On Exception and the Unconscious: Present/Absent, and the Otherness of Childhood

ABSTRACT

This article proceeds from my continued exploration of the relations between the subjective and the collective, and from the assumption that the subject, and subjectivity itself, are always a reflection, an iteration, an embodied instantiation of the social universe in which they emerge. In this article, I turn to what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls states of exception, those times and places where the law and the norm are suspended, such as we have seen most recently in the context of the COVID pandemic, but is always the case sometimes, in some places, most often regarding particular groups of people. I examine, as examples, two particular exception categories, a status in the Israeli legal code called present/absent, and our modern concept of childhood. I use the notions of present/absent and of childhood to think about what we call in psychoanalysis “the unconscious,” the unconscious as a subjective/collective terrain where what is socially excepted and forbidden becomes that which is psychologically dissociated and disavowed. And I reflect on how a social-theory driven perspective on subjectivity can both complicate and deepen our ability to address the intricacies of human experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Subjectivity
• social unconscious
• exception
• otherness
• childhood
• identity
• precarity
• alienation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Although under the encouragement of Trump and his right wing Jewish and evangelical coalition, it came close to doing so in 2020.

² One is reminded here of Freud’s (1920) tortured examination of the protozoa’s stimuli border in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” But that venue we will have to leave for another time.

³ The department of psychosocial studies at Birkbeck in London is one important center where this kind of work is pursued. See for example, “Psychosocial Imaginaries” (Frosh, 2015), which takes a snapshot of that effort. The book “Relational Psychoanalysis Vol. 3: New Voices” (2007), captures a similar thread in relational psychoanalysis. Layton and Leavy-Sperounis (2020) represent another consistent contribution, as does Muriel Dimen (2003). See, also Ayouch (2020), González (2020), Doñas (2020), and Guralnik (2016).

⁴ For a good review see, Ken Corbett et al. (2014) Talking Sex, Talking Gender – A Roundtable, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 15:4, 295–317.

⁵ It has indeed become my focus in this context (Rozmarin, 2020) to contemplate a notion of subjectivity as something in-between, a post on a frontier between the singular and the plural, a relay station, a threshold, where it does not quite make sense to talk about an inside or an outside, where meaning lies in the traffic or exchange between these hard to identify territories. For example, I am a a Jewish Israeli gay man immigrant in the United States. A statement that is both very much and not at all personal. A list of affiliations, social categories, none of which quite captures my singularity, none of which I live in peace in, and yet this list does mark so much of how I identify myself. This is the double nature of identification, that one’s sense of self always proceeds from the other. This is the strangely intimate and and public, acutely felt yet alienated nature of being a subject.

⁶ See, Firestone (1970) for an extended exposition of this argument.

⁷ See, Foucault (2007) for a detailed analysis of this transition.

⁸ See my paper “A second confusion of tongues” (Rozmarin, 2015) for an extended elaboration of this idea.

⁹ If we lean back on Levinas’ as he posits that “subjectivity is structured as the other in the same” childhood may offer us a specific variant of this formula, one of particular importance to psychoanalysis: subjectivity is structured as an alienated child in the adult.

¹⁰ To which we can add these days, and not a moment too soon, what we have come to call whiteness.

¹¹ It has not been radically different elsewhere. France had its Lacanian revolution and its Freudian restoration, a struggle still ongoing, developing in the process analytic confabulations and orthodoxies that rival the North American. The South American field has been more varied, sometimes more socially enlightened, but a language-culture barrier kept the English speaking world under-exposed to its richness.

¹² I debate this conundrum in great detail in my paper “To Be is To Betray” (Rozmarin, 2011).

¹³ It is one of the most binding paradoxes of human existence, that we are constantly working at building structures, self-sustaining structures, institutions of habit and truth that we then feel alienated in and imprisoned by. And so we long to escape the walls of these institutions, toward imagined freedoms that are destined to remain ephemeral. Perhaps because the idea of such freedoms is a feature of the very same institutions, perhaps because it reside in the domain of nothingness, such that Sartre (2003) writes about.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eyal Rozmarin

Eyal Rozmarin, Ph.D., is Co-Editor of the book series Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, and Associate Editor of the journals Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. He has published and presented his work widely. His research takes place at the intersection of psychoanalysis and social theory, and explores the relations between subjectivity and the collective forces that mold human experience. He teaches and practices in New York.