Simile

Just ran across one of my favorite similes from Virgil, at the beginning of Book VIII of the Aeneid. But I should say something about similes in general first, because they are very strange things. This is especially true when they take the extended "epic" form, which I actually think is the purest. Now, there are a lot of reasons to think otherwise: the epic simile provides a comparison which does not so much compare as narrate another story in miniature, and when they are not annoying for taking us away from the action, they vex our attempts to make sense of them, as they force even best interpretations to turn towards the awkwardness of allegory.

But many of these reasons come from a sense of the rhetorical canon (it doesn't have to be even an explicit rhetoric) that subordinates the simile to metaphor. Never mind the fact that this tendency often comes from the modern sense of metaphor as a function rather than a--for lack of a better word (the traditional "trope" having been coopted by de Man et. al.) I'll just say an artifice--which tends to justify itself with references the psyche empirically understood. Whether these take place in studies that present the empirical psyche straightforwardly as such (in a marriage of psychology and poetics that begins with I.A. Richards), or studies that veil it in a pseudo-phenomenological garb of anxiety and trauma (in a deconstructivism or late-Lacanianism), such view is problematic--not because empiricism provides its foundation, or because the reference is too psychological, but because such it sees the place where the psyche meets rhetoric as language, which is thereby both kept obscure and granted too much power (it becomes Language). This, by the way, is why this sense of metaphor as a function is really only helpful in structuralist poetics, which interprets the psyche psychoanalytically (as in Barthes) or with a genuine phenomenological intent (Ricoeur often, or the more un-de-Manian aspects of Derrida). Situating the link in a linguistic system which, made up as it is of signs, is able to be studied (that is, neither undifferentiated or wrapped in the mystery of infinite differentiation), these stay true to the real aim of the functional sense of metaphor, best outlined by Jakobson: to recover rhetoric by recovering its explanatory power, which means making it more economical (two tropes, which are brought into closer relationship to schemes) so as to restore some sense of the urgency of debates over typology (it will matter again whether the instance in question is an instance of metaphor or not).

But never mind all that: the point is that everything that makes us subordinate simile to a metaphoric function doesn't help us when it comes time to actually get a sense of the purpose of the simile. Here, it is more helpful to turn things around and say as Pope once did that a metaphor is really just a little simile: this junks all the deeper things we have learned about metaphor, and reduces them to the comparative purpose of the simile, but it gives us a perspective that doesn't take this comparative purpose for granted. More significantly, it changes the relationship between metaphor and simile from one of explicitness (when we think of simile subordinated, we often say that it is just a more explicit metaphor: we are apt to explain it as a metaphor that just "has" like or as) to one of size: we thereby understand the comparison accomplished by the "littler" simile as something more like a short illustration, and the comparison of the actual simile as something elaboration. There is something disgusting to modern ears in this, because it comes close to the late-19th century finishing-school sense of such tropes as ornaments that make everyday speech more noble, decorated, and serve to puff it up. But comparison as elaboration is something different than comparison as ornamentation, and it gives us some sense of the essential role that earlier generations felt such tropes played. For they did not have such a disgusting sense that proper speech should be utterly unornamented, devoid of anything but the most rudimentary grammatical connections and the plainest, most dumbed-down meaning: they did not have the sense that meaning was utterly opposed to the means that expressed it (a sense which is only exacerbated by weak attempts to dissolve this opposition and make everything "linguistic," like those of the empirical/postmodern theories I mentioned above--which is why I complain about them).

If we view the simile then in this light, we understand more its relationship to narrative. Perhaps we even see it see it as a modification of the storytelling impulse itself, a modification which seeks to put the fictional aspect of stories to good use: it seeks to find what in fiction compares or elaborates reality, and uses it to work up a fiction already being elaborated. Such a role might actually bring it more in line with a different, lyric impulse, which does not oppose fiction and reality but sets them side by side: the simile might be lyric trying to tell a story, in other words, or narrative trying to return to its similar lyric-like--sorry for the similes--lack of opposition to reality (considered as something different from history, which is mimetically duplicated--more on this in a moment). This view of similes can perhaps most be opposed to view that has to make sense of them as allegory, relating the components together into a hard lump which, in its self-consistency, opposes itself holistically, at one go, to whatever is being compared: maybe it is even the trope that is the very antidote to allegory itself, being always closer (even in its more condensed, illustrative moments) to something like a parable.

Of course, what challenges such a view is the mimetic function that is most explicit in a simile. But what if we rethought mimesis in our rethinking of this very explicitness above, though we did so in a (supposedly--I'd say seemingly but that's what is precisely in question) different connection? Elaboration, like fiction itself, surely involves mimesis, but is not therefore an elaboration of anything that would bring it into opposition to reality, or, as was often said in the height of a celebration of postmodernity, undermine reality (for similar--sorry again--perspectives on check out the writings of Paul Fry and Michael Wood: Fry has been advancing this "realist" view since the 80's). Once we admit the fact that fiction, with mimesis at its center driving it on, is not as opposed to reality as it is to history (the weird internal timeframe of literature, which you can sit down and slip back into at any time, is an index of this--which does not, for all that, make literature itself something ahistorical), we begin to see how tropes that involve it, that mobilize it, might actually be the stuff of literature that is most in connection with the real.

This probably requires a bit more thought (how does literature's non-opposition to the real differ from its elements? how does a novelistic fiction's elaboration of reality differ from lyric's, which is obviously more direct? and how much is rhetoric fictional, especially when it is used in "non-fictional" [a pejorative term, that brings fiction back into opposition with reality qua history] discourses?). But in the meantime, it certainly shows you why I grant the epic simile primacy, as something like the "model" of all similes, and explains as well perhaps the most fascinating thing about epic similes (and perhaps all similes, then): their amazing translatability. Because from a practical perspective they serve to elaborate first and foremost (or tend to open up into something more than illustration), they gain a certain freedom from the selection of words that tends to modify illustrations (metaphors) more. They differ, of course, from translation to translation, but are wonderfully portable.

Perhaps I'll give you an example with the following simile, to which I finally come:

quae Laomedontius heros
cuncta uidens magno curarum fluctuat aestu,
atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc diuidit illuc
in partisque rapit uarias perque omnia uersat,
sicut aquae tremulum labris ubi lumen aenis
sole repercussum aut radiantis imagine lunae
omnia peruolitat late loca, iamque sub auras
erigitur summique ferit laquearia tecti.
-Book VIII.18-25

Meanwhile the heir
of great Laomedon, who knew full well
the whole wide land astir, was vexed and tossed
in troubled seas of care. This way and that
his swift thoughts flew, and scanned with like dismay
each partial peril or the general storm.
Thus the vexed waters at a fountain's brim,
smitten by sunshine or the silver sphere
of a reflected moon, send forth a beam
of flickering light that leaps from wall to wall,
or, skyward lifted in ethereal flight,
glances along some rich-wrought, vaulted dome.
-Theodore Williams' (pretty literal) translation.

While Turnus and th' allies thus urge the war,
The Trojan, floating in a flood of care,
Beholds the tempest which his foes prepare.
This way and that he turns his anxious mind;
Thinks, and rejects the counsels he design'd;
Explores himself in vain, in ev'ry part,
And gives no rest to his distracted heart.
So, when the sun by day, or moon by night,
Strike on the polish'd brass their trembling light,
The glitt'ring species here and there divide,
And cast their dubious beams from side to side;
Now on the walls, now on the pavement play,
And to the ceiling flash the glaring day.
'T was night; and weary nature lull'd asleep
The birds of air, and fishes of the deep,
And beasts, and mortal men.
-Dryden's translation (I include three more lines because I think Dryden is doing a balancing act of some sort between night and day which nicely takes off from Virgil.)

I'll add other translations as I hunt them down.

Emotion, experience

As I read Sianne Ngai, she wants to say that emotion produces the very distance or distantiation that is at the heart of the experience of an aesthetic object qua object, via a modification (not at all Marxist) of Benjamin's concept of aura. Where for Benjamin, this sense of the object crystallizing out of a more richer intimate experience was itself only a nostalgic projection of the bourgeois conception of art (i.e. there was never any actual aura of the artwork, but rather the divorce of art from communal experience as the ruling class consolidates itself produced the retrofiction that there was, and it is now imbued with a power to ironically individualize the artwork), for Ngai, this is actually the function of emotion itself. The resulting ahistoricality of this formulation isn't entirely the most suprising thing about it, nor the complacency with which it distorts (under the aegis of modification) the already overpopular Benjamin. Rather, what's odd is it seeks to at once dissolve the process of reflection which produces the object into emotion, at the same time as it would seek to make any sort of pull away from that process also emotional, so that the solution to the objectification of the art object is also to sink it back into some even more primordial emotional structure.

