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Notes
notes
A preliminary version of parts of the present article was originally delivered as a paper at the 6th conference of the Society for European Philosophy (University of Essex, 9–11 September 2003). I wish to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewer of a later draft of this article for his comments. I must also thank Michael Lewis for his proofreading.
1 Readers should be reminded here that the notion of the “traversal of the fundamental fantasy” was thematised explicitly by Jacques-Alain Miller's reading of Lacan, and later popularised by Slavoj Žižek. In addition, I also want to specify that, in this paper, I speak of a “final” or “late” Lacan to refer to a loose period of time – which could itself easily be subdivided into other phases – covering Lacan's production from the mid-1960s onwards.
2 See B. Bosteels, “Alain Badiou's Theory of the Subject: The Re-Commencement of Dialectical Materialism,” Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 12–13 (2001–2002) especially 220–29 of volume 12 and 197–208 of volume 13; and S. Žižek, “Foreword to the Second Edition: Enjoyment within the Limits of Reason Alone” in S. Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 2002) especially lxxxi–lxxxviii.
3 Two conclusions could be drawn: 1) there is a tendency to read Žižek more than Lacan; 2) there is a tendency to identify inappropriately Žižek's theses with Lacan's own teachings.
4 For a more recent development of the way in which Žižek has used his new anti-transcendent reading of Lacan in a different context, see The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003) 59–79.
5 See J. Lacan, The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans. D. Porter (London: Routledge, 1992) 243–44. As early as 1956, Lacan notes that psychoanalysis “is to be situated in a tragic tradition” since, by “denying any tendency towards progress,” its “inspiration is fundamentally pessimistic.” Moreover, it is “fundamentally anti-humanist to the extent that there is in humanism this romanticism that would like to make the mind the flower of life”; see J. Lacan, The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955–1956, trans. R. Grigg (London: Routledge, 1993) 243.
6 The Seminar. Book VII 247.
7 Ibid. 247.
8 Ibid. 268. On these issues, see F. Regnault, Conférences d’esthétique lacanienne (Paris: Seuil, 1997) 92.
9 I therefore agree with A. Zupančič, when she claims that “an ethics of the Real is not an ethics oriented towards the Real, but an attempt to rethink ethics by recognizing and acknowledging the dimension of the Real […] as it is already operative” (Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan [London: Verso, 2001] 4, my emphases). However, Zupančič herself progressively parts from this initial programmatic statement and overestimates Lacan's appreciation of and compatibility with Kantian ethics: for Lacan himself, the latter is precisely an ethics towards the Real.
10 M. De Kesel, “An Image, Not an Example: Some Statements on Lacan's Aesthetical Ethics,” unpublished paper.
11 On the object a as “object-cause” of desire, see for example J. Lacan, Le séminaire livre X. L’angoisse, 1962–1963 (Paris: Seuil, 2004) 120.
12 The Seminar. Book VII 187; my trans.
13 On how beauty should be located at the level of the fundamental fantasy, see ibid. 239.
14 Ibid. 248; my trans.
15 Ibid. 249.
16 Ibid. 247.
17 Ibid. 244.
18 Ibid. 286.
19 Commentators fail to acknowledge that, in Seminar VII, Lacan prudently follows Descartes's ethical legacy and repeatedly seems to suggest that he is proposing a provisional ethics, one which is expressed “in the form of a question” (ibid. 109), “in an experimental form” (ibid. 319) and could lead to an “impasse” (ibid. 192). Safouan is therefore perfectly correct when he maintains that, against Lacan's will, the tu ne céderas pas sur ton désir “was soon turned into an imperative” and thus “recuperated by the Super-ego”; see M. Safouan, Lacaniana: Les séminaires de Jacques Lacan, 1953–1963 (Paris: Fayard, 2001) 155. (All translations from French and Italian source materials for which no English translation is currently available are mine.)
20 J. Lacan, The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Vintage, 1998) 276; my emphasis.
21 J. Lacan, Le séminaire livre XXIII. Le sinthome, 1975–1976 (Paris: Seuil, 2005) 138.
22 J. Stevenson, Lars von Trier (London: BFI Publishing, 2002) 118.
23 “The Man Who Would Give Up Control,” interview with L. von Trier by P.O. Knudsen (available on the internet at http://www. geocities. com/lars____von____trier2000/interviews3.html).
