pp. 90-91: Is not Lacan's futur anterieur his version of Marx's Thesis 11? The repressed past is never known 'as such', it can become known only in the very process of its transformation, since the interpretation itself intervenes in its object and changes it: for Marx, the truth about the past (class struggle, the antagonism which permeates the entire past history) can become visible only to a subject caught up in the process of its revolutionary transformation. What is at play here is the distinction between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of the enunciation: when, during psychoanalytic treatment, the analysand subjectively fully accepts the fact that his identification is that of a worthless scum or excrement,this very recognition is the unmistakable sign that he has effectively already overcome this identification. (Schelling made the same point apropos of the fundamental existential decision which concerns what I am in the kernel of my being: the moment this decision is explicitly taken, brought to consciousness, it is in reality already undone.)
pp. 91-92: Adorno's famous thesis that nothing is more true in Freud's theory than its exaggerations is to be taken literally, not reduced to the common-sense 'wisdom' according to which exaggeration in one direction corrects the existing opposite exaggeration, and thus re-establishes the proper balance. One has to abandon the textbook notion of the Hegelian dialectical process in which the first exaggeration is supplanted by the opposite one until, finally, the proper balance between the two is established, and each is reduced to its proper limited place, as in politics: one needs neither organic links that are too strong (which give us an inflexible corporate state unable to accommodate individual freedom, that is, the infinite right of subjectivity) nor a too-strong unilateral emphasis on abstract individual freedom (which leads to liberal anarchy and the disintegration of concrete social links, and as such gives rise to a mechanical state which is again experienced as an external power limiting the subjects' freedom), but the proper 'synthesis' of the two....
Hegel's point is not a new version of the yin/yang balance, but its exact opposite: 'truth' resides in the excess of exaggeration as such. That is to say: here one has to apply the fundamental Hegelian logical principle according to which the two species of the genus are the genus itself and its one species, so that we do not have the two exaggerations (finally reunited in a synthesis), but the balance as such and the disruptive 'exaggeration' which disturbs its poise. And of course, Hegel's point is the exact opposite of the standard wisdom: the harmonious balanced totality is not the 'truth' within which particular exaggerations, deprived of their excess, must find their proper place; on the contrary, the excess of 'exaggeration' is the truth which undermines the falsity of the balanced totality. In other words, in the choice between the Whole and its Part, one has to choose the Part and elevate it to the Principle of the Whole--this 'crazy' reversal introduces the dynamics of the process. One can also put it in terms of the opposition between 'being' and 'event', of the subject qua event, articulated by Alain Badiou: the subject emerges in the event of 'exaggeration', when a part exceeds its limited place and explodes the constraints of balanced totality.
pp. 93-95: [....] what is of interest in pragmatism is not a rather common-sense notion that the meaning of a term is always embedded in the use of this term within a concrete life-world context, but the much more radical thesis that the meaning of a term 'as such' is nothing but the multitude of its uses; what makes Oswald Ducrot's notion of argumentative topoi so interesting is not merely the premiss that each statement or predicate also has an argumentative dimension, that we use it in order to argue for some attitude towards the designated content--Ducrot claims that not only is the descriptive content of a predicate always accompanied by some argumentative attitude, but that this very 'descriptive content' is in itself nothing but a reified bundle of argumentative topoi; and so forth. Again, the key Hegelian point not to be missed here is that the enlightening 'truth-effect' of each of these theories resides not in the reduced kernel of truth beneath the false exaggeration ('not all meaning can be reduced to argumentative attitude, but a limited argumentative stance supplements its referential content in every statement we make...') but in the very 'unilateral' reductionist exaggeration.
Is not the whole point of Hegel, however, that one should pass from one position to the next through the self-resolution of its constrained character? Yes, but Hegel's point is that this passage occurs only and precisely when we fully assume the 'unilateral' reductionist gesture: Hegelian totality is not an organic Whole within which each element sticks to its limited place, but a 'crazy' totality in which a position reverts to its Other in the very movement of its excessive exaggeration--the dialectical 'link' of partial elements emerges only through their 'exaggeration'. Back to Ducrot: the Hegelian point to be made is not that each predicate has a descriptive aspect as well as an argumentative aspect, but that the descriptive aspect itself emerges when an argumentative attitude is brought to its extreme, 'reified', and thus self-negates.
