PINK KINDNESS.
Review of On Kindness. Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor. Hamish Hamilton. 2009.
‘Most people appear to believe that deep down they (and other people) are mad, bad and dangerous to know’. But this was not always the case, argue these authors, Adam Phillips a psychoanalyst and Barbara Taylor a historian, who have come together to produce a historical and contemporary analysis of kindness.
Their overriding thesis is that competitiveness and individualism, coinciding with the rise of modern capitalism, has brought about the loss of our general inclination to enjoy being kind to others. People who are kind realize how pleasurable it is. Kindness can be pleasurable! Yet we have come to regard kindness as moralistic and sentimental. Kindness opens us up beyond ourselves, ‘it is potentially more promiscuous than sexuality’. (12). The authors assert their belief that ‘children begin their lives “naturally” kind’(9), agreeing with Nietzsche that the moral requirement to be kind is a sinister symptom arising with Christian European culture.
The Stoics believed in oikeiôsis, the attachment of self to other. The Stoics were famously self-reliant, but communal, united by reason and mutual affection, as emperor Marcus Aurelius stressed. The Epicurians spoke of the extravagant joys of friendship, ‘which dances around the world’. (19). David Hume and Adam Smith also believed in the natural sociability of man. In this respect they were like the pagans of old, but quite unlike post-Augustinian Christianity, where, the authors assert, ‘kindness became linked, disastrously, to self sacrifice’ (19). With Christianity, kindness became universalized as divine love which irradiated the soul with caritas, redeeming our “original sin”. Without God man had no kindness. Luther and Calvin were even more ‘ferociously anti-human’, which, according to the authors, ‘has left some vicious legacies: the hatred of present-day right-wing Protestants for “liberals” and “secularists” has a very long pedigree with little kindness in it’.(24). Protestant caritas was institutionalized – charity in the modern sense. From here, the link is made between Protestantism, capitalism, Hobbes’s Leviathan, expressing the hedonistic ‘warre of alle against alle’.
However, the defenders of kindness persisted in spite of the march of waspish capitalism. Enlightened Anglicans insisted that ‘true pleasure was always generous’. (26). This was taken to an extreme by the “benevolists”, “Friends of Mankind” with much “moral weeping”. The position of the authors here is that kindness is not secondary to the ego, not an afterthought, but primary, á la Rousseau’s, Emile. Children are naturally friendly, it is a species thing, as are animals and “savages”. ‘As a small child, Emile feels an instinctive pitié for his parents’ (34). Although, the blot of Rousseau’s “exceptional callousness” in his private life is acknowledged! With the French Revolution, Rousseau became an ‘icon of revolutionary kindness’ (39). So kindness became part of the radical cause. However, the terror of the Revolution destroyed this dream, as well as the influence of Thomas Malthus whose dystopic vision concluded, in effect, that egoism was the engine of human civilization and progress.
By 19th century, kindness was corralled, “ghetto-ised” into specific groups – romatic poets, clergymen, charity workers, and especially women, who ‘were naturally prone to sympathetic incontinence’ (42). Add to this the Christian celebration of maternal love and the gender divide is complete, with men espousing the higher forms of charity while women are regarded as spontaneously kind, ‘the angel in the house’ of the Victorians. For Wordsworth and Dickens, children were the last vestiges of kindness in a cruel world. John Stuart Mill espoused brotherly love, while in France, August Comte developed a neurological theory of kindness.
The battle lines were drawn between the altruists, warm hearted women, humanitarians, Christian socialists, versus the “cold” market principle of Hard Times. The very broad notion that ‘kindness is part of the fabric of human subjectivity’ (46), that kindness itself was pleasurable was forgotten when the emphasis shifted decisively towards the Christian split between gratification and duty of care for others - kindness as self-denial. Freud and psychoanalysis are in here too: ‘moving away from the tender heart to the inflamed genitals’ (47).
Yet Phillips in his sections on psychoanalysis tempers what might have become an all too sentimental take on kindness with a number of Freudian themes which make kindness more complex. Quoting from Freud and Winnicott’s work, psychoanalysis depicts two attitudinal currents side by side: one current that is erotic towards and debasing of others and other that is affectionate and kind. The key question that divides psychoanalysts (although Phillips plays down the division): ‘Do we crave sensuous satisfaction as so-called drive theorists say, or do we crave intimacy or relationships? Do we want good company or good sex?’ (60). This is a false choice, the authors admit, because there is no sex without some measure of kindness, although if we are too kind the sex is unsatisfying. As Phillips says, ‘It is not kind to over protect other people from oneself, especially from one’s sexuality’. Philips acknowledges, following Freud, that hate is our first relation to the world, but suggests that the reason for this hate is self-protection, ‘which love could, if we were lucky, help us to recover from’. (64). However, Freud stresses that it is desire per se, and its satisfaction that attracts us, not so much the object (other) of our desire. As Phillips admits, ‘we are more in love with our desire than we are with other people’.(77). Using Freud’s word, the object-person we desire is merely “soldered” onto our desire. And of course the use of the term “object” says it all! We are only kind to the object insofar as they will keep on satisfying us. Sex described by Freud is ‘transgressive in its intent’ (80).
However, after WW2, British analysts described in detail the complex kindness engendered in the mother-child bond, a kindness that must prevail over the erotic. Kindness is a way of avoiding incest. Civilization seems to depend on it. Parents must not debase their children. However, Winnicott suggests that parents must be able to hate their children. For the child, ‘can believe in being loved only after reaching being hated’ (92). Genuine kindness must know hate. The real bond, to feel real, has to include hatred.
The authors favour open kindness, freely given, which includes a rough erotic generosity over and against free-market individualism that creates hate and division and debases affection. Against the Thatcherism, they praise the State’s “kindness” in setting up the Welfare system and the NHS, an example of, ‘The kindly state dedicated to universal well being’ (101). Now all this is changing. For instance, ‘In the past woman’s association with kindness was a source of some prestige, but now it is a sign of disempowerment. Kindness may be admirable, but it’s a mugs game’ (p108).
Well, maybe it was feminism that reduced women’s prestige. The former Irish President, Mary Robinson, recently suggested that women who stayed at home were “selling-out”. May be the authors secretly subscribe to the idea that kindness is a mug’s game. After all, they are against any sort of kindness that is sacrificial or that comes with any sense of duty. When we think that “carers” in the home – people caring for their sick relatives – save the State, the benevolent state, £56bn each year. Imagine then being against sacrificial kindness. What about the on-going kindness of teachers, nurses, police and so on and on. This is kindness of a different register to the spontaneous kind that Phillips and Taylor celebrate. They state that acts of kindness are not to be seen as ‘acts of will, or effort, or moral resolution’ (117). They make a false dichotomy between “official” types of kindness that comes pre-stigmatized by them as “moral superiority”, or “domineering beneficience” by “well fed moralists” or “the protection racket of good feelings”, and unofficial kindness shown by “natural” children, reminiscent of A.S. Neill’s Summerhill and other disasters, animals alleged to be spontaneously kind and even ants in their social colonies. This is reminiscent of Richard Leakey’s “discovery” that early hominids were essentially non-violent, when all the evidence is against this. After all only one hominid species survived!
The kindness that the authors hope for so forlornly in the current climate is haunted by the opposite: kindness as veiled egoism; as disguised sexual seduction; as a cover for aggression, or all three together. The irony, conceded by Phillips to some extent, is that psychoanalysts, with a few notable exceptions like Winnicott, paint the bleakest picture in relation to kindness. Kindness does not appear in the comprehensive index of Freud’s 24 volume Standard Edition. Psychoanalysis is skepticism and is skeptical about kindness and indeed unkind about anything good. This is the curse of psychoanalysis itself. Freud privileges the death drive over eros. And Darwin barely is mentioned, except to cite him as one of the enlightened ones, never mind, his legendary “survival of the fittest”, the most pitiless and influential of modern concepts. The notion that kindness springs freely from children, women and animals before they are damaged by civilization is an old story and one that probably Phillips and Taylor cannot really believe. It is a myth created by the structural effect of being situated within a civilization. The treasured “lost object” is always elsewhere, outside, other and heavily idealised.
Thus, it is not just the capitalists and free-market types that create the “me-first” unkind selfish culture, the liberals have their own forms of entitlement me-first culture too, but they refuse to acknowledge it, beyond advocating enlightened self-interest. Phillips and Talor come close to saying that left-wing people are kind, whereas right-wingers are not! Being itself presupposes what Spinoza called, conatus essendi, the struggle to survive, which does not imply much kindness to spare. Having largely dispensed with the Judeo-Christian heritage, the authors have little to go on, except that kindness and decency that still paradoxically linger in the minds and actions of many.
A discussant reviewing On Kindness criticized this “deconstruction” of kindness. Kindness, like the joke, is destroyed by analysis. Indeed it is a joke to analyse something simple like kindness. In a radical sense, kindness is beyond the trade-offs of the erotic and affection; beyond a cost-benefit analysis, beyond a psycho-analysis. Kindness does not belong to anyone or any time. No one has it. For Levinas, it is ‘otherwise than being’. We could paraphrase Slavoj Žižek and call it, ‘the fragile absolute’, and Derrida in Adieu (to God) speaks of, ‘the welcome that welcomes beyond itself’. The authors are correct to point out that charity without kindness – very far from always being the case – is unkind. However, kindness comes from elsewhere; it is a gift that gives ‘without counting the cost’, and it is more in us than we are in ourselves. We could paraphrase Lacan by saying that, ‘Kindness is giving what one doesn’t have’. It is senseless and priceless - such is the anarchic nature of kindness that defies description and analysis.
It is tempting to think that this book, complete with it little pink highlighted title, speaks to a self-regarding “kindness” - kindness as gesture – engaged in praising the kindness of the Other, while despising (being very unkind to), traditional forms of giving in the West, especially the paradoxical gifts of capitalism, enjoyed not least by liberal intellectuals. This pink version of kindness even when made more real by hate, has little in common with the ultimate and intimate connection of kindness with (symbolic) death and sacrifice, ‘the gift of death’ to use the title of one of Derrida’s last books.
Freud ridicules kindness, recounting a joke made by Heine, who declared that he would indeed be kind and “love his enemies” and obey God’s commandment if God first granted him a humble cottage, good food, a bed, flowers and, ‘a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees’.
BEING NOBODY.
Susan Greenfield. I.D. The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century. Sceptre. 2008. (a review).
This is a book about the neuroscience of identity written by an acknowledged expert in the field. Along with by now standard neuroscientific explanations of such phenomena as addiction, compulsion, mental illness and creativity in terms of neurotransmitters and neural connectivities, the author raises a specific concern in relation to the increasing intrusion of screen technology into the lives of children leading to the formation of radically new “identities”. In a sense though, Greenfield is herself part of the problem she describes. Like most neuroscientists, as an ultra-materialist she declares: ‘There is no separate “you” apart from all your neurons’ (p49). She acknowledges this unsolved conundrum: ‘will we ever grasp how that holistic operation [of the brain-mind] actually translates into that subjective feel of the moment we call consciousness’? (p79). This she emphasises is the “hard problem” – ‘how the water of brain events is turned into the wine of subjective conscious experience’(p196) Later on she decribes consciousness as being like a dimmer switch. ‘I speculate you can have more or less of it: consciousness will grow as brains grow’(p127). Her basic proposition is that neuronal connectivity equals our personalised identity or lack of it. And it is the possibility of substantial lack, or hollowing out of identity by screen culture that concerns the author.
Notions of identity came to the fore historically at roughly the same time as the novel, at a time of huge social change in the 18th century. At that time, ideas about identity begin to be linked to narrative and the privacy of the self or the “inner world”. There were three interrelated preoccupations. Firstly the subjective/objective split. Secondly, the idea of life understood as narrative - past, present and future. Thirdly, the fascination with consciousness and reflexive self-consciousness. These essentially are what constitutes “being human” for over three centuries. Our concern should be that this modern selfhood is being eroded by data banks and the many technological encroachments on the privacy of our inner world.
For the purposes of her argument, Greenfield identifies four contemporary identities – being Somebody, Nobody, Anybody, and, finally, being creative. The Somebody is a person who is preoccupied with status in a ruthless capitalist economy. But the burden of the argument developed by Greenfield, concerns the Nobody scenario. We are in danger of becoming a Nobody because we are the passive recipients of screen culture for up to 8.5hours a day. And this culture consists of rapid flux, bite knowledge and half formed ideas. In the absence of authorised authorites, Truth is assembled by audience. Children born since the early nineties have grown up thinking that these new technologies have always existed. They have known nothing different and the danger will be that of growing up with no pre-existing conceptual framework, there will be a loss of the capcity to use and understand metaphor. In other words, with the loss of abstract ideas how can such concepts as, for instance, democracy, honour or soul, be understood using merely icons, images or multi-media? Open ended questions will not occur in the immediate here and now world of the screen. Menus with a fixed number of options may be rigorously logical, but impose themselves on the thinking process, tending to exclude thinking laterally – tending to exclude thinking as such. Multimedia presentations discourage reflection. She refers to Sue Palmer’s Toxic Childhood. Children of the screen are dominated by immediate sensory and especially visual imputs, rather than content. They will inevitably tend to regress and not be able to focus on others’ needs and not be able to defer gratification, remaining trapped in childhood. Unable to think metaphorically and operating without checks and balances, reality can blur with fantasy to an alarming degree. Without the corporeal presence of the other, there is no comparing past conversation, thought or event. Instead, the screen world is frightening, exciting, unpredictable and above all emotionally charged. It is a world of immediate response rather than one of reflective inituition or real understanding. The activites that fostered learning and identity formation the the past, namely, repetition and physical exercise, both of which encourage neuron development, are less in evidence. The increasing “reality” of games, linked to TV shows or console games encourage us to take the world at face value with no questioning. Sherry Turkle, author of The Second Self , spoke of her daughter seeing a jellyfish and said with amazement: “Isn’t it realistic”?
In the cyber-world it’s all a game where no one feels pain, gets shot, or dies. In the human world, a here and now thrill would have been balanced by the mind’s learned ability to create an unfolding narrative of the situation. But if the pre-frontal cortex is suppressed for whatever reason, or if the sensation and the sensational is stronger and repeated more often, a here-and-now mentality will dominate. Under functioning of the prefrontal cortex is linked to excessive risk taking, schizophrenia, obesity, sleep deprivation and the world of early childhood.
Greenfield notes that the multimedia preoccupation with “interactivity” is only in its earliest developmental stages. Google will soon be “wrap-around”, giving us warnings and statements, but no conversation. ‘The critical issue facing us’, suggests Greenfield, ‘will be how to make the transition from the old question-rich, answer poor environment of the twentieth-century classroom to making sense of – indeed surviving in - the current question-poor answer rich environment…’ (p189). The major shift is from "slow content" to "fast process", ‘and it is this process that has an appeal all to itself’ (p194), thus becoming self-perpetuating. Computer games are attractive over and against the real world of complexity, imperfection, irrationality and other people with their hidden agendas.
The specific key to the identity shift is the experience of pleasure itself. Sensory laden euphorias, the jogger’s “high” facilitated by the release of endorphins gives you a sensational time, and the “personalised mind” with its infinity of connections developed through life, is temporarily suspended – you loose your mind. Very different to the notion of reward, pleasure is immediate whereas reward is delayed. Reward is based on your actions. It is a series of steps, a narrative requiring thinking set within a pre-existing set of values giving the end reward meaning and significance. Pleasure, on the other hand, is linked to addiction. Neuroscience indicates that Dopamine accumulates in the nucleus accumbens which connects directly to the prefrontal cortex. Dopamine released into the prefrontal cortex by the action of addictive drugs dampens down the personalied mind, prioritising the here-and-now, shifting the balance from the significance or meaning of the action to the process of the action itself, which becomes pleasurable and therefore addictive in itself alone, uncontested and without checks from the larger mind.
What Greenfield emphasises is that the personalisation of the brain through its plasticity builds up a unique conceptual framework which becomes our unique identity. Anything that impairs these connections – dementia, drugs, a fast-paced environment with strong sensory imputs, threatens the mind altogether, with ‘human nature…obliterated in favour of a passive state reacting to a flood of incoming sensations – a “yuk and wow” mentality…where personalised brain connectivity is either not functional or absent altogether’ (p203).
Another “identity” that should concern us is the Anyone identity, belonging to fundamentalist movements which by definition negate the private inner world of the individual. Here “long term potentiation” (LTP) is used for the purposes of religious indoctrination. LTP depends upon both emotional intensity and frequency of arousal in religious rituals, thus creating a believing brain that tends to be rigid and not open to new ideas.
Greenfield’s formula is as follows: ‘Someone - offers individuality without fulfilment; Anyone - fulfilment without individuality; Nobody - neither individuality nor fulfilment’. (p254). Her tentative antidote to these (degraded) identities is to foster ordinary creativity and inner autonomy. However, the inexorable drift is towards a society where there are no longer separate individuals because bio- and nano-technologies will wipe our traditional demarcations of the body versus external reality. Instead, we are developing third party access to our innermost bodily processes, the homogenisation of generations via health, appearance and reproduction. True, life becomes more intense, more fun and more comfortable overall, but with less and less meaning. Another paradigm shift is from owning goods to using services. Above all, we want services that provide feelings and sensations. Branding is relying more and more on the “experience” each brand provides, of wellbeing, pleasure or contentment. What will be left is, ‘a life lived out of the context of a sequential narrative: nothing less than the demise of a life-story’ (p281). The prospect Greenfield outlines is the loss of a conceptual framework, of a capacity to evaluate current experience against ideas gained by reading books. Instead, we live in an answer rich world but are increasingly unable to pose significant questions. It is indeed an irony that just at the time when the whole world opens itself, offers itself as a "noosphere", more and more individuals will not have the depth conceptual capacity to benefit from it. The gradual erosion of the conceptual world, the sequential narrative, has been paralleled by the larger scale loss of the metanarratives that sustained us. However, Greenfield’s book steers clear of this broader philosophical domain. So when the asks in the final pages, ‘If neuroscience can so deconstruct, analyse and understand the human mind as to enable meaningful manipulation of the environment, might we be robbing successive generations of that most precious attribute of the individual, Free Will'? Neuroscience is part and parcel of the post-human world that Greenfield is describing without herself using this term. In fact, neuroscience is at the heart of just this deconstruction, or the merging of the brain-mind (the supercomputer), with integrated technologies devoid of transcendence, devoid of mystery. For what else is a narrative if it not predicated upon the void that subtends it? Remove this veiled void and that is the end of narration. Narration is replaced by information. Barely perceptible within this text is the guilt of the neuroscientist for destroying the world and ushering in the post-human.
WINNICOTT. MOTHER BELOW IS WEEPING.
A paper presented to the college of Psychoanalysts in Ireland (CPI) PIVOTAL MOMENTS IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC PROJECT. November 2008.
Although Winnicott was writing, theorising and practicing at a time before the revolution in psychotherapy and counselling that took place during the ’80s, it is fair to say that he was a major influence on this therapy movement that informs so much of the way we generally are required to think about and deal with people at the current time both in therapy and outside. Winnicott has become the acceptable face of psychoanalysis. With Winnicott, we have lost a number of key components of the original revolutionary Cause which was early psychoanalysis – a Cause incidentally which has seen a huge revival with Lacan and more recently with Žižek.
I remember an introductory talk on Lacanian psychoanalysis given by an Irish Lacanian analyst, Helen Sheehan, at the end of the ‘80s to a small but distinguished group of Independents from London led by Eric Rayner (Author of The Independent mind in British psychoanalysis). As the talk proceeded, a certain disbelief was palpable among the visitors. One comment I remember summed up the view of the British: ‘what about this poor Lacanian baby, he must be a very lonely isolated creature! What hope is there for him or her’?
Because, of course, Winnicott’s enigmatic statement (in this respect of the enigma he was similar to Lacan), There is no such thing as a baby goes to the heart of the Winnicottian preoccupation – the mother’s near absolute attunement to the infant in her womb, primary maternal preoccupation around the time of the birth, said by Winnicott to be almost like a telepathic communication with the infant and an apparent “sickness” in the mother as she withdraws from the external world later in the pregnancy. Thus begins the central theme of how the mother “holds” the infant, then child, both with her body and with her mind, the whole question of the solid, bodily “reliability” of the mother and when this fails, the psychotic fear of being ‘infinitely dropped’, of falling for ever through space.
Although Winnicott was later to coin arguably the best known phrase in psychoanalysis – the “good enough mother”, he has been blamed by some for creating an ideal of perfection for mothers and babies against which some women (and now men) will judge themselves to be always failing.
The time at which any theory develops is always interesting. The context in which this maternal ideal arose is important and well known. Winnicott theorised the mother infant bond in such tender terms to address the unconscious guilt felt post-war, about the mass evacuation of children, separating them painfully from their parents for many years for fear of enemy bombing and in particular the London blitz. The devoted love for the infant thus theorised would make up for all the harm done and deprivation caused by the evacuation. Another more Baudrillardian reading would be that Winnicott theorised the mother-infant bond (as well as Bowbly and Attachment theorists) just at the time when this bond, had been, or was likely to be lost, or at least changed forever, as the rise of feminism and consumerist materialism was going to take many women outside the home, never to return.
So the Winnicottian theme assumes the status of a myth. There never was such a mother infant bond of such tender proportions. To believe that there was in some ideal golden moment in the past, fitted in well with the deeply conservative mood of the ‘50s, where the aim was to bring mothers back into the home and away from the rampant sexual freedoms that they had enjoyed briefly during the chaos of the war years.
In respect of timing, it is tempting to think that Lacan’s influential theory of the Imaginary which gained currency at the time when image itself became the main preoccupation creating a new era, the so-called post modern, with the explosion of the new media, new imaging techniques and imagistic culture in general, when surface triumphed over depth.
Although Winnicott would have protested, in his defence, that all that was needed (from mothers) was just as he said, to be “good enough”, this assertion should be read against the background of the maternal ideal, where since the dawn of the modern period, motherhood attained something close to the status of a vocation, based on evidence allegedly gleaned from the emerging psychological and sociological sciences. Winnicott’s formulation was only the most recent variant of that genealogy which goes back to the advice given to mothers about babies at the end of the nineteenth century.
Just as Freud suggested that man’s dependency on religion was really a wish for the protection of a Father, the current preoccupation with therapy as a secular religion might reflect another more primordial wish – the universal desire to be mothered. And religion itself has also undergone a change becoming a more spiritual affair under the sign of Woman – no longer the harsh rule imposed by the Father, but the soft inclusion of the Mother-God.
With this new ideal and the shift to the feminine comes a paradoxical twist in the nature of the superego articulated for us by Lacan and Žižek. Gone is the old superego which harshly opposed our transgressions; in comes the new superego which commands us to Enjoy! Now we feel guilty if we do not enjoy! In the past the child was told (by the Father), you cannot do X, it is forbidden. The child reluctantly obeyed out of fear, but there was always the possibility of developing an inner freedom against this kind of tyranny, an inner resistance – something Winnicott definitely would have approved of. Now, by contrast, the child will be “informed” about X from all angles and asked to choose whether or not he would really enjoy doing X. Whatever he chooses, it is his choice. He has to bear the weight of responsibility. And whatever he chooses he must enjoy. Take the example of toy guns. In the past, the little boy was allowed or not allowed to have one – simple as that. Now, on the contrary, the child will be sat down and told how terrible weapons are, how they cause wars like you have seen on television, how many innocent people have been killed by guns, how only sick people want to own one - people who are full of hatred, and so on. Now – do you really want a toy gun? Filled with a revulsion, which there is no getting away from, the little boy shakes his head. He really would not enjoy owning a gun. This is a more cruel superego because it leaves no freedom in its benign control and its command to enjoy.
This question of the too present maternal ideal is an unintended consequence of Winnicott’s emphasis on the mother against which he always protested that one only has to be “good enough”, but we can then ask when is enough enough and just how good is good enough? The superego inhabits this word “good”.
Finally, there may have been a very personal and poignant interest for Winnicott in what mothers do. Although his mother was described by his second wife in idealised terms, as “vivacious and outgoing”, at the age of 67, Winnicott wrote a poem which he sent to his brother-in-law James Britton, which included the following lines:
Mother below is weeping, weeping, weeping
Thus I knew her
Once stretched out on her lap
As now on dead tree
I learned to make her smile
To stem her tears
To undo her guilt
To cure her inward death
To enliven her was my living1
Adam Phillips notes Winnicott’s identification with Christ – ‘…stretched out…on dead tree’ and his interest in Robert Graves’ novel King Jesus in which Christ is the man who wants to be the zealous enemy of Woman and ends up being her hero! Did Winnicott end up being the enemy or the hero of Woman? May be the jury is still out! Or may be the theme has just been let go as we no longer speak so much about “mothers” and “fathers”, but rather “significant others”.
‘To enliven her was my living’. Note the twofold use of “live”, which becomes Winnicott’s central preoccupation in his work with children and adults – how to bring life and spontaneity, against this backdrop of the weeping mother on a dead-tree-lap. A striking image of a depressed mother and a child-cum-mother trying to bring solace, ‘to cure her inward death’: these lines are the key to Winnicott’s contribution to the psychoanalytic movement – curing inward death.
Winnicott envisaged the child, at least at times, and at the very beginning of life as potentially but not inevitably very fragile. Corelatively, an absolutely key theme for Winnicott is the privacy of the self and the related question of the “true self”, which, like the “barred subject” can never be found. Winnicott privileges privacy and reticence against interpretation and, he suggests, ‘we can understand the hatred people have of psychoanalysis that has penetrated a long way into the human personality, and which provides a threat to the human individual in his need to be secretly isolated’.2 Here is Winnicott’s hostility to the Kleinian tradition, in particular, with its constant theme of interpretation, and maybe his hostility to the whole psychoanalytic project. Here, he is not alone, as Freud indicates when he says resistance accompanies analysis every step of the way, so, we are all hostile to analysis and need to be so. Winnicott is constantly aware of the possibilities for impingement, especially by analysis itself, when you might be told in a reductive way what you allegedly are. What he has in mind here can be illustrated by the example of Ludovic Kennedy, who in first session of analysis was told by his classically trained analyst that he was a repressed homosexual. Kennedy left never to return. Winnicott’s special horror is reserved for analysis itself!
Winnicott, like Lacan, envisages a divided subject – split between a true and a false self. We are false selves, which translates into being alienated in Lacan’s Marxist terms. To be a false self is Winnicott’s equivalent of the normal-neurotic. This is how we function most of the time, care-taking the true self until it is safe for the latter to be realised in an un-forced spontaneity.
There is hope and promise in Winnicott. Over and against what our Independent visitors regarded, or misunderstood, as Lacan’s “intellectual sterility”. Winnicott longed for aliveness, spontaneity, vitality. Rather than the signifier, and a final “subjective destitution”, Winnicott strove for the Real of being alive - for enjoyment and excitement, but not an enjoyment that is a shock because of its horrific pleasure – like jouissance, but an enjoyment that is part of being alive and well in the most congenial sense, but which also includes aggression and creativity.
If analysis needs to be a more or less temporary aid to getting on the way to being alive, then so be it. For Winnicott, analysis is a means to an end. Remembering, recall and working through, yes, but only as a means of being able to forget oneself and live. The question of living and feeling alive is scarcely if ever mentioned in Freud and Klein. Winnicott felt that analysis was nothing if it didn’t have liveliness as its aim – a liveliness, not unlike desire, that does not know itself, but simply comes to be through the protective layer of the false-self functioning. As Hanaghan was fond of saying – analysts like neurotics ‘make all the preparations for the fire without ever setting light to it’!
I am reminded here of a tongue-in-cheek and rather corny story told by R.D. Laing about a very depressed patient who had been hospitalised several times for his depression. He had had some analysis and other forms of therapeutic intervention but he was more depressed than ever. Laing had a consultation with this patient and began to engage him in conversation without making any reference to his depression. They got onto the subject of jokes and each told the other jokes. The patient, like many depressed people, had a great sense of humour, and by the end of the hour, Laing recalls, ‘we were both collapsing with laughter’! Then as Laing is leaving the room, the man turns and says, ‘but doctor, what about my depression, you haven’t mentioned my illness’?
Laing uses this example to illustrate his engagement with the other and his refusal to be a therapeutic agent. And then he says, ‘and if this doesn’t work? Okay then, we’ll have to do some analysis’! Here, Laing is most like the well known Lacanian apostate, Francois Roustang, who had something similar in mind, albeit from a very different intellectual tradition. As Roustang has it, ‘The important thing is not so much that the symptom speaks and that one may, if one knows its dialect, interpret what it says. Quite the contrary, the key is to learn the tricks and detours that allow the symptom to return to the totality of the psyche – that is to restore the symptom to the general circulation of psychic life, by drawing it out of the narrow cyst in which it had become trapped’.3 For Roustang, consciousness is the problem, or more precisely, self-consciousness because it wants knowledge and control and creates anxiety as the wine of the blocked libido is turned into the vinegar of anxiety. With consciousness comes anxiety, masked by the symptom and the appeal to the Other. The symptom is a partial lifeless residue in the field of consciousness. By bringing the symptom back to anxiety, the analytic process brings it out of its isolation. Here, Roustang is following Kierkegaard – ‘Anxiety is always present as the possibility of a new state’. 4
Winnicott, Laing, Roustang, they are all against the analysis of the word per se. They are vitalists, with Winnicott being the most articulate and accessible in this respect. At the opposite end of the scale, I recall another Lacanian apostate pondering the question as to what Lacanian analysands do after analysis. Firstly, he asked if their analyses ever come to an end. Secondly, he suggested that their only way out was to become Lacanian analysts. Maybe this is the fate of all analysts; they are not able to let go analysing. I think this is what Winnicott was radically against. ‘We all hope our patients will finish with us and forget us, and that they will find living itself to be the therapy that makes sense’.5
For Winnicott, analysis is like an extended history-taking with therapeutics as a by-product! All of this work is to “facilitate” (a key term for Winnicott), a richly alive experiencing involving the protecting of the privacy of self, re-establishing continuity of being and being able to live in one’s own unique non-compliant way, with the concomitant ‘capacity to be alone’.6
Winnicott believed that in health, we would be able to make an environment ‘one’s own’. The prototype for making the environment one’s own Winnicott explains in his own poetic way -
‘The breast is created by the infant over and over again out of the infant’s capacity to love or (one can say) out of need. A subjective phenomenon develops in the baby, which we call the mother’s breast. The mother places the actual breast just there where the infant is ready to create, and at the right moment’.7 This pattern leads gradually over time to a localising of the self in the body – psycho-somatic partnership – sense of aliveness and coordination.
Chapter six in Playing and Reality, takes this further, referring to two interrelated terms that can cause some confusion, namely, “object relating” and “object usage”. Object relating refers to the subject as isolated “relating” omnipotently to its projected internal objects, analogous to day dreaming. It precedes object usage, where the subject places the object outside the area of its omnipotent control, analogous to night dreaming. It does this by destroying the object, but the object survives its destruction and thus becomes real. And now the subject can use the object. ‘This is the position that can be arrived at by the individual in the early stages of emotional growth only through the actual survival of cathected objects that are at the same time in the process of becoming destroyed because real, becoming real because destroyed’.8 This is the primitive version of the reality principle, where the horror of destructiveness in fantasy is mitigated by the survival of the other in reality. If, however, the other is not strong enough to survive our attacks, then we are left with the terror, because as Winnicott points out, there are thus no breaks on fantasy, there is nothing to stop the fantastic realisation of the world. Our rage becomes truly ruinous.
