From (Re)-turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies Spring 2005, Volume 2 The articles that appear in this second issue of Re-Turn take up more extensively both the nature and method of Lacan's teaching, as well as the implications of this teaching in
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the clinic itself. In Jacques-Alain Miller's chapter one of From the Symptom to the Fantasy and Return (et Retour), the role of affect is highlighted as it functions in Lacanian analysis. Miller shows how the American clinic misunderstands the symptom and closes its eyes to Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle - i.e. the death drive - that is, instead of living from ongoing pleasure, people live from their suffering and cling to the symptom that sustains it. The symptom is aligned, then, with the desire of the master. The symptom is a mode of jouissance for the subject. But while jouissance is aligned with pleasure, pleasure is aligned with the death drive, the repetitions that come after the pleasure principle.
Given this rethinking of the symptom, Miller also shows that fantasy is not what we think it is - something opposed to reality - but rather is reality itself. In other words there is a logical structure and function of the fantasy. Suffering, then, is fundamental to the fantasy. This leads to an ethical problematic: how does one cure in psychoanalysis? There is no clinic without ethics. Thus, given the consistency of clinging to the symptom and fantasy that bolsters it, the psychoanalytic clinic breaks with the drum-roll of everyday life. To quote Miller, "the fantasy consoles the subject for his symptom." Indeed, Miller shows that the logic of the signifier is a logic of the symptom whose Ur-form can be found in Freud's essay, "A Child is Being Beaten." The role of the analyst, then, is not to give the patient a success formula for everyday life, but a new signifier which will realign him in relation to his symptom. Lacan's wager was to ask analysts to ex-sist outside the social bond. Only in that way can the analysand find the path of his desire and the Real of his suffering. This text of Miller's, appearing for the first time in English, begins to clarify how the analyst uses the fantasy in the psychoanalytic session.
Andre Shane writes on Lacan's handling of symbols in Seminar II, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954-55). (Indeed, an absolute position in the Symbolic is the mark of an axiom in Lacan's teaching.) Shane infers Lacan's redefinition of symbols from what is not explained as objects. Shane does not work with Lacan's objet a, but rather with the philosophical concept of objects. By elucidating how things other than symbols explain the symbol anew, Shane shows how moment and object bring about the introduction of a symbol. Shane stresses that while the ego resists, objects can persist as long as they perceive themselves as spatially cohesive. Nonetheless, objects without symbols cannot mark time. Shane brings in Lacan's readings of Irma's injection dream and "The Purloined Letter" to make this point. This enables speech to imply the existence of things that are not objects. The strength of Shane's essay lies in his stressing the timelessness of the symbol and the transience of the object in order to give us a sense of periodicity.
Gerard Pape's account of the difference between IPA (International Psychoanalytic Association) analytic practice and Lacanian analysis focuses on the fact that the Lacanian analyst says very little. His or her role, rather, is to disrupt the analysand's jouissance through acts (coughing, yawning, shuffling papers, etc.). This is a radical departure from IPA practice or ego psychology or object relations practices. The Lacanian analyst aims to make the Real emerge. Lacking a concept of the object as lost, the IPA can only repair reality, rather than work with substitutes for primordially lost objects.
In Zak Watson's "On Lacan's Use of the Golden Number," the author illuminates some of the difficulties involving Lacan's complex use of mathematical concepts in the course of his lectures. Taking up Lacan's Seminar XIV, The logic of Fantasy(1966-67), Watson shows how Lacan's use of the Golden Number obtains in the use of the phallic symbol, where it serves as an illustration of the linkage of the necessary and the impossible. In other words, in order to be able to think, "I am one," one must not be one, by the very fact that thinking already involves the objet a.
The contributions in the second half of this issue turn from questions of ethics (in the clinic) toward questions concerning modern aesthetics, from Kant to Joyce. Adrian Johnston's "There is Truth, and then there are truths, or: Slavoj Zizek as a Reader of Alain Badiou," emphasizes Zizek's critique of Badiou, or "The New Sophists." Zizek's aim in his critique of Badiou also entails a re-reading of Kant. Zizek, following Lacan, revives the Cartesian Cogito and underscores a paradox at the heart of postmodern identity theories. While Zizek maintains that Kant, rather than Descartes, founded the notion of the subject as split Badiou argues that the subject is a real being, an infinite series of multiplicities. Zizek also takes up Badiou's concept of truth as a backsliding into Kant's old distinctions. While Johnston insists upon Badiou's concept of truth-as-place, as an eternally unsuturable void, he does not bring Lacanian topology into play. Zizek's importance for Johnston lies in forcing Badiou's system to confront the necessity of thinking through the truth event.
In "Art and Anxiety, or: Lacan with Joyce," Ruth Ronen challenges contemporary aesthetic theory, insofar as it attempts to "restitute a place for displeasure and for negative aesthetic values within the framework of aesthetics, while keeping displeasure as a clearly demarcated category." Working on Lacan's Seminar X On Anxiety(1962-63), Ronen shows that desire and jouissance are prior to signification, and that prior to signification one finds the symptom. Working with Lacan's redefinition of the symptom as the sinthome, Ronen argues that anxiety in Joyce's writing characterizes the moment of radical uncertainty that precedes aesthetic enjoyment. (For his part, Lacan defines this moment in theatrical performances as the rising of the curtain.) In other words, the signal that produces anxiety, is an effect of the emergence of the law of the Other: Will one be devoured or courted? Anxiety is what emerges retroactively at the moment prior to any judgment of an object as tragic or comic. For Joyce, the role anxiety plays in response to aesthetic judgment is that of producing a new kind of aesthetic. The effect of Joyce's writing has to do with the fact that the Imaginary has collapsed. Ronen's article, one of the first to appear in English, also represents an emerging use of Seminar X, which is only just beginning to be used toward the development of a new aesthetic.
In this book review/article, "Lacan-le-sinthome," Lorenzo Chiesa places Joyce between psychosis and neurosis. The excellence of this review lies in Chiesa's showing how many commentators on Joyce misunderstand both the nature of the sinthome and of psychosis. In the future, we hope to publish other book reviews of this caliber. The Editors | |