24 To avoid any possible misunderstanding by those readers familiar with Lacan's notions of “alienation” and “separation,” as exposed particularly in Seminar XI, I should emphasise how separation is here understood as – in Bruce Fink's formula – “further separation,” i.e., as a second separation that separates the subject from the Symbolic. Strictly speaking, “further separation,” that is, the negative moment of the traversal of the fundamental fantasy, separates the subject precisely from symbolic separation. Conversely, and following Žižek, alienation is here meant to encompass both the specific meaning of alienation (the child's early passive “being spoken” by language) and (the first) separation (the child's active entrance into the Symbolic as an alienated subject).
25 This tragic archetype of idealised woman is confirmed by von Trier's early television adaptation of Medea (1988): his particular emphasis on the heroine as “an individual who is able to decide her destiny, alone” – above all during the infanticide – has caught the attention of some classicists: M. Rubino, for example, describes the film as the “rewriting which in the twentieth century got the closest to the Greek original”; see “Medea di Lars von Trier” in M. Rubino, Medea contemporanea: Lars von Trier, Christa Wolf, scrittori balcanici (Genoa: Darficlet, 2002) especially 40–41.
26 For a Lacanian reading of Tarkovsky's work, see S. Žižek, “The Thing from Inner Space: On Tarkovsky,” Angelaki 4.3 (1999). In a short footnote, Žižek himself briefly indicates how von Trier's Breaking the Waves and Tarkovsky's Sacrifice adopt a similar sacrificial logic.
27 See Lars von Trier 8.
28 “The Thing is not nothing, but literally is not. It is characterized by its absence” (The Seminar. Book VII 63, my emphasis).
29 Žižek is therefore fully entitled to define perversion as “inherent transgression.”
30 Lacan's Antigone does not compromise her desire and thus provides evidence of the Other's lack (of sense). One could easily object that Antigone opposes herself to the Other (Creon) while promoting (the sense of) another Other, Hades, the gods for which her brother has to be buried, etc. However, the fact that Antigone's desire is a desire she advances on behalf of her brother, and of another Other, is not important for Lacan. The radicality of one's desire against the existing Other (Creon) is necessarily related, on the surface, to the desire for some other Other – in this case, “the unwritten laws” that impose the duty of burial. This link is, however, arbitrary since what really matters in the radical character of tragic desire is its underlying identity with a desire for the void. Consequently, Lacan is indirectly supporting the thesis of those scholars who think that “Antigone's deepest motives were purely personal” (see B. Knox's “Introduction” in Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984] 49), and who support this thesis by referring to lines 995–99 of Sophocles’ work where the heroine claims that she would not have done for her children what she did for Polynices: thus she implicitly admits that she was not acting as a champion of the unwritten laws. In parallel, this also means that, in other circumstances, Antigone could easily have defied Creon on behalf of somebody (or something) else.
31 The suicide is a pervert in so far as he acts out his tragic fundamental fantasy. I believe the suicidal act is more appropriately described as an acting out – which, by definition, addresses itself to the big Other – than as a passage à l’acte – which would, on the contrary, entail the real separation that the one who commits suicide does not actually achieve.
32 This is where the ambiguity of Karen's sacrifice lies: initially she might be thought to sacrifice herself against the Other, since she sacrifices herself for the group of “idiots” who are attempting to undermine the existing, hegemonic Other.
33 J. Lacan, Le séminaire livre V. Les formations de l’inconscient, 1957–1958 (Paris: Seuil, 1998) 245.
34 “Alain Badiou's Theory of the Subject,” Pli 13 (2002): 175.
35 Lacan in fact writes that “the hysteric wants a master” (Le séminaire livre XVII. L’envers de la psychanalyse, 1969–1970 [Paris: Seuil, 1991] 150). The hysteric does not want a new master. Indeed, he does not need him, since he knows that there is no master comparable to the omnipotent one that he wants: this is his enjoyment. No master can ever fully master himself.
36 Le séminaire livre XVII 205 and 239 (my emphasis).
37 Žižek uses the notion of the “sacrifice of sacrifice” in a slightly different, less literal way: for him, the sacrifice of sacrifice can in general be equated with the suspension of one's alienation in the Symbolic. While fully endorsing this equation, I nevertheless prefer to take the notion of the “sacrifice of sacrifice” at face value here.