Winnicott seems to situate psychoanalysis, the analysis itself, beyond the narrow preoccupation with the unconscious per se. ‘All sorts of things happen and they wither. This is the myriad deaths you have died. But if someone is there, someone who can give you back what happened, then the details dealt with in this way become part of you, and do not die’.9 Winnicott seems to be suggesting re-collection, the collaborative gathering together the details, sometimes or often painful, details of lived experience, conscious and unconscious. Here, I have used a fictionalised account from a novel by David Albahari, Götz and Meyer, which dramatises in the sharpest and most poignant possible way this process of re-membering. Two non-commissioned SS officers, Götz and Meyer, are entrusted with an assignment to transport 5,000 Jewish prisoners from a concentration camp near Belgrade in a hermetically sealed truck, in which the prisoners are asphyxiated by fumes released into the truck. The narrator of the story, is a Jewish schoolteacher, who discovers Wilhelm Götz and Erwin Meyer while researching the deaths of most of his relatives in these transports. In his increasing delirium while doing the research, he organizes a class trip. The school bus becomes Götz and Meyer’s truck, and the teacher and his students merge with Belgrade’s lost souls in a sacred act of remembering. In response to questions from the students about the value of remembering, and here I am thinking of this sacred remembering as precisely analogous to the process of an analysis, the teacher narrator says, ‘We’ll be sorry, I told my students, if we ever stop telling stories because if we do, there will be nothing to help us sustain the pressure of reality...But, they asked, isn’t life a story? No, I answered, life is the absence of story’.10 Then three of the students ask: ‘if souls already exist, can they be lost? Of course they can, I said, although a soul that remembers can never be lost. Don’t all souls remember, they asked, surprised. Some of them don’t, I said, some try to forget.11
Masud Khan, one of Winnicott’s analysands, and distinguished editor of his major works, may have been referring to this kind of sacred remembering when he describes the analyst, not just as an analyst who pulls apart the threads of being, but more than this - as a witness.
However, this sacred remembering is so much more than just words, signifiers and language. Sociability predates language. We only have to think of the smiles and chuckles of the infant. Or a colleague used the example of a group of Chinese students in Ireland, engaged in animated conversion; they were talking in Mandarin but laughing in English! Their language is foreign, but their sociability is familiar. The essential background for an analysis is therefore: rapport, meeting, merging, relating, attending, but not impinging. A difficult balance, requiring “tact”, as one Lacanian analyst described it. Ego-support may be essential early on in the analysis. But not too much silence, because that could signal omniscience. Winnicott cautions, ‘I retain some outside quality, by not being quite on the mark – or even being wrong’.12 Maybe one interpretative theme per session if the patient’s unconscious has provided the material. Playing stops when one of the participants becomes dogmatic/coercive – the analyst, for instance, knowing too much (adhering to closely to a taught technique). Playing is the process of finding through pleasure what interests you. To the analyst, he says: ‘If only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to enjoy the sense of having been clever’.13
The analytic process, thus, moves rhythmically between the process of remembering in the presence of a witness-analyst and un-self-conscious on-going being, life and spontaneity. There is no conflict here as each phase plays to the other creating ‘a soul that remembers’.
Winnicott lists three types of communication all of which will be part of an analysis. 1) Forever silent but connected to being alive and very personal (involving subjective objects). 2) Explicit indirect and pleasurable communication (via language) protecting the privacy of the self. 3) Finally, an intermediate form that slides out of playing into cultural experience. A key question for Winnicott is how to remain isolated without being insulated (autistic). Hide AND seek, where it is, ‘a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found’.
Winnicott lacks a theory of the Real. He lacks a conceptualisation of the really beyond of human reality. Which his not to say that the Real is not implied in his all his work, but is not conceptualised as such as it falls, by definition, outside what is considered as human. Faced with such nihilism, with the empty void, with the non-existence of the Other, we may all turn away! Maybe the ‘Mother below is weeping’ is too present and too endless – ‘weeping, weeping, weeping’ - to contemplate. Instead, Winnicott had such an implicit faith in the capacity of the environment or the Other, that it could withstand the attacks made on it. The Other was so strong, that it would withstand the antisocial tendency and make things good. Life itself will out. Depression is potentially a sign of life, he would say, following Klein and the realisation of the depressive position. When the Real appears in Winnicott it is the Real of life, the real of playing, the psyche-soma flowing together. There is no sense of the Night, no sense of the Night of the world.
Reality, as radical “not-me” (Other), is referred to by Winnicott, as an “insult”. Therefore, reality must be dosed. This is not just true for infants and babies. We approach the real asymptotically. Unless we are psychotic when it impinges directly and immediately, interrupting ongoing-being.
Instead, the Real is veiled. ‘We experience life in the area of transitional phenomena, in the exciting interweave of subjectivity and objectivity, and in the area that is intermediate between the inner reality of the individual and the shared reality of the world that is external to individuals’.14 Winnicott develops a genealogy of living as we emerge from the unconsciousness of fusion: firstly, transitional phenomena; then playing; then shared playing and from there to cultural experience. Each of these is a transitional object set in an illusory space just this human side of the really inhuman Real, or as Lacan would say, plugging the hole in the Real, like the objet-á. And the transitional object of Winnicott is made to do nearly as much work as the lost objet-á of Lacan, although to equate the two objects would be wrong. For instance, we must keep our distance from the latter lest it presence induces a psychosis, whereas the former can always be retreated to for comfort.
However, Winnicott was not afraid. His first child analysis was a delinquent. The boy attended regularly for a year, but the clinic stopped the sessions because the patient was causing too much of a disturbance in the clinic. Winnicott reported that the analysis was going well in spite of the fact that he got bitten by the boy on the buttocks several times. The boy flooded the basement of the clinic and on another occasion he broke into Winnicott’s locked car and drove it away in first gear on the starter motor. The boy was sent to an approved school. On another occasion, a very disturbed war evacuee resided in his home for three months, ‘three months of hell’, says Winnicott. ‘He was the most lovable and the most maddening of children… We dealt with the first phase by giving him complete freedom and a shilling whenever he went out. He had only to ring up and we fetched him from whatever police station had taken charge of him’. Then the acting out became an acting inside the home. ‘Interpretations had to be made at any minute day or night, and often the only solution in a crisis was to make the correct interpretation that he valued above everything’. It took both husband and wife to control him. ‘The important thing’, notes Winnicott in this famous paper “Hate in the countertransference”, is how ‘the evolution of this boy’s personality engendered hate in me…Did I hit him? The answer is no, I never hit. But I should have had to have done so had I not known all about my hate and if I had not let him know about it too. Instead, Winnicott would lift him up and put him outside the front door, in any weather day or night. There was a bell he could ring and he would be readmitted with no word about the past. ‘The important thing is’, says Winnicott, ‘that each time, just as I put him outside the door, I told him something; I said that what had happened had made me hate him. This was easy because it was true’. Winnicott believed that the words of hate were important for the boy as well as for Winnicott, who was better able to tolerate the situation, ‘without every now and again murdering him’.15
Rather along the lines of Luke 14:26 – if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his brothers and his sisters – yes even his own life – he cannot be my disciple, Winnicott states, ‘It seems doubtful whether a human child as he develops is capable of tolerating the full extent of his own hate in a sentimental environment. He needs hate to hate. If this is true a psychotic patient in analysis cannot be expected to tolerate his hate of the analyst unless the analyst can hate him’.16 These are some of the most puzzling words of Winnicott, this question of what he calls “objective hating”, but in an age where people do not want to hate, judge or stigmatise the other for fear of damaging their enjoyment, there is arguably plenty of hatred around, including, according to Bernardos’ recent report, plenty of hatred of children.
Notes and references
1. A Phillips. 1988. Winnicott. Fontana Modern Masters. Fantana Press, p29.
2. D. Winnicott. 1963 'Communicating and not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites'. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. P187
3. F. Roustang. 1996. How to Make a Paranoid Laugh. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p99. emphasis added.
4. Kierkegaard cited on p99
5. D. Winnicott, 1971. Playing and Reality. Hogarth, p87
6. D. Winnicott 1958. 'The capacity to be alone', In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Envoronment. p29
7. D. Winnicott, 1971. Playing and Reality, p11
8. ibid, p90
9. ibid, p61
10. D. Albahari. 1998. Götz and Meyer, Belgrade: Stubovi kulture, Trans. Ellen Elias-Bursac. London: Random House, 2004. p85
11. ibid, p160.
12. D. Winnicott 1962. ‘The aim of psycho-analytical treatment’. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Envoronment, p167
13. D. Winnicott, 1971. Playing and Reality. p86
14. ibid. p64
15. D. Winnicott. 1947 'Hate in the countertransference'. In Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis. Hogarth. p199, 200.
16. ibid. p202.
ENGLEBY. THE LIFE OF A DOG. A Lacanian Reading of Sebastian Faulk’s book, Engleby. Vintage 2008. (A talk given to psychotherapists at The Northern Ireland Institute for Human Relations, Oct 2008).
We are taking Mike Engleby as a case, or a character to study. He is a fictional character, but no matter. There was a book written maybe ten years ago now, in which all the cases within, to be looked at from a psychoanalytic standpoint, were made up! But they were all most interesting cases and there was the added bonus of no problems with confidentiality. And as George Steiner remarked, we remember fictional characters much more clearly than real people. Furthermore, within our own era, the post modern, we have become accustomed to seeing the co-mingling of truth and fiction which leads to a certain relativism. Psychoanalysis has been foremost in sponsoring this relativism, ever since 1897 when Freud went back on his seduction theory of sexual abuse and gave fantasy a central place in the psychical economy.
A colleague had said, analysts should read Engleby, he’s a good example of “projective identification” at work! It struck me reading this work, partly on this analyst’s recommendation over the summer, that whether or not it illustrates this well known Kleinian psychotic defence, it might be an interesting way to introduce the three Lacanian registers of “reality”. This book contains, represents, or can be read in all three Lacanian registers. Kleinian or Lacanian, there is more than one way to do this work.
The three registers can be briefly summarised. The Imaginary, which has to do with imagination – images of all sorts. It begins with the mirror stage, where we see our double and we go on seeing doubles everywhere, a little bit like the paranoid-schizoid. This is the foundation of our ego and of our narcissism. The Imaginary is always linked with narcissism. Here we are likely to misunderstand the other in terms of ourselves with all the ambivalences of love and hate and rivalry that this will involve. The other has what I want; I desire what the other desires.
The Symbolic register is primarily about language in the largest sense of the word. Lacanians believe that we are “inserted” into language, or into our culture, our social milieu. This insertion has a castrating or alienating effect. Once we are within language, repressed as it were, we will never be the same again. Much as we think we use language, it uses us in ways that we cannot comprehend. Language structures the way we think in conscious and above all unconscious ways. If we listen to someone speaking freely (that is in a non-technical sense), it is immediately apparent that they are saying more than they intend to. It is the analyst’s job to pick up some of these hidden meanings. What we call our human reality is a mixture of the Symbolic and the Imaginary and we need a mixture of the two registers, where the narcissism inherent in the Imaginary is cut short by the Symbolic. We need some of the narcissism engendered by the mirror stage and yet we need to know “our place” in the Symbolic. The normal-neurotic person has “a” place in the Symbolic. People say, I know my place. A psychotic, or maybe a creative artist, does not know his place and will therefore appear odd, because he doesn’t obey the unconscious rules of the Symbolic. He will suffer greatly from being an “outsider” (more on this later).
When I, as a normal neurotic, let us say, go to see my doctor, for instance, I go to see a man or woman who occupies a particular position in the Symbolic universe and I will speak to him or her accordingly, because I have been formed by the largely unconscious Symbolic rules for discourse. However, if I see my doctor in the local supermarket – out of role, or without their symbolic mandate/mask – I will find this difficult not knowing quite how I should address them. Sometimes Lacanians refer to the Symbolic as the big Other, with all those ominous overtones about what the big Other thinks or wants. This big Other is otherness itself, or more simply, the unconscious. And interestingly enough, Lacanians do not think of the unconscious as being “internal”. In fact, to talk of THE unconscious is probably incorrect. The unconscious is not a noun. And it does not exist, or, if it exists at all, it is not inside us. It exists "out there" somewhere in language. Lacan famously said: the unconscious is structured like a language.
Then the Lacanians talk about a third register, the Real, the most mysterious of them all. The Real also does not exist in the normal sense of existing – i.e. transparent and able to be talked about. The Real is what is beyond imagination and language. It is not represented. It is what artists approach with their work in order to try and “shake” our complacent realities and general assumptions, it is the ineffable or the sublime – death or trauma, extreme enjoyment (like addictions, for instance) – all of which are more or less unspeakable. We should stay away from the Real but we are irresistibly attracted towards it, because there is something about ordinary reality that is deeply unsatisfying, as we will see with Engleby. Lacan will refer to this as the ubiquitous lack in our lives, the want-of-being which makes any psychoanalysis based on notion of ‘adaptation to reality’, somewhat suspect. However, we may want to argue about that. So as is well known, Lacan challenges and reverses much of what we might generalise and call, normative psychotherapy or psychiatry to do with strengthening the ego, adaptation and creating better relations with others. Instead, Lacan wants to revive conflict; Freud’s theory is after all a conflict model. Lacan want to return the mystery, the enigma to psychoanalysis and to the subject. And in the last half century the Lacanians have been trying to reverse the “containing” or “holding” functions of psychoanalysis, the maternal functions, believing individuals to be first and foremost, responsible desiring subjects. Each of these words is important to the Lacanian way of doing things.
Engleby is a very bright working class boy, from a small red-bricked terrace house who wins a place at an esteemed English University to study English. We take up the story when he is already in his second year. If he were going into analysis, he might have started by saying that his problem was that he was besotted with a lovely girl from Lymington High, called Jennifer Arkland, from a wealthy family, who is in her second year studying history. It is not an exaggeration to say that he is absolutely obsessed with her, yet cannot find a way to talk to her on a personal level. He won a prize that pays his college fees, coming himself from a very poor family. His mother and sister are still alive, but his father, who worked in a paper mill, was always in poor health and died some time ago from a heart attack. His mother worked as a receptionist in a hotel on the Bath Road. He does not seem particularly close to either parent. Engleby has a drug and alcohol problem of unknown proportions. He seems to drive around a lot in his car on his own. And his attitude to his teachers in his private school seems to have been a problem. Such are the preliminary notes that we might have taken.
There is Mike Engleby’s account of himself which makes up this book, where with increasing candour and with significant gaps, aporia, forgettings and disavowals (all the things that happen with language), he represents himself in all his strangeness and cynicism. In this sense he is an exemplary post-modern subject, who is able to play on several contradictory levels at the same time; to appear to be serious and yet be entirely flippant; to appear to be sincere and insincere in the next breath; to speak and yet to remain enigmatic and so on. This is the Symbolic register where all these ambiguities can co-exist, as Freud reminded us that in the unconscious, opposites co-exist. We read his diary account with increasing involvement and interest, being drawn in even though we are not sure where we are going, but at least we think or rather believe that we are on some sort of firm ground, just as when we listen to an analysand speak. We take him at his word. However, we know or suspect that we are being duped here as in any given analysis, even before we read on, but we go along with the deception, believing and disbelieving at the same time, bending our ear to the unconscious, as Freud advises. Remember, it is in the nature of language to deceive – that’s its beauty and creativity, but also its lack of any guarantee. But we must go along with the fiction that people are telling us the truth. Just like in the recent banking crisis – we went along with the fiction of the seriousness of the banker and the solemn environment of the bank! Then look what happens, out of the blue, out of the unconscious.
Then, there is also Jennifer Arkland’s diary, Engleby’s imaginary lover in the university – his upper class mirroring counterpart (a word favoured by Lacanians) to his working class origin. He gets inside her being. Firstly, he imagines her woman’s college in all of its cosiness. He imagines the cold wind from Russia, sweeping in from the East, and the kettle on for tea, the cake Molly bought, Cat Stevens in the record player, Carlos Casteneda is Jennifer’s reading… or maybe this cosiness is all in his imagination. In reality, he thinks, they might be fighting over boys and hate each other! Then he has her diary proper and he inhabits her every word. He remembers page after page verbatim. Remember the letter to her father, where we get a glimpse into her wonderful world, of her good, good world.
Then there are the attempts to classify Engleby psychologically and psychiatrically. He is a loner, a thief, borderline, schizoid, etc. This again is in the register of the Imaginary with its objectification of the other with a view to treatment of an object person – part of a system. Taken alone it is de-meaning. It takes away (all) meaning from a life and a history. As he says about his psychiatrists’ long deliberations and evaluations: ‘What a way to spend your life’,(p293) ‘Ah what a piece of work is a man’, and reminiscent of the paedophile Humbert in Lolita, he continues, ‘The glory that was Engleby, the incomparable complexity of the human mind in all its glittering and bewildering beauty reduced to half a dozen non-sequiturs in blue Bic on an HMSO form.’ (p301).
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The glory that was Engleby? The ordinary glory of individual lives. I am not thinking of narcissism here. Is there not something about psychoanalysis that resist this objectification, in the strongest possible terms? One Left-wing group in the Republic has a slogan, People before Profits. Psychoanalysts should have a similar slogan, Subjects before Objects! The trouble is that psychoanalysts are complicit in the system, not wanting to be left outside with registration imminent.
Then there is the Real for Engleby, the real of the body, his rages, his panic attacks, his extensive use of drugs, alcoholism and violence. Here also is where the ethical is located, where Engleby acts, and what an act. His Act changes the coordinates of his whole existence and the existence of several others. His act is a crime and things will never be the same again. An Act in the Lacanian sense is not just a bit of behaviour, it has a real dimension, such that after it has taken place nothing will ever quite be the same again. This is very importantly clinically, as at this point things are changed forever with no going back. In some way the analysand must take responsibility for his Act. It is worth thinking about these Acts, with a capital “A”. The usual one mentioned is Freud’s woman patient, who is homosexual. When confronted by her father, she throws herself onto a railway line. Suicide is an Act in this sense, and as Lacan says, an act that succeeds completely. We can think of more commonplace examples, when, for instance, someone confronts their father with a truth that had been hidden, or a person gives up a permanent and pensionable job to follow a desire that has been latent for decades, or, someone who stands up to a dominating authority-Other at great risk to themselves. Antigone comes to mind as she fights the authority of Creon to the death if necessary out of loyalty to her brother Polynices. Although, the word is not often used, the Act has a lot to do with courage. It is a striking out in the Real, where the consequences are unknown.
These three registers compete for our attention because they are all linked or interwoven. They all rival each other and none of them must be entirely discounted by the analyst-reader.
For instance, the rivalry between the Imaginary, diagnosis-treatment-care option for Engleby with his alleged ‘personality-disorder’, versus the Ethico-Real of the criminal who must take responsibility for his Act. As Engleby writes at one point: ‘I was no longer a prisoner or a criminal; they’d taken off my handcuffs; I was a patient now. My identity was changed, from an object of vilest hatred to something broken that must be cured. The transformation was too much for me to take in; it literally took my breath away and I gasped’(p298, my italics). And without this dimension of the Real, the truly real dimension of his crime, Engleby, simply designated as ‘patient to be cared for’, feels less than human.
In this world of the Imaginary, there is no fault and no judgement. This is also the world of a certain kind of psychotherapy. Referring to his therapist and her refusal to pass judgement on him, Engleby is exasperated. ‘She never seemed able to express even so much as mild disapproval. He goes on to berate her, ‘“You’re like Bill Clinton”, I said, knowing the comparison would appal her. “He took the intern as his girlfriend, then denied it. He screwed her and he lied and lied and lied. But in the end when he coughed up he couldn’t say that he’d done wrong, he’d only say what he’d done was ‘inappropriate’”’. He could not admit that he had done wrong pure and simple! But the therapist persists in the way that therapists are trained to do, by saying that she doesn’t think that the idea of blaming is helpful! Don’t beat yourself up, she might have said! Engleby responds, and this is an absolutely crucial point,
‘With no blame there’s no shame. A human society can’t exist without shame. Shame is like handedness or walking upright. It’s a central human attribute. In fact, it’s the first human quality ever recorded…in Genesis, Chapter Three. The covering of nakedness. The acquisition of shame was the first consequence of consciousness, of the speciating moment. Take shame from me and you are calling me pre-human’. (p318)
The interesting point that is implied by Faulks here is that the real of shame has been transferred to the Imaginary register, where it becomes merely “inappropriate” behaviour that obliges us to do “work on it”. The whole question of shame and the really real of criminality, which can never be undone because the Act was done irrevocably, can be thus transformed into a psychological malfunction due to earlier failures open to obligatory therapeutic correction and resolution in a clinical setting. The brutal real of the Act is marginalised, or simply not recognised as an Act.
Instead, the therapist wanted Engleby to acknowledge and “work on” his sexism and racism. Trawling through his diary, she finds his stealing women’s bikes a sign of misogyny, as well as his attitudes to the women students in college generally, and, above all, in his criticism of her, his therapist in the transference! If there is any wrong, it is not named as such, but termed in the more neutral way, “inappropriate”! Similarly, she picks on a passage in his diary where he expressed pity for West Indians, who found Britain ‘cold and inhospitable… who had traded in their beautiful country for the grey rain of Catford and Lewisham’. This kind of evaluation is deemed racist especially when he suggests, ‘they’d be much happier going home, don’t you think? They’re trying to have a street culture in the pouring rain..’(p150). These sorts of statements are deemed “thought crimes” in the world of the imaginary and of course they are the way to police people psychologically in the absence of the real of responsibility.
The whole of what Engleby writes unlike his ever-so-healthy and well off, well-functioning counterpart, Jennifer, can be trawled and was trawled to demonstrate his disfunctionality.
Englesby is a philosopher. Consider his theories about human evolution and the emergence of consciousness. We are ‘containers for inactive bacteria which have been successful in the struggle for survival’. His view of recent history: ‘Something happened to this country, perhaps in the 1960s. We lost the past’.(p121). In these four words he defines the post modern. When his father returned from the war in 1946 to Reading, ‘after all he knew of the bodies burning in the ovens of Treblenca, children in flames in wood-and-paper houses in Japan…[Reading!!] hadn’t changed (it had always been an unlovely town) and there was still a main line to the past…Now [in post modernity, post-history] you walk down those same streets and it seems as though it’s all a sham, a play or a quotation. When I look through the window of the "shoppe", I didn’t see people rooted in that town: I saw people floating through disconnected’ (p122). He acknowledges that the old still have some idea of local history although they may be a little embarrassed about it. But what he is describing is the loss of the Real dimension, the loss of our registration of the Real. He says, ‘the only true reality - the present has insufficient depth to register it’. (p122, my italics).
His father died early, suddenly from a heart attack and Engleby’s view was that, ‘his dying made a mockery of his life. The plans the photographs, the “future” – all the stuff they lived by. It was a delusion…this banal brutality was what all along lay in wait?’ (p92). He didn’t mourn the death, unlike his sister and mother. Instead, being bright, he was sent to a brutal private school, Chatfield, where he was remorselessly bullied and wasn’t able to fight back. Like his father before him - at least Engleby’s myth of his father- he suggests that : ‘I don’t think dad ever reached a level much above a dog’s. He’d been beaten and he beat. He was beaten by his life as a slum child, as a young man in the navy, then as a working in a factory…’ (p162). During the war, he had seen a British ship sinking and the merchantmen drowning and burning in an oil slick which had been deliberately set alight by the Germans.
He was caught by the real of death and suffering. This is largely disavowed by the Symbolic and the Imaginary which after all has no way of comprehending it or can only speak about it quite inadequately. Music, on the other hand, remains close to the Real. The book is peppered with musical references. He says, ‘I often think good music is too much to take. Think of Sibelius Five, when the earth’s weight seems to shift on its axis in the closing moments…I listened to Beethoven’s late quartets yesterday. They’re quite wintry, aren’t they? But they have the feeling of a man thinking about death’. (p66).
Clearly, Engleby feels deathly about his life. There is a death current running in the background – it’s a mockery. The “future”, it’s all a delusion. Engleby himself was beaten like a dog. The theme of being beaten, as being beaten like a dog clearly has structured Engleby’s life in the same way that he talks about the life of his father. Maybe this gives the clue to why he is so bullied in Chatfield. His life has been structured in this way unconsciously. It would be the task of the analyst to underline this language effect. He is pre-disposed to be very close to the dimension of the Real, beyond the humanly constructed Imaginary-Symbolic. His nickname in Chatfield is “toilet” – he is a receptacle for everyone else’s excrement.
His philosophy is essentially nihilistic. ‘The sun can set and rise again. But for us once the short light is snuffed out, there is just one long night to be slept through’ (p92). This is Catullus. Engleby has thought out this brevity of life. He suggests that we represent the lifetime of our species as just one day. Then each of us can then expect to live for half a second! And what can you usefully do in half a second – nothing. That is if time is linear, and he suspects that time is not linear, in which case there is some hope, but, he says, the trouble is our brains can only think of time is in a linear way! He regards this as a cosmic joke - such an evolved creature as us with a design flaw. We cannot figure one of the dimensions in which we live. It is as if, ‘We’re deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but can’t hear it’. (p155). And he follows a Catholic Spanish philosopher who regards man, because he possesses consciousness, as a sick animal. Consciousness is a disease!
However, his philosophical reveries becomes more real. ‘I suppose all human “personalities” are at some level makeshift or provisional, but it is unusual to feel oneself come apart in such a molecular way’. (p130). His Symbolic universe is collapsing. He’s been to the cinema. He says, ‘Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive. I feel my sense of who I am drowned out by static. On the street, in the world, there’s too much extraneous filth and air and words. I don’t find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous’. (154). He describes ‘flying apart into my atomic pieces, reality in tatters’. He describes panic: as when the past, present and future hit you with overwhelming force. This is the Real, beyond the Imaginary and the Symbolic. It is what appears when the symbolico-imaginary fall apart
He is on the edge, not fitting in. In a sense he is un-alienated, that is he is in the position of truth, which is an impossible position because it is so painful and isolating. Consider, for instance, the brilliant description of the dinner party with all the phoney status talk and the mock interest in Engleby. Maybe we have all experienced this being on the outside while being included.
Darling! This is Mike Engleby…Have you children? Feigned interest…My mother’s in the hotel business. Really, I believe its very hard work…And your sister’s in brewing? Accounts? Such a volatile market…wines and spirits…is your sister married? No, er…Sensible girl, career first! Engleby says that he did his best to make his poor mother and sister ‘worthy of this apocalyptic degree of interest’. So much so that he almost believed his own story! Children, different schools, difficult and problematic au pairs from the East, mergers and acquisitions, being head hunted, a new school in Cambridge – do you know it? You bet, I gather its fantastic! (p215).
What you might hope for from such a gathering? ‘I had imagined that at a “dinner party” you talked to your friend, the one who’d invited you, and maybe his wife, and who knows a couple of others and the whole thing became a convivial, pooled chat…’ (p214). Here Engleby is ignoring, and yet only too well aware of, the inexorability of the Lacanian Symbolic, that hidden structure within language where you know your place. On the rational level – and aren’t we all rational and democratic now? – you have a place, you’re welcome of course, but on the level of the unconscious, your place is defined by all kinds of syntax and subtle semantics that can trip you up. Indeed you will be told your place. As happened to an Argentinean friend of mine working in a well heeled clothes shop when she answered the phone to a customer. The customer made her inquiry in a very friendly way and got the information she wanted and then went on to inquire where my friend was from. When told, she replied – oh my, so they are actually letting your crowd in now are they? He place, like ours, is designated for us in advance by the structure. For the Lacanians, structure comes before all else. The question we should be asking is: what is the subject’s place in the structure?
What can we say about Engleby? After reading him, we know him in an intimate way, yet we do not know him at all at the same time. He undoubtedly has a personality disorder on the Imaginary psychoanalytic-psychiatric level. He has had his say on the Symbolic level; he has had a chance to speak and we have listened with interest, to his cold cynicism, his truth telling and his unspoken, his silent, indifferent cruelty. He admits to being a vile criminal, after he is caught and realises, maybe for the first time what he has done. There is something of the Freudian notion of Nachtraglichkeit here. He has acted as if in a trance and only afterwards realised what he has done - the Real enormity of it. This is the truth. We should pay heed to R.D. Laing’s definition of a psychotic as 'a person who has no friends'. And this is what happens on the edge of the Symbolic – no friends to speak of or speak to. He is so “close” to Jennifer, we feel, in our naivety, they must be, or must become friends. He is closer to her than it is possible to be and maybe this is why he had to kill her; her proximity was unbearable. His envy was unbearable. And his writing circulates around this Real of the Act. There are various points in the story where he are led to circulate around this black hole, only to stop, so to speak, at the event horizon! It is Inspector Cannon who fills in this whole with the blood-stained tee-shirt. And what should we say about his “multiple personality”? Is he like the post modern subject who can appear in any guise as quite convincing? Maybe. Thatcher’s advice was right after all. He goes to interview her in his journalist phase and she gives him a piece of advice – absolutely contrary to psychoanalysis – ‘Too much looking back is a weariness to the soul. It was St Francis who said that, eyes on the horizon. Never be deflected. Don’t look down or you may stumble. Above all don’t look back’.(p241) This would be an ideal end to an analysis!
Žižek: silence and the real desert.
Why would anyone read Žižek? Why should Žižek be compulsory reading in the minutes before an analysand arrives for their session? Because he writes in the kind of way that analysts should be able to think. As he says himself, where there are networks there is also the possibility of short-circuits – cutting across the network to create a spark; not wanting to be reductive as in the old IPA style, but to evoke, to provoke, to de-centre, to open up the space of a lack, not just for the sake of it, but because without it everything seems banal. Not only can one cross these synapses like a flash, but the reverse, there are pathways in the networking system that are blocked, where there is a parallax situation. What opens up, then, is an impossibility, an incommensurability.
Žižek explores these impossibilities in his magnum opus, The Parallax View.1 Parallax, put simply, is the apparent shift of an object against the background that is caused by a change in the observer's position. You are driving along a country road and stop. At this point the tree by the roadside is aligned from this perspective with a church in the background. Drive a little further and look back at the tree and it is aligned now with a farm. Everything has remained the same except your position as observer. The two viewpoints are incompatible. The same holds true for for Jastrow’s duck-rabbit parallax, where one can see just the duck or the rabbit but not both at the same time. No mediation or synthesis is possible whereby one can see the duck and the rabbit simultaneously. They are on opposite sides of a Moebius strip and there is no possibility of a short-circuiting. The same problematic holds true for the wave/particle duality in physics. Electromagnetic waves “interfere” with each other very much like water waves creating peaks and troughs. However, with the discovery of the Photoelectric effect by Einstein in 1905, light must also be understood as tiny particles of energy called photons.
Against the New Age notion of opposites, polarities (Yin and Yang) that may dance and interact with each other, like some contemporary music to relax by that has no beginning or end, Žižek’s work is based on what he claims is ‘a strategic politico-philosophical decision’ to outline and hold to the ‘inherent “tension”, gap, noncoincidence of the One with itself’(p7). Further on he says, ‘What if the actual problem is not to bridge the gap but, to formulate it as such, to conceive it properly’? (p214). This is Žižek’s position. This gap is the parallax. Žižek follows Lacan with “the lack” in being, and Freud with the conflict model of human desire: life versus death drives; unconscious/conscious and so on. He also states counterintuitively that the gap is essentially Hegelian, ‘the opposites are not reconciled in a “higher synthesis” – rather their differences are posited “as such”’ (p299).
