Psychoanalysis and Post Human

8/13/2019 Psychoanalysis and Post Human

1/22

Psychoanalysis at the Time of thePosthuman: Insisting on the

Outside-Sense

VRONIQUEVORUZ

Abstract:

This article diagnoses the discourse of posthumanism as a contemporarysymptom, and thus as a mode of the social link that attempts to deal with thereal of the human condition as, precisely, non-natural. In order to then interpretthis posthuman symptom, the article outlines the psychoanalytic notion ofinterpretation itself, not as the laying bare of a latent meaning, but as theinducement of truth-effects which are distinct from scientific understandingsof truth premised upon identity and non-contradiction. Lacans Seminar XVIIis then utilized both as an example of the psychoanalytic interpretation ofcontemporary life, and as a resource for thinking through the reification ofscience and technological lathouses that underpins the posthuman era. Thearticle concludes with a strong defence of the capacity of psychoanalysis to holdopen a space for the outside-sense, or what evades capture by the (scientific)

signifier. It is argued that this outside-sense is what truly constitutes the humaninsofar as humans are speaking beings.

Keywords:alethosophere, cognitivism, fantasy, four discourses, posthuman,psychoanalysis, science, symptom

Introduction

At the 1953 Rome Congress, Lacan addressed the followingadmonition to his audience of analysts: Let him [the analyst] be

well acquainted with the whorl into which his era draws him in theongoing enterprise of Babel, and let him be aware of his function as

Paragraph33.3 (2010): 423443DOI: 10.3366/E0264833410000994 Edinburgh University Presswww.eupjournals.com/para


2/22

424 Paragraph

an interpreter in the strife of languages.1 Both Freud and Lacan andMillers work on interpreting modernity over the past decade or sois remarkable share the rare capacity of being able to reconfigurepsychoanalytic theory each time they encounter resistance in thetreatment of the symptoms of their contemporaries.2 Repetition-compulsion is the best-known example in Freuds case.3 And for thethirty years that his teaching lasted, Lacan did little else than try tokeep up, firstly, with the decline of the paternal imago,4 secondly, withthe marginalization of the Oedipus complex his invention of theconcept of object a is destined to replace the Freudian Oedipus asa clinical compass for interpretation thirdly, with the insufficiency

of object a to account for jouissance, and lastly, with the topologicalerasure of the place of exception in the constitution of contemporarysubjectivities.5

The Schools that inscribe themselves in the Lacanian orientationhave continued this elaboration, most recently with the conceptof ordinary psychosis6 as the tentative nomination of a subjectivestructure congruent with two traits of our modernity: the reductionof the master-signifier to the number,7 and the substitution ofglobalization for universalism as matrix of the social bond (S XX;IM2).8 The first trait signals the privileging of counting over sensein uses of the signifier modelled on scientific language. It entails areduction of the ideal to an inscription in the plump part of theGaussian curve. The second trait indexes a shift in our topologicalmodalities of subjective organization. Universalism is a structure inwhich the Lawor jouissance prohibition is valid for all men(pour tout homme) because it finds its origin in an exception (albeitfantasmatic, as is Freuds Dead Father) to the set. In this modality, theset of all men is constituted as finite though incomplete by virtueof an exception to itself that also acts as a limit. Broadly speaking, this isthe Oedipal unconscious, operative in Freudian societies. There thelibidinal economy is organized by the play of prohibition, repressionand sublimation. Satisfaction is obtained in mediated, deferred forms.It is the age of the Name-of-the-Father, also the structure of modern

democracy.9 By contrast, in our hypermodern or posthuman times, aset is a series developing without either limit or totalization (IM2,18); it suffers no exception. In the age of globalization, or thesocial not-all (IM2, 18), subjects struggle to find an operative limit(to jouissance) within an inconsistent set since the inside/outsideorganization of universalism is near defunct. Prohibition has openlymutated into what both Freud (SE XIX, 15572) and Lacan


3/22

Psychoanalysis at the Time of the Posthuman: Insisting on the Outside-Sense 425

(E, 64568) had already revealed as its truth: a will-to-jouissance, apush-to-enjoy, to consume. Sublimation seems old-fashioned, tedious,its eventual fruits pale before the instant gratification we can reap fromstaging ourselves for the networked eyes of others. We identify withour images, complete with myriad technological avatars of the drive-objects, and with silicon enhancements. Globalization is the age of themarket, but addiction is the natural law of the market.10 And thisis something that psychoanalysts have to deal with, even if it meansforsaking the once-hallowed conceptual tools devised by Freud, andinventing new ones.

Psychoanalysis and the Posthuman

What, then, is the position of psychoanalysis with regards to theposthuman? It shares a fundamental premiss with ideas of theposthuman: that the subject is first and foremost produced as an objectof discourse. But with a twist: for psychoanalysis, to be produced asobject also entails, in and of itself, an ultimate identification withthe objects perennial value: that of refuse.11 This enduring statusas refusethe human conditionimplies that human life is bestendured by becoming a subject.

