Too Muchness, the Surplus of Immanence, Manatheism

Abstract

This paper tries to provide some clues and red threads through the magisterial work of Eric Santner. The first part takes the point of departure in his book on Schreber (My Own Private Germany) and tries to lay down a basic narrative that subtends most of Santner’s work and can be encapsulated by “the secret history of modernity.” This narrative is briefly spelled out through the relationship of Schreber the father (the “surplus father” as the continuation of the enlightenment), Doctor Flechsig (the seminal representative of the modern university discourse), and Schreber the son, the embodiment of the symptom of the progress of modernity. The second part of the paper scrutinizes three interrelated concepts proposed by Santner, too muchness, the surplus of immanence, and manatheism, which provide conceptual tools to address the break of modernity. The three concepts are brought into relation with the historical placement of psychoanalysis in modernity, the dialectic of “what remains” and the emergence of the new, and finally with the nature of the exception pertaining to the notion of the surplus. The last part, “the punning of reason,” examines Santner’s frequent use of puns (“puncepts”) as a conceptual strategy to deal with the paradoxes of universality. Punning is taken not as an addition or embellishment but as a poignant way to propose a new status of universality, related to what Lacan named lalangue. The three different perspectives try to show the different ways by which Santner’s work addresses the core conundrums of modernity.

Keywords:

• modernity
• Schreber
• surplus enjoyment
• manatheism
• puncept

I introduction

I cannot but start on a personal note, faced with an impossible task to write about Eric Santner, my close and esteemed friend, in a dispassionate manner of the academic discourse. I must state this in advance. I met Eric in Princeton, while he was still teaching there in the mid-1990s, and this was an instant friendship, a friendship that would be spinning out over the next almost three decades now, with a passionate exchange and intense collaboration. When we met it turned out that by sheer coincidence I was at the time editing a volume on the Schreber case in Slovene, and Eric excitedly told me that he had just finished a manuscript on the case, something he had been working on for years. He was most generously willing to share it with me, and upon my return I immediately decided to have two sections translated for the Slovene edited collection which was underway. So it happened that a part of the book was first published in 1995 in Slovene, almost a year before the official publication with Princeton UP in 1996. This anecdote obliquely indicates how Eric’s encounter with the “Ljubljana thing” became formative for him and for us, Ljubljana stealing a march on Princeton, as it were, adding a moment of precipitation and advance, and finding an audience, creating an audience for him before the American big Other could take note of it. It was since that occasion that Eric was considered to be an honorary member of what was then starting to be known as the “Ljubljana school.” He was, and continues to be, “the plus one,” in Lacanian parlance, and it’s “the plus one” that makes the group; or “the odd one in,” to use the apposite title of Alenka Zupančič’s book on comedy (2008). Using it apropos Eric indicates in an oblique way that our collaboration with him was happily placed under the sign of comedy. There was a lot of laughing together underlying our engagement in theory, Eric is a great laugher, and laughing together should perhaps be seen as the most serious theoretical activity there is.

II

Given this coincidental short circuit concerning the Schreber case it is perhaps suitable that I briefly take an entry point from this angle. Santner’s engagement with Schreber in his truly magnificent book, My Own Private Germany, exposes perhaps in the simplest terms the tenets of the central plot underlying all his work: the “secret history of modernity,” as the subtitle goes, concerning the subject of modernity and its coterminous subject matter. The initial cast is minimal, this is a very reduced plot: there is Schreber the father and Schreber the son, and the transition from the one to the other is profoundly symptomatic of the break of modernity, it encapsulates it in a most singular nutshell which is at the same time a most salient indication of a universal plot, a peculiar subplot of universality itself, as if its excrescence, its cancer-like metastasis.

First, Schreber the father was by his self-description the man of the enlightenment, he proudly quoted Kant’s sapere aude, the great slogan of the enlightenment, as his own adage in the introduction to his book, the book dealing with, of all things, medical indoor gymnastics (1855),¹ the book that would become a bestseller for the following decades. The practical advice he gives in this book, concerning the bodily and spiritual health and happiness (and what a grotesque array of advice), is presented as the direct consequence and the realization of the program of the enlightenment, its translation into (bodily) practice, put to practical use for the general advancement, both individual and social, at the reach of everyone, in order to attain autonomy. There is quite literally the bodily discipline that figures as the means of transition from parental heteronomy to autonomy. The noble ideas of reason and autonomy, social care and progress, are proclaimed, but just a bit off, quite a bit off, turning into aggression and torture, as if on a Moebius strip, the seemingly beneficial on the same surface with the pernicious. Here we have the enlightener as the severe father, the excessive father, the surplus father – an excellent concept proposed by Santner, which can be extended to “surplus enlightenment.” Lacan proposed the adage “Kant avec Sade,” but one should add “Kant avec Schreber.” In both cases there is a libidinal economy, an economy of jouissance, that comes to supplement the enlightenment reason in its claim to universality.

