Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan's Return to Freud

psychoanalytic tKeorv in

Laoan's

return to

Freud

richard boothby

routledge

-new

york

end

london

Published in 1991 by Routledge An imprint of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35 Street New York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Copyright © 1991 by Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Portions of Chapter 6 were previously published as "Lacanian Castration: Body-Image and Signification in Psychoanalysis," in Crises in Continental Philosophy, reprinted by permission of SUNY Press. Diagram on page 118 reproduced from ECRITS, A Selection, by Jacques Lacan, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, by permission of W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. Copyright © 1977 by Tavistock Publications Ltd. Diagram on page 122 reproduced from Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1966) by permission of McGraw-Hill, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boothby, Richard. Death and desire : psychoanalytic theory in Lacan's return to Freud. / Richard Boothby. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-90171-5 (cloth). — ISBN 0-415-90172-3 (pbk.) 1. Death instinct—History. 2. Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939. 3. Lacan, Jacques, 1 9 0 1 . I. Title. BF175.5.D4B66 1991 150.19'52—dc20 91-7736 CIP British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data also available.

For my family, Elaine and Oliver.

!

Contents

Bibliographic Abbreviations Preface Acknowledgments

ix xi xii

1. The Enigma of the "Death Drive" Freud's Most Daring Hypothesis The Theoretical Value of the Death Drive Repudiation of Freud's Idea Re-posing the Question of the Death Drive Interpreting Lacan

1 2 3 6 10 14

2. Lacanian Reflections on Narcissism Life in the Mirror The Imaginary Register of the Drives The Imaginary Ego Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis: The Human Being against Itself What Is "Alienation"?

21 22 27 31 37 41

3. The Energetics of the Imaginary The Career of a Metaphor Returning to Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology The Fertile Remainder: Something Left To Be Desired The Myth of the Real The Return of the Real

47 47 51 55 60 65

4. Rereading Beyond the Pleasure Principle The Plan and Pitfalls of Freud's Argument Toward an Alternative Reading

71 72 78

va

Contents

Returning Freud to Himself Reconsidering Freud's T u r n to Biology

84 97

5. The Unconscious Structured like a Language "Au-dela de l'imaginaire, le symbolique" From the Ego to the Subject Reading "Schema L" T h e Agency of the Letter Acheronta Movebo

105 107 110 114 120 129

6. The Formations of the Unconscious On the Psychoanalytic Theory of Anxiety Understanding Castration: First Approach Castration—Imaginary and Symbolic In the Defile of the Signifier: The Objet a Toward a Reevaluation of the Superego T h e Vicissitudes of the Death Drive: Violence and Sublimation

139 140 145 151 158 167

7. Metapsychology in the Perspective of Metaphysics Death and Dialectic Freud and Schopenhauer From Schopenhauer to Nietzsche Freud and Heidegger Lacan versus Philosophy

185 188 191 196 203 215

176

8. Conclusion Corpus Occultum: Desire Beyond the Imaginable

223

Notes

229

Bibliography

251

Index

261

via

Bibliographical Abbreviations

B

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library, 1968.

BT

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

E Jacques Lacan. Ecrits. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966. £.$ . Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1977. FFC

. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1981.

FP

Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977.

S.I

Jacques Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953—1954. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester. New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1988.

S.II

. The Seminar ofJacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954—1955. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1988.

SJII

. Le Seminaire, Livre III, Les Psychoses. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981.

S.IV

. "Le Seminaire, Livre IV, La Relation d'objet." Unpublished transcript.

S.V.

. "Le Seminaire, Livre V, Les Formations de l'inconscient." Unpublished transcript.

S.VII . Le Seminaire, Livre VII, L'Ethique de la Psychanalyse. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986. IX

Bibliographical

S.XX

Abbreviations

. Le Seminaire, Livre XX, Encore. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975. SE Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. Edited and translated by J. Strachey, A. Freud, et al. London: Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1955. WR Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York, Dover Press, 1969.

Preface

This is a book about the conceptual architecture of psychoanalytic theory. It is centrally concerned with one of Freud's most radical and far-reaching formulations: the hypothesis of a primordial selfdestructive impulse or "death drive." It is a concept that occupies a pivotal position in Freud's mature theory but has been pivotal, too, for the development of psychoanalysis after Freud. To clarify its meaning is therefore to open a privileged window on the significance and transmission of Freud's discovery. Yet, of all Freud's major concepts, the hypothesis of the death drive remains the most maligned and neglected. In an attempt to raise again the question of the meaning and function of the death drive in psychoanalytic theory I will turn to close readings of key Freudian texts. This effort will draw its guiding clue from the contribution of the French analyst Jacques Lacan, in which Freud's concept is significantly reinterpreted. Lacan re-positions the theme of death in psychoanalysis in relation to Freud's cardinal concern: the nature and fate of unconscious desire. In doing so, Lacan challenges prevailing assessments of the death drive and invites us to revise our understanding of the psychoanalytic theory as a whole. This inquiry is subject to a number of limitations that should be indicated at the outset. First, its general orientation is not clinical but conceptual. I am not a clinician but a philosopher, and my effort here is to trace the outline of a theoretical problem the clinical implications of which I will touch upon only in passing. Second, it is selective in its scope. Although the concept of the death drive is among the most basic of all psychoanalytic concepts, my discussion of it remains a restricted lens through which certain features of psychoanalytic theory will be brought into sharp focus while others will be left out altogether. Third, the primary aim of this inquiry is to show what light is shed on a Freudian concept by Lacan's innovations, but, as such, it is not XI

Preface

intended as a comprehensive exposition of Lacan's teaching. In drawing on Lacan's rich legacy, I will say relatively little about the development of his thinking over the course of his career and will take the liberty of cutting across it along the bias of a single major concept. Within these limitations, the following discussions attempt to achieve several positive results. Primary among them is to sketch along Lacanian lines a distinctive interpretation of the meaning of death in psychoanalysis that restores to it the importance originally assigned to it by Freud. This task requires establishing a detailed correspondence between Freud's theoretical texts and Lacan's commentaries and constructions. The result is illuminating for both sides of the correspondence. With respect to Freud, a Lacanian angle of view allows many of Freud's major concepts—of anxiety and repetition, castration and the superego, narcissism and sublimation—to be reorganized in a distinctive integration. I hope to show how a Lacanian interpretation, far from muddying the waters of psychoanalytic theory, serves to clarify and coordinate the meaning of many of Freud's most basic ideas. With regard to Lacan, the interpretation I propose has the advantage of making visible an overarching coherence that may well escape the reader in an initial encounter with his teaching. Lacan's triad of key theoretical categories—the imaginary, the real, and the symbolic—are applied systematically to the task of regrasping Freud's theory, but in the process the relation between the three categories comes to light in a new way. A precisely structured dynamic emerges in the intersection of the three registers, the pivot point of which is the concept of the death drive. In general, the interpretation attempted here aims to substantiate Lacan's claim to "return to Freud." For many students of Freud, a passing familiarity with Lacan's text, as theoretically far-ranging as it is stylistically challenging, can make Lacan's claim of fidelity to Freud sound dubious indeed. I will try to show with reference to a key concept how Lacan's innovations, however far afield they may appear to wander, can be seen to retrieve and synthesize the essential points of Freud's thought. I hope to demonstrate in some detail how Lacan's work represents a remarkably nuanced and precise reading of Freud. Indeed, Lacan's interpretation of the psychoanalytic theory amounts to nothing less than a rediscovery of Freud's essential insights, a reading so deeply penetrating and clarifying that it might justly be described in the words of Eliot: that "the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

xii

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge the contribution of a number of people from whose guidance and support I have greatly benefited. I owe a special debt to William J. Richardson for the inspiration of his seminars, for the example of his intellectual integrity, and for the continuing privilege of his counsel and friendship. Thanks as well to Erazim Kohak, James Schmidt, Bernard Elevitch, and Jeffrey Mehlman, who helped see to completion the doctoral dissertation on which this book is based. I am especially grateful to Eric Olson, through whom I first became acquainted with the work of Jacques Lacan. I am still inspired by the memory of the many and marvelous discussions we shared in Cambridge over a period of years. I am also deeply appreciative of Judith Feher Gurewich for her wise and patient coUeagueship during the many hours we struggled together through Lacan's text and for collaboration with her in the years since. John Muller and Ed Casey read and meticulously commented on early versions of the manuscript. The completed version was improved by passing under the thoughtful eye of Jean Imbeault, who generously commented upon it and more than once bolstered my sagging confidence. I am grateful to the members of the Lacanian Clinical Forum and to Wilfried Ver Eecke, Joseph Smith, and others in our Washington Lacan circle for their stimulation. I benefited from the advice and encouragement of Francois Roustang, who read and commented upon portions of the text, and from the patience and support of Maureen MacGrogan at Routledge, Chapman and Hall. I would also like to thank William Desmond, Drew Leder, and my other colleagues in philosophy at Loyola College, as well as Dean David Roswell, for their insight, encouragement, and support. Finally, but most profoundly, I want to express my gratitude to my family—to my parents for their unstinting support and faith in me; to my uncle and aunt, Frank and Barbara Wendt, who have been like xiii

Acknowledgments

second parents in their encouragement and generosity; and to my wife, Elaine Foster Boothby, for half a life of love, courage, honesty, and forgiveness. To all these and many more whose names I know, thank you. November, 1990 Baltimore, Maryland

xiv

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably, we remain. By slow degrees our sickness, and dizziness, and horror, become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice s edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius, or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of afall from such a height. And this fall—this rushing annihilation—for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination—for this very cause do we now most vividly desire it. —Edgar Allen Poe, "The Imp of the Perverse"

xv

1

The Enigma of the "Death Drive" Men do not always take their great thinkers seriously, even when they profess most to admire them. —Sigmund Freud

Freud's theory oider Todestrieb, translated by James Strachey as the "death instinct," is arguably the darkest and most stubborn riddle posed by the legacy of psychoanalysis. 1 Jean Laplanche has remarked that "Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which in 1920 . . . introduces the death drive, remains the most fascinating and baffling text in the entire Freudian corpus"'2: If life . . . is regarded as materially present at the frontiers of the psyche, death's entry on the Freudian scene is far more enigmatic. In the beginning, like all modalities of the negative, it is radically excluded from the field of the unconscious. Then suddenly in 1920, it emerges at the center of the system as one of the two fundamental forces—and perhaps even as the only primordial force—in the heart of the psyche, of living beings, and of matter itself. [Death becomes] the soul of conflict, an elemental force of strife, which from then on is in the forefront of Freud's most theoretical formulations.3 As Laplanche indicates, Freud's hypothesis of the death drive was of central importance during his last years. Unlike so many of Freud's basic ideas, however, the death drive has not found a significant place in the popular diffusion of the psychoanalytic perspective. Not infrequently, expositions of psychoanalysis omit it altogether. In comparison with other key psychoanalytic concepts—the unconscious, repression, the agencies of id, ego, and superego—Freud's supposition of a self-destructive drive has suffered positive neglect. Precisely to that extent we may be led to ask how adequately it has been understood. What did Freud mean by positing a drive toward death? How did the concept of the death drive function in the totality of the psychoanalytic I

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

theory? What has it meant to psychoanalytic theory since Freud? What can it mean for us today? The intention of this book is to raise these questions on the level of a theoretical inquiry and to indicate the direction of an answer.

Freud's Most Daring Hypothesis Let us briefly recall the problem to which Freud's theory of the death drive provided a solution. From the inception of psychoanalysis in the 1890s and throughout the two and a half decades that followed, Freud conceived the psychic apparatus as a homeostatic system invested with quantities of energy and regulated by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. 4 Operating in this way according to a "pleasure principle," the system seeks to release the tension of accumulated excitations and to promote an equilibrium of psychic energies. Evacuation or at least constancy and stability of energy were taken to be the basic aims of psychic life. The pleasure principle was therefore tantamount to a "constancy principle" (SE, 18:9). The reality principle, under the operation of which tensions might be tolerated for a time in order to be more satisfactorily discharged later on, qualified the functioning of the pleasure principle but in no way departed from its basic logic. By 1920, however, the assumption of the pleasure principle and the view of psychic functioning that followed from it could no longer satisfactorily account for a number of observations made in clinical practice. In a number of instances, the psychic system appeared to behave precisely contrary to expectation, deliberately reintroducing or increasing energic tensions. The evidence fell into four main categories. First, there were cases of recurrent traumatic dreams. Observed particularly in victims of war neuroses, the repetition of traumatic experiences in dreams and memories failed to tally with Freud's earlier view, itself an expression of the pleasure principle, that dreams represent the fulfillment of wishes. Why, if pleasure is the aim of psychic life, should specifically painful, traumatizing experiences be repeated? Second, Freud remarked upon the repetitive games of children in which a painful loss is symbolically reexperienced. A child left alone by his mother was seen to re-create the painful drama of the mother's disappearance by alternately throwing a spool over the edge of his bed, retrieving it, and casting it away again. Once more, the question was why the experience of an unpleasurable loss was repeated rather than repressed. Third, there was the problem of masochism, which, for obvious reasons, challenged the notion that mental life is governed 2

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

simply by the pursuit of pleasure. In the case of the masochist, pleasure and pain seemed to be intertwined in a particularly striking and puzzling way. Lastly, Freud brought forward evidence specific to the analytic process itself, namely, the tendency of patients to obstruct the treatment by effectively re-creating, with the analyst, their most painful losses and disappointments. The search for the motive of these self-defeating behaviors, or "negative therapeutic reactions," touched upon one of the most fundamental challenges faced by psychoanalysis, that of explaining the apparently self-inflicted character of all neurotic suffering. Taken together, the traumatic dreams of the war neurotic, the presence/absence game of the child abandoned by its mother, the joy taken by the masochist in his own mistreatment, and the so-called negative therapeutic reaction indicated an order of satisfaction "beyond the pleasure principle," a paradoxical pleasure in pain. The evidence pointed Freud to what he could only call "mysterious masochistic trends of the ego" (SE, 18:14). The repetitive, even compulsively repetitive character of these phenomena led Freud to suspect the operation of a fundamental instinctual force. Alongside the homeostatic principle of pleasure there must exist a second basic principle, a destabilizing, disruptive force that tends not toward equilibrium and harmony but toward conflict and disintegration. In addition to the life drives, there must exist a primordial drive toward death. In his very late essay on "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," Freud summarized the main thrust of his argument: If we take into consideration the whole picture made up by the phenomena of masochism immanent in so many people, the negative therapeutic reaction and the sense of guilt found in so many neurotics, we shall no longer be able to adhere to the belief that mental events are exclusively governed by the desire for pleasure. These phenomena are unmistakable indications of the presence of a power in mental life which we call the instinct of aggression or of destruction according to its aims, and which we trace back to the original death instinct of living matter. (SE, 23:243) The Theoretical Value of the Death Drive It is difficult to overstate the strangeness and radicality of Freud's death-drive hypothesis. It amounts to saying that the true goal of living is dying and that the life-course of all organisms must be regarded as only a circuitous route to death. Shocking as this conclusion appeared, 3

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

even to its author, the hypothesis of the death drive served to account for clinical observations that otherwise remained inexplicable. But in addition, and perhaps even more significantly, the idea appealed to Freud on purely theoretical grounds. First and foremost, the opposition between the life and death drives allowed Freud to reassert a fundamental dualism in the aftermath of his studies on narcissism.5 The theory of narcissism, which supposed a differential investment of libido between the ego and its objects, seemed to lend support to the instinctual monism of Jung and his followers. The new theory of lifeand-death instincts reexpressed Freud's deeply held dualist sensibility as it installed conflict in the heart of the psychical process, indeed, in the very substance of organic material itself. Freud insisted that "only by the concurrent or mutually opposing action of the two primal instincts—Eros and the death instinct—never by one or the other alone, can we explain the rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life" (SE, 23:243). Although he maintained a cautious skepticism concerning his revised outlook, Freud valued the elegance and simplicity of the new theory. "To my mind," he said, the hypotheses of the life and death instincts "are far more serviceable from a theoretical standpoint than any other possible ones; they provide that simplification, without either ignoring or doing violence to the facts, for which we strive in scientific work" (SE, 22:119). Despite the tireless fidelity to the details of observation that has made Freud an intellectual hero, even among many who disagree with his conclusions, Freud's scientific spirit retained a decidedly philosophical bent. Metapsychology, as he hinted in a letter to Fliess and reiterated in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life, was Freud's answer to metaphysics.6 The theory of the death drive was the highwater mark of Freud's speculative urge. In one of his late essays, Freud enthusiastically compared his view of the life and death instincts with the Empedoclean principles oiphilia and neikos. He claimed to be "all the more pleased when not long ago I came upon this theory of mine in the writings of one of the great thinkers of ancient Greece. I am very ready to give up the prestige of originality for the sake of such a confirmation" (SE, 23:244). After 1920, Freud's commitment to his most controversial hypothesis was reinforced by the fact that the death drive came to play a key role in resolving several specific problems plaguing psychoanalytic theory. Primary among them were the origins of human aggressiveness and the nature and function of the superego. With respect to the former, although it was far from the case that Freud failed to recognize the importance of aggression in human affairs prior to 1920, there 4

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

can be little doubt that, after that time and with the theory of the destructive drive in hand, he felt more confident in approaching the subject and in surveying it theoretically. In the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, he asked himself, "Why have we ourselves needed such a long time before we decided to recognize an aggressive instinct? Why did we hesitate to make use, on behalf of our theory, of facts which were obvious and familiar to everyone?" (SE, 22:103). In fact, Freud's rhetorical question bears directly on certain points in the history of the psychoanalytic movement. Freud resisted the idea of an aggressive instinct when it was introduced in 1908 by Alfred Adler. In 1912, Sabina Spielrein posited a specifically self-destructive instinct in her paper "Destruction as the Cause of Becoming," but again Freud refused to accept it.7 Only with the working out of his own approach in Beyond the Pleasure Principle did Freud settle on a definitive view of the problem of aggression. Only then did he resolve the difficult question of sadism and masochism that had always oriented his thinking about human aggression. It became clear that although masochism and sadism are intimately bound up with one another, masochism is the more primary impulse. Sadism is to be conceived as a turning outward of a more primitive masochistic tendency. This view led Freud to the revolutionary thesis that all aggression and destructiveness in human beings is, according to its original nature, self-destructiveness. This means that human aggressiveness is to be understood neither as a reaction of self-defense nor as a result of an innately brutish disposition, but rather as an expression of an internal conflict of the individual human being with itself. Freud consistently maintained these views throughout the last period of his life, emphasizing them in The Ego and the Id, the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Civilization and Its Discontents, and An Outline of Psychoanalysis. Just as the theory of the death drive contributed to a new understanding of aggressivity, it also shed new light on the activity of the superego and the feelings of guilt produced by it. As an attempt to understand neurotic behavior, psychoanalysis was centrally concerned from its very beginnings with the question of the motive force behind the experience of guilt. It was in answer to this question that Freud offered another of his most speculative hypotheses: the supposition of an inherited predisposition to guilt. Totem and Taboo traced the existence of an inborn propensity to guilt back to the murder of the primal father by the fraternal band of sons. It was an idea that exerted an enduring hold on Freud's imagination, even after the theory of the superego was introduced with the 1923 publication of The Ego and the Id. As late as 1933 he remarked in Civilization and Its Discontents that 5

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

"the superego has no motive that we know of for ill-treating the ego, with which it is intimately bound up; but genetic influence, which leads to the survival of what is past and has been surmounted, makes itself felt" (SE, 21:125). With the introduction theory of the death drive, however, a new avenue of approach opened up. If human aggressiveness could be shown to derive from a fundamental aggressiveness of the individual against itself, then the self-inflicted sufferings of the neurotic became understandable in a new way. The motive force behind the hostility of the superego could be assigned to its participation with the death drive. The punitiveness of the superego, most remarkable in obsession and melancholia, could be attributed to its containing "a pure culture of the death instinct" (SE, 19:53). '

Repudiation of Freud's Idea However mysterious a notion in itself, there can be no doubt as to the pivotal importance of the death drive in the theoretical constructions of Freud's maturity. "In the series of Freud's metapsychological writings," James Strachey observes, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle may be regarded as introducing the final phase of his views."8 Despite occasional hesitations, Freud became increasingly convinced of the fundamental value of his most speculative construction. "When, originally, I had this idea," he confided to Robert Fliess, "I thought to myself: this is something altogether erroneous, or something very important. . . . Well, lately I have found myself more inclined toward the second alternative." 9 Thirteen years after the publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud reaffirmed his faith in the basic correctness of the death-drive theory, relying on the duality of life and death to frame his most sweeping conception of the nature and progress of human civilization. "To begin with," he admitted, "it was only tentatively that I put forward the views I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold on me that I can no longer think in any other way" (SE, 23:119). J.-B. Pontalis has summarily remarked that "the theme of death is as basic to Freudian psychoanalysis as is the theme of sexuality. I even believe that the latter has been widely put forward so as to cover up the former." 10 The dialectic of life and death represented the culmination of Freud's effort to conceptualize his experience and guided his thinking throughout the last third of his intellectual life. The notion of the death drive was thus the veritable keystone of Freud's most mature and far-reaching theoretical synthesis. But to the degree that we more 6

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

fully appreciate its importance to Freud and its central function in the final elaboration of his theory it can only strike us as more astonishing that the death drive was almost unanimously repudiated by his early followers. Ernest Jones remarked on the singular unpopularity of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: The book . . . is noteworthy in being the only one of Freud's which has received little acceptance on the part of his followers. Thus of the fifty or so papers that have since been directed to the topic one observes that in the first decade only half supported Freud's theory, in the second decade only a third, and in the last decade, none at all.11 "I am well aware," Freud himself complained, "that the dualistic theory according to which an instinct of death or of destruction or aggression claims equal rights as a partner with Eros as manifested in the libido, has found little sympathy and has not really been accepted even among psychoanalysts" (SE, 23:244). Ernest Becker, although not himself a psychoanalyst, has pronounced what can be taken as the majority view both inside and outside the analytic community: "Freud's tortuous formulations on the death instinct can now securely be relegated to the dust bin of history." 12 The speculative tenor of the death drive that seems to have appealed to Freud, especially in his last years, was an important factor in the negative reception of his idea. Due in part to Freud's own influence, psychoanalysis has always measured itself against the ideal of practical, empirical work and evidences a certain uneasiness about theory-spinning (in spite of—or precisely because of—the fact that the psychoanalytic field can be opened up only on the basis of the purely theoretical construct of the unconscious). It is not surprising, then, that many of Freud's followers judged the death drive to be a fanciful excess of theorizing, unjustified by the facts. David Rapaport characterized it as "a speculative excursion which does not seem to be an integral part of the [psychoanalytic] theory." 13 Kenneth Colby concluded that "the postulation of a death instinct we now know was based on a misapplication of physical principles to living organisms. Today it is only an interesting part of psychoanalytic history." 14 Otto Rank similarly accused Freud of allowing speculation to outrun the evidence, although for Rank the problem lay not so much in any discrepancy between the idea of the death drive and the rest of the psychoanalytic theory but rather in the way Freud seemed to distort the issue of death to make it compatible with his general paradigm of 7

The Enigma of the "Death Drive

wish-fulfillment. In Rank's view, the death drive seemed to be an instance of the sort of shoddy theorizing that Freud himself mocked by evoking Heine's image of the philosopher patching up the holes in the universe with the tatters of his nightshirt. According to Rank, even when he stumbled upon the inescapable death problem, [Freud] sought to give a new meaning to that also in harmony with the wish, since he spoke of death instinct instead of death fear. The fear itself he had meantime disposed of elsewhere. . . . [He] made the general fear into a special sexual fear (castration fear). . . . If one had held to the phenomena, it would have been impossible to understand how a discussion of the death impulse could neglect the universal and fundamental death fear to such an extent.15 Rank's criticism reflects another attitude that, although not always directly expressed, certainly motivated profound hostility to Freud's theory. The idea that every organism is destined to die for internal reasons, that death and destruction are the aims of a basic principle, perhaps the most basic principle of all life, violated the canons of common sense and religious belief even more than it offended scientific rationality.16 The death drive was the weightiest expression of Freud's much-touted pessimism and was no doubt especially disturbing to members of a profession devoted to the task of healing. Indeed, there seems to be something not only absurd but deeply and almost naturally repugnant about Freud's claim that "the aim of all life is death" (SE, 18:38). Given this spontaneous resistance to such an idea, it is not surprising to find among Freud's biographers ample assurances that his supposition of an ineluctable drive toward death cannot be taken as a result of scientific research but must be interpreted as an expression of bitter personal experience. In this view, it was not the evidence of psychoanalysis but rather the dark spectacle of the First World War, the recent deaths of his son and daughter, and increasing concern for his own mortality that led Freud to the death drive. Thus Henri Ellenberger has remarked that "Freud's concept of the death instinct can be best understood against the background of the preoccupation with death shared by a number of his eminent contemporaries: biologists, psychologists, and existential philosophers."17 Paul Roazen reports that "an unusual number of elderly analysts . . . thought Freud's cancer preceded his theory of the death instinct."18 For his part, however, Freud anticipated and tried to combat allegations that his reflections on the death drive were motivated by personal losses. He wrote to Max Eitingon in July of 1920: "The 8

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

'Beyond' is finally finished. You will be able to certify that it was half finished when Sophie was alive and flourishing."19 The most popular form of distortion to which Freud's position has been submitted can be similarly interpreted as a turning away from the most distressing aspect of his hypothesis. According to a common view, we need not worry ourselves about a specifically self-annihilating drive. We need only recognize the natural tendency in human beings toward aggressivity and destructiveness. This view is invited by distinguishing between theoretical and clinical contexts of discussion. On the clinical level, it is held, there is no need to invoke the complexities of the dual instinct theory. As Edward Bibring puts it: Instincts of life and death are not psychologically perceptible as such; they are biological instincts whose existence is required by hypothesis alone. That being so, it follows that, strictly speaking, the theory of the primal instincts is a concept which ought only to be adduced in a theoretical context and not in discussion of a clinical or empirical nature. In them, the idea of aggressive and destructive instincts will suffice to account for all the facts before us.20 The repudiation of the death-drive hypothesis presents a striking and nearly unique exception to the otherwise conspicuous and enduring authority of Freud. Indeed, in many circles the theory of the death drive remains one of the great embarrassments of psychoanalysis. We can be only more deeply intrigued that this exception concerns a point of theory that Freud himself held to be of capital importance. But the question of the death drive poses an enigma of more than merely political or historical significance. It demands a basic decision. We are led to ask whether the theory of the Todestrieb was simply a misguided speculative excess, the error of which Freud's followers saw better than the master himself, or whether, on the contrary, it really did constitute the crowning discovery of psychoanalysis, as Freud himself believed, and that its almost universal repudiation must therefore be seen to involve a fundamental and widely shared misunderstanding of Freud's teaching. Perhaps the most damaging consequence of posterity's judgment on Freud's theory of the death drive has been the near silencing of the question itself. In fact, most treatments of the problem have amounted to a side-stepping of it. Denounced as misconceived biology or denigrated as a speculative flight of fancy, the meaning and function of Freud's hypothesis in the larger framework of his theory is not taken into account. Dismissed as fodder for biographers or trimmed 9

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

down to an assertion of simple brutishness, the theory of the death drive is robbed of its power to challenge our basic assumptions. Unless we are willing to dismiss Freud's own estimate of the critical importance of his idea as easily as his interpreters have dismissed the idea itself, we must recognize in the death drive a question worth raising again.

Re-Posing the Question of the Death Drive Freud's theory of the death drive, although rejected by many, has always found some supporters. In the early days, the theory was embraced by Eitingon, Ferenczi, and, for a time, Franz Alexander. More notably, it was taken over and reworked by Melanie Klein and her school. Over the past forty years, however, the most significant treatment of Freud's most unpopular conception has been the work of a renegade French analyst named Jacques Lacan. Lacan does more than reemphasize Freud's notion of the death drive, he re-installs it at the very center of psychoanalytic theory. "To ignore the death instinct in [Freud's] doctrine," he insists, "is to misunderstand that doctrine completely" (E:S, 301). Lacan characterizes Beyond the Pleasure Principle as the "pivotal point" in the evolution of Freud's thought (S.II, 165). In that work is announced "the culminating point of Freud's doctrine . . . that death instinct whose enigma Freud propounded for us at the height of his experience" (E:S, 101). T o give Freud's conception of death its due, it must be seen to imply the lineaments of the entire psychoanalytic discovery. For Lacan, life and death are the terms par excellence of the Freudian dialectic: "When we get to the root of this life, behind the drama of the passage into existence, we find nothing besides life conjoined to death. That is where the Freudian dialectic leads us" (S.II, 232). Lacan insists that the death drive is not merely an unthinkable conundrum. "The death instinct isn't an admission of impotence, it isn't a coming to a halt before an irreducible, an ineffable last thing, it is a concept" (S.II, 70). But, further, it is not merely one concept among others. Perhaps more than any other point in the Freudian theory, it is with respect to the death drive that Lacan's innovation is rightly called a "return to Freud." What makes the death-drive theory so important is its pivotal position in the structured totality of the psychoanalytic theory. For Lacan, the death drive is the key to understanding the topography of id, ego, and superego upon which Freud based the final and most complete elaboration of his theory: 10

The Enigma of the "Death Drive" Beyond the Pleasure Principle . . . is the work of Freud that most of those who authorize themselves with the title of psychoanalyst don't hesitate to reject as a superfluous, even chance, speculation. . . insofar as the supreme antinomy which results from it, the death instinct, becomes unthinkable for them. It is difficult, however, to take as a mere sideshow, still less as a mistake, of the Freudian doctrine, the work which is precisely the prelude to the new topography represented by the terms ego, id, and super-ego that has become as prevalent in its theoretical usage as in its popular diffusion.21 Lacan insists that the death drive be understood in its original radically. Freud was not simply concerned to expose a general tendency toward aggressivity and destructiveness in h u m a n beings. T h e thrust of Freud's idea was to conceive of a force of s^/f-destructiveness, a primordial aggressivity toward oneself, from which aggressivity toward others is ultimately derived. T o fail to see that it is one's own death that is at stake in the death drive is to miss the point entirely. Such was the typical error of the ego psychologists, as Jean Laplanche has pointed out in a passage that might well have been written by Lacan himself: For these authors, for a Fenichel, the situation is fundamentally the same. In every case, there is a refusal of the essential thesis of Freud which affirms that the death drive is in the first instance turned, not toward the outside (as aggressivity), but toward the subject, that it is radically not a drive to murder, but a drive to suicide or to kill oneself22 Lacan returns to the death drive but not without reappropriating it in a distinctive way. Lacan finds in the death drive a privileged point at which the system of psychoanalytic concepts remains o p e n to question: Contrary to the dogmatism that is sometimes imputed to us, we know that this system [of psychoanalytic concepts] remains open both as a whole and in several of its articulations. These gaps seem to focus on the enigmatic signification that Freud expressed in the term death instinct, which, rather like the figure of the Sphinx, reveals the aporia that confronted this great mind in the most profound attempt so far made to formulate an experience of man in the register of biology (E:S, 8). 11

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

According to Lacan, the problem of the death drive opens psychoanalysis to question and, ultimately, to reformulation. But what sort of reformulation is announced herePThe answer is not immediately easy to determine. T h e question of the death drive in Lacan will take us to the heart of his theoretical innovations insofar as he links the meaning of death in psychoanalysis to the faculty of speech and language, on the one hand, and to the fate of desire, on the other. In this way, two of the prime themes of Lacan's thought, language and desire, can be seen to intersect in his treatment of the death drive. The question, one that will occupy us throughout this book, remains: How are language, desire, and death related? The most recognizable feature of Lacan's rereading of psychoanalysis is his insistence that the essential meaning of the psychoanalytic discovery concerns the role of language in the functioning of the unconscious. "What the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious," Lacan maintains, "is the whole structure of language" (E:S, 147). As he puts it in the well-known formula that stands like the sign over the door of the Lacanian school, "the unconscious is structured like a language" (E:S, 243). And indeed, it is instructive to take up once again the early texts of Freud in which the foundations of psychoanalysis were established—The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious—and reread them in the light of Lacan's thesis. One cannot fail to be struck by the fact that over and again the phenomena of the unconscious—dreams, slips, jokes, symptoms—are traced back to essentially verbal mechanisms, plays of words, and phonemic concatenations. The remarkable thing is that Freud so masterfully discerned the operation of essentially linguistic mechanisms, although he remained ignorant of the new science of language pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure and his followers. In Lacan's view, the concepts of structural linguistics, developed during Freud's lifetime but unavailable to him through "an accident of history," offer an ideal framework for theoretically rendering the psychoanalytic experience. 23 Lacking them, Freud modeled much of his theory on analogies to nineteenth-century physics and biology. Nevertheless, for Lacan Freud's true discovery concerned the function of the linguistic signifier in the unconscious: If what Freud discovered and rediscovered with a perpetually increasing sense of shock has a meaning, it is that the displacement of the signifier determines the subjects in their acts, in their destiny, in their refusals, in their blindnesses, in their end and in their fate, their innate gifts a n d social acquisitions notwithstanding, without regard

12

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

for character or sex, and that, willingly or not, everything that might be considered the stuff of psychology, kit and caboodle, will follow the path of the signifier.24 From the vantage point of mainstream psychoanalysis, Lacan's formulation readily appears an unlikely one. The common conception of Freud's discovery, far from suggesting an identity between the unconscious and language, tends to define them as mutually exclusive. As Jean Laplanche has pointed out, "the Freudian unconscious and the language of the linguists are in such radical opposition to each other that a term for term transposition of their properties and laws may properly be regarded as a paradoxical undertaking."25 But if there is some paradox in linking language to the unconscious, how much greater is the difficulty of associating language with a drive toward death and destruction! Oriented by the role of the signifier, Lacan locates the meaning of the death drive in a function of language. "I have demonstrated," he offers, "the profound relationship uniting the notion of the death instinct to the problems of speech" (E:S, 101): From the approach we have indicated, the reader should recognize in the metaphor of the return to the inanimate (which Freud attaches to every living body) that margin beyond life that language gives to the human being by virtue of the fact that he speaks. (E:S, 301) For Lacan, the death drive can be understood only against the background of the matrix of linguistic signifiers that he calls the "symbolic order": The death instinct is only the mask of the symbolic order. . . . The symbolic order is simultaneously non-being and insisting to be, that is what Freud has in mind when he talks about the death instinct as being what is most fundamental—a symbolic order in travail, in the process of coming, insisting on being realized. (S.II, 326) The challenge of interpreting Lacan is to make sense of passages like these, passages that bristle with multiple perplexities.What is "that margin beyond life" of which he speaks? How and why is it associated with language? How are we to locate the thematics of language and death along the axis of "non-being and insisting to be"? Lacan links the death drive to the function of speech and language but also, and equally improbably, to the nature and destiny of human desire. For Lacan, the issue of the death drive bears upon the essential 13

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

concern of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutics of unconscious desire. "[Freud] questioned life as to its meaning," Lacan poses, "and not to say that it has none . . . but to say that it has only one meaning, that in which desire is borne by death" (E:S, 277). "The function of desire must remain in a fundamental relation with death" (S.VII, 351). What does "desire" mean here? The sheer ubiquity of "desire" in Lacan's discourse signals its importance for his thinking. Even a brief encounter with Lacan's text serves to alert us to the very privileged status of the word in Lacan's vocabulary. Yet it is not easy to determine precisely its correspondence to Freud's terminology nor does Lacan offer a Hmpid definition. Left deliberately unspecified in its meaning, the word not unfrequently assumes an aura of almost mystical significance. 26 By linking death to desire, Lacan seems merely to compound one mystery with another.

Interpreting Lacan T h e r e can be no doubt about the importance of Lacan's interpretation of the Freudian death instinct. Lacan faces us with the disturbing possibility that the most readily recognizable and widely influential part of psychoanalytic theory—the triad of psychical agencies; id, ego, and superego—is based upon and is only fully understandable in terms of the most maligned and misunderstood part of the theory: the hypothesis of the death drive. Lacan thus takes the notion of the death drive to be a key point, perhaps the key point, for grasping the essential import of the psychoanalytic discovery. Further, he challenges us with the task of re-conceiving the meaning of the death drive and of unconscious processes in general according to a new paradigm: that of the unconscious structured like a language. The main task of this essay is to make sense of Lacan's treatment of this crucial point. But before we can evaluate Lacan's contribution to the enigma of the death drive it must be acknowledged that Lacan poses something of an enigma in himself. Despite the importance he attributes to it, Lacan nowhere devotes to the death drive a sustained discussion in which his position might be unambiguously grasped. Gathering together the many, but often brief and cryptic, references to the topic is equally disappointing. It is exceedingly difficult to discern in such a collection the main lines of a coherent theory. In reading Lacan, the experience of being unable to lay hold of a readily comprehensible "position" is not the exception, however, but the rule. And such, it seems, is Lacan's intention. Lacan 14

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

clearly discourages his reader from expecting of him anything like a traditionally structured "theory." "My Ecrits" he warns, "are unsuitable for a thesis, particularly for an academic thesis: they are antithetical by nature: one either takes what they formulate or one leaves them." 27 As Anika Lemaire has put it: Lacan claims, therefore, not to have put forward any "theories." His "utterances" or "writings," seeds scattered among the thorns of traditional philosophy and psychology, in no way lend themselves to anything resembling a closure. . . . For Lacan, then, any attempt to unify his scattered statements into a whole runs the risk of making erroneous interpolations.28 For all its brilliance and evocative power, Lacan's text remains stubbornly resistant to ready comprehension. T h e style of Lacan's discourse, first of all a spoken discourse, heard by those attending his famous seminar before appearing in print, is notoriously difficult. Jeffrey Mehlman has described it well as "Mallarmean in hermetic density, Swiftian in aggressive virulence, Freudian in analytic acumen." 29 Not surprisingly, Lacan has been accused of exercising a willful obscurantism that conceals a lack of rigor behind the dense foliage of a precious and overweighted style. Frangois Roustang has charged that understanding Lacan becomes a viciously never-ending and allconsuming labor: The work becomes infinite, thanks on the one hand to the obscurity of the discourse, for one would like to understand what has been intentionally rendered incomprehensible, thanks on the other hand to the very vague links [Lacan makes] to [other] disciplines, for one can never discover the relations which exist only on a metaphorical plane. It is necessary that the work be infinite, in order to absorb all one's energy in an effort to understand, leaving nothing for critique.30 The difficulty of Lacan's style is not wholly unintentional. Convinced that the curative effect of analysis does not consist in explaining the patient's symptoms and life history, convinced, that is, that the analyst's effort to understand the patient only impedes the emergence of the unconscious within the transference and that what is effective in analysis concerns something beyond the capacity of the analyst to explain, Lacan's discourse is calculated to frustrate facile understanding. His aim in part is to replicate for his readers and listeners something of 15

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

the essential opacity and disconnectedness of the analytic experience. Often what is required of the reader in the encounter with Lacan's dense and recalcitrant discourse, as with that of the discourse of the patient in analysis, is less an effort to clarify and systematize than a sort of unknowing mindfulness. We are called upon less to close over the gaps and discontinuities in the discourse than to remain attentive to its very lack of coherence, allowing its breaches and disalignments to become the jumping-off points for new movements of thought. Lacan says of himself: I am not surprised that my discourse can cause a certain margin of misunderstanding. . . . [I]t is with an express intention, absolutely deliberate, that I pursue this discourse in a way that offers you the occasion of not completely understanding it. This margin allows that for you who say that you follow me, which is to say that you remain in a problematic position, a door is always left open toward a progressive rectification.31 In more than one way, then, Lacan's discourse resists systematic conception. T h e attempt to present a coherent account of his teaching is therefore a chancy undertaking, and perhaps especially so with regard to the concept of the death drive. The death drive seems to be the locus of theoretical obscurity par excellence. Nevertheless, I will argue that there is far broader and deeper coherence in Lacan's thought than may at first appear. This essay is an attempt to demonstrate some of that coherence with special reference to the problem of the death drive. 32 Do I remain true to Lacan? I will quote extensively from Lacan's text and will try to acknowledge those points at which I clearly depart from him. In the end, perhaps, I will be judged to have departed from Lacan through the door he "left open toward a progressive rectification." My aim, however, is not to provide a comprehensive account of Lacan's work, but to traverse his thought obliquely along the lines of a specific concept. 33 In doing so, I hope to reveal in a limited way some aspects of the structure of his thinking, but, more important, I hope to show that the value of Lacan's innovations for reading the text of Freud. I will take seriously Lacan's claim to "return to Freud." My effort must finally be considered an explication of Lacan's work less for its own sake than for the light it sheds on a concept we find in Freud. Reference to Freud is not only the goal of my analysis but also a guide for interpreting Lacan. Lacan was fond of reminding would-be "Lacanians" that he, Lacan, strove only to be a "Freudian." As his 16

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

discussions of Freud's texts so powerfully demonstrate, Lacan's genius consisted not merely in bringing to psychoanalysis the concepts of structural linguistics, gestalt psychology, or philosophy, but doing it in a way that allows us to experience Freud's great cases as if for the first time.34 Lacan was first and last a reader of Freud. "I must note," he remarked with pointed irony, "that in order to handle any Freudian concept, reading Freud cannot be considered superfluous, even for those concepts that are homonyms of current notions" (E:S. 38). Consistent with this advice, it will be helpful to keep the text of Freud very clearly in view. It will be necessary during the course of this essay to locate, painstakingly, the origin and function of the death drive in Freud's theory. Only by determining its point of emergence in the unfolding of Freud's thought, by understanding the nature of the questions to which it provided an answer, and by discerning its linkages with other key concepts and problematics can we clarify how Lacan makes new sense of it. Lacan's claim to remain faithful to Freud gives us some warrant to use Freud in reading Lacan, but it can hardly be forgotten, for all the talk of return, that Lacan is not Freud. To return to Freud is by no means simply to repeat him. "We are not following Freud," Lacan poses, we are accompanying him. The fact that an idea occurs somewhere in Freud's work doesn't, for all that, guarantee that it is being handled in the spirit of the Freudian researches. As for us, we are trying to conform to the spirit, to the watchword, to the style of this research.35 The concept of the death drive in particular must be interpreted in a spirit that transcends the letter of Freud's text: This notion [of the death drive] must be approached through its resonances in what I shall call the poetics of the Freudian corpus, the first way of access to the penetration of its meaning, and the essential dimension from the origins of the work to the apogee marked in it by this notion, for an understanding of its dialectical repercussions. (E:S, 102) It is toward the end of revivifying the spirit of Freud's teaching that Lacan offers his most significant innovation: the three orders of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. They constitute, he suggests, "a sort of preface or introduction to a certain orientation of psychoanalysis."36 But that is too modestly said. Beginning in the early 1950s, 17

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

Lacan's work is at every point saturated with the distinction of these three fundamental registers. "Without these three systems to guide ourselves by," he insists, "it would be impossible to understand anything of the Freudian technique and experience" (S.I, 73): In order to gain an idea of the function which Freud designates by the word "ego," as indeed to read the whole of the Freudian metapsychology, it is necessary to use this distinction of planes and relations expressed in the terms, the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. (S.II, 36) T h e imaginary was the first of the three orders to appear, introduced in 1936 by Lacan's article on the "mirror stage." It was inspired by research in ethology, which associated behavior patterns in animals with the perception of specific visual images. Lacan proposed that a similar "imaginary" function operates in human beings. In the "mirror phase," the most rudimentary formations of psychic life are organized for the six- to eighteen-month-old infant as it identifies itself with a body image; either its own image in a mirror, or that of a caretaker or peer. For Lacan, the "imaginary" designates that basic and enduring dimension of experience that is oriented by images, perceived or fantasized, the psychologically formative power of which is lastingly established in the primordial identification of the mirror phase. Lacan's first and arguably most original and far-reaching innovation in psychoanalytic theory was to characterize the Freudian "ego" as a formation of the imaginary. T h e symbolic, announced in his 1953 paper on "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," was conceived by Lacan from the outset in dynamic opposition to the captures of the imaginary. Lacan's notion of the symbolic is indebted to the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, and to the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss. T h e symbolic is the register of language and of linguistically mediated cognitions. In the "symbolic order," Lacan envisions a complex system of signifying elements whose meaning is determined by their relation to the other elements of the system—a grand structure, then, in which meaning is free to circulate among associated elements or signifiers without necessarily referring to a particular object or signified. In opposition to the gestalt principles and relations of perceptual resemblance that govern the semiotics of the imaginary, the order of the symbolic functions in accordance with rules internal to the signifying system itself. Lacanian psychoanalysis

18

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

came fully into its own when Lacan identified the Oedipus Complex discovered by Freud with the formative moment in which the child, molded and snared by the imaginary, accedes to a symbolic mode of functioning. It is a good deal more difficult to characterize briefly the Lacanian sense of the "real." Especially in his later work, Lacan tries to show the interconnectedness of the imaginary, symbolic, and real, comparing them to the three interlocking rings of a Borromean knot. But the notion of the real is perhaps best introduced as being precisely that which escapes and is lacking in the other two registers. Neither figured in the imaginary nor represented by the symbolic, the real is the alwaysstill-outstanding, the radically excluded, the wholly uncognized. As Lacan puts it, "the real is the impossible." 37 In Lacan's sense, then, the real has very little to do with common "reality." By the measure of everyday reality, the Lacanian real is closer to being un- or sur-real. The real is sheer, wholly undifferentiated and unsymbolized force or impact. It is an experience of the real, therefore, that lies at the heart of trauma. However, the real is not simply a designation of something unknown external to the individual. It inhabits the secret interior as well. T h e real is therefore also to be associated with the active yet ineffable stirrings of organic need, the unconsciousness of the body. T h e tripartite distinction of imaginary, symbolic, and real constitutes the master key of Lacan's work. To interpret his treatment of the death instinct will therefore ultimately require determining its relation to these three essential registers. As I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters, this task offers a unique opportunity for clarifying the interrelation of Lacan's three basic categories to one another. This is true in spite of the fact, or rather precisely because of the fact, that each of the three registers seems to claim the death instinct for its own. From one point of view, Lacan clearly associates the death drive with the imaginary. "The point emphasized by Freud's thought, but [that] isn't fully made out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Lacan asserts, "[is that] the death instinct in man [signifies] that his libido is originally constrained to pass through an imaginary stage" (S.I, 149). At another point, however, it is the symbolic that appears as the order of death. Thus we read that "the nature of the symbol is yet to be clarified. We have approached the essence of it in situating it at the very point of the genesis of the death instinct" (S.III, 244). Is the drive toward death to be associated primarily with the imaginary? with the symbolic? Or is it not more fittingly associated with the real? Lacan's notion of the real—as lack or absence, as the impossible, as the unspeakable force of 19

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

the trauma, or as the ineffable exigence of the body—seems eminently qualified to be linked with the activity of what Freud called a "death drive." As I hope to show in what follows, the problem of death is relevant to each of the three registers, but in a different way. Clarifying these differences yields not only a more adequate solution to Freud's problem of the death drive but also a better understanding of Lacan's own thought as it illuminates the relations of the imaginary, symbolic, and real to one another.

