of cultural myth and the second, at the unconscious level of phantasy. Through an analysis of her work, I identify how cultural myths of progress and
objectivity are tied to fantasies of mastery and the wish not to be influenced by our helpless beginnings. But also, Milners study tells a story of the way meaning can breakdown
and regress, and, if all goes well, multiply and humble the claims we can make in the name of research, provided they can be symbolized.
Framework
2NC Jouissance
The desire for knowledge is structured by jouissance.
Gunder 4 (Michael Gunder is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and
Planning at the University of Auckland, Shaping the Planners Ego-Ideal A Lacanian
Interpretation of Planning Education,
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0739456X03261284, 3/1/04) AqN *modified for
gendered rhetoric*
For Lacan (1977), all individuals in society are barred subjects (S| ), alienated from
knowing their unconscious being and desires. This is a direct consequence of
each subjects acquisition of the language necessary for entry into the symbolic
network that constitutes society. Each barred subject adopts a position in
relationship to the Others equally unknowable desireoriginally that of the infant to the (m)otherinsofar as that
desire aroused the subjects own desire (Lacan 1988b, 1998). Lacan called this thing,11 which initially peeks and then drives our desire in reaction to the hidden desire of the
Other , object petit a. The individual adopts a position in relationship to the traumatic encounter with object a derived from a primal memory of
The
pleasure/paininitially ourselves as scared infants crying for the unfulfilled desire of nonstopped completeness provided by Mum in her milk and security.
Lacanian subject comes into being as a form of attraction toward and defence
against this primordial, overwhelming experience of what the French call
jouissance ...a pleasure that is excessive, leading to a sense of being overwhelmed
or disgusted, yet simultaneously providing a source of fascination (Fink 1995, xii). Lacan (1991)
uses the symbol a to stand for this loss of wholeness with the Other. Lacan (1998) suggests that we acquire knowledge
We have to either accept the norms and acceptable behaviors of our symbolic
identifications and forgo the jouissance fulfilled in acting out our desires or
transcend accepted behaviors and face the social sanctions incurred. The ego is
always unsure how to act because of this unyielding contradictory position. May I? Can I?
Absolute knowledge is always lacking from which to decide. Knowledge
Should I or not?
itself always stays within the realm of the signifier, truth starts within this realm
but evokes a dimension beyond it, that is the main reason we invented poetry. The ultimate dimension of desire and jouissance is the
driving part of it. . . . This dimension beyond the signifier is the . . . lost object a that is forever lacking for the speaking subject, causing his/her [their] ever shifting desire.
term social logic we designate those discursive patterns that, in the self-
interpretations of actors, tend to account for the success and failure of work-
related activities in terms of psychology or personality, rather than in terms of
wider socio-economic features linked to (missed) collective decision-making
opportunities. Or consider Deans discussion of what can be called patriarchal social logics. Such logics would denote a tendency in the discursive patterns (of
institutions and actors) to shrink the options available to women to enhance their personal and collective autonomy. An appeal to political
understood as a way of mediating the subjects relation to the norms and ideals
governing a social or political practice. The question of mediation is important
here, and can be approached from the point of view of enjoyment. One mode of
enjoyment, for example, might be understood in terms of a subjects
overinvestment in an ideal or norm, which we can link to Lacans concept of
phallic enjoyment. Here, the subject is in the thrall of his or her [their] fantasy, and thus insensitive to the contingency of social reality. This may explain the
frequently encountered response of subjects to their leaders noted in our account of Gabriels studies: either total rejection or total embrace. But it also raises questions about
the subject is
what sorts of practice may correspond to a non-phallic form of enjoyment, what Lacan calls jouissance feminine (or Other jouissance). Here,
taken to acknowledge and affirm the contingency of social relations. Thus, insofar
as the subjects relation to social norms is mediated in a phallic mode, we can
understand this subject as an ideological subject; and insofar as the subject
engages by means of a non-phallic enjoyment, we can qualify it as an ethical
subject. This matrix of doubly paired subjectivities (social-political and ideological-
ethical) enables us to provide a more complex picture of social and political
practices.7 It allows us to give specific sense, for example, to Walkerdines warning against treating reasons for exploitation as simply or straightforwardly a matter of
ideology or false-consciousness (Walkerdine 2005: 60). The logic of fantasy thus enables us to add an extra layer
of complexity to our account of ideology. It suggests to those of us interested in
better understanding the conditions of political transformation that obstacles to
change are not just social (inclusive of cultural, economic, and so on), but also
ideological where the power of ideology here derives its force and content from
the logic of fantasy and the way this structures our subjective relation to
enjoyment.
AT: Colonialist
Even if psychoanalysis has colonialist origins, the development of
psychoanalysis enables it to expose the colonial unconscious of
western society.
Frosh 13 (Stephen Frosh is a professor in the Psychosocial Studies Department at the
University of London in Birkbeck, Psychoanalysis, Colonialism, Racism,
http://www.academia.edu/6710953/Psychoanalysis_Colonialism_Racism, Journal of
Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 2013, Vol. 33, No. 3, 141154) AqN
The argument so far is that psychoanalysis has some of its roots in colonialist
assumptions that continue to resonate in contemporary theory and clinical
practice. Even though this is counterposed with a more complicated investment in a seditious mode of critique, the extent to which psychoanalysis is implicated in a
colonialist frame makes it a problematic candidate for postcolonial and antiracist adoption. Nevertheless, it is the case that
psychoanalysis also inuences contemporary postcolonial theory. This is mainly for two related
reasons, one shared with many other disciplines (including psychology) and the other perhaps specic to psychoanalysis. First, the tortured
history of psychoanalysis reveals how colonialism infect seven disciplines that also
have subversive possibilities. Psychoanalysis is a key instance of an attempt to
speak from the margins about Western culture, and indeed to reveal explicitly
how the claim of the west to progress and rationality is underpinned by violence
and irrationality. In his theory of culture, Freud proposed that the murder of the primal father was the basis for all civilization, including (in his 1939text,
Moses and Monotheism) monotheistic religion. In relation to individual psychology, the notion of the
dynamic unconscious is such that it places the supposedly primitive at the core of
even the most civilized subject. The unconscious is universal, no one is exempt
from it; even the most rened person has lust and aggression within.