Second, there is a trajectory, or rather a necessary implication leading from the father to the son. There is but a short step from the excess of the enlightenment project that the father translated into practical seemingly laudable material and social guidelines, to the son’s flamboyant delusion that everybody shied away from in horror. There is but a step between the excessive father, the surplus father, the grotesque father, the excruciating caricature of paternal authority, its last avatar, its swan song, to the delusional system of the son. This system is built upon the figures and the mechanisms which stand in maximal opposition to this surplus father, most conspicuously with the son’s metamorphosis into a woman, and the figure of a castrated wandering Jew, with all the flashy fantasies of the Jewish effeminacy, the couvade, even menstruation, which the last part of Santner’s book exposes and explores. And there is the God that, as opposed to the surplus-father’s prohibitions and regulations, actually commands, demands that the son adopt the posture of feminine jouissance; and even more, to be the woman who may conceive with God a new humanity. The very short step from the father to the son implies the direct transition from the prohibiting controlling father, a travesty of the premodern authority, to the injunction of the superego. Schreber’s God is like the figure of the superegoic command of jouissance, with all its utter ambiguity, for God is at the same time an egoist treating him with utmost cruelty.² This step is like a direct illustration of Lacan’s adage père ou pire, father or worse, with a vengeance – paternal authority was bad enough, but we are heading for worse. Père ou pire, an excellent pun in French, can be read as Lacan’s briefest diagnosis of modernity – the decline of the paternal authority yielding not some happy liberation and emancipation, but another kind of intractable authority, and it seems that the Schreber case is its showcase, where the surplus father figures as the symptom of the decline of the father and the paternal authority, its swan song turned grotesque, its point of linkage with the advent of the modern version of the superego.³

Third, there is another aspect, this is not a cast with two characters, there is an essential third, Dr Paul Emil Flechsig, massively present through the Memoires and adamantly presented, by Schreber the son, as the major cause of the degeneration of the world order. Flechsig, too, is the surplus father, but with a difference – if Schreber the father appears as a caricature figure with his Zimmergymnastik, the orthopedic devices, Kallipedia and Schreber gardens, then Flechsig is the surplus father supported by academic credentials, by scientific publications, actually one of the founders of what would develop into the modern neurosciences and the general spread of cognitive science – he, too, appears as the founding father (one of the founders) of a huge success story, something that became globally spread and indeed nowadays presents a major alternative to psychoanalysis. (Strange thought, the two Schrebers’ father figures becoming the founders of the global spread of, well, fitness and neuroscience, their soul is marching on.) One needn’t look far, the titles may suffice: there is Flechsig’s monography Gehirn und Seele / Brain and Soul (1894), and the title of his inaugural lecture Die körperliche Grundlagen der Geistesstörungen / The Physical Bases of Mental Disturbances (1882). The titles already spell out the program, which is yet again the extension of the enlightenment materialist program: to establish physical causality for the soul, to reduce the mind to the workings of the body, to find the material substratum for the soul, to account for the spiritual and the ideal by scientific means and methods, experiment and verification. “In one fell swoop, through Flechsig’s nomination, the tradition of the soul ended and the reign of the brain began” (Lothane, qtd in Santner, My Own Private Germany 70). Perhaps too much attention has been paid to Schreber the father, and not enough to Flechsig’s program of “psychophysics,” the neuro-anatomical paradigm, “the radical medicalization of all disturbances of the ‘soul,’ their ultimate reduction to the anomalies of the hard wiring of the brain” (74), the quite literal “soul murder” in the name of science. Hence Santner’s conclusion: “Flechsig’s brain science is the theory and Schreber’s delusions are the practice of the same traumatic collapse of the symbolic dimension of subjectivity” (75). The reduction of the psychic to the natural causality stands in sharp contrast to what Lacan called “the limping cause,” la cause qui cloche.

