by Mladen Dolar
The political in Freud
conceals under the air of innocence a most difficult, even impossible, topic.
Both terms are far from being unequivocal—it is not quite clear, despite the
appearances, what is meant by Freud, in spite of, or rather because of, the
aura that surrounds his name and the general clamor that his
fame provoked . . . and it is even less clear what is meant by
the political, in spite of, or rather because of, the fact that one is
constantly bombarded from all quarters by politics in all shapes and sizes. The
trickiest of all is the possible intersection of the two. The temptation is
great to adopt a deconstructivist rhetoric—instead of speaking about the topic, speaking
about the impossibility of speaking about the topic. I will very much try to
resist this temptation.
On the face of it, Freud was
not a man of politics, to say the least. He never engaged in political life,
not in any significant way, not of his own accord, not until it was thrust upon
him in the most insidious form of rampant anti-Semitism and finally the
occupation of his country, forcing him into exile. Apart from this staggering
ending, his relationship to politics was anecdotal. One can pick out anecdotes
about his aversion to Woodrow Wilson and co-authoring the unfortunate book
about him; his inopportune scribbled note dedicating a book to Mussolini; his
voting for the liberal party (in line with the whole Austrian Jewish
community); his skeptical remarks on Bolshevism, inadequate by his own
admission; his indulging in an extra cigar when the Emperor refused to appoint
Dr. Karl Lueger the burgomaster of Vienna despite his electoral victory in 1895—the
same Karl Lueger, one must add, who served as a role model to the young Hitler,
who was roaming the streets of Vienna at the turn of the century. Lueger taught
Hitler the tricks of the trade of anti-Semitism, as Hitler described in Mein
Kampf. And, coming from Slovenia, I cannot resist picking out one anecdote, I
suppose the most spectacular of all, of an event that happened during Freud’s
one brief visit to Slovenia. At Easter holidays in 1898, Freud visited Italy
with his brother Alexander, and, on the way back, they stopped at the famous
caves of Škocjan, in Slovenia (which are now actually a UNESCO heritage site).
He gives his account in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess (14 April 1898), describing
“a subterranean river running through magnificent vaults, with waterfalls and
stalactites and pitch darkness. . . It was Tartarus itself. If Dante saw
anything like this, he needed no great effort of the imagination for his
Inferno.”1 And whom did Freud meet at the bottom of this Tartarus, in the last
circle of this Inferno? “The ruler of Vienna, Herr Dr. Karl Lueger,”
who happened to be visiting the cave at the same time. He was with another
party from the capital visiting the outskirts of the Empire during holidays, a place to run into people with whom he would never come face-to-face in
Vienna itself. Freud, the paradigmatic Jew, meeting the paradigmatic
anti-Semite in the Slovene Inferno, of all places—the image
deserves to be seen, in retrospect, as an emblematic icon inaugurating the century,
laden with forebodings of so much of what was to happen.2
However picturesque this
anecdote may be, however indicative in many ways, there seems to be a glaring
absence: Freud never proposed a political line that would follow from his
discovery, a political stance to be taken. He avoided any reflection of the
political impact that his discovery might have, in a way that cannot be unintentional,
although never explicitly stated. He proudly refused that psychoanalysis should
adopt any Weltanschauung, any “world-view,” including a political one,
claiming that the scientific spirit precludes Weltanschauung. One can draw
the conclusion that there is in Freud an inherent indifference to political
matters—this is the line taken by someone like Jean-Claude Milner, a figure of
some standing in today’s France, who sees in this indifférence en matière
politique the proper way that psychoanalysis should follow, thus refusing
what he calls “the political view of the world.”3 One can of course quickly
object that there is no such thing as indifference in political matters, that
indifference is always itself a political stance that cannot evade endorsing
the powers that be. One gives effective and unwitting support to a certain kind
of politics precisely by refraining from it, so that indifference in politics
appears to be a contra- diction in terms (politics, like sexuality, being one
of those things that one always practices, whether one practices them or not).
So one may find this indifference regrettable, either as a sign of Freud’s
conservatism, or of a secretly (or blatantly) conservative nature of
psychoanalysis as such, which makes it implicitly or explicitly concur with,
say, patriarchy, phallocentrism, etc. There has been no shortage of this type
of argument. Alternatively, one may find it regrettable in the sense that Freud
never took stock of the politically subversive nature of his discovery, so one
should remedy his deficiency by proposing a radical politics that implicitly
follows from his theory and which he didn’t want, or dare, to spell out. Enter
Reich, Marcuse, and May ’68. Nous voulons jouir sans entraves.
But on the other hand one can
take a very different approach, not accepting the absence of the political in
Freud at all. If the birthplace of psychoanalysis has been the
treatment of the individual psyche, its symptoms and vicissitudes, and if
politics is about constructing a collectivity, then this boundary has always
already been crossed. On the first page of Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud starts off by claiming that, ultimately,
no such boundary exists:
The contrast between
individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at a first glance
may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when
it is examined more closely…………. In the individual’s mental life someone else
is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an
opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this
extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time
social psychology as well. (PFL 12, p. 95)
One may say that for
psychoanalysis there is no such thing as an individual, the individual only
makes sense as a knot of social ties, a network of relations to the others, to
the always already social Other—the Other being ultimately but a shorthand for
the social instance as such. Subjectivity cannot make sense without
this inherent relation to the Other, so that sociality has been there from the
outset—say in the form of that minimal script presented by Oedipus—a social
structure in a nutshell.
