Cassandra B. Seltman interviews Alenka Zupančič
MARCH 9, 2018
ALENKA ZUPANČIČ is professor
of philosophy at The European Graduate School and at the University of Nova
Gorica in Slovenia. She is a preeminent scholar in theLjubljana
School of psychoanalysis, founded in the late 1970s by Slavoj Žižek, Mladen
Dolar, and others, which draws together Marxism, German idealism, and Lacanian
psychoanalysis in order to facilitate — much like an analyst — a mode of
“listening” to sociocultural phenomena. Members of the school deploy linguistic
theory to cast light (and shadows) on history, politics, art, literature, and
cinema.
In her early work, such as her
2000 book Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan, Zupančič sought to link
trends in continental philosophy with the insights of contemporary
psychoanalysis. In 2008, she published The Odd One In: On Comedy, which
applies philosophical and psychoanalytic insights to the processes at work in
the practice of comedy. She also draws together Kant, comedy, and
psychoanalysis in her ambitious book Why Psychoanalysis?: Three
Interventions (2008). Her critical project explores the relations
between the sexual and the ontological, the comedic and the unconscious, the
ethical and the political.
I spoke with
Zupančič about her new book, What IS Sex? (2017), in which she
argues that sex is the place of meeting between epistemology and ontology, the
messy net that spans the gap between knowing and being. (Her colleague
Žižek’s own 2017 volume, Incontinence of the Void, is a response to
her book.) What IS Sex? models for us a way to glimpse — and draw
into the light — that hidden, obscure, and mysterious entity, the unconscious.
¤
CASSANDRA B. SELTMAN: The aim
of What IS Sex? is to return to and preserve the idea of sexuality as
a subject of philosophical investigation.
How do you understand the
proliferation of new ontologies in “the times we live in”? Do you see this as a
“return” to ontological questions?
ALENKA ZUPANČIČ: I see
this as a symptom. There are two levels or aspects of this question. On the one
hand, there is a truth, or conceptual necessity, in what you rightfully call
the return to ontology. Philosophy should not be ashamed of serious ontological
inquiry, and the interrogation here is vital and needed. There is, however,
something slightly comical when this need is asserted as an abstract or
normative necessity — “one should do this,” and then everybody feels that he or
she needs to have their own ontology. “I am John Doe, and here’s my ontology.”
There is much arbitrariness here, rather than conceptual necessity and rigor.
This is not how philosophy works.
Also, there is this rather
bafflingly simplifying claim according to which Kant and the “transcendental turn”
to epistemology was just a big mistake, error, diversion — which we have to
dismiss and “return” to ontology, to talking about things as they are in
themselves. Kant’s transcendental turn was an answer to a real impasse of
philosophical ontology. We can agree that his answer is perhaps not the
ultimate or philosophically the only viable answer, but this does not mean that
the impasse or difficulty that it addresses was not real and that we can
pretend it doesn’t exist.
My attempt to “return to” the
idea of sexuality as a subject of ontological investigation is rooted in my
conviction that psychoanalysis (i.e., Freud and Lacan) and its singular concept
of the subject are of great pertinence for the impasse of ontology that Kant
was tackling. So my claim is not simply that sexuality is important and
should be taken seriously; in a sense, it is spectacularly more ambitious. My
claim is that the Freudo-Lacanian theory of sexuality, in its inherent relation
to the unconscious, dislocates and transposes the philosophical question of
ontology and its impasse in a most interesting way. I’m not interested in
sexuality as a case of “local ontology,” but as possibly providing some key
conceptual elements for the ontological interrogation as such.
The relation of this
ontological question to sexuality brings to mind the operations of the
hysteric. Is the phenomenon of hysteria important to your project?
In a sense hysteria lies at
the very core of my project, so far as the hysteric is, so to say, the militant
of the question mark, starting with What am I (for the Other)?
Hysteria is all about the interrogation of the gap between knowledge and being,
its exposure. Which is why the philosophical netting we throw over this gap is
usually problematic for the hysteric, denounced by her as something false, like
a false beard, hiding the truth that there is nothing there. And sometimes a
hysteric sees herself as that which could fill in this gap.
