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The Object of Proximity

The Object of Proximity The Ethics of Psychoanalysis in iek and Santner via Lacan Daniel Tutt 12/11/09 Comments and or questions are welcome. Please direct them to danielp.tutt@gmail.com

The Object of Proximity

Introduction Proximity towards the jouissance of the Other, or the neighbor, in Lacans seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis becomes a matter of ethical concern because the Other as das Ding (the thing) poses problems outside of the moral relationship. In this paper I will examine the ethical positions of two psychoanalytic theorists, Eric Santner and Slavoj iek. The proximity towards the excessive jouissance of the neighbor as das Ding presents a number of interesting ethical problems. ieks confrontation with das Ding is a complex procedure that remains ambiguous, particularly in light of his sympathies towards the Christian Pauline agape version of radical love. ieks

treatment of proximity towards the Other seeks a total escape from the fantasmatic symbolic coordinates of the oppressive symbolic order, whereas with Santner, in his text The Psychotheology of Everyday Life, the mental excess of jouissance caused by confrontation with the Other as das Ding is sought to be converted into an owning of the excessive proximity into a blessings of more life. This paper first identifies and describes the Lacanian subject a subject rooted in lack and the crisis of symbolic investiture and argues that Lacanian subjectivity is capable of radical freedom from the fantasmatic symbolic coordinates that sustain its relationship to its own freedom. There are several meta-ethical questions that arise in light of Lacans notion of ethics for subjectivity inhabited by fantasmatic symptoms and a symbolic order structured by oppressive fantasy relations. These problems will be explored in this paper as they guide both ieks and Santners work, particularly the superego demand to love thy neighbor as thyself. The question of politics in relation to these ethical concerns, and the struggle to work through intrinsic pressures induced by

The Object of Proximity

the Other for Santner is centered on how to convert the superego ban into a blessings of more life. Whereas with iek, the meta-ethical subject ought to be positioned in relation to the Other to enable a radical break from the fantasmatic symbolic coordinates into a new symbolic relationship to the Other, a position highly reminiscent of Antigones. To what extent does Zizeks ethics reflect Lacans sympathies towards Antigones reluctance to renounce her fundamental desire? Furthermore, how does Santner in the

Psychotheology of Everyday Life position his meta-ethical subject in allegiance to the desire of the Other, and what are the political implications for both of these positions? Admittedly, this is an especially speculative question considering Santner does not deal directly with Lacans ethics seminar. With the rise of the Lacanain left, and a number of texts beginning to identify the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics, we are presented with a powerful critique of the undergirding assumptions behind liberal theory. Perhaps most importantly is the notion that transitive recognition from the Other as the constituting ground of intersubjectivity is inherently blocked by the functioning of desire. Das Ding and the Impossible Good of the Lacanian Subject The ethical injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself is problematized in Lacans seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, as the very core of the intersubjective relation is rooted in an unconscious structural relation to the realm that Lacan refers to as the symbolic. The Lacanian register of the symbolic is an often-difficult concept to unpack. One of the more cogent descriptions of the symbolic is found in popular culture through the example of Woody Allens public divorce with Mia Farrow. Allen is said to have dealt with the media in the same hyperactive, idiosyncratic ways as the characters in

The Object of Proximity

his films. A traditional psychoanalytic reading of this occurrence would argue that Woody Allens actions are merely repressed character traits of his own self put down onto the big screen and then reappearing as a result of a psychical and emotional breakdown. The Lacanian reading would argue something different; that Allens incorporation of his symbolic behavior patterns from symbolic art is real life as such. The Lacanian subject is deprived of that which it believes to be the most intimate part of himself, and this happens in the realm of the symbolic. When faced with the ethical injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself, the primary procedure for the multicultural and Judeo-Christian models are to keep at bay the proximity of the neighbor, as the neighbor is inhabited with an uncanny jouissance. To Lacan, one truly encounters the Other not when one discover her values, dreams, and wishes, but when the subject encounters the neighbor as jouissance. As iek has suggested, what the predominant liberal multiculturalist model has neglected is this very direct encounter with the traumatic kernel of the Other in favor of PC engagement with the decaffeinated Other. I encounter the other in her moment of jouissance. When I discern in her a tiny detail a compulsive gesture, an excessive facial gesture that signals the intensity of the real of jouissance. This encounter is always traumatic, there is something at least minimally obscene about it, I cannot simply integrate it into my universe, there is always a gap separating me from it.1 This encounter with jouissance is most often equated with Lacans dimension of the real. Jouissance is the excess of stuff that penetrates through the pores in the surface, like a science fiction alien whose liquid excrement remains both a void to be filled over in a lack of an excess of existence over representation, or it might also consist of
1

