300 Words About “Science and Truth”

How to close the July (and August) of Jacques Lacan? I can offer no better than the last essay of his Écrits: Science and Truth. In it Lacan stresses the need for science and structuralist philosophy, which separate subjects from objects, as the only reliable means to truth.

Simply put, structuralist science discards humanism, its perpetual blind spots and limitations. Chief among these flaws is the unspoken but very Platonic natural relationship between subjects and knowledge. In the field of psychoanalysis, Lacan targets Jung and his transcendent universe of psychological archetypes. Theories like Jung’s make subjects inappropriately assume that the subject has an essence and makes the subject incorrectly responsible for their own content. These theories ignore the multitude of forces which determine subjects and subjectivity and, in doing so, submit to them.

Structuralists all study some sort of world of “apparatus” whose operations exceed subjectivity. Lacan talks at length about his philosophical kinship with anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, seeing his psychoanalytic work as a partner theory. This kinship comes from Lacan and Levi-Strauss’ common focus on subjects as part of immortal, autonomous structures (language and kinship groups respectively) which determine the subject according to their own rules. Since humans cannot create “metalanguage” free of these structural powers, truth must be found obliquely through ordinary speech.

While Lacanian psychoanalysis studies meaning, it stays faithfully anti-humanist and unconcerned with meaning for its own sake. What psychoanalysis must study to become scientific is not object a, the thing which is desired and which causes desire, but rather the function of object a: what makes object a play the role it does in organizing the subject’s psychology. A scientific psychoanalysis cannot stop with what desire and desired things mean to subjects. It needs to go beyond the human to find what shapes and causes desire.

300 Words About “Kant With Sade”

This essay is mostly about the nature and power of fantasy, but its sizable set-up is provocative and profound enough to earn three-hundred words. In it Lacan links Immanuel Kant, champion of dignity and rationality, with the Marquis de Sade, who wrote philosophical plays advocating beating off onto the tortured bodies of recently deflowered virgins. Specifically, Lacan sees de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom as filling out a gap in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.

De Sade’s laissez-faire ethical philosophy revolves around pursuing pleasure. For Kant, such a project is doomed. No sensation, emotion or appetite constantly provides the same pleasures. Therefore, no universal law can be formulated in regards to pleasure, except perhaps to its avoidance. De Sade, writing six years after Kant’s Critique, was not dissuaded. De Sade argues for a categorical right to work one’s will upon and to receive satisfaction from the bodies of others.

To Lacan, de Sade’s categorical imperative is necessary to make Kantian ethics possible. Kant purges all contingencies from human life, which he calls pathological. To replace them: the dictates of pure reason. These pathologies, however, are still part of living in the world. What Kant insists is that subjects experience and legislate themselves as though they were Other. Morality, to Kant, demands we hijack someone else’s (our own) body and force it to obey external demands, rather than its own desires.

This leads Lacan to explain desire as fundamentally transgressive. Desire, as a temptation to experience impossible heights of pleasure (jouissance), rejects all law- natural and moral. Desire is just as impractical as Kant’s imperative. Both Kant’s unshakeable honesty and self-denial and de Sade’s torture orgies demand enormous, stupid sacrifices. Referring to the mirror stage, one’s desire always seeks to un-split their subject and achieve the impossible perfection of their ego-ideal.

300 Words About “On the Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”

The July of Jacques Lacan has spilled over into late August. Real-life summer school reading aside, this doorstopper of an essay is to blame.

Lacan defends his own theory against other psychoanalysts and their critics. Lacan’s teaching, according to Lacan, fills in a gap in psychoanalysis: the relationships between fantasies, symbols and desire.

If Lacan’s idea of frustration makes his Hegelian influence obvious. Frustration is the feeling a Hegelian slave has for its master: the slave works and the master enjoys the products of that work. Psychologically, the master is the fantasy image that enjoys while the subject doesn’t, or who enjoys more than the subject is able to bear or get away with.