20

2

Lacanian Reflections on Narcissism Man begins by being reflected in another man as in a mirror. Only when Peter develops an attitude toward Paul which is similar to the attitude he has toward himself, does Peter begin to be conscious of himself as a man. —Karl Marx quoted by Henri Wallon, Les origines du caractere chez Venfant

Jacques Lacan is best known for his rethinking of psychoanalysis in terms of linguistics. His contribution is often summed up by quoting his formula about the unconscious "structured like a language." There is a danger, however, in putting too much stress on the linguistic side of Lacan. For all its importance in Lacan's thought, his notion of the symbolic and its role in the unconscious must be understood in its dynamic relation to his earlier and seminal conception of the imaginary. Catherine Clement has proposed that "Lacan may not have had any idea other than that of the mirror stage. This was a true discovery. . . . In this discovery we find all his future work in embryonic form."1 Philippe Julien maintains that "the teaching of Lacan is, from start to finish, a debate with the imaginary."2 However we evaluate the relative importance of the imaginary and the symbolic in Lacan's work, there is good reason why a discussion of his approach to the death drive must begin with the imaginary. This is so because Lacan's treatment of the death instinct is closely bound up with his concept of "alienation." Central to Lacan's conception of both death and desire, alienation finds its first and decisive point of reference in the imaginary structuration of the mirror phase. Lacan asks of this alienation: "Isn't it the fundamental, original, specular foundation of the relation to the other, in so far as it is rooted in the imaginary? The first alienation of desire is linked to this concrete phenomenon" (S.I, 176). Alienation not only begins in the imaginary, the imaginary is somehow alienating in its very essence. "In the order of the imaginary, alienation is constitutive. Alienation is the imaginary 21

Reflections on Narcissism

as such" {SHI, 166). As fundamentally alienating, the imaginary is tied to death. Lacan therefore claims that "this life we're captive of, this essentially alienated life, existing, this life in the other, is as such joined to death, it always returns to death" (SJI, 233). And elsewhere: "This image of the master, which is what [man] sees in the form of the specular image, becomes confused in him with the image of death" (S./, 149). It is the alienating character of the imaginary that links it to death. Understanding what Lacan means by "alienation" is therefore a key requirement for clarifying his treatment of the death instinct. In this chapter, I will give a general account of Lacan's notion of the imaginary, which, before arriving at an answer, aims at posing the nature of imaginary alienation as a question. Life in the Mirror Lacan's theory of the imaginary function in human beings is inspired in part by ethological research into the role of perceptual mechanisms in animal behavior. In Lacan's view, the work of Lorenz, Tinbergen, and others has established beyond doubt the key part played by perceptual Gestalten in triggering behaviors of parade, territoriality, attack, courtship, and mating. For such behaviors, the primary stimulus is the visual image of another member of the same species. In his article on the mirror phase, Lacan cites the example of the female pigeon for which the sight of another member of its species is a necessary condition for the anatomical maturation of its reproductive organs {E:S, 3). That this effect is produced by the perception of an image and not by the real presence of another individual is shown by the fact that a bird raised in isolation from its peers is able to develop normally when it is supplied with a mirror. These observations suggest that the functioning of the sexual instinct in animals cannot be understood apart from such "imaginary" mechanisms: What serves as support for the sexual instinct on the psychological plane? What is the basic mainspring determining the setting into motion of the gigantic sexual mechanism? What is its releasing mechanism, as Tinbergen puts it, following Lorenz? It isn't the existence of the sexual partner, the particularity of one individual, but something which has an extremely intimate relation to what I have been calling the type, namely an image. . . . The mechanical throwing into gear of the sexual instinct is thus essentially crystallized in a relation of 22

Reflections on Narcissism images, in—now I come to the term you're expecting—an imaginary relation. (5./, 121-22) In his conception of the "mirror phase," Lacan transposes from animal ethology to human beings the importance of the perceptual imago of another member of the species. During the mirror phase, the psychically formative moment that occurs in the human infant at age six to eighteen months, the most rudimentary contours of psychical structure are laid down in perceptual registrations. However, the function of the imago that is so decisive for animal behavior assumes an even greater importance in human beings due to a striking feature of human development: the phenomenon embryologists call "fetalization." For Lacan, as for Henri Wallon whose work influenced him, the first months of life in the human being are characterized by a state of radical motor incoordination that evidences "a specific prematurity of birth in man": It must be remarked that the lateness of dentition and of walking, a lateness correlative for the majority of bodily equipment and functions, indicates in the infant a total vital impotence which lasts through the first two years. . . . [W]e must not hesitate to recognize in the first years a positive biological deficiency, and consider man as an animal prematurely born. I am led, therefore, to regard the function of the mirror stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality—or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt. In man, however, this relation to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of uneasiness and motor incoordination of the neonatal months. (E:S, 4) Because Lacan conceives the specific function and effects of the imaginary in human beings to be so closely bound up with the fact of prematurity, it is vital to understand more precisely what he takes prematurity to mean. He characterizes it less in terms of a general underdevelopment of functions than as a lack of coordination between functions. T h e basic elements are in place; it is the connections between them that are missing. This is particularly true for development of the central nervous system.4 "Human beings," Lacan claims, "are born with all sorts of extremely heterogenous dispositions" (S.II, 326). The 23

Reflections on Narcissism prematurely born h u m a n infant is, for all intents and purposes, a corps morcele, a body in bits and pieces: The study of the behavior of the newborn infant permits us to affirm that exterio-, proprio-, and interoceptive sensations are not yet, after the twelfth month, sufficiently coordinated in order either to achieve the recognition of the infant's own body nor, correlatively, the notion of what is exterior to it.5 In animals, knowledge is coaptation, an imaginary coaptation. . . . In man, there is nothing of the kind. The anarchy of his elementary impulses is demonstrated by analytic experience. His partial behaviour patterns, his relation to the object—to the libidinal object—is subject to all sorts of risks. Synthesis miscarries. (S.I, 168) T h e beneficial effect of the imago as Lacan thinks of it, again following Wallon, relates to the radical incoordination of the neonatal months. It is through the image of another person that the h u m a n infant gains the first inkling of its bodily integrity and the first measure o f control over its o w n movements. As Wallon put it: Far from constituting a closed system, the infant is devoid of internal cohesion and quite unable to exercise the least control over even the most fortuitous influences. The newborn's behavior displays only discrete and sporadic reactions that achieve no more than the elimination, by whatever pathways may be available at the time, of tensions deriving either from organic sources or from external stimuli. . . . Here is a being whose every reaction has to be completed, supplemented, and interpreted. As he is unable to do anything for himself, he is manipulated by others, and it is through the movements of others that his first attitudes will take shape.6 T h e imago of the fellow h u m a n being functions to provide coordination in the midst o f the infant's internal anarchy, to produce h o m o g e neity out of an original heterogeneity, to establish organization in the field o f a primal discord. A highly significant consequence of such imaginary mimicry—a consequence that will lend an initial orientation to the problem o f imaginary alienation—is the way it introduces a profound confusion o f self and other. Indeed, o n the level of such primitive identification, the distinction between self and other remains almost meaningless. T h e effects of this confusion continues well into early childhood, as the p h e n o m e n o n of transitivism suggests. Docu24

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mented by Charlotte Buhler, transitivism refers to the frequently observed occurrence in which a young child mistakes the experience of a peer for his own.7 The two-year-old, for instance, may complain of being struck when he hits another child or cry when he sees another child fall down. The salutary function of the imago thus consists first of all in its power to unify and integrate. In the imago of the other, the newborn relates itself to an ideal unity. "The specular image . . . is linked as a unifier to all the imaginary elements of what is called the fragmented body" (E:S, 196). Lacan's emphasis on the unitary character of the formative imago of the mirror phase shows the influence of yet another intellectual tradition, that of gestalt psychology. What the infant finds in the sight of the other is the Prdgnanz of a good form: What I have called the mirror stage is interesting in that it manifests the affective dynamism by which the subject originally identifies himself with the visual Gestalt of his own body: in relation to the still very profound lack of co-ordination of his own motility, it represents an ideal of unity, a salutory imago; it is invested with all the original distress resulting from the child's intra-organic and relational discordance during the first six months, when he bears the signs, neurological and humoral, of a physiological natal prematuration. (E:S, 18-19) The primordial imago coordinates the chaotic inner life of the neonate by referring it to an ideal unity, but also establishes a basis of stability over time. The imaginary Gestalt introduces a sort of fixed point into the flux of the infantile psyche. Thus Lacan asserts that "the total form of the body by which the subject anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power is given to him only as a Gestalt . . . that fixes it and in a symmetry that inverts it, in contrast to the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him" (E:S, 2, my emphasis). This "fixating" quality of the imago in the human being entails a "formal stagnation" that is not present in animals. Lacan thus remarks the contrast between the behaviors of the human infant and chimpanzee when confronted with their image in a mirror. For the monkey, interest in the reflected image quickly passes; for the human being, however, the mirror image continues to support a kind of fascination. The tendency toward temporal inertia or fixity of the imago is presented by Lacan as a general and fundamental feature of the imaginary function in human beings. Imaginary formations thus serve 25

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not only to mobilize a nascent sense of identity and to introduce directedness into the chaos of infantile impulses but also to lay down the ground lines of unity and stability along which the capacity for object recognition will be built. The imaginary Gestalt provides the basis for the perception of discrete things as well as the enduring impression by which things can be repeatedly recognized. The temporal fixity of imaginary formations appears with particular vividness in certain pathological states. Delusional feelings of persecution, for instance, are said to be similar in their strangeness to the faces of actors when a film is suddenly stopped in mid-action. . . . [T]his formal stagnation is akin to the most general structure of human knowledge: that which constitutes the ego and its objects with attributes of permanence, identity, and substantiality, in short, with entities or "things" that are very different from the Gestalten that experience enables us to isolate in the shifting field, stretched in accordance with the lines of animal desire. In fact, this formal fixation, which introduces a certain rupture of level, a certain discord between man's organization and his Umwelt, is the very condition that extends indefinitely his world and his power, by giving his objects their instrumental polyvalence and symbolic polyphony, and also their potential as defensive armour. (E:S, 17) As it serves to organize the internal confusion of the newborn, the imago may be said to enable the most primitive form of human action. Although the infant's newfound capacity for coordination is still dependent upon the image of a being outside itself, the jubilation of the mirror phase consists in the child's dawning realization of itself as an agent. In the specular image, " t h e / is precipitated in a primordial form" (E:S, 2). "[The infant's] joy is due to his imaginary triumph in anticipating a degree of muscular co-ordination which he has not yet actually achieved." 8 The imaginary thus becomes the register of power par excellence. Fantasies of omnipotence and utter helplessness, mastery and victimization, reflect the essential structure of the imaginary. T h e logic of the imaginary is a bipolar one of acting and being acted upon. T o sum up the preceding points: although the functioning of the imaginary in human beings is in some ways reminiscent of perceptual trigger mechanisms in the behavior of animals, special effects are produced in the human being as a result of its prematurity of birth. 26

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In effect, the perceptual cues that operate for animals only within a framework of instincts are for human beings cut free from their moorings in any predetermined instinctual schema. As a result, the imago of the body's wholeness assumes a special motive power in the human being, with far-reaching effects for psychological development. For Lacan, the imago becomes the uniquely privileged psychological object. T h e imago is "the proper object of psychology in exactly the same way that the Galilean notion of the inert material point served as the foundation for physics" (E, 188). The Imaginary Register of the Drives In more than one respect, Lacan's conception of the imaginary bears important implications for the psychoanalytic theory of the instincts or drives (Trieberi). For Freud, a key goal of psychoanalytic research was to clarify the way in which psychological functions are related to a substratum of somatic impulses and energies. It was toward the end of explaining this relation of psyche to soma that Freud offered one of his earliest and most enduring concepts: that of the "instinctual representative" (Triebreprasentanz). Freud insisted that instinctual forces are never present in themselves, either consciously or unconsciously, but become psychically effective only in and through a sort of proxy or delegate. 9 He thus proposed that the antithesis of conscious and unconscious is not applicable to instincts. An instinct can never become an object of consciousness— only the idea that represents the instinct can. Even in the unconscious, moreover, an instinct cannot be represented otherwise than by an idea. If the instinct did not attach itself to an idea or manifest itself as an affective state, we could know nothing about it. (SE, 14:177) T h e matter becomes more complicated as Freud offered three terms, "psychical," and "ideational," as well as "instinctual representative," that are difficult to distinguish. Nevertheless, the general intent of all three terms is clear. T h e Freudian concept of instinct is poised precariously at the juncture of the somatic and the psychical. By differentiating the instinct from its representative, Freud meant to distinguish the upsurge of biological forces or excitations (Reizen) within the organism from the idea or mental content in which those forces become psychologically palpable. Lacan's concept of the imaginary is extremely suggestive at this point. In the mirror phase, the most 27

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primitive formations of the libido are thought to come into being in and through the recognition of a perceptual Gestalt. The imago might thus be taken to be the most fundamental form of instinctual representative. Recognition of the imago mobilizes vectors of impulse from out of the chaos of excitations in the infantile body. In this way, too, the Lacanian conception illuminates the connection between fantasy and the genesis of the drive impulse remarked upon by Freud but never fully worked out by him. Laplanche and Pontalis recall that "in one of his first reflections on fantasy, Freud notes that the Impulse could perhaps emanate from fantasy."10 They go on to conclude that "the origins of fantasy cannot be isolated from the origins of the drive itself."11 Lacan makes this conclusion explicit in his own terms: "The libidinal drive," he insists, "is centered on the function of the imaginary" (S.I, 122). Lacan finds in the imaginary matrix of the mirror phase, itself a sort of proto-fantasy, the first channeling of libidinal energy that will influence all subsequent fantasies. The image of the body thus establishes "an essential dimension of the human, which entirely structures his fantasy life" (S.I, 79). One of the things that makes Freud's theory of instincts difficult to handle is the double intention that motivates it. On the one hand, Freud wants to assert the rootedness of the mind in the body and to suggest the profound linkage between psychology and biology. At one point, he makes bold to assert that "all our provisional ideas in psychology may some day be based on an organic substratum" (SE, 14:78). Yet at the same time psychoanalysis continually rediscovers the autonomy of the psychical domain from the biological; indeed, the specific character of the psychical consists in that very autonomy. Psychoanalysis thus reveals that human desire is not perverted from its "natural" aims only in certain pathological conditions but is in a sense intrinsically and essentially perverse. Lacan is especially sensitive to the issues involved in this problem, and his concept of the imaginary directly addresses it. Lacan can suggest that the imaginary is "halfrooted in the natural."12 The recognition of the Gestalt of the human face, for example, is a spontaneous function of human perception that appears within the first two weeks of birth. Yet for all the seeming "naturality" of the imaginary, for all its apparent continuity with examples from the animal kingdom, it cannot be forgotten that the mirror phase marks the point at which the impulse-life of the human being is decisively tipped into the register of symbols. The Gestalt of the body image—what Lacan calls "imaginary anatomy"—has relatively little to do with real anatomy. Imaginary anatomy orients itself in accordance with only the most superficial aspects of the body form. The emphasis 28

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in Lacan's work, partly in polemical response to over-naturalistic readings of Freud, is to insist on the disjunction between human desire and any biological reality. Although the distance of the human being from the biological only comes fully into its own under the aegis of the linguistic signifier, it is visible already in the order of the imaginary. According to Lacan, the imaginary function in human beings, far from doing full justice to the biological reality of the organism, is intrinsically de-naturalizing. "This illusion of unity, in which a human being is always looking forward to self-mastery . . . is the gap separating man from nature that determines his lack of relationship to nature."13 We are led to suppose that it is the peculiar temporality of the imago that accounts for its unnaturality. We noted above how the fixity of the imago involves a "formal stagnation" that contrasts markedly with "the shifting field . . . of animal desire." It is thus the formal fixity of the imaginary Gestalt that distinguishes the drive in human beings from animal impulse. What differentiates the drive from any organic function is its constancy. The force of the drive remains constant over time. Lacan asks: What exactly does Freud mean by Trieb} Is he referring to something whose agency is exercised at the level of the organism in its totality? Does the real qua totality irrupt here? Are we concerned here with the living organism? No. . . . [T]he characteristic of the drive is to be a konstante Kraft, a constant force. The constancy of the thrust forbids any assimilation of the drive to a biological function, which always has a rhythm. The first thing Freud says about the drive is, if I may put it this way, that it has no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall. It is a constant force. (FFC, 164-65) Although once invested in a particular representative the drive tends toward constancy, the variable character of that investment over a range of possible objects adds another dimension to the essentially unnatural character of human impulses and further distances human desire from biological need. It is the variability of the drive with respect to its objects that leads Lacan to criticize Strachey's translation of the Freudian Trieb as "instinct." "What [Freud] calls Trieb" Lacan tells us, "is quite different from an instinct" (E:S, 236). That is to say, the Freudian Trieb cannot be identified with the patterns of behavior in animals that are effectively "pre-wired" in relation to the environmental stimuli that produce them and to the objects that satisfy them. 29

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When it is a matter of innate animal responses, Freud uses the term Instinkt, not Trieb.lA What distinguishes Trieb from animal instinct is the greater latitude and openness to variation between the drive impulse and its mode and means of satisfaction. Freud went so far as to say that, for the Trieb, the choice of object is, strictly speaking, a matter of indifference. 15 It belongs to the essential nature of Trieb to be errant, shifting, deviant—in a word, perverse. Lacan thus proposes to translate Trieb by "derive," a word that suggests not only being deflected or turned aside but also being set adrift in ever shifting currents. 16 Human life, it seems, moves a la derive, it goes down the river. 17 T h e Lacanian conception of the imaginary is especially well-suited to characterize the essentially perverse tendency of the drive in relation to its object. Even in animals, those functions governed by the imaginary are most liable to the slippage from one object to another that is so characteristic of human sexuality. "In the animal world," Lacan proposes, "the entire cycle of sexual behaviour is dominated by the imaginary. . . . [I]t is in sexual behavior that we find the greatest possibilities of displacement occurring, even for animals" (S.I, 138). T h e potential for displacement is at the heart of the imaginary function in human beings; it is, in fact, part of the very definition of "imaginary": In man, it is also principally on the sexual plane that the imaginary plays a role and that displacement occurs. We would say, then, that behavior can be called imaginary when its direction to an image, and its own value as an image for another person, renders it displaceable out of the cycle within which a natural need is satisfied.18 Lacan's conception of the imaginary thus serves to explain and elaborate much that is present in Freud's formulations about the drives, but it also invites us to take a further step. T h e thesis of the mirror stage suggests that the drives are from the start directed more toward form than toward content. Lacan's view leads us to suppose that the contingency of the object that characterizes the drives in human beings may stem from the fact that the imaginary function is oriented less to the qualities of any particular object than it is to its discrete character as an object. It is precisely the unity of the imaginary Gestalt that is salutory for the chaotic impulse-life of the human infant. Satisfaction is linked not simply to the proximity of the object but to the experience of the very qualities of unity, identity, and substantiality 30

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that ground recognition of its being an object. It is partly for this reason that Lacan makes so much of Freud's rather offhand remark about das Ding.19 For Lacan, human desire is forever haunted by the dream of "the thing," the dream of re-finding a primordially lost object, of recovering an original source of utter plentitude. T h e theory of the mirror phase suggests something both about the imaginary outline of das Ding but also about why human desire longs to "re-find" an object that was in fact never possessed, an object that existed only as a mirage, indeed, that may have existed only as the shadow of a mirage. The Imaginary Ego Lacan uses the concept of the imaginary and of the mirror phase to rethink the notion of the Freudian drive but also to recast the theory of the ego. For Lacan, the ego is essentially a formation of the imaginary. "The fundamental fact which analysis reveals to us, and which I am in the process of teaching you, is that the ego is an imaginary function" (S.I, 193). Recognition of the primitive imagos of the mirror phase forms the basis for what Freud called "primary identification." Lacan suggests that "we have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image" (E:S, 2). Lacan associates the ego with all of the characteristics of the imaginary we have adduced above: (1) T h e ego is constituted in relation to the perceptual Gestalt or imago of the body. "The theory we have in mind," says Lacan, "is a genetic theory of the ego. Such a theory can be considered psychoanalytic in so far as it treats the relation of the subject to his own body in terms of his identification with an imago."20 Akin to the effect of the imago in animal behavior, the ego is the product of a sort of primitive, animal fascination. We are to think here of the infant whose wide-eyed gaze, fixed on the face of its mother, seems to deliver it momentarily, as if by magic, from the chaos of movements that characterize most of its waking life. "Fascination," Lacan insists, "is absolutely essential to the phenomenon of the constitution of the ego. The uncoordinated, incoherent diversity of the [infant's] primitive fragmentation gains its unity in so far as it is fascinated" (S.II, 50). (2) As the form of the ego is modeled on the body image, it always tends toward the replication of a bounded unity. Lacan therefore 31

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claims that "the only homogenous function of consciousness is in the imaginary capture of the ego by its specular reflection" (E, 832). As imaginary, the primitive ego exhibits the same characteristics of permanence and identity possessed by things in the world. "Literally," Lacan never tires of insisting, "the ego is an object" (S.II, 44). (3) In its capacity of providing unity and stability of form, the imaginary Gestalt grounds a certain parity between the cognition of objects and the identity of the ego. "For there to be an object relation," Lacan claims, "there must already be a narcissistic relation of the ego to the other. Moreover, that is the primary condition for any objectification of the external world—of naive, spontaneous objectification no less than that of scientific objectification" (S.II, 94). This thesis installs at the most fundamental level of psychic life a profound libidinal equivalence of ego, others, and objects in the world—an equivalence that remains inchoatively present in all subsequent experience. (4) The ego and its function in the psychic economy is closely bound up with the primitive libidinal drives. "Everything pertaining to the ego is inscribed in imaginary tensions, like all the other libidinal tensions. Libido and ego are on the same side" (S.II, 326). "It is in the erotic relation in which the human individual fixes upon himself an image . . . that are to be found the energy and the form on which this organization of the passions that he will call his ego is based" (E:S, 19). (5) Finally, and perhaps related to the temporal fixity of the imago in human beings, the form of the ego is essentially resistant to change. The ego strives to retain its structure intact in diverse relations and over the course of various developmental transformations. "One cannot stress too strongly," Lacan suggests, "the irreducible character of the narcissistic structure" (E:S, 24). Even under the influence of the most far-reaching effects of maturation and sublimation, the psychic organization remains at least partially oriented by the structure of the ego and can therefore never fully escape from the orbit of the imaginary. "The narcissistic moment in the subject is to be found in all the genetic phases of the individual, in all the degrees of human accomplishment in the person" (E:S, 24). The history of the subject develops in a more or less typical series of ideal identifications which represent the purest psychic phenomena

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Reflections on Narcissism in that they essentially reveal the function of the imago. And we conceive the ego to be nothing other than a central system of these formations, a system which must be understood in its imaginary structure and its libidinal value. (E, 178)

Lacan's theory of the imaginary genesis of the ego in the mirror phase, although novel in many ways, is broadly consonant with Freud's own formulations about the nature and origin of the ego. The very term, "narcissism," chosen by Freud as the keynote of his theory of the ego, connotes the same specular relation to a reflected image that Lacan takes to be paradigmatic. This choice of terminology, Lacan suggests, "reveals in those who invented it the most profound awareness of semantic latencies" (E:S, 6).21 But there are other, less incidental, convergences. In fact, nearly every major point of Lacan's conception can be referred to a text of Freud in which a similar view is proposed. There is, for example, Freud's statement in his essay "On Narcissism" that "we are bound to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to develop" (SE, 14:76-77). This assertion agrees well with the Lacanian view of the origin of the ego in the mirror stage. The theory of the mirror phase shows us quite precisely how and why the ego does not exist from the start. Lacan's account reemphasizes the Freudian thesis that the ego is a differentiation, a bounded and specialized portion of the psychic apparatus. It faces us with the implication that the ego is not coextensive with the organism, nor even with the psychic individual or subject. The ego is not necessarily the "center" of the personality. Lacan forces us to re-ask the question of the nature of the ego and of its relations to the psychic system and to the organism as a whole. Lacan's emphasis on the prematurity of human birth and its significance for psychological development also finds an echo in Freud. From early on in his career, Freud had stressed the importance for psychic development of the incomplete maturation of the infant's bodily functions. When Freud refers in The Ego and the Id to the lengthy duration of the human being's "childhood dependence" and to "the diphasic onset of man's sexual life," he is sounding an old theme (SE, 19:35). In Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, Freud returns to the subject of prematurity in an especially significant way. There, he discusses the source of intrapsychic conflict and seeks to isolate the key factors that predispose human beings to neurosis. He mentions three factors: one phylogenetic, one psychological, and one biological. The phylogenetic factor is "based only on inference" and concerns the inherited residuum of a momentous event in the prehistory of the species—the killing 33

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of the primal father. The psychological factor is the existence of the ego itself, differentiated from the id and in conflict with it. T h e third factor is the biological fact of premature birth. Significantly, Freud explicitly relates this prematurity to the separation of ego and id: The biological factor is the long period of time during which the young of the human species is in a condition of helplessness and dependence. Its intra-uterine existence seems to be short in comparison with that of most animals, and it is sent into the world in a less finished state. As a result, the influence of the real external world upon it is intensified and an early differentiation between the ego and the id is promoted. (SE, 20:154-55) T h e emphasis on the image of the body that is so central to Lacan's mirror stage is also present in Freud. In The Ego and The Id, Freud supposes that "the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego, it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface" (SE, 19:26). So, too, Lacan's stress on identification and the object-character of the ego repeats Freud's conclusion, especially in his later works, that the ego is the product of identifications and is cathected by the id as an internal love-object. Even more striking, perhaps, is the corroboration in a text of Freud of Lacan's thesis about the role of visual "fascination" in the constitution of the ego. It occurs in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, a text in which Freud sets out to relate the formation and character of the individual ego to the psychological processes at work in groups. This comparison of individual and group psychology is itself significant in relation to the Lacanian view, as the theory of the mirror stage posits a profound identity of ego and other at the very foundation of psychic life. Lacan's view of the genesis of psychic structure blurs the distinction between self and other and therefore tends to close the gap between individual and group psychology from the very start. But the discussion in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego touches on themes that are more immediately reminiscent of Lacan's notion of the imaginary; indeed, Freud's book can be transposed almost page for page into the terms of Lacan's concept. The psychology of groups, which Freud calls "the oldest human psychology," is said to be essentially imagistic (SE, 18:123). "[The group] thinks in images, . . . the feelings of a group are always very simple and exaggerated. So that a group knows neither doubt nor uncertainty" (SE, 18:78). Throughout Freud's book, the bond by which the individual is connected to the group is compared to hypnosis. It is related to "the state of 'fascination' in which the hypnotized 34

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individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer" (SE, 18:7576). This fascination is above all a function of looking and being looked at. How, Freud poses, does the hypnotist exercise his power of possession? "By telling the subject to look him in the eyes; his most typical method of hypnotizing is by his look" (SE, 18:125). This power of looking and being looked at—the power of the imaginary—is an essential part of the psychic constitution of groups, "It is precisely the sight of the chieftain that is dangerous and unbearable for primitive people, just as later that of the Godhead is for mortals" (SE, 18:125). Whatever its correspondences with specifics of Freud's text, the importance of the more general issue at stake in Lacan's definition of the ego as an imaginary construct can hardly be overestimated. It is on this point that what is most distinctive about Lacanian psychoanalysis can be located, particularly in contrast to the trend toward ego psychology prevalent in England and in the United States. Taking its clue from Anna Freud's account of the ego's defensive strategies in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, ego psychology emphasizes the executive and synthetic functions of the ego. In this view, the ego is charged with the task of drawing up compromises between the demands of instinct within and the constraints of reality without. Accordingly, the ego tends increasingly to be identified with the core of individual identity. Among many Anglo-American analysts, the terms "ego" and "self are virtually synonymous. 22 This trend toward the concept of an agent-ego was given impetus by the publication of Heinz Hartmann's The Ego and the Problem ofAdaptation, in which the function of the ego was identified with adaptation to reality. For Hartmann, such adaptation is thought to be possible for the ego by virtue of its possession of a "conflict-free sphere," a margin of independence from the clamoring of the id. In turn, more successful adaptation and the greater ego strength implied by it is credited to the enlargement of the ego's conflict-free sphere. It is not difficult to see why and how the ego-psychological emphasis on adaptation leads to a distinctive understanding of the nature of psychological health and illness as well as a revised approach to the goals and methods of analytic practice. Psychological distress is thought to derive from inadequacies of the ego in being either too weak or too inflexible to perform its adaptive, integrative functions. The array of defensive strategies available to the ego are organized into a hierarchy of increasingly mature and reality-oriented solutions to the ego's task of mediating between satisfaction and security. 23 Correspondingly, the curative effects of the analytic situation are attributed to the presence of the more well-adjusted and successful ego 35

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of the analyst with which the patient identifies, at least temporarily, while engaged in the process of building new and more adequate egostructures. T h e analytic relation thus becomes a "therapeutic alliance" of egos, in which the patient can be said to "borrow" the ego strength of the analyst. Lacan's conception of the ego as a product of the imaginary leads him to emphatically reject the ego psychological program both in its conception of health and illness and in its understanding of the progress of the cure. T h e key point concerns Lacan's insistence that the ego cannot be taken to be identical with the human subject. In fact, the very heart of Lacan's appropriation of psychoanalysis, the fulcrum of his polemical "return to Freud," is his assertion that the true discovery of Freud consists in the distinction between the ego and the subject. Of course, to sustain this claim Lacan cannot always rely on the letter of Freud's text—Freud's rather indiscriminate use of the German Ich does not provide the index of differentiation suggested in French by moi andje. Is Lacan's interpretation a fair one? It is a question as large as any in Lacan's oeuvre, and we will return to it numerous times throughout the present study. To begin to understand what is at stake in the question we must succeed in clarifying the problem of alienation in the imaginary. For the moment, it can at least be said that Lacan's intention is unambiguous. He categorically denies any identity between the ego and the subject: I think I have sufficiently emphasized that the unconscious is the unknown subject of the ego, that it is misrecognized [meconnu] by the ego, which is der Kern unseres Wesens [the core of our being]. . . . The core of our being does not coincide with the ego. (S.II, 43) The ego is an imaginary function, it is not to be confused with the subject. (S./, 193) As a precipitate of the imaginary, the ego must be taken to be an internal object and, as such, an essentially fictive and alienating formation. In his early paper on the mirror phase, Lacan suggests that the imaginary ego, far from offering a conflict-free margin in which the potentialities of the subject can unfold, must be linked to the source of psychical illness: We can thus understand the inertia characteristic of the formations of the [imaginary] /, and find there the most extensive definition of neurosis—just as the captation of the subject by the situation gives us 36

Reflections on Narcissism the most general formula for madness, not only the madness that lies behind the walls of asylums, but also the madness that deafens the world with its sound and fury. (E:S, 7)

Especially in his early period, Lacan portrays the labor of analysis in terms of freeing the subject from the alienating effects of the imaginary. "Psychoanalysis alone," he claims, "recognizes this knot of imaginary servitude that love must always undo again, or sever" (E:S, 7). Analytic listening consists in locating the lines of cleavage between the empty discourse of the ego and the emergent speech of the true subject: It is therefore always in the relation between the subject's ego (moi) and the "I" (je) of his discourse that you must understand the meaning of the discourse if you are to achieve the dealienation of the subject. (E, 90) From this perspective, it becomes abundantly clear why Lacan's evaluation of the aims of analysis differ so dramatically from the ego * psychological program. T o begin with, Lacan raises the question of how, within the ego psychological strategy, the patient is ever to move beyond identification with the analyst. But Lacan's real concern is more radical. From a Lacanian point of view, ego psychology requires that the treatment deepen the very imaginary relationships of the ego that lie at the root of the patient's deepest conflicts. Psychoanalysis that deserves the name must effect precisely the opposite, bringing about a certain deconstruction of already existing imaginary encrustations. Lacan suggests that "what is really at issue, at the end of analysis, [is] a twilight, an imaginary decline of the world, and even an experience at the limit of depersonalization" (S.I 232). Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis: The Human Being against Itself We have introduced Lacan's distinction between the ego and the subject, and, although we have stressed its importance, we have yet to clarify it in relation to the theme of imaginary alienation. Before turning to that task, it is useful to note the way in which the opposition between ego and subject underlies Lacan's treatment of aggressivity. T h e topic of aggressivity will take us back to the problem of the death drive and will serve to link the death drive with narcissism. In his 1949 paper on "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis," Lacan rearticulates the 37

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Freudian connection between aggressivity and self-destructiveness by pointing to the special relation between human aggressivity and the Gestalt of bodily wholeness that models the primitive ego. T h e keynote of the essay is that narcissism is intrinsically generative of aggressivity. T h e first requirement for understanding Lacan's treatment of aggressivity is to keep to the distinction he draws between the violence of an animal whose attempts at satisfaction are frustrated by external circumstances and the meaning of specifically human aggressivity discovered by Freud. With respect to the latter, Lacan is unequivocal: "The aggressivity experienced by the subject at this point has nothing to do with the animal aggressivity of frustrated desire" {E:S, 42). Animal aggressivity is explained by the notion, so pleasing to common sense, that "after all, one must eat—when the pantry is empty, one tucks into one's fellow being [semblable]. . . . [Thus] one assumes that the behavior of subjects, their inter-aggressivity, is conditioned and capable of explication by a desire which is fundamentally adequate to its object" (S.H, 232). But, Lacan continues, "the significance of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is that that isn't enough. Masochism is not inverted sadism, the phenomenon of aggressivity isn't to be explained simply on the level of imaginary identification. (S.II, 232) No doubt there exists in human beings a form of aggression akin to the animal violence that originates in the frustration of an impulse directed by the imaginary. But it is not with that in mind that Lacan so closely associates aggressivity and narcissism. The phenomenon he tries to bring into focus in "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" draws its motive force from a dimension that is beyond the imaginary. It is a force of aggressivity that has its origin in the internal conflict between the subject and its own ego. Lacan asserts that it is the ego as an imaginary function of the self, as a unity of the subject alienated from itself, of the ego as that in which the subject can recognize itself at first only in abolishing the alter ego of the ego, which as such develops the very distinct dimension of aggression that is called from now on: aggressivity.24 It is only in view of the conflict between the imaginary ego and the claims of the subject beyond the imaginary and alienated by it that we can make sense of Lacan's definition of aggressivity "as a correlative tension of the narcissistic structure in the coming-to-be (devenir) of the 38

Reflections on Narcissism

subject" (E:S, 22). Lacan maintains that aggressivity in psychoanalysis cannot be understood apart from the conception of the ego as it appears in Freud's mature theory. The ego must be seen in its opposition to the subject of the unconscious. Freud's final formulation of the ego, Lacan claims, can be understood only by grasping its coordination with the notion of primordial masochism and that of the death instinct, laid down in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. . . . [T]his study will give meaning to the mounting interest claimed by aggressivity in the transference and in resistance no less than in Civilization and Its Discontents, in showing that it isn't a matter of the aggressivity one imagines at the root of the vital struggle. The notion of aggressivity corresponds, on the contrary, to the splitting of the subject against himself. (£, 344) Some commentators on Lacan have characterized aggressivity, exactly contrary to Lacan's intention, as a defense of the imaginary unity of the ego. Thus one finds it said that "the main point of Lacan's theory of aggressivity is that aggressivity is a defensive strategy used when the loss of an ideal threatens the unity of the self."25 The real upshot of Lacan's theory is more nearly the opposite. T h e aggressivity that interests Lacan is not a defense of an ideal unity of the self but a rebellion against it. Aggressivity is a drive toward violation of the imaginary form of the body that models the ego. It is because aggressivity represents a will to rebellion against the imago that aggressivity is specifically linked in fantasy to violations of bodily integrity. Lacan thus characterizes a Gestalt proper to aggression in man [in terms of] the images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body, in short, the imagos that I have grouped together under the apparently structured term of images of the fragmented body" (E:S, 11-12)

It is because aggressivity in psychoanalysis is provoked not by a threat to the unity of the ego but by the alienating structure of the ego itself that a maximum aggressiveness would be produced by the individual's confrontation with an exact replica of himself: Let us imagine what would take place in a patient who saw in his analyst an exact replica of himself. Everyone feels that the excess of aggressive tension would set up such an obstacle to the manifestation 39

Reflections on Narcissism of the transference that its useful effect could only be brought about extremely slowly, and this is what sometimes happens in the analysis of prospective analysts. To take an extreme case, if experienced in the form of strangeness proper to the apprehensions of the double, this situation would set up an uncontrollable anxiety on the part of the analysand. {E:S, 15-16)

T h e Lacanian theory of the imaginary origin of aggressivity helps to explain a conspicuous and enigmatic feature of human experience: the fascination with bodily violation and dismemberment. It is a phenomenon remarked by Plato in the Republic. In passing by the place of public execution, a certain Leontius is said to have found himself unable to resist the urge to gaze upon the dead bodies laid out there. "With wide, staring eyes, he rushed up to the corpses and cried, 'There, ye wretches, take your fill of the fine spectacle.'" 26 St. Augustine, too, observes the peculiar magnetism exerted by the sight of the violated body. "What pleasure can there be," he asks, "in the sight of a mangled corpse? Yet people will flock to see one lying on the ground, simply for the sensation of sorrow and horror that it gives them." 27 T h e captivating power of body-horrors noted in these classical texts is equally manifest in that modern banality, the "rubbernecking" of motorists passing a bad accident on the highway. What is it that they hope to see there by the roadside—hoping to see in the very heart of fearing it? As his "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" makes clear, the propensity to images of bodily evisceration is rooted for Lacan in tensions internal to the imaginary origin of the ego and represents the most primitive expression of the coming-into-being of the subject against the constraints of its imaginary identity. Properly understood, Lacan's notion of aggressivity restores the central point of Freud's view: aggressivity is a function of a primordial destructiveness toward oneself. T h e whole point of Lacan's "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis," as is evident from its first page, is to shed some light "on the enigmatic significance that Freud expressed in terms of the death instinct" (E:S, 8). Aggressivity for Lacan is tied to death— "aggressivity gnaws away, undermines, disintegrates; it castrates; it leads to death" (E:S, 10)—but not only to someone else's death. Lacan's approach allows us to understand anew why Freud claims that violence directed toward other persons or objects is traceable to an essentially self-destructive impulse. Freud explained the dynamic in terms of a "turning outward" of an original self-destructive force. Thus Freud claims that "a portion of the [death] instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness and 40

