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As a faithful reader of ‘The Symptom’ and a doctoral candidate in American literature, I was delighted by the title of Kostelanetz’s piece. Thus, upon reading the piece in full, I was that much more disappointed. Though the essay is often quite funny and make several pertinent observations about the so-called ‘tenured class’ it remains woefully annecdotal about just what it is that constitues this class.
My 3 interventions:
1. Class as a concept is not easily or finally measured by monetary/economic power.
Kostelanetz claims that it isn’t money that constitutes this class, per se. That is, tenured academics don’t compete for money so much as they do for the accumulation of institutional power. Yet, this class is not merely constituted by the distance between what it thinks of itself and what the non-tenured class(es) think of it. Let’s not forget, that in good old fashioned Marxist terms, we are talking about the site for knowledge production. The production of knowledge requires the interlocking mechanisims of several classes, working across and within several contradictory moments in the institutional space of the university. By refocusing, not on class identity, but on the way the class itself collectively reproduces the university as a matrix of power, one can arrive at a much more rigourously theorized picture of the production of knowledge as it pertains to the modern university.
For instance class struggle in the university is in no way limited to academics, tenured or otherwise. The vast institutional system of the university is itself constituted by many different classes (and again, in good old fashioned Marxist terms , one should never confuse class with mere monetary wealth-this idea is itself a figment of bourgeois fantasy). A graduate student makes far, far less than most entry level staff and often times less than custodial staff. Yet, the university system itself encourages young academics to adopt the strategy of accumulating ‘cultural capital’ in leu of capital–hence, the vast never ending cocktail party chatter that constitutes most everyday interactions between academics (especially graduate students). The fascinating thing about this interpollation is that, rather than advocating across class boundaries (say, graduate students organizing with custodial staff and administrative staff), one instead gets class fantasy. Thus, tenure is not just a licence to say things that are ’stupid’ (to use Kostenlanetz’s phrase)- tenure is the process by which the academic class as a whole constitutes itself and brackets itself off from other classes. To be sure, my assertion is damnably under theorized, but I think it offers a way to avoid the trap of reading the academic class merely in itself, as I argue Kostenlanetz does.
2. What we really need is a more sophisticated account of how tenue, at the university level, works in favor of existing systems of governance under a neo-liberal state.
I am very much sympathetic to Kostenlanetz’s account of the state in his Lacan Ink article, but here I think he forgets the way in which the university refracts these larger structures of governance (refracts, not reflects). I think this is the source of his confusion over Churchill, Davis, and al-Arian. Rather than employing some very weak Cold War arguement about ideologues who don’t do in the field, rigourous, ‘concrete’ research, one should remember that the firing of these ‘tenured radicals’ presents a politically coded moment in the class struggle in the university. For what is at stake in the tenure process has much more to do with solidly and permanently integrating/colonizing the university into the corporate-capitialist state system of governance. This seems infinitely more important than the supposed stupidity/ignorance/willful obfuscation that happens at the ‘tenure’ level.
3. Which brings me to my last point: Kostenlantz is absolutely right to expose tenure as a shell game, but we have to rigourously theorize it before we can move past it.
The only way to stop desiring tenure for those of us in and around the university is to desire something different. Desiring differently, moving toward alternatives is an integral part of the struggle to engage and disrupt the entire class system of the university.
Several positions are attributed to Heidegger, without a single reference to any of Heidegger’s texts. Is this a case of the author projecting themselves onto an imaginary Heidegger? Perhaps because actually reading what Heidegger really wrote would contradict everything attributed here to an imaginary Heidegger?
“Perhaps because actually reading what Heidegger really wrote would contradict everything attributed here to an imaginary Heidegger?”
Does that mean that Heidegger’s Rectoral Addresses as his Political texts are known, belong to the realm of the imaginary? Meaning that Heidegger never was Rector at Freiburg, or that he never was a member of the Nazi Party? I hope I am mistaken…
alphonse – I presume the certain Other is better related to Heidegger’s soul – with “soul” I mean his writings – or the emotional, intellectual energy impulsing his dubious activities
1. I find no “imaginary” Heidegger here. Only the Heidegger that I’ve read over many years; a Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary Heidegger. Besides, to formalize my language, there are at-least-two Heideggers.
2. I am wondering how formalization in Heidegger operates as a narrative, not of sex, but of sexuality. Zizek has an interesting take on this in several places (I think Parallax View and Ticklish Subject). I cannot rehearse the specifics of his argument here, from memory, but the importance of the argument lies in the manner in which it allows one to come full circle with respect to formalization. That is, it seems to me what is missing from this paper is a stronger connection between Heideggers thought and its underlying sexualized (phantasy) logic.
3. Where in Heidegger can we find a stronger turn toward formalization? One example: look at any number of the political texts included in this edition of The Symptom and you will immediately see the logics of formalization at work, explicitly- the people as choosing between assuming their destiny or not (possibility bound to/through the Other as a mere background or medium for the arrival of that future), the logic of exception (this is an exceptional moment for an exceptional people) etc. etc. Thus, it seems that the Heidegger most represented here is the post World War II Heidegger (after the ‘turn’). Yet, the earlier Heidegger’s language is much more attuned to the types of formalization presented above.
1) In regard to Heidegger. The central question here is the position of the question of the meaning of the being of beings. My statement is that, for Heidegger, this question itself functions as the Other of the Other. The corollary of this is what I call the most important difference between Heidegger and Lacan. In other words, due to fact that the question of the meaning of the being of beings functions as the Other of the Other, Heidegger deals with the question of science as he does. From the perspective of the question of the meaning of the being of beings, sciences do really look like continuation of metaphysics. The moment the question of the meaning of the being of beings looses its position as the Other of the Other – that moment can arrive due to practical participation in scientific research or, for example, by reading Lacan, Badiou or Althusser – the moment one notices the essential differences between metaphysical and scientific propositions and discourses.
2) In regard to the sex. Unfortunately, I have not been clear enough about the difference between the sex and sexuality. The basic statement is simple: on the one hand, the sex is nothing but what natural sciences produce it to be; on the other hand, sexuality is not determined by the sex. The logic of monogamy structures sexuality and it has absolutely nothing to do with the sex. The logic of sexuality/monogamy can and has to be analyzed in logical terms, for it depends on signifiers, not on biology.
“From the perspective of the question of the meaning of the being of beings, sciences do really look like continuation of metaphysics.”
Thank you for this. I have always had trouble formulating exactly this point in a concise way.
One more question regarding the non-relation between sex and sexuality: can one propose then that the discourse of biology, with respect to contemporary ideological constructions of sexuality, ultimately functions as a ‘metaphysical remainder’ in the guise of supposed raw material fact?
Let me restate: can one also see Heideggers’ insistence on the ‘metaphysical’ foundation of (what he calls) science confirmed in terms of the fetishization of sex as determining sexuality since, according to this logic, biology operates as the Other of the Other of sexuality?
I totally agree with the notion that sexuality (and its various deployments-monogamy et. al.) operates according to a logic of signifiers and not biology. Yet, the article makes clear, contemporary cultural discourses on sexuality tend to plug up the non-relational logic (here the logic of monogamy) with a ‘metaphysical’ use of ‘biology’. Thus, what appears as the “meaning” of sexuality/sex, is actually a screen against the lack of meaning, the non-relational logic.
So, yes, one should always ruthlessly formalize.
Thank you very much for your article and your comments. They have been very helpful.
I would make a clear difference between 1) a science and 2) the individual opinions of scientists:
1) Natural sciences themselves are, from a Lacanian-Althusserian perspective, non-metaphysical. Their propositions on the presence, founded on empirical facts, are constructed in non-metaphysical ways. However, this statement presupposes that those propositions stay within their correct limits. Thus, genetics can tell us only on the construction of proteins within human bodies and we have to study this construction one protein by protein. Different calculations of general inheritance percents of, for example, different diseases – not to speak of sexuality – are usually very close to nonsense and differ greatly from one scientist to another and do not stand critical statistical analysis. The central point is that the limits of a science change historically, and if we want to define them in detail we have to do it working within that special scientific discourse in that historical situation. Thus my proposition is that today the most nuanced, manifold and complex concept of the sex is to be found in natural sciences like genetics, epigenetics, endocrinology etc. – in so far as those discourses stay within their proper limits. These scientific discourses use highly formalized, non-natural and non-human languages, including, for example, the so called Human Genome Project.
2) Individual scientist have great tendency to overestimate their expertise, and they think often that they can tell everything about everything. Using the authority they have gained due to their scientific work, they easily confuse, for example, ethical opinions with scientific propositions. In regard to the sex and sexuality, we have an excellent example of this kind of confusion or overstepping limits, namely, the studies on homosexuality done using the MRI. First of all, in those studies, scientists easily presuppose that a difference within biological organism is the cause of homosexuality, not an effect of homosexuality or the manifestation of homosexuality at the biological level. Secondly, they do not mention that the differences between individuals are usually much bigger than the small statistical differences they have found. Thirdly, their definition of homosexuality is usually so naive that it makes one wonder if there is a single homosexual human being whose sexuality were so simple construction.
Thus, I would say that yes, quasi-scientific propositions have been pronounced and used metaphysically. However, a science is not a collection of propositions, but a way to produce propositions on the presence in a certain historical situation. If we compare this to philosophy, we have a parallel situation: philosophy is not a set of propositions, but a way to produce them – and not everything presented as philosophy is philosophy.
None of this straightforward and honest indictment of tenure is new, and it’s not really separable from the problems of academic hierarchy in general. The article seems to make the usual assumption that getting rid of what upsets you solves the problem. Tenure and all these related problems are symptoms and getting rid of them wouldn’t address the underlying problem
Tenure and these related problems allow the protection and security of those who need it to accomplish often controversial intellectual work. That the tenured do not generally engage in that kind of work doesn’t answer the question of how those who do will be able to do so without tenure.
Jumping through the academic hoops at various stages has been a major annoyance and, ultimately, a diversion from serious work. However, unlike the author of this piece, I never had the resources that would permit me to do what I now do without an academic job.
I always defend people like Churchill because job security is essential to doing good work. The university hired and tenured him because it wanted a noisy showboat for public relations considerations, and the bosses shouldn’t be allowed to go back and redefine the terms of his–or anyone’s employment.
In the present situation, getting rid of tenure will–like any modifications of the current hiring, retention, tenuring and promotion processes–be in the hands of either the tenured professors themselves or, far more likely, managers of the education biz eager to reconfigure it to suit “market forces.” Already most of the classes in most institutions are taught by faculty not on a tenure track.
If you think academe is dominated by the assumptions of the rich today, wait until you turn it over entirely to a work force that can afford to dabble in something that doesn’t pay a living wage.
There’s much to say and more to do on this, but what’s reasonable is to think about addressing the problem rather than its symptoms.
No she said “What is the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick.” at the republican convention which took place before Obama’s statement that “you can put lipstick on a pig but its still a pig” which was in response to either McCains’s economic or health care plans.
“Indifference to the plights of others.” Then why is it you continuously keep returning to the ‘part of no-part’ so to speak. Is that not your gesture of care for the plight of THE others that matter?
What is not enfatized in the article is that she’s a “falo girl” and she’s not using her “feminity” against his oponents, but showing a laaaaaaarge fallus… if somebody is not feminist is this woman, who’s history, image and attitude is completly ferocius and in the “macho” way.
