Lacanian Coordinates

From the Logic of the Signifier to the Paradoxes of Guilt and Desire

Bogdan Wolf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429915512
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychoanalysis is an experience of truths and lies in language. It is also a discourse, and a praxis. Lacanian Coordinates takes the reader from the beginning of Lacan's teaching, from the logic of the signifier and the Lacanian subject, to the drive and object a, qua object a, the paradoxes of guilt, and finally to the desire of the Other, love, and femininity - the themes which are explored and developed in the forthcoming second volume of Lacanian Coordinates. This book explores the points of Lacanian orientation that lead us to the particularity of the subject, and considers whether we find them not solely in the discourse of the universal, to which religion, science and philosophy testify, but also in the analytic experience itself. Psychoanalysis creates conditions for an encounter with an analyst and with words forgotten, neglected, underestimated, yet also bursting with meaning and surprises. Each chapter contributes to this subjective realisation, taking as reference the clinic, the voice of an analysand, and everyday discourse.

Chapter One
The debris and the new discoveries

Knowledge in psychoanalysis

What does psychoanalysis do? If there is anything psychoanalysts may have in common, it is their diversity in which is recognised the work of loss, failure, and impossibility in the practice of psychoanalysis. It will be of no use, if only of pretence, to try to agree on these in principio and a priori without passing through an experience we call psychoanalytic. It is on the basis of this recognition that the analyst becomes authorised to capture his psychoanalytic experience in a form of a definition. How to define psychoanalysis, Lacan asks, if no one knows what psychoanalysis is. And since no one knows what it is, psychoanalysts can only speak about it on the basis of particularity, what it does, and to whom.

There is no point, I suppose, in launching a critique against the academics, philosophers, scientists, and other “psychoanalytic theorists” when they take a swing, and sometimes a stab, at psychoanalysis because there is no one, including clinicians, to suppose them of such a knowledge. “No one knows what psychoanalysis is” implies anyone can say about it what gives them pleasure. The measurement of knowledge may imply some form of a proof of what does not deceive, as Lacan said early on. But a knowledge of psychoanalysis does not give itself to measurement in the same way science would and does. Psychoanalytic knowledge can be found as situated in the structure of the discourse as a produce of analysis. Therefore, psychoanalytic knowledge is not so much measured as produced as a result of the analytic process. In the end of analysis we only know what we say or what we choose not to say, which gives us an inkling about desire, which in the case of those who followed Lacan’s desire gives them some indication about theirs. It may only be pertinent to note that whatever the qualitum of the analytic experience, psychoanalytic knowledge produced in effect derives at the beginning from what the subject wants to know and not from spoken and written productions referred to, which sometimes eclipses the subject’s desire in relation to knowledge.

The question therefore shifts towards the one concerning the practice of the symptom and of who listens and with what kind of ears. Does one listen because what is said easily slips into common beliefs, prejudices, agitating our well-worn yet overblown affects to resist and protest or does one listen to that which remains incomplete, enigmatic, unknown, and allusive? Sooner or later in the course of the analytic process we come to realise that in psychoanalysis we do not deal with meanings or units of information communicated, or ranted to and fro for better or worse, of the agitated prejudices of the ego. We realise this because precisely it had originally prompted us to seek in analysis an answer to the question of the subject: what do I want? Why is life so difficult? Why must I die before coming to know what life is? How much more of this sometimes unbearable solitude? Why does love never last long enough? Why did I agree with what other people wanted me to do to come to question what they expected of me? And so on. These traces of desire and obstacles to it at the same time constitute the indication in question—it is always what I want to know and from whom that will determine the product at the end.

Whatever the degree to which these questions differ from one subject to another, they already highlight a conflict and a struggle, alluding to what might be at stake and vaguely pointing to the paradoxical satisfaction that kept the subject hostage to these assumptions—for they are questions only in so far as they suppose an answer, namely an other who may have it. Analysis comes to existence out of this supposition. What is expected of the analyst and how to bear the enigma of that desire with which the subject comes to analysis to ask about it in any way he can, nostalgically, depressively, aggressively, persistently, until … .

