Just because people ask you for something doesn’t mean that’s what they really want you to give them.

Lacan, Seminar XIII, March 23, 1966

If Molly and Jodi sat down to talk

If there are 2 people in this world that should get together and talk it is Molly Anne Rothenberg and Jodi Dean.  Quite simply because they’re two of the most astute english speaking commentators on Žižek bar none. Dean’s presentation at the last conference on re-imagining communism proved she understands Žižek better than Žižek.  But also because the acuity of their (Molly and Jodi’s) contesting (yes contesting, though not a lot contesting, hmmm a little contesting), theoretical perspectives would make for TOTAL INTRIGUE.  Molly Anne Rothenberg’s scintillating book compares well to Jodi Dean’s treatment of subjective destitution and the discourse of the analyst, (see Dean’s book on Žižek’s Politics).  The latter to the former, Dean to Rothenberg, is what Occupy Wall St. is to a Sunday afternoon demo in front of The Gap.  Ok, I’m being a bit unfair to Molly, but only because her last chapter is so exasperating.  For one thing she moves from talking about a Mobius subject (also called: the excessive subject, subject*) to a ‘neosubject’ which is confusing.  Also, Rothenberg can’t quite pull off her wonderous and breathtaking “imagine yourself in a garage” analogy again, though she tries, this time in her treatment of the early Guattari, about a horse.  But the horse in the stall metaphor kinda stalls.  It’s Dean that could have brought Rothenberg’s last chapter to the finish line and hopefully that is not to slight the differences between them.

Kareen Ror Malone on Butler and Lacan and ethics

Ror Malone, Kareen. “Reading Desire and Tracing the Subject in Lacan and Butler: The Problem of Ethics Without Meta-Language.” Theoretical Psychology Critical Contributions. Selected Proceedings of the Ninth Biennial Conference of The International Society for Theoretical Psychology. Calgary, Alberta, Canada. June 3 – 8, 2001. Eds. Stephenson, Niamh. and H. Lorraine Radtke, René Jorna, Henderikus J. Stam. Concord: Captus Press Inc, 2003. 233-241.

From the abstract:

The “end” of meta-language refers to the necessity of crafting a more precise notion of the interactions that define the “extra-discursive,” authority, and the “reality” secured by language (e.g., norms).  It is at the intersection of these dimensions that one may ascertain a form of agency that is both embedded within culture yet able to subvert or take an ethical position in relation to its norms.  Language and loss the “inter-dit” in Lacanian interpretation, and Butler’s concept of rhetoricity are implicated as avenues through which one can understand the emergence of this sort of agency and ethics.

This article works basically as a primer on Lacan’s definition of the signifier: “a signifier represents a subject for another signifier” for her colleagues in various academic psychology departments who may still cling to ego-psychological notions of the subject that Lacan dismisses with his re-reading of Freud.   Ror Malone makes some interesting points about the “real” in Lacan, but unfortunately, as with any articles that tries to address a diverse audience of practioners in psychology and theorists in other fields, it remains caught between two stools, one is that it is somewhat too broadly descriptive of core Lacanian concepts, only scratching the surface on the real, on the other hand it probably fails to convince the positivists in the field who have yet to grasp the novelty of Freud’s discovery at the turn of the 20th century.

Excessive subject and the sinthome

After reading Molly Anne Rothenberg’s book and her critique of Foucault and Butler, I’m intrigued by this problematic of immanentism.  It happens when relations take place entirely within, that is, without any causal agent developing from the outside, without being effected by an ‘outside.’

… a subject produced by morality must find his or her relation to morality. One cannot will away this paradoxical condition for moral deliberation and for the task of giving an account of oneself. Even if morality supplies a set of norms that produce a subject in his or her intelligibility, it also remains a set of norms and rules that a subject must negotiate in a living and reflective way (10).