She even came along with his fallus in hand: a doll like Barbie sold by HeroBuilders.com
Greetings…
I think the “Falo girl” comment is spot on. What the Feminists need to be careful of is creating their own Palin; one that embodies all they want from a female in American politics. In creating their own Palin they leave themselves open prey for the establishment. What feminists want is someone who “knows that the phallus is only a semblance”. What they get with Palin is nothing more than a power-serving cheerleader who wants to win one for the home team.
I mean this last comment as an illustration/criticism of American Football. I hope I didn’t lose any Europeans. Women don’t usually play football in the states, they are typically there just to cheer on the boys.
I think the writer has spoken too soon. Indications are that people are holding her in increasing suspicion, including (especially, according to some accounts and polls) women.
She’ll prove to be a massive handicap to McCain in the end, I feel sure. In this case, “Operation ‘Castration’” will be a failure and possibly even set back regard for women in politics in general a few decades.
So, the Jews identify themselves with Coin, the chsen universal equivalent of all values. To appreciate this article well, one should read the section ‘The Unconscious of the Commodity-form ‘, in the author’s The Sublime Object of Ideology.
I keep this article for closer reading.
With the exception of a few, mainly Zizek and Badiou, many of these otherwise great theoreticians make the most obvious mistakes when it comes to reading current affairs. For anyone who is following, I don’t really understand how Jacques-Alain Miller can make this argument. If Hillary wanted to have the phallus its not the case that Sarah sees it as a only a semblance. He supplements it with Eros giving the phallus even greater appeal. Like a cheerleader.
Hussein – what Jacques-Alain Miller is saying is not that she, Sarah Palin
“sees it (the phallus) as only a semblance”, but that
“she knows that the phallus is only a semblance”
In other words, the phallus is semblance
What Kostelanetz calls “elitism for life” some people call “job security.” He seems to think that tenure would be okay if it involved a meritocracy adjudicated by Ayn Rand or some form of term limit and representative democracy like the one that so successfully ensures the quality of our government officials.
I’m not defending the tenure system but the attempt to get rid of it by today’s universities suggests something much worse. The writer of this piece hasn’t a clue about how universities function. Nor can I see any reason why this right wing propaganda is published on The Symptom. Is this some perverse postmodern joke: “Lacan with David Horowitz”?
According to Kostelanetz, independent scholars like himself have to pay for their smug stupidity. Let’s hope that’s the case.
Very good paper on such a crucial issue that certainly urgently needed to be addressed.
Thank you very much for sharing your very passionating work with the other.
Another other…Christine Janet.
Hussein–I like that you call her a cheerleader. I don’t think anything in Palin’s actions or speech suggests that she “knows that the phallus is semblance”. I think that Miller knows that the phallus is only a semblance, or a unreal construction fused with meaning by those who seek to control the meaning of the phallus. The fact that the phallus is only a semblance means it can mean anything. Palin does nothing to change the meaning of the phallus, nor does she show that it need not exist. Palin only want to serve power–not even wield it, just serve it. To Palin the Phallus is not a thing to be “disrespected, and not taken seriously” on the contrary, Palin serves the Phallus, and seeks its respect. To Palin the Phallus is the only REAL, everything else is a “semblance… that should not be taken seriously”.
Alice- that is not what I am saying at all. Bryan L Jones understood what I meant by that comment. Sarah Palin, I think, supplements it with Eros giving the phallus even greater appeal.
From what I understood, Jacques-Alain Miller thesis is: “The first ones imitated man, respected the phallus, and performed as if they had one. The second wave knows that the phallus is only a semblance and, furthermore, one not to be taken seriously: it is the de-complexified femininity.”
I think Sarah Palin is neither of these positions.
“The first ones imitated man, respected the phallus, and performed as if they had one. The second wave…” I guess Miller is talking of different models which emerge in the culture, both—first and second—already differing from “SHE wants to BE it/HE wants to HAVE it…
in “The Signification of the Phallus”, May 58, Écrits.
IMO, the above image shows Sarah Palin exhibiting Agamben’s concept of “gesture”. For me it’s quite amusing that his picture accompanied an essay on Lacan.com describing Palin as, what else to expect from the Freud camp, a castrator. Are you intellectuals sooo at loss as to what else to call her? A woman who wants to force unwanted pregnancies onto other women (Palin is a staunch anti-abortionist) doesn’t exactly sound like a castrator to me. Instead, Palin “respects the phallus” to such an extreme extent that she will let nothing get in its way, she will gladly watch other women to suffer the full consequences of conversing with the phallus.
Note that Lacan.com actually hosts Agamben pieces as well as various types of Agamben reception. You would have thought that the Lacan.com blokes would have been thankful and glad to have someone like Palin embody Agamben’s concept of “gesture” for the masses, but alas, Agamben’s dickish “gesture” is apparently not for girls. Nevertheless Palin seems to be the perfect performer of Agamben’s “gesture”, the masses are all “eating it up”, and the Lacan boys don’t like what they are seeing, a woman performing the phallus better and to greater mass appeal and idolatry than they were ever able to get away with. The hard dick envy you claim to see in Palin is all yours guys.
while at times this interview seeks to discuss that stereotypes are changing, “Socio-cultural stereotypes of womanliness and virility are in the process of radical transformation.” J.A.M Still Upholds very stereotypical views on both women and men, some would say that these ideas are a conservative,stereotypical, and outdated conjecture: ” In women, fantasies, whether conscious or unconscious, are decisive for the position of jouissance more than for the choice of love object. And it’s the opposite for men. For example, it may happen that a woman can only achieve jouissance – orgasm, let’s say – on condition that she imagines herself, during intercourse itself, being beaten, raped, or imagines that she’s another woman, or even that she’s elsewhere, absent.”
I can’t believe this article! I would argue that the production of the “rape fantasy in women” is a male production. This article is regressive, I’m horrified it’s published.
Well, interesting comments, and it raises the crucial question: When an analyst speaks, in general terms about gender relations, gender differences, and gender character traits, we might assume he speaks as if he knows from a wealth of clinical experience, from inductive inferences compiled from numerous observations of countless patients who were not led into saying what was said by the suggestive influence of the analyst, direct or indirect – but this is precisely what we do not know, nowhere is this information given, and neither do we know whether it is all but a free-association in the mind of the analyst, thinking about his own partner, or about some singular relationship that falls too close in that moment of utterance, whether within the clinic or without. With that said though, fixating too reductively on the latter epistemic concerns, can also make for the road to a resistance, rather than to an unconcealing, of a subject’s individual truth, where lies the meaning of their desire, which may not have a real meaning at all..
In Argentine ,some mothers leave their children because they cannot feed them ,or were raped or have no more than 15 years old,or somebody stole childs to sold
I was just thinking why Love is defined as dependence. I think parents can love their child or each other, but they are able to keep up their independence and self sufficiency.
I think this article is about the unconscious love, like “love at first sight”. I was wondering if any other types of love can exist between two sexes.
In addition, I agree with the first entry of “claroquesiputa”; but we should bear in mind that the stereotypes are not yet transformed entirely. Their transformation is slow, so we still can talk about stereotypical fantasies in women and men.
But as 21st century analysts, shouldn’t we take into consideration, or make statement that “these may be stereotypical ideas/assumptions but…” instead of conjecting their truth?
I often read J.A. Miller’s writings with somehow admiration, wonder and being defended; why? becoz sometimes I found something tastes conformist in them. Talking about love without a gest or gesture of not-knowing is necessary, I think. Love is a pretend, Lacan said; so it can not be acknowledging our lack but it is a fake, a play of simulation that I (lover) have something (phallus) so I can fill in your lack mu beloved! but it is not a successful fake, becoz at the same moment, I have to play being devoid of something so I need you my beloved and so on. Psychoanalysis is a bribe (as you wrote so many times before) just love.
Shahriar, thank you for your great comment, instead of focusing on women’s rights
I am not sure how what you are saying is mutually exclusive with what JAM said in the article
Financial liberalization has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement, capital flight, creates what some have called a “virtual parliament” of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programs and “vote” against them if they are considered irrational: i.e., if they are considered for the benefit of the majority of people, rather than for concentrated private power.
What Investors and lenders do here is “vote” by capital flight, through attacks on currencies and through other devices offered by financial liberalization. That is one reason why the BRETTON WOODS system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War had then instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.
The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organization. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will – for some measure of democracy.
John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.
In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a “fundamental right”, unlike such alleged “rights” as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: i.e., those such as health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as “letters to Santa Claus”, “preposterous”, mere “myths”.
–by Noam Chomsky, MIT Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus), excerpt from “ANTI-DEMOCRATIC NATURE OF US CAPITALISM IS BEING EXPOSED”, posted on Z-Net, 11 Oct 2008, article also appeared first in The Irish Times.
Fortunately for our species, the dreaming biped, there is no truth about truth that will suffice. Despite a Bretton Woods 2 and the US election of a well-crafted Subject-supposed-to-know (desperately embraced) in November, the fetished goal of financialized Capitalism will not regain it’s pretense of rational function: Money stays sh-te. In this debacle, the well-coutured looters have added too many zeros to the astronomical sums accumulating in their hoards for ‘normal’ to appear coherent again.
This time the bands that won the Battle in Seattle are become globalized millions: Man becomes Man? Will we even recognize him?
First of all, this is not a vergy good translation. In addition to being very unwieldy, it has at least two real mistakes: “And she immediately took it back, but it was too late” should be “and she immediately went up in the polls, but it was too late”.
“In the instances of his spouse, who is quite a pitbull herself” should be something like “under the influence of his wife, who is said to be quite a pitbull herself.”
As for the article itself, Miller’s conclusions about the future of American politics seem weirdly naive.
Some more data on Emanuel that might be of interest:
“So why is Obama hiring Emanuel as chief of staff? Probably for the same reason Daley hired him way back in 1989. He’s ruthless, cunning, and absolutely unafraid to be a jerk. In fact, I think Emanuel enjoys being a jerk. Moreover, by being a jerk, I predict Emanuel will do a great service for Obama. By the time Emanuel is finished irritating, humiliating, and infuriating folks in Washington, Obama will look like an angel. People will probably like him even more just because he’s not Emanuel.
In the last few days, Emanuel’s been telling friends in Chicago that he had to think long and hard over leaving Congress. But I doubt it was that tough of a decision.
It couldn’t have been easy for Emanuel to be a congressman, particularly at election time when he had to be nice to everyone like those old folks in the bingo parlor.
Now he gets to go back to being nasty. I suspect it will be like a dream come true.”
By Ben Joravsky, a staff writer for the Chicago Reader, where he has covered Chicago politics for many years. This article is an excerpt of one that appeared in ‘The American Prospect’, 7 Nov, 2008
do you think, obama has a deep and independent understanding of the money system? and are there deep enough understandings of that system at all?
i ask this question in the context of a book about money, written by german eske bockelmann called (something like: in the rhythm of money, 500 p., 2004, edition: zu klampen).
bockelmann starts with martin opitz and the early 17th century where – on one hand – there was a quite sudden, never sufficiently explained change/shift in the rhythm perception of western europe, replacing a multitude of rhythms and measures with the absolute domination of 4/4 and 3/4.
noone started this consciously – it just , which of course appears spooky. but martin opitz serves as a witness. his book <von der deutschen poeterey» (book of german poetry) describes the and the of this change just like that, without seeming surprised!