In an example you give in the
book, you note that Adam and Eve, when expelled from the Garden of Eden, are
basically experiencing a constitutive psychic lack, and the immediate result is
an affect — shame. So-called “affect theory” is very popular right now,
and there is much sanctimony around affective intuition. What do you make of this
situation?
The rise of the affect(s) and
the sanctimony around affective intuition are very much related to some
signifiers being out of our reach, and this often involves a gross ideological
mystification. Valorization of affectivity and feelings appears at the precise
point when some problem — injustice, say — would demand a more radical systemic
revision as to its causes and perpetuation. This would also involve naming —
not only some people but also social and economic inequalities that we long stopped
naming and questioning.
Social valorization of affects
basically means that we pay the plaintiff with her own money: oh, but your
feelings are so precious, you are so precious! The more you feel, the more
precious you are. This is a typical neoliberal maneuver, which transforms even
our traumatic experiences into possible social capital. If we can capitalize on
our affects, we will limit out protests to declarations of these affects — say,
declarations of suffering — rather than becoming active agents of social
change. I’m of course not saying that suffering shouldn’t be expressed and
talked about, but that this should not “freeze” the subject into the figure of
the victim. The revolt should be precisely about refusing to be a victim,
rejecting the position of the victim on all possible levels.
How do you think we
should respond to this kind of sanctimonious affect? It seems that, if one
continues to validate the affect, it responds with a kind of growing
insatiability. On the flip side, if it is questioned, the response is a kind of
outrage that refuses to evolve into anything else.
I agree, and this bind derives
precisely from the subjective gain or gratification that this positioning
offers. (Moral) outrage is a particularly unproductive affect, yet it is one
that offers considerable libidinal satisfaction. By “unproductive” I mean this:
it gives us the satisfaction of feeling morally superior, the feeling that we
are in the right and others are in the wrong. Now for this to work, things must
not really change. We are much less interested in changing things than in
proving, again and again, that we are in the right, or on the right side, the
side of the good. Hegel invented a great name for this position: the “beautiful
soul.” A “beautiful soul” sees evil and baseness all around it but fails to see
to what extent it participates in the perpetuation of that same order of
things. The point of course is not that the world isn’t really evil, the point
is that we are part of this evil world.
The beautiful soul attitude
finds a particularly fertile ground in what many call the “infantilization” of
our societies. We are encouraged to behave as children: to act primarily upon
how we “feel,” to demand — and rely on — constant protection against the “outer
world,” its dangers and fights, or simply against the world of others, other
human beings.
Perhaps something will make us
see how those who offer to protect us beyond a certain age, or some immediate
emergencies, are our worst enemies — that they, and not some outside brutal
villains, are the social agents of domination. We have to politely turn them
down, and start making, and standing behind, our decisions. Not alone, but
together with those who think in a similar way.
Since you mentioned
infantilization, I’d like to ask you about the part of your book that discusses
this developmental stage. You write about adult sexuality being not much
different, as Freud scandalously argued, from infantile sexuality. Yet the
latter exists in the absence of both biological (in terms of physical maturity)
and symbolic frameworks. Furthermore, the existence of sexuality in
children is usually fiercely denied. Is this denial damaging? If so, can you
envision a way that we could acknowledge infantile sexuality symbolically?
What distinguishes children
from adults is not that the latter are sexual beings whereas the former are
not. What distinguishes them is that adults are supposed to be basically able
to understand and handle intersubjective situations that involve sexuality.
This means above all that the fact that children are, as Freud argued, very
much sexual beings does not absolve adults when they want to involve them in
their own sexual gratification. On the contrary, it makes their endeavors
worse. There is a limit. To some extent, this limit is arbitrarily set — one
could always say, why not two months earlier or later than the so-called “age
of consent”? What is important is that there is a limit. This limit does not
protect children against sexuality; rather, it protects their sexuality, making
it so to say theirs and nobody else’s.