Flechsig himself described his endeavor as an attempt at “the localization of the crucial categories of Kant’s transcendental idealism in the frontal lobe of the brain” (Santner, My Own Private Germany 71). Both fathers refer to Kant, one to sapere aude, the battle cry of the enlightenment, the other extending the courage to know to the material localization of knowledge itself, as epitomized by nothing less than Kant’s categories, so that the a priori should meet the brain, with the implication of the brain becoming henceforward the material a priori of spirit and ideas in the new age of science. But this brings Flechsig into a strange vicinity of Franz Joseph Gall, the notorious founder of phrenology, indeed the first scientific attempt at localization of the functions of the mind, the one who provided the prompt for Hegel’s notorious infinite judgment, “the spirit is a bone.” Gall was a very respected anatomist and physiologist in his day, he too understood his mission as the extension of the enlightenment project, indeed he ran into trouble during the restauration because of his adherence to the enlightenment ideas and ideals (and eventually died in poverty in 1828).⁴ But if Gall’s ideas were soon ridiculed, given his excessive and hasty zeal, if phrenology turned into a monster science, the scarecrow of false science (or at best as an infant disease of science), then by the end of the century its idea got gentrified and acquired credibility with the serious attempts at localization by Phillipe Broca etc., so Flechsig appeared as the esteemed torchbearer at the forefront of scientific progress. The madness was exorcized, but there was its drastic and immediate return, with Schreber’s delusions taking Flechsig’s science of the soul and the body a bit too literally.

Finally, the question of sovereignty and the transformation of its status is immediately linked to this. What Santner describes as the crisis of investiture – and this was the triggering instance of Schreber’s delusions – pertains precisely to this moment of the decline of the master’s discourse, and the beginning of its afterlife, its haunting. (“Schreber’s mana-ical busyness was […] a response to the emergency that the big Other wasn’t working, circumstances that made normative, that transformed into office or duty, an otherwise exceptional state of jouissance” (Santner, “Rebranding” 59).) This coincides with the transition between two regimes, from what Lacan called the discourse of the master to the discourse of university, with Flechsig as the model of the university discourse. This shift implied a different mode of justification of authority, now supposedly relying on knowledge, reasons, and arguments, doing away with transcendence, yet Schreber immediately and drastically embodied its symptom, precisely at the point of investiture. Let me stop here with Schreber, a brief reminder of Santner’s laying out the parameters of the basic narrative underlying all his work.

III

I would like to approach Santner’s work through three interrelated concepts indicated in the title. First here is the quote that can serve as the simple and apposite shorthand to indicate what psychoanalysis is about:

Psychoanalysis differs from other approaches to human being by attending to the constitutive “too muchness” that characterizes the psyche; the human mind is, we might say, defined by the fact that it includes more reality than it can contain, is the bearer of an excess, a too much of pressure that is not merely physiological. The various ways in which this “too much,” this surplus life of the human subject, seeks release or discharge in the “psychopathology of everyday life” continues to form the central focus of Freudian theory and practice. (Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life 8)

A bit later in the book he expounds this further:

There is, in the Freudian view, something about mindedness itself that is “mindless,” nonteleological, that cannot be captured by our normal understanding of what meaningful, purposeful behavior is like. The persistence of mindlessness immanent to mindedness […] is what Lacan ultimately means by jouissance. (28–29)

First there is the very general point that psychoanalysis centrally deals with the problem of a surplus, a “too muchness” that one cannot come to terms with, as opposed to the view that psychoanalysis is ultimately an ontology of the lack – the lack as the fate and the premise of desire (endlessly pushed by a lack that can never be filled), the lack as defining the very position of the subject, the lack in the Other, the lack of the Other as the insight that the psychoanalytic process is ultimately aiming at; the very notion of castration as the negative cut, where the cut in the body meets the negativity of the symbolic. Ultimately, there is the claim of an ontological minus, the “minus one” preceding any positive entities, the negative entity that functions as their “condition of possibility,” as it were.⁵ Tellingly, the Lacanian organization (founded by Todd McGowan & Co. in 2015) is called LACK, as the signature emblem of what the Lacanian thing is supposed to stand for. Inspired by Santner’s knack for puns one can propose Lackan; and instead of Lacanians one can propose Lacunians.⁶

A lot of criticism of psychoanalysis was aimed at the centrality of the lack, the supposed inveterate “negative ontology.” Most famously, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus harshly opposed the notion of desire conditioned by lack, and promoted desire as a productive force, an overflow; Foucault reducing psychoanalysis to the drama of lack and desire; and a lot of variations followed. To be sure, one can find ample evidence in Lacan to support this, particularly in his early days and particularly under the strong influence of Kojève.

