"Not a desire to have him, but to be like him : Beautiful shadow a life of Patricia Highsmith"

 Slavoj Žižek, in: London Review of Books. vol. 25, No. 16, p. 13-15, 21 Aug. 2003. (English).

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/not-a-desire-to-have-him/

For me, the name ‘Patricia Highsmith’ designates a sacred territory: she is the One whose place among writers is that which Spinoza held for Gilles Deleuze (a ‘Christ among philosophers’). I learned a lot about her from Andrew Wilson’s biography, a book which strikes the right balance between empathy and critical distance. Wilson’s interpretations of her work, however, are often vapid. Can one really take seriously remarks such as: ‘Highsmith’s fiction, like Bacon’s painting, allows us to glimpse the dark, terrible forces that shape our lives, while at the same time documenting the banality of evil’? Much more pertinent are the observations he quotes, such as Duncan Fallowell’s perspicuous characterisation of Highsmith as ‘a combination of painful vulnerability and iron will’. Or the anecdotes that illustrate her complete lack of tact, her openness about her fantasies and prejudices (although a leftist, she preferred Margaret Thatcher to the usual feminist bunch). Or the ethico-political grounds – already, in 1954, she was describing the US as a ‘second Roman Empire’ – on which she based her decision to make her home in ‘old Europe’. As Frank Rich put it, she ‘made a life’s work of her ostracisation from the American mainstream and her own subsequent self-reinvention’.

Wilson’s book provides a lot of material for what Freud called ‘wild analysis’. We learn, for example, that five months before Highsmith was born, her mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine; she later told her daughter about this, with the comment: ‘It’s funny you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat.’ It’s tempting to see Highsmith’s liking for the smell of what might have been the agent of her own extinction as an expression of the Oedipal wish to return to her mother’s womb – in other words, of the wish not to have left the womb in the first place and, therefore, not to exist. Such speculations pale into insignificance, however, when you compare them with the wealth of Highsmith’s fictional universe, which is very much more compelling than any secret that might be unearthed by a pseudo-Freudian search of her own experiences for a key to the morbid world portrayed in her fiction. The greatest challenge for a Freudian reading of Highsmith lies elsewhere: to explain how writing for her was literally what Lacan would have called her sinthome, or the ‘knot’ that held her universe together, the artificial symbolic formation by means of which she preserved her sanity by conferring a narrative consistency on her tumultuous experience. In her masterpiece, Those Who Walk Away, the hero’s wife justifies her suicide with the words: ‘The world is not enough.’ It was her writing that enabled Highsmith herself to endure in such a world.

It’s often said that in order to understand a work of art we need to know the historical context in which it was made. The lesson of Highsmith, however, is not only that too much historical context can prevent you from making proper contact with her work but that, in her case, it isn’t the context that explains the work but the work that enables us properly to understand the context. The task in reading Highsmith is not to understand her novels in the light of her biography, but to explain by reference to her books how she was able to survive in her ‘real’ life.

Even her first published work (the short story ‘Heroine’, the novel Strangers on a Train), displays an uncanny completeness: everything already in place, no further growth needed. Her only conspicuous failure as a writer is her lesbian novel, first published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan as The Price of Salt in 1952, then reprinted in 1991 under Highsmith’s own name as Carol. The cause of this failure is, paradoxically, that the novel comes too close to Highsmith’s real-life traumas and concerns: as long as she was compelled to articulate these obliquely, the result was outstandingly successful; the moment she addressed them directly, we got a flat and uninteresting novel.

In Those Who Walk Away, Highsmith takes the most narrative genre of all, crime fiction, and imbues it with the inertia of the real, the lack of resolution, the dragging-on of ‘empty time’ characteristic of life itself. In Rome, Ed Coleman makes an unsuccessful attempt to murder his son-in-law, Ray Garrett, a failed painter and gallery-owner in his late twenties, whom he blames for the recent suicide of his only child, Peggy, Ray’s wife. Rather than flee, Ray follows Ed to Venice, where he is wintering with Inez, his girlfriend. What follows is Highsmith’s portrayal of the symbiotic relationship of two men inextricably linked by mutual hatred. Ray is haunted by guilt at his wife’s death, and is ready to let Ed’s violent intentions take their course. In accordance with his death wish, he accepts a lift in a motor-boat from Ed; in the middle of the lagoon, Ed pushes him overboard. Ray pretends he has been drowned and assumes a false name and identity, thus experiencing both an exhilarating freedom and an overwhelming emptiness. He roams through a wintry Venice like one of the living dead. Those Who Walk Away is a crime novel with no actual murder, merely a failed attempt at one: there is no clear resolution – except, perhaps, Ray and Ed’s resigned acceptance that they are condemned to haunt each other for the rest of their lives.

Highsmith recognised that true art lies not simply in the telling of stories, but in the telling of how stories go wrong, in rendering palpable the interstices in which ‘nothing happens’. In art, the spiritual and material spheres are intertwined: the spiritual emerges when we become aware of the material inertia, the dysfunctional bare presence, of the objects around us. It emerges after a murder attempt goes wrong and the would-be murderer and his victim are left stupidly staring at each other. Highsmith, more than any of her rivals, was responsible for elevating crime fiction to the level of art.