Sexuality does not begin with
the maturation of our sexual organs, nor is it limited to these organs. This
was Freud’s basic claim, which caused much scandal. Is this pan-sexualism? Is
Freud saying that sex is everywhere? No, he is saying that sex is not where we
expect to find it. This is his first and most significant point, often
overlooked. We expect to find it in some original physical dwelling. Or put
otherwise, we think that there is a “natural” site or place of sexuality, and
that if we keep away from that place, we keep away from sexuality. Freud’s
claim, however, was not something like: “No, sex is not only there, it is also
elsewhere, it can be all over the place.” His claim was that sex is lacking
from its home, that its “home” was the one place where sex is not to be found.
Sex does not originate in the satisfaction of the desire to reproduce and have
children. It starts as a secondary, surplus, collateral satisfaction produced
in the process of satisfaction of biological needs (including the need to
reproduce). This essentially collateral surplus satisfaction is what he
conceptualized as the drive.
Here one can of course ask:
But then, why call this polymorphous satisfaction “sexual”? Is this not
tendentious? It would certainly be tendentious if the reply were: Because of
its subsequent association with sexual organs as organs of reproduction. This, for
example, is how Foucault reads Freud: for Foucault, the problems are not drives
and their polymorphous perversity, but the allegedly normative (“biopolitical”)
move that captures them under the heading of “sexuality.” For Foucault, sex is
not the scandal, it is rather the end of the scandal, the end of the subversive
aspect of pleasures. But as Laplanche and Lacan have argued, drive satisfaction
is not sexual because of its link to the organs of sexual reproduction, but
because of its link with the signifying structure, which is also the structure
of the unconscious. Here is where things become really interesting, but also a
bit more complicated.
The way Lacan conceptualizes
the Freudian unconscious has important consequences for the theory of the signifying
order, and not only for our understanding of the unconscious. “The unconscious
is structured like speech” has become a well-known slogan of Lacanian
psychoanalysis. Usually, this is taken to imply a move in one direction only:
it tells us something about the unconscious; it tells us that the unconscious
is not simply about our most intimate inner thoughts, repressed feelings and
desires, but comes from the outside — it relates to the structure of language
and of speech. But then, if the unconscious comes from the outside, if it is
essentially “invasive” and not generated simply from within ourselves, what
does this imply? If the unconscious does not start with the first thing we
repress, that means that there is a dimension of repression already built into
the signifying order as such. This is actually how Lacan reads the Freudian
notion of “primal repression,” which precedes all repressions proper. Language
as such already involves a “repression” (Verdrängung). We could perhaps say:
Language/speech is structured like a repression and struggles with its own
inherent impossibility. This is also what Lacan means when he says that
repressive structures, such as family and society, do not simply impose or
demand repression, but are themselves formations built from repression.
This is an invaluable lesson for any kind of critical theory.
My reading or rendering of
this is as follows: the signifying order emerges as already lacking one
signifier, it appears with the lack of a signifier “built into it,”
so to speak. In other words, it is not simply the presence of the signifier
that induces the entire human and social “dialectics” and their contradictions,
but rather an absence at the very heart of this presence — namely, a
gap that appears together with the signifying order, built into it. This minus
or gap is not simply nothing, it is a minus that materially affects the
structure with which it appears. It is a non-being with serious consequences.
In this sense, the fact that
there is the unconscious — together with the fact that the unconscious is not
simply subjective but has an objective dimension to it, related to the
structure of speech/language — tells us something about this structure itself.
The very existence of subjective distortions tells us something “objective”
about the structure involved in them. It tells us that this objective structure
is ridden by a minus, asymmetry, contradiction. It is not simply neutral or
indifferent. This is also an important epistemological point. There is an
objective side to subjective distortions.
So there is this minus or gap,
but there is also enjoyment?
Right. And here is the crucial
point: this signifying minus is precisely the place where a surplus (enjoyment)
is generated. This brings us back to what I said earlier. It explains why it is
that a surplus, collateral satisfaction appears when we satisfy our organic
needs. Because these needs are caught up in the signifying structure and, more
importantly, in the very lack — or “minus one” — that comes with this structure.