In this work he will outline the parallax view in relation to three key areas: the philosophical, the cognitivist brain sciences and the political. In each area he will set “cruel traps” for the progressivists: ‘the usual gang of democracy-to-come-deconstructionist-postsecular-Levinasian-respect-for-Otherness suspects’ (p11). One parallax that should be pointed up at the beginning is that this Žižekian approach can be and is seen as deeply ironic, along the lines of Oscar Wilde’s fear that people will not misunderstand him. Žižek can become the source of jokes himself, like Terry Eagleton’s spoof: ‘The crack between the herring and the side of the can, to put the matter in Hegelese, is actually a crack within the pickled herring itself. It is the way the pickled herring differs minimally from itself…’. Against this amusement, Žižek is the philosopher of the impenetrable Real and therefore implacable opponent of the political consensus and soft ideological forms. Žižek hits the spot. He writes from within the catastrophe. He lives the catastrophe.
However, the parallax is more than just a simple problem with perspective, there is the additional complication of one’s subjective conditioning, the prejudices with which we come to the “object”. This reaches it apogee with l’objet petit á, this ordinary object transformed into a special object, which is the cause upon which desire is focussed, the “strange attractor” around which desire turns. Žižek suggests that this is an exemplary parallax problem, of “pure” difference, where this unfathomable X, perceived to be “in” the object, cannot be pinned down to any particular properties of the object. As an example of this impossible X, he gives a Laplanchian gloss to Freud’s seduction theory. From one perspective, there is the brutal real of adult seduction of the helpless child leading to sometimes severe adult pathologies. From the more nuanced psychoanalytic perspective, there is the whole problematic of the child’s sexual fantasies. Laplanche points out that seduction cannot be (and never was merely) reduced to infantile fantasies by Freud, but always represents a traumatic encounter with the Other’s “enigmatic message”, the other’s unconscious sexual desire. Seduction can never be reduced to a simple event in the subject’s life. It is always somewhere “between” these two viewpoints, partly “real”, partly “fantasy”, always a “shock”, always a “too soon”, a Thing that cannot be wholly integrated into a narrative of meaning.
Basic antagonisms
More generally, the foundational parallax concerns, on the one hand, the finite, phenomenal, ontic domain, the not-All, which parallels the infinite, noumenal, ontological domain of Being. We barred subjects exist in the void of the gap. And this gap is the seductive Real which anamorpotically distorts our perceptions of the “same” reality. This is what Žižek calls the “parallax Real”, as distinct from the standard Lacanian Real - ‘that which always returns to its place’ - the parallax real, represents the irreducible social antagonism, the ‘hard bone of contention which pulversises the sameness into a multitude of appearences’(p26). This is also the definition of post-modern relativitism, ‘the thought of the irreducible multiple of worlds, each of them sustained by a specific language game, so that each world “is” the narrative its members are telling themselves about themselves, with no shared terrain, no common language between them’(p37). In this chaotic dissensus, there is no Master-Signifier or quilting point, or, in Bion’s terminology, “selected fact”, that will enable the “facts” cohere in a new arrangement. Žižek mentions, as the exemplary Master-Signifier, the Nazi’s citing of the “Jewish plot”, as the master stroke that puts order on defeat, economic crisis and moral degeneracy in pre-War Germany.
Similarly, Žižek, via Kierkegaard, stresses the infinite gap between God and man. This gap parallels two incompatible notions of love: Christian love is love that asks for nothing in return and ambivalent love, of giving what one doesn’t have. This non-exchange value of Christian love marks it out from the Symbolic, calculating, cost-benefit form of love – give and take. Christian love is for nothing, like Abraham’s absolute willingness to sacrifice Isaac. ‘A man is required to make the greatest possible sacrifice, to dedicate his whole life as a sacrifice – and wherefore?’(p80). There is no guarantee, no value, nothing to be gained. Instead, a leap of faith is required, which tears through the Symbolic.
Levinas, however, distrusted psychoanalysis because if this ethical parallax question. Levinas cites, as a key reference, Vassily Grossman’s book, Life and Fate,2 Grossman is regarded as the first and the greatest of the dissidents of the post-Stalin era, who emerged from within Russia. Against progressivism, against scientific reason, Grossman pits human freedom, gratuitous giving, senseless kindness, which is unspoken for the most part and is not part of any system of Goodness and which goes unobserved and unrewarded.3 It is, therefore, not part of any Symbolic or Imaginary register. It remains unknown and unheeded, and for that reason specifically and uniquely human, part of Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy. Žižek asks, ‘Is this not the lesson of Kierkegaard – that every translation of ethics into some positive universal frame already betrays the fundamental ethical Call, and thus necessarily gets entangled in inconsistencies [ideologies]? Is the only true ethical stance, therefore, the acceptance of this paradox and its challenge’? (p87). The religious sensibility cannot synthesise this parallax - ‘the lack of a common measure, the insurmountable abyss between the Finite and the Infinite’(p103). 4
Silence
With the radical lack of common measure, what good does speaking do? Speaking in the abyss, or, speaking which creates the abyss. ‘I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature’ writes Edvard Munch in his diary in 1892, about his iconic painting of the small asexual figure and his silent scream with his hands over his ears. Take this example of the logic of talking therapy.5
-You say a crime was committed against you and your family in Kosovo?
-Yes.
-In your own time, in your own words, can you tell me about the terrible incident(s)?
-(Head in hands) Silence.
Therapist waits. After repeated attempts….
-No. I can’t speak about such terrible things. Never. Never.
-Okay. I understand. But when you do feel you can tell us, remember we are here to help and it will help you if you can share with us what happened.
-No. I can’t speak. I can only hate… those fucking animals, those murdering bastards…
For Steiner, language is primarily utterance and the Urnatur of language is silence: the silence that antedates speech, before speech emerges with the hominid brain’s explosive development; the silence that surrounds all speaking; the Holocaustal silence of the “Night of the world”. For Žižek, however, ‘The primordial fact is not silence (waiting to be broken by the divine word) but noise, the confused murmur of the Real’. The question then becomes how a space of silence can open up, as there can be no speech without this background of silence;6 ‘as Heidegger knew, all speech answers the “sound of silence”’(p154). Work is needed to open up a clearing in which words can be spoken, the same way as Lacan has suggested the vase or vaulted architecture creates a central void. Similarly, the potential space or “transitional space” guaranteed by the analyst represents this clearing in which words can be spoken. Žižek cites the Argentinian writer, Alejandra Pizarnik –
‘Everything makes love with silence
the silence of things
you speak to ignore me
far beyond any forbidden zone
is a mirror for our sad reflections.
This song of regret, alert, behind my poems:
This song denies me, chokes my voice.
Žižek reads this, ‘mirror for our sad reflections…far beyond…this song [of silence] denies me, chokes my voice’, as the terrifying noumenal domain of the Real, ‘in which a kind of “objective” truth (or rather, a totally objectifying knowledge) about me is inscribed’(p155, my emphasis).
Žižek recalls The Matrix, where the Cipher, the traitor, the secret agent of the Matrix among the rebels (located in reality himself) kills one rebel after another by unplugging them from the virtual world which they take for real, plunging them into the “desert of the Real”. They therefore die in both worlds. Žižek calls his small volume, published by Verso, along with contributions from Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard to commemorate the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentegon, Welcome to the Desert of the Real.
The Real which “returns”, does so as yet another semblance or phantasy, as a horrendous apparition which is so traumatic and intrusive (maybe “objective”) that it cannot be integrated into our meaningful symbolic universe, the coordinates of which are forever changed.
This objective Real, or “totally objectifying knowledge”, which, by definition, is clearly not our knowledge, ‘chokes our voice’. For example, consider the parallax difference, from, 1) the perspective of the patient told the objectifying knowledge that she will die within weeks from a newly discovered cancer, and, 2), from the perspective of the oncologist who gives the diagnosis before going for his round of golf. Martin Amis’s heroin, astrophysist Jennifer Rockwell,8 kills herself when she realises the enormity of the universe in its glacial empty objectivity. Julie Vignon de Courcy (Juliette Binoche), in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film, Blue, is the lone survivor in a car accident that killed outright her husband, a renowned composer, and their young daughter. The fatal crash happened on a country road when the family car smashed into a tree, at the precise moment that the father was telling a joke, without getting his usual chance to repeat the punch line. What we are struck by seconds after the accident is the absolutely “objective” silence at the scene.
Being no one
Žižek follows a number of contemporary authors on this key mind-body parallax: apparently encountering someone when we look into their eyes, versus, the brute biological fact that there is no one in the brain tissue. ‘You look down into an open head, watching the brain pulsate, watching the surgeon tug and probe, and you understand with absolute conviction that there is nothing more to it. There’s no one there’.9 Just as in Plato’s famous cave, there is no overall observing subject, but just a procession of shadows and their interplay. This, at least, is the well worn post-modern view of the subject, that has come all the way (down) from the high Renaissance estimation of man at the pinnacle of creation, through Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, to the ‘emergence of the subject as pure immaterial void’(p164). However, the turn towards appearances, as such, with phenomenology (albeit without substantial realities “behind” them), notions such as autopoeisis, the “emerging properties” of systems, events e-venting themselves, self-organising phenomena, fluid-multiple-open, quantum phenomena and the autonomy of pure flux-events, the ‘ontology of pure becoming’, and so on, all part and parcel of the by now commonplace de-substantialised “reality”, recover at least some ephemeral flickers of subjectivity without depth. Not non-all, but the maybe-not-quite-nothing of contemporary subjectivity.
However, subjectivity is further threatened by the encroachment of the brain-machine-interface: implants that can realise Orwellian thought control; the prospect of post-human “undead” virtual entities; the shift from hardware (brain) to software (mind), with the latter being able to detach from the former completely and enter the virtual.
Of particular fascination is the “link” between brain chemistry and consciousness. Everything we experience has corresponding neurophysiological correlates. For instance, brain processes accompany intense religious experiences. However, the question of causality remains unresolved. Taking an ecstacy pill creates in the user a feeling of exuberant abundant love towards the other. How does this short-cut compare to a religious training and devotion over a lifetime that might produce similar oceanic experiences, “naturally”? Consider the dour father, melancholic most of his life, who, on his deathbed is given morphine to relieve pain and seems to his visiting son, as cheerful, good-humoured and loving, for the first time in his life. Does the morphine neurophysiologically and artificially transform the father on his deathbed into this “loving” man, or, does it merely facilitate a very moving loving last gesture (“choice”) at the final moment, that was always hidden in this otherwise depressed man?10
Žižek cites John Taylor’s “skating” analogy of consciousness.11 Taylor understands consciousness as a relational phenomenon where past memories, representations, emotions are used to fill in and inform present sensory imputs, which triggers a host of related activities endowing the mental process with a ‘seeming insubstantiality’, which, at some critical point, ‘lifts’ the original imput into a new arena, like the skater who having launched himself onto the ice glides off effortlessly. Thus, consciousness emerges released from the “friction” of the pre-processing stages. This model accounts for properties like qualia, ineffability, transparency and intrinsicality. Consciousness floats free when the threshold is crossed. Therefore, there is no consciousness without self-consciousness. The “I” emerges as the self-relating interaction between present input and past, and what we can properly call “the self” is this escape into the fluid field of awareness and de-centring, creating the impossibility of the I’s immediate self-presence. Consciousness spins off from the substrate that created it. ‘A new quasi-object thus emerges’ (p213), the final states of which involve “attractor nets” which attract initial activity to become similar to their own, but remain insubstantial as they were created, posited and generated by the very substrates which react and interact to them in endless feedback loops. So subject and object (attractor) are almost one; the minimal “gap” is also the programmed space for freedom.
There is no subject prior to neural activity; no top-down, only bottom-up. Žižek emphasises, ‘cognitive scientists repeat again and again how our mind does not possess a centralised control structure which runs top-down…it is rather a bricolage of multiple agents who collaborate bottom-up’.(p241) The self is its own self-ing, unaware12 of the steps towards its own emerging for very good evolutionary reasons to do with necessarily rapid autopoeitic information processing. So when Žižek concludes that, ‘as true Freudians, we should reject the notion of “Me” as a substantial background of the ego’ (p217), he is also following Lacan and indeed Winnicott, whose understanding of ‘aliveness’ is a similar process of emergence via relating and “primary illusionment”.13
We are thinking the unthinkable – a self-less world, of living as ‘being no one’ (p218), maybe forgetting that for two and a half millennia, Buddhist enlightenment has been practicing the assumption of non-being.14 The old Cartesian consciousness of pure reflection that gets caught up by emotion as the price the mind has to pay for being embodied, has become consciousness emerging, ‘through the disturbance of the organism’s homeostasis, it “is” the very activity of dealing with disturbances’.(p223) For Damasio, for instance, ‘the core you is only born as the story is told, within the very story itself…You are the music while the music lasts’.15 In the Lacanian sense, the subject is the ‘answer of the Real’ (p225). Žižek recalls the joke about the patient in a large hospital ward who complains to the doctor about constant noise and crying from the other patients. The doctor replies that nothing can be done to prevent these suffering people from expressing their despair, since they all know they are dying. The patient then asks why they cannot be put in a separate room for the dying. And the doctor replies that this is the separate room for the dying.
However, Žižek believes that Damasio leaves out of consideration the ‘proper empty core of subjectivity’, radically exposed as it is, not to life-experience, but ‘affects: anxiety and horror. Anxiety as correlative to confronting the Void that forms the core of the subject; horror as the experience of disgusting life at it purest, “undead” life [the death drive]’. (p227) When, for instance, the subject is violently attacked, the emotional response is such that the cortical areas of the brain focus on the stimulus and inhibit interest in sex and food. Such stressors have, over time, acted to accelerate the development of our cognitive and behavioural capacities, not least, our acquisition of language, “placed”, as it is between these higher capacities and our emotional sub-systems. Žižek wants to emphasise this structural “gap” in connectivity between cognitive systems and emotional abilities. This gap, or point of failure, where emotions lag behind cognition defines our humanity. It gives rise to the uniquely human emotions of anxiety, melancholy and love. Without it humans would be virtual machines.16 As Žižek says, ‘Specifically “human” emotions (like anxiety) arise only when a human animal loses its emotional moorings in biological instincts, and this loss is supplemented [inadequately] by the symbolically regulated emotions qua man’s "secondnature".p228)
Interestingly, music arises in this gap between speech, always remains limited to phenomenal representations, and the “deeper” Real of our noumenal Will. As Schopenhauer has stressed: music will survive at the end of the world. Žižek suggests that music expresses the ‘underlying ”noumenal” flux of jouissance beyond linguistic meaningfulness…it is the inaccessible excess [“Night of the World”] which forms the very core of the subject’. (p229-230).
Biopolitics
The advent of biopolitical control and regulation – bureaucratic totalitarianism, the “administered world”, works as an ideological cover for the explosive nature of late, “end of history”, global capitalism with it continuous self-revolutionary effects. Similarly, risk aversion, fear of harassment, self-policing via diet, exercise, self-monitoring and so on, serve as a cover for excessive jouissance on the level of the individual. As Baudrillard admits, following the postmodern doxa, one no longer tries to overthrow the system, but does one’s best just to figure out its chaotic complexity and then enjoy it.
Žižek has a similar view. Against some (conservative) analysts, who would want to re-Oedipalise and reinvigorate the Symbolic,17 he suggests instead that the task is, ‘to fully assume the non-existence of the Other’ (p296). This assumption can be read in a number of ways. Most obviously: There is no Other of the Other: God is dead. For Vattimo, 18 for instance, the death of God means the death of any ultimate structures of value or belief. There is no objective foundation of meaning or worth, no secular accounts of the worth of human life. All value systems are simply interpretations – the making of meaning from within a particular cultural moment, lacking in any ultimate authority. The irony here is that such notions embrace and further the very decentralisation and chaos, the total freedom upon which capitalism depends for its full unfettered emergence. Secondly, the non-existence of the Other, should also be read in a Levinasian way: there is no other qua unique other, no neighbour in his absolute non-negotiable, irreducible nakedness; that is, there is no debt, nothing owing to him, no place for him in my (absolutely narcissistic) world. Thirdly, this assumption is reminiscent of IRA suspects brought before the British Crown legal system. They were obliged, by their own military code, to refuse to recognise the jurisdiction of the court (Other). As a consequence they say nothing. Finally, my declarative performative assumption that the big Other does not exist is an elemental gesture against the gaze of the big Other of omnipresent surveillance, part of the immense bureaucratising potential of the appropriately named IT industry, returning to its spying origins.
On one parallax view, capitalism, at the heart of its functioning, is continuously self-revolutionising creating unprecedented excess and perversion without limit, yet on the other parallax view, it is the logic of technological domination. These two perspectives, the economic and the political, are radically incompatible and antagonistic. No synthesis is possible, and, as with any parallax, we can only see one side at a time. For instance, we might celebrate the chaotic indeterminacy and autopoietic processes of capitalism and the creative emergence of decentralised decisions,19 as an unprecedented success story which has seen incomes in some part of the world quadruple since World War Two; while not seeing this success story as ‘the ideological mask of the unprecedented growth of [covert] state apparatuses and other forms of social and economic control and regulation’ (p375). In the obverse, one might praise the new rational measures being taken trans-culturally to protect children, women, minorities, regulate business and the professions, the gathering of unprecedented data on health and spending choices, crime prevention and CCTV, etc., and support these biopolitical controls, while not seeing these meta-regulations as a spectral cover for the spread of chaos, social breakdown, sexual perversion that the System inevitably generates, as by-product waste.
For Žižek, as for Lacanians generally, the analyst’s discourse should stand for,
'[T]he emergence of revolutionary-emancipatory subjectivity that resolves the split into university [knowledge, domination, administration] and hysteria [chaotic excess]: in it, the revolutionary agent (a) addresses the subject from the position of knowledge which occupies the place of truth (that is, which intervenes at the “symptomal torsion” of the subject’s constellation) and the goal is to isolate, get rid of, the Master Signifier which structured the subject’s (ideologico-political) unconscious' (p298).
Tentatively, Žižek hints at new quilting points, new Master Signifiers, ‘a new naming of our situation’, beyond the crazy underminings caused not so much by revolutionaries but by capitalism itself! However, is this not precisely what capitalism requires and has succeeded in causing: namely total and constant renewal, the process of continuous becoming, undermining any ideological-political commitments in favour of the carnival? How can a “subject”, so empty, so ephemeral, so contingent and light, within a system that both mirrors and creates it, be committed to anything for long enough to effect change?
The ironies of the post-‘68 rush to jouissance, was never going to be too far from the consumption of an endless supply of new products promising jouissance, up to and including the ‘autistic-masturbatory “asocial” jouissance whose supreme case is drug addiction…a commodity par excellence’ (311).20 The fall-out from this virtual revolution was the emergence of the real desert of the social in three key respects: social breakdown; terrorism; the turn inwards towards mysticism and drug states. What all three represent is ‘a withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement into a direct contact with the Real’ (311). And there is a sense that all three retreats are increasing at the same time as capitalism itself spirals onwards. And the Left today is caught between cautious reformism and revolutionary despair. Or as one disillusioned Lacanian colleague joked about Lacanian analysts, ‘they are just armchair revolutionaries’.
Another parallax concerns the Law itself. State power represents the interests of its subjects. It serves them, is answerable to them and is subject to their control. This is the official widely held democratic position. A slight shift in the parallax position reveals power’s ‘obscene superego supplement’ to the Law, always present but normally hidden. It emerges when the State is bombarded by impossible demands, from, for instance, anti-globalisation protesters. What transpires then seems more like the unconditional exercise of power: ‘law does not bind me, I can do whatever I like with you. I can treat you as guilty if I decide to, I can destroy you if I want to…’ (337).21 Power posits itself as rational, but always relies on the obscene stain of hidden violence. The best example of this parallax comes from a rather unlikely source, namely the power of abortion.22
For Žižek, opposing the Law via direct action, what he calls ‘the rumspringa of resistance’ only reinforces the System through our robust participation within it. Rumspringa refers to the “running around” of Amish youth, permitted experimentation and transgression for a brief time before they either, re-enter their strict community as evermore committed members, or leave altogether. Žižek is also against humanitarian aid, giving to charities to support orphans in Africa, opposing oil drilling in a wide-life area, presumably buying fair trade coffee, ethical products, or supporting feminists in Muslim countries, and so on. All the things that make well educated middle class people feel that they are doing “their bit” with their little rumspringa, before they revert to their normal lives. He is also against the by now standard response of dis-identifying with the system - I know it’s all a game - while participating fully within it. Or, more radically, going to California or Thailand to meditate, Zen-style, for a week or for a year – maybe the ultimate self-absorption in the guise of pan-spiritual withdrawal.
What Žižek wants to explore is a “new space” outside the hegemonic position and its mirroring negation - the Heideggerian sense of a clearing, the opening up of a place, ‘through a gesture which is thoroughly violent in its impassive refusal…to quote Mallarmé – nothing will have taken place but the place itself’ (381). This gesture is no-thing. It is the ‘immanent difference, gap, between this [everyday] reality and its own void; that is to discern the void that separates material reality from itself , that makes it “non-all”’(383).
A Lacanian joke: A man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to a mental hospital where the doctors work hard to convince him that he is a man. However, when he is cured and now believes that he is a man and not a grain of seed, he is allowed to leave the hospital and live as a normal man. He is outside the front door of the hospital and comes rushing back in trembling and scared. There was a chicken outside the door. The doctor tells him, ‘Look you know that you are not a grain of seed but a man’. ‘I know that full well’, says the patient, ‘but does the Chicken’? It is a question then of my knowledge of and my beliefs about myself, and the Other’s knowledge, which can be a shock or even traumatic. My knowledge and the Other’s can act as a parallax. One never knows what the Other is thinking! The Other might decide to ‘play the man rather than the ball’.23 The Other always has ironic effects, disorienting or negating effects. The best one can hope for is just this “new space”. Žižek puts the death drive to use here in the “clearing” process. For a moment or more, the subject is free from subjection to the Other. However, in a revolutionary atmosphere a new more severe Master will be taken on.24
For Baudrillard, the world in itself is already radical otherness, for which there is no equivalent and no exchange. Its absolute strangeness is seduction. Our problem is not the “forced choice” of castration and meaning, but being separated from our capacity for seduction. For Baudrillard, seduction precedes production in all its (capitalist-revolutionary-Other) forms. Here is a delightful passage from Baudrillard’s Cool Memories IV.
'The one fantastic moment is that moment of first contact, when things have not yet noticed we are there, when they have not yet fallen in with the order of analysis. It is the same with language when it has not yet had time to signify. Or with deserts: when their silence is still intact and our absence has not had time to dissipate…But that instant is ephemeral; it is gone in a trice. You would have not to be there to see it. Perhaps only ghosts experience that exceptional pleasure'.25
He speaks of the unsullied moment prior to representation and evaporation via the symbolic; the world before the banality of human contagion; language when it is still just materiality, before meaning. The key point is our absence and the generosity of the world without us. Against the unifying tendency of “one world”, technological synthesis and the reconciliation of all, Baudrillard advocates, ‘the dual form, irrevocable divergence. Against all that is striving to reconcile the antagonistic terms: maintain impossible exchange, play on the very impossibility of that exchange, play on that tension and dual form, which nothing escapes, but everything opposes’. 26
However, for Žižek, what releases us from enslavement to the Other is the “ethical act”, whereby the subject reverses the “forced choice” of the Oedipal era, when he was forced to choose between the Symbolic universe and the real seduction of psychosis. At this point of reversal – a repetition of the original “choice” in reverse - he is effectively and momentarily “free”, provided the Act does not lead to suicide. There is a correspondence here with Kierkegaard’s interest in Christ’s exemplary Act which challenged the hegemonic Jewish law. For Kierkegaard, the religious is a singular, exceptional moment, over and against the universalisation of the Christian ethical (moral) code. For Žižek, the death drive is not the blind will to self-destruction of popular imaginings, but the violent energy required for the (revolutionary) Act-Event – to blast a way back through the ontological blockage. These point-Singularities of freedom, however, are inevitably taken up into the Symbolic and loose their revelatory (counter-) power. Christianity, in its most radical and allegedly revolutionary origins, belongs to the realm of ethics in the Lacanian senseless-sense, undercutting and subverting morality. Lacanian analysis is to the IPA, the old psychoanalytic establishment, what radical New Testament Christianity is to the Old Testament and the Christian churches, only more so.
Lacanians are at the sophisticated end of a spectrum of radical analysis that began with the Reichians between the wars. Unlike Freud, who regarded neurosis as a condition of civilisation,27 the radicals were utopians. Radicalism continued with the hugely influential Frankfurt School and the groundbreaking work, The Authoritarian Personality in 1950. Lacanian ethics places no limits on desire and resists any universalisation – have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you? 28 But Lacan says, ‘whoever enters the path of uninhibited jouissance, in the name of the rejection of the moral law in some form or other, encounters obstacles whose power is revealed to us everyday innumerable forms…’ 29 So Lacan’s position is more nuanced, closer the Freud, being both anti-current orthodoxy and anti-utopian simultaneously.
When Lacan famously suggested that, ‘From an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one's desire’,30 there are a number of contradictory meanings that are possible. This is not simply the trite Marcusian slogan ‘to get rid of the policeman in your head’, on the contrary, guilt is an ever-present register. It might also mean, resistance to the superego compulsion to enjoy. It is the freedom not to do want you (impulsively) want to do, to not just give way to consumerist pressure, for instance, or another drink. Or the freedom to do want you don’t want to do, voluntarily. The choice is yours – absolutely - and in no way belongs to the realm of the Other’s desire. This “total” freedom is the key trope of Lacanian psychoanalysis.31 One could envisage the difference between Anglo-American psychoanalysis and the radical Lacanians, in the following way. The former are like the contemporary Third Way Left – all about state control and the analyst (who will soon be a registered State-analyst!) knowing what is best for the patient in terms of health and mental hygiene. While the latter present a radical free-market approach to desire, unfettered and answerable to no one if the Other doesn’t exist! Similarly, the former analysand, like the functionary in a state enterprise, often has little interest-desire in his analytic work of good health, while the latter, working for himself and his own enterprise has everything at stake in his desire, even the possibility of losing everything, like Antigone determined to bury Polynices at the risk of sacrificing her own life.
The radical Lacanian dream, like former radicals in the movement is to overcome the Pauline split introduced by the Law – Kant with Sade – to overcome, as it were, the ‘fear of freedom’, the title of Erich Fromm’s influental book, to relinquish the (neurotic) need for a Master. The problem is, however, that a truly free, sublime Act is unbearable, because all too Real. On the side of Kant it is a pure jouissance of the Law; on the side of Sade, pure jouissance of desire and violence. In either, the abolition in the Act, of Symbolic space, re-emerges in the Symbolic as “patholigical” extremism and becomes subject to a vulgar psychoanalytic explanation, rather than a free Act.
For Lacan, post-Kant, there can be no turning back; a breach has opened up in the history of ethics that cannot be closed over – ‘the cage broken open’ (Neitszche). The disinterested autonomy of Reason meets total objective indulgence of cruelty, almost two centuries before Auschwitz. Recall Arendt reminded us that Eichmann was a strict Kantian before he substituted Hitler’s command in place of the categorical imperative. By creating such a scandalous, diabolical sublime equality between extreme good and extreme evil, Lacan has managed, at a stroke, to create an equally extreme indifference to any moral outcomes which becomes today’s post-modern moral equivalence. Nothing matters. Hence the “post” in post-modern, post-human, post-political, etc., - post any system of values. And likewise all those books during the millenium with the title, “End of….”. Kantian law, according to Lacan, ‘is simply desire in its pure state, that very desire that culminates in the sacrifice, strictly speaking, of everything that is the object of love in one’s human tenderness…’.32
However, the opposing extremes of Kant’s ethics and Sade’s anti-ethics are not total. By introducing a hint of a gap in the ethical imperative between the ultimate “must” and more equivocal “ought” of an unrealisable ideal-duty, Kant is acknowledging that evil cannot be abolished. Similarly, Sade’s “evil” still retains more than a hint of a transgressive element encouraging us to take pleasure in the cold destruction of morality. For this reason, Žižek disagrees with Lacan, when Lacan alleges that Sade is “the truth” of Kant, that Sadian perversion is more complete. ‘On the contrary’, says Žižek, ‘the Sadian perversion emerges as the result of the Kantian compromise, of Kant’s avoiding the consequences of his breakthrough. Sade is a symptom of Kant’(96). It is only later in Seminar XXIII, that Lacan will conclude that jouissance is not a total Thing-in-itself beyond the Symbolic. Jouissance arises precicely as a failure to reach its total (mythical) goal of satisfaction and ends up finitely circulating repetitively around the goal, which, as such, defines the drive. ‘If he is to follow the path of pleasure, man must go round it’.33
Another parallax opens here about a Lacanian analysis, as such: from one side it has indeed an ethical outcome to do with one’s relation to jouissance as an absolute challenge and total resistance to the big Other; from the opposite view, it represents itself as the smart, cool, elite form of narcissistic investment entirely fitted for an atomised society. 34 Even Žižek himself seems inclines to this latter view! Responding to Miller’s public letter to Bernard Accoyer, the French depute, responsible for the legal regulation of psychoanalysis, contemporary analysts, Žižek claims, function as a ‘mental repair service, providing ersatz identifications…an exemplary case of conceding the terrain in advance to the enemy…’. Žižek longs for ‘Lacan’s old arrogant “elitism”’, which was not prepared to do business with the ruling ideology. Whereas today, seeking legitimacy, ‘psychoanalysts are thus described as profiting from today’s “disarray of identifications”: the more serious the crisis, the more business there is for them!’ (261).
Žižek believes Lacanians have lost their ‘sociopolitical critical edge’. Lacan, per se, was never explicitly political and revolutionary. He was first and foremost a psychoanalyst. However, his legendary and relentless critique of American ego-psychology can be seen in quasi-political terms as an attack on American capitalism, most notably in the 1953 Rome Discourse. Clearly, there is a link between Lacan’s notion of jouissance, “surplus enjoyment” and the Marxist theory of “surplus value”, placing enjoyment, as such, at the heart of the capitalist order. And although his name is still linked with the events of May ‘68, he even met Daniel Cohn-Bendit, his warning about the students’ aspiration for a new Master discourse, stand-out as being the most memorable. What marks out Lacan, politically, is his radical anti-utopianism. As Stavrakakis quips, ‘In true Lacanian style, one could even declare that “the Lacanian left” does not exist!’35 By which he means, there is no totality on the Lacanian Left, but rather, in this absence a significant trend is developing in Cultural Theory – The Politics of Lack - with Lacan at the epicentre. At varying distances from this epicentre are, for instance, Butler and Castoriadis at the furthest distance, Laclau and Mouffe, then Badiou, to whom reference is made below. However, this perspective of lack is controversial. Acknowledging that, ‘It has almost invisibly gained a foothold in theoretical literature’, Robinson concedes that, ‘This is at least partly due to its radical pretensions’, but continues, ‘It is, however, crucial to challenge it, because its [a-]political effects are to paralyse "radical" theory. It provides a very weak basis for any kind of politics, and certainly no basis for a radical or transformative agenda’.36 Everyway we turn, the signifier is, “impossibility”. The lack operates as a mythical essence in Lacanian analysis, giving rise to the foundational inevitability of the parallax examples we are discussing.