But one might say that this in turn supposes that one can't present the experience of the artwork in any other form. And this is typical of an extremely regressive post-postmodern movement going on now (not conscious of the ramifications of what it is really saying, and at worst just anarchic like the high theory it seeks to replace) that would try to overcome the sort of difference-producing logics of that earlier moment by showing how more traditional logics can be based upon them instead of upon logics of presence--something akin to having your cake and eating it too. Thus Ngai cites the "post-structuralist turn away from experience" (or some interpretation of emotion as a very thin form of testimony) as all the more legitimating her return to emotion and experience (even though--and this seems forgotten--all that was actually articulated in any generally sane post-structuralist theory like Lacan or Derrida's was a distance in levels between experience and what it would not grasp). But returning to emotion and experience in order to aestheticize both, and then pass them off as difference-friendly, doesn't seem legitimated at all. What is needed is rather something like a sense that the critical presentation or exposition is indeed based upon a different logic than our experience of the text, such that both come to meet each other from different places. As it is, Ngai still supposes, like all the close readers in the post-formalist days of high theory, that our criticism unproblematically expresses our experience, and that the more detailed this gets, the more experience there would be. Instead, I would suggest that I can have an intensely emotional experience of an artwork, and yet that my present explication of it (however impassioned) does not at all immediately reflect that experience, but another one instead. Moreover, I would claim that it is only because of this that I indeed can investigate an emotional experience in any concrete way.

Critique and revolution

In what I won't hesitate to say is the single best essay I've read on Derrida, "Marx's Purloined Letter," Fredric Jameson says (I paraphrase) that Derrida committed himself early on to the idea that systemic change was the only change there could be, and yet that this change could itself not be brought about by any existing system. This makes his work resolutely political in a strange, irresolute way: it seems more about preserving the possibility for change than bringing about change itself, as if on the one hand he wanted to freeze in time that ("magic" I think Badiou recently called it) moment between 1960 and 1968, after the post-war philosophies and before the post-68 micropolitics, and on the other, constantly found new ways to unfreeze this possibility in surprisingly relevant ways even into the 21st century. His project is then extremely consistent because it focuses itself on a type of change that has that sort of afterlife within (or before?) its life. This also makes the sort of change it protects extremely (and, for many, frustratingly) hard to realize.

Zizek recently (in In Defense of Lost Causes) characterized current postmodernist discourse as the result of a crisis of Leninism. To me, he's beating a dead horse, more than surprising us with something we should have already known. At most, that is, he's bringing this crisis home to the most ignorant, those who have the most secret sympathies with postmodernism despite allegedly breaking with it long ago, and haven't realized this was true twenty years ago. Sometimes that's necessary of course. But it seems old to me because Derrida seems to see this from the get-go. Thus there is not only explicit resistance to the Leninism of his interviewers in Positions, but also a resistance to giving them any very stable alternative. The alternative is, indeed, that of "overturning and displacement," which he calls a strategy. What I'd like to suggest is that this move here, as well as that of founding an impossible science of grammatology (among other things) are indeed part of an effort to rethink revolution in a way that both resists the classical Leninist position, as well as the more populist-leaning plans one will find after '68, though Derrida has, I think, more sympathy with them. What people often called his resistance to Marxism was indeed a resistance to vanguardism--and, I'd say, to the way vanguardism can creep into postmodern attempts to bypass it.

Spivak said once that Derrida wanted to write a book on Gramsci, but assembling the fragments was so demanding he never got around to it. I have a feeling that the book would indeed be about socialist strategy, but wouldn't quite resemble Laclau and Mouffe's writings. Gramsci indeed offers the alternative to revolution, but not so much by abandoning class, as they say. Acting as if purifying Marxism of class will be a major factor in overcoming the Leninist vanguardism--which Laclau and Mouffe don't entirely do, but which ends up being the postmodern position in general, often using their theses as justification--really only just keeps vanguardism rumbling underground. It is only dispersed into micropolitics of various sorts, pockets of local resistance which we can only add up, or agglomerate. And this only preserves the idea that in the end it is revolution that is the goal.

What Derrida does politically, from the beginning, is challenge any notion that revolution can occur through such local struggle. At the same time, he affirms that what we can see, what we can adequately deal with, will always be local struggle--or will manifest itself only in those terms. So this cuts off the additive connection, and makes us think always about that particular "short-circuit" (to use a Zizekian word) between the local and the totality (and the other way around--how total struggle strikes to form local contradictions). This doesn't exclude reform as a possibility (to pick up the old opposition). Rather, because his position makes reform something less subordinate to revolution, something different than the failed revolution or total change, his position encourages it. The point, though, is that we lose any notion of direction, of leading, and of the agglomeration of small groups of whatever sort that would ultimately end in an overturning of the present order.

Thus there is an intimate connection between revolution and globalization in Derrida: the revolution of the circle does not exclude, but rather encourages, the notion that if we expand our horizons (rigorously excluding what falls from above or rises from below, the Zufall), if we expand our world, we will all, ultimately, be connected and lead together through some great change. In this way, thinking globally and acting locally becomes indistinguishable, at a certain point, from thinking locally and acting globally. Both these propositions pass into each other, but what we find out is that at this moment, each has lost its meaning--as one can see in various aspects of the "go green" "movement" which Zizek (I think rightly) finds disgusting, along with the other perverse attempts act as if multinational capitalism can be fought through consumption itself (though one shouldn't entirely condemn reform--that follows from what I said above concerning separating it from revolution). Somewhere the system, the totality, has been missed. And this is why Derrida wants us to think revolution differently, in terms of something like strategy which opens onto total effects which it cannot anticipate on a horizon (what he calls the invention of the other).

Now, this also means intense reading of the local--that is, activities that are usually involved in something like critique. Derrida wishes to get beyond critique (thus deconstruction continually opposes itself to criticism), but he isn't against reading (as should be obvious). This, perhaps, hasn't actually been stressed enough: too quickly he was seen as precisely a critic (see Foucault's famous remarks on him at the end of History of Madness, which accuse him of justifying something like infinite explication in old philosophy classrooms--which are weirdly affirmed in the U.S. as what "saves the text" by Paul de Man), that somehow was against the normal way of reading. Everything about this view must be reversed. Meanwhile, one can wonder (with Zizek and many others) whether, at this point, it is actually at the other end of the spectrum that we should be working: thinking, that is, on the level of totalities. The only thing that Derrida did in this area is something Zizek thinks is particularly postmodern: he thought that the experience of thinking a totality had to be something like Benjaminian weak messianism. Perhaps this is indeed postmodern (approaching something like worship of a God without being). But if you tie it back into the thinking of revolution, and the rethinking of vanguardism, we see its origins, at least, are different. Zizek would rightly say that we don't need anything weak right now. But what I'd stress is that Derrida gives us a weakness that is, when perceived against this background, something more productive than what Zizek and various Lacanians have their sights set on (that postmodern religion and religiosity--which I agree can be interesting, but is a weird and suspicious turn for things to take). And what this means is that he offers us a way where elements of the local, which take over the interpretive aspects of the critical, can be retained to fight something like the crisis of Leninism--which indeed ends up in that precise fatalist sort of religiosity (our local struggles can't do anything, our thinking of the global can only be weak, so we just have to keep doing what we're doing, which is emptily criticizing both the local and the whole system at once). For too quickly the call to think new total systems sees itself as opposed to not only criticism, but the activities involved in criticism--like reading and interpretation. What I'd argue is that this can end up being just another form of criticism, now empty of all of its content. Derrida gives us a notion that we can pull away from criticism by modifying its elements, precisely by making the total system bear upon them. If we have now discovered this also means thinking the totality has a relationship to these elements (partially because, with Derrida, we have blinded ourselves to the inner dynamics of institutions, the possibilities of reform within them that are not ultimately directed towards revolution, and focused continually on their forms of founding violence--the other side of the naive recognition that they are, indeed, organized organizations), and perhaps a more important role than this strategic activity, this is perfect--we're not then really claiming that we're giving up all that reading that is involved in making visible, and rendering strategic, the local changes (in other words that the changes will have, for us, local effects). Don't get me wrong: it's not that interpretation and reading are something really great in themselves. But I just want to make clear that there is a danger in renouncing them. This would be to continually convey, in writing and through reading, that giving up writing and reading means we're going to immediately start thinking the totality. And this, I'd claim, might only be the other side of a certain postmodernism (which, people don't seem to remember, specifically militated against interpretation--i.e. Foucault and his historicists), and it tends to creep into certain discourses now that suspiciously lay all the blame on critique, on hermeneutics of suspicion.