Molly Anne Rothenberg says if the subject is produced by a morality, in what sense can it develop a relation to that morality, how can it distance itself such that it can be properly reflective of its relationship with a morality?  This is the problem of immanence and why Rothenberg moves to a version of extimate causality, with its emphasis on the non-coincident subject, but unlike Foucaultian immanentism, there is a space, an opening, in the subject’s ‘non-coincidence’ that allows it recognize it’s own relationship and defensive posturing with relationship to his/her own excess and yet instead of playing a game of ‘hot potato’ instead, absorb the excess via a identification with the sinthome.  Thus becoming in Rothenberg’s words (I think), a sinthomic subject.   That is, a subject that takes on the place of where jouissance formerly was, now the subject [Here I am] emerges.

Žižek and the Act

When Molly Anne Rothenberg states that “In Žižek’s view, the political meaning of one’s acts has nothing to do with one’s “sincerity or hypocrisy” — that is, one’s “subjective self-experience” is irrelevant to the objective truth of one’s actions.”  She is pointing out a basic psychoanalytic fact that the subject is split, between the stories it tells itself at the level of conscious life, and the unconscious ‘truth’.  For example Žižek in numerous lectures never tires of making this point, and somewhat irrepressibly cites as an example the movie United Flight 93.   As is well known the story of United Flight 93 is about the lone plane on September 11, 2001 that did not make it to its destination.  It crashed.  Žižek makes the point that the calls from the plane to relatives and family all professed love.  Žižek, not wanting to sound callous and cruel, voices the proper caveats before stating that those who take from these phone calls the St. Paul expression about the universality of love, how, “when the chips are down” love is all that matters.  Žižek’s point being that no, this is a lie.  Why?  Žižek always makes the point that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are lies.  Citing the refrain he claims to have taken from the mutlicultualists (Žižek is opposed to liberal multiculturalist politics), that says, “An enemy is only someone whose story you haven’t heard.”  Žižek claims that this is false and cites the example of Hitler, is this the case that he is merely and enemy because we have not heard his story.  Hitler’s own story, Žižek points out (guardedly), is probably sympathetic and ‘nice’, of how he cares about the German people etc.  And so to get back to United Flight 93 Žižek claim is that none of these phone calls represent a Lacanian ethical Act.  So what would have been an Act?  Žižek’s response is to claim that a man knowing that the plane is hurtling towards the ground and is going to crash, phones his wife and tells her, “Listen, our marriage was awful, I hate you, good-bye.”  Now the larger point that has to be made is that this is part of an ongoing debate between Žižek and Judith Butler regarding her argument in Giving Account of Oneself that describes becoming fundamentally ‘undone’ by the other.  Whereas Žižek would argue that one never can truly know her other (what he labels the neighbor), and this is a good thing, as it ensures, for Žižek, a modicum of distance, discreetness and impersonality that he claims is key to getting along in a human community.

To a subject of drive from a subject of desire

Instead of the subject of desire, Rothenberg argues that Žižek promotes the subject of the drive.  From page 177 of her book:

Rather, the subject of the drive institutes a gap between itself and its symbolic subjective dimension. The subject’s identification with objet a re-casts it, not as a set of symbolic properties, but as connected directly to the order of objectivity.  Introducing a distance towards one’s own symbolic identity puts one in a position to act in an “objective-ethical” way (OWB 182).  Presumably, it is this link to the objective that makes solidarity possible.  The manifold differences or symbolic properties of individuals move to the background, while each subject, as identified with the object of the drive, finds its way to the objective order, the only terrain on which meaningful change can occur. Solidarity, then, emerges not from intersubjective relations but rather from the relations of subjects purified of their symbolic identities, subjects who meet on the ground of objectivity, as objects (177).

Molly Anne Rothenberg is here slowly building up her case for the ethical component of the Möbius subject.  What she takes from Žižek is this attention to drive as opposed to desire, but more importantly the notion of subjective destitution, of a subtraction from all ontic qualities and a focus on meeting on the ground of objectivity.  However, Rothenberg sees this much differently from Žižek, whom she describes as not entirely clear how this formulation distances itself from fascism plain and simple.