iek, Slavoj, The Abyss of Freedom, Pg. 25

The Object of Proximity

representation without existence. Since reality only occurs in so far as the real is not fully experienced, reality happens at the shortest distance from the real through fantasy, hence the ugliness of the real stands for existence itself.2 The postmodern multiculturalist mode of engaging the other, as Zizek has noted, runs along two primary modes, that of the New Age, and the Judeo-Christian, both of which are merely displacing a form of pathos onto an Other that is more authentic, and this ends up causing a sort of inverted racism.3 This inverted racism, of keeping at far proximity the traumatic Other is in many ways a resurgence of Herbert Marcuses repressive tolerance, whereby the Other is deprived of their own cultural identity and forced to enter the totality of the repressive capitalist culture.4 Encountering the Other at the level of das Ding, without depriving that Other of its symbolic jouissance, which the liberal multiculturalist requires, is by definition an exclusivist act by the distance it maintains towards the Other. This distance towards the other is the basis of ethics Eric Santner and Slavoj iek, but before examining them, we turn to Lacans ethical system. In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan develops the neighbor as das Ding, (the Thing) a pre-symbolic object characterized primarily by affect and appearing in the symbolic realm prior to any and all representation.5 Das Ding is a substanceless void, and in structure it is equivalent to the neighbor, or the Other. The Other6 takes on a thing-like character based on an excess materiality that always resists symbolization in
2 3 4 5 6

iek, Slavoj, The Ticklish Subject, Pg. 165 iek, Slavoj, Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself? No, Thanks!, Pgs. 165 - 167 Marcuse, Herbert, A Critique of Pure Tolerance: Repressive Tolerance. Pg. 33. Lacan, Jacques, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Pg. 54

The Other is in most cases synonymous to the neighbor, as we see that the subject has their own inner Otherness, their own neighbor within them.

The Object of Proximity

the register of the real. 7 This Other as object is filled in by a certain distance, what Lacan refers to as proximity, a proximity that is identical to the neighbor. As Lacan comments, the neighbor is identical to the subject, in the same way that one can say the Nebenmensch that Freud speaks of as the foundation of das Ding as his neighbor.8 Lacans theory of the neighbor-as-das-Ding is rooted in Freuds conception of das Ding: and so the complex of the neighbor divides into two constituent parts the first of which impresses through the constancy of its composition, its persistence as a Thing, while the other is understood by means of memory-work9 Lacan characterizes Das Ding as a primordial function located at the level of the unconscious Vorstellungen.10 Das Ding ultimately indicates that there is no sovereign good; and thus no possibility to constitute the good in the realm of the subject. There is good and bad and then there is das Ding the Thing remains unfathomable, an excess, outside of the moral relationship. The Lacanain subject is based on subject suppose to know,11 or subjectivity that is always beyond mere identity and recognition. As Judith Butler notes, the Lacanian subject is not imminent to the discourse that creates it.12 Das Ding is posited at the center of the subjects desire, but das Ding itself is simultaneously excluded it is

The excess materiality is most frequently referred to as object petit a. Object petit a is the object of desire, the a represents the object that can never be attained. It is also defined as the left over from the introduction of the symbolic in the real (Seminar 11, Pg. 179).
8 9

Ibid, Pg. 76 Freud, Sigmund, Collected Works, 1885 1928 Pgs. 426 27 Lacan, Jacques, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Pg. 62

10 11

The basis of subject suppose to know is a desire to eliminate all negativity and replace it with a positivity, most often in political discourse, the subject suppose to know is rendered in utopian terms. Stavrakakis, Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Pg. 42
12

Butler, Judith Psychic Life of Power, Pg.

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something that only a representation can represent.13

Representation, in Lacanian

analytics is a form of apprehending, and representation will always develop out of the good of das Ding, but importantly das Ding presents itself in the realm of the symbolic as something that has already defined the good through an unconscious relation to the social, or the symbolic realm. The subject can only formulate their relation to das Ding as bad through their symptom, which is rooted in fantasy,14 more of which will be discussed below. Lacans Ethics: A Matter of Form and Freedom What are the ethical implications of Lacans understanding of the neighbor? Since ethics occurs, precisely when man poses that question of the good he had unconsciously sought in the social structures,15 and the question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real16 Lacanian ethics, as Zupani correctly points out, appears in the encounter, it is something that happens to us, it throws us out of joint, because it always inscribes itself in a given continuity as a rupture, a break or interruption. This is when ethics comes into play; i.e. will I act in conformity to what threw me out of joint? For Lacan, emphasis is placed on desire, have you acted in conformity with the desire which inhabits you? for after all, it is desire that aims at the real.17