NOW: on the other hand and as well in early 17th century there was a change/shift on the westeuropean markets: within not much more than a generation money changed from a can-partizipate-system to a must-partizipate-system. it had to happen and it happened then, in western europe only, first.
eske bockelmann discusse these two quite separate observations and discusses parallels, connections and influences from one system to the other, or, as he believes: from the sinister abstraction called money which forces us in an existential manner to believe in it. put otherwise: money demands an effort of believing in something we do not know but have to use it on a daily basis to become and stay part of the economy – be it king or farmer.
(pls forgive my basic english and my very rough explanations. i did an interview with bockelmann, it will be translated in english this year, i hope.)
POST SCRIPTUM. sorry the title of the book got lost. pls replace my second paragraph with this new version:
i ask this question in the context of a book about money written by german eske bockelmann called IM TAKT DES GELDES (something like: in the rhythm of money, 500 p., 2004, edition: zu klampen).
I was just coming home now observing the headlines and covers of the weekly magazines here in Brazil. Of course all of them display great pictures of the smiling-new-president Obama. Besides showing the picture, one of the magazines also quoted a small piece of the speech Obama made when elected. Something like “if one ever doubted the USA is the great democracy in the world, I´m here as a proof it really is”. Regarding ideology, is this not everything the States ever needed in order to ‘react’ in times of crisis, disbelief, and prejudices against the country? Is this not a perfect excuse to reinforce this false idea of a perfect and possible real democracy and capitalism? What other things can be done now (besides torture, war or global gambling in economy) in the name of this powerful and ‘perfect democracy’?
There are so many other interesting things about Obama, psychoanalytically. First, he’s the first introvert I’ve ever seen holding this particular office. Second, he regards himself as a blank screen, like an analyst. Third, he is prepared to use collectivity and group dynamics rather than just sell a product in order to to get elected. I thought Prof. Miller’s short essay was rather too heavy on our projections.
I have to agree with Timothy Morton. The point about Obama as the blank screen of the analyst is a compelling one, and it deserves elaboration in terms of Lacan’s Seminar VII. In fact, actor John Cusack already compared the “promise” of Obama to “Antigone before the king”:
This “coincidental” comparison is perhaps more telling than it is coincidental: people recognize that Obama’s image has brought about catharsis for the chorus. People still get choked up talking about Obama. He’s facilitating a mourning process.
This is why people expect great “change.” What has changed is the indigestible kernel of Obama’s image (his face, his name) has been elevated to the dominant position, which means that whatever the previous symbolic system had repressed is now open to reinterpretation.
People love to raise the question, Is Obama doomed to disappoint us? This is the wrong question to ask, because it suggests that analysis comes from the analyst–as if he were the Name of the Father and analysis were the analyst’s narrative.
Instead, we should acknowledge Obama’s effect on “grass roots” movements and his image’s empowerment of community organizers. When the mourning process is over, how many people quit analysis? How many will replace the president with themselves on the level of active citizenry?
If there is an Obama promise, that is it. To the extent that Obama can disappoint anyone, he’s not in the position of the analyst for that person. He will have become yet another phallus confining that person in a repressive symbolic system–waiting for a president to bring change.
Ironically, the “Obama promise” is not “socialist” as much as it is “libertarian”–at least in the sense that the private citizen is the source of social change.
Cheers to Morton and Kane. Today’s internet flurry about “uncritical exuberance” is of course settled by a reflection AWAY from the inevitable prospect of disapointment in Obama, back to the ever present imperatives of progress and justice. But the cynical, ugly tone taken over our emotional reactions to an obviously positive world-historical event is just unnecessary and counter-productive. When are we permitted to be happy if not now? Only when all injustices are corrected? What an inhumane and unlivable standard! You can be happy and still be vigilant.
It seems reasonable that Miller wants to stay away from conjectures about how Obama ‘regards himself’ as opposed to how he projects himself. Thus I cannot agree that the point about a tabula rasa is ‘compelling’ or even a ‘point’ – rather it is an interesting conjecture. Very interesting. However there is a difference after all, between our projections and Obama’s projections.
I think that the greatest moments of psychoanalytic thought follow in the tradition of stoicism. Not merely the stoicism of the Greeks, but that of Shakespeare. It is an evident cry of libidinal interjection to say ‘when am I permitted to be happy?’ However, it is to miss the point. The question is not of whether we have the ‘right’ (cf. Allan Bloom) or the permission to be happy, but of when we might trust our happiness. Hegel – who bequeathed our conception of the world-historical – would have been the first to say that we ought at the very least to ask questions when the words ‘obvious’ and ‘world-historical’ appear together.
This is not meant to foist priggish heavy-handedness, or the furrowed brow of the dour moralist upon the American conscience. Yet there has been a fair amount of knee-jerk resistance to Miller’s prudent analysis.
Below the fold of the Wall Street Journal’s front page this morning is a story about Credit Crunch merchandise: retailers across the UK are agog with items meant ‘to cheer up in the current economic climate’, from shoes (’Credit Crunch stilettos’) to candy (’Credit Crunch bars’) to wedding dresses (’Budget Weddings’). Marketing firms are responding to the crisis du jour in the only way they know: co-option. One is reminded of the crass jokes made about oceanfront property in Appalachia and the White Mountains, or, worse, land speculation in Green Antarctica.
What makes the Credit Crunch phenomenon unique is its use of signifier. Taken at face value the phrase supposedly connotes a shortage of virtual confidence and/or the resulting slowing of market inertia. That is, it suggests people are going to be able to spend and receive less money. By being transformed into a marketing tool, however, the phrase is made to imply its opposite: ‘Though you and I understand that we’re not supposed to be spending money, I’ve made it possible for you to spend some.’ It’s the same turn-the-other-way/dirty-uncle phenomenon that urges you to enjoy Coca-Cola because You Deserve It. This is a basic point, yes, and one wouldn’t have a hard time making the case for the Superego here.
…which is where we reach our point of departure: the signifier ‘Credit Crunch’ is stripped of its intended signified (freezer money) and, in the hands of our Superego older brother, made to mean its opposite (freer money). Boring? I would only like to point out that the signifier itself is able to mean two things at the same time. Our computational example of this is the undecided byte (I forget what it’s called), the banal example of which we have in the movie Swordfish – those little indecipherable bits of code that Stanley Jobson (the hacker) can turn into a ‘crack’, even while a prostitute goes to work on him at a club in LA. Lacan tells us that this is what constitutes a message from the Other, an incomplete message which has two viable means of interpretation. I’m oversimplifying here, but the choice is as follows: take the Other at face value and it is an object; take it as a lie (a feint) and it is a subject. He quotes a Jewish joke: ‘I am going to Krakow,’ one man says, to which the other replies, ‘Why are you telling me you are going to Krakow? You are telling me to make me believe that you are going somewhere else.’
So here we have a subjective choice to make: believe it when the Superego tells you that the markets aren’t that bad and take him up on his Credit Crunch knee socks, or read the newspaper and tell him to hit the road.
The tragedy lies in how this relates to Obama’s (pre-) presidency: innumerable are the articles we’ve read about ‘post-cynicism’ and our generation’s ‘Yes We Can’ middle finger to apathy; are we just fooling ourselves with more false Hope? The cynic is right to turn a blind eye on ‘credit crunch chic’…but the question arises: whose side is Hope on?
wtf, wassup with the desperate need of distinction? Did u read the article at all?
The love process is the same, but focused on the same gender. Negative Oedipus complex.
Please ignore that last comment: I am its author but it was posted here without my willing it…reading it over now I see its marginal relevance and I’d like to apologize if it in any way interrupted the conversation.
“Love” was mentioned many times in this article. But it seems to me, that J.A.M. uses word “love” to describe very different feelings and types of relationships. “Love at first sight”? How can you love someone at first sight when you don’t know that person? You can fall in love and you can have strong emotions, affection, but that’s not love. It is commonly used term (love at first sight) today, but it’s wrong. Different people say they love, thinking of strong emotions they have for someone, but that’s not necessarily love. Not everyone is capable of love, even they say they love and feel something about someone. That’s why I think this article is bad. I expected more.
As Tim’s arrogated voice intimated, it is not only the libidinal economy that is organized around the pursuit of a necessarily exorbitant element- one can clearly recognize the absence of any authority mediating between the dyadic exchange through which two elements become one in economy. Even or especially in the darkest, most banal sense, when it seems out of reach or out of touch, the metaphor of economy will not yield into something greater or less than itself. This metaphor produces.
Just one comment:
“Lacan stresses again and again that psychoanalysis is a science”…
That is not for sure, and it’s not that simple. Lacan stresses that the subject of psychianalysis is the subject of the science (science and truth 1965), but the fact that de Lacan worked in the formalization of the expirience of psychoanalysis doesn´t means psychoanalysis is a science. M. Mannoni, for example, affirmed the contrary. The ethics of psichoanalysis and its respect for the singularity are in fact contrary to the scientific method.
On the other hand, Lacan never denied that science could be the culmination of methaphisics; what its real for Lacan (a) its something that scapes from the any possibility of scientific formalization. Lacan’s topology and formulas are not recognized by the scientific community, because, if psychoanalysis is science, it would be a different kind of science, perhaps much closer to “being of beings”, or perhaps in a negative way (le parletre, the lack of being)…
Finally someone really knows what’s really going on inside the human person. I married one! Just as discribed above, and to the “T.” (He’s so proud, yes he “completes” himself – aliminating healthy emotion towards another). So everyone needs to read it again. Only this time pay attention, you may learn something. It’s been 27 years of marriage for us. And so far, having first hand experience – it’s been tense. Thanks for the confirmation!!!
Is not Obama less of an alternative to Bush and more of the product of the splitting into two of the one that is body making up capitalist hegemony?
The period of financial crisis coupled with the punctuated leaking of legitimacy experienced by social-democracy under Bush has resulted in the deferal of desire, and the striving for a collectively recognised Father to exercise(/exorcise) authority? Is not Obama the perverse Truth of Bush, that Bush was in fact the capitalist error? Obama is the man who will steer the ship into a time of plain sailing? That in the moment of crisis the True leader emerged to combat the ills of the world…?
No more need to follow false-prophets as the real one has arrived…?
If the vagina dentata invoked by Palin at the Republican Convention wasn’t already overly transparent as a gesture of castration, note the effect produced by the literal decapitation in the following:
The (always Chomsky-quoting) anti-globalization protesters are right to be aggrieved about having to foot the bill for investors’ crisis- how will they then be able to support their own crisis?
This strikes me as elucidating in certain ways, but only very obvious ones; it offers back to us that which we already know, now as insight. The difficulty here, though, is indeed that the ‘that which we already know’ bespeaks a cultural ‘we’ that those writing the more interesting comments have largely ceased belonging to or have never belonged to. It’s not, then, that the interview is empty of interesting or appropriate comments on love, but that the ‘that which we already know’ is the knowledge of a ‘we’ that we have no compelling grounds to even want to be. Viz., the constant focus on gender differentiation, as though ‘love in general’ were about things like this and not about things like the lamella or an inexplicable jouissance (I’m aware: it’s been explained–that doesn’t affect its being inexplicable in the slightest). The point (Lacan’s, here redacted) is appropriate: I love my other in part because s/he promises a coherent image of the ‘truth’ of that person that therefore I will have been. But the gendered explication and tracing out is reductively silly and crude (in fairness to Miller, the interviewer has asked for this, but look at [the textual representation of] his glee in response). I’ve tended to think of Miller as more subtle than this, and it’s unfortunate to see him here play Engel’s to Lacan’s Freud.