In apparent contrast, Žižek argues for a violent transformative agenda. Žižek’s Act is to write: to smash by writing; to create short-circuits and strict antimonies. He favours inhuman rights: ‘we should directly admit revolutionary violence as a liberating end in itself’(380).37 However, it should occur to us, in passing, that such revolutionary gestures should come under the same strict warning that Lacan gave the aforementioned Paris students ‘As hysterics, you want a new Master. You will get one’. Žižek is aware of the problem, but still follows Badiou favouring the revolutionary violence of, for instance, the exemplary Chinese legalists, the Jacobins, Lenin and Mao, who between them have been responsible for the deaths of countless millions. He favours, ‘The community of believers qua “uncoupled” outcasts from the social order - with, ideally, authentic psychoanalytic and revolutionary collectives as its two main forms’.38
The most radical parallax is formulated thus: ‘the pacifying God of Love is not the opposite of the vengeful Jehovah, but his other face’(280). We can never “understand”, as such, “violence as the work of love”, the words of Luke 14:26 – if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his brothers and his sisters – yes even his own life – he cannot be my disciple, and, on the other hand, the absolutely senseless passivity of Christ on the Cross. Although, it should be noted, no violence is ever advocated in the New Testament. Quite the opposite, violent Acts, done by “fundamentalists”, who have come suddenly, as it were, to know directly, totally and absolutely, emerge from the Real, seizing the moment, like the epochal Event of the October Revolution. Acts done, by limited human subjects, are open to the most monstrous abuses and the greatest tragic consequences sometimes affecting whole continents, causing immiseration for decades.
Here is an exemplary (radical, revolutionary, Lacanian-ethical) Act, the ‘leap of faith’ and the step outside the global circuit, a well known incident from the Vietnam war:
[A]fter the US Army occupied a local village, their doctors vaccinated the children on the left arm in order to demonstrate their humanitarian care; when, the day after, the village was retaken by the Vietcong, they cut off the left arms of all the vaccinated children. . . Although it is difficult to sustain as a literal model to follow, this complete rejection of the enemy precisely in its caring ‘humanitarian’ aspect, no matter what the cost, has to be endorsed in its basic intention. 40
Although, Oliver Marchart, criticises this example, as ‘difficult to sustain for an emancipatory project of the Left’, with its absolute rejection of the enemy, and its ‘sanitary effort at purification’, that might, ‘serve as a generalizable recommendation… and, in the last instance extermination’,41 criticism here is really only one of tactics for the revolutionary Left. There is absolutely no mention or no criticism of the barbarity of the Vietcong in their “counter-vaccination” anti-American programme. As far as they are concerned, the Vietcong were acting ethically in their total break with the enemy. Similarly, in Iraq, they would see the counter-insurgency Acts of suicide bombing innocent civilians and children at random, ‘although difficult to sustain’, as ethical nevertheless.
However, as always the margins are interesting! Those little hesitations, doubts (‘difficult to sustain’) might mark these intellectual theorists out, ominously, why not, for Badiou’s third moment of “revolutionary justice” – ‘egalitarian justice’ and its ‘immediate brutal imposition, with no understanding of the “complex circumstances”’ (379) – maybe the gulag or worse. How many intellectuals have been in receipt of such Real Love-violence – the ‘obscene stain’ of revolutionary power? As Lenin put it succinctly: ‘Intellectuals are lackeys of capitalism, who think they are the brains of the nation. They are not the brains of the nation. They’re its shit’.42
‘Could my former comrades’, asks Azar Nafisi in relation to the Iranian Revolution, ‘have predicted that one day they would be tried in a Revolutionary Court, tortured and killed as traitors and spies? ….not in their wildest dreams’.43 Could Orwell have imagined that, ‘scores of thousands of working class people, including eight or ten thousand soldiers who were freezing in the front-line trenches and hundreds of foreigners who had come to Spain to fight against fascism, often sacrificing their livelihood and nationality by doing so, were simply traitors in the pay of the enemy’? 44 These lies were spread all over Spain by posters and repeated all over the world by the pro-Communist press. Total betrayal. Orwell himself narrowly escaped death as he was shot through the neck from a Fascist position. POUM members were imprisoned, tortured and shot.45
Žižek’s uncompromising, ‘passion for the Real’, clears a space for radical “freedom”, violent transgression. Not for him a safe government position in the newly emerging Slovenian state in the early 1990s. He says, ‘the notion of serving as a Minister of culture, education or science seemed to be utterly ridiculous, not even worth consideration’.46 The casual, sweeping dismissal of any working within the System shows just how indiscriminate is Žižek’s nihilation of any System qua liberal-Capitalist System. None it appears is better than any other, even a state, his own people, freeing themselves from totalitarianism.
Maybe, the best example to hand of Badiou’s second revolutionary moment, “terror”, remains with Pol Pot. This is the utterly banal version of “clearing”, ‘through a gesture which is thoroughly violent’: clearing of time (year zero); clearing money (currency abolished); culture (markets, schools, newspapers, religious practices and private property are outlawed); people (public servants, police, military officers, teachers, ethnic Vietnamese, Christian clergy, Muslim leaders, members of the Cham Muslim minority, members of the middle-class and the educated are identified and executed).47
Welcome to silence and the real desert. Not the silence of our absence, but the Holocaustal silence brought about by our monstrous presence, monstrous Acts and the obscene stain of revolutionary power.
Notes and bibliography.
1. Žižek, S. (2006) The Parallax View. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All subsequent pages numbers in brackets are referring to this work. While this paper focuses on this volume in particular, it does not constitute a review.
2. Grossman, V. (1980) Life and Fate. Edition L’age d’Homme. Trans. Robert Chandler. London. Harville Press, 1995.
3. What stand out for Levinas are, ‘scenes of goodness in an inhuman world...exterior to all system’, (see Levinas, E. (2001) Is it Righteous To Be. Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Ed. Jill Robbins. California. Stanford University Press. p81), where, ‘the human [qua human] pierces the crust of being’, (ibid, p90), ‘where goodness escapes every ideology...goodness without thinking’.(ibid p217) Grossman is clear. He describes the uniformity of the wooden barrack huts in the Russian camp: ‘Everything that lives is unique...If you attempt to erase the peculiarities and individuality of life by violence, then life itself must suffocate’ (Grossman op. cit. p19). Grossman privileges, simple human devotion, like Lyudmila’s grief for her illegitimate son, Tolya, killed as a boy in the war, at his simple graveside by the rows of wooden crosses, talking to him in a delirium of grief all the cold night. ‘Nothing matters to her; there was nothing she needed. All that existed was some agonising force that was crushing her heart’ (ibid, p154).
4. We will return to the ethical question in relation to political action later in this paper. Levinas has been criticised for ignoring the finite specificities of ethics. The same criticism could be levelled at Žižek who favours revolutionary love against the finite reformism of the non-revolutionary Left.
5. Taken from a conference on psychotherapy and international conflict.
6. One wonders, in passing, about this silence, described by W. G. Sebald in his book, On the Natural History of Destruction (translated by A. Bell, London, Hamish Hamilton, 2002), the title taken from an article written by Solly Zuckerman for a journal called Horizon, after he had visited the city of Cologne ravaged by allied bombing. Sebald’s question was about the strange silence that surrounded the mass destruction of 131 German cities, the death of over 600,000 civilians, in the Allied bombings. This was destruction on a scale without historical precedent, which ‘seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness’ (p4). It is as if what he calls, ‘the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself’ became taboo, a ‘shameful family secret’ (p10).
7. Žižek, S. (2002) Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso. p15.
8. Amis, M. (1997) Night Train. London: Random House, .
9. Thomas Metzinger, cited on p163.
10. Of course, we would love the latter instances to be true to keep our world of meaning intact. And as psychoanalysts, we comfort ourselves with the rather smug illusion that positivistic science and neuroscience can never fully account for “our” field of human subjectivity and the “essence” of man. The image of human dignity will survive unscathed! And furthermore, as Žižek indicates, when thinking about the excitement around “neuro-psychoanalysis” there is as sense of “if you can’t beat them join them”! However, the position of psychoanalysis is looking increasingly precarious, as subjectivity is further “emptied”, becoming a mere “user illusion” (174)
11. See, Taylor, J. (2001) The Race for Consciousness. Cambridge MA. MIT Press.p37
12. Just as the eye sees without seeing itself seeing. The transparency of perception belies the opacity of the means of perception. What we see, out there, is really opaquely generated by a tiny flickering image, which is a little different on each retina. The imputs are synthesised by the visual cortex and projected back onto external objects with the added bonus of depth vision.
13. See Winnicott, D. (1971) Playing and Reality. London: Hogarth. Emergence is what happens in groups as well as neural networks. Recently, I was asked to give a (top-down) talk/lecture on Projective Identification to a group of post-graduate student studying on a group training course. We duly sat in a circle and I gave my talk in which, at one point, I gave some graphic vignettes of violent projective identification. The reaction of some of the students was to question why I had used these violent examples. The switch was from manifest content to latent process. So I became absorbed in the emerging group process of becoming - to do with affect rather than content.
14. How do we get from passive primary illusionment, or the assumption of “non-being” to something more active to do with subjectivity? Or, how does self-consciousness arise amidst and minimally separate from overwhelming billions of neural data? The answer seems to be, not so much “spontaneously”, but by some process of negation or by some malfunction or fault in the nature of reality, otherwise we would be no more than passive thinking machines. It is as if we stumble into self-consciousness through an “ontological crack” (242) in “reality” itself, which enables us to say: yes, I am here, over and against being a passive (unconscious) recipient of neuronal impulses. Žižek dramatises this crack by reference to ‘a traumatic excess’. Here again, through this margin of “error” that enables us to be, is our measure of freedom.
15. Damasio, A. (2000) The Feeling of What Happens. Boy, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness. London: Vintage. p191.
16. We already have “human” prototypes of these virtual machine humanoids when operators serving the public, officials, of any kind especially politicians, speak from protocols that have been fine-tuned to deal with “difficult” clients. Here there is no lag in “communication” and the same formulation is repeated over and over again, creating a machine-like response without this all important human gap.
17. At one point, however, Žižek himself suggests that, ‘we should …elevate the unfortunate “Oedipus Complex” to the dignity of ontology’ (405). And with the contemporary mass absence of fathering one can sympathise with this view. Other reactions of the psychoanalytic establishment to the contemporary crisis are, 1) disavowal: act as if nothing has really changed. The unconscious remains more or less as Freud described it. 2) Acknowledge the realities of borderline and narcissistic personality disorders and modify technique accordingly. 3) Search for new legitimation via the neurosciences and neuropsychoanalysis. 4) Seek a rapprochement with Jung, New Age holism and Zen practices.
18. Vattimo, G. (2004) Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics and Law., trans. William McCuaig. Colombia University Press
19. No coincidence, of course, that the same terms are currently used to structure ideas about modern subjectivity and contemporary capitalism.
20. And everywhere, one hears the call for drug legalisation.
21. The Irish Revenue, which is currently investigating 2,000 overseas property transactions by Irish residents, claims that it lacks the legal powers to pursue its tax inquiries thoroughly. And new Revenue Commissioners’ chairwoman Josephine Feehily has said she will ask the Government to change the law to compel Irish estate agents to release details of foreign property purchases by Irish residents. The law is operating at the level of reason and fairness respecting human rights. It is entirely fair that Revenue should be able to track down possible tax defaulters who may have stashed money away in foreign destinations. But there is another level, a secret (unconscious) perverse supplement to the law, a superego of enjoyment, quite outside and hidden from its official claims. This was Kafka’s world. You could almost hear it in the cold determined voice of the chairwoman herself when interviewed by RTE radio recently. This voice says, without saying: ‘I take pleasure in my power over you and I can do what I like with you and you can do nothing about it’. The same secret perverse supplement is at work one suspects when the police “interview” suspects, or chase them in high speed vehicles like boy-racers. However, what Žižek does not point up are the differences between legal systems and their execution of the Law. In China currently, tax defaulter are shot; there is no phoning your local radio station chat show to complain.
22. May 21st 2008: ‘We have in this country [Britain] at the moment a situation in which you can have two children, of exactly the same age and gestation, and one is in a cot with all the resources of medical science being poured into saving it and the other is quite deliberately being taken from the womb and destroyed’. British MPs vote to retain the 24week limit for abortions. Marie Stopes International said it was "reassuring" that a majority of MPs were wise to what it called an emotive and misleading campaign to chip away at women's reproductive rights and had disregarded it in exercising their votes. The women’s “right to choose” contains keys words, “right” and “choose”, two Master Signifiers of modern liberal democracies. What could be more reasonable and civilised more than 40 years after abortion was legalised? The obscene supplement to this exemplary human right is absolutely transparent: the death of a potentially viable foetus-infant. A parallax indeed.
23. This is the whole secret basis of psychoanalysis – playing the man rather than the ball, you may mean this, but you are really saying this. It is the opposite of the Catholic notion of hating the sin and loving the sinner; in psychoanalysis we welcome the sin and hate the sinner. And this is why we might properly hate and reject psychoanalysis. What is the secret supplement-stain of psychoanalysis? Is this question ever asked?
24. What should we make of those young Lacanians going from Ireland, for instance, to their Lacanian analysts in France, at great expense often for many years (some say 15 years)? What new mastery is involved? What cause could be so important?
25. J. Baudrillard (2001) Cool Memories IV, Editions Galilee. Trans. C. Turner. Verso 2003. p52.
26. J. Baudrillard (1999) Impossible Exchange. Edition Galilee. Trans. C. Turner. Verso 2001. p79. The dualistic form is the parallax.
27. Lacan acknowledges that for Freud, ‘if we continue to follow Freud in a text such as Civilisation and Its Discontents we cannot avoid the formula that jouissance is evil…He wrote Civilisation and Its Discontents to tell us this’ (J. Lacan 1959-1960. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Seminar VII. Ed. J-A. Miller. Trans. D. Porter. Routledge, 1992. p184)
28. ibid, p314.
29. ibid, p177.
30. ibid, p319
31. But it is precicely this kind of paradoxical freedom: Your money or your life. A parallax indeed: your money OR your life: never both. No wonder the Irishman when he was asked this question said – don’t rush me, I haven’t made up my mind yet!
32. J. Lacan. 1964 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Penguin, pp275-276 (emphasis added). Clearly the break with any notion whatsoever of human sentiment and sympathy is done with in this formulation. However, this is merely the structural opposite of the Anglo-American emphasis on the mother. It makes the same mistake in reverse.
33. Seminar VII op. cit. p95.
34. In this respect, it is not surprising to discover that the discourse of the analyst is the same formula as the discourse of perversion! (a<>$) The difference lies solely in the ambiguity that surrounds objet-a; on the one hand, it is the lure-screen for enjoyment (perversion) and on the other, the void, which endlessly provokes the subject to find the truth of his desire. In practice, the two get confused as when an “analyst” seduces an analysand. And if we follow Laplanche in this respect (leave aside Baudrillard), when do this not happen!
35. Stravakakis, Y. The Lacanian Left:Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics, p4
36. Robinson, A. 2005. ‘The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique’.
37. What is the difference between “creative” violence and what Žižek himself describes as “Id-evil”, skinhead random violence; between Krystallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) and Stalingrad? How, for instance, should one evaluate the following? ‘A well known Slovene Catholic intellectual, ex-Minister of Culture and ex-Slovenian ambassador to France, recently wrote, apropos of Derrida: “the only weapon is rebellion and destruction, as the recently deceased apostle Jacques Derrida taught us. Whenever you see a window, throw a brick into it. Where there is a building, there must be a mine. Where there is a high-rise building Bin Laden should come. Where there is any kind of institution, law or link, one should find a falsification, a ‘law’ of the street or of the underground”’. Incidently, Žižek quips that Where there is a high rise building Bin Laden should come, sounds like Freud’s woe s war soll ich warden.(421). An “emancipatory” Act, or a sick joke? Žižek pleads context is all; by the fruits, we shall know them; are the Symbolic coordinates fundamentally changed? However, what is most significant is that we will not agree on any judgement. Just as when the Twin Towers were attacked some “intellectuals” made no secret of their jubilation.
38. Žižek, S. 2000 The Fragile Absolute. London: Verso. p160. How could the unambiguous term “authentic” have crept in here? He is advocating more than this. The forward at the front of this volume suggests: ‘the explosive combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist tradition detonates a dynamic freedom that enables us to question the very presuppositions of the circuit of Capital’.
39. S.Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle. Verso. 2004: 83
40. O. Marchant, ‘Acting and the Act’ in The Truth of Žižek. Ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp. London: Continuum 2007, p110.
41. ‘At Beijing University during the “Cleansing the Class Ranks” campaign of 1968, suspect teachers were forced publicly to confess their “problems” and to denounce each other’. Many were driven to suicide, itself regarded as ‘alienating oneself from the party and the people’. N. Ferguson. The War of the World. History’s Age of Hatred. Allen Lane 2006. p620
42. Lenin cited by Martin Amis, 2002, in Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, Jonathan Cape, p15. Amis deals with this strange question of laughter that surrounds the Soviet experiment (quite unlike the Holocaust) and he quotes Nietzsche: ‘A joke it an epigram on the death of a feeling,’ if this is the case here, then, he says ‘ this joke is a massacre’ (p247).
43. Nafisi, A. 2003. Reading Lolita in Tehran. Fourth Estate. p115.
44. Orwell, G. 1938. Homage to Catalonia. Penguin, p207.
45. Christopher Hitchens, in Orwell’s Victory. Allen Lane, 2002, points out, ‘the deliberate subversion of the Spanish Republic by the agents of Stalin’ (p48). Andres Nin, the founder of the POUM, was kidnapped, tortured and - refusing to crack - murdered. The Communist spokesman said he had fled to join the Nazis. Friends of Orwell, like George Kopp, whom Orwell tried in vain to get freed from jail, was tortured by confinement with rats, and other volunteers like Bob Smillie died of their treatment. Considering how the history of this period will be distorted, Orwell comments, ‘The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world’. (p50).
46. Žižek, S. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Verso. p6.
47. Source. Pol Pot killer file. http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/pot.html
MAD, BAD AND SAD. A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present. By Lisa Appignanesi, Virago 2008. A review.
Symptoms and diagnoses are inseparable from the era in which they arise. Lisa Appignanesi sketches the changing patterns: mania was prevalent during the revolutionary period of the 19th Century; at the turn of the century it was sexual neurosis and hysteria as women sought liberation; more recently multiple personality disorder reflects our fashion for re-inventing the self. Currently we have a “diagnostic epidemic” for a variety of “attention deficits”. Anorexia is an illness of plenty. Depression accompanies times of peace and prosperity. The autistic spectrum occurs amidst information overload.
In spite of the title of this work, there is no automatic assumption, here, of women as victim to male mind doctors. There were cruel treatments, and the author cites many celebrated examples of women as patients, but with more women entering the field of mental health as practitioners, during the last century, there has been a massive expansion of the consciousness of suffering amongst women in particular, with the discovery of more and more hidden abuse.
More generally, illness and cure are symbiotically connected. Illness and cure need each other – ‘this incessant growth in illness might be linked to the unstoppable growth in potential cures’. Similarly, cures go in search of illnesses to cure. Gone is the notion of an objectifiable illness which will act as a cause for the production of a cure. In the field of mental health, more and more life problems and crises are “medicalised”, leading to more and more (pseudo-) cures, although Appignanesi does not draw the necessary conclusions here. Are we creating a sick society, increasingly unable to put up with hardship?
Appignanesi takes us from lunatics in madhouses and the end of the 18th century, where inmates could be abused, chained and beaten and their teeth knocked out, to the earliest attempts to differentiate the “mad” from the “bad”, the former being deemed to require help rather than punishment. Mary Lamb, who stabbed her paralysed mother, was spared the worst abuse because her confinements were carefully monitored by her brother Charles and she was surrounded by key figures of the burgeoning Romantic movement. With the first “alienists”, however, comes the “medical gaze” (Foucault). Madness enters the field of scientific observation and care. It was early on characterised as a delirium, ‘a sickness of the soul’, or, ‘extreme emotions stirred by the traumas of life’. Pinel and Esquirol are early key exponents, in France. Among the famous cases were the ‘revolutionary Amazon’, Théroigne de Méricourt and Henriette Cornier, who killed a child in cold blood.
The growth of asylums occurred during the 19th Century advocating the “moral management” of the insane. Dr Willis’s asylum and the famous York retreat of William Tuke were models of asylum life. However, their early therapeutic promise altered during the century as their populations swelled to bursting point and the care in them deteriorated. Gradually, heredity and degeneracy, rather than life trauma, came to the fore as causative factors in mental illness. In Britain, Henry Maudsley was a leading alienist and a Darwinist, but unlike Darwin he was, ‘beset by a visceral misogyny’. The widespread belief at the time was in favour of a division of labour along gender lines: ‘women were understood as being fashioned by evolution for the home and maternity, nervously fragile, intellectually inferior’.
It is arguable that no coherent or rationally credible theory of mental disturbance existed prior to Freud with his new understanding of hysteria. Freud’s work fleshed-out what the great practitioners of the time, like Charcot, were unofficially saying about the mentally ill, ‘in such cases it is always the genital thing [La chose génitale], always, always, always’. Charcot had developed a whole iconography of hysteria at the Salpêtriére in Paris. The hypnotism used by Charcot had been popular from the time of Mesmer’s healings with animal magnetism at the end of the eighteenth century. Trance states and double consciousness were key themes in the 1890s bringing together, for instance, William James from Boston, Hippolyte Bernheim from the Nancy School outside Paris, and Pierre Janet, who was a contemporary of Durkheim and Bergson. Splittings, doubles and multiple selves were popular in the literature of the time, with, for instance, Stevenson’s, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Janet concluded from his researches that there was ‘no single consciousness’, but that parts of the mind could exist alongside each other in mutual ignorance.
What distinguished Freud’s approach, however, was his emphasis on listening to what women told him: speech was the key, rather than the Charcotian clinical gaze. However, while Freud was dealing with neuroses, his contemporary, Emil Kraepelin, in Munich, profiled the psychoses believing that they demonstrated the early stages of dementia, while Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli in Zurich, an early reviewer of Freud’s Studies in Hysteria, believed schizophrenia to be reversible. He saw his patients twice a day for talking therapy. Jung joined later and for a number of years contributed to the psychoanalytic project until the famous split with Freud over the pivotal role of sexual desire. However, Zelda Fitzgerald, who began treatment in Prangins, a sanatorium on the shores of Lake Geneva, diagnosed as schizophrenic and Virginia Woolf, who maintained a hostility to analysis, went through the span of treatments that the earliest twentieth century had to offer and none of them seemed to work. Zelda died in a fire; Virginia committed suicide.
Appignanesi takes us through well-worn territory, post-Freud, where with Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby, the mother assumes central importance in the psychical health of the infant and the role of the father and the Oedipus complex is eclipsed. Appignanesi’s achievement is to delineate very sharply the complex battle lines drawn around women at this time by the burgeoning professional establishment. On one side there were the alientist-psychiatrists who wanted women to continue to be wives and mothers at home. Intellectual activities were deemed bad for women. On the other side, the progressives, like the Bloomsbury group including Freud, who understood women’s desire for liberation.
But the irony is this: with the new research on the importance of the mother-child relation coming from British psychoanalysis, attachment theory and biology, especially Harlow’s work with monkeys, women as mothers were becoming more pivotal in the mental well-being of the child and adolescent. American “moms” were accused of being so smothering that their castrated sons could no longer fight in war without succumbing to shell-shock. Mothers (and the nuclear family) could make their children schizophrenic (R.D. Laing and anti-psychiatry), or, as Bettelheim believed, traumatised children became “autistic” like concentration camp survivors. Or, maybe mothers, like Winnicott’s ideal, with her exemplary and instinctive telepathic, ‘primary maternal preoccupation’ could give rise to a spontaneous creative individuals. But one way or another, the woman as mother, is under pressure like never before from the mind doctors, just at the time they wanted also to be especially sexually liberated.
While Freud provided a listening space for women and “Anna O”, Bertha Pappenheim, for instance, campaigned against the sexual exploitation of women and children, and later, de Beauvoir praised Freud for separating biology from destiny, the second wave of feminists during the 1970s regarded Freud, in the words of Kate Millett, as ‘the strongest individual counter-revolutionary force in the ideology of sexual politics’. However, Juliet Mitchell, with reference to Lacan, corrected former simplistic notions of the phallic economy. The new emphasis on language and the “constructions” of gender, further undercut the alienist-patriarchal biological essentialism, paving the way for queer theory in the 1990s, not mentioned in this work. The drift all the while has been away from biologically and culturally fixed roles for women (and men), where, the double bind for women was, if you protested about your role you were diagnosed “mad” or “neurotic”.
However, the term liberation should perhaps be put in quotes. For “liberation” brings with it an excessive preoccupation with the self and the body like never before. The author refers to “body madness”. The excess thus liberated and apparently unstoppable is exemplified by the gaunt figure of the anorexic - ‘the suicide bomber in the family’. Then horrendous abuse suffered by women was discovered, which in the last decades of the twentieth century overtakes the earlier feminist preoccupations with freedom and social and sexual equality. Abuse takes on the horrific quality of the Shoah – today’s victims being called “survivors”. However, there can be no serious comparison with the Holocaust, without doing grave injustice to the victims of that planned genocide. That does not stop the suggestion that being in an abusive relationship is equivalent to being in a totalitarian regime. While not wanting to minimise in any way the suffering of those trapped in very dysfunctional violent relationships, they should not be compared with a totalising, terroristic culture where fear, torture and death are everywhere.
What started as “battered child syndrome” in 1962, was augmented by incest and sexual abuse by 1977, then ‘child abuse grew to encompass everything’. As Appignanesi suggests, ‘being alive as a woman at the end of the century meant to be an incest survivor’. Not only that, but there was the abuse that you had forgotten which is the hidden cause of all your current symptoms! This single cause for suffering was put about by the hypnotherapists and the publication in 1988 of The Courage to Heal, with its handy checklist of seventy-eight effects of abuse. All this makes work for the burgeoning therapeutic class of psychologists, counsellors, social workers. Appignanesi cites Ian Hacking who points out that four formerly separated types of harm done to children by adults are now run together. There used to be quite distinct and differentiated moral revulsion against a parent, who, for instance, neglected a baby, as distinct from a parent who savagely beats a child, as against a stranger molesting a child, as against abuse by incest. Running them together creates a powerful overdetermined effect of “moral evil”. I remember the head of a child support group here in Dublin suggesting that to slap a child was on the same continuum as child murder.
Against the notion of abuse rampant everywhere, perpetrated by men, Appignanesi notes the increase in sexual violence and brutality over recent decades by reference to Margaret Tsaltas’ work which she links to the real of social breakdown. However, in less ideologically driven times, it was possible to envisage Phyllis Greenacre’s more psychoanalytically nuanced view that in all the abuse cases she has seen, ‘prepuberty trauma was induced by the child generally…under the stimulus of an adolescent or older woman’. The traumatic situation could also be ‘precipitated’ by the child who was curious and preparing for puberty. Appignanesi concludes therefore ‘that all sex is not an irreparable violation, rape, insurmountable evil’.
Just as the Law, St Paul says, creates sin, so too, analogously, does the cure create illness. The anticipation of cures from the asylum to modern psychopharmacological products and treatments, starting with the use of chloral-hydrate as a seditive at the end of the nineteenth century, to the more than thirty different kinds of antidepressant today, has led to the massive expansion of and bureaucratisation of potential illness. Bringing madness and suffering from the madhouse into the realm of scientific discourse and management has culminated in the massive cataloguing of medicalised suffering described in DSM IV. Add to this widespread self-medicating via street drugs and alcohol and what emerges is an unprecedented chemo-regulation of mood.
A second line of argument that is implied in this work is the shift away from the notion of human responsibility. With the rise of secularism that parallels the rise of the mind doctors, bad or criminal behaviour is increasingly “explained” in morally neutral diagnostic terms. Covertly, science is made to do the work of social control and perfectibility.
Thirdly, the two waves of feminism have had a complex and somewhat paradoxical results in women’s lives. Appignanesi herself does not want to appear “reactionary” when she says that, ‘it isn’t as clear as we once thought that equality, however unequal, would erase the misery that topples women either towards anorexia or what our times understand as “depression”’. She omits to emphasise the new visibility of women in post-feminist image-saturated culture, has lead to widespread concerns about the over-sexualisation of young women and girls.
The final question raised implicitly by this work can be formulated thus: has our explicit faith in rationality – the rationality of liberation and the mind doctors increasingly enlightened view/control of mental illness, run up against, again and again, the implacable real of irrationality and madness that has haunted the project from the beginning?
SUICIDAL MASS MURDER. A review of The Second Plane. Martin Amis. Jonathan Cape 2008.
Martin Amis is one of an increasing number of intelligent independent minds who identify the paralysing malaise at the heart of Western liberalism brought sharply into focus by the paradigm shift created by the Islamist attack on the Twin Towers on September 11th 2001. In his introduction to the current work Amis says, that if this had to happen - the wake-up calls to the West - ‘then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime’. However, he confesses that on September 12th, he felt like Josephine, the opera singing mouse in Kafka’s story, Sing – ‘She can’t even squeak!’
Amis, however, has been smeared by accusations of racism recently, coming from Terry Eagleton, Ronan Bennett, Johann Hari, among others. He got a favourable reception from BBC Radio5-Live, when asked about this most recent collection of short essays and two fictional pieces, even though his thoughtful commentary was constantly fractured or denatured by rapid-fire traffic updates and “breaking-news” inserts. When interviewed on Andrew Marr’s Start the Week, Marr opens with, ‘Your book Martin…You’re clearly very angry…?’ As if Amis’s anger is a personal thing, maybe a questionable thing belonging to him alone. People are reassessing Amis, the man, alleging secret characterological flaws perhaps inherited from Kingsley, rather than concentrating on what he actually says and writes.
Returning from living in S. America, Amis is shocked about what he calls the “moral crash”, the fallout from 9/11. He is amazed by an angry woman on QuestionTime suggesting that America should ‘bomb itself’ and the loud applause she gets. ‘This was not equivalence’ says Amis, this is symptomatic of ‘hemispherical abjection’, or, ‘a citizenry haunted by a rudderlessly cruising suspicion’, longing for American defeat in Iraq and the humiliating punishment of Blair and Bush.