13

Lacan, Jacques, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Pg. 71

15 16 17

Ibid, Pg. 76 Lacan, Pg. 11 Zupani, Alenka, Ethics of the Real, Pg. 235

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Understanding the precise relation between Lacanian ethics and the good becomes a matter of form for Lacan, similar to Kantian ethics. The register of the real in Lacans theoretical period from 1959-60, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis depicts das Ding as that which always eludes symbolization. This inability to symbolically integrate das Ding indicates that das Ding always stays separate from ethics, which would in other philosophical schools of thought (utilitarian ethics, and Aristotelian ethics in particular18) seek to naively interject the thing, or more precisely, the good into the realm of representation, which can never be symbolically integrated.19 Lacans presupposition of das Dings impossible symbolic integration is rooted in his allegiance to the Freudian universal law of incest and the Oedipal complex that structures human desire and the I-other relationship, where good and evil seem to coalesce and das Ding is the remainder. Das Ding, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis comes to inhabit language a negative way, as that which manifests desire for the real. Thus, the real, in ethical terms is an extra moral matter, similar to what we find in Kants moral system. If a man is to become not merely legally, but morally, a good man this cannot be brought about by gradual reformation so long as the basis of the maxims remain impure, but must be affected through a revolution in the mans disposition He can become a new man only by a kind of rebirth, as it were through a new creation.20 Kant and Lacan are both placing ethics, and ethical change ex nihilo, and both develop their ethical systems out of a material excess, for Kant the excess is pathology, and for Lacan it is object petit a. 21 Both systems are seeking to manage the excess of the real,

18 19 20 21

Zupani, Alenka, Ethics of the Real, Pg. 11 Zupani, Alenka, Ethics of the Real, Pg. 55 Kant, Immanuel Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Pg. 42 43

Object petit a is unlike the big Other which represents a radical and irreducible alterity, the little other is the other which isnt other at all since it is essentially coupled with the ego. Later in Lacans seminars,

The Object of Proximity

and Zupancic argues, Lacans passage a la act22 is identical to Kants allegiance on form in his development of the Groundwork. For Lacan, the faculty of desire does not point to any particular act of desiring but to the frame of desiring as such, similar to how Kantian form points to duty. The surplus in relation to legality and to the ethical is what is dealt with by form the main point being that for Kant it is incumbent to follow the form of duty. Kantian ethics demands that an action not only conform to duty, but it mandates this conformity be the only content or motive of that action. Form itself must be appropriated as a material surplus, in order for it to determine the will, and Kantian form is the same as Lacans conception of object petit a, the thing that persists beyond surplus enjoyment. The metaphysical question to both systems of ethics is virtually the same, how can form become matter? Yet, both Lacanian and Kantian ethics seek to solve the problem of form, or how if Kantian form and Lacanian object petit a force the subject to follow a sort of second nature, then ethics functions as a drive and isnt ethics at all. As Zupani argues, how Lacan dealt with object petit a, or the surplus enjoyment left over in the domain of the real that persists for the sake of enjoyment is similar to how Kant dealt with the excess of pathology. Since the Kantian object drive is nothing but the drive of the will, and the Lacanain subjects separation from the pathological object petit a produces a certain remainder, a remainder that constitutes the drive of the ethical subject, both systems of thought construct ethics from very similar conceptual problems.23
object petit a is the surplus enjoyment, that is left over in the real. The small a persists in enjoyment for the sake of enjoyment. Evans, Dylan, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Pg. 124 125.
22

Passage a la act is a symbolic act addressed to the big Other, it is thus an exit from the symbolic, through identification with the object.
23

Zupani, Alenka, Ethics of the Real, Pg. 16 18

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We are beginning to see the contours of a Lacanian subject forming that is not rooted in a nightmarish ontological rut as many have criticized Lacan, particularly those that argue his subjectivity is purely a subject constructed from language. To the contrary, as Ed Pluth has noted in Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacans Theory of the Subject, Lacans ethics are rooted in a view of freedom of the subject. Importantly, the Lacanian subject can change the destiny of an unconscious desire to the point of being verbal to the second power since every act of speaking involves an act of addressing an other always implying a search for recognition from a third party other, a true ethical act is one that does not address the big Other. As Pluth observes, an act does not receive recognition for its identity from an other it is thus not the subject that acts, an act subjects.24 Thus, the Lacanain subject can never locate the good in the subject, but the subject is able to overturn their lack of capacity to assume their own symbolic identity. The capacity of the subject to overturn their symbolic situation will be examined via Slavoj iek and Eric Santners reading of the ethics of psychoanalysis. The Psychotheology of Over-Proximity The ethical problem of proximity to the neighbor introduces a number of ethical implications for ethics, and the ethical relation to the Other in Eric Santners work, The Psychotheology of Everyday Life. For Santner, the ultimate problem of the neighbor is based on the whether the subject accepts the Other (or neighbor) in their jouissance, or real excess, and in so doing, how they come to handle this over-proximity. Santner characterizes the Freudian mental excess (what Lacan would later deem jouissance) as an excess of validity over meaning, as the undeadness of biopolitical life, and his
24

Pluth, Ed, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacans Theory of the Subject, Pg. 6