Psychoanalysis reveals this and is consequently a radical opponent of the
primitive/civilized distinction. Yet, psychoanalysis carries within it a history of racism and antisemitism that is still visible, not only in the
fascination with the primitive mentioned above, but even in quite recent outbursts of antisemitism (Frosh, 2012). Psychoanalysis is thus an
heart of the nation also under-mines claims for the xedness and superiority of
European colonial culture, pointing to the reality that at its source is a hidden
otherness. There is no single identity, it is always open to the other, and claims for
its univocality depend on drowning out the voices of the others that have given it
shape. The European is thus infected from the start with the disruptive presence of
the colonized, and psychoanalysis shows how this occurs.
AT: Death Drive False
Freuds biological interpretations of the death drive were only a
building block for our current understanding. Their focus at the
biological level doesnt take into account the way the death drive has
been metaphorically deployed.
Armengou 8 (Frank Garcia-Castrillon Armengou is a Researcher and Professor at the
University Pablo de Olavide and CIEE (Council on International Educational Exchange), The
death drive: Conceptual analysis and relevance in the Spanish psychoanalytic community,
http://www.psicoterapiarelacional.es/Portals/0/Documentacion/FGCastrillon/IJP_Dr%20Fra
nk%20Castrillon.pdf, 10/23/8) AqN
Segal (1993) rightly recalls the clinical facts leading to Freuds suggestion of the existence of a death drive, providing clinical vignettes that seem to justify the concept.5 Nonetheless, Paniagua (1982) highlights
some false isomorphisms in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Among these are the analogies between fish and bird migration and repetition compulsion, and between the undifferentiated vesicle of excitable
substance, with its receptive membrane, and the organization of the human psyche. Freud described this vesicle as surrounded by a
differentiated and hardened surface that filtered external stimuli, thus protecting
the internal protoplasm. He interpreted these metaphors of psychic functioning
literally, transforming them into isomorphic analogies. We are thus no longer
dealing with a linguistic tool to understand mental functioning. The metaphorical comparison between the
functioning of the vesicle and the conscious system has become inductive reasoning. What happens to the vesicle, therefore, also happens to the conscious system. It is obvious that
Freud wanted to use isomorphic comparisons that encompassed all inorganic life.
These analogies, however, violate the laws of inference. Metaphorical analogy has
usually been considered unsuitable for scientific language. Metonymic continuity,
by contrast, fulfils one of sciences basic aspirations, namely, finding universal
causes and principles that may be applied to different dimensions of reality. Laplanche
(1970b) points to the ambiguity between metonymy and metaphor in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The model of the protoplasmic cell is at times viewed as a metaphor, and at times as metonymic continuity. As
Laplanche puts it: To make sense of the death drive, we cannot consider that the biological
myth developed by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is scientifically valid
(1970b, p. 42). In this sense, Meltzer (1984) explains that Freud debated between an anatomicalphysiological model and one that addressed specifically mental phenomena. Freud believed
that mind and brain were identical from a phenomenological viewpoint. He thus
created a model that enabled him to structure a metaphor that was confused with
a theory. Nonetheless, we can find passages in Freud (1915) where he questions the
likelihood of reducing the psychic to the cerebral: Research has given irrefutable
proof that mental activity is bound up with the function of the brain [] But every
attempt to go on from there to discover a localization of mental processes, every
endeavour to think of ideas as stored-up in nervecells and of excitations as
travelling along nerve-fibres, has miscarried completely [] There is a hiatus here [] Our psychical topography has
for the present nothing to do with anatomy. (Freud, 1915, pp. 1745) Consequently, to be considered plausible the death drive must be
interpreted in a figurative way, as Rechardt pointed out (see Folch and Eskelinen, 1984). From this perspective, it
represents the active and obstinate struggle to retrieve a state of peace, or the
effort to rid oneself of disturbing experiences. Death would be but a particular
guise of this peaceful state; destruction, the means to that end. We are not dealing
here with a provable biological principle but with a basic psychic aspiration. This
author contends that Freuds writings have been interpreted as a failed attempt to
find biological evidence to confirm his point of view, rather than as an attempt to
find a suitable thinking model. His biological speculations may be compared with
scaffoldings that served to build a theoretical model of the psyche. These should
have been dismantled once the building was completed. Conceiving of the death
drive as the restoration (through the shortest or most destructive route) of a state
of absolute stability that eliminates the tensions inherent in human life constitutes
a mistaken simplification of the life flow.6 The life drive also tends to create a state
of stability not in the sense of the Freudian principle of inertia or of Fechnerian stability, but in that of homeostasis as described by Breuer (Breuer and Freud, 18931895) in Studies on Hysteria.
This drive also seeks a state of balance and appeasement that facilitates rather
than counteracts life itself. We are talking about a tendency to a decrease in tension comparable to the Epicurean notion of pleasure. Epicureans do not view pleasure as
sensory gratification but as happiness, which is equated with a state of calm, of serenity (Hottois, 1997). This idea recalls Meltzers (1997) move to separate pleasure from sensuality so as to tie the former to Bions
K factor: The tremendous pleasure of understanding.