This feeling for the inert has a special significance in our age, in which the obverse of the capitalist drive to produce ever more new objects is a growing mountain of useless waste, used cars, out-of-date computers etc, like the famous resting place for old aircraft in the Mojave desert. In these piles of stuff, one can perceive the capitalist drive at rest. That’s where the interest of Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Stalker lies, with its post-industrial wasteland in which wild vegetation takes over abandoned factories, concrete tunnels and railroads full of stale water, and stray cats and dogs wander the overgrowth. Nature and industrial civilisation overlap, but in a common decay: a civilisation in decay is being reclaimed, not by an idealised, harmonious Nature but by nature which is itself in a state of decomposition. The irony is that it should be an author from the Communist East who displayed such great sensitivity towards this obverse of the drive to produce and consume. But perhaps the irony displays a deeper necessity, hinging on what Heiner Mueller called the ‘waiting-room mentality’ of Communist Eastern Europe:

There would be an announcement: ‘The train will arrive at 18.15 and depart at 18.20,’ and it never did arrive at 18.15. Then came the next announcement: ‘The train will arrive at 20.10.’ And so on. You went on sitting there in the waiting-room, thinking, it’s bound to come at 20.15. That was the situation: basically, a state of Messianic anticipation. There are constant announcements of the Messiah’s impending arrival, and you know perfectly well that he won’t be coming. And yet somehow, it’s good to hear him announced all over again.

The effect of this Messianic attitude was not that people continued to hope, but that, when the Messiah never arrived, they started to look around and take note of the inert materiality of their surroundings; in contrast to the West, where people are always frantic and never properly notice what goes on around them. In the East, people were more closely acquainted with the waiting-room and, caught up in the delay, experienced to the full the idiosyncrasies of their world, in all its topographical and historical detail. One can easily imagine Ray or Ed getting stuck at an East German railway station.

Can we imagine a proper hero in this landscape, someone who could walk these decrepit streets and counteract their inertia? Highsmith’s answer is Tom Ripley, the hero of five of her novels. Ripley is a difficult character to swallow; we can tell just how difficult from the failure of the four cinema versions of books in which he appears. First, there was Alain Delon in René Clément’s Plein soleil (1959, based on The Talented Mr Ripley, except that in the film, to Highsmith’s dismay, the police arrest Ripley at the end); next, Dennis Hopper in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend (1977, based on Ripley’s Game); then, in two strangely symmetrical remakes, Matt Damon in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) and John Malkovich in a new Ripley’s Game by Liliana Cavani (2003). Although, on their own terms, all four are good movies, their Ripley is not Highsmith’s Ripley because they somehow humanise his inhuman core: Delon is a demoniac European; Hopper an existentialist cowboy; Damon an emotionally unstable American brat; while Malkovich displays his usual decadent, ironic coldness.

Who, then, is the ‘real’ Ripley? The contrast is most perspicuous in Minghella’s film. Tom Ripley, a broke young New Yorker, is approached by the magnate Herbert Greenleaf, in the mistaken belief that Tom was at Princeton with his son Dickie. Dickie is off idling in Italy, and Greenleaf pays Tom to go there and bring him back, so that he can take his rightful place in the family business. Once in Europe, however, Tom becomes more and more fascinated by Dickie, and the easy-going upper-class society he inhabits. Tom should not be thought to be homosexual: Dickie is not an object of desire for Tom, but the ideal desiring subject, the subject who is ‘supposed to know’ how to desire. In short, Dickie becomes Tom’s ideal ego, a figure with whom he can identify in his imagination: the repeated sidelong glances he casts at Dickie betray not a desire to have him, but to be like him. To resolve his predicament, Tom concocts an elaborate plan. On a boat trip, he kills Dickie, assumes his identity and manages things so that he will inherit his money, too. Once this is accomplished, the false Dickie disappears, leaving behind a suicide note praising Tom. Tom can now reappear, throwing any suspicious investigators off the scent, and earning the gratitude of Dickie’s parents. Finally, he leaves Italy for Greece.

The novel was written in the mid-1950s, but in it Highsmith foreshadows today’s rewriting of the Ten Commandments as recommendations which we don’t need to follow too blindly. Ripley stands for the final step in this process: thou shalt not kill, except when there is really no other way to pursue your happiness. Or, as Highsmith herself put it in an interview: ‘He could be called psychotic, but I would not call him insane because his actions are rational . . . I consider him a rather civilised person who kills when he absolutely has to.’ Ripley isn’t an ordinary American psycho: his criminal acts are not frenetic passages à l’acte, or outbursts of violence in which he releases the energy accumulated by the frustrations of daily life. His crimes are based on simple pragmatism: he does what is necessary to attain his goal (a quiet life in an exclusive Paris suburb). What is so disturbing about him is that he seems to lack even an elementary moral sense: in daily life, he is mostly friendly and considerate, and when he commits a murder, he does it with regret, quickly and as painlessly as possible, in the way one performs any unpleasant but necessary task.