Thus the reflections on the
social which Freud increasingly undertook in his later life are not
an addition, an application of psychoanalysis to a new field of research, but
rather the unfolding of what has been there from the start. One can see the two
terms of the title, group psychology and the analysis of the ego, as standing
in a relation of mutual implication: group psychology relies on a certain
structure of the ego and is made possible by it, and the analysis of the
ego implies, always already, a group structure. So, Freud tries to present
this as a seamless transition, a mere deduction, or a magnification
and a multiplication of what was present on the small scale. The individual,
the ego, and the subject are inconceivable without a theory of a social tie.
On this account, politics
would be universally and ubiquitously present in Freud’s work, to the point
that there would hardly be room for anything else. Not a page of Freud’s
wouldn’t imply political consequences. But this account is only possible at the
price of a certain equivocation between the social and the political, a certain
seamless equation of the two, and one can easily feel that this is not
sufficient, that there is a seam to be made. Freud’s keywords, in his
“social writings,” are group, mass, culture, civilization. One can consider
those keywords precisely as a way to avoid raising the question in political
terms. To put it harshly, they tend to depoliticize the problem, to present it
as a cultural or a civilizational issue. The metaphor of a seam, of
sewing, is by no means innocent here; Lacan made great use of it with his
concept of point de capiton, the quilting point, the stitching point,
which in a way stands very much at the core of the political. The quilting
point is the very opposite of seamless, it is not an unfolding of a nutshell,
it requires a stitch, an act, and a change. Can we find this in Freud, be it in
an incipient form?
There are some ways in which
Freud made something like a political move, in a broad sense, and they all
raise difficult problems. They are perhaps ultimately the ways of how not to go
about it, the models not to follow. In what follows I will con- sider three of
them: the problem of establishing a psychoanalytic institution; the problem of
relying on reason or on Eros, libido, as a solution to the social
discontents, Unbehagen; and the problem of group psychology and its
construction. They involve very different issues, but my wager is that the
impasses they run into point to the same common ground, which can perhaps help
to elucidate the matter.
There is, first, the question
of the institution that would be the vessel and the guardian of this new
discovery, securing its social standing, its professional standards, and its
transmission. This is the part of the internal politics of psychoanalysis: what
would be the appropriate organizational form in which this new knowledge could
be maintained and properly passed on, its specificity protected, its adversaries kept at
bay, its social promotion secured? No doubt there is a political move here that
endows a discovery, a knowledge, a practice, with an institutional framework, a
social foothold, with permanence and with independence from the particular
people involved, including and especially from its founding father. Apart from
the practical concerns, there is a mission to this, a mission both social and
political, a mission of a truth to be spread, in the hope that it would
prevail. A truth to be spread by an organization (shall one say a Party?) and
not merely entrusted to writings—this is where a politics comes in, where a
seam has to be made between a knowledge and its social status. This is where a
psychoanalytic association massively differs, on the one hand, from mere
professional associations of, say, dentists or plumbers, which are there to
ensure certain professional standards, and, on the other hand, from scientific
associations. For what is at stake in science, in establishing
a scientific field, is the guarantee of the repeatable: the experiment is
that which is repeatable by anyone, universally available, and this is what
ensures objectivity, achieved through processes of verification; whereas in
psychoanalysis one constantly deals only with the singular, the singularity of
symptoms, the singularity of a particular unconscious—i.e., one
deals with the non-repeatable, and it is from the singular that the
universal has to be constructed.
The universality of what is at
stake here is of a different nature than that of scientific laws, the passage
from singular to universal requires a different act,
and this places psychoanalysis in a precarious situation: it is always
exposed to the criticism that it is not really a
science and cannot stand the test of repeatable verification, but at the same
time it has never given up its claim to scientific credentials and to its
entitlement as science. The passage from the singularity of psychoanalysis’
object and the universality of its claims involves an edge of truth that is of
a different order than the scientific truth, a truth without a guarantee, and
this is where the organization, the psychoanalytic association, is placed into
an impossible fix: that of appearing as the guarantee—but the missing
guarantee—of that truth.4 This peculiar situation, differing from both
the professional and the scientific, places psychoanalysis and its organizations
into the vicinity of the political, for a political act as well always
intervenes into situations that are inherently singular and draws
universal claims from there, claims with no simple guarantee, so the
political organizations, parties, etc., are also called upon as the warranties
of the warrantless. Can a psychoanalytic association ever measure up to
that impossible claim? (And can, for that matter, a political one?)
No doubt there is a part of
black comedy involved, if we look back on the history of psychoanalytic
organizations. Lacan, who had many reasons for personal grievance in this
regard, remarked: “We leave in suspense [the question of] what drove Freud to
this extraordinary joke, realized by the constitution of existing
psychoanalytic societies, for one cannot say that he wanted them to be
otherwise.”5
The official organizations,
such as The International Psychoanalytic Association, no doubt present a part
of success, both in securing an international institutional framework and in
assuring the standards of a profession, this new widespread global profession.
Yet this is perhaps the part where their own success ruined them, to use
Freud’s formula from another context. This is the part that Lacan refers to as
the joke: everything is secured except the essential. The professional has
dislodged the political, the edge of difficult and unsettling truth has been
blurred, and one would be hard put to imagine that truth has prevailed in this
global spread. But what would it mean for the precarious psychoanalytic truth
to prevail?
