Lacan and the Political

Yannis Stavrakakis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134694013
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The work of Jacques Lacan is second only to Freud in its impact on psychoanalysis. Yannis Stavrakakis clearly examines Lacan's challenging views on time, history, language, alterity, desire and sexuality from a political standpoint. It is the first book to provide an overview of the social and political implications of Lacan's work as a whole for students coming to Lacan for the first time.
The first part of Lacan and the Political offers a straightforward and systematic assessment of the importance of Lacan's categories and theoretical constructions for concrete political analysis. The second half of the book applies Lacanian theory to specific examples of widely discussed political issues, such as Green ideology, the question of democracy and the hegemony of advertising in contemporary culture.

1

THE LACANIAN SUBJECT

The impossibility of identity and the centrality of identification

Prolegomena

Having drawn the attention of the reader to the problems involved and the precautions that are necessary in any project linking Lacanian theory and the political (problems that stem both from the difficulties entailed in all attempts at bringing together psychoanalysis and the political and from the particular status of Lacanian theory), but also having sketched some of the gains anticipated from such an enterprise—and after the brief summary of contents and Lacan’s biography with which my introduction came to a conclusion—it is now time to start our exploration of Lacanian theory and its relevance for socio-political analysis, especially for a theory of the political. Our starting point, to which this first chapter is devoted, is the Lacanian conception of the subject. A subject that by being essentially split and alienated becomes the locus of an impossible identity, the place where a whole politics of identification takes place. It is this subject which is generally considered as Lacan’s major contribution to contemporary theory and political analysis.

There is no doubt that poststructuralism is gradually but steadily hegemonising our theoretical and cultural milieu (especially as far as it concerns areas such as cultural studies and social theory). Lacan has been hailed as one of the cornerstones of this movement together with Jacques Derrida and others.¹ For Sam Weber, ‘the writings of Lacan, together with those of Derrida, remain, today perhaps more than ever, two of the most powerful forces working to keep the alterity of language from being isolated and foreclosed’, and thus to keep poststructuralism alive and kicking (Weber, 1991:xii). What seems to be the most interesting idea behind the poststructuralist appropriation of Lacan is that Lacanian theory can provide poststructuralism with a new conception of subjectivity compatible with its own theoretical foundations. And although to many poststructuralists such a project might seem self-defeating (since poststructuralism is supposed per definitionem not to need the subject any more), others lament ‘the absence of an adequate poststructuralist (or should I say post-poststructuralist) theory of subjectivity’ (Johnson in Bracher, 1993:11). The Lacanian subject is celebrated as capable of filling this lack in poststructuralist theorisation.

This is not the case only with poststructuralism. It seems that the Lacanian subject can fill a lot of lacks and that lacks are increasingly proliferating around us (or maybe today we are becoming more aware of their presence and alert to their persistence). To provide only a few examples, giving particular attention to those having some political relevance, Rosalind Coward and John Ellis point out that ‘Lacan’s subject is therefore this new subject of dialectical materialism…. The emphasis on language provides a route for an elaboration of the subject demanded by dialectical materialism’ (Coward and Ellis, 1977:93). Michele Barrett, for her part, argues that ‘psychoanalysis [and she is mainly referring to Lacan] is the place one might reasonably start to correct the lamentable lack of attention paid to subjectivity within Marxism’s theory of ideology’ (Barrett, 1991:118–19, my emphasis), while Mark Bracher concludes that ‘Lacanian theory can provide the sort of account of subjectivity that cultural criticism needs’ (Bracher, 1993:12). To sum up, the core idea of this argument is that Lacan is relevant for contemporary sociopolitical analysis because of his vision of the human subject. As Feher-Gurewich states à propos of social theory: ‘Lacan’s psychoanalytic approach is founded on premises that are in sharp contrast to the ones which have led to the failure of an alliance between psychoanalysis and social theory’. And what are these premises? ‘Lacan provides social theory with a vision of the human subject that sheds new light on the relations between individual aspirations and social aims’ (Feher-Gurewich, 1996:154).

