On Psychoanalysis and Violence

Contemporary Lacanian Perspectives

Vanessa Sinclair, Manya Steinkoler, Vanessa Sinclair, Manya Steinkoler

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429793752
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psicología
• Categoría: Psicoanálisis

Psychoanalysis has not examined violence as such since it is a sociological and criminological concept; psychoanalysis is concerned with speech. On Psychoanalysis and Violence brings together noted Lacanian psychoanalysts and scholars to fill an important gap in psychoanalytic scholarship that addresses what the contributors term the "angwash" of our current time.

Today violence is everywhere. We are inundated with it, exhausted by it, bombarded by images and reports of it on a daily, even hourly basis. This book examines how psychoanalysis can account for the many manifestations of violence in contemporary society. Drawing on a broadly Lacanian perspective, the authors explore violence in war, terrorism, how the media portrays violence, violent video games, questions of identity, difference and the 'other'; violence narratives and violence and DSM, and explain how to account for how violence arises and the effect it has on us on both an individual and social level. These are just some of the daily social realities of the present day whose aggression are felt by everyone, which horrify us and which we often feel powerless to change. The contributors have therefore coined a term for this cultural malaise: "angwash", arguing that we are awash in angoisse or anxiety, in a constant panic regarding the impossible and contradictory demands of a "civilization" in crisis.

On Psychoanalysis and Violence will be of great interest to Lacanian psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

1
Bodies and the object-death

Jean-Jacques Moscovitz

I was asked to write something on the topic of – drumroll please – “Why we kill.” Is this a psychoanalytic question, one that can be analyzed using our conceptual toolkits as practitioners of Freud’s discovery? Or is it a political one, and should we think of it in political terms, especially following the massacre of November 13, 2016, the day of the ISIS attacks on Paris, just to mention one of many.

This is the question I was asked when approached to pen a chapter for this volume. In my book Rêver de réparer l’histoire (The Dream of Repairing History, 2015), I tried to link together psychoanalysis, cinema and politics by looking at a series of films and discussing several Freudian and Lacanian concepts. Surely such a link exists, because for the last 30 years I have been going on – abundantly, clumsily, insistently and, according to some, with great stubbornness – about the impact of the Shoah on our subjectivity, even before publishing, in 1991, D’où viennent les parents, psychanalyse depuis la Shoah (Where Parents Come From: Psychoanalysis since the Shoah).

To start off, here is Freud’s conclusion to his “Thoughts for the times on war and death” (1915): “It is, to be sure, a mystery why the collective units should in fact despise, hate and detest one another – every nation against every other – and even in times of peace.”

Bodies and the object-death

First, the body. In 1976, in Joyce le symptôme, Seminar XXIII, Lacan speaks about history, which he perceives from the perspective of an artist, himself traversed by the Symbolic of the time, and its points of fracture:

Joyce rejects that anything can happen in what the history of historians is supposed to take for its object. He’s quite right, history being nothing more than a flight, none of which is told but the exoduses. Through his exile, he [Joyce], sanctions the seriousness of his judgment. Deportees alone take part in history: since man’s got a body, it’s by the body that he can be got. The flipside of habeas corpus.

Habeas corpus comes from the legal Latin habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, which means that you have to bring your body before the judge. An institution originating in 12th-century England and codified in 1679, the Habeas Corpus Act guaranteed individual liberties of all citizens, protecting them against arbitrary arrests and detentions.

To fight against the darkness into which we are cast by torturers and barbarism, I would like to argue that with regard to the victim – the unarmed civilian targeted by genocide – every effort is made to annihilate his desire. We should understand this as a desire to kill, because the psyche, the Freudian unconscious, is the very site of murder. As psychoanalysts, we can understand this desire as the desire for the symbolic murder of the father.

Death/murder – an object (a)

Once this desire has been extinguished in the victim, they can no longer put up any resistance, much less launch a counterattack, consciously or otherwise. This is a form of silencing inherent in the desire to kill, which the criminal provokes in the victim’s unconscious. Death by murder, the collective murder of one group by another, becomes an object, an object petit a, an object deduced between the victim and the killer. Let’s take the object-gaze as an example, a very trivial one. The gaze between two fellow human beings defines the grip between two interlocutors; based on the desire to see and be seen, it becomes the cause for the desire to speak. Object a concerns a lack. However, in mass crime, the collective instead provokes an imitation of one human being by another, a reflection of the act committed by the collectively organized killer(s) against a group of victims.

