The Structures of Love

Art and Politics beyond the Transference

James Penney

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781438439723, 9781438439730
• eBook ISBN: 9781438439747
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Psychology

Both Freud and Lacan defined the transference as the ego's last stand—its final desperate attempt to keep the truth of the unconscious at bay. Both also viewed the transference as a social phenomenon. In The Structures of Love James Penney argues that transference is the concept with which psychoanalysis thinks through the unconscious demands that circumscribe and can sabotage our creative initiatives in the arts and politics. Penney suggests a method of cultural analysis that enables us to identity the transformative potential of genuine artistic and political acts. He stages a dialogue between Lacan's psychoanalysis and the philosophy of Alain Badiou; includes chapters on Frantz Fanon and Jean Genet, Chantal Akerman and Lucien Freud; and explores the aesthetic, political, and ethical consequences of the transference idea, pushing it into exciting new territory.

I

The Refusal of Love

Love in the Social

It's not too much to claim that the entire project of psychoanalysis was set in motion by Freud's remarkable discovery at the outset of his investigations that the patient never fails to fall in love during treatment. Baptizing this phenomenon transference love, Freud argues that such a love cannot not occur in analysis; that the rules of the game—patient lying on the couch, analyst seated behind, law of free association imposed—guarantee that it will occur without fail. The event of love revealed in the transference is the underlying condition of possibility of psychoanalysis. My initial aim in this chapter will be to show that, despite some terminological confusion and symptomatic ambivalences, two distinct ideas of love can be discerned in the pioneering Freudian texts. There is first the enigmatic power of resistance of the transference love that initiates Freud's analytic desire to solve the riddle of his patients' symptoms. But there is another kind of love as well, and the transference concept as Lacan formalizes it in his teaching is in my view the key to distinguishing between the two.

There is a love “beyond” the transference, that is to say, but it emerges only on condition that we come to terms with a paradox. Though, as Freud consistently maintains, the transference functions objectively as a form of resistance against unconscious desire, perpetuating thereby the symptom's nagging neurotic agency, its manifestation remains an efficient condition of the cure. In other words, the transference reliably points the way toward its own elusive beyond. The occurrence and proper interpretation of the transference are therefore necessary prerequisites for the setting in motion of our inherent capacity to love in the ethical, and therefore political, way that this book sets out to explore in some detail.

I will argue moreover that these statements hold true as firmly outside the specific concrete “situation” of analysis as they do within it. The scare quotes signal how the idea of the analytic scene differs from the phenomenological, existentialist, and sociological understandings of the term developed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Pierre Bourdieu, for example. We can distinguish the psychoanalytic understanding from its rivals by pointing to its acknowledgment of an unconscious psychical agency—desire—that cannot be charted onto the terrain of a situation through reference to either the phenomenon in any of its aspects or its determination by “concrete” or “material”—socioeconomic, most often—factors. This is not to say that the socioeconomic has no role to play in the psychoanalytic theory of love. Indeed, I will argue in this chapter that it leaves its mark on Freud's thought, though in a resolutely psychical guise. For this reason, as I will aim to show, the very category of the socioeconomic must be viewed as always and necessarily inflected by unconscious desire as it is made manifest in the transference.

Historically, the discipline of psychoanalysis writ large, perhaps especially in the Anglo-American region, has had tremendous difficulty relating its apparently subjective or person-based concepts to the collective, the social, and the political. By cutting down to size the formidable discursive wall that for many separates the intimacy of the clinic from the vagaries of its outside, I mean to suggest that no legitimate line of demarcation in theory or in practice can be drawn between our relation to the analyst as determined in the transference and our relation to the wider social world—to the Other, as I will prefer to say after Lacan. The latter relation is equally and identically determined by this very same transferential dynamic. Indeed, the only basic difference between what occurs inside and outside the analytic chamber with regard to the event of transference is that the analytic commitment to “neutrality”¹ has the benefit of making tangible the inauthentic, indeed illusory, foundations of the demand that lies at its root. As Freud clearly knew, the fact that the patient should address a strong passion to someone about whom he knows essentially nothing has the illuminating effect of isolating the psychical sphere, thereby making it amenable to intervention. What is all too rarely acknowledged, however, is that this clinical event uncovers how the transference necessarily mediates our relation to the social world as such, how in fact it has a crucial role to play in the structuring of the social relation in its various forms.

