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<i>L'envers de la [[psychanalyse]]</i>, [[Seminar]] XVII (1969-1970) on the four [[discourses]], is [[Lacan]]'s response to the events of [[1968]] - its premise is best [[captured]] as his [[reversal]] of the well-known anti-[[structuralist]] graffiti from the [[Paris]] walls of 1968 "[[Structures]] do not walk on the streets!" - if anything, this Seminar endeavors to demonstrate how structures DO walk on the streets, i.e. how [[structural]] shifts CAN account for the [[social]] outbursts like that of the 1968. Instead of the one [[symbolic]] [[Order]] with its set of a priori rules which [[guarantee]] social [[cohesion]], we get the [[matrix]] of the passages from one to [[another]] [[discourse]]: Lacan's interest is focused on the passage from the discourse of the [[Master]] to the discourse of [[University]] as the hegemonic discourse in contemporary [[society]]. No wonder that the [[revolt]] was located at the universities: as such, it merely signaled the shift to the new forms of domination in which the [[scientific]] discourse serves legitimizes the relations of domination. Lacan's underlying premise is sceptic-[[conservative]] - Lacan's diagnosis is best captured by his famous retort to the student revolutionaries: "As [[hysterics]], you [[demand]] a new master. You will get it!" This passage can also be conceived in more general [[terms]], as the passage from the prerevolutionary <i>ancien [[regime]]</i> to the postrevolutionary new Master who does not [[want]] to admit that he is one, but proposes himself as a mere "servant" of the [[People]] — in [[Nietzsche]]'s terms, it is simply the passage from Master's [[ethics]] to [[slave]] [[morality]], and this fact, perhaps, enables us a new approach to Nietzsche: when Nietzsche scornfully dismisses "slave morality," he is not attacking lower classes as such, but, rather, the new masters who are no longer ready to assume the title of the Master - "slave" is Nietzsche's term for a fake master. — How, then, more closely, are we to read the [[university discourse]]?
The university discourse is [[enunciated]] from the [[position]] of "neutral" [[Knowledge]]; it addresses the [[remainder]] of the [[real]] (say, in the [[case]] of pedagogical knowledge, the "raw, uncultivated [[child]]"), turning it into the [[subject]] ($). The "[[truth]]" of the university discourse, hidden beneath the bar, of course, is [[power]], i.e. the Master-[[Signifier]]: the constitutive lie of the university discourse is that it disavows its [[performative]] [[dimension]], presenting what effectively amounts to a [[political]] decision based on power as a simple insight into the factual [[state]] of things. What one should avoid here is the Foucauldian misreading: the produced subject is not simply the [[subjectivity]] which arises as the result of the disciplinary application of knowledge-power, but its remainder, that which eludes the grasp of knowledge-power. "Production" (the fourth term in [[The Matrix|the matrix ]] of discourses) does not stand simply for the result of the discursive operation, but rather for its "indivisible remainder," for the [[excess]] which resists [[being]] included in the discursive network, i.e. for what the discourse itself produces as the foreign [[body]] in its very heart. Perhaps the exemplary case of the Master's position which underlies the university discourse is the way in which medical discourse functions in our everyday lives: at the surface level, we are dealing with pure [[objective]] knowledge which desubjectivizes [[The Subject|the subject]]-[[patient]], reducing him to an [[object]] of research, of diagnosis and [[treatment]]; however, beneath it, one can easily discern a worried hystericized subject, obsessed with [[anxiety]], addressing the doctor as his Master and asking for reassurance from him. At a more common level, suffice it to [[recall]] the [[market]] expert who advocates strong budgetary measures (cutting [[welfare]] expenses, etc.) as a [[necessity]] imposed by his neutral expertise devoid of any [[ideological]] biases: what he conceals is the series of power-relations (from the [[active]] [[role]] of state apparatuses to ideological beliefs) which sustain the "neutral" functioning of the market [[mechanism]].
In the University discourse, is not the upper level ($ — <i>a</i>) that of [[biopolitics]] (in the [[sense]] deployed from [[Foucault]] to [[Agamben]])? Of the expert knowledge dealing with its object which is <i>a</i> - not [[subjects]], but individuals reduced to bare [[life]]? And does the lower not designate what [[Eric Santner]] called the "crisis of investiture," i.e., the [[impossibility]] of the subject to relate to S<sub>1</sub>, to [[identify]] with a [[Master-Signifier]], to assume the imposed symbolic mandate?<ref>See Eric Santner, <i>My Own Private [[Germany]]</i>, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996.</ref> The key point is here that the expert rule of "biopolitics" is grounded in and conditioned by the crisis of investiture; this crisis generated the "post-metaphysical" survivalist stance of the Last Men, which ends up in an anemic [[spectacle]] of life dragging on as its own shadow. It is within this horizon that one should appreciate today's growing [[rejection]] of [[death]] penalty: what one should be able to discern is the hidden "biopolitics" which sustains this rejection. Those who assert the "sacredness of life," defending it against the [[threat]] of transcendent powers which parasitize on it, end up in a [[world]] in which, on behalf of its very [[official]] [[goal]] — long pleasurable life — all effective pleasures are prohibited or strictly controlled (smoking, drugs, food…). [[Spielberg]]'s <i>Saving Private Ryan</i> is the latest example of this survivalist attitude towards dying, with its "demystifying" presentation of war as a meaningless slaughter which [[nothing]] can really justify - as such, it provides the best possible justification for the Colin Powell's "no-casualties-on-our-side" military [[doctrine]].
But what if these two stances nonetheless rely on the same root, what if they are the two aspects of one and the same underlying attitude, what if they coincide in what one is tempted to designate as the contemporary case of the Hegelian "infinite judgement" which asserts the [[identity]] of opposites? What the two poles share is precisely the underlying [[refusal]] of any higher Causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. Nowhere is the complicity of these two levels clearer as in the case of the opposition to death penalty — no wonder, since (violently putting another human being to) death is, quite logically, the ultimate [[traumatic]] point of biopolitics, the politics of the administration of life. To put it in Foucauldian terms, is the abolition of death penalty not part of a certain "biopolitics" which considers crime as the result of social, [[psychological]], ideological, etc., circumstances: the notion of the morally/legally [[responsible]] subject is an ideological [[fiction]] whose function is to cover up the network of power relations, individuals are not responsible for the crimes they commit, so they should not be punished? Is, however, the obverse of this [[thesis]] not that those who [[control]] the circumstances control the people? No wonder the two strongest industrial [[complexes]] are today the military and the medical, that of destroying and that of prolonging life.
[[SuperEgo|Superego ]] is thus not directly S<sub>2</sub>; it is rather the S<sub>1</sub> of the S<sub>2</sub> itself, the dimension of an unconditional injunction that is inherent to knowledge itself. Recall the informations about health we are bombarded with all the [[time]]: "Smoking is dangerous! To much fat may [[cause]] a heart attack! Regular exercise leads to a longer life!" etc.etc. — it is [[impossible]] not to hear beneath it the unconditional injunction "You should enjoy a long and healthy life!"… What this means is that the [[discourse of the University]] is thoroughly mystifying, concealing its true foundation, obfuscating the unfreedom on which it relies.
==References==