The hysteric “knows” it from the start, without knowing it, and Freud must have known it if he founded the practice of psychoanalysis starting with transference to his hysterics. But every subject is a hysterical subject, it is just that some do not want to know this and others only come to know it much later. There is no knowledge about the subject’s suffering, the malaise that turns him into evil-conceited actor or a compensation seeking victim, other than that which comes from the Other’s desire and the satisfaction called jouissance. The idea of knowledge called abstract, and therefore absolute to the extent that it is all alone, separate from any other, falls under the scope of the ideal rather than truth. One suffers for truth in order to be duped by it and to realise one has suffered for a lie. But let’s not reduce this lie to a whiff of vanity—this would render the truth worthless and the subject cynical. Lacan placed the two in the most intimate proximity when he said “I, the truth, lie”. And for those who listen badly, he added: “there is no way to tell all of it, the whole truth”. Why not to say some of it, not-all-of-it or not-every-one but only the relevant one, the one that led the subject by the nose to land a blow at the end of it? This is the kind of truth Lacan would tell us, not giving a toss to the question what to speak about to his students and followers, but following what insists and imposes itself on the subject.

Freud started with the hysterics because, being one of them, he also shunned the absolutist and totalist claim of philosophy to knowledge, assigning it from the start to the desire of the master who was obviously not without desire for the master. That’s why it is not to everyone that we would give a just produced article for comment. Just as it is not every one that we would ask about the analytic experience or the everyday life of the Greeks.

Psychoanalytic experience revolves around the body that does not have a body and around the real knowledge of that lack. How many times can the subject tell the truth? Every single time he speaks as there is no way to say it all. It is not an infinite number, for those who like to count, but it is not countable in advance either. Lacan made this link in Television connecting the satisfaction called jouissance with the uncountable number.

In the article “A spectacular health” (2008), M. Focchi tries to give psychoanalysis an autonomous place by way of eliminating the functions it serves together with other practices, like those of producing therapeutic effects, for example, or its utilitarian value or its function in the market, etc. In the end he is left with a remainder that can no longer be found in all those functions psychoanalysis purportedly shares with other psychotherapies and therapeutic services. This remainder cannot, of course, be defined in the same way as its use value or therapeutic function. As a doctrine and a practice, Focchi writes, psychoanalysis is an “extra factor” that relates to the object of psychoanalysis and no longer to its use value. This distinction, in slightly different terms, was already isolated by Lacan who, as early as at the time of founding the school of psychoanalysis, distinguished between pure psychoanalysis and applied psychoanalysis. For many critically inclined purists, this distinction in the Founding Act was an opportunity for attacking the term “pure” as they mistook it for an attribute. But with this term Lacan created a category to be distinguished from the category of the applicable or applied. He therefore distinguished analytic formation from applied psychoanalysis, especially in the mental health care institutions, where its functions and uses reflect a mixture of qualities, pure and impure being among them.

Pure psychoanalysis thus leads us towards the area that far from being abstract or puerile, in the sense of solely theoretical, designates what Focchi (2008) called “the object of psychoanalysis”, the extra factor that is not shared by or in the field of applied psychoanalysis. And he gives us some indications of what this factor might be when he says that it has to do with jouissance in the speaking being. Jouissance, we could say, points to one side of the object.

The other side has to do with semblance. What kind of satisfaction is jouissance? Let’s take a few examples. A boy who, before he turned criminal and abused women, had been systematically beaten by his mother until black and blue; a patient who keeps his shit well within his reach and marks his territory with the marker of loss; a man who constantly provokes his partner, so that she exhibits anger, even fury that serves for him as some kind of assurance and a token of her love; a man who insists on having all as one, a wife who loves him, children who admire him and work where he is respected; a woman who is happy in her marriage but cannot resist gravitating towards another man for a bit of nookie here and a bit of nookie there. Each of these modes of satisfaction called jouissance constitutes a unique mode of being in the world of discourse, and a paradoxical choice one makes without knowing it or wanting to know it. Getting in, getting out, and making use of objects, instruments, enduring suffering, relishing the idea of another satisfaction, and so on. Precisely in this sense these are also the objects of knowledge we do not want to know anything about. In the end we will, one by one, know something about it. Psychoanalysis inevitably comes to this point: you will know what you want to know, whether you are careful or not, but not in the way you imagined it to come or not to come. We will need to examine these modes of repetition in due course.