Highsmith’s Ripley transcends the stock American motif of an individual’s radical reinvention of himself, his capacity to erase the traces of the past and assume a new identity. Minghella’s movie betrays Highsmith in this respect, Gatsbyising Ripley into a new version of the self-recreating American hero. In a telling difference between the novel and the film, Minghella has Ripley experience the stirrings of a conscience, whereas in the novel such qualms are simply not part of his make-up. This is why making Ripley’s gay desires explicit in the film also misses the point. Minghella implies that while, back in the 1950s, Highsmith had to be more circumspect in order to make her hero palatable to the public at large, today we can be more open about such matters. Ripley’s coldness is not a manifestation of his gayness, however; it is the other way round. In one of the later Ripley novels, we learn that he makes love once a week to his wife, Heloïse, as a regular ritual, with nothing passionate about it. Tom is like Adam before the Fall: according to St Augustine, he and Eve did have sex, but only as an instrumental act, like sowing seeds in a field. One way to read Ripley is as an angelic figure, living in a universe which as yet knows nothing of the Law or its transgression (sin), and thus nothing of the guilt generated by our obedience to the Law. This is why Ripley feels no remorse after his murders: he is not yet fully integrated into the symbolic order.

Paradoxically, the price Ripley pays for this is his inability to experience sexual passion. In one novel, he sees two flies copulating on his kitchen table and squashes them in disgust. Minghella’s Ripley would never have done anything like this. Highsmith’s Ripley is disconnected from the realities of the flesh, disgusted at biological life’s cycle of generation and corruption. Marge, Dickie’s girlfriend, sums him up very effectively: ‘All right, he may not be queer. He’s just a nothing, which is worse. He isn’t normal enough to have any kind of sex life.’ One is tempted to claim that, rather than being a closet gay, Ripley is in fact a male lesbian. Tom Ripley was not a mask for Highsmith so much as her externalised ego; we learn from Wilson’s book that she even changed her name to Patricia Highsmith-Ripley and signed her mail with ‘Tom (Pat)’. It is rather like the old Taoist idea that a man dreaming he is a butterfly is also perhaps a butterfly dreaming it is a man. Was Highsmith dreaming that she was Ripley or was she Ripley dreaming that he was Highsmith the novelist?

Minghella’s Ripley makes clear what’s wrong with trying to be more radical than the original by bringing out its implicit, repressed content. By looking to fill in the void, Minghella actually retreats from it. Instead of a polite person who is at the same time a monstrous automaton, experiencing no inner turmoil as he commits his crimes, we get the wealth of a personality, someone full of psychic traumas, someone whom we can, in the fullest meaning of the term, understand.

The Climate Fixers: Is there a technological solution to global warming?

by Michael Specter

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/14/120514fa_fact_specter#ixzz1v2nYWVSE

[…]

For years, even to entertain the possibility of human intervention on such a scale—geoengineering, as the practice is known—has been denounced as hubris. Predicting long-term climatic behavior by using computer models has proved difficult, and the notion of fiddling with the planet’s climate based on the results generated by those models worries even scientists who are fully engaged in the research. “There will be no easy victories, but at some point we are going to have to take the facts seriously,’’ David Keith, a professor of engineering and public policy at Harvard and one of geoengineering’s most thoughtful supporters, told me. “Nonetheless,’’ he added, “it is hyperbolic to say this, but no less true: when you start to reflect light away from the planet, you can easily imagine a chain of events that would extinguish life on earth.”

There is only one reason to consider deploying a scheme with even a tiny chance of causing such a catastrophe: if the risks of not deploying it were clearly higher. No one is yet prepared to make such a calculation, but researchers are moving in that direction. To offer guidance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.) has developed a series of scenarios on global warming. The cheeriest assessment predicts that by the end of the century the earth’s average temperature will rise between 1.1 and 2.9 degrees Celsius. A more pessimistic projection envisages a rise of between 2.4 and 6.4 degrees—far higher than at any time in recorded history. (There are nearly two degrees Fahrenheit in one degree Celsius. A rise of 2.4 to 6.4 degrees Celsius would equal 4.3 to 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit.) Until recently, climate scientists believed that a six-degree rise, the effects of which would be an undeniable disaster, was unlikely. But new data have changed the minds of many. Late last year, Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, said that current levels of consumption “put the world perfectly on track for a six-degree Celsius rise in temperature. . . .

Everybody, even schoolchildren, knows this will have catastrophic implications for all of us.”

[…]

Weary warriors favor Obama

By Margot Roosevelt | Reuters – Mon, May 14, 2012

http://news.yahoo.com/weary-warriors-favor-obama-131752838.html

COLUMBIA, South Carolina (Reuters) - Mack McDowell likes to spend time at the local knife and gun show "drooling over firearms," as he puts it. Retired after 30 years in the U.S. Army, he has lined his study with books on war, framed battalion patches from his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, a John Wayne poster, and an 1861 Springfield rifle from an ancestor who fought in the Civil War.

But when it comes to the 2012 presidential election, Master Sergeant McDowell is no hawk.

In South Carolina's January primary, the one-time Reagan supporter voted for Ron Paul "because of his unchanging stand against overseas involvement." In November, McDowell plans to vote for the candidate least likely to wage "knee-jerk reaction wars."

Disaffection with the politics of shock and awe runs deep among men and women who have served in the military during the past decade of conflict. Only 32 percent think the war in Iraq ended successfully, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. And far more of them would pull out of Afghanistan than continue military operations there.