NB: I do think it helpful that we begin here with transference. The logic of transference is far more readily explicable than that of love, by definition inexplicable. The speakability of transference, its fictiveness, is as Miller notes in part due to its artificial character. Not, however, artificial in the sense that the analysand brings a ‘contrived love’ to the analyst, though this happens too. Rather, what is truly artificial about transference is it, itself, invented by Freud to help relocate what was then in danger of being unanimously recognized as Charcot’s desire.
This seems a little old fashioned and sexist to say that a man is embarrassed to love and therefore has to sleep around to feel better about it. Do you think that man is worried about losing control of his reality ego when he is in love? Is this the problem? Isn’t this just a problem with power? or abusing power that doesn’t exist anymore. Women get embarrassed about love too, and in turn, concerned about losing control of their reality ego. I don’t think love is a gender specific thing anymore, what you are talking about is a very old fashioned construct. It is very sad if you think that man is too embarrassed or looks silly if he is in love. We all love.
Isn’t it funny that most old psychoanalysis is written by men so players use these theories as the explanation for being cruel. Lucky we have third wave deconstructive feminist theorists out there, is all I can say.
While it is true that we all love and it is becoming outdated to talk about love as sex-specific, I believe the social construct of the male gender is slower to change, and still contains the subtext of emotional detachment. It is on the way out as well, but slowly.
Oh well us women will just have to go out with the Chris Isaak or hippie types won’t we? My last boyfriend did heaps more of the usual expected “feminine” stuff than I did. Thanks Rick you are right but things only change if you make sure that they do.
You say “philosophy isn’t a science and will never be” – maybe if you’re referring to continental philosophy exclusively that holds… But what about analytical philosophy? Logic? You can’t honestly think that psychoanalysis is more scientific than modern logic is? (By your own criteria of formalization…) – being founded on empirical data obviously isn’t a condition for science, or else math. wouldn’t be scientific. Therefore, at least one branch of philosophy is more scientific than psychoanalysis will ever be. (Logic affects math, math affects all other sciences. Russell’s paradoxes for instance had HUGE repercussions to all mathematics. And he was a philosopher. – After Freud, psychoanalysis was only of interest to humanities and to us philosophy students. – ) Maybe I perceive a bit of a desire there.. desire to be scientific. To be recognized, the way the sciences are today revered and recognized, their place in society almost replaces what once was the cleric’s role. I don’t know if psychoanalysis will ever become a science. I liked your article, just the parts where you write about what is and what isn’t science sounded arrogant.
About analytical philosophy. The foundamental error of analytic philosophy is that it tries to formalize natural languages. Scientific formalisations are formed within a particular scientific situation, and the language they formalize is specific to those matters in that particular moment of that particular science. Analytic philosophers presents themselves as scientists (the best example is Hintikka and his followers) – but usually they have never done any kind of scientific work: they know nothing about science.
About psychoanalysis as a science. I agree, psychoanalysis cannot be a science in the strict sense of the word: in psychoanalysis, there is no presence to be formalized as they do in genetics or in physics. If I have understood rightly what Lacan was after in the Seminar XI, then psychoanalysis could be seen as a science of the subject of science, that is, of the subject of signifier. And here is the crucial point: they are the signifiers of sciences. So the point seems to be that when the scientific signifiers hit the flesh – as they do all over the world nowadays – the effects are universal. Thus, even if the subject of signifier is not present as such (it will have been), the effects of this hitting of signifiers into flesh are.
So this opens up the possibility of scientific psychoanalysis. For my knowledge, the best example of this kind of psychoanalytic theory nowadays is what Paul Verhaeghe is doing: there are universal (in regard to the Western world of scientific era) phenomena called “disorders” etc, and what psychoanalysis – and it seems that only psychoanalysis can do this – can do is to give a coherent theory of the non-present dynamics behind these present phenomena.
A corollary of this is clear: if psychoanalysis loses its touch with clinical practice, it loses the possibility to become/to be a science of the subject of science. Namely, the present phenomena are only there, in the clinical practice. At the universities, you only have the discourse of university.
Castration? But of course! Psychoanalysts have genitalia for brains. They are absolutely and utterly incapable of looking at the world around them without the perennial phallus goggles (or is it pince-nez?) firmly perched on their noses. That this kind of tired psycho-twaddle still passes as respectable socio-psychological analysis is truly puzzling.
I think the general point that only a lacking being can truly love is a profound one. However, there is a tendency in psychoanalysis to emphasise a woman’s capacity to accept her lack, which I find suspect.
All of this talk about ‘their’ crisis and ‘our’ crisis is quite concerning. It reminds me of the Hegelian beautiful soul(s) who seek to obsolve themselves of any responsibility despite the constitutive role they play, especially in the system of global capital.
I was never castrated in the first place! Psychoanalysis shouldn’t be read so seriously. Seriously guys you’ll do your own heads in. Its usually something that’s come out of a psychoanalyst’s meeting with a single patient and I don’t think it should be read as a cultural “generalised theory”. If cultural theory is doing any of your heads in I strongly recommend a mental health first aid workshop where you can look at clinical symptoms and stop worrying so much about poetic analysis. It simply isn’t true.
Je ne crois pas que l’origine de la crise soit essentiellement la question des sub-primes , il me semble que le vrai probléme est le 11 septembre 2001 et la réponse qui s’ en suivi avec une guerre extrémement couteuse en Irak !
Cette crise révelle les contradictions du capitalisme lorsqu’ il devient le principal systéme de la planéte et que l’alternative communiste disparait deriére les critiques d’ un renouveau religieux du à une fin de millénaire plus qu’à une pratique chrétienne !
Comment peut on dire que Dieu tient tout lorsque l’ on assiste impuissant aux series de massacres contemporains ; Yougoslavie Rwanda Irak ? Non le Dieu du capitalisme n’est pas celui de Jésus CHRIST !
Le dieu de BUSCH est celui de la vengeance et non de l’amour, celui de l’ordre et non de la justice.
L’ ironie du sort a voulu que le nouveau President porte un prenom identique à la victime du précédent
le probléme pour Barak Hussein Obama va être un peu le même que celui rencontré par François MITTERAND en 1981 : Peut il y avoir un changement politique sans révolution économique ? La démocratie capitaliste est-elle condamnée à n’etre qu’une ploutocratie dans laquelle le peuple désabusé n’est même plus représenté car il sait que l’ordre monétaire consitue un pouvoir absolue comme la religion constituait celui des rois sous l’ancien régime ?
Si la crise renvoit à la critique le credit revoit à la croyance et la nouvelle génération d’analystes et d’intellectuels devra ouvrir les yeux au peuple au lieu de l’endormir dans une peopolisation charismaniaque …
“If one is interested in a left perspective, or in any for that matter, it is better to engage with those who are rational, empirical, logical and factual, rather than those who want to recycle morbid barbarians like Mao or mystic liars like Plato back into fashion with a prose decadence and pied-piper akin of Wagner. You should all know that the analyst doesn’t know anything by now; and if so, then you at least know one more thing than the average analyst” — by Tim Themi, Institute Professor of Circus Tricks Down Under.
Castration is a bullshit, Christian concept, ideal, desideratum that reeks of a morbid resignation that Freud falsely generalized from his idiosyncratic Judeo-phylogenesis. Nonetheless, in terms of a power differential, men and women have to learn to see the difference for what it is. No point moralising the bio-facticity of that to which we come. And there is no doubt we come. If we can not be first, nor best, just be sure to crown with laurel the right victor.
This analysis seems irredeemably naive less than a year later. Obama is just another politician who figured out where the a parade was marching and got in the front of it. He’s too inexperienced to accomplish anything with this vicious divided electorate. Rahm Emmanual as Obama’s dark lord is pure wish fulfillment. The Dems have absolutely no balls to do anything beyond their own selfish interests.
Dear Kalevi – We wish that the “psycho-analyst” in the pejorative sense merely had “genitalia for brains” – that would make then either a slightly more horny or slightly more self-honest version of all the rest of us (you decide!)
The problem is when they have castrated, cut-off, and self-mutilated genitalia on their brains – and think they are doing people a favor when they try and put this self-projecting morbidity on theirs!
I’m sure I’m not the only one to happily refuse to let every healthy, natural, genital impulse be associated and over-coded in advance with pallid, sickly ideations of incest & castration.
Much better orgasms that way! And dating becomes both a self-affirmation and an affirmation of earthly, somatic, natural-biological life!
Lacan in Seminar XVII broadens the concept of “castration” that much, that a change of terminology is more than just a little justified…
I read the article and comments with interest. I can understand why Penelope and others are indignant, but I just wanted to make a few points here: firstly that Miller points out that women ‘may’ have a fantasy of..it is one possibility. In the analytic sense, this may or may not be present, but a fantasy is not reality. I think therefore, we need to cautious in interpreting Miller’s words in a literal sense, that women want this as an everyday ‘real, conscious’ experience (real here being used in the everyday sense, not the The Real in the Lacanian sense). Accusations of patriarchy in Psychoanalysis are not unusual, however I would recommend reading Jacqueline Rose on feminine sexuality, reading Lacan against the grain, Rose argues that the phallus (although there is some inevitability that boys will allign with having it), is lacking and no guarantor. Rick’s comments on the movement within the socio-cultural field in relation to the deconstruction of masculinity maybe supports this thesis. There is, I agree, a difficulty within psychoanalytic language at times which is at odds with a post-modern political correctness, but when we deal with fantasy, the unconscious and social construction and discourses maybe there has to be an element of discomfort to keep pace with flux and lack of stability (and as Soler points out, an unmitigated rise in anxiety, but Lacan’s contribution is surely that the question posed is idiosyncratic to each subject, and in my practice, the question that love poses, is an ever recurring one.
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Why the Heidegger?
Why not?
As a faithful reader of ‘The Symptom’ and a doctoral candidate in American literature, I was delighted by the title of Kostelanetz’s piece. Thus, upon reading the piece in full, I was that much more disappointed. Though the essay is often quite funny and make several pertinent observations about the so-called ‘tenured class’ it remains woefully annecdotal about just what it is that constitues this class.
My 3 interventions:
1. Class as a concept is not easily or finally measured by monetary/economic power.
Kostelanetz claims that it isn’t money that constitutes this class, per se. That is, tenured academics don’t compete for money so much as they do for the accumulation of institutional power. Yet, this class is not merely constituted by the distance between what it thinks of itself and what the non-tenured class(es) think of it. Let’s not forget, that in good old fashioned Marxist terms, we are talking about the site for knowledge production. The production of knowledge requires the interlocking mechanisims of several classes, working across and within several contradictory moments in the institutional space of the university. By refocusing, not on class identity, but on the way the class itself collectively reproduces the university as a matrix of power, one can arrive at a much more rigourously theorized picture of the production of knowledge as it pertains to the modern university.