The divergence between the posthuman world and that ofpsychoanalysis is nicely illustrated by French art critic andpsychoanalyst Grard Wajcman in LOeil absolu. In his clear-sightedtales of our civilization of the gaze, Wajcman analyses among othercultural productions the Jason Bourne trilogy (OA, 16180). JasonBourne, played by Matt Damon, is a black ops agent whose mind hasbeen wiped clean and imprinted with the programmes necessary to aflawless killing machine. He is the perfect posthuman product, a pureproduct of science whose humanity appears to have been digitallymastered, by technology. Yet his true value as reject is revealed inthe opening scene, in which Jason Bourne surfaces as flotsam, castadrift in the sea, nameless, without identity, complete with grafted

chip on the hip. The trilogy unfolds against the backdrop of thefantasy of posthuman science: that biotechnologies could act directlyon jouissance, without the mediation of addressed speech. The thinlyveiled objective is that of controlling the obscure share present ineach subject,12 eradicating the flaws of the human programme aprogramme ofjouissance, and not of science.13 Sciences dream wouldbe to turn man into a wholly predictable machine or to eradicate


4/22


5/22


symbolic system is connected like a parasite produces an impossible torepresent.16

So singularity refers to the inaugural experience of every subject asone of perplexity in the encounter with language, a system which isparasitic upon the living; to recall what is perhaps a more familiarformulation, much commentated by Lacan in Seminar I when hewas dialoguing with the Hegelians, the Word is the murder of theThing.17 This inaugural perplexity initiates the interpretative processwhich produces our narratives about ourselves we can think hereof Freuds family romances (SEIX, 23541). To put it bluntly, forpsychoanalysis the human species is a malfunctioning hybrid ab initio,

as it were and the drive, its a-cephalic demand for satisfaction thatcan devastate the bodies that are its unwitting hosts, is a product ofthat hybridization.18 It is in this sense that psychoanalysis is radicallyopposed to cognitivism, which presupposes an adequacy of the bodyto the subject, that all psychical activity would address the needs ofthe living body.19 By contrast, in Lacans words, the speaking beingis a sick animal sick with symptoms that are yet also solutions.20

So no one is perhaps less humanistic, more materialist, less naivethan Lacan. To defend psychoanalysis is not to partake in reactionaryattempts at the conservation of a beautiful, pre-scientific being,soon to be extinct and replaced by transgenetic superbeings. Todefend psychoanalysis is to recognize that there is not, and never hasbeen, anything natural about being human. And it may be this stillscandalous truth that generates such hostility to psychoanalysis ahostility manifest in the current attempts to regulate the mental healthprofessions in many European countries. It is rooted in a desire to doaway with the drive, with the obscure share of ourselves that makes ushuman.

So far I have talked about posthumanism as a cultural fantasy,shared by a version of sciencea fantasy to perfect the humanand rid humanity of what makes it dysfunctional. That such anextreme position is alive and well can be amply substantiated bya recent conference at the Royal Society for the Encouragement

of Arts by neuroscientist David Eagleman. There Eagleman spokelyrically of the untapped potential of neuroscience in reconditioningthe brains of criminals a perfect solution to the problem ofcrime, rational sentencing at last. Talking about his experiments withthe reconditioning of smokers neural pathways, he added, to theaudiences peals of laughter: if this works (. . . ) were going straight forcriminals. Eaglemans opening line was that for neuroscience, you are


6/22

428 Paragraph

your brain. Any possible resemblance toClockwork Orangeis implicitlydispelled because for Eagleman, his project is about helping somebodyto help themselves. And it is self-evident that criminals dont want tocommit crime when you speak to criminals they say: I do not wantto be doing that sort of behaviour (. . . ). I cant stop myself. Thereis no need to recall our track record in bettering humanity throughscience. Suffice it to say that equating the brain with the subject is areduction of being to biology, in the name ofmastery.21

A more sympathetic understanding of posthumanism would see itas a symptomin the psychoanalytic sense, which is to say an attemptedtreatmentof the non-naturalness implicit in being human. What are the

specificities of posthumanism as symptom? What insights does it sharewith psychoanalysis? Can psychoanalysis tell us anything about the realthat it names?

Posthumanism as Symptom and so as Social Bond

The symptom is not yet exactly the real. It is the manifestation of the real at ourlevel as living beings. As living beings, we are ordered, bitten by the symptom.We are sick, thats all there is to it. The speaking being is a sick animal. In thebeginning was the Word says the same thing. (TR, 93, my translation)

If we take matters at the level ofcontentand notstructure, posthumanismranges from cognitive and neuroscience to technology, from critiquesof anthropocentrism to animal rights, from postcolonial readings ofrace to new modalities of constructing a body. There is a hugediversity between the different positions that rally around the label ofposthumanism. This diversity echoes Laurents preface to his recentbook, Lost in Cognition, in which he critically addresses cognitivismfrom the perspective of psychoanalysis. In his preface Laurent says ofthe discourse of cognitivism that it creates a newspeak:

In the academic cognitivist discourse, synonymies are dominant, in the sameway that [Paul] Valry said civilizations are produced by great vague ideas.