While the 2012 campaign today is dominated by economic and domestic issues, military concerns could easily jump to the fore. Nearly 90,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan. Israeli politicians and their U.S. supporters debate over whether to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities as partisans bicker over proposed Pentagon budget cuts.

Mitt Romney has accused President Obama of "a dangerous course" in wanting to cut $1 trillion from the defense budget - although the administration's actual proposal is a reduction of $487 billion over the next decade.

"We should not negotiate with the Taliban," the former Massachusetts governor contends. "We should defeat the Taliban." He has blamed Obama for "procrastination toward Iran" and advocates arming Syrian rebels.

Romney, along with his primary rivals Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, had also accused Obama of "appeasement" toward U.S. enemies - a charge that drew a sharpObama rebuttal. "Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top al-Qaeda leaders who've been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement," the president shot back. He has reproached GOP candidates: "Now is not the time for bluster."

If the election were held today, Obama would win the veteran vote by as much as seven points over Romney, higher than his margin in the general population.

[…]

The Insurrections Series at Columbia University Press–Forthcoming Titles

http://crestondavis.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/the-insurrections-series-at-columbia-university-press-forthcoming-titles/

For the past few years, Slavoj Zizek, Clayton Crockett, Jeff Robbins and I have developed the best new academic book series in the English speaking world.  We have already published 14 titles from such luminaries as Gianni Vattimo, Jack Caputo, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Peter Sloterdijk, Richard Kearney, Catherine Malabou, Stanislas Breton, and Arvind-Pal S. Mandair. 

In addition to these leading theorists, we published an awarding winning book by Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe.  The renowned artist and film director, Udi Aloni has also contributed an extraordinary book What Does a Jew Want? (featuring Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, and Judith Butler). 

Considered the leading Continental philosopher in the United States (in the wake of Jack Caputo’s retirement), Clayton Crockett has published two monographs (Radical Political Theology and the forthcoming Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event) and co-edited a volume on Hegel with Slavoj Zizek and myself.  Jeff Robbins, who is emerging as a leading theorist in the United States, has published Radical Democracy and Political Theology. 

My forthcoming book The Contradiction of America: A Meditation on Jefferson’s Monticello (with Alain Badiou) will add to the discussion on the interrelation between America and Radical Politics.  I will also be introducing Antonio Negri’s first of two books in the series, Spinoza for our Time.  Negri’s second book, 33 Lessons on Lenin is also forthcoming.  I will also be introducing the renowned German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk’s forthcoming book, Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault.

Other forthcoming titles include four more by Alain Badiou: The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts/Tragedie en trois acts, Heidegger: His Life and His Philosophy (with Barbara Cassin), There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship: Two Lessons on Lacan (with Barbara Cassin),and Political Writings (with Alberto Toscano and Nina Power).  Tyler Roberts has a brilliant book forthcoming entitled, New Models for Post-Secular Study: encountering Religion.

[…]

Alenka Zupančič: "Not-Mother: On Freud’s Verneinung"

Alenka Zupančič

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/not-mother-on-freuds-verneinung/

Not-Mother: On Freud’s Verneinung

At first sight, and considering its length, Freud’s short essay on Verneinung looks like a fleeting comment, a short note of an observation that is mostly, and in spite of its amusing character, of a technical nature: When in analysis we hear the person utter this and that, we can conclude, with great probability, that what is at stake is this and that.1 Freud’s most famous example is a remark made by a patient, and has since become proverbial: “You ask who this person in the dream can be. It’s not my mother” (Die Mutter is es nicht). In which case, adds Freud, the question is settled; we can be sure that it is indeed her. Moreover, every explicit negation of this sort, every strongly emphasized distancing from a certain content, strongly indicates the truth of precisely this content. This holds, of course, only in cases when the analysand herself “comes out” with this content or intention, yet accompanies it with a preliminary negation. For example: “Now you’ll think I mean to say something insulting, but really I’ve no such intention.”

Yet the more we advance into Freud’s essay, the more the technical unambiguity of examples remains behind, and what comes to the foreground is a fascinating knot of practically all the key problems of psychoanalysis, organized around the peculiar and evading negativity that is its central focus. For it soon becomes clear that the negativity at work in Freud’s witty examples is in no way reducible to the simple opposite of positivity, or affirmation; it is not reducible to the truthfulness of its opposite, and it becomes clear that by translating “It’s not mother” into “It is mother,” we don’t get very far—the symptoms persist, and the real problem, as well as the main part of analytical work, only starts here. What comes to light is a certain crack, or internal interval, that is at work in the relationship between the crucial categorical couples, and that undermines their complementariness and symmetry: inside/outside; pleasure/beyond the pleasure (principle); repression/becoming conscious of the repressed; affective/intellectual; Eros/destructive drive; and so forth.

Apart from this, but also of course related to it, Freud’s paper offers an extremely dense speculation about the very origin of thought, speculation that stupefied the prominent French Hegelian Jean Hippolyte, made apparent in his commentary on the essay, which he delivered upon Lacan’s invitation to his seminar. We are dealing with something like “the birth of thinking out of the spirit of negation” (or rather, from the—signifying—mark of negation). It seems indeed that Freud’s essay on “negation” is also a kind of quilting point between philosophy and psychoanalysis. And this is how we’ll read this essay here: as a way of thinking about the singular and paradoxical negativity outlined, as well as handled, by psychoanalysis, and its relationship to philosophy.