Simply put, the Lacanian conception of subjectivity is called to remedy the shortcomings or ‘supplement’—this term is not used here in its strictest Derridean sense, although a deconstructionist flavour is not entirely absent—poststructuralism, social theory, cultural criticism, theory of ideology, etc. But isn’t such a move a reductionist move par excellence? Although our own approach, as it will be developed in the following chapters, is clearly located beyond a logic of supplementation, it would be unfair to consider the Lacanian subject as the point of an unacceptable reduction. This would be the case only if the Lacanian notion of subjectivity was a simple reproduction of an essentialist subject, of a subject articulated around a single positive essence which is transparent to itself and fully representable in theoretical discourse. But this essentialist subject, the subject of the humanist philosophical tradition, the Cartesian subject, or even the Marxist reductionist subject whose essence is identified with her or his class interests, is exactly what has to be questioned and has been questioned; it cannot be part of the solution because it forms part of the initial problem. The Lacanian subject is clearly located beyond such an essentialist, simplistic notion of subjectivity. Not only is Lacan ‘obviously the most distant from those who operate with essentialist categories or simplistic notions of psychic cause or origin’ (Barrett, 1991:107), but the Lacanian subject is radically opposing and transcending all these tendencies without, however, throwing away the baby together with the bath water, that is to say, the locus of the subject together with its essentialist formulations.

For Lacan it is ‘true that the philosopher’s cogito is at the centre of the mirage that renders modern man so sure of being himself even in his uncertainties about himself’ (E: 165). But this essentialist fantasy, reducing subjectivity to the conscious ego, cannot sustain itself any more: ‘the myth of the unity of the personality, the myth of synthesis…all these types of organisation of the objective field constantly reveal cracks, tears and rents, negation of the facts and misrecognition of the most immediate experience’ (III:8). It is clear that the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, of an agency splitting the subject of this whole tradition, cannot be overlooked; it brings to the fore something that this tradition had to foreclose in order to sustain itself. As Lacan formulates it in the ‘Freudian Thing’, as a result of Freud’s discovery the very centre of the human being is no longer to be found at the place the humanist tradition had assigned to it (E: 114). It follows that, for Lacan, any project of asserting the autonomy of this essentialist free ego is equally unacceptable—which is not the same, of course, with promoting heteronomy as a general theoretical or political principle: ‘I designated that the discourse of freedom is essential to modern man insofar as he is structured by a certain conception of his own autonomy. I pointed out its fundamentally biased and incomplete, inexpressible, fragmentary, differentiated, and profoundly delusional character [which should not be confused with psychosis but, nevertheless, operates ‘in the same place’]’ (III:145). Lacan argues that Freud’s discovery of the unconscious is more radical than both the Copernican and the Darwinian revolutions in that they both left intact the belief in the identity between human subject and conscious ego. In his view, we owe to Freud the possibility of effecting a subversion of this conception of the subject. It is the subversion of the subject as cogito which, in fact, makes psychoanalysis possible (E: 296): psychoanalysis opposes ‘any philosophy issuing directly from the cogito’ (E: 1).²

But if Lacan dynamitises the essentialist conception of subjectivity, if he moves beyond the metaphysics of a conscious (present) subjectivity, what does he introduce in its place? (Because in opposition to poststructuralists who, in reality, eliminate the locus of the subject by reducing it to a set of subject positions, Lacan does introduce something.) ‘We are told that man is the measure of all things. But where is his own measure? Is it to be found in himself?’ he asks in his first seminar (I:68). And the answer is no. If there is an ‘essence’ in man it is not to be found at the level of representation, in his representation of himself. The subject is not some sort of psychological substratum that can be reduced to its own representation. Once this is granted the way is open to develop an alternative definition of subjectivity. If there is an essence in the Lacanian subject it is precisely ‘the lack of essence’ (Chaitin, 1996:196). And this lack may acquire a quasi-transcendental structure but it does not reproduce traditional metaphysics as some commentators seem to imply (see, in this respect, the discussion of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s The Title of the Letter (1992) in Chapter 3).