The social symbolic

If, then, what is called “the symbolic” encodes a socially sedimented heterosexual pathos, how ought the relation between the social and the symbolic to be reconfigured? If the symbolic is subject to rearticulation under the pressure of social arrangements, how might that be described, and will such descriptions trouble any effort to draw a clear distinction between the social and the symbolic? Has the social—within postmarxism—become equated with the descriptively given, and how might ideality (possibility, transformability) be reintroduced into feminist accounts of the social? Such a project would refuse the simple conflation of the domain of the social with what is socially given or already constituted, and reformulate a Marxian account of social transformation outside of implausible historical teleologies. To the extent that views of social transformation have relied on such teleological accounts of history, it seems imperative to separate the question of transformation from teleology. Otherwise, the site of political expectation becomes precisely the incommensurability between a symbolic and a social domain, one in which the symbolic now encodes precisely the ideality evacuated, after Marxism, from the domain of the social.
-Judith Butler, "Against Proper Objects"

To the question "Has the social—within postmarxism—become equated with the descriptively given," one can only answer yes, and it is Butler's ingenuity both to locate this problem unashamedly within the postmarxist discourse in which she works (not unlike Derrida) and resist it through a notion of power's psyche (involving insubordination through iterability and/or resistance in interpellation: see The Psychic Life of Power for the most breathtaking formulation of all this). The Lacanian and Foucauldian (and Deleuzian, perhaps) orientations only get so far in actually outlining what the social actually is: it is in their interest to displace it into some homogeneous symbolic arena or into the pure play of the social itself, placing a huge gap where the question of agency is left suspended at best, and the possibility of collective action continually deteriorates. There are two possibilities for getting out of this particular bind: I see one in Butler, and the other in Fredric Jameson (who would not do so "within postmarxism")--although the Gramscians perhaps also remain a possibility and I think they might be reconciled somewhat to Butler's position (Jameson, however, is also sympathetic to Gramsci). Both seem to recognize the same location of the problem, however--it is right here...

Like a language

I want to go over something pretty basic here. One of the objections constantly levied against structuralism is that it treats things as languages when it should treat the things as things. It is generally a legitimate frustration with the oddness of the founding structuralist gesture, which is to say that the thing being investigated is a language, or is structured like a language, or can be understood as a language, or comprehended by using the insights from linguistics, etc. etc. etc.

The criticisms (whether they come from phenomenologists, post-structuralists, or post-post-structuralists) claim that this simplifies the thing in question, and ultimately just projects upon the thing the very terms in which it is being analyzed.

The concern is legitimate, as I said, because it wonders at an analogy being taken so seriously and worked out to the fantastic length and intricacy involved in structural interpretations like those of Lévi-Strauss. But what it fails to understand is that the main term in the analogy, language, has to be understood differently if the analogy is to make any sense.

In other words, the critics of structuralism think they know what language is when they hear the phrase, x can be understood like a language. But the structuralist emphasizes that language, when considered as a structure, looks nothing like what they are imagining.

Language for the structuralist is more like a logic ("structure" is the name for this type of logic, or rather logic working in this way), and as such already doesn't have to be made up of words used in speech, or even something like a grammar (insofar as we think we know what "words," "speech," and "grammar" are when considered independently of the logic in which, according to the structuralist, they are merely minimal units or relations between of these units). So you can't object to a structuralist by saying that x or y doesn't exhibit any features of a language--by saying that it isn't something, for example, that is determined by a culture, or exhibiting conscious organization. For if it involves something like a logic, it will have already worked something like a language.

That is, if the thing has a logic in the way that it also participates, say, in dialectic, it will have worked like a language. "Logic," in other words, is helpfully understood in a pseudo-Hegelian way here. Lévi-Strauss himself articulates the commensurability between structure and dialectic in the famous last chapter of The Savage Mind, in a hugely influential attack on Sartre's fascinating (and too neglected) Critique of Dialectical Reason. In doing so, he is making the case that structural logic is immanent to the being of things in the way Sartre (rightly) says it it is in Hegel and Marx.

It is only after this that he overturns Sartre's notion of dialectical reason, grounding it in what Sartre calls analytic reason, ultimately leading him to conclusions which are more familiar, and which involves further qualifying the way this logic or structure works. Sartre says:

[Scientific, Analytic] Reason is the mind as an empty unifier... Dialectical Reason transcends the level of methodology; it states what a sector of the universe, or, perhaps, the whole universe is. It does not merely direct research, or even pre-judge the mode of appearance of objects. Dialectical Reason legislates, it defines what the world (human or total) must be like for dialectical knowledge to be possible; it simultaneously elucidates the movement of the real and that of our thoughts, and it elucidates the one by the other... It is therefore, both a type of rationality and the transcendence of all types of rationality. The certainty of always being able to transcend replaces the empty detachment of formal rationality: the ever present possibility of unifying becomes the permanent necessity for man of totalising and being totalised, and for the world of being an ever broader, developing totalisation.
-Critique of Dialectical Reason, 20

In short, dialectical reason does not remain one-sided: it is speculative, and therefore not a function of the understanding. Lévi-Strauss replies simply that:

all reason is dialectical... since dialectical reason seems to me like analytical reason in action; but then the distinction between the two forms of reason which is the basis of Sartre's enterprise would become pointless.
-The Savage Mind, 251

If we understand the logic established by dialectical reason's "legislation," or, in Sartre's terms, the totalizations, as the crucial thing, it does seem legitimate to say that analytical reason can establish them just as much as dialectical reason, if we add something to the former.

This is the other crucial aspect of structure, which is that it is not a logic that can be taken over by consciousness:

Linguistics thus presents us with a dialectical and totalizing entity but one outside (or beneath) consciousness and will. Language, and unreflecting totalization, is human reason which has its reasons and of which man knows nothing.
-The Savage Mind, 252

This, then, is the usual claim which we recognize in structuralism, and to which the objections usually are directed, since it makes the subject a mere function of "language." Thus, Levi-Strauss' immediate response:

And if it is is objected that it is so only for a subject who internalizes it on the basis of linguistic theory, my reply is that this way out must be refused, for this subject is one who speaks: for the same light which reveals the nature of language to him also reveals to him that it was so when he did not know it, for he already made himself understood, and that it will remain so tomorrow without since his discourse never was and never will be the result of a conscious totalization of linguistic laws.
-Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 252

But notice that such claims about language only make sense when we understand the more basic claim that "language" here is fundamentally like a logic. Thus the structure gets its non-internalized character because it is a logic immanent to things, not just because it is so determining (which is nearly always read as constraining) of the subject's role. The fact that the subject is a function of language here does not have to do with how determining the structure is, but how language is a logic. It is only in this sense that we can really understand why such a language resists internalization: for even if it were internalized, made conscious, it would still only be operative or produce effects because it was a logic. In short, making it conscious doesn't matter. The logic matters. And it is in this sense that the analytic reason can, when active, produce dialectic effects of totalization, because in that instance this only means what is always the case is indeed the case: the logic, the structure, is producing effects.

Let me just say that this fact complicates dismissals of poststructuralism as well as structuralism which rely upon the fact that, in absence of a deconstruction of something, one falls back upon structures and thereby remains within a certain cultural, linguistic sphere, or just involves deconstructing "cultural" structures--as if all taint of structuralism had to be removed. Such things are said of Foucault, Derrida, and even Lacan (leading to a move away from the tensions between the symbolic and the imaginary and a sole focus on the symbolic and the real). All of this is complicated if the critic understands that in each case language as a structure means something different than language--especially if we take language in its Heideggerian sense. By this I don't just mean that it is made up of binaries, either (though of course this is involved). I mean that it is a logic in the sense I explained earlier, and one which Lévi-Strauss is not so quick to immediately call "cultural" (that is, unless we reconsider our notion of that latter term).

Best of... Freud and psychoanalysis

So I have been trying to collect together a few sets or series of posts that I have done on this blog around various topics or themes that have come up. A "Best of" collection. So far, I we have Derrida and Heidegger. Today, Freud and Psychoanalysis. In the future, we'll probably have Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology. Look for them on the sidebar, where I'll put a more permanent link to the sets. Now, on to Freud:

Freud, philology, associations: I try to read an interesting remark in The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, and reflect on the difference between psychoanalysis and philology.

Anticipated normal path of development: I look closely at a crucial passage in the Schreber case that has been misread, making Freud's theories of development much more normative (in one respect) than they really are. Such cheap points against Freud usually are trying to push you into a false choice: either Freud is normative or he isn't. If you want to defend Freud against the sciolism (to borrow a great word of Coleridge's), you have to prove the impossible. For of course Freud is going to give you some sort of normativity. The real issue is where exactly he is normative--and it usually isn't where you expect.

Vicissitudes: A little reflection on this interesting Freudian (or, rather, Stracheyian) word.

Drives and primal repression: My attempt to work through the two theoretical essays "Instincts and the Vicissitudes" and "Repression."

Looking at drives: Basically, how drives work. I should say, though, Freudian drives, which are odd things.

Lacan and repetition: My reading of Lacan's "Tuchê and automaton."

Place, or/of the fetish: the beginning of a paper on "Fetishism," the splitting of the ego, and place in Freud and psychoanalysis.

Structuralism and finitude

A good understanding of structuralism is something I think we are regaining in the United States, after our flings with certain "post-structuralist" modes of understanding things: there is a return to structuralism that is going on.