Santner doesn’t subscribe to this view, his Lacan is not Lackan, but rather the Lacan of the surplus, the overkill of jouissance. It’s not that the talk about lack, the void, the incidence of negativity, castration, etc. is wrong – Santner proposed the concept of negative anthropology to deal with it. It’s rather that one cannot possibly stop there if one wants to envisage the central tenet of psychoanalysis, which is the insight that the lack doesn’t oppose jouissance but conditions it. The trouble with the signifying cut is not the lack, but that it produces a surplus that has no proper place and cannot be brought to a balance or a homeostasis, something that cannot be properly allotted and evenly distributed. Jouissance is precisely what is beyond the pleasure principle, the too muchness that the human psyche cannot deal with – ultimately this is why we need psychoanalysis as the science of the surplus. It’s not the lack of enjoyment that pushes people to psychoanalysis, but rather its overflow that they cannot be rid of – and this is what is called the symptom, the fact that one cannot enjoy the way one would want to, it enjoys at our expense. The basic tenet is that the symbolic cut, the negative cut (what Santner calls the signifying stress), the minus, coincides with the production of “too muchness” as its flip side, hence jouissance is always surplus jouissance. And if there is a constitutive “too muchness” that characterizes the human psyche, then one further consequence could be formulated like this: there is a constant state of exception that haunts the psyche. The unconscious, repression, drive, sexuality, are always subject to the state of exception. There is ultimately no psyche without the state of emergency as the inherent prospect. This raises the question of the task and function of psychoanalysis: does it strive for pacification of this state, bringing it back to “normal,” or does it rather use it as a lever of the transformation of the “normal”? One can conceive the whole history of psychoanalysis as suspended between these two alternatives.

The quote raises the question of what one could call the history of the unconscious, or its aptitude to historical shifts. How can the pan-historical have a history? Speaking of the “constitutive too muchness” implies that it pertains to the very constitution of the psyche, that it’s synonymous with it and has been there since time immemorial, since the emergence of language, defining the human as such. But how did “the secret history of modernity” affect this too muchness, this state of exception? Has the “too muchness” taken a different turn once we have experienced this modern shift, with the decline of sovereignty, the demise of (paternal) authority, the crisis of investiture, the “royal remains” haunting modernity – how has all this affected too muchness? Is there more too muchness around?

I think that the solution to this may be sought in the direction of “the historical turn of the pan-historical.” The invention of psychoanalysis is itself profoundly linked with the historic moment of modernity, and it is only from this historic vantage point that it could discover the pan-historic structure. It may have existed since ever (like the unconscious), defining the human, but it is only at this particular juncture, in this moment of crisis that its discovery could be made.⁷ It is only with the downfall of the master that the nature of the master could be tackled; the nature of sovereignty could only be properly addressed after its decline. This is what Lacan’s formula père ou pire points at – one can only grasp père on the basis of pire. And to propose another formula: if the surplus spells a state of exception, from the outset, then the turn of modernity brought this state of exception to a state of exception. The universal structure can be unraveled only from a particular historical juncture, and is conditioned by it in its very universality.⁸ The unconscious, in its existence “since ever,” could be discovered only at this moment of crisis.

A number of Santner’s other concepts point to this connection between surplus and the crisis of modernity, such as “the surplus of immanence,” “the royal remains,” “creatureliness,” and finally “the flesh.” Here are some quotes, chosen a bit at random, they could be easily multiplied. In the book On Creaturely Life (2006):

To bring it to a formula, creaturely life is just life abandoned to the state of exception/emergency, that paradoxical domain in which law has been suspended in the name of preserving law […] what is included in the state of exception is not simply outside the law but inside an outlaw dimension internal to the law, subject not to law but rather to sovereign jouissance. (22)

It is the excess of pressure that emerges at such sites – really a kind of life in excess both of our merely biological life and of our life in the space of meaning – that I am calling creaturely.⁹ (34)

The internal connection of the state of exception with the emergence of creatureliness as the underside of modernity marks its proper object, its internal excess, irreducible both to the symbolic and the physiological life – a surplus that can be pursued both through psychoanalysis as the “science” of this excess and through the contemporary literary endeavors from Rilke and Kafka to Beckett.