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primary ethical concern is in how to convert the excess into a blessings of more life.25 This mental excess that the subject inhabits, or what Santner refers to as undeadness colors everyday life as a paradoxical kind of mental excess that constrains by means of excess.26 Santner develops a slightly different type of Otherness than that of Lacan, based on Jean Laplanches psychoanalytic theory of seduction. Laplanche was an intimate student and colleague of Lacan, and in his conception of the Other, or the enigmatic signifier the traumatic encounter with the Others desire becomes constitutive of the inner strangeness we call the unconscious itself.27 Therefore, unlike the Lacanian Other, Santners Other is stripped of its material properties, a position that evokes Derridas notion of the spectral aura of the Other: the other is not reducible to its actual predicates, to what one might define or thematize about it, anymore than the I is. It is naked. Bared of every property, and this nudity is also its infinitely exposed vulnerability: its skin. This absence of determinable properties, of concrete predicates, of empirical visibility, is not doubt what gives to the face of the other a spectral aura.28 The subject is placed in a relationship with the enigma of the Others desire not through language (as in Lacan) but through an unconscious transmission that is neither simply enlivening nor simply deadening but rather undeadening the encounter with the Other produces an internal alienness that has a sort of vitality, and yet belongs to no life at all. This undeadness creates an encounter with legitimation, or what Freud referred to as

25 26 27 28

The blessings of more life is from Harold Bloom in his work on Freud, Why Freud Matters Santner, Pg. 22 Santner, Pgs. 33 34 Derrida, Jacques, Adieu. To Emmanuel Levinas, Pg. 111

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the death drive, a too much-ness of pressure and the build of an urge to put an end to it.29 Central to Santners ethical project in the Psychotheology is the way that the mental excess structures ones symbolic identity in institutions. Since symbolic identity in institutions creates an excess of validity over meaning whereby the symbolic identity and meaning of all communitys, individuals, or groups remain an utter mystery to that group, and this group identity crisis is constitutive of modernity as such. Santner

develops this notion of group identity crisis from the Hegelian observation that the mysteries of the ancient Egyptians were also mysteries to the Egyptians themselves. What psychoanalysis offers in the face of this excess of validity over meaning is a positing of theoretical tools to rework the transference into institutions. Santners

psychoanalytic model of transference is similar, but quite different than that of iek and Lacan. In both versions, the working through to traverse the fantasy of the

neighbor/stranger who dwells there with us is central.30 Santner incorporates new thinking, or Franz Rosenzweigs metaphysical thinking, from his famous post WWII text, the Star of Redemption to confront the Freudian mental excess, or what he refers to as old thinking. Old thinking is the condition where man has subjected himself to the excess but has simultaneously turned away from the challenges and claims of everyday life in the face of that excess.31 Rosenzweig is indebted to Freud in Moses and Monotheism in his construction of subjectivity, where we find the subject constituted on the unconscious, and bound up with
29 30 31

Santner, Pgs 36 37 iek, Slavoj, The Fragile Absolute, Pg. 86 Santner, Pg. 29

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sovereignty through symbolic investments into institutions. By institutions, Freud refers to all places that endow the public with social recognition and intelligibility.32 Freuds conception of identity formation in Moses and Monotheism is based on ones allegiance to their transgressions: myths, narratives, and cultural systems that help to organize fundamental human anxieties, conflicts and wishes. What is crucial in Santners reading of Moses and Monotheism is the basis of social solidarity with a group and with institutions: we are in a form of life, truly animated by its spirit, not so much when we agree with its basic rules, - i.e. its public sanctioned form of the good, but rather when we are haunted by its spirits, plagued at the level of our immemorial transgression that is structurally transmitted by the from of life and narratives of that solidarity. Before crisis of symbolic investiture can be examined, the ethical implications for adopting the blessings of more life in the face of the Freudian excess of mental life needs to be explored. The overarching emphasis of the Psychotheology is on what Santner calls a biopolitical subject, with biopolitical life, or the sort of subjectivity that has been thrown by the enigma of its legitimacy and stripped of its place within a meaningful order. Santner wants to know how do ought to come to understand this form of life? To be thrown by the enigma of legitimacy is to be seduced by the prospect of an exception to the space of social reality and meaning, by the fantasy of an advent, boundary, or outer limit of that space that would serve as its constituting frame and power, its final, self-legitimating ground.33 The release from this hold is a release from an exceptional beyond, or a sort of release as transcendence from undeadness, into biopolitical animation, a harnessing of the
32 33

Santner, Pg. 26 Santner, Pg. 56

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surplus value of life that is accessible via the unconscious. Again, borrowing from Freuds introduction of trauma into the social fabric in Moses and Monotheism Santner describes the too much of biopolitical life, as a certain pressure that interrupts the working of the pleasure principle, and the patterns of diffusion that constitute human everyday mindedness in its normal functioning. The pleasure principle reveals that the human mind is always operating under a sort of posttraumatic stress syndrome. Santners too muchness of biopolitical life is rooted in Feuds theory that trauma must contain an excess of demand, and the means to address an other. A trauma only becomes possible when the too muchness of ones address to an Other persists beyond what can be translated as a demand. There exists a surplus cause that always persists beyond any determinate lack and its possible satisfaction, a surplus that is beyond the workings of the pleasure principle. Santners ethics at this point, in light of the crisis of symbolic identity is concerned with whether we ought to assume our identity in the social body based on the symbolic mandates that determine our identity, or whether the subject ought to break with this system. The two poles of ethical action he develops are the sciences of symbolic identity, and the ethics of singularity. The strength of Santners ethical position is that only when we truly inhabit the midst of life are we able to loosen the fantasy that structures everyday life.34 Thus, similar to what we see in Lacan, to own ones fantasy is to really live as a free subject, aiming at the truly ethical question that Lacan poses:

34

Ibid, Pg. 33

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have you acted in conformity with the desire which inhabits you? for it is desire that aims at the real.35 The Crisis of Symbolic Investiture How the subject in Santners the Psychotheology, as well as Lacans ethical subject deals with the crisis of symbolic investiture are a matter of ethics, which we will explore below. For both Lacan and Santner, ethics requires a confrontation with the Other to free oneself of the Other and then surrender to the real, or everyday life. The confrontation with everyday life, or the Lacanian real is a collapse of the subjects symbolic constructed identity. The symbolic identity crisis that Lacan and Santner refer to can be more clearly understood through Santners reading of the book Soul Murder, and Lacans theory of the Name of the Father. Soul Murder and Name of the Father are instructive to understanding how the crisis of symbolic investiture operates through psychoanalytic theory.36 Both Lacan and Santner refer to the crisis of symbolic identity when discussing the infamous case of the Judge Daniel Schreber, who upon receiving the symbolic authority in society as a Judge experienced a total psychotic breakdown where his very ability to assume a symbolic identity rooted in authority became penetrated with a kernel of invasiveness, which introduced the subject into too much reality. What is it about this too much reality that created the conditions for the crisis of symbolic investiture? To fully understand this crisis, a reading of Lacans late capitalist

university discourse and the complex insertion of the Name of the Father bring the crisis into more clarity.
35 36

Zupani, Pg. 153

Soul Murder is based on the book written by Morton Schatzman in 1947 about the case of Daniel Schreber, the paranoid psychotic whom Freud, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari and many others have interpreted.

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For Lacan, symbolic identity inhabits an empty place, or the point de caption, which occurs when the subject functions as a signifier embodying a function beyond its own concreteness. The subject is emptied of its particular signification in point de caption, in order to represent fullness in general. Point de caption operates in national, religious, political, or ethnic signifiers such as the nation or communism or even religious identity groupings such as Christian or Muslim, yet they function as pure negativity, and represent what has to be excluded or negated. As Yannis Stavrakakis points out in the Lacanian Left, the Name of the Father functions as an insertion into point de caption, as an operation tied to power relations in late capitalism. Lacans Seminar on the Four Discourses introduces the university discourse as arising in the wake of the chaotic revolutionary protests of May 1968 in France, and across Europe. The university discourse is a mode of discourse that incorporates scientific discourse to legitimize relations of power. The subject in university discourse becomes equivalent with the social totality, and is situated in the particular historical and late capitalist symbolic space, where the movement occurs, mainly apart from the Masters discourse, and into university discourse. An excellent example that reveals the procedure of Name of the Father filing in the point de caption into empty symbolic identity are the popular culture jamming Yes Men.37 The Yes Men are a group of activists who inhabit false symbolic authority by assuming the identity of powerful businessmen, activists, and politicians. They deliver totally ludicrous presentations that are in actuality totally empty of legitimate content.
37

The Yes Men are a group of culture jamming activists who practice what they call "identity correction" by pretending to be powerful people and spokespersons for prominent organizations, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yes_Men.

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What they have discovered through these presentations to power holders is that their audiences end up listening attentively to their presentations, and more importantly, they end up taking their statements for total fact without question and most often end up agreeing with their absurd findings. What this indicates more than anything is that symbolic identity construction functions as an empty gesture of symbolic power supported by a fantasmatic supplement, and both unite to form reality.38 What the Yes Men and the case of Schreber both indicate is that the commands of identity, deployed from the level of fantasy will always be filled up as an empty vessel. The crisis of investiture for both Schreber and the Yes Men occur when the kernel of invasiveness of too much reality functions on the side of symbolic identity as an empty space that can be filled in with an inherent negativity. This crisis of identity problematizes attempts to adequately symbolize oneself in everyday reality. Lack and Desire in the Real In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the mediating force of the Other is desire. Desire is posited as universal, all desire is desire of the Other, since all desire is structured around a missing jouissance, around a lack; it is important to understand the way that lack of the Other structures symbolic identities. Lack is introduced at the intersection of the real and the symbolic, and it emerges through the symbolization of the real. Lack then introduces the idea of fullness and integration with the lost object, and most important for ethics, lack is always introduced through an act of exclusion, an exclusion in part responsible for the fundamental disequilibrium between integrating the Other into

38

Stavrakakis, 76.