They are the only ones to allow a sufficient synonymy to produce, in Lacanianterms, a misunderstanding. Great vague ideas produce the common bond that acivilization is, where the misunderstanding ends up being as broad, as expansiveas possible. This very extension allows us to speak amongst ourselves. When thereis need for a precision, science appears. The latter also creates a language, butit does not target the social bond. What is essential about this newspeak is thatit avails itself of synonymies, as broad as possible, which enable a conversation


7/22


between former Chomskyans, neurologists, biologists, academics, a conversationwhich gives the impression that they are talking among themselves of somethingwhich they have in common, whereas they on the contrary speak of things whichare rather different. This conversation that takes place in the name of science is apure social bond, a semblant of science. (LC, 9, my translation)

In this passage Laurent makes two crucial points: firstly, science is notthe same thing as the discourses that unfold in the name of science, andspeaking in the name of science does not confer the virtues of scientificvalidity upon a discourse. To put it crudely, to speak about science doesnot,ipso facto, entail the neutrality of the speaker. Second, a discourse isnot a language. These two points are central to Lacans Seminar XVII,The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. So posthumanism is a discourse thatbrings people together in a conversation where nobody knows whatthe other is saying, but everybody believes they understand each otherto a sufficient degree for a conversation to take place. It is in thissense that we can take posthumanism as a symptom, insofar as itorganizes a social bond. It is above all a discursive phenomenon. Butif the symptom is always a modality for the treatment of the real, whatthen is the real beneath the discourse, or what is it that the signifierposthuman tries to name?

On Interpretation

In approaching this question my first reflex was to turn to LacansSeminar XVII. Re-reading it, it struck me that this seminar wasan interpretation, and this may be why Lacan also elucidates therewhat makes an analytic interpretation operative. As interpretation ispsychoanalysiss only modality of intervention, I would like to bevery precise about this deceptively simple concept, and about whatdifferentiates it from cultural interpretations.

An analytic interpretation is not the revealing of a latent content, butan orientation given to a discourse by adding something that gives itsense: For [the analyst] the latent content is the interpretation that he

is going to give, insofar as it is, not this knowledge that we discover inthe subject, but what is added on to give it a sense.22 This definition ofinterpretation is related to what Lacan said earlier in the same lecture:In short, half-saying is the internal law of every species of enunciationof the truth. (SXVII, 110) This statement itself is to be read with anearlier one: The only sense is the sense of desire, (. . . ) the only truth isthe truth of what the said desire hides of its lack, so as to make light of


8/22

430 Paragraph

what it does find (61, translation modified). Putting these fragmentstogether, we can see that truth has to do with the sense one chooses togive to something, and that this sense has to do with ones desire. Thustruth is not of the signifier, and it can only be half-said because morethan one sense can be true for one statement desire is therefore atthe core of interpretation, or as Lacan said in Seminar VI, desire is itsinterpretation.23

For example, a patient may come in to complain about the very realsuffering he has experienced at the hands of others. The analyst caneither commiserate or choose to steer clear of the narrative of suffering.Both senses will be true, but the effect will be entirely different. The

first attitude is a response to the demand of the subject that saturateshis lack with a deleterious satisfaction, confirming his identificationwith a pathologized position.24 The second attitude, by contrast, canhelp the subject recognize that he plays a part in the ills he complainsof. This is why we have to be very careful when we interpret, becausewhen we choose to highlight a possible sense of what is being said,by the same token we cast another sense into the shadow. And this iswhy Lacan attached such importance to the desire of the analyst. If theanalyst wants the patient to like him, or the patient to get better, thenhe will be tempted to give the patient the satisfaction he demands, orto shore up his perceived weaknesses. But if the analysts desire is forthe possibility of desire in the patient, then he has to take the risk ofnot satisfying this demand, of fragilizing the analysands defences.

What Lacan says of truth as half-saying is to be read together withthe Freudian observation that the principle of contradiction does notexist in the unconscious: one thing and its opposite can both be true,as we have all experienced wishing the death of a loved one, ruiningthe one relationship we desire, and so forth. So the unconscious maybe an apparatus, but it is not a machine because it is an inconsistentsystem that is, a system within which everything and its oppositecan be demonstrated. So if the analysis cannot orient itself on truthas deductive process grounded upon the principle of contradictionin the same way as science, for which truth is demonstrated by the

fact that a signifier signifies itself (A =A, so A is not B etc.)thenit has to orient itself on truth as affect the points of fixation (. . . )that emerge as organizing around them the gravitation of elementsthat repeat themselves.25 So the truth of the unconscious is not theformalized truth of scientific knowledge in the sense that somethingwhich is true once will be true always. It is a gravitational truth,which means that sense revolves around the points at which a given


9/22


signifier affected the body, but this sense is amenable to dialectizationthrough the vector of transference.

In the same way that the unconscious does not abide by the principleof non-contradiction, interpretations themselves can be valid even ifthey are contradictory. The only way to judge an interpretation isthrough its effect, as Freud acknowledged in his text Constructionsin Analysis [1937] (SEXXIII, 265). This tallies with the recognitionby both Freud and Lacan that the after-effect, Freuds Nachtrglichkeit,is a dimension constitutive of subjectivity (receiving your message inan inverted form, the subject being an effect of language, etc.): Theeffects of language are retroactive (SXVII, 181). So, if we take the

four discourses, the tables of sexuation and borromean topology to besuccessive Lacanian interpretations of the social bond, it does not meanthat one supersedes or invalidates the other. It means that they canbe used to different effects, that each interpretation will illuminate adistinct aspect of truth whilst casting another into the shadow. Thus thefour discourses highlight the agent of discourse, the tables of sexuationcounterpoise universalism to globalization as two distinct modalities ofthe unconscious, and borromean topology emphasizes the singularityof each subjective solution to make the three heterogeneous registersof human experience, RSI, function as one.