AT: Not Falsifiable
The repetitive nature of the economy of tropes and enjoyment prove
that psychoanalysis is falsifiable specifically in the context of
rhetoric
Lundberg 12 (Christian Lundberg is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies, Lacan in Public:
Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric, 11/26/12) AqN
One of the most hallowed maxims of rhetorical studies is that rhetoric is an arta techne for engaging discourse in the properly Aristotelian sense of the term. Techne implies a systematic mode of experiential
knowledge, but often in declaring that rhetoric is an art, the accent of this declaration falls on the intuitive and the experiential facets of techne at the expense of the more systematic charge inherent in it.
While for much of the rhetorical tradition, techne has primarily taken the valence
of a prudential guide for intuitive judgment, Lacan turns to rhetoric to confer on
psychoanalysis a scientific status. Lacans claims to the science of rhetoric
respond to a number of critics who had framed psychoanalysis as an alchemical
mix of unfounded theories, intuitions and inherited practices. Borrowing from
Karl Poppers philosophy of science, such critiques of psychoanalysis argued that
analytic practice was non-falsifiable, resting on the idea that no empirical evidence
could be mustered to refute it. Any claim to evidence to the contrary of Freudian theories could always be elided by generating another explanation with dubious
empirical grounding to account for potential exceptions. In drawing on rhetoric as a systematic mode for theorizing the nature of the sign, representation, and the logic and social functions of discourse, Lacan
rescues Freudian categories from non-falsifiability. Rhetoric, which is so squarely rooted in art, became one of Lacans most powerful allies in articulating psychoanalysis as a science, providing a vocabulary for
attending to the repeatable elements of signification that might be held up to empirical verification. Lacan vacillated at different points in his career on psychoanalysiss status as a science, arguing at points that it
was clearly a science, at others that it was not, and at others that it was a special kind of science.61 Generally, Lacans early career embodied the strongest claim for the scientific status of psychoanalysis, while in
the ambivalence toward science in Lacans thought is that at each instance where
the relationship between psychoanalysis and science is at stake, the question of
rhetoric is never far from the conversation. For example, in The Psychoses and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan
argues that psychoanalysis is a science on the basis of its attention to a set of repeatable logical forms, specifically to trope as a way of specifying the possible connections underwriting discursive and
representational practices. Other accounts read Lacan as eventually giving up on the idea that psychoanalysis is a science, but do so, once again, with explicit reference to rhetoric. For example, Stuart
Schneiderman argues that by 1977 Lacan had given up the quest to prove psychoanalysis as a science, that after having posed the question of the scientific status of psychoanalysis for so many years, he had come
to the conclusion that it was not a science. The reason was one offered by Karl Popper, namely that psychoanalysis was irrefutable. Lacan said that analysis was closest to rhetoric. . . . Thus analysis seeks to
persuade but not convince, to persuade the analysand to recognize things that he knows already and to act on his desire.63 Of course, one might take issue with the account of rhetoric that is implicit in this claim,
particularly on the grounds that the framing of rhetoric in Schneidermans account affirms an understanding of rhetoric exclusively through reference to persuasion, contingency, and probabilitya conception
theory to be mapped onto reality because sciences are parasitic on the specific. As Lacan
argues, science always begins with the particular: To be sure, analysis as a science is always a science of the particular. The coming to fruition of an analysis is always a unique case, even if the unique cases lend
science of oratory might emerge? The answer is the economy of trope and
enjoyment. Claiming that Freud drew attention to a fundamental opposition between metaphor and metonymy in mechanisms of dreams, Lacan argues that what Freud calls condensation is
what in rhetoric one calls metaphor, what one calls displacement is metonymy.70 That this reference to a rhetoric of trope frames Lacans application of the vocabulary of structural linguistics is clear from the
concluding sentence of this paragraph: Its for this reason that in focusing attention back onto the signifier we are doing nothing other than returning to the starting point of the Freudian discovery.71 In The
Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the core insight of The Interpretation of Dreams might be fruitfully applied to more than just unpacking dreams. The logic that
inheres in dream work is the same logic that underwrites the function of speech generally. If, following Lacans reading of Interpretation of Dreams, one is inclined to agree that speech serves as a synecdoche for
rhetorical processes generally; by extension one might conclude that speech offers privileged insight into the functioning of everyday discourses. Thus it is no surprise that Lacan recommends instruction in
rhetoric as an indispensable component of analytic practice. According to Lacan, this realization should compel attention to the function of rhetoric . . . ellipsis and pleonasm, hyperbaton or syllepsis, regression,
repetition, appositionthese are the syntactical displacements; metaphor, catachresis, antonomasis, allegory, metonymy, and synecdoche these are the semantic condensations in which Freud teaches us to read
the intentions . . . out of which the subject modulates his oneiric discourse.72 This extension of Freuds dream work to speech by means of a globalization of trope founds the possibility of psychoanalysis as a
science, via recourse to the scientific properties of oratory: At the bottom of the Freudian mechanism one rediscovers these old figures of rhetoric which over time have come to lose their sense for us but which for
centuries elicited a prodigious degree of interest. Rhetoric, or the art of oration, was a science and not just an art. We now wonder, as if at an enigma, why these exercises could have captivated whole groups of men