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the symbolic realm, yet we find that there is something that does fill in the symbolic: fantasy. 39 The imposition of fantasy arises precisely when the desire for filling in, or covering over lack arises. On a structural level, fantasy stimulates and promises to cover over the lack in the Other created by the loss of jouissance. Since fantasy is also an effect of symbolic castration, it is also a defense mechanism against the fear of symbolic castration. Symbolic castration is defined by Lacan as, a symbolic lack of an imaginary object, and symbolic castration is the subjects first perception of the Other, as not complete, but lacking. Lacan argues that the subject can only maintain psychic normality by accepting this inherent lack of the other; hence symbolic castration plays a normalizing effect on the subject.40 Fantasy then becomes crucial to understanding the role of the I-Other relationship and to determining how the Other serves as a support that fills in the void for the lack in the Other, in the realm of the symbolic. The illusory nature of fantasy serves as the central support for the desire to identify, which is inherently impossible in the real, as discussed above.41 The Other of fantasy takes on the role of an object, or das Ding to sustains desire itself, and since the Other appears as a remainder, the Other is in an almost mythological status to the subject. The Other promises to provide what the subject lacks and thus unify both as subjects.42 The other takes on the role of the object that can potentially unify both the split psyche (of the subject) and of unifying the split social field itself.
39 40 41 42

Stavrakakis, Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Pg. 42. (Evans, 22 23). Stavrakakis, Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Pg. 46. Lacan, Jacques Seminar XI, 1982. Pg.165.

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Responsibility to the Other: Moving Beyond the Superego Like lack and the crisis of symbolic investiture, superego appears in the realm of the symbolic to police ones identity. The Other that invades the subjects jouissance is filled with too much pressure, but, importantly, it is this pressure that has already been processed as a superego demand. The superego already organizes these relations as impossible; it shuts the door by preventing psychic agency.
43

In The Ethics of

Psychoanalysis, the superego is an imperative of the Law, which Lacan develops in his lecture, Kant with Sade. Superego consists of a demand to fulfill the Other in so far as the Other demands the subject to enjoy an oppressive call that only results in a pervasive feeling of guilt.44 In Santners reading of the superego, the Other is double, the Other is within the I and the Other is external as das Ding, and both posses an enigmatic core. It is this core, or ground that creates an intersubjective struggle in the realm of the symbolic. The struggle revolves around how to translate these messages and how to form a common ground of struggle a possibility that Santner argues forms the very basis of intersubjective realtionality. Struggling through the material scraps of the excess of meaning that creates Santners validity in excess of meaning becomes the basis of how we assume our place among the meaningless of socio-symbolic value systems that keep us tied to the Others fantasmatic enigmatic thing-ness.
45

To push beyond into the

blessings of more life, Santner incorporates Rosenzweigs concept of revelation by which he refers to the capacity for space to be opened on the basis of a relational surplus
43 44 45

Santner, Pg. 83 Evans, Dylan, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Pgs. 200 201 Santner, Pg. 93

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in myself and in my neighbor. Revelation is an opening of space organized around the claims made upon me by the Other in-so-far as he or she is singularly out-of-joint with respect to the social intelligibility produced by this inscription of law. These moments of revelation capture the basis of our social relations, and they transform our biopolitical undeadness into a new potentiality, and form the basis for an opening into the beyond. By beyond, Santner means beyond the fantasies that sustain our biopolitical undeadness. These unconscious fantasies keep us at a distance from actually living life, and it is this distance that must be traversed. The goal then is not to revolutionize the social relations (as we find in iek) as such, but to Santner, a la Rosenzweig, the goal is to de-animate the undeadness (and undeadness is defined as a looming metaphysical loneliness) of biopolitical life and to convert the undead matter into a form of new social relations, new ways of both transgressing the excess and denying it simultaneously. There is a paradox to this system, in that there is a certain pressure exerted by the law of the superego and transgression to the Law is central to its very command. What holds a community together most deeply, iek notes, is not so much identification with the Law that regulates the communitys normal everyday circuit, but rather identification with a specific form of transgression of the Law, of the Laws suspension (in psychoanalytic terms) with a specific form of enjoyment.46 Every

induction of the subject into the socio symbolic field consists of a sort of seduction whereby ones solidarity with the family/community/institution is always in part sustained by a transgressive enjoyment structure sustained by fantasy. Another moment of release from the hold the Other has on ones superego can be found via shrugging off
46

iek, Slavoj, Metastases of Enjoyment. Six Essays on Women and Causality, Pg. 55

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the other. Rosenzweigs solution is similar to iek, in order to release the subject from the excitation of the superegoic demands, the time and space of this release ends up becoming the very time and space of the ethical encounter. Rosenzweigs ethical

encounter is an opening of space where new possibilities of being-together, of responsiveness to the Other, can arise.47 ieks version of shrugging off the fantasy of the other, or desublimation can result in a traumatic situation, as the gap separating beauty from ugliness is thus the gap that separates the real: what constitutes the real is the minimum of idealization the subject needs to sustain the horror of the real. This ugliness of proximity of the neighbor ends up requiring a sublime distance to maintain the neighbors fantasy frame. Once the neighbor approaches their status of ugly existence in the real, iek characterizes the encounter as traumatic. What we find at this point is that psychoanalysis lies outside of a teleology in favor of embracing the singularity of the subject, what Santner refers to as the ethics of singularity, or what Jonathan Lear has referred to as taking advantage of the disruption of previous attempts to construct a teleology.48 To Santner, what is crucial in the move beyond our intersubjective surrender to the Other and moving beyond biopolitical undeadness is the process of: an opening of what seems most fatefully demonic and what sticks out from our predicative being; it is paradoxical because it involves both an affirmation and a negation of this predicative core.49 Rosenzweigs Divine Love
47 48 49