There is, on the other hand,
the part of failure epitomized by the constant strives, rivalry, exclusions,
sectarian discords, opposition, controversies, the moves of revisionism vs.
orthodoxy, already in Freud’s time and then particularly around the
figure of Jacques Lacan. This is the part where the doctrine appears to be far
from secured, despite the institutional safeguards to secure it, or rather
because of them. There is hardly a clear-cut stock of knowledge to be
transmitted, and there is no set of well-defined practices—it all seems to be
subject to constant controversy, institutional splits, renegades, and the
possessors of the true ring. If psychoanalysis has always raised the
claim to the status of science, then this is a far cry from what a science is
supposed to look like: no piece of knowledge is granted as acquired, no
procedures are established beyond dispute. This part of failure is far more
interesting and indicative. Louis Althusser, in a classic paper on Marx and
Freud,6 forcefully argued that psychoanalysis is a conflictual science, the
feature it prominently shares with Marxism. Conflict is its home ground;
antagonism is the air it breathes. The moment it is turned into
a part of cultural heritage, the moment Freud is turned into a ‘cultural
hero,’ or the moment it is part of the established clinical know-how, its edge
is lost. One can draw some grim satisfaction from the fact that this move
of gentrification has never quite succeeded, despite a century of efforts at
domestication and pacification, so that the mere mention of Freud’s name
still tends to provoke controversy and disagreement.
It is not just a question of
external resistances, refusal and opposition—there was never any lack of those
(in our times this takes, for example, the shape of a wholesale dismissal on
the part of neurosciences, or cognitive sciences, which wave the
banner of the accepted notion of science in face of this
false pretender). Many scientific discoveries were initially met with harsh
opposition, but once their knowledge could be established, once they could
present the scientific credentials of verification, their progress was secured,
they could proceed by gradual accumulation of knowledge along
the well-defined paths. But this was never the case with
either psychoanalysis or Marxism: they both raised the claims
to the status of science, but proceeded only by way of
conflict and split—not just the conflict with external hostility, but through a
series of internal conflicts, as if the external opposition was constantly
transposed into an internal strife, a conflictuality which could never be
stabilized in an agreement.
This history—and this is the
gist of Althusser’s argument—is but an effect of the nature of truths that are
at stake in both: they both deal with a truth which is itself antagonistic, a
conflictual truth, although they deal with seemingly unrelated notions of class
struggle on the one hand and the unconscious and repression on the other. There
is no neutral piece of knowledge which could be free from this antagonism:
every piece of knowledge means taking sides, moving in a battlefield, in an
antagonism which is simultaneously and indistinguishably both internal and
external, an externality in the very inside. So the paradoxical result would be
that the minimal political move of providing an organizational framework for
psychoanalytic discovery could yield either a success at the price of utterly
depoliticizing the edge of truth at stake, or else could yield the seeming
failure, a series of disasters, but which testify, if per negationem, to
the political, antagonistic, conflictual nature of psychoanalysis, the
impossibility of turning it into a neutral field of knowledge, be it
scientific, clinical, cultural, or political. On this account, the political
impact of psychoanalysis emerges precisely with the constant failure to
establish even a minimal “political” consensus. But can this be enough for a
politics? Can we be happy with acknowledging this conflictual nature? Can there
be a complacent satisfaction in brandishing conflictuality?
There are some other ways in
which Freud approaches something that could be broadly understood as a
political line, by proposing a precept, a guideline, a remedy
to cure social ills. There are some places in his work where Freud emerges not
as a proponent of democracy (notwithstanding his self-description as “a liberal
of the old school”), but of a dictatorship, Diktatur. Not just any
dictatorship, but the dictatorship of reason, if this is an alleviating
circumstance. In the famous exchange with Einstein, dealing with the question
“why war?” and how to prevent it, he makes the following suggestion for the
ideal remedy against war: “The ideal condition of things would of course be a
community of men who had subordinated their instinctual life to the
dictatorship of reason. Nothing else could unite men so completely and
so tenaciously, even if there were no emotional ties between them.
But in all probability that is a Utopian expectation” (PFL 12,
p. 359-60). The formulation is no coincidence, we find it repeated in the same
year, 1932, in the New Introductory Lectures: “Our best hope for the
future is that intellect—the scientific spirit, reason—may in process of time
establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man” (PFL 2, p. 208). The
suggestion sounds rather baffling, coming from a man who devoted his whole life
to describing the forces that escape the control of reason, be it
as the forces of the unconscious that unstoppably play tricks on what reason
purports to do, or as the forces of the drives, those indomitable giants which
always force their way to satisfaction, including the most unlikely
and strenuous ways. One has often enough imagined psychoanalysis rather
as promoting the dictatorship of those forces, as opposed to reason. How can
reason bend them to its dictatorial power, what can it rely on faced
with this formidable adversary, unbeatable by Freud’s
own account? At the same time there is a sort of disavowal in
play, for Freud speaks about the dictatorship of reason in the lecture devoted
to Weltanschauung, that is, to demonstrating why psychoanalysis should not
espouse any Weltanschauung, while he actually demonstrates most blatantly
some of the salient features of what one could call the Enlightenment Weltanschauung:
faith in reason and progress, the scientific spirit, reason as an
enlightened monarch. Is this the best one can hope for?