for such a long time. If this is an anomaly its analogous to the existence of psychoanalysis, and its perhaps the same anomaly thats involved in mans relationships to language, returning over the course of
history, recurrently, with different ramifications and now presenting itself to us from a scientific angle in Freuds discovery.73 Why wonder at the enigma of a science of oratory and the exercises that
constituted it? The exercises that Lacan is most likely referring to were the progymnasmatathe graduated sequence of somewhat formulaic pedagogical practices that introduced the student of oratory to the
inventional moves one might make in composing and/or delivering a speech. This attention to form, embodied in both a theory of arrangement and delivery, attuned the budding orator to the regularities in speech
that render inventional moves not only intelligible, but potentially eloquent. Oratorical practice had foreseen and, long in advance of contemporary linguistics, discovered the formal properties animating
discursive practice. There are two senses of the word formal for Lacan: one that relies on quantification and another that relies, if not on math as we typically understand it, then on the mathematizable, or that
which can be symbolically rendered as a repeatable relation.74 A science is defined by mathematization, as opposed to
quantification: what is distinctive about positive science, modern science, isnt
quantification but mathematization and specifically combinatory, that is to say
linguistic, mathematization which includes series and iteration.75 The oratorical
tradition discovered that rhetorical invention was scientific: in discovering the
progymnasmata, the tradition articulated a conception of inventio (invention) as
the discovery of repeatable symbolic forms. Lacan prefers the first sense of formal because it comports with oratorical pedagogys insight that
language is mathematizable (amenable to a description of its repeatable formal properties), which is the condition of possibility for a science of oratory. The science of oratory
discovers a mode of knowing that would eventually make linguistics the most
advanced of the human sciences by specifying that which is formally repeatable in
the life of the subject and its discourses.76 This understanding of rhetoric moves it
from a prudential art of the intuitive intersubjective judgments to the symbolic
science of forms. For Lacan, an art premised on the disciplining of critical intuition does not move beyond the Imaginary because everything intuitive is far closer to the Imaginary than
the Symbolic.77 In place of the art of intersubjectively grounded intuition, Lacan calls for attention to the trans-subjective apparatus of the Symbolic: the important thing here is to realize that the chain of
possible combinations of the encounter can be studied as such, as an order which subsists in rigor, independently of all subjectivity. . . . [T]he symbol is embodied in an apparatuswith which it is not to be
does not abandon the subject; rather, it decenters the subject as a taken-for-
granted interpretive maxim, replacing attention to what goes on between subjects
with the formal movement of tropes, a movement that is mathematizable, and
therefore amenable to a formal scientific account of its effects: In as much as he is
[they are] committed to a play of [the Symbolic], to a symbolic world . . . man
[human] is a decentered subject. Well, it is with this same play, this same world, that the machine is built. The most complicated machines are made only with
words. Speech is first and foremost that object of exchange whereby we are reorganized. . . . That is how the circulation of speech begins, and it swells to the point of the symbol which makes algebraic calculations
machinic in a very specific way: only insofar as it relies on the set of regularized,
logically possible connections between words and other words. In other words, the
Symbolic is machinic because it is tropologically constituted. But because the
Symbolic is tropologically constituted, its machinic nature is premised on the
various failures in unicity that invite the trope as a compensatory function. Thus, if
the Symbolic is a machine, it is a machine that fails. In the next chapter, I take up the paradox of the failing machine by suggesting
the metaphor of economy as a way of parsing the relationship between the machinic (or automatic) and its failure in the life of the Symbolic.
AT: Not Falsifiable/Scientific
Theres no impact to psychoanalysis not being scientific because
science forecloses the natural state of the subject. Psychoanalytic
frameworks subsume those of science.
Nobus 17 (Dany Nobus is a Professor of Psychology and Psychoanalysis at the University of
Brusel in London and Head of the School of Social Sciences, When Peter Caws met Jacques
Lacan: Some notes on the scientific status of psychoanalysis, Brunel University Research
Archive (BURA)) AqN
In Science and Truth, Lacan is by no means averse to seeing psychoanalysis being
recognized as a science, yet he is quite clear that it cannot possibly associate itself
with any form of established, natural or human scientific practice. The reason is
that what has come to be known as science can only operate on the basis of a
radical rejectionand Lacan explicitly employs the term foreclosure, which he
had singled out as the causal mechanism of psychosis (Lacan, 2006c, p. 742;
2006b, p. 481)of the split subject, which generates the belief, or even conviction
that knowledge can coincide with truth. The term subject, here, should of course not be conflated with human being, individual,
personality, etc. Apart from the fact that it would be difficult to argue that the latter have
been rejected by science, especially since the advent of the human sciences, the
Lacanian subject is exactly the opposite of what the notions of human being,
individual and personality stand for: division rather than unity; absence instead
of presence; dis-being rather than being; real instead of symbolic and imaginary.
From a Lacanian point of view, what Caws designates as the individual subject is thus a contradiction in terms, unless we are to use individual merely as a synonym for
).3 If this is indeed the nature or, perhaps better, the structure of the
ones (Caws, 2003, p. 630
3
At the risk of stating the obvious, the Fort! refers to Freuds account, in the second chapter of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, of a little boys game with a wooden reel. See Freud (1955, pp. 14-16).
