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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>.[1]<brref>1. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997). Numbers in parentheses refer to the pages of this book.<br/ref>
===1===
Butler's, as well as Lacan's, starting point is the old Leftist one -- how is it possible not only to resist effectively, but also to undermine and/or displace the existing socio-symbolic network - the Lacanian "big Other" - which predetermines the only space within which the subject can exist. Significantly, Butler identifies "subject" with the symbolic position occupied within this space, while she reserves the term "psyche" for the larger unity encompassing that in the individual which resists being included in the symbolic space.[<ref>2] . Butler demonstrates that the Foucauldian "body" as the site of resistance is none other than the Freudian "psyche." Paradoxically, "body" is Foucault's name for the psychic apparatus insofar as it resists the soul's domination. That is to say, when, in his well-known definition of the soul as the "prison of the body," Foucault turns around the standard Platonic-Christian definition of the body as the "prison of the soul," what he calls the "body" is not simply the biological body, but is that which is already caught in some kind of pre-subjective psychic apparatus.</ref> Butler, of course, is well aware that the site of this resistance cannot be simply and directly identified as the unconscious; the existing order of Power is also supported by unconscious "passionate attachments," attachments publicly non-acknowledged by the subject:
<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). Therein resides the kernel of Butler's criticism of Lacan. According to her, Lacan reduces resistance to the imaginary misrecognition of the symbolic structure. Such a resistance, although it thwarts the full symbolic realization, nonetheless depends on the symbolic order and asserts it in its very opposition, unable to rearticulate its terms - "For the Lacanian, then, the imaginary signifies the impossibility of the discursive - that is, symbolic - constitution of identity" (96-97). Along these lines, she even identifies the Lacanian unconscious itself as imaginary, as "that which thwarts any effort of the symbolic to constitute sexed identity coherently and fully, an unconscious indicated by the slips and gaps that characterize the workings of the imaginary in language" (97).[<ref>3] . Incidentally, Butler here blatantly contradicts Lacan for whom the unconscious is "the Other's discourse," i.e. symbolic, not imaginary. Is not the best known single line from Lacan the assertion that "the Unconscious is structured like a language?" Slips and gaps are not for Lacan thoroughly symbolic facts. They confirm the functioning of the signifying network.</ref> Against this background, it is then possible to claim that, in Lacan, "psychic resistance presumes the continuation of the law in its anterior, symbolic form and, in that sense, contributes to its status quo. In such a view, resistance appears doomed to perpetual defeat" (98).<br><br>
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>
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===
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>
What Lacan does here is to introduce a distinction between the two terms which are identified in Butler, the fundamental fantasy which serves as the ultimate support of the subject's being, and the symbolic identification which is already a symbolic response to the trauma of the fantasmatic "passionate attachment." The symbolic identity we assume in a forced choice when we recognize ourselves in ideological interpellation relies on the disavowal of the fantasmatic "passionate attachment" which serves as its ultimate support.[<ref>4] . For example, apropos of the army life, such a "passionate attachment" is provided by a homosexual link which has to be disavowed if it is to remain operative. See Chapter 2 of Slavoj Zizek, ''The Plague of Fantasies'' (London: Verso, 1997).</ref> This leads to a further distinction between symbolic rearticulations and variations on the fundamental fantasy - like the variations on "Father is beating me" - which do not effectively undermine its hold, that is, between this dialecticization and the possible "traversing" the very fundamental fantasy. The ultimate aim of the psychoanalytic process is precisely for the subject to undo the ultimate "passionate attachment" which guarantees the consistency of his or her being, and thus to undergo what Lacan calls the "subjective destitution." At its most fundamental level, the primordial "passionate attachment" to the scene of fundamental fantasy is not "dialecticizable."<br><br>
An example of the reconfiguration of fantasy would be Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry series. In the first film, the masochist fantasy in all its ambiguity is almost directly acknowledged, while in the following installments, it looks as if Eastwood self-consciously accepted the politically correct criticism and displaced the fantasy to give to the story a more acceptable "progressive" flavor. In all these reconfigurations, however, the same fundamental fantasy remains operative. With all respect for the political efficiency of such reconfigurations, they do not really touch the hard fantasmatic kernel - they even sustain it. And in contrast to Butler, Lacan's wager is that even and also in politics, it is possible to accomplish a more radical gesture of "traversing" the very fundamental fantasy. Only such gestures which disturb this fantasmatic kernel are authentic acts.<br><br>