By lifting the prohibition against killing, death by murder becomes available for consumption and in turn engenders the desire for more murder. The perpetrator abolishes his own internal construction of what it means to kill, rendering the act of killing a mere action without prohibition; this message is then received by the victim. The latter no longer perceives his own desire for murder and neither can he recall the very existence of the foundational prohibition against killing.

The genocidal system

The genocidal system knows this very well; this is its raison d’être. Mass murder is committed by one human being against another and spreads as a murderous jouissance that constantly reproduces itself. This annullation, this engineered removal of the knowledge of the prohibition against killing, is the production of a constructed and willful ignorance on the side of the perpetrator, which in turn provokes a silence and a silencing, a paralysis on the side of the victim. For the latter, this results in a forclusive abolition (abolition forclusive): the victim can no longer do anything but ignore the murderous desire present in the other, even though the latter murders with such confidence and his offence receives such widespread recognition.

Before, during and after the crime, the victim can no longer access his desire to kill, which is structurally inherent to the act of wishing to live. In a sense, the end of the fantasy of killing and being killed is equivalent to the murder of death. In this way, the genocidal killer brings his victim into his murderous world. We must keep this in mind – and teach it in the appropriate institutions to prevent the hatred against the state and its militia, which the genocidal killer is so good at fomenting. We must bring the victims out of the world of the killers, so that their death can really be their own.

This is the ethical and humanizing aim that is transmitted to us by Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. Making the film was Lanzmann’s way of showing how humans kill other humans. The final solution was to kill. But the word Shoah, which we use to connote the murder of the Jews, designates both the carrying out of these crimes as well as the burial of each of the Jewish victims killed in the gas chambers. This term, the title of Lanzmann’s movie, attempts to return death to its place.

László Nemes’s Son of Saul (November, 2015) is also an act of cinematic creation, a mise-en-scène. The unfolding drama tells the story of a member of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, some of whom were in charge of taking the men, women and children to the gas chamber where they were to be killed, and others worked in the crematorium. One child is taken from the gas chamber unconscious but still breathing and, after being examined, is then killed by a Nazi doctor. The hero of the film cannot ignore this murder and takes the child’s body, literally carrying him on his shoulders, now no longer carrying out the task of murder, but taking on the symbolic burden of this son, affirming life by giving him a proper burial outside the camp, outside of the world of the killers. The Symbolic’s hold over the Real of our times is embodied in this scene and in this act. We must be able to say this to our politicians whether in words or act, if we are ever to break out of this mounting violence and destruction that affects the human race and the planet we live on.

My hypothesis, which is sustained by this dimension of the Symbolic, attempts to ensure that, in the unstoppable marching of time, life triumphs over death instantiated by murder. The point is not to understand “why we kill” but to recognize the effects of these murders on the social body and its suffering in our present time.

At the moment, my hypothesis derives from Freud’s key postulate of the father’s murder, as described in Moses and Monotheism (1938). In this essay, Freud presents the crucial argument of his discipline – namely, the murder of Moses by his own people. The murdered Moses returns in the human conscience, yet his death has been repressed and remains outside consciousness. What returns is Moses’s presence as the Only God, while his murder remains unknown. Freud’s point is that a repressed murder created the unconscious.

This is an example of what Freud calls “primal repression.” Freud developed his hypothesis by making the signifier “Jews” the subject of the story. In his reading of the Exodus, he says that the Jews preferred to kill Moses rather than remembering that they had already killed a primal father before him. He argues that humankind has always known about this repressed foundational murder, the murder of a great man that comes prior to all others. In his essay, he calls this an archaic heritage. Yet the idea is already present in Interpretation of Dreams as early as 1900 where it is signified by the missing link in the dreamer’s free associations which originate in the unconscious. Going back to the origin of speech, the narrative eventually runs into a gap, a hole, a radical lack of representation. This hole exerts an attraction; it acts as a ballast to human speech, which organizes itself around this primal lack, in other words, the Real. The origin is attached to this Real; it has to be empty. This empty place is the origin of the Symbolic voided of all Imaginary content. It functions as a border to primal repression.

Freud says very clearly that primal repression is not a clinical fact but an assumption, a logical antecedence. It is the foundation of the individual subject and of humanity, which originates from the Father’s symbolic murder, the site of absence radically separate from mortal men, who are nevertheless originally connected to each other through its lack.

In terms of structure, this origin of the Symbolic translates into the “incorporation,” since time immemorial, of the Father’s death. It is also the recognition of the existence of death on the conscious and secular level.