Finally, psychoanalytic interpretation is a consequence of thebinary knowledge/truth: knowledge is a series of networked signifiers(signifying chains) that produce enjoyed-meant [joui-sens] and is linkedto meaning. Truth is correlated to the structure which produces effectsof language, and to affect: truth produces effects ofsubject. The analystsinterpretation should not aim to produce sense, which is metonymicaland thus of the same, but a truth-effect. These truth-effects allow thesubject to glimpse his own position in what he says of himself, andeventually he will be able to discern his own fantasmatic position orhow he positions himself as object for the other.

Modalities of Interpretation

In the analytic discourse, understood broadly here and not in theprecise sense Lacan gave it in Seminar XVII, there are three modalitiesof interpretation. Here I am relying on Millers classification in hisannual public lecture series for the year 20078: the interpretationsthe analyst makes in the analytic session, the interpretations teachinganalysts make of psychoanalysis, and the interpretations analysts make


10/22

432 Paragraph

of the social bond. The last two modalities are the basis on which theinterpretations in the analytic session take place.26

In his lectures of 20078 Miller illustrated his argument withthe following example. Soon after Freuds death, the post-Freudiansresorted to analysing the mechanisms of defence of the ego becausethe Freudian method for the deciphering of the unconscious failed tocure patients. Deciphering the unconscious as interpretative methodwas grounded on Freuds interpretation of psychoanalysis, namely thatneurosis was caused by repression. The rapid failure of psychoanalysisto continue lifting symptoms by deciphering the unconscious canbe explained by the effect that psychoanalytic interpretations have

on the unconscious: if the first psychoanalytic interpretations wereeffective, it was because they operated by lifting a corner of theveil of repression. Today there is little that remains veiled, andpsychoanalysis has played an important part in this.27 Here wecan recall what Lacan points to in his Seminar XVII, namely thattruth is constituted by concealment (187). So the interpretation ofpsychoanalysis is a function of the effects and consequences of thepractice of psychoanalysis on psychoanalysis (OL, 19 March 2008).This means that the practice of psychoanalysis has effects on theunconscious. Todays unconscious has little to do with the Freudianunconscious. And the attendant vulgarization of psychology misses themainsprings of subjective change.28

In this perspective, Lacans invention of the object a is aninterpretation of psychoanalysis insofar as after the invention of thisconcept, analysts started to slant their interpretation to object a.In other words, analysts stopped deciphering the unconscious,and started to target the construction of the fantasy with theirinterpretations. The construction of the fantasy refers to the reductionof an analysands multiple fantasies to an axiom that subtends themall this is what Lacan does with Sade in his essay Kant with Sade,producing the maxim I have a right to enjoy your body, anyonecan say to me, and I will exercise this right without any limit to thecapriciousness of the exactions I may wish to satiate with your body

(E, 648).29 Lacans interpretation of psychoanalysis, of the closure ofthe unconscious produced by its deciphering, with the invention ofobject a, takes account of the impossibility of reduc[ing] libido to thebeing of sense.30

The other major interpretation Lacan made of psychoanalysis is thepass (AE, 24359;OL, 19 March 2008). The pass is adispositifinventedby Lacan to elucidate what the end of an analysis entailed for a given


11/22


subject. With the invention of the pass emerges the idea that an analysisis terminable, which is a considerable shift with regards to the Freudiandoxa. The end of analysis does not mean that jouissanceis reduced tosense, all-interpreted, but that the non-analysable, the experience ofperplexity each one of us makes in our singular, inaugural experienceof the fundamental xenopathy of language, can be circumscribed. Itthen becomes possible for a subject to position himself with regards toan opacity that determines him unbeknownst to him. Lacans inventionof the pass as an interpretation of the interminability of psychoanalysispreserves a space for the outside-sense in the analytic experience. Withthis interpretation Lacan takes stock, not only of the xenopathy of

language, but also of the increasing foreclosure of the outside-sensein contemporary discourses. The outside-sense is what remains of thereal for each singular being, resisting both symbolization (the play ofciphering/deciphering of the symbolic unconscious which converts

jouissanceinto sense) and imaginarization (the veiling of the real). Theoutside-sense is the grain of sand that derails the all-seeing machinesof contemporary science, a modality of science animated as neverbefore by a will to render the human transparent to the all-seeingeyes of modern technologies. And psychoanalysis refuses the conceitaccording to which the signifier could absorb all of jouissance, thisbeing the operative concern of what, loosely speaking here, we callthe discourse of the master, or the discourse that makes everythingwork in a given civilization.

This is why Lacan defines the discourse of the master through itsimpossibility: first, the signifier cannot reabsorb jouissancebecause it isits very cause, as he says inSeminar XX, and second, it is the dialecticofjouissancewith knowledge that allows the production of knowledge,as Lacan states of HegelsPhenomenology:

Its just that what I am calling the hysteria of this discourse stems precisely fromthe fact that the discourse eludes the distinction that would enable one to perceivethe fact that if this historical machine, which is in fact only the progress of theschools and nothing more, ever did culminate in absolute knowledge, it wouldonly be to mark the annulment, the failure, the disappearance at the conclusionof the only thing that motivates the function of knowledge its dialectic withjouissance. (SXVII, 35)

So the two interpretations Lacan makes of psychoanalysis, theinvention of object a and that of the pass, are political interventions inthe sense that they have a structuring effect on the real world, securinga place for the outside-sense, for the singularity of each subjects


12/22

434 Paragraph

inaugural perplexity upon his advent in a world of language thatpre-exists him. This is why psychoanalysis is not primarily therapeutic,though it does have what we refer to as incidental therapeutic effects,that can also be unwittingly normalizing or adaptive.