For instance class struggle in the university is in no way limited to academics, tenured or otherwise. The vast institutional system of the university is itself constituted by many different classes (and again, in good old fashioned Marxist terms , one should never confuse class with mere monetary wealth-this idea is itself a figment of bourgeois fantasy). A graduate student makes far, far less than most entry level staff and often times less than custodial staff. Yet, the university system itself encourages young academics to adopt the strategy of accumulating ‘cultural capital’ in leu of capital–hence, the vast never ending cocktail party chatter that constitutes most everyday interactions between academics (especially graduate students). The fascinating thing about this interpollation is that, rather than advocating across class boundaries (say, graduate students organizing with custodial staff and administrative staff), one instead gets class fantasy. Thus, tenure is not just a licence to say things that are ’stupid’ (to use Kostenlanetz’s phrase)- tenure is the process by which the academic class as a whole constitutes itself and brackets itself off from other classes. To be sure, my assertion is damnably under theorized, but I think it offers a way to avoid the trap of reading the academic class merely in itself, as I argue Kostenlanetz does.
2. What we really need is a more sophisticated account of how tenue, at the university level, works in favor of existing systems of governance under a neo-liberal state.
I am very much sympathetic to Kostenlanetz’s account of the state in his Lacan Ink article, but here I think he forgets the way in which the university refracts these larger structures of governance (refracts, not reflects). I think this is the source of his confusion over Churchill, Davis, and al-Arian. Rather than employing some very weak Cold War arguement about ideologues who don’t do in the field, rigourous, ‘concrete’ research, one should remember that the firing of these ‘tenured radicals’ presents a politically coded moment in the class struggle in the university. For what is at stake in the tenure process has much more to do with solidly and permanently integrating/colonizing the university into the corporate-capitialist state system of governance. This seems infinitely more important than the supposed stupidity/ignorance/willful obfuscation that happens at the ‘tenure’ level.
3. Which brings me to my last point: Kostenlantz is absolutely right to expose tenure as a shell game, but we have to rigourously theorize it before we can move past it.
The only way to stop desiring tenure for those of us in and around the university is to desire something different. Desiring differently, moving toward alternatives is an integral part of the struggle to engage and disrupt the entire class system of the university.
Several positions are attributed to Heidegger, without a single reference to any of Heidegger’s texts. Is this a case of the author projecting themselves onto an imaginary Heidegger? Perhaps because actually reading what Heidegger really wrote would contradict everything attributed here to an imaginary Heidegger?
Very much so, in the order of Carmelo Licita Rosa’s terms “the toilette of the Other….”
“Perhaps because actually reading what Heidegger really wrote would contradict everything attributed here to an imaginary Heidegger?”
Does that mean that Heidegger’s Rectoral Addresses as his Political texts are known, belong to the realm of the imaginary? Meaning that Heidegger never was Rector at Freiburg, or that he never was a member of the Nazi Party? I hope I am mistaken…
alphonse – I presume the certain Other is better related to Heidegger’s soul – with “soul” I mean his writings – or the emotional, intellectual energy impulsing his dubious activities
Two very quick things:
1. I find no “imaginary” Heidegger here. Only the Heidegger that I’ve read over many years; a Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary Heidegger. Besides, to formalize my language, there are at-least-two Heideggers.
2. I am wondering how formalization in Heidegger operates as a narrative, not of sex, but of sexuality. Zizek has an interesting take on this in several places (I think Parallax View and Ticklish Subject). I cannot rehearse the specifics of his argument here, from memory, but the importance of the argument lies in the manner in which it allows one to come full circle with respect to formalization. That is, it seems to me what is missing from this paper is a stronger connection between Heideggers thought and its underlying sexualized (phantasy) logic.
3. Where in Heidegger can we find a stronger turn toward formalization? One example: look at any number of the political texts included in this edition of The Symptom and you will immediately see the logics of formalization at work, explicitly- the people as choosing between assuming their destiny or not (possibility bound to/through the Other as a mere background or medium for the arrival of that future), the logic of exception (this is an exceptional moment for an exceptional people) etc. etc. Thus, it seems that the Heidegger most represented here is the post World War II Heidegger (after the ‘turn’). Yet, the earlier Heidegger’s language is much more attuned to the types of formalization presented above.
1) In regard to Heidegger. The central question here is the position of the question of the meaning of the being of beings. My statement is that, for Heidegger, this question itself functions as the Other of the Other. The corollary of this is what I call the most important difference between Heidegger and Lacan. In other words, due to fact that the question of the meaning of the being of beings functions as the Other of the Other, Heidegger deals with the question of science as he does. From the perspective of the question of the meaning of the being of beings, sciences do really look like continuation of metaphysics. The moment the question of the meaning of the being of beings looses its position as the Other of the Other – that moment can arrive due to practical participation in scientific research or, for example, by reading Lacan, Badiou or Althusser – the moment one notices the essential differences between metaphysical and scientific propositions and discourses.
2) In regard to the sex. Unfortunately, I have not been clear enough about the difference between the sex and sexuality. The basic statement is simple: on the one hand, the sex is nothing but what natural sciences produce it to be; on the other hand, sexuality is not determined by the sex. The logic of monogamy structures sexuality and it has absolutely nothing to do with the sex. The logic of sexuality/monogamy can and has to be analyzed in logical terms, for it depends on signifiers, not on biology.
From Janne Kurki’s comment (above):
“From the perspective of the question of the meaning of the being of beings, sciences do really look like continuation of metaphysics.”
Thank you for this. I have always had trouble formulating exactly this point in a concise way.
One more question regarding the non-relation between sex and sexuality: can one propose then that the discourse of biology, with respect to contemporary ideological constructions of sexuality, ultimately functions as a ‘metaphysical remainder’ in the guise of supposed raw material fact?
Let me restate: can one also see Heideggers’ insistence on the ‘metaphysical’ foundation of (what he calls) science confirmed in terms of the fetishization of sex as determining sexuality since, according to this logic, biology operates as the Other of the Other of sexuality?
I totally agree with the notion that sexuality (and its various deployments-monogamy et. al.) operates according to a logic of signifiers and not biology. Yet, the article makes clear, contemporary cultural discourses on sexuality tend to plug up the non-relational logic (here the logic of monogamy) with a ‘metaphysical’ use of ‘biology’. Thus, what appears as the “meaning” of sexuality/sex, is actually a screen against the lack of meaning, the non-relational logic.
So, yes, one should always ruthlessly formalize.
Thank you very much for your article and your comments. They have been very helpful.
I would make a clear difference between 1) a science and 2) the individual opinions of scientists:
1) Natural sciences themselves are, from a Lacanian-Althusserian perspective, non-metaphysical. Their propositions on the presence, founded on empirical facts, are constructed in non-metaphysical ways. However, this statement presupposes that those propositions stay within their correct limits. Thus, genetics can tell us only on the construction of proteins within human bodies and we have to study this construction one protein by protein. Different calculations of general inheritance percents of, for example, different diseases – not to speak of sexuality – are usually very close to nonsense and differ greatly from one scientist to another and do not stand critical statistical analysis. The central point is that the limits of a science change historically, and if we want to define them in detail we have to do it working within that special scientific discourse in that historical situation. Thus my proposition is that today the most nuanced, manifold and complex concept of the sex is to be found in natural sciences like genetics, epigenetics, endocrinology etc. – in so far as those discourses stay within their proper limits. These scientific discourses use highly formalized, non-natural and non-human languages, including, for example, the so called Human Genome Project.
2) Individual scientist have great tendency to overestimate their expertise, and they think often that they can tell everything about everything. Using the authority they have gained due to their scientific work, they easily confuse, for example, ethical opinions with scientific propositions. In regard to the sex and sexuality, we have an excellent example of this kind of confusion or overstepping limits, namely, the studies on homosexuality done using the MRI. First of all, in those studies, scientists easily presuppose that a difference within biological organism is the cause of homosexuality, not an effect of homosexuality or the manifestation of homosexuality at the biological level. Secondly, they do not mention that the differences between individuals are usually much bigger than the small statistical differences they have found. Thirdly, their definition of homosexuality is usually so naive that it makes one wonder if there is a single homosexual human being whose sexuality were so simple construction.
Thus, I would say that yes, quasi-scientific propositions have been pronounced and used metaphysically. However, a science is not a collection of propositions, but a way to produce propositions on the presence in a certain historical situation. If we compare this to philosophy, we have a parallel situation: philosophy is not a set of propositions, but a way to produce them – and not everything presented as philosophy is philosophy.
None of this straightforward and honest indictment of tenure is new, and it’s not really separable from the problems of academic hierarchy in general. The article seems to make the usual assumption that getting rid of what upsets you solves the problem. Tenure and all these related problems are symptoms and getting rid of them wouldn’t address the underlying problem
Tenure and these related problems allow the protection and security of those who need it to accomplish often controversial intellectual work. That the tenured do not generally engage in that kind of work doesn’t answer the question of how those who do will be able to do so without tenure.
Jumping through the academic hoops at various stages has been a major annoyance and, ultimately, a diversion from serious work. However, unlike the author of this piece, I never had the resources that would permit me to do what I now do without an academic job.
I always defend people like Churchill because job security is essential to doing good work. The university hired and tenured him because it wanted a noisy showboat for public relations considerations, and the bosses shouldn’t be allowed to go back and redefine the terms of his–or anyone’s employment.
In the present situation, getting rid of tenure will–like any modifications of the current hiring, retention, tenuring and promotion processes–be in the hands of either the tenured professors themselves or, far more likely, managers of the education biz eager to reconfigure it to suit “market forces.” Already most of the classes in most institutions are taught by faculty not on a tenure track.
If you think academe is dominated by the assumptions of the rich today, wait until you turn it over entirely to a work force that can afford to dabble in something that doesn’t pay a living wage.
There’s much to say and more to do on this, but what’s reasonable is to think about addressing the problem rather than its symptoms.
Is there anyway a translated version of this article could be posted?
Is this the same article that appeared in the Lacanian Theory of Discourse collection (Bracher…)?
pitbull with lipstick!
Palin herself said that, in response to Obama’s ‘put lipstick on that pig’ comment.
No she said “What is the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick.” at the republican convention which took place before Obama’s statement that “you can put lipstick on a pig but its still a pig” which was in response to either McCains’s economic or health care plans.
“Indifference to the plights of others.” Then why is it you continuously keep returning to the ‘part of no-part’ so to speak. Is that not your gesture of care for the plight of THE others that matter?
What is not enfatized in the article is that she’s a “falo girl” and she’s not using her “feminity” against his oponents, but showing a laaaaaaarge fallus… if somebody is not feminist is this woman, who’s history, image and attitude is completly ferocius and in the “macho” way.
She even came along with his fallus in hand: a doll like Barbie sold by HeroBuilders.com
Greetings…
I think the “Falo girl” comment is spot on. What the Feminists need to be careful of is creating their own Palin; one that embodies all they want from a female in American politics. In creating their own Palin they leave themselves open prey for the establishment. What feminists want is someone who “knows that the phallus is only a semblance”. What they get with Palin is nothing more than a power-serving cheerleader who wants to win one for the home team.
I mean this last comment as an illustration/criticism of American Football. I hope I didn’t lose any Europeans. Women don’t usually play football in the states, they are typically there just to cheer on the boys.
I think the writer has spoken too soon. Indications are that people are holding her in increasing suspicion, including (especially, according to some accounts and polls) women.