constant state of intrinsic inchoate becoming, without ever arriving at a point of
established being. In proposing that psychoanalysis, as an endless series of local theories, is an idiosyncratic science of the subject, Caws still appears to
believe in the possibility for psychoanalysis to accomplish what every scientist, whether human or natural, aspires to, notably the creation of truthful knowledge, with the caveat
the very
that in the psychoanalytic domain its realm of applicability would not extend beyond the boundaries of what he calls the individual subject. However,
cannot but wonder: to what extent, if at all, can the habits and dispositions
broadly, the forms of lifecultivated by psychoanalytic practice survive, let alone
flourish, under modern social and political conditions? If the emancipatory
inclinations and democratic virtues that psychoanalytic practice promotes are
systematically crushed or at least regularly unsupported by the world in which
they would be realized, then isnt psycho-analysis implicitly making promises it
cannot redeem? Might not massive social and political transformations be the
condition for the efficacious practice of psychoanalysis? And so, under cur-rent conditions, can we avoid
experiencing the forms of life nascently cultivated by psychoanalytic practice as something of a tease, or even a source of deep frustration?( 2 ) Concerning
Can we bring some order to this host of criticisms? It is remark- able that, for all the criticisms of Zizek's political
Romanticism, no one has argued that the ultra-extremism of Zizek's political position might reflect his
untenable attempt to shape his model for political action on the curative final moment in clinical
psychoanalysis. The differences between these two realms, listed in Figure 5.1, are nearly too many and
too great to restate - which has perhaps caused the theoretical oversight. The key thing is this. Lacan's notion of travers-
ing the fantasy involves the radical transformation of people's sub- jective structure: a refounding of their
most elementary beliefs about themselves, the world, and sexual difference. This is undertaken in the security of the clinic,
on the basis of the analysands' volun- tary desire to overcome their inhibitions, symptoms and
anxieties. As a clinical and existential process, it has its own independent importance and authenticity. The
analysands, in transforming their subjective world, change the way they regard the objective, shared social reality
outside the clinic. But they do not transform the world . The political relevance of the clinic can
only be (a) as a support- ing moment in ideology critique or (b) as a fully-fledged model of politics,
provided that the political subject and its social object are ultimately identical. Option ((7), Zizek's option, rests on the idea, not only of a subject
who becomes who he is only through his (mis) recognition of the objective sociopolitical order, but whose 'traversal of the fantasy' is
immediately identical with his transformation of the socio-political system or Other. I-Ience, according to Zizek, we can analyse
the institutional embodiments of this Other using psy- choanalytic categories. In Chapter 4, we saw Zi2ek's
resulting elision of the distinction between the (subjective) Ego Ideal and the (objec- tive) Symbolic Order. This leads him to analyse
our entire culture as a single subject-object, whose perverse (or perhaps even psychotic) structure is
expressed in every manifestation of contemporary life. Zizek's decisive political-theoretic errors, one substantive and the
other methodological, are different (see Figure 5.1) The substantive problem is to equate any political change worth the name with the
total change of the subject-object that is, today, global capitalism. This is a type of change that can only mean equat- ing
politics with violent regime change, and ultimately embrac- ing dictatorial govermnent, as Zizek now
frankly avows (IDLC 412-19). We have seen that the ultra-political form of Zizek's criti- cism of everyone
else, the theoretical Left and the wider politics, is that no one is sufficiently radical for him - even, we will
discover, Chairman Mao. We now see that this is because Zizek's model of politics proper is modelled on a pre-critical analogy with the
total transformation of a subiect's entire subjective structure, at the end of the talking cure. For what could the concrete consequences of this
have seen that Zizek equates the individual fantasy with the collective
governing analogy be? We
identity of an entire people. The social fantasy, he says, structures the regime's 'inherent
transgressions': at once subjects' habitual ways of living the letter of the law, and the regime's myths of origin and of identity. If
political action is modelled on the Lacanian cure, it must involve the complete 'traversal' - in Hegel's terms,
the abstract versus the determinate negation - of all these lived myths, practices and habits. Politics must involve the periodic founding of of
entire new subjectobjects. Providing the model for this set of ideas, the first iekian political subject was Schellings divided God, who gave
birth to the entire Symbolic Order before the beginning of time (IDLC 153; OB 1448). But can
the political theorist reasonably
hope or expect that subjects will simply give up on all their inherited ways, myths and
beliefs, all in one world- creating moment? And can they be legitimately asked or expected
to, on the basis of a set of ideals whose legitimacy they will only retrospectively see, after they have
acceded to the Great Leap Forward ? And if they do not for iek laments that today subjects are
politically disengaged in unprecedented ways what means can the theorist and his allies use to move
them to do so?
Drive Theory False
Drive theory is false especially the death drive. Its a form of sham
biology.
Callard and Papoulias 12 (Felicity Callard is a Professor in Social Science for Medical
Humanities at Durham University, Constantina Papoulias is a Postdoctoral Researcher in
Patient and Public Involvement, The rehabilitation of the drive in neuropsych oanalysis: from
sexuality to self-preservation, http://dro.dur.ac.uk/9672/1/9672.pdf, Durham University) AqN
Our choice of focus on the drive as it is discussed in neuropsychoanalytic writings is motivated in at least three ways. First, and centrally, the drive is not only a central concept in Freuds work but one that articulates the passage between th e somatic and the psychic.
the drive
Freud claims that the concept of embodies the question of the
is located on the frontier between the mental and the somatic,10 and in this sense the concept itself
relation between what are posited as two distinct domains. As such, drive
invokes a problematic that is also central within neuropsychoanalysis drive . Secondly, Freuds
theory is characterised by a remarkable volatility. Freud was centrally On the one hand,
needs (for example, the need for nourishment); he later recast this distinction as
an antagonism between sexual drives and selfpreservative or ego-drives (around
1910); finally, he installed the more mythic opposition between the life and death
drives, supplemented by their composites the drive marks the space of a , in 1920.13 Thirdly, in so far as
arises in relation to the death drive , it is signifi cantly buoyed by Freuds own claim that drive theory is our mythology.)17 Finally, the rejection of the drive has corresponded with many
There is,
contemporary psychoanalysts rethinking of psychic space through object relations and intersubjective engagements, and their seeking to minimise the determinism of endogenous forces in the production of that space. 18
the drive tout court, in so far as he defined att achment as a behavioural system, a
concept borrowed from ethology. A behavioural system is a species-universal
neural program that organizes an individuals behavior in ways that increase the
likelihood of survival.21 Bowlby and att achment theorists, in replacing drive
with behavioural systems, thereby construct a new foundation for psychic space,
in which this space emerges under the auspices of self-preservation, fitted towards
survival. In sum, we see the drive being rejected as too biologistic and not scientifi
c enough, charged with introducing a sham biology, a biolog-ism within the psyche .