Doesn’t Freud simplify matters by setting up the duality of reason on the one
hand and the unconscious and the drives on the other? Shouldn’t one be reminded
that the Freudian unconscious is not something simply unreasonable or
irrational? Freud never described it as something simply opposed to reason, but
rather as a glitch of reason, its slip, its inner torsion. And on the other
hand, isn’t the ego, the usual site of reason, precisely the agent of
aggression and repression, a more likely agent of wars than the id? Is not
reason, by Freud’s account, always inextricably linked with rationalization,
rationalizing something which is not reason- able? Hasn’t one been looking at
the picture from the wrong angle? I cannot pursue this any further here; I
tried to do it elsewhere.7
There is another way in which
Freud describes the conflict, not as the opposition between reason and the
instinctual life, but as the opposition among the drives them- selves, between
the two sorts of drives that in his later work he describes as libido, or Eros,
and the death drive, the supposed agency of aggressivity and destruction. In
the famous closing paragraph of Civilization and Its Discontents, he draws
the picture of an internal strife between the two:
The fateful question for the
human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural
development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal
life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be
that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special
interest [a]nd now it is to be expected that the other of the two ‘Heavenly
Powers,’ eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the
struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who
can foresee with what success and with what result? (PFL 12, p. 339-40)
It is rather odd that Freud
wages his hopes at once on the power of reason, its dictatorship, against the
power of the drives, and then, almost in the same
breath, on one of the drives against the other—the Eros, supposed to be the force
of union, concord and alliance, as opposed to the death-drive, the supposed
force of aggression and (self)destruction. In what way can reason be aligned to
libido and Eros? Is reason erotic? Is Eros reasonable?8 Is
unification their common denominator?
One can see that one is in
trouble with this line of argument, and the trouble
stems, I think, from the way in which the duality is constructed, setting up
the basic opposition between reason and the drives on the one hand and between
Eros and the death drive on the other. In both cases the division between the
two splits the good part from the bad part, the positive from the
negative side, with the consequence that one should rely on the good part
against the bad one, in a strife that is posited as eternal. What is missing is
precisely the inherent ambiguity of both parts,
which precludes pitting them one against the other in that way. The
profound ambiguity of the drive is what drove Freud to splitting it into
a positive and a negative part, but this move leads to conceptual
simplification. The profound ambiguity of both reason and the unconscious
precludes their simple opposition. So that the appeal—a political appeal?—to
rely on the one against the other leads one to think: “there will always
be a conflict between Eros and aggressivity, or between
reason and the drives, and the best we can do is to keep our
fingers crossed for the more likeable opponent.” Or, “let’s work for the one,
although we know very well that the other one can never be defeated and that
our struggle is Utopian—but nevertheless. ” Politics would thus mean envisaging
the psychic and the social as a conflictual battlefield, where one
should support the good forces against the bad ones, but the paradox is that the
bad ones are precisely those that psychoanalysis has discovered in the first
place: the unconscious, the drives, the death drive. Thus the aim of
psychoanalysis would be to try to do away with its object, ultimately to
abolish it—that would seemingly put an end to the trouble, to
drive the analyst out of business. The psychoanalytic Utopia would thus
be the world that didn’t need psychoanalysis.
But is putting our hopes this
time into libido, the Eros, against the death drive the only or the best
option? Couldn’t one rather go back to the radical
stance of the earlier Freud, say the Freud of Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality (1905), who insisted not on the duality of the drives
but on their ineradicable ambiguity? For the drive is a most paradoxical
conjunction between, on the one hand, the conservative, that which constantly
forces its way back to the site of satisfaction, endowed with a compulsory
nature which inexorably drives towards “more of the same,” and, on the other
hand, the disruptive alterity which makes it so that the drive is never
simply a force of adaptation, of homeostasis ruled by pleasure principle,
but produces the unsettling, the derailment, the excess, the
surplus (the surplus enjoyment, as Lacan would call it). Couldn’t one see in
this unsettling, disruptive force of the drive a better way to approach
politics? The drive is not just what preserves a certain institutional
order; it is at the same time the reason that this order cannot
stabilize itself and close upon itself, that it can never be
reduced to the best arrangement of the existing subjects and institutions, but
presents an excess which subverts it. That would entail not relying on the
supposed unifying power of the libido against the disruptive
death drive, but rather relying on the disruptive as an opening,
a possibility of another sort of social tie, its
transformation. It is not unification and union, binding together ever
larger units, as Freud describes it, that is the basis of a political
precept, but precisely its crack, its fissure, its
impossibility, its untying that presents an opening for the political. It
is the negative excess, the non-lieu constantly produced by the disruptive
nature of the drives, that requires representation and an act. Freud
seems to say that one has to turn into an agent of Eros, as it were, to oppose
the dangers of destructiveness and disintegration, as if forgetting
to what incredible extent unification and love can have a
murderous underside. But couldn’t one, on this rather
speculative and abstract level, suggest turning into an agent of
the (death) drive, untying the glue of social bonds, in the hope of
establishing the possibility of another kind of relation in the
social non-relation?
But in this way we arrive
again at the negative condition of the political, to the
point where the political opening is present precisely in the impossibility of
social unification—and the death drive may function as a name for this
impossibility. Its negativity points to a necessary fissure of the social
tissue, the crack where the political should engage, but it doesn’t tell us
anything about the ways to go about it.