Metaphors of the unconscious

But even these instances or insistences of jouissance do not exactly convey the foreignness of the libido filling the space of speech by the speaking subject. The subject speaks, and there are no other means, Lacan stated early on, through which he can transmit what he says. An analytic session, a pure analytic session because it does not apply to anything, rests on these experiences and acts of speech. In the analytic session we try to say the impossible, to speak about jouissance as close as possible to it speaking. But how close is “as close as possible”? The uninterrupted flow of words, the tears that flood the trail of discourse, the rhythmically punctuated statements, the repetitive utterances, sometimes accompanied by the movement of hands, the momentarily raised voice and the blind passion of some deep and unfathomable frustration that propels the movement of the subject, will sooner or later be derailed by a direction of the signifier the analyst isolates. These clear enough indications of a gruesome and recurring hurt are not the end of it or all of it, which would be another mode of jouissance. While showing that something had been done to him, some irreparable damage, a traumatic blow to one’s being in the mist of the past or in the maze of the present, all these, as soon as they begin to emerge and hit the air, start to mark the contours of the subject and make any therapeutic techniques, any advice or programme oriented treatments, any instructive and informative and descriptive comments, useless. And yet these indications of the satisfaction called jouissance with which the subject is imbued, hit the core of his existence and touch the most frequented passages of everyday life.

Here then we have the “extra factor”, the unique point on the map that orients the itinerary of jouissance of the speaking subject in the analysis called “pure” as it can no longer be left in the hands of array of therapeutic reactions. But is this what Lacan called pure psychoanalysis? The recurring question keeps imposing itself on us again and again in the era of regulation and passing talking therapies through the sieve of application value as determined by unexamined ideals and prejudices of the officials. Here it is indeed to do with a purification of practice and of therapeutic relations that are left at their purest when never entered into. The question of analytical formation that interests me lies elsewhere. It arises nowhere else but where the demand for analysis becomes articulated, by mistake, flip of a tongue, dream, parapraxis, in short by way of the unconscious.

When the Freudian unconscious came into ex-istence, it was first heard in the stories of psychoanalysis. Initially, the unconscious was presented through diverse metaphors that primarily included that of archaeology, of ruins, of architecture, and of the dark and hidden sides. A theory, and psychoanalysis was no exception, needs an interpretation, and the literary one is always nearest as it makes the best use of the imaginary means. Freud himself admired Schliemann, who discovered Troy under several layers of other urban ruins—and after initially giving up on the original site only to return to it following his coordinates—and we started to discover Freud. This marked the beginning of Freud’s discovery that was also his discovery of sexuality in everyday life.

As we know Freud invented psychoanalysis while working with the hysterics, which in his time meant hysterical women. Something puzzled him about them and he started to listen to them closer and closer. It was through the discourse of the hysteric, as we would say with Lacan, that he found the unconscious. How he discovered it has not ceased to puzzle us. Just think about this: the blabber as the cornerstone of psychoanalysis, yapping, moaning, and complaining as a foundation of the unconscious. And then, why not? If he had closely followed the cascade of words and the libido flowing through them, it was only to grasp that something of the order of the infinite was at play in that blabber, something continuously imposed itself on and between words, grimaces, surprises, laughter. And very quickly Freud discovered that the hysteric does not know what she is talking about. This was a crucial point. This blabber was indestructible, unstoppable, and somewhat like the drive, blind. It already had some of the characteristics of “our” unconscious, as Lacan elaborated it after founding his school in 1964. But it was not without the recourse to this inaugural discovery of Freud that Lacan came up with his own definition of the unconscious couple of years later, which for me is the most beautiful and intriguing one. Quite simply, the unconscious is “what we say it is”.

That the unconscious is what we say (it is) follows from another statement Lacan made some time earlier, namely that language is the condition of the unconscious. If it were the other way round, as Laplanche wanted it, what would have Freud been listening to? Philosophical ideas? And who would we have today in the analyst’s chair, Žižek? As if an idea, and a concept, were not part of language and part of the demonology of the obsessional. As if Lacan did not say that the concept of the unconscious is included in the unconscious. Freud continued to prick up his ears not because language was performing phonetic acrobatics before him but because he found a real satisfaction at the heart of the hysterical blabber. If the unconscious was constructed as an effect of language, the satisfaction was produced alongside it. We call it phallic jouissance.

Now, what exactly did Lacan have in mind when he said the unconscious is what we say? His assertion seems to imply that the unconscious is flat and even superficial. And that it is right there before our noses. So we waited all these years since Freud’s discovery to find that the structure of the unconscious is constituted as a surface? How disappointing it must have appeared to those who did not follow to realise that psychoanalysis is no longer a reflection of the “oceanic feeling” or an oracle of infinite meaning or a veil of profundity unknown to mankind. Gone with the wind went the archaeology of the unconscious, gone the architecture of depth, and gone the metaphors of castles and palaces, undergrounds and vaults, of Alhambra and of Schliemann’s Troy, of glimmering light in the distance and of the dark side of the moon. Gone but testifying to fantasies of their authors who like Dwelshauvers gave us several definitions of what the unconscious is not. We should add to it Hartmann’s opus magnus on the philosophy of the unconscious.