Freuds emphasis on the libidinal foundations of the psyche drive theory, in its . Here,
various recastings across Freuds own writings, becomes a placeholder not only
for what Freud referred to as the biological but also for the primacy of the sexual
in the psychic apparatus. we would suggest that the rejection of the drive in
Seen in this way,
youre saying it I think people might get the impression that theres a little tussle
over how this should be interpreted or that should be interpreted when in fact the
real historical touch-points that we have paint just a horrible picture of Freudof
someone whos really a complete fraud. Who manufactures evidence in order to
support his theories, that copies without attribution other peoples work or at least
he promotes himself as being this original great genius when hes really stood on
the shoulders of all these other people. I mean, the history of it beyond just
critiquing theory is just stunning for people who havent fully encountered it. The
other side of that that I really want you to get into to support that is how we know
this information was really held under lock and key and protected under the
tightest controls for so long. Then its gradually pried loose. So give people a sense for that. Dr. Todd Dufresne: Theres so much to say I hardly
know where to begin. In some ways, from my perspective, what really happened was Ernest Jones came out with this three-volume biography in 1953, 1955, 1957, Sigmund
Freud: Life and Work. Then he died. Basically you have everything after the Jones biography, which is an official biography of psychoanalysis, as kind of a response to this
official biography. What happens is that people start becoming more and more critical of psychoanalysis. For me, Rosen is one of the first figures in this regard and its around
1967 when he publishes a book called, Brother Animal, in which he reveals that one of Freuds earlier followers committed suicide. I guess the radical side of this is that Freud
was very unmoved by this followers plight. He was a sycophant like half the people surrounding Freud, and Freud rebuffed him in various ways and the guy committed suicide.
Okay, thats horrible but not entirely surprising in some ways. But deeper and more radical than that, Rosen exposed that during two periods in the 1920s Freud analyzed his
own daughter, Anna, and thats what really got him into trouble. Thats kind of the beginning of this movement to reassess the fundamental myths of psychoanalysis or the
things we didnt know were myths but certainly we now know are myths. I call it really the beginning of critical Freud studies. I take it to be a post-Jones movement, roughly
from the mid-60s through to the late 1990s and maybe going on today, as well. I see it as like the whole purpose of scholarship and Freud studies is to move to critical Freud
studies. Now how did it happen? Its really amazing. One of the untold stories of psychoanalytic studies or
Freud studies, as its usually called, is that one of the reasons theres so much
misinformation is that the vast majority of books published and that appear under
the library heading of BF173 to BF175 roughlygo to any library and youll find all
the Freud books there. Most of this work is vanity publishing. So much of the field
is run by psychoanalysts who have positions of authority. They start their own
book publishers. They start their own journals. Pretty soon they have an authority
in the marketplace of ideas so its very, very hard to actually find in the thousands
of books published on Freud anything that actually tells the truth. Its a hard thing for somebody to free
themselves from many, many misconceptions about Freud. You mentioned a couple of them. Freud manufactured evidence. One of the things
thats not well-appreciated is how Freud went out of his way to manipulate the reception of his own work, right? He wrote his own histories,
first of all. Many times he revised his own histories and sometimes there are
discrepancies with his own histories. He was always trying to spin his history in
advance because Freud always perceived himself as an historically important
person, so he proceeded accordingly. He destroyed some of his correspondence.
He would destroy some of his process notes that he used to create his famous case
studies, of which there really is only four that he wrote, all of which are failures, by
the way. He destroyed the notes and these were important cases. Youd think youd keep them but he
destroyed them. He tried to get his famous letters with Wilhelm Fliess destroyed but Marie Bonaparte preserved them against his wishes. So Freud was always interested in
manipulating the reception of his work and he was largely successful in many ways. People have generally believed what he said. Alex Tsakiris: Can we stop right there? One of
the things I always like to do when we get into these discussions with people and I have just a very superficial understanding of this stuffyou could get into it in much greater
detail. I always stop at this point and say, What would that look like in modern academic standards? Just what we already know there. What would that look like if any
intellectual, academic figure of our time was known to have done those things? I cant imagine but that they would be completely ostracized as just the beginning of it. Theyd be
a complete joke. Dr. Todd Dufresne: The problem is, Alex, thats theres hardly any modern equivalent to Freud. What Freud got away with for
so long, which is essentially passing off incomplete results or fraudulent results as
the truthI can give you some examples as we get into it later. He did all of the
things you said he did. He manufactured evidence and even the evidence that he
had, he may have felt legitimately and honestly is so shot-through with
epistemological problems because theres the contamination of results by the
expectations he had on the patients. We know this is called suggestion, right? And undue influence. One of the things thats interesting
about Freud is that he was a scientist and as a scientist he had followers. These followers routinely referred to his major works like The Interpretation of Dreams as their bibles.
So were already in Freuds life in the presence of a kind of cult or church or something thats not scientific. This guy was a trained neurologist, right? He asked some legitimate
What should
questions. He explored these questions but at some point ambition took over and he fudged the results in many ways like youre saying.
happen with Freud is the minute people see that he fudged the results in a number
of ways that are absolutely cleartheres no questionwell, anybody that has any
fair-mindedness would say that everything that follows from these results is
therefore questionable. But thats not what happens with Freud, and thats
because were in the presence of a belief system, like a religion, so people dont
want to question it. Anything like this today, youd lose tenure. Youd lose your job.
