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).

Angry criticism and the name

Obstinate old man--senex
sapiens, it is not. What is he saying;
why is he still so angry? He says, I cannot
forgive myself. We are immortal.
Where was I? Prick him.
-Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love

I'm interested in a type of criticism I've seen lately, one that can't stand other people's thoughts unless it has them held in a position, under a name. It is not so much that it can't stand people that don't have clear positions, as it is that it can't stand the difficulty of naming, in general, and at this historical juncture. Naming has become harder, somehow, in the postmodern world. This criticism concludes that it is better to have a name than none at all. So, frustrated with you, it gives you a name. And what it does in the process is not so much confine you to a position or that name, as think that you once had no name, no position at all, prior to their giving it to you.
This is the problem. I don't mind names, call me whatever you want. Names usually only help a situation: they label, they identify, they correct themselves, they allow you to see what faults describing something as X instead of Y produces, etc. The problem is that hesitation over what to call something or someone is not the same as indecision over it or, more significantly, a refusal of naming.
I just went to a talk, for example, where the phrase "ideological critics" was applied to certain people. By this was meant those who gave either new historicist or deconstructive or feminist or queer readings of a text, though in a looser way to also imply those all that work that is influenced by these modes of looking at texts. This was useful. But it was applied as if these ideological critics were refusing to take a stand on something crucial about textuality by being concerned with ideology. In short, the name was circularly applied: by calling these critics ideological critics, you could criticize what you call them. Thus, you only criticize the name: but the slippage here between the name and the referent is all that counts. It destroys any responsibility to try and rigorously demonstrate that the name applies to the referent. In the end, it assumes that the ideological critics refusal to call themselves your name is a dismissal of naming itself. And in the process what it does is not use naming so much as a process that elucidates as a process that just is frustrated with the problems of naming in itself.
What am I getting at? This criticism just seems angry, at the end of the day. And nothing more. By that, I don't mean it does nothing or is nothing. By no means. It is simply is frustrated with the conditions of its own possibility, and wants to impose those conditions upon everything. So it doesn't develop them, when it is placed in a new situation, but merely uses that situation to confirm its conditions of possibility. So it is in the end a type of criticism that doesn't do anything but can say a lot about everybody. It's just pissed off. When it does say something, it doesn't come from this way of criticizing: it seems external, like it could have been achieved by a critic who wasn't so angry. And this is the case because, indeed, under the guise of trying to quickly name something so the critic can get somewhere already and stop worrying about its conditions of possibility, it worries only about its conditions of possibility--because it doesn't think its responsible to step beyond them. So instead of engaging with its object, this criticism sucks its object back into its own sphere of problems. The name is the tool for this non-engagement: it labels, it makes it possible to talk about the thing, but at the same time it does this disingenuously, because it also believes labels or names don't hold. It aspires to a radical provisionality, while at the same time trying to impose its stamp upon everything.
Here is a position for you, angry critics: all pragmatism is this angry criticism.
This doesn't mean that the theses of pragmatism--what it has to say about truth, for example--have this character trait. It merely means that the way pragmatists, or those who fall into pragmatism (which is a more common phenomenon than you might think), go about articulating these theses is by getting angry. In short, what this means is that pragmatism (or its modern form) is a certain style of dealing with the investigations of Wittgenstein (among others), most notably characterized by the two pronged idea that a) we are beyond Wittgenstein, we should know better than him, and b) given the theses of Wittgenstein, which we know and are beyond, you can't get beyond him. Taking up this frustrating two pronged thesis and militantly waving it around, that is what makes you angry. Rorty was great at this, and played a lot with the possibilities of this anger. That is, he often appeared angry and calm at once, and it is this cognizance of his own position on positions that I personally enjoy about him--and why I think he resists a lot of the criticisms that people levy against pragmatists.
But those who do not at first appear to be pragmatists are also angry: Marxists, for one. Gayatri Spivak is constantly infuriated. This isn't bad, as I should emphasize: it simply is a way of presenting ideas and reducing your opponent's position--one which makes them into, in fact, your opponent. And especially under the guise of usefulness, that quality of the name that I tried to outline earlier. The name, the name for the position, is exceptionally useful. But to use its usefulness against itself, as a ruse that will allow you to claim to be, at least, clear about something--this is a strategy that angry critics constantly deploy. So in her essay on Foucault and Derrida, Spivak believes she is being clear when she tries to parcel out their respective positions. This doesn't in the future preclude her from criticizing Foucault in a pretty base manner--that is, in a really angry way, frustrated with her own real inability to criticize him.
But then there are other political thinkers, obsessed with the civic and with solidarity in different ways, who are exceptionally angry: Gillian Rose, perhaps is the most concrete example. The fury she displays (a lot like that of Geoffrey Hill, her friend) is extraordinary, and most precisely of all these examples takes the form I elaborated above with reference to naming. Let's look at her attack on Derrida, often a figure that this criticism grows unbelievably frustrated with. We can imagine why: not only does he criticize clarity as a virtue in itself--he calls this somewhere a naive belief in a sort of philosophical Esperanto--but he precisely resists the frustration one feels with the name. That is, unlike the pragmatist, he thinks the two pronged, contradictory relationship to Wittgenstein precisely as a contradiction to develop, to explore, such that it breaks down. It is not something that is constantly trying to be resolved for him, and it is not something that can be preserved by the work of philosophy: the work of philosophy takes it up and destabilizes its function as philosophy's premise or condition of possibility, no matter how contradictory it is. But back to Rose, for whom this is all intolerable: watch her infinite rage in motion:

All this stems from the logophobic ethos of Derrida's thinking (pardon my neologism). Desperate for expiation and for ethics, he nevertheless desires to avoid at all costs renewing the question (yes, the question), which Marx himself posed and from which his thinking, young and old, proceeded: "How do we stand in relation to the Hegelian dialectic?" Only our taking on the burden of posing this question anew would permit us to investigate the possibility of an ethics which does not remain naive and ignorant of its historical and political presuppositions and hence its likely outcomes.
-Mourning Becomes the Law, 70-71 (italics in original).

Notice the neologism with the immediate criticism of what she named. Nowhere is there a second thought as to whether this name applies to Derrida--thinker of the dialectic and the problems of the dialectic par excellence (has she ever read "From Restricted to General Economy?" or Glas?). The assumption, I think, is that he will respond, and that if he can prove the name logophobic doesn't apply--and it doesn't, as he addressed explicitly in several interviews and papers (cf. "For the Love of Lacan")--well, then, Rose will take back her position. She thus seems to demonstrate a good faith in discussion. Seems to: for will this taking-back ever happen? Well, the short answer is no: for what Rose here also deploys is the fact that the name will still stick unless she herself takes it back. So not only does Derrida have to say, no, that does not apply, he has to make her take the thing back herself. It's like we are in fourth grade, and saying bad things about each other's mothers. Take it back! You take it back! The good faith in discussion is the same thing as the anger with the frustrated possibility of naming something I outlined earlier--in short, faith in discussion is the imposition of her inability do discuss upon someone else. So she will say, with a fury it is oddly hard to dissociate from anti-Semitism (and I'm not the first to say this, of course), Levinas, Bloom, Derrida, Jabes, and others (but the term applies most forcefully to Levinas, I think) all "operate according to what might be termed neo-Hebraism" (Mourning Becomes the Law, 79--while she acts like this is well-known, the name is in fact Rose's), a quality that does not just remain as a label but also rings throughout her writing like a sort of accusation, like it also names a stain, a disgusting pathology. This excess in the act of naming is the frustration with naming: the name applies, but it applies itself knowing that it won't ever be exactly right. So what happens? You name anyway, without hesitating over the name--and here is where frustration turns into anger. The residue of affect here--the anger at the futile position of the neo-Hebraists--is not just one about whether this name applies or not. That would be too simple, too Rortyian (this is the technique I spoke of above: Rorty turns anger back against itself to merely end up with this frustration). This residue of affect is concerned with how the neo-Hebraists will not themselves ever accept the name that Rose gives them... even if they were to say they did. This is the same thing, I am suggesting, as the determination to skip over one's own inability to deal with the name: Rose wants to impose the frustration she feels upon others, to never look like she is hesitating. What this completely, utterly overlooks, is that Levinas, Derrida, Jabes, even Bloom all might feel this frustration too. In the process, she makes it seem as if her opponents don't ever think what she thinks--that they, in fact, renounce thinking, questioning (yes, questioning).
That the other might feel this frustration with language, with naming, is what Frederic Jameson understands. He is a great example of someone who escapes this angry sort of criticism while genuinely exploring all the virtues that angry critics think naming allows. Constantly calling the thing by a name, at the same time he never gets frustrated with naming. This can make him extremely difficult to read, especially in his later work, because the names he calls something keep shifting around, and don't apply in the way that you normally think they will apply to something. In short, he does not abuse the clarity afforded by the name, but puts it to work. Deceptively clear, he tries to produce a community where names can be used and are used, but one in which we all understand the other's frustration with their inappropriateness. Using a name is not a fatalistic act for Jameson--it doesn't demonstrate that one is making a resolute decision despite what one already knows about how the name will not apply. It doesn't want to "prick him," as Hill says in the poem above, as if this is a lamentable but responsible act. It simply is what happens in an effort to communicate.