One of this book's underlying premises is therefore that the ambiguities and contradictions that mark Freud's usage of our term of concern have far-reaching consequences for a wide range of fields of inquiry that, with precious few exceptions, have been perfectly happy not to take account of the unconscious; that are even sometimes invoked, especially on the political left, as ways of compensating for the allegedly individualistic or subjectivist shortcomings of Freudian psychoanalysis both as theory and practice. Indeed, the transference concept holds crucial implications for any field of study that sets itself the task of tackling—or reframing through alternative concepts—the thorny, age-old question of the relation between the subject and society, or between the psychic and the social, to use Judith Butler's formulation.² Foremost among these consequences is the fact that only muddled abstractions can result from any method of analysis that fails to acknowledge that the social acquires its properly human dimension through its inflection by the subject's desire—that of not just any old subject, mind you, but specifically that of the unconscious subject as Freud defines it.

I will take the risk of hazarding some reckless generalizations to illuminate this contested social-theoretical terrain in preparation for my intervention. As I present this brief theoretical survey I will attempt the perhaps impossible task of doing so at once in the technical terms familiar to specialists as well as in an ordinary idiom which I hope the general reader will find more accessible. Despite the considerable pressure exercised by a variety of self-styled postmodernist and poststructuralist discourses throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, numerous qualitative and quantitative social-scientific methodologies continue to approach the question of the social as if it were a self-sufficient entity requiring no consideration of its means of presentation or representation, regardless of whether or not such means are viewed as informed or determined by something of the order of the subject, be this either the psychological subject of sense perception or consciousness or the epistemological subject of knowledge. Through their precritical empiricism, these approaches fall short of acknowledging the problematic of the transference by simply approaching the social as if it were already there, ready-made and fully transparent to thought, untouched by the faculty of desire. Though these methodologies persist unquestioned in the less theorized enclaves of the social sciences in all their vastness, they are clearly not the ones that have gained ascendancy in cultural and literary studies over the last three or four decades.

Contrary to received wisdom, however, the more current and avowedly sophisticated discourse theories that strongly posit the constructed nature of the social fail to alter the approach considerably. Though they are explicitly recognized as contingent in their status as representations or vectors of desire, power, or force, social arrangements in these discourses are imagined as fabrications, however multiform and heterogeneously conceived, which remain ultimately consistent—accessibly positive (even in their radical difference), fully knowable or closed—in their inconsistency. More simply, not only does the construction of the social leave nothing unconstructed by discourse, nothing unproduced by power, but this construction is all-pervasive, leaving no empty pockets of negativity or non-knowledge. Remaining unexamined in such approaches is our collective libidinal investment in this construct of seamlessly consistent heterogeneity; in other words, how “the social” is propped up and totalized by both our narcissistic demand for personalized meaning and our submissive fascination with power. The result is that, on the rare occasion when these discourses try to account for (the possibility of) transformational or thoroughgoing change, they must resort to tortuously convoluted formulations and disorienting conceptual gymnastics. There is no space for the act, for the event: happenings that are not already immanent with respect to existing significations, logics, or relations of force. This remains the case even when these happenings are explicitly qualified as oppositional—deterritorializing or micropolitical, for example.

Alain Badiou's more consequential work does not lie vulnerable to these accusations. To my mind, the refreshing conceptual break that his system forces with respect to today's dominant cultural-theoretical orthodoxies is what accounts for the highly welcome, though no doubt improbable, ascendancy of Badiou's work in Anglophone theory circles during the past decade or so. His avowedly Platonist outline of a social world of appearances amenable to logical formalization and subordinated to a mathematical ontology of pure inconsistent multiplicity not only recognizes the objective possibility of unforeseeable and undetermined events, but also attributes to these events the hallowed but unfashionable status of truths, positing moreover that thought is capable of tracing the consequences of these truths in specific contexts through acts of militant fidelity. In other words, in contrast to the theories of discourse production and biopower, Badiou's framework privileges what does not appear in discourse. Put in more positive terms, Badiou aims to think the evanescent event that is all too easy to ignore or to dismiss as never having taken place.