Our dreams enjoy what and how we ourselves cannot. Symbolically, dreams behave like sentences (Lacan uses Freud’s term “rebus” several times) where different elements give one another meaning. This meaning, however, is not the subject or patient’s meaning. Dreams are fundamentally Other. What dreams mean to a subject comes through in his or her retelling them. As they retell the dream, they also relate to it. A skilled enough analyst interprets both the desire of the Other from the dream and the desire of the patient subjected to that dream’s desires.

Symbols purge themselves of being. A symbol represents its signified even when the signified isn’t present. Because of this emptiness, symbols drift from site to site in psychology. This makes the Oedipus complex possible. The symbolic conflict between son and father over the mother determines the subject’s behavior in other aggressive conflicts. Disputes with authority figures, for example, inappropriately conjure up old emotions and behaviors used to deal specifically with one’s father.

Of course, Lacan prances from topic to topic and this essay contains much more. The remaining two selections will hopefully cover this excess.

300 Words About “On the Subject who is Finally in Question”

Written as a preface to his next essay, Lacan discusses the need for psychoanalysis to assume that the subject (the “I”) is by its nature incomplete. This incompletion, which stems from Lacan’s linguistic ideas of signifier and signified, ties psychoanalysis to other social sciences and anchors it among them.

Since subjectivity is a side-effect of language, no substance props it up with innate qualities. Since such the subject is a signifier, it can only have meaning assigned to it from outside itself, when it is differentiated from other signifiers. Consequently, any content attributed to the subject is perpetually moved around: even simple phrases, “I am this, I am that,” allude to this.

This perpetual deferral of meaning makes any sort of personal progress (of the self-help book psychology variety) impossible in Lacanianism. Lacan himself approaches the idea with cynicism: there is no new start at psychosexual development, no discovery of one’s true self or the like, because there the subject is fundamentally alien to itself. To Lacan, a complete, coherent or substantial subject is an esoteric leftover, a leftover notion of the soul, which has no place in a science.

Lacan also suggests that training analyses, which crown students’ initiations into the practice of psychoanalysis, should take precedence over therapeutic analyses as the purer form of the discipline. Even though a training analysis analyzes a willing and more or less sane “patient,” the analysis will- if conducted properly, without the senior analyst being “too patient”- still end with a gap.

The flow of discourse itself eventually assembles a symptom and fills in its meaning retroactively, cobbling together trauma where there previously was none. Something irresolvable always remains which the patient, despite their own analytic insights, can only accept. For Lacan, this demonstrates in practice the essential incompleteness of the subject.

300 Words About “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”

The essay’s title should foreshadow its particularly high density jargon- even by Lacan’s own standards. But the essay’s content is as significant as it is bloated, so worth chewing on awhile.

Subjectivity begins in a human being in the Mirror Stage. Humans pass through the Mirror Stage around the age of six months when they can recognize their reflection in a mirror but still lack the physical development to act effectively on their instincts. While the infant experiences their own body as broken up and disobedient, due to its weakness, their reflection, on the contrary, seems whole.

This image forms the ego-ideal, an idea of oneself as something complete and stable which will occupy a special place in the subject’s psychology. The ego-ideal is the first identification (the thought: “I am that”) from which the subject will derive all future identifications. The infant’s mixture of fascination with the image’s attractiveness and aggression towards it over the difficulty of controlling it carries over into these future identifications.

Regardless, what seems counterintuitive about this self-identification is that its image lies outside the subject itself. It makes the infant see itself as something outside of itself. It’s alienating. Consequently, we don’t know ourselves immediately, only as observers of a symbol. Before we can think “I am like so-and-so other person,” we must first think “I am like myself,” which to Lacan is not a redundant premise.

By symbolizing the imaginary image of itself, the infant irreversibly enters the Symbolic order as one of its signifiers. The role of identification in this entrance should clarify Lacan’s idea of desire as a Symbolic process. Symbols, as signifiers in a language, have their own rules. Identifying with a symbol submits the subject to the Symbolic’s rules, experienced as the desires of- and for- the big Other.

300 Words About “Beyond the Reality Principle”

Here Lacan defends psychoanalysis against other forms of psychology. Specifically, psychologies rooted in the methods of natural science.