That is, unless it is a discovery of structuralism, a return to something that was never really understood well in the first place.

I add this because if you look back at the old journals, you can't help but feel that there was a sort of odd reception of structuralism in the US, one that really missed a lot of its points. Mostly (I think) this was because of the work that people who had the French connections were trying to connect it to discourses that were active in the US that looked like structuralism (in the positive sense that we will develop below). So Geoffrey Hartman, for one (and he was not the only one to do this), would try and explain the structuralist project alongside Northrop Frye's work. This is a good start, but it betrays the fact that there was a certain hermeneutic tradition that was lacking in the US that perhaps was there in France, and allowed a purer understanding of the structuralist approach to take place. And then there was the approach, right after--or, more accurately, right in the middle of the structuralist reception--of certain "post-structuralist" discourses: this perhaps closed the era of structuralism in the US before it really could begin. It isn't an accident that Lacan, Derrida, and others introduced these new notions in a conference meant to consolidate the structuralist influence, in 1966 at Johns Hopkins--introducing and destroying it at the same time for people.

Before outlining what distinguishes this purer understanding, I'll name what I think is the tradition: Heideggerian phenomenology.

Some might be tempted to say: Saussure. But as important as Saussure was in France, Heidegger and phenomenology remain the wider background against which the key notion of structuralism can really be grasped. This notion, which will lead us to the distinguishing characteristic of a solid understanding of structure, is the effectivity of the structure, the way the structure determines its elements.

Now, this effectivity is often explained still in Saussurian terms, around the discovery of the arbitrariness of the signifier: it has to do with the bonds forged horizontally, as it were, between the chain of signifiers, rather than vertically, or through reference to the signified. So where we have a group of signifiers, it is not the downward movement of each signifier's reference that matters,


but rather its ability to juxtapose itself beside other signifiers,


and bring about signification that way. This is a stronger claim, essentially, than "reference only occurs in a context." No: what this claims is that reference occurs only through context, such that 1) the context is what "in the last instance" does the work of reference, not the signifier's relationship to the signified (i.e. the context takes over for the arbitrariness), and 2) the context itself becomes wider than a mere "context:" it is not reducible to anything like order, syntax, or exchange which may locally bring about the juxtaposition. The context becomes a structure, nothing that is still dependent upon the downward work.

So, what do we end up with? The effectivity of the structure on its elements is one that holds it together in the absence of any specific (i.e. non-arbitrary) determination of its elements. The structure's effectivity is what allows meaning (or rather, the function of meaning) to take place and be understood despite the ultimate arbitrariness of meaning.

But this is what I will call only a positive definition of the effectivity involved. It is a rich, full concept of what it is for a structure to have the function of meaning. To this day, it is how we in the US are often taught the concept of structure.

What is more interesting, however, is the corresponding negative phenomenon, that which the positive definition implies. And phenomenology gives you a richer sense of this negative thing at work: it makes what is negative from the Saussurian perspective also positive. If the structure holds its elements together despite any local determination of those elements, what we have is a structure that is or exists only insofar as its elements exist. In other words, the limits of the structure are also defined here, such that we understand that while the structure is transcendental (it governs all the elements despite their determination), it is also finite (its governance does not bear upon anything other than what makes it up).

I will come back to this last word--finitude--in a moment, for it is precisely the distinguishing criterion of a purer understanding of structuralism that I am talking about. But it should already be clear from my vocabulary here (transcendental, finite) that these are phenomenological and specifically Heideggerian concerns. The effectivity we are talking about here is precisely the ontological one that Heidegger brings about in his laying out of Dasein: Dasein is made up of all sorts of specific elements, it is dispersed in these ways, but it holds itself together because the inner tendency (or necessity) of these elements is not to be without a determination (or rather, a determining) that is larger than them, as it were--something that makes of them a whole, but which is not merely a summation of them or even of the nature of an organic, part-whole relationship. Heidegger precisely describes this as the transcending (and not transcendental) essence of Dasein (or, more often, just Dasein's transcendence), which is quite accurate, because as we see, the ontological dimension which holds these elements together is only made up of these elements, and thus cannot be effective upon everything, universally: it is therefore a type of transcendence that goes against the very definition of the transcendental (it is finite), so another name must be sought out. Merleau-Ponty says that this transcendence or transcending is the "lining" of the elements like the lining of a jacket: it determines the contours of the elements but does not remain outside them, independently of them (he also calls it "the invisible"). Regardless, this transcending is the flip side, the negative of the determination of the arbitrary elements: it is the negative of a rich concept of structural signification which determines this signification as only existing insofar as its elements exist--and which is needed to bring this notion of signification really into its own.

Perhaps one of the best people to explain this is Louis Althusser, in Reading Capital. One can see there that, liberated from the Saussurian framework we can still have a structuralist analysis, because this negative phenomenon is thoroughly grasped. In this case it is Marxism that is grasped structurally--despite the fact that we lack any reference to signifiers and signifieds, or arbitrariness more generally: the mode of production there is the global structure that determines all the rest of Marxist phenomena (culture, ideology, relations of production, etc.). But the important thing is the structure's remaining a process of transcendence and not a universal transcendental status: in other words, its effectivity will not be able to be separated from the phenomena that make it up: it will not be anything apart from these, its (here, economic) expressions or effects:

The structure is not an essence outside the economic phenomena which comes and alters their aspect, forms and relations and which is effective on them as an absent cause, absent because it is outside them. The absence of the cause in the structure's "metonymic causality" on its effects is not the fault of the exteriorly of the structure with respect to the economic phenomena; on the contrary, it is the very form of the interiority of the structure, as a structure, in its effects. This implies therefore that the effects are not outside the structure, are not a preexisting object, element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark: on the contrary, it implies that the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term [that Althusser developed earlier], that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects.
-"Marx's Immense Theoretical Revolution," 188-89 (I've removed Althusser's italics and added my own--he significantly adds a footnote to the phrase "metonymic causality," which attributes it to Jacques-Alain Miller, who tries to characterize the causality Lacan recognizes in Freud.)

The phenomena which the structure structures precisely make up the structure: their existence is the condition of the structure's existence.

As I said, this is essentially the finitude of the transcendence of the structure that is involved. In Heidegger, the transcendence is precisely a function of the finitude of the phenomenon, as we saw but characterized only in a privative way by speaking of its non-universality. But more richly considered now, the this finitude is what makes determines the structure ultimately: the structure doesn't extend on and on in an infinite chain (the moving chain of signifiers in Lacan thus resists the structuralist mode of thinking the structure: the function of the Real is precisely developed to destroy the implications of this finitude), but remains a distinct entity which can be viewed, which can be seen existing, and which can therefore have limits insofar as the instances in which it makes its appearance or expresses itself are limited.

And it is this sense of finitude that is lacking in all the old talk about structuralism in the US. The idea came about that the structure lacked this finitude, and was therefore very ahistorical and all encompassing. And while this is true from a certain standpoint--insofar as the structure is considered finite and as something that exists--which is the standpoint precisely of the critiques of structuralism in France, in the US, without a sense of the finitude of the structure, this criticism seems to be more empty: it sounds like a criticism that can be levied against any method, which is that it pretends to a more universal or total set of ramifications, a universality or totality, than is always useful or safe. This also makes the post-structuralists just seem like a set of people reacting against structuralism (i.e., "post-structuralists," which is a uniquely Anglo-American name used to understand these people: they did not think of themselves as post-structuralists, as after anything). In other words, it inscribes structuralism into a uniquely Anglo-American progressivist timeline, one that allows people to talk about it as if it were yet another event in the history of ideas--and not a set of theoretical and methodological propositions which need to be dismantled from the inside. This would also explain the odd staying-power of structuralism: it would have staying-power insofar as these labels and names, these horribly inadequate (and usually pretentious) ways of thinking of ideas, would not have actually touched that to which they claim to refer.

In the end, the more and more this aspect of finitude gets recognized and developed now in the US (which I think it is), the richer and richer the understanding of structuralism becomes.