 

 

 

Rothenberg’s chapter on guess who …

Molly Anne Rothenberg’s chapter on Žižek, particularly her discussion of Žižek’s theory of the political Act, deserves a friendly rejoinder from Žižek himself.   I get the impression Žižek didn’t read this chapter closely enough before he submitted his foreward to her book to the publisher.  His foreward celebrates R’s call for retroversive causality, but it is in the name of this very concept that Rothenberg takes Žižek to task.

Potential Rothenberg and Stavrakakis link?

When Molly Anne Rothenberg in her book states the Ernesto Laclau disavows fantasy in his social theory, and which for Rothenberg, fantasy plays an important role in the social bond.  Yannis Stavrakakis claims that Laclau has under-estimated the role that jouissance plays in the ways in which individuals are subjugated to dominant ideology.  Hmm. Stay tuned.

Molly Anne Rothenberg on Butler’s (non) Foucaultian import

Molly Anne Rothenberg runs Judith Butler up against Joan Copjec.  Rothenberg argues that Butler has slid back to a Foucaultian “immanentist position on the reduction of subjects to their determinants.” (94)  Butler adds a Althusserian interpellative twist to the proceedings, and by interpellation R. understands the subject qua subject to be product of “internalized discourse.”

She argues that Butler’s theory of subject formation revolves around the censorship of speech, that the subject comes to be through “implict and explicit norms” that govern the speech of a subject.

But Rothenberg points out, this notion directly contradicts Foucault’s concerns about the repressive hypothesis, “which abjures such a notion of the constitutive role of repression.

So, even as she (Butler) is invoking Foucault in her reference to his model of power and to his notion of the discursive constitution of subjects, she is importing a non-Foucaultian — and equally non-psychoanalytic element — into her theory, that is, the constitution of subjects by way of exclusion. (94)

Molly Anne Rothenberg lauds the fact that Butler recognizes the theoretical importance of the “disjuncture between utterance and meaning.”  But the crucial dig occurs when Rothenberg argues that Butler correctly identifies the fantasy working in the belief that the speaker’s intention can be realized “univocally in the effect on the addressee.  This relies on a phantasy of sovereign action … one that immediately does what it says”.  But even having made this criticism about a sovereign speaker, “Butler goes on to garner support for this very “phantasy” in her own theory of subject formation (97).

Molly Anne Rothenberg disagrees with Butler’s theory of the subject

Having accepted the reasonable proposition that subjects are formed through language, she makes her theoretical missteps when she tries to figure out how to confer power on marginalized subjects by imagining that they can control the surplus attending all utterances … relying continually on a belief that somehow, the excess attending signification can be eradicated.  In this persistent gesture, Butler reveals that she does not understand the subject as itself a site of excess (107).

R.’s argument is thus: Butler like Foucault, claims that power is productive and produces resistance, but Butler is aware that Foucault theory of power doesn’t leave enough for the subject, that it is too productive in fact, that discourse only produces positivity and hence no room for contingency, as R. quotes Butler, “any effort of discursive interpellation or constitution is subject to failure, haunted by contingency, to the extent that discourse invariably fails to totalize the social field (Bodies That Matter 191-192)” (108).  Rothenberg likes this last quote very much.   For a brief shining moment, both seem to be on the same page.  That is until …

Butler uses psychoanalysis to pry open Foucaultian immanence.  As R. points out, for Butler, psychoanalysis is too ahistorical, “a charge she bases on her belief that psychoanalysis presents castration as a universal form of lack (Bodies That Matter 202 quoted in R).  So, in order to benefit from the psychoanalytic model of subjectification, she [Butler] proposes in Excitable Speech that subjects are formed by the installation of a lack that can be historicized.  … She conceives of this lack …. in terms of exclusion, an exclusion that produces a realm of “unspeakability” as the condition of the emergence and sustenance of the subject proper, but the “contents” of which are determined historically” (108).  Oh oh.