Another way of approaching the
tricky nexus of psychoanalysis and the political would take us back to the
seminal text on Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. We have seen
that the supposition on which the text opens is a mutual
implication between the group structure and the structure of the ego, a
smooth—seamless—transition between the two. What exactly are its
terms? Where do we start? Where do we arrive? By
what way? One spontaneous way of looking at things would be the following:
Freud started off with the “individual” psychic structure, which itself
involved a minimal core of social relations epitomized by Oedipus.
The individual could be turned into a subject only in the “family”
structure, and the key to all authority, its hidden spring and source,
its secret, was to be sought in the relation to the instance
of the father. What Freud is doing in this text appears to be, if not a
deduction of the social from the family, then a magnification and a multiplication
of Oedipus. The family with its Oedipal nexus would be the presupposition,
firmly established by prior psychoanalytic elaboration, and the social,
the various vicissitudes of group ties, would be the consequence, the result of
a certain understanding of the minimal social nucleus. The familial would
thus be the familiar from which to explain
the unfamiliar as a version of the familial.
This understanding is,
incidentally, at the source of a massive criticism of psychoanalysis presented
by Deleuze and Guattari under the banner of anti-Oedipus. Psychoanalysis is
blamed for finding the universal clue in this family romance; any complex
psychic or social arrangement can be reduced to a story of mummy and daddy. If
one can be brought to believe one’s desire is to be aligned with mummy and
daddy, then one can easily be prey to other forms of domination, to concurring
with molar groups, in the extreme consequence with fascism. And bringing one to
believe this is the part of normalization implied in the basic assumptions of
psycho- analysis, normalization as opposed to the nomadic, to the multiple and
the becoming. I am simplifying, but not much.
Another line of argument could
see Freud’s move as embedded in a venerable tradition of political philosophy
which goes back to antiquity, to the vulgata of Aristotle’s Politics,
where there is a basic congruence, the possibility of mutual transposition and
translation, between the three levels of the individual, the family and the
polis. In the same way as one is to be the master of one’s own passions, one’s
body and its inclinations, the higher faculties of the soul wisely guiding the
lower ones; in the same way the father is to be the head of the family,
the oikos, the domestic life, wisely guiding the children, the wife, the
slaves, and their economy; in the same way the ruler is to wisely guide the
polis. Only someone capable of ruling oneself and one’s oikos is apt
for ruling the polis with proper authority, and all authority is at its root
shaped on the model of the father, the source of natural authority. Is this
what Freud can be taken as saying? Does he give us a modern version of the
ancient political doctrine under a new disguise? Although taking the model of
Oedipus, of all things, after all a Greek myth, can only be seen as highly
ironic in that respect, this is a dysfunctional family if there ever was one,
to say the least. Can Oedipus serve as a model family?
But one can see already here
that Oedipus can hardly count as a reduction to the family, but rather as the
impossibility of any such reduction. It is what deroots the family,
dislocates it, prevents its normal function, thwarts it in its goal. It makes
any assumption of social functions and roles laden with a conflict
with uncertain outcome; it doesn’t secure social and family roles, but
subverts them. The father is divorced from his “natural”
authority, his authority becomes a function of identification, every subject is
placed into an impasse, no subject can simply occupy his or her place, every
role is subject to strife. As Balibar lucidly put it: “the family structure is
not based on Oedipus, but Oedipus, to the contrary, inscribes the conflict and
the variability of subjective positions into its core and thus hinders any
possibility for the family to impose the roles which it prescribes as simple
functions for individuals to fulfill ‘normally’ . . .”9 So Oedipus is not
a reduction to oikos, but rather the
inner disruption of oikos.
Can one say that Freud
presents the father as the source of every authority, thus also as
the clue to any political authority? There needs no Freud come from the
grave to tell us this, to paraphrase Hamlet; this was rather
the traditional view of authority that is precisely being put
to scrutiny here. It is not that Freud reduces everything to relations to
father and mother; he rather deprives them of their “natural” roles and
presents them as functions laden with structural conflict and
instability. Freud—and this is a rather massive hypothesis—discerns
the function of the father and its vicissitudes precisely at the time when this
traditional account has historically lost its sway.
To be sure, Freud proposed his
myth of the murder of the father, of the dead father acquiring more
force as the living one, ruling as the Name of the Father, as the symbolic
authority, authority of the symbolic, giving rise to the bonding of
the brothers who killed him, etc. But one could say that with the
advent of modernity— the French Revolution marking a symbolic cut and
presenting a shorthand for many different processes—it was the dead father
himself who died. He lost his symbolic impact, his name
stopped being the foundation of authority, it was revealed as an imposture.
Fathers, both “real” and symbolic, lost their power, which could then be
retroactively seen as tainted with imposture from the outset. So these massive
historic presuppositions made it possible for Freud to discern the father, not
as a source of authority, natural, religious or symbolic, but in the
contingency of his function. It was not that any father or ruler or god could
no longer measure up to his function, but rather the symbolic function itself
lost the power of measure. There are many ways and
vocabularies to describe the ascent of modernity, and this could
be one economical proposal: the dead father, the reference point of
symbolic authority, has met his demise. However, the outburst of joy at
this dwindling of authority would be premature, and this is one of the stakes
of Group Psychology, for what comes after the overthrow of kings and the
decline of symbolic authority is not just the happy spread of
triumphant democracy, but rather the rise of the underside of the symbolic
father, and the psychoanalytic name for it is the superego. This rule is more
intractable, or far more difficult to cope with. Lacan had a great
knack for inventing slogans, and this is one of them: Père
ou pire, “Father or worse.” The patriarchal rule was bad enough,
but what we are facing with its demise is even worse. All this gives Freud a
historical background that he always avoided, intentionally or not, but that
never stopped him from taking stock of it in the most perceptive
and lucid way, surpassing by far all those who swear by historicity and
historicization.