He writes in a collective style using the first person plural – Don’t we feel that…? Hoping to bring fellow independent readers with him, as if they still exist in considerable numbers. His book is not on the front shelves anymore than is Melanie Phillips’ Londistan. Instead, he is condemned as Islamophobic. Correcting this slur, he says he is “islamisophobic”. He is trying to find a language to describe a degree of terrorism, of maximum malevolence, that he calls “horrorism”, to cut a swathe through the ‘polite fiction’ of contemporary multiculturalism and ‘the lowest common dominator’ of current liberal thinking, or what Paul Berman calls, ‘rationalist naivety’. Contemplating suicidal mass murder, one is tempted to ask: ‘What are the reasons for this?’ Remember the IRA atrocities, committed by a former generation of fanatics, and the universal response from senior politicians – ‘there can be no possible justification…’. What we didn’t manage then, or now, less than ever, is ‘an unvarying factory siren of disgust’, but rather, ‘a murmur of dissonant evasion’. What we have become accustomed to instead is, ‘the fetishisation of “balance”, the ground rule of “moral equivalence”, and the ‘360-degree inability to pass judgement on any ethnicity other than our own (except in the case of Israel)’. For instance, Western liberals refuse to condemn atrocities by the “insurgency” in Iraq. As Blair tells Amis, ‘Al-Qaeda actions [in Iraq and elsewhere] are treated as morally neutral. They’re treated like natural disasters’. I remember Baudrillard jesting on the temptation for Al Qaeda to claim responsibility for earthquakes and hurricanes. Amis suggests, ‘with the twentieth century so fresh in our minds, you might think that human beings would be quick to identify an organised passion for carnage’.
Amis doesn’t need recourse to a psychoanalytic theory of the ‘death drive’ or jouissance, to explain this ‘thanatism’, but he has singled out a number of key factors. On the Islamist side, firstly, the turn against Reason, the ‘great leap backward’, and, secondly, the radical devaluation of human life – the use of human ‘delivery systems’, right down to, most recently, a terrified Down’s Syndrome delivery system. ‘Throw reason to the dogs’, a Taliban chant opens the way for ‘the illimitable world of insanity and death’, ‘death hunger’ and ‘death oestrus’.
However, Amis does try to account for, yes reason out, the undoubted ‘apocalyptic hurt of the Islamist’. For instance, in attacking Baghdad in the recent war, we were attacking the seat of the Caliphate, thus possibly creating ‘a casus belli that will burn for a generation’. During 1947 and 1948, two imperial decisions pitted Muslim against non-Muslim: the partition of India along religious lines, and the establishment of the state of Israel. During the 1970s, the US attempted to head off political dissent by supporting repressive regimes in the Middle East. During the 1980s, the US backed the mujahidin against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and helped fund the Pakistani madrasas whose student numbers increased from 30,000 in 1987 to over half a million by 2001. Following the equivalence argument, therefore, Islamists wearied of seeing the battles fought on their own soil and visited destruction on the West in 9/11. This then suited the neocons and Zionists who could them militarise their own homeland and push for Islamic oil reserves and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. The so-called “terrorists” are responding in kind to the “state terrorism” of the US and its clients. The attack therefore are political not messianic – the oppressed struggle against the oppressor. From this equivocalist viewpoint, to call Islamists ‘nihilistic fanatics’ is an ‘orientalist smear’. Terrorism is, according to Arundhati Roy, the ‘diabolic twin of the System’. Baudrillard has a similar notion of symmetry, whereby ‘the system itself will commit suicide in response to the multiple challenges posed by deaths and suicides’. He sees the collapse of the Twin Towers as precisely this symbolic suicide. Moral equivalence is mathematical: plus and minus cancel to zero - Ground zero. In The Spirit of Terrorism, Baudrillard says, ‘Every zero-death system is a zero-sum-game system. All the means of deterrence and destruction can do nothing against an enemy who has already turned his death into a counterstrike weapon’. The Islamists now fulfil that role. Clearly, the Left in sympathy with the Islamists still has a taste for Hegelian “absolute negativity” – the radical shattering of the complacent isolation of ordinary lives. And although Slavoj Žižek is generally critical of the Left’s response to 9/11, he says in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, ‘After their [Taliban] ghost was concocted to fight communism, they turned into the main enemy. Consequently, even if terrorism burns us all, the US “war on terrorism” is not our struggle, but a struggle internal to the Capitalist universe. The first duty of a progressive intellectual (if this term has any meaning left in it today) is not to fight the enemy’s struggles for him’.
Memories are short. Paul Virilio in Ground Zero, says, ‘Thus, on the first day of total war, Hitler…could at last sign the death sentences of millions of human beings who were decreed irredeemable. After the pathogenic races (Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, etc.), it would quickly be the turn of the mentally ill, of sexual deviants, of the disabled, then the tubercular, those suffering from heart disease, the aged, whom the regime planned to marginalise before slaughtering them’.
However, faced with such unendurable truth, we resort to “numbing” and or “doubling” (or splitting), where we “know” and “don’t know” at the same time. Amis is not referring to confusion among Western liberals, but to the Bush administration and its ‘Yes-man’s-land’ ‘miscalculation’ of the Iraq war and its aftermath, which he believes has possibly ignited the Muslim fratricide, not between moderate and extreme, which is already over, but between Sunni and Shia, ‘which has been marinating for one and a half millennia’.
We have to contend with another problem, facilitated by the internet – fabulation -. the desire for complex deceit masquerading as fact. 9/11 and 7/7 being blamed on their respective governments. 42% of Americans, for instance, believed that Americans caused 9/11. On the other side, ‘the weaponised fabulist’ and the notion put about everywhere on several thousand jihadi websites that it is possible, simultaneously, ‘to be a random mass murderer and a good Muslim’.
Amis’s generalised critique disposes what he calls, the ‘incuriosity of the dependent mind’, his global term for the passive attitude of religious believers. As an agnostic he deplores the ‘nullity of the non-conversation we are having the dependent mind’. He is referring in the current context, not just to the head banging rigidity, the ‘de-enlightenment’ that can pass for Islamist education/indoctrination, but by implication and extension, he implicates all religion. This is the standard clichéd critique of the self-satisfied and self-righteous! ‘Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful’. One could make the same generalisation about Atheism. Martin Amis clearly would have no time for Alasdair McIntyre’s, Dependent Rational Animals. Why Human Being Need the Virtues. (London, Duckworth. 1999). For McIntyre, disability and vulnerability mark every period of all human life, especially early childhood and old age. We should acknowledge our mutual indebtedness and dependence and lead virtuous lives accordingly. Amis may be reflecting accurately a neurotically dependent fixation to an allegedly protecting God, á la Freud, but to condemn all religious sensibility in the same breath betrays the same autistic incuriosity that he condemns. Why, for instance, has the liberal so-called independent free mind been so catastrophically unable to confront nihilism? Why has it embraced moral relativism and no longer been able to distinguish right from wrong? Why has it abandoned its Judeo-Christian heritage so comprehensively?
We can link these questions to a second theme touched on early in The Second Plane, namely, Amis’s deprecation of masculinity. In a recent interview, he said, ‘I am a gynocrat, I think the world would be better if women ruled it. Feminism today is only in its second trimester, and when it reaches delivery it will make the world an even better place’. While we can concede that the Islamic radical is a new subterranean low point in the ‘male idea’ and that Islam, as he says, is generous to ‘male needs’. Under the Shah of Iran, for instance, the age of concent was 18, which after the Revolution was halved, legalising male predation. However, this “dead white male” rhetoric is accepted everywhere today, in universities and the media, with some amusement. Maybe Amis is just trying to get onside again, but it tends to blow a large hole below the waterline in his otherwise cogent thesis returning us, alas to the dreamy make-believe world of rational naivety that he so successfully excoriates in the most ungynocratic language.
QUEER THEORY. QUEER FUTURE.
No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, by Lee Edelman (1). This book featured in a seminar on Queer Theory and the death drive (2). Here was the initial promo for the book, provided in advance of the seminar.
“The traditional Western concept of politics is predicated on making the future a better place and that the accepted—literal as well as symbolic—image of the future is the child, he [Edelman] states that "queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children.’" Edelman argues that homosexuality’s perceived social threat has to do with its separation from the act of reproduction, yet, he says, this non-reproductive capacity must be embraced as a social good [my italics]. He illustrates his provocative stance by analyzing numerous cultural artefacts—Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (why do the birds keep attacking children?); A Christmas Carol (he favours Scrooge over Tiny Tim); the musical Annie (with its hit song "Tomorrow"). His main target is the all-pervasive figure of the child, which he reads as the linchpin of our universal politics of “reproductive futurism.” Edelman argues that the child, understood as innocence in need of protection, represents the possibility of the future against which the queer is positioned as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity that he links with irony, jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself. One reviewer [Laurent Berlant] says: I learn so much from the way Lee Edelman grounds a queer ethics and politics outside kinship and reproductive circuits, those spaces of assimilation that use the bribe of futurity to distract us from the ongoing work of social violence and death.”[my italics]
This on-going work of social violence and death alludes to the century long revolutionary fantasy of overturning the System, seen in its bureaucratising, totalising, positivistic function (the Nanny State, CCTV, surveillance systems, various ‘discourses of power’, etc.). In this sense, queerness/uncanniness is deemed to “exist” in the Real – “outside” – a force for negativity and absolute refusal, a radical rebuttal of the System. This begs the question as to how a subject can ever really exist outside anymore – i.e. without representation in the Symbolic. At this limit point s/he has already disappeared, is already dead to the world, a world which demands ever more spectacular and promotional effects, which now includes and indeed promotes irony and celebratory madness – the more hyped, the madder, the more outside, the more wacky and transgressive, the better. So it seems to me what Edelman is advocating is nothing new as it is already and paradoxically central to our contemporary entertainment/celebratory culture which itself has already become ‘the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive’. A culture Baudrillard noted that has always already absorbed everything in advance, let us say, has already colonised queerness and negativity, in advance. There is no outside. It may be axiomatic for Edelman and queer theorists to regard the contemporary life of the majority as dull hetero-normativity, relentlessly positivistic about the social good, the future and the Rights of the Child. However, this is only the virtual and virtuous version of the world. This is no more than the official version of the world, which masks an infinitely larger “black economy” where good and especially evil circulate freely, indeed where many children already have no future, and nothing much is positive or good.
Edelman clearly goes beyond “identity politics”, allegedly queering identity as such altogether. Every groupuscule (the atomised mirror of former solidarity movements) has to scream its narcissism, its difference, its negative-positivity, its celebratory death drive, its refusal-triumph, and by so doing becomes unwittingly included in info-techno-system. There is no other way to be – relentlessly promotional – you see it on the streets, at home, on every screen, 24/7. The truly radical thing, however, as Baudrillard reminds us, is knowing how to disappear, of how not to be – fatal strategies. Or, as Levinas has it: otherwise than being, occupying the “null site” between being and nothingness. Reclusion, disappearance, privacy. The ‘refusal of the social and political order’, for Edelman the efficacy of queerness, must still end up only mirroring that same order and quickly being included within it. To think that one can remain outside is an illusion, the gay imaginary (3). What was clearly “outside” of Modernity, is included within Post modernity. What might have been regarded formerly as radical and cutting edge, like Edelman’s No Future, now seems rather conventional. Negativity, ephemerality, chaos, provisionality, once cutting edge, is now more like the status quo. Many commentators now regard and maybe approve or celebrate the west’s giving up on its core values and therefore its future.
As for the politics of “reproductive futurism” and homosexuality’s non-link with the future, via its separation from reproduction, we could ask: so what’s new? Some western countries are increasingly failing to reproduce themselves, with birth rates so low, that young migrant workers are required into the future to support our ageing populations. So Edelman’s claim that ‘this non-reproductive capacity must be embraced as a social good’, is clearly no further threat but very much part of how modern heterosexuals see themselves, calculating whether or not having a child might spoil their life-style. Children, or no children: it’s a life-style choice. True, people are driving around with “valuing children” ribbons on the back of their SUVs, but with increasing rates of separation and divorce, children are less and less cared for, outside official circles and government reports and targets. Again, everywhere the virtual promotion of children, their dignity and their Rights, but children are suffering in atomised society surrounded by the “care” of the state’s child protection industry, which incidentally makes men afraid to work with children for fear of being accused of paedophilia. What is at stake here and goes largely unchallenged, is adults’ liberation from children and if Edelman, ‘urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation’, gay marriage, gay adoption rights, even the word “gay” itself; this is only interesting in so far as it appears to fly in the face of modern democracy’s well meaning attempts to be inclusive. Throwing it back in our faces! How does it differ for instance from the anger you might incur if you hold the door open for a disabled person, or fail to do so! Homosexuals want to reject children and the reproductive future, ironically! So what’s different? In what George Steiner calls the ‘epilogue of the west’, so do many people. Baudrillard saw the Twin Towers collapsing from within and suggested that this was indeed the west’s suicide, its suiciding itself. Edelman’s No Future-Death drive will be avowed by many, “queer” and “straight”, who have already given up on any coherent western values.
Now to Edelman’s book itself. Currently, to set the scene, we can define maybe four loci for the death drive (4). 1) The relentless mechanised nature of the (Symbolic) System itself with key signifiers, these days, being “inclusion”, then “compliance”, which marks the excess of its “success” in globalisation. 2) Excess as located on the “inside” connected to the nakedness of the drive. 3) Islamist death-cults, suicide cults. 4) Deconstruction/destruction/disruption of all values, templates and difference, to create a level killing field of a value-free culture. Queer Theory enjoys 2 and 4 with a vengeance, feeling justified in its militancy against the over-arching death effects of 1. Edelman’s rant is pitched at the dominant figure of what he calls “reproductive futurism”, namely the Child, in whom we allegedly place all our hopes for the future.
In relation to the larger picture of the contemporary (as a Techno-Media-System) given above, he is probably, although not explicitly, aiming his polemic at the “silent masses” who live their lives rather quietly in their homes and workplaces, wanting the best for their children and grandchildren. These are the masses who exist largely outside the media glare and whose interests are not served by the mass-media. Edelman sees this essentially conservative world of marriage and children, like revolutionaries before him, as relentlessly bland, dead and stultifying. It is precisely and uncomplicatedly, at this present and future, with its widespread “heteronormativity”, that No Future is aimed. ‘Queerness names the side of those not “fighting for the children”’. (p3). Aligning itself with the (death) drive jouissance, and its explosive excess, its ‘negativity opposed to every form of social viability’, queerness will always be and must always remain “outside”. His pitch is that if queers are, always have been, a threat to civilisation, then they should defiantly be so – refusing all inclusion, persisting instead, ‘in the stubborn peculiarity that voids every notion of the general good’ (p6). Conservatives, he suggests, correctly understand this threat better than the liberal left who believe in the progressive rational inclusiveness of the Other, understanding “their love” to be merely differently expressed to “our love”, but confident that both are love, and together with gay adoption, the future is assured!
Everywhere, the queering of terms leads to their (normative) reversal, ironised by inverted commas. “The child”, “life”, “natural”, “reproduction”, “the social”, “the Future”, “love”, “compassion”, “meaning”, “family”, “civic mindedness”, “altruism”, “parental love” – all these terms are queered to reveal the naked truth of their ideological origins from the Real. According to the queer deconstruction of these “normative” terms, “Life” becomes no more than, ‘the phantom of meaning’ (p16), the “child” is a ‘vitalising fantasy’ (p9). We (sadly) invest ourselves in “reality”, with its “governing fictions” and its “persistent sublimations” (p18). Because of the Future, ‘[o]n every side our enjoyment of liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of the child’, and what he calls ‘our fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity’ (p21). Everywhere, he sees our reality as deadly boringly normative, repetitive, the closed identity of the same, ‘the tomb we call life’, the ‘calcification of form’ with its ‘fantasy of endurance’ (p48), over and against ‘our freedom [no inverted commas] from the necessity of translating the corrupt, unregenerate vulgate of fucking into the infinitely tonier, indeed sacramental, Latin of procreation?’(p40). As for the rest of us, we are the “scared straight”, ‘each and every child by way of an antigay immunization’ (p49). Narcissism, jouissance, the death drive, the immediacy of sexual pleasure without restraint as to aim or function - all good, because they resist the ego’s un-queering autonomy and the ascendancy of the Imaginary. The reversal is quite extreme: immediate sexual pleasure (jouissance) always “to hand” is the only Real; all of the rest, which has to do with civilisation, is un-natural, ideologically enforced, un-reality of a forever deferred future which reproduces more of the Same, namely children, who are equally, unnaturally, violently conditioned in their turn towards a dead future. This is the standard tirade trotted out by radicals ever since the ‘sixties cultural revolution. However, in this work it is more terroristically inflected.
In Edelman’s reverse, perverse paranoia, Scrooge is good – ‘unregenerate, refus[ing] the social imperative to grasp futurity in the form of the child’ (p49). George Eliot’s Silas Marner becomes ensnared: ‘the author deploys her plot to weave him into the social text, making him give up his worship of gold for the golden curls of the child that he finds on his hearth precisely on New Year’s Eve, as the assurance not only of his future, but also of hers and ours as well’ (p54). Praise too for Leonard (Martin Landau) in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, compassionless, pitiless, who in arranging the various violent acts his bosses demand, ‘materialises the force of negation, the derealising insistence of jouissance’ (p70). Worst of all are all those liberals who would try to ‘normalise queer sexualities’ (p74). He gives the example of a gay man who ‘found in a baby’s gurgle the music to soothe the gay male beast’ (p75), tired of circuit parties, preferring instead what Edelman refers to as, ‘this fascism of the baby’s face’(p75). Earlier, he had been even more explicit: ‘Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop’ (p29)(5). Victimised gays, “terrorised” by straight culture, justifying anything, although Edelman would be bound to refuse the notion of “justification”, as it’s part of reason and so on! Edelman quotes a radical left senator in France (before he was expelled from the Party), aptly named, Francois Abadie, who spoke of ‘those I call the gravediggers of society, those who care nothing for the future: homosexuals’ (cited on p74). Edelman attacks Baudrillard, who bemoans the contemporary “uselessness” of heterosexual reproduction, as we slip towards the unisexual/asexual ‘successive iterations of the same’ (Baudrillard cited p66), and the final liberation of reproduction from sex (via in vitro technologies, cloning, etc.). Edelman is relentless. He posits drive (enjoyment always “at hand”) over desire, with its endless futurity to screen out the drive’s insistence. He posits irony (with its shattering of every totalised form) over allegory (idealised narrative temporalisations and its speading-out of irony’s explosive negativity). Irony reduces time to one single explosive moment. Compassion, for instance, is allegorical in that it ‘abjects’ or negates, whomever it sees as a threat to the law. Hence the need for liberals to include gays as happy couples looking to the Future. Edelman prefers the right wing rants! He probably agrees with Father John Miller, when he says, ‘Gay activism is wholeheartedly determined to do battle against human life. Mistaken compassion must not allow us to “grant” civil rights to gays…’ (p91). Edelman disagrees with the radicalism of Judith Butler and her re-reading of Antigone’s plight in her death-drive struggle with Creon, the representative of civilised values. ‘[T]he sinthomosexual (Edelman’s Lacanese to combine jouissance and homosexual) refuses intelligibility’s mandate’ (p105). So did Antigone, until, that is, she is rehabilitated by Butler. Antigone is: ‘dying, yes. Surely dying from lack of recognition, dying indeed from the premature circumscription of the norms [of the Symbolic]’ (p103). All that Butler’s new reading of Antigone does is ‘provide the excluded with access to liveable social forms’ (p104), or ‘the progressive redistribution of meaning’ (p114). Promising Antigone a future is what Edelman refutes. This indefinite enlargement of the Symbolic extends ‘the tomb itself as the burial place for whatever continues to insist outside of meaning’ (p105). Other burial places are to be found in “the family”, “social capital”, “cherishing”. He seems pleased about the “stigmatised other”, that ‘intrudes on our collective reproduction of familialism by stealing, seducing, proselytising, in short, by adulterating those children’ (p113). Edelman’s rant is merely an extension of the later Lacanian psychoanalytic rant against normative hetero-genital sexuality and the famous, there is no sexual relation, or a general rant against anything positive.(6)
The figure of the Child fills the gap of loss at the heart of the Symbolic. ‘The sinthomosexual, who affirms that loss, effectively destroys that Child and with it the reality it means to sustain’ (p115), seeking explicitly to be a ‘radically negative force’ (p117) that destroys meaning, the future, etc. Hitchcock’s The Birds excites Edelman for its representation of ‘the violent undoing of meaning’ as represented by the attacking birds, who attack children in their school. The slogan, in advance of the film, was, ‘The Birds is coming’. This pleases Edelman for its violation of grammar (of meaning) and its allusion to ‘a radical coming without reserve’ (p132). He even imagines the ‘ever lurking predators, looking like scavenging crows…who gather in public parks and school playgrounds waiting…to pick up some innocent kid for the peck that everyone, even the pecker himself, perceives as the kiss of death’ (p140). They ‘merit the title “degenerate” for such antipathy to generation’ (p140). The bird attacks represent sex and aggression, ‘the antisocial bent of sexuality itself’ (p143). Again Edelman cannot resist joking about what he calls, ‘the comic book version of heterosexuality (to be sure the only version that has ever been given to us to read)’ (p143) as against sex freed from restraint, freed from procreation and convention, that is live sex, frenetic sex, always de-meaning! He is against what he calls, Zizek’s “momist” interpretation of The Birds as representing an irrational maternal superego blocking the “normal” sexual relations of Mitch who is said to be ‘light in the loafers’. This account, not too far from what Edelman despises as the, ‘mass market version of gay etiology’ (p149), blames the over-possessive mother of early childhood who hates any wife the boy may want. However, Zizek is not so far from Freud's early analysis that future gay men, ‘in the earliest years of their childhood, pass through a phase of very intense but short-lived fixation to a woman (usually their mother), and that, after leaving this behind, they identify themselves with a woman and take themselves as their sexual object. That is to say, they proceed from a narcissistic basis, and look for a young man who resembles themselves and whom they may love as their mothers loved them’ (7).
For Edelman, The Birds reflect the ‘radical loss of famili(arity) unleashed by jouissance’. (p149, my bracketing). Reproductive futurism, on the other hand, is sadly or pathetically reflected by Cathy’s lovebirds in a cage that they must never leave, the only thing she rescues at the end of the film, while fleeing in desperation from the attacking birds.
‘Dare we see’, asks Edelman, ‘this endless line of children – a genetic line, a narrative line, stretched out to the crack of doom – as itself the nightmare of history from which we are helpless to awake’ (italics mine, p149). For it is history (not homosexuality) with its narrative structure with its ‘determining lack’ that creates only an illusion of life, or in de Man’s words, ‘an afterlife…not human…not natural…purely a linguistic complication’. It is history, a “linguistic complication”, not homosexuality, that creates ‘the interminable movement towards the closure of meaning in the Symbolic’ (p152, my italics). It is not the endless “coming” and demeaning and degeneracy, ‘the pulsive iterations of the drive’ (p177), that brings closure and interminable repetition, but history itself with its children and, ‘this fascism of the baby’s face’ (p75). History denying and deferring the violence of its origins, negating negativity in the name of the future generations. True, something has to die for life to be born, but Edelman perverts, inverts, reverses all the terms for the sake of irony: life, which isn’t real life anyway, only an illusion, has to die for death to be born - the “life” of jouissance sinthomosexually, the only life that doesn’t count! The sinthomosexual (‘as saint?’) has no vision, no future, instead, ‘forsakes all causes, all social action, all responsibility for a better tomorrow or for the perfection of social forms’ (p101).
He ends on a threatening note:
'Attempting to evade the insistent Real always surging in its [history’s] blood, it lovingly rocks the cradle of life to the drumbeat of the endless blows it aims at sinthomosexuals. Somewhere, someone else will be savagely beaten and left to die - sacrificed to a future whose beat goes on, like a pulse or a heart – and another corpse will be left like a mangled scarecrow [reference to killing of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming in 1998] to frighten the birds who are gathering now, who are beating their wings, and who, like the [death] drive, keep on coming' (p154).
Far from ironic and playful, Edelman is a fundamentalist, brooking no compromise with no place within the System, out-radicalising Baudrillard, Zizek and Butler, giving us a clear unambiguous picture of a history freed from the burden of its future - the end of history.(8) Early in the book, he imagines his critics. However, he does not refer to “critics”, as such. Instead, ‘[t]here are many types of resistance for which, in writing a book like this, it is best to be prepared’ (p157, italics mine). Resistance implies ignorance, like the concept of resistance in psychoanalysis. Resistance implies the blocking of Truth. Resistance implies something we should admit to and overcome. He envisages being accused of “apolitical formalism”, of elitism, of writing from within a theoretical framework whose difficulty will be seen by some as pretentious, but nowhere does he envisage being criticised for his over-wrought narcissism, his fantasies of destruction. Here, in the open, very clearly articulated, is the queering of all western values. We are given some idea of just how far this unravelling process of de-meaning, of de-sublimation has progressed. Edelman is acutely sensitive to the contemporary ideological frame. He is pushing at an open door. He sets up a traditionalist politics, a sentimentalised, totalised “reproductive futurism”, as a polemical devise, as a straw man, against which he pits his “radical” posturing, which amounts to a plenitude of nothing. He is preaching to the converted. The hegemonic ideological position, adopted and greatly solicited by the mass media in the west, is that it’s all over, and has been for a long time, for any traditionalist ethics. All the “ethics” lie on the other side – ultra-narcissism - because you're worth it/give into temptation - a permanent state of excess! Edelman maybe, to borrow a phrase from Baudrillard, no more than a “playing of the system” that wants more and more of his kind of celebratory rant.
However, Edelman is doing no more than following the standard Lacanian take on “ethics”, which is an (anti-)ethics of refusal, formulated by Lacan nearly forty years ago. Taking up a radically and intentionally self-defeating position outside the Symbolic, Edelman advocates a striking against the self and its selfish (gay) interests in having and being – no accommodation, no giving ground to desire – taking desire beyond itself and its entanglement with the Law, towards the extreme of pleasure, towards a singularity of pure loss. No longer the cause of gay rights which operates within the Symbolic of liberal democracies, but a “selfless” abandonment, a gesture of pure abjection, enacting the symbolic abjection that gays are subjected in the “straightening” system. Instead of being a little queer, they must become so queer (Other) as to fall off the radar altogether, putting themselves beyond the pale. Like Antigone, before she was rehabilitated by Butler as we noted above. Like Sade who passed beyond desire to the death drive itself. Like Sygne de Coufontaine who sacrifices herself for her husband, but refuses to acknowledge her act or allow it to be co-opted for the Symbolic. As Lacan says himself, ‘If you adopt the opposite of all the laws of the Decalogue, you will end up with the coherent exposition of something which in the last instance may be articulated as follows: “Let us take as the universal maxim of our conduct the right to enjoy any other person whatsoever as the instrument of our pleasure”…everyone is invited to pursue to the limit the demands of his lust, and to realise them’ (9) This, claims Lacan, is no more than neo-Kantian ethics, where following Newton’s discovery of a universe independent of the human, Kant developed his notion of reason in its pure form, detached from any sentiment and affection. There is nothing personal when you pass beyond desire. What exists on this otherside of the Symbolic, is mechanised lust: everything from gay saunas to revolutionary violence, without sentiment or affection (10).
While it is the Symbolic that is portrayed as concealing its violent origins creating neurotic discontent in civilisation, which is inescapable, we must ask, how much more violent and unconcealed is this so-called “ethical” option for ‘creation ex nihilo’ or jouissance without limit – ultra-narcissism? This is not just a life-style choice which we should be free to make, it has de-meaning, de-basing effects which irradiates the culture, as is intended here, increasingly openly.
It is such a commonplace, but is worth reiterating again and again that, 1) liberal, democratic opinion has adopted wholesale what was once limited to the avant garde, namely that hegemonic power vested in States and governments are the sole source of violence in the world. 2) This systemic violence is the only Evil worthy of the name, and, 3) the only true ethical choice is to fight/resist this power with whatever means available on all fronts. What makes the Edelman book exemplary is its open avowal of ‘the ongoing work of social violence and death’. Going for the iconic child of heterosexuals; going for the future itself. Edelman’s work demonstrates (and advocates?) violence, no negotiation with the System because the System itself, represented by liberalism is death itself, the machinations of death. However, democratic liberals have heralded this work as courageous and ground braking! They simply do not see it as violence in any sense because they only see the violence of the System.
Camus characterised the last century as pitiless and Paul Virilio talked specifically of ‘A pitiless art’. Virilio cites Jacqueline Lichtenstein: ‘When I visited the museum at Auschwitz, I stood in front of the display cases. What I saw were the images from contemporary art and I found that absolutely terrifying. Looking at the exhibits of suitcases, prosthetics, children’s toys, I didn’t feel frightened. I didn’t collapse. I wasn’t completely overcome the way I had been walking around the camp. No. In the museum, I suddenly had the impression I was in a museum of contemporary art. I took the train back, telling myself that they had won! They had won since they produced forms of perception that are all of a piece with the mode of destruction they made their own’ (11). They had won? Who had won? It is not clear from this piece. Did the Nazis “win” by producing images worthy of contemporary art, or did the artists “win” by anticipating images from the Holocaust, foretelling the Holocaust? Baudelaire declared, ‘I am the wound and the knife’. The First Futurist Manifesto of 1909 declared, ‘War is the world’s only hygiene’. The Dadaists in 1918, ‘We were for the war. Dada today is still for war. Life should hurt. There is not enough cruelty’. Similar rhetorical sentiments to Edelman. Flirting with fascist violence, Edelman cites Paul de Man whose anti-Semitic writings during the war were discovered after his death. Virilio suggests, ‘Avant-garde artists, like many political agitators, propagandists and demagogues, have long understood what terrorism would soon popularise: if you want a place in “revolutionary history” there is nothing easier than provoking a riot, an assault on property, in the guise of art’. (12). Pitiless art to represent pitiless life? Or a pitiless violence and destruction that is interchangeable with terrorism. Terroristic art. Art moves closer to the Real. Art (and culture) moves closer to the real of destruction. According to Virilio, modernity moves art from the Symbolic to the Real, from the re-presentative and de-monstrative to the presentative and the monstrative, thus paralleling the decline in re-presentative democracy towards a ‘presentative multimedia democracy based on automatic polling’ (13). He cites Rothko: ‘To those who find my paintings serene, I’d like to say that that I have trapped the most absolute violence in every square centimetre of their surface’ (14). In Lacanian terms, these examples are ethical, pursuing desire to the limit, approaching the purity of drive in its end-point monstrous inhumanity. In opposition to Lacan’s (anti)ethics, Virilio links the word Piety (pietas) with Pity. One of the most pitiless end points of the inhuman, cited by Virilio is the Tuol Sleng Memorial in Phnom Penh, where the Angkar, the Pol Pot led government of Kampuchea, killed thousands of innocents photographing them immediately before their deaths. Coming almost a full circle back to the Parisian intellectual milieu, Pol Pot won a government scholarship, in 1949, to study radio electronics in Paris. He failed to obtain a degree but became enthralled by writings on revolutionary socialism. He forged bonds with other like minded young Cambodians, including Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, Khieu Ponnary and Song Sen. The members of the so-called “Paris student group” were destined to become the leaders of the Khmer Rouge.
Is Edelman’s No Future any different than Pol Pot’s Year Zero? Edelman’s analysis remains on the written, therefore Symbolic, level, while Pol Pot’s was acted-out in the Real. But the pitilessness is the same, the impiety, the same. The readiness to inflict suffering, the expenditure in violence, seems to be justified in advance by the avant garde and has always been defended or denied or overlooked by the Left as a necessary evil, to bring about a greater good. Edelman’s No Future and Pol Pot’s No Past amounts to the same elimination of the narrative of history (‘a linguistic complication’), the same destruction of connectedness, the same explosive NOW.(15)
Pitilessness extends to the interstices of the social, where the key signifier is “abuse”. Everyone claims abuse. What first appears as a loss of trust between people develops imperceptibly into loss of pity (pity, like compassion, is patronising/soffocating/abjecting) and later into pitilessness. Just as loss of piety leads to impiety first against religions, then towards all former belief systems. The assertion of Rights is coincident with impiety. It leads to the creation of a level killing field (16). All this queering leads inexorably to de-meaning, de-generacy, de-gradation, if carried to its end point beyond. Just as the System qua System goes beyond the human and embodies the death drive with its totalising function, so too can the anti-System go beyond its ironizing function into the totalising barbarism of fucking without limit.