She’ll prove to be a massive handicap to McCain in the end, I feel sure. In this case, “Operation ‘Castration’” will be a failure and possibly even set back regard for women in politics in general a few decades.
So, the Jews identify themselves with Coin, the chsen universal equivalent of all values. To appreciate this article well, one should read the section ‘The Unconscious of the Commodity-form ‘, in the author’s The Sublime Object of Ideology.
I keep this article for closer reading.
With the exception of a few, mainly Zizek and Badiou, many of these otherwise great theoreticians make the most obvious mistakes when it comes to reading current affairs. For anyone who is following, I don’t really understand how Jacques-Alain Miller can make this argument. If Hillary wanted to have the phallus its not the case that Sarah sees it as a only a semblance. He supplements it with Eros giving the phallus even greater appeal. Like a cheerleader.
Hussein – what Jacques-Alain Miller is saying is not that she, Sarah Palin
“sees it (the phallus) as only a semblance”, but that
“she knows that the phallus is only a semblance”
In other words, the phallus is semblance
What Kostelanetz calls “elitism for life” some people call “job security.” He seems to think that tenure would be okay if it involved a meritocracy adjudicated by Ayn Rand or some form of term limit and representative democracy like the one that so successfully ensures the quality of our government officials.
I’m not defending the tenure system but the attempt to get rid of it by today’s universities suggests something much worse. The writer of this piece hasn’t a clue about how universities function. Nor can I see any reason why this right wing propaganda is published on The Symptom. Is this some perverse postmodern joke: “Lacan with David Horowitz”?
According to Kostelanetz, independent scholars like himself have to pay for their smug stupidity. Let’s hope that’s the case.
Is this really a secret??
Yeah I fail to see what obvious mistakes Zizek’s mentor made in playing this idea out.
Very good paper on such a crucial issue that certainly urgently needed to be addressed.
Thank you very much for sharing your very passionating work with the other.
Another other…Christine Janet.
Hussein–I like that you call her a cheerleader. I don’t think anything in Palin’s actions or speech suggests that she “knows that the phallus is semblance”. I think that Miller knows that the phallus is only a semblance, or a unreal construction fused with meaning by those who seek to control the meaning of the phallus. The fact that the phallus is only a semblance means it can mean anything. Palin does nothing to change the meaning of the phallus, nor does she show that it need not exist. Palin only want to serve power–not even wield it, just serve it. To Palin the Phallus is not a thing to be “disrespected, and not taken seriously” on the contrary, Palin serves the Phallus, and seeks its respect. To Palin the Phallus is the only REAL, everything else is a “semblance… that should not be taken seriously”.
Alice- that is not what I am saying at all. Bryan L Jones understood what I meant by that comment. Sarah Palin, I think, supplements it with Eros giving the phallus even greater appeal.
From what I understood, Jacques-Alain Miller thesis is: “The first ones imitated man, respected the phallus, and performed as if they had one. The second wave knows that the phallus is only a semblance and, furthermore, one not to be taken seriously: it is the de-complexified femininity.”
I think Sarah Palin is neither of these positions.
The best secret I’ve ever heard. Too harsh on students, though
“The first ones imitated man, respected the phallus, and performed as if they had one. The second wave…” I guess Miller is talking of different models which emerge in the culture, both—first and second—already differing from “SHE wants to BE it/HE wants to HAVE it…
in “The Signification of the Phallus”, May 58, Écrits.
Re: the photograph at the very top of your essay
http://www.lacan.com/jacsara.jpg
IMO, the above image shows Sarah Palin exhibiting Agamben’s concept of “gesture”. For me it’s quite amusing that his picture accompanied an essay on Lacan.com describing Palin as, what else to expect from the Freud camp, a castrator. Are you intellectuals sooo at loss as to what else to call her? A woman who wants to force unwanted pregnancies onto other women (Palin is a staunch anti-abortionist) doesn’t exactly sound like a castrator to me. Instead, Palin “respects the phallus” to such an extreme extent that she will let nothing get in its way, she will gladly watch other women to suffer the full consequences of conversing with the phallus.
Note that Lacan.com actually hosts Agamben pieces as well as various types of Agamben reception. You would have thought that the Lacan.com blokes would have been thankful and glad to have someone like Palin embody Agamben’s concept of “gesture” for the masses, but alas, Agamben’s dickish “gesture” is apparently not for girls. Nevertheless Palin seems to be the perfect performer of Agamben’s “gesture”, the masses are all “eating it up”, and the Lacan boys don’t like what they are seeing, a woman performing the phallus better and to greater mass appeal and idolatry than they were ever able to get away with. The hard dick envy you claim to see in Palin is all yours guys.
Maria Technosux
while at times this interview seeks to discuss that stereotypes are changing, “Socio-cultural stereotypes of womanliness and virility are in the process of radical transformation.” J.A.M Still Upholds very stereotypical views on both women and men, some would say that these ideas are a conservative,stereotypical, and outdated conjecture: ” In women, fantasies, whether conscious or unconscious, are decisive for the position of jouissance more than for the choice of love object. And it’s the opposite for men. For example, it may happen that a woman can only achieve jouissance – orgasm, let’s say – on condition that she imagines herself, during intercourse itself, being beaten, raped, or imagines that she’s another woman, or even that she’s elsewhere, absent.”
BOO! Bad taste.
I can’t believe this article! I would argue that the production of the “rape fantasy in women” is a male production. This article is regressive, I’m horrified it’s published.
Sommes-nous si abrutis qu’on ne puisse plus lire Lacan qu’en anglais ?
Well, interesting comments, and it raises the crucial question: When an analyst speaks, in general terms about gender relations, gender differences, and gender character traits, we might assume he speaks as if he knows from a wealth of clinical experience, from inductive inferences compiled from numerous observations of countless patients who were not led into saying what was said by the suggestive influence of the analyst, direct or indirect – but this is precisely what we do not know, nowhere is this information given, and neither do we know whether it is all but a free-association in the mind of the analyst, thinking about his own partner, or about some singular relationship that falls too close in that moment of utterance, whether within the clinic or without. With that said though, fixating too reductively on the latter epistemic concerns, can also make for the road to a resistance, rather than to an unconcealing, of a subject’s individual truth, where lies the meaning of their desire, which may not have a real meaning at all..
In Argentine ,some mothers leave their children because they cannot feed them ,or were raped or have no more than 15 years old,or somebody stole childs to sold
I was just thinking why Love is defined as dependence. I think parents can love their child or each other, but they are able to keep up their independence and self sufficiency.
I think this article is about the unconscious love, like “love at first sight”. I was wondering if any other types of love can exist between two sexes.
In addition, I agree with the first entry of “claroquesiputa”; but we should bear in mind that the stereotypes are not yet transformed entirely. Their transformation is slow, so we still can talk about stereotypical fantasies in women and men.
But as 21st century analysts, shouldn’t we take into consideration, or make statement that “these may be stereotypical ideas/assumptions but…” instead of conjecting their truth?
claroquesiputa — which part of the article makes you mad to the point of saying it promotes rape?
In the intertextual chain, the translator acts as the invigorator of the assasinated-forgotten text.
I often read J.A. Miller’s writings with somehow admiration, wonder and being defended; why? becoz sometimes I found something tastes conformist in them. Talking about love without a gest or gesture of not-knowing is necessary, I think. Love is a pretend, Lacan said; so it can not be acknowledging our lack but it is a fake, a play of simulation that I (lover) have something (phallus) so I can fill in your lack mu beloved! but it is not a successful fake, becoz at the same moment, I have to play being devoid of something so I need you my beloved and so on. Psychoanalysis is a bribe (as you wrote so many times before) just love.
Are we going to stick to politically correct material or enter a discourse around desire…..
Shahriar, thank you for your great comment, instead of focusing on women’s rights
I am not sure how what you are saying is mutually exclusive with what JAM said in the article
I love the expression “conversing with the phallus” from the poster above. Perhaps it could be something of the order of Interview with a Vampire?
If the phallus is a vampire it is the kind of vampire we love, we want… right?
the conversing part is however dubious yet intriguing
The last conversation with the phallus I heard of was in concern with the virgin Mary who later gives birth to Jesus Christ – consequence of…?
Financial liberalization has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement, capital flight, creates what some have called a “virtual parliament” of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programs and “vote” against them if they are considered irrational: i.e., if they are considered for the benefit of the majority of people, rather than for concentrated private power.
What Investors and lenders do here is “vote” by capital flight, through attacks on currencies and through other devices offered by financial liberalization. That is one reason why the BRETTON WOODS system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War had then instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.
The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organization. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will – for some measure of democracy.
John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.
In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a “fundamental right”, unlike such alleged “rights” as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: i.e., those such as health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as “letters to Santa Claus”, “preposterous”, mere “myths”.
–by Noam Chomsky, MIT Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus), excerpt from “ANTI-DEMOCRATIC NATURE OF US CAPITALISM IS BEING EXPOSED”, posted on Z-Net, 11 Oct 2008, article also appeared first in The Irish Times.
Fortunately for our species, the dreaming biped, there is no truth about truth that will suffice. Despite a Bretton Woods 2 and the US election of a well-crafted Subject-supposed-to-know (desperately embraced) in November, the fetished goal of financialized Capitalism will not regain it’s pretense of rational function: Money stays sh-te. In this debacle, the well-coutured looters have added too many zeros to the astronomical sums accumulating in their hoards for ‘normal’ to appear coherent again.
This time the bands that won the Battle in Seattle are become globalized millions: Man becomes Man? Will we even recognize him?
First of all, this is not a vergy good translation. In addition to being very unwieldy, it has at least two real mistakes: “And she immediately took it back, but it was too late” should be “and she immediately went up in the polls, but it was too late”.
“In the instances of his spouse, who is quite a pitbull herself” should be something like “under the influence of his wife, who is said to be quite a pitbull herself.”
As for the article itself, Miller’s conclusions about the future of American politics seem weirdly naive.
Some more data on Emanuel that might be of interest:
“So why is Obama hiring Emanuel as chief of staff? Probably for the same reason Daley hired him way back in 1989. He’s ruthless, cunning, and absolutely unafraid to be a jerk. In fact, I think Emanuel enjoys being a jerk. Moreover, by being a jerk, I predict Emanuel will do a great service for Obama. By the time Emanuel is finished irritating, humiliating, and infuriating folks in Washington, Obama will look like an angel. People will probably like him even more just because he’s not Emanuel.
In the last few days, Emanuel’s been telling friends in Chicago that he had to think long and hard over leaving Congress. But I doubt it was that tough of a decision.
It couldn’t have been easy for Emanuel to be a congressman, particularly at election time when he had to be nice to everyone like those old folks in the bingo parlor.
Now he gets to go back to being nasty. I suspect it will be like a dream come true.”
By Ben Joravsky, a staff writer for the Chicago Reader, where he has covered Chicago politics for many years. This article is an excerpt of one that appeared in ‘The American Prospect’, 7 Nov, 2008
do you think, obama has a deep and independent understanding of the money system? and are there deep enough understandings of that system at all?
i ask this question in the context of a book about money, written by german eske bockelmann called (something like: in the rhythm of money, 500 p., 2004, edition: zu klampen).
bockelmann starts with martin opitz and the early 17th century where – on one hand – there was a quite sudden, never sufficiently explained change/shift in the rhythm perception of western europe, replacing a multitude of rhythms and measures with the absolute domination of 4/4 and 3/4.
noone started this consciously – it just , which of course appears spooky. but martin opitz serves as a witness. his book <von der deutschen poeterey» (book of german poetry) describes the and the of this change just like that, without seeming surprised!
