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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 S₁, 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]].

On today's market, we find a [[whole ]] series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol... And the [[list ]] goes on: what [[about ]] [[virtual ]] sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare, the contemporary redefinition of [[politics ]] as the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today's tolerant [[liberal ]] [[multiculturalism ]] as an [[experience ]] of [[Other ]] deprived of its [[Otherness ]] (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to [[reality]], while features like wife beating remain out of sight…)? Virtual Reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the resisting hard kernel of [[the Real ]] - in the same way decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like the real coffee without being the real one, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being one.

Is this not the attitude of the hedonistic [[Last Man]]? Everything is permitted, you can [[enjoy ]] everything, BUT deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous. (This is also Last Man's [[revolution ]] — "[[revolution without revolution]].") Is this not one of the two versions of Lacan's anti-Dostoyevski motto "If God doesn't [[exist]], everything is prohibited"? (1) God is [[dead]], we live in a permissive [[universe]], you should strive for pleasures and [[happiness ]] — but, in order to have a life [[full ]] of happiness and pleasures, you should avoid dangerous excesses, so everything is prohibited if it is not deprived of its substance; (2) If God is dead, [[superego ]] enjoins you to enjoy, but every determinate [[enjoyment ]] is already a [[betrayal ]] of the unconditional one, so it should be prohibited. The nutritive version of this is to enjoy directly the [[Thing ]] Itself: why bother with coffee? Inject caffeine directly into your blood! Why bother with sensual perceptions and excitations by [[external ]] reality? Take drugs which directly [[affect ]] your brain! - And if there is God, then everything is permitted — to those who [[claim ]] to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of His will; clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any "merely [[human]]" constraints and considerations (as in [[Stalinism]], where the reference to the [[big Other ]] of [[historical Necessity ]] justifies absolute ruthlessness).<br><br>Today's hedonism combines [[pleasure ]] with constraint — it is no longer the old [[notion ]] of the "[[right ]] measure" between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-[[Hegelian ]] immediate coincidence of the opposites: [[action ]] and reaction should coincide, the very thing which causes damage should already be the [[medicine]]. The ultimate example of it is arguably a <i>chocolate laxative</i>, available in the US, with the paradoxical [[injunction ]] "Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!", i.e., of the very thing which causes constipation. Do we not find here a weird version of [[Wagner]]'s famous "Only the spear which caused the wound can heal it" from <i>Parsifal</i>? And is not a [[negative ]] proof of the [[hegemony ]] of this stance the fact that [[true ]] unconstrained consumption (in all its main forms: drugs, free sex, smoking…) is emerging as the main [[danger]]? The fight against these dangers is one of the main investments of today's "biopolitics." Solutions are here desperately sought which would reproduce the [[paradox ]] of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is "safe sex" — a term which makes one appreciative of the truth of the old saying "Is having sex with a condom not like taking a shower with a raincoat on?". The ultimate goal would be here, along the lines of decaf coffee, to invent "opium without opium": no wonder marijuana is so popular among [[liberals ]] who want to legalize it — it already IS a kind of "opium without opium."

The [[structure ]] of the "chocolate laxative," of a product containing the [[agent ]] of its own containment, can be discerned throughout today's ideological landscape. There are two topics which determine today's liberal tolerant attitude towards [[Others]]: the respect of Otherness, [[openness ]] towards it, AND the obsessive [[fear ]] of harassment — in short, the Other is OK insofar as its [[presence ]] is not intrusive, insofar as the Other is not really Other… A similar structure is clearly [[present ]] in how we relate to [[capitalist ]] profiteering: it is OK IF it is counteracted with charitable activities — first you amass billions, then you [[return ]] (part of) [[them ]] to the needy… And the same goes for war, for the emergent [[logic ]] of humanitarian or pacifist militarism: war is OK insofar as it really serves to bring about peace, [[democracy]], or to create [[conditions ]] for distributing humanitarian [[help]]. And does the same not hold more and more even for democracy: it is OK if it is "rethought" to include [[torture ]] and a permanent emergency state, if it is cleansed of its populist "excesses," and if the people are "mature" enough to live by it…

However, what we were describing what cannot but appear as two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of [[humans ]] to [[bare life]], to <i>[[homo sacer]]</i> as the dispensable object of the expert caretaking knowledge; and that of the respect for the vulnerable Other brought to extreme, of the attitude of [[narcissistic ]] subjectivity which experiences itself as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a [[multitude ]] of potential "harassments." Is there a stronger contrast than the one between the respect for the Other's vulnerability and the reduction of the Other to "mere life" regulated by the administrative knowledge?

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 S₂; it is rather the S₁ of the S₂ 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.