Sunday, May 5, 2019
Desire, Jouissance and Fantasy
Éric Laurent
The 'desire of desire', as it
is posed, clearly has no defined object. The 'desire of desire' is precisely an
abyss, an opening, an endlessness. The 'desire to harm' has a very precise
object. It seems like a contradiction: does desire have an object or does
it not have an object?
This is exactly the point: in
order to clarify these difficulties, impasses, etc., a distinction was made
between 'desire' and ‘jouissance’.
In Freud the category of
‘desire’ was a notion that opened up the paradoxes of an object that is always
elsewhere, that flees, is displaced. It is desire for something else. It is the
displacement of desire.
‘Jouissance’ in contrast is
fixed, fixated. To do harm is not a desire, to harm is a mode of jouissance.
When the subject is sadistic he enjoys the effect produced by harm, that is,
helplessness. There are even some sadistic subjects beyond all limits that hurt
the other to the point where he begs for death; obtaining this may be the point
of jouissance of a sadist. There are some criminals who confess this, who
testify to what they were looking for... This appears in the testimonies of
victims who escaped: how the guy looked in the eyes of the poor girl who he had
assaulted, threatening to strangle her, seeking to capture the moment in which
the subject begs for death, in which she lets herself die. This is a specific
form of jouissance, it is not a desire.
And indeed, when a subject
comes to analysis he or she has fixations of jouissance. Subjects who have very
"perverse" fixations of jouissance do not come to psychoanalysis
because they do not ask for anything. They know what they want in life, they
know this is what they enjoy. The problem is that it is very difficult for them
to achieve, so they spend their lives inventing ways to achieve it, but not
wasting their time talking about this with a psychoanalyst.
In order to have the project
of embarking on this experience, the experience of an analysis, there has to be
at least a tension between desire and jouissance, there has to be a possibility
of displacement. This means that the subject can be fixated but at the same
time has to have a desire for something else.
This tension also has to be
maintained because the 'desire of desire' is another definition of neurosis.
Neurotic subjects, to take up a Freudian category that is not very current in
psychiatry nowadays, which works rather with catalogs of items, but anyway…
Subjects who fit into the Freudian category of the neuroses spend their lives
with this empty longing: 'a desire of desire', and the instrument through which
they ‘desire desire’ is what Freud called the ‘fantasy.
The idea is that you have to
cross the fantasy, traverse it. It is not about ‘desiring desire’. At the end
of the day, one has to find a mode of jouissance that is livable, satisfying
and which allows one to live a dignified life, rather than staying in the
day-dream, a little ideal, of being a 'being of desire'.
Interview by Iara Bianchi for De
Inconscientes®
Translated from the Spanish by
Florencia F.C. Shanahan & Roger Litten
For the youngsters who emigrated. For the silent grief of those who stayed behind. That’s why we vote for MeRA25 in Greece
Yanis Varoufakis
For those of you interested
in a glimpse into our Greek election campaign (European and national),
here is a translation of MeRA25’s first radio advertisement for the
forthcoming European and national elections (featuring, naturally,
DiEM25’s theme music composed & performed by our very own Brian
Eno). More radio and tv MeRA25 ads will follow soon.
For the youngsters who
emigrated
For the youngsters who stayed
behind
For the grandfathers who feel
ashamed
For the grandmothers who sigh
For the parents who weep at
the airports
For the silent grief of the
abandoned
For the drowned rage of the
unemployed
For the hidden sorrow of the
immigrant
For the struggling small
businesses
For Greeks who feel European
For Europeans who feel Greek
For the many, not for the
trappings of office
For all these people, in these
European and national elections we vote for MeRA25 – Because this night has
lasted long enough
Make Elizabeth Warren Hate Again
We don’t just need Elizabeth
Warren’s ideas. We need her rage.
BY MOE TKACIK
I was riding an UberPool home
from a demoralizing dead winter dinner shift in the midst of a pregnancy scare
when Elizabeth Warren’s universal
child care proposal hit my feeds. I had made $225.46 before taxes that
night; my babysitter had taken home $160, and she’d need a substantial raise if
I had a third. The Warren plan promised to cap day care costs at 7% of
household income. If day care costs were income-based, I could have three
wall-vandalizing, juicespilling, lipstick-smearing, toilet paper-unravelling,
time-murdering children, and I wouldn’t even have to be a waitress to begin
with. I could be an adjunct history professor!
I gave $27.50 to the Warren
campaign that night. Given her single-digit polling numbers, I realized I stood
a better chance of finagling my way into Norwegian citizenship than she had of
becoming president, but I wanted the proposals to keep coming. It felt like I
was getting something for my money, like I was funding a think tank, a real
think tank, not a tax-exempt front for a
confederation of lobbying interests staffed by former Hillary aides, but an
incubator of vital ideas and solutions in waiting for a Sanders administration.
The policy statement stream
persisted: the proposal to undo
Amazon and Facebook’s acquisition binges; the
$500 billion plan to build millions of affordable homes; the plan to force
agricultural equipment manufacturers to open-source
operations so farmers can repair their own machines; the $100
billion plan to radically expand opioid addiction treatment; the proposal
to ban fossil fuel extraction on publicly owned lands and make public
parks free; the $1.25
trillion plan to cancel student loan debt and make college free. And a raft
of targeted new taxes that would finance all these plans: on corporate profits
higher than $100 million, inheritances more valuable than $7 million, net worth
greater than $50 million.