However, Badiou's recent and laudable effort to define specific world-situations through logical formalization, amounting to a kind of non- or antisubjectivist phenomenology, rests on what I consider an aseptic transcendental conditionality that is troublingly severed from its link with human libidinal investment. Put in less philosophical terms, Badiou's project proceeds as if particular social arrangements existed independently of the subjects to whom they appear. Now, these subjects, psychoanalysis teaches us, are always shot through with particular libidinal interests and specific unconscious desires. Yet “the laws of appearance are intrinsic,” Badiou argues, “and they suppose no subject.”³ Badiou's reading of Kant, for example, is emblematic of his desire to rid phenomenology, the study of appearances, of any trace of subjectivity as it has generally been defined through categories designating either a priori psychological forms of consciousness or the experiential contents of sense perception.

The gesture by which Badiou moves to isolate his “worlds” from subjectivity is certainly a politically strategic one in that he wants to tie his own concept of the subject not to the world of appearances, to the status quo of specific situations, but rather to a causatively prior ontological register of pure inconsistent multiplicity. In this way the category of the subject becomes inseparable for Badiou from his notion of truth. For this reason it remains by definition militantly at odds with the state of things as they appear to be. Because it emerges from the void of a given situation, a “place” defined by its minimal degree of phenomenological existence, Badiou's subject remains unmarked by the far-reaching discursive determinations that limit its agency in the representationalist (deconstructionist) and postrepresentationalist (Foucauldian and Deleuzian) versions of poststructuralism. Badiou's event, and the subject who remains faithful to it, are therefore beyond the realm of discourse and power as contemporary theory understands these terms.

Unlike hegemonic theory's variously configured post-subjects, then, Badiou's subject is a subject of radical innovation, one who always emerges in opposition to “the social” as it is defined in any given world-situation. Badiou offers, to my mind, an invigorating alternative to the attacks on the concept of the subject of the last few decades because his construal of this subject is posthumanist: nonintentional, antipsychological, transpersonal; but also unfashionably autonomous in relation to the status quo—capable, that is, of bearing witness to occurrences that fail to appear as phenomena in predefined political, artistic, scientific, and amorous situations. In this light, Badiou's notion of the subject as subject-to-truth is comparable to the Freudian subject as Lacan refined its concept, for the psychoanalytic subject of unconscious desire is also defined by its nonappearance in language and the social. Indeed, the Freudian subject is strictly correlative to a violation of social law.

There are further, less commonly acknowledged points of comparison between Badiou's formalization of what he calls pure multiplicity's transcendental indexation—the configuration of being-as-being (être-en-tant-qu'être) within the existential logic of a specific world—and Lacan's concept of the Other, his term for the fragile and contingent signifying structure that mediates the social relation. As is well known to readers of his later work, Lacan's account of what he terms the logic of the signifier became increasingly dependent on the formal languages of mathematics and logic. By severing transcendental indexation from the psychoanalytic account of a subject split by its insertion into language, however, Badiou's framework cannot properly take account of our libidinal investment in the social as appearance, in other words, why so many of us fail to bear witness to the fragile truths his philosophy aims to think. This means that Badiou's system cannot adequately acknowledge the unconscious resistance that dissuades inquiry into the multiples that fail to appear in a given world. For psychoanalysis, in contrast, the subject always has a symptom: the sign of its failure to accommodate itself, in Badiou's terms, to being as pure indifferent multiplicity; being, that is, “before” its appearance has been shaped by normative logics of existence or value—discourses, if you prefer.

Further, Lacan's idea that the subject is marked by a fundamental manque-à-être (lack-in-being) reminds us that the world of appearances cannot decisively be extricated from the defenses that the ego insistently puts up. For Lacan, we come to be as subjects of the unconscious in consequence of a resistance to being: a piece of being-jouissance is cast off into the unconscious to be replaced by desire's empty, virtual essence—a quantity, that is to say, of nonbeing. Transference is the concept through which psychoanalysis sets itself the task of explaining our resistance as subjects to the truths that Badiou so justifiably wants to valorize and bring to the power of thought. In its admirable intention to cast off the fearful and self-pitying modesty of so much contemporary discourse, Badiou's framework simply grants too much to the subject when it assumes a clean break with a status quo whose seductive powers are therefore counterstrategically underestimated. As subjects of the unconscious, we never cease definitively to resist. Our capacity to become Badiouian subjects-to-truth depends absolutely on our acknowledgment of this difficult fact.