In The Royal Remains (2011), Santner uses the reflexive formula of “too muchness of too muchness,” although in a particular context of the racial policy of the Nazi movement (and linking it back to Schreber):

genocide, the elimination of precisely what represents a too much of too much, that purulent flesh that […] Judge Schreber imagined himself to have been singled out to embody and enjoy.¹⁰ (28)

“Too muchness” as the constitutive dimension (of human psyche) vs. “too much of too much,” which enabled this dimension to come to the fore and be brought to concept. The larger context involves the modern shift of the political paradigm from transcendence to immanence, from the royal sovereignty to the sovereignty of the people, the people’s two bodies and the royal remains, after the demise of the royal, the downfall of the big Other:

Because modern biopolitics is, in essence, a politics of pure immanence, it has no means to address the dimension of the flesh in its spectral yet visceral insistence, as the locus of what I have characterized as a surplus of immanence. (61)

One of the central problems for modernity is to learn how to track the vicissitudes of these royal remains in their now-dispersed and ostensibly secularized, disenchanted locations. (245)

The quotes can be multiplied, they all spell out the “same” basic plot, the “secret history” of modernity accompanying the official narrative of the progress (of reason, science, autonomy, democracy, knowledge, technology, etc.), its “foundational narrative” precisely in its lack of any transcendent, and transcendental, foundation. Although the basic structural determinants of this plot persist through its many variations and (always displaced) manifestations, the plot, in Santner’s hands, nevertheless shows ever new and unexpected facets, it gets more complex with the evolvement of his work – the plot thickens.

I have two general comments to add to this narrative, footnotes really, one on repression and one on exception. One could take the formula “the royal remains” as a version of the return of the repressed. Modernity has done away with the Master based on transcendence (or on the alleged natural order of hierarchy), but this doing away turned out to be an instance of repression, and the mechanism of the return of the repressed saw to it that the royal remains came back with a vengeance, and the repressed/suppressed transcendence took its revenge as the surplus of immanence. The superseded old premodern figures have the nasty tendency to surreptitiously come back in disguise. Once there was sovereignty, based on transcendence, now it has been discarded but keeps coming back. Once there was the “proper” father/master, the era when he ruled supreme, but after his demise he keeps coming back in a different veneer, the haunting of the old that cannot be laid to rest.¹¹ What I am concerned with is the “remains” part – and I am not contesting it, there is indeed something that remains, but it has to be supplemented by the insight that there is no coming back of the old. What remains is inherently the product of modernity, it doesn’t remain due to its inertia or obduracy or recalcitrance, it is a “new” surplus produced by the cut. Its air of the “old” coming back is a lure. And one can quickly see this verge between the return of the old and the novelty of it in the fate of modernism, which can be conceived as a movement that seized the surplus of immanence, creatureliness, the flesh, etc., as an opening to the new – unprecedented new forms of art, proposing also new forms of life (an opening to what Santner calls “in the midst of life”). The remaining of the old, its seeming return, is at the same time an opening to the new. On the one hand it produces a new logic of power (of the state of exception, of superego in the place of the downfall of paternal authority, etc.), but on the other it presents an opening and a promise – something that in Santner’s work could be called the prospect of a non-theological and non-teleological redemption. There is the essential ambiguity of what remains – it has the tendency of le mort saisit le vif, the dead seizes (gets hold of) the living (and this is the French phrase that Marx used apropos the capital, its shorthand), the tentacles of the past taking on new disguises that we cannot escape; and on the flip side there the promise of the new, an unexpected opening in the very closure.¹²

My second comment concerns the status of exception in relation to the nature of universality. Every sovereignty is obviously based on exception, the sovereign standing opposed the people, nation, country, multitude which it totalizes and unifies. With the sovereignty of the people the exception is done away with, but only by being incorporated and universalized – but what then happens to universality? That could be another tentative definition of modernity: the universalization of exception, but which necessarily runs into the failed universalization of exception, for there is no way that what previously belonged to the sovereign exception can now be evenly and universally distributed, without a rest – but this rest is precisely the substance of the surplus of immanence which haunts the modern ways of sovereignty.

This universalization of exception is nowhere to be seen more clearly than with Santner’s truly brilliant concept of manatheism (the last concept on my makeshift list), with its derivatives mana-facturing, mana-gement, mana-ical, mana-festation, etc. The signifier mana, introduced in the 1880s in anthropology, triggered the whole wave of what William Mazzarella (2017) called “the mana moment,” a period stretching roughly from 1880 to 1930, when it was used and developed by Marcel Mauss, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Freud, and a host of others. Mana was introduced precisely as the signifier in the position of exception, this is what defines it, for if all signifiers refer to signifieds, then there is one – there has to be one – that presents an exception, the signifier without a signified, what Lévi-Strauss would later call “the floating signifier.” Mana presents exception par excellence by being an empty signifier that could mean “everything and nothing,” an undefinable surplus that can be natural and supernatural, a noun, an adjective, a verb, a substance, a quality, or a relation. Lévi-Strauss famously argued that this surplus signifier is structurally necessary in the process of signification¹³ and proposed a purely formal definition of it, based solely on the logic of signification. Yet at the same time mana also presented the locus of surplus animation, of magic, a mystical source of efficiency, causing “collective effervescence” (Durkheim), a source of energy, thus implying precisely surplus jouissance. A surplus signifier meets surplus jouissance, the lack of meaning coincides with the source of surplus power, energy and animation – Lévi-Strauss’s reflections on mana served as the major source of what Lacan would later call S1, the master signifier, a structurally necessary exception, and it is this structurally necessary exception that for Lacan conditions the discourse of the master, the basic type of social bond. I am cutting a very long story very short, all this is well known.