1. The With-Without

Let’s take Freud’s essays step by step. Without being asked who played part in his dream, the patient rushes forward and volunteers the word “mother,” accompanied by negation. It is as if he has to say it, but at the same time cannot; it is at the same time imperative and impossible. The result is that the word is uttered as denied, and the repression coexists with the thing being consciously spoken out. The first mistake to avoid here is to read this in terms of what this person really saw in his dream, and then, because of a conscious censorship, lied about it in his account to the analyst. Crucial to the understanding not only of Verneinung but also of the Freudian unconscious as such is that what is unconscious in the given case is first and foremost the censorship, and not simply its object, “mother.” The latter is fully present in the statement, and introduced by the subject himself, who could have not mentioned her at all. Here, the unconscious sticks to the distortion itself (the negation), and is not hidden in what the subject supposedly really saw in his dream. It could well be that in the dream there actually appeared another person, known or unknown, yet the story of the unconscious that is relevant for analysis begins with this “not my mother” that takes place in the account of the dream. When mother thus appears in this singular “alloy” composition with negation as “not-mother,” it looks as if both terms have irredeemably contaminated each other. As if the “not” marked the mother with the stamp of unconscious desire (“like Made in Germany stamped on the object,” as Freud puts it), and “mother” no less contaminated the formal purity of the negation with “elements in traces,” to borrow what can sometimes be read on the packaging of certain foods.

In other words, the certainty emphasized by Freud in this context is not simply certainty regarding the given unconscious content (“mother”), but first and foremost certainty regarding the fact that we are indeed dealing with the intrusion of the unconscious. On the other hand, Freud’s conclusion “therefore it is mother” is not the conclusion of analysis of the given situation, but rather its starting point, the point where the real problem of the unconscious begins. As a matter of fact, it is only here that things become really interesting, for Freud goes on to say that even though in analysis we can bring this person to withdraw the “not” and accept the (content of the) repressed, “the repressive process itself is not yet removed by this.”2 The negation itself is negated (we could say that we now get something like, “this is not not-mother”), yet something of it persists—the repression, the symptoms persist beyond becoming conscious of the repressed. Here, we come across one of the crucial (and constitutive) discoveries of psychoanalysis, without which the latter would be little more than a hermeneutics of the unconscious, depending entirely on the (correct) interpretation, or translation, of the text deformed by the unconscious into its full and nondeformed version. Soon after his early enthusiasm that things might indeed work this way, Freud came up against the problem that they actually don’t, that the right interpretation (and its acceptance) doesn’t yet eliminate the symptom, and that the real kernel of the unconscious is not to be situated—in the case of dreams, for example—in the latent content, as opposed to the manifest content, and as “deciphered” from it. For our present purposes, and at this stage, this could be formulated as follows: We can accept the (repressed) content, eliminate it, but we cannot eliminate the structure of the gap, or crack, that generates it. This irreducible crack becomes visible precisely through double negation, as its “indivisible remainder.” For we are dealing precisely with something like, “it is not not-mother,” and this double negation circumscribes something that makes it irreducible to simply “mother” (or her absence). “It is not not-mother” is not the same as “(it is) mother,” a difference that is crucial for psychoanalysis, since the unconscious is to be situated precisely in this odd, fragile dimension. Lacan pointed out the flip side that the term “unconscious” has on account of its being negative, that is, the negative opposite of “conscious.” More importantly, it is because the unconscious is to be situated in this “third” and odd dimension that Lacan says at some point that the status of the unconscious is not ontical but ethical:3 

Ontically, the unconscious is the elusive (l’inconscient c’est l’évasif)—“but we are beginning to circumscribe it in a structure, a temporal structure, which, it can be said, has never yet been articulated as such.”4 The unconscious is not an alternative reality into which we could translate the slips and symptoms of our reality. Going back to the discussed example, we could also claim that what the patient wanted to say is precisely what he said. It was neither someone other than mother nor mother; rather, it was the “not-mother,” or “the mother-not.”

There is an excellent joke told at some point in Ernest Lubitsch’s film Ninotchka (1939), which I’ve already used in my paper on “Sexual Difference and Ontology.” Yet it would be difficult to avoid referring to it again here, since there is hardly any better way to get a grip on the singular object “mother-not.”

A guy goes into a restaurant and says to the waiter: “Coffee without cream, please.” The waiter replies: “I am sorry sir, but we are out of cream. Could it be without milk?”

This joke carries a certain real, even a certain truth about the real, which has to do precisely with the singular negativity introduced or discovered by psychoanalysis. A negation of something that is neither pure absence nor pure nothing nor simply the complementary of what it negates. At the moment it is spoken there remains a trace of that which is not. This is a dimension that is introduced (and made possible) by the signifier yet is irreducible to it. It has (or can have) a positive, albeit spectral, quality, which can be formulated in the precise terms of “with without (cream)” as irreducible to both alternatives (cream/no cream).