Reflections on Narcissism

destructiveness" (SE, 21:119). To be sure, there is a self-protective moment in this "turning outward" of the death drive, a projective mechanism that satisfies the self-destructive drive by means of a substitution. "In this way . . . the organism was destroying some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own self (SE, 21:119). T h e advantage of a Lacanian account is that it shows us the very workings of that mechanism in terms of an imaginary transitivism. For the infant of the mirror stage whose identity is bound up in a transitivistic parity, the fantasized dismemberment of another individual provides the unconscious equivalent of self-mutilation. T h e Lacanian perspective thus retains Freud's basic point and simplifies it. Along the axis of reflection in the imaginary double, murder and suicide amount to the same thing. In the mirror of the imaginary, sadism conceals and is ultimately motivated by a more fundamental masochistic impulse: For a sadistic fantasy to endure, the subject's interest in the person who suffers humiliation must obviously be due to the possibility of the subject's being submitted to the same humiliation himself. . . . It's a wonder indeed that people could ever think of avoiding this dimension and could treat the sadistic tendency as an instance of primal aggression pure and simple.28 What Is "Alienation"? We have opened up as yet only a very limited access to Lacan's thought, but already the fundamental point in his treatment of the death drive has emerged. What Freud called a drive toward death is to be related to the alienating structure of the imaginary ego. The death drive has its origin in the conflict between the subject and its imaginary identity. Thus Lacan asserts that "the death instinct in man [signifies] that his libido is originally constrained to pass through an imaginary stage" (S.I, 149). Or, as he puts it elsewhere: The libidinal tension that shackles the subject to the constant pursuit of an illusory unity which is always luring him away from himself, is surely related to that agony of dereliction which is Man's particular and tragic destiny. Here we see how Freud was led to his deviant concept of a death instinct.29 But although we may thus be able to determine a crucial element of Lacan's view, we will be helpless to develop it much further without 41

Reflections on Narcissism

specifying more precisely how and why Lacan conceives the imaginary to be alienating. Lacan unequivocally lays it down as the "essential point, [that] the first effect which appears from the imago in the human being is an alienation of the subject." It remains for us to determine what "alienation" means. The locus classicus for explaining the nature of imaginary alienation is the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave.30 T h e Hegelian paradigm constitutes a prototypical alienation of desire. Lacan continues, in the passage just quoted: The first effect which appears from the imago in the human being is an alienation of the subject. It is in the other that the subject first identifies and makes certain of himself—a phenomenon that is less surprising when we remember the fundamentally social conditions of the human Umwelt—and if one evokes the intuition which dominates the entire speculation of Hegel. The desire of man is constituted, he tells us, under the sign of mediation, it is desire for the recognition of his desire. (E, 181) T h e reference to Hegel lends confirmation to Lacan's thesis that the confusion of self and other in the imaginary establishes the fundamental structure of human desire as the desire of the other: "The object of man's desire, and we are not the first to say this, is essentially an object desired by someone else."31 A further value for Lacan of the allusion to Hegel's master and slave is that it corroborates the link Lacan finds between the first formations of identity in the mirror phase and the generation of a primordial competitiveness. For Hegel, too, a primordial aggressivity is installed at the very origin of human subjectivity. Finally, the reference to Hegel echoes the theme of death. Just as death expresses for Lacan the limit and breakdown of imaginary identification, death signifies for Hegel the stake against which the struggle for recognition is waged. But can the dynamics of alienation and aggressivity in psychoanalysis be fully explained in Hegelian terms? One of the key points to be explained is precisely how aggressivity is related to the alienating character of narcissism. It is readily understandable how imaginary identification involves a confusion of oneself with the image of the other, but how and why does it result in a primordial aggressivity? It is difficult to find passages in Lacan that directly clarify this point, perhaps because he tends to present the connection between narcissistic identification and aggressivity on a more or less empirical basis. 42

Reflections on Narcissism

Whatever makes it so, the vivid scenes of violation and dismemberment so characteristic of dreams, fantasies, and delusions give evidence of a positive desire for destruction linked to the imago of the bodily form. But the task of unraveling the meaning of the death drive forces us to conceive the relation of narcissism to aggressivity more exactly. An adequate theory of the imaginary genesis of the ego must account for narcissistic aggressivity as well as it explains the meaning of infantile transitivism. We are led to suppose that imaginary identification is somehow profoundly unsatisfying, that it generates a primordial frustration or privation. What could this mean? What sort of frustration is this? Following the Hegelian clue, alienation appears as a kind of slavery and aggressivity as the refusal of the slave to accept his oppression. But, at this point, one may question whether the analogy to the Hegelian scheme is not more confusing than it is clarifying. The idealist presuppositions that undergird the Hegelian account of the struggle between master and slave are, after all, among the first pillars of metaphysics swept away by the force of the Freudian discovery. For all Lacan's allusions to Hegel, there remains an important margin of difference between the Hegelian philosophy and psychoanalysis. As Rosalind Coward and John Ellis have observed: Although Lacan often refers to Hegel in a "totally didactic fashion," the dialectic of desire as it appears in Lacan is in no way comparable to Hegelian idealism. It can in no way be seen as the same as the alienation of self-consciousness of The Phenomenology of the Spirit. . . . J-A. Miller asked: "Surely the definition of being born into, constituted in, and regulated by a field external to him, is very different from the alienation of self-consciousness?" Lacan replied: "Yes indeed. . . . [I]t is much more a case of Lacan vs. Hegel."32 Elsewhere, Lacan remarks that it may be no bad thing to see what the root of this celebrated alienation really is. Does it mean, as I seem to be saying, that the subject is condemned to seeing himself emerge, in initioy only in the field of the Other? Could it be that? Well it isn't. Not at all—not at all—not at all. {FFC, 210)

We should resist the temptation, invited by Lacan's own references to Hegel and relied upon by many commentators of Lacan, to explain imaginary alienation solely in terms of the relations between the subject 43

Reflections on Narcissism

and an other or others outside itself. It is not enough to say, as Anika Lemaire puts it, that "alienation is the fact of giving up a part of oneself to another. T h e alienated man lives outside of himself."33 T h e alienation Lacan points to is correlative with the constitution of psychic identity at the most primordial level—a level that developmentally precedes the structuration of an intersubjective dialectic. It is precisely the point of Lacan's mirror stage to delineate a period in which self and other are radically indistinguishable. Yet it is in this very period that the most profound alienation occurs. T h e question therefore arises: who or what is it that is alienated? 34 In order to conceive alienation as an intersubjective conflict in which the self-possession of the subject is compromised by its dependence on the image of the other, it is necessary to assume the agency of an idealist or existential subject who feels so compromised. We must tacitly assume the existence of a sort of homunculus-subject that resents its dependence on the other. But in the Lacanian scheme, such an assumption is illegitimate. T h e existence of such a subject, a petit-homme-qui-est-dans-Vhomme, is precisely the sort of thing to which the whole of Lacan's work stands opposed. 35 But further, even if we could answer the question about who is alienated in imaginary identification, we still lack an account of why they might react aggressively to it. To explain alienation in terms of an intersubjective conflict presupposes not only a subject who experiences itself as alienated, but also assumes something like a primordial impetus toward self-sufficiency in the face of which dependence on the other is objectionable. Far from qualifying as an originary motivation in human beings, such a desire for independence from the other is more likely to appear in the light of psychoanalysis as a hard-won and highly derivative achievement of psychic development. I offer these considerations merely to suggest that the alienation Lacan associates with the formation of the ego is not as readily understandable as it may at first appear. Above all, alienation is not well accounted for by the recourse to a simple opposition between intersubjective domination and autonomy—a recourse that Lacan's own references to Hegel tend to encourage. Neither is it readily conceivable how such an intersubjective conflict could be possible for an infant in the mirror stage, nor is it clear, even if we grant the possibility of an infantile experience of domination, how and why the infant would object or react aggressively to it. T h e main problem with the master-slave approach is that it locates the meaning of alienation between two individuals. On a closer look, it is clear that the alienation Lacan has in mind is describable (and, indeed, must be describable) in other terms. What is at stake is an 44

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alienation of oneselffrom oneself. What is alienating is not the relation of the nascent ego to another ego, but of the inchoate subject to its own ego. Thus Lacan claims that "the spatial captation of the mirrorstage, even before the social dialectic, [is] the effect in man of an organic insufficiency" (E:S, 4, my emphasis). We must interpret imaginary alienation in a way that makes sense of the fact, as Lacan puts it, that this form [of the imago] situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being (le devenir) of the subject asymptotically, whatever the success of the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve as / his discordance with his own reality. (E:S, 2, my emphasis) If the imaginary formation of the ego somehow generates a primordial frustration, it is not owing to any obstacle or inhibition the ego experiences from outside objects or persons. It is the ego itself that is frustrating. "The ego," Lacan maintains, ". . . is frustration in its essence" (E:S, 42). Similarly, narcissistic aggressivity is first of all a response not to a social but to an internal conflict. Lacan conceives of aggressivity, as Freud did, in terms of an original aggressivity toward oneself. "The aggressiveness involved in the ego's fundamental relationship to other people . . . " Lacan insists, "is based upon the intra-psychic tension we sense in the warning of the ascetic that 'a blow at your enemy is a blow at yourself/ "36 "It is clear," he claims, "that the structured effect of identification with the rival is not self-evident, except at the level of fable, and can only be conceived of by a primary identification that structures the subject as a rival with himself' (E:S, 22). T h e key to the problem imaginary alienation lies in conceiving what it means for the subject to be constituted "as a rival with himself." Only by clarifying this point will it be possible to unfold Lacan's answer to the problem of the death drive. But how are we to proceed? In the following chapter, I will propose a reading of Lacan's concept of the imaginary in terms not often met with in commentaries on his work: a reading in terms of psychic energetics. Only after this reading has been established will it be possible to return to the other, more familiar characterization of alienation in terms of the desire of the other. In the meantime, however, an energetic perspective will open up fresh and fertile possibilities for interpretation.

45

3

The Energetics of the Imaginary Why does the subject alienate himself the more he affirms himself as ego? Thus we return to the question of the preceding session—what is it, beyond the ego, that seeks to make itself recognized? —from the seminar of Jacques Lacan

I have suggested that the question of the death instinct in Lacan is closely related to the notion of imaginary alienation. The nature of this alienation, however, remains obscure. The appeal to an intersubjective dialectic, which seeks to characterize alienation as a compromise of personal autonomy, does not account well for an essential point of Lacan's conception: alienation in the imaginary is first and foremost an estrangement of oneself from oneself. The imaginary formation of the ego is alienating not just because it is modeled on an other outside the subject but because imaginary identification somehow splits the subject from itself. In this chapter, we will try to move beyond this impass by offering an alternative account of imaginary alienation from the standpoint of psychic energetics. Why energetics? The metaphor of psychic energy may seem an unlikely point of reference for a discussion of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, it offers a valuable orientation with respect to Freud's system of concepts. T h e energetic perspective will help to clarify what Lacan means by alienation in a way that creates a bridge between the discourse of Lacan and the energetic assumption on which Freud's thinking was based. In this way, an energetic interpretation of the imaginary prepares the way for outlining a distinctively Lacanian conception of the death drive.

The Career of a Metaphor T h e metaphor of psychic energy was arguably the single most significant idea relied upon by Freud in the theoretical elaboration of his 47

Energetics of the Imaginary

experience. Especially as it was made more precise in the concept of libido, the energy metaphor functioned as a quantitative principle by means of which the psychical equivalence of manifestly different mental contents could be postulated. The notion of psychic energy, along with its companion idea of energy cathexis or investment, played a crucial role in conceptualizing such basic mechanisms as displacement, condensation, resistance, and repression. But, further, energetics makes a special claim on our attention in this essay as it is obviously a primary frame of reference for any discussion of what Freud meant by "drives." T h e notion of some raw force or energy coming to bear on psychic life seems especially unavoidable in the case of the death drive, thought by Freud to be the most primordial of the drives. In addition, the task immediately before us is to make sense of the Lacanian notion of imaginary alienation. We are therefore concerned to determine more precisely the functions and effects of the narcissistic ego. An energetic perspective is relevant as it was precisely a problem of energetics—the problem of the investment or disinvestment of the ego and of objects—that led Freud to propose his theory of narcissism. T o return to the metaphor of energetics is to return to the original staging of Freud's theory of the ego. But even if we accept the centrality of energetics in Freud's thought, how can reemphasizing it be anything but step backward? Isn't Freud's concept of psychical energy the most anachronistic and outmoded part of psychoanalysis? One could easily devote a long book to cataloguing the successive waves of criticism to which the concept of psychic energy has been subjected. There is wide agreement, as L. Breger puts it, that Freud's "emphasis on the basic urges and forces that underlie human psychology—in man's unconscious impulses, in sexuality and aggressivity—have made [psychoanalysis] the most influential theory of human motivation." 1 But there is equally widespread consensus with Breger's caveat that "the conceptual underpinning of the motivational theory—the concepts of psychic energy, of libido, of conservation or economy, of the life and death instincts—has long been its weakest aspect." 2 In the first place, the link between Freud's idea of psychic energy and the concepts of energy or force in the natural sciences that inspired it is based, at best, on a very liberal analogy. "The psychoanalytic system is based on energy concepts," K. S. Lashley has charged, "and I do not believe that the data justify them. There is no known source of energy of such character in the nervous system."3 Arguing along similar lines, Roy Grinker charges that "the series of words— instinct, drive, action, force, and energy—are misconceptions. There is no relation of 'psychic energy' to any known form of energy, and it 48

Energetics of the Imaginary

is not remotely related to the physical concept of force." 4 The validity of the very concept of psychical energy has thus come into question, but, in addition, as Grinker points out, energetics is becoming more and more obsolete as psychoanalysis turns to other theoretical frameworks that seem to do very well without it, Slowly but inevitably, information theory is replacing libido theory and its energic concomitant.. . . [S]ilently but definitely the dual drive theory, never fully accepted even by its originator, Freud, is being replaced by a monolithic theory of motivation (Eros) not too different from the ancient ideas of life. Life is a process that is there and necessary. Any other consideration at this time becomes speculative science, philosophy, or religion.5 Any recourse to the idea of psychic energy runs against a general tide of criticism of organicist and vitalist notions in psychoanalysis, but isn't it especially unsuitable for a discussion of Lacan? Isn't the critique of psychoenergetics one instance in which Lacan is moving in harmony with the general trend? What else are we to conclude from Lacan's thesis that "the unconscious is structured in the most radical way like a language"? Isn't it Lacan who insists that the pure gold of analysis is to be found, not in any effulgence of affect, but in the verbal articulations of the patient's discourse, in the algebra of the signifier? Doesn't this mean that it is precisely the notion of psychic energy that Lacan's reinterpretation of Freud seeks to eradicate from psychoanalysis? Clearly, the place of energetics in Lacanian psychoanalysis is problematic. Paul Ricoeur has faulted Lacan on precisely this point, claiming that Lacan's linguistic interpretation fails to encompass the energetic-hermeneutic duality of Freud's thought. 6 But, on closer examination, it will be seen that the energetic standpoint is not so much absent in Lacan as it is significantly reconceptualized. Lacan is well aware of the importance of energetics in Freud. "The innovation of Freud," he writes in his early monograph on paranoid psychosis, "seems to us capital in that it brings to psychology an energetic notion, which provides a common measure to very diverse phenomena." 7 In fact, the notion of libido reveals itself in Freud's doctrine as an extremely broad theoretical entity, which far outstrips the specialized sexual desire of the adult. It tends to identify itself rather with desire, the eros of antiquity taken in a very extended sense, namely as the ensemble of appetites in the human being which surpass the strict limits of conservation. . . . 49

Energetics of the Imaginary

For all the relative imprecision of the concept of libido, it seems to us to retain its value.8

Our immediate problem is the nature of imaginary alienation, for which the Hegelian perspective was seen to be only partially illuminating. It is especially suggestive, therefore, that Lacan emphasizes that the standpoint of energetics so central to Freud is precisely what is lacking in Hegel. Thus Lacan claims that "in Freud something is talked about, which isn't talked about in Hegel, namely energy. That is the major preoccupation, the dominant preoccupation" (S.II, 74). It is with respect to energetics that Lacan maintains that "Hegel is at the limit of anthropology. Freud got out of it. His discovery is that man isn't entirely in man" (S.II, 72). Lacan obviously appreciates the importance to Freud of an energetic perspective and he does not hesitate to rely upon many of the Freudian concepts most thoroughly informed by the energetic metaphor. In his seminar of 1963-64, for example, Lacan counts the problem of the drive among the "four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis."It is, of course, precisely the point of Lacan's work to demonstrate the circuiting of unconscious desire in the system of the signifier. T h e emphasis is shifted from force to structure. Any attempt to specify organic forces acting upon psychic life is rejected in favor of linguistic, even mathematical analysis. However, the point of Lacan's linguistic approach is not to throw out the notion of energetics altogether, but rather to re-pose it in a way that both radicalizes it and makes it less accessible to reification. Lacan demonstrates the metonymy of desire in language, but he never intends simply to identify the life of unconscious desire discovered by Freud with the object studied by linguistics. In Lacan's later work, energetics is apparently absent because he conceives of it by means of another category: that of the "real." There are good reasons, as I hope to show in the course of this chapter, why Lacan shifts the problem of energetics into the domain of the real—the domain of the unthinkable and, as he puts it, of the impossible. But my first concern will be to demonstrate that the nature of the imaginary function and the alienation associated with it is approachable in energetic terms. An energetics of the imaginary provides a key for determining the relation of the imaginary to the real. When this is done, it will become possible to see Lacan's innovation in relation to Freud's order of concepts in a way that lends new meaning to the notion of the death drive. 50

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Returning to Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology Lacan nowhere devotes a sustained discussion to the topic of psychic energy. Determining the place and meaning of energetics in Lacan is therefore unavoidably a matter of weaving together a number of oblique references and drawing out their implications. All the more valuable, therefore, is the commentary Lacan offers on Freud's most sustained effort to construct a purely quantitative account of the psychic apparatus: the Project for a Scientific Psychology of 1895. 9 Before turning to Lacan's commentary, it is worthwhile to examine Freud's argument in some detail. References to Freud's views in the Project will help locate the place of energetics in Lacan but will also be of indispensable value in the following chapter when we turn to a more specific analysis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The theory elaborated in the Project is at every point based on the assumption of psychic energy. Nowhere else in Freud's work is his conception of the mind as an apparatus for mastering excitation more rigorously worked out. Freud sets out to "represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles" (SE, 1:295). His concern is to identify the basic psychic structures that make possible "processes such as stimulus, substitution, conversion, and discharge" (SE, 1:295). He is guided by "the conception of neuronal excitation as quantity in a state of flow" (SE, 1:296). The basic building blocks of Freud's theory in the Project are the neurones, thought to be capable of absorbing and discharging quantities of energy. 10 As each individual neurone exhibits the double function of investment and discharge, it mimics the operation of the psychic apparatus as a whole. "A single neurone is thus a model of the whole nervous system with its dichotomy of [afferent and efferent] structures, the axis-cylinder being the organ of discharge" (SE, 1:298). In the interconnecting network of neurones, the economy of excitation and discharge is organized by a series of differentiated thresholds or "contact barriers" between neurons. T h e system of contact barriers thus constitutes an architecture of Bahnungen, or pathways ("facilitations" in Strachey's translation), which are more and less permeable to the transmission of energy. Thus conceived, the function of the psychic apparatus is to regulate the flow of energy along variously conducive pathways. This regulatory function is subject to the interplay of two basic principles. T h e first and most basic principle is that of neuronic inertia (Neuronentrdgheit), according to which the neurones strive for complete discharge of 51

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energy. The system thus aims at "neutralizing the reception of Qn [quantity of energy] by giving it o f f (SE, 1:296). This discharge is primarily accomplished in one of two ways. First, the quantity of energy taken on by a neurone may be passed along by associative links to other neurones. In a second mode of discharge, more satisfying for the system as a whole, neuronal energy is directed into the musculature and expended in motor activity. To these primary strategies of discharge an auxiliary is added: that of flight from the stimulus. When it is not possible to discharge energy taken on by contact with some stimulus, it may be necessary simply to get out of range of the source of excitation. However, not all sources of stimulation can be dealt with in this way. In particular, excitations originating from the interior of the organism cannot be eliminated by flight. Freud's statement on this point is worth quoting at length: The principle of inertia is, however, broken through from the first owing to another circumstance. . . . [T]he nervous system receives stimuli from the somatic element itself—endogenous stimuli—which have equally to be discharged. These have their origin in the cells of the body and give rise to the major needs: hunger, respiration, sexuality. From these the organism cannot withdraw as it does from external stimuli. . . . They only cease subject to particular conditions, which must be realized in the external world. (Cf., for instance, the need for nourishment.) . . . In consequence, the nervous system is obliged to abandon its original trend to inertia (that is, to bringing the level [of Qn] to zero). It must put up with [maintaining] a store of Qn sufficient to meet the demand for a specific action. Nevertheless, the manner in which it does this shows that the same trend persists, modified into an endeavor at least to keep the Qn as low as possible and to guard against any increase of it—that is, to keep it constant. All the functions of the nervous system can be comprised either under the aspect of the primary function or of the secondary one imposed by the exigencies of life. (SE, 1:296-297) In relation to "endogenous stimuli" the function of the contact barriers is in large part defensive: they protect against unmanageable excitations originating within the organism itself by setting u p points of resistance to the passage of energy between neurones. The barrier network serves to filter or diminish internal excitations. In a limited sense, the inhibitory contact barriers and the restricted pathways or facilitations they establish can be said to be continuous with the first principle of inertia: they function to prevent investments of energy 52

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that would otherwise have to be evacuated. T h e system thus "avoids, partly at least, being filled with Qn (cathexis), by setting u p facilitations. It will be seen, then, that facilitations serve the primary function" (SE, 1:301). But in another, important sense, the barriers work in opposition to the primary tendency toward complete and immediate evacuation of energy and thereby establish a second basic principle of functioning. T h e contact barriers inhibit the flow of energy, but also make possible the storage of limited quantities of energy in "permanently cathected neurones." A quantity of energy arriving at such a 'facilitated neurone' is not immediately passed off to another neurone but is at least temporarily retained or stored. Such storage of energy, although it violates the basic drive toward discharge, serves the advantage of the organism as a whole by establishing a reservoir of energy for the performance of specific actions in response to basic needs of the organism. In accordance with this second principle, the apparatus seeks not evacuation but constancy and stability of energy. Over and against the principle of inertia, therefore, Freud poses the principle of constancy. In distinguishing the two principles of inertia and constancy, Freud lays down the first articulation of the "primary" and "secondary" processes. The endogenous energies screened out by the "phi system" of the contact barriers represent what Freud will later come to call "drives." T h e system of facilitated neurones, on the other hand, which effects a general inhibition of excitations, but with the benefit that a quantity of energy is maintained to "meet the demand for a specific action," comes to be identified with the secondary organization of the ego. 11 According to the views set forth in the Project, therefore, the ego is an essentially defensive, regulatory structure. It establishes a controlled economy of excitations by acting as a kind of sieve or semipermeable membrane. It admits some portion of energies impinging upon the psychic apparatus from both outside and inside the organism but screens out other energies, thereby protecting the system from overload. In his 1955 seminar on the ego, Lacan identifies the barrier-pathway system outlined by Freud in the Project with a function of the imaginary. Such an identification is not surprising: in each case it is the problem of the origin and structure of the ego that is at stake. Yet pausing to examine the comparison more carefully is helpful both for niaking sense of the Freudian scheme and for understanding better the nature of the imaginary as Lacan conceives it. The gist of Lacan's claim is that the inhibitory function of the ego attributed by Freud to the system of contact barriers is to be related to the effects of the 53

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imaginary Gestalt. It is the gestalt function of perception that performs the selective, filtering action characteristic of the ego. "Freud isn't a Gestaltist," Lacan poses, "one cannot give him credit for everything— but he does sense the theoretical demands which gave rise to the Gestaltist construction": Indeed, so that a living being doesn't perish every time it turns round, it must possess some adequate reflection of the external world. This tells you that this schema is in fact based on what will later be isolated in the term "homeostasis." We find this here already in the notion of an equilibrium which has to be conserved and of a buffer-zone, which maintains the excitations at the same level, which therefore serves as much for not recording as for recording badly. It records, but in a filtered fashion. The notion of homeostasis is therefore already there, implying something which is called an energy both at the entry and the exit. (S.II, 107) The gestalt idea serves to explain the filtering process, presumably by analogy to the selective process by which a figure is separated from a ground in the formation of a visual Gestalt.12 Relatively little of the total content of the perceptual field is focally included in the gestalt figure. In fact, the figure comes forward to explicit awareness only because the background has been screened out or dimmed down in some way- In a parallel fashion, only a fraction of the energies coming to bear on the psychic apparatus are allowed to enter and influence psychic processes. 13 Like the figure abstracted from its background in the perceptual Gestalt, the ego is constructed by means of a bifurcation within the total economy of organismic excitations. T h e ego inevitably represents a reduction of the total quantity of excitation, a limited charge that has been siphoned off and forced to circulate within the confines of a closed structure. 14 The gestalt principle enables us to understand how the filtering process is at the same time an in-forming of sensation. The perceptual Gestalt produces a selection of stimuli, but also presents a definite, formal structure and internal organization. The gestalt function thus allows us to answer a question that otherwise remains unresolved in Freud, namely: How it is that the contact barriers, which are thought to be merely valvelike stoppage points between neurones, give rise to a system of pathways serviceable for the guidance of behavior? Left as it stands, Freud's account lacks an answer to this question. Thus Lacan claims that 54

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[Freud's] schema proves to be inadequate. If the nervous system in fact operates a filtering, it is an organized, progressive filtering, which brings with it facilitations. However, nothing here entitles one to think that the facilitations will ever have a functional utility. The sum total of all these facilitations, the events, the incidents which have occurred in the development of the individual, constitutes a model which provides the measure of the real. Is that the imaginary? The imaginary must indeed be there. . . . In short, memory is here conceived as a succession of engrams, as the sum of a series of facilitations, and this conception proves to be completely inadequate if we don't introduce the notion of image into it. (S.II, 107-8) The Fertile Remainder: Something Left To Be Desired Lacan's rereading of the Project in the light of the gestalt concept gives a clue for determining what we might call "the energetics of the imaginary." T h e key point can be modeled on the double function Freud attributes to the network of contact barriers. T h e phi system of barrier-facilitations admits and stores measured quantities of energy only insofar as it blocks or inhibits energy transfer within the psychic apparatus as a whole. T h e link between these two functions of storage and inhibition can be readily conceived on the level of individual neurones. If a flow of energy from one neurone to another is inhibited by the existence of a contact barrier between them, some or all of the energy will remained bottled up, as it were, in the first neurone. But what is thus envisaged on the microscopic level of neurones is also discernible on the macroscopic level of psychic agencies, and it is on the latter plane that the distinction between the two functions becomes most significant. T h e scheme of the Project anticipates a fundamental ambiguity in the function of the ego as it appears in Freud's mature theory, according to which the activity of the ego is divided between storage and inhibition of energy. On the one hand, the ego is thought to absorb instinctual energy into itself. It is posed by Freud "as a great reservoir of libido, from which libido is sent out to objects and which is always ready to absorb libido flowing back/rom objects" (SE, 18:257). On the other hand, the ego is poised defensively in relation to the id and is, to that extent, essentially resistant to the demands of instinct. Laplanche and Pontalis can therefore say summarily that "in Freud's description of the defensive conflict. . . the ego emerges as the agency which opposes itself to desire." 15 55

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This double function of energy absorption and inhibition is clearly present in Lacan's formulation. The imaginary is associated by Lacan with the genesis and action of the libidinal drives. "Libido and ego," Lacan says, "are on the same side" (S.II, 326). "The libidinal drive is centered on the function of the imaginary" (S.I, 122). But, in addition, the imaginary Gestalt acts as a buffer or filter that refuses the transmission of energy. Lacan claims that "the ego, doubly emphasizing the regulatory function of this buffer, must allow the maximum inhibition of the passage of energy through this system" (S.II, 110). Distinguishing between what is absorbed by the ego and what is excluded by it echoes another way of characterizing the genesis and function of the ego that occurs repeatedly in Freud: that of the analogy to bodily incorporation and expulsion. It is the latter moment of expulsion or exclusion that is decisive for determining the ego's relation to the psychic apparatus as a whole. As Lacan comments, "the specific domain of the primitive ego, Urich or Lustich, is constituted by a splitting, by a differentiation from the external world—what is included inside is differentiated from what is rejected by the processes of exclusion, Aufstossung, and projection" (S.I, 79). "The ego makes itself manifest there as defence, as refusal" (S.I, 53). It is in a similar register of primordial exclusion or refusal that Freud conceives the genesis of the unconscious. "What does Freud now tell us about the unconscious?" Lacan asks. "We declare that it is constituted essentially, not by what the unconscious may evoke, extend, locate, bring out of the subliminal, but by that which is, essentially, refused" (FFC, 43). T h e primitive form of the ego is constituted by a primordial force of exclusion—an exclusion that, as Luce Irigaray remarks, is an essential feature of the imaginary function. In its "structuring powers," she writes, the specular image, visualization of the signifier, . . . well illustrates the neurological anticipation which it permits for the still immature infant, anticipation from which it finds itself constituted by the signifier as "one." But this unification is also a disjunction. If the imaginary unifies, it [also] separates.. . . All structure supposes an exclusion, an empty ensemble, its negation, as the very condition of its functioning.16 T h e effect of the imago introduces a primordial bifurcation in the totality of the organism's energies. In doing so, it gives rise to a radical discord between the ego and the organism as a whole. Thus Lacan claims that 56

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experience demonstrates on the simplest glance that nothing separates the ego from its ideal forms . . . and that everything limits it with respect to the being which it represents, since almost the whole of the life of the organism escapes it, not only in so far as that life is the most commonly misrecognized by the ego, but in that for the most part it doesn't have to be known by the ego. (£, 179-80) The key point that emerges from Lacan's conception of the imaginary, approached here in terms of energetics, is that the unity of the imago remains forever inadequate to the fullness of desire. There is always a remainder, always something left out. Desire is split against itself insofar as only a portion of the forces animating the living body find their way into the motivating imaginary Gestalt. The imaginary ego is characterized by "its essential resistance to the elusive process of Becoming, to the variations of Desire." 17 What is left out, what is excluded, constitutes an ineffable reservoir of desire: The original notion of the totality of the body as ineffable, as lived, the initial outburst of appetite and desire comes about in the human subject via the mediation of a form which he at first sees projected, external to himself, and at first, in his own reflection.. . . Man knows that he is a body—although he never perceives it in a complete fashion, since he is inside it, but he lives it. This image is the ring, the bottle-neck, through which the confused bundle of desires and needs must pass in order to be him, that is to say in order to accede to his imaginary structure. (S.I, 176) The energetics of the imaginary enables us to understand the note of opposition that Lacan remarks between drive and desire. It is because the imaginary siphons off and directs only a portion of the energies animating the organism that the drive, which is "centered on the function of the imaginary," must always be a partial drive. "Every drive [is] by its essence as drive, a partial drive" (FFC, 203). T h e drive is "partial," in Freud's idiom, because the drive originates in relation to the function of a single erotogenic zone and assumes the form of a "component instinct." But it is precisely in the register of what Freud called "erotogenic zones" that Lacan speaks of an "imaginary anatomy." T h e drive is a specification or determination of desire in terms of selected organ functions, but, as such, no drive can exhaust the potentialities of desire. At the same time, an energetic perspective brings Lacan's theory of the imaginary into accord with Freud's insistence that the somatic substratum of the drive remains intrinsically 57

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inaccessible to consciousness. On the level of a purely somatic excitation, drive energy remains an ineffable, unthinkable organic force or pressure. Lacan's conception of the mirror phase requires us to think of the situation of the newborn in terms of a primal chaos of wholly unsymbolized somatic excitations. Identification with the imago is said to be "the psychic relationship par excellence" insofar as the imago functions to erect the most elemental forms of psychic life out of an anarchy of unformed and inarticulate organic strivings. 18 Prior to the recognition of the primordial imagos of the mirror stage, the force of "instinct" remains dispersed amid a panoply of bodily energies. T h e psychically unprocessed exigency of the body can thus be indicated only as an unknowable "X." "If, for lack of representation, [the Trieb] is not there," Lacan poses, "what is this Trieb? We may have to consider it as being only Trieb to come" (FFC, 60). We are now in a position to interpret imaginary alienation as an alienation of oneself from oneself T h e function of the imago is alienating as it installs the most primitive formation of psychic identity only at the cost of refusing a portion of the organism's vital energies. T h e dynamism and structure of the imaginary is essentially twofold. It is divided between an anarchy of impulses that remain outside the ego and a partial investment in an imaginary unity: The entire dialectic which I have given you . . . under the name of the mirror stage is based on the relation between, on the one hand, a certain level of tendencies which are experienced—let us say, for the moment, at a certain point in life—as disconnected, discordant, in pieces—and there's always something of that that remains—and on the other hand, a unity with which it is merged and paired. It is in this unity that the subject for the first time knows himself as a unity, but as an alienated, virtual unity. (S.II, 50) T h e salutary effect of the imago is to inform and mobilize the heterogeneity of infantile impulses and to enable their discharge in the most primitive form of action. The "fictive," alienating character of the imaginary formation is explainable in terms of the notion that the imago can "represent" only a fraction of the organism's panoply of vital energies. T h e imago fulfills its function of unity only by imposing an intrinsic limitation—only, in effect, by leaving something out. A quantity of energy is pressed into the service of the drive, but there is always an excluded and un-imaged remainder. "The Urbild of this formation [of the imaginary ego]," Lacan concludes, is "alienating . . . 58

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by virtue of its capacity to render extraneous" (E:S, 21). The alienating tension that is established in this way between the organism and its imaginary identity effects all subsequent psychic life. "This discordance between the ego and the being," Lacan suggests, "will be the fundamental note which will be retained in the whole harmonic scale which, through the phases of psychic history, will function to resolve it by developing it" (E, 187). As we have seen, the energetics of the imaginary is conceivable by analogy to the selective structure of the perceptual act. What is organized by inclusion and exclusion is in one case quantities of energy, in the other case, portions of the sensory field. Energetically, the imaginary articulates a directed impulse by suppressing an original energic heterogeneity; perceptually, it gives rise to a unitary Gestalt by shunting the greater part of incoming sensory information into a relatively unformed and irrelevant background. But we can further speculate on the nature of imaginary alienation by referring to its temporal dimension. The fixity and constancy of the imago gives rise to a temporal exclusion insofar as it poses an impediment to the natural unfolding of instinctual impulses over the course of development. Lacan thus maintains that the imaginary formation of the ego "turns the I into that apparatus for which every instinctual thrust constitutes a danger, even though it should correspond to a natural maturation" (E:S, 5— 6). He asks of the imaginary unity of the ego: "How can one not conceive that each great instinctual metamorphosis in the life of the individual will once again challenge its delimitation, composed as it is of a conjunction of the subject's history and the unthinkable innateness of his desire?" (E:S, 19-20). What is "excluded" by the imago can therefore be viewed from either of two angles: in analogy to the intrinsic selectivity of the perceptual Gestalt, the imago entrains certain potential impulses and excludes others; correlatively, owing to the temporal fixity of the imago, it excludes new forms of impulse arising in the course of a natural development. The perspective of energetics helps illuminate a number of key points in Lacan's thinking about the imaginary. First, Lacan attributes to the imaginary ego a function of distortion or meconnaissance, which, far from being a merely incidental feature of the ego, is actually constitutive of it. Viewed from an energetic standpoint, the notion of imaginary meconnaissance is given its full measure of significance. What Lacan wants to say by this word concerns something more fundamental than its stem, connaissance, may suggest. The imaginary involves relations, not of knowledge, but of power. Meconnaissance points to a dimension that is excluded, rejected, remaindered by the imaginary— 59

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a dimension not only of ideas but of the energies that animate ideas. "That the ego hasn't a clue about the subject's desires, "Lacan says, ". . . is called misrecognition (meconnaissance)" (S.I, 167). Second, an energetic viewpoint allows us to understand why Lacan claims that "the ego, whose strength our theorists now define by its capacity to bear frustration, is frustration in its essence" (E:S, 42). T h e ego is intrinsically frustrating as it inhibits and refuses as well as discharges energy. Third, energetics helps explain what Lacan means by saying that "there is something originally, inaugurally, profoundly wounded in the human relation to the world" (5.//, 167). The imaginary function in human beings, he repeats over and again, is distinct from its operation in animals. The imaginary in man generates a primordial lack or gap at the very origin of human desire: Living animal subjects are sensible to the image of their kind. This is an absolutely essential point, thanks to which the whole of living creation isn't an immense orgy. But the human being has a special relation with his own image—a relation of gap, of alienating tension. One has to assume a certain biological gap in [the human being], which I try to define when I talk to you of the mirror stage. The total captation of desire, of attention, already assumes the lack. The lack is already there when I speak of the desire of the human subject in relation to his image, of this extremely general imaginary relation which we call narcissism. (S.II, 323). The Myth of the Real T h e energetics of the imaginary as I have presented it parallels Lacan's distinction between the imaginary and the real. 19 From this point of view, Lacan's dichotomy of the real and the imaginary amounts to a distinction between the unsymbolized forces of the biological organism and the most primitive institution of psychic form— a distinction that is fundamental for the psychoanalytic conception of the human being. "Psychoanalysis," Lacan claims, "involves the real of the body and the imaginary of its mental schema" (E:S, 302). Lacan clearly poses the relation between the imaginary and the real in terms of mutual exclusion and locates the genesis of their disjunction in the structure of narcissism. In referring to the origin of the experience of inner and outer, he remarks that "the distinction is drawn between what is included in the narcissistic relation and what isn't. It 60

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is at the seam where the imaginary joins the real that the differentiation takes place" (S.II, 98). Imaginary and real designate the primordial partitioning of an originally undifferentiated and wholly unsymbolized "reality." Lacan thus proposes that "in so far as one part of reality is imagined, the other is real and inversely, in so far as one is reality, the other becomes imaginary" (S.I, 82). He compares the disjunction of imaginary and real to the noncoincidence of mathematical sets and maintains that "the conjunction of different parts, of sets, can never be accomplished" (S.I, 83). It is in terms of the real that the place and function of an energetic perspective in the discourse of Lacan can be understood. Like the notion of the real, the concept of psychic energy designates an irreducible dimension that is required by the theory, yet is radically impossible to specify. At the center of the problem is the relation of psychology to biology—a relation that is in a certain way paradoxical. Lacan is unequivocal in saying that "the Freudian biology has nothing to do with biology." Yet it is precisely with respect to the notion of energetics— apparently the most biologically determined point of Freud's theory— that Lacan insists on Freud's distance from biology: Freudian biology has nothing to do with biology. It is a matter of manipulating symbols with the aim of resolving energy questions.. . . Freud's whole discussion revolves around that question, what, in terms of energy, is the psyche? This is where the originality of what in him is called biological thought resides. He was not a biologist any more than any of us are, but throughout his work he placed the accent on the energy function. (S.II, 75) In the notion of psychic energy the discourse of psychoanalysis maintains a necessary but problematic point of contact with biology. Lacan is far from dismissing altogether the relevance of biology to psychological life. "I think ordinary organicism is a stupidity," he maintains, "but there is another variety which doesn't in any way neglect material phenomena" (S.II, 81). T h e energetic metaphor reminds us that the psychic apparatus is materially dependent on the body and that mental life represents a specialized response to bodily functions and needs. But, at the same time, Lacan is wary of energetics. The danger is that energetic concepts are liable to simple-minded reification. He warns against "the need we have . . . to confuse the St°ff> ° r primitive matter, or impulse, or flux, or tendency with what is really at stake in the exercise of the analytic reality."20 Why, then, speak of energy at all? T h e problem, if it can be put this way, is knowing 61

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how to talk about psychic reality before it comes to be symbolically represented. "I am not at all trying to deny here that there is something which is before," Lacan asserts, "that, for example, before I become a self or an It, there is something which the It was. It is simply a matter of knowing what this It is" (S.IV, 12/5/56). Strictly speaking, this prior It is unthinkable. It is an aspect of the real. In an analogy that explicitly links the problem of psychic energy with the real, Lacan compares the real to the energy of a hydroelectric dam. The important point is that it is impossible to specify the energy of the river without referring to the structure of the dam that will interrupt and redirect its flow. It is always possible, even necessary, to presuppose the potential force of the unharnessed river, but that force is incalculable without reference to the mechanism in which it becomes operative. Like the force behind the dam, organismic energy is meaningful only in conjunction with the psychical machinery through which it moves. As Lacan puts it: To say that the energy was in some way already there in a virtual state in the current of the river is properly speaking to say something that has no meaning, for the energy begins to be of interest to us in this instance only beginning with the moment in which it is accumulated, and it is accumulated only beginning with the moment when machines are put to work in a certain way, without doubt animated by something which is a sort of definitive propulsion which comes from the river current, but the reference to the current of the river as if it were the primitive order of this energy . . . [amounts] to a notion of the order of mana . . . which is very different from the idea of energy or even of force. (S.IV, 11/28/56) The concept of energy in psychoanalysis is therefore a theoretical requirement that, although it refers to an organic substratum, cannot be meaningfully articulated without reference to the psychical matrix within which it is invested or by which it is repressed. T h e energetic presupposition warrants a certain mode of discourse about psychical effects the way that, as Lacan puts it, "to draw the rabbit out of the hat, you always have to have put it in beforehand. . . . That is the principle of energetics, and that is why energetics is also a metaphysics" (S.II, 61). Energetics implies a metaphysics, or, as Freud thought of it, it grounds a metapsychology. Lacan maintains that the metapsychological enterprise—as a theoretical strategy that proceeds on economic assumptions—"is in truth completely impossible. . . . But one cannot practice psychoanalysis, not even for one second, without thinking in 62

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metapsychological terms" (S.I, 110). The presupposition of psychic energy is necessary, but also necessarily indeterminate. That becomes completely mysterious—we are absolutely ignorant as to what it might mean, to say that there's an equivalence of energy between the internal pressure, tied to the equilibrium of the organism, and what results from it. So what use does it serve? It's an X, which, after having been used as a starting point, is totally abandoned. (5.//, 106-7) As an indeterminate "X," the psychic energy presupposed by psychoanalysis has the character of a theoretically useful myth. Such was Freud's way of talking about the drives. "The theory of the instincts," he wrote in the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, "is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment disregard them, yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly" (SE, 22:95). Lacan is even more sensitive to the mythical status of libido: In the end, at this existential level, we can only talk about the libido satisfactorily in a mythical way—it is the genitrix, hominum divumque voluptas. That is what Freud is getting at. In former days what returns here used to be expressed in terms of the gods, and one must proceed with care before turning it into an algebraic sign. They're extremely useful, algebraic signs, but on condition that you restore their dimensions to them. That is what I am trying to do when I talk to you about machines. (S.II, 227) Not content simply to assert the mythic character of libido, Lacan provides the thing itself in his myth of the lamelle.21 His answer to the dyad of Aristophanes, Lacan's lamelle is also a creation story that aims at accounting for the genesis of the human being—"if you want to stress its joky side, you can call it Vhommelette"—and in particular the genesis of human desire. Lacan's fiction of the lamelle is especially significant as it integrates in a playful construction the main points of our discussion in this chapter. The lamelle is at once a representation of the libido, it is an aspect of the real, and it embodies, in a figure as suggestive as it is outrageous, the excluded residue of desire that I have tried to evoke by talking about an energetics of the imaginary. T h e lamelle is the closest Lacan comes to the supposition of a pure psychic energy. T h e lamelle, Lacan claims, "is the libido, qua pure life instinct, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life" 63