To come back to Group
Psychology, I think that the spontaneous reading which takes the family as the
secret core of the social is looking at things the wrong way, although Freud,
as always, offers various occasions for misunderstanding. One should take the
suggestion of a mutual implication more seriously—that is, not in the sense of
one- way implication, the familial implying the social and the artificial ties,
but as at the same time the social, artificial ties shedding light on the
family, something in the family which is neither familiar nor familial. The
unconscious is neither individual nor collective—an individual unconscious
depends on a social structure, whereas a collective unconscious would demand a
defined collectivity, a community to which it would pertain, but no such
pre-given community exists. The unconscious “takes place” precisely between the
two, in the very establishment of the ties between an individual (becoming a
subject) and a group to which s/he would belong. Strictly speaking there is no
individual or collective unconscious; it intervenes at the link between the
two. But what is the nature of this unconscious?
Freud opposes two kinds of
masses: there are, on the one hand, what he calls
artificial masses, exemplified by the army and the church (one could
say the repressive and the ideological state apparatuses, to use
Althusserian terms, although Freud never proposes any theory of the state here,
as Hans Kelsen was quick to point out in a most interesting exchange which
appeared in Imago in 1922).10 They present stability; they secure the
permanence and the reproduction of certain social ties as well as certain
ideas; they embed the subjects in a fixed hierarchy, assign them certain social
functions, put them into proper slots; they present the face of order and
arrangement. On the other hand, there are masses that Le Bon’s account deals
with (an exchange with Gustave Le Bon was Freud’s starting point), the ones
that act rather as hordes and present the loss of individuality, giving up
one’s own will, critical judgment and ethical standards, the thrust towards
immediate goals and instant gratification, the high
degree of suggestion, the contagion of feelings, intolerance, and the obedience
to the mysterious authority of the leader. Acquisitions of civilization are
readily thrown overboard, the mass looks like a regression to some more
primitive barbaric stage, supposedly from man’s phylogenetic past,
an earlier uncivilized phase, thus testifying to an unconscious root,
even more, to a reenactment of the primal horde. Both ultimately share
the basic structural feature of the mass, namely that of being “a
number of individuals who have put one and the same object in
the place of their ego ideal and have
consequently identified themselves with one another in their
ego” (PFL 12, 147). But they do it in radically different ways: the
artificial one upholds social ties, assures their permanence and stability and
allows for individuality within them, while the ‘primal’ one dismantles social
ties: it is ephemeral and threatens with an instant disintegration; it deprives
its members of individuality. The first one stands for durability and solidity
of social ties, the second one for their untying, and in that untying supplants
them with primitive ones, the relic from the primal horde and its boundless
submission to the primal father from whom the leader borrows the charismatic
features. (Hence the importance of hypnosis, this “vanishing mediator,” the
paradoxical “mass of two,” Masse zu zweit, the incipient form of mass
formation.)
What is the relation between
the two? “These noisy ephemeral groups . . . are as it were superimposed upon
the others,” says Freud (PFL 12, p. 161). The ephemeral is superimposed
upon the permanent and the enduring, the untying is superimposed
upon the ties, the horde is superimposed upon civilization. But
shouldn’t one read this as a structural relation rather than as a
temporary regression to some primitive stage? Do not the two structurally
belong together? And even if one uses the term regression, as Freud does, isn’t
one of the lessons of psychoanalysis precisely that there is no such thing as
regression? For every regression is not going back to an earlier
point, since the apparent going back is always a response to the present deadlock,
so that the previous that one goes back to is entirely mediated by the present
from which one regressed, and hence belongs to the present constellation. So
the primitive, ‘primary’ mass is a response to a deadlock of the
artificial one; it presents its underside, its undoing as operative in its
making, in its functioning and reproduction. It testifies to the precarity of
the established ties, their conflictual nature, their contingency. It is their
symptom. It displays the same structure (putting the same
object in the place of the ego ideal), but in a blatant way that exposes the
suppositions of the “normal” tie. So the argument would be the reverse of
the spontaneous reading: it is the primary mass that is derived from the
artificial one, although it may retrospectively seem that it was
historically at its origin.
The opposition between the
structured and permanent ties of the artificial masses and their undoing, even
if ephemeral, in the primary masses is the very space of politics, one of the
ways of looking at it. We arrive, by a different way, to the same point, that
of the undoing of the established social ties as inherent to their tying,
which is what opens the space of the political. Not of the
political taken as an arrangement of power, or taken as relations of
individuals to the community, or as the best way to run the state and
institutions, as the key question of the traditional political philosophy “what
should be a good government?”11 but of the political as a dislocation of
the existing social entities, as shifting the ground of what holds the existing
relations together.