NOW: on the other hand and as well in early 17th century there was a change/shift on the westeuropean markets: within not much more than a generation money changed from a can-partizipate-system to a must-partizipate-system. it had to happen and it happened then, in western europe only, first.
eske bockelmann discusse these two quite separate observations and discusses parallels, connections and influences from one system to the other, or, as he believes: from the sinister abstraction called money which forces us in an existential manner to believe in it. put otherwise: money demands an effort of believing in something we do not know but have to use it on a daily basis to become and stay part of the economy – be it king or farmer.
(pls forgive my basic english and my very rough explanations. i did an interview with bockelmann, it will be translated in english this year, i hope.)
POST SCRIPTUM. sorry the title of the book got lost. pls replace my second paragraph with this new version:
i ask this question in the context of a book about money written by german eske bockelmann called IM TAKT DES GELDES (something like: in the rhythm of money, 500 p., 2004, edition: zu klampen).
Mesias has arrived, future is now possible, jews are back again with Rham, a son of a figther of the Irgun
Thanks, Josefina and J Alain
Bachrach B.A. Eol Amp-
No comment? only: “pourquoi(s)”!
God and money
I was just coming home now observing the headlines and covers of the weekly magazines here in Brazil. Of course all of them display great pictures of the smiling-new-president Obama. Besides showing the picture, one of the magazines also quoted a small piece of the speech Obama made when elected. Something like “if one ever doubted the USA is the great democracy in the world, I´m here as a proof it really is”. Regarding ideology, is this not everything the States ever needed in order to ‘react’ in times of crisis, disbelief, and prejudices against the country? Is this not a perfect excuse to reinforce this false idea of a perfect and possible real democracy and capitalism? What other things can be done now (besides torture, war or global gambling in economy) in the name of this powerful and ‘perfect democracy’?
There are so many other interesting things about Obama, psychoanalytically. First, he’s the first introvert I’ve ever seen holding this particular office. Second, he regards himself as a blank screen, like an analyst. Third, he is prepared to use collectivity and group dynamics rather than just sell a product in order to to get elected. I thought Prof. Miller’s short essay was rather too heavy on our projections.
le prof miller est trés trés buffoon!
so damn facile!
so easily after the freudian.
pfuff!
I have to agree with Timothy Morton. The point about Obama as the blank screen of the analyst is a compelling one, and it deserves elaboration in terms of Lacan’s Seminar VII. In fact, actor John Cusack already compared the “promise” of Obama to “Antigone before the king”:
This “coincidental” comparison is perhaps more telling than it is coincidental: people recognize that Obama’s image has brought about catharsis for the chorus. People still get choked up talking about Obama. He’s facilitating a mourning process.
This is why people expect great “change.” What has changed is the indigestible kernel of Obama’s image (his face, his name) has been elevated to the dominant position, which means that whatever the previous symbolic system had repressed is now open to reinterpretation.
People love to raise the question, Is Obama doomed to disappoint us? This is the wrong question to ask, because it suggests that analysis comes from the analyst–as if he were the Name of the Father and analysis were the analyst’s narrative.
Instead, we should acknowledge Obama’s effect on “grass roots” movements and his image’s empowerment of community organizers. When the mourning process is over, how many people quit analysis? How many will replace the president with themselves on the level of active citizenry?
If there is an Obama promise, that is it. To the extent that Obama can disappoint anyone, he’s not in the position of the analyst for that person. He will have become yet another phallus confining that person in a repressive symbolic system–waiting for a president to bring change.
Ironically, the “Obama promise” is not “socialist” as much as it is “libertarian”–at least in the sense that the private citizen is the source of social change.
halooo!!! what about homosexual love? as usual, ignored!
Cheers to Morton and Kane. Today’s internet flurry about “uncritical exuberance” is of course settled by a reflection AWAY from the inevitable prospect of disapointment in Obama, back to the ever present imperatives of progress and justice. But the cynical, ugly tone taken over our emotional reactions to an obviously positive world-historical event is just unnecessary and counter-productive. When are we permitted to be happy if not now? Only when all injustices are corrected? What an inhumane and unlivable standard! You can be happy and still be vigilant.
It seems reasonable that Miller wants to stay away from conjectures about how Obama ‘regards himself’ as opposed to how he projects himself. Thus I cannot agree that the point about a tabula rasa is ‘compelling’ or even a ‘point’ – rather it is an interesting conjecture. Very interesting. However there is a difference after all, between our projections and Obama’s projections.
I think that the greatest moments of psychoanalytic thought follow in the tradition of stoicism. Not merely the stoicism of the Greeks, but that of Shakespeare. It is an evident cry of libidinal interjection to say ‘when am I permitted to be happy?’ However, it is to miss the point. The question is not of whether we have the ‘right’ (cf. Allan Bloom) or the permission to be happy, but of when we might trust our happiness. Hegel – who bequeathed our conception of the world-historical – would have been the first to say that we ought at the very least to ask questions when the words ‘obvious’ and ‘world-historical’ appear together.
This is not meant to foist priggish heavy-handedness, or the furrowed brow of the dour moralist upon the American conscience. Yet there has been a fair amount of knee-jerk resistance to Miller’s prudent analysis.
Below the fold of the Wall Street Journal’s front page this morning is a story about Credit Crunch merchandise: retailers across the UK are agog with items meant ‘to cheer up in the current economic climate’, from shoes (’Credit Crunch stilettos’) to candy (’Credit Crunch bars’) to wedding dresses (’Budget Weddings’). Marketing firms are responding to the crisis du jour in the only way they know: co-option. One is reminded of the crass jokes made about oceanfront property in Appalachia and the White Mountains, or, worse, land speculation in Green Antarctica.
What makes the Credit Crunch phenomenon unique is its use of signifier. Taken at face value the phrase supposedly connotes a shortage of virtual confidence and/or the resulting slowing of market inertia. That is, it suggests people are going to be able to spend and receive less money. By being transformed into a marketing tool, however, the phrase is made to imply its opposite: ‘Though you and I understand that we’re not supposed to be spending money, I’ve made it possible for you to spend some.’ It’s the same turn-the-other-way/dirty-uncle phenomenon that urges you to enjoy Coca-Cola because You Deserve It. This is a basic point, yes, and one wouldn’t have a hard time making the case for the Superego here.
…which is where we reach our point of departure: the signifier ‘Credit Crunch’ is stripped of its intended signified (freezer money) and, in the hands of our Superego older brother, made to mean its opposite (freer money). Boring? I would only like to point out that the signifier itself is able to mean two things at the same time. Our computational example of this is the undecided byte (I forget what it’s called), the banal example of which we have in the movie Swordfish – those little indecipherable bits of code that Stanley Jobson (the hacker) can turn into a ‘crack’, even while a prostitute goes to work on him at a club in LA. Lacan tells us that this is what constitutes a message from the Other, an incomplete message which has two viable means of interpretation. I’m oversimplifying here, but the choice is as follows: take the Other at face value and it is an object; take it as a lie (a feint) and it is a subject. He quotes a Jewish joke: ‘I am going to Krakow,’ one man says, to which the other replies, ‘Why are you telling me you are going to Krakow? You are telling me to make me believe that you are going somewhere else.’
So here we have a subjective choice to make: believe it when the Superego tells you that the markets aren’t that bad and take him up on his Credit Crunch knee socks, or read the newspaper and tell him to hit the road.
The tragedy lies in how this relates to Obama’s (pre-) presidency: innumerable are the articles we’ve read about ‘post-cynicism’ and our generation’s ‘Yes We Can’ middle finger to apathy; are we just fooling ourselves with more false Hope? The cynic is right to turn a blind eye on ‘credit crunch chic’…but the question arises: whose side is Hope on?
wtf, wassup with the desperate need of distinction? Did u read the article at all?
The love process is the same, but focused on the same gender. Negative Oedipus complex.
Please ignore that last comment: I am its author but it was posted here without my willing it…reading it over now I see its marginal relevance and I’d like to apologize if it in any way interrupted the conversation.
“Love” was mentioned many times in this article. But it seems to me, that J.A.M. uses word “love” to describe very different feelings and types of relationships. “Love at first sight”? How can you love someone at first sight when you don’t know that person? You can fall in love and you can have strong emotions, affection, but that’s not love. It is commonly used term (love at first sight) today, but it’s wrong. Different people say they love, thinking of strong emotions they have for someone, but that’s not necessarily love. Not everyone is capable of love, even they say they love and feel something about someone. That’s why I think this article is bad. I expected more.
Who plays this part? The concert of authorities…
As Tim’s arrogated voice intimated, it is not only the libidinal economy that is organized around the pursuit of a necessarily exorbitant element- one can clearly recognize the absence of any authority mediating between the dyadic exchange through which two elements become one in economy. Even or especially in the darkest, most banal sense, when it seems out of reach or out of touch, the metaphor of economy will not yield into something greater or less than itself. This metaphor produces.
Just one comment:
“Lacan stresses again and again that psychoanalysis is a science”…
That is not for sure, and it’s not that simple. Lacan stresses that the subject of psychianalysis is the subject of the science (science and truth 1965), but the fact that de Lacan worked in the formalization of the expirience of psychoanalysis doesn´t means psychoanalysis is a science. M. Mannoni, for example, affirmed the contrary. The ethics of psichoanalysis and its respect for the singularity are in fact contrary to the scientific method.
On the other hand, Lacan never denied that science could be the culmination of methaphisics; what its real for Lacan (a) its something that scapes from the any possibility of scientific formalization. Lacan’s topology and formulas are not recognized by the scientific community, because, if psychoanalysis is science, it would be a different kind of science, perhaps much closer to “being of beings”, or perhaps in a negative way (le parletre, the lack of being)…
Finally someone really knows what’s really going on inside the human person. I married one! Just as discribed above, and to the “T.” (He’s so proud, yes he “completes” himself – aliminating healthy emotion towards another). So everyone needs to read it again. Only this time pay attention, you may learn something. It’s been 27 years of marriage for us. And so far, having first hand experience – it’s been tense. Thanks for the confirmation!!!
Well I cannot find the actual article, just the comments!!! I’d like you guys from Lacandotcom to fix it!
Is not Obama less of an alternative to Bush and more of the product of the splitting into two of the one that is body making up capitalist hegemony?
The period of financial crisis coupled with the punctuated leaking of legitimacy experienced by social-democracy under Bush has resulted in the deferal of desire, and the striving for a collectively recognised Father to exercise(/exorcise) authority? Is not Obama the perverse Truth of Bush, that Bush was in fact the capitalist error? Obama is the man who will steer the ship into a time of plain sailing? That in the moment of crisis the True leader emerged to combat the ills of the world…?
No more need to follow false-prophets as the real one has arrived…?
If the vagina dentata invoked by Palin at the Republican Convention wasn’t already overly transparent as a gesture of castration, note the effect produced by the literal decapitation in the following:
(Google search Palin Turkey)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-kjM1asH-8
The (always Chomsky-quoting) anti-globalization protesters are right to be aggrieved about having to foot the bill for investors’ crisis- how will they then be able to support their own crisis?
Thank you!