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(FFC, 198). Such an expression of pure energy, for reasons we have noted above, must be associated with the register of the real. Lacan therefore calls the lamelle an organ, but a "false organ." Its "character is not to exist" {FFC, 197-98). It is real precisely by virtue of not being figured in the imaginary. "This organ ought to be called irreal, in the sense in which irreal is not imaginary, and precedes the subjectivity that it conditions by being in direct contact with the real" (E, 847). As an irreal organ, the lamelle "is defined by articulating itself on the real in a way that eludes us, and it is precisely this that requires that its representation should be mythical, as I have made it" {FFC, 205). Like the severed other half of Aristophanes's lover, the lamelle is "intended to embody the missing part" {FFC, 205). Lacan begins with the image of an egg, whose twofold structure of white and yolk suggests the idea of a differentiation between the individual and the organic substratum to which it is attached before its entry into the world. T h e price of birth is the loss of connection to that organic support. As Lacan puts it, "let us imagine that each time the membranes [of the egg] are ruptured, by the same issue a phantom flies off which has a form infinitely more primary than life and which could hardly be closer to redoubling the world in microcosm" {E, 845). Libido in its purest form is thus pictured as a sort of by-product, an entity that "flies o f f at the moment when the individual human being comes into existence. Lacan compares it to the placenta born with the baby. T h e lamelle is a by-product, but is nevertheless active and seeking. Lacan amusingly pictures it as "a large crepe which spreads out like an amoeba, ultra-flat in order to pass under doors, omniscient as it is guided by the pure instinct of life, immortal as it is capable of splitting itself {E, 845). After flying off at birth, it tends to return. But precisely because the lamelle names something that is fundamentally excluded, a part of oneself that has become alien, its return is experienced as menacing. As Lacan says of it, "here's something you wouldn't want to feel silently slipping over your face while you're sleeping" {E, 845). Lacan's fiction of the lamelle emphasizes that energetics can only be approached in full awareness of its status as a myth. But, in addition, it reminds us that there is an absolutely crucial role to be played by the energetic myth in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. By assuming the existence of a reservoir of psychic energy at work behind the theater of images and symptoms, Freud found a way to hold fast to the conviction that a human being is always something more than the sum of its representations. Energetics was a way to render palpable his discovery, as Lacan puts it, "that man isn't entirely in man" {S.II, 64

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72). T h e notion of psychic energy underlies the central Freudian assumption that the human being is not really a "being" at all if we understand by that a mere entity in the world. The human being is fundamentally a manque a etre, a want-of-being. Human being is essentially, not a being, but desire: The Freudian experience starts from an exactly contrary notion of the theoretical perspective. It starts by postulating a world of desire. It postulates it prior to any kind of experience, prior to any considerations concerning the world of appearances and the world of essences. Desire is instituted within the Freudian world in which our experience unfolds, it constitutes it, and at no point in time, not even in the most insignificant of our manoeuvres in this experience of ours, can it be erased. The Freudian world isn't a world of things, it isn't a world of being, it is a world of desire as such. (S.II, 222) The Return of the Real We can now see why, as Lacan puts it, "in the order of the imaginary, alienation is constitutive." Described in energetic terms, the first formation of psychic identity in the mirror phase can be said to originate and maintain itself by submitting the libidinal economy to a radical bifurcation. T h e imaginary mobilizes and informs the primitive drives, but does so only by refusing and excluding some portion of the energies animating the body. In her Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva evokes a similar conception of self-constitution by means of self-rejection and self-exclusion. I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which T claim to establish myself."22 So, too, in Kristeva's view, what is in this way refused and remaindered in the constitution of the ego assumes the aspects of utter opacity, of uncanny, unthinkable otherness that Lacan associates with the real. In Kristeva's terms, I become a subject capable of dealing with objects only by virtue of having constituted a domain of the abject. Thus "refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live."23 But what threatens to emerge from the real is ultimately a part of oneself, one's own refuse, one's own corpse. T h e imaginary function in human beings generates a primordial internal conflict in the subject even as it institutes the most basic formation of psychic identity and mobilizes the most primitive forms of intentionality. So conceived, the alienating character of the imaginary, 65

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whose function in animals and in human beings is intimately bound up with sexuality, can be proposed as an explanation of the idea, so fundamental to Freud's thought, that sexuality is somehow intrinsically generative of intrapsychic conflict. The energetics of the Lacanian imaginary, which locates in the formative effects of the imago a function of defense as well as discharge, an energetic exclusion as well as investment, helps explain what Freud might have meant by saying that "however strange it may sound, we must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction" (SE, 11:188).24 But the Lacanian view as I have developed it explains a further, much more significant point. If we suppose that the dynamics of the imaginary constitute the ego and its objects by a twofold process of investment and exclusion of organismic energies, the Lacanian account becomes precisely homologous to Freud's characterization of the ego and the id. In his final formulation of the ego and the id—a formulation that recapitulated his separation of primary and secondary processes set out in the Project thirty years earlier—Freud emphasized that, from an economic standpoint, the ego is merely a bounded and specialized portion of the id, split off under the influence of perceptual mechanisms from the larger mass of drive energies. "We were justified," he claimed, "in dividing the ego from the id, for there are certain considerations which necessitate that step. On the other hand, the ego is identical with the id, and is merely a specially differentiated part of it. . . . The ego is, indeed, the organized portion of the id" (SE, 20:97). In the opening pages of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud summarized his view in terms that are now quite familiar to us: Almost all the energy with which the apparatus is filled arises from its innate instinctual impulses. But these are not all allowed to reach the same phases of development. In the course of things it happens again and again that individual instincts or parts of instincts turn out to be incompatible in their aims or demands with the remaining ones, which are able to combine into the inclusive unity of the ego. The former are then split off from this unity by the process of repression, held back at lower levels of psychic development and cut off, to begin with, from the possibility of satisfaction. If they succeed subsequently . . . in struggling through, . . . that event, which would in other cases have been an opportunity for pleasure, is felt by the ego as unpleasure. (SE, 18:10-11) The splitting off of drives "incompatible with the inclusive unity of the ego" attributed by Freud to a force of repression is accounted for 66

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from a Lacanian perspective in terms of an essential feature of the imaginary function in the human being. Recognition of the imago effects a truly primordial form of repression. What is split off by it is not a particular psychic content or representation, but a quantity of energy that might otherwise animate such a representation. T h e myth of psychic energetics has served to accentuate a basic feature of Lacan's thinking and to highlight its homology with Freud: the constitutive tension between the imaginary and the real and its parallel to Freud's distinction between the ego and the id. As we will see in subsequent chapters, such bold strokes will have to be qualified in a number of ways. Nevertheless, they take us a step further in outlining the first contours of a Lacanian interpretation of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. From a Lacanian point of view, the source of what Freud called a "death drive" is to be located in the tension between the real and the imaginary, between "the real of the body and the imaginary of its mental schema." T h e pressing toward expression of somatic energies alienated by imaginary identification constitutes a force of death insofar as it threatens the integrity of that identity. It is because there exists a dimension in the human subject that extends beyond his ego that there must be another principle "beyond the pleasure principle": We are beginning to see why it is necessary that beyond the pleasure principle, which Freud introduces as what governs the measure of the ego and installs consciousness in its relation with a world in which it finds itself, that beyond, exists the death instinct. Beyond the homeostases of the ego, there exists a dimension, another current, another necessity, whose plane must be differentiated. This compulsion to return to something which has been excluded by the subject, or which never entered into it, the Verdrangt, the repressed, we cannot bring it back within the pleasure principle. If the ego as such rediscovers itself and recognizes itself, it is because there is a beyond to the ego, an unconscious, a subject which speaks, unknown to the subject. We must therefore posit another principle. (S.H, 171) In the section of hi& seventh seminar devoted expressly to "la pulsion de mort? Lacan offers an explanation of the essential dynamic of the death drive in terms that are characteristically indirect, cast in a myth or fable, but which line up very precisely with the energetic interpretation we have pursued. He refers to the fable recounted in Sade's Juliette: the System of Pope Pius VI. It is from this text of Sade that Lacan draws inspiration for the concept of the "second death" that 67

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plays a major role throughout the remainder of the seminar. "Not that what Freud offers us in the notion of the death drive is scientifically unjustifiable," says Lacan, "but it is of the same order as the System of Pope Pius VI" (S.VII, 251). In response to Juliette's question about the origin of his monstrous appetite for murder, Sade's pontiff appeals to Nature herself and seeks to explain why "murder is one of her laws."25 Nature, he explains, is a pure creative power, a great birthing-ground of being that gives rise to a myriad of forms; mineral, vegetable, and animal. 26 Nature's desire for ever new and different progeny is inexhaustible. Once particular forms have been cast, however, the great "blind mother" takes no further interest in them. Indeed, the very existence of created beings, reproducing themselves in mere repetitions of the same, becomes an impediment to the proliferation of new creations. Therefore it is only by means of destruction that the primordial generative forces of Nature can be again set to work. Only death can re-fertilize the great womb of the universe. An ever greater destruction of Nature's offspring inevitably liberates an ever greater resurgence of the creative power. Precisely when created forms are most utterly crushed, smashed, burned, and ground into ashes is the soil best prepared for Nature's new growths. "The more our destroying is of a broad and atrocious kind," concludes the pontiff, "the more agreeable it is to her." 27 Lacan describes this text: Sade puts before us the theory that crime enables man to collaborate in the new creations of nature. The idea is that the pure elan of nature is obstructed by its own forms, that the three realms, because they comprise fixed forms, bind nature in a limited cycle, and moreover a manifestly imperfect one, as is demonstrated by the chaos, the conflicts, the fundamental disorder of their reciprocal relations. Thus the most profound concern that one can attribute to this "psychical" subject of Nature, in the sense of the term that connotes being most profoundly hidden, is to make a clean slate so as to be able to begin again her activity, to emerge again in a new burst. (S.VII, 248) It is not difficult to recognize the likeness of this Sadean cosmology to the view we have taken of the Freudian death drive as destructive of the alienating form of the ego. From this perspective, the psychical individuation of the imaginary ego is seen in analogy to the created forms of nature and, as such, is opposed to the inexhaustible reservoir of nature's untamed energies. Just as the destruction of existing forms serves to liberate the emfettered creative energy of Nature, likewise in the death drive the stultifying form of the ego is submitted to 68

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dismantling as desire alienated by the imaginary strives toward expression. There is, of course, a difference between the two views. T h e dynamic attributed in Sade's fable to the whole of nature is located by the Freudian conception within the psychical economy insofar as it is bifurcated between ego and id. Beneath this difference, however, a deep similarity can be discerned. What is at stake in both cases is a tension between the existing, relatively stable forms by which beings are specified and individuated and "the pure elan of nature" that is obstructed by such forms and that welcomes their destruction as the means of its release from bondage. It will be noticed, of course, that from such a perspective life and death assume deeply paradoxical relations to one another. T h e process of individuation that grounds the life of the specific being introduces mortifying effects into the generative economy of natural processes. T h e death of the individual form, by contrast, must be counted as a movement toward renewal of a larger vitality. The death of the individual is thus called by Sade a "second life." Sade's character explains: At the instant we call death, everything seems to dissolve. . . . But this death is only imaginary, it exists figuratively but in no other way. Matter, deprived of the other portion of matter which communicated movement to it, is not destroyed for that; it merely abandons its form, it decays—and proves that it is not inert; it enriches the soil, fertilizes it, and serves in the regeneration of the other kingdoms as well as of its own. There is, in the final analysis, no essential difference between this first life we receive and this second, which is the one we call death.28 T h e ambiguity of life and death is further accentuated by Lacan in the fact that it seems to be from the example of this Sadean "second life" that he takes his concept of "second death." In fact, the paradoxical relation of vitality and mortality is a frequent theme in Lacan's discourse. He remarks, for example, on the ambiguity present in the very term "death instinct": As a moment's reflection shows, the notion of the death instinct involves a basic irony, since its meaning has to be sought in the conjunction of two contrary terms: instinct in its most comprehensive acceptation being the law that governs in its succession the cycle of behavior whose goal is the accomplishment of a vital function; and death appearing first of all as the destruction of life. (E:S, 101) 69

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As a psychically unrepresented force of vital energy, the death drive is itself a potential source of life. Lacan thus suggests that "it is not enough to decide on the basis of its effect—Death. It still remains to be decided which death, that which is brought by life or that which brings life" (E:S, 308). From this perspective, we can understand Lacan's paradoxical claim that "it is death that sustains existence" (E:S, 300). T h e death drive as Lacan reads it is, in effect, a mythical expression of pure desire, the effects produced in the psychical structure by vital forces that remain active and striving beyond the bounds of representation. It is for this reason that Lacan can state that "[Freud] questioned life as to its meaning and not to say that it has none . . . but to say that it has only one meaning, that in which desire is borne by

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Rereading Beyond the Pleasure Principle For all things, from the Void Called forth, deserve to be destroyed . . . Thus, all which you as Sin have rated— Destruction,—aught with Evil blent,— That is my proper element. —Goethe's Faust, Part 1, Scene 2 quoted by Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents Thou owest Nature a death. —Shakespeare, Henry IV quoted by Freud in a letter to Fliess, February 6, 1899

In the preceding chapter, we arrived at a first expression of the meaning of the death drive in Lacanian terms: the death drive has its origin in the tension between the imaginary ego and the real of the body that is only partly encompassed by the ego. But how are these ground lines of a Lacanian interpretation to be squared with the specifics of Freud's own formulation of the death drive? In what sense can Lacan's perspective be said to constitute a "return to Freud"? The primary question concerns the major point of difference between the Lacanian and the Freudian conception: for Lacan, the traumatic force of the death drive aims not at the biological organism but at the unity of the ego. Must not this difference be counted as a radical departure from Freud's views? In what follows I will try to show that the Lacanian conception, which opposes the force of the death drive to the imaginary identity of the ego, far from contradicting Freud, satisfactorily explains and integrates much of what Freud says about the death drive, but with the advantage of avoiding the conundrums into which Freud was led by posing the death drive as a biological reality. In the course of this analysis, it will become increasingly evident that Freud's attempt to establish the death drive on a biological basis was not in keeping 71

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with many aspects of his own framing of the problem and actually constitutes an awkward wrinkle in what can otherwise be construed as a surprisingly coherent framework of concepts. A Lacanian approach, which rejects Freud's biologism in favor of the dynamics of the imaginary and the real, serves to rectify a confusion in Freud's own thinking in a way that allows a deeper theoretical coherence to shine through. Such a perspective restores to the death drive its privileged position within the totality of the psychoanalytic theory, making it possible to see for the first time the internal coherence and continuity between the hypothesis of a death instinct and the larger conceptual architecture of Freud's thought. It allows us to integrate consistently Freud's theory of the life and death drives with the dynamics of binding and unbinding, the principles of constancy and inertia, and the problematic of pleasure and unpleasure. I hope to demonstrate that Lacan's treatment of the death drive is rightly called a "return to Freud"; indeed, in a certain sense Lacan can be said to return Freud to himself. To begin this task, it is imperative that we expose and clarify the conflicts interior to Freud's original posing of his idea. What is required is a meticulous examination of Freud's detailed and subtly nuanced argument. Only by plunging ourselves deep into the labyrinth of that argument and arriving at a lucid recognition of its points of internal tension will we arrive at the clues for a coherent rereading of Freud's theory. Similarly, it is only in terms of those details and difficulties that the advantages of such a rereading can be appreciated. The Plan and Pitfalls of Freud's Argument Let us return, then, to the text of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. T h e primary phenomenon Freud sought to explain was the tendency of patients in analysis to repeat unpleasant experiences by means of dreams, memories, or enactments in the transference. What was especially curious was that these painful repetitions were apparently motivated by a primitive compulsion: Patients repeat all of these unwanted situations and painful emotions in the transference and revive them with the greatest ingenuity. They seek to bring about the interruption of the treatment while it is still incomplete; they contrive once more to feel themselves scorned, to oblige the physician to speak severely to them and treat them coldly; they discover appropriate objects for their jealousy; instead of the passionately desired baby of their childhood, they produce a plan or 72

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a promise of some grand present—which turns out as a rule to be no less unreal. None of these things can have produced pleasure in the past. . . . In spite of that, they are repeated, under pressure of a compulsion. (S£, 18:21) Freud dubbed the repetitive insistence of such behaviors der Wiederholungszwangy the "repetition compulsion." The mystery presented by the repetition compulsion came down to this: How and why, contrary to the rule of pleasure that Freud took to be the fundamental law of psychic processes, is the ego deliberately subjected to pain? Freud was no stranger to the idea that impulses felt to be pleasurable for one psychic agency might be painful to another. In fact, some such mechanism, by which a yield of satisfaction at one level of psychic life is experienced as unpleasure at another level, might well be offered as the very heart of Freud's discovery of the unconscious. What psychoanalysis reveals within the neurotic symptom is a paradoxical mixture of unconscious pleasure and conscious pain. In the present case, however, Freud rejected this line of thought. Unlike the familiar instances of repressed wishes, what was repeated in traumatic dreams could not have been pleasurable at any time or at any level of the psyche. Thus Freud claimed: It is clear that the greater part of what is re-experienced under the compulsion to repeat must cause the ego unpleasure, since it brings to light activities of repressed instinctual impulses. That, however, is unpleasure of a kind we have already considered and does not contradict the pleasure principle: unpleasure for one system and simultaneously satisfaction for the other. But we come now to a new and remarkable fact, namely that the compulsion to repeat also recalls from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to instinctual impulses which have since been repressed. (SE, 18:20) The repetition compulsion apparently presented an instance in which pain experienced by the ego resulted not merely from the pressure of instinctual forces repressed by the ego, but from a specific will to mistreatment of the ego for its own sake. T h e repetition compulsion represented, in effect, a compulsion of the patient to torment his own ego. It indicated the activity of a "primordial masochism." So long as Freud viewed the ego essentially as a servant of instinctual satisfaction, instituting repressions only in response to the constraints of reality, the subjection of the ego to such torment appeared to be 73

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wholly gratuitous. 1 T h e compulsion to repeat therefore seemed to be motivated by a kind of "daemonic power" (SE, 18:40). So far, Freud's argument was prompted by observed phenomena and proceeded on an entirely psychological level. However, in the subsequent course of his discussion Freud moved the argument onto biological grounds, proposing that the clinical observations must ultimately be explained in terms of a self-destructive instinct operative in the very substance of organic material. Only a biological explanation seemed capable of accounting for the primordiality of the power at work in the repetition compulsion. T h e fact that this power was capable of overriding the fundamental principle of pleasure suggested the activity of an absolutely elemental force, even more primitive than the erotic instincts. Opposite the life instincts, there must exist a second, more basic class of instincts. If the compulsiveness of the repetitions suggested the operation of a basic instinct, it was the phenomenon of repetition itself that provided the clue for specifying more precisely the nature of the instinct involved. Impressed by the fact that every instance of repetition under consideration involved the activity of memory, Freud concluded that the compulsion to repeat was tantamount to a desire "to restore an earlier state of things" (SE, 18:36). This impulse toward restoration of the past signaled the effect of an essentially conservative tendency. If the most primitive instinct was thus found to be essentially conservative, it stood to reason that all instincts possess a conservative nature. By this route Freud came to posit the death drive not only as the most fundamental instinct but as paradigmatic of instinctual forces in general. "How," Freud asked, "is the predicate of being 'instinctual' related to the compulsion to repeat?": At this point we cannot escape a suspicion that we may have come upon the track of a universal attribute of all instincts and perhaps of organic life in general which has not hitherto been already recognized or at least not explicitly stressed. It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things. (SE, 18:36, Freud's emphasis) T h e difficulties introduced into Freud's theory by the supposition of a biologically based drive toward death are hard to overestimate. In a number of ways the new hypothesis seemed both incoherent in itself and contradictory in relation to Freud's long-standing views about the nature of the instincts. First, the notion that the most primordial force at work in organic matter is a drive to return to an inorganic 74

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state threatened to make the growth process of organisms almost unintelligible. Abandoned to its own innermost tendencies, organic material would immediately self-destruct. Freud was thus forced to suppose that the progressive, vital development of organisms is due to the disturbing influence of external circumstances. According to this view, the course of life appears to be only a circuitous path to death, a detour that is sustained by factors external to the organism. Freud was led to conclude that for a long time perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original source of life and to make ever more complicated detours before reaching its aim of death. (SE, 18:38-39) This conclusion was paradoxical in the extreme, if not completely nonsensical. It was a notion as foreign to widely accepted biological assumptions as it was repugnant to common sense. We are accustomed to assuming the opposite view: that external circumstances generally pose obstacles, constraints, and limitations to the self-assertion of the living organism. Freud was neither able to specify the "external influences" that preserve the organism from an early death nor to describe the process by which that preservation occurs. Perhaps even more damaging was his inability, assuming that the most basic drive in organic material is a drive toward the inorganic, to explain why living forms ever arose in the first place. Freud confessed that "the attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception" (SE, 18:37). In various ways, then, the concept of a death instinct constituted a sort of biological oxymoron that threatened to collapse under the incompatibility of its own terms. But Freud's new idea was also incompatible with some of his own most cherished assumptions. Freud's supposition that the conservative character of the death instinct is somehow paradigmatic of all instinctual forces conflicted with the characterization of instinct as a progressive, forward-seeking tendency that otherwise guided all his thinking. "This [new] view of instincts," he confessed, "strikes us as strange because we have become used to see[ing] in them a factor impelling towards change and development, whereas we are now asked to recognize in them the precise contrary— an expression of the conservative nature of living substance" (SE, 18:36). Throughout the rest of his work, Freud took the force of instinct to 75

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be an unspecified striving, an indeterminate pressure toward activity that raises in the organism a pure "demand for work." In Instincts and Their Vicissitudes he remarked that by the pressure [Drang] of an instinct we understand its motor factor, the amount of force or the measure of the demand for work which it represents. The characteristic of exercising pressure is common to all instinct; it is in fact their very essence. Every instinct is a piece of activity; if we speak loosely of passive instincts, we can only mean instinct whose aim is passive. (SE, 14:122) Directly or indirectly, Freud himself acknowledged all of these difficulties. Indeed, the fact that he so tenaciously defended the death instinct despite the near-absurdities readily implied by it indicates in itself Freud's high estimation of the importance of his new idea. However, the argument of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is plagued by an even more damaging internal conflict that Freud seems never to have recognized. The problem at issue involves determining whether the death drive increases or decreases psychical "tension." T h e concept of tension, Spannung, constitutes the pivot on which turns the entirety of Freud's argumentation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Inspired by the psychophysics of Gustav Fechner, Freud associated pleasure and unpleasure respectively with decreases and increases in the level of psychic tension. Such changes in tension corresponded to decreases or increases in the quantities of excitation with which the psychical system is invested. In his opening sentence Freud unambiguously laid out his view: In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension—that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure. (SE, 18:7) From the outset, then, Freud clearly associated pleasure with the diminution of psychic tension and unpleasure with its increase. In accordance with this initial framework, the death drive would be quite logically associated with an increase in tensions. Such, at least, would be the conclusion to be drawn from identifying the effect of the death drive with repetition of the trauma. For Freud, what characterized 76

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traumatic experience was precisely the overwhelming influx of new and psychically unmastered energies introduced by the trauma into the psychic system. Thus he remarked that we describe as "traumatic" any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield. It seems to me that the concept of trauma necessarily implies a . . . breach in an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli" (SE, 18:29). If, as Freud suggested, the death drive evidences its essential character in repetition of the trauma, then we are led to suppose that the essential activity of the death drive involves the infusion of fresh quantities of energy into the psychic apparatus, resulting in an unpleasureable increase in psychic tension. Adopting this view, we can make sense of the title of Freud's book. The death drive is said to be "beyond the pleasure principle" because the death drive increases rather than decreases psychical tensions and thereby constitutes a source of unpleasure internal to the psychic apparatus. Given this initial association of the activity of the death drive with increase of psychical tension, it comes as a complete surprise to find the death drive characterized toward the end of Freud's book in precisely opposite terms. As an impulse toward return to an inorganic state, the death drive is thought to constitute a drive not toward increase but toward reduction of tensions to an absolute minimum. It is this tendency toward reduction of tensions to zero that warranted identifying the death drive with a "Nirvana principle" (SE, 18:56). What has happened to the original association of the death drive with traumatic increase of tension? We seem faced with an contradiction inhabiting the very heart of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the death drive is first identified with a traumatic increase, then with maximal decrease of tension. 2 What has made this inversion possible? The pivot-point occurs when Freud translates the terms of his discussion out of its originally psychological frame of reference and into a biological one. As his discussion unfolds, Freud's use of the concept of tension undergoes an unacknowledged but utterly decisive shift that parallels his movement from a psychological to a biological discourse. On the first page, tension (Spannung) is clearly conceived psychologically. Psychical events {seelischen Vorgange) are said to be put in motion by an unpleasant tension (eine unlustvolle Spannung). During the course of the argument, however, the meaning of "tension" changes from its original signification of intrapsychic conflict, relevant to the problem of pleasure and unpleasure, to a second, biological 77

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sense of the term, which Freud uses to speak of the coalescence of material particles into a living being. Speaking of such biological or chemical tensions, Freud claims that the life instinct, which promotes "union with the living substance of a different individual, increases those tensions [Spannungen], introducing what may be described as fresh Vital differences* which must then be lived off." T h e death drive, by contrast, is responsible for the fact that "the life process of the individual leads for internal reasons to an abolition of chemical tensions [Spannungen]y that is to say, to death." Does the death drive increase or decrease tensions? Given the ambiguity in the concept of tension itself, we are unable to answer. Psychologically speaking, the death drive increases tensions; biologically or chemically speaking, it decreases them. T h e consequences of this confusion are anything but insignificant, as they bear directly upon the relationship between the death drive and the pleasure principle to which it is ostensibly opposed. It has long been a source of perplexity to many commentators that Freud's identification of the death drive with the Nirvana principle makes the force of the death drive almost indistinguishable from the workings of the pleasure principle. Both the Nirvana and the pleasure principles seek to diminish tensions through the reduction of excitations to zero or, failing that, through the maintenance of a constant level of excitation. Are the death instinct and the pleasure principle one and the same? Freud himself came very close to saying so when he claimed in his conclusion that "the pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instinct" (SE, 18:63). But if that is so, how are we to rescue any meaning for the title of Freud's work, which points to a force "beyond the pleasure principle"? More important, how are we to retrieve the insistence on a radical dualism that is unquestionably the underlying intention of Freud's work?

Toward an Alternative Reading It is with respect to the concept of psychical "tension" that Freud's shift from the psychological to the biological generates the greatest confusion. However, as we just saw, what is at stake in this confusion is no minor difficulty. On the contrary, the coherence, indeed, the very meaning of Freud's entire construction hangs on resolving it. If we suppose, as the identification of the death drive with the Nirvana principle suggests, that the work of the death drive involves a reduction of tensions, we are at a loss to see how the death drive is in any way 78

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opposed to the pleasure principle. The central intention of Freud's book can be fulfilled only by reaffirming the link drawn by Freud at the outset between the force "beyond pleasure" and the repetition of the trauma—that is, by recuperating the idea that the death drive invariably increases tension. But how is this recuperation to be accomplished? It is the resolution of this problem and the assessment of its implications that will occupy us for the remainder of this chapter. Inasmuch as Freud's appeal to biology can be shown to be at the root of the confusion surrounding the concept of tension, we are led not only to question the soundness of Freud's excursion into biology but also to wonder again what led him into it in the first place. If we examine more closely the unfolding of Freud's argument, the precise juncture at which the discussion is turned toward biology can be located at what may well seem an unlikely point. It concerns the concept of repetition. This concept functions in Freud's text like a sort of lightning flash that blinds even as it illuminates. It is at once Freud's initial clue to the operation of a force beyond the pleasure principle yet it also provides the point of slippage at which his argument veers off into questionable biology. We noted above that Freud construed repetition as a tendency to "return to an earlier state of things." If he was right to suspect in repetition the effects of a truly elemental force of instinct, then it seemed necessary to interpret the tendency to restore an earlier state of things in some very fundamental sense. Such a tendency must ultimately point to the very "earliest state," understood in its most radical meaning. In this light, an instinctual drive toward repetition appeared as a drive toward the most extreme form of regression: a drive to return to the inorganic state that preceded the organization of the living being. It was along this line of reasoning that the death drive came forward as a function of organic matter itself, a drive operative within cellular material that aimed at its dissolution. By this path, the "mysterious masochistic trends of the ego" brought to light by repetition assumed the dimensions of biological life and death. It was the idea of repetition that gave Freud the opportunity to make the jump from psychology to biology, but there are good reasons to question his argumentation at this crucial juncture. The main point—that the compulsion to repeat, as an urge to restore an earlier state of things, implies a will to return to an inorganic state—may be dubious enough on biological grounds, but it also involves an abuse of logic. From a purely logical point of view, the idea of repetition does not by itself imply any tendency toward a restoration of an earlier state of things. A drive toward repetition implies only that a state of 79

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affairs, once attained, will tend to recur. Without the addition of some other factor, there is no reason to suppose that the tendency toward repetition also involves a tendency to reach into the more and more distant past. Repetition does not necessarily imply regression. Freud himself struggled with this confusion between a merely repetitive or conservative process and a genuinely retrograde one. He first offered the conservative character of the death instinct as a universal attribute of all instincts but then identified the greatest conservativism with the instincts of life, as it is the erotic instincts that preserve the apparently immortal germ cells. Freud asserted that these instincts "are conservative to a higher degree in that they are peculiarly resistant to external influences" (SE, 18:40). This sort of conservatism, however, is clearly a matter of maintaining a given state, not returning to an earlier one. He finally qualified his position by proposing that while the life instincts are conservative, only the death instinct is truly retrograde. 5 It is not difficult to show how the concept of repetition opens a special door for Freud's recourse to biology, nor is it difficult to recognize the weakness of his reasoning at this critical moment. But the privileged role of repetition in Freud's argumentation is all the more curious for the fact that in itself repetition is rather poorly suited to represent what is distinctive about the death drive. In fact, it was not repetition as such but only repetition of unpleasurable experiences that raised the question about the operation of a force beyond the pleasure principle. As Freud himself noted, a will to repetition is more conspicuous in the case of pleasurable experiences than it is for unpleasurable ones. Freud goes so far as to say that repetition itself, as "the reexperiencing of something identical, is clearly in itself a source of pleasure" (SE, 18:36). But these facts suggest that the impulse toward repetition must, at the very least, be admitted for both classes of instincts and is arguably more appropriately linked with the life instincts and the functions of the ego insofar as they are thought to obey a principle of constancy. Despite all the difficulties it generated, Freud clung fast to the concept of repetition as a kind of indispensable key to unlocking the mystery of the death drive. It is almost as if, once the phenomenon of repetition had showed him the trail, he dared not let it go for fear of losing his bearings. But perhaps the most damaging consequence of Freud's reliance on repetition is the way it obscures the extent to which the argument of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is organized around a second basic idea: the twofold concept of psychical binding and unbinding (Bindung and Entbindung). In fact, Freud's thinking in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is rather awkwardly stretched around the two 80

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basic loci of repetition and binding. When we read Freud's book in the broader context of his work as a whole, it is hard not to conclude that of the two themes, repetition and binding, the latter is the more important. In any case, it makes a very great difference for the task of interpreting Freud's text how the choice between these two alternatives is weighted. We have already seen how repetition, construed as a return to the earliest state of things, gave Freud an entree into a biological reframing of his argument. By contrast, the concepts of binding and unbinding retain a decidedly psychological emphasis. T o be sure, binding is eventually drawn up into the biochemical metaphors that proliferate toward the end of the book. Thus binding is linked to the process by which organic material is melded into the unity of a living being. But the dominant connotation of binding, established in some of Freud's earliest papers and maintained throughout his career, is unquestionably psychological. Binding refers above all to the origin and function of the ego. By following out the logic of the concept of binding we are led to reconsider Freud's biologizing of the death drive. Although often overlooked in expositions of psychoanalytic theory, the notion of bound and free psychic energy was nevertheless assigned by Freud a place of capital importance. The idea may be said to be as old as psychoanalysis itself. It appeared first in the Studies on Hysteria, figured prominently in the Project for a Scientific Psychology, and was drawn upon in the theoretical chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams, In his 1915 essay on "The Unconscious," Freud remarked that "the distinction [of bound versus freely mobile energy] represents the deepest insight we have gained up to the present into the nature of nervous energy, and I do not see how we can do without it" (SE, 14:88). Psychical binding and unbinding again came to the fore in 1920 and continued to occupy a significant place in Freud's writings until the end of his life. What is crucial for our purposes is that the concept of binding is relevant first and foremost to the genesis and functions of the ego. It was in terms of unbound versus bound energies that Freud distinguished between the psychically unmastered instinctual forces of the id and the more organized and differentiated processes characteristic of the ego. Freud commented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that "the impulses arising from the instincts do not belong to the type of bound nervous processes but of freely mobile processes which press toward discharge" (SE, 18:34). As early as the Project, Freud associated the ego with bound energies. In fact, he offered the quality of being in a bound state as the very definition of the ego. "The ego itself," he claimed, "is a mass like this of neurones which hold fast to their 81

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how to talk about psychic reality before it comes to be symbolically represented. "I am not at all trying to deny here that there is something which is before," Lacan asserts, "that, for example, before I become a self or an It, there is something which the It was. It is simply a matter of knowing what this It is" (S.IV, 12/5/56). Strictly speaking, this prior It is unthinkable. It is an aspect of the real. In an analogy that explicitly links the problem of psychic energy with the real, Lacan compares the real to the energy of a hydroelectric dam. The important point is that it is impossible to specify the energy of the river without referring to the structure of the dam that will interrupt and redirect its flow. It is always possible, even necessary, to presuppose the potential force of the unharnessed river, but that force is incalculable without reference to the mechanism in which it becomes operative. Like the force behind the dam, organismic energy is meaningful only in conjunction with the psychical machinery through which it moves. As Lacan puts it: To say that the energy was in some way already there in a virtual state in the current of the river is properly speaking to say something that has no meaning, for the energy begins to be of interest to us in this instance only beginning with the moment in which it is accumulated, and it is accumulated only beginning with the moment when machines are put to work in a certain way, without doubt animated by something which is a sort of definitive propulsion which comes from the river current, but the reference to the current of the river as if it were the primitive order of this energy . . . [amounts] to a notion of the order of mana. . . which is very different from the idea of energy or even of force. (S.IV, 11/28/56) The concept of energy in psychoanalysis is therefore a theoretical requirement that, although it refers to an organic substratum, cannot be meaningfully articulated without reference to the psychical matrix within which it is invested or by which it is repressed. The energetic presupposition warrants a certain mode of discourse about psychical effects the way that, as Lacan puts it, "to draw the rabbit out of the hat, you always have to have put it in beforehand. . . . That is the principle of energetics, and that is why energetics is also a metaphysics" (5.//, 61). Energetics implies a metaphysics, or, as Freud thought of it, it grounds a metapsychology. Lacan maintains that the metapsychological enterprise—as a theoretical strategy that proceeds on economic assumptions—"is in truth completely impossible. . . . But one cannot practice psychoanalysis, not even for one second, without thinking in 62

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metapsychological terms" (S.I, 110). The presupposition of psychic energy is necessary, but also necessarily indeterminate. That becomes completely mysterious—we are absolutely ignorant as to what it might mean, to say that there's an equivalence of energy between the internal pressure, tied to the equilibrium of the organism, and what results from it. So what use does it serve? It's an X, which, after having been used as a starting point, is totally abandoned. (5.//, 106-7) As an indeterminate "X," the psychic energy presupposed by psychoanalysis has the character of a theoretically useful myth. Such was Freud's way of talking about the drives. "The theory of the instincts," he wrote in the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, "is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment disregard them, yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly" (SE, 22:95). Lacan is even more sensitive to the mythical status of libido: In the end, at this existential level, we can only talk about the libido satisfactorily in a mythical way—it is the genitrix, hominum divumque voluptas. That is what Freud is getting at. In former days what returns here used to be expressed in terms of the gods, and one must proceed with care before turning it into an algebraic sign. They're extremely useful, algebraic signs, but on condition that you restore their dimensions to them. That is what I am trying to do when I talk to you about machines. (S.II, 227) Not content simply to assert the mythic character of libido, Lacan provides the thing itself in his myth of the lamelle.21 His answer to the dyad of Aristophanes, Lacan's lamelle is also a creation story that aims at accounting for the genesis of the human being—"if you want to stress its joky side, you can call it Vhommelette"—and in particular the genesis of human desire. Lacan's fiction of the lamelle is especially significant as it integrates in a playful construction the main points of our discussion in this chapter. The lamelle is at once a representation of the libido, it is an aspect of the real, and it embodies, in a figure as suggestive as it is outrageous, the excluded residue of desire that I have tried to evoke by talking about an energetics of the imaginary. T h e lamelle is the closest Lacan comes to the supposition of a pure psychic energy. T h e lamelle, Lacan claims, "is the libido, qua pure life instinct, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life" 63

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(FFC, 198). Such an expression of pure energy, for reasons we have noted above, must be associated with the register of the real. Lacan therefore calls the lamelle an organ, but a "false organ." Its "character is not to exist" {FFC, 197-98). It is real precisely by virtue of not being figured in the imaginary. "This organ ought to be called irreal, in the sense in which irreal is not imaginary, and precedes the subjectivity that it conditions by being in direct contact with the real" (E, 847). As an irreal organ, the lamelle "is defined by articulating itself on the real in a way that eludes us, and it is precisely this that requires that its representation should be mythical, as I have made it" (FFC, 205). Like the severed other half of Aristophanes's lover, the lamelle is "intended to embody the missing part" (FFC, 205). Lacan begins with the image of an egg, whose twofold structure of white and yolk suggests the idea of a differentiation between the individual and the organic substratum to which it is attached before its entry into the world. T h e price of birth is the loss of connection to that organic support. As Lacan puts it, "let us imagine that each time the membranes [of the egg] are ruptured, by the same issue a phantom flies off which has a form infinitely more primary than life and which could hardly be closer to redoubling the world in microcosm" (E, 845). Libido in its purest form is thus pictured as a sort of by-product, an entity that "flies off" at the moment when the individual human being comes into existence. Lacan compares it to the placenta born with the baby. T h e lamelle is a by-product, but is nevertheless active and seeking. Lacan amusingly pictures it as "a large crepe which spreads out like an amoeba, ultra-flat in order to pass under doors, omniscient as it is guided by the pure instinct of life, immortal as it is capable of splitting itself" (E, 845). After flying off at birth, it tends to return. But precisely because the lamelle names something that is fundamentally excluded, a part of oneself that has become alien, its return is experienced as menacing. As Lacan says of it, "here's something you wouldn't want to feel silently slipping over your face while you're sleeping" (E, 845). Lacan's fiction of the lamelle emphasizes that energetics can only be approached in full awareness of its status as a myth. But, in addition, it reminds us that there is an absolutely crucial role to be played by the energetic myth in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. By assuming the existence of a reservoir of psychic energy at work behind the theater of images and symptoms, Freud found a way to hold fast to the conviction that a human being is always something more than the sum of its representations. Energetics was a way to render palpable his discovery, as Lacan puts it, "that man isn't entirely in man" (5.//, 64

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72). T h e notion of psychic energy underlies the central Freudian assumption that the human being is not really a "being" at all if we understand by that a mere entity in the world. The human being is fundamentally a manque a etre, a want-of-being. Human being is essentially, not a being, but desire: The Freudian experience starts from an exactly contrary notion of the theoretical perspective. It starts by postulating a world of desire. It postulates it prior to any kind of experience, prior to any considerations concerning the world of appearances and the world of essences. Desire is instituted within the Freudian world in which our experience unfolds, it constitutes it, and at no point in time, not even in the most insignificant of our manoeuvres in this experience of ours, can it be erased. The Freudian world isn't a world of things, it isn't a world of being, it is a world of desire as such. (S.II, 222) The Return of the Real We can now see why, as Lacan puts it, "in the order of the imaginary, alienation is constitutive." Described in energetic terms, the first formation of psychic identity in the mirror phase can be said to originate and maintain itself by submitting the libidinal economy to a radical bifurcation. T h e imaginary mobilizes and informs the primitive drives, but does so only by refusing and excluding some portion of the energies animating the body. In her Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva evokes a similar conception of self-constitution by means of self-rejection and self-exclusion. I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which T claim to establish myself."22 So, too, in Kristeva's view, what is in this way refused and remaindered in the constitution of the ego assumes the aspects of utter opacity, of uncanny, unthinkable otherness that Lacan associates with the real. In Kristeva's terms, I become a subject capable of dealing with objects only by virtue of having constituted a domain of the abject. Thus "refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live."23 But what threatens to emerge from the real is ultimately a part of oneself, one's own refuse, one's own corpse. T h e imaginary function in human beings generates a primordial internal conflict in the subject even as it institutes the most basic formation of psychic identity and mobilizes the most primitive forms of intentionality. So conceived, the alienating character of the imaginary, 65

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whose function in animals and in human beings is intimately bound up with sexuality, can be proposed as an explanation of the idea, so fundamental to Freud's thought, that sexuality is somehow intrinsically generative of intrapsychic conflict. The energetics of the Lacanian imaginary, which locates in the formative effects of the imago a function of defense as well as discharge, an energetic exclusion as well as investment, helps explain what Freud might have meant by saying that "however strange it may sound, we must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction" (SE, 11:188).24 But the Lacanian view as I have developed it explains a further, much more significant point. If we suppose that the dynamics of the imaginary constitute the ego and its objects by a twofold process of investment and exclusion of organismic energies, the Lacanian account becomes precisely homologous to Freud's characterization of the ego and the id. In his final formulation of the ego and the id—a formulation that recapitulated his separation of primary and secondary processes set out in the Project thirty years earlier—Freud emphasized that, from an economic standpoint, the ego is merely a bounded and specialized portion of the id, split off under the influence of perceptual mechanisms from the larger mass of drive energies. "We were justified," he claimed, "in dividing the ego from the id, for there are certain considerations which necessitate that step. On the other hand, the ego is identical with the id, and is merely a specially differentiated part of it. . . . The ego is, indeed, the organized portion of the id" (SE, 20:97). In the opening pages of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud summarized his view in terms that are now quite familiar to us: Almost all the energy with which the apparatus is filled arises from its innate instinctual impulses. But these are not all allowed to reach the same phases of development. In the course of things it happens again and again that individual instincts or parts of instincts turn out to be incompatible in their aims or demands with the remaining ones, which are able to combine into the inclusive unity of the ego. The former are then split off from this unity by the process of repression, held back at lower levels of psychic development and cut off, to begin with, from the possibility of satisfaction. If they succeed subsequently . . . in struggling through, . . . that event, which would in other cases have been an opportunity for pleasure, is felt by the ego as unpleasure. (SE, 18:10-11) The splitting off of drives "incompatible with the inclusive unity of the ego" attributed by Freud to a force of repression is accounted for 66