A tribute to Slavoj Zizek

I have been a bit harsh to Slavoj Zizek on this blog here, but I want to sort of take a step back and note that my harshness only comes from a deep belief that I think he is one of the best people that we have thinking today. In the end, my quibbles with him are with the particular directions that I see him going, never ones regarding the core of what he is doing and what he stands for. I actually think he is perhaps one of the most responsible intellectuals we have around. I want to outline here why I think this is so, and also why I think it is important to defend him against the ridiculous, uninformed slander that appeared a couple days ago in The New Republic about him.
This utterly disgusting denunciation of Adam Kirsch's--a young, unqualified, almost uneducated, unbelievably arrogant hack who works as a quote book critic unquote for the eminent literary journal that is the New York Sun--tries to pose as a review of Zizek's two latest books, Violence and In Defense of Lost Causes, but basically uses tired, pathetic arguments to try and remain as deaf as possible to anything Zizek has written. First, it says Zizek's 2007 article on the prevalence in the US of quite indifferent (but not scientific) discussions of torture--an amazing article, I think--is a trick Zizek pulled just to look good. It presupposes that he is a celebrity academic and that people are willing to read him because he is fashionable. Zizek would then be just trying to sell more books by acting like the good guy who denounces torture (see the article). In short, he'll say anything. Second, it claims that he is a jet-setting professor who poses as a rebel. This presupposes that what he says is dishonest or ineffective because of his position as an academic--and that the academy is disconnected with and ultimately hostile to reality (as if this article, this periodical, and this author wasn't). Third (and perhaps the most vomit-inducing) it makes him out to be un-American. In short, it presupposes that his Slovenian worldview is too restricted and inherently prejudiced against the US and capitalism.
Now, I think it is important to resist this slander because--as you can see from these presuppositions--all these points are the most banal but most prevalent ways people can dismiss him rather than engage him rigorously. I like to think that we're past this view of him--the view of him as a celebrity, as a provocateur, as a foreigner. This stupid image of him, I think, has shown itself just to be uninformative when we actually pick up his writings. He writes in the most calm, perspicuous philosophical English and is willing to engage the most analytic of philosophers in serious debate. This should be enough to convince us that what troubles the little imp here and makes him want to put Zizek down is actual philosophical language, proffered to us in the spirit of discussion--the kind of language you aren't exposed to as a feted Harvard undergraduate (Kirsch's only qualifications) because complaining to your wealthy parents and your connections is usually enough to make the problem (language that makes your tiny brain actually work) go away. "You can talk about these things?! Gasp! I thought capitalism, morals, ethics couldn't be discussed!" For this imbecile, this snot, a discussion leads to thinking, to questioning. This can't be allowed: either you're with us or against us--that is, the unprofessional, unintellectual, staggeringly stupid, yet wealthy, connected white male aesthetes.
But if these presuppositions hang on a bit even in our circles--and like I said, I don't know how much they do, but I'd like to kill them off for good here--it might be because of that fundamental feeling we get from the subject matter of his writing: that is, its inflammatory content, produced by astonishing reversals. Now, Zizek is inflammatory--but, quite frankly, I think he just shows us how little we know how to regard the tradition that he works in: that of (primarily Lacanian) psychoanalysis. For is it really for shock value that he talks about these things? Or is he really just trying to make sense of aspects of our life that are, indeed, tied intimately to the unconscious?
I could go further: so what if he was indeed trying to shock sometimes? Don't we know by now that this is precisely the effect of using what psychoanalysts called constructions? Or, to put it in more modern terms, don't we know by now that this is precisely the effect of the process that Lacan called "traversing the fantasy?" We perhaps display, that is, a fundamental naivete with regard to this Freudian and Lacanian post-hermeneutical process, a naivete which is typical of our thinking in the United States. The fact that something the analyst says to us--and Zizek is most certainly that, a critical analyst or producer of a cultural symptomatology--shocks us does not have to issue from the fact that what is said is shocking. Rather, our shock is the release of affect that comes with hitting something that makes our fantasy--our stable vision of the world--look just as constructed as what the analyst says. In short, the shock is part of the function of the interpretation that Zizek gives us. This means that the interpretation is not a mere commentary, but something that is mobilized in order to do something other than what it says. If it is said just to shock, what this really means is that it is said to try and bring about some change in relation to the fantasy that our unconscious produces and sustains. The point is then to bring us into a healthier relation with respect to the possibility of culture to build fantasies--that is, to be able to begin to live with an unconscious.
In short, Zizek shows us, like Freud did, that we are prudes. Not prudes with respect to sexuality, depravity, and the like, perhaps, but prudish with respect to dirty or indirect arguments: we don't want them to function any different than by meaning. Once we understand that what Zizek says perhaps has a function besides meaning--namely, traversing the fantasy--then our relationship to its shocking content becomes more mature. Of course, this doesn't mean that loses its ability to shock--and we begin to understand that we wouldn't want it to. For what is crucial to note here is that this non-meaningful function of traversing the fantasy takes place precisely through meaning: that something means when it is said is the precise thing that Zizek takes up and fiddles with--he thereby uses the fantasy against itself to try and shift the way the unconscious constructs it. So what I'm claiming is not that we are prudes because we are shocked by what Zizek says: indeed, what he says is sometimes rough to take. What I'm saying is that we are prudish because we are not open to the fact that the meaning can take on something that our unconscious gives it, and that perhaps its functioning, if altered, can be different. (Of course we would not be open at first--this fact here is repressed--but, afterwards, we might have a more open and mature relation to what happened when the repressed returned in this way. This is what we lack. In other words, we can't be prepared for what Zizek is saying, but we can, after he says it, be more committed to understanding why and, more importantly here, how it was said. This would produce genuine discussion--with disagreements--with less dismissal in front of a particular topic... fisting, for example. This would also allow us to think more about how to understand how Zizek can be wrong, or mislead--something I'm still not sure how to talk about without my prudish dismissal.)
So when this idiot quotes Zizek and tries to get the better of him with arguments any imbecile can make, we understand that, beyond the bankruptcy of the anti-intellectualist and xenophobic remarks, there is also a fundamental misunderstanding, and prudishness, at work that makes him take what Zizek says at face value. Really, is irony--which here I'll define positively as the capability of a discourse (whether theoretical/analytic or not) to function other than by direct reference--still that tough to comprehend? Perhaps, yes, to know, since what we are dealing with is a process that works back towards the unconscious and actually uses the fact that what is said gets its irony precisely from meaning... but knowing is not the same as comprehension, or a basic grasp of the importance of openness, not unlike the openness of a patient to analysis that she or he exhibits in just showing up.
But enough of this disgusting essay: I want to outline what I think is so eminently valuable about Zizek in more of my own terms.
For me, first and foremost, and as I've remarked before, a notion of the unconscious as closer to the sublime of Kant, which ultimately bridges the tradition of psychoanalysis with the tradition of phenomenology and the tradition of German Idealism, all at one go. It makes the unconscious able to be looked at through many more lenses more quickly.
It should be immediately said after this that this is another unbelievably valuable trait: the willingness to find a set of concepts that can function as a meeting-point for several discourses at once and thereby allow a clearer explanation of what is going on. Zizek is unparalleled in this respect, I think, both on this side of the Atlantic and on the Continent. He is, hands down, the best explainer we have. Like Anglo-American philosophers, he is still so willing to use examples, which I appreciate immensely. But he also thinks of concepts as things like examples--as structures that can, in their working, be ranged alongside each other and chosen for use based on whether they will allow more or less phenomena to be explained by them clearly. Thus the functioning of the sublime, above. If one really reads Zizek's summary of the concept of the sublime, one will be disappointed and find all sorts of inaccuracies. But--again this discourse functions as well as means--if one realizes that the concept is doing more work than just what it did in Kant, that it is something like a priveliged concept that can join together both experience and other discourses, well, Zizek becomes much clearer, and you will be able to disagree with him on more substantial issues.
This brings me to the next virtue of his work, which is what I disagree with him least about: his strident opposition to populism. For me, some of his best articles are those that resist Ernesto Laclau's recent work. This is not because they promote a sort of anti-democratic and anti-identity politics (after all, populism is arguably, as a response to trends in existing democracies, both of these). Rather, it is because he wants to see democracy differently but not take the easy way out of the problem that populism is. In short, he wants more government, not more people--and this is not anti-democratic. At the very least once could say that he wants to find ways that having a more substantial governmental role is amenable to the principles and the freedoms that democracy cherishes. This, for me, is precisely a response against what is most nihilistic, most pragmatic about populism: the idea that freedom will just sort of consolidate itself with more voices involved. Zizek thinks the tough political thought--but it is also one that has deep roots in Freudianism--that the people perhaps do not know what is best for them. In doing this, he takes up the most basic of political problems and affirms it against something that would dissolve this. While perhaps he takes this thought too far, I think that he is perpetuating something important and allowing us to see what it opposes, which is crucial for us.
Finally, there is the affirmation of the absurd and the disgusting as an important part of psychic life--as something that makes up a substantive part of psychic life that we do not want to throw away. At the end of a recent lecture, he said something about what he wants out of a loving relationship--it was something close to being able to be humiliated but almost indifferently... I think it was being shit on, as some sort of fetishistic gesture. While indifference can always be pursued too far--and Zizek always goes as far as possible, perhaps too far--I think indifference is something we have to understand that we inhabit, particularly after the atrocities of the 20th century and its machines of mass death. Part of this understanding is thinking about the fact that in the space of the indifferent, in the absurd, we can still have meaningful and valuable relationships. While we may not want to risk entering into them, broaching that area for thought is, right now, crucial I think for adjusting ourselves to a more techno-scientific, hyper-rational society, in which humiliation for another is sometimes just the effect of one's existence. To think about our own indifference and its more happy possibilities might allow us to undo aspects of it that we have imposed upon others.