I would have gladly pitched in
more tax dollars to fund most of her agenda, but tellingly, #TeamWarren never
asked. So I kept pressing those irritating DONATE buttons. I wasn’t alone. By
March the whole lamestream media, from the New York Times to CNBC,
was singing the praises of Warren’s proposal mill. A typical Guardian column pronounced her
the “intellectual powerhouse of the Democratic party.” Behind that powerhouse,
Warren had amassed the 2020 contest’s largest salaried campaign staff, 161
strong by The
Hill’s count.
But combing Warren’s Federal
Election Commission filings for names to put to this brain trust, I began to
feel a bit seasick. Staffer after staffer had cut her (or his) teeth
campaigning for Hillary. And upon closer inspection, a fair number of #TeamWarren’s
plans reeked of Clintonite horse-shitism (also, pandering 12-figure-pricetag
never-gonna-happen-ism.) One section of the housing plan relies on “leveraging”
each dollar spent with 10 dollars in private sector funds, which is to say,
classic neoliberal profiteering. The hysterically priced $1.2 trillion student
debt forgiveness package avoids any changes in Warren’s OG area of expertise,
the federal bankruptcy code—which, in denying bankruptcy (unconstitutionally)
for student debt, quite literally created the student loan disaster. I asked
Alan Collinge of Student Loan
Justice what was up. He said Warren’s staff is maddeningly weird on
the issue: full of promises one month, incapable of returning an email the
next, generally more interested in “throw[ing] money at” the problem than
addressing the salient structural flaw. He surmised she was taking orders
from the
Center for American Progress (CAP). Warren advisor Ganesh Sitaraman, whom
Collinge identified as her point person on student loans, is a CAP senior
fellow.
At best, as the Boston
Globe has detailed, #TeamWarren is using the wonkspam as a marketing
tool: Churn out meaty white papers, then ask for cash to keep the ideas in the
“conversation.” But it’s not Warren’s “ideas”—at least in the mealy
watered-down Beltway thought-leader sense—that we need. It is her (inimitably
well-informed) rage. America fell
in love with the Warren who went viral dressing down bank CEOs and
oblivious regulators, who spent five minutes detailing
the extent to which Citigroup alums had infested the Obama Administration
before telling the bank that Dodd-Frank’s major flaw was that it should have
“broken you up into little pieces”; whose low-key interrogation tactics induced
a New York Fed president to essentially confesscolluding
with Goldman to hide another bank’s balance sheet hole from European banking
authorities; who led the charge to fire the head of the agency overseeing
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for being too bank-captured to write down any of the
millions of underwater mortgages it owned after the 2008 crisis, then
publicly eviscerated his
replacement for the same exact thing a year later. The Old Warren was never so
interested in feeling your pain as she was articulating your pain, to
the rich white billionaires inflicting it.
The Old Warren was unabashedly
unafraid to tackle two things no other 21st century politician really had:
arcana, and the wholesale capture of Democratic Party politics by the big
banks. These two things are symbiotic—every election cycle the
Democrats bet that stupid Americans’ inability to comprehend the former
will continue to obscure the latter. And every election cycle, those same
Americans revolt against the bank-backed centrists the Democratic Party
pushes on them: by embracing Obama in 2008, the Tea Party in 2010, Bernie
Sanders then Donald Trump in 2016, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. I’m
not saying those Americans are all the same, or that they aren’t ever
stupid—shit, I genuinely believed Obama would be an antidote to all
this back in 2008, and that was stupid!—but they know what they don’t like, and
that is (preachy, endlessly self-satisfied) millionaire Democrats who take
marching orders from trillionaire banks. But where Bernie never had much of an
appetite for annotating the fine print behind our neoliberal malaise, or
calling out the Democratic committee staffers-turned-bank lobbyists who drafted
it, Warren always seemed invigorated by the naming of names and parsing details
of scams. That is why, as one banker quoted
in New York magazine put it, she “strikes fear in [the]
hearts” of Wall Street executives, despite her dreary poll numbers, even more
so than Sanders: They regard her as more
competent.
The old terrifyingly
well-informed Righteous Warren made a
brief reappearance on a CNN town hall in April, when she described
reading the section of the Mueller report in which Trump attempts to get White
House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, then attempts to get McGahn to refute
the stories about it, then tries to gaslight McGahn into agreeing that Trump
never used the word “fire,” then chews out McGahn for having taken notes.
Having two toddlers and a profound cynicism toward Russiagate, I hadn’t gotten
so far in the report. But Warren has a way of returning moral clarity well
after outrage fatigue has set in, and she made a compelling case that we didn’t
have to let yet another rich white guy get away with murder. We may have let
Chuck Prince and Angelo Mozilo and the Magnetar guys and the London Whale guys
off the hook, but maybe if we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have this crook in the White
House now.
She had a point. But she
shouldn't narrow her sights. Warren knows more intimately than any other
politician how deep and wide the population of rich American villains has
grown. They are everywhere, artificially inflating our housing costs and our
drug prices, our interest rates and our opioid addiction rates and our carbon
emissions.
Having sworn
off big-dollar fundraising, now is when Warren should be welcoming their
hatred—and exposing the cowardice of
phony populists like Joe Biden who have instead welcomed their $2,800
checks. Her fury is what the Left needs.
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