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I [[want]] to address the problem of [[identification]] by confronting the predominant deconstructionist doxa according to which the main problem with [[Lacanian]] [[theory]] - which allegedly also limits its [[political]] use - is that [[Lacan]] elevates the [[symbolic]] into a kind of [[transcendental]] [[position]] of a fixed [[normative]] [[order]] exempted from the transformative [[process]] of historical [[practice]]. According to this critique, [[the symbolic]] fixes in advance the constraints of compulsory [[heterosexuality]] and reduces all [[resistance]] to it to [[imaginary]] [[misrecognition]]. And if one does effectively break up the chains of the [[symbolic order]], one is expelled into the [[void]] of [[psychosis]]. Since the main proponent of this criticism is [[Judith]] [[Butler]], let me focus on her latest book, <i>The [[Psychic]] [[Life]] of [[Power]]</i>.<ref>[[Judith Butler]], The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997). Numbers in parentheses refer to the pages of this book.</ref>
<blockquote>
If the unconscious escapes from a given normative [[injunction]], to what other injunction does it [[form ]] an attachment? What makes us [[think ]] that the unconscious is any less [[structured ]] by the power relations that pervade [[cultural ]] [[signifiers ]] than is the [[language ]] of the subject? If we find an attachment to subjection at the level of the unconscious, what kind of resistance is to be wrought from that? (88).
</blockquote>
The exemplary [[case]] of the unconscious "passionate attachments" which sustain Power is precisely the inherent reflective eroticization of the regulatory power-mechanisms and procedures themselves. In the performance of an [[obsessional]] [[ritual]], one designated to keep at bay the illicit temptation, the ritual itself becomes the source of [[libidinal]] [[satisfaction]]. It is thus the "reflexivity" involved in the [[relationship]] between regulatory power and [[sexuality]], the way the repressive regulatory procedures themselves get libidinally invested, that functions as a source of libidinal satisfaction. And it is this radical masochistic reflective turn which remains unaccounted for in the standard [[notion]] of the "[[internalization]]" of [[social]] norms into psychic prohibitions.
The second problem with the quick identification of the unconscious as the site of resistance is that, even if we concede that the unconscious is the site of resistance which forever prevents the smooth functioning of power mechanisms, that [[interpellation]] - the subject's [[recognition]] in his or her allotted symbolic [[place]] - is always ultimately incomplete, failed. "Does such resistance do anything," asks Butler, "to alter or expand the dominant injunctions or interpellations of subject [[formation]]?" (88). In short, she concludes that "this resistance establishes the incomplete [[character]] of any effort to produce a subject by disciplinary means, but it remains unable to rearticulate the dominant [[terms]] of productive power" (89).
The first [[thing ]] to take note of here is that Butler seems to conflate two radically opposed uses of the term "resistance." One is the socio-critical use - resistance to power, for [[instance ]] - and the other the [[clinical ]] use operative in [[psychoanalysis ]] - the [[patient]]'s resistance to acknowledge the unconscious [[truth ]] of his [[symptoms]], the [[meaning ]] of his [[dreams]], and so on. When Lacan determines resistance as "imaginary," he has thereby in [[mind ]] the misrecognition of the symbolic network which determines us. On the other hand, for Lacan, radical rearticulation of the predominant symbolic order is altogether possible. This is what his notion of <i>[[point de capiton]]</i> - the "[[quilting point]]" or the [[master]]-[[signifier ]] - is [[about]]. When a new point de capiton emerges, the socio-symbolic field is not only [[displaced]], its very [[structuring ]] [[principle ]] changes. Here, one is thus tempted to turn around the opposition between Lacan and Foucault as elaborated by Butler. It is Foucault who insists on the immanence of the entire symbolic field by means of an act proper, a passage through "symbolic [[death]]." In short, it is Lacan who allows us to conceptualize the [[distinction ]] between imaginary resistance -- [[false ]] [[transgression ]] which reasserts the symbolic status quo and even serves as a positive condition of its functioning - and the effective symbolic rearticulation via the [[intervention ]] of the [[real ]] of an act.<br><br>