Rothenberg pounces on this last gesture by Butler.  Remember, the title of R’s book is The Excessive Subject.  My point being that R. doesn’t have much time for a theory that presents subject formation in terms of lack.  

The theorizing of an excess that sticks to and flows from all signification (whether in speech or in bodily gesture) is the hallmark of a psychoanalytic approach. The excess is inescapable, irremediable, and unsymbolizable: in Lacanian parlance it subsists in the register of the Real (106).

Rothenberg continually hammers Butler over the fact that Butler totally misunderstands the nature of this excess.  Butler’s excess is taken up in bodily way and read off transparently, as if meaning was transparent.  For R. this excess is irresolvibly non-transparent, beguiling even.  “(Butler) uses the trappings and terminology of psychoanalysis but spectacularly fails to appreciate precisely what distinguishes psychoanalysis from Foucaultianism —the theorization of the dimension of excess inherent in every speech act.  This failure inflects her version of subject formation: in disavowing the extimate cause, Butler leaves herself with no way to theorize the subject as a site of excess, as a Möbius subject” (107).

Molly Anne Rothenberg an intervention in social theory

You heard it here first — there are 3 books that you must read if you are at all interested in the Lacan-Badiou-Zizek-Laclau-Butler intervention in social and political theory: these are in no particular order:

- Against Adaptation: Lacan’s Subversion of the Subject by Philippe Van Haute,

- The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change by Molly Anne Rothenberg

- Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject by Ed Pluth

[Honorable mention goes to any of Glyn Daly's trenchant analyses of Žižek's thought.  Plus Jason Glynos and David Howarth's book: Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory is an interesting take-off from Ernesto Laclau's socio-political theory.]

Regarding Rothenberg’s book, I would like to set up her discussion of ‘negation’ through her absolutely fantastic discussion of Badiou’s notion of the empty set { }

Here is one of many scintillating quotes I could draw upon from her book:

{ } The simple addition of a formal property, the empty set, which has no substance in and of itself, negates the state of sheer being that attends each thing-as-such. It does so by establishing a minimal point of orientation — like making a small cut in a sheet of paper. Once this cut is added, then “things” can bear some minimal relation to each other — they all have a relation to this minimal point of orientation. This “cut” of the empty set creates a vector, and with this stroke, things precipitate into a world of identities, properties and relationships — as objects (33).

Now that is an awesome way of putting it.   What Rothenberg is getting at is this whole idea of a determinate negation: things become objects, only through a cut, a negation that allows them to be placed in a relationship to another.  If this sounds abstract, Rothenberg comes down to earth a bit later when she concretizes this concept by explicating it in conjunction with the Nom-du-Père.  This is a standard Lacanian move that locates the child’s entry into language, the ‘cut’ that vaults it into the ‘defiles of the signifier’.  Rothenberg is setting up her argument which consists in a very complex but fascinating and unique interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory which will allow her to argue for a totally new and innovative way in which to view the ‘social’ or ‘social field’ as she prefers to call it.

Lacan and the Political by Yannis Stavrakakis

The most interesting reason to read the work of Yannis Stavrakakis is because he provides a nice argument (whether one totally agrees with him or not), with regards to the applicability of Lacanian theory for a progressive political analysis.

Lacan’s adaption of Saussurian linguistics points to the overwhelming importance of language as a constitutive factor in the production of subjectivity. The moment the subject comes under the edict of the paternal function, it’s symbolic castration means now it must enter the symbolic, the realm of language, of signifiers, and separate from the jouissance of the mother’s body.  The entry into the symbolic marks the subject’s entry into language with one proviso.  Only upon this entry is the subject then marked by a lack, or tangible sense of missing something, due to the very nature of trying to say it all in language, when language cannot say it all.