Scientific truths never contain the full Truth of conscious experience because Truth- the Lacanian Real- is the uncertainty of lived experience itself. Unsurprisingly, the Real is always just out of reach of systematized, predictable, intelligible knowledge gleaned from natural science. This doesn’t mean science is untrue, but rather that its knowledge belongs to the Symbolic order. Science can “ally” with the Real, but cannot identify it.

However, this defends Lacanianism on its own grounds, so Lacan’s critique moves into the question of what makes credible psychological data. Psychology with a natural sciences standard has a problem with the notion of psychological data itself. Its data must be communicable in language, repeatable in experimentation and- above all else- coherent. Of course, mental life usually evades these criteria when freely given and is inaccessible in a raw state, since we cannot observe the minds of others.

To avoid contaminating data with a presupposed rationality (a possible criticism against cognitive science), psychoanalysis accepts the subject’s own account of consciousness as credible data and meaninglessness as a quality of it. The social nature of the account makes interpretation possible: even if a sentence is internally meaningless, it is spoken to someone. Who a sentence is addressed to is meaningful, though the sentence may not be. As long as the analyst offers no character of their own to the conversation, the patient unconsciously fills the void with an imaginary other to talk to. The goal of analysis is to bring the subject to recognize this unconscious image, which structures their thinking and speaking.

This explanation reveals Lacan’s close relationship with Idealist philosophy. To his credit or discredit, this is worth remembering when assessing his claims to science.

300 Words About “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’”

Lacan bills this seminar as an ideal introduction to the way he writes and thinks, though it actually in the introduction to the seminar, which follows its text, where Lacan’s clearest linguistic argument is found. The thesis: while signifiers (symbols- especially words) can correspond to something actually going on, rules that organize these signifiers among other signifiers take precedence in giving them meaning. That is, the meaning of a word is determined by first the meaning of other words and only secondly, if at all, by what we suppose the word represents.

To demonstrate, Lacan builds a simple language to describe coin flips. Assign every three flips (throws 1-3 determine the first symbol, 2-4 the second…) a symbol denoting their pattern: three-in-a-row, alternating or asymmetrical (ie. HTT). Because any one signifier’s three flips overlap with other signifiers’ flips, rigid rules for arranging signifiers emerge. Only a ‘three-in-a-row’ symbol can interrupt an even number of consecutive ‘asymmetry’ symbols, for example. Adding another layer of symbols to describe sequences of 3-flip signifiers adds another set of rules to this. Specifically, Lacan’s second set of rules schedules predictable, periodic repetitions of certain symbols.

Lacan’s point is that the Symbolic, the mental domain of language and most human thinking, exists autonomously from us and structures how we think. It is not a tool we use to express ourselves, but rather what determines our expressions. But Lacan does not suggest simple ‘if X then Y’ programming. Determination works both ways in language: successive signifiers can determine preceding ones and vice-versa. Psychologically, this means, among other things, that the past does not have its own meaning, but one structured by the language used to record and recall it.

The relationship between Subject and Other follows this logic, but that is writing for later in the month.

A July of Jacques Lacan

Now that the blog is growing at a respectable clip, it seems like a good time to cut 300 Words About’s adult teeth in the steak of a particularly egregious obscurantist. So without further poetry, welcome to a July of Jacques Lacan. Specifically, July 2009 will be dedicated to selections from Écrits, a collection of Lacan’s lectures which fill out his unorthodox psychoanalytic philosophy.

The short (but overcomplicated) essays of Écrits will allow this blog to accomplish two things: 1) more thorough synopses within the 300 word limit than those of larger books with broader scopes of argument, 2) to simplify the work of a thinker both sophisticated and pretentious, fascinating and frustrating- a sustained crusade against obscurantism.

For a crash course in Lacanian psychoanalysis, UVic professor Stephen Ross has written an introduction to Lacan, available here.

After this, I promise you, dear reader, simpler works by Plato and Aristotle. Until then, enjoy the sunshine and try not to think of your mother.