To be sure, Freud looks at the
emergence of ‘primary’ masses with some degree of horror. He doesn’t exactly
see them in the light of the ’68 slogan, “Ce sont les masses qui font
l’histoire,” to say the least. These masses don’t make
history; they unmake it. There is a mark of contempt for the
mob in his stance, a stance of some standing and a long tradition in the
Enlightenment. It never occurs to him to see them as the revolutionary masses
that could give rise to a hope for change, for a political trans- formation,
for the end of domination, doing away with social injustices, the hierarchy and
unfreedom of artificial masses. Quite the contrary, they appear as a regression
to the harshest form of domination, the reflex of the primal father and the
primal horde, the crumbling of all the achievements of civilization. He
envisages them as paramount instances of the return of the repressed, and the
repressed is not the strife for freedom but a tendency to archaic submission,
the lure of the loss of individuality, the instant gratification, the promise
of spoils based on a leader who, by his authoritarian stature, can undo the
validity of existing rules. The primary mass is like the state of emergency
that Giorgio Agamben speaks about; it instates a leader who can suspend the
law, something that points to the very modern and sinister paradoxes of
sovereignty. The thrust for immediate enjoyment has, on the other hand, all the
makings of the superegoic injunction to enjoy, that is, to enjoy under the
auspices of the submission to the archaic father. What opposes the present
hierarchical institutions like the army and the church, authoritarian as they
may be, is an unbounded rule—rule of the superego? So even the army and the
church, detested by Freud, particularly the latter, may appear as outposts of
civilization in the light of this comparison, their mitigated authoritarianism
appearing as preferable to the unmitigated one. One can describe the opposition
between the two in terms of the symbolic father, the symbolic authority
sustaining the army and the church, and the rule of the superego, the dark
underside of the Name of the Father, sustaining the mass. And one could see in
that not a regression to an archaic stage, but rather a clue to modernity,
something that can shed new light on the common suggestion that we live in a
“mass society,” something to be tied up with the demise of the symbolic father
and the new rule of the superego, celebrated as a feat of democracy.
But no doubt the grim
lesson Freud draws from it is not the only lesson that follows. It again
deprives the process it describes of its ambiguity, and it is its ambiguity
that points to the site of the political. There is again a danger of setting up
a duality, where the artificial masses would appear as the proponents of
stability, progress and our best hope for an ordered social existence, whereas
the primary masses would appear as the black pits of regression,
disintegration, and disarray under the banner of a primeval authority. But
both terms of the opposition are ambivalent: if the
primary masses are the symptom of the artificial ones, they bring to light
their hidden conflict, the repression at the price of which the latter can be
set up. On the other hand, the emergence of primary masses also has an effect
of lifting the repression (isn’t lifting the repression one of the aims that
Freud assigns to psychoanalysis?), shall one say of liberation and emancipation
alongside regression, although they pre- sent at the same time the moment
of the greatest danger of sinking into the crude authoritarian rule? No doubt
one shouldn’t oppose Freud’s grim vision with a rosy one,
with the romantic view of revolutionary masses aspiring for freedom,
breaking their chains and instituting a direct democracy once they have
shuffled off the coils of domination. But there is a moment of ambivalence in
untying the social ties that Freud describes as the
mass, which can go either way, neither simply back to the
primal father nor simply into the
reign of new freedom and “radical democracy”— and it is this moment
of ambivalence that is the site of a political seam, a stitch to be made, the
space where a point de capiton has to intervene. “Masses” don’t make
his- tory, for the good reason that they are not political agents but the site
of a political intervention.
We can see that all three
lines of inquiry intersect at a certain point, although they arrive there by
very different ways. The point has been variously named as conflictuality,
antagonism, rift, a crack in the social tissue, an excess, the point of
ambivalence, untying of social bonds, negativity. This point runs through all
of Freud’s works; one can detect it at work in different contexts and under
different concepts. One can see it in the conflictual
nature of psychoanalytic institutions; one can see it as
designated by the death drive or by what Freud calls the primary mass.
Those terms and those three approaches have different impacts and
ramifications, but I have been trying to single out a core around which they
turn as their common ground. And this core, I have been arguing,
has to be conceived as the site of the political, ubiquitously inherent
in Freud’s work—as a site. But designating this site is not establishing a
politics, taking a political line, making a political act—something that Freud
has always meticulously refrained from doing. It is as if psychoanalysis
circumscribes a site, a locus of the political, without ever quite
stepping into this site itself. It is as if it describes and dissects the
space of the political without ever quite engaging in politics; it
displays the stuff that politics is made of without making politics of it. I
would go even a step further and say that psychoanalysis and politics
share the same ground; they share the same condition, but
they treat it in a different way. They differ in the manners in which they
relate to it. The common core that binds them together is at
the same time the place of their disjunction.
The difference is not that
between “theory” and “practice,” for psychoanalysis involves a practice of its
own, a practice that is always also a social practice, although on
the basis of one-by-one, not of collectivity; and politics always
involves a theory. One could put it this way: if psychoanalysis refrains
from making a step, from deciding the ambivalence,
filling the crack, proposing a new tie for the untied, if
there is a missing step where a step would have to be made, then politics makes
a step too much. It decides the ambiguity; it proposes a new tie; it engages
what Badiou calls fidelity to the event, a subjective stance, a process of truth
without a guarantee, a transformation. It turns the negative condition into a
positive project, a movement, a party, a militancy. It proposes a
new master signifier, although it may well be
aware of its contingency. No doubt it thereby obfuscates the crack; it eludes
the contingency and the ambiguity; it represents the unrepresentable—that is,
it misrepresents it—but this is the price of taking the step. On the other
side, psychoanalysis is not simply apolitical; rather, its circumscribing
the site of the political is something that calls for politics, for an
engagement in that site, for a step too far, although one can only
do it at the price of entering into another logic than the one that
sustains psychoanalysis. The circumscription of the site is no neutral
description; it requires a step, although it itself doesn’t prescribe what this
step should be.