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from a Lacanian perspective in terms of an essential feature of the imaginary function in the human being. Recognition of the imago effects a truly primordial form of repression. What is split off by it is not a particular psychic content or representation, but a quantity of energy that might otherwise animate such a representation. T h e myth of psychic energetics has served to accentuate a basic feature of Lacan's thinking and to highlight its homology with Freud: the constitutive tension between the imaginary and the real and its parallel to Freud's distinction between the ego and the id. As we will see in subsequent chapters, such bold strokes will have to be qualified in a number of ways. Nevertheless, they take us a step further in outlining the first contours of a Lacanian interpretation of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. From a Lacanian point of view, the source of what Freud called a "death drive" is to be located in the tension between the real and the imaginary, between "the real of the body and the imaginary of its mental schema." The pressing toward expression of somatic energies alienated by imaginary identification constitutes a force of death insofar as it threatens the integrity of that identity. It is because there exists a dimension in the human subject that extends beyond his ego that there must be another principle "beyond the pleasure principle": We are beginning to see why it is necessary that beyond the pleasure principle, which Freud introduces as what governs the measure of the ego and installs consciousness in its relation with a world in which it finds itself, that beyond, exists the death instinct. Beyond the homeostases of the ego, there exists a dimension, another current, another necessity, whose plane must be differentiated. This compulsion to return to something which has been excluded by the subject, or which never entered into it, the Verdrangt, the repressed, we cannot bring it back within the pleasure principle. If the ego as such rediscovers itself and recognizes itself, it is because there is a beyond to the ego, an unconscious, a subject which speaks, unknown to the subject. We must therefore posit another principle. (S.H, 171) In the section of his. seventh seminar devoted expressly to "Za pulsion de mort" Lacan offers an explanation of the essential dynamic of the death drive in terms that are characteristically indirect, cast in a myth or fable, but which line up very precisely with the energetic interpretation we have pursued. He refers to the fable recounted in Sade's Juliette: the System of Pope Pius VI. It is from this text of Sade that Lacan draws inspiration for the concept of the "second death" that 67

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plays a major role throughout the remainder of the seminar. "Not that what Freud offers us in the notion of the death drive is scientifically unjustifiable," says Lacan, "but it is of the same order as the System of Pope Pius VI" (S.VII, 251). In response to Juliette's question about the origin of his monstrous appetite for murder, Sade's pontiff appeals to Nature herself and seeks to explain why "murder is one of her laws."25 Nature, he explains, is a pure creative power, a great birthing-ground of being that gives rise to a myriad of forms; mineral, vegetable, and animal. 26 Nature's desire for ever new and different progeny is inexhaustible. Once particular forms have been cast, however, the great "blind mother" takes no further interest in them. Indeed, the very existence of created beings, reproducing themselves in mere repetitions of the same, becomes an impediment to the proliferation of new creations. Therefore it is only by means of destruction that the primordial generative forces of Nature can be again set to work. Only death can re-fertilize the great womb of the universe. An ever greater destruction of Nature's offspring inevitably liberates an ever greater resurgence of the creative power. Precisely when created forms are most utterly crushed, smashed, burned, and ground into ashes is the soil best prepared for Nature's new growths. "The more our destroying is of a broad and atrocious kind," concludes the pontiff, "the more agreeable it is to her." 27 Lacan describes this text: Sade puts before us the theory that crime enables man to collaborate in the new creations of nature. The idea is that the pure elan of nature is obstructed by its own forms, that the three realms, because they comprise fixed forms, bind nature in a limited cycle, and moreover a manifestly imperfect one, as is demonstrated by the chaos, the conflicts, the fundamental disorder of their reciprocal relations. Thus the most profound concern that one can attribute to this "psychical" subject of Nature, in the sense of the term that connotes being most profoundly hidden, is to make a clean slate so as to be able to begin again her activity, to emerge again in a new burst. (S.VII, 248) It is not difficult to recognize the likeness of this Sadean cosmology to the view we have taken of the Freudian death drive as destructive of the alienating form of the ego. From this perspective, the psychical individuation of the imaginary ego is seen in analogy to the created forms of nature and, as such, is opposed to the inexhaustible reservoir of nature's untamed energies. Just as the destruction of existing forms serves to liberate the emfettered creative energy of Nature, likewise in the death drive the stultifying form of the ego is submitted to 68

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dismantling as desire alienated by the imaginary strives toward expression. There is, of course, a difference between the two views. T h e dynamic attributed in Sade's fable to the whole of nature is located by the Freudian conception within the psychical economy insofar as it is bifurcated between ego and id. Beneath this difference, however, a deep similarity can be discerned. What is at stake in both cases is a tension between the existing, relatively stable forms by which beings are specified and individuated and "the pure elan of nature" that is obstructed by such forms and that welcomes their destruction as the means of its release from bondage. It will be noticed, of course, that from such a perspective life and death assume deeply paradoxical relations to one another. T h e process of individuation that grounds the life of the specific being introduces mortifying effects into the generative economy of natural processes. T h e death of the individual form, by contrast, must be counted as a movement toward renewal of a larger vitality. The death of the individual is thus called by Sade a "second life." Sade's character explains: At the instant we call death, everything seems to dissolve. . . . But this death is only imaginary, it exists figuratively but in no other way. Matter, deprived of the other portion of matter which communicated movement to it, is not destroyed for that; it merely abandons its form, it decays—and proves that it is not inert; it enriches the soil, fertilizes it, and serves in the regeneration of the other kingdoms as well as of its own. There is, in the final analysis, no essential difference between this first life we receive and this second, which is the one we call death.28 T h e ambiguity of life and death is further accentuated by Lacan in the fact that it seems to be from the example of this Sadean "second life" that he takes his concept of "second death." In fact, the paradoxical relation of vitality and mortality is a frequent theme in Lacan's discourse. He remarks, for example, on the ambiguity present in the very term "death instinct": As a moment's reflection shows, the notion of the death instinct involves a basic irony, since its meaning has to be sought in the conjunction of two contrary terms: instinct in its most comprehensive acceptation being the law that governs in its succession the cycle of behavior whose goal is the accomplishment of a vital function; and death appearing first of all as the destruction of life. (E:S, 101) 69

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As a psychically unrepresented force of vital energy, the death drive is itself a potential source of life. Lacan thus suggests that "it is not enough to decide on the basis of its effect—Death. It still remains to be decided which death, that which is brought by life or that which brings life" (E:S, 308). From this perspective, we can understand Lacan's paradoxical claim that "it is death that sustains existence" (E:S, 300). T h e death drive as Lacan reads it is, in effect, a mythical expression of pure desire, the effects produced in the psychical structure by vital forces that remain active and striving beyond the bounds of representation. It is for this reason that Lacan can state that "[Freud] questioned life as to its meaning and not to say that it has none . . . but to say that it has only one meaning, that in which desire is borne by

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Rereading Beyond the Pleasure Principle For all things, from the Void Called forth, deserve to be destroyed . . . Thus, all which you as Sin have rated— Destruction,—aught with Evil blent,— That is my proper element. —Goethe's Faust, Part 1, Scene 2 quoted by Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents Thou owest Nature a death. —Shakespeare, Henry IV quoted by Freud in a letter to Fliess, February 6, 1899

In the preceding chapter, we arrived at a first expression of the meaning of the death drive in Lacanian terms: the death drive has its origin in the tension between the imaginary ego and the real of the body that is only partly encompassed by the ego. But how are these ground lines of a Lacanian interpretation to be squared with the specifics of Freud's own formulation of the death drive? In what sense can Lacan's perspective be said to constitute a "return to Freud"? The primary question concerns the major point of difference between the Lacanian and the Freudian conception: for Lacan, the traumatic force of the death drive aims not at the biological organism but at the unity of the ego. Must not this difference be counted as a radical departure from Freud's views? In what follows I will try to show that the Lacanian conception, which opposes the force of the death drive to the imaginary identity of the ego, far from contradicting Freud, satisfactorily explains and integrates much of what Freud says about the death drive, but with the advantage of avoiding the conundrums into which Freud was led by posing the death drive as a biological reality. In the course of this analysis, it will become increasingly evident that Freud's attempt to establish the death drive on a biological basis was not in keeping 71

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with many aspects of his own framing of the problem and actually constitutes an awkward wrinkle in what can otherwise be construed as a surprisingly coherent framework of concepts. A Lacanian approach, which rejects Freud's biologism in favor of the dynamics of the imaginary and the real, serves to rectify a confusion in Freud's own thinking in a way that allows a deeper theoretical coherence to shine through. Such a perspective restores to the death drive its privileged position within the totality of the psychoanalytic theory, making it possible to see for the first time the internal coherence and continuity between the hypothesis of a death instinct and the larger conceptual architecture of Freud's thought. It allows us to integrate consistently Freud's theory of the life and death drives with the dynamics of binding and unbinding, the principles of constancy and inertia, and the problematic of pleasure and unpleasure. I hope to demonstrate that Lacan's treatment of the death drive is rightly called a "return to Freud"; indeed, in a certain sense Lacan can be said to return Freud to himself. To begin this task, it is imperative that we expose and clarify the conflicts interior to Freud's original posing of his idea. What is required is a meticulous examination of Freud's detailed and subtly nuanced argument. Only by plunging ourselves deep into the labyrinth of that argument and arriving at a lucid recognition of its points of internal tension will we arrive at the clues for a coherent rereading of Freud's theory. Similarly, it is only in terms of those details and difficulties that the advantages of such a rereading can be appreciated. The Plan and Pitfalls of Freud's Argument Let us return, then, to the text of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. T h e primary phenomenon Freud sought to explain was the tendency of patients in analysis to repeat unpleasant experiences by means of dreams, memories, or enactments in the transference. What was especially curious was that these painful repetitions were apparently motivated by a primitive compulsion: Patients repeat all of these unwanted situations and painful emotions in the transference and revive them with the greatest ingenuity. They seek to bring about the interruption of the treatment while it is still incomplete; they contrive once more to feel themselves scorned, to oblige the physician to speak severely to them and treat them coldly; they discover appropriate objects for their jealousy; instead of the passionately desired baby of their childhood, they produce a plan or 72

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a promise of some grand present—which turns out as a rule to be no less unreal. None of these things can have produced pleasure in the past. . . . In spite of that, they are repeated, under pressure of a compulsion. (S£, 18:21) Freud dubbed the repetitive insistence of such behaviors der Wiederholungszwangy the "repetition compulsion." The mystery presented by the repetition compulsion came down to this: How and why, contrary to the rule of pleasure that Freud took to be the fundamental law of psychic processes, is the ego deliberately subjected to pain? Freud was no stranger to the idea that impulses felt to be pleasurable for one psychic agency might be painful to another. In fact, some such mechanism, by which a yield of satisfaction at one level of psychic life is experienced as unpleasure at another level, might well be offered as the very heart of Freud's discovery of the unconscious. What psychoanalysis reveals within the neurotic symptom is a paradoxical mixture of unconscious pleasure and conscious pain. In the present case, however, Freud rejected this line of thought. Unlike the familiar instances of repressed wishes, what was repeated in traumatic dreams could not have been pleasurable at any time or at any level of the psyche. Thus Freud claimed: It is clear that the greater part of what is re-experienced under the compulsion to repeat must cause the ego unpleasure, since it brings to light activities of repressed instinctual impulses. That, however, is unpleasure of a kind we have already considered and does not contradict the pleasure principle: unpleasure for one system and simultaneously satisfaction for the other. But we come now to a new and remarkable fact, namely that the compulsion to repeat also recalls from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to instinctual impulses which have since been repressed. (SE, 18:20) The repetition compulsion apparently presented an instance in which pain experienced by the ego resulted not merely from the pressure of instinctual forces repressed by the ego, but from a specific will to mistreatment of the ego for its own sake. T h e repetition compulsion represented, in effect, a compulsion of the patient to torment his own ego. It indicated the activity of a "primordial masochism." So long as Freud viewed the ego essentially as a servant of instinctual satisfaction, instituting repressions only in response to the constraints of reality, the subjection of the ego to such torment appeared to be 73

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wholly gratuitous. 1 T h e compulsion to repeat therefore seemed to be motivated by a kind of "daemonic power" (SE, 18:40). So far, Freud's argument was prompted by observed phenomena and proceeded on an entirely psychological level. However, in the subsequent course of his discussion Freud moved the argument onto biological grounds, proposing that the clinical observations must ultimately be explained in terms of a self-destructive instinct operative in the very substance of organic material. Only a biological explanation seemed capable of accounting for the primordiality of the power at work in the repetition compulsion. T h e fact that this power was capable of overriding the fundamental principle of pleasure suggested the activity of an absolutely elemental force, even more primitive than the erotic instincts. Opposite the life instincts, there must exist a second, more basic class of instincts. If the compulsiveness of the repetitions suggested the operation of a basic instinct, it was the phenomenon of repetition itself that provided the clue for specifying more precisely the nature of the instinct involved. Impressed by the fact that every instance of repetition under consideration involved the activity of memory, Freud concluded that the compulsion to repeat was tantamount to a desire "to restore an earlier state of things" (SE, 18:36). This impulse toward restoration of the past signaled the effect of an essentially conservative tendency. If the most primitive instinct was thus found to be essentially conservative, it stood to reason that all instincts possess a conservative nature. By this route Freud came to posit the death drive not only as the most fundamental instinct but as paradigmatic of instinctual forces in general. "How," Freud asked, "is the predicate of being 'instinctual' related to the compulsion to repeat?": At this point we cannot escape a suspicion that we may have come upon the track of a universal attribute of all instincts and perhaps of organic life in general which has not hitherto been already recognized or at least not explicitly stressed. It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things. (SE, 18:36, Freud's emphasis) T h e difficulties introduced into Freud's theory by the supposition of a biologically based drive toward death are hard to overestimate. In a number of ways the new hypothesis seemed both incoherent in itself and contradictory in relation to Freud's long-standing views about the nature of the instincts. First, the notion that the most primordial force at work in organic matter is a drive to return to an inorganic 74

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state threatened to make the growth process of organisms almost unintelligible. Abandoned to its own innermost tendencies, organic material would immediately self-destruct. Freud was thus forced to suppose that the progressive, vital development of organisms is due to the disturbing influence of external circumstances. According to this view, the course of life appears to be only a circuitous path to death, a detour that is sustained by factors external to the organism. Freud was led to conclude that for a long time perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original source of life and to make ever more complicated detours before reaching its aim of death. (SE, 18:38-39) This conclusion was paradoxical in the extreme, if not completely nonsensical. It was a notion as foreign to widely accepted biological assumptions as it was repugnant to common sense. We are accustomed to assuming the opposite view: that external circumstances generally pose obstacles, constraints, and limitations to the self-assertion of the living organism. Freud was neither able to specify the "external influences" that preserve the organism from an early death nor to describe the process by which that preservation occurs. Perhaps even more damaging was his inability, assuming that the most basic drive in organic material is a drive toward the inorganic, to explain why living forms ever arose in the first place. Freud confessed that "the attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception" (SE, 18:37). In various ways, then, the concept of a death instinct constituted a sort of biological oxymoron that threatened to collapse under the incompatibility of its own terms. But Freud's new idea was also incompatible with some of his own most cherished assumptions. Freud's supposition that the conservative character of the death instinct is somehow paradigmatic of all instinctual forces conflicted with the characterization of instinct as a progressive, forward-seeking tendency that otherwise guided all his thinking. "This [new] view of instincts," he confessed, "strikes us as strange because we have become used to see[ing] in them a factor impelling towards change and development, whereas we are now asked to recognize in them the precise contrary— an expression of the conservative nature of living substance" (SE, 18:36). Throughout the rest of his work, Freud took the force of instinct to 75

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be an unspecified striving, an indeterminate pressure toward activity that raises in the organism a pure "demand for work." In Instincts and Their Vicissitudes he remarked that by the pressure [Drang] of an instinct we understand its motor factor, the amount of force or the measure of the demand for work which it represents. The characteristic of exercising pressure is common to all instinct; it is in fact their very essence. Every instinct is a piece of activity; if we speak loosely of passive instincts, we can only mean instinct whose aim is passive. (SE, 14:122) Directly or indirectly, Freud himself acknowledged all of these difficulties. Indeed, the fact that he so tenaciously defended the death instinct despite the near-absurdities readily implied by it indicates in itself Freud's high estimation of the importance of his new idea. However, the argument of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is plagued by an even more damaging internal conflict that Freud seems never to have recognized. The problem at issue involves determining whether the death drive increases or decreases psychical "tension." T h e concept of tension, Spannung, constitutes the pivot on which turns the entirety of Freud's argumentation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Inspired by the psychophysics of Gustav Fechner, Freud associated pleasure and unpleasure respectively with decreases and increases in the level of psychic tension. Such changes in tension corresponded to decreases or increases in the quantities of excitation with which the psychical system is invested. In his opening sentence Freud unambiguously laid out his view: In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension—that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure. (SE, 18:7) From the outset, then, Freud clearly associated pleasure with the diminution of psychic tension and unpleasure with its increase. In accordance with this initial framework, the death drive would be quite logically associated with an increase in tensions. Such, at least, would be the conclusion to be drawn from identifying the effect of the death drive with repetition of the trauma. For Freud, what characterized 76

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traumatic experience was precisely the overwhelming influx of new and psychically unmastered energies introduced by the trauma into the psychic system. Thus he remarked that we describe as "traumatic" any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield. It seems to me that the concept of trauma necessarily implies a . . . breach in an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli" (SE, 18:29). If, as Freud suggested, the death drive evidences its essential character in repetition of the trauma, then we are led to suppose that the essential activity of the death drive involves the infusion of fresh quantities of energy into the psychic apparatus, resulting in an unpleasureable increase in psychic tension. Adopting this view, we can make sense of the title of Freud's book. The death drive is said to be "beyond the pleasure principle" because the death drive increases rather than decreases psychical tensions and thereby constitutes a source of unpleasure internal to the psychic apparatus. Given this initial association of the activity of the death drive with increase of psychical tension, it comes as a complete surprise to find the death drive characterized toward the end of Freud's book in precisely opposite terms. As an impulse toward return to an inorganic state, the death drive is thought to constitute a drive not toward increase but toward reduction of tensions to an absolute minimum. It is this tendency toward reduction of tensions to zero that warranted identifying the death drive with a "Nirvana principle" (SE, 18:56). What has happened to the original association of the death drive with traumatic increase of tension? We seem faced with an contradiction inhabiting the very heart of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the death drive is first identified with a traumatic increase, then with maximal decrease of tension. 2 What has made this inversion possible? The pivot-point occurs when Freud translates the terms of his discussion out of its originally psychological frame of reference and into a biological one. As his discussion unfolds, Freud's use of the concept of tension undergoes an unacknowledged but utterly decisive shift that parallels his movement from a psychological to a biological discourse. On the first page, tension (Spannung) is clearly conceived psychologically. Psychical events {seelischen Vorgange) are said to be put in motion by an unpleasant tension (eine unlustvolle Spannung). During the course of the argument, however, the meaning of "tension" changes from its original signification of intrapsychic conflict, relevant to the problem of pleasure and unpleasure, to a second, biological 77

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sense of the term, which Freud uses to speak of the coalescence of material particles into a living being. Speaking of such biological or chemical tensions, Freud claims that the life instinct, which promotes "union with the living substance of a different individual, increases those tensions [Spannungen], introducing what may be described as fresh Vital differences* which must then be lived off." T h e death drive, by contrast, is responsible for the fact that "the life process of the individual leads for internal reasons to an abolition of chemical tensions [Spannungen], that is to say, to death." 4 Does the death drive increase or decrease tensions? Given the ambiguity in the concept of tension itself, we are unable to answer. Psychologically speaking, the death drive increases tensions; biologically or chemically speaking, it decreases them. T h e consequences of this confusion are anything but insignificant, as they bear directly upon the relationship between the death drive and the pleasure principle to which it is ostensibly opposed. It has long been a source of perplexity to many commentators that Freud's identification of the death drive with the Nirvana principle makes the force of the death drive almost indistinguishable from the workings of the pleasure principle. Both the Nirvana and the pleasure principles seek to diminish tensions through the reduction of excitations to zero or, failing that, through the maintenance of a constant level of excitation. Are the death instinct and the pleasure principle one and the same? Freud himself came very close to saying so when he claimed in his conclusion that "the pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instinct" (SE, 18:63). But if that is so, how are we to rescue any meaning for the title of Freud's work, which points to a force "beyond the pleasure principle"? More important, how are we to retrieve the insistence on a radical dualism that is unquestionably the underlying intention of Freud's work?

Toward an Alternative Reading It is with respect to the concept of psychical "tension" that Freud's shift from the psychological to the biological generates the greatest confusion. However, as we just saw, what is at stake in this confusion is no minor difficulty. On the contrary, the coherence, indeed, the very meaning of Freud's entire construction hangs on resolving it. If we suppose, as the identification of the death drive with the Nirvana principle suggests, that the work of the death drive involves a reduction of tensions, we are at a loss to see how the death drive is in any way 78

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opposed to the pleasure principle. The central intention of Freud's book can be fulfilled only by reaffirming the link drawn by Freud at the outset between the force "beyond pleasure" and the repetition of the trauma—that is, by recuperating the idea that the death drive invariably increases tension. But how is this recuperation to be accomplished? It is the resolution of this problem and the assessment of its implications that will occupy us for the remainder of this chapter. Inasmuch as Freud's appeal to biology can be shown to be at the root of the confusion surrounding the concept of tension, we are led not only to question the soundness of Freud's excursion into biology but also to wonder again what led him into it in the first place. If we examine more closely the unfolding of Freud's argument, the precise juncture at which the discussion is turned toward biology can be located at what may well seem an unlikely point. It concerns the concept of repetition. This concept functions in Freud's text like a sort of lightning flash that blinds even as it illuminates. It is at once Freud's initial clue to the operation of a force beyond the pleasure principle yet it also provides the point of slippage at which his argument veers off into questionable biology. We noted above that Freud construed repetition as a tendency to "return to an earlier state of things." If he was right to suspect in repetition the effects of a truly elemental force of instinct, then it seemed necessary to interpret the tendency to restore an earlier state of things in some very fundamental sense. Such a tendency must ultimately point to the very "earliest state," understood in its most radical meaning. In this light, an instinctual drive toward repetition appeared as a drive toward the most extreme form of regression: a drive to return to the inorganic state that preceded the organization of the living being. It was along this line of reasoning that the death drive came forward as a function of organic matter itself, a drive operative within cellular material that aimed at its dissolution. By this path, the "mysterious masochistic trends of the ego" brought to light by repetition assumed the dimensions of biological life and death. It was the idea of repetition that gave Freud the opportunity to make the jump from psychology to biology, but there are good reasons to question his argumentation at this crucial juncture. The main point—that the compulsion to repeat, as an urge to restore an earlier state of things, implies a will to return to an inorganic state—may be dubious enough on biological grounds, but it also involves an abuse of logic. From a purely logical point of view, the idea of repetition does not by itself imply any tendency toward a restoration of an earlier state of things. A drive toward repetition implies only that a state of 79

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affairs, once attained, will tend to recur. Without the addition of some other factor, there is no reason to suppose that the tendency toward repetition also involves a tendency to reach into the more and more distant past. Repetition does not necessarily imply regression. Freud himself struggled with this confusion between a merely repetitive or conservative process and a genuinely retrograde one. He first offered the conservative character of the death instinct as a universal attribute of all instincts but then identified the greatest conservativism with the instincts of life, as it is the erotic instincts that preserve the apparently immortal germ cells. Freud asserted that these instincts "are conservative to a higher degree in that they are peculiarly resistant to external influences" (SE, 18:40). This sort of conservatism, however, is clearly a matter of maintaining a given state, not returning to an earlier one. He finally qualified his position by proposing that while the life instincts are conservative, only the death instinct is truly retrograde. 5 It is not difficult to show how the concept of repetition opens a special door for Freud's recourse to biology, nor is it difficult to recognize the weakness of his reasoning at this critical moment. But the privileged role of repetition in Freud's argumentation is all the more curious for the fact that in itself repetition is rather poorly suited to represent what is distinctive about the death drive. In fact, it was not repetition as such but only repetition of unpleasurable experiences that raised the question about the operation of a force beyond the pleasure principle. As Freud himself noted, a will to repetition is more conspicuous in the case of pleasurable experiences than it is for unpleasurable ones. Freud goes so far as to say that repetition itself, as "the reexperiencing of something identical, is clearly in itself a source of pleasure" (SE9 18:36). But these facts suggest that the impulse toward repetition must, at the very least, be admitted for both classes of instincts and is arguably more appropriately linked with the life instincts and the functions of the ego insofar as they are thought to obey a principle of constancy. Despite all the difficulties it generated, Freud clung fast to the concept of repetition as a kind of indispensable key to unlocking the mystery of the death drive. It is almost as if, once the phenomenon of repetition had showed him the trail, he dared not let it go for fear of losing his bearings. But perhaps the most damaging consequence of Freud's reliance on repetition is the way it obscures the extent to which the argument of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is organized around a second basic idea: the twofold concept of psychical binding and unbinding (Bindung and Entbindung). In fact, Freud's thinking in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is rather awkwardly stretched around the two 80

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basic loci of repetition and binding. When we read Freud's book in the broader context of his work as a whole, it is hard not to conclude that of the two themes, repetition and binding, the latter is the more important. In any case, it makes a very great difference for the task of interpreting Freud's text how the choice between these two alternatives is weighted. We have already seen how repetition, construed as a return to the earliest state of things, gave Freud an entree into a biological reframing of his argument. By contrast, the concepts of binding and unbinding retain a decidedly psychological emphasis. T o be sure, binding is eventually drawn up into the biochemical metaphors that proliferate toward the end of the book. Thus binding is linked to the process by which organic material is melded into the unity of a living being. But the dominant connotation of binding, established in some of Freud's earliest papers and maintained throughout his career, is unquestionably psychological. Binding refers above all to the origin and function of the ego. By following out the logic of the concept of binding we are led to reconsider Freud's biologizing of the death drive. Although often overlooked in expositions of psychoanalytic theory, the notion of bound and free psychic energy was nevertheless assigned by Freud a place of capital importance. The idea may be said to be as old as psychoanalysis itself. It appeared first in the Studies on Hysteria, figured prominently in the Project for a Scientific Psychology, and was drawn upon in the theoretical chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams. In his 1915 essay on "The Unconscious," Freud remarked that "the distinction [of bound versus freely mobile energy] represents the deepest insight we have gained up to the present into the nature of nervous energy, and I do not see how we can do without it" (SE, 14:88). Psychical binding and unbinding again came to the fore in 1920 and continued to occupy a significant place in Freud's writings until the end of his life. What is crucial for our purposes is that the concept of binding is relevant first and foremost to the genesis and functions of the ego. It was in terms of unbound versus bound energies that Freud distinguished between the psychically unmastered instinctual forces of the id and the more organized and differentiated processes characteristic of the ego. Freud commented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that "the impulses arising from the instincts do not belong to the type of bound nervous processes but of freely mobile processes which press toward discharge" (SE, 18:34). As early as the Project, Freud associated the ego with bound energies. In fact, he offered the quality of being in a bound state as the very definition of the ego. "The ego itself," he claimed, "is a mass like this of neurones which hold fast to their 81

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the dialectic of the death and life drives is no longer to be conceived as a conflict of two opposing biological trends, but rather as marking the problematic interface between the biological and the psychological.In its struggle against the ego-formations of Eros, the death drive is appropriately referred to as the most primordial instinctual force. The death drive presents the mute exigence of the organic as such. Over the course of this chapter, the reader will no doubt have noticed that despite our earlier precautions about Strachey's translation of the Freudian Trieb, we have constantly flipped back and forth between the terms "instinct" and "drive." Although this slippage is in part the result of frequent citations from the Strachey translation, we can take it as the occasion to define again more precisely the meaning of Freud's term. In the view we have taken, what distinguishes the death drive from the functioning of the ego is precisely its lack of determinate representation. To this extent, the Todestrieb is unlike animal instincts, which tend to be determinate with respect to their aims and objects, and is better called a "drive." Yet there remains something in the concept of the Todestrieb, as the word "instinct" tends to connote, that is bound u p with the biological forces that animate the living body. Even having admitted with Lacan that the death drive threatens the ego and not the biological organism, there remains a sense in which the death drive is rooted in the inarticulate strivings of the body. The death drive has its source in the "impossible" depths of the real. We are now in a position to appreciate more fully Lacan's assertion that the doctrine of the death drive constitutes the culmination of Freud's thought. T h e quintessential Freudian problematic is located on the limen between the psychical and the somatic. Unlike Jung, for whom the basic forms of psychical conflict are posed within a matrix of images and archetypes, Freud is continually drawn toward the very threshold of representation, that outer boundary of the thinkable at which the structures of psychic life trail off into a reservoir of forces that remain active but relatively devoid of form. For Freud, the fundamental problem is that of symbolization itself, the underlying conflict is that between psychically represented and unrepresented somatic forces. The dialectic of the life and death drives constitutes the master concept by which this conflict is expressed. In this way, too, Beyond the Pleasure Principle can be more clearly recognized in its preparatory and grounding relation to The Ego and the Id. The notion of the death drive can be seen to open the way for that of the id, marking the border along which the formations of the ego are liable to disintegration under the pressure of forces excluded by it. The death drive emerges 102

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as the key moment in the movement of Freud's thought toward recognition of the nonrepressed unconscious. It is the supreme expression of the view that psychic structure arises in response to the exigence of bodily forces yet remains forever inadequate to the task of exhaustively representing them.

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The Unconscious Structured like a Language Sing, Heavenly Muse, . . . Instruct me, for thou know'st, thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dove-like sat'st brooding over the vast abyss And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support. —Milton, Paradise Lost

We now arrive at a crucial juncture in the course of our inquiry. We have framed a rereading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle on the basis of the dynamics of the imaginary and the real—a rereading that we have not hesitated to call Lacanian. Yet this "Lacanian" interpretation has made almost no reference to the linguistic register that is the most distinctive mark of Lacan's thinking. The most radical and innovative feature of Lacan's approach is to "have demonstrated the profound relationship uniting the notion of the death instinct to the problems of speech" (E:S, 101). The purpose of this chapter is to make u p this deficit by exploring the relation Lacan finds among death, desire, and language. For readers familiar with Lacan, postponing discussion of the symbolic may already have seemed a questionable strategy, as we have introduced on the level of the imaginary the opposition between the ego and the subject that, strictly speaking, is articulable only within the register of the symbolic. The Lacanian subject is above all the subject of language, the subject who speaks. So, too, we have linked desire with an aspect of the real alienated by the imaginary structuration of the ego but have made no mention of Lacan's insistence that desire manifests itself only as a function of a speaking subject in a signifying chain. Indeed, to speak of the imaginary function of the ego in isolation from the symbolic can be misleading. Over the course of his teaching, Lacan increasingly insists that the influence of the 105

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symbolic is present from the beginning. The human child is born into an order of symbolic relations that, although it cannot be said to precondition imaginary identification in the sense that such identification could not take place without it, nevertheless provides the environing context in which the definition of subjective identity will finally assume its meaning. We are thus given to understand that "there is never a simple duplicity of terms . . . there are always three terms in the structure, even if these terms are not explicitly present" (S.I, 218). T h e drama of the mirror stage, which we have presented as a wholly presymbolic function unfolded in the register of perceptual relations, must finally be recognized as an abstraction: For the child, to start with there is the symbolic and the real, contrary to what one might think. Everything which we see taking on consistency, becoming enriched and being diversified in the register of the imaginary begins with these two poles. If you think that the child is more a captive of the imaginary than of the rest, you are right in a certain sense. The imaginary is there. But it is completely inaccessible to us. It is only accessible to us when we start from its realisation in the adult. (5.7,219) Admittedly, there are dangers in abstracting the imaginary from the symbolic, but there are also advantages. Of prime importance, focusing on the relations between the imaginary and the real apart from the role of the symbolic served to frame more clearly the homology of the two Lacanian categories with the Freudian ego and id. On the basis of this homology, some key points of a Lacanian reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle could be sketched. The abstraction of the imaginary from the symbolic will continue to be of value in the present chapter as it will allow us to contrast more decisively the structure and functions of imaginary identification from those of linguistic signification. In Chapter 6, it will help to unfold more deliberately the structure and consequences of the Oedipal drama as Lacan conceives it. But a further question immediately arises: If our focus on the imaginary must now be rectified by accounting for the role of the symbolic, hasn't our way of interpreting the imaginary in terms of energetics made the task of reintroducing the symbolic even more difficult? Our reliance on the concept of energetics has been a vital part of our interpretive strategy. Energetics provided the scaffold along which Lacanian categories of the imaginary and the real could be aligned with the conceptual register in which Freud worked. As we saw earlier, the concept of energetics is by no means wholly absent in Lacan. It is 106

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clearly resonant with Lacan's treatment of the real and is strikingly embodied in his fable of the lamelle. What is not so clear, however, is how the energetic metaphor is to be related to the characteristically Lacanian concern with linguistic signification. Doesn't an energetic perspective, far from preparing us to understand the attention to the details of the patient's verbal discourse that is the prime feature of Lacanian psychoanalysis, tend rather to cast Lacan in the role of an "id psychologist," an avatar of catharsis more than of interpretation? From the viewpoint we have adopted, Lacan's conception of psychoanalysis may seem to have more in common with Groddeck's Book of the It than with Saussure's Course in General Linguistics. It must be admitted that in outlining an energetics of the imaginary we have relied on a problematic construction. There is a constant danger of overliteralizing the energetic metaphor, thereby resurrecting precisely the sort of crude instinctualism of organismic needs that Lacan tries to combat. Nevertheless, there is something to be gained by running these risks. In positing a quantity of energy excluded by the imaginary, the energetic perspective will provide an initial frame within which the function of the symbolic can be introduced. By giving some tentative meaning to the notion of the real, the energetics of the imaginary will allow us to locate provisionally an indeterminate dimension beyond the imaginary out of which the desire of the subject will fleetingly appear in the play of the signifier. "Au-dela de l'imaginaire, le symbolique"1 What, then, is the relation of the symbolic to the imaginary and how are they linked to the real? This question will occupy us for the remainder of this book, and for good reason: it is the most fundamental question raised by Lacanian psychoanalysis. From the outset, Lacan conceives the relation between the symbolic and the imaginary to be o n e of dynamic conflict. Lacan repeatedly opposes the task of psychoanalysis to the captures of the imaginary. He conceives the imaginary structuration of identity as a problem to be overcome, as a form of bondage from which the subject must escape. "Psychoanalysis alone," he offers, "recognizes the knot of imaginary servitude that love must always undo again, or sever" (E:S, 7). This work of love, the work Freud identified with the dynamics of the transference, is essentially a labor of language. The keynote of Lacan's sensibility is to be heard in his insistence that "imaginary incidences, far from representing the essence of our experience, reveal only what in it remains inconsistent 107

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unless they a r e r e l a t e d to the symbolic chain which b i n d s a n d orients them."2 W h a t is p r o b l e m a t i c a b o u t t h e imaginary, as we have seen, is its alienation of desire. I n the Urbild of t h e i m a g i n a r y ego, Lacan locates t h e "delay, t h e unsticking (decollement) of m a n in relation to his o w n libido" (S.I, 146). I n t h e f o r m a t i o n of t h e ego s o m e t h i n g is inevitably lost, e x c l u d e d , r e m a i n d e r e d . W h a t is this lost libido, this alienated desire? Lacan assigns it a p u r e l y negative status. I m a g i n a r y identification i n t r o d u c e s a "biological g a p , " a n essential b r e a c h or lack: One has to suppose a certain biological gap in [man], which is what I try to define when I talk to you about the mirror stage. The total captation of desire, of attention, already assumes the lack. T h e lack is already there when I speak of the desire of the human subject in relation to his image, of the extremely general imaginary relation which we call narcissism. (S.II, 323) Desire originates from a p r i m o r d i a l lack, a hole o r g a p , a manque-aetre (lack, or w a n t , of being). I n t h e c a p t u r e s of t h e imaginary, "desire is essentially a negativity" (S./, 147). T h e function of t h e symbolic is to give this negativity a n a m e : Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the very origin of every variety of animation. (S.II, 223) That the subject should come to recognise and to name his desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis. (S.II, 228—29) T h e symbolization of desire b e y o n d t h e i m a g i n a r y is a process e v o k e d over a n d over again by Lacan in different contexts, a reiteration a p p r o p r i a t e to t h e p h e n o m e n o n h e describes, as t h e recovery of d e s i r e is a n u n e n d i n g a n d u n e n d a b l e task: What is my desire? What is my position in the imaginary structuration? This position is only conceivable in so far as one finds a guide beyond the imaginary, on the level of the symbolic plane, of the legal exchange which can only be embodied in the verbal exchange between human beings. (S.I, 141) The relation of the subject to his Urbild, his Idealich, through which he enters into the imaginary function and learns to recognise himself 108

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as a form, can always see-saw. Each time that the subject apprehends himself as form and as ego, each time that he constitutes himself in his status, his stature, his static, his desire is projected outside. From whence arises the impossibility of all human coexistence. But, thank God, the subject inhabits the world of the symbol, that is to say a world of others who speak. That is why his desire is susceptible to the mediation of recognition. Without which every human function would simply exhaust itself in the unspecified wish for the destruction of the other as such. (S.I, 171) Speech is that dimension through which the desire of the subject is authentically integrated on to the symbolic plane. (S.I, 183) Excluded and alienated by the imaginary, desire is retrievable in some measure through the power of language. Lacan thinks of the function of the symbolic as a power of memory, an activity of profound recollection. In the reality of the present, Lacan claims, "only speech bears witness to that portion of the powers of the past that has been thrust aside at each crossroads when the event has made its choice" (E:S, 47). What is this "portion of the powers of the past that has been thrust aside"? What is it that is recalled by the action of the symbolic? Ultimately, the retrieval of desire concerns the possibility of what Lacan calls jouissance, for which there is no adequate English equivalent. As the English translator of Lacan's Ecrits notes: "Enjoyment" conveys the sense, contained in puissance, of enjoyment of rights, of property, etc. Unfortunately, in modern English, the word has lost the sexual connotations it still retains in French, (fouir is slang for "to come.") "Pleasure," on the other hand, is pre-empted by "plaisir"—and Lacan uses the two terms quite differently. "Pleasure" obeys the law of homoestasis that Freud evokes in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," whereby, through discharge, the psyche seeks the lowest possible level of tension. "Jouissance" trangresses this law and, in that respect, it is beyond the pleasure principle. (E:S, x) T h e emergence of desire in the signifying chain brings with it a promise of jouissance. In the following passage, jouissance is placed in the context of Freudian energetics by being associated with the aim of the living being governed by the pleasure principle. Yet, if jouissance is thus posed in terms of energy discharge, it is at the same time shown to be an excluded, forbidden discharge, an energy that is put out 109

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of play by t h e p l e a s u r e principle in its defensive aspect of a v o i d i n g d i s p l e a s u r e . T h e function of l a n g u a g e a p p e a r s in t h e role of a liberati n g influence, which o p e n s u p t h e possibility of testing a foreclosed a n d f o r b i d d e n jouissance: If the living being is something at all thinkable, it will be above all as subject of the jouissance; but this psychological law that we call the pleasure principle (and which is only the principle of displeasure) is very soon to create a barrier to all jouissance. . . . [T]he organism seems to avoid too much jouissance. Probably we would all be as quiet as oysters if it were not for this curious organization which forces us to disrupt the barrier of pleasure or perhaps only makes us dream of forcing and disrupting this barrier. All that is elaborated by the subjective construction on the scale of the signifier in its relation to the Other and which has its root in language is only there to permit the full spectrum of desire to allow us to approach, to test, this sort of forbidden jouissance which is the only valuable meaning that is offered to our life.3 T h e n a t u r e of this " f o r b i d d e n jouissance" is illuminated by t h e e n e r getic i n t e r p r e t a t i o n of t h e imaginary, which locates t h e source of d e s i r e in a quantity of e n e r g y e x c l u d e d by t h e ego. T h i s i n t e r p r e t a t i o n has m a d e us familiar with t h e p a r a d o x t h a t t h e p l e a s u r e principle, insofar as it effects t h e r e g u l a t o r y function of constancy a n d homoestasis characteristic of t h e ego, installs a b a r r i e r to p l e a s u r e in t h e m o r e basic sense of e n e r g e t i c discharge. T h e erection of this b a r r i e r to c o m p l e t e d i s c h a r g e creates a r e m a i n d e r of vital energies incapable of d i s c h a r g e o n t h e level of t h e i m a g i n a r y alone. T h e recovery of these e x c l u d e d e n e r g i e s , t h e very substance of jouissance, is t h e w o r k of t h e signifier. " T h e signifier," L a c a n claims, is situated at the level of the substance jouissante. . . . The signifier is the cause of jouissance. Without the signifier, how can this part of the body even be approached? How, without the signifier, can this something that is the material cause of jouissance be brought into focus? As blurred, as confused as it is, it is a part of the body that is signified by this contribution. (S.XX, 27) From the Ego to the Subject I n s p e a k i n g of a substance jouissante t h a t is a p p r o a c h e d by t h e signifier, o r of t h e m a t e r i a l cause oijouissance t h a t is b r o u g h t into focus by 110

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signification, Lacan seems to underwrite the myth of energetics in a way that links energetic metaphors to the salutory effects of language in granting access to the subject's desire. Following that clue, we may be tempted to characterize the symbolic as Lacan conceives it by means of a relatively simple schema: the symbolic reveals itself as the capacity to pass beyond the alienation of the imaginary and to represent the real. T h e symbolic functions to give desire a name in the sense of lending form to an inarticulate dimension beyond the ego. In this way, the Lacanian perspective would appear to echo Freud's famous epigram "Where id was, there ego shall be," compared by Freud to the way the Dutch claimed dry land from the Zuider Zee. 4 One might even imagine that the symbolic comes to the aid of the ego in its effort "to acheive a progressive conquest of the id." Lacan seems at times to reinforce this impression, as when he suggests that "in the unconscious, excluded from the system of the ego, the subject speaks" (S.II, 58). "The subject is there to rediscover where it was—I anticipate—the real. Where it was, the Ich, the subject, not psychology—the subject must come into existence" (FFC, 45). We are led to suppose that a formless substance jouissante, excluded by the ego, is approached and focused by the signifier in the same way that the wild energies of the id are progressively annexed by the organization of the ego. There is something correct about this scheme. Lacan does speak of the symbolic as affording a recovery of alienated desire and as opening a renewed access to the real. However, there is also something significantly wrong about it. Two key points must be made against it the implications of which will orient us in our subsequent discussions. (1) In the first place, such a scheme ignores the positive opposition Lacan draws between the imaginary ego and the speaking subject. It is that opposition that prompts Lacan to reread Freud's epigram precisely contrary to the prevailing interpretation and, it must be admitted, at variance with the way Freud himself seems to have taken it. T o do justice to the real import of Freud's discovery, the "Ich" in the formula Wo Es war, soil Ich werden must be taken to mean, not the ego, but the subject. "[Freud] wrote Das Ich und Das Es," Lacan proposes, "in order to maintain this fundamental distinction between the true subject of the unconscious and the ego as constituted in its nucleus by a series of alienating identifications" (E:S, 128). "Not only is there an absolute dissymmetry between the subject of the unconscious and the organisation of the ego, but also a radical difference" (S.II, 59). Freud's dictum does indeed concern the recovery and reintegration of unconscious desire. "The end that Freud's discovery proposes for 111