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• Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’
• Beyond the Reality Principle
• The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience
• On the Subject Who is Finally in Question
• The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis
• Kant With Sade
• Science and Truth

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Selections from “Écrits”
Jacques Lacan (1966), translated by Bruce Fink, Printed by Norton and Company (2006)
ISBN: 0-393-32925-9

300 Words About “The End of Faith”

Outspoken atheism has returned to the philosophical vogue, lead by thinkers like Sam Harris. However, addressing atheism’s specifics here would be mostly redundant and ignore its other contributions. Case in point: The End of Faith. Its atheism is inseparable from its theses on politics, morality and consciousness.

Harris’ arguments on secular ethics are the most interesting of the book. He dismisses relativism, deontology and pragmatism, maintaining the analytic ethical tradition of consequentialism. The real dangers of true believers inspire Harris’ criticism, coupled with the inherently anti-progressive nature of religion. Insofar as it insists on its traditions, religion harms women, relishes bloodshed and punishes pleasure. When it sidesteps its own text and modernizes, it culturally excuses the ignorance and failures of true believers. Harris does not oppose spiritual experience, but, in a sophisticated and Buddhist-inflected way, advocates finding other sources of it.

Despite its foreseen consequences, disastrous aftermath and fundamentalist flavor, Harris surprisingly excuses the Iraq war from his own ethical criteria (what suddenly matters is the intent of the bombers, not the widespread collateral damage). However, he clarifies this lapse with a more productive (and still more shocking) argument. If ethics concerns collective happiness and harm- and must reject pacifism- then torture is eclipsed by the destruction of modern warfare. Culturally, however, we fret about the former and accept the latter. The crucial point is that ethics doesn’t synchronize cleanly with the intuitions stemming from our “Paleolithic genes.” Even an ethics of happiness demands uncomfortable, unpopular policies.

The End of Faith occupies an emerging and still-radical position in American thinking. It rejects the established spectrum of American politics and mixes radical atheism with a surprisingly spiritual take on consciousness. Most readers- atheists included- will find something to object to: the surest sign of a comprehensive argument on an urgent topic.

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“The End of Faith”
Sam Harris (2004), printed by W. W. Norton and Company (2004).
ISBN: 0-393-32765-5

300 Words About “Yojimbo”

Fans of A Fistful of Dollars should recognize Yojimbo, the samurai skeleton of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Western. Given similar stories, this review will focus on how Kurosawa and Leone told them.

The portrayals resonate in the most important aspects. Cinematography avoids Hollywood shots, instead modeling their close-ups as still portraits and reveling in panorama, silence and the interplay between actors and empty space.

Yojimbo and its successor diverge most when characterizing villains. Though ruthless, Yojimbo’s Seibei and Ushitora are cowards who fight and bicker clownishly. Their notable henchmen are not only simpletons but impossibly ugly to boot: fat, balding Inokichi, for example, sports a unibrow stretching back to his temples. A bug-eyed Tazaemon even prefaces the last blood of the feud by pacing about, smacking his prayer drum in what resembles a hissy fit. Clint Eastwood’s enemies, by comparison, mix their ruthlessness with charisma and good grooming. Excluding their most expendable mercenaries, the Baxters and Rojos exude competence.

The films’ nameless heroes differ little. Sanjuro, like the Man with No Name, is a Machiavellian hero: a skilled fighter and diplomat and an honest liar. But divergent villains paint the otherwise similar protagonists with different overtones. Pervasive, gritty moral ambiguity prevents The Man with No Name from chuckling over outwitting his enemies- at least until he rescues Marisol and confirms himself as actually good. Sanjuro’s victory fanfare always plucks a comedic note- except, oddly, after he rescues Kohei’s kidnapped wife from prostitution and threatens to kill the whole family for thanking him. The intriguing part is while both incidents serve identical plot functions, they also reveal their heroes’ hidden honor.

The common story brings the subtler qualities of character and cinematography out to shine in Yojimbo and its Western protégé. Aspiring writers especially should study both incarnations of the classic plot.

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“Yojimbo”
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay by Akira Kurosawa and Ryuzo Kikushima
Produced by Tomo Yuki Tanaka and Ryuzo Kikushima (1961)