Here, one should look to the problematic of the original Hilflosigkeit ('helplessness,' 'distress') of small infants. The first feature to be noted is that this "distress" covers two interconnected, but nonetheless different, levels -- first a purely organic helplessness, the inability of the small child to survive, to satisfy his or her most elementary needs, without the parents' help, and second the traumatic perplexion when the child is thrown into the position of a helpless witness of sexual interplay among the parents, other adults, or between adults and him- or herself. The child is helpless, without "cognitive mapping," when confronted with the enigma of the Other's <i>jouissance</i>, unable to symbolize the mysterious sexual gestures and innuendoes he or she is witnessing. Crucial for "becoming-human" is the overlapping of the two levels, the implicit "sexualization" of the way a parent satisfies a child's bodily needs - say, when the mother feeds the child by excessively caressing him, and the child detects in this excess the mystery of sexual <i>jouissance</i>.<br><br>
So, back to Butler - the crucial question concerns the philosophical status of this original and constitutive <i>Hilflosigkeit</i>. Is this <i>Hilflosigkeit</i> not another name for the gap of the primordial dis-attachment which triggers the need for the fantasmatic primordial "passionate attachment"? In other words, what if we turn around the perspective and conceive of the obstacle which prevents the infans fully to fit into its environs - this original "out-of-joint" state - in its positive aspect, as another name for the very abyss of freedom, for that gesture of "disconnecting" that liberates a subject from its direct immersion into its environs? Or, to put it in yet another way - true, the subject is as it were "blackmailed" into passively submitting to some form of the primordial "passionate attachment," since, outside of it, he simply does not exist. This non-existence is not directly the absence of existence, however, but a certain gap or void in the order of being which "is" the subject itself. The need for "passionate attachment" to provide a minimum of being implies that the subject qua "abstract negativity," qua the primordial gesture of dis-attachment from its environs, is already here. Fantasy is thus a defense-formation against the primordial abyss if dis-attachment that "is" the subject itself. At this precise point, then, Butler should be supplemented - the emergence of the subject and subjection in the sense of the "passionate attachment," i.e. submission to some figure of the Other, are not strictly equivalent, since, for the "passionate attachment" to take place, the gap which "is" the subject must already be here. Only if this gap is already here, can we account for how it is possible for the subject to escape the hold of the fundamental fantasy.[5]<brref>5. One should link this opposition of attachment and dis-attachment to the old Freudian metapsychological opposition of Life and Death drives. In The Ego and the Id, Freud defines these drives as the opposition between the forces of connection/unity and the forces of disconnection/disunity. Dis-attachment is thus death drive at its purest, the gesture of ontological "derailment" which throws "out of joint" the order of Being. It is the gesture of disinvestment, of "contraction"/withdrawal from being immersed in the world. The primordial attachment is the counter-move to this negative gesture. In the last resort, this negative tendency to disruption is none other than libido itself: what throws a subject "out of joint" is none other than the traumatic encounter with ''jouissance''.<br/ref>
===3===
So what is a proper act? Jacques-Alain Miller [<ref>6] . See Jacques-Alain Miller, "Des Semblants dans la Relation Entre les Sexes," ''La Cause Freudianne'' 36 (1997): 7-15.</ref> proposes as the definition of "a true woman" a certain radical act - the act of taking from man, her partner, of obliterating, destroying even, that which is "in him more than himself," that which "means everything to him" and to which he holds more than his own life, the precious agalma round which his life turns. The exemplary figure of such an act in literature is that of Medea who, upon learning that Jason, her husband, plans to abandon her for a younger woman, kills their two young children, her husband's most precious possessions. It is in this horrible act of destroying that which matters most to her husband that she acts as une vraie femme, as Lacan put it.[<ref>7]. Lacan's other example is that of Andre Gide's wife who, after his death, burned all his love letters to her, considered by him his most precious possession.</ref><br><br>
Would it not be possible, along these lines, also to interpret the unique figure of the <i>femme fatale</i> in the new noir of the 90s, as exemplified by Linda Fiorentino in John Dahl's <i>The Last Seduction</i>? In contrast to the classic noir <i>femme fatale</i> of the 40s, who remains an elusive spectral presence, the new <i>femme fatale</i> is characterized by direct, outspoken sexual aggressivity, verbal and physical, by direct self-commodification and self-manipulation. She has the "mind of a pimp in the body of a whore." Two dialogues are here indicative - the classic exchange of double entendres about a "speed limit" which finishes the first encounter of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred McMurray in Billy Wilder's <i>Double Indemnity</i>, and the first encounter of Linda Fiorentino with her partner in <i>The Last Seduction</i>. In the latter, Fiorentino directly opens up his fly, reaches into it and inspects his merchandise before accepting him as a lover: "I never buy anything sight unseen," she says, and later rejects any "warm human contact" with him.[8] How does this brutal "self-commodification," this reduction of herself and her male partner to an object to be satisfied and exploited, affect the allegedly "subversive" status of the <i>femme fatale</i> with regard to the paternal Law of speech?<br><br>