This strikes me as elucidating in certain ways, but only very obvious ones; it offers back to us that which we already know, now as insight. The difficulty here, though, is indeed that the ‘that which we already know’ bespeaks a cultural ‘we’ that those writing the more interesting comments have largely ceased belonging to or have never belonged to. It’s not, then, that the interview is empty of interesting or appropriate comments on love, but that the ‘that which we already know’ is the knowledge of a ‘we’ that we have no compelling grounds to even want to be. Viz., the constant focus on gender differentiation, as though ‘love in general’ were about things like this and not about things like the lamella or an inexplicable jouissance (I’m aware: it’s been explained–that doesn’t affect its being inexplicable in the slightest). The point (Lacan’s, here redacted) is appropriate: I love my other in part because s/he promises a coherent image of the ‘truth’ of that person that therefore I will have been. But the gendered explication and tracing out is reductively silly and crude (in fairness to Miller, the interviewer has asked for this, but look at [the textual representation of] his glee in response). I’ve tended to think of Miller as more subtle than this, and it’s unfortunate to see him here play Engel’s to Lacan’s Freud.
NB: I do think it helpful that we begin here with transference. The logic of transference is far more readily explicable than that of love, by definition inexplicable. The speakability of transference, its fictiveness, is as Miller notes in part due to its artificial character. Not, however, artificial in the sense that the analysand brings a ‘contrived love’ to the analyst, though this happens too. Rather, what is truly artificial about transference is it, itself, invented by Freud to help relocate what was then in danger of being unanimously recognized as Charcot’s desire.
*ahem*. Engels to Lacan’s Marx.
This seems a little old fashioned and sexist to say that a man is embarrassed to love and therefore has to sleep around to feel better about it. Do you think that man is worried about losing control of his reality ego when he is in love? Is this the problem? Isn’t this just a problem with power? or abusing power that doesn’t exist anymore. Women get embarrassed about love too, and in turn, concerned about losing control of their reality ego. I don’t think love is a gender specific thing anymore, what you are talking about is a very old fashioned construct. It is very sad if you think that man is too embarrassed or looks silly if he is in love. We all love.
I think gone are the days when male theorists are commended for writing horribly misogynist things too.
Isn’t it funny that most old psychoanalysis is written by men so players use these theories as the explanation for being cruel. Lucky we have third wave deconstructive feminist theorists out there, is all I can say.
While it is true that we all love and it is becoming outdated to talk about love as sex-specific, I believe the social construct of the male gender is slower to change, and still contains the subtext of emotional detachment. It is on the way out as well, but slowly.
Oh well us women will just have to go out with the Chris Isaak or hippie types won’t we? My last boyfriend did heaps more of the usual expected “feminine” stuff than I did. Thanks Rick you are right but things only change if you make sure that they do.
You say “philosophy isn’t a science and will never be” – maybe if you’re referring to continental philosophy exclusively that holds… But what about analytical philosophy? Logic? You can’t honestly think that psychoanalysis is more scientific than modern logic is? (By your own criteria of formalization…) – being founded on empirical data obviously isn’t a condition for science, or else math. wouldn’t be scientific. Therefore, at least one branch of philosophy is more scientific than psychoanalysis will ever be. (Logic affects math, math affects all other sciences. Russell’s paradoxes for instance had HUGE repercussions to all mathematics. And he was a philosopher. – After Freud, psychoanalysis was only of interest to humanities and to us philosophy students. – ) Maybe I perceive a bit of a desire there.. desire to be scientific. To be recognized, the way the sciences are today revered and recognized, their place in society almost replaces what once was the cleric’s role. I don’t know if psychoanalysis will ever become a science. I liked your article, just the parts where you write about what is and what isn’t science sounded arrogant.
About analytical philosophy. The foundamental error of analytic philosophy is that it tries to formalize natural languages. Scientific formalisations are formed within a particular scientific situation, and the language they formalize is specific to those matters in that particular moment of that particular science. Analytic philosophers presents themselves as scientists (the best example is Hintikka and his followers) – but usually they have never done any kind of scientific work: they know nothing about science.
About psychoanalysis as a science. I agree, psychoanalysis cannot be a science in the strict sense of the word: in psychoanalysis, there is no presence to be formalized as they do in genetics or in physics. If I have understood rightly what Lacan was after in the Seminar XI, then psychoanalysis could be seen as a science of the subject of science, that is, of the subject of signifier. And here is the crucial point: they are the signifiers of sciences. So the point seems to be that when the scientific signifiers hit the flesh – as they do all over the world nowadays – the effects are universal. Thus, even if the subject of signifier is not present as such (it will have been), the effects of this hitting of signifiers into flesh are.
So this opens up the possibility of scientific psychoanalysis. For my knowledge, the best example of this kind of psychoanalytic theory nowadays is what Paul Verhaeghe is doing: there are universal (in regard to the Western world of scientific era) phenomena called “disorders” etc, and what psychoanalysis – and it seems that only psychoanalysis can do this – can do is to give a coherent theory of the non-present dynamics behind these present phenomena.
A corollary of this is clear: if psychoanalysis loses its touch with clinical practice, it loses the possibility to become/to be a science of the subject of science. Namely, the present phenomena are only there, in the clinical practice. At the universities, you only have the discourse of university.
Castration? But of course! Psychoanalysts have genitalia for brains. They are absolutely and utterly incapable of looking at the world around them without the perennial phallus goggles (or is it pince-nez?) firmly perched on their noses. That this kind of tired psycho-twaddle still passes as respectable socio-psychological analysis is truly puzzling.
I think the general point that only a lacking being can truly love is a profound one. However, there is a tendency in psychoanalysis to emphasise a woman’s capacity to accept her lack, which I find suspect.
Not simply a lacking being, but rather, a being which recognizes their lack, has accepted their castration. The pervert cannot love.
All of this talk about ‘their’ crisis and ‘our’ crisis is quite concerning. It reminds me of the Hegelian beautiful soul(s) who seek to obsolve themselves of any responsibility despite the constitutive role they play, especially in the system of global capital.
I was never castrated in the first place! Psychoanalysis shouldn’t be read so seriously. Seriously guys you’ll do your own heads in. Its usually something that’s come out of a psychoanalyst’s meeting with a single patient and I don’t think it should be read as a cultural “generalised theory”. If cultural theory is doing any of your heads in I strongly recommend a mental health first aid workshop where you can look at clinical symptoms and stop worrying so much about poetic analysis. It simply isn’t true.
Je ne crois pas que l’origine de la crise soit essentiellement la question des sub-primes , il me semble que le vrai probléme est le 11 septembre 2001 et la réponse qui s’ en suivi avec une guerre extrémement couteuse en Irak !
Cette crise révelle les contradictions du capitalisme lorsqu’ il devient le principal systéme de la planéte et que l’alternative communiste disparait deriére les critiques d’ un renouveau religieux du à une fin de millénaire plus qu’à une pratique chrétienne !
Comment peut on dire que Dieu tient tout lorsque l’ on assiste impuissant aux series de massacres contemporains ; Yougoslavie Rwanda Irak ? Non le Dieu du capitalisme n’est pas celui de Jésus CHRIST !
Le dieu de BUSCH est celui de la vengeance et non de l’amour, celui de l’ordre et non de la justice.
L’ ironie du sort a voulu que le nouveau President porte un prenom identique à la victime du précédent
le probléme pour Barak Hussein Obama va être un peu le même que celui rencontré par François MITTERAND en 1981 : Peut il y avoir un changement politique sans révolution économique ? La démocratie capitaliste est-elle condamnée à n’etre qu’une ploutocratie dans laquelle le peuple désabusé n’est même plus représenté car il sait que l’ordre monétaire consitue un pouvoir absolue comme la religion constituait celui des rois sous l’ancien régime ?
Si la crise renvoit à la critique le credit revoit à la croyance et la nouvelle génération d’analystes et d’intellectuels devra ouvrir les yeux au peuple au lieu de l’endormir dans une peopolisation charismaniaque …
http://www.lepost.fr/article/2009/08/31/1676282_tu-deconnes-bendit.html
Don’t worry Penelope. Deconstructive third way feminism will save the day!
“If one is interested in a left perspective, or in any for that matter, it is better to engage with those who are rational, empirical, logical and factual, rather than those who want to recycle morbid barbarians like Mao or mystic liars like Plato back into fashion with a prose decadence and pied-piper akin of Wagner. You should all know that the analyst doesn’t know anything by now; and if so, then you at least know one more thing than the average analyst” — by Tim Themi, Institute Professor of Circus Tricks Down Under.
Castration is a bullshit, Christian concept, ideal, desideratum that reeks of a morbid resignation that Freud falsely generalized from his idiosyncratic Judeo-phylogenesis. Nonetheless, in terms of a power differential, men and women have to learn to see the difference for what it is. No point moralising the bio-facticity of that to which we come. And there is no doubt we come. If we can not be first, nor best, just be sure to crown with laurel the right victor.
oui Madeleine c’est navrant… heureusement qu’on a appris une autre langue alors.
This analysis seems irredeemably naive less than a year later. Obama is just another politician who figured out where the a parade was marching and got in the front of it. He’s too inexperienced to accomplish anything with this vicious divided electorate. Rahm Emmanual as Obama’s dark lord is pure wish fulfillment. The Dems have absolutely no balls to do anything beyond their own selfish interests.
Dear Kalevi – We wish that the “psycho-analyst” in the pejorative sense merely had “genitalia for brains” – that would make then either a slightly more horny or slightly more self-honest version of all the rest of us (you decide!)
The problem is when they have castrated, cut-off, and self-mutilated genitalia on their brains – and think they are doing people a favor when they try and put this self-projecting morbidity on theirs!
I’m sure I’m not the only one to happily refuse to let every healthy, natural, genital impulse be associated and over-coded in advance with pallid, sickly ideations of incest & castration.
Much better orgasms that way! And dating becomes both a self-affirmation and an affirmation of earthly, somatic, natural-biological life!
Lacan in Seminar XVII broadens the concept of “castration” that much, that a change of terminology is more than just a little justified…
thank u. awesome article.
I read the article and comments with interest. I can understand why Penelope and others are indignant, but I just wanted to make a few points here: firstly that Miller points out that women ‘may’ have a fantasy of..it is one possibility. In the analytic sense, this may or may not be present, but a fantasy is not reality. I think therefore, we need to cautious in interpreting Miller’s words in a literal sense, that women want this as an everyday ‘real, conscious’ experience (real here being used in the everyday sense, not the The Real in the Lacanian sense). Accusations of patriarchy in Psychoanalysis are not unusual, however I would recommend reading Jacqueline Rose on feminine sexuality, reading Lacan against the grain, Rose argues that the phallus (although there is some inevitability that boys will allign with having it), is lacking and no guarantor. Rick’s comments on the movement within the socio-cultural field in relation to the deconstruction of masculinity maybe supports this thesis. There is, I agree, a difficulty within psychoanalytic language at times which is at odds with a post-modern political correctness, but when we deal with fantasy, the unconscious and social construction and discourses maybe there has to be an element of discomfort to keep pace with flux and lack of stability (and as Soler points out, an unmitigated rise in anxiety, but Lacan’s contribution is surely that the question posed is idiosyncratic to each subject, and in my practice, the question that love poses, is an ever recurring one.
perfect
No está nada mal, pero prefiero a Freud.