Only at this level, assuming that we take into account the Lacanian notions of point de capiton and the act as real, does a meaningful dialogue with Butler become possible. Butler's [[matrix ]] of social [[existence ]] as well as Lacan's is that of a [[forced ]] [[choice]]. In order to exist at all within the socio-symbolic space, one has to accept the fundamental [[alienation]], the definition of one's existence in the terms of the "[[big Other]]." As she is quick to add, however, this should not constrain us to - what she perceives as - the Lacanian view according to which the symbolic order is a given which can only be effectively transgressed if the subject pays the price of psychic [[exclusion]]. So on the one hand we have the false imaginary resistance to the symbolic norm, and on the [[other, the ]] [[psychotic ]] breakdown, with the only "realistic option" being full acceptance of alienation in the symbolic order - the [[goal ]] of the [[psychoanalytic ]] [[treatment]]. Butler opposes to this Lacanian fixity of the symbolic the [[Hegelian ]] [[dialectic ]] of presupposing and positing. Not only is the symbolic order always-already presupposed as the sole milieu of the subject's social existence, but this order itself [[exists ]] and is reproduced, only insofar as [[subjects ]] recognize themselves in it and, via repeated [[performative ]] gestures, again and again assume their places in it. This, of course, opens up the possibility of changing the symbolic contours of our socio-symbolic existence by way of its parodically displaced performative enactings. Therein resides the thrust of Butler's anti-[[Kantianism]]. She rejects the Lacanian symbolic a priori as a new version of the transcendental framework which fixes the coordinates of our existence in advance, leaving no space for the [[retroactive ]] [[displacement ]] of these presupposed [[conditions]]. So when in a key passage Butler asks the question:
<blockquote>
What would it mean for the subject to [[desire ]] something other than its continued 'social existence'? If such an existence cannot be undone without falling into some kind of death, can existence nevertheless be risked, death courted or pursued, in order to expose and open to transformation the hold of social power on the conditions of life's persistence? The subject is compelled to [[repeat ]] the norms by which it is produced, but the [[repetition ]] establishes a [[domain ]] of risk, for if one fails to reinstate the norm "in the [[right ]] way," one becomes subject to further sanction, one feels the prevailing conditions of existence threatened. And yet, without a repetition that risks life - in its current organization - how might we begin to imagine the [[contingency ]] of that organization, and performatively reconfigure the contours of the conditions of life? (28-29).
</blockquote>
The Lacanian answer to this is clear - "to desire something other than its continued 'social existence'" and thus to fall "into some kind of death," that is, to risk a gesture by means of which death is "courted or pursued," points precisely towards the way Lacan reconceptualized the Freudian death-[[drive ]] as the elementary form of the [[ethical ]] act. Note that the act, insofar as it is irreducible to a "[[speech ]] act," relies for its performative power on the preestablished set of symbolic rules and/or norms.<br><br> Is this not the whole point of Lacan's reading of Antigone? Antigone effectively puts at risk her entire social existence, defying the socio-symbolic power of the city embodied in the rule of Creon, thereby "falling into some kind of death" - i.e., sustaining symbolic death, the exclusion from the socio-symbolic space. For Lacan, there is no ethical act proper without taking the risk of such a momentary "suspension of the big Other," of the socio-symbolic network which guarantees the subject's identity; an authentic act occurs only when a subject risks a gesture which is no longer "covered up" by the big Other. For that reason, Lacan pursues all possible versions of this entering the domain "between the two deaths," not only citing Antigone after her expulsion, but also Oedipus at Colonus, King Lear, Poe's Mr. Valdemar, and so on. Up to Sygne from Claudel's Coufontaine-trilogy, their common predicament is that they all found themselves in this domain of the undead, "beyond death and life," in which the causality of the symbolic fate is suspended. Butler, in the above-quoted passage, too quickly conflates this act in its radical dimension with the performative reconfiguration of one's symbolic condition via its repetitive displacements. The two are not the same. In other words, one should maintain the crucial distinction between mere "performative reconfiguration," a subversive displacement which remains within the hegemonic field and, as it were, fights against it an internal guerilla battle of turning against the hegemonic field its own terms, and the much more radical act of a thorough reconfiguration of the entire field which redefines the very conditions of socially sustained performativity - in Foucault's terms, the passage from one episteme to another.