Pitilessness, the loss of any bond with the other, derives from narcissism and the solipsism of the autoerotic. Edelman notes the division within narcissism whereby the primary resevoir of libido emerges from its objectless state to love the subject’s own ego in the image of the other. But this narcissistic fixation on the ego and the other is marked by the sense of something missing, something divided. What Edelman priveleges is the pulsating fucking at the heart of primary narcissism, undivided, prior to any differentiation even of the paultry imaginary kind. That the libido might, via an unfolding developmental process, be invested in others occurs only, ‘in the service of statist ideology that operates by installing pro-procreative prejudice’ (p53), scaring us straight! For Edelman, there can be nothing as simple, nothing as naïve, nothing as essentialist and biological as the attraction between the sexes! Heterosexuality is forced on us through scary statist ideology with its discourse of repressive power.(16)
That such an ideology exists cannot be refuted, but the silent masses have always maintained a resistant space, a conservative space of desire, for children and grandchildren and their simple wellbeing, ‘our eyes turned towards the light of the future’, a silence that manages to persist in spite of so many ideological assaults. Maybe this persistence of simple values is what so angers Edelman et al. They want to root out hypocrisies and repressive practices that still go under the negated names of love, compassion and pity. Ironically, the silent masses give all the appearence of embracing these assaults while secretly carrying on as before. As is well known, eastern Europe under communism outwardly acquiesced, but family values and religious values remained unchanged in secret, in spite of ‘the ongoing work of social violence and death’.
On the other hand, it is Edelman and the avant garde that embraces violence and death, while no one else much listens. Edelman even acknowledges (or celebrates) this when he links, following Freud, the orginary primary narcissism, primal negation, with primary masochism. The failure to turn the sexual death drive outward towards the other is fatal.
In turning the death drive outwards it becomes simply a disruptive force unsettling the settled. As one commentator puts it: ‘The queer becomes the name for the death drive itself, which as we know from Freud, Lacan and Zizek is not the desire for death, quiescence or calm, but very much to the contrary, that which disupts all efforts to produce a self-sufficient wholeness. It is what brings death to all systems, that tend towards the settled, the unliving force that introduces the Outside into all interiorities’ (18)
This is a lite version of the death drive, as yeast to the dough of the system, a “nothing” that injects life into an allegedly dead system. This is the academic/aesthetic version of the death drive which does/does not have destructive intent, or does it? All humour, irony and life is here with celebration!
Similarly, Edelman insists that he means no harm to real children but only to the intensely idealised iconic image of the child, which must be destroyed. He would presumably concur with Serge Leclaire:
`From where the analyst is sitting, what is at stake is the truth. There is no way out: reckoning with the absolute power of the infans, he must never stop perpetrating the murder of the child, even as he recognizes that he cannot carry it out. Psychoanalytic practice is based upon bringing to the fore the constant work of a power of death - the death of the wonderful (or terrifying) child who, from generation to generation, bears witness to parents' dreams and desires. There can be no life without killing that strange, original image in which everyone's birth is inscribed. It is an impossible but necessary murder, for there can be no life, no life of desire and creation, if we ever stop killing off the always returning `wonderful child'.
The wonderful child is first of all the nostalgic gaze of the mother who made him into an object of extreme magnificence akin to the Child Jesus majesty, a light and jewel radiating forth absolute power. But he is already the forsaken one as well, lost in total dereliction, facing terror and death alone.' (19)
This last sentence is pure hysteria. Who, other than a psychotic mother, keeps such and image (of absolute awe-struck wonder and/or terror) to the fore during the life of her child? And what is going to sustain a real child through all the vicissitudes of life, if not a dream of sorts, not a totalised ideological dream, but a persistent dream nevertheless?
Is this death drive and the icon of The Child at which it is aimed merely an academic/queering game? A virtual death drive that’s not really a death drive; a virtual child that not really a child; a “no future” that’s not really a no future? Or are we to posit real effects on real children in the real future? Does language, such as the language that Edelman uses, the language of social violence and death, illustrated here, not have real effects? Or is it only the System’s language that has deadly effects and needs deconstruction – queering beyond recognition?
Finally, is the real child not now caught between two death dealing alternatives: his idealised, sentimentalised image in the media promoting the future, on the one hand, and the stripping away of all potential templates, identities and futures in the name of deconstruction and queer theory on the other? Maybe this is where we should locate, in this nihilistic space that opens up between two extremes, the depression and suicides said to be increasing in younger and younger children. And, Edelman’s No Future and all that flows from it, to use his own words, amounts to and celebrates, “the production of nothing”.
Notes and references
(1) L. Edelman, No Future. Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press. 2004. All subsequent page numbers in brackets refer to this text.
(2) 'Sexuality and the Death Drive: Reading Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. This two-day intensive seminar took place at University College Dublin, Ireland on Tuesday 3 and Wednesday 4 July 2007. This seminar was organised by Noreen Giffney (Women's Studies, UCD School of Social Justice) and Anne Mulhall (Irish Studies, UCD School of English and Drama) and is convened in association with Irish Studies, UCD School of English and Drama, the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland (HII) and The(e)ories: Advanced Seminars for Queer Research (which Noreen convenes with Michael O'Rourke). I was invited by the organisers to participate because a chapter from my book on the death drive was going to act as a trigger paper. (see R. Weatherill. ‘Facing the death drive’. In The Death Drive. New Life for a Dead Subject? (1999). London: Rebus Press.)
(3) Clearly, to have one’s radical discontent printed, commented upon widely and reprinted, amounts to some inclusion!
(4) The death drive is one, but it comes to us in language in a variety of guises. Queering regards the “bad” death drive as coming from ‘the whole network of symbolic relations’, while the “good” death drive brings an explosive irony which desecrates the former.
(5) When I questioned Edelman about this quote, he paused and wondered why I had singled it out from the text and particularly from the preceding paragraphs. I said that I thought it was violent rather than ironic, repeating bits of the quote to him. He said he stood over it. Later he said that the Child is of course not a real person, but an icon. He wishes the real child no harm, unlike those who make a fetishitic icon out of the child. I think he means that those who want to offer a child goals and ambitions are destroying the child with ideology. Whereas his ideology of “freedom” is non-destructive! A old worn discredited distinction A.S. Neill would have been proud of.
(6) Terry Eagleton reminds us that deconstructionists hate any positivity!
(7) S. Freud. S.E. VII:145.
(8) Edelman tries to have it both ways. When questioned at the seminar, he says that of course he is for gay rights, adoption rights, for children, progressive politics, and so on. However, he is writing the opposite – no accommodation. Like the comedian who claims to be “for women”, but whose jokes are all misogynistic - queering all their “caring” and “loving” domination of men. Like left liberals shocked by third world poverty, who condemn humanitarian intervention as part of a post-colonial mindset. Paradoxically, Edelman leaves homosexuals with nothing, just like the right wing pundits he quotes to such good effect.
(9) Lacan, J. (1959-60) Seminar VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Paris: Edition du Seuil. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge. 1992. p79.
(10) Viagra, over the last decade, has ratcheted up male penetrative sex to new heights of the instrumentalisation of pleasure: ‘You get an erection and you are desperate to do something with it. You ejaculate and soon you want to do it again, and again…If the woman you are with is not up for it, things can get very unpleasant. You can end up having a steaming row and still having a hard on’ (The Sunday Times, magazine section. 15 July 2007).
(11) Virilio, P. Art and Fear. Trans. Julie Rose. Continuum, 2003. p28
(12) Ibid, p31
(13) Ibid, p35. With the monstrative, a monstrous dimension emerges which has to do with the death drive, the acephalic undead drive of the Real.
(14) Ibid, p38
(15) This sort of comparison may not be helpful and indeed compound the argument I am making. In the same way, people regularly comment that Right wing Christians are the same as Islamist killers. Parents who smack their children are the same as child abusers, they are on the same continuum! Similarly, those who dare to critique so-called gay culture are accused of being homophobic. Phobic meaning ‘fear of’ has been changed to something more ugly, meaning ‘hateful of’, or leading to hate crimes. A critic of gay culture, who neither fears nor hates homosexuals becomes the same as the psychopaths who wants to injure or kill homosexuals.
(16) Right’s culture in a post-Christian and anti-humanist context becomes nothing less than an out-and-out Darwinian struggle. The gloves have been off for along time; all the barriers to transgression have gone.
(17) Anything developmental, genetic, biological or having to do with a given, is regarded as being entirely “over-written” by the violent power of language that structures us in an entirely deadening way. Not so much “biology is not destiny”, biology has ceased to exist. So much so that in this seminar a discussion arose about the appearance of words like “rupture” or “tearing” with specific reference to women’s writing. But this theme was challenged as being too “essentialist”. How could women “claim” these words? To clear the pitch of biology serves the ideological purpose of locating all suffering as entirely due to statist violence. There is no such thing as heterosexuality beyond that structured by the language of power that creates it by naming it. However, the supremacy of language creates a problem for those who understand homosexuality as having a genetic basis.
(18) http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/005071.html This commentator is wrong, as Freud did understand the death drive as reducing everything to the quiescence of the inorganic, beyond living in any form.
(19) Leclaire, S. A Child is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive. Trans. Marie-Claude Hays. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. p2-3.
RASKOLNIKOV’S DREAM. COMPLACENT PSYS ALL ROUND?
Talk given as part of the College of Psychoanalysis day on Crime (Feb 3rd 2007) “Psys” - a term coined in France to cover psychotherapists and psychoanalysts
Abstract: Fears of social breakdown used to be dismissed as “hysteria” or “moral panic”, but as early as 1927, Freud regarded the superego as ‘the most precious cultural asset’. Soon after Lacan was concerned about the paternal function. By mid-century psys were seeing the rise of modern “borderline” maladies, and Klein analysed the “archaic” superego. By the eighties, Lasch was writing about a narcissistic culture. More recently, Zizek pointed-up the emergence of the obscene criminal father who is the inverse of the Law. Only two years ago Jacques-Alain Miller was commenting on the pathology of democracy. This paper will expand on these psychoanalytic myths and explore how psys are as much part of the problem as part of the solution. By implicitly promoting an emotivist, subjectivist culture largely free from ethical constraints, we may be further contributing to weakening of the social. No longer radical, “therapy culture” is a structural element of late capitalism smoothing the path to ever greater consumption of state and private resources.
"Never had people considered themselves as wise and as strong in their persuit of truth as these plague-ridden people. Never had they thought their decisions, their scientific conclusions, and their moral convictions so unshakable or so incontestably right…Each of them believed that the truth only resided in him…They did not know whom to put on trial or how to pass judgment; they could not agree what was good or what was evil. They did not know whom to accuse or whom to acquit. In cities the tocsin was sounded all day long: they called everyone together, but no one knew who had summoned them, and all were in a state of great alarm…" (Raskolnikov’s dream, in Crime and Punishment. F. Dostoyevsky. Penguin Classics.)
"On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself". (Albert Camus, The Rebel).
Back in the 1950s when fears of nuclear war were rife and Strontium 90 was circulating in the upper atmosphere, my parents’ generation worried about whether or not to bring children into such a potentially toxic world. In the 1990s, Guy and Hope, fictional mother and father in Martin Amis’s London Fields have produced an infant monster in the shape of little Marmaduke: ‘The moment came and Marmaduke sprang for the knife. After a fierce struggle beneath the table Guy, his father, disarmed him and climbed to his feet, holding his nose where Marmaduke had bitten it.’ The irony is that Guy and Hope always give generously to the charity Save the Children. But now they ask, ‘What about our own child? Who’s going to save him?’ No one can, it seems! He is in a state of permanent tantrum silenced only by a parental one. For years, like my parents’ generation, they had worried about the awful kind of world they were bringing their child into. Now they were seriously worried about the awful kind of child they were bringing into their world!
Towards the end of his work Freud asserted the civilising effect of the superego, taking for granted the necessity for “external coercion” in child-rearing:
'It is in keeping with the course of human development that external coercion gradually becomes internalised; for a special mental agency, man's superego, takes it over and includes it among its commandments. Every child presents this process of transformation to us; only by that means does it become a moral and a social being. Such a strengthening of the superego is a most precious cultural asset in the psychological field. Those in whom it has taken place are turned from being opponents of civilization into being its vehicles. The greater their number is in a cultural unit, the more secure is the culture and the more it can dispense with external measures of coercion'. (1)
Freud had a formula that went something like: cultural development occurs in proportion to the restraining, repressing, renounciation of the sexual and aggressive drives. Although this leads to discontent, malaise or neurosis within civilisation, the formula of repression must stay in some shape or form.
Melanie Klein took things further, with her concept of the 'archaic superego' which is the forerunner of the mature adult superego. Firstly, by contrast, it is not a moral agency in any sense. It opposes drive but in an entirely driven way. It operates on the principle of the talion, using aggression to oppose aggression. The ruthlessness of the infant in procuring its needs is matched by the ruthlessness of the archaic superego response. Freud had already noted this severity in melancholia and obsessional neurosis.
'How is it that the superego…develops such extraordinary harshness and severity towards the ego? If we turn to melancholia first, we find that the excessively strong superego which has obtained a hold upon consciousness rages against the ego with merciless violence, as if it had taken possession of the whole of the sadism available in the person concerned. Following our view of sadism we should say that the destructive component had entrenched itself in the superego and turned against the ego. What is now holding sway in the superego is a pure culture of the death instinct…
In obsessional neurosis…the instinct of destruction has been set free and it seeks to destroy the object…The superego behaves as if the ego were responsible for this…by the seriousness with which it chastises these destructive intentions…' (2)
Klein pointed-out that the early superego is 'immeasurably harsher and more cruel than that of the older child or adult and that it literally crushed down the feeble Ego of the small child…In the small child we come across a superego of the most incredible and phantastic proportions…' (3) The younger the child the more severe is the superego. 'We get to look upon the child's fear of being devoured, or cut-up, or torn to pieces, or its terror of being surrounded and pursued by menacing figures…'
When aggression is at its height they never tire of, 'tearing and cutting-up, breaking and wetting and burning all sorts of things like paper, matches, boxes, small toys, all of which represent (unconsciously) parents, brothers, sisters and bodies and breasts, and this rage for destruction alternates with attacks of anxiety and guilt'. (4) These frustrated and destructive rages within the child cause him great anxiety, 'for he perceives his anxiety arising from his aggressive instincts as fear of an external object [person], both because he had made that object their outward goal, and because he has projected them onto it, so that they seem to be initiated against himself from that quarter'. (5) He cannot own up to his rage; instead he will create terrifying images of his parents who are now felt to rage against him. This is a desperate attempt at control by turning sadism against the self.
In the archaic superego we have a brutal instrument of self-punishment which is as impulsive and dangerous as the drives of the Id, that it is trying to control. This is part of our very early development. It remains mostly unconscious and we only become aware of it during nightmares, certain drug states, during horror movies and certain paranoid states as well as depressive ones.
Critically, for our argument here, with the alleged loss of the more mature and benign superego and suitable identification figures, which has occurred over the last half century, children are increasingly exposed to this frightening internal world. The more that children and people generally were to be liberated from the old structures of paternal authority, the more freed up to do their own thing, the more they were to suffer the slavish oppression of the archaic superego. This is the insight we should reclaim from Freud and Klein.
However, the neo-Reichians continues to be so much more popular and influential in psy circles than either Freud or Klein. Many of the early analysts believed in sexual liberation and were promiscuous and bohemian social utopians in contrast to the psychoanalytic establishment. As early as 1930, the profession was completely polarised. Freud had published Civilisation and its Discontents, maintaining civilisation demanded sacrifice of our freedom, but the younger analysts believed in throwing off repressions. According to Elizabeth Danto (6), Reich was powerful, brilliant and sexy. He had an electrifying energy all of his own. Reich thought Freud’s civilisation book was a response to his ideas, saying that Freud was the one who was “discontented” by civilisation. Reich wanted to cure the world of sexual repression. In 1928, Freud referred to him as, ‘a worthy but impetuous young man, passionately devoted to his hobbyhorse, who now salutes in the genital orgasm the antidote to every neurosis'. That year Reich, created a mobile clinic, Sex-Pol, arguing for ‘free sexuality within an egalitarian society’. They were against abstinence, the corrupting influence of the family and in favour of pre-marital sex. Six free clinics were established, staffed by left-analysts, which immediately became overcrowded, boasting membership of over 40,000. In 1930, Reich met Freud and stressed the importance of removing children from the family if the Oedipus Complex was to be avoided, but Freud replied: ‘Your viewpoint is no longer compatible with the middle path of psychoanalysis’. Freud argued that it was not the job of psychoanalysis to save the world. Reich described Freud as being like a “caged animal”. Increasingly radical, Reich joined the communist party. Freud’s New Year’s resolution for 1932 was: step against Reich!
Fathers
However, around the same time, Lacan spoke up for the father (and by implication his internal representative – the superego) and the absolute value that should be placed on the 'tender virile identification.' However, Lacan acknowledged, and this acknowledgement is just as valid seven or eight decades later: ‘The resulting situation for this good father is a remarkably difficult one; to a certain extent he is an insecure figure.’ (7)
Speaking of neurosis as early as 1938, Lacan says that weak fathers problematise sublimation and creativity. With foresight, he warns, ‘Impotence and the utopian spirit are the sinister godmothers who watch over the cradle of the neurotic and imprison his ambition.’ (8)
And judging by our inbox spam, there is much impotence about and later we will have much to say about the utopian spirit.
It was not actual fathers, but the symbolic father which was the crucial agency for Lacan. The murdered father of the primal horde, “lives” on as this bearer of language, of differentiation, of meaning, of repression (the superego) on the one hand, and promise (the ego ideal) on the other. The father is the “spokesman,” who explains the world. He is the one who acknowledges, legitimates, and underscores us. Without the agency of the father, the Imaginary register, the imagistic-celebrity culture, becomes hyper-realised.
Borch-Jacobsen summarises the Lacanian position:
'…the insolvency and “narcissistic bastardising” of the father figure, the growing indistinguishability of the paternal function from the “specular double”, the “tangential movement towards incest” in our societies...In short, it is the competitive, rivalrous world, revealed as the great traditional ordering principles retreat, a world of doubles all the more identical for assuming their autonomy, all the more racked by guilt for declaring their emancipation from every law. Hense the paradox: “God is dead, so everything is permitted. Nothing is permitted anymore.”'(9)
This echoes our discussion above on the emergence of the archaic superego, where the criminal and the cop, double and interchange. In the free-market of feelings emerge hate crimes, metonymies of hate, searching at random on the streets for one hate object after another. The archaic superego becomes an undercover double-agent infiltrating the criminal underworld, death squad, the masked hit man, the contract killer to “take out” what is already dead. Criminal means justify criminal ends. The war on terror becomes terroristic.
The father has at least two functions in our psychoanalytic understanding. Firstly, he breaks the incestuous Oedipal bond of the child with the mother, in effect saving the child from a later psychosis. This is clinically verifiable again and again. Secondly, the father is the shield against death. In the jealous Oedipal rivalry with the father, lies a narrow footbridge thanks to which the son does not feel directly invaded, directly swallowed by the Real, i.e. unmediated confrontation with the anguish of death. Indeed, the death of the father, whenever it occurs, is felt by the son as a hole that opens in the Real. Freud puts it very strongly early in the Civilization book: ‘I cannot think of any need in childhood so strong as the need for a father’s protection’ (10)
Contemporary progressive thinking about the father prefers terms like “significant parent” de-differentiating mother from father, significant other, or carer, etc. Here the father may be important, but certainly no more important than anyone else. To think otherwise is flout the inclusive rhetoric. But research in Britain (there has only been one small study in Ireland) has shown that “fatherlessness” is disastrous in virtually every measurable outcome for the children concerned. An intergenerational vicious circle is set up, whereby sons without fathers become so antisocial, linked into gangland criminality, drugs and alcoholism and sire children who they in turn will not look after, that no woman would want to be associated with this kind of low-life. Meantime the women suffer poverty, having to cope largely on their own.
Here are some of the recent observations from Britain.
Half of all cohabitees split up before their child's fifth birthday, compared with just one in 12 married couples. That adds to the army of children being brought up without a male role model and imposes a heavy burden on society. The financial cost of family breakdown, now £20bn a year, a third of the U.K. education budget. The great majority of young offenders come from one-parent households. Children from broken homes tend to fail at school, are twice as likely to have behavioural problems as their friends and 70 per cent more likely to become hooked on drugs. Many run wild in street gangs, which have become substitute families. 15% of all babies born grow up without a father. Family breakdown, in all its forms, is occurring at a greater rate today than ever before. (11)
Lacan was quite aware that, in contemporary life, the rigour of the Symbolic register was more of a structuring mythology than a reality. The now chronic deficiency of the paternal function, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, the undermining of the Law, the loss of familial landmarks leads us to reformulate, the Freud/Lacanian Oedipus is not the Oedipus as it is; it is the Oedipus as it must be.
At this point, we have extracted a number of things. 1) Freud’s ironic valuation of the superego as a precious cultural asset. 2) Klein’s deepening of this structure with her understanding of the archaic superego, which is an enemy of culture, a violent urgent reaction to the drives, leadingly only to violence and panic, especially in children. 3) Lacan’s symbolic father as structuring effect which has been ailing throughout the time of psychoanalysis and modernity. 4) Finally the real flesh and blood father, who fails, but even in his failing is a hedge against incest, psychosis and ciminality.
Clinic
The psychoanalytic clinic in parallel with the failing father was also changing. For half a century psys have noticed an increase in the number of people seeking help who show narcissistic disturbances or borderline conditions. These people are fragmented. They have very profound mood swings, levels of self-esteem ranging from grandiosity to a sense of inferiority which is a void or empty space. Kohut spoke of a ‘depleted self … the empty depression, i.e. the world of unmirrored ambitions, the world devoid of ideals'. (12) Kernberg (1970) (13) pointed out that narcissistic pathology represents a defence against a fundamental rage that is felt to be so destructive, so full of impotent anger, that it threatens completely to destroy the self and other. Here the drives and the archaic superego vie for control leading potentially, at the end of the line, to homicide or suicide.
Most recently, Paul Verhaeghe (in unpublished work) goes on to talk about contemporary disorders, which are now quite unlike Freud’s descriptions of the psychoneuroses. He lists them. Panic attacks, stress disorders, addictions, cutting, promiscuity have much in common with Freud’s “actual neuroses”. They are action oriented, with the focus on the Real of the body, the here and now with no hidden meaning or historicisation. The transference is likely to be, not just a negative transference per se, but an immediate challenging of our position from the first instance. These people have not constructed symptoms to repress the drive, they haven’t the luxury of a sinthome – Lacan’s term for living in a creative way with one’s neurosis. So what position must the analyst adopt, he asks? Well, the therapeutic alliance and an attempt to provide, what Lacan called ‘a coating for the drive’.
The new social bond:
As Jacques Alain Miller says in his strong defence of contemporary psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, ‘the psy is now being expected to substitute himself for the forebear to assure the transmission of values and continuity between generations. The listening ear of the psy, qualified or not, constitutes the compassionate cushion to the “society of risk” …the need for personalised attention’ (14) Over and against this listening to the suffering other (the client, the patient), lies what Miller refers to as the desert of “abstract and anonymous systems”. Here he lists society’s pathologies: detraditionalisation; loss of bearings; disarray of identifications; dehumanisation of desire; violence in the community; suicide among the young; the passages á l’acte of the mentally ill. As Miller says, psys are being called upon to be ‘constitutive or re-constitutive of the social bond which is going though a process of restructuring probably without precedent since the industrial revolution’ (15)
We are being called upon to ‘assure the transmission of values and continuity between generation’, on the one hand, and to be ‘reconstitutive of the social bond’ on the other. Against this exemplary vision for psychoanalysis, we could claim that psys have facilitated, by their “value neutral” or culturally relativist position, precicely the opposite: the deconstructing all social bonds, identifications and traditions. We have been probably closer to the aims of the Cultural Revolution in China and the campaign by the Red Guards against the “Four Olds”: ideals, culture, customs, habits. To claim now that psys are constitutive of the social bond, or transmitting values, or acting in place of forbears, may be somewhat disingenuous. What values? What social bond?
As one person who I saw for analytic sessions over a number of years who had grown up in a strong rural community said, when I’d finished explaining payment and timing of the sessions, payment for missed sessions, etc: ‘To think that it has come all the way down to just this!’ What he explained was, he had seen the end of the old natural informal social ties and their replacement by the “professional relationship”. The rural communities in Ireland have been devastated with the loss of the creameries, the post office, the local shop, the local schools and most recently the rural pub.
The values that psys do transmit, the new social bond that they do constitute can be succinctly formulated. A transactional exchangeable/negotiable social bond which values listening and speaking in total freedom and without censorship or discrimination. We value non-judgemental, non-interventionist listening and that is the ethical example we set in terms of the social bond. And Miller is correct: this is, in effect the new social bond. Because what psys practice in their clinics has now been transposed as a model deployed as an ideal for all social bonds within a democratic liberal society. We must all work with each other, in public and private, in a non-judgemental, transactional, negotiated and equal ways. Psi-values have diffused to the whole culture. What is good in the clinic, becomes deeply problematic, I am arguing, when diffused into a whole culture.
What words do we use to describe the contemporary? Fluid, floating, ephemeral, rapidly changing, a continuous revolution, migratory, re-cyclable, diffuse, cool, non-committed, non-discriminatory. All this and more is part of psi-values, now writ-large in the community, now enshrined in human rights law. And this law (From the EU and the UN) supercedes all previous formulations. The postmodern is also post-history. We have pulled up all our roots. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, at least modernists still had a sense of the values they were at the same time destroying, they still had a sense of the tragic. Postmodernists, on the contrary, are post-everything – values and the tragic. This is the “liberation” that doesn’t even know itself, like the post-feminists who want to know nothing of feminism, or the post-Marxists, who want to know nothing of Marxism, and so on.
A well known Lacanian analyst, Bill Richardson, caused a stir when he argued in effect that clients in psychoanalysis need a sense of values and commitments to others!
In a letter in The Irish Times, Frank Farrell (09.01.07) wonders:
'Is there anything other than the lethargy of our legislature that is keeping Christianity from being a crime? Is there not a dominant thrust in public discourse to denigrate many things that Christianity used to stand for? Are parapets not being erected all over the place below which any budding Christian would do well to keep his head? Wouldn't an avowal of Christianity bring about howls of name-calling, even that shameful tag of fundamentalism? Surely all those things that Christians held to be wrong must now be permitted by law, since otherwise we would "criminalise" those who do them? So it is smart indeed to be careful about the evidence we leave.'
William Burleigh’s recent MORE4 programme, Dark Enlightenment, puts forwards the notion that the West’s desertion of its Christian roots has led to what Durkheim called “effervescence” where every bubble of this frothing represents an idea as the religious impulse fragments into a multiplicity of “solutions” and pseudo religions, cults and practices.
The superego, that Freud regarded as a precious cultural asset is constituted from the Judeo-Christian heritage. It enshrined rights, but rights with obligations inculcated by a long enculturation process. Now in the post-Christian psi-environment, we have competing rights without obligations. The new social bond that Miller refers to is a virtual bond: a bond that isn’t a real bond or, at most, passes itself off as a minimalist bond. Anything else would be unacceptable in a right-based, me-first culture. So it is a bond with a light (lite) touch, which allows for maximum exchangeability. Psi-culture has helped to create this new dispensation. What results then is a radically subjectivist culture – me first and my feelings first.
Children
The effects of this new post-Christian culture bear most heavily on children, among other vulnerable groups.
Christopher Bollas, in his novel I can hear the Mermaids singing, refers to Attention Deficit Disorder and its increasing diagnosis among children and the Ritalin prescribing that is running at a third of a million prescriptions a year currently in the UK. But he says, 'it is not the children who have ADD, it is the parents! He is suggesting, the entire culture projects its own disorder into the child. Too many parents do not know what to do with their children, so they are bundled off to pre-school, then later in the day they are watched by nannies or childminders. It seems clear to him that those with the attention deficit disorders were actually the parents, plus the entire culture that supported this form of attack on childhood’ (16) But again, here is the psi confusion, because Bollas would have argued for equal parenting and the whole play of liberation (for adults!), which then in turn led to a catastrophic rise in house prices requiring two incomes to own a house. He goes on, ‘All he knew was that each and every child with this tag who he had seen or supervised had been neglected by the mother or father. From his point of view it was not a matter of blaming the parents, but of recognising that children need to have their parents around. They needed the mother or father at home when they returned from school, as they were vital characters in helping kids breakdown from the strains of reality’ He suggest ominously by way of conclusion, ‘The world was unwittingly predisposing an entire population to a mordant after-effect: to the inevitability of depression following adolescence, when millions of people would feel some deep inner loss but not have a clue about its origins’ (16).
Run that thought beside these comments from the British survey: ‘Young adults are engaging in a new culture of intoxication. Behind these drugs and alcohol headlines is the emergence and growth of a range of addictive behaviours and practices. Self harm and cutting, virtually unheard of ten years ago, are on the rise. Gambling is national addiction. Britain can also claim the dubious achievement of chalking up the fastest rise in the prescription of anti-depressants and other mind-altering drugs to children.(18)
The three-Ds of Postmodernity: De-moralisation/De-sublimation/De-traditionalisation.
Thomas Mann on Freud's 80th birthday in 1936:
The analytic revelation is a revolutionary force. With it a blithe scepticism has come into the world, a mistrust that unmasks all the schemes and subterfuges of our own souls. Once roused and on the alert, it cannot be put to sleep again. It infiltrates life, undermines its raw naivete, takes from it the strain of its own ignorance
“Revolutionary”, “unmasking”, “undermining”. We have all been excited by this prospect, by this settling of accounts with complacency, with pharisaic righteousness, bringing down and breaking up. The end of hypocrisy and deference, fifties drabness as in Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, the emergence of colour, the breakdown of barriers to social mobility, rights for minorities, sexual freedom, economic freedom, wealth on a scale undreamt of two generations ago and so on. Deregulation in every area of life, especially the arts and entertainment. It is an amazing success story in the wealthy urban areas of the West. Here we must invoke parallel universes. Like a meteorite at the end of its trajectory burns brightest at the moment of it extinction, the huge undreamt of success of liberal democracies has allowed parallel growth in criminality on a global scale. I remember John Simpson, the BBC’s most sober world affair correspondent, on the eve of the millennium, saying how a senior Interpol spokesperson had acknowledged that global crime was now out of control. But this is largely hidden from us for two reasons. One, because of a kind of conspiracy of positivity – everything has to be seen in a positive progressive light. Two, because no one can configure postmodernity. It is complexity in action and, freed at last from our Judeo-Christian formation, we have no way of getting our bearings. Radical success and radical nihilism co-mingle. Anything can mean anything and seventy years on from Thomas Mann’s pronouncements, we have reached the most advanced forms “unmasking” and “scepticism.” On the hither side of our utopia – Raskolnikov again - 'Never had they thought their decisions, their scientific conclusions, and their moral convictions so unshakable or so incontestably right…Each of them believed that the truth only resided in him [radical subjectivity]…They did not know whom to put on trial or how to pass judgment; they could not agree what was good or what was evil. They did not know whom to accuse or whom to acquit. In cities the tocsin was sounded all day long: they called everyone together, but no one knew who had summoned them, and all were in a state of great alarm.'