Interpreting the Social Bond

The third modality of interpretation is the interpretation analysts makeof the social bond, and in Seminar XXwe find an example of such aninterpretation by Freud:Freud fortunately gave us a necessary interpretation it does not stop being

written, as I define the necessaryof the murder of the son as founding thereligion of grace. He didnt say it quite like that, but he clearly noted that thismurder was a mode of negation (dngation) that constitutes a possible form of theavowal of truth. (108)

The Freudian interpretation of the social bond had tremendousconsequences for the sense of civilization, influencing our vision ofreligion, authority, guilt, law, sin, desire, the social contract and soforth. To state things clearly, it is because our world is structured bydiscourse that an interpretation, in turn, has structuring consequenceson the real world. This is what Lacan illustrates in Seminar XVIIwiththe example of law: If this isnt what law is, if we cannot grasp howdiscourse structures the real world here, then where can we? (18).

Like the Freudian myth of the father, Seminar XVII is an analyticinterpretation of the social bond that produces effects by illuminatinga previously concealed aspect of truth. And if an interpretationalways aims at a symptom, what symptom does Seminar XVII seekto interpret? As I will argue, Seminar XVII is an interpretation of amodality of the social bond that increasingly produces us as objects, andthis interpretation seeks to preserve a place for truth beyond scientifictruth or knowledge.

Lacan grounds this interpretation on a radically novel theory ofdiscourse:

the discourses in question are nothing other than the signifying articulations, theapparatus whose presence, whose existing status alone dominates and governsanything that at any given moment is capable of emerging as speech. They arediscourses without speech, which subsequently comes and lodges itself withinthem. (166)

A discourse is a structure that produces effects of subject, of truth,of jouissance, of speech. To say it otherwise, a discourses function in


13/22


making sense is secondary to the satisfaction that it produces. Moresimply, sense is above all a vector of satisfaction, a mode of organizingsatisfaction in civilization. This is perhaps clearer than ever today, whenso many discourses endure in the face of their refutation, such as thediscourse of crime prevention for example.31 They endure, not becausethey are true or even effective, but because they provide ways for agiven civilization to curb the jouissanceof its subjects, to channel itthrough the networks of signification they generate.

Knowledge at the Command of Civilization

More specifically, Seminar XVII interprets the mutation of thediscourse of the master into the discourse of the university, or thefact that at a certain point in time (Lacan situates this with Hegel)knowledge became the agent of discourse, that the university discoursebecame the masters discourse:

To be sure, the present one [the masters discourse] does not have the structure ofthe old, in the sense in which the old is installed in the place of the left, the onecapped by the U. . . What occupies the place there, which we will provisionallycall dominant, is this S2, which is specified as being, not knowledge of everything(savoir de tout) weve not got to that point yet but all-knowing (tout-savoir).(31)32

As a result of the discourse of the university operating as the newmasters discourse, we are subjected to what Lacan calls the newtyranny of knowledge (32). Lacan develops his insight by arguing thatthe discourse of the university today takes on the form of the discourseof science. For science, truth has no function because in the placedesignated as that of truth by Lacan is the S1, reduced to the functionof a sheer command, an injunction:

The master was satisfied with this little tithe, this surplus jouissance, such that, afterall, there is no indication that in himself the slave was unhappy to be giving it.The case is quite different with respect to what is found, on the horizon of therise of the master subject, in a truth which asserts itself on the basis of his equalitywith himself, on the basis of this I-cracy I once spoke of, and which is, it seems,the essence of every affirmation in [a] culture that has seen this masters discourseflourish over all others. [translation modified] (7980)

What effect does Lacan hope to produce with this interpretation? Toposit psychoanalysis, the other side of the discourse of the master, as adispositive that operates with the truth foreclosed from the discourse of


14/22

436 Paragraph

science, which leaves no place to man (147). The discourse of scienceis the formalization of a knowledge that renders all truth problematic(79), whereas with psychoanalysis we have an opportunity for it tomake sense to question knowledge in terms of truth (1089).

So with this interpretation Lacan aims to extract truth fromknowledge, detaching it from the place ascribed to it by the scientificdiscourse of an I-cracy (or injunction to self-identity).

The Real of Posthumanity

The masters discourse has become the discourse of the university,itself modelled on science. The first specificity of science identifiedby Lacan is that it relies on self-identity that A equals A inmathematical language and so implies a foreclosure of the subjectof the unconscious, which is consistently defined by Lacan in thefollowing terms: a subject is represented by a signifier for anothersignifier (or S is an effect of S1 and S2). This definition implies thatthe very structure of the unconscious prevents self-identity. Yet, withscientific knowledge in the position of agent of the social bond,the effects of subject produced by the discourse of the master arewhat Lacan calls master-subject, I-cracy, or the conceit accordingto which we could be transparent to ourselves, know ourselves, fixourselves, and bypass the unconscious.