In other words, it is not enough to say that the signifier denaturalizes our
needs because it implicates them into all kinds of symbolic relations and
games. This would be the theory of desire and its irreducibility to the need,
because of its “symbolic” character (“desire is always the desire of the
Other”). The theory of the drives is something different. It implies that a
surplus satisfaction appears at the very site of the signifying minus, and that
this satisfaction is at the same time something real (not symbolic). We could
also say: The emergence of the signifying order directly coincides with the
non-emergence of one signifier, and this fact — this original minus-one —
leaves its trace in a particular disturbance of the signifying system — enjoyment
or surplus satisfaction.
Why are drive and desire
structured so differently yet so easily confused in conscious thought?
The confusion of these two
very different clinical and conceptual categories comes from the fact that they
both “propel” us in an extraordinary way: the satisfaction they are after is
not the satisfaction of our organic or biological needs. But beyond this, they
are quite different.
Desire aims at what we didn’t
get when our need, articulated in demand, was satisfied. It always aims at the
other thing, beyond the thing at hand. Desire sustains itself through the
difference between two kinds of satisfaction: satisfaction of the need or
demand, and another satisfaction, the only support of which is negativity
— That’s not It! I want that which I didn’t get. This is the symbolic
frame through which objects appear as objects of desire. Drive, on the other
hand, is not driven by what we didn’t get, but by the paradoxical surplus
satisfaction that we got without even asking for it. We didn’t ask for it, yet
it got unexpectedly attached to the satisfaction of the need. (The classic
Freudian example is the oral pleasure produced during our satisfaction of the
need for food.) Drive wants to repeat this satisfaction and precisely that
satisfaction, again and again, often regardless of what “we” want. The motor of
the drive is repetition of the unexpected real satisfaction, whereas the motor
of desire is difference, which is why desire is in perpetual, “metonymic,”
movement further.
You speak about the way that
sexuality creates a “curving” or bias in discourse. Can you say more to what
this looks like and where we can see it?
Let’s start with an example
from Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Freud couldn’t recall the
name (Signorelli) of the painter of the Orvieto frescoes and produced as
substitutes the names of two other painters, Botticelli and Boltraffio. Freud’s
analysis shows what associative processes had linked Signorelli to Botticelli
and Boltraffio. I won’t go into this analysis here, but I just want to point
out the configuration at stake, which is paradigmatic of repression. For some
reason Freud repressed the word Signorelli. How do we know that? How do we know
it was not simply a case of temporarily forgetting the name? We know it because
two other names kept coming to Freud’s mind instead. We notice that something
has been repressed not simply by noticing a blank, a hole, an empty space. No,
we notice it because something appears at this place, imposes itself. The
discursive or signifying chain is not necessarily interrupted, torn in any
visible way; it continues to run, but in a peculiar way. It is from this
peculiarity that we can deduce not only that something appeared instead of
something else (and that therefore something has been repressed); we can also
deduce that the repressed — or what is not there — very much dictates the logic
and appearance of what is there.
If this is how repression
works for speaking subjects, then my thesis, based on a certain reading of
Freud and on some explicit statements of Lacan, is the following: the space of
discourse already involves a “repression.” The hypothesis is that what Freud
called “primal repression” is not simply a first repression — it is a gap that
appears together with the discursive structure as such. Primal repression in
this sense is not a repression that anybody makes, it doesn’t have a subject —
it is a feature of the discursive (symbolic) order that appears with a gap
already built into in it. This gap, this lack of the “binary signifier” — or of
the signifier of the sexual relation, as Lacan calls it — is not visible in the
discursive space directly as lack. It can only be deduced from the logic of its
functioning, from its contradictions, from the surplus investments (affects,
enjoyment) that take place in it. And this is what I call a “curving” of the
discursive space. The latter is not simply neutral, it is biased, yet not
in a subjective way. It is biased in an “objective” or systemic way. And
subjects and their symptoms are always also a response to this systemic
torsion.