In the standard notion of the opposition between subject and object, the subject is conceived as the dynamic pole, as the active agent able to transcend every fixed situation, to 'create' its universe, to adapt itself to every new condition, and so on, in contrast to the fixed, inert domain of objects. Lacan supplements this standard notion with its obverse: the very dimension which defines subjectivity is a certain 'exaggerated', excessive, unbalanced fixation or 'freeze' which disturbs the ever-changing balanced flow of life, and can assume three forms, in accordance with the triad of Imaginary, Symbolic and Real:
*At the level of the Imaginary, Lacan--as is well-known--locates the emergence of the ego in the gesture of the precipitous identification with the external, alienated mirror-image which provides the idealized unity of the Self as opposed to the child's actual helplessness and lack of coordination. The feature to be emphasized here is that we are dealing with a kind of 'freeze of time': the flow of life is suspended, the Real of the dynamic living process is replaced by a 'dead', immobilized image--Lacan himself uses the metaphor of cinema projection, and compares the ego to the fixed image which the spectator perceives when the reel gets jammed. So, already at this most elementary level, one has to invert the commonplace according to which an animal is caught in its environs, in the self-enclosed organic whole of Innenwelt and Aussenwelt, while man can transcend this closure, dialectically subvert the confines of his environs, build new, artificial environs, and so on--yes, but what makes this transcendence possible is precisely an excessive fixation on the mirror image.
*The answer to this deadlock may seem to reside in the opposition between imaginary fixity and the dialectic fluidity and mediating power of the symbolic process: an animal remains stuck at the imaginary level, it is caught in the mirror-relationship to its environs, while man is able to transcend this closure by being engaged in the process of symbolization. It is the realm of 'symbolic fictions' which enables us to adapt ourselves to ever new situations, radically to change our self-perception, and so on. Is not the ultimate feature of the symbolic order found in its utter contingency? We can never derive the 'story we tell about ourselves' from our 'real situation', there is always a minimal gap between the real and the mode(s) of its symbolization....Here however, again, the very plasticity of the process of symbolization is strictly correlative to--even grounded in--the excessive fixation on an empty signifier: to put it in a somewhat simplified way, I can change my symbolic identity precisely and only in so far as my symbolic universe includes 'empty signifiers' which can be filled in by a new particular content. For example, the democratic process consists of the elaboration of ever new freedoms and equalities (of women, of workers, of minorities...); but throughout this process, the reference to the signifier 'democracy' is a constant, and the ideological struggle is precisely the struggle to impose an ever new meaning on this term (say, to claim that democracy which is not inclusive of democracy for women, which does not also preclude workers' enslavement, which does not also include respect for religious, ethnic, sexual, etc., minorities, is not true democracy...). The very plasticity of the signified content (the struggle for what democracy 'really means') relies on the fixity of the empty signifier 'democracy'. What characterizes human existence is thus the 'irrational' fixation on some symbolic Cause, materialized in a Master-Signifier to whom we stick regardless of the consequences, disregarding our most elementary interest, survival itself: it is the very 'stubborn attachment' to some Master-Signifier (ultimately a 'signifier without signified') which enables man to maintain free flexibility towards every signified content (the fact that I fear God absolutely enables me to overcome my fear of any worldly threat, etc.).
*According to this second commonplace, the self-transcending plasticity and freedom of man is grounded in the distance between 'things' and 'words', in the fact that the way we relate to reality is always mediated by a contingent symbolic process. Here again, however, a certain excessive fixity intervenes: according to psychoanalytic theory, a human subject can acquire and maintain a distance towards (symbolically mediated) reality only through the process of 'primordial repression': what we experience as 'reality' constitutes itself through the foreclosure of some traumatic X which remains the impossible-real kernel around which symbolization turns. What distinguishes man from animals is thus again the excessive fixation on the trauma (of the lost object, of the scene of some shattering jouissance, etc.); what sets the dynamism that pertains to the human condition in motion is the very fact that some traumatic X eludes every symbolization. 'Trauma' is that kernel of the Same which returns again and again, disrupting any symbolic identity.
So, at each of the three levels, the very dynamic, adaptive, self-transcending capacity which defines subjectivity is grounded in an excessive fixation.
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