The Alethosphere

The second effect of the discourse of science functioning as discourseof the master is to produce the environment Lacan names withthe neologism alethosphere. In Seminar XVII, Lacan presented ourenvironmentas the product of the now unchallenged hegemony of thecapitalists discourse, with its curious copulation with science (110).What is so specific about this environment? In Chapter XI Lacan said

that the characteristic of our sciencenot of science but of ourscience , is not to have introduced a better and more extensiveknowledge of the world but to have brought into existence, in theworld, things that did not in any way exist at the level of ourperception (158). These proliferating objects created by science arewhat Lacan called thelathouses:the world is increasingly populated bylathouses (162).33


15/22


The space in which the creations of science unfold is the space ofin-substance, the a-thing, lachosewith an apostrophea fact thatentirely changes the meaning of our materialism (159). In otherwords, the achose (a-thing to be heard here as no-thing) is a thingwhose existence stems onlyfrom its logical truth, from a combinatoryof signifiers: In so far as science only refers to an articulation that onlytakes form in the signifying order, it is constructed out of somethingwhere there was nothing beforehand. (160) Such a purely logical useof the signifier, instrumentalized in formal combinations dissociatedfrom the laws of nature, from representations (the imaginary), resultsin the severing of the link between signifier and signified. It is in that

sense perhaps that we can hear what the name posthuman seeks tocapture the human now exists outside the laws of nature as modelfor making sense of humanity, essentially sexual sense. So the a-thing isa space without imaginary law, and the alethosphere from the Greekword althia is a space filled with creations, effects of a formalizedtruth. Lacans precise formulation indicates that our science exceedsby far the effects of knowledge and understanding that it may also have;its specificity is to produce objects that do not fit with our previousenvironment, an environment that was organized by the imaginary,the laws of nature. Thus, for example, Lacan refers to the male andfemale principles as principles of the organization of the worldthe complementarity of yin/yang for instance and of perception,including the image, representation.34

The term alethosphere signals the connection between modernscience and the kind of truth it produces. This version of science as aset of purely signifying combinations dis-indexed from the imaginaryinduces a mutation in the status of the symbolic itself, restoringthe symbolic to its primary effect: that of effecting death on theliving. For as Lacan consistently argued throughout his teaching, puresymbolic is death, the murder of the thing. Furthermore, althoughthe subject is an effect of the signifier according to Lacans ownclassic definition according to which a signifier represents a subjectfor another signifier the subject is produced as subject insofar as

it is precipitated as signified of the Other. The subject qua effect ofa formal combinatory of signifiers is more of an object and less ofa subject: in this fundamental chapter, Lacan suggests that the effectof our science is that each one of us is initially determined as objectsmalla (160).

So the world has changed, the fundamental object produced byour civilization is waste and we are evermore encumbered with the


16/22

438 Paragraph

lathouses we produce.35 The more we shape the world to suit our everyneed, wish or whim, starting from the illusion that we were naturalbeings, the more we seek to escape our creation hence the thirstfor the authentic, the vacation spots no ones been to, the exoticismwith which we veil the abject poverty of the worlds majority or even,as in Avatar, for a new, better species. It is not up to analysts to saywhether the world is a worse or better place, nor to wish for a returnto the past, nor to egg on science to produce humans in the mannerof machines, or machines that resemble humans. From our vantagepoint, the neuroses of the twentieth century, with their intricatepatterns of repression, morality and transgression, seem perfectly mad

and certainly do not represent a time to be yearned for. On the otherhand, modern-day symptoms have little to endear themselves to us,as we witness the devastation caused by unlimited relations to thedrive.

Conclusion

There would be much more to say on the questions raised here thanI can do justice to in this paper, so I will conclude with a workinghypothesis for further reflections on our modernity. Our democracy,situated as it is in an environment produced by the unprecedentedconjunction of science and capitalism, entails a primary determinationof subjects as objects, and the attendant social bond is aptlycharacterized in terms of the management of subjects qua objects objects to be managed according to the logic of concentration,or the distribution of subjects-objects according to the propertieswhich the signifying articulations of the modern master identifyas operative (good health, time-keeping, efficiency, productivity,dangerousness. . . ). Our current discourses of crime control, researchassessment, mental health management, risk-prevention, performance-evaluation, evidence-based practices, target-setting and so on fitsquarely within such a perspective. Such a diagnosis leaves us with

a fundamental question: what forms of subversion can be expected ofthe modern subject, reduced as it is to its formal measurements, itspurely signifying determinants?

And what can psychoanalysis offer subjects produced by thealethosphere, by a real of science no longer cloaked by the laws of theimaginary? For Lacan, the real that psychoanalysis is confronted withis one that cannot be written by science, it is the real of the non-sexual


17/22


relation, of the fact that science will never be able to write an equationfor the sexual relation between a man and a woman. Psychoanalysisoperates on this other real, not the real of science but the real of thenon-sexual relation, for it is this real which continues to produce us assubjects, not as objects.

It is a political choice to target this outside-sense that eschews thearticulation of a subjects destiny by substituting the limit of castrationfor the limitless injunction of the superegoic injunction ciphered in thefantasy always act in such a way as to maximize your jouissance.36

An unprecedented desire may come to the fore for the subject,freed from his destiny if not from his jouissance, permitting the active

operation of singularities in the social bond.Why does it matter? I think of a comment made in passing by EricLaurent in his joint seminar with Miller in 1996 on the inexistence ofthe Other: The future depends on the way each one of us interpretshis or her symptoms.37 In seeking to desperately lodge ones jouissanceunder the multiplying signifiers obligingly provided by the mastersdiscourse, such as depression, oniomania, social phobia, addiction,etc., the subject is re-absorbed in the generality of a discourse thatleaves him defenceless against the singularity of his own inauguralexperience ofjouissance, or at best, with the meagre defence of a mono-symptomatic identification (groups centred around symptoms like AA,Hearing Voices, pro-ana, etc.).