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man was defined by him at the apex of his thought in these moving terms: Wo Es war, soil Ich werden. . . . This is one of reintegration and harmony, I would even say of reconciliation" (E:S, 171). But for Lacan, it is the ego itself that makes this labor of self-recovery necessary, and it is the ego that remains the primary obstacle to its accomplishment. This effort of self-recovery is undertaken not in the service of the ego but at its expense. T h e work of analysis, effected along the paths of linguistic signification, far from extending the hegemony of the ego, tends to bring about a certain deconstruction of its domain. The agency of the symbolic cannot be understood as an extension of the imaginary but must rather be taken as a challenge to it. The speaking subject is emphatically decentered in relation to the ego. (2) The scheme proposed above is misleading in another important respect inasmuch as it envisages a direct intervention of the symbolic in the field of the real. Such a formulation generates a classical aporia as it supposes an introduction of form into the heart of the utterly formless. By what means, in relation to what points of support, might the articulations of the symbolic gain a foothold in the real? It is easy to see how we were led to represent the relation of the symbolic and the real in this fashion. From an energetic perspective, we conceived the relation of the imaginary to the real in terms of a bifurcated economy of energies in which a limited quantity of energy invested in the formative imago is set apart from a relatively formless remainder constitutive of the real. When we then turned to the task of determining the role of the symbolic in the recovery of the real beyond the bounds of the imaginary, we found ourselves predisposed to think of it as the introduction of form into a formless substance. And, indeed, Lacan himself occasionally puts the matter in similar terms, inviting us to imagine a substance jouissante beyond the ego that is addressed by the signifier. Lacan suggests that this "id" beyond the ego should be called a pure "whatness," or, better, it should be designated in the form of a question, a "what is it?" Under certain conditions, this imaginary relation itself reaches its own limit and the ego fades away, dissipates, becomes disorganised, dissolves. The subject is precipitated into a confrontation with something which under no circumstances can be confused with the everyday experience of perception, something we could call an id, and which we will simply call, so as not lead to confusion, a quod, a whatis-it? (S.II, 178)

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It is presumably to this indeterminate id excluded by the ego that Lacan refers in saying that the action of analysis leads the subject "to recognise and to name his desire." Yet Lacan does more than emphasize the indeterminateness of the id; he insists on its radically negative character. What arises as desire in the movement of discourse cannot be supposed to preexist in some unconscious dimension. What the action of the signifier brings to life is something new: That the subject should come to recognise and to name his desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it isn't a question of recognising something which would be entirely given, ready to be coapted. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world. (S.II, 228-29) Desire remains a perennial gap, a missing chapter, an essential negativity. T h e emergence of desire in the signifying chain is therefore said to be a "metonymy of the want-to-be [manque a etre]" (E:S, 259). The lack Lacan associates with the origin of desire outruns all possibility of representation: Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn't the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists. This lack is beyond anything which can represent it. It is only ever represented as a reflection on a veil. (5.//, 223) It is at this point that we must begin to correct and limit the energetic metaphor that has guided so much of our inquiry and to underline its status as a mythic construction. We are led to conclude that the power of language to provide access to desire alienated by the imaginary derives not from any capacity to generate form out of formlessness, but rather from the way in which the symbolic function tends to deconstruct imaginary unities—that is, from the way in which the symbolic challenges and transforms the structure of the ego itself. In effect, there is no direct access to the real. Rather, the prime contribution of the symbolic consists in its power to negate the imaginary. Lacan thinks of the relation of the symbolic to the real less as a generation of form in the heart of the formless than as a transmutation of existing forms. When we attempt to specify the being of the subject and the source of its desire prior to the effects of the signifier, we are limited to expressing ourselves in purely negative terms. We can invoke only the fragmentation of the imaginary, the death of the ego:

113

The Unconscious: A Language So when we wish to attain in the subject what was before the serial articulations of speech, and what is primordial to the birth of symbols, we find it in death, from which his existence takes on all the meaning it has. (E:S, 105)

T h e question of the real is situated in the opposition of the symbolic and the imaginary. T h e real is encountered in the negation of the imaginary. Far from being merely an ancillary precision, this point designates what is most distinctive in Lacan's work. The Lacanian problematic par excellence concerns the dynamic play of image and signifier.To see it worked out in Lacan's text, we can refer to what J o h n Muller and William Richardson have called "the most fundamental of all Lacan's schemata": Schema L.5 Reading "Schema L" In his seminar on the ego, Lacan introduces Schema L in the following form:

(Es) S

*

►- - - *

N

\

/

\

cC

o' other

/

«

(ego) o

\) O' Other

I will not pretend to exhaust the very rich possibilities for interpretation afforded by this schema but want only to indicate its bearing on the problems immediately before us. The schema is formed by the criss-crossing of two axes, graphically indicating the irremedially conflictual character of what it represents. An imaginary vector, o-o\ which links the ego to the objects of its imaginary identifications, is traversed by a second, symbolic axis, O-S, which represents the coming-into-being of the subject through the agency of the Other in discourse. Taken as a whole, the diagram maps the dynamic field in which the human subject is constituted. It reveals a "combinatory 114

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structure" (E:S, 195) in which the "being" of the subject, if we can provisionally use that expression, is not locatable at any single corner of the matrix, but is stretched over the four corners of the schema, namely, S, his ineffable, stupid existence, o, his objects, o', his ego, that is, that which is reflected of his form in his objects, and O, the locus from which the question of his existence may be presented to him. (E:S, 194) I qualify the expression "being of the subject" as provisional because what is expressed by Schema L has the structure of a question. That is to say, the schema is intended to represent not a static being but a process, a coming-into-being. It is readable in terms of the commentary Lacan gives on Freud's formula, Wo Es war, soil Ich werden. In fact, the formula itself can be glimpsed in a collapsed form at the upper lefthand corner of the diagram—"(Es) S"—standing over the schema as a master cipher. Lacan elucidates the Freudian epigram as follows: Wo (Where) Es (the subject—devoid of any das or other objectivating article) war (was—it is a locus of being that is referred to here, and that in this locus) soil (must—that is, a duty in the moral sense, as is confirmed by the single sentence that follows and brings the chapter to a close) Ich (I, there must I—just as one declared, "this am I," before saying, "it is I"), werden (become—that is to say, not occur (survenir), or even happen (advenir), but emerge (venir aujour) from this very locus in so far as it is a locus of being. (E:S, 128) Lacan's Schema L articulates the structured process, tensed by the interaction of imaginary and symbolic effects, in which the speaking subject emerges as a question to itself. This questioning is in its essence a questioning of the ego. Accordingly, the schema implies a certain priority of the imaginary axis that corresponds to the developmental ordering suggested by Lacan's conception: the imaginary relation in which the ego takes shape is laid down first, to be later transformed by the torsion of the Oedipal triangulation. In the schema itself, this priority is suggested by the way in which the symbolic relation, as if to represent its essential incompleteness and problematic character, is indicated in its upper extension by a dotted line. The initial position of the schema, designating the formation of the ego in imaginary identification with an other—"the other which isn't an other at all, since it is essentially coupled with the ego, in a relation that is always 115

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reflexive, interchangeable" (SJI, 321)—might therefore be drawn simply: ego o

o' other

On this imaginary axis we may indicate the desire of the subject alienated by the ego by placing the Es in brackets beyond the ego and outside it6: (Es)ego o

o' other

The contribution of the symbolic function can now be plotted by opening this axis against itself. What is required is a differentiation of the desire of the subject from the ego with which it is originally confused. This differentiation is effected in concert with a differentiation in the other, according to which the specular other of imaginary identification is distinguished from the Other who speaks, the Other with a capital "O." Envisaging this process of double differentiation, we are able to recognize that the shape of the schema inscribes less an "L" than a "Z." 7 As such, it suggests a possible accordion-like movement of expansion or collapse. Lacan remarks that the "schema signifies that the condition of the subject S (neurosis or psychosis) is dependent on what is being unfolded (ce qui se deroule) in the Other O." (E:S, 193). We are thus led to propose that the matrix as a whole presents a process of deroulement, of unfolding or uncoiling—as the French suggests, like the uncoiling of a snake—in which the imaginary axis o-o' is opened up to a new dimensionality by the action of the symbolic.

(ego) o

0

(ego) o

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O' Other

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The new dimension opened up in the negation of the imaginary by the symbolic is that of the real. This point can be clarified with reference to another schema, the so-called Schema R, in which the field of the real is plotted within the quadrangular configuration of Schema L.

SCHEMA R:

Like Schema L, this new schema, elaborated by Lacan in his discussion of psychosis, affords a wealth of significations that extend beyond the scope of our present purposes. Indeed, even the most cursory attempt to plumb its meaning will force us to touch on extremely obscure matters. For the moment, we note only the way in which the real is depicted in a zone adjacent to the imaginary axis but distinct from it. The trapezoid described by this zone coincides with the portion of the symbolic axis that was indicated in the original schema by a broken line. We may take this coincidence to indicate, in the first place, the variable character of the real, that it is liable to greater and lesser access. In Schema R, the field of the real appears to be bound and stabilized by the imaginary and the symbolic. It is as if the real, like the volatile reaction of nuclear fusion, is held in place by the contending forces of the imaginary and symbolic functions. In a third, related schema, Schema I, offered by Lacan to represent the dynamics of psychosis in the Schreber case, we see the same field distorted by the effects of a foreclosure of the symbolic. The real undergoes a kind of leakage toward the four corners of the schema, thus indicating the way in which the real comes to dominate pathologically the experience of the psychotic in hallucinations and delusional ideas:

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SCHEMA I

e'sjT

Language

(loves his wife)

We may make a further point. The coincidence of the zone of the real with the broken line of the symbolic vector can be taken to suggest the episodic, evanescent character of the experience of the real—what Lacan calls the essentially "pulsative function of the unconscious" (FFC, 43). T h e broken line indicates the way in which the real emerges an an uncanny eruption in the gaps produced by discourse. It is in such gaps or breaks in the signifying chain that Lacan locates the unconscious effects explored by Freud in dreams, slips, and symptoms. In this light the following passage becomes interpretable: The Freudian unconscious is situated at that point, where, between cause and that which it affects, there is always something wrong. . . . [W]hat the unconscious does is to show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with a real—a real that may well not be determined. In this gap, something happens. . . . [W]hat does [Freud] find in the hole, in the split, in the gap so characteristic of cause? Something of the order of the non-realized. (FFC, 22) Returning to Schema L, we can see how the schema expresses the emergence of the subject in a fashion consonant with Lacan's analysis of Freud's Wo Es war.. . . T h e analysis we have given enables us to make better sense of Lacan's claim that "the subject is there to rediscover . . . the real." T h e schema shows how the movement from the subject's "ineffable and stupid existence" finds the means in the Other of dis118

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course to pose itself as a question. This question constitutes a birth of desire inasmuch as the relation to the Other serves not only to articulate the question "What am I there (Where it was)?" but also, "What do I want?" When Lacan insists that human desire is the desire of the Other, he means that it is only in and through the Other, to whom I am linked in a relation of symbolic interchange, that I am able to announce to myself my own desire: The question of the Other, which comes back to the subject from the place from which he expects an oracular reply in some such form as "Che vuoi?", "What do you want?", is the one that best leads him to the path of his own desire. (E:S, 312) Our analysis of Schema L has foregrounded the effect of negation exercised by the symbolic over the imaginary in a way that returns us to our theme of the death drive. It enables us to understand in a preliminary way how the emergence of the speaking subject and the pursuit of its desire is tied to death. The symbolic function is an essentially disruptive force, which exerts "a manifestly disturbing influence in human and interhuman relations" (S.III, 17). What makes the coming-into-being of the subject a being-towards-death is that it entails a certain disintegration of the ego. "If this speech received by the subject didn't exist, this speech which bears on the symbolic level, there would be no conflict with the imaginary" (S.II, 326). As a presentation of the intersection of imaginary and symbolic axes, Schema L may thus be taken to map the very structure of primordial masochism. The schema shows how "the question of his existence bathes the subject, supports him," but also "invades him, tears him apart even" (E:S, 194): We cannot understand [the masochistic outcome] without the dimension of the symbolic. It is located at the juncture between the imaginary and the symbolic. What, in its structuring form, is generally called primary masochism is located at this juncture. That is also where one must locate what is usually called the death instinct, which is constitutive of the position of the human subject (S.I, 172). The agency of the symbolic order constitutes an agency of death as it gives to the subject "the law of the acts that will follow him right to the place where he is not yet" (E:S, 68). The transformative effects of the symbolic bring about a realization of being: 119

The Unconscious: A Language The symbolic order is simultaneously non-being and insisting to be, that is what Freud has in mind when he talks about the death instinct as being what is most fundamental—a symbolic order in travail, in the process of coming, insisting on being realised. . . . This is the point where we open out into the symbolic order, which isn't the libidinal order in which the ego is inscribed, along with all the drives. It tends beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the limits of life, and that is why Freud identifies it with the death instinct.. . . The symbolic order is rejected by the libidinal order, which includes the whole of the domain of the imaginary, including the structure of the ego. And the death instinct is only the mask of the symbolic order. (S.II, 326)

The Agency of the Letter From the position we have attained, we have provisionally answered the question posed at the outset about the relation of the symbolic function to the death drive. It is centered on the conflict between the symbolic and the imaginary, the way the symbolic effects a negation of imaginary structures. Only by means of this effect of negation can the desire of the subject be rendered accessible. It remains for us to specify how such a negation is possible and to determine its modes of action. To accomplish this task, it is necessary to explore Lacan's conception of language with an eye to determining the way in which the entry of the subject into language introduces structures and functions essentially different from those of the imaginary. Lacan's understanding of the symbolic function is based on a conception of language inspired by the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. As Lacan appropriates it, this conception can be summarized in five main points. The structure of language is: 1.

transcendent

2.

diacritical

3.

comprehensive

4.

conventional

5.

binary

(1) By the "transcendence" of language I refer to the fact that language constitutes an organization of codes and meanings shared by 120

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the members of a human community over and beyond the individual speaker. The acquisition of language involves entrance into an alreadyestablished institution. "Language and its structure exist prior to the moment at which each subject at a certain point in his mental development makes his entry into it" (E:S, 148). Language is not invented, nor does it have the character of an instrument that the speaker is free to manipulate or discard as he wishes. The human being's relation to language is less like that of a workman to his tools than it is like that between a fish and the water in which it swims and breathes. (2) Following Saussure, Lacan conceives language as a diacritical system. That is to say, language is a structure of internal relations in which the meaning of each of its signifying elements is determined by its interconnectedness with the organization of the whole. A rough idea of the point at stake is gained simply by reflecting on the selfcontainedness of a dictionary in which each word is defined in terms of the other entries in the dictionary. According to Saussure, "language is a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms." 8 In an analogy to chess, Saussure proposes that "the respective value of the pieces depends on their position on the chessboard just as each linguistic term derives its value from its oppositions to all the other terms." 9 (3) Language is by its very nature comprehensive. This is not to say that there exists a word in every language specific to every possible denotation. Particular languages are more and less well-outfitted with words for specific uses. According to the often-cited example, the Eskimos have some two dozen terms for snow. The point is rather that language, as a system of meanings in which each element is dependent for its signification on other elements in the system, is always capable of producing new meanings even when a specific word is lacking. To propose another analogy, language is a system of interconnecting pathways on the basis of which any point in the topography of the signified may be reached by more than one route. As Lacan puts this idea, no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification: in its extreme form this amounts to the proposition that there is no language (langue) in existence for which there is any question of its inability to cover the whole field of the signified, it being an effect of its existence as a language (langue) that it necessarily answers all needs. {E:S, 150)

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(4) Lacan insists on the conventional character of language, or, in the terms of Saussure, on the arbitrariness of the relation between the linguistic signifier and what it signifies. Saussure defined the linguistic sign in terms of a sound image, or signifier, bound to a concept, or signified. He expressed their relationship in the following diagram:

The relation of signifier to signified is called "arbitrary" or "unmotivated" in so far as it is not based (1) on a relation of resemblance (as, for example, the image on a dollar bill stands for George Washington; or (2) on a relation of causality (as a footprint indicates that someone has passed). 10 The arbitrariness of the signifier is demonstrated by the fact that the same signified may be indicated by completely different signifiers: "tree," "arbre," "Baum"; "I am going to school," "Je vais au l'ecole," "Ich gehe in die Schule." T h e arbitrariness of the link between signifier and signified, which marks language as a conventional rather than a natural organization of forms, is closely related to and is in fact interdependent with the character of language as a diacritical system. Because it constitutes a system defined in and through itself, the signifying network of language can theoretically be posed in its independence from the entirety of the signified. Saussure was thus led to speak of signifier and signified as "two floating kingdoms." This analogy of floating kingdoms held together only by convention suggests the possibility of slippage between the two realms. "We are forced, then," Lacan claims, "to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier" (£:S, 154). Although the relation of signifier to signified may thus be taken to be arbitrary, the speaker is not free to use a signifier in a way that fully ignores its conventional meanings. Precisely because each signifying element is determined by its relation to all the other elements in the system, the meanings of particular signifiers are stabilized for a 122

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community of speakers. From this point of view, as Emile Benveniste has remarked, the relation of signifier to signified is not arbitrary but necessary. 11 (5) Finally, Lacan conceives the most elemental components of language to be binary in structure. In this respect, he follows the proposal of Roman Jakobson that all language is analyzable in terms of twelve pairs of distinct, vocal-physiological oppositions—oppositions such as voiced-unvoiced, dental-labial, rounded-nonrounded, etc.— which Jakobson calls "differential features." The building blocks of language, the phonemes, are composed of "bundles" of differential features. 12 Along the lines described by these five aspects of language, it is possible to specify the differential relation of the symbolic and the imaginary. In the first place, unlike the effects of the imaginary, the origin of which is circumscribed within the present experience of an individual perceiver and which remains coextensive with the ego-identity it forms and limits, the symbolic system always extends beyond the position of the perceiving subject both diachronically and synchronically—in the terms used a moment ago, language is both "transcendent" and "diacritical." On the one hand, as a system of shared codes that exists prior to the individual's entry into it, language offers an inexhaustible reservoir of forms from which psychic development beyond the infantile ego may draw its guiding clue. The symbolic order is adequate to provide a rule which "pre-exists the infantile subject and in accordance with which he will have to structure himself (E:S, 234). On the other hand, as comprehensive in its power to signify an ever-wider domain of meanings, language encompasses every form of motive and response. "This language system, within which our discourse makes its way," Lacan remarks, "isn't it something which goes infinitely beyond every intention that we might put into it, and which, moreover, is only momentary?" (5./, 54). In this respect, too, language differs from the effect of the imaginary, which tends toward a fixed and unilinear structuring of the drives. "When language gets into the act, the drives tend rather to proliferate, and the question (if anyone were there to ask it) would instead be how the subject will find any place whatsoever" (£, 662). Lacan summarizes the all-encompassing character of language in these terms: Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are 123

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going to engender him "by flesh and blood"; so total that they bring to his birth, along with the gifts of the stars, if not with the gifts of the fairies, the shape of his destiny; so total that they give the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and even beyond his death; and so total that through them his end finds its meaning in the last judgement, where the Word absolves his being or condemns it—unless he attain the subjective bringing to realization of being-for-death. (E:S, 68) The opposition between the symbolic and the imaginary may be related to the fact that language exists before and extends beyond the subject who speaks, but also to the way that entry into language effects a certain release from enthrallment with the objects of imaginary identification. In comparison with the relations of resemblance that govern the imaginary, the arbitrariness of the linguistic signifier implies a certain negation of the object. "The being of language is the non-being of objects" (E:S, 263). Lacan links this moment of negation with the themes of death and desire, claiming that "the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing, and this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire" (E:S, 104). Language effects an uncoupling from the imaginary object by virtue of the fact that the symbolic function is not dual, but triadic. "All dual relations," Lacan maintains, are more or less of an imaginary style; and in order for a relation to take its symbolic value, it is necessary that there be a mediation by a third person which realizes, by relation to the subject, the transcendent element thanks to which his relation to the object can be sustained at a certain distance.13 This triadic character of the symbolic function is related by Lacan to the triangularity of the Oedipus Complex, but it is ultimately based on the nature of the linguistic signifier. The capacity of the linguistic sign to evoke the signified depends on its imbrication in the whole system of signifiers. T h e third term introduced between subject and object is, ultimately, the entire signifying system itself. Of capital importance, therefore, is the way in which the subject, in being freed from the captures of the imaginary, is thrust into circulation within the symbolic system. It is tempting to put the matter thus: drawn out of the bipolar relation to the object that characterizes the imaginary, the subject 124

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enters into the system of language. Yet strictly speaking this formula is misleading, as it tends to assume an already existing subject who leaves the imaginary and enters the symbolic. As Lacan thinks of it, the subject is constituted by the entry into language. The subject is an effect of the unfolding of the signifying chain. According to his definition, "a signifier is that which represents the subject for another signifier" (E:S, 316). What does this mean? What are we talking about when we refer to the "signifying chain"? T h e property of language that Lacan refers to in terms of a chaining of signifiers derives from the fact, simply put, that the meaning of words is oriented less to the concrete things they may stand for than to other words that complete and complement them. Meaning in language is ultimately less a function of any one-to-one correspondence of words to things than it is a function of the ways in which words follow upon and interpret one another. The trap we must not let ourselves fall into is to believe that the signified are objects, things. The signified is something else altogether—it is the signification of which I have explained, thanks to Saint Augustine who is a linguist just as much as Mr. Benveniste, that it always refers to the signification, that is to say, to another signification. (5.///, 42-43) Signification is a human discourse in so far as it always refers to another signification. (S.III, 135) T h e priority emphasized by Lacan of relations between signifiers over relations to the signified can be schematized as a succession of signifiers above and separated from the signified by a bar 14 : Sl-»S2,S3,...Sn s This schema graphically represents Lacan's contention that meaning is a function of the signifying chain itself and cannot be determined by any one of its elements in isolation, or, as he puts it, "that it is in the chain of the signifier that the meaning 'insists' but that none of its elements 'consists' in the signification of which it is at the moment capable" (E:S9 153). Although the image of a chain suggests a linear progression (reminiscent of the essential linearity Saussure attributed to the linguistic 125

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act: one word after another), the signifying chain is by no means onedimensional. As Lacan remarks, "there is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as if attached to the punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended Vertically/ as it were, from that point" (E:S, 154). As polysemic as an orchestral score is polyphonic, linguistic discourse resonates with a multitude of meanings, some momentarily more prominent than others, arranged along different levels of attention and relevance. This polysemy is an essential feature of discourse and is of interest to psychoanalysis, first, in grounding the possibility of multiple meaning that Freud called "overdetermination." "Overdetermination is strictly speaking only conceivable within the structure of language" (E:S, 271). But, in addition, the tendency of discourse to evoke a multitude of meanings— what might be called the essential "extravagance" of speech—establishes the capacity of language to accommodate unconscious intentionality even in the most apparently mundane and innocent banter. Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life is a veritable encyclopedia of this phenomenon. Lacan makes this point by insisting that what this structure of the signifying chain discloses is the possibility I have, precisely in so far as I have this language in common with other subjects, that is to say, in so far as it exists as a language, to use it in order to signify something quite other than what it says. (E:S, 155) The multiple reverberations of meaning generated within the symbolic system as a whole by the signifying chain brings to light an aspect of what Lacan calls the "decentering of the subject." The meaning of the subject's discourse always and essentially outstrips his or her intention in speaking. Yet the excentricity of the speaking subject to itself in which Lacan locates the essential import of Freud's discovery is even more strikingly exhibited by the fact that it is the symbolic system itself that gives rise to the signifying chain. T h e diachrony of language is possible only on the basis of the fundamental synchrony of its internal relations. 15 The unfolding of the chain of discourse is immanently conditioned by the structure of the symbolic order. T h e status of the Lacanian subject is thus put at a double remove from any conception of autonomous and sovereign intentionality. T h e subject is "strung along" by the unfolding of the signifying chain, 16 but, in addition, the course of that unfolding is determined in large part by the network of grammar and syntax, of codes and meanings that comprise the symbolic order. Much of what has just been said can be summarized in terms of the 126

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examples Lacan provides in his essay on "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious." As we have seen, Saussure diagrams the complex of the sign by placing a tree-drawing, indicating the concept of "tree," over the sound-image, or signifier, "arbor." Lacan reprints the same diagram in his essay, but inverts it, placing the signifier on top of the signified to indicate the primacy of the signifier over the signified. He then offers an example of his own that further emphasizes his distance from Saussure:

LADIES

GENTLEMEN

o

This Lacanian revision of the definition of the sign not only gives the signifier priority over the signified, thus "silencing the nominalist debate by a low blow," but also fundamentally alters the status of the signified and the relationship of the signifier to it (2s;S, 151). For Saussure, the signified is a concept, the idea called up by the soundimage. In Lacan's diagram, what is offered in the place of Saussure's concept is an indication of the thing itself. The two doors in the diagram do not indicate two different rooms but a single room under the influence of two signifiers. Lacan's example thus illustrates how different modes of signification determine the very being of the thing signified. And what is this signified? It has assumed the status of the real. Without the intervention of the signifier, it remains completely undifferentiated. The signifier functions to realize an order of being that did not exist before. 17 Further, it is because the signified for Lacan ultimately occupies the place of the real that the line dividing signifier and signified in the diagram—the line that indicates an absolutely intimate connection for Saussure, a connection he compares at one point to the two sides of a piece of paper—must be recognized as a bar, a barrier to all signification. At the very heart of the sign there is a failure of transmission, a lack of any ultimate connection to the 127

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signified. There is something in the real that forever escapes the attempt to signify it. This conclusion returns us to the point made earlier: there is no question for Lacan of the real being carved at the joints, as it were, by the signifier. Rather, the effect of the signifier consists only in the negation of the imaginary. This, too, is suggested by the "Ladies and Gentlemen" inasmuch as it is the dynamics of sex difference that is at stake in it. By means of its imbrication in a system of signification, the signifier lifts the entire issue of sex difference out of the specular order in which it is originally registered and renders it available to an unending slippage of significations. A final point: we have emphasized that the symbolic introduces a certain negation of the imaginary, insofar as it severs the specular relation to the object. But the symbolic negates the imaginary in another and more fundamental sense related to the binary structure of the linguistic sign. T h e imaginary form is essentially a gestalt unity. By contrast, the linguistic signifier is structured, not by unity, but by difference. The "units" of language are not really units at all. The elements of language, the phonemes and the differential features that compose them, are in no way monadic entities. Their essential nature consists in pairings of oppositions. 18 Linguistic cognition is through and through a recognition of differences, and is such even on the level of its microstructure. The whole function of the linguistic phoneme is to register increments of distinction. 19 "All phonemes," Jakobson emphasizes, "denote nothing but mere OTHERNESS." 20 This means that for any phonemic element to perform its function, its contrary must be implicitly given in thought. As Jakobson makes this point, "the opposed terms are two in number and they are interrelated in a quite simple way: if one of them is present the mind educes the other. In an oppositive duality, if one of the terms is given then the other, though not present, is evoked by thought." 21 T h e significance for the problem of desire of this structural distinction between imaginary and symbolic effects is that where the imaginary generates a lack, a gap, or absence for which it is unable to compensate, the symbolic retains within itself the antipode of every position. "Speech is able to recover the debt that it engenders" (E:S, 144). T h e symbolic bears within itself the capacity to respond to the alienating effect of the imaginary, which produces a primordial absence. Thus Lacan suggests that "the human being has a special relation with his own image—a relation of gap, of alienating tension. That is where the possibility of the order of presence and absence, that is

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of the symbolic order, comes in. The tension between the symbolic and the real is subjacent here" (SJI, 323). The special power of the symbolic lies in its capacity "to give absence a name," a capacity that is based on the way in which the binary structure of language itself functions as a ceaseless alternance of presence and absence. "Through the word—already a presence made of absence—absence gives itself a name" (E:S, 65). Every phonemic opposition, although it becomes effective through the presence of one feature and the absence of its binary opposite, must be implicitly given to thought not in its disjunction but in its conjunction. The linguistic sign operates "in so far as it connotes presence or absence, by introducing essentially the and that links them, since in connoting presence or absence, it establishes presence against a background of absence, just as it constitutes absence in presence" (E:S, 234). The symbolic is distinguished from the imaginary by the fact that for every linguistic determination of meaning an opposite and complementary determination is always preserved, so to speak, inpotentia. Thus Lacan concludes that it is not because of some mystery concerning the indestructibility of certain infantile desires that these laws of the unconscious determine the analysable symptoms. The imaginary shaping of the subject by desires more or less fixed or regressed in their relation to the object is too inadequate and partial to provide the key to it. The repetitive insistence of these desires in the transference and their permanent recollection in a signifier that has been taken possession of by repression, that is to say, in which the repressed element returns, find their necessary and sufficient reason, if one admits that the desire of recognition dominates in these determinations the desire that is to be recognized, by preserving it as such until it is recognized. (E:S, 141, my emphasis) Acheronta Movebo Although we have supplied some key points of reference for understanding Lacan's concept of the symbolic, we have yet to specify concretely the meaning of his claim that the unconscious is structured like a language. It is to that task that we will turn in the following chapter. Nevertheless, on the basis of what we have said so far, it is possible to draw up some broad conclusions with regard to our central concern with the death drive and to relate them to the problem of the Freudian

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unconscious in general. Those conclusions have bearing on the problem of energetics in psychoanalyisis that has figured so prominently in this inquiry. At the outset of this chapter, we noted the basic tension between Lacan's concern for language and the energetic perspective along which we sought to establish a first avenue of approach to his work. This tension between energetics and signification is by no means peculiar to Lacan but may be said to occupy the very center of the theoretical field opened up by Freud. Perhaps the greatest challenge of Freud's thought consists in the way it is ambiguously poised at the interface between the physical and the psychical. The fundamental concerns of psychoanalysis tend to agitate the boundary between body and mind— the boundary on which the concept of the unconscious itself is located. On the one hand, Freud based his metapsychological speculations on suppositions about the organic sources of desire. The most conspicuous feature of Freud's legacy is its emphasis on sexuality and the economics of libido. Freud invites us to conceive the unconscious, as the concept of the id suggests, as a cauldron of seething forces, the primeval Acheron of the mind, whose black waters underlie and obscurely influence everything that occurs on the level of consciousness. Psychoanalysis might thus be characterized as first and foremost an attempt to illuminate the instinctual life of human beings. Freud himself called the theory of the instincts "the most important but at the same time the least complete portion of psychoanalytic theory" (SE, 7:168, n.2). On the other hand, however, the psychoanalyst is never confronted with the raw force of bodily energies. Although Wilhelm Reich could jusdy claim Freud as his forebear, Reich's quest for orgone energy had nothing to do with psychoanalysis. The practice of analysis, in both its evidence and its agency, relies upon the verbal exchange between an analyst and patient. Freud's discovery, so aptly dubbed by one of his patients "the talking cure," is intimately bound up with the process and structures of speech and language. From this second angle of view, for which Lacan is often taken to be the major spokesperson, the unconscious is to be identified with the precisely articulated processes of symbolization revealed by analysis in the overdetermined structure of dreams, the signifying play of slips and bungled actions, the symbolic architecture of symptoms. How are these two conceptions of the unconscious to be reconciled? In the extreme, we may be tempted to speak of two Freuds: on one hand, Freud the anatomist and neurologist, the author of the Project for a Scientific Psychology and Three Essays on Sexuality, who pursued a life-long fascination with the problem of the instinctual drives; on the other 130

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hand, Freud the semiologist or even linguist, who so brilliantly teases apart the complexities ofjokes and verbal slips or deciphers the private codes of dreams. And how is the problem of the death drive related to this fundamental ambiguity in the psychoanalytic unconscious? These questions can be seen to occupy a central place in Paul Ricoeur's monumental and penetrating study of psychoanalysis, Freud and Philosophy.

Ricoeur takes Freud's dualist sensibility as his guiding motif. For Ricoeur, psychoanalysis rests on the double foundation of energetics and hermeneutics. Ricoeur appreciates the necessity of the energetichermeneutic distinction, observing that it is from the simultaneous pursuit of both economic and interpretive approaches that psychoanalysis derives much of its fertility as a theory and its power as a therapeutic modality. "This mixed discourse is the raison d'etre of psychoanalysis" (FP, 65). Yet Ricoeur also stresses its status as an epistemological problem. The tension between energetic and hermeneutic perspectives threatens to imply an incommensurability between force and meaning. "The most difficult notion of all," he claims, "is the idea of an 'energy that is transformed into meaning.'. . .For a philosophical critique, the essential point concerns what I call the place of that energy discourse. Its place, it seems to me, lies at the intersection of desire and language" {FP, 395). In thus defining the problem, Ricoeur indicates the direction of a solution: there must be a reconciliation between the energetic and hermeneutic orders, an "intersection of desire and language." This reconciliation is required not simply to satisfy a logical requirement imposed on psychoanalysis from outside, but to do justice to what Ricoeur calls the "implicit teleology" of psychoanalysis. Ricoeur maintains that if psychoanalysis unavoidably relies upon a "mixed discourse," which implies a disjunction between desire and language, it must also be recognized that "Freudianism exists only on the basis of its refusal of that disjunction" (FP, 66). Ricoeur takes as his task "to overcome the gap between the two orders of discourse and to reach the point where one sees that the energetics implies a hermeneutics and the hermeneutics discloses an energetics" (FP, 65). What makes this project especially challenging is that its objective is not merely to show the compatibility of desire and language, but also to show how they are necessarily and inextricably bound up with one another. T h e greatest significance of Freud's work consists in the discovery that desire actually comes into being through symbols, that "the positing or emergence of desire manifests itself in and through a process of symbolization" (FP, 65). T h e burden then becomes explaining how 131

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this emergence of desire occurs. "The difficulty in the Freudian epistemology is not only its problem but also its solution" (FP, 66). Ricoeur comes closest to a solution in his discussion of sublimation. T h e implicit teleology of psychoanalysis is already located by Freud in the concept of sublimation. There, if anywhere, it seems we will be able to map the meeting-place of desire and language. What, then, is sublimation? As Ricoeur himself acknowledges, his discussion, although immensely suggestive, remains tentative and programmatic. His treatment of sublimation finally offers less an answer than a betterarticulated statement of the question.The problem of sublimation presents particular difficulties, in part because Freud said relatively little about it. Around certain key notions there remains an "unspoken factor" in Freud's doctrine. "The empty concept of sublimation," Ricoeur suggests, "is the final symbol of this unspoken factor" (FP, 492). But there is a deeper reason why the problem of sublimation refuses to yield its secret, for its solution is dependent on the solution of a prior problem: that of the genesis and function of the superego. It is only through the activity of the superego that sublimation becomes possible at all. "The whole economy of the superego," Ricoeur observes, "is reflected in the concept of sublimation" (FP, 489). T h e link between sublimation and the function of the superego, present in Freud but never fully worked out, might seem to make things even more mysterious. Far from making possible an emergence of desire, the superego is often taken to be the agency of repression par excellence. But the plot thickens yet again. Associated with the superego, the problem of sublimation is referred to the topography of superego, ego, and id, and to the master key of Freud's entire experience, the drama of the Oedipus Complex—topics for which there is no shortage of Freudian texts, yet for which a coherent account of the plan of the whole is still lacking. Why? On this point, the result of Ricoeur's inquiry is especially intriguing for the problematic we have been pursuing. The nature of the superego remains a mystery so long as its relations with the death drive, the enigmatic climax of Freud's mature theory, remain unclarified. It is not without reason, therefore, that the first half of Ricoeur's book, his "Reading of Freud," culminates with a discussion of the death drive and the "destructiveness" of the superego. "We must indeed admit," he remarks, "that the theory of the superego remains incomplete as long as we have not understood its 'deathly' component" (FP, 229). For Ricoeur, what begins as an inquiry into the unresolved dualism of energetics and hermeneutics in Freud's theory ends up in an appeal to sublimation, but only by way of the twin problems of conscience 132

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and death. How, then, does Ricoeur understand the death drive? At every point, his treatment of it raises the possibility of a fundamental reinterpretation. Ricoeur recalls the child's Fort-Da game, in which Freud discerned a first adumbration of a force "beyond the pleasure principle," and proposes that the primitive vocalizations of the child bereft of its mother somehow represent the very essence of the death drive. "What is surprising is that the death instinct is represented by such an important function which has nothing to do with destruction, but rather with the symbolization of play, with esthetic creation, and with reality-testing itself (FP, 317). Ricoeur proposes that "the death instinct, which is finally regarded as anticultural destructiveness, may conceal another possible meaning. . . . [D]o we not discover another aspect of the death instinct, a nonpathological aspect, which would consist in one's mastery over the negative, over absence and loss? And is not this negativity implied in every appeal to symbols and to play?" (FP, 314). He is then led to ask: "Are we not invited thereby to reinterpret the death instinct and relate it to the negativity through which desire is educated and humanized? Is there not a profound unity between the death instinct, the mourning of desire, and the transition to symbols?" {FP, 482). Certainly, this brief catalog of passages from Ricoeur yields only the barest glimpse of the reinterpretation of the death drive that he calls for. But it may at least be said that it leaves no doubt that Ricoeur finds in the problem of the death drive a privileged, if perhaps unexpected, opportunity to address his central problematic. His inquiry suggests that the "unspoken factor" in Freud's thought, the key for explaining sublimation and for resolving the aporia about the linkage of desire and language, is the death drive itself. It is all the more remarkable, then, that the question Ricoeur poses about the "profound unity between the death instinct, the mourning of desire, and the transition to symbols" is left unanswered. This very suggestive passage is, quite literally, his last word on the matter. In the remaining seventy pages of his book, the death drive is mentioned only once, and in passing. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Ricoeur very masterfully works his way toward the framing of a question about the relation of language, desire, and death in psychoanalysis that is as important and fascinating as it is unusual, only to let it drop once he has succeeded in raising it. The guiding clue for pursuing Ricoeur's question is to be found in an "unspoken factor" of his own text. Despite the curious paucity of references to Lacan, it is impossible to mistake the influence of Lacan on Ricoeur's work; indeed, Ricoeur's book is in large part a veiled 133

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challenge to Lacan's teaching. In particular, Ricoeur criticizes Lacan for failing to do justice to the energetic side of Freud. "The linguistic conception of the unconscious . . . makes sense only in conjunction with the economic concepts of Freudian theory; instead of replacing the Freudian topographical and economic point of view, it parallels that point of view in every respect" (FP, 395-96). In the course of this essay, I have tried to show that Ricoeur's criticism of Lacan is unwarranted, or at least that his claim that "the linguistic conception of the unconscious . . . instead of replacing the topographical and economic view, parallels it in every respect," is less a criticism of Lacan's perspective than a description of it. Lacan variously supplies support for both views of the unconscious, energetic and symbolic. At times, Lacan evokes the unconscious as an utterly indefinite substance, linking it with the indeterminate domain of the real, and designating it by a variety of mythical tropes. He will claim, for example, that for the "subject of the unconscious... to be rigorous, it, like Jehovah, should be neither represented, nor named" (5.//, 62). Such a characterization recalls the image of the Freudian id, rooted in the mute exigencies of an organic substratum, a substance jouissante, the very juice, so to speak, of the body. At other times, and doubtless more consonant with most accounts of his innovation, Lacan insists on the linguistically structured character of the unconscious. In fact, he will go so far as to claim, against the views of his students Laplanche and Leclaire, that without language there is no such thing as the unconscious. 22 We are thus faced with a basic ambiguity in Lacan's treatment of the unconscious—an ambiguity that is unmistakable in the following passage: On the one hand, the unconscious is, as I have just defined it, something negative, something ideally inaccessible. On the other hand, it is something quasi-real. Finally, it is something which will be realised in the symbolic, or, more precisely, something which, thanks to the symbolic progress which takes place in analysis, will have been. (5./, 158) T h e ambiguous character of the unconscious evidenced by this passage is to be related, as the wording of the passage indicates, to the duality of the real and the symbolic. T h e unconscious is both something ideally inaccessible, something quasi-real, yet it is also realized by the symbolic. In this distinction between the real and symbolic aspects of the unconscious, Lacan expresses Ricoeur's duality of energetics and hermeneutics. For Lacan, however, there is a third term in 134

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relation to which the real and the symbolic are brought into dynamic interchange. In our analysis of Schema L, we have seen how the two sides of this ambiguity meet in relation to the imaginary. Even by itself, the function of the imaginary is almost unintelligible apart from a double reference to energy and representation, force and form. T h e imaginary fixes the primitive libidinal drives in relation to perceptual registrations. Earlier we underlined this point by associating the imaginary with Freud's concept of "instinctual representative," a concept that embodies in itself the duality of force and form. Yet the conjunction of energy and structure effected by the imaginary is essentially problematic. T h e imaginary establishes the defensive structure of the personality and lays down the initial contours along which objects in the world can be stably and predictably experienced. T h e imaginary is revealed as the foundation for the twofold system of the pleasure and reality principles. This imaginary structuration is established only at the price of an alienation of the subject from itself. T h e "reality system, however far it is elaborated, leaves an essential part of what belongs to the real a prisoner in the toils of the pleasure principle" (FFC9 55). When the imaginary is brought under the influence of the symbolic, the effect is both to transform existing structures and to release hitherto inaccessible potentialities of desire. The symbolic function wins access to the real indirectly by means of the effect of negation it exercises over the imaginary. In contrast to the homeostatic tendency of the imaginary, the symbolic introduces difference and discontinuity. "Discontinuity, then, is the essential form in which the unconscious first appears to us as a phenomenon" (FFC, 25). Such discontinuity produces a certain fragmentation of the imaginary, in the gaps of which something of the real emerges as surprise: Impediment, failure, split. In a spoken or written sentence something stumbles. Freud is attracted by these phenomena, and it is there that he seeks the unconscious. There, something other demands to be realized—which appears as intentional, of course, but of a strange temporality. What occurs, what is produced in this gap, is presented as the discovery. It is in this way that the Freudian exploration first encounters what occurs in the unconscious. This discovery is, at the same time, a solution—not necessarily a complete one, but, however incomplete it may be, it has that indefinable something that touches us, that peculiar accent . . . namely, surprise, by which the subject feels himself overcome, by which he finds both more and less than he expected—but, in any case, it is, in relation to what he expected, of exceptional value. (FFC, 25) 135

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Filling out this schema of interrelation between the three registers, it is possible to see how and why Lacan characterizes the dynamics of the imaginary, real, and symbolic in terms of the three interlocking rings of a Borromean knot. Only insofar as the three registers act upon one another are the effects of the unconscious produced. So, too, clarifying this interrelation enables us to complete the basic outline of Lacan's account of the death drive, satisfying the anticipation set out in the first chapter that the death drive is to be variously related to all three of the Lacanian categories. The death drive may be said to involve the emergence of the real in the disintegration of the imaginary—a disintegration that is effected by the agency of the symbolic. In accordance with this formula, we can complete the mapping of the Lacanian categories in relation to the concepts of binding and unbinding that informed Freud's theory of the life and death drives. T h e function of the imaginary grounds the process of binding insofar as it tends toward the establishment of unities characteristic of the Gestalt. T h e effects of unbinding, associated by Freud with the trauma, are to be attributed in the first place to the real. Thus Lacan remarks that "at the origin of the analytic experience, the real . . . presented itself in the form of that which is unassimilable it is—in the form of the trauma." (FFC, 55). However, although it is tied to the real, the unbinding of imaginary structures is brought about by the intervention of the symbolic. T h e power of the symbolic to actualize the process of unbinding stems from the fact that linguistic signification is structured not by unity but by difference and opposition. It is for this reason, then, that Lacan claims that "the signifier—you perhaps begin to understand—materializes the agency of death." 23 From a Lacanian perspective, the Freudian death drive, as a drive toward difference over unity, fragmentation over wholeness, heterogeneity over any principle of sameness, is identifiable with a drive to signification.24 "Life is only caught u p in the symbolic piece-meal (morcelee), decomposed. The human being himself is in part outside life, he partakes of the death instinct" (S.II, 90). With this conclusion, we are able to resolve Ricoeur's dilemma about the energetic-hermeneutic duality in psychoanalysis. Energetics, as an aspect of the real, is accessible in the action of psychoanalysis as a function of the relation between imaginary and symbolic structures. The energy of the real emerges in the very heart of psychoanalytic hermeneutics insofar as that hermeneutics involves a realignment of imaginary forms under the influence of the symbolic. At the same time, we arrive at the answer to our original question about the enigmatic conjunction of desire, language, and death in Lacan's thought. Under136

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stood as an emergence of the real in the dynamism of the imaginary and the symbolic, the death drive becomes the very engine by which the intersection of desire and language is effected in the coming-tobe of the subject. In the activity of the death drive, the unrealized potentialities of the subject, the subject's question "What am I there (where it was)?" emerges beyond the imaginary in the metonymy of the signifier. We are able to see further why Lacan takes the death drive to be "the culminating point of Freud's doctrine." As we have interpreted it, the death drive emerges as the master concept around which the entire Freudian metapsychology can be unified and integrated. T h e action of the death drive becomes virtually consubstantial with the effects of the unconscious. The Freudian Acheron, like the mythical river of Hades, flows along the boundary separating life and death. In the following chapter, we will try to articulate these conclusions more precisely in relation to the Freudian topography of ego, id, and superego. On the basis of that analysis, it will be possible to venture some remarks on the relation of the death drive to sublimation—a problematic that is located, as Ricoeur suggests, at the furthest horizon of the Freudian discovery.