Youd be fired. When this happens people fall into disgrace. But Freud has never
really seriously fallen into disgrace. One of the things thats happened which is amazing to me because Im somebody who works in the
humanities is that part of the blame belongs to people in the humanities and social sciences that dont really care about science, or in some ways truth, not to be too general
They dont care that maybe he fudged the results; theyre just interested in this
about it.
producer of my times, and I was teaching Harvard undergraduates at a time when identity politics and the
critique thereof (anti-essentialism) dominated the humanities. The work I did and
taught on conscious and unconscious constructions of race/racism, gender/
sexism, sexuality/homophobia and their intersections was important work. But by the
early 2000s, it had become clear to me and, apparently to many others as well, that class had fallen off the intersectionality
research and teaching agenda. How that happened has become an area of great interest to me. It feels like
a fault line very much connected to neoliberalism: to changes in the nature of work, politics,
recognizing unconscious effects of power and how we reproduce them in the clinic,
and I have had the opportunity to elaborate that work with a wonderful group of clinicians from the relational, Kohutian, Lacanian and Kleinian/Bionian traditions. But, when I
began to think about what liberation psychologists might want to know about social psychoanalysis, I realized that my own education had completely omitted all the amazing
and important psychoanalytic work that has focused on groups and unconscious group process: the group analytic tradition, the Bionian Tavistock tradition, the social defenses
not teach this work to clinicians and began to feel that not teaching it is another
way we collude with individualism and neoliberalism. It seems to me that
psychoanalytic education has to change if psychoanalysts are going to contribute
anything to social transformation. And any radical form of social psychoanalysis
has to become accessible enough to enter the public sphere. The time is perhaps right for that, as even
mainstream journalists talk about the effects of unconscious racism (see, for example, Blow, 2015). But unconscious racism, like
terms with violence, exclusion and antagonism, not about resolving or removing
these. The acceptance of lack takes the form of an Act or Event, in which the myth of subjective completeness is rejected and the incompleteness of the self is embraced.
The primary ethical imperative in Lacanian politics is to accept the primacy of
antagonism, i.e. the central ontological claim of the Lacanian edifice itself. Mouffe, for
instance, demands that one accept an element of hostility among human beings as something akin to a fact of human nature (2000, 130132). She attacks deconstructive and
dialogical approaches to ethics for being unable to come to terms with the political in its antagonistic dimension. Such approaches lack a proper reflection on the moment of
decision which characterises the field of politics and which necessarily entail[s] an element of force and violence (ibid., 129130). Mouffes alternative involves a politics
which acknowledges the real nature of [the] frontiers [of the social] and the forms of exclusion that they entail instead of trying to disguise them under the veil of rationality or
morality (ibid., 105). She celebrates democracy, but her version of democracy depends on the possibility of drawing a frontier between us and them and always entails
relations of inclusionexclusion (ibid., 43). The derivation of such views is unclear from the text, but seems to be that, since everyone needs a master-signifier as an element in
their psyche, and since such a signifier arises through the machinations of the political, therefore the exclusionary and violent operations of coercive state apparatuses must be
the central
accepted as an absolute necessity for any kind of social life. This is Hobbesian statism updated for a post-modern era. As should by now be clear,
claims of Lacanian theory are ontological rather than political. Indeed, since
Lacans work deals with politics only very occasionally, the entire project of using
Lacan politically is fraught with hazards. With rare exceptions, Lacanian theorists
put ontology in the driving seat, allowing it to guide their political theorising.
Political discourse and events are subsumed into a prior theoretical framework in
a manner more reminiscent of an attempt to confirm already-accepted
assumptions than of an attempt to assess the theory itself. Among the authors discussed here, Zizek takes this
the furthest: the stuff of theory is notions, which have a reality above and beyond any referent, so that, if reality does not conform to the notions, it is so much the worse for
less nihilistic Lacanians such as Zizek and Badiou who maintain that a Lacanian politics requires a radical break with the present political system. Butler, for her part, is
not sufficiently committed to an ontology of lack to accept the other protagonists inability to provide substantial argumentation for their positions. She calls
Lacanian theory a theoretical fetish, because the theory is applied to its
examples, as if already true, prior to its exemplification. Articulated on its own
self-sufficiency, it shifts its basis to concrete matters only for pedagogical purposes
(in Butler, Laclau and Zizek 2000, 2627). She suggests, quite accurately, that the
Lacanian project is in a certain sense a theological project, and that its heavy
reliance on a priori assumptions impedes its ability to engage with practical
political issues, using simplification and a priori reasoning to avoid the rather
messy psychic and social entanglement involved in studying specific political
cases (ibid., 155156). She could perhaps have added that, in practice, the switch between ontology and politics is usually accomplished by the
transmutation of single instances into universal facts by means of a liberal
deployment of words such as always, all, never and necessity; it is by this
specific discursive move that the short-circuit between theology and politics is
achieved. Butler questions the political motivations involved in such practices.
Are we using the categories to understand the phenomena, or marshalling the
phenomena to shore up the categories in the name of the father [i.e. the master-
signifier]? (ibid., 152). The problems raised by Butler are serious, and reflect a deeper malaise. Aside from the absence of any significant support for their basic
ontological claims, the two Lacanian camps both face enormous problems once they attempt to specify their political agendas. For the Laclauians, the greatest difficulty is that of
democracy is necessary to take the bite out of intractable conflicts arising from
human nature, and the resultant condemnation of utopian theories such as
Marxism for ungrounded optimism and resultant totalitarian dangers, is hardly
original. To take one example, it arises in Rawls discussion of reasonable pluralism and the burdens of difference in Political Liberalism (1996, Lecture 2 and
passim). Since much of the appeal of Lacanian theory depends on its claims to be offering a new, radical approach to politics, such similarities must be downplayed.