Because limitlessness structures the contemporary social bond, thereare few in-built barriers to the devastating push-to-jouissancewe arewitness to. The contemporary era of globalization suffers no exception:we are all included within the set of humans catalogued accordingto our degree of divergence from, or convergence with, a growingnumber of norms (weight, size, health, performance, proclivities, andso forth). In this all-inclusive set, no longer limited by the exceptionto itself characteristic of universalism, what remains outside-discourseis the only point that allows for the expression of the invariantoccurrence of the singularity of each and every subject. If the analyticdiscourse enables those that want to to undertake this discovery,

the interpretations analysts make of the social bond also permits theformation of communities of interpretation united by a desire toknow something about it, distinct from the lethal combination ofa masters discourse seeking to domesticate the living through thesignifier and the death that it transmits, and the injunction to enjoywithout limit exponentially strengthened by the social not-all as matrixof civilization.


18/22

440 Paragraph

NOTES

1 Jacques Lacan,Ecrits, The First Complete Edition in English, translated by BruceFink in collaboration with Hlose Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: W. W.Norton & Company, 2006), 264; henceforth E.

2 This is how we can understand Lacans contention, developed inSeminar I,that resistance is always on the side of the analyst.

3 See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920], inThe StandardEdition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated andedited by James Strachey and others, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press,19531974), XVIII, 164; henceforth SE. See also subsequent texts suchas The Ego and the Id [1923], XIX, 159 and The Economic Problem of

Masochism [1924], XIX, 15572. For a critical account of Freuds theory ofthe dualism of the drives see Vronique Voruz, That which in life mightprefer death. . . From the Death Drive to the Desire of the Analyst, inLawand Evil: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis, edited by Ari Hirvonen and JannePortiviki (London: Routledge, 2010), 26085.

4 See Jacques Lacan, Les complexes familiaux [1938] in Autres crits (Paris:Seuil, 2001), 2384. This led Lacan to emphasize the symbolic as the modalityof the treatment of the imaginary in the first tier of his teaching.

5 This erasure of the place of exception can be read in the tables of sexuation.The left side configures subjective modalities organized by way of anexception to the set; it is because there is one that is not subjected to thephallic function that all others are. See Marie-Hlne Brousse, Ordinary

Psychosis in the Light of Lacans Theory of Discourse, translated by AdrianPrice, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 19: Ordinary Psychosis, edited by NatalieWulfing (2009), 719. The right side maps the time of globalization or socialnot-all. SeeThe Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, TheLimits of Love and Knowledge 19721973, translated by Bruce Fink (NewYork:W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), henceforth SXX; Jacques-Alain Miller,Intuitions milanaises [2], in Mental12 (mai 2003), 926 (18), henceforthIM2.

6 Jacques-Alain Miller, Ordinary Psychosis Revisited, translated by AdrianPrice, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 19: Ordinary Psychosis, edited by NatalieWulfing (2009), 13967.

7 Jacques-Alain Miller, The Era of the Man Without Qualities, translated

by Thelma Sowley, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 16: Regulation and Evaluation,edited by Philip Dravers (2007), 742.

8 See Jacques-Alain Miller, Intuitions milanaises [1], inMental11 (December2002), 921.

9 Vronique Voruz, The Logic of Exception,Law, Culture and the Humanities2:2 (June 2006), 16278.


19/22


10 See Grard Wajcman, LOeil absolu (Paris: Denol, 2010), 149; henceforthOA.

11 Many of todays ready-made complaints are profitably understood in light ofthe melancholic or abjectcore of subjectivity: depression, low self-esteem,social phobia. Hence the importance of agalmatization of ones object-position.

12 Elizabeth Roudinesco, La Part obscure de nous-mmes : une histoire des pervers(Paris: Albin Michel, 2007).

13 Eric Laurent, The Jouissance Programme is Not Virtual, translated byAsuncion Alvarez, Lacanian Ink35 (2010), 98108.

14 Along similar lines we can think of Joss Whedons most recent series,Dollhouse, in which characters rent their bodies out to a corporateventure named the Dollhouse to be imprinted with the skills, memoriesand personalities required for specific missions (ranging from incarnatingsomeones perfect sexual fantasy to solving particularly tricky situations). Ofcourse the heroine, a doll, played by Eliza Dushku and fittingly named Echo,soon begins to piece things together, becoming more human as the seriesunfolds.

15 Jacques Lacan, Note on the Child, inPsychoanalytical Notebooks 20: Object aand the Semblant(2010), 78.

16 Eric Laurent, Usages des neuro-sciences pour la psychanalyse, Ornicar?Digital312 (11 July 2008), 4.

17 Jacques Lacan,The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freuds Papers on Technique[19534], translated by John Forrester (New York & London: Norton, 1988),174.

18 Eating disorders and other addictions are the most obvious examples, butLacan also talked about the destructive modality of love he called ravagein his Seminar XXIII, more specifically concerning women. Jacques Lacan,Le Sminaire Livre XXII: Le Sinthome[19756] (Paris: Seuil, 2005).