Dynamic, structural: explaining free and bound energy, and more, in Freud

Here is a little thing I wrote about two years ago, as I was first getting into the problems of Freud. It's a bit on the right track, but it puts a lot of things the wrong way. I hope to revise what it says eventually in another post, one that will more clearly explain the shuttling between the dynamic (or "economic") and structural (or "topographical") accounts of the mind in Freud. My ultimate goal was a bit more expansive than it should have been, which confused me: I was trying to relate how the unconscious related to the Id, and what displacement was effected there in the terms with which Freud was dealing with the mind. However, following Derrida, I got hung up on how these problems were already emerging in the Project for a Scientific Psychology and resurfacing in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as well as, especially, "The Economic Problem in Masochism:"

In understanding the relationship between the Ego, Id, Unconsciousness and Consciousness, it is helpful to investigate what exactly underlies a comment Freud makes nearing the end of The Interpretation of Dreams. Recalling his discussion of the “primary” and “secondary” processes—what will be termed, descriptively, the unconscious and preconscious processes or, structurally (that is, in terms of how this process relates to the other processes of the mind when describing the dynamic operations of the whole apparatus), the Ucs. and Pcs.—Freud reminds us that what we are invited to assume by the postulation of these two different parts of the mind “is not the existence of two systems near the motor end of the apparatus, but the existence of two kinds of processes of excitation or modes of its discharge” (the first sentence of "Unconsciousness and Consciousness--Reality," the last section of the book). What Freud attempts to point out here is that these two processes can be made more distinguishable as results or effects of the dynamic movements of a basic psychical energy rather than as two static psychical territories that govern this movement. In other words, Freud reminds us that, when dealing with the two psychical processes he elaborates here, we should remain attentive not to the location of the psychical energy within the mind but to the two basic tendencies of movement of this psychical energy.
We may bring forth what underlies this comment if we see what happens when we heed his advice. Paying attention to psychical energy and its movements—that is, to its investments, its Besetzungen (translated in English as “cathexes”)—we find that Freud feels compelled to distinguish between two processes because he believes he has observed two basic tendencies of energetic movement or investment. As Freud explains here and throughout his writings, it becomes evident that the first (primary and Ucs.) process should be regarded as the process constituted by the tendency of energy to move or be invested such that it can be described as “free” energy, and the second (secondary and Pcs.) process constituted by the tendency of energy to move such that it may be described as “bound” energy. What do these descriptions mean? The aim, goal, or purpose of any accumulation of energy within the psychic apparatus being discharge (a fundamental point of Freud’s that we will discuss more in depth momentarily), energy is deemed “free” because it tends to move directly towards discharge along the path of least resistance—or at least along a path where there is as little deferral of the event of discharge as possible—and because when it discharges, it usually does so completely. On the other hand, the energy that makes up the Pcs. system is called “bound” because it is seen as “inhibited,” or more willing to defer its discharge and possess the tendency to discharge only partially (cf. “The Unconscious,” 135-6, “The Economic Problem in Masochism” 194). We may note in passing that these tendencies of movement amount as a whole into huge threads of energetic behavior that Freud calls “instincts” or, more accurately translated, “drives.”
Now that we more clearly understand this distinction between “free” and “bound” investment, we must turn to how Freud regards investment itself as existing only as differences of the quantity of energy. That is, at any specific moment in the history of the psyche, there exist no qualitative distinctions between units or even tendencies of psychic energy, and especially not between the “free” and the “bound.” The “free” and the “bound” are thus only different quantities of investment, despite their tendencies or mode of investment that we have just noted. The psyche is, indeed, like a portfolio: we may invest more or less rapidly, but at any particular point, if we ask exactly what we have invested, there will only be amounts of cash. However, throughout his work, Freud proceeds, after making this point, to keep these two distinctions of “free” and “bound” energy anyway, as if they were accumulations of investment so different in quantity as to be regarded for all intents and purposes as qualitatively different elements of the mind—so long as we remember these elemental qualities arise only from quantities.
We may ask, then, whether Freud should make this distinction in this way at all when he is attempting to set up two dynamic processes governed by the movement of psychic energy and not two static systems that, as it were, handle the energy with their own independent agency. Perhaps a simple criticism is adequate here: perhaps Freud could have explained this in different language so as to draw even more attention to the lack of a qualitative distinction between different movements of psychic energy, and thereby buttress his larger point about the radical difference of the dynamic and structural conception. For what the notion that we have merely one psychic substance made up of differences only in terms of quantity—what this notion helps to reaffirm is that we have two tendencies of psychic energy that simply operate in different ways, rather than two (or more) different types of energy within the mind warring against each other with no common battleground. That is, this quantitative conception eludes a horrific mistake of the systematic view: though this latter view is able to describe quite clearly the various parts of the mind and how they interact with each other, because it affirms a qualitative distinction between these parts in terms of the energy within them it actually forecloses an accurate analysis of the dynamics of these qualities’ intermixings. Each region of the mind gets divorced from the other based on the quality of its energetic unit, and we get only a reshuffling of the order of the qualities and their arrangement--Lacanians love this aspect of Freud the most, and generally all they do is this reshuffling (which of course has its own merits). So, would not referring to the two tendencies of energy within Freud’s structural and dynamic view in terms of their differing quantities then drive this point home? We quickly find, however, that our position is in the wrong: our hesitation to agree with this phrasing is precisely what Freud would have wanted to engender, but he only could engender it by keeping these two distinctions present in this way. That is, Freud’s decision to leave us with two types of energy, and thereby to seemingly contradict his own point by slipping back again into language that regards as qualitative what he claimed should be rigorously held as only quantitative, is not only to keep things simple for the reader so as to more fluently present the structural and dynamic conception of the mind. This contradictory phrasing remains because it also has the effect of actually reflecting and elucidating something else about the dynamic nature of the cathexes or investments that will eventually explain why a systematic view of the mind is essentially inadequate at an even more fundamental level: it is inadequate because to describe two manifestations of psychic energy in any terms other than qualitative ones (while appending disclaimers that this is, despite the language, not a qualitative distinction) is not possible if we are going to say that the psyche actually has a particular status, exists in a particular way at a particular time.
Let us elaborate: we find that this contradictory phrasing is in fact necessary for Freud because not only is he encountering a fundamental problem within the nature of the most basic element of his structural and dynamic theory of the mind, but he is also running up against a problem many thinkers--chiefly Nietzsche--have encountered. Essentially, the contradictory language opens up to larger, metaphysical levels because Freud here is tapping into a primordial contradiction: he attempts to describe something (psychical energy) that he wishes to assert ontologically exists as becoming while using language and logic that can only assert that something ontologically exists (and can only possess the quality of becoming). Thus he flips back and forth between quality and quantity. And because he is able to describe the psyche dynamically with quantities, he nevertheless must backtrack and describe it again in terms of quantity in order to say that, at a particular moment, it exists. If he were to forego the quantitative, he could only say that the psyche functions as organized, or looks as if it exists, in a particular way. This is the larger tension at play between the dynamic and structural accounts, and why both tend to feed off of each other's inadequacies.

Lacan and repetition, redone

I've redone and extended a post I wrote roughly a year ago to finally get around to what I believe repetition is doing in Lacan's 1964 seminar:

…Where do we meet this real? For what we have in the discovery of psycho-analysis is an encounter, an essential encounter—an appointment to which we are always called with a real that eludes us. That is why I have put on the blackboard a few words that are for us, today, a reference point of what we wish to propose.
 First, the tuché, which we have borrowed, as I told you last time, from Aristotle, who uses it in his search for cause. We have translated it as the encounter with the real. The real is beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle. The real always lies behind the automaton, and it is quite obvious, throughout Freud’s research, that it is this [process] that is his concern…

-"Tuche and Automaton," in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 53-54.



The encounter with the real (tuché) is beyond the process of returning (the automaton), or, put a little more clearly (for the names tuché, automaton, etc. are not important), the real is something that is encountered in a space that opens up once returning is no longer the way in which something comes back to the subject.

Let us bring in the passage from the previous session, “Of The Network of Signifiers” (which would have been fresh in the minds of his listeners), to explain what returning is, so that we can see what Lacan is getting at here. Reproduction is returning—Lacan uses both terms synonymously. So both reproduction and returning are, if we heed this last seminar, different from repetition: “Repetition is not reproduction,” Lacan asserts (50). Both repetition and reproduction, however, are ways that the subject can comport himself towards the past: in each case what is repeated or reproduced is something that for the subject was and now is again. But, as is evident by Lacan’s linking up of returning and reproducing, the past, when it returns, is also reproduced, in the sense that it is re-presented—it is present somehow again. Thus, we do not yet know that this is the case with repetition: indeed, “repetition appears," or is revealed or brought to us, "in a form that is not clear, that is not self-evident, like a reproduction, or a making present” (50, my italics). So we’ll let repetition go for now, noting this key distinction, until we can pick it up again with a fuller notion of what reproduction entails.
What in the past we are comporting ourselves towards, and that comes back again in such a way that it returns,—this “what” is reproduced, is re-presented. Freud calls what gets re-presented a memory—indeed, something that comes back from the past in such a way that it gets re-presented to us (in images, words, feelings, etc.) is what we normally think of as a memory. The key, though, is to link up re-presentation with “presentation” itself—this will show us what memory and what returning really are.