Perm Analytical Eclecticism
Permutation do both the permutation is a form of analytical
eclecticism where competing theories are combined to generate new
conceptual frameworks of engaging intuitions at the macro and micro
level. This is not a form of synthesis, which proves our competition
and resolves their totalizing claims of the world. Using the two
theories to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each is the
best method for resolving individual shortcomings.
Katzenstein and Sil 10 (Peter Katzenstein Jr. is a Professor of International Studies at
Cornell, Rudra Sil is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Pennsylvania, Analytic
Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics: Reconfiguring Problems and Mechanisms across
Research Traditions, Cambridge University Press,
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/B078D54DEFB199ADA653B7B35004EACF/S1537592710001179a.pdf) AqN
At the same time,analytic eclecticism should not be confused with unified synthesis. Although some
do use the term synthesis to refer to what we call eclecticism,26 we view synthesis as a more ambitious project. It requires something
This combinatorial logic of analytic eclecticism is evident in, among other fields,
the study of institutional change. The first point to note is that the path towards more eclectic styles of analysis
typically begins with the relaxation of metatheoretical postulates and the
broadening of analytic boundaries among discrete research traditions. Generally
treated as competing alternatives, economic, historical, and sociological variants
of the new institutionalism have all sought to explain a wider range of
phenomena employing a wider range of analytic constructs.30 Historical
institutionalists have moved away from the emphasis they initially placed on institutional persistence linked to path dependence. They now seek to
trace more incremental or gradual processes of change that can either generate
novel institutional forms over long time horizons or produce unexpected
breakdowns at critical thresholds.31 Economic institutionalists have gone beyond the treatment of institutions as emergent self-enforcing
equilibria produced by individual-level preferences. They now seek to make sense of institutional change by considering the implications of shifting parameters and iterated
sociological
games, and by exploring how social norms affect the supply of information and the expectations of actors engaged in bargaining.32 In addition,
that is so deeply set in the foundations of cultures. This makes the erection and
enforcement of laws and conventions of good behaviour all the more important,
because what is bad and underneath will not easily go away. We must be liberal in the public sphere and radical in our
knowledge of the deeper issue. Second, I want to return to the dialectic - the deep, mutually constitutive
interrelations between the racist and the oppressed. What binds them together is
not only the worst aspects of human nature - aspects that may well be ineradicable.
What makes these destructive aspects take the specific form of racism is
historically contingent, and at the root of that contingency is the social and
economic organisation of the world that gives order to consent along the lines of
economic and nationalistic relationships which are specific to our own age. These are not set
in unchippable stone. They are solid but mutable. When we seek to address racism psychoanalytically, we will get
nowhere (nor will we with respect to any other matter) unless we grasp and seek to
redirect the social, cultural, economic and geopolitical forces which lead our
nastiness to take this particularly horrid form. Then, perhaps, we can replace the
loud silence with the sounds of scraping and chipping away at our own ways of
shaping the thantic side of human nature. All of this takes me back to Freud's pessimism. He pointed out - and
Kleinians have been even more sombre about this - that the psychotic and rapacious parts of human nature are kept
at bay only by constant effort and that they are omnipresent in phantasy and ever-
ready to erupt if sublimation and guilt fail in their work. Racism, then, is not
something alien, a throwback. It is the omnipresence of primitive processes, let
out of their cage by thanatic social, cultural, political, ideological and related
forces in nominally civilised communities. I grew up in a highly-cultured, dropsically wealthy, suburb (the very one where the 'Dallas' television
soap opera was set), but it was racist throughout, with a black and Mexican servant class, and people with whom I worked at a nearby Ford assembly plant were at thast time active members of the Ku Klux Clan.
The emotions and actions we find in racism are part of our own mental worlds, relatively unaltered by the history of the civil rights movement. What has altered, however, is the frequency of violently acting out
such feelings, and the means of legal redress have also grown. Even so, as I write, the Sunday paper reports a race riot in Brooklyn between blacks and orthodox, Lubavitcher Jews. 'The Reverend Al Sharpton, a
veteran of these occasions, demanded the arrest of the driver of the car', a Hasidic Jew who had struck and killed a black child, 'and the appointment of a special prosecutor. The rotund preacher denounced the
Hasidic Jews as "diamond merchants" and held several of his trademark "Day of Outrage" demonstrations. 'For once, though, Sharpton - who was immortalised as The Rev. Bacon in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of
the Vanities - found himself outflanked by more radical voices. Sonny Carson, a self-styled urban guerrilla, who leads a group called X-clan [after Malcolm X], demanded more action on the streets... 'At the funeral
of the black child last week, Carson talked of a white plot to destroy black America. "The conspiracy is widespread. I've just come back from Milwaukee. In Milwaukee, they are eating us," he declared in an
pretend that we can wish or liberalise the feelings away. They are part of what
dwells in our inner worlds, inhabitants of our mental space - part of everyday
human nature, just below the surface, awaiting the appropriate social and
economic conditions to erupt again, with undimmed destructive virulence. That is the lesson of
the riot and of recent international relations. Eternal vigilance is the price of civilization. If you take the army
away, you'd better have some civil forces at the ready, or humanity will revert to its
primitive projective and scapegoating mechanisms. A pity, but it's best to know
what we are up against. De-repression is utterly dangerous unless civil society is
strong.