19 Eric Laurent,Lost in Cognition: Psychanalyse et sciences cognitives(Nantes: CcileDefaut, 2008), 5; henceforth LC.

20 Jacques Lacan,Le Triomphe de la religion (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 93; henceforthTR.

21 David Eagleman, Conference at the RSA: The Brain and the Law, http://www.thersa.org/events/vision-videos/david-eagleman-21-april-2009, con-

sulted 21 April 2009. It is interesting to contrast Eaglemans viewswith Lacans infinitely more sophisticated position on crime in his 1951intervention A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysisin Criminology (E, 10222), on which I have recently given a commentaryfor a criminological audience. See Vronique Voruz, Reading Criminologywith Psychoanalysis: the Case for Singularity, in New Directions for


20/22

442 Paragraph

Criminology: Notes from Outside the Field, edited by Ronnie Lippens andPatrick Van Calster (Antwerp: Maklu, 2010), 99118.

22 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis,translated by Russell Grigg (New York and London: Norton, 2007), 113;henceforth SXVII.

23 Jacques Lacan,Le Sminaire VI: Le Dsir et son interprtation. Unpublished.24 This is how we can understand the definition that Lacan gives of psychology

in Seminar XX: The aim of my teaching, insofar as it pursues what can besaid and enunciated on the basis of the analytic discourse, is to dissociate aand A by reducing the first to what is related to the imaginary and the otherto what is related to the symbolic. It is indubitable that the symbolic is thebasis of what was made into God. It is certain that the imaginary is basedon the reflection of one semblable in another. And yet, a has lent itself tobe confused with S( ) (. . . ), and it has done so by means of the function ofbeing. It is here that a scission or detachment remains to be effectuated. It isin this respect that psychoanalysis is something other than a psychology. Forpsychology is this uneffectuated scission (SXX, 83).

25 Session of 3 December 2008. Jacques-Alain Miller, Choses de finesse enpsychanalyse: Lorientation lacanienne, unpublished.

26 Jacques-Alain Miller, LOrientation lacanienne (20078) unpublished;henceforth OL.

27 In Freuds time the discontents of civilization were produced by the excessiverepression of desire of a more puritanical era. There is little doubt thatpsychoanalysis has played its part in weakening the forces of repression.

28 See also Jacques-Alain Miller, A Discussion of Lacans Kant with Sade,in Reading Seminars I and II, edited by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink andMaire Jaanus (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 21240. Here we can think of themisguided use of responsibilization by many therapists: the injunction to takeresponsibility for ones life bears no relationship to the psychoanalytic ideathat one should answer for ones action. One is injunctive, the other seeks tocircumscribe what remains opaque in the determination of our actions. Onlyonce that opacity has been glimpsed by the subject can responsibility trulyoccur.

29 The reduction of a subjects myriad fantasies to a simple formula, axiom oftheir jouissance, can be linked to the second stage of the beating fantasy,

A Child is Being Beaten [1919], which Freud says is never conscious buthas to be constructed in analysis (SEXVII, 175204). The latter chimes withLacans anyone can say to me, in that in both the unconscious stage ofthe beating fantasy and in the Sadean formulation, there is no other subjectthan the subject of the fantasy himself. This exposes the fantasy as a modeof enjoyment rather than as the passive position which the Other putativelyimposes on the subject. It is this revelation that is sometimes referred to asthe traversing of the fantasy (AE, 24359).


21/22


30 Jacques-Alain Miller, Interpretation in Reverse, in The Later Lacan, editedby Vronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 39 (6).

31 For an apt refutation, see Bernard Harcourt, Against Prediction (Chicago:Chicago University Press, 2006).

32 More recently Miller developed the striking thesis that the current discourseof the master was structured like the analysts discourse in that objecta is theagent of our social bond. In other words we as subjects of posthumanityare driven by the dictatorship of surplus-jouissance, best exemplified inthe push-to-enjoyment embodied by mass consumption. See Jacques-AlainMiller, Une fantaisie, in Mental15 (fvrier 2005), 927 (19).

33 A lathouse is an object produced by science which functions partly like adrive-object in that it absorbs jouissance, but is separable from the body the most obvious examples are networked voice and gaze objects. Theearly twentieth century saw the earth criss-crossed by voice-transmissiontechnology, the late twentieth century witnessed the proliferation oftechnological eyes (CCTV, webcams, mobile phones, digital cameras). Keyto the distinction between a classic object aand a lathouse is that the latterdoes not lend consistency to an Other this is instrumental in the narcissismof our cultures. See also OA, 2603.

34 We can think here of the new possibilities for human reproduction whichextend far beyond what the natural model allowed for.

35 Eric Laurent, Nous avons transform le corps humain en nouveau Dieu,La Nacin, 9 July 2008.

36 Jacques-Alain Miller, LOs du problme, inLakant, edited by Jacques-AlainMiller (Paris: Collection rue Huysmans/Navarin-Seuil, 2003), 5866 (64).

37 Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent, LAutre qui nexiste pas et ses comitsdthique Lorientation lacanienne, unpublished seminar (19967).


22/22

Copyright of Paragraph is the property of Edinburgh University Press and its content may not be copied or

emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.

However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Date post:	04-Jun-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	jonathan
View:	227 times
Download:	3 times

Psychoanalysis and Post Human

Documents