 The word “presentation” only designates something that occurs to us, something that our minds and bodies perceive or grasp or comport ourselves towards—and it is what “presents” itself in both the spatial and the temporal sense: what comes before us—the presented—and the time in which it comes before us—the present. Thus, if what is present is somehow re-presented, it will have to be what was in the past: if it is no longer present in the temporal sense, such that it has to be brought before us again, it will be present again in a different form—the form of present-become-past, or in the form of now-is-that-which-once-was. Thus, a representation (i.e. this form) is never going to appear as a past that is unable to be present itself once more: all of that-which-once-was can be again now. Moreover, all that is now is something that can be that-which-once-was. This means that what returns will always be something that could be present again—the past. Memory is not merely a representation of the past, then: memory is only that form which can adequately represent the past as something that once-was-present. Any other form will not reveal the past to us in such a way that we can recognize it as something that was once present.

So, if the real is the something that is encountered in the space that opens up once returning is no longer a factor, we can conclude that this space is no longer the space of the past. Repetition steps in here, taking over what was a function of returning or reproduction: repetition is the form of returning beyond returning, the form of bringing something before us in such a way that it is not revealed as something that once was present. Put a different way, the space that opens up once returning is no longer the form in which something comes before us--that is, the space of the real--this space is the space of repetition. How, then, does repetition bring something before us? Obviously not in the manner of representation/reproduction. And this means, not in the manner in which it renders something that comes back as past. Repetition, unlike reproduction, does not bring back the past. Rather, it brings back the real.

But what is the real? What is that which is brought back in repetition? If there is no past in repetition, is there any time at all? Indeed, Freud said that the unconscious does not participate in the temporality we are used to: if the unconscious is the seat of the real somehow, does it not have a past or time more generally?
To answer these questions, or at least to try and answer them, we must be clearer. When we say that there is no past in repetition, what we mean is that there is no past that can be simply presented again to consciousness. And when we hypothesize, with Freud, that the unconscious does not participate in temporality, we mean the type of temporality that presents moments to consciousness. However, this does not mean that there can be said to exist any other past or any other temporality than these--that is the question we must ultimately hold in abeyance. We do so along with Lacan, who, in the passages above, has enough on his hands already to show what manifests itself when something is brought back to the subject in repetition. So when we try to specify the past that is brought back by repetition, for example, we specify a past that can be said only to exist insofar as it manifests itself--that is, insofar as it is appearing to the subject. The ultimate status of this manifestation must remain a question for now.
This is all to say that we will also have to change the form of our following question: but what is the real? For the real, it will become clear, is nothing other than what is brought back by repetition. That is, it doesn't clearly exist as something outside repetition itself. Repetition, therefore, does not bring back anything. It is the bringing back itself. This means that the real is, insofar as it manifests itself, repetition. We now can begin to clear up how this repetition or this real relates to manifestation if it does not do so by way of making something present.
We made clear above that, if we take the representation of something as the manifestation of it, it is quite obvious that the real will not able to become manifest. We said that it would become manifest as repetition, but we have yet to understand whether, ultimately, this itself is really any manifestation in the normal sense of the term. What is manifestation of repetition? It is quite obvious what the answer should be: what gets manifested in repetition is the repetition of manifestation. Manifestation is doubled, as it were. In other words, what gets represented is not something simply represented: it is a doubled-representation of some sort, a representation of a representation.
But here we have to pause, and consider what we are saying. For isn't a doubled-representation still a representation? And didn't we just establish above that representation is merely the same thing as a presentation or manifestation? And didn't we say that only what returns or reproduces itself manifests itself as a modification of the present? We seem to be coming back to the same phenomenon--that of return or reproduction, not repetition--from the other side, as we try to derive it from the real.
However, at this point, Lacan explores a crucial word of Freud's that, he implies, would render this idea of a doubled-representation: Vorstellungrepräsentanz. But why does he suddenly bring attention to how the German would render our notion of a doubled-manifestation? Leaving us wondering, Lacan simply proceeds. Let's watch what he does.
He makes a simple point. In short, he notes that this word is not to be thought of like it sounds: that is, since Vorstellung and Repräsentant both mean representation, the temptation is to act like Freud's French translators and think of Vorstellungrepräsentanz as a representation of a representation, or (to say the same thing) a representative representation (le représentant représentatif). Lacan suggests that we think of this word of Freud's as saying "that which takes the place of the representation" (le tenant-lieu de la représentation, 59-60).
It should be clear now that in making this short, offhanded remark about how to translate a word, what Lacan is doing is showing us that there is a basis in Freud's language upon which we can rethink the manifestation of repetition. In other words, interpreting Vorstellungrepräsentanz in a particular way makes possible the following thought, a thought that does not allow us to fall back into thinking of repetition as reproduction: the manifestation of repetition is not a representation of a representation, but a repetition within representation.
What does this mean? To understand this, we have to follow Lacan through his interpretation of the fort-da game of Freud's grandson. He concludes, eventually, that the game little Ernst plays with his spool "itself... is the Repräsentanz of the Vorstellung" (63). In other words, the game is that which takes the place of the representation. Since representation here would be the mean the manifestation of repetition, what Lacan is saying is that the game is that which takes the place of repetition. Repetition, in other words, manifests itself as a game in which there is alternation back and forth between possible representations (or signifiers) of this repetition. But--and here is the crucial point in the analysis--the alternation back and forth in the game is itself repetition. So repetition (the game) takes the place of repetition (itself), which, if you think about it, makes total sense: repetition doesn't repeat anything other than its own activity.
I say "its own" activity, but what this means is really that what is broken down in repetition is any sense in which this repetition could be the repetition of the same act of repetition. Repetition here, since it institutes itself over and over, merely repeats the differences between its acts of repetition. Put back in terms of the game, what is happening here is that more and more games will attempt to signify or represent the repetition that is the real's manifestation. The games will repeat themselves, in that they will repeatedly keep taking the place of repetition. Or, in terms of the Vorstellungrepräsentanz, there will continue to be Repräsentanten of the Vorstellungen, because the Repräsentanten will in turn become the Vorstellungen that new Repräsentanten will have to take the place of. This is what Lacan means when he asks, "What will become of the Vorstellung when, once again, this Repräsentanz of the mother... will be lacking?" (63).

Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sex, part 1

For a couple weeks now I have been thinking or circling about a certain passage in The Animal That Therefore I Am, and its relation to a certain motif, a certain problematic, that stretches itself through Derrida's entire corpus, indeed announcing itself (quite literally: you can find it there in the text), if not always, then with surprising frequency.
It itself was largely the subject of a series of seminars on philosophical nationalism Derrida held in the late 80's. Hopefully these will all eventually be published. But the motif or problematic I am talking about is not just confined to the issues it involved and which these seminars (and the articles and works explicitly published around them or with reference to them, which included Of Spirit and The Politics of Friendship)--that is, sex or all the words centering around Geschlecht, including sex, gender, race or breeding, nation--so much as an issue revolving around Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the problem of reproduction and biology and/or technology which extends much further than the apparent (that is, explicit) reach even of (this subject of) Geschlecht.
(In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida says the following, which approximates--and yet I wonder whether we might ever get an abstracted, pure formulation of this, outside of any text, any project like The Politics of Friendship--the problem or motif I am trying to get at, but as a particular conceptualization and/or question of politics:

The concept of politics rarely announces itself without some sort of adherence of the State to the family., without what we will call a schematic of filiation: stock, genus or species, sex (Geschlecht), blood, birth, nature, nation... This is once again the abyssal question of the phúsis, the question of being, the question of what appears in birth, in opening up, in nurturing or growing, in producing by being produced. Is that not life? That is how life is thought to reach recognition.
-The Politics of Friendship, viii.)
First, the passage. Derrida is talking about how the issue of whether and how an animal could see itself (and perhaps see itself naked, i.e. feel shame) within a mirror, whether it can apprehend its own reflection--how this issue is not found discussed in any discourse of a philosophical type (with the exception of Lacan, who ends up saying that the animal actually does not "see"). He suggests that this is because these discourses would have to "know for certain" the following:

Where do the mirror and the reflecting image begin, which also refers to the identification of one's fellow being? Can one not speak of an experience that is already specular as soon as a cat recognizes a cat and begins to know, if not in the end to say, that "a cat is a cat?" Does not the mirror effect also begin wherever a living creature, whatever it be, identifies another living creature of its own species as its neighbor [prochain, also "its next"] or fellow [semblable, also "its likeness"]? And therefore at least wherever there is sexuality properly speaking, wherever reproduction relies on sexual coupling?
-The Animal That Therefore I Am, 59.