Santner, Pgs. 103 104 Santner, Pg. 99 Santner, Pg. 97

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Santners is concerned with the undeadness of biopolitical life, or life that has been thrown by the crisis of symbolic identity and investment into institutions, and he is also concerned with how to counter the superego ban, and lack. He looks to the Star of Redemption to find Biblical and religious resources to combat the undeadness. The possibility of un-deadness, or to reawaken what Santner refers to as exodus is coterminous with revelation, as described earlier. On one hand, the subject is

interpellated via symbolic investiture and on the other, the subject is excluded based on being a part of symbolic identity, which is no part, containing no teleology, and these two poles are linked. The only way out is through the game of divine love, as developed in the Star. Divine love is a psychoanalytic technique of identification that is similar to revelation, but it consists of a moving beyond from the institutions that create the undeadness of biopolitical life. Moving beyond involves transforming the institutional flux of that interpellate the subject and bring that subject into the midst of life, in relation to their neighbor. This movement beyond is what Rosenzweig refers to as falling in love, a situation that involves more than just positive affirmation of being falling in love, or might we say loving thy neighbor as thyself is a subsumption into the too muchness itself. Falling in love is a subsumption into das Ding itself, but it is a das Ding inhabited with an inherent positivity, having negated the institutional flux of biopolitical dead matter. This form of divine love is ultimately a form of singularization, a form of singling out of the subject, but not of excluding.50 Rosenzweigs divine love is an opening up of possibilities, a facing up to the too muchness which is in large part organized by the fantasies that bind us to social
50

Santner, Pg. 65 - 67

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reality.51 Here, Rosenzweigs subject becomes a meta-subject and out ethics become a matter of meta-ethics as we are creating an ideal intersubjective relation. The excess materiality of the human subject Rosenzweig refers to as the germ cell a particular point that stresses a remnant of humanity that remains able to think through the too muchness a part of the self will always remain a complete singularity. When looking at an old photograph we are being touched by the remnant of the self, and this left over remnant, Santner refers to as the germ cell. While this leads Santner to conclude that the self in its biopolitical undeadness is actually not part of the whole the self is a singularity beyond their generic-ness, it is this metaethical quality of the self that is most important to Santner to preserve. The self remains through the excess, a stain on the horizon of social intelligibility.52 iek, in a similar vein recognizes the singularity of the metaethical self: That which, in me, resists the blissful submergence into the Good is not my inert biological nature but it is the very kernel of my spiritual selfhood, the awareness that, beyond all particular and physical features, I am me, a unique person, an absolutely singular point of spiritual self reference.53 This meta-ethical self that we have developed up to this point is a self stripped of all its trappings of too muchness of life. It isnt an inert thing, but rather, the left over,

metaethical self is a tautological point of self-reference a breach in the chain of being. Yet, any encounter towards loving ones neighbor must be dealt with in terms of their death-driven singularity as an encounter with my neighbor as das Ding. The question remains: is the germ cell and metaethical self merely a version of embracing das Ding?
51 52 53

Santner, Pg. 71 Santner, Pg. 74 iek, Slavoj, Invisible Remainder, Pg. 59

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From Antigone to St. Paul ieks Ethical Ambiguity The intense form of desire as das Ding is what Lacan urges the subject not to renounce. Lacans wager to act in conformity with ones desire has led many to adopt a position that iek refers to as heroism as lack, a position that acts on the presupposition of lack in the Other. iek rejects those Lacanian influenced theorists who prefer a fundamental renunciation of desire as a condition of access to desire. Whats unclear in Santners ethics on the other hand, is whether he is assuming the heroism of lack in divine love and revelation. iek argues that such an ethical act is antithetical to Lacans ethical theory and to the very discovery of Freuds death drive: To desire something other than its continued social existence, and thus to fall into some kind of death, to risk a gesture by means of which death is courted or pursued, indicates precisely how Lacan reconceptualized the Freudian death drive as the elementary form of the ethical act.54 To iek, this is the entire point of the Antigone reading in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, as Antigone risks her entire social existence to defy the socio-symbolic power of the City embodied in the ruler (Creon), thereby she fell into some kind of death, i.e. her act of suicide sustained a symbolic death that enabled her to remain excluded from the sociosymbolic space. By offering nothing new but insisting on her unconditional demand, Antigone broke the cycle of desire and performed a truly ethical act. To iek, the main point of the authentic act is to gain free action, and in so doing, to renounce the transgressive fantasmatic supplement that attaches us to any given social reality.55 What seems to differentiate Santner from iek is this radical break with the entire sociosymbolic system in order to reinstitute fundamentally new ground.
54 55