Another way of putting it:
psychoanalysis does engage with the mass, but only at its core—that is, at the
point of Masse zu zweit, the mass of two, the point of the vanishing
mediator of hypnosis, the missing link that Freud interposes between the phenomena
of love and the mass formation. The vanishing mediator returns with a
vengeance, for psychoanalysis itself can be described precisely as the
reenactment of the mass of two. This is its home ground, but the
whole point is precisely to undo what has been tied together
in hypnosis—that is, to unravel the amalgamation of the ego ideal and the
object that has been put into its place. It is in
these terms that Lacan describes psychoanalysis’ mission on the last pages of
the seminar on the four fundamental concepts: “Now, as everyone knows, it was
by distinguishing itself from hypnosis that analysis became established. For the
fundamental mainspring of the analytic operation is the maintenance of the
distance between the I—identification— and the a [the object] . . .
it isolates the a, places it at the greatest
possible distance from the I ”12 Analysis is about undoing the knot
on which mass is based; it unties the mass at its core. But politics has to
reestablish the link between the two, at its own risk, without a prescription
and without guarantee.
In his seminar on the ethics
of psychoanalysis, Lacan at some point discusses the relationship of analysis
to moral action, and he gives the following general statement: “it
may well be that analysis prepares us [for the moral action], but
at the end of the day it leaves us at its door [en fin de compte elle
nous laisse à sa porte] Why does it stop at this
threshold? The ethical limits of analysis
coincide with the limits of its practice. Its
practice is but a prelude to moral action as such”13 Couldn’t one say that
an analogous statement can be made about politics? Analysis stops at a
threshold—it cannot pass a certain threshold without ceasing to be analysis—but
it circumscribes a locus in which a step should be made; but this
circumscribing a place is itself a political gesture, a political opening, the
opening of a door through which we must make a step.
I suppose one could describe
the relation between the two by the term used by Slavoj Žižek, the parallax
view: a shifting perspective between two points of view, between which no
synthesis or mediation is possible. One can only see the one
way or the other, although one is looking at the same thing. The
two may be two sides of the same thing, but they can never meet at the
same level; there is no neutral common space;
there is a non-relation, but this ties them together.
There is a parallax gap.14 Maybe this metaphor, this
model, is not a bad way of conceiving how psychoanalysis and politics belong
together but can never quite meet or converge. And it
is not true that everything is political. It is rather the
opposite: politics is rare. It’s a very scarce thing, and so is
psychoanalysis.
Notes
1 The Origins of
Psychoanalysis. Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, New York: Basic Books, 1977, p. 253.
2 When a couple of years
later, in 1900, Freud published his first great book, The
Interpretation of Dreams, he put on the frontispiece a motto from Virgil’s
Aeneid: Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo: “If I cannot
bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions” (cf. PFL 4,
p. 769). One could make a conjecture that in the choice of this motto one can
hear an echo of the Slovene episode. Freud is quoted from The Pelican
Freud Library (PFL), 15 vols., Harmondsworth etc.: Penguin,
1973-1986.
3 See, e.g., his Constats,
Paris: Gallimard, 2002.
4 I can refer here to Alain
Badiou, Infinite
Thought, London/New York: Continuum, 2004, pp. 80-2.
5 “Proposition du 9 octobre
1967”, first version, Analytica 8, Paris 1978, p. 8.
6 “Sur Marx et Freud”,
in Écrits sur la psychanalyse, Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1993, pp. 222-245.
7 A
Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge (Mass.): MIT, 2005, pp. 91-5.
8 Freud himself tacitly and
without further ado subscribes to an equivalence of the two when, in The
Future of an Illusion, he speaks about the duality of Logos and Ananke (relying
on Multatuli, PFL 12, p. 238) and a couple of years later, in Civilization
and Its Discontents, about the duality of Eros and Ananke (p. 290). What is
then the relationship of Eros and Logos, given that they are both structurally
opposed to Ananke, necessity, fate?
9 Étienne Balibar, La
crainte des masses, Paris: Galilée, 1997, p. 337.
10 Cf. the French translation:
Hans Kelsen, “La notion d’État et la psychologie sociale”, in Masses et
politique, Paris: CNRS, 1988.
11 Cf. Jacques Rancière’s
guideline that “politics is not an affair of ties between individuals and the
relations between the individuals and the community, it springs from the count
of ‘parts’ of the community which is always a false count, a double count or a
miscount” (La mésentente, Paris: Galilée, 1995, p. 25). It is an excellent
starting point that I cannot pursue here at greater length.
12 The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, London: Penguin 1979, p. 273.
13 L’éthique
de la psychanalyse, Paris: Seuil 1986, p. 30.
14 See Slavoj
Žižek, The
Parallax View, Cambridge (Mass.): MIT 2006.
No comments:
Post a Comment