This recognition constitutes the opposition between psychoanalysis and religion: all religions are founded upon such a murdered father, but only on the condition that the murder remains forgotten. Hence, the punishment by death of those who attack the religion’s origin, which it believes to be its own private business, because it is directly derived from the murder of Moses, Christ, Mohammed and others. For religion, this state of ignorance must be maintained by any means.

A murder signifies an act of cutting that founds the origin of a people, which does not suppose conscious knowledge, and carries the seal of primal repression. Religion is thus founded collectively on the condition that this repression becomes the mystery or sacred enigma.

Politics and religion are connected insofar as this originary repression creates the hole in knowledge about an origin, about the foundations of human social life. The origin has to remain a void, empty of any certainty, except for what can be attributed to divine revelation. Such a postulate cannot, of course, be accepted by everyone – those who do not accept it are called infidels. Infidels are threatened by death; whether and to what degree this threat is carried out, depends on the specific religion, region and historical period.

The attacks of the Islamic State in Paris suggest that these terrorists unknowingly identify with the Real of the origin. They are not at the origin, the way the totalitarian regimes already familiar to us would have wished to be; instead, they are the origin itself. They are death in the Real, which has become the murder of both themselves and their victims. The act of killing is a deadly incest, leaving the bodies of the kamikaze intermingled with those of their victims. The ISIS (is-is, a kind of name of being, a reduced “I am that I am”) takes itself for the origin of the world and immediately tries to destroy it via an apocalypse, in which the extermination of those who enjoy life is both the goal and a means to bringing an end to the human world.

This is no longer the void that all totalitarian regimes, religious or secular, want to fill with something concrete and visible, where they need to celebrate their power by excluding the bodies and words that do not fit in the world they wish to rule. For ISIS, the goal is to destroy origins, all origins. In this sense, their actions resemble a “new and improved” form of Nazism. In Germany, Death was the Master. Nazism was the previously unknown figure that destroyed everything that did not fit the shape of the origin of the humankind it invented. Everything that was not of the order of the visible, all that could have a double meaning, all equivocation, all that had to do with speaking, had to be annihilated. It was a kind of eugenics of the Symbolic itself.

For the Nazis, the Jew embodies something that cannot fit into their “models,” rather, he is the source of an interpretation of their limits. Hence, the need to exterminate the Jewish people and delete the traces of this very operation, an operation that marked an imaginary border. The Nazis attempted to murder death itself and the effects of this continue to be felt by us to this day.

The appropriation of the origin

As well as being the Fuhrerprinzip of Nazism, this appropriation of the human origin, both individually and collectively, is the hallmark of all religions. The origin is the sphere of the gods, of one God or of many gods. In any case, religions are founded on a murder.

Today, in order to try and put an end to the acting out of the anti-state hatred and its destructive power in our world, we must be familiar with the newly recognized human rights and international institutions created during and after World War II. Today, the latter are at an unprecedented risk of becoming obsolete, given the impact on human existence, on human life and death, because the scars are so indelible, so active and so impossible to put into words.

Malraux

We must bear witness to what has happened to life, death, the law, history and the world as the integrity of the Symbolic is continually attacked. Is this really happening before us, or is it a dream that we can bear witness and that this bearing witness matters? Is this just a naive illusion of psychoanalysts, historians, citizens and artists? Our justice is called to account for itself before the tribunal of human speech. After the crimes of the Shoah and those of our time, even if it is in vain, we are confronted with a silencing and an exhaustion that burdens our minds and saps our zest for life and love.

I think that the paradigm we can identify in the Symbolic of our time is the kind of interest in otherness that we saw in the late 19th century, of otherness freed from religion and providing a place of address for liberated speech. Freud was already part of this moment writing Interpretation of Dreams. Malraux continued this trend, in his own way, in 1955 when he writes:

The balance sheet of psychoanalysis shows that psychology in the past 50 years has put back the monsters and demons into man. I think that given the most terrible threat that humanity has faced, the task of the next century will be to put back the gods.

Malraux speaks at length about the developments in the Arab–Muslim world. His famous prophecy dates from 1953: “The 21st century will be religious, or it will not be at all.” Just to make sure we understand this remark, Malraux is talking about the bomb. And there we have it, the theme of the question that inspired my contribution to this volume, which comes back to us today in force.

The Islamic State is here, bringing with it a cultural war against the West, annihilation and the end of the world, proclaiming the apocalypse, the extermination of the Yezidis and many other peoples, reminding us of the Nazi acts of depopulation. In this case, there is no Holocaust denial, no need for secret enjoyment, no need to lie to the victims about their fate. Quite the contrary: their mass crimes are openly exhibited, celebrated and posted all over social media. ...