"I don't believe that there is any perception"

The following--from a discussion at Johns Hopkins during the great structuralism conference in 1966 (!) that took place right after Derrida delivered his "Structure, Sign, and Play" lecture--might help out some of my phenomenologist friends trying to wrap their heads around Derrida. Doubrovsky's great question at least allows you to approach the more structuralist and semiological mode of that essay's articulation:

SERGE DOUBROVSKY: You always speak of a non-center. How can you, within your own perspective, explain or at least understand what a perception is? For a perception is precisely the manner in which the world appears centered to me. And language you represent as flat or level. Now language is something else again. It is, as Merleau-Ponty said, a corporeal intentionality. And starting from this utilization of language, in as much as there is an intention of language, I inevitably find a center again. For it is not "one" who speaks, but "I." And even if you reduce the I, you are obliged to come across once again the concept of intentionality, which I believe is at the base of a whole thought, which, moreover, you do not deny. Therefore I ask how you reconcile it with your present attempts?

DERRIDA: First of all, I didn't say that there was no center, that we could get along without the center. I believe that the center is a function, not a being--a reality, but a function. And this function is absolutely indispensable. The subject is absolutely indispensable. I don't destroy the subject; I situate it. That is to say, I believe that at a certain level both of experience and of philosophical and scientific discourse one cannot get along without the notion of subject. It is a question of knowing where it comes from and how it functions. Therefore I keep the concept of center, which I explained was indispensable, as well as that of subject, and the whole system of concepts to which you have referred.
Since you mentioned intentionality, I simply try to see those who are founding the movement of intentionality--which cannot be conceived in the term intentionality. As to perception, I should say that once I recognized it as a necessary conservation. I was extremely conservative. Now I don't know what perception and I don't believe that anything like perception exists. Perception is precisely a concept, a concept of an intuition or of a given originating from the thing itself, present itself in its meaning, independently from language, from the system of reference. And I believe that perception is interdependent with the concept of origin and of center and consequently whatever strikes at the metaphysics of which I have spoken strikes also at the very concept of perception. I don't believe that there is any perception.
-From The Structuralist Controversy, Discussion of "Structure, Sign, and Play," 271-2

Translating Husserl into the language of structuralism and specifically semiology was primarily the work of Merleau-Ponty (good friend of Lévi-Strauss), and if one reads certain remarks of his from the late 50's you can get a good sense of what that work of translation entails--you can piece together the puzzle that semiology poses to the phenomenologist of the non-French tradition, and begin to read, because all of a sudden you are launched into the types of conversations that were held after his classes there. Suddenly, this more formalized remark of Derrida's--no less extreme in its conclusions--from 1959 might also help, because one understands that it basically says the same thing in a less semiological language:

The question of the possibility of the transcendental reduction cannot expect an answer. It is the question of the possibility of the question, opening itself, the gap, on whose basis the transcendental I, which Husserl was tempted to call "eternal" (which in his thought, in any event, means neither infinite nor ahistorical, quite the contrary) is called upon to ask itself about everything, and particularly about the possibility of the unformed and naked factuality of the nonmeaning, in the case at hand, for example, of its own death.
-"'Genesis and Structure' in Husserl's Phenomenology," in Writing and Difference, 167-8

All this is evidence of the benefits of a historically minded approach to philosophy, which doesn't so much focus on the appropriations and misappropriations of particular philosophers (Husserl or Heidegger), but tries to reconstruct the discourse in which those appropriations are happening. It is also helpful in discussions of Kant, say (who is dealing with the British empiricists and materialists, like Priestley), and Descartes.