Now the whole point of Santner’s concept of manatheism (and concomitant terms) is that it is precisely this “model” exception that got universalized (and thereby becomes unmanageable), and that mana, once the place of exception that conditioned signification, domination, and cult (magic etc.), now became the common condition of capitalism, something that pertains to the very notion of commodity production and redoubles it, as it were; it is what produces “commodity’s two bodies.” Here are some quotes:

Marx’s fundamental insight was that capitalism was, in effect, a manatheistic cult, one in which the manufacture of objects of use – production of use values – was always redoubled by the activity of mana-facture, the production of the gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit of Value proper, the magical stuff that ultimately dominates the lives of its officiant producers. (Mazzarella et al. 11)

If capitalism is, as Benjamin suggested, to be grasped as a religion, we should characterize it as a manatheistic one. Accordingly, Marx’s labor theory of value should be grasped not as a theory of work […], but rather of the processes of mana-facturing that officiantly produce the subtle matter […] (Santner, “Rebranding” 42)

[The shift in the locus of sovereignty] injects the royal remains of the King’s Two Bodies into the life of the People, thereby transforming the sovereign’s mana into every body’s business. Under conditions of capitalist modernity, we have all become “mana workers,” and the mana-facturing busyness goes on 24/7. (57)

Biopolitics and neoliberal political economy are two aspects of a life essentially devoted to various forms of mana-facturing. (66)

Quotes could again be multiplied. Mana can be further tied to the doxological practice, liturgical labor, production of glory, in the footsteps of Agamben, all of them following the same basic mechanism of universalizing the exception, by which the secular becomes the very space of the emptied out sacred. What I am interested in is, first, in what way this shift concerns and transforms the nature of universality itself. It seems that the universalization of exception makes the whole ungraspable, intractable, expanding in all directions, mana unlimited. And second, this is in resonance with, or rather a counterpart to, the nature of jouissance, namely that it is something “by definition” non-universalizable, non-substantializable. It’s an entity impossible to delimit. “Surplus” may be the term which designates precisely this recurrent emergence of something which has no assigned place of exception. So speaking of mana-theism, mana-facture, etc., along with a number of other concepts with which one tries to grasp capitalism, they all have the paradoxical nature of universalizing the non-universalizable, or more precisely universalizing the very condition of universalization and thereby losing the foothold of universality.¹⁴ They point at something that cannot quite acquire the status of the “classical” concept – what would be the best strategy to grasp it?

IV

My last section could be entitled the punning of reason. Anyone who has read Santner’s work will immediately agree that he is a great punner, a master punner. The puns are all over, but let’s stay with manatheism, mana-facture, and officiancy as perhaps the ones most to the point (one can add jewssance, sphinxter, encystance, and lots more). So let me take this not as a distraction, a sideshow, a decorative embellishment, amusing additions to the tough business of theory, but as a conceptual strategy. As opposed to concept we can propose a new entity puncept – I thought I invented a new term, to capture Santner’s approach, but as I quickly found out the term was proposed by Gregory Ulmer already in the 1980s.¹⁵

In the beginning of his last book, Untying Things Together, Santner admits his utter embarrassment when asked about his method. Trying to find some response he speaks about

my tendency to “distort” [concepts] by incorporating them (parts of them), often through a play on words, into neologisms, each of which thereby takes on the aspect of a disjunctive Aufhebung, one that displays the relative autonomy of its parts. (Santner, Untying Things vii)

He furthermore proposes “the dreamwork of the concept” (x), all of which may sound rather suspicious to the proponents of strict methods. But why not propose puncepts as a method?