This has some very interesting consequences for the logic implied in the unconscious, which is neither classical nor (and more surprisingly) simply intuitionist. Let us consider that for a moment. We can say, first, that what is introduced by the Freudian notion of negation is not reducible to the alternative P or non-P (“It is mother”/ “It isn’t mother”). In other words, we are not dealing with negation as it operates in the classical logic, relying on—in addition to the principle of identity— two fundamental principles: 1) The principle of noncontradiction (it is impossible to assert simultaneously, in the same context, the proposition P and the proposition non-P). And 2) The principle of the excluded middle, or the excluded third (if you have a proposition P, P is either true or false; that is, either P is true or non-P is true. We cannot have a third possibility). As a consequence of the excluded middle, there is also the principle of double negation: Negation of negation is equivalent to affirmation. However, the classical negation is not the only logical possibility concerning negation. Philosophically this is evident—it suffices to take not only the “modern” example of Nietzsche, but also the supposedly “classical” example of Hegel, who affirms that negation of negation is not equivalent to the immediate affirmation, and for whom contradiction, far from being excluded, is the very motor of dialectical movement. Within the field of logic itself we have two modern alternatives to classical logic: the intuitionist logic, created by L. E. J. Brouwer and formalized by Arend Heyting (the negation obeys the principle of contradiction, but not the excluded middle); and the paraconsistent logic, created and developed by the Brazilian school, and notably by Newton da Costa (the negation obeys the excluded middle, but not the principle of contradiction). The fourth possibility (the negation obeys neither the excluded middle nor the principle of contradiction) is excluded by logics, on grounds that it amounts to the complete dissolution of all potency of negativity.

But let’s return to Freud and to what the logical frame implied by psychoanalysis might be, that is, if it wants to properly account for this negation that is not reducible to the opposite of affirmation. One could simply say, “Well, Freud seems to be subscribing to the intuitionist logic, as opposed to the classical one.” However—and this is what is most intriguing and far-reaching in the Freudian outline—this is simply not the case. The standard presentation of the intuitionist logic allows for things to exist between the two extremes (or absolutes); between an absolute P and absolute non-P there is the whole world, so to speak, with all kinds of nuances with different shades, or degrees, of intensity. Because it allows for different degrees of intensity, the potency of negation is weaker in this logic than in classical logic. Here is an example of the intuitionist logic presented by Alain Badiou in his paper “The Three Negations”:

So, if the great field of the law is always a concrete world, or a concrete construction, its logic is not classic. If we take “law” in its strict legal sense, we know that perfectly well. If the sentence P is “guilty,” and non-P “innocent,” we have always a great number of intermediate values, like “guilty with attenuating circumstances,” or “innocent because certainly guilty, but with insufficient proof,” and so on … If I say in a concrete world “I am not guilty,” maybe it is true, but it is practically never absolutely true, because everybody is guilty, more or less.5

However, and as we’ve already seen, what is at stake in the Freudian discovery that, when dealing with the unconscious, the alternative “mother/not mother” is not exhaustive (negation of negation doesn’t bring us to the supposedly original affirmation) is something else. It is not a “more or less mother,” nor is it a difference in intensity with regard to two extremes, or absolutes; it is a paradoxical entity of “with-without.” The following is a very important question (and answer) asked by psychoanalysis and brought to the attention of both philosophy and logics: If we admit the non-functioning of the principle of the excluded third, what then is the status of the third that we allow for in this way? Is it something in between, a combination of two, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, a nuance with a certain degree of intensity? Or is it effectively something else (that is, precisely something “third”), with its own ontological status, even if the latter turns out to be very paradoxical? The discovery of the unconscious, and its real, brings forth the second possibility. But this could also imply that the logic introduced by the concept of the unconscious is not actually intuitionist, but rather a paradoxical twist of the classical logic itself: The third term (or third possibility), which is included rather then excluded, is nothing other than the very point of the (onto)logical impossibility of the third. In other words, what is included as something (as an entity) receives the very logical impossibility on which the alternative mother/not-mother is based. The fact that it is included doesn’t mean that the impossible now becomes possible (one of the possibilities, as in the intuitionist logic); rather, it is included in its very onto-logical impossibility—hence its spectral character: as included in reality, the impossible-real can only be a specter.

2. The Birth of Thinking from the Materiality of Negation

Another crucial and related point in Freud’s essay concerns the way in which he links the cut of (the signifier of) negation to the very constitution of thinking (conscious and unconscious). For the not is not only a trick, an instrument, of the unconscious (something that the unconscious “uses” in order to persist side by side with some inadmissible content); it is also its condition, or Grund. It is not only that which, together with other unconscious mechanisms (displacements, condensations …), patches up the gaps of the repression and alerts us to it, but also the condition of the repression as such.