Perhaps it is a failure of nerve, perhaps it is a senior moment, but this project, this praxis, we can see with the benefit of hindsight, has been de-moralising – gradually removing the moral basis for our civilisation, easily exploited as it was from the beginning by those who stood to gain from the liberation of the drives and the "policeman in your head" – namely rampant consumer capitalism on the one hand (from the Right as it were) and on the Left the state supported therapy industry that is required to pick up the pieces of social breakdown and its escalating costs. De-sublimation, Marcuse’s term, leads, not to the coating of the drive, to use Lacan’s term, but to the exposure of the drive and the kind of frenetic drivenness that characterises the postmodern subject.
One can be "addicted” to anything — not only to alcohol or drugs, but also to food, smoking, sex, work, shopping . . . This universalization of addiction points towards the radical uncertainty of any subjective position today: there are no firm predetermined patterns, everything has to be negotiated, up to and including suicide. Today, there are many young people saying: why live? It’s a cool question: why live? Camus emphasised that suicide is the only real philosophical problem. However, when precisely does this question “why live” actually arise? Only in postmodern de-traditionalised society, when life itself has lost touch with any natural rhythm, any proscribed pattern, any normality, when it is always, always now a question of choosing, even the ultimate choice of whether to live or die. The same kind of logic goes for euthanasia. Until recently, suicide was simply a sign of some terrible aberration, despair or misery, and suicide was regarded as a sinful act. With the contemporary, however, suicide becomes an existential act, the outcome of a pure decision. Living itself becomes an addiction, marked by an excess that no longer fits the simple life process. So instead of a balanced process of living to a natural life cycle, you must get passionately attached or stuck to some excess where your very survival in at stake.
Tom Wolfe says his novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, is about the "de-moralisa-tion" of sex.. The story told is one of student life at a fictional A-list US university. Sex, to these kids, has become just one more aspect of the good, the consumerised, life.
'I think there was actually comparatively little free love in the 1960s — in the communes, yes, but in the population, no. It's certainly in colleges now. The silken slither-slither, the golden spasms: that's what it's all about. These health centres in the colleges, they encourage good sex. It was going to all these colleges that made me realise that sex has been de-moralised. And I really don't think de-moralised sex is as much fun as good old evil sex.'
Wolfe, like Freud, inclines to the belief that sexual repression is one of the most distinctive things about human beings; removing it, therefore, threatens our humanity. (19)
One of our best known and most influential psys is Adam Phillips. In an interview connected with his book, Going Sane, where he suggests that madness has all the best lines (that is unless you are mad), he writes of how relationships are ‘not the kind of thing that one can be good or bad at, that one can succeed or fail at, any more than you can be good or bad at having red hair, or succeed and fail at being lucky. From my point of view, the way modern life is constructed and lived, you can't make a relationship work by an act of effort or will. The will can't do that work of imagination in a relationship, and when that happens people grow to hate each other even more,’ he says.
When a relationship feels (my emphasis) like it's over, he believes it is. We should accept that the man or woman of our dreams isn't someone we could actually have a relationship with, and learn to bear our frustrations’ (20).
Phillips has been called the writer of the floating world. Paradoxical, whimsical, ironic - ephemeral like the relationships he is describing. What does sustain a relationship if not, in the final analysis, effort, hard work, commitment and much imagination. With whom should we have a relationship if it is not the man or woman of our dreams, providing these dreams have some base in reality? We all know young lovers who have grown old together, who will stand by each other, in spite of difference and even hatred at times. All relationships are ambivalent. No but now nothing can be taken seriously; everything must be ironic.
Obscene fathers
The symbolic father, the imaginary father, the real father and now a contemporary myth that coincides with postmodernity and its total skepticism born of psi-values - the emergence of the obscene father. The father, the man, the male, male psychology, essentially lewd, lustful, pornographic. Once the father was feared and hated for his trenchant embodiment of the Law, now, in an absolute reversal, he becomes a terrifying figure. Within two generations, the old paternalist ambivalently loved and hated father has been displaced by his perverse counterpart.
The father has suddenly come alive! Zizek has it:
'[The] postmodern shift affects radically the status of paternal authority: modernism endeavours to assert the subversive potential of the margins which undermine the Father’s authority, of the enjoyments that elude the father’s grasp, whereas postmodernism focuses on the father himself and conceives him as “alive”, in his obscene dimension – the “anal father” who definitely does enjoy; the obscene little man who is the clearest embodiment of the phenomenon of the “uncanny” (unheimliche).' (21)
This other side of the Name-of-the-Father is revealed in Conrad's novels, in the figures of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, and Mister Brown in Lord Jim. Marlow encounters Kurtz deep in the midst of the African jungle. Kurtz is a paternal figure who is a master of enjoyment without restraint, a representation of radical evil, all powerful, cruel to the utmost, an absolute Master for whom there are no limits. Yet he is a father who knows beyond the dead neutrality of the Law, a knowledge that is to do with absolute destruction/pleasure of the law beyond the law. This is the father, who allegedly lies behind the stabilising father – the warlords, the drug barons, narco-capitalists, tribal chieftains, mercenaries, paramilitaries, terrorists, who boast of their raping, torturing, ethnic cleansing and their casual enjoyment of killing in excess.
Closer to home, in fact, we are constantly told, he is most likely to be in the home, the father and adults in general are no longer to be trusted. The one-time bearers of values for the next generation are radically compromised by our psi-culture that argues for the transparency and the openness of everything and the new social-bond-lite.
The Nazis, the Bolsheviks, Mao’s Red Guards all played the Oedipal card and got the children to snitch on their parents and adults. The adults were suspect and denounced publicly. Today with our perpetual cultural revolution, the same trick, get the children to tell on the adults. In Britain, if you want to work with children or help out in a childrens’ activity, you must pay £36 and fill in a fifteen page form and wait for 4 weeks to be vetted the Criminal Records Bureau, who are currently dealing with 9m applications.
According to the Manifest club website campaining against what it calls, the “child protection industry”,
'The vetting of adults in the name of child protection is out of control. Those now being vetted include 16-year-olds teaching younger kids to read, parents volunteering at school, and foster carers’ friends. Running an after-school club is now subject to more stringent security tests than selling explosives.' (22)
Jim Campbell, Mayor of Oxford: ‘The important informal ways in which people relate are going to disappear – everything will be done under contract. We are in danger of creating a generation of children who are encouraged to look at people who want to help them with suspicion.
If somebody has three different roles – say, a football coach, school governor and youth worker — they need three different checks. Sometimes they need multiple checks for one job, to satisfy the bookkeeping requirements of different organisations.
This mad bureaucracy is about to get madder, with a new law passed last Monday that will make it a crime for unchecked adults to work or volunteer with children, punishable by a fine of up to £5,000.' (23)
Informal ways in which people relate are going to disappear.
Every kind of human relationship is now to be subjected to training requirements leading to best practice, targeted improvements, evidence based testing, terms and conditions, protocols, contractual relations. This creates massive health bureaucracies, new industries of well paid psy-experts and service providers, regulators, funding agencies and inspectors, both in the public and private sectors. Less and less are people allowed to act informally without risking trouble or litigation. The pollution of paranoia enters into every niche of the social. How did we get here?
‘Blithe scepticism has come into the world, a mistrust that unmasks all the schemes and subterfuges of our own souls. Once roused and on the alert, it cannot be put to sleep again’ this last point is critical. The unmasking of every dark secret of every person of the unconscious of every organisation and institution proceeds apace. And it now seems unstoppable; it cannot be put to sleep.
The result is: hyperreality – an excess of reality, an explosion (terabits) of information, which in turn drives individuals and institutions into more and more subterfuge and secrecy to evade accountability in an attempt to stay below the radar. Again, there are two worlds – the official world of credibility, audits, political correctness, perfection and mission statements, being seen respecting the law. This in effect means people “covering their arses”. And the other receding (or is it growing?) outlawed world of secrecy and criminality thriving in a liberated world without values. The only thing the two worlds share is mistrust and multiplication, because they were both born in mistrust and driven apart by it. And the mistrust born from radical scepticism drives itself, so that every hypocritical vestige has to be chased down in a permanent drive towards perfection and realisation. People do the “correct” thing now, not because they believe in the value of doing it (they may still but it doesn’t matter) but more because they will be breaking the law if they don’t. Their freedom to truly engage with the other (now called client) is so restricted by terms and conditions that their heart may not be in it. Like those service providers who say-
We hope you’ve enjoyed your flight with us.
We hope you’ve enjoyed your shopping experience.
We have ended up with the psi-ideal, a neo-Reichian dream of freedom from all obligatory social ties and values while, at the same time, being caught for our own “safety and security” in the Kafkaesque world of scientific/information/language based controls and state surveillance security systems.
Having dispensed with the father, we’ve had to invoke a massively expensive state bureaucracy to stand in place of the father.
Camus threw out a challenge, a twentieth-century coda to Pascal's more famous wager. In a discussion with Sartre, Malraux, Koestler, and Manes Sperber that took place on the evening of October 29th, 1946, Camus suddenly addressed to his four companions the following question:
'Don't you agree that we are all responsible for the absence of values? What if we, who all come out of Nietzscheanism, nihilism, and historical realism, what if we announced publicly that we were wrong; that there are moral values and that henceforth we shall do what has to be done to establish and illustrate them. Don't you think that this might be the beginning of hope?' (24)
Notes and References
1. Freud, S. (1927) The Future of an Illusion, SE.21, p11
2. Freud, S. (1923) The Ego and the Id, SE. 19, p. 53.
3. Klein, M. (1933) ‘The early development of conscience in the child’. Love, Guilt and Reparation & Other Works 1921-45. The Writings of Melanie Klein. Vol. 1. Hogarth, pp. 248, 249.
4. (Ibid p. 255)
5. Ibid p. 250)
6. Danto, E. (2005) Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice 1919-1938. Columbia,
7. J. Lacan. (1959-60) Seminar VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Paris: Edition du Seuil. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge. 1992, p181.
8. J. Lacan. (1938) Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual. Trans. C. Gallagher. School of Psychotherapy, St. Vincent’s Hospital Dublin. (Unpublished), p46.
9. M. Borch-Jacobsen. (1991) Lacan. The Absolute Master. Trans. D. Brick. California: Stanford University Press, p129
10. Freud, S. Civilisation and its Discontents. SE 21, p66
11. Centre for Social Justice. http://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk
12. Kohut, H. (1977). The Restoration of the Self. International Universities Press, p. 243.
13. Kernburg, O. (1970) Factors in the psychoanalytic treatment of neuroses’, in A. Morrison (Ed). Essential Papers in Narcissism. New York University Press.
14. Miller, J-A. (2005) The Pathology of Democracy. Karnac, pp50-51.
15. ibid. p51
16. Bollas, C. (2005) I can hear the Mermaids Singing. Free Association Books, p76
17. ibid. p78
18. Op. cit.
19. Source: 4.12.05 (Sunday Times).
20. Phillips, A. An interview with Shane Hegarty to coincide with the publication of Going Sane. The Irish Times, December 20th 2005. For my review of Going Sane, see CultureWars at: http://www.culturewars.org.uk/2006-01/goingsane.htm
21. Zizek, S. 1992, Enjoy Your Symptom. London: Routledge. pp124-5
22. http://www.manifestoclub.com/hubs/vetting
23. Josie Appleton 29/10/06 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/10/29/do2909.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/10/29/ixopinion.html
24. Judt, T. (1998) The Burden of Responsibility. The University of Chicago Press. Camus quoted on p135.
DIDN’T YOU USED TO BE R.D.LAING?
A review of Zone of the Interior. Clancy Sigal. U.K. Pomoma Books 2005.
This is the book ‘they dared not publish’ back in 1976, when it was originally written and has since circulated underground, but it is hard to see why. It is a largely sympathetic portrayal of the anti-psychiatry movement, an exciting fictionalised first hand account by someone who was closely involved, a willing participant in the movement that those of us of a certain age came to know so well. Sid Bell is an American left political activist coming to London in the Sixties, who is “analysed” by Dr Willie Last, a Laingian anti-psychiatrist and anti-therapist, who breaks every rule of what would now be called “professional” conduct. This word would have epitomised everything Laing would have despised - protective boundaries, alienation treating alienation, distance masquerading as love. Clancy Sigal himself was briefly “analysed” by Laing, before beginning his own “voyage”, and the therapeutic community, Villa 21, ‘became my home’. Willie Last hates ‘routing around in emotional shit’. Instead, he shouts, ‘I’m invitin’ ye tae set us both free’. Dancing, no-touch karate, LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, becoming an existential guerrilla schizophrenic, setting heart and mind into free-fall expansion. Schizophrenia is not a mental illness, but a condition of “broken-heartedness”, better still, a voyage, a journey, indeed creativity itself. Sid Bell, under the enormous tranferential impact of Last, withdraws from his active political life into a life of acid trips, minimalism and self-absorption. ‘Why did we follow Last into the desert? Why after all my experience with the Communist party and the Unions, did I fall for the dialectical soft soap again…seek[ing] refuge in near-Fascist irrationalism’, asks Sid Bell at the end of it all?
Con house is where Sid Bells lives out madness. It is the fictional Villa 21, presided over by the self-styled existential anti-psychiatrist, Dr Dick Drummond, modelled on David Cooper and a psychiatric nurse, Les O’Brien, modelled on Frank Aikin, a deeply human man, who, as Sigal affirms, ‘in a just society would be at least as famous as Laing or Cooper’. Here, there is no division between staff and patients, virtually no psychotropic drug use, unlike the traditional wards of the rest of the King Edward Hospital, where the patients are sedated into near comatose states – to which spinsters, for instance, are banished because of unmarried pregnancies, the deaf and dumb, autistics, mild subnormals, alcoholics, homosexuals, the homeless, corralled into a death-like drug induced silence. In Con house, however, there is freedom is to be mad. Madness is celebrated. Gareth, the teenage infant, Jeff H who impresses visitors saying ‘I take the line of least existence’, passive to the end, rejected by his very orthodox Jewish parents from Golders Green, because he grew his hair long, and refused to go to his father’s funeral, announcing at eighteen that he was really a female cosmonaut. Many patients can do “Drum-talk”, that is ‘couch their problems in lofty existential terms’. Jerry Jackson who plays jazz on an invisible clarinet, got measles as a child which left him temporarily deaf, causing others to regard him as subnormal, schizoid, mentally ill, etc. A.C. Corrigan, the Catholic, who discovered homosexuality in the Seminary, at which point his Irish parents through him out. He tried to kill himself by taking wine and pills, sleeping under Charring Cross bridge, and had his first vision of Nelson’s Column as a giant phallus pumping sperm into the Pope’s mouth. There’s Clem Woodford, who later marries and becomes a teacher, black Abe, who was forced to submit to racism, without retaliation, by his immigrant parents’ aspirations to English respectability. And many others we meet follow in these pages. Staff use no restraints. Rage leads to broken windows that are never fixed, in case they are broken again. The self-restraint of staff, the non-interference, in the schizophrenic “process” is exemplary. The key ethic is, ‘not to violate the patient’s fundamental right to heal himself.’ True, this raises anxiety levels in everyone, doctors, nurses, patients, but, and this is Clancy Sigal’s position and commitment, ‘the resulting chaos, it seemed to me, is preferable to the warped terrors of straight wards’. According to Dick Drummond, ‘A therapist who gives up his patient commits a revolutionary act’. And Last: ‘Nothing gives me more satisfaction than seeing some poor deluded bastard tell his shrink to fuck off’.
Over and against the relative sobriety of Con house is Meditation Manor (Kingsley Hall), created by the ‘Clare Community Council’ in an abandoned partly ruined church in Brixton, which the local residents insist in renaming Medication Manor. Here, madness is acted out in all its semblances for the benefit of visiting professors, radical celebrities, media people, social workers, “itinerant idealists”, where indeed you’ve got to go crazy to please the doctors. Here the anti-psychiatric experiment, ‘never impose your own idea of sanity on anyone’ reaches an extreme – ‘Holy suffering’, Last calls it, and he now includes Eastern mysticism and Zen. We meet the most well known schizophrenic of them all, the barrister, Anna Shepherd, who is (maybe permanently) regressed and living in the basement, demanding feeding bottles and sharing her excrement at all times of day and night. As Bell comments, ‘before Willie Last came on the scene, no doctor had even remotely grasped her impelling need to gamble everything on total, uninhibited regression’. There are twins, expelled from A.S. Neill’s experimental Summerhill school, an ex-Battle of Britain pilot, who dive bombs people, a Rand corporation drop-out who has killed his wife and child in a car accident, a retired Adlerian analyst with an new interest in young boys, a young Pakistani girl who hasn’t spoken for years. The tramps, former inhabitants of the crumbling building, fled in terror after Khalil Gibran verses were shouted at them one morning. Last taught that madness was a response to “invalidation” by the normalising family and therefore, to get attention in the Manor you had to go as visably crazy as possible – ‘schizophrenia in wide-screen technicolour’, as one inmate put it. Art was essential as well: ‘many Manorites tossed off poetry and paintings as if schizophrenia hadn’t been invented…Dick Drummond wrote an entire book in a fortnight’. Drummond has now abandoned Con House, which returns, by default to more of a normal psychiatric unit. Bell himself attempts “supersanity” – ‘heady euphoric days. Sleepless nights, hand holding, embracing, breast cuddling, wild screams. Terrible insults, even more unendurable silences – “goin’ through that special agony reserved for those few obstinate souls, who refuse, at the cost of their lives, to relinquish their wholly-y humanity”’. But even here Bell fails to impress Last. In fact Last is contemptuous of his need. He insults Bell like he insults to others: “Every time Sid sticks his cock intae th’ twat of success he withdraws it before he can come. A flyaway bird fuelled by curiosity an’ a mortal terror of commitment”.
Soon, the singing, dancing, shouting poets, curiosity and spectacle seeking Americans outnumber the schizophrenics, Last is transformed into ‘a frail disciple of Ghandi’ loin cloth and all’, minus the Dundee accent, suggesting modestly that he was ‘no more than a speck of dirt on God’s face’, asserting that ‘all social questions end in maya’, his way of having fun while others do the work!
Sid finally concluded, when, ‘nothing I said or did made the slightest impression on him, I decided to pack up and leave the Manor’. This was not so much an ethical choice, or a seeing the light, but more in despair, ‘laughing and weeping at the pointlessness of human activity’. That is until two deaths awaken him to the real: Jerry, in suspicious circumstances, in the Churchill Wing of the King Edward, and Sid’s one-time German girlfriend, Lena, a patient of Last’s, by suicide. After one last ecstatic-mad vision/revelation/speaking-in-tongues, Sid asserts to Willie Last, ‘We’re both so full of crap, it’s comin’ out of our ears’.
So what does it all amount to? At the heart of this schizophrenic spectacular public voyaging which blew itself up into crazy multiple arty fragments of zero interest, is human contact with psychosis, which is radically un-spectacular. This is the best that can be said and should be said. Sigal is saying this very strongly in this book which is weakened only by the perceived need to fictionalize all the main players. However, Sigal (Sidney Bell) is both participant and observer. Maybe Laing was right when he suggested that at the precise moment of engagement, Sid he pulls out, like everyone else. All the rest that has been levelled at Laing over the years is right, but for the wrong reasons. To take just one criticism, I remember joking with a Lacanian analyst that Laing at least made deep contact with his psychotic patients. I was comparing, on the one hand, Lacan’s work with his celebrated patient, Marguerite Pantaine, whom he never helped, and on the other, Laing’s taking up residence in the padded cell, talking, fantasising and drinking whiskey with John, allegedly removing John’s need for any further medication! That is absolutely ridiculous, says my colleague. Laing was paranoid, believing that madness was caused by “the system,” whereas Lacan understood alienation and madness as structural – the speaking being is always divided. Laing had no notion of the unconscious, no concept of the signifier! True, true. But what Laing always shows without fail, is how the professionals lack humour! Mention Laing and people throw up their arms in horror. Yet behind the (necessary) professionalism of whatever kind, there’s evasion, defensiveness and only virtual contact with the other, of the ‘I feel your pain’ variety. Laing’s mad humour unleashes anarchy, freedom, madness which is celebratory but ultimately ephemeral, like the man himself.
In the Channel 4 film (the title of which I have borrowed above) Laing plays a patient encountering a clinical psychologist:-
I want you to cure me of my symptoms, doctor…You are a doctor aren’t you?....Not even a doctor…Why are you laughing? that’s called “inappropriate affect” by experts like you…I want you, doctor, to cure me of my insomnia, my gift of wakefulness, when everyone else is asleep…I’ll take any medication you give me…No, I’ve been to see those other therapists. They can’t help me and they sent me to you…So here I am…What are you going to do, take my money and chuck me out after 45minutes, what you jokingly call a therapeutic hour?
Ultimately, however, analysis is not down to professionalism versus anarchic humour, but an ethical commitment to the other which transcends both, sustainable over time, something intangible that Sigal did experience in Villa 21, maybe his inspiration for persisting with the book.
As for the larger influence, the Laing/Cooper nihilism against the family and his promotion of NON RUTS - read backwards, as well as forwards, as Sigal says – has made an anti-contribution, which has born bitter fruit over the last four decades. Because a small minority of families were and are demonstrably bad, dysfunctional and drive their children crazy, there was never a reason for attempting to destroy the one institution capable of protecting and nurturing children. Similarly, the fashion for “turning on” and “dropping out” (non-ruters) was equally disastrous for the social fabric. Even small towns now have a drugs problem that fuels crime on an increasing spiral. Sigal’s work is (unintentionally) timely in these respects, as we see through the pages of this book the infancy of what was to spread like a quiet destructive rage through the social, which many in power have allowed to happen, namely, the so-called “reordering” of families and creeping acceptability of recreational drug use. Meantime, the schizophrenics, whom all this foment was to help, have been released from their asylums, to “care in the community” at a time when both these word “care” and “community” have a hollow ring.
However, we still cannot be sure where Sigal stands, illusioned or dis-illusioned, because in the preface to the 2005 edition of this book, Sigal says, what began with Laing et al, 'has - in my view - enormous implications for the future treatment of whatever one chooses to call the mental distress of our fellow human beings. Let a hundred flowers bloom - no a thousand'. These is still a big question in my mind as to whether "flowers" and schizophrenic suffering should ever be put together?
The Neither Nors.
A review of Jacques Alain Miller. The Pathology of Democracy (Karnac 2005).
The pathology in question, it seems, is the desire of the State to regulate psychotherapy – to intervene in that intimate relationship between therapist and what is called, for want of a better word, “client”. This has come to a head in France, where Lacanian dominated psychoanalysis is both prestigious and well known. Jacques Alain Miller is Lacan’s son-in-law. Here is Miller’s reply on behalf of all psys (psychoanalysts and psychotherapists) in France against the State regulation of the “neither-nors” as we are called. That is, all those psys who simply ‘screw a plaque to their door’ who are neither doctors, psychiatrists, nor clinical psychologists. According to the Accoyer amendment (8/10/03), these “charlatans” or “scoundrels”, without heretofore recognised qualifications, will not be allowed to practice in France This proposal, passed unanimously and without consultation with the psys, was allegedly to close an existing lacuna in the law, part of a more generalised move in society towards more State control of services, “total quality control” and “evidence based” delivery. It meant that psychoanalysts, who are not also already doctors, psychiatrists or clinical psychologists would be unscrewing their plaques because they would become illegal overnight. The outcry was loud and clear across France. The result was a manifesto, created by the hastily convened, ‘Forum of the Phys’, to which about nine hundred people came at short notice, on November 15th 2003. As Miller says in his strong defence of contemporary psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, ‘the psy is now being expected to substitute himself for the forebear to assure the transmission of values and continuity between generations. The listening ear of the psy, qualified or not, constitutes the compassionate cushion to the “society of risk” …the need for personalised attention’ (p50-51). Over and against this uniquely personalised listening to the suffering other, lies the desert of “abstract and anonymous systems” and society’s woes, or pathology, listed by Miller: detraditionalisation; loss of bearings; disarray of identifications; dehumanisation of desire; violence in the community; suicide among the young; the passages á l’acte of the mentally ill. As Miller says, psys are being called upon to be ‘constitutive or re-constitutive of the social bond which is going though a process of restructuring probably without precedent since the industrial revolution’ (p51).
Against this exemplary, ethical vision for psychoanalysis, we could admit that psychoanalysis has also been central, together with Marxism, in the modernising process which has deconstructed all social bonds, identifications and traditions over the past decades. To claim now that psys are now constitutive of the social bond, or transmitting values, or acting in place of forbears, may be somewhat disingenuous. Not so long ago, such fears for the social bond would have been rejected in terms of “moral panic”. But Miller may have been forced into making too high a claim for this listening process. That psys are radically alternative to the global process, outlined by Miller, which aims ‘to suffocate all those practices that are employed to treat mental pain without medicinal prescriptions’ (p43), will be readily conceded. That powerful economic forces are pressurising doctors and psychiatrists to prescribe psychotropics, must also be conceded. They even argue that depression is under-diagnosed and more anti-depressants should be prescribed – ‘why not sweep away the last obstacles’ says Miller, ‘namely psychoanalysis and the psychotherapies?’ (p43). The French are already the largest consumers of psychotropics in the world.
The massive opposition to Accoyer created a number of compromises to the proposed legislation and by August 2004, the final form was in place. Now, all trained psychotherapists, who are qualified members of their associations, must be registered on a record maintained by the government, regularly updated and open to public inspection. Miller, however, was still against this apparent concession, fearing creeping medicalisation of practice, administrative control and the increasing favour being found with CBT approaches. Other psy groups however were quick to include themselves in the registration process. But doubt remains as to what the bureaucracy may do in the future in terms of new controls and regulations. As Bernard Burgoyne says in his introductory chapter, panels will be in positions of control over all psy-work: referral, practice, supervision, training. Little matter, he says, the ignorance of the State on questions of the relationship of psychoanalysis to psychiatry, to psychology, to various psychotherapies. What matters to the State is State control.
In a wider context, it is interesting to see that psys both in Britain and France, quite rightly resist State control and interference in their affairs and in what goes on in the privacy of the consulting room, although the drive towards control and transparency is inevitable and probably unavoidable. The State’s argument about protecting patients is spurious, as the legislation only gives the appearance of quality control. In reality, the psi-practitioner is still under the protection of the parent association. Complaints are very rare. However, what is interesting is that as the psi-community sees itself on the Left, its aversion to State interference is inconsistent. They would probably approve of State interference in “parenting” and the rights of childrens to be protected from what the State has deemed to be unfit parents. They would believe in the whole raft of legislation involving the policing of human rights and equality legislation, anti-discrimination and politically correct thinking, not leaving any of these human interactions to chance. They would probably believe and support the State’s policing of informal personal relations of all kinds to a degree unthinkable just a few decades ago. They would believe in the State’s right to investigate the backgrounds of any one of us who work with children, that would forbid any professional adult to be on his own with a child. They would probably agree with the State’s implicit assumption that adult men, in particular, should not be trusted with young children, although very few of these men ever harm children. All of this they would broadly support, but when it comes to similar legislation of their own profession, they want privacy! Here, uniquely perhaps they are lining up with the Right, in favour of deregulation, less bureaucracy and more personal freedom!
THE SELFISH MEME. A review of Niall Ferguson’s, The War of the World. History’s Age of Hatred. Penguin Allen Lane. 2006. By Rob Weatherill (Review published in Culturewars)
In this panoramic study of the principal conflicts of the 20th century, centred on the WW2, ‘ the greatest man-made catastrophe’, Ferguson argues that (1) economic instability, overlaid upon (2) failing imperial ambitions and (3) ethnic tensions, provoked most of the great killings. The pursuit of racial or political homogeneity during the last century became the great cause for mass slaughter. This was foreseen by H.G. Wells in his celebrated War of the Worlds, (1898) a work which is emblematic for Ferguson, a ‘Darwinian morality tale’, except that it wasn’t aliens from Mars that were doing the killing, but humans become alien to each other.
The war of the world ended, says Ferguson, in July 1953, when the Korean war petered out. Thereafter, new economic stability and a huge rise in prosperity combined with the strategic stability of the cold war to bring an end to the great wars in Europe, but not in the Third World where “hot” wars continued by proxy. Many of the ethnic minorities whose predicaments had helped provoke conflict earlier in the century had either been destroyed, transferred or partitioned. President Kennedy said of Germany’s partition: “A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”
Ethnic cleansing, his central theme, is behind every modern conflict. Racism, he notes, comes relatively late into history. German anti-Semitism, according to Ferguson, ‘was an extreme case of a general (though by no means universal) phenomenon.’ The racist world view, according to Ferguson, is a successful “meme” replicating itself across the world during the 20th century. Add to ethnicity, the notion of the “nation state” after 1800 and the likelihood of conflict increases with racial minorities suffering discrimination, even exterminiation, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. The meme is successful, not because it benefits people, but because it benefits the (racist) meme itself. Like Dawkins’ selfish gene, the formidable cultural idea becomes, what could be called a selfish-meme! In his Guardian article, Ferguson, suggests that it is a ‘virus of the mind’. Incorrectly, he claims that this meme is hard-wired into human nature and therefore not culturally propagated, no longer an “idea” or ideology. Instead, he claims, it is instinctual for us to fear and hate other humans who are genetically different. Breeding with strangers is a bad strategy if we want our genes to prosper. Again, this is not true biologically.
Throughout the world, people turned on their neighbours with ferocity. De-humanisation became common: the suddenness with which people could be cast as "aliens" was alarming. During the Armenian genocide of 1912-13, the Turks coined a description for the Armenians: "dog food". When Japanese soldiers entered Nanking in 1938, the 20,000 Chinese women they raped were considered less than human. As one soldier explained: "We felt no shame about it. No guilt." Through the classi- fication of the enemy as inhuman, they all became fair game.
Ferguson gives much analytical weight to the concept of "hatred", yet never really tells us what it is. Instead, he relies on the vague idea that hatred is one of humanity`s innate instincts. The ‘twin urge to rape and murder remains repressed in a civilised society’, he argues, but it wreaks havoc when unleashed upon the world. Economic volatility is one important trigger, as it was in the former Yugoslavia. Ferguson`s thesis is more controversial in the context of sexualised violence. He is entirely psychoanalytic when he suggests that the destructive instinct is intrinsically tied to the sexual impulse. Sexual violence directed against enemies was inspired by ‘erotic, albeit sadistic, fantasies as much as by ‘eliminationist’ racism’, he asserts. Bloodlust and rape go together: ‘the twin urge to rape and murder remains repressed in civilised society. It is only when civilisation breaks down or is broken down, as it was in Bosnia and Rwanda, that the urge is unleashed.’ What he calls the ‘metastasising of violence’ (which spreads and augments itself through time like cancer) requires the politicisation of ethnic difference via economical volatility and imperial ambition. The worst time for an empire is when it is weakening and breaking down, as it is then that rebellions start and they will have to be extinguished brutally, to avoid the perception of weakness. This had already been rehearsed, he suggests, in the 19th century by Qing China’s death throes.