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The Formations of the Unconscious Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest Now is the time that face should form another. —Shakespeare, Sonnet III

In this chapter, we set our sights on clarifying the relations of the death drive with sublimation, thus committing ourselves to an itinerary that will take us beyond the conclusions explicitly laid down by Freud. It is a problem for which Freud's text provides only fragmentary, tentative, and ambiguous clues. In view of this lack of direction by Freud, but also in consideration of the importance and complexity of the questions involved, we must cautiously limit our expectations from the start. Our aim will not be to provide an exhaustive account of the process of sublimation, either in its Freudian or Lacanian incarnations, but only to indicate some general and suggestive correspondences in relation to the theme of the death drive. Even to approach the question of sublimation, however, it will be necessary to traverse a twofold series of preliminary problematics: on the one hand, the theory of the Oedipus and castration complexes; on the other, the nature and function of the superego. As we will see, they are problematics very significantly illuminated by a Lacanian perspective. Indeed, whatever contribution we can make in these domains will provide a measure of the fruitfulness of the Lacanian innovations we have been following. In introducing Lacan's concept of the symbolic, we have stressed the conflict between the symbolic and the imaginary, suggesting how linguistic signification implies a certain deconstruction of imaginary formations. As we move toward the question of sublimation it will be necessary to shift this focus on the negative effects of the symbolic function toward an understanding of its positive contribution. In the dialectical play between these twofold effects, negative and positive, we will trace the emergence of what Lacan calls the "formations of the unconscious." They constitute what might otherwise be called the "thematics" of psychoanalytic interpretation, centered on the Oedipus 139

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wrote in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, "is the reaction to danger" (SE, 20:150). "But what," he went on to ask, "is a 'danger'?" If the prototypical situation of anxiety is to be found in the experience of birth and the helplessness of the newborn baby, it remained unclear by what means danger becomes psychically effective. As Freud put it: In the act of birth there is a real danger to life. We know what this means objectively; but in a psychological sense it says nothing at all to us. The danger of birth has as yet no psychical content. We cannot possibly suppose that the foetus has any sort of knowledge that there is a possibility of its life being destroyed. It can only be aware of some vast disturbance in the economy of its narcissistic libido. Large sums of excitation crowd in on it, giving rise to new kinds of feelings of unpleasure. (SE, 20:135) Linking anxiety to the perception of danger enabled Freud to draw a parallel between the experiences of anxiety and fear. The difference between the two is to be related to the presence or absence of a specific object. "Anxiety has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object. In precise speech, we use the word Tear' [Furcht] rather than 'anxiety' [AwgsJ] if it has found an object" (SE, 20:105). But, in addition to its indefiniteness with regard to an object, the danger that calls forth anxiety is related less to a threatening external situation than to an overflow of internal excitations. It was this economic consideration that dominated Freud's final version of the theory. T h e significant factor in anxiety is "the economic disturbance caused by an accumulation of amounts of stimulation which require to be disposed of. It is this factor, then, which is the real essence of the 'danger.' " (SE, 20:137). Although James Strachey has emphasized the way in which this new conception overturned Freud's long-held theory of anxiety as repressed libido, in another sense it renewed an old idea present in the Project for a Scientific Psychology.l As we saw earlier, the Project posits the mastery of excitation as the aim of the psychic apparatus. Excessive stimulation is the primary danger to the psychic system and especially so when the source of the stimulus lies within the organism itself, making physical withdrawal from the stimulus impossible. It was as a defense against the onslaught of such unchecked "endogenous stimuli" that Freud first posed in a systematic way the notion of the ego. T h e idea that anxiety expresses the danger to the ego of an unmanageable economic disturbance was therefore a direct inheritance from a conception that Freud developed very early in his experience. 142

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Lacan's view of anxiety builds on the Freudian account in a way that unifies and integrates Freud's various formulations. Like Freud, Lacan links anxiety to the vulnerability and internal discord experienced by the infant during the first months of life. The prototype of anxiety appears in the suffocation of birth, the cold, linked to the nudity of the skin, and the labyrinthine malaise which is allayed by the satisfaction of rocking, organizing by their triad the painful tone of organic life which, for the best observers, dominates the first six months of human life. These primordial afflictions all have the same cause: an insufficient adaptation to the rupture of the conditions of environment and of nutrition which ground the parasitic equilibrium of intra-uterine life.2 Lacan and Freud are in agreement, too, that it is the integrity of the ego that is threatened in anxiety. "The ego," as Freud put it, "is the actual seat of anxiety" (SE, 20:93). Insofar as the imaginary formation of the ego serves to deliver the infant from its original chaos and helplessness, the structure of the ego itself becomes the primary bulwark against anxiety. Yet anxiety remains an ever-present possibility to the extent that the ego is vulnerable to disintegration. The very possibility of anxiety testifies to the fact that the formation of the ego does not fully quell the infant's internal chaos. Lacan maintains that the structure of the primitive ego, "this illusion of unity, in which a human being is always looking forward to self-mastery, entails a constant danger of slipping back into the chaos from which he started; it hangs over the abyss of a dizzy Assent in which one can perhaps see the very essence of Anxiety." 3 Lacan's view of anxiety as a breakdown of the imaginary form of the ego serves to clarify a number of problematic points in Freud's account. In particular, it specifies the meaning of the danger to the ego signaled by anxiety. Freud clearly found it difficult to determine the nature of the danger. In The Ego and the Id he remarked that "what it is that the ego fears from the external and from the libidinal danger cannot be specified; we know that the fear is of being overwhelmed or annihilated; but it cannot be grasped analytically" (SE, 19:57). For Lacan, the danger is readily interpretable in terms of an explanation of the unity of the ego that is lacking in Freud. 4 Inasmuch as it is formed on the basis of a unifying perceptual Gestalt, the ego is liable to anxiety in fantasies of the fragmented body, or corps morcele. This idea might readily be extended to give new meaning to the opposition 143

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Complex, its conditions and derivatives. As such, the formations of the unconscious serve to explain the appearance of certain privileged fantasies encountered by analytic work. In addition to the family dynamics of the Oedipus Complex and in fact underlying those dynamics, the formations of the unconscious concern the role of the body image and parts of the body in the formation of character, sexual identity, and various pathological conditions. Of prime importance is the role of the phallus. For Lacan, "the phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire" (E:S, 287). Centered on the function of the phallus, the formations of the unconscious are thus to be related above all to the function of castration. From a Lacanian point of view, the castration complex remains an essential point of reference for psychoanalytic theory and its reinterpretation constitutes one of Lacan's most important contributions. If the drama of Oedipus is the guiding myth of psychoanalysis, Lacan contends, "what is not a myth, and which Freud nevertheless formulated soon after the Oedipus Complex, is the castration complex" (E:S, 318). "It is castration that governs desire, whether in the normal or the abnormal" (E:S, 323). What, then, does Lacan understand by castration? T o move forward toward an answer, let us begin with the basics: castration is an expression of anxiety. Before undertaking a discussion of castration it is helpful to review Freud's formulations on the problem of anxiety in general and to assess Lacan's treatment of it.

On the Psychoanalytic Theory of Anxiety Freud's thinking on the problem of anxiety can be roughly divided into two main periods. In the first period, beginning in the 1890s with his research on hysteria and continuing into the 1920s, Freud identified anxiety with the energy of repressed libido. In this view, anxiety was taken to be an alternative mode of release for instinctual energies denied expression by the secondary agencies of the psychic apparatus. Refused discharge along preferred pathways, energies subject to repression undergo a transformation and are experienced in characteristic somatic reactions: shortness of breath, weakness, sweating, shaking, dizziness, etc. Thus, in a draft from 1894, Freud associated the genesis of anxiety with sexual abstinence or coitus interruptus and asserted that "anxiety has arisen by transformation out of the accumulated sexual tension" (SE, 1:191). "What finds discharge in the generating of anxiety," he later commented, "is precisely the surplus 140

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of unutilized libido" (SE, 20:141). "One of the most important results of psychoanalytic research," he concluded, "is the discovery that neurotic anxiety arises out of libido, that it is a transformation of it, and that it is thus related to it in the same kind of way as vinegar to wine" (SE, 7:224). The "wine into vinegar" theory remained a central part of Freud's explanation of hysteria and of his view of mental functioning in general until the 1920s, when it finally collapsed under the weight of a number of difficulties. Primary among them was the case of phobic anxiety, for which the onset of anxiety could not readily be traced to a repression. In fact, the example of phobia seemed to demand precisely the inverse of Freud's earlier view: in phobia "it was anxiety which produced repression and not, as I formally believed, repression which produced anxiety" (SE, 20:109). In regard to phobias, "it is always the ego's attitude of anxiety which is the primary thing and which sets repression going. Anxiety never arises from repressed libido" (SE, 20:109). The example of phobia suggested that the phenomenon of anxiety represents a more fundamental feature of mental life than Freud's early theory had indicated. In his early account of anxiety as transformed libido, anxiety was thought to be a consequence of repression and, more specifically, of neurotic repression, the prime agency of which Freud came to identify with the superego. But this approach failed to account for the very striking occurrence of anxiety in infancy, prior to the formation of the superego. "There is a danger," he wrote in his 1926 monograph on Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, "of our overestimating the part played in repression by the super-ego. . . . [T]he earliest outbreaks of anxiety occur before the super-ego has become differentiated" (SE, 20:94). In fact, it seemed possible to locate the prototype of anxiety in the situation of the infant at birth. "In man and the higher animals it would seem that the act of birth, as the individual's first experience of anxiety, has given the affect of anxiety certain characteristic forms of expression" (SE, 20:93). Freud further suggested that it is not simply birth but the prematurity of birth that predisposes the human being to anxiety. He maintained that "the long period of time during which the young of the human species is in a condition of helplessness and dependence . . . establishes the earliest situation of danger" (SE, 20:154-155). The idea that anxiety might be the cause of repression and not the other way around, along with the fact that infantile anxiety could not always be attributed to the activity of the superego, led Freud to identify anxiety with a signal of "danger" to the ego. "Anxiety," he 141

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between "ego syntonics" cognition versus those that are dissonant with the ego's imaginary homogeneity. Lacan's conception of the ego as imaginary better explains its endangerment in fantasmatic disintegration, but also clarifies the economic situation of the ego in a way that reveals the unity of Freud's two formulations about anxiety as repressed libido and as danger to the ego. T h e ego as Lacan conceives it functions to inform the libidinal drives only at the cost of refusing some portion of the heterogeneity of organismic impulses—that quantity of alienated desire attributable to the real. Lacan's account thus makes it clear how and why anxiety is possible prior to the formation of the superego by locating the origin of anxiety in a form of repression more primitive than that at the disposal of the superego. The propensity to anxiety does not depend on the existence of an agency superior to the ego, but represents the price paid for the institution of the ego itself. From a Lacanian perspective, the most constant and elemental form of danger faced by the ego stems not from its relations with the superego nor with the external world, but from the reassertion of the real refused by its imaginary unity. Anxiety is the felt encounter with the real, the experience of a traumatizing economic overload. Jean Laplanche has characterized anxiety in very similar terms: "Anxiety would be precisely what comes closest to a kind of pure quantitative manifestation; it is, we might say, an affect without quality; an affect in which nothing remains but the quantitative aspect." 5 A similar view is suggested by Lacan's mythic lamelle, the menacing reassertion of which is evoked in the image of a suffocating, amoeboid stuff which may slip over one's face while one is sleeping. This outlandish lamelle, said by Lacan to represent the "libido qua pure life instinct, life that has need of no organ," is intrinsically anxiety-producing; its very indeterminacy threatens the stability and integrity of the ego. Stressing the conflict between the structure of the ego and the potentially anxiety-producing force of desire that it excludes enables Lacan to suggest that the ego not only finds its own interests served by the formation of symptoms that protect it from anxiety, the ego itself functions as a symptom. 6 "The ego is structured exactly like a symptom. At the heart of the subject, it is only a privileged symptom, the human symptom par excellence, the mental illness of man" (S.I, 16). Finally, the Lacanian view opens the way to integrating Freud's lifelong concern for the problem of anxiety with his hypothesis of the death drive. As a signal of danger to the ego, anxiety can be said to constitute a response to the effects of psychical unbinding that figure so prominently in his characterization of the death drive. As Serge 144

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Leclaire has remarked, "If it is difficult to conceptually grasp the death drive, at least we have in anxiety the experience of being grasped by its force." 7 From this perspective, what Freud called a death instinct may be taken to represent a fundamental predisposition to anxiety. Freud never made this connection explicit, even in his lecture on "Anxiety and Instinctual Life," where he puts summary discussions of anxiety and the theory of the dual instincts back to back. Yet the link between anxiety and the death drive should hardly be surprising. It represents a return to the key notion of repetition of the trauma that first put Freud on the track of the death drive. Understanding Castration: First Approach 8 The preceding discussion of the nature of anxiety in general provides a valuable preparation for understanding Lacan's treatment of castration. Freud and Lacan agree that the Oedipal crisis, for which castration is the pivotal issue, is precipitated by an intensification of the child's sexual strivings toward its parents, along with a shift in the aims of those strivings from an oral or anal to a genital orientation. Such a blossoming of instinctual impulses, for reasons we have just seen, tends to generate anxiety as it brings to bear on the infantile ego the force of psychically unmastered impulses. Freud describes the anxiety of Little Hans, his paradigm case of castration anxiety, in similar terms. According to Freud, "the boy felt anxiety in the face of a demand by his libido—in this case, anxiety at being in love with his mother; so the case was in fact one of neurotic anxiety" (SE, 22:86). "What he is afraid of is evidently his own libido" (SE, 22:84). The key questions remain, first, why Oedipal anxiety emerges in the form of a fear of castration; and second, how and why this particular manifestation of anxiety constitutes such a privileged moment in the radical crisis of psychological transformation located by Freud in the Oedipus Complex. Freud's view of castration is decisively influenced by his tendency to emphasize the paternal threat over the libidinal danger. He tends to shift the issue from neurotic to realistic anxiety. He thus qualifies the description of little Hans quoted above by insisting that this being in love only appeared to him as an internal danger which he must avoid by renouncing the object, because it conjured up an external situation of danger . . . [an] internal instinctual danger [turns] out to be a determinant and preparation for an external, real, situation of danger. (SE, 22:86) 145

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This external danger is the father's threat of castration. As Freud explains in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, "an instinctual demand is, after all, not dangerous in itself; it only becomes so inasmuch as it entails a real external danger, the danger of castration" (SE, 20:126). T h e theoretical advantage of emphasizing the role of the paternal threat was presumably in explaining how and why Oedipal anxiety emerges specifically as an anxiety about castration. Yet this approach runs into difficulties, as Freud himself recognized, as it fails to account for the ubiquity of castration fears, even in instances where a real threat, pronounced by the father or by some other caretaker, is absent. Freud attempted to resolve this difficulty by assuming an innate predisposition to the fear of castration based upon a phylogenetic inheritance from a primeval time in which castration was actually carried out. 9 Assuming the existence of such a predisposition, fears of castration might arise even without any actual threat being made. T h e upshot of Lacan's interpretation is to return to the internal determinants of castration anxiety. He rejetts Freud's phylogenetic construction and also his emphasis on the role of the paternal threat. Lacan refers to castration as a "radical function for which a more primitive stage in the development of psychoanalysis found more accidental (educative) causes" (E:S, 320). T h e main lines of Lacan's approach to castration parallel his treatment of anxiety in general. As a form of anxiety, castration signals a threat to the integrity of the imaginary ego. What sets this challenge to the ego in motion is an upsurge of libidinal energies that are foreign to its organization. T h e origin of Oedipal anxiety is the force of emergent sexuality, for which the infantile ego lacks adequate means of symbolization and discharge. It becomes possible, therefore, to speak of two moments of libido, the first associated with investment in the formative imagoes of the mirror phase, and a second that, although it emerges in the course of a natural development, challenges the limits of the initial imaginary organization: The libido which is related to the genital object is not on the same level as the primitive libido, whose object is the subject's own image. That is a crucial phenomenon. . . . If the primitive libido is relative to prematuration, the nature of the second libido is different. It goes beyond, it responds to an initial maturation of desire, if not of organic development. . . . Here there is a complete change of level in the relation of the human being to the image, to the other. It is the pivotal point of what is called 146

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maturation, upon which the entire Oedipal drama turns. It is the instinctual correlative of what, in Oedipus, takes place on the situational plane. (5./, 180) Lacan's emphasis on the imaginary organization of the ego enables us to move beyond the impasses of Freud's treatment of castration and to respond to a number of key questions. (1) It becomes possible to say why Oedipal anxiety tends to assume the form of fantasies of dismemberment. As a specialized form of dismemberment, castration is a representative of the corps morcele of prematurity over and against which the imaginary unity of the ego claimed its rights. 10 From a Lacanian perspective, therefore, the human child is predisposed to fantasies of dismemberment, even in the absence of any parental threat and without any contribution of a phylogenetic inheritance, inasmuch as the organization of the infantile ego has taken shape in relation to an image of bodily wholeness. Indeed, it is striking to observe how children three to six years-old relish tearing off dolls' heads and limbs, how they gleefully threaten to pluck out the eyes and bite off the fingers of caretakers and peers, or how they squirm with giddy but delighted fascination at fairy-tale scenes of violence. This underlying predisposition, which amounts to a readiness, even a desire to imagine the violation of the body, is activated for reasons that are now familiar. The imaginary form of the ego tends to become the target of a destructive impulse to the extent that it excludes or alienates the subject from the unfolding of its own desire. What predisposes the subject toward the "phantasy of decrepitude" offered by castration is the portion of libido that "remains preserved from immersion" in identification with the imaginary object. Thus Lacan suggests: The imaginary function is that which Freud formulated to govern the investment of the object as narcissistic object. It was to this point that I returned myself when I showed that the specular image is the channel taken by the transfusion of the body's libido towards the object. But even though part of it remains preserved from this immersion, concentrating within it the most intimate aspect of auto-erotism, its position at the "tip" of the form predisposes it to the phantasy of decrepitude in which is completed its exclusion from the specular image and from the prototype that it constitutes for the world of objects.11 147

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(2) If the Oedipal crisis tends to produce fears of dismemberment in general, how and why does it emerge in concern for a particular organ? Lacan gives an answer by focusing on the function of the penis as a sacrifice.12 T h e anxiety of castration is, in effect, a specialization of and a defense against a more general anxiety. Like certain species of lizard whose tail drops off in the jaws of a would-be predator, castration in its literal meaning as a loss of the penis functions to save the whole by giving up one of its parts. 13 Understood in this way, what is at stake in castration is not only anxiety but a transition from anxiety to fear—a transition, that is, in which an indeterminate restlessness caused by the upsurge of somatic energies lacking psychic representation becomes specified by being attached to a definite content. It is a shift remarked by Freud in the case of little Hans. "Hans' anxiety,. . ." he pointed out, "was, like every infantile anxiety, without an object to begin with: it was still anxiety and not yet fear" {SE, 10:25). (3) Why the penis? We have noted the connection Lacan finds between the upsurge of anxiety and fantasies of bodily dismemberment, but what privileges the idea of castration in particular? For the little boy, the penis is at once a primary seat of pleasure and is wellsuited to express the child's emerging sense of power over his own bodily functions and over objects in the environment by its capacity to project the flow of urine. Of far greater importance for children of both sexes, however, is the way that the central elements of the Oedipal situation are brought together and embodied by the penis.The penis is the distinguishing mark of the father and symbolizes the desire of the mother. At this point, a crucial feature of Lacan's revised outlook shows itself. Where Freud focused on the way the child's desire for the mother is interdicted by the father, Lacan reconceives the nature of desire along Hegelian lines, emphasizing that it is not the other qua object that is desired, but rather the other as him- or herself desiring. Human desire is essentially desire of the other's desire. For Lacan, then, the key issue in the Oedipus Complex is not the availability of the mother to the desire of the child but the position of the child in relation to the desire of the mother. The narcissism of the pre-Oedipal period is centered on the child's desire to be the privileged object of the mother's desire—that is, to offer himself as what is lacking to the mother. "If the desire of the mother is the phallus," Lacan contends, "the child wishes to be the phallus in order to satisfy that desire" (E:S, 289). T h e specter of the phallus thus arises in the child's imagination not because a part of his body is threatened by the father but because

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the phallus is taken to signify the mother's desire. Prior to the Oedipal stage, the child longs to be the phallus of the mother. (4) Just as Lacan rereads the drama of desire in the Oedipus complex in terms of the mother's desire for the phallus, so, too, he reinterprets and radicalizes the meaning of the loss of the phallus.Lacan reveals how castration involves coming to terms with what one is not, with what one does not have, with what one cannot be. The relation of castration to loss, limit, and, ultimately, to the recognition of finitude can be glimpsed in the interpersonal triangle of the Oedipus Complex just discussed. The child loses its privileged position as the be-all and end-all of the mother's desire with the dawning realization that her desire gravitates toward a third object: the father. Around the inevitability of this loss proliferate the terrors of separation anxiety. But the link between castration and loss ultimately derives from the nature of desire itself insofar as desire is occluded by the imaginary. Lacan sharpens and deepens Freud's insight that the love object is essentially a lost object, indeed, a lost object that was never possessed. Human desire turns around a fundamental lack, a manque a etre or "want of being." Castration means recognizing that something crucial is always already lost, and irretrievably so. Castration is therefore related in an essential way to the encounter with desire. In castration, the human subject confronts the intrinsic unfulfillability of its desire. Once again, castration is only incidentally related to a paternal threat of violence. Castration anxiety arises in the unfolding of an essential maturational task. It is not merely a possibility to be feared or anticipated, but a task to be symbolically accomplished. Acceptance of castration means abandoning the narcissistic dream of absolute self-adequacy and submitting to an original being-at-a-loss. In the light of this formulation, we can point to some important implications of Lacan's reinterpretation. Lacan enables us to understand how the complex of castration, although it unfolds differently for the little girl than for the little boy, is set in motion by a developmental crisis that is the same for both sexes. The situation is not, as Freud's account may tempt us to suppose, that where the little girl is lacking or missing something by an accident of anatomy, the little boy has from the start the advantage of possessing an essential wholeness and only later comes to fear that he, too, might suffer the little girl's loss. According to Lacan, castration anxiety is not a fear over the loss of an original wholeness but a reemergence of the sense of chaos and virtual dismemberment into which every human infant is born. The

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Lacanian view thus implies that too stubborn a resistance to castration reflects an inability to tolerate the anxiety produced by the upsurge of impulses foreign to the organization of the ego. Far from being an unqualified advantage, therefore, possession of the penis tends to tip masculine psychology into the orbit of fetishism. T h e boy's own penis, which readily offers itself as a reassuring presence, the guarantor of a false promise of wholeness, becomes the prototype of the fetishistic object.14 (5) Lacan deepens the significance of castration fear by radicalizing the meaning of loss. Yet the most distinctive feature of Lacan's treatment of castration and the point of his most significant advance over Freud consists in the way he reveals in castration the stakes of the subject's own desire. For Lacan, the castration complex is initiated by emergence of the subject's desire against the constraints imposed by the imaginary organization of his own ego. Castration becomes the occasion of both anxiety and obscure desire, of fear and of longing that does not yet know itself as longing. The relation to the mother becomes problematic in Lacan's view because the mother constitutes the primary pole of imaginary identifications. In this way, Lacan brings to light the source of a primordial ambivalence toward the maternal relation. If there arises in the child a drive, informed by an imaginary identification, to be the phallus for the mother, there is also a will to resist that identification. It is an ambivalence evidenced in the case of little Hans by the fact that in spite of his exaggerated yearning to be the object of his mother's desire, Hans initially experiences the fantasy of the biting horse as a female horse. The biting fantasy which is destined to represent castration is originally related to a fear of engulfment by the mother. 15 T h e Lacanian view, which relates castration to the overturning of an imaginary organization, thus serves to explain the role of castration in the transition out of narcissism. Freud had repeatedly emphasized the significance of the penis and of castration for the child's narcissism, but was unable to oppose castration and narcissism in a systematic way. So, too—and here we are brought back to the problem of the death drive—Freud clearly understood the final theory of the life and death drives to be the necessary amendment to his theory of narcissism, yet failed to attribute any other significance to their relation than that of restoring an essential dualism. For Lacan, the key problem is to answer "the question why does man get out of narcissism. Why [in the position of narcissism] is man dissatisfied?" (S.I, 131). The answer, as we have seen, is to be found in the death drive itself, in the notion that forces 150

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of the real that are alienated by the imaginary structure of the narcissistic ego assert themselves against the strictures of that organization. In the light of this perspective, the castration complex appears to be the inaugural and privileged fantasmatic expression of the drive toward death. In the crisis of castration, desire and death are intimately intertwined. It is with respect to castration that the most mysterious aspect of Freud's discovery impresses itself upon us, the aspect that Lacan emphasizes in his claim that "[Freud] questioned life as to its meaning, and not to say that it has none . . . but to say that it has only one meaning, that in which desire is borne by death" (E:S, 277). For Lacan, the destiny of desire in the human being is inextricably bound up with its most profound experiences of fear.

Castration—Imaginary and Symbolic Up to this point, our discussion of castration has focused on the way in which Lacan's concept of the imaginary structure of the ego serves to clarify problems arising from Freud's account. Lacan reveals the internal determinants of the castration complex in the alienating character of the imaginary ego. But this is only half the story. T o complete it we must take account of Lacan's claim that the Oedipal Complex marks the moment when the child enters language. For Lacan, castration is the pivotal moment in which the child effects the transition from a predominantly imaginary mode of functioning to a predominantly symbolic one. This shift can be variously described. (1) At the Oedipal stage, the subject that previously found its identity in the Gestalt unity of the ego comes to be represented by what linguists call "shifters," the personal pronouns whose meaning alters depending on whether they are sounded by my mouth or that of another. (2) T h e dyadic bond with the perceived other that structures the imaginary gives way to triadic relations in which social exchange is mediated by the laws of language. (3) T h e imaginary register of perceptual presence governed by resemblance yields to a system of differences that operates through a vacillating play of presence and absence. (4) The simultaneities of the imaginary, which ground anticipations limited to repetition of the same, now contrast with the serial unfolding of the signifying chain, which finds its circuit in the diacritical web of the symbol system. Reduced to its most absolutely basic terms, the Oedipal transition constitutes a shift from unity to complexity, from identity to difference. In progressing through the Oedipus complex, the subject ceases to be held in thrall to imaginary formations and passes into the defile 151

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of the signifying system. The psychic process moves beyond the bounds of imaginary unities and is taken up into the universe of signifies. It is a shift that readily finds a perceptual analogue in a contrast between the integrity of the body Gestalt and its dismemberment into fragments. To the extent, therefore, that Lacan reads the Oedipal crisis in terms of a transition between imaginary and symbolic functions, he understands the entry of the subject into language to be concomitant with, even conditioned upon, a certain transformation in the way the integrity of the body is experienced. It is this crisis of identity that makes possible a new mode of relation to the child's own impulses and to the surrounding world. As such, castration involves both an anxiety of fragmentation, as it implies the giving up of the imaginary unity of the ego, and a corresponding anxiety of separation, insofar as it requires tolerating the absence of the object (or at least absence of resemblance to the object) that is constitutive of linguistic signification. From a Lacanian point of view, castration is the central moment of the child's acquisition of language not in the sense of its becoming able to voice words or to use them in some way (of this both the pre-Oedipal child and the psychotic are capable) but rather in the sense of becoming able to dwell in language, to rely on language for the guidance of thought and action, genuinely to appropriate language and to be appropriated by it. In and through castration, the speaking subject comes into being by becoming subject, by being subjected, to language. Relevant to this aspect of castration as the hinge between imaginary and symbolic functions, we can add a number of further remarks. (1) We have already seen how the relation of imaginary and symbolic functions are charted by Lacan in the matrix of Schema L. If castration can be taken as the privileged moment of that relation, it should be possible to reread the schema in terms of the castration complex and the family dynamics that structure it. In his fifth seminar, on the "Formations of the Unconscious," Lacan provides precisely such a rereading by offering the following schema 16 : Mother

Father

Child

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the positions occupied in the original schema by the id, the ego, the imaginary object, and the Other of language, Lacan maps onto Schema L the configuration of what he calls the "paternal metaphor." In the paternal metaphor, the child passes beyond the imaginary relation to the mother in which his desire is fixed and alienated by virtue of a mediating third term: that of the father understood not as a literal father but as the paternal function of the symbolic law. (2) T h e unfolding of the paternal metaphor produces the fantasm of the phallus in the locus of the subject. What is it doing there? We ask again: How and why is the penis privileged in this conception? If the Oedipus Complex concerns above all the transition from an imaginary to a symbolic mode of functioning, the penis offers itself as the ideal vehicle of that transition. T h e penis is especially well suited both to represent the breakdown of an imaginary Gestalt and to anticipate the structure of the linguistic signifier. On the one hand, the anatomical vulnerability of the penis readily symbolizes the possibility of a violation of the body's imaginary wholeness. Aside from the mother's breast, the penis is the only bodily appendage unsupported by bone and the only appendage incapable of voluntary movement. It is sensitive and easily hurt. By virtue of its very physiology, therefore, the penis designates a special point of cleavage in the imaginary unity of the body. Like the other partial objects enumerated by Lacan, "the mamilla, the faeces, . . . the urinary flow," the penis bears "the mark of the cut" {E:S, 315). What these objects have in common is their potential separability from the body proper. In so far as they either literally separate from the body (feces, urine) or project beyond the general body surface in a way that suggests a possibility of separation, they readily represent fears of loss and bodily fragmentation. On the other hand, the penis displays the features of difference and of presence and absence that distinguish the structure of the linguistic signifier. As Freud himself was wont to emphasize, the child's conception of the penis soon comes to include a recognition of its presence in the male and its absence in the female. T h e penis thus functions anatomically like a differential feature in linguistics; its presence or absence signifies male or female. It constitutes on the level of anatomy what Jakobson calls "the marked and the unmarked." Even in the male alone, the penis embodies a principle of difference in its alternance of flacidness and erection. This discussion helps resolve the ambiguity around the terms "penis" versus "phallus." T h e anatomical literality of the penis is by no means irrelevant to Lacan's concept of the castration complex, yet it 153

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is in terms of the symbolic function of the penis—as phallus—that castration must ultimately be understood. When Lacan refers to the phallus as a privileged signifier, it is to emphasize the way that the male organ functions to mark the point of intersection between the imaginary and symbolic orders. Talk of a "privileged signifier" has prompted some commentators to take Lacan's concept of the phallus as an assertion of a privileged point of contact between the battery of signifiers and the truth of the signified. Jacques Derrida has argued, for example, that Lacan's phallocentrism amounts to a logocentrism the implication of which is to install a traditional concept of truth at the heart of psychoanalysis. 17 Although a detailed treatment of this debate cannot be undertaken here, it is perhaps evident from the preceding discussions that the result of Lacan's concept of the phallus is the opposite of what Derrida has attributed to it. Far from opening the door on any special or guaranteed access to the signified, the Lacanian concept of the phallus implies the impossibility of such access. As a giving up of the phallus, castration means precisely a relinquishing of the dream of a final signifier or of a fully adequate act of signification. 18 T h e phallus signifies the necessity of ever-ongoing signification. Ironically, then, Lacan's concept of the phallus implies the unending slippage of meaning that Derrida has called "dissemination." 19 T h e phallus is the never-realized object, the object that is forever out of reach, the object that can be approached only in a further movement of the signifying chain. (3) At the core of Lacan's theory of castration is the idea that the imaginary schema of the body's wholeness plays a crucial role in the unfolding of symbolic competence. T h e imaginary body-gestalt provides an initial organization of unitary form upon which the differentiating function of linguistic signification can go to work. The body imago functions as an originary frame or matrix over against which difference within identity can first be registered. T h e imaginary thus constitutes the protocontext for symbolic activity. It forms the original myth of human identity, but, as such, it becomes something more than a myth, a near-necessary myth. The imaginary has a peculiar epistemological status. On the one hand, it is an autochthonous function that arises from perceptual mechanisms that are more primitive than activities of conscious judgment and reflection. Yet, at the same time, the imaginary is essentially Active, since it grounds a perception of sex difference that has little to do with biology. Biologically speaking, there is nothing lacking in the female.

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We can note in passing the implications of this idea for the question of gender difference. T h e problem faced by any theorist is to explain how gender difference, if it is not merely a biological fact, occurs with such regularity across different cultures and epochs. Like Freud, Lacan is convinced that there is nothing biologically fixed or determined about gender identity, as the very existence of homosexuality suggests. Yet neither is sex difference purely and simply a result of learning or role socialization. From a Lacanian point of view, the psychology of patriarchal gender difference is not fixed or necessary (one might imagine other possible configurations of sexual identity), but it is, we might say, favored by the imaginary construal of anatomy. The structuring of desire in the unconscious is to be explained in terms of the positioning of the subject with respect to the presence or absence of the phallus as an imaginary object. (4) Lacan's approach to castration illuminates the function of the Oedipus Complex in promoting the movement from primary to secondary identification. As Lacan sees it, the complex of castration not only raises the specter of a potential dismemberment, but also concerns a much more fundamental relationship between the child and the phallus, a relation that he says "will turn around a 'to be' and a 'to have/ "20 In the negotiation of the Oedipus Complex, the child faces the question of being versus having the phallus. On the level of the imaginary identification constitutive of the mirror phase, the child is unable to symbolize to itself its own desire except in and through the desire of the other. But, in the Oedipal period, the child comes increasingly to realize that the mother's desire aims at an object over and beyond him/herself. T h e question for little Hans was therefore, "What is it that the mother desires when she desires something other than me, the child?" (SJV, 4/10/57). Under the pressure of that question, the primary imaginary identification with the phallus first intensifies, setting in motion a jealous rivalry with the father, then must finally be abandoned. T h e shift from being to having or not having the phallus implies a transition from an imaginary to a symbolic orientation, a shift, that is, from the all-or-nothing stakes of a dual relation to a more complex, more mediated mode of functioning concerned with the presence or absence of an element in a structured configuration. In this way, identification in the aftermath of the Oedipal crisis is no longer bound to assume the properties of the object as a whole, as a Gestalt, but is free to adopt particular traits or aspects of the other in a patchwork of borrowings.

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(5) It is beyond the scope of this essay to ask whether or to what extent this theory is empirically verified or verifiable. However, it is interesting to note briefly its corroboration in what is perhaps the most famous example of language acquisition: the education of Helen Keller. Aside from the fact of her famous infirmity, Helen Keller's passage into language was remarkable for its suddenness. Gently prodded by her teacher, Anne Sullivan, Helen came to recognize the meaning of the word "water" in a kind of flash of insight. All at once, she recognized that the pattern traced by her teacher, w-a-t-e-r, referred to "the wonderful, cool something that was flowing over her hand." 21 Once this breakthrough had occurred, Helen was immediately able to repeat it with other objects around her. As Anne Sullivan described this moment: I spelled "w-a-t-e-r" in Helen's free hand. The word coming so close upon the sensation of cold water rushing over her hand seemed to startle her. She dropped the mug and stood as one transfixed. A new light came into her face. She spelled "water" several times. Then she dropped on the ground and asked for its name and pointed to the pump and the trellis, and suddenly turning round she asked for my name.I spelled "Teacher." Just then the nurse brought Helen's little sister into the pump-house, and Helen spelled "baby" and pointed to the nurse. All the way back to the house she was highly excited, and learned the name of every object she touched, so that in a few hours she had added thirty words to her vocabulary.22 What made possible the breakthrough at the well-house? We may be tempted to think of it as a sort of magical spark of association that leapt between Helen's two hands, the one drawn upon and the other wetted. However, bearing in mind Lacan's emphasis on the necessity of an imaginary violation for the transition to symbols, we are prompted to look more closely.23 In fact, the drama at the pump-house is a story within a story. The larger story concerns a doll given to Helen by her teacher: One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put my big rag doll into my lap also, spelled "d-o-1-1" and tried to make me understand that "d-o-1-1" applied to both. Earlier in the day we had a tussle over the words "m-u-g" and "w-a-t-e-r." Miss Sullivan had tried to impress it upon me that "m-u-g" is mug and that "w-a-te-r" is water, but I persisted in confounding the two. In despair she had dropped the subject for the time, only to renew it at the first opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seiz156

Formations of the Unconscious ing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment of tenderness. I felt my teacher sweep the fragments to one side of the hearth and I had a sense of satisfaction that the cause of my discomfort was removed. She brought me my hat, and I knew I was going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip for pleasure. We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away. I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow. 24 R e a d i n g H e l e n Keller's account in t h e light of Lacan's t h e o r y of t h e role of castration in t h e accession to symbols, we a r e p r o m p t e d to ask a b o u t t h e relation b e t w e e n t h e b r o k e n doll a n d t h e miracle of d a w n i n g signification t h a t o c c u r r e d a few m o m e n t s later. T h e interesting t h i n g to n o t e is H e l e n ' s " k e e n sense of delight" at feeling t h e f r a g m e n t s of t h e b r o k e n doll. She twice r e m a r k s o n it. Is it possible t h a t t h e e x p e r i e n c e of t h e s m a s h e d doll accomplished for H e l e n Keller t h e function of i m a g i n a r y violation t h a t Lacan associates with t h e accession to symbols? M i g h t t h e doll's f r a g m e n t s , as a n i m a g e of t h e body's wholeness b r o k e n i n t o pieces, h a v e fulfilled t h e function of castration in its L a c a n i a n 157

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meaning? These suggestive questions seem underscored by the further details of Helen Keller's account. We might note, for instance, how when Helen returns to the house empowered by her "strange new sight" of a world with names, she remembers the broken doll and, for the first time, feels sorrow and remorse over its loss. It is tempting to take this detail as an evidence of a dawning superego, the first tremor of a new sense that the named world is subject to law. Viewed from this perspective, Helen Keller's experience at the well-house presents in extreme compression some of the key elements of the Oedipal drama as Lacan conceives it. In the Defile of the Signifier: The Objet a If we have succeeded in shedding some light on the Lacanian meaning of castration as the threshold of the symbolic function, we have yet to determine more specifically what contribution is made by the linguistic signifier in the unconscious. To do so, we must begin to move beyond the stress on the negative effect of the symbolic in overcoming the imaginary and describe the positive contribution achieved in the play of the signifier. Let us begin by following Lacan's analysis of the Freudian Witz in his fifth seminar of 1957-58. T h e thrust of that discussion is to identify the formations of the unconscious, circuited by the linguistic signifier, with the generation of new meaning. Lacan summarizes this point in the following terms: That by which a phenomenon can be recognized as belonging to the formations of the unconscious is strictly identifiable [with] . . . what linguistic analysis permits us to refer to as being the essential modes of the formation of meaning, insofar as this meaning is engendered by combinations of signifiers. . . . This grasp at a fundamental, elementary level of the functions of the signifier is a recognition at this level of an original power which is precisely that in which we can localize a certain generation of something called meaning, and something that in itself is very rich in psychological implications. (S. V, 11/ 20/57)25 What Lacan here refers to as the generation of meaning is illustrated by an example given by Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. It is the first joke presented by Freud, a joke of Heinrich Heine that occupies an inaugural position and performs a paradigmatic function reminiscent of the dream of Irma's injection in The Interpretation 158

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of Dreams. In this joke, Heine's character Hirsch-Hyancinth boasts to a friend about his meeting with the wealthy Baron Rothschild by saying: And, as true as God shall grant me all good things, Doctor, I sat beside Salomon Rothschild and he treated me quite as his equal— quite famillionairely. (SE, 8:16) T h e mechanism of the joke, what Freud calls its "technique/' can be readily analyzed in terms of a collapsing of the words "familiar" and "millionaire," to form a new word: "famillionaire." Freud schematizes it as follows:

FAMIL AR MILIONAR FAMILIONAR By means of the coalesence of the two words into one, the joke achieves an abbreviation of the two sentences that would otherwise express the thought contained in the joke: R. treated me quite familiarly, that is, so far as a Millionaire can. But such a mapping of the joke's technique does not suffice to explain fully its comic effect. In what can the comic aspect be said to consist? In Lacan's analysis, which strives to present the essentials of Freud's commentary in Lacan's own terms, it depends in the first place on the way that the punch line—the famillionaire—effects a violation of our expectations. T h e joke produces an effect of surprise and delightful confusion precisely because we don't expect to be treated familiarly by millionaires. To this extent, the joke is played on the expectations that we bring to the story beforehand—expectations that Lacan attributes to a function of the imaginary order. He points to the "very intense, very close connection between the phenomenon of laughter and the imaginary function in man, namely, the captivating character of the image" (S.V, 12/18/57). When these imaginary anticipations are taken by surprise and shattered, a certain effect of release is produced. T h e comic outcome is thus said to be triggered when "something is liberated from the constraint of the image" (S.V, 12/18/57). This analysis, both in its emphasis on the violation of routine expectations and in its 159