38 “Alain Badiou's Theory of the Subject,” Pli 13 (2002): 206.
39 In Seminar XVII, Lacan makes some astonishing remarks on Maoism, suggesting that it is a political movement which could truly undermine contemporary capitalism – whose discourse resembles that of perversion – in so far as it emphasises the importance of a return to manual knowledge [savoir du manuel]:
-
What strikes me in Maoism is its reference to manual knowledge […] This re-emphasising of the knowledge of the exploited seems to me profoundly motivated in the structure […] In a world in which it is not scientific thought but rather science qua objectification that clearly emerged as a presence – for example, I refer to these things that are entirely moulded by science, simply these little things, these gadgets that occupy the same space as we do – in a world in which this emergence occurred, can the manual know-how still be sufficiently weighty to become a subversive factor? (See Le séminaire livre XVII 174)
40 A perfect exemplification of the fact that the Father is always (or, better, is always thought to be) an obscene jouisseur as well as an agent of prohibition.
41 This is a perfectly Lacanian/Žižekian lesson. Saying “No!” to the Father – opposing the Oedipus with an only supposedly emancipative Anti-Oedipus – is not, in itself, a sufficient guarantee that one will avoid different and more perverse forms of subjection/enslavement.
42 From a Lacanian standpoint, before the resolution of the Oedipus complex, we are dealing with a subject-to-come. Therefore, subjective destitution is strictly speaking valid only after such a resolution.
43 Le séminaire livre V 329.
44 Le séminaire livre X 14. In this sense, the fantasy (qua locus of the subject's desire) is first and foremost a defence against the anxiety unleashed by the Other's desire; see also J. Lacan, Le séminaire livre VI, unpublished, lesson of 12 November 1958.
45 J.-A. Miller, “I sei paradigmi del godimento” in J.-A. Miller, I paradigmi del godimento (Rome: Astrolabio, 2001) 32.
46 Ibid. 31.
47 Ibid. 32.
48 J.-A. Miller, “Préface,” in Joyce avec Lacan, ed. J. Aubert (Paris: Navarin, 1987).
49 “Joyce identifies himself with the individual”; see J. Lacan, “Joyce le symptôme,” in Le séminaire livre XXIII 168.
50 “In formulating this title, Joyce-the-symptom, I give Joyce nothing less than his proper name” (ibid. 162). I have myself discussed Lacan's reading of Joyce in greater depth in “Lacan with Artaud: j’ouïs-sens, jouïs-sans, jouïs-sens,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. S. Žižek (London: Verso, 2006).
51 “Enjoyment within the Limits of Reason Alone” lxvi.
52 Ibid. ciii.
53 S. Žižek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (London: Routledge, 2004) 63.
54 Le séminaire livre XVII 82. One can deduce from this that if only Karen had not gone crazy/committed suicide, she would be a perfect example of such a general equation between the will “to talk rubbish” (i.e., the sinthome), “being disillusioned,” or better, “having one's feet on the ground” (i.e., accepting the inconsistency of the symbolic order), and “adopting a different tone” (i.e., traversing the fundamental fantasy).
55 “The Man Who Would Give Up Control.”
56 One should be reminded here that the same society that promotes this motto is the one that has definitely sanctioned the abnormality of people affected by Down syndrome at the allegedly “real” and irreducible level of genetics! Von Trier perfectly depicts the antinomy according to which, nowadays, in Western society, mentally disabled people are to be treated both as normal, “like us,” and as “never completely like us” in another of his works, the television series The Kingdom (1994). Here, a young couple affected with Down syndrome is relegated to washing dishes in the kitchens of a big hospital (this is the sort of job we give them), while a prestigious, lucid pathologist works out a plan to self-transplant a liver with cancer so that it becomes his own and he can study it in peace. While washing dishes, the disabled couple does something else: it functions as a sort of “inner” voice-over in the film, the couple tells the truth about what is really happening in the hospital. In this sense, one could argue that von Trier associates an ancient conception of mental abnormality according to which “madmen are not human beings, therefore they tell the truth” with a contemporary one according to which “mentally disabled people are like us, therefore they should be allowed to work, but it is better to keep them hidden away in the kitchens.”
57 At least in so far as lack is by definition a form of dis-ability, and, following a truly Lacanian legacy, man is first of all the product of a contingently successful form of dis-adaptation.