Real

What escapes all attempts at symbolisation is the real.  Language can’t say it all.

Loss of the Signified

The signified, what is supposed to be, through its links to external reality, the source of signification, indeed belongs to the real.  But this is a real that resists symbolisation — this is the definition of the real in Lacan; the real is what cannot be symbolised, the impossible.  Surely, if this real is always absent from the level of signification it cannot be in itself and by itself the source of this same signification. Its absence however, the constitutive lack of the signified as real, can.  This lack constitutes something absolutely crucial for signification.

The divorce of signified from signifier as represented by the bar between the S and s, places the signified at the level of the real.  The real resists symbolisation, which means ultimately the stabilization of meaning can only be accomplished through the play of signification at the level of the signifier.  The only way in which this space for the movement of meaning to be produced by the movement of signifiers is because there has emerged this ‘lack’ which Stavrakakis labels as ‘consititutive’ it is a constititive lack meaning that lack generates the complex of meaning by virtue of the fact if it weren’t for lack, the play of signification would ossify and die.

This absence has to be compensated if signification is to acquire any coherence.  It is the absence of the signified in its real dimension which causes the emergence of the tranference of the signified.  What emerges is the signified in its imaginary dimension.

The absence of a signified that can guarantee meaning may seem far away from something that could be of use for political analysis.  But is that really so?  Let’s take as a first example an extremely common occurrence that regularly arouses heated debate.  Art. The 1989 National Gallery of Canada’s installation of Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire, consisting of a red stripe on blue background, drew a host of mixed commentary ranging from the usual “Is this art?” to ones that opted out of passing aesthetic judgement but lamented that Canada Council funding (tax payer dollars) was used to support the mounting and exhibition etc. As is common, in an effort to calm mounting anxieties there is an effort to hear from the artist and if not available the curator is the one to stand in to explain and provide a meaning as if there is to be but one explanation that will lay to rest the furor.  Now instead of Voice of Fire, a different combination of words can be substituted, that is, are similarly cathected with a libidinal-political charge: This is Indian Land; Let the markets, not politicians, decide; Marriage between a man and woman is the only natural union. These signifiers attach themselves to politically contested signifieds or meanings, because, as one could say, politics abhors a vacuum.  Yet the point being made here is that if there is an attachment to any signified, or signifieds, these attachments to signifieds are ‘transferential’ that is, meaning is invested with strong libidinal and emotional ties.  Hence the Lacanian reservation of the Habermasian procedural democrats.

There is, however, one more dimension to this signifiying play.  This transference of the signified, the emergence of the imaginary signified can only be the result of the play between signifiers. This is how the third dimension, the dimension of the symbolic, determines signification. It is the predominance of the signifier that produces the imaginary signified in order to cover over the absence of the real signified or rather of the signified as real. 27

The numerous attempts to attach stable meaning to the continuous sliding of signifiers is also the attempt to cover over the void of the real.  The priority Lacan places on the signifier is due to what Stavrakakis argues is because the signified is ultimately the register of the real, that which escapes symbolisation but for that very reason, contesting political forces never tire from attempting to hegemonize key signifiers, that is, reorient signifiers like democracy, or individual rights, and embed them into their particular constellation of language games.

Stavrakakis makes very clear Lacan’s emphasis on the signifier and the dynamic in place as these attempts to hegemonize key signifiers, is nothing but an illustration of the moment of the political, when contesting political opponents contest each other by putting their opposing discursive regimes into play.  the emphasis for Stavrakakis is that this is an infinitely open playing field, these attempts to signify and hegemonize meaning around a core signfier or point de capiton, is illustrative of the open political game.

The elimination of lack through a definite symbolisation of the real is impossible. Yet this is the condition of possiblity of our freedom because it means that no order, no matter how repressive it might be, can acquire a stable character … 95