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evocation of an effect of liberation, echoes the view of Fischer, cited by Freud in his introduction to Jokes'. "It might be that from aesthetic freedom there might spring too a sort of judging released from its usual rules and regulations, which, on account of its origin, I will call a 'playful judgement,' and that in this concept is contained the first determinant, if not the whole formula, that will solve our problem. 'Freedom produces jokes and jokes produce freedom.' wrote Jean Paul. 'Joking is merely playing with ideas.'" (SE, 8:11) In Lacan's commentary on the famillionaire joke we thus recognize the pattern that emerged in the preceding chapter: namely, the way in which imaginary formations are subjected to a kind of deconstruction by the action of the symbolic. T h e condensation of two signifiers effects a release from the stereotypy of imaginary anticipations. But if such fracturing of an imaginary form provides the point of entree to the joke, the comic effect is completed by factors internal to the signifying condensation in "famillionaire." It is at this point that a new meaning is generated, something that hovers on the border between sense and nonsense. This aspect of the joke, too, is remarked by Freud in citing Lipp's book Komik und Humor. A remark seems to us to be a joke, if we attribute a significance to it that has psychological necessity and, as soon as we have done so, deny it again. Various things can be understood by this 'significance.' We attach sense to a remark and know that logically it cannot have any. We discover truth in it, which nevertheless, according to the laws of experience or our general habits of thought, we cannot find in it. (SE, 8:12) It is upon this sensible-nonsense that Lacan trains his lens, inviting us to find in it the essential contribution of the signifying function in the unconscious. What is produced in the famillionaire is an absolute minimum, an almost-nothing of meaning, a peu-de-sens or pas-de-sens. This "nonsense has the role of deluding us for an instant, long enough [to register] a meaning not grasped before, and which moreover also passes very quickly, furtively, in a flash" (S.V, 12/4/57). In the composite of familiar and millionaire, a new modicum of meaning emerges against the background of our expectation of an antithesis between them. What occurs is a kind of reverberation in the code in which the meanings of each of the words, previously understood to be contraries, 160

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cross-fertilize each other to produce a strange but curiously pleasing offspring. A new and hitherto unthinkable being is generated, a familiar-millionaire, in which the particular condescension of the very wealthy toward someone of lower status is compactly expressed in a way that foregrounds all the tensions and ironies of being on the receiving end of such an attitude. By means of his invention, Heine's character is able to remain in a naive position, basking in the attention paid to him by the wealthy man, yet he is able simultaneously to remark his awareness of the disingenuousness of the Baron's behavior and even to mock it. It will be fruitful to push further our analysis of the mechanism by which the sense-nonsense of the famillionaire is produced. It is precisely in the failure of agreement between familiarity and the millionaire, in the dissonance between the two words, that a generative spark is struck. "The creation of meaning of famillionaire" is thus said to derive from "those losses of meaning that are all the sparks, all the spatters produced around the creation of the word famillionaire, and that constitute its radiation, its weight, that which lends it for us its literary value" (S.V, 11/13/57). This process Lacan calls metaphor: It is in the action of the metaphor, insofar as certain original circuits impact upon the everyday, banal, commonly recognized circuit of metonymy, that the emergence of new meaning is produced. (S.V, 12/4/57) In this remark, Lacan pictures a conflict between two "circuits" of meaning, one well-worn and commonplace that is acted upon by original and unexpected ones. What is going on here reflects Lacan's conception of the nature of the linguistic signifier. Unlike the imaginary Gestalt, which derives its special properties from the way it constitutes a self-contained presentation, the linguistic signifier participates in a whole network of relations to other signifiers. In the web of this synchrony, the meaning of a linguistic signifier trails off into the signifying system of language itself in ways that cannot be made simultaneously co-present. What the metaphoric concatenation of signifiers effects is a kind of realignment of such tendrils of meaning, in which the more accustomed pathways of sense give way to the emergence of hitherto unnoticed potentialities of signification. T h e metaphor thus functions to evoke something in the penumbra of connotation that surrounds the signifiers it conjoins. Metaphor plays upon "language insofar as it carries within itself its moments of meaningful creation but in a non-active, latent state" (S.V, 12/11/57). A similar conception 161

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of metaphor was explored by the artists of Surrealism and Dada. For Breton, "the highest endeavour to which poetry can aspire is to compare two objects as remote as possible from one another, or, by any method whatsoever, to bring them into confrontation in an abrupt and striking way."26 In his "Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," Lacan explicitly refers his view of metaphor to the Surrealists: It should be said that modern poetry and especially the Surrealist school have taken us a long way in this direction by showing that any conjunction of two signifiers would be equally sufficient to constitute a metaphor, except for the additional requirement of the greatest possible disparity of the images signified, needed for the production of the poetic spark, or in other words for metaphoric creation to take place. (E:S9 156) T h e paradigmatic metaphor offered by Lacan in "The Agency of the Letter" is the line by Victor Hugo from his poem "Booz endormi": "His sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful" (E:S, 156). T h e relevance of this metaphor for the functioning of the unconscious is often attributed by commentators to the way the figure of Booz himself disappears in the metaphoric substitution of the sheaf. Booz is said to pass beneath the bar of signification in a movement comparable to repression. However, in the light of the present discussion, an additional and perhaps more important aspect of the metaphor comes into view. It concerns less the fact that Booz has been occluded by substitution of another signifier than the subtle transformation of meaning that occurs in this substitution. "In the substitution of signifier for signifier . . . an effect of signification is produced that is creative or poetic" (E:S, 164). This new signification is essentially complex. In Hugo's metaphor, the connotation of fertility carried by the sheaf evokes the promise of paternity in the figure of Booz for whom it has been substituted. But that is not all. In addition to this primary signifying effect, we can detect a second, less palpable but nevertheless important resonance of meaning. This secondary effect of the metaphor runs precisely contrary to its ostensible meaning of celebrating the grace and generosity of Booz. By means of it, the figure of Booz is obscurely claimed by the very greed and spite that are refused to the sheaf. Lacan devotes a lengthy passage to describing it: It is obvious that in the line of Hugo cited above, not the slightest spark of light springs from the proposition that the sheaf was neither miserly not spiteful, for the reason that there is no question of the 162

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sheafs having either of these attributes, since the attributes, like the sheaf, belong to Booz, who exercises the former in disposing of the latter and without informing the latter of his sentiments in the case. If, however, his sheaf does refer us to Booz, and this is indeed the case, it is because it has replaced him in the signifying chain at the very place where he was to be exalted by the sweeping away of greed and spite. But now Booz himself has been swept away by the sheaf, and hurled into the outer darkness where greed and spite harbour him in the hollow of their negation. But once his sheaf has thus usurped his place, Booz can no longer return there; the slender thread of the little word his that binds him to it is only one more obstacle to his return in that it links him to the notion of possession that retains him at the heart of greed and spite. So his generosity, affirmed in the passage, is yet reduced to less than nothing by the munificence of the sheaf. In the shadows of its primary meaning, the metaphor of the sheaf evokes a further signification that suggests a hint of possessiveness in the heart of Booz's emerging paternity, the subtlest implication of a service of greed in the enactment of his gift. This new meaning constitutes the pas-de-sens, an almost-nothing of meaning, limited to the faintest suggestion. In the terms given by Lipps in the quotation above, it behaves like the truth expressed in the joke, which "according to the laws of our experience and our general habits of thought we cannot find in it." This subtle implication of meaning may be taken to exemplify an instance of the power of language "to signify something quite other than it says" (E:S, 155). It illustrates Lacan's insistence that "the function of language is not to inform but to evoke" (E:S, 86). Beyond its assertion of generosity, the metaphor suggests the way Booz himself will be the beneficiary of that generosity. T h e metaphor thus affords expression of the paradoxical fact that the sheaf of his plenty will be augmented by the act of sharing it. In this way, the metaphor announces a complexity and ambiguity incapable of expression in the register of the imaginary. However vague and evanescent, the pas-de-sens generated by the metaphor is taken by Lacan to bear within itself a portentous power for the re-making of the experienced world. One thinks again of the Surrealists, for whom "poetic creations assume the tangible character of extending, strangely, the limits of so-called reality."27 Lacan suggests that it is ultimately out of such almost-nonsense that all human meanings are generated over the course of time. Thus "we ought to consider 163

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all human meanings as having been at some time metaphorically engendered by signifying conjunctions" (S. V, 11/20/57). It is to the potential for the evocation of something other in the play of signifiers that Lacan attributes the capacity of linguistic signification to open new access to the real: By the play of the substitution of one signifier for another, at a certain place, there is created not only the possibility of the development of the signifier, but also the possibility of the emergence of ever-new meaning, serving always to ratify, to complicate, and to deepen, to give its sense of depth to what in the real is only pure opacity. (S.V, 11/13/57) It is in this sense that Lacan attributes the emergence of desire beyond the imaginary to a function of the signifying chain. In its capacity to generate a pas-de-sens, a play of new meaning that opens up beyond the routinized circuits of signification, the action of metaphor gives to the desire of the subject its points of support. Desire is articulated in that Other beyond the imaginary other—the Other of language itself: Desire is expressed by and passes through the signifier, namely, it crosses the signifying line, and at the level of this intersection of desire and the signifying line, it encounters what? It encounters the other. . . . It encounters the other, I did not say as a person—it encounters the other as the treasury of the signifier, as the seat of the code. (S.V, 1/8/58) In this play of the signifier, the imaginary repetitions of the same, the reiterations of the imago, give way to a new metonymic progression constituted by the sliding of signification along the chain of discourse, the metonymy of the want-to-be. Contrary to the insistence of imaginary demand to be supplied with the object of its satisfaction once and for all, desire mediated by the signifier is by its essence a movement. Where demand situated in the dual relation of ego and imaginary other remains impossible of fulfillment, symbolically mediated desire is unable to satisfy itself with any single moment of signification, yet, producing new reverberations of meaning in each step of its unfolding, it is passed on indefinitely in pursuit of an ever-open possibility of further significations. Lacan thus describes the progress of desire in the signifying chain by means of an image of infinite, asymptotic approach: 164

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No part of the demand can be attained, once man has entered into the symbolic world, except by a sort of infinite succession of pas-desens, so that man, a new Achilles in pursuit of another tortoise, is destined by the grip on his desire in the mechanisms of language, to this infinite, never satisfied approach. (S.V, 12/18/57) We have already seen that this emergence of desire in the signifier effects a certain deconstruction of the imaginary object—in fact, it is only possible in relation to such a deconstruction. Yet the signifying chain remains haunted by the form of something object-like, as if the imaginary orientation to the object survives in a kind of ghost-life in the symbolic function. If the signifying chain introduces an essential heterogeneity, says Lacan, " y o u should understand heterogeneity with the accent placed on the heteros, which in Greek means inspired, and whose proper acceptation in Latin is that of a remainder, of a residue" (S.V, 12/11/57). What is this remainder or residue? It is present in the famillionaire, insofar as Heine's neo-logism evokes the trace of a new and unheard-of object, an object that never fully emerges from the shadows of signification but nevertheless draws our attention toward it: What happens when famillionaire appears? It can be said that something is indicated . . . in the side-effects of the phenomenon, in what will be propagated from there into the world by way of a consequence. It is a type of emerging object, that itself tends rather toward the comical, the absurd, the nonsensical. It is the famillionaire insofar as it is a derisory millionaire, by tending to take on the form of a figure, and it would not be difficult to indicate the direction in which it tends to be embodied. (S.V, 11/13/57) This quasi-object, rolled ahead of the unfolding of discourse, is the Lacanian objet a. It forms the nucleus of the fantasm around which desire will be lured and is closely associated by Lacan with the signifying function of the phallus. As we have seen, under the influence of castration, the phallus is shifted from its place in the child's relation to the mother's desire and assumes the role of a key element of the signifying chain. Castration is thus not so much the detachment of a part of the subject from himself as it is a detachment of his desire from the imaginary other. It is with respect to this process that we can situate the emergence of sublimation in its Lacanian meaning. 28 T h e objet a harkens back to the primordial object of satisfaction, that original object in relation to which every subsequent attempt at satisfaction 165

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must be deemed a re-finding of the object: the mother. Yet by virtue of being imbricated within the system of language, the locus of the objet a cannot be occupied by any imaginary form. It is cut free from the maternal relation and circulates in the signifying chain, drawing into its orbit the fragmentary resonances of significance generated by signifying combinations. As objet a, the phallus becomes a key signifier in the unconscious, or better, it becomes the mark of the necessity of ever-ongoing signification. What we have evinced in the preceding discussion can serve as a preface for the analysis Lacan gives of the child's Fort-Da game, cited by Freud in the course of his approach to the concept of the death drive. For Lacan, the Fort-Da episode offers a kind of microscope through which the essentials of the emergence of the subject's desire in the signifier can be glimpsed. T h e alternance of Fort and Da embodies on the most primitive level the way that all linguistic signification reaches beyond the utterance of any signifier and reverberates within the diacritical structure in which it is situated. In every Fort\ the Dal is tacitly implicated. "The Fort is correlative with the Da. T h e Fort can express itself only in the alternance stemming from a fundamental synchrony" (S.VII, 80). T h e child's game thus leads him beyond the disappearance of the mother that instigated it. T h e reel he throws away and retrieves in repeating Fort and Da "is not the mother reduced to a little ball . . . it is a small part of the subject that detaches itself from him while still remaining his, still retained. . . . To this object we will later give the name it bears in the Lacanian algebra—the petit a"(FFC, 62). T h e child's game provides the opening for the emergence of something that is not the mother, but rather something that will come out of the signifying chain itself:

We can now grasp in this (Fort-Da) the fact that in this moment the subject is not simply mastering his privation by assuming it, but that here he is raising his desire to a second power. For his action destroys the object which it causes to appear and disappear in the anticipatory provocation of its absence and presence. His action thus negatives the field of forces of desire in order to become its own object to itself. And this object, being immediately embodied in the symbolic dyad of two elementary exclamations, announces in the subject the diachronic integration of the dichotomy of the phonemes, whose synchronic structure existing language offers to his assimilation. (E:S, 103)

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Toward a Reevaluation of the Superego All of the topics traversed in the preceding sections—anxiety, castration and the Oedipal triangle, sublimation—converge on the problem of the superego. Moreover, the topic of the superego makes a special claim on our attention inasmuch as Freud closely associated it with the death drive. Yet it is an especially challenging problem and was so to Freud himself. The concept of the superego, both in its relations to neurotic anxiety and to sublimation, remains one of the most important and, at the same time, least worked-out of Freud's basic ideas. What does Lacan make of it? We seem justified in expecting that if the Lacanian return to Freud overturns prevailing views of the role and functions of the ego, so, too, Lacan's approach will suggest a radical reevaluation of the superego. In what follows, the view of the death drive we have developed along Lacanian lines will be drawn upon to illuminate some of the key dimensions of the superego. This discussion in no way claims to give a comprehensive account of the problem, but may suffice to mark some suggestive points of reference. Perhaps more than any other element of Freud's theory, the concept of the superego has been embraced and appropriated by popular consciousness, subsumed by a commonsensical notion of conscience. We are well accustomed to thinking of superego as fundamentally hostile to the satisfaction of desire. The superego is the Calvinist in all of us, the moralizing and guilt-wielding agency of repression that erects impediments to the discharge of impulse and punishes the excesses of a pleasure-seeking ego. This view, attributable to no one precisely because it is all around us, is related to the popular conception of Freud's discovery that neatly divides things up on either side of a barrier of repression. On one side is the pressure of the body's instinctual urges, represented by the Freudian id. On the other side are the structures of language, the "higher" faculties of reason and judgment, and the forms of culture and convention. It is a vision of the sinful flesh constrained by the repressive and distorting forces of rationality. In this view, the activity of the superego becomes the prime source of the discontents of the "civilized" human being whose natural instincts are oppressed by social constraints. Although there is a difference between this vulgarized version of Freud's theory and the sort of thing one finds in the analytic literature, the difference is sometimes not as great as one might suppose. Nor is it a perspective that is without support in the text of Freud. To the extent that our concept of the superego is informed by this commonsensical perspective, however, it

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comes as a surprise to find the paternal figure and the symbolic Law for which he stands, in short, the whole framing of the Freudian notion of the superego, revealed by Lacan in their nonrepressive, even liberating aspects. "The true function of the Father. . .," Lacan insists, "is fundamentally to unite (and not to set in opposition) a desire and the Law" (E:S, 321). Elsewhere he makes a similar point: If God doesn't exist, the father [Karamazov] says, then everything is permitted. Quite evidently, a naive notion, for we analysts know full well that if God doesn't exist, then nothing at all is permitted any longer. (S.II, 128) At the very outset, then, we are led to expect a fundamental reorientation of the nature and function of the superego as Lacan interprets it. Like almost everything in Lacan's innovation, however, the seeds of his revised outlook on the superego are to be found in Freud's own text. Here, as elsewhere, Lacan's conclusions are arguably less a departure from Freud than a clarification and revivification of Freud's basic intentions. Looking more closely at the way Freud describes the superego in The Ego and the Id, it becomes impossible to maintain that the superego functions simply as an obstacle to the fulfillment of wishes. Two considerations militate against it. First, contrary to what we might expect from an agency charged with the task of implementing moral prohibitions, Freud stresses the intimate relation between the superego and the id, suggesting that "the cathectic energy does not reach these contents of the superego from auditory perception (instruction or reading) but from sources in the id" (SE, 19:52-53). He suggests that "the superego is always close to the id and can act as its representative vis a vis the ego. It reaches deep down into the id and for that reason is farther from consciousness than the ego is" (SE, 19:48). Second, Freud's text makes clear that the superego directs its hostility not toward the impulsive id but rather toward the ego. But perhaps the proximity of the superego to the id and its opposition to the ego can be explained in a way that allows us to insist once again on the purely repressive character of the superego. Concerning its connection with the id, the superego might be said to have its origin in the id not in an unqualified sense but in relation to the specifically aggressive impulses of the id. In regard to its hostility toward the ego, the superego might be thought to restrain the id only indirectly, exercising its repressive function by proxy, forcing the ego to fulfill its demands for instinctual renunciation. Warrants for both these 168

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explanations may be found in Freud. Nevertheless, they are not adequate to resolve our difficulties. In fact, the close relation of the superego to the energies of the id and its hostility toward the ego constitute a twofold anomaly at the very heart of the concept of the superego. On the first point, the close relation between the superego and the id must be said to involve more than the aggressive energies of the id. In its role as an ego ideal, the superego is said to promote the reintegration of the most primitive libidinal energies into the structure of the ego. "The ego ideal," Freud remarked, "is therefore the heir to the Oedipus Complex, and thus it is also the expression of the most powerful impulses and the most important libidinal vicissitudes of the id" (SE, 19:36). Joseph Sandier clarifies the point by saying that "the id finds a pathway through the ego in two ways: directly, to the extent to which its impulses are ego-syntonic; and indirectly, through the superego." 29 From this point of view, we must assert that the superego really does function "to represent the id vis a vis the ego." Indeed, if the superego provides the structure that makes possible the satisfaction of sublimation, the superego must be seen to serve the libidinal interests of the id. On the second point, concerning the opposition of the superego to the ego, Freud over and again remarked on the excessive character of the superego's mistreatment of the ego and struggled to explain it. Freud found the punitiveness of the superego to be frequently incommensurate with the transgressions of the ego toward giving greater license to instinctual satisfactions. In some cases it seemed exactly the opposite: the wrath of the superego appeared to be related less to the ego's overpermissiveness than to its repressive control over the id. In obsession, for example, "the ego, having gained control over the libido by means of identification, is punished for doing so by the superego through the instrumentality of the aggressiveness which was mixed with the libido" (SE, 19:55). Particularly with respect to aggressive impulses, the function of the superego appeared to be precisely the opposite of what one might expect: the greater the renunciation of impulse, the greater the hostility of the superego toward the ego:

The ordinary view sees the situation the other way round: the standard set up by the ego ideal seems to be the motive for the suppression of aggressiveness. The fact remains, however, as we have stated it: the more a man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense becomes his ideal's inclination to aggressiveness against his own ego. (SE, 19:54) 169

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Freud noted with surprise that, contrary to the notion that the superego punishes the ego for its criminal licentiousness, the unconscious sense of guilt exacted upon the ego by the superego may itself emerge as a motive for criminal acts. "In all these situations," Freud suggested, "the superego displays its independence from the conscious ego and its intimate relations with the unconscious id" (SE, 19:54). From this perspective, therefore, the superego again appears to be a "representative of the id vis a vis the ego" in a straightforward sense. Far from itself demanding a renunciation of instinctual satisfactions, the superego seems to retaliate against the ego in response to repressions for which the ego alone is responsible. If the hostility of the superego toward the ego could not be traced simply to the hedonistic excesses of the ego, neither could it be explained as an internalizing of the child's experience of hostile treatment at the hand of its parents. On the contrary, the most severely critical superego was often to be found in children of the most loving parents. 30 The apparently gratuitous hostility of the superego thus faced Freud with a fundamental problem, relevant to one of the key questions of psychoanalytic research: the nature and origin of neurotic guilt. As we saw earlier, it was toward the solution of this problem that Freud offered his hypothesis of an inherited predisposition to guilt, the legacy of the murder of the primal father by the fraternal band of sons. A decade after the writing of Totem and Taboo, however, Freud sought a new answer by means of the theory of the death instinct. However, the explanatory power of this final association of the superego with a self-destructive drive were limited by the obscurities of the concept of the death drive itself. New possibilities are opened up along the lines of the Lacanian interpretation we have been pursuing. A Lacanian perspective enables us to recast the terms of the problem and to identify the "mysterious masochistic trends of the ego" brought to light in Beyond the Pleasure Principle with the moral masochism exercised by the superego. T h e difficulties in Freud's concept of the superego are resolved from a Lacanian point of view. T h e fundamental question is why a third psychic agency arises at all. So long as the ego is regarded simply as an executor of instinctual demands, arbitrating between the id and the constraints of a hostile external world, the anti-ego function of the superego is bound to seem superfluous. For Lacan, however, the stress is laid on the fundamentally alienating character of the ego. T h e infantile ego functions as a defensive structure that stabilizes the contour of a primitive identity only by excluding the heterogeneity of impulses animating the infantile body. In this way, Lacan provides an 170

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economic motive for the genesis of an agency critical of the ego and is able to explain why the hostility of the superego is aimed not at the instinctual forces of the id but at the defensive structures of the ego that exclude those forces from the psychical economy. Lacan finds the motive for the genesis of the superego in the force of the real excluded from the imaginary organization of identity: My thesis is that the moral law, the moral commandment, the presence of the moral agency, is that by which, in our activity in so far as it is structured by the symbolic, the real makes itself present—the real as such, the weight of the real.. . . [This] must have some relation with the movement that traverses the whole of Freud's thought, and which begins from a first opposition between the principle of reality and the principle of pleasure and leads, across a series of vacillations, oscillations, barely perceptible changes in his references, to something . . . which is called the death instinct. (S.VII, 28-29) Far from being the enemy of puissance, the superego, precisely in its hostile opposition to the ego, is the very thing that makes puissance possible. What is puissance? It is reduced here to being only a negative instance. Jouissance is what doesn't serve any purpose (c'est ce qui ne sert a rien).

I point there to the reserve implied by the field of the right-tojouissance. Right is not duty. Nothing forces anyone to enjoy, except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance—Jouisl (S.XX, 10) Economically considered, the superego may be said to act as a representative of the id, yet it remains possible to speak of the repressive function of the superego insofar as it deconstructs the battery of imaginary drives. The task performed by the superego is that of a measured disintegration of the narcissistic ego, the purpose of which is to open u p the ego's basic structure toward a more complex and sophisticated configuration capable of sustaining a wider range of instinctual expression. New possibilities of satisfaction are opened u p only at the price of giving up forms of satisfaction established by imaginary identification. This formulation of the matter should sound familiar, and for good reason. It is precisely parallel to our earlier discussion of the Schema L, in which the symbolic function was seen 171

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to realize access to the inchoate desire of the subject by means of its corrosive influence over the formations of the imaginary. This parallel can be readily mapped onto Schema L31:

As its location in the place of the Other of language suggests, the superego is identified by Lacan with the insertion of the subject into the signifying system. "The superego is essentially located within the symbolic plane of speech" (S.I, 102). It is on the plane of the symbolic function that another agency of the subject is stabilized over and beyond the imaginary: The superego . . . is produced in the symbolic system integrated by the subject. This symbolic world is not limited to the subject, because it is realized in a language, the universal symbolic system, in so far as it establishes its empire over a specific community to which the subject belongs. (S.l, 196) With this conclusion in hand, it is possible to summarize and integrate the main points of discussion in this chapter. (1) As an agency of self-transformation, the function of which is to install the law of the signifier over every narcissistic formation, the superego becomes the engine of the death drive as Lacan conceives it. The superego effects a deconstruction of the imaginary homogeneity of the ego, thereby introducing into the subjective economy a symbolic revival of the corps morcele of prematurity. This means that the superego has two aspects, correlative to the imaginary and symbolic father. The birth of the superego is intrinsically tied to the emergence of the fantasies of dismemberment and thus related to the menacing "No" of the father. But as the pun in Lacan's "Nom-du-Pere" suggests, the No of the father is also the Name of the father. The fantasied agent of 172

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imaginary castration gives way to the rule of the symbolic law to which the father, too, is subject. (2) The transition out of the narcissistic position effected by the superego implies a certain failure of integration that would have occasioned a crisis on the level of imaginary identification and a consequent outbreak of anxiety. Circuited by the symbolic system, however, this passage beyond the imaginary is rendered tolerable by the inauguration of a new mode of psychical functioning. The incompleteness of the subject is temporalized by the insertion into language. T h e recovery of a basic lack or fault in the subject is passed into the unfolding of the signifying chain. In the matrix of this new structure, anxiety is transformed into guilt. Guilt, as Freud said, is a variant of anxiety, but it is also a specification of anxiety and as such constitutes a form of defense against an unmasterable anxiety. 32 As Lacan puts it, "between imaginary and symbolic relationships there is the distance between anxiety and guilt."33 (3) By means of the institution of the superego, a new and more complex identity can begin to coalesce. T h e personality is delivered from the totalizing tendency of imaginary formations and opened to complexity and internal differentiation, by means of which ambiguity of ideation and ambivalence of feeling can be positively registered. It is on the basis of this shift that secondary identifications can be formed and that the superego can be said to make possible the formation of an ego ideal that is a composite of borrowed traits. (4) In this passage beyond the imaginary, desire is stimulated by the generation of new and more complex configurations and finds its points of support in the emergence of novel dimensions of meaning. As Lacan suggests in a punning wordplay, jouissance is effected in the generation oijouis-sens, a new register of satisfaction is opened up in the pursuit of "enjoy-meant." 34 This shift establishes a new relation to the object. What was previously oriented by the imaginary in the demand for a repetition of the same is deliteralized and temporalized in the figure of the objet a, which provides for the possibility of an unending circulation of objects. This new object is nonsubstantial, nonperceptual. It is related to the form of the body's imaginary anatomy by virtue of a negation and a fundamental displacement. In the resolution of the castration complex, the phallus becomes precisely what is not the penis. 173

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In these ways, the accession of the subject to the symbolic order and the establishment of the superego in which that transition is stabilized is virtually constitutive of sublimation. From this perspective, Lacan concurs with the judgement of Ricoeur that "sublimation is the symbolic function itself (FP, 497). T h e upshot of Lacan's view of the superego is most striking in relation to the popular conception evinced above. Contrary to the view that opposes the superego to the expression of desire and that finds in language the very wherewithal of the superego's repressive function, for Lacan it is only by means of the superego and its agency in the symbolic system that it is possible to attain anything at all of the subject's relation to desire. It is only by virtue of the passage through the castration complex that the subject wins access to the unfolding of its desire. Lacan expresses this paradoxical conclusion in a terse and intentionally strange-sounding formula: "Castration means thatjouissance must be refused, so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder {Vechelle reversee) of the Law of desire" (E:S, 324). Let us take this formulation as the occasion for posing a further question. If the superego constitutes a relation to the symbolic law that spells the demise of narcissism and grants access to desire, what is the relation of this law to particular social codes and conventions? Can the symbolic law simply be identified with the status quo of existing moral and social norms? Although a complete response to this question would take us far afield of our main concerns, it is possible to indicate at least the general direction of an answer. What Lacan has in mind in speaking of the law of the symbolic order might be said to undergird the codes governing specific human communities, but is not limited to them. In fact, the symbolic law provides the matrix by which particular conventions are given their measure and are subject to a constant possibility of reformation. Thus Lacan asserts that "the superego is at one and the same time the law and its destruction. As such it is speech itself, the commandment of law, in so far as nothing more than its root remains" (SJ, 102). T h e distinction between particular codes and the law of language in general is likened by Lacan to that drawn by Kant between the specific rules of a moral system and the utterly general and formally empty law of pure reason upon which they are ultimately grounded. At one point, Lacan goes so far as to suggest that the a priori categories of thought outlined by Kant must be understood in terms of the laws of language. 35 Like Kant, Lacan stresses the way the law functions to divide the subject from itself; for Kant duty is set against inclination, for Lacan the desire of the subject is opposed to the ego. In both cases, the ethical act is op174

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posed to the subject's self-definition in terms of its own good. In Freudian terms, the ethical emerges in what is beyond the pleasure principle, in service to what is wholly other to the narcissistic ego. That Lacan follows the implications of such a view beyond its Kantian expression is evidenced by the parallel Lacan draws between the positions of Kant and Sade. 36 The law of the signifier embraces the morality of Sade as readily as it does the categorical imperative of Kant. The provocative reference to Sade only serves to underscore the main point at stake in Lacan's concept of law. What is at issue is less a defense of any particular moral code than an insistence on an ethics of desire where "desire" is taken in opposition to the homeostases of the ego. 37 The Sadean ethic is an imperative of pure transgression. As such, it exemplifies in its essential form the self-transmutation by rule of law that is constitutive of the "sadism" of the superego. What emerges as the ethics of psychoanalysis implied by the law of the signifier is thus a wholly negative ethic. It is the law of the symbolic over the imaginary, the priority of the decentered subject over the ego. It is a law of unceasing transgression against the encrustation of the narcissistic substructure of the personality—a transgression that is effected in the name of desire. "Transgression in the sense of puissance" Lacan concludes, "is accomplished only by supporting itself on a contrary principle, on the forms of the Law" (S.VII, 208). What then is the law of language? Just as the Lacanian sense of the law is more fundamental than any particular social code, so, too, the law of language refers to something more basic than the rules of grammar or syntax. The symbolic law derives from the diacritical character of the symbolic system of language insofar as it necessitates that every entrance into the system is meaningful only in terms of other elements of the system that remain in the moment unspoken. T h e meaning of any signifier must be determined, indeed can only be determined, by recourse to another signifier. Every entry into the symbolic order is intrinsically unfinished, there is always another move in the game, there is always another reply. T h e law of language thus refers to the inevitable finitude of discourse, the impossibility of ever having the last word: We cannot conceive of human discourse as being unitary. Every emission of speech is always, up to a certain point, under an inner necessity to err. So we are led, it would appear, to a historical Pyrronism which suspends the truth-value of everything which the human voice can emit, suspends it in the expectation of a future totalization. (5./, 264) 175

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The law of language that provides for the passage beyond the strictures of narcissism implies in addition the impossibility of re-finding any image of totality in the symbolic system. T h e function of the signifier that opens to desire the circuits of its unfolding also guarantees the unending character of that unfolding: If there is anything that the Freudian experience has contributed, it is that we are determined by these structural laws for that which, rightly or wrongly, can be called the condition of the most profound image of ourselves that can be signified, or more simply, that something in ourselves, beyond the idea that we can construct of ourselves, on which we base ourselves, more or less cling to, and of which we sometimes made a little too prematurely the synthesis, the totality, of the person. (S.V, 11/27/57) The Vicissitudes of the Death Drive: Violence and Sublimation Over the course of this chapter, we have seen how a Lacanian interpretation repeatedly locates the activity of the death drive at the heart of key psychoanalytic concepts: anxiety, castration, the superego. In this way, Lacan reveals how Freud's theory of the dual instincts can be seen to unify and integrate the main points of the psychoanalytic metapsychology. But it also enables us to go beyond Freud's formulations toward a new understanding of the function of sublimation. We have already pointed to the way in which the insertion of the subject into the symbolic order opens new access to desire in the generation of new dimensions of meaning—that jouissance is effected in the production ofjouis-sens. From this point of view, sublimation is effected by the transition from imaginary to symbolic structures and, as such, is attributable to the work of the death drive. 38 To these discussions, however, it is necessary to add a final series of remarks to distinguish the action of the death drive in the register of the symbolic (the function of sublimation) in opposition to brute violence on the level of the imaginary. In the light of what has been said so far, the psychical processes that issue in the formation of the superego appear virtually continuous with the aggressivity that for Lacan is a concomitant feature of the narcissistic organization of the ego. Both the self-punishing criticism of the superego and the raging of imaginary aggression aim at breaking apart the unity of the ego under the pressure of impulses alienated by its defensive organization. There is, however, a crucial difference between the two. Narcissistic 176

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aggressivity is enacted on the level of literal violation of the body's imaginary integrity, whereas the self-mutative effects of the superego are achieved in the register of linguistic signification. We are thus led to propose that the death drive operates on two levels, imaginary and symbolic. In either case, the death drive attempts to have its way with the imaginary ego, seeking to deconstruct its false unity. But what emerges on the level of the imaginary as literal violence is accomplished in the function of the superego by means of a symbolically mediated transformation of identity. The graduation of the subject from the imaginary plane to that of the symbolic might thus be called a sublimation of the death drive. It symbolically effects a certain disintegration of the imaginary ego that is attempted on the narcissistic level by brute aggressivity. It is for this reason that Lacan refers to the "pacifying" function of the Oedipus Complex (E:S, 22). "The Oedipal identification," he suggests, "is that by which the subject transcends the aggressivity that is constitutive of the primary subjective individuation" (E:S, 23). T h e installation of the symbolic function enables the transcendence of narcissistic aggressivity but is also liable to various degrees of impairment. In fact, Lacan suggests that early views of the superego, which stressed its virulently sadistic character, were mistakenly based on the evidence of such failures. Thus "the emphasis that was placed at first in psychoanalytic theory on the aggressive turning around of the Oedipal conflict upon the subject's own self was due to the fact that the effects of the complex were first perceived in failures to resolve it" (E:S, 25). Such failures of accession to the level of the symbolic, although they are most readily precipitated during the formative crisis of the Oedipus Complex, are everpresent possibilities for the subject insofar as the narcissistic formation retains a function in the psychic process if only as the pole of regressions. Thus Lacan asserts that

this narcissistic moment in the subject is to be found in all the genetic phases of the individual, in all the degrees of human accomplishment in the person, in an earlier stage in which it must assume a libidinal frustration and a later stage in which it is transcended in a normative sublimation. This conception allows us to understand the aggressivity involved in the effects of all regression, all arrested development, all rejection of typical development in the subject, especially on the plane of sexual realization, and more specifically with each of the great phases that the libidinal transformations determine in human life. (E:S, 24) 177

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The idea that a failure in the insertion of the subject into the symbolic matrix brings about a regression of the death drive to the level of imaginary violation illuminates Lacan's analysis of the hallucination recounted by Freud in the case of the Wolfman. Seated beside his nurse in the garden, the boy is struck speechless with horror at the vision of his finger almost completely severed from his hand. T h e loss of speech is especially significant for Lacan, as it betokens a foreclosure of the symbolic function that is in a more general sense the central point around which the Wolfman's pathology revolves. The foreclosure of the symbolic implies a refusal of castration, the effect of which is an emergence of something uncanny in the field of the seen, something that can be represented only in the hallucinated violation of the imaginary: Castration, which is precisely what didn't exist for him, manifests itself in the form of something he imagines—to have cut his little finger, so deeply that it hangs solely by a little piece of skin. He is then overwhelmed by a feeling of a catastrophe that is so inexpressible that he doesn't even dare to talk of it to the person by his side. . . . There is a sort of immediate external world, of manifestations perceived in what I will call a primitive real, a non-symbolized real. (5.7, 58) In the experience of the Wolfman, a hallucination of bodily violation erupts as a consequence of the foreclosure of the symbolic law. Although it is risky to extrapolate too much from this example, it is tempting to draw from it the clue for a more general explanation of certain violent behaviors. A suggestive point of reference can be drawn from an historical example: the atrociously violent crimes committed in Colombia between 1949 and 1958 during the period known as La Violencia. This period is remarkable first for the sheer number of crimes committed. A conservative estimate puts the number of persons killed at 135,000. 39 Even more horrifying than the numbers, however, was the almost unimaginable savagery with which these crimes were carried out. During the height of the atrocities, roving groups of bandoleros descended upon villages in veritable orgies of brutality. T o give some idea of the horrors involved let us quote Carlos Leon's account: All of these crimes reveal an excess of aggression and cruelty and are qualified as such by a consensus of public opinion, which is shocked at them and identifies them as different from the "usual 178

Formations of the Unconscious types of crime." These aberrant criminal actions are performed either as part of the killing of the victims or after they are dead. Foremost among these crimes is quartering or dismembering of victims and burning of the bodies. This may involve individual victims or groups of them. After killing a priest in Uraba, a bandolero burned the body and the house where the priest was staying. When the body was half burned, he chopped it in pieces, put them in a bag and threw then in a river, upon which he became psychotic and ran into the jungle. In a small village in Tolima, 60 persons were locked in a house, the walls soaked in kerosene and then set on fire. The whole house became a huge bonfire. A man was crucified on a log and then killed by hammering nails through his eyes. Another victim had all his teeth broken with pliers and then was forced to walk with his previously sliced feet on a floor covered with salt. He died of pain. Dismembering of children is performed in the presence of parents before they are actually killed. Dynamite is placed in the mouth of a victim and then exploded. Recruits are forced to try themselves out with machetes on a prisoner or a dead body until some sort of exhilaration or climax is achieved after the body is cut up. Mutilation of noses, tongues, and ears is rather frequent. The leader of one gang instructed his people to bring him "no reports but ears" as tangible evidence of their crimes. Atrocious crimes of a sexual nature were both abundant in number and utterly shocking in design. These involved the extraction of fetuses from pregnant women, the mutilation of breasts, and emasculation of live victims and corpses. Rape was frequent and sometimes carried out in indescribable circumstances. In one instance a paralytic girl of 18 was raped by 15 bandoleros and burned alive afterwards. Women were raped in the presence of their husbands, parents, or children, who were previously immobilized and afterwards killed. Impaling was quite frequent, especially in Los Llanos. Vampirism was practiced by some bandoleros who, after decapitating their victims, drank their blood from the open blood vessels.40 This litany of atrocities, in which bodily dismemberment is a grisly leitmotif, is strikingly reminiscent of the aggressive potentiality attributed by Lacan to the narcissistic organization of the ego in his "Aggres179

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sivity in Psychoanalysis." Indeed, La Violencia seems to realize in actual deeds the fantasies of "castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body" that Lacan associates with "a Gestalt proper to aggression in man" (E:S, 11-12). T h e imaginary character of the crimes is further evidenced by the way in which much of the killing seems to have been carried out in a manner designed to produce a maximum effect of spectacle. These atrocities were intended to be seen. T h e highly ritualized nature of certain methods of killing, called "mottoes," only underscores their scenic character. Carlos Leon: Several ways of beheading or wounding invented by the bandoleros were used as their trademark. A few of these are: "£/ corte de franela" (T-shirt cut). Especially practiced in Tolima, this consists of a deep wound along the line where the throat joins the chest. It is not done by striking but by sliding a very sharp machete over the throat, usually with the help of another person to hold the head in place. "£/ corte de corbata" (necktie cut). This consists of an incision under the mandible, through which the tongue of the victim is pulled to hang like a tie. "Corte de mica' (monkey cut). The victim is beheaded and the head placed on the chest. "Corte jranees" (French cut). It is practiced by incision of the scalp, which exposes the skull of the victim when he is still alive. Sometimes a hose is used to spray the skull and make it look neater.41 In response to the question of the underlying causes of the more atrocious crimes committed during La Violencia, Leon points first to certain psychological preconditions, informed by a generally repressive social, economic, and religious environment that is reflected in the family by the authority of a despotic father who uses brutal punishment to assert his domination. Given the context of these conditioning factors, Leon invites us to suppose that a breakdown in the structure of political authority effects a violent release of forces previously held in repression. And, in fact, in the years just prior to the outbreak of violence, the political situation in Colombia underwent a series of convulsive and destabilizing shifts in which power vacillated between liberal and conservative factions. Putting the emphasis on this political upheaval, the descent into spectacular violence in Colombia appears 180

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to parallel on the level of a whole society the process by which the hallucination of bodily violation was produced in the experience of the Wolfman by the impairment of the paternal metaphor and its institution of the symbolic law. If this parallel can be sustained, we are led to amend the conclusions of Leon, who tends to pose the outbreak of atrocities as the explosion of repressed forces that occurs when the weight of repression is lifted. From a Lacanian point of view, the structure of authority and the violence that erupted in its collapse can be seen ultimately to aim at the accomplishment of the same end by different means and, of course, with very different effects. What is aimed at is the deconstruction of the imaginary either by the institution of a symbolic order or by a kind of self-mutilation of the imaginary itself. In the failure of adequate symbolic mediation, the destructive forces of the death drive are unleashed on the level of the imaginary. To these conclusions we can add a further speculation about the factors that predisposed Colombian society to the violent outcome of political disturbance. The outbreak of violence may have been favored by the way in which the law in Colombian culture was overliterally embodied in the figure of the father. In Lacanian terms, there was an inadequate distinction between the symbolic and imaginary father. Such a confusion might be especially likely to occur in predominantly Catholic countries, where the authority of the divine tends to be so closely invested in the very person of the father. Leon goes to some lengths in describing the role of religious factors in the psychological predisposition to violence precipitated by a crisis of authority. In summarizing the general characteristics of the bandoleros, he notes that "almost without exception they belong to the Catholic religion." 42 The imaginary character of the father figure may be further suggested by the way leaders of many of the bandolero groups assumed religious identities and became among their followers and the population at large the objects of almost mystical veneration. UiElMosco? a ferocious bandit of the Caldo region, was said to be a very religious m a n . . . . He was convinced that, due to divine protection, bullets would not enter his body." 43 Another bandolero in Tolima "had the skin of his chest opened, then placed a crucifix inside the wound, and had it sewn up. He wanted to carry the crucifix under his skin as a protection against the bullets of his enemies." 44 In these instances, the symbolic power of the father is literally invested in the very body of the leader. Not infrequently, the prestige of bandit leaders extended beyond the bandolero group to the local population. A shrine was erected on the site where one bandit leader was killed by the army in Bogota. This shrine inspired "men and women of all social classes [to make] a pilgrimage; 181

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busloads of people, as well as hundreds of automobiles, came from several regions of the country." 45 Leon notes that "in a certain Colombian city, the courtesy musical programs of the radio stations were loaded with requests from local girls and women to play certain records for well-known bandoleros."*6 Needless to say, this Lacanian analysis is entirely speculative. 47 It is a construction based on the barest summary of the facts and is offered here l