Having said this, however, I want to stress that I do not wish my argument to participate in a skeptical reaction to what must be considered in today's philosophical and political climates Badiou's heroic reclaiming of the category of truth for thought. Indeed, Badiou's thesis concerning the identity of what he calls being-as-being with the history of mathematical formalization is in intimate dialogue with the later Lacan. It is not for nothing that Badiou calls Lacan one of his masters, though to my mind Badiou overstates his debt to the great psychoanalyst. The truth of psychoanalysis forces us to recognize that there is no once-and-for-all exit from the transference, no unproblematic or post-ambivalent access to being. Neither can there be any absolute reduction of the psyche, definitive overcoming of resistance, or realized, successful encounter with desire's traumatic real.

For Lacan, our capacity to function as social beings, even and especially in radical opposition to dominant traditions of thought, rests on the precarious illusion of the Other's consistency. We must believe (or act as if we believe: same thing, for the Pascalian Lacan) in the coherence and binding purchase of the logics that legislate collective life in the particular social world in which we live. The consequence of this for Badiou's project is that mathematical formalization can only be, as it was for Lacan, an ideal. Yes, desire is an illusion premised on misrecognition; an empty, baseless surplus over being. And yes, as Badiou maintains, the real—being—is no doubt best conceived in thought as a pure, inaccessibly and inconsistently infinite multiplicity from which nothing is missing, in which nothing lacks. Yet for all the evidence of its duplicity and unreliability, the greatest illusion of all is the one that upholds the possibility of the psyche's absolute dissipation. Though psychoanalysis certainly does not deny the possibility of the experience of being, for the speaking subject being in language, in consciousness, is always barred, unattainable, unsatisfying, elsewhere. Les non-dupes errent, says Lacan, riffing on his name-of-the-father idea: those who are not duped (by the Other) err.⁴

Though Lacan in his later teaching fully embraces the project of formalizing psychoanalytic theory via the languages of mathematics and logic, his stance vis-à-vis the historical disciplines was identical to his position on the philosophical tradition. “The mathematical field is characterized by a hopeless effort to have the field of the Other as such hold together,” he claimed, adding that this is “the best way to demonstrate that it doesn't, that it isn't consistent.”⁵ Mathematical formalization may be the only available means of transmitting knowledge outside the transferential dynamic, as Lacan believed, but the discipline itself is haunted by the same irreducible demand for consistency that defines what Freud calls transference love.

Even mathematicians are required to (attempt to) communicate with one another and the world in so-called ordinary language. For Lacan, this is sufficient proof that their formalized articulations will necessarily betray signs of the same unconscious demand for consistency to which their everyday utterances bear witness. Even when we grant that mathematics, at least since Cantor and Gödel, has learned to live with inconsistency as an inescapable feature of the multiple, it remains the case that no subject will ever be capable of living entirely within the mathematical world without risking a radical psychotic break that would effectively exile that subject from human sociality. For psychoanalysis, the final word is simply that there is no possible escape from the social relation and its necessary traversal by language, by the Other.

The irreducibility of our unconscious libidinal investment in the Other—the ineradicable nature of the symptom, in other words—is precisely what Lacan indicates with the symbol for signification s(O) that occupies the bottom lefthand corner of his mature graph of desire (Fig. 1.1). Though the next section of this chapter turns to Freud's engagement with the problem of transference in his technical writings, it will be helpful here to frame this engagement through an anticipatory reading of Lacan. This framing will aim not only to unearth the foundation of Lacanian formalization in the Freudian texts, but also to contextualize the reproaches I will later make against the ambivalences that detract from the cogency of Freud's formulation of his transference idea.

Confronted by the O...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• I. The Refusal of Love
• II. Socrates, Analyst
• III. Like a Pack of Rats
• IV. Loving the Terrorist
• V. For the Love of Cinema
• VI. Naked Love
• Notes