It is this last sentence which made me think. It brought me around to that motif which I began to think about seriously when writing a paper on The Gift of Death--if only because it seemed like I had always thought along the lines of the necessity that the motif indicates, it captures and thematizes so very well the general experience that one has (and I certainly had) while reading Heidegger's Nietzsche. Indeed, in The Gift of Death, one finds a refrain of sorts that goes as follows: "that would be more Nietzschian than Heideggerian." So one finds, while Derrida is discussing a claim of Patocka's:

Heidegger would never have said that metaphysical determinations of being or the history of the dissimulation of being in the figures or modes of the entity developed as myths or fictions. Such terms would be more Nietzschean than Heideggerian.
-The Gift of Death (Second Edition), 39.

The refrain is important in this text for two reasons: 1) Derrida rarely economizes in this way by referring not even to the proper name but to the type or kind of discourse that is generally assumed to be that of a particular proper name--though The Gift of Death is indeed a rare text, full of many other rare instances of economizing, precisely--and 2) Nietzsche, as my friend Sand said to a class that included me several months ago, plays a crucial part in this book, if it all in fact does not wholly stand or fall with its take on Nietzsche.
But the importance is not just local: reading it, I remembered a phrase all the way back in Of Grammatology which seemed to bear upon this very refrain.

Radicalizing the concepts of interpretation, perspective, evaluation, difference, and all the "empiricist" or nonphilosophical motifs that have constantly tormented philosophy throughout the history of the West, and besides, have had nothing but the inevitable weakness of being produced in the field of philosophy, Nietzsche, far from remaining simply (with Hegel and as Heidegger wished) within metaphysics, contributed a great deal to the liberation of the signifier from its dependence or derivation with respect to the logos and the related concept of truth or the primary signified, in whatever sense that is understood. Reading, and therefore writing, the text were for Nietzsche "originary" operations... with regard to a sense that they do not first have to transcribe or discover, which would not therefore be a truth signified in the original element and presence of the logos, as topos noetos, divine understanding, or the structure of a priori necessity. To save Nietzsche from a reading of the Heideggerian type [my italics], it seems that we must above all not attempt to restore or make explicit a less naive "ontology," composed of profound ontological intuitions acceding to some originary truth, an entire fundamentality hidden under the appearance of an empiricist or metaphysical text... Therefore, rather than protect Nietzsche from the Heideggerian reading, we should perhaps offer him up to it completely [my italics again], underwriting that interpretation without reserve; in a certain way and up to the point where, the content of the Nietzschean discourse being almost lost for the question of being, its form regains its absolute strangeness...
-Of Grammatology (Corrected Edition), 19.

If we ignore the Saussurian language regarding "the liberation of the signifier"--this has been too much commented upon, in my opinion--we find that there is a proposal for rebelling against the Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche, and in a unique way (that annuls itself or self-destructs as rebellion--we will return to this later): that is, much of what will become Spurs. But before turning to that text--another in the motif we are establishing--we must ask, Why does Derrida propose (to take back) this rebellion? Why should we protect Nietzsche from Heidegger in the first place?
It is not that Heidegger's reading of Neitzsche itself fails to give due credit to certain crucial aspects of Nietzsche, namely those "nonphilosophical" ones Derrida speaks of--essentially his engagement with positivism (psychology) and his appropriations of Darwin. This would be, fundamentally, Deleuze's objection to the Heideggerian reading, along, perhaps, with Foucault. It is not, then, the oft noted fact that Heidegger takes the "late" Nietzsche, the most rigidly philosophical or schematic Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of The Will to Power, as the useful Nietzsche (indeed, if one wanted to really make this argument, one would encounter much opposition from the fact that Heidegger does interpret much early Nietzsche, if not so much in his two volumes on him then in other texts, where he usually brings in most of the corpus--the early writings and even some early fragments, not to mention much of Zarathustra). This despite the unbelievable extent of the prejudice against these aspects of Nietzsche that Heidegger expresses so often in his later work and so (there is no other word for it--though "hastily," "unthinkingly," "inappropriately," "misleadingly," "slanderously" all come to mind, and I use this one precisely to call up or recall what Heidegger himself said of his affiliation with the National Socialists--and I would argue this is just something basic about Heidegger, to be reviled and unceasingly argued against rather than mocked or dismissed, because it is right beside the brilliance of his interpretations) stupidly in remarks like the following: Nietzsche's philosophy, he says,

rests on strange foundations. These foundations indeed show themselves to be based on a quite ordinary and metaphysically highly questionable "psychology." Yet Nietzsche can afford that.
-The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, (Heidegger's winter 1929/30 seminar), 74.

No, Derrida does not reject this regarding Heidegger's Nietzsche. Nor does Derrida here directly reject what this move of Heidegger's is affiliated with--a suspicion about representation in general, and about die Zeit des Weltbildes--which Derrida often critiques (cf. "Envois" in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I for an amazing extended discussion of "The Age of the World-Picture"). It is more complicated here than the particular characterization of Nietzsche as a thinker of being as will, as calculable representation, that Heidegger will often lament in his sketches and essays on the history of being.
The rejection is at once more simple and infinitely more profound--this is why it will have to be taken up again in Spurs, as well as--indeed--the rest of the Derridian corpus: it is too much to the side of the main theses of Of Grammatology to be examined with the attention it deserves (and indeed this is why it can here be so directly). Derrida dismisses the idea that things in the world must, for Nietzsche, have their sense in being--and this is precisely what Heidegger concludes must be the case. In other words, things in the world (I have to use this awkward phrase because to use "what exists" or "beings" is already to submit to a Heideggerian interpretation) do not admit of looking any deeper behind them for what their residence in the world is grounded within (even if this ground is an ungroundedness, an abyss, an Abgrund). And this "looking deeper" for a ground is precisely what Heidegger always does with whatever Nietzsche asserts about the world (again, precisely by conceiving of its ground as ungrounded: to assert that Derrida is wrong because he misses this aspect of Heidegger--which I have seen happen often, especially on the part of Heideggerians--is to willfully misinterpret what Derrida is saying). For Heidegger, the things in the world from Nietzsche's perspective are indecidable with respect to their sense, their meaning--and this, however, is precisely their meaning: whatever is there, even if it is only an upsurge of becoming, has being, in the sense that it is not nothing. In the end, Heidegger thinks that if what becomes is not nothing, it must have being for Nietzsche on some level. That is, until Heidegger starts to entertain certain thoughts even beyond enowning (Ereignis) seriously. But we will (have to) come to this later.
Now, again, we are not circling around an exact interpretation of what "becoming" means in Nietzsche--and if it sounds as if this is the case, it is due to my lack of mastery over what I want to say here. But this term (becoming--and, indeed, how it relates to being) is not the point of the contestation (I outlined Heidegger's view of this with more precision--that is, with respect to eternal return and will to power--in a post last summer). If it were, then it would be an issue of either of the two objections we already specified (Deleuze and Foucault's, for example, and another Derrida's). Rather, in this passage of Of Grammatology, and throughout the sort of debate running through Derrida's corpus that I would here like to trace, there is an issue over the precise way things mean or have sense in Nietzsche's view and how we ourselves should interpret it--in short, it's much more basic than any debate over meaning, precisely because its about the most basic sense of meaning (if that means anything). What is at issue is an approach to Nietzsche, and whether it does not admit of another--a wholly other--way of approach. It comes down to this difference: if we were to take Heidegger's standpoint, we would suspect that whatever becomes, at some basic level (perhaps the level of attunements, which are not conscious), would still exist rather than not. What Derrida is advocating for, on the other hand, is the interpretation of becoming (that is, the things in the world) as a suspension of this being or meaning, even at this most basic level that Heidegger would be looking at. The indeterminacy with respect to meaning then would not be something that could be grounded even in what is ungrounded. It would be both indeterminate with respect to whether it is or meant, and indeterminate with respect to whether it was not (i.e. did not exist), or was not meaningful.
The entire discourse of Nietzsche, then--i.e. whatever he said about anything--would have been indeterminate. (This, by the way, is the fundamental thesis of Spurs, to which we will return).
This makes it more than clear that the stakes in this similarly naive-sounding "Such terms would be more Nietzschean than Heideggerian" are actually very high.
But before getting into this more, we must first ask about this detour I took with Derrida into Nietzsche and Heidegger--at bottom a detour towards a proposal for a saving (or not saving) of Nietzsche from (and by) Heidegger--and why I was reminded of it by a sentence on a discourse on animals. I say that there is a relation between the passage in The Animal That Therefore I Am and this this proposal. I will specify this relation--as well as develop this motif (by looking at remarks in both Spurs and Of Spirit, as well as the "Geschlecht" series of essays) in three or four more posts.