The unconscious as a surface and the dignity of the subject as captured in relation to the Other on the surface—this was indeed something radically new. It led Lacan to grasp a new reality where appearance is no longer the opposite, or a sign, of essence but enmeshed in it just as rose that appears as a rose is a rose. “A rose is a rose is a rose”, Gertrude Stein said not knowing she, too, was a Lacanian. With the difference between the appearance of a rose and its essence disappearing in Plato’s library, we were left with the truly incomprehensible knot of the real and the symbolic, being and its manifestation, that comes to existence in the analytic process is never the way you have imagined it. The appearance as essence and the essence as appearance, inseparable, like two sides of a band or inside and outside of a hole. The unconscious is just that kind of a rose.

Love and terror

The terrorism of today, which should be described as a destruction without time for negotiation, remains our failure—“our” in so far as violence is responded to violently. Terror, indubitably, emerges as a form of love, the most violent love we have come to witness, that appears as perplexing, indeed. It is a love to death but not without love of death. The act of destruction does not go without a subject whose saying is measured not to resonate back to him for which some listening of another is needed. That’s where the failure lies, in not hearing what may come in reply to violence. This love of death, which Freud called the death drive, has disoriented us as it indicates one way street where only death could catch up with death. This strange love of what Lacan called “dark God” has shaken the foundations of our belief in humanity. The unconscious can have this jolting effect of undermining and reorganising a subject’s belief in an instant, which is followed by a tacit mourning of coming to terms with it. The strange thing is that after an act of violence that tears to pieces our convictions, life goes on and a belief in the survival of humanity goes on too, however anachronistic this may seem to some. Love and terror have become neighbours, Christian neighbours who cannot live apart from each other, who love each other to death. How could there be terror without God? The unconscious, where it is not true to human convictions, the unconscious as inhuman, has this trace of being a terrorist, capable of destroying what we love and cling to, the ideals we mistake for the “universal values”. With the unconscious rewriting our daily history, psychoanalysis appears to enlighten the terrified ego gripped by the terror of the unconscious. In the dream told by an analysand he appears on a breakfast TV program and is asked whether psychoanalysis can in any way contribute to the debate about “terrorism”. “I said yes”, he says, “yes, it can, however minimally”. Perhaps he would want to change something in peoples’ perception of him. Perhaps he is gripped with guilt. His wish shows him as meaning well. Like all of us he is a Creon who would banish and condemn the law breakers to eternal hell in the name of good. That’s his good, as Lacan showed us in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1992). In the dream the subject gives a brief answer to the newsreader—“yes, it can, however minimally” He suffers and suffering is not universal, it concerns the subject, him. And then something awakes him: “We all suffer”, he adds, “the terrorised and the terrorising”. In theory we do, but the terrorised and the terrorising in the subject intersect at the level of the trauma. They are new signifiers for him, never articulated before, and they will produce new meanings. What’s important for him at this moment is what side he is on. This choice would be on the side of sense. To recognise his position where the two sides overlap would be something else and determine what he is for the Other. Of course his dream speaks about where he is in relation to those in his early life who wielded violence. In childhood the violence is language. It is called trauma, and it is a failure to symbolise an act in the act. So we only do it retroactively, after suffering has weighed down on him. Subject’s suffering is the royal road to the unconscious, to the master signifier between the ter-rorised and the terrorising that weighs down on him. And it is not royal at all. Is it true that he sees himself as someone of whom some knowledge can be supposed or does he expect the analyst to tell him this? Yes.

Some days later I open a newspaper and am reminded that the public debate on terrorism is widening and that it is not only my patient’s dream that is a co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• CHAPTER ONE The debris and the new discoveries
• CHAPTER TWO New coordinates of psychoanalysis
• CHAPTER THREE Of the truths and lies of logos: Lacan meets Heidegger
• CHAPTER FOUR The signifier, the letter, the voice, and the subject of certainty
• CHAPTER FIVE Two sides of repetition
• CHAPTER SIX The drive and its satisfactions
• CHAPTER SEVEN Superego and the logic of guilt
• REFERENCES
• INDEX