Puns are not to be taken lightly, the stakes are high, they were never just playful additions but implied ontological consequences. There is an alternative history of philosophy to be written through this spyglass (a task undertaken by the impressive work of Barbara Cassin). Witness the very beginning of philosophy with the battle launched against sophistry, a movement promoting (among other things) plays on words, puns, logical conundrums, short circuits, equivocations, homonymies, polysemy, etc., thereby threatening to undermine the authority of logos at the very outset. There would be no history of philosophy (not as we know it) without Socrates’s, Plato’s, and Aristotle’s campaign against sophists. Witness the resuming of this campaign in the age of the enlightenment where “the punning of reason” was yet again seen as a perilous menace.¹⁶ Witness, last but not least, Lacan, who couldn’t write a page without multiple puns, and who invented the concept, the puncept, of lalangue as the fundamental dimension of language, marking its “necessity of contingency,” as it were: the propensity of language (la langue) to chance encounters which constantly displace and undermine the differential rules that enable the production of meaning. No wonder that Lacan was a great admirer of James Joyce, who demonstrated a spectacular use of punning as royal road to modernism.¹⁷

One could call this alternative history of philosophy “concepts and their relation to the unconscious,” following Freud – aiming at an overlap of concepts and jokes. Puns are based on homonymy, the contingent encounters of sounds (as opposed to the pursuit of unitary meaning in synonymy), and one should keep in mind that homonymy is the very condition of the unconscious. If the unconscious is structured like a language, then as the propensity of language to punning rather than to making sense – and if puns do make sense, they make precisely a surplus sense which immediately points to, and embodies, the contingency at the bottom of making sense, the abyss of nonsense against which it is raised. Punning has a close relation with the work of the unconscious, premised on short circuits from which meaning is produced, hence Santner’s formula of “the dreamwork of concepts” provides a most valuable guideline.

The advantage of puncepts, regarding our problem of how to tackle the paradoxical status of universality, is that a puncept is a short circuit which turns the exception into the lever of the universal, a speculative resource. Pun is based on a chance find, a contingent exception to a rule but which, by undermining the rule, opens a different prospect of universality. Punning as a conscious endeavor¹⁸ has its ally in the unconscious, and according to Freud’s basic tenet, well, the unconscious thinks. The philosophical campaign against punning was perhaps always aimed at the scandal of an erratic thought that inhabits and fuels the unconscious.

Here is a telling quote from Alenka Zupančič’s recent book on Antigone (the book that Santner extensively engaged with):

Here [with lalangue] language functions and, paradoxically, also makes sense not through purely differential structure but through contamination, contagion, coincidence, short-circuiting, through impossible “incestuous” liaisons between words or sounds – incestuous because they ignore the law of the difference. So we could say, in language there are only differences [Saussure etc.], except that there is also incest. This is perhaps how the Freudian contribution to linguistics could be summed up. (62)

So here we have it: puns and puncepts are like the incest in language, and philosophy was premised on the prohibition of incest, that is, an imposition of univocity, of concepts designating ideas, meanings, entities, referents, whereas puns look like a permanent threat of sabotage, of undermining logos. If this comparison with incest seems extreme, then here is another one, coming from a different illustrious quarter, by Barbara Cassin:

Briefly, the prohibition of homonymy […] remains up to the present times, just as at the time of establishing the principle of non-contradiction, the equivalent in the sphere of language of the prohibition of incest, and it raises the claim to the universal trait of structure. (132)

Puncept as an infringement against the prohibition of incest? Going hand in hand with the infringement against the principle of non-contradiction as the founding principle of philosophy? The stakes are high. But of course one can and should also appreciate the dangers of adopting this way, the dangers lurking from the times of sophists to the postmodern vogue, namely that the very necessary questioning of logos and the project of establishing a different kind of universality can run out into a pandemic of punning, a pundemic where puns easily proliferate, every pun breeding more puns, stretching into bad infinity, so that the cutting edge of punning is blunted and watered down.

I would like to see Santner’s endeavor in this light: to restore the ontological ambition of punning as a method. It is perhaps strange to take “the punning of reason” as the way to characterize his method, to take the accidental as a central property, but maybe this side perspective, this “looking awry” at universality itself,¹⁹ nevertheless does justice to it. The new take on reason is based on the exception (the chance encounter) turned into a lever of universality, a speculative resource – to counter the surplus jouissance which binds us in its mana-ical circuit, and hopefully to make a difference that would make a difference – or in Lacanian terms, the capacity to bring punning to a matheme.

Too muchness, the surplus of immanence, manatheism, they all spell out the secret history of modernity, its underside. The three concepts seem to imply the gloomy predicament that we are stuck with, and the enormous odds to break this spell – but this is not Santner’s ultimate message. His message, as I see it, takes its support in the utter ambiguity of this underside, where the utter closure presents an opening, a possibility of undoing the glue of jouissance and the prospect to step in “the midst of life” – in the bosom of the very same conundrum.