The roots of this conception of subjectivity can be traced back to the Freudian idea of a Spaltung (splitting) characteristic of the human condition. Freud never elevated this idea to an epicentre of his theories, but he uses the term from time to time in order to refer to the internal division of the psyche, as in the separation between different psychical agencies (unconscious and conscious/pre-conscious systems) (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988:427–8). In addition, within Freudian theory the conception of the ‘Splitting of the Ego’ (Ich-spaltung) is primarily used with reference to fetishism and psychosis. Lacan, for his part, sees this split as something constitutive of subjectivity in general. It is clear, therefore, that Lacan’s standpoint differs in two crucial respects from Freud’s. While Freud does not refer to the concept of the subject which has mainly philosophical relevance, Lacan, from the very start of his teaching, focuses his theoretical edifice on the idea of subjectivity, which he understands as fundamentally split, thus generalising Freud’s idea of the Ich-spaltung.

Lacan always presented the idea of an irreducible split in subjectivity as the most crucial truth discovered by Freud. No matter how often—or how rarely—Freud used the term Spaltung, it cannot be denied that the discovery of the unconscious itself is a sufficient basis for its formulation and legitimisation, as well as for the generalisation that Lacan is promoting. In his own words:

But if we ignore the self’s radical ex-centricity to itself with which man is confronted, in other words, the truth discovered by Freud, we shall falsify both the order and methods of psychoanalytic mediation; we shall make of it nothing more than the compromise operation that it has, in effect, become, namely, just what the letter as well the spirit of Freud’s work most repudiates.

(E: 171).³

In his seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious (1957–8) Lacan reaffirms that the subject of psychoanalysis is not the subject of knowledge as it is constructed in the tradition of philosophy, that is to say, as corresponding to consciousness, but the subject as structured around a radical split, the Freudian Spaltung (seminar of 14 May 1958). Since the Lacanian conception of subjectivity has been widely acknowledged as the starting point par excellence for the socio-political appropriation of Lacan, our aim in this chapter will be to trace the formulation of this lacking subject within Lacanian theory and to map some of its socio-political implications.

Alienation in the imaginary: ‘the ego is essentially an alter ego’

As with most Lacanian concepts it is easier to approach the concept of the subject in Lacan by pointing out not what it is but what it is not, that is to say through a certain via negativa.⁴ The Lacanian subject becomes relevant for every philosophical discussion of the political exactly because it is not identical to the ‘individual’ or the ‘conscious subject’ presupposed in everyday discourse, but also implied in traditional Anglo-American philosophy and political analysis, from Rawls to rational choice theories.⁵ Most of these accounts of subjectivity reduce the subject to the ego. And the Lacanian subject, as we have already pointed out, is definitely not reducible to the ego. Distinguishing the subject from the ego has been a fundamental orientation of Lacanian theory ever since Lacan’s first seminar. It is necessary at this point to clarify this important distinction. In Lacan’s view, the ego can only be described as a sedimentation of idealised images which are internalised during the period Lacan names the ‘mirror stage’.⁶ Before this phase the self as such, as a unified whole, does not exist. In the mirror stage, during the period from the sixth to the eighteenth month of the infant’s life, the fragmentation experienced by the infant is transformed into an affirmation of its bodily unity through the assumption of its image in the mirror. This is how the infant acquires its first sense of unity and identity, a spatial imaginary identity.

At first, the infant appears jubilant due to its success in integrating its fragmentation into an imaginary totality and unity. Later on, however, the joyous affirmation of imaginary unity is replaced by a resurfacing of the distance between this new unity and the continuing fragmentary, uncoordinated and lacking character of the infant’s lived experience of its real body. Besides, the image in the mirror could never be identical to the infant since it is always of different size, it is inverted as all mirror images are, and, most importantly, it remains something alien—and thus fundamentally alienating:

The fact is that the total form of the body by which the subject anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his powers is given to him only as a Gestalt, that is to say, in an exteriority in which this form is certainly more constituent than constituted, but in which it appears to him above all in a contrasting size (un relief de stature) that fixes it and in a symmetry that inverts it, in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him. Thus, this Gestalt…by these two aspects of its appearance, symbolises the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination.