In what is arguably the most intriguing (and highly speculative) part of his essay, Freud develops the hypothesis of the constitution of reality and of the thinking subject as based on the original cut along the lines of appropriation (or, “taking in” as basis of affirmation, Bejahung) and Ausstoßung (“expulsion,” or “pushing out,” as basis of negation). Freud proposes a very dense genealogy of judgment that includes two steps coinciding with the difference between attributive and existential judgments. In the first case, we start with a situation that has pleasure as its only measure, relying on whether what he calls the original Ich takes things in or expels them. “Expressed in the language of the oldest—the oral—drive impulses, the judgement is: ‘I should like to eat this,’ or, ‘I should like to spit it out’; put more generally: ‘I should like to take this into myself and to keep that out.’ That is to say, ‘It shall be inside me’ or ‘it shall be outside me.’ As I have shown elsewhere, the original pleasure-ego wants to introject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself everything that is bad. What is bad, what is alien to the ego, and what is external are, to begin with, identical.”6

This is then where a first cut is produced, the split between in and out, Innen und Außen, which also and immediately coincides with the dividing lines between good and bad, foreign, or alien, and familiar. In the undoubtedly mythical being (or being of a given theoretical construction) that Freud calls das ursprüngliche Lust-Ich, the original pleasure-ego, these dividing lines simply coincide: the inner–the good–the familiar, on the one side, and the outer–the bad–the alien on the other. But already in the next step things become more complicated and these dividing lines fall out of joint.

“It is now no longer the question of whether what has been perceived (a thing) shall be taken into the ego or not, but of whether something which is in the ego as a presentation can be rediscovered in perception (reality) as well. It is, we see, once more the question of external and internal.”7

In other words, what is at stake here is the famous reality check, or “reality testing, ”Realitätsprüfung, based on the presupposition of an original loss of pleasure.8 The crucial aspect of which is the loss of immediacy: From now on, all pleasure will be a found-again-pleasure. The same goes for all objects of reality: As objects of reality (which is thus constituted as objective reality, that is, constituted through the opposition subjective-objective) they are never simply found, but always refound, found again, wiedergefunden.

“The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality testing is not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there.”9

So the moment we begin dealing with thinking and with certain relation to reality, both our pleasure and the existence of things are no longer immediate, but bear the mark of repetition and of the gap the latter implies. The second repartition of the dividing lines doesn’t simply replace the first, however, but adds to it with a twist, resulting in a gap, or a third dimension, that haunts from then on the very consistency of the distinction between inner and outer, and blurs the subject-object division and relation. We could also recapitulate the movement described by Freud like this. The first mythical difference between inside and outside is not yet a real difference, but a process of differentiating the indifferent, or the indistinct, led by the primary process of the pleasure principle. The latter operates, so to speak, with its head on in the indifferent that it separates, but the difference itself, the furrow that it leaves behind, at no point enters its horizon. The Ich only first encounters it in the second step, when it returns in its footsteps, but no longer finds the world as it has been “before.” Now there is difference, the difference between inside and outside, yet it no longer coincides with the difference between good and bad (or pleasant and unpleasant); for the condition of the good, and of experiencing pleasure, is now precisely in finding the object outside (in reality). The object of representation has to be found outside or else it is of no use to us. What has once been inside needs to be found outside. This outside is hence very much subjectively mediated, which is why psychoanalysis situates the real in neither this (subjective) outside nor in the pure inside, but precisely in the impossible space created by their twist and torsion.

We could also say that this first cut into the indifferent does not only produce two slopes of reality (inside/outside) but is itself also material and occupies some space. The metaphor that first comes to mind here is of course that of a crack or gap, separating and connecting the two sides, while at the same time figuring itself as something. (Freud’s key term here, Ausstoßung, or pushing out, suggests an emptying of some space that has already been occupied, and with it the constitution of an empty space in-between.) The cut between inside and outside, between affirmation and negation, does not produce two things but three: 1) affirmation (some positivity); 2) negation (absence, what is not); and 3) the place, or locus, of their difference.10 My point would be that the step from the (mythological) original Lust-Ich, or pleasure-ego, to subjectivity proper (and to the constitution of objective reality) is the step of including, of “taking in”—not simply some exteriority, but precisely the difference (crack or gap) that separates “me” from the outside, from what is not me. In other words: The negativity included in the subject at its very affirmative constitution is not this or that negativity (exteriority), but the very form of negation which reveals here its real structure, namely and precisely that of with-without. The cutting off (of the future outside reality) leaves a mark, a trace, which is precisely what the subject relies upon in its constitution. The constitutive affirmation, Bejahung, (inevitably) also takes in this supplement, the materialization of its own limit. And it is this limit that constitutes that peculiar third dimension, which is neither outside nor inside, neither subject nor object, neither something nor absence; rather, it has the precise structure of the “with-without,” and of the curve that this expression indicates or traces. This is what henceforth curves the given structure or space, magnetizes it.

And this has some bearing for the question of being and of ontology. We could say that all being is (a) being with-without—this is the “hole” referred to before: the hole in the order of being that curves its space. Ontology, or the science of being qua being, corresponds to the gesture of cutting off, or obliterating, the “with-without.” The latter is taken for nothing; it doesn’t count in the ontological space where one nothing (no cream) equals another (no milk). Yet, according to psychoanalysis, this is precisely a nothing that cannot be cut off as if it were nothing—at least not without consequences.

Returning to the questions with which we started this investigation, we can now say: The something (third) that remains between the fingers of the negation of negation (that is, as long as the negation of negation doesn’t simply bring us back to the inaugural affirmation) is nothing other than the constitutive portion of negativity of the inaugural affirmation itself.