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Notes

1 The inimitable title in German runs Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik oder System der ohne Gerät und Beistand überall ausführbaren heilgymnastischen Freiübungen als Mittel der Gesundheit und Lebenstüchtigkeit für beide Geschlechter, jedes Alter und alle Gebrauchszwecke, 1855, with innumerable reprints.

2 “These egoistic actions have been practiced against me for years with the utmost cruelty and disregard as only a beast deals with its prey” (qtd in Santner, My Own Private Germany 96).

3 Couldn’t Schreber the father be seen as the founding father of the whole fitness business, the universalized Zimmergymnastik? The promotion of a healthy life, workout, jogging, gym, healthy food, fresh air, exercise, spiritual growth, personality building, self-help – didn’t he win after all? Didn’t his suggestions get a global hearing and a global reach? There is no doubt that these measures are indeed good for your health, but the trouble is that there is a Schreberian tacit agenda attached to them, one cannot quite disentangle them from the hidden surplus.

4 For the context, cf. Lantéri-Laura.

5 This is what Freud’s term Urverdrängung refers to, the primary repression preceding all others.

6 I must recall the always excellent Charles Bernstein and his poem “The Twelve Tribes of Dr Lacan,” with its high artifice of punning (52).

7 In a paper on the uncanny, published thirty years ago (October, vol. 58, Autumn 1991), I tried to argue in a similar vein that the dimension of the uncanny (the focus of Freud’s paper in 1919) has existed (insisted?) since ever, but could only come to the fore with the turn of modernity. In premodern times it was assigned a place and codified within the parameters of the sacred and of transcendence, while with the modern turn it became unplaceable and hence haunting. Freud’s own examples (Hoffmann’s Sandman, the doppelganger, extended by Frankenstein) stem from the particular period of the aftermath of the French revolution, they are historically conditioned and belong to an “ontological opening” of modernity.

8 This is what the Althusserian concept of overdetermination aimed at: the universality is overdetermined by a historic juncture in its very pan-historic validity.

9 “What is more than life turns out to be […] immanent to and constitutive of life itself. Freud and Rosenzweig are […] among our most important thinkers of this immanent transcendence” (Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life 10).

10 “[W]hat Schreber was onto – or perhaps better, what was onto him – was precisely the sort of surplus of immanence we have been tracking” (Santner, Royal Remains 82).

11 This is of course a grossly simplified version, and I can here only add a caveat concerning the retroactive myth of the premodern as an era of the unalloyed sovereignty (along with metaphysics, mimesis, etc.), a myth that we need as a springboard in order to construct our narrative of modernity.

12 Cf. Kafka’s dog founding a new science, the science of freedom, on the last page of “Investigations of a Dog,” the short story that Santner recently amply commented on.

13 “In the system of symbols which makes up any cosmology, it would just be a zero symbolic value, that is, a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified already contains […]” (Lévi-Strauss 59).

14 They share some structural properties with what Lacan called le pas-tout, the non-all. In Lacan the non-all presents the possibility of another entry into “the universal” that would escape the classical universality and its traps. Yet, it comes with its own traps and dangers, which can bring it into the vicinity of what Hegel called the bad infinity, from which it should be sharply delimited. But maybe capitalism is but a machinery of bad infinity infinitized?

15 For example, “The puncept […] is not a gathering or collecting of properties, as in the concept, but a scattering, a dissemination, a throwing of dice” (Ulmer 188). It comes as no surprise that Ulmer is a Derridean, but punning as a strategy is of course much wider.

16 In 1714, an anonymous pamphlet was published entitled God’s Revenge Against Punning, Shewing the Miserable Fates of Persons Addicted to This Crying Sin, in Court and Town, where the author drew comparisons between punning, the Black Death, and the Great Fire of London – punning having comparingly devastating effects. The one who responded to this challenge was no other than Jonathan Swift, with the pamphlet A Modest Defence of Punning: or a compleat Answer to a scandalous and malicious Paper called God’s Revenge Against Punning, published in 1716 (for all this, cf. Pollack 78–80).

17 But here is also his minimalist counterpart Beckett in Murphy: “In the beginning was the pun. And so on” (41).

18 But is it simply conscious? It requires at least a different kind of attention, a distracted attention that cannot be quite intentionally steered.

19 “Looking awry” stems from Richard II, a quote Santner often used.