(E:2)

The ego, the image in which we recognise ourselves, is always an alien alter ego: we are ‘originally an inchoate collection of desires—there you have the true sense of the expression fragmented body [very well depicted, according to Lacan, in the art of Hieronymus Bosch]—and the initial synthesis of the ego is essentially an alter ego, it is alienated. The desiring human subject is constructed around a centre which is the other insofar as he gives the subject his unity’ (III:39). In this regard, the Lacanian theory of the mirror stage is probably one of the first instances in which the radical ex-centricity of human subjectivity is recognised within our cultural terrain.

What is most important here is that in the mirror stage, the first jubilant moment is anticipating its own failure. Any imaginary unity based on the mirror stage is founded on an irreducible gap: ‘the human being has a special relation with his own image—a relation of gap, of alienating tension’ (II:323). Unity in the imaginary is a result of captivation, of a power relation between the infant and its image. But this captivation, the anticipation of synthesis, can never eliminate the real uncoordination of the body of the infant, it can never erase the external and alienating character of its own foundation. This ambiguity is never resolved. One important consequence of this is that narcissism starts appearing in a different light, as constituting the basis of aggressive tension: the imaginary is clearly the prime source of aggressivity in human affairs.⁷ What characterises every narcissistic relation is its deep ‘ambiguity’ (III:92–3). The ambiguity of the imaginary is primarily due to the need to identify with something external, other, different, in order to acquire the basis of a self-unified identity. The implication is that the ‘reflecting specular image’ in imaginary relations, ‘always contains within itself an element of difference’: what is supposed to be ‘ours’ is itself a source of ‘alienation’. In that sense, ‘every purely imaginary equilibrium or balance with the other is always marked by a fundamental instability’ (Lacan in Wilden, 1968:481). This alienating dimension of the ego, the constitutive dependence of every imaginary identity on the alienating exteriority of a never fully internalised mirror image, subverts the whole idea of a stable reconciled subjectivity based on the conception of the autonomous ego. It is not surprising then that when Lacan discusses the idea of the autonomous ego in the ‘Freudian Thing’ it is enough for him to say ‘It is autonomous! That’s a good one!’ (E: 132).

If the imaginary representation of ourselves, the mirror image, is incapable of providing us with a stable identity, the only option left for acquiring one seems to be the field of linguistic representation, the symbolic register. In fact, the symbolic is already presupposed in the functioning of the mirror stage (which highlights the fact that, for Lacan, the passage from the imaginary to the symbolic is a theoretical abstraction pointing to a certain logical and not strictly speaking chronological order). From the time of its birth, and even before that, the infant is inserted in a symbolic network constructed by its parents and family. The infant’s name is sometimes chosen before it is born and its life is interwoven, in the parents’ imagination, with a pre-existing family mythology. This whole framework, while the new-born is not aware of it, is destined to influence its psychic development. Even the images with which we identify in the mirror stage derive from how our parents see us (thus being symbolically sanctioned) and are linguistically structured, which explains why the mirror stage takes place around the period the child is first inserted into language and starts developing its own linguistic skills. In his unpublished seminar on Anxiety (1962–3) Lacan explicitly points out that the articulation of the subject to the imaginary and the symbolic Other do not exist separately. Already in the first jubilant moment of the mirror stage, when the infant assumes itself as a functioning totality in its specular image, already at that point of inaugural recognition, it turns back towards the one who is carrying it, who is supporting and sustaining it, to the representative of the big Other (parent, relative, etc.), as if to call for his or her approval (seminar of 28 November 1962). In that sense, the specular image has to be ratified by the symbolic Other in order to start functioning as the basis of the infant’s imaginary identification: every imaginary position is conceivable only on the condition that one finds a guide beyond this imaginary order, a symbolic guide (I:141). ⁸ Lacan illuminates furthe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Bibliographical note
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Lacanian subject: the impossibility of identity and the centrality of identification
• 2 The Lacanian object: dialectics of social impossibility
• 3 Encircling the political: towards a Lacanian political theory
• 4 Beyond the fantasy of utopia: the aporia of politics and the challenge of democracy
• 5 Ambiguous democracy and the ethics of psychoanalysis
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index