Crucial in this respect is another point that Freud quickly makes at the end of the article. As a symbol of negation, and by enabling a certain freedom from repression (and from the limitations it imposes), “no” also enables some freedom from the “compulsion of the pleasure principle.” This is to say, if we sharpen things a bit, it marks the precise place of the death drive and of its constitutive function in thinking. Thanks to this “not,” we can now perform certain mental operations that would be otherwise blocked by the compulsion of the pleasure principle.

One could of course raise the following objection: This might be true, yet this freedom from the compulsion of the pleasure principle remains utterly abstract or de-realized in the discussed case (it remains a kind of mental experiment), which is why repression persists beyond becoming conscious of the repressed. But this is precisely not what is at stake, and this understanding is far too simplistic. For in all its “abstractness,” the symbol of negation effectively contributes to the successful analysis of repression, and it does so in two steps. First, it makes the “symptomatic” formation possible; that is to say, it makes a certain articulation of the repression possible, and hence also its inscription in reality. This is the first step, marked in our case by the statement “It’s not my mother.” It enables the subject to introduce “mother,” without the discomfort of preventing it in a context that strongly resists this introduction. But it s also crucial in the next step, which is beyond the point where “it is not mother” is simply reversed into “it is mother” (which, as we’ve seen, doesn’t bring us very far). As a matter of fact, it is only here that we arrive at the abstraction that befalls the repressed object itself; that is, mother. If the patient accepts this interpretation “intellectually,” but the repression persists, he has accepted the “mother” without that structural negativity that gives her her difficult status in his unconscious (as well as in the symbolic reality as such). For the end of analysis does not consist simply in the subject finally discovering what “personal pathology” is responsible for his having “problems with his mother,” and why the latter functions for him as a problematic figure, demanding repression. What must also be asked is what is it in the mother herself that enables, or generates, her repression. And by this I don’t have in mind this or that characteristic of the mother, but the point of impossibility that determines her in her structural reality.

Returning to Freud’s example we could say that, when it first appears, the “not-mother,” or negation, functions as the stopgap concealing the inconsistency of the entity called mother. At this first level, and with a surprising spin, the “it is not mother” could actually be read to imply not only “it is mother” but also, and more emphatically, “Mother is,” or “there is Mother.” It could be read as affirmation of the ontological fullness of Mother “in herself”—a fullness, or consistency, which, on account of and in comparison with the person appearing in my dream, could obviously not be the Mother, even if it was (my) mother. This could relate back to Freud’s genesis of judgment in its two steps. It enables a reading according to which the second step, the reality testing (in which we are supposed to check whether the object [of former satisfaction] can be found in the outside reality), is not actually about the question of the objective existence of things, but about something far more ambiguous. We could say that the crucial and fundamental problem of this level does not so much concern the objects that are not (or are no longer) to be found in reality; it concerns the fact that, in relation to objects that he or she does find in reality and that do really exist, the subject can only say “this is not it” (in comparison to the presupposed fullness of primary satisfaction). This is key to the Freudian emphasis on refinding, rather than finding, objects in reality.11 In other words, what is at stake is not simply whether the object of my representation also exists in (objective) reality, but rather, the question of the reality of satisfaction that it can give me as object of reality. In this context, the inaugural “this is not mother” contains a (involuntary?) dimension of truth; it indicates that whatever I can refind in reality is never IT. This is the constitutive “subjective distortion”: from the subjective perspective, existence as such is marked by a fundamental lack (or privation): If something exists (in objective reality) it cannot live up to its notion. And we are not speaking about the real thing as opposed to its idealization (nor about the state of full satisfaction being real in any meaningful sense); the point is that the existence of things is marked, for the subject, by a lack of something (which was never there to begin with) that forms (or obliterates) the perspective on what is there. (This would be the Freudian version of the transcendental constitution of reality: It doesn’t involve the a priori forms of sensibility but instead a “speculative” subtraction of something that was never “objectively” there, yet the hole involved in its absence functions as the armature of objective reality.)

One could say that the split of reality between the “appearance” (the phenomena) and the “thing in itself” is the philosophical equivalent of this structure, and if this were so, one could be able to detect a certain dimension of desire (and its eternal this is not IT) at work in this split. Formulated in philosophical terms, the end of analysis would be precisely the abandoning of the thing in itself, while preserving that gap that separates IT from the phenomenal reality, articulating this gap as function of an immanent transcendence. This is the function of the object a in psychoanalysis.

Relating this to Freud we can say that the end of analysis could finally, and indeed, be formulated in terms of “therefore it is mother.” Yet this now refers neither to a simple opposite of mother as denied nor to the emphatic “Mother is” implying her fullness “in herself” beyond her appearance in the world. Instead it refers to what one might formulate as follows: “THIS, and nothing else, is mother.” The accent is thus on the fact that it is precisely this individuum, unequal to its notion, that is the actual notion of mother. In other words, it is not simply that no mother is ever equal to her notion/task, or that we have to reconcile ourselves with this painful split (and inadequacy). We must make one more step and recognize in this configuration precisely that which makes mother mother, that is, what accounts for her being equal to her notion. “THIS, and nothing else, is the notion of mother.”