<br><br> 2<br><br> Is it possible to undermine also the most fundamental level of subjection, what Butler calls "passionate attachments"? The Lacanian name for the primordial passionate attachments on which the very consistency of the subject's being hinges is, of course, fundamental fantasy. The "attachment to subjectivation" constitutive of the subject is thus none other than the primordial "masochist" scene in which the subject "makes/sees himself suffer," that is, assumes la doleur d' exister and thus provides the minimum of support to his being - like Freud's primordially repressed middle term "Father is beating me" in the essay "A Child is Being Beaten." This fundamental fantasy is thoroughly "inter-passive." In it, a scene of passive suffering, or subjection, is staged which simultaneously sustains and threatens the subject's being - only insofar, that is, as being remains foreclosed, primordially repressed. From this perspective, a new approach opens up to the recent artistic practices of sado-masochistic performance. In such practices, isn't this very foreclosure ultimately undone? In other words, what if the open assuming/staging of the fantasmatic scene of primordial "passionate attachment" is far more subversive than the dialectic rearticulation and/or displacement of this scene?<br><br> The difference between Butler and Lacan is that for Butler primordial repression is the foreclosure of the primordial "passionate attachment," while for Lacan, the fundamental fantasy, the stuff of which "primordial attachments" are made, is already a filler, a formation which covers up a certain gap or void. Thus it is only here, at this very point where the difference between Butler and Lacan is almost imperceptible, that we encounter the ultimate gap that separates Butler from Lacan. Butler again interprets these "primordial attachments" as the subject's presuppositions in a proto-Hegelian meaning of the term, and therefore counts on the subject's ability dialectically to rearticulate these presuppositions of his or her being, to reconfigure and displace them. The subject's identity "will remain always and forever rooted in its injury as long as it remains an identity, but it does imply that the possibilities of resignification will rework and unsettle the passionate attachment to subjection without which subject formation - and re-formation - cannot succeed" (105). For example, subjects are confronted with a forced choice in which rejecting an injurious interpellation amounts to not existing at all; under the threat of non-existence, they are, as it were, emotionally blackmailed into identifying with the imposed symbolic identity, "nigger," "bitch," etc. Since symbolic identity retains its hold only by its incessant repetitive re-enacting, however, it is possible for the subject to displace this identity, to recontextualize it, to make it work for other purposes, to turn it against its hegemonic mode of functioning.<br><br>
Consequently, this Lacanian notion of act also enables us to break with the deconstructionist [[ethics]] of the irreducible finitude, of how our [[situation]] is always that of a displaced being, caught in a constitutive [[lack]], so that all we can do is to assume heroically this lack, to assume heroically the fact that our situation is that of being thrown into an impenetrable finite context. The corollary of this ethics, of course, is that the ultimate source of totalitarian and other catastrophes is man's presumption that he can overcome this condition of finitude, lack and displacement, and "act like God," in a total transparency, surpassing his constitutive division. Lacan's answer to this is that absolute/unconditional acts do occur, but not in the idealist guise of a self-transparent gesture performed by a subject with a pure will who fully intends them. They occur, on the contrary, as a totally unpredictable tuche, a miraculous event which shatters our lives. To put it in somewhat pathetic terms, this is how the "divine" dimension is [[present]] in our lives, and the different modalities of ethical [[betrayal]] relate precisely to the different ways of betraying the act-event. The true source of evil is not a finite mortal man who acts like God, but a man who disavows that divine miracles occur and reduces himself to just another finite mortal being.<ref>In a further elaboration, one should thus reread Lacan's matrix of the four [[discourses]] as [[three]] modes of coming to terms with the trauma of the [[analytic]] act. The master's [[semblance]] resides in the fact that he pretends to nominate and thus directly translate into the symbolic fidelity the dimension of the act. That is, the defining feature of the Master's gesture is to change the act into a new master-signifier. In contrast to the master, the [[hysteric]] maintains the ambiguous attitude of division towards the act, insisting on the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of its [[symbolization]]. In contrast to both of them, the [[perverse]] agent of the [[university]] discourse disavows that there was the event of an act in the first place. By means of the [[chain]] of [[knowledge]], he wants to reduce the consequences of the act to just another thing which can be explained away as part of the normal run of things.</ref>
===Notes:===
<references />
==Source==
* [[From "Passionate Attachments" to Dis-identification]]. ''Umbr(a): Identity/Identification''. [[Number ]] 1. 1998. <http://www.gsa.buffalo.edu/lacan/zizekidentity.htm>. Also listed on ''[[Lacan.com]]''. <http://www.lacan.com/zizekpassionate.htm>.
[[Category:Articles by Slavoj Žižek]]
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