Usually, when we speak about
the signifying or discursive order, we imply that this is a “space” determined
by the signifier, its logic and its rules. I want to suggest something more —
namely that the rule of the signifier is itself (over)determined by something.
This “something” is not something external to it: it is a missing element of
its own reality, a missing element that determines the very structuring and
appearance of this reality. Or, put more simply: The discursive order is not
neutral, because it is constantly struggling with its own point of
impossibility.
This brings us to the famous
dictum by Lacan: “There is no (signifier of) sexual relation.” Obviously this
doesn’t mean that there are no sexual relationships. The absence of the
relation, or its signifier, does not appear simply as an absence of
relationships, but rather as that which affects their logics and appearance. As
Lacan himself puts it, “the absence of the relation does of course not prevent
the tie (la liaison), far from it — it dictates its conditions.” The
non-relation gives, dictates the conditions of what ties us — which is to say
that it is not a simple, indifferent absence, but an absence that curves and
determines the structure with which it appears. The non-relation is not the
opposite of the relationship, it is the inherent (il)logic of the
relationships that are possible and existing.
If we understand sexuality not
just as a problem one “has,” but as something constitutive of the subject, must
one always encounter a sense of disillusionment or loss at the heart of any
analysis, clinical or otherwise? I used to have a pin that said, “since I gave
up hope I feel much better.” Is analysis a process of giving up a kind of
hope?
Yes. And no. One has to be very
precise here, so as not to preach any kind of resigned cynical wisdom. The
negativity that one encounters and traverses in analysis is supposed to affect
not simply our knowledge about being, but our very being. It is supposed to
shift something there. And implications of “hope” change in the process. There
is disillusionment, but not simply in the sense that we now know better than to
nourish certain hopes and that we now acknowledge certain things to be
impossible. We change.
Let’s take a literary example,
Marcel Proust’s Swann in Love. The hero here is desperately in love with
Odette, who herself no longer loves him. In his terrible suffering he at first
believes that what he really wants is to cease to be in love with her, so as to
escape from his suffering. But then, upon more careful analysis of his
feelings, he realizes that this is not so. Instead he wants his suffering to
end while he himself remains in love, because his experience of the
pleasure of love depends on this latter condition. Here’s where he is hooked,
so to say. The problem is that, although he knows that his suffering would end
if he were to cease being in love with Odette, if he were to be “cured” of his
love for her, this is what he least wants to happen, since “in the depths of his
morbid condition he feared death itself no more than such a recovery, which
would in fact amount to the death of all that he now was.” In other words,
cured of his condition he would no longer be the same subject and so would no
longer find either pleasure in Odette’s love or pain in her indifference and
infidelity. We could say that this is precisely where analysis leads at some
point — to the “death” of many things that we are when we start it. And this is
why we sometimes hang on to our pathologies even if they involve a lot of
suffering. But if, in this precise sense, at the end we are not the same
subject as before, “disillusionment” is perhaps not the best word. It is not so
much giving up hope that relieves us, as it is a certain relief — a shift in
the moorings of our being — that delivers us of hope.
We don’t expect, or desire,
certain things anymore. But we do expect something; we can even expect, want,
demand a lot. In relation to this Lacan says something very interesting in
the Ethics of Psychoanalysis. He speaks of the tragedy of Oedipus, of what
happens to him in the two plays (Oedipus the Kingand Oedipus at Colonus),
and how this resonates with what happens at the end of analysis. We can
certainly say that Oedipus is disillusioned and not hopeful subject, but at the
same time Lacan very much insists upon the fact that “he is shown to be
unyielding right to the end, demanding everything, giving up nothing,
absolutely unreconciled.” Giving up hope does not mean reconciling oneself with
what is — and trying to get the best out of it. On the contrary, it can be a
condition in which we are able to engage with the world, and not simply with
our personal hopes and expectations about it. Perhaps this is my philosophical
(and political) bias, but my understanding of analysis is that, to some extent
at least, it replaces hope with courage. The courage to fight.
¤
Cassandra B.
Seltman is a writer, psychotherapist, and psychoanalytic fellow at New York
University.
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