iek, Slavoj The Ticklish Subject, Pg. 263 Ibid, Pg. 169

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Whether Santners divine love is a matter of existing as lack, or if it promotes the heroism of lack or owning of das Ding, or an Antigone-like symbolic refusal is difficult to discern. A reading into ieks ethical position on love may shed some light, however. When faced with the ethical situation induced by Lacanian ethics, iek however is ambivalent. In some cases, he identifies only two available options: Is not Lacans entire theoretical edifice torn between these two options: between the ethics of desire/Law, and lethal suicidal immersion into the Thing?56 Is there yet a third way, however, offered by iek? As Frances Restuccia has suggested in an excellent discussion of Lacanian ethics through film in Amorous Acts, iek opens up a third way to the ethical impasse that of love. To pass through the ethical impasse into a form of Pauline agape, iek claims the subject arrives at a sort of mystical communion, but the subject has to pass through the zero-point of night of the world.57 It is this intense confrontation the Hegelian night of the world, or with negation that iek credits Christianitys agape love as promoting. St Pauls ethics were more of an unplugging from the symbolic desire system, and less of a renunciation of desire, similar to that of Antigone. Pauls unplugging is achieved only by throwing the balanced circuit of the universe off the rails.58 To fully appreciate how love enters the psychoanalytic system, we must first differentiate love from desire. With desire there is always a gap between the object of desire and its cause, the mediating feature or element that makes this object desirable59
56 57 58 59

Ibid, Pg. 239. iek, Slavoj, Fright of Real Tears, Pg. 165. iek, Slavoj The Fragile Absolute, Pg. 121 Ibid, Pg. 121

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whereas with love the object is not split off from its cause. With love, the very distance between the object and cause collapse.60 The most frequent example Lacan refers to is that of courtly love, they way in which the lady is brought to the level of das Ding, her proximity is denied of its jouissance. iek waivers between preferring to simply exist as a lacking subject over and above the Antigone version of desire induced symbolic suicide. As we see from the Plague of Fantasies, ieks ethical position in no way condones suicidal persistence in following ones Thing; on the contrary, it enjoins us to remain faithful to our desire as sustained by the Law of maintaining a minimal distance to the Thing one is faithful to ones desire by maintaining the gap that sustains desire, the gap on account of which the incestuous das Ding forever eludes our grasp. 61 The core ethical question to iek revolves around immersion into the Thing or allegiance to the ethics of desire/Law. Unplugging in the Pauline version offers the kind of radical break with the symbolic coordinates via love that iek finds satisfactory to completely change the coordinates of the fantasmatic supplement of the desire system. Unplugging is what Rosenzweig and Santner refer to as revelatory conversion, or an opening to and an acknowledgement of the Other qua stranger, the Other whos face manifests a spectral aura of jouissance. Unplugging results in a freeing of jouissance where the Other is externalized, a process that in psychoanalytic terms is actually a freeing of psychosis.62 We find two very different, but complimentary ethical outcomes of the neighbor as das Ding in Santner and iek. Santners divine love posits a radical intersubjective
60 61 62

Ibid, Pg. 21 iek, Slavoj, Plague of Fantasies, Pg. 239 Ibid, Pg. 86

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sort of love through negation, where the Other is simultaneously embraced, but the institutional flux of undeadness is negated. ieks more radical break with the Other is only by totally throwing the balanced circuit off the train tracks does the subject come to open up a clear third way forward, a position that Lacan never seemed to recognize as possible.

Bibliography 1. Pluth, Ed, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacans Theory of the Subject. State University of New York Press, 2007. 2. iek, Slavoj, Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself? No, Thanks! Columbia University Press, 1998. 3. Stavrakakis, Yannis, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics. State University of New York Press, 2007.

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4. Evans, Dylan, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Rutledge Press, 1996. 5. Crocket, Clayton, Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory. Fordham University Press, 1997. 6. Restuccia, Frances, Amorous Acts, The Taming of the Real: ieks Missed Encounter with Kieslowskis Insight. Stanford University Press, 2006. 7. Lacan, Jacques, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959-1960. Norton and Company Inc., 1986. 8. Santner, Eric, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig. The University of Chicago Press, 2001. 9. iek, Slavoj, Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1996 10. iek, Slavoj The Fragile Absolute: Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Preserving. New York: Verso, 2004 11. iek, Slavoj, Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kielowski Between Theory and Post-Theory. New York: Verso, 2001 12. iek, Slavoj The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. New York: Verso, 1998 13. iek, Slavoj, Invisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. New York: Verso, 1996 14. iek, Slavoj, Metastases of Enjoyment. Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994 15. Derrida, Jacques, Adieu. To Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999

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16. Marcuse, Herbert, A Critique of Pure Tolerance: Repressive Tolerance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965 17. Butler, Judith Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1997 18. Freud, Sigmund, Collected Works, 1885 1928. New York, Copyright, 2007. 19. Kant, Immanuel Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960

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