At base, all conflict is internecine. Perhaps, Ferguson agrees, in part, with Spengler, that the ‘new Caesars’, ‘reawakening the powers of the blood’ would launch a war on the ‘rationalism of the Megalopolis’. Last century, (Spengler means the 19th) was dominated by materialism, parliamentarianism, socialism and money, but in this century ‘blood and instinct’ will regain their rights. ‘The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them’. However, set against this appalling vista of Spengler, the improving statistic that, since the 1980s, warfare has decreased by 60% and in the last three years, 12 wars have ended.
Modernity is mentioned on the fly-leaf, but is not referred to in the index or in the text. The notion that modernity is about “making it all anew,” about destruction, about the nihilism of the city, reification and atomisation; none of this is mentioned. However, the 20th century’s vogue for, what Ferguson calls, the “empire state” comes close. Uniquely, the empire state developed a passion for uniformity, stripping away local and imperial law, religion, tradition. It made a virtue of increasing ruthlessness and industrial efficiency, willing to make war on whole categories of people. These new so-called empires were short lived, a few decades, and the Third Reich was the shortest and most brutal, lasting at most 12 years. By comparison, the old empires, lasted centuries and were comparatively benign and multicultural, maintaining a loosely globalized economy up until the early 1900s.
Psychoanalysis and the death drive, to which Ferguson briefly refers late in the book, understands that civilisation divides us. Civilised selves are divided selves, discontented, anxious and confused in their dividedness, especially, for example, when Freud himself was writing, during the waning of the Hapsburgs. Fanatical ideologies attempt to undo that anxious civilised complexity of modern life, where nothing is ever complete, nothing is pure or certain, calling us instead to the totally regressive allure of un-dividedness, absolute strength through the pure simplicity of destructive violence and genocide linked to The Cause. Then humans can morph into pure instruments of terrifying violence. In the first instance, against Furgeson, this has nothing to do with genes or memes, or with our so-called “animal” or biological nature. Animals never kill in such large numbers. Instead, it has everything to do with the anomie, or some degree of alienation, confusion and uncertainty within failing or economically unstable civilisations. George Bataille emphasised that civilisations periodically explode into violence, returning to a sacrificial logic, which he referred to as the Sacred – no more divided selves in this orgy of destruction, but intense singularities. Any work that attempts to “explain” the extreme brutality that Ferguson depicts for us, is doomed, in a sense, to failure, because this phenomenon is beyond civilisation, therefore beyond our means of description and understanding.
Finally, the critical role of the media is not explored by Ferguson. For instance, the way in which public opinion is mobilised by creating and inflaming dissatisfaction with contemporary complexities and inadequacies. Stalin used the media. As far back as the 1930s, fascism was sustained and augmented by the media. In the 1960s, Guy Debord referred to our culture as “the society of the spectacle”. The Hutu dominated media pumped out racist propaganda against the Tutsis. In present time, jahidis can upload on a daily basis images of beheadings and multiple atrocities within thirty minutes to a world-wide audience on the web to recruit more Muslim youth to the holy war against the ever weakening western empire, that continues to look the wrong way.
BATAILLE AND LEVINAS AT THE LIMITS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS.
Paper presented to a one day conference held by the College of Psychoanalysis. “Trauma, Body, Impasse”. Oct 7. 2006
Our clinical problem, the central problem, is that in every instance in every case, we discover at root a more or less distant attachment to pain, to a pleasure-pain alloy, a catastrophic metallic excitement, covered by the term jouissance. This is the nuclear secret, the discovery of a primordial masochism, or as Freud refers to it as a “primary erotogenic masochism” (Freud, 1924, p164), or in “Analysis, terminable and interminable”, he points to ‘a force which is defending itself by every possible means against recovery and which is absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffering’. (Freud, 1937, p242). This is the bedrock of our heresy where we come up against what George Bataille, more than any other thinker, has a right to call "the impossible".
Bataille lived the death drive (1). Bataille was analysed by Adrien Borel who showed him photographs (taken by Louis Carpeaux, reproduced in Surya, 2002, p274-275) of a murdered Chinese prince, Fu Chou Li, being cut into a hundred pieces. In the series of photographs, the victim’s reactions seem to resemble those of mystics in states of ecstacy. What so impressed Bataille was the juxtaposition of divine ecstacy and extreme horror.(2) What followed was his lifelong search for the “sacred” beyond the enlightenment of the civilised world.
In the years leading up to WW2, the West was in a state of deep moral crisis with the seemingly inexorable rise of fascism. Bataille’s response was not so much to counter this process of moral decline, but to accelerate the decent with an (ironic) aggressive and visceral anti-intellectualism and anti-idealism. He criticised the “idle negativity” of European intellectuals on the Left, countering with his review, Ancephale, the cover of which reproduced a drawing by Andre Masson of a headless man (reproduced in Stoekl, 1985, p180), representing the “death” of anyone foolish enough to still have faith in cephalic reason and progress. Following in the tradition of de Sade, Neitzsche, Dionysus and others, the first two issues carried articles by Klossowski. The first, published in June 1936, called, “The monster” asserting the Sadean dream of ‘total monstrosity’, the negation of the self, the power of dream over consciousness, the second article was on the current state of Nietzschian studies attempting to rescue Nietzsche from anti-semitism and fascism.(3) Ancephale was a negative religion, a negative theology, but fiercely religious for all that: in the spirit of the melevolent Aztec gods; in the spirit of ritual sacrifices, familiar with the most violent death; in the spirit of non-productive wild expenditure borrowed from Marcel Mauss, (Mauss, 1950) of a mad generosity, as well as in the spirit of the bullfight and the bullfighter gored by a horn that penetrates the bullfighter’s eye, which also held a great fascination for Bataille.
Nothing, as far as Bataille was concerned, must get in the way of the totality of being, no divided consciousness, no Freudian repression or renunciation, also, beyond a certain point, no language. Ancephale was a secret society. However, there is no evidence that it actually carried out any human sacrifices (see Surya, p250).
Against what Bataille regarded as the ‘weak’ forms of ‘servile’ morality in decline, like Christianity, communism, surrealism, ‘spineless’ bourgeois democracies, and today we might include “multiculturism” and “political correcteness” all of which opposed life with some ideal, goals, ends, progress, etc., Bataille went into reverse, turning all morality into a hyper-morality of the sacred, of ruin, of giving, of madness, of sovereignty. Here, for Bataille, the unconscious is a non-knowing at the heart of consciousness itself, which is the headless attraction and fascination felt for abjection and excrement, a primary masochism, what Bataille terms a “heterology” - the Other logic. This Other is the Lacanian Real, made flesh, as it were, and, like the Lacanian Real, Bataille is insistent that it has nothing to do with nature or biology, but is profoundly an effect brought about by the purity and elevation (homogeneity) of Christian religion and culture. The flesh is subject to decay and putrefaction, torn and lacerated. Bataille, like the Cathars, pushes religion to its extreme limit point. The flesh is cursed, because the body is tied inexorably to its own decay and death. There is no sexual liberation (as in the sex manuals which promote an idealised sexuality) but rather a black erotics, where the orgasm is the shattering moment of nothing, linked to the final death which it anticipates and rehearses. The beautification and cosmetic surgery of the body is only an attempt to placate the sacred, the otherness of decay, ageing, necrosis, while at the same time signalling its overwhelming hidden power.
Bataille makes clear that, ‘To the extent that we are normally drowned in this world of mechanisms that a sacred element is completely other for us...irreducible to the things of the profane world’ (in Richardson, 1998, p40). The mechanisms of exchange in the profane Symbolic social universe in which we exist in our alienated fashion, exclude this radically sacrificial logic. Against differentiation and mechanisms of exchange, Bataille seeks contagion - prodigality, perversity, crime, anguish. His mysticism is above all social, but has nothing to do with sociology or communications theory. After Ancephale, Bataille set up his so-called “College of Sociology” in 1937 with Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris. But this was neither sociology nor a college. Here, what constitutes the “social” what brings people together is death; death and sacrifice bind a community. ‘Everything leads us to believe that early human beings were brought together by disgust and a common terror’ (Surya, p265.). ‘The living only gather together “in anguish”; the greater this is, the stronger being is in them, and the stronger their community, [always of necessity] a tragic community’ (Surya, p243). Laceration creates communication. Our love for each other is based on a shared death: communication in tragedy. Death must circulate freely without resistance among the living as an awakening to fatality - father, can’t you see I’m burning. The crucifixion, in the Christian version, was a sacrifice offered to mankind to save us from our sins. But Bataille adds, that this crime, this striking at God himself, leads us to understand that man might now communicate in endless memory of this primal murder: Christ’s death makes us speak.
In his work, Eroticism, Bataille understands the erotic as connected to an elemental violence and violation which we discontinuous beings go in fear of. We will go some small way towards this excess, with our “safe sex”, our manuals on sexual etiquette and sexual hygiene, but on the hitherside of repression, as it were, the sacrifical logic of continuity is at one with death. ‘Eroticism opens the way to death’ (Bataille, 1962, p24). Bataille links up, at this point, desire, terror, intense pleasure and anguish. At this point of rupture, all terms become equivalent and contagious, continuity is re-established. Violent death disrupts the individual’s discontinuity, and ‘what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one’ (p82). The earliest taboos were erected against the violent surge of life which they saw all around them in the cycles of death and rebirth. Freud’s Totem and Taboo is a more recent living vestige. Life in and for itself alone, in its continuity, teems, multiplies, convulses, circulates, unleashes itself. In this sense it is sacred. And, ‘violence alone, blind violence, can burst the barriers of the rational world and lead us into continuity’ (p140). The ugliness and disgust we feel for the sacrifice, especially as the ‘victim is chosen so that its perfection shall give full point to the full brutality of death’ is linked as ever with the ugliness of the sex. ‘Human beauty, in the union of bodies, shows the contrast between the purest aspect of mankind and the hideous animal quality of the sexual organs’(p144). This hideousness is not so much linked to any educational training or any repressive child-rearing, as we hear so often stated, but linked to a certain animality, which has nothing to do with animals per se, but has to do with our knowing of death and decay and its generosity and our fatal attraction towards them. As Bataille says, ‘Language cheats to conceal universal annihiliation’ (p187). Language, as Freud noted, provides ‘the shield against stimuli’. Echoing Freud, Bataille tells us about the NO language of violence, ‘the profound silence peculiar to violence, for violence never declares either its own existence or its right to exist; it simply exists’ (p188). Criticising de Sade, he suggests that a paradox exists, because ‘he attributes his own attitude to people who in real life could only have been silent...he is the mouthpiece of a silent life, of utter and inevitable speechless solitude’ (pp188-189). Relating the erotic to mysticism and states of rapture described by mystics of all religions, they have the same significance, ‘of non-attachment to ordinary life, indifference to its needs, anguish...until the being reels, and the way left open to a spontaneous surge of life...which bursts forth in freedom and infinite bliss’ (pp246-247). Secrecy, silence, the outside to ordinary life, eroticism is silence, the denial of which is language: ‘language scatters the totality of all that touches us most closely...Through language we can never grasp what matters most to us’ (p274).
And Bataille was well placed to become this “excremental philosopher” (Breton). What clearly marked his life as impossible was the blind visceral helplessness of his syphilitic father. Were his father and mother mad or did they go mad? Bataille’s older brother by 8 years, Martial, bitterly denies that either were mad and wanted no public comment made. Their father, Joseph-Aristide, was 35 when he met and married Marie-Antoinette Tournadre. He had previously undertaken medical studies, but not finished them. He became a civil servant, working as a college bursar, a prison employee (of Melun prison), then a postmaster. Then his illness came to light. He was 44 when George was born (1897) and already blind. Three years later he lost the use of his limbs and was confined to an armchair. ‘He had huge ever-gaping eyes...[that] went almost entirely blank when he pissed.’ (GB quoted in Suyra, p7) These eyes were the void, the gaping hole, no doubt absolutely obscene. ‘These eyes, open to the void or the abyss, this truth of eyes that were more real than those of the living were the eyes of either a “madman” or a saint’ (Surya, p7). ‘Stabbing pains tore animal cries from him.’ ‘He sometimes shat in his pants.’ (GB quoted in Suyra, p8) At night George helped his father onto his bedpan. Suyra affirms clearly, ‘George Bataille loved this man. He said so simply without thinking he should add that this love owed nothing to pity’ (pp8-9). However, at 14, hatred took the place of love... ‘I began vaguely enjoying his constant shrieks..in one figure the blind man and the paralytic..that supremely nauseating figure’ (GB quoted in Surya, p9, italics mine). At this point in 1911, George claims that his father’s madness set in. In this year Martial went off to do his military service and did not return until after the war. There are violent screams in the night, and the doctor who had come to help is accused by the father: ‘Doctor, let me know when you’re done fucking my wife’ (p10). His mother makes two suicide attempts: the first by hanging in the attic; the second by attempting to drown herself in a local creek. Can we believe all this? Did George as Martial claimed take pleasure in darkening the story? His father definitely had syphilis for 20 years. George went to school in Rheims where the Batailles came to live. Bored there, he claims to have been devoted to the joys of self-mutilation: ‘I wanted to inure myself to pain’ (quoted in Suyra, p14). He also became convinced that his father had made obscene advances toward him in the cellar of their house. He used the word ‘rape’ and says he saw his father ‘beckoning his obscene hands [towards him] with a venomous and blind smile’ (quoted, p15). In 1914, at the age of 17, he discovers God and becomes a convert to Catholicism. Later that year, from 5-12th September, Rheims was almost completely destroyed by the advancing German army, by which time, along with the civilian population, George and his mother had obeyed the order to evacuate (at the end of August), leaving his father to ‘fire and destruction.’ By August 1919, Rheims had been through 857 days of concerted bombardment. He would never see his father alive again. ‘On 6 November 1915...two or three miles from German lines, my father died abandoned’ (GB quoted in Surya, p18) The son was placed in a position that caused him a sense of guilt that would never leave him: ‘No one on earth, or in the heavens was concerned with the anguish of my dying father’ (quoted, p18). ‘I abandoned my father, alone, blind, paralytic, mad, screaming and twitching with pain, transfixed in a worn-out armchair’ (quoted, p19).
There were three senses that George Bataille gave of this abandonment of his father: 1) the flight from Rheims, as per the orders given; 2) not returning in spite of knowing how close his father was to death (giving in to his mother’s “madness” - the suicide attempts were at this time); 3) converting to Catholicism and a consoling God, when his father had lived and died without religion. His conversion is dated precisely at the time of the abandonment in Rheims.
What his father’s suffering laid bare and manifest in the Real, with his empty eyes, was the materiality, the absolute presence without mediation, of a slow, painful decent into death, which George and perhaps he alone witnessed as a helpless child for many many years. George, later makes clear his travail: ‘God, who watches over my efforts, give me the night of your blind man’s eyes’ (quoted, p20). As Suyra concludes, ‘Praying to him, entreating him, kept Bataille at his father’s side, obedient, long before he knew it, to this Hegelian injunction: “The spirit is this power only in knowing how to look the negative in the eyes and knowing how to stay close to it”’ (p21).
For some nine or ten years Bataille was a devout Catholic. Then came debauchery. The plunge into the horror/fascination of the flesh. He had been reading about the Christian martyrs and their extremes of suffering. According to Andre Masson, Bataille’s was a violent loss of faith. He gave up piety, which he felt was an evasion: ‘I wanted to escape my destiny at any price, I was abandoning my father. Today, I know I am “blind”, immeasurable, I am man “abandoned” on the globe like my father at N. No one on earth or in heaven cared about my father’s dying terror’. (Bataille, 1928, p78).
It would be an understatement to say that this was ever an easy return to the body - his body, his father’s body - never a simple affirmation of the flesh, but quite the reverse - a transgression full of impossibility. Bataille was not and never could be a forerunner of our current therapeutic evangelists of the flesh where everything appears as resolved and reconciled, at peace – like the anti-depressant wishful fantasy of “safe sex”.
To take surely an entirely unoriginal analogy, and more generally speaking, we are the moths circulating around the hopelessly intense flame of the sacred-Real, in ecstatic danger of being consumed, but quite unable to leave the intense light, that gives us life and death at the same time. The question of impasse (body and trauma) can be formulated as such: being caught between the rock of the real of the flaming death and the hard place of the Symbolic and “death” by alienation. Caught between the two, we are stuck, in a holding pattern, like a flight (non)arrival at Heathrow. Impasse: we apologise for the delay, please hold. Baudrillard has this lovely piece at the beginning of Cool Memories IV, whereby he suggests in Zarathrustrian mode, that silent laughter is the background noise of the universe, the silent laughter of the trees and the flowers and so on, that is, until man comes along with what Baudrillard calls, the whole catastrophe of the real world. Similarly, Schopenhauer suggests that even if the World is destroyed, music will persist. Our appearance on the scene, as an unwanted guest who is currently under the illusion of being a special guest(!) causes a perturbation in the universe and creates a hell on earth. The emergence of consciousness (meaning, logos) is the emergence of hell – the hell of lack, the hell of imperfection and limitation, which Bataille, in his own rigorous way, refused, by silencing everything that lacked and was liable to impasse and dividedness. Emergence, or creation, always involves a tearing like giving birth. Form leaves a rent in the potential of non-being: a carving is the death of a stone. The violence of making, is a “tearing away”; a rupture of primordial unity and cohesion. I remember the sculptor friend, spending 8 hours a day everyday, chiselling granite out in his back yard - the violence of beginnings.
The current strategy (impasse) however has been to put all “negativity” out of our minds, making the world totally transparent and “evidence based”, on the one hand, and a celebratory culture of glitz and bling, on the other, leaving ourselves open to infinite ironic subversion. Without a sense of humour, we makes jokes of ourselves, driving our tiny children round in ridiculously massive four-by-fours built like tanks; embracing political and emotional correctness, engaging generally in what Baudrillard terms, the massive ‘laundering of Evil’. Imagine your little girl taking part in a beauty pageant, with total make-up and bouffant hairdo at the age of five or six. The film, Little Miss Sunshine, itself an ironic take on the American dream family, ends with a brilliantly staged subversion of the beauty pageant, by Olive (Abigail Breslin), who, when her turn eventually comes, dances the increasingly outrageous, obscene and explicit erotic moves taught her in secret by her wonderful grandpa, firing parts of her gear into the increasingly outraged audience. The beauty pageant is precisely and emblematically, the extreme appearance of living without the negative
We could think also of the whole rhetoric of bullying/anti-bullying, pampering, comfort zones, being good to the inner you, healing the psyche. There is such a demand for retreat to the world of childhood reassurance, the demand for escape. Even the recent concern expressed by a range of experts for the welfare of children, living increasingly in their virtual worlds, cited the worrying desire of adults to be children again.
Not staying close to the negative and what do you get? Christopher Hitchens codified it well: endless - self-pity, self-righteousness and self hatred.
For Bataille, there was no neutralisation of the sacred and profane: life and death, the living and the dead must circulate without reconciliation. Remember Ishi, the last native American, who when he saw the vast crowds in San Francisco believed that the dead must be co-mingling with the living. The dead don’t die, they can appear out of nowhere on the street, they constantly reappear in dreams.
An Irishman's home is his coffin, wrote James Joyce in Ulysses. ‘Nobody does death in quite the high style of the Irish - it's just life that we sometimes find hard to manage’, writes Declan Kibird, (Irish Times, 26.9.06). He is praising Cré na Cille, the greatest novel in the modern Irish language. Its author, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, born in 1906, sets the novel in a Connemara cemetery. There, the buried bodies refuse to be quiet, but gossip non-stop about one another. In each chapter, a newly-deceased person is interred, bringing news of the latest outrages above ground, causing all tongues to wag even faster. Kibird suggests that it is more likely that the talking corpses were Ó Cadhain's version of the Irish language itself, considered dead by detractors but still astoundingly articulate. Kybird quotes Beckett: ‘All the dead voices . . . They make noise like wings . . . To have lived is not enough for them . . . They have to talk about it’.
A culture that prevents this circulation, this exchange of life and death, must periodically make war. In Terry Eagleton’s vernacular ‘effing the ineffable’, relentless positivity, utopian idealism, will be burst open and blown apart by chthonian violence, madness unleashed, a reign of terror.
Bataille did not bemoan his fate demanding narcissistic redemption, but plunged in, in intimate solidarity with his father’s extreme suffering and abandonment to illness, to war and burning destruction. Give me the night. No retreat, no going back to religion, but the reverse, an absolute facing of the blind abyssal eyes of his father (4).
For Levinas and Bataille, the ethical is precisely this real encounter with the other: by substitution; by being taken hostage; by sacrifice; by obsession; by subversion and black humour by being accursed with no way of slipping away from the naked face of the other. This is a version of the Lacanian fundamental phantasy. Both understood the world in terms of an extreme shaking. They, after all, experienced criminal ideologies at first hand, which were secreted as surplus by enlightenment humanism (Communism) and nationalism (Fascism). They wanted, above all, our awakening from the dream of progressivism. They were against the century of machines of negative perfection - machines of death. Both are situated in the same beyond of Freud’s death drive, in an asymmetric universe which dissolves any hope of the self identifying conformably with itself. They were moved by a elemental fraternity that precedes yet underpins any political notion of solidarity, by a communion in death that moves us to proximity, a continuity with the other in communion. The unconscious, here, opens, not to the language of the Other that structures it, but to silence. Both had been involved in that celebrated revival of Hegelian studies in Paris during the ‘thirties with Alexandre Kojeve and Alexandre Koyre and both had contributed to Recherches Philosophiques (see Roudinesco, 1993, Ch 10). They would take up in their different ways the limitless ethical challenge posed by the void left by the Death of God and the free-fall of values of European civilisation in the face of Fascism.
Without the sacred, without this polybonding of the social, what falls out are atoms, discrete packages of discontinuity, little minature machines as it were, the smallest nanobots, in random opposition to each other, at war without end. In a sense this is the tragic underside of all liberation struggles. We get the negative by default, literally by our failure to repay our debts to the Symbolic. Are we not back with Weissman’s protista (cited by Freud in Freud, 1920) that are immortal by virtue of being a-sexual and complete in themselves with no need of an other? Condemned therefore to an endless repetition compulsion - more of the Same? Or to put it in the words of Peter Porter’s poem: once bitten, twice bitten.
‘Please explain’, asks a young analyst of the contemporary Millerian-Lacanian school, ‘why an analyst might read Levinas, Bataille, Baudrillard and others that you say you read? How could they help in the clinic?’
‘Not an easy question to answer’, I replied, sensing that she was not enthusiastic, merely polite. For, I might have added, there is no reason and no explaining as such. All one can say is that something of the extra-ordinary emerges from these texts that creates an opening that recuperates nothing but unsettles everything – an impasse that psychoanalysis maybe inclined to ignore. We will return to Lacan, psychoanalysis and this complex question of truth in the next chapter.
Bataille and Levinas establish the infinity of the ethical dimension, the a priori of ethics, ethics as first philosophy (Levinas) and therefore point to the position with respect to freedom one must take. We must now be clear precisely what we have to fight against. After both thinkers, there can be no complacency. However, subjectivity becomes complacency; subjectivity is indifference to suffering (ironically no longer sub-ject). When I assert my rights, my desire, ‘my place in the sun’ (Levinas is always quoting Pascal), I am indifferent to the other and the Dark. When I choose an ethical position, i.e. to do this not that, to say this not that, I must also be indifferent to the that, presenting a razor edge to that other, like in a divorce where everything is divided down the middle. The other has to be fought against, the Dark has to be fought against, all in the name of a clearing of a transitional space for subjectivity. What has been demonstrated above is just how hard this fight, this vigilance and wakefulness has to be, will always be. It is a fight without ceasing, but a fight with responsibility and a fight with what Levinas refers to as non-indifference.
Notes.
(1). Bataille was widely read in psychoanalysis and had a founding influence on Lacan in particular, although Lacan never refers to Bataille specifically.
(2). Of the victim, Bataille says, ‘I loved him with a love in which the sadistic instinct played no part: he communicated his pain to me, or perhaps the excessive nature of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin’ (ibid. pp274-275)
(3) Nietzsche had already criticised the anti-semitism of his sister and her husband and had never adopted any authoritarian doctrine of soil, race or fatherland. On the contrary, Nietzsche was a celebration of freedom in a world without God.
(4). However, by saying or suggesting this (above) living out of his life experience, we do not wish in any way to pathologise his theory that has an “origin” in neurosis or psychosis (see Steokl, 1985, px). Bataille’s contribution stands independently of its neurotic underpinnings.
REFERENCES.
Bataille, G. (1928) The Story of the Eye, trans J.J.Pauvert, London: Penguin, 1982
Bataille, G. (1962) Eroticism. Paris. Edition de Minuit. Trans: M. Dalwood. London: Marion Boyars. 1987.
Freud, S. (1920) ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’. S.E. 18. 3-64.
Freud, S. (1924) ‘The economic problem of masochism’. S.E. 19. 157-172.
Freud, S. (1937) ‘Analysis terminable and interminable’. S.E. 23. 209-254.
Mauss, M. (1950) The Gift, Presses Universitaires de France. Trans. W.D. Halls. London: Routledge. 1990.
Richardson, M. (1998) (Editor) George Bataille Essential Writings. Sage Publications
Roudinesco, E. (1993) Jacques Lacan. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Stoekl, A. (1985) (Editor and translator) George Bataille. Visions of Excess Selected Writings 1927-1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Surya, M. (2002) George Bataille. An Intellectual Biography. Trans. K. Fijalkowski and M. Richardson. Verso 2002.
EVERYMAN (FOR HIMSELF)
A review of Philip Roth’s, Everyman. Jonathan Cape. 2006.
This is a short novel about what several reviewers have referred to as a “stark”, “brutal”, face-to-face encounter with suffering and death, complete with black dust-jacket and the thin red line around the title. Everyman takes its title from a fifteenth-century allegorical play about the summoning of the living to death. It starts as it means to goes on:
Around the grave in the rundown cemetery were a few of his former advertising colleagues from New York, who recalled his energy and originality and told his daughter, Nancy, what a pleasure it had been to work with him. There were also people who'd driven up from Starfish Beach, the residential retirement village at the Jersey Shore where he'd been living since Thanksgiving of 2001 -- the elderly to whom only recently he'd been giving art classes. And there were his two sons, Randy and Lonny, middle-aged men from his turbulent first marriage, very much their mother's children, who as a consequence knew little of him that was praiseworthy and much that was beastly and who were present out of duty and nothing more. His older brother, Howie, and his sister-in-law were there, having flown in from California the night before, and there was one of his three ex-wives, the middle one, Nancy's mother, Phoebe, a tall, very thin white-haired woman whose right arm hung limply at her side. When asked by Nancy if she wanted to say anything, Phoebe shyly shook her head but then went ahead to speak in a soft voice, her speech faintly slurred. "It's just so hard to believe. I keep thinking of him swimming the bay -- that's all. I just keep seeing him swimming the bay." And then Nancy, who had made her father's funeral arrangements and placed the phone calls to those who'd showed up so that the mourners wouldn't consist of just her mother, herself, and his brother and sister-in-law….
Everyone is there to say goodbye to this man without a name - the author never gives him a name. This book faces the real of death, without flinching. One cannot say otherwise that this work, contrary to so much writing about death, is totally and refreshingly unsentimental. There is absolutely no notion of a “good death”, or of being reconciled, or of kissing the shadow, or of a “peaceful end”, or of merely slipping away, or any of the contemporary pseudo-religious positivity that attempts to neutralise the otherness of death and suffering. Even the old Jewish graveyard, where the man is being buried, like his parents before him has been vandalised as if to underline the fact that the dead no longer count.
And yet the book itself is curiously somewhat dead in itself. There is perhaps too little in it to move us in our common humanity and common destiny. True there are the delightful childhood stories of the errands he would run for his father carrying the quarter or half carat diamonds in his pocket from the Everyman Jewellery Store his father owned and worked for sixty to seventy hours each week for nearly forty years to support his family. There’s his first encounter with death as he played in the surf as a child on the New Jersey shoreline, the love between him and his older brother. ‘the ecstasy of a whole day of being battered silly by the sea’ (p127). His love for Phoebe.
Perhaps it is the man himself as contemporary everyman that deadens this story. For this man represents everyman - for himself. A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is struck down with heart disease and the book details his many surgical operations and his stoicism in the face of death. But the “for himself” is there throughout – he is not a man who gives. Unlike his father, he is not a generous man. He looks to women without exception for either sex or support or preferably both. His first wife is mad. His second wife leaves him after discovering his affair with a very young woman, his secretary (whom he “fucks” in his office) whom he then marries and who proves totally “useless” for looking after him when he has had a quintuple bye-pass surgery, and his only daughter, Nancy, with her “unstinting generosity” will be the only one to support him in his final years. It is always what the other can do for him. He even gives art classes (he has always painted during his retirement), by his own admission, in the hope of meeting another woman. Later on still, he propositions a jogger who runs past his retirement complex every day. All he has to set against nihilating death is sex: ‘that sharp sense of individualisation, of sublime singularity, that marks a fresh sexual encounter or love affair and that is the opposite of the deadening depersonalisation of serious illness’ (p134).
His deep loneliness is in part self-created which lessens the truth-telling courage of the narrative itself. When it comes to dying he has nothing: ‘life had been given to him, as to all, randomly, fortuitously, and but once, and for no known or knowable reason’ (p125). Life is a given, not a Gift. Ultimately meaningless, he is nothing, he has nothing and he knows in a sense he deserves nothing. He has alienated through envy his only brother who had always loved him: “Without even Howie! To wind up like this, without even him!” (p158). In response to his sons’ total condemnation of him, he wonders if their judgement of him is worse than what he really did to them. After all, ‘He was one of millions of American men who were party to a divorce that broke up a family…Did he fail to support their mother or fail to support them?...What could have been avoided?…What could he have done differently?’ (p94).
The nameless man dies on the operating table (his seventh operation) released from his ultimately pointless existence. But there is a redemptive moment as he goes into the anaesthetic coma. ‘Nothing could extinguish the vitality of that boy whose slender little torpedo of an unscathed body once rode the big Atlantic waves…the abandon of it, and the smell of the salt water and the scorching sun! Daylight, he thought, penetrating everywhere…off a living sea, an optical treasure so vast and valuable that he could have been peering through the jeweller’s loupe engraved with his father’s initials, at the priceless planet itself…’ (p182)
Perhaps Roth has created a man of our times, an ordinary man, out for what he can get and there is no problem about that. A man who is stoical in his minimalism and inspires no great sympathy from anyone. Roth is non-judgemental and faithfully records his life and slow death. ‘Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre’ (p156).
The book ends with his meeting a black man, digging a grave, who explains the whole grave digging process to our dying man. The grave digger, as it turns out, buried his parents and he knows will bury him. And this poignant ending, with this black man, who, in a sense, sees it all – the summation of everyone, the end, is reminiscent of a similar encounter with Les Farley at the end of The Human Stain. We find Farley out on the ice of a frozen lake, a lone figure in brown overalls and a black cap seated on a bucket fishing through an ice hole. Farley represents the hard Real of this book, the absolute point of dereliction, brought on by his Vietnam experience. He is thinking, if he had a son, he would be showing him how to fish. Instead he is traumatised: ‘When I came back, I couldn’t relate to anything...wearing clean clothes, and people saying hello, and people smiling...I couldn’t relate to it anymore...’
